Sep 18, 2017
An attorney who held a number of South African ministerial posts, F.W. de Klerk became both the leader of South Africa’s National Party and the country’s president in 1989. Upon becoming President, de Klerk, a conservative, shocked many when he lifted the ban on the...
Sep 18, 2017
After losing her mother and brother to Guatemalan death squads in the late 1970s, Rigoberta Menchu Tum followed in her father’s footsteps to become a human rights activist and leader in her country. A Mayan Indian, she publicly protested human rights abuses against...
Sep 18, 2017
Mikhail Gorbachev was the eighth and last leader of the Soviet Union. He initiated his new policy of perestroika (literally “restructuring” in Russian), with radical reforms, in 1986. In 1988 his introduction of glasnost gave the Soviet people freedoms that they had...
Sep 18, 2017
His Holiness the Dalai Lama, 1989 Nobel Peace Prize Laueate Tenzin Gyatso is the 14th Dalai Lama, spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism. As a young boy growing up in a village in Tibet, he was formally recognized by Tibetan Buddhist elders as the reincarnated Dalai...
Sep 18, 2017
Elie Wiesel was fifteen years old when his entire family was taken from their homes in Romania to the Nazi concentration camps, first to Auschwitz where his mother and younger sister died, and then to Buchenwald where his father perished. He and his two older sisters...
