1070 The legendary date for the origin of blue cheese near Roquefort, France. According to the story a shepherd left a lunch of bread and ewe’s milk cheese in a cave and forgot about it until some months later when he returned to the area and found that mould had transformed the cheese. The mould comes from the soil of the local caves.
1717 London. The first Grand Lodge of Freemasonry was established. Its founding Premier compiled a history and constitution of Freemasonry tracing its roots back to Biblical Egypt. Hence the Egyptian motifs associated with Freemasonry. We visited a local lodge for enlightenment once and found it most entertaining. (Probably not the purpose of the evening, to be sure.) The numerous entries are Wikipedia are suitably gnomic.
1876 A transcontinental express train left New York City and arrived just over 83 hours later in San Francisco. It had crossed three thousand miles in less than four days. Wagons took four to six months to make the trip.
1919 Washington DC. In a joint resolution Congress approved the Nineteenth Amendment to enfranchise women and sent it to the states for ratification. The House vote was 304-89 and the Senate 56-25. A sufficient number of states ratified by January 1920 when Kentucky accepted it. Women’s work in World War I was credited with providing momentum.
1940 Twenty-two year old Carson McCullers published her first novel, ‘The Heart is a Lonely Hunter,’ charting the lives of residents of a boarding house in a Georgia mill town. There is the deaf-mute narrator, the mentally unbalanced trouble maker, the teenage tomboy who wants to play the piano, the alcoholic labor organiser, the owner, and the black physician who hopes for the best against the odds of the time and place. In this and her subsequent books she gave voice to the rejected, the forgotten, the mistreated, the deformed, the broken and the oppressed from the inside out. No reader ever forgets her novels.
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