Margaret Abbott (June 15, 1878 – June 10, 1955) was an American
amateur golfer and the first American woman to win an Olympic event: the
women's golf tournament at the 1900 Summer Olympics. Born in Calcutta in
1878, Abbott moved with her family to Chicago in 1884. She joined the
Chicago Golf Club in Wheaton, Illinois, where she was coached by Charles
B. Macdonald and H. J. Whigham. In 1899, she traveled with her mother
to Paris to study art. The following year, along with her mother, she
signed up for a women's golf tournament without realizing it was part of
the second modern Olympics. Abbott won with a score of 47 strokes and
was awarded a porcelain bowl; her mother tied for seventh. In
December 1902, she married the writer Finley Peter Dunne. They moved to
New York and had four children. Abbott died never realizing she won an
Olympic event. She was not well known until University of Florida
professor Paula Welch researched her life. The New York Times published
her belated obituary in 2018.
Read more: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Abbott>
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Today's selected anniversaries:
1520:
Pope Leo X issued the papal bull Exsurge Domine, censuring 41
propositions from Martin Luther's Ninety-five Theses and subsequent
writings, and threatening him with excommunication unless he recanted.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exsurge_Domine>
1921:
Bessie Coleman became the first Black person to earn an
international pilot's license from the Fédération Aéronautique
Internationale.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bessie_Coleman>
1995 :
Western Greece was struck by an earthquake registering
6.4–6.5 Mw that killed 26 people.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1995_Aigio_earthquake>
2006:
US president George W. Bush designated 140,000 square miles
(360,000 km2) around the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands as the
Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, now one of the world's
largest protected areas.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papah%C4%81naumoku%C4%81kea_Marine_National_Monument>
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Wiktionary's word of the day:
glacis:
1. A gentle incline.
2. (geomorphology) A gentle sloping landform created by the deposition
or erosion of material.
3. (military)
4. (architecture, also figuratively) A gentle incline in front of a
fortification which protects it from cannon fire and exposes attackers
to more effective return fire from defenders.
5. In full glacis plate: the angled armour plate on the front of a tank
which protects it from projectiles; also (often nautical), such a plate
protecting an opening (for example, on a ship).
6. (post) A device for sorting mail which slides parcels across a sloped
surface.
<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/glacis>
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Wikiquote quote of the day:
Drovers were racing brokenly across the milling hogs like wind
through grass until a whole echelon of them careering up the outer flank
forsook the land and faired into space with torn cries. Now the entire
herd had begun to wheel wider and faster along the bluff and the
outermost ranks swung centrifugally over the escarpment row on row
wailing and squealing and above this the howls and curses of the drovers
that now upreared in the moil of flesh they tended and swept with dust
had begun to assume satanic looks with their staves and wild eyes as if
they were no true swineherds but disciples of darkness got among these
charges to herd them to their doom.
--Cormac McCarthy
<https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Cormac_McCarthy>
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