Charles Curtis started out life on an Indian Reservation and made it all the way to the Vice-Presidency.

George Bancroft was America's first great historian but more importantly established the U.S. Naval Academy.

Timothy Dwight, as president of Yale, resisted the influence of French Revolution ideas, which resulted in revival breaking out.

Judith Reisman is the woman who exposed Alfred Kinsey's experiments as a fraud.

John Russell Pope was one of the last neo-classical architects in the U.S. The buildings he designed are some of the most beautiful in the country.

Robert Smalls, as a slave, was trained to be a wheelman on a steamboat. He would use those skills to escape and turn the ship over to the Union Navy.

George Wythe was a founder who was far ahead of most of the others on race relations and wrote legal opinions to undermine slavery.

Nathaniel Hawthorne was America's first great novelist. He wrote one of the most required books to read in high school, The Scarlet Letter

General James Wilkinson was for 12 years the senior soldier in the U.S. Army. All during that time, he was a paid agent of the Spanish empire. He was never definitively caught during his lifetime.

Russell Kirk was a public intellectual and writer who gave conservatism its name.