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Kids learn about the biography of Sally Ride, the first American woman astronaut in outer space. The Space Shuttle Challenger.

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Kids learn about the biography of Amelia Earhart, aviator and first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean.

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Kids learn about the biography of Harriet Tubman, leader in the Underground Railroad who led many of the enslaved to freedom.

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Harriet Tubman (born Araminta Ross; c. 1820 or 1821 - March 10, 1913) was an African-American anti-slavery worker, and humanitarian. She was also a Union spy and the first black woman to lead an American mission during the American Civil War. She was born into slavery but she escaped. During her life, made 13 missions to rescue approximately 70 slaves, including family and friends. She used the Underground Railroad.

When Tubman was a child in Dorchester County, Maryland, she was whipped and beaten by many different masters. When she was very young, an angry overseer threw a heavy metal weight at another slave. The weight accidentally hit Tubman's head. That caused seizures, headaches, visions, and vivid dreams. She had those issues all her life. Tubman believed the visions and vivid dreams came from God.

In 1849, Tubman escaped to Philadelphia. Slaves were free there. She later returned to Maryland to rescue her family. She eventually guided dozens of other slaves to freedom. Slave owners offered large rewards for the return of their slaves. Tubman was never caught because nobody knew she was freeing the slaves.

When the American Civil War began, Tubman worked for the Union Army. She worked first as a cook and nurse. Later she was an armed (carrying weapons) scout and spy. She was the first woman to lead an armed group in the war. She guided the Combahee River Raid, which freed more than 700 slaves in South Carolina. After the war, she moved to her family home in Auburn, New York. There she cared for her aging parents. She became active in the women's suffrage movement in New York until she became ill. Near the end of her life, she lived in a home for elderly African Americans. Years earlier, she had helped create that home.

Early life and education

Tubman's mother Rit (whose father might have been a white man) was a cook. Her father Ben was a woodsman who did the timber work on a plantation. Ben and Rit married around 1808. According to court records, they had nine children together. Linah was born in 1808, Mariah Ritty in 1811, Soph in 1813, Robert in 1816, Minty (Harriet) in 1821, Ben in 1823, Rachel in 1825, Henry in 1830, and Moses in 1832.

Tubman's mother was owned by Mary Pattison Brodess and later her son, Edward. Rit was assigned to "the big house" as a cook and had very little time to be with her family. Harriet took care of a younger brother and a baby. This was typical in large families. When she was five or six years old, Brodess hired her out as a nursemaid to a woman named "Miss Susan." Tubman was ordered to watch the baby. Whenever the baby woke up and cried, Tubman was whipped. She later talked about a day when she was whipped five times before breakfast. She had the scars for the rest of her life. She found ways to resist such as running away for five days, wearing layers of clothing as protection against beatings, and fighting back.

As a child, Tubman also worked at the home of a planter named James Cook. She had to check muskrat traps in nearby marshes. She did that work even after she got measles. She became so ill that Cook sent her back to Brodess. After Harriet's mother nursed her back to health, Brodess hired her out again. Tubman spoke later of the intense homesickness she experienced as a child. She compared herself to "the boy on the Swanee River" (referring to Stephen Foster's song "Old Folks at Home"). When she was older and stronger, she did field and forest work, driving oxen, plowing, and hauling logs.

Head injury

One day when she was an adolescent, Tubman was sent to a dry-goods store for supplies. There she met a slave owned by another family. That slave had left the fields without permission. His overseer was angry and demanded that Tubman help restrain the young man. Tubman refused. As the slave ran away, the overseer threw a two-pound weight at him. The weight hit Tubman instead. Tubman said the weight "broke my skull." She later explained her belief that her hair - which "had never been combed and ... stood out like a bushel basket" - might have saved her life. Bleeding and unconscious, Tubman was returned to her owner's house and laid on the seat of a loom. She had no medical care for two days. She was sent back into the fields, "with blood and sweat rolling down my face until I couldn't see." She began having seizures and seemed to fall unconscious. She later said she was aware of her surroundings while appearing to be asleep. These episodes were frightening to her family. They couldn't wake her when she fell asleep suddenly and without warning. This condition remained with Tubman for the rest of her life. She may have suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy because of the injury.

Family and marriage

Around 1844, Tubman married a free black man named John Tubman. Little is known about him or their time together. Their marriage was complicated because she was a slave. Since children from the marriage would have the status of the mother, any children born to Harriet and John would become slaves. By this time, half the black population on the Eastern Shore of Maryland was free. Marriages between free people and enslaved people were common. Most African-American families had both free and enslaved members. It is possible that the couple might have planned to buy Tubman's freedom.

Escape from slavery

In 1849, Harriet became ill again. This reduced her value when Edward Brodess tried to sell her. Edward could not sell her and died shortly thereafter. Edward's wife, Eliza began working to sell the family's slaves. Tubman did not wait to be sold, but escaped with two of her brothers, Ben and Henry. Later, the two men had second thoughts about escaping and made Harriet return with them.

Soon afterward, Tubman escaped again, this time without her brothers. She later explained, "I had reasoned this out in my mind; there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other."

John Brown and Harpers Ferry

In April of 1958, Tubman was introduced to the abolitionist John Brown. Harriet did not agree that violence should be used against white people as John Brown did, but she did help him by sharing her knowledge of support networks and resources in the border states. Brown asked Tubman, who he called "General Tubman," to gather former slaves who might be willing to join his fighting force.

On May 8, 1958, Bown held a meeting where he shared his plan for a raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia) Tubman helped with the plans, but when it was time for the attack, Tubman could not be contacted.

The raid failed; Brown was convicted of treason, murder, and inciting (starting) a slave rebellion. He was hanged in December.

In early 1859, abolitionist Republican U.S. Senator William H. Seward sold Tubman a small piece of land on the outskirts of Auburn, New York, for $1,200 ($36,191 in 2023). Her land in Auburn became a haven for Tubman's family and friends. For years, she took in relatives and boarders, offering a safe place for black Americans seeking a better life in the North.

American Civil War

When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Tubman saw a Union victory as a key step toward the abolition of slavery. Harriet hoped to offer her own expertise and skills to the Union cause, too, and soon she joined a group of abolitionists who helped fugitives.

Tubman served as a nurse in Port Royal, making medicines from local plants and helping soldiers suffering from dysentery. She helped men with smallpox and miraculously did not get the disease.

Scouting and the Combahee River Raid

When Lincoln finally issued the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863, Tubman thought it was an important step toward the goal of freeing all black people from slavery. She began leading a band of scouts in land that was similar to where she grew up. She put her knowledge of how to travel secretly to good use and was able to give Colonel James Montgomery important information that helped in his capture of Jacksonville, Florida.

Later that year, Tubman helped Montgomery again. She became the first woman to lead an armed assault during the Civil War. Tubman guided three steamboats around Confederate mines in the waters that led to the shore. As Montgomery and his troops set fire to several plantations, the steamboats sounded their whistles, slaves throughout the area ran to the boats. Confederate troops were too late to stop the steamboats that were packed full of slaves, and the boats took off toward Beaufort, South Carolina.

More than 750 slaves were rescued in the Combahee River Raid. For two more years, Tubman worked for the Union, helping the newly freed slaves, scouting into Confederate territory, and nursing wounded soldiers in Virginia. She also made some trips back to Auburn to visit her family and care for her parents. After the Confederacy surrendered in April of 1865, Tubman served for several more months and headed home to Auburn.

Even though Harriet Tubman served the U.S. government for years, she did not receive a regular salary. Tubman spent her last years in Auburn, tending to her family and other people in need. She worked various jobs to support her elderly parents and took in boarders to help pay the bills. Her friends and supporters from her earlier abolition days help raise funds to support her.

Suffragist activism

In her later years, Tubman worked to advance the cause of women's suffrage. She worked with other women such as Susan B. Anthony and Emily Howland. Harriet traveled to cities to speak out in favor of women's voting rights. She described her actions during and after the Civil War and used the sacrifices of countless women throughout modern history as proof of women's equality with men.

AME Zion Church, illness, and death

At the turn of the 20th century, Tubman became involved with the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Auburn. In 1903, she donated a piece she owned to the church, under the instruction that it be made into a home for "aged and indigent (poor) colored people." The home opened five years later. Tubman was upset that the church ordered residents to pay a $100 entrance fee. She wished that people would not have to pay anything to live there.

In the late 1890s, Harriet had brain surgery to help with the seizures and headaches that continued to plague her. The surgery helped her for a time. By 1911, Tubman began living in the rest home she began, the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged. She died of pneumonia in 1913 and was buried with semi-military honors at Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn.

Tubman has had many museums and historical sites named after her. She is the subject of works of art including songs, novels, sculptures, paintings, movies, and theatrical productions.

Harriet Tubman quotes

"I said to the Lord, 'I'm going to hold steady on to you, and I know you will see me through.'"

"I would make a home for them in the North, and the Lord helping me, I would bring them all here."

"If a person would send another into bondage, he would, it appears to me, be bad enough to send him into hell if he could."

"I ain't got no heart to go and see the sufferings of my people played on the stage."

"I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can't say; I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger."

"I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person now that I was free."

Interesting facts about Harriet Tubman

When Harriet was helping slaves to freedom, her code name was "Moses" and she was known as the "black ghost."

She used spirituals and songs as coded messages for her followers.

When she had brain surgery to help with her seizures and headaches, she did not receive anesthesia for the procedure. Instead, she bit down on a bullet as she had seen Civil War soldiers do.

Harriet Tubman has two National Park sites dedicated to her: the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park in Dorchester County, Maryland, and the Harriet Tubman National Historical Park in Auburn, New York.

Images for kids

Notice in the Cambridge Democrat newspaper offering a reward of US$100 ($3,260 in 2023) for the capture and return of "Minty" (Harriet Tubman) and her brothers Henry and Ben, after they escaped on September 17, 1849

Frederick Douglass, who worked for slavery's abolition alongside Tubman, praised her in print.

Tubman's great-niece, Eva Stewart Northrup, launching the SS Harriet Tubman in 1944.

In Spanish: Harriet Tubman para niños

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Amelia Mary Earhart (born July 24, 1897; disappeared July 2, 1937) was an American aviation pioneer and author.

Earhart was the first female aviator (pilot) to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. She set many other records, wrote best-selling books about her flying experiences, and played a large part in the formation of The Ninety-Nines, an organization for female pilots.

Born in Atchison, Kansas, Earhart developed a passion for adventure at a young age, steadily gaining flying experience from her twenties. In 1928, Earhart became the first female passenger to cross the Atlantic by airplane accompanying pilot Wilmer Stultz. This is part of what made her famous.

In 1932, piloting a Lockheed Vega 5B, Earhart made a nonstop solo transatlantic flight, becoming the first woman to achieve such a feat. She received the United States Distinguished Flying Cross for this accomplishment.

In 1935, Earhart became a visiting faculty member at Purdue University as an advisor to Purdue University School of aeronautical engineering and a career counselor to women students. She was also a member of the National Woman's Party and an early supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment.

During an attempt to make a circumnavigational flight of the globe in 1937 in a Purdue-funded Lockheed Model 10-E Electra, Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan disappeared over the central Pacific Ocean near Howland Island. She was declared dead on January 5, 1939.

Background

Amelia Earhart's parents encouraged her from a young age to participate in activities usually left to boys, such as football, baseball, and fishing in her hometown of Atchison, Kansas. Receiving their encouragement, watching numerous air shows in Los Angeles, and paying a pilot a dollar for a 10-minute airplane ride all contributed to her decision to become a pilot and join this mainly male field. After her first ride, she wrote, "By the time I had gotten two or three hundred feet off the ground, I knew I had to fly."

From 1921 to 1922, Earhart was taught to fly by Neta Snook, the first woman to graduate from the Curtis School of Aviation. In October 1922, Earhart received her pilot's license from the Federation Aeronatique Internationale. Soon after, on October 22, 1922, Earhart set a women's altitude record of 14,000 feet (4,200 meters) in a Kinner Canary, an open-cockpit, single-engine biplane.

Charles Lindbergh made his record-setting solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927. One of the people inspired by his feat was flying enthusiast Amy Guest, who hoped to be the first woman to cross the Atlantic. She purchased a plane but her family stopped the trip.

Earhart went in her place and became the first female to cross the Atlantic Ocean. Leaving Newfoundland, Canada, on June 4, 1928, Earhart joined Wilmer L. Stutz and Louis E. Gordon in their bright red Fokker F.VII named the Friendship on their 2,000-mile (3,219-kilometer) trip to Wales. Earhart had no part in piloting the plane during the 20-hour, 40-minute trip and was, in her words, "just baggage," making her even more eager to cross the Atlantic on her own.

In 1929, Earhart co-founded an organization whose goal was to advance women's participation and opportunities in aviation. Called the Ninety-Nines, the organization was composed of 99 charter members, representing 99 of the 117 licensed women pilots in the United States at the time.

Earhart continued setting records. On July 6, 1930, she set a woman's speed record of 181 miles per hour (291 kilometers per hour), in a Lockheed Vega, a single-engine monoplane. On April 8, 1931, she set an autogiro (similar to a helicopter) altitude record of 18,451 feet (5,623.8 meters).

First solo Atlantic flight

On May 20-21, 1932, Earhart accomplished her goal of flying solo across the Atlantic Ocean. She took off from Newfoundland, Canada, at 7:12 p.m. on May 20, in her Lockheed Vega. Her flight was filled with dangers, from rapidly changing weather, to a broken altimeter (so she could not tell how high she was flying), to gasoline leaking into the cockpit. At one point her plane dropped almost 3,000 feet (914 meters) and went into a spin (which she managed to pull out of) and flames were shooting out of the exhaust manifold.

