Winston Churchill was born on November 30, 1874 in Woodstock, Oxfordshire. He was born into an aristocratic family. Churchill was the son of Lord Randolph Churchill and the American heiress Jennie Jerome. He was educated at Harrow and the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, and was sent to India with a cavalry commission in 1895. He won early fame as a war correspondent covering the Cuban revolt against Spain (1895), and British campaigns in the Northwest Frontier of India (1897), the Sudan (1898) and South Africa during the Boer War (1899). His daring escape from a Boer prison camp in 1899 made him a national hero and ushered him into the House of Commons, where his career spanned for more than 60 years.

Churchill was originally in the Conservative party, but joined the Liberal party in 1904. When the Liberal Party collapsed in 1922 Churchill was temporarily out of office, but he was reelected to Parliament as an independent in 1924 and then became a Conservative again, when the Prime Minister asked him to serve as Chancellor of the Exchequer.

After the Soviet Union and the United States entered the war in 1941, he worked to build what he called a "Grand Alliance," traveling thousands of miles to meet with allies and coordinate military strategy. With them he redrew the map of Europe as Germany collapsed in 1945. Almost immediately, he saw the threat that had arisen in Hitler's place, and warned the West of the Soviet "Iron Curtain" in his famous speech in Fulton, Missouri, in 1946.

In 1963, Churchill was given the honor of United States citizenship by President John F. Kennedy. President John F. Kennedy praised Sir Winston as a defender of freedom, wartime leader, orator, historian, statesman, and Englishman

Winston Churchill died on 24 January 1965.