Muhammad Ali

• Famously refused to be drafted into the Vietnam War, citing his religion and ethics as core reasons. This energized the countercultural movement and the civil rights movement in the U.S.
• Stood his ground once convicted of draft evasion in 1967, leading to the stripping of all his boxing titles and a five-year prison sentence. Took on the fight of his life to take the case to the Supreme Court, winning in 1971.
• Civil rights figures came to believe that Ali’s draft evasion fight had an energizing effect on the freedom movement as a whole. Al Sharpton spoke of his bravery at a time when there was still widespread support for the Vietnam War:

“For the heavyweight champion of the world, who had achieved the highest level of athletic celebrity, to put all of that on the line—the money, the ability to get endorsements—to sacrifice all of that for a cause, gave a whole sense of legitimacy to the movement and the causes with young people that nothing else could have done. Even those who were assassinated, certainly lost their lives, but they didn’t voluntarily do that. He knew he was going to jail and did it anyway. That’s another level of leadership and sacrifice.”

Poetry

In defiance of his dyslexia, Ali was known for his spoken word poetry, iconic speeches, and freestyling trash talking, which he often structured in rhymes.

“I am America. I am the part you won’t recognize. But get used to me. Black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my own; get used to me.

“I’ve done something new for this fight. I done wrestled with an alligator, I done tussled with a whale; handcuffed lightning, thrown thunder in jail; only last week, I murdered a rock, injured a stone, hospitalized a brick; I’m so mean I make medicine sick.”

“My enemy is the white people, not Viet Cong or Chinese or Japanese. You my opposer when I want freedom. You my opposer when I want justice. You my opposer when I want equality. You won’t even stand up for me in America for my religious beliefs—and you want me to go somewhere and fight, but you won’t even stand up for me here at home?”

Martin Luther King Jr.
(1929 – 1968)

MLK’s Crowning Achievements

• Believed that nonviolent protest against systemized southern segregation, known as the Jim Crow laws, would lead to extensive media coverage of the struggle for African American equality and voting rights. Footage of daily deprivation and indignities, and of segregationist violence and harassment of civil rights workers and marchers, produced a wave of sympathetic public opinion that convinced Americans that the civil rights movement was the most important issue in American politics in the early 1960s.
• Displayed immense personal bravery as a public face for the civil rights movement at considerable risk to himself and his family.
• Led the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, resulting in the desegregation of local buses after a 385-day fight. The situation became so tense that King’s house was bombed. King was also arrested and jailed during this campaign, which overnight drew the attention of national media, and greatly increased King’s public stature and ability to influence progress.
• As Founder of the SCLC, led the Albany Movement in Georgia, acting to desegregate businesses and public spaces in the city. Arrested during a sit-in at Rich’s, Atlanta’s largest department store and sentenced to four months of hard labor. Drew the attention of both Presidential candidates. Pressure on the state governor from John F. Kennedy led to his release.
• Organized the nonviolent 1963 protests against racial segregation and economic injustice in Birmingham, Alabama. African American people in Birmingham, organizing with the SCLC, occupied public spaces with marches and sit-ins, openly violating laws that they considered unjust. During the protests, the Birmingham Police Department, led by Eugene “Bull” Connor, used high-pressure water jets and police dogs against protesters, including children. Footage of the police response was broadcast on national television news and dominated the nation’s attention, shocking many white Americans and consolidating African American Americans behind the movement. But the campaign was a success: Connor lost his job, the “Jim Crow” signs came down, and public places became more open to African Americans.
• Organized the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. More than a quarter of a million people of diverse ethnicities attended the event, sprawling from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial onto the National Mall and around the reflecting pool. At the time, it was the largest gathering of protesters in Washington, D.C.’s history.
• Organized two of the three Selma to Montgomery marches.
• In his final years, he expanded his focus to include opposition towards poverty, capitalism, and the Vietnam War.

Notable Quotes

“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.”

“I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

“The black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws—racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism. It is exposing evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.”

Nikola Tesla

Tesla was born in what is now Croatia on a summer night in 1856, during what he claimed was a lightning storm – which led the midwife to say, “He will be a child of the storm,” and his mother to counter prophetically, “No, of the light.” As a student, Tesla displayed such remarkable abilities to calculate mathematical problems that teachers accused him of cheating. During his teen years, he fell seriously ill, recovering once his father abandoned his demand that Nikola become a priest and agreed he could attend engineering school instead.

