Few artists could phrase a song like Patsy Cline could. She had a way of lingering on a note long enough to pull every ounce of feeling from it, as her smoky, full-bodied voice carried life’s sorrows and joys. This ability wasn’t just a singing technique, though. It was how Patsy approached life. “Say the words with the feeling they deserve,” she would say.

Born Virginia Patterson Hensley in 1932, Patsy grew up in the small town of Winchester, Virginia, where dreams often faded during the Great Depression. It was a difficult place in a difficult time. As her mother later wrote, "We weren't very happy, because there wasn't any money."

But there were joys in young Patsy's life. Music being the biggest. As her mother recalled,

"As a child Patsy idolized Shirley Temple. She would come home from the movies after seeing the pictures twice and say, 'Mama, I want to be a dancer like her.'

I'd say, 'What! Now listen, Virginia... ' but it didn't do any good. It wasn't too long before she was tap dancing all over the house. I'd stand there and watch her and shake my head. But I couldn't help but smile or laugh. She was something!"

Things stabilized somewhat by the end of that decade. And Patsy, whose love for music began around the age of four, received her first piano at eight. She would consider this the start of her music career.

By her teen years, Patsy actively sought performance opportunities anywhere that would let her play. And at 15, her music was on the radio. But these early songs were all flops, and fame would be far away. But it would come. There was just something deeply special about Patsy. And the talent was there.

The turning point came in 1957 when she performed Walkin’ After Midnight on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts. Her electric performance turned the song into a national hit, launching Patsy into the spotlight. Stardom followed shortly after.

Sadly, in 1963, just as she was beginning to enjoy the fruits of all the hard work, tragedy struck. A small plane carrying her and a couple of other musicians crashed, taking her life at 30 years old.

Patsy's music, however, has passed the test of time. Decades later, her voice continues to soothe hearts and bring smiles.

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A couple of Patsy’s other songs:

Sources:

• Cline, Patsy, et al. Love Always, Patsy: Patsy Cline's Letters to a Friend. United States, Berkley Books, 1999.

• Nassour, Ellis. Patsy Cline. United States, Tower Books, 1981.

• “Patsy Cline.” Country Music Hall of Fame, https://www.countrymusichalloffame.org/hall-of-fame/patsy-cline

• Ward, Ed. “Patsy Cline: A Country Career Cut Short.” NPR Fresh Air, August 30, 2010, https://www.npr.org/2010/08/30/129526320/patsy-cline-a-country-career-cut-short

• Wikimedia Commons, Wikimedia Foundation, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Patsy_Cline_1960_publicity_portrait_-_cropped.jpg

Dozens of Johns Hopkins surgeons and medical students crowded into the two-level observation gallery overlooking the Halsted Clinic operating room on the morning of November 29, 1944. Below them lay fifteen-month-old Eileen Saxon on the operating table. She weighed just nine pounds. But perhaps more striking than her size was the deep blue color of her skin and lips, a sign that not enough blood was reaching her lungs to pick up the oxygen her body needed.

Eileen had tetralogy of Fallot, one of several congenital heart conditions doctors grouped under the label blue baby syndrome. Severity varied widely: roughly half of these children died before the age of three, while others lived years longer, some into their teens, though few survived much past adolescence. Eileen’s case was among the most severe, and doctors believed she would not survive much longer without intervention.

The operating team planned to redirect an artery so that more blood would reach Eileen’s lungs — an operation no one had ever successfully performed on a child in her condition. Denton Cooley, then a 24-year-old surgical intern in the room that day, later recalled the mood: “The real worry at the time was could a little blue child like this withstand surgery? And withstand anesthesia?”

Leading the team was Alfred Blalock, the hospital’s chief of surgery. He would perform the operation. Helen Taussig, the pediatric cardiologist whose observations of children like Eileen had led her to propose the idea, stood at the head of the table. Yet the person with the most experience performing this exact procedure was not a surgeon, or even a physician.

Standing on a step stool just behind Blalock was Vivien Thomas, a laboratory technician. Thomas had spent nearly two years developing and repeatedly testing the operation in laboratory dogs. He had helped devise many of the specialized instruments the surgery required. And for the next four and a half hours, he would guide Blalock through the procedure.

Thomas had reached that operating room without ever attending medical school, after watching his own plans to become a doctor collapse.

Born in Lake Providence, Louisiana, in 1910 and raised in Nashville, Tennessee, he began working alongside his father’s construction crews at thirteen. He would later write about the time,

“My father took advantage of the propensity of boys to hammer on things and brought us up in his own trade of carpentry. Beside contracting the building of entire houses, he also took on repairs, additions to, and the remodeling of existing structures. He never kept us out of school for a day of work, but we were required to report after school hours to whatever job he had in progress. Our school hours were from 8am to 2pm, so we had from 3pm to 5:30pm to work. We also worked from 7am until noon on Saturdays. During the summer, daily work hours were from 7am to 5:30pm. I began reporting for work when I was thirteen.”

It was also in these years that Thomas first absorbed a lesson his parents impressed on all their children: “always give your best in whatever you do.”

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Eighteen-year-old Grace Fryer began working at Radium Luminous Material Corporation in Orange, New Jersey, in 1917, joining a group of young women who painted luminous numbers onto watch dials so people could read the time in the dark. The work was semi-skilled precision labor and was considered desirable because it paid better than other factory work.

But one of the job’s requirements, at least by the company’s standards, was for the women to touch the tip of the brush to their lips, as the brushes would lose their point after a few strokes. Then they would dip those brushes in paint and apply it to the dial. The women did this hundreds of times a shift. As Grace summed it up later, “Our instructors told us to point them with our lips. I think I pointed mine with my lips about six times to every watch dial. It didn’t taste funny. It didn’t have any taste, and I didn’t know it was harmful.”

The women had been assured the paint was harmless. In some ways it was even fun. Some of the women used the leftover paint on their nails. But Grace did later remember blowing her nose after a shift and finding that her handkerchief glowed faintly in the dark.

But then, by the spring of 1922, a fellow worker named Amelia “Mollie” Maggia began going to her dentist, Joseph Knef, because she couldn’t make her jaw stop aching. What Joseph found frightened him, and he suspected phosphorus poisoning, sometimes referred to as “phossy jaw,” a disease he knew from match factory workers. Joseph asked the company for the paint formula so he could test his theory. “This was refused,” he said afterward.

Through the following months, Joseph kept removing pieces of Mollie’s jawbone as the damage spread, with nothing to go on and no cooperation from the company. In September, Mollie died when she hemorrhaged after the disease reached her jugular vein. Because physicians had also considered syphilis as the culprit behind her ailment, that is what went on her death certificate.

Radium had captured the public imagination since Marie and Pierre Curie announced its discovery in 1898. Marie later remembered the faintly luminous silhouettes of the concentrated radium compounds in their laboratory: “These gleamings, which seemed suspended in the darkness, stirred us with ever-new emotion and enchantment.” That light came from radium’s radiation exciting surrounding material, not from the element glowing on its own. To onlookers, it looked like magic.

Once doctors found that radium could shrink tumors, its reputation grew broader than medicine, like a general miracle substance sold in pharmacies for all kinds of ailments, marketed as a cure for aging, mixed into toothpaste and cosmetics, and even bottled as drinking water.

