This Day in History: 04/30
1927: The first federal prison for women opens
1945: Annie Dillard is born
1952: Anne Frank published in English
1993: Tennis star Monica Seles stabbed
1997: "Coming out" episode of Ellen
1927: THE FIRST FEDERAL PRISON FOR WOMEN OPENS
The Federal Industrial Institution for Women, the first women's federal prison, opens in Alderson, West Virginia. All women serving federal sentences of more than a year were to be brought here.
Run by Dr. Mary B. Harris, the prison's buildings, each named after social reformers, sat atop 500 acres. One judge described the prison as a "fashionable boarding school." In some respects the judge was correct: The overriding purpose of the prison was to reform the inmates, not punish them. The prisoners farmed the land and performed office work in order to learn how to type and file. They also cooked and canned vegetables and fruits.
Other women's prisons had similar ideals. At Bedford Hills in New York, there were no fences, and the inmates lived in cottages equipped with their own kitchen and garden. The prisoners were even given singing lessons.
Reform efforts had a good chance for success since the women sent to these prisons were far from hardened criminals. At the Federal Industrial Institution, the vast majority of the women were imprisoned for drug and alcohol charges imposed during the Prohibition era.
SOURCE: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-first-federal-prison-for-women-opens
1945: ANNIE DILLARD IS BORN
Poet, essayist, and novelist Annie Dillard is born on this day in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1945.
At age 28, Dillard became the youngest American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize, which she was awarded for her collection of essays Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974). The book, often compared with Henry David Thoreau's Walden, collected her meditations during a year spent living on the shores of a creek. She also wrote a collection of poetry, Tickets for a Prayer Wheel, the same year.
Dillard began reading avidly as a child and studied writing at Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia, where she earned her bachelor's and master's degrees. In 1965, she married her creative writing professor, R.H.W. Dillard. Between 1975 and 1978, she was a scholar-in-residence at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington. She moved to Connecticut in 1979 and became a professor at Wesleyan University after her second marriage. She began writing prolifically, publishing five more books by 1989 and writing essays, poems, memoirs, and reviews.
Dillard's first novel, The Living (1992), a detailed chronicle of Pacific Northwest pioneers, was a critical success. Her second novel, The Maytrees (2007), which follows the courtship, marriage, and later years of a Cape Cod couple, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2008.
SOURCE: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/annie-dillard-is-born
1952: ANNE FRANK PUBLISHED IN ENGLISH
The moving diary of Anne Frank, a Jewish victim of the Holocaust, is now available in British book shops entitled The Diary of a Young Girl.
The book was first published in Dutch in 1947 under the title Het Achterhuis (The Secret House) by her father Otto Frank, who survived the concentration camps.
It is a lively and at the same time disturbing account of a teenager living in hiding with seven others in fear of their lives in occupied Holland.
Anne died just before her 16th birthday in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945.
Faith in humanity
Her father survived and returned to Amsterdam where he, his family and friends had been in hiding for two years before the Nazis found them.
There, his Dutch friends gave him papers left behind after the Gestapo raid. Among them was his daughter's diary.
It was some days before he could bring himself to read it and when he did he was astonished to find out about a side of his daughter he never knew - someone who was wise beyond her years and had a deep faith in humanity in spite of her suffering.
Her entry for 12 July 1944, three weeks before her arrest, read: "I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us ... I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up into the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too will end, that peace and tranquillity will return once more."
The Franks had moved to Holland from Nazi Germany in 1933. In July 1942, after the Germans had occupied the country, the Franks and four other Jewish people went into hiding in an annex of a house in central Amsterdam.
That year, Anne, who had an ambition to be a writer, was given a red and white check diary for her 13th birthday and immediately started writing about her experiences.
The annex was raided by the Gestapo on the 4 August 1944 after a tip-off from a Dutch informer and the eight occupants sent to Westerbork, a transit camp in Holland, and then on to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.
Anne died weeks before the liberation of Bergen-Belsen as did her mother, Edith, and sister, Margot.
SOURCE: http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/april/30/newsid_3715000/3715435.stm
1993: TENNIS STAR MONICA SELES STABBED
Top women’s tennis player Monica Seles is stabbed by a deranged German man during a match in Hamburg. The assailant, a fan of German tennis star Steffi Graf, apparently hoped that by injuring Seles his idol Graf would be able to regain her No. 1 ranking.
