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95d6294332f866744ea42e5e6f65cc4c | https://www.britannica.com/topic/An-Enquiry-into-the-Present-State-of-Polite-Learning-in-Europe | An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe | An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe
His rise began with the Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe (1759), a minor work. Soon he emerged as an essayist, in The Bee and other periodicals, and above all in his Chinese Letters. These essays were first published in the journal The Public Ledger and…
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d049c1e105408029393b1b353ea4e69e | https://www.britannica.com/topic/An-Essay-on-the-Application-of-Mathematical-Analysis-to-the-Theories-of-Electricity-and-Magnetism | An Essay on the Application of Mathematical Analysis to the Theories of Electricity and Magnetism | An Essay on the Application of Mathematical Analysis to the Theories of Electricity and Magnetism
In his Essay on the Application of Mathematical Analysis to the Theory of Electricity and Magnetism (1828), Green generalized and extended the electric and magnetic investigations of the French mathematician Siméon-Denis Poisson. This work also introduced the term potential and what is now known as Green’s theorem,…
…a copy of George Green’s An Essay on the Application of Mathematical Analysis to the Theories of Electricity and Magnetism. That work and Fourier’s book were the components from which Thomson shaped his worldview and that helped him create his pioneering synthesis of the mathematical relationship between electricity and heat.…
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62134427642c73bb87241f569cbf5333 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/An-Essay-on-Woman | An Essay on Woman | An Essay on Woman
…the proof sheets of “Essay on Woman,” an obscene parody on Alexander Pope’s “Essay on Man,” which had been written by Wilkes and Thomas Potter years before. Wilkes had commenced, but not completed, printing 12 copies, probably for the “Monks.” At the start of the parliamentary session in November…
…obscene libel for his poem An Essay on Woman, a parody of Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man. Prosecutions for obscenity in other European countries also betrayed a merging of moral and political concerns. Perhaps the most celebrated obscenity trial in 19th-century France was that of Gustave Flaubert, who was…
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6998c01d574a4e82d45648b53e279ed9 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/An-Experiment-in-Education | An Experiment in Education | An Experiment in Education
…of his Madras system in An Experiment in Education (1797), but his ideas had little popularity in England until they were adapted by Joseph Lancaster in a school opened at Southwark in 1801 and by Robert Owen in New Lanark, Scotland. (See monitorial system.) Meanwhile, Bell was made rector of…
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cf50cecba7460102f362811fd487b78a | https://www.britannica.com/topic/An-Experiment-in-Love | An Experiment in Love | An Experiment in Love
…for the clear-eyed coming-of-age novel An Experiment in Love (1995). Three years later she returned to historical fiction with The Giant, O’Brien, which imaginatively explores and contrasts the lives of two real 18th-century figures—a freakishly tall sideshow performer steeped in the Irish oral tradition and a Scottish surgeon in thrall…
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27d601b8587cea622f7383145369bc58 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/An-Explanation-of-the-Effect-of-Lime-upon-Alkaline-Salts | An Explanation of the Effect of Lime upon Alkaline Salts | An Explanation of the Effect of Lime upon Alkaline Salts
…concerning an industrial process, “An Explanation of the Effect of Lime upon Alkaline Salts,” which was published in Home’s Experiments on Bleaching (1771). Another approach to the bleaching problem was to look for a cheaper way of making potash. Cullen turned his mind to this and was rewarded by…
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9355f4a6e7e6ac3d07c3b53a167b27a7 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/An-Introduction-to-Social-Psychology | An Introduction to Social Psychology | An Introduction to Social Psychology
…physiological psychology and author of An Introduction to Social Psychology (1908; 30th ed. 1960), which did much to stimulate widespread study of the basis of social behaviour.
…the publication of McDougall’s book An Introduction to Social Psychology (1908), his purposive psychology caught on to such an extent that explanation in terms of instinct became a fashion in the social sciences, including economics (as evidenced by American economist Thorstein Veblen’s The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of…
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ce3bbfdc794dd263ba016761abdeb31a | https://www.britannica.com/topic/An-Introduction-to-the-Theory-of-Mental-and-Social-Measurements | An Introduction to the Theory of Mental and Social Measurements | An Introduction to the Theory of Mental and Social Measurements
…research, chiefly through his handbook, An Introduction to the Theory of Mental and Social Measurements (1904). Other important works in the early part of his career were The Principles of Teaching Based on Psychology (1906), Education: A First Book (1912), and Educational Psychology, 3 vol. (1913–14; 2nd ed., 1921). These…
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8b4ea95b4120500f136466e79761f05a | https://www.britannica.com/topic/An-Island-in-the-Moon | An Island in the Moon | An Island in the Moon
…is visible in the satirical An Island in the Moon (written c. 1784–85); he then took the bolder step of setting aside sophistication in the visionary Songs of Innocence (1789). His desire for renewal encouraged him to view the outbreak of the French Revolution as a momentous event. In works…
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828565509d40f70d50d6d6bb6c6c76cc | https://www.britannica.com/topic/An-Ordinary-Life | An Ordinary Life | An Ordinary Life
…judgments; and Obyčejný život (1934; An Ordinary Life) explores the complex layers of personality underlying the “self” an “ordinary” man thinks himself to be.
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1e73d9cf1f391c6acaad7617b8e13cca | https://www.britannica.com/topic/An-Unsuitable-Job-for-a-Woman | An Unsuitable Job for a Woman | An Unsuitable Job for a Woman
James also wrote An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972) and The Skull Beneath the Skin (1982), which centre on Cordelia Gray, a young private detective. The first of these novels was the basis for both a television movie and a short-lived series. James expanded beyond the mystery…
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80f5475015b6e4bd65603832bf19afaf | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Anahiti | Anāhiti | Anāhiti
Anāhiti, also called Anāhitā, ancient Iranian goddess of royalty, war, and fertility; she is particularly associated with the last. Possibly of Mesopotamian origin, her cult was made prominent by Artaxerxes II, and statues and temples were set up in her honour throughout the Persian empire. A common cult of the various peoples of the empire at that time, it persisted in Asia Minor long afterward. In the Avesta she is called Ardvī Sūrā Anāhitā (“Damp, Strong, Untainted”); this seems to be an amalgam of two originally separate deities. In Greece Anāhiti was identified with Athena and Artemis.
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75da127982df2f92b1e77658fea025d2 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Anales-de-la-corona-de-Aragon | Anales de la corona de Aragón | Anales de la corona de Aragón
…in his major work, the Anales de la corona de Aragón (1562–80). Covering the period from the Moorish invasions (8th century) until the death of King Ferdinand II (1516), this was the first national history of Aragon, and it remains a useful source for Spanish history.
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3e42b174d1047971eca43e5b2d535d47 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/analog-information | Analog information | Analog information
…called analog-form information, or simply analog information. Until the development of the digital computer, cognitive information was stored and processed only in analog form, basically through the technologies of printing, photography, and telephony.
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0db14ffb9b5e16e3d5a3172b9d538938 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/analytic-philosophy | Analytic philosophy | Analytic philosophy
Analytic philosophy, also called linguistic philosophy, a loosely related set of approaches to philosophical problems, dominant in Anglo-American philosophy from the early 20th century, that emphasizes the study of language and the logical analysis of concepts. Although most work in analytic philosophy has been done in Great Britain and the United States, significant contributions also have been made in other countries, notably Australia, New Zealand, and the countries of Scandinavia.
Analytic philosophers conduct conceptual investigations that characteristically, though not invariably, involve studies of the language in which the concepts in question are, or can be, expressed. According to one tradition in analytic philosophy (sometimes referred to as formalism), for example, the definition of a concept can be determined by uncovering the underlying logical structures, or “logical forms,” of the sentences used to express it. A perspicuous representation of these structures in the language of modern symbolic logic, so the formalists thought, would make clear the logically permissible inferences to and from such sentences and thereby establish the logical boundaries of the concept under study. Another tradition, sometimes referred to as informalism, similarly turned to the sentences in which the concept was expressed but instead emphasized their diverse uses in ordinary language and everyday situations, the idea being to elucidate the concept by noting how its various features are reflected in how people actually talk and act. Even among analytic philosophers whose approaches were not essentially either formalist or informalist, philosophical problems were often conceived of as problems about the nature of language. An influential debate in analytic ethics, for example, concerned the question of whether sentences that express moral judgments (e.g., “It is wrong to tell a lie”) are descriptions of some feature of the world, in which case the sentences can be true or false, or are merely expressions of the subject’s feelings—comparable to shouts of “Bravo!” or “Boo!”—in which case they have no truth-value at all. Thus, in this debate the philosophical problem of the nature of right and wrong was treated as a problem about the logical or grammatical status of moral statements.
In spirit, style, and focus, analytic philosophy has strong ties to the tradition of empiricism, which has characterized philosophy in Britain for some centuries, distinguishing it from the rationalism of Continental European philosophy. In fact, the beginning of modern analytic philosophy is usually dated from the time when two of its major figures, Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) and G.E. Moore (1873–1958), rebelled against an antiempiricist idealism that had temporarily captured the English philosophical scene. The most renowned of the British empiricists—John Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume, and John Stuart Mill—have many interests and methods in common with contemporary analytic philosophers. And although analytic philosophers have attacked some of the empiricists’ particular doctrines, one feels that this is the result more of a common interest in certain problems than of any difference in general philosophical outlook.
Most empiricists, though admitting that the senses fail to yield the certainty requisite for knowledge, hold nonetheless that it is only through observation and experimentation that justified beliefs about the world can be gained—in other words, a priori reasoning from self-evident premises cannot reveal how the world is. Accordingly, many empiricists insist on a sharp dichotomy between the physical sciences, which ultimately must verify their theories by observation, and the deductive or a priori sciences—e.g., mathematics and logic—the method of which is the deduction of theorems from axioms. The deductive sciences, in the empiricists’ view, cannot produce justified beliefs, much less knowledge, about the world. This conclusion was a cornerstone of two important early movements in analytic philosophy, logical atomism and logical positivism. In the positivist’s view, for example, the theorems of mathematics do not represent genuine knowledge of a world of mathematical objects but instead are merely the result of working out the consequences of the conventions that govern the use of mathematical symbols.
The question then arises whether philosophy itself is to be assimilated to the empirical or to the a priori sciences. Early empiricists assimilated it to the empirical sciences. Moreover, they were less self-reflective about the methods of philosophy than are contemporary analytic philosophers. Preoccupied with epistemology (the theory of knowledge) and the philosophy of mind, and holding that fundamental facts can be learned about these subjects from individual introspection, early empiricists took their work to be a kind of introspective psychology. Analytic philosophers in the 20th century, on the other hand, were less inclined to appeal ultimately to direct introspection. More important, the development of modern symbolic logic seemed to promise help in solving philosophical problems—and logic is as a priori as science can be. It seemed, then, that philosophy must be classified with mathematics and logic. The exact nature and proper methodology of philosophy, however, remained in dispute.
For philosophers oriented toward formalism, the advent of modern symbolic logic in the late 19th century was a watershed in the history of philosophy, because it added greatly to the class of statements and inferences that could be represented in formal (i.e., axiomatic) languages. The formal representation of these statements provided insight into their underlying logical structures; at the same time, it helped to dispel certain philosophical puzzles that had been created, in the view of the formalists, through the tendency of earlier philosophers to mistake surface grammatical form for logical form. Because of the similarity of sentences such as “Tigers bite” and “Tigers exist,” for example, the verb to exist may seem to function, as other verbs do, to predicate something of the subject. It may seem, then, that existence is a property of tigers, just as their biting is. In symbolic logic, however, existence is not a property; it is a higher-order function that takes so-called “propositional functions” as values. Thus, when the propositional function “Tx”—in which T stands for the predicate “…is a tiger” and x is a variable replaceable with a name—is written beside a symbol known as the existential quantifier—∃x, meaning “There exists at least one x such that…”—the result is a sentence that means “There exists at least one x such that x is a tiger.” The fact that existence is not a property in symbolic logic has had important philosophical consequences, one of which has been to show that the ontological argument for the existence of God, which has puzzled philosophers since its invention in the 11th century by St. Anselm of Canterbury, is unsound.
Among 19th-century figures who contributed to the development of symbolic logic were the mathematicians George Boole (1815–64), the inventor of Boolean algebra, and Georg Cantor (1845–1918), the creator of set theory. The generally recognized founder of modern symbolic logic is Gottlob Frege (1848–1925), of the University of Jena in Germany. Frege, whose work was not fully appreciated until the mid-20th century, is historically important principally for his influence on Russell, whose program of logicism (the doctrine that the whole of mathematics can be derived from the principles of logic) had been attempted independently by Frege some 25 years before the publication of Russell’s principal logicist works, Principles of Mathematics (1903) and Principia Mathematica (1910–13; written in collaboration with Russell’s colleague at the University of Cambridge Alfred North Whitehead).
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9fcc299f6aef300ad1121462bb322d5c | https://www.britannica.com/topic/analytical-Marxism | Analytical Marxism | Analytical Marxism
Analytical Marxism, a movement within Marxist theory and in various branches of social science and philosophy that seeks to investigate and develop the substantive theses of standard Marxism using the techniques of conceptual analysis associated with analytic philosophy and the methods of standard neoclassical economics.
Analytical Marxism represents a break with conventional Marxist theorizing precisely in its rejection of the view that there is a profound methodological divide between Marxism and bourgeois social science. Indeed, its approach is the exact opposite of that of the Hungarian Marxist philosopher György Lukács, who famously argued in his book Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (1923; History and Class Consciousness) that the distinctive feature of Marxism lies not in its substantive conclusions but rather in its methodological commitments. Analytical Marxists, by contrast, are directly concerned with addressing the truth or falsity of Marx’s substantive findings in social science and have attempted to reconstruct or salvage his arguments using the same tools that conventional social scientists or philosophers would use. They place great emphasis on the need to state arguments clearly and in a manner that optimizes the possibilities for rational discussion and critique, and they often characterize the methodological stance of other Marxists as being obscurantist or directed toward evading falsification.
In his book Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (1978), the British political philosopher G.A. Cohen developed a traditional reading of Marxian historical materialism as outlined by Marx in the 1859 preface to Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy). Until Cohen’s work, most analytic philosophers had thought that historical materialism was marred by an apparent inconsistency. Specifically, it appeared that Marx had been committed both to the claim that the social and economic structure of a society was to be explained as a function of its scientific and technological development and to the claim that the very same structure caused (and therefore explained) that scientific and technical progress. A parallel difficulty was widely thought to afflict Marx’s conception of the relationship between social structure and political and legal superstructure. Cohen argued that those supposed inconsistencies could be avoided if Marx’s explanatory theses were taken to be instances of functional explanation. Just as evolutionary theory might show how the fact that birds have hollow bones is explicable by the role those bones play in the life and survival of the organism, so Marxian historical materialism could show that the selection of a particular structure of social relations for a society (and especially its system of property) was to be explained by the role that such a structure would play in developing the society’s productive resources.
Cohen’s work was subjected to critique on a variety of grounds. Some critics objected to it as an interpretation of Marx, whereas others thought that Cohen’s reconstructed historical materialism was either implausible as a reading of historical development or philosophically flawed. In the third camp was the Norwegian philosopher and political scientist Jon Elster, who argued in a series of papers and in his book, Making Sense of Marx (1985), against Cohen’s deployment of functional explanation. Elster did not oppose the use of functional explanation in principle but rather argued that, to be legitimate, it had to be underpinned by more conventional causal or intentional modes of explanation. Whereas the theory of evolution by natural selection provided such an explanatory underpinning for biological science, Cohen had provided no such supporting mechanism for historical materialism or for the social sciences more generally.
Although Cohen disputed Elster’s view that functional explanation was inadmissible in the absence of supporting foundations, other analytical Marxists were keen to supply them for other areas of Marxian theory. In particular, analytical Marxism became widely associated with methodological individualism in social theory (the claim that large-scale social phenomena should be explained in terms of the behaviour of human individuals), rational-choice theory (the claim that large-scale social phenomena should be explained in terms of the choices of rational individuals seeking to maximize utility, or benefit to themselves), and game theory (the mathematical analysis of interdependent decision making).
