November 14 (and 12, and 13)

I was on goodreads.com earlier, and it's a really good site. Talk about books, and just random stuff. Really cool.

Yesterday, 13 November, 1850, Robert Louis Stevenson was born. The day before, 12 November, 1917, Australia's Transcontinental Railway was opened, linking the west and east coasts of Australia.

Then there's today, 14 November. On this day:

• 1851: Moby Dick, by Herman Melville, was published in America. It had been published in Britain 3 weeks earlier as The Whale, so as not to offend the public with the real title's wording. However, the publisher accidentally left out the epilogue, leaving the readers and critics totally confused as to how it all ends. Herman Melville's literary genius was never acknowledged during his lifetime, and died in poverty in 1891. Today, Moby Dick is considered one of the greatest English novels.

• 1889-Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman, using the pseudonym Nellie Bly, left New York to mimic Jules Verne's famous book, Around the World in 80 Days. 72 days, 6 hours, 11 minutes and 14 seconds later, she returned to New York, beating the record of Jules Verne's fictional character, Phileas Fogg. In 1880, the Pittsburgh Dispatch's most popular writer, Erasmus Wilson wrote that women belonged in the home doing domestic tasks such as sewing, cooking and raising children and called the working woman "a monstrosity." Elizabeth was outraged at this and wrote a fiery letter to the editor, signing it "Lonely Orphan Girl". The editor was so impressed that he offered a job to the man who wrote the letter. You would think that the "Lonely Orphan Girl" would be a hint that it wasn't a man writing, but when the editor found out that it wasn't a man who had written the letter, he refused to give her the job. Nevertheless, she talked her way into it and found her way out of fashion and gardening stories (the usual tasks for female journalists) by becoming a foreign correspondent in Mexico. Though only 21, she spent nearly 6 months reporting on the conditions in Mexico, a dictatorship at the time. After being threatened with arrest by the Mexican authorities, she decided to go back to Pittsburgh. However, she was put back on fashion and gardening stories, so she left for New York. She was hired by New York World, and was tasked with a story on brutality at the Womens Lunatic Asylum. She feigned insanity, and was in the asylum for 10 days. This prompted major changes for the asylums. More about Nellie Bly.
• 1922-The British Broadcasting Company Limited (BBC) was launched.
• 1985-A Colombian volcano that had been dormant for 400 years erupted. It killed about 20,000 people, mainly because of mudslides from broken dams.