On February 8

On this day in ...
... 1911 (100 years ago today), Elizabeth Bishop (left) was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her father died when she was an infant, and her mother was committed to a mental institution when she was 5; she grew up 1st on her maternal grandparents' Nova Scotia farm and then with her father's family in Worcester. (photo credit) A published poet as a high school student, Bishop cofounded a literary magazine with her Vassar classmate Mary McCarthy. Bishop would go on to live in France, Brazil, and elsewhere, to publish many works of poetry, to teach at Harvard and other universities, to serve as the United States' Poet Laureate from 1949 to 1950, and to win the 1956 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her book North & South (1946). She died in 1979.


(Prior February 8 posts are here, here, and here.)

On June 4

On this day in ...
... 1917, the 1st Pulitzers were awarded, and the all-male board gave a prize to women won in 1 of the 4 categories. The winning book in the Biography or Autobiography category was Julia Ward Howe (1916), written by Laura E. Richards (left) (credit) and Maude Howe Elliott assisted by Florence Howe Hall. All 3 were daughters of the subject of the 2-volume work, the slavery abolitionist and women's suffragist at right (credit) who, as we've posted: in 1862, wrote "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," an anthem that U.S. President Abraham Lincoln said precipitated the Civil War, then 8 years later wrote an antiwar poem that launched Mother's Day. Ward Howe died at age 91 about 5 years before her daughters earned the prize.

(Prior June 4 posts are here, here, and here.)

On February 9

On this day in ...
... 1934 (75 years ago today) , at Athens, the leaders of Greece, Romania, Turkey, and Yugoslavia entered the Pact of Balkan Entente. The agreement "was formed to guarantee mutually the security of their frontiers and thus was directed largely against Bulgaria."
... 1944 (65 years ago today) , in Eatonton, Georgia, a daughter was born to sharecroppers Willie Lee and Minnie Lou Grant Walker. This eighth and last child of theirs won a scholarship to Spelman College in Atlanta, having earned honors as class valedictorian though blinded in one eye by a shooting accident during her childhood. Alice Walker (left), winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Color Purple (1982), her epistolary novel, continues to agitate for peace and the rights of women and minorities, and against nuclear weapons and female genital mutilation. IntLawGrrls reviewed 1 of Walker's most recent books here.

On December 7

On this day in ...

... 1873 (135 years ago today), Willa Cather (right) was born in Back Creek Valley, Virginia, to a farming family that had ancestral roots in England, Ireland and Alsace. When she was 8 or 9 the family moved west, homesteading near Red Cloud, Nebraska. After graduation from the University of Nebraska, she worked as a newspaperwoman and began writing poetry and stories. Among her most noted works are My Ántonia (1918) and O Pioneers! (1913). Having won a Pulitzer Prize in 1923, in the 1930s she was ranked as 1 of the United States' 2 best novelists. Cather, who died in 1947, is best known "as a chronicler of the pioneer American West" whose stories evince grand themes such as "the universal story of the rise of civilizations in history" and "the drama of the immigrant in a new world."

... 1988 (20 years ago today), Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat (below left) issued the following statement respecting the PLO and Israel at a meeting in Stockholm, Sweden:

As its contribution to the search for a just and lasting peace in the Middle East, the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization, assuming the role of the Provisional Government of the State of Palestine wishes to issue the following official statement:
1. That it is prepared to negotiate with Israel within the framework of the International Conference a comprehensive peace settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict on the basis of U.N. resolutions 242 and 338.
2. That it undertakes to live in peace with Israel and other neighbours and to respect their right to exist in peace within secure and internationally recognized borders, as will the democratic Palestinian State which it seeks to establish in the Palestinian occupied territories since 1967.
3. That it condemns individual, group and State terrorism in all its forms, and will not resort to it.