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Mannu
Knowflake

Posts: 45
From: always here and no where
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posted January 07, 2008 08:13 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Mannu     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Jan 7 :
Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891 – January 28, 1960) was an American folklorist and author during the time of the Harlem Renaissance, best known for the 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zora_Neale_Hurston

Millard Fillmore (January 7, 1800 – March 8, 1874) was the thirteenth President of the United States, serving from 1850 until 1853, and the last member of the Whig Party to hold that office. He was the second Vice President to assume the Presidency upon the death of a sitting President, succeeding Zachary Taylor who died of acute gastroenteritis. Fillmore was never elected President; after serving out Taylor's term, he failed to gain the nomination for the Presidency of the Whigs in the 1852 presidential election, and, four years later, in the 1856 presidential election, he again failed to win election as President as the Know Nothing Party and Whig candidate.


Jan 7
St Bernadette is born http://www.catholicpilgrims.com/lourdes/ba_bernadette_intro.htm

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Mannu
Knowflake

Posts: 45
From: always here and no where
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posted January 08, 2008 09:18 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Mannu     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Jan 8th - Stephen Hawking (physicist) is born
Jan 8th - Elvis Presley (king of rock and roll)

Jan 8th - Frank Doubleday (publisher) is born

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Mannu
Knowflake

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From: always here and no where
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posted January 09, 2008 10:11 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Mannu     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Richard Nixon - born Jan 9th 1913

I remember him as a president responsible for popularity of wal-mart. I mean think of it, if he wasn't interested in friendship with china

And also as the only other president most likely to have been impeached because of water gate scandal.

Oh finally he called our indian lady pm an 'old witch' for being on the side of Russia.


quote:

Under President Nixon, the United States followed a foreign policy marked by détente with the Soviet Union and by the opening of diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China. Domestically, his administration faced resistance to the Vietnam War. As a result of the Watergate scandal, Nixon resigned the presidency in the face of likely impeachment by the United States House of Representatives and conviction by the Senate. His successor, Gerald Ford, issued a controversial pardon for any federal crimes Nixon may have committed.

Indo Pak War of 1971:

Nixon strongly supported General Yahya Khan of Pakistan during the Indo-Pakistan War of 1971 despite widespread human rights violations against the Bengalis, particularly Hindus, by the Pakistan Army. Though Nixon claimed that his objective was to prevent a war, and safeguard Pakistan's interests (including the issue of refugees), in reality the U.S. President was fearful of an Indian invasion of West Pakistan that would lead to Indian domination of the sub-continent and strengthen the position of the Soviet Union, which had recently signed a Treaty of Friendship with India. He also sought to demonstrate his reliability as a partner to the People's Republic of China, with whom he had been negotiating a rapprochement, and where he planned to visit just a few months later. President Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger downplayed reports of Pakistani genocide in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and risked a confrontation with Moscow to look tough.[12] Many, including Kissinger,[13] have mentioned that the foreign policy "tilt" towards Pakistan had more to do with Nixon's personal like for the dictator and the support to Pakistan was influenced by sentimental considerations and a long standing anti-Indian bias.[14] The Nixon administration was also responsible for illegally providing military supplies to the Pakistani military despite Congressional objections,[15] and against American public opinion, which was concerned with the atrocities against East Pakistanis.[16] His decision to help Pakistan in a war at any cost prompted him to send the nuclear-equipped USS Enterprise to the Indian Ocean to try to threaten the Indian military. Though it did little to turn the tide of war, it has been viewed as the trigger for India's subsequent nuclear program.[17] During the crisis Nixon was vocal in abusing the Prime Minister of India Indira Gandhi as an "old witch" in private conversations with Henry Kissinger, who is also recorded as making derogatory comments against Indians.[18] Ultimately Nixon's foreign policy initiatives in this matter largely failed as his attempt at a show of strength to impress China was at the cost of dismembering their mutual ally, Pakistan, who felt that once again United States had fallen short as an ally in failing to prevent Bangladeshi independence



Also born on 9th:
Simone de Beauvoir - French author and philospher. Feminist- LOL
She said that woman is not born but made.
Not sure what words she used as she is french and most mistranslated her works.

Posting a great book by her in the universal forum if you care.

The Ethics of Ambiguity (A philosophical book based on existentiality)
http://www.linda-goodman.com/ubb/Forum2/HTML/003154.html


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Mannu
Knowflake

Posts: 45
From: always here and no where
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posted January 10, 2008 09:57 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Mannu     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Jan 10th bdays
-------

Dame Barbara Hepworth DBE (January 10, 1903 – May 20, 1975, christened Jocelyn Barbara Hepworth) was a major British sculptor and artist of the twentieth century. She was a contemporary and friend of Henry Moore.

One of her most prestigious works is Single Form, in memory of Dag Hammarskjold, at the United Nations building in New York City.


George Foreman - January 10, 1949

American boxer who twice was the world heavyweight champion (1973–74, 1994–95). When Foreman regained the heavyweight title at age 45, he was the oldest world heavyweight champion.


Max Roach - Jan. 10, 1924
American jazz drummer and composer, one of the most influential and widely recorded modern percussionists

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Mannu
Knowflake

Posts: 45
From: always here and no where
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posted January 11, 2008 09:17 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Mannu     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
January 11th.
------------

Canadian lawyer and Liberal Party politician, who served as prime minister of Canada from 1993 to 2003.

The 18th of 19 children of a working-class family, Chrétien studied law at Laval University and was called to the bar
in Quebec in 1958. Long interested in politics, he was first elected to the House of Commons in 1963 and was reelected
thereafter through 1984. In the successive administrations of Lester B. Pearson and Pierre Elliott Trudeau,
Chrétien became a parliamentary secretary to the prime minister in 1965, a minister of state in 1967, and
minister of national revenue in 1968. He served as minister of Indian affairs and northern development from 1968 to 1974 and in 1977
became the first French Canadian to hold the post of minister of finance. Known as an incisive and shrewd administrator, he went on
to serve as minister of justice and attorney general (1980–82), minister of energy (1982–84), and deputy prime minister (1984).

After losing to John Turner in a contest to succeed Trudeau as head of the Liberal Party, Chrétien resigned his seat in
the House of Commons in 1986. He was reelected to Parliament in 1990 and took over the leadership of the Liberals that same year.
Chrétien led his party to a landslide victory over the governing Progressive Conservative Party in national elections on October 25, 1993,
and became prime minister of Canada on November 4. In 1995 he weathered a major crisis as voters in Quebec, a predominantly
French-speaking province, narrowly rejected secession. Quebec independence remained a central concern, though the movement
had weakened by the end of the 20th century. Chrétien’s government focused on reducing the budget deficit, and in 1998
it passed Canada’s first balanced budget since 1970. Chrétien was reelected in 2000, the first Canadian prime minister
since 1945 to win three consecutive majorities. His relationship with the United States was sometimes tense, underscored by
his refusal to commit Canadian troops to the U.S.-led war against Iraq in 2003. In social policy, he pursued progressive
reforms, drafting a law in 2003 that would recognize same-sex marriages. Chrétien retired as prime minister in December 2003.


