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Born Elsewhere

Americans who were not born in America, in the order they arrived in the world. This site files people by where the work happened, not where it started. Countries shown are present-day — each entry keeps the birthplace as it was.

139 people

#	Person	Year
1	John Winthrop 1588–1649 United Kingdom Long-serving Massachusetts Bay governor whose vision of a covenant community influenced New England political culture.	1588
2	Anne Hutchinson 1591–1643 United Kingdom Religious dissenter whose trial and banishment exposed tensions over authority, gender, and conscience in Puritan New England.	1591
3	Roger Williams 1603–1683 United Kingdom Founder of Rhode Island and early advocate of religious liberty and separation of church and state.	1603
4	William Penn 1644–1718 United Kingdom Founder of Pennsylvania who advanced representative government and religious toleration in colonial America.	1644
5	Thomas Paine 1737–1809 United Kingdom Pamphleteer whose Common Sense and Crisis essays mobilized American public opinion for independence.	1737
6	John Paul Jones 1747–1792 United Kingdom Continental Navy captain whose Revolutionary War victories established early American naval tradition.	1747
7	Alexander Hamilton 1755–1804 Saint Kitts and Nevis Founding Father who established the nation's financial system and co-authored the Federalist Papers.	1755
8	John Jacob Astor 1763–1848 Germany America's first multimillionaire, made in furs, the China trade and Manhattan land	1763
9	James Smithson 1765–1829 France British scientist whose bequest founded the Smithsonian Institution, America's museum complex.	1765
10	Denmark Vesey 1767–1822 U.S. Virgin Islands Free Black carpenter executed for organizing a large planned slave revolt in Charleston.	1767
11	John James Audubon 1785–1851 Haiti Naturalist and illustrator whose Birds of America shaped American ornithology and the society bearing his name.	1785
12	John Ericsson 1803–1889 Sweden Swedish-American engineer who designed the ironclad USS Monitor, revolutionizing naval warfare.	1803
13	John A. Roebling 1806–1869 Germany Developed wire-rope suspension bridge design and planned the Brooklyn Bridge.	1806
14	George G. Meade 1815–1872 Spain Union general whose command victory at Gettysburg marked a turning point in the Civil War.	1815
15	Isaac Mayer Wise 1819–1900 Czech Republic Built the three institutions that still hold American Reform Judaism together.	1819
16	Elizabeth Blackwell 1821–1910 United Kingdom First woman to receive a medical degree in the United States and a pioneer of women’s medical education.	1821
17	Levi Strauss 1829–1902 Germany Immigrant entrepreneur whose company helped turn blue jeans into an enduring American product and symbol.	1829
18	Andrew Carnegie 1835–1919 United Kingdom Steel magnate who built one of the largest steel empires in history and later became a major philanthropist.	1835
19	Mother Jones 1837–1930 Ireland Organizer whose militant campaigns for miners and against child labor made her an icon of American labor.	1837
20	James J. Hill 1838–1916 Canada Built the Great Northern Railway without federal land grants and shaped northern plains settlement.	1838
21	John Muir 1838–1914 United Kingdom Naturalist and organizer whose advocacy helped create national parks and the modern wilderness movement.	1838
22	Thomas Nast 1840–1902 Germany Political cartoonist who broke the Tweed Ring and drew the modern Santa Claus	1840
23	Alexander Graham Bell 1847–1922 United Kingdom Inventor of the telephone and founder of AT&T, transforming global communication.	1847
24	Joseph Pulitzer 1847–1911 Hungary Publisher who transformed mass-circulation journalism and endowed the Pulitzer Prizes.	1847
25	Augustus Saint-Gaudens 1848–1907 Ireland Sculptor whose public monuments, including the Shaw Memorial, are among America's finest.	1848
26	William Osler 1849–1919 Canada Built bedside clinical teaching into American medical education as a founding Johns Hopkins professor.	1849
