Sitting Bull

Hi everyone, I'm gonna tell you some facts of the life of this incredible man, a man that I admire a lot.

Sitting Bull(1831-1890), also known by his Sioux name Tatanka Iyotanka, was a native Amerindian chief of the Sioux's tribe Hunkpapa.

He was born in 1831 near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in Dakota Territory. When he was born he was named Jumping Badger but there is a Sioux tradition by which he was later given one of his father's names, Tȟatȟaŋka Iyotȟaŋka, Sitting Bull in English.

In the Dakota War of 1862 the Sioux killed 600 settlers and soldiers in Minnesota as a response to the bad treatment that the Sioux have received by the gorvernment. Because of that, in 1864 about 2200 American soldiers attacked a Sioux village. The defenders were led by Sitting Bull among others Sioux chiefs. But as a result the Sioux were driven out.
In September of the same year Sitting Bull was shot but the wound wasn't too serious.

During the period 1868–1876, Sitting Bull became the most important of Native American chiefs as most of the chiefs had moved to live in the reservations where they were dependent for subsistence on the US Indian agencies. But Sitting Bull refused to adopt any dependence and he and his warriors lived isolated on the Plains. Every Amerindian tribe which was threatened by the white people asked for Sitting Bull's help, and their people became really numerous.

On June 25, 1876 the Americans attacked the Sitting Bull's camp, the Little Big Horn River, but they didn't know how large the camp was so they were defeated by the Amerindian warriors. Over the next year, the new American military forces pursued the Sioux, forcing many of them to surrender. Sitting Bull refused to surrender and in May 1877 led his band across the border into Saskatchewan, Canada.
But in 1881 hunger and cold forced Sitting Bull and the people who remained with him to surrender.

At first they were recluded as prisoners of war in the Fort Randall but 20 months after they were allowed to come back to to the Standing Rock Agency. But when the Ghost dance took place the American feared it and thought that Sitting Bull was one of the leaders of this Ghost dance. Finally he was killed by a Sioux, their people got angry. As a result 8 policemen and 7 of his supporters died that day.

As time passed, Sitting Bull became a symbol and archetype of Native American resistance movements .

I hope you like the life of this amazing man, a symbol for many people, a hero for a society.

Borja Gil García

JOHN WINTHROP

John Winthrop was born in Groton, Suffolk, England in 1588. He studied law in London but he was persecuted due to his Puritan religious beliefs. Winthrop thought that the Church of England should abbolish bishops and relics of Roman Catholicism. He served as governor of Massachusetts for twelve terms and was considered to be a good leader. However, in 1636 he clashed with Roger Williams and was forced to banish from the colony.

In addition, in 1645 Winthrop became the first president of the Confederation of New England. His book History of New England was published after his death in 1649.

A Model of Christian Charity is a sermon delivered to his fellow Puritans colonists aboard the ship Arbella before landing at Massachusetts Bay Colony. However, it is known because of the phrase ''City upon a Hill'' which became the ideal New England colonists placed upon their capital city (Boston). 

Here you can take a look at the main points of this sermon:

''God has made different classes of men, and, indeed, of all things. All men are not created equal. The reason herof:
In conformity to the rest of the world and demonstrating his wisdom, God created a great variety and differences in his creatures for the persevation of the whole.

The differences give humans the opportunity to manifest the work of the Spirit withhim them.

God made variey any differences so that all men would have a need of one another.'' [...]

Harriet Tubman

Hey guys! I was studing for tomorrow's exam and I thought that it would be interesting to know more about Harriet Tubman. 

