Last time on History Recaps, we talked about the hero of the Revolutionary War, the last monarch of Hawaii, and a scientist and a sniper both alive during World War II. Today we continue with a couple more people alive during World War II, and another scientist, this one involved in the space program.
Hopefully your interest is piqued by now, so on we go!
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5. Josephine Baker (1906 - 1975)
Josephine Baker was an African-American jazz dancer who accomplished a lot of almost-unbelievable stuff in her time. She was born into extreme poverty in St. Louis, and one of the few bright spots in her early life was dancing. When she was ten, she won a dancing contest put on by a travelling salesman, and this gave her purpose. As she became an adult, she was able to find steady work as a dancer, and eventually she attracted the attention of touring show producers who ran a show that was leaving for Paris. Josephine joined their show, excited to visit Paris and hoping both to see the world and to escape some of the racism she faced in the U.S.
In Paris, and jazz music and the Harlem Renaissance were rising in popularity, and since Josephine, a jazz dancer herself, seemed to embody everything beautiful about black people, she quickly became one of the most famous, popular people in Paris. She was the most photographed woman of 1926, and inspired such artists as Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso. She starred in a film called Zou-Zou, making her the first black woman to have a leading role in a film. Highly paid for her dancing and singing performances, some estimate that she was the richest black woman in the world at the time.
However, not everyone appreciated Josephine. During many of her tours in Germany and Austria she encountered virulent racism, and quickly, rightfully, came to associate that racism with the Nazi party. As Nazi influence began to spread across Europe, Josephine became determined to fight it in anyway she could.
So she became a spy.
No one was going to suspect the lively, vivacious dancer and entertainer of being a spy for the French Resistance. As she toured Italy, Josephine attended many functions that along with high-ranking members of Mussolini's government and army. Here she was able to gather information and pass it along to the Resistance. She also did work in the French colonies in North Africa.
After the war, Josephine went on to campaign against segregation in the U.S., refusing to perform for segregated audiences. She faced some financial troubles as she got older, but continued to captivate audiences young and old.
6. Hannie Schaft (1920 - 1945)
Jannetje Johanna Schaft, known as Hannie, was a university student in Holland when it was invaded and taken over by Germany. One of the terms of the occupation was that all Dutch university students had to sign a declaration of allegiance to the German government. Hannie was close friends with Philine Polak and Sonja Frenk, both of them Jewish, and this was one of Hannie's main reasons for refusing to sign the declaration. Unable to continue college, she went to live with her parents, and eventually joined the Dutch communist Resistance.
Resistance groups all over Europe were eager to hire women as couriers and messengers, since women traveling around the country were a lot less likely to be stopped and/or forcibly conscripted than men. However, Hannie wasn't willing to stop at merely being a courier; she wanted to fight. So, the Resistance trained her and two other young women as assassins.
Hannie soon gained a reputation with both sides. The Germans dubbed her "the girl with the red hair" after she was seen but not identified in the field. After this, Hannie died her hair dark and continued operating.
Many Resistance couriers throughout World War II operated for years without being caught and lived to tell the tale. Hannie was not one of them. She was caught at a military checkpoint by the Germans, and once they had identified her as the red-haired assassin, there was no opportunity for escape. Hannie was brought to the Bloemendaal sand dunes in Holland and executed at short range. The Nazis buried her body in the sand; after the war, four hundred and twenty-two bodies were found there. All of them were male except for Hannie.
Hannie was posthumously honored by Princess Juliana of the Netherlands after her body was recovered. However, due to her ties to the Dutch Communist Party and the reputation communism gained after World War II, Hannie's popularity declined for a while. She has been recognized in several different ways in Holland today, but she remains an obscure historical figure.
7. Margaret Hamilton (1936 - ?)
Margaret Hamilton, née Heafield, is a computer scientist who worked on, among many other things, the Apollo space mission. She received her BA from Earlham College, majoring in math and minoring in philosophy. After graduation she postponed her PhD, first to support her husband while he worked on his undergraduate degree, then to take an interim position MIT to help develop weather-predicting software. At this point, neither computer science nor software engineering were named fields; programmers learned on the job, through hands-on training. From 1961 to 1963 Margaret worked on the SAGE project (the first computer built to search for unfriendly aircraft), and also worked with the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories.
It was through her work on the SAGE project that Margaret qualified for work on the Apollo 11 mission. She joined the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory at MIT, joined the work on the Apollo space project. Hamilton and her team pioneered the software the project needed to navigate and land on the moon. Hamilton, and her team, actually saved the moon landing by designing and implementing an "asynchronous executive", a program that enabled the computer to drop low-priority tasks if necessary to preserve computing power. Thus, when the rendezvous radar, a comparatively unimportant part of the project, started overloading the computer with unimportant pieces, of data, the computer was able to deal with the radar and continue functioning. It is now agreed that without this program, and the foresight and skill that went into it, the moon landing might not have happened.
Margaret Hamilton also co-founded Higher Order Software and founded Hamilton Technologies, Inc., and was CEO of both companies. In 1986 she received the Augusta Ada Lovelace Award from the Association for Women in Computing, and in 2003 she was given the NASA Exceptional Space Act Award for her contributions. She popularized the term "software engineering", and the programs that she pioneered in that field are still in use today.
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Sources/Further Reading
Liberty's Kids - Okay, technically this isn't a book, it's a TV series, but it's still one of the better summaries of the American Revolution I've seen. It concisely and accurately covers the entire Revolution, and covers such obscure historical figures as Phyllis Wheatley, Deborah Sampson, Moses Michael Hayes, and yes, James Armistead.
James Armistead Lafayette at Biography.com.
Kaiulani: The People's Princess by Ellen Emerson White - This book, a fictional diary of the real Princess Kaiulani, was my first exposure to the history of Hawaii and the story of Queen Liliuokalani. It was also kind of my only exposure, because we still don't talk about this hardly at all here in the U.S. But I digress.
Liliuokalani at the Encyclopedia Britannica website.
Lise Meitner at the Nobel Prize database...
"Meet the world's deadliest female sniper who terrorized Hitler's Nazi army." - Great article that sums up Lyudmila Pavlichenko's life and exploits. It's at Business Insider for some weird reason.
Women Heroes of World War II by Kathryn J. Atwood - This is a great book that tells the stories of twenty-six women who did incredibly heroic and courageous things during World War II. It was my primary source for Josephine Baker and Hannie Schaft, but it also talks about twenty-four other women, including Sophie Scholl, Noor Inayat Khan, and Corrie Ten Boom. I would definitely recommend giving this book a read.
"Meet Margaret Hamilton, the bada** '60s programmer who saved the moon landing." - Vox.com article telling the story of how Margaret Hamilton saved the moon landing.
Margaret Hamilton's About Page at the NASA Office of Logistice Design webpage.
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Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoyed this second post more than I enjoyed writing it! If you have any comments, questions, critiques, or if you just want to chat about cool historical people, feel free to leave a comment. Until next time!
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