Louis Pasteur (27 December 1822 – 28 September 1895) was a French chemist and microbiologist best known for his remarkable breakthroughs in the causes and prevention of disease. His experiments supported the germ theory of disease, also reducing mortality from puerperal fever (childbed), and he created the first vaccine for rabies. He was best known to the general public for inventing a method to stop milk and wine from causing sickness - this process came to be called pasteurization. He is regarded as one of the three main founders of microbiology, together with Ferdinand Cohn and Robert Koch. He is also credited with dispelling the theory of spontaneous generation with his experiment employing chicken broth and a goose neck flask. He also made many discoveries in the field of chemistry, most notably the asymmetry of crystals.
The above information is based on the Pasteur article on Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, based on the GNU Free Documentation License.
Links:
Pasteur's Papers on the Germ Theory
Biographies for children: Pasteur with online activites
Pasteur's Pride a Time Magazine article from 1939
The Pasteur Museum
Louis Pasteur birthplace
Resources:
search results for Louis Pasteur
note: I have carefully chosen the above resources and consider them to be among the best available on the topic. Clicking on an image will take you to Amazon.com where you can read descriptions and reviews. If you choose to buy the title, you will be supporting this site.
Booker Taliaferro Washington (April 5, 1856 – November 14, 1915) was an American educator, orator, author and leader of the African-American community. He was freed from slavery as a child, gained an education, and as a young man was appointed to lead Tuskegee Institute, then a teachers' college for blacks. From this position, he rose into a nationally prominent role as spokesman and leader for African Americans. He was successful in building relationships with major philanthropists to contribute to education at Tuskegee and for public schools for black children in the South, as well as to donate to legal challenges to segregation and disfranchisement. From 1895-1915 he was the most powerful African-American man in the nation. Washington did much to improve the overall friendship and working relationship between the races in the United States.
Washington was the dominant figure in the African-American community in the United States from 1890 to 1915, especially after he achieved prominence for his "Atlanta Address of 1895". To many politicians and the public in general, he was seen as a popular spokesperson for African-American citizens. Representing the last generation of black leaders born into slavery, Washington was generally perceived as a credible proponent of education for freedmen in the post-Reconstruction South. Throughout the final 20 years of his life, he maintained his standing through a nationwide network of core supporters in many communities. His autobiography, Up From Slavery, first published in 1901, is still widely read today.
The above information is based on the Washington article on Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, based on the GNU Free Documentation License.
Links:
The Booker T. Washington papers digital archive, University of Illinois Press searchable index to complete annotated text of all important letters to and from Washington and all his writings.
Booker T. Washington National Monument
read Up From Slavery online
African American Odyssey: The Booker T. Washington Era a detailed Library of Congress exhibit on Washington's life, work and influence on American culture.
Legends of Tuskegee from the National Park Service
Listen to Booker T. Washington's Atlanta Address (1895)
Booker T. Washington website for teachers and children
Resources:
search results for Booker T. Washington
note: I have carefully chosen the above resources and consider them to be among the best available on the topic. Clicking on an image will take you to Amazon.com where you can read descriptions and reviews. If you choose to buy the title, you will be supporting this site.
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (March 6, 1475 – February 18, 1564), commonly known as Michelangelo, was an Italian Renaissance painter, sculpor, architect, poet, and engineer.
Michelangelo's output in every field during his long life was prodigious; when the sheer volume of correspondence, sketches and reminiscences that survive is also taken into account, he is the best-documented artist of the 16th century. Two of his best-known works, the Pietà and the David, were sculpted before he turned thirty. Despite his low opinion of painting, Michelangelo also created two of the most influential works in fresco in the history of Western art: the scenes from Genesis on the ceiling and The Last Judgment on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel in Rome.
Two biographies were published of him during his lifetime. One of them proposed that he was the pinnacle of all artistic achievement since the beginning of the Renaissance. In his lifetime he was also often called Il Divino ("the divine one"). One of the qualities most admired by his contemporaries was his terribilità, a sense of awe-inspiring grandeur, and it was the attempts of subsequent artists to imitate Michelangelo's impassioned and highly personal style that resulted in the next major movement in Western art: Mannerism.
The above information is based on the Michelangelo article on Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, based on the GNU Free Documentation License.
The Digital Michelangelo Project
Michelangelo at the Louvre Museum
Michelangelo Buonarroti at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Michelangelo Buonarroti at the National Gallery of Art
Resources:
search results for Michelangelo
note: I have carefully chosen the above resources and consider them to be among the best available on the topic. Clicking on an image will take you to Amazon.com where you can read descriptions and reviews. If you choose to buy the title, you will be supporting this site.
Henry Ford (July 30, 1863 - April 7, 1947) was the American founder of the Ford Motor Company and father of modern assembly lines used in mass production. His introduction of the Model T automobile revolutionized transportation and American industry. He was a prolific inventor and was awarded 161 U.S. patents. As owner of the Ford Company he became one of the richest and best-known people in the world. Henry Ford's intense commitment to lowering costs resulted in many technical and business innovations, including a franchise system that put a dealership in every city in North America, and in major cities on six continents.
The above information is based on the Ford article on Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, based on the GNU Free Documentation License.
Links:
Automobile History Online – Henry Ford history and photos
Full text Ford's biography My Life and Work
The Henry Ford Heritage Association
Resources:
search results for Henry Ford
note: I have carefully chosen the above resources and consider them to be among the best available on the topic. Clicking on an image will take you to Amazon.com where you can read descriptions and reviews. If you choose to buy the title, you will be supporting this site.
George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950) was an Irish playwright. Born in Dublim, he moved to London at the age of twenty and lived in England for the remainder of his life.
Although Shaw's first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, his talent was for drama, and during his career he authored more than sixty plays. Nearly all of his writings deal sternly with prevailing social problems, but are leavened by a vein of comedy to make their stark themes more palatable. Shaw examined education, marriage, religion, government, health care, and class privilege and found them all defective, but his ire was most aroused by the exploitation of the working class; his writings seldom fail to censure that abuse.
He is the only person to have been awarded both the Nobel Prize for Literature (1925) and an Oscar (1938). These were for his contributions to literature and for his work on the film Pygmalion, respectively. Shaw would have refused his Nobel Prize outright, because he had no desire for public honors, but accepted it at his wife's behest: she considered it a tribute to Ireland. He did reject the monetary award, requesting it be used to finance translation of Swedish books to English.
The above information is based on the Shaw article on Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, based on the GNU Free Documentation License.
Links:
Works by or about George Bernard Shaw at Internet Archive (scanned books original editions color illustrated)
Works by George Bernard Shaw at Project Gutenberg
The Shaw Society, UK, established in 1941
Resources:
search results for George Bernard Shaw
note: I have carefully chosen the above resources and consider them to be among the best available on the topic. Clicking on an image will take you to Amazon.com where you can read descriptions and reviews. If you choose to buy the title, you will be supporting this site.