German poet and novelist Achim von Arnim was born #OTD in 1781.
He is best known as one of the key figures of German Romanticism. His works were collected, with an introduction by Wilhelm Grimm, in twenty volumes (1839–48). He influenced late Romantics and Realists such as Eduard Mörike, Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Uhland and Theodor Storm, particularly through the Wunderhorn.
Books by Achim von Arnim at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/848
"Poet, never chase the dream.
Laugh yourself and turn away.
Mask your hunger, let it seem
Small matter if he come or stay;..."
#OTD in 1918.
The English poet Robert Graves marries the painter Nancy Nicholson in London. The wedding guests include Wilfred Owen, whose first nationally published poem appears three days later ("Miners" in The Nation). He will die by the end of the year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Graves
Robert Graves at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/628
#OTD in 1902.
The first example of a Sherlockian game – a study of inconsistencies of dates in Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles (the serialisation of which in The Strand Magazine concludes in April) by publisher Frank Sidgwick – appears in The Cambridge Review.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_of_Sherlock_Holmes
Arthur Conan Doyle at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/69
American journalist Nellie Bly died #OTD in 1922.
She was widely known for her record-breaking trip around the world in 72 days in emulation of Jules Verne's fictional character Phileas Fogg, & for an exposé in which she worked undercover to report on a mental institution from within. Bly was also an inventor, receiving U.S. patent 697,553 for a novel milk can & U.S. patent 703,711 for a stacking garbage can.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nellie_Bly
Nellie Bly at PG
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/9648
#OTD in 1925.
Ravel's opera L'enfant et les sortilèges (written from 1917 to 1925), to a libretto by Colette, is premiered at the Opéra de Monte-Carlo.
After being offered the opportunity to write a musical work, Colette wrote the text in eight days. Several composers had proposed to Colette that she write to music, but she was only excited by the prospect of Ravel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27enfant_et_les_sortil%C3%A8ges
L'enfant et les sortilèges at the IMSLP:
https://imslp.org/wiki/L%27enfant_et_les_sortil%C3%A8ges_(Ravel,_Maurice)
Swedish writer Astrid Lindgren died #OTD in 2002.
She is best known for several children's book series, featuring Pippi Longstocking, Emil of Lönneberga, Karlsson-on-the-Roof, and the Six Bullerby Children (Children of Noisy Village in the US), and for the children's fantasy novels Mio, My Son; Ronia the Robber's Daughter; and The Brothers Lionheart.
#OnThisDay, 29 Jan 1891, Liliʻuokalani is sworn in as Queen of the Hawaiian Kingdom.
She is the first, and only, regnant queen of the country and is deposed in a coup in 1893 that was supported by the US marines.
#RegnantWomen #WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #Histodons
"And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted — nevermore!"
#OTD in 1845.
Edgar Allan Poe first publishes the narrative poem "The Raven", under his own name in The Evening Mirror of New York, of which he is a staff critic until February. It is rapidly reprinted across the United States and appears in book form by the end of the year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Raven
The Raven at PG:
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/14082
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/17192
"The intense interest aroused in the public by what was known at the time as “The Styles Case” has now somewhat subsided."
Opening lines
#OTD in 1920.
Agatha Christie’s first novel is published in the U.K. The Mysterious Affair at Styles is the first detective novel by Dame Agatha Christie, introducing her fictional detective Hercule Poirot. It was written in the middle of the First World War, in 1916.
The Mysterious Affair at Syles at PG:
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/863
#OnThisDay, 30 Jan 1913, Ida B Wells forms the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago, Illinois, to give a voice to Black women who had been excluded by national suffrage organisations because of their race.
In March 1913, the club headed to Washington DC to take part in the national Women’s Suffrage Procession. They were told to march at the back, in a segregated section, so as not to upset white southern women.
#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #AmericanHistory #Histodons
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#OTD in 1853.
Charlotte Brontë's novel, Villette, appears, its publication having been delayed in order to allow Ruth, by her friend Elizabeth Gaskell, to be given a head start in the press.
Villette was Charlotte Brontë's third & last novel published during her life. It was preceded in writing by The Professor (her posthumously published 1st novel, of which Villette is a reworking, though still not very similar), Jane Eyre, & Shirley.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villette_(novel)
"What seems to us serious, significant and important will, in future times, be forgotten or won’t seem important at all."
#OTD in 1901.
Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters premieres at Moscow Art Theatre in Russia under the direction of Konstantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sisters_(play)
Three Sisters at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7986
#OTD in 1863.
