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Mickey Mantle | Biography, Stats, & Facts

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Mickey Mantle, in full Mickey Charles Mantle, byname the Mick, (born October 20, 1931, Spavinaw, Oklahoma, U.S.—died August 13, 1995, Dallas, Texas), professional American League baseball player for the New York Yankees (1951–68), who was a powerful switch-hitter (right- and left-handed) and who hi…

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If cream puffs have ever seemed intimidating and out of reach to make at home, let today change your mind! I promise this foolproof cream puffs recipe will make you feel like a rock star in the kitchen - and in no time (cream puffs are pretty darn fast to make!).

There's a how-to video below to make making them even easier, plus, I'm sharing a couple tricks that will make them turn out every single time!

The great thing about cream puffs is that their craggy tops mean you don't have to fight for perfection. Rustic is good. Very, very good.

These tender tiny pastries are so amazingly delicious - what with the super charged layers of luscious homemade vanilla cream filling topped with sweetened whipped cream and all.

And like I mentioned above, it's ok if they look like a miniature art form. Do some of mine look a little spiky and modern art-ish on top? Perhaps. But I can promise you this: no one is going to remember the architecture on the top of the shell after inhaling the ethereal goodness of these mini cream puffs.

Two Secrets for the Best Cream Puffs

1) Use a mini muffin tin or regular muffin tin to bake the cream puffs! This ensures the cream puffs will rise up (instead of flattening) and they will hold their shape beautifully! Also, scooping the sticky batter in with a cookie scoop is lifechangingly easy (my favorite cookie scoops here - aff. link).

2) Immediately out of the oven, pierce each cream puff with a thin wooden skewer or small paring knife to let the steam escape while they cool. This is KEY to making sure those cute little puffs don't collapse!

(Also, pro tip: dipping your finger in cold water and smoothing out the top of each cream puff before they bake will help minimize the dangerous spikes.)

Watch the How-To Video Here!

You can see other Bake with Mel videos here on Instagram Live or over on this page.
One Year Ago: Spinach Strawberry Salad with Homemade Creamy Poppy Seed Dressing
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Vanilla Cream Filling:

Place an oven rack in the lower-middle position. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F (decrease by 25 or 50 degrees if using a dark coated pan). Lightly grease a 24-cup mini muffin tin or a 12-cup regular muffin tin (you'll bake in two batches).

In a medium saucepan, bring the water and butter to a simmer over medium heat. Reduce the heat to medium-low and add the flour, stirring with a wooden spoon or spatula until the mixture forms a ball.

Scrape the warm mixture into a mixing bowl (or into the bowl of an electric stand mixer) and beat with a handheld electric mixer until the dough has cooled slightly, 1-2 minutes. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating constantly, until the mixture is thick and smooth.

Scoop a heaping 1/2 tablespoon into each mini muffin tin (about 1/2 full) or a couple tablespoons into a regular muffin tin (again, about 1/2 full). A cookie scoop works great for this.

Once the mini muffin cups are filled, wet your fingers with cold water and dab them on the top of the mounded dough to smooth out any rough spots and even out the dough (this will help them bake into a pretty rounded top).

Bake for about 15-20 minutes for mini cream puffs and 25 minutes for regular cream puffs until the tops of the shells are lightly golden and they are baked all the way through (if there is any doughy moisture inside the shells add a few minutes so they don't collapse).

Remove the pan from the oven and working quickly, use a thin wooden skewer to pierce the side of each cream puff; doing this will allow any steam to escape. I try to poke the cream puff shell right in the middle where I'll be splitting it anyway to add the cream. Remove them from the tin and let them cool completely on a wire rack.

Repeat the filling and baking process with the remaining dough.

For the vanilla cream filling, in a medium saucepan, bring the milk and 1/4 cup powdered sugar to a simmer. Meanwhile, in a medium bowl, whisk together the egg yolks, egg, cornstarch and 1/3 cup powdered sugar. Slowly ladle or drizzle in the hot milk mixture to the bowl while whisking constantly (this tempers the eggs so they don't curdle and cook into hard bits). Return the mixture to the saucepan and cook over medium heat, stirring and/or whisking constantly, until the mixture bubbles and thickens.

Remove from the heat and stir in the butter and vanilla.

Pour the mixture through a fine mesh strainer (this part is optional but can help remove any lumps) into a clean bowl. Press plastic wrap directly on the top and refrigerate until cold. The vanilla cream filling can be made up to a week in advance.

For the sweetened whipped cream, whip the heavy cream with the powdered sugar and vanilla to stiff peaks (I like to use my Blendtec for whipping cream; super simple and takes just a minute or two).

Split each cooled cream puff shell in half right at the seam where the puffy top meets the smooth bottom. Spoon vanilla cream into the bottom of each shell and top with a dollop of sweetened whipped cream and place the top back on. Lightly dust all the cream puffs with powdered sugar.

The cream puffs can be fully assembled up to a day in advance (they actually taste better if assembled ahead of time). I store them uncovered in the refrigerator up to a day before serving.

Sweetened Whipped Cream:

Recipe: Sally gives a lot of good information in her original cream puff post. I adapted her recipe to make mini cream puffs but follow a lot of her advice.

Make Ahead: the cream puff shells can be made in advance (baked, cooled and lightly covered - not airtight or they'll get soggy - up to a day or so in advance), the cream puffs can be entirely assembled and filled with cream and dusted with sugar up to a day in advance and actually taste better filled ahead of time. Store them uncovered in the refrigerator.
Recipe Source: cream puffs adapted from Sally's tried-and-true recipe, which is very similar to this recipe I posted years ago, except made them into mini size, vanilla cream adapted slightly from allrecipes (used powdered sugar for a smoother, silkier pastry cream) Recipe originally published March 2015; updated with new photos, commentary, video and recipe notes.
Follow @MelsKitchenCafe on Instagram and show me the recipes you are making from my blog using the hashtag #melskitchencafe. I love seeing all the goodness you are whipping up in your kitchens!

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If cream puffs have ever seemed intimidating and out of reach to make at home, let today change your mind! I promise this foolproof cream puffs recipe will make you feel like a rock star in the kitchen - and in no time (cream puffs are pretty darn fast to make!).

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Table of Contents

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bar mitzvah, also spelled bar mitzva or mitzwa (Hebrew: "son of the commandment"), plural bar mitzvahs, bar mitzvot, or bar mitzwot, Jewish religious ritual and family celebration commemorating the religious adulthood of a boy on his 13th birthday. The boy, now deemed personally responsible for fulfilling all the commandments, may henceforth don phylacteries (religious symbols worn on the forehead and left arm) during the weekday morning prayers and may be counted as an adult whenever 10 male adults are needed to form a quorum () for public prayers.

