Today, The Grandma has gone to the library to search more information about the Granite Railway, one of the first railroads in the United States, that began operations as the first chartered railway in the U.S. on a day like today in 1826.
The Granite Railway was one of the first railroads in the United States, built to carry granite from Quincy, Massachusetts, to a dock on the Neponset River in Milton. From there, boats carried the heavy stone to Charlestown for construction of the Bunker Hill Monument.
The Granite Railway is popularly termed the first commercial railroad in the United States, as it was the first chartered railway to evolve into a common carrier without an intervening closure.
The last active quarry closed in 1963; in 1985, the Metropolitan District Commission purchased 8.9 ha, including Granite Railway Quarry, as the QuincyQuarries Reservation.
In 1825, after an exhaustive search throughout New England, Solomon Willard selected the Quincy site as the source of stone for the Bunker Hill Monument.After many delays and much obstruction, the railway itself was granted a charter on March 4, 1826, with right of eminent domain to establish its right-of-way.
Businessman and state legislator Thomas Handasyd Perkins organized the financing of the new Granite Railway Company, owning a majority of its shares, and he was designated its president.
The railroad was designed and built by railway pioneer Gridley Bryant and began operations on October 7, 1826. Bryant used developments that had already been in use on the railroads in England, but he modified his design to allow for heavier, more concentrated loads and a three-foot frost line.
The railway ran 4.8 km from quarries to the Neponset River. Its wagons had wheels 1.83 m in diameter and were pulled by horses, although steam locomotives had been in operation in England for 13 years. The wooden rails were plated with iron and were laid 1,524 mm apart, on stone cross ties spaced at 8-foot intervals. By 1837 these wooden rails had been replaced by granite rails,once again capped with iron.
In 1830, a new section of the railway called the Incline was added to haul granite from the Pine Ledge Quarry to the railway level 26 m below. Wagons moved up and down the 96 m long incline in an endless conveyor belt. TheIncline continued in operation until the 1940s.
The railway introduced several important inventions, including railway switches or frogs, the turntable, and double-truck railroad cars. Gridley Bryant never patented his inventions, believing they should be for the benefit of all.
The novelty of the new railroad attracted tourists who journeyed out from Boston to witness the revolutionary technology in person.
Notable visitors such as statesman Daniel Webster and English actress Fanny Kemble were early witnesses to the new railway. Miss Kemble described her 1833 visit in her journal.
The Granite Railway was the site of one of the first fatal railway accidents in the United States, on July 25, 1832, when the wagon containing Thomas B. Achuas of Cuba derailed as he and three other tourists were taking a tour. The accident occurred while the wagon -empty of stone but now carrying the four passengers- was ascending the Incline on its return trip and a cable broke. The occupants of the car were thrown over a cliff, approximately 11 m. Achuas was killed, and the three other passengers were badly injured.
In 1871, the Old Colony and Newport Railway took over the original right-of-way of the Granite Railway, replacing its track with contemporary construction, and steam trains then took granite from the quarries directly to Boston without need of barges from the Neponset River. This portion of the Old Colony Railroad through Quincy and Milton was later absorbed into the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad.
During the early twentieth century, metal channels were laid over the old granite rails on the Incline and motortrucks were hauled up and down on a cable. Passenger service on the Granite Branch (West Quincy Branch) ended on September 30, 1940; freight service was abandoned in stages from 1941 to 1973. Most of the right of way of the railway was eventually incorporated into much of the Southeast Expressway in Milton and Quincy.
The railway's Incline was added to the National Register of Historic Places on June 19, 1973, and a surviving portion of the railroad bed, just off the end of Bunker Hill Lane, was added on October 15, 1973.
The Granite Railway was designated as a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark by the American Society of Civil Engineers in 1976.
A centennial historic plaque from 1926, an original switch frog, a piece of traintrack, and a section of superstructure from the Granite Railway are in the gardens on top of the Southeast Expressway (Interstate 93) as it passes under East Milton Square.
The frog had been displayed at the World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893. The commemorative display is at the approximate site of the railroad'sright-of-way as it went through Milton on its way to the Neponset River.
In Quincy, visitors can walk along several parkland trails that reveal vestiges of the original railway trestle and the Incline. These trails connect to the quarries, most of which are now filled for safety purposes with dirt from the massive Big Dig highway project in Boston. In years past, many persons were injured -and some killed- while diving into the flooded abandoned quarries from great heights.
