Ida Minerva Tarbell (November 5, 1857 – January 6, 1944) was an American teacher, author and journalist. She was known as one of the leading "muckrakers" of the progressive era, work known in modern times as "investigative journalism". She wrote many notable magazine series and biographies.

She is best-known for her 1904 book The History of the Standard Oil Company, which was listed as No. 5 in a 1999 list by the New York Times of the top 100 works of 20th-century American journalism. She began her work on The Standard after her editors at McClure's Magazine called for a story on one of the trusts.

Tarbell was born in the village of Hatch Hollow in Amity Township, Erie County, Pennsylvania on November 5, 1857. She was born in a log cabin that was the home of her maternal grandfather, Walter Raleigh McCullough, a Scots-Irish pioneer.

She grew up in the western portion of the state where new oil fields  were developed in the 1860s. She was the daughter of Ester Ann McCullough and Franklin Summer Tarbell, a teacher and a joiner by trade, who used his trade to build wooden oil storage tanks.

Winona LaDuke (born 1959) is a Native American activist, environmentalist, economist, and writer. In 1996 and 2000, she ran for vice president as the nominee of the United States Green Party, on a ticket headed by Ralph Nader. In the 2004 election, however, she endorsed one of Nader's opponents, Democratic candidate John Kerry. In the 2008 presidential election, LaDuke endorsed Democrat Barack Obama.

She is currently the Executive Director of both Honor the Earth and White Earth Land Recovery Project.

LaDuke was born in Los Angeles, California to Vincent and Betty LaDuke. Her father was part Anishinaabe (Ojibwe or "Chippewa") from Minnesota. He was an actor with supporting roles in Western movies, an activist, a writer, and at the end of his life, a spiritual guru under the name Sun Bear. Her mother was a Jewish artist, employed as an art professor at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, Oregon.

Dolores C. Huerta (born April 10, 1930) is the co-founder and First Vice President Emeritus of the United Farm Workers of America, AFL-CIO (UFW), and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Her parents divorced when she was three years old. Her mother, Alicia Chavez, raised Dolores, along with her two brothers, and two sisters, in the central San Joaquin Valley farmworker community of Stockton, California. Her mother was a business woman who owned a restaurant and a 70-room hotel that often took in farm worker families for free.

In 1955, Huerta co-founded the Stockton chapter of the Community Service Organization, and in 1960 co-founded the Agricultural Workers Association. In 1962, she co-founded the National Farm Workers Association with César Chávez, which would later become the Unit's Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee. In 1966, she negotiated a contract between the UFWOC and Schenley Wine Company, marking the first time that farmworkers were able to successfully collectively bargain with an agricultural enterprise.

Patria Mercedes Mirabal (February 27, 1924 – November 25, 1960), Bélgica Adela "Dedé" Mirabal-Reyes (March 1, 1925 – present), María Argentina Minerva Mirabal (March 12, 1926 – November 25, 1960) and Antonia María Teresa Mirabal (October 15, 1935 – November 25, 1960) were citizens of the Dominican Republic who fervently opposed the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo.

Dedé Mirabal was not assassinated and has lived to tell the stories of the death of her sisters. Presently, she still lives in Salcedo, Dominican Republic. She resides in the house where the sisters were born and works to preserve her sisters' memory through the Museo Hermanas Mirabal  which is also located in Salcedo and was home to the women for the final ten months of their lives. She has written her first and only book Vivas en El Jardín, released on August 25, 2009.