The James Logan Courier

From wikipedia:
Percy Heath (April 30, 1923 – April 28, 2005) was an American jazz bassist, brother to tenor saxophonist Jimmy Heath and drummer Albert Heath, with whom he formed the Heath Brothers in 1975. Heath also worked with Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Wes Montgomery and Thelonious Monk.

Heath was born in Wilmington, North Carolina and spent his childhood in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His father played the clarinet and his mother sang in the church choir. He started playing violin at age 8 and also sang locally. He was drafted into the Army in 1944, becoming a member of the Tuskegee Airmen, but saw no combat.

Watch an interview with Jimmy and Percy Heat, free from Artistshousemusic.org.

From wikipedia:
Rafael Sabatini (April 29, 1875 - February 13, 1950) was an Italian/British writer of novels of romance and adventure.

Rafael Sabatini was born in Jesi, Italy, to an English mother and Italian father. His parents were opera singers who became teachers.

At a young age, Rafael was exposed to many languages, living with his grandfather in England, attending school in Portugal and, as a teenager, in Switzerland. By the time he was seventeen, when he returned to England to live permanently, he was the master of five languages. He quickly added a sixth language — English — to his linguistic collection. He consciously chose to write in his adopted language, because, he said, "all the best stories are written in English."

Read Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini, one of 17 of his works available free from Project Gutenberg.

From wikipedia:
Oskar Schindler (28 April 1908 – 9 October 1974) was an ethnic German industrialist born in Moravia. He is credited with saving almost 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust by employing them in his enamelware and ammunitions factories, which were located in what is now Poland and the Czech Republic respectively. He is the subject of the novel Schindler's Ark, and the film based on it, Schindler's List.

Schindler was born on 28 April 1908 into an ethnic German family in Svitavy, Moravia, then part of Austria-Hungary, now in the Czech Republic. His parents, Hans Schindler and Franziska Luser, were divorced when Oskar was 27. Oskar was very close to his younger sister, Elfriede. Schindler was brought up in the Catholic faith but was not a religious man. After school he worked as a commercial salesman.

Learn more about Oskar Schindler from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

From wikipedia:
Walter Benjamin Lantz (April 27, 1899 – March 22, 1994) was an American cartoonist, animator, film producer, and director, best known for founding Walter Lantz Productions and creating Woody Woodpecker.

Lantz was born in New Rochelle, New York to Italian immigrant parents, Francesco Paolo Lantz (formerly Lanza) and Maria Gervasi. According to Joe Adamson's biography, The Walter Lantz Story, Lantz's father was given his new surname by an immigration official who Anglicized it. Walter Lantz was always interested in art, completing a mail order drawing class at age twelve. He saw his first animation when he watched Winsor McCay's cartoon short, Gertie the Dinosaur.

Read a news story and interview with Walter Lantz, free from googlebooks.com.

From wikipedia:
Gertrude Pridgett, orMa Rainey (April 26, 1886 - December 22, 1939) was one of the earliest known American professional blues singers and one of the first generation of such singers to record. She was billed as The Mother of the Blues. She did much to develop and popularize the form and was an important influence on younger blues women, such as Bessie Smith, and their careers.

Learn more about Ma Rainey, and hear her sing, free from redhotjazz.com.

From wikipedia:
Edward Roscoe Murrow, KBE (born Egbert Roscoe Murrow; April 25, 1908 – April 27, 1965) was an American broadcast journalist. He first came to prominence with a series of radio news broadcasts during World War II, which were followed by millions of listeners in the United States and Canada.

Fellow journalists Eric Sevareid, Ed Bliss and Alexander Kendrick considered Murrow one of journalism's greatest figures, noting his honesty and integrity in delivering the news.

A pioneer of television news broadcasting, Murrow produced a series of TV news reports that helped lead to the censure of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Learn more about Edward R. Murrow, and hear some of his broadcasts, free from otr.com.

From wikipedia:
Robert Penn Warren (April 24, 1905 – September 15, 1989) was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the influential literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935. He received the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel for his novel All the King's Men (1946) and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1958 and 1979. He is the only person to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and poetry.

Visit the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities website.

From wikipedia:
Dame Ngaio Marsh DBE (April 23, 1895–February 18, 1982), born Edith Ngaio Marsh, was a New Zealand crime writer and theatre director. There is some uncertainty over her birth date as her father neglected to register her birth until 1900.

