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#1. The name John Pershing most likely elicited fear and loathing, not admiration.

#2. According to historian Geoffrey Perret, Pershing had been an avid practitioner of hazing as an upperclassman before graduating in 1886.

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One of the most dashing men ever to wear the uniform, John Joseph "Black Jack" Pershing was the most accomplished and celebrated American soldier of the early 20th century.

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Pershing had to build an army almost from scratch, organizing, training, and supplying an inexperienced force that eventually numbered two million. Then, he had to fight a war on two fronts: one against the Germans, the other against his Allies, who sought to fill their depleted ranks with his fresh troops.

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One of the most dashing men ever to wear the uniform, John Joseph "Black Jack" Pershing was the most accomplished and celebrated American soldier of the early 20th century.

General John J. Pershing, Chaumont, France. NARA

But to a young Douglas MacArthur entering West Point in 1899, the name John Pershing most likely elicited fear and loathing, not admiration. That summer MacArthur joined Company A, where stories about their recently departed tactical officer -- Pershing, known to the company as "Lord God Almighty" -- had already become legendary. According to historian Geoffrey Perret, Pershing had been an avid practitioner of hazing as an upperclassman before graduating in 1886. When he returned as a "tac" (in charge of cadet disclipine) in 1897, he took "a perfectly ordinary group of cadets and made them hate him.... Pershing's methods amounted to a caricature of leadership and a living definition of the martinet." Under different circumstances, however, the same iron will and force of personality would propel him to a remarkable career.

Born in a small town in Missouri, Pershing served in the cavalry out West after graduating from the Academy, and later received a law degree from the University of Nebraska. During the Spanish-American War, he distinguished himself commanding a black cavalry regiment at San Juan Hill before sailing to the Philippines in 1899. While there, his work in pacifying the fierce Moros on the island of Mindanao caught the eye of General Arthur MacArthur, the new military governor of the Philippines. Perret writes that by the time General MacArthur introduced his son Douglas to Pershing in 1903, the Captain "was probably the best-known junior officer in the Army." With the stories from Company A still fresh in his mind, Douglas was awestruck by Pershing, whose "ramrod bearing, steely gaze and confidence-inspiring jaw created almost a caricature of nature's soldier." Pershing also noticed the younger MacArthur, noting, "I was favorably impressed by the manly, efficient appearance of the second lieutenant." Their paths were destined to cross many more times.

After serving as military attache to Japan and observing the Russo-Japanese War, Pershing was elevated to brigadier general by President Roosevelt in 1906. As a provincial governor in the southern Philippines, he finished his campaign against the Moros, who by 1913 no longer presented a threat to American rule. In 1916, he gained notice leading a force of 5,000 American troops in pursuit of Pancho Villa and his Mexican rebels. When the Americans finally joined the war in Europe in 1917, Pershing's experience and charisma made him the logical choice to command the Allied Expeditionary Force.

First, Pershing had to build an army almost from scratch, organizing, training, and supplying an inexperienced force that eventually numbered two million. Then, he had to fight a war on two fronts: one against the Germans, the other against his Allies, who sought to fill their depleted ranks with his fresh troops. But after months of reinforcing the British and French, Pershing's Army started operating on its own in the summer of 1918, and played a decisive role in defeating the Germans that fall. Although MacArthur, who believed the only real soldiers were those at the front, resented the "Chaumont" crowd at A.E.F. headquarters (which included Colonel George C. Marshall), Pershing's was a monumental achievement. What MacArthur failed to realize -- but thankfully Pershing did not -- was that this was a new type of war, the first fully mechanized global war in history, and it required a new kind of soldier.

Pershing rightfully emerged as the most celebrated American hero of the war. Congress honored him by creating a new title, General of the Armies, and he served as Chief of Staff from 1921 to 1926. His reputation was so great that long after his retirement, as the next great war approached, President Roosevelt named George Marshall Chief of Staff largely based on Pershing's suggestion. Given Marshall's sterling performance, this surely counts as one more great contribution by one of America's finest soldiers.

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General John J. Pershing | American Experience | PBS

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One of the most dashing men ever to wear the uniform, John Joseph "Black Jack" Pershing was the most accomplished and celebrated American soldier of the early 20th century. But to a young Douglas MacArthur entering West Point in 1899, the name John Pershing most likely elicited fear and loathing, not admiration.

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#1. After a career in the consular service, Zimmermann won transfer to the diplomatic branch in 1901.

#2. German foreign secretary during part of World War I.

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Arthur Zimmermann was the German foreign secretary during World War I from 1914 to mid-1917. He is best remembered for the Zimmermann Telegram that led to U.S. involvement in World War I.

