The James Logan Courier

Elizabeth Blackwell (February 3, 1821 – May 31, 1910) was an abolitionist and women's rights activist, and the first woman to practice medicine in the United States with a college degree.

Blackwell was born in Bristol, England, the third of nine children born to a sugar refiner who could afford to give his numerous sons, as well as his daughters, an education. In 1831, the family emigrated to the United States, and set up a refinery in New York City. After the death of her father, she took up a career in teaching. Desiring to apply herself to the practice of medicine, she took up residence in a physician's household, using her time there to study from the family's medical library. She became active in the anti-slavery movement (as did her brother Henry Brown Blackwell, who married Lucy Stone), in the course of which she made friends with Harriet Beecher Stowe. Another brother, Samuel C. Blackwell, married another important figure in women's rights, Antoinette Brown.

Read "Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell's Graduation--An Eye-Witness Account" by Margaret Munro DeLancey, free from the Hobart and William Smith Colleges.

Fernando Amorsolo y Cueto (May 30, 1892 - April 26, 1972) is one of the most important artists in the history of painting in the Philippines. Amorsolo was a portraitist and painter of rural Philippine landscapes. He is popularly known for his craftsmanship and mastery in the use of light. Born in Paco, Manila, he earned a degree from the Liceo de Manila Art School in 1909.

Learn more about Fernando Amorsolo, free from the Lopez Museum.

From wikipedia:
Alfonsina Storni (May 29, 1892 – October 25, 1938) was one of the most important Latin-American poets of the postmodernism movement.

Alfonsina was born in Sala Capriasca, Switzerland to an Argentine beer industrialist living in Switzerland for a few years. There, Alfonsina learned to speak Italian. After the family's business had failed, it opened a tavern in the city of Rosario, Argentina, where Alfonsina worked at a variety of chores.

In 1907, she joined a traveling theatre company which took her around the country. With them she performed in Henrik Ibsen's Spectres, Benito Pérez Galdós's La loca de la casa, and Florencio Sánchez's Los muertos.

Read some of Alfonsina Storni's poems, free from famouspoetsandpoems.com.

From wikipedia:
Papa John Creach (b. John Henry Creach May 28, 1917, Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania; d. February 22, 1994, Los Angeles, California) was the fiddler for Jefferson Airplane (1970-1975), Hot Tuna, Jefferson Starship, Jefferson Starship - The Next Generation, the San Francisco All-Stars (1979-1984), The Dinosaurs (1982-1989), and Steve Taylor.

Creach began playing violin in Chicago bars when the family moved there in 1935, and eventually joined a local cabaret band, the Chocolate Music Bars. Moving to L.A. in 1945, he played in the Chi Chi Club, spent time working on an ocean liner, appeared in "a couple of pictures", and performed as a duo with Nina Russell.

Read an interview with Papa John Creach.

From wikipedia:
Samuel Dashiell Hammett (May 27, 1894—January 10, 1961) was an American author of hardboiled detective novels and short stories. Among the enduring characters he created are Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon), Nick and Nora Charles (The Thin Man), and the Continental Op (Red Harvest and The Dain Curse). In addition to the significant influence his novels and stories had on film, Hammett "is now widely regarded as one of the finest mystery writers of all time" and was called, in his obituary in The New York Times, "the dean of the... 'hard-boiled' school of detective fiction".

Learn more about Dashiell Hammett, free from PBS.org/

From wikipedia:
Rosario Castellanos (25 May 1925 – 7 August 1974) was a Mexican poet and author. Along with the other members of the Generation of 1950 (the poets who wrote following the second world war, influenced by Cesar Vallejo and others), she was one of Mexico's most important literary voices in the last century. Throughout her life, she wrote eloquently about issues of cultural and gender oppression, and her work has influenced feminist theory and cultural studies. Though she died young, she opened the door of Mexican literature to women, and left a legacy that still resonates today.


Read selected poems of Rosario Castellanos, free from the Western Michigan University.

From wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Jonathan Wild (baptised 6 May 1683–24 May 1725) was perhaps the most famous criminal of London — and possibly Great Britain — during the 18th century, both because of his own actions and the uses novelists, playwrights, and political satirists made of them. He invented a scheme which allowed him to run one of the most successful gangs of thieves of the era, all the while appearing to be the nation's leading policeman. He manipulated the press and the nation's fears to become the most loved public figure of the 1720s; this love turned to hatred when his villainy was exposed. After his death, he became a symbol of corruption and hypocrisy.

