Steve Jobs's Quotes and Speech

Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech.

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Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was born July 18, 1918, at the Cape of Good Hope, in South Africa. He became a militant activist who fought for black rights against the white-controlled South African government. He spent twenty-eight years in prison, but eventually was freed and became the country’s first black president, an office he retained until 1999.

FIGHT AGAINST APARTHEID
For most of Mandela’s life, South Africa had been ruled under a system called apartheid. Apartheid—which means “apartness” in Afrikaans, the language of most white South Africans—required that whites, blacks, and other racial groups be separated as much as possible. In practice, apartheid meant that blacks, who made up the vast majority of the population, would be forced to be subservient, and whites, who made up less than 20 percent of the population, would have the best land, jobs, and lives. Mandela came from a prominent Xhosa family (the Xhosa comprise one of South Africa’s largest black ethnic groups) and was able to go to college and law school—a privilege most black South Africans could only dream of. Mandela, however, did not allow his privileged position to blind him to the injustice that characterized his country. He was determined to fight against it. In 1943, Mandela joined the African National Congress (ANC), a black civil rights group dedicated to ending racial discrimination in South Africa. Although he supported ANC goals, its approach was too moderate for Mandela and other young activists. In 1944, they formed the ANC Youth League, which had a more confrontational approach than the parent body. By 1947 Mandela and his allies were pushing the ANC to follow their more aggressive style. In 1960, responding to ANC-inspired antiapartheid protests, South African police fired on hundreds of unarmed demonstrators at the township of Sharpeville. The resulting uproar of protest led the whitecontrolled government to ban the ANC.

Mandela was transformed into a rebel. In 1962 he was charged with treason. At his trial he made a moving four-hour speech criticizing apartheid; the white court ignored his speech and ordered him imprisoned. He stayed in prison for the next twenty-eight years.

Mandela spent most of his prison time in Robben Island Prison, a dreary prison located off the coast of South Africa. In his memoirs, Mandela said: “Robben Island was without question the harshest, most iron-fisted outpost in the South African penal system. It was a hardship station not only for the prisoners but for the prison staff. Gone were the Coloured warders who had supplied cigarettes and sympathy. The warders were white and overwhelmingly Afrikaans-speaking, and they demanded a master-servant relationship. They ordered us to call them ‘baas,’ which we refused. The racial divide on Robben Island was absolute: there were no black warders, and no white prisoners. . . . Robben Island was like going to another country. Its isolation made it not simply another prison, but a world of its own, far removed from the one we had come from.”

During his twenty-eight years of captivity, Mandela became one of the most famous prisoners in the world. The South African government tried to portray him as a communist revolutionary and troublemaker, but most of the world grew to see him as a dedicated man fighting for justice and imprisoned for political reasons. “Free Nelson Mandela” signs, posters, and bumper stickers became commonplace in many parts of the industrialized world. The prominence of Mandela as a prisoner helped to make many people aware of the evils of apartheid and prompted them to support economic sanctions against South Africa. After 1985, the white regime, recognizing Mandela’s growing influence, tried to defuse his importance by repeatedly offering him a freedom in return for a promise to cease his political activities.

Mandela, not wishing to compromise his principles, refused these offers. Facing growing opposition from both inside and outside the country, the South African government finally recognized that apartheid had to end, and that apartheid’s most famous prisoner had to be released. President F. W. de Klerk released Mandela from prison on February 11, 1990. Mandela was chosen to be the leader of the ANC, and during the next few years he worked closely with de Klerk, his former enemy, to bring about a peaceful end to apartheid. The transition from apartheid to true democracy was marred by violence, much of it white on black, but Mandela consistently and continuously worked to calm tensions and avoid violent confrontations. In 1993, Mandela and de Klerk were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Price. In 1994, Nelson Mandela was elected the first black president of South Africa. As president, Mandela worked to heal the wounds caused by apartheid. Rather than seeking revenge, he organized the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, whose job it was to investigate the crimes that occurred under apartheid, but not to punish them. Mandela recognized that seeking justice for past crimes might have led to continued violence in South Africa; it also might have alienated many white South Africans, whose education and technical skills were required if the country were to prosper economically. In 1999 he ended his term as president and retired from political life.

Mandela’s determination, even after years of imprisonment, and his magnanimity upon his release, marks him as unique among those who have fought for human rights. Many observers expected South Africa to explode into violence as apartheid ended; it is probably Mandela’s efforts, motivated by his respect for human life, that kept this from happening. For most of his life he was one of the oppressed; when he gained power, he refused to become an oppressor. He believed in human rights, not only for his people, but for all people.

Related Video: Nelson Mandela

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Diana, Princess of Wales (1901–97)

The death of Diana, the princess of Wales, in a car crash in Paris in 1997, was met by perhaps the deepest mourning of this century. An unprecedented amount of press covered every aspect of the funeral procession and service, which was viewed on television by more than two and one-half billion people worldwide. Why so many who had never met the princess would lament her death is part of the phenomenon that had grown up around her person in the years after her marriage in 1981 to Charles, the prince of Wales and heir to British throne.

Lady Diana Spencer was born on July 1, 1961, the third daughter of Viscount Althorp (who became the eighth Earl Spencer after his father died in 1975) and Viscountess Althorp. Her family was one of England’s oldest, and her ancestry included five lines of descent from Charles II (1660–85). She went to a finishing school in Switzerland, the Institute Alpin Videmanette, but was unhappy there and convinced her father to allow her to come home.

