Famous people

GEORGE WASHINGTON (1732 ? 1799)

(he was born 22nd February near Fredericksburg in state Virginia, he died on December 14, 1799, he was caught in a snowstorm while riding around his farm and became sick, the news of his death came as a great shock to the whole world, he married rich joung widow Martha Custis and they settled down in his farm called ?Mount Vernon? for 16 years, he was a wealthy tobacco planter ? this was his happiest time in his life, he had now children, but he loved girl and boy who were Martha?s children by her first husband)

– general Washington became and international figure because of the role he played in the French and
Indian war of 1754 (he led soldiers against the French and Indian)
– he commanded the Continental Army during the War of Independence
– his qualities of leadership were outstanding (his army lost more battles than it won, but it was never
destroyed, it was never captured,…)
– in summer 1787 was a meeting called Consitutional Convetnion, there G. Washington with other men
from different states drew up the plan of new government – Constitution of the United States, G.
Washington was a chairman of the convention
– he was regerded as the ?father of his country?
– in 1788 the American Constitution was adopted and the following year – in 1789 George Washington
was elected the first President of the United States (1789 ? 1797)
(april 30, 1789 ? General George Washington stood on the balcony of Federal Hall in New York City, he leaned forward and kissed Bible on which he sworn. Everyone was sure they had chosen their best leader to be the first President)

THOMAS JEFFERSON
(13th April 1743 ? 4th July 1826)
3rd President of the United States, 1801-1809

Thomas Jefferson was born in frontier country Goochland (now Albemarle) County in Virginia. His father was a farmer and his mother came from one of the best families in Virginia. He was tall and thin with freckled face and sandy hair.
Much more important are his minds and his activities. He was very diligent1 and versatile2. Before he was thirty years old he had studied half a dozen languages, law, mathematics, science and philosophy. He was a self-taught3 architect (designed many beautiful houses), inventor (invented American system of money) and fine musician too.
He started his political career in the age of 26, when he was elected to the Virginia legislature. Instead of making public speeches (he wasn´t a good speaker) he wrote many letters and articles often about the growing trouble between the Colonies and Great Britain. One of his articles was about the rights of America and it made him known in all the Colonies.
In 1775 he was elected to the Continental Congress and he was appointed to write the Declaration of Independence. During the Revolutionary War he was a member of the Virginia legislature and the governor of that state. He put through a law guaranteering freedom of religion. So thank to him Virginia was the first state in America with that kind of law.
A few time after the war he served as a minister in France, when George Washington was elected President, Jefferson was named as a secretary of state.
Jefferson was afraid that USA might become a dictatorship someday, but he believed that people should and could govern themselves and citizens must be educated for safeguarding the new democracy. So he thought all children should have to go to school through the third grade. But the secretary of treasury ? Alexander Hamilton ? had another opinion. He believed that only the system headed by President with much power would be best. Both men were sure they have been write. Both Jefferson and Hamilton had men who agreed with them and the situation came to form two political parties ? Republicans (Jefferson) and Federalists (Hamilton). That was a start of party system in USA. George Washington agreed more with Hamilton so Jefferson resigned and went back to Virginia.
When John Adams was elected President, Thomas Jefferson became Vice president despite he was from the another party. The Constitution hadn´t thought about political parties at that time (it planned that who gets the most of votes becomes President and who gets second most of votes become Vice president), but later it was changed. Now they are President and Vice president from the same party.
Jefferson was elected President after Adams. He wanted to run country as cheaply as possible so he cut down on the army, navy and in presidential advantages like handsome uniforms, big carriages etc.
In 1803 he tried to buy New Orleans from France, because France controlled the land on both sides of Mississippi River there so France could stop American boats in New Orleans. Surprisingly Napoleon offered him to sell the whole Louisiana Territory from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains. So here was very good chance for his country and he signed treaty buying that territory. But he was criticized by some men for doing more than Constitution said and he was suspect of trying to make himself emperor of the vast new territory.
About this time the Barbary pirates from northern coast of Africa had been capturing American merchant ships in Mediterranean Sea and holding the crews for ransom, but U. S. navy sent there by Jefferson finally forced pirates to let American ships pass there in peace. Later France and England were at war again. English warships often captured American merchant ships to keep them from trading with France. To avoid war Jefferson got Congress to pass a law forbidding American ships to trade with both England and France. But merchants began to lose money and country started to be more harm4 than good so he asked Congress to repeal that law.
Jefferson didn´t believe that any man should be President for more than two terms. So he didn´t candidate after finishing his second term, but he probably would have been elected if he had candidated. Also, he had never been happy as President. He returned home to Virginia to be planter again. But he troubled with slavery and after in his will5 he freed some of his slaves.
He planned and help build the University of Virginia, he brought together the teachers and helped decide what subjects should be taught. He gave advice to later Presidents of the United States.
Thomas Jefferson died on the same day as his precursor in presidential function John Adams and it was exactly fifty years after the Declaration of Independence, which he had written. He also wrote the words to go on his gravestone: ?Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, of the statute of Virginia for religious freedom, and father of the University of Virginia.?
He even didn´t mention that he was President of the United States.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN (1809 – 1865)
16th president of the USA (1861 – 1865)

