Browsing People by region: North America (816 records)
  • 1895 – 1974, American

    Comedian (Abbot and Costello). Their work, first in Vaudeville and later in film and on radio and television, expressed the value of silliness.

  • 1893 – 1971, American

    Lawyer and U.S. secretary of state (1949-1953). He expressed values of devotion to country and extreme personal rectitude. Some thought him the embodiment of the so-called White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP).

  • 1915 – 2004, American

    Oil well fire-fighter. He became a symbol of physical derring-do.

  • 1722 – 1803, American

    Merchant, political leader, and rebel. He courageously organized the Boston Tea Party prior to the American Revolutionary War.

  • 1767 – 1848, American

    Ambassador, U.S. senator, sixth president of the United States, then Congressman. He was a vocal enemy of slavery.

  • 1735 – 1826, American

    U.S. president. A founding father of the United States, he exemplified honor, decency, and civility in public life.

  • 1744 – 1818, American

    Public figure. She took positions that would be described later as feminist, and left a rich literary record in her extensive letters.

  • 1838 – 1918, American

    Historian and essayist. He was one of the master expositors of the related values of sense experience (using our eyes, ears, and other sense organs to take in every bit of life) and empiricism (relying on observation, including careful self-observation rather than on logic or on authority). His life and work also expressed the value of a life of contemplation rather than action (in contrast to his immediate forebears, who served as U.S. presidents, congressmen and ambassadors); of friendship and private life; of beauty and estheticism; of knowledge and discovery; and of the appreciation of complexity and paradox.

  • 1860 – 1935, American

    Jane Addams was one of the first American public intellectuals, and a hugely successful activist and reformer as well. In 1931, she became the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. She may have been the most influential woman in American history. She founded Hull House, a "settlement house" intended to serve the poor of Chicago, in 1897, and lived there the rest of her life.

    As time passed, she became a spokesperson for the poor, for women, for children, for families, for sanitation, for public health, for social and political reform, first in Chicago, then nationally, and finally throughout the world. Concern for the poor and minorities led her gradually into active politics. This included, in addition to municipal reform, winning voting rights for women and also a pacifist approach to world affairs.

    In her time, Addams was as famous as a president, and her books were read everywhere.

  • 1912 – 1988, American

    Cartoonist. He expressed the humorous possibilities of the macabre.

  • 1902 – 2001, American

    Philosopher. His work epitomized the search for moral truth, through verbal logic. He also defended classical learning and "great books."

  • 1909 – 1955, American

    Author of books, and important film scripts (The African Queen and The Night of the Hunter). He collaborated with Walker Evans in capturing the gritty poverty of the pre-World War II American South in Let us Now Praise Famous Men.

  • 1908 – 2000, American

    U.S. politician, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. He helped President Lyndon Johnson pass civil rights and "Great Society" (social services and welfare) legislation that was widely regarded as the culmination of what President Roosevelt had started in the 1930's with the "New Deal."

  • 1891 – 1971, American

    Archaeologist, leading excavator of biblical sites. He loved history, the Holy Land, and the Bible.

  • 1832 – 1899, American

    Novelist and Unitarian clergyman. His books about young men who prosper became a by-word for hope, optimism, hard work, persistence, and the importance of good moral character in earning and winning success.

  • Born 1942, American
  • Born 1935, American

    Film actor and director. His films, which are autobiographical in style, expressed the value of neuroticism, especially of neurotic feelings of inferiority or inadequacy, along with psychoanalysis, self-absorption, social and sexual license, and urban living.

  • 1738 – 1789, American
  • Born 1927, American

    Christian theologian. A leading figure in the "Death of God" theology of the 1960's, his work expresses extreme Christian "liberalism," in which traditional Christian doctrines are largely abandoned. One of his books is titled The Gospel of Christian Atheism.

  • 1840 – 1913, American

    Self-made merchant (B. Altman and Co.). He assembled a major collection of art and left it to the Metropolitan Museum. His marriage of business and art collecting illustrates a fairly common theme in the history of money and power.