After returning home she worked as a waitress, a charlady, and a babysitter. Diana soon found a job at the Young England kindergarten where she taught children drawing, dancing, and painting. She continued to supplement her income by working as a cleaner at her sister Sarah’s house.

Diana first met Prince Charles in November 1977 on the Althorp estate. At the time he was dating her sister Sarah. It was not until July 1980 that Diana would see Charles again. Their engagement was announced on February 24, 1981. The wedding took place on July 29, 1981. The couple and the wedding became a national obsession as people marketed and sold Charles and Di mugs, plates, bookmarks, and coins. The wedding was televised and there was a mood of universal celebration as the beautiful, shy bride married what seemed to be her “prince charming.” In the early 1990s, Diana revealed that she had begun to suffer from bulimia shortly before her marriage, an eating disorder that would haunt her for much of her life. She became depressed and believed Charles was still seeing Camilla Parker Bowles, his former mistress. Her life was plagued by depression and apparent suicide attempts, but the marriage produced two sons.

Diana gave birth to Prince William, on June 21,1982. Another son, Prince Henry, followed in September 1984. As Charles and Diana made official tours around the world, her popularity grew. Eventually, Diana overcame her shyness and grew more comfortable with photographers. Diana’s public persona emerged as a warm and caring person who loved her children deeply. She also transformed her style of clothing and became one of the most glamorous women in the world.

Diana’s marriage, however, disintegrated. Both she and Charles reportedly had affairs during their marriage. In 1991, the publication of excerpts from the book by Andrew Morton, Diana: Her True Story, shocked and horrified the royal family. Although Diana denied contributing to the book, it was widely believed by Charles—and was later confirmed—that she had cooperated with the author. The book portrayed Charles as a cruel and neglectful husband who flaunted his mistress. It also depicted the royal family as cold and indifferent. On December 9, 1992, the government announced that the two would separate, but not divorce. Diana did not surfer the humiliations that Charles did over the separation. She was elevated to a kind of secular sainthood as she toured orphanages, homeless shelters, and hospices, hugged lepers in Nepal, and touched the untouchables in India. People continued to be mesmerized by her warmth and beauty. Her involvement with charitable organizations raised hundreds of million of pounds annually.

Relations between Charles and Diana did not get any better, and in August 1996 they divorced, reportedly at the insistence of the queen. After the divorce, Diana continued her charity work, developing a special interest in ridding the world of land mines. Diana had taken her sons with her on holiday in July 1997 to the south of France, where they stayed as guests of Dodi al-Fayed, the son of a wealthy Egyptian businessman who resided in London. On August 31, 1997, shortly after leaving the Ritz Hotel in Paris, Diana and Dodi’s car crashed into a concrete dividing pillar inside the Alma Tunnel. The driver and Dodi Fayed were killed instantly. A bodyguard was seriously injured and Diana lay near death. Despite efforts to save her, she died two hours later. Later, investigators determined that the driver’s blood contained four times the legal amount of alcohol permitted.

As news of her death spread, London became engulfed in flowers. People left them along the gates of Buckingham Palace, lamp posts, park benches, and monuments. Almost every flag in the kingdom flew at half mast. Diana’s funeral was held at Westminster Abbey. In order to accommodate the 1,500,000 who were expected to line the route of the funeral procession, Charles ordered that the procession be doubled to two miles. The cortege began at Diana’s home, Kensington Palace. Behind Diana’s coffin walked Prince Philip; Earl Spencer, Diana’s brother; Charles; William; and Harry. Behind them walked five representatives from each of the one-hundred ten charities Diana had supported. Diana’s body was laid to rest on an island inside the grounds of Althorp.

Since her death, Diana has become an icon. Some believe that because Diana revealed herself as a normal, flawed person that people felt close to her. In comparison to the rest of the royal family, Diana seemed genuine and warm. Her compassion toward the sick and her insistence that her sons be raised as normal boys brought her even closer to people’s hearts.

Related Video: Diana

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Fidel Castro

Cuban president and perpetual thorn in the side of US administrations, Fidel Castro has outwitted the United States for over forty years, withstanding the Bay of Pigs invasion, CIA assassination attempts, blockades and other efforts to destabilize his regime. Castro came to power in 1958 after overthrowing Fulgencio Batista, a corrupt and unpopular dictator whose own rise to power had been facilitated by President Roosevelt. Castro began as a baseball-loving Social Democrat, with considerable support from Americans initially until he declined to accept American bank loans, believing that they had so many strings attached that they could not help bring development to Cuba. Instead, he began nationalizing US property and, by the end of 1959, announced that he was going to join the communists and begin receiving aid from the Soviet Union. After this declaration, the US began to prepare to overthrow Castro. He survived the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and Robert Kennedy’s “Operation Mongoose.” Castro then began to export his revolution, offering support to rebels and nations from Chile to Grenada in the western hemisphere, and aiding Angola in its efforts to fight the forces of apartheid in South Africa. The Cuban economy meanwhile collapsed, especially after the end of the Cold War with Soviet loans drying up, and, while the country managed to keep a social welfare system in place, opposition grew. Thus Castro met with growing repression, censoring the press, imprisoning many opponents of the regime and forcing others into exile in the US, where they joined exiles from the revolution in large Cuban communities in Florida. Efforts to liberalize Cuba in the 1990s have led many to believe that Castro’s rule may be nearing a close, but the final chapter has yet to be written.

