“Imagine This” by Freya Manfred from Speak, Mother. © Red Dragonfly Press, 2015.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

On this day in 1679, Daniel Greysolon, Sieur du Lhut, first reached Lake Superior, about where the city that bears his name — Duluth — now lies. He was a French soldier and explorer, and had visited Montreal on several occasions. In 1675, he bought a house there, and started thinking about making a trip to the headwaters of the Mississippi River. He became friends with the Sioux Indians, and in 1678 he set out with seven French followers and three Indian slaves, intending to broker a peace agreement between the Sioux and the Ojibwe Indians north and west of Lake Superior, and firm up the tribes’ fur trading relationship with New France. He negotiated the peace treaty, arranged some inter-tribal marriages, and encouraged the tribes to hunt together, before moving west to explore the Mississippi and St. Croix rivers.

On this day in 1698, British engineer Thomas Savery patented the first steam engine. He wanted to find a way to pump water out of coal mines, and eventually he built a machine that was filled with water itself. When steam was introduced under pressure, the water level rose and created a vacuum that drew more water up through a valve below. He described it in his book The Miner’s Friend (1702) as “a new invention for raising of water and occasioning motion to all sorts of mill work by the impellent force of fire, which will be of great use and advantage for draining mines, serving towns with water, and for the working of all sorts of mills where they have not the benefit of water nor constant winds.”

Though Savery’s invention worked, his machine was never used in mines due to fears that the boilers would explode. It also wasn’t cost-efficient and used large amounts of fuel to run the boiler, and the soldered joints wouldn’t tolerate much pressure. Savery coined the term “horsepower” in describing how powerful his steam engine was; because mines had previously been drained using horses and buckets, he claimed his machine had the power of 10 horses.

It was on this day in 1937, that Amelia Earhart was last heard from, somewhere over the Pacific. She and her navigator, Fred Noonan, had set off in May from Miami to fly around the world in a Lockheed Electra. She said, “I have a feeling that there is just about one more good flight left in my system, and I hope this trip is it.”

They had completed all but about 7,000 miles of the trip when they landed in New Guinea. Maps of this part of the Pacific were inaccurate, and U.S. Coast Guard ships were in place to help guide them to their next stop, the tiny Howland Island. The weather was cloudy and rainy when they left New Guinea. At 7:42 a.m., Earhart communicated to the Coast Guard Cutter Itasca: “We must be on you, but we cannot see you. Fuel is running low. Been unable to reach you by radio. We are flying at 1,000 feet.” Her last transmission, about an hour later, was “We are running north and south.”

Today is the birthday of Hermann Hesse, born in Calw, Germany, in 1877. In 1911, he took a trip to India and started studying Eastern religions, and ancient Hindu and Chinese cultures. His travels inspired his novel Siddhartha, about the early life of Gautama Buddha. It became popular among the counterculture movement of the 1960s, more than 40 years after it was published.

He said: “The world is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a path to perfection. No, it is perfect at every moment, every sin already carries grace in it.”

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It’s the birthday of French novelist George Sand, born Lucile Aurore Dupin in Paris (1804). She was raised by her grandmother at the family’s estate in rural Berry in central France, and was sent to an English convent in Paris to be educated. Although she started out as a troublemaker, Aurore underwent a spiritual conversion and decided to become a nun.…

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“Two Birds in the Evening” by Brendan Galvin from The Air’s Accomplices. © Louisiana State University Press, 2015.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

The United States Postal service introduced ZIP codes on this day in 1963. “ZIP” stands for “Zone Improvement Plan,” and they’re designed to make sorting and delivering mail more efficient. The first three digits represent the part of the country the mail is going to, and the last two identify the post office within that region.

In 1983, the U.S. Postal Service rolled out “ZIP + 4,” which added a hyphen and four additional digits to the end of the current ZIP code to speed things up even more. The first two digits of the addendum stand for a specific group of streets or cluster of large buildings, and the last two narrow it down further, specifying one side of the block or even one floor in a large building.

ZIP codes start with zero in the Northeast and get bigger as one moves south and west. There are more than 42,000 ZIP codes in the United States.

On this day in 1979, Sony introduced the Walkman portable cassette player. Sony’s co-founder, Masaru Ibuka, liked to listen to music when he traveled, but he was tired of lugging a full-size cassette player with him, so he commissioned designers to come up with something more portable. Cassette player technology had been around since 1963, but Sony miniaturized it and made it portable, with no external speaker. They took the idea of the Pressman — a portable tape recorder that was popular with journalists — and removed the recording mechanism and added stereo sound.

The first Walkman model was the TPS-L2; it weighed 14 ounces, had a blue and silver chassis, chunky buttons, and two headphone jacks so you could listen with a friend.

It’s the birthday of novelist Jean Stafford, born in Covina, California (1915). She’s the author of several novels, including The Mountain Lion (1947) and The Catherine Wheel (1952). When she published Collected Stories of Jean Stafford in 1969, it won the Pulitzer Prize. Stafford died 10 years later and left her entire estate to her cleaning woman.

It’s the birthday of the man who told writers to “Omit needless words!”: William Strunk Jr., born in Cincinnati, Ohio (1869). He was an English professor at Cornell, where he published his grammar book The Elements of Style (1918). He intended it as a reference for his students, and one of those students was named Elwyn Brooks White. E.B. White went on to become a famous writer, and in 1957, White was commissioned to revise and expand the original grammar book. The new version of The Elements of Style, also referred to simply as “Strunk & White,” has sold more than 10 million copies.

It’s the birthday of French novelist George Sand, born Lucile Aurore Dupin in Paris (1804). She was raised by her grandmother at the family’s estate in rural Berry in central France, and was sent to an English convent in Paris to be educated. Although she started out as a troublemaker, Aurore underwent a spiritual conversion and decided to become a nun. She was an enthusiastic convert, and the other girls called her “Saint Aurore.” When her grandmother discovered her granddaughter’s intentions, she promptly removed her from the convent and brought her home.

Back in Berry, she abandoned her dreams of the convent and did whatever she pleased. She loved to ride horseback, and her tutor at the time encouraged her to wear men’s clothing since it was more comfortable, so she rode all over the countryside in pants and a loose shirt. She smoked tobacco, learned to shoot, and flirted outrageously with all the local men. When her grandmother died, she inherited her money and estate.

She briefly went to Paris to live with her mother, then got married and had two children. But her marriage soon deteriorated — her husband drank too much and was unfaithful. She fell in love with other men, including the novelist Jules Sandeau. Her relationship with Sandeau was short-lived, but while they were together, they co-wrote a novel, Rose et Blanche (1831). It was published under Sandeau’s pseudonym, J. Sand. When the publisher asked for another book, she had one written entirely by her, but Sandeau did not want it under his pen name. As a compromise, she published her new novel, Indiana (1832), under the name George Sand. It was a big success.

She was a prolific writer; she wrote more than 90 novels, 35 plays, and a multivolume autobiography.

Sand was one of the most famous women of her time, not just for her writing but for her scandalous behavior — everything from her men’s clothing and cigars to her sexual exploits were in the public eye. She had a long string of lovers, including Frédéric Chopin, and her many friends included Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola, Eugène Delacroix, Ivan Turgenev, and Gustave Flaubert. Sand and Flaubert were especially close, although the two novelists disagreed on just about everything from politics to the role of women to the purpose of art. They spent long hours together, smoking and discussing literature and humanity; they exchanged frequent letters, and read each other’s unpublished work. Sand was 17 years older than Flaubert; he addressed his letters to her “dear master,” while she addressed hers “friend of my heart.”

