The first medical school for women, the Boston Female Medical School, opened, 1848.
KDKA radio in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, made the first commercial news broadcast, reporting the presidential election returns, 1920.
North Dakota and South Dakota became states, 1889.
Originally, he was just performed rope tricks for the audience, but he realized that he had a talent for humor when he made the audience laugh between tricks. He didn't want his jokes to grow stale, so his wife suggested that he read the newspaper everyday before performing, and make jokes about whatever was happening in the world. That was the beginning of his career as a so-called "Cowboy Philosopher."
One of his early topics for humor was prohibition. He said, "Here is just how it started... Right in the start of Genesis... it says, 'And Noah became a husbandman and planted a vineyard.' The minute he became a husband he started in raising the ingredients that goes with married life. So you can trace all drink to marriage, see. What we got to prohibit is marriage."
Rogers went on to become the original king of all media. In his lifetime he was a Broadway showman, Hollywood actor, traveling public speaker, radio commentator, and newspaper columnist.
His career as a newspaper columnist only lasted for thirteen years, but in that time he managed to publish more than two million words. His column was syndicated in almost 400 papers; it was the most widely read column of its day.
His topics ranged widely. One day he would write about international affairs, the next about a circus stranded in Arkansas with no food for the animals, then about a relative in Oklahoma or an old bird dog in South Carolina that was named for him.
He often turned in his columns without capitalizing the first letters of sentences, and when one of his editors complained, he started writing with all capital letters. When the author Homer Croy asked him how he could write his columns so quickly, Rogers said, "It don't take long to write my kind of stuff. I save time on the punctuation. If you hadn't went to college, Homer, you'd be a lot faster writer."
Will Rogers said, "There is no credit to being a comedian, when you have the whole government working for you. All you have to do is report the facts. I don't even have to exaggerate."
Anna Sewell began writing Black Beauty, 1871. Why did humane societies distribute her book?
It's the birthday of the "King of the Cowboys,"
Dr. James Naismith was born in Canada in 1861. He originated the game of basketball.
Abraham Lincoln defeated Stephen A. Douglas, John C. Breckinridge, and john Bell for the presidency, 1860.
It's the birthday of novelist James Jones, (books by this author) born in Robinson, Illinois (1921). He's best known as the author of the military novel From Here to Eternity (1951). At the urging of his father, he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1939. He was stationed in Hawaii on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He went on to fight in the battle of Guadalcanal, where he was wounded, earning the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star. He kept a journal while he was in the army, and when he got home from the war, he wrote a novel about the experience of disillusioned veterans. It was rejected by all the major publishing houses, but the editor Maxwell Perkins liked a particular scene from the novel and told him to expand it. He spent five years expanding that scene, and it became the novel From Here to Eternity (1951), the story of a soldier's life in the years leading up to the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The novel was a huge international bestseller, in part because Jones tried to portray military life as realistically as possible, using dirty language in the dialogue and describing soldiers' reckless sex lives. Jones used much of the money he made from the book to start a writing colony, and he bought a mobile home to travel around the country. He went on to write many more novels, including The Thin Red Line (1962) about the Battle of Guadalcanal.
The elephant became the symbol for the Republican Party, 1874.
NBC became the first network to broadcast all of its programs in color, 1966.
Montana became a state, 1889.
German physicist Wilhelm Conrade Toentgen discovered X rays, 1895.
It's the birthday of Bram Stoker, (books by this author) born in Dublin, Ireland (1847). He was working as a clerk for the civil service when he saw an unknown actor named Henry Irving in a play that changed his life. He became obsessed with Irving's acting career, and began writing freelance reviews of every play in which Irving appeared. Eventually, Irving became one of the most famous Shakespearian actors of the era, and he invited Bram Stoker to be his manager at the Lyceum Theater in London.
Stoker became the devoted servant of Henry Irving, writing his speeches, ordering his lunches, and planning his every appointment. He was a hard worker and a meticulous bookkeeper and always kept the theater out of debt, and didn't have much ambition to do anything else. But one night, in 1890, he dreamt that a woman was trying to kiss him on the throat, and an elderly Count interrupted her shouting, "This man belongs to me!" Stoker woke up and immediately wrote about the dream in his diary. He couldn't get it out of his mind for weeks, and kept thinking about whom the Count might be.
Over the next several years, he began to make notes for a novel about the Count. He spent seven years gathering material, reading Transylvanian folklore, visiting graveyards, and studying the behavior of zoo animals. He named the Count after a Romanian historical figure, Vlad Dracula, remembered as the last warrior to defend Europe against the Turks after the fall of Constantinople.
