Hale, Edward Everett (03 April 1822–10 June 1909), author, reformer, and Unitarian minister, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Nathan Hale, a journalist, and Sarah Preston Everett. His father was a nephew of revolutionary war hero Captain Nathan Hale, and his maternal uncle and namesake was the orator and statesman ...
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Lloyd, Henry Demarest (01 May 1847–28 September 1903), journalist and social reformer, was born in New York City, the son of Aaron Lloyd, a pastor of the Dutch Reformed church, and Marie Christie Demarest. Lloyd grew up in impoverished rural parishes in New York, New Jersey, and Illinois. But in 1860 his father gave up the ministry and returned to New York City to move in with his father-in-law, a customs house official, and run a small book shop. A scholarship student at Columbia College, Lloyd graduated with a B.A. in 1867 and entered Columbia Law School. In 1869, after passing the New York bar exam, he became assistant secretary to the New York-based American Free-Trade League and for three years served as its public relations agent....
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Loeb, Sophie Irene Simon (04 July 1876–18 January 1929), author, journalist, and welfare worker, was born in Rovno, Russia, the daughter of Samuel Simon, a jeweler, and Mary Carey. Both of her parents were Jewish. Loeb emigrated to the United States with her family at the age of six; they settled in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh. Upon the death of her father ten years later, she began part-time work in a local store while finishing high school. Sophie was teaching grade school when in 1896, at the age of nineteen, she married Anselm Loeb, an older man who owned the store where she had worked. She stopped teaching and lived the life of a middle-class married woman, concentrating on entertaining, music, art, and poetry. She wrote epigrams, which she later published, and sympathetic essays about the poor. Unhappy with her married life, and seeking to serve society, Loeb obtained a divorce in 1910 and moved to New York City....
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Mencken, H. L. (12 September 1880–29 January 1956), author, editor, and journalist, was born Henry Louis Mencken in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of August Mencken, a cigar manufacturer, and Anna Abhau. Having emigrated from Germany during the mid-nineteenth century, the Menckens and Abhaus had quickly adapted to life in the United States, and they provided a home more Victorian than German-American for their four children. Henry Mencken, the eldest, did attend a private German school for his earliest education, but he completed his formal education at Baltimore Polytechnic, a high school primarily responsible for producing engineers and technicians....
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Marilyn Blackwell
Nichols, Clarina Howard (25 January 1810–11 January 1885), journalist, reformer, and advocate for women's rights, was born Clarina Irene Howard in West Townshend, Vermont, the eldest daughter of Chapin Howard and Birsha Smith. A prominent tradesman, land investor, Baptist elder, and local official, Chapin Howard raised his eight children with a combination of religious discipline and paternal solicitude. Clarina's prodigious intellect flowered at district schools and during her only term at a local select school in 1828. In a valedictory address, she compared “a scientific and an ornamental education for women,” signifying her passion for knowledge and pride in her cerebral accomplishments. At five feet, eight inches tall, she was a striking young woman with deep-set blue eyes, a high forehead, and long oval face....
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Robert D. Cross
Riis, Jacob August (03 May 1849–26 May 1914), journalist and social reformer, was born in Ribe, Denmark, the son of Niels Edward Riis, a Latin teacher, and Carolina Lundholm. After studying in his father’s school, Riis was apprenticed for four years to a carpenter in Copenhagen. Unable to find steady employment and spurned by Elisabeth Gortz, the young woman who in 1876 would marry him, Riis emigrated in 1870 to the United States. For the rest of his life he regularly compared the sociability and the close relationships of life in Ribe with the impersonality and harsh precariousness of American urban life....
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Michael Kammen
Seldes, Gilbert Vivian (03 January 1893–29 September 1970), critic and writer, was born in Alliance, New Jersey, the son of George Sergei Seldes, a pharmacist, and Anna Saphro, who died when Gilbert was three. His only sibling, George Seldes, became a distinguished journalist known for his coverage of European affairs between the world wars. Their father, a freethinker of Russian Jewish descent, sought to convert his farm into an anarchist utopian colony. When that did not succeed, he entered the drugstore business. He enjoyed friendships with ...
