Mary Lyon, Champion of Women’s Higher Education

Mary Lyon was a progressive educator and pioneer of women’s higher education. In 1837 she founded the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley,...

Pearl Buck, 1938 Winner of Nobel Prize in Literature

Pearl Buck is best known for her novel “The Good Earth,” which received the Pulitzer Prize in 1935 and helped earn her the Nobel...

Jack Kirby, Creator of Comic Book Superheroes

Jack Kirby was as much of a hero to the comic book industry as the characters he created. An innovator in the industry for...

Arthur Ashe, Tennis Star and Human Rights Activist

Arthur Ashe was one of the most accomplished tennis players of his generation and the only African-American man to win a Grand Slam title,...

Thurgood Marshall, Civil Rights Lawyer and Supreme Court Justice

Before Thurgood Marshall became the first African-American justice of the Supreme Court, he was also the most successful person to argue cases before the...

George Pullman, Inventor of the Sleeper Car

Inventor and industrialist George Pullman literally raised Chicago from the sewer and built luxury railroad cars for the elite. The media praised his “utopian”...

Elinor Ostrom, First Woman to Win the Nobel Prize in Economics

Elinor Ostrom won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics for her against-the-grain studies of how self-imposed regulation of common resources can be more efficient...

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was Shah of Iran for more than 30 years. His reforms transformed his country into a substantial Middle Eastern economic and...

Peggy Guggenheim, Art Collector

American heiress Peggy Guggenheim was considered to be as intriguing as the art she collected. One of the pioneering collectors of Abstract Expressionism, she...

John Philip Sousa, “The March King”

John Philip Sousa is the American composer behind such marching band classics as “The Stars and Stripes Forever” and “Semper Fidelis.” John Philip Sousa's Early...