Charles Kuralt has been called "the poet laureate of the common man." For almost 30 years he wandered the back roads of America, finding inspiring stories in the lives of ordinary people in out of the way places. Throughout the 1960s and '70s, while the lead stories on the CBS Evening News...

Garth Fagan is one of America’s most original and influential choreographers. Born in Jamaica, Fagan graduated from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, and studied in New York with many of the pioneers of 20th Century dance, including José Limon, Alvin Ailey and Martha Graham....

Kevin Costner won twin Oscars for producing and directing the 1990 blockbuster Dances With Wolves, a powerful tale of the tragic interaction of Native Americans and the expanding United States in the 19th century West. The film was a high point in the remarkable string of hits that made...

Actor, dancer, singer, choreographer, theatre director Tommy Tune has won nine Tony Awards and the National Medal of Arts. Tune was born in Texas to oil rig worker Jim Tune and Eva Mae Clark. At age five, he began tap, acrobatics and ballet lessons and he later majored in drama at the...

A large consensus of critics, dancers, and dance-loving audiences would agree that Twyla Tharp has succeeded in her mission. No one making serious dances in this country since the 1960s could ignore the challenge of her inventive, quirky, complex creations. No serious dance artist has ever...

Abe Pollin (1923 - 2009) was Chairman and CEO of Washington Sports and Entertainment Limited Partnership (WSELP), longtime owner of the Washington Wizards basketball team and the Washington Capitals hockey franchise. A building contractor and real estate developer, as well as a sportsman...

Arnold O. Beckman (April 10, 1900 – May 18, 2004) was the founder and chairman of Beckman Instruments, and is one of the top inventors of scientific instruments that revolutionized the study of human biology, ultimately saving countless lives around the world. In 1922, he earned his degree...

Returning home to Minneapolis after service as a fighter pilot instructor in World War II and Korea, Burton Joseph took charge of the small grain trading business his family had founded in 1912. Under Burton Joseph's leadership, the I.S. Joseph Company became an international conglomerate,...

For 18 years, Alan K. Simpson represented the State of Wyoming in the United States Senate. As Assistant Majority Leader for ten of those years, he was an influential member of the body's Republican leadership. Partisanship aside, he was noted throughout his service for independent...

The events of 2014 drew the world's attention once again to the role of NATO in preserving the hard-won peace of Europe. No individual bears greater responsibility for the readiness and coordination of the world's largest military alliance than the SACEUR (Supreme Allied Commander Europe),...

Douglas D. Osheroff shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics (with Dave Lee and Robert C. Richardson) for their discovery of superfluidity in helium-3. He earned his degree from the California Institute of Technology in 1967 and joined the Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics at...

The world's leading genetic scientists discuss the revolution in genetics that is transforming medical science. In this podcast, recorded at the 2008 International Achievement Summit in Hawaii, award-winning journalist Kathleen Matthews moderates the discussion and introduces the panelists: Dr....

Few have done more to tease out the fundamental mysteries of the universe than Dr. Gerard 't Hooft of the Institute for Theoretical Physics at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. For the last century, as physicists pried further into the atom to better understand this basic building...

As a boy, Murray Gell-Mann excelled in every possible field of academic study, except one -- physics -- but after he decided to pursue it as a career, he emerged as the era's most brilliant and original mind in the field. In his 20s, he revolutionized the study of particle physics, and for...

Since the 1990s, Roger Tsien has revolutionized the fields of cell biology and neurobiology by designing fluorescent protein molecules to illuminate biochemical processes. The green fluorescent protein GFP, which occurs naturally in the jellyfish Aequorea Victoria, has been used in...

The only son of a widowed immigrant mother who worked as a cleaning lady, Donald Johanson did so poorly on his SATs that his high school guidance counselor told him to forget about going to college. Johanson ignored the counselor's advice, pursued higher education, and earned a Ph.D. in...

The most successful and admired female songwriter in the history of pop music, Carole King proves that one woman alone at the piano can be more powerful than a four-piece rock band or a 30-piece orchestra. She grew up in Brooklyn, New York, where her mother was a teacher and her father a...

In the rock and roll pantheon, Chuck Berry stands alone. Every element of the music existed before he ever stepped onstage, but no one can deny he was the first writer and performer to put it all together. In the 1950s, he combined stinging guitar licks with a jumping rhythm...

Chris Wallace has won every major broadcast news award for his reporting, including the Peabody Award and three Emmy Awards. He has worked at three of the major American networks, as the host of Meet the Press for NBC, as White House correspondent for ABC, and as the host of Fox News Sunday. ...

Colbie Caillat was barely out of her teens when she established herself as one of America's premier singers and songwriters. She released her first album, Coco, in 2007, just weeks before her 22nd birthday. The album debuted at Number 5 on the Billboard magazine charts, driven by the hit...

David Breashears is an award-winning filmmaker, author, adventurer, and world-class mountaineer. Since 1978, he has combined his skills in climbing and filmmaking to complete more than 40 film projects. In 1983, Breashears transmitted the first live television pictures from the summit of...

Born in Chicago, Illinois, Siskel was raised by his aunt and uncle after both his parents died when he was ten years old. He attended Culver Academies, graduated in Philosophy at Yale University in 1967, where he studied writing under Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Hersey, who helped...

When a five-year-old James Earl Jones moved with his grandparents from rural Mississippi to frosty Michigan, he developed a stutter so severe that he refused to speak aloud, even in school. One day in high school, an understanding teacher, impressed by a poem Jones had written, dared him...

