France has a new president by the name of Francois Hollande; Russia has re-installed Vladimir Putin as president; Ratko Mladic goes on trial for mass murder; and Abdrabbuh Hadi is the newly appointed president of Yemen. Where does one find accurate information on these people? A place to start with is the BBC News site that has a search box in which you can find biographical information by the simple expedient of typing “profile” along with the person’s name; for example, typing “profile Francois Hollande” will retrieve this biography along with other valuable links. Hundreds of valuable portraits are contained here. Another place to mine in the BBC is its Country Profiles section where you will find not only biographical information on the leaders of every country and selected NGOs, but you will also find overviews and media outlets for each entity. Times Topics People provides thousands of biographical profiles along with free access to relevant NY Times articles as well as links to outside sources. For example, here are Hadi’s entry, Mladic’s profile, and Putin’s biography. So whether you are looking for information on the president of Sri Lanka Mahinda Rajapaksa or Alekandr Lukashenko of Belarus, using either or both of these sources will yield satisfying results.
Archive for Biography
Are Jeremy Lin and Rihanna Together?
Yes they are! They are listed in Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World. Each individual is accorded a biography written by a noteworthy person preferably in their own field; for example, Louis CK’s profile is by Joan Rivers and Matt Lauer’s is by Howard Stern. If you want the rationale behind these picks, please read this.
Biographies of European Officials
With all the media coverage focusing on the debt crisis in Europe, we thought everyone could use some help in identifying all the players. Whoiswho is the official directory of the European Union; it provides searching by name, EU institution, or hierarchical listing. The information is fairly sparse, but it does identify everyone in the various EU entities and provides their title, telephone and fax numbers as well as their email and Internet site. Additional information can be garnered from the biographies of the European Commissioners of the EU, and the members of the European Parliament. A non-EU site, the Council of Europe, provides personal data on its officials at its leaders page and its member states page.
2011 Nobel Prize Winners
Complete List of 2011 Emmy Award Winners
Please come here for the full list of nominees and winners. Biographical information on nominees and winners is found at emmys.com; more can be found at biography.com and and the television section of IMDb. EmmyTVLegends provides interviews with the movers and shakers of television from actors/actresses to producers, writers, and directors. And don’t forget to visit the Encyclopedia of Television.
2012 Presidential Candidates’ Biographies and Calendars
Although the presidential election is over a year away, potential and announced candidates have already appeared. This site from Project Vote Smart lists the candidates along with their biographies, key votes, speeches, ratings, and campaign finances. To keep up with their daily perambulations, go to the 2012 Daybook Calendar from Politico that is searchable by date, state, and candidate. And do not forget Reuters’ Factbox: Key dates in the U.S. presidential race, and C-SPAN’s Road to the White House should also be consulted for its video coverage of the candidates.
Biographies of Women Athletes
Here are some good sites: Sports Biographies: Women (HickokSports, quite extensive); 100 Greatest Female Athletes (Sports Illustrated); Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame; Distinguished Women of Past and Present: Sports; Great Women of Cycling; and USA Track and Field: Women.
Harriet Tubman
Harriet Tubman, born a slave, died a free woman in upstate New York. One of the most courageous women of her time, she personally risked her life on many occasions to guide escaped slaves north along the Underground Railroad. (For Jersey City’s role in this network, please come here. Two of the most important collections of documents on the Railroad are: Wilbur Siebert’s The Underground Railroad for Slavery to Freedom published in 1898 and containing the accounts of active abolitionists from that time, and William Still’s 1872 work Underground Rail Road which included eyewitness accounts. Still himself worked with the Philadelphia Underground Railroad.) Harriet Tubman worked as a cook, nurse, and spy for the Union army. She lectured and was an ardent suffragette as well. For so accomplished and heroic figure, she left no writings, letters, or memoirs because she was illiterate. So what we have about her is derived from sources once removed. However, these sources do portray an individual of immense moral stature; John Brown, the famous abolitionist, called her “…the most of a man, naturally, that I ever met with.”(Quoted in John Brown, 1800-1859: A Biography Fifty Years After, p.327). As was the case with many who served the government, Tubman was forced to subsist on a very small monthly stipend; to supplement her income, she had Sarah Bradford help her write her autobiography Harriet: The Moses of Her People (1869). With the proceeds from this volume, she purchased a house in Auburn, N.Y. and turned it into a home for the aged and needy. She died in 1913. Additional information is at: Harriet Ross Tubman (SUNY Buffalo); Harriet Tubman (University of North Carolina); Harriet Tubman (americaslibrary.gov); Harriet Tubman: Online Resources (Library of Congress); Black Dispatches (CIA – details Tubman’s spy activities during the Civil War); Contemporary Newspaper Articles (from “Chronicling America“); and Harriet Tubman (PBS).
Database of Contemporary British Writers
This collection presents current information on contemporary writers in the UK. Biographical information, along with critical appraisals, author bibliographies, and prizes awarded are listed for each profile.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Online
The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. Project as published by the University of California Press has six volumes out so far, tracing Dr King’s life to 1963. Each volume has a voluminous introduction, a timeline and the full text of all the documents contained therein. So, you have a wide range of materials from the 1955 Minutes of the Montgomery Improvement Authority where King is elected president to his 1959 letter to Harry Belafonte. Also available is A Knock at Midnight, a selection of his great sermons, and A Call to Conscience, a collection of his greatest speeches. The MLK Encyclopedia provides a thousand hyperlinked articles on his life. (Just a word of caution : the encyclopedia has a less than a robust search interface. It is worth the effort, however.)
Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook is Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year”
The special report is here. More biographical information on the co-founder and CEO of Facebook can be located at: The New York Times, Biography.com, the Wall Street Journal, 60 Minutes (interview), and Stanford (interview).
Biography of Liu Xiaobo, Nobel Peace Prize Winner
Biographies of Newly Elected Congresspeople
Many new members have been elected to Congress; their biographies will be found here. As always, the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, 1774 to Present provides information on all those who have served in Congress, and it will be updated to reflect these new members. Other biographical sources are discussed here and here.
Who is General McChrystal?
As of today, he is at the center of controversy thanks to his Rolling Stone interview. For now, he is the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Of course, one does not get to such a high rank without some previous experience. Biographical information on him is at: ISAF(International Security Assistance Force) Afghanistan, Time, and The Guardian. The New York Times has an extensive section on him. General McChrystal has been in the news before: The Tillman Fratricide: What the Leadership of the Defense Department Knew (House Hearing).
Who is Ray Mabus?
Ray Mabus is the person President Obama has named to coordinate the restoration of the Gulf areas devastated by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. He is presently the Secretary of the Navy and is not a stranger to public service. He was also Governor of Mississippi (additional gubernatorial bio here) and appointed by President Clinton as Ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Additional biographical information is presented by: Head Count:Tracking Obama’s Appointments, whorunsgov, The New York Times, and CNN.
Additional Biographies/Writings of Elena Kagan
Ms. Kagan is no stranger to the Washington corridors of power. She served during the Clinton years as Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy as well as Deputy Director of the Domestic Policy Council. As such, she was actively involved in a wide variety of policy decisions. Some of her writings can be found here and here courtesy of the William J Clinton Presidential Library. More biographies can be found at both Decision Makers and whorunsgov.
Biography of Elena Kagan, Supreme Court Nominee
President Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Elena Kagan, has never held a judgeship before. She, if approved, will become only the fourth female Supreme Court Justice. Biographical information is available from: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, biography.com, and SCOTUSblog. She is currently the Solictor General of the United States; to fill that position she had to answer a 51 page questionnaire from the Senate Judiciary Committee, a process she will have to go through again. Her answers to the original series of questions are here. The confirmation hearings for her present position are also online. Some of her statements and writings can also be perused, and videos of her are found on C-SPAN. President Obama’s nominating remarks are now online. A previous post has dealt with the nominating process for the Supreme Court.
Baseball Biographies
Well, it is spring after all, and that can only mean one thing -baseball! We are unreconstructed Brooklyn Dodger fans and even if this means dating ourselves, we remember The Silver Fox (aka Duke Snider to you uninitiated) patrolling the outer reaches of Ebbets Field, the shadow of which we grew up in. For those who like to indulge in tracking your favorite players, we hereby list for you some sites that prove of value. The Baseball Biography Project, sponsored by the Society for American Baseball Research, has as its goal to present in-depth articles on those who played, managed, or had an impact on baseball. You can search or browse the list; the browse function allows you to narrow by achievement, demographics, era, or awards and honors. At the time of this writing there are about 1330 biographies present or soon to be completed; each one has a bibliography attached to it. As far as we can see, no current ballplayer is examined, but biographies are available for those who played in the “modern” (post 1976) era. Current players as well as past athletes are profiled in The Ballplayers: A Baseball Player Encyclopedia. The biographies are very brief, just “bare bones” so to speak, but their life stories are augmented with a veritable flood of statistics. If career statistics are more your priority, then check out Player Search from MLB. Searches can be conducted for either “active” players or “historical” players; then stand back for the numbers! Historic Baseball Player Biographies does what is says with links to The Ballplayers: A Baseball Player Encyclopedia site for the statistical side. Baseballlibrary.com presents The Ballplayers that has both active and inactive players. Each entry is hyperlinked and contains brief statistical information, a chronology, and “related info,” which is in reality links to full text articles on the player in question. For those who still cannot get enough, we recommend the Baseball Digest along with its issues back to July 1945.
Who is Carlos Slim?
Only the wealthiest person in the world, according to the most recent Forbes The World’s Billionaires(this link also gives you access to many other billionaire-related lists; i.e., homes of the billionaires, top billionaire cities, etc.) His actual name is Carlos Slim Helu and he is a telecommunications giant in Mexico who has broadened his footprint into a number of diversified industries through his Grupo Carso. He currently owns 17% of the common stock of The New York Times, to which he loaned $250 million in early 2009. More information can be found here: Best Practices for Becoming the World’s Richest Man (from the AtlanticWire – it contains links to other stories); Carlos Slim Helu (biography.com); Profile: Carlos Slim (BBC); and Carlos Slim Helu (New York Times Topics – lots of links to NYT articles). Other reports of interest include: Priorities for Telecommunications Reform in Mexico (Stanford, 2007); Mexico Must Boost Competition in Telecom, OECD Says (Bloomberg News, 2007); IT and Telecom in Mexico (U.S. Commercial Service, 2009); and Background Note: Mexico (State Dept., 2010)
Updated Congressional Biography Sources
These recent prosopographical publications from the inestimable Congressional Research Service should prove of merit: Membership of the 111th Congress: A Profile; Women in the United States Congress; 1917-2009; Asian Pacific Americans in the United States Congress; and African-American Members of the United States Congress: 1870-2009.