Although an outstanding student, Tesla eventually withdrew from polytechnic school and ended up working for the Continental Edison Company, where he focused on electrical lighting and motors. Wishing to meet Edison himself, Tesla immigrated to the U.S. in 1884, and he later claimed he was offered the sum of US$50,000 if he could solve a series of engineering problems Edison’s company faced. Having achieved the feat, Tesla said he was then told that the offer had just been a joke, and he left the company after six months.

Tesla then developed a relationship with two businessmen that led to the founding of Tesla Electric Light and Manufacturing. He filed a number of electrical patents, which he assigned to the company. When his partners decided that they wanted to focus strictly on supplying electricity, they took the company’s intellectual property and founded another firm, leaving Tesla with nothing.
Tesla reported that he then worked as a ditch digger for $2 a day, tortured by the sense that his great talent and education were going to waste.

Success as an inventor

In 1887, Tesla met two investors who agreed to back the formation of the Tesla Electric Company. He set up a laboratory in Manhattan, where he developed the alternating current induction motor, which solved a number of technical problems that had bedeviled other designs.

When Tesla demonstrated his device at an engineering meeting, the Westinghouse Company made arrangements to license the technology, providing an upfront payment and royalties on each horsepower generated.

The so-called “War of the Currents” was raging in the late 1880s. Thomas Edison promoted direct current, asserting that it was safer than AC. George Westinghouse backed AC, since it could transmit power over long distances. Because the two were undercutting each other’s prices, Westinghouse lacked capital. He explained the difficulty and asked Tesla to sell his patents to him for a single lump sum, to which Tesla agreed, forgoing what would have been a vast fortune had he held on to them.

With the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 looming in Chicago, Westinghouse asked Tesla to help supply power; they’d have a huge platform for demonstrating the merits of AC. Tesla helped the fair illuminate more light bulbs than could be found in the entire city of Chicago, and wowed audiences with a variety of wonders, including an electric light that required no wires. Later Tesla also helped Westinghouse win a contract to generate electrical power at Niagara Falls, helping to build the first large-scale AC power plant in the world.

Challenges along the way

Tesla encountered many obstacles. In 1895, his Manhattan laboratory was devastated by a fire, which destroyed his notes and prototypes. At Madison Square Garden in 1898, he demonstrated wireless control of a boat, a stunt that many branded a hoax. Soon after he turned his attention to the wireless transmission of electric power. He believed that his system could not only distribute electricity around the globe but also provide for worldwide wireless communication.

Seeking to test his ideas, Tesla built a laboratory in Colorado Springs. There he once drew so much power that he caused a regional power outage. He also detected signals that he claimed emanated from an extraterrestrial source. In 1901 Tesla persuaded J.P. Morgan to invest in the construction of a tower on Long Island that he believed would vindicate his plan to electrify the world. Yet Tesla’s dream did not materialize, and Morgan soon withdrew funding.

In 1909, Marconi received the Nobel Prize for the development of radio. In 1915, Tesla unsuccessfully sued Marconi, claiming infringement on his patents. That same year, it was rumored that Edison and Tesla would share the Nobel Prize, but it didn’t happen. Unsubstantiated speculation suggested their mutual animosity was the cause. However, Tesla did receive numerous honors and awards over his life, including, ironically, the American Institute of Electrical Engineers Edison Medal.

A singular man

Tesla was a remarkable person. He said that he had a photographic memory, which helped him memorize whole books and speak eight languages. He also claimed that many of his best ideas came to him in a flash, and that he saw detailed pictures of many of his inventions in his mind before he ever set about constructing prototypes. As a result, he didn’t initially prepare drawings and plans for many of his devices.

The 6-foot-2-inch Tesla cut a dashing figure and was popular with women, though he never married, claiming that his celibacy played an important role in his creativity. Perhaps because of his nearly fatal illness as a teenager, he feared germs and practiced very strict hygiene, likely a barrier to the development of interpersonal relationships. He also exhibited unusual phobias, such as an aversion to pearls, which led him to refuse to speak to any woman wearing them.

Tesla held that his greatest ideas came to him in solitude. Yet he was no hermit, socializing with many of the most famous people of his day at elegant dinner parties he hosted. Mark Twain frequented his laboratory and promoted some of his inventions. Tesla enjoyed a reputation as not only a great engineer and inventor but also a philosopher, poet and connoisseur. On his 75th birthday he received a congratulatory letter from Einstein and was featured on the cover of Time magazine.

In the popular imagination, Tesla played the part of a mad scientist. He claimed that he had developed a motor that ran on cosmic rays; that he was working on a new non-Einsteinian physics that would supply a new form of energy; that he had discovered a new technique for photographing thoughts; and that he had developed a new ray, alternately labeled the death ray and the peace ray, with vastly greater military potential than Nobel’s munitions.