Seles became the youngest woman to win the French Open in 1990 when she defeated No. 1-ranked Steffi Graff in the finals. In 1991, Seles, a power player with a habit of grunting loudly during matches, replaced Graf as the top-ranked women’s player. At the time of the 1993 attack, she had won eight Grand Slam titles and was ranked No. 1 in the world. On April 30, 1993, Seles, then 19, was sitting on a courtside seat during a changeover in her match against Magdalena Maleeva at the Hamburg Open when 38-year-old Gunter Parche leaned over a fence and stabbed her between the shoulder blades with a knife. Parche was quickly apprehended by security officials and Seles was taken to the hospital. She recovered from her physical injuries but was left with deep emotional scars and didn’t play again professionally for another two years.
Parche, who was described as a mentally unbalanced loner, contended he was only trying to hurt Seles, not kill her. A German court convicted him of grievous bodily harm in October 1993 and he received a two-year suspended sentence. Seles, along with many others, was angered by the lenient verdict and prosecutors eventually won the right to a re-trial. However, the judge at Parche’s second trial in 1995 upheld the suspended sentence.
In August 1995, Seles, who became a U.S. citizen the previous year, made her tennis comeback by winning the Canadian Open. The next month, she lost the U.S. Open finals to Steffi Graf. In January 1996, she won her fourth Australian Open and final Grand Slam title. In 2003, a foot injury forced Seles out of competition and she has played only sporadically since then.
SOURCE: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/tennis-star-monica-seles-stabbed
1997: "COMING OUT" EPISODE OF ELLEN
On this day in 1997, in a widely publicized episode of the ABC sitcom Ellen, TV character Ellen Morgan (played by Ellen DeGeneres) announces that she is gay.
DeGeneres, a former stand-up comedian who was born on January 26, 1958, became part of the ensemble cast of the ABC series These Friends of Mine in 1994. She soon emerged as the undisputed star of the show, which landed in the top 20 best-rated programs for the 1994-95 season. It would return in 1995, after being renamed Ellen. With her sitcom success, DeGeneres seemed to be following in the footsteps of stand-up comics such as Tim Allen and Jerry Seinfeld. Like them, DeGeneres soon published a bestselling memoir, My Point--And I Do Have One (1995).
In the fall of 1996, word leaked out that the character of Ellen Morgan, a bookstore manager, might acknowledge that she was a lesbian, making Ellen the first prime-time sitcom to feature a gay leading character. Over the next six months, ABC relentlessly encouraged the hype, with DeGeneres herself fueling the fire by joking in television interviews that her character was “Lebanese” and resisting attempts to clarify her own sexuality. A week before the episode aired, DeGeneres made a well-publicized “coming out” of her own, appearing on the cover of TIME magazine under the headline “Yep, I’m Gay.” An interview with Diane Sawyer on ABC’s 20/20 ran on April 25, during the all-important “sweeps week” for the network.
An estimated 42 million viewers watched April 30th’s special hour-long episode, which featured cameo appearances by Laura Dern (as the woman Ellen falls for), Oprah Winfrey (as the therapist to whom she makes her revelation), k.d. lang, Demi Moore, Billy Bob Thornton and Dwight Yoakam. Later episodes of Ellen failed to hold audiences, however, and by the end of the 1997 season the show was canceled due to low ratings. DeGeneres went on to star in the short-lived CBS sitcom The Ellen Show and provide the voice for a lead character in the acclaimed 2003 animated blockbuster Finding Nemo. In September 2003, she launched a syndicated talk show, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, which won four Daytime Emmy Awards in its first season. From 2004 to 2008, DeGeneres picked up four straight Daytime Emmy Awards for Best Talk Show Host. She has also served as a host for both the Emmy Awards and the Academy Awards.
In addition to her thriving career, DeGeneres has also made headlines for her love life, including a well publicized relationship with the actress Anne Heche, who later broke up with DeGeneres and married a man. In May 2008, shortly after the California Supreme Court overturned a ban on same-sex marriage, DeGeneres announced she would marry her longtime girlfriend, the actress Portia De Rossi. The two were wed at their Beverly Hills home on August 16 of that same year.
