Floriography
Floriography (language of flowers) is a means of cryptological communication through the use or arrangement of flowers. Meaning has been attributed to flowers for thousands of years, and some form of floriography has been practiced in traditional cultures throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa. Plants and flowers are used as symbols in the Hebrew Bible, particularly of love and lovers in the Song of Songs, as an emblem for the Israelite people, and for the coming Messiah. In Western culture, William Shakespeare ascribed emblematic meanings to flowers, especially in ''Hamlet''. Interest in floriography soared in Victorian England and in the United States during the 19th century. Gifts of blooms, plants, and specific floral arrangements were used to send a coded message to the recipient, allowing the sender to express feelings which could not be spoken aloud in Victorian society. Armed with floral dictionaries, Victorians often exchanged small "talking bouquets", called nosegays or ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Mary Wortley Montagu
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (née Pierrepont; 15 May 168921 August 1762) was an English aristocrat, writer, and poet. Born in 1689, Lady Mary spent her early life in England. In 1712, Lady Mary married Edward Wortley Montagu, who later served as the British ambassador to the Sublime Porte. Lady Mary joined her husband in the Ottoman excursion, where she was to spend the next two years of her life. During her time there, Lady Mary wrote extensively on her experience as a woman in Ottoman Istanbul. After her return to England, Lady Mary devoted her attention to the upbringing of her family before dying of cancer in 1762. Lady Mary is today chiefly remembered for her letters, particularly her '' Turkish Embassy Letters'' describing her travels to the Ottoman Empire, as wife to the British ambassador to Turkey, which Billie Melman describes as "the very first example of a secular work by a woman about the Muslim Orient".Melman, Billie. ''Women's Orients: English Women and the Middl ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Sarah Josepha Hale
Sarah Josepha Buell Hale (October 24, 1788April 30, 1879) was an American writer, activist, and editor of ''Godey's Lady's Book''. She was the author of the nursery rhyme "Mary Had a Little Lamb". Hale famously campaigned for the creation of the American holiday known as Thanksgiving, and for the completion of the Bunker Hill Monument. Early life and family Sarah Josepha Buell was born in Newport, New Hampshire, to Captain Gordon Buell, a Revolutionary War veteran, and Martha Whittlesay Buell. Her parents believed in equal education for both genders.Howe, Daniel Walker. ''What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848''. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007: 608. Home-schooled by her mother and elder brother Horatio (who had attended Dartmouth), Hale was otherwise an autodidact. As Sarah Buell grew up and became a local schoolteacher, in 1811 her father opened a tavern called The Rising Sun in Newport. Sarah met lawyer David Hale the same year.Parker, G ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Dorothea Dix
Dorothea Lynde Dix (April 4, 1802July 17, 1887) was an American advocate on behalf of the indigent mentally ill who, through a vigorous and sustained program of lobbying state legislatures and the United States Congress, created the first generation of American mental asylums. During the Civil War, she served as a Superintendent of Army Nurses. Early life Born in the town of Hampden, Maine, she grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts among her parents' relatives. She was the first child of three born to Joseph Dix and Mary Bigelow, who had deep ancestral roots in Massachusetts Bay Colony. Her mother suffered from poor health, thus she wasn't able to provide consistent support to her children. Her father was an itinerant bookseller and Methodist preacher.. This sequence of events is described over several chapters, commencing page 180 (n206 in electronic page field). At the age of twelve, she and her two brothers were sent to their wealthy grandmother, Dorothea Lynde (married t ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Elizabeth Wirt
Elizabeth Washington Gamble Wirt (1784–1857), who published under the name E. W. Wirt, was a 19th-century American author whose ''Flora's Dictionary'' was the first book to broadly popularize the concept of a language of flowers for American readers. Education and family Elizabeth Washington Gamble was born in Richmond, Virginia, on January 30, 1784, to Colonel Robert Gamble and Catherine Grattan Gamble. She was educated at a female seminary, probably acquiring a knowledge of Latin that would prove useful later when she turned to authorship. In 1802, she became the second wife of William Wirt, a future attorney-general of the United States. During their marriage, Elizabeth ran the household and also managed most business affairs related to their properties. The Wirts lived in Virginia and Washington, D.C., and after Elizabeth was widowed in 1834, she moved to Florida. She died in Annapolis, Maryland on January 24, 1857. Authorship For the entertainment of her family—the Wir ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Saturday Evening Post
''The Saturday Evening Post'' is an American magazine, currently published six times a year. It was issued weekly under this title from 1897 until 1963, then every two weeks until 1969. From the 1920s to the 1960s, it was one of the most widely circulated and influential magazines within the American middle class, with fiction, non-fiction, cartoons and features that reached two million homes every week. The magazine declined in readership through the 1960s, and in 1969 ''The Saturday Evening Post'' folded for two years before being revived as a quarterly publication with an emphasis on medical articles in 1971. As of the late 2000s, ''The Saturday Evening Post'' is published six times a year by the Saturday Evening Post Society, which purchased the magazine in 1982. The magazine was redesigned in 2013. History Rise ''The Saturday Evening Post'' was first published in 1821 in the same printing shop at 53 Market Street in Philadelphia where the Benjamin Franklin-founded ''Pennsyl ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Constantine Samuel Rafinesque
