H. G. Wells (1866) It was on this date, September 21, 1866, that English author Herbert George Wells, who wrote about 100 books, half of them novels, as H.G. Wells, was born in Bromley, Kent. About his early days he said, I was indeed a prodigy of Early Impiety....There was a time when I believed […]

Upton Sinclair (1878) It was on this date, September 20, 1878, that American writer Upton Sinclair was born in Baltimore, Maryland. In a 67-year career, Sinclair published over 90 books, mostly novels with a social reform theme. But he began life as a religious boy – it is said his two great heroes were Jesus […]

Roman Polanski (1933) It was on this date, September 18, 1933, that director Roman Polanski was born Rajmund Roman Thierry Polański in Paris to Polish Jewish parents, neither of whom practiced their religion seriously. The family got caught in Poland as the Nazis overran the country. Polanski's mother, a Roman Catholic, died in the concentration […]

Marquis de Condorcet (1743) It was on this date, September 17, 1743, that French mathematician and political philosopher Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, was born in Ribemont, Picardy, France. His father died early, so his mother, a very devout woman, had Condorcet educated at Jesuit Colleges in Reims and at the Collège […]

William Howard Taft (1857) It was on this date, September 15, 1857, that the 27th US President, William Howard Taft, was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of a Unitarian. As he grew up, in the late 1850s, Dr. Moncure D. Conway, author of The Life of Thomas Paine, was his church minister. Taft graduated […]

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 […]

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 […]

Stephen Jay Gould (1941) It was on this date, September 10, 1941, that "One of the most influential evolutionary biologists of the 20th century and perhaps the best known since Charles Darwin"[1] - Stephen Jay Gould - was born. He grew up in New York City, graduated from Antioch College and in 1967 earned his […]

Queen Elizabeth I (1533) It was on this date, September 7, 1533, that the first Queen Elizabeth, monarch of the "Golden Age" of English history, was born at Greenwich Palace. She was a disappointment to her father, King Henry VIII, who desperately wanted a son. Henry had gone so far as to break away from […]

Jane Addams (1860) It was on this date, September 6, 1860, that American social reformer Jane Addams, was born in Cedarville, Illinois. Addams graduated valedictorian from the Rockford Female Seminary in 1881. She met and became life-long friends with Ellen Gates Starr,* with whom she traveled in Europe from 1883-1885. There they studied social conditions. […]