Luis Alvarez was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, probably most famous for the discovery of the iridium layer (subatomic particles) and his theory that the mass extinction of dinosaurs was caused by an asteroid or comet colliding with Earth. Besides doing the normal work you might expect of a physics professor, Alvarez took on more unusual projects, like making use of cosmic rays to search for hidden chambers in an Egyptian pyramid.
A ceramist and author of two best-selling autobiogrophies---Fifth Chinese Daughter and No Chinese Stranger, Jade Snow Wong was among the first Chinese-American artist to have her work shown in major American museums, while her books pioneered the rich tradition of memoir writing among Chinese-American women.
Antonio Moreno was born and raised in Spain. He moved to New York at an early age to pursue a career on stage. Moreno traveled to California and worked in bit parts in films until he was discovered by the film pioneer D.W. Griffith, who launched him on a screen career in 1914.
In 1890 Dr. Ida Gray Nelson Rollins became the first black woman to earn a doctor of dental surgery degree in the United States when she graduated from the University of Michigan. She opened her practice in Cincinnati, where she was able to serve all races, genders, and ages.
Dr. Min Chueh Chang, who was born in T'ai-yüan in China, was educated at the Tsinghua University in Peking, and at Cambridge, England, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1941. He emigrated to America in 1945 and joined the Worcester Foundation in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, where he subsequently remained. From 1961 he also served as professor of reproductive biology at Boston University.
On August 11, 1978, Congress passed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (AIRFA). After noting the U.S. right to freedom of religion and the inconsistent extension of that right to Native American people, Congress acknowledged its obligation to "protect and preserve for Native Americans their inherent right of freedom to believe, express, and exercise the traditional religions on the Native American Indian, Eskimo, Aleut, and Native Hawaiian, including but not limited to access to sites, use and possession and sacred objects, and the freedom to worship through ceremonial and traditional rites.
Phillip Bazaar joined the Union Navy in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Seaman Bazaar was assigned to the USS Santiago de Cuba. The Santiago de Cuba was a wooden, brigantine-rigged, side-wheel steamship under the command of Rear Admiral David D. Porter. Bazaar and 5 other crew members, under the direct orders from Rear-Admiral Porter, carried dispatches during the battle while under heavy fire from the Confederates to Major General Alfred Terry.
Horacio Rivera, Jr., was the first Puerto Rican four-star admiral and second Hispanic to rise to full admiral, was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, where Rivero received his primary and secondary education in the public schools of San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Gloria Bird is a poet and scholar and member of the Spokane Tribe of Washington State. She is one of the founding members of the Northwest Native American Writers Association. Bird then attended Lewis & Clark College in Portland, OR where she received her B.A. in English in 1990, moving on to the University of Arizona in Tucson, AZ where she received her M.A. in English in 1992.
Charles Hobson wanted to bring that community and residential feeling to the screen with “Inside Bedford-Stuyvesant,” which premiered in April 1968. The public affairs television program, which aimed to capture a realistic portrait of the neighborhood that countered negative stereotypes in the wake of local riots in 1964. A first of its kind in the United States at the time, a television series specific to African-American audiences.
Mamie Phipps Clark was born in Hot Springs, Ark., and Kenneth Clark was born and raised in Harlem, N.Y. Both obtained their bachelor's and master's degrees from Howard University. Influenced by her work with children in an all-black nursery school, Mamie decided to conduct her master’s thesis, "The Development of Consciousness of Self in Negro Pre-School Children". Not long after, she met her soon-to-be husband, Kenneth Clark, who partnered with her to extend her thesis research on self-identification in black children. This work was later developed into the famous doll experiments that exposed internalized racism and the negative effects of segregation for African-American children.
In addition to prospecting for gold in California, many Chinese also came as contract laborers to Hawaii to work in sugarcane plantations. However, while in California, Chinese miners experienced their first taste of discrimination in the form of the Foreign Miner Tax. This was supposed to be collected from every foreign miner but in reality, it was only collected from the Chinese, despite the multitude of miners from European countries there as well.
