History & Culture National Park Service: People

People

President Harry S Truman Celebrating his birthday

President Truman celebrating his birthday

Sometimes all you need to know is that there was a Homestead Act of 1862. Sometimes, you want to understand the life of a homesteader, someone like Adeline Hornbek. A single mother of four, Hornbek made her own way for her family and became the owner of a prosperous ranch in Colorado's Florissant Valley.

Thomas Edison earned 1,093 United States patents, a record that still stands. He kept a cot in his New Jersey lab so he could work through the night when inventing.

In his autobiography, Up From Slavery, Booker T. Washington wrote, “ I had the feeling that to get into a schoolhouse and study would be about the same as getting into paradise.” He founded Tuskegee Institute in 1881.

Susan LaFlesche Picotte's dream was a hospital to care for her people on the Omaha Indian Reservation. The first American Indian woman to practice medicine in the United States, she graduated from medical school in 1889 and realized her dream 14 years later with the first privately-funded reservation hospital.

People make history. Find them here.

Earliest Americans

U.S. Presidents

image of a Tuskegee Airman during World War 2

Tuskegee Airmen

Image of Asian American girl in ceremonial dress

Asian Reflections

Did You Know?
The shirt of Chief Red Cloud, a leader of the Oglala Sioux of the Lakota Nation who led his people in the 1860s wars along the Bozeman Trail and negotiated a truce with the United States resulting in the abandonment of the Army's forts along the trail, is in the collections of Agate Fossil Beds National Monument in Nebraska. more...