Celebrations Today – May 25

Holidays and observances

• Africa Day (African Union)
• African Liberation Day (African Union, Rastafari)
• Christian feast day:
  • Aldhelm
  • Bede
  • Gerard of Lunel
  • Mary Magdalene de Pazzi
  • Pope Gregory VII
  • Pope Urban I
  • May 25 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
• Day of Youth, celebrated on Josip Broz Tito‘s birthday (the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia)
• Earliest day on which Arbor Day can fall, celebrated on the last Sunday in May (Venezuela)
• Earliest day on which Children’s Day can fall, celebrated on the last Sunday in May (Hungary)
• Earliest day on which Memorial Day can fall, celebrated on the last Monday in May (United States)
• Earliest day on which Mother’s Day can fall, celebrated on the last Sunday in May (Algeria, Dominican Republic, France (First Sunday of June, if Pentecost occurs on this day), Haiti, Mauritius, Morocco, Sweden, Tunisia)
• Earliest day on which Turkmen Carpet Day can fall, celebrated on the last Sunday in May (Turkmenistan)
• First National Government / National Day (Argentina)
• Geek Pride Day (geek culture)
• Independence Day, celebrates the independence of Jordan from the United Kingdom in 1946.
• Last bell (Russia, post-Soviet countries)
• Liberation Day (Lebanon)
• National Missing Children’s Day (United States), and its related observances:
  • International Missing Children’s Day
• National Tap Dance Day (United States)
• Towel Day in honour of the work of the writer Douglas Adams

Celebrations Today – USA: May 25

National Brown-Bag It Day
National Missing Children’s Day
National Tap Dance Day
National Wine Day
Towel Day
National Geek Pride Day
National Brown-Bag-It Day
National Missing Children’s Day

Today in US History: May 25

Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion;…The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self Reliance,”
Essays, First Series, 1841.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, copyright 1884.
Prints & Photographs Online Catalog

Essayist, philosopher, and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston on May 25, 1803. Son and grandson of Protestant divines, Emerson attended Harvard College and Harvard Divinity School, entering the Unitarian ministry in 1829.

A popular, if unconventional preacher, young Emerson’s sermons consisted of personal reflections on spirituality and virtue. He avoided expounding doctrine or engaging in scriptural exegesis. Increasingly dissatisfied with traditional protestant theology, Emerson resigned from the ministry in 1832. By the end of the decade, however, he was the leading exponent of transcendentalism, a philosophy that maintains the universality of creation, upholds the intrinsic goodness of man, and grounds truth in personal insight.

From the 1830s on, Emerson and a group of like-minded thinkers including Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody were based in Concord, Massachusetts. The transcendentalist community at Concord not only shared radical religious views, but also embraced forward-looking social reforms including abolition, temperance, and woman suffrage.

He lived in his family home, the Old Manse, for one year, where he completed his manifesto, Nature (1836), and composed the poem “Concord Hymn” (1837) which commemorates the Revolutionary War battle with its phrase “And fired the shot heard round the world.” (Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife later rented the Old Manse.) A prolific writer and thinker, Emerson’s collected essays earned international acclaim, and, for decades, he remained a popular lecturer.

The Old Manse, Concord, Massachusetts, copyright 1900.
Touring Turn-of-the-Century America: Photographs from the Detroit Publishing Company, 1880-1920

By the time of his death in 1882, the eighty-year-old radical was heralded as the “Sage of Concord.”

Home of Emerson, Concord, Mass.
Cosmos Pictures Co., N.Y., 1905.
Prints & Photographs Online Catalog

Use American Memory to learn more about the New England transcendentalists.

• Search the Today in History Archive for features on the reformers, philosophers, writers, and artists that formed Emerson’s circle:
  • Henry David Thoreau
  • Elizabeth Palmer Peabody
  • John Burroughs
  • Walt Whitman
  • Bronson Alcott
  • Daniel Chester French
  • Louisa May Alcott
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• Search the collection The Nineteenth Century in Print: Books on Emerson to find Ralph Waldo Emerson; an Estimate of His Character and Genius in Prose and Verse by Bronson Alcott (1882).
• Read a letter, from Emerson to Walt Whitman praising Whitman’s poetry. The Emerson letter is one of several documents in Words and Deeds in American History highlighting important moments in American literary history.
• Emerson edited and wrote a moving biographical sketch for Henry David Thoreau’s final work, Excursions. Published posthumously in 1863, Excursions is available through the collection The Evolution of the Conservation Movement, 1850-1920.
• In 1840, Emerson founded the transcendentalist literary magazine, The Dial, with Margaret Fuller and others. A writer, editor, and intellectual, Fuller published an introspective account of a trip to the Great Lakes region in 1843. Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 is available through the collection Pioneering the Upper Midwest.
• Search on Ralph Waldo Emerson in The Nineteenth Century in Print: Periodicals for articles by Emerson as well as correspondence.
• Take a virtual tour of turn-of-the-century Concord, Massachusetts. Homes and haunts of the transcendentalists include the large white house Emerson occupied after renting the Manse to Nathaniel Hawthorne.
• A number of Emerson’s works are available through the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia Library.
• View the Woman Suffrage collections in American Memory:
  • Votes for Women: Selections from the National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection, 1848-1921
  • By Popular Demand: “Votes for Women” Suffrage Pictures, 1850-1920
  • Women of Protest: Photographs from the Records of the National Woman’s Party
  • Miller NAWSA Suffrage Scrapbooks, 1897-1911