Related Video: Fidel Castro Biography

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Mustapha Kemal (1880–1938)

More commonly known as Atatürk, soldier and father of modern Turkey, Mustapha Kemal was born in Salonica in 1880, where a museum at the current Turkish Consulate commemorates his birthplace. His father died when Mustapha was seven, and his mother brought him up. Mustapha studied at the military secondary school in Selânik, where his mathematics teacher gave him the additional name Kemal (“perfection”) because of his academic excellence. He entered the military academy at Manastır in 1895, graduated as a lieutenant decade later and was posted to Damascus.

Mustapha joined a small secret revolutionary society of reformist officers in Damascus called “Motherland and Liberty” and became an active opponent of the Porte. In 1907, when he was posted to Selânik, he joined the Committee of Union and Progress commonly known as the Young Turks. In 1908, the Young Turks seized power from Abdul Hamid II and Mustapha became a senior military fi gure. In 1911, he was send to defend Libya against the Italian invasion, and he was stranded there when the fi rst of the Balkan Wars started and was unable to take part. In July 1913, he was appointed commander of the Ottoman defenses of the Gallipoli Peninsula and in 1914 as military attaché in Sofi a. After a brief period of constitutional rule, power became vested in the triumvirate of Mehmet Talat Pasha, Ahmet Cemal Pasha, and Enver Pasha, who, through secretive negotiations, courted a German alliance. When they joined the Ottoman Empire to the side of the Central Powers during World War I, Mustapha was posted to Tekirda˘g, on the Sea of Marmara. He was then promoted to colonel and assigned the command of a division in Gallipoli. He played a vital role in the battle against the allied forces in April 1915, holding them off at Conkbayırı and on the Anafarta hills. He was promptly promoted to a brigadier general, thus acquiring the title of pasha. During 1917 and 1918, Kemal Pasha was sent to the Caucasus to fi ght against the Russians and then the Hejaz, to suppress the Arab revolt. After resigning his commission, he returned to serve in the unsuccessful defense of Palestine. In October Kemal, 1918, the Ottomans capitulated to the Allies and he became one of the leaders that favored defending Anatolia and withdrawing from territory not dominated by Turks.

Kemal Pasha, seeing that the disintegration and partition of the Ottoman Empire, even in Anatolia, was a serious possibility, arranged to be sent to Samsun, in Anatolia, with extraordinary powers, as an inspector of the Nineteenth Army and started ordering provincial governors and military commanders to resist occupation. In June 1919, he declared that the government at Constantinople held no legitimate authority and a government-in-exile should be established in Anatolia. In April 1920, a parliament, the Grand National Assembly, was formed in Ankara, and Kemal became the president. This body repudiated the Constantinople government and rejected the Treaty of Sèvres. This was a direct threat to Greece, which stood to gain the most, an empire in Anatolia, from that treaty and that country invaded Anatolia. After a series of Greek successes, in January and again in April 1921, Ismet Pasha defeated the Greek army at ˙Inönü. In July, after a third Greek offensive, Kemal took command and routed the Greeks in the 20-day Battle of Sakarya. Victory over the Greeks came in the Battle of Dumlupinar in August 1922 and this assured Turkey’s sovereignty and the Treaty of Lausanne delineated the borders.

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Kennedy Family

Joseph Kennedy (1888–1969), a self-made man who had accumulated one of the largest fortunes in the United States from Wall Street and Hollywood movies, became the American Ambassador to Britain in 1938. Descended from Irish Catholic immigrants, Kennedy’s success embodied the ragsto-riches myth of American immigration and assimilation. His appointment to the Court of St. James, which owed much to his friendship with President Roosevelt, was only a step in the Kennedy’s dramatic rise to the status of American royalty and tragic mythology.

Nonetheless, Kennedy’s isolationism and anti-Semitism during the Second World War meant the architect of Camelot was unable to gain the presidency and instead turned to his nine children by Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy The eldest, Joe Jr., the father’s first choice for president, died on a flying mission during the War. After the second son, John Fitzgerald (1917–63), survived his ordeal as commander of a torpedo boat PT 109 in the Pacific, his father orchestrated his attempt to run for the House of Representatives for Boston, MA, using his wartime heroism and the family’s Boston connections to sell him in an unfamiliar constituency In 1946 Kennedy entered Congress as one of the few successful Democrats in a year of Republican dominance and the head of a new generation of Democrats. In 1952 when Republican Eisenhower trounced Adlai Stevenson in the presidential race, Kennedy defeated Henry Cabot Lodge in Massachusetts’ Senate race, and soon thereafter married Jacqueline Bouvier, an elegant young journalist with intellectual and social credentials as well as her own features of the Kennedy legend.

Meanwhile, John’s younger brother, Robert (1925–68), made a name for himself as an assistant to Joseph McCarthy in the attempt to purge communists from all branches of the government. Robert’s connection with McCarthy would later seem anomalous in light of his much-touted radical credentials. Yet his father had tended to see Roosevelt’s internationalism though the prism of communist or Jewish conspiracy.

After a less than distinguished period in the Senate, John Kennedy ran for the presidency in 1960, where the Kennedy machine defeated consummate parliamentarian and Texas Senator Lyndon B. Johnson for the nomination and barely defeated Richard Nixon in the general elections. With help from friends, John Kennedy also had become the celebrated author of Profiles in Courage (1954), for which he earned a Pulitzer Prize. At the same time, Robert matched Nixon in campaign strategy including helping to get Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. released from jail in the week before the election, swinging many African American votes to Kennedy (with a poor civil-rights record) and providing the slim margin of victory.

