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Bertrand Russell: United States
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Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, was born in Trelleck, Wales, on May 18, 1872, and educated at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. After graduation in 1894, he traveled in France, Germany, and the United States and was then made a fellow of Trinity College. From an early age he developed a strong sense of social consciousness; at the same time, he involved himself in the study of logical and mathematical questions, which he had made his special fields and on which he was called to lecture at many institutions throughout the world. He achieved prominence with his first major work, The Principles of Mathematics (1902), in which he attempted to remove mathematics from the realm of abstract philosophical notions and to give it a precise scientific framework.
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In 1894, after overcoming the opposition of his family, Russell married an American girl, Alys Pearsall Smith. The first years of their marriage were largely spent traveling in Europe and in the United States, where Russell gave some lectures. From this period his first book, comprising a set of lectures on German socialism, and his fellowship dissertation, An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry, date. The latter work established Russell's reputation. The year 1900 was another turning point for Russell, for at the International Congress of Philosophy, he met Giuseppe Peano, the Italian mathematical theorist, and immediately saw the significance of Peano's work. Enormously stimulated, he began to rethink his own ideas about the fundamental notions of mathematics, and during the fall of 1900 he finished most of his first major work, The Principles of Mathematics.
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During the 1940s and 1950s, Russell participated in many broadcasts over the BBC on various topical and philosophical subjects. By this time in his life, Russell was world famous outside of academic circles, frequently the subject or author of magazine and newspaper articles, and was called upon to offer up opinions on a wide variety of subjects, even mundane ones. En route to one of his lectures in Trondheim, Russell survived a catastrophic plane crash in October 1948. A History of Western Philosophy (1945) became a best-seller, and provided Russell with a steady income for the remainder of his life. Along with his friend Albert Einstein, Russell had reached superstar status as an intellectual. In 1949, Russell was awarded the Order of Merit, and the following year he received the Nobel Prize in Literature.
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Russell's speeches to munitions workers in South Wales were inaccurately reported by detectives, and the War Office forbade Russell from entering prohibited areas. In January 1918 an article by Russell appeared in a little weekly newspaper called The Tribunal suggesting that American soldiers were likely to be used as strike-breakers in England, because they had been employed in that way in the United States. This statement was backed up by a Senate Report. For this, Russell was sentenced to prison for six months. He spent the uninterrupted time cheerfully writing.
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Russell published his three-volume autobiography in 1967, 1968 and 1969. Although he became frail, he remained lucid, writing articles and letters in the national newspapers up to his death. In November 1969 he appealed to Secretary General U Thant of the United Nations to support an international war crimes commission to investigate alleged "torture and genocide" by the Americans in South Vietnam. On 31 January 1970 he issued a statement which condemned "Israeli aggression in the Middle East", saying that "We are frequently told that we must sympathise with Israel because of the suffering of the Jews in Europe at the hands of the Nazis. What Israel is doing today cannot be condoned, and to invoke the horrors of the past to justify those of the present is gross hypocrisy". This was read out at the International Conference of Parliamentarians in Cairo on 3 February 1970, the day after Russell's death.
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Russell was a prominent opponent of nuclear weapons. On November 20, 1948, in a public speech at Westminster School, addressing a gathering arranged by the New Commonwealth, Russell shocked some observers by suggesting that a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union was justified. Russell argued that the threat of war between the United States and the Soviet Union would enable the United States to force the Soviet Union to accept the Baruch Plan for international atomic energy control. (Earlier in the year he had written in the same vein to Walter W. Marseille.) Russell felt this plan "had very great merits and showed considerable generosity, when it is remembered that America still had an unbroken nuclear monopoly." (Has Man a Future?, 1961). Russell later relented from this stance, instead arguing for mutual disarmament by the nuclear powers, possibly linked to some form of world government.
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