His money long gone, Tesla spent his later years moving from place to place, leaving behind unpaid bills. Eventually, he settled in at a New York hotel, where his rent was paid by Westinghouse. Always living alone, he frequented the local park, where he was regularly seen feeding and tending to the pigeons, with which he claimed to share a special affinity. On the morning of Jan. 7, 1943, he was found dead in his room by a hotel maid at age 86.

Today the name Tesla is still very much in circulation. The airport in Belgrade bears his name, as does the world’s best-known electric car, and the magnetic field strength of MRI scanners is measured in Teslas. Tesla was a real-life Prometheus: the mythical Greek titan who raided heaven to bring fire to mankind, yet in punishment was chained to a rock where each day an eagle ate his liver. Tesla scaled great heights to bring lightning down to earth, yet his rare cast of mind and uncommon habits eventually led to his downfall, leaving him nearly penniless and alone.

Galileo’s Contribution to Science

• Galileo studied speed and velocity, gravity and free fall, the principle of relativity, inertia, projectile motion and also worked in applied science and technology, describing the properties of pendulums and “hydrostatic balances”.
• He invented the thermoscope and various military compasses, and used the telescope for scientific observations of celestial objects.
• His contributions to observational astronomy include telescopic confirmation of the phases of Venus, observation of the four largest satellites of Jupiter, observation of Saturn’s rings, and analysis of sunspots.
• He was often willing to change his views in accordance with observation. In order to perform his experiments, Galileo had to set up standards of length and time, so that measurements made on different days and in different laboratories could be compared in a reproducible fashion. This provided a reliable foundation on which to confirm mathematical laws using inductive reasoning.

Galileo’s Disagreements with the Church

• Galileo’s championing of Copernican heliocentrism (Earth rotating daily and revolving around the sun) was met with opposition from within the Catholic Church and from some astronomers. The matter was investigated by the Roman Inquisition in 1615, which concluded that heliocentrism was foolish, absurd, and heretical since it contradicted Holy Scripture.
• Galileo later defended his views in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632), which appeared to attack Pope Urban VIII and thus alienated both the Pope and the Jesuits, who had both supported Galileo up until this point. He was tried by the Inquisition, found “vehemently suspect of heresy”, and forced to recant. He spent the rest of his life under house arrest.
• According to popular legend, after recanting his theory that the Earth moved around the Sun, Galileo allegedly muttered the rebellious phrase “And yet it moves”.
• According to Stephen Hawking, Galileo probably bears more of the responsibility for the birth of modern science than anybody else, and Albert Einstein called him the father of modern science.

Frida Kahlo Biography

Considered one of Mexico’s greatest artists, Frida Kahlo was born on July 6, 1907 in Coyocoan, Mexico City, Mexico. She grew up in the family’s home where was later referred to as the Blue House or Casa Azul. Her father is a German descendant and photographer. He immigrated to Mexico where he met and married her mother Matilde. Her mother is half Amerindian and half Spanish. Frida Kahlo has two older sisters and one younger sister.

Frida Kahlo has poor health in her childhood. She contracted polio at the age of 6 and had to be bedridden for nine months. This disease caused her right leg and foot to grow much thinner than her left one. She limped after she recovered from polio. She has been wearing long skirts to cover that for the rest of her life. Her father encouraged her to do lots of sports to help her recover. She played soccer, went swimming, and even did wrestle, which is very unusual at that time for a girl. She has kept a very close relationship with her father for her whole life.

Frida Kahlo attended the renowned National Preparatory School in Mexico City in the year of 1922. There are only thirty-five female students enrolled in that school and she soon became famous for her outspokenness and bravery. At this school she first met the famous Mexican muralist Diego Rivera for the first time. Rivera at that time was working on a mural called The Creation on the school campus. Frida often watched it and she told a friend she will marry him someday.

In the same year, Kahlo joined a gang of students who shared similar political and intellectual views. She fell in love with the leader Alejandro Gomez Arias. On a September afternoon when she traveled with Gomez Arias on a bus the tragic accident happened. The bus collided with a streetcar and Frida Kahlo was seriously injured. A steel handrail impaled her through the hip. Her spine and pelvis are fractured and this accident left her in a great deal of pain, both physically and physiologically.

She was injured so badly and had to stay in the Red Cross Hospital in Mexico City for several weeks. After that, she returned home for further recovery. She had to wear full-body cast for three months. To kill the time and alleviate the pain, she started painting and finished her first self-portrait the following year. Frida Kahlo once said, “I paint myself because I am often alone and I am the subject I know best”. Her parents encouraged her to paint and made a special easel made for her so she could paint in bed. They also gave her brushes and boxes of paints.

