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Dennis DeConcini was the last Democrat to win a U.S. Senate race in Arizona, in 1988, before Kyrsten Sinema's 2018 victory ended a 30 year drought. Born in Tucson in 1937, he was the son of Evo DeConcini, who served on the Arizona Superior Court, as state attorney general and on the Arizona Supreme Court. Dennis earned his degrees at the University of Arizona, served in the Army Judge Advocate Gen...

Dionisio "Dennis" Chavez was born in April 1888 in Los Chavez, in the New Mexico Territory, 24 years before New Mexico became a state. His parents, David and Paz Chavez, moved the family around 1895 to the Barelas neighborhood of Albuquerque so his father could work on the railroad. By seventh grade Chavez had to leave school to deliver groceries for the Highland Grocery Store, while studying engi...

Dan Quayle, the 44th vice president of the United States, was born James Danforth Quayle in 1947 into the Pulliam publishing family, owners of the Arizona Republic and the Indianapolis Star. He captained the golf team at DePauw University, studied law at Indiana University, served in the Indiana National Guard during the Vietnam era, and married Marilyn Tucker weeks after meeting her in a night la...

Daniel Ray Coats was born in 1943 in Jackson, Michigan, served in the Army Corps of Engineers from 1966 to 1968 and earned a law degree from Indiana University. A Chicago Cubs fan who took his bride to a game on their wedding day, he became a staffer for Representative Dan Quayle, won Quayle's House seat in 1980 and was appointed to Quayle's Senate seat when Quayle became vice president. In the Se...

Clair Engle was born in Bakersfield, California, in 1911, named for the aunt who helped deliver him, and grew up in rural Shasta and Tehama counties, becoming student body president at Red Bluff High School. After Chico State Teachers College and a law degree from UC Hastings in 1933, he eloped with his first wife, Hazel, opened a practice in Corning and was elected Tehama County district attorney...

Charles H. Percy was born in Pensacola, Florida, in 1919 and raised in Chicago, where his Sunday school teacher, Joseph McNabb, was president of camera maker Bell & Howell. Percy joined the company as a trainee in 1938, graduated from the University of Chicago in economics in 1941, joined the board within a year, served three years in the Navy and became president in 1949 at about 30. Under hi...

Carl Schurz was born in Prussia in 1829 and left school a year early because of his family's financial ruin, then passed a special exam to enter the University of Bonn, where he studied under Professor Gottfried Kinkel. In the revolutions of 1848 he took up arms for a democratic constitution, and in 1849 he escaped the besieged fortress of Rastatt through a sewer drain and crossed into Switzerland...

Burton K. Wheeler, a Massachusetts born lawyer fresh from the University of Michigan, was bound for Seattle in 1905 when he lost everything in a poker game in Butte, Montana, and stayed. Elected to the state legislature in 1910, he took on the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, which owned the state's major newspapers. As U.S. attorney for Montana during World War I he refused to use the Sedition Act...

Boies Penrose was born in 1860 into an elite Philadelphia family: one ancestor was a shipbuilder invited by William Penn, and his grandfather had been speaker of the state Senate. Nearly expelled from Harvard for poor grades, he turned things around and graduated second in his class in 1881, passed the bar in 1883 and wrote scholarly books on municipal reform. Elected to the Pennsylvania House in...

Robert Foster Bennett was born in 1933 in Salt Lake City, the grandson of Heber J. Grant, seventh president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and son of longtime Senator Wallace F. Bennett. He was student body president at the University of Utah, an army chaplain in the Utah Army National Guard, a congressional press secretary and a J.C. Penney government affairs staffer. In 1971...

Edward Lewis "Bob" Bartlett, born in Seattle in 1904, graduated from the University of Alaska in 1925 and spent a decade as a newspaper reporter in Fairbanks. After his father's death in 1935 he briefly ran the family mine, which he hated, then moved into government as secretary to the territory's congressional delegate and head of the unemployment commission. In 1939 President Franklin Roosevelt...

Benjamin Wade was born in Massachusetts in 1800 and dug the Erie Canal before studying law and practicing in Ohio with antislavery advocate Joshua Giddings. He served as a prosecutor, state senator and judge, was elected to the U.S. Senate as a Whig in 1851 and became a founding member of the Republican Party. His agenda went beyond abolition: he opposed debtors' prisons and special privileges for...

Benjamin Harrison, the 23rd president, was the grandson of President William Henry Harrison and great grandson of Declaration signer Benjamin Harrison V, yet started his Indianapolis law career as a court crier earning $2.50 a day. A Miami University graduate married to Caroline Scott, he raised the 70th Indiana Infantry in the Civil War, led a hand to hand assault on a Confederate battery at Resa...

Ben Nighthorse Campbell was born Benny Campbell in 1933 in Auburn, California, to Mary, a Portuguese immigrant whose family came through Ellis Island, and Albert, a World War I veteran of primarily Northern Cheyenne descent. His parents met while both were institutionalized, she for tuberculosis and he for alcoholism, and he and his sister spent long stretches in Catholic orphanages. He dropped ou...

Barack Obama was born in Honolulu in 1961, making him the only U.S. president born outside the contiguous United States. His parents met in 1960 in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii: Ann Dunham, an 18 year old from Kansas, and Barack Obama Sr., a 27 year old Luo scholarship student from Kenya. They divorced by 1964, and his father visited him only once, in 1971, before dying in...

Carter Glass, born in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1858, lost his mother at age two, was raised largely by his teenage sister and earned the nickname Pluck for fighting back against bullies. His father was the local postmaster and a newspaper publisher, and a rival publisher died in a duel with his father's editor over postal access. Glass became a printer's apprentice at 13, clerked in a railroad audi...

Arthur Vandenberg, a Republican U.S. Senator from Michigan, went from one of the Senate's most entrenched isolationists to a builder of postwar American foreign policy. Born in Grand Rapids in 1884 to a family with Dutch American roots, he graduated first in his class at Central High School in 1900 and was publishing the Grand Rapids Herald in his early 20s, a paper owned by Senator William Alden...

Albert B. Fall, Secretary of the Interior under President Warren G. Harding, became the first U.S. cabinet member sentenced to prison, over the Teapot Dome scandal. The story starts with the Navy's switch from coal to oil and President William Howard Taft's creation of Naval Petroleum Reserves at Elk Hills and Buena Vista in California and Teapot Dome in Wyoming. In 1921 Fall persuaded Harding to...

Al D'Amato served as a Republican U.S. Senator from New York from 1981 to 1999. Born in Brooklyn in 1937 of Italian ancestry and raised in Island Park on Long Island, he earned a law degree at Syracuse University and worked his way up through Nassau County politics as public administrator, Hempstead tax assessor, town supervisor and vice chair of the county Board of Supervisors. In 1980 he beat fo...

William Beebe (1877 to 1962) grew up in New Jersey shooting and stuffing birds, taught himself taxidermy, and left Columbia University just short of a degree. In 1899 the new Bronx Zoo hired him as assistant curator of ornithology, and he pushed for a flying cage built over living trees and pools so birds could behave naturally. After a 1904 horseback trip through Mexico with his first wife, Blair...

In 2021 fishermen off Yemen hauled in a crusty 280 pound lump worth $1.5 million: ambergris. It forms when the indigestible chitin beaks of giant squid irritate a sperm whale's gut and the bile ducts coat them in a cholesterol rich wax, much as an oyster coats sand to make a pearl, and researchers often find beaks inside. Only about 1 percent of sperm whales produce it. Small masses pass with fece...

A 2014 translation of a 4,000 year old Babylonian cuneiform tablet revealed the oldest known ark instructions, in which the god Enki tells Atra-Hasis to build not a pointed ship but a giant round, waterproofed basket. That shape is the coracle, from the Welsh corwgl: split willow rods woven into a lattice, tied with willow bark, and covered with horse or bullock hide and tar, later with tarred can...

Below 40 degrees south there is no law, and below 50 degrees there is no God, went the sailors' saying. The Roaring Forties blow between 40 and 50 degrees south, fed by the Hadley and Ferrel cells that carry air south from the tropics and bent eastward by the Coriolis effect into a steady westerly stream. Winds average about 22 miles per hour with gusts past 56, and unlike the Northern Hemisphere,...

The equator is set by the planet's shape, but zero longitude has to be chosen. In the second century CE Ptolemy put it at the Fortunate Isles, the western edge of the known world, so every coordinate stayed positive, and the Indian Surya Siddhanta ran its meridian through Ujjain. In 1493 Christopher Columbus found a line in the Atlantic where his compass pointed to true north, and the hope of a ma...

Sailors in the northwestern Indian Ocean have long reported nights when the sea turned into a glowing, snow white plain to the horizon. Unlike the flashing dinoflagellates of breaking waves or Scotland's localized glow, a milky sea is a steady, continuous light from the bacterium Vibrio harveyi, which feeds on decaying organic matter such as a collapsed microalgal bloom. Through quorum sensing, th...