Alexander Hamilton -died July 12, 1804
----------------
New York delegate to the Constitutional Convention (1787), major author of the Federalist papers, and first secretary of the Treasury of the United States (1789–95), who was the foremost champion of a strong central government for the new United States. He was killed in a duel with Aaron Burr.

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Mannu
Knowflake

Posts: 45
From: always here and no where
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posted January 12, 2008 10:51 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for Mannu     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote

Jan 12th birthday:

John Hancock, born this day in 1737, was a leader of the American Revolution, the first signer of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, and president of the Continental Congress from May 1775 to October 1777

Jack London - 1876, San Francisco

pseudonym of John Griffith Chaney American novelist and short-story writer whose works deal romantically with elemental struggles for survival. He is one of the most extensively translated of American authors.

He was an American author who wrote The Call of the Wild and other books

Deserted by his father, a roving astrologer, London was raised in Oakland, Calif., by his spiritualist mother and his stepfather


P. W. Botha

born Jan. 12, 1916, Paul Roux

was the prime minister of South Africa from 1978 to 1984 and the first executive state president from 1984 to 1989.
Botha was a long-time leader of South Africa's National Party and a staunch advocate of racial segregation and the apartheid system.
While in power he made some small concessions towards human rights, but he always refused to apologise for apartheid. He refused to testify at
the new government's Truth and Reconciliation Commission and was fined and given a suspended jail sentence for his refusal to testify in relation
to human rights violations.


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Mannu
Knowflake

Posts: 45
From: always here and no where
Registered: Apr 2009

posted January 12, 2008 08:16 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Mannu     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Oops there is this correction on John Hancocks birthday. He is Jan 23rd per Gregorian calendar.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hancock

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AcousticGod
Knowflake

Posts: 4415
From: Pleasanton, CA
Registered: Apr 2009

posted January 13, 2008 12:12 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for AcousticGod     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
quote:
Deserted by his father, a roving astrologer, London was raised in Oakland, Calif., by his spiritualist mother and his stepfather

I live about 25 miles east of there. There's a social and business center there called Jack London Square.

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Mannu
Knowflake

Posts: 45
From: always here and no where
Registered: Apr 2009

posted January 14, 2008 08:23 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Mannu     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Cool AG

Oops I missed Sunday so here goes sunday's and monday.

January 13th
Sophie Tucker
Jan. 13, 1884, Russia
Russian-born American singer Sophie Tucker, the ?Last of the Red-Hot Mamas,? was born.


original name Sophie Kalish , also called Sophie Abuza American singer whose 62-year stage career included American burlesque, vaudeville, and nightclub and English music hall appearances.

Born somewhere in Russia as her mother was on her way to join her father in the United States, Sophie Kalish grew up in Boston and then in Hartford, Connecticut, where her mother ran a restaurant. Her father…


Horatio Alger
born Jan. 13, 1832, Chelsea, Mass., U.S.

also called Horatio Alger, Jr. one of the most popular American authors in the last 30 years of the 19th century and perhaps the most socially influential American writer of his generation.

Alger was the son of a Unitarian minister, Horatio Alger, Sr., who tutored him in reading from the age of six. The young Alger showed an interest in writing, and at Harvard University…


Salmon P. Chase, secretary of the Treasury (1861?64) in Abraham Lincoln's wartime cabinet and sixth chief justice of the United States (1864?73), was born.
in full Salmon Portland Chase lawyer and politician, antislavery leader before the U.S. Civil War, secretary of the Treasury (1861–64) in Pres. Abraham Lincoln's wartime Cabinet, sixth chief justice of the United States (1864–73), and repeatedly a seeker of the presidency.

Chase received part of his education from his uncle Philander Chase, the first Episcopal bishop of Ohio…


January 14th
Albert Schweitzer
Albert Schweitzer?the Alsatian German theologian, philosopher, organist, and mission doctor in Africa?was born this day in 1875 and received the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize for his works in behalf of ?the Brotherhood of Nations.?


The eldest son of a Lutheran pastor, Schweitzer studied philosophy and theology at the University of Strasbourg, where he took the doctor's degree in philosophy in 1899. At the same time, he was also a lecturer in philosophy and a preacher at St. Nicholas' Church, and the following year he received a doctorate in theology. His book Von Reimarus zu Wrede (1906; The Quest of the Historical Jesus) established him as a world figure in theological studies. In this and other works he stressed the eschatological views (concerned with the consummation of history) of Jesus and St. Paul, asserting that their attitudes were formed by expectation of the imminent end of the world.

During these years Schweitzer also became an accomplished musician, beginning his career as an organist in Strasbourg in 1893. Charles-Marie Widor, his organ teacher in Paris, recognized Schweitzer as a Bach interpreter of unique perception and asked him to write a study of the composer's life and art. The result was J.S. Bach: le musicien-poète (1905). In this work Schweitzer viewed Bach as a religious mystic and likened his music to the impersonal and cosmic forces of the natural world.

In 1905 Schweitzer announced his intention to become a mission doctor in order to devote himself to philanthropic work, and in 1913 he became a doctor of medicine. With his wife, Hélène Bresslau, who had trained as a nurse in order to assist him, he set out for Lambaréné in the Gabon province of French Equatorial Africa. There, on the banks of the Ogooué (Ogowe) River, Schweitzer, with the help of the natives, built his hospital, which he equipped and maintained from his income, later supplemented by gifts from individuals and foundations in many countries. Interned there briefly as an enemy alien (German), and later in France as a prisoner of war during World War I, he turned his attention increasingly to world problems and was moved to write his Kulturphilosophie (1923; “Philosophy of Civilization”), in which he set forth his personal philosophy of “reverence for life,” an ethical principle involving all living things, which he believed essential to the survival of civilization.

Schweitzer returned to Africa in 1924 to rebuild the derelict hospital, which he relocated some two miles up the Ogooué River. A leper colony was added later. By 1963 there were 350 patients with their relatives at the hospital and 150 patients in the leper colony, all served by about 36 white physicians, nurses, and varying numbers of native workers.

