Oprah Winfrey
Oprah Winfrey is an American media executive, talk show host, television producer and philanthropist. She is best known for her talk show The Oprah Winfrey Show, the highest-rated television program of its kind in history and was nationally syndicated from 1986 to 2011 in Chicago. Dubbed the "Queen of All Media", she was the richest African American of the 20th century and North America's first black multi-billionaire, has been ranked the greatest black philanthropist in American history, she has been sometimes ranked as the most influential woman in the world. Winfrey was born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a teenage single mother and raised in inner-city Milwaukee, she has stated that she was molested during her childhood and early teens and became pregnant at 14. Winfrey was sent to live with the man she calls her father, Vernon Winfrey, a barber in Tennessee, landed a job in radio while still in high school. By 19, she was a co-anchor for the local evening news. Winfrey's emotional, extemporaneous delivery led to her transfer to the daytime talk show arena, after boosting a third-rated local Chicago talk show to first place, she launched her own production company and became internationally syndicated.
Credited with creating a more intimate confessional form of media communication, Winfrey popularized and revolutionized the tabloid talk show genre pioneered by Phil Donahue. Through this medium, Winfrey broke 20th-century taboos and allowed LGBT people to enter the mainstream through television appearances. In 1994, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. By the mid-1990s, Winfrey had reinvented her show with a focus on literature, self-improvement and spirituality. Though she was criticized for unleashing a confession culture, promoting controversial self-help ideas, having an emotion-centered approach, she has been praised for overcoming adversity to become a benefactor to others. Winfrey had emerged as a political force in the 2008 presidential race, delivering about one million votes to Barack Obama in the razor close 2008 Democratic primary. In 2013, Winfrey was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama and honorary doctorate degrees from Duke and Harvard.
In 2008, she formed Oprah Winfrey Network. Winfrey's first name was spelled "Orpah" on her birth certificate after the biblical figure in the Book of Ruth, but people mispronounced it and "Oprah" stuck, she was born in Mississippi, to an unmarried teenage mother. She said that her conception was due to a single sexual encounter and the couple broke up not long after, her mother, Vernita Lee, was a housemaid. Winfrey's biological father is noted as Vernon Winfrey, a coal miner turned barber turned city councilman, in the Armed Forces when she was born. However, Mississippi farmer and World War II veteran Noah Robinson Sr. has claimed to be her biological father. A genetic test in 2006 determined that her matrilineal line originated among the Kpelle ethnic group, in the area that today is Liberia, her genetic makeup was determined to be 89% Sub-Saharan African, 8% Native American, 3% East Asian. However, the East Asian markers may, given the imprecision of genetic testing be Native American. After Winfrey's birth, her mother traveled north, Winfrey spent her first six years living in rural poverty with her maternal grandmother, Hattie Mae Lee, so poor that Winfrey wore dresses made of potato sacks, for which the local children made fun of her.
Her grandmother taught her to read before the age of three and took her to the local church, where she was nicknamed "The Preacher" for her ability to recite Bible verses. When Winfrey was a child, her grandmother would hit her with a stick when she did not do chores or if she misbehaved in any way. At age six, Winfrey moved to an inner-city neighborhood in Milwaukee, with her mother, less supportive and encouraging than her grandmother had been as a result of the long hours she worked as a maid. Around this time, Lee had given birth to another daughter, Winfrey's younger half-sister, Patricia who died of causes related to cocaine addiction. By 1962, Lee was having difficulty raising both daughters so Winfrey was temporarily sent to live with Vernon in Nashville, Tennessee. While Winfrey was in Nashville, Lee gave birth to a third daughter, put up for adoption and was also named Patricia. Winfrey did not learn she had a second half-sister until 2010. By the time Winfrey moved back with her mother, Lee had given birth to a boy named Jeffrey, Winfrey's half-brother, who died of AIDS-related causes in 1989.