She said: “The world will know and understand me someday. But if that day does not arrive, it does not greatly matter. I shall have opened the way for other women.”

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It was on this day in 1936 that Margaret Mitchell‘s novel Gone With the Wind was published.

Mitchell was from a prominent Atlanta family — she was a fourth-generation Atlantan on her father’s side, and came from a big Irish Catholic family on her mother’s side. She grew up hearing grandiose stories of the Civil War. She was 10 years old before she found …

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“Down By the Salley Gardens” by William Butler Yeats. Public Domain.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

On this day in 1860, a debate on the merits of the theory of evolution took place at Oxford University. It occurred as part of the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species (1859) had just been published seven months earlier, and was hotly contested by scientists and theologians on both sides of the issue. Noted biologist Richard Owen had written a scathing review of the book in the Edinburgh Review, and he also coached the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, in his condemnation of the book. On the pro-Darwin side of the issue were several liberal theologians — including mathematician and priest Baden Powell — as well as scientists Joseph Dalton Hooker and Thomas Henry Huxley. Huxley was such an ardent and vocal supporter of evolutionary theory that he came to be known as “Darwin’s bulldog.”

Bishop Wilberforce, one of the most famous orators of the day, was to be one of the speakers on Saturday the 30th. The hall was packed and hundreds lined up outside to hear the discussion, which came to be known as the Wilberforce-Huxley debate (or the Huxley-Wilberforce debate, depending on whose side you were on), even though there were many contributors to the discussion. There is no transcript of the day’s events, but one exchange has reached the status of legend. Wilberforce asked Huxley whether he was descended from an ape on his father’s side or his mother’s, and Huxley retorted that he was not ashamed to have a monkey as an ancestor, but he would be ashamed to descend from someone who used his great gifts to obscure the truth. Most accounts include some version of this story, but according to Hooker, that may have been all that most people heard. In his report to Darwin (who was too ill to attend), Hooker wrote:

“Well, Sam Oxon got up and spouted for half an hour with inimitable spirit, ugliness and emptiness and unfairness ... Huxley answered admirably and turned the tables, but he could not throw his voice over so large an assembly nor command the audience ... he did not allude to Sam’s weak points nor put the matter in a form or way that carried the audience. The battle waxed hot. Lady Brewster fainted, the excitement increased as others spoke; my blood boiled, I felt myself a dastard; now I saw my advantage; I swore to myself that I would smite that Amalekite, Sam, hip and thigh if my heart jumped out of my mouth, and I handed my name up to the President as ready to throw down the gauntlet.”

Hooker was the closing speaker of the discussion, and he felt that his speech had carried the day (of course, Wilberforce and Huxley each felt the same way about their own speeches). In the end, though each side claimed victory, most accounts chalk it up as a win for the Darwinians.

It’s the birthday of poet and dramatist John Gay, born in Barnstaple, England (1685), best known for his play The Beggar’s Opera, which was first performed in 1728.

It’s the birthday of Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, born in Szetejnie, Lithuania (1911).

It was on this day in 1936 that Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone With the Wind was published.

Mitchell was from a prominent Atlanta family — she was a fourth-generation Atlantan on her father’s side, and came from a big Irish Catholic family on her mother’s side. She grew up hearing grandiose stories of the Civil War. She was 10 years old before she found out — from some black farm workers — that the South had actually lost the war.

She wanted to be a journalist, and she went off to Smith College; but her mother died after her first year of college, and she came home to run the household for her father. By this time, it was the 1920s, and Mitchell enjoyed the freedom that came with it. She cut her hair short, smoked cigarettes and drank corn liquor, and read scandalous literature like Lady Chatterley’s Lover. She shocked her family’s social circle when she performed a provocative Parisian street dance with a male partner at a charity ball — after the dance, she was banned from the Junior League.

She might have shocked polite society, but she attracted plenty of admirers. Just 4 feet 11 inches, she was charming and energetic. An Atlanta gossip columnist wrote in 1922: “She has in her brief life, perhaps, had more men really, truly ‘dead in love’ with her [...] than almost any other girl in Atlanta.” For a while she was encouraging five suitors at the same time. She married a handsome young man, Red Upshaw, who made his money bootlegging liquor in the Georgia mountains. Their marriage lasted just a few months. Mitchell needed some income, so she got a job as a reporter for The Atlanta Journal. A few years later, she married John Marsh, who had been the best man at her first wedding.

In 1926, a recurring ankle injury got so bad that a doctor ordered her to stay in bed and rest. She quit her job at the newspaper and began writing fiction. She started work on a novel about a headstrong teenage flapper named Pansy Hamilton, but it didn’t come together. So she renamed her heroine Pansy O’Hara and started writing a novel set during the Civil War. She wrote most of it in three years, but didn’t do anything with the manuscript, and continued to fuss with it for almost 10 years, eventually writing more than 1,000 pages. She wrote on a Remington typewriter set up on her sewing table, and she wouldn’t tell anyone about it — whenever people came over, she covered her work with a towel. But all her friends knew she was writing it, and jokingly called it “the Great American Novel.”

In the spring of 1935, an editor for Macmillan named Harold Latham was scouting for manuscripts in the South. He got a tip that there was a reporter from Atlanta who had written a book. Latham found Mitchell; she refused to let him see it, even after he spent the afternoon touring Atlanta’s flowering dogwood trees and other local scenery with her. After he left, an acquaintance said she was surprised that Mitchell had written anything good enough for an editor to consider. Furious, she returned home, and rounded up all the pieces of her manuscript, which were in various envelopes under her bed and in a closet. They didn’t all fit together quite right, and she didn’t even have a first chapter, so she just grabbed the envelopes and went to Latham’s hotel. She described her appearance on arrival: “Hatless, hair flying, dust and dirt all over my face and arms and worse luck, my hastily rolled up stockings coming down about my ankles.” She handed over her manuscript but soon doubted her decision and asked for it back. Instead, Macmillan offered her an advance, and she spent the next year reworking the novel. She changed the name of the heroine from Pansy to Scarlett, and she gave her book a title, Gone With the Wind. It came out on this day in 1936, and sold a million copies in its first six months, going on to sell more than 30 million copies. Mitchell won the Pulitzer Prize, and three years after its publication, Gone With the Wind (1939) was made into a movie that quickly became the highest-earning film of all time.

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“In a Room with Many Windows” by Jane Hirshfield from The Beauty. © Knopf, 2015.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

It’s the birthday of French aviator and writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, born in Lyons in 1900. He joined the French army in 1921, and that’s where he flew his first plane. He left the military five years later and began flying airmail routes into the Sahara Desert, eventually becoming the director of a remote airfield in Rio de Oro. Living conditions were Spartan, but he said, “I have never loved my house more than when I lived in the desert.” He wrote his first novel, Southern Mail (1929), in the Sahara and never lost his love for the desert.

In 1929, he moved to South America to fly the mail through the Andes, and he later returned to carry the post between Casablanca and Port-Étienne. He worked as a test pilot and a journalist throughout the 1930s, and survived several plane crashes. He also got married in 1931, to Consuelo Gómez Carrillo. She wrote of him in her memoir, “He wasn’t like other people, but like a child or an angel who has fallen down from the sky.”

He rejoined the French army upon the outbreak of World War II, but when the Nazis invaded France in 1940, he fled to the United States, hoping to serve the U.S. forces as a fighter pilot. He was turned down because of his age, and, homesick and discouraged, he began his best-known book, The Little Prince (1943). The following year, he returned to North Africa to fly a warplane for France. He took off on a mission on July 31, 1944, and was never heard from again.

