Lawrence Welk, accordionist, bandleader, and television impresario, who hosted The Lawrence Welk Show from 1951 to 1982, was born in Strasburg, North Dakota on March 11, 1903. His style came to be known to his large number of radio, television, and live-performance fans (and critics) as “champagne music”. During the 1930s, Welk led a traveling big band that specialized in dance tunes and “sweet” music. The term “Champagne Music” was derived from an engagement at the William Penn Hotel in Pittsburgh, when a dancer referred to his band’s sound as “light and bubbly as champagne.” In the early 1940s, the band began a 10-year stint at the Trianon Ballroom in Chicago, regularly drawing crowds of nearly 7,000. From 1949 through 1951, the band had its own national radio program on ABC, sponsored by “The Champagne of Bottle Beer” Miller High Life. Find Lawrence Welk on hoopla and Freegal.

On March 11, 1818 Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is published. The book, by 21-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, is frequently called the world’s first science fiction novel. In Shelley’s tale, a scientist animates a creature constructed from dismembered corpses. The gentle, intellectually gifted creature is enormous and physically hideous. Cruelly rejected by its creator, it wanders, seeking companionship and becoming increasingly brutal as it fails to find a mate. Find Mary Shelley at the library, on hoopla and in OverDrive.