In 1804, the Lewis and Clark Expedition departed from Camp Dubois and began its historic journey, traveling up the Missouri River.
Arise, then, Christian women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts, Whether your baptism be that of water or of tears!
Say firmly: We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies.
Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country, to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.
From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says: Disarm, disarm!
-from Julia Ward Howe’s "Appeal to Womanhood Throughout the World" (1870). It would later come to be known as the “Mother’s Day Proclamation".
Born in 1904 – Salvador Dalí, Spanish painter.
Above: “Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea Which at Twenty Meters Becomes the Portrait of Abraham Lincoln–Homage to Rothko” (1976)
Born in 1906 – Roberto Rossellini, Italian director and screenwriter.
Above: Still image from Rossellini’s 1950 film, The Flowers of St. Francis.
It’s the Feast of St. George in the Eastern Orthodox tradition.
Saint George, with courage you stood up to those in power, to tell them that what they were doing was wrong. Pray that we, too, may have the courage to stand up for what is right, with God’s help.
Above: St. George, by an unknown Ethiopian artist.
Born in 1818 – Karl Marx, German philosopher and sociologist.
In 1856 he said:
“In our days, everything seems pregnant with its opposite: Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labor, we behold starving and overworking it. The new-fangled sources of wealth, by some strange, weird spell, are turned into sources of want. The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character. At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. Even the pure light of science seems unable to shine but on the dark background of ignorance. All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force.This antagonism between modern industry and science on the one hand, modern misery and dissolution on the other hand; this antagonism between the productive powers and the social relations of our epoch is a fact, palpable, overwhelming, and not to be controverted.
Born in 1796 – Horace Mann, American educator, reformer, and politician.
“After a child has arrived at the legal age for attending school–whether he be the child of noble or of peasant–the only two absolute grounds of exemption from attendance are sickness and death.“
– from Life and Works of Horace Mann: Vol. III
Born in 1919 – Pete Seeger, American singer-songwriter.
Above: Seeger sings Tom Paxton’s “What Did You Learn in School Today?”
Born in 1921 – Satyajit Ray, Indian director, producer, and screenwriter.
Above: Still from Ray’s 1955 film, Pather Panchali.
It’s the feast day of St. Joseph the Worker.
Above: St. Joseph and the Child Jesus by John Collier.
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