Isaac Newton books and biography. Biography Click to expand. For more details on this topic, see Isaac Newton's later life. At Newton's birth, Gregorian dates were ten days ahead of Julian dates: thus Newton was born on Christmas Day by the Julian calendar but on 4 January by the Gregorian.
Unless otherwise noted, the remainder of the dates in this article follow the Julian calendar. The Royal Society. Retrieved on History of Science: Newton. Fred Wilson's Physics Web. Lagrange," Oeuvres de Lagrange I. Paris, , p. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. December Eric Weisstein's World of Biography.
Isaac Newton: Inventor, Scientist and Teacher. Milford, Michigan, U. Journal of the History of Ideas 68 1 : pp. The Rosicrucian Enlightenment.
London: Routledge. The Newtonians and the English Revolution: Cornell University Press, pp. Science and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England. New Haven: Yale University Press, p. Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in eighteenth-century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. New York: King's Crown Press, p. Knud Haakonssen. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge: Robert M. Wallace trans. London: Oxford UP, Ideology and International Relations in the Modern World.
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Books Video icon An illustration of two cells of a film strip. Video Audio icon An illustration of an audio speaker. Audio Software icon An illustration of a 3. But ten thousand times better than that. How sweet the sound. His birth coincided with a crucial turning point in the history of American race relations, although like many turning points it did not seem so at the time. Few observers believed that Jim Crow was in its death throes.
Board of Education , less than one percent of black schoolchildren in the South attended integrated public schools. At the undergraduate level, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was one of the few integrated southern colleges, having admitted three black students in By that number had risen—to four. In , Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes successfully integrated the University of Georgia, but most other major southern colleges, including Duke, Clemson, and the flagship state universities of South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi remained segregated.
Despite the lack of de jure segregation, northern universities were only marginally better. Ruffin, in , but nearly a century later, there were rarely more than two or three blacks in each graduating class, and there were no Afri- can Americans on the Harvard Law School faculty until Despite the Civil Rights acts of and and promises from the new administration of Presi- dent John F.
Kennedy, in some Black Belt counties of Geor- gia, Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana, up to 90 percent of African Americans were excluded from the political process, as they had been by state law and custom since the late nine- teenth century. There were a handful of black state legislators and city councilmen in the North, and a sprinkling of African Americans sat on boards of education and city councils in the urban upper South, but there were no black mayors other than in all-black towns.
While ten percent of all Americans were black in the census, only four African Americans served in the member House of Representatives. No African Americans sat in the hundred-member U. Senate between the departure of Blanche K. Brooke R-MA in The federal judiciary, the branch of government most re- sponsive to black demands for equality, offered a slightly more positive picture. In the fall of , the U.
Senate confirmed James B. By August , however, there was also an emerging chal- lenge to the old racial order—at least in the South. They began, in the summer of , with the Freedom Rides that ultimately forced the presi- dent and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Virginia ruling prohibiting segregation in interstate travel.
In the autumn of Moses penned a note from a freezing drunk-tank in Magnolia, Mississippi, where he and eleven others were being held for the crime of attempting to register black voters.
This is a tremor in the middle of the iceberg from a stone that the builders rejected. By filling county jails and prison farms, by facing fire hoses, truncheons—and, for Jimmie Lee Jackson, Herbert Lee, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, Michael Schw- erner, and others, by giving their lives—they ultimately made segregation and disfranchisement untenable.
In alliance with the more cautious, though equally determined, activists of the Southern Christian Leadership Council and the NAACP, and eventually with the support of the administration of a south- ern-born president, Lyndon B. So too did the Immigration and Nationality Act, which extended the same nondiscriminatory principle to immigra- tion, ended the system of quotas favoring northern Europe, and ushered in new waves of immigration from Latin America, Asia, and Africa.
The nation into which Barack Obama was born was sim- ply not a genuine democracy, and certainly not one in which a person of color might reasonably aspire to the presidency.
In- deed, his very existence was to some degree a consequence of those struggles. His father, Barack Hussein Obama Sr. As Barack Obama Jr. To that end, Mboya secured scholarship funds from such civil rights movement stalwarts as Jackie Robinson, Harry Belafonte, and Sidney Poitier.
In speeches, Barack Obama has mistakenly cred- ited the family of John F. After Dunham became pregnant, they married. Interracial marriage was legal in Hawaii, but was outlawed at that time in twenty-two states. A Gallup poll found that 96 percent of white Americans opposed such unions. As Obama Jr. Obama Sr. Other than a brief Christmas visit by Obama Sr. Those values were largely secular, though grounded in the church-based idealism of the early s civil rights movement.
