Bare Fact

On the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11 month of 1918, an armistice, or temporary cessation of hostilities between the Allied nations and Germany was declared in the 1st World War, then known as "the Great War."

The Treaty of Versailles was signed on June 28, 1919, but November 11 remained in the public imagination as the date that marked the end of the Great War. November the 11th became a legal federal holiday in 1938. After World War II and the Korean War, Armistice Day became Veterans Day dedicated to all veterans of American wars.

In 1968 Congress passed the uniform Holiday Bill, which sought to ensure three-day weekends for federal employees, and encourage tourism and travel by celebrating four national holidays (Washington's birthday, Memorial Day, Veterans Day and Columbus day) on Mondays.

More than 16 million people served during WW II (1941-1945), consisting of the US Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force, some 5.7 million more served in the Korean War (1950-1953). In 1954, the 83rd U. S. Congress amended the 1938 act that had made Armistice Day a holiday, striking the word " Armistice" in favor of "Veterans". President Eisenhower signed the legislation on June 1st, 1954.

Britain, France, Australia and Canada commemorate the veterans of WWII on or near November 11. Canada has Remembrance Day and Britain has Remembrance Sunday (second Sunday of November).

Naked Truth

In Flanders Fields the most famous war poem of all times was written by John McCrae amid the carnage of the Second Battle of Ypres. John McCrae (30th November 1872 - 28th January 1918) John McCrae, was a Major and a military doctor and was second in command of the 1st Brigade Canadian Field Artillery. The brigade had arrived on the west bank of the Ypres-Yser canal in the early hours of 23 April.

Lieutenant Alexis Helmer a 22 year old and a popular young officer in the 2nd Battery, 1st Brigade Canadian Field Artillery left his dugout on the morning of Sunday May 2nd and was killed instantly by a direct hit from an 8-inch German shell. He and John McCrae had become good friends.

Near the 1st Canadian Brigade's position on the canal bank there was a small burial ground which had been established during the First Battle of Ypres in the autumn of the previous year, 1914. The Second battle of ypres began on 22 april 1915 and it became know as the Essex Farm British Military cemetery.

It is thought that doctor McCrae began the draft for his poem on the evening of the 2nd May, 1915 in the second week of fighting during the Second Battle of Ypres. Lieutenant Helmer was buried on the 2nd May, Major John McCrae conducted a simple service at the graveside.

Major McCrae sent this poem to "the Spectator" magazine, it was returned to him unpublished. However, it was published by "Punch" magazine on 8th December 1915.

Bare Facts

"All life is Wakan. So also is everything which exhibits power, whether in action, as the winds and drifting clouds, or in passive endurance, as the boulder by the wayside. For even the commonest sticks and stones have a spiritual essence which must be revered as a manifestation of the all-pervading mysterious power that fills the universe."

Elie Wiesel-Jew
Sept. 30, 1982
Journalist/Author/Human Rights Activist
Nobel Prize Winner for Peace

"Always question those who are certain of what they are saying." - Inducted 1996

Bare Fact

Elie Wiesel was born in Sighet, Transylvanis. He grew up in a close-knit Jewish family in a diverse town. His family spoke Yiddish at home but read and conducted their grocery business in German, Hungarian or Romanian as needed. Ukrainian, Russian and several other languages were widely spoken in his hometown.

The Nazis invaded Wiesel's hometown in 1944, he, his family and other Jewish inhabitants of the village were deported to concentration camps in Auschwitz, Poland. At 15, Wiesel was separated from his mother and sisters never to see them again.

He and his father remained together for the next year. They were worked almost to death, starved, beaten, and shuttled from camp on foot, or in open-cattle cars, in driving snow, without food, proper shoes or clothing. His father died the last month of the war from dysentary, starvation, exhaustion and exposure. After the war he found asylum in France and later learned that his two older sisters survived the concentration camp. While in France Wiesel mastered the French language and studied philosophy at Sorbonne, supporting himself as a choir master and teacher of Hebrew. He became a professional journalist writing for newspapers in France and Isarel.

Wiesel never spoke about his wartime experience until 1955 when Francois Mauriac another writer urged him to do so. He wrote a 900-page memoir in Yiddish entitled Un die welt hot geshvign (And the World Kept Silent), first published in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He compressed his work into a 127-page French adaption, La Nult (Night). Finding a publisher for the French or English version took several years and even after publishers were found the book sold only a few copies.

While covering the United Nations in 1956 Wiesel was struck by a taxi cab confining him to a wheel chair for almost a year. Unable to renew the French document allowing him to travel as a stateless person, he applied successfully for American citizenship. He remained in New York and became a feature writer for the Yiddish-language newspaper, the Jewish Daily Forward (Der forverts).

As his books began to win him an international reputation, he took an increasing interest in the plight of persecuted Jews in the Soviet Union. Traveling to the USSR in 1965 he reported on his travels in The Jews of Silence In 1968 his account of the Six Day War between Isarel and its Arab neighbors appeared in English as A Beggar in Jerusalem. In time he was able to use his fame to plead for justice for oppressed people in several countries.

