The James Logan Courier

From wikipedia:
Robert Wilhelm Eberhard Bunsen (31 March 1811 – 16 August 1899) was a German chemist. He investigated emission spectra of heated elements, and with Gustav Kirchhoff he discovered cesium and rubidium. Bunsen developed several gas-analytical methods, he was a pioneer in photochemistry, and he did early work in the field of organoarsenic chemistry. With his laboratory assistant, Peter Desaga, he developed the Bunsen burner, an improvement on the laboratory burners then in use. The Bunsen-Kirchhoff Award for spectroscopy is named after Bunsen and his colleague, Gustav Kirchhoff.

Read Gasometry by Robert Bunsen and Henry Enfield Roscoe, free from google.books.

From wikipedia:
Anna Sewell (30 March 1820 – 25 April 1878) was a British writer, best known as the author of the classic novel Black Beauty.

Anna Sewell was born in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, England into a devoutly Quaker family. Her father was Isaac Sewell (1793-1879), and her mother, Mary Wright Sewell (1798 - 1884) was a successful writer of children's books in her own right. Sewell had one sibling, a younger brother called Philip (1822–1906) who worked first as a construction engineer in Europe, building railways in Spain and elsewhere, before settling back in Norfolk and working as a banker.

Read Black Beauty by Anna Sewell, free from Project Gutenberg.

From wikipedia:
Philip Ahn (March 29, 1905 – February 28, 1978) was a Korean-American actor. Ahn was born Pil Lip Ahn in Highland Park, California.

His parents were the first Korean married couple admitted into the United States, and his mother, Helen Lee, only the second Korean woman admitted, when they arrived in 1902. His father, Dosan Ahn Chang-ho, was an educator and an activist for Korean independence during the Japanese occupation. Philip is believed to be the first American citizen born in the United States of Korean parents.

Read excerpts from the book, Hollywood Asian: Philip Ahn and the Politics of Cross-Ethnic Performance, by Hye Seung Chung, free from googlebooks.com.

Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (March 28, 1793–December 10, 1864) was an American geographer, geologist, and ethnologist, noted for his early studies of Native American cultures, as well as for his discovery in 1832 of the source of the Mississippi River. His wife's knowledge on Native American legends shared with Schoolcraft formed in part the source material for Longfellow's epic poem, The Song of Hiawatha.

Read Henry Schoolcraft's Personal Memoirs of a Residence of Thirty Years with the Indian Tribes on the American Frontiers, free from Project Gutenberg.

From wikipedia:
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, born Maria Ludwig Michael Mies (March 27, 1886 – August 17, 1969) was a German-American architect. He was commonly referred to and addressed by his surname, Mies, by most of his American students and others.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, along with Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, is widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of modern architecture. Mies, like many of his post World War I contemporaries, sought to establish a new architectural style that could represent modern times just as Classical and Gothic did for their own eras. He created an influential 20th century architectural style, stated with extreme clarity and simplicity. His mature buildings made use of modern materials such as industrial steel and plate glass to define interior spaces. He strived towards an architecture with a minimal framework of structural order balanced against the implied freedom of free-flowing open space. He called his buildings "skin and bones" architecture. He sought a rational approach that would guide the creative process of architectural design, and is known for his use of the aphorisms "less is more" and "God is in the details".

Learn more from the Mies van der Rohe society at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

From wikipedia:
Alfred Edward Housman (26 March 1859 – 30 April 1936), usually known as A. E. Housman, was an English classical scholar and poet, best known for his cycle of poems A Shropshire Lad. Lyrical and almost epigrammatic in form, the poems were mostly written before 1900. Their wistful evocation of doomed youth in the English countryside, in spare language and distinctive imagery, appealed strongly to late Victorian, Edwardian and Georgian taste, and to many early twentieth century English composers (beginning with Arthur Somervell) both before and after the First World War. Through its song-setting the poetry became closely associated with that era, and with Shropshire itself.

Read A.E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad, free from Bartleby.com.

From wikipedia:
Myles Walter Keogh (March 25, 1840 – June 25, 1876) was an Irishman who fought in Italy during the 1860 Papal War before volunteering for the Union side in the American Civil War (1861 to 1865). During the war years, he was promoted from the rank of Captain to that of Major, finally being awarded the brevet rank of Lieutenant Colonel. After the Civil War ended, Keogh received a permanent commission as Captain of Company I, 7th U.S. Cavalry Regiment commanded by George Armstrong Custer during the Indian Wars of the 1870s. Myles Keogh was killed with Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, June 25 1876.

Learn more about Myles Keogh at www.myleskeogh.org.

From wikipedia:
George Francis Train (March 24, 1829 – January 5, 1904) was a businessman, author, and an eccentric figure in American history.