Schweitzer never entirely abandoned his musical or scholarly interests. He published Die Mystik des Apostels Paulus (1930; The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle), gave lectures and organ recitals throughout Europe, made recordings, and resumed his editing of Bach's works, begun with Widor in 1911 (Bachs Orgelwerke, 1912–14). His address upon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, Das Problem des Friedens in der heutigen Welt (1954; The Problem of Peace in the World of Today), had a worldwide circulation.

Despite the occasional criticisms of Schweitzer's medical practice as being autocratic and primitive, and despite the opposition sometimes raised against his theological works, his influence continues to have a strong moral appeal, frequently serving as a source of encouragement for other medical missionaries.


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Mannu
Knowflake

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From: always here and no where
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posted January 15, 2008 07:50 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Mannu     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote

Thomas Nast
born Jan. 15, 1909, Chicago, Ill., U.S.

American cartoonist, best known for his attack on the political machine of William M. Tweed in New York City in the 1870s.

Nast arrived in New York as a boy of six. He studied art at the National Academy of Design and at the age of 15 became a draftsman for Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper and at 18 for Harper's Weekly.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
Martin Luther King, Jr., born this day in 1929, led the civil rights movement in the United States from the mid-1950s until his assassination in 1968 and was the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.


King came from a comfortable middle-class family steeped in the tradition of the Southern black ministry: both his father and maternal grandfather were Baptist preachers. His parents were college-educated, and King's father had succeeded his father-in-law as pastor of the prestigious Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. The family lived on Auburn Avenue, otherwise known as “Sweet Auburn,” the bustling “black Wall Street,” home to some of the country's largest and most prosperous black businesses and black churches in the years before the civil rights movement. Young Martin received a solid education and grew up in a loving extended family.

This secure upbringing, however, did not prevent King from experiencing the prejudices then common in the South. He never forgot the time, at about age six, when one of his white playmates announced that his parents would no longer allow him to play with King, because the children were now attending segregated schools. Dearest to King in these early years was his maternal grandmother, whose death in 1941 left him shaken and unstable. Upset because he had learned of her fatal heart attack while attending a parade without his parents' permission, the 12-year-old Martin attempted suicide by jumping from a second-story window.


In 1944, at age 15, King entered Morehouse College in Atlanta under a special wartime program intended to boost enrollment by admitting promising high-school students like King. Before beginning college, however, King spent the summer on a tobacco farm in Connecticut; it was his first extended stay away from home and his first substantial experience of race relations outside the segregated South. He was shocked by how peacefully the races mixed in the North. “Negroes and whites go [to] the same church,” he noted in a letter to his parents. “I never [thought] that a person of my race could eat anywhere.” This summer experience in the North only deepened young Martin's growing hatred of racial segregation.

At Morehouse, King favoured studies in medicine and law, but these were eclipsed in his senior year by a decision to enter the ministry, as his father had urged. King's mentor at Morehouse was the college president, Benjamin Mays, a social gospel activist whose rich oratory and progressive ideas had left an indelible imprint on King, Sr. Committed to fighting racial inequality, Mays accused the black community of complacency in the face of oppression, and he prodded the black church into social action by criticizing its emphasis on the hereafter instead of the here and now; it was a call to service that was not lost on the teenage Martin. King graduated from Morehouse in 1948.

King spent the next three years at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, where he became acquainted with Mohandas Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolence as well as with the thought of contemporary Protestant theologians and earned a bachelor of divinity degree in 1951. Renowned for his oratorical skills, King was elected president of Crozer's student body, which was composed almost exclusively of white students. As a professor at Crozer wrote in a letter of recommendation for King, “The fact that with our student body largely Southern in constitution a colored man should be elected to and be popular [in] such a position is in itself no mean recommendation.” From Crozer, King went to Boston University, where, in seeking a firm foundation for his own theological and ethical inclinations, he studied man's relationship to God and received a doctorate (1955) for a dissertation titled “A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman.”


While in Boston, King met Coretta Scott, a native Alabamian who was studying at the New England Conservatory of Music. They were married in 1953 and had four children. King had been pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, slightly more than a year when the city's small group of civil rights advocates decided to contest racial segregation on that city's public bus system. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, an African American woman, refused to surrender her bus seat to a white passenger, and as a consequence was arrested for violating the city's segregation law. Activists formed the Montgomery Improvement Association to boycott the transit system and chose King as their leader. He had the advantage of being a young, well-trained man who was too new in town to have made enemies; he was generally respected, and his family connections and professional standing would enable him to find another pastorate should the boycott fail.

In his first speech to the group as its president, King declared:

We have no alternative but to protest. For many years we have shown an amazing patience. We have sometimes given our white brothers the feeling that we liked the way we were being treated. But we come here tonight to be saved from that patience that makes us patient with anything less than freedom and justice.


These words introduced to the nation a fresh voice, a skillful rhetoric, an inspiring personality, and in time a dynamic new doctrine of civil struggle. Although King's home was dynamited and his family's safety threatened, he continued to lead the boycott until, one year and a few weeks later, the city's buses were desegregated.

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference
Recognizing the need for a mass movement to capitalize on the successful Montgomery action, King set about organizing the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which gave him a base of operation throughout the South, as well as a national platform from which to speak. King lectured in all parts of the country and discussed race-related issues with civil-rights and religious leaders at home and abroad. In February 1959 he and his party were warmly received by India's prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru; as the result of a brief discussion with followers of Gandhi about the Gandhian concepts of peaceful noncompliance (satyagraha), King became increasingly convinced that nonviolent resistance was the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom. King also looked to Africa for inspiration. “The liberation struggle in Africa has been the greatest single international influence on American Negro students,” he wrote. “Frequently I hear them say that if their African brothers can break the bonds of colonialism, surely the American Negro can break Jim Crow.”

In 1960 King moved to his native city of Atlanta, where he became co-pastor with his father of the Ebenezer Baptist Church. At this post he devoted most of his time to the SCLC and the civil rights movement, declaring that the “psychological moment has come when a concentrated drive against injustice can bring great, tangible gains.” His thesis was soon tested as he agreed to support the sit-in demonstrations undertaken by local black college students. In late October he was arrested with 33 young people protesting segregation at the lunch counter in an Atlanta department store. Charges were dropped, but King was sentenced to Reidsville State Prison Farm on the pretext that he had violated his probation on a minor traffic offense committed several months earlier. The case assumed national proportions, with widespread concern over his safety, outrage at Georgia's flouting of legal forms, and the failure of President Dwight Eisenhower to intervene. King was released only upon the intercession of Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy—an action so widely publicized that it was felt to have contributed substantially to Kennedy's slender election victory eight days later.


