Ali told The New York Times in that he thought Stevenson was a promising amateur fighter but that he was probably not ready for the pros. Stevenson never took the bait. He had remained a promising amateur at his death, in Havana on June 11, You make a lot of money, but how many boxers in history do we know that died poor?
While the world was consumed with war in the first half of the s, three men were subsumed with growing unrest across India, with the fates of tens of millions of their compatriots in their hands. At the stroke of midnight on Aug. But there was a fatal flaw: There were no borders. Indians had struggled for decades to rid themselves of British rule, galvanized by the nonviolent movement led by Gandhi. Their efforts were kept in check by ruthless military force, but by the end of World War II, Britain lacked the will and the means to defeat the campaign.
They reluctantly relinquished India after years, leaving the country at the brink of implosion. Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah were divided on what should happen once the British left.
Gandhi, more an idealist than a realist, wanted an undivided nation; he chose to remain out of government. The British negotiated with the Muslim League, led by Jinnah, who believed that a separate state was the only way to protect the rights of Muslims, who were a minority; and the mostly Hindu Indian National Congress, led by Nehru, who grudgingly went along with the British decision to divide India on the basis of religion. But it prolonged the uncertainty for millions and very likely increased the loss of life to come.
Shortly before the clock struck midnight on Aug. Those stirring words met the occasion, but had no effect on the swirling chaos on the ground as mobs sought on their own to determine the religious makeup of towns and villages. Communities that had lived together for centuries viciously turned on each other. The borders were announced two days after independence: Hindu-majority India flanked by Muslim-majority West Pakistan and East Pakistan. Up to 15 million people moved across the two borders in less than a year, one of the fastest mass migrations in history.
Millions of Muslims fled India, most heading west. About the same number of Hindus and Sikhs went mostly east into the new India. About one million people were killed. On Jan. Nehru ruled for 17 years and died on May 27, Those hastily drawn borders by the British became the focus of four wars and seven decades of animosity between India and Pakistan. For many millions on the subcontinent today, all the promise that came with independence remains unfulfilled.
Were you, a family member or your community personally affected by the partition of India? First and last preferred, please. You are agreeing that we can use your submission in all manner and media of The New York Times and that we shall have the right to authorize third parties to do so. And you agree to our Terms of Service. Robin Williams, an indefatigable, improvisational genius, arrived on screens as an alien and left as an Academy Award-winning actor.
After his death , two years ago today, The New York Times described him like this:. Onstage he was known for ricochet riffs on politics, social issues and cultural matters both high and low; tales of drug and alcohol abuse; lewd commentaries on relations between the sexes; and lightning-like improvisations on anything an audience member might toss at him. His gigs were always rife with frenetic, spot-on impersonations that included Hollywood stars, presidents, princes, prime ministers, popes and anonymous citizens of the world.
His irreverence was legendary and uncurtailable. We remember Williams with some of our favorite scenes and lines some of which contain strong language , and encourage readers to do the same on Twitter using tellnyt. Williams broke through to mainstream audiences on this quirky sitcom, in which he played Mork from Ork, a sweet, goofy alien who befriends a young Colorado woman. Stick that sword into that snake! He voiced an unforgettably zany blue genie in the Walt Disney feature. Oh, dear.
Well, they say a man who has to buy a big car like that is trying to compensate for smaller genitals. Williams played an actor who cross-dressed as a British housekeeper to spend more time with his children in this family comedy.
Babe Didrikson preferred victory to humility. Didrikson backed up her swagger; There was seemingly no sport she could not master. Some teams had as many as 22 athletes, but Didrikson performed solo in all of the events as a publicity stunt for her sponsor. She won five individual events, tied in a sixth and won the championships single-handed. At the Games, Didrikson won gold medals in both the javelin throw and the high hurdles.
In the high jump, she cleared 5 feet 5 inches, the same as gold medalist Jean Shiley. But she was disqualified on her final jump and awarded the silver medal after a judge ruled her technique had violated Olympic rules, even though the issue had not been raised in earlier rounds. The fact that Didrikson won only three medals also deserves an asterisk.
Women were limited to three Olympic track and field events in , so Didrikson could possibly have won more had she been allowed to compete. She had only taken up the sport in , but had tackled it with the same drive she brought to all of her athletic endeavors. She met her future husband, the professional wrestler George Zaharias, when they were paired to play golf together at a tournament.
She took his surname when they married in She developed an aggressive, dramatic style, hitting down sharply and crisply on her iron shots like a man and averaging yards off the tee with her woods. As an amateur golfer, Zaharias once won 14 tournaments in a row. Zaharias beat Betty Hicks by 12 strokes in the United States Open, an astonishing margin considering that Zaharias had been treated for colon cancer in and had undergone a colostomy.
