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22384d638bfaaf4236725addee26fc65 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Adams | William Adams | William Adams
William Adams, also called Anjin or Miura Anjin, (born 1564, Gillingham, Kent, England—died May 26, 1620, Hirado, Japan), navigator, merchant-adventurer, and the first Englishman to visit Japan.
At the age of 12 Adams was apprenticed to a shipbuilder in the merchant marine, and in 1588 he was master of a supply ship for the British navy during the invasion of the Spanish Armada. Soon after the British victory, he began serving as a pilot and ship’s master for a company of Barbary merchants. In June 1598 he shipped out as pilot major with five Dutch ships bound from Europe for the East Indies (present-day Indonesia) via the Strait of Magellan. The trouble-ridden fleet was scattered by storms, and in April 1600 Adams’s ship, the Liefde (“Charity”), its crew sick and dying, anchored off the island of Kyushu in southern Japan, the first northern European ship to reach that country.
Adams and the other survivors were summoned to Ōsaka, where Tokugawa Ieyasu—soon to become the shogun (generalissimo) of Japan—interrogated mainly Adams about a variety of political, religious, and technological topics. Ieyasu was so impressed with Adams’s knowledge, especially of ships and shipbuilding, that he made the Englishman one of his confidants. Adams was given the rank of hatamoto (“bannerman”), a retainer to the shogun, and was awarded an estate at Miura, on the Miura Peninsula south of Edo (now Tokyo). Despite those honours, in the early years of his sojourn Adams repeatedly expressed his desire to return to England (where he had a wife and family, whom he eventually was able to continue to support) but was refused permission. He thus became permanently settled in Japan, married a Japanese woman, and came to be known by the name Anjin (“Pilot”; later called Miura Anjin).
Adams oversaw the construction of Western-style ships, wrote letters on behalf of the shogun encouraging Dutch and English traders to come to Japan, and then officiated between the shogunate and the traders who began visiting the country. In 1613 he helped to establish an English factory (trading post) for the East India Company at Hirado, in Kyushu northwest of Nagasaki. Adams was allowed to undertake several overseas voyages between 1614 and 1619, traveling as far as Southeast Asia.
Ieyasu died in 1616, however, and under his successor, Tokugawa Hidetada, Japan became increasingly isolationist. The activities of the English traders were curtailed (eventually the Dutch were the only Europeans allowed to trade with Japan), and Adams found his influence with the shogunate greatly diminished. By 1620 Adams was ill, and while in Hirado he died and was buried there. The English factory was shut down soon thereafter.
Adams’s career in Japan was the inspiration for a number of English- as well as Japanese-language books, notably James Clavell’s best-selling novel Shogun (1975), which was also the basis for a popular television miniseries of the same name (1980). In addition to his Kyushu estate, Adams had a house in the Nihonbashi district of Edo, and the neighbourhood where it was located is still called Anjin-chō. Among the annual observances for him in Japan are those held in Hirado (May) and in Itō, Shizuoka prefecture (August), the latter commemorating the place where the first Western-style ships were built and launched.
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f720b98620528183698c459f053de444 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Alanson-White | William Alanson White | William Alanson White
…the influence of the psychiatrist William Alanson White, who extended the principles of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis to the severely ill, hospitalized psychotic, rather than restricting them to the more functional neurotics treated by most Freudian analysts of the time. In his interviews with schizophrenic patients, Sullivan’s uncommon ability in psychoanalysis…
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bf9001e421f58acbecf2406a6eec4442 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Alexander-Craigie | Sir William Alexander Craigie | Sir William Alexander Craigie
Sir William Alexander Craigie, (born Aug. 13, 1867, Dundee, Angus, Scot.—died Sept. 2, 1957, Watlington, Oxfordshire, Eng.), Scottish lexicographer and language and literature scholar who was joint editor (1901–33) of The Oxford English Dictionary and chief editor (1923–36) of the four-volume Historical Dictionary of American English.
Craigie attended St. Andrews University, studied Scandinavian languages in Copenhagen, and taught at St. Andrews before joining the Oxford dictionary staff in 1897; from 1905 on he taught at the University of Oxford. His writings include several works on Scandinavian, English, and Scottish philology and literature.
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9932b70b4acad1e0d992e211360717db | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Ames | William Ames | William Ames
William Ames, (born 1576, Ipswich, Suffolk, Eng.—died Nov. 14, 1633, Rotterdam), English Puritan theologian remembered for his writings on ethics and for debating and writing in favour of strict Calvinism in opposition to Arminianism.
As a student at Cambridge, Ames viewed cardplaying as an offense to Christian living—no less serious than profanity. In 1609 his dispute with the Church of England’s customs of conduct came to a head in his sermon attacking what he saw as the debauchery attending the feast of St. Thomas. Obliged to leave England, he sailed in 1610 to Rotterdam. There, in the fisherman’s habit donned for the passage, he debated Nicolaas Grevinckhoven (Grevinchovius), minister to the local Arminian Church, on the doctrines of atonement and predestination. The Calvinists emphasized that salvation is limited to those who are foreordained by God to receive it and are not capable of falling out of his grace. The Arminians, on the other hand, believed that all men are capable of receiving God’s grace if they are believers and if they fulfill certain other conditions.
Ames, considered triumphant in the debates, became widely known throughout the Low Countries. Subsequently, he entered into written disputes with Grevinckhoven on universal redemption and related questions. He served as an observer at the Synod of Dort (1618–19), at which Arminianism was firmly denounced, and as professor of theology at Franeker, in Friesland (1622–33). Among his more important works are Medulla Theologiae (1623; The Marrow of Sacred Divinity, 1642) and De Conscientia et Ejus Jure vel Casibus (1632; Conscience, 1639). The latter text was considered for many years by the Dutch Reformed Church to be a standard treatise on Christian ethics and the variety of ethical situations faced by believers.
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926e0dec6030daeb60bce0ba99d269e0 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Arnold-Anthony | William Arnold Anthony | William Arnold Anthony
William Arnold Anthony, (born Nov. 17, 1835, Coventry, R.I., U.S.—died May 29, 1908, New York, N.Y.), physicist and pioneer in the teaching of electrical engineering in the United States.
After studying at Brown (Providence, R.I.) and Yale universities, Anthony taught physics and chemistry at Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio (1867–69); Iowa State Agricultural College, Ames (1869–72); Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. (1872–87); and Cooper Union, New York City (1894–1908). While at Cornell he originated and developed one of the first courses in electrical engineering in the United States (1883).
Anthony also designed and built improved dynamos, including the one used for the first underground distributing system for electricity and for the first outdoor-lighting system in the United States. He also contributed to the development of the gas-filled electric lamp.
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f511dec322f4aae3203ece01627cafee | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Avery-Bishop | William Avery Bishop | William Avery Bishop
William Avery Bishop, byname Billy Bishop, (born Feb. 8, 1894, Owen Sound, Ont., Can.—died Sept. 11, 1956, West Palm Beach, Fla., U.S.), Canadian fighter ace who shot down 72 German aircraft during World War I.
Bishop was educated at the Royal Military College, Kingston, and went overseas during World War I with the Canadian cavalry. In 1915 he transferred to the Royal Flying Corps, joining the 60th Squadron in France in 1917. He soon became highly skilled in aerial combat and shot down a total of 72 enemy aircraft, including 25 in one 10-day period. He was awarded the Victoria Cross and several other decorations, and in March 1918 he was promoted to the rank of major, assuming command of the 85th Squadron.
Promoted to lieutenant colonel, Bishop was appointed to the staff of the British Air Ministry in August 1918, and in this capacity he helped to form the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) as a separate service. After the war he joined one of the first commercial aviation companies in Canada, and he eventually became a businessman. In 1936 he was appointed honorary air vice-marshal of the RCAF, and he became honorary air marshal during World War II. He was the author of Winged Warfare (1917) and Flying Squad (1926).
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ad468bf53e9d5d2e0456c725e8fda007 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Bainbridge | William Bainbridge | William Bainbridge
William Bainbridge, (born May 7, 1774, Princeton, N.J.—died July 27, 1833, Philadelphia), American naval officer who captured the British frigate Java in the War of 1812.
Bainbridge commanded merchant vessels from 1793 to 1798, when he became an officer in the newly organized U.S. Navy. He served in the war with the Barbary States (1801–05) and was in command of the frigate Philadelphia when it was captured by the Tripolitans (1803). Imprisoned for a time, he returned to the merchant marine upon his release (1805). At the outbreak of the War of 1812 he was again commissioned in the U.S. Navy and was given command of the frigate Constitution. His capture of the Java off the Brazilian coast was one of the notable American naval victories of the war and, according to some, helped earn for his ship the sobriquet “Old Ironsides.”
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fc570a118e84fe653e6a35400f3aec2c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Barker-Canadian-fighter-pilot | William Barker | William Barker
William Barker, in full William George Barker, (born November 3, 1894, Dauphin, Manitoba, Canada—died March 12, 1930, Rockcliffe, Ottawa, Ontario), Canadian World War I fighter pilot who was the most-decorated war hero in Canadian history.
The eldest son of a farmer who was also a blacksmith and sawmill operator, Barker grew up on the frontier in Manitoba, where he became proficient at riding horses and shooting. Although he was a good student, Barker often was required to miss school to work at the family farm or sawmill. Early on, he demonstrated intellectual independence and an intensity of focus that complemented his kinesthetic skills. Having seen “flying machines” at agricultural fairs, he also indicated an early interest in becoming a pilot. In 1914 he left high school and enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) to fight in World War I. He joined the 1st Regiment, Canadian Mounted Rifles (CMR), trained as a machine gunner, sailed to England with his unit in June 1915, and served in the Ypres Salient in Belgium that fall and winter. Barker found service in the muddy trenches to be cold, wet, and discouraging, and in early 1916 he transferred to the Royal Flying Corps (RFC), where he became an observer and was commissioned as a second lieutenant.
He quickly gained combat experience, performing artillery spotting and photographic reconnaissance as well as acting as a gunner on the Blériot Experimental 2 (B.E.2) reconnaissance plane. Flying in France during the First Battle of the Somme with No. 15 Squadron, he earned the first of the 12 gallantry awards he would receive—the Military Cross (MC), for supporting the capture of Beaumont-Hamel in November. He then trained as a pilot in England, completing all ground and flying training in only four weeks and returning to the Western Front in February 1917. While flying a Reconnaissance Experimental 8 (R.E.8), he was awarded a bar for his MC, promoted to the rank of captain, and appointed a flight commander. After sustaining a head wound in August, Barker was assigned to duty as a flying instructor in England. However, he had no desire to teach. After he performed an unauthorized aerobatic display over Piccadilly Circus in London, the RFC reassigned him to combat as a fighter pilot flying the Sopwith Camel.
Barker returned to France in October 1917. Over the next 12 months he shot down 50 enemy aircraft on the Italian and Western fronts. Barker’s tally placed him in the top 10 of Royal Air Force (RAF) aces and fourth among Canadian-born flyers. Barker’s Sopwith Camel, No. B6313, was flown almost exclusively by him. With an unprecedented 46 enemy downings in one plane flown by the same pilot, B6313 has been called the single most-successful fighter aircraft in the history of the RAF. Remarkably, Barker never had a wingman killed while flying with him or an aircraft he was escorting shot down.
During 11 months of continuous combat on the Italian Front, Barker was awarded a second bar to his MC, a Distinguished Service Order (DSO) and bar, a French Croix de Guerre, and an Italian Silver Medal for Valour, the last for dropping an Italian army espionage agent behind enemy lines at night. On October 27, 1918, while flying a Sopwith Snipe in France on the final day of a 10-day roving commission, he downed one enemy two-seater plane and then was attacked by a large formation of single-seater Fokker D.VII fighters and was wounded three times. He shot down three of the enemy aircraft (raising his victory score to 50). He escaped from the remaining German fighters and crash-landed. For that final aerial battle, he was awarded the Victoria Cross (VC).
After the war, Barker partnered with fellow ace and VC recipient Billy Bishop in an airline and aircraft sales company. However, it went out of business within a few years. Barker returned to the military in 1922 and was appointed acting director of the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) in April 1924. After leaving the RCAF in 1926, he served as the first honorary president of the Toronto Maple Leafs hockey team, and in 1930 he became president of Fairchild Aircraft Ltd. While demonstrating a Fairchild KR-21 biplane at Rockcliffe, Ottawa, Ontario, on March 12, 1930, he crashed and was killed. Some 50,000 spectators witnessed his national state funeral, the largest the city of Toronto had ever held.
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3fac3a6272f32e458558c4efa809214c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Barnes | William Barnes | William Barnes
William Barnes, (born Feb. 22, 1801, Bagber, near Sturminster Newton, Dorsetshire, Eng.—died Oct. 7, 1886, Winterbourne Came, Dorsetshire), English dialect poet whose work gives a vivid picture of the life and labour of rural southwestern England and includes some moving expressions of loss and grief, such as “The Wife A-Lost” and “Woak Hill.” He was also a gifted philologist, and his linguistic theories as well as his poetry influenced two major writers, Thomas Hardy and Gerard Manley Hopkins.
After leaving school at 15, Barnes worked for a solicitor, studied classics with local clergymen, and opened a school in 1823. He later took a Cambridge degree and was ordained as an Anglican priest in 1847. His first Dorset dialect poems were published in the Dorset County Chronicle (1833–34). His many books include an Anglo-Saxon primer (1849), An Outline of English Speech-Craft (1878), Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect (two series: 1844, 1862), Hwomely Rhymes (1859), and Poems of Rural Life in Common English (1868). His “Dissertation on the Dorset Dialect,” prefaced to Poems of Rural Life in 1844, is a helpful introduction to his distinctive language, though in 1859 he switched to a new way of representing it in print and revised his earlier work accordingly. Barnes combined his rustic diction with a sophisticated verse technique to powerful and distinctive effect.
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32b88779a989cd9e9c7964756f81ac10 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Beaumont | William Beaumont | William Beaumont
William Beaumont, (born Nov. 21, 1785, Lebanon, Conn., U.S.—died April 25, 1853, St. Louis, Mo.), U.S. army surgeon, the first person to observe and study human digestion as it occurs in the stomach.
On June 6, 1822, while serving at Fort Mackinac (now in Michigan), Beaumont was summoned to Michilimackinac to treat Alexis St. Martin, a 19-year-old French-Canadian trapper, who had been wounded at close range by a shotgun blast. The shot had removed a portion of the abdominal wall and left a perforation in the anterior wall of the stomach. During the year it took for the wound to heal, the aperture in the abdominal wall never sealed but was held closed by the inversion of tissue surrounding it. As a result, a gastric fistula, or passage, remained. When it was depressed with the finger, Beaumont could view the activities occurring within St. Martin’s stomach.
Three years after the near-fatal accident Beaumont began physiological studies of St. Martin’s stomach. He believed that the process of digestion was essentially a chemical process carried out by chemicals in the stomach. Determined to prove this hypothesis, he collected samples of gastric juice and sent them for analysis to several chemists, who established the presence of free hydrochloric acid in the juice. Beaumont also reported on the effects of different foods on the stomach, finding that vegetables were less digestible than other foods, that milk coagulated prior to the onset of digestion, and that cold gastric juice had no effect upon food. In 1833 he published Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice and the Physiology of Digestion.
Beaumont’s experiments threw new light upon the nature of gastric juice and the digestive process in general, and established alcohol as a cause of gastritis (inflammation of the stomach’s mucous membrane).
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f77d0d332d73f75dfe8c9c1cd9b33dee | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Blake/Blake-as-a-poet | Blake as a poet | Blake as a poet
Blake’s profession was engraving, and his principal avocation was painting in watercolours. But even from boyhood he wrote poetry. In the early 1780s he attended the literary and artistic salons of the bluestocking Harriet Mathew, and there he read and sang his poems. According to Blake’s friend John Thomas Smith, “He was listened to by the company with profound silence, and allowed […] to possess original and extraordinary merit.” In 1783 Harriet Mathew’s husband, the Rev. Anthony Stephen Mathew, and Blake’s friend John Flaxman had some of these poems printed in a modest little volume of 70 pages titled Poetical Sketches, with the attribution on the title page reading simply, “By W.B.” It contained an “advertisement” by Reverend Mathew that stated, “Conscious of the irregularities and defects to be found in almost every page, his friends have still believed that they possessed a poetic originality which merited some respite from oblivion.” They gave the sheets of the book, uncut and unsewn, to Blake, in the expectation that he would sell them or at least give them away to potential patrons. Blake, however, showed little interest in the volume, and when he died he still had uncut and unstitched copies in his possession.
But some contemporaries and virtually all succeeding critics agreed that the poems did merit “respite from oblivion.” Some are merely boyish rodomontade, but some, such as “To Winter” and “Mad Song,” are exquisite. “To the Muses,” lamenting the death of music, concludes,
Eighty-five years later, Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote that in these lines “The Eighteenth Century died to music.”
Blake never published his poetry in the ordinary way. Instead, using a technology revealed to him by his brother Robert in a vision, he drew his poems and their surrounding designs on copper in a liquid impervious to acid. He then etched them and, with the aid of his devoted wife, printed them, coloured them, stitched them in rough sugar-paper wrappers, and offered them for sale. He rarely printed more than a dozen copies at a time, reprinting them when his stock ran low, and no more than 30 copies of any of them survive; several are known only in unique copies, and some to which he refers no longer exist.
After experimenting with tiny plates to print his short tracts There Is No Natural Religion (1788) and All Religions Are One (1788?), Blake created the first of the poetical works for which he is chiefly remembered: Songs of Innocence, with 19 poems on 26 prints. The poems are written for children—in “Infant Joy” only three words have as many as two syllables—and they represent the innocent and the vulnerable, from babies to beetles, protected and fostered by powers beyond their own. In “The Chimney Sweeper,” for example,
Sustained by the vision, “Tom was happy & warm” despite the cold.
In one of the best-known lyrics, called “The Lamb,” a little boy gives to a lamb the same kind of catechism he himself had been given in church:
The syllogism is simple if not simplistic: the creator of child and lamb has the same qualities as his creation.
Most of Blake’s poetry embodies myths that he invented. Blake takes the inquiry about the nature of life a little further in The Book of Thel (1789), the first of his published myths. The melancholy shepherdess Thel asks, “Why fade these children of the spring? Born but to smile & fall.” She is answered by the Lilly of the Valley (representing water), the Cloud (air), and the Clod of Clay (earth), who tell her, “we live not for ourselves,” and say that they are nourished by “he that loves the lowly.” Thel enters the “land unknown” and hears a “voice of sorrow”:
The poem concludes with the frightened Thel seeing her own grave there, shrieking, and fleeing back to her valley.
Blake’s next work in Illuminated Printing, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790?), has become one of his best known. It is a prose work in no familiar form; for instance, on the title page, no author, printer, or publisher is named. It is in part a parody of Emanuel Swedenborg, echoing the Swedish theologian’s “Memorable Relations” of things seen and heard in heaven with “Memorable Fancies” of things seen and heard in hell. The section titled “Proverbs of Hell” eulogizes energy with lines such as “Energy is Eternal Delight,” “Exuberance is Beauty,” and “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” The work ends with “A Song of Liberty,” which celebrates the values of those who stormed the Bastille in 1789: “Let the Priests of the Raven of dawn, no longer […] curse the sons of joy […] For every thing that lives is Holy.”
America, A Prophecy (1793) and Europe, A Prophecy (1794) are even more daringly political, and they are boldly acknowledged on the title pages as “Printed by William Blake.” In the first, Albion’s Angel, representing the reactionary government of England, perceives Orc, the spirit of energy, as a “Blasphemous Demon, Antichrist, hater of Dignities,” but Orc’s vision is of an apocalypse that transforms the world:
The mental revolution seems to be accomplished, but the design for the triumphant concluding page shows not rejoicing and triumph but barren trees, bowed mourners, thistles, and serpents. Blake’s designs often tell a complementary story, and the two visions must be combined in the reader’s mind to comprehend the meaning of the work.
The frontispiece to Europe is one of Blake’s best-known images: sometimes called The Ancient of Days, it represents a naked, bearded old man leaning out from the sun to define the universe with golden compasses. He seems a familiar image of God, but the usual notions about this deity are challenged by an image, on the facing title page, of what the God of reason has created: a coiling serpent with open mouth and forked tongue. It seems to represent how
This God is opposed by Orc and by Los, the imagination, and at the end of the poem Los “call’d all his sons to the strife of blood.” The work’s last illustration, however, is not of the heroic sons of Los storming the barricades of tyrannical reason but of a naked man carrying a fainting woman and a terrified girl from the horrors of a burning city.
In the same year as Europe, Blake published Songs of Experience and combined it with his previous lyrics to form Songs of Innocence and of Experience Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. The poems of Songs of Experience centre on threatened, unprotected souls in despair. In “London” the speaker, shown in the design as blind, bearded, and “age-bent,” sees in “every face…marks of woe,” and observes that “In every voice…The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.” In “The Tyger,” which answers “The Lamb” of Innocence, the despairing speaker asks the “Tyger burning bright” about its creator: “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” But in the design the “deadly terrors” of the text are depicted as a small, meek animal often coloured more like a stuffed toy than a jungle beast.
Blake’s most impressive writings are his enormous prophecies Vala or The Four Zoas (which Blake composed and revised from roughly 1796 to 1807 but never published), Milton, and Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion. In them, his myth expands, adding to Urizen (reason) and Los (imagination) the Zoas Tharmas and Luvah. (The word zoa is a Greek plural meaning “living creatures.”) Their primordial harmony is destroyed when each of them attempts to fix creation in a form corresponding to his own nature and genius. Blake describes his purpose, his “great task,” in Jerusalem:
Like the Zoa Los, Blake felt that he must “Create a System or be enslav’d by another Mans.”
Milton concerns Blake’s attempt, at Milton’s request, to correct the ideas of Paradise Lost. The poem originated in an event in Felpham, recorded in Blake’s letters, in which the spirit of Milton as a falling star entered Blake. It includes the lyric commonly called “Jerusalem” that has become a kind of alternative national anthem in Britain:
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e86afae5abf0eac5f45228bc82c73838 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Blake/Career-as-engraver | Career as engraver | Career as engraver
On the completion of his apprenticeship in 1779, Blake began to work vigorously as an independent engraver. His most frequent commissions were from the great liberal bookseller Joseph Johnson. At first most of his work was copy engraving after the designs of other artists, such as the two fashion plates for the Ladies New and Polite Pocket Memorandum-Book (1782). He also engraved important plates for the Swiss writer John Caspar (Johann Kasper) Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy (vol. 1, 1789), for the English physician Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden (1791), and for his friend John Gabriel Stedman’s violent and eccentric Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796), which included illustrations titled A Negro Hung Alive by the Ribs to a Gallows and Flagellation of a Female Samboe Slave.
Blake became so well known that he received commissions to engrave his own designs. These included 6 plates for Original Stories from Real Life (1791), a collection of narratives for children by Johnson’s friend Mary Wollstonecraft, and 43 folio plates for part one of Edward Young’s poem Night Thoughts (1797), with a promise, never fulfilled, for a hundred more. Blake’s style of designing, however, was so extreme and unfamiliar, portraying spirits with real bodies, that one review in The British Critic (1796; of Gottfried August Bürger’s Leonora) called them “distorted, absurd,” and the product of a “depraved fancy.”