JFK created a special moment for the Kennedy myth, epitomized in the epithet “Camelot,” linking his regime to the mythical age of King Arthur. The president’s reliance on his family, especially his father’s advice, and his younger brother continued with Robert as an activist Attorney-General in civil rights and a key role in Cuban interventions. Following JFK’s assassination—again a defining moment for the nation— Robert continued serving Lyndon Johnson, although his contempt for the Texan made this short-lived, and he seized the opportunity of a vacant New York Senate seat. In 1968, following Eugene McCarthy’s strong showing against Johnson in the New Hampshire primary “Bobby” Kennedy joined the race for the presidency After winning the California primary in June, however, he was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan. This left Edward Moore “Ted” Kennedy as the remaining son (the daughters had public but less political and sometimes tragic lives). “Inheriting” the Massachusetts Senate seat, he had developed a strong reputation as a good legislator without the charisma of John or the political savvy of Robert. Nevertheless, the Kennedy mystique might have gained him the White House but for a July 1969 incident at Chappaquiddick, in which Edward drove off a bridge, drowning Mary Jo Kopechne. Kennedy’s failure to report the accident immediately to police led to the widespread suspicion that he had been drunk. When he later tried to wrest the Democratic Party nomination from Jimmy Carter in 1980, the incident and other rumors haunted him. As the third most senior senator, Edward has remained a powerful liberal voice in the Democratic Party. In the next generation, while Kennedy “cousins”—including member of Congress Joseph P. Kennedy II (Massachusetts), Patrick Kennedy (Rhode Island) and Maryland Lieutenant-Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend—have been visible in politics and media, John F.Kennedy Jr., became the focus of the family mystique. Since his birth to the charismatic first family and the photograph of him saluting his father’s cortege in 1963, he has been treated by media and the public as a prince whose time on the throne would come. His legal career and political magazine George were followed in detail, as were his dating with and marriage to Carolyn Bessette. When, in July 1999, he crashed his single-engine plane at Martha’s Vineyard en route to a Kennedy clan wedding in Hyannisport (although he was not qualified for the flight), the incident was treated as a national tragedy by media and government—and a tragic myth of the rise and fall of royalty brought full circle.

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Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)

A philosopher and political economist, Friedrich Engels is best known as Karl Marx’s lifetime friend and ally. Engels was born in Barmen, present-day Wuppertal, Germany on November 28, 1820, the eldest son of a successful textile manufacturer. The works of the radical German poet Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) and the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) greatly influenced Engels. The German Socialist Moses Hess (1812–1875) converted Engels to Communist beliefs. While passing through Paris in 1844, Engels met Marx, and their lifelong association began.

In Manchester, England, Engels came into contact with chartism, the movement for extension of suffrage to workers. He contributed to the Northern Star and other publications and made a study of political economy. His experience and studies convinced him that politics and history could be explained only in terms of the economic development of society. He fi rmly believed that the social evils of the time were the inevitable result of the age-old institution of private property. These conclusions were embodied in a historical study, Condition of the Working Class in England (1844), a creditable piece of factual research that was highly praised by Karl Marx and established Engels’s reputation as a revolutionary political economist.

In 1844, Engels visited Marx in Paris. Marx had published works sympathetic to communism. The two men found that they had arrived independently at identical views on capitalism. Engels wrote that there was virtually “complete agreement in all theoretical fi elds.” Their many-sided collaboration, which continued until the death of Marx in 1883, had two principal aspects: systematic development of the principles of communism, later known as Marxism; and the organization of an international Communist movement. Lesser aspects of their collaboration included journalistic writing for the New York Tribune and other publications.

In elaborating Communist ideas and principles, the two men delved into the field of philosophy but subsequently turned to other fi elds. Marx dealt particularly with political thought, political economy, and economic history; Engels’s interests included the physical sciences, mathematics, anthropology, military science, and languages. The Communist Manifesto (1848), written by Marx, partly on the basis of a draft prepared by Engels, influenced all subsequent Communist literature and is regarded as a classic articulation of modern Communist views.

After the death of Marx in 1883, Engels, in his own words, had to play the first fiddle for the fi rst time. He did it through his writings that suggested the “orthodox” ways of interpreting Marx and through advising numerous newly emerging Marxist groups in various countries. Sometimes Engels tried to serve as a moderating influence, raising his voice against extreme emphasis on “revolutionary violence.” He could not, however, prevent Leninist-Stalinist orthodoxy from shaping some of the most oppressive totalitarian regimes of the time. Engels died in London on August 5, 1895, long before it all happened; but his name, just as the name of Marx, cannot be dissociated from the most traumatic experiment of the twentieth century. Engels was also a military critic, and he held out the hope that the universal conscription common in his time might become the vehicle of social revolution—a hope not wholly unfounded.

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Anatoly Yevgenyevich Karpov

Russian chess player and longtime world champion, the youngest player ever awarded the title of Soviet Master. Born in Zlatoust, Russia (then part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics), Karpov learned to play chess at age six. He was tutored by former world champion Mikhail Botvinnik when he was 13, and at age 15 Karpov was awarded the title Soviet Master. He attended Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) University, where he studied economics, English, and Spanish.

