Madeleine Albright: Human rights advocate and Encyclopædia Britannica editor

Madeleine Albright: Human rights advocate and Encyclopædia Britannica editor

Madeleine Albright served as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations (1993–97) and the first female secretary of state (1997–2001). Before all of that, she worked at Encyclopædia Britannica.
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Transcript

Madeleine Albright was a champion of democracy who served as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations (1993–97)…
… and the first female secretary of state (1997–2001). She was the author of numerous books and a professor at Georgetown.
Early in her career, she worked at Encyclopaedia Britannica. I have to give you a little bit of background.

We were living in Chicago. And I actually wanted to be a journalist. Anyway, I saw from where we were sitting Encyclopaedia Britannica as a building.
And I had heard, there was actually an ad, about they needed somebody to work at EB, as it was called, to work on some issues because…
… as I understood it always, once every year, there was a decision to update a variety of articles in EB. And that year, what they were doing was geographical articles.
And since I was a poli-sci major, they figured that I would be able to do that. And so my job when I first started was to select the various art and photographs and maps that went with those articles.
And it's one of the things that I truly did enjoy doing in life. And it taught me what is really important in terms of reading and understanding.
And then there have always been articles in EB that were written by the expert on a particular issue. So it was very informative.