Because of the éclat with which they were published, the best-known engravings after Blake’s own designs were those for Robert Blair’s poem The Grave (1808). In 1805 the entrepreneur Robert Hartley Cromek paid Blake £21 for 20 watercolours illustrating Blair’s poem and agreed to publish folio (large-format) prints after them engraved by Blake. The number of designs was whittled down, without notifying Blake, from 20 to 15 to 12. Worst of all, the lucrative commission for engraving them, worth perhaps £300, was taken from Blake, without informing him, and given to the fashionable Italian engraver Luigi Schiavonetti. To add critical insult to commercial injury, when the work was published in 1808, the radical weekly The Examiner mocked the absurdity of “representing the Spirit to the eye,” and the reactionary Antijacobin Review not only deplored the designs as “the offspring of a morbid fancy,” which “totally failed” “ ‘to connect the visible with the invisible world,’ ” but also mocked Blake’s poetical dedication of the designs “To the Queen”:
The frontispiece to the work was an engraving after Thomas Phillips’s portrait of Blake (above), which became the best-known representation of the artist. It shows him with a pencil in his hand, indicating, truthfully, that he is an artist, and wearing a waistcoat and an elegant frilled stock, suggesting, falsely, that he is a gentleman. The most remarkable feature of the portrait, however, is the prominent eyes. According to Blake’s acquaintance Allan Cunningham, at the sitting Blake and Phillips talked of paintings of angels, and Blake said that the Archangel Gabriel had told him that Michelangelo could paint an angel better than Raphael could. When Blake demanded evidence that Gabriel was not an evil spirit, the voice said,
Later important commissions included plates for William Hayley’s biography of the poet William Cowper (1803–04), for sculptor John Flaxman’s illustrations for the Iliad (1805) and the works of Hesiod (1817), and for the Wedgwood ware catalogue (1816?), as well as marvelously modest and poignant little woodcuts after his own illustrations for a school edition of Virgil published in 1821 by the physician and botanist Robert John Thornton.
Blake also published his engravings of his own designs, though mostly in very small numbers. One of the best known is Glad Day, also called Albion Rose (designed 1780, engraved 1805?), depicting a glorious naked youth dancing upon the mountaintops. Even more ambitiously, he invented a method of printing in colour, still not clearly understood, which he used in 1795 to create his 12 great folio colour prints, including God Judging Adam and Newton. The latter shows the great mathematician naked and seated on a rock at the bottom of the sea making geometric designs. These were printed in only two or three copies apiece, and some were still in his possession at his death.
More publicly visible were Blake’s engravings of his enormous design of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims (1810), his 22 folio designs for the Book of Job (1826), and his 7 even larger unfinished plates for Dante (1826–27). Though only the Chaucer sold well enough to repay its probable expenses during Blake’s lifetime, these are agreed today to be among the greatest triumphs of line engraving in England, sufficient to ensure Blake’s reputation as an engraver and artist even had he made no other watercolours or poems.
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7053dde56258b2a294262d06f0cb4559 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Bourne | William Bourne | William Bourne
…1578 from the pen of William Bourne, a British mathematician and writer on naval subjects. Bourne proposed a completely enclosed boat that could be submerged and rowed underwater. It consisted of a wooden frame covered with waterproof leather; it was to be submerged by reducing its volume by contracting the…
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c2b1ec0374c6dd6dbc4e4b21d6ad978c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-C-Whitney | William C. Whitney | William C. Whitney
William C. Whitney, in full William Collins Whitney, (born July 5, 1841, Conway, Mass., U.S.—died Feb. 2, 1904, New York, N.Y.), U.S. secretary of the navy (1885–89) who played a major role in the post-Civil War rebuilding of the navy.
Admitted to the bar in 1865, Whitney practiced law in New York City and became active in local Democratic Party affairs. An opponent of Tammany Hall (the city Democratic organization), he joined Samuel J. Tilden in overthrowing the powerful but corrupt political boss William Magear (“Boss”) Tweed. From 1875 to 1882, Whitney was corporation counsel for the city of New York.
In 1884 he worked to promote the Democratic presidential candidacy of Grover Cleveland, who, upon taking office, appointed Whitney secretary of the U.S. Navy. During his four years in that post Whitney strengthened the U.S. fleet, which had been neglected after the North’s victory in the Civil War. Under Whitney’s leadership, naval appropriations were more than doubled. He undertook a major shipbuilding program, putting to sea the battleship Maine and others that were to figure prominently in the Spanish-American War (1898). With Cleveland’s defeat, Whitney returned to New York, where, as a joint owner of the Metropolitan Traction Company, he was charter operator of the city’s rapid-transit system. He continued to be active in party affairs but, as a Gold Democrat (i.e., member of the party’s anti-free-silver faction), declined to support the candidacy of William Jennings Bryan for president in 1896.
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d840ac3650de60c183d05fa433102498 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Campbell-Irish-born-American-parasitologist | William Campbell | William Campbell
William Campbell, (born June 28, 1930, Ramelton, Ireland), Irish-born American parasitologist known for his contribution to the discovery of the anthelmintic compounds avermectin and ivermectin, which proved vital to the control of certain parasitic infections in humans and other animals. For his discoveries, Campbell was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine (shared with Japanese microbiologist Ōmura Satoshi and Chinese scientist Tu Youyou).
Campbell earned a bachelor’s degree in zoology from Trinity College in Dublin in 1952. He subsequently went to the United States, where he studied veterinary science, zoology, and pathology at the University of Wisconsin. In 1957, after completing a Ph.D. at Wisconsin, Campbell took a position as a research assistant at the Merck Institute for Therapeutic Research in New Jersey. There in 1976 he was made the director of basic parasitology, and from 1984 to 1990 he served as a senior scientist and directed assay research and development. Campbell became a U.S. citizen in 1962.
In the 1970s researchers at Merck & Co. received a culture of the soil bacterium Streptomyces avermitilis from Ōmura Satoshi, who had discovered the species in the course of his work at the Kitasato Institute in Japan. Preliminary experiments suggested that the organism produced a substance that was potentially lethal to certain types of parasites. In 1975, using an assay that tested compounds for activity against the infectious nematode Nematospiroides dubius in mice, Campbell and colleagues at Merck discovered avermectin, which existed as several compounds, all closely related in structure and known as macrocyclic lactones. Having purified avermectin, the Merck team subjected the compound to structural modification, ultimately producing a chemical known as ivermectin. Ivermectin was found to be active against a wide array of microfilariae (larvae) produced by certain threadlike nematode parasites. Of particular consequence was its ability to clear infections in humans involving the microfilariae of Onchocerca volvulus, the cause of river blindness, and Wuchereria bancrofti and Brugia malayi, the major causes of lymphatic filariasis (elephantiasis). Both river blindness and lymphatic filariasis were significant sources of debilitating illness in tropical regions of the world. The drug also proved critical to the prevention of certain arthropod and microfilariae-associated infections in other animals, including horses, sheep, and cattle; it also was used widely for the prevention of heartworm disease in cats and dogs.
In later research Campbell studied a variety of parasitic diseases, including trichinosis. He retired as research fellow emeritus at Drew University in New Jersey. During his career he served as the president of multiple organizations, including the American Society of Parasitologists. In addition to numerous research papers, Campbell edited two texts, Trichinella and Trichinosis (1983) and Chemotherapy of Parasitic Diseases (1986, with Robert S. Rew), which were critical to furthering the understanding of parasitic disease.
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7aca90823e60608e67cbb0821f8f7ae0 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Castle | William Castle | William Castle
William Castle, original name William Schloss, (born April 24, 1914, New York City, New York, U.S.—died May 31, 1977, Los Angeles, California), American director who was known for the innovative marketing techniques he used to promote his B-horror movies.
He began his entertainment career as an actor in Off-Broadway productions, and he later directed a well-received stage version of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula. During this time he translated his family’s German surname, Schloss, into its English equivalent, Castle, which he took as his professional name. In 1937 he appeared in the first of several films, though he was often uncredited. Three years later he became a dialogue coach at Columbia Pictures. In 1943 Castle directed his first feature films, and the following year he made several movies, including three notable low-budget film noirs: The Whistler and The Mark of the Whistler, which were adapted from a radio program and featured Richard Dix as the suicidal protagonist, and When Strangers Marry, a taut thriller that cast Robert Mitchum as the murderous spouse of Kim Hunter. In 1945 Castle made his last Whistler film, Voice of the Whistler, and that year he took over the Crime Doctor series, which was also based on a popular radio show. Castle directed several installments, including The Crime Doctor’s Warning (1945) and Crime Doctor’s Gamble (1947).
In 1949 Castle moved to Universal, and his first films for the studio were the solid crime dramas Johnny Stool Pigeon, with Shelley Winters and Dan Duryea, and Undertow (both 1949), with Scott Brady. After directing It’s a Small World (1950)—a melodrama centring on a dwarf who undertakes a life of crime—Castle demonstrated his versatility by working in a number of genres. In 1953 he helmed the westerns Fort Ti and Conquest of Cochise; the spectacle Serpent of the Nile, featuring Rhonda Fleming as Cleopatra; and the biblical tale Slaves of Babylon. The following year he released the period-adventure movies Charge of the Lancers and The Iron Glove.
Castle might have continued grinding out such piecework, but in 1958 he decided to produce and direct a series of horror films, overcoming the limitations of casts and budgets by creating a gimmick with which each one could be exploited. The first film to employ this marketing strategy was the intense shocker Macabre (1958), which was advertised with the prominent guarantee “So terrifying we insure you for $1,000 against death by fright!” House on Haunted Hill (1959), which starred Vincent Price at his most malevolent and was probably the best of Castle’s tongue-in-cheek shockers, featured “Emergo,” a luminescent skeleton that floated over the heads of moviegoers (assuming the exhibitor was cooperating, which rarely happened).
The Tingler (1959), a clever tale about the nature of fear, had “Percepto,” in which electric buzzers were wired under selected patrons’ seats; star Price instructed the audience from the screen that they had to scream if the parasitic Tingler was to be destroyed. For 13 Ghosts (1960), Castle offered “Illusion-O,” a pair of glasses with tinted plastic lenses that made the ghosts visible on-screen when worn. Homicidal (1961) was a knockoff of Psycho (1960), with the added fillip of a “Fright Break,” which offered audiences a refund if they left during the film’s final minutes. In 1961 Castle returned to period movies with Mr. Sardonicus (1961), in which a disfigured, evil count (played by Guy Rolfe) has his fate decided at film’s end by the audience’s vote during a “Punishment Poll.” Such innovative promotional campaigns gave Castle the nickname “King of the Gimmick.”
Zotz! (1962) was one of Castle’s few disappointments during this creative burst. A middling Cold War comedy starring Tom Poston, it offered only a plastic coin to patrons as its promotional tie-in. Castle returned to the Cold War with 13 Frightened Girls!, whereas The Old Dark House (both 1963) was a tongue-in-cheek remake of the 1932 chiller. Noting that his box-office grosses had dipped while he fiddled with macabre comedy, Castle returned to shocking audiences with Strait-Jacket (1964), which starred Joan Crawford as an erstwhile ax murderer who fears that she is reverting to her old ways. The film, which was written by Robert Bloch, featured the tagline “Just keep saying to yourself: It’s only a movie…it’s only a movie…” Bloch also wrote Castle’s The Night Walker (1964), a middling suspense film that was perhaps most notable for its use of veterans Barbara Stanwyck, Robert Taylor, and Rochelle Hudson as headliners. Crawford was back in I Saw What You Did (1965), which featured John Ireland as a murderous psychopath on the hunt for two teenage girls.
Castle’s subsequent films began to wane in popularity. Let’s Kill Uncle (1966) set a couple of kids against a homicidal British soldier, and Project X (1968) was a dubious science-fiction adventure starring Christopher George. During this time, Castle was denied perhaps his biggest chance at mainstream success. He had acquired the film rights to the novel Rosemary’s Baby (1967) by Ira Levin, but Paramount studio head Robert Evans refused to allow Castle to direct. Instead, Roman Polanski was handed the reins, and Castle served only as a producer. The horror film (1968) was a box-office smash and became a classic in the genre. In 1974 Castle returned to directing for his final film, Shanks. The gruesome production featured Marcel Marceau as a puppeteer who uses dead bodies instead of marionettes.
Although Castle directed more than 50 feature films, only a few were more memorable than the genius with which they were exploited. As Castle admitted in the autobiography Step Right Up! I’m Gonna Scare the Pants Off America (1976), he considered himself the P.T. Barnum of cinema. A master showman, he made a unique, if minor, contribution to American motion pictures. The comedy Matinee (1993) paid tribute to the director, with John Goodman capturing Castle’s larger-than-life persona as a cigar-chomping film promoter who was half huckster, half savant. The movie was set in Florida during the Cuban missile crisis—Castle’s heyday and a fittingly scary time.
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6d59b501b6d1e79d9e99e8a157a9c997 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Claire-Menninger | William Claire Menninger | William Claire Menninger
…1924 Charles Menninger’s youngest son, William Claire Menninger (born October 15, 1899, Topeka—died September 6, 1966, Topeka), received an M.D. from Cornell University Medical College and served his internship at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. The following year he joined the family practice.
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aa05f319e651a7224c0c5c7b2dd35bb7 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Clito | William Clito | William Clito
William Clito, French Guillaume Cliton, (born c. 1101—died July 28, 1128, Aalst, Flanders [now in Belgium]), count of Flanders and titular duke of Normandy (as William IV, or as William III if England’s William Rufus’ earlier claim to the duchy is not acknowledged).
Son of Duke Robert II Curthose (and grandson of William the Conqueror and Matilda of Flanders), William Clito was supported by Louis VI of France in claiming the duchy when his father was imprisoned (1106) by the English. Henry I of England, however, had his own son William the Aetheling recognized as heir to Normandy and, in 1119, decisively defeated Louis VI and Clito at Bremule. When the Aetheling was drowned (1120), Clito made further trouble in Normandy. Although Clito was Louis VI’s candidate for the countship of Flanders in 1127, he died in 1128.
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921572ea0326f0f5c26287d9ae160152 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Cornelius-Van-Horne | Sir William Cornelius Van Horne | Sir William Cornelius Van Horne
Sir William Cornelius Van Horne, (born February 3, 1843, near Joliet, Illinois, U.S.—died September 11, 1915, Montreal, Canada), American-born Canadian railway official who directed the construction of Canada’s first transcontinental railroad.
Van Horne worked as a telegraph operator on the Illinois Central Railroad. By 1880 he was general superintendent of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad system. In 1881 he became general manager of the Canadian Pacific Railway and oversaw the completion of its construction (1885). He rose to be president of the Canadian Pacific in 1889, then served as chairman of the board from 1899 to 1910. His activities expanded to include the promotion of railways and industry in Cuba. He was knighted in 1894.
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24be6d29170da3f14ba40623a0ea0294 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Crapo-Durant | William Crapo Durant | William Crapo Durant
William Crapo Durant, (born Dec. 8, 1861, Boston—died March 18, 1947, New York City), American industrialist and founder of General Motors Corporation, which later became one of the largest corporations in the world in terms of sales.
After establishing a carriage company in Michigan in 1886, Durant took over a small firm in 1903 and began to manufacture Buick motorcars. He brought together several automotive manufacturers to form the General Motors Company in 1908, but financial problems cost him control of the company in 1910. With Louis Chevrolet, however, he established the Chevrolet Motor Company, which acquired control of General Motors in 1915. From that base, Durant, as president, created the General Motors Corporation and launched a successful expansion program. Post-World War I difficulties again forced him out of General Motors in 1920, and he formed a new firm, Durant Motors, Inc., in 1921. This and later ventures, some of which were large, were generally unsuccessful.
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e6052144c2519997f0f18bb03ecb9146 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Crookes | Sir William Crookes | Sir William Crookes
Sir William Crookes, (born June 17, 1832, London, Eng.—died April 4, 1919, London), British chemist and physicist noted for his discovery of the element thallium and for his cathode-ray studies, fundamental in the development of atomic physics.
After studying at the Royal College of Chemistry, London, Crookes became superintendent of the meteorological department at Radcliffe Observatory, Oxford, in 1854, and the following year gained a post at the College of Science in Chester, Cheshire. Having inherited a large fortune from his father, he devoted himself from 1856 entirely to scientific work of various kinds at his private laboratory in London. His researches on electrical discharges through a rarefied gas led him to observe the dark space around the cathode, now called the Crookes dark space. He demonstrated that cathode rays travel in straight lines and produce phosphorescence and heat when they strike certain materials. He invented many devices to study the behaviour of cathode rays, but his theory of radiant matter, or a fourth state of matter, proved incorrect in many respects.
With the introduction of spectrum analysis by R.W. Bunsen and G.R. Kirchhoff, Crookes applied the new technique to the study of selenium compounds. In 1861 he discovered thallium in some seleniferous deposits. He continued work on that new element, isolated it, studied its properties, and in 1873 determined its atomic weight.
During his studies of thallium, Crookes discovered the principle of the Crookes radiometer, a device that converts light radiation into rotary motion. The principle of this radiometer has found numerous applications in the development of sensitive measuring instruments. Crookes was knighted in 1897.
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61ebefd176dc754649b8441ecebb9a10 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-D-P-Bliss | William D.P. Bliss | William D.P. Bliss
William D.P. Bliss, in full William Dwight Porter Bliss, (born August 20, 1856, Constantinople [now Istanbul]—died October 8, 1926, New York City, New York, U.S.), American social reformer and organizer of Christian Socialist societies.
The son of American missionaries in Turkey, Bliss was educated at the Hartford Theological Seminary (Hartford, Connecticut). First as a Congregationalist and later as an Episcopalian, he held several pastorates following his graduation from Hartford in 1882.
In the late 1880s Bliss became deeply interested in Christian Socialism, a movement intent upon applying the teachings of Jesus to the social dislocations caused by industrialization and urbanization. Bliss organized the first U.S. Christian Socialist Society in 1889 and edited its publication, The Dawn. Bliss traveled extensively, lecturing on the problems of labour and social reform. He compiled and edited many books, the best known being the Encyclopedia of Social Reform (1897). He unsuccessfully ran for lieutenant governor of Massachusetts in 1887 on the Labor Party ticket, and he also served as an investigator for the Bureau of Labor. He did educational work among French and Belgian soldiers interned in Switzerland during World War I. He returned to the United States after the war and preached in New York City until his death.
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918f8e0bca1f447ca1faea31f204890b | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Daniel-Leahy | William Daniel Leahy | William Daniel Leahy
William Daniel Leahy, (born May 6, 1875, Hampton, Iowa, U.S.—died July 20, 1959, Bethesda, Maryland), American naval officer who served as personal chief of staff to President Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II.
Leahy graduated from the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, in 1897 and was assigned as midshipman to the battleship Oregon. He was aboard that warship during its spectacular dash from the Pacific coast around Cape Horn to join the U.S. fleet off Cuba in the spring of 1898, during the Spanish-American War. The following year he was commissioned an ensign and assigned to the Asiatic Station, where he saw active service during the Philippine insurrection (1899–1901) and the Boxer Rebellion in China (1900).
In World War I he commanded the navy transport Princess Matoika and formed a lasting friendship with Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the navy. After the war Leahy’s ability brought steady professional advancement: rear admiral in 1930, vice admiral in 1935, and admiral in 1936. His talent for organization was early recognized, and during the post-World War I years he held all three of the navy’s highest administrative offices: chief of the Bureau of Ordnance (1927–31), chief of the Bureau of Navigation (1933–35), and chief of Naval Operations (1937–39).
Leahy’s first career ended with retirement because of his age in August 1939. His second career began a few months later, when President Roosevelt named him governor of Puerto Rico. He held that post until December 1940, when he was appointed ambassador to the Vichy government that had been established in France after the Germans defeated the French army. There Leahy’s chief task was to stiffen French resistance to German pressure and to keep the French fleet out of German hands. After achieving some success in this difficult assignment, he was recalled in 1942 to fill the newly created position of chief of staff to Roosevelt. As liaison between the president and the armed services, Leahy conferred with Roosevelt daily, presided over the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and participated in almost all the major military and diplomatic decisions of the war years. He was made a fleet admiral in December 1944 and accompanied Roosevelt to the Yalta Conference the following year.
After Roosevelt’s death (April 1945), Leahy was asked by President Harry S. Truman to continue as his personal chief of staff. He retired from that position in 1949, and the following year he published a book of war memoirs, I Was There (1950).
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947c69ee81031ccfcb955cefd9c46fa0 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-de-Hauteville | William de Hauteville | William de Hauteville
William de Hauteville, byname William Iron Arm, Italian Guglielmo d’Altavilla or Guglielmo Braccio-di-Ferro, French Guillaume de Hauteville or Guillaume Bras de Fer, (born, Hauteville-la-Guichard, Normandy [France]—died 1046), Norman adventurer, the eldest of 12 Hauteville brothers, a soldier of fortune who led the first contingent of his family from Normandy to southern Italy. He undertook its conquest and quickly became count of Apulia.
William and his brothers Drogo and Humphrey responded (c. 1035) to an appeal for reinforcements in Italy by the Norman Rainulf of Aversa. He fought under Byzantine command against the Arabs (1038–40), and he earned his sobriquet “Iron Arm” during the Norman-Byzantine siege of Muslim-occupied Syracuse (Sicily) when he charged and killed the emir of the city. When his commander was recalled to Constantinople, William and his men rebelled. He served as a captain of the Norman army that joined the Lombards in invading Apulia, in southern Italy, and was proclaimed count of Apulia in 1042. The title was confirmed later that year by Gaimar V, the Lombard prince of Salerno, who arranged a marriage between William and his own niece, daughter of the duke of Sorrento. Emerging as the most powerful leader in southern Italy, William, allied with Gaimar, invaded Calabria (the toe of Italy) two years later. After his death, his brother Drogo was invested as count of Apulia.
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f688160d6affba523450b92743e8feae | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-de-la-Mare | William De La Mare | William De La Mare
William De La Mare, (born, England—died c. 1290), English philosopher and theologian, advocate of the traditional Neoplatonic-Augustinian school of Christian philosophy, and leading critic of the Aristotelian thought introduced by Thomas Aquinas.
A member of the Franciscan order, William became a master of theology at the University of Paris c. 1275 and subscribed to the Augustinian school as expressed by the celebrated Italian Franciscan Bonaventure. While lecturing at Paris, William wrote his Commentarium super libros sententiarum (“Commentary on the Books of Sentences”—i.e., annotations on Peter Lombard’s 12th-century collection of patristic and early medieval theology). Reflecting his Augustinian intellectual development, William considered the knowing process to be the operation of an inherent power in the human spirit given by God at creation. According to William, man’s intrinsic desire to reunite with God, and an inner enlightenment of the soul (illuminationism) by which eternal ideas are recognized, constituted the essence of human psychology.
On returning to England William wrote his chief work, Correctorium fratris Thomae (1278; “Corrective of Brother Thomas”), a critique of the writings of Thomas Aquinas. The introduction of Aristotelian thought into theology drew a volatile reaction from the traditional Neoplatonic thinkers, who had dominated Western thought since Augustine. Desirous of providing students with a guide to control these new thoughts, William chose 118 articles from Aquinas’ writings, mostly from his celebrated Summa theologiae (“Sum of Theology”), and noted points at which Aristotelian influence produced concepts or interpretations contrary to orthodox formulas. Historians of philosophy, however, observe that William failed to analyze the basic questions causing conflict between Thomistic Aristotelians and Neoplatonists—i.e., the distinction between essence and existence, time and eternity, matter and spirit.