In the years from 1960 to 1965 King's influence reached its zenith. Handsome, eloquent, and doggedly determined, King quickly caught the attention of the news media, particularly of the producers of that budding medium of social change—television. He understood the power of television to nationalize and internationalize the struggle for civil rights, and his well-publicized tactics of active nonviolence (sit-ins, protest marches) aroused the devoted allegiance of many blacks and liberal whites in all parts of the country, as well as support from the administrations of Presidents Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. But there were also notable failures, as at Albany, Georgia (1961–62), when King and his colleagues failed to achieve their desegregation goals for public parks and other facilities.


The letter from the Birmingham jail
In Birmingham, Alabama, in the spring of 1963, King's campaign to end segregation at lunch counters and in hiring practices drew nationwide attention when police turned dogs and fire hoses on the demonstrators. King was jailed along with large numbers of his supporters, including hundreds of schoolchildren. His supporters did not, however, include all the black clergy of Birmingham, and he was strongly opposed by some of the white clergy who had issued a statement urging African Americans not to support the demonstrations. From the Birmingham jail King wrote a letter of great eloquence in which he spelled out his philosophy of nonviolence:

You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.

Near the end of the Birmingham campaign, in an effort to draw together the multiple forces for peaceful change and to dramatize to the nation and to the world the importance of solving the U.S. racial problem, King joined other civil rights leaders in organizing the historic March on Washington. On August 28, 1963, an interracial assembly of more than 200,000 gathered peaceably in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial to demand equal justice for all citizens under the law. Here the crowds were uplifted by the emotional strength and prophetic quality of King's famous I Have A Dream speech, in which he emphasized his faith that all men, someday, would be brothers.

The rising tide of civil rights agitation produced, as King had hoped, a strong effect on national opinion and resulted in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, authorizing the federal government to enforce desegregation of public accommodations and outlawing discrimination in publicly owned facilities, as well as in employment. That eventful year was climaxed by the award to King of the Nobel Prize for Peace in Oslo, Norway, in December. “I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind,” said King in his acceptance speech. “I refuse to accept the idea that the ‘isness' of man's present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal ‘oughtness' that forever confronts him.”


The first signs of opposition to King's tactics from within the civil rights movement surfaced during the March 1965 demonstrations at Selma, Alabama, which were aimed at dramatizing the need for a federal voting-rights law that would provide legal support for the enfranchisement of African Americans in the South. King organized an initial march from Selma to the state capitol building in Montgomery but did not lead it himself; the marchers were turned back by state troopers with nightsticks and tear gas. He was determined to lead a second march, despite an injunction by a federal court and efforts from Washington to persuade him to cancel it. Heading a procession of 1,500 marchers, black and white, he set out across Pettus Bridge outside Selma until the group came to a barricade of state troopers. But, instead of going on and forcing a confrontation, he led his followers in kneeling in prayer and then unexpectedly turned back. This decision cost King the support of many young radicals who were already faulting him for being too cautious. The suspicion of an “arrangement” with federal and local authorities—vigorously but not entirely convincingly denied—clung to the Selma affair. The country was nevertheless aroused, resulting in the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Throughout the nation, impatience with the lack of greater substantive progress encouraged the growth of black militancy. Especially in the slums of the large Northern cities, King's religious philosophy of nonviolence was increasingly questioned. The rioting in the Watts district of Los Angeles (August 1965) demonstrated the depth of unrest among urban African Americans. In an effort to meet the challenge of the ghetto, King and his forces initiated a drive against racial discrimination in Chicago at the beginning of the following year. The chief target was to be segregation in housing. After a spring and summer of rallies, marches, and demonstrations, an agreement was signed between the city and a coalition of African Americans, liberals, and labour organizations, calling for various measures to enforce the existing laws and regulations with respect to housing. But this agreement was to have little effect; the impression remained that King's Chicago campaign was nullified partly because of the opposition of that city's powerful mayor, Richard J. Daley, and partly because of the unexpected complexities of Northern racism.

In Illinois and Mississippi alike, King was now being challenged and even publicly derided by young black-power enthusiasts. Whereas King stood for patience, middle-class respectability, and a measured approach to social change, the sharp-tongued, blue jean–clad young urban radicals stood for confrontation and immediate change. In the latter's eyes, the suit-wearing, calm-spoken civil rights leader was irresponsibly passive and old beyond his years (though King was only in his 30s): more a member of the other side of the generation gap than their revolutionary leader. Malcolm X went so far as to call King's tactics “criminal”: “Concerning nonviolence, it is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks.”

In the face of mounting criticism, King broadened his approach to include concerns other than racism. On April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church in New York City and again on the 15th at a mammoth peace rally in that city, he committed himself irrevocably to opposing U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Once before, in early January 1966, he had condemned the war, but official outrage from Washington and strenuous opposition within the black community itself had caused him to relent. He next sought to widen his base by forming a coalition of the poor of all races that would address itself to such economic problems as poverty and unemployment. It was a version of populism, seeking to enroll janitors, hospital workers, seasonal labourers, and the destitute of Appalachia, along with the student militants and pacifist intellectuals. His endeavours along these lines, however, did not engender much support in any segment of the population.

Meanwhile, the strain and changing dynamics of the civil rights movement had taken a toll on King, especially in the final months of his life. “I'm frankly tired of marching. I'm tired of going to jail,” he admitted in 1968. “Living every day under the threat of death, I feel discouraged every now and then and feel my work's in vain, but then the Holy Spirit revives my soul again.”


King's plans for a Poor People's March to Washington were interrupted in the spring of 1968 by a trip to Memphis, Tennessee, in support of a strike by that city's sanitation workers. In the opinion of many of his followers and biographers, King seemed to sense his end was near. As King prophetically told a crowd at the Mason Temple Church in Memphis on April 3, on the night before he died, “I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.” The next day, while standing on the second-story balcony of the Lorraine Motel where he and his associates were staying, King was killed by a sniper's bullet; the killing sparked riots and disturbances in over 100 cities across the country. On March 10, 1969, the accused white assassin, James Earl Ray, pleaded guilty to the murder and was sentenced to 99 years in prison.

Ray later recanted his confession, claiming lawyers had coerced him into confessing and that he was the victim of a conspiracy. In a surprising turn of events, members of the King family eventually came to Ray's defense. King's son Dexter met with the reputed assassin in March 1997 and then publicly joined Ray's plea for a reopening of his case. When Ray died on April 23, 1998, Coretta King declared, “America will never have the benefit of Mr. Ray's trial, which would have produced new revelations about the assassination…as well as establish the facts concerning Mr. Ray's innocence.” Although the U.S. government conducted several investigations into the murder of King and each time concluded that Ray was the sole assassin, the killing remains a matter of controversy.