Harriet Tubman (Araminta Harriet Ross) was born into slavery in 1819 or 1820, in Dorchester County, Maryland. Given the names of her two parents, both held in slavery, she was of purely African ancestry. She was raised under harsh conditions, and subjected to whippings even as a small child. At the age of 12 she was seriously injured by a blow to the head, inflicted by a white overseer for refusing to assist in tying up a man who had attempted escape.
Tubman was given a piece of paper by a white neighbor with two names, and told how to find the first house on her path to freedom. At the first house she was put into a wagon, covered with a sack, and driven to her next destination. Following the route to Pennsylvania, she initially settled in Philadelphia, where she met William Still, the Philadelphia Stationmaster on the Underground Railroad. With the assistance of Still, and other members of the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Society, she learned about the workings of the UGRR.In 1851 she began relocating members of her family to St. Catharines, (Ontario) Canada West. North Street in St. Catharines remained her base of operations until 1857. There she worked at various activities to save to finance her activities as a Conductor on the UGRR.
After freeing herself from slavery, Harriet Tubman returned to Maryland to rescue other members of her family. In all she is believed to have conducted approximately 300 persons to freedom in the North. 
After the outbreak of the Civil War, Tubman served as a soldier, spy, and a nurse, for a time serving at Fortress Monroe. While guiding a group of black soldiers in South Carolina, she met Nelson Davis, who was ten years her junior. Denied payment for her wartime service, Tubman was forced, after a bruising fight, to ride in a baggage car on her return to Auburn.

Source: http://www.nyhistory.com/harriettubman/life.htm

Harriet Ann Jacobs (1813-1897)

Harriet Ann Jacobs was slave but she could escape from slavery to the north and there wrote her only work, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. It published in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent, was one of the first autobiographical narratives about the fight for freedom of the slaves and story of the sexual abuse they suffered. She changed all the names of people and cities because she didn’t want to compromise anyone for helping her.

After all, she became an abolitionist speaker and reformer. For a short time Harriet worked in Rochester in New York in Anti-Slavery Office where they became acquainted with Frederick Douglass, Amy Post and other abolitionists.

Harriet died in Washington on 7^th March in 1897.

http://www.harrietjacobs.org/index.html

Annie Besant (1847 - 1933)

Besant was a British social reformer, campaigner for women's rights and a supporter of Indian nationalism.

Annie Woods was born in London on 1 October 1847. She had an unhappy childhood, undoubtedly partly due to her father's death when she was five. Annie's mother persuaded her friend Ellen Marryat, sister of the writer Frederick Marryat, to take responsibility for her daughter and Ellen ensured that Annie received a good education.

In 1867, Annie married Frank Besant, a clergyman, and they had two children. But Annie's increasingly anti-religious views led to a legal separation in 1873. Besant became a member of the National Secular Society, which preached 'free thought', and also of the Fabian Society, the noted socialist organisation.

In the 1870s, Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh edited the weekly National Reformer, which advocated advanced ideas for the time on topics such as trade unions, national education, womens' right to vote, and birth control. For their pamphlet on birth control the pair were brought to trial for obscenity, but were subsequently acquitted.

Besant supported a number of workers' demonstrations for better working conditions. In 1888 she helped organise a strike of the female workers at the Bryant and May match factory in east London. The women complained of starvation wages and the terrible effects on their health of phosphorus fumes in the factory. The strike eventually led to their bosses significantly improving their working situation.

Social and political reform seems not to have satisfied Besant's hunger for some all-embracing truth to replace the religion of her youth. She became interested in Theosophy, a religious movement founded in 1875 and based on Hindu ideas of karma and reincarnation. As a member and later leader of the Theosophical Society, Besant helped to spread Theosophical beliefs around the world, notably in India.

Besant first visited India in 1893 and later settled there, becoming involved in the Indian nationalist movement. In 1916 she established the Indian Home Rule League, of which she became president. She was also a leading member of the Indian National Congress.

In the late 1920s, Besant travelled to the United States with her protégé and adopted son Jiddu Krishnamurti, whom she claimed was the new Messiah and incarnation of Buddha. Krishnamurti rejected these claims in 1929.

Besant died in India on 20 September 1933.

from:http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/besant_annie.shtml

Florence Nightingale

Hi everyone!

I’m going to talk you about a very well known and admirated English woman of the nineteenth century: Florence Nightingale (1820-1910).