Ngaio Marsh was educated at St Margaret's College in Christchurch, New Zealand, where she was a foundation pupil. She studied painting at the Canterbury College School of Art before becoming an actress with the Allan Wilkie company touring New Zealand. From 1928 onward she divided her time between living in the United Kingdom and in her native New Zealand. She was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1966.

Watch an interview with Ngaio Marsh, free from nzonscreen.com.

From wikipedia:
Raden Ayu Kartini, (21 April 1879 – 17 September 1904), or sometimes known as Raden Ajeng Kartini, was a prominent Javanese and an Indonesian national heroine. Kartini is known as a pioneer in the area of women's rights for native Indonesians.

Kartini was born into an aristocratic Javanese family in a time when Java was still part of the Dutch colony, the Dutch East Indies. Kartini's father, Raden Mas Sosroningrat, became Regency Chief of Jepara, and her mother was Raden Mas' first wife, but not the most important one. At this time, polygamy was a common practice among the nobility.She also wrote the Letters of a Javanese Princess.

Read excerpts from Letters of a Javanese Princess, free from googlebooks.com.

From wikipedia:
Joan Miró i Ferrà (April 20, 1893 – December 25, 1983) was a Spanish Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist born in Barcelona.

Earning international acclaim, his work has been interpreted as Surrealism, a sandbox for the subconscious mind, a re-creation of the childlike, and a manifestation of Catalan pride. In numerous interviews dating from the 1930s onwards, Miró expressed contempt for conventional painting methods as a way of supporting bourgeois society, and famously declared an "assassination of painting" in favour of upsetting the visual elements of established painting

From wikipedia:
Eliot Ness (April 19, 1903 – May 16, 1957) was an American Prohibition agent, famous for his efforts to enforce Prohibition in Chicago, Illinois, and the leader of a legendary team of law enforcement agents nicknamed The Untouchables.

Eliot Ness was born April 19, 1903 in Chicago, Illinois. He was the youngest of five siblings born to Norwegian immigrants, Peter and Emma Ness. Ness attended Christian Fenger High School in Chicago. He was educated at the University of Chicago, where he was a member of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, graduating in 1925 with a degree in business and law. He began his career as an investigator for the Retail Credit Company of Atlanta. He was assigned to the Chicago territory, where he conducted background investigations for the purpose of credit information. He returned to the University to take a course in criminology, eventually earning a Master's Degree in the field.

Read Eliot Ness: The Man Behind the Myth, free from TruTv.com.

From wikipedia:
Vicente Yap Sotto, also known as Nyor Inting (1877-1950) was a former Senator of the Philippines and considered as one of the greatest Cebuanos of the 20th century.

His principal achievement lies in two areas: law, politics, and government; and culture and letters.

Sotto was born in Cebu City on April 18, 1877 to Marcelino Sotto and Pascuala Yap.

He finished his secondary education at the University of San Carlos (formerly Colegio de San Carlos), Cebu City. He obtained the degree of Bachelor of Laws and Judicial Science and passed the bar examinations in 1907.

Read more about Vicente Sotto and other Cebuano writers, free from islandcebu.blogspot.com

From wikipedia:
Wenceslao Moreno (April 17, 1896 – April 20, 1999), better known as Señor Wences, was a Spanish ventriloquist. His popularity grew with his frequent appearances on CBS-TV's Ed Sullivan Show in the 1950s and '60s.

Wences was born in Peñaranda de Bracamonte, Salamanca, Spain. His father was Antonio Moreno Ross, artist, and his mother was Josefa Centeno Lavera, both from Salamanca. His name Wenceslao is of Czech origin (Václav) meaning "victorious". As a newborn, his family was so destitute that his birth certificate was three days late being filed. (This has led to some confusion regarding Moreno's age at death.)

Watch Señor Wences on The Ed Sullivan Show, free from YouTube.

From wiipedia:
José de Diego y Martínez (April 16, 1866 – July 16, 1918), known as "The Father of the Puerto Rican Independence Movement", was a statesman, journalist, poet, and advocate for Puerto Rico's independence from Spain and from the United States.

