#otd

See tagged statuses in the local Gatti Ninja community

Very early , 12 Apr 1944, Odette Wilen parachutes into France to work as a wireless operator for the British Special Operations Executive. The SOE supports the French resistance.

Wireless operators were at the greatest risk of discovery, as their position could be triangulated whenever they were transmitting messages back to London.

Wilen evades capture by minutes and escapes over the Pyrenees. She lives until 2015.

poor quality snapshot of Odette Wilen in her uniform. She is a white woman with dark hair.

"No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true."

in 1850.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's historical novel The Scarlet Letter is published by William Ticknor and James T. Fields in Boston, Massachusetts, where it is set. It sells 2,500 copies in ten days.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scarlet_Letter

The Scarlett Letter at PG:
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/33

Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of "The Scarlet Letter" (1850), regarded this painting, which William Walters commissioned from Merle in 1859, as the finest illustration of his novel. Set in Puritan Boston, the novel relates how Hester Prynne was publicly disgraced and condemned to wear a scarlet letter "A" for adultery. Arthur Dimmesdale, the minister who fathered her child, and Roger Chillingworth, Hester's elderly husband, appear in the background. Merle's canvas reflects some of the same 19th-century historical interest in the Puritans as Hawthorne's book, a fascination that reached its peak with the establishment of Thanksgiving as a national holiday in 1863. By depicting Hester and her daughter, Pearl, in a pose that recalls that of the Madonna and Child, Merle underlines "The Scarlet Letter"'s themes of sin and redemption.

in 1818.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, his wife Mary and her stepsister Claire Clairmont leave England for Italy (to escape its "tyranny civil and religious"), intending to take Claire's illegitimate child Alba to her father, Lord Byron.

Over the next four years produced what Zachary Leader and Michael O'Neill call "some of the finest poetry of the Romantic period".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Bysshe_Shelley

Shelley at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/1529

Posthumous Portrait of Shelley Writing Prometheus Unbound in Italy-painting by Joseph Severn, 1845. Oil on canvas. Keats-Shelley Memorial House, Rome, Italy. This romantic and idealized portrait shows the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley seated among the ruins of an ancient structure. Shelley is portrayed in a contemplative and slightly melancholic posture, with his hand resting on his face, gazing into the distance.

Danish seismologist and geophysicist Inge Lehmann died in 1993.

She is best known for her discovery in 1936 of the solid inner core that exists within the molten outer core of the Earth. The seismic discontinuity in the speed of seismic waves at depths between 190 and 250 km is named the Lehmann discontinuity after her. Lehmann is considered to be a pioneer among women and scientists in seismology research.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inge_Lehmann

Lehmann in 1932. Image courtesy The Royal Library, National Libary of Denmark and University of Copenhagen University Library, under a Creative Commons License. Even Neuhaus (6.2.1863-20.4.1946) - http://www5.kb.dk/images/billed/2010/okt/billeder/object11164/da/ The photograph is sepia-toned and features Lehmann with a composed expression, wearing a modest dark jacket over a white blouse. Her hair is neatly pulled back, and she has a serious, determined gaze. The signature "Marthæus 1932" is visible in the lower right corner.

, 19 Feb 1963, American writer Betty Friedan's book 'The Feminine Mystique' is published in the USA.

It is widely credited as kick-starting second wave feminism, and identified social expectations of femininity as a driver of women's unhappiness.

cover of the first edition of the Feminine Mystique
black and white photo of Betty Friedan. She is a white woman with light hair.

in 1894.

French anarchist Martial Bourdin accidentally kills himself while attempting to plant a bomb at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, a fictionalised version of which appears in Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent (1907). Bourdin's motives remain a mystery as does his intended target, which may have been the Greenwich Observatory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martial_Bourdin

The Secret Agent at PG:
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/974

First US edition of The Secret Agent. The book cover has a striking Art Nouveau-style design with symbolic elements reflecting the novel's themes of espionage, political conspiracy, and anarchism. A long-haired figure at the top, possibly representing Fate or an anarchist figure, holds a pair of scissors cutting a string. The string leads downward to a compass-like object, forming a triangle that frames the book’s title. The triangle may symbolize secret societies, conspiracies, or anarchist cells.

6 Feb 1916 the Cabaret Voltaire nightclub opened in Zürich, Switzerland. Described as "history's wildest nightclub" it was the spiritual home of the often radical Dada art movement, formed by artists revolted by the capitalist carnage of WWI https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/10606/opening-of-the-cabaret-voltaire-nightclub

Mary Douglas Leakey was born in 1913.

She discovered the 1st fossilised Proconsul skull, an extinct ape which is now believed to be ancestral to humans. She discovered the robust Zinjanthropus skull at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. She developed a system for classifying the stone tools found at Olduvai. She discovered the Laetoli footprints, and at the Laetoli site she discovered hominin fossils that were more than 3.75 million years old.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Leakey

Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey (1903-1972) and his wife, archeologist and anthropologist Mary Douglas Nicol Leakey (1913-1996), digging at Oduvai Gorge, Tanzania, Africa.