It was on this date, January 11, 1842, that American psychologist William James was born in New York, the son of a Swedenborgian theologian, Henry James, Sr. Emanuel Swedenborg was the 18th century Swedish mystic who entered ecstatic trances, claimed to have therein visited heaven and hell, but was found by his contemporaries to be […]

It was on this date, January 10, 1776, that an anonymous pamphlet called “Common Sense” was published in the American colonies, authored by English-born citizen Thomas Paine. It became so popular that Paine himself was often called “Common Sense.” In effect, Thomas Paine, a Deist who denied the divinity but not the morality of Jesus, […]

It was on this date, January 9, 1908, that French existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir was born Simone Lucia Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir in Paris. Rejecting her mother’s Roman Catholicism, she became an Atheist as a teenager and graduated from the Sorbonne in 1929, after giving a presentation on Leibniz. Shortly thereafter de Beauvoir […]

It was on this date, January 9, 1967, that popular musician Dave Matthews was born David John Matthews in Johannesburg, South Africa. Dave Matthews came to the U.S. at age 18. Since the 1990s the Dave Matthews band has prospered with their unique combination of jazz and rock, and providing music for the films Mr. […]

It was on this date, January 9, 1911, that burlesque-era stripper Gypsy Rose Lee was born Rose Louise Hovick in Seattle, Washington. Sister of actress June Havoc, Gypsy started dancing and stripping at burlesque houses from the age of 15, under the oppressive hand of her mother, Rose. She took her stage name while dancing […]

It was on this date, January 8, 1697, that Edinburgh University student Thomas Aikenhead was hanged for blasphemy in Scotland. Thomas was born in March 1676 and baptized on the 28th. His upbringing is obscure, except that he was the son of an educated father and that he was an orphaned by age 10. Nevertheless, […]

It was on this date, January 8, 1911, that actress Thelma “Butterfly” McQueen was born in Tampa, Florida, the daughter of a stevedore and a domestic worker. Although she was raised a Christian, she began to question the value of organized religion as a child. She gave up her study of nursing to become an […]

It was on this date, January 7, 1997, in Los Angeles, that Heidi Fleiss, known as the “Hollywood Madam,” was sentenced to 37 months in prison for cheating on her taxes and laundering prostitution profits. Fleiss spent 21 months in a federal prison in Dublin, California, and was released in 1999. There was talk of […]

It was on this date, January 5, 1527, that Swiss Anabaptist reformer Felix Manz was drowned in punishment for preaching adult baptism — as opposed to the infant baptism most Protestant sects approved. That he was drowned for punishment in the Limmat, near the current Rathaus bridge in Zürich, seems somehow ironic, if unjust, for […]

It was on this date, January 5, 1932, that Italian philologist and writer Umberto Eco was born in Alessandria, in the Italian province of Piedmont. He works as a professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna, teaching the study of signs and their interpretation, and their function in syntax, semantics and literary theory. Eco […]