She was an important and celebrated nurse, writer and statiscian.

She devoted herself with so much love to his profession as a nurse (she was convinced it was “a call of God”) that until our time is considered a great symbol of nursing, because of all the medical and hygienic reforms she made.

Florence was born into a rich family, belonging to high society, in Florence, Italy.

She decided to be nurser in 1844, in spite of the family’s opposition, since they expected that she become a wife and mother (victorian values).

She began to educate herself very hard in the art and science of nursing.

The most famous of her actions was her contribution in the Crimean War (1854). She and a 38 volunteer nurses were taken to the Ottoman Empire, where the main British base of operations had been settled.

The British soldiers were dying because of poor higiene and nutrition, and Nightingale fought very hard for improve the sanitary conditions .

Consequently, she helped reducing deaths in the Army during the peacetime and promoted better sanitary designs of hospitals.

During this stage, she got the nickname “The Lady with the Lamp”, because of the article that published the Times:

She is a ministering angel without any exaggeration in these hospitals, and as her slender form glides quietly along each corridor, every poor fellow's face softens with gratitude at the sight of her. When all the medical officers have retired for the night and silence and darkness have settled down upon those miles of prostrate sick, she may be observed alone, with a little lamp in her hand, making her solitary rounds.

In 1859, she collected funds and created the “Nightingale Fund” for training the nurses, and then she opened in 1860 the “Nightingale Training School”, in the Saint Thomas Hospital.

She died at age 90, in 1910, while she was sleeping in her room of Park Lane.

MILLICENT GARRETT FAWCETT and SUFFRAGISTS

Millicent Garret Fawcett was born in Aldeburgh, Suffolk in 1847.  She was a British writer, reformer, feminist, suffragist, and political worker. In 1867 she married Henry Fawcett, an economist. He was a defender of human rights and because of his condition of blindness; he depended upon her all the time. That is why Millicent Garret started to be really involved in his work. In this year, she also became part of the management of the London National Societies for Women’s Suffrage.

Mrs Fawcett had been engaged for many years in the higher education of women and their political and economic future. At certain time of her live she became more prominent and active because of her husband’s death (1884) and also because of the division of the suffrage movement over association with particular parties, she was in favour of the non-alignment of the women's suffrage movement with political parties. Various small societies had grown up with the same aspiration, the advancing of the cause of women’s suffrage. In 1896 these were associated under the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, and Mrs. Fawcett in 1907 became the president of this movement.

At first she supported the more visible militancy. Woman’s Social and Political Union pledged to work by militant, with no lawful tactics. When revolutionary militants increased their violence she was strongly opposed to the methods of suffragists and all out disassociated the N.U.W.S.S .

Millicent Garrett Fawcett emphasized her efforts on a bill to achieve the women’s right to vote to singles and widows. This attempt failed and only the Labour Party had support women’s suffrage. Like clockwork N.U.W.S.S aligned officially with Labour Party.

Then she supported the effort of the British war in the World War I. She thought that if women supported it, women’s suffrage would be conferred when the war finished.

In 1919, Parliament admitted the Representation of the People Act and British women over the age of thirty were allowed to vote. The next president was Eleanor Rathbone. She and organization, now transformed itself into the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (N.U.S.E.C), worked for reduce the voting age for women to 21, as for men. Millicent Garret Fawcett disagreed some reformations by the N.U.S.E.C and left her position on the board of the

organization.

In 1924 she was awarded with the Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire, and also became Dame Millicent Fawcett. Finally she died in 1929 in London.

If you want to know more information about Millicent Garret Fawcett and the Women's Right to Vote you can find more information in this interesting video-clip: 

Gertrude Elion

Hello everyone!

Gertrude Belle Elion was born on January 23rd, 1918 in New York. She was a pharmacologist and a biochemist. She graduated from Hunter College in 1937 and, later, from New York University in 1941. Due to the fact that she was unable to obtain a graduate research position, she decided to work as a laboratory assistant and as a high school teacher. Years later, she stopped working as an assistant to Georger H. Hitchings at Burroughs Welcome pharmaceutical company. 

