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28137bb6938f2a13fbd0eae6e916c864 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Moorcroft | William Moorcroft | William Moorcroft
…travelers such as the Englishmen William Moorcroft, George Trebeck, and Godfrey Thomas Vigne plotted the locations of major rivers, glaciers, and mountains. The extraordinary topography, along with protracted military tensions in the Karakorams between Russia and Britain and more recently between China, Pakistan, and India, prompted many expeditions in the…
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131b44ce5469871631351276fd471001 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Morgan-Shuster | William Morgan Shuster | William Morgan Shuster
William Morgan Shuster, (born February 23, 1877, Washington, D.C., U.S.—died May 26, 1960, New York, New York), U.S. lawyer, civil servant, financial expert, and publisher, who served as treasurer general to the Iranian government (1911).
Shuster entered the Cuban customs service in 1899 but resigned in 1901 to become collector of customs at Manila, the Philippines. In 1906 he was appointed secretary of public instruction in the Philippines and a member of the Philippine Commission. When the Iranian government appealed in 1910 to the U.S. government for help reorganizing its financial system, Shuster, on the recommendation of President William Howard Taft (under whom he had served in the Philippines), was chosen to head a party of U.S. financial experts to go to Iran. Shuster’s brusque manner and unflinching devotion to duty antagonized the Russian and British governments, both of which had considerable financial interests in Iran. Because of Russian opposition and the threat of armed intervention, the Shuster mission left Tehrān in early 1912. Shuster recounted the history of his mission in his book, The Strangling of Persia (1912). He subsequently turned to publishing, serving as president of the Century Company of New York City (1915–33) and of Appleton-Century Crofts Inc. from 1933 until retirement in 1952.
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61c7da5022764e30b0be9a6ba546d357 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Moulton-Marston | William Moulton Marston | William Moulton Marston
…for DC Comics by psychologist William Moulton Marston (under the pseudonym Charles Moulton) and artist Harry G. Peter. Wonder Woman first appeared in a backup story in All Star Comics no. 8 (December 1941) before receiving fuller treatment in Sensation Comics no. 1 (January 1942) and Wonder Woman no. 1…
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0552e4b33da416c3377cc446c963f429 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Nicholson-English-chemist-and-inventor | William Nicholson | William Nicholson
William Nicholson, (born 1753, London, England—died May 21, 1815, Bloomsbury, London), English chemist, discoverer of the electrolysis of water, which has become a basic process in both chemical research and industry.
Nicholson was at various times a hydraulic engineer, inventor, translator, and scientific publicist. He invented a hydrometer (an instrument for measuring the density of liquids) in 1790. In 1800, after he heard of the invention of the electric battery by the Italian physicist Alessandro Volta, he built one of his own. He then discovered that when leads from the battery are placed in water, the water breaks up into hydrogen and oxygen, which collect separately to form bubbles at the submerged ends of the wires. With this discovery Nicholson became the first man to produce a chemical reaction by electricity.
In 1797 Nicholson founded the Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry and the Arts, which was the first independent scientific journal. The success of this periodical inspired the creation of several rival scientific journals in England that eventually drove Nicholson’s periodical out of business. Nicholson’s Introduction to Natural Philosophy (1781) was the most successful of his published works.
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8f2f76aa76fa7bb3156a938ddcc12fe7 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-OBrien | William O'Brien | William O'Brien
William O’Brien, (born October 2, 1852, Mallow, County Cork, Ireland—died February 25, 1928, London, England), Irish journalist and politician who was for several years second only to Charles Stewart Parnell (1846–91) among Irish Nationalist leaders. He was perhaps most important for his “plan of campaign” (1886), by which Irish tenant farmers would withhold all rent payments from landlords who refused to lower their rents and would pay the money instead into a mutual defense fund on which evicted tenants could draw.
A journalist from 1869, O’Brien was appointed editor of the Irish Land League’s weekly United Ireland by Parnell in 1881. In October of that year the British authorities suppressed the paper and put O’Brien in Kilmainham jail, Dublin, along with Parnell and others. There he drew up a “No Rent Manifesto,” which, when read at a Land League meeting, resulted in the outlawing of the League. Released in 1882, he resumed the editorship of United Ireland, and in 1883 he was elected to the British House of Commons (remaining there until 1895). His “plan of campaign” was disavowed by Parnell but nonetheless stirred up fierce agitation. To suppress the movement, the British government passed the Coercion Act of 1887, under which O’Brien was jailed again.
For some time following the O’Shea divorce case (1889–90), in which Parnell was corespondent, O’Brien attempted to mediate between the Parnellites and their opponents, although he sided with the majority in rejecting Parnell’s continued leadership of the Irish Home Rule struggle. In 1902 he supported the Land Conference, which secured agreement between landlords and tenants’ representatives and resulted in the Wyndham Land Purchase Act of 1903, which was designed to turn Irish tenant farmers into occupying owners.
In 1898 O’Brien had founded the United Irish League, and in 1910, after control of that group had passed to the Parnellite John Redmond, he established the All-for-Ireland League in opposition to the older organization. Most of his personal following, however, had joined Arthur Griffith’s Sinn Féin Party by the end of World War I.
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f474b1852d7fa430c6dc8b6c5e20134f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-of-Auvergne | William of Auvergne | William of Auvergne
William of Auvergne, also called William of Paris or William of Alvernia, French Guillaume d’Auvergne or Guillaume de Paris, (born after 1180, Aurillac, Aquitaine, France—died 1249, Paris), the most prominent French philosopher-theologian of the early 13th century and one of the first Western scholars to attempt to integrate Classical Greek and Arabic philosophy with Christian doctrine.
William became a master of theology at the University of Paris in 1223 and a professor by 1225. He was named bishop of the city in 1228. As such, he defended the rising mendicant orders against attacks by the secular clergy, which impugned the mendicants’ orthodoxy and reason for existence. As a reformer, he limited the clergy to one benefice (church office) at a time if it provided them sufficient means.
William’s principal work, written between 1223 and 1240, is the monumental Magisterium divinale (“The Divine Teaching”), a seven-part compendium of philosophy and theology: De primo principio, or De Trinitate (“On the First Principle,” or “On the Trinity”); De universo creaturarum (“On the Universe of Created Things”); De anima (“On the Soul”); Cur Deus homo (“Why God Became Man”); De sacramentis (“On the Sacraments”); De fide et legibus (“On Faith and Laws”); and De virtutibus et moribus (“On Virtues and Customs”).
After the condemnation of Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics in 1210 by church authorities fearful of their negative effect on the Christian faith, William initiated the attempt to delete those Aristotelian theses that he saw as incompatible with Christian beliefs. On the other hand, he strove to assimilate into Christianity whatever in Aristotle’s thought is consistent with it.
Influenced by the Aristotelianism of Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā), an 11th-century Islamic philosopher, and by the Neoplatonism of Augustine and the school of Chartres, William nevertheless was sharply critical of those elements in Classical Greek philosophy that contradicted Christian theology, specifically on the questions of human freedom, Divine Providence, and the individuality of the soul. Against Avicenna’s determinism, he held that God “voluntarily” created the world, and he opposed those proponents of Aristotelianism who taught that man’s conceptual powers are one with the single, universal intellect. William argued that the soul is an individualized immortal “form,” or principle, of intelligent activity; man’s sentient life, however, requires another activating “form.”
The complete works of William of Auvergne, edited in 1674 by B. Leferon, were reprinted in 1963. A critical text of William’s De bono et malo (“On Good and Evil”) by J.R. O’Donnell appeared in 1954.