William’s Correctorium was approved for the entire Franciscan order in 1282, when the Franciscan minister general Bonagratia forbade the study of Aquinas’ Summa theologiae except by scholars using the critical standard of William’s Correctorium. After publication, the Correctorium, in a publicized polemic, was in turn corrected by Thomists, notably the English Dominicans Richard Clapwell and Thomas Sutton and the French Dominican John of Paris. Entitling their response Correctorium corruptorii fratris Thomae (“Corrective of the Corruptor of Brother Thomas”), the Thomists emphasized William’s failure to comprehend both Aquinas and Aristotle. The surviving texts of the Correctoria, edited by P. Glorieux (1927), with comments by F. Pelster (1956), probably do not give William’s original version but only preserve a revision that he completed c. 1284.
Of parallel importance were William’s contributions to biblical studies. His Correctio textus bibliae (“Corrective of the Text of the Bible”) and the De Hebraeis et Graecis vocabulis glossarum bibliae (“On the Hebrew and Greek Terms of Biblical Annotations”) are considered among the most learned from the medieval period.
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cfd5fbd4e7ef6b173dadd5e940ddc7f5 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Dieterle | William Dieterle | William Dieterle
William Dieterle, original name Wilhelm Dieterle, (born July 15, 1893, Ludwigshafen, Germany—died December 8, 1972, Ottobrunn), German-born filmmaker who directed a diverse range of movies but was perhaps best known for a series of acclaimed biopics, one of which won the Warner Brothers studio its first-ever Academy Award for best picture.
Dieterle was born into a poor family, the youngest of nine children. He began acting while a teenager and within a few years had become a member of Max Reinhardt’s stage company. In the 1920s Dieterle frequently appeared on the big screen, and his acting credits eventually included more than 60 movies. During this time he also developed an interest in directing. In 1923 he helmed his first film, Der Mensch am Wege (Man by the Roadside), and in 1930 he signed with Warner Brothers–First National to go to Hollywood. While Dieterle had earned a reputation as a capable director, he was also known for his unconventional working methods, not the least of which was consulting his astrological chart before deciding when a film would begin shooting.
Dieterle’s first English-language picture for Warners was The Last Flight (1931), a bleak Lost Generation drama set in Paris about four World War I airmen whose disillusionment leads to tragic results; it starred Richard Barthelmess, Elliott Nugent, David Manners, and Johnny Mack Brown. In 1931 Dieterle also directed Her Majesty, Love, an indifferent musical with Marilyn Miller and W.C. Fields. Six features bore Dieterle’s name in 1932. Man Wanted was a romantic comedy with Kay Francis as an unhappily married woman who falls in love with her male assistant; Jewel Robbery paired Francis to good effect with the suave William Powell; and The Crash saw an accountant (played by George Brent) ruined by his high-living wife (Ruth Chatterton). Six Hours to Live is a science-fiction drama about a murdered diplomat (Warner Baxter) who is brought back to life for six hours, while Scarlet Dawn was a melodrama set during the Russian Revolution of 1917, with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and Nancy Carroll. Dieterle completed 1932 with Lawyer Man, which featured Powell as a slick attorney facing blackmail.
Dieterle remained busy in 1933. After the formulaic police procedural From Headquarters, he directed Grand Slam a deft satire on bridge tournaments, in which a wife (Loretta Young) competes with her estranged husband (Paul Lukas) in the championship. After quitting the melodrama Female because of illness, Dieterle then made Fashions of 1934, a popular musical featuring Powell as a New York businessman who uses a designer (Bette Davis) to steal the latest styles from Paris. The comedy was especially notable for the lively production numbers staged by Busby Berkeley. Dieterle reteamed with Davis for Fog over Frisco, with the actress portraying a bored heiress involved in stolen securities; the crime drama was especially notable for its brisk pacing. Dieterle’s last films from 1934 were Madame Du Barry, a highly imaginative account of the infamous French courtesan (played by Dolores del Rio), and The Firebird, a static murder mystery set in Vienna.
By the mid-1930s, Dieterle had made some 20 movies for Warners but had not been entrusted with any top properties. In 1935, however, he was tapped to work on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, one of the studio’s most prestigious releases of that year. Although his old mentor Max Reinhardt had begun filming, Dieterle was brought in to codirect. The resulting movie was a colourful though imperfect adaptation of William Shakespeare’s play, with miscasting at the root of many of its problems. Even so, it received an Academy Award nomination for best picture. With the success of that film, Dieterle began working on the studio’s higher-profile movies. Dr. Socrates (1935), a crackling crime picture, may not have been one of Paul Muni’s most enduring vehicles, but The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936) certainly was; Muni won his only Academy Award for his performance as the French scientist, and the picture received an Oscar nomination. In The White Angel (1936) Francis was less convincing as Florence Nightingale than Muni had been as Pasteur.
Dieterle took a break from biopics to direct Satan Met a Lady (1936), a pallid adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, with the characters and material played for laughs. In 1937 he made the crime drama The Great O’Malley, which starred Pat O’Brien and Humphrey Bogart, and Another Dawn, an adequate soap opera set in Africa, with Francis and Errol Flynn. Dieterle then landed the prestige property The Life of Emile Zola (1937). Muni played the outspoken writer who protested the unjust charge of treason that had been leveled against Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus. The film was a box-office success, and it won the Academy Award for best picture—Warner Brothers’ first win in that category. In addition, Dieterle received his only Oscar nomination for best director.
Dieterle then directed Blockade (1938), which starred Henry Fonda and Madeleine Carroll as lovers torn apart by the Spanish Civil War. The film generated controversy for what some claimed were leftist sympathies, and it failed at the box office. Dieterle returned to biopics with Juarez (1939). Although positioned to be another Zola, it floundered, in part because of Muni’s impassive interpretation of the charismatic Mexican leader. In 1939 Dieterle remade The Hunchback of Notre Dame for RKO, and it was one of his finest (if least typical) works. The lavish production was anchored by Charles Laughton’s moving performance as Quasimodo, and the fine supporting cast included Cedric Hardwicke, Thomas Mitchell, and Maureen O’Hara. Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet (1940) was another tasteful screen biography; Edward G. Robinson starred as the German scientist who discovered a cure for syphilis, and Ruth Gordon played his wife. A Dispatch from Reuter’s (1940) featured Robinson as yet another famous 19th-century German, the founder of the international news service. However, the picture was not particularly compelling, and it proved to be Dieterle’s last for Warner Brothers.
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415460a399038dcf461c1fd765f4dd1f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Diller-Matthew | William Diller Matthew | William Diller Matthew
William Diller Matthew, (born Feb. 19, 1871, Saint John, N.B., Can.—died Sept. 24, 1930, San Francisco), Canadian-American paleontologist who was an important contributor to modern knowledge of mammalian evolution.
From 1895 to 1927 Matthew worked in the department of vertebrate paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, New York City. He became curator of the department in 1911 and divisional curator in chief in 1922. During this period he made an exhaustive study of the fossil collections of pioneer paleontologist Edward Cope and published 240 papers. Most important among them was “Climate and Evolution” (Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 24, 1915). In this work, Matthew argued for a relative permanency of the great ocean basins and continental masses and against the existence of former land bridges across what are now abyssal depths. He proposed a theory of transport by natural rafts to explain the existence of closely related species on landmasses separated by such depths. His principal contention was that most mammalian orders and families originated in the Northern Hemisphere, subsequently spreading southward. Isolation of species in more remote southern areas, such as Australia, accounted for the extraordinary primitive faunas there.
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925945add65df5eae4e9e072f3814bfe | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-duke-of-Gelderland | William | William
…expedition in August 1388 against Duke William of Gelderland; Charles, however, made a speedy peace with William and returned to France.
…development, partly because the powerful Duke William (ruled 1379–1402) of that principality had his own financial resources as a result of his military activities in the service of the English and, later, French kings; under William’s successors, however, the knights and the towns became more powerful and finally gained permanent…
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cad6763d26dd63d179c8e4142cd37f29 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Dwight-Whitney | William Dwight Whitney | William Dwight Whitney
William Dwight Whitney, (born Feb. 9, 1827, Northampton, Mass., U.S.—died June 7, 1894, New Haven, Conn.), American linguist and one of the foremost Sanskrit scholars of his time, noted especially for his classic work, Sanskrit Grammar (1879).
As a professor of Sanskrit (1854–94) and comparative language studies (1869–94) at Yale University, Whitney conducted extensive research and published a number of works. These included editions and translations of the Vedas, the ancient Hindu sacred scriptures, written in the oldest form of Sanskrit. Whitney also contributed to the great Sanskrit dictionary of Otto von Böhtlingk and Rudolf von Roth.
Whitney also served as editor in chief of The Century Dictionary: An Encyclopedic Lexicon of the English Language, 6 vol. (1889–91), which in its time was one of the finest general-purpose dictionaries in the United States. He was also the editor of the 1864 edition of Webster’s dictionary. Whitney wrote The Life and Growth of Language (1875), Essentials of English Grammar (1877), and Max Müller and the Science of Linguistics: A Criticism (1892). Most of his scholarly articles were republished in his Oriental and Linguistic Studies, 2 vol. (1873–74). Appraisals of his life and work appeared in 1897 in the Whitney Memorial Meeting, edited by Charles Rockwell Lanman.
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8f01e1c0204fd06a5c5bf400ac22dc6f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-E-Borah | William E. Borah | William E. Borah
William E. Borah, in full William Edgar Borah, (born June 29, 1865, Fairfield, Ill., U.S.—died Jan. 19, 1940, Washington, D.C.), Republican U.S. senator from Idaho for 33 years, best known for his major role at the end of World War I (1918) in preventing the United States from joining the League of Nations and the World Court.
Borah practiced law in Boise, Idaho, and in 1892 became chairman of the Republican State Central Committee. He first won election to the U.S. Senate in 1906 and was returned to office five times by large majorities, making his tenure one of the longest in U.S. history. Borah’s distrust of government centralization limited his commitment to social reform, but he did sponsor bills establishing the Department of Labor as well as the federal Children’s Bureau. He also strongly supported the federal income tax and fought the trusts.
Isolationism dominated Borah’s attitudes toward foreign policy. He did, however, sponsor a congressional resolution (1921) calling for an international naval disarmament conference in Washington, D.C., resulting in the Naval Armament Limitation Treaty concluded Feb. 6, 1922. Assuming the chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 1924, he wielded enormous power in this area for the next 16 years.
Borah did not object to international compacts so long as the enforcement mechanism was limited to moral sanctions; thus he lent his support to the Kellogg–Briand Pact (Paris, 1928)—an ineffective multilateral agreement theoretically outlawing war as an instrument of national policy. He consistently upheld diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union and also helped establish the Good Neighbor policy toward Latin America by advocating a fair deal for Mexico during the controversy over foreign-held oil properties (1926–28).
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Borah supported many New Deal measures designed to relieve internal economic conditions. As European tensions mounted, however, he held fast to his isolationist stance by resisting all attempts to involve the U.S. on the side of the Allies.
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b5ff7eef540012dccfdd321cf3be7366 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Edmondstoune-Aytoun | William Edmondstoune Aytoun | William Edmondstoune Aytoun
William Edmondstoune Aytoun, (born June 21, 1813, Edinburgh, Scot.—died Aug. 4, 1865, Elgin, Moray), poet famous for parodies and light verse that greatly influenced the style of later Scottish humorous satire.
Born into a literary family, Aytoun learned from his mother to love Scottish ballads and history. He was educated at the University of Edinburgh and in Germany, and in 1840 he was called to the Scottish bar. That same year he first collaborated with Theodore Martin in a series of humorous and satirical papers for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, later published as the Bon Gaultier Ballads (1845). These papers include Aytoun’s parodies “The Queen in France,” based on “Sir Patrick Spens,” and “The Massacre of the Macpherson,” both of which were models for later writers, especially for W.S. Gilbert in the Bab Ballads (1869).
In 1844 Aytoun joined the staff of Blackwoods, to which he contributed political as well as miscellaneous articles. The following year he was appointed professor of rhetoric and belles lettres at Edinburgh. Shortly afterward he published Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers (1849), a set of Jacobite ballads that achieved wide popularity. In 1854, reverting to light verse, he published Firmilian, or the Student of Badajoz, a Spasmodic Tragedy, in which the writings of the spasmodic school were brilliantly ridiculed.
In 1858 Aytoun published The Ballads of Scotland, 2 vol., and a translation made with Martin of the Poems and Ballads of Goethe. His Norman Sinclair (1861) pictures Scottish manners in the early 19th century.
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7d944bd9ad96469d663533802a66e2bc | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Ellery-Channing | William Ellery Channing | William Ellery Channing
William Ellery Channing, (born April 7, 1780, Newport, R.I.—died Oct. 2, 1842, Bennington, Vt., U.S.), U.S. author and moralist, Congregationalist and, later, Unitarian clergyman. Known as the “apostle of Unitarianism,” Channing was a leading figure in the development of New England Transcendentalism and of organized attempts in the U.S. to eliminate slavery, drunkenness, poverty, and war.
He studied theology in Newport and at Harvard and soon became a successful preacher in various churches in the Boston area. From June 1, 1803, until his death he was minister of the Federal Street Church, Boston. Preferring to avoid abstruse points of doctrine, he preached morality, charity, and Christian responsibilities. He became a popular speaker on ceremonial occasions and reached an even larger audience by writing for liberal Boston periodicals, one of which was The Christian Disciple (from 1824 called The Christian Examiner). In 1815 he was attacked by the orthodox Calvinist periodical The Panoplist, whose editor, Jedidiah Morse, denounced the Boston clergy as “Unitarian” rather than Christian. During the next five years Channing issued several defenses of his position, especially “Unitarian Christianity,” a sermon delivered at an ordination in Baltimore in 1819.
Reluctantly accepting the label of Unitarianism, Channing described his faith as “a rational and amiable system, against which no man’s understanding, or conscience, or charity, or piety revolts.” Although he did not wish to found a denomination, believing that a Unitarian orthodoxy would be just as oppressive as any other, he formed (1820) a conference of liberal Congregational ministers, later (May 1825) reorganized as the American Unitarian Association.
Channing sympathized with the beliefs of several social and educational reform movements but did not believe that society could be improved by collective action. He denied that government—the only legitimate function of which was, in his view, the essentially negative one of maintaining public order—could advance the moral sensibility of the human race.
In his time, Channing’s reputation as a man of letters was based on several long essay-reviews, among the first of their kind in the U.S. One took John Milton’s “Treatise on Christian Doctrine” as a starting point; another, Sir Walter Scott’s biography of Napoleon I, in whose career Channing saw the great social danger of taking prominent soldiers for heroes. Most of his manuscripts were destroyed by fire.
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1035a7bfb2faaba492c8480835020962 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-F-Halsey-Jr | William F. Halsey, Jr. | William F. Halsey, Jr.
William F. Halsey, Jr., in full William Frederick Halsey, Jr., byname Bull Halsey, (born Oct. 30, 1882, Elizabeth, N.J., U.S.—died Aug. 16, 1959, Fishers Island, N.Y.), U.S. naval commander who led vigorous campaigns in the Pacific theatre during World War II. He was a leading exponent of warfare using carrier-based aircraft and became known for his daring tactics.
A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Md., in 1904, Halsey served as a destroyer commander in World War I. He became a naval aviator in 1935 and reached the rank of vice admiral in 1940. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (December 1941), Halsey’s task force was virtually the only operational battle group left in the Pacific. While the United States rebuilt its fleet, he directed surprise forays on Japanese-held islands in the Marshalls and Gilberts as well as on Wake Island. In April 1942 his group maneuvered close enough to Tokyo for Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle’s planes to carry out the first bombing of the Japanese capital. Consistent successes led to his appointment in October 1942 as commander of the South Pacific force and area. During the next two months, he played a vital role in the Battle of Santa Cruz Islands and the naval Battle of Guadalcanal (November 12–15) and was promoted to admiral. From 1942 to mid-1944 Halsey directed the U.S. campaign in the Solomon Islands.
In June 1944 Halsey became commander of the 3rd Fleet and led his carrier task force in brilliant air strikes. He was responsible for covering and supporting U.S. land operations as well as finding and destroying much of the Japanese fleet in the Battle of Leyte Gulf (October). He led U.S. forces in the final naval operations around Okinawa in the Ryukyu Islands from May 28, 1945, to September 2, when the Japanese surrendered.
Halsey was promoted to the rank of fleet admiral in December 1945, and he retired in 1947. He was president of International Telecommunications Laboratories (1951–57).
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3fd6da592456609f04b02d2ea51d1bc0 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Ferguson-Massey | William Ferguson Massey | William Ferguson Massey
William Ferguson Massey, (born March 26, 1856, Limavady, County Londonderry, Ire.—died May 10, 1925, Wellington, N.Z.), New Zealand statesman, prime minister (1912–25), lifelong spokesman for agrarian interests, and opponent of left-wing movements. His Reform Party ministries included leadership of the country during World War I.
After immigrating to New Zealand in 1870, Massey farmed near Auckland and assumed leadership in farmers’ organizations. He entered Parliament in 1894 as a conservative and from 1894 to 1912 was a leader of the conservative opposition to the Liberal ministries. He became prime minister in 1912 and promptly signed legislation enabling freeholders to buy their land at its original value. The first years of his ministry saw labour strikes by miners in Waihi in 1912 and wharf workers in Wellington in 1913; his harsh repression of them gave impetus to the formation of the Labour Party in 1916. He also improved federal administration by putting civil service positions under a nonpolitical commission.
A coalition with the Liberal Party led by Sir Joseph Ward enabled Massey to continue his ministry in 1915. He participated in the Imperial War Cabinet (1917–18) and signed the Treaty of Versailles at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, making New Zealand a founding member of the League of Nations. He opposed separate sovereign status for dominions within the British Commonwealth.
Following the war, farmers were troubled by depressed prices resulting from the sharply reduced British demand for their products, and they also faced inflation in land prices, aggravated by increased demand for land by returned servicemen. Massey responded to these problems by establishing the Meat Control Board (1922) and the Dairy Export Control Board (1923), but rural and urban unrest resulting from rising prices continued to mount in the final years of his ministry.
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530ba40b671731f51914c114e710ac63 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Forsythe | William Forsythe | William Forsythe
William Forsythe, (born December 30, 1949, New York, New York, U.S.), American choreographer who staged audaciously groundbreaking contemporary dance performances during his long association with the Frankfurt Ballet and later with his own troupe, the Forsythe Company. His body of work, which displayed both abstraction and forceful theatricality, deconstructed the classical ballet repertoire by incorporating the spoken word, experimental music, and elaborate art installations.
Although Forsythe performed in musicals when he was in high school, he did not begin formal dance training until he was a drama student at Jacksonville (Florida) University. He began studying at the Joffrey Ballet School in New York in 1969 and from 1971 to 1973 danced with Joffrey Ballet II, often appearing in the parent company’s productions. Forsythe moved to Germany in 1973 to dance with the Stuttgart Ballet, and in 1976 he choreographed his first piece, Urlicht. He became the Stuttgart’s resident choreographer in 1978 and that same year created his first piece for the the company, Dream of Galilei. With his first full-length ballet, Orpheus (1979), he began to move beyond traditional classical ballet and present his own dynamic and unconventional vision. Forsythe left the company in 1980 to freelance and created works for companies that included the Munich State Opera Ballet, Netherlands Dance Theatre, the Frankfurt Ballet, and the Paris Opéra Ballet.
In 1984 Forsythe became director of the government-sponsored Frankfurt Ballet. He continued to develop his own concepts for his dances, using spoken word, video projections, and electronic sounds and devising an extreme physical vocabulary. In works that included In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated (1987) and Herman Schmerman (1992), he dazzled—and often confused—his audiences. Numerous companies worldwide included his works in their repertoires. During this time he was commissioned by Daniel Libeskind to create installations that featured architecture and performance. Forsythe dubbed these works “Choreographic Objects” and continued to produce them into the 21st century. In 2002 the Frankfurt government began to withdraw its support in order to cut costs and to favour a more conventional dance company. The public protested, but Forsythe decided to move on, and in 2004 the Frankfurt Ballet gave its last performance.
Forsythe’s new company, the Forsythe Company, was about half the size of the Frankfurt Ballet, but nearly all of its dancers were from that company. Forsythe continued to present his vision to a wide audience. With bases in Frankfurt and Dresden and supported by both state and private funding, the Forsythe Company made its debut in 2005 with the premiere of Forsythe’s Three Atmospheric Studies. A major retrospective of Forsythe’s work was presented at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich in 2006, and in subsequent years, his company toured across Europe, appearing in Paris, Zürich, and London. In 2009 London held a monthlong “Focus on Forsythe” celebration that included events across the city, a traveling multimedia installation, and the performance of Nowhere and Everywhere at the Same Time, an elaborate installation piece at the Tate Modern, in which dancers weaved through hundreds of suspended pendulums. In 2015 Forsythe stepped down as director of his troupe, and it was subsequently renamed the Dresden Frankfurt Dance Company. However, he continued to be active with the company. He joined the faculty at the University of Southern California in 2015.
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2f51aaedb16ed4d52a6759ead07cb20c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-George-Horner | William George Horner | William George Horner
William George Horner, (born 1786, near Bristol, Gloucestershire, Eng.—died Sept. 22, 1837, Grosvenor Place, Bath, Somerset), mathematician whose name is attached to Horner’s method, a means of continuous approximation to determine the solutions of algebraic equations of any degree.
Horner became assistant master of Kingswood School, Bristol, in 1802, and headmaster four years later. He founded his own school at Grosvenor Place in 1809. Horner’s method was known to the Chinese in the 13th century (see Zhu Shijie), and in 1804, fifteen years before Horner published his discovery in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Paolo Ruffini won the gold medal of the Italian Science Society for describing a similar method. Horner’s name became attached to the method, and it became very popular in England and America, largely as a result of the publicity of Horner’s work by the British mathematician Augustus De Morgan.
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a40e0090df0747c6b50199ce3f11a945 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-George-Ward | William George Ward | William George Ward
William George Ward, (born March 21, 1812, London, Eng.—died July 6, 1882, London), English author and theologian, one of the leaders of the Oxford movement, which sought to revive in Anglicanism the High Church ideals of the later 17th-century church. He eventually became a convert to Roman Catholicism.
Ward was educated at Christ Church, Oxford, and became a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, in 1834. He was ordained in the Anglican church in 1840. Under the influence of John Henry Newman, later cardinal, he joined the Oxford movement, in which his role was that of an extremist pressing for submission to the Roman Catholic authority. Protestants strongly opposed his argument that the Thirty-nine Articles—the doctrinal formularies of the Church of England—were incompatible with the Catholic status of the Church of England. He was suspended from Balliol for supporting Newman in a series of pamphlets. After publishing The Ideal of a Christian Church (1844), which urged the Church of England to “sue humbly” at Rome’s feet “for pardon and restoration,” his work was condemned by the University of Oxford.
In September 1845 he joined the Roman Catholic church, followed in the next month by Newman and many other members of the movement. Ward then taught theology at St. Edmund’s College, Ware, Hertfordshire (1851–58), and received a doctorate of philosophy in 1854 from Pope Pius IX. From 1863 to 1878 he edited the Dublin Review, an influential Roman Catholic quarterly. With the poet laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Archbishop Manning of Westminster, Ward founded the Metaphysical Society in 1869. He eventually retired to the Isle of Wight.