Posthumous reputation and legacy
King ranks among the most analyzed men in American history. As with the study of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln, there is an exhaustive range of perspectives on the man and his legacy, many of them still evolving as new information about his life becomes available. What is clear today, decades after his death, is that King's extraordinary influence has hardly waned and that his life, thought, and character were more complex than biographers initially realized or portrayed. His chapter in history is further proof of the maxim that martyred heroes never really die—they live on in memories, collectively and individually, and their legacies take on a life of their own.

King became an object of international homage after his death. Schools, roads, and buildings throughout the United States were named after him in the 1970s and '80s, and the U.S. Congress voted to observe a national holiday in his honour, beginning in 1986, on the third Monday of January. In 1991 the Lorraine Motel where King was shot became the National Civil Rights Museum. In July 1998 a sculpture of King was unveiled over the door to the west front of Westminster Abbey in London, an area of honour reserved for 20th-century “victims of the struggle for human rights.” And in December 1999 the U.S. National Capital Planning Commission approved a site in the Tidal Basin of Washington, D.C., for a Martin Luther King, Jr., memorial, the first time in American history that a private individual has been accorded such distinction.

With many of these tributes, however, came controversy and sometimes heated debate. Many critics, during King's lifetime and after, accused him of harboring communist sympathies, associating with known communists, and undermining the American war effort in Vietnam. These charges, along with allegations of King's marital infidelities, attracted the attention and surveillance of J. Edgar Hoover's Federal Bureau of Investigation during King's lifetime, and they resurfaced in the 1970s and '80s during debate in the U.S. Congress over the King holiday. King's personal life and character were scrutinized further when the public learned in 1989–90 that King had plagiarized much of his academic work, including his doctoral dissertation.

The posthumous reverence of King, and whether it has helped or ironically harmed King's reputation and the cause of civil rights, has been widely discussed. King's longtime confidant Ralph Abernathy, for example, claimed in And the Walls Came Tumbling Down (1986) that his controversial discussion of King's private life was necessary to stem the deification of his friend, “to let everyone know that …[King's] humanity did not detract from the legend but only made it more believable for other human beings.” Similarly, scholars and social activists who contributed to We Shall Overcome: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Black Freedom Struggle (1993) argued that the lionization of King had actually caused the civil rights movement to lose sight of the grassroots efforts critical to social change; the perception of King as a superman, a saviour, a Christ-like Messiah, they argued, discouraged initiative and self-reliance and left African Americans dependent on the appearance of yet another Great Man to save them. According to religious studies professor Michael Eric Dyson, the canonization of King has also diluted King's message, smoothed out its sharp edge, and transformed King into “a Safe Negro.” “Today right-wing conservatives can quote King's speeches in order to criticize affirmative action,” he wrote in I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr. (2000), “while schoolchildren grow up learning only about the great pacifist, not the hard-nosed critic of economic injustice.” As these posthumous debates and tributes make plain, King's legacy has not waned in social and political relevance.

Assessment
Martin Luther King, Jr., was the seminal voice during one of the most turbulent periods in American history. His contribution to the civil rights movement was that of a leader who was able to turn protests into a crusade and to translate local conflicts into moral issues of nationwide, ultimately worldwide, concern. By force of will and a charismatic personality, he successfully awakened African Americans and galvanized them into action. He won his greatest victories by appealing to the consciences of white Americans and thus bringing political leverage to bear on the federal government in Washington. The strategy that broke the segregation laws of the South, however, proved inadequate to solve more complex racial problems elsewhere.

King was only 39 at the time of his death—a leader in midpassage who never wavered in his insistence that nonviolence must remain the essential tactic of the movement nor in his faith that all Americans would some day attain racial and economic justice. Though he likely will remain a subject of controversy, his eloquence, self-sacrifice, and courageous role as a social leader have secured his ranking among the most influential men of recent history.

David L. Lewis

Ed.

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posted January 16, 2008 09:32 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Mannu     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Jan 16th birthday

Dian Fossey (1985)
American zoologist Dian Fossey, born this day in 1932, became the world's leading authority on the mountain gorilla, and her autobiography, Gorillas in the Mist (1983), was subsequently adapted into a feature film.


Marilyn Horne (1934), an American mezzo-soprano noted for the seamless quality and the exceptional range and flexibility of her voice, was born.

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posted January 17, 2008 10:26 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Mannu     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Jan 17th
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Anne Brontë 1820, Thornton, Yorkshire, Eng.
pseudonym Acton Bell English poet and novelist, sister of Charlotte and Emily Brontë and author of Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848).

The youngest of six children of Patrick and Marie Brontë, Anne was taught in the family's Haworth home and at Roe Head School. With her sister Emily, she invented the imaginary kingdom of Gondal,...

Muhammad Ali (1942)

original name Cassius Marcellus Clay,
Jr. American professional boxer and social activist. Ali was the first fighter to win the world heavyweight championship on three separate occasions; he successfully defended this title 19 times.


Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr., grew up in the American South in a time of segregated public facilities. His father, Cassius Marcellus Clay, Sr., supported a wife and two sons by painting billboards and signs. His mother, Odessa Grady Clay, worked as a household domestic.

When Clay was 12 years old, he took up boxing under the tutelage of Louisville policeman Joe Martin. After advancing through the amateur ranks, he won a gold medal in the 175-pound division at the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome and began a professional career under the guidance of the Louisville Sponsoring Group, a syndicate composed of 11 wealthy white men.

In his early bouts as a professional, Clay was more highly regarded for his charm and personality than for his ring skills. He sought to raise public interest in his fights by reading childlike poetry and spouting self-descriptive phrases such as “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” He told the world that he was “the Greatest,” but the hard realities of boxing seemed to indicate otherwise. Clay infuriated devotees of the sport as much as he impressed them. He held his hands unconventionally low, backed away from punches rather than bobbing and weaving out of danger, and appeared to lack true knockout power. The opponents he was besting were a mixture of veterans who were long past their prime and fighters who had never been more than mediocre. Thus, purists cringed when Clay predicted the round in which he intended to knock out an opponent, and they grimaced when he did so and bragged about each new conquest.


On Feb. 25, 1964, Clay challenged Sonny Liston for the heavyweight championship of the world. Liston was widely regarded as the most intimidating, powerful fighter of his era. Clay was a decided underdog. But in one of the most stunning upsets in sports history, Liston retired to his corner after six rounds, and Clay became the new champion. Two days later, Clay shocked the boxing establishment again by announcing that he had accepted the teachings of the Nation of Islam. On March 6, 1964, he took the name Muhammad Ali, which was given to him by his spiritual mentor, Elijah Muhammad.


