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MLA - Michals, Debra. "Maria Mitchell." National Women's History Museum. National Women's History Museum, 2015. Date accessed.

Chicago - Michals, Debra. "Maria Mitchell." National Women's History Museum. 2015. www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/maria-mitchell.

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The first female astronomer in the United States, Maria Mitchell was also the first American scientist to discover a comet, which brought her international acclaim. Additionally, she was an early advocate for science and math education for girls and the f

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Maria Mitchell (1818-1889) was one of the first famous female astronomers. She was born in Nantucket, Massachusetts, and went to private schools in her life. Her love for astronomy began when her father began maintaining a small observatory. The accomplishment that brought her international recognizition was when she discovered a telescopic comet in October of 1847. The year after she became the first women elected at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Afterwards she became professor of astronomy at Vassar College in 1865 and stayed there until she retired in 1888.

Discovery of Miss Mitchell's Comet

Using a telescope, she discovered "Miss Mitchell's Comet" (Comet 1847 VI, modern designation is C/1847 T1) on October 1, 1847, at 10:30 pm. Mitchell published a notice of her discovery, under her father's name, in Silliman's Journal in January 1848. The following month, she submitted her calculation of the comet's orbit, ensuring her claim as the original discoverer. That year, she was celebrated at the Seneca Falls Convention for the discovery and calculation.

Some years previously, King Frederick VI of Denmark had established gold medal prizes to each discoverer of a "telescopic comet" (too faint to be seen with the naked eye). The prize was to be awarded to the "first discoverer" of each such comet (note that comets are often independently discovered by more than one person). Maria Mitchell won one of these prizes, and this gave her worldwide fame, since the only previous women to discover a comet were the astronomers Caroline Herschel and Maria Margarethe Kirch. Her discovery and recognition by the Danish government legitimized American astronomy in Europe, who previously looked down on American astronomers.

A temporary question of priority existed because Francesco de Vico had independently discovered the same comet two days later, but had reported it to European authorities first; however, this was resolved in Mitchell's favor. The prize was awarded in 1848 by the new king Christian VIII.

Academic achievements

Mitchell began recording sun spots by eye in 1868, but from 1873, her students and she at Vassar College were able to make daily photographic records, allowing more accurate records. These were the first regular photographs of the sun, and they allowed her to explore the hypothesis that sun spots were cavities rather than clouds on the surface of the sun. For the total solar eclipse of July 1878, Mitchell and five assistants travelled with a 4-inch telescope to Denver for observations.

She became the first woman elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1848 and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1850. In 1881, reporting to the Association for the Advancement of Women, Mitchell expressed surprise that no women had been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences after her. Mitchell was also one of the first women elected to the American Philosophical Society (1869, at the same meeting Mary Somerville and Elizabeth Cabot Agassiz were elected). She later worked at the U.S. Nautical Almanac Office, calculating tables of positions of Venus, and traveled in Europe with Nathaniel Hawthorne and his family.

She became professor of astronomy at Vassar College in 1865, the first person appointed to the faculty. She was also named as director of the Vassar College Observatory. Thanks in part to Mitchell's guidance, Vassar College enrolled more students in mathematics and astronomy than Harvard University from 1865 to 1888. After teaching there for some time, she learned that despite her reputation and experience, her salary was less than that of many younger male professors. Mitchell and Alida Avery, the only other woman on the faculty at that time, insisted on a salary increase, and got it. She taught at the college until her retirement in 1888, one year before her death.

In 1843, she left the Quaker faith and followed Unitarian principles. In protest against slavery, she stopped wearing clothes made of southern cotton. She was friends with various suffragists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and co-founded the Association for the Advancement of Women in 1873.

Personal life

Mitchell became a celebrity following her discovery and awards, with hundreds of newspaper articles written about her in the subsequent decade. At her home in Nantucket, she entertained prominent academics of the time such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, and Sojourner Truth.

Mitchell never married, but remained close to her immediate family throughout her life. After she retired from Vassar College in 1888, she lived in Lynn, Massachusetts, with her sister Kate and her family. Very few of her personal documents remain from before 1846. The Mitchell family believes she witnessed personal papers of fellow Nantucketers blown through the street by the Great Fire of 1846, and because fear of another fire persisted, she burned her own documents to keep them private.

Images for kids

Maria Mitchell (seated) inside the dome of the Vassar College Observatory, with her student Mary Watson Whitney (standing), ca. 1877.

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Maria Mitchell (1818-1889) was one of the first famous female astronomers. She was born in Nantucket, Massachusetts, and went to private schools in her life. Her love for astronomy began when her father began maintaining a small observatory. The accomplishment that brought her international recognizition was when she discovered a telescopic comet in October of 1847.

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Next time you glance into the night sky, you might spot "Miss Mitchell's Comet," which was named after America's first professional female astronomer. Like her comet, Maria Mitchell came a long way to become discovered.

She was born on August 1, 1818, in Nantucket, MA. In those days, science was a subject only boys studied. But Mitchell was fascinated by surveying and navigation, and she urged her father to teach her how to use a telescope to scan the heavens.

She learned to use the positions of heavenly bodies to determine one's own location on Earth, a skill used in navigation. At 14, she was such an expert that whaling crews used her computations to help guide their voyages.

On the night of October 1, 1847, Mitchell was scanning the sky from the roof of the bank where her father worked as a cashier. She spotted a small object that, to her knowledge, had never been recorded. It turned out to be a comet, and it became known as "Miss Mitchell's Comet," with the formal title of C/1847 T1.

After the discovery made her famous, she quit her job as a librarian to travel through the U.S. and Europe, where she met the king of Denmark - another avid astronomer. In 1848, she became the first woman named to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In 1865, Mitchell became Professor of Astronomy at Vassar College, where students found inspiration in her love of teaching and "learning by doing." For example, she would track and photograph sunspots with them.

In 1873, she co-founded the Association for the Advancement of Women, which she led as president for three years. In 1994, Mitchell was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.

In addition to her comet, an observatory, a ship, and even a crater on the moon have all been named after her, to honor her achievements as one of the first American women to be recognized as a scientist.

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Meet Maria Mitchell, America's First Professional Female Astronomer - Kids Discover

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Next time you glance into the night sky, you might spot "Miss Mitchell's Comet," which was named after America's first professional female astronomer. Like her comet, Maria Mitchell came a long way to become discovered. She was born on August 1, 1818, in Nantucket, MA. In those days, science was a subject only boys studied.

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Kids learn about the biography of Benjamin Banneker including his early life, education, becoming an astronomer, writing almanacs, fight against slavery, and interesting facts.

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The exceptional life of Benjamin Banneker - Rose-Margaret Ekeng-Itua

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Benjamin Banneker, Astronomer | Biography

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Educational Videos for Students (Cartoons on Bullying, Leadership & More)

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Black History Month Facts for Students: Who is Benjamin Banneker? Top 10 Fun Facts for Students

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Benjamin Banneker (November 9, 1731 - October 9, 1806) was an African American scientist, surveyor, almanac author and farmer. Parks, schools, streets and other tributes commemorate him and his works.

Benjamin Banneker was born on November 9, 1731 in Ellicott Mills, Maryland Born to a free African-American woman and a former slave. Banneker was taught to read by his white grandmother Molly, and for a short time attended a small Quaker school. He owned a farm near Baltimore. Banneker taught himself mathematics using borrowed textbooks. Banneker taught himself astronomy by watching the stars. He accurately forecast lunar and solar eclipses.

Public life

Banneker started as a clock maker and a surveyor. His work came to the attention of the Ellicott brothers. In 1791 Banneker partnered with Andrew Ellicot to help map out a new national capital. Later, he compiled almanacs from 1792 to 1797. His almanacs contained opinion pieces, literature, medical and tidal information. In his almanacs, Banneker criticized Thomas Jefferson because of slavery. Outside of his almanacs, Banneker also published information on bees and calculated the cycle of the 17 year locust.

Notable works

Around 1753, at about the age of 21, Banneker reportedly completed a wooden clock that struck on the hour. He appears to have modelled his clock from a borrowed pocket watch by carving each piece to scale. The clock continued to work until his death.

After his father died in 1759, Banneker lived with his mother and sisters. In 1768, he signed a Baltimore County petition to move the county seat from Joppa to Baltimore. An entry for his property in a 1773 Baltimore County tax list identified Banneker as the only adult member of his household.

In 1788, George Ellicott, a son of Andrew Ellicott, loaned Banneker books and equipment to begin a more formal study of astronomy. During the following year, Banneker sent George his work calculating a solar eclipse.

In 1790, Banneker prepared an ephemeris for 1791, which he hoped would be placed within a published almanac. However, he was unable to find a printer that was willing to publish and distribute the work.

Survey of the original boundaries of the District of Columbia

In early 1791, U.S. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson asked surveyor Major Andrew Ellicott (a son of Joseph Ellicott and a cousin of George Ellicott) to survey an area that would contain a new federal district. In February 1791, Ellicott left a surveying team that he had been leading in western New York so that he could begin the district's survey. Ellicott then hired Banneker as a replacement to assist in the initial survey of the federal district's boundaries, advancing him $60 for travel expenses to and at Georgetown.

The territory that became the original District of Columbia was formed from land along the Potomac River that the states of Maryland and Virginia ceded to the federal government of the United States in accordance with the 1790 federal Residence Act and later legislation. The territory was a square that measured 10 miles (16 km) on each side, totaling 100 square miles (260 km ²) (see: Founding of Washington, D.C.). Ellicott's team placed boundary marker stones at or near every mile point along the borders of the new capital territory (see: Boundary markers of the original District of Columbia).

Biographers have stated that Banneker's duties on the survey consisted primarily of making astronomical observations and calculations to establish base points, including one at Jones Point in Alexandria, Virginia, where the survey started and where the south corner stone was to be located. They have also stated that Banneker maintained a clock that he used to relate points on the ground to the positions of stars at specific times.

However, some have noted that Banneker's actual role in the survey is uncertain, as his involvement in the effort "rests on extremely meager documentation". An April 21, 1791, news report of the April 15 dedication ceremony for the first boundary stone (the south corner stone) stated that it was Andrew Ellicott who "ascertained the precise point from which the first line of the district was to proceed". The news report did not mention Banneker's name.

Banneker left the boundary survey in April 1791 within three months of its initiation because the time that he was devoting to the project was conflicting with the time that he had expected to use to calculate an ephemeris for the year of 1792. Further, the arrival of spring required him to direct more attention to his farm than was needed during the winter. In addition, Andrew Ellicott's younger brothers, Benjamin and Joseph Ellicott, who usually assisted Andrew, had completed the New York survey and were able to join the survey of the federal district at around that time.

Banneker therefore returned to his home near Ellicott's Mills. The Ellicotts and other members of the surveying team then laid the remaining Virginia marker stones later in 1791. The team laid the Maryland stones and completed the boundary survey in 1792.

Banneker's almanacs

Rittenhouse responded to Pemberton by stating that Banneker's ephemeris "was a very extraordinary performance, considering the Colour of the Author" and that he "had no doubt that the Calculations are sufficiently accurate for the purposes of a common Almanac. .... Every instance of Genius amongst the Negroes is worthy of attention, because their suppressors seem to lay great stress on their supposed inferior mental abilities." A biographer wrote that Banneker replied to Rittenhouse's endorsement by stating: "I am annoyed to find that the subject of my race is so much stressed. The work is either correct or it is not. In this case, I believe it to be perfect."

Pemberton then made arrangements for Joseph Crukshank (a Philadelphia Quaker who was a founder of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery and who had since 1770 been publishing almanacs, including at least one that Waring had calculated) to print Banneker's almanac. Having thus secured the support of Pemberton, Rittenhouse and Waring, Banneker delivered a manuscript containing his ephemeris to William Goddard, a Baltimore printer who had published The Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia Almanack and Ephemeris for every year since 1782. Goddard then agreed to print and distribute Banneker's work within an almanac and ephemeris for the year of 1792.

Banneker's Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia Almanack and Ephemeris, for the Year of our Lord, 1792 was the first in a six-year series of almanacs and ephemerides that printers agreed to publish and sell. At least 28 editions of the almanacs, some of which appeared during the same year, were printed in seven cities in five states: Baltimore; Philadelphia; Wilmington, Delaware; Alexandria, Virginia; Petersburg, Virginia; Richmond, Virginia; and Trenton, New Jersey.

The title pages of the Baltimore editions of Banneker's 1792, 1793 and 1794 almanacs and ephemerides stated that the publications contained:

the Motions of the Sun and Moon, the True Places and Aspects of the Planets, the Rising and Setting of the Sun, Place and Age of the Moon, &c. - The Lunations, Conjunctions, Eclipses, Judgment of the Weather, Festivals, and other remarkable Days; Days for holding the Supreme and Circuit Courts of the United States, as also the useful Courts in Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. Also - several useful Tables, and valuable Receipts. - Various Selections from the Commonplace-Book of the Kentucky Philosopher, an American Sage; with interesting and entertaining Essays, in Prose and Verse -the whole comprising a greater, more pleasing, and useful Variety than any Work of the Kind and Price in North America.

In addition to the information that its title page described, the 1792 almanac contained a tide table listing the methods for calculating the time of high water at four locations along the Chesapeake Bay ( Cape Charles and Point Lookout, Virginia; Annapolis and Baltimore, Maryland). Later almanacs contained tables for making such calculations for those locations as well as for Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Halifax, Quebec, Hatteras, Nantucket and other places. Monthly tables in each edition listed astronomical data and weather predictions for each of the months' dates.

A Philadelphia edition of Banneker's 1795 almanac contained a lengthy account of a yellow fever epidemic that had struck that city in 1793. Written by a committee whose president was the city's mayor, Matthew Clarkson, the account related the presumed origins and causes of the epidemic, as well as the extent and duration of the event.

The title pages of two Baltimore editions of Banneker's 1795 almanac had woodcut portraits of him as he may have appeared. However, a biographer later concluded that the portraits were more likely portrayals of an idealized African-American youth.

A Baltimore edition of Banneker's 1796 almanac contained a table enumerating the population of each U.S. state and the Southwest Territory as recorded in the 1790 United States census. The table listed the number of free persons and slaves in each state and the territory according to race and gender, as well as to whether they were above or below the age of 16 years. The table also listed the number of members of the U.S. House of Representatives that each state had during the almanac's year.

The almanacs' editors prefaced the publications with adulatory references to Banneker and his race. Editions of Banneker's 1792 and 1793 almanacs contained full or abridged copies of a lengthy commendatory letter that James McHenry, the Secretary of the 1787 United States Constitutional Convention and self-described friend of Banneker, had written to Goddard and his partner, James Angell, in August 1791 to support the almanac's publication.

As first published in Banneker's 1792 almanac and later given an increased circulation when re-published in Philadelphia within The American Museum, or Universal Magazine, McHenry's full letter began:

Benjamin Banneker, a free Negro, has calculated an Almanack, for the ensuing year, 1792, which being desirous to dispose of, to the best advantage, he has requested me to aid his application to you for that purpose. Having fully satisfied myself, in respect to his title to this type of authorship, if you can agree to him for the price of his work, I may venture to assure you it will do you credit, as Editors, while it will afford you the opportunity to encourage talents that have thus far surmounted the most discouraging circumstances and prejudices."

In their preface to Banneker's 1792 almanac, the editors of the work wrote that they:

feel themselves gratified in the Opportunity of presenting to the Public, through the Medium of their Press, what must be considered as an extraordinary Effort of Genius - a complete and accurate EPHEMERIS for the Year 1792, calculated by a sable Descendant of Africa, .... - They flatter themselves that a philanthropic Public, in this enlightened Era, will be induced to give their Patronage and Support to this Work, not only on Account of its intrinsic Merit, (it having met the Approbation of several of the most distinguished Astronomers in America, particularly the celebrated Mr. Rittenhouse) but from similar Motives to those which induced the Editors to give this Calculation the Preference, the ardent desire of drawing modest Merit from Obscurity, and controverting the long-established illiberal Prejudice against the Blacks.