Winfrey has stated she was molested by her cousin, a family friend, starting when she was nine years old, something she first announced to her viewers on a 1986 episode of her TV show regarding sexual abuse. When Winfrey discussed the alleged abuse with family members at age 24, they refused to believe her account. Winfrey once commented that she had chosen not to be a mother because she had not been mothered well. At 13, after suffering what she described as years of abuse, Winfrey ran away from home; when she was 14, she became pregnant but her son was born prematurely and he died shortly after birth. Winfrey stated she felt betrayed by the family member who had sold the story of her son to the National Enquirer in 1990, she began attending Lincoln High School in Milwaukee, but after early success i
Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship is the process of designing and running a new business, initially a small business. The people who create these businesses are called entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship has been described as the "capacity and willingness to develop and manage a business venture along with any of its risks in order to make a profit". While definitions of entrepreneurship focus on the launching and running of businesses, due to the high risks involved in launching a start-up, a significant proportion of start-up businesses have to close due to "lack of funding, bad business decisions, an economic crisis, lack of market demand—or a combination of all of these. A broader definition of the term is sometimes used in the field of economics. In this usage, an Entrepreneur is an entity which has the ability to find and act upon opportunities to translate inventions or technology into new products: "The entrepreneur is able to recognize the commercial potential of the invention and organize the capital and other resources that turn an invention into a commercially viable innovation."
In this sense, the term "Entrepreneurship" captures innovative activities on the part of established firms, in addition to similar activities on the part of new businesses. Entrepreneurship is the act of being an entrepreneur, or "the owner or manager of a business enterprise who, by risk and initiative, attempts to make profits". Entrepreneurs oversee the launch and growth of an enterprise. Entrepreneurship is the process by which either an individual or a team identifies a business opportunity and acquires and deploys the necessary resources required for its exploitation. Early-19th-century French economist Jean-Baptiste Say provided a broad definition of entrepreneurship, saying that it "shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher productivity and greater yield". Entrepreneurs create something new, something different—they change or transmute values. Regardless of the firm size, big or small, they can partake in entrepreneurship opportunities; the opportunity to become an entrepreneur requires four criteria.
First, there must be situations to recombine resources to generate profit. Second, entrepreneurship requires differences between people, such as preferential access to certain individuals or the ability to recognize information about opportunities. Third, taking on risk is a necessity. Fourth, the entrepreneurial process requires the organization of resources; the entrepreneur is a factor in and the study of entrepreneurship reaches back to the work of Richard Cantillon and Adam Smith in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. However, entrepreneurship was ignored theoretically until the late 19th and early 20th centuries and empirically until a profound resurgence in business and economics since the late 1970s. In the 20th century, the understanding of entrepreneurship owes much to the work of economist Joseph Schumpeter in the 1930s and other Austrian economists such as Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek. According to Schumpeter, an entrepreneur is a person, willing and able to convert a new idea or invention into a successful innovation.
Entrepreneurship employs what Schumpeter called "the gale of creative destruction" to replace in whole or in part inferior innovations across markets and industries creating new products including new business models. In this way, creative destruction is responsible for the dynamism of industries and long-run economic growth; the supposition that entrepreneurship leads to economic growth is an interpretation of the residual in endogenous growth theory and as such is hotly debated in academic economics. An alternative description posited by Israel Kirzner suggests that the majority of innovations may be much more incremental improvements such as the replacement of paper with plastic in the making of drinking straws; the exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities may include: Developing a business plan Hiring the human resources Acquiring financial and material resources Providing leadership Being responsible for both the venture's success or failure Risk aversionEconomist Joseph Schumpeter saw the role of the entrepreneur in the economy as "creative destruction" – launching innovations that destroy old industries while ushering in new industries and approaches.
