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Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum Reopens May 5, 2005
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18 April 2005
Today is the 60th anniversary of the death of War Correspondent Ernie Pyle.
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MARCH 5, 2005
The Underground Railroad in
Lycoming County, PA.
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FAMOUS WOMEN
A presentation of 40 women in history
From: World Class Learning Materials, Inc.
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BORN: September 6, 1860
EDUCATION: Rockford College
Illinois
DIED: May 21, 1935
Jane Addams was a dedicated social worker and humanitarian concerned with helping the underprivileged people of America's cities. She worked with civic groups and legislatures to press for reform on the problems of the poor of every race. She advocated research to determine the causes of poverty and crime.
Between 1883 and 1888, Addams traveled extensively inn Europe. She visited the Tonybee Hall Settlement House in London. Impressed, Addams decided to return to the United States to establish her own settlement house modeled after Tonybee Hall. In 1889 Hull House, one of the nation's first settlement houses in Chicago, Illinois, provided community services and support for immigrants and poor residents of the city. By 1893, it included a nursery, gymnasium, dispensary, and playground. Classes in cooking and sewing were offered, and a cooperative boarding house for working girls was maintained.
Politically, Hull House became involved in the study of social conditions. In 1895, Addams published the "Hull House Maps and Papers, a report that dealt with the tenement conditions, sweat shops, and child labor. The report recommended labor unions, child labor laws, improved welfare procedures, and the protection of immigrants. The establishment of the nation's first juvenile court in Chicago was largely due to Hull House efforts. In 1910, Jane Addams became the first woman president of the National Conference of Social Work. In 1931, she was the co-recipient, with Nicholas Murray Butler, of the Nobel Peace Prize.
SELECTED WORKS
Jame Addams many books reflect her commitment to her ideals. Among them are:
Democracy and Social Ethics (1902),
The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (1909),
Newer Ideals of Peace (1915), and
Peace and Bread in Time of War (1922).
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BORN: May 22, 1844, Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania
EDUCATION: Pensylvania
Academy of Art
DIED: June 14, 1926
Born in Pittsburgh, Mary Cassatt lived most of her life in France. In 1865, against her family's wishes, she left for Europe to study in Paris. There, she became associated with the Impressionist movement of the 1870's and 1880's. The Impressionist painters believed that painting needed to be rescued from competition with the camera. She worked in oils, pastels and the printmaking processes of etchings and lithographs.
Cassatt's pointing style and subject matter were greatly influenced by her friend and teacher Edgar Degas, one of the masters of modern art, and by the old Japanese masters Utamaro and HNokusai. Like them, she used delicate color and strong, clear lines. She became famous for her painting and prints such as
The Bath (La Toilette), ca, 1891, that portrayed the warm, human sentiment of mothers and children in everyday situations.
Mary Cassatt was largely responsible for selecting the works that make up the Havermeyer Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The French government honored Cassatt with the French Legion of Honor award in 1904.
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BORN: November 29, 1832, Germantown,
Pennsylvania
DIED: March 6, 1888
Louisa May Alcott became famous for her novels for and about children. Her best-known book,
Little Women, tells the warm, sentimental story of four sisters growing up in New England in the 1800's.
Alcott was born in Pennsylvania but grew up in Massachusetts. Her father was a noted educator. Famous writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Henry Thoreau were the Alcott's friends and neighbors. No doubt, they influenced Louisa in her choice of career.
Louisa May Alcott had a happy life with her parents and four sisters. The Alcotts had modest means, through, and Louisa's lifelong concern was for her family's welfare. At an early age, she began to work in order to help support the family. She worked as a seamstress and as a household servant. After a brief career as a teacher, she began to write books. Alcott's very first book,
Flower Fables (1854), contained stories she had made up to tell her students. Her eventual success with
Little Women provided her family with financial security.
Alcott's stories became very popular and were published frequently in highly circulated journals like
The Atlantic Monthly. Her other books for young readers, such as
An Old Fashioned Girl (1870),
Little Men (1871), and
Jo's Boys, were based on her own experienced growing up.
