By: Madisen Child Welcome back to the fourth installment “This Day In History,” where we feature a prominent event, birth, and death from one day spanning all of human history. Today, we are focused on March 26.
Death: Ludwig Van Beethoven, a household name when it comes to classical music, was a German composer known for songs like Für Elise and Moonlight Sonata. Most of his songs, although the titles aren’t as well known, are very popular in Western Media. For example, Symphony No. 5 may be used in suspenseful, dramatic scenes with it’s iconic opening motif that can’t exactly be described in words. It is well known that Beethoven was deaf. One story states that, at the opening of Symphony No. 9, he had to be physically turned around to see his applauding audience. What many may not know is that Beethoven also suffered from liver disease. He succumbed to the disease at age 56 on March 26, 1827. Reports state that over 20,000 people attended his funeral. Birth: “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,” is a well known opening phrase to middle and high school English literature. “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost was written in 1915. Frost, the author of this poem, was born on March 26, 1874, making him 41 years old when the poem was written. Frost was born to Isabelle Moodie and William Prescott Frost Jr. in San Francisco, California. He had one sister, Jeanie, who was born in 1885. Frost’s life was no walk in the park; his father died of Tuberculosis in 1885, his mother died of cancer in 1900, and Jeanie had to be committed to a mental hospital in 1920. Frost grew up to make something of himself and become a classroom classic despite all these hardships. Event: Cremation, the act of burning a body to ashes, has been around for tens of thousands of years. However, Catholics of the 1800s and earlier didn’t favor cremation because of their beliefs of the afterlife. This practice was usually reserved for heretics, usually done before they died. The Victorians of Great Britain saw cremation as a more sanitary method of disposing of bodies. Previously, a doctor named William Price was arrested for attempting to cremate his baby boy. He claimed he was a Druidic priest, a notable role in Irish folklore, and wanted to cremate his son along with his own Druidic rituals. He was eventually tried and let go. The Cremation Society, formed by the physician to Queen Victoria, took this as a green light to start cremations. The first legal and official cremation in the UK was a woman named Janet Pickersgill on March 26, 1885. Today, cremation is a perfectly common, perfectly legal practice all over the world.
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