Frida Kahlo reconnected with Rivera in 1928. She asked him to evaluate her work and he encouraged her. The two soon started the romantic relationship. Despite her mother’s objection, Frida and Diego Rivera got married in the next year. During their earlier years as a married couple, Frida had to move a lot based on Diego’s work. In 1930, they lived in San Francisco, California. Then they moved to New York City for Rivera’s artwork show at Museum of Modern Art. They later moved to Detroit while Diego Rivera worked for Detroit Institute of Arts.

In 1932, Kahlo added more realistic and surrealistic components in her painting style. In the painting titled Henry Ford Hospital(1932), Frida Kahlo lied on a hospital bed naked and was surrounded with a few things floating around, which includes a fetus, a flower, a pelvis, a snail, all connected by veins. This painting was an expression of her feelings about her second miscarriage. It is as personal as her other self-portraits.

In 1933, Kahlo was living in New York City with her husband Diego Rivera. Rivera was commissioned by Nelson Rockefeller to create a mural named as Man at the Crossroads at Rockefeller Center. Rivera tried to include Vladimir Lenin in the painting, who is a communist leader. Rockefeller stopped his work and that part was painted over. The couple had to move back to Mexico after this incident. They returned and live in San Angel, Mexico.

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera’s marriage is not a usual one. They had been keeping separate homes and studios for all those years. Diego had so many affairs and one of that was with Kahlo’s sister Cristina. Frida Kahlo was so sad and she cut off her long hair to show her desperation to the betrayal. She has longed for children but she cannot bear one due to the bus accident. She was heartbroken when she experienced a second miscarriage in 1934. Kahlo and Rivera have been separated a few times but they always went back together. In 1937 they helped Leon Trotsky and his wife Natalia. Leon Trotsky is an exiled communist and rival of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Kahlo and Rivera welcomed the couple together and let them stay at her Blue House. Kahlo also had a brief affair with Leon Trotsky when the couple stayed at her house.

Her health condition has been worsening in 1950. That year she was diagnosed with gangrene in her right foot. She became bedridden for the next nine month and had to stay in hospital and had several surgeries. But with great persistence, Frida Kahlo continued to work and paint. In the year of 1953, she had a solo exhibition in Mexican. Although she had limited mobility at that time, she showed up on the exhibition’s opening ceremony. She arrived by ambulance, and welcomed the attendees, celebrated the ceremony in a bed the gallery set up for her. A few months later, she had to accept another surgery. Part of her right leg got amputated to stop the gangrene.

With the poor physical condition, she is also deeply depressed. She even had an inclination for suicide. Frida Kahlo has been out and in hospital during that year. But despite her health issues, she has been active with the political movement. She showed up at the demonstration against US-backed overthrow of Founder Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala on July 2. This is her last public appearance. About one week after her 47th birthday, Frida Kahlo passed away at her beloved Bule House. She was publicly reported to die of a pulmonary embolism, but there is speculation which was saying she died of a possible suicide.

Frida Kahlo’s fame has been growing after her death. Her Blue House was opened as a museum in the year of 1958. In the 1970s the interest in her work and life is renewed due to the feminist movement since she was viewed as an icon of female creativity. In 1983, Hayden Herrera published his book on her, A Biography of Frida Kahlo, which drew more attention from the public to this great artist. In the year of 2002, a movie named Frida was released, staring alma Hayek as Frida Kahlo and Alfred Molina as Diego Rivera. This movie was nominated for six Academy Awards and won for Best Makeup and Original Score.

Elvis’ Story

• Presley was a shy child, stating that “I took the guitar, and I watched people, and I learned to play a little bit. But I would never sing in public. I was very shy about it.”
• In school, he was regarded as a loner. When he began bringing his guitar to school on a daily basis, he was often teased as a “trashy” kid who played hillbilly music.
• When he was twelve years old, he was scheduled him for two on-air performances. Presley was overcome by stage fright the first time, and had no formal music training. He could not read music, and studied and played by ear.
• At one point, he failed an audition for a local vocal quartet, the Songfellows. He explained to his father, “They told me I couldn’t sing.” He was rejected in a tryout, and was advised to stick to truck driving “because you’re never going to make it as a singer”.
• Despite this, Presley’s released his first single, “Heartbreak Hotel”, which became a number-one hit in the United States. Within a year, RCA would sell ten million Presley singles. With a series of successful network television appearances and chart-topping records, Presley became the leading figure of the newly popular sound of rock and roll.
• A combination of his strong response to rhythm and nervousness at playing before a large crowd led Presley to shake his legs as he performed: his wide-cut pants emphasized his movements, causing young women in the audience to start screaming.

