Oliver Wendell Holmes Born in Cambridge
On this day in 1809, Oliver Wendell Holmes was born in Cambridge. The man who coined the phrase "Boston Brahmin," he was a true member of that class, and he entertained the nation with poems, stories, and essays about its peculiar ways. A contemporary and friend of Hawthorne, Emerson, and Longfellow, Holmes was a guiding light behind the Atlantic Monthly, the journal that published many of his columns and verses. But Holmes's greatest legacy may have been his son, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who survived three serious injuries during his service in the Union Army to become a distinguished legal scholar. A justice of the United States Supreme Court for 30 years, Holmes, Jr. had perhaps the greatest legal mind in the nation's history.
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