Dracula came out in 1897 and got mixed reviews. It only became a minor best-seller in Stoker's lifetime. When he died in 1912, the obituaries about Stoker focused on his career in theater, and not a single one mentioned his authorship of Dracula. Stoker's wife made a fortune when the first Dracula movies started appearing in 1922, but she lost most of the money in the 1929 stock market crash. She used her remaining savings to build a bathroom in her basement, and she named the bathroom "Drac."
Count Dracula went on to become one of the most enduring fictional and cinematic characters of all time, appearing in more than 250 movies. Today there is a World Dracula Congress, many Dracula societies, and Romania has recently developed a tourist trade around Dracula, leading tours of Vlad Dracula's castle, where visitors can purchase Dracula goblets, Draculina soft drinks, paintings of Dracula, and bottles of blood red Vodka.
It's the birthday of the author of Gone with the Wind (1936), Margaret Mitchell, (books by this author) born in Atlanta, Georgia (1900). She spent almost her entire life in Atlanta, where everyone's grandparents told stories about the Old South and the War Between the States. She started writing fiction, and had written short stories and novels by the time she was a teenager, but she decided she wasn't good enough, so she gave up. She went to Smith College for a year and studied psychiatry, but moved back home when her mother became ill.
She was an independent and controversial young lady. The Atlanta Junior League rejected her application for membership because she'd once performed a risqué dance at a debutante ball that scandalized everyone in attendance. She married a wild bootlegger named Red Upshaw, who later became the basis of the character Rhett Butler, but when he turned violent she divorced him and married his best friend.
She got a job as a reporter, and wrote a series of stories about Georgia women who'd broken conventions, including a woman who'd disguised herself as a man to fight in the Civil War. The articles resulted in a barrage of angry letters from readers who said Mitchell was defaming Georgian womanhood. So she gave up on feminist journalism and started writing about Confederate history. While working on a story about Confederate General Henry Benning, she became fascinated by the story of his wife, who struggled to keep the family plantation in operation and nursed wounded Confederate soldiers in her house.
In 1926, Mitchell injured her ankle, which forced her to quit her job as a reporter. Her husband brought her books to read from the library during her recovery, and then one day he brought home a stack of copy paper and a typewriter as a present. He told her that there was hardly a book left in the library she hadn't read, so she better write one of her own. She worked on her novel for years, writing the chapters out of order, and pouring over history books so she could get all the historical details right. She documented at least four sources for every historical event she referenced.
Mitchell was still working on the rough draft when the editor for Macmillan, who was in Atlanta looking for publishable manuscripts, heard about her book. He contacted her, but she denied having written anything. Then, just before he was to leave the city, she showed up at his hotel with the five-foot pile of paper. She later said, "I just couldn't believe that a Northern publisher would accept a novel about the War Between the States from the Southern point of view."
Macmillan editors said Mitchell's manuscript was in terrible shape, with more than 1000 pages of faded and dog-eared paper, poorly typed and with penciled changes. But they loved the story. They asked Mitchell to change the original title "Tomorrow Is Another Day" because at the time there were already thirteen books in print with the word "Tomorrow" in the title. They also asked her to change the main character's name from Pansy to Scarlett.
Gone with the Wind broke all publication records. It sold 50,000 copies in one day, a million copies in six months, and two million by the end of the year. The sales of the book were even more impressive because it was in the middle of the Great Depression. The hardcover of the novel cost three dollars a copy, which was fairly expensive at the time. Its sales injected millions of dollars into the publishing industry The year it came out, employees at the Macmillan publishing company received Christmas benefits for the first time in nearly a decade.
Gone with the Wind was translated into almost forty languages. Margaret Mitchell was particularly proud that it was banned in Nazi-occupied Europe during the war and that black market copies sold for high prices among members of the French Resistance, who identified strongly with Scarlett O'Hara.
Margaret Mitchell became one of the most famous writers in America. She was the victim of rumors she was insane, that she had a wooden leg, that her husband had really written Gone with the Wind, that she had paid author Sinclair Lewis to write the book for her, that she was dying of leukemia, and that she was going blind.
Mitchell never wrote another novel, but spent the rest of her life answering fan mail and doing charity work. In 1945, she had a premonition and wrote to a friend, "I'm going to die in a car-crash. I feel very certain of this." Four years later, she was crossing the street with her husband, when a drunk driver struck and killed her. Two collections of her early writing have been published: Before Scarlett: Girlhood Writings of Margaret Mitchell and Margaret Mitchell: Reporter, both of which came out in 2000.