Gertrude Elion and Hitchings

In her numerous researches, she and Hitchings used the differences in biochemistry between pathogens, which are agents that cause diseases, and normal human cells in order to design new chemicals that were able to inhibit or kill the reproduction of some specific pathogens without harming the host cells. Both of them achieved new effective drugs against leukemia, gout, urinary infections, malaria, herpesviral and several autoimmune diseases. 

Gertrude Elion receiving the  

Nobel Prize of Medicine

In 1988, Gertrude Elion, together with Sir James Black and Hitchings, received the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Moreover, she obtained other awards: the National Medal of Science in 1991 and the Lemelson-MIT Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997. Likewise, she became the first woman to be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Finally, she died on February 21st, 1999.

Rosa Parks pioneer in civil rights

She was born on February the 4 , 1913 in Alabama united states. She was raised in a poor family, her father was a carpenter and her mother a school teacher. During her life she took various jobs among them housekeeper, domestic worker and hospital aide.

In 1932 she married Raymond Park who was a barber and who belonged to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People(NAACP) . Some years later, she became secretary of the association.

All over her life, Rosa had seen the segregation between blacks and whites; the discrimination happened in every place. Even thought in public transport buses. Black people could not sit just anywhere they wanted in the bus. They had to sit in the back of the bus. If white people were already sitting in the front of the bus, the black person had to pay the fare, get off the bus, and reenter at the back door. Sometimes the bus driver just drove off and left them before they could get back on at the back door. If the bus filled up with people, the driver would ask a black person to move so he could reposition the movable sign which divided the black and white sections.

But on the 1st of December, 19995, Rosa and four other people were sitting in the first seats of the black setion of the bus, the driver moved the board back and asked the four to get out. The other three complied, while Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat. The driver called the police and she was arrested. After this incident, she decided to stand up for her rigths because she was tired of being humilated.

As a result. Began a nationwide movement that launched the career of none other than Martin Luther King; which paved the way for the removal of tne racist and discriminatory attitude withing the United States of America.

On the 13th of November, 1956, the United States Supreme Court passed a court order which deemed the racial segregacion on buses to be unconstitutional. After that, Rosa Parks and her NAACP associates, suffered many attack from segregationists.

But life for Rosa and her husband became very difficult; both of them lost their jobs. They had to move to Hampton, Virginia and then to Detroid where she worked as a seamstress.

In 1965 she was appointed as a secretary and receptionist in the congressional office of African-American U.S.representative John Conyers. She worked there until she retired in 1988.

In 1977 her husband die of cancer.

In 1992 Rosa Parks published her autobiography .

Later on in 1996 she received honors such us the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Bill Clinto

Rosa Parks passed away on October 24, 2005 at the age of 92.

Rosa Parks was and continued being a symbol of struggle on equal terms among human beings…

“I would like to be remembered as a person who wanted to be free... so other people would be also free.”

RoSa PaRkS

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN (1706 - 1790)

Hello to everybody,

Benjamin Franklin was one the Founding Fathers of the United States.

He was born in a very poor family and he started to work at the age of eleven. Between seventeen and twenty-four years, he was working printing business and he became editor of Pennsylvania Gazelle. His most important clue is the following:

GOD HELPS WHO HELPS HIMSELF

Franklin gained international renown as a scientist for his famous experiments in electricity and for his many inventions, especially the lightning rod.

From 1785 to 1788, he served as Governor of Pennsylvania. Toward the end of his life, he freed his slaves and became one of the most prominent abolitionists.

The first part of Franklin's biography is to consolidate the ideas of myths and stereotypes, as he believed plenty on Enlightenment thoughts. Franklin's autobiography, begun in 1771 but published after his death in 1791, has become one of the classics of the genre, as this genre was so important in America. The main ideas in his works are:

• The self-made man
• To Go from Rags to Riches.  

