September 30 - Rumi

Persian poet Rumi was born Jalal ad Din Muhammad Rumi on September 30, 1207, in Tajikistan. As a young boy in what is now Iran, while fleeing the advance of Mongol hordes, his spiritual nature was recognized, and by age 25 he had become an Islamic teacher. In 1244, after meeting a dervish (ascetic), Rumi became a mystical ascetic and began writing lyric poetry. In what is now Turkey he spent 12 years writing the Masnavi, his masterwork that combines tales of everyday life with spirituality. It strongly focuses on music as a means of union with the divine, whereby the soul is both destroyed and reborn. The ritual practice of “whirling dervishes” was developed from Rumi’s concepts. The core of Rumi’s beliefs is that the soul, separated and devolved from the divine, undergoes an evolutionary journey to be reunited with the divine. All things in the universe are governed by this law, and the process is driven by an inner urge Rumi calls “love.” This cosmic evolution and search for union with God are Rumi’s version of the Fall of Adam and the banishment from Paradise.

September 26 - George Gershwin

Composer and pianist George Gershwin was born Jacob Gershowitz on September 26, 1898, in Brooklyn, NY. At age 11 he began playing a second-hand piano acquired for his older brother, Ira, with whom he would many write hit songs. He dropped out of school at age 15, played piano in New York nightclubs, and worked as a “song-plugger” (promoter) in Tin Pan Alley (at $15 a week) and a rehearsal pianist for Broadway performers. He sold his first song for $5 in 1916 at age 17. He was commissioned by bandleader Paul Whiteman to compose his first classical work, “Rhapsody in Blue” (1924), for orchestra and piano. In 1928 he asked French composer Maurice Ravel to be his teacher, but Ravel told him he would be better as a first-rate Gershwin than a second-rate Ravel, instead recommending he study in Paris with renowned teacher, Nadia Boulanger. She, in turn, promptly refused to compromise his jazz-influenced style through the study of classical music. As a result, Gershwin wrote the innovative symphonic tone poem, “An American in Paris.”

September 25 - Dmitri Shostakovich

Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich was born on September 25, 1906, in St. Petersburg. A child prodigy on the piano, he composed his First Symphony at age 19. It was praised by major musical figures, including conductor Leopold Stokowski. But in 1936 he ran afoul of the Communist bureaucracy when Joseph Stalin and the Politburo publicly derided an opera he had composed, and he was denounced by the newspaper Pravda. That year, Stalin began his “Great Purge.” Shostakovich put away his Western-style Fourth Symphony and, in 1937, composed a pivotal work in his career, his heroic Fifth Symphony, which Soviet officials viewed as a personal perestroyka (political "rehabilitation"). Ironically, however, the monumental work was a huge success among the Russian public for its subtle condemnation of Stalin’s brutal repression. Listeners openly wept during the graceful yet mournful Largo movement, which reflected the terrible period in which Stalin sent more than seven million Russians to the Gulag (labor camps).

September 21 - H.G. Wells

Novelist and journalist Herbert George "H. G." Wells was born on September 21, 1866, in a suburb of London. His parents were shopkeepers of little means, and his education was haphazard. In the 1880s he studied under biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, who advocated Darwin’s theory of evolution. In 1895 Wells published his hugely successful novella, The Time Machine, the story of a Time Traveler’s journey to a dystopian, dying Earth in the distant future. His second major “scientific romance” – a genre now known as science fiction – was The War of the Worlds (1898), in which Earth is invaded by Martians whose superior force strikes into the heart of Britain at the height of its own imperialism. The novel is a brutal vision of millennial apocalypse at the close of the 19^th century, in the tradition of “invasion literature,” addressing many disturbing themes: the rise of total war stripped of moral constraints, the industrialization of weaponry, the grim path of human evolution, race and class issues via Social Darwinism, and the separation of science from faith.

September 20 - Jay Ward

Television producer J Troplong "Jay" Ward was born on September 20, 1920, in Berkeley, California. Following business school, he became involved in producing animated TV programs initially with cartoonist Alex Anderson, a childhood friend who created the characters of Crusader Rabbit, Rocky the Flying Squirrel, Bullwinkle the Moose and Dudley Do-Right the Canadian Mountie. In 1949 he founded Jay Ward Productions, which later produced the animated TV series “Rocky & His Friends” and “The Bullwinkle Show,” which together became “The Rocky & Bullwinkle Show,” airing from November 1959 to June 1964 on the ABC TV network, later on NBC. The show’s undercurrent of savvy, intelligent wit made the show popular with viewers of all ages. Ward also produced the characters of Mr. Peabody and his sidekick Sherman, Boris Badenov, Natasha Fatale, George of the Jungle and Super Chicken. His company designed the characters for three cereals, Cap'n Crunch, Quisp and Quake. Ward came close to death in accidents twice in his life.

