Saturday

Mar. 6, 1999

Ultrasound

by Sharon Bryan

SATURDAY 3/6

Poem: "Ultrasound," by Sharon Bryan, from Flying Blind (Sarabande Books).

It's the birthday of the Colombian writer, GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ, born in the coastal town of Arataca, 1928, and author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, which came out in 1967 and won him the Nobel Prize for Literature.

It's the anniversary of the BATTLE OF FORT DOUAMONT, a part of the larger 1916 Battle of Verdun in WWI.

ASPIRIN was patented on this day in 1899 by the chemist Felix Hoffmann. He found a way to take the pain-killing ingredient that people had used for centuries in the willow tree and other plants and stabilize it and manufacture it cheaply.

LOUISA MAY ALCOTT, the author of Little Women, died on this day in 1888 in Boston — overcome with grief after returning just a few hours earlier from her father's funeral.

It was on this day in 1884 that SUSAN B. ANTHONY and more than 100 other suffragists presented President Chester Arthur with a demand that he support women's right to vote. They failed, but the two women's suffrage groups—the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association—soon merged and worked for the next 36 years toward passage of the 19th Amendment, in 1920.

The poet ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING was born on this day in 1806 near Durham, England, author of Sonnets from the Portuguese, published in 1850, including the one that starts, "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways."

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®

 

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