27	Jacob Riis 1849–1914 Denmark Photographer and reporter whose documentation of New York tenements drove housing reform campaigns.	1849
28	Samuel Gompers 1850–1924 United Kingdom Founding leader of the American Federation of Labor who established durable craft-union organization.	1850
29	Albert A. Michelson 1852–1931 Poland The Michelson-Morley experiment and the measurement of the speed of light	1852
30	John Singer Sargent 1856–1925 Italy Painted the Gilded Age at full length, then closed the portrait studio at the height of the demand.	1856
31	Nikola Tesla 1856–1943 Croatia Serbian-American inventor who developed alternating current electrical systems and numerous electrical innovations.	1856
32	Franz Boas 1858–1942 Germany Founded American academic anthropology and argued against racial determinism from Columbia University.	1858
33	Ralph Modjeski 1861–1940 Poland Polish-American bridge engineer who designed major spans including the Bay Bridge and Benjamin Franklin Bridge.	1861
34	James Naismith 1861–1939 Canada Nailed two peach baskets to a gymnasium balcony in December 1891 and invented basketball.	1861
35	Charles Proteus Steinmetz 1865–1923 Poland Electrical engineer whose work on alternating current systems powered the electrification of America.	1865
36	Emma Goldman 1869–1940 Lithuania Anarchist orator and editor whose free-speech and birth-control agitation led to her 1919 deportation.	1869
37	Alexander Berkman 1870–1936 Lithuania Anarchist who shot and stabbed Henry Clay Frick in 1892 and wrote Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist.	1870
38	Joseph Goldberger 1874–1929 Slovakia Showed that pellagra was a dietary deficiency rather than an infectious disease.	1874
39	Stephen S. Wise 1874–1949 Hungary Founder of the Free Synagogue and the World Jewish Congress, and the leading American Jewish voice of the Holocaust years	1874
40	Othmar Ammann 1879–1965 Switzerland Swiss-American structural engineer who designed the George Washington Bridge and other major spans.	1879
41	Albert Einstein 1879–1955 Germany German-American theoretical physicist whose theory of relativity revolutionized modern physics.	1879
42	Theodore von Karman 1881–1963 Hungary Aerodynamics, the Karman vortex street, and the founding of JPL	1881
43	Felix Frankfurter 1882–1965 Austria Supreme Court justice and Harvard professor whose jurisprudence and government service shaped twentieth-century American law.	1882
44	Charles Ponzi 1882–1949 Italy The 1920 Boston postal-coupon fraud that gave the Ponzi scheme its name	1882
45	Rose Schneiderman 1882–1972 Poland Labor organizer who championed women workers, workplace safety, and social reforms later incorporated into the New Deal.	1882
46	Ludwig Mies van der Rohe 1886–1969 Germany Directed architecture at Illinois Institute of Technology and defined American modernist steel-and-glass buildings.	1886
47	Marcus Garvey 1887–1940 Jamaica Founded the UNIA and the Black Star Line and built the largest Black mass movement in American history.	1887
48	Sidney Hillman 1887–1946 Russia Labor leader who built the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and linked organized labor to New Deal politics.	1887
49	Irving Berlin 1888–1989 Russia Songwriter whose vast catalog, from 'God Bless America' to Broadway standards, helped define the American popular songbook.	1888
50	Selman Waksman 1888–1973 Ukraine Ran the soil-screening programme that produced streptomycin, the first effective treatment for tuberculosis.	1888
51	Charlie Chaplin 1889–1977 United Kingdom British-American actor and filmmaker whose Tramp character became an icon of the silent film era.	1889
52	Aimee Semple McPherson 1890–1944 Canada Evangelist and media innovator who founded the Foursquare Church and pioneered religious broadcasting and celebrity ministry.	1890
53	Benjamin Graham 1894–1976 United Kingdom Established value investing and securities analysis as a professional discipline.	1894