At the forefront of such developments was the American economist John Roemer. In his first book, Analytical Foundations of Marxian Economic Theory (1981), Roemer sought to reconstruct Marxian economics using the tools of neoclassical economic theory. In his second, A General Theory of Exploitation and Class (1982), he employed game theory to show how the emergence of coalitions of agents, closely resembling Marxian social classes, could be explained by the differential endowment of such agents with productive resources such as labour power or ownership of capital.
Roemer’s work on class and exploitation inspired, in turn, a program of research by other analytical Marxists, including the American sociologist Erik Olin Wright, who used Roemer’s conceptual framework to analyze the class structure of modern capitalist societies in his book Classes (1985). Another important contribution to analytical Marxism was made by the Polish American political scientist Adam Przeworski, who used rational-choice theory in his Capitalism and Social Democracy (1985) to argue that social democratic parties are fatally driven to compromise in modern liberal democracies: the need to secure a sufficiently broad coalition to achieve electoral success necessitates the dilution of the socialist program.
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523bba05922059f2d62b4ff5f858796a | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Anarchy-Is-What-States-Make-of-It-The-Social-Construction-of-Power-Politics | Anarchy Is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics | Anarchy Is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics
…publication of Wendt’s essay “Anarchy Is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics” (1992) established him as the leading thinker of constructivism in international relations. Broadly defined, constructivism is a theoretical framework in which the fundamental elements of international politics are conceived of as social…
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573c75e2822a28cf03925dadd54c73c0 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/ancient-Iranian-religion/Cosmography | Cosmography | Cosmography
The Iranians conceived of the cosmos as a three-tiered structure consisting of the earth below, the atmosphere, and the stone vault of heaven above. Beyond the vault of heaven was the realm of the Endless Lights, and below the earth was the realm of darkness and chaos. The earth itself rested on the cosmic sea called Varu-Karta. In the centre of the earth was the cosmic mountain Harā, down which flowed the river Ardvī. The earth was divided into six continents surrounding the central continent, Khvaniratha, the locus of Aryāna Vaijah, the Aryan land (i.e., Iran).
In sharp contrast to the peoples of the Middle East, the Iranians did not make images of their deities, nor did they build temples to house them, preferring to worship in the open. Worship of the gods was performed primarily in the context of a central ritual called yazna, which corresponds in a great many details to the Vedic yajña. It is interesting to note that both rituals, though they have undergone some changes over the millennia, are still performed by Zoroastrians and Hindus in what must be the oldest continuously enacted ritual known. The plan of the yazna, as far as it can be reconstructed, was essentially that of a highly stylized festive meal offered to an honoured guest, the sacrificer being the host and the deity the guest. Although it is not known precisely when or how frequently the yazna was held (in Zoroastrianism it became a daily ritual), the reason for holding a yazna was to enter into communion with a divine being either for a specific purpose (to obtain offspring or a victory, and for example) or for general welfare or as an expression of piety. As a ritual meal, the yazna followed the established rules of hospitality: the guest was sent an invitation; on his arrival from afar he was greeted, shown to a comfortable seat, given meat and a refreshing and invigorating drink, and entertained with song extolling his great deeds and virtues. Finally, the guest was expected to return the hospitality in the form of a gift.
Of utmost importance was fire. In ancient Iran, fire was at once a highly sacred element and a deity. Thus, the word ātar denoted simultaneously “fire” and “Fire,” every instance of fire being a manifestation of the deity. Since burned offerings were not made, the role of Ātar, like that of his Vedic counterpart Agni, was principally that of intermediary between heaven and earth, between humans and gods. Beyond the sphere of the yazna, fire was always treated with utmost care as a sacred element. Whether in the household hearth or, at a later period, in fire temples, the sacred fire had to be maintained with proper fuel, kept free from polluting agents, and above all never permitted to go out or be extinguished.
More important than the meat offering of an animal victim was the preparation of the divine drink hauma. As with fire, hauma was regarded as both a sacred drink and as a powerful deity. Probably the greatest part of the yazna was devoted to the pressing of the hauma. Although there have been a number of proposals for the identification of the plant whose juices were extracted for the ritual drink, all have fallen short of absolute proof, and some, such as the toxic mushroom Amanita muscaria, are not worth consideration. In any case, an understanding of the religious meaning of hauma does not depend on a botanical identification. The word hauma itself derives from a verb “to press, extract” and thus literally means the juice that has been pressed out of the stems or stalks (ãsu) of whatever plant was being used. In this process the stalks were first soaked in water, then pounded. In Zoroastrianism this has been done with a metal mortar and pestle, but originally the stalks were pounded between two pressing stones, a lower and an upper. The juice, described as yellow, was filtered and mixed with milk, to cut the bitter taste, and perhaps with water too. Since the resulting drink was consumed immediately, it is clear that it was not alcoholic but rather was a mind-altering drug. The Yasht to Hauma says, “All other intoxicants are accompanied by Wrath with the horrible club, but that intoxication which is Hauma’s is accompanied by gladdening Truth (arta).” This brief statement can be amplified by the far more extensive descriptions of the Rigveda, where soma is not only offered to the gods but also taken by poets to enhance their insight and creative powers in their search for truth. Also, hauma, invoked for victory, was taken as a stimulant by warriors going into battle, and various heroes of Iranian myth and legend are remembered as primary practitioners of its cult.
As mentioned above, a comfortable seat was provided for the god or gods invited to yazna. Originally this consisted of special grasses strewn on the ground in front of the altar. In Vedic terminology this seat was called the barhish (Avestan barzish, “cushion”), while in Zoroastrianism a cognate word, Avestan barəsman (Iranian barzman), is used for a bundle of sticks—later thin metal rods—that is manipulated by the priest.
It is likely that from a very early period a priest, the zautar (Vedic hotar), was required to properly carry out the yasna. The zautar might be assisted by a number of other ritual specialists. With the priest or priests acting on behalf of the sacrificer, the god or gods were invoked through the intermediary of Fire. The sacred drink was prepared and the victim led up. When the god arrived, he was seated on the barzman and given food (parts of the slaughtered victim) and drink, after which he was entertained with song. Finally, the host-sacrificer put in a request for a return gift: heroic sons, long life, health, or victory, for example. In a certain sense, then, the entire ritual followed the old Latin dictum do ut des (“I give so that you may give”), in providing a means of inducing the powerful deities to act with favour toward human beings. Yet it also made possible communion between the divine and human realms. Deities could also be addressed directly in prayer with the supplicant standing erect with upraised arms; prostration was unknown.
Of further importance is the song of praise directed to the divine guest. Much of the poetic portions of the Avesta and almost all of the Rigveda must be understood in this ritual context. That is to say, ancient Indo-Iranian poetry was religious in nature and specifically composed for those ritual occasions when the gods required songs of praise to make them well disposed to their worshippers. The obscurity of Zarathustra’s Gāthās and of many Vedic hymns can best be understood when it is realized that the intended audience was not humans but rather the gods.
During the year there were various festivals, mostly relating to the agricultural and herding cycles. By far the most important was that of the New Year, which is still celebrated by Iranians with great festivity.
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d5814e323fc61cfe8a42935b89c65644 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ancrene-Wisse | Ancrene Wisse | Ancrene Wisse
Ancrene Wisse, (Middle English: “Guide for Anchoresses”) also called Ancrene Riwle (“Rule for Anchoresses”), anonymous work written in the early 13th century for the guidance of women recluses outside the regular orders. It may have been intended specifically for a group of women sequestered near Limebrook in Herefordshire.
Translated from English into French and Latin, the manual remained popular until the 16th century. It is notable for its humanity, practicality, and insight into human nature but even more for its brilliant style. Like the other prose of its time, it uses alliteration as ornament, but its author was influenced by contemporary fashions in preaching, which had originated in the universities, rather than by vernacular traditions. With its richly figurative language, rhetorically crafted sentences, and carefully logical divisions and subdivisions, it achieved linguistic effects that were remarkable for the English language of the time. Ancrene Wisse is often associated with the Katherine Group, a collection of devotional works also written near Herefordshire.
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143fa4ef247e50d496b70818707026e4 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/And-Everything-Is-Going-Fine | And Everything Is Going Fine | And Everything Is Going Fine
He then directed And Everything Is Going Fine (2010), a documentary about the life of Spalding Gray, and the big-budget ensemble thriller Contagion (2011), which portrayed the rapid spread of a deadly airborne virus. The adrenaline-fueled spy film Haywire (2011) focused on a female covert-operations specialist.
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2c9f00d7980a5405361f1b9819b8f4bd | https://www.britannica.com/topic/androcentrism | Androcentrism | Androcentrism
…ecofeminists, for example, claim that androcentrism (male-centredness), rather than anthropocentrism, is the true cause of the degradation of nature. They maintain that androcentrism as seen in traditional power-wielding patriarchal society is responsible for the striving to dominate nature. Just as males have always tried to dominate women, so too have…
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f6402d2276d21cc873a5e53b18b44d27 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Andromache-Mourning-Hector | Andromache Mourning Hector | Andromache Mourning Hector
…pathos and painterly skill of Andromache Mourning Hector brought him election to the Académie Royale in 1784; and that same year, accompanied this time by his wife and studio assistants, he returned to Rome with a commission to complete a painting that appears to have been originally inspired by a…
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b5d5c9ee1cf5975bb43db06c8d34a6d0 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Andromache-play-by-Euripides | Andromache | Andromache
Andromache, drama by Euripides, performed about 426 bce. Set in the aftermath of the Trojan War, the play has an exciting beginning marked by strong anti-Spartan feeling. Most of the original characters disappear, however, and interest is soon dissipated.
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ff67d3b6e449ffe105a597687b59181e | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Andromaque-et-Pyrrhus | Andromaque et Pyrrhus | Andromaque et Pyrrhus
>Andromaque et Pyrrhus (1810) are melodramatic, highly calculated pieces. His best painting, the only one to show feeling for colour and atmosphere, is Enée racontant à Didon les malheurs de la ville de Troie (1817). He was director of the Académie de France in Rome…
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b9a5f66e2f4f7f60e2a28e0d0f124c1d | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Andronicus-or-the-Unfortunate-Politician | Andronicus, or the Unfortunate Politician | Andronicus, or the Unfortunate Politician
…London in 1646 and wrote Andronicus, or the Unfortunate Politician (1646), a satire against Oliver Cromwell. In 1649 he was given the parish of Waltham Abbey, Essex, where he became a friend of the other leading biographer of the age, Izaak Walton.
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b52fdc8306cf768e38d1568a989e784e | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Andy-Hardy-Gets-Spring-Fever | Andy Hardy Gets Spring Fever | Andy Hardy Gets Spring Fever
Van Dyke was then assigned Andy Hardy Gets Spring Fever (1939), which was not a very prestigious project for a director of his stature. However, his films of the previous year or two had been uneven, and that might have been an attempt to get him back on track. Whatever…
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861f59757bd35e185be871262ef7ce6b | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ang | Ang | Ang
Ang, in the Khmer language, a person of royal blood, usually translated “prince” or “princess.” For articles on such persons, see the personal name; e.g., for Ang Duong, see Duong.
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577c611e4c46763cbf7a64849235b321 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Angel-Face | Angel Face | Angel Face
…period included the underrated thriller Angel Face (1953), with Jean Simmons as a murderous psychotic and Robert Mitchum as a chauffeur she pursues. Preminger then acquired the rights to F. Hugh Herbert’s stage success The Moon Is Blue. The 1953 romantic comedy centres on a womanizing architect (William Holden) and…
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284e1718eda6a302f843ee9004583544 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/angel-religion | Angel and demon | Angel and demon
Angel and demon, demon also spelled daemon, respectively, any benevolent or malevolent spiritual being that mediates between the transcendent and temporal realms.
Throughout the history of religions, varying kinds and degrees of beliefs have existed in various spiritual beings, powers, and principles that mediate between the realm of the sacred or holy—i.e., the transcendent realm—and the profane realm of time, space, and cause and effect. Such spiritual beings, when regarded as benevolent, are usually called angels in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and those viewed as malevolent are termed demons. In other traditions, such intermediate beings are less categorical, for they may be benevolent in some circumstances and malevolent in others.
The term angel, which is derived from the Greek word angelos, is the equivalent of the Hebrew word mal’akh, meaning “messenger.” The literal meaning of the word angel thus points more toward the function or status of such beings in a cosmic hierarchy rather than toward connotations of essence or nature, which have been prominent in popular piety, especially in Western religions. Thus, angels have their significance primarily in what they do rather than in what they are. Whatever essence or inherent nature they possess is in terms of their relationship to their source (God, or the ultimate being). Because of the Western iconography (the system of image symbols) of angels, however, they have been granted essential identities that often surpass their functional relationships to the sacred or holy and their performative relationships to the profane world. In other words, popular piety, feeding on graphic and symbolic representations of angels, has to some extent posited semidivine or even divine status to angelic figures. Though such occurrences are not usually sanctioned doctrinally or theologically, some angelic figures, such as Mithra (a Persian god who in Zoroastrianism became an angelic mediator between heaven and earth and judge and preserver of the created world), have achieved semidivine or divine status with their own cults.
In Zoroastrianism there was a belief in the amesha spentas, the holy or bounteous immortals, who were functional aspects or entities of Ahura Mazdā, the Wise Lord. One of the amesha spentas, Vohu Manah (Good Mind), revealed to the Iranian prophet Zarathustra (Zoroaster; died c. 551 bce) the true God, his nature, and a kind of ethical covenant, which humans may accept and obey or reject and disobey. In a similar manner, about 1,200 years later, the archangel Gabriel revealed to the Prophet Muhammad (5th–6th century ce) the Qurʾān (the holy book of Islam) and the true God (Allah), his oneness, and the ethical and cultic requirements of Islam. The epithets used to describe Gabriel, the messenger of God—“the spirit of holiness” and “the faithful spirit”—are similar to those applied to the amesha spentas of Zoroastrianism and to the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), in Christianity. In these monotheistic religions (though Zoroastrianism later became dualistic) as also in Judaism, the functional characteristics of angels are more clearly enunciated than their ontological (or nature of being) characteristics—except in the many instances in which popular piety and legend have glossed over the functional aspects.
Various religions, including those of nonliterate cultures, have beliefs in intermediary beings between the sacred and profane realms, but the belief is most fully elaborated in religions of the West.
The term demon is derived from the Greek word daimōn, which means a “supernatural being” or “spirit.” Though it has commonly been associated with an evil or malevolent spirit, the term originally meant a spiritual being that influenced a person’s character. An agathos daimōn (“good spirit”), for example, was benevolent in its relationship to humans. The Greek philosopher Socrates, for example, spoke of his daimōn as a spirit that inspired him to seek and speak the truth. The term gradually was applied to the lesser spirits of the supernatural realm who exerted pressures on humans to perform actions that were not conducive to their well-being. The dominant interpretation has been weighted in favour of malevolence and that which forbodes evil, misfortune, and mischief.
In religions of nonliterate peoples, spiritual beings may be viewed as either malevolent or benevolent according to the circumstances facing the individual or community. Thus, the usual classification that places demons among malevolent beings is not totally applicable in reference to these religions.
The positions of spiritual beings or entities viewed as benevolent or malevolent may in the course of time be reversed. Such has been the case in the ancient Indo-Iranian religion, from which evolved early Zoroastrianism and the early Hinduism reflected in the Vedas (ancient Aryan hymns). In Zoroastrianism the daevas were viewed as malevolent beings, but their counterparts, the devas in ancient Hinduism, were viewed as gods. The ahuras of Zoroastrianism were good “lords,” but in Hinduism their counterparts, the asuras, were transformed into evil lords. In a similar manner, Satan, the prosecutor of humans in the court of God’s justice in the Book of Job, became the chief antagonist of Christ in Christianity and of humanity in Islam. Many similar transformations indicate that the sharp distinctions made between angels as benevolent and demons as malevolent may be too simplistic, however helpful such designations may be as indicators of the general functions of such spiritual beings.