Bill “Bojangles” Robinson

Bill Robinson,
Carl Van Vechten, photographer, January 25, 1933.
Creative Americans: Portraits by Van Vechten, 1932-1964

Legendary jazz tap dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson was born on May 25, 1878, in Richmond, Virginia. His given name was Luther, but he despised it and appropriated that of his younger brother, William. An extraordinary performer and synthesizer of the tap tradition, Robinson is also credited with one major innovation in this American art form: transforming its flat footwork into dancing up on the toes, which gave tap “a hitherto-unknown lightness and presence.”* Many steps Robinson perfected with his trademark clarity, precision, and elegance, including the famous “stair dance,” remain part of the tap repertoire today.

Orphaned in early childhood and unwanted by his grandmother, a survivor of slavery and strict Baptist who forbade dancing, Robinson nevertheless began dancing and singing as a young child for nickels and dimes on Richmond street-corners. He ran away to Washington, D.C., and spent some years dancing in local beer-gardens and surviving on odd jobs before breaking into the relatively new theatrical genre called “vaudeville,” which showcased dancers, singers, comedians, and actors in a series of short performances. By the early decades of the twentieth century, Robinson was earning top dollar on the vaudeville circuit and in nightclubs as one of the very few black dancers who was permitted to perform as a soloist. In 1928 he burst onto Broadway with sensational success in the all-black revue Blackbirds of 1928. Other Broadway triumphs followed.

By the 1930s, motion pictures and radio had usurped vaudeville’s popularity and Robinson moved with the times. He went to Hollywood in 1932 and appeared in some sixteen films, most famously opposite Shirley Temple. Stormy Weather (1943), with Lena Horne, provided him a rare opportunity to appear in an African-American production. Although his film career brought him even greater prominence during this period, Robinson also continued to work in the theater. He was featured in the highly acclaimed Hot Mikado, staged at the 1939 World’s Fair, in which a critic for Theatre Arts described his dancing:

He does not sing, or even swing, with his voice but with his feet.  Never has shoe leather beaten out such a variety of intricate patterns.  Never … has one note been made to sing and soar, to whisper and to laugh, in such astonishingly complex rhythm.

A quick-tempered and competitive man, a perfectionist well aware of his own immense artistic gifts, Robinson chafed at and challenged the oppressive racial norms of his era, gambled recklessly, and carried a gold-plated revolver that no one doubted he was prepared to use.  He celebrated his sixty-first birthday by dancing down Broadway from Columbus Circle to 44th Street. As his seventieth birthday approached, his dancing abilities, like his popularity, barely waned. At Robinson’s death in 1949, thousands passed by his body as it lay in state in Harlem, where he had long since been deemed honorary mayor. Black and white, high and low, alike paid tribute to the man’s professional genius and personal generosity.

Use American Memory to learn more about the life and times of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson:

Bill Robinson,
Carl Van Vechten, photographer, January 25, 1933.
Creative Americans: Portraits by Van Vechten, 1932-1964

• Browse the Subject Index for the American Memory collection The Capital and the Bay: Narratives of Washington and the Chesapeake Bay Region, ca. 1600-1925 to find works on Richmond, Virginia, where Robinson spent his earliest years; including the illustrated 1907 work Souvenir Views: Negro Enterprises & Residences, Richmond, Va.
• The American Memory collection American Variety Stage, 1870-1920 illustrates the vibrant and diverse forms of entertainment, especially vaudeville, that thrived at the turn of the century. Search the collection on tap dance to view The Boys Think They Have One On Foxy Grandpa.
• Explore the timeline “The Development of an African-American Musical Theatre 1865-1910” in the collection African-American Sheet Music, 1850-1920 to learn more about the difficult and complex world of entertainment in which Robinson got his start.
• Search the collection American Life Histories, 1936-1940 on Harlem to retrieve several interviews describing the Harlem Robinson knew in the 1920s and 1930s. “Harlem Beauty Shop” mentions the Hot Mikado.
• Search on the words Dunbar Apartments in the American Memory collection Built in America: Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record, 1933-Present to see photographs and information on a building where Robinson lived in New York City.
• Read Today in History features on some of Robinson’s show-business contemporaries, including impresario Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., escape artist Harry Houdini, and “the Father of the Blues,” W. C. Handy.

Fights of Nations
From American Variety Stage, 1870-1920

Tap Dance Sequence From Fights of Nations,
American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, 1907.
Part 2 of 3.
American Variety Stage, 1870-1920

Unabashedly racist, the comedy Fights of Nations relies on both stereotype and slapstick. “Part 2” opens with a sword fight between three kilted Scots, and moves on to a New York City dance hall. Between brawls, viewers are treated to a tap dance, performed by a character known as “The Bully.”

Fights of Nations,
American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, 1907.
Part 2 of 3.
American Variety Stage, 1870-1920

MPEG format…30 Mb

Quick Time format…17 Mb

The Library of Congress presents such materials as part of the record of the past, reflecting the attitudes, perspectives, and beliefs of different times. The Library of Congress does not endorse the views they express.

*  Marshall and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance  (rev. ed. with foreword and afterword by Brenda Bufalino; New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), 187.

Today in History – May 25-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