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190e1653ea3b8e1fbe15494aa1015aff | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-of-Champeaux | William of Champeaux | William of Champeaux
William of Champeaux, French Guillaume de Champeaux, Latin Guglielmus de Campellis, (born c. 1070, Champeaux, Fr.—died 1121, Châlons-sur-Marne), French bishop, logician, theologian, and philosopher who was prominent in the Scholastic controversy on the nature of universals (i.e., words that can be applied to more than one particular thing).
After studies under the polemicist Manegold of Lautenbach in Paris, the theologian Anselm of Laon, and the philosopher Roscelin at Compiègne, William taught in the cathedral school of Notre Dame, Paris, where he had Peter Abelard among his pupils. He became head of the school and archdeacon of Paris c. 1100, but retired in 1108, probably because of the violent polemics between him and Abelard over the doctrine of universals.
William withdrew to the nearby abbey of Saint-Victor, where—at the school he established with Anselm’s aid—he taught rhetoric, logic, and theology, again having Abelard as his pupil. The abbey flourished under William’s direction, contributing significantly to the mystical trend characteristic of St. Victor. He was consecrated bishop of Châlons-sur-Marne in 1113 and initiated a reform, becoming an advocate of clerical celibacy and a champion of orthodoxy and ecclesiastical investiture. In 1115 he ordained the great Bernard of Clairvaux, who probably studied under him.
William’s surviving works are all theological. The fragmentary De sacramento altaris (“On the Sacrament of the Altar”), the possibly apocryphal De origine animae (“On the Origin of the Soul”), the De essentia Dei (“On the Essence of God”), and the Dialogus seu altercatio cujusdam Christiani et Judaei de fide Catholica (“A Dialogue or Argument of a Certain Christian and Jew on the Catholic Faith”) are printed by J.-P. Migne in Patrologia Latina (“Works of the Latin Fathers”). His logical works are not extant. William’s Sententiae seu Quaestiones (“Sentences or Questions”) is an early systematization of classical Christian doctrine.
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da801b3ebbafe2ead315288c925fe8e0 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-of-Ockham | William of Ockham | William of Ockham
William of Ockham, also called William Ockham, Ockham also spelled Occam, byname Venerabilis Inceptor (Latin: “Venerable Enterpriser”), or Doctor Invincibilis (“Invincible Doctor”), (born c. 1285, Ockham, Surrey?, Eng.—died 1347/49, Munich, Bavaria [now in Germany]), Franciscan philosopher, theologian, and political writer, a late scholastic thinker regarded as the founder of a form of nominalism—the school of thought that denies that universal concepts such as “father” have any reality apart from the individual things signified by the universal or general term.
Little is known of Ockham’s childhood. It seems that he was still a youngster when he entered the Franciscan order. At that time a central issue of concern in the order and a main topic of debate in the church was the interpretation of the rule of life composed by St. Francis of Assisi concerning the strictness of the poverty that should be practiced within the order. Ockham’s early schooling in a Franciscan convent concentrated on the study of logic; throughout his career, his interest in logic never waned, because he regarded the science of terms as fundamental and indispensable for practicing all the sciences of things, including God, the world, and ecclesiastical or civil institutions; in all his disputes logic was destined to serve as his chief weapon against adversaries.
After his early training, Ockham took the traditional course of theological studies at the University of Oxford and apparently between 1317 and 1319 lectured on the Sentences of Peter Lombard—a 12th-century theologian whose work was the official textbook of theology in the universities until the 16th century. His lectures were also set down in written commentaries, of which the commentary on Book I of the Sentences (a commentary known as Ordinatio) was actually written by Ockham himself. His opinions aroused strong opposition from members of the theological faculty of Oxford, however, and he left the university without obtaining his master’s degree in theology. Ockham thus remained, academically speaking, an undergraduate—known as an inceptor (“beginner”) in Oxonian language or, to use a Parisian equivalent, a baccalaureus formatus.
Ockham continued his academic career, apparently in English convents, simultaneously studying points of logic in natural philosophy and participating in theological debates. When he left his country for Avignon, Fr., in the autumn of 1324 at the pope’s request, he was acquainted with a university environment shaken not only by disputes but also by the challenging of authority: that of the bishops in doctrinal matters and that of the chancellor of the university, John Lutterell, who was dismissed from his post in 1322 at the demand of the teaching staff.
However abstract and impersonal the style of Ockham’s writings may be, they reveal at least two aspects of Ockham’s intellectual and spiritual attitude: he was a theologian-logician (theologicus logicus is Luther’s term). On the one hand, with his passion for logic he insisted on evaluations that are severely rational, on distinctions between the necessary and the incidental and differentiation between evidence and degrees of probability—an insistence that places great trust in man’s natural reason and his human nature. On the other hand, as a theologian he referred to the primary importance of the God of the creed whose omnipotence determines the gratuitous salvation of men; God’s saving action consists of giving without any obligation and is already profusely demonstrated in the creation of nature. The medieval rule of economy, that “plurality should not be assumed without necessity,” has come to be known as “Ockham’s razor”; the principle was used by Ockham to eliminate many entities that had been devised, especially by the scholastic philosophers, to explain reality.
Ockham met John Lutterell again at Avignon; in a treatise addressed to Pope John XXII, the former chancellor of Oxford denounced Ockham’s teaching on the Sentences, extracting from it 56 propositions that he showed to be in serious error. Lutterell then became a member of a committee of six theologians that produced two successive reports based on extracts from Ockham’s commentary, of which the second was more severely critical. Ockham, however, presented to the pope another copy of the Ordinatio in which he had made some corrections. It appeared that he would be condemned for his teaching, but the condemnation never came.
At the convent where he resided in Avignon, Ockham met Bonagratia of Bergamo, a doctor of civil and canon law who was being persecuted for his opposition to John XXII on the problem of Franciscan poverty. On Dec. 1, 1327, the Franciscan general Michael of Cesena arrived in Avignon and stayed at the same convent; he, too, had been summoned by the pope in connection with the dispute over the holding of property. They were at odds over the theoretical problem of whether Christ and his Apostles had owned the goods they used; that is, whether they had renounced all ownership (both private and corporate), the right of property and the right to the use of property. Michael maintained that because Christ and his Apostles had renounced all ownership and all rights to property, the Franciscans were justified in attempting to do the same thing.
The relations between John and Michael grew steadily worse, to such an extent that, on May 26, 1328, Michael fled from Avignon accompanied by Bonagratia and William. Ockham, who was already a witness in an appeal secretly drafted by Michael on April 13, publicly endorsed the appeal in September at Pisa, where the three Franciscans were staying under the protection of Emperor Louis IV the Bavarian, who had been excommunicated in 1324 and proclaimed by John XXII to have forfeited all rights to the empire. They followed him to Munich in 1330, and thereafter Ockham wrote fervently against the papacy in defense of both the strict Franciscan notion of poverty and the empire.
Instructed by his superior general in 1328 to study three papal bulls on poverty, Ockham found that they contained many errors that showed John XXII to be a heretic who had forfeited his mandate by reason of his heresy. His status of pseudo-pope was confirmed in Ockham’s view in 1330–31 by his sermons proposing that the souls of the saved did not enjoy the vision of God immediately after death but only after they were rejoined with the body at the Last Judgment, an opinion that contradicted tradition and was ultimately rejected.
Nevertheless, his principal dispute remained the question of poverty, which he believed was so important for religious perfection that it required the discipline of a theory: whoever chooses to live under the evangelical rule of St. Francis follows in the footsteps of Christ who is God and therefore king of the universe but who appeared as a poor man, renouncing the right of ownership, submitting to the temporal power, and desiring to reign on this earth only through the faith vested in him. This reign expresses itself in the form of a church that is organized but has no infallible authority—either on the part of a pope or a council—and is essentially a community of the faithful that has lasted over the centuries and is sure to last for more, even though temporarily reduced to a few, or even to one; everyone, regardless of status or sex, has to defend in the church the faith that is common to all.
