July 4, 2020 • 11 mins
Walt Witman's 'Leaves of Grass' was published on this day in 1855. / On this day in 1997, Mars Pathfinder landed on Mars.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, y'all were rerunning two episodes today, which means that
you'll hear two hosts me and Tracy V. Wilson enjoy
the show. Hi, and welcome to this day in history class,
it is July four. Poet Walt Whitman published his book
Leaves of Grass for the first time on this day
in eighteen fifty five. Sometimes people will quibble with the
(00:23):
fact that probably you couldn't go into the store on
July four to buy it because it was Independence Day
and it would store wouldn't have been open, but it's
generally recognized the July four was the day that this
book came out for the first time. So all. Whitman
was born on May thirty one, eighteen nineteen. He was
from a very proud and patriotic family. All of his
siblings were named after their ancestors or after the nation's founders,
(00:47):
and they lived in places that are boroughs of New
York City today, but at the time they were their
own separate communities, so places like Brooklyn and communities that
are in central and eastern Long Island. Walt Whitman went
to public schools for about six years, but for the
most part he was self educated, and before he published
Leaves of Grass, he worked in several other fields, especially
(01:08):
journalism and teaching. He also wrote some fiction. So in
eighteen forty four, Ralph Waldo Emerson published an essay called
The Poet, in which he meditated on what poetry is
and what a poet's place should be in society. Here's
the thing that he wrote in their quote, America is
a poem in our eyes. It's ample geography, dazzles the imagination,
(01:31):
and it will not wait long for meters. He was
basically calling for the United States to have its own
poet to record, to reflect, and to shape upon the
young nation's consciousness. He thought the nation needed a poet.
So it's really not completely clear whether this essay affected
(01:51):
Walt Whitman's decision to be a poet. There are critics
who argue that it definitely did not a certain but regardless,
what he went and did is basically exactly what Emerson
said needed to happen. He went out and he wrote
the book that Emerson said the nation was lacking. So
(02:14):
what Whitman printed the first edition of Leaves of Grass
at his own expense, seven and ninety five copies. That
was all that he could afford. And this book contains
twelve poems, none of them had titles. They were very
different from most poetry at the time. They were all
over the place in terms of their length, and they
didn't fit into conventional structures or rhyming patterns at all.
(02:37):
The lines themselves, like the written lines on the page,
they were also all over the place. They were very
different and from one another in terms of how long
they were, and they were so long that he actually
printed it on very wide paper so that he wouldn't
have to break the lines. He could print the whole
thing out on this very wide page. The tone of
these poems is relentlessly optimistic, and under line the whole
(03:01):
thing is this focus on the promise of what American
democracy had the potential to be. So he sent a
lot of copies of this book to lots of other poets.
No one really cared, except for Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose
letter that he wrote in response began quote, I greet
you at the beginning of a great career. Perhaps unsurprisingly,
(03:24):
the fact that Walt Whitman had written exactly the kind
of book that Ralph Waldo Emerson said needed to be
written meant that Ralph Waldo Emerson liked it a lot.
Leaves of Grass wasn't the only thing that Walt Whitman
worked on for the rest of his career, but he
did work on it a lot. He kept releasing multiple
new editions of the book that would have new poems
(03:45):
and revisions of the old one. The eighteen fifty six
edition was on smaller paper. The idea was that you
could just carry it in your pocket, and he put
the word poem in the titles of all the poems,
maybe because of all the criticism that he had gotten
after the first edition that these things that he had
written were not even poetry. The eighteen sixty edition was
(04:06):
even more controversial because it included Children of Adam, which
was a celebration of the body and of sexual relationships
between women and men, and it also included another group
of poems called the Calamus Cluster and that celebrated love
between men. This got the book banned in a lot
of places, but it was really this edition that started
(04:28):
to sell pretty well, maybe in part because of all
that controversy about its contents. The American Civil War really
affected Walt Whitman's book. He had been so optimistic in
his poetry about what America could be, and the nation
was literally tearing itself apart over the issue of whether
it was okay to own human beings this property. He
(04:51):
couldn't keep writing relentlessly optimistic poetry in that kind of environment.
The eighteen sixty seven edition of Leaves of Grass included
some of his wartime poetry in the form of Drum
Taps and Sequel to Drum Taps. But this edition came
out in a lot of different versions, and some of
those poems were in there, and sometimes the edition would
(05:11):
not have those poems. The whole thing was very haphazard
and full of airs. It was really almost like he
had ripped up his own work the way the country
had torn itself up, and then tried to stick it
back together. Whitman spent the last years of his life
in Camden, New Jersey, where he died on March two
at the age of seventy two, and today he's remembered
(05:33):
as one of the nation's most influential and groundbreaking poets.