It was on this day in 1956 that President Eisenhower signed the Federal Highway Act, which established the Interstate Highway System.

The Interstate Highway System had been in the works for a while. During World War I, the Army determined that the condition of national roads needed to be improved for national defense, so they produced a map for the government of the major routes they felt were important in the event of war. In 1938, President Roosevelt drew out a map of “superhighways” to cross the country.

The American public had its first taste of the “superhighway” system in 1939, at the New York World’s Fair. The most popular exhibit there was the General Motors Futurama ride, which showed a vision of the future in 1960. Fairgoers sat in chairs that moved through a diorama of the future America, where everyone owned a car and the entire country was connected by freeways. On these freeways, the lanes going in one direction were separated from the traffic coming from the other direction. Drivers could go up to 50 mph, and could travel from one coast to the other without a single traffic light. These ideas were so exciting that 28,000 people attended the Futurama exhibit every day.

As a general during World War II, Eisenhower was impressed by Germany’s autobahn system, and he decided that the United States needed something comparable. After the war, the economy was booming, and Eisenhower decided the time was right to push through the Interstate Highway System. It was the largest public works project in American history. It took longer than expected to build—35 years instead of 12—and it cost more than $100 billion, about three times the initial budget. But the first coast-to-coast highway, Interstate 80, was completed in 1986, running from New York City to San Francisco.

It was a great boon for hotel and fast-food chains, which sprung up by interstate exits. It was also a boon for suburban living, since commuting was faster and easier than before.

But it was not necessarily good for American literature. When John Steinbeck took a cross-country trip with his dog and wrote Travels with Charley (1962), he only traveled on the interstate for one section, on I-90 between Erie, Pennsylvania, and Chicago, Illinois. He wrote: “These great roads are wonderful for moving goods but not for inspection of a countryside. You are bound to the wheel and your eyes to the car ahead and to the rear-view mirror for the car behind and [...] at the same time you must read all the signs for fear you may miss some instructions or orders. No roadside stands selling squash juice, no antique stores, no farm products or factory outlets. When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.”

Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road in 1951, and by the time it was published, in 1957, construction had begun on the Interstate Highway System. In 1969, shortly before his death, Kerouac said: “You can’t do what I did any more. I tried in 1960, and I couldn’t get a ride. Cars going by, kids eating ice cream, people with hats with long visors driving, and, in the backseat, suits and dresses hanging. No room for a bum with a rucksack.”

William Least Heat-Moon wrote Blue Highways (1982) about the cross-country trip he took after losing his job and separating from his wife. He took only back roads. He wrote: “Life doesn’t happen along interstates. It’s against the law.”

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“What We Might Be, What We Are” by X.J. Kennedy from Exploding Gravity. © Little Brown, 1992.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

It’s the birthday of the man who wrote, “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains”: philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, born on this day in Geneva (1712). In 1749, the Academy of Dijon sponsored an essay contest, and the question was: “Has the revival of the arts and sciences done more to corrupt or to purify morals?” Rousseau was delighted by the question, and he said that his head was so full of ideas he was unable to breathe. He said: “And that is how I became a writer almost against my will. ... The remainder of my life and all my subsequent misfortunes were the inevitable result of this moment of aberration.” He worked feverishly on his essay, “A Discourse on the Arts and Sciences.” He argued that the advances of science and art had been harmful to humanity by consolidating power in the hands of governments and creating an atmosphere of competition and fear between citizens. His essay won first prize, and he went on to write many more philosophical works, including his most famous, The Social Contract (1762), in which he said that the natural condition of humanity is to be brutal and lawless, and that it is through an agreed “social contract” of what constitutes a good society that humans are able to rise above their base nature.

It was on this day in 1888 that Robert Louis Stevenson set sail for the South Seas. Stevenson’s father was a lighthouse engineer, and his parents had hoped that he would enter the family trade. Stevenson soon left the study of engineering for the study of law, and on his summer breaks he would travel. He suffered from an undiagnosed respiratory illness, most likely tuberculosis. As a result, he usually traveled to warmer climates like the French Riviera, where he hobnobbed with artists and writers. He earned his law degree, but never practiced; he told his parents that he wanted to become a writer instead. His first book was An Inland Voyage (1878), about his canoe trip from Antwerp to northern France. The book set the pattern for much of Stevenson’s later tales of travel and adventure. While in France, he met and fell in love with Fanny Vandegrift Osbourne, an American woman who was separated from her husband. She returned to California, Stevenson followed her, and they were eventually married.

In the 1880s, Stevenson’s health declined. He wrote many of his most famous books — including Treasure Island (1883), Kidnapped (1886), and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) — from his sickbed in Scotland. In the hope that a warmer climate would be beneficial for his condition, the Stevensons departed San Francisco aboard the schooner yacht Casco for an extended tour of the South Pacific. They arrived in Samoa the following year and decided to settle there. The locals dubbed Stevenson “Tusitala,” the teller of tales. Stevenson wrote journalistic accounts of the region and his attempts to better understand it in his books In the South Seas (1896) and A Footnote to History (1892). Stevenson died of a brain hemorrhage in 1894, at the age of 44. He was buried at the top of Mount Vaea.

Today is the birthday of the founder of the Methodist movement, John Wesley (1703). He was born in Epworth, Lincolnshire, England, and his father was a Nonconformist — a dissenter from the Church of England. Wesley studied at Oxford, where he decided to become a priest. He and his brother joined a religious study group that was given the nickname “the Methodists” for their rigorous and methodical study habits; the name wasn’t meant as a compliment, but Wesley hung onto it anyway and managed to attract several new members to the group, which fasted two days a week and spent time in social service.

By 1739, he felt he wasn’t really reaching people from the pulpit, so he took to the fields, traveling on horseback, preaching two or three times a day. He began recruiting local laypeople to preach as well, and ran afoul of the Church of England for doing so. He believed that Christians could be made “perfect in love” when their actions arose out of a desire to please God and to promote the welfare of the less fortunate.

Wesley was an ardent abolitionist and tireless man. He traveled 250,000 miles, preached 40,000 sermons, and wrote, translated, or edited more than 200 volumes. He made £20,000 for his publications but gave most of it away and died in poverty. Though there’s no evidence that he actually wrote it himself, “John Wesley’s Rule” does a fair job of summing up his life:

Do all the good you can,
By all the means you can,
In all the ways you can,
In all the places you can,
At all the times you can,
To all the people you can,
As long as you ever can.

It’s the birthday of Eric Ambler, born in London (1909). He was the first author to write stories about international espionage that were based on real life. His books include Background to Danger (1937) and Cause for Alarm (1938).

It was on this date in 1928 that Louis Armstrong and his band the Hot Five recorded “West End Blues.” Armstrong was 26 years old at the time and living in Chicago, where he’d been for six years. He’d moved there from New Orleans as part of Joe “King” Oliver’s band; Oliver had been a friend and mentor to the young singer and trumpeter since Armstrong was a teenager. They parted ways in 1925. Oliver composed “West End Blues” and had just recorded his own version a few weeks earlier, but Armstrong’s cover, recorded in Chicago’s OKeh studio, is legendary. It features Earl “Fatha” Hines on piano, and it’s one of the first recorded examples of Armstrong’s trademark “scat” singing.

The recording took the jazz world by storm. An ecstatic audience carried Armstrong off the stage when he performed the song live one night. Composer Gunther Schuller wrote that the record “made it clear jazz could never again revert to being entertainment or folk music. The clarion call of ‘West End Blues’ served notice that jazz could compete with the highest order of musical expression. Like any profoundly creative innovation, [it] summarized the past and predicted the future.”

