Category: Today’s Birthday

Baker was an African-American maid who was executed for murder by the State of Georgia in 1945 for killing her employer, Ernest Knight. The only woman ever executed by electrocution in Georgia, Baker was fully pardoned 60 years after her death. At her trial, she claimed that Knight had imprisoned her and threatened to shoot her if she attempted to leave, so she had taken his gun and shot him in self defense. Her trial was presided over by Judge William “Two Gun” Worrill and lasted how long? Discuss

Brummell was an English dandy and wit who was greatly admired for his fastidious appearance and confident manner. The leader of English fashion of his time, he influenced men of society to wear dark, simply cut clothes, elaborate neckwear, and trousers rather than breeches. After a quarrel with his friend Prince George of Wales, later King George IV, and deeply in debt from gambling, Brummell fled to France, where he lived for 14 years in poverty and squalor. What killed him? Discuss

The most celebrated painter of the Spanish school, Velázquez was one of the outstanding artists of the 17th century. His early works were mostly religious or genre scenes. After arriving in Madrid in 1623, he painted a portrait of King Philip IV that won him immediate success and an appointment as court painter. Notable among his portraits is his masterpiece, Las Meninas—The Maids of Honor. Why is there debate about who the true subject of the painting is? Discuss

Villa was a legendary Mexican guerrilla leader. He fought for land reform and joined with revolutionaries against dictator Porfirio Díaz as well as his successor but was forced to flee after breaking ties with Venustiano Carranza, who had assumed power in 1914. Angered by US support for Carranza, Villa raided a New Mexico town in 1916. A US force was sent to apprehend him, but he managed to evade capture. Three years after he was finally pardoned, he was assassinated. What was his real name? Discuss

Mannerheim was a Finnish-born soldier and statesman. A career officer in the Russian imperial army from 1889 to 1917, he went on to command the anti-Bolshevik forces in the Finnish Civil War and expelled the Soviet forces, serving as regent of Finland until the new republic was declared. He served as commander-in-chief of Finnish forces in the Russo-Finnish War and was named president of Finland in 1944, after which he negotiated a peace agreement with the Soviets. Why did he resign in 1946? Discuss

Loewi was a German-born American physiologist and pharmacologist. A professor of pharmacology at Austria’s University of Graz, he was forced into exile by the Nazi purge of professors in 1938 and began teaching at New York University in 1940. He investigated the physiology and pharmacology of metabolism, the kidneys, the heart, and the nervous system. For his discovery of the chemical transmission of nerve impulses, he shared the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with whom? Discuss

Elgar was an English composer whose oratorio The Dream of Gerontius is considered one of the finest examples of English choral music in history. He received his training from his father and succeeded him as organist of St. George’s Church, Worcester, in 1885. He earned recognition for his Imperial March, composed in 1897 for Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee, and for his Enigma Variations. His most popular works are his five marches, the first of which is what famous song? Discuss

After commanding a Union regiment in the American Civil War, Harlan served as a state attorney general before being appointed to the Supreme Court by President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1877. During his tenure, which lasted until his death in 1911, he became the court’s outstanding liberal justice and one of the most forceful dissenters in its history. His best-known dissenting opinion came in Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the Supreme Court established what infamous doctrine? Discuss

Sidgwick was a British philosopher whose Methods of Ethics is considered by some to be the most significant 19th-century ethical work in English. Drawing on the utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill and the categorical imperative of Immanuel Kant, he proposed a system of “universalistic hedonism” that would reconcile the conflict between the pleasure of self and the pleasure of others. He promoted higher education for women and cofounded what society devoted to studying paranormal events? Discuss

Barrientos was elected vice president of Bolivia in 1964, but he soon broke with the president and joined other army officers in a coup. He was installed as head of a military junta and became the sole president after winning the 1966 elections. He launched a moderate—albeit military—administration, retaining the reforms instituted by his predecessors. Three years later, he died in a helicopter crash. Why did he once jump out of an airplane with a parachute that had earlier failed to open? Discuss