De Diego, son of Felipe de Diego Parajón a Spanish army officer from Asturias, Spain and Elisa Martínez Muñiz a Criollo from Puerto Rico, was born in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico and received his primary education in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico. He then moved to Spain where he graduated from the "Polytechnic College of Logroño". While in Spain, de Diego collaborated with the newspaper El Progreso (Progress) which was founded by José Julián Acosta and which attacked the political situation in Puerto Rico. This led to various arrests and eventually he returned to the island.

Read more about José de Diego, free from the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress.

From wikipedia:
Thomas Hart Benton (April 15, 1889 - January 19, 1975) was an American painter and muralist. Along with Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry, he was at the forefront of the Regionalist art movement. His fluid, almost sculpted paintings showed everyday scenes of life in the United States. Though his work is perhaps best associated with the Midwest, he created scores of paintings of New York - where he lived for over 20 years, Martha’s Vineyard - where he summered for much of his adult life, the American South and the American West.

See the Naval art of Thomas Hart Benton, and read more about him, free from the U.S. Navy.

From wikipedia:
Anne Sullivan, Annie Sullivan, or Johanna Mansfield Sullivan Macy, (April 14, 1866 – October 20, 1936) was a teacher best known as the tutor of Helen Keller.

Anne Sullivan was born in Feeding Hills, Massachusetts. Her parents, Thomas Sullivan and Alice Clohessy, were poor Irish farmers who left Ireland in 1847 because of the Irish Potato Famine. Sullivan’s father was an alcoholic and sometimes abused her, but he also passed on to her Irish tradition and folklore. Her mother, suffering from tuberculosis, died when she was eight, and when she was ten, she had to move in with a relative. Later her relatives left her and her brother at the Massachusetts State Infirmary in Tewksbury. Sullivan spent all her time with her younger, crippled brother (who, like his mother, suffered from tuberculosis) in hopes that they would never be separated; however, Jimmie soon died in the infirmary.

Read The Story of my life; with her letters (1887-1901) and a supplementary account of her education, including passages from the reports and letters of her teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan, by John Albert Macy, free from Project Gutenberg.

From wikipedia:
Franklin Winfield Woolworth (April 13, 1852 – April 8, 1919) was an American merchant. Born in Rodman, N.Y., he was the founder of F.W. Woolworth Company, an operator of discount stores that priced merchandise at five and ten cents. He pioneered the now-common practices of buying merchandise direct from manufacturers and fixing prices on items, rather than haggling.

The son of a farmer, Woolworth aspired to be a merchant. In 1873, he started working in a drygoods store in Watertown, New York. He worked for free for the first three months, because the owner claimed "why should I pay you for teaching the business". He remained there for six years. There he observed a passing fad: Leftover items were priced at five cents and placed on a table. Woolworth liked the idea, so he borrowed $300 to open a store where all items were priced at five cents.

Learn more about Woolworth's history in England, free from the Woolworths Virtual Museum.

From wikipedia:
Keiko Fukuda (born April 12, 1913) is the highest-ranked female judo practitioner in history, holding the rank of 9th dan from both the Kodokan and the United States Judo Federation, and is the last surviving student of Kanō Jigorō, founder of judo. She is a renowned pioneer of women's judo, being the first woman promoted to 6th dan (c. 1972), and later 9th dan (2006), by the Kodokan. After completing her formal education in Japan, Fukuda visited the United States of America to teach in the 1950s and 1960s, and eventually settled there. She continues to teach her art in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Read more about Keiko Fukuda, free from judoinfo.com.

From wikipedia:
Jamini Roy (April 11, 1887-April 24, 1972) was an Indian painter.

Jamini Roy was born in 1887 into a middle-class family of land-owners in a village called Beliatore in the District of Bankura in Bengal .

When he was sixteen he was sent to study at the Government School of Art in Calcutta. He was taught to paint in the prevailing academic tradition drawing Classical nudes and painting in oils and in 1908 he received his Diploma in Fine Art.

Read more about Jamini Roy and his art, free from the India Times.

Joseph Pulitzer (April 10, 1847 – October 29, 1911) was a Hungarian-American publisher best known for posthumously establishing the Pulitzer Prizes and (along with William Randolph Hearst) for originating yellow journalism.

