The James Logan Courier

From wikipedia:
Zip the Pinhead, born William Henry Johnson (1842? in Liberty Corner, New Jersey – April 28, 1926 in New York City, New York), was an American freak show performer famous for his oddly tapered head.

William Henry Johnson was born to a very poor African-American family. His parents were William and Mahalia Johnson, former slaves. As he grew his body developed normally but his head remained small. His tapering cranium and heavy jaw made him attractive to agents from Van Emburgh's Circus in Somerville, New Jersey. His unusual appearance caused many to believe that he was a "pinhead", or microcephalic. Microcephalics are characterized by a small, tapering cranium and impaired mental faculty. It is clear, however, that William Henry was not mentally deficient.

Read more about William Johnson's career as Zip the Pinhead, free from weirdnj.com.

From wikipedia:
Frank Alvin Gotch (April 27, 1878 - December 17, 1917) was an American professional wrestler credited for popularizing professional wrestling in the United States. He competed back when the contests were largely legitimate (see catch wrestling), and his reign as World Heavyweight Wrestling Champion (from 1908 to 1915) is the second longest in the history of wrestling. He became one of the most popular athletes in America from the 1900s to the 1910s.

He was the first inductee to both the Professional Wrestling Writers Hall of Fame in Latham, New York and the Lou Thesz/George Tragos Professional Wrestling Hall of Fame in Newton, Iowa; his professional wrestling record is 154 wins and 6 losses.

Learn more about Frank Gotch at www.frankgotch.com.

From wikipedia:
Gertrude Malissa Nix Pridgett Rainey, better known as Ma Rainey (April 26, 1886 – December 22, 1939), was one of the earliest known American professional blues singers and one of the first generation of such singers to record. She was billed as The Mother of the Blues. She did much to develop and popularize the form and was an important influence on younger blues women, such as Bessie Smith, and their careers.

Listen to several selections of Ma Rainey's music, free from Rhapsody.com.

From wikipedia:
Edward (Edmund) Cartwright (April 24, 1743 – October 30, 1823) was an English clergyman and inventor of the power loom, a poet and writer.

Born in Marham, Norfolk, he was a clergyman of the Church of England. He was educated at University College, Oxford.

More fortunate than his predecessors, he attacked the problem of mechanical weaving after much initial work had been done, especially that relating to mechanical spinning and the factory system, for without these no power loom could succeed. He designed the first power loom in 1784 patented it in 1785, but it proved to be valueless. In the following year, however, he patented another loom which has served as the model for later inventors to work upon. He was conscious that for a mechanically driven loom to become a commercial success, either one person would have to attend several machines, or each machine must have a greater productive capacity than one manually controlled.

Read Armine and Elvira: A Legendary Tale. In Two Parts. By Edmund Cartwright, free from Google books.

From wikipedia:
Charles Edward "Cow Cow" Davenport (April 26, 1894 – December 3, 1955) was an American boogie woogie piano player. He also played the organ and sang.

He was born in Anniston, Alabama. Arnold Caplin, on the liner notes to the album Hot Pianos 1926-1940 reports that Davenport started playing the piano at age 12. His family objected strongly to his musical aspirations and sent him to a theological seminary, where he was expelled for playing ragtime.

Read more about Cow Cow Davenport, free from blues.co.nz.

Hear Cow Cow Davenport play and sing "Cow Cow Blues."

From wikipedia:
Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow (April 22, 1873 - November 21, 1945) was a Pulitzer Prize winning American novelist from Richmond, Virginia.

Beginning in 1897, Glasgow wrote 20 novels and many short stories, mainly about life in Virginia. Her own education had been rudimentary, a fact Glasgow compensated for by reading widely. Today, her novels are regarded as more than just depictions of life in the Southern United States.

Read The Deliverance; a romance of the Virginia tobacco fields by Ellen Anderson Glasgow, one of seven of her works available free from Project Gutenberg.

From wikipedia:
Raden Ajeng (Adjeng) Kartini or, more accurately, Raden Ayu (Ajoe) Kartini, (April 21, 1879–September 17, 1904), was a prominent Javanese and an Indonesian national heroine. Kartini is known as a pioneer in the area of women's rights for native Indonesians.

