Origins
Davis Day originated in memory of William Davis, a coal miner who was killed during a protest near the town of New Waterford by striking miners. The protest was in response to a decision by the mining company, British Empire Steel and Coal Company (BESCO), to shut down the drinking water supply and electricity to the town as a result of the strike, while miners were attempting to shut down electricity to the mine's surface workings and pumps for removing seawater.
Davis was shot and killed at approximately 11:00 AM on June 11, 1925 and many other miners were injured, when striking miners were charged by the company police force, whose officers fired over 300 shots. In the weeks and months following Davis' shooting, company facilities were looted and/or vandalized, despite the deployment of the provincial police force and 2,000 soldiers in what remains Canada's second-largest military deployment for an internal conflict (after the Northwest Rebellion).
Read more about this topic: William Davis Miners' Memorial Day
Famous quotes containing the word origins:
“Grown onto every inch of plate, except
Where the hinges let it move, were living things,
Barnacles, mussels, water weeds—and one
Blue bit of polished glass, glued there by time:
The origins of art.”
—Howard Moss (b. 1922)
“The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)