Apr 02
It was on this date, April 2, 1947, that American author, teacher, and social critic Camille Paglia was born. She was brought up in New York by Italian immigrant parents and spent her earliest days on a farm before her educator-father moved the family to more urban surroundings. Paglia graduated Harpur College at Binghamton University …
Permanent link to this article: http://freethoughtalmanac.com/?p=6256
Sep 14
Margaret Sanger (1879) It was on this date, September 14, 1879, that Margaret Sanger, the founder of the modern birth control movement and the organization that later became Planned Parenthood, was born Margaret Louise Higgins in Corning, New York. She was the sixth of eleven children: her mother died at 50 after eighteen pregnancies and …
Permanent link to this article: http://freethoughtalmanac.com/?p=3159
Sep 12
H.L. Mencken (1880) It was on this date, September 12, 1880, that the “Bard of Baltimore,” Henry Louis Mencken – H.L. Mencken – was born in Baltimore, Maryland. His father was an Agnostic, his mother a Lutheran, and Mencken grew up with a disdain for all orthodoxies, especially Christian. In a letter to historian Will …
Permanent link to this article: http://freethoughtalmanac.com/?p=3149
Aug 31
Théophile Gautier (1811) On this date, August 31, 1811, French poet and journalist Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier was born in Tarbes, in the southwestern region of France. Although he was inclined to paint, he was influenced by Victor Hugo to write poetry and got a job at the Chronique de Paris with help from Honoré …
Permanent link to this article: http://freethoughtalmanac.com/?p=3049
Aug 14
Russell Baker (1925) It was on this date, August 14, 1925, that US journalist, humorist and biographer Russell Baker was born in Loudon County, Virginia. His father died early on and his hard-working mother reared him and his sisters during the Great Depression. Baker managed to get himself into Johns Hopkins University, where he studied …
Permanent link to this article: http://freethoughtalmanac.com/?p=2898
Jul 30
E. Haldeman-Julius (1889) It was on this date, July 30, 1889, that Emanuel Julius was born in a Philadelphia tenement – later to become known as the book publisher E. Haldeman-Julius. Emanuel left school at age 13 to seek his fortune as a writer in New York and got a job on a Socialist newspaper, …
Permanent link to this article: http://freethoughtalmanac.com/?p=2766
Jul 21
The famous 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial was a publicity stunt that exposed the imbecility of fundamentalism.
Permanent link to this article: http://freethoughtalmanac.com/?p=2682
Jul 14
John Chancellor (1927) It was on this date, July 14, 1927, that American news reporter, anchor, and NBC commentator John Chancellor was born in Chicago, Illinois. A high school drop-out, Chancellor got his first job as a copy boy at the Chicago Sun-Times. From there his assignments extended from the 1957 desegregation of Central High …
Permanent link to this article: http://freethoughtalmanac.com/?p=2602
Apr 13
Hitchens says, “I’m an atheist. I’m not neutral about religion, I’m hostile to it. I think it is a positively bad idea, not just a false one. And I mean not just organized religion, but religious belief itself.”
Permanent link to this article: http://freethoughtalmanac.com/?p=1905
Mar 12
He always expressed a profound contempt for the Roman Catholic Church, which returned the affection by putting all D’Annunzio’s work on the Index of Prohibited Books.
Permanent link to this article: http://freethoughtalmanac.com/?p=1669
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