She brought her plane down on the coast of Ireland after a harrowing trip that lasted 15 hours, 18 minutes. The flight was the second solo flight across the Atlantic and the longest nonstop flight by a woman-2,026 miles (3,261 kilometers)--as well as the first flight across the Atlantic by a woman.

President Herbert Hoover awarded her the National Geographic Society Medal on June 21, 1932, for her achievement, and the U.S. Congress awarded her the Distinguished Flying Cross, the first woman to receive such an honor. Earhart's accomplishment meant a great deal to the entire world, but especially to women, for it demonstrated that women could set their own course in aviation and other fields.

Other achievements

Her next major achievement was to set the women's nonstop transcontinental speed record. On August 24-25, 1932, she flew from Los Angeles, California, to Newark, New Jersey, in a record 19 hours, 5 minutes, flying a Lockheed Vega, also becoming the first woman to fly solo coast-to-coast. The next July, she flew the same flight; this time she did it in 17 hours, 7 minutes and set a new transcontinental speed record.

In January 1935, Earhart became the first woman to make a solo long-distance flight over the Pacific Ocean, flying from Honolulu, Hawaii, to San Francisco, California. This complicated flight in her second Lockheed Vega occurred in adverse weather conditions and demonstrated Earhart's courage as well as her stubbornness.

She followed that flight with two more first solo flights-one on April 19-20 from Los Angeles, California, to Mexico City, in 13 hours, 23 minutes and the second on May 8, 1935, from Mexico City to Newark, New Jersey, in 14 hours, 19 minutes.

Flight around the world

Earhart wanted to be the first of either gender to fly around the world at its widest, close to the equator. She got the most advanced long-range, non-military aircraft available-a Lockheed Model 10E Electra. The all-metal, two-engine plane had been reconfigured with extra fuel tanks replacing the passenger seats, allowing the plane to travel farther between refueling.

Her first attempt at the world flight began on March 17, 1937, in Oakland, California, but ended abruptly with a runway crash in Honolulu, Hawaii, after a tire blew and a shock absorber on the landing gear failed. Earhart decided to repair the damaged plane and try again.

Her next try began on May 20, 1937, this time heading from Oakland to Miami, Florida. However, the plane had mechanical problems along the way that resulted in further delays. Eventually, she and Fred Noonan, her navigator, reached Miami and made final adjustments to the plane's engines and instruments. Finally, Earhart and Noonan were ready to depart.

What turned out to be the final flight of Earhart's career, and, ultimately, her life, began on June 1, 1937. Earhart and Noonan left for their round-the-world flight from Miami, Florida, in her twin-engine, red-winged Electra. From Miami, they flew to San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Right before taking off on this leg of the flight, Earhart was quoted as saying, "I have a feeling there is just about one more good flight left in my system and I hope this trip is it. Anyway, when I have finished this job, I mean to give up long-distance 'stunt' flying."

Disappearance

As Earhart's journey continued, news of her flight made the front page of newspapers around the world. She sent reports of the land, cultures, and people she encountered. On June 30, 1937, Earhart and Noonan arrived in Lae, New Guinea. They had traveled 22,000 miles (35,406 kilometers) and had 7,000 miles (11,265 kilometers) left to go.

Their next destination, and the most dangerous stop of the trip, was Howland Island, a tiny island in the Pacific Ocean, 2,556 miles (4,113 kilometers) away. Before Earhart took off from Lae on July 1, there was confusion about which radio frequencies were to be used. This did not get solved before she took off.

As the scheduled time neared for Earhart to approach the island, several transmissions were received from her, demanding to know the weather. A new weather report describing heavy clouds and rain northwest of Howland had been issued, and Earhart had run into the storm. Earhart transmitted several more times but never reached her destination, disappearing somewhere off the coast of the island.

A large search party was quickly organized, but no remains of the crew and the plane were ever found.

There are many theories surrounding the controversial disappearance of Earhart's plane on July 2, 1937. Most researchers believe that Earhart and Noonan got lost, ran out of gas, and went down somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. However, two other theories have grown in the years since, one involving capture and execution as spies by the Japanese, and the other dying of exposure after landing on a deserted island.

Although only 39 when she disappeared, Earhart accomplished a great deal and is considered a true hero of the 20th century, especially for women. She demonstrated courage, integrity, and an independent spirit.

She used her fame to advance the cause of women and showed that a determined woman could achieve anything. Her efforts led a generation of women to seek new horizons and new roles for themselves.

Books by Earhart

Amelia Earhart was an accomplished writer who served as aviation editor for Cosmopolitan magazine from 1928 to 1930. She authored numerous magazine articles and essays, and published two books based on her experiences as a flyer during her lifetime:

20 Hrs., 40 Min. was her journal of her 1928 flight across the Atlantic as a passenger, making her the first woman to make such a journey.

The Fun of It was a diary/memoir of her flying experiences, as well as an essay on women in aviation.

A third book credited to Earhart, Last Flight, was published following her disappearance and featured journal entries she made in the weeks before her final departure from New Guinea.

Amelia Earhart quotes

"Adventure is worthwhile in itself."

"I have often said that the lure of flying is the lure of beauty."

"Never interrupt someone doing what you said couldn't be done."

"Mostly, my flying has been solo, but the preparation for it wasn't. Without my husband's help and encouragement, I could not have attempted what I have."

"Worry retards reaction and makes clear-cut decisions impossible."

Interesting facts about Amelia Earhart

Amelia called her sister Grace "Pidge" and her sister called her "Meely." They continued this through their adulthood.

Amelia once built a ramp off the top of a toolshed and said that she felt like she was flying.

Amelia dropped out of school to volunteer as a nurse for World War I soldiers.

She did not like coffee or tea but preferred hot chocolate.

Amelia was one of the first celebrities to create her own fashion line, a trend that is popular among celebrities today.

She encouraged other women to fly.

After Amelia disappeared, America spent $4 million looking for her.

There is another Amelia Earhart who became the youngest woman to fly around the world in a single-engine plane in 2014.

Questions kids ask about Amelia Earhart

How did Amelia Earhart die?
Since they never found her they couldn't say for certain, but two years after she went missing they said that her plane had probably crashed in the Pacific Ocean and she had drowned.

How old would Amelia Earhart be today?
Amelia would be 125 years old today.

Was Amelia Earhart's plane ever found?
No trace of her plane has ever been found. In 2019, the explorer who found the Titanic, Robert Ballard, went searching for the plane and he found no hint of it.

Where did Amelia Earhart disappear?
Amelia and her navigator disappeared somewhere over the Pacific Ocean.

What island did Amelia Earhart crash on?
Howland Island was the island in the central Pacific Ocean where they thought Amelia may have crashed. She was trying to locate the island when she disappeared.

Did Amelia Earhart have kids?
Amelia didn't have any children of her own but did have two step-children.

What were Amelia's last words?
Her last message was Amelia giving compass headings to the Coast Guard cutter Itasca that was near Howland Island that was helping her during her flight. "We are on the line 157 337. We will repeat this message. We will repeat this on 6210 kilocycles. Wait..."

Did Amelia Earhart survive the crash?
Amelia and her navigator, Fred Noonan may have survived a crash landing.

Images for kids

L-R: Neta Snook, Earhart's Kinner Airster and Amelia Earhart, c.  1921

Earhart walking with President Hoover in the grounds of the White House on January 2, 1932

Studio portrait of Amelia Earhart, c.  1932. Putnam specifically instructed Earhart to disguise a "gap-toothed" smile by keeping her mouth closed in formal photographs.

USCGC Itasca was at Howland Island to support the flight.

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Amelia Mary Earhart (born July 24, 1897; disappeared July 2, 1937) was an American aviation pioneer and author. Earhart was the first female aviator (pilot) to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. She set many other records, wrote best-selling books about her flying experiences, and played a large part in the formation of The Ninety-Nines, an organization for female pilots.

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Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell (November 8, 1900 - August 16, 1949) was an American novelist and journalist. Mitchell wrote only one novel, published during her lifetime, the American Civil War-era novel Gone with the Wind, for which she won the National Book Award for Fiction for Most Distinguished Novel of 1936 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937. Long after her death, a collection of Mitchell's girlhood writings and a novella she wrote as a teenager, titled Lost Laysen, were published. A collection of newspaper articles written by Mitchell for The Atlanta Journal was republished in book form.

Family history

Margaret Mitchell was a Southerner, a native and lifelong resident of Georgia. She was born in 1900 into a wealthy and politically prominent family. Her father, Eugene Muse Mitchell, was an attorney, and her mother, Mary Isabel "Maybelle" Stephens, was a suffragist and Catholic activist. She had two brothers, Russell Stephens Mitchell, who died in infancy in 1894, and Alexander Stephens Mitchell, born in 1896.

Mitchell's family on her father's side were descendants of Thomas Mitchell, originally of Aberdeenshire, Scotland, who settled in Wilkes County, Georgia in 1777, and served in the American Revolutionary War. Thomas Mitchell was a surveyor by profession. He was on a surveying trip in Henry County, Georgia, at the home of Mr. John Lowe, about 6 miles from McDonough, Georgia, when he died in 1835 and is buried in that location. William Mitchell, born December 8, 1777, in Lisborn, Edgefield County, South Carolina, moved between 1834 and 1835, to a farm along the South River in the Flat Rock community in Georgia. William Mitchell died February 24, 1859, at the age of 81 and is buried in the family graveyard near Panola Mountain State Park. Her great-grandfather Issac Green Mitchell moved to farm along the Flat Shoals Road located in the Flat Rock community in 1839. Four years later he sold this farm to Ira O. McDaniel and purchased a farm 3 miles farther down the road on the north side of the South River in DeKalb County, Georgia.

Her grandfather, Russell Crawford Mitchell, of Atlanta, enlisted in the Confederate States Army on June 24, 1861, and served in Hood's Texas Brigade. He was severely wounded at the Battle of Sharpsburg, demoted for "inefficiency," and detailed as a nurse in Atlanta. After the Civil War, he made a large fortune supplying lumber for the rapid rebuilding of Atlanta. Russell Mitchell had thirteen children from two wives; the eldest was Eugene, who graduated from the University of Georgia Law School.

Mitchell's maternal great-grandfather, Philip Fitzgerald, emigrated from Ireland and eventually settled on a slaveholding plantation, Rural Home, near Jonesboro, Georgia, where he had one son and seven daughters with his wife, Elenor McGahan, who was from an Irish Catholic family with ties to Colonial Maryland. Mitchell's grandparents, married in 1863, were Annie Fitzgerald and John Stephens; he had also emigrated from Ireland and became a captain in the Confederate States Army. John Stephens was a prosperous real estate developer after the Civil War and one of the founders of the Gate City Street Railroad (1881), a mule-drawn Atlanta trolley system. John and Annie Stephens had twelve children together; the seventh child was May Belle Stephens, who married Eugene Mitchell. May Belle Stephens had studied at the Bellevue Convent in Quebec and completed her education at the Atlanta Female Institute.

Early influences

Margaret Mitchell spent her early childhood on Jackson Hill, east of downtown Atlanta. Her family lived near her maternal grandmother, Annie Stephens, in a Victorian house painted bright red with yellow trim. Mrs. Stephens had been a widow for several years prior to Margaret's birth; Captain John Stephens died in 1896. After his death, she inherited property on Jackson Street where Margaret's family lived.

Grandmother Annie Stephens was quite a character, both vulgar and a tyrant. After gaining control of her father Philip Fitzgerald's money after he died, she splurged on her younger daughters, including Margaret's mother, and sent them to finishing school in the north. There they learned that Irish Americans were not treated as equal to other immigrants. Margaret's relationship with her grandmother would become quarrelsome in later years as she entered adulthood. However, for Margaret, her grandmother was a great source of "eye-witness information" about the Civil War and Reconstruction in Atlanta prior to her death in 1934.

Girlhood on Jackson Hill

In an accident that was traumatic for her mother although she was unharmed, when Mitchell was about three years old, her dress caught fire on an iron grate. Fearing it would happen again, her mother began dressing her in boys' pants, and she was nicknamed "Jimmy", the name of a character in the comic strip, Little Jimmy. Her brother insisted she would have to be a boy named Jimmy to play with him. Having no sisters to play with, Mitchell said she was a boy named Jimmy until she was fourteen.

Stephens Mitchell said his sister was a tomboy who would happily play with dolls occasionally, and she liked to ride her Texas plains pony. As a little girl, Mitchell went riding every afternoon with a Confederate veteran and a young lady of "beau-age". She was raised in an era when children were "seen and not heard" and was not allowed to express her personality by running and screaming on Sunday afternoons while her family was visiting relatives. Mitchell learned the gritty details of specific battles from these visits with aging Confederate soldiers. But she didn't learn that the South had actually lost the war until she was 10 years of age: "I heard everything in the world except that the Confederates lost the war. When I was ten years old, it was a violent shock to learn that General Lee had been defeated. I didn't believe it when I first heard it and I was indignant. I still find it hard to believe, so strong are childhood impressions." Her mother would swat her with a hairbrush or a slipper as a form of discipline.

May Belle Mitchell was "hissing blood-curdling threats" to her daughter to make her behave the evening she took her to a women's suffrage rally led by Carrie Chapman Catt. Her daughter sat on a platform wearing a Votes-for-Women banner, blowing kisses to the gentlemen, while her mother gave an impassioned speech. She was nineteen years old when the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, which gave women the right to vote.

May Belle Mitchell was president of the Atlanta Woman's Suffrage League (1915), co-founder of Georgia's division of the League of Women Voters, chairwoman of press publicity for the Georgia Mothers' Congress and Parent Teacher Association, a member of the Pioneer Society, the Atlanta Woman's Club, and several Catholic and literary societies.