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b0e2485c92ed84022a60b82fbabe3f8e | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Gilbert | William Gilbert | William Gilbert
William Gilbert, Gilbert also spelled Gylberde, (born May 24, 1544, Colchester, Essex, England—died November 30 [December 10, New Style], 1603, London?), pioneer researcher into magnetism who became the most distinguished man of science in England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I.
Educated as a physician, Gilbert settled in London and began to practice in 1573. His principal work, De Magnete, Magneticisque Corporibus, et de Magno Magnete Tellure (1600; On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies and on the Great Magnet the Earth), gives a full account of his research on magnetic bodies and electrical attractions. After years of experiments, he concluded that a compass needle points north–south and dips downward because Earth acts as a bar magnet. The first to use the terms electric attraction, electric force, and magnetic pole, he is often considered the father of electrical studies.
In 1601 Gilbert was appointed physician to Queen Elizabeth I, and upon her death in 1603 was appointed physician to King James I. However, later that year Gilbert died, possibly in a plague epidemic that swept London. He left an unpublished work that was edited by his brother from two manuscripts and published posthumously in 1651 as De Mundo Nostro Sublunari Philosophia Nova (“A New Philosophy of Our Sublunary World”). He held modern views on the structure of the universe, agreeing with Copernicus that Earth rotates on its axis. He concluded that fixed stars are not all the same distance from Earth and believed that the planets were held in their orbits by a form of magnetism.
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58ab09058b1297fbc1c07302692a8b6a | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Gilmore-Simms | William Gilmore Simms | William Gilmore Simms
William Gilmore Simms, (born April 17, 1806, Charleston, S.C., U.S.—died June 11, 1870, Charleston), outstanding Southern novelist.
Motherless at two, Simms was reared by his grandmother while his father fought in the Creek wars and under Jackson at New Orleans in 1814. Simms lived a vicariously adventurous childhood through his father, while absorbing history through his storytelling grandmother who had lived through the Revolution. After attending public schools for four years, when he entered the College of Charleston at 10, he knew enough French, Latin, German, and Spanish to dabble in translations. At 12 he completed the study of materia medica, and left college to become a druggist’s apprentice. He began publishing poetry in Charleston papers at 16. Soon thereafter he joined his itinerant father in the Mississippi frontier country, meeting the people and seeing the life of which he later wrote. He edited a magazine and published a volume of poetry at 19, married at 20, and was admitted to the bar at 21.
Simms was a prodigious worker, whether at Woodlands Plantation in winter, Charleston in summer, or on yearly publishing trips north. As state legislator and magazine and newspaper editor, he became embroiled in political and literary quarrels. From Charleston and the South he nevertheless received lifelong praise approaching adulation; from the North, wide audience and eminent literary friendships despite his strong defense of slavery. Though his life was shadowed by defeat of the Confederacy, the death of his second wife, poverty, and the destruction of his home and library during the passage of Sherman’s army, his letters attest a figure long underestimated by literary historians. Although not born into the social and literary circles of Charleston, he was eventually made a member of the city’s most select group, the St. Cecilia Society.
Simms has been criticized for writing too much, too carelessly, and with too frequent use of stock devices; he was at his best the master of a racy and masculine English prose style and in dealing humorously with rowdy frontier characters. His gift as a teller of tales in the oral tradition and the antiquarian care he took in preparing historical materials are dominant features of such works as Pelayo (1838), in an 8th-century setting; Vasconselos (1853), 16th century; The Yemassee (1835; his most successful work in audience appeal), colonial; the revolutionary series—The Partisan (1835), Mellichampe (1836), The Kinsmen (1841), Katherine Walton (1851), Woodcraft (1854), The Forayers (1855), Eutaw (1856), Joscelyn (1867); his best border romances—Richard Hurdis (1838) and Border Beagles (1840); his short-story collection The Wigwam and the Cabin (1845); and his History of South Carolina (1840). Of 19 volumes of poetry, the collected Poems (1853) deserve mention. Most popular of his biographies were The Life of Francis Marion (1844) and The Life of Chevalier Bayard (1847). His literary criticism is represented in Views and Reviews of American Literature (1845).
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9b24b5499d7a8bd8c9f5b22e9826d142 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Graham-Sumner | William Graham Sumner | William Graham Sumner
William Graham Sumner, (born Oct. 30, 1840, Paterson, N.J., U.S.—died April 12, 1910, Englewood, N.J.), U.S. sociologist and economist, prolific publicist of Social Darwinism.
Like the British philosopher Herbert Spencer, Sumner, who taught at Yale from 1872 to 1909, expounded in many essays his firm belief in laissez-faire, individual liberty, and the innate inequalities among men. He viewed competition for property and social status as resulting in a beneficent elimination of the ill adapted and the preservation of racial soundness and cultural vigour. For him the middle-class Protestant ethic of hard work, thrift, and sobriety was conducive to wholesome family life and sound public morality. Foreseeing the drift toward the welfare state, but considering poverty the natural result of inherent inferiorities, he opposed all reform proposals that smacked of paternalism because they would impose excessive economic burdens on the middle class, his “forgotten man.” In his best known work, Folkways (1907), he stated that customs and morals originate in instinctive responses to the stimuli of hunger, sex, vanity, and fear. He emphasized the irrationality of folk customs and their resistance to reform. Sumner’s notes became the basis of The Science of Society, 4 vol. (1927–28), edited by Albert G. Keller.
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4bdbd81e3e673c9dbc76ab0808cdff56 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-H-Barlow | William H. Barlow | William H. Barlow
Pancras, London (1864–68, by William H. Barlow), where the wrought-iron arches have a span of 243 feet (74 metres) and rise to a height of 100 feet (30 metres).
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c9bcaaf2156a16b78f82fc66abaadae2 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-H-Woodward | William H. Woodward | William H. Woodward
The trustees then sued William H. Woodward, college secretary and ally of Wheelock, but lost in the state courts.
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79d12e1578f2f2032031154d8d665bb8 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Henry-Harrison/Political-career | Political career | Political career
After the war, Harrison settled in Ohio, where he quickly became active in politics. He served in the U.S. House of Representatives (1816–19), where he worked on behalf of more liberal pension laws, better militia organization, and improvements in the navigation of the Ohio River and for the strict construction of the power of Congress over the territories, particularly in regard to slavery. In accordance with this view, in 1819 he voted against James Tallmadge’s amendment (restricting the extension of slavery) to the enabling act for the admission of Missouri as a state. He delivered forcible speeches upon the death of Tadeusz Kościuszko and upon Gen. Andrew Jackson’s invasion of Florida in 1818, favouring a partial censure of the latter. Harrison also served in the Ohio Senate (1819–21) and the U.S. Senate (1825–28). In 1820 he made an unsuccessful run for governor of Ohio.
In 1828, after failing to secure for Harrison either the command of the army upon the death of Maj. Gen. Jacob Jennings Brown or the nomination as vice president on the ticket with John Quincy Adams, Harrison’s friends managed to get him appointed as the first minister of the United States to Gran Colombia. He became, however, an early sacrifice to Jackson’s spoils system and was recalled within less than a year, though not before he had involved himself in some awkward diplomatic complications with the short-lived republic’s government. For some years after his return from Colombia, Harrison lived in retirement at North Bend, Ohio. He was occasionally mentioned as a candidate for governor, senator, or representative by the anti-Jackson forces, and during this period he delivered a few addresses on agricultural or political topics. Later he obtained the lucrative post of clerk of the court of common pleas of Hamilton county, Ohio.
Early in 1835 Harrison began to be mentioned as a suitable presidential candidate for the nascent Whig Party in the 1836 election. He was nominated as one of the splintered new party’s three candidates at large public meetings in Pennsylvania, New York, and Maryland (the Whigs had neither a unifying platform nor a national convention). In the general election, Harrison attracted a large portion of the Whig and Anti-Masonic vote in the Midwest and Western states, but, although he finished highest among those candidates opposing Democrat Martin Van Buren, Harrison received only 73 electoral votes, while Van Buren secured 170 to become president.
Nonetheless, Harrison’s popular-vote totals were large enough to encourage him to make another attempt. In the 1840 election campaign, Harrison won the Whig nomination over Sen. Henry Clay of Kentucky, largely because of Harrison’s military record and noncommittal political views.
In Harrison the Whigs believed they had found a new Jackson, attractive as a war hero and a frontiersman. He became, as a result, the first “packaged” presidential candidate, depicted as a simple soul from the backwoods. To pull in Southern Democrats, the Whigs nominated John Tyler of Virginia for vice president. Capitalizing on voters’ distress over the severe economic depression caused by the panic of 1837, the campaign deliberately avoided discussion of national issues and substituted political songs, partisan slogans, and appropriate insignia: miniature log cabins and jugs of hard cider were widely distributed to emphasize Harrison’s frontier identification, and the cry of “Tippecanoe and Tyler too” rang throughout the land, calling up Harrison’s dramatic triumph on the field of battle 29 years earlier. These appeals triumphed, with Harrison winning 234 electoral votes to incumbent Van Buren’s 60.
Harrison was the first president-elect to travel by railroad to Washington, D.C., for his inauguration. Wearing no gloves and no overcoat despite the freezing weather, he rode up Pennsylvania Avenue on a white horse to take the oath of office on March 4, 1841. It was said that he was as pleased with the presidency “as a young woman with a new bonnet.” In the cold drizzle he delivered an inaugural address that lasted almost two hours. In it he highlighted a common Whig concern—“executive usurpation”—and reconfirmed his belief in a limited role for the U.S. president. He said he would serve but one term, limit his use of the veto, and leave revenue schemes to Congress.
The address was circulated to some parts of the country by railroad. For the first time, people outside Washington could read the president’s words the same day they were uttered.
Harrison was soon overwhelmed by office seekers. He was thoroughly dominated by the better-known leaders of his party—Daniel Webster, whom he appointed secretary of state, and Henry Clay. His relations with Clay were embittered, as Clay then preferred to wield power as leader of the Whigs in Congress. Once, when Clay was pressing his opinions on him, Harrison responded, “Mr. Clay, you forget that I am president.” Harrison tried to do everything expected of him, even trudging around Washington to purchase supplies for the White House. But a cold he had contracted on inauguration day developed into pneumonia, and he died just a month later. His wife, Anna, who was recovering from an illness, had not yet traveled to Washington; the couple’s widowed daughter-in-law, Jane Irwin Harrison, was performing the duties of first lady in her absence. Anna was packing her belongings for the journey when she learned of her husband’s death, which brought “His Accidency,” John Tyler, to the presidency. The first president to lie in state in the Capitol, Harrison was buried in Washington. Two months later, in June, his remains were reinterred in North Bend, Ohio.
The table provides a list of cabinet members in the administration of Pres. William Henry Harrison.
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13728156d88be33ab488e6e7c963f201 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Henry-Waddington | William Henry Waddington | William Henry Waddington
William Henry Waddington, (born Dec. 11, 1826, Saint-Rémy-sur-Avre, France—died Jan. 12, 1894, Paris), French scholar, diplomat, and politician. His appointment as French premier by the moderate Republicans, largely because of his cautious and colourless personality, marked the beginning of a trend in the Third Republic toward the exclusion from power of outstanding men.
The son of an English manufacturer living in France since 1780, Waddington began his education in France but completed it in England at Rugby and at Trinity College, Cambridge. He traveled in the eastern Mediterranean, published a number of studies on Middle Eastern and Roman antiquities, and was elected to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in 1865. In the same year and again in 1869, he ran unsuccessfully as a candidate for the Chamber of Deputies. He was elected, however, as an independent in 1871; he was elected senator in 1876. Waddington was minister of education for a few days in May 1873 and again from March 1876 to May 1877. Becoming minister of foreign affairs in December 1877, he distinguished himself as the French representative at the Congress of Berlin (1878).
When elections in January 1879 strengthened the power of the moderate Republicans, the more conservative Marshal Patrice Mac-Mahon was compelled to resign the presidency, and Jules Grévy, who succeeded to the post, chose Waddington as premier (February 1879), partly because he feared that by elevating the brilliant Léon Gambetta, at the time the leading figure among the Republicans, his own prestige would be eclipsed. Waddington did not, in fact, attempt to impose his leadership on the government. Rather, he retained his post as minister of foreign affairs and devoted his energies to active diplomacy over the status of Egypt and the Balkans. However, a member of his cabinet, Jules Ferry, who would later become premier, introduced measures to drastically reduce the influence of the Roman Catholic church in education. This provoked a controversy so bitter that Waddington was forced to resign (December 1879). As ambassador to Great Britain (1883–93) he handled the negotiations over Egypt in 1884. He lost his seat in the Senate in 1893.
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3ce6e8459f17f6ca7e66b0099adc1351 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Hesketh-Lever-1st-Viscount-Leverhulme | William Hesketh Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme | William Hesketh Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme
William Hesketh Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme, (born Sept. 19, 1851, Bolton, Lancashire, Eng.—died May 7, 1925, Hampstead, London), British soap and detergent entrepreneur who built the international firm of Lever Brothers.
Lever entered the soap business in 1885, when he leased a small, unprofitable soapworks. With his brother, James Darcy Lever, he began to make soap from vegetable oils instead of tallow and registered the name “Sunlight” for the product. At Port Sunlight in 1888 their company financed a model industrial village; and the brothers soon instituted other employee benefits, including pensions, medical care, unemployment compensation, profit sharing, and free insurance. By 1925 the firm served a world market through a system of 250 associated companies.
William Lever, elected to Parliament in 1906, was raised to the peerage as a baron in 1917 and became a viscount in 1922. “Leverhulme” was a combination of his own name and his wife’s maiden name, Hulme.
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abca15a7d1ecd721a5f2f97e5200bc6b | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Hewlett | William Hewlett | William Hewlett
William Hewlett, in full William Redington Hewlett, (born May 20, 1913, Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S.—died January 12, 2001, Palo Alto, California), American engineer and businessman who was the cofounder of the electronics and computer corporation Hewlett-Packard Company (HP).
Hewlett’s interest in science and electronics started when he was a child, and in 1930 he began studying engineering at Stanford University in California. It was there that he met American engineer David Packard, and the two became lifelong friends. After graduation (1934) Hewlett earned (1936) a master’s degree in engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, and then returned to Stanford for further study.
On January 1, 1939, at the suggestion of engineering professor Frederick Terman and with start-up funds of $538, Hewlett and Packard set up a small electronics business, HP, in a rented garage in Palo Alto, California. One of HP’s products, an audio oscillator, brought the company its first success when Walt Disney Productions purchased eight of the devices to test sound equipment for the animated film Fantasia (1940).
Following service in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during World War II, Hewlett returned to HP (1947) and was made a vice president, and in 1964 he became president, a position he retained until 1977. The company expanded rapidly and in 1968 produced the first desktop scientific calculator, the HP 9100A. The pocket scientific calculator, the HP-35, followed in 1972, rendering slide rules largely obsolete. HP became even better known in 1984 with its laser-jet printer. Hewlett served as HP’s CEO (1969–78), chairman of the executive committee (1977–83), vice chairman of the board (1983–87), and director emeritus (from 1987). Hewlett provided many technical innovations for HP products, and he and Packard promoted an innovative management style that stressed creativity, flexibility, openness, and teamwork.
In 1966 Hewlett and his first wife, Flora (died 1977), established the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which made bequests to numerous environmental, arts, educational, and social causes. In 1983 he was honoured with the National Medal of Science, the highest scientific award in the United States. At his death Hewlett was one of the wealthiest Americans, with a fortune of $9 billion, and his estate bequeathed $6 billion to the Hewlett Foundation.
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96f409d82de8f3e40771b3268eff0c4a | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-I-elector-of-Hesse-Kassel | William I | William I
The elector William I (reigned 1785–1821) pursued a policy of neutrality toward Napoleon, who nevertheless occupied Hesse-Kassel after the Battle of Jena (1806) and in 1807 united it with the Kingdom of Westphalia. In 1815 Hesse-Kassel regained its independence, but the elector William I and his successor…
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0c1cb7b636ba7c529a3899e00d75b5be | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-I-emperor-of-Germany | William I | William I
William I, German in full Wilhelm Friedrich Ludwig, (born March 22, 1797, Berlin—died March 9, 1888, Berlin), German emperor from 1871, as well as king of Prussia from 1861, a sovereign whose conscientiousness and self-restraint fitted him for collaboration with stronger statesmen in raising his monarchy and the house of Hohenzollern to predominance in Germany.
He was the second son of the future king Frederick William III of Prussia. In 1814 he fought at Bar-sur-Aube in the German War of Liberation against Napoleon I. Subsequently he devoted himself to the Prussian Army and military affairs. In 1840, on the accession of his childless elder brother, Frederick William IV, he became prince of Prussia and heir presumptive.
When revolution broke out in Berlin in March 1848, the conservative William’s advocacy of force earned him the sobriquet of “Kartätschenprinz” (Prince of Grapeshot). After a brief exile in England, he returned to Prussia in June 1848, and in 1849 he commanded the troops sent to suppress an insurrection in Baden.
William’s mistrust of constitutionalism was mitigated by the lessons of 1848, by his exposure to English political ideas, and by the influence of his consort, Augusta of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach. (He married this witty and temperamental princess in 1829, after renouncing a youthful love affair with Eliza Radziwill.) Appointed military governor of Rhineland Province in 1849, he made his residence at Coblenz, a centre of opposition to the reactionary policies of Berlin. He described Otto von Bismarck’s ideas as “schoolboy’s politics.”
From October 1858 William was regent for his ailing brother, and, on Jan. 2, 1861, William succeeded to the Prussian throne. As regent he made himself popular by proclaiming a “New Era” of liberalism, but he appointed a ministry comprising pronounced conservatives as well as moderate liberals.
The problems raised for Prussia in 1859 by the wars for Italian independence were beyond his capacity: while he favoured an alliance with Austria against the France of Napoleon III, he insisted that Prussia have the supreme command on the Rhenish front; and the Austro-French armistice of Villafranca took him by surprise.
On internal affairs William’s fundamental conservatism reasserted itself. Backed by his war minister, Albrecht von Roon, and by the chief of the military cabinet, Edwin von Manteuffel, the King insisted on a three-year term of military conscription, which the liberal lower chamber rejected in 1862. William thereupon was ready to abdicate but was dissuaded by Bismarck, whom he installed as prime minister during this crisis.
After the Prussian victory in the Seven Weeks’ War against Austria in 1866, the King, despite their frequent disagreements, realized that Bismarck was more necessary to Prussia than he himself was. In 1870, when the Hohenzollern candidature to the Spanish throne was leading to the Franco-German War, William was far more cautious than Bismarck; during the war, he arbitrated between his chief advisers, Bismarck and Helmuth von Moltke. He was distressed by the Kulturkampf that Bismarck and the liberals conducted against the Roman Catholic Church, but in 1877, when Bismarck made his last appeal to be relieved of office, William answered: “Never.”
William was so imbued with the traditions of the Prussian monarchy that it was painful for him to accept Bismarck’s foundation of the German Reich and the imperial title, which came to him by a sham offer (arranged by Bismarck) from the German princes. William was acclaimed German emperor (not “emperor of Germany,” which he thought more suitable) at Versailles, in conquered France, on Jan. 18, 1871. General indignation at the two attempts made on his life in 1878 (by Max Hödel on May 11 and by K.E. Nobiling, who seriously wounded him, on June 2) was expressed in popular support for Bismarck’s anti-Socialist legislation.
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674d86a1bafd4f8fec013748d6b02fa7 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-I-king-of-England | William I | William I
William I, byname William the Conqueror or William the Bastard or William of Normandy, French Guillaume le Conquérant or Guillaume le Bâtard or Guillaume de Normandie, (born c. 1028, Falaise, Normandy [France]—died September 9, 1087, Rouen), duke of Normandy (as William II) from 1035 and king of England (as William I) from 1066, one of the greatest soldiers and rulers of the Middle Ages. He made himself the mightiest noble in France and then changed the course of England’s history by his conquest of that country.
Before he became the king of England, William I was one of the mightiest nobles in France as the duke of Normandy, but he is best remembered for leading the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, which changed the course of English history and earned him the sobriquet William the Conqueror.
William was the elder of the two children of Robert I, duke of Normandy and his concubine Herleva (the daughter of a tanner or undertaker from the town of Falaise). Sometime after William’s birth, Herleva was married to Herluin, viscount of Conteville by whom she bore two sons—including Odo, the future bishop of Bayeux—and at least one daughter.
At the Battle of Hastings on October 14, 1066, William, duke of Normandy, defeated the forces of Harold II, king of England, and then was himself crowned king as William I, leading to profound political, administrative, and social changes in the British Isles as result of the Norman Conquest.
In July 1087, while attempting to enforce his claim to Mantes, on the border of Normandy and the French royal demesne, William either suffered a fatal injury during the town’s burning or fell fatally ill. He lay dying in the priory of St. Gervais near Rouen for five weeks before finally expiring on September 9, 1087.
William was the elder of the two children of Robert I of Normandy and his concubine Herleva (also called Arlette, the daughter of a tanner or undertaker from the town of Falaise). Sometime after William’s birth, Herleva was married to Herluin, viscount of Conteville, by whom she bore two sons—including Odo, the future bishop of Bayeux—and at least one daughter. In 1035 Robert died while returning from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and William, his only son, whom he had nominated as his heir before his departure, was accepted as duke by the Norman magnates and by his overlord, King Henry I of France.
William and his friends had to overcome enormous obstacles, including William’s illegitimacy (he was generally known as the Bastard) and the fact that he had acceded as a child. His weakness led to a breakdown of authority throughout the duchy: private castles were erected, public power was usurped by lesser nobles, and private warfare broke out. Three of William’s guardians died violent deaths before he grew up, and his tutor was murdered. His father’s kin were of little help, since most of them thought that they stood to gain by the boy’s death. His mother, however, managed to protect him through the most dangerous period. These early difficulties probably contributed to William’s strength of purpose and his dislike of lawlessness and misrule.
By 1042, when William reached his 15th year, was knighted, and began to play a personal part in the affairs of his duchy, the worst was over. But his attempts to recover rights lost during the anarchy and to bring disobedient vassals and servants to heel inevitably led to trouble. From 1046 until 1055 he dealt with a series of baronial rebellions, mostly led by his kinsmen. Occasionally he was in great danger and had to rely on Henry of France for help, but it was during these years that William learned to fight and rule. A decisive moment came in 1047, when Henry and William defeated a coalition of Norman rebels at Val-ès-Dunes, southeast of Caen, a battle in which William first demonstrated his prowess as a warrior.
William soon learned to control his youthful recklessness. He was always ready to take calculated risks on campaign and to fight a battle, but he was not a flamboyant commander. His plans were simple, his methods direct, and he ruthlessly exploited any opportunity. If he found himself at a disadvantage, he withdrew immediately. He showed the same qualities in his government. He never lost sight of his aim to recover lost ducal rights and revenues, and, although he developed no theory of government or great interest in administrative techniques, he was always prepared to improvise and experiment.
He was moral and pious by the standards of the time, and he acquired an interest in the welfare of the Norman church. He made his half brother Odo bishop of Bayeux in 1049 at the age of about 16; as bishop, Odo combined the roles of nobleman and prelate in a way that did not greatly shock contemporaries. Although Odo and the other bishops appointed by William were not recognized for their spirituality, they strengthened the church in Normandy by their pious donations and administrative skill. Presiding over numerous church councils, William and his bishops passed important legislation against simony (the selling of church offices) and clerical marriage. He also welcomed foreign monks and scholars to Normandy, including Lanfranc of Pavia, a famous master of the liberal arts, who entered the monastery of Bec about 1042 and was made abbot of Caen in 1063. William endowed several monasteries in his duchy, significantly increasing their number, and introduced the latest currents in reform to Norman monasticism.