His plays include Zalmen, or the Madness of God and the Trial of God.

His novels include The Gates of the Forest, The Oath, The Testament and the Fifth Son. His essays and short stories have been collected into volumes. Legends of Our Time, One Generation After and a Jew Today. He still writes in French and he and his wife collaborates on the English translation.

Wiesel has been Andrew Mellon Professor of Humanities at Boston University. He lives in New York City with his wife Marion and his son Elisha.

In 1978 President Carter appointed him Chairman of the U. S. Holocast Memorial Council. He was awarded the Congressional Medal of Freedom in 1985, the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1986. In 1995 the English translation of his memoirs was published as All Rivers Run to the Sea. A second volume appeared in 2000. Wiesel speaks out on behalf of the victims of genocide and oppression all over the world. Although he is now known by millions for his human rights activism, he still writes fiction. His latest novel A Mad Desire to Dance released in 2009.

Naked Truth

The Holocaust including ethnic Poles, the Romani, Soviet civilans, Soviet prisoners of war, people with disabilities, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses and other political and religious opponets. By this definition the total number of Holocaust victims would be between 11 and 17 million people.

The persecution and genocide were carried out in stages. Legislation to remove the Jews from civil society was enacted years before the outbreak of World War II. Concentration camps were established in which inmates were used as slave labor until they died of exhaustion or disease. Where the Third Reich conquered new territory in eastern Europe, specialized units called Einsatzgruppen murdered Jews and political Opponents in mass shootings. Jews and Romani were confined in overcrowded ghettos before being transported by freight train to extermination camps where if they survived the journey, the majority were killed in gas chambers. Every arm of Nazi Germany's beureaucracy was involved in the logistics of the mass murders.

The word Holocaust has been used since the 18th century to refer to violent deaths of a large number of people. Holocaust was adopted as a translation of Shoah-a Hebrew word connoting catastrophe, calamity, disaster and destruction which was used in 1940 in Jerusalem. While the term " Shoah and "Final Solution" always refer to the fate of the Jews during Nazi rule, the term Holocaust is sometimes used in a wide sense to describe other genocides of the Nazi and other regimes.

http://www.achievement .org

http://wikipedia.org

Jan Ernst Matzeliger
African/Dutch American
1852-1889
Inventor

Bare Fact

Jan Matzeliger born in Paramaribo, Dutch Guiana (now Suriname), in 1852. A shoemaker by trade, the son of an African homemaker and a Dutch engineer. He began working in his fathers machine shop at the age of 10. At 19 he became a sailor, and two years later moved to the United States, settling in Lynn, Massachusetts in 1877. He got a job with a shoe manufacturing company, began studying English and physics, painted and gave art lessons.

His main interest was mechanics. Using wood, wire, and cigar boxes, he designed a machine to speed up the manufacture of shoes. Though crude his design was impressive and he was offered $50 for it which he turned down.
By 1880, he had built a more advanced model and was offered $1,500 and also rejected it. Receiving a patent for a "Lasting Machine" on March 20, 1883. This machine cut the cost of manufacturing shoes in half and greatly increased production. Matzeliger went into business, but later sold his five patents to another company in return for stock.

Matzeliger in poor health due to years of poverty and self-sacrifice contracted tuberculosis and died at age 37. He left his stock to the North Congregational Church, the one church in Lynn that had not rejected him on account of race. The company that bought his patents later became the United Shoe Machinery Corporation, within 65 years of acquiring the patents, it was worth over $1 billion. GO FIGURE!

1992, U. S. made a postage stamp in his honor

1883 Patent - Auto method for lasting shoes
1890 Patent - Nailing machine
1890 Patent - Tack separating and distributing mechanism
1891 Patent - Lasting machine increase shoemaking speed by 900%
1899 Patent - Mechanism for distributing tack, nails, etc.

Naked Truth

Apartment complexes (multiple family dwellings) (ca. A.D. 1) Mesoamerican, North america Southwest and Northeast cultures

Although multiple family dwellings were built by other cultures, American Indians constructed some of the largest and most impressive in the world.

The first and oldest urban center in the New World, the city of Teotihuacan, which was located in what is now central Mexico on the site of Mexico City. This city flourished in the first thousand years after A.D. 1, and is the only Mesoamerican city to have multiple family dwellings. Archaeologist, are unsure of who the people of Teotihuacan were, where they came from and what happened to them, but have found the remains of block after block of one story stuccoed ADOBE apartment buildings.

Multiple family dwellings, the first American apartment complexes, were common thoroughout the Southwest. Taos, Pueblo, still occupied today, is a prime example of the Pueblo style of srchitecture invented by the Anasazi, who began building the structures in the Southwest in about A.D. 700 are still standing throughour the American Southwest. The two most impressive examples of Anasazi architecture are Mesa Verde in Colorado and Pueblo Bonito at Chaco Canyon in New Mexico. Mesa Verde's Cliff Palace contains 200 rooms. In the early 10th century Pueblo Bonito consissted of about 100 rooms and a century later it covered almost two acres and contained 800 rooms. At its highest point, the D-shped pueblo was four stories high.