East Germany opened the Berlin Wall to allow passage between East and West Germany, 1989.
Today is the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night in 1938 when German Nazis coordinated a nationwide attack on Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues. The attack was inspired by the murder of a German diplomat by a Jew in Paris. When Hitler heard the news, he got the idea to stage a mass uprising in response. He and Joseph Goebbels contacted storm troopers around the country, and told them to attack Jewish buildings but to make the attacks look like spontaneous demonstrations. The police were told not to interfere with the demonstrators, but instead to arrest the Jewish victims. Fire fighters were told only to put out fires in any adjacent Aryan properties. Everyone cooperated.
In all, more than 1,000 synagogues were burned or destroyed. Rioters looted about 7,500 Jewish businesses and vandalized Jewish hospitals, homes, schools, and cemeteries. Many of the attackers were neighbors of the victims. The Nazis confiscated any compensation claims that insurance companies paid to Jews. They also imposed a huge collective fine on the Jewish community for having supposedly incited the violence. The event was used to justify barring Jews from schools and most public places, and forcing them to adhere to new curfews. In the days following, thousands of Jews were sent to concentration camps.
The event was called Kristallnacht, which means, "Night of Broken Glass." It's generally considered the official beginning of the Holocaust. Before that night, the Nazis had killed people secretly and individually. After Kristallnacht, the Nazis felt free to persecute the Jews openly, because they knew no one would stop them.
It's the birthday of the astronomer Carl Sagan, (books by this author) born in Brooklyn, New York (1934). He said, "I wanted to be a scientist from the moment I first caught on that stars are mighty suns, [and] it dawned on me how staggeringly far away they must be to appear to us as mere points of light." He spent many nights of his childhood in a field, situating himself so he couldn't see any buildings, trees, or anything else but stars. He graduated from high school and won a scholarship to the University of Chicago when he was only sixteen.
He became a professor of astronomy at Cornell University. At a time when most other astronomers were focusing on distant stars, other galaxies, and the history of the Universe, Sagan focused his research on the planets in our own solar system. He was particularly interested in the possibility that there might be life beyond the planet earth.
Because he had done extensive research on nearby planets, NASA hired him as an advisor for a mission to send remote controlled spacecrafts to Venus. Sagan said, "It was just a dream come true. We were actually going to go to the planets!"
In preparation for the mission, Sagan was shocked to learn that there would be no cameras on the robotic spacecrafts, called Mariner I and Mariner II. The other scientists thought cameras would be a waste of valuable space and equipment. They wanted to measure things like temperature and magnetism. Sagan couldn't believe they would give up the chance to see an alien planet up close. He said, "Cameras are important precisely because they could answer questions we are too stupid to ask."
Sagan lost the argument that time, but he won over NASA eventually. The Mariners were the last exploratory spacecraft ever launched by NASA without cameras. He contributed to the Viking, Voyager, and Galileo planetary exploration missions, and his insistence on the use of cameras helped us get the first close up photographs of the outer planets and their moons. Sagan understood that in order to get the public to care about science, to give tax dollars to science, he would have to appeal to the public's sense of wonder.
He was one of the first scientists to appear on the Johnny Carson show, and he became a regular guest, appearing twenty-five times. He created the TV show Cosmos, which attracted an audience of over half a billion people in sixty countries, the most popular scientific television program ever produced. His book based on the series spent seventy weeks on the New York Times best-seller list.
He won a Pulitzer Prize for his book The Dragons of Eden (1977) about the evolution of human intelligence, and he was also the author of the best-selling novel Contact (1985) which was made into a movie. He even had an asteroid named after him.
Carl Sagan said, "For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love."
And, "Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."
"Sesame Street" debuted, 1969.
It's the birthday of theologian Martin Luther, born in Eisleben, Saxony (1483), which is now located in Germany. He's best known as the man who sparked the Protestant Reformation, but he was also an extraordinarily productive writer. Between the years of 1516 to 1546, he published an article on religion every other week, totaling more than sixty thousand pages. It has been estimated that during his writing life, his published writings made up twenty percent of all the literature being published in Germany at the time.
In addition to his own writing, Luther spent much of his late life working on a translation of the Bible into German. There had been a few German translations before his, but they were purely literal translations. He wanted to appeal to average people, and he tried to use words that would be understood by common Germans. He said, "[The translator] must ask the mother at home, children in the street, the common man in the market and look them in the mouth, and listen to how they speak, then translate accordingly."
Toward the end of his life, Luther began to regret how many books he had written. He said, "The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing. . . . I wish that all my books were consigned to perpetual oblivion."
