Archimedes
.... of Syracuse during a Roman siege by constructing huge lenses to focus the Sun's light on Roman ships and huge cranes to turn them upside down. When the Romans finally broke the siege, Archimedes was killed by a Roman soldier after snapping at him "Don't disturb my circles", a reference to a geometric figure he had outlined on the sand.
Archimedes biggest contribution to math, especially geometry, was his discovery for finding the volume of a sphere showing that it is two thirds the volume of the smallest cylinder that can contain it and the definition of Pi. Although Pi was used by the Babylonians and Egyptians it was never r .....
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The Life Of Elizabeth Blackwell
.... they did not take her seriously. She then decided to open her own hospital. Elizabeth had to buy a house as her office because no one would rent space to her. This house later became the New York Infirmary for Women and Children. It wasn’t long before Elizabeth started seeing many patients because the Society of Friends supported her accomplishment as a doctor and referred people to her.
She also helped train nurses for the battlefront during the Civil War. After the war ended, Elizabeth pursued a new goal, which was to open a college for women. In 1868, she opened the New York Infirmary and College for Women, a hospital c .....
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The Life Of Stalin
.... Frantic to catch up with the West in 1928, Stalin and his men launched a set of policies known as the "five-year plans," designed to turn backward Russia into an industrial and military world power, which he accomplished in only one decade. Though this was a great success, the peasants paid dearly, most with their lives. Most of starved to death from famine. Those that survived were killed off in Stalin's "purges" to rid him of opposition.
Stalin's birth name was Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili.
Stalin was born on December 21, 1879, in Gori, a village in Transcaucasian Georgia, a province of the Russian Empire within the .....
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Tennessee Williams
.... the actual events of my life, but it reflects the emotional currents of my life” (Devlin, 75). Critics have made much use of William’s family background as a means of analyzing his plays. William’s father, Cornelius, was a businessman from a prominent Tennessee family who traveled constantly and moved his family several times during the first decade of William’s life. Cornelius was often abusive towards his son, calling him “Miss Nancy” (Bigsby 236), because the child preferred books to sports. In A Streetcar Named Desire, William’s father is portrayed through the role of Stanley Kowalski. His mother, Edwina, was a southern b .....
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Aaron Burr Jr.
.... United States senator. In the presidential election of 1800, he received the same number of electoral votes as Thomas Jefferson, but the tie was broken in the House of Representatives in Jefferson's favor, and Burr became vice-president.
Four years later, on July 11, 1804, in the historic duel at Weehawken, New Jersey, Burr mortally wounded his professional rival and political enemy, Alexander Hamilton Thereafter came his errant political adventures in the West, his trial for treason, and his acquittal.
Burr's chief counsel at the trial was Luther Martin, a fellow member and one of the founders of the Cliosophic Society. A f .....
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Pythagoras
.... that of Miletos. The great problem at this date was the duplication of the square, a problem which gave rise to the theorem of the square on the hypotenuse, commonly known still as the Pythagorean proposition (Euclid, I. 47). If we were right in assuming that Thales worked with the old 3:4:5 triangle, the connection is obvious.
Pythagoras argued that there are three kinds of men, just as there are three classes of strangers who come to the Olympic Games. The lowest consists of those who come to buy and sell, and next above them are those who come to compete. Best of all are those who simply come to look on. Men may be classif .....
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Caesar
.... uncle, Cuius Cotta held an important position in the College of Priests.
Caesar learned a lot from his uncle, Gaius Marius (Grant, pg 34). Marius was involved in politics at a very young age, just as Caesar was. It was very difficult being a young man involved in a career that mostly adults were in charge of, but Marius won the loyalty of the common people and was elected into consul in 108 BC. Marius was also a brilliant general who won a lot of battles for Rome and its people.
Caesar was also in the military and held a rank as general. Caesar led his troops to many battles and was rarely defeated. Du .....
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Ernest Hemmingway
.... got to the age when he wanted to be a "gun-toting Pawnee Bill". He began, at that time, to pull away from his mother, and never forgave her for his humiliation. The town of Oak Park, where Ernest grew up, was very old fashioned and quite religious. The townspeople forbad the word "virgin" from appearing in school books, and the word "breast" was questioned, though it appeared in the Bible.
Ernest loved to fish, canoe and explore the woods. When he couldn't get outside, he escaped to his room and read books. He loved to tell stories to his classmates, often insisting that a friend listen to one of his stories. In spite of .....
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The Life Of William Shakespeare
.... arrived in London about 1588 and by 1592 and had success as an actor and playwright. He secured the patronage of Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton. William Shakespeare’s professional life in London was marked by a number of financially advantageous arrangements that permitted him to share in the profits of his acting company. his plays were given special presentation at the courts of Queen Elizabeth 1 and King James 1. He risked losing royal favor only once, in 1599, when his company performed “the play of the deposing and killing of King Richard II” at the request of a group of conspirators agai .....
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Origins Of Louis Leakey
.... the prehistoric ancestors of humankind."
Secondly, a rugby accident also contributed to success in his field. Leakey was accepted to Cambridge University in 1922, but "numerous blows to the head during the rugby season left him unable to study." He experienced recurring headaches and dizzy spells and left school to recover. This event, although bad at the time, turned out to be a great stroke of luck for Leakey. After leaving school, he immediately acquired a job as an African expert for an archaeological dig in, what is now called, Tanzania. He was to work aside dinosaur bone expert, William E. Cutler. .....
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David Livingstone
.... and one sister. The seven were crowded into a two-room house. The fa-ther, while delivering tea to his customers, would also distribute religious books. At age ten young David was put into the cotton-weaving mills factory as a piecer to aid in the earnings of the family. He purchased Rudiments of Latin, which he used to help himself study that language at evening school. His hours at the factory were long, from 6 a.m. till 6 or 8 p.m. He attended evening school from 8 to 10 p.m., then studied until midnight or later. Often he placed a book on a portion of the spinning jenny so he could catch a few sentences in passing. By ag .....
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Ulysses S. Grant’s Leadership And Simplicity
.... turned the tables and had defeated the enemy forces. Grant was much more than just an incredible battlefield commander. He produced the foundation of the modern American army. Grant emphasized a strategy of maximum firepower with maximum mobility (Perret, 28).
Simplicity was the basis of Grant’s nature. He saw the war in its simplest form, which meant that he saw it as a whole. He did not see the difficulties in winning until they surfaced. His strategy was simple, he was going to hold Lee in Virginia and move Sherman through Georgia to attack him in rear. “His theory of war was simplicity itself; he says: ‘The art of war .....
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