Notable Americans

Pocahontas

Pocahontas (born Matoaka, and later known as Rebecca Rolfe, c. 1595 – March 1617) was a Virginia Indian notable for her association with the colonial settlement at Jamestown, Virginia. She was the daughter of Chief Powhatan, the head of a network of tributary tribal nations in the Tidewater region of Virginia.

Pocahontas is most famously linked to the English colonist Captain John Smith, who arrived in Virginia with other settlers in April 1607. Ыhe is said to have saved his life by placing her head upon his own when her father raised his war club to execute him.

Pocahontas was captured by the English during Anglo-Indian hostilities in 1613, and held for ransom. During her captivity, she converted to Christianity and took the name Rebecca. When the opportunity arose for her to return to her people, she chose to remain with the English. In April 1614, she married tobacco planter John Rolfe.

In 1616, the Rolfes traveled to London. Pocahontas was presented to English society as an example of the civilized "savage" in hopes of stimulating investment in the Jamestown settlement. She became something of a celebrity, and attended a masque at Whitehall Palace. In 1617, the Rolfes set sail for home, but Pocahontas died at Gravesend of unknown causes. She was buried in England, but her resting place is not known.

Numerous places, landmarks, and products in the United States have been named after Pocahontas. Her story has been romanticized over the years, and she is the subject of art, literature, and film.

Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson (April 13, 1743 (April 2, 1743 O.S.) – July 4, 1826) was an American Founding Father, the principal author of the United States Declaration of Independence (1776) and the third President of the United States (1801–1809). At the beginning of the American Revolution, Jefferson served in the Continental Congress, representing Virginia. He then served as a wartime Governor of Virginia (1779–1781). Just after the war ended, from mid-1784 Jefferson served as a diplomat, stationed in Paris, initially as a commissioner to help negotiate commercial treaties. In May 1785, he became the United States Minister to France. He was the first United States Secretary of State (1790–1793) during the administration of President George Washington. Upon resigning his office, with his close friend James Madison he organized the Democratic-Republican Party. Elected Vice-President in 1796, under his opponent John Adams, Jefferson with Madison secretly wrote the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, which attempted to nullify the Alien and Sedition Acts and formed the basis of states' rights.

Elected president in what Jefferson called the Revolution of 1800, he oversaw a peaceful transition in power, purchased the vast Louisiana Territory from France (1803), and sent the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804–1806) to explore the new west. His second term was beset with troubles at home, such as the failed treason trial of his former Vice President Aaron Burr, and escalating trouble with Britain. With Britain at war with Napoleon, he tried aggressive economic warfare against them; however, his embargo laws did more damage to American trade and the economy, and provoked a furious reaction in the Northeast. Jefferson has often been rated in scholarly surveys as one of the greatest U.S. presidents, though since the mid-twentieth century, some historians have increasingly criticized him for his failure to act against domestic slavery.^[1][2]

A leader in the Enlightenment, Jefferson was a polymath who spoke five languages and was deeply interested in science, invention, architecture, religion and philosophy. He designed his own large mansion on a 5,000 acre plantation near Charlottesville, Virginia, which he named Monticello. His interests led him to assist in founding the University of Virginia in his post-presidency years. While not an orator, he was an indefatigable letter writer and corresponded with many influential people in America and Europe.

Jefferson's views on slavery were complex. As a young man, he opposed slavery, thought it was contrary to the laws of nature, and added an anti-slavery clause in the original draft of the Declaration of Independence. He was a leading American opponent of the international slave trade, and, as President, signed the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves on March 2, 1807. However, Jefferson shared the common view of his times that Africans were racially inferior. As part of the Virginia planter elite, and as a tobacco planter, he owned hundreds of slaves throughout his lifetime, and did little to end domestic slavery after 1789. ^[3][4]

After Martha Jefferson, his wife of eleven years, died in 1782, Jefferson remained a widower for the rest of his life; his marriage produced six children, with only two surviving to adulthood. In 1802 allegations surfaced that he was also the father of his slave Sally Hemings' children. In 1998, DNA tests revealed a match between her last child and the Jefferson male family line. Whether these children were fathered by Jefferson himself, or one of his relatives, remains a matter of debate among historians.

