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From Wikipedia:

Captain James Buchanan Eads (May 23, 1820 – March 8, 1887) was a world-renowned American civil engineer and inventor, holding more than 50 patents.

Eads was born in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, and named for his mother's cousin, then Congressman and subsequent President of the United States James Buchanan. He grew up in St. Louis, Missouri.

James Eads was largely self-educated; at the age of 13, he left school to take up work to help support the family. One of his first jobs was at the Williams & Duhring dry-goods store run by Barrett Williams. Williams allowed the young Eads to spend time in his library, located above the store. In Eads's spare time, he read books on physical science, mechanics, machinery, and civil engineering.

Read more about James Eads, free from PBS.

From Wikipedia:
Vance Packard (May 22, 1914 – December 12, 1996) was an American journalist, social critic, and author.

He was born in Granville Summit, Pennsylvania to parents Philip J. Packard and Mabel Case Packard. Between 1920-32 he attended local public schools in State College, Pennsylvania where his father managed a farm owned by the Pennsylvania State College (later Penn State University). In 1932 he entered Penn State, majoring in English. He graduated in 1936, and worked briefly for the local newspaper, the Centre Daily Times. He earned his master's degree at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1937. That year, he joined the Boston Daily Record as a staff reporter and a year later, he married Virginia Matthews.

Visit VancePackard.com.

From Wikipedia:
Mary Anning (21 May 1799 – 9 March 1847) was a British fossil collector, dealer, and paleontologist who became known around the world for a number of important finds she made in the Jurassic marine fossil beds at Lyme Regis in Dorset, where she lived. Her work contributed to fundamental changes that occurred during her lifetime in scientific thinking about prehistoric life and the history of the Earth.

Anning searched for fossils in the area's Blue Lias cliffs, particularly during the winter months when landslides exposed new fossils that had to be collected quickly before they were lost to the sea. It was dangerous work, and she nearly lost her life in 1833 during a landslide that killed her dog, Tray. Her discoveries included the first ichthyosaur skeleton to be correctly identified, which she and her brother Joseph found when she was just twelve years old; the first two plesiosaur skeletons ever found; the first pterosaur skeleton located outside Germany; and some important fish fossils. Her observations played a key role in the discovery that coprolites, known as bezoar stones at the time, were fossilised faeces. She also discovered that belemnite fossils contained fossilised ink sacs like those of modern cephalopods. When geologist Henry De la Beche painted Duria Antiquior, the first widely circulated pictorial representation of a scene from prehistoric life derived from fossil reconstructions, he based it largely on fossils Anning had found, and sold prints of it for her benefit.

Learn more about Mary Anning, free from Princeton University.

From Wikipedia:
Simon Fraser (20 May 1776 – 18 August 1862) was a fur trader and an explorer who charted much of what is now the Canadian province of British Columbia. Fraser was employed by the Montreal-based North West Company. By 1805, he had been put in charge of all the company's operations west of the Rocky Mountains. He was responsible for building that area's first trading posts, and, in 1808, he explored what is now known as the Fraser River, which bears his name. Simon Fraser's exploratory efforts were partly responsible for Canada's boundary later being established at the 49th parallel (after the War of 1812), since he as a British subject was the first European to establish permanent settlements in the area. According to historian Alexander Begg, Fraser "was offered a knighthood but declined the title due to his limited wealth"


Read more about Simon Fraser, free from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online.

From Wikipedia:
Nancy Witcher Langhorne, Viscountess Astor, CH (May 19, 1879 — May 2, 1964) was the first woman to sit as a Member of Parliament (MP) in the British House of Commons. She was the wife of Waldorf Astor, 2nd Viscount Astor.

Nancy was born Nancy Witcher Langhorne in Danville, Virginia, in the United States to Chiswell Dabney Langhorne and Nancy Witcher Keene. Chiswell's earlier business venture had depended at least in part upon slave labour, and the outcome of the American Civil War caused 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 sizable home. Chiswell Langhorne later moved the family to their estate, known as Mirador, in Albemarle County, Virginia.

From Wikipedia:
Mathew B. Brady (ca. 1822 – January 15, 1896) was one of the most celebrated 19th century American photographers, best known for his portraits of celebrities and his documentation of the American Civil War. He is credited with being the father of photojournalism.

Brady was born in Warren County, New York, the youngest of three children of Irish immigrant parents, Andrew and Julia Brady. At age 16 he moved to Saratoga, New York, where he met famed portrait painter William Page. Brady became Page's student. In 1839 the two traveled to Albany, New York, and then to New York City, where Brady continued to study painting with Page, and also with Page's former teacher, Samuel F. B. Morse. Morse had met Louis Jacques Daguerre in France in 1839, and returned to the US to enthusiastically push the new daguerrotype invention of capturing images.

See Mathew Brady's portraits, free from the Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery.

From Wikipedia:
Lisa Fonssagrives (May 17, 1911 – February 4, 1992), born Lisa Birgitta Bernstone was a Swedish fashion model widely credited as the first supermodel.

