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Benoîte Groult
This biography is not yet available in English.
You can find the German version here.
There is also version.
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Theophanu die Jüngere
This biography is not yet available in English.
You can find the German version here.
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Jelena Georgijewna Bonner
This biography is not yet available in English.
You can find the German version here.
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Wallis Simpson, Herzogin von Windsor
This biography is not yet available in English.
You can find the German version here.
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born April 23 1951 on Ebeye Island in the Marshall Islands
died June 18 1996 on Majuro Island in the Marshall Islands
Anti-nuclear Activist and Marshall Islander
“We are testing these bombs for the good of mankind and to end all wars.” So spoke a U.S. Navy officer in 1946 – the year after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the end of World War II – to explain to the people of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean why the U.S. was about to embark on a series of tests of nuclear bombs there. The same year, a U.S. Navy press release included this statement: “The natives are delighted, enthusiastic about the atomic bomb, which has already brought them prosperity and a new promising future.”
Darlene Keju would strongly disagree. Between 1946 and 1958, a total of 67 bombs were tested in the Marshalls – atomic bombs like the ones used in Japan, and the much more powerful hydrogen or thermonuclear bombs. Islanders were exposed to high levels of radioactive fallout, resulting in a wide range of devastating health problems, including radiation sickness, cancers, and severe birth defects. Many were evacuated to ostensibly safer…read more
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Lotte Reiniger
This biography is not yet available in English.
You can find the German version here.
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Born 22 May 1844 in Allegheny City (now Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania
Died 14 June 1926 at Château de Beaufresne near Oise, France
U.S. painter and graphic artist
The daughter of a respectable upper-class family, Mary Cassatt decided at an early age to become an artist against the wishes of her father; her determination and talent led her to become the most distinguished woman painter of her era. Her paintings, drawings and prints portray in particular the manifold activities of a bourgeois woman’s life during the late 19th century; in the inner concentration and reflectiveness of her female subjects Cassatt created a new feminine image that challenged the traditional iconography of woman as simply a beautiful object of the male gaze.
Cassatt was the fourth child of the banker Robert Simpson Cassatt and Katherine Kelso Cassatt, an unusually cultivated and well-read woman. Mary was exposed to the art treasures of European museums while still a child during a four-year sojourn of the family in Europe. At seventeen she prevailed against her father and began to study art, first at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia and…read more
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German-Swiss philanthropist and psychologist
Born 30 January 1939 in Berlin
Died 17 Juni 2001 in Vaduz, Liechtenstein
5th anniversary of death on 17 Juni 2006
Mariann Steegmann, daughter of the German corporate lawyer Josef Steegmann and the Swiss hotel-owner Lea Steegmann, née Morosani, studied psychology after her school years. Following completion of her studies with the Diplom degree in 1968 she worked in a home for children. Then, in 1973, she and a friend took over responsibilty for a health spa (Kurhaus) in Degersheim (Appenzeller Land), which she headed until shortly before her death.
Her excellent knowledge of languages (she spoke English and Italian fluently, as well as her native German) and her open and outgoing manner made her very popular with her co-workers. In order to advise her patients more effectively, Mariann acquired additional medical training, and she took charge of instructing the student nurses herself. A friend says of this period: “She had a special ability to resolve conflicts positively … she never judged in an authoritarian way; rather she saw herself as one among equals, which contributed a lot to…read more
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American writer
born June 14, 1811 in Litchfield, Connecticut
died July 1, 1896 in Hartford, Connecticut
120th anniversary of death on July 1 2016
Harriet Beecher Stowe was one of the most popular American writers of the 19th century. Today she is best known for her anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, which was printed in over 40 languages, but she also produced several other novels and numerous short stories. She often took inspiration from her experiences growing up in a large, devoutly religious family in Protestant New England. Stowe's father, Lyman Beecher, was a Congregational minister, known for his evangelical sermons and moral reforms; Roxana Foote Beecher, mother of Stowe's eight full siblings, was a well-read and educated woman in an age when few women were literate. She died when Stowe was four, leaving Catharine, her oldest daughter, to fill the maternal role for Stowe for the rest of her life.
Born into an intelligent and ambitious family, Stowe received an unusually rich education for a girl. She read avidly in her father's study any material she could find: old sermons, theological texts, and a…read more
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born 25 April 1917 in Newport News, Virginia, USA
died 15 June 1996 in Beverly Hills, CA
US-American Jazz singer; "First Lady of Song"
100th birthday on 25 April 2017
As a girl in a poor neighborhood of New York, Ella Fitzgerald told her playmates: “Someday you’re going to see me in the headlines. I’m going to be famous.” (Nicholson 5) Unlikely as it seemed at the time, the enthusiastic young performer would eventually realize her own prophecy and become America’s “First Lady of Song,” maintaining a career as top jazz singer through six decades and in styles from swing to bebop and pop. As her biographer Stuart Nicholson writes: “No other artist in jazz has enjoyed such unanimous approbation over such a long period from both public and critics….” (2).
Ella was blessed with a huge talent – a singular purity of voice, perfect intonation, clarity of diction, harmonic imagination, amazing memory and rhythmic sensibility – but her absolute love of singing and commitment to performing despite obstacles were almost equally important to her success. As a black woman in a white man’s world she experienced both racism and sexism in her career. But…read more