Elvis’ Impact

• Presley truly changed the game of music, upsetting many traditional figures. Jack Gould of The New York Times wrote, “Mr. Presley has no discernible singing ability. … His phrasing, if it can be called that, consists of the stereotyped variations that go with a beginner’s aria in a bathtub. … His one specialty is an accented movement of the body … primarily identified with the repertoire of the blond bombshells of the burlesque runway.” Ben Gross of the New York Daily News opined that popular music “has reached its lowest depths in the ‘grunt and groin’ antics of one Elvis Presley. … Elvis, who rotates his pelvis … gave an exhibition that was suggestive and vulgar, tinged with the kind of animalism that should be confined to dives and bordellos”. Ed Sullivan, whose own variety show was the nation’s most popular, declared him “unfit for family viewing”
• Accompanying Presley’s rise to fame, a cultural shift was taking place that he both helped inspire and came to symbolize. Igniting the “biggest pop craze since Glenn Miller and Frank Sinatra … Presley brought rock’n’roll into the mainstream of popular culture”, writes historian Marty Jezer. “As Presley set the artistic pace, other artists followed. … Presley, more than anyone else, gave the young a belief in themselves as a distinct and somehow unified generation—the first in America ever to feel the power of an integrated youth culture.”
• He is now recognized as the best-selling solo music artist of all time by Guinness World Records, Presley was commercially successful in many genres, including pop, country, R&B, adult contemporary, and gospel.

Churchill’s Story

• In February 1895, Churchill was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars regiment of the British Army. Eager to witness military action, he used his mother’s influence to get himself posted to a war zone.
• After his train was derailed by Boer artillery shelling, he was captured as a prisoner of war and interned in a Boer POW camp in Pretoria. In December, he escaped from the prison and evaded his captors by stowing away aboard freight trains and hiding in a mine. He eventually made it to safety in Portuguese East Africa.
• Throughout the war, he had publicly chastised anti-Boer prejudices, calling for them to be treated with “generosity and tolerance”, and after the war he urged the British to be magnanimous in victory.
• Churchill entered British Parliament in 1900. While there, he introduced the Mines Eight Hours Bill, which legally prohibited miners from working more than an eight-hour day. He introduced the Trade Boards Bill, creating Trade Boards which could prosecute exploitative employers. Passing with a large majority, it established the principle of a minimum wage and the right of workers to have meal breaks. In May 1909, he proposed the Labour Exchanges Bill to establish over 200 Labour Exchanges through which the unemployed would be assisted in finding employment. He also promoted the idea of an unemployment insurance scheme, which would be part-funded by the state.
• As First Lord of the Admiralty, he was tasked with overseeing Britain’s naval effort when the First World War began in August 1914. During the war, Churchill oversaw the Gallipoli Campaign but, after it proved a disaster, he was demoted to Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.
• Out of government during his so-called “wilderness years” in the 1930s, Churchill took the lead in calling for British rearmament to counter the growing threat of militarism in Nazi Germany. At the outbreak of the Second World War he was re-appointed First Lord of the Admiralty. In May 1940, he became Prime Minister, replacing Neville Chamberlain.
• Churchill oversaw British involvement in the Allied war effort against the Axis powers, resulting in victory in 1945.
• Churchill believed that the only option throughout the war was to fight on and his use of rhetoric hardened public opinion against a peaceful resolution and prepared the British people for a long war – Jenkins says Churchill’s speeches were “an inspiration for the nation, and a catharsis for Churchill himself”.
• Apart from two years between 1922 and 1924, he was a Member of Parliament (MP)
  from 1900 to 1964 and represented a total of five constituencies.

A Few Notable Quotes

Churchill succeeded as an orator despite being handicapped from childhood with a speech impediment.

“I would say to the House… that I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. You ask, what is our policy? I will say: it is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: it is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.”

“We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air. We shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”

“The gratitude of every home in our Island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world, except in the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of the World War by their prowess and by their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”

