Category: Today’s Birthday

Flaubert was a French writer considered one of the supreme masters of the realistic novel. At 22, he abandoned law studies to pursue a career as an author. In 1856, after five years of work, he published his masterpiece, Madame Bovary, about the frustrations and love affairs of a romantic young woman married to a dull provincial doctor. A sharply realistic portrayal of bourgeois boredom and adultery, the novel led to his prosecution on moral grounds. What was the verdict? Discuss

Cannon was an American astronomer whose cataloging work is still in use and serves as the basis for modern theoretical understanding of stellar evolution. In 1897, she became an assistant in the Harvard College Observatory, where she later served as astronomer and curator of astronomical photographs. Recognizing that the spectra of many stars had been photographed in the second half of the 19th century, Cannon classified more than 500,000 stars. What celestial feature is named for her? Discuss

In 1876, while working as a college librarian, Dewey developed a decimal-based system for organizing the contents of a library by subject category, indicated by a three-digit numeral, with further specification expressed by numerals following a decimal point. He established the first library training school and the American Library Association and is also credited with inventing the vertical office file. A cofounder of the Spelling Reform Association, Dewey respelled his own name in what way? Discuss

Considered the greatest English poet after William Shakespeare, Milton wrote 23 sonnets that are accepted as among the best ever written as well as the epic Paradise Lost. This masterpiece reworks Classical epic conventions to recount the fall of man in blank verse and contains a portrayal of Satan so compelling that many 19th century critics considered him, not Adam, to be the real hero of the epic. The 12-volume work was completed well after Milton became blind. How did he compile it? Discuss

Bjørnson was a Norwegian writer, editor, and theatre director who won the 1903 Nobel Prize for Literature. He worked to stimulate national pride by linking Norwegian history and legend to modern ideals and sought to revive Norwegian as a literary language. His poem “Yes, We Love This Land Forever” serves as the lyrics of the Norwegian national anthem. Bjørnson is known as one of “the four great ones” of 19th-century Norwegian literature. Who are the other three? Discuss

Schwann was a German physiologist who founded modern histology by recognizing the cell as the basic unit of animal structure. He also studied nerve structure, discovering the myelin sheath covering nerve cells, and formulated the basic principles of embryology. While investigating digestive processes, he isolated a substance responsible for digestion in the stomach, the first enzyme prepared from animal tissue, and named it pepsin. What other common scientific term was coined by Schwann? Discuss

Gay-Lussac was a French chemist and physicist who showed that all gases expand by the same fraction of their volume for a given temperature increase—which led to the devising of a new temperature scale whose thermodynamic significance was later established by Lord Kelvin. By taking measurements from a balloon above 20,000 feet (6,000 m), he concluded that Earth’s magnetic intensity and atmospheric composition were constant to that altitude. Gay-Lussac also helped to discover what element? Discuss

In the American Civil War, Custer was a cavalry officer whose pursuit of Confederate troops under General Robert E. Lee hastened the South’s surrender. After the war, Custer participated in the government’s campaign to force the Cheyenne and Sioux onto reservations. In 1876, after dividing his force, he rashly commanded an attack against Native Americans in Little Bighorn, Montana. He and all of his more than 200 troops were killed in the battle against how many Indian warriors? Discuss

Carlyle was a Scottish historian and writer. His adherence to Calvinist values despite his loss of faith in traditional Christianity proved appealing to many Victorians, and he gained notice with his first major work, Sartor, Resartus. Simultaneously factual and fictional, the work forces the reader to confront the problem of where “truth” is to be found and was initially considered bizarre and incomprehensible by some. It had some success in the US, however, where it was admired by whom? Discuss

Before becoming a novelist, Conrad lived an adventurous life at sea. He later fictionalized many of his experiences in novels that combine realism and high drama. Though he knew little English before he was 20, Conrad became one of the greatest novelists and prose stylists in English literature. Marked by a distinctive, rich prose, many of his novels are considered masterpieces, but he is perhaps best known for the novella Heart of Darkness. What were some of Conrad’s real-life escapades? Discuss