Lincoln warned the South in his Inaugural Address: „In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you…. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect and defend it.“
Lincoln thought secession illegal, and was willing to use force to defend Federal law and the Union. When Confederate batteries fired on Fort Sumter and forced its surrender, he called on the states for 75,000 volunteers. Four more slave states joined the Confederacy but four remained within the Union. The Civil War had begun.
The son of a Kentucky frontiersman, Lincoln had to struggle for a living and for learning. Five months before receiving his party’s nomination for President, he sketched his life:
„I was born Feb. 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky. My parents were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished families–second families, perhaps I should say. My mother, who died in my tenth year, was of a family of the name of Hanks…. My father … removed from Kentucky to … Indiana, in my eighth year…. It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up…. Of course when I came of age I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher … but that was all.“
Lincoln made extraordinary efforts to attain knowledge while working on a farm, splitting rails for fences, and keeping store at New Salem, Illinois. He was a captain in the Black Hawk War, spent eight years in the Illinois legislature, and rode the circuit of courts for many years. His law partner said of him, „His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest.“
He married Mary Todd, and they had four boys, only one of whom lived to maturity. In 1858 Lincoln ran against Stephen A. Douglas for Senator. He lost the election, but in debating with Douglas he gained a national reputation that won him the Republican nomination for President in 1860.
As President, he built the Republican Party into a strong national organization. Further, he rallied most of the northern Democrats to the Union cause. On January 1, 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation that declared forever free those slaves within the Confederacy.
Lincoln never let the world forget that the Civil War involved an even larger issue. This he stated most movingly in dedicating the military cemetery at Gettysburg: „that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain–that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom–and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.“
Lincoln won re-election in 1864, as Union military triumphs heralded an end to the war. In his planning for peace, the President was flexible and generous, encouraging Southerners to lay down their arms and join speedily in reunion.
The spirit that guided him was clearly that of his Second Inaugural Address, now inscribed on one wall of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D. C.: „With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds…. “
On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, Lincoln was assassinated at Ford’s Theatre in Washington by John Wilkes Booth, an actor, who somehow thought he was helping the South. The opposite was the result, for with Lincoln’s death, the possibility of peace with magnanimity died.

WOODROW WILSON (29.12.1856-3.2.1924)

– 28th President of the United States (1913-1921)
– he was born in Virginia 5 years before the start of the Civil War
– With his family and close friends, Wilson was warm, witty, and loving. To many other persons he seemed cold and even bitter.
– He received a law degree and for a little while practiced law in Atlanta. But he didn?t like law. He went back to school, received a Ph.D., and began to teach. In 1902 he was made president of Princeton University.
– He wanted to change Princeton, he said from ?a place where there are youngsters doing tasks to a place where there are men thinking?
– Wilson became known as a man who believed in honest, democratic government.
– In 1910 he was elected governor of New Jersey. 2 years later he was elected President.
– He believed the job of the President was to represent all the people.
– He made the import tariff (=dovozní clo) lower. This angered some big manufacturers, but it brought lower prices to the public.
– He reformed the national banking system. He declared, that it was not against federal law for working men to go on strike.
– His great hope was that United States could stay out of the World War I. He tried to find ways to help the warring countries make peace.
– In 1916 he was nominated for second term. One of the slogans during the campaign was: ?He kept us out of war.? ? it helped him win reelection.
× soon German submarines began to sink American ships in the Atlantic Ocean without warning ? Wilson asked Congress to declare war against Germany.
– He drew up (sestavil) his famous Fourteen Points peace plan.
– He had a stroke that paralyzed his left side. For 2 month he was hardly conscious (byl stěží při smyslech). His wife, Edith, was his link to the outside world. Probably no other First Lady had more influence on the presidency than she did. × She angered some members of Congress.
– After his second term in office was over, he took no more part in politics.