In a public act of acknowledging religious majority, the boy is called up during the religious service to read from the Torah. This event may take place on any occasion following the 13th birthday at which the Torah is read but generally occurs on the Sabbath. The liturgy of the day thus permits the boy to read the weekly text from the Prophets, called Haftarah. This is sometimes followed by a hortatory discourse. After the religious ceremony, there is often a festive kiddush, or prayer over a cup of wine, with a family social dinner or banquet on the same or the following day.

Though records of the 2nd century mention 13 as the age of religious manhood, most elements of the bar mitzvah celebration did not appear until the Middle Ages. Reform Judaism replaced bar mitzvah, after 1810, with the confirmation of boys and girls together, generally on the feast of Shavuot. In the 20th century, however, many Reform congregations restored bar mitzvah, delaying confirmation until the age of 15 or 16. Numerous Conservative and Reform congregations have instituted a separate ceremony to mark the adulthood of girls, called bat mitzvah.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Amy Tikkanen.

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bar mitzvah, also spelled bar mitzva or mitzwa (Hebrew: "son of the commandment"), plural bar mitzvahs, bar mitzvot, or bar mitzwot, Jewish religious ritual and family celebration commemorating the religious adulthood of a boy on his 13th birthday.

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Lyndon B. Johnson: Biography of Lyndon B. Johnson, 36th U.S. president, who championed civil rights and the "Great Society" but unsuccessfully oversaw the Vietnam War.

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the Beatles, British musical quartet and a global cynosure for the hopes and dreams of a generation that came of age in the 1960s. The principal members were John Lennon (b. October 9, 1940, Liverpool, Merseyside, England-d. December 8, 1980, New York, New York, U.S.), Paul McCartney (in full Sir James Paul McCartney; b. June 18, 1942, Liverpool), George Harrison (b. February 25, 1943, Liverpool-d. November 29, 2001, Los Angeles, California, U.S.), and Ringo Starr (byname of Richard Starkey; b. July 7, 1940, Liverpool). Other early members included Stuart Sutcliffe (b. June 23, 1940, Edinburgh, Scotland-d. April 10, 1962, Hamburg, West Germany) and Pete Best (b. November 24, 1941, Madras [now Chennai], India).

Formed around the nucleus of Lennon and McCartney, who first performed together in Liverpool in 1957, the group grew out of a shared enthusiasm for American rock and roll. Like most early rock-and-roll figures, Lennon, a guitarist and singer, and McCartney, a bassist and singer, were largely self-taught as musicians. Precocious composers, they gathered around themselves a changing cast of accompanists, adding by the end of 1957 Harrison, a lead guitarist, and then, in 1960 for several formative months, Sutcliffe, a promising young painter who brought into the band a brooding sense of bohemian style. After dabbling in skiffle, a jaunty sort of folk music popular in Britain in the late 1950s, and assuming several different names (the Quarrymen, the Silver Beetles, and, finally, the Beatles), the band added a drummer, Best, and joined a small but booming "beat music" scene, first in Liverpool and then, during several long visits between 1960 and 1962, in Hamburg-another seaport full of sailors thirsty for American rock and roll as a backdrop for their whiskey and womanizing.

In autumn 1961 Brian Epstein, a local Liverpool record store manager, saw the band and fell in love. Unshakably convinced of their commercial potential, Epstein became their manager and proceeded to bombard the major British music companies with letters and tape recordings of the band, finally winning a contract with Parlophone, a subsidiary of the giant EMI group of music labels. The man in charge of their career at Parlophone was George Martin, a classically trained musician who from the start put his stamp on the Beatles, first by suggesting the band hire a more polished drummer (they chose Starr) and then by rearranging their second recorded song (and first big British hit), " Please Please Me," changing it from a slow dirge into an up-tempo romp.

Throughout the winter and into the spring of 1963, the Beatles continued their rise to fame in England by producing spirited recordings of original tunes and also by playing classic American rock and roll on a variety of British Broadcasting Corporation radio programs. In these months, fascination with the Beatles-at first confined to young British fans of popular music-breached the normal barriers of taste, class, and age, transforming their recordings and live performances into matters of widespread public comment. In the fall of that year, when they belatedly made a couple of appearances on British television, the evidence of popular frenzy prompted British newspapermen to coin a new word for the phenomenon: Beatlemania. In early 1964, after equally tumultuous appearances on American television, the same phenomenon erupted in the United States and provoked a so-called British Invasion of Beatles imitators from the United Kingdom.

Beatlemania was something new. Musicians performing in the 19th century certainly excited a frenzy-one thinks of Franz Liszt-but that was before the modern mass media created the possibility of collective frenzy. Later pop music idols, such as Michael Jackson in the mid-1980s and Garth Brooks in the 1990s, sold similarly large numbers of records without provoking anything approaching the hysteria caused by the Beatles. By the summer of 1964, when the Beatles appeared in A Hard Day's Night, a movie that dramatized the phenomenon of Beatlemania, the band's effect was evident around the world as countless young people emulated the band members' characteristic long hair, flip humour, and whimsical displays of devil-may-care abandon. Indeed, their transformative social and cultural influence was even recognized among the upper echelons of political power. In 1965 each of the four Beatles was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE), having been recommended for the honour by British Prime Minister Harold Wilson (and despite a brief storm of protest by some previous recipients, mainly military veterans, against what they perceived as a lowering of the dignity of the royal order).

The popular hubbub proved to be a spur, convincing Lennon and McCartney of their songwriting abilities and sparking an outpouring of creative experimentation all but unprecedented in the history of rock music, which until then had been widely regarded, with some justification, as essentially a genre for juveniles. Between 1965 and 1967 the music of the Beatles rapidly changed and evolved, becoming ever more subtle, sophisticated, and varied. Their repertoire in these years ranged from the chamber pop ballad " Yesterday" and the enigmatic folk tune " Norwegian Wood" (both in 1965) to the hallucinatory hard rock song " Tomorrow Never Knows" (1966), with a lyric inspired by Timothy Leary's handbook The Psychedelic Experience (1964). It also included the carnivalesque soundscape of " Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite! " (1967), which featured stream-of-consciousness lyrics by Lennon and a typically imaginative arrangement (by George Martin) built around randomly spliced-together snippets of recorded steam organs-a tour de force of technological legerdemain quite typical of the band's studio work in this era.

In 1966 the Beatles retired from public performing to concentrate on exploiting the full resources of the recording studio. A year later, in June 1967, this period of widely watched creative renewal was climaxed by the release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, an album avidly greeted by young people around the world as indisputable evidence not only of the band's genius but also of the era's utopian promise. More than a band of musicians, the Beatles had come to personify, certainly in the minds of millions of young listeners, the joys of a new counterculture of hedonism and uninhibited experimentation-with music and with new ways of life. (Various members of the band in these years flirted with mind-expanding drugs such as LSD and also with exotic spiritual exercises such as transcendental meditation, a technique taught to them by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a barnstorming guru from India.)