According to a brief description by an anonymous author—who borrowed extensively from Einhard’s biography of Charlemagne (Vita Karoli Magni; “Life of Charles the Great”)—William was just above average height and had a robust, thickset body. Although he was always sparing of food and drink, he became fat in later life. He had a rough bass voice and was a good and ready speaker. Writers of the next generation agree that he was exceptionally strong and vigorous. He was a hunter and soldier, fierce and despotic, and generally feared; uneducated, he had few graces but was intelligent and shrewd and soon obtained the respect of his rivals.
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e11bb99961639c77828e277ff935dab2 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-I-king-of-England/Death | Death | Death
William was taken to the priory of St. Gervais just outside Rouen, where he lay dying for five weeks. He had the assistance of some of his bishops and doctors, and in attendance were his half brother Robert, count of Mortain, and his younger sons, William Rufus and Henry. Robert Curthose was with the king of France. It had probably been William’s intention that Robert, as was the custom, should succeed to the whole inheritance. Although William was tempted to make the loyal Rufus his sole heir, in the end he compromised: Normandy and Maine went to Robert and England to Rufus. Henry was given great treasure with which to purchase an appanage. William died at daybreak on September 9, in his 60th year.
His burial in St. Stephen’s Church, which he had built at Caen, was as eventful as his life. The funeral procession was disrupted by a fire in the town, a local noble complained that he had been dispossessed of the land in which William was to be buried, and William’s body was broken as it was being forced into the stone coffin. The tomb itself was desecrated by Calvinists in the 16th century and by revolutionaries in the 18th.
William left a profound mark on both Normandy and England and is one of the most important figures of medieval English history. His personal resolve and good fortune allowed him to survive the anarchy of Normandy in his youth, and he gradually transformed the duchy into the leading political and military power of northern France. His support for monastic reform and improved episcopal organization earned him respect from church leaders and further strengthened his hand in the duchy. His conquest of England in 1066 altered the course of English history, even though he adopted a number of Anglo-Saxon institutions and continued various social and economic trends that had begun before 1066. The English church was Normanized by William and brought more fully into line with developments on the Continent. William also imposed a new aristocracy on England that was French in language and culture; English language and literature and art and architecture were transformed because of William’s conquest. The new king and his nobility were also very much involved with affairs in Normandy and France, and, therefore, the orientation of English royal policy shifted toward Continental affairs. New forms of land tenure and military service were established after the conquest, and castles dotted the landscape as a symbol of the new regime. As conqueror and king, William significantly shaped the history of England.
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fb3c23716020e27e940816218dcd175e | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-I-king-of-England/New-alliances | New alliances | New alliances
After 1047 William began to participate in events outside his duchy. In support of King Henry and in an attempt to strengthen his southern frontier and expand into the western county of Maine, he fought a series of campaigns against Geoffrey Martel, count of Anjou. But from 1052, when Henry and Geoffrey made peace and a serious rebellion began in eastern Normandy, until 1054 William was again in grave danger. During this period he conducted important negotiations with his cousin Edward the Confessor, king of England, in which he was named heir to the English throne, and took a wife.
Norman interest in Anglo-Saxon England derived from an alliance made in 1002, when King Ethelred II of England married Emma, the sister of Count Richard II, William’s grandfather. Two of her sons, William’s cousins once removed, had reigned in turn in England: Hardecanute (1040–42) and Edward the Confessor (1042–66). William had met Edward during that prince’s exile on the Continent and may well have given him some support when he returned to England in 1041. In that year Edward was about 36 and William 13 years old. It is clear that William expected some sort of reward from Edward; thus, when Edward’s marriage proved unfruitful, William began to develop an ambition to become his kinsman’s heir. Edward, whose childlessness was a diplomatic asset, probably at times encouraged William’s hopes.
In 1049 William negotiated with Baldwin V of Flanders for the hand of his daughter, Matilda. Baldwin, an imperial vassal with a distinguished lineage, was in rebellion against the emperor, Henry III, and was in desperate need of allies. At the Council of Reims in October 1049, the emperor’s cousin, Pope Leo IX, condemned the proposed marriage as incestuous (William and Matilda were evidently related in some way), but William and Baldwin were so eager for the alliance that the wedding took place before the end of 1053, possibly in 1052. In 1059 William was reconciled to the papacy, and as penance he and Matilda built two monasteries at Caen. Four sons were born to the couple: Robert (the future duke of Normandy), Richard (who died young), William Rufus (his father’s successor in England), and Henry (Rufus’s successor). Among the daughters was Adela, who became the mother of Stephen, king of England from 1135 to 1154.
It is possible that William used his new alliance with Flanders to extort an acknowledgment from Edward that William was the English king’s rightful heir. At all events, Edward seems to have made some sort of promise to William in 1051, the year in which Tostig, son of the greatest nobleman in England, Godwine, married Baldwin’s half sister. The immediate purpose of this tripartite alliance was to improve the security of each of the parties. If William obtained a declaration that he was Edward’s heir, he was also looking very far ahead.
Between 1054 and 1060 William was threatened by the combined menace of internal revolt and the new alliance against him between King Henry and Geoffrey Martel. Had the Norman rebels coordinated their attacks with king and count, it would have meant the end for William, but his own skill and some luck allowed him to prevail. After suppressing the rebels, William decisively defeated the invading forces of Henry and Geoffrey at the Battle of Mortemer in 1054. After a second victory, at Varaville in 1057, the duke was in firm control of Normandy. His position was secured even further when both Henry and Geoffrey died in 1060 and were succeeded by weaker rulers. Finally conquering Maine in 1063, William became the most powerful ruler in northern France.
In 1064 or 1065 Edward sent his brother-in-law—Harold, earl of Wessex, Godwine’s son and Edward’s eventual successor as king—on an embassy to Normandy to confirm Edward’s recognition of William as his heir, according to Norman sources. While en route, Harold was captured by one of the duke’s vassals. He was ransomed by William, who then took him on a campaign into Brittany. It was at this time, according to the Norman account, that Harold swore an oath in which he renewed Edward’s bequest of the throne to William and promised to support it. This oath, and Harold’s violation of it, would become the central elements of William’s justification of his eventual invasion of England.
When Edward died childless on January 5, 1066, Harold was accepted as king by the English magnates, and William decided on war. He proceeded carefully, however, first taking steps to secure his duchy and to obtain international support for his venture. He took council with his leading nobles, bestowed special authority on his wife, Matilda, and his son Robert, and appointed key supporters to important positions in the ducal administration. He petitioned the pope in Rome and received the blessing of Alexander II, who was encouraged by Archdeacon Hildebrand (the future Pope Gregory VII) to support the invasion. He also appealed to volunteers to join his army of invasion and won numerous recruits from outside Normandy.
Events outpaced William, however, as others moved more quickly. Tostig, Harold’s exiled brother, raided England in May but suffered defeat at the hands of one of Harold’s allies. In September Tostig joined Harald III Hardraade, king of Norway, in an invasion of the Northumbrian coast. Although ultimately unsuccessful, Tostig and Harald’s attack had significant implications for the success of William’s invasion in the south.
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ebae255372ab4fce7538eaa3fc81275c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-I-king-of-England/The-Battle-of-Hastings | The Battle of Hastings | The Battle of Hastings
By August William had gathered his army and his fleet at the mouth of the Dives River. At this point he probably intended to sail due north and invade England by way of the Isle of Wight and Southampton Water. But adverse winds held up his fleet, and in September a westerly gale drove his ships up-Channel. William regrouped his forces at Saint-Valéry on the Somme. He had suffered a costly delay, some naval losses, and a drop in the morale of his troops. The delay, however, yielded a very important benefit for William: on September 8 Harold was forced to release the peasant army he had summoned to defend the southern and eastern coastlines, leaving them without adequate protection. On September 27, after cold and rainy weather, the wind turned in William’s favour. William embarked his army and set sail for the southeastern coast of England. The trip was not without incident: William’s ship lost touch with the rest of the fleet, but he calmed his crew by supping as if he were at home, and contact with the other ships was made not long after. The following morning he landed, took the unresisting towns of Pevensey and Hastings, and began to organize a bridgehead with 4,000 to 7,000 cavalry and infantry.
William’s forces were in a narrow coastal strip, hemmed in by the great forest of Andred, and, although this corridor was easily defensible, it was not much of a base for the conquest of England. The campaigning season was almost past, and, when William received news of his opponent, it was not reassuring. On September 25 Harold had defeated and slain Tostig and Harald at Stamford Bridge, near York, in a bloody battle with great losses on both sides, and he was retracing his steps to meet the new invader at Hastings. On October 13, Harold emerged from the forest, but the hour was too late to push on to Hastings, and he took up a defensive position instead. Early the next day, before Harold had prepared his exhausted troops for battle, William attacked. The English phalanx, however, held firm against William’s archers and cavalry. The failure to break the English lines caused disarray in the Norman army. As William’s cavalry fled in confusion, Harold’s soldiers abandoned their positions to pursue the enemy. William rallied the fleeing horsemen, however, and they turned and slaughtered the foot soldiers chasing them. On two subsequent occasions, William’s horsemen feigned retreat, which fooled Harold’s soldiers, who were then killed by their opponents. Harold’s brothers were also killed early in the battle. Toward nightfall the king himself fell, struck in the eye by an arrow according to Norman accounts, and the English gave up. William’s coolness and tenacity secured him victory in this fateful battle. He then moved quickly against possible centres of resistance to prevent a new leader from emerging. On Christmas Day, 1066, he was crowned king in Westminster Abbey. In a formal sense, the Norman Conquest of England had taken place.
William was already an experienced ruler. In Normandy he had replaced disloyal nobles and ducal servants with his friends, limited private warfare, and recovered usurped ducal rights, defining the duties of his vassals. The Norman church flourished under his reign, as he adapted its structures to English traditions. Like many contemporary rulers, he wanted the church in England to be free of corruption but also subordinate to him. Thus, he condemned simony and disapproved of clerical marriage. He would not tolerate opposition from bishops or abbots or interference from the papacy, but he remained on good terms with Popes Alexander II and Gregory VII—though tensions arose on occasion. During his reign, church synods were held much more frequently, and he also presided over several episcopal councils. He was ably supported in this by his close adviser Lanfranc, whom he made archbishop of Canterbury, replacing Stigand; William replaced all other Anglo-Saxon bishops of England—except Wulfstan of Dorchester—with Normans. He also promoted monastic reform by importing Norman monks and abbots, thus quickening the pace of monastic life in England and bringing it into line with Continental developments.
William left England early in 1067 but had to return in December to deal with unrest. The rebellions that began that year reached their peak in 1069, when William resorted to such violent measures that even contemporaries were shocked. To secure his hold on the country, he introduced the Norman practice of building castles, including the Tower of London. The rebellions, which were crushed by 1071, completed the ruin of the English higher aristocracy and secured its replacement by an aristocracy of Norman lords, who introduced patterns of landholding and military service that had been developed in Normandy. To secure England’s frontiers, he invaded Scotland in 1072 and Wales in 1081, creating special defensive “marcher” counties along the Scottish and Welsh borders.
During the last 15 years of his life, William was more often in Normandy than in England, and there were five years, possibly seven, in which he did not visit the kingdom at all. He retained most of the greatest Anglo-Norman barons with him in Normandy and confided the government of England to bishops, trusting especially his old friend Lanfranc. He returned to England only when it was absolutely necessary: in 1075 to deal with the aftermath of a rebellion by Roger, earl of Hereford, and Ralf, earl of Norfolk, which was made more dangerous by the intervention of a Danish fleet; and in 1082 to arrest and imprison his half brother Odo, who was planning to take an army to Italy, perhaps to make himself pope. In the spring of 1082 William had his son Henry knighted, and in August at Salisbury he took oaths of fealty from all the important landowners in England. In 1085 he returned with a large army to meet the threat of an invasion by Canute IV (Canute the Holy) of Denmark. When this came to nothing, owing to Canute’s death in 1086, William ordered an economic and tenurial survey to be made of the kingdom, the results of which are summarized in the two volumes of Domesday Book, one of the greatest administrative accomplishments of the Middle Ages.
Despite his duties as king, William remained preoccupied with the frontiers of Normandy even after the conquest. The danger spots were in Maine and the Vexin on the Seine, where Normandy bordered on the French royal demesne. After 1066, William’s Continental neighbours became more powerful and even more hostile. Fulk the Surly succeeded to Anjou in 1068 and Robert the Frisian to Flanders in 1071. King Philip I of France allied with Robert, and Robert allied with the Danish king, Canute IV. There was also the problem of William’s heir apparent, Robert Curthose (the future Robert II), who, given no appanage (grant of land from the royal domain) and seemingly kept short of money, left Normandy in 1077 and intrigued with his father’s enemies. In 1081 William reached agreement with Fulk in the treaty of Blancheland: Robert Curthose was to be count of Maine but only as a vassal of Fulk. The eastern part of the Vexin, the county of Mantes, had fallen completely into King Philip’s hands in 1077, when William had been busy with Maine. In 1087 William demanded from Philip the return of the towns of Chaumont, Mantes, and Pontoise. In July he entered Mantes by surprise, but, while the town burned, he either suffered an injury from which he never recovered or he fell fatally ill (sources differ). He was thwarted at the very moment when he seemed about to enforce his last outstanding territorial claim.
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ff61be44bf83c52189d49f327e612038 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-I-stadholder-of-United-Provinces-of-The-Netherlands | William I | William I
William I, in full William, prince of Orange, count of Nassau, byname William the Silent, Dutch Willem, prins van Oranje, graaf van Nassau, or Willem de Zwijger, (born April 24, 1533, Dillenburg, Nassau—died July 10, 1584, Delft, Holland), first of the hereditary stadtholders (1572–84) of the United Provinces of the Netherlands and leader of the revolt of the Netherlands against Spanish rule and the Catholic religion.
William, the eldest son of William, count of Nassau-Dillenburg, grew up in a cultivated Lutheran environment. Far richer than his father’s ancestral possessions in the region of the Lahn River in Nassau were the estates that, since 1404, another branch of the family had obtained in Brabant and elsewhere in the Low Countries, where its main seat was at Breda. At the time of William’s birth, the Brabant branch was represented by his father’s elder brother Henry and by Henry’s only son, René, who in 1530 had inherited from a maternal uncle the domains of the House of Chalon-Arlay, so becoming the greatest seigneur of the Franche-Comté and ruler of the Provençal principality of Orange. René of Orange was killed in 1544, leaving the combined wealth of the houses of Nassau-Breda and of Chalon-Orange to his cousin William, then aged 11.
In view of the importance of this heritage, the lord of the Burgundian Netherlands, the Habsburg emperor Charles V, stipulated that William’s parents should renounce his guardianship and that the young prince should be educated in his new fatherland as a Catholic. So William passed his formative years at Breda and Brussels, under the guidance of suitable tutors, and was duly imbued with the principles proper to a youth of his standing. French became his daily language, and he acquired a colloquial command of Dutch.
In spite of his immense landed property, his financial circumstances were straitened from the beginning. Scarcity of liquid assets continued to hamper him, even after his marriage (July 8, 1551) to a wealthy heiress, Countess Anne of Egmond-Buren, who brought him several additional baronies, mainly in Holland. These “structural” pecuniary straits he shared with most of his class and with the Burgundian government itself.
A favourite with Charles V and with the court at Brussels, the Prince faithfully discharged the social, military, and diplomatic duties that were expected of him. He continued to do so under Philip II, the Emperor’s son and successor as king of Spain and lord of the Burgundian dominions. Together with his later enemies Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, bishop of Arras, and the duke of Alba, he was a negotiator of the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis (1559), which, in ending prolonged strife between Burgundy-Habsburg and France, released from French occupation his princedom of Orange and made the Netherlands accessible to Calvinist preachers from France. Philip II, at his accession in 1555, had admitted William to the Council of State, and, now before his departure to Spain, the King appointed him his stadtholder (governor and commander in chief) in Holland, Zeeland, and Utrecht (August 1559) and afterward in Franche-Comté (February 1561).
From about 1561 William, the prince of Orange, together with other great lords who felt themselves excluded from their rightful share in the country’s government, began to protest openly against the conduct of the Brussels administration, in which Granvelle, the principal adviser of the regent Margaret, duchess of Parma, was the most powerful figure. At first religious questions were not prominent among the causes of discontent, but they gradually became so with the spread of Protestant ideas and the determination of Philip II not to tolerate any deviation from the strictest Catholic orthodoxy. The Prince and his associates, in varying degrees influenced by the comprehensive views of the Humanist Desiderius Erasmus, shared in this respect the feelings of the majority of their countrymen, who, while remaining conventional Roman Catholics, resented religious persecution. Besides, several of the nobles had, as had William, friends and parents among the Protestants. On Aug. 25, 1561, the Prince, a widower since 1558, reinforced his Lutheran and German connections by taking as his second wife Anna of Saxony.
In the mind of William, the prince of Orange, the religious issue gradually assumed paramount importance. In a sensational speech in the Council of State, he argued that it was not feasible to enforce religious unity and that it was not right for princes to presume to rule over the consciences of their subjects. But the King in October 1565 gave strict orders that the ordinances against heretics should be inexorably applied.
Consequently, the situation became increasingly dangerous. The leadership of the opposition was now taken over by a confederation of lesser nobles and gentlemen, some of them Calvinists, who were more desperate than the grandees and less averse to a violent solution; they and their followers soon came to be called the Gueux (Beggars). The great lords kept aloof, but William and a few others showed sympathy for the movement, with which the Prince was personally in touch through his brother, Count Louis of Nassau, a Lutheran with Calvinistic leanings. Orange persuaded the confederates not to resort to armed action but instead to petition the regent Margaret for a suspension of the decrees against Protestants. The Duchess did indeed promise a moderation of the anti-heretical measures, but it was already too late for minor relaxations to avert trouble. Misery caused by the economic depression contributed to the violent explosions of religious fanaticism that shook the Low Countries in August 1566. Calvinist mobs forcibly entered churches, smashing the images and destroying the furnishings. Besides causing irreparable damage, these excesses had a threefold effect: peaceful coexistence of Catholics and Protestants became more difficult; the opposition movement was weakened because its responsible members felt it necessary to defend the church; and, finally, it caused King Philip to resort to force in an attempt to crush heresy and rebellion at one blow. To this end, in December 1566, he appointed the duke of Alba as his captain general in the Netherlands.
Orange seems to have contemplated immediate active resistance but in the end did nothing because the popular hero Lamoral, count of Egmond, stadtholder of Flanders and Artois, would not support him. William allowed the Protestants, now openly rebellious, to hail him as their defender, but he upheld public order. As hereditary viscount of Antwerp he quelled an insurrection of the numerous Calvinists there, and he kept the city gates closed to rebels and government forces alike. He protested his loyalty to the king, yet he refused to take the new oath of unconditional obedience that the Regent required from all officeholders and prudently retired in April 1567 to the family seat at Dillenburg. Many thousands followed William’s example or had preceded him; a general exodus to England, Germany, and France took place.
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b9f7c10a7f16b30f5f7ade3c809d7db8 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-I-stadholder-of-United-Provinces-of-The-Netherlands/Open-revolt-and-alliance-with-Calvinism | Open revolt and alliance with Calvinism | Open revolt and alliance with Calvinism
By May 1567 order was everywhere restored. Nevertheless, in August Alba entered Brussels at the head of a well-trained army and inaugurated a reign of terror. In September a special court, the Council of Troubles, was set up to try all cases of rebellion and heresy, and more than 1,000 executions took place (including those of the counts of Egmond and Hoorne). Orange, summoned to appear before the court, replied with a dignified Justification of his conduct. But his possessions in Philip’s dominions were confiscated, and his son Philip William, a student at Leuven (Louvain), was deported to Spain.
Once again the cause of liberty, no less than that of religion, was clearly seen to be at stake. The opposition, however secret, became much more widespread, and Orange was justified in expecting a general rising when he should appear as a liberator. He saw his own fortunes irrevocably bound up with those of the Netherlands, and he no longer hesitated to proceed to military action. Though disappointed in his hopes of substantial support from the Lutheran German princes (he himself had reverted to the creed of his childhood) or from the emperor Maximilian II, he managed, mainly through the aid of his relatives, to raise a number of troops. In April 1568 two invasions of the Low Countries were inaugurated, but both badly miscarried. One of the attacking forces was destroyed by Alba on the banks of the Ems River. The Prince himself took the field in the beginning of October and marched toward Brabant, but the expected rising did not materialize, and he was obliged to retire to France. There he stayed for a time with the Huguenots, the Calvinist party then in rebellion against the royal government, before returning, in October 1569, to Germany. His brother Count Louis remained in France as his personal representative. The abortive campaigns had at least popularized Orange as the champion against oppression. The Calvinists were ready to forgive him for failing to take up arms in 1566, while he had come to appreciate them as the hardcore of the resistance movement, though he disliked their Puritanism and intolerance. Moreover, Calvinism was an “international” power, and from its adherents in Germany and France he had hitherto received his most effective support. So a rapprochement took place, but it was not until 1573 that he finally joined the Reformed Church.
These were his darkest years. With Alba securely in power and his own designs frustrated, having lost a brother (Adolph) and many of his friends, and bereft of his son, his estates, and his offices, he was also harassed by financial difficulties and by the wayward conduct of his wife, Anna of Saxony, whom he divorced in 1571. Orangist propaganda was active, but military operations were mainly confined to the exploits of the Sea Beggars, who had taken to the sea to combat the King of Spain from foreign bases. Their blockading activities contributed to the economic malaise in the Netherlands and so to the discontent nourished by Alba’s harsh administration. This was especially the case in the seafaring province of Holland.
For the summer of 1572 Orange planned a number of coordinated attacks, counting on help from France, but on April 1, well ahead of any officially planned move, a fleet of Sea Beggars, driven from English ports, surprised and captured the port of Brielle (Den Briel) in Zuid-Holland. Their success triggered off the desired popular rising in Holland and Zeeland, most towns declaring themselves for the Prince, so that by July only Amsterdam, Middelburg, and two other towns in Zeeland remained in loyalist hands. On the initiative of Orange, the provincial States of Holland met at Dordrecht (July 19–23) and recognized the Prince as still being their stadtholder, nominally on behalf of the King, and they themselves assumed an effective share in the government. Equal rights for Catholics and Calvinists were proclaimed, pending a decision by the States General, the joint assembly of all the provinces.
Meanwhile, large parts of Gelderland and Friesland joined the revolt, as Alba and his army were retained in the south to counter the main attack, which had been launched from France. Louis of Nassau had captured Mons and was besieged there by the Spanish. Orange himself marched into Brabant, and several towns opened their gates to him. Hopes of French support were soon dashed, however, when the Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day destroyed Huguenot influence at the French court. Louis was obliged to capitulate in September, and Orange disbanded his mercenaries. The fighting in the south had at least provided breathing space for the rebellious northern provinces to consolidate their position. The Prince decided to join them, landing at Enkhuizen on October 21.