The Department of Conservation and Recreation maintains the Quincy QuarriesReservation, which has facilities for rock climbing, and trails connecting the remains of the Granite Railway.
When you are in a small rural place with cold weather and a lot of granite, you need people who are going to work hard, and you really stop worrying about what gender they are.
Today, The Grandma is at home reading about normal schools.
On a day like today in 1839, the first state normal school in the United States, the forerunner to today's FraminghamStateUniversity,opened in Lexington, Massachusetts with three students, and TheGrandma wants to commemorate this event talking about these schools.
A normal school is an institution created to train high school graduates to be teachers by educating them in the norms of pedagogy and curriculum.
Most such schools, where they still exist, are now denominated teacher-training colleges or teachers' colleges, require a high school diploma, and may be part of a comprehensive university.
Normal schools in the United States, Canada and Argentina trained teachers for primary schools, while in continental Europe, the equivalent colleges educated teachers for primary, secondary and tertiary schools.
In 1685, St. Jean-Baptiste de La Salle, founder of the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, founded what is generally considered the first normalschool, the École Normale, in Reims, Champagne, France.
The term normal herein refers to the goal of these institutions to instil and reinforce particular norms within students. Norms included historical behavioural norms of the time, as well as norms that reinforced targeted societal values, ideologies and dominant narratives in the form of curriculum.
The first public normal school in the United States was founded in Concord, Vermont, by Samuel Read Hall in 1823 to train teachers.
In 1839, the first state-supported normal school was established by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts on the northeast corner of the historic Lexington Battle Green; it evolved into Framingham State University.
The first modern teacher training school in China was established by educator Sheng Xuanhuai in 1895 as the normal school of the Nanyang Public School, now Shanghai Jiao Tong University, in Shanghai during the Qing dynasty.
Many comprehensive public or state-supported universities, such as the University of California, Los Angeles in the United States and Beijing Normal University in China, were established and operated as normal schools before expanding their faculties and organizing as research universities. Some of these universities, particularly in Asia, retain the word Normal in their name to recognize their historical purpose.
In Canada, most normal schools were eventually assimilated into a university as its faculty of education, offering a one or two-year Bachelor of Education degree. Such a degree requires at least three, but usually four, years of prior undergraduate study.
Educating teachers was of great importance in the newly industrialized European economies and their need for a reliable, reproducible and uniform work force.
The process of instating such norms within students depended upon the creation of the first uniform, formalized national educational curriculum.
Thus, normal schools, as the teacher training schools, were tasked with both developing this new curriculum and developing the techniques through which teachers would instil these ideas, behaviours and values in the minds of their students.
Today, The Grandma has received a new visit of one of her closest friends, Jordi Santanyí. Jordi is a writer and he loves Literature. He spends hours and hours talking with TheGrandma about authors and their works. They have been talking about Edward Estlin Cummings, the American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright who was died on a day like today in 1962.
Jordi and The Grandma think that the best way to pay homage to E. E. Cummings is talking about his life and his amazing works, especially his poems.
Edward Estlin "E. E." Cummings (October 14, 1894-September 3, 1962), often styled as e ecummings, as he is attributed in many of his published works, was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright.
He wrote approximately 2,900 poems, two autobiographical novels, fourplays, and several essays.
He is often regarded as one of the most important American poets of the 20th century.
Cummings is associated with modernist free-form poetry. Much of his work has idiosyncratic syntax and uses lower case spellings for poeticexpression.
Edward Estlin Cummings was born on October 14, 1894in Cambridge, Massachusetts to Edward Cummings and the former Rebecca Haswell Clarke, a well-known Unitarian couple in the city. His father was a professor at Harvard University who later became nationally known as the minister of South Congregational Church (Unitarian) in Boston, Massachusetts. His mother, who loved to spend time with her children, played games with Cummings and his sister, Elizabeth.
From an early age, Cummings' parents supported his creative gifts. Cummings wrote poems and drew as a child, and he often played outdoors with the many other children who lived in his neighborhood. He grew up in the company of such family friends as the philosophers William James and Josiah Royce.
Many of Cummings' summers were spent on Silver Lake in Madison, New Hampshire, where his father had built two houses along the eastern shore. The family ultimately purchased the nearby Joy Farm where Cummings had his primary summer residence.
Cummings wanted to be a poet from childhood and wrote poetry daily from age 8 to 22, exploring assorted forms. He graduated from Harvard University with a Bachelor of Arts degree magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1915 and received a Master of Arts degree from the university in 1916.