SELECTED WORKS
Louisa May Alcott wrote many other books, among them;
Hospital Sketches(1867),
Aunt Jo's Scrapbag, 6 volumes (1872-1882), and
Eight Cousins (1875).
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BORN: ca. 1820, Bucktown,
Maryland
MARRIED: John Tubman, 1844
DIED: March 10, 1913
Harriet Tubman led hundreds of slaves to freedom in the northern United States and in Canada. She was responsible for the organization and growth of the Underground Railroad, an elaborate secret network by which slaves were channeled into free states. Black people called her "Moses" because she was like the biblical patriarch who led the Jews out of Egypt. Harriet Tubman led her people out of the South to freedom.
Tubman was born into slavery and worked as a house and field servant on a cotton plantation in Maryland. In 1849, upon the death of her "master," she escaped to freedom through the Underground Railroad and successfully taught her destination in Philadelphia. In the decade preceding the Civil War, Tubman returned to Maryland 19 times to assist slaves to freedom. She maintained a military discipline among her followers. She was never caught and never lost a slave on any of her rescue missions. At one time, the rewards for her capture reached $40,000. Tubman was highly revered by fellow abolitionists Frederick Douglass, Gerritt Smith, Wendell Phillips, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1858, she counseled and encouraged John Brown in his plan for armed action against slavery.
During the Civil War, Tubman served for 3 years in South Carolina as a nurse, spy, and scout, often securing intelligence from Negro informants residing behind Confederate lines. In one campaign she helped more than 700 slaves in freedom. Harriet Tubman promoted freeman's schools in the South and took to leading part in the suffrage movement, as well as in the growth of the African Methodist Church.
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BORN: June 26, 1892, Hillsboro,
West Virginia
EDUCATION: Randolph-Macon
Women's College,
Virginia
MARRIED: John Buck, 1917
Richard Walsh, 1935
CHILDREN: One
DIED: March 26, 1973
As the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries, Pearl Buck grew up in China and developed a love for the country and its people. She received her early education in Shanghai, China, but attended college in the United States. After graduating, she went back to China and taught at the University of Nanking. She married John Buck, an American expert in agriculture, in 1917.
Pearl Buck became famous for the stories she wrote about Chinese life. Her stories first appeared in American magazines in 1923. Works such as
The Good Earth (1931),
Sons (1932), and
A House Divided (1935) described in a sympathetic way the life of Chinese peasants struggling to gain land and social position. Many of Pearl Buck's books urged more understanding between East and West.
In 1935, Buck married New York publisher Richard Walsh. Thereafter, she lived in the United States, where she continued to write books based on her experiences. In 1938, she was the recipient of the Nobel prize for literature. In her later years, she published 5 novels under a pseudonym, John Sedges.
Throughout her lifetime, Pearl Buck continued to demonstrate her love of China. After World War II, she established the Pearl Buck Foundation to aid the illegitimate children of United States servicemen in Asian countries.
SELECTED WORKS
Pearl Buck wrote nay books, including
Dragon Seed (1942),
Imperial Woman (1956),
The First Wife and Other Stories (1933), and
Autobiography: My Several Worlds (1954).
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BORN: July 29, 1936, Salisbury, NY
EDUCATION: Duke University,
North Carolina
Harvard University,
Massachusetts
MARRIED: Robert J. Dole, 1979
Elizabeth Dole held several federal positions during the presidency of Richard M. Nixon. In 1969, Nixon appointed her as executive director of the President's Commission on Consumer Interests. She held this position until 1971, when she became the deputy director of the Office of Consumer Affairs. In 1973, she was appointed to the Federal Trade Commission. She resigned in 1979 in order to campaign for her husband, Senator Robert Dole of Kansas, in his unsuccessful bid for the 1980 Republican presidential nomination.
In 1981, Dole worked for the Reagan administration as a public liaison, soliciting support from various organizations for President Reagan's programs and policies. Two years later, President Reagan appointed Elizabeth Dole as the first woman to head the United States Department of Transportation.