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“Living a Week Alone” by Robert Bly from Like the New Moon, I Will Live My Life. © White Pine Press, 2015.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

On this day in 1787 English historian Edward Gibbon completed the final volume of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in his garden in Lausanne, Switzerland. In his diary, he wrote, “I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom and perhaps the establishment of my fame ... I had taken my everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion.” The history took 20 years and six volumes to complete. It traces the trajectory of Western civilization from the height of the Roman Empire to the fall of Byzantium. The book was a sensation, becoming the model for all future historical texts; Gibbon is considered the first modern historian of ancient Rome. He wrote, “History ... is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortune of mankind.”

It’s the birthday of novelist Alice McDermott, born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1953 and raised in a tight-knit community of Irish immigrants in Elmont, Long Island. Her novels are often generational sagas about Irish-American families struggling with secrets and loss. She said, “I’m not terribly interested in plots, and am always a little skeptical of stories that are too neat or too familiar.” She’s been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction three times, and won the National Book Award for her novel Charming Billy in 1998. McDermott works on two novels at once, waiting for one story to pull ahead, which she calls “a bad habit.” Her latest novel, Someone, was published in 2013.

It’s the birthday of Helen Keller, born in Tuscumbia, Alabama (1880). As a toddler, she became sick with an illness that left her both blind and deaf. She became a difficult child, until her 20-year-old teacher, Anne Sullivan, managed to communicate the letters for “water” while running water from the pump on the little girl’s hand. It was a breakthrough, and on that day alone, Keller learned 30 words.

Keller was very bright—she went on to Radcliffe College, where she became a popular lecturer and began sharing her story and advocating for others with disabilities. She also became a radical activist along the way, joining the Socialist Party of Massachusetts in 1909, when she was 29, and then the Industrial Workers of the World. She supported Communist Russia and hung a red flag over her desk. The FBI opened a file on her. She advocated for women’s suffrage and for access to birth control. She helped found the American Civil Liberties Union.

Helen Keller died in 1968, at the age of 87.

She said, “No one has ever given me a good reason why we should obey unjust laws.”

It’s the birthday of writer and activist Grace Lee Boggs, born in Providence, Rhode Island (1915). Her parents were immigrants from Guangdong province in China, and her father ran a Chinese restaurant in downtown Providence. She grew up in a tiny apartment above the restaurant. Her mother didn’t know how to read — she had been sold into slavery in China as a young girl, and her only escape was an arranged marriage with Grace’s father, who was 20 years her senior. Grace remembers being a young girl, crying over one thing or another, and hearing the waiters in her father’s restaurant suggest her parents should leave her outside to die since she was a girl. She said, “That’s how I learned early on about living for change.” When her family moved to New York City to open up restaurants there, they had to buy their house in Queens in the name of their Irish contractor, because Asians weren’t allowed to own land there.

She won a scholarship to Barnard College, where she studied philosophy. She went on to get her Ph.D. at Bryn Mawr College, and after she graduated, she couldn’t find a job — not only was it impossible for women of color to get jobs as academics, but even department stores told her that they didn’t hire Asians. So she headed to Chicago and was eventually offered a job at the University of Chicago Philosophy Library. She earned $10 a week and lived for free on a couch in a basement filled with rats. She wore the same clothes every day: a blue corduroy jumper, saddle oxfords, and when it was cold out, a leopard coat.

The rats were so bad that she went to check out the South Side Tenants Organization, which fought against rat-infested housing on the South Side. Through that group, she began working with the black community in Chicago, and she participated in the March on Washington. She became a radical community organizer, and a few years later, she met Jimmy Boggs, a black autoworker in Detroit. He was recently divorced, with six children. For their first date, Grace invited Jimmy over to dinner. He showed up two hours late, and he refused to eat the lamb chops she had prepared because he thought they were too fancy. She put on a Louis Armstrong record, and Boggs announced that he hated Armstrong. But by the end of the date, he asked her to marry him. She accepted without hesitation, and they were married for 40 years, until his death in 1993. She said: “My knowledge had come mostly from books. He had never been to college, although he was full of ideas. [...] He was the person in the [...] community to whom everyone came for advice [...] So when he asked me to marry him on our first date [...] I didn’t hesitate for a minute.”

Boggs continued her work as a radical activist in Detroit, and she and her husband worked together on projects and publications. Her books include Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century (1974), co-written with her husband; and most recently, The Next American Revolution (2011), published when she was 95 years old.

She said: “Do something local. Do something real, however, small. And don’t dis the political things, but understand their limitations.”

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From the Archives: The News from Lake Wobegon - The Best of 1984 (3 CDs)

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D-Day, 1944

The great, teeming mass of American democracy awoke in the dark, jammed into the bellies of steel beasts. Look closely at these nervous, rough-edged sons of Manhattan and Iowa, breathing each other’s sweat and fear. They were mechanics and farm boys, not mere pieces on a distant chessboard. Yet, the high-and-mighty generals and fat-cat financiers orchestrated a horrific theater where the currency was youth and the dividend was dirt. It is the very oldest, cruelest racket in the book; wrapping a proud flag around a meat-grinder to sell it as a holy crusade.

When the ramps dropped into the churning, bloody surf of Normandy, the smooth political speeches instantly evaporated. The sky screamed with lead. The cold ocean swallowed the brave. It was an absolute, chaotic mess of frontline slaughter, won entirely by the raw grit of the common man. These ordinary men waded through hell not for a corporate balance sheet, but for the terrified, breathing soldier right next to them.

By nightfall, the cliffs were won, but the staggering cost was carved deeply into the red sand. Thousands lay still, their songs permanently silenced, their immense, vibrant lives traded for a beachhead. Look at the pale bodies of the young boys who will never grow old, whose heartbroken mothers will receive cold, official telegrams. Let the proud politicians claim victory. The true, eternal glory belongs strictly to the muddy, profane, and sublime souls who looked into the mouth of tyranny, bled for their brothers, and moved forward anyway.

Doug MacKenzie

Dit-dit-dit-Dah

My Father’s Day memories always begin with D-Day. Late at night, my father and I would sit shoulder to shoulder, tuning the FM radio to catch the faint tapping of Morse code. Through the static, he listened intently, deciphering dits and dahs almost instinctively. He recognized handshakes and signoffs with ease, and to me this was just one more remarkable skill possessed by the man who seemed larger than life.

During World War II, my father served as a radioman on the USS Augusta, flagship of the Normandy invasion. On June 6, 1944, he was stationed in the radio room while Admiral Kirk and General Omar Bradley directed the assault from on board. The stakes were immense. A single German shell might have changed history, and my father was there in the middle of it, quietly doing his part.

Most of the messages he relayed from that asbestos-lined radio shack were coded and decoded by others. But in August 1945, while President Truman was returning from Potsdam aboard the Augusta, my father relayed one message in plain language. Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s message told Truman that the atomic bomb had been dropped, and he believed the president should announce it himself before the press released the news. To me, Father’s Day means remembering a man whose quiet skill and courage linked my childhood admiration to history itself, and whose steady hand carried one of the twentieth century’s most consequential messages directly to the President of the United States.

John and Cindy Kirkpatrick

“Follower” by Seamus Heaney from Selected Poems: 1966-1987. © Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1987.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

On this day in 1974, the first Universal Product Code was scanned at a supermarket cash register. The first scan was made at a Marsh’s Supermarket in Troy, Ohio, which had agreed to serve as a test facility for the new technology, and the first item scanned was a pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit Gum. There’s no significance to gum being the first item scanned; it just happened to be the first thing pulled from the cart. That pack of gum is on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.