In his studies at Harvard, he developed an interest in modern poetry, which ignored conventional grammar and syntax, while aiming for a dynamicuse of language. Upon graduating, he worked for a book dealer.
E. E. Cummings
In 1917, with the First World War ongoing in Europe, Cummings enlisted in the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps. On the boat to France, he met William Slater Brown and they would become friends. Due to an administrative error, Cummings and Brown did not receive an assignment for five weeks, a period they spent exploring Paris. Cummings fell in love with the city, to which he would return throughout his life.
During their service in the ambulance corps, the two young writers sent letters home that drew the attention of the military censors. They were known to prefer the company of French soldiers over fellow ambulance drivers. The two openly expressed anti-war views; Cummings spoke of his lack of hatred for the Germans.
On September 21, 1917, five months after starting his belated assignment, Cummings and William Slater Brown were arrested by the French military on suspicion of espionage and undesirable activities. They were held for three and a half months in a military detention camp at the Dépôt de Triage, in La Ferté-Macé, Orne, Normandy.
They were imprisoned with other detainees in a large room. Cummings' father failed to obtain his son's release through diplomatic channels, and in December 1917 he wrote a letter to President Woodrow Wilson. Cummings was released on December 19, 1917, and Brown was released two months later.
Cummings used his prison experience as the basis for his novel, TheEnormous Room (1922), about which F. Scott Fitzgerald said, Of all the work by young men who have sprung up since 1920 one book survives -The Enormous Room by e e cummings... Those few who cause books to live have not been able to endure the thought of its mortality.
Cummings returned to the United States on New Year's Day 1918. Later in 1918 he was drafted into the army. He served in the 12th Division at Camp Devens, Massachusetts, until November 1918.
Cummings returned to Paris in 1921 and lived there for two years before returning to New York. His collection Tulips and Chimneys was published in 1923 and his inventive use of grammar and syntax is evident. The book was heavily cut by his editor. XLI Poems was published in 1925. With these collections, Cummings made his reputation as an avant garde poet.
During the rest of the 1920s and 1930s, Cummings returned to Paris a number of times, and traveled throughout Europe, meeting, among others, artist PabloPicasso.
In 1931 Cummings traveled to the Soviet Union, recounting his experiences in Eimi, published two years later. During these years Cummings also traveled to Northern Africa and Mexico. He worked as an essayist and portrait artist for Vanity Fair magazine (1924–1927).
E. E. Cummings
In 1926, Cummings' parents were in a car crash; only his mother survived, although she was severely injured.
His father's death had a profound effect on Cummings, who entered a new period in his artistic life. He began to focus on more important aspects of life in his poetry. He started this new period by paying homage to his father in the poem my father moved through dooms of love.
In the 1930s Samuel Aiwaz Jacobs was Cummings' publisher; he had started the Golden Eagle Press after working as a typographer and publisher.
In 1952, his alma mater, Harvard University, awarded Cummings an honorary seat as a guest professor.
Cummings spent the last decade of his life traveling, fulfilling speaking engagements, and spending time at his summer home, Joy Farm, in Silver Lake, New Hampshire.
He died of a stroke on September 3, 1962, at the age of 67 at Memorial Hospital in North Conway, New Hampshire.
Cummings was buried at Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston, Massachusetts. At the time of his death, Cummings was recognized as the second most widely read poet in the United States, after Robert Frost.
Cummings' papers are held at the Houghton Library at Harvard University and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.
According to his
testimony in EIMI, Cummings had little interest in politics until his
trip to the Soviet Union in 1931. He subsequently shifted rightward on
many political and social issues. Despite his radical and bohemian
public image, he was a Republican, and later, an ardent supporter of
Joseph McCarthy.
Despite Cummings' familiarity with avant-garde styles, likely affected by the Calligrammes of French poet Apollinaire, according to a contemporary observation, much of his work is quite traditional. Many of his poems are sonnets, albeit often with a modern twist. He occasionally used the blues form and acrostics.
Cummings' poetry often deals with themes of love and nature, as well as the relationship of the individual to the masses and to the world. His poems are also often rife with satire.
While his poetic forms and themes share an affinity with the Romantictradition, Cummings' work universally shows a particular idiosyncrasy ofsyntax, or way of arranging individual words into larger phrases and sentences. Many of his most striking poems do not involve any typographical or punctuation innovations at all, but purely syntactic ones.
