Amazing People: Volume 1: Selected Biographies of Influential People with Audio

By Oldiees Publishing

"Timeless collection of the greatest American biographies.

American Biographies Series provides descriptions and stories of people important in the history of the United States. Including the basic facts like education, work, relationships, and death, the series also presents highlights of various aspects of his or her life."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oldiees Publishing
• Release date: Sep 19, 2017
• ISBN: 9791186505335

Book preview

Title

Amazing People: Volume 1

Timeless Collection of American Biographies

Preface

American Biographies Series provides descriptions and stories of people important in the history of the United States. Including the basic facts like education, work, relationships, and death, the series also presents highlights of various aspects of his or her life.

Learn English as you read and listen to the descriptions and stories of people important in the history of the United States. Adaptations are written at the intermediate and upper-beginner level and are read one-third slower than regular English.

· AARON COPLAND

He Taught Americans About Themselves Through Music

PLAY AUDIO ▶

1900-1990

Aaron Copland wrote many kinds of music. He wrote music for the orchestra, piano, and voice. He wrote music for plays, movies and dance. Copland also was a conductor, pianist, speaker, teacher and author.

Music critics say Copland taught Americans about themselves through his music. He used parts of many old traditional American folk songs in his work. He was influenced to do this after studying music in France. He said that composers there had a very French way of writing music. He said Americans had nothing like that in this country. So he decided to compose music that was truly American.

Aaron Copland was born in nineteen hundred in Brooklyn, New York. He was the youngest of five children. His parents had come to the United States from eastern Europe. They owned a store in Brooklyn. Aaron began playing the piano when he was a young child. He wrote his first song for his mother when he was eight years old. His dreams of becoming a composer began when he was young.

When he was sixteen, he urged his parents to let him study composing with Rubin Goldmark. Goldmark had taught the composer George Gershwin.

When he was in his early twenties, Copland went to Paris where he studied music with Nadia Boulanger. She was one of the most important music teachers of the time. He returned to New York in nineteen twenty-four.

Nadia Boulanger in 1925

The famous conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Serge Koussevitzky, learned about Copland's music. Koussevitzky led the orchestra for the first performance of Copland's early work, Music for the Theater, in nineteen twenty-five. Koussevitzky also conducted Copland's Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in nineteen twenty-seven. This work was unusual because Copland used ideas from jazz music in his concerto.

Copland later wrote the music for two ballets about the American West. One was about the life of a famous gunfighter called Billy the Kid. Copland used music from American cowboy songs in this work. This piece from Billy the Kid: Ballet Suite is called Street in a Frontier Town.

In nineteen forty-two, the conductor Andre Kostelanetz asked Copland to write music about a great American, Abraham Lincoln. Copland wrote Lincoln Portrait to honor America's sixteenth president. Copland's music included parts of American folk songs and songs popular during the American Civil War. He added words from President Lincoln's speeches and letters.

A Lincoln Portrait has been performed many times in America. Many famous people have done the speaking part. Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of President Franklin Roosevelt, was one of them. Here, actor James Earl Jones performs in Copland's A Lincoln Portrait.

Also in nineteen forty-two, the music director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra asked eighteen composers to write music expressing love for America. For the competition, Copland composed Fanfare for the Common Man. This music is played in America during many national events, including some presidential inaugurations.

Experts say Fanfare for the Common Man was an example of Copland's change in direction during the nineteen forties. He began writing music that was more easily understood and more popular. Copland wrote about this in nineteen forty-one in his book, Our New Music. He wrote that a whole new public for music had developed as a result of the popularity of the radio and record player. He said that there was no reason to continue writing music as if these devices did not exist. So he decided to write music in a simpler way.

Copland spread his ideas about music in other ways. He taught at the New School for Social Research in New York City and at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. One of the many awards he received was the Pulitzer Prize. He won it in nineteen forty-five for his famous music for a ballet called Appalachian Spring. It is one of his most popular works. The last part of the ballet is based on a traditional song, A Gift to be Simple.

Copland also wrote music for several major motion pictures. He won an Academy Award in nineteen fifty for composing the music for the film, The Heiress. Then, he began experimenting with what is called a twelve-tone system of composing. His music no longer was as easy to understand, or as popular.

Copland stopped composing at the end of the nineteen sixties. Yet he continued to be active as a conductor and speaker. In nineteen eighty-two, Queens College of the City University of New York established the Aaron Copland School of Music.

Copland was a strong supporter of liberal ideas. In the early nineteen- fifties, he and other famous writers, actors and intellectuals were accused of supporting communism. Public opinion changed, though. In nineteen sixty-four, President Lyndon Johnson presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. It is America's highest award to civilians. Aaron Copland died in nineteen ninety at the age of ninety. But his music lives on.

