There are 4 entries on this date: Michael Servetus, Sharlot Hall, Niccolo Paganini and Klas Pontus Arnoldson.

On this date in 1553, Spanish physician Michael Servetus, ne Miguel Serveto, was executed for heresy by order of John Calvin, in Geneva, Switzerland. The anti-Trinitarian and rationalist published the first correct explanation of how blood circulates in the body. Born in 1511, Serveto grew up near Aragon, and studied law at the University of Toulouse in France, where he first read the bible, only newly available in printed form. Struck by the absence of mention of the trinity in the bible, and repelled by the excesses of the Roman Catholic Church, he turned to Protestantism. Its proponents also cast him out for his views. The Supreme Council of the Inquisition in Spain summoned him to return to Spain, a sure death sentence. In Paris, Servetus met a young student, John Calvin, who at one time was forced himself to go into hiding for heresy. Servetus studied medicine at the University of Paris, where he published the first work accurately describing pulmonary circulation. Servetus practiced medicine for 12 years in Vienne. In 1546, he began a fateful, heated correspondence on the trinity with his former acquaintance, Calvin. Calvin wrote a colleague that if Servetus should ever visit Geneva, "if my authority is of any avail I will not suffer him to get out alive." Servetus published Restitutio under a pseudonym in 1553, including in it 30 of his letters to Calvin. When he sent Calvin a copy, Calvin exposed Servetus' identity to the Catholic Inquisition in Vienne. Arrested and interrogated, Servetus escaped prison, but was arrested in Geneva while traveling to Italy. The Council of Geneva convicted him of antitrinitarianism and opposition to child baptism. Calvin lobbied for a beheading; the Council sentenced him to be burned at the stake. Only 3 copies of Servetus's Restitutio survived. In it, he rejected original sin and salvation, vicarious atonement and Christ's dual nature.

Photo--Sharlot Hall Museum Library/Archives

On this date in 1870, Arizona historian and freethinker Sharlot Hall was born in frontier Kansas. She moved with her family near Prescott (then Dewey), Arizona, at the age of 11. She worked for room and board to attend Prescott High School briefly and escape ranch life, but was forced to return home when her mother became ill. Sharlot took up photography and explored ancient Indian cliff dwellings with her brother. Seeing the lot of women of her era and taking a jaundiced view of the "egotism of the average man," Sharlot vowed never to marry. When her family attended lectures by freethinker Samuel Putnam in Prescott in 1895, 24-year old Sharlot joined him on the platform, speaking of Thomas Paine. She wrote for The Truth Seeker, a major freethought periodical, as well as for many newspapers, and met many leading reformers such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Two volumes of Hall's poetry were published. She began taking oral histories of Arizona pioneers. In 1909, territorial governor Judge Richard Sloan appointed her territorial historian, giving her a Phoenix office. Supported by the Federation of Women's Clubs, she traveled throughout Arizona collecting history. After statehood was won, the first governor dismissed her in 1912. After a reclusive retirement caring for family members, Sharlot returned to work at age 57 in 1927, when she was given a life lease on the Governor's Mansion to restore it as a museum of Arizona history in the city of Prescott. The mansion and Sharlot Hall Museum remain open to the public. D. 1943.

On this date in 1782, the world's great violinist, Niccolo Paganini, was born In Genoa, Italy. He composed his first sonata before the age of 9, and made his first public appearance in 1793. Paginini was appointed first violinist at the Lucca Court, where his diligent application (reportedly practicing up to 15 hours a day as a youth) made him Europe's foremost virtuoso violinist. Paganini's acclaimed 6-year world tour, wowing audiences with his legendary showmanship, made him wealthy and an international celebrity. He played his own songs, considered to be so diabolically intricate that the superstitious widely accused him of having made a pact with the devil. Yet his tender passages routinely brought his audience to tears. Paginini retired to his villa in Parma. He lived a religion-free life, refused the sacraments of the Roman Catholic church on his deathbed and religious ritual at his burial. Even his religious biographer, Count Conestabili, admitted Paganini's "religious indifferentism" (Vita de Niccolo Paganini, 1851, cited in Joseph McCabe's A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Rationalists, 1920.) D. 1840.

On this date in 1844, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Klas Pontus Arnoldson was born in Goteburg, Sweden. He left school after his father died at age 16, and worked for the Swedish State Railways for two decades. He was elected to the Riksdag, the Swedish parliament, from 1882 to 1887, where he championed expansion of franchise, religious freedom, antimilitarism, and promoted political neutrality for Sweden. He founded the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society in 1883, and edited several journals. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1908 for his pacifist work, especially during the 1895 dissolution of the union between Norway and Sweden, in which he controversially sided with Norway. According to his Nobel Prize biography, "Familiar with the humanistic tenets of religious movements originating in the nineteenth century in Great Britain and in the New England section of the United States, he decried fanatic dogmatism and espoused essentially Unitarian views on truth, tolerance, freedom of the individual conscience, freedom of thought, and human perfectibility. These views he published in the Nordiska Dagbladet [Northern Daily] which he edited for a short time in the early 1870's, and in Sanningssškaren [The Truth Seeker]." After concentrating on largely journalistic writing, Arnoldson wrote several major works during his last three decades, including Religion in the Light of Research (1891). D. 1916.