The UPC bar code system was originally invented specifically for grocery stores, to speed checkout and help them keep better track of their inventory, but it proved so successful that it spread quickly to other retailers. The first patent for a bar code went to N. Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver in 1952. They didn’t do anything with it for 20 years, because the scanning technology didn’t exist yet. By 1972, Woodland was working for IBM, and it was there that the bar code design was perfected and the prototype scanner was built in 1973. The IBM 3660 included a digital cash register and checkout scanner, and the grocery industry, which had been collaborating with IBM on the invention, began requiring its suppliers to start putting bar codes on their packaging.

It was on this day in 1997 that the first book in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, was published in Britain. Joanne Rowling was an unemployed, single mother waiting for a delayed train, when an idea suddenly came to her. “I did not have a functioning pen with me,” she said. “I simply sat and thought for four hours, while all the details bubbled up in my brain, and this scrawny, black-haired, bespectacled boy who didn’t know he was a wizard became more and more real to me ... I began to write that very evening.” The seven Harry Potter books have sold 450 million copies worldwide and spawned a successful movie franchise. The character of Harry Potter earns J.K. Rowling, as she is now known, an estimated $10,000 every hour.

It’s the birthday of Pearl Buck, born in Hillsboro, West Virginia, in 1892 to two Presbyterian missionaries, Absalom and Caroline Sydenstriker. The family moved to China when Buck was three months old, and she lived there for most of the next 40 years. As a child, she was homeschooled by her mother in the mornings. In the afternoon, she was taught classical Chinese by a scholar named Mr. Kung.

Her first novel, East Wind, West Wind, (1930) sold well, but it was her second novel, The Good Earth (1931), about a clan of Chinese peasants struggling to survive during a drought, that became an international best-seller and won Buck the Pulitzer Prize. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1938, one of only two American women to do so (the second was Toni Morrison).

Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” was published on this date in 1948. The story is about a small American town that holds a lottery every year to ensure a bountiful harvest. Names are written on slips of paper, and the winner of the lottery is stoned to death by the townspeople. Jackson said she wrote it in about two hours, one sunny June afternoon after she had run some errands with her young daughter. “[The idea] had come to me while I was pushing my daughter up the hill in her stroller,” she later recalled. “It was ... a warm morning, and the hill was steep, and beside my daughter, the stroller held the day’s groceries—and perhaps the effort of that last 50 yards up the hill put an edge to the story.”

Jackson submitted the story to The New Yorker and the editors wasted no time in accepting it; it was in print three weeks after Jackson’s agent had sent it to them. The public outcry against the story was immediate and intense. People canceled their subscriptions to The New Yorker in droves, and they wrote in with complaints and questions. The magazine forwarded all letters to Jackson, at the rate of 10 or 12 a day; Jackson’s mail carrier stopped speaking to her. Out of the roughly 300 letters Jackson received that summer, only 13 of them were positive, and those all came from friends. Even her mother was a critic. She wrote, “Dad and I did not care at all for your story in The New Yorker ... [I]t does seem, dear, that this gloomy kind of story is what all you young people think about these days. Why don’t you write something to cheer people up?”

It’s the birthday of the blues musician Big Bill Broonzy, born in Scott, Mississippi (although some sources say Lake Dick, Arkansas), in 1898 (some sources say 1893), one of 17 children of parents born into slavery. When he was a young boy, his uncle made him a fiddle from a cigar box and taught him how to play. He moved to Chicago and started playing fiddle tunes, which did not appeal to sophisticated Chicago audiences. So, he learned to play the guitar and sing the blues. It took him several years to get the hang of it, but he began making recordings in 1927 and soon became one of the most popular blues singers in the country. He sang at Carnegie Hall in 1939, but by the late 1940s, the blues began to change with Muddy Waters’ electric guitar sound and style. By 1950, Broonzy was working as a janitor at Iowa State University when Studs Terkel “rediscovered” him and had him on his radio program as a frequent guest.

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“Monet” by Howard Nemerov from The Selected Poems of Howard Nemerov. © Swallow Press, 2003.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

It was on this day in 1950 that North Korea invaded South Korea, beginning the Korean War. Most of the actual combat occurred in the first year of the war, but it dragged on and on. Truce negotiations began in 1951, and they were the longest truce negotiations in the history of warfare, lasting two years and 17 days, with 575 meetings between the opposing sides. Dwight D. Eisenhower ran for president in 1952 on the platform that he would end the war, and when he was elected that’s what he did.

The Korean War was the first war the United States had concluded without success. There were no celebrations when it ended. More than 3 million people lost their lives, and many years later, an American veteran named Harold Richards wrote: “I was not brave, nor was I a hero in any way. I was just as scared as anyone else under fire ... I took part in five major battles and two invasions. I suffered the cold of North Korea along with every GI during the northern campaign. There were so many unsung heroes of that war, only men there could understand.”

Today is the birthday of English novelist, essayist, and critic George Orwell, born Eric Arthur Blair in 1903 in Motihari, British India. In childhood, Orwell was an avid reader, but a neglectful student: his parents decided he would be better off testing for a position on the Indian Imperial Police force. He chose a posting in Burma, where he was responsible for the security of more than 200,000 people and where he first started to see the consequences of poverty and oppression. It was in Burma that he began a physical, as well as political, metamorphosis: he grew a mustache and had a small blue circle tattooed on each knuckle, something the Burmese natives did to protect against bullets and snake bites. He contracted dengue fever and returned to England to recuperate in 1927, deciding to resign his post and become a writer. He used his experiences in Burma for his first novel, Burmese Days (1934). Resolving to write about poverty in England and the “down and outers who inhabit it,” he began dressing as a tramp and living among the lower classes and the destitute, penning strident essays under the pen name P.S. Burton. He ended 1931 by getting drunk and trying to get himself jailed so he could write about it, but his state of drunkenness was deemed “insufficient” and he was sent home. The essays formed the basis of the book Down and Out in Paris and London (1933).

For a few years, he continued to write essays, while working as teacher and at the Booklovers’ Corner, a second-hand bookshop. He joined the Spanish Civil War and got shot in the throat by a sniper. In his essay “Why I Write,” he said: “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art.”

In the early 1940s, Orwell began work on a novel about a group of farm animals who decide to stage an uprising against their tyrannical farmer called Animal Farm (1945). It was published near the end of the war, and became an international sensation. Then came the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949, about a man losing his identity while living under a repressive regime.

It’s the birthday of best-selling children’s author and illustrator Eric Carle, born on this day in Syracuse, New York (1929). He has written and illustrated more than 70 books, including Do You Want to Be My Friend? (1971), The Grouchy Ladybug (1977), and his most famous, The Very Hungry Caterpillar (1969), which has sold almost 30 million copies.

And it was on this day in 1942 that Dwight D. Eisenhower became the commander of the U.S. troops in Europe. He had been a military man for more than 20 years, but he’d never seen combat. All he’d ever done was train soldiers. He would go on to become supreme commander of the entire Allied Armies in Europe, and he helped plan many of the major offensives during the European theater of the war, including D-Day.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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“Sweetness” by Stephen Dunn from New and Selected Poems. © Norton, 1994.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

It’s the birthday of Ambrose Bierce, born near Horse Cave Creek, Ohio (1842). He wrote essays, journalism, and satire, and he’s well known for his short stories, especially “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (1890) and The Devil’s Dictionary (1906), a satirical reference book. He volunteered for the Union Army when the Civil War broke out, and he was only the second person in his county to do so. He fought in some of the bloodiest battles, and later he wrote stories about the war: bleak, bitter stories with senseless deaths and no heroes.

