It was 15 years ago — just before the humor prize was created — when DeGeneres came out on Time magazine’s cover and as her character on the sitcom “Ellen” to a record 46 million viewers. The popular show began losing viewers, though, and was canceled a year later. DeGeneres said at the time that ABC caved in to fear and abandoned the show. She faced tough questions over whether the sitcom was “too gay” and if she had torpedoed her career by pushing a “gay agenda.”

“When I’m accused of becoming political, I’m showing love,” DeGeneres told ABC’s Diane Sawyer in a 1998 interview. “How is that political to teach love an acceptance?”

The rejection was enough to send DeGeneres into a deep depression.

“Ellen” paved the way, though, for future shows to also break the taboo of showing gay characters. “Will and Grace” would follow, along with “Glee,” ”Modern Family” and others.

DeGeneres bounced back with movie roles, including as the voice of a lead character in the animated film “Finding Nemo.” She also has a hit talk show now in its ninth season, best-selling books and had a stint as the fourth judge on “American Idol.”

Cappy McGarr, an executive producer for the Mark Twain Prize show and a Kennedy Center board member, said DeGeneres has a special style of observational humor in the tradition of Twain. She also makes people laugh across political lines.

“She’s not just a comedian,” he said. “She’s really a miracle worker. She got the president to dance, the first lady to do pushups and (Republican) Tom Delay to laugh.”

The New Orleans native got her start as an emcee at a local comedy club in her hometown. In 1982, a videotape of her club performance won DeGeneres Showtime’s “Funniest Person in America.” By 1986, she appeared on “The Tonight Show” and became the first female comedian summoned to Johnny Carson’s desk to chat about her performance.

The Mark Twain prize honors people who have an impact on society in the tradition of Samuel Clemens, better known as Twain, as a social commentator and satirist.

McGarr said the Kennedy Center, which awards the prize, is not making a political statement by selecting the trailblazing DeGeneres.

“This has nothing to do with any political issue,” he said. “But she’s brilliantly shined a light on society, and that’s what Mark Twain did.”

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Rubenstein said Duke, where he graduated in 1970, is positioned to inspire social and business entrepreneurs across disciplines to create new ventures and jobs.

“Students today increasingly want to be entrepreneurs, social or business,” he told The Associated Press. “When I was at Duke in college many years ago, the word entrepreneur wasn’t talked about that much.”

His gift is designed to be a “kick start” to spur other Duke alumni to contribute to the effort to foster new innovations. Rubenstein serves on the university’s board of trustees, and his son also attends Duke.

The Baltimore native and son of a postal worker said he was grateful to Duke for giving him a scholarship that allowed him to attend the private college. Before co-founding the Carlyle Group, Rubenstein worked as a lawyer in the Senate and private practice and served as a domestic policy adviser to President Jimmy Carter.

Rubenstein’s gift makes Duke the largest single beneficiary of his philanthropy, following a gift of $13.6 million to Duke’s libraries last year and earlier gifts to its public policy school. In total, he will give the school nearly $40 million.

The gift also follows major gifts to Washington’s cultural scene. Over the past five years, Rubenstein has given or spent more than $83 million to support the capital’s museums and arts institutions with cash gifts or to purchase historic documents for public display. Most recently he gave $7.5 million to repair the earthquake-damaged Washington Monument.

Rubenstein’s donation is Duke’s largest gift devoted to its new Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiative. The effort to foster a culture of innovation spans all of Duke’s schools, from business, engineering and medicine to public policy and the divinity school, said university spokesman Michael Schoenfeld.

“We have people who are looking for innovative solutions to social problems,” he said. “They may be interested in literature, but they’re also entrepreneurs and looking for ways to turn their interest into some sort of venture.”

Having seed money for projects and funding for new programs and research “will put us on the map in a way that we would like to be,” Schoenfeld said.

Duke wants to encourage students to take the risk of being an entrepreneur, not just in business, Rubenstein said. Teach for America is the quintessential example, he said, of an idea that came out of Princeton University and had an impact.

“Obviously you make less money in social entrepreneurial actives, but you can maybe make the world a better place,” he said. “And that’s a pretty good reward.”

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In 1999, Gray became CEO of a museum devoted to the legacy of movie star Gene Autry in Los Angeles and is credited with transforming it into a major cultural center. Gray merged it with Colorado’s Women of the West Museum and Los Angeles’ Southwest Museum of the American Indian. The combined center with more than 500,000 objects also created the Institute for the Study of the American West.

Gray, 63, called the Smithsonian’s U.S. history museum the “most important history museum in America.” He told The Associated Press he couldn’t turn down the opportunity to help lead it, even though he retired in 2010, enrolled in a master’s degree program in Eastern classics and built a home in Santa Fe, N.M.

“One of the joys I have is looking at museums through a non-museum eye — what does it actually mean for me?” he said. He recalled his first visit to the Smithsonian was with his family as a child, and he has been a “compulsive museum-goer” ever since.

“Museums have always been the way I learned and understood the world,” he said.

Smithsonian officials said they were impressed with Gray’s experience transforming the Autry museum to tell a fuller story of American history.

“He took a museum of the American West, including the collections of Gene Autry, and transformed it into an institution representing a broader, inclusive and complicated vision of the American West,” said Richard Kurin, the Smithsonian’s undersecretary for history, art and culture, in announcing the appointment.

At least one exhibit from Gray’s tenure there, “On Gold Mountain: The Chinese-American Experience,” was shown at the Smithsonian in 2001.

The National Museum of American History, which is home to the flag that inspired the national anthem, the first ladies’ inauguration gowns and Dorothy’s ruby slippers from “The Wizard of Oz,” has been criticized for not representing the full scope of U.S. history. Ten years ago, a blue-ribbon commission called the museum’s layout confusing and questioned its less-than-inclusive presentation, noting that religion, immigration and slavery were underrepresented. It is in the midst of a major overhaul of its exhibition wings to broaden its scope.

In the years ahead the Smithsonian will build a National Museum of African American History and Culture, and there is legislation in Congress for a Latino American museum. Some have questioned whether that leaves the American history museum as the history of white Americans. Gray said the museum should present an inclusive view of history from many perspectives.

“I’d make the argument that there’s really one American story and that within that one American story are multiple voices, multiple histories,” he said.

Gray succeeds Brent Glass, who retired as director in August 2011. Glass led the museum since 2002, overseeing a major renovation of the museum’s central core and Star-Spangled Banner gallery. He also brought costumed historical characters into the museum to engage visitors.

Gray will oversee 234 employees at the museum with an annual budget of more than $34 million.

The biggest challenge ahead for the museum is to become more appealing and exciting for visitors in a digital age with greater demands and expectations, Gray said. If done right, artifacts transport people back in time, he said. So his goal is to make a museum visit “almost a more magical experience of understanding and being engaged in our history.”

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National Museum of American History: http://americanhistory.si.edu/

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