Fonssagrives was born in Sweden (variously reported as Gothenburg or Uddevalla) and raised in Uddevalla. As a child, she took up painting, sculpting and dancing. She went to Mary Wigman's school in Berlin and studied art and dance. After returning to Sweden, she opened a dance school. She moved from Sweden to Paris to train for ballet (after participating with choreographer Astrid Malmborg in an international competition) and worked as a private dance teacher with Fernand Fonssagrives, which then led to a modeling career, and she would say that modeling was "still dancing".

Learn more about Lisa Fonssagrives, free from Vogue.com.

From Wikipedia:
Edward Twitchell Hall, Jr. (May 16, 1914 – July 20, 2009) was an American anthropologist and cross-cultural researcher. He is remembered for developing the concept of Proxemics, a description of how people behave and react in different types of culturally defined personal space. Hall was an influential colleague of Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller.

Born in Webster Groves, Missouri, Hall taught at the University of Denver, Colorado, Bennington College in Vermont, Harvard Business School, Illinois Institute of Technology, Northwestern University in Illinois and others. The foundation for his lifelong research on cultural perceptions of space was laid during World War II, when he served in the U.S. Army in Europe and the Philippines.

Read a review of Edward T. Hall's The Silent Language, free from the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

From Wikipedia:
Katherine Anne Porter (May 15, 1890 – September 18, 1980) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist. Her 1962 novel Ship of Fools was the best-selling novel in America that year, but her short stories received much more critical acclaim. She is known for her penetrating insight; her work deals with dark themes such as betrayal, death and the origin of human evil. In 1990, Recorded Texas Historic Landmark number 2905 was placed in Brown County, Texas to honor the life and career of Porter.

Read an interview with Katherine Anne Porter.

From Wikipedia:
Robert Frederick Christy (May 14, 1916 – October 3, 2012) was an American theoretical physicist and later astrophysicist who worked on the Manhattan Project. He was also briefly president of California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

Christy was born in 1916 in Vancouver, British Columbia and attended the University of British Columbia in the 1930s where he studied physics during the blossoming of quantum physics. Following the path blazed by George Volkoff who was a year ahead of him at UBC, Christy was accepted as a graduate student by Robert Oppenheimer at University of California, Berkeley, the leading theoretical physicist in the US at that time.

Read an interview with Robert F. Christy, free from CalTech.

From Wikipedia:
Rabbi Judah Nadich (May 13, 1912 – August 26, 2007), was a Conservative Rabbi, who served congregations in Buffalo and Chicago, and later was the U.S. Army's senior Jewish chaplain in Europe while Allied forces were liberating Nazi concentration camps, and later was the President of the Rabbinical Assembly, the international association of Conservative rabbis.

He was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the eldest child of Isaac and Lena Nathanson Nadich, who had emigrated from Russia in the early 1900s. His father owned a grocery store. Rabbi Nadich's mother died when he was 7, and he and his two sisters were raised by their stepmother, Nettie Gifter Nadich, an immigrant from Lithuania. Isaac and Nettie also had a daughter together.

Read Judah Nadich's obituary, free from the Washington Post.

From Wikipedia:
Joseph John Rochefort (May 12, 1900 in Dayton, Ohio – July 20, 1976 in Torrance, California [3]) was an American Naval officer and cryptanalyst. His contributions and those of his team were pivotal to victory in the Pacific War.

Rochefort was a major figure in the United States Navy's cryptographic and intelligence operations from 1925 to 1946, particularly in the Battle of Midway.

In 1917, Rochefort had joined the Navy while still in high school in Los Angeles. He enlisted in the Navy in 1918. He was commissioned as an ensign after graduation from the Stevens Institute of Technology, and in 1919 became engineering officer of the tanker USS Cuyama.

Learn more about Joseph Rochefort, free from the National Security Agency.

From Wikipedia:

Ellis R. Dungan (11 May 1909 - 1 December 2001) was an American film director, who was well known for working in Indian films, predominantly in Tamil cinema, from 1936 to 1950. He was an alumnus of the University of Southern California and moved to India in 1935. During his film career in South India, Dungan directed the debut films of several popular Tamil film actors, such as M. G. Ramachandran in Sathi Leelavathi, T. S. Balaiya and N. S. Krishnan.

Read an excerpt from Ellis R. Dungan's autobiography.

From Wikipedia:
Ariel Durant (10 May 1898 – 25 October 1981) was the co-author of The Story of Civilization.

Durant was born in Proskurov, Russian Empire (now Khmelnytskyi, Ukraine) as Chaya Kaufman to Ethel Appel Kaufman and Joseph Kaufman. The family emigrated to the United States in 1901. She met her future husband, Will Durant, while a student at Ferrer Modern School in New York. Will was a teacher at the school at the time, but resigned his post in order to marry Ariel. She was fourteen at the time of the wedding.

Learn more about Ariel Durant, free from the Jewish Women's Archive.

From Wikipedia:
William Moulton Marston (May 9, 1893 – May 2, 1947), also known by the pen name Charles Moulton, was an American psychologist, feminist theorist, inventor and comic book writer who created the character Wonder Woman. Two women, his wife Elizabeth Holloway Marston and Olive Byrne (who lived with the couple in a polyamorous relationship), served as exemplars for the character and greatly influenced her creation.

He was inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2006.

Learn more about William Moulton Marston, free from comicvine.com.