I love history and I love to know about past and people who made life easier for us, so I am going to put a biography of special people from the past up to the present... Hepburn, Katharine 1907 -- Click below to own the video: Actress. Born May 12, 1907, in Hartford, Connecticut. She was the eldest of six children of Thomas Hepburn, a urological surgeon, and Katharine Houghton Hepburn, a prominent feminist who campaigned actively for womens rights. Hepburn spent a privileged childhood in the wealthy New England town of Hartford, where she attended Hartford School for Girls. She continued her education at Pennsylvanias Bryn Mawr College, studying history and philosophy. Upon receiving her bachelors degree in 1928, Hepburn set her sights on an acting career. She quickly won a small role with a Baltimore stock company, making her stage debut in a production of The Czarina. Within a few months she landed a small part in the short-lived Broadway play Night Hostess (1928). Hepburn spent the next few years in supporting roles, finally dazzling critics and audiences with her portrayal of the mythic Antiope in the play The Warriors Husband (1932). On the strength of her stage performance, she was contracted by RKO Studios. After delivering an impressive screen test, she was cast opposite John Barrymore in the George Cukor film A Bill of Divorcement (1932). The project proved to be an auspicious debut for Hepburn, who followed the films immediate success with equally compelling performances in Little Woman and Morning Glory (both 1933). For the latter film, she earned her first Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of Eva Lovelace, an aspiring actress who comes to New York in search of fame and fortune. Hepburn returned to Broadway in the 1934 production The Lake, in which her performance was upbraided by drama critic Dorothy Parker who famously quipped that Hepburn runs the gamut of emotions from A to B. Despite her initial success, Hepburns popularity waned throughout the 1930s. Her film projects ranged from the successful Alice Adams (1935) to the box-office disasters Sylvia Scarlett (1935) and Mary of Scotland (1936). Refusing to give interviews or sign autographs, she was viewed as arrogant by both critics and audiences. Her detachment made her a low box office draw and strained her relationship with RKO, with whom she severed her contract in 1937. Free from studio commitments, Hepburn collaborated with screenwriter Philip Barry to create the play The Philadelphia Story. She assumed the custom-tailored role of Tracy Lord in the 1938 Broadway production, which met with favorable reviews. Two years later, she reprised the role in the film adaptation, which costarred Cary Grant and James Stewart. The movie triumphed at the box office, earned Hepburn an Academy Award nomination, and rejuvenated her flagging screen career. Hepburn scored another success with the 1942 film Woman of the Year, which was her first screen project with Spencer Tracy. Her performance as an icy political reporter humbled by Tracys brash unaffected character marked the beginning of one of the greatest pairings in cinema history. The film also initiated an offscreen romance between the two actors. Hepburn and Tracy would star opposite each other in eight more films, including Adams Rib (1949), Pat and Mike (1952), and Desk Set (1957). The unorthodox film Guess Whos Coming to Dinner? (1967) featured Tracy in his final dramatic performance and awarded Hepburn a second Oscar for Best Actress. Shortly after the films release, Tracy died of heart failure, ending the couples legendary 26-year relationship. As she aged, Hepburn demonstrated remarkable staying power by gracefully making a transition into more mature roles. She offered stellar performances as a passionate missionary in John Hustons The African Queen (1951) and as a drug-addicted mother in Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962), based on the life of famed playwright Eugene ONeill. In 1968, Hepburn took home her third Academy Award for her part as Queen Eleanor (opposite Peter OTooles King Henry II) in the historical film A Lion in the Winter. The following year, she returned to Broadway, earning critical acclaim for her performance as the legendary fashion designer Gabrielle Chanel in the musical Coco. Throughout the 1970s, Hepburn turned her attention toward television, appearing in a handful of impressive projects, including The Glass Menagerie (1973), Love Among the Ruins (1975), and The Corn is Green (1978). In 1981, the 74-year-old actress earned an unprecedented fourth Academy Award for her performance in the sentimental drama On Golden Pond. Following a 13-year absence, Hepburn returned to film acting in 1994 with a role in the timeless story Love Affair (a remake of 1957s An Affair to Remember, which starred Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr). As the aristocratic aunt of Warren Beatty, Hepburn's performace was credited by many critics as the highlight of the otherwise stale film. In 1928, Hepburn married Ludlow Ogden Smith, whom she divorced in 1934. Before meeting Tracy, she was romantically involved with producer Howard Hughes. In 1991, Hepburn published an autobiography Me: Stories of My Life. She currently lives an extremely reclusive life on her familys beachfront estate in a suburb of Connecticut. She was admitted to a Hartford, Connecticut, hospital in July 2001 to undergo treatment for a minor infection, but doctors expected her to recover fully and she was discharged shortly thereafter. © 2000 A&E Television Networks. All rights reserved.

