Original Stories from Real Life is the only complete work of children's
literature by the 18th-century British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. It
begins with a frame story that sketches out the education of two young
girls by their maternal teacher Mrs. Mason, followed by a series of
didactic tales. The book was first published by Joseph Johnson in 1788;
a second, illustrated edition, with engravings (pictured) by William
Blake, was released in 1791 and remained in print for around a quarter
of a century. Wollstonecraft employed the then burgeoning genre of
children's literature to promote the education of women and an emerging
middle-class ideology. She argued that women would be able to become
rational adults if they were educated properly as children, which was
not a widely held belief in the 18th century, and contended that the
nascent middle-class ethos was superior to the court culture represented
by fairy tales and to the values of chance and luck found in chapbook
stories for the poor. Wollstonecraft, in developing her own pedagogy,
also responded to the works of the two most important educational
theorists of the 18th century: John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Read more: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_Stories_from_Real_Life>
_______________________________
Today's selected anniversaries:
1865:
U.S. Army soldiers cornered and fatally shot John Wilkes Booth,
the assassin of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, in rural northern
Virginia, ending a twelve-day manhunt.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wilkes_Booth>
1937:
Spanish Civil War: The Bombing of Guernica by the Condor Legion
of the German Luftwaffe resulted in a devastating firestorm that caused
widespread destruction and civilian deaths and inspired one of Pablo
Picasso's most famous paintings.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guernica_(painting)>
1964:
Tanganyika and Zanzibar merged to form Tanzania (flag pictured)
with Julius Nyerere as its first president.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanzania>
1989:
A tornado struck the Manikganj District of Bangladesh, killing
an estimated 1,300 people, the deadliest tornado in history.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daulatpur%E2%80%93Saturia_tornado>
1994:
Just prior to landing at Nagoya International Airport, the co-
pilot of China Airlines Flight 140 inadvertently pushed the wrong
button, causing the plane to crash and killing 264 of the 271 people on
board.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Airlines_Flight_140>
_____________________________
Wiktionary's word of the day:
inside baseball:
1. (US, sports) Technical matters concerning baseball not apparent to
spectators.
2. (US) Matters of interest only to insiders.
<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/inside_baseball>
___________________________
Wikiquote quote of the day:
Philosophical problems can be compared to locks on safes, which
can be opened by dialing a certain word or number, so that no force can
open the door until just this word has been hit upon, and once it is hit
upon any child can open it.
--Ludwig Wittgenstein
<https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ludwig_Wittgenstein>