Cleopatra’s Story

• At the young age of 18, Cleopatra was anointed queen of Egypt, and left to deal with a litany of issues including famine caused by drought and a low level of the annual flooding of the Nile, and lawless behavior instigated by the Gabiniani, the now unemployed and assimilated Roman soldiers left by Gabinius to garrison Egypt. Inheriting her father’s debts, Cleopatra also owed the Roman Republic 17.5 million drachmas.
• Soon after the siblings’ ascension to the throne, Ptolemy’s advisers acted against Cleopatra, who was forced to flee Egypt for Syria in 49 B.C. She raised an army of mercenaries and returned the following year to face her brother’s forces in a civil war at Pelusium, on Egypt’s eastern border. Meanwhile, after allowing the Roman general Pompey to be murdered, Ptolemy XIII welcomed the arrival of Pompey’s rival, Julius Caesar, to Alexandria. In order to help her cause, Cleopatra sought Caesar’s support, reportedly smuggling herself into the royal palace to plead her case with him.
• Cleopatra initially sent emissaries to Caesar, but upon allegedly hearing that Caesar was inclined to having affairs with royal women, she came to Alexandria to see him personally.
• After four months of war between Caesar’s outnumbered forces and those of Ptolemy XIII, Roman reinforcements arrived; Ptolemy was forced to flee Alexandria, and was believed to have drowned in the Nile River. Entering Alexandria as an unpopular conqueror, Caesar restored the throne to the equally unpopular Cleopatra and her younger brother Ptolemy XIV (then 13 years old). Caesar remained in Egypt with Cleopatra for a time, and around 47 B.C. she gave birth to a son, Ptolemy Caesar. He was believed to be Caesar’s child, and was known by the Egyptian people as Caesarion, or Little Caesar.

• Following Caesars’ murder, Cleopatra sent four Roman legions stationed in Egypt by Caesar to support a triumvirate of Caesars’ allies. In 42 B.C., after defeating the forces of Brutus and Cassius in the battles of Philippi, Mark Antony and Octavian divided power in Rome.
• Mark Antony soon summoned Cleopatra to the Cicilian city of Tarsus (south of modern Turkey) to explain the role she had played in the complicated aftermath of Caesar’s assassination. According to the story recorded by Plutarch (and later dramatized famously by William Shakespeare), Cleopatra sailed to Tarsus in an elaborate ship, dressed in the robes of Isis. Antony, who associated himself with the Greek deity Dionysus, was seduced by her charms.
• He agreed to protect Egypt and Cleopatra’s crown, pledging support for the removal of her younger sister and rival Arsinoe, then in exile. Cleopatra returned to Egypt, followed shortly thereafter by Antony, who left behind his third wife, Fulvia, and their children in Rome. He spent the winter of 41-40 B.C. in Alexandria, during which he and Cleopatra famously formed a drinking society called “The Inimitable Livers.” In 40 B.C., after Antony’s return to Rome, Cleopatra gave birth to twins, Alexander Helios (sun)
  and Cleopatra Selene (moon).
• Cleopatra carefully chose Antony as her partner for producing further heirs, as he was deemed to be the most powerful Roman figure following Caesar’s demise. With his powers as a triumvir, Antony also had the broad authority to restore former Ptolemaic lands, which were currently in Roman hands, to Cleopatra.
• Octavian, Antony’s great rival, launched war on Cleopatra a few years later. When captured by Octavian, Cleopatra told him bluntly, “I will not be led in a triumph”. When a spy informed her that Octavian planned to move her and her children to Rome in three days, she prepared for suicide as she had no intentions of being paraded in a Roman triumph like her sister, Arsinoe IV.

Parks’ Story

• On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a city bus. The incident led to the Montgomery bus boycott, which was led by Martin Luther King.
• The boycott lasted for 385 days, and the controversy ended when the United States District Court issued a ruling in Browder v. Gayle that prohibited racial segregation on all Montgomery public buses. African Americans resumed riding the buses again, and were able to sit in the front with full legal authorization.
• Parks’ act of defiance and the Montgomery bus boycott became important symbols of the civil rights movement. She became an international icon of resistance to racial segregation, and organized and collaborated with civil rights leaders, including Edgar Nixon and Martin Luther King Jr.
• Although widely honored in later years, she also suffered for her act; she was fired from her job, and received death threats for years afterwards. Her husband lost his job as a barber at Maxwell Air Force Base after his boss forbade him to talk about his wife or the legal case.
• In 1980, Parks—widowed and without immediate family—rededicated herself to civil rights and educational organizations. She co-founded the Rosa L. Parks Scholarship Foundation for college-bound high school seniors, to which she donated most of her speaker fees. In February 1987, she co-founded, with Elaine Eason Steele, the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development, an institute that runs the “Pathways to Freedom” bus tours which introduce young people to important civil rights and Underground Railroad sites throughout the country. Parks also served on the Board of Advocates of Planned Parenthood.

Notable Quotes

• “I thought of Emmett Till – a 14-year-old African American who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955, after being accused of offending a white woman in her family’s grocery store, whose killers were tried and acquitted – and I just couldn’t go back.”
• “I would have to know for once and for all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen.”
• “People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in
  But when I had to face that decision, I didn’t hesitate to do so because I felt that we had endured that too long. The more we gave in, the more we complied with that kind of treatment, the more oppressive it became.”

