Happy Birthday, Marie Curie, Discoverer of Radium

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

Eugene V. Debs spearheaded labor movements, led the American Socialist Party and is remembered today for being an agitator who never shied from passionately expressing his opinions—even when it led to his arrest.

To his colleagues, he was “Old Iron Pants,” and to everyone else, he was “The Most Trusted Man in America.” For more than half a century, CBS newsman Walter Cronkite reported, and to a certain extent, made the news, announcing Kennedy’s assassination and the first steps on the moon as well as influencing a more rapid end to the Vietnam War.

Osamu Tezuka has been called the “god of comics” in Japan. After writing his first comic strip in third grade, Tezuka published his first professional manga while studying at medical school. His innovations to the field of Japanese comics and animation are evident through the 700 works he produced, which include more than 150,000 pages of manga.

The most beautiful daughter of the Austrian emperor, Marie Antoinette was guaranteed a life of privilege. But as the teen bride of French King Louis XVI, her free spending, decadent lifestyle angered the working class, who saw her as the embodiment of all that was wrong with the monarchy.

Although he is considered one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, Stephen Crane’s life and career were cut short before his 30th birthday. His books, essays and poems—the best known of which was “The Red Badge of Courage”—remain among the most revered and referenced today.

Romualdo Pacheco, born October 31, 1831, was the first Hispanic representative of a state in Congress and to date, California’s only Latino governor.

Legendary bodybuilder Charles Atlas became an icon in the 1920s as the man who transformed himself from a skinny weakling into a muscle-bound celebrity.