Today, most of Luther's writings are only read by theologians, but his words survive in his popular hymns. He knew that many people couldn't read, and he believed hymns could communicate ideas more broadly. He also just loved music. He said, "My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary." His hymns are sung in churches throughout the world.
Martin Luther said, "God writes the Gospel not in the Bible alone, but also on trees, and in the flowers and clouds and stars."
It's the birthday of writer Neil Gaiman , books by this author ) born in Portchester, England (1960). He writes serious comic books and turns them into graphic novels. Growing up in England, he knew what comic books were, but the comic books published in England weren't very exciting. One day, a friend of his father gave him a box of old DC and Marvel comic books from America, and he fell in love with them. He stayed up late every night, reading them by the light from the hallway.
He said, "The most important dreams, the most manipulable of cultural icons, are those that we received when we were too young to judge or analyze." He wanted to take those icons of his youth and write about them in a serious, literary way.
In 1987, DC Comics let Gaiman pick one of their old, failed comic book characters and revive him. Gaiman chose a character called the Sandman, who uses sleeping gas to catch criminals. Gaiman kept the name but changed everything else, turning the character into the god of both dreams and stories.
He chose different artists to draw the seventy-five issues, and he filled the series with references to myths, folklore and literature, especially Shakespeare. In 1991, a single issue of The Sandman called "A Midsummer Night's Dream" became the first comic book to win the World Fantasy Award.
People like Stephen King and Norman Mailer became fans of the Sandman series, and it was also one of the first comic books to appeal to women. The seventy-five issues were collected and published in ten volumes, the first of which was The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes (1991). It launched the graphic novel as a serious art form.
Vincent van Gogh's painting Irises sold for #53.9 million in New York City, 1987. During his lifetime, van Gogh sold only one painting.
Remembrance Day (Canada)
Kate Smith first performed the patriotic tune "God Bless America," 1938.
Washington became a state, 1889.
Abigail Adams, influential first lady and early women's rights activist, was born, 1744.
Acrobat Jules Leotard introduced the flying trapeze at the Circus Napoleon in Paris, 1879.
Stevenson and his wife traveled constantly during the years of their marriage, looking for a climate to improve his health. They tried Switzerland, Scotland, France, England, and even New Jersey. Stevenson's health kept declining, people called him "Bag of Bones," but he wrote constantly on trains, in boats, and in his bed, coughing. He once said, "To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive." They finally settled on the Pacific island of Samoa.
One day in the summer of 1881, Stevenson painted a map of an imaginary island for his stepson, and the map gave him an idea for the novel Treasure Island (1883). He finished it in a few weeks, and was happy to get the hundred pound payment, never realizing that the book would become one of the most popular adventure stories of all time, with one of literature's most famous villains, the one-legged pirate Long John Silver. A few years later, he wrote The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) in a single week. Despite his productivity, he believed strongly in the benefits of idleness. He said, "A faculty for idleness implies . . . a strong sense of personal identity."
Stevenson's contemporaries saw him as one of the greatest writers of his generation. Henry James considered him an equal, and G.K. Chesterton wrote, "All his images stand out in sharp outline. . . . It is as if [the words] were cut out with cutlasses." But with the rise of modern fiction and its emphasis on psychology and emotion rather than action, critics began to look down on Stevenson as merely a children's writer of adventure stories. One of the few modern writers who claimed Stevenson as an influence was Jorge Luis Borges, who said, "If you don't like Stevenson, there must be something wrong with you."
The first underwater tunnel built in the United States, the Holland Tunnel, opened, 1927. The tunnel ran under the Hudson River and connected New York City, New York, and Jersey City, New Jersey.
The first successful blood transfusion was performed on two dogs in London, England, 1666.
* It's the birthday of the woman who wrote about the adventures of a girl named Pippi Långstrump, or, as we know her in English, Pippi Longstocking: Swedish author Astrid Lindgren, was born Astrid Ericsson on a farm near Vimmerby, Sweden (1907).
It's the birthday of cartoonist and author William Steig, books by this author born in New York City (1907). When he was 23, The New Yorker bought one of his cartoons for $40. It was 1930, the beginning of the Great Depression, and his father had lost his job. William said he wanted "to be a professional athlete, or to go to sea like Melville," but he earned $4,500 his first year as a cartoonist, which he used to support the family. His cartoons are collected in books such as Small Fry (1944), Spinky Sulks (1988), and Our Miserable Life (1990). In 1990 he wrote Shrek! , about a green ogre whose name means "fear" in Yiddish and who has nightmares about fields of flowers and happy children who won't stop hugging and kissing him. In March, Steig published his last book, When Everybody Wore a Hat, a picture-book memoir about what it was like to be eight years old in 1916.
