FAMOUS CURTINS
Andrew Gregg Curtin - Governor of Pennsylvania during the American Civil War
Andrew Gregg Curtin (April 22, 1817 - October 7, 1894 was a lawyer and politician. He was Governor of Pennsylvania during the American Civil War. Later he was Ambassador to Russia and served in the United States Congress.
Jeremiah Curtin - American Translator and Folklorist
Jeremiah Curtin (September 6, 1835 - December 14, 1906) was born in Detroit, Michigan. He graduated from Harvard College in 1863. In 1864 he went to Russia, where he worked as both a translator and for the U.S. legation. He left Russia in 1877, stayed a year in London, and returned to the United States, where he worked for the Bureau of Ethnology. His specialties were his work with the American Indian languages and the Slavic languages. In addition to publishing collections of fairy tales and folklore and writings about his travels, Curtin translated a number of volumes by Henryk Sienkiewicz including Quo Vadis. He also published an English version of Boleslaw Prus' only historical novel, Pharaoh, under the title The Pharaoh and the Priest (1902).
Tomás Mac Curtain
Tomás Mac Curtain (March 20, 1884 - March 20, 1920) was Lord Mayor of Cork, Ireland. He was elected in the January 1920 council elections as the Sinn Féin councillor for NW Ward No. 3 of Cork, and was chosen by his fellow councillors to be the Lord Mayor. He began a process of political reform within the city, making changes to the way in which the council operated and was run. In January 1919 the Anglo-Irish war started and Mac Curtain became an officer in the IRA. On 20 March 1920, his 36th birthday, Mac Curtain was shot dead in front of his wife and son by a group of men with blackened faces, who were found to be members of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC).
John Curtin - Prime Minister of Australia during WWII
John Joseph Curtin (January 8, 1885 - July 5, 1945), Australian politician and 14th Prime Minister of Australia, led his country when the Australian mainland came under direct military threat during the Japanese advance in World War II. He is widely regarded as one of the country's greatest Prime Ministers General Douglas MacArthur said that Curtin was "one of the greatest of the wartime statesmen". His Prime Ministerial predecessor, Arthur Fadden wrote: "I do not care who knows it but in my opinion there was no greater figure in Australian public life in my lifetime than Curtin."
Philip DeArmond Curtin - Historian, Anthropologist and Author
Philip D. Curtin (May 22, 1922 - June 4, 2009) was a Professor Emeritus at Johns Hopkins University and a noted historian of Africa and the Atlantic slave trade. He published an estimate that from the 1500's to 1870, around 9,566,000 African slaves were imported to the Americas. A MacArthur Fellow, Curtin published a total of 19 books.