Joan Hinton was a nuclear physicist and one of the few women scientists who worked for the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos. Dismayed at the use of the atomic bomb against the Japanese, she went to live and work in China, staying on after the establishment of the People's Republic of China after 1949. She and her husband Erwin (Sid) Engst participated in China's efforts at developing a socialist economy, working extensively in agriculture, and supported the policies of Mao Zedong. She lived on a dairy farm north of Beijing before her death on June 8, 2010.

The Putney School is an independent high school in Putney, Vermont. The school was founded in 1935 by Carmelita Hinton on the principles of the Progressive Education movement and the teachings of its principal exponent, John Dewey. It is a co-educational, college-preparatory boarding school, with a day-student component, 12 miles (19 km) outside Brattleboro, Vermont. Danny O'Brien became head of school in 2022. The school enrolls approximately 225 students on a 500 acres (2.0 km2) hilltop campus with classrooms, dormitories, and a dairy farm on which its students work before graduating.