Almanac – June 14

1928 – Che Guevara born. Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, guerrilla leader, diplomat, and military theorist.

A major figure of the Cuban Revolution, his stylized visage has become a ubiquitous countercultural symbol of rebellion and global insignia within popular culture.

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1949 – Albert II, a rhesus monkey, rode a V2 rocket to an altitude of 134 km (83 mi), thereby becoming the first monkey in space. He survived the flight but   died on impact  after a parachute failure.

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1953 – David Thomas born.  American singer, songwriter, and musician.

He was one of the founding members of the short-lived protopunk Rocket From The Tombs (1974–1975), where he went by the name of Crocus Behemoth, and of  Pere Ubu (1975–present, intermittently). He has also released several solo albums. Though primarily a singer, he sometimes plays melodeon, trombone, guitar or other instruments.

Thomas has described his artistic focus as being the “gestalt of culture, geography and sound“. Common themes crop up throughout much of his work, such as the US Interstate Highway system, images of roadside or “junk” tourist culture, Brian Wilson, AM Radio, and many others.

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1966 – The Vatican announced the abolition of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (“index of prohibited books“), which was originally instituted in 1557.

The avowed aim of the list was to protect the faith and morals of the faithful by preventing the reading of immoral books or works containing theological errors, and noteworthy intellectuals and religious figures on the Index included Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Voltaire, Denis Diderot, Victor Hugo, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, André Gide, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, René Descartes, Francis Bacon, John Milton, John Locke, Galileo Galilei, Blaise Pascal, Hugo Grotius and Saint Faustina Kowalska. Charles Darwin’s works were notably never included, nor was Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

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