Kartini was born into an aristocratic Javanese family in a time when Java was still part of the Dutch colony, the Dutch East Indies. Kartini's father, Raden Mas Sosroningrat, became Regency Chief of Jepara, and her mother was Raden Mas' first wife, but not the most important one. At this time, polygamy was a common practice among the nobility.

Read more about Kartini, at myhero.com.

From wikipedia:
Dinah Maria Craik (born Dinah Maria Mulock, also often credited as Miss Mulock) (20 April 1826 - 12 October 1887) was an English novelist and poet. She was born at Stoke-on-Trent and brought up in Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire.

After the death of her mother in 1845, Dinah Maria Mulock had settled in London about 1846. She was determined to obtain a livelihood by her pen, and, beginning with fiction for children, advanced steadily until placed in the front rank of the women novelists of her day.


Read The Little Lame Prince by Dinah Craik, one of 10 of her works available free from Project Gutenberg.

From wikipedia:
Eliot Ness (April 19, 1903 – May 16, 1957) was an American Prohibition agent, famous for his efforts to enforce Prohibition in Chicago, Illinois, as the leader of a legendary team of law enforcement agents nicknamed The Untouchables.

Ness was born in Chicago, the youngest of five, to Norwegian bakers Peter and Emma Ness. Because his four older siblings were almost grown by the time he was born, Eliot received a large amount of attention from his parents growing up. As a boy, Ness was interested in reading, especially Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. He was educated at the University of Chicago, graduating in 1925 with a degree in business and law. He began his career as an investigator for the Retail Credit Co. of Atlanta. He was assigned to the Chicago territory, where he conducted background investigations for the purpose of credit information. He returned to the University to take a course in criminology, eventually earning a masters degree in the field.



Read Eliot Ness: The Man Behind the Myth By Marilyn Bardsley, free from crimelibrary.com.

From wikipedia:
Vicente Yap Sotto, also known as Nyor Inting (1877-1950) was a former Senator of the Philippines and considered as one of the greatest Cebuanos of the 20th century.

His principal achievement lies in two areas: law, politics, and government; and culture and letters.
Contents

Sotto was born in Cebu City on April 18, 1877 to Marcelino Sotto and Pascuala Yap.

Read the decision of the Philipine Supreme Court in it's 1949 contempt of court case against Vicente Yap Sotto, free from lawphil.net.

From wikipedia:
Thornton Niven Wilder (April 17, 1897 – December 7, 1975) was an American playwright and novelist. His best known work is his play Our Town.

Thornton Niven Wilder was born in Madison, Wisconsin, and was the son of Amos Parker Wilder, a U.S. diplomat, and Isabella Niven Wilder. All of the Wilder children spent part of their childhood in China due to their father's work.

Learn more about Thornton Wilder at the Thornton Wilder Society's website.

From wikipedia:
Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun (April 16, 1755 - March 30, 1842) was a French painter, and is recognized as the most famous woman painter of the eighteenth century. Her style is neoclassical in exhibiting ideals of simplicity and purity.

She was born in Paris, Marie Élisabeth-Louise Vigée, the daughter of a portraitist and fan painter, Louis Vigée, from whom she received her first instruction. She also benefited by the advice of Gabriel François Doyen, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Joseph Vernet, and other masters of the period.

Read the memoirs of Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun, free from batguano.com.

See examples of her art, free from batguano.com

From wikipedia:
Jimmy Cliff (born James Chambers, 1 April 1948, Somerton District in St James, Jamaica) is a Jamaican reggae musician, best known among mainstream audiences for songs like "Sittin' in Limbo", "You Can Get It If You Really Want It" and "Many Rivers to Cross" from The Harder They Come, a film soundtrack which helped popularise reggae across the world.

Visit Jimmy Cliff's homepage.

From wikipedia:
Christiaan Huygens (April 14, 1629 – July 8, 1695) was a Dutch mathematician, astronomer and physicist; born in The Hague as the son of Constantijn Huygens, a friend of Rene Descartes. He studied law and mathematics at the University of Leiden and the College of Orange in Breda before turning to science. Historians commonly associate Huygens with the scientific revolution.


Read Treatise on Light, by Christiaan Huygens, translated by Silvanus P. Thompson, free from Project Gutenberg.

From wikipedia:
Lily Pons (April 12, 1898 – February 13, 1976) was a French-American coloratura soprano.

