Curated playlist
Hall of Fame for Great Americans inductees
- Mark TwainMark Twain predicted he would die with Halley's Comet, and he did. He died the day after it passed closest to the Sun.
- Edgar Allan PoeEdgar Allan Poe's executor used forged letters to paint him as a drunken madman.
- Abraham LincolnAbraham Lincoln is the only U.S. president to hold a patent. In 1849 he patented a way to lift riverboats.
- Theodore RooseveltTheodore Roosevelt was shot in the chest, then gave a 90-minute speech. It happened in Milwaukee in October 1912.
- Thomas JeffersonThomas Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
- Ulysses S. GrantIn 1859, Ulysses S. Grant freed an enslaved man worth at least $1,000 that he desperately needed.
- Alexander HamiltonAlexander Hamilton was still a teenager in 1771 when the owner of Beekman and Cruger, an import-export firm on the island of Saint Croix, sailed away and left him running the place for five months. The young man had been born out of…
- Andrew JacksonAndrew Jackson was slashed with a sword as a boy for refusing to polish a British officer's boots.
- Woodrow WilsonWoodrow Wilson ordered his own supporters to vote against his League of Nations treaty.
- Susan B. AnthonySusan B. Anthony voted in 1872, waited, and was arrested days later. She then refused to pay her $100 fine.
- John AdamsJohn Adams died on the 4th of July 1826. Exactly fifty years earlier, Congress had approved the Declaration of Independence, and Adams had been among those who made that vote happen. He was the second president of the United States,…
- Thomas EdisonThomas Edison clamped his teeth into a piano to hear it. He was deaf in one ear and barely heard from the other.
- Henry Wadsworth LongfellowLongfellow used his own body to smother the flames on his wife's burning dress. He wore a beard from then on.
- Nathaniel HawthorneNathaniel Hawthorne paid $100 to print his first novel, then tried to suppress every surviving copy.
- Robert E. LeeRobert E. Lee privately called secession "nothing but revolution" before he led the army that fought for it.
- Benjamin FranklinIn 1728, a 22-year-old printer named Benjamin Franklin sat down and wrote his own epitaph. He pictured his body as the cover of an old book, its contents torn out and its lettering and gilding stripped away. It would lie in the earth as…
- Ralph Waldo EmersonRalph Waldo Emerson put a plain question to Henry David Thoreau in the fall of 1837. "Do you keep a journal?" he asked. The question became a lifelong inspiration for Thoreau. Emerson had his own answer to it. His journal was eventually…
- Wright brothersThe Wright brothers' 1903 patent did not claim an airplane. It claimed a system for controlling one.
- Alexander Graham BellAlexander Graham Bell was honored after his death in an unusual way. When his funeral ended, for one minute at 6:25 p.m. Eastern Time, every telephone on the continent of North America was silenced. The man being remembered is credited…
- Andrew CarnegieAndrew Carnegie sat down in 1868, at the age of 33, and wrote himself a memo that read like a vow. He called the piling up of wealth one of the worst forms of idolatry. He planned to cap his income at $50,000 a year and retire from…
- William Tecumseh ShermanThe Cincinnati Commercial called Union general William Tecumseh Sherman insane in 1861. He later took Atlanta.
- Eli WhitneyEli Whitney's cotton gin made him famous but left him near bankruptcy. Lawsuits over the 1793 patent drained him.
- Robert FultonA steamboat mocked as "Fulton's Folly" went from New York City to Albany and back in 62 hours in 1807.
- Stonewall JacksonStonewall Jackson, born Thomas Jonathan Jackson, came close to losing his teaching post at the Virginia Military Institute. In 1856, a group of alumni tried to have him removed. His students had already nicknamed him Tom Fool. They…
- David FarragutLashed to the mast so he would not fall, David Farragut led a fleet into a mined bay.
- William PennWilliam Penn has stood above Philadelphia since 1894, when a bronze statue of him by Alexander Milne Calder was set on top of City Hall. At the time, City Hall was the tallest building in the city. Urban designer Edmund Bacon liked to say…