For Ockham the power of the pope is limited by the freedom of Christians that is established by the gospel and the natural law. It is therefore legitimate and in keeping with the gospel to side with the empire against the papacy or to defend, as Ockham did in 1339, the right of the king of England to tax church property. From 1330 to 1338, in the heat of this dispute, Ockham wrote 15 or 16 more or less political works; some of them were written in collaboration, but Opus nonaginta dierum (“Work of 90 Days”), the most voluminous, was written alone.
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2645c48fd5616e6bcbb2c32ffbed6fb1 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-of-Saint-Amour | William Of Saint-amour | William Of Saint-amour
William Of Saint-amour, French Guillaume De Saint-amour, (born c. 1200, Saint-Amour, Kingdom of Arles—died September 1272, Saint-Amour), French philosopher and theologian who led the opposition at the University of Paris to the 13th-century rise of the newly formed mendicant religious orders.
A protégé of the Count of Savoy, who supported his doctoral studies in canon law and theology at the University of Paris, William was chosen dean of the theology masters c. 1250. During that period he wrote a significant commentary on the logical treatises De Analytica priora et posteriora (“On the Prior and Posterior Analytics”) of Aristotle.
Disdaining the mendicant religious orders, William initiated the attack on their representatives and theological scholars at the university, notably the Franciscan Bonaventure and the Dominican Thomas Aquinas. At William’s instigation, the university suspended the Dominican masters in the winter of 1254. He also obtained from Pope Innocent IV in July 1254 a decree limiting each religious order to one university master’s chair. In November of the same year, Pope Innocent rescinded certain privileges of the orders to minister the sacraments.
The following month, however, the new pope, Alexander IV, abrogated these restrictions and ordered the masters at Paris to receive again the Dominicans into the university. William resisted these rulings and disputed the very legitimacy of the mendicant orders by relating their purpose to the apocalyptic teaching of Joachim of Fiore. Intending to taint the mendicants by association, William attacked Joachim’s prophecy of a new theocratic age that would dispense with political and ecclesiastical structures. In 1255 William wrote the Liber de Antichristo et ejusdem ministris (“The Book of Antichrist and His Ministers”), in which he attempted to show that the Dominicans were the forerunners of the catastrophic age of Antichrist. After an investigation of the issue, Pope Alexander in June 1256 suspended William from all academic and ecclesiastical offices and sought his expulsion from France. Following a review of his case by the French bishops, which elicited a promise to correct in his writings whatever was contrary to church teaching, William, in September 1256, obtained the collaboration of other Parisian masters in a denunciation of the mendicant orders, the De periculis novissimorum temporum (“On the Dangers of Recent Times”). When this work also was condemned by Pope Alexander in October 1256, William presented a defense early in 1257 but was judged again to be in error and was exiled from France. On an appeal to Pope Clement IV, William was permitted to return to France late in 1266 and retired to his home at Saint-Amour. Although forbidden by the pope to continue the controversy with the religious orders, William maintained correspondence with his colleagues at Paris, who subsequently revived the polemic. The complete works of William of Saint-Amour were published in 1632.
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dd128060cb15bfc60588205b95bbf94a | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-of-Saint-Carilef | William Of Saint Carilef | William Of Saint Carilef
William Of Saint Carilef, also called William Of Saint Calais, orBishop William, (died Jan. 2, 1096, Windsor, Eng.), Norman-French bishop of Durham (1081–96), adviser to William I the Conqueror, and chief minister to William II Rufus (1088).
Bishop William distinguished himself in his early years as a diligent and practical monk and abbot at the monasteries of St. Carilef (later named St. Calais) and St. Vincent, respectively. William I the Conqueror, taking notice of his abilities, made him bishop of Durham on Jan. 3, 1081, and retained him as a close adviser.
Upon ascending the throne, William II Rufus made Bishop William his chief minister (1088), an act that, in part, caused Odo of Bayeux (William the Conqueror’s half brother) to rebel. Bishop William sided with Odo and, after Odo’s defeat, was stripped of his see and castle and forced to take refuge in Normandy. After spending three years in exile, Bishop William succeeded in regaining the king’s favour and recovered his bishopric and property.
For the next four years Bishop William devoted himself to the rebuilding of Durham Cathedral. He sided with the king against St. Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury, at the Synod of Rockingham (March 1095) and unsuccessfully advocated the archbishop’s removal. Ailing, William was summoned to Windsor in late 1095 and died there shortly after his arrival.
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4bbaf4d9fe8666d3b1ead4f81ac8099d | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-of-Sherwood | William of Sherwood | William of Sherwood
…1253 and 1257; and (3) William of Sherwood, who produced Introductiones in logicam (Introduction to Logic) and other logical works sometime about the mid-century.
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340739c1a1de55f276f3e98718d0fae8 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-of-Tripoli | William of Tripoli | William of Tripoli
The Dominican William of Tripoli had some success, presumably within the Crusaders’ area; he and his colleague Riccoldo di Monte Croce both wrote perceptive treatises on Islamic faith and law. Other missionaries usually failed, and many suffered martyrdom. In the 14th century the Franciscans were finally permitted…
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ff856e58e2ce472209f7b012acd38a33 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-P-Lear | William P. Lear | William P. Lear
William P. Lear, (born June 26, 1902, Hannibal, Mo., U.S.—died May 14, 1978, Reno, Nev.), self-taught American electrical engineer and industrialist whose Lear Jet Corporation was the first mass-manufacturer of business jet aircraft in the world. Lear also developed the automobile radio, the eight-track stereo tape player for automobiles, and the miniature automatic pilot for aircraft.
The child of immigrant parents and a broken home, Lear said that at the age of 12 he had worked out a blueprint of his life, based upon profiting by inventing what people wanted. He held some 150 patents at his death.
After completing eighth grade, Lear quit school to become a mechanic and at the age of 16 joined the navy, lying about his age. During World War I, Lear studied radio and after his discharge designed the first practicable auto radio. Failing to secure the financial backing to produce the radio himself, Lear sold the radio to the Motorola Company in 1924.
In 1934 he designed a universal radio amplifier (i.e., one that would work with any radio.) The Radio Corporation of America purchased the plans, giving Lear the capital he needed to expand his operations. He founded the Lear Avia Corporation in 1934 to make radio and navigational devices for aircraft. In 1939 he founded Lear, Inc. By 1939 more than half the private airplanes in the United States were using Lear radio and navigational equipment. In World War II, the company manufactured cowl-flap motors and other precision devices for Allied aircraft. After World War II, Lear, Inc. introduced a new, miniaturized autopilot that could be used on small fighter aircraft.
Between 1950 and 1962 the sales of Lear, Inc., rose to $90,000,000. New plants were added in the Midwest and on both coasts, and the company embarked on the manufacture of stereophonic sound systems and miniature communications satellites. Lear himself wanted to expand into low-priced, small jet aircraft for businessmen. When his board of directors would not approve the expenditure, Lear sold his share of the company and formed Lear Jet, Inc., Wichita, Kan., which produced its first compact jet in 1963. The new company’s jets became among the world’s most popular private jet aircraft. Lear sold his interest in the corporation in 1967 and formed Lear Motors Corporation (1967–69) to produce a steam car.