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Fourteen thousand fans spent the evening of December 15, 1908, at Madison Square Garden in New York City, watching two men race a marathon on an indoor track. Many who couldn't get a ticket waited outside, eagerly anticipating the results. It was a reflection of the time when audiences craved one-on-one endurance competitions.

Thomas (Tom) Longboat came into that race still relatively new to competitive distance running. He had been running for much of his life. As his mother said about Tom, "He run every morning. He run every night." But his competitive running career had only started a few years prior, in 1905. Yet, while the years of competition were few, the victories had become numerous and impressive. Many had already billed him as the world's fastest distance runner. He had the records to prove it.

This night would go as many had before. Tom won. He finished the race in 2 hours, 45 minutes and 5.2 seconds. For his victory, Tom received $3,750.

Tom would run two more indoor marathons in the next six weeks, winning both while taking time between the race days to get married.

Born on July 4, 1886, near Brantford, Ontario, Canada, Tom's birth name was Cogwagee. His family was part of the Onondaga people, a Native American tribe who lived in what is now the United States for centuries but moved to Canada after the American Revolution, as they had sided with the British during the war.

Growing up in the tribe, Tom played lacrosse, which was popular amongst the community. And it was lacrosse that would lead Tom to competitive running. In 1905, one of Tom's teammates challenged Tom to a race. As would become his norm, Tom easily won. He began entering racing competitions after this victory.

Tom developed "a long slow stride that was deceiving in its speed and seemed to carry him over the ground with the least possible exertion." It would take him to many victories, including the 1907 Boston Marathon. About his race, it was written,

"Longboat's defeat of his field of upwards of 100 starters, creditable as it was, was as nothing compared to the phenomenal, though official time of which he covered the hilly course. His time was 2 hours, 24 minutes and 20 4/5 seconds or more than five minutes better than the record made by J.O. Caffrey, another Canadian runner, six years ago.

Never before has any runner either amateur or professional, in this country or abroad, on the road or on the under path ever approached the figures set up by Longboat yesterday afternoon.

His work demonstrated beyond all question that he is the greatest distance runner that the world has ever seen."

Tom was celebrated for his victory back in Toronto. The mayor greeted Tom upon his return with an education scholarship fund and a gold medal from the city. "Mr. Mayor, I thank you kindly for the splendid reception, for the medal and the city grant and I shall try to behave so as to prove myself worthy of the City's kindness,” Tom replied.

The following year, Tom was running in the Olympics. He didn't win, with some believing that Tom was drugged before the race. But in the year after, Tom became a World Champion.

Tom's running career had many successes but also came with many challenges. He experienced racism in the press and dealt with issues surrounding amateur status. Yet, he did what he set out to do. He wanted to show the world the talents of an Onondaga runner. And in doing so, he inspired many Native Americans to take up running.

A few years after the Olympics came World War I. Tom joined to serve his country, working as a dispatch runner in Belgium and France. Twice during his service he was wounded, and at least twice press reports wrongly declared him killed in action — reports so persistent that his wife, Lauretta Maracle, believing herself widowed, remarried in 1918 before Tom returned home.

Tom did survive the war and returned to Canada in 1919. For decades after, Tom worked and lived a quiet life relative to his previous fame. He passed away in 1949.

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Sources:

• Batten, Jack. The Man Who Ran Faster Than Everyone: The Story of Tom Longboat. United States, Tundra, 2009.

• Cronin, Fergus, "The Rise and Fall of Tom Longboat", MacLeans Magazine. Vol. 69 (February 4, 1956) p.20.

• Littlechild, Wilton. Tom Longboat : Canada's outstanding Indian athlete. University of Alberta Libraries, 1975.

• Longboat Was Drugged". Lindsay Watchman Warder. Lindsay, Ontario. September 17, 1908. p. 4. Archived from the original on January 24, 2023.

• "T Longboat, the Canadian runner Standing (HS85-10-18314)." Wikimedia Commons (British Library), Wikimedia Foundation, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:T_Longboat,_the_Canadian_runner_Standing_(HS85-10-18314).jpg

• The Brantford Courier, Brantford: April 20, 1907

• "Tom Longboat." Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Longboat

Paine arrived in France in mid-September 1792, landing in a country now in the fourth year of a revolution whose pace was quickening. Just five weeks earlier, armed insurgents had stormed the royal palace, forcing the government to suspend King Louis XVI’s authority and take him and his family into custody.

Paine had no direct role in any part of this, or anything else to do with the uprising. And yet he came ashore already a celebrity in this new France as a hero of the Revolution because of his book, Rights of Man, which had circulated widely in France, but to an almost opposite outcome from its reception at home. In England it would bring him a conviction for seditious libel, while in France it made him famous and a symbol worth claiming — the French Assembly voted to grant him honorary citizenship, placing him among a select group of seventeen foreigners that included Washington, Hamilton, and Madison

The honor for Paine, however, was more than symbolic. Four separate departments elected him to the new National Convention that would run the country before he’d even set foot on French soil. Of the seats on offer, he chose Pas-de-Calais, the region facing England across the narrow strait that gave it its name, the same area that held the port where Paine had landed only days before, and where he had been welcomed with public celebrations.

In the Convention, Paine took his seat in a legislature that debated in a language he barely spoke, leaving him to lean on friends and translators for much of his work. Even his most important addresses had to pass through someone else first, rendered into French and read aloud by another deputy on his behalf.

But the first great question Paine faced in the chamber needed no translation at all. On September 21, almost immediately after the Convention assembled, its deputies moved to abolish the monarchy outright. Louis had already been stripped of power and taken into custody, and the Convention itself had been elected to write a new constitution in the aftermath of his overthrow. The assembly rose together, by what one contemporary account called "a spontaneous movement," and abolished the monarchy by acclamation, without a recorded roll call.

Paine’s support had never been in doubt during that vote. But another vote came that winter once the Convention turned to the deposed king’s fate, and that one would bring Paine’s loyalty into question.

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Tye Leung was small in stature, standing just about 4'5." People called her "Tiny." But my, was she a force. While history remembers Tye as the first Chinese-American woman to vote, her story includes much more.

Tye was born in 1887 as the youngest of eight children in San Francisco's Chinatown. At the time, the area was a city within a city, with narrow streets winding between simple and worn wooden buildings that leaned close together and had signs in bold Chinese characters hanging over shop doors.

The community had formed a bit out of necessity, a refuge for Chinese immigrants who were welcomed for their labor but little else. A big swath had come during the Transcontinental Railroad construction. Many more immigrated after, looking for work opportunities as China endured economic hardship. However, this had slowed down throughout the 1880s as the newly passed Chinese Exclusion Act banned immigration from China for a decade. Anti-Chinese sentiment ran high, and opportunities for Chinese workers were severely limited.

For Tye and her family, like most families living in Chinatown, life came with many challenges. Some of her earliest memories were of scavenging leftover food from gambling houses. At nine, she began working as a domestic servant, a common experience for Chinese girls her age. But when Tye's parents attempted to marry her off to an older Chinese man in Montana, the young girl, just in her early teens, rebelled and ran away to the local Presbyterian Mission House. "I refused," she would later say about that marriage.

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A fire broke out on the eighth floor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company factory in Manhattan on March 25, 1911, and spread rapidly through the two floors above it. Most workers on the eighth floor escaped down the stairs or through the elevators as the two elevator operators made run after run to the burning floors. Nearly everyone on the tenth floor also escaped, many of them by reaching the roof and crossing ladders extended from a law school next door.