After winning the World Junior Championship in 1969, Karpov achieved a string of successes in major chess tournaments, earning the title of International Grandmaster in 1970. In 1974 he became the official challenger for the world championship title held by American grandmaster Bobby Fischer. When Fischer refused to play Karpov, the Fédération Internationale des Échecs (FIDE) named Karpov world champion by default. During the next two years Karpov won seven first prizes in major tournaments, and in 1978 and 1981 he successfully defended his world champion title against Viktor Korchnoi, a grandmaster who had defected from the Soviet Union during the 1970s.
In 1985 Karpov lost the world championship to Russian grandmaster Garry Kasparov. Karpov’s attempts to regain the championship from Kasparov in 1987 and 1990 were unsuccessful. In 1993 Karpov failed to qualify as the challenger for the world championship match.

In 1993 Kasparov and challenger Nigel Short of England rejected the FIDE and played for a rival organization, the Professional Chess Association (PCA); Karpov played a FIDE-authorized match with Jan Timman of The Netherlands. Kasparov and Karpov both won their respective championship matches, and both claimed the title of world champion. In 1994, in an international tournament at Linares, Spain, Karpov finished in first place without losing a game, one of the greatest successes of his career. Karpov defended his FIDE title in 1998 but lost it in 1999 when he refused to agree to the organization’s tournament format. His autobiography, Karpov on Karpov, was published in 1990.

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Garry Kimovich Kasparov

Chess player and longtime world champion, who competes for Russia. At the age of 22 he became the youngest world chess champion in history. Born Garri Weinstein in Baku, Azerbaijan, in what was then the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), he learned chess from his father, who died when Garri was seven years old. He subsequently adopted his mother’s maiden name, and his first name is now widely spelled as “Garry.”

At the age of 12 Kasparov won the Azerbaijan championship and the USSR junior championship, and at the age of 16 he won the world junior championship. In 1980, at the age of 17, he earned the International Grandmaster title. Two years later Kasparov became a candidate for the world championship, and in 1984 he earned the right to challenge the world champion, Russian Anatoly Karpov. Their first match was stopped by Florencio Campomanes of the Philippines, president of the Fédération Internationale des Échecs (FIDE), after it had lasted six months without a deciding result. In 1985 Kasparov won a match against Karpov and became the world champion. He defended his title by beating Karpov in 1986, then tied a match with him in 1987 (FIDE rules permit a champion to keep the title if the match ends in a tie). Kasparov beat Karpov again in 1990 and retained his championship.

When Karpov failed to qualify to challenge Kasparov for the world championship in 1993, Kasparov and British challenger Nigel Short broke away from the FIDE and held a championship match under the governance of the Professional Chess Association (PCA). Spurned by Kasparov, the FIDE sanctioned a championship match between Karpov and Dutch grandmaster Jan Timman. Kasparov and Karpov won their respective matches, and both claimed the title of world champion. In 1995 Kasparov retained his PCA title by defeating Indian challenger Viswanathan Anand, though the association fell apart soon afterward.

In 1996 Kasparov competed against an International Business Machines (IBM) computer named Deep Blue, the first time a world champion had competed against a computer under standard match conditions. Deep Blue, operated by a team of IBM programmers, was capable of processing millions of chess positions per second. Applying this massive computational power, a technique of artificial intelligence known as brute force, Deep Blue won the first game of the match to become the first computer to defeat a world champion under regulation time controls. Kasparov subsequently defeated Deep Blue by a score of 4 games to 2 to win the match. A year later, however, Kasparov accepted a rematch against an enhanced version of Deep Blue, capable of processing 200 million chess positions per second. Although Kasparov won the first game, he was defeated in the six-game series 3.5 games to 2.5 games. It was the first time an international grandmaster lost a series to a computer.

In November 2000 Kasparov lost his world title in a match against his former pupil, Vladimir Kramnik of Russia. The match was sponsored by a British Internet company and was not recognized by FIDE, which organized a competing world championship tournament.

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Joseph Stalin (Josif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili) (1879–1953) Soviet dictator

The future dictator of the Soviet Union was born Josif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili to illiterate peasant parents in Georgia in the southern Caucuses. Some historians have attributed his tyrannical temperament to the frequent beatings he received from his father when he was growing up. His mother encouraged him to become a priest in the Russian Orthodox Church, and he studied for the priesthood until he was almost 20. However, he fell under the sway of Karl Marx rather than God, and he was expelled from the seminary in 1899. He then became involved in the socialist underground, distributing Marxist propaganda and serving as a labor agitator. Dzhugashvili was arrested by the czarist police in 1903 and sentenced to imprisonment in Siberia, but he was back in Georgia within a year. When the Social Democrats split into two factions (Mensheviks and Bolsheviks), he joined the more militant Bolsheviks under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin. In 1908 he was arrested again and sent into exile but managed to escape. The next several years were marked by other arrests, narrow escapes, and secret trips abroad on behalf of Lenin to raise support for the Bolsheviks. During this period Dzhugashvili assumed the pseudonym Stalin (meaning “man of steel”) and was elevated by Lenin to the Central Committee, the highest body of the Bolshevik Party (later the Communist Party).

In 1913 Stalin was again arrested and again exiled to Siberia, to be freed only when the monarchy was toppled by revolution in 1917. He then established a base in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) and became editor of Pravda, the Communist Party’s mouthpiece. In 1919 he was elected a member of the Politburo, the Communist Party’s most important decision-making body. He also became head of the Commissariat for Nationality Affairs, a position that was of crucial importance because the new Soviet regime was struggling to maintain control over the country’s disparate ethnic groups and nationalities in the midst of civil war, which lasted from 1918 to 1921. Stalin was directly involved in planning military strategy against counterrevolutionary forces—the Whites—as well as against Polish forces in the war between Russia and Poland (1920–21). His decisions were disastrous and put him at loggerheads with Leon Trotsky, the commissar of war and heir apparent to Lenin.

