July 19, 1936

1936David Colquhoun, English pharmacologist and academic^[†]

David Colquhoun is a British pharmacologist at University College London (UCL). He has contributed to the general theory of receptor and synaptic mechanisms, and in particular the theory and practice of single ion channel function. He held the A.J. Clark chair of Pharmacology at UCL from 1985 to 2004, and was the Hon. Director of the Wellcome Laboratory for Molecular Pharmacology. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1985 and an honorary fellow of UCL in 2004. Colquhoun runs the website DC's Improbable Science, which is critical of pseudoscience, particularly alternative medicine, and managerialism.

1936Spanish Civil War: The CNT and UGT call a general strike in Spain – mobilizing workers' militias against the Nationalist forces. People's Olympiad of Barcelona cancelled.^[†]

The Spanish Civil War was fought from 1936 to 1939 between the Republicans and the Nationalists. Republicans were loyal to the left-leaning Popular Front government of the Second Spanish Republic and included socialists, anarchists, communists, and separatists. The opposing Nationalists who established the Spanish State were an alliance of fascist Falangists, monarchists, conservatives, and traditionalists supported by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy and led by a military junta among whom General Francisco Franco quickly achieved a preponderant role. Due to the international political climate at the time, the war was variously viewed as class struggle, a religious struggle, or a struggle between dictatorship and republican democracy, between revolution and counterrevolution, or between fascism and communism. The Nationalists won the war, which ended in early 1939, and ruled Spain until Franco's death in November 1975.