When the fire broke out, a bookkeeper on the eighth floor tried to phone a warning upstairs. It reached the tenth floor, and that’s why the workers there began evacuating. But the ninth floor’s line went unanswered. By survivors’ accounts, the fire seemed to arrive there with almost no notice at all. The workers headed to a stairway, but found the door leading to it locked, a common practice meant to prevent unauthorized breaks and theft. Flames cut off another stairway, while the building’s single exterior fire escape collapsed from the weight of the workers trying to use it.

Firefighters did arrive within minutes and entered the building, reaching the ninth floor quickly. But the fire had already done severe damage by the time they got there, and outside, their ladders extended only to the sixth floor, well short of the windows where workers had been calling for help. Dozens jumped or fell. As one journalist wrote, “I learned a new sound that day, a sound more horrible than description can picture—the thud of a speeding living body on a stone sidewalk.”

The fire killed 146 of the roughly 500 workers in the building that day, most of them young immigrant women, including two girls listed as only fourteen years old.

Garrett Morgan had spent years working in Cleveland’s garment factories before building businesses of his own. One of his most successful products came to be by accident out of a liquid he’d been testing to keep sewing needles from scorching fabric, which turned out, once he tried it first on a scrap of fur and then on himself, to straighten hair.

His wife had also come out of that same world of factory work; before they married, she had been a sewer in a Cleveland tailor shop, the same kind of job held by many of the young women who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire.

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On April 19, 1783, eight years to the day after the first battles of the war at Lexington and Concord, and the day the cessation of hostilities was publicly proclaimed to the Continental Army, Paine published the final essay of The American Crisis. Looking back over the more than seven years he had spent writing on behalf of independence, he said it was “the cause of America that made me an author,” and that whatever he had accomplished for her, he had “likewise added something to the reputation of literature, by freely and disinterestedly employing it in the great cause of mankind.”

Over the next two years, Paine became more financially secure than he had ever been. New York granted him a 277-acre farm in New Rochelle, Pennsylvania awarded him five hundred pounds, and Congress voted him three thousand dollars in 1785. While peace had left Paine without a war to write about, it did not leave him without problems that absorbed him. With this newfound financial security, Paine devoted increasing attention to an entirely different kind of problem: bridge design.

At the time, the Schuylkill River could freeze heavily during the winter as it passed Philadelphia. When the ice broke up each spring, the moving floes and the floodwaters that came with them struck anything standing in the channel, and conventional bridges built on piers were, in Paine’s own words, poorly “adapted to many of the rivers in America on account of the ice in the winter.” Piers stood directly in the ice’s path each spring thaw, and even the sturdiest were vulnerable to the damage.

Paine sought a solution. It came in the form of a bridge with no piers to catch the ice on at all. Instead, a single iron arch would cover the whole span of the river, supported by foundations built into the two banks rather than piers in the water. The bridge itself would be formed from thirteen parallel iron ribs, each assembled from curved iron bars and connecting blocks, with the ribs braced together across the width of the span.

Paine traced the principle of his idea to structures he had observed in nature. As he wrote: “The idea and construction of this arch is taken from the figure of a spider’s circular web, of which it resembles a section, and from a conviction that when nature empowered this insect to make a web she also instructed her in the strongest mechanical method of constructing it. Another idea, taken from nature in the construction of this arch, is that of increasing the strength of matter by dividing and combining it, and thereby causing it to act over a larger space than it would occupy in a solid state, as is seen in the quills of birds, bones of animals, reeds, canes, etc.”

In April 1787, Paine sailed for France with a model of the bridge, which he presented to the French Academy of Sciences that July. The Academy delivered a favorable report the following month. Paine then traveled to England, where he secured a patent in August 1788. An ironworks in the north of England cast and tested an experimental rib roughly ninety feet long, loading it with twice its own weight in iron to prove its strength. In 1790, a larger demonstration bridge was erected on a public green in London, where visitors paid a shilling apiece to see it.

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Leading that small party was thirty-eight-year-old Hungarian aviator and desert explorer László Almásy, who had spent years crossing the Sahara in open-cab trucks, cataloging rock art throughout the region. Traveling with him on this expedition were Leo Frobenius, a German ethnologist who had spent three decades documenting rock art across Africa, his colleague Hans Rhotert, and a young artist named Elisabeth Pauli, who would spend days in the heat reproducing the paintings.

To Almásy, the discovery of the figures had not come as a complete surprise. Surveying roughly 150 kilometers to the south above a desert spring called Ain Dua six months earlier, he and his colleagues had found an extensive complex of prehistoric rock art, including hundreds of images of cattle and animals, among them antelope, giraffe, and elephant — none of them native to the desert surrounding him.

He considered two explanations: that the artists had come from other regions and painted animals they knew firsthand, or that those animals had once lived in a Sahara not yet turned to desert.

The swimmers at Wadi Sura settled the question for him. He concluded the paintings were relics of a wetter Sahara.

Almásy would turn out to be right, though the proof did not come from the paintings as the debate about whether the figures depict people swimming or something more symbolic remains unsettled among archaeologists to this day. Instead, the confirmation came later, from geologists and sediment researchers who found evidence of a wetter, more habitable Sahara independent of the rock art itself.

Decades later, the Cave of Swimmers and a highly fictionalized Almásy entered popular culture through Michael Ondaatje’s 1992 novel The English Patient and its 1996 film adaptation. The novel drew loosely from Almásy’s life, and both versions gave the cave a central role. The film did not use the original shelter at Wadi Sura. Its cave scenes were staged at a site in Tunisia, with paintings created for the production.

Today, the tracks left in the sand by Almásy’s expedition and those that came earlier still lie undisturbed across the desert surface. And the figures of the people who appear to be swimming in a Sahara before it became a desert continue to live on the walls.

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Sources:

• Batonai, Alexandra. "'Abu Ramla': László Almásy's Short Biography." Journal of Central and Eastern European African Studies, vol. 3, no. 2, 2023, pp. 30-50, https://jceeas.bdi.uni-obuda.hu/index.php/jceeas/article/view/154/305

• “Cave of Swimmers, Egypt.” British Museum, africanrockart.britishmuseum.org/country/egypt/cave-of-swimmers/.

• Kubassek, János, et al. “The World-Famous Desert Researcher, Geographic Explorer László Almásy, Who Explored the Last White Spots in the Sahara. ‘The English Patient.’” Dynamiques environnementales, vol. 39-40, 2017, journals.openedition.org/dynenviron/422.

• Riemer, Heiko. “Dating the Rock Art of Wadi Sura.” Wadi Sura — The Cave of Beasts: A Rock Art Site in the Gilf Kebir (SW-Egypt), edited by Rudolph Kuper, Heinrich-Barth-Institut, 2013, hbi.uni-koeln.de/files/media/PDF/Buecher/Wadi_Sura/AP26_38-41_riemer_dating.pdf.

• “The Cave of Swimmers, Egypt — The Rock Art of Gilf Kebir.” Bradshaw Foundation, bradshawfoundation.com/africa/gilf_kebir_cave_of_swimmers/index.php.

Intro

The story of Henry Ossawa Tanner begins in the U.S. just before the start of the Civil War and ends shortly before the beginning of World War II. Throughout these years, life came with the promise of Reconstruction and the perils of its demise, the segregation that followed, and then numerous global tragedies, including a world war and the Great Depression.

