Abraham,Martin,John,Charles Dickens ,tc.
1.Dr.Martin Luther King
Dr.Martin Luther King was a vital figure of the modern era.The movements and marches he led gave black and poor people hope and a sense of dignity.His philosophy nonviolent direct action,and his strategies of rational and nondestructive social change,galvanized the conscience of this nation and recordered its priorities.On April 4th 1968,Dr.King is assassinated as he standed talking on the balcony of his second-floor room in at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.He died at St.Joseph's Hospital from a gunshot wound in the neck.
2.Charles Dickens
'Halloa! Below there!'
When he heard a voice thus calling to him, he was standing at the door of his box, with a flag in his hand, furled round its short pole. One would have thought, considering the nature of the ground, that he could not have doubted from what quarter the voice came; but instead of looking up to where I stood on the top of the steep cutting nearly over his head, he turned himself about, and looked down the Line. There was something remarkable in his manner of doing so, though I could not have said for my life what. But I know it was remarkable enough to attract my notice, even though his figure was foreshortened and shadowed, down in the deep trench, and mine was high above him, so steeped in the glow of an angry sunset, that I had shaded my eyes with my hand before I saw him at all.
'Halloa! Below!'
From looking down the Line, he turned himself about again, and, raising his eyes, saw my figure high above him.
'Is there any path by which I can come down and speak to you?'
He looked up at me without replying, and I looked down at him without pressing him too soon with a repetition of my idle question. Just then there came a vague vibration in the earth and air, quickly changing into a violent pulsation, and an oncoming rush that caused me to start back, as though it had force to draw me down. When such vapour as rose to my height from this rapid train had passed me, and was skimming away over the landscape, I looked down again, and saw him refurling the flag he had shown while the train went by.
I repeated my inquiry. After a pause, during which he seemed to regard me with fixed attention, he motioned with his rolled-up flag towards a point on my level, some two or three hundred yards distant. I called down to him, 'All right!' and made for that point. There, by dint of looking closely about me, I found a rough zigzag descending path notched out, which I followed.
The cutting was extremely deep, and unusually precipitate. It was made through a clammy stone, that became oozier and wetter as I went down. For these reasons, I found the way long enough to give me time to recall a singular air of reluctance or compulsion with which he had pointed out the path.
When I came down low enough upon the zigzag descent to see him again, I saw that he was standing between the rails on the way by which the train had lately passed, in an attitude as if he were waiting for me to appear. He had his left hand at his chin, and that left elbow rested on his right hand, crossed over his breast. His attitude was one of such expectation and watchfulness that I stopped a moment, wondering at it.
I resumed my downward way, and stepping out upon the level of the railroad, and drawing nearer to him, saw that he was a dark sallow man, with a dark beard and rather heavy eyebrows. His post was in as solitary and dismal a place as ever I saw. On either side, a dripping-wet wall of jagged stone, excluding all view but a strip of sky; the perspective one way only a crooked prolongation of this great dungeon; the shorter perspective in the other direction terminating in a gloomy red light, and the gloomier entrance to a black tunnel, in whose massive architecture there was a barbarous, depressing, and forbidding air. So little sunlight ever found its way to this spot, that it had an earthy, deadly smell; and so much cold wind rushed through it, that it struck chill to me, as if I had left the natural world.
Before he stirred, I was near enough to him to have touched him. Not even then removing his eyes from mine, he stepped back one step, and lifted his hand.
This was a lonesome post to occupy (I said), and it had riveted my attention when I looked down from up yonder. A visitor was a rarity, I should suppose; not an unwelcome rarity, I hoped? In me, he merely saw a man who had been shut up within narrow limits all his life, and who, being at last set free, had a newly-awakened interest in these great works. To such purpose I spoke to him; but I am far from sure of the terms I used; for, besides that I am not happy in opening any conversation, there was something in the man that daunted me.
He directed a most curious look towards the red light near the tunnel's mouth, and looked all about it, as if something were missing from it, and then looked it me.
That light was part of his charge? Was it not?
He answered in a low voice,--'Don't you know it is?'
The monstrous thought came into my mind, as I perused the fixed eyes and the saturnine face, that this was a spirit, not a man. I have speculated since, whether there may have been infection in his mind.
In my turn, I stepped back. But in making the action, I detected in his eyes some latent fear of me. This put the monstrous thought to flight.
3.Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin in Hardin County, Kentucky, on February 12th, 1809. The son of Thomas Lincoln, a frontiersman whose own father had been killed by Native Americans, the years leading up to Abraham's adulthood were marred by poverty. His mother, Nancy, died of "milk sickness" when Abraham was ten, and the family moved to Indiana. The year after, Thomas Lincoln married Sarah Bush Johnston, who encouraged Abraham's education. Though he had little formal schooling, he could read and write. In 1830, when Abraham was twenty-one years old, his family moved again, this time to Illinois, and Abraham decided to go his own way.
Abraham joined the Illinois militia during the Black Hawk War. In 1832, he ran and was defeated for Illinois State Legislature, but in 1834, at age twenty-four, he ran again and was elected as a Whig and served for four terms. After receiving his law license in 1836, Lincoln married Mary Todd on November 4th, 1842. In 1847, Lincoln was elected to and served one term in the U.S. House of Representatives. In 1856, Lincoln changed his political alliance to the Republican Party, but lost a Senate election to Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas. By 1860, Lincoln was a well-known presidential candidate. He was inaugurated in March of 1861 as the sixteenth President of the United States.
During 1861, southern states were trying to secede from the Union of the United States and form their own country. Lincoln, though against the separation, made clear in his inaugural address that he held no malice toward the South: "There need be no blood-shed or violence, and there shall be none unless it be forced upon the national authority. The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere." On April 12th, 1861, the Confederates opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston, and the Civil War began. Two years later, on January 1st, 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, a declaration that stated that "all slaves in States or parts of States then in rebellion" were free. On April 9th, 1865, General Lee surrendered to General Grant at Appomattox, ending the war.
"I leave you, hoping that the lamp of liberty will burn in your bosoms until there shall no longer be a doubt that all men are created free and equal." (Abraham Lincoln)
On April 14th, 1865 at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C., Abraham Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes-Booth. He died on April 15th from the wound. Though he never authored any books, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, given on November 19th, 1863, is one of the best-known speeches of any decade. "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this."
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