December 10

“The soul should always stand ajar, / That if the heaven inquire, / He will not be obliged to wait” … Poet Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts. She briefly attended Mount Holyoke before returning to her family's house in Amherst, where she lived a mostly introverted, reclusive life, known for wearing white clothing. Despite prolific writing, fewer than a dozen of her poems were published in her lifetime. Her poetry is varied in form and style, resonating with hymns and song forms and also with psalms and riddles, marked by the use of dashes, unconventional capitalization, and highly idiosyncratic vocabulary and imagery. In her most creative period, 1861-1865, she wrote a high volume of vigorous, emotional poems and developed her themes of life and death. Before she died in 1886, her last letter simply stated, "Little Cousins, Called Back. Emily."

December 9

“Better to reign in Hell, than to serve in Heaven.” … English poet and scholar John Milton was born on December 9, 1608. He wrote with fierce conviction at a time of upheaval in Britain. During the English Civil War, he wrote tracts serving the Puritan and Parliamentary cause, advocating radical topics that included the morality of divorce, sanctioned regicide and, in Areopagitica (1644), freedom of speech and the press. While serving Cromwell he steadily lost his eyesight and was blind by 1651. His vast epic poem, “Paradise Lost” (1667), one of the greatest works of the English language, tells the Fall of Man: Satan’s tempting of Adam and Eve and the expulsion from Eden. Milton's purpose was to "justify the ways of God to men" and debate fundamental issues of freedom, free will and self-determination.

December 8

Inventor Eli Whitney was born on December 8, 1765, in Massachusetts. As a youth during the Revolutionary War, he made nails with a device he invented. After graduating from Yale, he pursued a tutoring job in Georgia but wound up inventing a centerpiece of the Industrial Revolution: the cotton gin (short for “engine”), patented in 1794, that quickly, efficiently removed seeds from cotton using a system of hooks, wires and a rotating brush. It reshaped the economy of the Antebellum South by altering a previously labor intensive process, making “King Cotton” a practical, profitable crop – and reinvigorating slavery as a means of producing it. Whitney never became wealthy because the gin was easily, widely copied. He began making firearms and championed the interchangeable-parts system, which revolutionized manufacturing. Pictured: The gin and its patent.

December 7

40 years ago: In the early morning of December 7, 1972, Apollo 17 was launched from Cape Kennedy to the Moon. It was the eleventh and final mission of the Apollo program, the first night launch of U.S. human spaceflight, the final crewed launch of a Saturn V rocket, and the sixth and last mission to land humans on the Moon. Crew were Eugene Cernan, Ronald Evans and Harrison Schmitt, who returned to Earth after a 12-day mission that included the longest total lunar surface extravehicular activities, the largest lunar sample return and the longest time in lunar orbit. Five hours after launch, at a distance of 28,000 miles, the crew took a photo known as “The Blue Marble” (pictured), one of the most widely distributed photographic images in existence. It is one of the few to show a fully illuminated Earth, since the Sun was behind the astronauts when they took the image.

December 6

On December 6, 1884, the Washington Monument was completed with the placement of a nine-inch aluminum pyramid at its top, 555 feet in the air. The original design by architect Robert Mills included a Greek temple at the base. Construction began on July 4, 1848, though funds fell far short of the $1 million needed. Work halted in 1854-1877 due to obstruction by the nativist Know-Nothings, lack of funds and the Civil War. Construction resumed with visibly different exterior marble. The monument is the world's tallest stone structure and tallest true obelisk. The apex was the largest single piece of aluminum cast at the time, when the metal cost nearly as much as silver. The apex was put on public display beforehand and stepped over by visitors who could say they had "stepped over the top of the Washington Monument." Pictured: Instagram, National Park Service.

December 5

Film animator, producer, director and entrepreneur Walt Disney was born on December 5, 1901, in Chicago. He grew up in Marceline, Mo., and Kansas City, where he became interested in drawing, movies and a nearby amusement park. He started an early animation business that went bankrupt in 1923, so Walt and his brother, Roy, went to Hollywood and began Disney Brothers' Studio, which was stolen in its entirety by a New York distributor. They quickly made silent animated shorts featuring a character Walt created, Mickey Mouse, then the popular “Steamboat Willie” (1928) in sound, voiced by Walt. His first full-length animated film was the historic “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (1937, pictured), which won eight Oscars. In the next five years, Disney completed “Pinocchio” (1940), “Fantasia” (1940), “Dumbo” (1941) and “Bambi” (1942).

December 4

On December 4, 1872, the greatest maritime mystery of modern times sailed into view when the American brigantine (two-masted) merchant ship Mary Celeste was discovered in the Atlantic by the Dei Gratia, abandoned 600 miles off Portugal. She was the archetypal “ghost ship,” derelict with no explanation. One lifeboat, the crew of seven, the captain, his wife and daughter were missing. The weather was fine, the ship was seaworthy (though “a wet mess” between decks) and still under sail toward Gibraltar. Built in 1861 as the Amazon (pictured), three captains had already died aboard her. She had sailed from New York with 1,701 barrels of raw commercial alcohol bound for Genoa. Everything aboard was virtually untouched, though the compass had been destroyed. The ship’s fate has never been explained.

December 3

Polish-born British author Joseph Conrad (Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski) was born on December 3, 1857. At age 17, he became a seaman for 16 years and learned English while on a British trade boat. His life at sea formed the basis of much of his fiction, including Heart of Darkness (1902), inspired by his service on a Congo River steamboat. He became a British subject in 1886, left the sea and began writing in the late 1890s. His most celebrated works, including Lord Jim (1900), Nostromo (1904) and The Secret Agent (1907), explore complex issues of character, personal choice and morality in a universe Conrad described as an indifferent knitting machine. The Secret Agent addresses dark issues of anarchism, espionage, terrorism and social exploitation. Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski perversely claimed it as an influence.

December 2

French Post-Impressionist painter Georges Seurat was born on December 2, 1859, into a wealthy Parisian family. He studied art, particularly drawing, and allied himself with independent artists after his first major painting was rejected by the Paris Salon. In 1884 he befriended neo-Impressionist painter Paul Signac with whom he shared ideas about pointillism, a painting technique in which small, distinct dots of pure color are applied in patterns to form an image. Art critics initially coined the name as a term of ridicule. Seurat absorbed popular color theorists' ideas about scientific approaches to painting, believing that color could be used to create harmony and emotion. His large canvas, “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” (1884–1886, pictured), is now an icon of late 19th-century painting.

November 1

American architect Minoru Yamasaki was born on December 1, 1912, in Seattle. His first significant design was the Pruitt–Igoe housing project in St. Louis, a set of stark, modernist concrete high-rises in which living conditions deteriorated soon after completion in 1956. Poverty, crime and segregation marked it as a public policy failure, and its 33 buildings were entirely razed in 1972. Yamasaki’s four-domed design of the Lambert-St. Louis Airport terminal (1956) inspired terminals at New York’s JFK Airport and Paris-Charles de Gaulle Airport. In 1965 he began the innovative design of the 1,360 foot twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center, completed in 1972, costing $900 million. The world’s tallest buildings were dismissed as inhospitable glass-and-metal “filing cabinets.” Ironically, Yamasaki had a fear of heights. Pictured: Twin towers and East River, 1971.