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551a793a6f5aff259e3f3ede6fea6e55 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Angelica-fictional-character | Angelica | Angelica
Angelica, fictional character who is beloved by Orlando (Roland) in two epic Italian poems, Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato (1483; Roland in Love) and Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1516; Mad Roland).
Angelica, daughter of the king of Cathay, is a beautiful young woman with whom many men, including the hero, Orlando, fall in love. She is the cause of many duels. When she runs away, Orlando attempts to find her. Eventually, she falls in love with and marries Medoro, a Saracen knight. Orlando’s loss of Angelica causes him to go mad.
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8041c301eddb39fdb851529b09438a16 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Angels-and-Demons-novel-by-Brown | Angels & Demons | Angels & Demons
In his next novel, Angels & Demons (2000), Brown introduced Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor of symbology. The fast-paced thriller follows Langdon’s attempts to protect the Vatican from the Illuminati, a secret society formed during the Renaissance that opposed the Roman Catholic Church. Although the novel received positive reviews,…
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33bfd7037d729e1e9b331806847ce622 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Angels-with-Dirty-Faces | Angels with Dirty Faces | Angels with Dirty Faces
Angels with Dirty Faces, American gangster film, released in 1938, that is considered a classic of the genre, influencing countless subsequent movies.
The story centres on boyhood friends Rocky Sullivan (played by James Cagney) and Jerry Connolly (Pat O’Brien), who take radically different paths as adults. Rocky becomes a criminal, while Jerry serves as a neighbourhood priest desperately trying to influence young boys to take the “straight-and-narrow” path in life. When Rocky becomes an idol to some of the boys, it puts him in conflict with his old friend.
By modern standards Angels with Dirty Faces may seem clichéd, with the impressionable young kids idolizing a local gangster, the two boyhood friends now on opposite sides of the law, and the tough-as-nails neighbourhood priest pleading with his gangster pal to surrender to the police. However, these elements were innovative when introduced in the film. Perhaps the most enduring aspect of the movie is the Academy Award-nominated performance of Cagney as the tough guy worshipped by the local boys, who were played by a group of actors known as the Dead End Kids. Cagney based his now-famous mannerisms and swagger on a pimp he knew from his boyhood neighbourhood. The characteristics that would become so identifiable with his persona originated in Angels with Dirty Faces. The film’s final scene is considered a classic, with Cagney feigning terror on his way to the electric chair in an attempt to dissuade his young admirers from idolizing him.
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b9c9f496eb9803fe80b1b03d7f26bfc8 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Anger-Management | Anger Management | Anger Management
Deeds (2002) and Anger Management (2003), Sandler made forays into drama with Punch-Drunk Love (2002) and Spanglish (2004). The latter performances won him critical accolades. He reunited with Barrymore in the romantic farce 50 First Dates (2004). In 2007 he appeared in Reign over Me, a dark comedy…
…them the Adam Sandler vehicle Anger Management (2003).
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021574a53916e576d98f4e1f8aadabb8 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Angiosperm-Phylogeny-Group-III | Angiosperm Phylogeny Group III | Angiosperm Phylogeny Group III
…update in 2009 known as APG III, and into another revision in 2016 known as APG IV. The synopsis of flowering-plant classification presented here follows the APG IV system. It is important to recognize that modifications to the APG IV system continue as new data become available.
…euasterid I group of the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group III (APG III) botanical classification system (see angiosperm).
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a50f803a9e5a2797ae463d9f95d1ad31 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Angkasawan | Angkasawan | Angkasawan
…enter the Malaysian spaceflight program, Angkasawan. Angkasawan was the product of a Malaysian-Russian agreement in which Malaysia purchased 18 Russian fighter jets and Russia arranged to train and fly a Malaysian cosmonaut on a mission to the International Space Station (ISS).
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b25c1dc9a8018ba174f7d688c4223f97 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Anglican-religious-community | Anglican religious community | Anglican religious community
Anglican religious community, any of various religious communities for men and for women that first began developing within the Anglican Communion in the 19th century. Although monastic communities were numerous in the pre-Reformation English Church, they were suppressed in the 16th century by Henry VIII when he broke with the Roman Catholic Church. Their revival almost 300 years later was due primarily to the interest and encouragement of some of the leaders of the Oxford Movement, who emphasized the Catholic rather than the Protestant heritage of Anglicanism.
The first community, the Sisterhood of the Holy Cross, was founded in London at Park Village, in 1845. In the following 10 years the Society of the Holy Trinity at Devonport (1845); the Community of St. Mary the Virgin at Wantage, Berkshire (1848); the Community of St. John the Baptist at Clewer, near Windsor (1851); the Community of All Saints, London Colney, Hertfordshire (1851); and the Society of St. Margaret at East Grinstead, Sussex (1855), were founded. Notable among later 19th-century foundations were the Community of the Holy Name, Malvern Link, Worcestershire (1865); the Sisters of Bethany, London (1866); the Sisters of the Church, London (1870); and the Community of the Epiphany, Truro (1883).
Almost all the sisterhoods combined an active life (teaching, nursing, helping in parishes, etc.) with a life of prayer and worship. Anglican sisters were among those who accompanied Florence Nightingale during the Crimean War and took part in the work of raising the standards and status of the nursing profession. In various forms of social and educational work the Anglican sisterhoods offered opportunities of service not readily available to women in mid-19th-century England, but the religious motive predominated in the revival.
Many English sisterhoods opened branch houses abroad, and independent communities were founded in other provinces of the Anglican Communion. In the United States the oldest surviving sisterhood is the Community of St. Mary at Peekskill, New York (1865); in Canada there is the Sisterhood of St. John the Divine (1884), at Willowdale, Ontario, and in Australia the Community of the Holy Name (1886), at Melbourne.
During the 20th century the foundation of new communities continued, though at a slower rate. A number of enclosed communities of contemplative nuns were established both in England and in the United States. A flourishing active community, the Order of the Holy Paraclete, was founded at Whitby, Yorkshire, in 1917.
The first Anglican religious community for men was the Society of St. John the Evangelist (the Cowley Fathers), founded in 1866 at Oxford. Since then numerous other communities or brotherhoods have been founded in England. The largest men’s communities are the Community of the Resurrection (Mirfield Fathers) founded in 1892 at Mirfield, Yorkshire; the Society of the Sacred Mission (Kelham Fathers), at Kelham, Nottinghamshire, founded in 1892; and the Society of St. Francis, Cerne Abbas, Dorset, founded in 1921. An Anglican Benedictine community was established at Pershore in 1914 and moved to Nashdom Abbey, Burnham, Buckinghamshire, in 1926. It has a branch house in the United States. The only indigenous men’s community of any size in the Protestant Episcopal Church in the U.S. is the Community of the Holy Cross, West Park, New York (1881).
In the late 20th century more than 50 Anglican religious communities for men and for women, many with several houses or branches, were in existence. Several English communities have branch houses overseas. In general the communities are not large.
The Anglican Communion has never made provision for religious communities in canonical legislation, and the relations of the communities with the ecclesiastical authorities were at first vague and undefined. Since 1935 it has been possible for those in England to obtain formal recognition from the advisory council on religious communities established for the provinces of Canterbury and York.
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2034af2a94ca0dc0c4efb686e89194d8 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Anglo-American-Chain-of-Command-in-Western-Europe-June-1944-1673115 | Anglo-American Chain of Command in Western Europe, June 1944 | Anglo-American Chain of Command in Western Europe, June 1944
When U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met at the Arcadia Conference (December 1941–January 1942), they began a period of wartime cooperation that, for all the very serious differences that divided the two countries, remains without parallel in military history. Anglo-American cooperation was formally embodied in the Combined Chiefs of Staff, which was not so much a body as a system of consultation, reinforced by frequent conferences, between the British Chiefs of Staff Committee and the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. Between conferences, the British Joint Staff Mission, based in Washington, D.C., maintained contact with the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff on behalf of their counterparts in the United Kingdom.
For the invasion of northwest Europe, the Combined Chiefs created the temporary position of Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force and assigned it to General Dwight D. Eisenhower, an American with a proven ability to work amicably with the often considerable personalities who directed the Allied armies in Europe. Eisenhower’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) had authority over all the branches (air, sea, and land) of the armed forces of all countries whose contribution was necessary to the success of Operation Overlord (the planned Normandy invasion). These were grouped for the invasion under the Allied Naval Expeditionary Force, the Allied Expeditionary Air Force, and the Twenty-first Army Group (the expeditionary ground force)—all commanded by Britons. For the duration of Overlord, the U.S. Strategic Air Forces in Europe and the Royal Air Force Bomber Command were placed directly under the supreme commander’s authority, ensuring the contribution of those very important commands to the overall invasion plan. The European Theater of Operations, U.S. Army, was to direct the gigantic effort of supplying an entire invasion army as it crossed the English Channel and advanced into the Continent. French General Charles de Gaulle, president of the French Committee of National Liberation but by no means the universally acknowledged head of the French government-in-exile, maintained a liaison with SHAEF through the commander of the Free French Forces in Britain.
Below the level of expeditionary force or army group, the various air forces, naval task forces, and armies were divided into British or American commands (the First Canadian Army achieving coequal status during the Normandy campaign). Even at the operations level, however, the cooperation among the fighting units reflected the binational structure of SHAEF and the Combined Chiefs of Staff. In this manner the Anglo-American allies managed to avoid the division of responsibility that was built into the German chain of command and that proved fatal to the Germans’ war effort from D-Day on.
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4e0176819ea1e0b0a3a4d4410c489f13 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Anglo-Saxon | Anglo-Saxon | Anglo-Saxon
Anglo-Saxon, term used historically to describe any member of the Germanic peoples who, from the 5th century ce to the time of the Norman Conquest (1066), inhabited and ruled territories that are today part of England and Wales.
According to St. Bede the Venerable, the Anglo-Saxons were the descendants of three different Germanic peoples—the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. By Bede’s account, those peoples originally migrated from northern Germany to the island of Britain in the 5th century at the invitation of Vortigern, a ruler of Britons, to help defend his kingdom against marauding invasions by the Picts and Scotti, who occupied what is now Scotland. Archaeological evidence suggests that the first migrants from the Germanic areas of mainland Europe included settlers from Frisia and antedated the Roman withdrawal from Britain about 410 ce. Their subsequent settlements in what is now England laid the foundation for the later kingdoms of Essex, Sussex, and Wessex (Saxons); East Anglia, Middle Anglia, Mercia, and Northumbria (Angles); and Kent (Jutes). Ethnically, the Anglo-Saxons actually represented an admixture of Germanic peoples with Britain’s preexisting Celtic inhabitants and subsequent Viking and Danish invaders.
The peoples of each of the various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms spoke distinctive dialects, which evolved over time and together became known as Old English. Within that variety of dialects, an exceptionally rich vernacular literature emerged. Examples include the masterful epic poem Beowulf and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a collection of manuscripts that cover events in the early history of England.
The term Anglo-Saxon seems to have been first used by Continental writers in the late 8th century to distinguish the Saxons of Britain from those of the European continent, whom St. Bede the Venerable had called Antiqui Saxones (“Old Saxons”). The name formed part of a title, rex Angul-Saxonum (“king of the Anglo-Saxons”), which was sometimes used by King Alfred of Wessex (reigned 871–99) and some of his successors. By the time of the Norman Conquest, the kingdom that had developed from the realm of the Anglo-Saxon peoples had become known as England, and Anglo-Saxon as a collective term for the region’s people was eventually supplanted by “English.” For some time thereafter, Anglo-Saxon persisted as an informal synonym for English, but that use diminished as emigrants from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and other areas beyond northern Europe further reshaped Britain’s ethnic composition.
“Anglo-Saxon” continues to be used to refer to a period in the history of Britain, generally defined as the years between the end of Roman occupation and the Norman Conquest. During that period, though, the various peoples commonly grouped together as Anglo-Saxons were not politically unified until the 9th century, and their reign over England was interrupted by 26 years of Danish rule that began in 1016 with the accession of Canute.
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12286215b0eafcb943cf50cc58bb8699 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Angry-Young-Men | Angry Young Men | Angry Young Men
Angry Young Men, various British novelists and playwrights who emerged in the 1950s and expressed scorn and disaffection with the established sociopolitical order of their country. Their impatience and resentment were especially aroused by what they perceived as the hypocrisy and mediocrity of the upper and middle classes.
The Angry Young Men were a new breed of intellectuals who were mostly of working class or of lower middle-class origin. Some had been educated at the postwar red-brick universities at the state’s expense, though a few were from Oxford. They shared an outspoken irreverence for the British class system, its traditional network of pedigreed families, and the elitist Oxford and Cambridge universities. They showed an equally uninhibited disdain for the drabness of the postwar welfare state, and their writings frequently expressed raw anger and frustration as the postwar reforms failed to meet exalted aspirations for genuine change.
The trend that was evident in John Wain’s novel Hurry on Down (1953) and in Lucky Jim (1954) by Kingsley Amis was crystallized in 1956 in the play Look Back in Anger, which became the representative work of the movement. When the Royal Court Theatre’s press agent described the play’s 26-year-old author John Osborne as an “angry young man,” the name was extended to all his contemporaries who expressed rage at the persistence of class distinctions, pride in their lower-class mannerisms, and dislike for anything highbrow or “phoney.” When Sir Laurence Olivier played the leading role in Osborne’s second play, The Entertainer (1957), the Angry Young Men were acknowledged as the dominant literary force of the decade.
Their novels and plays typically feature a rootless, lower-middle or working-class male protagonist who views society with scorn and sardonic humour and may have conflicts with authority but who is nevertheless preoccupied with the quest for upward mobility.
Among the other writers embraced in the term are the novelists John Braine (Room at the Top, 1957) and Alan Sillitoe (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, 1958) and the playwrights Bernard Kops (The Hamlet of Stepney Green, 1956) and Arnold Wesker (Chicken Soup with Barley, 1958). Like that of the Beat movement in the United States, the impetus of the Angry Young Men was exhausted in the early 1960s.
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146efc0f4fea614eb788628def1c20bb | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Animal-Dreams | Animal Dreams | Animal Dreams
In Animal Dreams (1990) a disconnected woman finds purpose and moral challenges when she returns to live in her small Arizona hometown. Pigs in Heaven (1993), a sequel to her first novel, deals with the protagonist’s attempts to defend her adoption of her Native American daughter.…
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6dd82a8b538f05fda5ee8569b48e00c3 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Animal-Enterprise-Protection-Act | Animal Enterprise Protection Act | Animal Enterprise Protection Act
…passage in 1992 of the Animal Enterprise Protection Act (AEPA). The act defined a new legal category of “animal enterprise terrorism” as the intentional “physical disruption” of an animal enterprise (e.g., a factory farm, a slaughterhouse, an animal experimentation laboratory, or a rodeo) that causes economic damage (including loss of…
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28ebda6178e3bad7bc7b7ae2b9969d3d | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Animal-Enterprise-Terrorism-Act | Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act | Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act
In 2005 the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA) expanded the definition of animal enterprise terrorism to include “interfering with” the operations of an animal enterprise, extended protection to third-party enterprises having a relationship to or transactions with an animal enterprise, expanded the definition of animal enterprise to include…
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5f538ca7649b7ea7ffa4706d4c1776f0 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/animal-social-behaviour | Animal social behaviour | Animal social behaviour
Animal social behaviour, the suite of interactions that occur between two or more individual animals, usually of the same species, when they form simple aggregations, cooperate in sexual or parental behaviour, engage in disputes over territory and access to mates, or simply communicate across space.
Social behaviour is defined by interaction, not by how organisms are distributed in space. Clumping of individuals is not a requirement for social behaviour, although it does increase opportunities for interaction. When a lone female moth emits a bouquet of pheromones to attract male potential mates, she is engaging in social behaviour. When a male red deer (Cervus elaphus) gives a loud roar to signal dominance and keep other males away, he is also being social.
Animal social behaviour has piqued the interest of animal behaviorists and evolutionary biologists, and it has also engaged the public, thanks to life science filmmakers who captured the drama and stunning diversity of animal social interactions in documentaries and other media programs.
