On October 9, 1593, Claes Pieterszoon was born in Amsterdam. He came from a prosperous family, and grew up to become a doctor. He built himself a house in 1616, and named it De Tulp, after tulips. He evidently liked tulips quite a lot, because the next year he also changed his own name to… Continue reading

Vincent van Gogh was not born today, but this story is very much about him as well as Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, who was born October 4, 1862. She was born in Amsterdam, and by the time she was 22 was teaching English at a boarding school. Around that time she was introduced to Theo van… Continue reading

Thomas Wolfe was a famous 20th-Century American novelist who often gets confused with Tom Wolfe, a famous 20th-Century American novelist. Thomas Wolfe came first, and was born October 3, 1900. He only lived to be 37 years old, but managed to become regarded as one of the most important writers in the Southern Renaissance in… Continue reading

Jack Parsons is one of the most important figures in the US space and rocketry systems. He was a real space cadet, too. This is quite lengthy, but also quite a story, and all true. Parsons was born October 2, 1914, in Los Angeles, California. His actual name, and I’m not making this up, was… Continue reading

Extreme weather events are getting more frequent and more extreme, and atmospheric scientists are studying what’s going on in the air around us, especially in regard to storms. One of the leaders in that effort is Joshua Wurman, who celebrates his 64th birthday today. Wurman was born in Pennsylvania, in the US, to Gloria Nagy,… Continue reading

Lucinda Hinsdale Stone was an American feminist long before the word “feminism” existed. She founded at least fifty women’s literary and study clubs in the midwestern US in the mid-1800s, was the first US woman to lead classes of young female students on international study trips, and after a career as a professor at the… Continue reading

Upton Sinclair was born September 20, 1878, and got famous first for his 1906 novel The Jungle. It was an expose that uncovered shockingly bad conditions in the meat packing industry of the US. That was over a century ago, and not everything has changed; a major US meat packing company is currently closed because… Continue reading

In the 1930s in Canada, the author and lecturer Grey Owl became a well-known advocate of wilderness conservation and environmentalism. He was known as the son of a Scottish father and an Indigenous (Apache) mother, and achieved international attention for his articles, books, lectures, and films about the depletion of natural resources and the decimation… Continue reading

You might remember, from your childhood, an impish monkey named Curious George. He and his companion, The Man with the Yellow Hat, were born today. Well, sort of. Actually Hans Augusto Reyersbach, who was H.A. Rey, one of the authors, was born September 16, 1898 in Hamburg.  Reyersbach and his wife Margret (who was Margret… Continue reading