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Profiles of notable Americans, not celebrities, who have shown courage by standing up for their beliefs or taking risks against great odds. Their lives, their legacies inspire us to become the person we've dreamed of becoming.
Recent Posts Tagged With 'legacy'
Gene Kranz: The Prototypical NASA Flight Controller
Gene Kranz had always wanted to be a pilot, but his flying career almost crashed on take-off. Accepted into the U.S. Naval Academy, he flunked the physical due to diabetes. “I had been working at the A&P warehouse and living on chocolate milk a...
David Lim: The Phoenix of One World Trade Center
Lim, a second-generation Chinese-American and 22-year veteran cop, was embarking on the longest, most arduous, and most heart-breaking day of his life....
Lynn Harrell: Ambassador of Music, Citizen of the World
“For a young composer to feel the weight of that body, the finality, we know it affected him,” said celebrated cellist Lynn Harrell. He was describing the welter of feelings bearing down on 29-year-old Franz Schubert, one of six pallbearers carry...
Daniel Callahan: There at the Birth of Bioethics
One day Daniel Callahan accompanied his friend Paul Desjardins to the dry cleaners. As they were leaving the shop, Desjardins, a World War II veteran working on a doctorate degree in philosophy, turned to Callahan, an 18-year-old student at Yale, and...
Thomas P. Doyle: Fighting to Prevent Clergy Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church
“We put it together in good faith with every confidence that U.S. bishops would respond to what we believed to be a problem they were not aware of and would respond in an effective way, especially toward victims.” Interestingly, in the report the...
Emily Warner: First Female Commercial Airline Pilot and Captain
“I was the only passenger on the flight, so I asked the stewardess if I could see the cockpit,” Warner said. “I was invited to the cockpit and sat in the jump-seat. I looked out the front window and the sight changed my life. I’m not kidding....
Robert Ballard, Ph.D.: Building a Legacy of Discovery with Today’s Youth
Robert Ballard has always been a hunter, an explorer, a finder of lost things. Growing up in San Diego, he was enchanted by stories of explorers and their adventures. One was 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne. As a 10-year-old Ballard drea...
Patty Limerick: Breathing New Life into the History of the American West
For Americans coming of age in the middle of the 20th century, one Hollywood actor above all others embodied the virtues and bravado of the American West — John Wayne. But the movie star, whose real name was Marion Morrison, was mythology. In J...
Marva Collins: A Teacher First, Last and Always
From all appearances Marva Collins didn’t have much going for her — a young, African-American growing up in the South during the Depression. But in truth she possessed riches children, even in the best of families, long for. Her father, Henr...
Dennis Smith: From Street-Fighter to Firefighter
Few people understand the role chance plays in one’s life better than Dennis Smith, whose life, time and again, proves the point. Smith, a retired New York City firefighter, bestselling author, magazine founder, and businessman, is both an oddity a...
Stacy Allison: First American Woman to Summit Mt. Everest
Ironically, Allison said her strength turned out to be her biggest weakness. She thought she could survive and rescue an abusive marriage the same way she overcame treacherous mountains. “I thought I had so much control mentally and physically over...
Frances Hesselbein: Leadership Is Being, Not Doing
When Frances Hesselbein was approached by a neighbor to be a scout leader of a failing troop, she thought the idea was ridiculous. Not only had she never been a Girl Scout, she didn’t even have a daughter. Busy assisting her husband in his business...
Bishop John Shelby Spong: Battling Bigots, Mostly God-fearing Christians
“I was raised in an evangelical church in the Bible Belt that taught me segregation was the will of God, and quoted the Bible to prove it,” he said. “It taught me that men were superior to women, and quoted the Bible to prove it. It taught me i...
Victoria Hale, Ph.D.: A Visionary Making Affordable Drugs for Developing World
Hale, who had several previous miscarriages, had yet another. "I really wanted this baby. I realized the world happens to you, not because of you.” The lost baby led to a deeper and growing discontent in her work. “I realized I was missing spirit...
Dr. Carol North: A Former Patient, Now Healer and Researcher
Then North's grit and determination paid off. Cadoret learned of an experimental and controversial treatment for schizophrenia -- kidney dialysis. Kidney dialysis?...
Daniel Ellsberg: Speaking Truth to Power
“Don’t do what I did,” Ellsberg said. “Don’t wait until a war has started, for bombs to have fallen, until a thousand more people have died. If you have information that would give the lie to efforts to get us into a wrongful war, do what I...
Harry Wu: Making “Laogai” a Household Word
Ask most Americans what the Chinese word “laogai” means and you’ll get a blank stare. But if Harry Wu has his way, he will make “laogai” as familiar a word as “Holocaust” or “Gulag.” He may never realize his dream. But Wu, who w...
Nonie Darwish: Arab-American Advocate of Israel
If Darwish has one regret in life, it is: “I wish I discovered all I discovered earlier,” she said. “I’ve been changing very slowly, but my ultimate change needed a 9/11 to realize how wrong the educational system is in the Arab world, how Is...