It was on this day in 1374 in Aachen, Germany that an outbreak of dancing plague or dancing mania, also known as St. Vitus’ Dance, first began. From Aachen it spread across central Europe and as far away as England and Madagascar. Dancing mania affected groups of people — as many as thousands at a time — and caused them to dance uncontrollably for days, weeks, and even months until they collapsed from exhaustion. Some danced themselves to death, suffering heart attacks or broken hips and ribs. At the time, people believed the plague was the result of a curse from St. Vitus. Scientists now tend to believe it was due to ergot poisoning or mass hysteria.

It’s the birthday of poet John Ciardi, born in Little Italy in Boston’s North End (1916).

He taught at various colleges, including Kansas State and Harvard, before giving up teaching for writing full time. Ciardi’s popularity grew after the publication of his 1959 textbook, How Does a Poem Mean? — still widely used in high schools and colleges across America. He completed his last collection of poetry, The Birds of Pompeii, shortly before his death in 1986.

It’s the birthday of novelist Anita Desai, born in Mussoorie, India (1937). Her mother was German and her father was Bengali. She grew up speaking German at home, Hindi with her friends, learned Bengali from her father, and listened to Urdu poetry recited in the street. But she first learned to read and write in school, and in English. She said: “I think it had a tremendous effect that the first thing you saw written and the first thing you ever read was English. It seemed to me the language of books. I just went on writing it because I always wanted to belong to this world of books.”

Desai has published 12 novels, including Clear Light of Day (1980), In Custody (1984), and Fasting, Feasting (1999).

It’s the birthday of poet Stephen Dunn, born in Forest Hills, New York (1939). He published more than 10 books of poetry before his collection Different Hours won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001.

Dunn’s first love was basketball. He was a star on the 1962 Hofstra basketball team that went 25 and one on the year. They called him “Radar,” for his accurate jump shot. After college, he played professional basketball for the Williamsport, Pennsylvania, Billies for a couple of years before giving up the sport.

Dunn found a job as a brochure writer for Nabisco, and for the next seven years, he rose through the ranks of the corporation. He started to worry though that he would get stuck in a job doing something he didn’t believe in, so he quit and moved to Spain with his wife and he started to write poetry.

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It was on this day in 1972 that Title IX was signed into law by President Richard Nixon. Title IX prohibited sex discrimination in any federally funded education activity or program. This applied to all schools, from elementary to universities, both public and private. Although the original language doesn’t mention sports, the biggest change came for fe…

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“Living Tree” by Robert Morgan from Dark Energy. © Penguin, 2014.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

Tonight is Midsummer Night’s Eve, also called St. John’s Eve. St. John is the patron saint of beekeepers. It’s a time when the hives are full of honey. The full moon that occurs this month was called the Mead Moon, because honey was fermented to make mead, and that’s where the word “honeymoon” comes from. It is a time for lovers. An old Swedish proverb says, “Midsummer Night is not long but it sets many cradles rocking.”

It was on this day in 1926 that 8,040 college applicants, in 353 locations around the U.S., were administered an experimental college admissions test. The test was the brainchild of Carl Brigham, a professor of psychology at Princeton. Brigham had been an assistant during World War I for the U.S. Army’s IQ testing movement, the “Army Alpha,” which assessed the intelligence of new recruits. After the war, he tinkered with the test, mainly making it more difficult, but also looking for a measurement of pure intelligence, regardless of the test-taker’s educational background. At that time, college applicants took entrance exams for each college they applied to; Brigham thought one exam for all colleges would be more efficient. The Scholastic Aptitude Test, now known as the SAT, was formally adopted in 1942. Today’s test takes three hours to complete.

The typewriter was patented on this date in 1868, by Christopher Latham Sholes of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Sholes was a newspaperman, and he was driven to invention out of necessity: His printers went on strike. He and two colleagues set out to invent a machine to print letters on paper. There had been attempts to make typewriters before, but they weren’t very practical — it took longer to type a letter than to write it by hand, and the devices were viewed as novelties for rich and bored people. Sholes and his collaborators didn’t bother to look at what the other inventors had tried before them, so they repeated a lot of the same mistakes.

The QWERTY keyboard evolved hand in hand with the typewriter. At first glance, it looks like the arrangement of the letters is arbitrary, and it would seem logical to just put them in alphabetical order. That’s what Sholes did originally, but the way his typebars were set up, some letters that were often used together in words ended up with their bars close together as well. The trouble was that an experienced typist would get going so fast that the typebars of those letters would get jammed and have to be unstuck. Sholes rearranged the keys so that there was more space between the frequently paired letters.

Ernest Hemingway loved his Royal typewriter. He kept it in his bedroom so it would never be too far away, and he put it on top of a bookshelf and wrote standing up.

Hunter S. Thompson wrote on a red IBM Selectric. One of his first jobs was as a copy boy for Time, and while he was supposed to be working, he used a typewriter and typed out, word for word, all of The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms, in order to learn something about writing style.

Jack Kerouac was a fast typist, and it frustrated him to have to change the paper so often. So he took long sheets of drawing paper, trimmed them to fit in the machine, and wrote all of On the Road that way. When he taped them together at the end, the manuscript was 120 feet long.

Today is the birthday of writer David Leavitt, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1961). Both sets of Leavitt’s grandparents were Jewish immigrants from the Pale of Settlement; “Leavitt” is the Americanization of “Labovitz.” He grew up in Palo Alto, the son of intellectuals. He said: “I grew up being the only child in the room whose presence everyone forgot about. By the time I was twenty, therefore, I had absorbed an enormous amount, but I had experienced almost nothing.” He was studying writing at Yale with Gordon Lish and John Hersey when an editor at The New Yorker noticed a short story of his in a literary magazine and asked him to submit something. They rejected him nine times before accepting a story, Territory, in 1982. It was the first story the magazine had ever published that was overtly about homosexual life. Leavitt was 20 years old. Two years later, he published his first collection of stories, Family Dancing (1984).

Leavitt is considered the first modern fiction writer to bring gay themes to mainstream literature.

It’s the birthday of novelist Michael Shaara, born in Jersey City, New Jersey (1928). His great-grandfather had been wounded at Gettysburg, which inspired Shaara to spend years researching and writing a book about the Civil War. When he finished his book, it was rejected by 15 publishers, and finally bought by the David McKay Company. The Killer Angels was published in 1974. It got mixed reviews and sold poorly, so it was a shock to Michael Shaara and everyone else when The Killer Angels was awarded the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In 1993, Gettysburg, a film based on The Killer Angels, finally made the novel a best-seller.

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“May opens wide” by Marge Piercy from Made in Detroit. © Knopf, 2015.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

It’s the birthday of writer Arthur Conan Doyle, born in Edinburgh, Scotland (1859). He studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, and there he met Joseph Bell, his favorite professor. Bell taught his students how to make a successful diagnosis through observation and deduction.

After graduating, Doyle opened his own practice and wrote fiction in his spare time. In 1887, he published A Study in Scarlet, a mystery featuring a character based on his old professor: the detective Sherlock Holmes. He ended up writing 56 short stories and four novels with the famous detective, including The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902).

Doyle said, “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

And Sherlock Holmes said to his sidekick, Dr. Watson, “You have a grand gift for silence, Watson. It makes you quite invaluable as a companion.”

It’s the birthday of writer Peter Matthiessen, born in New York City (1927). He grew up in a wealthy family in Connecticut, where he went to boarding school before joining the Navy during WWII. He went on to Yale and later studied at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Matthiessen published his first short stories in The Atlantic Monthly, but he was barely scraping by teaching creative writing courses, when one of his Yale professors, Norman Holmes Pearson, asked if he would work for the newly formed CIA. Matthiessen didn’t have much interest in politics, but he asked if he could be sent to Paris, and Pearson agreed. “So,” he said, “out of sheer greed and opportunism, off I went.”

