Rip Van Winkle Rip Van Winkle "Rip Van Winkle" is a short story by the American author Washington Irving first published in 1819. It follows a Dutch-American villager in colonial America named Rip Van Winkle who falls asleep in the Catskill Mountains and wakes up 20 years later, having missed the American Revolution. Irving wrote it while living in Birmingham, England, as part of the collection "The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent." The story is set in New York's Catskill Mountains, but Irving later admitted, "When I wrote the story, I had never been on the Catskills." "Rip Van Winkle" is set
Mina Van Winkle Mina Van Winkle Mina Caroline Ginger Van Winkle (March 26, 1875 – January 16, 1933) was a crusading social worker, suffragist, and groundbreaking police lieutenant. From 1919 until her death in 1933, she led the Women's Bureau of the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia (in Washington D.C.), and became a national leader in the protection of girls and other women during the law enforcement and judicial process. Her provocative statements about gender and morality in the jazz age brought her further national attention. She was born Wilhelmina ("Mina") Caroline Ginger in New York City in 1875. From