It was October 24, 1838 that Annie Edson Taylor was born in Auburn, New York in the US. She grew up to become a schoolteacher. She married, but her husband died fairly soon afterward, and she never remarried. As a widow, she moved around the US for years, working in various cities.  In Bay City,… Continue reading

October 22 should win the Nobel Prize for Coincidences, because not two, not three, not four, but five Nobel Prize winners share today as a birthday. To take them in chronological order: Ivan Bunin was born in 1870 in Voronezh in the Russian Empire. He became a writer and was called the “heir to the… Continue reading

Let’s say that you’re alive in the US in about 1942 and you read a magazine article about how some people seem to “fit” particular jobs better than others. You’re thinking about your country is preparing to send troops to war in various places in the world, and you have the idea that if only… Continue reading

Two dramas, both from the 20th Century, have entered the American zeitgeist so much that their plots and characters are familiar to people who have never seen or read the plays. I’m talking about The Crucible, a 1953 play ostensibly about the Salem Witch Trials and allegorically about the McCarthyism era in the US. And… Continue reading

In the US, some people use the word “webster’s” to mean “dictionary.” That’s because in 1828 Noah Webster published what was for a long time the most popular dictionary in the US. He titled it An American Dictionary of the English Language, but everybody just called it Webster’s Dictionary (which eventually became the title). Noah… Continue reading

When you read about a disaster like the sinking of the RMS Titanic, sometimes you muse about the details. Like “who first saw the iceberg, and what did they do?” In this case, we know exactly who first saw the iceberg and what they did. It was Frederick Fleet, a British sailor and part of… Continue reading

Manufactured goods from Japan have an excellent reputation for quality and durability. That wasn’t always the case; immediately before and after World War II, good from Japan were regarded as shoddy. One big reason for the difference is a person: the American William Edwards Deming, who went by W. Edwards Deming. He was born October… Continue reading

In the sometimes mysterious and remote Blue Ridge mountains in the US state of Virginia, there are countless obscure valleys and hidden keeps. The only habitation of note is Roanoke, where, on October 11, 1937, a baby was born. It’s not recorded whether any omens predicted the birth, whether any supernatural events accompanied it, or… Continue reading

If you have children, or if you were, yourself, once a child, and if you can read (which, since you’ve made it this far in a much-too-lengthy sentence, we will assume), you’re probably aware that children’s literature that’s also historically accurate is easy to find. That was not always true, and that it now is… Continue reading

John Cummings and Christopher Ward share a birthday: October 8. They were both born in New York CIty; Cummings in 1948 and Ward in 1965. And they have something else in common: their name. That’s because John Cummings and Christopher Ward are better known as Johnny and C.J. Ramone, of the punk band the Ramones. … Continue reading