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47 illustrations
Efforts to do good are misunderstood and ill-requited; benevolent plans are ridiculed, motives misrepresented, kindness abused, and hopes of success treated as visionary.
This repetition teaches us the nature of biblical *proseuche* (prayer): not a single petition, but sustained intercession through distress.
You cannot awake one morning in glad surprise to find it finished to the turret stone.
On the evening of February 23, 1807, the House of Commons erupted in something rarely heard within those walls — a standing ovation. Members of...
On October 3, 1904, Mary McLeod Bethune welcomed five little girls and her own son into a rented cottage in Daytona Beach, Florida. She had...
On January 23, 1849, Elizabeth Blackwell walked across the stage at Geneva Medical College in upstate New York and received her Doctor of Medicine degree...
In a cramped, leaking shed behind the École de Physique et de Chimie in Paris, Marie Curie bent over a steaming iron cauldron in the...
In 1904, Mary McLeod Bethune — the fifteenth of seventeen children born to former slaves in Mayesville, South Carolina — traveled to Daytona Beach, Florida,...
On the evening of March 24, 1882, Dr. Robert Koch stood before the Berlin Physiological Society and made an announcement that would alter the course...
Between 1850 and 1860, Harriet Tubman returned thirteen times to Maryland's Eastern Shore — the very land from which she had escaped — to lead...
By 1818, Ludwig van Beethoven could not hear a single note. The composer who had once filled Vienna's concert halls now lived in total silence,...
In 1873, Phoebe Knapp sat at her piano in Brooklyn and played a new melody for her friend Fanny Crosby. "What does this tune say?"...
In 1873, composer Phoebe Knapp sat at her piano in Brooklyn, New York, and played a new melody for her friend Fanny Crosby. "What does...
Between 1850 and 1860, Harriet Tubman made thirteen trips from freedom back into the slave-holding South — back into the very darkness she had escaped....
In the spring of 1508, Michelangelo Buonarroti stood before Pope Julius II in Rome and protested. He was a sculptor, not a painter. His hands...
On the evening of May 7, 1824, Ludwig van Beethoven stood on the stage of Vienna's Theater am Kärntnertor, his back to a packed house....
On the evening of May 7, 1824, Ludwig van Beethoven stood before a packed audience at the Theater am Kärntnertor in Vienna, his arms sweeping...
In October 1772, a young enslaved woman named Phillis Wheatley stood before a panel of eighteen of Boston's most prominent men — including Governor Thomas...
On the evening of July 31, 1834, thousands of enslaved men, women, and children gathered in churches and chapels across the British Caribbean. In Jamaica,...
In December 1785, William Wilberforce sat across from John Newton in a London parlor. Wilberforce — a wealthy young Member of Parliament — had recently...
On March 9, 1841, seventy-three-year-old John Quincy Adams rose before the United States Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. The former president, long retired from the...
On the evening of April 7, 1864, Louis Pasteur stood before a packed audience at the Sorbonne in Paris and held up a simple glass...
Along the windswept shore of Lyme Regis, Dorset, twelve-year-old Mary Anning gripped her hammer against the cold limestone cliffs in 1811. Her brother Joseph had...
In the winter of 1811, twelve-year-old Mary Anning knelt on the rain-slicked cliffs of Lyme Regis, Dorset, carefully chipping limestone away from an enormous skeleton...