The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

It's the birthday of the man most responsible for reviving Hebrew as a spoken language, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (books by this author), born in Luzhki, part of the Russian Empire (1858). He wanted to make sure that Jewish people from around the world could communicate with each other. Though children from Jewish families often learned some Hebrew at Hebrew school, at the time no one on earth spoke modern Hebrew at home as a first language. Many European Jews spoke Russian or Yiddish, a Germanic language written in the Hebrew alphabet.

Ben-Yehuda felt that reviving the Hebrew language was firmly intertwined with the creation of a Jewish homeland, which did not yet exist. He raised his child to be the first native speaker of modern Hebrew, and he's the author of first modern Hebrew dictionary. Today, modern Hebrew is spoken by more than 7 million people in Israel. It's one of Israel's two official languages. The other is Arabic.

On this date in 1610, Galileo wrote a letter describing his discovery of three of Jupiter's moons. He had recently made some improvements to his telescope, and he discovered them in December. As he continued to observe them over the next few months, a fourth celestial body appeared, and he realized that they were actually orbiting the giant planet. Since most people at that time still believed in the Ptolemaic theory — that the Earth was the center of the universe and everything revolved around us — it was an important discovery. It went a long way toward confirming Copernicus's controversial theory that the Earth went around the Sun.

Today is the birthday of Zora Neale Hurston (books by this author), born in Notasulga, Alabama, in 1891. She grew up in Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated African-American community in the United States, with a population of about 125. Hurston loved it there, and would set many of her stories in Eatonville, depicting it as a sort of Utopia; she also described it in her 1928 essay, "How It Feels to Be Colored Me." When she was 13, her mother died, and her father remarried immediately, so she was sent to a boarding school in Jacksonville, Florida. She was expelled when her father stopped paying her tuition, and she went to live with a series of family members.

She went to Howard University, and cofounded the school's newspaper, The Hilltop. She was offered a scholarship to Barnard College, where she studied anthropology, and she was the college's only black student. She published many short stories in the 1920s and early '30s, and her first book, Mules and Men (1935), was an anthropological study of African-American folklore. She's best known for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).

A founding member of the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston died in poverty in 1960 and was buried in an unmarked grave. In 1973, novelist Alice Walker and literary scholar Charlotte Hunt found an unmarked grave in the cemetery where Hurston was buried, and marked it as hers. Alice Walker wrote about the event in her article "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" (1975), and the article sparked a renewed interest in Hurston's writing.