H.C. Martin Historical Figures and Cultural Masters Courtesy Of: Philip Wertz George Michael Cohan July 3, 1878 – November 5, 1942 Cohan was an American entertainer, playwright, composer, lyricist, actor, singer, dancer and producer. Although Cohan is mostly remembered for his songs, he became an early pioneer in the development of book musicals, and bridged the gaps between drama and music.

Hector Berlioz December 11, 1803 – March 8, 1869 Berlioz was a French Romantic composer, best known for his compositions Symphonie Fantastique and Grande messe des morts (Requiem). He composed huge orchestras for some of his works, and performed several concerts with more than 1,000 musicians. His influence was critical to the further development of Romanticism.

Georges Bizet October 25, 1838 – June 3, 1875 Registered at birth as Alexandre César Léopold Bizet and was a French composer of the romantic era. Best known for his operas in a career cut short by his early death. Carmen was his final piece, which has become one of the most popular and frequently performed works in opera.

Claude-Achille Debussy August 22, 1862 – March 25, 1918 Debussy was a French composer and was one of the most prominent figures associated with Impressionist music. Debussy’s music is noted for its sensory content and frequent usage of nontraditional tones.

George Gershwin September 26, 1898 – July 11, 1937 Gershwin was an American composer and pianist. Gershwin's compositions crossed both popular and classical genres, and his most popular melodies are widely known. Among his best-known works are the orchestral compositions Rhapsody in Blue (1924), An American in Paris (1928), and his opera Porgy and Bess (1935).

Henry Franklin Belknap Gilbert September 26, 1868 – May 19, 1928 Gilbert was an American composer and collector of folk songs. He is best remembered today for his interest in the music of African-Americans around the turn of the 20th century.

Paul Robert Ash February 11, 1891 – July 13, 1958 Ash was an American orchestra leader, composer, vaudeville personality (a theatrical genre of variety entertainment popular in Canada and the United States from 1880s-1930s), and recording artist. He was a pioneer in elevating the orchestra from secondary status to a featured role on the Broadway stage.

Georg Friedrich Händel February 23 1685 – April 14, 1759 Händel was a German then later a British baroque composer who spent most of his career in London. He became well known for his operas, oratorios, anthems, and organ concertos. He was strongly influenced both by the great composers of the Italian Baroque and the middle-German polyphonic choral tradition.

Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff April 1, 1873 – March 28,1943 Rachmaninoff was a Russian pianist, composer, and conductor of the late-Romantic period. Some of his works are among the most popular in the classical collection. He is regarded as one of the major composers of the 20th century.

Antonio Lucio Vivaldi March 4, 1678 – July 28, 1741 Vivaldi was an Italian Baroque composer, violinist, teacher, and religious leader. He is known mainly for composing many instrumental concertos, for the violin and a variety of other instruments, and more than forty operas. His best-known work is a series of violin concertos known as The Four Seasons.

Bedřich Smetana March 2, 1824 – May 12, 1884 Smetana was a Czech composer and widely regarded in his homeland as the father of Czech music. He is best known for his opera The Bartered Bride and Má vlast ("My Homeland"), which portrays the history, legends and landscape of his native land.

Joseph Maurice Ravel March 7, 1875 – December 28, 1937 Ravel was a French composer, pianist, and conductor. Ravel is often associated with impressionism along with Claude Debussy, although both composers rejected the term. In the 1920s and 1930s Ravel was internationally regarded as France's greatest living composer.

Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky June 17, 1882 – April 6, 1971 Stravinsky was a Russian composer, pianist and conductor. Stravinsky's career was notable for its stylistic diversity. He first achieved international fame with three ballets, The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (1913).

Christopher Columbus Between August and October 1451 – May 20, 1506 Columbus was an Italian explorer, navigator, and colonizer. Under the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, he completed four voyages across the Atlantic Ocean. His efforts were to establish permanent settlements on the island of Hispaniola (Haiti) and initiated the European colonization of the New World.

John Brown May 9, 1800 – December 2, 1859 Brown was an American abolitionist who believed armed revolts were the only way to overthrow the institution of slavery in the United States.

Lewis "Lew" Wallace April 10, 1827 – February 15, 1905 Wallace was an American lawyer, Union general in the American Civil War, governor of the New Mexico Territory, politician, diplomat, and author from Indiana. Wallace is best known for his historical adventure story, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1880), a bestselling novel that has been called "the most influential Christian book of the nineteenth century." Francis DeSales Ouimet May 8, 1893 – September 2, 1967 Ouimet was an American amateur golfer who is frequently referred to as the "father of amateur golf" in the United States. He won the U.S. Open in 1913 and was the first non-Briton elected Captain of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews. He was later inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 1974.

Benjamin Franklin January 17, 1706 – April 17, 1790 Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. He was a leading author, political theorist, politician, freemason, scientist, inventor, civic activist, and diplomat. As a scientist, he was a major figure in the American Enlightenment and the history of physics for his discoveries and theories regarding electricity. . George Washington February 22, 1732 – December 14, 1799 Washington was the 1st President of the United States (1789 – 1797). He was Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War. He presided over the convention that drafted the current United States Constitution and during his lifetime was called the "father of his country".

Thomas Woodrow Wilson December 28, 1856 – February 3, 1924 Wilson was an American academic and politician who served as the 28th President of the United States (1913-1921). He also served as President of Princeton University in 1902. He was elected the 34th Governor of New Jersey and was the first Southerner elected as president since 1848.