Under President George Bush, Elizabeth Dole was appointed Secretary of Labor in 1989. She resigned from the post in 1990 to become Director of the American Red Cross. During the 1996 Presidential election, Dole took a Leave of Absence to help her husband launch his Republican campaign against Clinton.
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BORN: November 8, 1907, Hartford, CN
EDUCATION: Bryn Mawr College,
MARRIED: Ludlow Ogden Smith, 1928
DIVORCED: 1934
DIED: June 29, 2003
In 1928, after graduating from Bryn Mawr College as a theater major, Katherine Hepburn became an actress, first in summer stock theater, then on Broadway. She accepted her first film contract with RKO Pictures in 1932. Success as a motion picture actress came with her first film,
A Bill of Divorcement, directed by George Cukor. She became famous for her distinct face, voice, and manner.
Throughout the 1930's, Hepburn starred in many films. Her most memorable works were the comedies made by actor Cary Grant, like
Bringing Up Baby and
Holiday. In 1942, during the filming of
Woman of the Year, Hepburn met actor Spencer Tracy. They began a 27-year friendship and, during that time, appeared in nine films together, the last one being
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967).
Katherine Hepburn's distinguished career as an actress in due, in part, to the independence, strength, and diversity that she revealed in all of her roles, both on the screen and on the stage. She has been nominated for twelve and has won four Academy Awards, one for each of the following films:
Morning Glory (1933),
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967),
The Lion in Winter (1969), and
On Golden Pond (1981). In 1962, she won a Cannes Film Festival award for
Long Day's Journey into Night.
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BORN: December 16, 1901, Philadelphia, PA
EDUCATION: Barnard College,
New York City
Columbia University (Ph.D.)
MARRIED: Luther Creswell, 1923
CHILDREN: One
DIED: November 15, 1978
Margaret Mead became famous for her studies of human culture and for her unique perspectives on cross-cultural social issues-the ways in which human societies are alike and different. She was one of the first anthropologists to study child-rearing and link it to overall social patterns. Throughout her long career, Mead studied the different cultures of Russia, the United States, and the islands in the Pacific Ocean.
During World War II, Mead worked for the United States government in important advisory posts. She served on the United States Committee on Food Habits, and studied the American society's consumption of food.
One of Margaret Mead's greatest contributions to the field of anthropology was making anthropology accessible to the average person, through films and photographs that documented her cultural studies. In addition, she wrote about her life experiences in over 40 books and 1,000 monographs (scientific papers).
In 1948, Margaret Mead became the Director of Columbia University's Department of Research in Contemporary Cultures. In 1975, she was elected to the position of President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Margaret Mead wrote many books, among them her autobiography,
Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years (1962). She wrote
Coming of Age in Samoa (1928),
Growing Up in New Guinea (1930),
Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935),
Male and Female (1949), and
Letters from the Field: 1925-1975 (1977).
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BORN: June 23, 1940,
St. Bethlehem, Tennessee
EDUCATION: Tennessee State University
DIED: November 12, 1994
Wilma Rudolf was the first American woman to win 3 gold medals in track and field. She won them in the 1960 Olympic Games held in Rome, Italy. She held the world record of 22.9 seconds for the 200-mter race.
Rudolph was sickly as a child and could not walk without a brace on her left leg until she was 11 years old. She worked hard to overcome her handicap and, in high school, became an excellent basketball player and sprinter. Ehen Rudolph was 16 years old, she was a member of the team that won the bronze medal in the 4 X 100-meter relay race in the 1956 Olympic Games in Melborne, Australia. From 1959 through 1962, she was the continual champion of the Amateur Athletic Union's 100-yard dash. In 1961, she won the James E. Sullivan Outstanding Athlete of the Year Award.
In the 1960's Wilma Rudolph retired as a runner to become the assistant director for Mayor Richard Daley's Youth Foundation in Chicago. She also promoted the sport of running nationally and developed girls' track and field teams.
Rudolph published her autobiography,
Wilma, in 1977, after she was named to the National Track and Field Hall of Fame (1974).