Read The History of the Life of the Late Mr Jonathan Wild the Great by Henry Fielding, free from Project Gutenberg.

From wikipedia:
Alfred Pritchard Sloan, Jr. (May 23, 1875 – February 17, 1966) was a long-time president and chairman of General Motors.

Sloan was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He studied electrical engineering and graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1895. While attending MIT he joined the Delta Upsilon fraternity.

Visit the website of the Afred P. Sloan Foundation.

From wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:Mary Stevenson Cassatt (May 22, 1844 – June 14, 1926) was an American painter and printmaker. She lived much of her adult life in France, where she first befriended Edgar Degas and later exhibited among the Impressionists.

Cassatt (pronounced ca-SAHT) often created images of the social and private lives of women, with particular emphasis on the intimate bonds between mothers and children.

See more of Mary Cassatt's paintings, free from the Webmuseum.

From wikipedia:
Alfred Moore (May 21, 1755 – October 15, 1810) was a distinguished North Carolina judge who became a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Moore Square, a park located in the Moore Square Historic District in Raleigh, North Carolina was named in his honor. Moore was buried at the St. Philip's Church near Wilmington.

His father, Maurice, preceded him in the practice of law and served as a colonial judge in North Carolina. Alfred was sent to Boston to complete his education, but he returned to North Carolina and apprenticed at the law with his father before being admitted to the bar at the age of twenty.

Learn more about Alfred Moore, free from jrank.org.

From wikipedia:
Faisal bin Al Hussein Bin Ali El-Hashemi, 20 May 1883 – September 8, 1933) was for a short time King of Greater Syria in 1920 and King of Iraq from 23 August 1921, to 1933. He was a member of the Hashemite dynasty, a descendant of the tribe of Muhammad. Faisal encouraged overcoming cleavage between Sunni and Shiite to foster common loyalty and promote pan-Arabism in the goal of creating an Arab state that would include Iraq, Syria, and parts of the Fertile Crescent. While in power, Faisal tried to diversify his administration by including different ethnic and religious groups in offices. He faced great challenges in achieving this because the region was under European, specifically French and British, control and other Arab leaders of the time were hostile to his ideas as they pursued their own political aspirations for power. In addition, Faisal’s attempt at pan-Arab nationalism inevitably isolated certain religious groups.

Read about Faisal's acceptance of the Balfour Declaration, free from the Jewish Virtual Library.

From wikipedia:
Nancy Witcher Astor, Viscountess Astor, CH, (May 19, 1879 – May 2, 1964) was the first woman to serve as a Member of Parliament (MP) in the British House of Commons. (Constance Markiewicz was the first woman elected to serve in the House of Commons after running for the Sinn Féin party in 1918, but in line with Sinn Féin policy she did not take her seat.) She was the wife of Waldorf Astor, 2nd Viscount Astor.

Astor was born Nancy Witcher Langhorne in Danville, Virginia, in the United States. Her father was Chiswell Dabney Langhorne and her mother was Nancy Witcher Keene. Her father's earlier business venture had depended at least in part upon slave labor and had been badly damaged by the fallout from the American Civil War, causing the family to live in near-poverty for several years before Nancy was born. After her birth her father began working to regain the family wealth, first with a job as an auctioneer and later with a job that he obtained with the railroad by using old contacts from his work as a contractor. By the time she was thirteen years old, the Langhornes were again a rich family with a sizeable home. Chiswell Langhorne later moved the family to their estate, known as Mirador, in Albemarle County, Virginia.

From wikipedia:
Walter Adolph Georg Gropius (May 18, 1883 – July 5, 1969) was a German architect and founder of Bauhaus who along with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, is widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of modern architecture.

Born in Berlin, Walter Gropius was the third child of Walter Adolph Gropius and Manon Auguste Pauline Scharnweber. Gropius married Alma Mahler (1879-1964), widow of Gustav Mahler. Walter and Alma's daughter, named Manon after Walter's mother, was born in 1916. When Manon died of polio at age eighteen, composer Alban Berg wrote his Violin Concerto in memory of her (it is inscribed "to the memory of an angel"). Gropius and Alma divorced in 1920. (Alma had by that time established a relationship with Franz Werfel, whom she later married.) In 1923 Gropius married Ise (Ilse) Frank (d. 1983), and they remained together until his death. They adopted Beate Gropius, also known as Ati.

See photos of Walter Gropius' Fagus Works, free from greatbuildings.com.

