MONDAY, 8 MAY, 2006
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Poem: "Science" by Jim Harrison from Saving Daylight. © Copper Canyon Press. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
Science
It was one of those mornings utterly distorted by the night's dreams.
Why go to court to change my name to Gaspar de la Nuit in order to
avoid thinking of myself as a silly, fat old man? At midmorning I
looked at the dogs as possibilities for something different in my life.
I was dogsitting both daughters' dogs plus our own: Lily, Grace, Pearl,
Harry, Rose and Mary. I shook the biscuit box and they assembled in
the living room on a very cold windy morning when no one wanted
to go outside except for a quick pee and a bark at the mailman. I sang,
"He's got the whole world in his hands," as they waited for their snack.
Harry was embarrassed and furtive and tried to leave the room but I
called him back. I tried, "Yes, we have no bananas, we have no bananas
today," and Lily, the largest of the dogs, became angry at the others
who looked away intimidated. I tried something religious, "The Old
Rugged Cross," to no particular response except that Mary leapt up
at the biscuit box in irritation. I realized decisively that dogs don't care
about music and religion and thus have written up this report. This
scarcely makes me the Father of the A-bomb, I thought as I flung the
contents of the full box of biscuits around the room with the dogs
scrambling wildly on the hard maple floor. Let there be happy chaos.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Edmund Wilson, (books by this author), born in Red Bank, New Jersey (1895). He is generally considered the greatest American man of letters of the twentieth century, though he published almost all of his work in popular magazines. He never took a teaching position and rarely gave lectures.
He went to communist Russia and learned both Russian and German to write about the history of socialism in his book To the Finland Station (1940). He wrote about Russian poetry, Haitian literature, the Hebrew language, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the literature produced during the American Civil War.
Wilson introduced Americans to writers like James Joyce, Marcel Proust and Vladimir Nabokov. He almost single-handedly resurrected the reputation of the novelist Henry James, who had been forgotten for years. He championed new writers like Ernest Hemingway, and it was Wilson who persuaded American readers that F. Scott Fitzgerald had been a genius, and that The Great Gatsby was an American classic.
Today is believed to be the birthday of the legendary bluesman Robert Johnson, born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi (1911). We know very little about his life. The only reason we know for sure he existed is that in 1937 he recorded twenty-nine of his songs over the course of two recording sessions. He had two photographs taken of himself around the same time. Those were the only recordings he made and the only photographs taken of him in his lifetime, and he died the following year, at the age of 27.
But before he'd even died, people began to spread the rumor that Robert Johnson had met the devil one night at the crossroads of two highways and sold his soul in exchange for his skill at the guitar.
It's the birthday of Gary Snyder, (books by this author), born in San Francisco (1930). He started out as one of the Beat writers of the 1950s. In 1956 he left the San Francisco Beat scene and went to Japan. He spent most of the next twelve years in a monastery, studying Buddhism.
Gary Snyder said, "As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth. They go back to the Neolithic: the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe."
It's the birthday of novelist Thomas Pynchon, (books by this author), born in Glen Cove, Long Island (1937). Over the course of his career, he became a kind of mythical figure. People said that he lived on the run, giving out false names wherever he went. Some claimed he had joined a band of Mexican rebel fighters.
Then, in the late 1990s, an article in New York magazine revealed that he lived in New York City with his wife and son. He wasn't hiding out in an underground bunker. He just wasn't seeking publicity.
TUESDAY, 9 MAY, 2006
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Poem: "Little Night Music" by Charles Simic from The Voice at 3:00 A.M.: Selected Late & New Poems. © Harcourt Inc. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
Little Night Music
Of neighbors' voices and dishes
Being cleared away
On long summer evenings
With the windows open
As we sat on the back stairs,
Smoking and sipping beer.
The memory of that moment,
So sweet at first,
The two of us chatting away,
Till the stars made us quiet.
We drew close
And held fast to each other
As if in sudden danger.
That one time, I didn't recognize
Your voice, or dare turn
To look at your face
As you spoke of us being born
With so little apparent cause.
I could think of nothing to say.
The music over, the night cold.
Literary and Historical Notes:
On this night in 1671, Captain (Thomas) Blood tried to steal the Crown Jewels from the Tower of London. Disguised as a priest, he managed to convince the Jewel House keeper to hand over his pistols. One of Captain Blood's accomplices shoved the Royal Orb down his breeches. Blood flattened the crown with a mallet and tried to run off with it, but he and his partners in crime were caught in the act. King Charles was so impressed with Blood's audacity that he pardoned him, restored his estates in Ireland, and gave him an annual pension of five hundred pounds.
