"Give me the money that has been spent in war and I will clothe every man, woman, and child in an attire of which kings and queens will be proud. I will build a schoolhouse in every valley over the whole earth. I will crown every hillside with a place of worship consecrated to peace. " ~Charles Sumner

So. Charles Sumner was the U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, whose brains were nearly beaten out of his handsome head in 1856, by way of So. Carolinian Congressman Preston Brooks' walking stick [made of stout gutta-percha. "a genus of tropical trees native to Southeast Asia and northern Australasia," god, I love wikipedia. not always to be trusted, I know, but I love it anyway. sounds like a romance novel, no?]. I'd never have known that Sen. Sumner said these noble words had I not been clicking about, looking for something to paste onto my Facebook profile today, today being the official end of the official combat chapter anyway, of our heartbreaking, budget-busting invasion of Iraq. Man oh man, what a violent species we are.

oh yes. according to one of my books hereabouts, baby Gaius Caesar Gerrmanicus, a.k.a. Caligula, dreadful Roman emperor, was born on this day in history, Anno Domini 12.

‎"My dreams were all my own; I accounted for them to nobody; they were my refuge when annoyed - my dearest pleasure when free... My dreams were at once more fantastic and agreeable than my writings."

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley

"Independence I have long considered as the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue; and independence I will ever secure by contracting my wants, though I were to live on a barren heath."

This second quotation is attributed to Mary's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, who was born in Victoria's London on the 25th of April, 1759. Incidentally, just for you to know, the baby who'd grow up to be the national poet of his nation, was born this year as well; Robert Burns of Scotland. And the composer, George Friedrich Handel died this year, but I digress. As usual. Why? I enjoy it, quite a lot.

Denied formal education, Mary educated herself by way of many a book, as did many a female back in the day. Those of us who know that Mary once lived, know of her because we've got her placed in a dusty pigeonhole labeled Early Feminist, Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Mary W. published her manifesto in 1792, some five years before she gave birth to a girl, August 30, 1797. [Early in President John Adams' one and only term in office. Napoleon on the rise. Two future fabulous composers born that year, Gaetano Donizetti and Franz Schubert...] Mary W. and her reform-minded politician husband, William Godwin, named their daughter Mary. Alas, Mary Sr. died not two weeks later, never to know what a passionate teenager her child would become.

Every bit as strong minded as her long-lost mother, 16-year-old Mary ran away with her lover, Percy Shelley, 23, in 1814. They married later on, in 1816, after Percy's first wife killed herself. Horrible and dreadful, absolutely, for poor drowned Harriet Westbrook Shelley, but pretty romantic, no? After all, romance, no less than comedy, is firmly linked with tragedy. And too, none of this would we ever have heard about had not Percy been such an admired poet (who'd also die by drowning, in 1822. go figure) - and had not his bride conceived of a story, a thoughtful, horrifying story. Two years later, in 1818, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley published it, her masterpiece: Frankenstein.

ingrid

August 19th? It's been ten days since I've written anything here? Nothing about the anniversary of all that bloody Spartan hoohah at Thermopylae [20 Aug, 480BC]? Nothing about long-dead Aubrey Beardsley's,[ brilliant twisted master of pen & ink], 128th birthday on the 21st? Nothing about - oooh cool: did you know that the 23rd was the anniversary of the day that Wm. Wallace [we're talking Braveheart] got drawn & quartered in 1305? And what kind of a sick, vicious boogernose-nightmare thought of doing THAT to a fellow human being, I mean REALLY. Quantrill's riders burning & pillaging Lawrence, KS, in the summer of 1863? And how that awful day was provoked by years of mayhem inflicted on Missourians - I mean, check out what happened to the folks of Osceola in Sept. 1861 - in those horrifying times? Nothing about Laura Ingalls and Almanzo Wilder's 125th wedding anniversary? on the 25th, the anniversary of the big Pompeii Deathday, A.D. 79? And, you know, it was two days+ 1,804 years later, Aug. 27, 1883, that Krakatoa erupted. And anyway, today would make 39 years I'd have been married to my first husband if I'd actually STAYED w/ my 1st husband. one of us would have been celebrating the day in either prison or the loony bin. But the MAIN thing is that the lovely and glorious Ingrid Bergman came into the world on this day in history. 1915 to be exact. The Great War was - oh, don't get me started....