Yet, amid these challenges, Henry became a world-renowned painter, celebrated by some as “the greatest artist that America has produced.” This praise carried a bittersweet irony as Henry spent much of his adult life living in France, seeking refuge from America’s racial prejudice and the limitations of being a “negro painter.”

Part I

Henry was born in 1859 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, at a time when America was undergoing dramatic physical, social, and political transformations. The Industrial Revolution was reshaping the country’s landscape, and Pittsburgh stood at the forefront of this change. With a strategic location at the confluence of the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio Rivers and abundant coal and iron deposits, the city was becoming a hub for manufacturing and trade. Factories and mills arose as a result, earning Pittsburgh the nickname “Smoky City,” as thick plumes of soot darkened the skyline.

It was also during this time that America rapidly expanded westward under the banner of Manifest Destiny, asserting its belief in a country “from sea to shining sea.” Regions became territories, and territories were becoming states.

But, economic growth and national expansion couldn’t contain the underlying turmoil taking place in the country. America had deeply fractured in the 1850s after a decade of federal policies intended to sustain slavery only heightened tensions.

Questions about slavery’s existence were not new. Since the nation’s founding, it had been a deeply divisive issue, with Northern states gradually moving toward abolition in the decades after the Revolution. While this created a general division between free and slave states, the issue remained unresolved, with repeated conflicts over its expansion into new territories and states. But then came the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required Northerners to assist in the capture of escaped slaves, bringing the horrors of slavery into their communities, transforming a relative apathy into a strong desire to end the institution and helping galvanize abolitionist movements.

Henry was born into this fraught environment as the first child of Sarah and Benjamin Tanner. The topics of slavery and racism were prominent in the family’s home, where the issues were deeply personal. Henry’s mother had been born into enslavement and lived so until escaping via the Underground Railroad. Henry’s father came from a long Pennsylvania lineage and had always been free. He was a proud American known for being vocal and uncompromising about both issues. In one of his first prominent examples, Benjamin sued a U.S. Deputy Marshall for assault and battery after the Marshall threw Benjamin out of an event in 1859. While trial records no longer exist after being burned in a fire, the action itself spoke volumes about Benjamin’s character — he would not tolerate injustice even if doing so came at great risk.

Such moral stances and determination, coupled with a strict ethos of working hard, being disciplined, and caring about details, would help Benjamin become a towering figure in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, renowned for his sermons and prolific writings that combined theological depth with calls for social justice, including a critically successful book in 1867 called An Apology for African Methodism. He was just at the beginning of his rise when Henry was born, but the habits and importance of religion would soon be passed down to his son.

The Tanner family did not stay in Pittsburgh for long. Following Benjamin’s growing career in the church, they moved first to Washington, D.C., and then to Philadelphia, where Henry spent most of his childhood.

In Philadelphia, their home became known as “the center of the black intellectual community in Philadelphia.” The home was also an extension of Benjamin’s interests and diligent focus, as observed by Henry’s niece,

“Food was never considered a matter on which one should spend precious hours of his life. I can so well remember that we children were not even allowed to discuss what we enjoyed eating. The attitude of our grandparents was that food was to be eaten only to keep the body well, so that one could work, not give pleasure. My maternal grandfather (Benjamin T. Tanner), a prolific writer, would eat only fruit, cereal, tea and/or milk in the morning. Frequently, we children would have to wait until almost 2:00 p.m. for the noon day meal, because Grandpa was writing in his study and would not stop, saying that if he stopped to eat, his mind would become dull because the blood previously supplying his mind would be used to help the stomach take care of the food.”

It was also here in Philadelphia that, during a walk through Fairmont Park, Henry experienced the moment that would change his life. He stumbled upon an artist painting the surrounding landscape on canvas. The sight mesmerized the young boy. That evening, Henry talked about the experience with his father, later writing about the outcome,

“A long conversation that night produced fifteen cents and this, early the next morning, secured from a common paint shop some dry colors and a couple of scraggy brushes. Then I was out immediately for a sketch. I went straight to the spot where I had seen the artist the day before. Coming home that night, I examined the sketch from all points of view, upside down and down side up decidedly admiring and well content with my first effort.”

Henry’s art life had begun.

Part II

Henry’s pursuit of art came with mixed emotions. Being black made everything more challenging and burdensome for the sensitive young man. His first difficulty came in learning the craft as one studio after another rejected him when he sought their teaching. “I plodded along as best I could without instruction,” he wrote later.

Despite these setbacks, Henry did have his father’s ethos of hard work, discipline, and a positive attitude. Though still just in his early teens, he walked the streets of Philadelphia, observing art in store windows. He later recalled:

“After school, I would often go down on Chestnut Street, to see the pictures in Earle’s Galleries, or in the window of Bailey’s jewelry store. How well I remember ‘A Foggy Morning,’ by Cowell—in whose studio I afterward worked; or ‘A Morning at Long Beach,’ by Senat; how much better the numerous ‘Storm at Sea,’ by Hamilton, and still more numerous ‘Breezy Day off Dieppe,’ by Briscoe; how, after drinking my full of these art wonders, I would hurry home and paint what I had seen, and what fun it was!”

At home, Henry eagerly read books on art from his father’s library, supplementing his observed education with whatever knowledge he could gather.

It did help that Henry had his family’s support, even though they didn’t always believe art was a wise career choice. His father consistently helped financially and provided connections that eased some of the challenges Henry faced, giving him access to opportunities that most black or even many white Americans could not attain. This support eventually led him to the prestigious Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Though there, dealing with racism continued as Henry was the only black student. He wrote:

“I was extremely timid, and to be made to feel that I was not wanted, although in a place where I had every right to be, even months afterward caused me sometimes weeks of pain. Every time any one of these disagreeable incidents came into my mind, my heart sank, and I was anew tortured by the thought of what I had endured, almost as much as by the incident itself.”

While many of these “disagreeable incidents” took the form of verbal abuse, there were also times when Henry was brutally beaten. The sorrow from these experiences weighed heavily, and he frequently fell ill during these years.

Despite these hardships, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts became pivotal in Henry’s artistic development. His talent began to evolve into something extraordinary under the mentorship of Thomas Eakins, a teacher and arguably one of the most famous painters in Philadelphia. One lesson from Thomas stood out in particular and would stay with Henry for the rest of his life:

“About this time, Mr. Thomas Eakins, under whom I was studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, gave me a criticism which aided me then, and ever since; it may apply to all walks of life, I will ‘pass it along.’ I had made a start on a study, which was not altogether bad, but very probably the best thing I had ever done. He encouraged but, instead of working to make it better, I became afraid I should destroy what I had done, and really did nothing the rest of the week. Well, he was disgusted. ‘What have you been doing? Get it, get it better, or get it worse. No middle ground of compromise.’”

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“Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.”
— Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776

In October 1774, Paine sailed for Philadelphia aboard a ship called the London Packet. It was not the vessel he’d originally booked. He’d changed his passage after finding the first “not having proper Conveniences,” an exchange he later admitted was “much for the Worse.” During the nine-week crossing, what Paine called a “putrid fever” broke out among the roughly one hundred and twenty passengers traveling below decks, indentured servants who’d contracted away years of future labor in exchange for the cost of their crossing. The likely culprit was epidemic typhus. Five died and were buried at sea, and Paine wrote that no more than five others escaped the illness entirely.