Mitchell's father was not in favor of corporal punishment in school. During his tenure as president of the educational board (1911-1912), corporal punishment in the public schools was abolished. Reportedly, Eugene Mitchell received a whipping on the first day he attended school and the mental impression of the thrashing lasted far longer than the physical marks.

Jackson Hill was an old, affluent part of the city. At the bottom of Jackson Hill was an area of African-American homes and businesses called " Darktown". The mayhem of the Atlanta Race Riot occurred over four days in September 1906 when Mitchell was five years old. Local white newspapers printed unfounded rumors that several white women had been assaulted by black men, prompting an angry mob of 10,000 to assemble in the streets, pulling black people from street cars, beating, killing dozens over the next three days.

As the rioting continued, rumors ran wild that black people would burn Jackson Hill. At his daughter's suggestion, Eugene Mitchell, who did not own a gun, stood guard with a sword. Though the rumors proved untrue and no attack arrived, Mitchell recalled twenty years later the terror she felt during the riot.

A few years after the riot, the Mitchell family decided to move away from Jackson Hill. In 1912, they moved to the east side of Peachtree Street just north of Seventeenth Street in Atlanta. Past the nearest neighbor's house was forest and beyond it the Chattahoochee River. Mitchell's former Jackson Hill home was destroyed in the Great Atlanta Fire of 1917.

Mitchell's father was of a Protestant background, while her mother was a devout Catholic; Mitchell was raised in a Catholic household. As a young woman, she spent time visiting the Sisters of Mercy convent affiliated with St. Joseph's Infirmary in downtown Atlanta. Her religious upbringing influenced her decision to make the O'Hara family in her novel Catholics in a Protestant-majority state. One of Mitchell's mother's cousins entered the Sisters of Mercy at St. Vincent's Convent in Savannah in 1883, becoming Sister Mary Melanie. The characters Melanie Hamilton and Careen O'Hara were probably based on this relation.

The South of Gone with the Wind

While "the South" exists as a geographical region of the United States, it is also said to exist as "a place of the imagination" of writers. An image of "the South" was fixed in Mitchell's imagination when at six years old her mother took her on a buggy tour through ruined plantations and "Sherman's sentinels", the brick and stone chimneys that remained after William Tecumseh Sherman's " March and torch" through Georgia.

From an imagination cultivated in her youth, Margaret Mitchell's defensive weapon would become her writing.

On summer vacations, she visited her maternal great-aunts, Mary Ellen ("Mamie") Fitzgerald and Sarah ("Sis") Fitzgerald, who still lived at her great-grandparents' plantation home in Jonesboro. Mamie had been twenty-one years old and Sis was thirteen when the Civil War began.

An avid reader

An avid reader, young Margaret read "boys' stories" by G.A. Henty, the Tom Swift series, and the Rover Boys series by Edward Stratemeyer. Her mother read Mary Johnston's novels to her before she could read. They both wept reading Johnston's The Long Roll (1911) and Cease Firing (1912). She also read the plays of William Shakespeare, and novels by Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott. Mitchell's two favorite children's books were by author Edith Nesbit: Five Children and It (1902) and The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904). She kept both on her bookshelf even as an adult and gave them as gifts. Another author whom Mitchell read as a teenager and who had a major impact in her understanding of the Civil War and Reconstruction was Thomas Dixon and his popular trilogy of novels The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden (1902), The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905) and The Traitor: A Story of the Rise and Fall of the Invisible Empire (1907). As a teenager, Mitchell liked Dixon's books so much that she organized the local children to put on dramatizations of his books. The picture the white supremacist Dixon drew of Reconstruction is now rejected as inaccurate, but at the time, the memory of the past was such it was widely believed by white Americans. In a letter to Dixon dated August 10, 1936, Mitchell wrote: "I was practically raised on your books, and love them very much."

Young storyteller

An imaginative and precocious writer, Margaret Mitchell began with stories about animals, then progressed to fairy tales and adventure stories. She fashioned book covers for her stories, bound the tablet paper pages together and added her own artwork. At age eleven she gave a name to her publishing enterprise: "Urchin Publishing Co." Later her stories were written in notebooks. Mary Belle Mitchell kept her daughter's stories in white enamel bread boxes and several boxes of her stories were stored in the house by the time Margaret went off to college.

"Margaret" is a character riding a galloping pony in The Little Pioneers, and plays "Cowboys and Indians" in When We Were Shipwrecked.

Romantic love and honor emerged as themes of abiding interest for Mitchell in The Knight and the Lady (ca. 1909), in which a "good knight" and a "bad knight" duel for the hand of the lady. In The Arrow Brave and the Deer Maiden (ca. 1913), a half-white Indian brave, Jack, must withstand the pain inflicted upon him to uphold his honor and win the girl. The same themes were treated with increasing artistry in Lost Laysen, the novella Mitchell wrote as a teenager in 1916, and, with much greater sophistication, in Mitchell's last known novel, Gone with the Wind, which she began in 1926.

In her pre-teens, Mitchell also wrote stories set in foreign locations, such as The Greaser (1913), a cowboy story set in Mexico. In 1913 she wrote two stories with Civil War settings; one includes her notation that "237 pages are in this book".

School life

While the Great War carried on in Europe (1914-1918), Margaret Mitchell attended Atlanta's Washington Seminary (now The Westminster Schools), a "fashionable" private girls' school with an enrollment of over 300 students. She was very active in the Drama Club. Mitchell played the male characters: Nick Bottom in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Launcelot Gobbo in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, among others. She wrote a play about snobbish college girls that she acted in as well. She also joined the Literary Club and had two stories published in the yearbook: Little Sister and Sergeant Terry. Ten-year-old "Peggy" is the heroine in Little Sister.

Mitchell received encouragement from her English teacher, Mrs. Paisley, who recognized her writing talent. A demanding teacher, Paisley told her she had ability if she worked hard and would not be careless in constructing sentences. A sentence, she said, must be "complete, concise and coherent".

Mitchell read the books of Thomas Dixon, Jr., and in 1916, when the silent film, The Birth of a Nation, was showing in Atlanta, she dramatized Dixon's The Traitor: A Story of the Fall of the Invisible Empire (1907). As both playwright and actress, she took the role of Steve Hoyle. For the production, she made a Ku Klux Klan costume from a white crepe dress and wore a boy's wig. (Note: Dixon rewrote The Traitor as The Black Hood (1924) and Steve Hoyle was renamed George Wilkes.)

During her years at Washington Seminary, Mitchell's brother, Stephens, was away studying at Harvard College (1915-1917), and he left in May 1917 to enlist in the army, about a month after the U.S. declared war on Germany. He set sail for France in April 1918, participated in engagements in the Lagny and Marbache sectors, then returned to Georgia in October as a training instructor. While Margaret and her mother were in New York in September 1918 preparing for Margaret to attend college, Stephens wired his father that he was safe after his ship had been torpedoed en route to New York from France.

Stephens Mitchell thought college was the "ruination of girls". However, May Belle Mitchell placed a high value on education for women and she wanted her daughter's future accomplishments to come from using her mind. She saw education as Margaret's weapon and "the key to survival". The classical college education she desired for her daughter was one that was on par with men's colleges, and this type of education was available only at northern schools. Her mother chose Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts for Margaret because she considered it to be the best women's college in the United States.

Upon graduating from Washington Seminary in June 1918, Mitchell fell in love with a Harvard graduate, a young army lieutenant, Clifford West Henry, who was chief bayonet instructor at Camp Gordon from May 10 until the time he set sail for France on July 17. Henry was "slightly effeminate", "ineffectual", and "rather effete-looking" with "homosexual tendencies", according to biographer Anne Edwards. Before departing for France, he gave Mitchell an engagement ring.

On September 14, while she was enrolled at Smith College, Henry was mortally wounded in action in France and died on October 17. As Henry waited in the Verdun trenches, shortly before being wounded, he composed a poem on a leaf torn from his field notebook, found later among his effects. The last stanza of Lieutenant Clifford W. Henry's poem follows:

Henry repeatedly advanced in front of the platoon he commanded, drawing machine-gun fire so that the German nests could be located and wiped out by his men. Although wounded in the leg in this effort, his death was the result of shrapnel wounds from an air bomb dropped by a German plane. He was awarded the French Croix de guerre avec palme for his acts of heroism. From the President of the United States, the Commander in Chief of the United States Armed Forces, he was presented with the Distinguished Service Cross and an Oak Leaf Cluster in lieu of a second Distinguished Service Cross.

Clifford Henry was the great love of Margaret Mitchell's life, according to her brother. In a letter to a friend (A. Edee, March 26, 1920), Mitchell wrote of Clifford that she had a "memory of a love that had in it no trace of physical passion".

Mitchell had vague aspirations of a career in psychiatry, but her future was derailed by an event that killed over fifty million people worldwide, the 1918 flu pandemic. On January 25, 1919, her mother, May Belle Mitchell, succumbed to pneumonia from the "Spanish flu". Mitchell arrived home from college a day after her mother had died.

An average student at Smith College, Mitchell did not excel in any area of academics. She held a low estimation of her writing abilities. Even though her English professor had praised her work, she felt the praise was undue. After finishing her freshman year at Smith, Mitchell returned to Atlanta to take over the household for her father and never returned to college. In October 1919, while regaining her strength after an appendectomy, she confided to a friend that giving up college and her dreams of a "journalistic career" to keep house and take her mother's place in society meant "giving up all the worthwhile things that counted for-nothing!"

Margaret began using the name "Peggy" at Washington Seminary, and the abbreviated form "Peg" at Smith College, when she found an icon for herself in the mythological winged horse, " Pegasus", that inspires poets. Peggy made her Atlanta society debut in the 1920 winter season. In the "gin and jazz style" of the times, she did her "flapping" in the 1920s. At a 1921 Atlanta debutante charity ball, she performed an Apache dance. The dance included a kiss with her male partner that shocked Atlanta high society and led to her being blacklisted from the Junior League.

In April 1922, Mitchell was seeing two men almost daily: one was Berrien ("Red") Kinnard Upshaw (March 10, 1901 - January 13, 1949), whom she is thought to have met in 1917 at a dance hosted by the parents of one of her friends, and the other, Upshaw's roommate and friend, John Robert Marsh (October 6, 1895 - March 5, 1952), a copy editor from Kentucky who worked for the Associated Press. Upshaw was an Atlanta boy, a few months younger than Mitchell, whose family moved to Raleigh, North Carolina in 1916. In 1919 he was appointed to the United States Naval Academy, but resigned for academic deficiencies on January 5, 1920. He was readmitted in May, then 19 years old, and spent two months at sea before resigning a second time on September 1, 1920.

Although her family disapproved, Peggy and Red married on September 2, 1922; the best man at their wedding was John Marsh, who would become her second husband. The couple resided at the Mitchell home with her father. By December the marriage to Upshaw had dissolved and he left. Upshaw agreed to an uncontested divorce. Upshaw and Mitchell were divorced on October 16, 1924.

During this time, Mitchell left the Catholic Church and became an Episcopalian.

On July 4, 1925, 24-year-old Margaret Mitchell and 29-year-old John Marsh were married in the Unitarian-Universalist Church. The Marshes made their home at the Crescent Apartments in Atlanta, taking occupancy of Apt. 1, which they affectionately named "The Dump" (now the Margaret Mitchell House and Museum).

Reporter for The Atlanta Journal

While still legally married to Upshaw and needing income for herself, Mitchell got a job writing feature articles for The Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine. She received almost no encouragement from her family or "society" to pursue a career in journalism, and had no prior newspaper experience.

Her first story, Atlanta Girl Sees Italian Revolution, by Margaret Mitchell Upshaw, appeared on December 31, 1922. She wrote on a wide range of topics, from fashions to Confederate generals and King Tut. In an article that appeared on July 1, 1923, Valentino Declares He Isn't a Sheik, she interviewed celebrity actor Rudolph Valentino, referring to him as "Sheik" from his film role.

Mitchell was quite thrilled when Valentino took her in his arms and carried her inside from the rooftop of the Georgian Terrace Hotel.

Many of her stories were vividly descriptive.

In another article, Georgia's Empress and Women Soldiers, she wrote short sketches of four notable Georgia women. One was the first woman to serve in the United States Senate, Rebecca Latimer Felton, a suffragist who held white supremacist views. The other women were: Nancy Hart, Lucy Mathilda Kenny (also known as Private Bill Thompson of the Confederate States Army) and Mary Musgrove. The article generated mail and controversy from her readers. Mitchell received criticism for depicting "strong women who did not fit the accepted standards of femininity."

Mitchell's journalism career, which began in 1922, came to an end less than four years later; her last article appeared on May 9, 1926. Several months after marrying John Marsh, Mitchell quit due to an ankle injury that would not heal properly and chose to become a full-time wife. During the time Mitchell worked for the Atlanta Journal, she wrote 129 feature articles, 85 news stories, and several book reviews.

Early works

Mitchell wrote a romance novella, Lost Laysen, when she was fifteen years old (1916). She gave Lost Laysen, which she had written in two notebooks, to a boyfriend, Henry Love Angel. He died in 1945 and the novella remained undiscovered among some letters she had written to him until 1994. The novella was published in 1996, eighty years after it was written, and became a New York Times Best Seller.

In Mitchell's teenage years, she is known to have written a 400-page novel about girls in a boarding school, The Big Four. The novel is thought to be lost; Mitchell destroyed some of her manuscripts herself and others were destroyed after her death.

In the 1920s Mitchell completed a novelette, Ropa Carmagin, about a Southern white girl who loves a biracial man. Mitchell submitted the manuscript to Macmillan Publishers in 1935 along with her manuscript for Gone with the Wind. The novelette was rejected; Macmillan thought the story was too short for book form.

