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musical education at Yale University, he soon ventured down the path his father had pointed him toward and used familiar American folk tunes, hymn tunes, and popular tunes to create harmonically and rhythmically innovative music, including piano works, symphonies and other orchestral works, chamber music, and songs. While he was certainly an avant-garde—even defiantly idiosyncratic—composer, Ives was deeply rooted in American culture and experience. He neither sought nor received much recognition in his lifetime—he made his living as an insurance executive—but his best compositions are now considered among the nation’s most important “classical” music and anticipated many later developments in modern music.

Jackson, Andrew (1767–1845) Born on the frontier between North and South Carolina, Jackson lost his mother and his brother in the American Revolution, went on to become a lawyer, made and lost a fortune, killed a man in an 1806 duel in defense of his wife’s honor, became a politician, was the principal victor against the Red Stick Creeks in the Creek War, and won a glorious victory at the Battle of New Orleans (1815) in the War of 1812. Defeated by John Quincy Adams in an 1824 run for the White House, he was elected four years later and introduced an unprecedented degree of egalitarian—if sometimes raucous—democracy. It was, however, Jackson, too, who promoted the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which uprooted many thousands of Indians living east of the Mississippi, exiling them to arid lands west of the river. The Cherokee called this long, often lethal march the “Trail of Tears.”

Jackson, Helen Hunt (1830–1885) Jackson was a popular and prolific novelist, who was moved by the plight of the Indians, which she saw firsthand after she moved with her husband to Colorado in 1875. The result was a historical study called A Century of Dishonor (1881), which examined and condemned federal Indian policy. She was appointed to a federal commission to investigate conditions among Indians living on the western missions. This inspired her best-known novel, Ramona (1884), which was effective in raising public consciousness about the mistreatment of Native Americans.

Jackson, Jesse Louis (1941– ) Born into a poor African-American family in Greenville, South Carolina, Jackson earned a scholarship to the University of Illinois during 1959–1960, completed his undergraduate degree in sociology in 1964 at the Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina, then did postgraduate work at Chicago Theological Seminary, becoming ordained as a Baptist minister in 1968. Inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Jackson started Operation Breadbasket in Chicago in 1966 and, in 1971, Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity), an organization to promote black self-reliance. A major figure in the civil rights movement both before and after King’s assassination in 1968, Jackson led a voter registration program that helped elect Chicago’s first black mayor, Harold Washington, in 1983. From this point on, Jackson earned a reputation as an influential political figure on the national as well as international scene.

Jackson, Maynard (1938–2003) Jackson was a Dallas-born lawyer and politician, whose election as mayor of Atlanta in 1973 made him the first African American chief executive of a large southern city. He served three terms—during 1974–1982 and 1990–1994—presiding over the spectacular growth of the South’s major metropolis.

Jackson, Michael (1958– ) Jackson entered show business as the youngest—and most talented—of the Jackson 5 (consisting of the five Jackson brothers), which shot to stardom in 1969 and reigned supreme on the pop charts through about 1975. Jackson had his first solo hit in 1979—the album Off the Wall—and by the 1980s was unchallenged as the most popular entertainer in the world: the “King of Pop.” His success declined in the early 1990s as his appearance and behavior became increasingly bizarre. In 1993, he was accused of child molestation by a 13-year-old boy who had been a guest at Neverland, Jackson’s Los Angeles