For four heroic years (1572–76), William, the prince of Orange, led the desperate resistance of the two maritime provinces (Holland and Zeeland) against the Spanish armies sent to subdue them. Two more of his brothers—Louis and Henry—fell in a serious defeat near Nijmegen in April 1574. Meanwhile, his agents were active in the subdued provinces, in England, Germany, and France, and on June 12, 1575, he married Charlotte of Bourbon-Montpensier, a former abbess who had joined the Reformed Church. The Prince needed all his authority, tact, and tenacity of purpose to hold his followers together and prevent their pursuing divisive interests. He tried to check the excesses and mitigate the intolerance of the Protestants but was unable to maintain the equality of the Catholic and Reformed churches that he had previously advocated, and in 1573 Catholic worship was forbidden. In the closer unions Orange brought about between the different parts of Holland (July 1575) and between Holland and Zeeland (April 1576), he was recognized as “Chief and Supreme Authority” for the duration of the war, but liberty of worship was specifically excluded, though liberty of conscience was recognized.
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1009cd75fb81f25ece1c66cea94e1966 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-I-stadholder-of-United-Provinces-of-The-Netherlands/The-Princes-triumph | The Prince’s triumph | The Prince’s triumph
A temporary collapse of Spanish power in the Low Countries in 1576 gave the Prince a fresh chance. In the absence of a governor-general after the death of Alba’s successor, Luis de Requesens y Zúñiga, and confronted with mutinous Spanish troops, the Council of State ventured to convene the States General. This assembly, pretending to act in the name of the King but in fact usurping viceregal powers, immediately opened negotiations with the rebellious provinces. The Pacification of Ghent (Nov. 8, 1576) was the result. It has been supposed that Orange’s influence and agents were primarily responsible for this achievement. Certainly this peace, supplemented by the first Union of Brussels (January 1577), heralded the realization of his ambitions and ideals: not only were his governorships confirmed and his possessions restored to him, but the union of the so-called 17 Netherlands under a national government seemed about to be accomplished. But the idea of a “common fatherland,” though steadily growing, was not yet strong enough to overcome particularistic or religious divisions. Because of the Perpetual Edict of 1577, the treaty the States General concluded with the new governor-general, Don John of Austria, specified that the Roman Catholic religion was to be maintained all over the country, and because of the absence of provisions for the maintenance of the Pacification, the deputies of Holland and Zeeland left the assembly.
In July 1577, however, Don John attempted to renew hostilities, thus driving more and more people to support the Prince. Those towns of Holland and Zeeland that had always opposed Orange or had been recovered by Spanish arms now recognized his authority; the last to accede (February 1578) was Amsterdam. The town and province of Utrecht followed suit, and in Flanders, Brabant, Groningen, and elsewhere, the radical Orangists, mostly Calvinistic burghers and craftsmen, gained the upper hand. In September 1577 the States General, to which the representatives of Holland and Zeeland had now returned, invited Orange to come south to Brussels, where he was triumphantly received. Under his influence a new union came into being, providing for joint action by both Roman Catholics and Protestants against “the common enemy of the fatherland.” Meanwhile, the States General, continuing to act with sovereign power, had formed a government headed by the young archduke Matthias, an Austrian nephew of King Philip. Matthias agreed to conditions laid down by the Prince guaranteeing a constitutional system of government. Moreover, in January 1578, Orange was commissioned to act as lieutenant general for Matthias.
Orange was now at the zenith of his career, but his triumph proved as short-lived as was the general union of the provinces. His failure to consolidate the newly won unity was primarily due to the excesses of his Calvinist supporters who forcibly introduced popular and intolerant regimes. Thus, the revolutionaries played into the hands of King Philip’s new governor-general, Alessandro Farnese, duke of Parma. He was the son of the former regent Margaret, and on Oct. 1, 1578, he had taken office after the death of Don John.
The Catholic but still anti-Spanish reaction made itself felt first in the southern, French-speaking provinces. Not unnaturally, when seeking for help, their thoughts turned to France, but it was on the Prince of Orange’s advice that the States General in August 1578 adopted the Catholic Duke d’Anjou, brother of Henry III of France, as “Defender of the Liberty of the Netherlands.” Soon afterward, the formation of specific unions by smaller groups of provinces began to compromise the general union, which was irrevocably compromised in May 1579 when the Prince gave qualified support to the “Union of Utrecht,” whose main promoter was his brother John, stadtholder of Gelderland and a staunch Calvinist. On March 15 the Prince was outlawed by Philip II and a reward offered for his assassination. He answered the charges of treason with a vehement Apologie, written for him by his court chaplain, and he continued to put his trust in France. Against much Protestant opposition, he persuaded the States General in 1580 to give the Duke d’Anjou the hereditary sovereignty of the Netherlands, and in 1581 they solemnly renounced their allegiance to the king of Spain. Meanwhile, the provinces of Holland and Zeeland, unwilling to grant the French prince any direct authority, planned to create Orange their hereditary count.
Anjou, however, far from aiding the cause of liberty, added to the prevailing confusion. With great difficulty Orange effected his reconciliation with the States General. His own continuing reliance on France is shown by his fourth marriage (1583), to Louise de Coligny, a daughter of the murdered Huguenot leader the Count de Coligny.
As a result of the ban pronounced by Philip II, an attempt was made on the Prince’s life at Antwerp in March 1582. With Parma advancing from the south, he retired in July 1582 to Holland, where he moved into his old quarters in a former convent at Delft. There, in 1584, he was shot by a fanatical Catholic, the Franc-Comtois Balthasar Gérard. His last words were a prayer for the people he had tried to lead for so long. The family seat of Breda being then in enemy hands, he was buried in the New Church at Delft.
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83dbb2c1e260a78a8a91eb5797f1030c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-I-the-Pious | William I the Pious | William I the Pious
…of the 9th century by William I (the Pious), count of Auvergne and the founder of the abbey of Cluny. In the first half of the 10th century the counts of Auvergne, of Toulouse, and of Poitiers each claimed this ducal title, but it was eventually secured by another William…
…century, it was reconstituted under William the Pious (died 926) and again, more imposingly, under William V (994/5–1029), who was acclaimed as one of the greatest rulers of his day and even offered the imperial crown in 1024. An advocate of religious reform, William sought to strengthen his control over…
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9b3cde1e1d941ad22d1d6d7c571580b7 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-II-count-of-Holland | William II | William II
Count William II built a castle there in 1248, around which several buildings came to be clustered, and these became the principal residence of the counts of Holland. These buildings now form the Binnenhof (“Inner Courtyard”) in the old quarter of the city. Among the great…
William II, count of Holland from 1234 to 1256, promoted land reclamation, pressed for the maintenance of waterways and dikes, and encouraged municipal development by granting trading privileges to the growing towns of the county. He was also elected German king in 1247 by the…
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0028ba21aa8f1f863dd5ad605b4df6aa | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-II-elector-of-Hesse-Kassel | William II | William II
…William I and his successor William II (reigned 1821–47) were reactionaries who overturned the liberal reforms made in Hesse-Kassel previously by the French. The electors continuously quarreled with liberal reformers in the Diet (legislative assembly), and in 1831 revolutionary action compelled William II to turn over control of the government…
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7c45dcc322fd712fbc5e620c55d82747 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-II-emperor-of-Germany/Legacy | Legacy | Legacy
William often bombastically claimed to be the man who made the decisions. It is true that the German constitution of 1871 put two important powers in his hands. First, he was responsible for appointing and dismissing the chancellor, the head of the civil government. The chancellor needed the support of the Reichstag to pass legislation but not to remain in office. Secondly, the German army and navy were not responsible to the civil government, so that the kaiser was the only person in Germany who was in a position to see that the policy followed by the soldiers and sailors was in line with that pursued by the civil servants and diplomats. Thus, British journalists and publicists had some justification when during and immediately after the war they portrayed William as Supreme War Lord, and therefore the man who, more than anyone else, decided to make war.
As time passed, historians increasingly viewed William more as an accomplice rather than an instigator. In the years after 1890 the German upper and middle classes would have wanted a larger say in the world’s councils no matter who had been on the throne, and this “urge to world power” was almost bound to bring them into collision with some of the existing great powers. The chief real criticism to be made of the kaiser is that, instead of seeing this danger and using his influence to restrain German appetites, he shared those appetites and indeed increased them, particularly by his determination to give Germany a navy of which it could be proud and by his frequently tactless and aggressive public statements.
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2a200aff7edeaa578e5eef61596500a1 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-II-Villehardouin | William II Villehardouin | William II Villehardouin
…most successful under its prince William II Villehardouin (1246–78), but in 1259 he had to cede a number of fortresses, including Mistra, Monemvasiá, and Maina, to the Byzantines. Internecine squabbles weakened resistance to Byzantine pressure, especially from the 1370s onward, when Jacques de Baux hired the Navarrese Company to fight…
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bffc267e3c32bcbf343671233ba81cc5 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-III-king-of-England-Scotland-and-Ireland/King-of-England | King of England | King of England
In November 1677 William had married his cousin Mary, daughter of James, duke of York (later King James II of England). William himself stood fourth in the English succession, and this marriage with the heiress presumptive gave him added importance in England, though during Charles II’s reign his role in English affairs was that of an anxious spectator rather than of a participant. During the 1680s Louis’s numerous minor aggressions kept Europe in a continual state of tension, but William’s efforts to build up a new coalition against him were repeatedly frustrated, largely by the activities of a small but powerful pro-French party in Holland and by the equivocal attitude of England. Eventually, however, the English king James II, a Roman Catholic, had so antagonized his subjects by his despotic and romanizing policies that by 1687 many of them were urging William to intervene. In 1688 the birth of a son to James, which opened the possibility of a Roman Catholic succession, finally brought matters to a head.
An invitation, signed by a representative selection of James’s opponents, was dispatched on July 10 (Old Style), and on November 5 (November 15, New Style) William and his army landed at Brixham on Tor Bay in Devon and proceeded almost unopposed to London. James fled to France, and the so-called Convention Parliament, summoned in January 1689, declared that James had abdicated and offered the vacant throne, with an accompanying Declaration of Right, to William and Mary. They were proclaimed in February and crowned on April 21. The crown of Scotland was offered to them in the same month.
The revolution in England had been accomplished almost without bloodshed, but in Scotland and Ireland there was armed resistance. This collapsed in Scotland in 1689, but the country remained troubled and unsettled throughout William’s reign. In 1692 Alexander MacDonald of Glen Coe and some of his clansmen were murdered in cold blood for tardiness in taking the oath of allegiance to William. William ordered an inquiry but took no further action until in 1695 the Scottish Parliament demanded a public investigation. He then showed culpable leniency to the offenders, merely dismissing from his secretaryship Sir John Dalrymple, on whom responsibility for the massacre was finally placed. In Ireland war formally broke out in 1689, when James landed there with French support. But the successful defense of Londonderry and of Enniskillen, and William’s own victory at the Battle of the Boyne on July 1, 1690, ensured the reconquest of Ireland and freed him to turn his attention to the European continent. Here, after a series of minor attacks on the empire, Louis XIV had invaded the Palatinate in 1688. The Dutch and the emperor concluded the Treaty of Vienna (May 1689) and declared war on Louis; over the next 18 months William’s rare diplomatic skill brought into the alliance Brandenburg, Hanover, Saxony, Bavaria, Savoy, and Spain, as well as England, which became its linchpin.
From 1691 William spent much time campaigning on the continent with varying degrees of success, but by 1696 a number of factors made both sides anxious for peace, and the Treaties of Rijswijk were signed in 1697. The question, vital for a European balance of power, of who was to succeed the childless king Charles II of Spain remained unsettled, however, and William had good cause to fear that the peace would be no more than a truce. The English Parliament, on the contrary, was convinced that it would be lasting, insisted on cutting down the size of the army, and resolutely turned its back on foreign affairs. William, in the hope of averting a new war, entered into two Spanish Partition treaties (1698–99) with Louis—measures that involved him in serious frictions with Parliament. But when the Spanish king died on November 1, 1700, Louis, ignoring his agreements, accepted the crown of Spain for his grandson and soon showed that he had not relinquished his plans for French aggrandizement.
William, though hampered by English apathy, set himself to rebuilding the Grand Alliance and to preparing his two countries for the now inevitable conflict. In September 1701 the exiled James II died, and Louis XIV proclaimed his son king of England, contrary to his agreement in one of the Rijswijk treaties, and thus roused the English to an enthusiasm for war. William did not live to see this war declared. His health had long been declining, and in March 1702 he died. His plans for a European settlement were largely carried out by the Treaty of Utrecht (1713). His ideal, which he had pursued doggedly for 30 years, was an international order in which no single power was able to tyrannize the rest.
Holland, by the time of William’s death, was ceasing to be a great power, for reasons for which he cannot be held responsible. That it remained free, independent, and prosperous was in no small measure due to him. In England he remained to the last an alien, unpopular with the ruling classes, though the common people always looked on him as the Protestant hero and hailed his appearances with enthusiasm.
His reign was of great importance in the constitutional history of the country, and his own contribution to these developments was far from negligible. By moderation and good faith in his exercise of the royal prerogative, he preserved the crown and with it those elements of stability and continuity that have been the peculiar strength of Great Britain. William hated faction, and his influence brought to an end a long period of murderous party strife. He sponsored the reform of the currency and promoted the Irish linen trade. The Toleration Act (1689) fell short of his wishes, but in spite of many frustrations he did his utmost to promote religious toleration. In 1689, of his own free will, he granted independence to the judiciary, a grant later given statutory permanence by the Act of Settlement (1700–01).
Contemporaries acclaimed William a great soldier, although he was not, in fact, a very fortunate general. But the Dutch and British armies that Marlborough inherited to continue the war against Louis were at least in part his creation. Though a martinet with his soldiers, he won and kept their devotion by his personal bravery and his concern for their well-being. A life of gruelling public activities left him little leisure for other pursuits, but he deserves mention as a patron of the arts. On his private estates he was an enlightened lord of the manor in his concern for the welfare of his tenants and the maintenance of his lands; in his private charities he was particularly concerned to help refugees.
Though reserved in manner, and sometimes irritable and ungracious, partly as a result of ill health and overwork, he could also show himself kindly, courteous, and forbearing, and he had the gift of winning and keeping love. His wife, Mary, was devoted to him, and he to her, although he was not always an easy nor a strictly faithful husband. He became more withdrawn after the shock of her death in 1694. Of his mistress Elizabeth Villiers little is known, except that she was loyal, discreet, and apparently not unduly mercenary. A legend of William’s homosexuality does not stand up to examination.
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8b07007f9469c096a14942c20808bca3 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-IV-count-of-Holland | William IV | William IV
…succession on the death of William IV (1345) led to a prolonged civil war between factions known as the Hooks (Hoeken) and the Cods (Kabeljauwen), who came to represent rival aristocratic and middle-class parties, respectively. The issue was finally settled with the intervention of the house of Wittelsbach, whose members…
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3dfe98e596a810977bc35d43203720e5 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-IV-grand-duke-of-Luxembourg | William IV | William IV
William IV, German in full Wilhelm Alexander, (born April 22, 1852, Biebrich, Nassau, Germany—died February 25, 1912, Schloss Berg, near Luxembourg), grand duke of Luxembourg (1905–12), eldest son of grand duke Adolf of Nassau. Falling severely ill soon after his accession, he eventually on March 19, 1908, had his consort Maria Anna of Braganza named regent, or governor (Statthalterin). Also, having no sons and wishing to secure the succession of his daughters Marie-Adélaide and Charlotte, he had the Luxembourg Parliament allow succession in the female line.
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163f2db2adbbba0946252fc149cbb4fe | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-IX | William IX | William IX
William IX, (born Oct. 22, 1071—died Feb. 10, 1127, Poitiers, Fr.), medieval troubadour, count of Poitiers and duke of Aquitaine and of Gascony (1086–1127), son of William VIII and grandfather of the famous Eleanor of Aquitaine.
William IX spent most of his life in warfare, including leading an unsuccessful Crusade to the Holy Land (1101–02) and battling the Moors near Cordova (1120–23). His fame rests chiefly, however, on his being the first poet in the Provençal language whose works have come down to us. His chansons, or songs, are boisterous, amorous, humorous, usually delicate but sometimes coarsely obscene and tend, in the fashion of courtly love, to idolize one’s lady love.
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da62e511a60e1d58e8f5ddb46fc32e8e | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-J-Casey | William J. Casey | William J. Casey
William J. Casey, in full William Joseph Casey, (born March 13, 1913, Elmhurst, Queens, N.Y., U.S.—died May 6, 1987, Glen Cove, N.Y.), powerful and controversial director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from 1981 to 1987 during the Ronald Reagan administration.
Casey graduated from Fordham University (B.S., 1934), studied at the Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C., and took a law degree from St. John’s University, Jamaica, N.Y. (1937). After working for the private Research Institute of America, Washington, D.C., he served in Europe (1941–46) with the Office of Strategic Services (forerunner of the CIA), directing continental spies from London. After the war he lectured on tax law at New York University (1948–62), wrote legal and business books, and invested wisely enough to amass a fortune. He was also a partner in a New York law firm (1957–71), along with Republican Party leader Leonard Hall. After working on Richard M. Nixon’s presidential campaign in 1968, Casey successively became chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (1971–73), under secretary of state for economic affairs (1973–74), president and chairman of the Export-Import Bank (1974–75), and member of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (1976).
While affiliated with the law firm Rogers & Wells (1976–81), Casey became Reagan’s presidential campaign manager and was subsequently awarded the directorship of the CIA in 1981. Under his leadership, covert action increased in such places as Afghanistan, Central America, and Angola, and the agency stepped up its support for various anticommunist insurgent organizations. He was viewed as a pivotal figure in the CIA’s secret involvement in the Iran-Contra Affair, in which U.S. weapons were sold to Iran and in which money from the sale was funneled to Nicaraguan rebels, in possible violation of U.S. law. Just before he was to testify in Congress on the matter in December 1986, he suffered seizures and then underwent brain surgery; he died from nervous-system lymphoma without ever testifying.
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d247559b47dd356313051e45fd773698 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Jaggard | William Jaggard | William Jaggard
…headed by Edward Blount and William Jaggard. The actors John Heminge and Henry Condell undertook the collection of 36 of Shakespeare’s plays, and about 1,000 copies of the First Folio were printed, none too well, by Jaggard’s son, Isaac.
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f3f37593c0ac5f84eb8a77f6dc487f64 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-James-Mayo | William James Mayo | William James Mayo
William James Mayo (b. June 29, 1861, Le Sueur, Minn.—d. July 28, 1939, Rochester) was the eldest son of William Worrall Mayo. He received his M.D. degree in 1883 from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and then engaged at Rochester in the private practice…
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583700563d47264b85d2bd3eace2652c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Jefferson-Hague | William Jefferson Hague, Baron Hague of Richmond | William Jefferson Hague, Baron Hague of Richmond
William Jefferson Hague, Baron Hague of Richmond, (born March 26, 1961, Rotherham, Yorkshire, England), British politician who served as leader of the Conservative Party (1997–2001) and as foreign secretary under Prime Minister David Cameron (2010–14).
Hague was born into a family that ran a small soft-drink business. He attended local schools—like John Major, his immediate predecessor as Conservative leader, but unlike most prominent Tories. By age 12 he devoted himself to following politics, and at 16 he spoke to his first Conservative Party conference. The confident attack on the then Labour government by a 16-year-old schoolboy with a pronounced northern accent captivated the media and impressed the Conservative leader, Margaret Thatcher.
Hague attended the University of Oxford, was elected president of the Oxford Union debating society, and obtained a first-class honours degree in philosophy, politics, and economics. After graduation he joined the Shell Oil Co. as a management trainee, but a year later he was recruited by management consultants McKinsey and Co.
In February 1989 he was selected to contest a by-election in the “safe” Conservative seat of Richmond, North Yorkshire, and within two years he had become parliamentary private secretary to the chancellor of the Exchequer, Norman Lamont. When Major, by then prime minister, appointed him secretary of state for Wales in 1995, Hague at age 34 became Britain’s youngest cabinet minister since Harold Wilson in 1947. Despite having no previous connections with Wales, Hague won the respect of his new constituents for his sympathy, good humour, and intelligence.
In May 1997, following the party’s election defeat—the worst since 1906—by the revived Labour Party under Tony Blair, Major announced his resignation as Conservative Party leader. One of the men widely tipped as a favourite for the leadership, Michael Portillo, had lost his seat in the election and was out of the running, while other contenders from the party’s right wing had their detractors. Hague’s centre-right platform, imbued with opposition to transferring additional authority to European Union (EU) institutions (a view popular among the Conservative rump), offered a compromise, and on June 19, 1997, on the third ballot, Hague at age 36 became the youngest leader of a major political party in the United Kingdom in 200 years.
Hague then set about reviving his party’s fortunes. He announced a series of reforms, similar to those implemented by Labour in the 1980s and early ’90s, to bring greater internal democracy to his party, including giving local party members a say in future leadership elections. At his first party conference as Conservative leader, Hague sought to soften the party’s image by declaring support for more compassionate policies. He also advocated “understanding and tolerance of people making their own decisions about how they lead their lives,” including accepting the rights of people to have same-sex relationships or to bear and raise children outside marriage. Hague’s speech marked a clear break with the strictly “pro-family” ethos of the Thatcher years.
In spite of those efforts, the Tories performed disastrously at the polls in 2001, and Hague stepped down as party leader. Iain Duncan Smith was elected to succeed him, and Hague receded to the backbenches. In 2005 Hague returned to frontbench politics when David Cameron selected him to serve as shadow foreign secretary. In the general election of 2010 Hague easily won reelection, and, after the confirmation of Cameron as prime minister, Hague was named foreign secretary in Cameron’s cabinet. His tenure in that post was characterized by an understated pragmatism, and the soft Euroskepticism that Hague had expressed as Conservative leader was eclipsed by elements within the party who wished to withdraw from the EU entirely. He stepped down in July 2014 as part of a broader cabinet reshuffle and was named leader of the House of Commons. In May 2015 Hague left the House of Commons, and in October he was made a life peer.
Hague wrote a number of well-received biographies of William Pitt the Younger (2004) and William Wilberforce (2007).
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972b28751b260d8311080903fc0c73a8 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-John-Wilgus | William John Wilgus | William John Wilgus
Wilgus in the Detroit River in 1903 for the Michigan Central Railroad. Wilgus dredged a trench in the riverbed, floated segments of steel tube into position, and sank them; the segments were locked together by divers and pumped out and could then be covered with…
…developed by an American engineer, W.J. Wilgus, for the construction (1906–10) of the Detroit River twin-tube railroad tunnel between Detroit, Mich., and Windsor, Ont., where it was successfully used for the 2,665-foot river-crossing portion. A structural assembly of steel tubes was prefabricated in 262-foot-long sections with both ends temporarily bulkheaded…
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9a6d60c4a7eb649e762db2d5ee78aaba | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-John-Wills | William John Wills | William John Wills
…by his second in command, William John Wills, and by Charles Gray and John King. The four reached northern Australia in February 1861 but could not penetrate the swamps and jungle scrub that lay between them and the Gulf of Carpentaria.
…of Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills, who crossed from Melbourne to the Gulf of Carpentaria in 1860–61 but starved to death on the return. Later explorations of Western Australia in the 1870s added the names of John Forrest and Ernest Giles to the pantheon of explorer-heroes.
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6d4f23a24aa4451ad1feb82550d204cc | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Joseph-Brennan-Jr | William Brennan | William Brennan
William Brennan, in full William Joseph Brennan, Jr., (born April 25, 1906, Newark, N.J., U.S.—died July 24, 1997, Arlington, Va.), associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (1956–90).