For the next three years, Ali dominated boxing as thoroughly and magnificently as any fighter ever had. In a May 25, 1965, rematch against Liston, he emerged with a first-round knockout victory. Triumphs over Floyd Patterson, George Chuvalo, Henry Cooper, Brian London, and Karl Mildenberger followed. On Nov. 14, 1966, Ali fought Cleveland Williams. Over the course of three rounds, Ali landed more than 100 punches, scored four knockdowns, and was hit a total of three times. Ali's triumph over Williams was succeeded by victories over Ernie Terrell and Zora Folley.

Then, on April 28, 1967, citing his religious beliefs, Ali refused induction into the U.S. Army at the height of the war in Vietnam. This refusal followed a blunt statement voiced by Ali 14 months earlier: “I ain't got no quarrel with them Vietcong.” Many Americans vehemently condemned Ali's stand. It came at a time when most people in the United States still supported the war in Southeast Asia. Moreover, although exemptions from military service on religious grounds were available to qualifying conscientious objectors who were opposed to war in any form, Ali was not eligible for such an exemption because he acknowledged that he would be willing to participate in an Islamic holy war.

Ali was stripped of his championship and precluded from fighting by every state athletic commission in the United States for three and a half years. In addition, he was criminally indicted and, on June 20, 1967, convicted of refusing induction into the U.S. armed forces and sentenced to five years in prison. Although he remained free on bail, four years passed before his conviction was unanimously overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court on a narrow procedural ground.

Meanwhile, as the 1960s grew more tumultuous, Ali's impact upon American society was growing, and he became a lightning rod for dissent. Ali's message of black pride and black resistance to white domination was on the cutting edge of the civil rights movement. Having refused induction into the U.S. Army, he also stood for the proposition that “unless you have a very good reason to kill, war is wrong.” As black activist Julian Bond later observed, “When a figure as heroic and beloved as Muhammad Ali stood up and said, ‘No, I won't go,' it reverberated through the whole society.”

In October 1970, Ali was allowed to return to boxing, but his skills had eroded. The legs that had allowed him to “dance” for 15 rounds without stopping no longer carried him as surely around the ring. His reflexes, while still superb, were no longer as fast as they had once been. Ali prevailed in his first two comeback fights, against Jerry Quarry and Oscar Bonavena. Then, on March 8, 1971, he challenged Joe Frazier, who had become heavyweight champion during Ali's absence from the ring. It was a fight of historic proportions, billed as the “Fight of the Century.” Frazier won a unanimous 15-round decision.

Following his loss to Frazier, Ali won 10 fights in a row, 8 of them against world-class opponents. Then, on March 31, 1973, a little-known fighter named Ken Norton broke Ali's jaw in the second round en route to a 12-round upset decision. Ali defeated Norton in a rematch. After that, he fought Joe Frazier a second time and won a unanimous 12-round decision. From a technical point of view, the second Ali-Frazier bout was probably Ali's best performance in the ring after his exile from boxing.

On Oct. 30, 1974, Ali challenged George Foreman, who had dethroned Frazier in 1973 to become heavyweight champion of the world. The bout (which Ali referred to as the “Rumble in the Jungle”) took place in the unlikely location of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). Ali was received by the people of Zaire as a conquering hero, and he did his part by knocking out Foreman in the eighth round to regain the heavyweight title. It was in this fight that Ali employed a strategy once used by former boxing great Archie Moore. Moore called the maneuver “the turtle” but Ali called it “rope-a-dope.” The strategy was that, instead of moving around the ring, Ali chose to fight for extended periods of time leaning back into the ropes in order to avoid many of Foreman's heaviest blows.

Over the next 30 months, at the peak of his popularity as champion, Ali fought nine times in bouts that showed him to be a courageous fighter but a fighter on the decline. The most notable of these bouts occurred on Oct. 1, 1975, when Ali and Joe Frazier met in the Philippines, 6 miles (9.5 km) outside Manila, to do battle for the third time. In what is regarded by many as the greatest prizefight of all time (the “Thrilla in Manila”), Ali was declared the victor when Frazier's corner called a halt to the bout after 14 brutal rounds.

The final performances of Ali's ring career were sad to behold. In 1978 he lost his title to Leon Spinks, a novice boxer with an Olympic gold medal but only seven professional fights to his credit. Seven months later, Ali regained the championship with a 15-round victory over Spinks. Then he retired from boxing, but two years later he made an ill-advised comeback and suffered a horrible beating at the hands of Larry Holmes in a bout that was stopped after 11 rounds. The final ring contest of Ali's career was a loss by decision to Trevor Berbick in 1981.

Ali's place in boxing history as one of the greatest fighters ever is secure. His final record of 56 wins and 5 losses with 37 knockouts has been matched by others, but the quality of his opponents and the manner in which he dominated during his prime place him on a plateau with boxing's immortals. Ali's most tangible ring assets were speed, superb footwork, and the ability to take a punch. But perhaps more important, he had courage and all the other intangibles that go into making a great fighter.

Ali's later years have been marked by physical decline. Damage to his brain caused by blows to the head have resulted in slurred speech, slowed movement, and other symptoms of Parkinson syndrome. However, his condition differs from chronic encephalopathy, or dementia pugilistica (which is commonly referred to as “punch drunk” in fighters), in that he does not suffer from injury-induced intellectual deficits.

Ali's religious views have also evolved over time. In the mid-1970s, he began to study the Qur'an seriously and turned to Orthodox Islam. His earlier adherence to the teachings of Elijah Muhammad (e.g., that white people are “devils” and there is no heaven or hell) were replaced by a spiritual embrace of all people and preparation for his own afterlife. In 1984 Ali spoke out publicly against the separatist doctrine of Louis Farrakhan, declaring, “What he teaches is not at all what we believe in. He represents the time of our struggle in the dark and a time of confusion in us, and we don't want to be associated with that at all.”

Ali married his fourth wife, Lonnie (née Yolanda Williams) in 1986. He has nine children, most of whom have chosen to avoid the spotlight of which Ali was so fond. One of his daughters, however, Laila Ali, is pursuing a career as a professional boxer. While her skills are limited, she has benefited from the fact that the Ali name is still financially viable.

In 1996 Ali was chosen to light the Olympic flame at the start of the 24th Olympiad in Atlanta, Ga. The outpouring of goodwill that accompanied his appearance confirmed his status as one of the most beloved athletes in the world.


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posted January 17, 2008 10:46 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Mannu     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Jan 18th
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Paul Keating
born Jan. 18, 1944, Sydney, N.S.W., Austl.

in full Paul John Keating politician who was leader of the Australian Labor Party and prime minister of Australia from December 1991 to March 1996.