Social behaviour ranges from simple attraction between individuals to life in complex societies characterized by division of labour, cooperation, altruism, and a great many individuals aiding the reproduction of a relative few. The most widely recognized forms of social behaviour, however, involve interaction within aggregations or groups of individuals. Social behaviours, their adaptive value, and their underlying mechanisms are of primary interest to scientists in the fields of animal behaviour, behavioral ecology, evolutionary psychology, and biological anthropology.
The word social often connotes amicable interaction, accounting for the common misconception that social behaviour always involves cooperation toward some mutually beneficial end. Biologists no longer believe that cooperative behaviours necessarily evolve for the good of the species. Instead, they believe that the unit of natural selection is usually the individual and that social behaviour is fraught with competition. English naturalist Charles Darwin, who first brought evolution by natural selection to the attention of the world, introduced this paradigm for thinking about social behaviour, noting that it is the best competitors within a species, the “fittest” individuals, that survive and reproduce. Once genetics was integrated into this concept of evolution, it became apparent that such individuals will transmit the most copies of their genes to future generations.
Consistent with Darwin’s ideas, social organisms are often seen to be fiercely competitive and aggressive. For example, friendly interactions among children on a playground can quickly dissolve into fierce competition if there are too few balls or swings. In addition, intense competitive interactions resulting in bodily harm can occur even among family members. Social behaviour is designed to enhance an individual’s ability to garner resources and form the alliances that help it to survive and to reproduce. The modern view of social behaviour is that it is a product of the competing interests of the individuals involved. Individuals evolve the capacity to behave selfishly and to cooperate or compete when it benefits them to do so. A delicate balance of cooperative and competitive behaviours is thus expected to characterize animal societies.
Social behaviour encompasses a wide variety of interactions, from temporary feeding aggregations or mating swarms to multigenerational family groups with cooperative brood care. Over the years, there have been many attempts to classify the diversity of social interactions and understand the evolutionary progression of social behaviour.
A series of veteran American entomologists—starting in the 1920s with William Morton Wheeler and continuing into the 1970s with Howard Evans, Charles Michener, and E.O. Wilson—developed a categorization of sociality following two routes, called the parasocial sequence and the subsocial sequence. This classification is based primarily on the involvement of insect parents with their young, whereas classifications of vertebrate sociality are frequently based on spacing behaviour or mating system. Both routes culminate in “eusociality,” a system in which the young are cared for cooperatively and the society is segregated into different castes that provide different services.
In the parasocial sequence, adults of the same generation assist one another to varying degrees. At one end of the spectrum are females of communal species; these females cooperate in nest construction but rear their broods separately. In quasisocial species, broods are attended cooperatively, and each female may still reproduce. Semisocial species also practice cooperative brood care, but they possess within the colony a worker caste of individuals that never reproduce. Eusocial species typically engage in cooperative brood care; in addition, they have distinct castes that perform different functions and an overlap of generations within the colony.
The subsocial sequence, the alternate route to eusociality, involves increasingly close association between females and their offspring. In primitively subsocial species, the female provides direct care for a time but departs before the young emerge as adults. This stage is followed by two intermediate subsocial stages: one where the care of young is extended to the point where the mother is present when her offspring mature, and the other where offspring are retained that assist in the rearing of additional broods. At the eusocial end of this sequence, some mature offspring are differentiated into a permanently sterile worker caste—a stage that mirrors the same eusocial outcome achieved by the parasocial sequence described above.
E.O. Wilson, whose Sociobiology: The New Synthesis provided a blueprint for research in this field when it was published in 1975, felt that general classifications of societies invariably fail because they depend on the qualities chosen to divide species, which vary markedly from group to group. Instead, Wilson compiled a set of 10 essential qualities of sociality, including (1) group size, (2) distributions of different age and sex classes, (3) cohesiveness, (4) amount and pattern of connectedness, (5) “permeability,” or the degree to which societies interact with one another, (6) “compartmentalization,” or the extent to which subgroups operate as discrete units, (7) differentiation of roles among group members, (8) integration of behaviours within groups, (9) communication and information flow, and (10) fraction of time devoted to social behaviour as opposed to individual maintenance. These overlapping qualities of societies provide a good indication of the complexities involved with classifying, much less understanding, the highly varied social behaviour of animals.
While categories of social behaviour can be useful, they can also be confusing and misleading. The current tendency is to view sociality as a multifaceted continuum from simple aggregations to the highly organized and complex levels of social organization found in eusocial species. Biologists interested in sociality focus on how cooperation increases an individual’s genetic legacy, either by increasing its ability to produce offspring directly or by increasing the number of offspring produced by relatives.
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a53b7f0d69daaceaa060f24f5c8afdac | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Anna-Karenina-fictional-character | Anna Karenina | Anna Karenina
Anna Karenina, fictional character, the tragic heroine of Anna Karenina (1875–77) by Leo Tolstoy. The character has been notably portrayed by Greta Garbo (1935; she also starred in a 1927 adaptation, Love) and by Vivien Leigh (1948).
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822d110ecc2df22ca922b41439ecf585 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Anna-Karenina-novel | Anna Karenina | Anna Karenina
Anna Karenina, novel by Leo Tolstoy, published in installments between 1875 and 1877 and considered one of the pinnacles of world literature.
The narrative centres on the adulterous affair between Anna, wife of Aleksey Karenin, and Count Vronsky, a young bachelor. Karenin’s discovery of the liaison arouses only his concern for his own public image. Anna promises discretion for the sake of her husband and young son but eventually becomes pregnant by Vronsky. After the child is born, Anna and the child accompany Vronsky first to Italy and then to his Russian estate. She begins making furtive trips to see her older child and grows increasingly bitter toward Vronsky, eventually regarding him as unfaithful. In desperation she goes to the train station, purchases a ticket, and then impulsively throws herself in front of the incoming train. A parallel love story, involving the difficult courtship and fulfilling marriage of Kitty and Levin, provides a rich counterpoint to the tragedy and is thought to reflect Tolstoy’s own marital experience.
There is an inevitability about the tragic fate that hangs over the adulterous love of Anna and Vronsky. “Vengeance is mine, I will repay” is the epigraph of the novel and the leitmotif of the story. Anna pays not so much because she transgresses the moral code but because she refuses to observe the proprieties customarily exacted in such liaisons by the hypocritical high society to which she belongs.
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36c0ee5490612f9bd47269bd7f4818d6 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Anna-Livia-Plurabelle | Anna Livia Plurabelle | Anna Livia Plurabelle
Anna Livia Plurabelle, fictional character in James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake (1939) who symbolizes the eternal and universal female.
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3d6bad285245024139bed3fc7e73ea1a | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Annie-John | Annie John | Annie John
Annie John (1984) and Lucy (1990) were novels but were autobiographical in nature, as were most of Kincaid’s subsequent works, with an emphasis on mother-daughter relationships. A Small Place (1988), a three-part essay, continued her depiction of Antigua and her rage at its despoliation. Kincaid’s…
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53ae5c291c3b352a297da970ab58a306 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Annou-Prince-and-Peasant | Annou: Prince and Peasant | Annou: Prince and Peasant
…of the first Hebrew novel, Ahavat Ziyyon (1853; Annou: Prince and Peasant), an idyllic historical romance set in the days of the prophet Isaiah. Couched in florid biblical language, it artfully depicts pastoral life in ancient Israel; the book attained immediate popularity and was later translated into several languages.
The first Hebrew novel, Ahavat Ziyyon (1853; “The Love of Zion”), by Abraham Mapu, was a Romantic idyll, in which Mapu, like all Haskala writers, employed phrases culled from the Bible and adapted to the thought the writer wished to express.
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2fc721517b1e752155ef125fdfbc6dba | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Anomoean | Anomoean | Anomoean
Anomoean, (from Greek anomoios, “unlike”), any member of a religious group of the 4th century that represented an extreme form of Arianism (q.v.), a Christian heresy that held that the essential difference between God and Christ was that God had always existed, while Christ was created by God. Aëtius, the founder of the Anomoeans, reasoned that the doctrine carried to its logical conclusion must mean that God and Christ could not be alike. Because agennēsia (“self-existence”) is a part of the essence of God, Christ could not be like God because he lacked this necessary quality. Aëtius’ chief convert and the second leader of the movement was Eunomius, after whose death (c. 394) the Anomoeans soon disappeared.
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464e227b4d4ee3e9dc8327fa1471a950 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/anonymity | Anonymity | Anonymity
First, anonymity prevents people from being isolated or identified, which leads to a feeling of being untouchable and to a loss of a sense of personal responsibility. Le Bon further argued that such loss of control leads to contagion, in which a lack of responsibility spreads…
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7fb9a8c6bafcaaf7f92b2b320b3c8a27 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Anonymous-film-by-Emmerich | Anonymous | Anonymous
In Anonymous (2011), which advanced the theory that the plays attributed to Shakespeare were written by Edward de Vere, 17th earl of Oxford, Redgrave portrayed Elizabeth I. She then appeared as the strong-willed Volumnia in a 2011 film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and played a cancer…
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8cf14f3e42368f908381d37689322137 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Another-America-Otra-America | Another America (Otra America) | Another America (Otra America)
Another America (Otra America) (1991), a poetry collection in English, with a Spanish translation, primarily concerns the struggles of impoverished women against sexual and political abuse, war, and death.
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cac97e22951487d54384de6ae9242126 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Another-Country-motion-picture-1984 | Another Country | Another Country
…Guy Burgess in the play Another Country. In 1984 Firth starred in the film adaptation, though he was cast in a different role. Over the next decade Firth worked steadily, appearing in numerous stage, movie, and television productions. In 1988 he received critical praise for the TV film Tumbledown, in…
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9e9b513cc9f6fa544c7875f291742756 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Another-Day-on-Earth | Another Day on Earth | Another Day on Earth
…vocal album of his own, Another Day on Earth (2005). He returned to the producer’s chair for Paul Simon’s critically lauded Surprise (2006) and Coldplay’s multi-platinum Viva la Vida (2008).
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5bf57b272b06ecd57f9ff7d25a0bd56e | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Another-Part-of-the-Forest-film-by-Gordon | Another Part of the Forest | Another Part of the Forest
…was handed the prestige project Another Part of the Forest (1948), playwright Lillian Hellman’s prequel to The Little Foxes (1941), with the impressive cast of O’Brien, Fredric March, and Dan Duryea.
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38a50937c383e865e96dc88162d243d4 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Another-Place | Another Place | Another Place
For Another Place (1997; at Crosby in Merseyside, England), for example, Gormley placed 100 cast-iron figures facing out to sea over a 2-mile (3.2-kilometre) stretch of beach. For 6 Times (2010; in Edinburgh), he placed six figures along the Water of Leith, four of them partly…
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3e8f1056698247051dd5e2c2287f603e | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Another-Thin-Man | Another Thin Man | Another Thin Man
Another Thin Man (1939) was a more-expected project, and Van Dyke spun another enjoyable confection; that installment included Nick and Nora Charles’s new baby.
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64b29e110610854cf44b700689a9af0c | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Antagonia | Antagonía | Antagonía
…most significant accomplishment, his tetralogy Antagonía, comprises Recuento (1973; “Recounting”), Los verdes de mayo hasta el mar (1976; “May’s Greenery as Far as the Sea”), La cólera de Aquiles (1979; “The Rage of Achilles”), and Teoría del conocimiento (1981; “Theory of Knowledge”), which reveal him as a consummate practitioner of…
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8d0db05f5174dc16c5a129c239cdad74 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Antarctic-Treaty-System | Antarctic Treaty System | Antarctic Treaty System
…agreements are collectively called the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS). The granting of consultative status within the Antarctic Treaty, permitting full participation in its operation with that of the original 12 contracting states, depends on long-term scientific commitment. It began in 1977 with the addition of Poland, followed by West Germany…
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8d635d755f150da51f6a4fe4d89d09e8 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Anthesteria | Anthesteria | Anthesteria
Anthesteria, one of the several Athenian festivals in honour of Dionysus, the wine god, held annually for three days in the month of Anthesterion (February–March) to celebrate the beginning of spring and the maturing of the wine stored at the previous vintage. On the first day (Pithoigia, or “Jar Opening”) libations were offered to Dionysus from the newly opened casks. The second day (Choes, or “Wine Jugs”) was a time of popular merrymaking typified by wine-drinking contests in which even slaves and children participated; but the state performed a secret ceremony in a sanctuary of Dionysus in the Lenaeum, in which the wife of the king archon went through a ceremony of marriage to Dionysus. The fullest description, which omits many details, is found in Apollodorus’s speech “Against Neaera.” On these days, it was believed, the souls of the dead came up from the underworld and walked abroad; people chewed leaves of whitethorn and smeared their doors with tar to protect themselves from evil. The third day (Chytroi, or “Pots”) was a festival of the dead, for which, apparently, pots of seed or bran were offered to the dead.
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a14ffcb96984273950f0f640f6cf5c27 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Anthony-Adverse-fictional-character | Anthony Adverse | Anthony Adverse
Anthony Adverse, fictional character, hero of the historical novel Anthony Adverse (1933) by Hervey Allen. Adverse is an illegitimate but well-born child and the heir to his wealthy grandfather, under whom he apprentices.
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f14b73ccaab94cce510b6e51286ef08f | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Anthony-Blanche | Anthony Blanche | Anthony Blanche
Anthony Blanche, fictional character in the novel Brideshead Revisited (1945) by Evelyn Waugh. Blanche, a homosexual friend of Sebastian Marchmain, is an intellectual and an aesthete whose astute critical faculties fascinate and impress his Oxford classmates.
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ae1f4ce733b7cdae5bed06f489268181 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Antichrist | Antichrist | Antichrist
Antichrist, the polar opposite and ultimate enemy of Christ. According to Christian tradition, he will reign terribly in the period prior to the Last Judgment. The Antichrist first appeared in the epistles of St. John (I John 2:18, 22; I John 4:3; II John 1:7), and the fully developed story of Antichrist’s life and reign is found in medieval texts. As applied to various individuals and institutions for nearly two millennia, Antichrist and precursor of Antichrist have been, and remain, terms of the most intense opprobrium.
The Christian conception of Antichrist was derived from Jewish traditions, particularly The Book of Daniel in the Hebrew Bible. Written about 167 bce, it foretold the coming of a final persecutor who would “speak great words against the most High and wear out the saints of the most High, and think to change times and laws” (7:25). Scholars agree that the author of Daniel was alluding to the contemporary Hellenistic ruler of Palestine, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who attempted to extirpate Judaism. But because Antiochus was not named, later readers could apply the prediction in Daniel to any persecutor. Early Christians applied it to the Roman emperors who persecuted the church, in particular Nero (reigned 54–68 ce).
The four books of the New Testament that fueled Christian belief in Antichrist were the first two epistles of John, the Revelation to John, and the second epistle of Paul to the Thessalonians. The first three of these were written near the end of the 1st century ce; the last was written either by the apostle Paul shortly after 50 ce or by one of Paul’s immediate disciples some 20 or 30 years later. Neither II Thessalonians nor Revelation use the term Antichrist, but both works refer to a coming persecutor who is evidently the same person. The first epistle of John introduces an important distinction between “the” Antichrist who will come and the many antichrists who are already active in the world. This distinction not only enabled believers to denigrate contemporaries as “antichrists” without having to label a single individual as “the” Antichrist but also allowed them to identify the “body of Antichrist” as a collectivity existing in the present but destined to have its day of triumph in the future.
Nevertheless, early Christians tended to emphasize the coming of the one great Antichrist. The Revelation to John refers to this figure as “the Beast from the Abyss” (11:7) and “the Beast from the Sea” (13:1). In the most sustained account of his appearance, II Thessalonians 2:1-12, he is called “the man of sin” and “son of perdition.” He will come at a time of a general apostasy, deceive people with signs and wonders, sit in the temple of God, and claim to be God himself. Finally, he will be defeated by Jesus, who will destroy him by “the spirit of his mouth” and “the brightness of his coming” (2:8).