It's the birthday of poet Charles Simic, (books by this author), born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia (1938). His family survived the bombing of Belgrade during World War II and fled Eastern Europe after the war was over. Simic said, "My travel agents were Hitler and Stalin. They were the reason I ended up in the United States."
Simic wound up in Oak Park, Illinois, and went to the same high school Ernest Hemingway had gone to. The high school teachers there were always reminding kids that Hemingway had gone before them, and that inspired Simic to become a writer. He was drawn to poetry because his English still wasn't very good, and in poems he didn't have to use so many words.
Simic published his first book of poetry, What the Grass Says, in 1967, and he went on to publish many more collections, including School for Dark Thoughts (1978), Frightening Toys (1995), and Night Picnic (2001).
Charles Simic said, "Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them. We are always at the beginning, eternal apprentices."
It's the birthday of poet Mona Van Duyn, (books by this author), born in Waterloo, Iowa (1921). Her mother was an extremely strict and protective woman and Van Duyn often felt as though she were growing up in a prison. She had to go to bed every night at 7:30 and her mother kept her home from school for weeks on end if she showed the slightest sign of a cold. She said, "[Any] attempts at disobedience were quickly squashed by frightening threats that I would get sick and die, since my parents would refuse to pay the doctor bills."
Since she was rarely allowed to leave the house, she started reading all the time, even though her mother warned her that so much reading could cause her to lose her mind. At school, the other kids made fun of her because she was such a good student and because she was so tall. She was the tallest woman in her town and she sometimes wondered if she might be the tallest woman in the world. The only place she felt free was in her notebook, which she began filling with poetry.
After high school, she thought she wanted to be a writer or a dress designer, and only chose writing because a professor in college encouraged her. She got a degree in English and became a college professor, and finally published her first book of poetry, Valentines to the Wide World, in 1959. She was thirty-eight years old. She later said, "For half my life, nobody knew I wrote."
She published many books of poetry, including Near Changes (1990), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Her Selected Poems came out in 2002.
It's the birthday of journalist, novelist, and playwright J M (James Matthew) Barrie, (books by this author), born in Angus, Scotland (1860). He was the seventh of eight children. When he was six years old, his older brother died in a skating accident. His mother fell into a deep depression, and Barrie tried to make her feel better by wearing his older brother's clothes and doing things his older brother used to do. At some point, it occurred to Barrie that his dead brother would never grow up, and that idea led to the character of Peter Pan, who appeared in Barrie's play Peter Pan, the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up (1904), which was about Peter and Wendy and Captain Hook.
It was on this day in 1960 that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the use of the world's first birth control pill.
It was one of the first times a drug had ever been approved by the FDA for a purpose other than to cure an illness or relieve pain. It was also the first time that a new medication was known not by its official name, Enovid-10, but simply as "the pill."
Some people hoped it would end unwanted pregnancies but today about 50 percent of all pregnancies in the U.S. are unplanned.
WEDNESDAY, 10 MAY, 2006
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Poem: "Sweet Annie Divine" by Corey Mesler from Short Story and Other Short Stories. © Parallel Press. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
Sweet Annie Divine
Sweet Annie Divine (1925-1976). Born Rooster, Arkansas, Annie
May Auspeux. Also known as The Duchess. Dropped out of school
at the age of 13 to work her parents' cotton fields. Started singing
professionally at 16 in juke joints in Arkansas, Mississippi and
Tennessee. Toured with Jimmy Reed for a while, sang with Styx
Ygg's BamBam Five on Beale Street in the forties. Fronted her
own band, The Moxie Seven (or Eight depending on the night),
which included Hillbilly Thomas and Sweetie Sykes and they had a
mid-major hit with "Stephen Daedalus's Blues" in 1948. Recorded
"Chicken Finger Blues," "Write Em Right," "Saint Ursula Goes
Down for the Third Time," and her signature tune "Mississippi
Low-down Blues" for the Lightning Label. She is credited with
the composition of only one standard, the rocking "Lemme Get
Up First," later, of course, covered by The Rolling Stones. Her
last record for a major label was a cover of Holmes and Howard's
"Somebody's Been Using that Thing." Comparisons to Big Mama
Thorton and Bessie Smith brought her a brief renaissance of
interest in the restless sixties. She died of the drink in a Memphis
boarding house, just hours after recording her last record, the
plaintive and pain-filled "I'm a Drunk in a Memphis Boarding
House." Alan Lomax has said of her, "She could have been one of
the greats if not for the hooch."