Longhouses built by the Iroquois in the Northeast of what is now the United States. These 20-foot long apartments were considered private, with two families living across from each other sharing the same cooking fire. Longhouses ranged between 90 and 100 feet in length. Enclosed porches at the ends held firewood and served as storage for possessions. These house were enclosed by a high long stockade, making them the first secured apartment compleses on the continent. These house were the inspiration for QUONSET HUTS of the 40's

Copies of patents available at:

http://www.about.com/inventors

other info from
http://www.scholastic.com

and Encyclopedia of American Indian Contributions to the World Emory Dean Keoke and Kay Marie Porterfield

Granville T. Woods-African American
1856-1910
Inventor
Nicknamed - "The Black Edison"

Bare Fact

Woods held more than 60 patents mostly in electronics. Forced to quit school at age 10 to go to work in a machine shop he became fascinated with electronics and studied it. After working in different states, he returned to Ohio in 1881, where he opened The Woods Electric Company in Cincinnati with his brother Lyates. In 1884 he received a patent for an improved telephone transmitter and sold the rights to it to American Bell Telephone Company of Boston. Over a six year period he acquired over a dozen more patents relating primarily to electric motors, telecommunications, railroad safety and electromagnetic brakes. One of his most important inventions was a device that made it possible to transmit messages to moving trains warning of obstacles on the tracks ahead. Woods moved to New York City in 1890 and continued to work, selling many of his patents to companies like General Electric, Westinghouse, and American Bell Telephone. Woods developed the "third rail," an important element in subway systems.

~The Encyclopedia of African American Heritage - Susan Altman

Naked Truth

The first light house in precontact MesoAmerica was built by ancient Maya. (Maya culture arose in Yucatan Peninsula of what is now Mexico in about 1500 B. C.) This lighthouse is located in the ancient city of Tulum located on the Yucatan Peninsula-a city so imposing that the first Spaniards to see it called it Castillo (castle). The Maya lighthouse looked like a smaller version of the Maya Pyramids and was built on a hill near the beach. Obtaining a grant from the National Geographis Society, researcher Michael Creamer set out to discover how and why the lighthouse worked. On the face of the structure, facing the ocean, were several vertical, rectangular slots. Placing lanterns in the slots Creamer discovered that the Light could only be seen from the ocean, only from a natural opening in the dangerous reefs offshore. The Tulum lighthouse has the distinction of being the first Maya structure seen by the Spaniards.

http://caribbeanmag.org

mayan-reviera-mexico/tulum.stm

National Geographics 176, no.4 (Oct 1989) 424-479

The Encyclopedia of American Indian Contributions - Emory Dean Keoke and Kay Marie Porterfield

Abraham-African American
1790-0871
Souanakke Tustenukle Sohanac-Indian Name
Advisor and Interpreter to Micanopy-Seminole Chief

Abraham was born a slave and escaped during the War of 1812. After the war, he settled among the Florida Seminole and rapidly gained an influential role.
In 1816 General Andrew Jackson ordered the invasion of Spanish Florida in order to attack Ft. Negro. This was a fortress taken over by blacks after the British defeat, beginning the First Seminole War.
In 1825, he accompanied Chief Micanopy to Washington D. C. and later served as an interpreter during the negotiations of the 1832 Treaty of Paynes Landing and the 1833 Treaty of Fort Gibson, both treaties called for the removal of the Seminole from Florida. War between the Seminole and the United States broke out again in 1835 when the black wife of Chief Osceola was kidnapped and sold into slaverly.
Abraham was a leader in Seminole military operations and was active in encouraging resistance among slaves. In 1837 the Seminole and their allies were forced to agree to the Treaty of Ft. Dade after being defeated in 1837. He was largely responsible for negotiating this treaty and for convincing the Indiams to agree to it.
The treaty was broken causing another outbreak of fighting. Once again Abraham stepped in and peace was finally restored. Abraham was shipped west with his family but continued to be involved in Indian Affairs. (It did not say if he was forcefully shipped, just that he was shipped you form your own opinion.)
Abraham was described as a "great" man who ruled all the councils and actions of the Indians in the region" by army officers.

That is the Naked Truth

-The Encyclopedia of African American Heritage
Susan Altman - Author, Play Writer, Producer

Bare Facts

On October 14, 1964, Billy Mills, Sioux Indian, won the Olympic Gold Medal for the 10,000 meter run in record time in Tokyo, becoming the first Native American Indian to win the event. Official time: 28 minutes and 24.04 seconds.

365 Days of Walking the Red Road - Terri Jean - Author

Hugs!

grannym

Naked Truth

American Indians donated many gifts to the worlds common fund of knowledge in all areas. Agriculture, science and technology, medicine, transportation, architecture, psychology, military strategy, government and language. These contributions take the form of inventions, processes, philosophies, political and social systems. People throughout the world enjoyed the fruits of indigenous American inventions without being aware of their origins. For instance rubberized raincoats, POPCORN, HAMMOCKS and the drug QUININE! At the same time text books, novels movies and television protrayed the first people of America as primitives incapable of complex inventions.