Because even II Thessalonians is sketchy about the details of Antichrist’s person and the nature of his reign, a succession of biblical commentators and pseudonymous apocalyptic writers from the era of the Church Fathers and the early Middle Ages began to provide the missing features. Their work was integrated into a brief treatise in the 10th century (c. 954) by a monk from Lorraine, Adso of Montier-en-Der, in a letter to Queen Gerberga of France. Adso’s letter became the standard medieval reference work on Antichrist. In the 13th century it was partially supplanted by several chapters on Antichrist in Hugh Ripelin’s extremely popular handbook, Compendium theologicae veritatis (c. 1265; “Compendium of Theological Truth”). Although it was more orderly, Ripelin’s account differed from Adso’s only in minor details.
The medieval view of Antichrist communicated by Adso, Ripelin, and a host of other writers rested on the principle that Antichrist is the parodic opposite of Christ in all things. (Antichrist literally means “opposed to Christ.”) Thus, as Christ was born of a virgin by means of conception by the Holy Spirit, so Antichrist will be born of a whore by means of conception by a diabolical spirit. Although opinions differed as to whether Antichrist’s father will be a man or a demon, in either case Antichrist will be, as commonly noted in the Middle Ages, “full of the devil” from the time of his conception. Both Christ and Antichrist are born of the Jews, but Antichrist will be born of the tribe of Dan—“the viper in the road” (Genesis 49:17)—rather than the tribe of Judah, and in Babylon, not Bethlehem. Like Christ, Antichrist will grow up in obscurity and begin his open “ministry” at age 30, gaining followers by giving signs and performing miracles. The signs and miracles once more are polar opposites of Christ’s, because Antichrist’s supposed miracles will be only tricks.
Antichrist’s triumphant reign (never clearly distinguished from the start of his ministry) will last for three and a half years. Like Christ, Antichrist will come to Jerusalem, but, as the opposite of Christ, he will be enthusiastically hailed and revered by the Jews. During his reign he will rebuild the Temple and sit on the throne of Solomon in a sacrilegious and hideous inversion of just priesthood and just kingship. He will convert the rulers of the earth to his cause and persecute Christians dreadfully. All those who resist his wiles will be tortured, and—as Jesus prophesied in Matthew 24:21—there will be “great suffering, such as has not been from the beginning of the world until now.” The two great prophets Enoch and Elijah, who never died but were spirited away to the earthly paradise, will arrive to preach against the tyrant and comfort the elect, but Antichrist will slay them. At the end of the allotted three and a half years, however, Antichrist will be destroyed by the power of Christ, whereupon, after a very brief interval, there will come the Last Judgment and the end of the world.
One important medieval thinker who departed substantially from the received teachings about Antichrist was the 12th-century Calabrian monk Joachim of Fiore. Joachim formulated a view of successive past and future persecutions of the Christian church that inspired him to propose the appearance of a succession of “antichrists” (e.g., Nero, Muhammad, and Saladin) before the arrival of the great Antichrist. As for the great Antichrist, according to Joachim, he will not be a Jew from “Babylon” but rather the embodiment of the worst evils arising out of Joachim’s own society, preeminently the crimes of heresy and oppression of the church. Lastly, since Joachim expected the coming of a wondrous millennial era on earth between the death of Antichrist and the Last Judgment, he found himself obliged to foretell the coming of another enemy of God, a “final Antichrist.” Although Joachim was vague about the nature of this last antagonist of God, he referred to him as “Gog,” implying that the final Antichrist will be allied with, or identical to, the enemy forces of Gog and Magog, which will appear to do final battle with the saints after the millennium and before the Last Judgment (Revelation 20: 7-9).
The expectation of the imminent reign of Antichrist in the later Middle Ages encouraged the belief among many that his forerunners were already in the ascendant or, indeed, that Antichrist himself had arrived in the person of a given ruler or pope. Such beliefs were attached in particular to the “antipapal” emperor Frederick II (reigned 1212–50) and to a persecutor of ecclesiastical dissidents, Pope John XXII (reigned 1316–34). The tendency to identify a hated contemporary ruler as Antichrist in some cases outlasted the Middle Ages. The Russian tsar Peter the Great (reigned 1689–1725), for example, was named Antichrist by his opponents, the Old Believers. Even in the 20th century some commentators identified Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist dictator, as Antichrist because of his attempt to revive the Roman Empire.
Nevertheless, beginning in the 16th century, the fixation on Antichrist as a coming or present terrible individual gave way to the view of Antichrist as a collective body of evil. This position had been accepted in the abstract by some medieval theologians, but it was made concrete and popular by Martin Luther, who insisted that the institution of the papacy, rather than any given pope, was Antichrist. Modern Protestants have characteristically preferred to conceive of Antichrist as whatever resists or denies the lordship of Christ, and Roman Catholics have become less inclined to identify Antichrist as a specific coming individual.
Vestiges of the medieval Antichrist tradition can be found in contemporary popular culture, as in Hollywood films such as Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Omen (1976) and its sequels. The view of Antichrist as a diabolical institution is also reflected to some extent in the superstition that credit cards and electronic bar codes mysteriously mark innocent people with Antichrist’s sign, the number 666 (Revelation, 13:18).
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2d08db42e348f090b9149fd0acccd615 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/antipasto | Antipasto | Antipasto
Antipasto, in Italian cuisine, a first course or appetizer. In the home, cured or smoked meats and sausages, olives, salted anchovies, sardines, fresh or pickled vegetables, shellfish, peppers, and cheeses are favoured, while restaurant presentations add to these elaborate prepared dishes such as seafood salads, stuffed mushrooms, vitello tonnato (cold braised veal in tuna mayonnaise), and the like.
Antipasto traditionally was believed to stimulate the appetite before the main meal. Particularly in restaurants, the colour and flavour of the foods in antipasto are important considerations for presentation and for pairing with the meal that follows.
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033d90cecd7c87d30e4cac97a3ac43b6 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Anuket | Anuket | Anuket
Anuket, Greek Anukis, in Egyptian religion, the patron deity of the Nile River. Anuket is normally depicted as a beautiful woman wearing a crown of reeds and ostrich feathers and accompanied by a gazelle. She was originally a Nubian deity.
Anuket belonged to a triad of deities worshipped at the great temple at Elephantine, an island in the upper Nile. Alongside Khnum (Khenemu) and Sati, Anuket oversaw the fertility of the lands near the river. Indeed, she was worshipped as the great nourisher of the farms and fields because of the annual inundation of the Nile that deposited the heavy layer of black silt from Upper Egypt and Nubia.
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b3e1adadac29071f5af4f13ad829d14e | https://www.britannica.com/topic/apathy | Apathy | Apathy
Apathy, in Stoic philosophy, condition of being totally free from the pathē, which roughly are the emotions and passions, notably pain, fear, desire, and pleasure. Although remote origins of the doctrine can probably be found in the Cynics (second half of the 4th century bc), it was Zeno of Citium (4th–3rd century bc) who explicitly taught that the pathē were to be extirpated entirely.
Attacks on the Stoics suggesting that they were insensitive to the human condition invoked rejoinders from the later Stoics, some of whom compromised by distinguishing between good and evil pathē. Early Stoics, however, rejected the pathē altogether, breaking with the Aristotelians, who sought a mean between them, and with the Epicureans, who proclaimed pleasure, rightly chosen, to be the only criterion by which to judge an action. One of the greatest of the Middle Stoics (2nd–1st century bc), however, Panaetius, rejected the idea of apathy altogether and reintroduced the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean (or of virtue as a mean between two extremes) and argued (as did Seneca, the 1st-century-ad Roman Stoic philosopher) that some of the goods of this world might be worth pursuing for their own sake.
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587f08e46362026a1f2fe00f2b7961da | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Aphrodite-Greek-mythology | Aphrodite | Aphrodite
Aphrodite, ancient Greek goddess of sexual love and beauty, identified with Venus by the Romans. The Greek word aphros means “foam,” and Hesiod relates in his Theogony that Aphrodite was born from the white foam produced by the severed genitals of Uranus (Heaven), after his son Cronus threw them into the sea. Aphrodite was, in fact, widely worshipped as a goddess of the sea and of seafaring; she was also honoured as a goddess of war, especially at Sparta, Thebes, Cyprus, and other places. However, she was known primarily as a goddess of love and fertility and even occasionally presided over marriage. Although prostitutes considered Aphrodite their patron, her public cult was generally solemn and even austere.
Aphrodite is the ancient Greek goddess of sexual love and beauty, identified with Venus by the Romans. She was known primarily as a goddess of love and fertility and occasionally presided over marriage. Additionally, Aphrodite was widely worshipped as a goddess of the sea and of seafaring; she was also honoured as a goddess of war, especially at Sparta, Thebes, Cyprus, and other places.
The Greek poet Hesiod recounts in his epic Theogony that Aphrodite was born from the white foam produced by the severed genitals of Uranus, the personification of heaven, after his son Cronus threw them into the sea. Hence, the goddess’s name comes from the Greek word aphros, meaning “foam.”
In early Greek art, representations of Aphrodite are fully dressed and without features that differentiate her from other goddesses. Greek sculptors of the 5th century BCE were the first to endow her with unique features. Praxiteles’ statue of Aphrodite, carved for the Cnidians, was the first full-scale female nude, and it later became the model for Hellenistic masterpieces such as the Venus de Milo (2nd century BCE).
Aphrodite was compelled by Zeus to marry Hephaestus, the god of fire. However, they were an imperfect match, and Aphrodite consequently spent time cheating with the god of war, Ares, as well as a slew of mortal lovers, such as the Trojan nobleman Anchises and the youth Adonis.
Aphrodite’s notable divine offspring include those from her affair with Ares, the god of war: Harmonia, the warrior twins Phobos and Deimos, and Eros, the god of love. From her relationship with the mortal Anchises, she became the mother of Aeneas, a mythical hero of Troy and Rome.
Some scholars believe Aphrodite’s worship came to Greece from the East; many of her attributes recall the ancient Middle Eastern goddesses Ishtar and Astarte. Although Homer called her “Cyprian” after the island chiefly famed for her worship, she was already Hellenized by the time of Homer, and, according to Homer, she was the daughter of Zeus and Dione, his consort at Dodona. In Book VIII of the Odyssey, Aphrodite was mismatched with Hephaestus, the lame smith god, and she consequently spent her time philandering with the handsome god of war, Ares (by whom she became the mother of Harmonia, the warrior twins Phobos and Deimos, and Eros, the god of love).
Of Aphrodite’s mortal lovers, the most important were the Trojan shepherd Anchises, by whom she became the mother of Aeneas, and the handsome youth Adonis (in origin a Semitic nature deity and the consort of Ishtar-Astarte), who was killed by a boar while hunting and was lamented by women at the festival of Adonia. The cult of Adonis had underworld features, and Aphrodite was also connected with the dead at Delphi.
Aphrodite’s main centres of worship were at Paphos and Amathus on Cyprus and on the island of Cythera, a Minoan colony, where in prehistoric times her cult probably originated. On the Greek mainland, Corinth was the chief centre of her worship. Her close association with Eros, the Graces (Charites), and the Horae (Seasons) emphasized her role as a promoter of fertility. She was honoured by the Roman poet Lucretius as Genetrix, the creative element in the world. Her epithets Urania (Heavenly Dweller) and Pandemos (Of All the People) were ironically taken by the philosopher Plato (in the Symposium) to refer to intellectual and common love; rather, the title Urania was honorific and applied to certain Asian deities, while Pandemos referred to her standing within the city-state. Among her symbols were the dove, pomegranate, swan, and myrtle.
Representations of Aphrodite in early Greek art are fully dressed and without distinguishing features that differentiate her from other goddesses. She first attained individuality at the hands of the great 5th-century-bce Greek sculptors. Perhaps the most famous of all statues of Aphrodite was carved by Praxiteles for the Cnidians. The first full-scale female nude, it later became the model for such Hellenistic masterpieces as the Venus de Milo (2nd century bce).
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6437536ecd2ce44924e2b4af10c76e33 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Apollo-11 | Apollo 11 | Apollo 11
Apollo 11, U.S. spaceflight during which commander Neil Armstrong and lunar module pilot Edwin (“Buzz”) Aldrin, Jr., on July 20, 1969, became the first people to land on the Moon and walk the lunar surface. Apollo 11 was the culmination of the Apollo program and a massive national commitment by the United States to beat the Soviet Union in putting people on the Moon.
From the time of its launch on July 16, 1969, until the return splashdown on July 24, almost every major aspect of the flight of Apollo 11 was witnessed via television by hundreds of millions of people in nearly every part of the globe. The pulse of humanity rose with the giant, 111-metre- (363-foot-) high, 3,038,500-kg (6,698,700-pound) Saturn V launch vehicle as it made its flawless flight from Pad 39A at Cape Kennedy (now Cape Canaveral), Florida, before hundreds of thousands of spectators. So accurate was the translunar insertion that three of the en route trajectory corrections planned were not necessary. Aboard Apollo 11 were Armstrong, Aldrin, and command module pilot Michael Collins. Their enthusiasm was evident from the beginning, as Armstrong exclaimed, “This Saturn gave us a magnificent ride.…It was beautiful!”
The third stage of the Saturn then fired to start the crew on their 376,400-km (234,000-mile) journey to the Moon. The three astronauts conducted their transposition and docking maneuvers, first turning the command module, Columbia, and its attached service module around and then extracting the lunar module from its resting place above the Saturn’s third stage. On their arrival the astronauts slowed the spacecraft so that it would go into lunar orbit. Apollo 11 entered first an elliptical orbit 114 by 313 km (71 by 194 miles) and then a nearly circular orbit between 100 and 122 km (62 and 76 miles) above the surface of the Moon.
On the morning of July 20, Armstrong and Aldrin crawled from the command module through an interconnecting tunnel into the lunar module, Eagle. Toward the end of the 12th lunar orbit, the Apollo 11 spacecraft became two separate spacecraft: Columbia, piloted by Collins, and Eagle, occupied by Armstrong and Aldrin.
By firing Eagle’s propulsion system, the two astronauts changed from their nearly circular orbit to an elliptical course whose closest approach to the Moon was only 15,000 metres (50,000 feet). At this low point they again fired their engine, this time to undergo the powered descent initiation maneuver. Five times during the descent, the guidance computer triggered an alarm (called “1202” or “1201”) that its memory was full, but NASA simulations before the mission showed that a landing could still happen despite the alarm, and thus Mission Control told the astronauts to continue the descent. At about 150 metres (500 feet) above the surface, Armstrong began maneuvering the craft manually (although the main engine continued under automatic control) to avoid landing in a rock-strewn crater.
For about a minute and a half, Armstrong hovered Eagle, moving it laterally with the reaction control system until he found a clear area on which to descend. Then the contact light went on inside the cockpit, as the 172-cm (68-inch) probes dangling below Eagle’s footpads signaled contact with the ground. One second later the descent rocket engine was cut off, as the astronauts gazed down onto a sheet of lunar soil blown radially in all directions. Armstrong then radioed at 4:17 pm U.S. Eastern Daylight Time (EDT), “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” Eagle had touched down in the Sea of Tranquility, an area selected for its level and smooth terrain.
At 10:56 pm EDT on July 20, Armstrong stepped out onto the lunar soil with the words, “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.” (In the excitement of the moment, Armstrong skipped the “a” in the statement that he had prepared.) He immediately described the surface as “fine and powdery” and said that there was no difficulty moving about. Aldrin joined his companion about 20 minutes later.
During their moon walk of more than two hours, Armstrong and Aldrin set up a device to measure the composition of the solar wind reaching the Moon, a device to receive laser beams from astronomical observatories on Earth to determine the exact distance of the two bodies from one another, and a passive seismometer to measure moonquakes and meteor impacts long after the astronauts had returned home. They also took about 23 kg (50 pounds) of rock and soil samples, took many photographs, and maintained constant communication with mission control in Houston, Texas. After 21 hours 38 minutes on the Moon’s surface, the astronauts used Eagle’s ascent stage to launch it back into lunar orbit. After various maneuvers, Eagle once again docked with Collins in Columbia, and the trip back to Earth began soon afterward.
