Little has been written about Richard Spikes in terms of his childhood, education and personal life. What is known is that he was an incredible inventor and the proof of this is in the incredibly diverse number of creations that have had a major impact on the lives of everyday citizens.
Born in Honolulu as the son of Japanese immigrants, George Ariyoshi became the first governor of Japanese ancestry in the nation.
Margarete Bagshaw was a featured lecturer and has spoken across the country – including the Smithsonian N.M.A.I. in Washington DC for “Women’s History Month” to San Jose State University to the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. Bagshaw was the opening speaker for the National Association of Art Educators first-ever Leadership Conference in 2014 and was scheduled to be one of their keynote speakers at their National Conference in New Orleans, LA in March of 2015. Her memoirs "Teaching My Spirit To Fly" was published in 2012.
An Wang (means "peaceful king"), made important inventions relating to computer memories and to electronic calculators. He was the founder and longtime executive officer of Wang Laboratories Incorporated, a leading American manufacturer of computers and word processing systems.
Edward Alexander Bouchet graduated valedictorian from Hopkins Grammar School in 1870. That same year, he began his studies at Yale University. He completed his bachelor's degree in 1874. Bouchet made history two years later, becoming the first African American to earn a doctorate degree in the United States. After earning his doctorate in physics, he taught at the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia for more than 25 years.
Franklin Chang-Díaz is a Costa Rican-born American physicist and the first Hispanic astronaut of Chinese descent.
Vijaya Lakshmi Emani was an Indian American social activist known for her work against domestic violence and was a civic leader among the Indian American community in Cleveland, Ohio. Starting with Northeast Ohio Telugu Association, followed by the Federation of Indian Community Associations and with Greater Cleveland Asian Community, she was the president of the Federation of India Community and a board member of the Federation of India Community Associations (FICA).
In 1868 John W Menard was the first black elected to Congress. He was awarded his full salary but never seated.
A water feature found in the Maya city of Palenque, Mexico, is the earliest known example of engineered water pressure in the new world, according to a collaboration between two Penn State researchers, an archaeologist and a hydrologist.
Elijah McCoy was working as a fireman on the Michigan Central Railroad, shoveling coal and lubricating engine parts with a handheld oil can when he realized that there must be a better, more efficient way of delivering oil to the vital gears, screws, and cylinders that kept the mighty locomotive engine running. He wondered if a mechanical device existed that could automatically drip the proper amount of oil into the moving parts of the engine whenever and wherever needed so that a train would no longer have to be stopped every few miles to be manually lubricated. After experimenting for two years in a makeshift machine shop, McCoy came up with a design for a special “lubricating cup” that could be fitted into the steam cylinders of locomotives and other stationary machinery.
Testtdi Antonia Novella overcame childhood poverty and illness to become one of the leading doctors in the United States. She was trained as a pediatrician and served in the public health sector. After spending several years at the National Insitute of Health (NIH), Novello was appointed United States Surgeon General by President George Bush. She was the first woman and Latina to hold this position. Novello used this role to bring national attention to important health issues, such as alcohol abuse, smoking, violence, and AIDS, as well as issues that especially affected women and Hispanics.
Yung Wing is the first-known Chinese student to graduate from an American university. He graduated from Yale in 1854, where he was a member of the choir, played football, was a member of the boat club and won academic prizes for English competitions.
Harold Amos a native of Pennsauken, N.J., who graduated from Springfield College in Springfield, Mass with a baccalaureate in 1941. He had gone there on an academic scholarship, something few African Americans received at that time. He also served in the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps in Europe during World War II. Following this service, he earned an MA from Harvard University and then received his Ph.D. from the HMS Division of Medical Sciences in 1952. From 1951 to 1952, he was a Fulbright scholar at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and, in 1954; he joined the Medical School faculty as an instructor in the Department of Bacteriology and Immunology. From 1968 until 1971, and again from 1975 until 1978, he served as chair of the department (now the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics).
The 65th Infantry originated as a Puerto Rican outfit in the form of the Battalion of Porto Rican Volunteers (May 20, 1899) in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War of 1898. They were regarded as colonial troops, part of the first “American Colonial Army.” In 1908, and by then a regiment, the unit officially became part of the U.S. Army. It came to be known as the Porto Rican Regiment. During WWI the regiment was sent to the Canal Zone in Panama- far from the European battlefields. In 1920, the unit’s name changed from the Porto Rican Regiment to the 65th Infantry Regiment, United States Army.
Ynes Mexia is a Mexican-American social worker, botanical collector, and explorer. Her interest in botany developed in San Francisco, where she moved in 1908 and practiced as a social worker. She joined the Sierra Club and at the age of 51 enrolled as a special undergraduate student at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1925 she participated in a botanical expedition to Mexico sponsored by Stanford University. Once in Mexico, however, she decided she could accomplish more on her own; abandoning the group, she traveled the country for two years and collected more than 1,500 specimens, which she sent to the herbarium at Berkeley. Her success in Mexico assured her reputation.
Navarro Scott Mammedaty, a Kiowa Indian, was born in Lawton, Oklahoma and grew up in close contact with the Navajo and San Carlos Apache communities. He received his BA in political science in 1958 from the University of New Mexico. At Stanford University he received his MA and Ph.D. in English, in 1960 and 1963, respectively.
Yuri Kochiyama was a tireless political activist who dedicated her life to contributing to social change through her participation in social justice and human rights movements.
In 1944, the Army sent three WAC (Women Army Corps) recruiters to the island of Puerto Rico to organize a unit of 200 WACs. The young women of the island responded enthusiastically, and over 1,500 applications were submitted.
North America (the United States and Canada) was originally known as Turtle Island. The name comes from the Aboriginal Creation story of the Anishinaabek and was renamed to the Americas after the Italian explorer, Amerigo Vespucci.
Born in the Corona neighborhood of Queens, New York, Marie Maynard Daly was an avid reader and was fascinated by Paul De Kruif’s popular book The Microbe Hunters. She was further inspired by her father’s love of science. Unfortunately, he had been forced by economic circumstances to drop out of Cornell University, where he had been pursuing a bachelor’s degree in chemistry.
Sono Osato, the Japanese-American ballet dancer who created the role of Ivy Smith in the 1944 Broadway premiere of On the Town was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1919 to a French-Canadian mother and Japanese father, Osato began her professional career at the age of 14, when she auditioned for and was hired to join the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in 1934. She made history not only as the company’s youngest dancer, but also as the first American, and the first dancer of Japanese descent to join the internationally renowned troupe.
Sylvia Méndez was born in 1936 in Santa Ana, CA to a Puerto Rican mother and a Mexican father. As a young child, she attended a school for Hispanic children. When she was eight-years-old, her parents decided Sylvia, her brothers, and their cousins should attend a nearby Whites-only school with better resources. The school said Sylvia’s lighter-skinned cousins could attend, but she and her brothers could not.
Mamie Phipps Clark was born in Hot Springs, Ark., and Kenneth Clark was born and raised in Harlem, N.Y. Both obtained their bachelor's and master's degrees from Howard University. Influenced by her work with children in an all-black nursery school, Mamie decided to conduct her master’s thesis, "The Development of Consciousness of Self in Negro Pre-School Children". Not long after, she met her soon-to-be husband, Kenneth Clark, who partnered with her to extend her thesis research on self-identification in black children. This work was later developed into the famous doll experiments that exposed internalized racism and the negative effects of segregation for African-American children.