Harriet Leveson-Gower, Countess Granville (29 August 1785 –

25 November 1862), was a British society hostess and writer. The

younger daughter of Lady Georgiana Spencer and the 5th Duke of

Devonshire, she was a member of the wealthy Cavendish and Spencer

families. In 1809, Harriet married Granville Leveson-Gower, a diplomat

who had been her maternal aunt's lover for seventeen years. During

intermittent periods between 1824 and 1841, Granville served as the

British ambassador to France, requiring Harriet to perform an array of

social duties in Paris that she often found exhausting. A prolific

writer of letters, Harriet corresponded with others for most of her

life, often describing her observations of those around her. Historians

have since found her detailed accounts to be a valuable source of

information on life as an ambassadress as well as life in the 19th-

century aristocracy. Between 1894 and 1990, four edited collections of

Harriet's correspondence were published.

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Today's selected anniversaries:

1885:

Gottlieb Daimler patented the world's first internal-combustion

motorcycle, the Reitwagen (replica pictured).

1911:

The last member of the Yahi, known as Ishi, emerged from the

wilderness near Oroville, California, to join European American society.

1959:

Mona Best opened the Casbah Coffee Club with a performance by

the Quarrymen, the precursor of the Beatles.

1960:

Air France Flight 343 crashed while attempting to land at Yoff

Airport, Dakar, killing all 63 occupants.

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Wiktionary's word of the day:

pablum:

1. (uncountable) Alternative letter-case form of Pablum (“a type of

cereal for infants made from cornmeal, oat, and wheat”).

2. (by extension, uncountable) Mushy, easily digested food; pap;

(countable) a specific type of such food.

3. (countable, uncountable, figurative, derogatory) Something overly

bland or simplistic, especially speech or writing.

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Wikiquote quote of the day:

  All I wanna say is that they don't really care about us. Some

things in life they just don't wanna see But if Martin Luther was

livin' He wouldn't let this be.  

--Michael Jackson

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