Showing posts with label Liberia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Liberia. Show all posts

Thursday, September 17, 2020

September 17th in stamps von Steuben, Marquis de Condorcet, Harriet Tubman escapes from slavery, Alfred de Vigny


Here are some events that happened on September 17th. It could be an event or a person that died or was born on that day


1730 Born: Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, Prussian-American general (d. 1794)

Friedrich Wilhelm August Heinrich Ferdinand von Steuben (born Friedrich Wilhelm Ludolf Gerhard Augustin von Steuben; September 17, 1730 – November 28, 1794), also referred to as Baron von Steuben, was a Prussian and later an American military officer. He served as Inspector General and a Major General of the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War. He was one of the fathers of the Continental Army in teaching them the essentials of military drills, tactics, and discipline. He wrote Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States, the book that served as the Army's drill manual for decades. He served as General George Washington's chief of staff in the final years of the war.

Generally, Von Steuben Day takes place in September in many cities throughout the United States. It is often considered the German-American event of the year. Participants march, dance, wear German costumes and play German music, and the event is attended by millions of people. The German-American Steuben Parade is held annually in September in New York City. It is one of the largest parades in the city and is traditionally followed by an Oktoberfest in Central Park as well as celebrations in Yorkville, Manhattan, a historically German section of New York City. The German-American Steuben Parade has been taking place since 1958. Chicago also hosts a von Steuben Day parade, which is featured in the U.S. film Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Philadelphia hosts a smaller Steuben Parade in the Northeast section of the city.

Stamps from Germany, Berlin and the US depicting von Steuben

General Von Steuben

Berlin 1980 Friedrich Wilhelm Von Steuben

Germany 1994 Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben

Wilhelm von Steuben to Horse. FDC



1743 Born: Marquis de Condorcet, French mathematician and political scientist (d. 1794)

Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis of Condorcet (17 September 1743 – 29 March 1794), known as Nicolas de Condorcet, was a French philosopher and mathematician. His ideas, including support for a liberal economy, free and equal public instruction, constitutional government, and equal rights for women and people of all races, have been said to embody the ideals of the Age of Enlightenment and Enlightenment rationalism. He died in prison after a period of flight from French Revolutionary authorities.

French stamp depicting Marquis de Condorcet

France Condorcet.


1849 – American abolitionist Harriet Tubman escapes from slavery.

Harriet Tubman (born Araminta Ross, c. March 1822 – March 10, 1913) was an American abolitionist and political activist. Born into slavery, Tubman escaped and subsequently made some 13 missions to rescue approximately 70 enslaved people, including family and friends, using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. During the American Civil War, she served as an armed scout and spy for the Union Army. In her later years, Tubman was an activist in the movement for women's suffrage.

Born enslaved in Dorchester County, Maryland, Tubman was beaten and whipped by her various masters as a child. Early in life, she suffered a traumatic head wound when an irate overseer threw a heavy metal weight intending to hit another enslaved person, but hit her instead. The injury caused dizziness, pain, and spells of hypersomnia, which occurred throughout her life. After her injury, Tubman began experiencing strange visions and vivid dreams, which she ascribed to premonitions from God. These experiences, combined with her Methodist upbringing, led her to become devoutly religious.

In 1849, Tubman escaped to Philadelphia, only to return to Maryland to rescue her family soon after. Slowly, one group at a time, she brought relatives with her out of the state, and eventually guided dozens of other enslaved people to freedom. Traveling by night and in extreme secrecy, Tubman (or "Moses", as she was called) "never lost a passenger". After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was passed, she helped guide fugitives farther north into British North America (Canada), and helped newly freed enslaved people to find work. Tubman met John Brown in 1858, and helped him plan and recruit supporters for his 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry.

When the Civil War began, Tubman worked for the Union Army, first as a cook and nurse, and then as an armed scout and spy. The first woman to lead an armed expedition in the war, she guided the raid at Combahee Ferry, which liberated more than 700 enslaved people. After the war, she retired to the family home on property she had purchased in 1859 in Auburn, New York, where she cared for her aging parents. She was active in the women's suffrage movement until illness overtook her, and she had to be admitted to a home for elderly African Americans that she had helped to establish years earlier. After her death in 1913, she became an icon of courage and freedom.

Stamps from the US and Liberia depicting Harriet Tubman

Liberia - 2013 - HARRIET TUBMAN - Souvenir Sheet

US Black Heritage Harriet Tubman 13c single

US. Harriet Tubman Abolitionist. Civil War. 1995



1863 Died: Alfred de Vigny, French author, poet, and playwright (b. 1797)

Alfred Victor, Comte de Vigny (27 March 1797 – 17 September 1863) was a French poet and early leader of French Romanticism. He also produced novels, plays, and translations of Shakespeare.

He settled in Paris with his young English bride Lydia Bunbury, whom he married in Pau in 1825. He collected his recent works in January 1826 in Poèmes antiques et modernes. Three months later he published the first important historical novel in French, Cinq-Mars, based on the life of Louis XIII's favorite Henri Coiffier de Ruzé, Marquis of Cinq-Mars, who conspired against the Cardinal de Richelieu. With the success of these two volumes, Vigny seemed to be the rising star of the Romantic movement, though one of Vigny's best friends, Victor Hugo, soon usurped that role. Vigny wrote of Hugo: "The Victor I loved is no more... now he likes to make saucy remarks and is turning into a liberal, which does not suit him." Unlike Hugo and Alphonse de Lamartine, who moved gradually to the center and then to the left during the 1830s, Vigny remained pliantly centrist in his politics: he accepted the July monarchy, at first welcomed and then rejected the Second French Republic, and then supported Napoleon III. Vigny later denounced members of his inner circle whom he suspected of republican sympathies to the imperial police.