"What we don't understand we destroy" this is a quote I read or heard somewhere, I'm sorry I don't remember who the author of this quote is.

-The Encyclopedia of American Indian Contributions to the World.
Emory Dean Keoke - member of the Standing Rock Sioux and Kay Marie Porterfield writer/reporter for Indian Country Today, the largest Indian-owned weekly newspaper in the U. S.

Bare Fact

Ira Hayes (of the Pima tribe), famous for raising the United States flag over Iwo jima with fellow Marines during World War II. A bronze sstatue and postage stamp later commemorated the event. He died on January 24, 1955, at the age of 33. Bob Dylan immortalized him in the song "The ballad of Ira Hayes."

-365 Days of Walking the Red Road Terri Jean - author and founder of the Red Roots Educational Project.

As I stated earlier I am sharing this information because of my own curisority. No other reason, perhaps someone else is as curious as I am to learn about unknown things just for the sake of learning.

Hugs!

grannym

Nino Reyos
Flutist, Dancer,
Member of National Academy of Recording Artist and Science (NARAS)

Nino Reyos spent the majority of his adolescent life among the Ute People in North Eastern Utah near Ft. Duchesse. He is a member of the Northern Ute and Laguna Indian Nations and the youngest of eleven children. Nino holds a Master's degree in Social Work, being the only member of his family to receive a degree of higher education. Nino is a Native American Veteran and received an honorable discharge from the
United States Marine Corp. No dates available.

Nino is a Northern Traditional Dancer, a cultural presenter, educating and entertaining audiences of all ages. He has overcome his battle of alcohol and drug use and has been sober since 1985. He teaches Native Culture and Philosophies with seminars on self-esteem, parenting, cultural aspects of living, substance abuse/prevention, and musical healing. Nino uses his cultural background as a foundation for his teaching of indigenous craft, dance and music conducting workshops in the areas in drum making and influencing people of both indigenous and non-indigenous cultures.

Nino performs throughout the United States, including the well-known Indiam Summer gathering in Milwaukee, WI, as well as with musicians such as Douglas Spottedeagle and Bill Miller. Nino was one of five flute players selected to be part of the 2002 Winter Olympic Games held in Salt Lake City, Utah. His third CD was released in the spring of 2004 and won an international Telly award.

His music is included in the film "CULTURE" Schools and Success and "TOUBAT" The Journey of the Native American Flute, also on commercials on the Navajo Indian Reservation and on video display monitors located at the various sport complexes during the 2002 Olympic Winter Games.

I have not been able to find more pertinent info such as DOB, schools attended and parents, I will continue to search.

This info was found at: http://www.paradisewest.com and

http://naotu.biz

To hear Nino's music check out: www-nativeradio.com

Luis Walter Alvarez
1911-1988
American Physicist
Member of National Inventor's Hall of Fame
Nobel Prize in Physics 1968


~ "There is no democracy in Physics. We can't say that some second-rate guy has as much right to opinion as Fermi."


Luis Walter Alvarez born in San Francisco, graduated from the University of Chicago in 1932. Received his PH. D in 1936. His discovery of a large number of residence states (subatomic particles that have very short lifetimes and that occur only in high-energy nuclear collisions). He also developed the liquid-hydrogen bubble chamber. Luis helped develop the ground-controlled radar system for aircraft in the 1940's and played an important part in the Manhattan Project, suggesting the technique for detonating the implosion type of atomic bomb. He holds the patents for more than 30 inventions, including three types of radar systems.

He; his son, geologist Walter Alvarez, and others proposed that unusually high levels of iridium at the boundary between Cretaceous and Tertiary rocks indicated a major meteor impact with the earth about 65 million years ago and that this might be the cause of the mass extinction of the dinosaurs.

His autobiography, Alvarez: Adventures of a Physicist was published in 1987 and unfortunately Luis died in 1988.

http://www.infoplease.com

Googled quotes by Luis Walter Alvarez for quote.

Isabel Allende
August 2, 1942 - Lima, Peru
Novelist, Journalist, Dramatist


"I think that my most significant achievement is not my writing, but the love I share with my family."


The daughter of a diplomat, best-selling author Isabel Allende spent her childhood in S. America, Europe and the Middle East. As a teenager she returned to her families native country, Chile, where she became a writer and television host. She fled in 1975 following a military coup, she has lived and worked in the United States since 1988.

Isabel parents, Tornas (a Chilean government represenative) and Francisca Allende divorced when she was three. After the divorce she and her mother traveled to Santiago, Chile, where she was raised in her grandparents' home. Her grandmother's interest in fortune telling and astrology as well as the stories she told, made a lasting impression on Allende. The house was filled with books, and she was allowed to read whatever she wanted.