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1940 that Winston Churchill took power as the prime minister of Great Britain, (books by this author). He became a politician in 1900, but he had a bumpy political career. He switched parties not once but twice. He started out conservative, then became liberal, and then went conservative again. At the start of World War I, he was one of the few British politicians to predict how widespread the war would be. But when he advocated an invasion of Turkey, Germany's ally, the result was a disaster. There were hundreds of thousands of British casualties, and nothing to show for it. Churchill had to resign his office in disgrace.
But instead of going into the private sector, he joined the army again and went into battle himself, commanding a battalion in the trenches. He was the only politician of his stature to serve in the trenches during World War I. After the war he got back into politics, but he found himself alienated from both parties. Liberals and conservatives both thought he was an extremist reactionary. In 1932 he made a speech about the growing danger of a second world war with Germany. No one took him seriously.
Churchill kept warning of Hitler's rise to power throughout the 1930s. Most people saw Churchill as an arrogant, paranoid warmonger, and most people supported appeasement of Hitler. Things changed when Hitler took control of Czechoslovakia and Austria, then invaded Poland, Belgium and France. In a less than two years, almost all of Western Europe's mainland was either controlled by or allied with Nazi Germany.
And then, on this day in 1940, Churchill became the prime minister. In his acceptance speech, he famously said, "All I have to offer is blood, toil, tears and sweat."
By that summer, the situation for Great Britain was already so dire that Hitler assumed Churchill would surrender. The British army had already been decimated in a retreat from Dunkirk. Hitler was so confident that he delayed invasion because he thought it would be a waste of resources. Almost everyone thought it was a hopeless situation, but Churchill decided that he would persuade the people not to give up.
In a series of extraordinary speeches, he used his abilities as an orator to rally the British people. He said, "We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. ... We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the landing-grounds; we shall fight in the fields and in the streets. ... We shall never surrender."
By sheer force of will and personality, he persuaded the British people to keep up their spirits even as their country was subject to a U-boat blockade, and food became scarce, and London was bombed by German planes. His leadership gave the British courage hold out long enough for the Royal Air Force to fight off the Nazi planes and for the United States to join the war and help win it.
Today, in Great Britain, Churchill is remembered as an important but imperfect statesman. In America, he's considered an almost flawless hero. American presidents have put portraits of him up on the walls of the White House, and in the last few decades, whenever an American president needs to use military force, he often mentions Churchill and even quotes his words.
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Poem: "Back Porch" by Jay Leeming from Walking Coy Hill Road. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
Back Porch
Before
my father needed
an oxygen machine
to breathe
he would often sit
on the back porch
smoking
on summer nights
and I would join him
to talk
about music or
the moon
as the sun went
down
and the cicadas
rattled
in the willow trees
If we sat there
long enough
darkness would fill
the backyard
until our bodies
disappeared
and the orange glow
of his
cigarette
as he inhaled
became all
that I could see
of him
as if his life
were only
that burning
and the ashes
scattered afterwards
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Mari Sandoz, (books by this author), born in the post office run by her family near Hay Springs, Nebraska (1896). Her parents were Swiss immigrants to the American frontier. She was the oldest of her siblings, and she spent her childhood working hard around the farm. When she was thirteen, she and her brother spent a day digging their cattle out of a blizzard snowdrift, and she developed snow-blindness in one eye.
Sandoz fell in love with the work of Shakespeare and Hawthorne and especially Joseph Conrad, whose writings about life on the sea reminded her of life on the prairie. But her father disapproved of reading fiction, so she had to smuggle books into the house in the front of her dress. She began to write in secret.
She got a job as a journalist out of college, but she wrote under the name Marie Macumber so that her father wouldn't find out what she was doing. When she got news that her father was on his deathbed, she went back home and she was shocked when he asked her to write his life story. It was his last request.
Mari Sandoz spent five years researching and writing about her father. She wrote about his decision to become a pioneer, his extraordinarily hard work establishing a life on the prairie, his role as a leader of the pioneer community, and his love of history and friendship with the local Indians in the area. But she also wrote about her own experiences as his daughter, his bitterness and anger and his frequent violence toward his wife and children.