Brennan was the son of William Joseph Brennan, an Irish immigrant who was a brewery worker and union organizer, and Agnes McDermott Brennan. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1928 and then studied law under Felix Frankfurter at Harvard University, where he received a law degree in 1931. After graduation, he joined a Newark, N.J., law firm and specialized in labour law. His practice was interrupted by service in the U.S. Army during World War II, in which he rose to the rank of colonel, but after the war he returned to Newark to practice law. In 1949 Brennan was appointed to the newly created New Jersey Superior Court by Gov. Alfred E. Driscoll, and the following year he was named to the appellate division. In 1952 he was elevated to the state Supreme Court. Brennan’s service on the state bench was marked by his administrative skill in speeding litigation and clearing a calendar severely in arrears. Despite being a Democrat, Brennan was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by Republican Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower in October 1956. A recess appointment, he was formally nominated to the Supreme Court in January 1957 and was confirmed by the U.S. Senate by voice vote on March 19.
A liberal constructionist and articulate defender of the Bill of Rights, Brennan was nonetheless able to secure general consensus among several of the justices by tailoring constitutional issues to precise questions and, when possible, to specific elements of constitutional text. Despite these efforts, he is regarded as a leading liberal and broad-themed interpretivist—a justice unusually willing to acknowledge that “we current justices read the Constitution in the only way that we can: as 20th-century Americans.” He is perhaps best remembered for his role in a series of obscenity cases, beginning with Roth v. United States (1957), many of which broadened the protection accorded to publishers but which also showed an attempt to balance individual freedoms with the interests of the community. In New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964), Brennan created the “right to be wrong”—the speech and press rule stipulating that even false statements about public officials should be entitled to protection under the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution of the United States unless “actual malice” could be demonstrated.
Brennan was a strong believer in the importance of an independent judiciary and of the impact of procedure upon substantive rights. These concerns informed his opinions in the loyalty oath cases; in his dissent in State v. Tune (1953), in which the defendant was denied a copy of the confession; and in Jencks v. United States (1957), in which Brennan gave the court’s opinion, establishing a defendant’s right to examine the reports of government witnesses. In his dissents in Ker v. California and Lopez v. United States (both 1963), Brennan argued for the right to privacy as implicit in the Fourth Amendment (which prohibits unlawful search and seizure). His decision for the court in Baker v. Carr (1962), which established the principle of “one person, one vote,” provided the grounds for national legislative redistricting.
After suffering a stroke, Brennan retired from the court in 1990. In 1993 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honour. In more than three decades on the Supreme Court, Brennan wrote more than 1,300 opinions, including 461 majority opinions. Many Supreme Court analysts consider Brennan’s decisions among the most influential in the modern history of the Supreme Court. In addition to working for the redefinition of obscenity and libel, expansion of individual rights, and reapportionment of political boundaries, he opposed capital punishment and supported abortion rights, affirmative action, and school desegregation (see racial segregation).
Brennan was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, where he rests next to his first and second wives (respectively, Marjorie Leonard Brennan [died 1982] and Mary Fowler Brennan [died 2000]).
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bdfa7985833b62da6a4b66aa31cc9da8 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Julius-Wilson | William Julius Wilson | William Julius Wilson
William Julius Wilson, (born Dec. 20, 1935, Derry township, Pa., U.S.), American sociologist whose views on race and urban poverty helped shape U.S. public policy and academic discourse.
Wilson was educated at Wilberforce University (B.A., 1958) and Bowling Green State University (M.A., 1961) in Ohio, as well as at Washington State University (Ph.D., 1966). He joined the faculty of the University of Massachusetts (Amherst) as an assistant professor of sociology in 1965. In 1972 he moved to the University of Chicago, becoming a full professor in 1975 and gaining a chaired university professorship in 1990. Wilson conducted research, taught, wrote on inner-city poverty, and led the Center for the Study of Urban Inequality at the University of Chicago until 1996, when he joined Harvard University as a university professor in sociology and became the director of Harvard’s Joblessness and Urban Poverty Research Program.
In two seminal works, The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions (1978) and The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (1987), Wilson maintained that class divisions and global economic changes, more than racism, had created a large African American underclass. In When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (1996), he showed how chronic joblessness deprived those in the inner city of skills necessary to obtain and keep jobs. In More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City (2009) he addresses urban poverty among African Americans.
Wilson disputed the liberal stance that the “black underclass” (a term he later abandoned) owed its existence to entrenched racial discrimination; he also disagreed with the conservative view that African American poverty was due to cultural deficiencies and welfare dependency. Instead, Wilson implicated sweeping changes in the global economy that pulled low-skilled manufacturing jobs out of the inner city, the flight from the inner city of its most successful residents, and the lingering effects of past discrimination. He believed the problems of the underclass could be alleviated only by “race neutral” programs such as universal health care and government-financed jobs. Wilson was a MacArthur Prize fellow from 1987 to 1992, and he was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1998. In 2003 he received the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Talcott Parsons Prize for his contributions to the social sciences.
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f6851fa32f5f8fe817966725d168bbcb | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-K-Estes | William K. Estes | William K. Estes
William K. Estes, in full William Kaye Estes, (born June 17, 1919, Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.—died August 17, 2011), American psychologist who pioneered the application of mathematics to the study of animal learning and human cognition.
Estes received B.A. (1940) and Ph.D. (1943) degrees in psychology from the University of Minnesota. He taught and did research at Indiana, Stanford, Rockefeller, and Harvard universities.
Estes studied under the American behaviourist B.F. Skinner, with whom he developed the conditioned emotional response (CER) paradigm, a method of studying conditioned animal behaviours. In their landmark 1941 study, rats were repeatedly given food (a naturally positive stimulus) after pressing a lever. Eventually, an electric shock was applied immediately after the food presentation, which caused the lever pressing to be suppressed, presumably because of anxiety. Next, a tone was repeatedly paired with the shock until the tone alone, without the shock, caused response suppression because of the new CER (anxiety conditioned to the tone).
Estes eventually changed his focus from animal behaviour to human cognition, as can be seen in another of his more notable contributions to psychology—stimulus-sampling theory, a model for describing learning mathematically. This theory holds that a stimulus is really a collection of qualities (e.g., blue, round, pungent), not just one unitary quality (e.g., blue), and that responses to a stimulus at each trial of an experiment reflect random sampling of a stimulus’s properties by a subject and will vary over time. For example, a pigeon may peck differently in response to a yellow light at each of many separate presentations. The pigeon seems to be responding to, or sampling, different qualities of the light at each trial. SST accounts for the lack of consistency in human and animal learning: individuals respond differently to the same stimulus because they are responding to different stimulus properties at different times. The theory holds that random variations in sampling are necessary for learning.
Estes helped to found the Journal of Mathematical Psychology, which was first published in 1964. In 1997 he received the National Medal of Science.
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ae18bf5d46bdcab3627d2c583b4bd496 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Keith-Brooks | William Keith Brooks | William Keith Brooks
William Keith Brooks, (born March 25, 1848, Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.—died Nov. 12, 1908, Lake Roland, Md.), American zoologist known for his research on the anatomy and embryology of marine animals, especially the tunicates, crustaceans (e.g., crayfish), and mollusks (notably the oyster). In his acceptance of evolution, he remained in the tradition of 19th-century descriptive morphology; but, through his more able students, he influenced the transition to an experimental, causal approach to 20th-century biology, particularly in cytology, genetics, and embryology.
A student of Louis and Alexander Agassiz at Harvard University, where he received a doctorate in 1875, Brooks advocated the study of marine organisms in their natural habitats and was one of the first morphologists to accept Charles Darwin’s evolutionary concepts. From 1876 he taught at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, where he became head of the biology department in 1894. He founded the Chesapeake Zoological Laboratory (1878) and, as Commissioner to the General Assembly of Maryland, championed the conservation of the Chesapeake Bay oyster. Among his more important works are The Oyster (1891), a monograph on “The Genus Salpa” (1893), and The Foundations of Zoology (1899).
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642feab518a05af7bf92ecaa645527e9 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Kennedy-Laurie-Dickson | William Kennedy Laurie Dickson | William Kennedy Laurie Dickson
He assigned the project to William K.L. Dickson, an employee interested in photography, in 1888. After studying the work of various European photographers who also were trying to record motion, Edison and Dickson succeeded in constructing a working camera and a viewing instrument, which were called, respectively, the Kinetograph and…
Edison and William Dickson of the United States in 1891. In it, a strip of film was passed rapidly between a lens and an electric light bulb while the viewer peered through a peephole. Behind the peephole was a spinning wheel with a narrow slit that acted…
Instead it was William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, working in the West Orange, New Jersey, laboratories of the Edison Company, who created what was widely regarded as the first motion-picture camera.
…were entrusted to an assistant, W.K.L. Dickson, and generally because there are several plausible pre-Edison claimants in England and France. Indeed, a U.S. Supreme Court decision of 1902 concluded that Edison had not invented the motion picture but had only combined the discoveries of others. His systems are important, nevertheless,…
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e29138b647ed56486a12d54c70329922 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Kent | William Kent | William Kent
William Kent, (born c. 1685, Bridlington, Yorkshire, Eng.—died April 12, 1748, London), English architect, interior designer, landscape gardener, and painter, a principal master of the Palladian architectural style in England and pioneer in the creation of the “informal” English garden.
Kent was said to have been apprenticed to a coach painter at Hull. Local patrons, impressed by his talent, sent him to study painting in Rome from 1709 to 1719. There he studied under Benedetto Luti.
In Rome he also met the Earl of Burlington, the foremost architectural patron of the 18th century in England and the principal promoter of Andrea Palladio’s classical building style (Palladianism). He took Kent back to London in 1719 to decorate Burlington House in Piccadilly, where Kent then lived for the rest of his life. The association with Burlington had a determining effect on Kent’s rather severe architectural style, which was characterized by well-proportioned masses arranged in simple relationships. Although later Neoclassical architects, such as Robert Adam, were to criticize Kent’s works as “immeasurably ponderous,” his influence on them was considerable. Kent was also familiar with the style of Inigo Jones, whose Designs (published 1727) Kent edited.
By the 1730s Kent had become a fashionable architect. Among his principal buildings is Holkham Hall, Norfolk (begun 1734). Here, as in other works, Kent designed interiors and even furniture, becoming one of the earliest English architects to plan a house in one unified design scheme. Kent’s best known works came out of his appointment, through Burlington’s influence, as a master carpenter in the Office of Works (1725). The Royal Mews (1732), the treasury buildings, Whitehall (1734–36), and the Horse Guards Building in Whitehall (1750–58; completed after Kent’s death) are all part of Burlington’s grand intention of rectifying the sorry state of England’s architecture by adhering more closely to classical precedent.
The rather theatrical interiors of some of these structures, as of the masterful No. 44 Berkeley Square (1742–44), and Kent’s taste for fanciful Gothic style in furniture designs suggest that he wore his Palladianism lightly and that, in the absence of Burlington’s overpowering influence, Kent might as easily have become a master of the Baroque.
It was in his gardens—conceived of as natural landscapes to contrast with the classical severity of his buildings—that Kent may have achieved his freest expression. He created gardens at Rousham Hall, Oxfordshire (1738–41), and Stowe House, Buckinghamshire (c. 1730), where winding paths and open vistas lead to small classical temples in informal wooded glades. In describing the revolt from formality in garden design, Horace Walpole wrote that Kent saw that “all Nature was a garden.” The informal and irregular landscaping at these sites and others, such as Pope’s Villa, Twickenham, Middlesex (for Alexander Pope; c. 1730), and Richmond Gardens, Surrey, were a marked departure from the manicured, symmetrical precision of French gardens such as those at Versailles. The English style soon crossed the Channel and had a substantial impact in France during the second half of the 18th century.
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6c28934e967c19b7eba3209a910d06fe | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-king-of-Germany | William | William
William, also called William Of Holland, German Wilhelm Von Holland, (born 1228—died Jan. 28, 1256, near Hoogwoude, Holland), German king from Oct. 3, 1247, elected by the papal party in Germany as antiking in opposition to Conrad IV and subsequently gaining general recognition. As William II he was also count of Holland, succeeding his father, Count Floris IV, in 1234.
William was elected German king to succeed Henry Raspe (died Feb. 16, 1247), Pope Innocent IV’s nominee to replace Conrad, whom the Pope had declared deposed in 1245. Although crowned at Aachen on Nov. l, 1248, William was king of a minority of the German states until King Conrad decided, late in 1251, to leave Germany for Italy (where he became king of Sicily). On March 25, 1252, William was recognized as king by Albert, duke of Saxony, and by John and Otto, margraves of Brandenburg; further support came in 1254, from the Rhenish League of Cities.
William’s growing strength in the Rhineland caused Archbishop Conrad of Cologne (who had crowned him) to plan his deposition in favour of Otakar II of Bohemia. That conspiracy (late 1254) was checked by Pope Alexander IV.
As count of Holland, William promoted the urban development of Haarlem, Delft, Middelburg, and Alkmaar, all of which became trading centres. While trying to secure his rule over the Frisians, he was killed in battle.
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9dca09c6b9e345e69f6446761c11bbc3 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Klein | William Klein | William Klein
…the late 1940s and ’50s, William Klein, Lisette Model, Helen Levitt, Roy DeCarava, and Robert Frank were making careers of documenting American culture. The photographs they took were provocative and often contained vulgar or unaesthetic subject matter. Levitt,
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68931d004e939c08d3937e1bdc1ea30d | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Knox-DArcy | William Knox D'Arcy | William Knox D'Arcy
William Knox D’Arcy, (born Oct. 11, 1849, Newton Abbot, Devonshire, Eng.—died May 1, 1917, Stanmore, Middlesex [now Greater London]), English businessman who was the principal founder of the Iranian oil industry.
As a youth D’Arcy emigrated with his father to Queensland, Australia, where between 1882 and 1889 he made a fortune in the Mount Morgan goldfield. He returned to London and, with British government assistance, secured (in 1901) a 60-year oil-mining concession in Iran. The area, more than 500,000 square miles (1,300,000 square km), included the entire country exclusive of five provinces bordering on Russia. The first strike of any value was made in May 1908 in southwestern Iran and led to the formation of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in 1909. D’Arcy retired from active business immediately thereafter. As the first Westerner to discover the oil-production potential of the Middle East, D’Arcy effectively transformed the region into an area of enduring geopolitical interest.
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848530b3ce99b51a56920896f659f957 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Kunstler | William Kunstler | William Kunstler
…seven defendants, plus their attorney William Kunstler, to prison terms for contempt of court. The contempt convictions were reversed on appeal in 1972, and, in a separate appeal that same year, all the criminal convictions except Seale’s were also overturned. The appellate court cited, in part, the judge’s “deprecatory and…
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b0bb56661963a8ece17ed99ecc71d8d8 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-L-Marcy | William L. Marcy | William L. Marcy
William L. Marcy, (born Dec. 12, 1786, Southbridge, Mass., U.S.—died July 4, 1857, Ballston Spa, N.Y.), U.S. politician, governor, and Cabinet member, remembered primarily for his remark: “To the victor belong the spoils of the enemy.”
From 1823 to 1829 Marcy was comptroller of New York state and a leading member of the “Albany Regency,” a group of powerful Democrats. After serving as an associate justice of the New York Supreme Court (1829–31), he entered the U.S. Senate, where, in a speech defending Secretary of State Martin Van Buren against an attack by Sen. Henry Clay, he made his remark and thereby became known as champion of the “spoils system.” He resigned from the Senate (January 1833) to become governor of New York (1833–39). Marcy was secretary of war under Pres. James K. Polk (1845–49) and secretary of state under Pres. Franklin Pierce (1853–57).
In the latter office he secured approval of the Gadsden Treaty (1853), which settled the boundary dispute between Mexico and the United States; he also settled the Black Warrior case (1854), thus avoiding war with Spain.
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91d1f794b0febd1e516a1c040acebc13 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-L-Shirer | William L. Shirer | William L. Shirer
William L. Shirer, in full William Lawrence Shirer, (born Feb. 23, 1904, Chicago, Ill., U.S.—died Dec. 28, 1993, Boston, Mass.), American journalist, historian, and novelist, best known for his massive study The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (1960).
In the 1920s and ’30s Shirer was stationed in Europe and in India as a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and the Universal News Service. In addition, he served from 1937 to 1941 as radio broadcaster for the Columbia Broadcasting System, relaying to America news of the European crises leading to World War II. His impassioned statements alerting America to the Nazi danger earned him several journalistic awards.
Shirer collected his impressions of European political events in Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934–1941 (1941), which gained an international audience for its simple documentation of survival amid horror. In the 1950s Shirer began his research for The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which won a National Book Award in 1961. The book is a comprehensive and readable study of the Nazis’ rise to power under Adolf Hitler, the details and excesses of their rule, and their eventual demise. Shirer’s other major historical work is The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940 (1969). The book is considered by some to be the best one-volume study of France during the period between the world wars. In 1979 Shirer published Gandhi: A Memoir, in which he recalled a series of interviews that he conducted with Mohandas Gandhi while stationed as a foreign correspondent in India during the early 1930s. Shirer’s three-volume set of memoirs is collectively entitled Twentieth-Century Journey (1976, 1984, 1990).
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0aa65ffe547ad30a994074a0526e0984 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Langland | William Langland | William Langland
William Langland, (born c. 1330—died c. 1400), presumed author of one of the greatest examples of Middle English alliterative poetry, generally known as Piers Plowman, an allegorical work with a complex variety of religious themes. One of the major achievements of Piers Plowman is that it translates the language and conceptions of the cloister into symbols and images that could be understood by the layman. In general, the language of the poem is simple and colloquial, but some of the author’s imagery is powerful and direct.
There were originally thought to be three versions of Piers Plowman: the A version of the text, which was the earliest, followed by the B and C versions that consisted of revisions and further amplifications of the major themes of A. However, a fourth version, called Z, has been suggested and the order of issue questioned. The version described here is from the B text, which consists of (1) a prologue and seven passus (divisions) concerned primarily with the life of man in society, the dangers of Meed (love of gain), and manifestations of the seven capital sins; and (2) 13 passus ostensibly dealing with the lives of Do-wel, Do-bet, and Do-best; in effect, with the growth of the individual Christian in self-knowledge, grace, and charity.
In its general structure the poem mirrors the complexity of the themes with which it deals, particularly in the recurring concepts of Do-wel, Do-bet, and Do-best, all in the end seen as embodied in Christ. They are usually identified with the active, contemplative, and “mixed” religious life, but the allegory of the poem is often susceptible to more than one interpretation, and some critics have related it to the traditional exegetical way of interpreting the Scriptures historically, allegorically, anagogically, and topologically.
Little is known of Langland’s life: he is thought to have been born somewhere in the region of the Malvern Hills, in Worcestershire, and if he is to be identified with the “dreamer” of the poem, he may have been educated at the Benedictine school in Great Malvern. References in the poem suggest that he knew London and Westminster as well as Shropshire, and he may have been a cleric in minor orders in London.
Langland clearly had a deep knowledge of medieval theology and was fully committed to all the implications of Christian doctrine. He was interested in the asceticism of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, and his comments on the defects of churchmen and the religious in his day are nonetheless concomitant with his orthodoxy.
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a3d0c06d87d68335658ea28c97c7b823 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Latimer | William Latimer | William Latimer
…dominated by men such as William Latimer, the chamberlain, proved unpopular and ineffective. When the so-called Good Parliament met in 1376, grievances had accumulated and needed to be dealt with. As in previous crises, a committee consisting of four bishops, four earls, and four barons was set up to take…
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87a5ad8e16c621c862a69ee0a87d17da | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Laud/Trial-and-execution | Trial and execution. | Trial and execution.
In the spring of 1640 Parliament met for the first time in 11 years and with it the clerical assembly, the Convocation, which laid down in a new set of canons the principles of the Laudian church. They explained the prescribed ceremonies as “fit and convenient” rather than essential. But they added to the popular hatred of Laud shown in mass demonstrations, petitions, and leaflets. In December, formally accused of high treason, he was taken to the Tower. His trial, managed enthusiastically by Prynne, began only in 1644, in the midst of the Civil War. As with Strafford, the Commons had to abandon legal proof and resort to an ordinance of attainder, accepted hesitantly by the lords. On Jan. 10, 1645, the Archbishop was beheaded.
Laud was never much liked, even by his allies. A humourless, dwarflike figure, uninterested in court pleasures, unmarried, tactlessly impartial in his condemnations, he could never establish a party of influential supporters. During the war and interregnum, royalists and peacemakers generally preferred to forget him. At the Restoration, in 1660, outward Laudian forms were accepted but by a church less significant than ever to the community and the individual. Few in the 18th century saw Laud as a martyr. In the 19th century the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay’s fierce contempt for the “ridiculous old bigot” inspired the schoolbooks of many generations. The Oxford Movement, a movement of High Anglican reform in the 1840s, tried unconvincingly to reestablish him as a religious leader, and High Anglican clergy have remained his principal supporters. But at the turn of the 19th century, the Civil War historian Samuel Rawson Gardiner stressed Laud’s abilities and integrity and regarded the links with authoritarian politics as his “misfortune.”
In the 20th century, the eminent English historian H.R. Trevor-Roper has set against his narrow-minded methods the comprehensive idealism of his social policy, “coloured over by the accepted varnish of an appropriate religious doctrine.” Laud, as he himself was well aware, failed; but his devotion to a coherent purpose and his repudiation of hypocrisy, compromise, and corruption in allies and enemies of whatever class were rare and admirable qualities.
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43b2be76bb14cd3ec7f70c4afffcaaf6 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Lawes | William Lawes | William Lawes
William Lawes, (baptized May 1, 1602, Salisbury, Wiltshire, England—died Sept. 24, 1645, Chester, Cheshire), English composer, prominent during the early Baroque period, noted for his highly original instrumental music.
The brother of the composer Henry Lawes, he entered the household of the earl of Hertford about 1612 and in 1635 became a musician to Charles I. Lawes fought with the Royalists during the English Civil Wars (1642–51) and was killed at the siege of Chester. His music includes Great Consort for violin, bass viol, theorbo, and harp; The Royal Consort (a set of dance suites); and fantasias, anthems, and psalms. His daring harmonies employ unusual dissonances. Lawes was a skilled contrapuntalist who after some difficulty mastered the idiom of the Baroque. He was also one of the principal masque composers, composing the music for James Shirley’s The Triumph of Peace (1634) and The Triumph of Beauty (c. 1644) and Sir William Davenant’s The Triumph of the Prince d’Amour (1636; with Henry Lawes) and Britannia Triumphans (1638).
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e8362947776689361090918481d330cf | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Leedes | William Leedes | William Leedes
with John Newberry, John Eldred, William Leedes, and James Story, Fitch embarked in the Tiger and reached Syria in late April. (Act I, scene 3 of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth alludes to the trip.) From Aleppo (Syria), they went overland to the Euphrates, which they descended to Al-Fallūjah, now in Iraq,…
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87805c35f4e34dacd09c38d8bb6ba07a | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Lenthall | William Lenthall | William Lenthall
William Lenthall, (born June 1591, Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, Eng.—died Sept. 3, 1662, Burford, Oxfordshire), English Parliamentarian who, as speaker of the House of Commons, was at the centre of repeated struggles between the Parliamentarians and Royalists during the English Civil Wars.