After Goddard and Angell had published their 1792 Baltimore edition of the almanac, Angell wrote in the 1793 edition (which he alone edited) that abolitionists William Pitt, Charles James Fox and William Wilberforce had introduced the 1792 edition into the British House of Commons to aid their effort to end the British slave trade in Africa. However, the British Parliament's report of the debate that accompanied this effort did not mention either Banneker or his almanac.

The title page of a Petersburg edition of Banneker's 1794 "Virginia Almanack" stated that the work was "Calculated by that ingenious self taught astronomer Benjamin Banneker, a black man", repeating a term that Angell had used in the 1793 Baltimore almanac. The introduction to a 1795 Philadelphia edition contained a poem titled: "Addressed to Benjamin Banneker". The verse began and ended:

Fain would the muse exalt her tuneful lays,
And chant in strains sublime Banneker's praise;
Fain would the soar on Fame's majestic wing,
Thy genius, great Banneker, to sing;
Thy talents and thy greatness would I shew,
Not in applausive strains to thee undue;
..............
Long may thou live an evidence to shew,
That Afric's sable race have talents too.
And may thy genius bright its strength retain;
Tho' nature to decline may still remain;
And may favour us to thy latest years
With thy Ephemeris call'd Banneker's.
A work which ages yet unborn shall name
And be the monument of lasting fame;
A work which after ages shall adore,
When Banneker, alas! shall be no more!

The writer of a tribute in a 1796 Baltimore edition quoted a quatrain and amended another that an Englishman, Thomas Gray, had placed in a popular poem first published in 1751 (see Adaptations and parodies of Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard). The revised rhyme stated:

Nor you ye proud, impute to these the blame
If Afric's sons to genius are unknown,
For Banneker has prov'd they may acquire a name,
As bright, as lasting, as your own.

Supported by Andrew, George and Elias Ellicott and heavily promoted by the Maryland and Pennsylvania abolition societies, the early editions of the almanacs achieved commercial success. Printers then distributed at least nine editions of Banneker's 1795 almanac. A Wilmington, Delaware, printer issued five editions for distribution by different vendors. Printers in Baltimore issued three versions of the almanac, while three Philadelphia printers also sold editions. A Trenton, New Jersey, printer additionally sold a version of the work.

In 1796, Banneker gave a manuscript of one of his almanacs to Suzanna Mason, a member of the Ellicott family who was visiting his home. In 1836, Mason's daughter wrote a published memoir of her mother's life, letters and manuscripts. The memoir contained a copy of a poem that Mason had sent to Banneker shortly after her 1796 visit. A portion of the verse stated:

But thou, a man exhalted high,
Conspicuous in the world's keen eye,
On record now thy name's enrolled,
And future ages will be told,
There lived a man called Banneker,
An African astronomer.

Political views

A Philadelphia edition of Banneker's 1793 almanac that Joseph Crukshank published contained copies of pleas for peace that the English anti-slavery poet William Cowper and others had authored, as well as anti-slavery speeches and writings from England and America. The latter included extracts from speeches that William Pitt, Matthew Montagu and Charles James Fox had given to the British House of Commons in 1792 during the debate on a motion for the abolition of the British slave trade, an extract from a 1789 poem by an English Quaker, Thomas Wilkinson, and an extract from a query in Thomas Jefferson's 1787 Notes on the State of Virginia.

Crukshank's edition of Banneker's 1793 almanac also contained a copy of "A Plan of a Peace-Office, for the United States". Although the almanac did not identify the Plan's author, writers later attributed the work to Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the 1776 Declaration of Independence.

The Plan proposed the appointment of a "Secretary of Peace", described the Secretary's powers and advocated federal support and promotion of the Christian religion.

Correspondence with Thomas Jefferson

On August 19, 1791, after departing the federal capital area, Banneker wrote a letter to Thomas Jefferson, who in 1776 had drafted the United States Declaration of Independence and in 1791 was serving as United States Secretary of State. Quoting language in the Declaration, the letter expressed a plea for justice for African Americans.

To support his plea, Banneker included within his letter a handwritten manuscript of an almanac for 1792 containing his ephemeris with his astronomical calculations. He retained handwritten copies of the letter and Jefferson's August 30, 1791, reply in a volume of manuscripts that became part of a journal.

In late 1792, James Angell published a Baltimore edition of Banneker's 1793 almanac that contained copies of Banneker's letter and Jefferson's reply. Soon afterwards, a Philadelphia printer distributed two sequential editions of a widely circulated pamphlet that also contained the letter and reply.

The Universal Asylum, and Columbian Magazine also published Banneker's letter and Jefferson's reply in Philadelphia in late 1792. The Magazine's editors (A Society of Gentlemen) titled the letter as being "from the famous self-taught astronomer, Benjamin Banneker, a black man".

In his letter, Banneker accused Jefferson of criminally using fraud and violence to oppress his slaves by stating:

.... Sir, how pitiable is it to reflect, that altho you were so fully convinced of the benevolence of the Father of mankind, and of his equal and impartial distribution of those rights and privileges which he had conferred upon them, that you should at the same time counteract his mercies, in detaining by fraud and violence so numerous a part of my brethren under groaning captivity and cruel oppression, that you should at the Same time be found guilty of that most criminal act, which you professedly detested in others, with respect to your Selves.

The letter ended:

And now Sir, I Shall conclude and Subscribe my Self with the most profound respect,
Your most Obedient humble Servant
Benjamin Banneker

Jefferson's reply did not directly respond to Banneker's accusations, but instead expressed his support for the advancement of his "black brethren". His reply, which writers have characterized as "courteous", "polite", "ambivalent", "ambiguous", "evasive", "tepid" and "noncommittal", stated:

Philadelphia Aug. 30. 1791.
Sir,
I thank you sincerely for your letter of the 19th. instant and for the Almanac it contained. no body wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren, talents equal to those of the other colours of men, & that the appearance of a want of them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence both in Africa & America. I can add with truth that no body wishes more ardently to see a good system commenced for raising the condition both of their body & mind to what it ought to be, as fast as the imbecillity of their present existence, and other circumstance which cannot be neglected, will admit. I have taken the liberty of sending your almanac to Monsieur de Condorcet, Secretary of the Academy of sciences at Paris, and member of the Philanthropic society because I considered it as a document to which your whole colour had a right for their justification against the doubts which have been entertained of them. I am with great esteem, Sir,
Your most obedt. humble servt.
Th: Jefferson

Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, to whom Jefferson sent Banneker's almanac, was a noted French mathematician and abolitionist who was a member of the French Société des Amis des Noirs (Society of the Friends of the Blacks). It appears that the Academy of Sciences itself did not receive the almanac.

When writing his letter, Banneker informed Jefferson that his 1791 work with Andrew Ellicott on the District boundary survey had affected his work on his 1792 ephemeris and almanac by stating:

.... And altho I had almost declined to make my calculation for the ensuing year, in consequence of that time which I had allotted therefor being taking up at the Federal Territory by the request of Mr. Andrew Ellicott, ....

On the same day that he replied to Banneker (August 30, 1791), Jefferson sent a letter to the Marquis de Condorcet that contained the following paragraph relating to Banneker's race, abilities, almanac and work with Andrew Ellicott:

I am happy to be able to inform you that we have now in the United States a negro, the son of a black man born in Africa, and of a black woman born in the United States, who is a very respectable mathematician. I procured him to be employed under one of our chief directors in laying out the new federal city on the Patowmac, & in the intervals of his leisure, while on that work, he made an Almanac for the next year, which he sent me in his own hand writing, & which I inclose to you. I have seen very elegant solutions of Geometrical problems by him. Add to this that he is a very worthy & respectable member of society. He is a free man. I shall be delighted to see these instances of moral eminence so multiplied as to prove that the want of talents observed in them is merely the effect of their degraded condition, and not proceeding from any difference in the structure of the parts on which intellect depends.

In 1809, three years after Banneker's death, Jefferson expressed a different opinion of Banneker in a letter to Joel Barlow that criticized a "diatribe" that a French abolitionist, Henri Grégoire, had written in 1808:

the whole do not amount in point of evidence, to what we know ourselves of Banneker. we know he had spherical trigonometry enough to make almanacs, but not without the suspicion of aid from Ellicot, who was his neighbor & friend, & never missed an opportunity of puffing him. I have a long letter from Banneker which shews him to have had a mind of very common stature indeed.

Banneker never married. For reasons that are unclear, the four editions of his 1797 almanac were the last ones that printers published. After selling much of his homesite to the Ellicotts and others, he probably died in his log cabin nine years later on October 19, 1806, aged 74. (Some sources state that Banneker died on Sunday, October 9, 1806, which was actually a Thursday.)

An obituary concluded:

Mr. Banneker is a prominent instance to prove that a descendant of Africa is susceptible of as great mental improvement and deep knowledge into the mysteries of nature as that of any other nation.

A commemorative obelisk that the Maryland Bicentennial Commission and the State Commission on Afro American History and Culture erected in 1977 near his unmarked grave stands in the yard of the Mount Gilboa African Methodist Episcopal Church in Oella, Maryland (see Mount Gilboa Chapel).

The Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston holds in its collections the August 17, 1791, handwritten letter that Banneker sent to Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson endorsed the letter as received on August 21, 1791.

The Library of Congress holds a copy of Jefferson's August 30, 1791, handwritten reply to Banneker. Jefferson produced this document on a letter copying press made by James Watt & Co. that he used before he sent his reply to Banneker. He retained the copy in his files.

The Library of Congress also holds a copy of Jefferson's August 30, 1791, handwritten letter to the Marquis de Condorcet that described Banneker's race, abilities, almanac and work with Andrew Ellicott. Jefferson produced this document on his copying press before sending the handwritten letter to the Marquis.

The Library of Congress holds a handwritten duplicate of Jefferson's letter to the Marquis de Condorcet. The pagination in the duplicate differs from that in the copy that Jefferson produced on his copying press. The Library attributes the duplicate to Jefferson.

The Princeton University Library holds within its Straus Autograph Collection the recipient's copy of the handwritten letter that Jefferson sent to Joel Barlow in 1809. Jefferson's letter cited the letter that Banneker had sent to him in 1791. Barlow endorsed Jefferson's letter after he received it.

The Library of Congress holds a copy of Jefferson's 1809 letter to Joel Barlow that Jefferson had retained in his files after sending his handwritten letter to Barlow. Jefferson used a polygraph device that enabled him to make the copy at the same time that he was writing the original. An Englishman, John Isaac Hawkins, and an American, Charles Willson Peale, had earlier developed this device with the help of Jefferson's suggestions.

In 1987, a member of the Ellicott family, which had retained Banneker's only remaining journal, donated that document and other Banneker manuscripts to the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore. The family also retained several items that Banneker had used after borrowing them from George Ellicott, as well as some that Banneker himself had owned.

Mythology and commemorations

A substantial mythology exaggerating Banneker's accomplishments has developed during the two centuries that have elapsed since his death, becoming a part of African-American culture. Several such urban legends describe Banneker's alleged activities in the Washington, D.C., area around the time that he assisted Andrew Ellicott in the federal district boundary survey. Others involve his clock, his astronomical works, his almanacs and his journals.

A United States postage stamp and the names of a number of recreational and cultural facilities, schools, streets, and other facilities and institutions throughout the United States have commemorated Banneker's documented and mythical accomplishments throughout the years since he lived. In 1983, Rita Dove, a future Poet Laureate of the United States, wrote a biographical poem about Banneker while on the faculty of Arizona State University.

Interesting facts about Benjamin Banneker

Benjamin Banneker would be 292 years old today.

He produced one of the United States' first almanacs

He constructed a striking clock made out of wood. The clock continued to run until it was destroyed in a fire forty years later.

He predicted the solar eclipse of 1789.

In 1980 he was featured on the15 cent stamp.

He spent most of his life on the family tobacco farm in Baltimore County.

In Spanish: Benjamin Banneker para niños

Images for kids

View of the Patapsco Valley from Ellicott City (June 2012)

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Benjamin Banneker

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Benjamin Banneker: an Important Black American

Part 2: Famous writer, designer

He was also a very good writer. He had learned to read at an early age, and his mother encouraged him to write and write well. In 1792, he began publishing an almanac. This book contained all kinds of information, including weather forecasts and dates for eclipses. The book also contained medical information and articles about society in general. His book was read by people all over the country.

Banneker was also a voice for social change. He was a free Black man, and he spoke out against slavery. He sent a copy of his first almanac to Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson. Banneker thought Jefferson was being dishonest by claiming that "all men are created equal" while at the same time owning slaves. Jefferson was so impressed with Banneker's arguments, the good writing, and the accuracy of the scientific calculations that he sent the almanac to famous people in Europe. White Americans and Europeans were astounded that a Black man had such knowledge. In fact, Banneker worked most of his life to disprove the notion that Black people were by their very nature inferior to white people.

Banneker is perhaps most famous for designing the nation's capital. In 1791, President George Washington appointed Banneker to the engineering group that was designing the city of Washington, D.C. Banneker thus became the first Black American to receive a presidential appointment. Pierre Charles L'Enfant, the head of the group, quit in 1792 after a disagreement and took his plans back to France. Banneker reproduced those plans from memory, and the new capital was born.

Banneker published his almanac every year for 10 years, stopping only because he was physically unable to continue. He died in 1806. His reputation lives on. Schools in Maryland, Virginia, and Georgia are named for him. So are centers for the study of law and social justice.

What Everyone Should Know
About Benjamin Banneker

He designed the nation's capital, Washington, D.C., from memory.

He built his own clock--made of wood--and it kept accurate time for more than 40 years.

He published a yearly almanac that made him famous around the world.

He correctly predicted an eclipse, proving white scientists wrong.

He was born and died a free Black man.

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Benjamin Banneker: An Important Black American Part 2

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Benjamin Banneker: an Important Black American Part 2: Famous writer, designer He was also a very good writer. He had learned to read at an early age, and his mother encouraged him to write and write well. In 1792, he began publishing an almanac.

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Kids learn about Benjamin Franklin's biography. Inventor, scientist, statesman, and Founding Father of the United States.

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Educational Videos for Students (Cartoons on Bullying, Leadership & More)

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Benjamin Franklin Cartoon! Ben Franklin (Biography Cartoon Network)

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Benjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706-April 17, 1790) was a scientist, an inventor, a writer, and a statesman. He helped draft the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston on January 17, 1706. He learned to read at an early age. But his father, Josiah Franklin, pulled him out of school when he was 10 years old. He sent Ben to work in the family candle and soap shop. Ben grew restless with the work. When he turned 12, his father sent him to work in a printer's shop. It was owned by Ben's older brother, James.

Ben learned all about the newspaper business. At the time, printing was done by hand. The printer laid out the page letter by letter on a printing press. Ben learned how to build sentences with care. He also learned to write. He wrote political essays. He did not sign his name to the essays. Instead, he signed them Silence Dogood. This was so readers would think they were written by an ordinary person in the town. But his brother James did not want Ben to write. He often beat him. So at 16, Ben fled to Philadelphia. He would call the city home for the rest of his life.

Ambition and Invention

Franklin became known in Philadelphia as a hardworking young man. In 1728, he and a friend opened a print shop. Then in 1729, he bought the Pennsylvania Gazette. He turned it into the most widely read newspaper in the American colonies. At the time, newspapers were the best way to spread ideas. Newspapers spread the ideas that would eventually bring about the American Revolution.

Over the years, Franklin became even more well-known. In 1732, he began publishing the yearly Poor Richard's Almanack. He wrote in the voice of a farmer named Poor Richard. The almanac contained weather forecasts, information about astronomy, poetry, and other amusements. It became famous for its folksy proverbs. Two of the most famous proverbs are "No pains without gains" and "Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise."

Benjamin Franklin and associates at Franklin's printing press.

Franklin became one of the richest men in Pennsylvania. In 1748, he retired from the print business. He wanted to devote his time to science. His famous kite-and-key experiment in 1752 demonstrated that lighting was electricity. He invented the lightning rod. Some of the terms he coined are still used today, such as battery, charge, and electrify. He also invented bifocal eyeglasses and maybe even the first rocking chair.