She called the book Old Jules, and it came out in 1935. It was a Book-of-the-Month club selection and a best-seller, and it allowed Sandoz to go on to write many more books about frontier life and especially about Indians.
She was a meticulous researcher. She wanted to see firsthand the places she wrote about—the routes, camps, and battlefields of the Sioux and Cheyenne. So, in the summer of 1930, she went with a friend on the first of many trips—a three-week, 3,000-mile journey in a Model T Ford. When the car broke down, the women fixed it themselves. They visited reservations, slept in tents, and conducted interviews with Indians in North and South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana.
Sandoz used her research in books such as Crazy Horse (1942), a biography of the Sioux Indian chief who helped lead the Indians at the battle of Little Bighorn, where Custer was defeated. Crazy Horse was one of the first books by a white author that tried to see the Indian Wars from the Indians' point of view.
Mari Sandoz said, "I always come back to the Middle West. There's a vigor here, and a broadness of horizon."
It's the birthday of Stanley Elkin, (books by this author) born in New York City (1930). He was one of those writers whose books are deeply admired by other writers but not by many readers. He once said, "I think I know most of my readers by name."
By the time Elkin died in 1995, most of his books had gone out of print, but they were all brought back into print in the last few years, including The Dick Gibson Show (1971) about a radio personality who takes on-air confessions from all the crazy people in America.
It's the birthday of Irving Berlin, (works by this artist) born Israel Baline, in Russia (1888). He came to New York City with his family when he was five, and when he was eight his father died. That was the end of his formal education. After only two years of school, he worked as a street singer and a singing waiter in New York's Lower East Side to help support his family. Eventually, he became a songwriter.
He wrote many holiday anthems, including "Something to Be Thankful For" for Thanksgiving, "Say It With Firecrackers" for the Fourth of July, "A Little Bit of Irish,'' for St. Patrick's Day, "Let's Start the New Year Right" for New Year's Eve, and "I Can't Tell a Lie" for Washington's Birthday. But he's better known for "White Christmas" and "Easter Parade."
On this day, in 1858 the state of Minnesota was admitted into the Union. It's the home of the world's largest Paul Bunyan statue, and it was from Minnesotans that we got the stapler, water skis, and roller blades—not to mention Scotch tape, Bisquick, and Spam.
FRIDAY, 12 MAY, 2006
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Poem: "Mother Night" by Jim Harrison from Saving Daylight. © Copper Canyon Press. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
Mother Night
When you wake at three AM you don't think
of your age or sex and rarely your name
or the plot of your life which has never
broken itself down into logical pieces.
At three AM you have the gift of incomprehension
wherein the galaxies make more sense
than your job or the government. Jesus at the well
with Mary Magdalene is much more vivid
than your car. You can clearly see the bear
climb to heaven on a golden rope in the children's
story no one ever wrote. Your childhood horse
named June still stomps the ground for an apple.
What is morning and what if it doesn't arrive?
One morning Mother dropped an egg and asked
me if God was the same species as we are?
Smear of light at five AM. Sound of Webber's
sheep flock and sandhill cranes across the road,
burble of irrigation ditch beneath my window.
She said, "Only lunatics save newspapers
and magazines," fried me two eggs, then said,
"If you want to understand mortality look at birds."
Blue moon, two full moons this month,
which I conclude are two full moons. In what
direction do the dead fly off the earth?
Rising sun. A thousand blackbirds pronounce day.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the man who has been called "the father of nonsense," Edward Lear, (books by this author), born in London, England (1812). He was the twentieth of his mother's twenty-one children, almost half of whom had died in infancy. He was raised by his sister Ann, who taught him at an early age how to paint birds and flowers. He went to school only briefly, and then, as a teenager, began to support himself painting shop signs for local merchants and sketching diseased patients for medical textbooks.
At the time, there was a fad for books of illustrated birds, so Edward Lear got into that business and became one of the most successful bird illustrators in the industry. Unlike other painters, he refused to paint stuffed birds, and tried only to work from living specimens, which made his paintings more anatomically accurate. Among his clients was Charles Darwin, who had Lear illustrate the specimens he brought back from his trip on the H.M.S. Beagle.
Lear suffered from periodic depression as an adult, along with terrible eyesight and epilepsy. Most scholars also believe he was a homosexual. Despite all his success as a painter and illustrator, he felt like an outcast in respectable British society. He wrote in his diary, "Nothing I long for half so much as to giggle heartily and to hop on one leg ... but I dare not."