Trained in law, Lenthall was chosen speaker of the House at the beginning of the Long Parliament in November 1640. When on Jan. 4, 1642, King Charles I personally entered the Commons to arrest five opposition leaders, Lenthall refused to reveal their whereabouts, uttering the famous words “May it please your Majesty, I have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place but as the House is pleased to direct me, whose servant I am here.” During the Civil Wars he sided with Parliament, and upon the outbreak (1647) of the power struggle between the Presbyterians and Independents he supported the Independents. At the same time he was probably secretly in sympathy with the Royalist cause.
Lenthall continued as speaker in the first Parliament (1654) held under Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate, and after the collapse of the Protectorate in 1659 he was speaker of the restored Long Parliament. Although he supported the Restoration of King Charles II in 1660, he was thereafter barred from public office. He soon gained royal favour by testifying against a man accused of participating in the trial and execution (1649) of Charles I.
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9f55006acf3b875b974bba75aaa5ecb3 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Lescaze | William Lescaze | William Lescaze
William Lescaze, (born March 27, 1896, Geneva, Switz.—died Feb. 9, 1969, New York, N.Y., U.S.), Swiss-born American architect best known for conceiving, in conjunction with George Howe, the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society Building, or PSFS (1931–32), which effectively introduced the International style of architecture into the United States. It is considered one of the best-designed skyscrapers of the pre-World War II era of modern architecture.
Lescaze studied in Zürich under the modernist architect Karl Moser and worked in France until 1920, when he went to the United States. He practiced first in Cleveland and then moved to New York City. His first important commission was for the Oak Lane Country Day School, near Philadelphia, a structure notable for its scaling down to child size of many features, such as stairs, and for its use of cork floors to reduce knee injuries. In 1929 he entered into a five-year partnership with George Howe, after which he headed his own firm. His own house in Manhattan (1934) and the Longfellow Building (1941) were notable early examples of the International style in the United States.
After World War II, Lescaze was a successful designer of office buildings in New York City, two of which were under construction at the time of his death. Among his important late works were the Borg-Warner Building, Chicago (1955); the chancery building of the Swiss embassy, Washington, D.C. (1959); and the Church Peace Center Building, New York City (1962).
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9d44ab83b8c1f6e2a23e13ec3d80d3f0 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Leybourn | William Leybourn | William Leybourn
In England, somewhat belatedly, William Leybourn, a mathematics teacher, textbook writer, and surveyor, in 1694, published his Pleasure with Profit: Consisting of Recreations of Divers Kinds, viz., Numerical, Geometrical, Mechanical, Statical, Astronomical, Horometrical, Cryptographical, Magnetical, Automatical, Chymical, and Historical. The title page further states that the purpose of the…
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2d22f5c7a7d1fe19e81d8a976c8c9c1d | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Longchamp | William Longchamp | William Longchamp
William Longchamp, (died Jan. 31, 1197, Poitiers, France), ecclesiastical statesman who governed England in 1190–91, while King Richard I (reigned 1189–99) was away from the kingdom during the Third Crusade.
Of Norman origin, Longchamp was made chancellor of England and bishop of Ely when Richard ascended the throne. After Richard’s departure on crusade, he became joint justiciar with Hugh de Puiset, bishop of Durham (March 1190). Longchamp soon drove Hugh from office, and in June 1190 he was appointed papal legate by Pope Clement III. Although he was able and completely loyal to Richard, Longchamp’s overbearing manner and anti-English prejudices earned him the hostility of the English people. Hoping to profit by this situation, Richard’s brother John (later King John, 1199–1216) rebelled and forced Longchamp to flee to France. Early in 1193 Longchamp visited Richard, who was being held prisoner in Germany, and arranged for the king to be ransomed. John’s rebellion collapsed upon Richard’s return to England (March 1194). Richard retained Longchamp as chancellor and employed him on diplomatic missions.
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83ce1139d005e3d4b46490d18fad393a | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Longsword-3rd-earl-of-Salisbury | William Longsword, 3rd earl of Salisbury | William Longsword, 3rd earl of Salisbury
William Longsword, 3rd earl of Salisbury, Longsword also called Longespée, (died March 7, 1226, Salisbury, Wiltshire, England), an illegitimate son of Henry II of England who became a prominent baron, soldier, and administrator under Kings John and Henry III. His date of birth is not known, and his parentage was, for many centuries, a mystery. He was long assumed to have been the son of Rosamond, with whom Henry II had an infamous affair. By the early 21st century, however, documents had been discovered that indicated that his mother was probably Countess Ida de Tosny, who later married Roger Bigod, 2nd earl of Norfolk.
Longsword was recognized as a son by Henry II and granted use of the coat of arms of his grandfather, Geoffrey IV. Henry also granted Longsword the honour of Appleby, in Lincolnshire, in 1188. In 1196 Richard I gave him the hand of Ela (or Isabel), daughter and heir of William Fitzpatrick, earl of Salisbury, thus making Longsword the earl of Salisbury. Among the many official positions to which Salisbury was appointed were the sheriff of Wiltshire (1199–1202, 1203–07, 1213–26), lieutenant of Gascony (1202), warden of the Cinque Ports (1204–06), honour of Eye (1205), warden of the Welsh Marches (1208), and sheriff of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire (1212–16).
He was sent on missions to France (1202) and to Germany (1209). In 1213–14 he organized John’s Flemish allies, taking part in the destruction (1213) of the French fleet at Damme, then the port of Bruges, and leading the right wing of the allied army at Bouvines (July 27, 1214), where he was captured by the bishop of Beauvais and held prisoner along with Ferrand, count of Flanders. Salisbury was exchanged for Robert of Dreux and was back in England by May 1215, when he was employed by John in inspecting the defenses of royal castles and fighting the rebels in the southwest.
During John’s war against the barons, Salisbury deserted the king after the landing of Louis VIII of France (May 1216). He returned to royal allegiance, however, by March 1217, fought at Lincoln (May) and Sandwich (August), and attested the Treaty of Lambeth (September 1217). Salisbury held various posts during the minority of Henry III and served against the Welsh in 1223 and in Gascony in 1225. He and his wife were benefactors of Salisbury Cathedral and laid foundation stones of the new cathedral in 1220. He was buried there and his effigy, a splendid early example, still survives. It is popularly believed that Salisbury was poisoned by Hubert de Burgh, but there is little evidence aside from Roger of Wendover’s account in Flores historiarum.
Since his death, Salisbury has become a recurring character in legend and literature. He was generally regarded in a positive light by the chroniclers of the era, and the relative lack of information about him seems to have made him a figure of speculation for antiquarians and romantics. One of Salisbury’s earliest appearances in literature was in William Shakespeare’s “The Life and Death of King John,” in which he appears as a minor character, a conciliatory voice between John and his frustrated barons. He became a protagonist in his own right with the publication of Thomas Leland’s Longsword, Earl of Salisbury (1762), which draws heavily on Roger of Wendover’s account of Salisbury’s life and death. In the 21st century Salisbury appeared as a central character in Elizabeth Chadwick’s historical romance To Defy a King (2010) and Cornelia Funke’s children’s novel Ghost Knight (2012).
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21aa209e761d0d7a5953080aadbdb21f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Lonsdale | William Lonsdale | William Lonsdale
William Lonsdale, (born Sept. 9, 1794, Bath, Somerset, Eng.—died Nov. 11, 1871, Bristol, Gloucestershire), English geologist and paleontologist whose studies of fossil corals suggested the existence of an intermediate system of rocks, the Devonian System, between the Carboniferous System (299 million to 359 million years old) and the Silurian System (416 million to 444 million years old).
Educated for the military, Lonsdale served in the British army at the battles of Salamanca (1812) and Waterloo (1815) and retired as a lieutenant. In 1829 he became assistant secretary and curator of the Geological Society of London at Somerset House. In that same year he published the results of a survey begun two years earlier on the oolitic strata (rocks composed of rounded particles resembling fish eggs) of Bath. Later he was engaged in a survey of the oolitic strata of Gloucestershire (1832).
Lonsdale became the foremost authority in England on corals, and he described fossil forms from the lower Cenozoic (2.6 million to 65.5 million years old) and Cretaceous (65.5 million to 146 million years old) strata of North America and from older strata of Great Britain and Russia. In 1837 he suggested from a study of the fossils of the South Devon limestones that they would prove to be of an age intermediate between the Carboniferous and Silurian systems. This suggestion was adopted by British geologists Adam Sedgwick and Roderick Impey Murchison in 1839 and may be regarded as the basis on which they founded the Devonian System.
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bd8f594d1284678be55de77e0af86324 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Lyon-Mackenzie | William Lyon Mackenzie | William Lyon Mackenzie
William Lyon Mackenzie, (born March 12, 1795, Springfield, Angus, Scot.—died Aug. 28, 1861, Toronto), Scottish-born journalist and political agitator who led an unsuccessful revolt against the Canadian government in 1837.
Mackenzie emigrated from Scotland to Canada in 1820 and became a general merchant. Responding to the discontent in Upper Canada (now part of Ontario), he became involved in politics. In 1824 he founded a newspaper in Queenston, the Colonial Advocate, in which he criticized the ruling oligarchy. Later that year he moved to York (as of 1834, Toronto); there his newspaper office was sabotaged by political opponents, but, with the damages awarded, he set up an improved plant and became leader of the radical wing of the province. Elected as a member of the provincial Parliament for York in 1828, he was expelled six times by the Tory majority, mainly because of fierce invectives against the Tories in his newspaper, only to be returned each time by the York electors. He visited England in 1832; well received by the colonial office, he caused the dismissal of several officers in Canada. While in England he wrote Sketches of Canada and the United States, stating Canadian grievances. In 1835 he was returned to the provincial Canadian Parliament in a reform administration. A report by Mackenzie’s committee on grievances exposed the inadequacies of colonial rule and caused the British government to recall the current governor, but the new governor was the even more autocratic Sir Francis Bond Head. Mackenzie was elected mayor of the new city of Toronto in 1835; but he lost his parliamentary seat in 1836, along with other prominent reformers accused of disloyalty.
Mackenzie then began seriously to consider rebellion, and he founded a more radical news paper, the Constitution, in which he supported ideas of Jacksonian democracy (the policies of U.S. President Andrew Jackson). As corresponding secretary for the extreme wing of the Reform Party, he communicated with Louis Joseph Papineau in Lower Canada (now in Quebec), who was already planning rebellion. An economic depression in 1837 brought many newcomers to Mackenzie’s rural meetings; that December he assembled 800 followers near Toronto and planned to seize the governor and set up a provisional government. Inadequate organization and control resulted in failure, however, and Mackenzie escaped to the United States. When an attempt to rally his forces on Navy Island in the Niagara River collapsed, Mackenzie was charged by the United States with breaking neutrality laws and was imprisoned for 11 months. While serving time in a Rochester, N.Y., prison, he wrote The Caroline Almanack, expressing his disillusionment with U.S. politics.
Mackenzie was pardoned and allowed to reenter Canada in 1849. In 1851 he was elected to Parliament for Haldimand. Allied to the Radicals, he maintained his position of extreme independence and incorruptibility, refusing several government positions. He opposed the development of large-scale corporations and clung to the ideal of an agrarian democracy and small-scale industrialism. He was forced to resign in 1858 because of illness. After his death he became a symbol of Canadian radicalism.
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d60c451780efe6cef8d5cc9e855d27de | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-M-Kelso | William Kelso | William Kelso
William Kelso, also called William M. Kelso, (born March 30, 1941, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.), American archaeologist who directed the Jamestown Rediscovery Project, an organized effort to uncover and preserve artifacts from the Jamestown Colony, the first permanent English settlement in North America.
Kelso began working in field archaeology after earning an M.A. (1964) in early American history at the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia. He then earned a Ph.D. (1971) in historical archaeology from Emory University, Atlanta. Kelso served as commissioner of archaeology (1971–79) for the Virginia Historic Landmarks Commission, and he studied historical sites such as colonial farms and plantations along the James River before they were lost to real-estate development. He later was a research archaeologist (1979–85) and director of archaeology (1986–93) at Monticello, the Virginia home of former U.S. president Thomas Jefferson. As Kelso became an expert on colonial America, he pioneered the use of archaeology to learn about slavery during the period.
Kelso held a longtime fascination with Jamestown, and in 1993 he was named director of archaeology for the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities’ Jamestown Rediscovery Project. The exact location of the original fort of the Jamestown colonists on the James River in Virginia was a mystery, and all that was known about the earliest years of the settlement came from historical accounts and documents. Although the prevailing view was that the site had been washed away by the river long ago, Kelso firmly believed that the remains of the fort still existed. He began excavations in 1994 at a location where he deduced the fort might have been, and he soon unearthed several early 17th-century objects. By late 1996 he and his staff had uncovered evidence of palisades and the foundations of other structures that confirmed the identity of the fort. Subsequent excavations recovered millions of artifacts (such as tools, household items, weaponry, and body armour), as well as the skeletal remains of some of the first colonists. Kelso lectured extensively about the ongoing archaeological work at the Jamestown site and headed a summer field school at which students and outside archaeologists could participate in the excavations.
Kelso was the author of a number of books on American archaeological projects, including Kingsmill Plantations, 1619–1800: Archaeology of Country Life in Colonial Virginia (1984), Archaeology at Monticello: Artifacts of Everyday Life in the Plantation Community (1997), Jamestown, the Buried Truth (2006), and Jamestown, the Truth Revealed (2017).
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7e0f3232f17a629446468cdbc2eca6f1 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Makepeace-Thackeray/Mature-writings | Mature writings | Mature writings
With Vanity Fair (1847–48), the first work published under his own name, Thackeray adopted the system of publishing a novel serially in monthly parts that had been so successfully used by Dickens. Set in the second decade of the 19th century, the period of the Regency, the novel deals mainly with the interwoven fortunes of two contrasting women, Amelia Sedley and Becky Sharp. The latter, an unprincipled adventuress, is the leading personage and is perhaps the most memorable character Thackeray created. Subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero,” the novel is deliberately antiheroic: Thackeray states that in this novel his object is to “indicate . . . that we are for the most part . . . foolish and selfish people . . . all eager after vanities.”
The wealthy, wellborn, passive Amelia Sedley and the ambitious, energetic, scheming, provocative, and essentially amoral Becky Sharp, daughter of a poor drawing master, are contrasted in their fortunes and reactions to life, but the contrast of their characters is not the simple one between moral good and evil—both are presented with dispassionate sympathy. Becky is the character around whom all the men play their parts in an upper middle-class and aristocratic background. Amelia marries George Osborne, but George, just before he is killed at the Battle of Waterloo, is ready to desert his young wife for Becky, who has fought her way up through society to marriage with Rawdon Crawley, a young officer of good family. Crawley, disillusioned, finally leaves Becky, and in the end virtue apparently triumphs, Amelia marries her lifelong admirer, Colonel Dobbin, and Becky settles down to genteel living and charitable works.
The rich movement and colour of this panorama of early 19th-century society make Vanity Fair Thackeray’s greatest achievement; the narrative skill, subtle characterization, and descriptive power make it one of the outstanding novels of its period. But Vanity Fair is more than a portrayal and imaginative analysis of a particular society. Throughout we are made subtly aware of the ambivalence of human motives, and so are prepared for Thackeray’s conclusion: “Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum! Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire, or having it, is satisfied?” It is its tragic irony that makes Vanity Fair a lasting and insightful evaluation of human ambition and experience.
Successful and famous, Thackeray went on to exploit two lines of development opened up in Vanity Fair: a gift for evoking the London scene and for writing historical novels that demonstrate the connections between past and present. He began with the first, writing The History of Pendennis (1848–50), which is partly fictionalized autobiography. In it, Thackeray traces the youthful career of Arthur Pendennis—his first love affair, his experiences at “Oxbridge University,” his working as a London journalist, and so on—achieving a convincing portrait of a much-tempted young man.
Turning to the historical novel, Thackeray chose the reign of Queen Anne for the period of The History of Henry Esmond, Esq., 3 vol. (1852). Some critics had thought that Pendennis was a formless, rambling book. In response, Thackeray constructed Henry Esmond with great care, giving it a much more formal plot structure. The story, narrated by Esmond, begins when he is 12, in 1691, and ends in 1718. Its complexity of incident is given unity by Beatrix and Esmond, who stand out against a background of London society and the political life of the time. Beatrix dominates the book. Seen first as a charming child, she develops beauty combined with a power that is fatal to the men she loves. One of Thackeray’s great creations, she is a heroine of a new type, emotionally complex and compelling, but not a pattern of virtue. Esmond, a sensitive, brave, aristocratic soldier, falls in love with her but is finally disillusioned. Befriended as an orphan by Beatrix’ parents, Lord and Lady Castlewood, Henry initially adores Lady Castlewood as a mother and eventually, in his maturity, marries her.
Written in a pastiche of 18th-century prose, the novel is one of the best evocations in English of the atmosphere of a past age. It was not well received, however—Esmond’s marriage to Lady Castlewood was criticized. George Eliot called it “the most uncomfortable book you can imagine.” But it has come to be accepted as a notable English historical novel.
Thackeray returned to the contemporary scene in his novel The Newcomes (1853–55). This work is essentially a detailed study of prosperous middle-class society and is centred upon the family of the title. Col. Thomas Newcome returns to London from India to be with his son Clive. The unheroic but attractive Clive falls in love with his cousin Ethel, but the love Clive and Ethel have for each other is fated to be unhappily thwarted for years because of worldly considerations. Clive marries Rose Mackenzie; the selfish, greedy, cold-hearted Barnes Newcome, Ethel’s father and head of the family, intrigues against Clive and the Colonel; and the Colonel invests his fortune imprudently and ends as a pensioner in an almshouse. Rose dies in childbirth, and the narrative ends with the Colonel’s death. This deathbed scene, described with deep feeling that avoids sentimentality, is one of the most famous in Victorian fiction. In a short epilogue Thackeray tells us that Clive and Ethel eventually marry—but this, he says, is a fable.
The Virginians (1857–59), Thackeray’s next novel, is set partly in America and partly in England in the latter half of the 18th century and is concerned mostly with the vicissitudes in the lives of two brothers, George and Henry Warrington, who are the grandsons of Henry Esmond, the hero of his earlier novel. Thackeray wrote two other serial novels, Lovel the Widower (1860) and The Adventures of Philip (1861–62). He died after having begun writing the novel Denis Duval.
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16a3d53debeb0f162dce5cd4a7a4b3b9 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Manchester | William Manchester | William Manchester
In the United States, William Manchester’s Death of a President (1967), on John F. Kennedy, created an even greater stir in the popular press. There the issue is usually presented as “the public’s right to know”; but for the biographer it is a problem of his obligation to preserve…
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5f11aef9633d74baaa5989732a467e0d | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-McDougall-American-psychologist | William McDougall | William McDougall
William McDougall, (born June 22, 1871, Chadderton, Lancashire, Eng.—died Nov. 28, 1938, Durham, N.C., U.S.), British-born U.S. psychologist influential in establishing experimental and 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.
Soon after becoming a fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge, McDougall joined the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait, between Australia and New Guinea, and there administered psychological tests to the native inhabitants. He then went to Germany, where, at the University of Göttingen, he conducted research on colour vision. His interest in psychical research also dates from that period. An assistant at the experimental laboratory, University College, London (1901), he was appointed reader in mental philosophy at the University of Oxford (1904), where he wrote Physiological Psychology (1905), demonstrating the value of a thoroughgoing biological approach in place of the traditional philosophical approach.
McDougall’s well-known Introduction to Social Psychology developed a Darwinian theory of human behaviour based on the assumption of inherited instinct, or tendency, to note particular stimuli and to respond to them for the purpose of attaining some goal. Should response be delayed, an emotional reaction follows. Diversification and stabilization of response result from learning. A classic work, Body and Mind (1911), subtitled A History and Defense of Animism represented the kind of espousal of unpopular causes that increasingly tended to isolate McDougall from colleagues.
Opposed to mechanistic interpretations of human behaviour, he wrote The Group Mind (1920), a speculative attempt to interpret national life and character that was intended as a sequel to his Social Psychology. Its poor reception was partly responsible for his move that year to the United States and a professorship at Harvard University. Maintaining that the basic human activity is searching for goals, he generally alienated himself from the dominant U.S. behaviourists, who confined psychology to observable evidence of organismic activity. In an attempt to demonstrate inheritance of acquired characteristics, he published Outline of Psychology (1923) and Outline of Abnormal Psychology (1926). Finding his situation at Harvard unsatisfactory, in 1927 he moved to Duke University, Durham, N.C. There he developed a psychology department and continued various research, including work in parapsychology.
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2b48fedaf70e78837ba100d6ffbbcf53 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Meredith | William Meredith | William Meredith
William Meredith, in full William Morris Meredith, Jr., (born Jan. 9, 1919, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died May 30, 2007, New London, Conn.), American poet whose formal and unadorned verse was compared to that of Robert Frost. Meredith was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1988.
Meredith attended Princeton University (A.B., 1940), where he first began to write poetry. After a short stint as a reporter for the New York Times, he joined the army and during World War II was a pilot with the U.S. Navy; he also served (1952–54) in the Korean War. In the mid-1940s Meredith embarked on a teaching career, holding posts at Princeton and the University of Hawaii. In 1955 he joined the faculty of Connecticut College, where he taught until 1983, when he suffered a severe stroke that affected not only his ability to speak but also his ability to use language. From 1978 to 1980 he was the poetry consultant to the Library of Congress (now the poet laureate consultant in poetry).
Meredith’s first collection, Love Letter from an Impossible Land (1944), drew praise for its eloquence and honesty. Ships and Other Figures (1948) was based on his experiences in the navy, and several of Meredith’s later works, such as The Open Sea, and Other Poems (1958) and The Wreck of the Thresher, and Other Poems (1964), also deal with nautical themes and use the sea as a metaphor. Partial Accounts: New and Selected Poems (1987) was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, and Effort at Speech: New and Selected Poems (1997) received a National Book Award. His prose works include two lectures he delivered as poetry consultant, published as Reasons for Poetry & The Reason for Criticism (1982), and Poems Are Hard to Read (1991). He translated poetry by Guillaume Apollinaire in Alcools: Poems, 1878–1913 (1964), and he contributed, with Richard Harteis, to The White Island (1998–2000), a bilingual collection of English and Bulgarian poetry.
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72b60645676b7c9922ee151515a6a93f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Monson | Sir William Monson | Sir William Monson
Sir William Monson, (born 1568, Lincolnshire, Eng.—died February 1643, Kinnersley, Surrey), English naval officer best-known for his Naval Tracts.
He entered Balliol College, Oxford, in 1581 but four years later ran away to sea; however, he took his degree in 1594. In the Spanish Armada campaign he served as a volunteer in the Charles pinnace and afterward accompanied George Clifford, 3rd earl of Cumberland, on three voyages to the West Indies. In 1596 he was flag captain to the earl of Essex at the capture of Cadiz, and in 1602 he was vice admiral of the last fleet to be sent against Spain, when the great carrack St. Valentine was taken. From 1604 to 1616 he was Admiral of the Narrow Seas, being chiefly engaged against pirates. He was dismissed partly for accepting bribes from Spain and partly because of his supposed connection with the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury. Monson’s last service at sea was in command of the ship-money fleet of 1635.
During his retirement he composed his Naval Tracts, which were first printed in abbreviated form in 1682, then in full in 1704, a definitive edition in five volumes being edited by M. Oppenheim for the Navy Records Society in 1902–14. It is to these writings that Monson owes his fame, since, besides being the first account by a naval officer of a war in which he himself served, they provide a valuable commentary on the Elizabethan war with Spain and conditions at sea during that period.
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