Abbreviated Bios

General Samuel Armstrong opened a school for former slaves after the Civil War to train them in how to make a living.

Joseph Warren was one of the most important Patriot leaders in the events just prior to the American Revolution. He is mostly forgotten today because he died at the Battle of Bunker Hill.

George Chaffey was a pioneer in irrigation. He developed towns in California and Australia, electrified them and created the Imperial Valley.

Benjamin Church is known and the first army ranger and used those tactics to defeat King Philip's forces in the war of that name.

Charles Curtis started out life on an Indian Reservation and made it all the way to the Vice-Presidency.

George Bancroft was America's first great historian but more importantly established the U.S. Naval Academy.

Timothy Dwight, as president of Yale, resisted the influence of French Revolution ideas, which resulted in revival breaking out.

Judith Reisman is the woman who exposed Alfred Kinsey's experiments as a fraud.

John Russell Pope was one of the last neo-classical architects in the U.S. The buildings he designed are some of the most beautiful in the country.

Robert Smalls, as a slave, was trained to be a wheelman on a steamboat. He would use those skills to escape and turn the ship over to the Union Navy.

George Wythe was a founder who was far ahead of most of the others on race relations and wrote legal opinions to undermine slavery.

Nathaniel Hawthorne was America's first great novelist. He wrote one of the most required books to read in high school, The Scarlet Letter

General James Wilkinson was for 12 years the senior soldier in the U.S. Army. All during that time, he was a paid agent of the Spanish empire. He was never definitively caught during his lifetime.

Russell Kirk was a public intellectual and writer who gave conservatism its name.

Elizabeth Bentley was a Soviet spy who switched to the American side, disrupting KGB operations throughout the U.S.

Medgar Evers was an important civil rights leader in Mississippi. He was assassinated in 1963.

Frederick Gates was the man most responsible for the rise in scientific medicine which led to Big Pharma.

David Hosack was not only the attending physician at the Hamilton-Burr duel, he also found the first botanic garden in America to train medical students. He was the first American doctor to regularly use the stethoscope.

William Jennings Bryan, the Old Commoner, was a 3-time presidential candidate who later became a Secretary of State. Sadly, he is only remembered for a wildly inaccurate portrayal of him in the movie "inherit the Wind." Learn who he really was.

Andrew Mellon served 3 Presidents as Secretary of State and helped create the Roaring 20s economy. He made a big profit from it, too.

Albert G. Spalding helped establish baseball as America's National Pastime and created a sporting goods company that still supplies sports equipment to people around the world.

henry Morris is considered the "Father of Creation Science" and was partly responsible for the lessening belief in the theory of evolution.

Luther Burbank experimented with plants by cross breeding them in order to create disease resistant and tastier fruits and vegetable, most of which we still eat today.

Henry J. Kaiser was an amazing businessman who built dams, brought the steel industry to California, constructed ships during WWII, made the Jeep brand popular around the world and created the HMO.

John C. Calhoun is considered a villain of American History. He considered slavery to be a positive for society. Some progressives are stealing his ideas today.

Mercy Otis Warren was one of America's Founding Mothers and the writer of the first complete history of the American Revolution.

When we read the Constitution, we read Gouverneur Morris' words.

Thomas Cole was an early American artist who founded the Hudson River School of landscape art. Since this is a painter and Anchor now supports, video, this episode is a video presentation.

Mary Walker was the only woman ever to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. She was also considered a freak of nature in the 1800s for insisting on wearing pants. She accomplished a lot in her life.

James K. Polk accomplished so many things for the U.S. in his one term that he should be considered one of America's great presidents. But few people have ever heard of him. You will, however, if you listen to this episode.

William Wells Brown wrote the first novel by an African American in America. It took on the topic of President Jefferson fathering children by one of his slaves.

John Wesley Powell explored the Colorado River by boat over the dangerous rapids of the Grand Canyon. He is also one of the reasons so many Dams were built in the west to save water.

Thomas Nelson Jr. was a signer of the Declaration of Independence who lost his fortune because of his support of the Patriot cause. Yet he never regretted his actions.

Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca was a Conquistador stranded in North America during the 1530s. He went from Conquistador to slave to healer in his struggle to survive. The previous version of this had another episode attached. How? I don't know.

Frederick Funston, at 5 foot 4 and 115 pounds did not look like a great military officer. He overcame those perceptions to become an American hero of the Philippine insurrection.

William Seward was Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of State and survived an assassination attempt on the same night Lincoln was killed.

Civil War general Lew Wallace wrote the best-selling American novel of the 1800s, Ben Hur.

Matthew Maury developed the scientific specialty of Oceanography and got the idea for it by reading the Bible.

Garfield was a brilliant and kind man who was shot 3 months into his presidency.

Phyllis Schlafly helped shape the modern Republican Party. Learn about her in this episode of Abbreviated Bios.

Stephen Foster was the first great American songwriter who, unfortunately, died in obscurity.

Richard Mentor Johnson was the 9th Vice-President of the U.S. who had an unusual personal life for that time in U.S. History.

There will be a new Abbreviated Bio each week. Among the people being profiled in upcoming episodes will be James K. Polk, Richard Johnson, Calvin Coolidge, Benjamin Banneker, Phyllis Schlafly, and Pio Pico.