So, with a few clicks I discover that these very different individuals each came into the world through the door marked AUGUST 19: English poet John Dryden [1613] and the gent said to have written Pamela (Was it important that I learned that in college? No. Is it weird that I still remember, yet barely call to mind the people w/whom I went to class? Yes), the first English novel, Sam'l Richardson [1689]. Designer Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel [1883]. Silent film star, dark-haired, sweet-faced Colleen Moore [1899] This link will take you to cyber-glimpses of her glorious doll house: www.msichicago.org/whats-here/exhibits/fairycastle

Little Wilbur Wright got a baby brother [I am SO trying to envision the infant Orville and 3-year-old Wilbur. I'm trying to imagine a world in which loving parents would name innocent baby boys Wilbur & Orville.]

Madame DuBarry began her life on this day in 1743. It ended December 8 [same deathday as John Lennon's. yes, roll your eyes heavenward. I do.], 1793, when her head was chopped off. See how lovely she was or, perhaps, how beautifully her portrait was painted by wondrous artist Elizabeth Vigée Le Brun] at this wiki site. Read down far enough, at least to see her last words.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madame_du_Barry

And if you're reading this, you're the sort of person who might LIKE to know that this is mathematician Blaise Pascal's deathday (1662), James Watt's, too (steamy Scottish inventor, 1819), AND the great & mighty Emperor of Rome, Caesar Augustus kicked the bucket on this day, A.D.14. and that his wife probably poisoned him. Sigh.

Failure Was Impossible

"Failure is impossible." So wrote Susan B. Anthony, but there had to have been days when it seemed pretty goddamned impossible: Woman Suffrage

It was in 1848 that Elizabeth Cady Stanton of Seneca Falls, NY, launched the Women's Rights Convention, this radical confab being the first of its kind. Not until the spring of 1851 later does Lizzie Stanton [short & round & curly-girly radical whose tough mind crackled with ideas and revolutionary opinions on nearly] meet tall, spare Susan B., known as "Aunt Susan" to the legions of suffragists. Fifty years the team would write, agitate, organize, petition the U.S. Congress, and otherwise plug away at trying to wrench the Vote out of the government's tight fist. "I forged the thunderbolts," said Mrs. Stanton of her writings, and Susan fired them, riding "the [railroad] cars" thousands of miles to speak, to state the cause, lay out the argument to audiences around the country. Countless women [and men] paraded in the streets. A few, including the valiant Alice Paul, endured arrest and cruel treatment behind bars for daring to stand silently with their banners outside the White House fence.

Of course neither Lizzie nor Susan B. lived to see the day, August 18, 1920, when the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was finally ratified, thanks to a narrow vote in the Tennessee state house. Almost 72 years after the Seneca Falls convention and 90 years ago today.

i"Come, come, my conservative friend, wipe the dew off your spectacles, and see that the world is moving." Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Davy, Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier

Born on a mountain top in Tennessee
The greenest state in the land of the free
Raised in the woods so's he knew ev'ry tree
Kilt him a b'ar when he was only three...

So goes the song (lyrics by Tom Blackburn) about one of the great American self-promoters, David Crockett, hunter, frontier folk hero, storyteller, scout, and soldier, in 1813, fighting warriors of the Creek Nation. In 1826 his Tennessee neighbors elected him to represent them in the U.S. House of Representative. We don't know just exactly when he died. Was he killed on March 6, 1836, in the last ferocious fighting, when General Santa Anna's forces overtook the Alamo? Or was he captured then executed? The dead take their secrets with them. If Davy's deathday is a mystery, his folks recorded his birthday: the 17th of August, 1786, a year that saw Danial Shay's tax-uprising up in Massachusetts. Far, far away in another world entirely, a silk & velvet-clad audience of Viennese gents and ladies saw and heard Le Nozze di Figaro, the very newest opera by 30-year-old W. A. Mozart.

So, yesterday came and sifted away without my ever having written about the factoid I'd come across. A puny, insignificant discovery, but my interest was piqued. Doesn't take much. Two fellows, one born a poor country boy [in 1935], the other born in 1895, a poor, hard luck city boy, each blessed with gifts that would delight and astonish. And Elvis Presley and Geo. Herman "Babe" Ruth [plus countless chariotloads of other souls down the millennia] share a deathday, Aug. 16. The day we go out is as worthy of note as the day we come in, I reckon. But no, I'd just as soon not think about it. Still, my granny liked to point out that people get things all mixed up, sorrowing at a funeral, for someone whose troubles are over, then celebrating at a wedding for a pair whose trouble has just begun.