SOURCE: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/coming-out-episode-of-ellen
1945: Annie Dillard is born
1952: Anne Frank published in English
1993: Tennis star Monica Seles stabbed
1997: "Coming out" episode of Ellen
1927: THE FIRST FEDERAL PRISON FOR WOMEN OPENS
The Federal Industrial Institution for Women, the first women's federal prison, opens in Alderson, West Virginia. All women serving federal sentences of more than a year were to be brought here.
Run by Dr. Mary B. Harris, the prison's buildings, each named after social reformers, sat atop 500 acres. One judge described the prison as a "fashionable boarding school." In some respects the judge was correct: The overriding purpose of the prison was to reform the inmates, not punish them. The prisoners farmed the land and performed office work in order to learn how to type and file. They also cooked and canned vegetables and fruits.
Other women's prisons had similar ideals. At Bedford Hills in New York, there were no fences, and the inmates lived in cottages equipped with their own kitchen and garden. The prisoners were even given singing lessons.
Reform efforts had a good chance for success since the women sent to these prisons were far from hardened criminals. At the Federal Industrial Institution, the vast majority of the women were imprisoned for drug and alcohol charges imposed during the Prohibition era.
SOURCE: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-first-federal-prison-for-women-opens
1945: ANNIE DILLARD IS BORN
Poet, essayist, and novelist Annie Dillard is born on this day in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1945.
At age 28, Dillard became the youngest American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize, which she was awarded for her collection of essays Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974). The book, often compared with Henry David Thoreau's Walden, collected her meditations during a year spent living on the shores of a creek. She also wrote a collection of poetry, Tickets for a Prayer Wheel, the same year.
Dillard began reading avidly as a child and studied writing at Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia, where she earned her bachelor's and master's degrees. In 1965, she married her creative writing professor, R.H.W. Dillard. Between 1975 and 1978, she was a scholar-in-residence at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington. She moved to Connecticut in 1979 and became a professor at Wesleyan University after her second marriage. She began writing prolifically, publishing five more books by 1989 and writing essays, poems, memoirs, and reviews.
Dillard's first novel, The Living (1992), a detailed chronicle of Pacific Northwest pioneers, was a critical success. Her second novel, The Maytrees (2007), which follows the courtship, marriage, and later years of a Cape Cod couple, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2008.
SOURCE: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/annie-dillard-is-born
1952: ANNE FRANK PUBLISHED IN ENGLISH
The moving diary of Anne Frank, a Jewish victim of the Holocaust, is now available in British book shops entitled The Diary of a Young Girl.
The book was first published in Dutch in 1947 under the title Het Achterhuis (The Secret House) by her father Otto Frank, who survived the concentration camps.
It is a lively and at the same time disturbing account of a teenager living in hiding with seven others in fear of their lives in occupied Holland.
Anne died just before her 16th birthday in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945.
Faith in humanity
Her father survived and returned to Amsterdam where he, his family and friends had been in hiding for two years before the Nazis found them.
There, his Dutch friends gave him papers left behind after the Gestapo raid. Among them was his daughter's diary.
It was some days before he could bring himself to read it and when he did he was astonished to find out about a side of his daughter he never knew - someone who was wise beyond her years and had a deep faith in humanity in spite of her suffering.
Her entry for 12 July 1944, three weeks before her arrest, read: "I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us ... I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up into the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too will end, that peace and tranquillity will return once more."
The Franks had moved to Holland from Nazi Germany in 1933. In July 1942, after the Germans had occupied the country, the Franks and four other Jewish people went into hiding in an annex of a house in central Amsterdam.
That year, Anne, who had an ambition to be a writer, was given a red and white check diary for her 13th birthday and immediately started writing about her experiences.
The annex was raided by the Gestapo on the 4 August 1944 after a tip-off from a Dutch informer and the eight occupants sent to Westerbork, a transit camp in Holland, and then on to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.
Anne died weeks before the liberation of Bergen-Belsen as did her mother, Edith, and sister, Margot.
SOURCE: http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/april/30/newsid_3715000/3715435.stm
1993: TENNIS STAR MONICA SELES STABBED
Top women’s tennis player Monica Seles is stabbed by a deranged German man during a match in Hamburg. The assailant, a fan of German tennis star Steffi Graf, apparently hoped that by injuring Seles his idol Graf would be able to regain her No. 1 ranking.
