Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891 – January 28, 1960) was an African-American novelist, short story writer, folklorist, and anthropologist known for her contributions to African-American literature, her portrayal of racial struggles in the American South, and works documenting her research on Haitian voodoo. Of Hurstons four novels and more than 50 published short stories, plays, and essays, she is best known for her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama, and moved to Eatonville, Florida, with her family in 1894. Eatonville would become the setting for many of her stories and is now the site of the Zora! Festival, held each year in Hurstons honor. In her early career, Hurston conducted anthropological and ethnographic research while attending Barnard College. While in New York she became a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Her short satires, drawing from the African-American experience and racial division, were published in anthologies such as The New Negro and Fire!!. After moving back to Florida, Hurston published her literary anthropology on African-American folklore in North Florida, Mules and Men (1935) and her first three novels: Jonahs Gourd Vine (1934); Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937); and Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939). Also published during this time was Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938), documenting her research on rituals in Jamaica and Haiti.
Hurstons works touched on the African-American experience and her struggles as an African-American woman. Her novels went relatively unrecognized by the literary world for decades, but interest revived after author Alice Walker published In Search of Zora Neale Hurston in the March 1975 issue of Ms. Magazine. Hurstons manuscript Every Tongue Got to Confess (2001), a collection of folktales gathered in the 1920s, was published posthumously after being discovered in the Smithsonian archives.
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1787 Delaware was the first state to ratify the U.S. Constitution. (Delaware Food Trivia)
1863 Richard Warren Sears was born. He developed his mail-order jewelry business (1886) into the Sears Roebuck & Company. By 1894 the Sears catalog was 507 pages.
1879 Charles Lavelle Broley was born (died May 4, 1959). A Canadian banker and ornithologist, he was one of the first to implicate DDT in the declining hatching success of bald eagles, and the environmental dangers of pesticides.
1901 Andre Tchelistcheff born (died April 5, 1994). Tchelistcheff was a Russian-born U.S. enologist, was a pivotal figure in the revitalization of the California wine industry following Prohibition (1919-33) and used his Paris training in viticulture and wine making to pioneer such techniques as cold fermentation and the use of American oak barrels for aging. He was also an authority on the types of soil suitable for growing various grape varieties. Known as the "dean of American winemakers"
1904 Clarence Nash was born. The original voice of Donald Duck.
1909 Leo Hendrik Baekeland of Yonkers, N.Y. received U.S. patent No. 942,699 for ‘Bakelite,' the first plastic that did not soften when heated. Those black plastic knobs on stoves, and distributor caps for car engines are examples.
1913 Aaron Montgomery Ward died (born Feb 17, 1844). Founder of Montgomery Ward & Co. to sell general merchandise by mail order.
1926 The Electrolux Servel Corp. received the first U.S. patent for a household refrigerator cooled by a sealed gas refrigerant. (Refrigerator Trivia)
1942 Harry Chapin was born (died July 16, 1981). American singer-songwriter ('Taxi,' 'Cat's in the Cradle,' etc.). A dedicated humanitarian, a co-founder of the organization World Hunger Year in 1975 and influential in President Jimmy Carter's establishment of the Presidential Commission on World Hunger in 1977. Chapin was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 1987 for his humanitarian work.
2006 The Hard Rock Cafes and Casinos were purchased by Florida's Seminole American Indian Tribe.
2009 British TV channel ITV apologized for the death of a rat on its reality show 'I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!' in Australia. Two contestants, Gino D’Acampo and Stuart Manning skinned, cooked and ate the rat during filming, and were later convicted of animal cruelty.
2020 Coronavirus: Global cases total more than 67 million with over 1,540,000 deaths; U.S. cases total more than 15 million with more than 288,000 deaths.
2021 Coronavirus: Global cases total more than 266,628,000 with over 5,276,000 deaths; U.S. cases total more than 50,104,000 with more than 809,600 deaths.