In those years the Beatles effectively reinvented the meaning of rock and roll as a cultural form. The American artists they admired and chose to emulate- Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Elvis Presley, the Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, the pioneering rock composers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, the influential soul songwriter Smokey Robinson, and, after 1964, folksinger and topical songwriter Bob Dylan -became widely regarded as canonic sources of inspiration, offering "classical" models for aspiring younger rock musicians. At the same time, the original songs the Beatles wrote and recorded dramatically expanded the musical range and expressive scope of the genre they had inherited. Their close vocal harmonies, subtle arrangements, and clever production touches, combined with an elemental rhythm section anchored by Starr's no-nonsense drumming, created new standards of excellence and beauty in a form of music previously known for amateurism.

After 1968 and the eruption of student protest movements in countries as different as Mexico and France, the Beatles insensibly surrendered their role as de facto leaders of an inchoate global youth culture. They nevertheless continued for several more years to record and release new music and maintained a level of popularity rarely rivaled before or since. In 1968 they launched their own record label, Apple; hoping to nurture experimental pop art, they instead produced chaos and commercial failure, apart from the work of the Beatles themselves. The band continued to enjoy widespread popularity. The following year Abbey Road went on to become one of the band's best-loved and biggest-selling albums.

Meanwhile, personal disagreements magnified by the stress of symbolizing the dreams of a generation had begun to tear the band apart. Once the collaborative heart and soul of the band, Lennon and McCartney fell into bickering and mutual accusations of ill will. By now millions of dollars were at stake, and the utopian aura of the performers was in jeopardy, given the discrepancy between the band's symbolic stature as idols of a carefree youth culture and their newfound real status as pampered plutocrats.

In the spring of 1970 the Beatles formally disbanded. In the years that followed, all four members went on to produce solo albums of variable quality and popularity. Lennon released a corrosive set of songs with his new wife, Yoko Ono, and McCartney went on to form a band, Wings, that turned out a fair number of commercially successful recordings in the 1970s. Starr and Harrison, too, initially had some success as solo artists. But, as time went by, the Beatles became as much of a historical curio as Al Jolson or Bing Crosby or Frank Sinatra or Elvis Presley before them.

In 1980 Lennon was murdered by a demented fan outside the Dakota, an apartment building in New York City known for its celebrity tenants. The event provoked a global outpouring of grief. Lennon is memorialized in Strawberry Fields, a section of Central Park across from the Dakota that Yoko Ono landscaped in her husband's honour.

In the years that followed, the surviving former Beatles continued to record and perform as solo artists. McCartney in particular remained musically active, both in the pop field, producing new albums every few years, and in the field of classical music-in 1991 he completed Liverpool Oratorio; in 1997 he supervised the recording of another symphonic work of large ambition, Standing Stone; and in 1999 he released a new classical album, Working Classical. McCartney was knighted by the queen of England in 1997. Starr was also very visible in the 1990s, touring annually with his All-Star Band, a rotating group of rock veterans playing their hits on the summertime concert circuit. Beginning in 1988, Harrison recorded with Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, and Roy Orbison in a loose amalgam known as the Traveling Wilburys, but, for most of the 1980s and '90s, he had a low profile as a musician while acting as the producer of several successful films. After surviving a knife attack at his home in 1999, Harrison succumbed to a protracted battle with cancer in 2001.

Early in the 1990s McCartney, Harrison, and Starr had joined to add harmonies to two previously unreleased vocal recordings by Lennon. These new songs by "the Beatles" served as a pretext for yet another publicity blitz, aimed at creating a market for a lavishly produced quasi-historical series of archival recordings assembled under the supervision of the band and released in 1995 and 1996 as The Beatles Anthology, a collection of six compact discs that supplemented a 10-hour-long authorized video documentary of the same name. A compilation of the band's number one singles, 1, appeared in 2000 and enjoyed worldwide success, topping the charts in such countries as England and the United States. The afterglow of Beatlemania may have disappeared, but the iconography of an era of youthful tumult had been reverently preserved for posterity.

The Beatles were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988, and Lennon (1994), McCartney (1999), Harrison (2004), and Starr (2015) were also inducted as individuals. In September 2009, specially packaged digitally remastered versions of the Beatles' entire catalog and a Beatles version of the popular electronic music game Rock Band were released simultaneously. After it was reported in February 2010 that the financially troubled EMI was soliciting buyers for its Abbey Road Studios, where the Beatles made the great majority of their recordings, the British Department for Culture, Media, and Sport declared the recording complex a historic landmark. EMI subsequently announced that it would retain ownership of the iconic studio while seeking outside investment to improve its facilities.

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Beatles | Members, Songs, Albums, & Facts

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Beatles, British musical quartet of enduring popularity.

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Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Date:

April 4, 1968

(Show more)

assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., mortal shooting of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., the most prominent leader of the American civil rights movement, on April 4, 1968, as he stood on the second floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had come to lead a march by striking sanitation workers. In response to King's death, more than 100 American inner cities exploded in rioting, looting, and violence. James Earl Ray, a career small-time criminal who became the object of a more than two-month manhunt before he was captured in England, pled guilty to the shooting and received a 99-year prison sentence. He quickly recanted his plea and spent the rest of his life claiming that he had been framed by a conspiracy that was really responsible for King's assassination.

Context: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the United States in April 1968

The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., was one of the earthshaking events of 1968 that made it among the most tumultuous and momentous years in American history. The civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the antiwar movement all were in full swing as the year began. King's opposition to the Vietnam War had been building steadily since 1965, though initially he was reluctant to prominently criticize the conduct of the war by Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson, who had been a key ally in the effort to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. When the war effort began to rob funding from Johnson's Great Society plan, however, King became a more vocal critic, and his opposition to the war grew to embrace a more radical critique of what he saw as U.S. militarism and imperialism. King also took American capitalism to task and began portraying inequality in economic as well as racial terms. "Beyond Vietnam," the address that he gave at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967, exactly one year before his death, brought all of these elements together in a speech that made manifest his opposition to the war.

A number of mainstream publications, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, thought King had gone too far with the speech. He had already begun to find himself betwixt and between. Many whites saw him as a dangerous radical. On the other hand, despite his increasingly radical message, a growing number of militant African Americans had become impatient with his nonviolent methods and what they saw as a lack of success in his civil rights efforts in northern cities. It had been several years since his southern triumphs in the Montgomery bus boycott, the Birmingham campaign, and the Selma March.

