Resultados Editorial "Charles River Editors" en Biografías y memorias

Among America's presidents, Harry Truman's presidency produced some of the nation's most crucial decisions and left one of the nation's most unique legacies. When President Franklin Roosevelt died in April 1945, Vice President Truman, somewhat unprepared for the Presidency, now had to fill some of the biggest shoes in American history.

While Nebuchadnezzar’s name lives on mostly due to the Bible and the Hanging Gardens, behind it all was a man documented by the Babylonians and his contemporaries as a competent and successful king.

Within a month of becoming president, the issue of Communist Cuba became central to John F. Kennedy. On February 3, 1961, President Kennedy called for a plan to support Cuban refugees. A month later, he created the Peace Corps, a program that trained young American volunteers to help with economic and community development in poor countries. Both programs were attempts to align disadvantaged groups against the Soviet Union and its communist satellites. Meanwhile, covert operations were laying the groundwork for overthrowing Fidel Castro.

Rosa Parks is one of the most famous women in American history, and an instantly recognizable name among Americans of all ages, thanks to the events of December 1, 1955. That afternoon, on her way home from work, Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white person in defiance of Montgomery’s segregated bus policies. Within days of her arrest, Montgomery’s civil rights activists had organized a wide-scale boycott of Montgomery’s buses by blacks.

On February 14, 1929, members of Bugs Moran's North Side gang arrived at a warehouse on North Clark Street in Chicago, only to be approached by several police officers. The officers then marched them outside up against a wall, pulled out submachine guns and shotguns, and gunned them all down on the spot. A famous legend is that one of the shot men, Frank Gusenberg, dying from 14 gunshot wounds, told police that nobody shot him. Though Gusenberg's statement is probably apocryphal, nobody opened their mouths.

Leading Athens for upwards of 40 years between the Second Persian War and the Peloponnesian War, Pericles has become an idealized figure over the last millennia, but he was a polarizing figure among his contemporaries. According to some, he was an honest and upstanding politician, while for others he was the lowest kind of demagogue. They thought he was a political opportunist whose ability to wriggle free of criticism was best summed up by the typically pithy comment of his rival Thucydides.

In many ways, Charles Lindbergh represented the best and worst of America during the first half of the 20th century. Lindbergh became famous for being an aviation pioneer whose solo flight across the Atlantic captured the imagination of an entire world, yet he was an isolationist who wanted to keep American freedoms safe for Americans and no one else. History for Kids: An Illustrated Biography of Charles Lindbergh for Children chronicles the amazing life and career of Lindbergh, his greatest highs and most notorious lows, and everything in between.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, or Mahatma Gandhi as he is more popularly known, is widely considered the father of India, the preeminent leader of the Indian struggle against British imperialism, and one of the most influential minds of the 20th century, Gandhi emerged to become one of the greatest advocates of peace and nonviolent resistance that the world has known. Gandhi became one of those rare leaders who preached through his own practices, motivating millions of people to follow his principles of freedom and peace.

The latter half of the 20th century was privy to one of the greatest displays of ongoing international diplomacy seen in American history, but to say that Henry A. Kissinger's career as an American diplomat was purely American would be short-sighted and simplistic. The diplomatic atmosphere, particularly in the 1970s, was far from the image of a public official manning an office in Washington, D.C., greeting foreign dignitaries, and traveling on occasion to sign foreign agreements.

Over the course of 83 years, Paul Revere was one of the most prominent citizens in Boston, heralded for his silversmith work, his participation in the Sons of Liberty, and his service in the Massachusetts militia. Fathering 16 children by two wives, 11 of whom survived to adulthood, Revere supported his large family by doing everything from dentistry to casting church bells and engraving the most popular image of the Boston Massacre.

Mosby, the "Gray Ghost" of the Confederate lore that celebrates the Lost Cause, has an image that has proven nearly impossible to corrupt or change, and time has done little good against it. Unlike the vanished 19th century code of honor that he represented, Mosby has retained the image and all its connotations. But that image, which he helped fashion, was mostly an invention

America has always preferred heroes who weren't clean cut, an informal ode to the rugged individualism and pioneering spirit that defined the nation in previous centuries. The early 19th century saw the glorification of frontier folk heroes like Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone. After the Civil War, the outlaws of the West were more popular than the marshals, with Jesse James and Billy the Kid finding their way into dime novels.

The United States of America has had many presidents that Americans agree were either great or awful while some fall into a mediocre category of irrelevance. In many cases a national consensus has been reached on men like Abraham Lincoln and James Buchanan. But the president with the most controversial legacy might be "Old Hickory", Andrew Jackson.

Joan of Arc is one of the most famous women in history: a French folk legend, a Catholic saint, and a military heroine. Yet almost nothing is truly known about the Maid of Orleans besides her ultimate fate - being burned at the stake when she was still a teenager. Claiming God instructed her to save France from England, she convinced the uncrowned Charles to send her to the siege of Orleans, and she subsequently led the French army to a string of important victories that made it possible for Charles VII to be coronated as the king of France.

Given how bad some of Rome's emperors were, it's a testament to just how insane and reviled Caligula was that he is still remembered, nearly 2,000 years later, as the epitome of everything that could be wrong with a tyrant. The Romans had high hopes for him after he succeeded Tiberius in AD 37, and by all accounts he was a noble and just ruler during his first few months in power. But after that, he suffered a mysterious illness that apparently rendered him insane. Indeed, the list of Caligula's strange actions is long.

In 1872, during a fight along the Yellowstone River between US troops protecting railroad workers and Sioux warriors, one of the Sioux did something both unusual and inspiring. At the height of the battle, with bullets whizzing all around him, this warrior sat down, loaded his cannupa (sacred pipe), and began to smoke, partaking in his people's religious sacrament.

At the height of Hollywood's golden age; of the 1940s through the early 60s, many of the industry's brightest stars could boast of unique stories describing how they were discovered. Their distinctiveness as on-screen personalities was an important part of that stardom, but one unlikely actor, a mismatch of contrasts, dialects, looks, and personal behavior, was to become an icon of the age, revered and disdained, but in the end, fondly remembered by the movie industry and fan base.

In the 19th century, one of the surest ways to rise to prominence in American society was to be a war hero, like Andrew Jackson and William Henry Harrison. But few would have predicted such a destiny for Hiram Ulysses Grant, who had been a career soldier with little experience in combat and a failed businessman when the Civil War broke out in 1861.

In 427 B.C., the Ancient Greek city-state of Athens was flourishing. Approximately 80 years earlier, the Athenians had formed the first self-representative democracy in history, the Peloponnesian War against Sparta had only just started, and Socrates was only beginning to lay the foundation of what would become Western philosophy.

The events of the Arab Spring have come to be overshadowed by the civil war in the Arabic-speaking nation of Syria, which has been ruled throughout the 21st century by Bashar al-Assad. Though he had not planned on ruling Syria, several events conspired to make Bashar the successor of his father, Hafez. Though the West frequently looked for signs that Bashar might be a reformer, due in part to his formerly popular Western wife, Assad remained part of a critical alliance with Iran and the sub-state groups Hamas and Hezbollah.