Independent Historian

Pamela Spratlen, currently the U.S. Ambassador to the Kyrgyz Republic, was sworn into that post on April 15, 2011.  A native of Columbus, Ohio, Spratlen graduated from Wellesley College with an A. B. degree in psychology in 1976. After graduation, she worked for nearly a decade in California with various public-service oriented organizations, including Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) in Los Angeles, California. She graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1981 with a master’s degree in public policy and then served as Senior Consultant to the California Legislature’s Joint Legislative Budget and Assembly Ways and Means Committees, advising them on the oversight of the state’s $ billion higher education budget.

In 1990 Spratlen left California in 1990 to join the U.S. Department of State as an economics officer. In 1998 she became the Special Assistant to the Counselor of the Department of State where she was responsible for planning the official travels of the Secretary of State.
Spratlen served in U.S. diplomatic posts in Guatemala, Washington and Paris before taking an assignment in Moscow, Russia from 2000 to 2002. Spratlen assumed the role of Vladivostok Consul General in 2002 and served in that capacity until 2004.  There she worked on a number of issues including U.S. business prospects in that region of Russia and Chinese migration.  She later served at the U.S. Mission to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and was briefly the Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Astana, Kazakhstan before assuming her current post.

Richard T. Greener (1844-1922)

The son of a sailor, Richard Theodore Greener, a native of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania became the first African American to graduate from Harvard College.  He later was assigned to serve the United States in diplomatic posts in India and Russia. Greener lived in Boston, Massachusetts and … Read MoreRichard T. Greener (1844-1922)