Splashdown of Apollo 11 occurred in the Pacific Ocean about 1,400 km (900 miles) west of Hawaii on July 24. The astronauts were immediately placed in quarantine in a van on the recovery ship. From there they were flown to the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, where they were transferred into the large, 58-room Lunar Receiving Laboratory. The quarantine lasted 21 days from the time Eagle took off from the Moon; during that period the astronauts were checked for any diseases they might have picked up on the Moon, and the lunar samples were subjected to preliminary analysis.
Columbia is part of the collections of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.
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a09c4a74843a59b65bda9eb1d260b031 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Apollo-15 | Apollo 15 | Apollo 15
…Worden were launched on the Apollo 15 flight. After a 31/2-day trip Scott and Irwin landed on the Moon, at the base of the Apennine Mountains near a gorge called Hadley Rille. Using the Lunar Roving Vehicle, they covered about 28 km (18 miles) on three separate treks and spent…
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73f070f74eb432fd9a3fb426a2352373 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Apollo-7 | Apollo 7 | Apollo 7
…and civilian participant in the Apollo 7 mission (October 11–22, 1968), in which the first crewed flight of Apollo Command and Service modules was made.
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c6fb27e1533342d7f4fe1ba275238196 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Apollo-and-Daphne | Apollo and Daphne | Apollo and Daphne
…to the hallucinatory vision of Apollo and Daphne (1622–24), which was intended to be viewed from one spot as if it were a relief. In his David (1623–24), Bernini depicts the figure casting a stone at an unseen adversary. Several portrait busts that Bernini executed during this period, including that…
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bbf8606ba426d967a3caf854e835fc02 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Apollo-Theater | Apollo Theater | Apollo Theater
Apollo Theater, theatre established in 1913 at 253 West 125th Street in the Harlem district of New York City. It has been a significant venue for African American popular music.
The Apollo was the central theatre on Harlem’s main commercial street, and its position reflects its central role in Harlem’s culture. Designed by New York architect George Keister, the building was leased by Jules Hurtig and Harry Seamon and opened as Hurtig and Seamon’s New (Burlesque) Theater. After a few years it was purchased by a competitor and renamed the 125th Street Apollo Theater. The district surrounding the building was opened up during the 1910s to African Americans making the Great Migration out of the South, and in the 1920s Harlem was transformed into a Black residential and commercial area.
The Apollo was again under new ownership in 1932; burlesque shows began to give way to musical revues, and the theatre’s new owners began to tailor shows to the area’s most recent residents. The building opened its doors to African Americans for the first time on January 26, 1934. That year the long-standing weekly talent show called Amateur Night at the Apollo was born, and one of its early winners was the young Ella Fitzgerald. These Wednesday night shows became legendary, not only for the individuals and groups discovered there (including Lena Horne, Sam Cooke, the Orioles, Marvin Gaye, James Brown, and many others) but also for the highly sophisticated and critical audience that attended. Many performers—including Brown, Moms Mabley, B.B. King, and Clyde McPhatter—recorded live albums at the theatre; these recordings document the Apollo’s trademark performer-audience dialogue.
In addition to introducing a vast number of rising stars, the Apollo quickly became a vital stop for any Black entertainer, and virtually every major African American musical act performed there at least once—as did several white acts (notably Buddy Holly), who often were booked because they were assumed to be Black. The management maintained a policy of alternating live stage shows with B movies (allegedly to clear the house). The Apollo was the pinnacle of the “chitlin circuit” of venues—including the Regal Theater in Chicago and the Howard Theater in Washington, D.C.—that catered to African American audiences. As a show of respect for its legacy, the building was left untouched during the riots of the 1960s. In 1977 the shows were discontinued, and the theatre was operated (unsuccessfully) as a movie theatre. A year later the building was closed. Purchased by investors in 1981, the Apollo received landmark status in 1983, was renovated, and was reopened to the public in 1985.
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a7ba1bb0e3e3cc70eca600d3e9b1581c | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Appalachian-Spring | Appalachian Spring | Appalachian Spring
Appalachian Spring, ballet by Aaron Copland, first performed in Washington, D.C., on October 30, 1944. The ballet, which won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1945, contains some of the composer’s most familiar music, particularly his set of variations on the Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts.” Appalachian Spring was commissioned in 1942 by the American patron of the arts Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, who requested a new ballet for the dancer and choreographer Martha Graham.
The ballet depicts the day of a wedding celebration at a Pennsylvania farmhouse in the early 20th century. It opens at dawn with a gentle theme for strings and winds. The characters are introduced: the revivalist preacher, the pioneer woman, the young couple to be married, and the preacher’s followers. There is a lively general dance, then a prayer scene, and then a pas de deux danced by the young couple.
The sweet interlude erupts into joyous dancing as the wedding is celebrated. Still, the couple remain apprehensive about their new life, and the music carries a sombre undertone. Only the strength of their older neighbours and the faith of a revivalist meeting (conveyed by Copland’s direct quotation of the hymn “Simple Gifts”) provide reassurance. At last, taking courage from those around them, the bride and groom stand in their new home. Copland’s score concludes as serenely as it began, ending the day with the same chords with which dawn was evoked.
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94369601d4df0ddcf19c4758ede4de86 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/appetizer | Appetizer | Appetizer
Appetizer, food eaten to pique the appetite or to moderate the hunger stimulated by drink. Cocktails, especially apéritifs, the characteristic “dryness” of which allegedly stimulates the appetite, are customarily served with appetizers. Hors d’oeuvres, small portions of savoury foods, often highly seasoned, and canapés, small pieces of bread, crackers, or croutons with various toppings, are the classic appetizer categories.
The Scandinavian smorgasbord, Spanish tapas, Greek meze, Egyptian mazza, and Russian zakuska are all elaborate appetizer displays offering many dishes, with traditional beverage counterpoints, e.g., vodka or sherry. Many cuisines offer a mixed hors d’oeuvre, of which the Italian antipasto may be the best-known, made up of such foods as olives, nuts, cheese, sausage, peppers, fish, raw vegetables, and eggs. Crudités are raw or barely cooked vegetables, often served with a dip or sauce.
Because appetizers are intended to be provocative, they enable the diner to enjoy foods that are too pronounced in taste or too rich to be eaten in larger quantities.
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41703eabc798da4d968b61fc7d18f18a | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Apple-Inc | Apple Inc. | Apple Inc.
Apple Inc., formerly Apple Computer, Inc., American manufacturer of personal computers, smartphones, tablet computers, computer peripherals, and computer software. It was the first successful personal computer company and the popularizer of the graphical user interface. Headquarters are located in Cupertino, California.
Apple Inc. had its genesis in the lifelong dream of Stephen G. Wozniak to build his own computer—a dream that was made suddenly feasible with the arrival in 1975 of the first commercially successful microcomputer, the Altair 8800, which came as a kit and used the recently invented microprocessor chip. Encouraged by his friends at the Homebrew Computer Club, a San Francisco Bay area group centred around the Altair, Wozniak quickly came up with a plan for his own microcomputer. In 1976, when the Hewlett-Packard Company, where Wozniak was an engineering intern, expressed no interest in his design, Wozniak, then 26 years old, together with a former high-school classmate, 21-year-old Steve Jobs, moved production operations to the Jobs family garage. Jobs and Wozniak named their company Apple. For working capital, Jobs sold his Volkswagen minibus and Wozniak his programmable calculator. Their first model was simply a working circuit board, but at Jobs’s insistence the 1977 version was a stand-alone machine in a custom-molded plastic case, in contrast to the forbidding steel boxes of other early machines. This Apple II also offered a colour display and other features that made Wozniak’s creation the first microcomputer that appealed to the average person.
Though he was a brash business novice whose appearance still bore traces of his hippie past, Jobs understood that in order for the company to grow, it would require professional management and substantial funding. He convinced Regis McKenna, a well-known public relations specialist for the semiconductor industry, to represent the company; he also secured an investment from Michael Markkula, a wealthy veteran of the Intel Corporation who became Apple’s largest shareholder and an influential member of Apple’s board of directors. The company became an instant success, particularly after Wozniak invented a disk controller that allowed the addition of a low-cost floppy disk drive that made information storage and retrieval fast and reliable. With room to store and manipulate data, the Apple II became the computer of choice for legions of amateur programmers. Most notably, in 1979 two Bostonians—Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston—introduced the first personal computer spreadsheet, VisiCalc, creating what would later be known as a “killer app” (application): a software program so useful that it propels hardware sales.
While VisiCalc opened up the small-business and consumer market for the Apple II, another important early market was primary educational institutions. By a combination of aggressive discounts and donations (and an absence of any early competition), Apple established a commanding presence among educational institutions, contributing to its platform’s dominance of primary-school software well into the 1990s.
Apple’s profits and size grew at a historic rate: by 1980 the company netted over $100 million and had more than 1,000 employees. Its public offering in December was the biggest since 1956, when the Ford Motor Company had gone public. (Indeed, by the end of 1980, Apple’s valuation of nearly $2 billion was greater than Ford’s.) However, Apple would soon face competition from the computer industry’s leading player, International Business Machines Corporation. IBM had waited for the personal computer market to grow before introducing its own line of personal computers, the IBM PC, in 1981. IBM broke with its tradition of using only proprietary hardware components and software and built a machine from readily available components, including the Intel microprocessor, and used DOS (disk operating system) from the Microsoft Corporation. Because other manufacturers could use the same hardware components that IBM used, as well as license DOS from Microsoft, new software developers could count on a wide IBM PC-compatible market for their software. Soon the new system had its own killer app: the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet, which won an instant constituency in the business community—a market that the Apple II had failed to penetrate.
Apple had its own plan to regain leadership: a sophisticated new generation of computers that would be dramatically easier to use. In 1979 Jobs had led a team of engineers to see the innovations created at the Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto (California) Research Center (PARC). There they were shown the first functional graphical user interface (GUI), featuring on-screen windows, a pointing device known as a mouse, and the use of icons, or pictures, to replace the awkward protocols required by all other computers. Apple immediately incorporated these ideas into two new computers: Lisa, released in 1983, and the lower-cost Macintosh, released in 1984. Jobs himself took over the latter project, insisting that the computer should be not merely great but “insanely great.” The result was a revelation—perfectly in tune with the unconventional, science-fiction-esque television commercial that introduced the Macintosh during the broadcast of the 1984 Super Bowl—a $2,500 computer unlike any that preceded it.
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7e743044b8cabc598fc044fcc970b90b | https://www.britannica.com/topic/April-Fools-Day | April Fools' Day | April Fools' Day
April Fools’ Day, also called All Fools’ Day, in most countries the first day of April. It received its name from the custom of playing practical jokes on this day—for example, telling friends that their shoelaces are untied or sending them on so-called fools’ errands. Although the day has been observed for centuries, its true origins are unknown and effectively unknowable. It resembles festivals such as the Hilaria of ancient Rome, held on March 25, and the Holi celebration in India, which ends on March 31.
Some have proposed that the modern custom originated in France, officially with the Edict of Roussillon (promulgated in August 1564), in which Charles IX decreed that the new year would no longer begin on Easter, as had been common throughout Christendom, but rather on January 1. Because Easter was a lunar and therefore moveable date, those who clung to the old ways were the “April Fools.” Others have suggested that the timing of the day may be related to the vernal equinox (March 21), a time when people are fooled by sudden changes in the weather.
There are variations between countries in the celebration of April Fools’ Day, but all have in common an excuse to make someone play the fool. In France, for example, the fooled person is called poisson d’avril (“April fish”), perhaps in reference to a young fish and hence to one that is easily caught; it is common for French children to pin a paper fish to the backs of unsuspecting friends. In Scotland the day is Gowkie Day, for the gowk, or cuckoo, a symbol of the fool and the cuckold, which suggests that it may have been associated at one time with sexual license; on the following day signs reading “kick me” are pinned to friends’ backs. In many countries newspapers and the other media participate—for example, with false headlines or news stories.
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38c508b5fbba6eadfd59a68967d850f0 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/apsara | Apsara | Apsara
Apsara, in Indian religion and mythology, one of the celestial singers and dancers who, together with the gandharvas, or celestial musicians, inhabit the heaven of the god Indra, the lord of the heavens. Originally water nymphs, the apsaras provide sensual pleasure for both gods and men. They have been beautifully depicted in sculpture and painting in India and throughout areas of South and Southeast Asia influenced by Hinduism and Buddhism. Notable examples are the 5th–6th-century frescoes at Ajanta in India and at Sigiriya in Sri Lanka and the sculptures and bas-reliefs decorating the temples of Angkor, Cambodia.
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673bbad2b15c1dcd7470916e55955697 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Arab-Legion | Arab Legion | Arab Legion
Arab Legion, Arabic al-Jaysh al-ʿArabī, police force raised in 1923 by British Lieut. Col. Frederick Gerard Peake (who had served with T.E. Lawrence’s Arab forces in World War I), in what was then the British protectorate of Transjordan, to keep order among Transjordanian tribes and to safeguard Transjordanian villagers from Bedouin raids. Peake’s second in command, Maj. (later Gen.) Sir John Bagot Glubb, organized the Desert Patrol, a largely Bedouin branch of the legion, in the early 1930s. In 1939 Glubb Pasha, as he came to be known, became the legion’s commander and transformed it into one of the most effective military forces in the Arab world. At the end of the first of the Arab-Israeli wars (1948–49), the Arab Legion, with some 4,500 men available for combat from its total force of 6,000, was the only Arab army that had been able to retain any Palestinian territory against the Israelis. King ʿAbdullāh of Transjordan later annexed those portions, which included Jerusalem, Hebron, and Nāblus. In April 1949 he directed that the official name of the country be changed to the Hāshimite Kingdom of Jordan.
Even after Jordan proclaimed its independence from Britain, the Arab Legion remained under Glubb’s command. Nationalist sentiment in the country grew, however, with much of it focusing on the legion’s image of dependency upon the British—sustained by Glubb and his fellow British officers—as well as the accompanying lack of real opportunity for Jordanians in the corps. King Ḥussein, who came into power in 1953, relieved Glubb of his command on March 1, 1956. The legion was nationalized and soon placed under the command of ʿAlī Abū Nawwār, Ḥussein’s principal aide-de-camp. In that same year the Arab Legion, which was a volunteer army, merged with the Jordanian National Guard, a conscripted force, to form a unified Jordanian army.
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3cc223ed4c6734a34b636fea3f7627e0 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Arabian-religion | Arabian religion | Arabian religion
Arabian religion, beliefs of Arabia comprising the polytheistic beliefs and practices that existed before the rise of Islam in the 7th century ce. Arabia is here understood in the broad sense of the term to include the confines of the Syrian desert. The religion of Palmyra, which belongs to the Aramaic sphere, is excluded from this account. The monotheistic religions that had already spread in Arabia before the arrival of Islam are also mentioned briefly. For historical background, see Arabia, history of: History and cultural development: Pre-Islamic Arabia, to the 7th century ce.
In the polytheistic religions of Arabia most of the gods were originally associated with heavenly bodies, to which were ascribed powers of fecundity, protection, or revenge against enemies. Aside from a few deities common to various populations, the pantheons show a marked local particularism. But many religious practices were in general use. The study of these practices is instructive in view of their similarities with those of the biblical world and also with those of the world of Islam, for, while firmly repudiating the idolatry of the pre-Islamic period, which it calls the “Age of Ignorance” (Jāhiliyyah), Islam has nevertheless taken over, in a refined form, some of its practices.
Knowledge of pre-Islamic Arabia rests mainly on original archaeological and epigraphic data from the region itself. Countless pre-Islamic sites are scattered over the whole Arabian Peninsula: ancient lines of circles of raised stones, cairns, graveyards, and so on. In addition there are more recent constructions such as fortified towns and ruins of temples and irrigation systems. Many rock faces are covered with incised drawings. The oldest drawings, barely visible under a dark patina, date back to several millennia bce and provide evidence, for instance, of an ancient cult for the bull and the ostrich. These ancient drawings also depict peculiar ritual scenes that refer to a still obscure mythology. More explicit and much later (at least no earlier than the end of the 2nd millennium bce) are tens of thousands of alphabetic rock graffiti in ancient Arabian dialects, written in related local South Semitic alphabets. These graffiti were clustered predominantly along the natural routes followed by nomads and caravaneers, as well as less numerous monumental inscriptions from the sites formerly occupied by a sedentary population.
