History Recap: 7 Historical Figures You've Probably Never Heard Of (Part 2)

[Part I of this post]

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... 

...and at Encyclopedia Brittanica.

"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!

History Recap: 7 Historical Figures You've Probably Never Heard Of (Part 1)

I've really been on a history kick lately, it seems. But hey, what can I say? I'm learning things, you guys are learning things, and we're both (hopefully) having fun, so on we go with the history recaps.

Today I thought I'd (mostly) take a break from the American Revolution. So we'll be spanning several different eras and events with one of my favorite topics: Historical People You've Probably Never Heard About (For One Reason Or Another). Today we'll be going over seven; not an exhaustive list by any means, but a good starting place. As a coincidental bonus, none of the people on this list are white men.

And so, without further ado, here we go! (With Part One. This got longer than I expected it to, so this is just Part One. Part Two will contain the rest of the list and some additional sources you can look into.)

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1. James Armistead Lafayette (1760 - 1830)
We all know the stories. America never would have won the Revolutionary War without two things: French involvement and the superior strategy of America's leaders. These two things culminated at the 1781 Battle of Yorktown, where American and French forces combined to pen the British in on all sides at Chesapeake Bay. But what most people don't know is that this victory was facilitated, in part, by a black spy named James Armistead.

James Armistead was a slave when, in 1781, he volunteered to join the American army. He ended up serving as a spy under the Marquis de Lafayette. Since the British army had successfully one-upped the Americans by offering freedom to any slave who joined their army, it was easy for James to pose as a runaway slave and "join" the British army under Benedict Arnold--yes, that Benedict Arnold. And apparently, James was such a good spy that Benedict Arnold, a longtime spy himself, trusted him completely.

In the spring of 1781, Arnold went north and James Armistead repeated his ruse, this time with Cornwallis. Cornwallis also fell for it hook, line, and sinker, and James was free to travel back and forth between the British and American camps, carrying information to the Americans and feeding misinformation to the British. Much of the information he carried to other American spies was instrumental to the American success at Yorktown.

After the war, though there were some legal provisions for freeing slaves who had served in the army, James was denied this because ~technically~ he'd only served as a spy, not a soldier. (Yeah, I have no idea how they told him that with a straight face, either.) Fortunately, James was able to petition the Virginia Assembly for freedom in 1786. With the help of a testimonial Lafayette wrote for him in 1784, he was manumitted. At that point, he changed his name to James Armistead Lafayette in honor of his commanding officer.
(In 1824, while Lafayette was touring America, he and James ran into each other again and had a joyful reunion. At this time, Lafayette wrote another testimonial on his behalf.)

In conclusion, most people know about the decisive American victory at Yorktown, but most people don't know that if not for James Armistead Lafayette, we might never have won that battle.


2. Queen Liliuokalani (1838 - 1917)
Also known as Lydia Kamakaeha, Lydia Liliuokalani Paki, or Liliu Kamakaeha, Queen Liliuokalani was the last monarch of Hawaii before it was annexed by the United States. She was raised in a high-ranking family, receiving a modern education and spending time touring other countries in the Western world. In 1862, she was married to John Owen Dominis, an official in the Hawaiian government. In 1874, her brother, David Kalakaua, was chosen as king. After her second brother, the heir apparent, died in 1877, Liliuokalani was named heir presumptive. After Kalakaua died in 1891, Liliuokalani became the first female ruler of Hawaii.

Liliuokalani regretted the loss of power the crown had experienced under her brother, and did her best to recover some of that power. This move alienated the foreign businessmen who had set up shop in Hawaii, and they promptly tried to annul the queen's power. Eventually, the Missionary Party, led by Sanford Dole, basically led a takeover of Hawaii by requesting Liliuokalani's abdication and then setting up their own government, after declaring her deposed. Liliuokalani went along with it to avoid bloodshed, but submitted a request to President Cleveland to reinstate her. Cleveland granted her request and withdrew support for Dole, but Dole--determined to get his own way--rejected Cleveland's authority on the matter and set up a government independent of the U.S., the Republic of Hawaii. An 1895 insurrection against this government, in the queen's name, caused Liliuokalani to be placed under house arrest.

Liliuokalani fought bitterly against U.S. annexation, but it happened anyway in 1898. The former queen then wrote and published a book: Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's Queen. She also composed "Aloha Oe".

In conclusion, Liliuokalani was both the only female monarch of Hawaii and its last ruler. She fought for her country in her own way and though she was eventually defeated by the U.S., she never stopped loving her country. It's a shame that she is remembered by so few people.


3. Lise Meitner (1878 - 1968)
Lise Meitner was a Jewish, Austrian scientist who was instrumental in the discovery of nuclear fission and how particles behave under bombardment. Her story was--is--exceptional almost from the beginning. To begin with, women in Vienna were not allowed to attend public institutions of higher education; but Lise's parents were supportive and she still managed to get an education in physics. Secondly, Lise was allowed to attend the lectures of physicist  Max Planck, even though Planck had until that point turned away women asking to attend his lectures. Lise then went on to become Planck's assistant; it was in this position that she met and worked with Otto Hahn, a chemist. This was the beginning of Lise's career in science.