Founding Father

In 1751, Franklin was elected as a representative to the Pennsylvania Assembly. He was reelected every year until 1764.

In March 1765, the British government passed the Stamp Act. This made the North American colonists angry. The act required that the colonists pay a tax on printed materials. The colonists used a lot of printed material. They used print documents for business and legal matters. At the time, Franklin was living in London. He was Pennsylvania's agent in Britain. He went before the British Parliament to condemn the tax. The bill was repealed in 1766.

Franklin was elected to the Second Continental Congress in 1775. He believed the American colonies should separate from English rule. In 1776, he joined a committee to draft the Declaration of Independence. He then traveled to France. There, he negotiated a treaty. France agreed to lend the colonies money and soldiers to fight the war against Britain. After the war, Franklin went to Britain with John Adams and John Jay. They negotiated terms of peace with Britain. This led to the Treaty of Paris in 1783.

In 1787, Franklin represented the state of Pennsylvania at the Constitutional Convention. The purpose of the convention was to draft the U.S. Constitution. At 81, he was the oldest delegate. He went on to serve as president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. Franklin once owned a slave. But in 1790, he urged Congress to abolish slavery in the U.S.

Franklin died on April 17, 1790, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His memoirs were published the following year. They are known today as The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.

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Benjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706-April 17, 1790) was a scientist, an inventor, a writer, and a statesman. He helped draft the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston on January 17, 1706. He learned...

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Biographical Highlights

Dr. Hector Perez Garcia (1914-1996) was a passionate advocate for Hispanic-American rights in the United States. He was described by Commander Rudy Escalante (2003) as a "devoted father of a fine and accomplished family, a concerned citizen, dedicated physician, beloved humanitarian, and the most prominent Mexican-American civil rights leader to emerge in the United States immediately after World War II."

Upon his return after serving voluntarily in the Army during WWII, Dr. Garcia provided medical assistance to those who could not afford it or to those who were denied treatment. He founded the American GI Forum in March 1948 in Corpus Christi, Texas, in response to the many acts of discrimination he and his fellow Mexican Americans suffered. It was also an avenue to encourage Mexican Americans to keep their children in school.

Dr. Garcia was instrumental in several presidential campaigns and has often been compared to Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., for his dedication to his people. His many relationships with presidents, senators, ambassadors and civic leaders were not always considered friendly. Nevertheless, he was a well-respected leader among all who interacted with him.

Historic Roots

Hector Perez Garcia was born in Llera, Tamaulipas state, Mexico on January 17, 1914, to Jose and Faustina Perez Garcia. He was one of seven children. When Perez was only four years old, his parents legally immigrated to Mercedes, Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley. Their sudden departure was prompted by an attack on their village during the Mexican Revolution.

Jose Garcia, Hector's father, attempted to continue his education but his credentials were unacceptable in the U.S. The family settled in Mercedes with family and helped run a dry goods store. In spite of the obstacles, Jose Garcia was adamant about his children receiving the best education possible. He and his wife dedicated their time to educating their children at home and stressing the importance of a good education in order to succeed in life.

During a period of time when Mexican Americans typically dropped out of school by third grade, Dr. Garcia graduated as valedictorian of his high school class, graduated with honors from the University of Texas in 1936, and was admitted into the University of Texas medical school in Galveston. He graduated with his M.D. degree in 1940.

In 1942, Dr. Garcia volunteered for Army duty during WWII. He served as an infantry officer and a combat engineer officer. Though unable to practice medicine for a while in the Army, he finally served as a medical corps officer before being discharged in 1946 as a major. He was awarded a Bronze Star with six battle stars for his service on the battlefields of North Africa and Italy.

It was in Italy that he met Wanda Fusillo, who would later become his wife. They had their first child shortly after getting married and moved to Texas immediately after he was discharged from the Army. Mrs. Garcia was quoted in a historical document by Carl Allsup: "In Italy and many European countries that I have visited, the word 'America' was always associated with liberty, equality and freedom of opportunity.I was dumbfounded at the attitudes displayed towards the Mexican people" ("Dr. Hector P. Garcia" 2000).

Upon his return to Texas, Garcia opened a clinic next door to the United States Veteran's Administration office in Corpus Christi. Most of his patients were Hispanic veterans who had been denied medical treatment. The Veteran's Administration offered him $3 per patient that he signed up in his clinic. This was considered a great accomplishment during this time considering the many displays of discrimination Hispanics experienced at the time.

Through treating soldiers and other poor Mexican-American families, Dr. Garcia became aware of the intolerable discrimination his people suffered. He described his times as having discrimination everywhere. His people had to pay to vote, went to segregated schools, were not allowed to enjoy public places and were not allowed to buy land outside of the "barrio." In March 1948, he officially organized his first meeting of the American G.I. Forum with the participation of hundreds of Hispanic-American veterans. Even though Wanda Garcia did not know Spanish, she demonstrated her support by accompanying her husband to several organizing rallies for the American G.I. Forum. She helped by passing out literature to the attendees. Within months, branches of the A.G.I.F. opened throughout Texas.

One incident that helped increase the significance of the A.G.I.F. was the unfair treatment of Private Felix Longoria. He was a soldier who had been killed while in combat in the Philippines. His family approached Dr. Garcia for assistance with Longoria's burial in his hometown of Three Rivers, Texas, after the owner of the only mortuary in town would not allow a Mexican American to have chapel services. Dr.

Garcia quickly set out to right this wrong by reporting the mortuary owner's statement to the media and sending telegrams to congressmen, the governor and senators, including Senator Lyndon Johnson. The injustice became a national story which prompted a quick response from Senator Johnson who offered to have Private Longoria buried with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery. Longoria's family accepted.

The Longoria Incident resulted in the expansion of G.I. Forum chapters to New Mexico and Colorado. By 1954, the organization began holding national conventions. Dr. Garcia never hesitated in his advocacy efforts. He led A.G.I.F. in battles against school segregation, equality and fairness in court proceedings, and supporting presidential candidates. Even during his last days, he met with community leaders from his bed to discuss strategies for A.G.I.F. chapters. Dr. Hector P. Garcia died a highly-respected Hispanic leader in July 1996 in Corpus Christi, Texas.

Importance

The American G.I. Forum became an advocate for all Hispanics and broadened its activities throughout the states to promote civic affairs. Dr. Garcia was recognized by the nation for his work in service to America in being presented the country's highest civilian award, the Medal of Freedom by President Ronald Reagan. He was honored further by having his pioneer work for veterans and public affairs recognized by the United States Treasury - a new series of savings bonds was issued with the $75 bond bearing Dr. Garcia's portrait.

He forged alliances with instrumental civic leaders and elected officials throughout his life. An example of his dedication and talent were illustrated by his ability to mobilize voters during the 1960 presidential election. He formed the "Viva Kennedy Clubs" and helped deliver the Hispanic vote for the Democratic nominee, John F. Kennedy.

His passion for justice extended into wiping out the blight of poor housing, providing job opportunities and speaking to anyone who would listen about the importance of an education. He was highly respected by many in his community and in the political world for his ability to articulate his values and passion for equality. Dr. Garcia served as a delegate to the United Nations with ambassadorial rank and was the first Mexican-American member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. In spite of all the political activities in which he participated, he always considered himself "a doctor and a humanitarian" (Justice for My People 2003).

Ties to the Philanthropic Sector

Dr. Garcia's philosophy was very simple. All Americans deserve the same access to freedom and opportunity. His beliefs were not always openly welcomed, though, most often, they were respected. Many community leaders, humanitarians and political superiors were in support of Dr. Garcia's passion for equality. He was able to achieve much of his work through A.G.I.F.'s membership fees from individuals who joined its many chapters. The organization's viability and need are evident today as its membership numbers almost 150,000. Fundraisers still present a primary goal of assisting families and veterans in need. Notably, government grants are a large source of income for the organization.

Key Related Ideas

Chicano Movement - Consisted of a large grass-roots effort to raise public awareness and equality for Mexicans and Hispanics in the United States. A number of organizations, including A.G.I.F., focused public attention on a variety of issues related to the opportunities, treatment and working conditions of these peoples.

"Education is our Freedom, and Freedom should be Everybody's Business" - This was Dr. Garcia's motto ("Dr. Hector P. Garcia" 2000). Public appearances and interviews included this statement as the one that represented his reason for being involved in this cause.

Equality - Achieving equality for his fellow veterans was the primary purpose for Dr. Garcia's crusade. In turn, equality among students and Mexican Americans became the driving force for the A.G.I.F.

Justice - Dr. Garcia also became involved in ensuring that the justice system treated Mexican Americans equally.

La Raza - A term used to describe individuals of Hispanic descent. It was also used significantly during the Chicano Movement.

Important People Related to the Topic

President Jimmy Carter - Served as 39th president; appointed Dr. Garcia as a member of U.S. Circuit Judge Nominating Commission and the White House Conference on Balanced National Growth and Economic Development.

Edna Ferber - Pulitzer Prize winning author who wrote a book in 1952 entitled Giant which was made into a movie in 1956. The book included two Dr. Garcia-inspired incidents (Felix Longoria case and his wife being refused service in a café).

Dr. Cleo Garcia - Longtime Corpus Christi physician, community advocate, and younger sister of Dr. Hector P. Garcia. Dr. Clotilde P. Garcia is also well-known for her leading role in promoting Hispanic genealogy and history.

President Lyndon B. Johnson - Served as thirty-sixth president; appointed Dr. Garcia as a delegate to the United Nations with the rank of ambassador.

President John F. Kennedy - Served as thirty-fifth president. Dr. Garcia was instrumental for the Kennedy campaign during the election by coordinating the "Viva Kennedy Clubs." As a result, Kennedy received 85% of the Mexican-American vote.

President Ronald Reagan - Served as fortieth president; awarded Dr. Garcia with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Related Nonprofit Organizations

American G.I. Forum - Organization founded by Dr. Garcia in 1948 to assist veterans and their families with housing, employment and support services. The Forum's motto is: "Education is Freedom and Freedom should be Everybody's Business." This concept is the basis for two of its largest programs: the Veterans Outreach Program (VOP) and Ser-Jobs for Progress (SER).

League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) - Modeled after civic organizations in the United States. LULAC promoted the idea that Mexican Americans should establish roots in the United States and mix with the dominant society in all aspects of life. The League's current mission is to advance the economic condition, educational attainment, political influence, health and civil rights of the Hispanic population of the United States.

Related Web Sites

American G.I. Forum Web site , at http://www.agif.org , provides a history of Dr. Garcia, (its founder) and Private Longoria, as well as information relevant to Hispanic G.I.s: association news, scholarships, a veteran's outreach program, an award program, a link to recent legislation affecting veterans, memorial benefits, and more.

League of United Latin American Citizens Web site , at http://www.lulac.org , provides information for the public and the organization's members, including a history, League events, programs, publications, internship and employment opportunities, and congressional policy issues.

n.a. "Dr. Hector P. Garcia, A Mexican-American Fighter for Equality and Justice," La Voz de Aztlan I (14 February 2000): 4.

Averyt, Libby. "President Clinton Mourns Garcia," Corpus Christi Coastal Bend South Texas News , 22 January 2002.

Escalante, Rudy. "Commander's Report, April 1998." American GI Forum Orange County Rudy Escalante Chapter/Larry Amaya Chapter Web site. [cited 7 April 2003]. Available from http://www.angelfire.com/ca/Chicanoveterans/REPORT.HTM

Estrada, Richard. "Garcia Sought Equality Via Inclusiveness," The Dallas Morning News , August 1996.

Justice for My People. Dr. Hector P. Garcia . [updated 2002; cited 25 January 2003]. Available from http://www.justiceformypeople.org .

Perez, Toni. Dr. Hector Perez Garcia: Founder of the American GI Forum . [updated January 2002; cited 27 January 2003]. Available from http://www.inficad.com/~1stbooks/forum1.htm .

This paper was developed by a student taking a Philanthropic Studies course taught at Grand Valley State University. It is offered by Learning To Give and Grand Valley State University.

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Biographical Highlights Dr. Hector Perez Garcia (1914-1996) was a passionate advocate for Hispanic-American rights in the United States. He was described by Commander Rudy Escalante (2003) as a "devoted father of a fine and accomplished family, a concerned citizen, dedicated physician, beloved humanitarian, and the most prominent Mexican-American civil rights leader to emerge in the United States immediately after World War II."

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Héctor P. García

January 17, 1914-July 26, 1996

Physician and pioneering activist Héctor P. García was once described as "a man who in the space of one week delivers twenty babies, twenty speeches, and twenty thousand votes."

Born in Mexico in 1914, García grew up in Mercedes, Texas, in the lower Rio Grande Valley. He earned undergraduate and medical degrees from The University of Texas and served in the Army with distinction in World War II.

In 1946, García opened a medical practice in Corpus Christi, where he witnessed the struggles of veterans and migrant workers. His work inspired a lifetime commitment to social reform. García became known as the "doctor to the barrios," offering low- and no-cost treatment to impoverished patients.

In 1948, García founded the American GI Forum, organizing veterans to fight for educational and medical benefits, and later, against poll taxes and school segregation. A proud member of the Greatest Generation, García sought the inclusion of Mexican Americans into mainstream America.

In 1984, President Reagan awarded García the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award. García was the first Mexican American ever to receive the honor.

A statue on the Texas A&M-Corpus Christi campus now stands as a memorial to García's legacy. It bears his personal motto, which is also the motto of the American GI Forum: "Education is our Freedom, and Freedom Should be Everybody's Business."

For More about Héctor P. García

The Dr. Héctor P. García Memorial Foundation honors García's legacy by supporting people and projects that protect the rights of all through the funding of scholarships, educational grants, and community-building efforts. The Foundation also promotes the fair treatment and support of those who have served our country in the armed forces.

The Dr. Héctor P. García Papers, located at the Mary and Jeff Bell Library on the campus of Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, focus on the GI Forum but also cover all major issues facing Mexican Americans during Garcia's lifelong pursuit of civil rights.

A website maintained by The University of Texas Medical Branch documents García's life and accomplishments.

The PBS Documentary Justice for My People: The Héctor P. García Story, produced by South Texas Broadcasting (KEDT), aired in September 2007, and follows the Mexican American struggle for rights from the 1920s to the 1980s through García's eyes.

García's advocacy on behalf of fallen soldier Felix Longoria garnered national attention for equal citizenship rights for Mexican Americans. See The Longoria Affair, a documentary film by John J. Valadez, funded by PBS and the Houston Endowment.

Selected Bibliography
Akers, Cecilia García. The Inspiring Life of Texan Héctor P. García. Mount Pleasant, South Carolina: The History Press, 2016. Carroll, Patrick James. Felix Longoria's Wake: Bereavement, Racism, and the Rise of Mexican-American Activism. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. García, Ignacio M. Héctor P. García: In Relentless Pursuit of Justice. Houston: Arte Público Press, 2002. García, Ignacio M. Viva Kennedy: Mexican Americans in Search of Camelot. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2000. Hall, Michelle Kells. Héctor García: Everyday Rhetoric and Mexican-American Civil Rights. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006. Kreneck, Thomas H. "Dr. Héctor P. García: An Archivist/Historian's Perspective" In Tejano Epic: Essays in Honor of Félix D. Almaráz Jr., edited by Arnoldo De León, 99-119. Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2005. Kreneck, Thomas H. "Dr. Héctor P. García: Twentieth Century Mexican-American Leader." In Invisible Texans: Women and Minorities in Texas, edited by Donald Willett and Stephen Curley, 204-213. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005. Pycior, Julie Leinenger. "From Hope to Frustration: Mexican Americans and Lyndon Johnson in 1967." Western Historical Quarterly 24 (1993): 469-494. Pycior, Julie Leinenger. LBJ and Mexican Americans: The Paradox of Power. Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1997. Ramos, Henry A. J. The American GI Forum: In Pursuit of the Dream, 1948-1983. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1998. Rosales, Frances Arturo. Chicano!: The History of the Mexican-American Civil Rights Movement. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1997. Rosales, Stephen. "Fighting the Peace at Home: Mexican American Veterans and the 1944 GI Bill of Rights." Pacific Historical Review 80 (2011): 597-627.

