Brian Patrick Lamb (born October 9, 1941, in Lafayette, Indiana) is the founder, chairman, and CEO of C-SPAN, an American cable network which provides coverage of the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate as well as other public affairs events. Prior to launching C-SPAN in 1979, Lamb held various communications roles including White House telecommunications policy staffer and Washington bureau chief for Cablevision magazine. He also served in the United States Navy for four years. Lamb has conducted thousands of interviews in his lifetime, including those on C-SPAN's Booknotes and Q&A, and is known for his unique interview style, focusing on short, direct questions. Over the course of his career Lamb has received numerous honors and awards including the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Humanities Medal.

Lamb was born in Lafayette, Indiana and lived there until he was twenty-two. Growing up, he wanted to be an entertainer and spent time as a disc jockey and as a drummer in multiple local bands. Lamb showed an early interest in television and radio: he started his first radio job at a local station in Lafayette, WASK (AM), at the age of 17, working as a disc jockey and selling advertisements. His job at the radio station gave him the opportunity to interview musicians including Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Nat King Cole, Count Basie, and The Kingston Trio, while he was still in high school. In 1961, during his junior year at college, he coordinated a television program titled Dance Date, similar to Dick Clark's ABC series, American Bandstand.

Stokely Carmichael (aka Kwame Ture; June 29, 1941 – November 15, 1998) was a Trinidadian-American black activist active in the 1960s American Civil Rights Movement. He rose to prominence first as a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced "snick") and later as the "Honorary Prime Minister" of the Black Panther Party. Initially an integrationist, Carmichael later became affiliated with black nationalist and Pan-Africanist movements. He popularized the term "Black Power".

Born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, Stokely Carmichael moved to Harlem, New York City in 1952 at age eleven to rejoin his parents, who had left him with his grandmother and two aunts to immigrate when he was two. He attended the elite Tranquility School in Trinidad until his parents were able to send for him.

His mother, Mabel R. Carmichael, was a stewardess for a steamship line, and his father, Adolphus, was a carpenter who also worked as a taxi driver. The reunited Carmichael family eventually left Harlem to live in Morris Park in the East Bronx, at that time an aging Jewish and Italian neighborhood. According to a 1967 interview he gave to LIFE Magazine, he was the only black member of the Morris Park Dukes, a youth gang involved in alcohol and petty theft.

Brenda Mae Tarpley (born December 11, 1944), known as Brenda Lee, is an American performer who sang rockabilly, pop and country music, and had 37 US chart hits during the 1960s, a number surpassed only by Elvis Presley, The Beatles, Ray Charles and Connie Francis. She is best known for her 1960 hit "I'm Sorry", and 1958's "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree", a US holiday standard for more than 50 years.

At 4 ft 9 inches tall, she received the nickname Little Miss Dynamite in 1957 after recording the song "Dynamite"; and was one of the earliest pop stars to have a major contemporary international following.

Lee's popularity faded in the late 1960s as her voice matured, but she continued a successful recording career by returning to her roots as a country singer with a string of hits through the 1970s and 1980s. She is a member of the Rock and Roll, Country Music, Rockabilly and Hit Parade Halls of Fame. Lee currently lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

Lee was born Brenda Mae Tarpley in the charity ward of Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia. She weighed 4 pounds 11 ounces at birth. She attended grade schools wherever her father found work, primarily in the corridor between Atlanta and Augusta. Her family was poor, living hand-to-mouth; she shared a bed with her two siblings in a series of three-room houses without running water. Life centered on her parents finding work, their extended family, and the Baptist Church, where she sang solos every Sunday.

Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011) was an English American author and journalist whose career spanned more than four decades. Hitchens, often referred to colloquially as "Hitch", was a columnist and literary critic for New Statesman, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Daily Mirror, The Times Literary Supplement and Vanity Fair. He was an author of twelve books and five collections of essays. As a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits, he was a prominent public intellectual, and his confrontational style of debate made him both a lauded and controversial figure.

Hitchens was known for his admiration of George Orwell, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, as well as for his excoriating critiques of various public figures including Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger and Diana, Princess of Wales. Although he supported the Falklands War, his key split from the established political left began in 1989 after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the Western left to the Rushdie Affair. The September 11 attacks strengthened his internationalist embrace of an interventionist foreign policy, and his vociferous criticism of what he called "fascism with an Islamic face." His numerous editorials in support of the Iraq War caused some to label him a neoconservative, although Hitchens insisted he was not "a conservative of any kind", and his friend Ian McEwan describes him as representing the anti-totalitarian left.

Richard Norton Smith (born 1953) is an American historian and author specializing in US presidents.

Born in Leominster, Massachusetts, in 1953, Smith graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1975 with a degree in government. Following graduation he worked as a White House intern and as a free-lance writer for The Washington Post. He became a speech writer for Massachusetts Senator Edward Brooke, and then Senator Bob Dole, with whom he has collaborated on numerous projects over the years.

Smith’s first major book, Thomas E. Dewey and His Times, was a finalist for the 1983 Pulitzer Prize. He has also written An Uncommon Man: The Triumph of Herbert Hoover (1984), The Harvard Century: The Making of a University to a Nation (1986) and Patriarch: George Washington and the New American Nation (1993). In June 1997, Houghton Mifflin published his biography of Robert R. McCormick The Colonel: The Life and Legend of Robert R. McCormick, which was later reprinted by Northwestern University Press in 2003. It received the Goldsmith Book Prize awarded by Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government in 1998. Historian David M. Kennedy called it a "candid and colorful biography".