Complete Index

Hetty Green was a successful American businesswoman who was as renowned for her Wall Street savvy and fantastic wealth as she was for her ruthless frugality and scroogelike behavior.

“Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science.” The namesake for NASA’s most important telescope, Edwin Hubble has been called a modern-day Galileo. He identified multiple galaxies and helped to define the way in which the universe expands, providing evidence for the Big Bang theory.

Writer Nadine Gordimer has devoted her life to fighting for the rights and health of the less fortunate and oppressed. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991 for showing “the true power of words,” having written 14 novels and 11 collections of short stories.

Jack Welch was CEO of General Electric for 20 years, beginning his tenure in the midst of 1981’s tough economic conditions and leading the company to enormous growth. An author, husband and father of four, Welch, along with his wife, Suzy, is a leadership guru whose viewpoint is routinely requested by companies and business students.

William Schwenck Gilbert, one half of the successful Gilbert and Sullivan duo, had a knack for satire and an eye for staging, producing comic operettas beloved to this day, including “The Pirates of Penzance” and “The Mikado.” Gilbert coped with a difficult childhood with disagreeable parents and surmounted a period of indecision before launching himself into a renowned career writing for theater.

“It’s easy to think of Scorsese as a kind of poet of the underworld,” the American Film Institute reflected when they granted him a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997. Raised on the streets of New York, director Martin Scorsese has shone a visionary light on the darkest of scenes and characters.

Beginning with the seminal arcade game Donkey Kong nearly three decades ago, Nintendo’s chief game developer and the father of modern video games, Shigeru Miyamoto, has combined his love of art and adventure to create a fantasy universe and wear the mantle of modern-day Walt Disney.

Actor and political activist Ed Asner has earned critical acclaim both on Broadway and in Hollywood. He is best known for his Emmy and Golden Globe Award-winning role as Lou Grant, the newsroom boss on the 1970s TV series “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”

French painter Claude Monet was the central figure of the Impressionist movement in the late 19th century, producing colorful, vibrant studies of natural and architectural landscapes.

Although weak in health himself, Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson will always be associated with vigorous adventure, thanks to such thrilling tales as “Kidnapped” and "Treasure Island.” He also achieved international fame for his chilling (and subsequently oft-imitated) Victorian horror story, “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”

Iranian spiritual leader Bahá'u'lláh founded the Bahá’í religion in 1863. Today, it has five million followers from around the world.

First Lady Abigail Adams became the first presidential wife to live in the White House when she joined her husband, John Adams, in Washington in 1800.

Neil Gaiman transformed a writing career penning rock and roll biographies into a multinational success story. In less than three decades writing comics, graphic novels and various works of speculative fiction, he has earned legions of loyal fans, produced Hollywood blockbusters adapted from his work and been named one of the 10 best authors living today.

Hedy Lamarr was a woman perpetually ahead of her time. She shocked the world with one of the first filmed nude scenes in 1933, and a decade later, invented a method of frequency transmission used today to provide secure communications for wireless and cell phone networks.

Milton Bradley is a household name for his creation of such board game classics as The Game of Life, but he was more than just an inventor. His fascination with the process of learning, coupled with his skill at printing, made him a pioneer in the field of early childhood education as well.

The first woman in France to receive a doctorate degree, scientist Marie Curie is remembered for her discoveries in radioactivity and radioactive elements. Her work won her two Nobel prizes in physics and chemistry, but unfortunately also led to her death.

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.

In honor of her October 29 birthday, we look at the life and career of longtime politician and economist-in-exile Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, who became the first elected female president in Africa when she won the 2006 general election in Liberia.

Modern cuisine owes many of its practices to the great French chef Auguste Escoffier. In addition to inventing the chef’s hat, Escoffier changed public dining in hotels and restaurants worldwide by creating systematized kitchens, serving dishes in a specific order instead of all at once and emphasizing the freshness and flavor of the ingredients used. We celebrate Escoffier’s culinary vision on the anniversary of his birth.

Playing with a skill so dazzling and in so eerie a manner that it was seen as supernatural, violinist and composer Niccolò Paganini is considered to be one of the greatest violin virtuosos of all time.

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was Shah of Iran for more than 30 years. His reforms transformed his country into a substantial Middle Eastern economic and military power, but his autocratic rule and corrupt regime eventually led to his downfall.

From his Cubist works to his famous Blue Period, painter Pablo Picasso changed the face of art forever.

The “Father of Microbiology,” Anton van Leeuwenhoek was not a trained scientist, yet he made some of the most astounding scientific discoveries of his time. He is credited with being the first to observe bacteria under his microscopes and discovering the cellular processes underlying sexual reproduction in animals.