Lise went on to work with Planck and Hahn. She achieved much; during World War I she worked as a nurse, pioneering x-ray use along with people like Marie Curie and her daughter Irene. After the war she became the first woman in Germany to assume the post of full professor. She also participated in countless experiments with radioactivity and new elements. When Hitler came to power she, and other Jewish scientists, were forced to leave the country; she eventually ended up moving to Sweden.

Lise went on to participate in Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann's discovery of nuclear fission. However, when Hahn won a Nobel prize for the discovery, both Lise and her nephew Otto Frisch were excluded from the award. Though she won other awards, Lise's contributions to physics and chemistry have largely gone unsung. However, in 1997, the element meitnerium was named in her honor.


4. Lyudmila Pavlichenko (1916 - 1974)
Lyudmila Pavlichenko was a Soviet Russian sniper during World War II. Her journey began at fourteen, when she moved with her family to Kyiv and joined a shooting club and began developing her skills as an amateur sharpshooter.

Lyudmila was twenty-four when, in 1941, Germany began its invasion of the Soviet Union. She was among the first volunteers to join the army; when given the opportunity to become a nurse she declined, instead becoming one of about two thousand female snipers in the Russian army. She was one of roughly five hundred of those snipers who survived the war.

Lyudmila was credited with  three hundred and nine kills during World War II, thirty-six of which were enemy snipers. in 1942 she was wounded and withdrawn from active combat. She went on to tour the U.S., Canada and the U.K. to speak on the war effort; she also trained other snipers until the war's end. After the war, she became a historian and a research assistant to the Chief HQ of the Soviet Navy. She died in 1974, having accomplished more in fifty-eight years than many do in a hundred.

History Recap: The Boston Massacre

I swore my next blog post was going to be a book review. I am still working on that book review, but I've also recently been hit with the Revolutionary War Era feelings, so here's another history post. Please enjoy!

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Today we're going to start with a story. 

Once upon a time, there was a town. Not a small town, but not a huge town, either. Recent events meant that the inhabitants of this town--mostly blue-collar workers without a ton of money to their names--were, well, disgruntled with the law enforcement in their town. For the most part, this disgruntlement had resulted in some heckling of the local law enforcement officers--kids yelling things and throwing snowballs, people grumbling under their breath and glaring whenever an officer passed. 

Then, things escalated. 

There was a gathering--ostensibly a peaceful gathering, a legal gathering, but bordering on a riot in some places. People were getting violent, pressing in a couple of officers, yelling things at them, threatening to get violent. The officers called for backup. A higher-ranking officer showed up with reinforcements, but ordered his men not to get violent with the crowd, as that wouldn't end well for anybody. The crowd, though, was determined to provoke a reaction. They continued to act up until--and no one exactly knows why or how--one of the officers fired his gun. 

Some of the other officers fired, then, though none of them would later recall hearing the order to fire. The crowd scattered; when it was all over and the smoke had cleared, eleven people had been shot. (If I'm remembering this incident correctly, five died and two more died later of injuries.)

This broke the floodgates. The people of the town were enraged. Some of them held funerals and wakes and protest marches. Some of them formed violent mobs, seeking to take out their fury on any scapegoat they could find. The government sent in more law enforcement officers, which only aggravated the situation. 

Eventually, the officers involved were indicted, taken to court, for murder. Their lawyer crafted a compelling case--the situation really wasn't as cut and dry as it first appeared, and the officers weren't directly at fault. They were found not guilty; but this, too, aggravated the people, because at the end of the day, sons and father and brothers had been killed by the very people who were meant to protect them. Law enforcement fired on a crowd of citizens, and no one was going to let that go. 

The story doesn't end there, of course, but I think it's a decent stopping point. Now, thanks to the title of this post, you've probably figured out that all that up there is the story of the Boston Massacre of 1770. However, that's not all the story is. I deliberately used vague terminology to re-tell the story, because I want you to be able to look back at it and see the story of Ferguson, of Baltimore, of the all the communities that have been in turmoil recently. 

Recently, we as a country have been more aware than ever of the misdeeds and unclear decisions of our police forces. There's been a question, recently, of just what racial biases are embedded in our law enforcement system. I'm not here to answer that question; there's a lot of evidence and argument and rhetoric on either side, and I am far from the most educated person on any of that. 

But I have been thinking about history lately. And I have been thinking about parallels lately, and I've been thinking about how messy--muddy and unclear and divisive--the Boston Massacre really was. It came at a time of palpable tension--economic tension, not racial tension, but tension all the same. Both sides debated it, trying to twist it to fit with their own narrative. Loyalists said that the crowd was a mob on the verge of attacking soldiers who didn't have the option to fight back. Rebels said that armed soldiers had fired into an innocent, peaceful gathering of civilians. Neither narrative was completely correct. The truth is, the people were angry and the soldiers were scared and a horrible, irreversible mistake was made. 

