Considered one of the greatest writers in the United States, Maya Angelou was the first African-American to work on the streetcars in San Francisco. She was the first African-American woman to recite her poetry at a U.S. presidential inauguration, the first African-American women to make the non-fiction bestseller’s list, the first African-American woman to have an original screenplay produced for the movie Georgia, Georgia in 1972.
Helen Keller lost her vision and became mute February 1882. She worked on behalf of the blind, campaigning that the major cause of blindness in infants was a condition called ophthalma neonatarum.
Cleopatra ruled an empire that included Egypt, Cyprus, part of modern-day Libya and other territories in the Middle East. She first ascended the throne in 51 B.C. with her brother Ptolemy XIII as co-monarch. Following her return to Alexandria at 21-years-old, her surviving half-brother, Ptolemy XIV, was elevated to the position of pharaoh at about age 12. She was the first Ptolemaic queen with her head and name minted on coins.
As a child, Frida was stricken with polio in her right leg at the age of six. Despite this handicap, she played soccer, boxed, wrestled, and became a champion swimmer. She spoke and wrote English, loved to use foul language in Spanish, loved floor length native Mexican dresses, and similar to Anne Frank, she kept a diary, but written in the last decade of her life.
Anne Frank was born Annaliese Marie Frank in Frankfurt, Germany. Her original red and white checkered diary was a birthday gift. Her family was sent to Auschwitz in 1944, the last shipment of Jews to leave Holland. She would die from typhus at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp before turning 16, two weeks before the camp was liberated and two months before the war ended.
