Kathleen Tracy
Inventor, artist, scientist . . . Leonardo da Vinci's wide-ranging inquisitiveness was the source of his greatest accomplishments and his lifelong financial difficulties—he would get bored quickly and rarely finish his projects. As an artist, only seventeen of his finished works survive, and yet they include two of the most famous paintings in the world: The Last Supper and Mona Lisa. His scientific studies of human anatomy were centuries
...Islamic Culture in Perspective is an in-depth look at the cultures of Islam, with an emphasis on current culture. The young reader is presented with an overview of a variety of regional cultures that developed historically and analyzes how the cultural history shapes the current culture. The book is written in a lively and interesting style, and contains Islamic languages, foods, music/dance, art/literature, religions, holidays, lifestyle, and
...For almost three thousand years, The Iliad and The Odyssey have thrilled people with tales of adventure in ancient Greece. The stories of Helen and Paris, the Greek gods, the Trojan War, Achilles, and of Odysseus's ten year quest to return home after the war are known all over the world among all cultures. But so much about the life of the man responsible for those epic poems remains a mystery that for a while some scholars doubted he even really
...8) Rosa Parks
When a young African-American seamstress named Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus to a white passenger, she turned the smoldering civil rights movement into a firestorm. For years, blacks in the South had seen their civil liberties stolen through segregation laws that demanded the races be kept separate but equal—except there was no equality in it. Parks's arrest was chosen to challenge the constitutionality
...Although his career spanned a mere twenty years, Édouard Manet remains one of the most influential artists in history. Rejecting the classical style of painting religious or mythological subjects, Manet was one of the first artists in the nineteenth century to paint modern people in modern situations. Many of his paintings depicted the everyday street life of Paris, especially the cafés. The realism of his art offended the mainstream art community,
...In the 1930s, Hitler's Germany became the most powerful—and feared—country in Europe. Hitler was determined to control the entire continent. After the shocking attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States declared war on Japan. In turn, Germany declared war on America, igniting World War II. The biggest concern for America and the Allies was that Hitler was working on a nuclear "super bomb." Believing the fate of the world hung in the
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