Zaharias became a spokeswoman for cancer awareness and toured for as long as she could, but the disease returned. She died from it in September Eisenhower said at the time. Sports Illustrated lauded her as the woman Athlete of the 20th Century in individual sports. A few seconds, perhaps a fraction of a second, can mean the difference between victory and defeat, between becoming a legend or leaving as a footnote. Yet that lifetime of training, which propelled Owens into the history books with his performance in the Games in Berlin, seemed for a time as if it might be of little use.
With the rise of Nazi Germany roiling Europe, the Amateur Athletic Union remained divided in over whether to allow American athletes to compete in Berlin; it ultimately approved their participation, but only by a narrow vote. The purpose of the Olympics, anyway, was to do your best. The A. Owens, who was black, was encouraged by some civil rights groups to boycott the games. After deciding to go, he found a chilly reception in Germany, where claims of Aryan supremacy were central to Nazi ideology.
He was called racial epithets and subjected to other mistreatment. To the dismay of Hitler and the Nazis, Owens went on to win four gold medals — in the long jump, meter dash, the meter dash and the 4x meter relay — more than any other American track and field athlete in a single Olympic Games.
His long jump record, of 8. The son of a sharecropper and grandson of a slave, James Cleveland Owens was born on Sept. Sickly in his youth, he went by the nickname J. But it was his time at Ohio State University that proved crucial in his development. For all his record-breaking Olympic success overseas, his return home was sobering. President Franklin D. Unlike modern-day athletes who can be paid handsomely through endorsements and other commercial deals, Owens had to take myriad jobs to support his family.
He later became a motivational speaker and public relations representative. In , President Gerald R. Ford awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor given to civilians in the United States. Owens died from complications related to lung cancer on March 31, In Rio, the heirs of Owens, like Usain Bolt of Jamaica and Allyson Felix of the United States, are looking to carve their own names in Olympic history, propelled by the chance for glory, pride for country and perhaps, as Owens had expressed, a simple love for the sport.
Yauch, known as MCA, was born 52 years ago on this day in Brooklyn. He attended Edward R. It became the first hip-hop album to reach No. Born and bred in Brooklyn the U. Yauch became a supporter of feminism and a practicing Buddhist, creating the Milarepa Fund to support Tibetan independence from China. A series of Tibetan Freedom Concerts raised awareness for his cause.
In , the Beastie Boys offered a post-Sept. Offstage, Yauch, Horovitz and Diamond were businessmen, too. In , they started Grand Royal, their label and magazine. Hans Christian Andersen , whose fairy tales endure more than a century after his death on this day in , had a childhood as difficult as those of his plucky protagonists.
Born on April 2, , in Odense, Denmark, Andersen grew up in stark poverty, but his father, a shoemaker, cultivated his imagination. Andersen was a solitary child who spent most of his time making costumes for puppets and enacting plays on a model stage his father had built for him.
He headed for Copenhagen when he was just a teenager. Many of his stories featured children who persevered in the face of ridicule, ignorance and evil. In time, Andersen became famous and traveled around Europe, meeting celebrities like Charles Dickens.
So the opening line of his autobiography is hardly hyperbolic. When Henri Cartier-Bresson first picked up a tiny Leica 35mm film camera in , he began a visual journey that would revolutionize 20th-century photography. His camera could be wielded so discreetly that it enabled him to photograph while being virtually unseen by others — a near invisibility that turned photojournalism into a primary source of information and photography into a recognized art form.
In , he and Robert Capa helped create the photographer-owned cooperative photo agency Magnum. Though he often focused on the human condition in his photographs, Cartier-Besson would often look at his contact sheets or prints upside down to judge the images separate from any social content. They stood as rigorous compositions on their own.
His signature shooting technique was to find a visually arresting setting for a photograph and then patiently wait for that decisive moment to unfurl.
They also admired his coolness under pressure. The director Louis Malle remembered that, despite all the turmoil at the peak of the student protests in Paris in May , Mr. Cartier-Bresson took photographs at the rate of only about four an hour. With the primacy of digital photography and social media in the 21st century, slow, painstaking image-making is becoming a relic.
Photographers and their images now move at a pace as fast as the events swirling around them. Photographs are no longer rare artifacts, nor primarily a means of learning about the exotic or unknown. They arrive instantaneously on our phones every day from every corner of the world and from all kinds of people. With a smart phone, everyone is a photographer, and images compete for crowd approval on social media channels like Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook.
