Mary Somerville, a Scottish scientist died #OTD in 1872. Her most famous work, The Mechanism of the Heavens (1831), was a translation and expansion of Laplace's Traité de mécanique céleste.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Somerville
"The educator must above all understand how to wait; to reckon all effects in the light of the future, not of the present."
Swedish writer Ellen Key was born #OTD in 1849.
She on many subjects in the fields of family life, ethics and education and was an important figure in the Modern Breakthrough movement. She was an early advocate of a child-centered approach to education and parenting, and was also a suffragist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_Key
Ellen Key at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/502
#OTD in 1884.
The first London publication of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn occurs.
Twain initially conceived of the work as a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer that would follow Huckleberry Finn through adulthood. He worked on the manuscript off and on for the next several years, ultimately abandoning his original plan of following Huck's development into adulthood.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventures_of_Huckleberry_Finn
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at PG:
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/76
"Thine emulous fond flowers are dead, too,
And the daft sun-assaulter, he
That frightened thee so oft, is fled or dead:
Save only me
...
There is none left to mourn thee in the fields."
#OTD in 1894. Robert Frost's first poem, "My Butterfly" appears in The New York Independent, which pays him $15.
#OTD in 1908.
Cuala Press, set up at Churchtown, Dublin, as a private press independent of the former Dun Emer Press in connection with the Irish Literary Revival and Arts and Crafts movement by Elizabeth "Lolly" Yeats with editorial support from her brother W. B. Yeats, produces its first publication, Poetry and Ireland: Essays by W. B. Yeats and Lionel Johnson (died 1902).
"I saw you - and from that day
I see only you in the world."
Johan Henric Kellgren, born #OTD in 1751, was a Swedish poet and critic.
Kellgren began as a tutor and later worked as a journalist and editor for Stockholms Posten, where he gained a reputation as a sharp and influential critic. Notable works include "Mina Löjen", which blends satire with lyrical beauty, and "Den nya skapelsen", which highlights themes of renewal & enlightenment.
"A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas."
Godfrey Harold Hardy, who died #OTD in 1947, was an English mathematician, known for his achievements in number theory & mathematical analysis.
In biology, he is known for the Hardy–Weinberg principle, a basic principle of population genetics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._H._Hardy
Books by G.H. Hardy at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/39236
"Ask no questions, and you'll be told no lies."
#OTD in 1860.
Charles Dickens's Bildungsroman Great Expectations begins serialization in All the Year Round. Although intended for weekly publication, Great Expectations was divided into nine monthly sections, with new pagination for each.
Great Expectations at PG:
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/1400
#OTD in 1892.
George Bernard Shaw's first play Widowers' Houses has its first performance, at the Royalty Theatre in London under the auspices of the Independent Theatre Society. The author is booed.
This is one of three plays Shaw published as Plays Unpleasant in 1898. The other plays in the group are The Philanderer and Mrs. Warren's Profession.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widowers%27_Houses
Books by Bernard Shaw at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/467
#OTD in 1812.
Leigh Hunt is tried and convicted of libel for calling the Prince Regent "a violator of his word, a libertine over head and ears in debt and disgrace" in The Examiner on March 22.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leigh_Hunt
Original files (with links) are available at @internetarchive
Books by Leigh Hunt at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/3612
#OTD in 1822.
French physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel, in a memoir read to the Academy of Sciences, coins the terms linear polarization, circular polarization, and elliptical polarization, and reports a direct refraction experiment verifying his theory that optical rotation is a form of birefringence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustin-Jean_Fresnel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polarization_(waves)
The wave theory of light is available at @internetarchive
https://archive.org/details/wavetheoryofligh00crewrich
“The more we gave in, the more we complied with that kind of treatment, the more oppressive it became.”
#OnThisDay, 1 Dec 1955, Rosa Parks does *not* give up her seat on the bus for a white passenger, and is arrested. Her refusal is a key moment in the American civil rights movement.
#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #AmericanHistory #Histodons
1/3
"It is equally a fault to believe all men or to believe none."
#OTD in 1817.
Walter Scott's historical novel Rob Roy, written from this spring, is published anonymously by Archibald Constable in Edinburgh, while a shipload of copies is carried from Leith to London for simultaneous publication there by Longman.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Roy_(novel)
Rob Roy at PG:
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/7025
#OTD in 1898.