Growing up in working-class Bankstown, a suburb of Sydney, Keating left school at age 14. He became involved in trade union activity and labour politics and was elected in 1969 to the House of Representatives at age 25. Acquiring a reputation for…


Cary Grant
born January 18, 1904, Bristol, Gloucestershire, England
died November 29, 1986, Davenport, Iowa, U.S.

original name Archibald Alexander Leach British-born American film actor whose good looks, debonair style, and flair for romantic comedy made him one of Hollywood's most popular and enduring stars.

To escape poverty and a fractious family, Archie Leach ran away from home at age 13 to perform as a juggler with the Bob Pender Troupe of comedians…

Daniel Webster

1782: American orator and politician Daniel Webster was born in New Hampshire.

American orator and politician who practiced prominently as a lawyer before the U.S. Supreme Court and served as a U.S. congressman (1813–17, 1823–27), a U.S. senator (1827–41, 1845–50), and U.S. secretary of state (1841–43, 1850–52). He is best known as an enthusiastic nationalist and as an advocate of business interests during the period of the Jacksonian…


Peter Mark Roget
born Jan. 18, 1779, London, Eng.

English physician and philologist remembered for his Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases (1852), a comprehensive classification of synonyms or verbal equivalents that is still popular in modern editions.

Roget studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh and later helped found the medical school at Manchester. …

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posted January 17, 2008 10:51 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Mannu     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Jan 19th
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Robert E. Lee

born Jan. 19, 1807, Stratford, Westmoreland county, Va., U.S.
in full Robert Edward Lee Confederate general, commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, the most successful of the Southern armies during the American Civil War (1861–65). In February 1865 he was given command of all the Southern armies. His surrender at Appomattox Courthouse April 9, 1865, is commonly viewed as signifying the end of the Civil War.

Edgar Allan Poe
born January 19, 1809, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.

Life
Poe was the son of the English-born actress Elizabeth Arnold Poe and David Poe, Jr., an actor from Baltimore. After his mother died in Richmond, Virginia, in 1811, he was taken into the home of John Allan, a Richmond merchant (presumably his godfather), and of his childless wife. He was later taken to Scotland and England (1815–20), where he was given a classical education that was continued in Richmond. For 11 months in 1826 he attended the University of Virginia, but his gambling losses at the university so incensed his guardian that he refused to let him continue, and Poe returned to Richmond to find his sweetheart, (Sarah) Elmira Royster, engaged. He went to Boston, where in 1827 he published a pamphlet of youthful Byronic poems, Tamerlane, and Other Poems. Poverty forced him to join the army under the name of Edgar A. Perry, but, on the death of Poe's foster mother, John Allan purchased his release from the army and helped him get an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Before going, Poe published a new volume at Baltimore, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829). He successfully sought expulsion from the academy, where he was absent from all drills and classes for a week. He proceeded to New York City and brought out a volume of Poems, containing several masterpieces, some showing the influence of John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He then returned to Baltimore, where he began to write stories. In 1833 his "MS. Found in a Bottle" won $50 from a Baltimore weekly, and by 1835 he was in Richmond as editor of the Southern Literary Messenger. There he made a name as a critical reviewer and married his young cousin Virginia Clemm, who was only 13. Poe seems to have been an affectionate husband and son-in-law.

Poe was dismissed from his job in Richmond, apparently for drinking, and went to New York City. Drinking was in fact to be the bane of his life. To talk well in a large company he needed a slight stimulant, but a glass of sherry might start him on a spree; and, although he rarely succumbed to intoxication, he was often seen in public when he did. This gave rise to the conjecture that Poe was a drug addict, but according to medical testimony he had a brain lesion. While in New York City in 1838 he published a long prose narrative, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, combining (as so often in his tales) much factual material with the wildest fancies. It is considered one inspiration of Herman Melville's Moby Dick. In 1839 he became coeditor of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine in Philadelphia. There a contract for a monthly feature stimulated him to write "William Wilson" and "The Fall of the House of Usher," stories of supernatural horror. The latter contains a study of a neurotic now known to have been an acquaintance of Poe, not Poe himself.

Later in 1839 Poe's Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque appeared (dated 1840). He resigned from Burton's about June 1840 but returned in 1841 to edit its successor, Graham's Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine, in which he printed the first detective story, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." In 1843 his "The Gold-Bug" won a prize of $100 from the Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper, which gave him great publicity. In 1844 he returned to New York, wrote "The Balloon-Hoax" for the Sun, and became subeditor of the New York Mirror under N.P. Willis, thereafter a lifelong friend. In the New York Mirror of January 29, 1845, appeared, from advance sheets of the American Review, his most famous poem, The Raven, which gave him national fame at once. Poe then became editor of the Broadway Journal, a short-lived weekly, in which he republished most of his short stories, in 1845. During this last year the now-forgotten poet Frances Sargent Locke Osgood pursued Poe. Virginia did not object, but “Fanny's” indiscreet writings about her literary love caused great scandal. His The Raven and Other Poems and a selection of his Tales came out in 1845, and in 1846 Poe moved to a cottage at Fordham (now part of New York City), where he wrote for Godey's Lady's Book (May–October 1846) The Literati of New York City—gossipy sketches on personalities of the day, which led to a libel suit.

Poe's wife, Virginia, died in January 1847. The following year he went to Providence, Rhode Island, to woo Sarah Helen Whitman, a poet. There was a brief engagement. Poe had close but platonic entanglements with Annie Richmond and with Sarah Anna Lewis, who helped him financially. He composed poetic tributes to all of them. In 1848 he also published the lecture Eureka, a transcendental “explanation” of the universe, which has been hailed as a masterpiece by some critics and as nonsense by others. In 1849 he went south, had a wild spree in Philadelphia, but got safely to Richmond, where he finally became engaged to Elmira Royster, by then the widowed Mrs. Shelton, and spent a happy summer with only one or two relapses. He enjoyed the companionship of childhood friends and an unromantic friendship with a young poet, Susan Archer Talley.

Poe had some forebodings of death when he left Richmond for Baltimore late in September. There he died, although whether from drinking, heart failure, or other causes was still uncertain in the 21st century. He was buried in Westminster Presbyterian churchyard in Baltimore.


Appraisal

Poe's work owes much to the concern of Romanticism with the occult and the satanic. It owes much also to his own feverish dreams, to which he applied a rare faculty of shaping plausible fabrics out of impalpable materials. With an air of objectivity and spontaneity, his productions are closely dependent on his own powers of imagination and an elaborate technique. His keen and sound judgment as an appraiser of contemporary literature, his idealism and musical gift as a poet, his dramatic art as a storyteller, considerably appreciated in his lifetime, secured him a prominent place among universally known men of letters.

