Alexander Hamilton was one of the youngest and brightest of the founders of the United States. He was the first secretary of the treasury. He worked to create a strong U.S. government.
Hamilton was born on January 11, probably in 1755, in the British West Indies. He was the illegitimate son of James Hamilton, a Scotsman, and Rachel Fawcett Lavien, daughter of a French Huguenot physician. At the age of 12 he worked as a clerk in a trading firm in St. Croix. The boy went to school in New Jersey and New York. In 1776 he left college without graduating. Hamilton joined the military during the American Revolution. From 1777 to 1781 he served with General George Washington. Noticed by Washington, Hamilton became the general’s trusted aide-de-camp. After the war Hamilton became a lawyer.
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Barack Obama was the first African American to be elected president of the United States. In 2008 he become the country’s 44th president. In 2009 Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Barack Hussein Obama II was born on August 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii. His mother, who was white, came from Kansas and his father was from Kenya. His parents divorced when the boy was 2 years old. His mother later married a man from Indonesia, and Barack lived in Indonesia between the ages of 6 and 10. Then he lived with his mother’s parents in Hawaii. His father died in 1982 at the age of 46.
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Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a writer and reformer. She helped to start the women’s rights movement in the United States. She fought to give women the right to vote in elections. Stanton was perhaps the most gifted and versatile feminist leader in American history.
Elizabeth Cady was born on November 12, 1815 in Johnstown, New York, into the family of a judge. She was the eighth of eleven children of Daniel Cady and Margaret Livingston Cady; five of her brothers and sisters died at an early age.
She was a clever girl, but couldn’t go to college, because colleges did not accept women then. Elizabeth attended Troy Female Seminary in New York. In 1840 she married a lawyer and abolitionist leader Henry Stanton. Between 1842 and 1856, the couple had six children. The seventh, unplanned, was born in 1859, when Elizabeth was 44 years old.
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Davy Crockett was famous as a fighter, lawmaker, and frontiersman in a coonskin cap. During his own lifetime he became a celebrity and folk hero. After his death he became a symbol of the American spirit.
David Crockett was born on August 17, 1786, in Hawkings County, eastern Tennessee. At age 12 he went to work as a cattle driver to help support his family. He also became an excellent rifleman and hunter. Crockett worked and traveled throughout Virginia. Several years later he decided that his lack of education limited his marriage possibilities, and he arranged to work 6 months for a nearby Quaker teacher. In return Crockett received 4 days a week of instruction. He learned to read and to write a little.
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Nelson Mandela fought against apartheid. It was an official policy of the government of South Africa that separated people according to their race and color. During World War II, Mandela joined the African National Congress (ANC), and later became one of its leaders. They fought for the freedom of the black people in South Africa. In 1962 Mandela was sentenced to five years in prison. The next year, he was found guilty on more charges and sentenced to life imprisonment. In 1990 South Africa’s president, F.W. de Klerk, ordered Mandela’s release. De Klerk, together with Mandela, worked to change South Africa into a country where all races would have equal rights. In 1994 Mandela became South Africa’s first black president.
Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was born on July 18, 1918, in Umtata, South Africa. He was the eldest child of his father’s third wife, Nosekeni Fanny. The boy was called Rolihlahla. He was given the name Nelson Mandela at age seven when he attended a mission school. He became the first member of his family to do so.
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Marcus Garvey was the leader of the worldwide movement for the rights of blacks. He was the founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). He offered new hope for working-class Blacks in the 1920s. Garvey’s clarion call for Black nationalism resonated primarily among lower- and working-class blacks and inspired numerous Black mass-appeal leaders and movements.
Marcus Mosiah Garvey was born on August 17, 1887 in Saint Ann’s Bay, Jamaica, then British colonial possession. He attended school until the age of 14. As a young man, Garvey moved to Kingston, where he worked as a printer and editor. He travelled extensively in the West Indies and Central America and lived briefly in England. Garvey became convinced that Black people suffered a sort of universal cultural and economic exploitation wherever they lived outside Africa.
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Ivan Mazepa (ca. 1644-1709) was the Ukrainian Cossack leader, Hetman.
Ivan Stepanovich Mazepa was raised in Poland and educated in the West. In 1663 he returned to Ukraine to enter the military service during the turbulent period of Ukrainian history known as the Ruin. Mazepa reached the rank of inspector general while still in his early 30s.
In 1687 he was elected hetman (chief) of the Ukrainian Cossack state. Mazepa managed to build new schools and churches, but his chief goal became the freeing of his people from Russian domination and the formation of an independent state including all of the Ukraine.
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