Joan of Arc
(c. 1412 – 1431)

• After years of one humiliating defeat after another against the English, both the military and civil leadership of France were demoralized and discredited. Every orthodox, every rational option had been tried and had failed. Joan of Arc, citing her religious visions, convinced a regime in the final straits of desperation to pay heed to an illiterate farm girl who said that the voice of God was instructing her to take charge of her country’s army and lead it to victory.
• At the age of just 16, a peasant Joan petitioned a garrison commander in a nearby town for an armed escort to take her to the French Royal Court at Chinon. On arrival, she convinced the Dauphin Charles to be equipped for war and placed at the head of his army.
• Her first appearance, in the siege at Orléans, coincided with a sudden change in French fortunes. During the five months before her arrival, the defenders had attempted only one offensive assault, which had ended in defeat. Despite being wounded by an arrow between the neck and shoulder while holding her banner in the trench outside les Tourelles, Joan led a final assault that succeeded in taking the fortress. The English retreated from Orléans the next day, and the siege was over.
• Joan then persuaded Charles VII to allow her to accompany the army with Duke John II of Alençon to recapture nearby bridge-towns along the Loire as a prelude to an advance on Reims.
• The French army marched swiftly to Reims, first accepting the conditional surrender of the Burgundian-held city of Auxerre. Other towns in the army’s path returned to French allegiance without resistance.

• The French assault at Paris ensued on 8 September. Despite a wound to the leg from a crossbow bolt, Joan remained in the inner trench of Paris until she was carried back to safety by one of the commanders. In October, Joan was with the royal army when it took Saint-Pierre-le-Moûtier, followed by an unsuccessful attempt to take La-Charité-sur-Loire in November and December.
• Later that year, Joan and her family were ennobled by Charles VII as a reward for her actions.
• A truce with England during the following few months left Joan with little to do. The truce then England quickly came to an end, and Joan traveled to Compiègne to help defend the city against an English and Burgundian siege.
• She was with a force that attempted to attack the Burgundian camp at Margny north of Compiègne, but was ambushed and captured after staying to fight with the rear guard.
• Joan was imprisoned by the Burgundians at Beaurevoir Castle. She made several escape attempts, on one occasion jumping from her 70-foot (21 m) tower, landing on the soft earth of a dry moat, after which she was moved to the Burgundian town of Arras.
• The Burgundian noblemen traded Joan to the English, where she was burned at the stake after a brief trial, ending her reign as the leading religious figure in the French army.

• Joan carried her banner in battle and had never killed anyone, preferring her banner “forty times” better than a sword. Many noblemen stated that Joan had a profound effect on their decisions since they often accepted the advice she gave them, believing her advice was divinely inspired.
• From Christine de Pizan to the present, women have looked to Joan as a positive example of a brave and active woman. She operated within a religious tradition that believed an exceptional person from any level of society might receive a divine calling.

Alexander the Great’s Story

Alexander was born in July 356 B.C. to Philip II and his third wife, Olympias. The parents were far from a happy couple, and Alexander was raised primarily under the influence of his mother. At the age of thirteen, he was sent to study with Aristotle–an education that was for the most part formal. Aristotle promoted the belief that non-Greeks were naturally slaves, thus encouraging the prince’s thirst for conquest. Ultimately, however, Alexander would reject this belief, at least implicitly, as he attempted to cooperate with the Persians even as he subjugated them.

Returning to Macedonia after three years, Alexander soon had the opportunity to prove his strength in battle, as he subdued rebellions and contributed to his father’s famous victory over Athens and Thebes at Chaeronea. But when Philip divorced Olympias and married Cleopatra, Alexander began to fear that his father was looking for a new heir, and the father and son had a falling out. Their dispute was shortly resolved, but both remained suspicious of the other. Indeed, Philip was soon assassinated by a guard who presumably had a personal grievance, though Alexander and his mother are traditionally thought to have played some kind of role in Philip’s death.

Alexander thus succeeded to the throne and began the inevitable dynastic purging of enemies. At the same time, he had to force the other Greek city-states to acknowledge his authority as Hegemon of the Hellenic League, which Philip had established. In doing so, Alexander razed the city of Thebes as an example–though many sympathized with Thebes and only grew to resent Alexander more deeply. But Alexander had more important concerns–namely, the Persian expedition. This had been Philip’s dream and Alexander’s inheritance, and he wasted no time in beginning.

Alexander advanced gradually and conquered territory by territory until Darius, the Great King of Persia, was forced to come out himself to face Alexander. Alexander was victorious in the two key battles at Issus and Gaugamela, and Darius was murdered by conspirators soon afterward. In the meantime, Alexander also conquered Phoenicia, Egypt, and Babylon, all of which proved to be valuable acquisitions.

