Good morning.
Thursday in town will be sunny with a high of forty-six.
Whitewater’s Police & Fire Commission meets tonight at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1851, Harper & Brothers publishes Melville’s Moby-Dick:
….Moby-Dick, a novel by Herman Melville about the voyage of the whaling ship Pequod, is published by Harper & Brothers in New York. Moby-Dick is now considered a great classic of American literature and contains one of the most famous opening lines in fiction: “Call me Ishmael.” Initially, though, the book about Captain Ahab and his quest for a giant white whale was a flop.
After Moby-Dick’s disappointing reception, Melville continued to produce novels, short stories (Bartleby) and poetry, but writing wasn’t paying the bills so in 1865 he returned to New York to work as a customs inspector, a job he held for 20 years….
Today is also the birthday of an American historian from Portage:
1861 – Frederick Jackson Turner Born
On this date Frederick Jackson Turner was born in Portage. Turner spent most of his academic career at the University of Wisconsin. He published his first article in 1883, received his B.A. in 1884, then his M.A. in History in 1888. After a year of study at Johns Hopkins (Ph.D., 1890), he returned to join the History faculty at Wisconsin, where he taught for the next 21 years. He later taught at Harvard from 1910 to 1924 before retiring. In 1893, Turner presented his famous address, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” at the Chicago World’s Fair. Turner died in 1932. [Source: Bowling Green State University]
Scientific American‘s daily trivia question asks not about a mysterious white whale, but about blue ones. (Clicking on the question leads to its answer.)