Joan of Arc, French Heroine & Catholic Saint
Joan of Arc was a French peasant girl born in 1412 who led the French army to important victories during the Hundred Years' War and helped bring about the coronation of King Charles VII. She said that her leadership came from visions from God that instructed her to reclaim France from English rule. She was captured and burned at the stake when she was 19 years old, in 1431. She was canonized as a saint in 1920 and is one of the three patron saints of France. Her martyrdom has inspired politicians, writers, and composers throughout the ages, from Shakespeare to Tchaikovsky to the tv series Joan of Arcadia that ran from 2003-2005.
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On October 24, 1901, Annie Edson Taylor, a school teacher from Michigan, becomes the first person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel.
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In 2007 Drew Gilpin Faust became President of Harvard University, its first woman president in 371 years.
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Sharon Pratt Dixon was the first woman to serve as mayor of a major U.S. city. She was sworn in as mayor of Washington, D.C., in 1991.
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Think Girl Power the Next Time You Go to the Grocery Store
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That's because the flat-bottomed brown paper bag was invented by Margaret Knight, who started inventing things when she was only 12 years old! When she was 30, Margaret decided paper bags would work much better if they had flat bottoms and she set out to create a machine that would make such a bag. She received a patent for her machine in 1871, when she was 33 -- after a legal battle with a man who tried to steal her invention. ©
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No, we didn’t misspell the name of this section. History has this pesky habit of
focusing on the achievements of boys and men while leaving out the equally important
accomplishments of girls and women. This unbalanced view of history (or is it his
story?) gives many people the impression that females didn’t contribute much to
the building of our society and makes some believe that girls can’t or shouldn’t
do the same things men do. In the past and present girls and women have fought for
a place for themselves in careers that used to be reserved only for men—like science
(Marie Curie), sports (Lisa Leslie), and medicine (Elizabeth Blackwell)—and they
continue to fight for positions that remain off limits, like Victoria Woodhull and
Hillary Clinton campaigning to be the President of the United States. Girls and
women have greatly contributed to making our world what it is today, and are a big
part of shaping its future, so only seemed natural to call a section about their
historical achievements “HerStory.” We hope you will learn from it, be inspired
by it, and pass it along so that other girls and boys can learn how important girls
and women are too.
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