On this day in 1851, Harper & Brothers published Moby-Dick , by Herman Melville, about a ship captain named Ahab who is obsessed with hunting the great white sperm whale that took his leg. The book had been published in Britain in October with the title The Whale; Melville's decision to change the title didn't get there in time. The American version of the book had crowded pages and ugly binding, but the English version was done in three beautiful volumes with bright blue and white covers. It also had gold stamps of whales, but they were the wrong kind: they were shaped like Greenland whales—humpbacks or gray whales—instead of sperm whales. The British publisher accidentally left out the ending of the book, the epilogue. This confused a lot of British readers, because without the epilogue there was no explanation of how the narrator lived to tell the tale. It seemed like he died in the end with everyone else on the ship. The reviews from Britain were harsh, and costly to Melville. At the time, Americans deferred to British critical opinion, and a lot of American newspaper editors reprinted reviews from Britain without actually reading the American version with the proper ending. Melville had just bought a farm in Massachusetts, his debts were piling up, he was hiding them from his wife, and he was counting on Moby-Dick to bring in enough money to pay off his creditors. The book flopped, partly because of those British reviews. Melville never fully recovered from the disappointment.
Capt. Zebulon Pike first sighted Grand Peak, 1806. It was later renamed Pike's Peak in his honor.
It's the birthday of artist Georgia O'Keeffe, born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin (1887). She's particularly well known for her giant paintings of flowers, though she once said, "I only paint them because they're cheaper than models and they don't move." She worked for years teaching art at various colleges but found herself unable to spend time on her own work. She said the smell of turpentine made her sick. When O'Keeffe finally returned to her artwork, she painted in a totally new style. She said, "I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me . . . shapes and ideas so near to me . . . so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn't occurred to me to put them down." O'Keeffe married the photographer Alfred Stieglitz. They lived together in New York, and it was there that she started to paint the giant flowers for which she is known. She said, "Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not." On a trip to Taos, New Mexico, O'Keeffe grew to love the desert, which she called "the faraway." She felt that the thin, dry air enabled her to see farther, and she was awed by the seemingly infinite space that surrounded her. She would devote much of the rest of her career to painting desert scenery. O'Keeffe said, "I know now that most people are so closely concerned with themselves that they are not aware of their own individuality. I can see myself, and it has helped me to say what I want to say . . . in paint."
Nestle's chocolate chips went on sale for the first time, 1939.
August Mobius, the German astronomer, mathematician, teacher, and author was born, 1790. What's a Mobius strip?
The first postage stamps depicting the American eagle were issued, 1851.
President Abraham Lincoln delivered his Gettysburg Address, 1863.
Columbus dropped anchor in Puerto Rico, 1493.
Garrett Morgan, an African-American inventor, received a patent for the traffic light, 1923. In what order are the lights on a traffic light arranged?
Jean Francois Pilate de Rozier and the Marquis Francois Laurent d'Arlandes became the first men to fly, 1783. Their hot-air-balloon flight lasted 25 minutes.
In a letter to her sister, first lady Abigail Adams complained about the yet-unfinished White House, 1800.
Archaeologists found the first fossil bones in Antarctica, 1969.
Apollo 12 astronauts held the world's first space-to-earth news conference, 1969.
Vermont enacted the first absentee voting law, 1874.
Philanthropist Andrew Carnegie was born, 1835.
* The Statue of Liberty received a new, 4,800-pound copper torch, 1985.
The Senate confirmed Gerald Ford as vice-president, 1973. His predecessor, Spiro Agnew, resigned amid charges of income tax evasion.
Jimi Hendrix, influential rock guitarist, was born, 1942.
Children's author and illustrator Ed Young was born in the world's most populous country, 1931? Where was he born?
President Theodore Roosevelt wrote a letter to his distant cousin Franklin, approving of his engagement to the presiden't niece Eleanor, 1904.
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In America, Moby-Dick sold for $1.50. One reviewer said the book wasn't worth more than 25 cents. It took only two weeks for the publisher to see that Moby-Dick would sell even fewer copies than Melville's previous books. In his lifetime, Melville's royalties added up to a total of about $10,000. These days, college students buy 20,000 copies of Moby-Dick every year.
Melville said, "It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation."
Did you know that "Mickey Mouse" was the Allies' password on D-Day during World War II?
* Archeologists report they've found a 3,300 year=old treasure, which includes gold, silver, ivory, and ebony, in a shipwreck off the coast of Turkey, 1987.