Welcome to the history tricks, where any resemblance to a boring old history lesson is purely coincidental.

And here's your 30-second summary.

History paints her as a purveyor of sex and death, but sometimes, my friends, a cow just dies in the desert.

And sometimes a flower is just a flower. The end. Let's talk about

Georgia O'Keefe. But first let's drop her into history. In 1887, Melville Dewey, the creator of the

Dewey Decimal System, opened the first library school at Columbia College.

The world's largest recorded snowflake measuring 15 inches in diameter fell during a Montana snowstorm.

Construction of the Eiffel Tower began, and Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller met and began their work together.

Queen Victoria celebrated her golden jubilee, celluloid, photographic film, the mechanized elevator door, and the grimophone were all patented.

Social activist Dorothy Dix, Swedish nightingale, Jenny Lind, and Liberty Poet Emma Lazarus all died.

And in November of 1887, the future mother of American modernism was born.

Georgia, Tato O'Keefe, was born on November 15, 1887 in his son, Prairie, Wisconsin, the second of the seven children of Frank Kalyxtas O'Keefe and Ida Tenike Tato O'Keefe.

Papa and Mama grew up together as neighbors.

Papa's parents had been relatively unusually Irish immigrants of property and had been able to set

themselves up quite nicely with good farmland, servants in the house, four healthy sons, silver service,

you know, all the important things. They were very settled. Grandpa O'Keefe, however, died

when Papa was still in school, but still with men to run the farm, economically the family

was just fine. Mama was descended from a Hungarian count and a descendant of someone

that rode over on the Mayflower, though this does not carry the monetary cachet, the filthy

lucre that you might imply from that, unfortunately, for her, but there was exciting ancestry.

Grandma and Grandpa Tato had six children.

Mama was toward the end, and when she was 12,

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