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3c4a02992b2a6f62602dd54171e86050 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Paats | William Paats | William Paats
In Paraguay, Dutchman William Paats introduced the game at a school where he taught physical education, but the country’s first (and still leading) club, Olimpia, was formed by a local man who became enthusiastic after seeing the game in Buenos Aires in 1902. In Bolivia the first footballers…
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8b47406f9b1712bc1e595a1d22563e08 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Paterson-United-States-statesman | William Paterson | William Paterson
William Paterson, (born December 24, 1745, County Antrim, Ireland—died September 9, 1806, Albany, New York, U.S.), Irish-born American jurist, one of the framers of the U.S. Constitution, U.S. senator (1789–90), and governor of New Jersey (1790–93). He also served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1793 to 1806.
Paterson immigrated to America with his family in 1747. They came to Pennsylvania and then eventually settled in Princeton, New Jersey. He graduated in 1763 from the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), studied law, and began to practice in 1769. He served twice in the provincial congress (1775–76), was a delegate to the state constitutional convention (1776), and from 1776 to 1783 was attorney general of New Jersey.
In 1787 Paterson headed the New Jersey delegation to the federal Constitutional Convention, where he played a leading role in the opposition of the small states to representation according to population in the federal legislature. As an alternative to the Virginia (or large-state) Plan, Paterson submitted the New Jersey (or small-state) Plan, also called the Paterson Plan, which advocated an equal vote for all states. The issue was finally resolved with the compromise embodied in the bicameral Congress—representation by population in the House of Representatives, and equality of states in the Senate.
Paterson was instrumental in securing ratification of the final document in New Jersey and was elected one of the state’s first two U.S. senators. He resigned his seat in 1790 and served as governor of New Jersey until 1793, when he was named an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. The city of Paterson, New Jersey, was named for him.
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951b7f9208e7409a7331935681ccbe85 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Patterson | William Patterson | William Patterson
William Patterson, in full William Allan Patterson, (born October 1, 1899, Honolulu, Hawaii—died June 13, 1980, Glenview, Illinois, U.S.), American airline executive who played a major role in shaping the history of aviation as the pioneering first president of United Airlines (1934–63), which became the world’s largest commercial air carrier.
In 1929 Patterson persuaded Philip G. Johnson (president of the Boeing Airplane Co. and Boeing Air Transport) and W.E. Boeing (chairman of the Boeing companies and the United Aircraft and Transport Corp.) to purchase Pacific Air Transport. Pacific and Boeing merged to form United Airlines, with Patterson as general manager and later as president. United flights eventually spanned the nation from coast to coast and were the first to carry female flight attendants and have pilots who were guaranteed a monthly salary regardless of their hours in the air. Patterson was also instrumental in helping the Douglas Aircraft Co. develop the DC-4, the first airliner equipped solely for passengers. After retiring as president in 1963, Patterson was elected chairman of the board. He held the position until 1966, when he was named director emeritus and honorary chairman of both United Airlines and its parent company, UAL Inc.
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1b60f915f3c40172e8d7459469f006f8 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Pinkney | William Pinkney | William Pinkney
William Pinkney, (born March 17, 1764, Annapolis, Md.—died Feb. 25, 1822, Washington, D.C.), U.S. statesman and diplomat, considered one of the foremost lawyers of his day.
A member of the Maryland convention that ratified the federal Constitution in 1788, Pinkney himself voted against ratification. He served in the Maryland state legislature (1788–92; 1795) and on the state’s Executive Council (1792–95). From 1796 to 1804 he represented the United States as a commissioner to negotiate an agreement with Great Britain concerning American maritime losses, and he served as U.S. minister to Great Britain from 1807 to 1811.
Pinkney was U.S. attorney general (1811–14) under President James Madison, served in the House of Representatives (1815–16), and was minister to Russia (1816–18). From 1819 to 1822 he was a member of the U.S. Senate, where he became a champion of the slave states. He successfully argued many important cases before the Supreme Court, including McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), in which the power of Congress to charter the Bank of the United States was upheld.
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06bd902d9db4cd02a1e2ecb966f9e6ff | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Platt | William Platt | William Platt
…frontier directly into Ethiopia, General William Platt and the Indian divisions invaded Eritrea on January 19, 1941 (the Italians had already abandoned Kassala); and, almost simultaneously, British troops from Kenya, under General Alan Cunningham, advanced into Italian Somaliland.
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ae2808b77d4ca7c42c4a098812b78141 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Playfair | William Playfair | William Playfair
…crowned by the 19th-century architect William Playfair’s City Observatory (1818) and a charming Gothic house by Craig, built for the astronomer royal. Behind this rise 12 columns of an intended replica of the Parthenon that was designed by Playfair in 1822 as a memorial to the Scots who died in…
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77d9431140b7580f2e8c5c8096f34808 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-R-Bascom | William R. Bascom | William R. Bascom
William R. Bascom, in full William Russell Bascom, (born May 23, 1912, Princeton, Ill., U.S.—died Sept. 11, 1981, San Francisco, Calif.), American anthropologist who was one of the first to do extensive fieldwork in West Africa. He served as chairman (1956–57) of the anthropology department and acting director of African studies (1953, 1957) at Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill.
After completing a period of government service in West Africa during and immediately following World War II (1943–46), Bascom became a Fulbright research scholar (1950–51). In 1957 he was made professor and director of the Robert H. Lowie Museum at the University of California, Berkeley. A specialist in African folklore, Bascom, in his treatise on Ifa Divination: Communication Between Gods and Men in West Africa (1969), clarified the Yoruba divination system, which is orally transmitted by Ifa priests to apprentices. Other writings include African Arts (1967) and The Yoruba of Southwestern Nigeria (1969).
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8bcda3054b7efb2a07e446afb38753f5 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-R-Wilde | William R. Wilde | William R. Wilde
…specialty was first formulated by William R. Wilde of Dublin, who in 1853 published Practical Observations on Aural Surgery, and the Nature and Treatment of Diseases of the Ear. Further advances were made with the development of the otoscope, an instrument that enabled visual examination of the tympanic membrane (eardrum).
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776cd0ffb989e8301c4affd77cebd81e | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Rainey-Harper | William Rainey Harper | William Rainey Harper
William Rainey Harper, (born July 24, 1856, New Concord, Ohio, U.S.—died January 10, 1906, Chicago, Illinois), American Hebraist who served as leader of the Chautauqua Institution and as the first president of the University of Chicago.
Harper’s interest in Hebraic studies began in Muskingum College, New Concord, from which he graduated in 1870. In 1875, when only 19 years of age, he received a Ph.D. at Yale for studies in the Indo-Iranian and Semitic languages. In 1880, after several years of academy teaching, he was given a professorship in Hebrew at the Baptist Union Theological Seminary near Chicago. There he founded The Hebrew Student and Hebraica and organized the American Institute of Hebrew. He published a number of textbooks and study helps for the teaching of Hebrew, which found wide use. In 1886 he accepted a professorship in Semitic languages at Yale, and in 1889 he was appointed Woolsey Professor of Biblical Literature, filling both positions simultaneously. Harper began teaching Hebrew in the summer program at Chautauqua, New York, in 1883. Within nine years he was in charge of the entire Chautauqua system.
In 1891 Harper became president of the newly established University of Chicago. His liberal aims and comprehensive plans for the new university, drawn in part from innovations introduced at Chautauqua, attracted wide attention. He proposed dividing the traditional collegiate program into two parts. His model, which devoted the first two years to general education and the last two years to the study of more advanced subjects, paved the way for the development of the junior college. Harper also pioneered the first university extension system in the United States, offering correspondence courses and lectures given throughout Chicago to enrolled students. His other innovations included a yearlong academic calendar divided into quarters. Harper remained at the University of Chicago as president and head of the department of Semitic languages until his death. Among his more important books are Religion and the Higher Life (1904), A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Amos and Hosea (1905), The Prophetic Element in the Old Testament (1905), and The Trend in Higher Education (1905).