The written graffiti are short inscriptions scratched on the rock. The author gives his name and his patronymic and/or his tribal affiliation and genealogy. Short messages, such as a description of an incident, a sad evocation of a dead relative, or an invocation to a god, may follow. Thanks to their considerable number, such texts, which may be rather insignificant in themselves, provide valuable information on the gods and their attributes and on their worshipers.
The monumental inscriptions are much more elaborate and meaningful, both because they belong to the complex institutions of a sedentary culture and because they appear in an archaeological context. They are carefully engraved, so that the state of evolution of the script allows them to be dated approximately, even when no explicit date is given. They are utilitarian in character and are usually concerned with the construction of buildings, the dedication of objects to a god, or arrangements relating to irrigation. They may also describe military campaigns. So far only traces of a true religious literature have been recovered. But several specimens of a hitherto unknown type of document, excavated since 1970 in Yemen, contradict the unilateral character of the inscriptions. These are records from private archives (personal letters, contracts, and so on), finely engraved in a cursive writing on small wooden sticks. Iconographic documents such as statues and reliefs, seals, and coins also reveal aspects of the religion.
Yet another source is the Muslim tradition. Next to the pre-Islamic poetry, belatedly put into writing, it comprises the Qurʾān, the sacred book of the Muslims transmitted by its Prophet Muhammad, which takes a stand against idolatry. Historical traditions have been transmitted by early Muslim annalists and geographers; more specific data on the ancient folklore and religion appear, for instance, in “The Book of the Idols” (Kitāb al-aṣnām), by the Iraqi genealogist Ibn al-Kalbī (8th–9th century ce), and in “The Crown” (al-Iklīl), by the Yemeni encyclopaedist and geographer al-Hamdānī (9th–10th century ce), which describes the pre-Islamic antiquities of Yemen.
External sources are scanty: Arabia has remained little known to its neighbours. From the 9th to the 7th century bce Assyrian kings report their campaigns against North Arabian kings (or queens) and tribes and occasionally name their gods. The annals of Sargon for the year 718 bce and those of his son Sennacherib name two successive sovereigns of Sabaʾ who sent them a “tribute” of aromatics. The Book of Kings of the Bible describes the legendary visit in Jerusalem of a queen of Sheba, bringing presents of gold and frankincense, during the reign of Solomon (10th century bce). In the middle of the 6th century bce the Neo-Babylonian king Nabu-naʾid (Nabonidus) conquered the oasis of Taymāʾ in the Hejaz (al-Ḥijāz). He boasts of having settled populations from Babylonia there and in neighbouring oases such as Dedān, Khaybar, and Yathrib (Medina), which are known to have been inhabited since ancient times by Jewish populations. It is quite probable that Jews of the Babylonian Exile were among those forced settlers and initiated at that time the Jewish presence in Arabia.
Some classical authors, from Herodotus (5th century bce) to Claudius Ptolemy (2nd century ce), provide information on the religion of the Arabs and on the geography of the Arabian Peninsula. Several Byzantine authors report conflicts between Jews and Christians in Yemen in the 6th century ce.
For many subsequent centuries Arabia remained practically closed to European penetration. Important discoveries of monuments and inscriptions occurred only from about the middle of the 19th century. It was only after World War II, and indeed mostly since the late 1970s, that major archaeological surveys and excavations began in various parts of the peninsula.
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51c84494a2a788ead48cb76adfbd3dfe | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Aramis-fictional-character | Aramis | Aramis
Aramis, fictional character, one of the swashbuckling heroes of The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas père. With the other two musketeers, Athos and Porthos, Aramis fights against various enemies, notably Cardinal Richelieu, during the reigns of the French kings Louis XIII and Louis XIV.
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edab7c57a655a20b8a33c3c0cf720060 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/arbitrage | Arbitrage | Arbitrage
Arbitrage, business operation involving the purchase of foreign exchange, gold, financial securities, or commodities in one market and their almost simultaneous sale in another market, in order to profit from price differentials existing between the markets. Opportunities for arbitrage may keep recurring because of the working of market forces. Arbitrage generally tends to eliminate price differentials between markets. Whereas in less developed countries arbitrage can consist of the buying and selling of commodities in different villages within the country, in highly developed countries the term is generally used to refer to international operations involving foreign-exchange rates, short-term interest rates, prices of gold, and prices of securities.
Foreign-exchange arbitrage, confined to spot-exchange markets—in which exchange is bought and sold for immediate delivery—may involve two or more exchange centres (two-point arbitrage or multiple-point arbitrage). For example, assume that Country A’s sovereign is exchanging at two to the dollar in New York City, while Country B’s franc is valued at five to the dollar. Logically, Country A’s sovereign should exchange at two sovereigns to five francs. But for some reason banks in Country B are paying four francs for two sovereigns. A New York City operator with $100,000 at his disposal may then make three moves: (1) buy 500,000 francs in New York City in the form of an electronic transfer to his account in Country B; (2) instruct his correspondent in Country B to use a similar amount of francs to buy 250,000 of Country A’s sovereigns at the going rate of four francs for two sovereigns, in the form of an electronic transfer to his account in Country A; and (3) sell the same amount of sovereigns in New York City at two to the dollar for a total of $125,000, or a profit of $25,000. Foreign exchange operators will continue to do this until the heavy demand for francs in New York City has raised their price and eliminated the profit.
Opportunities for interest arbitrage arise when the money rates differ among countries. Gold arbitrage and securities arbitrage operate in principle very much like commodity arbitrage in the domestic market, except that in the two former cases exchange rates are important, either because funds must be remitted abroad for the operation or because the proceeds must be brought home at the end of the operation.
With the increase in corporate mergers and takeovers in the 1980s, a form of stock speculation called risk arbitrage arose. It was based on the fact that a company or corporate raider, when trying to merge with or purchase a corporation, usually must offer to buy that company’s stock at a price 30 or 40 percent higher than the current market price, and the target company’s price usually rises to near the offered price on the open market once the takeover attempt has been publicly announced. Risk arbitrageurs try to identify in advance those companies that are targeted for a takeover; they then buy blocks of the company’s stock before a tender offer has been announced and sell that stock after the merger or takeover has been completed, thus realizing large profits. The risk is that the merger or takeover attempt will not succeed, in which case the stock price usually falls back down again, thus incurring large losses for the arbitrageur.
Risk arbitrageurs’ activities can either facilitate or hinder the efforts of corporate raiders and investment banks to consummate a takeover attempt, and there are temptations for those parties to communicate advance knowledge of their takeover attempts to arbitrageurs, who can then speculate in the target company’s stock with a minimum of risk. This is a form of insider trading and is illegal in the United States and some other countries. Such was the case with the best known American arbitrageur, Ivan Boesky, who, while under government investigation in 1986, admitted that he had engaged in some highly profitable insider trading and was fined $100,000,000 as a consequence.
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4e94a3e1771e5bd166dfe0ac0c447444 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Arbor-Day | Arbor Day | Arbor Day
Arbor Day, holiday observed in many countries by planting trees. It was first proposed in the 19th century by J. Sterling Morton, an American journalist and politician, who famously wrote, “Other holidays repose upon the past; Arbor Day proposes for the future.” Arbor Day is observed in the United States on Friday, April 30, 2021.
Morton, the editor of a Nebraska newspaper, often wrote agricultural articles and shared his passion for trees with his readers. There were relatively few trees in the state at the time, and for several years Morton proposed such a holiday to encourage his fellow Nebraskans to plant trees. He believed that trees would serve as effective windbreaks, protecting crops from erosion and overexposure to the sun, and would provide fuel and building materials. The first Arbor Day celebration was held in Nebraska on April 10, 1872, and more than one million trees were planted. During the 1870s several U.S. states established Arbor Day as a holiday, and in 1885 Nebraska declared J. Sterling Morton’s birthday, April 22, as the date of the holiday. In the 1880s American schools typically observed the day by planting trees as memorials of historical events and in honour of famous people.
In the United States, Arbor Day is now most commonly observed on the last Friday in April, though some states have moved the date to coincide with the best tree planting weather. For example, Arbor Day in Florida is observed on the third Friday in January, while in Alaska it is celebrated on the third Monday in May. Many other countries also observe the holiday but often on a different day and under a different name.
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2fd51329d24924fad1f58789c7690d16 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Archduke-Trio | Archduke Trio | Archduke Trio
Archduke Trio, byname of Piano Trio No. 7 in B-flat Major, Op. 97, German Erzherzog-Trio or Erzherzogtrio, trio for piano, violin, and cello by Ludwig van Beethoven, which premiered on April 11, 1814, in Vienna. The premiere of the Archduke Trio was one of Beethoven’s final concert performances as a pianist, because of his increasing deafness. Dedicated to Archduke Rudolf of Austria—Beethoven’s benefactor, student, and friend—it was the last of Beethoven’s piano trios, and it remains one of his best-known chamber works.
The composer himself was the pianist at the premiere, which was given as part of a charity concert in Vienna. It was one of Beethoven’s final concert appearances as a performer, for his increasing deafness made it virtually impossible for him to play. Some observers at the premiere commented on a lack of clarity and precision in his technique, yet the composition itself was roundly praised, and the composer’s friends recounted later that the experience led him to discontinue public performances.
Structured in four movements, rather than three as was more customary for chamber works, the trio is in grand concept almost a symphony for three musicians, more than just a trio. Its first movement is a majestic sonata form in which the piano is often the most prominent of the players. Melodies often begin in the piano before moving to one or the other of the strings for further elaboration. The second movement is a carefree scherzo in which the strings begin with dancelike themes that only belatedly move to the piano. Its middle section is more darkly dramatic, before the return of the playful opening theme. A serene and songlike andante, with initial focus upon the piano, appears with the third movement. Nimbler lines occupy the central section of that movement, though sorrowful moods dominate the movement’s closing. Those sorrows are quickly dispelled by the playful, almost jolly aura of the final movement.
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1ea5e5584220e96ff77becca253977dd | https://www.britannica.com/topic/architecture/Architectural-planning | Architectural planning | Architectural planning
The architect usually begins to work when the site and the type and cost of a building have been determined.
The site involves the varying behaviour of the natural environment that must be adjusted to the unvarying physical needs of human beings; the type is the generalized form established by society that must be adjusted to the special use for which the building is required; the cost implies the economics of land, labour, and materials that must be adjusted to suit a particular sum.
Thus, planning is the process of particularizing and, ultimately, of harmonizing the demands of environment, use, and economy. This process has a cultural as well as a utilitarian value, for in creating a plan for any social activity the architect inevitably influences the way in which that activity is performed.
The natural environment is at once a hindrance and a help, and the architect seeks both to invite its aid and to repel its attacks. To make buildings habitable and comfortable, the architect must control the effects of heat, cold, light, air, moisture, and dryness and foresee destructive potentialities such as fire, earthquake, flood, and disease.
The methods of controlling the environment considered here are only the practical aspects of planning. They are treated by the architect within the context of the expressive aspects. The placement and form of buildings in relation to their sites, the distribution of spaces within buildings, and other planning devices discussed below are fundamental elements in the aesthetics of architecture.
The arrangement of the axes of buildings and their parts is a device for controlling the effects of sun, wind, and rainfall. The sun is regular in its course; it favours the southern and neglects the northern exposures of buildings in the Northern Hemisphere, so that it may be captured for heat or evaded for coolness by turning the axis of a plan toward or away from it. Within buildings, the axis and placement of each space determines the amount of sun it receives. Orientation may control air for circulation and reduce the disadvantages of wind, rain, and snow, since in most climates the prevailing currents can be foreseen. The characteristics of the immediate environment also influence orientation: trees, land formations, and other buildings create shade and reduce or intensify wind, while bodies of water produce moisture and reflect the sun.
Planning may control the environment by the design of architectural forms that may modify the effects of natural forces. For example, overhanging eaves, moldings, projections, courts, and porches give shade and protection from rain. Roofs are designed to shed snow and to drain or preserve water. Walls control the amount of heat lost to the exterior or retained in the interior by their thickness and by the structural and insulating materials used in making them. Walls, when properly sealed and protected, are the chief defense against wind and moisture. Windows are the principal means of controlling natural light; its amount, distribution, intensity, direction, and quality are conditioned by their number, size, shape, and placement and by the characteristics of translucent materials (e.g., thickness, transparency, texture, colour). But the planning of fenestration is influenced by other factors, such as ventilation and heating. Since most translucent materials conduct heat more readily than the average wall, windows are used sparingly in extreme climates. Finally, since transparent windows are the medium of visual contact between the interior and exterior, their design is conditioned by aesthetic and practical demands.
Colour has a practical planning function as well as an expressive quality because of the range of its reflection and its absorption of solar rays. Since light colours reflect heat and dark colours absorb it, the choice of materials and pigments is an effective tool of environmental control.
The choice of materials is conditioned by their own ability to withstand the environment as well as by properties that make them useful to human beings. One of the architect’s jobs is to find a successful solution to both conditions; to balance the physical and economic advantages of wood against the possibility of fire, termites, and mold, the weather resistance of glass and light metals against their high thermal conductivity, and many similar conflicts. The more violent natural manifestations, such as heavy snow loads, earthquakes, high winds, and tornadoes, are controlled by special technical devices in regions where they are prevalent.
Any number of these controls may be out of reach of the planner for various reasons. The urban environment, for example, restricts freedom of orientation and design of architectural forms and creates new control problems of its own: smoke, dirt, noise, and odours.
The control of the environment through the design of the plan and the outer shell of a building cannot be complete, since extremes of heat and cold, light, and sounds penetrate into the interior, where they can be further modified by the planning of spaces and by special conditioning devices.
Temperature, light and sound are all subject to control by the size and shape of interior spaces, the way in which the spaces are connected, and the materials employed for floors, walls, ceilings, and furnishings. Hot air may be retained or released by the adjustment of ceiling heights and sources of ventilation. Light reflects in relation to the colour and texture of surfaces and may be reduced by dark, rough walls and increased by light, smooth ones. Sounds are transmitted by some materials and absorbed by others and may be controlled by the form of interiors and by the use of structural or applied materials that by their density, thickness, and texture amplify or restrict sound waves.
Conditioning devices played only a small part in architecture before the introduction of mechanical and electrical systems in the 19th century. The fireplace was almost the only method of temperature control (though the ancient Romans anticipated the modern water system for radiant heating); fuel lamps and candles had to be movable and were rather in the sphere of furnishings than of architecture; the same is true of the tapestries and hangings used for acoustical purposes and to block drafts.
Today, heating, insulation, air conditioning, lighting, and acoustical methods have become basic parts of the architectural program. These defenses and comforts of industrialization control the environment so efficiently that the contemporary architect is free to use or to discard many of the traditional approaches to site and interior planning.
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3adf98a2c55cdf9dc5108c21c4b904df | https://www.britannica.com/topic/architecture/Methods | Methods | Methods
The two types of wall are load bearing, which supports the weight of floors and roofs, and nonbearing, which at most supports its own weight.
The load-bearing wall of masonry is thickened in proportion to the forces it has to resist: its own load, the load of floors, roofs, persons, etc., and the lateral forces of arches, vaults, wind, etc., that may cause it to crack or buckle. Its thickness often can be reduced at the top, because loads accumulate toward the base; in high buildings this is done by interior or exterior setbacks at the floor level of upper stories. Walls that must resist lateral forces are thickened either along the whole length or at particular points where the force is concentrated. The latter method is called buttressing. Doors and windows weaken the resistance of the wall and divert the forces above them to the parts on either side, which must be thickened in proportion to the width of the opening. In multistory buildings, windows—unless they are very small—must be placed one above the other so as to leave uninterrupted vertical masses of wall between them to transfer loads directly to the ground. The number of openings that can be used depends on the strength of the masonry and the stresses in the wall. Walls in light, wood-framed structures and in reinforced-concrete construction may have a bearing function also. But the nature of the material admits other means of resisting forces than the increase of mass.