As her son later recalled, it was a fairly ro- manticized idealism. Assisted by her parents and government food stamps, she completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Hawaii, where she met her second husband, Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian student. Contrary to claims later made by his political opponents, however, he did not at- tend an Islamic madrassa.
He was enrolled, first, in a Roman Catholic elementary school and then in the state-run Basuki school, which taught children of all faiths—Christians, Bud- dhists, and Confucians, as well as Muslims. The language of instruction was Indonesian. Dunham briefly moved back to Hawaii with her daughter with Lolo , Maya, to live with Obama and her parents, before returning to Indonesia to pursue an anthro- pology degree on peasant blacksmithing in Java. She later worked with development organizations in Pakistan and In- donesia to set up microfinance programs to help women in remote villages gain access to credit.
He outlines this process in Dreams from My Father with great honesty and, although it was clearly a time of much anxiety, not a little wit. Barry Obama was, after all, a teenager growing up in the s with black skin, a white mother; a half-Caucasian, half-Indonesian half-sister in Java; and an absent, unknown African father in Kenya.
But at the end of his process of self-discovery, and not- withstanding his love for his white mother and grandparents, the physiological fact of his black skin proved to be the most important element in his psychological understanding of self. Yet, while ap- preciating their genius, the teenage Obama despaired that, despite W. One of the first critics to discuss jazz as a political as much as a cultural and aesthetic phenomenon, jazz exemplified to Davis a distinctive black, working-class challenge to white claims of racial superiority.
His poetry and criticism would have a significant influence on the Black Arts Movement of the s. Davis, a Kansas native, moved to Hawaii in the late s on the advice of Paul Robeson and worked as a journalist on a newspaper for the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, one of the most powerful unions on the islands. Eighteen-year-old Barry Obama re- mained unsure, exactly, what college was for when he arrived at Occidental College, a small liberal arts college in Los Ange- les in At both Occidental and Columbia, Obama was active in student politics, notably in antiapartheid protests, where he first discovered the power of his own oratory.
As his interest in basketball, drinking, partying, and recreational drugs waned, his devotion to academic study waxed.
At Columbia he lived a monk-like existence in small, uncluttered apartments, and absorbed himself in books on political theory, philosophy, international politics, and literature. During that time he also began to write fiction and keep a journal, developing some of the ideas and themes that later appear in Dreams from My Fa- ther. Obama graduated from Columbia in with a BA in po- litical science, having developed a vague notion that he might become a community organizer, although he was not entirely sure just what it was that a community organizer did.
He did, however, have a romantic image, perhaps in grainy black- and-white, picked up from his mother and his old poet friend Frank, and from books and documentaries of the civil rights struggle. They were stoic, short-haired, neatly dressed black students sitting in at a segregated lunch counter. Or dungaree- wearing SNCC workers like Bob Moses or Stokely Carmichael, leaning on a dusty porch in Mississippi, trying to persuade sharecroppers to take a chance and register to vote.
His fellow employees from that time have suggested, however, that Obama exaggerates the degree to which the company symbolized rapacious s capitalism, perhaps to portray his community organizing career as a more self-sacrificing choice than it actually was.
But it was the general atmosphere of Manhattan, rather than simply its corporate excesses that Obama rejected when he decided to leave the city in The progressive left of the s, Obama realized, was no less shallow than the capitalist right. Believing that easy sloganeering and posturing had replaced the certitude and rectitude of SNCC and CORE in the early s, Obama contemplated abandoning his goal of community organizing.
The mids heyday of Reaganism was a time of retrench- ment in the American labor movement, when industrial firms in the North closed their gates and reopened in the nonunion- ized South or in Mexico. But it was also a time when such work was most des- perately needed. He would find that community and sense of place in Chicago, and especially on its South Side, the largest, most populous collec- tion of African American neighborhoods in the country. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton portrayed in a ground-breaking study by that title Chicago was also the home of people-centered, communi- ty-based organizing was born after World War II in the theo- ries and programs of Saul Alinsky.
In , a Wellesley senior named Hillary Rodham wrote her senior thesis on Alinsky. The Developing Communities Project, which employed Obama from to , followed the Alinsky principles that lead- ers listen, that change comes from the bottom up, and that ordinary people can do extraordinary things.
