Thursday, July 31, 2014

Today -100: July 31, 1914: Of menacing mobilizations, neutrality, neurality, hysterical fervor, and sinopes


(NOTE: The NYT website really screwed up this issue, replacing all but 2 pages in the index and Timesmachine with a 1916 issue. Stories I had to get from Proquest have no links. Sorry.)

Austria captures Belgrade. So I guess World War I is over now? I really don’t know what the big deal is.

Alliteration of the Day -100: Germany demands an explanation for Russia’s “menacing mobilization.”

The Netherlands declares itself neutral.

The British Labour party does the same, its MPs passing a resolution that it “hopes that on no account will this country be dragged into a European conflict in which, as the Prime Minister has stated, we have no direct or indirect interest.”

Woodrow Wilson says he has no intention of offering any of the European nations his advice or good offices. To be fair, no one’s asked him for either.

World War I in Los Angeles: a Serb, Jerko Kojarchick, shoots at three Austrians in West LA, misses and runs away, but is soon stopped by a Juvenile Officer, who doesn’t know why Kojarchick was running and whose search fails to discover the gun in his pocket. A crowd had collected after the shooting, so the cop brings him towards it to find out what had happened. Kojarchick starts firing at the crowd, but again hits no one.

Proquest Typo of the Day: “JAPAN WILL REMAIN NEURAL UNLESS ENGLAND IS INVOLVED.”

In the (British) Women’s Freedom League’s newspaper The Vote, Nina Boyle writes of the pro-war demonstrations in Berlin, “Their fervour, had it been displayed by female persons alone, would undoubtedly have been characterised as hysterical!”



The Lick Observatory discovers a new moon of Jupiter, which will only be given a name, Sinope, in the 1970s.


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