1932 A Bill of Divorcement 1933 Christopher Strong 1933 Morning Glory 1933 Little Women 1934 Spitfire 1934 The Little Minister 1935 Break of Hearts 1935 Sylvia Scarlett 1935 Alice Adams 1936 A Women Rebels 1936 Mary of Scotland 1937 Stage Door 1937 Quality Street 1938 Holiday 1938 Bringing Up Baby 1940 The Philadelphia Story 1942 Woman of the Year 1942 Keeper of the Flame 1943 Stage Door Canteen 1944 Dragon Seed 1945 Without Love 1946 Undercurrent 1947 The Sea of Grass 1947 Song of Love 1948 State of the Union 1949 Adam's Rib 1951 The African Queen 1952 Pat and Mike 1955 Summertime 1956 The Iron Petticoat 1956 The Rainmaker 1957 Desk Set 1959 Suddenly Last Summer 1962 Long Day's Journey Into Night 1967 Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? 1968 The Lion in Winter 1969 The Madwoman of Chaillot 1972 The Trojan Women 1973 The Glass Menagerie (TV) 1973 A Delicate Balance 1975 Love Among the Ruins (TV) 1975 Rooster Cogburn 1978 Olly, Olly, Oxen Free 1979 The Corn is Green (TV) 1981 On Golden Pond 1984 The Ultimate Solution of Grace Quigley 1986 Mrs Delafield Wants to Marry (TV) 1988 Laura Lansing Slept Here (TV) 1992 The Man Upstairs (TV) 1994 One Christmas (TV) 1994 Love Affair 1994 This Can't Be Love (TV)

Nightingale, Florence (, known as the Lady of the Lamp)

1820 -- 1910

Nurse and the founder of modern nursing. Florence Nightingale was born in Florence, Italy, on May 12, 1820, of wealthy parents. Her father was heir to a Derbyshire estate. Her mother, from solid merchant stock, dedicated herself to the pursuit of social pleasure within the circumscribed life then proper for women of high station. Though Florence was tempted by prospects of a brilliant social life and marriage, she had a stronger strain that demanded independence, dominance in some field of activity, and obedience to God by selfless service to society. In 1844 Nightingale decided to work in hospitals. Her family furiously resisted her plan, on the ostensible ground that nurses were not "ladies" but menial drudges, usually of questionable morals. Nevertheless, she managed to do some private nursing and then to spend a few months at Kaiserworth, a German school and hospital. In 1853 she became superintendent of the London charity-supported Institution for Sick Gentlewomen in Distressed Circumstances. This opportunity allowed her to achieve effective independence from her family and also to try out novel techniques of institutional organization and management, conducted in a scientific, nonsectarian spirit. In October 1854 Nightingale organized a party of 38 nurses, mostly from various religious orders, for service in the Crimean War. They arrived at Constantinople in November. Conditions at the British base hospital at Scutari were appalling and grew steadily worse as the flow of sick and wounded soldiers from the Crimea rapidly increased. The medical services of the British army were both insufficient and inefficient: a supply system of infinite and archaic complexity actually cut off deliveries to the patients; the Barrack Hospital, where Nightingale and her nurses were quartered, sat over a massive cesspool which poisoned the water and even the fabric of the building itself. However, the attitude still prevailed that the common soldier was an uncivilized, drunken brute on whom all comforts and refinements would be wasted. Nightingale saw that her first task was to convert the military doctors to accept her and her nurses. Her discretion and diplomacy, combined with the influx of new sick and wounded, soon brought this about. She also had a large fund of private money, much of it raised by the London Times, with which she could cut through the clogged supply system. By the end of 1854 some order and cleanliness had been created, not only through her efforts but also through the revelations and improvements made by a governmental sanitary commission. The death rate among patients fell by two-thirds. But with improvement came new problems, with the defensiveness and hostility of the officials responsible for conditions now exposed and with the sectarian squabbling among the nurses, which Nightingale called the "Protestant Howl" and the "Roman Catholic Storm." Florence Nightingale left Scutari in the summer of 1856, soon after the hostilities ended. By now she was idolized by the troops and the public as the "Lady with the Lamp" and the "Nightingale in the East." But this popular image is essentially false. Although she did active nursing in the wards, her real work lay outside the expression of tenderness and compassion. It began with her deliberate refusal to respond to public adulation and with her use of her influence in high places, even to the Queen and Prince Albert, to fight for effective reform of the entire system of military hospitals and medical care. Nightingale planned tactics from behind the scenes. In Notes on Matters Affecting the Health, Efficiency and Hospital Administration of the British Army (1857) she used the experiences of the war as a body of data to prove the necessity of a new system. Within five years this effort led to the reconstruction of the administrative structure of the War Office. Nightingale's Notes on Hospitals (1859) detailed the proper arrangements for civilian institutions. In the next year she presided over the founding of the Nightingale School for the training of nurses at St. Thomas's Hospital in London. After 1858 she was recognized as the leading expert on military and civilian sanitation in India, in which capacity she advocated irrigation as the solution to the problem of famine. Nightingale's personality is well documented. Her whole life she rebelled against the idle, sheltered existence of her family. She achieved a dominant position in a masculine world, driving and directing her male allies with the same ruthless force she applied to herself. She frequently complained of women's selfishness, and she ironically had no sympathy with the growing feminist movement. But she also developed a conception of spiritual motherhood and saw herself as the mother of the men of the British army--"my children" as she referred to them--whom she had saved. Florence Nightingale never really recovered from the physical strain of the Crimea. After 1861 she was housebound and bedridden until her death on August 13, 1910. © 2000 Gale Group ABOUT THE GALE GROUP The biography youre reading today has been provided courtesy of the Gale Group, a world leader in publishing for libraries, businesses, and information technologists. To learn more about Gale, please visit us at www.galegroup.com or consult your local library.