MARTIN LUTHER KING (January 15,1929-April 4, 1968)

Martin Luther King, Jr., was born Michael Luther King, Jr., but later had his name changed to Martin. His grandfather began the family’s long tenure as pastors of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, serving from 1914 to 1931; his father has served from then until the present, and from 1960 until his death Martin Luther acted as co-pastor. Martin Luther attended segregated public schools in Georgia, graduating from high school at the age of fifteen; he received the B. A. degree in 1948 from Morehouse College, a distinguished Negro institution of Atlanta from which both his father and grandfather had been graduated. After three years of theological study at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania where he was elected president of a predominantly white senior class, he was awarded the B.D. in 1951. With a fellowship won at Crozer, he enrolled in graduate studies at Boston University , completing his residence for the doctorate in 1953 and receiving the degree in 1955 In Boston he met and married Coretta Scott, a young woman of uncommon intellectual and artistic attainments. Two sons and two daughters were born into the family.

In 1954, Martin Luther King accepted the pastorale of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Always a strong worker for civil rights for members of his race, King was, by this time, a member of the executive committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the leading organization of its kind in the nation. He was ready, then, early in December, 1955, to accept the leadership of the first great Negro nonviolent demonstration of contemporary times in the United States, the bus boycott described by Gunnar Jahn in his presentation speech in honor of the laureate. The boycott lasted 382 days. On December 21, 1956, after the Supreme Court of the United States had declared unconstitutional the laws requiring segregation on buses, Negroes and whites rode the buses as equals. During these days of boycott, King was arrested, his home was bombed, he was subjected to personal abuse, but at the same time he emerged as a Negro leader of the first rank.

In 1957 he was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization formed to provide new leadership for the now burgeoning civil rights movement. The ideals for this organization he took from Christianity; its operational techniques from Gandhi. In the eleven-year period between 1957 and 1968, King traveled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest, and action; and meanwhile he wrote five books as well as numerous articles. In these years, he led a massive protest in Birmingham, Alabama, that caught the attention of the entire world, providing what he called a coalition of conscience. and inspiring his „Letter from a Birmingham Jail“, a manifesto of the Negro revolution; he planned the drives in Alabama for the registration of Negroes as voters; he directed the peaceful march on Washington, D.C., of 250,000 people to whom he delivered his address, „l Have a Dream“, he conferred with President John F. Kennedy and campaigned for President Lyndon B. Johnson; he was arrested upwards of twenty times and assaulted at least four times; he was awarded five honorary degrees; was named Man of the Year by Time magazine in 1963; and became not only the symbolic leader of American blacks but also a world figure.

At the age of thirty-five, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize. When notified of his selection, he announced that he would turn over the prize money of $54,123 to the furtherance of the civil rights movement.

On the evening of April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was to lead a protest march in sympathy with striking garbage workers of that city, he was assassinated.

QUEEN VICTORIA (1819 – 1901)
Victoria was the daughter of Edward, the Duke of Kent and Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg. She was born in Kensington Palace in London on May 24th, 1819.
Edward died when Victoria was but eight months old, upon which her mother enacted
a strict regimen that shunned the courts of Victoria’s uncles, George IV and William IV.
In 1837 Queen Victoria took the throne after the death of her uncle William IV. Due to her secluded childhood, she displayed a personality marked by strong prejudices and a willful stubbornness.
Barely eighteen, she refused any further influence from her domineering mother and ruled in her own stead. Popular respect for the Crown was at a low point at her coronation, but the modest and straightforward young Queen won the hearts of her subjects. She wished to be informed of political matters, although she had no direct input in policy decisions. The Reform Act of 1832 had set the standard of legislative authority residing in the House of Lords, with executive authority resting within a cabinet formed of members of the House of Commons; the monarch was essentially removed from the loop. She respected and worked well with Lord Melbourne (Prime Minister in the early years of her reign) and England grew both socially and economically.