As well as being
influenced by notable modernists, including Gertrude Stein and Ezra
Pound, Cummings in his early work drew upon the imagist experiments of
Amy Lowell. Later, his visits to Paris exposed him to Dada and
Surrealism,which he reflected in his work. He began to rely on
symbolism and allegory, where he once had used simile and metaphor. In
his later work, he rarely used comparisons that required objects that
were not previously mentioned in the poem, choosing to use a symbol
instead. Due to this, his later poetry is frequently more lucid, more
moving, and more profound than his earlier.
E. E. Cummings
Cummings also liked to incorporate imagery of nature and death into much of his poetry.
While some of his poetry is free verse, with no concern for rhyme or meter, many have a recognizable sonnet structure of 14 lines, with an intricate rhyme scheme. A number of his poems feature a typographically exuberantstyle, with words, parts of words, or punctuation symbols scattered across the page, often making little sense until read aloud, at which point the meaning and emotion become clear. Cummings,who was also a painter, understood the importance of presentation, and used typography to paint a picture with some of his poems.
Following his autobiographical novel, The Enormous Room, Cummings' first published work was a collection of poems titled Tulips and Chimneys (1923). This work was the public's first encounter with his characteristically eccentric use of grammar and punctuation.
Some of Cummings' most famous poems do not involve much, if any, idiosyncratic typography or punctuation, but they still carry his unmistakable style, particularly in unusual and impressionistic word order.
Cummings' work often does not proceed in accordance with the conventional combinatorial rules that generate typical English sentences. In addition, a number of Cummings' poems feature, in part or in whole, intentional misspellings, and several incorporate phonetic spellings intended to represent particular dialects.
Cummings also made use of inventive formations of compound words, as in his poem in Just, which features words such as mud-luscious, puddle-wonderful, and eddieandbill. This poem is part of a sequence of poems titled Chansons Innocentes; it has many references comparing the balloonman to Pan, the mythical creature that is half-goat and half-man.
Literary critic R.P. Blackmur has commented that this use of language is frequently unintelligible because Cummings disregards the historical accumulation of meaning in words in favour of merely private and personal associations.
Fellow poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, in her equivocal letter recommending Cummings for the Guggenheim Fellowship he was awarded in 1934, expressed her frustration at his opaque symbolism. If he prints and offers for sale poetry which he is quite content should be, after hours of sweating concentration,inexplicable from any point of view to a person as intelligent as myself, then he does so with a motive which is frivolous from the point of view of art, andshould not be helped or encouraged by any serious person or group ofpersons... there is fine writing and powerful writing, as well as some of the most pompous nonsense I ever let slip to the floor with a wide yawn... What Ipropose, then, is this: that you give Mr. Cummings enough rope. He may hanghimself; or he may lasso a unicorn."
Many of Cummings' poems are satirical and address social issues but have an equal or even stronger bias toward romanticism: time and again his poems celebrate love, sex, and the season of rebirth.
Cummings also wrote children's books and novels. A notable example of his versatility is an introduction he wrote for a collection of the comic strip KrazyKat.
Today, The Grandma has gone to the library to search information about the SalemWitch Trials, the events happened in the Colonial America during the 17th century that finished with the lives of nineteen people with a false accusation.
This episode is one of Colonial America's most notorious cases of mass hysteria and The Grandma wants to remember it today on the 327th anniversary of the execution of Bridget Bishop,the first victim of these fake trials.
The Grandma remembers her last visit to Danvers (then Salem Village) in Massachussets and how the history of the witches of Salem impacted her because of the similarities between this story in the USA in the 17th century and the Cathars in Occitania in the 13th century.
Justice must be a tool to find the truth but never a method of revenge based of religious or political ideals. Sadly, nowadays, fake justice is easy to find in some countries under a supposed disguise of democracy and legality.
More than three hundred years later, some Justice Courts continue their proposals of accusing people who express ideas, feelings or opinions that are nor in the same line of the judges or tribunals that are judging them. It is a must for us to denounce them and to repair their actions.
The Salem Witch Trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. More than 200 people were accused, 19 of whom were found guilty and executed by hanging, 14 women and 5 men.
Salem Witch Trials, Massachussets, 1692-1693
One other man, Giles Corey, was crushed to death for refusing to plead, and at least five people died in jail. It was the deadliest witch hunt in the history of colonial North America.
