Monday, September 21, 2020
September 21st in stamps Arthur Schopenhauer, H. G. Wells, Haakon VII of Norway
Sunday, September 20, 2020
September 20th in stamps Chulalongkorn, Jacob Grimm, Simon Wiesenthal
A collection of fairy tales was first published in 1812 by the Grimm brothers, known in English as Grimms' Fairy Tales.
From 1837–1841, the Grimm brothers joined five of their colleague professors at the University of Göttingen to form a group known as the Göttinger Sieben (The Göttingen Seven). They protested against Ernest Augustus, King of Hanover, whom they accused of violating the constitution. All seven were fired by the king.
Stamps from Germany, East Germany and Berlin featuring the Grimm brothers or their fairy tales
Saturday, September 19, 2020
September 19th in stamps James A. Garfield, Porsche, King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden, Ole Rømer
Rømer also invented the modern thermometer showing the temperature between two fixed points, namely the points at which water respectively boils and freezes.
In addition to inventing the first street lights in Copenhagen, Rømer also invented the meridian circle, the altazimuth, and the passage instrument (also known as the transit instrument, a type of meridian circle whose horizontal axis is not fixed in the east-west direction).
In scientific literature, alternative spellings such as "Roemer", "Römer", or "Romer" are common.
Danish stamp depicting Ole Rømer
An important contributor to the German war effort during World War II, Porsche was involved in the production of advanced tanks such as the VK 4501 (P), Tiger I, Tiger II, Elefant, and Panzer VIII Maus, as well as other weapon systems, including the V-1 flying bomb. Porsche was a member of the Nazi Party, and was called the "Great German Engineer" by Nazi officials. He was a recipient of the German National Prize for Art and Science, the SS-Ehrenring and the War Merit Cross.
Porsche was inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame in 1996 and won the Car Engineer of the Century award in 1999
Some stamps depicting Ferdinand Porsche or the Porsche car
Friday, September 18, 2020
September 18th in stamps Leonhard Euler, Oscar II, Royal Opera House in London opens, Léon Foucault
The current building is the third theatre on the site following disastrous fires in 1808 and 1856. The façade, foyer, and auditorium date from 1858, but almost every other element of the present complex dates from an extensive reconstruction in the 1990s. The main auditorium seats 2,256 people, making it the third largest in London, and consists of four tiers of boxes and balconies and the amphitheatre gallery. The proscenium is 12.20 m wide and 14.80 m high. The main auditorium is a Grade I listed building.
Stamp from Great Britain depicting the Royal Opera House
Thursday, September 17, 2020
September 17th in stamps von Steuben, Marquis de Condorcet, Harriet Tubman escapes from slavery, Alfred de Vigny
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
Sunday, August 30, 2020
August 31st in stamps de Bougainville, Baudelaire, Wilhelmina
In 1771, Bougainville published his travel log from the expedition under the title Le voyage autour du monde, par la frégate La Boudeuse, et la flûte L'Étoile (a.k.a. Voyage autour du monde and A Voyage Around the World). The book describes the geography, biology and anthropology of Argentina (then a Spanish colony), Patagonia, Tahiti and Indonesia (then a Dutch colony). The book was a sensation, especially the description of Tahitian society. Bougainville described it as an earthly paradise where men and women lived in blissful innocence, far from the corruption of civilization.
After an interval of several years, Bougainville again accepted a naval command and saw much active service between 1779 and 1782 during the American Revolutionary War, when France was as an ally of the rebels. He played a crucial part in the French victory at the Battle of the Chesapeake, which led to the eventual defeat of Great Britain.
Returning to Paris, he was one of the founding members of the Bureau des Longitudes. In 1799, the Consul Napoleon made him a senator. He died in Paris on 31 August 1811.
Stamps from New Hebrides and New Caledonia depicting de Bougainville
His most famous work, a book of lyric poetry titled Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), expresses the changing nature of beauty in the rapidly industrializing Paris during the mid-19th century. Baudelaire's highly original style of prose-poetry influenced a whole generation of poets including Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé, among many others. He is credited with coining the term "modernity" (modernité) to designate the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility of artistic expression to capture that experience.
Stamps from France and Monaco depicting Charles Baudelaire
Wilhelmina was the only child of King William III and his second wife, Emma of Waldeck and Pyrmont. On William's death in 1890, she ascended to the throne at the age of ten under the regency of her mother. In 1901, she married Duke Henry of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, with whom she had a daughter, Juliana. Wilhelmina was generally credited with maintaining Dutch neutrality during the First World War.
Following the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940, Wilhelmina fled to Britain and took charge of the Dutch government-in-exile. She frequently spoke to the Dutch people over radio and came to be regarded as a symbol of the Dutch resistance. She returned to the Netherlands following its liberation in 1945.
Increasingly beset by poor health after the war, Wilhelmina abdicated in September 1948 in favour of Juliana. She retired to Het Loo Palace, where she died in 1962.
Dutch, Suriname and Netherlands Indies stamps depicting Wilhelmina