On this day in 1927, American tennis champion Althea Gibson was born in Silver, South Carolina. Despite a challenging childhood spent in the New York City borough of Harlem, Gibson made history as the first African-American tennis player to compete at both the U.S. National Championships (1950) and Wimbledon (1951). Althea Orr Diament hand pieced […]
On this day in 1983, Hurricane Alicia formed south of Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico. Twenty-one deaths and billions of dollars of damage were caused by the storm. Louisiana quiltmaker Wealthy Alicia Logan Long made this Crazy quilt 100 years earlier (1883). From this Quilt Index record: “Maker had 9 children. The quilt was […]
On this day in 1950, Anne Elizabeth Alice Louise, Princess Royal of England, was born to then Princess Elizabeth, Duchess of Edinburgh, and Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. Anne had an interest in pharology, the study of lighthouses, and as a patron of the Northern Lighthouse Board, visited each of Scotland’s 215 lighthouses. Â This Lighthouse […]
On this day in 1892, the “Baltimore Afro-American” newspaper was founded by former slave John H. Murphy, Jr. Two editions of the paper are still in circulation—one in Baltimore, and the other in Washington D.C. Elizabeth Perry of Bethesda, Maryland machine pieced this sunny yellow and gold Pineapple Log Cabin quilt in 1932. Perry did […]
On this day in 1990, self-taught fossil hunter Susan Hendrickson discovered three large bones jutting out of a click near Faith, South Dakota. The bones turned out to be the largest Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton ever discovered. The nearly 90 percent complete 65 million-year-old remains were later dubbed Sue. Carrie Elizabeth McLane Flannery of Faith, South […]
On this day in 1861, American composer Carrie Jacobs-Bond was born in Janesville, Wisconsin. Her most popular songs were “I Love You Truly (1901) and “A Perfect Day” (1910). Norwegian-born mother of eight Grunhild Loftus Anderson hand appliqued and hand quilted this cream and yellow feedsack Hour Glass Variation quilt in the early 1900’s. At […]
On this day in 1950, American Florence Chadwick swam the English Channel from France to England in 13 hours and 20 minutes, breaking the record of Gertrude Ederle. In 1951 she became the first woman to swim from England to France, making her the first woman to swim the channel in both directions. And unnamed […]
On this day in 1782, General George Washington created the “Badge for Military Merit,” a purple heart-shaped piece of silk, edged with silver with the word “Merit” stitched across the face in silver. Only three known soldiers were awarded the “Purple Heart” during the Revolutionary War. An unnamed Green County, Pennsylvania quiltmaker created this machine […]
On this day in 1928, Pop art superstar and cultural icon Andy Warhol was born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to immigrant parents from Czechoslovakia. Warhol studied pictorial design (illustration) at Carnegie Institute of Technology and began painting in the 1950’s. Following the advice of his art school teacher who told Warhol to paint what […]
On this day in 2002, the turret of the ironclad Union warship, the U.S.S. Monitor, was raised from the spot on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean where it sat since the ship sank in 1862. Divers worked for six weeks to bring the ship to the surface, finding the remains of two of the […]