Happy Birthday, Mae!

The Maundy Morning Newsletter - This Week in History October 17 - 23.

Happy Maundy Morning, friends! I hope you spent the weekend making all the different kinds of chili.

Thank you for continuing to support Okay History.

---

For today’s lesson, I’m going to dive a little deeper into someone I mentioned on Friday when talking about the Space Shuttle Endeavour. I’ll give you a moment to look if you haven’t had the chance yet.

Okay, you’ll notice that Endeavour had the first African American woman on board, and today, October 17, we celebrate Mae Jemison’s birthday! Happy birthday, Mae!

Mae is an impressive person. Born in Alabama, she watched a lot of Star Trek as a child, which helped her form the idea of being an astronaut. The youngest child, and therefore the greatest child, Mae, also participated in ballet, among other activities.

At 16, she graduated from high school and went off to Stanford. She debated whether to do space stuff or become a ballet person and, in the end, decided to earn her degree in chemical engineering. I wish I could say I had a similar experience.

After Stanford, Jemison went off to Cornell to earn her medical degree because if you can engineer chemicals, you can pretty much do whatever you want. After med school, she went off to the Peace Corps, where she traveled to Cuba and Thailand, helping people.

Jemison was inspired to apply to the NASA astronaut program due to women like Sally Ride and was chosen in 1987. Her flight on Endeavour took place on September 12-20, 1992. She brought along a poster of her favorite ballet company and began each shift with a quote from Star Trek. During her time, she did a lot of space stuff. I don’t understand space stuff. I came up with a mediocre humorist history blog, so I encourage you to look her up and see all the things she did while she orbited the earth 127 times.

After resigning from NASA in 1993, Mae became a professor at Dartmouth and Cornell. She founded a bunch of foundations dedicated to environmental sciences and has kept up with her love of ballet by building a studio.

Her greatest achievement could be becoming the first astronaut to appear on an episode of Star Trek when she was cast as Lieutenant Palmer in Star Trek, The Next Generation.

I hope she has a wonderful birthday!

---

Okay, let's highlight what else happened this week. Here's what I got:

1. General Cornwallis surrendered to George Washington at Yorktown on October 19, 1781. After whipping the Brits in this coastal Virginia town, Cornwallis didn’t attend the surrender ceremony, and instead, his second in command gave the sword to Washington’s second in command. What a sore loser.    

2. Tom Petty was born on October 20, 1950. The “Won’t Back Down” rocker was born in Gainesville, Florida, home of the University of Florida. Following his death in 2017, the football Gator began this tradition during games. I experienced it live once, and it was awesome.

3. George McGovern died on October 21, 2012. The longtime representative and Senator from South Dakota was the 1972 Democratic presidential nominee who got whipped by Richard Nixon.

---

I want to thank everyone who took my request from last Monday to heart and liked the posts. A special shout out to one reader, Jason, who went back and liked every single post, even the ones I transported from the old site. Jason wins the reader of the week award! Also, it’s a reminder I haven’t transferred everything. I need to get on that.

I’m traveling for work this week, but I promise to get in a state ranking by Friday. Not sure if it will be a three-stater like last Friday. I will keep you in suspense!

See you on Friday!

Okay,

Chris