Woodrow Wilson served as the 28th President of the United States from 1913 to 1921. He was a member of the Democratic Party and previously served as the president of Princeton University and governor of New Jersey. As president, Wilson oversaw progressive new policies and led the country during World War I, establishing an activist foreign policy. He championed the creation of the League of Nations at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference but was unable to get the U.S. to join.

1. Woodrow Wilson,
28th President of the United States
Thomas Woodrow Wilson (December 28, 1856 – February 3,
1924) was an American statesman and academic who served as
the 28th President of the United States from 1913 to 1921. A
member of the Democratic Party, Wilson served as the President
of Princeton University from 1902 to 1910, and as Governor of
New Jersey from 1911 to 1913, before winning the 1912
presidential election. As president, he oversaw the passage
of progressive legislative policies unparalleled until the New
Deal in 1933. He also led the United States during World War I,
establishing an activist foreign policy known as "Wilsonianism."
He was one of the three key leaders at the 1919 Paris Peace
Conference, where he championed a new League of Nations, but
he was unable to win Senate approval for U.S. participation in
the League.

2. Early Life
• Wilson was born to a Scots-Irish American family
in Staunton, Virginia, on December 28, 1856, at
18–24 North Coalter Street (now the Woodrow
Wilson Presidential Library). He was the third of
four children of Joseph Ruggles Wilson and Jessie
Janet Woodrow. Wilson's paternal grandparents
immigrated to the United States
from Strabane, County Tyrone, Ireland (present-
day Northern Ireland), in 1807. His mother was
born in Carlisle, England, the daughter of Rev. Dr.
Thomas Woodrow from Paisley, Scotland, and
Marion Williamson from Glasgow.

3. Education
• Wilson began reading at age ten; the delayed start was possibly caused
by dyslexia. He later blamed the lack of schools. As a teen, he taught himself the
Graham shorthand system to compensate, and achieved academically with self-
discipline, studying at home with his father, then in classes at a small Augusta,
Georgia school. During Reconstruction, Wilson lived in Columbia, South Carolina,
from 1870 to 1874, while his father was a theology professor at the Columbia
Theological Seminary.
• His father moved the family to Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1874 where he was
the minister at First Presbyterian Church until 1882. Wilson attended Davidson
College in North Carolina for the 1873–74 school year, cut short by illness, then
transferred as a freshman to the [[Princeton University|College of New Jersey
(later renamed Princeton University)]]. He graduated in 1879, a member of Phi
Kappa Psi fraternity. In his second year, he studied political philosophy and history,
was active in the Whig literary and debating society, and wrote for the Nassau
Literary Review. He organized the Liberal Debating Society and later coached the
Whig–Clio Debate Panel. In the hotly contested presidential election of 1876,
Wilson declared his support for the Democratic Party and its nominee, Samuel J.
Tilden.

4. Academic career
• Wilson worked as a lecturer at Cornell University in 1886–87, where
he joined the Irving Literary Society. He next taught at Bryn Mawr
College from 1885 until 1888, teaching ancient Greek and Roman
history; while there, he refused offers from the universities of
Michigan and Indiana.When Ellen was pregnant with their first child
in 1886, the couple decided that Ellen should go to her Aunt Louisa
Brown's residence in Gainesville, Georgia, to have their first child;
she arrived just one day before the baby, Margaret, was born in
April 1886. Their second child, Jessie, was born in August 1887.
• In 1888, Wilson left Bryn Mawr for Wesleyan University; it was a
controversial move, as he had signed a three-year contract with
Bryn Mawr in 1887. Both parties claimed contract violations and
the matter subsided. At Wesleyan, was inducted into Phi Beta
Kappa and coached the football team and founded the debate
team, which bears his name.

5. Political science author
• Wilson, a disciple of Walter Bagehot, considered the United States
Constitution to be cumbersome and open to corruption. Wilson favored
a parliamentary system for the United States and in the early 1880s wrote,
"I ask you to put this question to yourselves, should we not draw the
Executive and Legislature closer together? Should we not, on the one
hand, give the individual leaders of opinion in Congress a better chance to
have an intimate party in determining who should be president, and the
president, on the other hand, a better chance to approve himself a
statesman, and his advisers capable men of affairs, in the guidance of
Congress."
• Wilson's first political work, Congressional Government (1885), advocated
a parliamentary system. He critically described the United States
government, with frequent negative comparisons to Westminster. Critics
contended the book was written without the benefit of the author
observing any operational aspect of the U.S. Congress, and supporters
asserted the work was the product of the imagination of a future
statesman. The book reflected the greater power of the legislature,
relative to the executive, during the post-bellum period. Wilson later
became a regular contributor to Political Science Quarterly, an academic
journal.

7. • Student: Savulescu Ionut-Viorel
• Profesor coordonator: Frumuselu Mihai
Daniel