During his first three years in Chicago, Obama achieved some modest success in mobilizing hundreds of residents in the South Side neighborhoods of Roseland and Altgeld Gar- dens. He also encouraged alliances among black, white, and Hispanic community organizations to stop plans that would have expanded a landfill into wetlands near residential neighborhoods.
Rush, have criticized him for taking too much credit for the asbestos removal victory at Altgeld Gardens and for ignoring the efforts of neighborhood residents who began a similar campaign before Obama arrived. He was quickly disabused of this notion by his experiences with black ministers who jealously guarded their prerogatives and con- gregations. Man, these preachers in Chicago.
You are not going to orga- nize us. No, no, no. He knew his constituency; he truly enjoyed people. With ambitions of becoming a future Chicago mayor who might translate those principles into such an agenda, Obama applied to several law schools.
In , he was accepted by Harvard Law. Vowing to return to Chicago and community organizing after graduation, he left for Massachusetts, choos- ing to live not in Cambridge itself, but instead in a basement apartment in the nearby working-class, multi-ethnic town of Somerville.
In his first year he worked as an editor on the Harvard Civil Rights—Civil Liberties Law Review, and impressed members of the faculty with his maturity and common sense as well as his breadth of knowledge. Obama was not the first African American to serve as president of a law review.
That honor went to Clara Burrill Bruce, the daughter-in-law of former black U. Bruce, who presided over the Boston University Law Review in Obama never hid his own po- litical liberalism, however. He continued his active opposition to apartheid and support for affirmative action, and also spoke in favor of African American professor Derrick A.
Bell Jr. Obama nonetheless earned the respect of political conservatives on the Law Re- view for acting as an honest broker between warring factions. Indeed, he was more likely to be criticized by some on the left, including some of his fellow African American students, for not pursuing a more radical agenda. Such traits would serve him well in his future political career.
After graduating from Harvard Law in , Obama turned down several offers of clerkships for federal judges, the typical next step for former editors of Ivy League law reviews. Instead he returned, as promised, to Chicago. There he spearheaded voter registration efforts that helped secure the election of Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton.
Judson Miner had been an important white liberal ally of Harold Washington. From to , Obama also taught courses on constitutional law at the University of Chicago.
The couple had two daughters, Malia, born in , and Natasha, known as Sasha, born in As a bonus, Michelle Robinson gave Obama important political connections as well. Her family was well-known and regarded on the South Side, and she had attended school with Santita Jackson, daughter of the Reverend Jesse L. Jackson and sister of U. Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. Shortly before he won election to that body, Obama published Dreams from My Father a memoir about his unique background as the child of an Af- rican father and a white mother from Kansas and his child- hood in Hawaii and Indonesia.
The book also examines his student experiences and s work as a community orga- nizer in the Chicago. Dreams from My Father has been reprinted many times and has sold over two million copies in hardcover and paperback. In he won a seat representing the 13th district in the Illinois Senate.
He had launched his bid for the legisla- ture after the incumbent, Alice Palmer, had stepped down to pursue a seat in the U. When she failed in that ef- fort and tried, with the support of established local black lead- ers, to reclaim the seat she had relinquished, Obama refused to back down.
He also demanded an investigation of question- able signatures on the petitions required for her candidacy, and succeeded in having enough struck off to keep Palmer off the ballot. Obama won the Democratic primary unopposed, which in the Republican-phobic South Side meant he would win the general election with ease. He helped craft a law that banned the per- sonal use of campaign money by state legislators and banned lobbyists from giving gifts to lawmakers.
In short, he pursued a pragmatic progressive agenda, very much in line with the policies of the Clinton administration that was in office at the time. These veterans of the civil rights struggles of the s and s believed that the clearly ambitious Obama had not paid his dues, and needed to wait his turn. As at Harvard, Obama sought out the company of conservative Republicans and moderate downstate Democrats, and crafted harmonious working relationships with all shades of political opinion.
Thomas P. By late , at the age of thirty-eight, Obama had worked and lived in Chicago for fifteen years, even returning there to work during the summer recesses at Harvard Law School. While he enjoyed the intellectual stimulation of teaching constitutional law, and had begun to earn the sometimes grudging admiration of his colleagues in the state legislature, it had become increas- ingly evident that his political ambitions and the transforma- tive social changes he sought would not be satisfied in Spring- field.
Daley as deeply entrenched in the Second City in the s as his fa- ther Richard J. Late in , he launched a bid for the U.