You can learn more about Walt Whitman and his work
in the April seventeen episode of Stuffy Miss In History class.
You can subscribe to This Day in History class on
Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and wherever else you get your podcasts. Tomorrow,
we'll be visiting a factory full of phosphorus. Greetings everyone,
(06:03):
welcome to this Day in History class, where we learn
a smidgen of history every day. The day was July four.
The National Aeronautics in Space Administration, better known as NASA,
landed the Mars Pathfinder on Mars's aries Valis. It's robotic rover,
(06:29):
named so Journer, became the first wheeled vehicle to explore
the surface of another planet. Part of Pathfinders purpose was
to prove that spacecraft could be cheaper, faster, and better.
The mission would demonstrate the technology that was necessary to
get a lander and robotic rover to the surface of
Mars on a lower budget. The lander cost one and
(06:49):
fifty million dollars to develop and build, while the rover
cost about twenty five million dollars including launch and operations.
The Mars Pathfinder mission cost two d sixty five million dollars.
The Mars Pathfinder mission will be the first time at
spacecraft landed on the planet in more than two decades.
The previous time was in nineteen seventy six, when Viking
(07:12):
one and Viking two made it to Mars. Landing was
a difficult tash for spacecraft. In fact, many landers at
the Soviet Union, Russia, and United States sent to Mars
were lost or destroyed. Mars Pathfinder was launched on December four, nineteen.
The robotic spacecraft was made up of an eight hundred
and sixteen pound or three hundred and seventy k lander
(07:35):
officially called the Carl Sagan Memorial Station, and the twenty
three pound rovers to Journer. The rover was named after
Sojourner Truth, an abolitionist and activists in the nineteenth century.
On July fourth, ninete, Mars Pathfinder entered the thin Martian atmosphere,
taking atmospheric measurements. As it descended towards the surface of
(07:57):
the planet, a heat shield slowed the space craft down.
Then a parachute was deployed, slowing the craft descent through
the atmosphere. It then released its heat shield and the
landers separated and lowered from the back shell on a tether.
Air bags inflated about ten seconds before landing, forming a
protective shield around the lander. Three solid rockets fired to
(08:21):
slow the descent even more, the tether was cut and
the lander dropped to the surface. It bounced more than
a dozen times before it rolled and stopped two and
a half minutes after landing Mars. Pathfinder had landed on
the surface of the red planet in a floodplane in
the northern hemisphere called Aries Vallas, chosen for its safety
(08:42):
and the variety of rocks present there that sword Journer
could analyze. It made it to Mars surface less than
a second from its projected landing time. The whole process
of entry, descent, and landing lasted about four minutes. After landing,
the air bags deflated and Pathfinder opened its solar panels.
The lander sent back data it had collected during entry
(09:05):
and landing, and it sent images that it took of
the landing area. So Journer was soon released from the
lander down a ramp. So Journer had two black and
white cameras to navigate, one color camera, and an alpha
proton expert spectrometer for analyzing rocks and soil. Its top
speed was about two ft per minute. The rover analyzed
(09:27):
the composition of nearby rocks, which scientists named Barnacle, bill, Yogi,
and Scooby Doo. NASA said that the data it gathered
could be evidence of a more water rich Mars. The
lander relayed information from the rover to Earth and took
pictures of the sky and its surroundings. It also tested
the magnetic properties of dust on the planet. So Joarner
(09:51):
was designed to last seven days, but it ended up
staying in operation for eighty four days. It traveled about
three and thirty feet during the mission. The lander was
designed to last thirty days, but the final data transmission
from Pathfinder was received on September. The battery, which had
(10:11):
been repeatedly charged and discharged, may have failed. The lander
and rover sent more than seventeen thousand images back to Earth.
It also provided analysis of the rocks and soil on
Mars and data on wind and weather. The technology used
in the Mars Pathfinder mission was later used with some changes,
(10:32):
on the Mars Exploration Rover mission, which began in two
thousand three. I'm Eve Chef Coote, and hopefully you know
a little more about history today than you did yesterday.