Isabel graduated from a private high school at the age of sixteen. Three years later, in 1962, she married her first husband, Miguel Frias, an engineer whom she later divorced. She went to work for the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization in Santiago, where she was a secretary for several years. Later she became a journalist, editor, and advice columnist for Paula magazine. In addition she worked as a television interviewer and newscaster.

When her uncle, Chilean president Salvador Allende (1908-1973), was assassinated in 1973 as part of a military takeover of the government, Isabel Allende's life changed greatly. She, her husband, and their two children fled to Venezuela, a successful career as a journalist in Chile, she had a difficult time finding similar work in Venezuela.

During her life in exile Allende was inspired to write her debut novel, The House of the Spirits 1982 earned the Quality Paperback Book Club New Voice Award nomination and was adapted by writer and director Bille August and released as a film in the US in 1994.

While on a lecture tour in San Jose, California, to promote the publication of .. Of Love and Shadows she met William Gordon, a lawyer, fell in love and married in 1988.

Devoting all of her time to writing she quit her job as school administrator.

Journalist:

-1964-74 in Chile:
* Women's magazine
* Children's magazine
* Television shows
* Movie documentaries

-1975-84 in Venezuela

* Newspaper

Author of:

Published articles in newspapers and magazines in America and Europe
Lecture tours in America and Europe
Speech tours in universities and colleges
Literature Workshops in USA

-Taught Literature at:
University of Virginia, Charlottesville
Montclair college, New Jersey
University of California, Berkeley

Short stories for children and humor books, Chile 1972-73

Short story for children, Venezuela 1983

-Theater plays in Chile:

"El Embajador", 1971

"La Balada del Medio Pelo", 1973

"Los Siete Espejos", 1974

Isabel authored 16 novels from 1982-2007

For more info see http://www.isabelallende.com

and

http://www.notablebiographies.com

Amy Tan
Novelist
February 19,1952
Best-Selling List

~"I Think books were my salvation, they saved me from being miserable."

Amy Tan born in Oakland, California lived in several communities in Northern California before her family settled in Santa Clara. Her parents were Chinese immigrants.

Her father, was an electrical engineer and Baptist minister who came to America to escape the turmoil of the Chinese Civil War. The harrowing early life of her mother, Daisy, inspired Amy's novel The Kitchen God's Wife. Her mother lost custody of her three children and was forced to leave them behind when she escaped on the last boat to leave Shanghai before the Communist takeover in 1949. She later married John Tan, Amy's father and produced three children, Amy and her two brothers.

Amy's father and oldest brother both died of brain tumors within a year of each other. Her mother then moved her surviving children to Switzerland where Amy finished high school. Amy left the Baptist college her mother had selected for her to follow her boyfriend to San Jose City college. This did not set well with her mother. She further defied her mother by abandoning the pre-med course her mother had urged, to pursue the study of English and linguistics. She received her bachelor's and master's degrees in these fields at San Jose State University.She married her boyfriend Louis DeMattei in 1974 and settled in San Francisco.

DeMattei took up the practice of tax law, and Amy studied for a doctorate in linguistics, first at the University of California at Santa Cruz, later at Berkeley. Developing an interest in the problems of the developmentally disabled she left the doctoral program in 1976 and took a job as a language development consultant to the Alameda County Association for Retarded Citizens and later directed a training project for developmentally disabled children.

With a partner, she started a business writing firm, providing speeches for salesmen and executives for large corporations. After a dispute with her partner she became a full-time freelance writer. She prospered as a business writer and after a few years she was able to purchase a house for her mother. She became dissatisfied with her business and sought relief in creative efforts. She studied jazz piano, hoping to channel the musical training forced on her by her parents in childhood into a more personal expression. She also began to write fiction.

Her first story "Endgame," won her admission to the Squaw Valley writer's workshop taught by novelist Oakley Hall. The story appeared in FM literary magazine, and was reprinted in Seventeen. A literary agent, Sandra Dijkstra, was impressed with her second story "Waiting Between the Trees," and took her on as a client.

Her mother fell ill and Amy promised herself that if her mother recovered, she would take her to China to see the daughter she had left behind almost forty years before. She and her mother departed for China in 1987 and it gave her a new perspective on her often-difficult relationship with her mother and inspired her to complete the book of stories she had promised her agent.

Dijkstra found a publisher for the book, now called The Joy Luck Club with a $50,000 advance . Amy quit business writing and finished her book in little more than four months.

Upon publication in 1989 the book won enthusiastic reviews and spent eight months on the NY Times best-seller list, paperback rights sold for $1.23 million, it has been translated in 17 languages. Amy produced The Kitchen God's Wife in 1991, two childrens books, The Moon Lady and The Chinese Siamese Cat and Two novels The Hundred Secret Senses in 1995, the Bonesetter's Daughter 2001 and in 2003 The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings.

http://www.achievement.org

Rita Dove
Aug 28, 1952
Former Poet Laureat of the United States
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry - 1987


"You have to imagine it's possible before you can see something." Inducted 1994


Mrs. Dove was born in Akron, Ohio. Her father, Ray A. Dove was a chemist, and a pioneer of Integration in American Industry. From an early age, she loved poetry and music. She played the cello in her high school orchestra, and led her high school's majorette squad. As an oustanding high school graduate she was invited to the White House as a Presidential scholar.