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January 17, 1914-July 26, 1996 Physician and pioneering activist Héctor P. García was once described as "a man who in the space of one week delivers twenty babies, twenty speeches, and twenty thousand votes." Born in Mexico in 1914, García grew up in Mercedes, Texas, in the lower Rio Grande Valley.

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Kids learn about the biography of Clara Barton, Civil War nurse who founded the American Red Cross.

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Clarissa Harlowe "Clara" Barton (December 25, 1821 - April 12, 1912) was an American teacher, nurse, and humanitarian. During the American Civil War, she was in charge of the agency to find missing Union soldiers. She also headed several hospitals in Virginia. She is best remembered for organizing the American Red Cross.

Childhood of the Angel of the Battlefield

Clara was born on December 25, 1821 in Oxford, Massachusetts. She was the youngest child of Sarah Stone and Stephen Barton. In her youth, Barton was timid and sensitive, which made household life difficult for Barton.

Clara's father was an important member of the town; he served as the town's moderator, ran a decent farm, and were well-known members of the town's church. Clara shared a special bond with her father. Both of them were adventurous and patriotic. Clara's father often told her stories about war, and they pretended to fight each other in fake battles.

Clara's mother was said to be a very beautiful woman. She was married at the age of seventeen, and by the time she was twenty she had already given birth to four children. She was very practical (good with her hands) and taught Clara many chores around the house. Her mother was strict and would not even let Clara have a toy doll. However, Clara's mother taught her many important things. She was a very strong and determined woman, and was full of common sense, traits that were both passed on to Clara.

Clara's four siblings were all older than she was. Her oldest sister, Dorothy, was seventeen years old when Clara was born; her oldest brother, Stephen, was fifteen; her younger brother, David, was thirteen; and her younger sister, Sally, was ten. She learned many skills from her siblings. Her sisters taught her how to read before she was even three years old. Stephen taught her mathematics, and David taught her how to ride a horse.

As a child, Clara liked to pretend she was a nurse. She took care of sick and injured animals. When she was eleven, her brother David fell off the roof of a barnhouse. This incident had a large effect on Clara, who helped nurse her brother. David suffered a severe injury to his head, and he was close to death for two years. For two years Clara took care of her brother, hardly leaving his bedside. She learned many medical practices, including bloodletting, giving medicine, and applying leeches. Though she didn't realize it, Clara had discovered her talent and love of nursing. After David was treated, Clara felt anxious and restless. She began becoming depressed because she had nothing to do. She tried being a weaver at her brother David's mill, but she quit and looked for a new job.

Early careers

One day, a phrenologist visiting the Barton household told Barton's parents to teach in a school so she could overcome her extreme shyness. Barton was first terrified of this, but she soon taught a class of forty girls and boys in a local school. Barton impressed the children, who were barely younger than she was, and she felt happy at earning their respect. After her school received an award for discipline, Barton received many job offers. She asked for and received the same pay for teaching as male teachers, which was uncommon at the time. Barton taught at the school for ten years.

When she was thirty, Barton enrolled at the Clinton Liberal Institute in New York. After graduating, two schoolmates, Charles and Mary Norton, invited her to live with their family in Hightstown, New Jersey. Barton began teaching in the local school, and then began starting free public schools like the ones in Massachusetts. The school was very successful, and many new teachers were hired and a new building was built. A man was hired to run the school, and he received a salary almost twice as high as Barton's salary. Barton was angry at this treatment, and she left to find a new job in Washington D.C.

Washington D.C.

Barton spent the next five years of her life in the US capital, her first job being a clerk for the government. Department of the Interior records say that she became a clerk in 1855, which makes her the first female to work for the government. Barton was appointed a position in the US patent office. She even received the same pay as the other workers, receiving $1400 a year. The other workers were very angry about this; they "spat on the floor", "blew smoke in her face", insulted her, and made slanderous remarks about her. Many of these men lost their jobs because of this behavior.

Later life and death

Barton quit working and lived in Glen Echo, Maryland. She wrote a book about herself called The Story of My Childhood.

She died at the age of 90 years old from Tuberculosis on April 12, 1912.

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Clarissa Harlowe "Clara" Barton (December 25, 1821 - April 12, 1912) was an American teacher, nurse, and humanitarian. During the American Civil War, she was in charge of the agency to find missing Union soldiers. She also headed several hospitals in Virginia. She is best remembered for organizing the American Red Cross.

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See the fact file below for more information on Clara Barton or alternatively, you can download our comprehensive worksheet pack to utilise within the classroom or home environment.

Early Life:

Clarissa Harlowe Barton was a civil war nurse, educator and humanitarian.

She was born on December 25, 1821, in Oxford, Massachusetts.

Her father was a local militia commander and a farm owner. She was the youngest of five children.

She was an intelligent and sensitive child and excelled in school.

Clara became a teacher at an early age of 17 and had a 12-year career teaching school children.

She was able to manage unruly students, mainly boys, and was known as an effective teacher.

Clara Barton gave up her job as a teacher and decided to pursue a college degree in 1850.

After graduating in 1851, she opened a free school in Bordentown, New Jersey.

Government Service:

She was the first woman to enter government service in the United States when she joined the U.S. Patent Office as a patent clerk in 1855.

She was initially paid a salary equal to men but later her salary and designation were downgraded.

Because of gender discrimination, her experience as a woman in government was not very good. Clara and other women were dismissed from service.

She campaigned for Women's Rights and was supported by Abraham Lincoln.

When Lincoln became president, Clara rejoined the Patent Office as a copyist.

Civil War:

When Clara was only ten, her brother David fell from the roof and was severely injured. Doctors had given up on him but Carla nursed him day and night and helped him recover.

Clara's father inspired her to help injured soldiers in the war.

She started collecting supplies, clothing and food for Union soldiers.

In August 1862, she was allowed to work in field hospitals on the front lines.

Throughout the war, she remained in close proximity of battle zones and worked to manage cleanliness of hospitals, apply dressings, distribute supplies and serve food to wounded soldiers.

She was present on the frontline during the battles of Antietam, Fredericksburg and Second Bull Run.

She was nicknamed 'Angel of the Battlefield' for her service to the Union soldiers.

Red Cross:

After the Civil War, Clara ran the Office of Missing Soldiers, where she helped find missing and dead Union soldiers.

The Union army had kept little record of missing soldiers and Clara worked tirelessly to trace down the fates of many men.

She then went on a visit to Europe and came to know of the Red Cross movement.

She worked alongside the Red Cross during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, and upon her return to America she decided to convince the U.S. government to establish and American Red Cross.

In 1881, she succeeded in founding American Red Cross and was elected its first president.

Under her presidency, Red Cross worked tirelessly during the Spanish-American War and several other calamities and natural disasters.

Later Years:

After she resigned from Red Cross in 1904, she founded the National First Aid Society.

She spent her final years in Glen Echo, Maryland.

She died on April 12, 1912, from tuberculosis.

Clara Barton Worksheets

This bundle includes 11 ready-to-use Clara Barton worksheets that are perfect for students to learn about Clara Barton who is respected over the world for her humanitarian work and services for Women's Rights. She never married and considered soldiers she served during the Civil War as her family.
This download includes the following worksheets:

Clara Barton Facts

Knowing Clara

Service

Angel of the Battlefield

Red Cross

Patriotism

Adjectives

Women's Rights

Father

Word Jumble

Teacher Appreciation

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Clara Barton Facts, Worksheets, Biography & Women's Rights For Kids

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Clara Barton is respected over the world for her humanitarian work and services for Women's Rights. She never married and considered soldiers she served during the Civil War as her family. Click for more information and to download our comprehensive worksheet.

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This is a complete biography of Clara Barton.

Clara Barton

Childhood

Clarissa Harlowe Barton, called Clara, was born on December 25, 1821, in North Oxford, Massachusetts. Before she started school, her brothers taught her spelling, arithmetic, and geography. When she was four, she could already spell three-syllable words. She was very shy.

Teacher

Clara became a teacher when she was seventeen. In 1850, Clara went to teach at a school in Bordentown, New Jersey. Many children could not go to the school because their families could not pay the tuition. Clara offered to teach without a salary if children could attend for free. In this way, she started the first free school in New Jersey. Even though she raised enrollment from six to six hundred, the school board hired a man to be the head of the school instead of offering the job to Clara. Clara resigned.

Angel of the Battlefield

Her congressman helped her get a job as a copyist at the Patent Office in Washington, DC. She was working there when the Civil War (1861-1865) began. After the Baltimore Riots, a trainload of soldiers arrived in Washington with no baggage or supplies. Clara helped take care for them and gather some of the necessary supplies. After the First Battle of Bull Run, Clara advertised in the Worcester, Massachusetts Spy magazine for medical supplies to treat wounded soldiers. Her ads were successful, and she began an organization to distribute bandages, socks, and other supplies. The US Surgeon General, William A. Hammond, gave her permission to travel to places where fighting was taking place. Clara did not work primarily as a nurse during the war; she was important because she obtained and passed out supplies where they were needed. She became known as the "Angel of the Battlefield."

Providing Closure

In 1865, at Camp Parole, Maryland, she decided to organize a group to find soldiers listed as missing in action. Clara also went to Georgia to identify Union soldiers in unmarked graves at Andersonville, the Confederate prison camp. She helped set up a national cemetery there. She became the first woman bureau head in the United States government when she was appointed head of the Missing Person Office. In coordination with the Bureau of Records, the organizations identified nearly twenty thousand soldiers so that families could know what happened to their loved ones. This was about one-tenth of the total number of missing or unidentified in the Civil War.

Red Cross

In 1869, she went to Geneva, Switzerland, where she met officials of the recently organized International Red Cross. She worked to get the US Congress to agree to the Geneva Convention. This agreement resulted in the formation of the Red Cross, and it asked nations to agree to protect medical personnel on the battlefield. After she returned to the United States, she lived in Danville, New York. In 1877, she offered to lead the American branch of the International Red Cross. Besides helping during wartime, the American Red Cross provides relief for victims of epidemics and natural disasters like floods and earthquakes. Her work helping people in times of war and times of peace made her an eternal symbol of humanitarianism. She died on Good Friday, April 12, 1912, in Glen Echo, Maryland.

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This is a complete biography of Clara Barton. Clarissa Harlowe Barton, called Clara, was born on December 25, 1821, in North Oxford, Massachusetts. Before she started school, her brothers taught her spelling, arithmetic, and geography. When she was four, she could already spell three-syllable words. She was very shy.

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George Washington Facts, Biography, Information & Worksheets For Kids

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Not ready to purchase a subscription? Click to download the free sample version Download sample For more information, see the George Washington fact file below or download the comprehensive worksheet pack which can be utilised within the classroom or home environment.

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George Washington was the 1st president of the United States. Learn about his biography and life story.

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Pretty much everybody knows that George Washington was our first President, but how much else do you know about this Founding Father?

The man that would go on to be known as the Father of our Country lived a pretty interesting life, so let's take the time to explore his life!

George Washington was born in Virginia in 1732. When George was born, Virginia was one of the 13 colonies that were ruled by England. America was not a country yet.

When George was young, he was a very good student. He was especially good at math and spelling.

When he was 16 years old, he left his house to find a job. He got a job as a surveyor. It was his job to measure land and make maps. This helped people know how big the property was and other important facts about it.

Before the War

When George was 20, he joined the Virginia army. He was very brave and soon was put in charge of the whole militia. He was a part of the militia during the start of the French and Indian war.

In one particular battle, he narrowly escaped death when his horse was shot out from under him.

George always dreamed of having a family. On January 6, 1759, George married a woman named Martha Curtis. George and Martha lived on a large farm named Mount Vernon. They never had any children.

George didn't get to stay with Martha for very long. Soon, he had to rejoin the army to fight the Revolutionary War.

The Revolutionary War

George and other wealthy landowners were unhappy with England because they made lots of rules that the Colonies thought were unfair.

When England refused to change the rules, the Colonies decided to declare their independence. The colonies formed, and George was picked to lead the army.

The Colonial Army had lots of problems. They didn't have enough supplies and weren't trained very well. Luckily, George was a great leader. He trained his soldiers and worked to get the supplies that they needed.

George planned to outlast the British Army. The war lasted eight long years, and eventually, England surrendered. This happened in Yorktown on October 17, 1781.

The war was over, and the Colonies had won their independence from England!

The Presidency

Once the war was over, the new country needed a leader. George was unanimously picked to be the country's first president on April 30, 1789.

He was a very good leader and led the country for two different terms, which lasted eight total years.

During his time as President, George put in place many roles and traditions that our Presidents still follow today.

For instance, it was his choice to only have Presidents serve for a certain amount of time. See our article on the 22nd amendment for more on that.

He said that this would prevent anyone from becoming too powerful, like the King of England was. He also helped form the government and defined what a President should do, as well as who should be his helpers.

George also founded (started) the offices of the Presidential Cabinet.

After the Presidency

When he was done being President, George returned to his home in Virginia, where he lived for several more years. Then in December of 1799, George got a bad cold. This turned into a terrible throat infection.

George Washington died on December 14, 1799.

George Washington is known as the "Father of our Country." He was a great leader both before, during, and after the Revolutionary War. He helped to make our country what it is today.

He is honored for his role in our nation's history with many different monuments, with none being more famous than the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C, which is also named for him.

Fun Facts About George Washington

George never served as President in Washington, D.C. The capital when he was President was New York City, and then Philadelphia.

Though George was very honest, the story of him and the cherry tree probably never happened.

George had many different sets of dentures throughout his life. They were not made from wood but were rather fashioned from various types of bone.

George owned slaves but gave them all freedom upon his death.
US Presidents

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George Washington Biography Pretty much everybody knows that George Washington was our first President, but how much else do you know about this Founding Father? The man that would go on to be known as the Father of our Country lived a pretty interesting life, so let's take the time to explore his life!

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Not ready to purchase a subscription? Click to download the free sample version Download sample

An author, lecturer, and advocate of empowerment among the handicapped, Helen Keller was the first deafblind person to have earned a bachelor of arts degree.
See the fact file below for more information on the Helen Keller or alternatively, you can download our 17-page Helen Keller worksheet pack to utilise within the classroom or home environment.
Key Facts & Information

EARLY LIFE

Born on June 27, 1880 in Tuscumbia, Alabama, Helen Adams Keller was stricken by an illness that left her blind and deaf at age two. Beginning in 1887, it was Keller's teacher, Anne Sullivan who helped her make tremendous progress with her ability to communicate.

She was the first of two daughters born to Arthur H. Keller, an officer in the Confederate Army during the Civil War and Katherine Adams Keller. The family's income came from the cotton plantation and later her father's work as the editor of North Albanian newspaper.

Born with her senses of sight and hearing, young Helen began speaking at 6 months old and started walking at the age of 1.

However, Keller contracted an illness called "brain fever" by the family doctor. It produced a high body temperature in 1882. Some experts believe it might have been scarlet fever or meningitis. At 19 months old, Helen had lost both her sense of sight and hearing. Helen's mother noticed the change with her daughter when she didn't show any reaction when the dinner bell was rung, or when a hand was waved in front of her face.

Young Helen grew up with their cook's daughter, Martha Washington who had created a type of sign language with her. At the age of 7, Helen and Martha already invented more than 60 signs to communicate with one another.

In 1886, Keller's mother looked for answers and inspiration. She came across a travelogue by Charles Dickens, American Notes and read about the successful education of another deaf and blind child, Laura Bridgman, and soon dispatched Keller and her father to Baltimore, Maryland to see specialist Dr. J. Julian Chisholm. After examining Keller, Chisholm recommended Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, who was working with deaf children at the time.

Michael Anagnos, suggested Helen work with one of the institute's most recent graduates, Anne Sullivan. And so began a 49-year relationship between teacher and pupil.

KELLER AND SULLIVAN

Sullivan went to Keller's home in Alabama on March 3, 1887. She began by teaching Helen, who was six years old, fingerspelling, starting with the word "doll," to help Keller understand the gift of a doll she had brought along. She also taught other words such as water, milk, teacher, and Helen.

