The James Logan Courier

From wikipedia:
Barbara Wertheim Tuchman (January 30, 1912 – February 6, 1989) was an American self-trained historian and author. She became best known for The Guns of August, a history of the prelude and first month of World War I.

As an author, Tuchman focused on producing popular history. Her clear, dramatic storytelling covered topics as diverse as the 14th century and World War I, and sold millions of copies.

Watch an interview with Barbara Tuchman, conducted by journalist Bill Moyers on the PBS show Bill Moyers Journal, free from pbs.org.

From wikipedia:
Lala Lajpat Rai was an Indian author and politician who is chiefly remembered as a leader in the Indian fight for freedom from the British Raj. The freedom fighter was popularly known as Punjab Kesari (The Lion of Punjab). He was also the founder of Punjab National Bank and Lakshmi Insurance Company.

Read more about Lala Lajpat Rai, free from iloveindia.com.

From wikipedia:
Oran Thaddeus Page (27 January 1908 – 4 November 1954) jazz trumpeter, singer, bandleader born in Dallas, Texas, better known as Hot Lips Page by the public, and Lips Page by his fellow musicians. He was known as a scorching soloist and powerful vocalist.

In his early years, Page travelled the southwest backing such blues singers as Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Ida Cox. He moved to Kansas City, Missouri in 1928 and played with leading bands, including the Walter Page's legendary Blue Devils, Bennie Moten, and Count Basie's original Reno Club orchestra.

Read an interview with Todd Bryant Weeks, author of Luck's In my Corner: The Life and Music of Hot Lips Page, free from allaboutjazz.com.

From wikipedia
Robert Burton (February 8, 1577 – January 25, 1640) was an English scholar and vicar at Oxford University, best known for writing The Anatomy of Melancholy.

Life and work
Born at Lindley, Leicestershire, Burton spent most of his life at Oxford, first as a pupil at Brasenose College, and then as a Student (the equivalent of a fellow at other Oxford and Cambridge colleges) of Christ Church. He studied a large number of diverse subjects, many of which informed his masterful study of melancholia for which he is chiefly famous. He was appointed vicar of St. Thomas Church in Oxford in 1616, and in 1630 he was also made the rector of Segrave, Leicester. Apart from The Anatomy of Melancholy his only other published work is Philosophaster, a satirical Latin comedy.

Read Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, free from Project Gutenberg.

Edith Wharton (January 24, 1862 – August 11, 1937) was an American novelist, short story writer, and designer.

Born Edith Newbold Jones, to a wealthy New York family often associated with the phrase Keeping up with the Joneses, Edith combined her insights into the privileged classes with her natural wit to write novels and short fiction which are notable for their humor and incisiveness.

Read Edith Wharton's classic novel Ethan Fromme, free from Project Gutenberg

Hear Edith Wharton's short story "The Diletante," an "audiobook" available free from Librivox

From wikipedia:
Subhas Chandra Bose (born January 23, 1897; presumed to have died August 18, 1945 although this is disputed), popularly known as Netaji (literally "Respected Leader"), is one of the most respected politicians of modern India.

Bose was elected president of the Indian National Congress for two consecutive terms but resigned from the post following ideological conflicts with Mahatma Gandhi. Bose believed that Mahatma Gandhi's tactics of non-violence would never be sufficient to secure India's independence, and advocated violent resistance. He established a separate political party, the All India Forward Bloc and continued to call for the full and immediate independence of India from British rule. He was imprisoned by the British authorities eleven times.

Read Subhas Chandra Bose and India's Struggle for Independence, by Andrew Montgomery, free from the Institute of Historical Review.

From wikipedia:
Henry Kawaihoa "Prince" Oana (January 22, 1908 - June 19, 1976) was a Major League Baseball player with the Philadelphia Phillies and Detroit Tigers.

Born in Waipahu, Hawaii, Oana was one of the first Hawaiian players to play Major League baseball. Oana was a big 6'2" right-hander. He started as an outfielder, playing 6 games for the Philadelphia Phillies, collecting 5 hits and scoring 3 runs. Despite Oana's talents as a hitter, Rogers Hornsby converted him into a pitcher at Fort Worth in the early 1940s. Oana did not return to the Major Leagues until 1943, at age 35, this time as a pitcher for the Tigers. Oana appeared in 10 games as a reliever in 1943, compiling a 3-2. Oana returned to the Tigers in 1945, but played in only 3 games as a reliever.

