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