He no longer found contentment in his position at Cambridge and was becoming more involved in other issues. He helped lead the resistance to King James II's attempts to reinstitute Catholic teaching at Cambridge, and in he was elected to represent Cambridge in Parliament. While in London, Newton acquainted himself with a broader group of intellectuals and became acquainted with political philosopher John Locke.
Though many of the scientists on the continent continued to teach the mechanical world according to Aristotle , a young generation of British scientists became captivated with Newton's new view of the physical world and recognized him as their leader. However, within a few years, Newton fell into another nervous breakdown in The cause is open to speculation: his disappointment over not being appointed to a higher position by England's new monarchs, William III and Mary II, or the subsequent loss of his friendship with Duillier; exhaustion from being overworked; or perhaps chronic mercury poisoning after decades of alchemical research.
It's difficult to know the exact cause, but evidence suggests that letters written by Newton to several of his London acquaintances and friends, including Duillier, seemed deranged and paranoiac, and accused them of betrayal and conspiracy.
Oddly enough, Newton recovered quickly, wrote letters of apology to friends, and was back to work within a few months.
He emerged with all his intellectual facilities intact, but seemed to have lost interest in scientific problems and now favored pursuing prophecy and scripture and the study of alchemy. While some might see this as work beneath the man who had revolutionized science, it might be more properly attributed to Newton responding to the issues of the time in turbulent 17th century Britain.
Many intellectuals were grappling with the meaning of many different subjects, not least of which were religion, politics and the very purpose of life. Modern science was still so new that no one knew for sure how it measured up against older philosophies. In , Newton was able to attain the governmental position he had long sought: warden of the Mint; after acquiring this new title, he permanently moved to London and lived with his niece, Catherine Barton.
Barton was the mistress of Lord Halifax, a high-ranking government official who was instrumental in having Newton promoted, in , to master of the Mint—a position that he would hold until his death. Not wanting it to be considered a mere honorary position, Newton approached the job in earnest, reforming the currency and severely punishing counterfeiters.
As master of the Mint, Newton moved the British currency, the pound sterling, from the silver to the gold standard. However, Newton never seemed to understand the notion of science as a cooperative venture, and his ambition and fierce defense of his own discoveries continued to lead him from one conflict to another with other scientists. By most accounts, Newton's tenure at the society was tyrannical and autocratic; he was able to control the lives and careers of younger scientists with absolute power.
In , in a controversy that had been brewing for several years, German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz publicly accused Newton of plagiarizing his research, claiming he had discovered infinitesimal calculus several years before the publication of Principia. In , the Royal Society appointed a committee to investigate the matter. Of course, since Newton was president of the society, he was able to appoint the committee's members and oversee its investigation.
Not surprisingly, the committee concluded Newton's priority over the discovery. That same year, in another of Newton's more flagrant episodes of tyranny, he published without permission the notes of astronomer John Flamsteed. It seems the astronomer had collected a massive body of data from his years at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, England. Newton had requested a large volume of Flamsteed's notes for his revisions to Principia.
Annoyed when Flamsteed wouldn't provide him with more information as quickly as he wanted it, Newton used his influence as president of the Royal Society to be named the chairman of the body of "visitors" responsible for the Royal Observatory.
He then tried to force the immediate publication of Flamsteed's catalogue of the stars, as well as all of Flamsteed's notes, edited and unedited. To add insult to injury, Newton arranged for Flamsteed's mortal enemy, Edmund Halley, to prepare the notes for press. Flamsteed was finally able to get a court order forcing Newton to cease his plans for publication and return the notes—one of the few times that Newton was bested by one of his rivals. By this time, Newton had become one of the most famous men in Europe.
His scientific discoveries were unchallenged. He also had become wealthy, investing his sizable income wisely and bestowing sizable gifts to charity.
Despite his fame, Newton's life was far from perfect: He never married or made many friends, and in his later years, a combination of pride, insecurity and side trips on peculiar scientific inquiries led even some of his few friends to worry about his mental stability. By the time he reached 80 years of age, Newton was experiencing digestion problems and had to drastically change his diet and mobility. In March , Newton experienced severe pain in his abdomen and blacked out, never to regain consciousness.
He died the next day, on March 31, , at the age of Newton's fame grew even more after his death, as many of his contemporaries proclaimed him the greatest genius who ever lived.
Maybe a slight exaggeration, but his discoveries had a large impact on Western thought, leading to comparisons to the likes of Plato , Aristotle and Galileo.
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