"Y" You Should Read This Post-Celebrating Americans From Z to A

Today's history celebration is brought to you by the letter  ''Y" and the great American Melting Pot.

1.Yoyo (Inventor)

PEDRO FLORES, father of the yo-yo (Donald Duncan purchased the company and renamed it Duncan Yo-Yo Co.) Pedro Flores was an immigrant to the United States from Vintarilocos Norte, Philippines.  He came to the United State in 1915. Attended the High School of Commerce in San Francisco 1919-1920 then he took up the study of Law at the University of California Berkeley and the Hastings College of Law in San Francisco. Flores worked as a bellhop at a Santa Monica hotel. Carving and playing with wooden yo-yos was a traditional pastime in the Philippines, but Pedro found that his lunch break yo-yo playing drew a crowd was the first appearance of the name "yo-yo," which means "come-come". Mr. Flores was the singular most important person in introducing the word "yo-yo" to the United States. Although the yo-yo as a toy (known as a bandalore) has been used for centuries, even existing in the United States for years prior to Mr. Flores, as one astute observer noted in the late 1920's "we've all done the yo-yo before but we never had a name for it." Although Pedro Flores was frequently described as the inventor of the yo-yo, Mr. Flores never personally claimed to have invented the yo-yo, and he always mentioned its past history as a centuries old Philippine game.

2. Chemist

YUAN TSEH LEE (Chinese: 李遠哲  pinyin: Li Yuanzhé, Wade-Giles: LiYüan-che; pe?h-oe-ji: Lí Oán-tiat) (born November 19, 1936) is a famous chemist. He was the first Taiwanese-born Nobel Prize laureate, who, along with the German-Canadian John C. Polanyi and American Dudley R. Herschbach won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1986 "for their contributions to the dynamics of chemical elementary processes." 

3.Educator

 YAMATO ICHIHASHI, Ichihashi was born in Nagoya, of the Aichi prefecture of Japan in 1878.Yamato Ichihashi was one of the first academics of Asian ancestry in the United States. Ichihashi wrote a comprehensive account of his experiences as an internee at the Tule Lake War Relocation Center where he was imprisoned in World War II along with other relocated Japanese Americans.

4.Governmental Leader

JOHN YOO, born 1967 is Korean-born American legal scholar and a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley (Boalt Hall), and is best known for his work from 2001 to 2003 in the United States Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel.

5. Activist
JAMES J. YEE (Chinese: 余百康 or 余优素福) is an American former United States Army chaplain with the rank of captain. He is best known for being subject to an intense investigation by the United States, but charges were later dropped. Yee, a Chinese American, was born in New Jersey. All court-martial charges against Yee were quietly dropped on March 19, 2004, and he was released to resume his duties. 

6.Authors

YOLANDA CORNELIA "NIKKI" GIOVANNI (born June 7, 1943, in Knoxville, Tennessee) is an American poet and author. Nikki Giovanni was born in Knoxville, Tennessee into a family of mixed African American and Italian ancestry. Giovanni is a breast cancer survivor who contributed an introduction to the book “Breaking the Silence: Inspirational Stories of Black Cancer Survivors.” 

 LOIS-ANN YAMANAKA (born September 7, 1961 in Ho'olehua, Molokai, Hawaii) is a Japanese American poet and novelist from Hawaii. Many of her critically acclaimed literary works are written in Hawaiian Pidgin, and some of her writing has dealt with controversial ethnic issues. In particular, her works confront themes of Asian American families and the local culture of Hawaii.

7.Activist: 

YUNG WING (Chinese: 容闳 Pinyin: Róng Hóng) was born November 17, 1828 in Zhuhai in Guangdong province. He persuaded the Qing Dynasty government to send young Chinese to the United States to study Western science and engineering.With the U.S. government's eventual approval, he organized what came to be known as the Chinese Educational Mission.

8. Sports:

KRISTI TSUYA YAMAGUCHI (born July 12, 1971 in Hayward, California) is an American figure skater. Yamaguchi was the first woman to have won both the U.S. Senior pairs and ladies figure skating titles.

9. Media/Entertainment:

READABOUT MORE GREAT AMERICANS IN THE BOOK

YO-YO MA (Chinese: 馬友友; simplified Chinese: 马友友; Ma Youyou) (born October 7, 1955) is a French-born Chinese-American cellist, considered one of the finest in the world.

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