Isabella Bird, 1831-1904

Bird wearing Manchurian clothing from a journey through China. Photo credit - G.P. Putnam's Sons, New York Public Library's Digital Library

An English explorer, writer, photographer, and naturalist. The first woman to be elected as a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

Isabella Bird was born in Boroughbridge, England. Due to her father’s work as a priest, her family frequently moved, so her parents home-schooled her, teaching her botany, flora, and much general knowledge. Bird became an avid reader and writer and published her first essay at 16, discussing free trade versus protectionism.

Since she was little, Bird suffered from various illnesses, including a spinal complaint, insomnia, and nervous headaches. To improve her health, she spent most of her time outdoors, learning to ride and row, skills that became helpful later in her life.

After spine surgery at 23, she embarked on her first voyage to Canada and the US to strengthen her health. The letters she wrote on this trip became the basis of her first book, An Englishwoman in America, published in 1856.

Following her father’s death in 1858, Bird moved to Edinburgh with her mother and sister. During the next decade, she wrote about her experiences in North America, publishing two more books and several articles.

In 1872, at 41, Bird left the UK, this time to Australia, New Zealand, and Hawaii. She compiled her adventures in the book Six Months In The Sandwich Islands, published in 1875. From there, she continued to Colorado, traveling 800 miles on a horse in the Rocky Mountains. Afterward, she published her letters to her sister in The Leisure Hour magazine and incorporated them into her bestseller book A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879).

After a short stay in Edinburgh, she packed her bags and left for Japan, where she lived with the Ainu tribe, and wrote about it in the 1880 book Unbeaten Tracks in Japan. Then, she traveled to Korea, Vietnam, Singapore, the Malay Peninsula, Egypt, and the Sinai Peninsula, where she contracted typhoid fever and returned to Scotland to recover.

In 1881, Bird married Dr. John Bishop, ten years her junior; sadly, he died only five years later.
Bird decided to devote her life to medical missions. In 1886, after studying medicine at St. Mary’s Hospital in London, she joined the missionary cause, and at 58, she began her journey to India via Turkey, Kurdistan, and Persia.

That was the first trip in which Bird began to document her experiences by image, taking photos of the places she visited and the people she met and publishing the pictures with her writings.

In India, Bird worked with the renowned medical missionary Fanny Jane Butler and founded the Henrietta Bird Hospital for Women in Punjab and the John Bishop Memorial Centre in Cashmere.

By then, Bird’s recording of her extensive traveling made her a household name. Her writing style was accessible and entertaining, crafting her personal experiences relatable to all and making her readers feel like they were traveling with her.

In 1890, at 59, Bird became a fellow of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, and the following year, she made history as the first woman elected as a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. Later, she was also appointed a member of the Royal Photographic Society.

In 1897, at 66, she traveled through China and Korea, publishing her encounters in the 1899 book The Yangtze Valley and Beyond.

Bird’s final journey was to Morocco in 1900, where she joined the Berbers for a few months.

Not long after her return, Bird fell ill. She died in her home in Edinburgh at the age of 73.

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“A traveler must buy his own experience, and success or failure depends mainly on personal idiosyncrasies.”

“A traveler must buy his own experience, and success or failure depends mainly on personal idiosyncrasies.”

Fun Facts

  • She published 26 books.
  • Like most Western explorers of her time, she didn't travel alone but employed people to help her.
  • While in Egypt, she joined a group of British soldiers and traveled with them from Baghdad and Tehran, armed with a revolver and her medicine supply.
  • She bequeathed funds in her will for establishing the Henrietta Amelia Bird memorial clock in Tobermory in commemoration of her sister.
  • Her biography, written by Anne M Stoddart, was published in 1907.
  • She is a character in the play Top Girls by Caryl Churchill.
  • She is the main character in the manga Isabella Bird in Wonderland.
  • The BBC program Trailblazers: A Rocky Mountain Road Trip follows her life.
  • In July 2023, Kaneyama, Japan, retraced Bird's actual route along the Ushu Kaido road near the Uwadai mountain pass to commemorate Bird's travels through Japan.
  • Her ancestors were slavery abolitionists, and her father opposed Sunday labor.
  • As silk masters themselves, the Bird family established the silk trade in Coventry in the late 1600s.