In November 1967 King's concern with economic inequality led him and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to mount a Poor People's Campaign, which was to culminate in a massive march on Washington, D.C. Before that could happen, other events of early 1968 interceded. On January 30, North Vietnam launched the Tet Offensive, a widespread attack in South Vietnam that put the Americans and South Vietnamese on their heels for weeks. The pervasiveness of this shocking assault and especially the images of fighting in and around the U.S. embassy in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) dramatically belied the U.S. government's contention that the Americans and the South Vietnamese had the war well in hand. Opposition to the war led to Johnson's defeat by antiwar candidate Sen. Eugene McCarthy in the March 12, 1968, Democratic presidential primary in New Hampshire, followed by the announcement of the candidacy of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (March 16) and the withdrawal of Johnson's candidacy (March 31). Meanwhile, Republican front-runner Richard Nixon's popularity grew with the "silent majority" who opposed social change and supported the war. Against this backdrop and that of the previous year's rioting in Detroit and Newark, King interrupted the planning of the Poor People's March to travel to Memphis in support of a strike by sanitation workers.

The Memphis sanitation workers strike

Sanitation workers in Memphis-most of whom were African American and received a paltry wage of about $1.00 per hour-conducted a strike for better wages and working conditions in 1966 but failed to gain sufficient community support. The situation changed after a pair of sanitation workers who had been sheltering from the rain by crouching inside the loading hopper of their garbage truck were crushed because of a malfunctioning switch. This time the strike that resulted in response to their deaths was supported by some 150 local clergymen. The group's leader, the Rev. James Lawson, asked King, his friend, for support, and on March 18 King addressed a crowd of between 15,000 and 25,000 people, which was said to be the largest indoor gathering in the history of the civil rights movement to that date. King returned to Memphis on March 28 to join Lawson in leading a march in support of the strike. Violence erupted early in the demonstration: looting broke out, and police shot and killed a 16-year-old boy. King was reluctantly spirited away to safety. Dozens of others were injured as police dispensed tear gas and wielded batons while pursuing demonstrators inside the Clayborn Temple. Blame for the outbreak of violence, which marred King's reputation for nonviolent protest, was placed by many on the Black Organizing Project (better known as the Invaders), a local Black Panther Party-inspired organization. The next day, strikers returned to their daily demonstrations carrying placards that read "I Am a Man," and reporters asked King if he would be able to keep the Poor People's Campaign in Washington peaceful. He met with representatives of the Invaders, who claimed not to have instigated the violence and with whom King agreed to coordinate efforts as plans began for a follow-up march.

Having returned to his home base in Atlanta, King contemplated not going back to Memphis. The planning for the Poor People's Campaign was escalating. At a meeting on March 30, however, he decided that he needed to see through his commitment to the effort in Memphis, and, after some dissent, the leadership of the SCLC agreed. King had come to see the struggle in Memphis as emblematic of the objectives of the Poor People's Campaign.

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Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. | History & Facts

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Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., mortal shooting of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., the most prominent leader of the American civil rights movement, on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee. Learn more about the background, details, and aftermath of the assassination in this article.

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Robert F. Kennedy, in full Robert Francis Kennedy, (born November 20, 1925, Brookline, Massachusetts, U.S.-died June 6, 1968, Los Angeles, California), U.S. attorney general and adviser during the administration of his brother Pres. John F. Kennedy (1961-63) and later a U.S. senator (1965-68). He was assassinated while campaigning for the Democratic Party 's presidential nomination in 1968.

Robert interrupted his studies at Harvard University to serve in the U.S. Navy during World War II but returned to the university and graduated in 1948. After receiving a law degree from the University of Virginia Law School in 1951, he began his political career in Massachusetts the next year with the management of his brother John's successful campaign for the U.S. Senate. Robert first came into national prominence in 1953, when he was an assistant counsel to the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, headed by Joseph R. McCarthy (he resigned in mid-1953 but returned in 1954 as counsel to the Democratic minority). In 1957 he was chief counsel to the Senate select committee conducting investigations into labour racketeering, which led to his long-standing feud with James R. Hoffa of the Teamsters Union. Kennedy resigned from the committee staff in 1960 to conduct his brother's campaign for the U.S. presidency. After John won the election, he appointed (1961) Robert attorney general in his cabinet.

On November 22, 1963, the president was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Kennedy continued to serve as attorney general until he resigned in September 1964. The months after his brother's death were a desperate time for him. He was stooped by grief and spent long periods staring out windows or walking in the Virginia woods. He had presided over the Department of Justice for 44 months. He had emerged as a statesman of the law, improving the lot of many. Learning on May 20, 1961, that a hostile mob threatened the civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., and about 1,200 of his supporters in Montgomery, Alabama, Kennedy sent 400 federal marshals to protect them. In subsequent racial crises he used long telephone sessions to work out the strategies of peace officers in the South. He also led a tough and imaginative drive against organized crime. One of his proudest achievements was assembling the evidence that convicted Hoffa. On Kennedy's departure from the Department of Justice, The New York Times, which had criticized his appointment three years earlier, said editorially,

Kennedy, John F.: funeral AP Images

He named excellent men to most key posts, put new vigor into protecting civil rights through administrative action, played a pivotal role in shaping the most comprehensive civil rights law in this century.... Mr. Kennedy has done much to elevate the standard.

He was the author of The Enemy Within (1960), Just Friends and Brave Enemies (1962), and Pursuit of Justice (1964).

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In November 1964 he was elected U.S. senator from New York. Within two years Kennedy had established himself as a major political figure in his own right. He became the chief spokesman for liberal Democrats and a critic of Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson's Vietnam policy. On March 16, 1968, he announced his candidacy for the presidency. By June 4 he had won five out of six presidential primaries, including one that day in California. Shortly after midnight on June 5 he spoke to his followers in Los Angeles' Ambassador Hotel. As he left through a kitchen hallway, he was fatally wounded by a Palestinian immigrant, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan. Kennedy was buried near his brother John at Arlington National Cemetery.

Kennedy and his wife, Ethel, had 11 children, several of whom became politicians and activists.

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Robert F. Kennedy | Biography, Facts, & Assassination

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Robert F. Kennedy, attorney general and adviser during the administration of his brother U.S. President John F. Kennedy (1961-63) and later a U.S. senator (1965-68). He was assassinated while campaigning for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination in 1968. Learn more about his life and career in this article.

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What was Shakespeare's family like?

How many plays did Shakespeare write?

How many sonnets did Shakespeare write?

Why is Shakespeare still important today?

William Shakespeare, Shakespeare also spelled Shakspere, byname Bard of Avon or Swan of Avon, (baptized April 26, 1564, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England-died April 23, 1616, Stratford-upon-Avon), English poet, dramatist, and actor often called the English national poet and considered by many to be the greatest dramatist of all time.