Paine himself was a paying passenger, with his fare likely funded by the settlement from his separation from Elizabeth. But the ship couldn’t keep the sick contained. He caught the ailment in its full force, writing that he “suffered dreadfully with the fever. I had very little hopes that the Capt. or myself would live to see America.”

But live he would, though he arrived in America too weak to stand. When a Philadelphia physician named Dr. John Kearsley attended the ship on arrival and learned that Paine had with him a letter from Benjamin Franklin, he arranged lodging and sent men to carry Paine off the ship and bring him there.

Six weeks passed before Paine was well enough to deliver the letter to Franklin’s son-in-law, Richard Bache. Opportunities followed almost immediately: offers to tutor the children of Philadelphia gentlemen, and through that same circle, an introduction to Robert Aitken, a Scottish-born printer preparing an ambitious new magazine of American writing. Aitken brought him on first as a contributor, then as editor beginning with the magazine’s second issue.

By March 1775, Paine wrote to Franklin to report on everything the letter had set in motion: “Your countenancing me has obtained for me many friends and much reputation,” he began, before turning to Aitken’s magazine specifically — “He had not above six hundred subscribers when I first assisted him. We now have upwards of fifteen hundred and daily increasing.”

Yet it would be his own writing that would make Paine famous in the Colonies. One anonymously published essay from this period, a ferocious attack on slavery, has long been attributed to Paine and believed by some to be his first piece of writing as an American. It challenged the colonists on their own hypocrisy directly: “With what consistency, or decency [do] they complain so loudly of attempts to enslave them, while they hold so many hundred thousands in slavery?”

Whether Paine actually wrote the essay remains disputed, and recent scholarship has cast doubt on the attribution. But Paine’s opposition to slavery does not depend on the disputed attribution. Fifteen years later, writing from Paris to an old friend, Paine confessed he no longer expected to live to see the slave trade actually abolished, and urged him to keep up the fight in America.

By the autumn of 1775, Congress had still not fully embraced independence, even as the king rejected the colonies’ Olive Branch Petition that August and declared them in open rebellion. Many delegates hoped reconciliation might somehow be possible. George Washington had written the previous fall about independence: “I am well satisfyed, as I can be of my existence, that no such thing is desired by any thinking man in all North America; on the contrary, that it is the ardent wish of the warmest advocates for liberty, that peace & tranquility, upon Constitutional grounds, may be restored, & the horrors of civil discord prevented.”

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It was the mid-1850s, and Britain was at war in Crimea. The battles led to many soldiers being sent to Scutari Hospital, where they lay wounded, often for days in their blood-stained uniforms, surrounded by candles placed in empty wine or beer bottles that served as light. Their suffering and struggle to heal was especially challenging as the hospital was unsanitary and lacked proper medical supplies, running water, and clean clothes. Disease was rampant, with more soldiers dying from infections like typhus, typhoid, cholera, and dysentery than battle wounds.

It was into this environment that Florence Nightingale and her team of 38 volunteer nurses were dispatched with the responsibility of nursing the wounded British soldiers back to good health.

Upon arriving, Florence recognized the many problems these soldiers were experiencing in their care. She wasted no time and, with unwavering determination, instigated drastic reforms. She overhauled the hospital’s sanitation system and introduced clean water and adequate medical supplies. A newly installed kitchen ensured soldiers received nutritious meals, and newly erected laundry facilities provided clean clothing and bedding. The hospital transformed under her meticulous care.

Yet even amid all of this administrative work, Florence made time for individual soldiers. After long, arduous days, Florence made rounds to check up on the soldiers at night. She wanted to visit as many as possible, but particularly the most sick, sitting at their bedsides to ease their suffering and she wrote letters home to loved ones on their behalf.

This routine led to an affectionate nickname for Florence from the soldiers. They called her “Lady with the Lamp.”

About Florence in the hospital, it was written in a newspaper,

“She is a ‘ministering angel’ without any exaggeration in these hospitals, and as her slender form glides quietly along each corridor, every poor fellow’s face softens with gratitude at the sight of her. When all the medical officers have retired for the night and silence and darkness have settled down upon those miles of prostrate sick, she may be observed alone, with a little lamp in her hand, making her solitary rounds.”

Florence continued her dedication to the soldiers even when she herself fell ill from what is believed to be a bacterial infection known as “Crimean Fever,” possibly brucellosis. People told her she needed to go back to England to recover. She refused, and stayed to continue her work.

Her health never fully recovered as a result.

“I am of certain convinced that the greatest heroes are those who do their duty in the daily grind of domestic affairs whilst the world whirls as a maddening dreidel.” – Florence Nightingale

Florence was born into a wealthy, upper-class British family on May 12, 1820, in the city of Florence, Tuscany, which was then a part of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. Her parents, William Edward Nightingale and Frances Nightingale, were on an extended honeymoon tour and decided to name their daughter after the city of her birth. Soon after, the Nightingale family returned to England in 1821, and Florence grew up in Embley, Hampshire, and Lea Hurst, Derbyshire, the family’s two homes.

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One afternoon in 1856, a woman walked into Allan Pinkerton’s Chicago office and asked whether he would employ her as a detective. Pinkerton later remembered her as “slender, graceful in her movements, and perfectly self-possessed in her manner…her features, although not what would be called handsome, were of a decidedly intellectual cast. Her eyes were very attractive, being dark blue, and filled with fire. She had a broad, honest face, which would cause one in distress instinctively to select her as a confidante.”

Still, employing a woman as a detective was not the custom, Pinkerton told her. It was “unheard of,” in fact.

She answered that she could “go and worm out secrets in many places to which it was impossible for male detectives to gain access,” winning her way into the confidence of the wives and sisters of men his agents were chasing, hearing what people said carelessly around a woman.

Pinkerton asked her to come back the next day. When she did, he had made up his mind. He hired her. And with that decision, Kate Warne became the first known woman employed as a professional detective in the United States.

Five years later, in 1861, Warne would help uncover, and help Abraham Lincoln escape, a plot to kill him before he could be sworn in as president.

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Thomas Paine was born on January 29, 1737, in Thetford, England, a market town about eighty miles northeast of London. Thetford had a rich history. It had once been one of the principal centers of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of East Anglia, which fell to the Viking Great Army in the ninth century. For a brief period after, the town also served as the seat of the region’s bishop, an honor of real significance in medieval England, since bishops ranked among the largest landholders and sat among the king’s counselors.

But both distinctions were centuries gone by the 1700s. What Thetford had become instead was a pocket borough. Its parliamentary seats had been allotted centuries earlier and were never redrawn as the town shrank. Just thirty-one qualified electors still returned two of the 558 members of the House of Commons. And for most of the century those thirty-one answered to one family who controlled the borough largely unopposed.

Here, Paine’s family had some social standing on his mother’s side. Frances Cocke was the daughter of Thomas Cocke, an attorney and the town’s clerk. But the household depended largely on the more modest income of Paine’s father, Joseph, a Quaker who worked as both a corset maker and a small tenant farmer. Even so, his parents managed to send him to the local grammar school — a real advantage for the son of a provincial tradesman, even if it fell short of the classical education that might have carried him toward a learned profession. Paine would later describe what he received there as “a tolerable stock of useful learning”: reading, writing, and arithmetic.