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Arthur Zimmermann | German Diplomat, WWI Foreign Minister

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Arthur Zimmermann, German foreign secretary during part of World War I (1916–17), the author of a sensational proposal to Mexico to enter into an alliance against the United States. After a career in the consular service, Zimmermann won transfer to the diplomatic branch in 1901. Because of the

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#1. In 1917 he proclaimed American entrance into World War I a crusade to make the world “safe for democracy.”

#2. Wilson advanced rapidly as a conservative young professor of political science and became president of Princeton in 1902.

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Woodrow Wilson, a leader of the Progressive Movement, was the 28th President of the United States (1913-1921). After a policy of neutrality at the outbreak of World War I, Wilson led America into war in order to “make the world safe for democracy.”

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Woodrow Wilson, a leader of the Progressive Movement, was the 28th President of the United States (1913-1921). After a policy of neutrality at the outbreak of World War I, Wilson led America into war in order to "make the world safe for democracy."

Like Roosevelt before him, Woodrow Wilson regarded himself as the personal representative of the people. "No one but the President," he said, "seems to be expected ... to look out for the general interests of the country." He developed a program of progressive reform and asserted international leadership in building a new world order. In 1917 he proclaimed American entrance into World War I a crusade to make the world "safe for democracy."

Wilson had seen the frightfulness of war. He was born in Virginia in 1856, the son of a Presbyterian minister who during the Civil War was a pastor in Augusta, Georgia, and during Reconstruction a professor in the charred city of Columbia, South Carolina.

After graduation from Princeton (then the College of New Jersey) and the University of Virginia Law School, Wilson earned his doctorate at Johns Hopkins University and entered upon an academic career. In 1885 he married Ellen Louise Axson.

Wilson advanced rapidly as a conservative young professor of political science and became president of Princeton in 1902.

His growing national reputation led some conservative Democrats to consider him Presidential timber. First they persuaded him to run for Governor of New Jersey in 1910. In the campaign he asserted his independence of the conservatives and of the machine that had nominated him, endorsing a progressive platform, which he pursued as governor.

He was nominated for President at the 1912 Democratic Convention and campaigned on a program called the New Freedom, which stressed individualism and states' rights. In the three-way election he received only 42 percent of the popular vote but an overwhelming electoral vote.

Wilson maneuvered through Congress three major pieces of legislation. The first was a lower tariff, the Underwood Act; attached to the measure was a graduated Federal income tax. The passage of the Federal Reserve Act provided the Nation with the more elastic money supply it badly needed. In 1914 antitrust legislation established a Federal Trade Commission to prohibit unfair business practices.

Another burst of legislation followed in 1916. One new law prohibited child labor; another limited railroad workers to an eight-hour day. By virtue of this legislation and the slogan "he kept us out of war," Wilson narrowly won re-election.

But after the election Wilson concluded that America could not remain neutral in the World War. On April 2,1917, he asked Congress for a declaration of war on Germany.

Massive American effort slowly tipped the balance in favor of the Allies. Wilson went before Congress in January 1918, to enunciate American war aims-the Fourteen Points, the last of which would establish "A general association of nations...affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike."

After the Germans signed the Armistice in November 1918, Wilson went to Paris to try to build an enduring peace. He later presented to the Senate the Versailles Treaty, containing the Covenant of the League of Nations, and asked, "Dare we reject it and break the heart of the world?"

But the election of 1918 had shifted the balance in Congress to the Republicans. By seven votes the Versailles Treaty failed in the Senate.

The President, against the warnings of his doctors, had made a national tour to mobilize public sentiment for the treaty. Exhausted, he suffered a stroke and nearly died. Tenderly nursed by his second wife, Edith Bolling Galt, he lived until 1924.

Learn more about President Wilson's first wife, Ellen Axson Wilson, who died during her term.

Learn more about President Wilson's second wife, Edith Bolling Galt Wilson.

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Woodrow Wilson, a leader of the Progressive Movement, was the 28th President of the United States (1913-1921). After a policy of neutrality at the outbreak of World War I, Wilson led America into war in order to "make the world safe for democracy."

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#1. In 1900, Ferdinand gave up his children's rights to the throne in order to marry a lady-in-waiting.

#2. While in power, he attempted to restore Austro-Russian relations while maintaining an alliance with Germany.

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Franz Ferdinand's assassination on June 28, 1914, at the hand of a Serbian terrorist group the "Black Hand," led to the beginning of World War I.

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Franz Ferdinand - Assassination, WW1 & Death

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Franz Ferdinand’s assassination on June 28, 1914, at the hand of a Serbian terrorist group the “Black Hand,” led to the beginning of World War I.