In 1980, she created the Wilma Rudolph Foundation to help young people reach their full academic, character, and physical potential. The foundation offers counseling and special programs geared toward educational development. It works with inner-city young people in the area of athletic and offers reading and tutorial help. Rudolph was inducted into the International Sports Hall of Fame in 1980, and the U.S. Hall of Fame in 1983. She received the National Sports Award in 1993 and induction into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1994.
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BORN: August 27, 1910, Skopje, Macedonia
DIED: September 5, 1997
Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhlu decided while still in grade school that she wanted to become a nun and work as a missionary among the underprivileged. In 1929, she entered the convent of Loreto nuns in Calcutta, India, and became known as Sister Teresa. For twenty years she taught at the convent's school for girls.
In 1948 with the Catholic Church's permission, Mother Teresa left her convent to begin her missionary work in the slums of Calcutta. In 1950 she became an Indian citizen. She established a new congregation in Calcutta which she called the Missionaries of Charity. Today, this order has branches in about 30 other countries. The Missionaries of Charity provide food, clothing, shelter, and medical care for the poor and the elderly.
Mother Teresa received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, for her devotion to helping the poor and deprived people of the world. She has received other prestigious awards, including the Pope John XXIII Peace Prize in 1971, and India's Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding, given to her in 1972.
In March, 1997, Mother Teresa, in frail health at age 86, turned over the leadership of the Missionaries of Charity to Mother Normal. On June 5, 1997 during a visit to the United States, Congress honored Mother Teresa with the Congressional Gold Medal. She addressed Congress from her wheelchair and spoke of her devotion to a cause for almost 50 years.
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BORN: August 31, 1870, Ancona, Italy
EDUCATION: University of Rome
DIED: May 6, 1952
Maria Montessori founded an education system based on the belief that children can learn how to learn by themselves. The Montessori System was designed to encourage a child's creative potential, his or her drive to learn, and right to be treated as an individual. The goal of the Montessori System was to allow self-direction and self-motivation to children from 3 to o6 years old in a progressive classroom atmosphere. In her method, children were neither punished nor rewarded for what they did in school.
After graduating from medical school in 1894, Maria Montessori began studying the educational problems of mentally retarded children at the University of Roman's psychiatric clinic. She designed the educational programs that assisted the classroom learning process by encouraging individual, rather than group, effort. In 1907, Montessori founded the Casa dei Bambini, or "children's House," a school for disadvantaged children. In this institution, she successfully applied her teaching methods to students of normal intelligent levels. Eventually, Montessori opened other schools that taught the Montessori System. She traveled worldwide for 40 years, lecturing and establishing training programs for teachers.
In 1922, Maria Montessori was appointed to the position of inspector of Schools for the Italian government. In 1934, she left Italy to live in The Netherlands.
SELECTED WORKS
Maria Montessori's fascination for education led her to write many books on the subject, among them:
The Montessori Method (1912),
The Secret of Childhood (1936),
Education for a New World (1946), and
The Absorbent Mind (1949).
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BORN: October 17, 1956, Decatur, Alabama
EDUCATION: Stanford University (1977), Cornel University (1981)
Mae Jemison received her undergraduate degree in chemical engineering in 1977 from Stanford University in California. She earned her medical degree from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York in 1981. In 1987, Dr. Jemison was elected as an astronaut candidate. On September 2, 1992, she was a crewperson aboard the
Endeavor, a shuttle mission designed to study the effects of zero gravity on people.
The last of three siblings born to a maintenance worker father and a school teacher mother, Jemison demonstrated an interest in science and social service in her adolescent years. As a medical student, she traveled to Kenya, Cuba, and Thailand as part of a team offering primary medical aid to residents of these nations. After completing her formal medical training, she served as a Peace Corp medical officer in Sierra Leone and Liberia from 1982 to 1985. This assignment involved supervising and training the African professional staff.
When Dr. Jemison returned to the United States in 1985, she joined the CIGNA Health Plans Company in California and began her own private medical practice. In her spare time, she took graduate level engineering classes and then applied for admission to the NASA Astronaut Program. Unsuccessful with her first application, she didn't give up. In 1987 she became one of the 15 persons accepted out of a group of 2,000 applicants. When the
Endeavour took off with its seven person crew, Dr. Jemison became the first Black American female to work aboard a space shuttle.