Writing Gone with the Wind

Main page: Gone with the Wind (novel)

In May 1926, after Mitchell had left her job at the Atlanta Journal and was recovering at home from her ankle injury, she wrote a society column for the Sunday Magazine, "Elizabeth Bennet's Gossip", which she continued to write until August.

To aid her in her literary endeavors, John Marsh brought home a Remington Portable No. 3 typewriter (c. 1928). For the next three years Mitchell worked exclusively on writing a Civil War-era novel whose heroine was named Pansy O'Hara (prior to Gone with the Wind's publication Pansy was changed to Scarlett). She used parts of the manuscript to prop up a wobbly couch.

World War II

During World War II, Margaret Mitchell was a volunteer for the American Red Cross and she raised money for the war effort by selling war bonds. She was active in Home Defense, sewed hospital gowns and put patches on trousers. Her personal attention, however, was devoted to writing letters to men in uniform-soldiers, sailors, and marines, sending them humor, encouragement, and her sympathy.

The USS Atlanta (CL-51) was a light cruiser used as an anti-aircraft ship of the United States Navy sponsored by Margaret Mitchell and used in the naval Battle of Midway and the Eastern Solomons. The ship was heavily damaged during night surface action on November 13, 1942, during the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal and subsequently scuttled on orders of her captain having earned five battle stars and a Presidential Unit Citation as a "heroic example of invincible fighting spirit".

Mitchell sponsored a second light cruiser named after the city of Atlanta, the USS Atlanta (CL-104). On February 6, 1944, she christened Atlanta in Camden, New Jersey, and the cruiser began fighting operations in May 1945. Atlanta was a member of task forces protecting fast carriers, was operating off the coast of Honshū when the Japanese surrendered on August 15, 1945, and earned two battle stars. She was finally sunk during explosive testing off San Clemente Island on October 1, 1970.

Death and legacy

Margaret Mitchell was struck by a speeding automobile as she crossed Peachtree Street at 13th Street in Atlanta with her husband, John Marsh, while on her way to see the movie A Canterbury Tale on the evening of August 11, 1949. She died at age 48 at Grady Hospital five days later on August 16 without fully regaining consciousness.

The driver, Hugh Gravitt, was an off-duty taxi driver who was driving his personal vehicle when he struck Mitchell. After the collision, Gravitt was arrested for drunken driving and released on a $5,450 bond until Mitchell's death. He was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in November 1949 and sentenced to 18 months in jail. He served almost 11 months. Gravitt died in 1994 at the age of 74.

Margaret Mitchell was buried at Oakland Cemetery, Georgia. When her husband John died in 1952, he was buried next to his wife.

In 1978, Mitchell was inducted into the Georgia Newspaper Hall of Fame, followed by the Georgia Women of Achievement in 1994, and the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2000.

In 1994, Shannen Doherty starred in the television film A Burning Passion: The Margaret Mitchell Story, a fictionalized account of Mitchell's life directed by Larry Peerce.

When Mitchell's nephew, Joseph Mitchell, died in 2011, he left fifty percent of trademark and literary rights of the Margaret Mitchell Estate, as well as some personal belongings of Mitchell's, to the Archdiocese of Atlanta.

In Spanish: Margaret Mitchell para niños

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Ella Jane Fitzgerald (April 25, 1917 - June 15, 1996), was an American jazz singer. She was called "Lady Ella", the "Queen of Jazz", and the "First Lady of Song".

Her voice spanned three octaves. She could sing very high notes and very low notes. She was famous for her scat singing. She won 14 Grammy Awards. She was awarded the National Medal of Art and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Ella Fitzgerald was born in 1917 in Newport News, Virginia, United States to William and Temperance "Tempie" Fitzgerald. Soon after Ella was born, her parents separated. She went to live in Yonkers, New York with her mother and her mother's boyfriend, Joseph Da Silva. In 1923, Fitzgerald's half-sister, Frances Da Silva, was born. When she was a child, Fitzgerald lived in the Colored Orphan Asylum in Riverdale, the Bronx.

As a youngster, Fitzgerald wanted to be a dancer. She loved listening to jazz music by Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby and The Boswell Sisters. She especially liked the lead singer Connee Boswell, later saying, "My mother brought home one of her records, and I fell in love with it....I tried so hard to sound just like her."

In 1932, Fitzgerald's mother died. Ella began doing badly at school. She got into trouble with the police, and was sent to a reform school. She escaped from the reformatory, and for a time was homeless.

Fitzgerald had her first job as a singer when she was 17 on November 21, 1934 at the Harlem Opera House in Harlem, New York. She was able to compete in one of its famous "Amateur Nights". At first she was going to go on stage and dance but, intimidated by some local dancers, she decided to sing instead. She won the first prize of US$ 25 singing Connee Boswell's "Judy" and "The Object of My Affection".

Big-band singing

In January 1935, Fitzgerald won the chance to perform for a week with the Tiny Bradshaw band at the Harlem Opera House. She met a drummer and bandleader called Chick Webb here. Webb had already hired a singer called Charlie Linton to work with the band. According to The New York Times, Webb was "reluctant to sign her....because she was gawky and unkempt, a diamond in the rough." Webb let her try singing with his band when they played a dance at Yale University.

Fitzgerald began singing often with Webb's Orchestra during 1935, at Harlem's Savoy Ballroom. She recorded several hit songs with them, including "Love and Kisses" and "(If You Can't Sing It) You'll Have to Swing It (Mr. Paganini)". In 1938 she co-wrote and sang a version of the nursery rhyme, "A-Tisket, A-Tasket". After this, she started getting famous.

Chick Webb died on June 16, 1939, and his band was renamed "Ella Fitzgerald and her Famous Orchestra". Fitzgerald became the bandleader. She recorded nearly 150 sides during her time with the orchestra.

Singing with Decca

In 1942, Fitzgerald left the band and began to work as a solo singer. She was signed to the Decca label, and she had several popular hit songs. She recording with other musicians like the Ink Spots, Louis Jordan, and the Delta Rhythm Boys.

Decca's Milt Gabler became her manager and she began working often for the jazz producer Norman Granz. She often sang in his Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts. Then, Granz became her manager, but he did not record her on any of his record labels for nearly a decade.

In the mid-1940s, after the swing era, and the end of the great touring big bands, jazz music became quite different. A new kind of jazz called bebop became popular and Fitzgerald changed her style of singing. She worked with Dizzy Gillespie's big band and started including scat singing as a big part of her performances. About singing with Gillespie, Fitzgerald said, "I just tried to do [with my voice] what I heard the horns in the band doing."

Her 1945 scat recording of "Flying Home" was later described by The New York Times as "one of the most influential vocal jazz records of the decade....Where other singers, most notably Louis Armstrong, had tried similar improvisation, no one before Miss Fitzgerald employed the technique with such dazzling inventiveness." Her be-bop recording of "Oh, Lady be Good!" (1947) was also very popular, and made people think of her as one of the most important jazz singers.

Granz did not like some of the music Fitzgerald was given at this time, so during her last years on the Decca label she recorded some duets with pianist Ellis Larkins, released in 1950 as Ella Sings Gershwin.

Singing with Verve

In 1955, Fitzgerald left Decca, and joined Granz's new record label, Verve Records. She said later, "I had gotten to the point where I was only singing bebop. I thought bebop was 'it', and that all I had to do was go some place and sing bop. But it finally got to the point where I had no place to sing. I realized then that there was more to music than bop. Norman....felt that I should do other things, so he produced The Cole Porter Songbook with me. It was a turning point in my life."

A new album, Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook, was released in 1956. It was the first of eight multi-album "Songbook" sets that she would record for Verve between 1956 and 1964. Many of the songs were standards and Fitzgerald tried to cross over into a non-jazz audience.

Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Duke Ellington Songbook was the only Songbook on which the composer of the songs also played with her. Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, who had worked together for a long time, both played on half the set's 38 tracks, and wrote two new pieces of music for the album: "The E and D Blues", and a musical piece about Fitzgerald (the only "Songbook" track that Fitzgerald does not sing on).

The Songbook series became the Fitzgerald's most critically acclaimed and popular work. The New York Times wrote in 1996, "These albums were among the first pop records to devote such serious attention to individual songwriters, and they were instrumental in establishing the pop album as a vehicle for serious musical exploration."

Ella Fitzgerald also recorded albums of the songs of Cole Porter and George Gershwin in 1972 and 1983. The albums were called Ella Loves Cole and Nice Work If You Can Get It. A later album of songs by a single composer was released when she was with Pablo Records, Ella Abraça Jobim, with songs by Antonio Carlos Jobim.

While she was recording the Songbooks and the occasional studio album, Fitzgerald toured 40 to 45 weeks per year in the United States and internationally, with Norman Granz. Granz helped her to become one of the most important live jazz performers.

In the mid-1950s, Fitzgerald became the first African-American to perform at the Mocambo (a Hollywood nightclub), after Marilyn Monroe had persuaded the owner to make the booking. This was very important in Fitzgerald's career. The event was turned into a play by Bonnie Greer which is to receive a production in London's West End from November 2009.

Some live albums on Verve that she recorded are well thought of by critics: Ella at the Opera House, Ella in Rome and Ella in Berlin.

Later years

In later life, Fitzgerald kept a busy concert schedule, but her health worsened. She had heart surgery in 1986. She had diabetes, which accounted for her failing eyesight. Her diabetes worsened, and both legs were cut off (amputated) below the knees. She never completely recovered. She was unable to perform often. She spent time with family. Fitzgerald died in her Beverly Hills, California home on June 15, 1996. She was interred in the Sunset Mission Mausoleum at Inglewood Park Cemetery in Inglewood, California.

By the 1990s, Fitzgerald had recorded more than 200 songs. In 1991, she gave her final concert at Carnegie Hall. She had performed there 26 times. She received numerous awards. In 1979, she received Kennedy Center Honors. In 1987, she received the National Medal of Arts. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. France presented her with the Commander of Arts and Letters award. Yale University, Dartmouth, and other schools awarded her honorary doctorates. Several of Fitzgerald's awards, significant personal possessions, and documents were given to the Smithsonian Institution, the library of Boston University, the Library of Congress, and the Schoenberg Library at UCLA.

Personal life

In 1941, Fitzgerald married Benny Kornegay, a convicted drug dealer. The marriage was annulled after two years. In December 1947, she married double bass player Ray Brown. They adopted a child of Fitzgerald's half-sister, Frances. They named him Ray Brown, Jr.. Fitzgerald and Brown divorced in 1953.

In July 1957, Reuters reported that Fitzgerald had secretly married Thor Einar Larsen, a young Norwegian, in Oslo. The affair was quickly forgotten when Larsen was sentenced to five months hard labor in Sweden for stealing money from a young woman.

Images for kids

Fitzgerald with Dizzy Gillespie, Ray Brown, Milt Jackson, and Timme Rosenkrantz in New York City, 1947.

Ella Fitzgerald at the Paul Masson Winery, Saratoga, California in 1986

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Ella Jane Fitzgerald (April 25, 1917 - June 15, 1996), was an American jazz singer. She was called "Lady Ella", the "Queen of Jazz", and the "First Lady of Song". Her voice spanned three octaves. She could sing very high notes and very low notes. She was famous for her scat singing.

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Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón ( 6 July 1907 - 13 July 1954) was a Mexican painter known for her many portraits, self-portraits, and works inspired by the nature and artifacts of Mexico. Her paintings often had strong autobiographical elements and mixed realism with fantasy. She is also known for painting about her experience of chronic pain.

Early years

Born to a German father and a mother, Kahlo spent most of her childhood and adult life at La Casa Azul, her family home in Coyoacán - now publicly accessible as the Frida Kahlo Museum. Although she was disabled by polio as a child, Kahlo had been a promising student headed for medical school. Due to polio, Kahlo began school later than her peers. Along with her younger sister Cristina, she attended the local kindergarten and primary school in Coyoacán and was homeschooled for the fifth and sixth grades. While Cristina followed their sisters into a convent school, Kahlo was enrolled in a German school due to their father's wishes. She was soon expelled for disobedience.

Kahlo enjoyed art from an early age, receiving drawing instruction from printmaker Fernando Fernández (who was her father's friend) and filling notebooks with sketches.

A severe bus accident at the age of 18 left Kahlo in lifelong pain. Confined to bed for three months following the accident, Kahlo began to paint. She started to consider a career as a medical illustrator, as well, which would combine her interests in science and art.

Her mother provided her with a specially-made easel, which enabled her to paint in bed, and her father lent her some of his oil paints. She had a mirror placed above the easel, so that she could see herself. Painting became a way for Kahlo to explore questions of identity and existence. She explained, "I paint myself because I am often alone and I am the subject I know best." She later stated that the accident and the isolating recovery period made her desire "to begin again, painting things just as [she] saw them with [her] own eyes and nothing more."

Most of the paintings Kahlo made during this time were portraits of herself, her sisters, and her schoolfriends.

In 1925, Kahlo began to work to help her family. She became a paid engraving apprentice for Fernández. He was impressed by her talent, although she did not consider art as a career at this time.

Kahlo spent the late 1920s and early 1930s travelling in Mexico and the United States withe her husband and fellow Mexican artist Diego Rivera. During this time, she developed her artistic style, drawing her main inspiration from Mexican folk culture. She painted mostly small self-portraits that mixed elements from pre-Columbian and Catholic beliefs.

Her paintings raised the interest of surrealist artist André Breton, who arranged for Kahlo's first solo exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1938; the exhibition was a success and was followed by another in Paris in 1939. While the French exhibition was less successful, the Louvre purchased a painting from Kahlo, The Frame, making her the first Mexican artist to be featured in their collection. Throughout the 1940s, Kahlo participated in exhibitions in Mexico and the United States and worked as an art teacher. She taught at the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado (" La Esmeralda") and was a founding member of the Seminario de Cultura Mexicana. Kahlo's always-fragile health began to decline in the same decade. She had her first solo exhibition in Mexico in 1953, shortly before her death in 1954 at the age of 47.