Or are they even more instructive today? Respond on Twitter using the hashtag tellnyt. James Baldwin, whose cutting, unequivocal writing about race relations helped make America more equal than it was before, was born on this day in , according to many accounts. The Times wrote in his obituary on Dec. I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain. What is ghastly and really almost hopeless in our racial situation now is that the crimes we have committed are so great and so unspeakable that the acceptance of this knowledge would lead, literally, to madness.
The human being, then, in order to protect himself, closes his eyes, compulsively repeats his crimes, and enters a spiritual darkness which no one can describe.
Only white Americans can consider themselves to be expatriates. Once I found myself on the other side of the ocean, I could see where I came from very clearly, and I could see that I carried myself, which is my home, with me. You can never escape that. I am the grandson of a slave, and I am a writer. I must deal with both. I was a maverick, a maverick in the sense that I depended on neither the white world nor the black world. It gave me another touchstone — myself.
On March 10, , Professor Alexander Graham Bell stood in a Boston boarding house holding a receiving device connected to a series of wires that ran into an adjacent room.
There, his assistant, Thomas A. Watson , waited patiently, clutching another receiver to his ear. Come here! I want—! I heard you! From that experiment using just a few feet of wire would grow an industry that would transform the world. Alexander Graham Bell — who died at 75 on this day in at his estate in Nova Scotia in Canada — was fascinated by speech, sound and communication from a very young age.
He was homeschooled by his father, a phoneticist and the developer of Visible Speech, a series of symbols designed to aid the deaf in oration. Bell moved to Boston in the early s and there used methods that he had learned from his father to teach deaf students. His techniques proved so useful that he eventually taught them to others as a professor at the Boston University School of Oratory.
During these years he continued his research into sound at the university, experimenting with electricity. He hired Watson, an electrical designer and mechanic, for his electrical expertise. Soon they were collaborating on acoustic telegraphy, hoping to transmit a human voice by means of pulses along a telegraph wire. Bell was granted a patent for the telephone — No. The patent, however, proved controversial from the start.
Even though Bell is known as the father of telephony, his claim as its inventor has been challenged repeatedly in hundreds of legal cases, some of which have appeared before the United States Supreme Court. He would go on to undertake important work in fields such as hydrofoils and aeronautics; make early advances in the creation of the metal detector; and develop a wireless telephone, called the photophone.
Well, fairy tales have a way of coming true in science and invention. I often wonder what Yves Saint Laurent, who was born on this day in , would think of the modern fashion world. This is in part because his name has been in the news recently, given the upheaval at the brand he built, where yet another creative director will debut a newish vision for the label next month.
In fact, he never saw them as causes per se, but rather as simply part of the definition of what it meant to be modern. Saint Laurent was among the first designers to embrace black models on the runway, claiming such women as Iman, Katoucha Niane and Dalma Callado as his muses. Naomi Campbell credits him with getting her her first French Vogue cover. Yet every season, we still seem to have the same discussion about the color myopia of the industry.
The power of pantsuits? He understood what they could mean for women back in , when he unveiled his first Le Smoking: a tuxedo for women worn with a ruffled white shirt and a satin cummerbund. The idea shocked the world then. The New York socialite Nan Kempner was turned away from Le Cote Basque for wearing hers, only to return having divested herself of the trousers and wearing the jacket as a mini-dress. That was, somehow, more acceptable to the management.
The democratization of fashion? Saint Laurent popularized the idea of high fashion ready-to-wear, introducing Rive Gauche, his Left Bank boutique and off-the-rack collection, in He was the first couturier to make his clothes available to consumers beyond the gilded doors of the haute salons. Now e-commerce has moved the dial even further, and for the first time this season three designers Tom Ford, Tommy Hilfiger and Burberry will be showing clothes that can be bought the next day, instead of six months down the line.
So maybe Mr. Saint Laurent, who died on June 1, , would be rolling his eyes. Maybe he would be laughing. But the breathtaking disclosure was delivered with a major caveat: The practical application of the discovery, if any, would take 25 years.
That prediction, as it turned out, was off by a long shot. Hahn made his discovery in his laboratory at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, working with his assistant, Fritz Strassmann. Hahn said after the war that he had opposed Nazism. But the process of splitting the uranium atom would not be labeled nuclear fission until later, and Hahn himself, as a chemist rather than a physicist, initially described his discovery in the most equivocal terms.