From wikipedia:
Horace Elgin Dodge (May 17, 1868 — December 10, 1920) was an American automobile manufacturing pioneer and co-founder of Dodge Brothers Company.

Early years and business
Born in Niles, Michigan, where his father owned a foundry and machine shop, Horace Dodge and his elder brother John were inseparable as children and as adults. In 1886, the Dodge brothers moved to Detroit where they took jobs at a boiler maker plant. In 1894 they went to work as machinists at the Dominion Typograph Company across the Detroit River in Windsor, Ontario.

Learn about Horace Dodge's steam yacht, Dephine, free from ssdelphine.com.

From wikipedia:
David Edward Hughes (16 May 1831 – 22 January 1900) coinventor of the microphone, and an accomplished Welsh musician and a professor of music as well as chair of natural philosophy at a seminary for women in Bardstown, Kentucky.

Hughes was born in London in 1831 and emigrated to the United States as a young man. He was an experimental physicist, mostly in the areas of electricity and signals. He also invented an improved microphone, which was a modification of Thomas Edison's carbon telephone transmitter. He revived the term "microphone" to describe the transmitter's ability to transmit extremely weak sounds to a Bell telephone receiver. He invented the induction balance (later used in metal detectors) and in 1879 to transmitted and received radio waves. Despite Hughes' facility as an experimenter, he had little mathematical training. He was a friend of William Henry Preece.

Learn more about David Edward Hughes and his inventions, free from Clarkson University.

From wikipedia:
Georges Braque (13 May 1882 – 31 August 1963) was a major 20th century French painter and sculptor who, along with Pablo Picasso, developed the art movement known as cubism.

Georges Braque was born in Argenteuil, Val-d'Oise. He grew up in Le Havre and trained to be a house painter and decorator, as his father and grandfather were, but he also studied painting in the evenings at the École des Beaux-Arts in Le Havre from about 1897 to 1899. He apprenticed in Paris under a decorator and was awarded his certificate in 1902. The following year, he attended the Académie Humbert, also in Paris, and painted there until 1904. It was here that he met Marie Laurencin and Francis Picabia.

See examples of Georges Braque's work, free from artcyclopedia.com.

From wikipedia:
Lincoln Ellsworth (May 12, 1880 - May 26, 1951) was an explorer from the United States.

Son of James Ellsworth and Eva Frances Butler, he was born in Chicago, Illinois. He also lived in Hudson, Ohio as a child.

Arctic/North Pole exploration
Lincoln Ellsworth's father, James, a wealthy coal man from the United States, spent US$100,000 to fund Roald Amundsen's 1925 attempt to fly from Svalbard to the North Pole. The craft were forced down onto the ice short of their goal, and the explorers spent 30 days trapped on the surface.

Learn more about Lincoln Ellsworth, free from south-pole.com

From wikipedia:
Upendrokishore Ray , also known as Upendrokishore Raychowdhury was a famous Bengali writer, painter, violin player and composer. He was born on 10 May 1863 in a little village called Moshua in Mymensingh District in East Bengal, now a part of Bangladesh. He spent most of his adult life in Kolkata, where he died on 20 December 1915, aged only fifty-two.

He was the father of the famous writer Sukumar Ray and grandfather of the renowned film-maker Satyajit Ray. Upendrakishore Ray Chauduri was a product and leading member of the Brahmo Movement that spearheaded the cultural rejuvenation of Bengal. He collaborated with the Tagores whose family, in the arts, achieved world renown. As a writer he is best known for his collection of folklore; as a printer he pioneered in India in the art of engraving and was the first to attempt color printing at the time when engraving and color printing were also being pioneered in the West.

Read The Wicked Tiger by Upendrokishore Ray, translated from Bengali by Indrani Chakraborty, free from www.parabaas.com.

Henry John Kaiser (May 9, 1882—August 24, 1967) was an American industrialist who became known as the father of modern American shipbuilding. He established the Kaiser Shipyard which built Liberty ships during World War II, after which he formed Kaiser Aluminum and Kaiser Steel. Interested in industrial medicine and public health, Kaiser organized Kaiser Permanente health care for his workers and their families. He led Kaiser-Frazer followed by Kaiser Motors, automobile companies known for the safety of their designs. Kaiser was involved in large construction projects such as civic centers and dams, and invested in real estate. With his acquired wealth, he initiated the Kaiser Family Foundation, a charitable organization.

Watch a video of the launching of the last Liberty ship launched by Henry J. Kaiser.