For Schumpeter, the changes and "dynamic disequilibrium brought on by the innovating entrepreneur the norm of a healthy economy". While entrepreneurship is associated with new, for-profit start-ups, entrepreneurial behavior can be seen in small-, medium- and large-sized firms and established firms and in for-profit and not-for-profit organizations, including voluntary-sector groups, charitable organizations and government. Entrepreneurship may operate within an entrepreneurship ecosystem which includes: Government programs and services that promote entrepreneurship and support entrepreneurs and start-ups Non-governmental organizations such as small-business associations and organizations that offer advice and mentoring to entrepreneurs Small-business advocacy organizations that lobby governments for increased support for entrepreneurship programs and more small business-friendly laws and regulations Entrepreneurship resources and facilities Entrepreneurship education and training programs offered by schools and universities Financing In the 2000s, usage of the term "entrepreneurship" expanded to include how and why some individuals ide
President of the United States
The president of the United States is the head of state and head of government of the United States of America. The president directs the executive branch of the federal government and is the commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces. In contemporary times, the president is looked upon as one of the world's most powerful political figures as the leader of the only remaining global superpower; the role includes responsibility for the world's most expensive military, which has the second largest nuclear arsenal. The president leads the nation with the largest economy by nominal GDP; the president possesses international hard and soft power. Article II of the Constitution establishes the executive branch of the federal government, it vests the executive power of the United States in the president. The power includes the execution and enforcement of federal law, alongside the responsibility of appointing federal executive, diplomatic and judicial officers, concluding treaties with foreign powers with the advice and consent of the Senate.
The president is further empowered to grant federal pardons and reprieves, to convene and adjourn either or both houses of Congress under extraordinary circumstances. The president directs the foreign and domestic policies of the United States, takes an active role in promoting his policy priorities to members of Congress. In addition, as part of the system of checks and balances, Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution gives the president the power to sign or veto federal legislation; the power of the presidency has grown since its formation, as has the power of the federal government as a whole. Through the Electoral College, registered voters indirectly elect the president and vice president to a four-year term; this is the only federal election in the United States, not decided by popular vote. Nine vice presidents became president by virtue of a president's intra-term resignation. Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 sets three qualifications for holding the presidency: natural-born U. S. citizenship.
The Twenty-second Amendment precludes any person from being elected president to a third term. In all, 44 individuals have served 45 presidencies spanning 57 full four-year terms. Grover Cleveland served two non-consecutive terms, so he is counted twice, as both the 22nd and 24th president. Donald Trump of New York is the current president of the United States, he assumed office on January 20, 2017. In July 1776, during the American Revolutionary War, the Thirteen Colonies, acting jointly through the Second Continental Congress, declared themselves to be 13 independent sovereign states, no longer under British rule. Recognizing the necessity of coordinating their efforts against the British, the Continental Congress began the process of drafting a constitution that would bind the states together. There were long debates on a number of issues, including representation and voting, the exact powers to be given the central government. Congress finished work on the Articles of Confederation to establish a perpetual union between the states in November 1777 and sent it to the states for ratification.
Under the Articles, which took effect on March 1, 1781, the Congress of the Confederation was a central political authority without any legislative power. It could make its own resolutions and regulations, but not any laws, could not impose any taxes or enforce local commercial regulations upon its citizens; this institutional design reflected how Americans believed the deposed British system of Crown and Parliament ought to have functioned with respect to the royal dominion: a superintending body for matters that concerned the entire empire. The states were out from under any monarchy and assigned some royal prerogatives to Congress; the members of Congress elected a President of the United States in Congress Assembled to preside over its deliberation as a neutral discussion moderator. Unrelated to and quite dissimilar from the office of President of the United States, it was a ceremonial position without much influence. In 1783, the Treaty of Paris secured independence for each of the former colonies.
With peace at hand, the states each turned toward their own internal affairs. By 1786, Americans found their continental borders besieged and weak and their respective economies in crises as neighboring states agitated trade rivalries with one another, they witnessed their hard currency pouring into foreign markets to pay for imports, their Mediterranean commerce preyed upon by North African pirates, their foreign-financed Revolutionary War debts unpaid and accruing interest. Civil and political unrest loomed. Following the successful resolution of commercial and fishing disputes between Virginia and Maryland at the Mount Vernon Conference in 1785, Virginia called for a trade conference between all the states, set for September 1786 in Annapolis, with an aim toward resolving further-reaching interstate commercial antagonisms; when the convention failed for lack of attendance due to suspicions among most of the other states, Alexander Hamilton led the Annapolis delegates in a call for a convention to offer revisions to the Articles, to be held the next spring in Philadelphia.