Declaration of Independence

Thomas Jefferson was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, a formal document which officially proclaimed the dissolution of the American colonies from the British Crown. The sentiments of revolution put forth in the Declaration were already well established in 1776 as the colonies were already at war with the British when the Declaration was being debated, drafted and signed.^[36][37]

Before the Declaration was drafted Jefferson served as a delegate from Virginia to the Second Continental Congress beginning in June 1775, soon after the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War. He sought out John Adams who, along with his cousin Samuel, had emerged as a leader of the convention.^[38] Jefferson and Adams established a lifelong friendship and would correspond frequently; Adams ensured that Jefferson was appointed to the five-man committee to write a declaration in support of the resolution of independence.^[39] Having agreed on an approach, the committee selected Jefferson to write the first draft. His eloquent writing style made him the committee's choice for primary author; the others edited his draft.^[40][41] During June 1776, the month before the signing, Jefferson took notes of the Congressional debates over the proposed Declaration in order to include such sentiments in his draft, among other things justifying the right of citizens to resort to revolution.^[4] Jefferson also drew from his proposed draft of the Virginia Constitution, George Mason's draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, and other sources.

The historian Joseph Ellis states that the Declaration was the "core of [Jefferson]'s seductive appeal across the ages".^[42] After working for two days to modify the document, Congress removed language that was deemed antagonistic to friends in Britain and Jefferson's clause that indicted the British monarchy for imposing African slavery on the colonies. This was the longest clause removed.^[4] Congress trimmed the draft by about one fourth, wanting the Declaration to appeal to the population in Great Britain as well as the soon to be United States, while at the same time not wanting to give South Carolina and Georgia reasons to oppose the Declaration on abolitionist grounds. Jefferson deeply resented some of the many omissions Congress made.^[4][43] On July 4, 1776, Congress ratified the Declaration of Independence and distributed the document.^[44] Historians have considered it to be one of Jefferson's major achievements; the preamble is considered an enduring statement of human rights that has inspired people around the world.^[45] Its second sentence is the following:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

This has been called "one of the best-known sentences in the English language",^[46] containing "the most potent and consequential words in American history".^[47] The passage came to represent a moral standard to which the United States should strive. This view was notably promoted by Abraham Lincoln, who based his philosophy on it, and argued for the Declaration as a statement of principles through which the United States Constitution should be interpreted.^[48] Intended also as a revolutionary document for the world, not just the colonies, the Declaration of Independence was Jefferson's assertion of his core beliefs in a republican form of government.^[4] The Declaration became the core document and a tradition in American political values. It also became the model of democracy that was adopted by many peoples around the world, including South Africa, the People's Republic of China, the Soviet Union and other modern day contemporaries trying to advance the ideas of individual freedom and democracy for their countries. Abraham Lincoln once referred to Jefferson's principles as "..the definitions and axioms of a free society..".

Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865) was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. He successfully led his country through its greatest constitutional, military and moral crisis – the American Civil War – preserving the Union while ending slavery, and promoting economic and financial modernization. Reared in a poor family on the western frontier, Lincoln was mostly self-educated. He became a country lawyer, a Whig Party, Illinois state legislator in the 1830s, a one-term member of the United States House of Representatives in the 1840s, but he failed in two attempts to be elected to the United States Senate in the 1850s. After opposing the expansion of slavery in the United States in his campaign debates and speeches,^[1] Lincoln secured the Republican Party nomination and was elected president in 1860.