Constantine Samuel Rafinesque-Schmaltz (; October 22, 1783September 18, 1840) was a French 19th-century polymath born near Constantinople in the Ottoman Empire and self-educated in France. He traveled as a young man in the United States, ultimately settling in Ohio in 1815, where he made notable contributions to botany, zoology, and the study of prehistoric earthworks in North America. He also contributed to the study of ancient Mesoamerican linguistics, in addition to work he had already completed in Europe. Rafinesque was an eccentric and erratic genius. He was an autodidact, who excelled in various fields of knowledge, as a zoologist, botanist, writer and polyglot. He wrote prolifically on such diverse topics as anthropology, biology, geology, and linguistics, but was honored in none of these fields during his lifetime. Indeed, he was an outcast in the American scientific community whose submissions were rejected automatically by leading journals. Among his theories were th ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Kate Greenaway
Catherine Greenaway (17 March 18466 November 1901) was an English Victorian artist and writer, known for her children's book illustrations. She received her education in graphic design and art between 1858 and 1871 from the Finsbury School of Art, the South Kensington School of Art, the Heatherley School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art. She began her career designing for the burgeoning holiday card market, producing Christmas and Valentine's cards. In 1879 wood-block engraver and printer, Edmund Evans, printed ''Under the Window'', an instant best-seller, which established her reputation. Her collaboration with Evans continued throughout the 1880s and 1890s. The depictions of children in imaginary 18th-century costumes in a Queen Anne style were extremely popular in England and internationally, sparking the Kate Greenaway style. Within a few years of the publication of ''Under the Window'' Greenaway's work was imitated in England, Germany and the United States. Child ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Frederic Shoberl
Frederic Shoberl (1775–1853), also known as Frederick Schoberl, was an English journalist, editor, translator, writer and illustrator. Shoberl edited ''Forget-Me-Not'', the first literary annual, issued at Christmas "for 1823" and translated ''The Hunchback of Notre Dame''. Biography Shoberl was born in London in 1775, and educated at the Moravian school at the Fulneck Moravian Settlement in West Yorkshire.G. C. Boase, "Shoberl , Frederic (1775–1853)", rev. Nilanjana Banerji, ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'', Oxford University Press, 200retrieved 1 June 2010/ref> From 1809 he began editing Rudolph Ackermann's ''Repository of Arts'' which had just started and was only at its third edition. Ackermann was seen as the populariser of aquatint engraving and his ''Repository of Arts'' was intended to cover "arts, literature, commerce, manufactures, fashions, and politics". At the beginning of February 1814, Shoberl and Henry Colburn founded and became co-proprietors of ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Henry Phillips (horticulturist)
Henry Phillips ( 1779 – 8 March 1840) was a botanist, horticultural writer and landscape gardener from the seaside resort of Brighton in England. After spending time as a banker and teacher in London and Sussex, he came to national attention for his botanical articles and books, and was renowned for his landscape gardening work in Brighton during its period of rapid growth. In the 1820s he became involved in several major schemes in the town and neighbouring Hove, encompassing gardens, conservatories and similar. His grandiose Anthaeum project, an elaborate indoor botanical garden topped by "the largest dome in the world", ended in disaster when the structure spectacularly collapsed just before its official opening. Life Phillips was born in around 1779 in the West Sussex village of Henfield. The first 40 years of his life were spent in London and Sussex: he worked for a bank in Worthing and lived in the town, then moved to Brighton with his wife, Elizabeth Willmer who he ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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South America
South America is a continent entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere at the northern tip of the continent. It can also be described as the southern subregion of a single continent called America. South America is bordered on the west by the Pacific Ocean and on the north and east by the Atlantic Ocean; North America and the Caribbean Sea lie to the northwest. The continent generally includes twelve sovereign states: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay, and Venezuela; two dependent territories: the Falkland Islands and South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands; and one internal territory: French Guiana. In addition, the ABC islands of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Ascension Island (dependency of Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha, a British Overseas Territory), Bouvet Island ( dependency of Norway), Pa ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Germany
Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated between the Baltic and North seas to the north, and the Alps to the south; it covers an area of , with a population of almost 84 million within its 16 constituent states. Germany borders Denmark to the north, Poland and the Czech Republic to the east, Austria and Switzerland to the south, and France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands to the west. The nation's capital and most populous city is Berlin and its financial centre is Frankfurt; the largest urban area is the Ruhr. Various Germanic tribes have inhabited the northern parts of modern Germany since classical antiquity. A region named Germania was documented before AD 100. In 962, the Kingdom of Germany formed the bulk of the Holy Roman Empire. During the 16th ce ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |