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Industrial & Progressive era
Born 1865-1899 — industry, immigration, reform and the first American century.
–1699
Colonial era
7
1700–1779
Founding era
34
1780–1819
Early Republic
64
1820–1864
Antebellum & Civil War era
110
1865–1899
Industrial & Progressive era
125
1900–1929
Early 20th century
238
1930–1949
Mid-20th century
204
1950–1969
Late 20th century
113
1970–
Contemporary era
46
125 people, oldest first
The people
Warren G. Harding 1865–1923Government & PoliticsTwenty-ninth president whose administration was marked by postwar retrenchment and the Teapot Dome scandal.Gifford Pinchot 1865–1946Reform & RightsFirst chief of the U.S. Forest Service and leading advocate of scientific conservation and managed public lands.Charles Proteus Steinmetz 1865–1923Technology & BuildingElectrical engineer whose work on alternating current systems powered the electrification of America.Matthew Henson 1866–1955Frontier & SportArctic explorer who co-led Robert Peary’s 1909 expedition, which claimed to have reached the North Pole.Anne Sullivan 1866–1936Ideas & MediaTeacher who famously educated Helen Keller, breaking through her isolation from deafness and blindness.Madam C. J. Walker 1867–1919Business & LaborEntrepreneur who built a major Black hair-care company and used her wealth for philanthropy and civil-rights causes.Frank Lloyd Wright 1867–1959Technology & BuildingArchitect and engineer whose organic architecture, including Fallingwater, reshaped the built environment.Wilbur Wright 1867–1912Technology & BuildingCo-inventor of the first successful powered airplane and pioneer of aeronautical engineering.W.E.B. Du Bois 1868–1963Ideas & MediaSociologist, historian, and civil rights activist who was the first African American to earn a Harvard doctorate.Scott Joplin 1868–1917Arts & LettersRagtime composer whose piano rags were among the first widely sold American popular sheet music.Henrietta Swan Leavitt 1868–1921Science & MedicineDiscovered the Cepheid period-luminosity relation that made measuring cosmic distances possible.Harvey Cushing 1869–1939Science & MedicineSurgeon who established modern neurosurgery as a specialized medical discipline.Emma Goldman 1869–1940Reform & RightsAnarchist orator and editor whose free-speech and birth-control agitation led to her 1919 deportation.Alice Hamilton 1869–1970Science & MedicineFounded American industrial toxicology and documented workplace lead and chemical poisoning.Bill Haywood 1869–1928Business & LaborCo-founded the Industrial Workers of the World and led major mining and textile strikes.Amadeo Giannini 1870–1949Business & LaborFounded Bank of Italy and grew it into Bank of America by lending to ordinary depositors.Joseph Strauss 1870–1938Technology & BuildingChief engineer of the Golden Gate Bridge, one of the most photographed structures in the world.Orville Wright 1871–1948Technology & BuildingCo-inventor of the first successful powered airplane, achieving human flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903.Calvin Coolidge 1872–1933Government & PoliticsThirtieth president who cut taxes and federal spending during the economic expansion of the 1920s.Julia Morgan 1872–1957Technology & BuildingFirst woman licensed as an architect in California and designer of Hearst Castle.Willa Cather 1873–1947Arts & LettersNovelist whose work made immigrant settlement and the Great Plains central subjects of American literature.Lee de Forest 1873–1961Technology & BuildingInvented the Audion triode tube that enabled electronic signal amplification and early radio broadcasting.Robert Frost 1874–1963Arts & LettersFour-time Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose rural New England verse became synonymous with American poetry.Joseph Goldberger 1874–1929Science & MedicineShowed that pellagra was a dietary deficiency rather than an infectious disease.Herbert Hoover 1874–1964Government & PoliticsEngineer and relief administrator whose presidency was consumed by the onset of the Great Depression.Thomas J. Watson Sr. 1874–1956Business & LaborExecutive who built IBM into the dominant punched-card and business-machine company before the computer age.Mary McLeod Bethune 1875–1955Ideas & MediaEducator and civil rights leader who founded Bethune-Cookman University and advised four presidents.Alfred P. Sloan 1875–1966Business & LaborGeneral Motors leader who established the multidivisional corporation and professional management systems copied across industry.Willis Carrier 1876–1950Technology & BuildingEngineer who invented modern air conditioning, transforming industry, architecture, and daily life.Garrett Morgan 1877–1963Technology & BuildingInventor who created the traffic signal and gas mask, saving countless lives.Jack Johnson 1878–1946Frontier & SportFirst Black world heavyweight boxing champion whose reign provoked national controversy over race and sport.Lucy Sprague Mitchell 1878–1967Ideas & MediaProgressive educator who founded Bank Street College and revolutionized early childhood education.Upton Sinclair 1878–1968Ideas & MediaNovelist whose expose of Chicago meatpacking spurred federal food and drug inspection laws.Othmar Ammann 1879–1965Technology & BuildingSwiss-American structural engineer who designed the George Washington Bridge and other major spans.Albert Einstein 1879–1955Science & MedicineGerman-American theoretical physicist whose theory of relativity revolutionized modern physics.Margaret Sanger 1879–1966Reform & RightsBirth-control advocate who transformed reproductive health access while leaving a deeply contested legacy involving eugenics.Helen Keller 1880–1968Reform & RightsDeafblind author and lecturer who became the leading American advocate for blind and disabled people.John L. Lewis 1880–1969Business & LaborUnion leader who built the United Mine Workers and helped found the CIO, expanding industrial unionism and collective bargaining.Douglas MacArthur 1880–1964Government & PoliticsCommander who led major Pacific campaigns, oversaw Japan’s occupation, and became central to the Korean War controversy.George C. Marshall 1880–1959Government & PoliticsArmy chief of staff who organized U.S. victory in World War II and later designed the Marshall Plan.H.L. Mencken 1880–1956Ideas & MediaSatirist and cultural critic whose biting prose defined American journalism in the early 20th century.Frances Perkins 1880–1965Business & LaborFirst woman in a presidential cabinet and labor secretary who helped create Social Security, minimum-wage, and workplace protections.William Boeing 1881–1956Business & LaborFounded the aircraft company that became the largest American commercial airplane manufacturer.Felix Frankfurter 1882–1965Government & PoliticsSupreme Court justice and Harvard professor whose jurisprudence and government service shaped twentieth-century American law.Robert Goddard 1882–1945Technology & BuildingPhysicist and engineer who built the first liquid-fueled rocket, laying the foundation for space exploration.Robert H. Goddard 1882–1945Technology & BuildingBuilt and launched the first liquid-fueled rocket and patented foundational rocket propulsion methods.Edward Hopper 1882–1967Arts & LettersRealist painter whose depictions of urban isolation, like Nighthawks, became iconic American images.Sam Rayburn 1882–1961Government & PoliticsLongest-serving Speaker of the House who steered New Deal and postwar legislation through Congress.Franklin D. Roosevelt 1882–1945Government & Politics32nd President who led the nation through the Great Depression and most of World War II.Rose Schneiderman 1882–1972Business & LaborLabor organizer who championed women workers, workplace safety, and social reforms later incorporated into the New Deal.William J. "Wild Bill" Donovan 1883–1959Government & PoliticsFounder and director of the OSS whose wartime organization became a principal institutional predecessor of the CIA.Eleanor Roosevelt 1884–1962Reform & RightsFirst Lady and human rights advocate who chaired the UN committee that drafted the Universal Declaration.Harry S. Truman 1884–1972Government & Politics33rd President who authorized the atomic bomb and implemented the Marshall Plan.Sinclair Lewis 1885–1951Arts & LettersFirst American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, whose satirical novels critiqued American capitalism.Chester W. Nimitz 1885–1966Government & PoliticsFleet admiral who directed U.S. naval strategy in the Pacific during World War II.George S. Patton 1885–1945Government & PoliticsArmored commander whose aggressive leadership made him one of the most prominent American generals of World War II.Alice Paul 1885–1977Reform & RightsStrategist of the final campaign for women's suffrage and author of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment.Harlow Shapley 1885–1972Science & MedicineDetermined the size of the Milky Way and displaced the Sun from its center.Henry H. "Hap" Arnold 1886–1950Government & PoliticsCommanding general of the Army Air Forces who built American air power during World War II and helped lay the foundation for the Air Force.Hugo Black 1886–1971Government & PoliticsJustice who championed strong First Amendment protections and incorporation of the Bill of Rights.Ludwig Mies van der Rohe 1886–1969Technology & BuildingDirected architecture at Illinois Institute of Technology and defined American modernist steel-and-glass buildings.Ruth Benedict 1887–1948Ideas & MediaAdvanced culture-and-personality anthropology through Patterns of Culture and wartime studies of Japan.Sidney Hillman 1887–1946Business & LaborLabor leader who built the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and linked organized labor to New Deal politics.Aldo Leopold 1887–1948Reform & RightsEcologist whose “land ethic” became foundational to modern environmental thought.Georgia O'Keeffe 1887–1986Arts & LettersModernist painter known for her enlarged flowers, New York skyscrapers, and New Mexico landscapes.Jim Thorpe 1887–1953Frontier & SportNative American athlete who won Olympic gold medals and excelled in multiple professional sports.Irving Berlin 1888–1989Arts & LettersSongwriter whose vast catalog, from 'God Bless America' to Broadway standards, helped define the American popular songbook.Richard Byrd 1888–1957Frontier & SportNaval officer and explorer who claimed to be the first to reach the North Pole by air.John Foster Dulles 1888–1959Government & PoliticsEisenhower's Secretary of State who built Cold War alliances and advocated massive nuclear retaliation.Robert Moses 1888–1981Technology & BuildingMaster builder whose roads, parks, and public works reshaped metropolitan New York while displacing communities and entrenching car dependence.Eugene O'Neill 1888–1953Arts & LettersPlaywright whose psychologically complex dramas established serious American theater on the world stage.Charlie Chaplin 1889–1977Arts & LettersBritish-American actor and filmmaker whose Tramp character became an icon of the silent film era.Edwin Hubble 1889–1953Science & MedicineAstronomer whose discovery of expanding galaxies provided the foundation for the Big Bang theory.Walter Lippmann 1889–1974Ideas & MediaColumnist and political thinker whose work shaped modern journalism and debate over public opinion and democracy.A. Philip Randolph 1889–1979Reform & RightsLabor and civil-rights leader who pressured presidents to desegregate defense work and the armed forces.Edwin Howard Armstrong 1890–1954Technology & BuildingInvented the regenerative and superheterodyne circuits and frequency modulation radio.Vannevar Bush 1890–1974Technology & BuildingBuilt the differential analyzer and directed U.S. wartime research while proposing the Memex concept.Marjory Stoneman Douglas 1890–1998Reform & RightsWriter and activist whose advocacy was central to preserving the Florida Everglades as a national ecological treasure.Dwight D. Eisenhower 1890–1969Government & Politics34th President and Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II.Elizabeth Gurley Flynn 1890–1964Business & LaborOrganized IWW strikes and helped found the American Civil Liberties Union.Aimee Semple McPherson 1890–1944Ideas & MediaEvangelist and media innovator who founded the Foursquare Church and pioneered religious broadcasting and celebrity ministry.Zora Neale Hurston 1891–1960Arts & LettersNovelist and folklorist whose work preserved Black Southern speech and culture and became central to the American canon.Cole Porter 1891–1964Arts & LettersComposer and lyricist of Broadway standards including Anything Goes and Kiss Me Kate.Earl Warren 1891–1974Government & PoliticsChief justice whose Court transformed civil rights, voting, representation, and criminal procedure.Grant Wood 1891–1942Arts & LettersRegionalist painter best known for American Gothic, one of the most parodied images in American art.Robert H. Jackson 1892–1954Government & PoliticsJustice, attorney general, and chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg who influenced constitutional law and international criminal justice.Reinhold Niebuhr 1892–1971Ideas & MediaTheologian whose Christian realism influenced American foreign policy, civil rights, and public ethics.Bessie Smith 1892–1937Arts & LettersLeading blues recording artist of the 1920s known as the Empress of the Blues.Dean Acheson 1893–1971Government & PoliticsSecretary of State who helped build NATO and the postwar architecture of American foreign policy.Omar Bradley 1893–1981Government & PoliticsSenior World War II commander and first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.Charles Burchfield 1893–1967Arts & LettersPainter known for his visionary watercolors of nature and American small-town life.Allen Dulles 1893–1969Government & PoliticsLongest-serving CIA director who built the agency's covert operations capacity during the early Cold War.Huey Long 1893–1935Government & PoliticsLouisiana governor and senator whose Share Our Wealth program pressured New Deal policy before his assassination.Dorothy Thompson 1893–1961Ideas & MediaColumnist and radio broadcaster who was one of the most influential women in American media.John Ford 1894–1973Arts & LettersDirector of Westerns and Depression dramas who won four directing Academy Awards.Benjamin Graham 1894–1976Business & LaborEstablished value investing and securities analysis as a professional discipline.Norman Rockwell 1894–1978Arts & LettersIllustrator whose idealized depictions of American life graced magazine covers for nearly 50 years.Norbert Wiener 1894–1964Science & MedicineMathematician who founded cybernetics, influencing computing, automation, neuroscience, and theories of communication and control.Buckminster Fuller 1895–1983Technology & BuildingPopularized the geodesic dome and promoted resource-efficient structural design.R. Buckminster Fuller 1895–1983Technology & BuildingDesigner and inventor who developed the geodesic dome and promoted sustainable design principles.J. Edgar Hoover 1895–1972Crime & NotorietyLongtime FBI director who built a powerful national police institution while conducting extensive political surveillance and abuses.Buster Keaton 1895–1966Arts & LettersSilent-film comedian and director whose visual precision, stunts, and deadpan style became foundational to screen comedy.Dorothea Lange 1895–1965Arts & LettersDocumentary photographer whose Depression-era images defined the visual record of the 1930s.Matthew Ridgway 1895–1993Government & PoliticsArmy commander credited with restoring U.N. forces in Korea and later serving as NATO supreme commander and Army chief of staff.Babe Ruth 1895–1948Frontier & SportBaseball legend whose home-run hitting transformed the sport and made him a national celebrity.Fulton J. Sheen 1895–1979Ideas & MediaCatholic bishop whose radio and television programs made him one of America’s first major religious media personalities.Wallace Carothers 1896–1937Science & MedicineLed the DuPont research that produced neoprene and nylon and established polymer science.Gerty Cori 1896–1957Science & MedicineBiochemist and first American woman to win a Nobel Prize in science, honored for discoveries about carbohydrate metabolism.F. Scott Fitzgerald 1896–1940Arts & LettersNovelist who captured the Jazz Age in The Great Gatsby, the defining novel of the American Dream.Dorothy Day 1897–1980Ideas & MediaCo-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, combining religious faith with radical commitments to peace and the poor.Amelia Earhart 1897–1937Frontier & SportAviation pioneer and the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean.Elijah Muhammad 1897–1975Ideas & MediaLeader who built the Nation of Islam into a major religious and Black nationalist movement.William Faulkner 1897–1962Arts & LettersNobel laureate whose stream-of-consciousness novels set in Yoknapatawpha County reshaped American fiction.Alexander Calder 1898–1976Arts & LettersSculptor who invented the mobile and whose kinetic sculptures changed modern art.William O. Douglas 1898–1980Government & PoliticsLongest-serving Supreme Court justice, noted for expansive civil-liberties jurisprudence and environmental advocacy.George Gershwin 1898–1937Arts & LettersComposer who fused jazz, popular song, Broadway, and concert music into a distinctly American style.Henry Luce 1898–1967Ideas & MediaMagazine publisher whose Time — Life and Fortune defined mid-century American newsweekly formats.Norman Vincent Peale 1898–1993Ideas & MediaMinister whose bestselling positive-thinking message joined American Protestantism with modern self-help culture.Helen B. Taussig 1898–1986Science & MedicineFounder of pediatric cardiology whose work helped create the first successful treatment for blue-baby syndrome.Humphrey Bogart 1899–1957Arts & LettersStudio-era screen actor identified with Casablanca and the hardboiled detective role.Al Capone 1899–1947Crime & NotorietyGangster whose criminal empire made him the defining symbol of Prohibition-era organized crime.Duke Ellington 1899–1974Arts & LettersComposer and bandleader who expanded the artistic ambition and vocabulary of jazz.Ernest Hemingway 1899–1961Arts & LettersNobel Prize-winning novelist whose spare prose style defined 20th-century American fiction.Alfred Hitchcock 1899–1980Arts & LettersDirector whose Hollywood films and television presence defined modern suspense and influenced generations of American filmmakers.Percy Lavon Julian 1899–1975Science & MedicinePioneered synthesis of cortisone and other steroids from plant sterols.