Later years

Even as Kahlo was gaining recognition in Mexico, her health was declining rapidly, and an attempted surgery to support her spine failed. Her paintings from this period include Broken Column (1944), Without Hope (1945), Tree of Hope, Stand Fast (1946), and The Wounded Deer (1946), reflecting her poor physical state. During her last years, Kahlo was mostly confined to the Casa Azul. She painted mostly still lifes, portraying fruit and flowers with political symbols such as flags or doves.

Photographer Lola Alvarez Bravo understood that Kahlo did not have much longer to live, and thus staged her first solo exhibition in Mexico at the Galería Arte Contemporaneo in April 1953. Though Kahlo was initially not due to attend the opening, as her doctors had prescribed bed rest for her, she ordered her four-poster bed to be moved from her home to the gallery. To the surprise of the guests, she arrived in an ambulance and was carried on a stretcher to the bed, where she stayed for the duration of the party. The exhibition was a notable cultural event in Mexico and also received attention in mainstream press around the world. The same year, the Tate Gallery's exhibition on Mexican art in London featured five of her paintings.

In 1954, Kahlo was again hospitalized in April and May. That spring, she resumed painting after a one-year interval. Her last paintings include the political Marxism Will Give Health to the Sick (c. 1954) and Frida and Stalin (c. 1954) and the still-life Viva La Vida (1954).

Health issues and death

In 1950, Kahlo spent most of the year in Hospital ABC in Mexico City, where she underwent a new bone graft surgery on her spine. It caused a difficult infection and necessitated several follow-up surgeries. After being discharged, she was mostly confined to La Casa Azul, using a wheelchair and crutches to be ambulatory. During these final years of her life, Kahlo dedicated her time to political causes to the extent that her health allowed. She had rejoined the Mexican Communist Party in 1948 and campaigned for peace, for example, by collecting signatures for the Stockholm Appeal.

Kahlo's right leg was amputated at the knee due to gangrene in August 1953. She became severely depressed and anxious, and her dependency on painkillers escalated.

In her last days, Kahlo was mostly bedridden with bronchopneumonia, though she made a public appearance on 2 July 1954, participating with Rivera in a demonstration against the CIA invasion of Guatemala. She seemed to anticipate her death, as she spoke about it to visitors and drew skeletons and angels in her diary. The last drawing was a black angel, which biographer Hayden Herrera interprets as the Angel of Death. It was accompanied by the last words she wrote, "I joyfully await the exit - and I hope never to return - Frida" ("Espero Alegre la Salida - y Espero no Volver jamás").

The demonstration worsened her illness, and on the night of 12 July 1954, Kahlo had a high fever and was in extreme pain. At approximately 6 a.m. on 13 July 1954, her nurse found her dead in her bed. Kahlo was 47 years old. The official cause of death was pulmonary embolism, although no autopsy was performed.

On the evening of 13 July, Kahlo's body was taken to the Palacio de Bellas Artes, where it lay in state under a Communist flag. The following day, it was carried to the Panteón Civil de Dolores, where friends and family attended an informal funeral ceremony. Hundreds of admirers stood outside. In accordance with her wishes, Kahlo was cremated. Rivera, who stated that her death was "the most tragic day of my life", died three years later, in 1957. Kahlo's ashes are displayed in a pre-Columbian urn at La Casa Azul, which opened as a museum in 1958.

Recognition

Kahlo's work as an artist remained relatively unknown until the late 1970s, when her work was rediscovered by art historians and political activists. By the early 1990s, she had become a recognized figure in art history. She was also regarded as an icon for Chicanos, the feminism movement, and the LGBTQ+ community.

Kahlo's work has been celebrated internationally as emblematic of Mexican national and indigenous traditions.

Personal life

Kahlo's interests in politics and art led her to join the Mexican Communist Party in 1927, through which she met fellow Mexican artist Diego Rivera. The couple married in 1929. He was 42 and she was 22.

The couple divorced in 1939, but remarried December 8, 1940, in San Francisco, California. A year after Kahlo's death, on July 29, 1955, Rivera married Emma Hurtado, his agent since 1946.

Kahlo and Rivera had no children together.

Frida Kahlo quotes

"They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality."

"I paint flowers so they will not die."

"At the end of the day, we can endure much more than we think we can."

"Nothing is worth more than laughter."

"The most important part of the body is the brain. Of my face, I like the eyebrows and eyes."

Interesting facts about Frida Kahlo

Frida was born in Mexico, but her father was German.

Her name, which was originally spelled "Frieda" means "peace" in German.

Frida survived both polio and a bus crash.

She married a man with a name even longer than hers. Her husband's full name was Diego María de la Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez.

She exaggerated her facial hair in her self-portraits.

Because of the bright clothing she wore, she was asked by children, "Where's the circus?"

She was born and died in the same house, called "La Casa Azul" (The Blue House), which is now known as Frida Kahlo Museum.

Commemorations

Kahlo's legacy has been commemorated in several ways:

La Casa Azul, her home in Coyoacán, was opened as a museum in 1958, and has become one of the most popular museums in Mexico City, with approximately 25,000 visitors monthly.

The city dedicated a park, Parque Frida Kahlo, to her in Coyoacán in 1985. The park features a bronze statue of Kahlo.

In the United States, she became the first Hispanic woman to be honored with a U.S. postage stamp in 2001.

She was inducted into the Legacy Walk, an outdoor public display in Chicago that celebrates LGBT history and people, in 2012.

Kahlo received several commemorations on the centenary of her birth in 2007.

Notable artists such as Marina Abramovic, Alana Archer, Gabriela Gonzalez Dellosso, Yasumasa Morimura, Cris Melo, Rupert Garcia, and others have used or appropriated Kahlo's imagery into their own works.

Kahlo's life and art have inspired artists in various fields. Kahlo has also been the subject of several stage performances.

In 2018, Mattel unveiled seventeen new Barbie dolls in celebration of International Women's Day, including one of Kahlo. Critics objected to the doll's slim waist and noticeably missing unibrow.

In 2018, San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously voted to rename Phelan Avenue to Frida Kahlo Way. Frida Kahlo Way is the home of City College of San Francisco and Archbishop Riordan High School.

In 2019, Frida was featured on a mural painted by Rafael Blanco in downtown Reno, Nevada.

In 2019, Frida's "Fantasmones Siniestros" ("Sinister Ghosts") was burned to ashes, publicizing an Ethereum NFT.

In 2022, as part of a collaboration with Centre Pompidou, Swatch released a watch based on The Frame.

Solo exhibitions

4 January 2022 onwards Frida Kahlo: The Life of an Icon at Barangaroo Reserve, Sydney. Audio visual exhibition created by the Frida Kahlo Corporation.

8 February - 12 May 2019 - Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving at the Brooklyn Museum. This was the largest U.S. exhibition in a decade devoted solely to the painter and the only U.S. show to feature her Tehuana clothing, hand-painted corsets and other never-before-seen items that had been locked away after the artist's death and rediscovered in 2004.

16 June - 18 November 2018 - Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The basis for the later Brooklyn Museum exhibit.

3 February - 30 April 2016 - Frida Kahlo: Paintings and Graphic Art From Mexican Collections at the Faberge Museum, St. Petersburg. Russia's first retrospective of Kahlo's work.

27 October 2007 - 20 January 2008 - Frida Kahlo an exhibition at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 20 February - 18 May 2008; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 16 June - 28 September 2008.

1-15 November 1938 - Frida's first solo exhibit and New York debut at the Museum of Modern Art. Georgia O'Keeffe, Isamu Noguchi, and other prominent American artists attended the opening; approximately half of the paintings were sold.

Images for kids

Kahlo (on the right) and her sisters Cristina, Matilde, and Adriana, photographed by their father, 1916

Frida photographed in 1932 by her father, Guillermo

Kahlo and Rivera's houses in San Ángel; they lived there from 1934 until their divorce in 1939, after which it became his studio

1937 photograph by Toni Frissell, from a fashion shoot for Vogue

In Spanish: Frida Kahlo para niños

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Josephine Baker (born Freda Josephine McDonald; 3 June 1906 - 12 April 1975) was an American-born French entertainer, activist, and French Resistance agent. Her career was centered primarily in Europe, mostly in her adopted France. During her early career she was renowned as a dancer, and was among the most celebrated performers to headline the revues of the Folies Bergère in Paris. Her performance in the revue Un vent de folie in 1927 caused a sensation in Paris. Her costume, consisting of only a girdle of bananas, became her most iconic image and a symbol of the Jazz Age and the 1920s.

Baker was celebrated by artists and intellectuals of the era, who variously dubbed her the "Black Pearl", the "Bronze Venus", and the "Creole Goddess". Born in St. Louis, Missouri, she renounced her U.S. citizenship and became a French national after her marriage to French industrialist Jean Lion in 1937. She raised her children in France. "I have two loves," the artist once said, "my country and Paris."

Baker was the first person of color to become a worldwide entertainer and to star in a major motion picture, the 1934 Marc Allégret film Zouzou.

Baker refused to perform for segregated audiences in the United States and is noted for her contributions to the Civil Rights Movement. In 1968 she was offered unofficial leadership in the movement in the United States by Coretta Scott King, following Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. After thinking it over, Baker declined the offer out of concern for the welfare of her children.

She was also known for aiding the French Resistance during World War II. After the war, she was awarded the Croix de guerre by the French military, and was named a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur by General Charles de Gaulle.

Later years and death

In her later years, Baker converted to Roman Catholicism.

Baker was on stage at the Olympia in Paris in 1968, in Belgrade in 1973, at Carnegie Hall in 1973, at the Royal Variety Performance at the London Palladium in 1974, and at the Gala du Cirque in Paris in 1974.

On 8 April 1975, Baker starred in a revue at the Bobino in Paris, Joséphine à Bobino 1975, celebrating her 50 years in show business. The revue, financed notably by Prince Rainier, Princess Grace, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, opened to rave reviews. Demand for seating was such that fold-out chairs had to be added to accommodate spectators. The opening night audience included Sophia Loren, Mick Jagger, Shirley Bassey, Diana Ross, and Liza Minnelli.

Four days later, Baker was found lying peacefully in her bed surrounded by newspapers with glowing reviews of her performance. She was in a coma after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage. She was taken to Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, where she died, aged 68, on 12 April 1975.

She received a full Roman Catholic funeral that was held at L'Église de la Madeleine. The only American-born woman to receive full French military honors at her funeral, Baker's funeral was the occasion of a huge procession. After a family service at Saint-Charles Church in Monte Carlo, Baker was interred at Monaco's Cimetière de Monaco.

Place Joséphine Baker in the Montparnasse Quarter of Paris was named in her honor. She has also been inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame, and on 29 March 1995, into the Hall of Famous Missourians.

In 2015 she was inducted into the Legacy Walk in Chicago, Illinois, USA. The Piscine Joséphine Baker is a swimming pool along the banks of the Seine in Paris named for her.

Darren Royston, historical dance teacher at RADA credited Baker with being the Beyoncé of her day, and bringing the Charleston to Britain. Two of Baker's sons, Jean-Claude and Jarry (Jari), grew up to go into business together, running the restaurant Chez Josephine on Theatre Row, 42nd Street, New York City. It celebrates Baker's life and works.

Château des Milandes, a castle near Sarlat in the Dordogne, was Baker's home where she raised her twelve children. It is open to the public and displays her stage outfits including her banana skirt (of which there are apparently several). It also displays many family photographs and documents as well as her Legion of Honour medal. Most rooms are open for the public to walk through.

Baker continued to influence celebrities more than a century after her birth. In a 2003 interview with USA Today, Angelina Jolie cited Baker as "a model for the multiracial, multinational family she was beginning to create through adoption". Beyoncé performed Baker's banana dance at the Fashion Rocks concert at Radio City Music Hall in September 2006.

On 3 June 2017, the 111th anniversary of her birth, Google released an animated Google Doodle, which consists of a slideshow chronicling her life and achievements.

Images for kids

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Josephine Baker (born Freda Josephine McDonald; 3 June 1906 - 12 April 1975) was an American-born French entertainer, activist, and French Resistance agent. Her career was centered primarily in Europe, mostly in her adopted France. During her early career she was renowned as a dancer, and was among the most celebrated performers to headline the revues of the Folies Bergère in Paris.

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Sally Kristen Ride (May 26, 1951 - July 23, 2012) was an American astronaut and physicist. Born in Los Angeles, she joined NASA in 1978, and in 1983 became the first American woman in space. She was the third woman in space overall, after USSR cosmonauts Valentina Tereshkova (1963) and Svetlana Savitskaya (1982). Ride remains the youngest American astronaut to have traveled to space, having done so at the age of 32. After flying twice on the Orbiter Challenger, she left NASA in 1987.

Ride worked for two years at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Arms Control, then at the University of California, San Diego as a professor of physics, primarily researching nonlinear optics and Thomson scattering. She served on the committees that investigated the Challenger and Columbia Space Shuttle disasters, the only person to participate in both. Having been married to astronaut Steven Hawley during her spaceflight years and in a private, long-term relationship with former Women's Tennis Association player Tam O'Shaughnessy in her years after, she is the earliest space traveler to have been recognized as LGBT. Ride died of pancreatic cancer on July 23, 2012.

The elder child of Dale Burdell Ride and Carol Joyce Ride (née Anderson), Ride was born in Los Angeles. She had one sibling, Karen "Bear" Ride, who is a Presbyterian minister. Both parents were elders in the Presbyterian Church. Ride's mother, who was of Norwegian descent, had worked as a volunteer counselor at a women's correctional facility. Her father had been a political science professor at Santa Monica College.

