This Day in History: 06/01
1660: Mary Dyer hanged
1926: Marilyn Monroe born
1968: Helen Keller dies
1660: MARY DYER HANGED
Known for: Quaker martyr
About Mary Dyer:
Mary Dyer sided with Anne Hutchinson in the Antinomian controversy in 1630s Massachusetts, for which Dyer and her husband, William Dyer, were banished with Hutchinson. The Dyers then settled in Providence, Rhode Island.
In the 1650s the Dyers accompanied Roger Williams and John Clarke to England, where Mary Dyer became a Quaker, influenced by George Fox. Returning to Boston, she was arrested and expelled under a new law outlawing Quakers. (Her husband, who had not become a Quaker, was not arrested.)
Mary Dyer was arrested a year later for preaching Quakerism in New Haven. she returned to Massachusetts to visit two English Quakers held in the jail, and was arrested there. Banished, she returned with other Quakers to defy the law, and was arrested. Two of her comrades were hanged, but she received a last-minute reprieve.
She returned to Rhode Island, then traveled to Long Island, but finally in 1660 returned to Massachusetts to again defy the anti-Quaker law. This time, her sentence was carried out the day after her conviction, and on June 1, 1660, Mary Dyer was hanged for being a Quaker in Massachusetts.
Dyer is now honored with a statue at The State House in Boston.
SOURCE: http://womenshistory.about.com/cs/religion/p/p_mary_dyer.htm
1926: MARILYN MONROE BORN
Norma Jeane Mortenson--who will become better known around the world as the glamorous actress and sex symbol Marilyn Monroe--is born on this day in 1926, in Los Angeles, California. She was later given her mother’s name, and baptized Norma Jeane Baker.
After a tumultuous childhood--both maternal grandparents and her mother were committed to mental institutions, and she lived with a string of foster families--Norma Jeane married one of her neighbors, James Dougherty, when she was 16. He later joined the Merchant Marines and was sent to the South Pacific during World War II. A photographer “discovered” the naturally photogenic Norma Jeane while she was working in a California munitions factory, and she was soon launched into a successful modeling career. She divorced Dougherty in June 1946 and soon after signed a film contract with 20th Century Fox.
At the outset of her acting career, Norma Jeane dyed her brown hair blonde and changed her name again, calling herself Marilyn Monroe (Monroe was her grandmother’s last name). After a bit part in 1947’s The Shocking Miss Pilgrim, she had a string of forgettable roles before landing a spot in John Huston’s thriller The Asphalt Jungle (1950). That same year, she also drew attention for her work in All About Eve, starring Bette Davis. Her true breakout performance, however, came in Niagara (1953), a thriller in which Monroe played an adulterous young wife who plots with her lover to kill her husband.
After starring turns in Gentleman Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire--both also released in 1953--Monroe was at the top of Hollywood’s A-list. In January 1954, she married baseball great Joe DiMaggio at San Francisco’s City Hall after a two-year romance. Though the press hailed their relationship as the quintessential All-American love affair, trouble began brewing almost immediately. DiMaggio was notoriously uncomfortable with his new wife’s sexy public image, and her wild popularity, as evidenced by the near-riot among U.S. servicemen stationed in Korea during a performance she gave in the middle of the couple’s honeymoon. They would divorce that October, after only nine months of marriage, but remained good friends. (After Monroe’s death, DiMaggio famously sent roses to her grave several times a week for more than three decades, until his own death in 1999.)
Monroe attempted to switch to more serious acting roles, studying at the prestigious Actors’ Studio in New York. She earned positive reviews for her more nuanced work in Bus Stop (1956), The Prince and the Showgirl (1957) and particularly Some Like It Hot (1959). By 1961, however, trouble in Monroe’s personal life--her third marriage, to the acclaimed playwright Arthur Miller, dissolved after four years--had led to her increasing emotional fragility, and that year she was admitted on two occasions to hospitals for psychiatric observation and rest. Her final film was The Misfits (1961), written by Miller and co-starring Montgomery Clift and Clark Gable (it would also be Gable’s final appearance on-screen.) In June 1962, Fox dismissed the actress after repeated and extended absences from the set of Something’s Got to Give. On August 5, 1962, Monroe was found dead from an overdose of barbiturates in her home in Brentwood, California. She was 36 years old.
SOURCE: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/marilyn-monroe-born
1968: HELEN KELLER DIES
On June 1, 1968, Helen Keller dies in Westport, Connecticut, at the age of 87. Blind and deaf from infancy, Keller circumvented her disabilities to become a world-renowned writer and lecturer.
Helen Adams Keller was born on June 27, 1880, on a farm near Tuscumbia, Alabama. A normal infant, she was stricken with an illness at 19 months, probably scarlet fever, which left her blind and deaf. For the next four years, she lived at home, a mute and unruly child. Special education for the blind and deaf was just beginning at the time, and it was not until after Helen's sixth birthday that her parents had her examined by an eye physician interested in the blind. He referred the Kellers to Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone and a pioneer in teaching speech to the deaf. Bell examined Helen and arranged to have a teacher sent for her from the Perkins Institution for the Blind in Boston.