At thirteen, the schooling ended. Joseph needed help in the shop, and his son became his apprentice. But the boy wanted to venture out into the sea, not spend time in his father’s trade. Years later, describing his own state of mind at the time, Paine wrote that he had been “raw and adventurous, and heated with the false heroism of a master,” referring here to a schoolmaster who had served aboard a man-of-war, and Paine credited his example with stirring his own desire for a life on the water. And so, in the autumn of 1756, the nineteen-year-old Paine set off for London, where he found a privateer called the Terrible fitting out under a captain named William Death.

His father learned of the plan, however, and persuaded Paine to abandon the pursuit. The intervention proved a genuine rescue. The Terrible sailed a few weeks later, captured a French merchantman, and was then attacked by a larger French privateer. Captain Death was killed, and one contemporary report claimed that only twenty-six of the men who remained aboard were found alive after the battle.

Yet the fate of the Terrible did not end Paine’s desire for the sea. He tried again early the following year, more quietly this time, and shipped out on another privateer.

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Thomas Paine arrived in Philadelphia from England at the age of thirty-seven in late November of 1774, having nearly died from typhus on the voyage and needing to be carried ashore, too weak to stand. He was an immigrant now, settling in the American colonies for the first time in his life, after years marked by tragedy and failure — having been widowed once and separated once, dismissed twice from government service, and having watched two businesses of his own fail. Now he had little to his name beyond a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin, who described him as “an ingenious, worthy young man” and recommended that he begin a new life in the colonies.

Franklin’s judgment would prove remarkably sound. Little more than a year later, Paine would publish a small pamphlet that helped turn a colonial rebellion, one that many Americans still hoped and believed would end in reconciliation with Britain, into a movement for independence.

That pamphlet, titled Common Sense, was published on January 10, 1776. In it, Paine made the case for independence in direct, vigorous language that carried political argument beyond the educated elite. He wrote for tradesmen, farmers, merchants, and laborers, and gave them an inspiration for their own inclusion in the government process, or what we’d today call democracy. The work spread quickly as a result, selling an estimated 120,000 copies in its first three months, with its reach far larger still, as copies circulated from hand to hand and were frequently read aloud. Paine declined to profit from the sales and allowed it to be reprinted freely, asking that the money due to him be used instead for the war effort.

In addition, writing under the pen name “Republicus,” Paine publicly called for the colonies to adopt a new name — the United States of America. Historians still debate whether he was truly first to use it; a private letter from one of George Washington’s aides had used the same phrase months earlier.

But Paine’s impact didn’t stop there. In December 1776, the Continental Army had been driven out of New York, reduced to a few thousand ragged men, and was staring at desertion issues when enlistments expired at year’s end. Many believed the Revolution was already lost.

Paine had marched with that retreat himself as a volunteer, and it was during that march that he wrote the first of what would become a thirteen-part series of pamphlets called The American Crisis, opening with the famous line, “These are the times that try men’s souls.”

He published it on December 19. Six days later, on Christmas night, Washington’s army crossed the ice-choked Delaware and won a decisive fight at Trenton the following morning, a victory that began a remarkable reversal in a campaign that had seemed all but lost. By long-standing tradition, though no firsthand account actually confirms it, Washington had Paine’s essay read aloud to his troops before that crossing.

Paine became one of the most famous men in America. Then he went to France, where he once again moved toward the center of a revolution. Granted French citizenship and elected to the National Convention, he opposed the execution of Louis XVI and urged that the former king instead be exiled to America. The stance aligned him with a political faction that soon fell from power, and as fears grew of foreign influence in a France now at war with his native England, Paine found himself dangerously exposed. He was arrested in December 1793 and sent to Luxembourg Prison.

Paine later said that he came within a chalk mark on a cell door of being sent to the guillotine. He survived because his cellmates had left the door open to cool his fever, and when the guards came to take away the condemned, the mark was on the inside, so they passed the cell by.

Shortly before his arrest, Paine completed the first part of The Age of Reason, an attack on organized religion so unsparing that it cost him much of the popularity he had once enjoyed in America. It was a fall from favor his later public break with George Washington only deepened. When he returned to the United States, a local election official refused to let him vote, claiming his years in the French government had cost him his American citizenship. Paine protested, but the decision stood.

Despite his fame and having stood near the center of two major revolutions, when he died on June 8, 1809, in a rented room in Greenwich Village, only twelve people were said to have come to his funeral.

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Sources:

• Bell, Richard. "BTSA: Professor Richard Bell on 'Common Sense' Thomas Paine (1776)." C-SPAN, www.youtube.com/watch?v=42U7lVigby8.

• "Benjamin Franklin to Richard Bache, 30 September 1774." Founders Online, National Archives, founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-21-02-0170

• Berton, Gary, and Scott Cleary. “Thomas Paine and the 250th Anniversary of Common Sense.” YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bh8BzCLCL4.

• Claeys, Gregory. "Thomas Paine." The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford U, plato.stanford.edu/entries/paine/.

• Dabos, Laurent. Thomas Paine. c. 1792, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, npg.si.edu/object/npg_NPG.2008.5. / Wikimedia Commons, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Portrait_of_Thomas_Paine.jpg.

• “Common Sense.” Encyclopædia Britannica, www.britannica.com/topic/Common-Sense-by-Paine.

• Ingersoll, Robert G. “Thomas Paine.” The North American Review, vol. 155, no. 429, 1892, pp. 181–95. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25102425.

• “Professor Richard Bell to Speak at Smithsonian on Thursday, Nov. 16th.” Department of History, University of Maryland, 15 Nov. 2017, history.umd.edu/news/professor-richard-bell-speak-smithsonian-thursday-nov-16th.

• “The Coined Phrase ‘United States of America.’” New-York Historical Society, www.nyhistory.org/blogs/coined-phrase-united-states-america-may-never-guess.

• “Thomas Paine’s Common Sense.” American Battlefield Trust, www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/common-sense.

• “Thomas Paine and the Clarion Call for American Independence.” Featuring Harlow Giles Unger. YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScWbEBqM4BA.

Jesse Owens had a soft smile and a warm demeanor. He was humble and yet a star, an enormous talent, the best in his track and field events. But what he seemed to care most for was friendship. "Friendships born on the field of athletic strife are the real gold of competition. Awards become corroded, friends gather no dust," he would say. Jesse was special, and people adored him. He was beloved.

Jesse was born as James Cleveland Owens on September 12, 1913, in Oakville, Alabama, a small town in the southern United States. His parents were sharecroppers, a system of farming in which families worked on land owned by someone else and received a share of the crops as payment. Life for the Owens family was fraught with hardship; they were poor and lived in a region with much racial segregation.

In search of better opportunities, in 1922, the Owens family joined the Great Migration, a mass movement of African Americans from the South to the Northeast, Midwest, and West. They settled in Cleveland, Ohio, where young Jesse encountered a world different from Alabama.

Jesse's years in Cleveland were formative. Much in his life changed, starting with his name. J.C. is what family and friends had always called him. But at his new school, a teacher misunderstood how Jesse pronounced his name in a strong southern drawl. Jesse was shy and didn't correct the teacher. And that is how J.C. became Jesse.

It was also in Cleveland that Jesse's track and field career began. Though it almost ended before starting. Jesse had numerous health issues growing up. He was frail and often sick and suffered from pneumonia multiple times. His ailments led to his mother being more protective of her son. When Jesse first approached her about running while in elementary school, she said no. But Jesse insisted and asked his father, who was a runner, to let him become one as well. After sleeping on it and talking with Jesse's father, Jesse's mother agreed to let her son run. His running career had begun.

