Caliban and the Witch

01Federici traces the witch trial peak to the exact decades when European feudal commons were being legally enclosed and privatized.
02She argues contraceptive knowledge — held by women healers — was the specific threat that made midwives and herbalists targets for execution.
03'Caliban and the Witch' was rejected by major publishers for 15 years before Autonomedia released it; it is now assigned in over 200 universities.

Front page cover of the newspaper L'Aurore for Thursday 13 January 1898, with the letter J'Accuse...! , written by Émile Zola about the Dreyfus affair . The headline reads I Accuse...! Letter to the President of the Republic .

15-year-old Nayirah al-Ṣabaḥ giving her testimony to the United States Congressional Human Rights Caucus on October 10, 1990, two months after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait . It was later revealed that she was the daughter of Kuwaiti…

Caliban and the Witch

Silvia Federici's 2004 'Caliban and the Witch' reread the witch trials as primitive accumulation — capitalism's founding act required burning the women who held communal knowledge of contraception, land, and the body.

Phineas Gage

In 1848, a 3.5-cm iron tamping rod blasted through Phineas Gage's left cheekbone and out the top of his skull. He survived, walked to a cart — and became an entirely different man.

Quokka

The quokka, Australia's smiling marsupial, ejects its pouch joey directly into a predator's path — a muscular contraction, not a choice — then flees while the infant screams.

J'Accuse...!

Zola's open letter, published across the front page of L'Aurore on 13 January 1898, named eleven army and government officials by name. The editor printed 300,000 copies; Paris sold out before noon.

Jane Goodall

Jane Goodall spent months sitting motionless in Tanzania's Gombe forest until a chimpanzee she named David Greybeard allowed her to approach — the first time a wild chimp accepted a human. She was twenty-six, had no university degree, and had been in Africa five months.

Brennus (leader of the Senones)

After sacking Rome in 390 BC — the only time the city fell for eight centuries — Brennus tossed his sword onto the ransom scales and sneered 'Vae victis': woe to the conquered.

Nayirah testimony

A 15-year-old girl wept to Congress about Iraqi soldiers dumping Kuwaiti babies from incubators. She was the Kuwaiti ambassador's daughter, coached by PR firm Hill & Knowlton for $10.8 million.

Houston Astros sign stealing scandal

Houston Astros players watched a live camera feed of the catcher's signals and banged a trash can once or twice to tell batters what pitch was coming. They won the World Series doing it.

Ferrer movement

Francisco Ferrer opened a Barcelona school in 1901 with no grades, no priests, no corporal punishment. Spain blamed him for a workers' uprising he didn't lead and executed him by firing squad in 1909.