The CIA thought that Matthiessen needed a better cover than struggling novelist, so they helped support his founding of The Paris Review. Most of his work for the CIA involved infiltrating the lives of French communists, but as the McCarthy trials gained attention in America, Matthiessen resigned, and he later called his work as a spy “the only adventure I’ve ever regretted.”

He then spent three years working unsuccessfully as a commercial fisherman on Long Island. He said, “I had picked up a very wide, if not very deep, knowledge of the natural world, when I then failed as a fisherman I realized that I could write about nature.” In 1956, 29-year-old Matthiessen took off across the country in his Ford with a sleeping bag, some books, and a shotgun. He wanted to visit every wildlife refuge in the country. The result was Wildlife in America (1959). It caught the eye of William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker. Shawn funded Matthiessen’s trip to the Amazon, where he wrote The Cloud Forest: A Chronicle of the South American Wilderness (1961), which was serialized in The New Yorker.

Matthiessen continued to write novels, such as At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965), as well as books about nature, such as The Snow Leopard (1978).

He said, “I’ve never been bored one day in my life. I could fill 500 years with no problem.”

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“My Daughter Describes the Tarantula” by Faith Shearin from Telling the Bees. © Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2015.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

Today is Father’s Day. The holiday that we celebrate on the third Sunday in June traces its roots to 1910, but the first recorded celebration of a holiday honoring fathers took place in Fairmont, West Virginia, on July 5, 1908. Grace Golden Clayton wanted to celebrate the lives of 210 fathers who had died in a mining cave-in in Monongah, West Virginia. That particular observance was never promoted outside of Fairmont, and no mention was made of it until years later. The Father’s Day that took root owes its origins to Sonora Smart Dodd, of Spokane, Washington. She heard a Mother’s Day sermon in 1909 and thought it might be nice to honor fathers as well. So the following year, she promoted the idea with the support of area churches. The first bill to make it a national holiday was introduced in Congress in 1913, but in spite of encouragement by President Woodrow Wilson, it didn’t pass. In 1966, Lyndon Johnson issued a proclamation designating the third Sunday in June to honor fathers, and it finally became an official, permanent national holiday during the Nixon administration.

Today is the summer solstice and the first day of summer in the Northern Hemisphere. For those of us in the north, today will be the longest day of the year and tonight will be the shortest night. The entire Earth is about 3 million miles farther from the sun at this time of the year. The difference in the temperature is due to the fact that our planet is tilted on its axis, and at this time of year, the Northern Hemisphere is tilted toward the sun, receiving more direct radiation for longer periods of time each day. It is that slight tilt, only 23 1/2 degrees, that makes the difference between winter and summer. The rise in temperature allows most of the plants we eat to germinate. Wheat and many other plants require an average temperature of at least 40° F to grow. Corn needs a temperature of 50° F, and rice needs a temperature of 68° F.

It’s the birthday of novelist Ian McEwan, born in Aldershot, England (1948). He was an army brat, traveling all over the world as a kid. He said: “I remember how I liked to loll unobtrusively on the floor behind the sofa when my mother had a friend round. I would listen in to these roaming, intimate heart-to-hearts ... how compelling they were ... and, with so many bad people in the world, what a lucky six-year-old I thought I was when my mother and her friends were always on the side of the good.”

He went to college, then read about a new fiction writing program at the University of East Anglia, directed by Malcolm Bradbury. He called and got straight through to Bradbury, who explained that they dropped the program because no one applied. McEwan said that he wanted to apply, and Bradbury agreed. Every few weeks, McEwan wrote a short story, and he and Bradbury met in a pub to talk it over, and that’s the way he wrote most of the stories that became his first book, First Love, Last Rites (1975). That book, and the ones that followed, were so dark and twisted that he was nicknamed “Ian McAbre.”

His books include Amsterdam (1998), Atonement (2001), On Chesil Beach (2007), Sweet Tooth (2012), and The Children Act (2014).

It’s the birthday of author Mary McCarthy, born in Seattle, Washington (1912). She published several novels — including The Group (1963) about a group of Vassar students — but she had a hard time making things up, so most of her novels are autobiographical.

Most critics believe that her best book is the memoir Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957). She is also remembered for her literary criticism. The writer Gore Vidal said, “She was our most brilliant literary critic, [because she was] uncorrupted by compassion.”

It’s the birthday of naturalist and writer Donald Peattie, born in Chicago (1898). He married his high school sweetheart, studied botany at Harvard, and worked as a botanist for the Department of Agriculture. He felt that literature was his true calling, and he and his wife moved their family to Paris, where they hoped to become great writers. He said, “We had crossed a wide Atlantic elated with excitement, unafraid to launch the frail bark of our careers.” But two days after their arrival, their young daughter died. Autumn came to Paris — cold, dark, and dreary. They relocated to the South of France and lived there for six years. Peattie published a couple of novels, but they were flops.

In 1933, they returned home with their three sons, so poor that they had to borrow money for the ship tickets back home. It was the middle of the Great Depression, Peattie was unemployed, and his wife’s health was bad. They settled at his wife’s childhood home, The Grove, a 100-acre estate in Glenview, Illinois. He found work writing pamphlets about trees, and he began writing a day-by-day account of the natural area at The Grove — the woods, wetlands, and original prairie. That became An Almanac for Moderns (1935), and it launched his career. He wrote: “I learned also the value of knowing some one thing, at last, with a certain degree of thoroughness, be it only my one square mile. I even began to welcome the very limitations of my problem, as a sonnet writer his fourteen lines ... I have learned, however, that three years is utterly insufficient to make me a master of a reasonable amount of wood-wisdom concerning one square mile of Illinois land.”

A few years later, they moved to Santa Barbara, and there Peattie wrote his two greatest books: A Natural History of Trees of Eastern and Central North America (1950) and A Natural History of Western Trees (1953). For each tree, Peattie wrote poetic descriptions, natural histories, identifying characteristics, and anecdotes.

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“Retired” by Faith Shearin from Telling the Bees. © Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2015.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

It’s the birthday of poet Paul Muldoon, born in Portadown, Northern Ireland (1951). He said of his childhood: “The place was County Armagh, about halfway across northern Ireland, an apple growing district where some of the people who had been planted there in the Elizabethan era had come from Warwickshire and brought with them their apple plants, but also much of the language, which William Shakespeare was using and which was fossilized where I was brought up.”

He published his first book, New Weather (1973), when he was 21 years old, and he has published more than 30 collections since then.

It’s the birthday of Charles Waddell Chesnutt, born on this day in Cleveland (1858). His parents were free mixed-race Southerners who left Fayetteville, North Carolina, for Ohio. One of his grandfathers had been a slaveholder, and Chesnutt looked white, but he always identified as black. His family moved back to Fayetteville when Charles was eight, and the boy went to a Freedmen’s Bureau school for the children of freed slaves. He became a teacher, and then principal of the State Colored Normal School in Fayetteville, which trained black teachers.

In 1880, when he was 22 years old, he wrote in his journal: “I think I must write a book. I am almost afraid to undertake a book so early and with so little experience in composition. But it has been a cherished dream, and I feel an influence that I cannot resist calling me to the task.”