Shakespeare occupies a position unique in world literature. Other poets, such as Homer and Dante, and novelists, such as Leo Tolstoy and Charles Dickens, have transcended national barriers, but no writer's living reputation can compare to that of Shakespeare, whose plays, written in the late 16th and early 17th centuries for a small repertory theatre, are now performed and read more often and in more countries than ever before. The prophecy of his great contemporary, the poet and dramatist Ben Jonson, that Shakespeare "was not of an age, but for all time," has been fulfilled.

It may be audacious even to attempt a definition of his greatness, but it is not so difficult to describe the gifts that enabled him to create imaginative visions of pathos and mirth that, whether read or witnessed in the theatre, fill the mind and linger there. He is a writer of great intellectual rapidity, perceptiveness, and poetic power. Other writers have had these qualities, but with Shakespeare the keenness of mind was applied not to abstruse or remote subjects but to human beings and their complete range of emotions and conflicts. Other writers have applied their keenness of mind in this way, but Shakespeare is astonishingly clever with words and images, so that his mental energy, when applied to intelligible human situations, finds full and memorable expression, convincing and imaginatively stimulating. As if this were not enough, the art form into which his creative energies went was not remote and bookish but involved the vivid stage impersonation of human beings, commanding sympathy and inviting vicarious participation. Thus, Shakespeare's merits can survive translation into other languages and into cultures remote from that of Elizabethan England.

Shakespeare the man

Life

Although the amount of factual knowledge available about Shakespeare is surprisingly large for one of his station in life, many find it a little disappointing, for it is mostly gleaned from documents of an official character. Dates of baptisms, marriages, deaths, and burials; wills, conveyances, legal processes, and payments by the court-these are the dusty details. There are, however, many contemporary allusions to him as a writer, and these add a reasonable amount of flesh and blood to the biographical skeleton.

Animals in Shakespeare Quiz

Early life in Stratford

The parish register of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, shows that he was baptized there on April 26, 1564; his birthday is traditionally celebrated on April 23. His father, John Shakespeare, was a burgess of the borough, who in 1565 was chosen an alderman and in 1568 bailiff (the position corresponding to mayor, before the grant of a further charter to Stratford in 1664). He was engaged in various kinds of trade and appears to have suffered some fluctuations in prosperity. His wife, Mary Arden, of Wilmcote, Warwickshire, came from an ancient family and was the heiress to some land. (Given the somewhat rigid social distinctions of the 16th century, this marriage must have been a step up the social scale for John Shakespeare.)

Stratford enjoyed a grammar school of good quality, and the education there was free, the schoolmaster's salary being paid by the borough. No lists of the pupils who were at the school in the 16th century have survived, but it would be absurd to suppose the bailiff of the town did not send his son there. The boy's education would consist mostly of Latin studies-learning to read, write, and speak the language fairly well and studying some of the Classical historians, moralists, and poets. Shakespeare did not go on to the university, and indeed it is unlikely that the scholarly round of logic, rhetoric, and other studies then followed there would have interested him.

Instead, at age 18 he married. Where and exactly when are not known, but the episcopal registry at Worcester preserves a bond dated November 28, 1582, and executed by two yeomen of Stratford, named Sandells and Richardson, as a security to the bishop for the issue of a license for the marriage of William Shakespeare and " Anne Hathaway of Stratford," upon the consent of her friends and upon once asking of the banns. (Anne died in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare. There is good evidence to associate her with a family of Hathaways who inhabited a beautiful farmhouse, now much visited, 2 miles [3.2 km] from Stratford.) The next date of interest is found in the records of the Stratford church, where a daughter, named Susanna, born to William Shakespeare, was baptized on May 26, 1583. On February 2, 1585, twins were baptized, Hamnet and Judith. (Hamnet, Shakespeare's only son, died 11 years later.)

How Shakespeare spent the next eight years or so, until his name begins to appear in London theatre records, is not known. There are stories-given currency long after his death-of stealing deer and getting into trouble with a local magnate, Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote, near Stratford; of earning his living as a schoolmaster in the country; of going to London and gaining entry to the world of theatre by minding the horses of theatregoers. It has also been conjectured that Shakespeare spent some time as a member of a great household and that he was a soldier, perhaps in the Low Countries. In lieu of external evidence, such extrapolations about Shakespeare's life have often been made from the internal "evidence" of his writings. But this method is unsatisfactory: one cannot conclude, for example, from his allusions to the law that Shakespeare was a lawyer, for he was clearly a writer who without difficulty could get whatever knowledge he needed for the composition of his plays.

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William Shakespeare | Plays, Poems, Biography, Quotes, & Facts

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William Shakespeare, the renowned English playwright and poet, crafted timeless works that continue to entertain audiences worldwide with their profound insights into human nature and enduring literary brilliance.

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Julius Caesar, tragedy in five acts by William Shakespeare, produced in 1599-1600 and published in the First Folio of 1623 from a transcript of a promptbook.

Based on Sir Thomas North's 1579 translation (via a French version) of Plutarch's Bioi parallēloi (Parallel Lives), the drama takes place in 44 bce, after Caesar has returned to Rome. Fearing Caesar's ambition, Cassius forms a conspiracy among Roman republicans. He persuades the reluctant Brutus-Caesar's trusted friend-to join them. Brutus, troubled and sleepless, finds comfort in the companionship of his noble wife, Portia. Caesar's wife, Calpurnia, alarmed by prophetic dreams, warns her husband not to go to the Capitol the next day. Then, as planned, Caesar is slain in the Senate on March 15, "the ides of March." His friend Mark Antony, who has expediently shaken the bloodied hands of the conspirators, gives a stirring funeral oration that inspires the crowd to turn against them. Octavius, Caesar's nephew, forms a triumvirate with Antony and Lepidus; Brutus and Cassius are eventually defeated at the Battle of Philippi, where they kill themselves to avoid further dishonour.

For a discussion of this play within the context of Shakespeare's entire corpus, see William Shakespeare: Shakespeare's plays and poems.

David Bevington

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Julius Caesar | Tragedy, Roman History, Play

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Julius Caesar, tragedy in five acts by William Shakespeare, produced in 1599-1600 and published in the First Folio of 1623 from a transcript of a promptbook. Based on Sir Thomas North's 1579 translation (via a French version) of Plutarch's Bioi parallēloi (Parallel Lives), the drama takes place in

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Carmen Twillie, Lebo M. - Circle of Life (From "The Lion King")

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Hamlet, tragedy in five acts by William Shakespeare, written about 1599-1601 and published in a quarto edition in 1603 from an unauthorized text, with reference to an earlier play. The First Folio version was taken from a second quarto of 1604 that was based on Shakespeare's own papers with some annotations by the bookkeeper.

