Imogen Cunningham was an American photographer born April 12, 1883. Her parents named her “Imogen” after the character in Cymbeline, a play by Shakespeare. She was born in Portland, Oregon, and was interested in art from a very early age. The schools there didn’t teach art, but her parents sent her to art lessons and… Continue reading

Pulitzer Prizes come and Pulitzer Prizes go, but today is Pulitzer’s Birthday! Joseph Pulitzer was born April 10, 1847 in Hungary, which was a monarchy at the time. As a boy he would have been known as Pulitzer Jozsef, because that’s the customary name order in Hungarian. His father was a successful businessman, and was… Continue reading

Some of the features of the infrastructure of the modern world include bridges with very wide spans, tunnels under rivers, standardized railroads, ships driven by propellers, ships that are really big and made of steel…I could go on. An amazing number of these were first designed and built by one man: Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who… Continue reading

Industries change, and one of the ones that has changed the most is the motion picture industry. In the early days of the US film industry, in 1909, an early star named Mary Pickford appeared in 51 films. In those days a “movie” was a short, monochrome, silent pantomime that only took a few days… Continue reading

Have you ever read a story by Donald Barthelme? The odds are you haven’t; Jacob Appel (a literary critic) described him in 2010 as “the most influential unread author in United States history.” Barthelme was born April 7, 1931, and died pretty young at 58 in 1989. He published more than a hundred short stories,… Continue reading

The European revolutions of 1848, which attempted to establish socialist systems of government and economics, didn’t spring up out of nowhere. Neither did the Narodniks, who were members of an agrarian socialist movement in Russia in the 1860s and 1870s. Narodism wasn’t the only socialist movement in Tsarist Russia, either; the Socialist Revolutionary Party was… Continue reading

April 5 is partly interesting because it’s the birthday of Tulse Luper, in Newport, Wales, in 1911. Or Tulse might be said to have been born April 5, 1942, also in Newport. It’s an intricate story, best told in the form of several valises; a subset of a much larger collection:  Valise 1: It’s possible… Continue reading

Owen Suffolk was born April 4, 1829, and was not a nice, law-abiding citizen. He was born into a comfortable middle-class life in England, but everything changed when his father’s business was ruined when he was probably in his teens. To make a living he went to sea. When he returned, though, he had no… Continue reading

Today is Jane Goodall’s 90th birthday. She might be celebrating with the chimpanzees she’s close to. Goodall was born in 1934 in London, and her first encounter with chimpanzees was a stuffed toy her father gave her instead of a teddy bear. Her mother’s friends thought the toy might terrify Goodall, but she loved it,… Continue reading

As everybody knows, airplanes didn’t arrive until appropriate power plants, gasoline engines, were invented. The older steam engines were much too heavy.  As is the case with a daunting number of things that “everybody knows,” this is not true. Clement Ader, who was born April 2, 1841 in France, invented a working airplane in 1886,… Continue reading