If there are any upcoming days in history that you'd
really like me to cover on the show, give us
a shout. On social media at t d I h
(10:53):
C podcast You can subscribe to This Day in History
class on Apple podcasts, the IHR radio app, or wherever
you get your podcasts. Tune in tomorrow for another Day
in History. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit
(11:14):
the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Hey, y'all were rerunning two episodes today, which means that
you'll hear two hosts me and Tracy V. Wilson enjoy
the show. Hi, and welcome to this day in history class,
it is July four. Poet Walt Whitman published his book
Leaves of Grass for the first time on this day
in eighteen fifty five. Sometimes people will quibble with the
(00:23):
fact that probably you couldn't go into the store on
July four to buy it because it was Independence Day
and it would store wouldn't have been open, but it's
generally recognized the July four was the day that this
book came out for the first time. So all. Whitman
was born on May thirty one, eighteen nineteen. He was
from a very proud and patriotic family. All of his
siblings were named after their ancestors or after the nation's founders,
(00:47):
and they lived in places that are boroughs of New
York City today, but at the time they were their
own separate communities, so places like Brooklyn and communities that
are in central and eastern Long Island. Walt Whitman went
to public schools for about six years, but for the
most part he was self educated, and before he published
Leaves of Grass, he worked in several other fields, especially
(01:08):
journalism and teaching. He also wrote some fiction. So in
eighteen forty four, Ralph Waldo Emerson published an essay called
The Poet, in which he meditated on what poetry is
and what a poet's place should be in society. Here's
the thing that he wrote in their quote, America is
a poem in our eyes. It's ample geography, dazzles the imagination,
(01:31):
and it will not wait long for meters. He was
basically calling for the United States to have its own
poet to record, to reflect, and to shape upon the
young nation's consciousness. He thought the nation needed a poet.
So it's really not completely clear whether this essay affected
(01:51):
Walt Whitman's decision to be a poet. There are critics
who argue that it definitely did not a certain but regardless,
what he went and did is basically exactly what Emerson
said needed to happen. He went out and he wrote
the book that Emerson said the nation was lacking. So
(02:14):
what Whitman printed the first edition of Leaves of Grass
at his own expense, seven and ninety five copies. That
was all that he could afford. And this book contains
twelve poems, none of them had titles. They were very
different from most poetry at the time. They were all
over the place in terms of their length, and they
didn't fit into conventional structures or rhyming patterns at all.
(02:37):
The lines themselves, like the written lines on the page,
they were also all over the place. They were very
different and from one another in terms of how long
they were, and they were so long that he actually
printed it on very wide paper so that he wouldn't
have to break the lines. He could print the whole
thing out on this very wide page. The tone of
these poems is relentlessly optimistic, and under line the whole
(03:01):
thing is this focus on the promise of what American
democracy had the potential to be. So he sent a
lot of copies of this book to lots of other poets.
No one really cared, except for Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose
letter that he wrote in response began quote, I greet
you at the beginning of a great career. Perhaps unsurprisingly,
(03:24):
the fact that Walt Whitman had written exactly the kind
of book that Ralph Waldo Emerson said needed to be
written meant that Ralph Waldo Emerson liked it a lot.
Leaves of Grass wasn't the only thing that Walt Whitman
worked on for the rest of his career, but he
did work on it a lot. He kept releasing multiple
new editions of the book that would have new poems
(03:45):
and revisions of the old one. The eighteen fifty six
edition was on smaller paper. The idea was that you
could just carry it in your pocket, and he put
the word poem in the titles of all the poems,
maybe because of all the criticism that he had gotten
after the first edition that these things that he had
written were not even poetry. The eighteen sixty edition was
(04:06):
even more controversial because it included Children of Adam, which
was a celebration of the body and of sexual relationships
between women and men, and it also included another group
of poems called the Calamus Cluster and that celebrated love
between men. This got the book banned in a lot
of places, but it was really this edition that started
(04:28):
to sell pretty well, maybe in part because of all
that controversy about its contents. The American Civil War really
affected Walt Whitman's book. He had been so optimistic in
his poetry about what America could be, and the nation
was literally tearing itself apart over the issue of whether
it was okay to own human beings this property. He
(04:51):
couldn't keep writing relentlessly optimistic poetry in that kind of environment.
The eighteen sixty seven edition of Leaves of Grass included
some of his wartime poetry in the form of Drum
Taps and Sequel to Drum Taps. But this edition came
out in a lot of different versions, and some of
those poems were in there, and sometimes the edition would
(05:11):
not have those poems. The whole thing was very haphazard
and full of airs. It was really almost like he
had ripped up his own work the way the country
had torn itself up, and then tried to stick it
back together. Whitman spent the last years of his life
in Camden, New Jersey, where he died on March two
at the age of seventy two, and today he's remembered
(05:33):
as one of the nation's most influential and groundbreaking poets.