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0938d6def45cf474826ed805f95db080 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Robert-Grove | Sir William Robert Grove | Sir William Robert Grove
Sir William Robert Grove, (born July 11, 1811, Swansea, Glamorgan, Wales—died August 1, 1896, London), British physicist and a justice of Britain’s High Court (from 1880), who built the first fuel cell in 1842 and first offered proof of the thermal dissociation of atoms within a molecule.
Grove was educated by private tutors and then at Brasenose College, Oxford, and also studied law at Lincoln’s Inn and was called to the bar in 1835. Ill health interrupted his law career, and he turned to science. In 1839 he developed the two-fluid electric cell, known as the Grove battery, consisting of amalgamated zinc in dilute sulfuric acid and a platinum cathode in concentrated nitric acid, the liquids being separated by a porous container. At the London Institution, where he was professor of experimental philosophy (1840–47), he used his platinum-zinc batteries to produce electric light for one of his lectures. In 1842 he developed the “gas battery,” the first fuel cell, in which the formation of water from hydrogen and oxygen gas generated an electric current.
His classic On the Correlation of Physical Forces (1846) enunciated the principle of conservation of energy a year before the German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz did so in his famous paper Über die Erhaltung der Kraft (“On the Conservation of Force”).
His scientific career led to the practice of patent and other law after 1853. He was appointed to the Court of Common Pleas in 1871 and was knighted in 1872. After retirement from the bench in 1887, he resumed his scientific studies.
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44e8e99b1472f393a67167f331ee7dc3 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Robert-Shepherd | William Robert Shepherd | William Robert Shepherd
William Robert Shepherd, (born June 12, 1871, Charleston, S.C., U.S.—died June 7, 1934, Berlin, Ger.), American historian known as an authority on Latin America and on European overseas expansion.
Shepherd was educated at Columbia University, where he earned his Ph.D. (1896). He studied in Berlin, returned to Columbia as a professor of history, and taught there until his death in 1934.
By 1908 Shepherd was considered an authority on Latin America and served that year as a delegate to the first Pan-American Scientific Congress at Santiago, Chile, and a year later as secretary of the U.S. delegation to the fourth International Conference of American States at Buenos Aires. He continued to participate in numerous pan-American conferences and lectured extensively abroad on Latin America. He became Seth Low professor of history at Columbia in 1924. Among Shepherd’s major works on Latin America are Central and South America (1914), Latin America (1914), and The Hispanic Nations of the New World (1919). His Historical Atlas (1911) is perhaps the work by which he is best known, however. In addition, he served as advisory editor of The Hispanic-American Review and was a member of numerous scholarly societies. His continual criticism of U.S. imperialism in relations with Latin America was influential in the attempt to achieve greater pan-American unity.
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ed7e90d66548c391a0c2b80326df14aa | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Robertson-Smith | William Robertson Smith | William Robertson Smith
William Robertson Smith, (born Nov. 8, 1846, Keig, Aberdeenshire, Scot.—died March 31, 1894, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, Eng.), Scottish Semitic scholar, encyclopaedist, and student of comparative religion and social anthropology.
Smith was ordained a minister in 1870 on his appointment as professor of Oriental languages and Old Testament exegesis at the Free Church College of Aberdeen. When his articles on biblical subjects appeared in the 9th edition of Encyclopædia Britannica (notably the article “Bible,” published in 1875), the authorities of the Free Church took strong exception to them; in 1877 they suspended him from his teaching duties. He was formally tried, and in 1880 the assembly dropped the indictment against him. After a second attack on his opinions, he was again suspended; in 1881 he was removed from his chair.
Later that year he was appointed joint editor of Encyclopædia Britannica. He moved to Edinburgh and wrote The Old Testament in the Jewish Church (1881) and The Prophets of Israel (1882). He held academic positions at Cambridge University from 1883 and remained editor in chief of Britannica until the 9th edition was completed in 1888. His article “Sacrifice” (1886) and his book Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia (1885) are important landmarks in the study of comparative religion. In 1889 he wrote his most original work, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites.
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5bcc68c4a6bc35d0ff2858d893edf385 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Rothenstein | Sir William Rothenstein | Sir William Rothenstein
…supporter in the director there, William Rothenstein, who was not unsympathetic to modern artistic tendencies, although he remained a conservative artist himself.
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b99e3e6ed46b80560ad9dd9092a9c5a8 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-S-Knowles | William S. Knowles | William S. Knowles
William S. Knowles, (born June 1, 1917, Taunton, Massachusetts, U.S.—died June 13, 2012, Chesterfield, Missouri), American chemist who, with Noyori Ryōji and K. Barry Sharpless, won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2001 for developing the first chiral catalysts.
Knowles earned a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1942, after which he conducted research at the Monsanto Company in St. Louis, Missouri, until his retirement in 1986.
Many molecules are chiral—they exist in two structural forms (enantiomers) that are nonsuperimposable mirror images. Likewise, the receptors, enzymes, and other cellular components made from these molecules are chiral and tend to interact selectively with only one or two enantiomers of a given substance. For many drugs, however, conventional laboratory synthesis results in a mixture of enantiomers. One form usually has the desired effect while the other form may be inactive or cause undesirable side effects, such as occurred with the drug thalidomide. This problem led scientists to pursue chiral catalysts, which drive chemical reactions toward just one of two possible outcomes.
In 1968 Knowles produced the first chiral catalyst for an asymmetrical hydrogenation reaction. He was seeking an industrial synthesis for the drug l-dopa, which later became a mainstay for treating Parkinson disease. Variations of the new catalyst found almost immediate application in producing very pure preparations of the desired l-dopa enantiomer.
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079bed22e4ecf2a94d16b6f5a01210fc | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Shakespeare/Romeo-and-Juliet | Romeo and Juliet | Romeo and Juliet
Apart from the early Titus Andronicus, the only other play that Shakespeare wrote prior to 1599 that is classified as a tragedy is Romeo and Juliet (c. 1594–96), which is quite untypical of the tragedies that are to follow. Written more or less at the time when Shakespeare was writing A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet shares many of the characteristics of romantic comedy. Romeo and Juliet are not persons of extraordinary social rank or position, like Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. They are the boy and girl next door, interesting not for their philosophical ideas but for their appealing love for each other. They are character types more suited to Classical comedy in that they do not derive from the upper class. Their wealthy families are essentially bourgeois. The eagerness with which Capulet and his wife court Count Paris as their prospective son-in-law bespeaks their desire for social advancement.
Accordingly, the first half of Romeo and Juliet is very funny, while its delight in verse forms reminds us of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The bawdry of Mercutio and of the Nurse is richly suited to the comic texture of the opening scenes. Romeo, haplessly in love with a Rosaline whom we never meet, is a partly comic figure like Silvius in As You Like It. The plucky and self-knowing Juliet is much like the heroines of romantic comedies. She is able to instruct Romeo in the ways of speaking candidly and unaffectedly about their love rather than in the frayed cadences of the Petrarchan wooer.