· ALAN SHEPARD

The First American to Fly in Space

PLAY AUDIO ▶

1923-1998

MISSION CONTROL: Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four three, two, one, zero. Liftoff!

SHEPARD: Ah Roger, liftoff and the clock has started.

MISSION CONTROL: [unintelligible]

SHEPARD: Yes sir, reading you loud and clear. This is Freedom Seven. The fuel is go, one point two g, cabin at 14 psi, oxygen is go!

The clock has started. With those words, Alan Shepard became the first American to travel into space. He was in a small spacecraft called Freedom Seven. It was on top of a huge rocket traveling at more than eight thousand kilometers an hour.

Fifteen minutes later, Freedom Seven came down in the Atlantic Ocean. Alan Shepard was a national hero. He had won an important victory for the United States. The date was May fifth, nineteen sixty-one. The United States and the Soviet Union were in a tense competition for world influence. And this competition was reaching even into the cold darkness of space.

Shepard in the Freedom 7 capsule before launch

In nineteen fifty-seven, the Soviet Union launched the first electronic satellite, Sputnik One. The United States successfully launched its first spacecraft less than four months later. Now the two sides were racing to see who could launch the first human space traveler.

On April twelfth, nineteen sixty-one, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin flew in space for one hundred eight minutes. He circled the Earth once. The Soviets again were winning the space race, but not for long. Three weeks later the United States also put a man into space. He was a thirty-seven-year-old officer in the Navy -- Alan Shepard.

Alan Bartlett Shepard, Junior, was born on November eighteenth, nineteen twenty-three in East Derry, New Hampshire. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy in nineteen forty-four. He married soon after his graduation. Then he served for a short time on a destroyer in the Pacific during World War Two.

In nineteen forty-seven, Alan Shepard became a pilot in the Navy. Later he became a test pilot. The life of a test pilot can be very dangerous. It helped prepare Alan Shepard for an even greater danger in the future.

The successes that the Soviet Union had with its Sputnik program caused the United States to speed up its plans for a space program. The Americans decided to launch a satellite as soon as possible. The first attempt failed. The rocket exploded during launch.

Support was growing, in Congress and among scientists, for a United States civilian space agency. Soon, Congress passed a bill creating NASA -- the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. President Eisenhower signed the bill into law.

NASA's job was to be scientific space exploration. Its major goal was sending the first Americans into space.

Within three months, the program had a name: Project Mercury. Mercury was the speedy messenger of the Greek gods. While engineers built the spacecraft, NASA looked for men to fly them.

NASA wanted military test pilots because they test fly new planes. Test pilots are trained to think quickly in dangerous situations. On April seventh, nineteen fifty-nine, the space agency announced the seven Mercury astronauts. They would be the first American space travelers. Alan Shepard was one. The others were Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Virgil Grissom, Walter Schirra and Donald Slayton.

Nine months after the project started, NASA made its first test flight of the Mercury spacecraft from Cape Canaveral, Florida. In the next two years, many other tests followed, all without astronauts.

The final test flight was at the end of January, nineteen sixty-one. It carried a chimpanzee named Ham on a seven-hundred-kilometer flight over the Atlantic Ocean. Several problems developed. But Ham survived the launch and the landing in the ocean. Later, Alan Shepard often was asked how he became the first human American to fly in space. They ran out of monkeys, he joked.

There were some concerns about the safety of the huge Redstone rocket that was to carry the spacecraft. The launch had been delayed several times while more tests were done. By the time the rocket was ready for launch, Yuri Gagarin had already gone into space for the Soviet Union.

The choice of Alan Shepard to be the first American to fly in space was announced just a few days before the launch. Flights planned for May second and May fourth had to be halted because of bad weather.

On May fifth, nineteen sixty-one, a Friday, Alan Shepard struggled once again into his Mercury capsule. The vehicle was named Freedom Seven. There was almost no room to move. Shepard waited inside for four hours. Weather was partly the cause of the delay. There were clouds that would prevent filming the launch. Also some last-minute repairs had to be made to his radio.

Shepard was tired of waiting. So he told the ground crew to hurry to solve the problems and fire the rocket. Finally, they did.

The rocket slowly began climbing. Millions of radio listeners heard a voice from the Cape Canaveral control room say: This is it, Alan Shepard, there's no turning back. Good luck from all of us here at the Cape.

The rocket rose higher and higher. For five minutes, Alan Shepard felt the weightlessness of space. He felt himself