May Almanac
This Day in History May 1, 1926: Sauk Centre’s Sinclair Lewis declines the Pulitzer Prize for his novel “Arrowsmith,” writing in a letter to the committee: “All prizes, like all titles, are dangerous. The seekers for prizes tend to labor not for inherent excellence but for alien rewards.” May 3, 1865: John Campbell is lynched in Mankato after murdering the Jewett family in Garden City. Campbell, whose brother Baptiste Campbell was among the 38 Dakota Indians hanged in Mankato in 1862, initially denied the crimes during a makeshift trial staged by a mob of about 800 men and women. After a four-hour trial and a tense tug-of-war for his custody, Campbell confessed and the mob lynched him from a basswood on the corner of Hickory and Fifth streets. May 19, 1968: The Waterville-born artist and renowned lithographer Adolf Dehn dies in New York. The two-time recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship was valedictorian of his class at Waterville High School and helped define a number of American artistic movements. May 24, 1941: Robert Zimmerman is born to parents Abe and Beatty Zimmerman. Later, the slim youth would strike out for New York, change his name to Bob Dylan and write more than 500 songs while becoming one of America’s most influential musicians.
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Finding freebies
verywhere we go these days, it seems we’re paying for something. But just a little Internet searching yields a host of websites that offer something for nothing.
Books: Project Gutenberg (gutenberg.org) is the Internet’s largest collection of e-books with more than 38,000 titles, many of which are classic titles in the public domain. Also, Obooko.com features a large collection of free, legally distributed e-books that are offered by the authors and publishers themselves. Bookmooch.com is a site where users can list titles they’re willing to give away in exchange for titles they’re hoping to find. Music: Spotify.com and Grooveshark.com offer free as well as paid subscriptions to huge libraries of music. Pandora.com is a free radio site where users can input a song or artist they like and receive a radio playlist of related music. Data storage: The race to scoop up consumers in this relatively new industry has yielded a number of free options for so-called “cloud” storage. Sites like Dropbox.com and CX.com offer up to 5 GB of storage for free, sometimes more if you refer a friend. Free samples: The Internet is overrun with websites that help link people to free samples and giveaways. A few of the best are www.heyitsfree.net, www.totallyfreestuff. com and www.yesall4free.com.
8 • may 2012 • MANKATO MAGAZINE