Didius Julianus was the emperor of Rome for nine weeks from March to June 193, during the Year of the Five Emperors. Julianus had a promising political career, governing several provinces, including Dalmatia and Germania Inferior, defeating the Chauci and Chatti, two invading Germanic tribes, he was appointed to the consulship in 175 along with Pertinax as a reward, before being demoted by Commodus. After this demotion, his early, promising political career languished, he ascended the throne after buying it from the Praetorian Guard, who had assassinated his predecessor Pertinax. A civil war ensued. Septimius Severus, commander of the legions in Pannonia and the nearest of the generals to Rome, marched on the capital, gathering support along the way and routing cohorts of the Praetorian Guard Didius Julianus sent to meet him. Abandoned by the Senate and the Praetorian Guard, Julianus was killed by a soldier in the palace and succeeded by Severus. Julianus was born to Quintus Petronius Didius Severus and Aemilia Clara.

Julianus's father came from a prominent family in Mediolanum, modern-day Milan, his mother was a North African woman of Roman descent, from a family of consular rank. His brothers were Didius Proculus and Didius Nummius Albinus, his date of birth is given as 30 January 133 by Cassius Dio and 2 February 137 by the Historia Augusta. Didius Julianus was raised by mother of the emperor Marcus Aurelius. With Domitia's help, he was appointed at a early age to the vigintivirate, the first step towards public distinction, he married a Roman woman named Manlia Scantilla, sometime around 153, she bore him a daughter, Didia Clara, their only child. In succession Julianus held the offices of quaestor and aedile, around 162, was named as praetor, he was nominated to the command of the Legio XXII Primigenia in Mogontiacum. In 170, he served for five years. After repelling an invasion by the Chauci, a tribe dwelling in the drainage basin of the river Scheldt, the northwestern coastal area of present-day Germany, he was raised to the consulship in 175 along with Pertinax.

He further distinguished himself in a campaign against the Chatti, governed Dalmatia and Germania Inferior. He was made prefect, charged with distributing money to the poor of Italy. Modern historians consider this a demotion for political reasons, as Commodus, the Roman Emperor at the time, feared Julianus' growing power, it was around this time that he was charged with having conspired against the life of Commodus, but the jury acquitted him and instead punished his accuser. Afterwards, he succeeded Pertinax as the proconsul of North Africa. After the murder of Pertinax on March 28, 193, the Praetorian guard announced that the throne was to be sold to the man who would pay the highest price. Titus Flavius Claudius Sulpicianus, prefect of Rome and Pertinax's father-in-law, in the Praetorian camp ostensibly to calm the troops, began making offers for the throne. Meanwhile, Julianus arrived at the camp, since his entrance was barred, shouted out offers to the guard. After hours of bidding, Sulpicianus promised 20,000 sesterces to every soldier.

The guards closed with the offer of Julianus, threw open the gates, proclaimed him emperor. Threatened by the military, the senate declared him emperor, his wife and his daughter both received the title Augusta. Upon his accession, Julianus reversed Pertinax's monetary reforms by devaluing the Roman currency to near pre-Pertinax levels; because Julianus bought his position rather than acquiring it conventionally through succession or conquest, he was a unpopular emperor. When Julianus appeared in public, he was greeted with groans and shouts of "robber and parricide." Once, a mob obstructed his progress to the Capitol by pelting him with large stones. When news of the public anger in Rome spread across the Empire, three influential generals, Pescennius Niger in Syria, Septimius Severus in Pannonia, Clodius Albinus in Britain, each able to muster three legions, rebelled, they instead declared themselves emperor. Julianus declared Severus a public enemy because he was the nearest of the three to Rome, making him the most dangerous foe.

Julianus sent senators to persuade Severus' legionaries to abandon him, a new general was nominated to replace him, a centurion dispatched to take Severus' life. The Praetorian Guard had fought in field battles, so Julianus marched them into the Campus Martius and drilled the guard in the construction of fortifications and field works. Despite this training, the Praetorian Guard was still undertrained compared to the field legionaries of Severus. Severus first secured the support of Albinus, declaring him Caesar, seized Ravenna and its fleet. Severus killed Tullius Crispinus, the Praetorian prefect, sent to negotiate with Severus and slow his march on Rome and won over to his cause the ambassadors sent to turn his troops. Cassius Dio maintains that the Praetorian Guard tried to fight back, but were crushed, while modern historians believe that the Praetorian Guard abandoned Julianus, deserting en masse. Julianus attempted to negotiate with Severus, offering to share the empire with his rival, but Severus ignored these overtures and pressed forward.

As he marched and more cities in Italy supported his claim to the throne. The remnants of the Praetorian Guard received pardons from Severus in exchange for

Victoria Clay Haley Victoria Clay Roland, was an American suffragist, bank executive, fundraiser based in St. Louis, Missouri and in Chicago. Victoria Clay was born in Macon and raised in St. Louis, the daughter of Samuel Clay and Charlotte Williams Clay, she graduated from Sumner High School in St. Louis in 1895, attended a business college in Chicago. Victoria Clay taught school from 1900 until her marriage in 1904, she was the first vice-president of the Young Women's Christian Association in St. Louis, served two terms on the board of commissioners of the State Industrial School for Incorrigible Negro Girls, she was a contributing editor to a weekly newspaper, St. Louis Afro-American, wrote short stories, she was a member of the National Negro Press Association. Victoria Clay Haley was president of the Federated Colored Women's Clubs of St. Louis in 1913, when the city hosted a large regional suffrage conference. Haley attended, although the hotel venue of the conference did not serve black guests.

