Word: born
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Temujin was born clutching a blood clot the size of a knucklebone. His name was war booty, taken from a captive rival by his proud warrior father and tacked on like a medal to his firstborn son. But history echoes with another of his names, a title Temujin would receive 39 years later. In 1206, by acclamation of all the Mongols, he became Genghis Khan, the "Oceanic Ruler" who in the next two decades would father an empire that rolled across Eurasia, linking the Pacific Ocean to the Blade Sea as it amassed kingdoms as loot and nations as slaves...
Little is known of the life and development of Giotto di Bondone, born around 1267 to peasants in the bucolic valleys outside Florence. Legend says the country boy tending his flocks was discovered by the painter Cimabue, who saw him draw a fine sheep upon a rock. A more likely tale has him haunting Cimabue's Florentine bottega until the painter made him an apprentice. There Giotto absorbed his mentor's strength of drawing and sense of drama, but nature was his true teacher. He divined how to depict, with brush and pigment, the human body according to the prescription...
Johann Gutenberg was born of well-to-do parents in the Archbishopric of Mainz, Germany. Details of his life, early as well as late, are sketchy, but he apparently trained as a goldsmith and/or gem cutter and then became a partner in a printing shop in Strasbourg...
Elizabeth was born unpropitiously into a man's world and a man's role. Desiring a son, Elizabeth's father Henry VIII divorced his first wife and broke with the Roman Catholic Church to marry Anne Boleyn. When Anne bore him a girl, he ordered his wife beheaded and the child princess declared a bastard. Elizabeth grew up in loneliness and danger, learning the urgency of keeping her balance on England's quivering political tightrope. She was lucky to receive a boy's rigorous education, tutored by distinguished scholars in the classics, history, philosophy, languages and theology. She was serious...
...live on bread and wine, and, at an astonishingly precocious age, absorbed everything important that was known to science up to that time (the works of Aristotle and, after that, the new men who superseded him: Copernicus, Kepler, Descartes and Galileo, who died in 1642, the year Newton was born). Riding on the shoulders of giants--and correcting the giants where they went wrong--Newton began assembling and perfecting the Newtonian universe, a miraculously predictable and rational clockwork creation held together by his universal gravitation and regulated by his elegant laws of motion...