Early Running Career

Jesse was a fast runner from his earliest running years. But in late middle school, Jesse struggled to perform well, losing to runners he believed that he was faster than. The innate talent was there, but he wasn't winning. Though still shy, Jesse asked his coach for help. 

Soon, Jesse's coach took him to an event, where he told the young boy, "We're going to watch the best runners in the world. I want you to watch these horses run. No man in the world can come close to them." Jesse was surprised that the best runners his coach talked about were horses. But he went along. 

"Do you know why the best horses make it look easy? Because the determination is all on the inside," his coach said.

This experience changed how Jesse perceived competition. It changed his attitude. And he continued following his coach's wisdom. His coach, who was technique and character-oriented, told Jesse, "Don't worry about running fast. Just run right. The speed will come by itself."

Though still young, Jesse had a deep respect for his coach. He would say,

"I grew to admire and respect [Coach's] words and actions and everything else. I wanted to be like him because he was a wonderful person, well liked by everybody." 

From there, stardom came quickly as Jesse competed for East Technical High School in Cleveland, Ohio. He set national records and attracted the attention of college coaches. After high school, he enrolled at Ohio State University, where his track and field stardom continued, including a special day in 1935 when Jesse set three world records and tied another in a forty-five-minute span. 

Along with the records in 1935, that year also marked an important milestone in Jesse's life. He married Minnie Ruth Solomon. About his wife, Jesse would say,

"She was unusual because even though I knew her family was as poor as ours, nothing she said or did seemed touched by that. Or by prejudice. Or by anything the world said or did. It was as if she had something inside her that somehow made all that not count. I fell in love with her some the first time we ever talked, and a little bit more every time after that until I thought I couldn't love her more than I did. And when I felt that way, I asked her to marry me … and she said she would."

The couple would have three kids and be married for the rest of Jesse's life.

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War had ended, but the peace left heavy debts behind. Those obligations touched off a new conflict.

To pay what it owed, Massachusetts laid hefty taxes on its people, demanding payment in gold or silver, which farmers rarely had. Those who could not pay were brought before the county court, where creditors won judgments against their land and livestock and, at times, even had them jailed. Debtors petitioned the state legislature for relief through the summer of 1786. When none came, some resolved that if the government would not stop the courts, they would do so themselves.

So on the morning of August 29, 1786, men from the countryside of western Massachusetts made their way toward Northampton, where the Court of Common Pleas was to open its quarterly session that day. They came in groups, some marching to fifes and drums, as they had done during the war. By noon, about five hundred had assembled, armed with muskets, swords, or simply hickory clubs.

The judges were gathered that morning at a nearby tavern to robe and put on their wigs before walking to the courthouse to open court. When they set out, they found the approach blocked by the protestors who had assembled under Captain Luke Day of West Springfield, who was a Continental Army veteran. Day handed the judges a petition asking them to adjourn until the legislature answered the complaints the people had already sent. The judges withdrew to the tavern to weigh the request.

By afternoon, the crowd in the street had grown to fifteen hundred armed men. Whatever the judges made of the petition, the situation in the street settled the question. They came back out and postponed the cases on the docket.

Within weeks, similar crowds closed courts in other towns. Calling themselves Regulators, the protestors believed they were acting in the tradition of 1776 — ordinary people resisting a distant government that taxed them beyond what they could bear.

Among them was a farmer named Daniel Shays, who had marched after Lexington and fought at Bunker Hill, and who had left the army in 1780 without receiving all he was owed. Over the autumn, Shays became the most conspicuous of the leaders, with the uprising taking his name.

Massachusetts Governor James Bowdoin answered the Northampton court closing within days. In a proclamation issued September 2, he denounced the Regulators’ conduct as “contempt and open defiance of government.” But the state legislature did offer them some relief: certain proceedings were postponed, legal costs were reduced, and the state allowed more flexibility in meeting some obligations.

But the legislature also moved to break the resistance. It passed a Riot Act authorizing officials to order unlawful gatherings to disperse and, if they refused, to call out armed men to seize them. It also suspended the writ of habeas corpus, letting the governor, with the Council’s approval, detain people deemed dangerous to the Commonwealth without the ordinary right to challenge their imprisonment.

Word of the unrest had already traveled south in private letters, and nowhere did it land harder than at Mount Vernon, where George Washington had gone home three years earlier believing his public life finished. His old artillery chief, Henry Knox, wrote him that October with an account that lost nothing in the telling. Knox warned that the Regulators might come to twelve or fifteen thousand, and they meant “to annihilate all debts public and private” and to divide up property by law.

Knox’s figure was a guess, and almost certainly an inflated one, but Washington trusted his account of the disorders, and it shook him. What frightened him most was that Massachusetts might not be the end of it: “There are combustibles in every State,” he warned, “which a spark might set fire to.”

Despite the measures, and the alarm already spreading beyond the state, the uprising continued, and by January 1787 it had a new target. A force of some twelve hundred men under Shays turned toward the arsenal at Springfield, where thousands of muskets and other military stores belonging to the United States were kept. Although the arsenal stood in Massachusetts, the threat concerned Congress as well as the state, as federal property stood in danger.

Yet the national government had no dependable force ready to protect it. Congress had voted the previous October to raise additional troops, officially for service on the northwestern frontier, though the unrest in Massachusetts influenced the decision. But Congress had no revenue of its own with which to support the troops. As a result, the requisition brought in little — recruitment proceeded slowly, and no federal force was ready when Shays marched. The immediate defense of the United States arsenal therefore fell to the Massachusetts militia.

Governor Bowdoin ordered General William Shepard, a local militia commander and veteran of the Revolution, to defend Springfield with approximately twelve hundred men. He also placed General Benjamin Lincoln — one of Washington’s senior officers during the war — at the head of a separate force of some three thousand men marching west to suppress the uprising. Boston merchants advanced the funds for Lincoln’s troops, expecting the state to reimburse them.

Shepard’s men occupied the arsenal and positioned cannons toward the road along which the Regulators would approach. As the column advanced through the snow on the afternoon of January 25, Shepard repeatedly sent an aide and two other men to ask Shays, in his own words, “what he was after, or what he wanted.” Shays answered that he wanted the barracks and military stores.

Shepard ordered warning shots fired over the advancing men. When they continued forward, he directed the artillery into the column, finally with grapeshot. Three men were killed on the field and another died of his wounds; the rest broke and fled.

Writing to Governor Bowdoin the next morning, Shepard did not celebrate. “The unhappy time is come,” he began, “in which we have been obliged to shed blood.” Lincoln pursued the remaining force and surprised it at Petersham in early February. The Regulators scattered, and organized resistance collapsed.

The effort to fix the union had, however, begun before Shays marched. In March 1785, commissioners from Virginia and Maryland met at Washington’s home at Mount Vernon to settle questions of navigation, commerce, and jurisdiction on the waters the two states shared. The agreement they reached suggested something more significant: states could negotiate solutions to commercial problems that Congress had no power to settle uniformly.

That success widened into a plan for a general meeting of all the states on questions of trade, held at Annapolis in September 1786. Nine states appointed commissioners, but delegates from only five arrived; too few to do the work they had gathered for.

So the men who did come wrote a report instead, calling for the states to send delegates to Philadelphia the following May, “to take into consideration the situation of the United States” and devise what might render the federal government “adequate to the exigencies of the Union,” or in more modern terms, powerful enough to address the country’s pressing needs. The commissioners directed their chairman to sign the report on their behalf. That chairman was John Dickinson.

