Pancho Villa: Mexican Robin Hood?

It is the birthday of Mexican hero Pancho Villa (1878), who led revolutionaries in northern Mexico for a decade beginning in 1910. The result of the conflict was the Mexican Constitution of 1917, which established social rights for the country’s citizens. Villa, whose real name was José Doroto Arango Arámbula, robbed trains and raided haciendas to support the cause. He virtually ran the state of Chihuahua, which provided him with resources to conduct his war.

When he crossed the border and raided Columbus, New Mexico, in 1916, that got the attention of the United States government. General John J. Pershing chased him for nine months but never captured him. Then the United States got into World War I and Gen. Pershing was needed elsewhere. Villa retired in 1920 and received a large estate, which he set up as a colony for his former soldiers. Three years later, Villa got involved with politics again and was assassinated.

Here is a fascinating program, The Hunt for Pancho Villa, from The American Experience with vintage film footage. Pancho Villa is depicted is either a Mexican Robin Hood or a common criminal.

Gen. Rains developed Civil War land mines

It is the birthday of Brigadier General Gabriel J. Rains (1803), who is credited, along with his brother George, with creating land mines, booby traps, and torpedoes during the Civil War. A West Point graduate, he served in the Seminole Wars and was brevetted major after defeating the Seminoles near Fort King. He also served in the Mexican War and out west in the Indian Wars but when the Civil War came, he sided with the Confederacy and became a brigadier general. Rains had used explosive booby traps in 1940 during the Seminole War but historians say he developed the first modern mechanically fused land mines during the Battle of Yorktown in 1862.

Allen Ginsberg 'Howl'ed in San Francisco

It is the birthday of Beat poet Allen Ginsberg (1926), who wrote the epic poem Howl (1956), which he first read publicly on October 5, 1955 at the Six Gallery in San Francisco. After Ginsberg’s friend Lawrence Ferlinghetti publish it, the work caused an uproar for explicit depiction of sex acts but was eventually ruled not obscene in court. The poem includes stories about Ginsberg’s Beat friends Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Lucien Carr and others. Here is a recording of Ginsberg reading the first part of the Howl.

Thomas Hardy stirred up Victorian readers

It is the birthday of English poet and novelist Thomas Hardy (1840), whose most well known books, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874). The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895), examined the decline of rural Victorian English society. Hardy was heavily influenced by the work of Charles Dickens and his criticism English urban life. Tess and Jude received a lot of criticism, Tess for its apparent sympathetic portrait of a woman of ill repute, and Jude for its criticism of marriage and its open discussion of sexual themes. He wrote no more novels after that.