Biography Essays

Herndon refers to a predilection for scribbling verses which began when Abraham Lincoln was a youth in Indiana, and expresses the opinion that it is just as well none are extant. Perhaps during this period also Lincoln began a practice of writing pseudonymous political letters to the Sangamo Journal...

Rivaling the demise of the Bush administration for surprise value was the ascendancy of Bill Clinton to the Oval Office. When Bill Clinton announced his candidacy in the fall of 1991, Campbell was approached by his university's student newspaper to offer his views...

A small ship, battered by storms, returned to the harbor of Palos on 15 March 1493. It brought news of a voyage across the Sea of Darkness, and that news drew back the veil that had concealed from each other the people of the two halves of the world. The opening up of the Western Hemisphere...

On 4 March 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Democratic Party's proud and victorious standard-bearer stood before the Capitol on an inclement day to be sworn in as the twenty-sixth president of the United States. Having campaigned for a "New Deal" designed to elevate a moribund and...

Despite the numerous controversies of interpretation which swirl around the Galileo Galilei affair, the basic facts of the case are now quite well known. Furthermore a delineation of these facts reveals the key parameters which have characterized the relationship between science and religion ever since...

To most students Newton is known for some single line of achievement. It is, therefore, a privilege to have set before us an intellectual symposium which allows us to form a broader idea of his remarkable gifts. That such a master as Professor Miller in the field of optics should tell us...

He dazzled the nation as a politician and as our thirty-fourth president. Yet his presidency is difficult to evaluate. His record was a mixed one. Even he was dissatisfied with the results, although he was more pleased with his third year than with his first two...

When his Father Confessor asked Narvaez on his deathbed, "General, have you forgiven your enemies?" the General answered, "I have no enemies. I had them shot." So Joseph Stalin might have answered, too, had he believed in deathbed confession for himself, as he did for his victims...

Sixteenth-century magisterial assessments of Martin Luther can be divided into two areas: his person and his teachings. Given the indisputable charisma of the Wittenberg reformer, the rapid escalation of Catholic polemics against him, and the uneven coalescence of official Roman reaction...

The family, the country, and the continent into which Louis Napoleon was born were dominated by a single will: that of his uncle, the Emperor Napoleon. Nine years ago the Corsican exile had made himself master of Paris. Four years ago he had been crowned Emperor of the French people...

Ronald Reagan's dedication began long before he went to Washington. During the 1930s, he spoke out against the barbaric denial of freedom in Nazi Germany. Later, he vehemently denounced the evils of Stalinist Russia and other communist regimes. Freedom came naturally to Ronald Reagan...

In July 1988 the exhausted belligerents accepted a UN-sponsored ceasefire and withdrew to pre-war boundaries. Relations between the two states remained hostile until, in mid-August 1990, in order to secure his Iranian flank while annexing Kuwait, Saddam Hussein handed over...

Thomas Edison was the man who had invented almost everything; Ford, who had concentrated all his energies on a single project, carrying it to perfection, envied and admired his friend's universality. His admiration took the form of creating an open-air museum...

No biography of William Shakespeare was published during his lifetime, nor for ninety-three years after his death. This neglect of the greatest writer in the English language seems very strange, or even suspicious, to those modern readers and theater-goers who have some knowledge of...

Greatness needs no bellman and Winston Churchill no introduction. He made his introduction for himself on the world's stage. For nearly sixty years of his public life the spotlights played upon him, dazzling in their intensity. But the brighter the light the deeper the shadow cast...

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