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Algernon Charles Swinburne, 1837-1909

Celebrating Springtime

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Happy April Fool's Day!

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1772-1834

World Poetry Day - 21st March

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Elizabeth Bowen, 1899-1973

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

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Simone de Beauvoir, 1908-1986

International Women's Day - 8th March

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How are you gearing up for Spring?

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Maya Angelou, 1928-2014

Commemorating Black History Month

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John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963

President's Day - 17th February

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Happy Valentine's Day!

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Jesse Jackson, 1941-

Celebrating Black History Month

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Have you ever wanted to know more about your favorite classic authors? Each month, we share various facts about the lives and works of our Author of the Month.

During January, we honored Anne Brontë as our Author of the Month to tie in with the bicentenary of Brontë’s birth. Anne was born on January 17th 1820 in Yorkshire and some of the most interesting things we learned about her this month were…

Anne is the youngest sibling and was known to be the most delicate of all the Brontë children, and after the death of her eldest sisters she was educated at home rather than at Cowan Bridge with Emily and Charlotte. 

In 1839, Anne Brontë began work as a governess for the Ingham family. This experience influenced Anne to write her first novel, 'Agnes Grey,' which described the experience of being a governess as being a miserable one--spending all day with spoiled children she was forbidden to punish. 

In 1845, Charlotte discovered a manuscript of Emily's poems and made it her mission to publish a collection of the sisters’ poetry. By May 1846, at the sisters’ expense, a collection of the poems of 'Curer, Ellis, and Acton Bell' was published.

After Branwell Brontë's death on 24 September 1848 and Emily's on 19 December, symptoms of pulmonary tuberculosis became evident in Anne's declining health. Charlotte took her to the sea to recover, and it was there Anne Brontë died on 28 May 1849 at their lodging at 2 St Nicholas Cliff, Scarborough—with almost her last breath saying she was happy, and thanking God that 'death was come, and come so gently.'

For the month of February, we are exploring the life and work of Victor Hugo. Be sure to follow the #ClassicsInContext hashtag on Twitter and Facebook to learn more!

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A Very Short Fact: On this day in 1736 (Old Style), English-born American political activist and revolutionary Thomas Paine was born in Norfolk. He is best remembered for his pamphlet Common Sense, which vocalized rebellious demands for independence from Great Britain.

“These questions about the politics of knowledge will arise repeatedly in subsequent chapters. For the moment, let us consider just one other example – the philosopher and firebrand Thomas Paine. An unsuccessful corset-maker, sacked tax-collector, and occasional political writer, Paine left his native England to start a new life in America in 1774. On his arrival in Philadelphia, he found work as the editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine. A couple of years later, his polemical pamphlet Common Sense (1776) was a key factor in persuading the American colonists to go to war against the British government, and established Paine as the bestselling author of the age. An associate of Benjamin Rush, Thomas Jefferson, and others of the founding fathers of the United States of America, Paine’s democratic and anti-monarchical political philosophy shaped the Declaration of Independence. After politics, Paine’s other great passions were science and engineering. He had attended popular lectures on Newton and astronomy back in England, and he spent many years of his life working on a design for a single-span iron bridge, inspired by the delicacy and strength of one of the great works of nature – the spider’s web. His whole philosophy was a scientific one. He saw revolutions in governments paralleling the revolutions of celestial bodies in the heavens. Each was an inevitable, natural, and law-governed process. Later in his life, having had a hand in both the American and French revolutions, he turned his sights from monarchy to Christianity. The institutions of Christianity were as offensive to his enlightened and Newtonian sensibilities as were those of monarchical government. In his Age of Reason (1794), Paine complained of ‘the continual persecution carried on by the Church, for several hundred years, against the sciences and against the professors of science.’” — From ‘Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction’ by Thomas Dixon

[Pg. 10-1 — From ‘Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction’ by Thomas Dixon.]