Hahn later said that he had never believed that his discovery would have military implications. He later became an antiwar activist who opposed nuclear proliferation and expressed his fears in this rhyme:. American elections — and the American electorate — grow more complex and confounding every campaign cycle. George H. Gallup, who died 32 years ago this week at age 82 , could not, and probably would not, tell you who he thought would win in November.
But he could tell you what forces were driving public opinion, from fear of crime and terrorism to a widespread unease about rapid cultural and demographic changes. And he most certainly would have pointed out the flaws in a presidential primary system that produced two candidates with such high negative ratings and so many voters in despair.
Gallup, an Iowan with a commanding presence and a bone-crushing grip, would also undoubtedly have strong feelings about the profound changes roiling the polling industry. His organization pioneered many of the advances in measuring public opinion , including use of the telephone rather than mail or face-to-face interviews.
That technology is now under scrutiny, as more and more pollsters are turning to the internet and mobile devices to conduct surveys.
Gallup and The New York Times rely almost exclusively on telephone polling, but are experimenting with reaching the public in other ways. A Gallup poll famously predicted that Thomas E. Dewey would defeat Harry S. The company instead is now focusing on the mood of the public, taking, as Mr. When Hillary Clinton formally clinches the Democratic presidential nomination this week in front of television cameras and a crowd of thousands, one vital influence will be conspicuously absent: her mother, Dorothy Rodham , whose quintessentially American story of resilience is woven into the fabric of her candidacy.
It was sent to states for ratification and took effect 14 months later. Dorothy and her little sister were sent on a cross-country train to live with their grandparents in California. Dorothy was 8, her sister was 3. Their grandmother was old-fashioned and strict. She preferred black Victorian dress and tolerated no disobedience — Dorothy was not allowed to attend parties or have visitors. After she went trick-or-treating one Halloween, she was confined to her bedroom for a year, let out only to go to school.
She cooked, cleaned and nannied for a family in San Gabriel, Calif. She lived in near abject poverty, but in that household Dorothy learned what family was. Would you like it? But her mother lied: She brought Dorothy back to work as a housekeeper. Heartbroken, Dorothy eventually found secretarial work. In , Dorothy married Hugh Ellsworth Rodham , a conservative Republican who operated a small drapery business.
They raised three children — Hillary Diane, Hugh Jr. Dorothy Rodham raised her daughter to stand her ground and hit back if necessary, Mrs. Clinton wrote. In , after Hillary Rodham had entered Wellesley College as a civic-minded Republican and had become plagued by doubts about remaining there, her mother bucked her up.
The war in Vietnam and the turmoil of the civil rights movement led Mrs. Clinton to undergo a political transformation.
She graduated as an antiwar Democrat. During her unsuccessful campaign for the presidential nomination, Mrs. Later in life, Dorothy Rodham resumed her education by taking college courses. She died on Nov. Clinton wrote :. Mom measured her own life by how much she was able to help us and serve others. I knew if she was still with us, she would be urging us to do the same. Never rest on your laurels. Never quit. Never stop working to make the world a better place. This is the story of Cassius Marcellus Clay — not that Cassius Clay, the heavyweight fighter and luminous worldwide presence best known as Muhammad Ali.
This story is about the original Cassius Clay: the 19th-century scion of a slaveholding family who became a belligerent emancipationist, globe-trotting statesman, unsparing duelist, early Republican and larger-than-life American eccentric. A firebrand publisher, Yale-educated lawyer, Kentucky state legislator, major general in the Union Army, survivor of multiple assassination attempts and the United States minister to Russia under Presidents Lincoln and Johnson, General Clay was as well known for his private activities as for his public ones.
His obituary in The New York Times, published on July 23, , is remarkable for a level of catty candor rarely seen in American news obituaries of the era — traditionally staid, reverential documents — and, very likely, of any era. On one occasion, caught without his pistol, General Clay was shot above the heart by a would-be assassin.
He was 84 at the time. And so he did, taking Dora Richardson as his bride in Young Dora, who evidently had little say in the matter of her betrothal, did not take kindly to being yoked to a man more than five times her age. She ran away repeatedly from home and from the boarding school to which her husband sent her.
The youngest son of Gen. His father had been a hero of the Revolutionary War and was a general in the War of ; Henry Clay, the United States senator and statesman, was a cousin.
Returning home after earning a law degree in , he established a practice in Lexington, served three terms in the Kentucky General Assembly and was a captain in the 1st Kentucky Cavalry in the Mexican War. In , he freed his own slaves and the next year started The True American, an emancipationist newspaper published in Lexington. His proposals for gradually ending slavery, which he also promulgated in public lectures, did not go over well in Kentucky.