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BORN: June 27, 1880, Tuscumbia, Alabama
EDUCATION: Horace Mann School for the Deaf, Massachusetts
Wright-Hurmabon Oral School,
New York City
Radcliffe College (1904)
DIED: June 1, 1968
A severe childhood illness left Helen Keller deprived of sight and sound before she was 19 months old. She was unable to speak, and was essentially cut off from the world around her. In 1886, her parents appealed to Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone and teacher of the deaf, for counseling regarding Helen's education. He suggested that they contact Anne Sullivan, a graduate of Perkins School for the Blind in Boston, to instruct the child.
In 1887, Sullivan began teaching Helen the names of objects by pressing the manual alphabet into her palm. When she was 10 years old, Helen learned to speak by placing her fingers on Sullivan's larynx to "hear" the vibrations. In addition to Miss Sullivan's teachings, Keller learned to read and write in Braille at the Horace Mann School for the deaf, and at the Wright-Humabon Oral School. In 1900, Keller entered Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1904, she graduated
cum laude.
While in college, Helen Keller developed her love for writing. She was encouraged by the
Ladies Home Journal to write her autobiography. In 1902,
The Story of My Life was published. In 1909, Century Publishing House published
The World I Live In, a collection of Keller's essays describing the truths she had discovered about human nature.
Helen Keller transcended her handicaps and embraced many social reforms. Publicly, she campaigned for the abolition of child labor and capital punishment. She supported the NAACP, appeared before legislatures, and spoke to soldiers blinded in war. She wrote books and articles, traveled and lectured. In 1906, she was appointed to the Massachusetts State Commission for the Blind and led the crusade for prevention of blindness. In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson conferred upon Helen Keller the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
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BORN: May 12, 1820, Florence, Italy
EDUCATION: Institution of Protestant Deaconesses, Germany
DIED: August 13, 1910
Florence Nightingale was one of the most influential women of the Victorian Age. She was the founder of the profession of nursing as it exists today. She cared deeply for the sick, the soldiers injured in battle, and women, who wished to choose for themselves the work they wanted to do.
When she was sixteen, Nightingale made her decision: she wanted to dedicate herself to serving others. She gave up the parties and social activities a girl of her station was expected to enjoy. Instead, she spent her time studying health and reforms in the treatment of the sick. In 1846, Nightingale went to Germany to study nursing. In 1853, she became superintendent of a women's hospital in London.
During the Crimean War (1854), the British army needed nurses. Nightingale and 38 other nurses found few medical supplies. Florence's tirelessness, intelligence, interest in medical reform, and ability to organize began a whole new way of treating soldiers wounded in battle. She worked hard, walking with her lamp up and down the corridors of her makeshift hospital. For the first time, soldiers received decent hospital care. Her success was so widely recognized that she was given charge of all the army hospitals in the Crimea. She had saved thousands of lives and brought about international reforms in nursing and hospital management.
Florence used a $150,000 gift from a grateful public to found the Nightingale Home for Nurses in London. She became a world authority on scientific care of the sick. Heads of governments, authors, reformers and politicians sought her advice. Her 800 page report on conditions in the British army in India and in hospitals led to the formation of the Royal Commission on Health of the British Army in 1858. In 1907, she became the first woman to receive the British Order of Merit.
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BORN: June 14, 1811, Connecticut
EDUCATION: Hartford Female Seminary
MARRIED: Calvin Ellis Stowe, 1836
CHILDREN: Seven
DIED: July 1, 1896
Harriet Beecher Stowe's creative impulse as a writer grew out of a devotion to her religious experience, and a passionate reaction against the recorded cruelties of slavery. She is widely known for her anti-slavery novel,
Uncle Tom's Cabin, first published in 1851.