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Wernher von Braun, 1912-1977

International Outer Space Day - 27th January

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A Very Short Fact: On this day in 1561, English philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon was born in London. Often called the father of empiricism, Bacon is credited with developing the scientific method.

“The linkage of scientific discovery to practical application is perhaps most often associated with Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626). Born into a well-placed family, educated as a lawyer, elected to Parliament, ennobled as Lord Verulam, and eventually named Lord Chancellor of England (and ousted on bribery charges), Bacon lived most of his life in the halls of power. Accordingly, the topic of power and the building of empire was rarely far from his thoughts. He asserted that natural philosophical knowledge should be used; it promised power for the good of mankind and the state. He characterized – or caricatured – the natural philosophy of his day as barren, its methods and goals misguided, its practitioners busy with words but neglecting works. Indeed, although Bacon expressed skepticism of natural magic's metaphysical foundations, he praised magic because it ‘proposes to recall natural philosophy from a miscellany of speculations to a magnitude of works’. Natural philosophy should be operative not speculative – it should do things, make things, and give human beings power. He considered printing, the compass, and gunpowder – all technological achievements – to have been the most transformative forces in human history. As a result, Bacon called for nothing less than a ‘total reconstruction of sciences, arts, and all human knowledge’.

Methodology is crucial to Bacon's desired reform. He advocated the compilation of ‘natural histories’, vast collections of observations of phenomena whether spontaneously occurring or the result of human experimentation, what he called forcing nature out of her usual course. After sufficient raw materials had been collected, natural philosophers could fit them together to formulate increasingly universal principles by a process of induction. The key was to avoid premature theorizing, navel-gazing speculations, and the building of grand explanatory systems. Once the more general principles of nature had been uncovered, they should then be used productively. Yet Bacon did not advocate a crass utilitarianism. Experiments were useful not only when they produced fruit (practical application) but also when they brought light to the mind. True knowledge of nature served both for ‘the glory of the Creator and the relief of man's estate’. While Bacon is clear that one goal of his enterprise is to strengthen and expand Britain – although neither Elizabeth I nor James I responded to his petitions for state support of his ideas for reform – on a larger scale Bacon saw the goal of such operative knowledge as to regain the power and human dominion over nature bestowed by God in Genesis, but lost with Adam's Fall.” — From ‘The Scientific Revolution: A Very Short Introduction’ by Lawrence M. Principe.

[Pg. 120-1 — From ‘The Scientific Revolution: A Very Short Introduction’ by Lawrence M. Principe.]

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Martin Luther King Jr., 1929-1968

Celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. Day - 20th January

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A Very Short Fact: On this day in 1919, Marxist theorist, anti-war activist, and economist Rosa Luxemburg died.

“Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) was a revolutionary Marxist in the German SPD. She was often deeply critical of the leadership of her own party because she believed it was becoming too dominated by short-term reforms and was losing sight of the ultimate goal of socialist revolution. However, she believed in mass action by the working class as the way of bringing about change and was critical of Lenin’s concept of a vanguard party. In 1903, she attacked it for ultra-centralism, which she equated with the ‘sterile spirit of the overseer:

Lenin’s concern is not so much to make the activity of the party more fruitful as to control the party – to narrow the movement rather than to develop it, to bind rather than unify it.

Once the Russian Revolution took place, she gave it cautious support and was a leading figure in the German Communist Party when it was established in December 1918. However, the next month she (and Karl Liebknecht, another prominent figure in the new party) were arrested by German cavalry officers, who were suppressing a revolutionary uprising. Both were murdered while in custody, so Luxemburg did not live to witness the subsequent development of the Soviet system and the uses that would be made of the Leninist party.” — From ‘Socialism: A Very Short Introduction’ by Michael Newman

[Pg. 40-1 — From ‘Socialism: A Very Short Introduction’ by Michael Newman]

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Mark Twain, 1835-1910

How are you sticking to your New Year's resolution?

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