Andrew Jackson March 15, 1767 – June 8, 1845 During the American Revolutionary War Jackson acted as a courier. At age 13, he was captured and mistreated by his British captors. He later became a lawyer and was also elected to Congressional office, first to the U.S. House of Representatives and twice to the U.S. Senate. Jackson also served as the seventh President of the United States (1829-1837). Ulysses S. Grant April 27, 1822 – July 23, 1885 Grant was the 18th President of the United States and was twice elected for president (1869–1877). He was a Commanding General of the United States Army (1864–1869) and worked closely with President Abraham Lincoln to lead the Union Army to victory over the Confederacy in the American Civil War.

Abraham Lincoln February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865 Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. Lincoln led the United States through its bloodiest war, known as the Civil War. By doing so, he abolished slavery, preserved the Union, and strengthened the government.

Courtesy of: Danielle Jones

Nathaniel Hawthorne July 4, 1804 - May 19, 1864 Hawthorne was an American novelist and short-story writer who was considered a master of the symbolic and allegorical tale. Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts in 1804. He is best known for his novels The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851).

Eugene O'Neill October 16, 1888 - November 27, 1953 O'Neill was born on October 16, 1888, in New York City and was the first U.S. playwright to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. His plays were among the first to introduce the drama techniques of realism to America. He is most known for his piece, Long Day's Journey into Night (1957).

O'Henry - William Sydney Porter September 11, 1862 - June 5, 1910 Porter went by his pen name O’ Henry and is known for his humor and irony. He is most known for the short story "The Gift of the Magi"(1905). His writings expressed the effect of coincidence on the character through humor, grim or ironic, and often had surprise endings.

Carl Sanburg January 6, 1878 - July 22, 1967 Sanburg was an American poet, writer, and editor who won three Pulitzer Prizes: two for his poetry and one for his biography of Abraham Lincoln: The War Years in1939.

Plutarch 45 AD - 120 AD Plutarch was a Greek historian, essayist, and biographer known primarily for his Moralia (Morals), and Parallel Lives. Moralia is a collection of 78 essays and transcribed speeches that provide insights into Roman and Greek life. Parallel Lives is a series of biographies of famous men that showed their common moral virtues or failings.

Dante Alighieri June 1, 1265 - September 14, 132 Alighieri was a major Italian poet of the Late Middle Ages. His Divine Comedy, originally named Comedìa (Commedia) and later called Divina by Boccaccio, is widely said to be the greatest Italian literary work and is considered a masterpiece of world literature.

Lord Byron January 22, 1788 - April 19, 1824 Byron was an English poet that was seen as a leading figure in the Romantic movement. His best-known works are among the longest narrative poems, Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, and the short lyric "She Walks in Beauty".

Charlotte Brontë April 21, 1816 - March 31, 1855 Charlotte was the oldest of the three Brontë sisters who survived into adulthood and whose work have become classics of English literature. She was a poet and novelist who first published her works (including her best known novel, Jane Eyre) under the pen name Currer Bell.

Robert Frost March 26, 1874 - January 29, 1963 Frost was an American poet and four-time Pulitzer Prize winner in poetry. Robert Frost is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life through language and situations familiar to the common man. Some of his most known works include The Road Not Taken and Maple.

Herman Melville August 1, 1819 - September 28, 1891 Melville was an American novelist, poet, and short story writer of the American Renaissance period. Melville is best known for Typee (1846), a romantic account of his experiences in Polynesian life, and his whaling novel Moby-Dick (1851).

Virgil October 15, 70 BC. - September 21, 19 BC. Virgil was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He is known for three major works of Latin literature, the Eclogues (or Bucolics), the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid. His Aeneid has been considered the national epic of ancient Rome from the time it was written to the present day. Virgil is traditionally ranked as one of Rome's greatest poets. Homer Born between the 12th and 8th centuries BC Homer is best known as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey. He was believed to have been the first and the greatest of the epic poets by the ancient Greeks. Both works have had an enormous effect on Western culture, but very little is known about the author.

William Blake November 28, 1757 - August, 12 1827 Blake was an English poet, printmaker, and painter. Blake was largely unrecognized during his lifetime. He is now considered an influential figure in the history of the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age.

Hans Christian Anderson April 2, 1805 – August 4, 1875 Hans Christian Andersen was a Danish author best known for writing children's stories, including "The Little Mermaid" and "The Ugly Duckling." His fairy tales are published in numerous collections during his life and many are still in print today. He was also a prolific writer of plays, novels, travel essays, and poems.

Courtesy of: Scott Medders Winston Churchill November 30, 1874 - January 24, 1965 Churchill was a British statesman who was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and was the first person to be made an honorary citizen of the United States.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt March 4, 1933 - April 12, 1945 A political leader who served as the 32nd President of the United States from 1933 to 1945. Roosevelt was the president during the great depression and helped the American people regain faith in themselves.

Douglas MacArthur January 26, 1880 - April 5, 1964 MacArthur was an American five-star general who commanded the Southwest Pacific in World War II (1939-1945). He oversaw the successful Allied occupation of postwar Japan and led United Nations forces in the Korean War (1950-1953).

Harry S. Truman May 8, 1884 - December 26, 1972 Truman was the 33rd President of the United States from 1945 - 1953. He served as the United States Senator from Missouri (1935-45) and was briefly vice president before he became president on April 12, 1945, upon the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Adolf Hitler April 20, 1889 - April 30, 1945 Adolf Hitler was a German politician who was the leader of the Nazi Party, Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and Führer of Nazi Germany from 1934 to 1945. He initiated World War II in Europe with the invasion of Poland in September 1939 and was a central figure of the Holocaust.