Category: Today’s Birthday

Audubon was a US ornithologist and artist known for his drawings and paintings of North American birds. After failing in business, he concentrated on compiling his extraordinary four-volume Birds of America, published between 1827 and 1838. Though his bird poses are sometimes unrealistic—the result of painting dead birds wired into position—and some details are inaccurate, his studies were fundamental to New World ornithology. How many bird species are featured in Birds of America? Discuss

After winning an amateur contest at Harlem’s Apollo Theater in 1934, Fitzgerald started singing with Chick Webb’s big band and soon became its star. She recorded her first hit, “A Tisket-A Tasket,” in 1938 and went on to become one of the best-selling vocal recording artists in history and a 14-time Grammy Award winner. In 1960, she made a famous live recording in which she improvised new lyrics to a song after forgetting the original ones. The performance earned her a Grammy. What song was it? Discuss

Born in the US and taken to the UK as a child, Joyce became involved with the fascist movement as a teen and fled to Germany before the outbreak of WWII. He remained there throughout the war, broadcasting Nazi propaganda in English from Berlin. He was captured by British soldiers in 1945 and, despite his American birth, was deemed subject to British jurisdiction because he held a British passport. He was convicted of treason and hanged. What urban legends about Joyce circulated during the war? Discuss

A precocious performer known for her dimples and golden curls, Temple was a child actress who became America’s most popular female star and Hollywood’s top box office attraction in the Great Depression era. In 1934, she made nine movies, leaping to stardom with Little Miss Marker and winning a special Academy Award that year. She effectively retired from moviemaking in 1950. As an adult, Temple served as a US delegate to the UN General Assembly and as US ambassador to what countries? Discuss

Fielding was an English novelist and dramatist known for his humor and satire. He settled in London in 1729 and began writing comedies, farces, and burlesques, including Tom Thumb. Two of his satires attacked the Walpole government and provoked the Licensing Act of 1737, which initiated censorship of the stage and ended his career as a playwright. He thereupon turned to writing novels, publishing his most popular work, Tom Jones, in 1749. Why did he travel to Portugal in 1754? Discuss

Weber was a German sociologist and political economist whose most famous and controversial work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, examines the relationship between Calvinist—or Puritan—morality, compulsive labor, bureaucracy, and economic success under capitalism. Weber also wrote about social phenomena such as charisma and mysticism, which he saw as antithetical to the modern world and its underlying process of rationalization. What other important works did he write? Discuss

After moving to Paris in 1778, Pinel, a French physician, was appointed director of the Bicêtre and Salpêtrière hospitals. His experiences there prompted him to advocate for the humane treatment of mentally ill persons—then called the insane—and for the empirical study of mental disease. He further contributed to the development of psychiatry by establishing the practice of thoroughly documenting psychiatric case histories for research. What initially inspired Pinel’s interest in mental illness? Discuss

Ricardo was a British economist who made a fortune in the stock market before turning to the study of political economy, publishing his major work, The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, in 1817. According to his labor theory of value, the value of almost any good is a function of the labor needed to produce it; thus, a $10 watch requires ten times more labor than a $1 pencil. According to his “iron law of wages,” what keeps wages stabilized around the subsistence level? Discuss

Darrow was an American lawyer and a leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union. He worked to free anarchists charged with murder in the Haymarket Riot, and his defense of Eugene V. Debs established his reputation as a union lawyer. Later came sensational criminal cases that displayed his eminence as a defense lawyer, especially the Loeb-Leopold murder case. Perhaps his most famous case was the Scopes trial, in which he defended a high school teacher who was charged with what? Discuss

The son of a financier, Morgan began his career as an accountant before being named a partner in the firm that became J.P. Morgan and Company. One of the world’s most powerful railroad magnates, he formed a syndicate to supply the US Treasury’s depleted gold reserves and financed the mergers that formed General Electric and US Steel Corporation—the world’s first billion-dollar corporation. In addition to being a noted art collector, Morgan had one of America’s most important collections of what? Discuss