The teacher, 20-year-old Anne Sullivan, was partially blind. At Perkins, she had been instructed how to teach a blind and deaf student to communicate using a hand alphabet signaled by touch into the student's palm. Sullivan arrived in Tuscumbia in March 1887 and immediately set about teaching this form of sign language to Helen. Although she had no knowledge of written language and only the haziest recollection of spoken language, Helen learned her first word within days: "water." Keller later described the experience: "I knew then that 'w-a-t-e-r' meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free."
Under Sullivan's dedicated guidance, Keller learned at a staggering rate. By April, her vocabulary was growing by more than a dozen words a day, and in May she began to read and arrange sentences using raised words on cardboard. By the end of the month, she was reading complete stories. One year later, the seven-year-old Keller made her first visit to the Perkins Institution, where she learned to read Braille. She spent several winters there and in 1890 was taught to speak by Sarah Fuller of the Horace Mann School for the Deaf. Keller learned to imitate the position of Fuller's lips and tongue in speech, and how to lip-read by placing her fingers on the lips and throat of the speaker. In speaking, she usually required an interpreter, such as Sullivan, who was familiar with her sounds and could translate.
When she was 14, Keller entered the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf in New York City. Two years later, with Sullivan at her side and spelling into her hand, she enrolled at the Cambridge School for Young Ladies in Massachusetts. In 1900, she was accepted into Radcliffe, a prestigious women's college in Cambridge with classes taught by Harvard University faculty. She was a determined and brilliant student, and while still at Radcliffe her first autobiography, The Story of My Life, was published serially in The Ladies Home Journal and then as a book. In 1904, she graduated cum laude from Radcliffe.
Keller became an accomplished writer, publishing, among other books, The World I Live In (1908), Out of the Dark (1913), My Religion (1927), Helen Keller's Journal (1938), and Teacher (1955). In 1913, she began lecturing, with the aid of an interpreter, primarily on behalf of the American Foundation for the Blind. Her lecture tours took her several times around the world, and she did much to remove the stigmas and ignorance surrounding sight and hearing disorders, which historically had often resulted in the committal of the blind and deaf to asylums. Helen Keller was also outspoken in other areas and supported socialism all her life. For her work on behalf of the blind and the deaf, she was widely honored and in 1964 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, by President Lyndon B. Johnson.
"My life has been happy because I have had wonderful friends and plenty of interesting work to do," Helen Keller once wrote, adding, "I seldom think about my limitations, and they never make me sad. Perhaps there is just a touch of yearning at times, but it is vague, like a breeze among flowers. The wind passes, and the flowers are content."
SOURCE: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/helen-keller-dies
1926: Marilyn Monroe born
1968: Helen Keller dies
1660: MARY DYER HANGED
Known for: Quaker martyr
About Mary Dyer:
Mary Dyer sided with Anne Hutchinson in the Antinomian controversy in 1630s Massachusetts, for which Dyer and her husband, William Dyer, were banished with Hutchinson. The Dyers then settled in Providence, Rhode Island.
In the 1650s the Dyers accompanied Roger Williams and John Clarke to England, where Mary Dyer became a Quaker, influenced by George Fox. Returning to Boston, she was arrested and expelled under a new law outlawing Quakers. (Her husband, who had not become a Quaker, was not arrested.)
Mary Dyer was arrested a year later for preaching Quakerism in New Haven. she returned to Massachusetts to visit two English Quakers held in the jail, and was arrested there. Banished, she returned with other Quakers to defy the law, and was arrested. Two of her comrades were hanged, but she received a last-minute reprieve.
She returned to Rhode Island, then traveled to Long Island, but finally in 1660 returned to Massachusetts to again defy the anti-Quaker law. This time, her sentence was carried out the day after her conviction, and on June 1, 1660, Mary Dyer was hanged for being a Quaker in Massachusetts.
Dyer is now honored with a statue at The State House in Boston.
SOURCE: http://womenshistory.about.com/cs/religion/p/p_mary_dyer.htm
1926: MARILYN MONROE BORN
Norma Jeane Mortenson--who will become better known around the world as the glamorous actress and sex symbol Marilyn Monroe--is born on this day in 1926, in Los Angeles, California. She was later given her mother’s name, and baptized Norma Jeane Baker.
After a tumultuous childhood--both maternal grandparents and her mother were committed to mental institutions, and she lived with a string of foster families--Norma Jeane married one of her neighbors, James Dougherty, when she was 16. He later joined the Merchant Marines and was sent to the South Pacific during World War II. A photographer “discovered” the naturally photogenic Norma Jeane while she was working in a California munitions factory, and she was soon launched into a successful modeling career. She divorced Dougherty in June 1946 and soon after signed a film contract with 20th Century Fox.
At the outset of her acting career, Norma Jeane dyed her brown hair blonde and changed her name again, calling herself Marilyn Monroe (Monroe was her grandmother’s last name). After a bit part in 1947’s The Shocking Miss Pilgrim, she had a string of forgettable roles before landing a spot in John Huston’s thriller The Asphalt Jungle (1950). That same year, she also drew attention for her work in All About Eve, starring Bette Davis. Her true breakout performance, however, came in Niagara (1953), a thriller in which Monroe played an adulterous young wife who plots with her lover to kill her husband.
