On this day in ...... 1998 (10 years ago today) , near-simultaneous explosions at the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, took the lives of more than 200 people and injured another 4,000. In May 2001, a federal jury in New York convicted 4 men for their role in the bombing, which they were alleged to have taken in concert with Osama bin Laden. At a sentencing hearing today, members of a military commission jury at Guantánamo are listening to evidence about Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Bin Laden's driver, whom yesterday they convicted of material support for terrorism but acquitted of more serious charges of conspiracy. (credit for photo of Nairobi embassy after bombing)
... 1813 (195 years ago today), Paulina Kellogg was born in Bloomfield, New York. After her parents' death in 1820 she moved in with a religious aunt and herself became religious; her early career interest was squelched by the church's ban on single women missionaries. Her marriage to a merchant coincided with growing activism in "women’s rights, anti-slavery and temperance causes." Widowed in 1845, she "was left an independent and wealthy woman," who studied and lectured "on female physiology and anatomy, unprecedented in her
time, which is said to have encouraged some of her listeners to join the first generation of women physicians." Paulina Wright Kellogg Davis (right), following her marriage in 1849 to a member of Congress from Rhode Island: organized the 1st 2 national women's rights conventions; ran "Una, the 1st feminist periodical that was owned, written, and edited entirely by women"; co-founded the New England Woman Suffrage Association; and published A History of the National Woman’s Rights Movement (1871).