September 19 - Arthur Rackham

English illustrator Arthur Rackham was born on September 19, 1867, in London. One of 12 children, he began studying art in his teens and by the 1890s had settled into a career of book illustration. Beginning with Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle (1905), he produced a series of lavishly illustrated books, most published in signed, limited editions and cloth-bound trade editions, often bound in vellum and signed by Rackham. Other major books included J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906), Lewis Carroll’s Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1907), four volumes of Wagner’s “Ring Cycle” (1910-11), English Fairy Tales (1918) and many others. He became the most well-known artist of the period called the “Golden Age” of illustration, spanning the years prior to 1900 through the onset of World War I in 1914. Post-war changes in taste affected the market for Rackham’s fanciful, often dark depictions of fairies and mythic, folkloric figures. His edition of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (pictured) was published posthumously in 1940.

September 17 - Anton van Leeuwenhoek and bacteria

On September 17, 1683, Dutch merchant and early scientist Anton van Leeuwenhoek wrote to the Royal Society of England describing and illustrating five different kinds of objects, which he called “animalcules,” he had found in his own saliva and plaque. The father of microscopy had discovered bacteria. As a tradesman in Delft, he had used magnifying glasses to count threads in cloth, which led to his interest in lensmaking, accomplished in secret by processing thin rods of glass into very small spheres offering high magnification (more than 200x). His “microscopes” consisted of a brass plate a few inches long, with the lens in a tiny hole (pictured). Though he had first observed microscopic life in 1674, his letter of 1683 reported with “great wonder … many very little living animalcules, very prettily a-moving.” He also described “enormous numbers” of animalcules from the mouths of two old men who had never cleaned their teeth in their lives. In hundreds of other letters, Van Leeuwenhoek also described the life in a drop of water and blood corpuscles circulating in capillaries.

September 15 - Darwin in the Galápagos

On September 15, 1835, naturalist Charles Darwin arrived at the Galápagos Islands, nearly 1,000 miles west of Ecuador in the Pacific Ocean. He was a crew member of the second voyage of the HMS Beagle, on its mission to survey South America and circumnavigate the globe. In the next five weeks, Darwin and others made geological and biological observation on four of the 18 main islands of the volcanic Galápagos archipelago. Though Darwin focused on geology and had no expertise in ornithology, he collected what he called mockingbirds (later known as “Darwin’s finches”) and other birds on each of the islands, though he did not label them for location. Back in England, in 1837, an ornithologist found that the birds were differing species of finches, each unique to specific islands, each with beaks that had been adapted over time to specific habitats. This discovery, and the knowledge that tortoises differed from island to island, were critical in the development of Darwin's theory of natural selection explaining evolution, presented in The Origin of Species (1859).

September 14 - Alexander von Humboldt

Naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt was born on September 14, 1769, in Berlin. His youthful interest in identifying and collecting natural objects – plants, shells and insects – developed into a passion for travel, inspired by a friendship with Captain James Cook’s illustrator who had sailed on Cook's second world voyage. During his scientific explorations of South America with a botanist, from 1799 to 1804, he collected 6,000 new species of plants, herbs, rocks, minerals and animals, and amassed a vast trove of maps and information about the natural world, ranging through geology, astronomy, meteorology, botany, anthropology and linguistics. On South America’s west coast, he discovered and measured what is now called the Humboldt Current in the Pacific Ocean. After exploring Mexico in 1803, he settled in Paris and later explored Russia. In 1845 he published the first of five volumes of “Cosmos,” a scientifically holistic treatise on the Earth and the universe. As famous as Napoleon in his time, von Humboldt promoted the interrelatedness of the natural sciences.

September 12 - Battle of Marathon

September 12, 490 BCE, is the likely date of the Battle of Marathon, fought in Attica in southern Greece during the first invasion of the Persians who, under generals of King Darius, sought to subjugate Athens and mainland Greece after a revolt by Greek colonists in Asia Minor. Athens' army was far less than half the size of the Persian forces, which had advanced across the Aegean Sea, but it blocked the two exits from the plain of Marathon and encircled and defeated the Persians. It then thwarted a surprise attack on Athens by quickly marching back to the city. The Persians fled to their ships and would not return again for another 10 years. The victory at Marathon was a pivotal moment for the young Athenian democracy, marking not only the start of its classical “golden age” – lasting nearly three centuries – but also fundamentally the birth of Western civilization. The story of the Greek messenger, Pheidippides, who brought news of the victory to Athens, then collapsed and died, is historically inaccurate but is the source of the modern “marathon” footrace.