After starring turns in Gentleman Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire--both also released in 1953--Monroe was at the top of Hollywood’s A-list. In January 1954, she married baseball great Joe DiMaggio at San Francisco’s City Hall after a two-year romance. Though the press hailed their relationship as the quintessential All-American love affair, trouble began brewing almost immediately. DiMaggio was notoriously uncomfortable with his new wife’s sexy public image, and her wild popularity, as evidenced by the near-riot among U.S. servicemen stationed in Korea during a performance she gave in the middle of the couple’s honeymoon. They would divorce that October, after only nine months of marriage, but remained good friends. (After Monroe’s death, DiMaggio famously sent roses to her grave several times a week for more than three decades, until his own death in 1999.)
Monroe attempted to switch to more serious acting roles, studying at the prestigious Actors’ Studio in New York. She earned positive reviews for her more nuanced work in Bus Stop (1956), The Prince and the Showgirl (1957) and particularly Some Like It Hot (1959). By 1961, however, trouble in Monroe’s personal life--her third marriage, to the acclaimed playwright Arthur Miller, dissolved after four years--had led to her increasing emotional fragility, and that year she was admitted on two occasions to hospitals for psychiatric observation and rest. Her final film was The Misfits (1961), written by Miller and co-starring Montgomery Clift and Clark Gable (it would also be Gable’s final appearance on-screen.) In June 1962, Fox dismissed the actress after repeated and extended absences from the set of Something’s Got to Give. On August 5, 1962, Monroe was found dead from an overdose of barbiturates in her home in Brentwood, California. She was 36 years old.
SOURCE: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/marilyn-monroe-born
1968: HELEN KELLER DIES
On June 1, 1968, Helen Keller dies in Westport, Connecticut, at the age of 87. Blind and deaf from infancy, Keller circumvented her disabilities to become a world-renowned writer and lecturer.
Helen Adams Keller was born on June 27, 1880, on a farm near Tuscumbia, Alabama. A normal infant, she was stricken with an illness at 19 months, probably scarlet fever, which left her blind and deaf. For the next four years, she lived at home, a mute and unruly child. Special education for the blind and deaf was just beginning at the time, and it was not until after Helen's sixth birthday that her parents had her examined by an eye physician interested in the blind. He referred the Kellers to Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone and a pioneer in teaching speech to the deaf. Bell examined Helen and arranged to have a teacher sent for her from the Perkins Institution for the Blind in Boston.
The teacher, 20-year-old Anne Sullivan, was partially blind. At Perkins, she had been instructed how to teach a blind and deaf student to communicate using a hand alphabet signaled by touch into the student's palm. Sullivan arrived in Tuscumbia in March 1887 and immediately set about teaching this form of sign language to Helen. Although she had no knowledge of written language and only the haziest recollection of spoken language, Helen learned her first word within days: "water." Keller later described the experience: "I knew then that 'w-a-t-e-r' meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free."
Under Sullivan's dedicated guidance, Keller learned at a staggering rate. By April, her vocabulary was growing by more than a dozen words a day, and in May she began to read and arrange sentences using raised words on cardboard. By the end of the month, she was reading complete stories. One year later, the seven-year-old Keller made her first visit to the Perkins Institution, where she learned to read Braille. She spent several winters there and in 1890 was taught to speak by Sarah Fuller of the Horace Mann School for the Deaf. Keller learned to imitate the position of Fuller's lips and tongue in speech, and how to lip-read by placing her fingers on the lips and throat of the speaker. In speaking, she usually required an interpreter, such as Sullivan, who was familiar with her sounds and could translate.
When she was 14, Keller entered the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf in New York City. Two years later, with Sullivan at her side and spelling into her hand, she enrolled at the Cambridge School for Young Ladies in Massachusetts. In 1900, she was accepted into Radcliffe, a prestigious women's college in Cambridge with classes taught by Harvard University faculty. She was a determined and brilliant student, and while still at Radcliffe her first autobiography, The Story of My Life, was published serially in The Ladies Home Journal and then as a book. In 1904, she graduated cum laude from Radcliffe.
Keller became an accomplished writer, publishing, among other books, The World I Live In (1908), Out of the Dark (1913), My Religion (1927), Helen Keller's Journal (1938), and Teacher (1955). In 1913, she began lecturing, with the aid of an interpreter, primarily on behalf of the American Foundation for the Blind. Her lecture tours took her several times around the world, and she did much to remove the stigmas and ignorance surrounding sight and hearing disorders, which historically had often resulted in the committal of the blind and deaf to asylums. Helen Keller was also outspoken in other areas and supported socialism all her life. For her work on behalf of the blind and the deaf, she was widely honored and in 1964 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, by President Lyndon B. Johnson.
"My life has been happy because I have had wonderful friends and plenty of interesting work to do," Helen Keller once wrote, adding, "I seldom think about my limitations, and they never make me sad. Perhaps there is just a touch of yearning at times, but it is vague, like a breeze among flowers. The wind passes, and the flowers are content."
SOURCE: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/helen-keller-dies