Prospects for the next convention appeared bleak until James Madison and Edmund Randolph succeeded in securing George Washington's attendance to Philadelphia as a delegate for Virginia. When the Constitutional Convention convened in May 1787, the 12 state delegations in attendance (Rh
Auto racing
Auto racing is a motorsport involving the racing of automobiles for competition. Auto racing has existed since the invention of the automobile. Races of various sorts were organised, with the first recorded as early as 1867. Many of the earliest events were reliability trials, aimed at proving these new machines were a practical mode of transport, but soon became an important way for competing makers to demonstrate their machines. By the 1930s, specialist racing cars had developed. There are now each with different rules and regulations; the first prearranged match race of two self-powered road vehicles over a prescribed route occurred at 4:30 A. M. on August 30, 1867, between Ashton-under-Lyne and Old Trafford, a distance of eight miles. It was won by the carriage of Isaac Watt Boulton. Internal combustion auto racing events began soon after the construction of the first successful gasoline-fueled automobiles; the first organized contest was on April 28, 1887, by the chief editor of Paris publication Le Vélocipède, Monsieur Fossier.
It ran 2 kilometres from Neuilly Bridge to the Bois de Boulogne. On July 22, 1894, the Parisian magazine Le Petit Journal organized what is considered to be the world's first motoring competition, from Paris to Rouen. One hundred and two competitors paid a 10-franc entrance fee; the first American automobile race is held to be the Thanksgiving Day Chicago Times-Herald race of November 28, 1895. Press coverage of the event first aroused significant American interest in the automobile. With auto construction and racing dominated by France, the French automobile club ACF staged a number of major international races from or to Paris, connecting with another major city, in France or elsewhere in Europe. Brooklands, in Surrey, was the first purpose-built motor racing venue, opening in June 1907, it featured a 4.43 km concrete track with high-speed banked corners. One of the oldest existing purpose-built automobile racing circuits in the United States, still in use, is the 2.5-mile-long Indianapolis Motor Speedway in Speedway, Indiana.
It is the largest capacity sports venue of any variety worldwide, with a top capacity of some 257,000+ seated spectators. NASCAR was founded by Bill France, Sr. on February 21, 1948, with the help of several other drivers of the time. The first NASCAR "Strictly Stock" race was held on June 19, 1949, at Daytona Beach, Florida. From 1962, sports cars temporarily took a back seat to GT cars, with the FIA replacing the World Championship for Sports Cars with the International Championship for GT Manufacturers. From 1972 through 2003, NASCAR's premier series was called the Winston Cup Series, sponsored by R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company cigarette brand Winston; the changes that resulted from RJR's involvement, as well as the reduction of the schedule from 48 to 31 races a year, established 1972 as the beginning of NASCAR's "modern era". The IMSA GT Series evolved into the American Le Mans Series, which ran its first season in 1999; the European races became the related Le Mans Series, both of which mix prototypes and GTs.
Turismo Carretera is a popular touring car racing series in Argentina, the oldest car racing series still active in the world. The first TC competition took place in 1937 with 12 races, each in a different province. Future Formula One star Juan Manuel Fangio won the 1940 and 1941 editions of the TC, it was during this time that the series' Chevrolet-Ford rivalry began, with Ford acquiring most of its historical victories. The two most popular varieties of open wheel road racing are the IndyCar Series. Formula One is a European-based series that runs only street race tracks; these cars are based around technology and their aerodynamics. With the highest speed record set in 2005 by Juan Pablo Montoya hitting 373 kph; some of the most prominent races are the Monaco Grand Prix, the Italian Grand Prix, the British Grand Prix. The season ends with the crowning of the World Championship for constructors. In single-seater, the wheels are not covered, the cars have aerofoil wings front and rear to produce downforce and enhance adhesion to the track.
In Europe and Asia, open-wheeled racing is referred to as'Formula', with appropriate hierarchical suffixes. In North America, the'Formula' terminology is not followed; the sport is arranged to follow an international format, a regional format, and/or a domestic, or country-specific, format. In the United States, the most popular series is the National Championship, more known as the IndyCar Series and known as CART; the cars have traditionally been similar though less technologically sophisticated than F1 cars, with more restrictions on technology aimed at controlling costs. While these cars are not as technologically advanced, they are faster because they compete on oval race tracks, being able to average a lap at 388 kph; the series' biggest race is the Indianapolis 500, referred to as "The Greatest Spectacle in Racing" due to being the longest continuously run race and having the largest crowd for a single-day sporting event. The other major international single-seater racing series is Formula 2.