After the Communist victory, Stalin quietly built up organizational strength. In 1923 he was elected general secretary of the Communist Party, a position he used as his power base. Lenin, who was seriously ill at this point, was beginning to harbor deep misgivings and wrote a “testament” in which he cautioned against allowing Stalin to succeed him. But Stalin continued his inexorable rise to power after Lenin’s death in 1924. For the next few years he was obliged to outmaneuver a number of rivals, including Nikolai Bukharin, Lev Kamenev, and Grigory Zinovyev. But it was only after he had succeeded in marginalizing Trotsky, Stalin (left) with top Soviet leader Sergey Kirov (later assassinated) (Library of Congress) who was forced into exile, that he was able to secure uncontested power. (Trotsky was assassinated on Stalin’s orders in Mexico City in 1940.) Thereafter, from 1928 until his death in 1953, Stalin was effectively in complete control over the party and the country.

With the economy in a state of decline, Stalin abandoned Lenin’s New Economic Policy, which allowed some free-market commerce, in favor of a policy of collectivization of the agricultural sector to raise output and bolster efficiency. Although the policy was promoted as a boon to peasants, it was vigorously resisted by small farmers, known as kulaks, who were now being called upon to sacrifice their land and become members of a collective farm. The new policy threatened not only their livelihood but a traditional way of life that had endured for generations. Stalin forcibly suppressed opposition, characterizing the kulaks as capitalist parasites and using special Shock Brigades to bring them to heel. The kulaks were either shot or sent to Siberia.

Between 1929 and 1933, as collectivization was being carried out, millions of people lost their lives—5 million in the Ukraine alone, according to some estimates—mostly on account of a famine that resulted from the massive disruption to agricultural production. At the same time, Stalin moved rapidly to industrialize Russia—regarded as one of the poorest nations in Europe before 1914—introducing a succession of five-year plans. The ramped-up production levels did yield extraordinary gains that exceeded Germany’s pace of industrialization in the 19th century and Japan’s earlier in the 20th century. To subsidize this ambitious program, Stalin relied to a great degree on wealth he appropriated from the people. However ruthless his regime, he is also credited with improving the health of the Soviet populace with aggressive immunization campaigns against typhus, cholera, and malaria and improving and expanding the educational system. In the early 1930s Stalin consolidated absolute power by carrying out purges of political opponents, real or imagined— among them many old Bolsheviks. Between 1936 and 1937—a period known as the Great Terror—several once-powerful Communist Party officials were convicted in “show trials” and either shot or sent to the GULAG—the camps in Siberia and elsewhere. There were four major purge trials during these years: the Trial of the Sixteen; the Trial of the Seventeen; the Trial of the Red Army Generals; and finally, in March 1938, the Trial of the Twenty-One.

The KGB, the successor to the NKVD (the Soviet secret police under Stalin), estimated that 681,692 people were shot between 1937 and 1938, although this figure might be an undercount. Millions of people were arrested, often in the dead of night, on the basis of trumped-up charges or none at all. (Historians are divided as to how many million victims there actually were, with estimates ranging from eight to 20 million; some put the number as high as 50 million.)

Stalin is thought to have personally signed as many as 40,000 death warrants of political opponents. For all his cunning, Stalin appears to have been taken in by Adolf HITLER’s assurances that the Germans had no territorial designs on the Soviet Union. In 1939 he agreed to a nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), which also contained a secret appendix that carved up Poland between the Soviet Union and Germany and allowed the USSR a free hand in the Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. In 1940 Stalin effectively decapitated the Polish leadership, ordering the execution of thousands of Polish officers in Katyn Forest after they had been captured by the Red Army, which had seized its share of the country under the terms of the nonaggression pact. The Kremlin later tried to cover up responsibility and laid the blame on the Germans for the atrocity.

In 1941 the Germans, taking Stalin by surprise, launched Operation Barbarosa, the code name for their invasion of the Soviet Union. Initially Germany scored major gains. The Red Army was at a disadvantage because its leadership had been crippled by Stalin after he had purged so many of his top generals. There is no doubt that the Soviets suffered the most during World War II and yet were responsible in large part for Germany’s ultimate defeat. Approximately 22 million people (13 percent of the Soviet population)—7 million of them civilians—were killed in the war. Ironically, German aggression united the Soviet people behind Stalin against a common invader, even after so many years of misrule. Stalin cleverly played the nationalist card, downplaying ideology, to mobilize resistance to the invader. The 1943 surrender of General von Paulus’s Sixth Army to the Red Army at Stalingrad is generally considered the turning point of the war, making the German defeat inevitable.

Even before the end of the war, Stalin began to plan for the expansion of Soviet influence well beyond the borders of the USSR. As a vital wartime ally, he wrested concessions from an ailing President Franklin Roosevelt that allowed the Soviets to carve out a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe after the war. Between 1945 and 1948, the Soviets extended their influence over East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. (An independent communist regime under Josip Broz [Tito] was established in Yugoslavia.) These puppet “people’s republics” formed a military alliance known as the Warsaw Pact, which was dominated by Moscow. In a famous speech in Fulton, Missouri, British prime minister Winston Churchill declared that an “iron curtain” had descended across Europe. The phrase stuck. What became known as the cold war between the Communist empire and the West had begun.

