Biography of Mahatma Gandhi… Martin Luther King… Albert Einstein… St. Francis of Assisi…

Biography of Mahatma Gandhi

(1869/10/02 - 1948/01/30)

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Nationalist leader

"The generations of the future just will believe that a man like this walked the Earth in flesh and blood."
Albert Einstein
He was born on 2 October 1869 in Porbandar (current state of Gujarat).
Son of Karamchand Gandhi Uttamchand (1822-1885), who served as Diwan (Prime Minister) of the State in Porbandar. His father was married four times. His first two wives died young after each gave birth to a girl; his third marriage was childless. In 1857, he applied for permission to his third wife to remarry and that same year married Putlibai (1844-1891), with whom he had three children over the next decade; on October 2, 1869, gave birth to her last child, Mohandas.
When you have 13 years, he married Kasturba, a girl of his own age in a marriage arranged by parents.
He studied law at the University College of London. He returned to the India in 1891 and looked for work as a lawyer in Bombay, but without success. In 1893, was hired by a firm india as legal advisor to its offices in Durban, South Africa, where he lived for 20 years by visiting the prison because of their demands on numerous occasions. He served in the army during the war Boercomo orderly, launching a crusade against violence after witnessing the horrors of war. In 1896, after being attacked and beaten by white South Africans, began to spread the policy of passive resistance and non-cooperation with the South African authorities. Part of the inspiration for this policy is located in Liev Tolstoy (whose influence on Gandhi was deep). It also acknowledged the debt that had with the writer Henry David Thoreau, especially by his essay civil disobedience. Gandhi, however, considered the terms 'passive resistance' and 'civil disobedience' unsuitable for its objectives and coined another term, satyagraha ('embrace of truth', in Sanskrit).
After a great work in South Africa to have organized a corps of ambulances for the British army, lead a section of the Red Cross and have founded some unions for the defence of the rights of the Indians, he returned to the India. He became a nationalist leader who achieved that millions of poor and illiterate Indians formed a mass movement that freed India from the British Empire. After World War I, he began his movement of passive resistance, which spread across India to approve the laws of Rowlatt in 1919, through which were given to the colonial authorities British emergency powers to deal with the so-called subversive activities. In 1920, noting that the British Government did not establish any reform, proclaimed an organized campaign of non-cooperation. All the streets of the country were stopped by citizens who, despite sitting despite being beaten by police were not built. In this event he was arrested, but she was soon released.
Gandhi led a life of more humble: did not accept any earthly possession, dressed as the lower classes and their diet was based on vegetables, fruit juices and goat's milk. He campaigned in favor of the vernacular languages of the India and class prejudices of the caste system. He won a considerable credibility thanks to the austerity practiced. He defended love as the only valid relationship between human beings. In 1921 the Indian National Congress, he gave him full executive authority. A series of violent revolts against Britain, which recognized the failure of his campaign of civil disobedience, were developed so he decided to put an end to this. He was imprisoned again. To regain their freedom in 1924, he left active political life dedicated solely to practice communal unit. But it didn't take long to return to the fight for independence.
In 1930, he urged the population not to pay taxes, especially that of salt, which was very high. Again, he was arrested and released in 1931. A year later after creating a new campaign of civil disobedience against the British authorities, he was arrested twice, fasting for long periods on several occasions. In 1934, he decided to leave politics, which would return in 1939 as it was to end the Federation with the rest of the India Indian principalities. As a protest, he carried out a hunger strike with the intention of achieving a Rajkot state leader to change his autocratic regime. The British colonial Government granted the demands.
At the beginning of World War II, the Indian National Congress and Gandhi called for a declaration of intent with regard to the conflict and its implications with respect to the India. As a reaction to the British response, the Party decided to not support to Britain if not granted total independence from the India. Britain rejected the proposal. In 1944 the British Government agreed to grant independence with the condition that the Muslim League and the Indian National Congress to resolve their differences. Gandhi initially disagreed that the India was separated into two, although he came to the conclusion that inner peace would be achieved once you grant demands for the creation of a Muslim State. In 1947, Britain granted independence to the India, but this and Pakistan became two independent States.
On 30 January 1948 while he went to his usual evening prayer in New Delhi, Gandhi was assassinated by Nathura Vinayak Godse, a member of an extremist group hindu, who shot him at point-blank range three times in the chest. His funeral procession was 8 kilometers long. Most of the relics of Gandhi, including the clothing they wore when he was shot, are preserved at the Gandhi Museum, Madurai.
He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize five times. On 2 October, date of birth, is commemorated as Gandhi Jayanti, a national, and the world-the international day of non violence Festival.

