Confucius was a Chinese teacher and thinker, who believed in people’s ability to improve themselves. His family name was Kong and Confucius is a European version of the Chinese name Kong- fuzi, meaning “Master Kong.” Confucianism is often called a religion, but it is really a system of values for living a good life.
Confucius was born in 551 BC in Qufu into a poor family. His exact birthday is not known, though many people in eastern Asia celebrate it on September 28. His father died when he was 3 years old and the mother educated the boy at home. Later teachers helped him learn many subjects, including music, arithmetic, chariot riding, calligraphy, shooting with a bow and arrow, Chinese poetry and history. At the age of nineteen Confucius married, but divorced four years later.
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Medgar Evers gave his life for equal rights for African Americans. His assassination called attention to racial hatred in the southern United States. He was one of the first martyrs of the civil-rights movement.
Medgar Wiley Evers was born on July 2, 1925 in Decatur, Mississippi. He was the third of four children of a small farm owner who also worked at a nearby sawmill.
During World War II he served in the U.S. Army. After the war he studied at Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College in Mississippi. He entered college in 1948, majored in business administration, and graduated in 1952.
During his senior year he married a fellow student, Myrlie Beasley. After graduation the young couple moved near Evers’s hometown.
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Neil Armstrong was the first human to stand on the Moon. In 1969 millions of people watched on television as Armstrong stepped out of his spacecraft and said, “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”
Neil Alden Armstrong was born on August 5, 1930, in Wapakoneta, Ohio. Neil was the eldest of three children of Stephen and Viola Engel Armstrong. At a young age he became interested in airplanes and on his 16th birthday Neil received his pilot’s license. The boy had to work a variety of jobs to pay for his flying lessons. Moreover, he played in a jazz band, pursuing the musical interest that remained a hobby throughout his life.
After high school Armstrong became an air cadet in the U.S. Navy. At the age of 20 Armstrong was flying combat missions in Korea. He flew 78 missions, earning three air medals.
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Anne of Brittany led the duchy of Brittany after her father, the duke, died in 1488. As the wife of two French kings, she played a significant role in the political and cultural life of France during the early years of the Renaissance. The French king Charles VIII took control of Brittany and married Anne in 1491. This led in time to the union of Brittany with France. Charles died in 1498, and the following year Anne married his successor, Louis XII. During Louis’s reign, Anne made great efforts to encourage the arts. She brought poets, painters, decorators, and translators to the court to enhance the image of the king. Anne’s daughter Claude became the wife of one French king, Francis I, and the mother of another, Henry II.
The Duke of Brittany Francis II had no sons. So, he had to raise his daughter Anne, who was born on January 25, 1477, as heir to the throne. As a result, she received an atypical education for a medieval girl. She studied foreign languages, rhetoric, logic. And the duke usually solved political problems in her presence.
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Geronimo was the legendary warrior, a leader of the Chiricahua band of the Apache people. He struggled for a Native American way of life in conflict with American frontiersmen who wanted to take the tribe’s land. The Apache lived in northern Mexico and what is now the southwestern United States.
Geronimo was born in June 1829 in No-doyohn Canyon in Arizona. At the age of 17 he became a member of his tribe’s warrior council. The Apache fought with the Mexicans. Geronimo married a woman from the Chiricahua tribe and had three children. On March 5, 1851, a detachment of 400 Mexican soldiers from the Sonora State, led by Colonel José María Carrasco, attacked the Geronimo’s camp while most of the tribe’s men went to the city to trade. His mother, wife, and three children were killed by Mexican bounty hunters. Wanting revenge, Geronimo fought even more fiercely. During the next 15 years he rose steadily as a war leader among the Apaches.
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Everyone knows that Janusz Korczak was a teacher and writer. But not everyone knows that his main profession was a doctor. In pre-war Poland, Janusz Korczak was called Pan Old Doctor.
Henryk Goldszmit, known worldwide as Janusz Korczak, was born on July 22, 1878 in Warsaw into the family of a famous Moscow lawyer and writer. Parents were not very interested in raising his son, and he grew up as a closed, shy child, immersed in the world of his fantasies.
When Henryk was seven years old, he was sent to a Russian gymnasium, where he studied Latin, French, German, Greek and many other subjects.
In 1889 the Goldszmit family experienced a great shock: the father had signs of mental illness. He was placed in a special clinic. Money for treatment soon ended, the mother had to sell paintings, porcelain, furniture… The prosperous life was over. To support the family, the young man had to give lessons to children from wealthy families. For the first time he proved himself to be a capable teacher.
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Nikolai Shchors was a wartime officer of the Russian Imperial Army, head of the division of the Red Army during the Civil War in Russia, a member of the Communist Party from the fall of 1918.
Nikolai Aleksandrovich Shchors was born on May 25 (June 6), 1895 in the village of Snovsk, the Chernigov province, in a large family of a railway worker. In July 1914 he graduated from the military paramedic school in Kiev.
On August 1, 1914 the Russian Empire entered the First World War and Nikolai received an appointment for the post of military paramedic of the artillery regiment on the rights of a volunteer. In 1914-1915 he took part in hostilities on the North-Western Front.
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