Awards

  • The Royal Order of Kapiolani (1881)
  • Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society (1890)
  • Inducted into the Colorado Women's Hall of Fame (1985)

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Category: Activism & Feminism, Arts, and Business & Entrepreneurship
Tags: Author and Photographer

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Ada Louise Huxtable WWP
Arts

Ada Louise Huxtable, 1921-2013

An architecture critic and a writer. Received the first-ever Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.

Born Ada Louise Landman in NYC, an only child in a middle-class Jewish family. Growing up in Manhattan, Huxtable loved strolling along the streets, fascinated by its building, such as the Grand Central Terminal, the Metropolitan Museum, and the Museum of Natural History. She studied art at Hunter College, graduating magna cum laude, and then architectural history at NYU Institute of Fine Arts. At the time, she worked in Bloomingdale’s furnishings department, where she met her soon-to-be husband, Garth Huxtable. In 1946, at 25, Huxtable landed a job as an assistant curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art. After five years, she left her job to study Italian architecture in Italy for a year. Upon her return, she began writing as a contributing editor for various art and architectural journals. At the age of 37, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, in which she examined the structural and design advances of American architecture. In 1963, 42 years old Huxtable was hired as the first architecture critic at The New York Times, a position she held for almost 20 years. In her column, she wrote about new and old buildings, threatened buildings, and bad-designed buildings. She also mentioned emerging architects, architectural trends, movements, and exhibitions. Huxtable encouraged the everyday readers to look at buildings from a new perspective, not as an assembly of bricks and pilasters but as a public statement with history and meaning. Raising awareness of the city’s heritage, the urban environment, and civic engagement, she set the tone for modern architecture criticism, for which, at the age of 49, she was the first-ever to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. In 1981, at the age of 60, Huxtable received a MacArthur grant that allowed her in-depth research on subjects she was interested in, such as the development of the skyscraper, the negative impact of postmodernism building, and preservation vs. modernity. At 76, she returned to writing for the public as an architecture critic for The Wall Street Journal, publishing columns for the next 15 years. Throughout her career, Huxtable was involved in various committees, serving as a fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the Architectural Selection and Building Design Committees for the Getty Center, Getty Villa, and as a Jury member for The Pritzker Architecture Prize. She published more than 10 books on architecture, including “Kicked a Building Lately?,” “Goodbye History,” “Hello Hamburger,” and a biography of Frank Lloyd Wright. Huxtable died in NYC at 91. This post is also available in: Español Read more...
Agatha Christie WWP
Literature & Poetry

Agatha Christie, 1890-1976

English author and playwright. Known as the Queen of Mystery for her detective novels.

Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born in Torquay, England, into a middle-class family. In her early years, she was homeschooled by her parents and taught herself to read at the age of five, against her mother’s wish. In 1901, at 10, she wrote her first poem, “The Cow Slip.” That same year, her father died, and not long after, her mother remarried, and the family moved to Cheadle, Cheshire. She began to receive formal education at Miss Guyer’s Girls’ School but had trouble adjusting to the strict environment. At 15, she was sent to a boarding school in Paris, where she mainly had piano lessons and vocal training. Following her return to England, she began writing short stories reflecting her interest in spiritualism and the paranormal. These include The Call of Wings, and The House of Beauty, later published as The House of Dreams. In addition, she began working on her first novel, Snow Upon the Desert, which she tried to publish under a pseudonym but got rejected by six different publishers. In 1912, at 22, she began a relationship with a military officer named Archie Christie. At the outbreak of World War I, he was sent to fight in France, and the couple had to wait for his home leave to get married. During the war, she volunteered as a nurse at the Voluntary Aid Detachment of the Red Cross. There, she met many Belgian soldiers, which inspired her to create the character of Hercule Poirot – a former Belgian police officer “with a magnificent mustache.” He appeared in Christie’s first detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, as the distinguished detective and later in 25 more novels and numerous short stories. That first novel was written in 1916 but was published only in 1920 after Christie signed a six books contract with The Bodley Head publication. After the war, Christie and her husband moved to London, and in 1919 she gave birth to her daughter Rosalind. She continued to write thrillers and murder mystery stories, developing new detective characters, such as Tommy and Tuppence in The Secret Adversary and Miss Jane Marple in the short story collection The Thirteen Problems. In 1926, she published The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which was an immediate best-seller, and years later was voted the best crime novel ever by the British Crime Writers’ Association. Despite her literary success, she dealt with personal issues. First, her mother died, and then her husband filed for divorce after falling in love with another woman. On December 3rd, 1926, following a fight with her husband, Christie left the house without saying where she was going. The next morning, her car was found abandoned, and the mysterious disappearance of the author became a news sensation. Thousand police officers and 15,000 volunteers searched for her. The author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, gave a medium one of Christie’s gloves to locate her, and a newspaper offered a £100 reward to the person who would find her. Eleven days later, Christie got recognized in a hotel in Yorkshire, where she registered under the last name of her husband’s lover. She suffered from amnesia and couldn’t recall who she was or how she got to Yorkshire. After the incident, she moved to London with her daughter, received psychiatric treatment, and divorced. In 1928, at 38, she took the Orient Express to Istanbul and then continued to Baghdad. While visiting the archaeological site at Ur, she befriended the archaeologist Leonard Woolley, who invited her back the following year. Then, she met the archaeologist Max Mallowan, 13 years her junior. After they married, she joined him on his archaeological expeditions in the Middle East, which inspired many of her stories, such as the 1934 novel Murder on the Orient Express. She continued to publish more novels and short stories, and in 1943, after she disliked a stage adaption of one of her novels, she began to adapt her stories into plays. In the early 1970s, her health began to decline. She published her last novel in 1973 and made her last public appearance in 1974. She died two years later at the age of 85. During her life, she wrote 74 novels (66 of them are detective stories), 14 short-stories collections, 19 plays, and an autobiography. Dozens of her works got adapted into films, TV series, and stage plays. Her books have been translated into over 100 languages and sold over 300 million copies worldwide. In 1976, at the time of her death, she was the best-selling novelist in history.   Dive deeper into the inspiring story of Agatha Christie with our fun and engaging printable worksheet! Available now on Etsy and Teachers Pay Teachers.   This post is also available in: Español Read more...
Alice Walker WWP
Literature & Poetry

Alice Walker, 1944

A novelist, poet, and social activist. The first African-American woman to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Alice Malsenior Tallulah-Kate Walker was born in Eatonton, Georgia, the youngest of eight children of sharecroppers. At 8, she was injured in her eye after her brother played with a BB gun, causing her permanent blindness in one eye. The mark on her eye made her an easy target to her classmates, so she turned to poetry for comfort. Growing up in the segregated south, she attended an only black kids’ high school, from which she graduated valedictorian. Her high scores granted her a full scholarship to Spelman College, where she studied for two years before transferring to Sarah Lawrence College in NYC. In this period, Walker had an abortion which caused her suicidal thoughts. She wrote all about it in her poems. In 1965, at the age of 21, Walker moved to Jackson, Mississippi, and became active in the civil rights movement. She worked for the Legal Defense Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and as a consultant in black history to the Friends of the Children of Mississippi Head Start program while serving as writer-in-residence in various academic institutes publishing essays and short stories. At 23, she married Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal, a Jewish civil rights attorney. At the time, interracial marriage was illegal in the south, and the couple had to travel to NYC to get married. On their return, they became the first legally married interracial couple in Mississippi since 1822, when the miscegenation laws passed. During their nine years of marriage, they suffered recurring harassment from the Ku Klux Klan. In 1970, at 26, Walker published her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, following the life of an abusive sharecropper husband and father. Three years later, she was appointed editor of Ms. Magazine, published her second poetry collection and her first collection of short stories. In 1976, Walker returned to NYC and published her second novel Meridian, about several civil rights activists in the south during the 1960s. In the late 1970s, she moved to California, where she wrote her best-known work, The Color Purple. Published in 1982, the novel explores the struggles of a black woman in the racist and patriarchal society of 1900s Georgia. The book was a best-seller, and in the following year, 39 years old Walker became the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Later the novel was adapted into a film featuring Oprah Winfrey and Whoopi Goldberg and a Broadway musical produced by Quincy Jones and Oprah Winfrey. In 1984, she co-founded the feminist publishing company Wild Tree Press. She deepened the world of some of her characters from The Color Purple in two of her novels, The Temple of My Familiar and Possessing the Secret of Joy, and created new characters that allowed her to delve into other social issues, such as female sexuality in By the Light of My Father’s Smile from 1998, and identity questions in Now Are the Time to Open Your Heart from 2005. Throughout the decades, Walker published seven novels, ten poetry collections, four short stories collections, four children’s books, and a dozen collections of essays and articles. In all of her work, Walker deals with the struggles of black people, especially women, and their experiences in sexist, racist, and violent surroundings. Often using Black vernacular, which highlights the hundreds of years of slavery and oppression, she had dealt with complex topics such as rape, isolation, bisexuality, and troubled relationships within the black community. Walker is a long-time social and political activist, promoting and fighting for various causes, from black and women’s rights to environmental issues, Palestinians’ fight for independence, and the elimination of female genital mutilation. This post is also available in: Español Read more...
Angela Davis WWP
Activism & Feminism