Twelve other women had previously been executed in Massachusetts and Connecticut during the 17th century. Despite being generally known as the Salem Witch Trials, the preliminary hearings in 1692 were conducted in several towns: Salem Village, now Danvers, Salem Town, Ipswich, and Andover. The most infamous trials were conducted by the Court of Oyer and Terminer in 1692 in Salem Town.
The episode is one of Colonial America's most notorious cases of mass hysteria. It has been used in political rhetoric and popular literature as a vivid cautionary tale about the dangers of isolationism, religious extremism, falseaccusations, and lapses in due process. It was not unique, but a Colonial American example of the much broader phenomenon of witch trials in the early modern period, which took place also in Europe.
Memorial, Danvers
Many historians consider the lasting effects of the trials to have been highly influential in subsequent United States history. According to historian George Lincoln Burr, the Salem witchcraft was the rock on which the theocracy shattered. At the 300th anniversary events in 1992 to commemorate the victims of the trials, a park was dedicated in Salem and a memorial in Danvers.
In November 2001, an act passed by the Massachusetts legislature exonerated five people, while another one, passed in 1957, had previously exonerated six other victims. As of 2004, there was still talk about exonerating all the victims, though some think that happened in the 19th century as the Massachusetts colonial legislature was asked to reverse the attainders of George Burroughs and others.
In January 2016, the University of Virginia announced its Gallows Hill Project team had determined the execution site in Salem, where the 19 witches had been hanged. The city owns the site and is planning to establish a memorial to the victims.
Bridget Bishop (c. 1632-10 June 1692) was the first person executed for witchcraft during the Salem witch trials in 1692. Altogether, about 200 people were tried, and 20 others were executed.
Bridget Bishop
One interpretation of the historical record suggests that she was a resident of Salem Town and thus not the tavern owner. Perhaps she did not know her accusers. This would be supported in her deposition in Salem Village before the authorities stating, I never saw these persons before, nor I never was in this place before.
The indictments against her clearly note that she was from Salem which meant Salem Town, as other indictments against residents of SalemVillage specified their locations as such. She was often confused with Sarah Bishop, one of the other accused during the Salem trial.
Bridget's maiden name appears to have been Mangus or Playfer. She was married three or an undocumented four times. She married her first husband Captain Samuel Wesselby on 13 April 1660, at St. Mary-in-the-Marsh, Norwich, Norfolk, England.
She had only one son and one daughter from her first marriage, Benjamin and Mary. She had another daughter from her marriage to Thomas Oliver, Christian Oliver -sometimes spelled Chrestian-, born 8 May 1667.
Her second marriage, on 26 July 1666, was to Thomas Oliver, a widower and prominent businessman. She was earlier accused of bewitching Thomas Oliver to death, but was acquitted for lack of evidence. Her last marriage c. 1687 was to Edward Bishop, a prosperous sawyer, whose family lived in Beverly.
Bishop was accused of bewitching five young women, Abigail Williams, Ann Putnam, Jr., Mercy Lewis, Mary Walcott, and Elizabeth Hubbard, on the date of her examination by the authorities, 19 April 1692.
A record was given of her trial by Cotton Mather in The Wonders of the Invisible World. In his book, Mather recorded that several people testified against Bishop, stating that the shape of Bishop would pinch, choke or bite them. The shape also threatened to drown one victim if she did not write her name in a certain book.
Bridget Bishop's memorial, Salem, Massachussets
During the trial, anytime Bishop would look upon one of those supposed to be tortured by her, they would be immediately struck down and only her touch would revive them.
More allegations were made during the trial including that of a woman saying that the apparition of Bishop tore her coat, upon further examination her coat was found to be torn in the exact spot. Mather mentions that the truth of these many accusations carried too much suspicion, however. William Stacy, a middle aged man in Salem Town, testified that Bishop had previously made statements to him that other people in the town considered her to be a witch. He confronted her with the allegation that she was using witchcraft to torment him, which she denied.
Another local man, Samuel Shattuck, accused Bishop of bewitching his child and also of striking his son with a spade. He also testified that Bishop asked him to dye lace, which apparently was too small to be used on anything but a poppet, doll used in spell-casting.
John and William Bly, father and son, testified about finding poppets in Bishop's house and also about their cat that appeared to be bewitched, or poisoned, after a dispute with Bishop. Other victims of Bishop, as recorded by Mather, include Deliverance Hobbs, John Cook, Samuel Gray, Richard Coman, and John Louder.
