January 2: A tie between Isaac Asimov, the
Russian American writer, scientist, and philosopher who helped originate and
popularize an
entire literary genre, taught at the BU School of Medicine for decades, and
developed original insights into such crucial 20th and 21st
century fields as computers,
robotics, the role of technology and science in society, their relationship to
spirituality, and more; and the pioneering novelist and filmmaker Oscar Micheaux.
January 3: A tie between Lucretia Coffin Mott, one of the 19th
century’s most influential and prolific social activists and reformers, one of
the very few Americans who can be describe as leading both the abolitionist
and the suffragist
movements, and by all accounts a speaker
of tremendous talent, passion, and eloquence; and the groundbreaking actor and activist Anna May Wong.
January 4: Max Eastman, the poet,
journalist, and political activist whose complex and always interesting and
inspiring writings and life can help us trace many of the 20th
century’s most prominent communities, from the Harlem
Renaissance (for which he was a patron) to 1930s Communism, his modernist literary efforts to
post-World War II conservative
turns in his political and philosophy ideas.
January 5: Hosea Williams,
the Civil Rights leader and hugely inspiring American whose exemplary
20th century life included surviving a near-lynching, serving in
World War II, working closely with Martin Luther King, and
founding a still-thriving
organization dedicated to feeding hungry and homeless Americans.
January 6: Carl Sandburg,
the son of Swedish American immigrants and a Spanish American War vet who
became one of the 20th century’s most multi-talented and prolific
writers: of poems that define a
city and era, of a Pulitzer-winning multi-volume biography
of Lincoln, and of a huge and very underrated historical
novel.
January 7: Zora Neale
Hurston, the Harlem Renaissance novelist,
anthropologist
and folklorist, and essayist
whose works consistently depict the complexity and richness, the pain and
promise, the horrors and hopes, of African American and American communities
and lives.
January 8: Emily
Green Balch, the Nobel Prize-winning anti-war activist whose near-century
of inspiring American life included professing economics and sociology at
Wellesley, writing pioneering books on Slavic
Americans and international
women’s organizing and activism (among others), and defending
human rights around the globe.
January 9: Joan Baez,
the folk singer-songwriter who has been an iconic presence on the American
cultural landscape since Woodstock,
who has done important activist work on behalf of civil and gay rights, anti-war
and anti-poverty efforts, and the environment (among many other issues), and
who continues to release powerful new
music in the 21st century.
January
10: Robinson Jeffers,
the iconoclastic poet whose works compare favorably to modernists like T.S.
Eliot, American Studiers like William
Carlos Williams, and natural/spiritual poets like Robert
Frost, and whose biting
and bracing views of human nature offer important correctives to some of
our more blithely sunny ideals.
January 11: William James, the
pioneering psychological,
philosopher,
spiritual thinker,
and renaissance American who not only significantly advanced human knowledge
and ideas in a number of disciplines but also played a hugely influential role
in the careers and lives of both one of our greatest creative writers (his
brother Henry) and (to me) the most inspiring single American (W.E.B.
Du Bois).
January 12: Ira Hayes, the Pima
Native American (from the Gila River
community) whose service with the Marines during World War II was immortalized
in his role as one of the six Iwo Jima flag raisers,
who played himself in a subsequent film about the battle,
and whose complex and tragic yet also crucial American identity and life have
been further immortalized by such artists as Tony Curtis, Johnny Cash, and Clint Eastwood.
January 13: Salmon Chase, best known as
Lincoln’s crucial Secretary
of the Treasury and then as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court who
swore in Lincoln’s successor Andrew Johnson and helped uphold the 13th
and 14th
amendments during Reconstruction, but just as inspiringly an abolitionist
lawyer and activist who helped form the 1840s Liberty Party and continued
after the war to take important stands such as his support for voting
rights for black men.
January 14: A tie between Tillie Olsen, the hugely unique author
and activist
who helped change the way Americans think about class,
gender, motherhood, and identity (among other themes); and Julian Bond,
the Civil Rights leader, legislator, and scholar who helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC) and whose influences on 20th and 21st
century America are immeasurable.
January 15: A tie between Martin
Luther King, Jr., who of course already has a holiday
in his honor but who deserves it as much as anyone I will or could nominate
all year; and Ernest Gaines!
January 16: Dian Fossey, the
pioneering zoologist and activist whose work with gorillas, both as a scientist studying them in the wild
and as a political advocate of protecting
them and their habitats, embodies the best of public research and studies
(and made for a pretty
good film to boot).