Before Lincoln could take office in March of 1861, seven southern slave states declared their secession and formed the Confederacy. When war began with the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter on April 12, Lincoln concentrated on both the military and political dimensions of the war effort, seeking to reunify the nation. He vigorously exercised unprecedented war powers, including the arrest and detention without trial of thousands of suspected secessionists. He prevented British recognition of the Confederacy by skillfully handling the Trent affair late in 1861. His efforts toward the abolition of slavery include issuing his Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and encouraging Congress to propose what would become the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Lincoln closely supervised the war effort, especially the selection of top generals, including commanding general Ulysses S. Grant. He brought leaders of various factions of his party into his cabinet and pressured them to cooperate. Under his leadership, the Union set up a naval blockade that shut down the South's normal trade, took control of the border slave states at the start of the war, gained control of communications with gunboats on the southern river systems, and tried repeatedly to capture the Confederate capital at Richmond. Each time a general failed, Lincoln substituted another until finally Grant succeeded in 1865.

An exceptionally astute politician deeply involved with power issues in each state, he reached out to War Democrats and managed his own re-election in the 1864 presidential election. As the leader of the moderate faction of the Republican party, Lincoln found his policies and personality were "blasted from all sides": Radical Republicans demanded harsher treatment of the South, War Democrats desired more compromise, Copperheads despised him, and irreconcilable secessionists plotted his death.^[2] Politically, Lincoln fought back with patronage, by pitting his opponents against each other, and by appealing to the American people with his powers of oratory.^[3] His Gettysburg Address of 1863 became the most quoted speech in American history.^[4] It was an iconic statement of America's dedication to the principles of nationalism, republicanism, equal rights, liberty, and democracy. At the close of the war, Lincoln held a moderate view of Reconstruction, seeking to reunite the nation speedily through a policy of generous reconciliation in the face of lingering and bitter divisiveness. But six days after the surrender of Confederate commanding general Robert E. Lee, Lincoln was assassinated by Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth. His death was the first assassination of a U.S. president and sent the nation into mourning. Lincoln has been consistently ranked by scholars and the public as one of the three greatest U.S. presidents.^[

O. Henry

William Sydney Porter (September 11, 1862 – June 5, 1910), known by his pen name O. Henry, was an American writer. O. Henry's short stories are known for their wit, wordplay, warm characterization and clever twist endings. Some of his best and least-known work is contained in Cabbages and Kings, a series of stories each of which explores some individual aspect of life in a paralytically sleepy Central American town, while advancing some aspect of the larger plot and relating back one to another.

Among his most famous stories are:

"The Gift of the Magi" about a young couple who are short of money but desperately want to buy each other Christmas gifts. Unbeknownst to Jim, Della sells her most valuable possession, her beautiful hair, in order to buy a platinum fob chain for Jim's watch; while Jim sells his own most valuable possession, his watch, to buy jeweled combs for Della's hair.

"The Ransom of Red Chief", in which two men kidnap a boy of ten. The boy turns out to be so bratty and obnoxious that the desperate men ultimately pay the boy's father $250 to take him back.

"The Cop and the Anthem" about a New York City hobo named Soapy, who sets out to get arrested so that he can be a guest of the city jail instead of sleeping out in the cold winter. Despite efforts at petty theft, vandalism, disorderly conduct, and "mashing" with a young prostitute, Soapy fails to draw the attention of the police. Disconsolate, he pauses in front of a church, where an organ anthem inspires him to clean up his life—and is ironically charged for loitering and sentenced to three months in prison.

"A Retrieved Reformation", which tells the tale of safecracker Jimmy Valentine, recently freed from prison. He goes to a town bank to case it before he robs it. As he walks to the door, he catches the eye of the banker's beautiful daughter. They immediately fall in love and Valentine decides to give up his criminal career. He moves into the town, taking up the identity of Ralph Spencer, a shoemaker. Just as he is about to leave to deliver his specialized tools to an old associate, a lawman who recognizes him arrives at the bank. Jimmy and his fiancée and her family are at the bank, inspecting a new safe, when a child accidentally gets locked inside the airtight vault. Knowing it will seal his fate, Valentine opens the safe to rescue the child. However, much to Valentine's surprise, the lawman denies recognizing him and lets him go.

"The Duplicity of Hargraves". A short story about a nearly destitute father and daughters trip to Washington, D.C.

Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein (14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German theoretical physicist who developed the theory of general relativity, effecting a revolution in physics. For this achievement, Einstein is often regarded as the father of modern physics. While best known for his mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc2,he received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect".

He was visiting the United States when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, and did not go back to Germany, where he had been a professor at the Berlin Academy of Sciences. He settled in the U.S., becoming a citizen in 1940.On the eve of World War II, he helped alert President Franklin D. Roosevelt that Germany might be developing an atomic weapon, and recommended that the U.S. begin similar research. Einstein was in support of defending the Allied forces, but largely denounced using the new discovery of nuclear fission as a weapon.

Einstein published more than 300 scientific papers along with over 150 non-scientific works. His great intelligence and originality have made the word "Einstein" synonymous with genius. Einstein has been the subject of or inspiration for many novels, films, plays, and works of music. He is a favorite model for depictions of mad scientists and absent-minded professors; his expressive face and distinctive hairstyle have been widely copied and exaggerated.

James Fenimore Cooper (September 15, 1789 – September 14, 1851) was a prolific and popular American writer of the early 19th century. He is best remembered as a novelist who wrote numerous sea-stories and the historycal novels. Among his most famous works is the romantic novel “The last of Mohicans”, often regarded as his masterpiece.

Shortly after his first birthday, his family moved to Cooperstown, New York a community founded by his father.At the age of 13, Cooper was enrolled at Yale, but he did not obtain a degree, due to his expulsion, apparently for a dangerous prank that involved blowing up another student's door. Another less dangerous prank consisted of training a donkey to sit in a professor's chair. at 18, joined the United States Navy and at age 21, he married. They had seven children, five of whom lived to adulthood. His daughter, Susan Fenimore Cooper, was a writer on nature, female suffrage, and other topics. She and her father often edited each other’s work. He was very fond of reading and one day when he had finished an English novel he said: "I could write a better story than that myself!" (so americanly). When his wife challenged him to write the book Cooper set to work, beginning a prolific literary career.

Cooper's first novel PRECAUTION (1820) was an imitation of Jane Austen's novels and did not meet with great success. In 1823 appeared THE PIONEERS. It started his preoccupation with a series of frontier adventures and pioneer life, in which he spent about twenty years. The novels depicted the adventures of Natty Bumppo and his Indian companion Chingachgook. Natty himself was educated by the Delaware Indians, who gave him the name 'Hawkeye'. The books, which were not written in chronological order, included the classics The Deerslayer, The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder, and THE PRAIRIE (1827).

From 1826 to 1833 Cooper lived in Europe, where he published romances and unsuccessful books about democracy, politics, and society. He served as the US consul at Lyons and travelled a great deal. During the last decades of his life Cooper was earning less from his books but was forced to go on writing for income. In 1833 Cooper returned to the Unites States. In THE AMERICAN DEMOCRAT Cooper also expressed his political and social views. Cooper died at Otsego Hall, on September 14, 1851.

Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American author and journalist. His economical and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.

Hemingway was born in 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois. His father was a doctor who initiated the boy into the outdoor life of hunting, camping, and fishing. While at school, Hemingway wrote articles for the school newspaper.

In 1917, when the United States entered the World War I, Hemingway left home and wanted to enlist for the war but was rejected because of an eye injury from football. Finally he managed to go to Europe as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross. He joined the Italian army and was seriously wounded.



His war experience and adventurous life provided the background for his many short stories and novels. He achieved success with "A Farewell to Arms", the story of a love affair between an American lieutenant and an English nurse during the World War I.

Hemingway actively supported the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and wrote another successful novel of war, love and death. It was "For Whom the Bell Tolls".



During the World War II Hemingway was a war correspondent first in China and then in Europe. He fought in France and helped to liberate Paris.

In his later years Hemingway lived mostly in Cuba where his passion for deep-sea fishing provided the background for "The Old Man and the Sea". He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954.

Unwilling to live with the inevitable physical aging, Hemingway committed suicide, as his father had done under similar circumstances.Added to Hemingway's physical ailments was the additional problem that he had been a heavy drinker for most of his life.