From the President of Mexico's website:
Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla was born at the Corralejo Hacienda in Pénjamo, Guanajuato, Mexico on May 8, 1753.

He was sent to Valladolid (now Morelia) to study at the San Nicolás Obispo College, where he later taught theology, philosophy and ethics, and eventually became college rector. In 1792, he was ordained (he became a priest) and after working a different parishes, came to practice his ministry at the Parish of Dolores.

Read more about Miguel Hidalgo, at Mexonline.com

From wikipedia:
Ishirō Honda, sometimes miscredited in foreign releases as "Inoshiro Honda", (May 7, 1911 in Yamagata Prefecture – February 28, 1993) was a Japanese film director. His early film career included working as an assistant under the famed director, Akira Kurosawa.

Alongside his film duties, he was drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II in China and was a prisoner there when the war ended.

Visit the official Ishiro Honda website.

From wikipedia:
Motilal Nehru (May 6, 1861 – February 6, 1931) was an early Indian independence activist and leader of the Indian National Congress. He was the founder patriarch of India's most powerful political family, the Nehru-Gandhi family.

Motilal Nehru was born in Garden Grove, to Ganga Dhar in a Kashmiri Pandit family. He became one of the first generation of young Indians to receive a 'Western-style' college education. He attended Muir Centeal College at Allahabad, but failed to appear for the final year B.A examinations. Later he qualified "Bar at law" from Cambridge and then enlisted as a lawyer in the English courts.

Read more about Motilal Nehru, free from congresssandesh.com

From wikipedia:
Carlos Monsiváis Aceves (born May 4, 1938, in Mexico City) is a Mexican writer and journalist on the El Universal newspaper. He writes political opinion columns in other leading newspapers and is considered to be an opinion leader within the country's progressive sectors.

Monsiváis studied economics and philosophy in the National Autonomous University of Mexico. His writings, some of which are written with an ironic undertone, show a deep understanding of the origin and development of Mexican popular culture.

Learn more about Carlos Monsivais, free from culturebase.net.

From wikipedia:
Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli (3 May 1469 – 21 June 1527) was an Italian philosopher, writer, and politician and is considered one of the main founders of modern political science. As a Renaissance Man, he was a diplomat, political philosopher, musician, poet and playwright, but, foremost, he was a Civil Servant of the Florentine Republic. He is known as "The French Chanakya" in the eastern world. In June of 1498, after the ouster and execution of Girolamo Savonarola, the Great Council elected Machiavelli as Secretary to the second Chancery of the Republic of Florence.

Read Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius by Niccolò Machiavelli, one of several of his works available free from Project Gutenberg.

From wikipedia:
Clyde Fitch (May 2, 1865 – September 4, 1909) was an American dramatist.

Born William Clyde Fitch at Elmira, New York, he wrote over 60 plays, 36 of them original, which varied from social comedies and farces to melodrama and historical dramas.

As the only child to live to adulthood, his father, Captain William G. Fitch, a graduate of West Point and a Union officer in the Civil War, encouraged him to become an architect or to engage in a career of business, but his mother, Alice Clark, in whose eyes he could do no wrong, always believed in his talent. Fitch graduated from Amherst College in 1886, where he was a member of Chi Psi Fraternity.

Read The Smart Set by Clyde Fitch, one of five of his plays available free from Project Gutenberg.

From wikipedia:
Martha Jane Cannary-Burke, better known as Calamity Jane (May 1, 1852 – August 1, 1903), was a frontierswoman and professional scout best known for her claim of being a close friend of Wild Bill Hickok, but also for having gained fame fighting Native Americans.

Early life: 1852 – 1870
Cannary was born on May 1, 1852 as Martha Jane Cannary in Princeton, Missouri, the oldest of six children, having two brothers and three sisters. Robert W. and Charlotte Cannary are listed in the 1860 census living in Ravanna, Mercer County, Missouri. Robert packed his family and moved by wagon train from Missouri to Virginia City, Montana in 1865. Charlotte died along the way in Black Foot, Montana in 1866 of "washtub pneumonia". In the spring of that year, Robert took his six children on to Utah, arriving in Salt Lake City in the summer. They were there a year before he died in 1867. At the tender age of 15, Martha Jane took over as head of the family, loaded up the wagon once more, and took her siblings to Fort Bridger, Wyoming Territory. They arrived in May of 1868. From there they traveled to Piedmont, Wyoming, on the Union Pacific Railroad.

Read Life and Adventures of Calamity Jane by Calamity Jane, free from Project Gutenberg.