Shannon Firth

Most Recent Articles by Shannon Firth

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  Peggy Whitson, First Woman to Command the International Space Station
  On April 19, 2008, Peggy Whitson completed a tour as the first female commander of the International Space Station. A veteran NASA astronaut, Whitson oversaw the station’s first expansion in six years.
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  Happy Birthday, Charles Dickens, Notable English Novelist
  Charles Dickens is best remembered for novels such as “Oliver Twist” and “David Copperfield.” For his dedication to social justice, most notably his humanizing portraits of society’s lowest castes, he has been called “the conscience of Victorian England.”
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  Dame Helen Mirren, British Actress of the Stage and Screen
  In her 20s, anxious and fearful about her career, Helen Mirren visited a palm reader. Though she wrote pages of notes during the visit, she felt so uplifited by the experience that she threw them out. In an interview, she recalled the palm reader’s one indelible prophecy: “When you’re in your 50s, you will get to be very, very famous.”
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  Katharine Graham, “Lady Pub,” Former President and Publisher of The Washington Post
  At 46, the world watched Katharine Graham transition from a nervous widow to chairman and chief executive officer of The Post Co. She saw this evolution much differently, however: “What I essentially did was to put one foot in front of the other, shut my eyes and step off the ledge.”
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  Happy Birthday, Peter Mark Roget, Compiler of Roget’s Thesaurus
  Peter Mark Roget had far-ranging passions and hobbies. He was a philologist, a doctor, a teacher, an inventor and a chess aficionado. Roget improved on the kaleidoscope and made important contributions to the science of cinema. He helped found the University of London and the Society for the Diffusion of Knowledge, but arguably his most memorable contribution is his thesaurus.