I'm the last person to try to discredit the Black Lives Matter movement. I'm the last person to say that we need to tear down our police departments. But I am the person to say that we need to be better, we need to work our hardest to ensure that our neighborhoods are safe--that all neighborhoods are safe, regardless of who lives there--and that our cops are doing their jobs to the very best of their abilities. I think, in the end, the lesson of the Boston Massacre is that we need to be able to look rationally at both sides of a conflict, since it's rare that only one side is in the right. 

(We tend to empathize with the members of the crowd in the case of the Boston Massacre, yet in a modern-day rehashing of the story, the cops are often the ones who receive the most empathy. Just something to think about.)

So, yes. Does the Black Lives Matter movement have a valid point? Yes, I think they do. Nothing has ever been accomplished by people staying silent about the issues they see affecting their communities. However, I also think that we need to listen to police officers and their advocates, since it just isn't fair or right to target an entire group of people without at least hearing them out. In conclusion, I think the only way for us to resolve this issue is to impartially listen to both sides and try to come to an equally impartial conclusion. If we can't do that, I don't think we'll be coming to a solution any time soon. 

History Recap: The Alien and Sedition Acts

I've been doing some history reading recently. I've been learning about the American Revolution--the political atmosphere surrounding it, the men involved with it, and the construction of a country from the ground up that came afterward. It's all very fascinating stuff. And one of the most fascinating things that I've found is a little incident called the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798.

First, let me give you some background.

In 1798, a few things were going on at once. For one thing, John Adams, a member of the Federalist party, had been elected president and was doing his best, no doubt, to iron out the wrinkles in a government that hadn't quite figured out how to work smoothly yet. For another thing, across the Atlantic Ocean, French peasants were rising up and slaughtering every member of the upper class they could get their hands on, and England was making a stand against the country that killed its own king. The fledgling United States had already made a statement of their neutrality in this conflict under Washington, but the prominent politicians of the day had still taken sides. The Federalist party (Adams's party, if you'll remember), led by Alexander Hamilton, was squarely on the side of the English. The Jeffersonian Republicans, led by Thomas Jefferson, supported the French.

All this was tumultuous enough for a new country with a new president. But this wasn't all that was going on. You see, because of the aforementioned slaughtering of French aristocracy, many French noblemen and Catholic priests (who were also targeted by the revolutionaries) were fleeing to America. This sudden influx of French refugees/immigrants, combined with statements by the French revolutionaries that they would spread their brand of "freedom" to the rest of the world, made the American government--particularly the Federalists--very nervous.

(Is any of this starting to sound familiar?)

This is the political climate that President John Adams found himself in. And this is the political climate that eventually motivated Mr. Adams to sign four Congressional laws collectively known as the Alien and Sedition Acts.

The Alien Acts encompassed three laws. To summarize, these laws basically stated that the President had the power to deport any foreign immigrant, for any reason. They also made it much harder for foreigners to become American citizens. The Sedition Act was the fourth law, and it made it illegal to publish anything "false, scandalous, or malicious" about the government.

As the Jeffersonian Republicans were quick to point out, these Acts ran roughshod over the First Amendment. Adams & co. ignored these protests; they felt that, given what was going on with the French, these acts were the only way to keep their new country safe. Also, given the amount of muckraking, slander, and attacks the newspapers of the day published against their politicians, the Federalists felt perfectly justified in restricting what could be said about the government.

In the end, no immigrants were deported because of the Alien Acts. Only twenty-five people were arrested for Sedition, and of those people, only eleven were tried and only ten were convicted. (And those ten were pardoned by Jefferson at the start of his presidency.)

However, the fact that these acts were passed at all cast enough of a shadow on the Federalist party to eventually cause their demise. Adams wasn't re-elected after his first term. The Alien and Sedition Acts expired in 1800 and 1801, and Congress didn't try to renew them. The only man who might have rescued the Federalists--Alexander Hamilton--was killed in a duel in 1804. The Federalists faded into obscurity, the Alien and Sedition Acts being their only lasting legacy.

Now, all this makes for a very interesting and even entertaining story, but what's the moral behind it all? What are we to learn?

Well, first of all, the situation with the French revolution has, I would say, several fascinating parallels with our current problem of ISIS and the Syrian refugees. We today also have a problem: evil, bloodthirsty "revolutionaries" are tearing a country apart. Refugees are flooding from that country, trying to find safety in Europe and America. And all those refugees are making our politicians nervous, because what if some terrorists sneak in with all the innocents?

Of course, our government hasn't yet gone as far as the Federalists did in 1798. We haven't totally destroyed our credibility with immigrants and refugees. (Although it's happening. Our immigration system is pretty much shot to hell, and we do already have a strenuous system for vetting refugees.) And we haven't made it illegal to speak against the government.

But I think the Alien and Sedition Acts are something of a cautionary tale, particularly in what they have to say about refugees and immigrants. After all, we're in the midst of a presidential campaign right now, and the Republican candidates seem to enjoy nothing more than promising to deport great swathes of people, or cut off immigration altogether. (You could also argue that the Sedition Acts mirror the current railing against "PC culture", but that's a whole other blog post.) I think these candidates would do well to remember that such actions were what heavily contributed to the destruction of the Federalist party. And I think these candidates would do well to remember that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Thank you.