As Helen began to show tantrums, Sullivan requested from the family that they be isolated, so that Keller could concentrate only on Sullivan's instruction. The two moved to a cottage on the plantation.

Keller began speech classes at the Horace Mann School for the Deaf in Boston in 1890. She would toil for 25 years to learn to speak so that others could understand her. She attended the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf in New York City from 1894 to 1896. There, she worked on improving her communication skills and studied regular academic subjects.

By 1896, she attended the Cambridge School for Young Ladies, a preparatory school for women. Keller already mastered several methods of communication, including touch-lip reading, Braille, speech, typing and finger-spelling. Keller wrote her first book, The Story of My Life with the help of Sullivan and Sullivan's future husband, John Macy.

At the age of 24, she graduated, cum laude, from Radcliffe in 1904. After graduation, Keller became a member of the Socialist Party and by 1909 and 1921, she wrote several articles about socialism and supported Eugene Debs, a Socialist Party presidential candidate.

LATER LIFE AND DEATH

At age 75, Keller embarked on a 40,000-mile, five-month trek across Asia. She delivered numerous speeches and appearances and brought inspiration and encouragement to millions of people.

In 1961, Keller suffered a series of strokes and spent the remaining years of her life at her home in Connecticut.

On June 1, 1968, few weeks before her 88th birthday, she died in her sleep.

Helen Keller was invited to the White House by every US President starting with Grover Cleveland to Lyndon B. Johnson.

Her life inspired and educated many who see handicapped people differently. Keller manifested courage, perseverance, and intelligence throughout her life as manifested in her works and speeches.

Helen Keller Worksheets

This is a fantastic bundle which includes everything you need to know about Helen Keller across 17 in-depth pages. These are ready-to-use Helen Keller worksheets that are perfect for teaching students about an author, lecturer, and advocate of empowerment among the handicapped, Helen Keller who was the first deafblind person to have earned a bachelor of arts degree.

Complete List Of Included Worksheets

Helen Keller Facts

Amazing Helen

Adversity of Life

Extraordinary People

Character Reference

First Words

The Braille Alphabet

My Teacher, My Hero

Technology Today

Speaking Keller

The Miracle Worker

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Use With Any Curriculum
These worksheets have been specifically designed for use with any international curriculum. You can use these worksheets as-is, or edit them using Google Slides to make them more specific to your own student ability levels and curriculum standards.

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Helen Keller Worksheets, Facts & Information For Kids

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Not ready to purchase a subscription? Click to download the free sample version Download sample An author, lecturer, and advocate of empowerment among the handicapped, Helen Keller was the first deafblind person to have earned a bachelor of arts degree.

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Kids learn about the biography of Helen Keller, blind and deaf woman who learned to read, write, and talk.

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Helen Keller

Helen Keller was blind, deaf and mute due to an early childhood illness and overcame these disabilities to become a major individual responsible for influencing how people viewed and treated those with disabilities. Keller was one of the 20th centuries leading humanitarians and founder of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Keller's early life as a child was one that her parents and family could not seem to help with. Being blind, deaf and mute they couldn't control her and while they tried to treat her as one of their children, she acted more closely to a small wild animal. It wasn't until they employed Anne Sullivan as a teacher that there seemed to be any progress. Sullivan used specialized sign language finger spelling communication methods that were proven to work for the deaf, combined with a lot of patience. Keller would throw wild tantrums when she couldn't get her way and Sullivan was forced to arrange total isolation so that she could teach Keller. The success came through when Keller learned how to identify and spell the word 'water'.

Helen Keller attended speech classes for the deaf in 1890 in Boston and then attended another school in New York to extend her academic studies and continue perfecting her communication efforts. By 1896, Helen was determined to attend college and she attended a preparation school, Cambridge School for Young Ladies. She was very focused on learning and getting a good education while she continued to practice her speech so that people could understand her.

Her story began to get a lot of attention and this included some famous celebrities. When Mark Twain, the famous author and celebrity met Keller he was so impressed that he introduced her to his friend and Standard Oil Executive, Henry H. Rogers. Rogers was also incredibly impressed with the drive and determination of this young woman that he agreed to pay her way to attend Radcliffe College. Anne Sullivan accompanied Keller to help her with interpretations and lectures and to assist in her studies.

Keller, by this point, was communicating in a number of ways: braille, touch-lip reading, finger spelling and typing. With the help of Sullivan and Sullivan's future husband, they produced Keller's first book "The Story of My Life". She then graduated cum laude from Radcliffe and was 24 years old. Keller went to live with Anne and her husband and Anne continued to be devoted to Keller.

Keller began to be a celebrity of her own, giving presentations, lectures and sharing her story. She wanted to know as much about the world as possible but also became passionate about women's suffrage, pacifism and birth control and got involved in many social and political issues. By 1915 she testified before Congress on improvement of treatment of blind people.

The same year she co-founded Helen Keller International to help fight blindness due to malnutrition and disease. By 1920 she assisted in founding the ACLU. When the American Federation for the Blind was started in 1921, Keller joined and became an active participant to raise awareness and money for the cause.

Keller joined many organizations and helped those less fortunate using her celebrity status and her story of survival and determination. Sullivan remained with Keller for over forty nine years, working with her to help promote many of the causes. Keller held a number of important titles and posts in quite a few organizations that assisted those in need.

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Helen Keller was blind, deaf and mute due to an early childhood illness and overcame these disabilities to become a major individual responsible for influencing how people viewed and treated those with disabilities. Keller was one of the 20th centuries leading humanitarians and founder of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

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I am Abraham Lincoln | Children's Books Read Aloud

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Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States. Learn about his biography, the Civil War, and his life story.

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Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 - April 15, 1865) was an American politician. He was the 16th President of the United States. He was president from 1861 to 1865, during the American Civil War. Just five days after most of the Confederate forces had surrendered and the war was ending, John Wilkes Booth assassinated Lincoln because he believed Lincoln was a tyrant. Lincoln was the first president of the United States to be assassinated. He has been remembered as the "Great Emancipator" because he worked to end slavery in the United States.

Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, in Hodgenville, Kentucky, United States. His parents were Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks Lincoln. His family was poor. Abraham had one brother and one sister. His brother died in childhood. Lincoln grew up in a small log cabin, with just one room inside. Although slavery was legal in Kentucky at that time, Lincoln's father, who was a religious Baptist, refused to own any slaves.

When Lincoln was seven years old, his family moved to Indiana. Later they moved to Illinois. In his childhood, he helped his father on the farm.

On October 5, 1818, when Abraham was 9, his mother died, leaving Abraham's 11-year-old sister Sarah in charge of the household. His father later married again.

When he was 21, he worked on a flatboat that carried freight. When he was 22 years old, he left home and moved to New Salem, Illinois, where he worked in a general store and as a postmaster. Later, he said that he had gone to school for just one year, but that was enough to learn how to read, write, and do simple math. In 1842, he married Mary Todd. They had four children, but three of them died when they were very young.

Abraham Lincoln was sometimes called Abe Lincoln or "Honest Abe" after he ran miles to give a customer the right amount of change. The nickname "Honest Abe" came from a time when he started a business that failed. Instead of running away as many people would have, he stayed and worked to pay his debt.

In 1851, Abraham's father died at the age of 73.

Early political career

Lincoln started his political career in 1832 when he ran for the Illinois General Assembly (IGA), but he lost the election. He served as a captain in the Illinois militia during the Black Hawk War, a war with Native American tribes. When he moved to Springfield in 1837, he began to work as a lawyer. Soon, he became one of the most highly respected lawyers in Illinois. He rode the circuit of courts for many years. In 1841, he won a court case (Bailey v. Cromwell) in which he represented a black woman who claimed she had already been freed and could not be sold as a slave. In 1847, he lost a case (Matson v. Rutherford) representing a slave owner (Robert Matson) claiming the return of fugitive slaves.

In 1846, Lincoln joined the Whig Party and was elected to one term in the House of Representatives. After that, he ignored his political career and instead worked as a lawyer. In 1854, in reaction to the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Lincoln became involved in politics again. He joined the Republican Party, which had recently been formed in opposition to the expansion of slavery. In 1858, he wanted to become a senator and ran against Stephen A. Douglas. Although he lost the senate race, the debates drew national attention to him. The Republican Party nominated him for the Presidential election of 1860.

Presidency

Lincoln was chosen as a candidate for the elections in 1860 for different reasons. Among these reasons was that his views on slavery were less extreme than those of other people who wanted to be candidates. Lincoln was from what was then one of the Western states and had a bigger chance of winning the election there. Other older, more experienced candidates had enemies inside the party. Lincoln's family was poor, which added to the Republican position of free labor, which is the opposite of slave labor. Lincoln won the election in 1860 and was made the 16th President of the United States. He won with almost no votes from those living in the South. For the first time, a president had won the election because of the large support he got from the states in the North. During his presidency, Lincoln became well-known because of his large stovepipe hat. He used his tall hat to store papers and documents when he was traveling.

The Civil War

After Lincoln's election in 1860, seven states ( South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Texas, and Louisiana) formed the Confederate States of America. When the United States refused to surrender Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, the Confederate Army attacked the fort, beginning the American Civil War. Later, four more states ( Arkansas, Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina) joined the Confederacy to make a total of eleven Confederate states. While Lincoln was President, he had to rebuild the Union with military force and many bloody battles. He also had to stop the "border states," like Kentucky, Missouri, and Maryland, from leaving the Union and joining the Confederacy.

Emancipation Proclamation

With the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln ordered the freedom of all slaves in those states still in rebellion during the American Civil War. However, it did not immediately free all those slaves, since those areas were still controlled by the rebelling states of the Confederacy. Only a small number of slaves already behind Union lines were immediately freed. As the Union army advanced, nearly all four million slaves were effectively freed. Some former slaves joined the Union army after 1862. The Proclamation also did not free slaves in the slave states that had remained loyal to the Union (the federal government of the U.S.). Neither did it apply to areas where Union forces had already regained control, as in Tennessee.

The Proclamation made freeing the slaves a Union goal for the war and put an end to movements in European nations (especially in Great Britain and France) that would have recognized the Confederacy as a separate nation from the Union. Lincoln then sponsored a constitutional amendment to free all slaves. The Thirteenth Amendment, making slavery illegal everywhere in the United States, was passed late in 1865, eight months after Lincoln was assassinated.

Gettysburg Address

During the important Battle of Gettysburg, many soldiers from both sides died. Abraham Lincoln made a famous speech called the Gettysburg Address at the new cemetery for the fallen soldiers. It is one of the most famous speeches in American history.

Second Term and Assassination

Lincoln was re-elected president by a slim margin in 1864 and re-inaugurated on March 4, 1865. Soon afterward, it looked like the Union would win the Civil War. Lincoln proposed terms that would not be harsh on the states that had rebelled. He wanted them to be able to restore self-government. On April 9, 1865, the leading Confederate general, Robert E. Lee, surrendered his armies. On April 11, 1865, Lincoln gave a speech in which he promoted voting rights for black American citizens.

During the day on April 14, 1865, Lincoln signed the legislation that created the secret service, the U.S. President's security force. That evening, Lincoln attended a play with his wife, Mary Todd, at Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C. He had invited Ulysses S. Grant to attend the play with them. As a general, Grant would have brought his own extra military security force, but he did not attend the play because his wife Julia Grant and Mary Todd Lincoln did not get along well.

During the third act of the play, John Wilkes Booth, a well-known actor and a Confederate spy from Maryland, entered the presidential box and shot Lincoln at point-blank range and shouted " Sic semper tyrannis" ("Thus always to tyrants"). An unconscious Lincoln was carried across the street to Petersen House. He was placed diagonally on the bed because his tall frame would not fit normally on the smaller bed. He remained in a coma for nine hours before dying the next morning. According to some accounts, at his last drawn breath, on the morning after being shot, he smiled broadly and then expired. Lincoln was the first American president to be assassinated.

Booth escaped but died from shots fired during his capture on April 26.

President Lincoln and his wife Mary Todd Lincoln had four sons.

Only Robert survived into adulthood. Of Robert's children, only Jessie Lincoln had any children (2 - Mary Lincoln Beckwith and Robert Lincoln Beckwith). Neither Robert Beckwith nor Mary Beckwith had any children, so Abraham Lincoln's bloodline ended when Robert Beckwith (Lincoln's great-grandson) died in 1985.

Lincoln has been consistently ranked both by scholars and the public as one of the greatest U.S. Presidents. He is often considered the greatest President for his leadership during the American Civil War and his eloquence in speeches such as the Gettysburg Address.

Abraham Lincoln quotes

"Whatever you are, be a good one."

"My concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side, for God is always right."

"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."

"Folks are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be."

"Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves."

"Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally."

"Character is like a tree and reputation its shadow. The shadow is what we think it is and the tree is the real thing."

"You cannot help people permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves."

Interesting facts about Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln was born into a poor family in Kentucky. He later moved to Indiana and then Illinois.

He earned the name "Honest Abe" because he did not run from failure but stayed to pay the debt he owed.

Abraham was a captain in the Illinois Militia that fought in a war against some Native American tribes.

Abraham moved to Springfield, Illinois, and became a well-respected lawyer.

When Lincoln tried to become a senator, he lost the election, but gained attention and was nominated for the Presidential election in 1860.

Abraham Lincoln was America's 16th president during the Civil War.

Lincoln ordered that all slaves be set free in the states that were still in rebellion. This was called the Emancipation Proclamation.

Abraham Lincoln was elected as President for a second time after his first term of four years was complete.

He sponsored adding the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which made slavery illegal everywhere in the United States. The Amendment passed after Lincoln's death.

One of the most famous speeches in United States History was given by Abraham Lincoln. It was after the Battle of Gettysburg and it was called the Gettysburg Address.

On April 14, 1865, Lincoln went to see a play with his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, at Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C.

He was shot in the head by John Wilkes Booth and died the next morning.

Abraham Lincoln was the first American President to be assassinated.

Questions kids ask about Abraham Lincoln

Why is Abraham Lincoln important?
Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States. He Presided over the Civil War. His Emancipation Proclamation freed 20,000 slaves. He was one of the most important people involved in the passage of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution and other important legislation that pushed the United States towards being a great country.

Who ended slavery?
Slavery was ended in the United States under the Lincoln presidency on December 18, 1865, once the 13th Amendment had been ratified and was officially adopted into the Constitution.

Why was Lincoln murdered?
On April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth killed the President because Booth was in support of slavery and wanted the South the same as it was before. He was trying to revive the Confederate cause by eliminating the three most important officials in the United States government, the President, Vice President and the Secretary of State. The president was the only person killed in Booth's plot.

Why is Lincoln considered the greatest president?
Abraham Lincoln is often considered the greatest president for his leadership during the American Civil War and his speeches, such as the Gettysburg Address.

Where is Abraham Lincoln buried?
The Lincoln Tomb is the final resting place of Abraham Lincoln, his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, and three of their four sons, Edward, William, and Thomas. It is located in Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, Illinois.

Can you visit Abraham Lincoln's grave?
Yes, you can walk around the monument and go inside.

Why was he buried in Springfield?
Even though he was born in Kentucky, Lincoln regarded Illinois as his home. He said "Springfield is my home, and there, more than elsewhere, are my life-long friends."

Images for kids

Abraham Lincoln, a portrait by Mathew Brady taken February 27, 1860, the day of Lincoln's Cooper Union speech

A political cartoon of Vice President Andrew Johnson (a former tailor) and Lincoln, 1865, entitled The 'Rail Splitter' At Work Repairing the Union. The caption reads (Johnson): "Take it quietly Uncle Abe and I will draw it closer than ever." (Lincoln): "A few more stitches Andy and the good old Union will be mended."

This funeral train, called the Lincoln Special, carried Lincoln's body on the three-week trip from Washington, D.C. to Springfield, Illinois. Along the way, it was met by hundreds of thousands of American mourners.

In Spanish: Abraham Lincoln para niños

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Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809-April 15, 1865) was the 16th president of the United States. He led the country through the Civil War and worked to end slavery. His life was cut short early in his second term when he was assassinated.