Ride attended Portola Junior High (now Portola Middle School) and then Birmingham High School before graduating from the private Westlake School for Girls in Los Angeles on a scholarship. In addition to being interested in science, she was a nationally ranked tennis player. She even took a break from college to try and pursue a professional tennis career. Ride attended Swarthmore College for three semesters, took physics courses at University of California, Los Angeles, and then entered Stanford University as a junior, graduating with a bachelor's degree in English and physics. At Stanford, she earned a master's degree in 1975 and a PhD in physics in 1978 while doing research on the interaction of X-rays with the interstellar medium. Astrophysics and free electron lasers were her specific areas of study.

NASA career

Ride was selected to be an astronaut as part of NASA Astronaut Group 8, in 1978, the first class to select women. She applied after seeing an advertisement in the Stanford student newspaper, and was one of only 35 people selected out of the 8000 applications. After graduating training in 1979, becoming eligible to work as a mission specialist she served as the ground-based capsule communicator (CapCom) for the second and third Space Shuttle flights, and helped develop the Space Shuttle's "Canadarm" robot arm.

Prior to her first space flight, she was subject to media attention due to her gender. During a press conference, she was asked questions such as, "Will the flight affect your reproductive organs?" and "Do you weep when things go wrong on the job?" Despite this and the historical significance of the mission, Ride insisted that she saw herself in only one way-as an astronaut.

On June 18, 1983, she became the first American woman in space as a crew member on Space Shuttle Challenger for STS-7. Many of the people attending the launch wore T-shirts bearing the words "Ride, Sally Ride", lyrics from Wilson Pickett's song "Mustang Sally". The purpose of the mission was to deploy two communications satellites and the first Shuttle Pallet Satellite (SPAS-1), conduct experiments within the cargo bay, and test the TDRS satellite. SPAS-1 was successfully deployed, underwent experiments, then recollected and brought back to Earth.

Part of Ride's job was to operate the robotics arm to deploy and retrieve SPAS-1.

Her second space flight was STS-41-G in 1984, also on board Challenger. She spent a total of more than 343 hours in space.

Cancelled Shuttle mission

Ride had completed eight months of training for her third flight (STS-61-M, a TDRS deployment mission) when the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster occurred.

Rogers Commission

She was named to the Rogers Commission (the presidential commission investigating the Challenger disaster) and headed its subcommittee on operations. She was the only person to serve on both of the panels investigating Shuttle accidents (those for the Challenger accident and later the Columbia disaster). Following the Challenger investigation, Ride was assigned to NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., where she led NASA's first strategic planning effort, authored a report titled "NASA Leadership and America's Future in Space" and founded NASA's Office of Exploration. After Sally Ride's death in 2012, General Donald Kutyna revealed that she had discreetly provided him with key information about O-rings (namely, that they become stiff at low temperatures) that eventually led to identification of the cause of the explosion.

In 1987, Ride left her position in Washington, D.C., to work at the Stanford University Center for International Security and Arms Control. In 1989, she became a professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego, and director of the California Space Institute. From the mid-1990s until her death, Ride led two public-outreach programs for NASA-the ISS EarthKAM and GRAIL MoonKAM projects, in cooperation with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and UCSD. The programs allowed middle school students to request images of the Earth and Moon. In 1999, she acted in the season 5 finale of Touched by an Angel, titled "Godspeed". In 2003, she was asked to serve on the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. She was the president and CEO of Sally Ride Science, a company she co-founded in 2001 that creates entertaining science programs and publications for upper elementary and middle school students, with a particular focus on girls.

According to Roger Boisjoly, who was one of the engineers that warned of the technical problems that led to the Challenger disaster, after the entire workforce of Morton-Thiokol shunned him, Ride was the only public figure to show support for him when he went public with his pre-disaster warnings. Sally Ride hugged him publicly to show her support for his efforts.

Ride wrote or co-wrote seven books on space aimed at children, with the goal of encouraging children to study science.

Ride endorsed Barack Obama for U.S. President in 2008. She was a member of the Review of United States Human Space Flight Plans Committee, an independent review requested by the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) on May 7, 2009.

Personal life and death

Ride was extremely private about her personal life. In 1982, she married fellow NASA astronaut Steve Hawley. They divorced in 1987.

After Ride's death, her obituary revealed that her partner of 27 years was Tam O'Shaughnessy, a professor emerita of school psychology at San Diego State University and childhood friend, who met her when both were aspiring tennis players. O'Shaughnessy was also a science writer and, later, the co-founder of Sally Ride Science. O'Shaughnessy served as the Chief Executive Officer and Chair of the Board of Sally Ride Science. They wrote six acclaimed children's science books together. Their relationship was revealed by the company and confirmed by her sister, who said she chose to keep her personal life private, including her sickness and treatments. This made Ride the first LGBT astronaut in outer space.

Ride died on July 23, 2012, at the age of 61, in her home in La Jolla, California, seventeen months after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Following cremation, her ashes were interred next to her father at Woodlawn Memorial Cemetery, Santa Monica.

Awards and honors

Ride received numerous awards throughout her lifetime and after. She received the National Space Society's von Braun Award, the Lindbergh Eagle, and the NCAA's Theodore Roosevelt Award. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame and the Astronaut Hall of Fame and was awarded the NASA Space Flight Medal twice. Two elementary schools in the United States are named after her: Sally Ride Elementary School in The Woodlands, Texas, and Sally Ride Elementary School in Germantown, Maryland.

In 1994, Ride received the Samuel S. Beard Award for Greatest Public Service by an Individual 35 Years or Under, an award given out annually by Jefferson Awards.

On December 6, 2006, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver inducted Ride into the California Hall of Fame at the California Museum for History, Women, and the Arts.

In 2007, she was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in Dayton, Ohio.

Ride directed public outreach and educational programs for NASA's GRAIL mission, which sent twin satellites to map the moon's gravity. On December 17, 2012, the two GRAIL probes, Ebb and Flow, were directed to complete their mission by crashing on an unnamed lunar mountain near the crater Goldschmidt. NASA announced that it was naming the landing site in honor of Sally Ride. Also in December 2012, the Space Foundation bestowed upon Ride its highest honor, the General James E. Hill Lifetime Space Achievement Award.

In April 2013, the U.S. Navy announced that a research ship would be named in honor of Ride. This was done in 2014 with the christening of the oceanographic research vessel RV Sally Ride (AGOR-28).

On May 20, 2013, a "National Tribute to Sally Ride" was held at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. and on that same day, President Barack Obama announced that Ride would receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States. The medal was presented to her life partner Tam O'Shaughnessy in a ceremony at the White House on November 20, 2013. In July 2013, Flying magazine ranked Ride at number 50 on their list of the "51 Heroes of Aviation".

In 2014, Ride was inducted into the Legacy Walk, an outdoor public display that celebrates LGBT history and people.

In 2017, a Google Doodle honored her on International Women's Day.

The U.S. Postal Service issued a first-class postage stamp honoring Ride in 2018.

In 2019 Stanford University's Serra House located in Lucie Stern Hall was renamed the Sally Ride House. It was formerly named after Junípero Serra.

For their first match of March 2019, the women of the United States women's national soccer team each wore a jersey with the name of a woman they were honoring on the back; Tierna Davidson chose the name of Sally Ride.

In popular culture

When she became the first American woman in space on the Space Shuttle Challenger, many in the crowd attending the launch wore T-shirts printed, "Ride, Sally Ride", a play on the lyric of the 1965 song "Mustang Sally".

Billy Joel's 1989 song "We Didn't Start the Fire" mentions her.

In 1999, Ride appeared as herself on the Touched By An Angel episode "Godspeed".

In 2013, Janelle Monáe released a song called "Sally Ride".

Also in 2013, astronauts Chris Hadfield and Catherine Coleman performed a song called "Ride On". The song was later released as part of Hadfield's album Space Sessions: Songs from a Tin Can under the name Ride That Lightning.

Ride's space flight is a central event in the 2016 novel Our Lady of the Inferno.

In 2017, a "Women of NASA" LEGO set went on sale featuring (among other things) mini-figurines of Ride, Margaret Hamilton, Mae Jemison, and Nancy Grace Roman.

In 2019, Mattel released a Barbie doll in Ride's likeness as part of their "Inspiring Women" series.

In the 2020 movie Valley Girl, she is referred to as the first woman astronaut and a valley girl, since she was from Encino.

Images for kids

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Sally Kristen Ride (May 26, 1951 - July 23, 2012) was an American astronaut and physicist. Born in Los Angeles, she joined NASA in 1978, and in 1983 became the first American woman in space. She was the third woman in space overall, after USSR cosmonauts Valentina Tereshkova (1963) and Svetlana Savitskaya (1982).

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Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford; February 18, 1931 - August 5, 2019), known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987); she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.

Born and raised in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison graduated from Howard University in 1953 with a B.A. in English. She earned a master's degree in American Literature from Cornell University in 1955. In 1957 she returned to Howard University, was married, and had two children before divorcing in 1964. Morrison became the first black female editor in fiction at Random House in New York City in the late 1960s. She developed her own reputation as an author in the 1970s and '80s. Her work Beloved was made into a film in 1998. Morrison's works are praised for addressing the harsh consequences of racism in the United States and the Black American experience.

The National Endowment for the Humanities selected Morrison for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities, in 1996. She was honored with the National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters the same year. President Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom on May 29, 2012. She received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2016. Morrison was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2020.

Early years

Toni Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford, the second of four children from a working-class, Black family, in Lorain, Ohio, to Ramah (née Willis) and George Wofford. Her mother was born in Greenville, Alabama, and moved north with her family as a child. She was a homemaker and a devout member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. George Wofford grew up in Cartersville, Georgia. George Wofford moved to the racially integrated town of Lorain, Ohio, in the hope of escaping racism and securing gainful employment in Ohio's burgeoning industrial economy. He worked odd jobs and as a welder for U.S. Steel. Traumatized by his experiences of racism, in a 2015 interview Morrison said her father hated whites so much he would not let them in the house.

When Morrison was about two years old, her family's landlord set fire to the house in which they lived, while they were home, because her parents could not afford to pay rent. Her family responded to what she called this "bizarre form of evil" by laughing at the landlord rather than falling into despair. Morrison later said her family's response demonstrated how to keep your integrity and claim your own life in the face of acts of such "monumental crudeness."

Morrison's parents instilled in her a sense of heritage and language through telling traditional African-American folktales, ghost stories, and singing songs. Morrison also read frequently as a child; among her favorite authors were Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy.

She became a Catholic at the age of 12 and took the baptismal name Anthony (after Anthony of Padua), which led to her nickname, Toni.

Attending Lorain High School, she was on the debate team, the yearbook staff, and in the drama club.

Adulthood, Cornell years, and editing career: 1949-1975

In 1949, she enrolled at Howard University in Washington, D.C., seeking the company of fellow black intellectuals. It was while at Howard that she encountered racially segregated restaurants and buses for the first time. She graduated in 1953 with a B.A. in English and went on to earn a Master of Arts from Cornell University in 1955. Her master's thesis was titled " Virginia Woolf's and William Faulkner's treatment of the alienated." She taught English, first at Texas Southern University in Houston from 1955 to 1957, and then at Howard University for the next seven years. While teaching at Howard, she met Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect, whom she married in 1958. Their first son was born in 1961 and she was pregnant with their second son when she and Harold divorced in 1964.

After her divorce and the birth of her son Slade in 1965, Morrison began working as an editor for L. W. Singer, a textbook division of publisher Random House, in Syracuse, New York. Two years later, she transferred to Random House in New York City, where she became their first black woman senior editor in the fiction department.

In that capacity, Morrison played a vital role in bringing Black literature into the mainstream. One of the first books she worked on was the groundbreaking Contemporary African Literature (1972), a collection that included work by Nigerian writers Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, and South African playwright Athol Fugard. She fostered a new generation of Afro-American writers, including poet and novelist Toni Cade Bambara, radical activist Angela Davis, Black Panther Huey Newton and novelist Gayl Jones, whose writing Morrison discovered. She also brought to publication the 1975 autobiography of the outspoken boxing champion Muhammad Ali, The Greatest: My Own Story. In addition, she published and promoted the work of Henry Dumas, a little-known novelist and poet who in 1968 had been shot to death by a transit officer in the New York City Subway.

Among other books that Morrison developed and edited is The Black Book (1974), an anthology of photographs, illustrations, essays, and documents of Black life in the United States from the time of slavery to the 1920s. Random House had been uncertain about the project but its publication met with a good reception. Alvin Beam reviewed the anthology for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, writing: "Editors, like novelists, have brain children - books they think up and bring to life without putting their own names on the title page. Mrs. Morrison has one of these in the stores now, and magazines and newsletters in the publishing trade are ecstatic, saying it will go like hotcakes."

First writings and teaching, 1970-1986

Morrison had begun writing fiction as part of an informal group of poets and writers at Howard University who met to discuss their work. She attended one meeting with a short story about a Black girl who longed to have blue eyes. Morrison later developed the story as her first novel, The Bluest Eye, getting up every morning at 4 am to write, while raising two children on her own.

The Bluest Eye was published by Holt, Rinehart, and Winston in 1970, when Morrison was aged 39. It was favorably reviewed in The New York Times by John Leonard, who praised Morrison's writing style as being "a prose so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry ... But The Bluest Eye is also history, sociology, folklore, nightmare and music." The novel did not sell well at first, but the City University of New York put The Bluest Eye on its reading list for its new Black studies department, as did other colleges, which boosted sales. The book also brought Morrison to the attention of the acclaimed editor Robert Gottlieb at Knopf, an imprint of the publisher Random House. Gottlieb later edited most of Morrison's novels.

