Celebrations Today – September 1

Holidays and observances

• Anniversary of the Start of the Armed Struggle (Eritrea)
• Christian feast day:
  • David Pendleton Oakerhater (Anglican Communion)
  • Giles
  • The beginning of the new liturgical year (Eastern Orthodox Church and the Eastern Catholic Church)
  • September 1 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
• Constitution Day (Slovakia)
• Disaster Prevention Day (Japan)
• Earliest day on which Father’s Day can fall, while September 7 is the latest; celebrated on the first Sunday in September. (Australia, Fiji, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea)
• Earliest day on which Labor Day can fall, while September 7 is the latest; celebrated on the first Monday in September. (Canada, United States, Palau)
• Earliest day on which Teacher’s Day can fall, while September 7 is the latest; celebrated on the first Friday in September. (Singapore)
• First day of school in many countries in Asia, Europe and the Americas.
• Flag Day (Honduras)
• Independence Day, celebrates the independence of Uzbekistan from the Soviet Union in 1991.
• Journalist Day (Taiwan)
• Knowledge Day (Russia, Ukraine and Armenia)
• Random Acts of Kindness Day (International observance)
• Veteran’s Day (Poland)
• Wattle Day (Australia)

Celebrations Today – USA: September 1

National Chicken Boy Day
National No Rhyme (Nor Reason) Day
National Lazy Mom’s Day – First Friday in September
American Chess Day
National Building and Code Staff Appreciation Day
National Chicken Boy’s Day
Emma M. Nutt Day
National Cherry Popover Day
National No Rhyme or Reason Day
National Pink Cadillac Day
National Toy Tips Executive Toy Test Day
World Letter Writing Day

Today in US History: September 1

Phillis Wheatley

ARISE, my soul, on wings enraptur’d, rise
To praise the monarch of the earth and skies,
Whose goodness and beneficence appear
As round its centre moves the rolling year,
Or when the morning glows with rosy charms,
Or the sun slumbers in the ocean’s arms:
Of light divine be a rich portion lent
To guide my soul, and favour my intent.
Celestial muse, my arduous flight sustain
And raise my mind to a seraphic strain!Phillis Wheatley, “Thoughts on the Works of Providence,”
Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773).

Frontispiece and Title Page,
Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral,
Engraving attributed to Scipio Moorhead,
1773.
American Treasures of the Library of Congress

On September 1, 1773, Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was published in London, England. Wheatley’s collection was the first volume of poetry by an African-American poet to be published. Regarded as a prodigy by her contemporaries, Wheatley was approximately twenty at the time of the book’s publication.

Born in the Senegambia region of West Africa, she was sold into slavery and transported to Boston at age seven or eight. Purchased off the slave ship by prosperous merchant John Wheatley and his wife Susanna in 1761, the young Phillis was soon copying the English alphabet on a wall in chalk.

Rather than fearing her precociousness, the Wheatleys encouraged it, allowing their daughter Mary to tutor Phillis in reading and writing. She also studied English literature, Latin, and the Bible—a strong education for any eighteenth-century woman. Wheatley’s first published poem, “On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin,” was published in Rhode Island’s Newport Mercury newspaper on December 21, 1767.

Manumitted by the Wheatley family, the poet sailed to London in 1773. Her reputation preceded her. She met many influential people, including the Lord Mayor of London who presented her with a copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Her volume of poetry was published under the patronage of Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon.

