The Writer's Almanac for Thursday, August 31, 2017

On this day in 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his famous "American Scholar" address to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard (books by this author ). He told the students to think for themselves rather than absorb thought, to create rather than repeat, and not to look to Europe for cultural models.

In 1920, radio was still a medium for hobbyists, and no one really used it for the widespread distribution of up-to-the-minute information. The Scripps newspaper family, which owned The Detroit News , provided the first push in that direction. They were worried that radio would put the newspapers out of business, but they were also worried that they would look bad if their radio news experiment failed to take off. They hired a teenager named Michael DeLisle Lyons to start up a radio station as a kind of trial. They told him to set it up in his own name, so that if it bombed, the Scripps name would not be associated with it. Lyons got government approval on August 20, and he played nonstop music for 10 days while he worked out the bugs. August 31 was the date of the primary elections, and TheDetroit News reported that returns would be announced that evening over the radio.

The next morning, the newspaper reported: "The sending of the election returns by The Detroit News' radiophone Tuesday night was fraught with romance and must go down in the history of man's conquest of the elements as a gigantic step in his progress. In the four hours that the apparatus [...] was hissing and whirring its message into space, few realized that a dream and a prediction had come true. The news of the world was being given forth through this invisible trumpet to the waiting crowds in the unseen market place."

The radio station that began as 8MK is still in business, operating under the call letters WWJ, and it is still an all-news station. The Detroit News would later launch Michigan's first television station.

His mother worked with other Armenian immigrants picking fruit for large farms and working in canneries. Saroyan started selling newspapers on the streets of Fresno when he was eight to make ends meet. He liked school, but left at 15. He haunted public libraries, reading anything he could get his hands on, but especially Sherwood Anderson and Guy de Maupassant. His first short story, "The Broken Wheel" (1933), was published under the name "Sirak Goryan" in Hairenik, an Armenian journal. Not long after, Story magazine published a vibrant and romantic short story called "The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze" (1934). The story was a hit, and Saroyan began to write feverishly, completing a collection of stories with the same name. The book became a best-seller. His play "The Time of Your Life" won the Pulitzer Prize for drama (1940), but Saroyan rejected the money, saying, "Businessmen shouldn't judge art."

Saroyan's stories almost always centered on young boys and the immigrant life in Fresno. His characters were brash and irreverent, capable of celebrating life in spite of poverty.

Towards the end of his life and dying of prostate cancer, he called the Associated Press to give a statement to be released posthumously. The statement was: "Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case. Now what?"

As a doctor, she worked with children with special needs, and through her work with them she became increasingly interested in education. She believed that children were not blank slates, but that they each had inherent, individual gifts. It was a teacher's job to help children find these gifts, rather than dictating what a child should know. She emphasized independence, self-directed learning, and learning from peers. Children were encouraged to make decisions. She was the first educator to use child-sized tables and chairs in the classroom.

During World War II, Montessori was exiled from Italy because she was opposed to Mussolini's fascism and his desire to make her a figurehead for the Italian government. She lived and worked in India for many years, and then in Holland. She died in 1952 at the age of 81.

She wrote many books about her philosophy of education, including The Montessori Method (1912), and is considered a major innovator in education theory and practice.