The leaders and reformers who changed the course of nations and the lives within them.
The first Prime Minister of the independent Congo, Patrice Lumumba became a global symbol of African liberation and a martyr after his assassination in 1961. This is his story.
He renamed his country Burkina Faso, the land of upright people, and in four short years made it a symbol of African self-determination. This is the story of Thomas Sankara.
He turned the Gold Coast into Ghana, the first sub-Saharan colony to win independence, and became the foremost champion of Pan-Africanism. This is the story of Kwame Nkrumah.
Abraham Lincoln rose from frontier poverty to lead the United States through its bloodiest war, sign the Emancipation Proclamation and deliver some of the most enduring words in the history of democratic governance. He was assassinated five days after the war's effective end.
From a rural childhood in Mvezo to twenty-seven years in prison and finally the presidency, the story of Nelson Mandela is the story of a man who refused to let bitterness define a nation.
Barack Obama's ascent from a mixed-race childhood in Hawaii to two terms in the Oval Office is a story about identity, persistence, and the enduring American belief that the arc of history bends toward justice.
Martin Luther King Jr. compressed more courage, more vision, and more consequence into thirty-nine years than most movements manage across generations, reshaping American law and conscience through the force of nonviolent protest.
Winston Churchill's career was a long preparation for a single crisis, and when the crisis of 1940 arrived, the man who had been dismissed as a reckless anachronism turned out to be exactly what a democracy on the edge of catastrophe required.
From a shy lawyer in colonial South Africa to the spiritual father of Indian independence, Mahatma Gandhi's life was a laboratory for the proposition that nonviolent resistance is not weakness but a form of moral power capable of moving empires.
Margaret Thatcher broke through every barrier that British society placed before women in politics, then spent eleven years as Prime Minister pursuing policies that her supporters called a necessary revolution and her opponents called a social catastrophe.