It was on this date, February 5, 1866, that Scottish anatomist and physical anthropologist Sir Arthur Keith was born in Aberdeen. After earning a Bachelor of Medicine Degree from the University of Aberdeen in 1888, Keith traveled as a physician on a gold mining trip to Siam (now Thailand), where he did his first field […]

It was on this date, February 5, 1962, that the sun, the moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn were in conjunction as viewed from Earth. Sometimes called the Great Aquarian Conjunction, the heavenly bodies were not in a straight line, but only within 16 degrees of each other. They were joined by a solar […]

It was on this date, February 4, 1842, that Danish critic and scholar Georg Brandes was born Georg Morris Cohen Brandes in Copenhagen, to a Jewish middle-class family of non-orthodox leanings. As Brandes recalled, “Neither of my parents was in any way associated with the Jewish religion, and neither of them ever went to the […]

It was on this date, February 3, 1943, that four chaplains aboard the US Army Transport Dorchester, sinking from a German U-Boat attack in the icy North Atlantic, helped other soldiers board lifeboats and gave up their own life jackets when the supply ran out, thereby sacrificing their lives to save the lives of sailors […]

It was on this date, February 2, 1859, that English psychologist and sexologist Havelock Ellis was born Henry Havelock Ellis in Croydon, Surrey. In his youth, he traveled around the world with his father, a sea captain, stopping in Australia, where he worked as a teacher in New South Wales. There he read Life in […]

It was on this date, February 2, 1882, that Irish author James Joyce was born James Augustine Aloysius Joyce in Dublin, the son of a Roman Catholic mother and an underachieving father. James Joyce’s early education was from Irish Jesuits, who (he said) taught him to think straight — but he rejected their religion while […]

It was on this date, February 2, 1905, that Objectivist philosopher and author Ayn Rand was born Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum to Jewish parents in St. Petersburg, Russia. She always knew she wanted to be a writer. As a young girl, Alissa witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution and saw firsthand the brutality of the Soviet regime. Fearing […]

It was on this date, February 1, 1902, that American poet James Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, the son of a schoolteacher mother and a storekeeper father. As Hughes himself noted, “I grew up in a not very religious family, but I had a foster aunt who saw that I went to church […]

It was on this date, January 31, 1797, that Austrian composer Franz Schubert was born in Vienna. He studied the violin from age eight and the pianoforte after that, composing his first piano duet before he turned 14. Two of his songs so impressed Antonio Salieri, that the composer sought out Schubert and taught him […]

It was on this date, January 31, 1881, that American chemist Irving Langmuir was born in Brooklyn, NY. Langmuir is chiefly remembered for coining in 1923 the physics term “plasma” to describe a fourth state of matter, distinct from solid or liquid or gas and present in stars and fusion reactions, such as that which […]