It took Chesnutt a few years to get there. He was an established and respected citizen in Fayetteville, but in 1883 he decided that he didn’t have much of a future as a black writer in the hostile post-Civil War South. So he moved back to Cleveland with his wife and children. He passed the state bar exams and set up a stenography business, and in his spare time he wrote stories. In 1887, he published his first short story, “The Goophered Grapevine,” in The Atlantic Monthly. He was the first black fiction writer to be published in The Atlantic — although the magazine assumed that he was white until he informed them several years, and many stories, later.

In 1891, Chesnutt sent a manuscript to Houghton Mifflin, who wrote back: “A writer must have acquired a good deal of vogue through magazine publication before the issue of a collection of his stories in book form is advisable.” Apparently he had not acquired enough vogue, because his manuscript was rejected. He continued to publish stories, and in 1899 Houghton Mifflin finally released his first book, The Conjure Woman. Most of the Conjure Woman stories described clever slaves outwitting their cruel masters, and they were written in dialect, filled with supernatural events. The Conjure Woman was incredibly successful, and Chesnutt was welcomed as a major new voice in American fiction.

Chesnutt was trying to write a critique of racism, but it was easy to lose sight of that in the stories. William Dean Howells, one of his champions, wrote about The Conjure Woman: “As far as his race is concerned, or his sixteenth part of a race, it does not greatly matter whether Mr. Chesnutt invented their motives, or found them, as he feigns, among his distant cousins of the Southern cabins. In either case, the wonder of their beauty is the same; and whatever is primitive and sylvan or campestral in the reader’s heart is touched by the spells thrown on the simple black lives in these enchanting tales.”

Chesnutt switched gears for his next book, The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color-Line (1899), realistic stories of life in Ohio and North Carolina, featuring middle-class, light-skinned, mixed-race characters. The Wife of His Youth was also a big seller, and Chesnutt decided to quit his stenography business and become a full-time writer.

Chesnutt followed up these collections with three novels: The House Behind the Cedars (1900), The Marrow of Tradition (1901), and The Colonel’s Dream (1905). They sold poorly — readers considered them too angry and radical. So just six years after publishing his first book, Chesnutt’s literary career was finished. He went back to his stenography business, worked as an activist, and published an occasional essay or short story.

It’s the birthday of Lillian Hellman, born in New Orleans (1905). When she was 20, she married a writer and moved with him to Hollywood. She published a few stories in the magazine her husband edited. Then she read a Scottish book called Bad Companions (1930) by William Roughead. It contained a chapter about a court case in Edinburgh where a young girl accused her female teachers of having an affair, on no basis whatsoever. Hellman decided that the premise would make a good play. She said: “Anyone young ordinarily writes autobiographically. Yet I picked on a story that I could treat with complete impersonality. I hadn’t even been to boarding school.” She had a new lover, the detective writer Dashiell Hammett, whom she had met at a Hollywood restaurant, and he encouraged her to try her hand at writing drama. So at the age of 26 she wrote her first play, The Children’s Hour, which debuted when she was 29. It is the story of two teachers, Karen and Martha, who teach at an elite all-girls New England boarding school. A malicious student spreads a rumor that Karen and Martha are lesbian lovers, and their lives fall apart. Parents pull their students out of school, Karen breaks up with her fiancé out of fear that she has damaged his reputation, and Martha commits suicide. The Children’s Hour was a sensation. It was so controversial that it was banned in several cities, including Chicago, London, and Boston. But it opened to rave reviews on Broadway, and when it failed to win the Pulitzer Prize because of its content, critics objected so strongly that they formed the New York Drama Critics Circle Award as a way to honor it. That was the beginning of Lillian Hellman’s celebrity.

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It’s the birthday of the music journalist and cultural critic Greil Marcus, born in San Francisco (1945). He was named for his father, Greil Gerstley, who was killed in World War II before Marcus was born. Gerstley served on a Navy ship, one of three that were deliberately sent into a typhoon. Although the other officers urged him to mutiny, Gerstley re…

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“In Bed With A Book” by Mona Van Duyn from Near Changes. © Knopf, 1992.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

Today is Juneteenth, also known as “Freedom Day” or “Emancipation Day.” It’s a holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. It was on this date in 1865 that Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas, to spread the word that slavery had been abolished. Of course, the Emancipation Proclamation had gone into effect some two and a half years earlier, in January 1863; most Confederate states ignored it until they were forced to free their slaves by advancing Union troops.

From the balcony of Galveston’s Ashton Villa, General Gordon read the contents of General Order Number Three: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”

Galveston’s former slaves celebrated that day, and formal Juneteenth festivities were held in other parts of Texas on the first anniversary. Celebrations of the holiday have waxed and waned over the years; today, Juneteenth is celebrated in communities all over the country, and as of April 2012, it’s officially recognized as a holiday by the governments of 42 of the United States. Observances often include a reading of the Emancipation Proclamation and performances of traditional African-American music, dancing, and literature.

Today is the birthday of mathematician, physicist, and religious philosopher Blaise Pascal, born in Clermont-Ferrand, France. He was a child prodigy, and by the time he was 19, he had already perfected the first mechanical calculator for sale to the public. In the field of physics, he discovered that air has weight and proved that vacuums are possible in nature. In mathematics, he founded the theory of probabilities and developed an early form of integral calculus. He also invented the syringe and the hydraulic press.

He was often torn between a spiritual life and a scientific one. When he was 23, he began to feel the need to withdraw from the world and devote his life to God. He did just that, for a while, but soon threw himself back into his scientific pursuits, working so hard he made himself ill. He returned to religion for good after a mystical conversion experience, which he called the “night of fire,” in 1654, and entered the Abbey of Port-Royal in January 1655. He lived as an informal hermit, and he never again published under his own name. He only wrote things that the monks requested, and he produced two great works of religious philosophy: Provincial Letters (1657) and Thoughts (1658).

It’s the birthday of the music journalist and cultural critic Greil Marcus, born in San Francisco (1945). After he graduated from Berkeley, he got a job writing reviews for Rolling Stone magazine. He was frustrated, though, because most reviewers just wanted to talk about lyrics, and he wanted to go deeper. He wanted to write about music the way Pauline Kael wrote about movies. So Rolling Stone‘s founder, Jann Wenner, made him an editor instead. In the decades since, he’s written numerous volumes of rock music criticism and other criticism, including A New Literary History of America (2009). It’s a collection of essays — nearly 1,100 pages long — which he co-edited with Werner Sollors. The book covers Colonial days to the election of Barack Obama.

Today is the birthday of novelist Salman Rushdie, born in Bombay (now Mumbai), India (1947).

In 1987, he published a book called The Satanic Verses, which got mixed reviews. Most Western critics didn’t notice that it would be offensive to Muslims. But a month after the book came out, it was banned in India and book burnings throughout the Muslim world followed. The Ayatollah Khomeini eventually announced that Rushdie should be sentenced to death for blasphemy, and he placed a $1.5 million bounty on Rushdie’s head. Rushdie had to go into hiding. His Italian translator was threatened and stabbed. His Japanese translator was murdered. His Norwegian publisher was attacked and left for dead. Rushdie spent the next nine years moving from place to place. He lived in more than 30 houses. He found it difficult to write, so he helped set up an international organization for the protection of persecuted writers. The death sentence was finally lifted in 1998.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed by the United States Senate on this date. It’s often viewed as the most important United States civil rights legislation since the Reconstruction, and it prohibited discrimination based on race, color, religion, or national origin in employment, voting, and the use of public facilities. It was first proposed in 1963 by President Kennedy, but failed to pass. Lyndon Johnson put forward a more robust version the following year, but it had faced a long battle in Congress, including a 57-day filibuster organized by Richard B. Russell. Eventually, the Senate voted to end the filibuster and passed the act, with a 71-29 vote.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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