#OtD 8 May 1942 a group of Black and white young people staged a sit-in at the Jack Spratt Coffee House in Chicago - the first of the civil rights movement. The restaurant dropped its discriminatory policy https://t.co/NIcwSeYAum https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/10838/Jack-Spratt-Coffee-House-sit-in?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon
otd
French mathematician and astronomer Jean Baptiste Joseph Delambre died #OTD in 1822.
He was director of the Paris Observatory & was involved in the precise measurement of the length of the earth's meridian, the basis of the original definition of the metre. He also wrote extensively on the history of astronomy. His six-volume Histoire de l'Astronomie is a detailed chronicle of the development of the field from ancient times through to the modern era.
#OtD 22 Aug 1893 Dorothy Parker, US writer and victim of Hollywood blacklisting, was born. Radicalised by the executions of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, she later founded the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and helped Spanish civil war orphans. https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/9447/dorothy-parker-born?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon
American writer, literary critic and journalist Edmund Wilson was born #OTD in 1895.
Over his career, he contributed to numerous periodicals and his essays and reviews are often credited with influencing public and scholarly opinion on many subjects. Wilson was the author of more than twenty books, including Axel's Castle, Patriotic Gore, and Memoirs of Hecate County. He was a friend F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos.
French mathematician, physicist, inventor, philosopher, and Catholic writer Blaise Pascal was born #OTD in 1623.
One of his most famous contributions in Mathematics is the Pascal's Theorem. Along with Pierre de Fermat, Pascal is credited with founding probability theory. He also made significant contributions to the study of binomial coefficients, which led to the formation of Pascal's Triangle.
Books by Blaise Pascal at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/7913
#art #history: this quote by francois truffaut (born #otd in 1932) isn't his most erudite, but there's still a lot of veracity to it.
recogised by sci-fi nerds as the scientist, claude lacombe, in spielberg's 'close encounters of the third kind', he was one of the founders of the nouvelle vague. francois started his career as a film critic for the esteemed journal, 'cahiers du cinema' & went on to direct the semi-autobiographical classic, 'les 400 coups'.
#francoisTruffaut #illustration #film
American writer Harriette Woods Baker was born #OTD in 1815.
She wrote under the pseudonym "Madeline Leslie." She devoted herself successfully to novels; but after about 15 years, she wrote popular religious literature. Some of her well-known titles include The Family in the Parsonage (1853), The Mother’s Mission (1854), and The Orphan Children (1856).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harriette_Woods_Baker
Books by Madeline Leslie at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/31136
"For the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief."
#OTD in 1843.
Edgar Allan Poe's Gothic short story "The Black Cat" is first published in The Saturday Evening Post.
At the time, the publication was using the temporary title United States Saturday Post. The story was reprinted in The Baltimore Sun and The Pensacola Gazette that same year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Cat_(short_story)
The Black Cat at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2148
16 February 1926 | A German Jewish girl Margot Frank, Anna's older sister, was born in Frankfurt. She and her family went into hiding in Amsterdam. After being arrested they were deported with their parents to Auschwitz. The sisters perished in Bergen-Belsen.
#Auschwitz #Birkenau #Holocaust #Shoah #Jews #history #Germany #otd #Germany #Frankfurt #Amsterdam #Netherlands #hiding #girl
English aristocrat and society hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell died #OTD in 1938.
Her salons were frequented by key figures of the Bloomsbury Group, including Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, & Lytton Strachey, as well as writers like Aldous Huxley, T.S. Eliot, & D.H. Lawrence. Artists such as Duncan Grant & Vanessa Bell were also regular visitors. During World War I, they invited conscientious objectors such as Duncan Grant, Clive Bell & Lytton Strachey to take refuge at Garsington.
Using a 13-inch (33-cm) telescope at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, Clyde W. Tombaugh, a 24-year-old American with no formal training in astronomy, discovered the dwarf planet Pluto #OTD in 1930.
The music of the spheres : A nature lover's astronomy by Grondal discusses Pluto as well as many other planets:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/70382
More about Pluto at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=Pluto&submit_search=Go%21
Mathematician and astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus was born #OTD in 1473.
The publication of Copernicus's model in his book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, just before his death in 1543, was a major event in the history of science, triggering the Copernican Revolution and making a pioneering contribution to the Scientific Revolution. via @wikipedia
Books by Nicolaus Copernicus at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/6426
German physicist Maria Goeppert Mayer died #OTD in 1972.
She was a Nobel laureate in Physics (jointly shared with Hans Jensen in 1963) for proposing the nuclear shell model of the atomic nucleus. She was the second woman to win a Nobel Prize in physics, the first being Marie Curie. Her model explained why certain numbers of nucleons in an atomic nucleus result in particularly stable configurations, the so-called magic numbers. via @wikipedia
https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2018/06/mayer-lecture.pdf
American physician Alice Hamilton was born #OTD in 1869.
