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8 unusual facts about Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.


Andrew Inglis Clark

He was introducued to a fellow Unitarian Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, with whom he corresponded for the rest of his life.

Clark, as a child attended a Baptist Sabbatical School until 1872 when the chapel was dissolved on a motion put by Clark due to the "lack of discipline and proper order of government in worship." He then joined a Unitarian chapel, which led him into contact with leading American Unitarians, including Moncure Conway and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Battle of Fort Stevens

Lincoln was brusquely ordered to take cover by an officer, possibly Horatio Wright, although other probably apocryphal stories claim that it was Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Private John A. Bedient of the 150th Ohio Infantry, the fort commander, other privates of the Ohio National Guard, and Elizabeth Thomas.

Joseph Kiselewski

His bronze Bust of Sylvanus Thayer, 1966, is in the Hall of Fame for Great Americans, Bronx Community College/CUNY, on University Avenue and West 181st Street, as is his bronze Bust of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., 1970.

Justice Holmes

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1902 to 1932

Lewis Einstein

Einstein also engaged in a longtime correspondence with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and in 1964 their collected letters were published in the volume The Holmes-Einstein Letters : Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Lewis Einstein 1903-1935, edited by James Bishop Peabody.

Mattapoisett, Massachusetts

With the decline of whaling and associated shipbuilding, Mattapoisett transitioned into a popular summer vacation spot for prominent New York and Boston residents, including Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Today, the town is largely a suburban community, with most residents commuting to jobs in greater New Bedford, Providence or Boston, or operating businesses targeting summer tourism.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841–1935), justice of the Supreme Court of the United States


1830 in poetry

Oliver Wendell Holmes, "Old Ironsides", written after the author becomes angry that the USS Constitution, a navy ship that had seen service in the Tripolitan War and the War of 1812 was to be scrapped; first published in the Boston Daily Advertiser and reprinted nationwide, the poem saved the ship from destruction.

American Chess Congress

Morphy’s prize was given to him by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Annie Haven Thwing

In the course of her life she corresponded with a number of notables including Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Fanny Bowditch Dixwell Holmes, Alice James, Charles Franklin Thwing, Horace Howard Furness, and Edward Everett Hale.

Dover Street

Oliver Wendell Holmes in Our Hundred Days in Europe records staying at Mackellar's Hotel, 17 Dover Street, where "we found ourselves comfortably lodged and well cared for during the whole time we were in London".

Henrietta Christian Wright

One of her books of children's stories, Children's Stories in American Literature: 1861-1896, covered a period of 1660-1860 with great authors like Edgar Allan Poe, William Bryant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Imbecile

and was used in 1927 by United States Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in his ruling in the forced-sterilization case Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927).

Infection control

Independent studies by Ignaz Semmelweis in 1847 in Vienna and Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1843 in Boston established a link between the hands of health care workers and the spread of hospital-acquired disease.

John White Alexander

In 1881 he returned to New York and speedily achieved great success in portraiture, numbering among his sitters Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Burroughs, Henry G. Marquand, R. A. L. Stevenson, and president McCosh of Princeton University.

Lee Marmon

In May and June 2006, a collection of Marmon's best-known images was on display at the Oliver Wendell Holmes Library on the campus of Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.

Louis Menand

His long-anticipated second book, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (2001), includes detailed biographical material on Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey, and documents their roles in the development of the philosophy of pragmatism.

McGuffey Readers

American composer Burrill Phillips composed a work entitled Selections from McGuffey's Reader, for orchestra, based on poems by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. It was completed in 1933.

Michael Baum

Some 160 years after Homeopathy and Its Kindred Delusions, an essay by Oliver Wendell Holmes, we are still debating whether homeopathy is a placebo or not...

More Stately Mansions

The title of the play was derived from the line "Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul" in the poem The Chambered Nautilus by Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Oak View, Norwood, Massachusetts

Some of the most prominent figures hosted in Oak View during those years were President (and later a Supreme Court Justice) William Howard Taft, President Calvin Coolidge, Russian Composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, artist John Singer Sargent, Episcopal Bishop of Boston Phillips Brooks and philosopher William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Viscount Kentaro Kaneko of Japan, tenor John McCormack and others of similar stature.

Overengineering

A story about very precise engineering is given in the 1858 story The Deacon's Masterpiece or, the Wonderful "One-hoss Shay": A Logical Story by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., which tells of a carriage (one-horse shay)

Roxbury Conglomerate

The American poet Oliver Wendell Holmes, wrote a poem called "The Dorchester Giant" in 1830, and referred to this special kind of stone, "Roxbury puddingstone", also quarried in Dorchester, which was used to build churches in the Boston area, most notably the Central Congregational Church (later called the Church of the Covenant) in Boston's Back Bay neighborhood.

Social Law Library

Many of the proprietors of the library were chief justices of the Supreme Judicial Court, including Theophilus Parsons, Lemuel Shaw, Horace Gray, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr..

Stephen Alonzo Schoff

Among his other noteworthy portraits are Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, George Eliot, John Greenleaf Whittier, Walt Whitman, Emanuel Swedenborg and a self-portrait after a W.H.W. Bicknell photograph.

Stereoscope

In 1861 Oliver Wendell Holmes created and deliberately did not patent a handheld, streamlined, much more economical viewer than had been available before.

The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America

The Metaphysical Club recounts the lives and intellectual work of the handful of thinkers primarily responsible for the philosophical concept of pragmatism, a principal feature of American philosophical achievement: William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey.

Thomas Willett

The 'Dorothy Q.' of the poem of Oliver Wendell Holmes was Thomas Willett's great-granddaughter, and the great-grandmother of Holmes.

Walter Hayle Walshe

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. and François Louis Isidore Valleix, the French physician, were his fellow-students, and continued his friends throughout life.


see also

The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America

The book begins by examining the family history and early life of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., the future U.S. Supreme Court Justice, and goes on to recount the acquaintance among Holmes, James, Peirce, Dewey and others, and how their association led to James' development of pragmatism.