Jean-Baptist-Point Du Sable, born in St. Marc, Sainte-Domingue (now Haiti), was a black pioneer trader and discoverer of the settlement that later became the city of Chicago.
Kartar Dhillon was a South Asian American writer and activist. Her father, Mr. Bakshish Singh, was one of the first Punjabi pioneers to arrive in the United States in 1897. Her mother, Rattan Kaur, later joined him in 1910. The family lived primarily in Astoria, Oregon and, southern California, but her family maintained ties to the Sacramento Valley and father worked in the Sacramento Delta at one time.
Elijah McCoy was working as a fireman on the Michigan Central Railroad, shoveling coal and lubricating engine parts with a handheld oil can when he realized that there must be a better, more efficient way of delivering oil to the vital gears, screws, and cylinders that kept the mighty locomotive engine running. He wondered if a mechanical device existed that could automatically drip the proper amount of oil into the moving parts of the engine whenever and wherever needed so that a train would no longer have to be stopped every few miles to be manually lubricated. After experimenting for two years in a makeshift machine shop, McCoy came up with a design for a special “lubricating cup” that could be fitted into the steam cylinders of locomotives and other stationary machinery.
In 1828 21 black women met in New York to draw up plans for the African Dorcas Society. This was the first black women's charitable group. Its principal objective was to aid young blacks in attending schools and supplying them with clothes, hats, and shoes.
For the 1904 Lousiana Centennial Exposition World's Fair, the U.S. government, with the aid of anthropologists, put on display this extraordinary exhibit of people and cultures from the Philippine Islands. All told there were about 1200 Filipinos exported from the Philippines to St. Louis for exhibition purposes in the summer of 1904.
In 1820, The Emancipator was the first anti-slavery magazine, edited and published by abolitionist Elihu Embree who was once a slave owner himself. At the time of his death, Mr. Embree had a subscription of over 2000, which was equivalent to any major regional publication of the day.
The first known Lebanese immigrant to the United States was Antonios Bachaalani and Karim Bou Orm Filus, who arrived in Boston Harbor in 1854.
Selena Sloan Butler was an educator, child welfare advocate, and community leader. Throughout her life, Butler was active in many civic and service organizations, among them the American Red Cross, the Georgia Commission on Interracial Cooperation, and the Phyllis Wheatley branch of the Young Women's Christian Association. An organizer of the Atlanta Women's Club and Atlanta's Ruth Chapter of the Order of the Eastern Star, she also published "The Woman's Advocate," a monthly paper devoted to the concerns and interests of African American women.
Filipino men began arriving in Louisiana as early as 1765, arguably establishing the first Asian community in North America. They came by way of the Spanish galleon trade between Manila and Acapulco, and while it may be easy to picture them becoming dissatisfied with their lives as merchant seamen, it takes a little more imagination to figure how and why they made their way from the Pacific coast of Mexico to the New Orleans area. Filipino sailors are rumored to have been among Jean Lafitte’s Baratarians at the Battle of New Orleans.
Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton is among the best-remembered authors of nineteenth-century Mexican American literature. Fully bilingual, de Burton was the first female Mexican American to write novels in English: Who Would Have Thought It? and The Squatter and the Don.
In 1905 Twenty-nine black intellectuals and activist from fourteen states met near Niagara Falls, New York to establish the Niagara Movement. Led By W.E.B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter, the organization encouraged blacks to press for immediate civil rights without compromise. In 1909 the movement merged with the NAACP.
Mary Golda Ross was the first known Native American (Cherokee Nation) female engineer and the first female engineer in the history of Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. Ross began her career by working on the P-38 Lightning fighter plane. She was later asked to be one of the 40 founding engineers of the renowned and highly secretive Skunk Works project at Lockheed.