Seles became the youngest woman to win the French Open in 1990 when she defeated No. 1-ranked Steffi Graff in the finals. In 1991, Seles, a power player with a habit of grunting loudly during matches, replaced Graf as the top-ranked women’s player. At the time of the 1993 attack, she had won eight Grand Slam titles and was ranked No. 1 in the world. On April 30, 1993, Seles, then 19, was sitting on a courtside seat during a changeover in her match against Magdalena Maleeva at the Hamburg Open when 38-year-old Gunter Parche leaned over a fence and stabbed her between the shoulder blades with a knife. Parche was quickly apprehended by security officials and Seles was taken to the hospital. She recovered from her physical injuries but was left with deep emotional scars and didn’t play again professionally for another two years.
Parche, who was described as a mentally unbalanced loner, contended he was only trying to hurt Seles, not kill her. A German court convicted him of grievous bodily harm in October 1993 and he received a two-year suspended sentence. Seles, along with many others, was angered by the lenient verdict and prosecutors eventually won the right to a re-trial. However, the judge at Parche’s second trial in 1995 upheld the suspended sentence.
In August 1995, Seles, who became a U.S. citizen the previous year, made her tennis comeback by winning the Canadian Open. The next month, she lost the U.S. Open finals to Steffi Graf. In January 1996, she won her fourth Australian Open and final Grand Slam title. In 2003, a foot injury forced Seles out of competition and she has played only sporadically since then.
SOURCE: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/tennis-star-monica-seles-stabbed
1997: "COMING OUT" EPISODE OF ELLEN
On this day in 1997, in a widely publicized episode of the ABC sitcom Ellen, TV character Ellen Morgan (played by Ellen DeGeneres) announces that she is gay.
DeGeneres, a former stand-up comedian who was born on January 26, 1958, became part of the ensemble cast of the ABC series These Friends of Mine in 1994. She soon emerged as the undisputed star of the show, which landed in the top 20 best-rated programs for the 1994-95 season. It would return in 1995, after being renamed Ellen. With her sitcom success, DeGeneres seemed to be following in the footsteps of stand-up comics such as Tim Allen and Jerry Seinfeld. Like them, DeGeneres soon published a bestselling memoir, My Point--And I Do Have One (1995).
In the fall of 1996, word leaked out that the character of Ellen Morgan, a bookstore manager, might acknowledge that she was a lesbian, making Ellen the first prime-time sitcom to feature a gay leading character. Over the next six months, ABC relentlessly encouraged the hype, with DeGeneres herself fueling the fire by joking in television interviews that her character was “Lebanese” and resisting attempts to clarify her own sexuality. A week before the episode aired, DeGeneres made a well-publicized “coming out” of her own, appearing on the cover of TIME magazine under the headline “Yep, I’m Gay.” An interview with Diane Sawyer on ABC’s 20/20 ran on April 25, during the all-important “sweeps week” for the network.
An estimated 42 million viewers watched April 30th’s special hour-long episode, which featured cameo appearances by Laura Dern (as the woman Ellen falls for), Oprah Winfrey (as the therapist to whom she makes her revelation), k.d. lang, Demi Moore, Billy Bob Thornton and Dwight Yoakam. Later episodes of Ellen failed to hold audiences, however, and by the end of the 1997 season the show was canceled due to low ratings. DeGeneres went on to star in the short-lived CBS sitcom The Ellen Show and provide the voice for a lead character in the acclaimed 2003 animated blockbuster Finding Nemo. In September 2003, she launched a syndicated talk show, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, which won four Daytime Emmy Awards in its first season. From 2004 to 2008, DeGeneres picked up four straight Daytime Emmy Awards for Best Talk Show Host. She has also served as a host for both the Emmy Awards and the Academy Awards.
In addition to her thriving career, DeGeneres has also made headlines for her love life, including a well publicized relationship with the actress Anne Heche, who later broke up with DeGeneres and married a man. In May 2008, shortly after the California Supreme Court overturned a ban on same-sex marriage, DeGeneres announced she would marry her longtime girlfriend, the actress Portia De Rossi. The two were wed at their Beverly Hills home on August 16 of that same year.
SOURCE: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/coming-out-episode-of-ellen