Ten years earlier, Dickinson had been the principal draftsman of the first plan of confederation formally commissioned by Congress for an American union. The man who had drafted Congress’s first official frame of union signed the invitation to build the next one.

Congress set strict limits to the work when approving the convention, authorizing the “sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation.” Many of the states, in commissioning their own delegates, used similar language. Whatever came out of Philadelphia was to be reported back to Congress and the legislatures, and would bind no one until every state agreed, as Article XIII required for any amendment.

That, however, is not what happened. And the break came quickly.

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Maryland’s delegates signed the Articles of Confederation on March 1, 1781. With their ratification, the document Congress had adopted more than three years earlier formally took effect. The United States now had a written constitution. Celebration followed immediately. At the signal that the Confederation was complete, thirteen cannons fired from the hill above Philadelphia, and in the evening came fireworks at the State House.

But no festivity could disguise the problem underneath — the United States was running out of money. Paper currency Congress had printed through the war had depreciated until it was nearly worthless, and would cease circulating altogether within months. The country had a treasury that could not pay for the Revolutionary War that was now in its sixth year.

Making the matter worse, Congress had few options for raising the funds. Under the Articles, the power to tax belonged to the states alone; Congress could only send them requisitions — a statement of what each state owed — and wait to see what the states sent. Borrowing was also no answer, since lenders had little confidence that the government could repay them.

So despite the achievement of a governing document at last in place, the more pressing question of whether the country would have the money to finish the war remained.

Even before Maryland signed the Articles, Congress had turned to the one man delegates believed might solve the financial issues. Robert Morris, a Philadelphia merchant born in Liverpool, England, in 1734, had come to Maryland at thirteen to join his father in the tobacco trade and risen into one of the wealthiest men in America. Morris had signed the Declaration of Independence, and through the war his firm’s ships, credit, and connections had been moving supplies for the army when Congress’s own arrangements failed.

In early 1781, Congress reorganized how the government ran, replacing its committees with single executives at the head of each department, including finance. On February 20 of that year, Congress unanimously elected Morris superintendent, concentrating more authority over the national treasury in his hands than any single American had previously held. At the announcement, the delegates rose to applaud. Morris, however, did not rise with them, or smile, or give any sign that he accepted. Instead, he sat where he was until the applause ran out and the presiding officer ended the session.

Despite his years of service in bringing the United States toward independence, Morris did not want this office. The post threatened both halves of the life he had built — the trading house that had made him wealthy, and the ease at home with his wife and children that he felt two decades of work had earned. “This appointment,” he wrote in his diary the next day, “was evidently contrary to my private interest and if accepted must deprive me of those enjoyments social and domestic which my time of life required... I was therefore absolutely determined not to engage in so arduous an undertaking.”

Friends and colleagues spent weeks persuading him otherwise. In March, Morris answered Congress with his conditions: he must be able to appoint and remove his own subordinates, and he would not entirely surrender his private commercial interests, though he promised to place the management of his own accounts in other hands.

Congress accepted the arrangement, a measure both of its confidence in Morris and of the desperation of the crisis. In May he accepted, closing with a promise that "The United States may command everything I have except my integrity."

Almost immediately, Morris faced a crisis. In August 1781, Washington saw a chance to trap the main British army in the South, under General Cornwallis, at Yorktown in Virginia. But this could only happen if he could march his troops hundreds of miles south within weeks, before a French fleet that had agreed to blockade the coast there was due to depart. Moving an army that far and that fast meant hiring ships and wagons from private owners, and those owners would not take the government’s paper money; they wanted gold or silver. Morris had neither.

Morris wrote to all thirteen states pleading for money, warning that the army stood, in his words, “on the Eve of the most Active Operations,” which might stall for want of supplies. But by this point Congress had made him the government’s last resort in nearly every money matter. Departments that could not pay their bills sent them to Morris, officers short of funds appealed to Morris, and contractors expected his signature to stand behind debts the treasury could not cover. Privately, he recorded this burden: “It seems as if every person connected in Public Service entertain an opinion that I am full of money.”

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The debate over Dickinson’s draft began on the twenty-second of July, 1776, in the Pennsylvania State House at Philadelphia, in the same ground-floor room where earlier that month the Declaration of Independence had been adopted, and independence declared. Now, amid war, the men had to decide what the country would be.

John Adams, looking back in 1818, described the extraordinary problem of union. The colonies had grown up under constitutions of government “so different,” with “so great a variety of religions,” their customs and manners bearing “so little resemblance,” and “their knowledge of each other so imperfect,” that uniting them in one system of action “was certainly a very difficult enterprise.” He captured the achievement in a single image — “Thirteen Clocks were made to Strike together; a perfection of Mechanism which no Artist had ever before effected.”

At root, the question was whether they were drafting something closer to a constitution joining the states into one political country, or something more akin to a treaty among thirteen sovereignties agreeing to fight as one body while remaining fundamentally separate. That larger question emerged most sharply in three disputes.

The first centered on representation. Should each state cast one vote, or should votes be apportioned by population, so that Virginia, with ten times the people of Delaware, would possess ten times the voice? Let the small states “give equal Money and Men, and then have an equal Vote,” Benjamin Franklin argued; to grant them equal voices while they bore unequal shares of the war “will never last long.”

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Marie Curie was born Maria Skłodowska on November 7, 1867, in Warsaw, Poland, which was then part of the Russian Empire. She was the youngest of five children, born into a family of educators and intellectuals. Her father, Władysław Skłodowski, was a teacher of mathematics and physics, while her mother, Bronisława, was a school principal and a teacher. The Skłodowski family upheld the values of learning and education, shaping young Maria's intellectual pursuits.

Maria, or Marie, as she would later become known, grew up in Warsaw during a period of heightened political tension. The city was controlled by the Russian Empire, which was determined to impose its culture, language, and policies on the Polish people. Due to this suppression of Polish cultural and academic institutions, many Poles were forced to find alternative ways to preserve their heritage. One such effort was the establishment of underground, clandestine classes. These courses, often referred to as "floating" classes, moved from place to place to avoid detection by Russian authorities. They were a means to secretly teach the Polish youth about their rich history, culture, and language - subjects largely ignored or suppressed in official school curricula.

In this environment, Maria began her education. She was sent to a boarding school and subsequently to a gymnasium for girls. At both institutions, Maria displayed a keen intellect, consistently ranking among the top students. Her abilities began to shine early on, particularly in the sciences and mathematics.

After graduating from the gymnasium with gold honors, Maria faced a period of struggle. Universities in Warsaw did not admit women. To continue their education, Maria and her sister Bronisława made a pact. Maria would work to support Bronisława's medical studies in Paris. Once Bronisława was established, she would support Maria in her educational pursuits. 

True to this agreement, Maria worked as a governess and private tutor for several years. By 1891, with the funds she'd saved and now with support from her sister, Maria moved to Paris to attend the University of Paris in Sorbonne. There, she adopted the French version of her name, becoming Marie.

College Years and Marriage

At the Sorbonne, Marie initially pursued physics, immersed in her studies and dedicating herself fully to her academic pursuits. Despite facing challenges like adapting to a new language and environment, Marie was an exceptional student. In 1893, just two years after starting her studies, she graduated first in her class in physics.

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