The #stampoftheday for Sunday, April 26, is the 10-cent 1940 stamp honoring Jane Addams was a social reformer who was the co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. She is best known for being the founder of Hull House, which offered social, educational, and cultural opportunities to the large immigrant population of Chicago and she’s considered the founder of modern social work.
The stamp is one of 35 issued in 1940 honoring famous Americans, divided into 7 categories: authors, poets, educators, scientists, composers, artists, and inventors. Each category of five has the same set of denominations – 1¢, 2¢, 3¢, 5¢, and 10¢. Addams was in the set that included scientists. She’s one of only three women in the series (the others were Louisa May Alcott and Frances E. Willard, president of Woman’s Christian Temperance Union from 1879 until 1898. The only person of color was Booker T. Washington.
Here’s a question for a dreary Sunday. How many of the 35 famous Americans honored in the 1940 stamp series (selected in part from people nominated the general public) are people you don’t recognize (or have never heard of)? I couldn’t identify seven of them.
Here’s the full list:
- Jane Addams
- Louisa May Alcott
- John James Audubon
- Alexander Graham Bell
- Luther Burbank
- Samuel Clemens
- James Fenimore Cooper
- Charles W. Eliot
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Stephen Foster
- Daniel Chester French
- Victor Herbert
- Mark Hopkins
- Elias Howe
- Washington Irving
- Dr. Crawford W. Long
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- James Russell Lowell
- Edward A. MacDowell
- Horace Mann
- Cyrus Hall McCormick
- Samuel F.B. Morse
- Ethelbert Nevin
- Major Walter Reed
- Frederic Remington
- James Whitcomb Riley
- Augustus Saint-Gaudens
- John Philip Sousa
- Gilbert Stuart
- Booker T. Washington
- James A. McNeill Whistler
- Walt Whitman
- Eli Whitney
- John Greenleaf Whittier
- Frances E. Willard
The 7 I didn’t recognize are:
- Daniel Chester French (sculptor who did the Lincoln Memorial)
- Victor Herbert (composer whose works include Babes in Toyland)
- Mark Hopkins (19th century educator and Congreationalist theologian)
- Dr. Crawford Long (first person to use ether in surgery)
- Edward McDowell (19th century composer)
- Ethelbert Nevin (another composer best known for the 1901 lullaby “Mighty Lak’a Rose”)
- Frances Willard, longtime head of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union