Indiana Historical Society

Arville Lynn Funk (1929–1990) was a lawyer, teacher, author, and an Indiana historian. He was born in Harrison County, Indiana, the son of Herman E. and Elsie McGonigle Funk. He attended public school in Corydon and studied law in New Albany. He opened a law practice in Corydon where he lived most of his life.
A member of the Indiana Historical Society and the Harrison County Indiana Historical and Genealogical Society, Funk was most interested in Indiana's Civil War History. He authored several books about Indiana history and commonly wrote an abbreviated version of his larger works dedicated to Harrison County topics. His many books include:

Tales of Our Hoosier Heritage (1965)
Indiana's Birthplace: a History of Harrison County, Indiana (1966)
Our Historic Corydon (1966)
Hoosiers in the Civil War (1967)
Harrison County in the Indiana Sesquicentennial Year (1967)
A Sketchbook of Indiana History (1969)
The Morgan Raid in Indiana and Ohio (1971)
Historical Almanac of Harrison County, Indiana (1974)
Squire Boone in Indiana (1974)
Revolutionary War Soldiers of Harrison County, Indiana (1975)
Revolutionary War Era in Indiana (1975)
The Battle of Corydon (1976)
Harrison County in the Indiana Sesquicentennial Year (1976)
A Hoosier Regiment in Dixie: A History of the Thirty-Eighth Indiana Regiment (1978)
The Hoosier Scrapbook (1981)He coauthored Indiana's Birthplace: A History of Harrison County, Indiana in 1966 and was a regular contributor the Indiana Magazine of History between 1950 and 1980. He was an advocate of county historical societies and oversaw the creation of historical societies in several Indiana counties.
From 1955 to 1965 he taught high school history. Funk married Rosemary E. Springer on August 25, 1956. They had two children, named Cynthia and Mark. He was admitted to the Indiana bar in 1963 and, in 1965, formed a partnership with Frank O'Bannon and C. Blaine Hays Jr.
Arville Funk died in 1990 and is buried in Corydon's Cedar Hill cemetery.

Emmett I. Brown Jr. (1918 – September 9, 1959) was a professional photographer who is most noted for documenting Indianapolis, Indiana's jazz music scene along Indiana Avenue, a hub of activity for the city's African-American community in the 1940s and 1950s. Brown opened his own photography studio, the Brown Show Case, on Indiana Avenue in the late 1940s. During a brief residence in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in the mid-1950s, Brown opened a photography studio and became an editor at Sepia magazine. Brown returned to Indianapolis in 1956 and established a new studio on the city's eastside, where he concentrated on portraits and did freelance photography, including work for the Indianapolis Recorder. During his twenty-year career, cut short due to a heart ailment, Brown photographed Dizzy Gillespie, jazz trombonist Jimmy Cleveland, the Hampton Sisters, the Milt Buckner Trio, and The Mills Brothers, among others. He also photographed local churches, businesses, and street scenes, as well as notable individuals in Indianapolis's African-American community and nationally known boxers Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson.
Brown, who grew up in Indianapolis and attended Crispus Attucks High School, also studied at Tennessee A and I (now known as Tennessee State University) in Nashville, Tennessee, and a photography school in Chicago, Illinois, before returning to his hometown to begin his career as a photographer. Brown was a member of Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity, a thirty-second degree Prince Hall Mason, and also served as an assistant pastor at Indianapolis’s Martindale Avenue Church of Christ. Many of his photographs from the 1940s and 1950s are included the collection of the Indiana Historical Society.

Emma Lou Thornbrough (January 24, 1913 – December 19, 1994) was a pioneer among professional historians in African-American history, a lifelong civil-rights activist in Indiana, a professor of history at Butler University from 1946 until her retirement in 1983, and an Indiana historian and author. She was born in Indianapolis, Indiana. Thornbrough's major scholarly contributions include several publications devoted to black history, such as The Negro in Indiana before 1900; Booker T. Washington; T. Thomas Fortune, Militant Journalist; Since Emancipation: A Short History of Indiana Negroes, 1863–1963; and Indiana Blacks in the Twentieth Century (published posthumously in 2000). She also wrote Indiana in the Civil War Era, 1850–1880, among other scholarly publications. In addition to her writing and research, Thornbrough was well known as a social activist and was especially active in Indianapolis civil rights groups, including the Indianapolis Human Relations Council, which she helped organize; the Indiana Civil Liberties Union; and the Indianapolis National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.