She began to pursue writing seriously at Miami University, in Ohio. Graduating summa cum laude with a degree in English in 1973. She won a Fulbright Scholarship to study in Germany for two years at the University of Tubingen. She then joined the famous Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, receiving her Master's Degree in 1977, there she met her soon to be husband a young writer from Germany named Fred Viebahn, they married in 1979 and their daughter was born in 1983.

Rita taught creative writing at Arizona State University from 1981 to 1989. Appearing in magazines and anthologies she won national acclaim before she published her first poetry collection, The Yellow House on the Corner in 1980, followed by Museum in 83 and Thomas and Beulah in 85, a collection of interrelated poems loosely based on the life of her grandparents.

Thomas and Beulah won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1987. She was appointed to a two-year term as Poet Laureate of the United States and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She was the youngest person, and the first African-American, to receive this highest official honor in American letters. In the fall of 1994, she read her poem, Lady Freedom Among Us, at the ceremony commemorating the 200th anniversary of the U. S. Capitol.

Her other pulications are: Fifth Sunday, Grace Notes, Selected Poems and Mother Love, Through the Ivory Gate a Verse drama, The Darker Face of the Earth premiered at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 1986 it also appeared at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington D. C., in 1997.

In 1986 she along with President Carter welcomed a gathering of Nobel Laureates in Literature to Atlanta, Georgia for the Cultural Olympiad held in conjunction with the 1996 Olympic Games. That same year, a symphonic work for orchestra and narrator -- Umoja -- Each One of Us Counts," -- was performed at Atlanta's Symphony Hall with her text performed by former Mayor and U. N. Ambassador Andrew Young.

Her lifelong interest in music has taken other forms, she has provided text for works by composers Tania Leon, Bruce Dolphine, and Alvin Singleton. Her song cycle "Seven For Luck" with music by John Williams, is featured on a PBS television special with the Boston Symphony. In her spare time, she studies classical voice and practices the viola da gamba, a 17th century forerunner of the modern cello.

She is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she lives with her husband and daughter.

http://www.achievement.org

Aaron Douglas
(1898-1979)
Artist
Pioneering Africanist, one of the most influencial artist of the Harlem Renaissance

Born in Kansas in 1898 Aaron Douglas attended the University of Nebraska.He taught art in a Kansas City high school, and moved to New York where he studied with German illustrator Winold Reiss, incorporating African design elements into his otherwise realistic approach to painting. Soon his work came to the attention of Alain Locke, who incorporated six pages of Douglas artwork into his pioneering book, The New Negro.

He was commissioned to create a mural for Club Ebony, a popular Harlem night club, and later to create murals for Fisk University, the ballroom of Chicago's Sherman Hotel, and the Countee Cullen Branch of the New York Public Library. The Library murals, called "Aspects of Negro Life", are vibrant historic depictions of African-American life and is among Douglas' best know work, and another critically acclaimed series of illustrations for James Weldon Johnson's 1925 book. "God Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse" often called "The Father of Black American Art."

He broke away from a traditional realistic approach to create a more geometric style, incorporating circles, squares and triangles. His depiction of figures through silhouettes recalled the classical black silhouettes on Greek vases. He often combined such figures with muted earth tones creating the prescence of spirituality, celebrating the many facets of black life.

He became first president of the Harlem Artist Guild in 1928. He moved to Nashville, TN in 1940, founded the Art Department at Fisk University and taught for 29 years.

PBS.org
The Encyclopedia of African-American Heritage by Susan Altman
Afroamhistory.about.com
.

Oscar Howe
May 13, 1915 - October 7, 1983
American Artist/Casein Paintings
Artist Laureate of South Dakota - 1960


~"One criterion for my painting is to present the cultural life and activities of the Sioux Indians; dances, ceremonies, legends, lore, arts... It is my greatest hope that my paintings may serve to bring the best thing of Indian culture into the modern way of life."


Oscar Howe (Mazuha Hokshina or "trader Boy") (Yanktonai Dakota, 1915-1983) was an American artist, who became well known for his casein paintings.

(May 13, 1915-October 7, 1983) born in Joe Creek, South Dakota on the Crow Creek Sioux Reservation in South Dakota. Descended from Sioux Chiefs, belonged to the Yanktonai band of Dakota. He attended the Pierre Indian school in South Dakota in 1933, before attending Dorothy Dunn's famous art program at the Santa Fe Indian School from 1933-1938.

He was a veteran of WW II , and held a masters of fine arts degree in art from the University of Oklahoma.

Howe developed a distinct style of his own, he began with traditional Sioux "straight line" painting, based on hide and later ledger paintings, a form which symbolizes truth or rightousness and infused it with Cubism, portraying the contemporary realities of his tribal cultural.