During her sentencing, a jury of women found a third nipple upon Bishop, then considered a sure sign of witchcraft, yet upon a second examination the nipple was not found. In the end Mather states that the biggest thing that condemned Bishop was the gross amount of lying she committed in court. According to Mather, there was little occasion to prove the witchcraft, it being evident and notorious to all beholders. Bishop was sentenced to death and hanged.
Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were Italian-born American anarchists who were convicted of murdering a guard and a paymaster during the April 15, 1920 armed robbery of the Slater and Morrill Shoe Company in Braintree, Massachusetts, United States.
In August, 27 1927, they were executed in the electric chair at Charlestown State Prison. Both men adhered to an anarchist movement that advocated relentless warfare against a violent and oppressive government.
After a few hours' deliberation on July 14, 1921, the jury convicted Sacco and Vanzetti of first-degree murder and they were sentenced to death by the trial judge.
They were sentenced to death
A series of appeals followed, funded largely by the private Sacco and Vanzetti Defense Committee. The appeals were based on recanted testimony, conflicting ballistics evidence, a prejudicial pre-trial statement by the jury foreman, and a confession by an alleged participant in the robbery.
All appeals were denied by trial judge Webster Thayer and also later denied by the Massachusetts State Supreme Court.
By 1926, the case had drawn worldwide attention. As details of the trial and the men's suspected innocence became known, Sacco and Vanzetti became the center of one of the largest causes célèbres in modern history. In 1927, protests on their behalf were held in every major city in North America and Europe, as well as in Tokyo, Sydney, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, and Johannesburg.
Protest to demand justice for Sacco and Vanzetti
Investigations in the aftermath of the executions continued throughout the 1930s and 1940s.
The publication of the men's letters, containing eloquent professions of innocence, intensified belief in their wrongful execution. Additional ballistics tests and incriminating statements by the men's acquaintances have clouded the case.
On August 23, 1977, the 50th anniversary of the executions, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis issued a proclamation that Sacco and Vanzetti had been unfairly tried and convicted and that any disgrace should be forever removed from their names. Writer Bruce Watson, in his introduction to the 2007 re-printing of The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti, noted Sacco and Vanzetti are still on trial and probably always will be.
Sacco was a shoemaker and a night watchman, born April 22, 1891 in Torremaggiore, Province of Foggia, in Puglia, Italy, who migrated to the United States at the age of seventeen.
Vanzetti was a fishmonger born June 11, 1888 in Villafalletto, Province of Cuneo, in Piemonte, who arrived in the United States at age twenty. Both men left Italy for the US in 1908, although they did not meet until a 1917 strike.
Here's to you, Nicola and Bart. Rest forever here in our hearts. The last and final moment is yours. That agony is your triumph.
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886) was an American poet. With the possible exception of Walt Whitman, Dickinson is now recognized as the most important American poet of the 19th century.
Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. Although part of a prominent family with strong ties to its community, Dickinson lived much of her life in reclusive isolation. After studying at the Amherst Academy for seven years in her youth, she briefly attended the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before returning to her family's house in Amherst. Considered an eccentric by locals, she developed a noted penchant for white clothing and became known for her reluctance to greet guests or, later in life, to even leave her bedroom. Dickinson never married, and most friendships between her and others depended entirely upon correspondence. Dickinson was a recluse for the later years of her life.
While Dickinson was a prolific private poet, fewer than a dozen of her nearly 1,800 poems were published during her lifetime. The work that was published during her lifetime was usually altered significantly by the publishers to fit the conventional poetic rules of the time. Dickinson's poems are unique for the era in which she wrote; they contain short lines, typically lack titles, and often use slant rhyme as well as unconventional capitalization and punctuation. Many of her poems deal with themes of death and immortality, two recurring topics in letters to her friends.
Although Dickinson's acquaintances were most likely aware of her writing, it was not until after her death in 1886, when Lavinia, Dickinson's younger sister, discovered her cache of poems, that the breadth of her work became apparent to the public.
Her first collection of poetry was published in 1890 by personal acquaintances Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, though both heavily edited the content. A complete, and mostly unaltered, collection of her poetry became available for the first time when scholar Thomas H. Johnson published The Poems of Emily Dickinson in 1955. Despite some unfavorable reception and skepticism over the late 19th and early 20th centuries regarding her literary prowess, Dickinson is now almost universally considered to be one of the most significant of all American poets.