The outstanding fact in Poe's character is a strange duality. The wide divergence of contemporary judgments on the man seems almost to point to the coexistence of two persons in him. With those he loved he was gentle and devoted. Others, who were the butt of his sharp criticism, found him irritable and self-centred and went so far as to accuse him of lack of principle. Was it, it has been asked, a double of the man rising from harrowing nightmares or from the haggard inner vision of dark crimes or from appalling graveyard fantasies that loomed in Poe's unstable being?

Much of Poe's best work is concerned with terror and sadness, but in ordinary circumstances the poet was a pleasant companion. He talked brilliantly, chiefly of literature, and read his own poetry and that of others in a voice of surpassing beauty. He admired Shakespeare and Alexander Pope. He had a sense of humour, apologizing to a visitor for not keeping a pet raven. If the mind of Poe is considered, the duality is still more striking. On one side, he was an idealist and a visionary. His yearning for the ideal was both of the heart and of the imagination. His sensitivity to the beauty and sweetness of women inspired his most touching lyrics (To Helen, Annabel Lee, Eulalie, To One in Paradise) and the full-toned prose hymns to beauty and love in Ligeia and Eleonora. In Israfel his imagination carried him away from the material world into a dreamland. This Pythian mood was especially characteristic of the later years of his life.

More generally, in such verses as The Valley of Unrest, Lenore, The Raven, For Annie, and Ulalume and in his prose tales, his familiar mode of evasion from the universe of common experience was through eerie thoughts, impulses, or fears. From these materials he drew the startling effects of his tales of death ( "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Masque of the Red Death," "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," "The Premature Burial," "The Oval Portrait," "Shadow" ), his tales of wickedness and crime ( "Berenice," "The Black Cat," "William Wilson," "The Imp of the Perverse," "The Cask of Amontillado," "The Tell-Tale Heart" ), his tales of survival after dissolution ( "Ligeia," "Morella," "Metzengerstein" ), and his tales of fatality ( "The Assignation," "The Man of the Crowd" ). Even when he does not hurl his characters into the clutch of mysterious forces or onto the untrodden paths of the beyond, he uses the anguish of imminent death as the means of causing the nerves to quiver ( "The Pit and the Pendulum" ), and his grotesque invention deals with corpses and decay in an uncanny play with the aftermath of death.

On the other side, Poe is conspicuous for a close observation of minute details, as in the long narratives and in many of the descriptions that introduce the tales or constitute their settings. Closely connected with this is his power of ratiocination. He prided himself on his logic and carefully handled this real accomplishment so as to impress the public with his possessing still more of it than he had; hence the would-be feats of thought reading, problem unraveling, and cryptography that he attributed to his Legrand and Dupin. This suggested to him the analytical tales, which created the detective story, and his science fiction tales.

The same duality is evinced in his art. He was capable of writing angelic or weird poetry, with a supreme sense of rhythm and word appeal, or prose of sumptuous beauty and suggestiveness, with the apparent abandon of compelling inspiration; yet he would write down a problem of morbid psychology or the outlines of an unrelenting plot in a hard and dry style. In Poe's masterpieces the double contents of his temper, of his mind, and of his art are fused into a oneness of tone, structure, and movement, the more effective, perhaps, as it is compounded of various elements.

As a critic, Poe laid great stress upon correctness of language, metre, and structure. He formulated rules for the short story, in which he sought the ancient unities: i.e., the short story should relate a complete action and take place within one day in one place. To these unities he added that of mood or effect. He was not extreme in these views, however. He praised longer works and sometimes thought allegories and morals admirable if not crudely presented. Poe admired originality, often in work very different from his own, and was sometimes an unexpectedly generous critic of decidedly minor writers.

Poe's genius was early recognized abroad. No one did more to persuade the world and, in the long run, the United States, of Poe's greatness than the French poets Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé. Indeed his role in French literature was that of a poetic master model and guide to criticism. French Symbolism relied on his The Philosophy of Composition, borrowed from his imagery, and used his examples to generate the modern theory of “pure poetry.”


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posted January 19, 2008 11:25 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for Mannu     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Jan 19th

Paul Cézanne 1839
French painter, one of the greatest of the Post-Impressionists, whose works and ideas were influential in the aesthetic development of many 20th-century artists and art movements, especially Cubism. Cézanne's art, misunderstood and discredited by the public during most of his life, grew out of Impressionism and eventually challenged all the conventional values of painting in the 19th century because of his insistence on personal expression and on the integrity of the painting itself, regardless of subject matter.

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posted January 19, 2008 11:27 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for Mannu     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
I saw this painting in an exhibition dedicated to him in Metropolitan museum of art - nyc

Paul Cézanne
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Still Life with a Ginger Jar and Eggplants, 1890-94
oil on canvas
28 1/2 x 36 inches (72 x 91 cm)


Click here for this still life painting and then click on the image


More: http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/cezanne/land/


During the last decade of his life, Cézanne's paintings became more simplified, the objects in his landscapes reduced to components -- cylinders, cones and spheres. He is often seen as anticipating cubist and abstract art, because he reduced the imperfect forms of nature to these essential shapes. By the time of his death in 1906, Picasso and Braque were in the midst of exploring the most radical implications of his style. Maybe the world has finally caught up with Cézanne. Complexity is more admired now than it was 100 years ago, and since his reputation precedes him, perhaps the exhibition at the Grand Palais will make his work more accessible to the average museum-goer.



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posted January 19, 2008 11:55 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for Mannu     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
How did I miss the birthday of the guy I admire on Jan 6th :

Alan Wilson Watts 1915
The Zen teacher of the West
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Watts

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posted January 20, 2008 03:17 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Mannu     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Jan 20th birthday:

1930:
American astronaut Buzz Aldrin was born in Montclair, New Jersey

Buzz Aldrin astronaut who set a record for extravehicular activity and was the second man to set foot on the Moon.

A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, N.Y. (1951), Aldrin became an air force pilot. He flew 66 combat missions in Korea and later served in West Germany. In 1963 he wrote a dissertation on orbital mechanics to earn his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute

His footprint captured by himself shown below:

Federico Fellini
Italian director Federico Fellini, born this day in 1920, was one of the most celebrated filmmakers in the post-World War II period, his distinctive style imposing dreamlike or hallucinatory imagery on ordinary situations.

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posted February 18, 2008 12:39 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for Mannu     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Tribute to Swami Vivekananda (January 12, 1863 – July 4, 1902)


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swami_Vivekananda

He is also the spiritual guru of Nikola Tesla (July 10). Tesla died a celibate with no children.

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