54	Gerty Cori 1896–1957 Czech Republic Biochemist and first American woman to win a Nobel Prize in science, honored for discoveries about carbohydrate metabolism.	1896
55	Frank Capra 1897–1991 Italy Three directing Oscars in five years, and the Christmas film nobody wanted in 1946.	1897
56	Lucky Luciano 1897–1962 Italy Building the Commission that governed the American Mafia	1897
57	Henry Luce 1898–1967 China Magazine publisher whose Time — Life and Fortune defined mid-century American newsweekly formats.	1898
58	Leo Szilard 1898–1964 Hungary Conceived the nuclear chain reaction, started the American bomb program, then petitioned against using it	1898
59	Alfred Hitchcock 1899–1980 United Kingdom Director whose Hollywood films and television presence defined modern suspense and influenced generations of American filmmakers.	1899
60	Vladimir Nabokov 1899–1977 Russia Author of Lolita, Pale Fire and Speak, Memory	1899
61	Hyman G. Rickover 1900–1986 Poland Architect of the nuclear Navy who transformed submarine propulsion, naval engineering, and military management.	1900
62	Harry Bridges 1901–1990 Australia Led West Coast longshore workers through the 1934 strike and headed the ILWU for decades.	1901
63	Enrico Fermi 1901–1954 Italy Italian-American physicist who built the first nuclear reactor and won the Nobel Prize in Physics.	1901
64	Louis Kahn 1901–1974 Estonia The Salk Institute, the Kimbell and the National Assembly at Dhaka, from an architect who began at 50.	1901
65	Lee Strasberg 1901–1982 Ukraine Taught the Method to two generations of American actors, and made affective memory the centre of it.	1901
66	Walter Brattain 1902–1987 China The experimentalist whose hands built the first working transistor, at Bell Labs in December 1947.	1902
67	Menachem Mendel Schneerson 1902–1994 Ukraine Led Chabad-Lubavitch from Brooklyn for 43 years and sent married emissaries to more than 100 countries.	1902
68	Mark Rothko 1903–1970 Latvia Abstract expressionist known for his large color-field paintings that evoke deep emotional responses.	1903
69	John von Neumann 1903–1957 Hungary Hungarian-American mathematician and engineer whose computer architecture remains the basis of modern computing.	1903
70	Willem de Kooning 1904–1997 Netherlands Abstract expressionist whose gestural paintings helped define the New York School.	1904
71	Cary Grant 1904–1986 United Kingdom The definitive Hollywood leading man, and one of the first stars to break the studio contract system.	1904
72	Ayn Rand 1905–1982 Russia Novelist and philosopher whose defense of individualism and capitalism deeply influenced American conservative and libertarian thought.	1905
73	Hans Bethe 1906–2005 France Physicist who explained stellar energy production and led theoretical work at Los Alamos before becoming a prominent arms-control voice.	1906
74	Kurt Gödel 1906–1978 Czech Republic Proved the incompleteness theorems and spent his later career at the Institute for Advanced Study.	1906
75	Maria Goeppert Mayer 1906–1972 Poland Physicist and Nobel laureate who developed the nuclear shell model, a fundamental account of atomic nuclei.	1906
76	Albert Sabin 1906–1993 Poland Medical researcher who developed the oral polio vaccine used in worldwide eradication campaigns.	1906
77	Billy Wilder 1906–2002 Poland Hollywood writer-director of Sunset Boulevard — Some Like It Hot and Double Indemnity.	1906
78	Abraham Joshua Heschel 1907–1972 Poland Rabbi and theologian who linked Jewish thought with civil-rights and antiwar activism.	1907
79	John Kenneth Galbraith 1908–2006 Canada Economist and public intellectual whose The Affluent Society critiqued American consumerism.	1908
80	Edward Teller 1908–2003 Hungary Physicist and advocate of the hydrogen bomb whose work and policy influence shaped Cold War science and defense.	1908
81	Elia Kazan 1909–2003 Turkey Directed A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman and On the Waterfront, and named names to HUAC.	1909
82	Ronald Coase 1910–2013 United Kingdom Developed transaction-cost theory of the firm and the Coase theorem while at Chicago.	1910
