Herman Vandenburg Ames (1865–1935) was an American legal historian,
educator, and document preservationist. He was a professor of
constitutional history at the University of Pennsylvania, and the dean
of its graduate school for more than two decades. As a doctoral student
at Harvard, he studied under the historian Albert Bushnell Hart. Like
Hart, Ames spent time in Europe learning German historical methodology;
drawing on his studies at the universities of Heidelberg and Leipzig, he
later helped establish government archives throughout the United States.
His 1897 monograph The Proposed Amendments to the Constitution of the
United States During the First Century of Its History was the first
exhaustive catalog of such amendments. He also authored John C. Calhoun
and the Secession Movement of 1850 and Slavery and the Union
1845–1861, and coauthored The X.Y.Z. Letters. He has been credited
with stimulating his student Ezra Pound's lifelong interest in history.
Read more: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Vandenburg_Ames>
_______________________________
Today's selected anniversaries:
1898:
White supremacists seized power in Wilmington, North Carolina,
in the only instance of a municipal government being overthrown in
United States history.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_insurrection_of_1898>
1958:
Merchant Harry Winston donated the Hope Diamond, the "most
famous diamond in the world", to the Smithsonian Institution.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hope_Diamond>
1975:
The United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 3379,
which equated Zionism with racism.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_General_Assembly_Resolution_3379>
2006:
Prominent Sri Lankan Tamil politician and human rights lawyer
Nadarajah Raviraj was assassinated in Colombo.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadarajah_Raviraj>
_____________________________
Wiktionary's word of the day:
heresiarch:
(religion) The founder of a heresy, or a major ecclesiastical proponent
of such a heresy.
<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/heresiarch>
___________________________
Wikiquote quote of the day:
We all – adults and children, writers and readers – have an
obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to
pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which
society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a
wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals
change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they
do it by imagining that things can be different.
--Neil Gaiman
<https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Neil_Gaiman>