Jeremy Irons had already made a name for himself on the London stage when international audiences got their first look at him in the television miniseries Brideshead Revisited. Although Irons made his reputation as a romantic leading man in films such as The French Lieutenant's Woman, he...

Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ, The Color of Money, GoodFellas, Cape Fear, The Age of Innocence, Casino. A list of films directed by Martin Scorsese is a roll call of some of the most exciting, powerful, personal motion pictures ever made. By his own...

The brilliant novelist, poet and literary innovator Michael Ondaatje was born on the island nation of Ceylon (now the independent republic of Sri Lanka) to parents of Indian and Dutch descent. When Ondaatje was nine his parents separated, and his mother took him, along with his brother and...

Robert Kinlock Massie III is a distinguished historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author who has devoted much of his writing career to the House of Romanov, the royal family of Imperial Russia. Massie studied American history at Yale University and modern European history at Oxford on a...

Thomas Keller grew up in the restaurant business in Palm Beach, Florida, working his way up from dishwasher to cook. As a teenager, he fell in love with the art of French cooking, and learned his craft working in restaurants up and down the East Coast before moving to France to complete...

In recognition of Women's History Month, the Academy of Achievement presents a selection of extraordinary women who have defied expectations, broken boundaries, and made history around the world. They include courageous political leaders and human rights activists, recipients of the...

In recognition of Women's History Month, the Academy of Achievement presents a selection of extraordinary women who have defied expectations, broken boundaries, and made history around the world. They include courageous political leaders and human rights activists, recipients of the...

As First Lady of the United States from 1989 to 1993, Barbara Pierce Bush became one of the most admired women in America. She was only 16 when she met her future husband, George Herbert Walker Bush at a Christmas dance. The couple corresponded throughout his service overseas in World War...

Frank Perdue (May 9, 1920 – March 31, 2005) was for many years the Chairman and CEO of Perdue Farms, a poultry empire with nearly $3 billion in annual sales and 19,000 employees. His father, Arthur Perdue, started the family chicken business in 1920 on the Delmarva Peninsula in rural...

James LeVoy Sorenson (July 30, 1921 – January 20, 2008) was a lifelong inventor and entrepreneur, Utah's richest man, and founder and chairman of Sorenson Companies, a conglomerate of 32 corporations in industries ranging from medicine and bioscience to investment and development to...

Judith Leiber is the world's foremost designer of elegant ladies' handbags. Born Judith Peto in Budapest, Hungary, she trained as a handbag maker in a traditional European guild system, learning every aspect of her craft from tanning the skins, to designing the frames and clasps, to...

Today, television audiences are used to seeing Hilary Swank resplendently gowned, gliding over a red carpet at glittering Hollywood soirees, but her early years were anything but glamorous. She spent much of her childhood living in a trailer park near Lake Samish in Bellingham, Washington....

Peter Matthiessen is a two-time National Book Award-winning American novelist and nonfiction writer as well as an environmental activist. He frequently focuses on American Indian issues and history, as in his detailed study of the Leonard Peltier case, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. In...

In her greatest roles, Sally Field has personified the strong-willed, independent woman of the American heartland, earning Oscars for her performances as a courageous union organizer in Norma Rae and as a Depression-era widow struggling to keep the family farm in Places in the Heart....

Richard Leakey won fame as a paleoanthropologist while still in his early twenties, with sensational discoveries of the fossil remains of our most ancient ancestors, but his subsequent career as an author, conservationist, government official and political activist of unyielding courage has been...

By age 23, John Lewis was already recognized as one of the principal leaders of the American Civil Rights Movement, along with Martin Luther King Jr. The son of sharecroppers in rural Alabama, he led his first demonstrations while studying theology in Nashville, Tennessee. As Chairman of the...

Trisha Yearwood has been hailed as the premier pop-country interpreter of her generation. From the small town of Monticello, Georgia, she moved to Nashville at age 20 and took a job as a receptionist in a record company while recording songwriters' demo tapes for $10 a song. After six years of...

When Michael Dell was a freshman at the University of Texas, his parents were concerned that his entrepreneurial interests would interfere with his pre-medical studies. When they paid him a surprise visit, he rushed to hide his inventory of computer parts in a friend's room. But before long, his...

John Sculley is a former President of PepsiCo and was CEO of Apple Computer from 1983 to 1993. A graduate of Brown University and the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business he joined Pepsi as trainee in 1967. By age 30, he was the company’s youngest marketing vice...

Today, Pierre Omidyar is hailed as the architect of a new age of digital commerce, but the founder of eBay, the world's largest personal online trading community, became a web entrepreneur almost by accident. In 1995, he created the prototype for an online auction site as an experiment on...

Thomas J. Pritzker is Executive Chairman of the Board of Hyatt Hotels Corporation and the Marmon Group. He is also Chairman and CEO of The Pritzker Organization, a family merchant bank. He was born and raised in Chicago and holds an MBA and a law degree from the University of Chicago. A...

As President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and as United States Commissioner of Education, Ernest L. Boyer (1928 - 1995) was regarded as the most influential person in American education. His grandfather William Boyer -- head of the Mission of the Brethren in...

As a Ph.D. student at the University of British Columbia, Hans Keirstead invented a method for regenerating damaged spinal cords using embryonic human stem cells. His work holds promise, not only for the treatment of spinal cord injury, but for multiple sclerosis and stroke. When the...

Roger Bannister was still a medical student in 1954, when he made headlines around the world with one of the landmark events of 20th century sports history. At the time, it was thought to be impossible for a human being to run a mile in under four minutes. The world record of 4:01.3 had stood for...