Pulitzer was born in Makó, Hungary, Pulitzer sought a military career, but was turned down by the Austrian army for frail health and poor eyesight. He emigrated to the United States in 1864 to serve in the American Civil War. After the war he settled in St. Louis, Missouri, where in 1868 he began working for a German-language daily newspaper, the Westliche Post. He joined the Republican Party and was elected to the Missouri State Assembly in 1869. In 1872, Pulitzer purchased the Post for $3,000. Then, in 1879, he bought the St. Louis Dispatch for $2,700 and merged the two papers, which became the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which remains St. Louis' daily newspaper. It was at the Post-Dispatch that Pulitzer developed his role as a champion of the common man with exposès and a hard-hitting populist approach.

Read about Joseph Pulitzer, the Pulitzer Prize and prize winners at pulitzer.org.

From wikipedia:
Charles Baudelaire (April 9, 1821 – August 31, 1867) was a French poet who also produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe.

Baudelaire the Poet
Baudelaire is one of the major innovators in French literature. His poetry is influenced by the French romantic poets of the earlier 19th century, although its attention to the formal features of verse connect it more closely to the work of the contemporary 'Parnassians'. As for theme and tone, in his works we see the rejection of the belief in the supremacy of nature and the fundamental goodness of man as typically espoused by the romantics and expressed by them in rhetorical, effusive and public voice in favor of a new urban sensibility, an awareness of individual moral complexity, an interest in vice (linked with decadence) and refined sensual and aesthetical pleasures, and the use of urban subject matter, such as the city, the crowd, individual passers-by, all expressed in highly ordered verse, sometimes through a cynical and ironic voice. Formally, the use of sound to create atmosphere, and of 'symbols', (images which take on an expanded function within the poem), betray a move towards considering the poem as a self-referential object, an idea further developed by the Symbolists Verlaine and Mallarmé, who acknowledge Baudelaire as a pioneer in this regard.

Read poems by Charles Baudelaire, free from the Poetry Archive.

From wikipedia:
Dionisio "Dennis" Chavez (April 8, 1888 – November 18, 1962) was a Democratic politician from the U.S. State of New Mexico who served in the United States House of Representatives, and in the United States Senate from 1935 to 1962.
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Chavez was born in Los Chaves, Valencia County, New Mexico. His parents, David and Paz Chavez, were members of families that had lived in Los Chaves for generations. In 1895, David Chavez moved his family to the Barelas section of Albuquerque where Dennis attended school until financial hardships necessitated that he work. His first job was delivering groceries at the Highland Grocery store. Later on, he studied engineering and surveying at night, and worked as an engineer for the City of Albuquerque for several years.

Visit the Dennis Chavez Foundation.

From wikipedia:
Gabriela Mistral (April 7, 1889 – January 10, 1957) was the pseudonym of Lucila de María del Perpetuo Socorro Godoy Alcayaga, a Chilean poet, educator, diplomat, and feminist who was the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1945. Some central themes in her poems are nature, betrayal, love, a mother's love, sorrow and recovery, travel, and Latin American identity as formed from a mixture of Native American and European influences. Gabriela Mistral was of Basque and Amerindian descent.

Mistral was born in Vicuña, Chile, but was raised in the small Andean village of Montegrande, where she attended the Primary school taught by her older sister, Emelina Molina. She respected her sister greatly, despite the many financial problems that Emelina brought her, in later years. Her father, Juan Gerónimo Godoy Villanueva, was also a schoolteacher. He abandoned the family before she was three years old, and died, long since estranged from the family, in 1911. Throughout her early years she was never far from poverty. By age fifteen, she was supporting herself and her mother, Petronila Alcayaga, a seamstress, by working as a teacher's aide in the seaside town of Compañia Baja, near La Serena, Chile.

Read Gabriela Mistral's Nobel Prize banquet speech.

From wikipedia:
Félix Nadar was the pseudonym of Gaspard-Félix Tournachon (6 April 1820, Paris – 21 March 1910), a French photographer, caricaturist, journalist, novelist and balloonist. Some photographs by Nadar are marked "P. Nadar" for "Photographie Nadar".

He was a caricaturist for Le Charivari in 1848. In 1849 he created the Revue comique and the Petit journal pour rire. He took his first photographs in 1853 and in 1858 became the first person to take aerial photographs. He also pioneered the use of artificial lighting in photography, working in the catacombs of Paris.