Abraham Lincoln was born to uneducated farmers. They lived in a one-room log cabin in Hodgenville, Kentucky. The family later moved to southern Indiana. Throughout Lincoln's life, he demonstrated that anyone can achieve greatness. But it requires dedication and hard work. Lincoln attended school for no more than a year. He was an reader, however. He did not attend law school. Instead, he studied on his own. He became an attorney in 1836.

As a lawyer, Lincoln earned a reputation for being clever, fair, and honest. Five years after moving to Springfield, Illinois, he married Mary Todd. They eventually had four children: Robert, Eddie, Willie, and Tad.

In 1834, Lincoln won the first of four elections to the Illinois State Legislature. He then served one term in the U.S. House of Representatives, from 1847 to 1849. In 1858, he ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate. During the race, he debated Stephen Douglas seven times. Lincoln gained national attention for his skills as an . Two years after losing the Senate race, he made a remarkable comeback. He was elected president.

Defender of the Union

MPI/GETTY IMAGES

Lincoln was inaugurated in 1861. At the time, there were rising tensions in the U.S. The country was split over states' rights and slavery. President Lincoln opposed slavery. So did many lawmakers in the North. But Southern landowners depended on slave labor for their farms. They demanded that slavery remain legal. Within months of Lincoln's taking office, seven states broke away from the Union. They formed the Confederate States of America. Later, four more states joined the Confederacy. Lincoln was determined to keep the union . But he knew that it likely meant going to war with the states that had .

The North and South fought the Civil War. It lasted four years. It remains the deadliest conflict ever fought by Americans. An estimated 620,000 soldiers died in the fighting. That was about 2% of the country's population. The bloodiest battle of the war took place in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. It was fought from July 1 to 3, 1863. More than 50,000 Union and Confederate troops died.

Months after the battle, a cemetery was created to honor the Union soldiers who had died. The dedication was held on November 19, 1863. President Lincoln attended the ceremony. There, in front of 15,000 people, he delivered the Gettysburg Address. It is now considered a key moment in U.S. history. In the speech, Lincoln explained why it was important to preserve the union. He said that the U.S. represented the ideas of democracy and self-government. Lincoln promised that "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

The Great Emancipator

As the Civil War raged on, the end of slavery became a key war aim for Lincoln. On January 1, 1863, he signed the Emancipation emancipation the act of setting someone free (noun) Your emancipation from your parents comes when you turn 18. Proclamation. The document freed the slaves in the states that had seceded from the Union. Lincoln later played a major role in the addition of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. The amendment formally slavery in the U.S. It was passed by Congress on January 31, 1865. The states the amendment on December 6, 1865. Lincoln did not live to see the ratification.

Lincoln was reelected in 1864. The Civil War was still being fought. But Lincoln called for the North and the South to forgive each other. "With malice toward none; with charity for all," he said in his second inaugural address. It was delivered on March 4, 1865. "Let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan." Lincoln urged all Americans "to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

The following month, on April 9, Confederate general Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union general Ulysses S. Grant. The Civil War was coming to an end. The U.S. would remain intact as one nation. Lincoln had accomplished his goal. But on April 14, he was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. Lincoln was attending a play at Ford's Theatre, in Washington, D.C. Upon his death, Lincoln's secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton, is believed to have said, "Now he belongs to the ages."

Today, Abraham Lincoln is widely revered as one of the greatest U.S. presidents. His face is on the penny, the $5 bill, and Mount Rushmore, in South Dakota. The Lincoln Memorial, in Washington, D.C., is one of the most visited monuments in the capital. Across the U.S. and around the world, people continue to look to Lincoln as an inspiration.

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Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809-April 15, 1865) was the 16th president of the United States. He led the country through the Civil War and worked to end slavery. His life was cut short early in his second term when he...

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Early Life

Ruth Joan Bader, the second daughter of Nathan and Cecelia Bader grew up in a low-income, working class neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. Ginsburg's family was Jewish. Ginsburg's mother, a major influence in her life, taught her the value of independence and a good education.

Cecelia herself did not attend college, but instead worked in a garment factory to help pay for her brother's college education, an act of selflessness that forever impressed Ginsburg. At James Madison High School in Brooklyn, Ginsburg worked diligently and excelled in her studies.

Her mother struggled with cancer throughout Ginsburg's high school years, and died the day before Ginsburg's graduation.

Bader graduated from Cornell University in 1954, finishing first in her class. She married Martin D. Ginsburg, also a law student, that same year.

The early years of their marriage were challenging, as their first child, Jane, was born shortly after Martin was drafted into the military in 1954. He served for two years and, after his discharge, the couple returned to Harvard where Ginsburg also enrolled.

At Harvard, Ginsburg learned to balance life as a mother and her new role as a law student. She also encountered a very male-dominated, hostile environment, with only eight females in her class of 500.

The women were chided by the law school's dean for taking the places of qualified males. But Ginsburg pressed on and excelled academically, eventually becoming a member of the prestigious legal journal, the Harvard Law Review.

Arguing for Gender Equality

Then, another challenge: Martin contracted testicular cancer in 1956, requiring intensive treatment and rehabilitation. Ginsburg attended to her young daughter and convalescing husband, taking notes for him in classes while she continued her own law studies.

Martin recovered, graduated from law school, and accepted a position at a New York law firm. Ginsburg transferred to Columbia Law School in New York City to join her husband, where she was elected to the school's law review. She graduated first in her class in 1959.

Despite her outstanding academic record, however, Ginsburg continued to encounter gender discrimination while seeking employment after graduation. After clerking for U.S. District Judge Edmund L. Palmieri, she taught at Rutgers University Law School (1963-72) and at Columbia (1972-80), where she became the school's first female tenured professor.

During the 1970s, she also served as the director of the Women's Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union ( ACLU), for which she argued six landmark cases on gender equality before the U.S. Supreme Court.

However, she also believed that the law was gender-blind and all groups were entitled to equal rights. One of the five cases she won before the Supreme Court involved a portion of the Social Security Act that favored women over men because it granted certain benefits to widows but not widowers.

On the Supreme Court

In 1980, President Jimmy Carter appointed Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. She served there until she was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1993 by President Bill Clinton, selected to fill the seat vacated by Justice Byron White.

President Clinton wanted a replacement with the intellect and political skills to deal with the more conservative members of the Court. The Senate Judiciary Committee hearings were unusually friendly, despite frustration expressed by some senators over Ginsburg's evasive answers to hypothetical situations.

Several expressed concern over how she could transition from social advocate to Supreme Court Justice. In the end, she was easily confirmed by the Senate, 96-3. Ginsburg became the court's second female justice as well as the first Jewish female justice.

As a judge, Ginsburg was considered part of the Supreme Court's moderate-liberal bloc, presenting a strong voice in favor of gender equality, the rights of workers and the separation of church and state.

In 1996, Ginsburg wrote the Supreme Court's landmark decision in United States v. Virginia, which held that the state-supported Virginia Military Institute could not refuse to admit women. In 1999, she won the American Bar Association's Thurgood Marshall Award for her contributions to gender equality and civil rights.
READ MORE: Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Landmark Opinions on Women's Rights
Legacy

Despite her reputation for restrained writing, she gathered considerable attention for her dissenting opinion in the case of Bush v. Gore, which effectively decided the 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore.

Objecting to the court's majority opinion favoring Bush, Ginsburg deliberately and subtly concluded her decision with the words, "I dissent" a significant departure from the tradition of including the adverb "respectfully."

On June 27, 2010, Ruth Bader Ginsburg's husband, Martin, died of cancer. She described Martin as her biggest booster and "the only young man I dated who cared that I had a brain."

Married for 56 years, as a couple, they were said to be quite different: Martin was gregarious, loved to entertain and tell jokes while Ruth was serious, soft-spoken and shy. Martin provided a reason for their successful union: "My wife doesn't give me any advice about cooking and I don't give her any advice about the law."

After 27 years serving as a justice on the Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on September 18, 2020 due to complications from metastatic pancreas cancer.

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Ruth Joan Bader, the second daughter of Nathan and Cecelia Bader grew up in a low-income, working class neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. Ginsburg's family was Jewish. Ginsburg's mother, a major influence in her life, taught her the value of independence and a good education.

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The Making of RBG

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The Making of RBG | Kid Reporters' Notebook | Scholastic Inc.

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Bader Ginsburg, who was once a law professor, still considers herself to be a teacher. "I try to teach through my opinions, through my speeches, how wrong it is to judge people on the basis of what they look like, the color of their skin, whether they're men or women," she once told author and reporter Irin Carmon.

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Ruth Bader Ginsburg, née Joan Ruth Bader, (born March 15, 1933, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.-died September 18, 2020, Washington, D.C.), associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1993 to 2020. She was the second woman to serve on the Supreme Court.

Joan Ruth Bader was the younger of the two children of Nathan Bader, a merchant, and Celia Bader. Her elder sister, Marilyn, died of meningitis at the age of six, when Joan was 14 months old. Outside her family, Ginsburg began to go by the name "Ruth" in kindergarten to help her teachers distinguish her from other students named Joan. The Baders were an observant Jewish family, and Ruth attended synagogue and participated in Jewish traditions as a child. She excelled in school, where she was heavily involved in student activities and earned excellent grades.

At about the time when Ruth started high school, Celia was diagnosed with cancer. She died of the disease four years later, just days before Ruth's scheduled graduation ceremony, which Ruth could not attend.

Ruth entered Cornell University on a full scholarship. During her first semester, she met her future husband, Martin ("Marty") Ginsburg, who was also a student at Cornell. Martin, who eventually became a nationally prominent tax attorney, exerted an important influence on Ruth through his strong and sustained interest in her intellectual pursuits. She was also influenced by two other people-both professors-whom she met at Cornell: the author Vladimir Nabokov, who shaped her thinking about writing, and the constitutional lawyer Robert Cushman, who inspired her to pursue a legal career. Martin and Ruth were married in June 1954, nine days after she graduated from Cornell.

After Martin was drafted into the U.S. Army, the Ginsburgs spent two years in Oklahoma, where he was stationed. Their daughter, Jane, their first child, was born during this time. The Ginsburgs then moved to Massachusetts, where Martin resumed-and Ruth began-studies at Harvard Law School. While Ruth completed her coursework and served on the editorial staff of the Harvard Law Review (she was the first woman to do so), she acted as caregiver not only to Jane but also to Martin, who had been diagnosed with testicular cancer. After his recovery, Martin graduated and accepted a job with a law firm in New York City. Ruth completed her legal education at Columbia Law School, serving on the law review and graduating in a tie for first place in her class in 1959.

Despite her excellent credentials, she struggled to find employment as a lawyer, because of her gender and the fact that she was a mother. At the time, only a very small percentage of lawyers in the United States were women, and only two women had ever served as federal judges. However, one of her Columbia law professors advocated on her behalf and helped to convince Judge Edmund Palmieri of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to offer Ginsburg a clerkship (1959-61). As associate director of the Columbia Law School's Project on International Procedure (1962-63), she studied Swedish civil procedure; her research was eventually published in a book, Civil Procedure in Sweden (1965), cowritten with Anders Bruzelius.

Hired by the Rutgers School of Law as an assistant professor in 1963, she was asked by the dean of the school to accept a low salary because of her husband's well-paying job. After she became pregnant with the couple's second child-a son, James, born in 1965-Ginsburg wore oversized clothes for fear that her contract would not be renewed. She earned tenure at Rutgers in 1969.

In 1970 Ginsburg became professionally involved in the issue of gender equality when she was asked to introduce and moderate a law student panel discussion on the topic of "women's liberation." In 1971 she published two law review articles on the subject and taught a seminar on gender discrimination. As a part of the course, Ginsburg partnered with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to draft briefs in two federal cases. The first (originally brought to her attention by her husband) involved a provision of the federal tax code that denied single men a tax deduction for serving as caregivers to their families. The second involved an Idaho state law that expressly preferred men to women in determining who should administer the estates of people who die without a will ( see intestate succession). The U.S. Supreme Court's decision in the latter case, Reed v. Reed (1971), was the first in which a gender-based statute was struck down on the basis of the equal protection clause.

During the remainder of the 1970s, Ginsburg was a leading figure in gender-discrimination litigation. In 1972 she became founding counsel of the ACLU's Women's Rights Project and coauthored a law-school casebook on gender discrimination. In the same year, she became the first tenured female faculty member at Columbia Law School. She authored dozens of law review articles and drafted or contributed to many Supreme Court briefs on the issue of gender discrimination. During the decade, she argued before the Supreme Court six times, winning five cases.

In 1980 Democratic U.S. Pres. Jimmy Carter appointed Ginsburg to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in Washington, D.C. While serving as a judge on the D.C. Circuit, Ginsburg developed a reputation as a pragmatic liberal with a keen attention to detail. She enjoyed cordial professional relationships with two well-known conservative judges on the court, Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia, and often voted with them. In 1993 she delivered the Madison Lecture at New York University Law School, offering a critique of the reasoning-though not the ultimate holding-of Roe v. Wade (1973), the famous case in which the Supreme Court found a constitutional right of women to choose to have an abortion. Ginsburg argued that the Court should have issued a more limited decision, which would have left more room for state legislatures to address specific details. Such an approach, she claimed, "might have served to reduce rather than to fuel controversy."

On June 14, 1993, Democratic U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton announced his nomination of Ginsburg to the Supreme Court to replace retiring Justice Byron White. Her confirmation hearings were quick and relatively uncontroversial. She was endorsed unanimously by the Senate Judiciary Committee and confirmed by the full Senate on August 3 by a vote of 96-3.

On the Court, Ginsburg became known for her active participation in oral arguments and her habit of wearing jabots, or collars, with her judicial robes, some of which expressed a symbolic meaning. She identified, for example, both a majority-opinion collar and a dissent collar. Early in her tenure on the Court, Ginsburg wrote the majority's opinion in United States v. Virginia (1996), which held that the men-only admission policy of a state-run university, the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), violated the equal protection clause. Rejecting VMI's contention that its program of military-focused education was unsuitable for women, Ginsburg noted that the program was in fact unsuitable for the vast majority of Virginia college students regardless of gender. "[G]eneralizations about 'the way women are,' estimates of what is appropriate for most women, no longer justify denying opportunity to women whose talent and capacity place them outside the average description," she wrote.

Although Ginsburg tended to vote with other liberal justices on the Court, she got along well with most of the conservative justices who had been appointed before her. She enjoyed a special connection with Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, a moderate conservative and the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court, and she and conservative Justice Antonin Scalia famously bonded over their shared love of opera (indeed, the American composer-lyricist Derrick Wang wrote a successful comic opera, Scalia/Ginsburg, celebrating their relationship). She praised the work of the first chief justice with whom she served, William Rehnquist, another conservative. Ginsburg had less in common with most of the justices appointed by Republican U.S. Presidents George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump, however.

Ginsburg attracted attention for several strongly worded dissenting opinions and publicly read some of her dissents from the bench to emphasize the importance of the case. Two such decisions in 2007 concerned women's rights. The first, Gonzales v. Carhart, upheld the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act on a 5-4 vote. Ginsburg decried the judgment as "alarming," arguing that it "cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to chip away at a right [the right of women to choose to have an abortion] declared again and again by this Court." Similarly, in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire, another 5-4 decision, Ginsburg criticized the majority's holding that a woman could not bring a federal civil suit against her employer for having paid her less than it had paid men (the plaintiff did not become aware of her right to file suit until after the filing period had passed). Ginsburg argued that the majority's reasoning was inconsistent with the will of the U.S. Congress-a view that was somewhat vindicated when Congress passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, the first bill that Democratic U.S. Pres. Barack Obama signed into law.