Giuliani, Rudolph W. (Rudy)

1944 --

Mayor of New York City. Born Rudolph William Giuliani, on May 28, 1944, in Brooklyn, New York. Giuliani grew up in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, as an only child in a strict Roman Catholic family; his grandparents were Italian immigrants. Though he later moved with his parents to suburban Long Island, he continued to attend school in Brooklyn, at Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School. He majored in political science and philosophy at Manhattan College, in the Bronx. Upon his graduation from college in 1965, with his career plans still undecided, he entered New York University Law School, graduating magna cum laude in 1968. A clerkship at the office of New York Federal District Court Judge Lloyd F. McMahon led to a job as an assistant United States attorney in the Southern district of New York. There, the ambitious young Giuliani was named chief of the narcotics unit and promoted to the position of executive U.S. attorney. In 1975, Giuliani moved to Washington, D.C., to work as the associate deputy attorney general and chief of staff for Deputy Attorney General Harold R. Tyler. By that time, Giuliania Democrathad become increasingly disillusioned with what he saw as the leftist leanings of the party. For the first time, he registered as a Republican, like Tyler. With Jimmy Carters victory in the 1976 presidential election, Tyler and other high-ranking Republicans were on their way out of Washington. Giuliani followed his boss back to New York, where he became a partner in the law firm of Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler. After practicing law for four years, Giuliani was named associate attorney general in the new administration of President Ronald Reagan in 1981. As the third-highest-ranking member of the Department of Justice, Giuliani oversaw all the U.S. attorneys federal law enforcement agencies, as well as the Bureau of Corrections, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), and the U.S. Marshals. In 1983, Giuliani returned to Manhattan to work as the U.S. attorney for the Southern district of New York. In his six years in the office, he was extremely aggressive in the prosecution of accused criminals, including drug dealers, members of organized crime, and white-collar criminals. Giulianis critics accused him of being overzealous and of prosecuting cases merely to advance his own political ambitions. Whatever his motives, his methods paid off, as he amassed an impressive record of 4,152 convictions and only 25 reversals. A vocal and very visible member of the New York political scene, Giuliani entered the race for mayor of New York City in 1989. He lost by a close margin to his Democratic rival David N. Dinkins, who became the citys first African-American mayor. Four years later, when Giuliani ran again, he was able to capitalize on the fact that people saw Dinkins as largely ineffectual and blamed him for the citys mounting murder rate and homeless population. Giuliani won the election by a margin of two percentage points over Dinkins, becoming New Yorks first Republican mayor in over 20 years. Giuliani set the tone for his administration in his inaugural address, when he stated that the era of fear has had a long enough reign. As he had done in the U.S. attorneys office, Giuliani began an aggressive attack on crime, working closely with his police commissioner, William Bratton. By making the members of the police department feel accountable to the mayor for the level of crime on their beats, the Giuliani administration effectively made New York a much safer city. From 1993 to 1998, the citys crime rate fell by 40 percent, and the murder rate decreased by an even greater percentage, leading the FBI to characterize New York as Americas safest large city. In addition to its crackdown on crime, the Giuliani administration saw the establishment of the countrys largest workfare program. By 1997, the number of people on welfare in New York City had fallen to 780,000 (a decrease of 320,000), with total savings of $700 million. Aside from these undeniable successes, Giuliani had a number of harsh critics in the city and state of New York. Many argued that much of his success could be attributed to fortunate timing, and that many of the reforms that materialized under Giulianis administration (the infiltration and revamping of the once-squalid Times Square by mainstream companies like Disney, for example) actually started under Dinkins. It was certainly true that his reduction in crime coincided with the end of the national recession