Finding the unexpected in the everyday.
Grace Darling earned worldwide acclaim for her heroic efforts to help rescue survivors of a shipwreck off the coast of northeastern England’s ceremonial county of Northumberland in 1838. The seventh of nine children, Darling was born in Northumberland on November 24, 1815. Her father William was a lighthouse keeper. In 1826, William Darling became keeper... Continue Reading →
By the early 1920s, Seattle resident Carlia S. Westcott had become the first woman granted a license to work as a marine engineer in the United States. (Marine engineers design, operate, repair and/or maintain machinery and equipment on ships; quite a few of those engineers perform similar work on offshore installations.) The significance of Westcott’s... Continue Reading →
Aviation pioneer Helen Hodge was one of the first American women to earn a pilot’s license. She was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1892, and received her secondary school education at Brownell Hall (now Brownell-Talbot School) in that city. By 1909, Hodge and her family had moved to Oakland, California. Over time, both Hodge and... Continue Reading →
During the 1880s, Elsa von Blumen firmly established herself as a formidable contender in both walking and cycling competitions throughout the United States. Von Blumen, who was originally known as Caroline “Carrie” Kiner, was born to Prussian immigrants on October 6, 1859, and grew up in Oswego County, New York. As a child, Carrie was... Continue Reading →
Annie Belle Andrews, who was born in 1959, has served as a high-level and even trailblazing leader in both military and civilian capacities. She highlighted her approach to leadership in 2016 when she addressed the graduating class of the Women’s College of Brenau University of Georgia. “Not only as women do you have a voice... Continue Reading →
Elizabeth Whitney Williams was one of the longest-serving lighthouse keepers in American history. In 1904, the Detroit Free Press underscored both the challenges and significance of Williams’ lifesaving role on behalf of maritime transportation. This article stated, “For more than three decades she has been in charge of one of Uncle Sam’s lighthouses on the... Continue Reading →
JoAnn Hardin Morgan made history as the first female engineer at NASA’s John F. Kennedy Space Center (KSC) on Merritt Island in Florida. She was also the first woman to serve as a senior executive at KSC. Morgan was born on December 4, 1940, in the city of Huntsville, Alabama. Her father, Don Hardin, was... Continue Reading →
Kathryn Dwyer Sullivan was born in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1951. She earned a B.S. degree in earth sciences from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1973 and a Ph.D. in geology from Dalhousie University in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia in 1978. It was also in 1978 that Sullivan formally became one... Continue Reading →
On October 8, 1922, Lillian Gatlin became the first woman to travel across the continental United States in a plane when she arrived at the U.S. air mail service station at Long Island’s Curtiss Field at 5:45 p.m. and three days after departing from San Francisco. Wearing a “special delivery” tag on her flying suit,... Continue Reading →
On January 15, 2009, New York Waterway ferry captain and U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) reservist Brittany Catanzaro and her crew played a crucial lifesaving role for the passengers of an Airbus A320 after that plane had made an emergency landing on the Hudson River. This landing was made necessary because the aircraft (US Airways Flight... Continue Reading →
Transportation History 