Louisiana State University

Shaquille Rashaun O'Neal , nicknamed "Shaq" , is a former American professional basketball player and current analyst on the television program... Inside the NBA. Standing 7 ft 1 in tall and weighing 325 pounds , he was one of the heaviest players ever to play in the NBA. Throughout his 19-year career, O'Neal used his size and strength to overpower opponents for points and rebounds. Following his career at Louisiana State University, O'Neal was drafted by the Orlando Magic with the first overall pick in the 1992 NBA Draft. He quickly became one of the top centers in the league, winning Rookie of the Year in 1992–93 and later leading his team to the 1995 NBA Finals. After four years with the Magic, O'Neal signed as a free agent with the Los Angeles Lakers. He won three consecutive championships in 2000, 2001, and 2002. Amid tension between O'Neal and Kobe Bryant, O'Neal was traded to the Miami Heat in 2004, and his fourth NBA championship followed in 2006. Midway through the 2007–2008 season he was traded to the Phoenix Suns.
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Joanne Gignilliat Trimmier Woodward is an American actress, television and theatrical producer, and widow of Paul Newman. She is perhaps best known... for her Academy Award winning role in The Three Faces of Eve . Woodward was born in Thomasville, Georgia, daughter of Elinor Gignilliat and Wade Woodward, Jr., who at one point was vice president of publisher Charles Scribner's Sons. Her middle name, "Gignilliat", originates from distant Huguenot ancestry. She was influenced to become an actress by her mother's love of movies. Her mother named her after Joan Crawford, using the Southern pronunciation of the name "Joanne". Attending the premiere of Gone with the Wind in Atlanta, nine-year-old Woodward rushed out into the parade of stars and sat on the lap of Laurence Olivier, star Vivien Leigh's partner and future husband. She eventually worked with Olivier in 1977, in a television production of Come Back, Little Sheba. During rehearsals, she mentioned this incident to him and he told her he remembered her doing it. Woodward lived in Thomasville until she was in the second grade. Her family relocated to Marietta, Georgia.
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Robert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of... the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the influential literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935. He received the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel for his novel All the King's Men and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1958 and 1979. He is the only person to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and poetry. Warren was born in Guthrie, Kentucky, which is very near the Tennessee-Kentucky border, to Robert Warren and Anna Penn. Warren's mother's family had roots in Virginia, having given their name to the community of Penn's Store in Patrick County, Virginia. Robert Penn Warren graduated from Clarksville High School in Clarksville, Tennessee, Vanderbilt University in 1925 and the University of California, Berkeley in 1926. Warren later attended Yale University and obtained his B. Litt. as a Rhodes Scholar from New College, Oxford, in England in 1930. He also received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study in Italy during the rule of Benito Mussolini.
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Thomas Harry Williams was an award-winning historian at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge whose career began in 1941 and extended for... thirty-eight years until his death at the age of seventy. A popular faculty member, Williams is perhaps best known for his American Civil War study, Lincoln and His Generals, a "Book of the Month" selection from 1952, and his Huey Long, the definitive 1969 study of Huey Pierce Long, Jr., winner of both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Williams was born in Vinegar Hill Township, Jo Daviess County, Illinois, to William D. Williams and the former Emma Necollins. His father died when Williams was a small boy, and he was reared by an uncle and grandmother. He was educated in the schools of the village of Hazel Green, Wisconsin. He procured his bachelor of arts degree in 1931 from the University of Wisconsin–Platteville in Platteville. He thereafter obtained his Master of Arts and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1932 and 1937, respectively. He first instructed history in the extension division of UW from 1936 to 1938.
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Rodger Kamenetz is an American poet and author. He was born in Baltimore and educated at Yale, Stanford and Johns Hopkins University. He currently... lives in New Orleans and is Professor Emeritus, retiring with a dual appointment as Professor of English and Professor of Religious Studies at LSU where he was also an LSU Distinguished Professor and Erich and Lea Sternberg Honors Professor. He currently works privately with clients, using dreams in a process of spiritual direction. He is best known as the author of The Jew in the Lotus , an account of the historic dialogue between rabbis and the XIV Dalai Lama. A new "plus" edition released in 2007 includes an afterword, bringing the story of the dialogue up to date. His "Stalking Elijah" received the National Jewish Book Award for Jewish Thought in 1997. In fall 2007, Harper One published The History of Last Night's Dream which explores the spiritual possibilities of dreaming from Genesis to now. Oprah Winfrey interviewed the author about the book in a two part XM radio broadcast, in her "Soul Series", in August 2008. The material was subsequently webcast.
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Stephen Edward Ambrose was an American historian and biographer of U.S. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. He was a long time... professor of history at the University of New Orleans and the author of many best selling volumes of American popular history. Beginning late in his life and continuing after his death, however, evidence and reports have continued to surface documenting long time patterns of plagiarism, falsification, and inaccuracies in many of his published writings and other work. In response to one of the early reports, Ambrose said he was not "out there stealing other people's writings." Ambrose was born in Lovington, Illinois to Rosepha Trippe Ambrose and Stephen Hedges Ambrose. His father was a physician who served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. Ambrose was raised in Whitewater, Wisconsin, where he graduated from Whitewater High School. His family also owned a farm in Lovington, Illinois and vacation property in Marinette County, Wisconsin.
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