In 1975, Morrison's second novel Sula (1973), about a friendship between two Black women, was nominated for the National Book Award. Her third novel, Song of Solomon (1977), follows the life of Macon "Milkman" Dead III, from birth to adulthood, as he discovers his heritage. This novel brought her national acclaim, being a main selection of the Book of the Month Club, the first novel by a Black writer to be so chosen since Richard Wright's Native Son in 1940. Song of Solomon also won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

At its 1979 commencement ceremonies, Barnard College awarded Morrison its highest honor, the Barnard Medal of Distinction.

Morrison gave her next novel, Tar Baby (1981), a contemporary setting. In it, a looks-obsessed fashion model, Jadine, falls in love with Son, a penniless drifter who feels at ease with being Black.

In 1983, Morrison left publishing to devote more time to writing, while living in a converted boathouse on the Hudson River in Nyack, New York. She taught English at two branches of the State University of New York (SUNY) and at Rutgers University's New Brunswick campus. In 1984, she was appointed to an Albert Schweitzer chair at the University at Albany, SUNY.

Morrison's first play, Dreaming Emmett, is about the 1955 murder of Emmett Till. The play was performed in 1986 at the State University of New York at Albany, where she was teaching at the time. Morrison was also a visiting professor at Bard College from 1986 to 1988.

The Beloved Trilogy and the Nobel Prize: 1987-1998

In 1987, Morrison published her most celebrated novel, Beloved. It was inspired by the true story of an enslaved African-American woman, Margaret Garner, whose story Morrison had discovered when compiling The Black Book.

Beloved was a critical success and a bestseller for 25 weeks. Canadian writer Margaret Atwood wrote in a review for The New York Times, "Ms. Morrison's versatility and technical and emotional range appear to know no bounds. If there were any doubts about her stature as a pre-eminent American novelist, of her own or any other generation, Beloved will put them to rest."

Not all critics praised Beloved, however. African-American conservative social critic Stanley Crouch, for instance, complained in his review in The New Republic that the novel "reads largely like a melodrama lashed to the structural conceits of the miniseries," and that Morrison "perpetually interrupts her narrative with maudlin ideological commercials."

Despite overall high acclaim, Beloved failed to win the prestigious National Book Award or the National Book Critics Circle Award. Forty-eight Black critics and writers, among them Maya Angelou, protested the omission in a statement that The New York Times published on January 24, 1988. "Despite the international stature of Toni Morrison, she has yet to receive the national recognition that her five major works of fiction entirely deserve," they wrote. Two months later, Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It also won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.

Beloved is the first of three novels about love and African-American history, sometimes called the Beloved Trilogy. Morrison said that they are intended to be read together, explaining, "The conceptual connection is the search for the beloved - the part of the self that is you, and loves you, and is always there for you." The second novel in the trilogy, Jazz, came out in 1992. Told in language that imitates the rhythms of jazz music, the novel is about a love triangle during the Harlem Renaissance in New York City. That year she also published her first book of literary criticism, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), an examination of the African-American presence in white American literature. (In 2016, magazine noted that Playing in the Dark was among Morrison's most-assigned texts on U.S. college campuses, together with several of her novels and her 1993 Nobel Prize lecture.)

Before the third novel of the Beloved Trilogy was published, Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. The citation praised her as an author "who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality." She was the first Black woman of any nationality to win the prize. In her acceptance speech, Morrison said: "We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives."

In her Nobel lecture, Morrison talked about the power of storytelling. To make her point, she told a story. She spoke about a blind, old, Black woman who is approached by a group of young people. They demand of her, "Is there no context for our lives? No song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong? ... Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world. Make up a story."

In 1996, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Morrison for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for "distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities." Morrison's lecture, entitled "The Future of Time: Literature and Diminished Expectations," began with the aphorism: "Time, it seems, has no future." She cautioned against the misuse of history to diminish expectations of the future. Morrison was also honored with the 1996 National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, which is awarded to a writer "who has enriched our literary heritage over a life of service, or a corpus of work."

The third novel of her Beloved Trilogy, Paradise, about citizens of an all-Black town, came out in 1997. The following year, Morrison was on the cover of magazine, making her only the second female writer of fiction and second Black writer of fiction to appear on what was perhaps the most significant U.S. magazine cover of the era.

Beloved onscreen and "the Oprah effect"

Also in 1998, the movie adaptation of Beloved was released, directed by Jonathan Demme and co-produced by Oprah Winfrey, who had spent ten years bringing it to the screen. Winfrey also stars as the main character, Sethe, alongside Danny Glover as Sethe's lover, Paul D, and Thandiwe Newton as Beloved.

The movie flopped at the box office. A review in The Economist suggested that "most audiences are not eager to endure nearly three hours of a cerebral film with an original storyline featuring supernatural themes [...] and slavery." Film critic Janet Maslin, however, in her New York Times review "No Peace from a Brutal Legacy" called it a "transfixing, deeply felt adaptation of Toni Morrison's novel. ... Its linchpin is of course Oprah Winfrey, who had the clout and foresight to bring 'Beloved' to the screen and has the dramatic presence to hold it together." Another review suggested that Beloved was not a genre ghost story but the supernatural was used to explore deeper issues and the non linear structure of Morrison's story had a purpose.

In 1996, television talk-show host Oprah Winfrey selected Song of Solomon for her newly launched Book Club, which became a popular feature on her Oprah Winfrey Show. An average of 13 million viewers watched the show's book club segments. As a result, when Winfrey selected Morrison's earliest novel The Bluest Eye in 2000, it sold another 800,000 paperback copies. John Young wrote in the African American Review in 2001 that Morrison's career experienced the boost of " The Oprah Effect, ... enabling Morrison to reach a broad, popular audience."

Winfrey selected a total of four of Morrison's novels over six years, giving Morrison's novels a bigger sales boost than they got from her Nobel Prize win in 1993. The novelist also appeared three times on Winfrey's show. Winfrey said, "For all those who asked the question 'Toni Morrison again?'... I say with certainty there would have been no Oprah's Book Club if this woman had not chosen to share her love of words with the world." Morrison called the book club a "reading revolution."

The early 21st century

Morrison continued to explore different art forms, such as providing texts for original scores of classical music. She collaborated with André Previn on the song cycle Honey and Rue, which premiered with Kathleen Battle in January 1992, and on Four Songs, premiered at Carnegie Hall with Sylvia McNair in November 1994. Both Sweet Talk: Four Songs on Text and Spirits In the Well (1997) were written for Jessye Norman with music by Richard Danielpour, and, alongside Maya Angelou and Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Morrison provided the text for composer Judith Weir's woman.life.song commissioned by Carnegie Hall for Jessye Norman, which premiered in April 2000.

Morrison returned to Margaret Garner's life story, the basis of her novel Beloved, to write the libretto for a new opera, Margaret Garner. Completed in 2002, with music by Richard Danielpour, the opera was premièred on May 7, 2005, at the Detroit Opera House with Denyce Graves in the title role.

Love, Morrison's first novel since Paradise, came out in 2003. In 2004, she put together a children's book called Remember to mark the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision in 1954 that declared racially segregated public schools to be unconstitutional.

From 1997 to 2003, Morrison was an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University.

In June 2005, the University of Oxford awarded Morrison an honorary Doctor of Letters degree.

In the spring 2006, The New York Times Book Review named Beloved the best work of American fiction published in the previous 25 years, as chosen by a selection of prominent writers, literary critics, and editors. In his essay about the choice, "In Search of the Best," critic A. O. Scott said: "Any other outcome would have been startling since Morrison's novel has inserted itself into the American canon more completely than any of its potential rivals. With remarkable speed, 'Beloved' has, less than 20 years after its publication, become a staple of the college literary curriculum, which is to say a classic. This triumph is commensurate with its ambition since it was Morrison's intention in writing it precisely to expand the range of classic American literature, to enter, as a living Black woman, the company of dead white males like Faulkner, Melville, Hawthorne and Twain."

In November 2006, Morrison visited the Louvre museum in Paris as the second in its "Grand Invité" program to guest-curate a month-long series of events across the arts on the theme of "The Foreigner's Home", about which The New York Times said: "In tapping her own African-American culture, Ms. Morrison is eager to credit 'foreigners' with enriching the countries where they settle."

Morrison's novel A Mercy, released in 2008, is set in the Virginia colonies of 1682. Diane Johnson, in her review in Vanity Fair, called A Mercy "a poetic, visionary, mesmerizing tale that captures, in the cradle of our present problems and strains, the natal curse put on us back then by the Indian tribes, Africans, Dutch, Portuguese, and English competing to get their footing in the New World against a hostile landscape and the essentially tragic nature of human experience."

Princeton years

From 1989 until her retirement in 2006, Morrison held the Robert F. Goheen Chair in the Humanities at Princeton University. She said she did not think much of modern fiction writers who reference their own lives instead of inventing new material, and she used to tell her creative writing students, "I don't want to hear about your little life, OK?" Similarly, she chose not to write about her own life in a memoir or autobiography.

Though based in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton, Morrison did not regularly offer writing workshops to students after the late 1990s, a fact that earned her some criticism. Rather, she conceived and developed the Princeton Atelier, a program that brings together students with writers and performing artists. Together the students and the artists produce works of art that are presented to the public after a semester of collaboration.

Inspired by her curatorship at the Louvre Museum, Morrison returned to Princeton in the fall 2008 to lead a small seminar, also entitled "The Foreigner's Home".

On November 17, 2017, Princeton University dedicated Morrison Hall (a building previously called West College) in her honor.

Final years: 2010-2019

In May 2010, Morrison appeared at PEN World Voices for a conversation with Marlene van Niekerk and Kwame Anthony Appiah about South African literature and specifically van Niekerk's 2004 novel Agaat.

Morrison wrote books for children with her younger son, Slade Morrison, who was a painter and a musician. Slade died of pancreatic cancer on December 22, 2010, aged 45, when Morrison's novel Home (2012) was half-completed.

In May 2011, Morrison received an Honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Rutgers University-New Brunswick. During the commencement ceremony, she delivered a speech on the "pursuit of life, liberty, meaningfulness, integrity, and truth."

In 2011, Morrison worked with opera director Peter Sellars and Malian singer-songwriter Rokia Traoré on Desdemona, taking a fresh look at William Shakespeare's tragedy . The trio focused on the relationship between Othello's wife Desdemona and her African nursemaid, Barbary, who is only briefly referenced in Shakespeare. The play, a mix of words, music and song, premiered in Vienna in 2011.

Morrison had stopped working on her latest novel when her son died in 2010, later explaining, "I stopped writing until I began to think, He would be really put out if he thought that he had caused me to stop. 'Please, Mom, I'm dead, could you keep going ...?'"

She completed Home and dedicated it to her son Slade. Published in 2012, it is the story of a Korean War veteran in the segregated United States of the 1950s who tries to save his sister from brutal medical experiments at the hands of a white doctor.

In August 2012, Oberlin College became the home base of the Toni Morrison Society, an international literary society founded in 1993, dedicated to scholarly research of Morrison's work.

Morrison's eleventh novel, God Help the Child, was published in 2015. It follows Bride, an executive in the fashion and beauty industry whose mother tormented her as a child for being dark-skinned, a trauma that has continued to dog Bride.

Morrison was a member of the editorial advisory board of The Nation, a magazine started in 1865 by Northern abolitionists.

Personal life

While teaching at Howard University from 1957 to 1964, she met Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect, who she married in 1958. She took his last name and became known as Toni Morrison. Their first son, Harold Ford, was born in 1961 (who is married to the economist Cecilia Rouse). She was pregnant when she and Harold divorced in 1964. Her second son, Slade Kevin, was born in 1965.

Morrison began working as an editor for L.W. Singer Company, a textbook division of Random House in Syracuse, New York. She moved with her sons as her career took her to different positions in different places.

Her son Slade Morrison died of pancreatic cancer on December 22, 2010, when Morrison was halfway through writing her novel Home. She stopped work on the novel for a year or two before completing it; that novel was published in 2012.

Death and memorial

Morrison died at Montefiore Medical Center in The Bronx, New York City, on August 5, 2019, from complications of pneumonia. She was 88 years old.

A memorial tribute was held for Morrison on November 21, 2019, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. At this gathering she was eulogized by, among others, Oprah Winfrey, Angela Davis, Michael Ondaatje, David Remnick, Fran Lebowitz, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Edwidge Danticat. The jazz saxophonist David Murray performed a musical tribute.

Documentary films

Morrison was interviewed by Margaret Busby in a 1988 documentary film by Sindamani Bridglal, entitled Identifiable Qualities, shown on Channel 4.

Morrison was the subject of a film titled Imagine - Toni Morrison Remembers, directed by Jill Nicholls and shown on BBC One television on July 15, 2015, in which Morrison talked to Alan Yentob about her life and work.

In 2016, Oberlin College received a grant to complete a documentary film begun in 2014, The Foreigner's Home, about Morrison's intellectual and artistic vision, explored in the context of the 2006 exhibition she guest-curated at the Louvre. The film's executive producer was Jonathan Demme. It was directed by Oberlin College Cinema Studies faculty Geoff Pingree and Rian Brown, and incorporates footage shot by Morrison's first-born son Harold Ford Morrison, who also consulted on the film.

In 2019, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders' documentary Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. People featured in the film include Morrison, Angela Davis, Oprah Winfrey, Sonia Sanchez, and Walter Mosley, among others.

Awards and nominations

1975: Ohioana Book Award for Sula

1977: National Book Critics Circle Award for Song of Solomon

1977: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award

1982: Ohio Women's Hall of Fame inductee

1988: Robert F. Kennedy Book Award

1988: Helmerich Award

1988: American Book Award for Beloved

1988: Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Race Relations for Beloved

1988: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Beloved

1988: Frederic G. Melcher Book Award for Beloved

1988: Honorary Doctor of Laws at University of Pennsylvania

1989: Honorary Doctor of Letters at Harvard University

1993: Nobel Prize in Literature

1993: Commander of the Arts and Letters, Paris

1994: Condorcet Medal, Paris

1994: Rhegium Julii Prize for Literature

1996: Jefferson Lecture

1996: National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters

1997: Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Gustavus Adolphus College.

