Katharine Lee Bates

In our next episode, we'll explore the lives of women who challenged social norms in the latter part of the nineteenth century.

From Louisa May Alcott or Lou, the author of Little Women, whose own life and writing complicated gendered expectations, to Edmonia Lewis, the first internationally recognized woman sculptor of color who fought for every stage of her career, and Katharine Lee Bates, the Wellesley professor who penned the lyrics to America the Beautiful.

We'll look at how they pursued happiness for themselves.

Thank you for listening.

As they're going by, they're all calling, and you're, you're there in the midst of it.

[birds chirping] Yellow Warblers by Katherine Lee Bates.

The first faint dawn was flushing up the skies, when, Dream-land still bewildering mine eyes, I looked out to the oak, that, winter-long, A winter wild with war and woe and wrong, Beyond my casement had been void of song.

And lo! with golden buds the twigs were set; Live buds that warbled like a rivulet Beneath a veil of willows.

Train goers get an hour at the summit to take it all in.

[train horn blows] It's the same view that inspired Katharine Bates to write a four-stanza poem she called America.

Today, we know it as a song, America the Beautiful.

More than a century later, modern engineering has preserved the path so visitors today can still marvel at God's creation.

In 1931 the Star-Spangled Banner became the official national anthem of the United States.

The Star-Spangled Banner oh say can you see by the dawn's early light what so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight o'er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming and the rocket's red glare the bombs bursting in air gave proof through the night that our flag was still there oh say does that star-spangled banner yet wave o'er the land of the free and the home of the brave america the beautiful by katharine lee bates eighteen ninety three america the beautiful was written in eighteen ninety three by katharine lee bates a professor of english literature at wellesley college in massachusetts Bates wrote the lyrics while on a trip to Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Describing the extraordinary view at the top of Pike's Peak, she said, It was then and there, as I was looking out over the sea-like expanse of fertile country, fretting away so far under those ample skies, that the opening lines of the hymn floated into my mind.

On July 4, 1895, America the Beautiful first appeared in print in The Congregationalist, a weekly journal.