Have a great weekend, everybody!

Have a happy and safe Independence Day!

Happy birthday, John Singleton Copley

Detail: Paul Revere (1770). Detail: Watson and the Shark (1778).

It is the birthday of painter John Singleton Copley (1738), who is remembered for his portraits of New England colonial figures and his depiction of historical events both in colonial America and in England, where he lived for a time and became quite well known. His parents were Irish merchants who emigrated to Boston. His father died about the time he was born and his mother remarried. His stepfather was an accomplished engraver, who no doubt influenced Copley. Scholars don't know exactly when he started painting but he was executing fine portraits by his mid-teens. Among his best-known works is a portrait of the patriotic silversmith Paul Revere, painted in the environment of his day job. Copley's first venture into historical painting was a shark attack in Havana harbor.

Happy birthday, Justice Thurgood Marshall

It is the birthday of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall (1908), the first African-American appointed the the nation's highest judicial body. While he was a lawyer, Marshall successfully argued the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case before the Supreme Court in 1954. That case led to the end of racial segregation in public schools. Marshall was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1967. Marshall's writing was collected as Thurgood Marshall: His Speeches, Writings, Arguments, Opinions and Reminiscences (2001).

Happy birthday, William Strunk, Jr.

It is the birthday of professor William Strunk, Jr. (1869), the Cornell University English professor who wrote The Elements of Style (1918) as a concise writing guide to help his students. It was a collection of the writing rules focused particularly on the composition principles students tended to get wrong most often. Strunk published it privately and distributed it to his students, among whom it became known as "the little book." Decades later (1957), one of Strunk's students, E.B. White, came across his copy of "the little book" and wrote a column about it in The New Yorker. Macmillian and Company asked White to revise and modernize it. Today it is considered one of the most authoritative writer's guides in the world. In 2010, comic Steven Colbert whipped out his copy to make a point about the Oxford comma during his show on Comedy Central.