Shakespeare's telling of the story of Prince Hamlet was derived from several sources, notably from Books III and IV of Saxo Grammaticus's 12th-century Gesta Danorum and from volume 5 (1570) of Histoires tragiques, a free translation of Saxo by François de Belleforest. The play was evidently preceded by another play of Hamlet (now lost), usually referred to as the Ur-Hamlet, of which Thomas Kyd is a conjectured author.

As Shakespeare's play opens, Hamlet is mourning his father, who has been killed, and lamenting the behaviour of his mother, Gertrude, who married his uncle Claudius within a month of his father's death. The ghost of his father appears to Hamlet, informs him that he was poisoned by Claudius, and commands Hamlet to avenge his death. Though instantly galvanized by the ghost's command, Hamlet decides on further reflection to seek evidence in corroboration of the ghostly visitation, since, he knows, the Devil can assume a pleasing shape and can easily mislead a person whose mind is perturbed by intense grief. Hamlet adopts a guise of melancholic and mad behaviour as a way of deceiving Claudius and others at court-a guise made all the easier by the fact that Hamlet is genuinely melancholic.

Hamlet's dearest friend, Horatio, agrees with him that Claudius has unambiguously confirmed his guilt. Driven by a guilty conscience, Claudius attempts to ascertain the cause of Hamlet's odd behaviour by hiring Hamlet's onetime friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on him. Hamlet quickly sees through the scheme and begins to act the part of a madman in front of them. To the pompous old courtier Polonius, it appears that Hamlet is lovesick over Polonius's daughter Ophelia. Despite Ophelia's loyalty to him, Hamlet thinks that she, like everyone else, is turning against him; he feigns madness with her also and treats her cruelly as if she were representative, like his own mother, of her "treacherous" sex.

Hamlet contrives a plan to test the ghost's accusation. With a group of visiting actors, Hamlet arranges the performance of a story representing circumstances similar to those described by the ghost, under which Claudius poisoned Hamlet's father. When the play is presented as planned, the performance clearly unnerves Claudius.

Moving swiftly in the wake of the actors' performance, Hamlet confronts his mother in her chambers with her culpable loyalty to Claudius. When he hears a man's voice behind the curtains, Hamlet stabs the person he understandably assumes to be Claudius. The victim, however, is Polonius, who has been eavesdropping in an attempt to find out more about Hamlet's erratic behaviour. This act of violence persuades Claudius that his own life is in danger. He sends Hamlet to England escorted by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, with secret orders that Hamlet be executed by the king of England. When Hamlet discovers the orders, he alters them to make his two friends the victims instead.

Upon his return to Denmark, Hamlet hears that Ophelia is dead of a suspected suicide (though more probably as a consequence of her having gone mad over her father's sudden death) and that her brother Laertes seeks to avenge Polonius's murder. Claudius is only too eager to arrange the duel. Carnage ensues. Hamlet dies of a wound inflicted by a sword that Claudius and Laertes have conspired to tip with poison; in the scuffle, Hamlet realizes what has happened and forces Laertes to exchange swords with him, so that Laertes too dies-as he admits, justly killed by his own treachery. Gertrude, also present at the duel, drinks from the cup of poison that Claudius has had placed near Hamlet to ensure his death. Before Hamlet himself dies, he manages to stab Claudius and to entrust the clearing of his honour to his friend Horatio.

For a discussion of this play within the context of Shakespeare's entire corpus, see William Shakespeare: Shakespeare's plays and poems.

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Hamlet, tragedy in five acts by William Shakespeare, written about 1599-1601 and published in a quarto edition in 1603 from an unauthorized text. Often considered the greatest drama of all time, the play tells the story of the troubled titular prince of Denmark.

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Romeo and Juliet, play by William Shakespeare, written about 1594-96 and first published in an unauthorized quarto in 1597. An authorized quarto appeared in 1599, substantially longer and more reliable. A third quarto, based on the second, was used by the editors of the First Folio of 1623. The characters of Romeo and Juliet have been depicted in literature, music, dance, and theatre. The appeal of the young hero and heroine-whose families, the Montagues and the Capulets, respectively, are implacable enemies-is such that they have become, in the popular imagination, the representative type of star-crossed lovers.

Shakespeare's principal source for the plot was The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562), a long narrative poem by the English poet Arthur Brooke, who had based his poem on a French translation of a tale by the Italian Matteo Bandello.

Shakespeare sets the scene in Verona, Italy. Juliet and Romeo meet and fall instantly in love at a masked ball of the Capulets, and they profess their love when Romeo, unwilling to leave, climbs the wall into the orchard garden of her family's house and finds her alone at her window. Because their well-to-do families are enemies, the two are married secretly by Friar Laurence. When Tybalt, a Capulet, seeks out Romeo in revenge for the insult of Romeo's having dared to shower his attentions on Juliet, an ensuing scuffle ends in the death of Romeo's dearest friend, Mercutio. Impelled by a code of honour among men, Romeo kills Tybalt and is banished to Mantua by the Prince of Verona, who has been insistent that the family feuding cease. When Juliet's father, unaware that Juliet is already secretly married, arranges a marriage with the eminently eligible Count Paris, the young bride seeks out Friar Laurence for assistance in her desperate situation. He gives her a potion that will make her appear to be dead and proposes that she take it and that Romeo rescue her. She complies. Romeo, however, unaware of the friar's scheme because a letter has failed to reach him, returns to Verona on hearing of Juliet's apparent death. He encounters a grieving Paris at Juliet's tomb, reluctantly kills him when Paris attempts to prevent Romeo from entering the tomb, and finds Juliet in the burial vault. There he gives her a last kiss and kills himself with poison. Juliet awakens, sees the dead Romeo, and kills herself. The families learn what has happened and end their feud.

For a discussion of this play within the context of Shakespeare's entire corpus, see William Shakespeare: Shakespeare's plays and poems.

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Romeo and Juliet | Summary, Characters, & Facts

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Romeo and Juliet, play by William Shakespeare, written about 1594-96 and first published in an unauthorized quarto in 1597. The appeal of the young hero and heroine is such that they have become, in the popular imagination, the representative of star-crossed lovers.

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The Tempest, drama in five acts by William Shakespeare, first written and performed about 1611 and published in the First Folio of 1623 from an edited transcript, by Ralph Crane (scrivener of the King's Men), of the author's papers after they had been annotated for production.