Train was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1829. At the age of four he was orphaned in New Orleans after a yellow fever plague killed his family. He was raised by his strict Methodist grandparents in Boston, who hoped he would become a minister.




Read My Life in Many States and in Foreign Lands by George Francis Train, free from googlebooks.com.

From wikipedia:
Nathaniel "Texas Jack" Reed (March 23, 1862 – January 7, 1950) was a 19th-century American outlaw responsible for many stagecoach, bank, and train robberies throughout the American Southwest during the 1880s and '90s. He acted on his own and also led a bandit gang, operating particularly in the Rocky Mountains and Indian Territory.

Read more about Texas Jack.

From wikipedia:
Benito Pablo Juárez García (March 21, 1806 – July 18, 1872) was a Zapotec Amerindian who served five terms as president of Mexico: 1858–1861 as interim, 1861–1865, 1865–1867, 1867–1871 and 1871–1872. For resisting the French occupation, overthrowing the Empire, and restoring the Republic, as well as for his efforts to modernize the country, Juárez is often regarded as Mexico's greatest and most beloved leader. Juárez was recognized by the United States as a ruler in exile during the French-controlled Second Mexican Empire, and got their support in reclaiming Mexico under the Monroe Doctrine after the United States Civil War ended. Benito Juárez was the first Mexican leader who did not have a military background, and also the first full-blooded indigenous national to serve as President of Mexico and to lead a country in the Western Hemisphere in over 300 years.

Read Mexico's Lincoln: the ecstasy and agony of Benito Juárez by Jim Tuck, free from mexconnect.com.

From wikipedia:
Ota Benga (c.1881 or 1884 – March 20, 1916) was a Congolese pygmy who was featured in a 1906 human zoo exhibit at the Bronx Zoo alongside an orangutan. The exhibit was intended to promote the concept of human evolution, eugenics and scientific racism.

Listen to From the Belgian Congo to the Bronx Zoo, about Ota Benga, free from National Public Radio.

Captain From wikipedia:
Sir Richard Francis Burton KCMG FRGS (March 19, 1821 – October 20, 1890) was an English explorer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, ethnologist, linguist, poet, hypnotist, fencer and diplomat. He was known for his travels and explorations within Asia and Africa as well as his extraordinary knowledge of languages and cultures. According to one count, he spoke twenty-nine European, Asian, and African languages.


Read Richard Francis Burton's Vikram and the Vampire: Classic Hindu Tales of Adventure, Magic and Romance, one of 30 of his works available free from Project Gutenberg.

From wikipedia:
Ebenezer Elliott (17 March 1781 - 1 December 1849) was an English poet, known as the Corn Law rhymer.

Elliott was born at the New Foundry, Masbrough, in the Parish of Rotherham, Yorkshire. His father, (known as "Devil Elliott", for his fiery sermons) was an extreme Calvinist and a strong Radical, and was engaged in the iron trade. His mother suffered from poor health, and young Ebenezer, although one of a family of eleven children, of whom eight reached mature life, had a solitary and rather morbid childhood. At the age of six he contracted small-pox, which left him ‘fearfully disfigured and six weeks blind.’ His health was permanently affected, and he suffered from illness and depression in later life.

Learn more about Ebenezer Elliott.

Captain Matthew Flinders RN (16 March 1774 – 19 July 1814) was one of the most accomplished navigators and cartographers of his age. In a career that spanned just over twenty years, he sailed with Captain William Bligh, circumnavigated Australia and encouraged the use of that name for the continent, survived shipwreck and disaster only to be imprisoned as a spy, identified and corrected the effect of iron components and equipment on board wooden ships upon compass readings, and wrote the seminal work on Australian exploration A Voyage To Terra Australis.

Read Matthew Flinders' A Voyage to Terra Australis — Volume 1, free from Project Gutenberg. Volume Two is also available.

Sly Stone (born Sylvester Stewart on 15 March 1943, in Denton, Texas) is an American musician, songwriter, and record producer, most famous for his role as frontman for Sly & the Family Stone, a band which played a critical role in the development of soul, funk and psychedelia in the 1960s and 1970s. Sly & the Family Stone was started in San Francisco, California.

Sylvester Stewart was the second of 5 children raised in Vallejo, in the northern San Francisco Bay Area. After the family moved from Denton, Texas to Vallejo, he and his brother Freddie and their sisters Rose and Vaetta formed "The Stewart Four" as children, performing gospel music in the Church of God in Christ and even recording a single in 1952. All of the Stewart children except oldest sister Loretta would later adopt the surname "Stone" and become members of Sly & the Family Stone.


Visit Phattadatta.com, the official website of Sly Stone.