The play is ultimately a tragedy, of course, and indeed warns its audience at the start that the lovers are “star-crossed.” Yet the tragic vision is not remotely that of Hamlet or King Lear. Romeo and Juliet are unremarkable, nice young people doomed by a host of considerations outside themselves: the enmity of their two families, the misunderstandings that prevent Juliet from being able to tell her parents whom it is that she has married, and even unfortunate coincidence (such as the misdirection of the letter sent to Romeo to warn him of the Friar’s plan for Juliet’s recovery from a deathlike sleep). Yet there is the element of personal responsibility upon which most mature tragedy rests when Romeo chooses to avenge the death of Mercutio by killing Tybalt, knowing that this deed will undo the soft graces of forbearance that Juliet has taught him. Romeo succumbs to the macho peer pressure of his male companions, and tragedy results in part from this choice. Yet so much is at work that the reader ultimately sees Romeo and Juliet as a love tragedy—celebrating the exquisite brevity of young love, regretting an unfeeling world, and evoking an emotional response that differs from that produced by the other tragedies. Romeo and Juliet are, at last, “Poor sacrifices of our enmity” (Act V, scene 3, line 304). The emotional response the play evokes is a strong one, but it is not like the response called forth by the tragedies after 1599.
Whatever his reasons, about 1599–1600 Shakespeare turned with unsparing intensity to the exploration of darker issues such as revenge, sexual jealousy, aging, midlife crisis, and death. Perhaps he saw that his own life was moving into a new phase of more complex and vexing experiences. Perhaps he felt, or sensed, that he had worked through the romantic comedy and history play and the emotional trajectories of maturation that they encompassed. At any event, he began writing not only his great tragedies but a group of plays that are hard to classify in terms of genre. They are sometimes grouped today as “problem” plays or “problem” comedies. An examination of these plays is crucial to understanding this period of transition from 1599 to 1605.
The three problem plays dating from these years are All’s Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and Troilus and Cressida. All’s Well is a comedy ending in acceptance of marriage, but in a way that poses thorny ethical issues. Count Bertram cannot initially accept his marriage to Helena, a woman of lower social station who has grown up in his noble household and has won Bertram as her husband by her seemingly miraculous cure of the French king. Bertram’s reluctance to face the responsibilities of marriage is all the more dismaying when he turns his amorous intentions to a Florentine maiden, Diana, whom he wishes to seduce without marriage. Helena’s stratagem to resolve this difficulty is the so-called bed trick, substituting herself in Bertram’s bed for the arranged assignation and then calling her wayward husband to account when she is pregnant with his child. Her ends are achieved by such morally ambiguous means that marriage seems at best a precarious institution on which to base the presumed reassurances of romantic comedy. The pathway toward resolution and emotional maturity is not easy; Helena is a more ambiguous heroine than Rosalind or Viola.
Measure for Measure (c. 1603–04) similarly employs the bed trick, and for a similar purpose, though in even murkier circumstances. Isabella, on the verge of becoming a nun, learns that she has attracted the sexual desire of Lord Angelo, the deputy ruler of Vienna serving in the mysterious absence of the Duke. Her plea to Angelo for her brother’s life, when that brother (Claudio) has been sentenced to die for fornication with his fiancée, is met with a demand that she sleep with Angelo or forfeit Claudio’s life. This ethical dilemma is resolved by a trick (devised by the Duke, in disguise) to substitute for Isabella a woman (Mariana) whom Angelo was supposed to marry but refused when she could produce no dowry. The Duke’s motivations in manipulating these substitutions and false appearances are unclear, though arguably his wish is to see what the various characters of this play will do when faced with seemingly impossible choices. Angelo is revealed as a morally fallen man, a would-be seducer and murderer who is nonetheless remorseful and ultimately glad to have been prevented from carrying out his intended crimes; Claudio learns that he is coward enough to wish to live by any means, including the emotional and physical blackmail of his sister; and Isabella learns that she is capable of bitterness and hatred, even if, crucially, she finally discovers that she can and must forgive her enemy. Her charity, and the Duke’s stratagems, make possible an ending in forgiveness and marriage, but in that process the nature and meaning of marriage are severely tested.
Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601–02) is the most experimental and puzzling of these three plays. Simply in terms of genre, it is virtually unclassifiable. It can hardly be a comedy, ending as it does in the deaths of Patroclus and Hector and the looming defeat of the Trojans. Nor is the ending normative in terms of romantic comedy: the lovers, Troilus and Cressida, are separated from one another and embittered by the failure of their relationship. The play is a history play in a sense, dealing as it does with the great Trojan War celebrated in Homer’s Iliad, and yet its purpose is hardly that of telling the story of the war. As a tragedy, it is perplexing in that the chief figures of the play (apart from Hector) do not die at the end, and the mood is one of desolation and even disgust rather than tragic catharsis. Perhaps the play should be thought of as a satire; the choric observations of Thersites and Pandarus serve throughout as a mordant commentary on the interconnectedness of war and lechery. With fitting ambiguity, the play was placed in the Folio of 1623 between the histories and the tragedies, in a category all by itself. Clearly, in these problem plays Shakespeare was opening up for himself a host of new problems in terms of genre and human sexuality.
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6564353e0a06520a556126400caba633 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Shakespeare/Shakespeares-plays-and-poems | Shakespeare’s plays and poems | Shakespeare’s plays and poems
Shakespeare arrived in London probably sometime in the late 1580s. He was in his mid-20s. It is not known how he got started in the theatre or for what acting companies he wrote his early plays, which are not easy to date. Indicating a time of apprenticeship, these plays show a more direct debt to London dramatists of the 1580s and to Classical examples than do his later works. He learned a great deal about writing plays by imitating the successes of the London theatre, as any young poet and budding dramatist might do.
Titus Andronicus (c. 1589–92) is a case in point. As Shakespeare’s first full-length tragedy, it owes much of its theme, structure, and language to Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, which was a huge success in the late 1580s. Kyd had hit on the formula of adopting the dramaturgy of Seneca (the younger), the great Stoic philosopher and statesman, to the needs of a burgeoning new London theatre. The result was the revenge tragedy, an astonishingly successful genre that was to be refigured in Hamlet and many other revenge plays. Shakespeare also borrowed a leaf from his great contemporary Christopher Marlowe. The Vice-like protagonist of Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, Barabas, may have inspired Shakespeare in his depiction of the villainous Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus, though other Vice figures were available to him as well.
The Senecan model offered Kyd, and then Shakespeare, a story of bloody revenge, occasioned originally by the murder or rape of a person whose near relatives (fathers, sons, brothers) are bound by sacred oath to revenge the atrocity. The avenger must proceed with caution, since his opponent is canny, secretive, and ruthless. The avenger becomes mad or feigns madness to cover his intent. He becomes more and more ruthless himself as he moves toward his goal of vengeance. At the same time he is hesitant, being deeply distressed by ethical considerations. An ethos of revenge is opposed to one of Christian forbearance. The avenger may see the spirit of the person whose wrongful death he must avenge. He employs the device of a play within the play in order to accomplish his aims. The play ends in a bloodbath and a vindication of the avenger. Evident in this model is the story of Titus Andronicus, whose sons are butchered and whose daughter is raped and mutilated, as well as the story of Hamlet and still others.
Other than Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare did not experiment with formal tragedy in his early years. (Though his English history plays from this period portrayed tragic events, their theme was focused elsewhere.) The young playwright was drawn more quickly into comedy, and with more immediate success. For this his models include the dramatists Robert Greene and John Lyly, along with Thomas Nashe. The result is a genre recognizably and distinctively Shakespearean, even if he learned a lot from Greene and Lyly: the romantic comedy. As in the work of his models, Shakespeare’s early comedies revel in stories of amorous courtship in which a plucky and admirable young woman (played by a boy actor) is paired off against her male wooer. Julia, one of two young heroines in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1590–94), disguises herself as a man in order to follow her lover, Proteus, when he is sent from Verona to Milan. Proteus (appropriately named for the changeable Proteus of Greek myth), she discovers, is paying far too much attention to Sylvia, the beloved of Proteus’s best friend, Valentine. Love and friendship thus do battle for the divided loyalties of the erring male until the generosity of his friend and, most of all, the enduring chaste loyalty of the two women bring Proteus to his senses. The motif of the young woman disguised as a male was to prove invaluable to Shakespeare in subsequent romantic comedies, including The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night. As is generally true of Shakespeare, he derived the essentials of his plot from a narrative source, in this case a long Spanish prose romance, the Diana of Jorge de Montemayor.
