Martha Graham was an artistic force of the 20th century. Some have equated her talent to the genius of her contemporaries Picasso, James Joyce, Stravinsky, and Frank Lloyd Wright. According to the Martha Graham website, she created 181 ballets and an innovative dance technique that “has been compared to ballet in its scope and magnitude”, […]
MacKenzie Scott is one of the richest women in the world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index. Scott married Jeff Bezos in 1993, helped him build Amazon, and co-found the company in 1994. The couple divorced in 2019. In September 2020, she was considered the world’s richest woman when her net worth was about $62 […]
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was an early British feminist, writer and controversial thinker who promoted educational and social equality for women. A radical proposition at the time, a main argument she defended in her writings was that girls and boys should be educated together and that women and men should share parental responsibilities. Her life was […]
Made up of sections of DNA, genes control the life processes of organisms, according to Nobelprize.org In 2012, American biochemist Jennifer Doudna along with French microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier developed “a methodology for high precision changes to genes. They used the immune defenses of bacteria, which disable viruses by cutting their DNA up with a type […]
In Tuscumbia, Alabama in 1880, a baby girl was born who would make a difference to millions. Her name was Helen Keller and she was no ordinary child; at 19 months old, she contracted a disease (possibly rubella or scarlet fever) that caused her to lose her sight and hearing. As a consequence, she also […]
It would be difficult to find an art aficionado who is not familiar with the influential Italian painter Caravaggio (1571-1610). Another talented individual, though, who is considered the one and only “Caravaggista” – the artist whose work stands out as equal in emotion, action and fervor to that of the renowned painter – was all […]
A leading foreign policy voice in the United States, Czech-born Madeleine Albright (1937-2022) was the first woman to serve as US secretary of state, remaining in that position from 1997 to 2001. Secretary of state is the most senior position in the American president’s cabinet and is fourth in the presidential line of succession, after […]
Six decades ago, US President John F. Kennedy announced that the United States would put human beings on the Moon by the end of the decade. But it wasn’t until 2016 that Margaret H. Hamilton (b. 1936), a computer scientist and software innovator, was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her work on […]
Malala Yousafzai is a Pakistani human rights activist, especially for women’s and girls’ education, and the world’s youngest Nobel Peace Prize laureate (the second Pakistani to receive the prize). Born in the Swat Valley in northwest Pakistan in 1997, she started writing a blog under a pseudonym for the BBC Urdu, detailing her life during […]
Marie Curie was a pioneer of modern science. Despite a career that was physically demanding and ultimately fatal, she discovered polonium and radium, championed the use of radiation in medicine and fundamentally changed the understanding of radioactivity. Marie Curie was born Marie Skłodowska in 1867 in Warsaw, Poland, to a family of teachers who believed […]