From wikipedia:
Sylvia Beach (March 14, 1887 – October 5, 1962), born Nancy Woodbridge Beach in her father's parsonage in Baltimore, Maryland, was one of the leading expatriate figures in Paris between World War I and II.

Early life
Sylvia Beach was born on March 14, 1887, the second of three daughters of Sylvester Beach and Eleanor Thomazine Orbison. Although named Nancy after her grandmother Orbison she later decided to change her name to Sylvia. Her maternal grandparents were missionaries to India and her father, a Presbyterian minister, was decended from several generations of clergymen. When the girls were young the family lived in Baltimore and in Bridgewater, New Jersey. Then in 1901 the family moved to France when Sylvester Beach was appointed as assistant minister of the American Church in Paris and director of the American student center.


Learn more about Sylvia Beach, free from the Sylvia Beach Papers, from Princeton University.

From wikipedia:
Walter Hubert Annenberg (March 13, 1908 – October 1, 2002) was an American billionaire publisher, philanthropist, and diplomat.

Walter Annenberg was born in to a Jewish family in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on March 13, 1908. He was the son of Sarah and Moses "Moe" Annenberg, who published The Daily Racing Form and purchased The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1936. The Annenberg family moved to Long Island, New York in 1920, and Walter attended high school at the Peddie School in Hightstown, New Jersey, graduating in 1927. He went on to college at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 1931. While in college he was a member of Zeta Beta Tau, a Jewish fraternity.

Learn more about Walter Annenberg from the Annenberg Foundation website.

From wikipedia:
George Berkeley (12 March 1685 – 14 January 1753), also known as Bishop Berkeley, was an influential Irish philosopher whose primary philosophical achievement is the advancement of a theory dubbed "immaterialism" by Berkeley himself (also later called "subjective idealism"). This theory, summed up in his dictum, "Esse est percipi" ("To be is to be perceived"), states that individuals can only directly know sensations and ideas of objects, not abstractions such as "matter." His most widely-read works Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713) (Philonous, the "lover of the mind," representing Berkeley himself and Hylas, named after the ancient Greek word for matter, partially representing the ideas of Locke). In 1734 he published The Analyst, a critique of the foundations of calculus, which was influential in the subsequent development of mathematics.

Read Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous by George Berkeley, one of four of his works available free from Project Gutenberg.

Ralph David Abernathy (March 11, 1926 – April 17, 1990) was an American civil rights leader.

Abernathy was born the son of a farmer in Linden, Alabama. After serving in the army during World War II, he enrolled at Alabama State University, in Montgomery, Alabama, graduating with a degree in mathematics in 1950. His involvement in political activism began in college while he was a member of Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, when he led demonstrations protesting the lack of heat and hot water in his dormitory and the dreadful food served in the cafeteria. In 1951 he earned a M.A. in sociology from Atlanta University (later Clark Atlanta University) and then became pastor of the First Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. While living in Montgomery he formed a close and enduring partnership with Dr. Martin Luther King.

Read a 1968 speech by Ralph Abernathy memorializing Dr. Martin Luther King, free from the Northeastern University library.

From wikipedia:
Mikimoto Kōkichi (10 March 1858 – 21 September 1954) was a Japanese entrepreneur and adopter of the Mise/Nishikawa technique for production of spherical cultured pearls.

Born as the first son of an udon shop owner in Toba, Shima Province (present-day Mie prefecture), Mikimoto left school at the age of 13 and sold vegetables to support his family. Seeing the pearl divers of Ise unloading their treasures at the shore in his childhood started his fascination with pearls.

Meiji entrepreneur
In 1888, Mikimoto obtained a loan to start his first pearl oyster farm at the Shinmei inlet on Ago Bay in Mie prefecture together with his wife and partner Ume. On 11 July 1893, after many failures and near bankruptcy, he was able to create the hemispherical cultured pearls. He introduced these mabes at a marine products exposition in Norway in 1897, and began an export business. However, it took him another 12 years to create completely spherical pearls that were indistinguishable from the highest quality natural ones, and commercially viable harvests were not obtained until the 1920s.

Learn more about Mikimoto Kokichi and the Japanese pearl industry, free from the Mikimoto Pearl Island website.

From wikipedia:
Amerigo Vespucci (March 9, 1454 - February 22, 1512) was an Italian merchant, explorer and cartographer. He played a senior role in two voyages which explored the east coast of South America between 1499 and 1502. On the first of these voyages he discovered that South America extended much further south than believed by other European explorers crossing the Atlantic, who thought they were reaching Asia (the Indies). Vespucci's voyages became widely known in Europe after two accounts attributed to him were published between 1502 and 1504. In 1507, Martin Waldseemüller produced a world map on which he named the new continent America after Vespucci's first name, Amerigo. In an accompanying book, Waldseemüller published one of the Vespucci accounts, which led to criticism that Vespucci was trying to usurp Christopher Columbus' glory. However, the rediscovery in the 18th century of other letters by Vespucci, primarily the Soderini Letter, has led to the view that the early published accounts were fabrications, not by Vespucci, but by others. Waldseemüller may have suspected the self promoting tendencies of Vespucci even in his own time as later publications replaced America with Terra Incognita.

