Sarah Winnemucca, 1844-1891

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A Northern Paiute leader, negotiator, lecturer, activist, social reformer, and writer. The first Native American woman to publish a book.

Thocmentony, “Shell Flower,” was her given name in the Northern Paiute tribe in the Humboldt Lake area in Nevada. When she was six years old, she moved with her family near Stockton, California, and, at 13, she and her sister went to live with a settler family at Carson City, Nevada as a companion for the family’s daughter. There, she established her English and adopted the name Sarah. When she returned to California two years later, she shortly attended a convent school before she was forced to leave due to complaints from parents of white students.

During the Paiute War of 1860, Native Americans and settlers were frequently attacking one another. Winnemucca and her family members escaped to San Francisco. In the next five years, the family made a living by performing on stage as the “Paiute Royal Family.” In 1868, Winnemucca, among 500 Paiute survivors, moved to Fort McDermit military camp, where she began to use her skills as an interpreter. Three years later, the tribe relocated to the new Malheur Reservation in Oregon; there, she worked as an interpreter and as an assistant teacher at the local school.

During the Bannock War in 1878, Winnemucca’s father, among other tribe members, had been taken hostage. She volunteered to save them and went to scout the Bannock territory. She covered more than a hundred miles before she located the Bannock camp, releasing the prisoners and gathering valuable intelligence for the US army. Afterward, she became a close associate of the commanding General, assisting with other missions that required her talents as scouter and interpreter. At the end of the war, the Paitus tribe was forced to move to the Yakama Reservation, suffering neglect and deprivation. Outraged by the reservation conditions, for the next five years, Winnemucca advocated and delivered hundreds of speeches regarding the injustice against Native Americans. She campaigned for the cause wherever she could, addressing army officers, senators, and legislators and securing thousands of signatures for a petition granting reservation lands for the Native Americans. Sadly, her efforts were fruitless.

During her lecturing tour, she met Elizabeth Peabody and Mary Peabody Mann, who encouraged her to assemble her speeches into a book. In 1883, she published her autobiography “Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims,” becoming the first Native American woman to publish a book and the first to secure her copyright registration in the US. Her writings were a rare and valuable description of the life of the Northern Paiute and the impact of the white settlers on them.

In 1884, at the age of 40, Winnemucca returned to live in Nevada, where she and her brother established a school for Paiute children, teaching them Native American culture and languages. Three years later, the school was shut down due to an act that ruled that Native children can only study in English schools managed by settlers. In 1887, after her second husband died, Winnemucca moved to live with her sister in Henry’s Lake, Idaho. She passed away four years later at the age of 47.

 

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“Be kind to bad and good, for you don’t know your own heart.”

“Be kind to bad and good, for you don’t know your own heart.”

Fun Facts

  • Both her father and grandfather were Paiute chiefs.
  • From childhood, she spoke three Indigenous dialects as well as English and Spanish.
  • The town of Winnemucca, Nevada, was named after her father.
  • A statue of her was contributed in 2005 by the state of Nevada to the National Statuary Hall Collection in the US Capitol.
  • She was married twice, and there are no records if she had kids.
  • The Sarah Winnemucca Elementary school in Washoe County, Nevada, is named in her honor.
  • October 16th (the day she died in 1891) was declared as Sarah Winnemucca Day in Nevada.

Awards

  • Inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame (1993)
  • Inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame (1994)

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Category: Academy & Education, Literature & Poetry, and Religion & Ethnic Culture
Tags: Author, Educator, and Spiritual Leader

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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...
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Adelina “Nina” Otero Warren was born near Los Lunas, New Mexico. Her family was among the early settlers in New Mexico, and her parents were part of the Hispanic elite. When she was 2 years old, her father was killed by an Anglo squatter. A few years later, her mother married an English businessman, and she grew up in a multicultural environment. She was influenced by her mother, who was an advocate for social and educational developments and served as the director of Santa Fe’s Board of Education. At 16, the family relocated to Santa Fe, where she became a socialite. At the age of 26, she married Lieutenant Rawson D. Warren, a cavalry officer who was nine years older than her. Though the marriage did not last long, she kept her x-husband’s last name and called herself a widow, so she would not be stigmatized as a divorced woman.   At 31, Nina moved to NYC to keep house for her brother. There, she became active in Anne Morgan’s settlement house, working alongside the famous suffragist Alice Paul and organizing crafts programs for working-class women. Two years later, her mother died, and Nina returned to Santa Fe to take care of her half-siblings. Upon her arrival, she started working for the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage. Soon she became the first Mexican-American state leader of the Congressional Union in New Mexico, raising support from the Spanish-speaking community as well as from the English-speaking community. Using her family connections, she was a successful lobbyist for voting in favor of the Nineteenth Amendment, and she had a key role in its ratification in 1920. In 1922, at the age of 41, Nina ran as the Republican Party nominee for New Mexico to the US House of Representatives – The first Latina to run for the US Congress. During her campaign, she spoke Spanish and advocated for the improvement of education, health care, and welfare services, as well as for the preservation of Hispano heritage and culture. Ultimately, she lost the election by less than 9%, probably because it was discovered that she was a divorcee, not a widow. In 1917 Nina was appointed as the Santa Fe Superintendent of Instruction – one of the first women to serve as government officials in New Mexico. In her 12 years in office, she worked tirelessly to improve the education of Hispano. This post is also available in: Español Read more...
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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...
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