BIG DAY!

It's the birthday of the sculptor Bernini, born Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini in Naples in 1598. He sculpted many fountains around Rome, and he's most famous for his work as an architect and artist on St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City.

It was on this day in 43 B.C.E. that the great Roman orator Cicero was executed. He had been giving speeches against Marc Antony, and he was hunted down and beheaded. Cicero's head was taken back to Marc Antony, whose wife, Fulvia, pulled out Cicero's tongue and jabbed it with her hairpin in revenge.

It's the birthday of the novelist Willa Cather, (books by this author) born in Back Creek Valley, Virginia (1873). Her family moved to Nebraska when she was a little girl, to get away from a tuberculosis epidemic that had killed a lot of her extended family. In Red Cloud, Nebraska, Cather spent most of her free time talking to the immigrant farmers and listening to their stories about their homelands. She was amazed that they had come to America to be farmers, even though most of them had been tailors, locksmiths, joiners, and cigar-makers, and had never farmed in their lives. She went to college, then moved to New York City and became a successful magazine editor for McClure's. But after 10 years, she quit her job and took a trip back to Nebraska, where she was inspired to begin work on O Pioneers! (1913). She felt like she had always been imitating other writers, but when she wrote O Pioneers! she said, "In this one I hit the home pasture." She went on to write many more novels, including The Song of the Lark (1915), My Ántonia (1918), and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927).
It's the birthday of the public intellectual, political writer, and the man known as the "father of modern linguistics," Noam Chomsky, (books by this author) born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1928). His book Syntactic Structures (1957) argued that there is a universal grammar innate to the human brain.
It was on this day in 1941 that Japanese bombers attacked Pearl Harbor. Two thousand three hundred and ninety Americans were killed. Congress declared war the following morning, and the United States officially entered WWII. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said that December 7th was a date that would "live in infamy."