May 22, 1703
British author Daniel Defoe was fined, imprisoned and later pilloried for seditious libel for his satire, The Shortest Way With Dissenters, which poked fun, in much the way that The Onion does today, of the persecution of religious sects such as the Quakers, Unitarians, Anabaptists, Baptists and Puritans. The book was published a year earlier: it took that long for the powers that be to realize it was mocking them.