Regional series include Formula Nippon and Formula V6 Asia, Formula Renault 3.5, Formula Three, For
Rural area
In general, a rural area or countryside is a geographic area, located outside towns and cities. The Health Resources and Services Administration of the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services defines the word rural as encompassing "...all population and territory not included within an urban area. Whatever is not urban is considered rural."Typical rural areas have a low population density and small settlements. Agricultural areas are rural, as are other types of areas such as forest. Different countries have varying definitions of rural for administrative purposes. In Canada, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development defines a "predominantly rural region" as having more than 50% of the population living in rural communities where a "rural community" has a population density less than 150 people per square kilometre. In Canada, the census division has been used to represent "regions" and census consolidated sub-divisions have been used to represent "communities". Intermediate regions have 15 to 49 percent of their population living in a rural community.
Predominantly urban regions have less than 15 percent of their population living in a rural community. Predominantly rural regions are classified as rural metro-adjacent, rural non-metro-adjacent and rural northern, following Ehrensaft and Beeman. Rural metro-adjacent regions are predominantly rural census divisions which are adjacent to metropolitan centres while rural non-metro-adjacent regions are those predominantly rural census divisions which are not adjacent to metropolitan centres. Rural northern regions are predominantly rural census divisions that are found either or above the following lines of parallel in each province: Newfoundland and Labrador, 50th; as well, rural northern regions encompass all of Northwest Territories and Nunavut. Statistics Canada defines rural for their population counts; this definition has changed over time. It has referred to the population living outside settlements of 1,000 or fewer inhabitants; the current definition states that census rural is the population outside settlements with fewer than 1,000 inhabitants and a population density below 400 people per square kilometre.
84% of the United States' inhabitants live in suburban and urban areas, but cities occupy only 10 percent of the country. Rural areas occupy the remaining 90 percent; the U. S. Census Bureau, the USDA's Economic Research Service, the Office of Management and Budget have come together to help define rural areas. United States Census Bureau: The Census Bureau definitions, which are based on population density, defines rural areas as all territory outside Census Bureau-defined urbanized areas and urban clusters. An urbanized area consists of a central surrounding areas whose population is greater than 50,000, they may not contain individual cities with 50,000 or more. Thus, rural areas comprise open country and settlements with fewer than 2,500 residents. USDA The USDA's Office of Rural Development may define rural by various population thresholds; the 2002 farm bill defined rural and rural area as any area other than a city or town that has a population of greater than 50,000 inhabitants, the urbanized areas contiguous and adjacent to such a city or town.
The rural-urban continuum codes, urban influence code, rural county typology codes developed by USDA’s Economic Research Service allow researchers to break out the standard metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas into smaller residential groups. For example, a metropolitan county is one that contains an urbanized area, or one that has a twenty-five percent commuter rate to an urbanized area regardless of population. OMB: Under the Core Based Statistical Areas used by the OMB, a metropolitan county, or Metropolitan Statistical Area, consists of central counties with one or more urbanized areas and outlying counties that are economically tied to the core counties as measured by worker commuting data. Non-metro counties are outside the boundaries of metro areas and are further subdivided into Micropolitan Statistical Areas centered on urban clusters of 10,000–50,000 residents, all remaining non-core counties. In 2014, the USDA updated their rural / non-rural area definitions based on the 2010 Census counts.
National Center for Education Statistics revised its definition of rural schools in 2006 after working with the Census Bureau to create a new locale classification system to capitalize on improved geocoding technology. Rural health definitions can be different for establishing under-served areas or health care accessibility in rural areas of the United States. According to the handbook, Definitions of Rural: A Handbook for Health Policy Makers and Researchers, "Residents of metropolitan counties are thought to have easy access to the concentrated health services of the county's central areas. However, some metropolitan counties are so large that t
Vanderbilt University
Vanderbilt University is a private research university in Nashville, Tennessee. Founded in 1873, it was named in honor of New York shipping and rail magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, who provided the school its initial $1-million endowment despite having never been to the South. Vanderbilt hoped that his gift and the greater work of the university would help to heal the sectional wounds inflicted by the Civil War. Vanderbilt enrolls 12,800 students from all 50 U. S. states and over 100 foreign countries in four undergraduate and six graduate and professional schools. The university is in the process of converting its residence halls into an academic residential college system. Several research centers and institutes are affiliated with the university, including the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center, Dyer Observatory. Vanderbilt University Medical Center part of the university, became a separate institution in 2016. With the exception of the off-campus observatory, all of the university's facilities are situated on its 330-acre campus in the heart of Nashville, 1.5 miles from downtown.
