Gustave Eiffel, the most eminent civil engineer in the world for his Paris tower and for the structure of the Statue of Liberty, was briefly imprisoned for financial fraud during the collapse of Ferdinand de Lesseps’ Compagnie Universelle, formed to cut a sea-level canal through Panama. The US government bought all the assets and finished the project, with a system of locks.
I’m pretty sure it could have been called famous long before that. 
According to David McCullough’s award-winning history The Path Between the Seas, enough rock and dirt was moved in building the Panama Canal to fill a freight train long enough to circle the Earth four times at the equator, or to build the equivalent of 63 Great Pyramids of Giza.
David McCallum introduced his wife, actress Jill Ireland Bronson when both were filming The Great Escape in 1963. Bronson and Ireland began an affair that year, which contained until McCallum left Ireland in 1967 to marry model Katherine Carpenter. Bronson and Ireland would marry the following year, and stay married until her death in 1990.
The Harp is the official Emblem of Ireland, not the Shamrock.
Thomas Moore’s song “The Harp that Once Through Tara’s Halls” was written while Ireland was still under an unwelcome British rule. Moore uses Tara to symbolize the seat of Irish government and the rule of Ireland. The harp, the traditional musical instrument of Ireland, represents the Irish people, culture and spirit.
A more commonly heard song by Moore is “The Minstrel Boy”; he composed the song in remembrance of friends whom he met while studying at Trinity College, Dublin and who were killed during the Irish Rebellion of 1798. The melody is frequently played, typically on bagpipes, at funerals of members and/or officers of Irish regiments and Irish American organizations who have died or been killed in service.
[My kids had to play this song in their middle school marching band and were a little upset to find out that it was about a dead boy]
The heraldic harp of Ireland appears on the standards of both the Sovereign of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and of the President of Ireland - although not, as one might expect, on a green field in either case.
Turlough O’Carolan, who lived from 1670 to March 25, 1738 was a blind Irish harpist, composer and singer whose great fame is due to his gift for melodic composition. Although not a composer in the classical sense, he is considered by many to be Ireland’s national composer.
The National Gallery Art in Washington, D.C., dedicated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on March 17, 1941, stands on the former site of the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad station, where in 1881 a disgruntled office seeker, Charles Guiteau, shot President James Garfield.
In a review of Sarah Vowell’s Assassination Vacation, about her fascination with and love of the quirker parts of American History (you *must *read it, preferably in audio), the Washington Post said:
James Garfield was a nurturing, fun-loving father; on the morning of his assassination he woke his teenage sons early, spoke to them about the responsibilities of the presidency, sang lines from a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, did back-flips and roughhoused with them.
Irish singer Gilbert O’Sullivan was voted the top UK male singer of 1972 by the music magazine Record Mirror.
The Daily Mirror is a British national daily tabloid newspaper founded in 1903. On 2 April 1996, the Daily Mirror was printed entirely on blue paper. This was done as a marketing exercise with Pepsi-Cola, who on the same day had decided to relaunch their cans with a blue design instead of the traditional red and white logo.
Der Spiegel (“The Mirror”) is a German weekly news magazine published in Hamburg. It was founded in 1947 by John Seymour Chaloner, a British army officer, and Rudolf Augstein, a former Wehrmacht radio operator who was recognized in 2000 by the International Press Institute as one of the fifty World Press Freedom Heroes.
The symphonic poem Finlandia by Jean Sibelius has become a deep expression of patriotism for Finns. Sibelius wrote it in 1899 for a rally defending freedom of the press, a covert protest against increasing censorship from the Russian Empire.
Kathleen Sibelius, the former governor of Kansas, was the daughter of Jack Giligan, a former governor of Ohio.
“Gilligan’s Island” creator Sherwood Schwartz named the S.S. Minnow after former Federal Communications Commission chairman Newton Minow, who was best remembered for calling television programming “a vast wasteland”.
The original pilot episode of Gilligan’s Island had Kit Smythe as Ginger. She was replaced by Tina Louise in the regular series, and Smythe went on to appear in multiple episodic television series and as late as 2005 was working in a musical review in Palm Springs.
“Hope springs eternal in the human breast” is a line in Pope’s Essay on Man. The poem is a major piece on the theme of philosophical optimism.
Ernest Thayer’s baseball poem “Casey at the Bat” begins
*The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville nine that day:
The score stood four to two, with but one inning more to play,
And then when Cooney died at first, and Barrows did the same,
A pall-like silence fell upon the patrons of the game.
A straggling few got up to go in deep despair. The rest
Clung to the hope which springs eternal in the human breast;
They thought, “If only Casey could but get a whack at that—
We’d put up even money now, with Casey at the bat.”*
(I’m an Ohioan and never heard of Gilligan (not “Giligan”) referred to as “Jack”).
One-term Ohio Governor John Gilligan and his daughter Kathleen are the only father-daughter pair of governors in U.S. history. Both are Democrats. Gilligan served in the United States Navy during World War II as a destroyer gunnery officer. He was awarded a Silver Star for gallantry in action at Okinawa.
ETA: There is no town in Ohio named Mudville.