2000: National Humanities Medal

2002: 100 Greatest African Americans, list by Molefi Kete Asante

2005: Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement

2005: Honorary Doctorate of Letters from University of Oxford

2008: New Jersey Hall of Fame inductee

2009: Norman Mailer Prize, Lifetime Achievement

2010: Officier de la Légion d'Honneur

2010: Institute for Arts and Humanities Medal for Distinguished Contributions to the Arts and Humanities from the Pennsylvania State University

2011: Library of Congress Creative Achievement Award for Fiction

2011: Honorary Doctor of Letters at Rutgers University Graduation Commencement

2011: Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of Geneva

2012: Presidential Medal of Freedom

2013: The Nichols-Chancellor's Medal awarded by Vanderbilt University

2013: Honorary Doctorate of Literature awarded by Princeton University

2013: PEN Oakland - Josephine Miles Literary Award for Home

2013: Writer in Residence at the American Academy in Rome

2014: Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award given by the National Book Critics Circle

2016: PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction

2016: The Charles Eliot Norton Professorship in Poetry (The Norton Lectures), Harvard University

2016: The Edward MacDowell Medal, awarded by the MacDowell Colony

2018: The Thomas Jefferson Medal, awarded by The American Philosophical Society

2020: National Women's Hall of Fame inductee

2020: Designation of "Toni Morrison Day" in Ohio, to be celebrated annually on her birthday, February 18

2021: Featured on "Cleveland is the Reason" mural in downtown Cleveland (with other notable Cleveland area figures)

2023: Featured on a USPS Forever stamp, designed by art director Ethel Kessler with photography by Deborah Feingold

Nominations

In Spanish: Toni Morrison para niños

Images for kids

Street art depicting Toni Morrison in Vitoria, Spain.

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(1931-2019). American author Toni Morrison was noted for her examination of the African American experience-particularly the female experience-within the black community. Her use of fantasy, her intricate poetic style, and her rich interweaving of the mythic gave her stories great strength and texture. In 1993 she won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio. She grew up in a poor family but graduated from Howard University in Washington, D.C., in 1953 and received a master's degree in English from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, in 1955. After several years as an English instructor, Morrison became an editor and wrote in her spare time.

Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), was a criticism of middle-class black life and of human intolerance. With the 1977 publication of Song of Solomon, which is told by a male narrator in search of his identity, Morrison received popular as well as critical acclaim. Tar Baby (1981), set on a Caribbean island, explores conflicts of race, class, and sex. Beloved won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It is based on the true story of a runaway slave who, at the point of recapture, kills her infant daughter in order to spare her a life of slavery. Morrison's later works include A Mercy (2008), which deals with slavery in 17th-century America, and Home (2012), about a traumatized Korean War veteran who encounters racism after returning home and later overcomes apathy to rescue his sister. God Help the Child (2015) examines the consequences of child abuse and neglect through the tale of Bride, a black girl with dark skin who is born to light-skinned parents.

Besides her novels, Morrison published a work of criticism, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, in 1992. Many of her essays and speeches were collected in What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction (edited by Carolyn C. Denard), published in 2008. In addition, Morrison released several children's books, including Who's Got Game?: The Ant or the Grasshopper? and Who's Got Game?: The Lion or the Mouse?, both written with her son and published in 2003. Remember (2004), also aimed at children, uses archival photographs to chronicle the hardships of black students during the integration of the U.S. public school system. Morrison wrote the libretto for Margaret Garner (2005), an opera about the same story that inspired Beloved.

In 2010 Morrison was made an officer of the French Legion of Honour. Two years later she was awarded the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom. Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am (2019) is a documentary about her life and career. Morrison died on August 5, 2019, in New York City.

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(1931-2019). American author Toni Morrison was noted for her examination of the African American experience-particularly the female experience-within the black community. Her use of fantasy, her intricate poetic style, and her rich interweaving of the mythic gave her stories great strength and texture. In 1993 she won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

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Birthday - February 18, 1931 Who is Toni Morrison? Toni Morrison is an accomplished novelist, editor, and professor, and her writings are usually noted for their African American characters.

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Kids learn about the biography of Josephine Baker including her childhood, career as a dancer, life in France, work as a World War 2 spy, and civil rights activist.

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Josephine Baker Facts for Kids | KidzSearch.com

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Josephine Baker (June 3, 1906 - April 12, 1975) was an American-born French dancer, singer, and actress. She was born Freda Josephine McDonald in St. Louis, Missouri. Fluent in both English and French, Baker became an international musical and political icon. She was given such nicknames as the "Bronze Venus", the "Black Pearl", and the "Créole Goddess".

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Frida Kahlo died on 13 July 1954, after suffering more and more health problems. Her husband died three years later. Today Frida and Diego's home, La Casa Azul, is a very popular museum, dedicated to Frida's life and work.

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€5.95 | FREE On orders over €50

explore the outdoors with a little bit of imaginative play inside

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€5.95 | FREE On orders over €50 explore the outdoors with a little bit of imaginative play inside This website uses JavaScript to apply discounts. To be eligible for discounts, please enable JavaScript for your browser.

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Frida Kahlo | Biography, Paintings, & Facts

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Frida Kahlo, Mexican painter known for her uncompromising and brilliantly colored self-portraits that confront such themes as identity, the human body, and death. Some of her notable paintings included Frieda and Diego Rivera (1931) and The Two Fridas (1939). Read more about Kahlo’s life and career.

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In 1938 Fitzgerald recorded a song based on the popular "A-Tisket, A-Tasket" nursery rhyme. That recording sold more than a million copies, and Fitzgerald became famous. During the 1940s she toured the United States with a popular jazz group. Fitzgerald also performed outside the country and soon became an international star. Audiences enjoyed the singer's rare ability to glide between low and high notes. Fitzgerald also became a master of "scat," which is a way of using the voice like an instrument by singing meaningless syllables.

In the 1950s, Fitzgerald began recording the "songbooks," a series of albums celebrating the works of well-known American composers. One songbook was devoted to the music of brothers Ira and George Gershwin. Her versions reportedly inspired Ira to say, "I never knew how good our songs were until I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing them." She also sang the music of Cole Porter, Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin, and others.

During her long career Fitzgerald recorded more than 100 albums of several kinds of music, including jazz, ballads, show tunes, and pop songs. She performed with such artists as jazz greats Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie as well as singers Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby. In addition to winning many Grammy awards for her recordings, Fitzgerald was honored with lifetime achievement awards by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Despite health problems, she continued to record and perform in her later years. Fitzgerald died on June 15, 1996, in Beverly Hills, California.

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In 1938 Fitzgerald recorded a song based on the popular "A-Tisket, A-Tasket" nursery rhyme. That recording sold more than a million copies, and Fitzgerald became famous. During the 1940s she toured the United States with a popular jazz group. Fitzgerald also performed outside the country and soon became an international star.

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Birthday: April 25, 1917 Who was Ella Fitzgerald? Ella Fitzgerald is "The First Lady of Song," best known for her vocal talents, including an impressively wide vocal range partnered with a uniquely sweet voice and a whimsical flair to her singing.

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Margaret Mitchell, in full Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell Marsh, (born November 8, 1900, Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.-died August 16, 1949, Atlanta), American author of the enormously popular novel Gone With the Wind (1936). The novel earned Mitchell a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize, and it was the source of the classic film of the same name released in 1939.

Mitchell grew up in a family of storytellers who regaled her with firsthand accounts of their experiences during the American Civil War, which had ended just 35 years before her birth. An active tomboy, she played in the earthen fortifications that still surrounded her hometown of Atlanta and often went horseback riding with Confederate veterans. She also was a voracious reader and wrote numerous stories and plays throughout her youth.

Mitchell graduated from Atlanta's Washington Seminary in 1918 and enrolled at Smith College in Massachusetts. When her mother died the following year, Mitchell returned to Atlanta to keep house for her father and brother. Bored with her domestic duties and the Atlanta social scene, she characterized herself as a "dynamo going to waste." In 1921 she caused a scandal by performing a risqué dance at a local debutante ball.

In 1922 Mitchell wed Berrien Upshaw, but the marriage quickly soured amid allegations of his alcoholism and physical abusiveness. They separated, and with the assistance of John Marsh, who had been best man at her wedding, Mitchell accepted a position as a reporter for the Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine. In the summer of 1925, Mitchell and Marsh married.

In the spring of 1926, an ankle injury, aggravated by arthritis, led her to resign from the newspaper. She turned her attention to writing a novel about the Civil War and Reconstruction from a Southern point of view. She set the story in her native Georgia because she knew so much of its history from the family tales she had heard growing up; she also felt that Virginia had received too much attention in previous Civil War narratives. As originally drafted, the novel featured Pansy O'Hara, a spoiled and strong-willed coquette who comes of age just as her family's life on a cotton plantation is ravaged by war. Over a period of nine years, Mitchell worked at her novel sporadically, composing episodes out of sequence and often drafting multiple versions of single scenes.

The manuscript came to the attention of the Macmillan publishing company through the recommendation of its associate editor Lois Dwight Cole, a close friend of Mitchell's. Cole had not yet read the unnamed and unfinished novel but had confidence in Mitchell's storytelling ability and convinced Harold Latham, Macmillan's editor in chief, that it was sure to be worth reading. On a visit to Atlanta in the spring of 1935, Latham persuaded Mitchell to submit her work in progress for consideration.

Although Mitchell's submission consisted of a disorganized collection of draft chapters, the Macmillan company saw potential in her writing and, that summer, offered her a publishing contract. Underestimating the work that would be required to complete the novel, Mitchell agreed to have it ready for publication the following spring. She spent the next seven months in a frantic state as she endeavoured to complete the narrative, fact-check each of the historical details referenced in the novel, and decide on a title. Macmillan liked Tomorrow Is Another Day, while Mitchell preferred Gone With the Wind, based on a line in Ernest Dowson's poem "Cynara" (formally, "Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae sub Regno Cynarae," published in 1891). She also was eager to find a better name for Pansy and proposed Scarlett as a replacement. Cole initially rejected the suggestion, but she eventually agreed to let it stand.

Mitchell's novel was published as Gone With the Wind on June 30, 1936. Scarlett's story of survival amid the brutalities of war and its aftermath struck a chord with readers around the world. Fifty thousand copies were sold in one day; within six months, one million copies had been printed. The book went on to sell more copies than any other novel in U.S. publishing history. By the turn of the 21st century, more than 30 million copies had been sold worldwide in more than 40 languages.

Within a month of the novel's release, Mitchell sold the motion-picture rights to producer David O. Selznick for $50,000, the highest amount ever paid to a debut novelist at the time. Mitchell later bristled at rumours that Selznick had been willing to pay $100,000 and that other producers had offered to acquire the rights from him for $150,000. She also was displeased about the shoddy wording of the contract she had signed with Selznick. Though unwilling to admit she had made a mistake by selling the rights so quickly, Mitchell resented the situation. She also worried that the film would not be true to her novel or live up to public expectations. To Selznick's dismay, she declined to be publicly associated with the movie's production.

The film, starring Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable, premiered in Atlanta on December 15, 1939, after an unprecedented period of advance promotion, including the highly publicized search for an actress to play Scarlett. The movie was an immediate box-office smash and, at the 1940 Academy Awards ceremony, won 8 of the 13 Oscars for which it was nominated and two special awards. In gratitude, Selznick offered to give the author his Academy Award for best picture. She declined but, in 1942, did accept a bonus payment of $50,000 that he sent her as a gesture of appreciation. For almost three decades, numerous rereleases in the United States and abroad kept the film atop the list of all-time moneymakers.

After the book's initial launch, Mitchell declined to make any promotional appearances and, beginning in 1937, to sign any more copies of the book (subject to occasional exceptions for foreign editions). As a result, she developed a reputation for being a recluse overwhelmed by her celebrity status. In reality, Mitchell simply disliked the spotlight and felt her time was better spent responding to the thousands of fan letters she received and managing what quickly became an international publishing empire. She spent a substantial portion of her time pursuing legal actions against foreign publishers who produced unauthorized or substandard editions of the novel. Her efforts to protect her literary rights overseas called attention to the inadequacy of copyright protections for American authors and inspired Congress to enact legislative improvements.

For many years after Gone With the Wind's release, Mitchell insisted that, because of the disruption the book caused in her life, she had no intention of ever writing again. By the late 1940s, though, much of the excitement had waned, and she was considering ideas for a new novel. On August 11, 1949, Mitchell was crossing the street on her way to a movie theatre when she was struck by a speeding car. She suffered extensive internal injuries, including a skull fracture, and died five days later. Her death was lamented in newspapers around the world; U.S. Pres. Harry S. Truman lauded Mitchell as "an artist who gave the world an eternal book."

Decades after Mitchell's death, her estate authorized novelist Alexandra Ripley to write Scarlett: The Sequel to Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (1991), which was an international best seller but panned by critics. In 2001 Mitchell's estate, claiming copyright infringement, sued to block the publication of Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parodic sequel to Gone With the Wind told from a former slave's perspective. The case was settled out of court. Mitchell's estate later authorized two additional derivative novels: Rhett Butler's People (2007) and Ruth's Journey (2014), both of which were written by historical novelist Donald McCaig.

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Margaret Mitchell | Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author of Gone With the Wind

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Margaret Mitchell, American author of the enormously popular novel Gone With the Wind (1936). The novel earned Mitchell a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize, and it was the source of the classic film of the same name released in 1939.