Learn more about Henry Oana, free from thediamondangle.com

Eulogio "Amang" Adona Rodriguez, Sr. (January 21, 1883–December 19, 1964) was a Filipino politician, the longest serving Senate President after Manuel L. Quezon, serving the post from April 30, 1952 to April 17, 1953 and May 20, 1953 to April 5, 1963.

Rodriguez was born in Montalban (renamed Rodriguez in his honor), Distrito de Morong on January 21, 1883 to Petronilo Rodriguez and Monica Adona. He first studied at the Spanish-run public school in Montalban, then took his secondary course at the Colegio de San Juan de Letran in Manila, where he completed his Bachelor of Arts in 1896. He then studied law under a private tutor.

Read more about the history of the Philippines and the Presidents of the Senate, free from nationmaster.com.

From wikipedia:
1898 - 19 July 1947; Arabic: Abdul Razak‎) was a Burmese politician who was a respected educationalist. He was a minister and was assassinated, along with his cabinet, on 19 July 1947. July 19 is celebrated in Myanmar today as Martyrs' Day. U Razak was Minister of Education and National Planning, and was chairman of the Burma Muslim Congress.

Abdul Razak was born in Meiktila on 20 January 1898. He studied at the Wesleyan School in Mandalay, and continued his studies at the Rangoon College, earning a B.A. degree in English. Throughout his school years, Razak was involved in athletics.

Read more about U Razak, free from The Irrawaddy.

From wikipedia:
John Harold Johnson (19 January 1918 – 8 August 2005) was an American businessman, publisher. He is the founder of the Johnson Publishing Company, and in 1982, the first African-American to appear on the Forbes 400.

Early years
Johnson was born to Leroy Johnson and Gertrude Jenkins in Arkansas City, Arkansas. Because there were no high schools there for African-Americans to attended, in the 1930s he moved to Chicago, Illinois with his family, where he attended DuSable High School and would become president of his class and editor-in-chief of the school paper. After attending University of Chicago on a scholarship, and later, Northwestern University.

Learn more about John H. Johnson at the Johnson Publishing Co. website.

From wikipedia:
Daniel Hale Williams (18 January 1858 – 4 August 1931) was an American surgeon. He was the first African-American cardiologist, and is sometimes attributed with performing the first successful surgery on the heart. He also founded Provident Hospital, the first non-segregated hospital in the United States.Early years

Williams was born the fifth of seven children to Daniel and Sarah Price Williams, middle-class, free people of color in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. He attended the Chicago Medical College (now the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University), and after graduation in 1883, he began his medical career in the office of Surgeon General Henry Palmer in Janesville, Wisconsin.

From wikipedia:
Carlos Pellicer Cámara (January 16, 1897 – February 16, 1977), born in Villahermosa, Tabasco, was part of the first wave of modernist Mexican poets and was heavily active in the promotion of Mexican art and literature. An enthusiastic traveller, his work is filled with beautiful depictions of nature, and a certain sexual energy that is shared with his contemporary, Octavio Paz.

Read three of Carlos Pellicer's poems, free from geocities.com.

From wikipedia:
Xu Zhimo (January 15, 1897—November 19, 1931) was an early 20th century Chinese poet. He was given the name of Zhangxu and the courtesy name of Yousen . He later changed his courtesy name to Zhimo.

He is romanticized as pursuing love, freedom, and beauty all his life (from the words of Hu Shi). He promoted the form of modern Chinese poetry, and therefore made tremendous contributions to modern Chinese literature.

Read some of Xu Zhimo's poems, free from thinkquest.org.

From wikipedia:
Alfred Bertram Guthrie, Jr. (January 13, 1901 – April 26, 1991) was an American novelist, historian, and literary historian who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1950 for his The Way West. The author called himself "Bud" because he felt that Alfred Bertram "was a sissy name."

A. B. Guthrie, Jr. was born in Bedford, Indiana, and moved with his parents to Montana when he was six months old. His father was a graduate of Indiana University, his mother from a Earlham College at Richmond, Indiana. "My father came West to become the first principal of the first high school in the Montana territory," he said.

Learn more about A.B. Guthrie Jr. from Montana Newspaper Hall of Fame at the School of Journalism at the University of Montana.

