1001 People Who Made America - Alan Axelrod [14]
Bridger, Jim (1804–1881) Bridger spent two decades, from 1822 through the early 1840s, tramping through the vast wilderness bounded by Canada, the Missouri River, the Colorado-New Mexico border, Idaho, and Utah, in search of new peltries (fur-trapping grounds). He was the first white man to see the Great Salt Lake (1824), and in 1843, he established Fort Bridger in southwestern Wyoming, which served as rendezvous for trappers and as a way station Oregon Trail “emigrants” bound for the far West.
Brooks, Gwendolyn (1917–2000) Born in Topeka, Kansas, Brooks grew up in Chicago’s black ghetto and began publishing poetry in the 1930s in The Chicago Defender, a black newspaper. Her first book appeared in 1945. Brooks wrote about daily life in Chicago’s black community and in 1949 became the first African-American poet to win the Pulitzer Prize. She was named poet laureate of Illinois in 1968.
Brooks, Van Wyck (1886–1963) Brooks was a prolific historian of American literature and culture, who created a sensation in 1908 with his first book, The Wine of the Puritans, which, instead of praising the Puritan forefathers, blamed them for stunting American culture. Taken together, his writings outline the history of American literature from its beginnings to his own day.
Brown, Charles Brockden (1771–1810) In his short life, Philadelphia-born Brown wrote six important early American novels—including two classics of “Gothic” fiction, Wieland and Edgar Huntley—and published and edited important early periodicals. His fiction shows profound psychological insight, which prefigured the great work of later American novelists such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, but he was perhaps even more important to the nation’s literature and culture as the first American writer to earn a living solely from literary pursuits.
Brown, John (1800–1859) Brown was active in the vicious guerrilla war between antislavery and proslavery settlers in Kansas. On May 24, 1856, he led a raid against a proslavery settlement at Pottawatomie Creek, in which five men were hacked to death with sabers. After this, he came east, and on October 16, 1859, raided the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now in West Virginia), intending to arm local slaves for an uprising he hoped would trigger a universal slave rebellion. A small force of U.S. Marines (led by army officer Robert E. Lee) attacked the raiders on the 17th, wounding Brown and killing two of his sons as well as eight other followers. Brown was tried for murder, inciting a slave insurrection, and treason. He was hanged on December 2, 1859. Abolitionists regarded him as a martyr, and the raid, trial, and punishment hastened the coming of the Civil War.
Brubeck, Dave (1920– ) Brubeck started playing jazz in 1933, then studied with modern classical giants Darius Milhaud and Arnold Schoenberg. He combined his jazz background with his modernist training to produce “third-stream” jazz, combining elements of traditional jazz and African-rooted music with avant-garde classical techniques. Since the late 1940s, Brubeck has been one of the most influential and admired of American pianists and composers and is universally regarded as a jazz great.
Bryan, William Jennings (1860–1925) Nebraska’s Bryan was thrice defeated for the presidency (1896, 1900, 1908), but was renowned as an electrifying orator who championed such Populist causes as the popular election of senators, the introduction of a graduated income tax, the creation of a Department of Labor, the institution of Prohibition, and the passage of woman suffrage. A great campaigner, he was perceived as a man of the people, especially