On Feb 10th, 1840, only three years after taking the throne, Victoria took her first vow and married her cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Their relationship was one of great love and admiration. Together they bore nine children – four sons and five daughters: Victoria, Bertie, Alice, Alfred, Helena, Louise, Arthur, Leopold, and Beatrice.
Prince Albert replaced Melbourne as the dominant male influence in Victoria’s life. She was thoroughly devoted to him, and completely submitted to his will. Victoria did nothing without her husband’s approval. Albert assisted in her royal duties. He introduced a strict decorum in court and made a point of straitlaced behavior. Albert also gave a more conservative tinge to Victoria?s politics. If Victoria was to insistently interject her opinions and make her views felt in the cabinet, it was only because of Albert?s teachings of hard work.
The general public, however, was not enamored with the German prince; he was excluded from holding any official political position, was never granted a title of peerage and was named Prince Consort only after seventeen years of marriage.. His interests in art, science, and industry spurred him to organize the Crystal palace exhibition in 1851, a highly profitable industrial convention. He used the proceeds, some Ł186,000, to purchase lands in Kensington for the establishment of several cultural and industrial museums.Reflecting back into her childhood, Victoria was always prone to self pity. On Dec. 14th 1861 Albert died from typhoid fever at Windsor Castle . Victoria remained in self-imposed seclusion for ten years. This genuine, but obsessive mourning kept her occupied for the rest of her life and played an important role in the evolution of what would become the Victorian mentality.
Her popularity was at its lowest by 1870, but it steadily increased thereafter until her death. In 1876 she was crowned Empress of India by Disraeli. In 1887 Victoria?s Golden Jubilee was a grand national celebration of her 50th year as Queen. The Golden Jubilee brought her out of her shell, and she once again embraced public life. She toured English possessions and even visited France (the first English monarch to do so since the coronation of Henry VI in 1431).
Victoria’s long reign witnessed an evolution in English politics and the expansion of the British Empire, as well as political and social reforms on the continent. France had known two dynasties and embraced Republicanism, Spain had seen three monarchs and both Italy and Germany had united their separate principalities into national coalitions. Even in her dotage, she maintained a youthful energy and optimism that infected the English population as a whole.
The national pride connected with the name of Victoria – the term Victorian England, for example, stemmed from the Queen’s ethics and personal tastes, which generally reflected those of the middle class.

WINSTON CHURCHILL
The Right Honourable Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (1874-1965), the son of Lord Randolph Churchill and an American mother, was educated at Harrow and Sandhurst. After a brief but eventful career in the army, he became a Conservative Member of Parliament in 1900. He held many high posts in Liberal and Conservative governments during the first three decades of the century. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty – a post which he had earlier held from 1911 to 1915. In May, 1940, he became Prime Minister and Minister of Defence and remained in office until 1945. He took over the premiership again in the Conservative victory of 1951 and resigned in 1955. However, he remained a Member of Parliament until the general election of 1964, when he did not seek re-election. Queen Elizabeth II conferred on Churchill the dignity of Knighthood and invested him with the insignia of the Order of the Garter in 1953. Among the other countless honours and decorations he received, special mention should be made of the honorary citizenship of the United States which President Kennedy conferred on him in 1963.

Churchill’s literary career began with campaign reports: The Story of the Malakand Field Force (1898) and The River War (1899), an account of the campaign in the Sudan and the Battle of Omdurman. In 1900, he published his only novel, Savrola, and, six years later, his first major work, the biography of his father, Lord Randolph Churchill. His other famous biography, the life of his great ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough, was published in four volumes between 1933 and 1938. Churchill’s history of the First World War appeared in four volumes under the title of The World Crisis (1923-29); his memoirs of the Second World War ran to six volumes (1948-1953/54). After his retirement from office, Churchill wrote a History of the English-speaking Peoples (4 vols., 1956-58). His magnificent oratory survives in a dozen volumes of speeches, among them The Unrelenting Struggle (1942), The Dawn of Liberation (1945), and Victory (1946).