Shakespeare’s most classically inspired early comedy is The Comedy of Errors (c. 1589–94). Here he turned particularly to Plautus’s farcical play called the Menaechmi (Twins). The story of one twin (Antipholus) looking for his lost brother, accompanied by a clever servant (Dromio) whose twin has also disappeared, results in a farce of mistaken identities that also thoughtfully explores issues of identity and self-knowing. The young women of the play, one the wife of Antipholus of Ephesus (Adriana) and the other her sister (Luciana), engage in meaningful dialogue on issues of wifely obedience and autonomy. Marriage resolves these difficulties at the end, as is routinely the case in Shakespearean romantic comedy, but not before the plot complications have tested the characters’ needs to know who they are and what men and women ought to expect from one another.
Shakespeare’s early romantic comedy most indebted to John Lyly is Love’s Labour’s Lost (c. 1588–97), a confection set in the never-never land of Navarre where the King and his companions are visited by the Princess of France and her ladies-in-waiting on a diplomatic mission that soon devolves into a game of courtship. As is often the case in Shakespearean romantic comedy, the young women are sure of who they are and whom they intend to marry; one cannot be certain that they ever really fall in love, since they begin by knowing what they want. The young men, conversely, fall all over themselves in their comically futile attempts to eschew romantic love in favour of more serious pursuits. They perjure themselves, are shamed and put down, and are finally forgiven their follies by the women. Shakespeare brilliantly portrays male discomfiture and female self-assurance as he explores the treacherous but desirable world of sexual attraction, while the verbal gymnastics of the play emphasize the wonder and the delicious foolishness of falling in love.
In The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1590–94), Shakespeare employs a device of multiple plotting that is to become a standard feature of his romantic comedies. In one plot, derived from Ludovico Ariosto’s I suppositi (Supposes, as it had been translated into English by George Gascoigne), a young woman (Bianca) carries on a risky courtship with a young man who appears to be a tutor, much to the dismay of her father, who hopes to marry her to a wealthy suitor of his own choosing. Eventually the mistaken identities are straightened out, establishing the presumed tutor as Lucentio, wealthy and suitable enough. Simultaneously, Bianca’s shrewish sister Kate denounces (and terrorizes) all men. Bianca’s suitors commission the self-assured Petruchio to pursue Kate so that Bianca, the younger sister, will be free to wed. The wife-taming plot is itself based on folktale and ballad tradition in which men assure their ascendancy in the marriage relationship by beating their wives into submission. Shakespeare transforms this raw, antifeminist material into a study of the struggle for dominance in the marriage relationship. And, whereas he does opt in this play for male triumph over the female, he gives to Kate a sense of humour that enables her to see how she is to play the game to her own advantage as well. She is, arguably, happy at the end with a relationship based on wit and companionship, whereas her sister Bianca turns out to be simply spoiled.
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38cd6485c58b7ccffd287df529f16e34 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Shirley | William Shirley | William Shirley
William Shirley, (born December 2, 1694, Preston, Sussex, England—died March 24, 1771, Roxbury, Massachusetts, U.S.), colonial governor of Massachusetts who played an important role in Britain’s struggle against France for control of North America.
In 1731, after 11 years of law practice in England, Shirley migrated to Boston. He was appointed admiralty judge in 1733 and the king’s advocate general in 1734. In 1741 Shirley was appointed governor. He built up the Massachusetts fortifications, and during King George’s War (1740–48) he organized and planned Britain’s one great victory, the capture in 1745 of the French fortress of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island.
After the defeat and death of General Edward Braddock in western Pennsylvania (1755), Shirley became commander in chief of the English forces in America but failed to gain the respect and cooperation necessary to carry out his plans. Following the failure of his expedition against Fort Niagara, he was replaced as commander and governor. Accusations of mismanagement aroused suspicions, and he was recalled to England, where he was charged with treason. After being vindicated he was appointed governor of the Bahamas in 1761 but later returned to Massachusetts (1770).
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913c95776533b6246fb43b16d87c4fd7 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Shreve-Bailey | William Shreve Bailey | William Shreve Bailey
…was edited in Newport by William Shreve Bailey, who, after a pro-slavery mob threw his presses and type into the street (October 28, 1859), moved to Cincinnati. The city experienced its greatest growth in the 1880s and ’90s with an influx of German settlers and the completion of bridges to…
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85cc87db172f865039367ccae54cf952 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Sidney-Mount | William Sidney Mount | William Sidney Mount
William Sidney Mount, (born November 26, 1807, Setauket, Long Island, New York, U.S.—died November 19, 1868, Setauket), American genre painter who mainly depicted rustic life in his native Long Island. He was one of the first and best 19th-century anecdotal painters in the United States.
A farm boy until age 17, Mount apprenticed himself to his older brother Henry, a sign painter working in New York City. They were joined by another brother, Shepard Alonzo, who eventually became a portrait painter. In 1826, when the National Academy of Design opened drawing classes, Mount was one of its first students and was elected an associate member in 1831 (he became a full member in 1832). He stayed only a year before returning to Setauket, where he continued painting and sending work to be exhibited in New York, where it received great acclaim.
Although Mount began his career by painting historical subjects, soon after returning to Setauket he began to explore the social manners and rituals of rural life in his work, an approach known as genre painting. His first genre painting, The Rustic Dance (1830), was an immediate success, and Mount never departed from this vein. He did not sentimentalize his scenes but rather portrayed his subjects with naturalness and simplicity. His paintings often commented on American social and political issues, as seen in his exploration of temperance and the abolition of slavery in Bar-room Scene (1835). The recognizable situations and detailed, representational character of Mount’s paintings struck a responsive chord in Victorian America and now serve as a valuable record of a bygone, agrarian age.
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4ce33e5ea4c4ebd67f49e0041e872d80 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Slavata | William Slavata | William Slavata
…Prague, where the imperial regents, William Slavata and Jaroslav Martinic, were tried and found guilty of violating the Letter of Majesty and, with their secretary, Fabricius, were thrown from the windows of the council room of Hradčany (Prague Castle) on May 23, 1618. Although inflicting no serious injury on the…
Two governors of Bohemia, William Slavata and Jaroslav Martinic, were accused of violating the charter. After an improvised trial, they were thrown from the windows of the Royal Chancellery at the Prague Castle (May 23, 1618) but escaped unharmed. This act of violence, usually referred to as the Defenestration…
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a5c2684cbaece3e731ffb61e88b90d89 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Smellie-Scottish-physician | William Smellie | William Smellie
William Smellie, (born 1697, Lanark, Lanark, Scotland—died March 5, 1763, Lanark), Scottish obstetrician who was the first to teach obstetrics and midwifery on a scientific basis.
After 20 years of village practice, Smellie went to London to give obstetrical lecture-demonstrations to midwives and medical students. He delivered poor women free of charge if his students were allowed to attend the delivery, thus establishing a trend toward the attendance of medically trained persons at childbirth.
Smellie invented an obstetric forceps but is best known for his description of “the mechanism of labour,” or how the infant’s head adapts to changes in the pelvic canal during birth.
Smellie wrote A Set of Anatomical Tables (1754) and Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Midwifery, 3 vol. (1752–64).
