Famous Birthdays Today

It's the birthday of Joan of Arc, who was born on this date in 1412. Her parents were peasants in the French town of Domrémy. She began seeing visions when she was 13, and believed that Saints Michael, Catherine, and Margaret were urging her to defend France against the English. France's Prince Charles provided the troops, and Joan cut off her hair, posing as a boy. She led the troops to victory, and she was at the prince's side when he was later crowned King Charles IV.

When she was 18, she went into battle again, but this time she was captured by allies to the English. She was put on trial for heresy, and she was denied legal counsel. Her prosecutors tried to trick her by asking her if she knew she was in God's grace. Because church doctrine said that no one could know that for certain, she couldn't answer yes without being guilty of heresy. She also couldn't answer no, because that would be taken as an admission of guilt. Joan avoided the trap by saying, "If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me."

But she was found guilty, in part because of forged court documents and a confession that the illiterate Joan signed without reading. She was burned in the market square in Rouen in 1431, when she was 19.

It's the birthday of the man who called writing a "socially acceptable form of schizophrenia": E.L. Doctorow (books by this author), born in New York City (1931). He made a name for himself with his third novel, The Book of Daniel (1971). It won the National Book Award. Ragtime, which followed in 1975, was a best-seller and, he claimed, the easiest book he ever wrote.

His latest book is All the Time in the World: New and Selected Short Stories (2011).

Today is the birthday of Carl Sandburg (books by this author), born in Galesburg, Illinois (1878). Many people know him because of his poetry, or perhaps because of his six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln. But years before he first published his poems, he traveled all over the United States, collecting folk songs — more than 300 in all — which he eventually published in The American Songbag (1927).

Sandburg wrote three collections of stories for children: Rootabaga Stories (1922), Rootabaga Pigeons (1923), and Potato Face (1930). Sandburg believed there was a need for truly American fairy tales, since castles and knights didn't have any relevance to American kids. So he wrote fables about the American Midwest, stories about corn fairies, and skyscrapers, and farms.

Education pioneer Maria Montessori opened her first school on this date in 1907. It was called Casa dei Bambini, or Children's House, and it was located in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Rome. Montessori had some revolutionary ideas about education. She didn't believe in traditional classrooms where "children, like butterflies mounted on pins, are fastened each to his place." She believed that the teacher should pay attention to the students and not the other way around. And she also believed that children were naturally interested in practical activities and liked to master tasks that they saw adults doing every day. So she made the furnishings child sized, and gave them "work": sweeping, helping prepare meals, washing up, and gardening. She gave them lots of hands-on activities and plenty of unstructured time for self-guided learning, and her experiment was a success.