Selina (Shirley) Hastings,
Countess of Huntingdon (1707-1791),
[between 1830 and 1880(?)].
Prints & Photographs Online Catalog

Learning of Mrs. Wheatley’s ill health, Phillis Wheatley returned to Boston prior to the book’s appearance. Arriving in Boston in September 1773, she nursed her mistress until Susanna Wheatley died the following March. Wheatley continued to write. In 1776, she sent her poem “To his Excellency General Washington,” later published in the Pennsylvania Magazine, to the commander in chief of the Continental army. General Washington thanked her for the poem in a letter:

I thank you most sincerely for your polite notice of me, in the elegant Lines you enclosed; and however undeserving I may be of such encomium and panegyrick, the style and manner exhibit a striking proof of your great poetical Talents. In honour of which, and as a tribute justly due to you, I would have published the Poem, had I not been apprehensive, that, while I only meant to give the World this new instance of your genius, I might have incurred the imputation of Vanity. This and nothing else, determined me not to give it place in the public Prints.George Washington to Phillis Wheatley, February 28, 1776.
George Washington Papers at the Library of Congress, 1741-1799

Phillis Wheatley continued to live with various members of the Wheatley family until 1778. After the death of John Wheatley and his daughter, Phillis moved to her own home. She soon married John Peters, a free black Bostonian who held a variety of jobs before falling into debt. She bore the frequently absent Peters three children. Beset with financial problems, she sold her volume of Milton to help pay his debts. To support herself and her only surviving child, Phillis Wheatley worked in a Boston boarding house. Both the poet and her child died there on December 5, 1784.

• Like Benjamin Banneker and Crispus Attucks, Phillis Wheatley continued to inspire African-American achievement throughout the nineteenth century. Search the collection The African-American Experience in Ohio, 1850-1920: Selections from the Ohio Historical Society on Phillis Wheatley to retrieve nineteenth-century materials including biographical sketches of the poet and an oration commemorating Wheatley’s contributions to American literature.
• Wheatley’s volume of Paradise Lost came eventually into the possession of Harvard University. Recently, Wheatley’s work has been studied for evidence of its ongoing embrace of West African narrative as well as its reliance on English literary forms. To learn more about Wheatley, and see pages from her 1773 volume published in London, go to A Voice of Her Own in the Imagination section of the American Treasures exhibition.
• Another online exhibition, The African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship highlights the Library’s exceptional African-American collections which include rare books and important maps such as a mid-18th-century map of Africa covering the area that extends from present-day Gambia and Senegal in the northwest, where Phillis Wheatley was born, to Gabon in the southeast. A lithograph in the lower left of the map is illustrative of the dress, dwellings, and work of some West Africans of the period.
• Additional African-American digital materials can be found through the African American History Month portal.  Explore the portal to find images, audio and video presentations, and online collections related to black history on the Library’s Web site.
• Search on the word poetry in The Nineteenth Century in Print: Books to find, among a wide variety of other works, The Family Library of Poetry and Song, edited by William Cullen Bryant, and Songs of Three Centuries, edited by John Greenleaf Whittier.
• See Today in History features on other African-American literary artists including Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, and James Baldwin.

The Fall of Atlanta

So Atlanta is ours, and fairly won.Telegram from Major General William T. Sherman
to Major General H. W. Halleck, September 3, 1864.

Atlanta, Ga. Gen. William T. Sherman, Leaning on Breach of Gun, and staff at Federal Fort No. 7,
George N. Barnard, photographer, 1864.
Selected Civil War Photographs

On September 1, 1864, Confederate General John B. Hood evacuated Atlanta, leaving the city, a crucial supply center for the Confederacy, in Union hands. Union General William T. Sherman’s victory helped ensure President Lincoln‘s reelection two months later.  With 98,000 men under his command from the Chattanooga area, Sherman prepared to move toward Atlanta on May 4, 1864. By July 6, Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston, who was defending the city with half as many men, had retreated, heading south of the Chattahoochee River to Peachtree Creek. General Hood relieved Johnston and attacked Sherman on July 20, but was forced to retreat with a large number of casualties. By August 31, Sherman had crossed Hood’s supply line, forcing him to evacuate the city the following day. In response, Hood moved toward Nashville where he later met defeat at the hands of General George H. Thomas.

On November 16, Sherman began his famous march from Atlanta to the sea, leaving devastation in his wake. Although many Southerners vilified Sherman for the destruction wrought upon their homeland, others saw him as a liberator. E. W. Evans was nine when Sherman’s troops passed by the plantation where he was born. As was the custom of the day, interviewer Geneva Tonsill transcribed his words in dialect. Evans remembered Sherman as the herald of his family’s freedom.