View examples of Nadar's photos, free from masters-of-photography.com.

Elihu Yale (April 5, 1649 – July 8, 1721) was a British merchant, philanthropist, governor of the British East India Company, and a benefactor of Collegiate School of Connecticut, which in 1718 was named Yale College in his honor.

Born in Boston, Colony of Massachusetts to David Yale (1613–1690) and Ursula Knight (1624–1698), Yale was the grandson of Ann Lloyd (1591–1659), who after the death of her first husband, Thomas Yale (1590–1619) in Chester, Cheshire, England, married Governor Theophilus Eaton (1590–1657) of New Haven Colony. In 1652, when Elihu was three years old, the Yale family moved back to England and never returned to North America.


Read more about the history of Yale University.

From wikipedia:
Maya Angelou ( born Marguerite Ann Johnson on April 4, 1928) is an American author and poet who has been called "America's most visible black female autobiographer" by scholar Joanne M. Braxton. She is best known for her series of six autobiographical volumes, which focus on her childhood and early adult experiences. The first and most highly acclaimed, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), tells of her first seventeen years. It brought her international recognition, and was nominated for a National Book Award. She has been awarded over 30 honorary degrees and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for her 1971 volume of poetry, Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'Fore I Diiie.

Visit mayaangelou.com.

From wikipedia:
Iron Eyes Cody (April 3, 1904 – January 4, 1999) was an American actor. He was recognized for portraying American Indians in Hollywood films. Near the end of his life, his Italian ancestry was made public. In 1995 he was honored by the American Indian community for his portrayals.

Cody was born as Espera Oscar de Corti in Kaplan, Louisiana, a son of Antonio de Corti and his wife, Francesca Salpietra, immigrants from Sicily, Italy. They had a local grocery store in Gueydan, Louisiana, where he was raised. In some of his earliest acting credits, Cody was listed as Tony de Corti. Cody was drawn to the Indian people finding comfort/similarities for himself in their struggle. He later changed his name to Tony Cody, and from then on lived his life as if he were of indigenous descent, both on and off the screen. Cody married Bertha "Birdie" Parker, a woman of indigenous descent.

Visit IronEyesCody.org.

Max Ernst (2 April 1891 – 1 April 1976) was a German painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst is considered to be one of the primary pioneers of the Dada movement and Surrealism.

Ernst was born on April 2, 1891, in Brühl, near Cologne, the third of nine children of a middle-class Catholic family. His father Philipp Ernst was a teacher of the deaf and dumb and an amateur painter. A devout Christian and a strict disciplinarian, he inspired in his son a penchant for defying authority, while his interest in painting and sketching in nature influenced Max Ernst to take up painting himself. In 1909 Ernst enrolled in the University of Bonn, studying philosophy, art history, literature, psychology and psychiatry. He visited asylums and became fascinated with the art of the mentally ill patients; he also started painting this year, producing sketches in the garden of the Brühl castle and portraits of his sister and himself. In 1911 Ernst befriended August Macke and joined his Die Rheinischen Expressionisten group of artists, deciding to become an artist. In 1912 he visited the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne, where works by Pablo Picasso and post-Impressionists such as Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin profoundly influenced his approach to art. His own work is exhibited the same year together with that of the Das Junge Rheinland group, at Galerie Feldman in Cologne, and then in several group exhibitions in 1913.

Learn more about Max Ernst, and see examples of his art at artchive.com.

From wikipedia:
Keshav Baliram Hedgewar(April 1, 1889 – June 21, 1940) was the founder of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Hedgewar founded the RSS in Nagpur, Maharashtra in 1925, with the intention of promoting the concept of the Hindu nation. Hedgewar drew upon influences from social and spiritual Hindu reformers such as Swami Vivekananda, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and Aurobindo to develop the core philosophy of the RSS.

He went to Kolkata to pursue a degree in medicine. After successful completion, Hedgewar was drawn into the influence of secret revolutionary organisations like the Anushilan Samiti and Jugantar in Bengal. He was also a member of the Hindu Mahasabha till his death. Hedgewar was imprisoned for sedition by the British government in 1921 for a year and again in 1930 for nine months. After his spell in prison he instructed the RSS to remain aloof from political activities including the Salt Satyagraha (1930) and continue mainly as a social organisation.

Visit the official website of the RSS.