83	Eero Saarinen 1910–1961 Finland Architect whose expressive buildings and furniture became icons of postwar American modernism.	1910
84	William Shockley 1910–1989 United Kingdom Co-inventor of the transistor at Bell Labs, earning the Nobel Prize and launching the semiconductor age.	1910
85	Louise Bourgeois 1911–2010 France French-American sculptor whose giant spider sculptures and psychologically intense works explored trauma.	1911
86	Wernher von Braun 1912–1977 Germany German-American aerospace engineer who led the development of the Saturn V rocket that took humans to the Moon.	1912
87	Chien-Shiung Wu 1912–1997 China Experimental physicist whose decisive work on parity violation transformed particle physics and challenged assumptions about natural symmetry.	1912
88	Larry Itliong 1913–1977 Philippines Filipino American labor leader whose organizing initiated the Delano grape strike and helped build the United Farm Workers.	1913
89	Hedy Lamarr 1914–2000 Austria Actress and inventor who co-developed frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology, the basis for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.	1914
90	Saul Bellow 1915–2005 Canada Novelist whose intellectually rich fiction explored individuality, urban life, and the immigrant experience in modern America.	1915
91	Thomas Merton 1915–1968 France Trappist monk and writer whose books popularized contemplative spirituality, social criticism, and interfaith dialogue.	1915
92	I. M. Pei 1917–2019 China Architect whose monumental modern buildings reshaped American civic and cultural architecture.	1917
93	Isaac Asimov 1920–1992 Russia Writer whose science fiction and popular science helped shape public imagination about robots, technology, and the future.	1920
94	Ahmet Ertegun 1923–2006 Turkey Co-founder of Atlantic Records	1923
95	Henry Kissinger 1923–2023 Germany National security adviser and secretary of state who shaped détente, China policy, and controversial Cold War interventions.	1923
96	Benoit Mandelbrot 1924–2010 Poland Developed fractal geometry during a long research career at IBM and Yale.	1924
97	Elisabeth Kübler-Ross 1926–2004 Switzerland Introduced the stages-of-grief model and advanced hospice and end-of-life care in America.	1926
98	Gordie Howe 1928–2016 Canada Mr. Hockey — 26 NHL seasons, 801 goals and six Hart Trophies	1928
99	Elie Wiesel 1928–2016 Romania Holocaust survivor, author of Night, and Nobel Peace laureate	1928
100	Frank Gehry 1929–2025 Canada Developed a sculptural architectural language seen in the Walt Disney Concert Hall and other landmarks.	1929
101	Fazlur Rahman Khan 1929–1982 Bangladesh Developed tubular structural systems that made the Sears Tower and John Hancock Center possible.	1929
102	Michael Collins 1930–2021 Italy Apollo 11 command module pilot who orbited alone behind the Moon while Armstrong and Aldrin walked below.	1930
103	Jaime Escalante 1930–2010 Bolivia Math teacher who inspired underprivileged students in East Los Angeles to excel in advanced calculus.	1930
104	George Soros b. 1930 Hungary Investor and founder of the Open Society Foundations, supporting democracy and human rights worldwide.	1930
105	Rupert Murdoch b. 1931 Australia Media mogul whose News Corp and Fox Corporation shaped global news and entertainment.	1931
106	Barbara Gittings 1932–2007 Austria Struck homosexuality from the psychiatric manual and put gay books on library shelves.	1932
107	Elizabeth Taylor 1932–2011 United Kingdom Two-time Academy Award winner who turned the largest fame in the world into the first mass-audience campaign against AIDS.	1932
108	William Anders 1933–2024 Hong Kong Apollo 8 astronaut who took the iconic Earthrise photograph, changing humanity's view of our planet.	1933
109	Amartya Sen b. 1933 India Indian-American economist and Nobel laureate whose work on welfare economics and famine reshaped development.	1933
110	Daniel Kahneman 1934–2024 Israel Israeli-American psychologist who won the Nobel Prize for his work on behavioral economics and decision-making.	1934