January 17: A tie between Ben Franklin, not because he wrote a
relatively self-aggrandizing autobiography
that helped launch the idealized
“self-made man” narrative, nor because he gradually changed
his mind on his xenophobic opposition to Germans in Pennsylvania (although
he did indeed change), but because he was one of the first and remains one of
the most impressive genuinely renaissance Americans,
and one who (the Germans notwithstanding) modeled attitudes of tolerance
and community
that can and should inspire all Americans; and Muhammad Ali, who needs no further introduction!a
January 18: Daniel Hale
Williams, the first African American cardiologist and a physician and
surgeon of tremendous talent and influence, but also a pioneering social
activist: Williams opened the Provident Hospital
and Nursing Training School for young African Americans, served as
surgeon-in-chief at Washington’s Freedmen’s Hospital, and, when denied
membership in the American Medical Association, founded the National Medical
Association.
January 19: Edgar Allan Poe, one of the
couple most famous American writers (you get a football team named after you,
you’re at the top of the list) but still underappreciated for the breadth and
depth of his talent: the guy helped create and popularize not only realistic psychological horror,
but also the detective
story, science
fiction, and modern literary
criticism—all before the age of forty! (To say nothing of his innovative, mathematically precise yet
still emotionally resonant poetry.)
January 20: Buzz Aldrin,
the pioneering astronaut and advocate for space exploration who performed
America’s first
spacewalk, was one of the first
men to walk on the moon, and has continued to make an impassioned
case for the values of exploration and science ever since—most especially
and inspiringly in his books for and
work with schoolchildren.
January 21: Roger
Nash Baldwin, the influential social worker
and probation officer who, in response to World War I and the need for an
organization to support
and defend conscientious objectors, helped found and then directed for many
years the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU),
spearheading many of the ACLU’s signature legal
and social
efforts.
January 22: Noah
Phelps, the Revolutionary War officer whose efforts as a spy led directly
to one of the war’s earliest and most significant victories (Ethan Allen’s
capture of Fort Ticonderoga), and who continued to serve the new nation
politically for many years, chairing the meeting that passed Connecticut’s
Articles of Confederation and serving as a delegate
to the state’s Constitutional Convention.
January 23: Gertrude Belle Elion,
the Nobel
Prize-winning medical researcher and chemist who was the daughter of two Jewish
immigrants and one of America’s most
pioneering female scientists, creating her own career and opportunities as
well as much of the field of modern medical research.
January 24: Edith
Wharton, the novelist and scholar who was the first American woman awarded the
Pulitzer prize, who became a self-educated authority on topics
as diverse as architecture and travel, and whose best works
of fiction engage realistically with both
social and psychological identity as well as any American writer.
January 25: Etta James!
January 26: A tie between Bessie
Coleman, the first black woman in
the world to earn an aviator’s license and, to my mind, an
even more inspiring and pioneering aviator and American than Amelia Earhart
(which is no knock on Earhart); and Paul
Newman, not for his iconic
and impressively long and
diverse career in film so much as for his incredibly
successful and inspiring work as a philanthropist
and activist.
January 27: Samuel
Gompers, the Anglo-Jewish
immigrant and cigar maker who became one of the labor
movement’s earliest and most
eloquent and committed
leaders and advocates.
January 28: José
Martí,
the Cuban American revolutionary, political
and social activist and leader, journalist and translator and essayist and poet,
and general transnational
Renaissance American whose essay “Our
America” makes a perfect case for precisely that transnational American
Studies identity and community.
January 29: Edward Abbey,
the pioneering environmentalist,
naturalist, and activist whose books Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang (among many
others) join the works of Thoreau, John Muir, and Rachel Carson at the summit
of American naturalist and activist writing. [NOTE: I learned on Twitter in 2022 after Abbey's frustrating racism and xenophobia--for now I'm leaving this entry here, as it reflects the presence of such attitudes across so much of American culture and history, but I'm very open to other nominees for January 29th of course!]
January 30: A tie between Thomas Rolfe,
the son of Pocahontas
and John Rolfe and so the first
prominent mixed race American child (and one whose English and Virginian life is full of both the complexities and the promises of
cross-cultural American identity); Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
without whose influence (whatever your political perspectives) 20th
century American and world history would have been entirely different; and reader nomination Fred Korematsu.
January 31: Jackie Robinson, one of the most socially significant American sports figures and a pretty
talented baseball player to boot.
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