Moscow Art Theatre's first season opens with a double bill of Emilia Matthai's Greta's Happiness and Carlo Goldoni's The Mistress of the Inn. The successful and influential Moscow Art Theatre production of The Seagull by Chekhov (its Moscow première), would open on 29 December 1898.
"O Day! he cannot die
When thou so fair art shining!
O Sun, in such a glorious sky,
So tranquilly declining;..."
#OTD in 1844.
Emily Brontë writes the poem "A Death-Scene". It was published in 1846 in a book collecting poetry by Brontë and her siblings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Death-Scene
Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1019
#OTD in 1851.
The French coup d'état of 1851 prompts Victor Hugo to be a leader of an unsuccessful insurrection against it. He is forced into exile, initially to Brussels, then Jersey, from which he was expelled for supporting L’Homme. He finally settled with his family at Hauteville House in Saint Peter Port, Guernsey, where he would live in exile from October 1855 until 1870.
Books by Victor Hugo at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/85
#OTD in 1928.
Radclyffe Hall's novel The Well of Loneliness, published by Jonathan Cape in London, is tried and convicted on the grounds of obscenity under the Hicklin test, after a campaign against it by James Douglas in the Sunday Express.
#OTD in 1920.
D. H. Lawrence's novel Women in Love appears in a limited U.S. subscribers' edition. This first was available only to subscribers, due to the controversy caused by Lawrence's previous work, The Rainbow (1915).
Women in Love at PG
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/4240
American admiral and computer scientist, (designed COBOL) Grace Hopper was born #OTD in 1906.
She created the first compiler, the A-0 System, in 1952. She was also one of the first programmers on the Harvard Mark I computer. Hopper popularized the term "debugging" in computing after discovering an actual moth causing a malfunction in the Mark II computer.
Mária Telkes died #OTD in 1980. She was a Hungarian-American biophysicist, engineer, & inventor who worked on solar energy technologies.
During World War II, she developed a solar water distillation device, deployed at the end of the war, which saved the lives of downed airmen and torpedoed sailors. In the 1940s she and architect Eleanor Raymond created one of the first solar-heated houses, Dover Sun House, by storing energy each day.
#OTD in 1901.
The first Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded, to French poet Sully Prudhomme.
He devoted the bulk of the money he received to the creation of a poetry prize awarded by the Société des gens de lettres. He also founded, in 1902, the Société des poètes français with Jose-Maria de Heredia and Leon Dierx.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sully_Prudhomme
Books by Sully Prudhomme at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/7695
Alfred North Whitehead, who died #OTD in 1947, was an English mathematician and philosopher. He is best known as the defining figure of the philosophical school known as process philosophy, which today has found application to a wide variety of disciplines, including ecology, theology, education, physics, biology, economics, and psychology, among other areas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_North_Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/8283
#OTD in 1899.
Robert Browning's book Asolando; Fancies and facts is published on the same day he dies at Ca' Rezzonico in Venice. He is buried in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.
His magnum opus, The Ring and the Book (1868–1869), is a 12-volume epic poem based on a real-life Italian murder trial. He is particularly celebrated for his dramatic monologues, which reveal the inner workings of his characters' minds.
Asolando
https://archive.org/details/asolandofanciesf00browiala
American educator and zoologist Cornelia Clapp died #OTD in 1934.
Clapp was a pioneering zoology researcher and leading ichthyology scholar. Her work on the toadfish was instrumental in correcting the idea that its egg was attached by a "sucker" to the yolk stalk, as she discovered that it was instead adhered with a disc of "transparent secretion" that could be separated from the membrane.
#OTD in 1854.
Wilkie Collins's "The Lawyer's Story of a Stolen Letter", published as "The Fourth Poor Traveller" in The Seven Poor Travellers – the Household Words special Christmas number – is the first non-police detective fiction published in Britain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilkie_Collins
The Lawyer's Story of a Stolen Letter at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1626
![With Estella after all.
Great Expectations
[1867 Edition]
by Charles Dickens
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/1400](/proxy/post_attachment/531410/604c689fba.jpg "With Estella after all.
Great Expectations
[1867 Edition]
by Charles Dickens
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/1400")