Angela Davis, 1944

A political activist, scholar, and author.

Angela Davis was born and raised in the middle-class African American neighborhood in Birmingham, Alabama, which got the nickname Dynamite Hill after the bombings by the Ku Klux Klan during the 1950s. Her mother was an active member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored (NAACP) and a Communist Southern Negro Youth Congress organizer. As a high school junior, she moved to NYC to participate in a program that placed black students from the South in integrated schools in the North. There, she joined the communist youth group. After high school, she received a scholarship to Brandeis University and studied French and philosophy. In 1965, after graduating magna cum laude, she continued to graduate school at the University of Frankfurt in Germany. The Socialist German Student Union activists inspired her to join political organizations in the United States, including the Black Panthers and the Che-Lumumba Club, an all-black branch of the Communist Party. In 1969, at 25, Davis was hired as an assistant professor at the University of California in Los Angeles but got fired because of her communist association. She took her case to court, which ruled that she could not get fired for her party affiliation. She returned to her position but had to leave in the following year when her contract expired. At the time, she became known as a supporter of the Soledad Brothers, three inmates of Soledad Prison convicted of murdering a guard. In August 1970, during the trial of George Lester Jackson, one of the defendants, his brother, took over the courtroom and tried to claim hostages to exchange for his brother. A shoot-out occurred while transporting the hostages, in which four people were killed, including Superior Court Judge Harold Haley. Davis was accused of being part of the event since the weapons were registered under her name. She went into hiding, and the FBI listed her on its Ten Most Wanted Fugitive List. After two months, she was caught and sent to jail. She became a symbol of resistance. The Free Angela Davis became a movement, with thousands of people in over 60 countries signing petitions for her release, arguing that she was a political prisoner targeted for her activism and political beliefs. After 16 months of incarceration and no trial, she got released on $100,000 bail. She was acquitted by the jury four months later. Her time in prison only fueled her passion for fighting against injustice. After her release, she embarked on an international speaking tour, welcomed and praised mainly in communist countries, such as Cuba, East Germany, and the Soviet Union. In 1975, at the age of 31, she resumed her scholar career, teaching history, Black and Women’s studies in various academic institutes, including Claremont Colleges, San Francisco State University, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. She continued with her activism work, speaking publicly on various causes, from racial equality and women’s rights to prison reform and the inequality of capitalism. In 1991, she founded the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, and in 1997, she co-founded the Critical Resistance – an organization dedicated to abolishing the prison system. Over the years, she has been writing and editing 12 books, focusing mainly on various aspects of politics, feminism, and civil rights. She is serving on the advisory board of the Prison Activist Resource Center and continues to advocate for equality for all. This post is also available in: Español Read more...
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