Jules Verne's novel Five Weeks in a Balloon, or, Journeys and Discoveries in Africa by Three Englishmen (Cinq semaines en ballon) is published in Paris. It will be the first of Verne's Voyages Extraordinaires. This was Verne's first novel to be published by Pierre-Jules Hetzel, following the rejection of Voyage en Angleterre et en Écosse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Weeks_in_a_Balloon
Five Weeks in a Balloon at PG:
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/3526
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/4548
#OTD in 1848.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels publish The Communist Manifesto (Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei) in London.
Published amid the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe, the manifesto remains one of the world's most influential political documents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Communist_Manifesto
Danish seismologist and geophysicist Inge Lehmann died #OTD in 1993.
She is best known for her discovery in 1936 of the solid inner core that exists within the molten outer core of the Earth. The seismic discontinuity in the speed of seismic waves at depths between 190 and 250 km is named the Lehmann discontinuity after her. Lehmann is considered to be a pioneer among women and scientists in seismology research.
#OTD in 1904.
J. M. Synge's tragedy Riders to the Sea is first performed at Molesworth Hall, Dublin, by the Irish National Theatre Society, with Helen Laird playing Maurya.
Synge's use of phrasing from the Irish language is part of the Irish Literary Revival, a period when Irish literature looked to encourage pride and nationalism in Ireland.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riders_to_the_Sea
Riders to the Sea at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/994
#OTD in 1909.
The first issue appears of La Nouvelle Revue Française, a literary magazine founded in Paris by André Gide, Jacques Copeau, Jean Schlumberger, Gaston Gallimard, and others.
Established writers such as Paul Bourget and Anatole France contributed to the magazine from its early days. The first published works by André Malraux and Jean-Paul Sartre were in the pages of the Revue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nouvelle_Revue_Fran%C3%A7aise
Nouvelle Revue Française is available at UPenn:
https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/serial?id=nouvellerevfr
#OTD (to March 17) in 1877
Robert Louis Stevenson's first published work of fiction, the novella "An Old Song", appears anonymously in four episodes in the magazine London. It is first attributed to Stevenson in 1980.
Books by Robert Louis Stevenson at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/35
"Hvad skal manden være? Sig selv, det er mit korte svar."
"What ought a man to be? Well, my short answer is ‘himself’."
Act IV
#OTD in 1876.
The stage première of the verse-play Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen (published 1867) with incidental music by Edvard Grieg, takes place in Christiania, Norway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_Gynt
Peer Gynt at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/66239
In Norwegian at @runeberg-org.bsky.social
https://runeberg.org/peergynt/
Today is the start of #BlackHistoryMonth in the US. It is also the anniversary of #OtD 1 Feb 1960 in Greensboro, NC, when four Black college students refused to move from a Woolworth's lunch counter after they were denied service https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/10962/greensboro-civil-rights-sit-ins
Katherine Johnson died #OTD in 2020.
Her work included calculating trajectories, launch windows, and emergency return paths for Project Mercury spaceflights, including those for astronauts Alan Shepard and John Glenn, and rendezvous paths for the Apollo Lunar Module and command module on flights to the Moon. Her calculations were also essential to the beginning of the Space Shuttle program, and she worked on plans for a mission to Mars.
#OTD in 1830.
The première of Victor Hugo's play Hernani in Paris elicits protests from an audience seeing it as an attack on Classicism.
Hugo had enlisted the support of fellow Romanticists such as Hector Berlioz and Théophile Gautier to combat the opposition of Classicists who recognised the play as a direct attack on their values.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hernani_(drama)
Hernani at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9976
#OTD in 1922.
In a "savage creative storm" of less than three weeks beginning today at Château de Muzot in Switzerland, Rainer Maria Rilke writes his Sonnets to Orpheus (Die Sonette an Orpheus) and completes his Duino Elegies (Duineser Elegien).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnets_to_Orpheus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duino_Elegies
Books by Rainer Maria Rilke at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/846
"There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present."
James Joyce was born #OTD in 1882.
Together with Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson, he is credited with the development of the stream of consciousness technique in which the same weight is given to both the internal world of the mind and the external world of events and circumstances as factors shaping the actions and views of fictional characters.
James Joyce at PG:
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/1039
#OnThisDay, 24 Feb 1968, Jocelyn Bell Burnell - along with her male supervisor and three other men - published a paper confirming the discovery of pulsars. She had built the array, picked up the signal and argued it was not an anomaly. Hewish received the Nobel prize for it in 1974: Bell Burnell did not.
In 2018 Bell Burnell received a £3m prize for her work. She's used it to set up a foundation to improve the diversity in STEM.
