This Week in History, Jan. 12th – Jan. 18th.

“Nobody said not to go.”
― Emily Hahn

Author of 54 books and over 200 articles and short stories¹, Missourian Emily Hahn was born this week in 1905.

To say that Ms. Hahn was a unique and rare individual would be an understatement.  Listed are just three of her accomplishments.

• • Aged 19, drove 2400 miles across the USA with a friend in a Model T (while dressed as a man, presumably for protection).  She wrote letters about their journey across New Mexico to her brother-in-law, letters that without her knowledge eventually made their way to the The New Yorker magazine. It was the beginning of her writing career.²
  • Aged 21, was the first woman to receive a degree in Mining Engineering from the University of Wisconsin – Madison. (After being told by one of her instructors that “The female mind is incapable of grasping mechanics or higher mathematics or any of the fundamentals of mining taught” in engineering.)³
  • A world traveler. She either visited or lived in Florence, Italy; London, England; the Belgian Congo in Africa (later walking across Central Africa by herself) and Shanghai, China. She eventually settled in New York.

Emily Hahn passed away at age 92 from complications due to surgery for a shattered femur.

To learn about her and her adventures living in China at the beginning WWII, check out, China to me : a partial autobiography. It can be found at PS3515.A2422 Z463 1975

“Let us return, however, to the League of Nations. To create an organization which is in a position to protect peace in this world of conflicting interests and egotistic wills is a frighteningly difficult task.”

Hjalmar Branting

It was a century ago this week that the first meeting of the Council of the League of Nations met in Paris, France.  Formed as the first attempt at an international peace organization, the League officially came into existence just the day before.  Unfortunately, the League lacked the authority and the will to enforce it’s decisions and was judged as being mostly ineffective. Benito Mussolini commented that “…the League is very well when sparrows shout, but no good at all when eagles fall out.”⁶ The inability of the membership of the League to enforce a peace despite their own conflicting interests was a lesson learned post WWII with the formation of its replacement, the United Nations.

You can access The League of Nations, by Ruth B. Henig, by going online and checking it out through the Clark library.

“If you would have your son to walk honorably through the world, you must not attempt to clear the stones from his path, but teach him to walk firmly over them – not insist upon leading him by the hand, but let him learn to go alone.”
― Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

This week is the bicentennial birthday of author Anne Brontë. Often eclipsed by her better known sisters, Charlotte and Emily, author George Moore “declared that “if Anne Brontë had lived ten years longer, she would have taken a place beside Jane Austen, perhaps even a higher place.”⁹

Many critics now consider The Tenant of  Wildfell Hall⁷, to be one of the first feminist novels.  The suffragist May Sinclair⁸ noted that “the slamming of [Helen’s] bedroom door against her [abusive] husband reverberated throughout Victorian England.”⁷

Anne Brontë , by Maria H. Frawley, can be found in the Clark Library at PR4163 .F73 1996

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Hahn

² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Hahn

³ Cuthbertson, Ken (1998). Nobody Said Not to Go. Union Square West, New York: Faber and Faber, Inc. pp. 3, 32. ISBN 0571-19965-8.

⁴ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Hahn#/media/File:Emily_Hahn.jpg

⁵ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_the_League_of_Nations_(1939%E2%80%931941).svg

⁶ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_Nations^[4]

⁷ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tenant_of_Wildfell_Hall

⁸ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_Sinclair

⁹ https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/anne-bronte

¹⁰ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Bront%C3%AB#/media/File:AnneBronte.jpg