He [Sherman] come through Madison on his march to the sea and we chillun hung out on the front fence from early morning ‘til late in the evening, watching the soldiers go by. It took most of the day…. The next week…Miss Emily called the five women that wuz on the place and tole them to stay ’round the house…She said they were free and could go wherever they wanted to.”E. W. Evans, Brick Layer & Plasterer,”
Atlanta, Georgia,
Geneva Tonsill, interviewer,
circa 1936-40.
American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1940

By the 1930s, Evans, who started out in 1877 as a bricklayer and plasterer, owned a twelve-room Atlanta home that was, he noted, “somewhat larger than Colonel Hill’s house where the family lived who owned us as slaves.”

Union veteran L. C. McBride fought with Sherman in the siege of Atlanta and remembered his venture into the South as the event that made him a Republican. Ninety-two-year-old McBride, wounded fighting in southeast Tennessee after the fall of Atlanta, recalled the taunts he endured at the hands of Confederates while recuperating in a Murphysboro [Tennessee] hospital:

There were four Rebels in there and they used to roast me something fierce. ‘What did you’uns come down here to fit weuns for? I can hear them saying it yet. I had always been a Democrat but after that I turned Republican and have been so ever since. These Rebels were Democrats.”L. C. McBride,”
Lincoln, Nebraska,
Harold J. Moss, interviewer,
March 21, 1939.
American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1940

Atlanta, Before Being Burnt: by Order of Gen’l. Sherman, from the Cupola of the Female Seminary,
October, 1864.
Taking the Long View: Panoramic Photographs, 1851-1991

Learn more about the Civil War. Explore the following American Memory collections:

• A Civil War Soldier in the Wild Cat Regiment: Selections from the Tilton C. Reynolds Papers
• Civil War Treasures from the New-York Historical Society
• Civil War Maps
• First Person Narratives of the American South, 1860-1920 presents the culture of the American South from the viewpoint of Southerners, during and after the Civil War. A Woman’s Wartime Journal: An Account of the Passage Over Georgia’s Plantation of Sherman’s Army on the March to the Sea is Dolly Lunt Burge’s wartime tale. Read this and other Southern perspectives on the campaign. Search the collection on Sherman’s march.

“Marching Through Georgia”
In honor of Maj. Gen. Sherman’s Famous March “From Atlanta to the Sea,”
by Henry Clay Work,
1865.
Historic American Sheet Music: 1850-1920

• Selected Civil War Photographs contains photographs of Atlanta during the siege of 1864, including a view of refugees evacuating the city. Search the collection on Atlanta to find more photographs documenting this pivotal event in the history of the Civil War.
• Search The Prints & Photographs Online Catalog on civil war for hundreds of images including photographs of people, buildings, and monuments; posters, and more.
• Search the Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress on Sherman to view correspondence from Sherman to Lincoln and others and on Atlanta to view letters before and after the battle for that city.
• Search Map Collections on Atlanta or Civil War to find maps made during the war.
• Read about additional Civil War events by searching the Today in History Archive on Civil War.
• Prior to the Civil War, William T. Sherman spent more than a decade in California. Read Recollections of California, 1846-1861, Sherman’s memoir of his experiences there available through the collection “California as I Saw It”: First-Person Narratives of California’s Early Years, 1849-1900.
• Search Map Collections on Atlanta or Civil War to find maps made during the war.

Today in History – September 1-External Links

Today’s Weather in History
Today in Earthquake History
This Day in Naval History
Today’s Document from the National Archives
Today’s Events, Births & Deaths –Wikipedia
Today in History by AP
On this Day -1950 to 2005 – Today’s Story–BBC
On This Day: The New York Times
This Day in History –History.com
Today in Canadian History – Canada Channel
History of Britain that took place On This Day
Russia in History –Russiapedia