Despite its urban surroundings, the campus itself is a national arboretum and features over 300 different species of trees and shrubs. The Fugitives and Southern Agrarians were based at the university in the first half of the 20th century and helped revive Southern literature among others; the Jean and Alexander Heard Library, the campus library system, contains over 8 million items across ten libraries and stands as one of the nation's top research libraries. Vanderbilt Television News Archive holds the most extensive collection of television news coverage in the world, with over 40,000 hours of content. BioVU, Vanderbilt's DNA databank, is one of the largest of its kind in the world, running over 200 ongoing projects and holding over 225,000 samples. Additionally, Vanderbilt's Institute for Space and Defense Electronics, the largest of its type in the world, provides integral support to several companies and governmental units, including Boeing, NASA, the United States Department of Defense.
Vanderbilt has many distinguished alumni and affiliates, including 45 current and former members of the United States Congress, 17 U. S. Ambassadors, 13 governors, ten billionaires, seven Nobel Prize laureates, two Vice Presidents of the United States, two U. S. Supreme Court Justices. Other notable alumni include Rhodes Scholars, Pulitzer Prize winners, Academy Award winners, Grammy Award winners, MacArthur Fellows, CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, heads of state and other leaders in foreign government, musicians, professional athletes, Olympians. Vanderbilt has more than 139,000 alumni, with 40 alumni clubs established worldwide. Vanderbilt is a founding member of the Southeastern Conference and has been the conference's only private school for a half-century. In the years prior to the American Civil War of 1861–1865, the Methodist Episcopal Church South had been considering the creation of a regional university for the training of ministers in a location central to its congregations. Following lobbying by Nashville bishop Holland Nimmons McTyeire, church leaders voted to found "The Central University of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South" in Nashville in 1872.
However, lack of funds and the ravaged state of the Reconstruction Era South delayed the opening of the college. The following year, McTyeire stayed at the New York City residence of Cornelius Vanderbilt, whose second wife was Frank Armstrong Crawford Vanderbilt, a cousin of McTyeire's wife, Amelia Townsend McTyeire. Cornelius Vanderbilt, the wealthiest man in the United States at the time, was considering philanthropy as he was at an advanced age, he had been planning to establish a university on New York, in honor of his mother. However, McTyeire convinced him to donate $500,000 to endow Central University in order to "contribute to strengthening the ties which should exist between all sections of our common country."The endowment was increased to $1 million and would be only one of two philanthropic causes financially supported by Vanderbilt. Though he never expressed any desire that the university be named after himself, McTyeire and his fellow trustees rechristened the school in his honor.
Vanderbilt died in 1877 without seeing the school named after him. They acquired land owned by Texas Senator John Boyd inherited by his granddaughter and her husband, Confederate Congressman Henry S. Foote, who had built Old Central, a house still standing on campus; the first building, Main Building known as Kirkland Hall, was designed by William Crawford Smith, a Confederate veteran who designed the Parthenon. In the fall of 1875, about 200 students enrolled at Vanderbilt, in October the university was dedicated. Bishop McTyeire was named Chairman of the Board of Trust for life by Vanderbilt as a stipulation of his endowment. McTyeire named Landon Garland, his mentor from Randolph-Macon College in Virginia and then-Chancellor of the University of Mississippi, as chancellor; as chancellor, he shaped the school's structure and hired the school's faculty, many of whom were renowned scholars in their respective fields. However, most of this faculty left after disputes including over pay rates; when the first fraternity chapter, Phi Delta Theta, was established on campus in 1876, it was shut down by the faculty, only to be reestablished as a secret society in 1877.
