Curated playlist
Hall of Fame for Great Americans inductees
- Mark TwainMark Twain was born on the 30th of November 1835, shortly after Halley's Comet swept past the Earth, and he came to believe the two of them were bound together. In 1909 he wrote it plainly. "I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is…
- Edgar Allan PoeEdgar Allan Poe was found semiconscious on the streets of Baltimore on the 3rd of October, 1849, wearing clothes that were not his own. He could not explain himself. Four days later, at five in the morning on a Sunday, he was dead. He was…
- Abraham LincolnAbraham Lincoln was born in a one-room log cabin in Kentucky on the 12th of February 1809, and he died with a bullet in the back of his head at twenty-two minutes past seven on a April morning in 1865. Between those two facts sits the most…
- Theodore RooseveltTheodore Roosevelt was shot in the chest on the 14th of October 1912, while on his way to give a campaign speech in Milwaukee. The bullet passed through his eyeglass case and a 50-page folded copy of his speech before lodging in his chest…
- Thomas JeffersonThomas Jefferson died on the 4th of July, 1826 , the same day as John Adams, on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Adams's last words, spoken without knowing Jefferson had already died a few hours earlier, were:…
- Ulysses S. GrantUlysses S. Grant was born Hiram Ulysses Grant on the 27th of April 1822, in Ohio, and by the time he died on the 23rd of July 1885, he had commanded the largest army in American history, won the Civil War, and served two terms as…
- Andrew JacksonAndrew Jackson refused to polish a British officer's boots, and the officer slashed him with a sword. The blade left scars on his left hand and head. Jackson was a boy then, captured with his brother Robert in April 1781 during the…
- Woodrow WilsonWoodrow Wilson was three years old when he heard a man outside the Augusta parsonage announce in disgust that Abraham Lincoln had been elected and that a war was coming. That earliest memory shaped everything: a boy growing up in the…
- Susan B. AnthonySusan B. Anthony was arrested on the 18th of November 1872 for the crime of casting a ballot. A U.S. Deputy Marshal came to her door in Rochester, New York, and charged her with voting illegally in the presidential election held just days…
- Thomas EdisonThomas Edison kept his own deafness a mystery, inventing elaborate false stories about how he lost his hearing. He was completely deaf in one ear and barely heard from the other. To enjoy a piano or a music player, he clamped his teeth…
- Henry Wadsworth LongfellowHenry Wadsworth Longfellow published his first poem at age 13 in the Portland Gazette on the 17th of November, 1820. It was a patriotic four-stanza piece called "The Battle of Lovell's Pond", and almost nobody noticed. What followed across…
- Nathaniel HawthorneNathaniel Hawthorne was born on the 4th of July, 1804, in Salem, Massachusetts, a town that had marked his family with a particular darkness long before he drew breath. Two of his ancestors had sat in judgment at the Salem witch trials,…
- Robert E. LeeRobert Edward Lee was born on the 19th of January 1807 at Stratford Hall Plantation in Westmoreland County, Virginia, into one of the oldest and most storied families in the state. His father was Henry "Light Horse Harry" Lee III, a…
- Wright brothersThe Wright brothers, Wilbur and Orville, filed a U.S. patent in March 1903, months before they had flown a powered aircraft. The document did not claim to have invented a flying machine at all. Instead it claimed something narrower: a…
- William Tecumseh ShermanWilliam Tecumseh Sherman was born on the 8th of February, 1820, in Lancaster, Ohio, and by the time he died seventy-one years later, he had helped reshape the way wars are fought and won. His name conjures a single image for most…
- Eli WhitneyEli Whitney Jr. died on the 8th of January 1825, in New Haven, Connecticut, just one month after his fifty-ninth birthday. He had spent his final illness reportedly inventing mechanical devices to ease his own pain. That restless ingenuity…
- Robert FultonRobert Fulton was 12 years old when he made the visit that would shape his life. In 1777, he traveled to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to call on William Henry, a state delegate who had recently returned from England with news about a…
- David FarragutDavid Glasgow Farragut was lashed to the mast of his flagship, hanging over a battle he could barely see through the smoke, when he gave the order that would define his life. It was the 5th of August, 1864, and the bay ahead was thick with…