The hotel management and some fellow attendees requested that she leave, but she held her seat, her attendance was defended by the conference leadership. She returned to the same conference in Iowa the following year. Haley was active in the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs, she was on the executive committee of the Frederick Douglass Home, a historic preservation project of the NACW. In 1914, her motion carried for the NACW to endorse the work of Madame C. J. Walker. During World War I, she chaired the St. Louis chapter of the Colored Women's Unit of the Council of National Defense, chaired the Colored Women's War Savings Commission of Missouri. Haley was active in Republican party work in St. Louis, she was an alternate in the Missouri delegation to the 1920 Republican National Convention. In 1921, she was the director of the Western district for the Republican National Committee's outreach to black women voters. Victoria Clay Haley was active in church work, was Grand Matron of the Order of the Eastern Star in Missouri.

She was "chief of the St. Louis division of the Grand Fountain of the United Order of True Reformers" in 1912. In the 1920s, she was on the executive board of the Douglass National Bank of Chicago. In 1926 she was named chair of the National Headquarters Fund of the NACW, to raise money for a national headquarters. Victoria Clay married James L. Haley in 1904, they divorced in 1921. She moved to Chicago soon after and was known as Victoria Clay Roland there

Ernesto Buonaiuti was an Italian historian, philosopher of religion, Catholic priest and anti-fascist. He lost his chair at the University of Rome owing to his opposition to the Fascists; as a scholar in History of Christianity and religious philosophy he was one of the most important exponents of the modernist current. Buonaiuti was born in Rome on April 24, 1881, he was ordained priest on December 19, 1903, began his studies working with the historian of religion Salvatore Minocchi. He made use of the positive method in his study of early Christianity in his book Il cristianesimo primitivo e la Politica imperiale romana. From 1906 to 1908 he was the archivist of the Sacred Congregation of Apostolic Visitation, he founded the magazine Rivista storico-critica delle scienze teologiche, was its director from 1905 to 1910. After that he directed the magazine Ricerche religiose; those magazines were soon banned by the church and placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the index of publications to be considered as forbidden to Catholic readers.

On January 25, 1925 he was excommunicated, confirmed several times, because in his works he defended the ideas of modernism in Il programma dei modernisti and Lettere di un prete modernista. From 1925 he was Professor of History of Christianity at the University of Rome. In 1931 his university chair was definitively revoked, because he refused to swear the "oath of loyalty" to Fascism. In his autobiography Il pellegrino di Roma, Buonaiuti reconstructed the history of his conflict with the Catholic Church, of which he continued to claim himself a "loyal son" after his excommunication. In 1945, after the Allied victory in the Second World War he was restored to his rank of university professor, but he was not allowed to give lectures, according to the bureaucracy and the laws resulting from the Concordat, which were retained by the new government, teaching in any Italian State University was forbidden to any excommunicated priest, he died on April 1946 in Rome. The complete works of Buonaiuti are extensive: he wrote more than three thousand works, including books and articles, among them the ponderous Storia del Cristianesimo in three volumes, his autobiography and many studies about Gioacchino da Fiore and Martin Luther.

The three books of Storia del Cristianesimo were published between 1942 and 1943. It is considered Buonaiuti's most significant academic work; as he himself wrote in his autobiography of 1945, the work was motivated by apologetic reasons: "in order to draw up the definitive balance-sheet of Christian action in history, now that from a thousand signs one could and deduce that Christianity was approaching its hour of dramatic expiration". The main theme of the work revolves around the mystic and moral character of Christianity and its subsequent transformation into a philosofico-theological system and a bureaucratic organization. In Buonaiuti's view, the main religions are not speculative views of the world or rational schematizations of reality, but normative indications of a set of pre-rational and spiritual behaviours. Christianity, born as an announcement of palingenesis, implied a huge social program "which imposed a progressive conceptual enrichment and an rigid disciplinary organization.

To live and bear fruit in the world, Christianity was condemned to lose its nature and degenerate". The only chance of salvation for the Church and all of modern society is, in Buonaiuti's view, the restoration of the elementary values of primitive Christianity: love, regret, death; the title of this autobiographical work, published in Rome in 1945, cites a definition that the Italian historian Luigi Salvatorelli gave of him, entitling one of his essays "Ernesto Buonaiuti, pellegrino di Roma" to emphasize Buonaiuti's love for the Catholic Church, despite the grave disciplinary sanctions he had to face. Buonaiuti claims as his own two works of a modernist tendency published anonymously in 1908: Lettere di un prete modernista, which he considered "a youth's sin", Il Programma dei Modernisti, his modernist positions are motivated by scientific reasons. His modernism seemed similar to the positions of Protestant liberal theologians like Albrecht Ritschl and Adolf von Harnack. Buonaiuti claimed to be Catholic and to want to stay so usque dum vivam, as he wrote to the theology faculty of the University of Lausanne, which had offered him a chair in History of Christianity if he joined the Calvinist Church.

Buonaiuti was an exact contemporary in Rome with Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, who wa