111	Edward Said 1935–2003 Israel His 1978 book Orientalism argued that Western knowledge of the East was built inside imperial power, and it remade several humanities fields.	1935
112	Andrew Grove 1936–2016 Hungary Led Intel through its shift to microprocessors and shaped American technology management practice.	1936
113	Madeleine Albright 1937–2022 Czech Republic First woman to serve as U.S. Secretary of State and shaped 1990s policy in the Balkans.	1937
114	Peter Jennings 1938–2005 Canada ABC World News Tonight anchor whose calm authority made him one of the most trusted voices in news.	1938
115	Stokely Carmichael 1941–1998 Trinidad and Tobago The SNCC chairman who made Black Power a national slogan	1941
116	Federico Faggin b. 1941 Italy Led design of the Intel 4004 microprocessor and later co-founded Zilog.	1941
117	Wolf Blitzer b. 1948 Germany CNN anchor whose coverage of the Gulf War and political events made him a household name.	1948
118	Christopher Hitchens 1949–2011 United Kingdom Columnist, debater and author of god Is Not Great, who broke with the left over Iraq.	1949
119	David Ho b. 1952 Taiwan Physician-scientist whose research helped establish combination antiretroviral therapy as the standard treatment for HIV/AIDS.	1952
120	Kevin O'Leary b. 1954 Canada Canadian-American businessman and Shark Tank investor known as Mr. Wonderful.	1954
121	Steven Pinker b. 1954 Canada Cognitive psychologist and linguist whose books argue that reason and science have driven human progress.	1954
122	Tim Berners-Lee b. 1955 United Kingdom British-American computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web, revolutionizing global information sharing.	1955
123	Katalin Karikó b. 1955 Hungary Biochemist whose work on modified messenger RNA enabled highly effective mRNA vaccines and new therapeutic platforms.	1955
124	Martina Navratilova b. 1956 Czech Republic Tennis champion with the most singles and doubles titles in the Open Era and LGBTQ advocate.	1956
125	Len Blavatnik b. 1957 Ukraine Ukrainian-American industrialist and Warner Music owner whose Access Industries spans chemicals and media.	1957
126	Christiane Amanpour b. 1958 United Kingdom CNN chief international correspondent who has covered wars and crises from the Balkans to the Middle East.	1958
127	Nicolas Berggruen b. 1961 France Investor and philosopher whose Berggruen Institute fosters cross-cultural governance and philosophy.	1961
128	Safra Catz b. 1961 Israel CEO of Oracle who has steered one of the world's largest enterprise software companies.	1961
129	Wayne Gretzky b. 1961 Canada Hockey legend known as The Great One, holding the most records in NHL history.	1961
130	Malcolm Gladwell b. 1963 United Kingdom Staff writer for The New Yorker whose books on social science became publishing phenomena.	1963
131	Jensen Huang b. 1963 Taiwan Co-founder and CEO of NVIDIA whose GPUs became the engine of the AI revolution.	1963
132	Jeff Skoll b. 1965 Canada eBay's first president whose Skoll Foundation supports social entrepreneurs solving global problems.	1965
133	Satya Nadella b. 1967 India CEO of Microsoft who pivoted the company toward cloud computing and AI, driving massive growth.	1967
134	Pierre Omidyar b. 1967 France eBay founder whose Omidyar Network supports entrepreneurship, human rights, and governance reform.	1967
135	Peter Thiel b. 1967 Germany PayPal co-founder and first outside investor in Facebook whose contrarian views shaped Silicon Valley culture.	1967
136	Lisa Su b. 1969 Taiwan CEO of AMD who transformed the semiconductor company into a major competitor to Intel and NVIDIA.	1969
137	Elon Musk b. 1971 South Africa Engineer and entrepreneur whose companies have advanced electric vehicles, reusable rockets, and neural interfaces.	1971
138	Sundar Pichai b. 1972 India CEO of Alphabet and Google who oversees the world's dominant search engine and AI research.	1972
139	Sergey Brin b. 1973 Russia Co-founder of Google who helped develop the PageRank algorithm and expanded into AI and autonomous vehicles.	1973