With the retirements of Justices David Souter in 2009 and John Paul Stevens in 2010, Ginsburg became the most senior justice within the liberal bloc. She wrote dissents articulating liberal perspectives in several more prominent and politically charged cases. Her partial dissent in the Affordable Care Act cases (2012), which posed a constitutional challenge to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (also known as "Obamacare"), criticized her five conservative colleagues for concluding-in her view contrary to decades of judicial precedent-that the commerce clause did not empower Congress to require most Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a fine. In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), the Court's conservative majority struck down as unconstitutional Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965, which had required certain states and local jurisdictions to obtain prior approval ("preclearance") from the federal Justice Department of any proposed changes to voting laws or procedures. Ginsburg, in dissent, criticized the "hubris" of the majority's "demolition of the VRA" and declared that "throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet." Ginsburg was likewise highly critical of the majority's opinion in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. (2014), a decision that recognized the right of for-profit corporations to refuse on religious grounds to comply with the Affordable Care Act's requirement that employers pay for coverage of certain contraceptive drugs and devices in their employees' health insurance plans. Ginsburg wrote that the majority opinion "falters at each step of its analysis" and expressed concern that the Court had "ventured into a minefield" by holding "that commercial enterprises...can opt out of any law (saving only tax laws) they judge incompatible with their sincerely held religious beliefs." Throughout her career Ginsburg concluded her dissents with the phrase "I dissent," rather than the conventional and more common "I respectfully dissent," which she considered an unnecessary (and slightly disingenuous) nicety.

In part because of her increasing outspokenness, Ginsburg became, during the Obama administration (2009-17), a progressive and feminist folk hero. Inspired by some of her dissents, a second-year law student at New York University created a Tumblr blog entitled "Notorious R.B.G."-a play on "Notorious B.I.G.," the stage name of the American rapper Christopher Wallace-which became a popular nickname for Ginsburg among her admirers. Nevertheless, some liberals, citing Ginsburg's advanced age and concerns about her health (she was twice a cancer survivor) and apparent frailty, argued that she should retire in order to allow Obama to nominate a liberal replacement. Others, however, pointed to her vigorous exercise routine and the fact that she had never missed an oral argument to urge that she should remain on the Court for as long as possible. For her own part, Ginsburg expressed her intention to continue for as long as she was able to perform her job "full steam." On the day after Martin Ginsburg died in 2010, she went to work at the Court as usual because, she said, it was what he would have wanted.

In an interview in 2016 Ginsburg expressed dismay at the possibility that Republican candidate Donald Trump would be elected president-a statement that was widely criticized as not in keeping with the Court's tradition of staying out of politics. (Ginsburg later said that she regretted the remark.) Trump's electoral victory renewed criticism of Ginsburg for not having retired while Obama was president. She remained on the Court as its oldest justice, publicly mindful of John Paul Stevens's service until the age of 90.

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Ruth Bader Ginsburg, associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1993 to 2020. The second woman to serve on the Supreme Court, she became an articulate representative of liberal perspectives on the Court and eventually the leader of the Court's minority liberal bloc.

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Kids learn about the biography of Cesar Chavez, civil rights leader who fought for the conditions of migrant farmers and Latinos.

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Cesar Chavez was a Latino-American civil rights activist who fought against the mistreatment of farm laborers and migrant workers in a non-violent way. Below are some great facts on Cesar Chavez or alternatively download our comprehensive worksheet pack to utilise within the classroom or home environment.

Cesar Chavez was a Latino-American civil rights activist who fought against the mistreatment of farm laborers and migrant workers in a non-violent way.

He was born on March 31, 1927 in Arizona, and he had 5 siblings.

After his family lost their home and surrounding land, they moved to California to work as migrant farm workers.

While living in California, their family had a tough time making ends meet. Cesar attended over 30 different schools, all taught by racist white teachers. He experienced racism and mistreatment from a young age.

Cesar's family moved from home to home in search of work. Every member of his family, including him, had to work.

Their work ranged from season to season. In the spring they picked cherries and beans, in the summer it was grapes and corn, and by fall they were required to pick cotton. By winter time, they had to endure the harsh temperatures outside and pick peas and lettuce.

When Cesar was in the 7th grade, he dropped out of school to work full-time so that his mother didn't have to work in the fields.

The days were very long and often they didn't have enough food to eat, and were exhausted from the day's work.

Cesar joined the U.S Navy in 1946, which he thought would give him valuable skills to take back to his old life. Unfortunately, when he reflected on his time in the navy, he said it was the "worst two years of my life".

When he returned from the navy, he continued working in the fields until 1952. At that point, he formed the Community Service Organization.

It was through this organization that he worked for the rights of Latino workers, including their right to vote.

After traveling around California and making speeches about the importance of the right to vote, he became the national director of the CSO in 1958.

Throughout his time with the CSO, hebegan reading about advocators of changewho did so in a peaceful way - including Martin Luther King Jr and Gandhi. He felt that he too could bring about change in anon-violent way.

In 1962, Cesar left the CSO and co-founded the National Farm Workers Association.

Once Cesar had started the Farm Workers Association, he went back to working in the fields to try and encourage other workers to join. Because other attempts had been made to recruit workers into a union, people were hesitant to join. They thought they would get into trouble, and that the Association wouldn't work.

Cesar kept at it, and eventually recruited more members. He called his movement for better working conditions "La Causa", which means "The Cause".

One of his first major actions in the FWA (which was later called the United Farm Workers (UFW) was to strike against grape farmers, and the unsafe and unfair working conditions imposed upon the farm workers.

The group demanded that all Americans boycott eating grapes as a sign of support for their cause.

In 1970, he and 67 other grape farm workers marched 340 miles to Sacramento, California, to protest against these unfair conditions. Along the way, the group grew in size. By the time they arrived in Sacramento, there were thousands of workers protesting.

In the end, the grape growers signed a contract that allowed the farm workers to unionize with collective bargaining rights. This meant that all the farm workers could have a collective, unanimous voice in determining their rights and responsibilities as workers.

Cesar advocated for non-violent protests, strikes, and boycotts to achieve his goals for his cause.

Over the next few decades, he continued to work for the rights and working conditions of migrant farmers to ensure they were being treated properly, paid accordingly, and that they had fair and safe working conditions.

His actions and messages spread to other states. Eventually, migrant workers from Texas, Wisconsin, and Ohio followed suit and held protests and boycotts of their own.

Cesar was known to participate in fastings in order to raise awareness for his causes. Fasting is when you don't eat for a period of time. His fasts would range from a few days to up to 36 days.

In fact, during his 36-day fast on August 21, 1988, celebrities took part with him. Some of them included Martin Sheen, Emilio Estevez, Robert Kennedy's daughter, Kerry, Danny Glover, and Whoopi Goldberg.

Eventually, farmers were taking notice of Cesar's actions, and realized that they were being put in danger everyday from many things, including:

- Long working days with low pay
- Prejudice and racist comments
- Long-term exposure to the mass use of pesticides
- Unsafe working conditions
- Unfair treatment (being fired for complaining, no toilets, no breaks)

Cesar and his wife, Helen Fabela, had 8 children and were vegan. They cared very much for the welfare of animals and the environment.

Cesar Chavez died in his sleep on April 23, 1993 in Arizona.

He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom shortly after his death.

Cesar Chavez Worksheets

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Cesar Chavez Facts, Worksheets & Information For Kids

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Cesar Chavez was a Latino-American civil rights activist who fought against the mistreatment of farm laborers and migrant workers in a non-violent way. Click to read some great facts on Cesar Chavez or alternatively download our comprehensive worksheet pack to utilise within the classroom or home environment.

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History for kids - Free history network for kids

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Cesar Chavez learned about the prejudice against the Hispanic community in America very early in life. His family home and land in Yuma, Arizona was stolen with an illegal deal from white businessmen. His family, now poverty stricken, relocated to California and lived in a 'barrio' (slum) and his father set the goal to try to send his children to college so that they could escape a poor life.

They all worked up and down the California coast as farm and migrant workers and Cesar attended thirty seven different schools that were taught by white teachers. Cesar grew up learning to live with horrible racial comments by both the teachers and students as well as some schools that separated the Hispanic children from the white children. He was forced to drop out of school in the eighth grade and work the fields full time when his father was involved in an accident.

After two years in the Navy, which was segregated for minorities, he married and returned to San Jose, California where he met Father Donald McDonnell. He became involved in discussions about farm worker rights and strikes. It was during this time that he also became involved in the philosophy of nonviolence through reading about Gandhi and St. Francis. Cesar started an organization called the Community Service Organization (CSO) that started a focus on voter registration for the workers.

By 1962, Cesar became the founder of the National Farm Workers Association that would later be the UFW, United Farm Workers. He designed a flag that was the symbol of the organization and he wanted it to be seen as a symbol of dignity. In 1970 the UFW had the grape growers to accept a labor union contract and this step allowed 50,000 paying members to become an organized group in the industry. His leadership, combined with nonviolent actions prompted a 340 mile march in protest and the Delano grape strike to require that the state allow farm workers to organize into a union which would bring 'collective bargaining' (bargaining with power in numbers) and for safe working conditions. The workers carried a flag with the symbol and the words 'Viva La Causa' (Long live our cause).

Cesar encouraged nonviolent methods of protest including strikes, pickets and boycotts to achieve their goals. He trained many of the workers so that they could go to other areas where there were protests and make sure the nonviolent methods were used. Cesar himself participated in many food protests where he fasted for days for the cause. The reason he did this was to make sure that the angry protestors saw the results of nonviolence as an action.

Farmers across the country were taking notice of Cesar and his group. The workers were being put in danger every day due to mass use of pesticides, long working days, unsafe conditions, low pay and prejudice. People from all walks of life began to hear about Cesar's fasting protests and joined in support by refusing to buy grapes. His actions were the final protest as the grocery stores were continuing to buy the grapes that were earned on the backs of the migrant and farm workers.

Cesar's efforts became so well-known across the United States that he was joined by many members of the religious and celebrity community. His 36-day Fast for Life in August 21, 1988 was completed and was followed by The Reverend Jesse Jackson picking up for Cesar by fasting for three days and then passing the fast on to the other members that had joined their group: Actor, Martin Sheen; SCLC President, the Reverend J. Lowery; Actors Edward Olmos and Emilio Estevez; Kerry Kennedy, daughter of Robert Kennedy; Legislator, Peter Chacon; Actress, Julie Carmen; Actor, Danny Glover; Singer, Carly Simon and Actress Whoopi Goldberg.

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Cesar Chavez made a major contribution to the way in which farm labor and migrant workers were treated in the United States. His nonviolent methods of protest became a banner cry across the country for all workers that were forced to work for low wages and in poor conditions.

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Harriett Tubman Biography (Black History Month for Kids/Children)

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You might know her as a conductor for the Underground Railroad. She was also a spy.

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Harriet Tubman (born Araminta Ross; c. 1820 or 1821 - March 10, 1913) was an African-American anti-slavery worker, and humanitarian. She was also a Union spy and the first black woman to lead an American mission during the American Civil War. She was born into slavery but she escaped. During her life, made 13 missions to rescue approximately 70 slaves, including family and friends. She used the Underground Railroad.

When Tubman was a child in Dorchester County, Maryland, she was whipped and beaten by many different masters. When she was very young, an angry overseer threw a heavy metal weight at another slave. The weight accidentally hit Tubman's head. That caused seizures, headaches, visions, and vivid dreams. She had those issues all her life. Tubman believed the visions and vivid dreams came from God.

In 1849, Tubman escaped to Philadelphia. Slaves were free there. She later returned to Maryland to rescue her family. She eventually guided dozens of other slaves to freedom. Slave owners offered large rewards for the return of their slaves. Tubman was never caught because nobody knew she was freeing the slaves.

When the American Civil War began, Tubman worked for the Union Army. She worked first as a cook and nurse. Later she was an armed (carrying weapons) scout and spy. She was the first woman to lead an armed group in the war. She guided the Combahee River Raid, which freed more than 700 slaves in South Carolina. After the war, she moved to her family home in Auburn, New York. There she cared for her aging parents. She became active in the women's suffrage movement in New York until she became ill. Near the end of her life, she lived in a home for elderly African Americans. Years earlier, she had helped create that home.

Early life and education

Tubman's mother Rit (whose father might have been a white man) was a cook. Her father Ben was a woodsman who did the timber work on a plantation. Ben and Rit married around 1808. According to court records, they had nine children together. Linah was born in 1808, Mariah Ritty in 1811, Soph in 1813, Robert in 1816, Minty (Harriet) in 1821, Ben in 1823, Rachel in 1825, Henry in 1830, and Moses in 1832.

Tubman's mother was owned by Mary Pattison Brodess and later her son, Edward. Rit was assigned to "the big house" as a cook and had very little time to be with her family. Harriet took care of a younger brother and a baby. This was typical in large families. When she was five or six years old, Brodess hired her out as a nursemaid to a woman named "Miss Susan." Tubman was ordered to watch the baby. Whenever the baby woke up and cried, Tubman was whipped. She later talked about a day when she was whipped five times before breakfast. She had the scars for the rest of her life. She found ways to resist such as running away for five days, wearing layers of clothing as protection against beatings, and fighting back.

As a child, Tubman also worked at the home of a planter named James Cook. She had to check muskrat traps in nearby marshes. She did that work even after she got measles. She became so ill that Cook sent her back to Brodess. After Harriet's mother nursed her back to health, Brodess hired her out again. Tubman spoke later of the intense homesickness she experienced as a child. She compared herself to "the boy on the Swanee River" (referring to Stephen Foster's song "Old Folks at Home"). When she was older and stronger, she did field and forest work, driving oxen, plowing, and hauling logs.

Head injury

One day when she was an adolescent, Tubman was sent to a dry-goods store for supplies. There she met a slave owned by another family. That slave had left the fields without permission. His overseer was angry and demanded that Tubman help restrain the young man. Tubman refused. As the slave ran away, the overseer threw a two-pound weight at him. The weight hit Tubman instead. Tubman said the weight "broke my skull." She later explained her belief that her hair - which "had never been combed and ... stood out like a bushel basket" - might have saved her life. Bleeding and unconscious, Tubman was returned to her owner's house and laid on the seat of a loom. She had no medical care for two days. She was sent back into the fields, "with blood and sweat rolling down my face until I couldn't see." She began having seizures and seemed to fall unconscious. She later said she was aware of her surroundings while appearing to be asleep. These episodes were frightening to her family. They couldn't wake her when she fell asleep suddenly and without warning. This condition remained with Tubman for the rest of her life. She may have suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy because of the injury.

Family and marriage

Around 1844, Tubman married a free black man named John Tubman. Little is known about him or their time together. Their marriage was complicated because she was a slave. Since children from the marriage would have the status of the mother, any children born to Harriet and John would become slaves. By this time, half the black population on the Eastern Shore of Maryland was free. Marriages between free people and enslaved people were common. Most African-American families had both free and enslaved members. It is possible that the couple might have planned to buy Tubman's freedom.

Escape from slavery

In 1849, Harriet became ill again. This reduced her value when Edward Brodess tried to sell her. Edward could not sell her and died shortly thereafter. Edward's wife, Eliza began working to sell the family's slaves. Tubman did not wait to be sold, but escaped with two of her brothers, Ben and Henry. Later, the two men had second thoughts about escaping and made Harriet return with them.

Soon afterward, Tubman escaped again, this time without her brothers. She later explained, "I had reasoned this out in my mind; there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other."

John Brown and Harpers Ferry

In April of 1958, Tubman was introduced to the abolitionist John Brown. Harriet did not agree that violence should be used against white people as John Brown did, but she did help him by sharing her knowledge of support networks and resources in the border states. Brown asked Tubman, who he called "General Tubman," to gather former slaves who might be willing to join his fighting force.

On May 8, 1958, Bown held a meeting where he shared his plan for a raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia) Tubman helped with the plans, but when it was time for the attack, Tubman could not be contacted.

The raid failed; Brown was convicted of treason, murder, and inciting (starting) a slave rebellion. He was hanged in December.

In early 1859, abolitionist Republican U.S. Senator William H. Seward sold Tubman a small piece of land on the outskirts of Auburn, New York, for $1,200 ($36,191 in 2023). Her land in Auburn became a haven for Tubman's family and friends. For years, she took in relatives and boarders, offering a safe place for black Americans seeking a better life in the North.

American Civil War

When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Tubman saw a Union victory as a key step toward the abolition of slavery. Harriet hoped to offer her own expertise and skills to the Union cause, too, and soon she joined a group of abolitionists who helped fugitives.