Meanwhile, Old Gym
Lyndon B. Johnson
Lyndon Baines Johnson referred to as LBJ, was an American politician who served as the 36th president of the United States from 1963 to 1969. The 37th vice president of the United States from 1961 to 1963, he assumed the presidency following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. A Democrat from Texas, Johnson served as a United States Representative and as the Majority Leader in the United States Senate. Johnson is one of only four people. Born in a farmhouse in Stonewall, Johnson was a high school teacher and worked as a congressional aide before winning election to the House of Representatives in 1937, he won election to the Senate in 1948 and was appointed to the position of Senate Majority Whip in 1951. He became the Senate Minority Leader in 1953 and the Senate Majority Leader in 1955, he became known for his domineering personality and the "Johnson treatment", his aggressive coercion of powerful politicians to advance legislation. Johnson ran for the Democratic nomination in the 1960 presidential election.
Although unsuccessful, he accepted the invitation of then-Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts to be his running mate, they went on to win a close election over the Republican ticket of Richard Nixon and Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. On November 22, 1963, Kennedy was assassinated and Johnson succeeded him as president; the following year, Johnson won in a landslide. With 61.1 percent of the popular vote, Johnson won the largest share of the popular vote of any candidate since the uncontested 1820 election. In domestic policy, Johnson designed the "Great Society" legislation to expand civil rights, public broadcasting, Medicaid, aid to education, the arts and rural development, public services and his "War on Poverty". Assisted in part by a growing economy, the War on Poverty helped millions of Americans rise above the poverty line during his administration. Civil rights bills that he signed into law banned racial discrimination in public facilities, interstate commerce, the workplace and housing.
With the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, the country's immigration system was reformed, encouraging greater emigration from regions other than Europe. Johnson's presidency marked the peak of modern liberalism after the New Deal era. In foreign policy, Johnson escalated American involvement in the Vietnam War. In 1964, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which granted Johnson the power to use military force in Southeast Asia without having to ask for an official declaration of war; the number of American military personnel in Vietnam increased from 16,000 advisors in non-combat roles in 1963 to 525,000 in 1967, many in combat roles. American casualties soared and the peace process stagnated. Growing unease with the war stimulated a large, angry anti-war movement based chiefly among draft-age students on university campuses. Johnson faced further troubles when summer riots began in major cities in 1965 and crime rates soared, as his opponents raised demands for "law and order" policies.
While Johnson began his presidency with widespread approval, support for him declined as the public became frustrated with both the war and the growing violence at home. In 1968, the Democratic Party factionalized. Nixon was elected to succeed him, as the New Deal coalition that had dominated presidential politics for 36 years collapsed. After he left office in January 1969, Johnson returned to his Texas ranch, where he died of a heart attack at age 64, on January 22, 1973. Johnson is ranked favorably by many historians because of his domestic policies and the passage of many major laws that affected civil rights, gun control, wilderness preservation, Social Security, although he has drawn substantial criticism for his escalation of the Vietnam War. Lyndon Baines Johnson was born on August 27, 1908, near Stonewall, Texas, in a small farmhouse on the Pedernales River, he was the oldest of five children born to Samuel Ealy Johnson Rebekah Baines. Johnson had one brother, Sam Houston Johnson, three sisters.
The nearby small town of Johnson City, was named after LBJ's cousin, James Polk Johnson, whose forebears had moved west from Georgia. Johnson had English and Ulster Scots ancestry, he was maternally descended from pioneer Baptist clergyman George Washington Baines, who pastored eight churches in Texas, as well as others in Arkansas and Louisiana. Baines, the grandfather of Johnson's mother, was the president of Baylor University during the American Civil War. Johnson's grandfather, Samuel Ealy Johnson Sr. was raised as a Baptist and for a time was a member of the Christian Church. In his years the grandfather became a Christadelphian; as a politician, Johnson was influenced in his positive attitude toward Jews by the religious beliefs that his family his grandfather, had shared with him. Johnson's favorite Bible verse came from the King James Version of Isaiah 1:18. "Come now, let us reason together..." In school, Johnson was an awkward, talkative youth, elected president of his 11th-grade class.
He graduated in 1924 from Johnson City High School, where he participated in public speaking and baseball. At age 15, Johnson was the youngest member of his class. Pressured by his parents to attend college, he en