The play opens with a storm raised by Prospero, who years earlier, as the rightful duke of Milan, had been set adrift in a boat with his three-year-old daughter, Miranda, by his usurping brother, Antonio. Prospero, more interested in his books and his magic than in the pragmatics of ruling Milan, had left himself vulnerable to this overthrow. Arriving at an island, Prospero proceeded to make good use of his magic by freeing the sprite Ariel from the torment of imprisonment to which Ariel had been subjected for refusing to carry out the wicked behests of the sorceress Sycorax. Prospero and Miranda found no living person on the island other than Sycorax's son Caliban. They took Caliban into their little family and lived in harmony until Caliban attempted to rape Miranda. Prospero then confined Caliban to a rock and to the status of slave, requiring him to attend to their needs by performing such tasks as gathering firewood. As the play begins, Prospero raises the tempest in order to cast onto the shores of his island a party of Neapolitans returning to Naples from a wedding in Tunis: King Alonso of Naples, his son Ferdinand, his brother Sebastian, and Prospero's brother, Antonio.

With the arrival of the outsiders, the process of testing and eventual reconciliation begins. The party is brought to shore by Ariel, but Ferdinand is separated from the others and is believed drowned. Ariel helps foil plots against Prospero by Caliban and against Alonso by Antonio. Ariel then appears to Alonso and Antonio as a harpy and reproaches them for their treatment of Prospero. Alonso, believing Ferdinand dead, is certain that his death was punishment for Alonso's crime and has a change of heart. Prospero, convinced that Antonio and company are repentant (or at least chastened), reconciles all and prepares to return to Milan to reclaim his throne.

Young Ferdinand meantime has encountered Miranda, and the two have fallen instantly in love. Their courtship is watched carefully by Prospero, who, though insistent that they proceed carefully and preserve their virginity until they are actually married, welcomes this love relationship as a way of making Miranda happy and at the same time of reconciling Milan and Naples; their marriage will unite the two contending kingdoms.

For a discussion of this play within the context of Shakespeare's entire corpus, see William Shakespeare: Shakespeare's plays and poems.

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The Tempest | Play by Shakespeare, Analysis & Summary

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The Tempest, drama in five acts by William Shakespeare, first written and performed about 1611 and published in the First Folio of 1623 from an edited transcript, by Ralph Crane (scrivener of the King's Men), of the author's papers after they had been annotated for production.

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The Beatles - The Beatles - Eleanor Rigby (From "Yellow Submarine") [Official Music Video]

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1968 New York Yankees Statistics | Baseball-Reference.com

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New York Yankees latest stats and more including batting stats, pitching stats, team fielding totals and more on Baseball-Reference.com

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1968 New York Mets Statistics | Baseball-Reference.com

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New York Mets latest stats and more including batting stats, pitching stats, team fielding totals and more on Baseball-Reference.com

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The Beatles - The Beatles - Yellow Submarine (Official Music Video) [Remastered 2015]

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Vietnam War, (1954-75), a protracted conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam and its allies in South Vietnam, known as the Viet Cong, against the government of South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States. Called the "American War" in Vietnam (or, in full, the "War Against the Americans to Save the Nation"), the war was also part of a larger regional conflict ( see Indochina wars) and a manifestation of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies.

At the heart of the conflict was the desire of North Vietnam, which had defeated the French colonial administration of Vietnam in 1954, to unify the entire country under a single communist regime modeled after those of the Soviet Union and China. The South Vietnamese government, on the other hand, fought to preserve a Vietnam more closely aligned with the West. U.S. military advisers, present in small numbers throughout the 1950s, were introduced on a large scale beginning in 1961, and active combat units were introduced in 1965. By 1969 more than 500,000 U.S. military personnel were stationed in Vietnam. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union and China poured weapons, supplies, and advisers into the North, which in turn provided support, political direction, and regular combat troops for the campaign in the South. The costs and casualties of the growing war proved too much for the United States to bear, and U.S. combat units were withdrawn by 1973. In 1975 South Vietnam fell to a full-scale invasion by the North.

The human costs of the long conflict were harsh for all involved. Not until 1995 did Vietnam release its official estimate of war dead: as many as 2 million civilians on both sides and some 1.1 million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters. The U.S. military has estimated that between 200,000 and 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers died in the war. In 1982 the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated in Washington, D.C., inscribed with the names of 57,939 members of U.S. armed forces who had died or were missing as a result of the war. Over the following years, additions to the list have brought the total past 58,200. (At least 100 names on the memorial are those of servicemen who were actually Canadian citizens.) Among other countries that fought for South Vietnam on a smaller scale, South Korea suffered more than 4,000 dead, Thailand about 350, Australia more than 500, and New Zealand some three dozen.

Vietnam emerged from the war as a potent military power within Southeast Asia, but its agriculture, business, and industry were disrupted, large parts of its countryside were scarred by bombs and defoliation and laced with land mines, and its cities and towns were heavily damaged. A mass exodus in 1975 of people loyal to the South Vietnamese cause was followed by another wave in 1978 of " boat people," refugees fleeing the economic restructuring imposed by the communist regime. Meanwhile, the United States, its military demoralized and its civilian electorate deeply divided, began a process of coming to terms with defeat in what had been its longest and most controversial war. The two countries finally resumed formal diplomatic relations in 1995.

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Vietnam War | Facts, Summary, Years, Timeline, Casualties, Combatants, & Facts

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Vietnam War (1954-75), conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam and its allies in South Vietnam, the Viet Cong, against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States. It was part of a larger regional conflict as well as a manifestation of the Cold War.

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Walter Kronkite reports on Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination.

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Walter Kronkite reports on Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination.

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1968 King Assassination Report (CBS News)

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Martin Luther King, Jr. (born January 15, 1929, Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.-died April 4, 1968, Memphis, Tennessee) Baptist minister and social activist who led the civil rights movement in the United States from the mid-1950s until his death by assassination in 1968. His leadership was fundamental to that movement's success in ending the legal segregation of African Americans in the South and other parts of the United States. King rose to national prominence as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which promoted nonviolent tactics, such as the massive March on Washington (1963), to achieve civil rights. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.

Early years

King came from a comfortable middle-class family steeped in the tradition of the Southern Black ministry: both his father and maternal grandfather were Baptist preachers. His parents were college-educated, and King's father had succeeded his father-in-law as pastor of the prestigious Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. The family lived on Auburn Avenue, otherwise known as "Sweet Auburn," the bustling "Black Wall Street," home to some of the country's largest and most prosperous Black businesses and Black churches in the years before the civil rights movement. Young Martin received a solid education and grew up in a loving extended family.

This secure upbringing, however, did not prevent King from experiencing the prejudices then common in the South. He never forgot the time when, at about age six, one of his white playmates announced that his parents would no longer allow him to play with King, because the children were now attending segregated schools. Dearest to King in these early years was his maternal grandmother, whose death in 1941 left him shaken and unstable. Upset because he had learned of her fatal heart attack while attending a parade without his parents' permission, the 12-year-old King attempted suicide by jumping from a second-story window.