Then in 1832, the Earl of Darby invited Lear to come to his estate and paint all the animals in his private zoo, the largest private zoo in the world at the time. Lear agreed, and when he arrived at the estate, he wound up spending most of his free time with the Earl's grandchildren. Lear had never spent any time with children before, and he found that they brought out a whole different side of his personality. He began acting like a clown for them, singing songs, drawing cartoons, and making up humorous poems. The children loved the poems so much that he wrote them down and they became his Book of Nonsense (1846).
There had long been an oral tradition of nonsense poetry in the English language, from nursery rhymes to schoolyard chants and drinking songs. Shakespeare had drawn on that tradition when he wrote the dialogue for fools and madmen. But Edward Lear was the first English writer to make nonsense poetry into an art form: something worth writing and publishing in its own right.
It's the birthday of actress Katharine Hepburn, (books by this actor), born in Hartford, Connecticut (1907). She became a Hollywood star by not doing anything that Hollywood stars were supposed to do. Her looks were unconventional: she had red hair and freckles and sharp cheekbones. She didn't wear make-up or dresses, she didn't cooperate with the media, and she had a habit of insulting other people in the business. She played smart, sexy, independent women who were always able to get the guy in the end.
She won her first Oscar for her role in Morning Glory (1933). After that she hand-picked each of her movies, and she often had a say in who the other actors in the movie would be. Sometimes she rewrote her own lines, something almost no other actress would have dared to do at the time.
In 1991, Hepburn published her autobiography, titled Me, and it was a best-seller. She wrote about her twenty-seven-year affair with Spencer Tracy, her career, and life in her brownstone in the middle of Manhattan, where she lived for more than sixty years.
Katharine Hepburn said, "If you obey all the rules you miss all the fun."
SATURDAY, 13 MAY, 2006
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Poem: "Spring" by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Public domain. (buy now)
Spring
Nothing is so beautiful as spring—
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush's eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.
What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth's sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden.—Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid's child, thy choice and worthy the winning.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of one half of the Gilbert and Sullivan opera writing team, Arthur Seymour Sullivan, born in London in 1842. He was a notorious drinker and smoker, and composing came very easily to him. He often entertained guests as he worked on a piece of music.
He established himself in 1862 as a composer when he wrote an orchestral suite for Shakespeare's The Tempest that was performed at the Crystal Palace. Charles Dickens attended the concert and complimented Sullivan after the show. He began collaborating with William Gilbert in 1871, and the pair would go on to write fourteen enormously popular comic operas, including Trial by Jury (1875), The Mikado (1885), and The Pirates of Penzance (1879).
It's the birthday of painter Georges Braque, born in Argenteuil-sur-Seine, France, in 1882. He painted scenes of villages where the buildings were reduced to their basic geometrical shape, the cube, and along with Pablo Picasso became a leader of Cubism. Cubist paintings challenged traditional art by using simple shapes and drab colors like gray and brown to show an object from multiple perspectives.
Georges Braque said, "There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain."
It's the birthday of novelist Daphne du Maurier, (books by this author), born in London (1907). She came from a long line of actors and writers, and her first two big successes were books about her family—Gerald (1936), a biography of her father, and The Du Mauriers (1937), the story of her family tree dating back to the beginning of the eighteenth century. She said, "[I wanted to find out] why they wept and why they suffered, and what strange memories enfolded these Du Mauriers of 60 and 100 years ago."
She spent most of her adult life in the coastal town of Cornwall, known for its stormy, unpredictable weather. Her three most famous novels, Jamaica Inn (1936), Frenchman's Creek (1941), and Rebecca (1938), are all set in Cornwall.
Rebecca is narrated by a young, nameless woman who lives with a rich widower in a haunted house near the cliffs of Cornwall. Rebecca has been made into a play, an opera, and a TV series. Orson Welles made it into a radio drama, and Alfred Hitchcock made it into a movie. In 2003, the BBC held something called the Big Read, in which the British public got to vote on their favorite books of all time. About 150,000 people cast votes, and Rebecca was named one of the nation's twenty favorite books.
It's the birthday of novelist Armistead Maupin, (books by this author), born Armistead Jones in Washington, D.C. (1944). He's famous for his Tales of the City series, which evolved from a regular column he wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle, beginning in 1976. The novels focus on a group of gay and straight characters who share a boarding house in San Francisco.