In the 30's he was employed by the Works Progress Admin. in South Dakota, which hired him to paint a set of murals for the municipal auditorium in Mobridge, SD and a mural within the dome of the old Carnegie Library, now the Carnegie Resource Center in Mitchell, SD. From 1948-1971, Howe designed panels for the Corn Palace in Mitchell, SD.

He was rejected from a show of Native American art at the Philbrook Museum, because his art did not meet the criteria of "traditional" Indian style. In protest he wrote "Are we to be held back forever with one phase of Indian painting that is the most common way? Are we to be herded like a bunch of sheep, with no right for individualism, dictated to as the Indian has always been, put on reservations and treated like a child and only the White Man know what is best for him... but one could easily turn to become a social protest painter. I only hope the Art World will not be one more contributor to holding us in chains." This action led to the acceptance of abstraction within that community.

He was named Artist Laureate of SD in 1960, two exhibition spaces are dedicated to show his work. One in Mitchell and one in Vermillion South Dakota

From April 17, 2007 to February 17, 2008, an exhibit of Oscar Howe's work was on display at the SD Art Museum in Brllkings, SD. Most of these works were done in casein paint. There were also works in graphite on paper and sculpture of stone and bronze on display. There is also an Elementary School in Sioux Falls SD named afte him.

For more information check out!

http://en.wikipeida.org

http://OscarHowe.org

Hugs!

Fritz Scholder
Octobr 6,1937-February 10,2005
Artist
Received support from the Rockefeller, Whitney and Ford Foundations early in his career.

~"I give thanks everyday that I've been able to take my craziness and make it work for me." Inducted 1985

Fritz Scholder was born in Breckenridge, Minnesota. In his family he was the fifth consecutive male to bear this name. His paternal grandmother was a member of the Luiseno tribe of Mission Indians. Although he did not consider himself and Indian, he was regarded by many as a leader of the New American Indian Art movement.

Throughout his childhood, his family moved frequently, living in small towns in the Dakotas and Wisconsin. In the long winter evenings, he amused himself by drawing, an interest that was soon channeled into serious art study. The painter Oscar Howe, a Sioux Indian, introduced him to modern art while he was still in high school. In 1957, the family settled in Sacramento, where Scholder earned a Bachelor of Arts degree at Sacramento State University. At Sacramento, the painter Wayne Thiebaud exposed Scholder to the Pop Art movement. Thiebaud also arranged Scholder's first solo exhibition.

After, graduation, Scholder taught public school in Sacramento. In 1961, he won a scholarship to the Southwest Indian Art Project at the University of Arizona, where he earned a Master's of Fine Arts degree.

From 1964 to 1969 he taught painting and art history at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Struggling to represent the landscape and people of the Southwest without indulging in the romantic cliche's of genre art on the Native themes. In time he created an extraordinary fusion of abstract expressionism, surrealism and pop art to express his unique vision of the Southwestern scene and the Native experience.

He taught in Santa Fe for five years, retired to paint full time and traveled in Europe and North Africa.

He added sculpture and printmaking to his activities, creating mixed media constructions, bronzes, lithographs, etchings and monotypes. From the beginning, he created works in series: women, landscapes, Indians, butterflies, cats, dogs, dreams, the Empire State Building and ancient Egypt.

In the late 60's he was guest artist or artist-in-residence at American University, Idyllwild School of Music and the Arts, the Oklahoma Arts Institute, Sante Fe Institute of Fine Arts, and Dartmouth College. He received grants from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as arts organizations in France and Germany. He maintained his primary residence in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Over a dozen books have been published on Fritz Scholder and his work, and he has been profiled in two documentaries for public television. In a single year, exhibitions of his work were seen in Japan, France, China, Germany and at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Fritz Scholder died in 2005 at the age of 67. Since his death, interest in his work has continued to grow. In 2008, the Smithsonian Institutions' National Museum of the American Indian mounted a career retrospective of his work, with exhibitions in both New York City and Washington, D. C.


See more: http://www.achievement.org

http://www.scholder.com

Benjamin Carson
DOB September 18,1951
Public Speaker
Winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom the nations highest civilian honor - Inducted 1993

~"There is no such thing as an average human being. If you have a normal brain, you are superior."

Benjamin Carson was born in Detroit, Michigan. His mother had dropped out of school in the third grade, and married when she was only 13. When Benjamin Carson was only eight, his parents divorced, and Mrs. Carson was left a single parent with two children. She worked at two, sometimes three jobs at a time to provide for her children.

benjamin and his brother fell farther and farther behind in school, In fifth grade, Carson was at the bottom of his class. His classmates called him "dummy" and he developed a violent, uncontrollable temper.

Seeing her sons' failing grades, she was determin to turn her sons' lives around. She limited the boys' television watching and refused to let them outside to play until they had finished their homework each day. She required them to read two library books a week and to give her written reports on their reading even though she could barely read what they had written.

Carson astonished the class by identifying rock samples his teacher brought to class. He recognized them from one of the books he had read. "It was at that moment that I realized I wasn't stupid," he recalled later. Carson continued to amaze his classmates with his newfound knowledge and within a year he was at the top of his class.