Biography of Martin Luther King

(1929/01/15 - 1968/04/04)

Martin Luther King
Religious and American activist

He was born on January 15, 1929 in Atlanta (Georgia).
Son of the Reverend Martin Luther King, came to the world in a room of the House at 501 Auburn Avenue. He was the eldest son and received the same name as his father, family members called him "M.L.". Over the next 12 years he lived in this Victorian house in two floors, along with their parents, grandparents, brothers, uncles, aunts and other residents. Two blocks to the West of his home is Ebenezer Baptist Church, the parish of the grandfather and the father of Martin.
He entered with 15 years at Morehouse College and was ordained a Baptist Minister at 17. In 1951 was graduated from Crozer Theological Seminary, performed his graduate work at Boston University. Crozer and Boston began to treat the ideas of Mahatma GandhiIndian nationalist, which became the center of his own philosophy of protest nonviolent.
In 1954 he was appointed as pastor at the Baptist Church on Dexter Avenue in Montgomery (Alabama). That year, was banned segregationist public education that kept the United States Supreme Court with numerous Southern States. In 1955, the idea of a boycott is was asking directed against a public transportation company in Montgomery, in which it had committed injustice lead to the arrest of a black woman after refusing to leave his seat to a passenger white. Martin Luther King called a boycott of the buses of Montgomery with the following words: "don't have another option that the protest. There have been many years of remarkable patience, to the point that, on occasions, we have given our white brothers printing that we liked the way they treated us. But tonight we are here to liberate us from this patience that has made us patients with something as important as freedom and justice." The protest was carried out for 381 days. in it King was arrested and imprisoned, his house was destroyed and received many was threatened with death. In 1956 he ended the boycott with an order of the Supreme Court that it prohibited segregation in public transportation in the city.
After the success of the boycott of Montgomery, King took the role of leader well-respected. He was subsequently founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) by the black clergymen of the South, which was named King its President. In 1959, he left his Pastorate in Montgomery to practice in the Baptist Church of Ebenezer in Atlanta, a major step that allows you to participate in the national leadership of the civil rights movement. At the beginning it was focused on reconciliation, now due to the black leadership suffered a radical transformation required a change 'by any means possible'. There were some differences in ideology and jurisdiction between the SCLC and other groups (Black power and Black Muslims), but King requested that non-violence, remained the main strategy of resistance. In 1963 was facing in Birmingham (Alabama) for a campaign in favor of civil rights to achieve the Census of black voters, ending segregation and get a better education and accommodation in the southern States. During these campaigns he was arrested several times. On August 28, 1963 the 200,000 people who had marched on Washington in support of civil rights, heard you his most famous speech: I dream of the day that this nation rises to live in accordance with his belief in the obvious truth that all men are created equal (...) I dream of the day when my four kids live in a nation where not will be judged by the color of their skin but by the integrity of his character". In 1964 they awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
After reasoning over and over again, King believed that the solution of local problems of human relationships were unfeasible due to the Viet Namwar. King strategies were challenged. In Chicago, local Black Baptists objected you publicly. Also there demonstrators planted face bands of white members of the Ku Klux Klan, resulting in clashes. In what refers to the Viet Nam war, many believed that the black leadership should concentrate on the struggle of racial injustice within the United States. In 1967, King was associated with the leaders of the movement against the war, regardless of color. The further concern of King by Viet Nam and his determination to lead a 'poor people's March' on Washington endangered his life.
On April 4, 1968, King was assassinated in Memphis (Tennessee). James Earl Ray, a white inmate who had escaped from prison, was arrested for murder. found guilty, in March 1969 was sentenced him 99 years in prison. The place of birth and his grave in Atlanta were designated national historic sites. To commemorate the violent death April 4, 1968, civil rights, Martin Luther King, Jr. leader, many cities and States decreed days to remember it. Some days they coincided with the birth and others of his death. Since 1986 he chose a day close to the of his birth (15 January) as a national holiday, and Congress decreed it to be the third Monday of January.

