Tuesday

Jul. 4, 2000

Stars and Stripes Forever

by John Philip Sousa

Broadcast date: TUESDAY, 4 July 2000

Lyrics to "Stars & Stripes Forever," by John Phillips Sousa.

It's writer Nathaniel Hawthorne's birthday, born in Salem, Massachusetts, 1804. In 1848, he was in his mid-40s with a family to feed; faced with bankruptcy he wrote The Scarlet Letter in about two months, which made him wealthy and the country's best-known novelist.

They broke ground on this day in 1817 for the Erie Canal, to link the Great Lakes with New York City via the Hudson River.

Henry David Thoreau left his home in Concord, Massachusetts, on this day in 1845, when he was twenty-eight years old, to take up residence in a little cabin he'd built on Ralph Waldo Emerson's land on Walden Pond.

The first edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass came out on this day in 1855. Whitman had had no luck finding a publisher, so he brought the book out himself. He left his name off the cover, and put his own portrait on instead.

It's Independence Day, the anniversary of the day in 1776 that the Continental Congress approved the Declaration of Independence.

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

 

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  • “Writers end up writing stories—or rather, stories' shadows—and they're grateful if they can, but it is not enough. Nothing the writer can do is ever enough” —Joy Williams
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