He deetermined to become aphysician, and he learned to control the violent temper th t still threatened his future. After graduating with honors from his high school, he attended Yale University, where he earned a degree in Psychology.

From yale he went to the Medical School of the University of Michigan, where his interest shifted from psychiatry to neurosurgery. His hand-eye coordination and three dimensional reasoning skills made him a superior surgeon. After medical school he became a neurosurgery resident at the world-famous Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. At age 32, he became the hospital's Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery.

He made history in 1987, with an operation to seperate a pair of Siamese twins.The Binder twins were born joined at the back of the head, Operations to separate twins joined in this way had always failed, resulting in the death of one or both. Carson agreed to undertake the operation. A 70-member team, led by him, worked for 22 hours. At the end, the twins were successfully separated and can now survive independently.

His other surgical innovations include the first intra-uterine procedure to relieve pressure on the brain of a hydrocephalic fetal twin, and a hemispherectomy, in which an infant suffering from uncontrollable seizure has half of its brain removed. This stops the seizures, and the remaining half of the brain actually compensated for the missing hemisphere.

He is a public speaker, and devotes much of this time to meeting with groups of young people. Received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2008.

Dr. Carson is the author of Gifted Hands, a memoir and Think Big a motivational book.

Talent: Our Creator has endowed all of us not just with the ability to sing, dance or throw a ball, but with intellectual talent. Start getting in touch with that part of you that is Intellectual and develop that, and think of careers that will show you to use that.

Honesty: If you lead a clean and honest life, you don't put skeletons in the closet. If you put skeletons in the closet, they definitely will come back just when you don't want to see them and ruin your life.

Insight: It comes from people who have already gone where you're trying to go. Learn from their triumphs and their mistakes.

Nice: If you're nice to people, then once thay get over the suspicion of why you're being nice, they will be nice to you.

Knowledge: It makes you into a more valuable person. The more knowledge you have, the more people need you. It's an interesting phenomenon, but when people need you, they pay you, so you'll be okay in life.

Books: They are the mechanism for obtaining knowledge, as opposed to television.

In-depth Learning: Learn for the sake of knowledge and understanding, rather than for the sake of impressing people or taking a test.

God: Never get too big for Him.

http://www.achievement.org

N. Scott Momaday
Born: February 27, 1934
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Pioneer of Modern Native American Literature - Inducted: 1993

"I simply kept my goal in mind and persisted. Perseverance is a large part of writing."

Navarre Scott Momaday ws born in Lawton Oklahoma and spent the first year of his life at his grandparents' home on the Kiowa Indian reservation, where his father was born and raised. When he was one year old, his parents moved to Arizona. His father was a painter, his mother who is of English an dCherokee descent, was an author of children's books. Both taught on Indian reservations when Scott was growing up and he was exposed to not only Kiowa traditions but also to the Navajo, Apache and Pueblo Indian cultures of the Southwest. Growing up he developed an interest in literature, especially poetry.

After graduation from the University of New Mexico and a year of teaching on the Apache reservation at Jicarilla, he won a poetry fellowship to the creative writing program at Stanford University. Being mentored by poet and critic Yvor Winters, he earned a doctorate in English lit in 1963, and accepted a teaching post at the Univ. of Calif. at Santa Barbara. As his docoral dissertation,he edited and annotated the Complete works of the 19th century American poet; Frederick Goddard Tuckerman. It was published by Oxfore University Press in 1965.

His first novel House Made of Dawn was awarded te Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969, he also moved to the Univ. of Calif. at Berkley the same year as Professor of English and Comparative Literature, where he designed a graduate program of Indian Studies and taught a popular course in American Indian literature and mythology. His long study of the Kiowa oral tradition bore fruit that year in The Way to Rainy Mountain, a collection of Kiowa tales illustrated by his father Al Momaday. That same year, he was initiated into the Gourd Dance Society, the ancient fraternal organization of the Kiowas.

In 1971 his essay "The American Land Ethic" drew public attention to the traditin of respect for nature practiced by the native peoples and its significance to modern American society in an era of envronmental degradation. Angle of Geese and Other Poems was published in 1974, a memoir, The Names, in 1976. A second volume of poems, The Gourd Dancer (1976) ws partly written while he was lecturing in Moscow in 1974. At the he took up drawing and pinting seriously for the first time in his life. Since then his work has been exhibited through the US. His newer books are frequently illustrated with his own paintings and etchings.

He left Berkely for Stanfod in 1973, he has lived in Tucson and taught at the Univ of Arizona, giving occasional lectures at other schools including Priceton and Columbia. His more recent books include: The Ancient Child (1989), In the Presence f the Sun (1991), Circle of Wonder: A Native American Christmas Story (1993), and The Nativ Amerians: Indian Country (1993). He is also the author of a play, The Indolent Boys, and was featured in the award-winning documentary film Remembered Earht: New Mexico's High Desert. In 2007, President George W. Bush awarded N. Scott Momaday the National Medal of Arts, "for his wriings and his work that celebrate and preserve Native American art and oral tradition."

For more info check out: http://www.achievement.org