Biographies cover such pioneers from Thomas Jefferson, the master stylist of American history, to Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood. The biography entries in this encyclopedia are focused on the social, political, and other circumstances relevant to the individual’s work.
Lord John Acton, the great liberal academic who dominated the field of history during the latter part of the Victorian Age, was born into a family of the upper echelon of society in Italy and moved to England at the age of three.
Anthony Amsterdam, law professor and opponent of the death penalty, earned an A.B. from Haverford College in 1957 and an L.L.B. in 1960 from the University of Pennsylvania.
Harry Anslinger was born in Altoona, Pennsylvania, the son of an immigrant railroad worker. He earned an associate degree in engineering and business management and then went to work for the Pennsylvania Railroad as an investigator.
Susan B. Anthony, reformer and women’s suffragist, was born in Adams, Massachusetts, to Daniel Anthony and Lucy Read, one of eight children.
John Ashcroft served as attorney general during the first term of the administration of George W. Bush, and in his last year in office analysts were terming him the worst attorney general in the nation’s history.
Born the grandson of Benjamin Franklin and educated in Geneva, Benjamin Franklin Bache epitomized early America’s ambivalent relationship with the press.
Roger Baldwin was the founder of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and served as its director from 1920 to 1950. He was widely recognized as the foremost advocate of civil liberties in the United States during those years.
Francis Biddle, the scion of a family that emigrated to America in the early seventeenth century, attended private schools, including Harvard College, from which he graduated cum laude, and the Harvard Law School, where he received an LL.B. in 1911.
John Armor Bingham, an Ohio lawyer, was a prominent figure in American politics and government in the latter half of the nineteenth century. He participated in many of the key events surrounding and shortly after the Civil War.
Noted jurist, author, and scholar, Robert Heron Bork was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He received a B.A. from the University of Chicago in 1948 and a J.D. in 1953.
An extremely effective lawyer and reformer in the Progressive era before Woodrow Wilson named him to the Supreme Court in 1916, Brandeis had very little if any contact with issues that would be identified as civil liberties.
Justice Stephen Breyer, a Massachusetts Democrat, was President Bill Clinton’s second and final appointment to the Court (following Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 1993).
Lenny Bruce is often considered the most influential figure in modern comedy, a pioneer of the acerbic social satire that would dominate the genre in the latter half of the twentieth century.
Perhaps best known for his famous ‘‘Cross of Gold’’ speech, William Jennings Bryan had a public career lasting some thirty years.
If the Stonewall riot was the event that galvanized the movement for gays’ civil rights, Anita Bryant was the personality that first embodied at the national level the opposition to those rights.