Marshall Islands Edition
Looking Back at 1900 Day leads today's complete edition for Marshall Islands.
Daily Edition
Official observances, world days, local context, and everyday celebrations for people who need something worth reading, sharing, or talking about today.
Bengal is the heart of the nationalist movement. The British partition of Bengal in 1905 has inflamed Hindu-Muslim tensions. The jute mills of Calcutta employ thousands. The countryside is poor and getting poorer. The monsoon still decides who eats and who does not.
On March 7, 1946, the U.S. military governor informed the Bikinians they must leave their homeland for "the good of mankind and to end all world wars." The 167 residents of Bikini were loaded onto a landing craft and taken to Rongerik, an uninhabited atoll one-sixth the size of Bikini with inadequate food and water. Within months they were starving. The U.S. Navy commodore had told them the evacuation was temporary : "you will be like the children of Israel, for the Lord your God will lead you to a land of plenty" : but it became permanent. The Bikinians were moved again to Kili Island in 1948, a small island without a lagoon, where they could not fish or sail canoes. The psychological devastation of displacement : the loss of land, identity, and self-sufficiency : remains the defining wound of the Marshall Islands nuclear experience. This remembrance, observed alongside Remembrance Day, specifically honors the Bikinians' sacrifice and their ongoing struggle to return home.
The anniversary of the Bravo nuclear test on March 1, 1954, which was the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated by the United States. The 15-megaton Castle Bravo shot was 1,000 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The test was conducted on Bikini Atoll, and the fallout contaminated the Marshall Islands, causing radiation sickness, cancer, and birth defects that persist to this day. The radioactive plume drifted over 7,000 square miles, blanketing Rongelap, Ailinginae, and Rongerik atolls with snow-like fallout that children played in, not knowing it was poisoned ash. The day is observed with ceremonies at the Nuclear Victims Memorial in Majuro, and the reminder that the Marshallese people are the victims of 67 nuclear tests conducted between 1946 and 1958. The Bikinians were relocated from their atoll in 1946, and they have never been able to return permanently. The day is not just remembrance. It is a demand for justice, and every year the call grows louder for full compensation, environmental remediation, and an honest accounting of what was done to these islands and their people.