Tubman served as a nurse in Port Royal, making medicines from local plants and helping soldiers suffering from dysentery. She helped men with smallpox and miraculously did not get the disease.

Scouting and the Combahee River Raid

When Lincoln finally issued the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863, Tubman thought it was an important step toward the goal of freeing all black people from slavery. She began leading a band of scouts in land that was similar to where she grew up. She put her knowledge of how to travel secretly to good use and was able to give Colonel James Montgomery important information that helped in his capture of Jacksonville, Florida.

Later that year, Tubman helped Montgomery again. She became the first woman to lead an armed assault during the Civil War. Tubman guided three steamboats around Confederate mines in the waters that led to the shore. As Montgomery and his troops set fire to several plantations, the steamboats sounded their whistles, slaves throughout the area ran to the boats. Confederate troops were too late to stop the steamboats that were packed full of slaves, and the boats took off toward Beaufort, South Carolina.

More than 750 slaves were rescued in the Combahee River Raid. For two more years, Tubman worked for the Union, helping the newly freed slaves, scouting into Confederate territory, and nursing wounded soldiers in Virginia. She also made some trips back to Auburn to visit her family and care for her parents. After the Confederacy surrendered in April of 1865, Tubman served for several more months and headed home to Auburn.

Even though Harriet Tubman served the U.S. government for years, she did not receive a regular salary. Tubman spent her last years in Auburn, tending to her family and other people in need. She worked various jobs to support her elderly parents and took in boarders to help pay the bills. Her friends and supporters from her earlier abolition days help raise funds to support her.

Suffragist activism

In her later years, Tubman worked to advance the cause of women's suffrage. She worked with other women such as Susan B. Anthony and Emily Howland. Harriet traveled to cities to speak out in favor of women's voting rights. She described her actions during and after the Civil War and used the sacrifices of countless women throughout modern history as proof of women's equality with men.

AME Zion Church, illness, and death

At the turn of the 20th century, Tubman became involved with the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Auburn. In 1903, she donated a piece she owned to the church, under the instruction that it be made into a home for "aged and indigent (poor) colored people." The home opened five years later. Tubman was upset that the church ordered residents to pay a $100 entrance fee. She wished that people would not have to pay anything to live there.

In the late 1890s, Harriet had brain surgery to help with the seizures and headaches that continued to plague her. The surgery helped her for a time. By 1911, Tubman began living in the rest home she began, the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged. She died of pneumonia in 1913 and was buried with semi-military honors at Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn.

Tubman has had many museums and historical sites named after her. She is the subject of works of art including songs, novels, sculptures, paintings, movies, and theatrical productions.

Harriet Tubman quotes

"I said to the Lord, 'I'm going to hold steady on to you, and I know you will see me through.'"

"I would make a home for them in the North, and the Lord helping me, I would bring them all here."

"If a person would send another into bondage, he would, it appears to me, be bad enough to send him into hell if he could."

"I ain't got no heart to go and see the sufferings of my people played on the stage."

"I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can't say; I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger."

"I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person now that I was free."

Interesting facts about Harriet Tubman

When Harriet was helping slaves to freedom, her code name was "Moses" and she was known as the "black ghost."

She used spirituals and songs as coded messages for her followers.

When she had brain surgery to help with her seizures and headaches, she did not receive anesthesia for the procedure. Instead, she bit down on a bullet as she had seen Civil War soldiers do.

Harriet Tubman has two National Park sites dedicated to her: the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park in Dorchester County, Maryland, and the Harriet Tubman National Historical Park in Auburn, New York.

Images for kids

Notice in the Cambridge Democrat newspaper offering a reward of US$100 ($3,260 in 2023) for the capture and return of "Minty" (Harriet Tubman) and her brothers Henry and Ben, after they escaped on September 17, 1849

Frederick Douglass, who worked for slavery's abolition alongside Tubman, praised her in print.

Tubman's great-niece, Eva Stewart Northrup, launching the SS Harriet Tubman in 1944.

In Spanish: Harriet Tubman para niños

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Facts

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Harriet Tubman was an African-American abolitionist, humanitarian, and during the American Civil War, a Union spy. She was born into slavery and Tubman was able to escape, as well help seventy friends and family escape from slavery as well.
See the fact file below for more facts and information on Harriet Tubman or download the double bundle worksheet collection which includes over 30 worksheets to utilise within the classroom or home environment.
Quick Facts

Harriet Tubman was named Araminta Ross when she was born around 1820 in Bucktown, Maryland.

Araminta changed her name to Harriet to honor her mother, and when she married John Tubman her last name changed also.

When Harriet was twelve years old an overseer threw an iron weight at her and struck her in the head... she was standing up for another slave... for the rest of her life she suffered from blackouts and headaches.

At the age of 30 in 1849, Harriet ran away to the North and ended up in Philadelphia... she learned about a movement to abolish slavery and a group of people who were dedicated to helping slaves escape to the North... these people created the Underground Railroad.

The Underground Raillroad wasn't an actual railroad... It was a path that slaves traveled at night with the help of conductors, or people who guided them from safehouse to safehouse until they had reached the North... the station masters were the people who lived at the safehouse... these houses could be identified by the candles or lanterns that sat in the window.

Harriet made about 13 trips to the South and helped hundreds of slaves reach the safety of the North.

When the Civil War broke out, Harriet Tubman worked as a cook, nurse and spy for the Union Army.

Harriet Tubman was known as Moses after the Biblical Moses. He led his people out of Egypt and Harriet led her people out of the South and out of slavery.

She worked for the rights of African Americans until she died on March 10, 1913, at the age of 93.

Harriet Tubman has been honored many times since her death for her bravery and humanitarian efforts.

In-depth Biography:

Early Life

Harriet Tubman was born as Araminta "Minty" Ross in Dorchester County, Maryland. She was the daughter of Harriet Green and Ben Ross, both were born into slavery. The couple had nine children, Minty was the fifth child.

At the age of five, Minty was hired to take care of an infant. By eight, she served in a household where she experienced punishment from her mistress because she took a lump of sugar and tasted it.

Four years later, she worked in the plantation of a man named Barrett. Tubman preferred working outside instead of domestic works.

When Harriet was twelve years old, an overseer threw an iron weight at her and struck her in the head. She was standing up for another slave and for the rest of her life she suffered from blackouts and headaches.

Minty and her family were hired by John Steward to cut timber in Baltimore. Araminta changed her name to Harriet in honor of her mother, and when she married John Tubman in 1884, her last name also changed.

Harriet Tubman's Legacy and Death

At the age of 30 in 1849, Harriet ran away to the north and ended up in Philadelphia where she learned about a movement to abolish slavery with the group of people who were dedicated to helping slaves escape to the north. These people created the Underground Railroad.

The Underground Railroad was not an actual railroad. It was a path that slaves traveled at night with the help of conductors, or people who guided them from safehouse to safehouse until they had reached Canada. The station masters were the people who lived at the safehouse. These houses could be identified by the candles or lanterns that stood in the window.

During the Civil War, Tubman was recruited as a volunteer by General Benjamin Butler. She became the only African-American to be part of an all-white troop. Tubman worked as a cook, nurse and laundry washer without compensation.

From Virginia, she travelled to Port Royal, South Carolina, where she joined Dr. Henry K. Durand, Director of the Freedman's Hospital.

On January 1, 1863, right after the Emancipation Proclamation, she became the commander of the team in charge of espionage. Tubman led the creation of lifelines and escape routes for trapped slaves.

On June 2, 1863, the Combahee River Raid took place. It was led by Tubman who guided 150 black soldiers and they liberated more than 750 slaves.

Harriet Tubman was known as Moses after the Biblical Moses, who led his people out of Egypt, and Harriet led her people out of the south and out of slavery.

After the Civil War, Tubman returned to Auburn, New York. Her father died in 1871 while her mother passed nine years later.

On March 18, 1869, Tubman married Nelson Davis, a former soldier and brickmaker.

She worked for the rights of African Americans until she died on March 10, 1913, at the age of 93.

Harriet Tubman has been honored many times since her death for her bravery and humanitarian efforts.

Harriet Tubman Worksheets

This is a double bundle addition which includes over 30 ready-to-use Harriet Tubman worksheets that are perfect for students to learn about this famous lady who was born into slavery and was able to escape, as well help seventy friends and family escape from slavery as well.

Harriet Tubman Facts

Araminta's Biography

Slavery Bank

Famous Abolitionists

The Underground Railroad

Freedom Lamp

Tubman Timeline

Emancipation Proclamation

Words to Remember

Swing Low Sweet Chariot

Looking Back

Introduction

Harriet Tubman Facts

Which do not belong?

Word Search 01

Word Search 02

Freedom Wheel

Order of Events

Civil War Heroes

Triad of Hope

Word decode

Acrostic

Reflection

Link/cite this page

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Link will appear as Harriet Tubman Facts & Worksheets: https://kidskonnect.com - KidsKonnect, January 7, 2018
Use With Any Curriculum
These worksheets have been specifically designed for use with any international curriculum. You can use these worksheets as-is, or edit them using Google Slides to make them more specific to your own student ability levels and curriculum standards.

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Harriet Tubman Facts, Worksheets, Information & Biography For Kids

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Not ready to purchase a subscription? Click to download the free sample version Download sample Harriet Tubman was an African-American abolitionist, humanitarian, and during the American Civil War, a Union spy. She was born into slavery and Tubman was able to escape, as well help seventy friends and family escape from slavery as well.

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Fresberg Cartoon – Learning & History for Students

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Fun Cartoon on Dr.Martin Luther King Jr for Kids! Dr. Martin Luther King Jr Bio: Black History Month

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A hero is born

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1929. At the time in that part of the country, segregation-or the separation of races in places like schools, buses, and restaurants-was the law. He experienced racial predjudice from the time he was very young, which inspired him to dedicate his life to achieving equality and justice for Americans of all colors. King believed that peaceful refusal to obey unjust law was the best way to bring about social change.

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Civil Rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., never backed down in his stand against racism. Learn more about the life of this courageous hero who inspired millions of people to right a historical wrong.

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Kids learn about Martin Luther King, Jr.'s biography. A great civil rights leader.

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Martin Luther King, Jr. (born Michael King, Jr.; January 15, 1929 - April 4, 1968) was an American pastor, activist, humanitarian, and leader in the Civil Rights Movement. He was best known for improving civil rights by using nonviolent civil disobedience, based on his Christian beliefs. Because he was both a Ph.D. and a pastor, King is sometimes called the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. (abbreviation: the Rev. Dr. King), or just Dr King. He is also known by his initials MLK.

Led by Dr. King and others, many African Americans used nonviolent, peaceful strategies to fight for their civil rights. These strategies included sit-ins, boycotts, and protest marches. Often, they were attacked by white police officers or people who did not want African Americans to have more rights. However, no matter how badly they were attacked, Dr. King and his followers never fought back.

King fought for equal rights from the start of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 until he was murdered by James Earl Ray in April 1968.

At age 6, King first went through discrimination (being treated worse than a white person because he was black). He was sent to an all-black school, and a white friend was sent to an all-white school.

Once, when he was 14, King won a contest with a speech about civil rights. When he was going back home on a bus, he was forced to give up his seat and stand for the bus ride so a white person could sit down. At the time, white people were seen as more important than black people. If a white person wanted a seat, that person could take the seat from any African American. King later said having to give up his seat made him "the angriest I've ever been in my life."

Civil rights work

Montgomery Bus Boycott

King first started his civil rights activism in 1955. At that time, he led a protest against the way black people were segregated on buses. They had to sit at the back of the bus, separate from white people. He told his supporters, and the people who were against equal rights, that people should only use peaceful ways to solve the problem.

King was arrested for starting a boycott. He was fined $500, plus $500 more in court costs. His house was fire- bombed. Others involved with MIA were also threatened. However, by December 1956, segregation had been ended on Montgomery's buses. People could sit anywhere they wanted on the buses.

March on Washington

In 1963, King helped plan the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. This was the largest protest for human rights in United States history. On August 28, 1963, about 250,000 people marched from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial. Then they listened to civil rights leaders speak. King was the last speaker. His speech, called " I Have a Dream," became one of history's most famous civil rights speeches. King talked about his dream that one day, white and black people would be equal.

That same year, the United States government passed the Civil Rights Act. This law made many kinds of discrimination against black people illegal. The March on Washington made it clear to the United States government that they needed to take action on civil rights, and it helped get the Civil Rights Act passed.

Nobel Prize

In 1964, King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. When presenting him with the award, the Chairman of the Nobel Committee said:

Today, now that mankind [has] the atom bomb, the time has come to lay our weapons and armaments aside and listen to the message Martin Luther King has given us[:] "The choice is either nonviolence or nonexistence"....[King] is the first person in the Western world to have shown us that a struggle can be waged without violence. He is the first to make the message of brotherly love a reality in the course of his struggle, and he has brought this message to all men, to all nations and races.

Voting rights

In 1963 and 1964, civil rights groups in Selma, Alabama had been trying to sign African-American people up to vote, but they had not been able to. At the time, 99% of the people signed up to vote in Selma were white. However, the government workers who signed up voters were all white. They refused to sign up African-Americans. In January 1965, these civil rights groups asked King and the SCLC to help them. Together, they started working on voting rights. However, the next month, an African-American man named Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot by a police officer during a peaceful march. Jackson died. pp. 121-123 Many African-American people were very angry.

The first march was on March 7, 1965. Police officers, and people they had chosen to help them, attacked the marchers with clubs and tear gas. They threatened to throw the marchers off the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Seventeen marchers had to go to the hospital, and 50 others were also injured. This day came to be called Bloody Sunday. Pictures and film of the marchers being beaten were shown around the world, in newspapers and on television. Seeing these things made more people support the civil rights activists. People came from all over the United States to march with the activists. One of them, James Reeb, was attacked by white people for supporting civil rights. He died on March 11, 1965.

On August 6, 1965, the United States passed the Voting Rights Act. This law made it illegal to stop somebody from voting because of their race.

After this, King continued to fight poverty and the Vietnam War.

Assassination

On April 4, 1968, King was in Memphis, Tennessee. He planned to lead a protest march to support garbage workers who were on strike. At 6:01 pm, King was shot while he was standing on the balcony of his motel room.

King was rushed to St. Joseph's Hospital. His heart had stopped. Doctors there tried to make his heart start pumping again. However, they were unable to save King's life. He died at 7:05 p.m.

King's death led to riots in many cities.

"

[After I die,] I'd like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King Jr. tried to give his life serving others.

"

After his death, King was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. King and his wife were also awarded the Congressional Gold Medal.

In 2003, the United States Congress passed a law allowing the beginning words of King's "I Have a Dream" speech to be carved into the Lincoln Memorial.

More than 900 streets in the United States have also been named after King. These streets exist in 40 different states; Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico. and many others

In 2011, a memorial statue of King was put up in West Potomac Park next to the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

There are also memorials for King around the world. These include:

Interesting facts about Martin Luther King Jr.

He was born in his Grandparents house in Atlanta, Georgia.

He was named "Michael King" when he was born. He decided to change his name as a teenager to Martin Luther King Jr. after his father.

He graduated from high school early and entered college at just 15 years of age in 1944.

He only earned $8,000 a year as a preacher, which is just under $ 60,000 today, so he wasn't wealthy when he died.

In 1964 he was the youngest person (35 years) to have received the Nobel Peace Prize.

He won the Nobel Peace Prize for his nonviolent resistance to racial prejudice in in the United States.

His favorite foods were fried chicken and pecan pie.

Martin Luther King Jr. would be 92 years old today.

Related pages

Images for kids

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Martin Luther King, Jr. (born Michael King, Jr.; January 15, 1929 - April 4, 1968) was an American pastor, activist, humanitarian, and leader in the Civil Rights Movement. He was best known for improving civil rights by using nonviolent civil disobedience, based on his Christian beliefs. Because he was both a Ph.D.

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I Dissent: read aloud

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CML Presents: I Dissent: Ruth Bader Ginsburg Makes Her Mark by Debbie Levy