It's the birthday of novelist and travel writer Bruce Chatwin, (books by this author), born in Sheffield, Yorkshire, England (1940). His father took him on trips when Chatwin was a boy, and he later became an archeologist, traveling to Africa and Afghanistan. He began writing a column for the London Times, and then decided to go off to Patagonia. There he collected the material for what would become his first book, In Patagonia (1977).
It became an instant classic, and its popularity helped to inspire a new generation of travel writers in England and America—authors like Paul Theroux, Jonathan Raban, Peter Matthiessen, and Bill Bryson.
SUNDAY, 14 MAY, 2006
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Poem: "A Party" by Kate Barnes from Kneeling Orion. © David R. Godine. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
A Party
My neighbor who hates everyone
doesn't hate the space around his trailer.
I hear his lawn tractor start up
on this late May afternoon
and I know he is riding back and forth, peacefully
beheading the grasses, drinking whiskey from his flask,
making circles around the blooming apple trees
as he dreams about whom he could sue, and for what.
Even in repose, his face
is as fierce as the face of a wild boar.
The small eyes are hot. Above him,
the old trees sway their blossoms,
white and pink, against the clear sky.
When he first moved here
he tried to make a fresh start;
he drank less, he made an effort to be civil.
Once, while he was still speaking to us,
he said he thought he'd give a garden party
every year when the apple trees were in bloom.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1796 that the doctor Edward Jenner inoculated an eight-year-old boy with a vaccine for smallpox, the first safe vaccine ever developed.
Jenner was a country doctor and surgeon in the small town of Berkeley, England, where he had lived for most of his life. The only time he'd ever been away from Berkeley was when he studied for a few years at a hospital in London. It was there that he learned the basics of the scientific method, experimentation and careful observation.
The most devastating disease in the world at the time was smallpox, a disease that caused boils to break out all over the body. It killed about one in every four adults who caught it, and one in every three children. It was so contagious that most human beings in populous areas caught it at some point in their lives. During the eighteenth century alone, it killed about sixty million people.
Jenner worked in a dairy farming area, and there was a rumor that milkmaids almost never caught smallpox. Jenner realized that the milkmaids had all suffered from disease called cowpox, which they'd caught from the udders of cows. Jenner had a hunch that the infection of cowpox somehow helped the milkmaids develop immunity to smallpox.
So on this day in 1796, he gathered some cowpox material from an infected milkmaid's hand and injected it into the arm of an eight-year-old boy named James Phipps. The boy developed a slight headache and lost his appetite, but that was all. Six weeks later, Jenner inoculated the boy with smallpox, and the boy showed no symptoms. He had developed immunity from the cowpox. It was the first time anyone had successfully prevented the infection of any contagious disease.
By 1840, the British government passed a law providing all British infants with free smallpox vaccinations: the first free medical service in the country's history. Smallpox continued to infect and kill unvaccinated people around the world through the 1960s. An effort to eradicate the disease began in 1967, and the last known natural case of smallpox occurred ten years later in Somalia.
It was on this day in 1804 that Captain Meriwether Lewis and Lieutenant William Clark set out from St. Louis, Missouri, on their overland expedition to the Pacific coast and back. (books by Lewis and Clark) President Thomas Jefferson had ordered the expedition to survey the land that had been included in the Louisiana Purchase.
On this day in 1804, the day they started their journey, William Clark wrote in his journal: "Rained the fore part of the day. ... I Set out at 4 oClock P.M., in the presence of many of the neighboring in habitants, and proceeded on under a jentle brease up the Missourie ... a heavy rain this after-noon."
Meriwether Lewis wrote on the same day, "I could but esteem this moment of my departure as among the most happy of my life."
Clark was thirty-three years old at the time and Lewis was twenty-nine. They were both Virginians and outdoorsmen. They were well-stocked for their journey: they brought clothes, guns, medical supplies and 193 pounds of portable soup—a thick paste made by boiling down beef, eggs and vegetables. They also brought gifts for Native Americans, including silk ribbons, ivory combs, 130 rolls of tobacco, vermilion face paint, 144 small pairs of scissors and twelve dozen pocket mirrors.
They crossed the Rocky Mountains, nearly starving to death in the process, surviving on horsemeat. They identified 178 plants and 122 animals that had never before been recorded for science, including the grizzly bear, which often chased the group across the plains and mountains.
They ultimately covered about eight thousand miles, and they lost only one man on the journey. He died of appendicitis. They returned to St. Louis in 1806.