Biography of Albert Einstein

(1879/03/14 - 1955/04/18)

Albert Einstein
German physicist

"I questions my attitude towards life. I prefer to give than to receive, under any circumstances; I do not give importance to my person, or the accumulation of wealth; not me ashamed of my weaknesses or my mistakes and take instivamente things with humor and fairness. There are many people like me and I do not understand at all that a kind of Idol made of me. It is, without doubt, as incomprehensible as the mystery of an avalanche, where a single grain of dust is enough to trigger it, and that takes a well determined path."
Albert Einstein in a letter to Hedi Born, wife of Max Born, dated April 12, 1949.
He was born on March 14, 1879 in Ulm.
His parents moved to Munich when Einstein was an infant. The family business, an electric appliances factory, went bankrupt in 1894, then the family moved to Milan, Italy.
A compass aroused the interest of Albert Einstein by science when at age 5 was sick in bed. His father gave it and was fascinated because its needle always pointed to the same place, which gave him to understand that there were forces that drove everything. Without having completed high school, failed a test that would have done to receive a diploma of electrical engineer in the Polytechnic of Zurich. He returned in 1896 to the Polytechnic and graduated in 1900 as a school teacher of high school mathematics and physics.
For two years he devoted to teaching to teachers or giving private lessons. Finally, in 1902 he got work as an examiner at the Patent Office Switzerland in Berne. In the year 1905 was doctorate by the University of Zurich with a thesis on the dimensions of the molecules; He also wrote three theoretical articles of great value to the development of twentieth-century physics. His third publication was on the electrodynamics of moving bodies (1905), which exposed the special theory of relativity. The hypothesis which held that the mechanical laws were fundamental was called mechanical world view. On the other hand, the hypothesis that maintained that the electrical laws were the fundamental named electromagnetic world view. None of these two conceptions were able to give an explanation to the interaction of radiation and matter being. In 1905 it came to the conclusion that the solution was not in the theory of matter but in the theory of measures. Following this reasoning, began to develop a theory that was based on two premises: the principle of relativity and the principle of the invariance of the speed of light.
After that, it was able to explain the physical phenomena observed in non-inertial reference systems, without having to go into the nature of matter or radiation and its interaction. Despite the many scientists against his theories, were recognized important followers. As his first known advocate is to quote the German physicist Max Planck. He attended for four years the Patent Office as he began to Excel in the scientific community and ascending in the academic world of the German language. First he went to the University of Zurich in 1909; After two years there, he moved to the University of Prague, German language, and in 1912 he returned to the National Polytechnic Institute of Zurich. Finally, in 1913 he was appointed director of the Institute of physics Kaiser Wilhelm in Berlin.
In 1907, he began his work on the extension and generalization of the theory of relativity to all coordinate system. It began with the formulation of the principle of equivalence that gravitational fields are equivalent to the acceleration of the reference system. It was published in 1916. Relying on this theory general relativity, he understood the variations of the rotational movement of the planets and predicted inclination of the light of the stars to approaching bodies like the Sun. From the year 1919, he began to be recognized internationally getting prizes of several scientific societies, such as the Nobel Prize in physics in 1921.
During the first world war, he publicly condemned the participation of Germany in this. At the end of the war continued with their activities pacifist and Zionist, which caused numerous attacks by anti-Zionist groups and German rights. In 1933 he left for the United States. There he obtained work at the Instituto de Estudios Superiores in Princeton, New Jersey. Continued with its activities in favour of Zionism but decided to abandon its previous pacifist stance since I thought that regime nazi of Germany was a threat to humanity. In 1939 with other physicists sent a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt asking that was created a program of research on reactions chain. This letter was able to accelerate the atomic bomb. In 1945, when it was already known the existence of the bomb, Einstein returned to write the President to convince him that he did not use the nuclear weapon.
After the war, Einstein became activist of international disarmament and World Government, and continued to contribute to the cause of Zionism. In the late 1940's and early 1950's, the idea of keeping political freedom he defended in United States.
Albert Einstein died on April 18, 1955, in Princeton. The last words he said before he died were in German and were not understood by the nurse who was by his side, since I did not understand the language.