Churchill, a gifted amateur painter, wrote Painting as a Pastime (1948). An autobiographical account of his youth, My Early Life, appeared in 1930.
HORATIO NELSON (1758 – 1805)
„England expects that every man will do his duty.“
With these words Nelson successfully inspired his squadron before the Battle of Trafalgar. Nelson was a complex leader who balanced a personal longing for honor and glory with a compassion and respect for his men.
Born in Burnham Thorpe, Norfolk, the sixth of eleven children, he joined the Navy at age 12. He became a captain at age 20, and saw service in the West Indies, Baltic and Canada. He married Frances Nisbet in 1787 in Nevis, and returned to England with his bride to spend the next five years on half-pay, frustrated at not being at sea.
When Britain entered the French Revolutionary Wars in 1793, Nelson was given command of the Agamemnon. He served in the Mediterranean, where he helped capture Corsica and battled at Calvi, where he lost the sight in his right eye. He would later lose his right arm at the Battle of Santa Cruz de Tenerife (1797).
As a commander he was known for bold action, and the occasional disregard of orders from his seniors. This defiance brought him victories against the Spanish off Cape Vincent in 1797, and at the Battle of Copenhagen four years later, where he ignored orders to cease action by putting his telescope to his blind eye and claiming he couldn’t see the signal.
At the Battle of the Nile (1798), he successfully destroyed Napoleon’s fleet and bid for an overland trade route to India. His next posting took him to Naples where he fell in love with Emma, Lady Hamilton. Although they remained married to others, they considered each other soul mates and together had a child, Horatia, in 1801. Earlier that same year, he was promoted to Vice-Admiral.
Over the period 1794 to 1805, under Nelson’s leadership, the British Navy proved its supremacy over the French. His most famous engagement, at Cape Trafalgar, saved Britain from threat of invasion by Napoleon, but it would be his last. Struck by a French sniper’s bullet he died on the first day of battle, October 21, 1805.

WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR (1027 – 1087)
William I, King of England, commonly called William the Conqueror, was the illegitimate son of Robert, surnamed Le Diable, Duke of Normandy. He was born in 1027, and succeeded to the Dukedom on the death of his father in 1035. Previous to his father’s death, he had been intrusted to the care of Henry I of France, but it was owing rather to the quarrels and jealousies of his own subjects than to the protection of Henry, that he was able to preserve his dominion intact until he arrived at manhood. Ih 1047, he gained a victory at Val de Dunes, over a powerful competitor, Guido, of Macon; and in 1054 he defeated another rival, Guillamme, Count of Arques, being aided in both conquests by the French. His ambition now began to extend to England, where Edward the Confessor reigned at this time. On visiting England, William found his hopes of succeeding Edward much strengthened by the dominance of Norman influence in the councils of that monarch. On Edward’s death, however, the Witenagemote chose Harold to fill the English throne; ignoring according to the monkish chroniclers of Norman bias, in so doing, an alleged bequest of Edward in favor of William. The Norman asserted his pretended rights by a powerful invasion, and the result was his acquisition of the Crown by the famous battle of Hastings, October 14th, 1066. Harold having been killed in the fight, the Saxons chose Edgar Atheling as his successor. Edgar was however, soon obliged to yield, and William was crowned King of England, December 25th, 1066; from which day his reign is dated.
Before long William began to rule like a true conqueror. Everywhere the Saxons were reduced almost to a state of slavery. The higher classes were deprived of every office of Church and state, while the people were ground down by new and oppressive taxes. Fortresses were erected over the country, and garrisoned to overawe the Saxon inhabitants. In 1072, the Saxons were so far reduced to submission, that William found time to lead an army across the border into Scotland, in order to punish the King of that country, Malcom Canmore, for having received and protected Edgar Atheling. The Conqueror marched as far north as the Tay, and received a nominal submission from Malcore. In 1085, an attempt was made to overturn the power of the English King, by Canute, King of Denmark. A great naval armament was got together for the purpose of invasion, but the enterprise was abandoned, the abandonment being caused partly by ill luck, and partly, it is supposed, by a skillful application of William’s treasure. Most of the latter part of William’s life was spent in Normandy, the government of England being intrusted mainly to his half-brother, Odo, Bishop of Bayeux. William was of a corpulent habit of body, at which fact it seems that his brother monarch, Philip I of France, had pointed some sarcasm. William in a fit of wrath, raised an army, and invaded France. He took the City of Mantes, and set it on fire; but while in full enjoyment of the blaze, his horse, stumbling on some hot embers, threw him, and the injuries he received proved fatal. He died September 9th 1087.
Stern and ruthless as William undoubtedly was, he yet knew how to govern a nation and protect it from foreign aggressions. For more than two centuries England had been frequently harrassed by the frequent descents of piratical hordes. He put an end to these. Never after William’s time, did a Norse rover venture to show face on the English coast. In the common administration of justice, he was royally impartial. Many of his severities are referable in part to his thorough hatred of anarchy, while his attitude toward the church is admirable. He clearly defined the limits of ecclesiastical judicature, and when the formidable Hildebrand desired that the Conqueror should do homage to him for the Kingdom of England, the latter refused.