A Song Flung Up to Heaven is the sixth book in a series of autobiographies by author Maya Angelou (pictured). Set between 1965 and 1968, it begins where her previous book All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes ends, with her return to the United States from Accra, Ghana, where she had lived for four years. The assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. frame the beginning and end of the book. Angelou describes how she dealt with these events and the sweeping changes both in the country and in her personal life, and how she coped with her return home. The book ends with Angelou writing the opening lines to her first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Angelou wrote Song in 2002, sixteen years after All God's Children. By that time she had received recognition as an author, poet and spokesperson. A recorded version of the book received the Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album in 2003. (This article is part of a featured topic: Maya Angelou autobiographies.).
Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_topics/Maya_Angelou_autobiographies
_______________________________ 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
1920:
Three African-American circus workers were lynched by a mob in Duluth, Minnesota (memorial pictured), a crime that shocked the country for having taken place in the Northern United States. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duluth_lynchings
1996:
The Troubles: The Provisional Irish Republican Army detonated a truck bomb in the commercial centre of Manchester, England, injuring more than 200 people and causing widespread damage to buildings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_Manchester_bombing
2012:
American acrobat Nik Wallenda became the first person to walk a tightrope stretched directly over Niagara Falls. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nik_Wallenda
_____________________________ Wiktionary's word of the day:
Magna Carta: 1. (law, historical) A charter granted by King John to the barons at Runnymede in 1215, which is one of the bases of English constitutional tradition; a physical copy of this charter, or a later version. 2. (figuratively) A landmark document that sets out rights or important principles. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Magna_Carta
___________________________ Wikiquote quote of the day:
We believe in only the government we need, but we insist on all the government we need. We believe in a government that is characterized by fairness and reasonableness, a reasonableness that goes beyond labels, that doesn't distort or promise to do things that we know we can't do. We believe in a government strong enough to use words like "love" and "compassion" and smart enough to convert our noblest aspirations into practical realities. We believe in encouraging the talented, but we believe that while survival of the fittest may be a good working description of the process of evolution, a government of humans should elevate itself to a higher order. --Mario Cuomo https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mario_Cuomo
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