Biography of St. Francis of Assisi

(1182/07/05 - 1226/10/03)

San Francisco de Assisi
Giovanni di Pietro Bernardone
Francesco d´Assisi

Italian mystic and preacher, founder of the Franciscans

He was born 5 July 1182 in Assisi, in the bosom of a wealthy family.
Son of Monna Pica and Pedro Bernardone.
During his youth, he led a worldly life. After a battle between Assisi and Perugia was imprisoned for a year in this city. Being prisoner suffered a serious illness during which decided to change their way of life.
In 1205 he practiced charity among lepers and began work on the restoration of ruins of churches because a vision in which the crucifix in the Church in ruins of San Damián in Assisi ordered that it will repair your home. Expenditures on charity angered his father, who came to disinherit him.
He renounced his luxurious clothes by a layer and spent the next three years to the care of lepers and outcasts in the forests of the Mount Subastio. He restored the ruined Chapel of St. María de los Ángeles.
In 1208, during a mass, heard a call telling her to come out to the world and, following the text of Matthew 10, 5-14, "he possessed nothing but do good everywhere". When he returned to Assisi in the same year, he began to preach, causing the renewal of Christian spirituality of the 13th century.
It brought together the 12 disciples who were to become the original brothers of his order, later called the First order and elected him superior. In 1212 he received a nun Assisi called Clara, the Franciscan community; It was established the order of the poor ladies (the Poor Clares, later second Franciscan order).
In 1212 he embarks on road to the Holy Land, but a snowstorm forced him to return. Other difficulties prevented him to carry much of the missionary work when he arrived in Spain to evangelize Muslims. In 1219 he was in Egypt, where could preach though he failed to convert the sultan. He then traveled to Holy Land remaining there until the year 1220. I wanted to be martyred and was glad to know that five Franciscan monks had died in Morocco while they fulfilled their obligations. On his return he found opposition among the Friars and resigned as superior, devoted the following years planning what would be the Third Franciscan order, the tertiary.
The tradition of putting the Bethlehem in the world goes back to the year 1223, in the Italian town ofGrecio Christmas . In this village, St. Francis of Assisi brought together neighbors to celebrate the midnight mass. Round a crib, with the figure of the child Jesus, shaped by the hands of San Francisco, is sang praises to the mystery of the birth; Since then "Births" fame and his custom spread all over the world.
In September 1224, after forty days of fasting, praying on the Mount Alverno felt a pain mixed with pleasure, and the crucifixion of Christ, stigmata, marks appeared on her body. He was taken to Assisi, where he spent the years that he had marked by physical pain and an almost total blindness .
"Canticle of the creatures", it is believed that he wrote it in Assisi in 1225.
Francis of Assisi died on October 3, de1226 near the Porziuncola Chapel and was buried in San Giorgio. He was canonized July 16, 1228 by Pope Gregorio IX. His remains are located in the Basilica di San Francesco in Assisi.
In 1980 Pope John Paul II proclaimed him patron of ecologists. Their emblems are the Wolf, lamb, fish, birds and the stigmata. Her feast is celebrated on 4 October.