In 1944, at age 15, King entered Morehouse College in Atlanta under a special wartime program intended to boost enrollment by admitting promising high-school students like King. Before beginning college, however, King spent the summer on a tobacco farm in Connecticut; it was his first extended stay away from home and his first substantial experience of race relations outside the segregated South. He was shocked by how peacefully the races mixed in the North. "Negroes and whites go [to] the same church," he noted in a letter to his parents. "I never [thought] that a person of my race could eat anywhere." This summer experience in the North only deepened King's growing hatred of racial segregation.

At Morehouse, King favoured studies in medicine and law, but these were eclipsed in his senior year by a decision to enter the ministry, as his father had urged. King's mentor at Morehouse was the college president, Benjamin Mays, a social gospel activist whose rich oratory and progressive ideas had left an indelible imprint on King's father. Committed to fighting racial inequality, Mays accused the African American community of complacency in the face of oppression, and he prodded the Black church into social action by criticizing its emphasis on the hereafter instead of the here and now; it was a call to service that was not lost on the teenage King. He graduated from Morehouse in 1948.

King spent the next three years at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, where he became acquainted with Mohandas Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolence as well as with the thought of contemporary Protestant theologians. He earned a bachelor of divinity degree in 1951. Renowned for his oratorical skills, King was elected president of Crozer's student body, which was composed almost exclusively of white students. As a professor at Crozer wrote in a letter of recommendation for King, "The fact that with our student body largely Southern in constitution a colored man should be elected to and be popular [in] such a position is in itself no mean recommendation." From Crozer, King went to Boston University, where, in seeking a firm foundation for his own theological and ethical inclinations, he studied man's relationship to God and received a doctorate (1955) for a dissertation titled "A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman."

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Martin Luther King, Jr. | Biography, Speeches, Facts, & Assassination

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Martin Luther King, Jr., a visionary leader and advocate for equality, spearheaded the civil rights movement in America through nonviolent protests, inspiring lasting change and leaving an enduring legacy.

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Walter Cronkite, in full Walter Leland Cronkite, Jr., (born November 4, 1916, St. Joseph, Missouri, U.S.-died July 17, 2009, New York, New York), American journalist and pioneer of television news programming who became known as "the most trusted man in America." He was the longtime anchor of the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite (1962-81), for which he reported on many of the most historic events of the latter half of the 20th century.

As a boy, Cronkite was an avid reader of books, magazines, and newspapers. In 1927 he moved with his family to Houston, where he worked on school newspapers in both middle school and high school. After graduating he studied political science at the University of Texas at Austin (1933-35) and, to help pay his tuition, worked as a correspondent for a Houston newspaper. In 1935 he left college to take a full-time position with the paper. In 1939 Cronkite became a news editor for United Press (UP; see United Press International). When the United States entered World War II in 1941, UP elevated Cronkite to overseas war correspondent, assigning him to cover fighting in the North Atlantic. He was soon reassigned to London, where he reported on German bombing raids on the city. Cronkite also covered the invasion of North Africa. He flew in bombing raids over Germany and in 1944 reported on the Allied landing on the beaches of Normandy, France, on D-Day. After the war's conclusion, he remained in Europe, covering the Nürnberg trials and helping set up numerous UP bureaus. Before returning to the United States, he served as UP bureau chief in Moscow (1946-48).

Cronkite attracted the attention of Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) vice president Edward R. Murrow, who in 1950 hired him as a correspondent for the CBS television affiliate in Washington, D.C. Throughout the 1950s Cronkite hosted the CBS shows You Are There, an imaginary broadcast of historical events; The Morning Show, which he cohosted with a puppet named Charlemagne; and a documentary series, The Twentieth Century.

Working in a medium he initially knew little about, Cronkite helped shape the face of television news. He had an unflappable calmness and an uncanny ability to extemporize verbally, which made him ideal for hosting the political news show Man of the Week (1952-53) and for covering unpredictable events, as he did when reporting on the presidential conventions of 1952, 1956, and 1960.

In 1962 Cronkite attained the position he would become most famous for: anchorman of the CBS Evening News. Soon after Cronkite took over from his predecessor Douglas Edwards, the then 15-minute broadcast was expanded to 30 minutes, making it the first half-hour nightly news show on American network television. From the anchor chair of the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, he reported on the most traumatic and triumphant moments of American life in the 1960s, from the assassination of U.S. Pres. John F. Kennedy in 1963 to the Apollo 11 Moon landing in 1969. The influence of Cronkite's reporting is perhaps best illustrated by his commentary on the Vietnam War. In 1968 he left the anchor desk to report from Vietnam on the aftermath of the Tet Offensive. Upon his return Cronkite departed from his usual objectivity, declaring that the war could end only in a protracted stalemate. U.S. Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson told his staff, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America," and some held that Johnson's decision not to run for reelection that year was a direct result of Cronkite's reporting.

Cronkite continued in his position at CBS through the 1970s, reporting on the decade's most memorable events, including the Watergate scandal, the resignation of U.S. Pres. Richard M. Nixon, and the historic peace negotiations between Egyptian Pres. Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. His avuncular mien and adherence to journalistic integrity-exemplified by his sign-off line, "And that's the way it is"-endeared him to the American public, and a 1972 poll named him "the most trusted man in America."

Cronkite covered nearly every American manned spaceflight from 1961 to 1981. Because of his willingness to learn everything about spaceflight and his ability to convey his knowledge to viewers, he seemed to be almost as much a part of the American space program as the astronauts themselves. His infectious enthusiasm for the space program was often revealed on the air, as when he yelled, "Go, baby, go!" while watching the launch of Apollo 11.

Although he resigned from the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite in 1981 after 19 years as the show's anchor, he remained active in television. He hosted numerous documentaries for the Public Broadcasting Service and for various cable television networks; among these programs was Cronkite Remembers (1997), a miniseries chronicling the historic occasions on which he had reported. He also contributed essays to National Public Radio's All Things Considered and occasionally served as a special correspondent for CBS. Cronkite published his autobiography, A Reporter's Life, in 1996.

During his many decades of news broadcasting, Cronkite won several Emmy Awards and Peabody Awards and became the most famous and admired broadcast journalist in the world. In 1981 U.S. Pres. Jimmy Carter awarded Cronkite the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

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Walter Cronkite | Biography, Facts, & Views on Vietnam War

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Walter Cronkite, in full Walter Leland Cronkite, Jr., (born November 4, 1916, St. Joseph, Missouri, U.S.-died July 17, 2009, New York, New York), American journalist and pioneer of television news programming who became known as "the most trusted man in America."