In the early 1950s Stalin increasingly showed signs of mental and physical disability. His megalomania was only matched by his paranoia. Those closest to him were fearful, never knowing when he would single them out for disloyalty, which could mean either imprisonment or execution. In early 1953 he ordered the arrests of several Kremlin doctors whom he accused of plotting against his life. As many of these doctors were Jewish, his action raised fears that he was about to initiate an anti-Semitic campaign throughout the country. But if he were planning such a pogrom, he never lived long enough to order it. On March 1, 1953, Stalin collapsed after an all-night dinner whose guests included Lavrenti Beria, head of the secret police, and Nikita Khrushchev, who would later become Soviet premier. He died four days later, having never regained consciousness. Officially the cause of death was a cerebral hemorrhage, but Vyacheslav Molotov, the foreign minister, claimed in his memoirs that Beria had poisoned Stalin.

Since Stalin’s death, historians have quarreled about how he should be judged. For example, in his biography Stalin: Breaker of Nations, Robert Conquest found that there was “something in [Stalin’s] character best thought of as an absence of life in its fullest sense.” He characterized Stalin as a “vast, dark figure looming over the century,” who was incapable of any sort of sympathetic human relationship. On the other hand, Robert Service in his portrait of the Soviet dictator, Stalin: A Biography, argues that while indeed Stalin was “as wicked a man as has ever lived” and someone who suffered from a “dangerously damaged” personality, he was nonetheless “hard-working,” “capable of kindness to relatives,” a “ruler of great assiduity,” a “fluent and thoughtful writer,” and “a delightful purveyor of jokes and mimicry.” In addition, Service finds him “a thoughtful man” who “tried to make sense of the universe as he found it.” Service allows that he could be guilty of trying to humanize Stalin but points out that “[i]f the likes of Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Pol Pot are represented as having been ‘animals,’ ‘monsters’ or ‘killing machines,’ we shall never be able to discern their successors.” In Russia, too, Stalin’s reputation has undergone a resurrection of sorts. Denounced by Khrushchev for his excesses at a famous speech delivered in secret to the 20th Communist Party Congress, Stalin has enjoyed renewed popularity among some Russians who see him as a symbol of former Soviet glory. In 2005 the government announced a plan to erect a statue of Stalin in Moscow after a long period in which his once-ubiquitous image had been stripped from practically all public places. The backers of legislation to raise the statue maintained that Stalin should be honored for his leadership in World War II.

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The Father of America (George Washington)

George Washington is rightly known as “the father of his country.” No figure had a more central role during the American Revolution and early national period. Even after his death he remained the preeminent embodiment of national character. To understand the trajectory of Washington’s career is to understand that of early American history.

EARLY YEARS
Washington was born 22 February 1732, the son of a wealthy Virginia planter. He received irregular schooling from the ages of seven to fifteen. His father died when he was only eleven, and he became the ward of his half-brother Lawrence, who was married to Anne Fairfax. The Fairfax family was one of the wealthiest and most influential in early Virginia, and young Washington benefited from their patronage. Washington’s early years were spent as a surveyor, a profession that kindled his enduring interest in George Washington.

Washington eventually became the heir to Lawrence’s estate, including Mount Vernon, which would serve as Washington’s lifelong home; his inheritance made him one of the wealthiest planters in Virginia. In 1759 he added significantly to his holdings when he married the wealthy widow Martha Dandridge. The couple did not have children. Washington spent his early life as a very successful planter. He was an assiduous caretaker of his own property, often experimenting with new farming techniques. Over time, Washington shifted his farm production from tobacco to wheat, which helped save him from the crippling debt that affected so many other Virginia planters. He served in a number of local offices as well as in the Virginia House of Burgesses.

In contrast to many other Virginians, Washington, though a slaveholder, eventually charted what was a somewhat progressive path for his time. Despite eventually having more slaves than he could productively employ and their upkeep added to his expenses, he refused to sell his slaves because he did not want to break up slave families. In his will, he stipulated that all of his slaves (with the exception of his wife’s dower slaves) were to be freed upon his wife’s death.

Washington gained military experience during the French and Indian War (1754–1763). He served in a number of posts, including as British General Edward Braddock’s aide-de-camp; his coolness, bravery, and resourcefulness when Braddock’s force was ambushed gained him the confidence of his fellow Virginians. He was eventually appointed commander in chief of all of Virginia’s troops during the conflict. After the war he resigned his commission. He retired once again to life as a planter and seemed likely to finish his life as a wealthy, respected Virginia gentleman. The looming imperial crisis would change all of that and make Washington one of the most famous figures in the Western world.

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
After Washington resigned his commission during the French and Indian War, he tried to get a regular commission in the British army. If he had been successful, the course of the future nation would likely have been substantially different. His attempt reflected the common aspirations of elite provincial Americans for acceptance among the elite of British society. The unwillingness of British gentlemen to give their American cousins what Americans felt was their due helped sow resentments that eventually led people like Washington to choose the path of resistance. Washington quickly showed himself to be an ardent Patriot. He was chosen to be a Virginia delegate to both the First and Second Continental Congresses and, in 1775, was chosen commander in chief of the Continental Army. His appointment was, in part, due to bargaining with the delegates from New England, who were willing to give the honor of command to a Virginian so as to tie that powerful colony firmly to the cause of Revolution, most of the burden of which New England had borne up to that point.

Washington accepted the appointment and rode north to oppose the British forces that had gathered at Boston. Washington was not a superior tactician; if judged solely by his performance on the battlefield, he was a mediocre general. He showed daring and élan with his nighttime crossing of the Delaware and his surprise attacks and victories at Trenton and Princeton, and his decisive plan to capture Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown was a model piece of strategy. But he also blundered repeatedly, most severely during the Battle of New York in 1776. He divided his force in the face of superior numbers and almost allowed his army to be trapped by the British navy.