Although Vigny gained success as a writer, his personal life was not happy. His marriage was a disappointment; his relationship with Marie Dorval was plagued by jealousy; and his literary talent was eclipsed by the achievements of others. He grew embittered. After the death of his mother in 1838 he inherited the property of Maine-Giraud, near Angoulême, where it was said that he had withdrawn to his 'ivory tower' (an expression Sainte-Beuve coined with reference to Vigny). There Vigny wrote some of his most famous poems, including La Mort du loup and La Maison du berger. Proust regarded La Maison du berger as the greatest French poem of the 19th century. In 1845, after several unsuccessful attempts to be elected, Vigny became a member of the Académie française.

In later years, Vigny ceased to publish. He continued to write, however, and his Journal is considered by modern scholars to be a great work in its own right, though it awaits a definitive scholarly edition. Vigny considered himself a thinker as well as a literary author; he was, for example, one of the first French writers to take a serious interest in Buddhism. His own philosophy of life was pessimistic and stoical, but celebrated human fraternity, the growth of knowledge, and mutual assistanc as high values. He was the first in literary history to use the word spleen in the sense of woe, grief, gall, descriptive of the condition of the soul of modern man. In his later years he spent much time preparing the posthumous collection of poems now known as Les Destinées, for which his intended title was Poèmes philosophiques. It concludes with Vigny's final message to the world, L'Esprit pur.

French stamps depicting Alfred de Vigny

France 1963 Alfred de Vigny, French author, poet, and playwright

Sunday, May 12, 2019

July 5th in Stamps

Here are some events that happened on July 5th. It could be an event or a person that died or was born on that day



1687 – Isaac Newton publishes Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica.

Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Latin for Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), often referred to as simply the Principia (/prɪnˈsɪpiə, prɪnˈkɪpiə/), is a work in three books by Isaac Newton, in Latin, first published 5 July 1687. After annotating and correcting his personal copy of the first edition,Newton published two further editions, in 1713 and 1726. The Principia states Newton's laws of motion, forming the foundation of classical mechanics; Newton's law of universal gravitation; and a derivation of Kepler's laws of planetary motion (which Kepler first obtained empirically).

The Principia is considered one of the most important works in the history of science. The French mathematical physicist Alexis Clairaut assessed it in 1747: "The famous book of Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy marked the epoch of a great revolution in physics. The method followed by its illustrious author Sir Newton ... spread the light of mathematics on a science which up to then had remained in the darkness of conjectures and hypotheses."


Here are some stamps from Russia, Germany, Great Britain and Monaco depicting Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton publishes Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica.stamp Great Britain

Isaac Newton publishes Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica.stamp Germany

Isaac Newton publishes Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica.stamp Monaco FDC

Isaac Newton publishes Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica.stamp Russia FDC




Died: 1833 – Nicéphore Niépce, French inventor, created the first known photograph (b. 1765)

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (7 March 1765 – 5 July 1833), commonly known or referred to simply as Nicéphore Niépce, was a French inventor, usually credited as the inventor of photography and a pioneer in that field. Niépce developed heliography, a technique he used to create the world's oldest surviving product of a photographic process: a print made from a photoengraved printing plate in 1825. In 1826 or 1827, he used a primitive camera to produce the oldest surviving photograph of a real-world scene. Among Niépce's other inventions was the Pyréolophore, the world's first internal combustion engine, which he conceived, created, and developed with his older brother Claude.

Here are some stamps from Albania and France depicting Nicéphore Niépce

Albania Stamps 2015. Nicéphore Niépce

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce France

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce France FDC Europa CEPT




1884 – Germany takes possession of Cameroon.


German Cameroon (German: Kamerun) was an African colony of the German Empire from 1884 to 1916 in the region of today's Republic of Cameroon. German Cameroon also included northern parts of Gabon and the Congo with western parts of the Central African Republic, southwestern parts of Chad and far eastern parts of Nigeria.

Here are some stamps issued for this German colony





1996 – Dolly the sheep becomes the first mammal cloned from an adult cell

Dolly (5 July 1996 – 14 February 2003) was a female domestic sheep, and the first mammal cloned from an adult somatic cell, using the process of nuclear transfer.

Dolly was cloned by Keith Campbell, Ian Wilmut and colleagues at the Roslin Institute, part of the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and the biotechnology company PPL Therapeutics, based near Edinburgh. The funding for Dolly's cloning was provided by PPL Therapeutics and the Ministry of Agriculture. She was born on 5 July 1996 and died from a progressive lung disease five months before her seventh birthday (the disease was not considered related to her being a clone). She has been called "the world's most famous sheep" by sources including BBC News and Scientific American.

Dolly had three mothers: one provided the egg, another the DNA, and a third carried the cloned embryo to term

Here is a stamp of Liberia with the sheep Dolly

1996 – Dolly the sheep becomes the first mammal cloned from an adult cell