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Inspiring aviatrix Willa Brown was the first black woman to hold a commercial pilot’s license in the United States. She was also the first black female officer in the Civil Air Parol.
(I took this photograph at the Pima Air and Space Museum).
The audacious journalist Nellie Bly set the record for fastest trip around the world (in 75 days). Wendy MacNaughton illustrated what Nelly wore and brought in her trip around the world. Talk about traveling light!
Learn more about Nellie at Brainpickings
“No other female aviator has had Amelia Earhart’s instant worldwide fame. Committed to aviation, she promoted “airmindedness” at a time when most people were skeptical about airplanes as a form of transportation.”
Learn more from the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum
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Paul-Emile Victor, a French explorer who spent five decades documenting the earth’s polar wildernesses.
From his first visit to Greenland in 1934 to his last visit to Antarctica in 1987, he covered almost 312,000 miles over ice and snow. Spending harsh winters with native peoples, he documented the polar regions and the ways of life he found there in numerous books, paintings and scientific papers.
It was reading about Paul-Emile Victor that I discovered hivernaut Alexander Kumar, who poetically described his experience of overwintering in Antarctica in 2012.
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Today’s photo is of George Borup, a member of the 1908-1909 North Pole expedition. A Yale 1907 graduate, Borup was a rising star in Peary’s crew, and he published a popular account of the expedition, “A Tenderfoot with Peary,” upon his return.
Borup, with Donald MacMillan, proposed and planned to lead the Crocker Land Expedition of 1913, and was widely considered to be Peary’s successor. He tragically perished in a boating accident in 1912 when he was just 27 - only about 3 years after this photo was taken. MacMillan subsequently took over solo leadership of the Crocker Land trip.
Antarctica is Easter Island.
Penguin Egg hunt on Robert Falcon Scott’s 1901 Discovery Expedition.
![squid81:
Photograph from the Expedition [group portrait], 1911-1914 by State Library of New South Wales collection on Flickr.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m24zigwJEq1qdtph4o1_500.jpg)