Born Alice Joséphine Pons in Draguignan near Cannes, Pons first studied piano at the Paris Conservatory, winning the First Prize at the age of 15. During World War I, she played piano and sang for soldiers in Paris hospitals. She also sang at receptions in Cannes. In 1925, encouraged by soprano Dyna Beumer, she started taking singing lessons from Alberti de Gorostiaga in Paris.

She successfully made her operatic debut in the title role of Léo Delibes' Lakmé at Mulhouse in 1928 and went on to sing several coloratura roles in French provincial opera houses.

Read more about Lily Pons from a 1940 article in Time magazine.

From wikipedia:
Jane Matilda Bolin LL.B. (April 11, 1908-January 8, 2007) was the first African-American woman to graduate from Yale Law School, the first to join the New York City Bar Association, and the first to join the city's law department. She became the first black woman to serve as a judge in the United States when she was sworn in to the bench of the New York City Domestic Relations Court in 1939.

Bolin was born in Poughkeepsie, New York. She was the youngest of four siblings. Her father, Gaius Charles Bolin, was the first African-American to graduate from Williams College and became a lawyer. Her mother, Matilda Ingram Bolin (née Emery), a white Englishwoman, died when Bolin was 8 years old.

Read Jane Bolin's obituary, in the New York Times.

From wikipedia:
Frances Coralie Perkins (born Fanny Coralie Perkins, lived April 10, 1882 – May 14, 1965) was the U.S. Secretary of Labor from 1933 to 1945, and the first woman ever appointed to the US Cabinet. As a loyal supporter of her friend Franklin D. Roosevelt, she helped pull the labor movement into the New Deal coalition.

Perkins was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to Frederick W. Perkins, the owner of a stationer's business, and Susan Bean Perkins, but spent much of her childhood in Worcester.[1] She attended the Ferry Hall School in Illinois before graduating from Mount Holyoke College in 1902, and from Columbia University in 1910 with a master's degree in sociology. In between, she held a variety of teaching positions and volunteered at settlement houses, including Hull House.

Read more about Frances Perkins, free from the George Washington University Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project.

From wikipedia:
Theobald Boehm (April 9, 1794- November 25, 1881) was a Bavarian inventor and musician, who perfected the modern Western concert flute and its improved fingering system. In addition, he was a virtuoso flautist and was a Bavarian Court Musician as well as a celebrated composer for the flute.

Born in Munich in Bavaria, Boehm learned his father's trade of goldsmithing. After making his own flute, he quickly became proficient enough to play in an orchestra at the age of eighteen and at twenty-one he was first flautist in the Royal Bavarian Orchestra.

Read a 1886 letter from Theobald Boehm to Letter to Walter Broadwood, free from www.mcgee-flutes.com.

From wikipedia:
David Rittenhouse (April 8, 1732 – June 26, 1796) was a renowned American astronomer, inventor, mathematician, surveyor, scientific instrument craftsman, and public official. Rittenhouse was a member of the American Philosophical Society and the first director of the United States Mint.

Rittenhouse was born near Germantown, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in a small village called RittenhouseTown, located along a stream called Paper Mill Run, the stream itself a tiny tributary of the Wissahickon Creek. He was self-taught and from a young age showed great ability in science and mathematics. At nineteen years old, he started a scientific instrument shop at his father's farm in West Norriton Township, Pennsylvania. His skill with instruments, particularly clocks, led him to construct two orreries, one of which is currently in the library of the University of Pennsylvania and the other is at Peyton Hall of Princeton University. Rittenhouse was one of the first to build a telescope used in the United States.

Read the Memoirs of the Life of David Rittenhouse, by William Barton, free from Google Books.

From wikipedia:
Flora Tristan (born April 7, 1803 in Paris, France - died November 14, 1844 in Bordeaux, France) was a socialist writer and activist. She was also one of the founders of modern feminism and, through Alina María Chazal, Paul Gauguin's grandmother. Her complete name was Flore-Celestine -Therèse-Henriette Tristan-Moscoso. Her father, Mariano Tristán y Moscoso, was an Arequipa-born Peruvian colonel of the Spanish Navy, and her mother, Anne Laisney, a Frenchwoman. Her parents met in Bilbao, Spain during her father's stay there.

Read Peregrinaciones de una Paria by Flora Tristan, in Spanish, free from the University of Wisconsin at Madison's library.