Read more about Amerigo Vespucci in the book Amerigo Vespucci by Frederick A. Ober, available at Project Gutenberg.

From wikipedia:
Hector Louis Berlioz (December 11, 1803 – March 8, 1869) was a French Romantic composer best known for the Symphonie fantastique, first performed in 1830, and for his Grande Messe des Morts (Requiem) of 1837, with its tremendous resources that include four antiphonal brass choirs. At the other extreme, he also composed about 50 songs for voice and piano.

Listen to the introduction to Berlioz' Romeo et Juliet, in mp3 format, free from The Courier.
Click here to listen to 19 more pieces from Romeo et Juliet, free from www.classicistranieri.com.

From wikipedia:
Pieter Cornelis (Piet) Mondriaan, after 1912 Mondrian, (b. Amersfoort, Netherlands, March 7, 1872 — d. New York City, February 1, 1944) was a Dutch painter.

He was an important contributor to the De Stijl art movement and group, which was founded by Theo van Doesburg. Despite being well-known, often-parodied and even trivialized, Mondrian's paintings exhibit a complexity that belies their apparent simplicity. He is best known for his non-representational paintings that he called compositions, consisting of rectangular forms of red, yellow, blue, white or black, separated by thick, black rectilinear lines. They are the result of a stylistic evolution that occurred over the course of nearly 30 years and continued beyond that point to the end of his life.

From wikipedia:
Cyrano Hercule Savinien de Bergerac (March 6, 1619 – July 28, 1655) was a French dramatist and duellist born in Paris, who is now best remembered for the many works of fiction which have been woven around his life story, most notably the play by Edmond Rostand which bears his name (see Cyrano de Bergerac (play)). In those fictional works he is featured with an overly large nose

Life and works
Cyrano was born into an old Parisian family and spent much of his childhood in Saint-Forget (now Yvelines). He went to school in Paris and spent his adult life there when he was not on campaign. He was not, therefore, a Gascon, but many of his fellow-soldiers would have been. The myth of his Gascon origins may even have been cultivated by him during his lifetime, since the swash-buckling manners of the Gascon soldiers were much admired in his day. The real Cyrano de Bergerac had little in common with the hero of the Rostand play.

Read Cyrano de Bergerac's The Other World: The Societies and Governments of the Moon,translated from French by Donald Webb, free from bewilderingstories.com

From wikipedia:
William Henry Beveridge, 1st Baron Beveridge (March 5, 1879 – 16 March 1963) was a British economist and social reformer. He is perhaps best known for his 1942 report Social Insurance and Allied Services (known as the Beveridge Report) which served as the basis for the post-World War II Labour government's Welfare State, including specially the National Health Service.

Read the Social Insurance and Allied Services Report by Sir William Beveridge, also known as the Beveridge Report, free from the Modern History Sourcebook at Fordham University.

From wikipedia:
Dr. William Carlos Williams (sometimes known as WCW) (September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963), was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism.

Life
Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, a community near the city of Paterson. His father was an English immigrant, and his mother was born in Puerto Rico. He attended public school in Rutherford until 1897, then was sent to study at Château de Lancy near Geneva, Switzerland, the Lycée Condorcet in Paris, France, for two years and Horace Mann School in New York City. Then, in 1902, he entered the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. During his time at Penn, Williams befriended Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle (best known as H.D.) and the painter Charles Demuth.

Listen to William Carlos Williams recite his poetry, free from PennSound, the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania.

From wikipedia:
Robert Hooke, (July 18, 1635 – March 3, 1703) was an English polymath who played an important role in the scientific revolution, through both experimental and theoretical work. His father was John Hooke curate of the Church of All Saints, Freshwater.

Early life
Robert Hooke was interested in the sciences, particularly biology, from his early childhood. Like his three other brothers (all ministers), Robert was expected to be good at his education and join his father's church. However, Hooke continually suffered from headaches whilst studying. His parents, fearing he would not reach adulthood, decided to give up on his education and leave him to his own devices.

Read the Project Gutenberg eBook, Micrographia, by Robert Hooke, free.

From wikipedia:
Susanna "Dora" Madora Salter (March 2, 1860 – March 17, 1961) was a U.S. politician and activist. She served as mayor of Argonia, Kansas, becoming the first woman elected as mayor and the first women elected to any political office in the United States.

Read more about Susanna Salter, free from the Kansas Collection.