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#1. He was the founder of the organization known as Comintern

#2. Lenin must for good or ill be regarded as the century’s most significant political leader.

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He served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. Under his administration, Russia, and later the Soviet Union, became a one-party socialist state governed by the Communist Party.

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Where was Vladimir Lenin born?

Where was Vladimir Lenin educated?

When was Vladimir Lenin married?

How did Vladimir Lenin change the world?

When did Vladimir Lenin die?

Vladimir Lenin, also called Vladimir Ilich Lenin, original name Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, (born April 10 [April 22, New Style], 1870, Simbirsk, Russia-died January 21, 1924, Gorki [later Gorki Leninskiye], near Moscow), founder of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), inspirer and leader of the Bolshevik Revolution (1917), and the architect, builder, and first head (1917-24) of the Soviet state. He was the founder of the organization known as Comintern (Communist International) and the posthumous source of "Leninism," the doctrine codified and conjoined with Karl Marx's works by Lenin's successors to form Marxism-Leninism, which became the Communist worldview.

If the Bolshevik Revolution is-as some people have called it-the most significant political event of the 20th century, then Lenin must for good or ill be regarded as the century's most significant political leader. Not only in the scholarly circles of the former Soviet Union but even among many non-Communist scholars, he has been regarded as both the greatest revolutionary leader and revolutionary statesman in history, as well as the greatest revolutionary thinker since Marx.

Early life

The making of a revolutionary

It is difficult to identify any particular events in his childhood that might prefigure his turn onto the path of a professional revolutionary. Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov was born in Simbirsk, which was renamed Ulyanovsk in his honour. (He adopted the pseudonym Lenin in 1901 during his clandestine party work after exile in Siberia.) He was the third of six children born into a close-knit, happy family of highly educated and cultured parents. His mother was the daughter of a physician, while his father, though the son of a serf, became a schoolteacher and rose to the position of inspector of schools. Lenin, intellectually gifted, physically strong, and reared in a warm, loving home, early displayed a voracious passion for learning. He graduated from high school ranking first in his class. He distinguished himself in Latin and Greek and seemed destined for the life of a classical scholar. When he was 16, nothing in Lenin indicated a future rebel, still less a professional revolutionary-except, perhaps, his turn to atheism. But, despite the comfortable circumstances of their upbringing, all five of the Ulyanov children who reached maturity joined the revolutionary movement. This was not an uncommon phenomenon in tsarist Russia, where even the highly educated and cultured intelligentsia were denied elementary civil and political rights.

As an adolescent Lenin suffered two blows that unquestionably influenced his subsequent decision to take the path of revolution. First, his father was threatened shortly before his untimely death with premature retirement by a reactionary government that had grown fearful of the spread of public education. Second, in 1887 his beloved eldest brother, Aleksandr, a student at the University of St. Petersburg (later renamed Leningrad State University), was hanged for conspiring with a revolutionary terrorist group that plotted to assassinate Emperor Alexander III. Suddenly, at age 17, Lenin became the male head of the family, which was now stigmatized as having reared a "state criminal."

Fortunately the income from his mother's pension and inheritance kept the family in comfortable circumstances, although it could not prevent the frequent imprisonment or exile of her children. Moreover, Lenin's high school principal (the father of Aleksandr Kerensky, who was later to lead the Provisional government deposed by Lenin's Bolsheviks in November [October, O.S.] 1917) did not turn his back on the "criminal's" family. He courageously wrote a character reference that smoothed Lenin's admission to a university.

In autumn 1887 Lenin enrolled in the faculty of law of the imperial Kazan University (later renamed Kazan [V.I. Lenin] State University), but within three months he was expelled from the school, having been accused of participating in an illegal student assembly. He was arrested and banished from Kazan to his grandfather's estate in the village of Kokushkino, where his older sister Anna had already been ordered by the police to reside. In the autumn of 1888, the authorities permitted him to return to Kazan but denied him readmission to the university. During this period of enforced idleness, he met exiled revolutionaries of the older generation and avidly read revolutionary political literature, especially Marx's Das Kapital. He became a Marxist in January 1889.

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Vladimir Lenin | Biography, Facts, & Ideology

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Vladimir Lenin, also called Vladimir Ilich Lenin, original name Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, (born April 10 [April 22, New Style], 1870, Simbirsk, Russia-died January 21, 1924, Gorki [later Gorki Leninskiye], near Moscow), founder of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), inspirer and leader of the Bolshevik Revolution (1917), and the architect, builder, and first head (1917-24) of the Soviet state.