Milestones: December 14, 2023

December 14, 2023 Brooklyn Eagle Staff

Share this:

WRITINGS COMMANDED GOOD MONEY — THE AUTHOR SHIRLEY JACKSON, BORN DEC. 14, 1916, is perhaps best known for her short horror story, “The Lottery,” but she was a regular contributor to women’s magazines and, according to some accounts, her family’s breadwinner. She had an agent and successfully negotiated high figures for her writings, including one story for the Saturday Evening Post which in 1959 fetched her $2,250. She was born in California, for which she remained homesick much of her life, but lived in Vermont, where her husband, Stanley Hyman, taught at Bennington College. The New Yorker magazine published her 1948 short story, “The Lottery,” about a small town that blindly continued a dark and deadly tradition. However, the magazine did not indicate that it was a work of fiction, and Jackson received much hate mail, even though the story later won the O. Henry Prize and is now required reading in most schools.

Shirley Jackson’s first novel, “The Road Through the Wall,” was also published in 1948.

✰✰✰

A SOMBER ANNIVERSARY — THE NEWTOWN, CONNECTICUT, SCHOOL SHOOTINGS BROKE OUT ON DEC. 14, 2012, in which 20 children and six adults were killed. Adam Lanza, a 20-year-old man with a history of mental illness, shot his mother with her gun in their home. He then shot his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, armed with an AR-15 assault weapon and two pistols and killed the 20 first-graders as the teachers courageously tried to shield them. Lanza turned a gun on himself as the police approached.

Happening 13 ½ years after the shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado, the tragedy revived a national debate over gun control that is still being waged. The number of school shootings since Columbine is at 392, according to a Washington Post article updated on Dec. 6, 2023.

✰✰✰

DOCTOR KNOWN FOR PROPHECY — THE FRENCH PHYSICIAN, NOSTRADAMUS, BORN ON DEC. 14, 1503 AS MICHEL DE NOTREDAME, WAS MORE WIDELY KNOWN FOR HIS ASTROLOGICAL PREDICTIONS AND PROPHECIES that, in retrospect, sounded accurate against the backdrop of world history. He was born into a Jewish family that had to practice its faith in secret and then converted to Catholicism (thus the name Notredame, which is French for Our Lady. Notredame was later Latinized to Nostradamus). According to the Jewish Medical Dictionary and the Jewish Virtual Library, Nostradamus became impassioned with the Kabbalah, which is a collection of mystical Jewish texts about the quest of humankind for an intimate union with God. But Nostradamus is best known for his book “Les Prophéties,” a collection of 942 poetic quatrains allegedly predicting future events. Some of his later-day disciples believed that Nostradamus accurately presaged the 1929 stock market crash, World War II, the Kennedy assassination and the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

A polymath, Nostradamus distinguished himself not only in mathematics but also in the Hebrew, Greek and Latin languages and in medicine, where he grew impatient with what he called the ignorance of his contemporaries in that field.

✰✰✰

‘HEART OF DIXIE’ — ALABAMA WAS ADMITTED TO THE UNION ON DEC. 14, 1819, thus marking its 204th anniversary as the 22nd state this year. Established as a separate territory in 1817, Alabama became a state during the time that President James Monroe was in office, and was unofficially nicknamed “The Heart of Dixie,” although state records indicate no official moniker. During the post-Civil War Reconstruction, whites in government power there pushed back against emancipation, passing “black code” laws to limit the former slaves’ freedoms, passing Jim Crow segregation laws and sanctioning violence against Blacks. By the mid-1960s, Alabama became an epicenter of the Civil Rights movement, led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and others.

According to the latest U.S. Census Bureau report, Alabama’s population rose over the past decade by 7.4%, to 33.1 million. However, the latest decennial census began in the months before the pandemic, and the COVID death toll may not have been factored in. The three largest racial and ethnic compositions as of the 2020 Census were White alone, 61.6%, Hispanic, 18.7%; Black Alone,12.4%.

✰✰✰

BECAME AN IVY LEAGUE SCHOOL — DARTMOUTH COLLEGE ALUMNI CAN REJOICE THAT THEIR ALMA MATER HAS TURNED 254. THE COLLEGE WAS ESTABLISHED ON DEC. 13, 1769 when the governor of the Province of New Hampshire, John Wentworth, acting in the name of George III, King of Great Britain, granted a charter to the school, whose original mission was to Christianize the indigenous tribes of the region. According to ‘A Dartmouth Lesson Plan” by Francis Lane Childs (published in the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine in December 1957 and available online), a Mohican Indian named Samson Occum became one of the young men who preacher Eleazar Wheelock took into his home to study. The two became close and Occum, recognizing that Wheelock lived on modest means, set sail to England with another preacher as a companion and to raise funds so that Wheelock could establish a college. New Hampshire provided the best offers of land and Wentworth signed the charter. Wheelock wanted to name the school in honor of Wentworth, who demurred and suggested that it be named for his English friend, the Earl of Dartmouth.

Dartmouth alumnus Daniel Webster, one of the nation’s greatest orators and a senator, successfully argued the case Dartmouth College v. Woodward before the Supreme Court. The crux of this landmark 1818-19 Supreme Court case centered on whether Dartmouth should be incorporated into the state university or remain private, which it remains to this day.

See previous milestones, here.