The placement of walls is determined by the type of support for floors and roofs. The commonest support is the beam, which must be jointed to walls at both ends; consequently, its maximum permissible length establishes the distance between bearing walls. All floors and coverings are most easily supported on straight, parallel walls except the dome (see below Dome).
Excluding the independent garden variety, the nonbearing wall appears only where loads are carried by other members, as in heavy timber and other skeletal structures. Modern steel and reinforced-concrete frames require exterior walls only for shelter and sometimes dispense with them on the ground floor to permit easier access. Since the wall rests or hangs upon members of the frame, it becomes a curtain or screen and admits treatment in any durable, weather-resisting material. Traditional materials are often used, but light walls of glass, plastic, metal alloys, wood products, etc., can be equally efficient. This freedom of choice extends also to the form of walls and offers greatly expanded opportunities for creative expression.
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0188c1435fcebd97ffde5c466a95282d | https://www.britannica.com/topic/architecture/Texture | Texture | Texture
Texture plays a dual role in architecture: it expresses something of the quality of materials, and it gives a particular quality to light. Although one absorbs both qualities simultaneously by eye, the first has tactile, the second visual associations.
Specific tactile textures are peculiar to every material by virtue of its manufacture or natural composition, but they may be altered to produce a variety of expressive qualities. Any stone may be used in its natural, irregular state, or it may be chiselled in a rough or smooth texture or highly polished to convey a range of meanings from vigour to refinement.
Visual textures are produced by the patterns given to the lighting of the surface both through the way the materials are worked (e.g., vertical or horizontal chiselling of stone) and through the way they are employed in building (e.g., vertical or horizontal boarding, projection and recession of courses of brick). Like all patterns, visual textures create associations of movement, giving rhythm to the surface.
A single texture is rarely employed in building. The variety of materials and treatments typically produces a complex of textures that must be composed and harmonized like the forms and spaces of architecture into a consistent expressive whole.
Since colour is a characteristic of all building materials, it is a constant feature of architecture. But building materials are selected primarily for their structural value, and their colours are not always suited to expressive requirements; thus, other materials chosen for their colour are frequently added to the surface. These include pigments, which usually preserve the texture of the original surface, and veneers of stone, wood, and a variety of manufactured products that entirely alter the surface character.
But colour, regardless of how it is produced, is the most impermanent element in architecture. It changes with the weathering and staining of materials (the white Gothic cathedrals are now deep gray), or, if it is superficial, it can easily be altered or removed (as the coloured stucco veneers of ancient Greek temples or the bright marble facing on Roman brickwork).
The values that are associated with colour (yellow and red, for instance, are called “gay,” black and deep blue “sombre”) are independent of materials and forms, and they give architects a range of expression not provided by other means at their disposal. A different expressive device is provided by the great range of light reflection in the colour scale. Colours that reflect light brilliantly appear to advance toward the viewer, and those that absorb light appear to recede; the degree of projection and recession of architectural forms may be altered, emphasized, or subdued by the colours of their surfaces.
Architecture, unlike most of the other arts, is not often conceived independently of particular surroundings. The problems of design extend beyond the organizing of space and mass complexes to include the relating of the total form to its natural and architectural environment.
In site planning, a primary function of architectural design, the architect aims to create harmonies with preexisting elements in the landscape and “townscape.”
But the province of the architect is not limited to the conception of single structures in harmony with a given setting. Throughout history, architects have been employed in giving a new form to the environment itself: planning the natural surroundings by the design of parks, roadways, waterways, etc.; designing complexes of related buildings; and organizing the urban environment into areas of residence, recreation, assembly, commerce, etc., both to increase their utility and to give them unique expressive qualities through the interrelationship of groups of buildings to the open areas about them.
Although it would be difficult to cover in any single definition all conceptions, past and present, of what constitutes ornament in architecture, three basic and fairly distinct categories may be recognized: mimetic, or imitative, ornament, the forms of which have certain definite meanings or symbolic significance; applied ornament, intended to add beauty to a structure but extrinsic to it; and organic ornament, inherent in the building’s function or materials.
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ac48d9158d48adbfa2a0c016fbbc5775 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ardh-satya | Ardh satya | Ardh satya
…of others in the film Ardh satya (1983). His other notable films include the comedy Jaane bhi do yaaro (1983), the thriller Mirch masala (1987), the crime drama Maqbool (2003), and the caper comedy Singh Is Kinng (2008).
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c96417e3c8fde28e3fafea850635839d | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ardhanarishvara | Ardhanarishvara | Ardhanarishvara
Ardhanarishvara, (Sanskrit: “Lord Who Is Half Woman”) composite male-female figure of the Hindu god Shiva together with his consort Parvati. As seen in many Indian and Southeast Asian sculptures, the right (male) half of the figure is adorned with the traditional ornaments of Shiva. Half of the hair is piled in a hairdress of matted locks, half of a third eye is visible on the forehead, a tiger skin covers the loins, and serpents are used as ornaments. The left (female) half shows hair well combed and knotted, half of a tilak (a round dot) on the forehead, the eye outlined in black, a well-developed breast, a silk garment caught with girdles, an anklet, and the foot tinted red with henna.
The symbolic intent of the figure, according to most authorities, is to signify that the male and female principles are inseparable. A predecessor of Ardhanarishvara appears in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, which states that the first creature “was of the same size and kind as a man and woman closely embracing. He caused himself to fall into two pieces, and from him a husband and wife were born.”
A popular explanation of the Shaivite form of this figure, as given in a collection of legends known as the Shiva-purana, is that the god Brahma created male beings and instructed them in turn to create others, but they were unable to do so. When Shiva appeared before him in an androgynous form, Brahma realized his omission and created females.
Yet another legend has it that the sage (rishi) Bhringi had vowed to worship only one deity and so failed to circumambulate and prostrate himself before Parvati. Parvati tried to force him to do so by asking Shiva to unite with her in one form. However, the sage assumed the form of a beetle, pierced a path through the middle of the androgyne, and continued to circumambulate only the male half. Parvati at first cursed Bhringi to become nothing but a skeleton (in classical Hindu embryology, the father gives a child only the bones and sinew while the mother gives the blood and flesh), but eventually they were reconciled, and she blessed him.
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a2fb8269df87e97ca4ae660de9fe47e6 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ardi | Ardi | Ardi
Ardi, nickname for a partial female hominid skeleton recovered at Aramis, in Ethiopia’s Afar rift valley.
Ardi was excavated between 1994 and 1997 and has been isotopically dated at 4.4 million years old. She is one of more than 100 specimens from the site that belong to Ardipithecus ramidus, a species considered by most scientists to be a very ancient hominid. Ardi possesses a small cranial cavity comparable to that of a chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) and has long arms and fingers, opposable great toes, and relatively small canine teeth that do not project and sharpen like those in apes. Her pelvis and foot exhibit many features characteristic of later bipedal hominids. Ardi walked upright on the ground, and her foot structure suggests at least a partially arboreal existence in a woodland habitat. She weighed about 50 kg (110 pounds) and stood about 1.2 metres (3.9 feet) tall.
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0593bde32c01cd6b038752e32624de79 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Are-These-Our-Children | Are These Our Children? | Are These Our Children?
…then made the socially conscious Are These Our Children? (1931), a cautionary tale of a youth (played by Eric Linden) who turns to a life of crime and ends up sentenced to death. His films from 1932 include No Man of Her Own, a solid romance with Clark Gable and…
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ae86317b2ad1b757ff5ecc7c1515078e | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Are-You-Smarter-Than-a-5th-Grader | Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? | Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?
…they competed against one another; Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? (2007–19), a game show hosted by comedian Jeff Foxworthy where the contestant had to correctly answer questions typical of elementary-school quizzes; and Sarah Palin’s Alaska (2010–11), which chronicled the outdoor pursuits of the 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate.…
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3bead76990942a3d800ed04214d5a86e | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Are-You-There-God-Its-Me-Margaret | Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret | Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
…literature with the publication of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, a preteen novel told from the perspective of Margaret Simon, an 11-year-old girl whose family has moved to a new town. Margaret, who has a Christian mother and a Jewish father, struggles to understand her developing body and…
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ed843ca157536f9435575de394d2fcf7 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/area-studies | Area studies | Area studies
Area studies, multidisciplinary social research focusing on specific geographic regions or culturally defined areas. The largest scholarly communities in this respect focus on what are loosely defined as Asian, African, Latin American, or Middle Eastern studies, together with a variety of subfields (Southeast Asian studies, Caribbean studies, etc.). Area-studies programs typically draw on disciplines such as political science, history, sociology, ethnology, geography, linguistics, literature, and cultural studies.
Today’s area studies can be seen as having their origins in the colonial expansion of European powers during the 18th century and the accompanying academic efforts to better understand the languages, cultures, and social organizations of colonized peoples. In that sense, area studies emerged as a “child of empire,” often driven by commercial and political interests or the perceived civilizing mission of the colonial powers. At the same time, the study of ancient civilizations, ethnic codes, social hierarchies, or foreign languages was part of the much broader process of the extension of Western science across the globe. Whereas mid-18th-century European capitals began to display the treasures and arts of “exotic” civilizations along with those of ancient civilizations in public museums, the 19th century saw the establishment of colonial studies in European universities. In the United States, interdisciplinary centres for area studies first emerged after World War I, and they received a strong impulse after World War II, corresponding to the rise of the United States as a global power. A better understanding of societies in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America was seen as urgent in the context of the Cold War rivalry between competing superpowers looking for local clients and supporters, particularly in the developing world. (A similar, security-driven incentive to promote the study of foreign cultures was again seen after the attacks of September 11, 2001.)
The work of German geographer Alexander von Humboldt during the 19th century was a forerunner of area studies. At a later stage, a critical strand of area studies emerged that openly condemned colonial practices. That branch emphasized respect for other cultures, challenged the supposed universality of the Western worldview and the Eurocentrism inherent in theories claiming general validity, and advocated mutual learning instead of unilaterally copying Western social or political models. Even so, a common legacy of all strands of area studies is that they almost always refer to “other” areas. There are no “German studies” in Germany or “U.S. studies” in the United States.
A particular concern in area studies is the exact territorial demarcation of the “areas” under investigation—all the more so given the emphasis on transnational and transregional interrelationships that became more prominent after the turn of the 21st century. Is it appropriate, for instance, that African studies more often than not deal exclusively with the Africa south of the Sahara? Put differently, is North Africa part of both African and Arab studies? What implications does the choice between “Arab world” and “Islamic world”—an emphasis on ethnicity or an emphasis on religion—have for the understanding of the region? Does it make sense to group Southeast Asian, Central Asian, and South Asian studies together under the label of Asian studies? Intellectual debates on such matters abound, but the persistence of the existing classifications is a sign that they continue to provide a basis for the production of meaning.
Criticism of area studies has been raised from within the regions under scrutiny, most prominently in the “Orientalism” debate kicked off by the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), an influential critique of Western constructions of the “Orient.” Area studies, according to that critique, expressed an imperialist and condescending worldview regarding the “other.” Thus, the object of research had to be redefined, and a complete overhaul of the production of academic research on non-Western societies was necessary. Postcolonial studies emerged from that line of thought as a competing paradigm of research that sharply criticized mainstream Western academic approaches as being part of an international system of domination in continuity with the colonial past. Although strongest in literary theory and cultural studies, postcolonialist approaches also concern social and political science.
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668cd2b44fde89179369365117c3a09e | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Argo-by-Theotokis | Argo | Argo
…trenches in World War I; Argo (2 vol., 1933 and 1936) by Yórgos Theotokás, about a group of students attempting to find their way through life in the turbulent 1920s; and Eroica (1937) by Kosmás Polítis, about the first encounter of a group of well-to-do schoolboys with love and death.
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394f1d1ea99cae093a801a4163cccce5 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Argobba-language | Argobba language | Argobba language
…northern Ethiopia and central Eritrea; Argobba; Hareri; and Gurage. Although some scholars once considered the so-called Ethiopic languages to be a branch within Semitic, these languages are now referred to as Ethio-Semitic. They are generally grouped together with the dialects of the South Arabic language as Southern Peripheral Semitic or…
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b73f4ffe7cf8a523f78a5920c2aeb28e | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Argonaut-Jr | Argonaut, Jr. | Argonaut, Jr.
Lake’s first experimental submarine, the “Argonaut, Jr.,” built in 1894, had a wooden hull and was about 14 feet (4 metres) long. It travelled the sea bottom on wheels turned by hand. The “Argonaut,” built in 1897, was 36 feet (11 metres) long and was powered by a 30-horsepower gasoline…
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ccb816d10d5174aae74efe2a9957dce0 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Argonaut-proto-submarine | Argonaut | Argonaut
Argonaut, first submarine to navigate extensively in the open sea, built in 1897 by the American engineer and naval architect Simon Lake. Designed to send out divers rather than to sink ships, the Argonaut was fitted with wheels for travel on the bottom of the sea and had an airtight chamber with a hatch that could be opened to the sea when the air pressure of the chamber and of the water outside were made equal. In 1898 the Argonaut traveled from Norfolk, Va., to New York through heavy storms, proving the seaworthiness of this type of submarine construction.
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743bfd02fb0d2fd102717205a5ce7270 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Argonautica-by-Valerius-Flaccus | Argonautica | Argonautica
…epic poet, author of an Argonautica, an epic which, though indebted to other sources, is written with vivid characterizations and descriptions and style unmarred by the excesses of other Latin poetry of the Silver Age.
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24d6cd44aad7745686f6120629f1a0a3 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Argonauts-of-the-Western-Pacific | Argonauts of the Western Pacific | Argonauts of the Western Pacific
…lesser extent by Malinowski in Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) and Magic, Science and Religion (1925). Radcliffe-Brown posited that the function of magic was to express the social importance of the desired event, while Malinowski regarded magic as directly and essentially concerned with the psychological needs of the individual.
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73f7a2e436cf6c1b79c10958ebda5ce3 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Argonne-National-Laboratory | Argonne National Laboratory | Argonne National Laboratory
Argonne National Laboratory, the first U.S. national research laboratory, located in Argonne, Illinois, some 40 km (25 miles) southwest of Chicago, and operated by the University of Chicago for the U.S. Department of Energy. It was founded in 1946 to conduct basic nuclear physics research and to develop the technology for peaceful uses of nuclear energy. Argonne National Laboratory now supports more than 200 basic and applied research programs—in science, engineering, and technology—that are directed to maintain basic scientific leadership, guide energy-resource development, improve nuclear-energy technology, and promote environmental-risk management.
The Argonne laboratory houses several major research facilities that are available for collaborative and interdisciplinary use by government, academic, and industrial scientists. Four of these facilities—the Advanced Photon Source (APS), the Intense Pulsed Neutron Source (IPNS), the Argonne Tandem Linear Accelerator System (ATLAS), and the High-Voltage Electron Microscope- (HVEM-) Tandem Facility—have been designated official U.S. Department of Energy National User Facilities.
The APS, which opened in 1996, is a 7-gigaelectron volt (GeV) synchrotron particle accelerator that is designed to produce brilliant (highly collimated) and intense beams of high-energy X-ray synchrotron radiation for advanced X-ray imaging and diffraction studies. Using the APS, scientists have performed X-ray diffraction analyses to unravel the structures of complex biological supramolecular assemblies, including ribosomes, enzyme-inhibitor (drug) complexes, and bacterial toxins.
ATLAS is a superconducting linear accelerator that accelerates beams of heavy ions up to and including uranium for high-energy nuclear physics research. One example of this work involves experiments to probe the details of nuclear structure in order to answer fundamental questions concerning nuclear stability. The IPNS provides a powerful source of neutrons for neutron-scattering experiments in materials science research; applications include high-temperature ceramics and advanced superconducting materials. The HVEM-Tandem Facility combines electron microscopy with ion-beam irradiation to study, for example, high-temperature superconductors.
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