From wikipedia:
Nadar was the pseudonym of Gaspard-Félix Tournachon (April 6, 1820 – March 21, 1910), a French photographer, caricaturist, journalist, novelist and balloonist.

Nadar was born in 1820 in Paris (although some sources state Lyon). He was a caricaturist for Le Charivari in 1848. In 1849 he created the Revue comique and the Petit journal pour rire. He took his first photographs in 1853 and in 1858 became the first person to take aerial photographs. Around 1863, Nadar built a huge (6000 m³) hot air balloon named Le Géant ("The Giant"), thereby inspiring Jules Verne's Cinq semaines en ballon (Five Weeks in a Balloon). The "Géant" project was unsuccessful and convinced him that the future belonged to heavier-than-air machines. Afterwards "The Society for the Encouragement of Aerial Locomotion by Means of Heavier than Air Machines" was established, with Nadar as president and Jules Verne as secretary.

Read the Nadar-inspired novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon by Jules Verne, free from Project Gutenberg.

From wikipedia:
Mistinguett (April 5, 1875 – January 5, 1956 from Enghien-les-Bains, Val-d'Oise, Île-de-France, France) was a French actress and singer, with the birth name of Jeanne Bourgeois.

At an early age she aspired to be an entertainer. She began as a flower-seller in a restaurant in her home-town, singing popular ballads as she sold her flowers. When a song-writing acquaintance made up the name Miss Tinguette, Jeanne liked it. She made it her own by joining it together and eventually dropping the second S and the final E (Mistinguett).

Learn more about Mistinguett, and see more pictures of her and the doll made in her likeness, free from lenci-dolls.net.

From wikipedia:
Robert Emmet Sherwood (4 April 1896–14 November 1955) American playwright, editor, and screenwriter.

Born in New Rochelle, New York, he was the son of the prominent American portrait artist Rosina Emmet Sherwood. He was the great-great-grandson of the former New York State Attorney General Thomas Addis Emmet and the great-great-nephew of the notable Irish nationalist Robert Emmet who was executed for high treason in an abortive rebellion attempt against the British. His aunts included the notable American portrait artists Lydia Field Emmet, Jane Emmet de Glehn and his second cousin was artist Ellen Emmet Rand.

Learn more about Robert E. Sherwood and his work, free from the Internet Movie Data Base.

Edward Everett Hale (April 3, 1822 – June 10, 1909) was an American author and Unitarian clergyman.

Hale was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts, the son of Nathan Hale (1784-1863), proprietor and editor of the Boston Daily Advertiser, and the brother of Lucretia Peabody Hale. Edward Hale was the nephew of Edward Everett, the orator and statesman, while his father was the nephew of the Nathan Hale who was executed by the British for espionage during the Revolutionary War. Edward Hale graduated from Harvard in 1839; was pastor of the Church of the Unity, Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1846-1856, and of the South Congregational (Unitarian) church, Boston, in 1856-1899. In 1903 he became chaplain of the United States Senate. Hale married Emily Baldwin Perkins in 1852—she was the niece of Connecticut Governor & US Senator Roger Sherman Baldwin and Emily Pitkin Perkins Baldwin on her father's side and Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher on her mother's side. They had eight children; one of his grandsons was the actor Edward Everett Horton. Hale died in Roxbury, by then part of Boston, in 1909.

Read The Brick Moon and Other Stories by Edward Everett Hale, free from Project Gutenberg.

From wikipedia:
Max Ernst (2 April 1891 - 1 April 1976) was a German painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet, considered one of the chief representatives of Dadaism and Surrealism.

Max Ernst was born in Brühl, Germany, near Cologne. In 1909, he enrolled in the University at Bonn to study philosophy but soon abandoned the courses. He began painting that year, but never received any formal artistic training.

During World War I he served in the German army, which was a momentous interruption in his career as an artist. He stated in his autobiography, "Max Ernst died the 1st of August, 1914."

View six of Max Ernt's artworks, free from the Guggenheim Museum.

From wikipedia:
Edmond Eugène Alexis Rostand (April 1, 1868–December 2, 1918) was a French poet and dramatist.

Rostand is associated with neo-romanticism, and is best known for his play Cyrano de Bergerac. Rostand's romantic plays provided an alternative to the naturalistic theatre popular during the late 19th century. One of Rostand's works, Les Romanesques, has been adapted as the highly successful musical comedy The Fantasticks.