On this day in 1934, aspiring dancer Ella Fitzgerald, intimidated by other competitors, changed her act to singing at the last minute and won the Amateur Night at Harlem’s Apollo Theater. Fitzgerald was only seventeen years old and a ward of New York State at the time, having been orphaned two years before. After a […]
On this day in 1827, abolitionist and educator Emily Howland was born in Sherwood, New York. Howland taught the children of freed slaves in Washington, D.C. In 1857, she built a school in Sherwood and personally founded and financially supported fifty other schools for emancipated slaves. She taught in several of these schools and was […]
On this day in 1945, Wilma Pearl Mankiller, who would become the first female chief of he Cherokee Nation, was born in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. She was the sixth of eleven children; her father was full-blooded Cherokee and his mother was a Caucasian of Dutch and Irish descent. Mankiller received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in […]
On this day in 1558, 25-year-old Elizabeth succeeded her sister Queen Mary I, beginning the Elizabethan Age. Elizabeth was the daughter of King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn and was nicknamed the Virgin Queen because she resisted marriage feeling it would endanger her authority as ruler of England and Ireland. Elizabeth Briskey Mast made this […]
On this day in 1915, Booker T. Washington, founder of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute (now Tuskegee University) died in Alabama at the age of 59 from congestive heart failure. Washington was born into slavery in rural Virginia and after the Civil War he worked many jobs and still managed to go to school. At […]
They say everything is bigger in Texas, and they might be right! At the end of October, the Quilt Alliance visited the International Quilt Festival in Houston, Texas. It was the festival’s 40th anniversary–its Ruby Jubilee–and there were more quilts than ever before. With all those quilts and quiltmakers in one place, it was a […]
On this day in 1982, the Vietnam Memorial, designed by Yale University architecture student Maya Lin, was dedicated in Washington, D.C. The monument is a simple v-shaped black granite wall inscribed with the names of 57,939 Americans who died in the war, arranged in order of the date of their death versus their rank. This […]
On this day in 1954, Ellis Island shuts its doors. The immigration gateway that opened in 1892 processed more than 12 million people with a peak occurring from 1892-1924. The island was name for its owner in the 1770’s, Samuel Ellis. This Navy Signature fundraising quilt was made by the Ladies Auxiliary, Fleet Reserve Association, […]
On this day in 1918, World War I (also known as the Great War) ended on the 11 a.m. when German forces, low on manpower and supplies and facing certain invasion, signed an armistice agreement with the Allies outside of Compiegne, France. The war left nine million soldiers dead and 21 million wounded, and at […]
This Sunday’s Q.S.O.S. Spotlight is a few days late, but we have a very special quilt to share in honor of today, Veterans Day in the US. When Pam Neil’s son Scott was deployed to Afghanistan after September 11, 2001, she decided to make a quilt for him and add one square for every day […]