In
Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stowe re-created characters and incidents from her childhood, using both realism and humor to lay bare the heart of slavery. It was her goal to analyze the issue of slavery and to illustrate the existence of a wrong. This book, more than any other, intensified the disagreements between the North and the South over the morality of owning slaves. Stowe responded to the Southern protests to
Uncle Tom's Cabin by writing a
A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin and
Dred, another anti-slavery novel written in 1856.
Between 1862 and 1864, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote many essays on the issues of the day, as well as children's stories, biographies, and a foreign novel,
Agnes Sorrento. The subject matter of her later novels, like
The Minister's Wooing and
Oldtown Folks, was based on the New England of the early 1800's and on personal interviews with people. In them, the positive and negative aspects of Puritanism are characterized. In 1870, she wrote
Lady Byron Vindicated, a novel about Lady Byron's divorce from the famous poet, Lord Byron. This book, based on private interviews with Lady Byron, was considered shocking by Stowe's contemporaries.
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BORN: May 3, 1898, Kiev, Ukraine
EDUCATION: Teacher's Seminary, Wisconsin
MARRIED: Morris Myerson, 1921
DIED: December 8, 1978
In 1906, Goldie Mabovitz immigrated from Kiev, Ukraine, to the United States with her family. Living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, se became both a teacher and an active campaigner for Zionism, a movement to set up a Jewish national or religious state in Palestine. In 1921, she married Morris Myerson. Together, they emigrated to Palestine, a small land at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, to join a collective farm village, or
kibbutz. In 1956, she Hebraized her name to Golda Meir.
Golda Meir's distinguished political career began in 1928, when she became Secretary of Women's Labor Council and represented the Israeli labor movement at international conferences. During the 1930's she undertook political missions to the United States and the United Kingdom as an elected delegate to the World Zionist Congress. In 1948, when British mandate was enforced on Palestine, dividing the country into the new nation of Israel and an Arab state, Meir served as Israel's first Minister of Labor. She was Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1956 to 1966. From 1966 to 1969, she served as the Secretary-General of the Israeli Mapai (Labor) Party.
Upon the death of Prime Minister, Levi Eshkol in 1969, Golda Meir was elected to be Israel's first female Prime Minister. Because of intense criticism of her government's actions in the Arab-Israel conflict of 1973, Meir resigned from the position on April 10, 1974.
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BORN: March 10, 1930, El Paso, Texas
EDUCATION: Stanford University
MARRIED: John J. O'Connor, 1952
CHILDREN: Three
On September 25, 1981, Sandra Day O'Connor was sworn into office as one of the 9 Justices of the Supreme Court. She became the first woman to serve on the highest court in the country. Upon nominating her, President Ronald Reagan described O'Connor was "possessing those unique qualities of temperament, fairness, intellectual capacity and devotion to the public good which have characterized the 101 'brethren' who have preceded her."
After graduating from Stanford University, Sandra married John J. O'Connor and opened her own law firm in Maryvale, Arizona. From 1960 to 1965, she worked for the Maricopa County (Arizona) Board of Adjustments and Appeals and the Governor's Committee on Marriage and the Family. O'Connor was Assistant Attorney General for Arizona until Governor Jack Williams appointed her to the Arizona State Senate seat vacated by Isabel A. Burgess. Two years later, she campaigned on the Republican ticket and won the same seat. She was also elected as majority leader, becoming the first woman to hold that office in any state senate in the country.
During her 5 years in the state senate, O'Connor supported measures to limit government spending and to revise tax laws. She championed revision of Arizona laws discriminating against women and voted in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment.
Toward the end of her second term in the senate (1974), O'Connor chose to move from the legislative to the judiciary branch of government by winning a judgeship on the Maricopa County Superior Court. In 1978, she was appointed by Governor Bruce Babbitt to the Arizona Court of Appeals. She held this position until 1981, when she was nominated as a Supreme Court Justice.