She focused her explorations on occupational toxic disorders, examining the effects of substances such as aniline dyes, carbon monoxide, mercury, tetraethyl lead, radium, benzene, carbon disulfide & hydrogen sulfide gases. In 1925, at a Public Health Service conference on the use of lead in gasoline, she testified against the use of lead & warned of the danger it posed to people & the environment. via @wikipedia
#art #history: somebody mentioned 'mississippi goddam' &, geography aside, it perfectly expresses my feelings about today's unholy balderdash - which makes it serendipitous that nina simone would have celebrated her 91st #otd.
she needs no drivel from me. you all know how phenomenal she was & what an indelible mark she left upon the world of both music & activism. just put some records on & raise a tipple to eunice kathleen waymon!
#ninaSimone #illustration #music #activism #northCarolina
#OTD 1616. Galileo Galilei is formally banned by the Roman Catholic Church from teaching or defending the view that the earth orbits the sun.
In 1610, he published his Sidereus Nuncius, describing the observations that he had made with his new, much stronger telescope, amongst them, the Galilean moons of Jupiter. With these observations and additional observations that followed, he promoted the heliocentric theory of Copernicus published in De revolutionibus orbium coelestium.
Writer and illustrator Edward Gorey was born #OTD in 1925.
Not in the drafty old rooms of an Edwardian manse somewhere out on the moors, but in Chicago, of all places!
French painter Berthe Morisot died #OTD in 1895. The stages of her career are not very marked, as she destroyed all her early works. Together with Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Camille Pissarro and Edgar Degas, she founded the avant-garde group "Artistes Anonymes Associés", which later became the Société Anonyme des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs et Graveurs, a group of Impressionists. via @wikipedia
Books about Berthe Morisot at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=Berthe+Morisot&submit_search=Go%21
American artist, author, translator, and illustrator Wanda Gág was born #OTD in 1893.
"Millions of Cats" (1928), tells the story of an old man and an old woman who decide to get a cat. The book's unique illustrations, which Gág created using lithographic crayon, made it a classic of children's literature. Gág wrote and illustrated several other children's books, including "The Funny Thing" and "Snippy and Snappy."
"Millions of cats" will be available at PG pretty soon.
American novelist, short story writer, and poet Louisa May Alcott died #OTD in 1888. In 1860, Alcott began writing for the Atlantic Monthly. In the mid-1860s she wrote passionate, fiery novels and sensation stories akin to those of English authors Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon under the nom de plume A. M. Barnard. Alcott achieved further success with the first part of Little Women: or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy (1868).
Louisa May Alcott at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/102
#art #History
to the writers & poets of england, scotland, ireland & wales, nancy cunard (born #otd in 1896) enquired about their attitudes to the Spanish Civil War: 'are you for, or against, the legal Government & the People of the Republican Spain? are you for, or against, franco and fascism?' what do you think she'd have thought about war on #gaza today? if you don't already know the answer, a short thread follows.
#nancyCunard #illustration #antifascism #antiracism #ceasefireNow #writer
"“Age is my alarm clock,” the old man said. “Why do old men wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?”
#OTD in 1953.
Ernest Hemingway wins the Pulitzer Prize for The Old Man and the Sea.
The story was initially published in its entirety in the September 1st, 1952 issue of Life magazine. It was later issued as a book by Charles Scribner's Sons.
#OTD in 1781. The planet Uranus was discovered.
English astronomer William Herschel observed the seventh planet from the Sun, Uranus—first described by him as “a curious either nebulous star or perhaps a comet” and named for the father of the god Saturn. With a homemade 6.2-inch reflecting telescope, Herschel "engaged in a series of observations on the parallax of the fixed stars."
Books about Herschel at PG:
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=William+Herschel&submit_search=Go%21
English author, poet, and gardener Vita Sackville-West was born #OTD in 1892.
She published more than a dozen collections of poetry and 13 novels during her life. She was twice awarded the Hawthornden Prize for Imaginative Literature: in 1927 for her pastoral epic, The Land, & in 1933 for her Collected Poems. She was the inspiration for the protagonist of Orlando: A Biography, by her friend & lover Virginia Woolf.
Vita Sackville-West at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/34850
German physicist Albert Einstein was born #OTD in 1879.
Best known for developing the theory of relativity, he also made important contributions to quantum mechanics. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921 for his explanation of the photoelectric effect, which contributed significantly to the foundation of quantum theory. He was also a prominent public figure & advocate for pacifism, civil rights, and social justice.
Albert Einstein at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=einstein&submit_search=Go%21