Upon hearing of Darius’s death, the Macedonian army assumed that the expedition was over and the war won, but Alexander insisted on pushing farther east. Here he faced a formidable opponent in Spitamenes, who possessed a smaller army but continued harassing Alexander and even slaughtered a Macedonian unit after Alexander underestimated him. Spitamenes was ultimately defeated, the rebellion fell apart, and Alexander went on to conquer the Paraetacene territory. In the Far East, Alexander founded a large number of cities that would contribute to the expansion of Greek culture.

Finally there remained India (which at the time referred to a small area in western Pakistan, not the country of modern times). Although Alexander was already the undisputed king of Asia, he would not be satisfied until he had personally vanquished the entire continent. He soon allied himself with one ruler, Ambhi, but there remained Ambhi’s enemy Porus. The result was one of Alexander’s greatest military achievements, but the battle was difficult, particularly because the Macedonian army has two had face a frightful experience in fighting elephants.

After India, Alexander wanted to press still farther, recognizing that Asia extended beyond what he may have expected from limited geographical knowledge. At this point, however, his troops finally refused to further, and mutinous thoughts stirred after eight hard years of combat and marching. Alexander was furious, but he was eventually forced to give in and return home.

Back in Persia Alexander dealt with administrative matters, including the replacement of various satraps, or local rulers. More important, his experience of Asia had changed his attitude toward Persians. His desire to cooperate with the Persians alienated many conservative Macedonians, who still viewed Persians as barbarians. Alexander’s new attitude may even have led to his death in 323 B.C. Though the official cause of his death was a fever aggravated by heavy drinking, many historians have speculated that Alexander was poisoned by Aristotle, his former tutor, and Antipater, his close advisor, as a result of his favorable treatment of the barbarians.

Marilyn Monroe
(1926-1962)

• Born and raised in Los Angeles, Monroe spent most of her childhood in foster homes and an orphanage; she married at age 16.
• In late 1944, she met photographer David Conover. She quit working at the factory where she met Conover, and began modeling for him and his friends.
• Defying her deployed husband, she then moved on her own and signed a contract with the Blue Book Model Agency.
• According to the agency’s owner, Monroe quickly became one of its most ambitious and hard-working models; by early 1946, she had appeared on 33 magazine covers for publications such as Pageant, U.S. Camera, Laff, and Peek.
• She then made the move to Hollywood, featuring in several films before finding herself at the center of a scandal in 1952, when she revealed publicly that she had posed for a nude calendar in 1949.
• The studio had learned about the photos and that she was publicly rumored to be the model some weeks prior, and together with Monroe decided that to avoid damaging her career it was best to admit to them while stressing that she had been broke at the time.

Fighting the Traditional Production System

• After poor publicity of her nude calendar shoot, she fought back and left Hollywood for the East Coast, where she and photographer Milton Greene founded their own production company, Marilyn Monroe Productions (MMP)—an action that has later been called “instrumental” in the collapse of the studio system.
• Monroe stated that she was “tired of the same old sex roles” and asserted that she was no longer under contract to Fox. This began a year-long legal battle between her and Fox in January 1955. The press largely ridiculed Monroe and she was parodied in the Broadway play Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1955), in which her lookalike Jayne Mansfield played a dumb actress who starts her own production company.
• By the end of the year, Monroe and Fox signed a new seven-year contract, as MMP would not be able to finance films alone, and the studio was eager to have Monroe working for them again. Fox agreed to pay her $400,000 to make four films, and granted her the right to choose her own projects, directors and cinematographers. She would also be free to make one film with MMP per each completed film for Fox.
• The press now wrote favorably about her decision to fight the studio; Time called her a “shrewd businesswoman” and Look predicted that the win would be “an example of the individual against the herd for years to come”.
• Monroe next filmed a scene for Something’s Got to Give in which she swam naked in a swimming pool. To generate advance publicity, the press was invited to take photographs; these were later published in Life. This was the first time that a major star had posed nude at the height of their career.
• From the beginning, Monroe played a significant part in the creation of her public image, and towards the end of her career exerted almost full control over it. She devised many of her publicity strategies, cultivated friendships with gossip columnists such as Sidney Skolsky and Louella Parsons, and controlled the use of her images.
• She has been written about by scholars and journalists who are interested in gender and feminism. Some, such as Steinem, have viewed her as a victim of the studio system. Others, such as Haskell, Rose, and Churchwell, have instead stressed Monroe’s proactive role in her career and her participation in the creation of her public persona.