Washington’s greatness lay not in his tactical brilliance but in his strength of character, which was largely responsible for holding the army together. As long as Washington could keep a viable army in the field, the Americans were, in some sense, winning the war. Washington did just that, despite tremendous challenges. His original recruits were raw, untrained colonials who often signed up for short enlistments, yet he managed to create a disciplined fighting force, even though his army was rarely supplied with the food and equipment it needed. It was said that, during the winter, you could follow the path of the army by the bloody footprints left by shoeless feet.

The Continental Congress not only failed to supply him adequately but frequently complained about his generalship. Subordinates made at least two attempts to displace him. Through his adroit management, he also managed to prevent a mutiny at the end of the war by disillusioned and discouraged officers. Despite all of these difficulties, Washington persevered and, by doing so, brought the army to eventual victory. After the Treaty of Paris had been signed in 1783, officially ending the war, Washington rode to Annapolis, Maryland, and, appearing before the  ontinental
Congress, resigned his commission. Echoing Cincinnatus, the Roman general who did not attempt to seize power but returned to his farm after leading his army to victory, Washington’s gesture gained him immeasurable fame and admiration. That act alone increased his prestige as much as anything else he did in his lifetime.

PRESIDENCY
Washington knew that the work of the Revolution was unfinished. His personal experiences under the Articles of Confederation convinced him that a stronger union was the only safeguard for the future of the nation. But he himself did not expect to take part in this work. After pledging to retire from public life, he did just that and returned to Mount Vernon to repair his fortunes, which had been severely damaged by the war. But the 1780s proved a turbulent and difficult time for the new nation. At the behest of several friends, Washington eventually agreed to take part in the constitutional convention at Philadelphia. When he arrived, he was quickly elected president of the proceedings. Although he played almost no part in the debates, his silent presence played an essential role in the eventual shape of the government.

Everyone expected Washington to be the first president, and thus the delegates were willing to give the office powers that they would never have bestowed on another man. In addition, his prestige was essential to the eventual ratification of the Constitution. Although many were frightened by the additional powers being given to a central government only a few short years after concluding a war against another centralized power, a great many of those people trusted Washington to pursue a moderate course. After the document was ratified, Washington was unanimously elected to the presidency and, as he traveled north to New York City, was met by cheering crowds along the way. When he arrived, he and others had to invent a new government almost from whole cloth. The Constitution is remarkable for its brevity, and many of the crucial details of governing had to be established.

One of Washington’s first tasks was establishing what sort of tone he would take as president. No one was certain how a chief executive should be treated in a republican government. He was not a king, but neither was he a common man. Washington eschewed some of the trappings of high office: he expressed a preference for a simple title, “Mr. President,” rather than some of the elaborate titles proposed. But he limited his availability to the public to weekly receptions. He also wore a sword and rode in a carriage and four. He attempted to establish a proper sense of dignity for the office; but some began to whisper against him, seeing his actions as signs of creeping royalism.

During his two terms (1789–1797), although Washington tried to keep himself above partisan disputes, he leaned more and more heavily to the side of the Federalists, supporters of the administration who advocated a stronger central government and a more deferential society, as well as a foreign policy that favored Great Britain. He backed Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton’s financial plans, including the assumption of state debts and the creation of a national bank. He insisted on neutrality when war broke out between Great Britain and the newly republican France despite America’s original treaty with France (1778), which had promised perpetual alliance. These actions and others earned him the enmity of the Republican Party, which had emerged in opposition to the Federalists. He found himself the butt of vicious partisan attack in the newspapers. For someone who considered himself above party, who longed for retirement, and who worried constantly about his reputation, this partisan controversy was galling.

Even after retiring to private life, Washington was called on one more time to be commander in chief of the provisional army in case of a possible war with France, although in the end war was avoided. He died on 14 December 1799, an appropriate date for a man who was so thoroughly of the eighteenth century.

NATIONAL SYMBOL
After his death, Washington’s symbolic importance to the nation remained. Freed from the partisan bickering that had dogged his final years, he quickly became not just father to his country but a role model for its people. During his lifetime, Washington unavoidably became entangled in the nation’s political divisions; but Washington as symbol served a unifying role. No one played a more important role in refashioning his character to fit the new political realities than Mason Locke Weems, an itinerant preacher and bookseller—and inventor of the story of young George Washington and the cherry tree—who wrote the astoundingly popular Life of Washington. Weems remade Washington as a common man who could serve as a proper role model for the nation, and this formulation provided the grounds for future generations’ veneration. Throughout the history of the United States, Washington has continued to serve as a symbol for the nation and its ideals. Although his eighteenth-century manner now seems stiff and foreign to us, he remains the symbolic father of his country, the indispensable man.

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How to add url (submit) blog or website to google

One way to improve Search Engine Optimization, then you need to register your blog or website to search engines, among the famous google, yahoo, msn and altavista.

General tools that work to calculate the ranking of a website's traffic using data from four search engines, the rest from a combination of the other search engines. So the obligation to register a website url to our search engine page, so that our website and can be identified and index by Search engine's.

To register url (blog) to google website, you can use the link below

http://www.google.com/addurl

Following page will appear, type your website url, comment (description or title of your blog), type the captcha code that appears random


Click the Add button URL,

If successful a success message will appear from google

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