You can learn more about Walt Whitman and his work
in the April seventeen episode of Stuffy Miss In History class.
You can subscribe to This Day in History class on
Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and wherever else you get your podcasts. Tomorrow,
we'll be visiting a factory full of phosphorus. Greetings everyone,
(06:03):
welcome to this Day in History class, where we learn
a smidgen of history every day. The day was July four.
The National Aeronautics in Space Administration, better known as NASA,
landed the Mars Pathfinder on Mars's aries Valis. It's robotic rover,
(06:29):
named so Journer, became the first wheeled vehicle to explore
the surface of another planet. Part of Pathfinders purpose was
to prove that spacecraft could be cheaper, faster, and better.
The mission would demonstrate the technology that was necessary to
get a lander and robotic rover to the surface of
Mars on a lower budget. The lander cost one and
(06:49):
fifty million dollars to develop and build, while the rover
cost about twenty five million dollars including launch and operations.
The Mars Pathfinder mission cost two d sixty five million dollars.
The Mars Pathfinder mission will be the first time at
spacecraft landed on the planet in more than two decades.
The previous time was in nineteen seventy six, when Viking
(07:12):
one and Viking two made it to Mars. Landing was
a difficult tash for spacecraft. In fact, many landers at
the Soviet Union, Russia, and United States sent to Mars
were lost or destroyed. Mars Pathfinder was launched on December four, nineteen.
The robotic spacecraft was made up of an eight hundred
and sixteen pound or three hundred and seventy k lander
(07:35):
officially called the Carl Sagan Memorial Station, and the twenty
three pound rovers to Journer. The rover was named after
Sojourner Truth, an abolitionist and activists in the nineteenth century.
On July fourth, ninete, Mars Pathfinder entered the thin Martian atmosphere,
taking atmospheric measurements. As it descended towards the surface of
(07:57):
the planet, a heat shield slowed the space craft down.
Then a parachute was deployed, slowing the craft descent through
the atmosphere. It then released its heat shield and the
landers separated and lowered from the back shell on a tether.
Air bags inflated about ten seconds before landing, forming a
protective shield around the lander. Three solid rockets fired to
(08:21):
slow the descent even more, the tether was cut and
the lander dropped to the surface. It bounced more than
a dozen times before it rolled and stopped two and
a half minutes after landing Mars. Pathfinder had landed on
the surface of the red planet in a floodplane in
the northern hemisphere called Aries Vallas, chosen for its safety
(08:42):
and the variety of rocks present there that sword Journer
could analyze. It made it to Mars surface less than
a second from its projected landing time. The whole process
of entry, descent, and landing lasted about four minutes. After landing,
the air bags deflated and Pathfinder opened its solar panels.
The lander sent back data it had collected during entry
(09:05):
and landing, and it sent images that it took of
the landing area. So Journer was soon released from the
lander down a ramp. So Journer had two black and
white cameras to navigate, one color camera, and an alpha
proton expert spectrometer for analyzing rocks and soil. Its top
speed was about two ft per minute. The rover analyzed
(09:27):
the composition of nearby rocks, which scientists named Barnacle, bill, Yogi,
and Scooby Doo. NASA said that the data it gathered
could be evidence of a more water rich Mars. The
lander relayed information from the rover to Earth and took
pictures of the sky and its surroundings. It also tested
the magnetic properties of dust on the planet. So Joarner
(09:51):
was designed to last seven days, but it ended up
staying in operation for eighty four days. It traveled about
three and thirty feet during the mission. The lander was
designed to last thirty days, but the final data transmission
from Pathfinder was received on September. The battery, which had
(10:11):
been repeatedly charged and discharged, may have failed. The lander
and rover sent more than seventeen thousand images back to Earth.
It also provided analysis of the rocks and soil on
Mars and data on wind and weather. The technology used
in the Mars Pathfinder mission was later used with some changes,
(10:32):
on the Mars Exploration Rover mission, which began in two
thousand three. I'm Eve Chef Coote, and hopefully you know
a little more about history today than you did yesterday.
If there are any upcoming days in history that you'd
really like me to cover on the show, give us
a shout. On social media at t d I h
(10:53):
C podcast You can subscribe to This Day in History
class on Apple podcasts, the IHR radio app, or wherever
you get your podcasts. Tune in tomorrow for another Day
in History. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit
(11:14):
the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
This Day in History Class News
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