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The Writer’s Almanac for Friday, September 8, 2023

Posted on September 8, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

Today is the birthday of Jimmie Rodgers, the American singer-songwriter and guitarist known as “The Father of Country Music.” Born in Meridian, Mississippi, in 1897, Rodgers was one of the first nationally recognized country music stars and the first inductee into the Country Music Hall of Fame. His influence reached later country musicians, including Hank Snow, Merle Haggard, Ernest Tubb, and Lefty Frizzell.

The Writer’s Almanac for Thursday, September 7, 2023

Posted on September 7, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

On this day in 1927, a 21-year-old inventor named Philo T. Farnsworth achieved the first fully electronic television system. He successfully transmitted an image through the purely electronic means of a device he called an “image dissector” (the first television camera tube). On that day in his lab at 202 Green Street in San Francisco, he transmitted a tele-electronic image onto a glass slide in a different room. Over the course of his life, Farnsworth held more than 300 patents, and even helped develop important advances in nuclear fusion.

The Writer’s Almanac for Wednesday, September 6, 2023

Posted on September 6, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

Today is the birthday of social reformer and peace activist Jane Addams, born in Cedarville, Illinois (1860). When she was in her 20s, she and her friend Ellen Gates Starr took the Grand Tour of Europe, an excursion that was popular for young people at the time, in which they traveled widely before choosing marriage or school. Addams had already graduated from the Rockford Female Seminary in 1881, but she also suffered depression, and physical pain related to a childhood disability, and she wasn’t quite sure what she wanted to do.

The Writer’s Almanac for Tuesday, September 5, 2023

Posted on September 5, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

On this day in 1978, peace accord discussions began with United States President Jimmy Carter, Prime Minister of Israel Menachem Begin, and President of Egypt Anwar Sadat at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland. When President Jimmy Carter introduced the Accords to the public, he said: “It’s been more than 2,000 years since there was peace between Egypt and a free Jewish nation. If our present expectations are realized, this year we shall see such peace again.”

The Writer’s Almanac for Monday, September 4, 2023

Posted on September 4, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

George Eastman received a patent for the first film camera, which he called Kodak, on this date in 1888. Eastman had been an enthusiastic photographer since he was a young man, but found the whole method — with its bulky cameras and heavy, breakable glass plates — cumbersome and inconvenient. He wanted to make it easier for people to take up the hobby, so he worked on new technology in his spare time. The name “Kodak” is also an invention of Eastman’s, and carries no special meaning. He once explained: “I devised the name myself.

The Writer’s Almanac for Sunday, September 3, 2023

Posted on September 3, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of the man who said, “Form follows function.” That’s American architect Louis Henry Sullivan, born in Boston (1856). He worked in Chicago in the 1880s and ’90s, when the city was teeming with immigrants, grain trading, and railroads. Sullivan designed more than 100 buildings for the city, including its early steel-frame skyscrapers — innovations in their day for using a kind of experimental skeleton construction on the inside and intricate, subtle ornamentation outside.

The Writer’s Almanac for Saturday, September 2, 2023

Posted on September 2, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of Austrian novelist and journalist Joseph Roth, born in Brody, Ukraine (1894). He started out as a journalist just after the end of the First World War, and he began moving back and forth between Berlin and Paris, as well as Russia, Poland, Albania, Italy, and southern France. He covered the riots and assassinations and political uprisings that went on all over Europe during the 1920s and ’30s. He rarely had a home in his adult life, and lived in hotels for years on end. He wrote his novels in between newspaper deadlines, while sitting at café counters. He somehow managed to produce 16 novels in 16 years.

The Writer’s Almanac for Friday, September 1, 2023

Posted on September 1, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

It was on this day in 1773 that 20-year-old Phillis Wheatley published Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. It was the first book of poetry published by an African-American. George Washington praised her talents, and she published numerous poems in magazines. But her husband fell into debt and then abandoned her when she was pregnant, and she died in childbirth, in a boarding house, when she was only 31 years old.

The Writer’s Almanac for Thursday, August 31, 2023

Posted on August 31, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

Aug 31 It’s the birthday of Maria Montessori , born on this day in Chiaravalle, Italy (1870). She was a bright student, studied engineering when she was 13— after a few years, she decided to pursue medicine, and she became the first woman in Italy to earn a medical degree. It was so unheard of for a woman to go to medical school that she had to get the approval of the pope in order to study there.

The Writer’s Almanac for Wednesday, August 30, 2023

Posted on August 30, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of the journalist and humorist, Molly Ivins who said, “The thing about democracy, beloveds, is that it is not neat, orderly, or quiet. It requires a certain relish for confusion.” Molly Ivins, born in Monterey, California (1944) and raised in Houston, Texas. She went to Smith and to Columbia’s School of Journalism and spent years covering the police beat for the Minneapolis Tribune (the first woman to do so) before moving back to Texas.

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