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BORN: December 10, 1830, Amherst,
. . . . . . Massachusetts
EDUCATION: Mount Holyoke Seminary
DIED: May 15, 1886
Emily Dickinson wrote over 1,700 poems while living the life as a recluse in her hometown of Amherst, Massachusetts. Her poetry concerned the relationship between the inner self and the external world. She saw few people outside her family, and never intended her work to be widely read. Dickinson gave universal significance to emotions, such as despair, longing, desire, and awe and is ranked with Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Edgar Allen Poe as the finest American poets of the nineteenth century.
Dickinson's poetic style was untraditional in form. The verses were composed in short and irregular four-line stanzas. The rhymes were imperfect, using striking and unusual language. She often left her poetry untitled.
During Dickinson's lifetime, only two of her poems were published, and these without her consent. In her desire to remain an unknown poet, she requested that all of her poetry be destroyed upon her death. Her sister, unable to destroy the work, had it edited in the 1880's by Mabel Loomis and Todd Higginson into three volumes of poetry. The first volume was published four years after Emily Dickinson's death.
Because I Could Not Stop for Death
Because I could not stop for death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And immortality.
We slowly drove, he knew no haste.
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.
We passed the school where children played
At wrestling in a ring:
We passed the fields of grazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.
We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The comics but a mound.
Since then 'tis centuries; but each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Where toward eternity.
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BORN: 1933 Luzon Island, Phillippines
MARRIED: Benigno Aquino, Jr., 1846 - Five Children
In February of 1986, Corazon Aquino was elected to the office of President of the Philippines. Her remarkable victory, fueled by the support of the Philippine people, severed the 20-year dictatorship of President Ferdinand Marcos and sent him into exile.
Corazon Aquino's husband, the opposition leader Benigo Aquino, was assassinated in 1983 by Marcos' followers. Her immediate success as a leader was due to the number of Filipinos who supported her attacks on tyranny and corruption of Marco's government. During the 1986 presidential election, Marcos tried, through intimidation and voter fraud, to deny Aquino an honest victory. The Philippine people protected the ballot boxes, often risking their personal safety. The votes were recounted, and Aquino won by a majority.
Aquino, as President of a land left corrupt and poverty-stricken by Marcos, believed that she should allow her power to be determined by the Filipinos' decisions and actions in order to successfully attack the problems of her country. Two of Aquino's goals were to deter communist insurgency in the Philippines and to exert civilian control over the military. There were other difficulties ahead of her-a huge national debt, a threat of military overthrow, and plots by the powerful friends of Ferdinand Marcos, and Marcos trying to regain the presidency he lost in Corazon Aquino. In 1992, Corazon Aquino declined to run for a second term
.
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BORN: March 6, 1806 in Durham, England
MARRIED: Robert Browning, 1846 - One Child
DIED: June 30, 1861
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a poet who lived in Victorian times. She enjoyed great popular success as a poet, despite contemporary criticism of the style, lengthiness, and chaotic expressions of her poetry. She also wrote critical essays and translated Greek for numerous magazines and journals. In 1857, after she published
Aurora Leigh, a volume of poetry considered to be her most mature work, she was mentioned as a possible successor to William Wordsworth for the title of poet laureate of England.
At the age of 9, Elizabeth began to write poetry. For her, it was an escape from an unhappy childhood. In 1821, she injured her spine in a fall. Everyone thought that she would be a permanent invalid. She spent her time in her room with the curtains drawn, reading and writing. When she was 40 years old, she met the poet, Robert Browning; they fell in love and married, despite her father's violent opposition. The Brownings settled in Florence, Italy, where Elizabeth found recognition as a poet. In one year alone, she produced 6 volumes of poetry. Her health improved remarkably. She became involved in Italy's political struggle to rid itself of Austrian domination. Browning's later poetry reflects her growing involvement in Italian international affairs, as well as an avid interest in spiritual phenomenon.
Elizabeth Browning's poetry was acclaimed for its spontaneous rhythm and lyrical qualities. An example of her rhyming pattern and poetic structure may be found in her volume of poetry
Sonnets from the Portuguese, in which is considered one of the most famous sonnet sequences in the English language. The sonnets tell of Elizabeth's love for Robert Browning, and contain the well-known line: "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways . . ."
From: World Class Learning Materials, Inc.