In his biography, Franklin made a plan to achieve perfection. That is to make people themselves perfect, living in society. To make this possible he defined 13 virtues:

Benjamin Franklin's Grave. National Memorial

1. TEMPERANCE: Eat not to Dulness. Drink not to Elevation.
2. SILENCE: Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself. Avoiding trifling Conversation.
3. ORDER: Let all your Things have their Places. Let each Part of your Business have its Time.
4. RESOLUTION: Resolve to perform what you ought. Perform without fail what you resolve.
5. FRUGALITY: Make no Expense but to do good to others or yourself: i.e. Waste nothing.
6. INDUSTRY: Lose no Time. Be always employ’d in something useful. Cut off all unnecessary Actions.
7. SINCERITY: Use no hurtful Deceit. Think innocently and justly; and, if you speak; speak accordingly.
8. JUSTICE: Wrong none, by doing Injuries or omitting the Benefits that are your Duty.
9. MODERATION: Avoid Extremes. Forbear resenting Injuries so much as you thing they deserve.
10. CLEANLINESS: Tolerate no Uncleanness in Body, Clothes or Habitation.
11. TRANQUILITY: Be not disturbed at Trifles, or Accidents common or unavoidable.
12. CHASTITY: Rarely use Venery but for Health or offspring; Never to Dulness, Weakness, or the Injury of your own or another’s Peace or Reputation.
13. HUMILITY: Imitate Jesus and Socrates.

Franklin, in his text Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America, wants to aware people about what they called savages: “Savages we call them, because their manners differ from ours, which we think the perfection of civility; they think the same of theirs”. With this he tried to say that people on society called them savages but if people put on society this savages, they might think the savages are the people. Having different life style is not enough to ensure that one or another is better than the other. Both are totally acceptable.

Ending with that, it is important and remarkable to mention that he is the only one whose face appears at the money not being president, because every face printed at money are presidents.  

Wyatt Earp

Portrait of Wyatt Earp

Wyatt Earp (March 19, 1848 – January 13, 1929) was an American Marshall who served in several Western frontier towns. He was also at different times a farmer, teamster, bouncer, or saloon-keeper.

As I said above, he was sheriff in several towns as Dodge City (Kansas), Tombstone (Arizona), and Lamar (Missouri).

He is best known for his participation in the controversial "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral," which took place at Tombstone, Arizona, on October 26, 1881. In this legendary Old West encounter, Wyatt Earp, his brothers Virgil and Morgan, and one of his best friends, the alcoholic and consumptive gunmen "Doc" Holliday faced a bunch of outlaw cowboys who were terrorizing the town. The criminals were twice their number, however they were killed and arrested by Earp. The 30-second gunfight defined the rest of his life and created Earp's modern-day reputation as the Old West's "toughest and deadliest gunman of his day." 

Henry Fonda

Wyatt Earp would become the fearless Western hero in countless novels and films. You can see several performances of the famous marshall in much appreciated films as "My Darling Clementine" ( 1946, performed by Henry Fonda), "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral" (1957, by Burt Lancaster), "Wyatt Earp" (1994 by Kevin Costner) and my favourite "Tombstone" (1993) where Earp is performed by Kurt Russel.

Kurt Russell

Kevin Costner

The last surviving Earp brother and the last surviving participant of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral died at home in the Earps' small apartment in Los Angeles, of chronic cystitis (some sources cite prostate cancer) on January 13, 1929 at the age of 80.

With his dead also died a big part of the Wild West history.

Goodbye mates!

Hi everybody!

In the last class we were talking about Frederick Douglass, a man who fought against the slavery and the racism, a symbol for the black race.
I asked Patricia if there was any film about his life as I think he is a really interesting person, a symbol for many people and a fighter for the freedom, the human rights and the equality.
I have looked for films about his life and I have found out that there are several documentary films, the latest one is called "Frederick Douglass and the White Negro"(2008) by John J Doherty.
I have found the trailer of this documentary film:

By the way I have found an entire documentary about F.Douglass, I adjunct it and hope you like it.