He kept a cannon on hand to protect the newspaper office from looming mobs and weathered several more attempts on his life. General Clay, who in the s helped establish the Republican Party, was a friend and staunch supporter of Abraham Lincoln. After the outbreak of the Civil War, he organized the Cassius M. The Iraqi army was poised to invade. Oveissi promised Saddam that Iran was weak and its military in disarray.
Of course that is what Saddam wanted to hear. The intelligence community issued an immediate warning memo indicating that the Iraqis were going to invade and assessing the implications. The memo concluded that Iraq was not likely to win a quick and cheap war.
Oveissi was assassinated in Paris on February 7, by an Iranian hit team. The war lasted eight years and cost the lives of a half million people, another million injured and over a trillion dollars in damage. It set in motion the march of folly that led to three more wars. Order from Chaos. A how-to guide for managing the end of the post-Cold War era. Read all the Order from Chaos content ». Related Books. One of the leaders read out a statement, saying: "We Muslim students, followers of Imam Khomeini, have occupied the espionage embassy of America in protest… We announce our protest against America for granting asylum and employing the criminal Shah while it has on its hands the blood of tens of thousands of women and men in this country.
The takeover was backed by Khomeini, promoting Carter to put pressure on the new regime by freezing Iranian assets. In response, the Ayatollah unleashed a furious tirade of vitriol to his amassed followers, declaring: "Don't forget that the US is your worst enemy. Don't forget to chant: 'Death to US'.
Amid the revolutionary fervour, there was no appetite in Iran for negotiation and in the end, 52 American diplomats were held for days, with a failed rescue mission along the way resulting in the deaths of eight servicemen.
While US diplomats were still being held hostage in Tehran, in September , Iraqi forces invaded Iran, citing Iran's failure to abide by a border agreement. By , Iran had hit back, retaking the territory Iraq had initially seized and pushing on towards the Iraqi city of Basra. The US, terrified the Iranians might defeat Iraq and move on to seize other Middle Eastern oil rich allies, began supporting the regime of Saddam Hussein and arranged for non-US-made weapons to be imported, according to several sources.
At the start of the Iranian revolution, the US had held up a shipment of weapons the Shah's regime had paid for, causing further rancour among his successors. In , two separate attacks against the US embassy and a US Marine peacekeeper barracks in Beirut killed a total of people, while another attack on a French base killed 58 troops. The attacks were claimed by a previously unknown Shia Islamist group called the Islamic Jihad Organisation, but many sources have accused Iran of being behind them.
Five years later, after the US stationed its navy in the Persian Gulf to protect shipping from the ongoing Iran-Iraq war, an Iran Air passenger jet was shot down over Iranian territorial waters by a surface-to-air missile fired by the USS Vincennes in the Straits of Hormuz.
The US said later the US navy ship had incorrectly believed the aircraft was an attacking war plane, but never apologised. Iran accused the US of being negligent. The same year, in , Pan Am Flight was blown out of the sky above Lockerbie, Scotland, an act of terror some have blamed on Iran. Despite the deteriorating relations between the two countries, there were moments when it appeared as though they were able to co-operate, albeit in controversial circumstances.
Evidence emerged in that a faction of the Reagan administration had arranged to ship replacement weapon parts to Iran, despite a US-sponsored arms embargo, in exchange for Iran's help in getting US hostages being held in Lebanon released.
The hostages were being held by a Shia militant group called the Islamic Jihad Organisation, which was allied to Hezbollah and arose out of the conflict in southern Lebanon. The US had designated Iran a State Sponsor of Terrorism in , originally for its support for Hezbollah and other militant groups and later for its support of Hamas. The phrase remains a kind of shorthand for American failure to anticipate developments in Iran and the broader Middle East. The tsunami of political change that overtook Iran in took Iranians by surprise as well, including some of the leading voices in the opposition.
These words would prove horribly prescient. Only a few days earlier, Iranian demonstrators had briefly attacked the U. It also precipitated a full-blown breach with Washington, which had sought to build relations with the post-revolutionary leadership. Some blamed the State Department, which had few Persian speakers stationed in Tehran prior to the revolution and discouraged U. Within Iran, conspiracy theories abounded, continuing to this day, many suspecting it was all somehow a British plot.
None of these narratives are entirely accurate. Where Washington failed on Iran and with other black swan developments arose from a failure of political imagination, to borrow a phrase from my colleague Bruce Riedel. The Iranian revolution left a broad and complex legacy within Washington.
Today, the consequences of the revolution continue to shape the bilateral dynamic between Washington and Tehran, even as memories of the moment itself begin to fade in both countries.
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