From wikipedia:
Abd-ar-Rahman III (January 11, 889 – October 15, 961) was the Emir and Caliph of Cordoba (912-961) and a prince of the Ummayad dynasty in al-Andalus (Moorish Hispania).He ascended the throne when he was twenty-two years of age and reigned for half a century as the most powerful prince of the Umayyad dynasty in Iberia.

Learn more about Abd-ar-Rahman III and the Umayyad Caliphate, the first Muslim dynasty, free from Princeton University.

Carl Rogers (January 8, 1902 – February 4, 1987) was an influential American psychologist, who, along with Abraham Maslow, was the founder of the humanist approach to clinical psychology. He was also instrumental in the development of non-directive psychotherapy, which he initially termed Client-centered therapy. He later renamed it as the Person-centered approach (PCA) to reflect that his theories were meant to apply to all interactions between people, not just to those between therapist and client. Today PCA is also called Person-centered psychotherapy.

Biography
Rogers was born on January 8, 1902, in Oak Park, Illinois, a Chicago suburb. His father was a civil engineer and his mother was a housewife and devout Christian; Rogers was the fourth of six children.

Read an excerpt of Carl Rogers' "On Becoming a Person," a collection of essays by Carl Rogers published in 1961, presented free from panarchy.org.

From wikipedia:
Louis Braille (pronounced /ˈbreɪl/ in English, [bʁɑj] in French; January 4, 1809 – January 6, 1852) was the inventor of braille[1], a world-wide system used by blind and visually impaired people for reading and writing. Braille is read by passing the fingers over characters made up of an arrangement of one to six embossed points. It has been adapted to almost every known language.

Louis Braille became blind at the age of 3, when he accidentally stabbed himself in one eye with an awl, one of his father's workshop tools and got an infection, the other eye went blind from the infection spreading to it. At the age of 10, Braille earned a scholarship to the Royal Institution for Blind Youth in Paris, one of the first of its kind in the world. However, the conditions in the school were not notably better. Louis was served stale bread and water, and students were sometimes abused or locked up as a form of punishment.


Read excerpts from Out of Darkness: The Story of Louis Braille by Russell Freedman, free from googlebooks.

From wikipedia:
Anna May Wong( January 3, 1905 – February 2, 1961) was an American actress, the first Chinese American movie star, and the first Asian American to become an international star. Her long and varied career spanned both silent and sound film, television, stage, and radio.

Read more about Anna May Wong, free from wikipedia.

Robert Gruntal Nathan (January 2, 1894-May 25, 1985) was an American novelist and poet.

He was born into a prominent New York family. He was educated in the United States and Switzerland. He attended Harvard University for several years beginning in 1912. It was there that he began writing short fiction and poetry. However, he never graduated, choosing instead to drop out and take a job at an advertising firm to support his family. (He married while a junior at Harvard.) It was while working in 1919 that he wrote his first novel, a semi-autobiographical work - Peter Kinred. The novel was a critical failure. But his luck soon changed during the 1920s, when he wrote seven more novels including The Bishop's Wife which was later made into a successful film starring Cary Grant, David Niven and Loretta Young.

Read Robert Nathan's novel, Autumn, free from Project Gutenberg.

From wikipedia:
Maria Edgeworth (1 January 1767 – 22 May 1849) was an Anglo-Irish novelist.

Maria Edgeworth was born at Black Bourton, Oxfordshire, the second child of Richard Lovell Edgeworth and Anna Maria Edgeworth nee Elers. On her father's second marriage in 1773, she went with him to Ireland, where she eventually was to settle on his estate, Edgeworthstown, in County Longford. There, she mixed with the Anglo-Irish gentry, particularly Kitty Pakenham (later the wife of Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington), Lady Moira, and her aunt Margaret Ruston of Black Castle. She acted as manager of her father's estate, later drawing on this experience for her novels about the Irish. Edgeworth's early literary efforts were melodramatic rather than realistic. One of her schoolgirl novels features a villain who wore a mask made from the skin of a dead man's face. Maria's first published work was Letters for Literary Ladies in 1795, followed in 1796 by her first children's book, The Parent's Assistant, and in 1800 by her first novel Castle Rackrent.

Read Castle Rackrent by Maria Edgeworth, free from Project Gutenberg.