and the resurgence of Wall Street, both of which contributed immensely to the increase in New Yorks business and tourism. Giulianis critics also argued that while the mayor had had success cracking down on small criminals such as graffiti vandals, panhandlers, and speeding taxi drivers, he failed to make substantial improvements in other aspects of his purported agenda, including reshaping the educational system, improving race relations, and finding long-term, meaningful work for people on welfare. Much of the criticism focused on Giulianis brash and unabashedly confrontational personal style. Known for his volatile temper and withering sarcasm, the mayor earned a reputation for being self-righteous and ruthless in his criticism of those with whom he disagreed. In his first two years in office, he effectively forced Schools Chancellor Ramon Cortines out of office with public attacks in the press. Giuliani gladly portrayed himself as a crusading figure, taking credit for virtually all of the positive changes in New York. His relationship with Governor George Pataki, a fellow Republican, has been chilly since 1994, when Giuliani denounced Pataki as unethical and broke ranks with his party to endorse Patakis opponent, the incumbent Mario Cuomo. Despite these criticisms, Giuliani remained a popular mayor throughout the 1990s, easily winning reelection in 1997 over Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messenger. He appealed most explicitly to the middle-class and business community; but he inspired confidence in all New Yorkers who had deplored the prevalence of crime and disorder in their city during the 1980s. Somewhat of a paradoxical figure, Giuliani is a conservative reformer, yet he remains philosophically liberal in many wayshe is pro-choice, pro-gun control, and a tireless supporter of immigration rights. Near the end of the 1990s, Giuliani spent a good deal of time in the public eye outside of New York, as he reportedly tested the waters for a possible presidential run. In late 1998, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the senior senator from New York, announced his retirement in 2000, it was universally speculated that Giuliani would run for his vacant seat. Although it was widely known that Pataki did not support Giuliani, the mayor was such a visible figure that he seemed a sure bet for the Republican candidacy. The New York Senate race earned national attention during 1999 and early 2000, when Hillary Rodham Clinton declared her candidacy on the Democratic side and received the nomination, becoming the first wife of a sitting president to actively seek political office. In April 2000, Giuliani announced publicly that he had been diagnosed with the early stages of prostate cancer, prompting speculation that he would not continue his Senate campaign. Less than two weeks later, Giuliani announced that he was separating from his wife of 11 years, Donna Hanover, a former television journalist and actress. Hanover announced in her own press conference that Giuliani had been romantically involved with at least two other women during their marriage, including his former communications director, Cristyne Lategano, and Judith Nathan, a New York City businesswoman who had been appearing with him in public since late 1999. The mayors tumultuous spring reached a climax on May 19, 2000, when Giuliani officially withdrew from the Senate race, stating that he would finish out his second and final term as mayor and concentrate on his personal issues, including the process of getting treatment for his prostate cancer (his father died of the disease). After the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, Giuliani's commanding leadership earned him the admiration and respect of the international community and especially of the griefstricken residents of New York City. Though his popularity might have earned him a third term as mayor, election restrictions prohibited him from running. The Republican candidate, business leader Michael Bloomberg, triumphed in November, and was sworn in as mayor of New York City on January 1, 2002. Giuliani was married to his first wife, Regina Peruggi, from 1968 to 1982. After their divorce, Giuliani also obtained an annulment on the grounds that the two were second cousins, and had not received the proper dispensation necessary to marry. He and Hanover were married in April 1984. They have two children, Andrew and Caroline. After a very public divorce, Giuliani announced his engagement to longtime companion Judith Nathan in October 2002. © 2002 A&E Television Networks. All rights reserved.