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77f63b98c8e841dfd4da4befd63467f6 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Sowden-Sims | William Sowden Sims | William Sowden Sims
William Sowden Sims, (born Oct. 15, 1858, Port Hope, Ont., Can.—died Sept. 28, 1936, Boston, Mass., U.S.), admiral whose persistent efforts to improve ship design, fleet tactics, and naval gunnery made him perhaps the most influential officer in the history of the U.S. Navy.
Sims was born in Ontario where his father, an American engineer, was employed at the time. The family moved to Pennsylvania in 1872, and Sims entered the U.S. Naval Academy in 1876. After graduating in 1880 he served almost continuously on sea duty for the next 17 years. During this time he wrote a navigation text that was long used by both the navy and the merchant marine.
Sims served as naval attaché to the U.S. embassies in Paris and St. Petersburg from 1897 to 1900. His observations of foreign navies convinced him of the comparative inferiority of the U.S. Navy, despite its recent victories in the Spanish-American War. While serving under the commander of the U.S. Asiatic fleet (1901–02), he learned from a British officer, Captain Percy Scott, of the new gunnery technique of continuous-aim firing. Sims wrote a series of reports to the Navy Department setting forth the technique along with his criticisms of U.S. ships and naval marksmanship. Receiving no satisfactory response, he wrote directly to President Theodore Roosevelt, who brought him to Washington as inspector of naval target practice. After seven years in this post Sims returned to sea duty, having effected remarkable improvements in the state of naval gunnery.
Sims was promoted to rear admiral and became head of the Naval War College in 1917. When the United States entered World War I that year he was promoted to vice admiral. During the war he commanded the U.S. fleet that operated with Britain’s Royal Navy in European waters. He worked in close cooperation with the naval commands of the other Allied powers, and he played a major role in securing the adoption of the convoy system to protect Allied merchant ships against German submarine attack. After the war he resumed his post as president of the Naval War College, while continuing to agitate for reforms in the Navy Department. He retired in 1922.
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b82dde09ab2b6d6b12d8b62a45eeba48 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Stewart-Halsted | William Stewart Halsted | William Stewart Halsted
William Stewart Halsted, (born Sept. 23, 1852, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died Sept. 7, 1922, Baltimore, Md.), American pioneer of scientific surgery who established at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, the first surgical school in the United States.
After graduating in 1877 from the College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York City, Halsted studied for two years in Europe, mainly in Vienna, under the noted German surgeon Theodor Billroth. Returning to New York, Halsted quickly built a successful practice that demanded his services at six hospitals. In 1881, he discovered that blood, once aerated, could be reinfused into a patient’s body.
By self-experimentation he developed (1885) conduction, or block, anesthesia (the production of insensibility of a part by interrupting the conduction of a sensory nerve leading to that region of the body), brought about by injecting cocaine into nerve trunks. He fell into a drug addiction that required two years to cure. Halsted continued his research at Johns Hopkins, where he developed original operations for hernia, breast cancer, goitre, aneurysms, and intestinal and gallbladder diseases.
An early champion of aseptic procedures, Halsted introduced (1890) the use of thin rubber gloves that do not impede the delicate touch demanded by surgery. By ensuring completely sterile conditions in the operating room, Halsted’s gloves allowed surgical access to all parts of the body. His emphasis on the maintenance of complete homeostasis, or balanced body metabolism, during surgical operations, gentleness in handling living tissue, accurate realignment of severed tissues, and his creation of hospital residencies in training surgeons did much to advance surgery in the United States.
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40d23d36774a23182599b5358ae3abec | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Strong | William Strong | William Strong
William Strong, (born May 6, 1808, Somers, Conn., U.S.—died Aug. 19, 1895, Lake Minnewaska, N.Y.), U.S. Supreme Court justice (1870–80), one of the most respected justices of the 19th-century court.
Admitted to the bar in 1832, Strong practiced law in Reading, Pa., and served in the U.S. House of Representatives (1847–51). While sitting on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court (1857–68), Strong, a Democrat but a firm supporter of the Union, changed his political affiliation and became a Republican.
On Feb. 7, 1870, President Ulysses S. Grant, also a Republican, nominated Strong to succeed the retiring justice Robert C. Grier, a Democrat. At the same time, Grant named Joseph P. Bradley to fill a new seat on the court, which had been made available by a Congressional authorization enlarging the number of the justices from eight to nine. The circumstances of new appointments were such that Grant was charged with a court-packing scheme, and internal dissension with the court was exacerbated. The very day that the two appointees were nominated, the Supreme Court announced its decision in Hepburn v. Griswold (1870), a case that involved the constitutionality of the Legal Tender Act of 1862. The court, in a 5–3 vote (including a vote for the majority by the ailing Grier), struck down the Legal Tender Act, thus denying Congress the power to issue paper currency as legal tender.
The following year, in Knox v. Lee and Parker v. Davis (1871), the newly formed court overturned the Hepburn decision by a vote of 5–4. Strong spoke for the majority, upholding the government’s power to enact legal-tender legislation and defending such power under the “necessary and proper” clause of the Constitution. The abrupt reversal of a major decision so soon after the enlargement of the bench renewed the charges against Grant. Despite this controversy, which overshadowed Strong’s appointment to the high court and his first major decision, he served with distinction for 10 years, winning the respect of the legal community for his ability and integrity.
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33d94f85288c80346017a64bd5b42ef8 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-the-Aetheling | William the Aetheling | William the Aetheling
William the Aetheling, French Guillaume Aetheling, (born 1103—died November 25, 1120, at sea off Barfleur, France), Anglo-Norman prince, only son of Henry I of England and recognized duke of Normandy (as William IV, or as William III if the earlier claim of his uncle, William Rufus, is not acknowledged). He succeeded his uncle, the imprisoned Duke Robert II Curthose.
In successful battles in Normandy and France, Henry I forced the Norman barons to give homage to his son William the Aetheling (1115); and in 1119 Pope Calixtus II, in an interview with Henry at Gisors, recognized both the rightful imprisonment of Duke Robert and the succession of William the Aetheling (excluding William Clito, the candidate of Louis VI of France).
However, on the night of November 25, 1120, the White Ship, carrying William to England, foundered as it left the port of Barfleur, with all lives lost save one. The notoriety of the wreck is due to the large number of the royal household on board, including not only the king’s son and heir but also two of his natural children and several earls and barons. Its long-range significance lay in that it left Henry I without a male heir, bolstered William Clito’s claims in Normandy, and resulted in a period of anarchy after Henry’s death.
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d4fbdb0469066bd7a2c6457c4a1f6e03 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Thomas-Stead | William Thomas Stead | William Thomas Stead
William Thomas Stead, (born July 5, 1849, Embleton, Northumberland, England—died April 15, 1912, at sea, North Atlantic), British journalist, editor, and publisher who founded the noted periodical Review of Reviews (1890).
Stead was educated at home by his father, a clergyman, until he was 12 years old and then attended Silcoates School at Wakefield. He became an apprentice in a merchant’s countinghouse and in about 1870 began to contribute to the Liberal daily newspaper Northern Echo at Darlington. The following year he was invited to become the Echo’s editor. He and the paper diligently supported Prime Minister W.E. Gladstone. In 1880 he went to London as assistant editor of the Pall Mall Gazette under John Morley, later Viscount Morley. When Morley went into Parliament, Stead succeeded him as editor and made of the Pall Mall Gazette a sprightly and unconventional journal. He introduced such modern journalistic techniques as the use of illustrations. He also developed the interview form in newspaper writing. His press campaigns effected many changes, including the improvement of British naval defenses.
In 1890 Stead decided to give up daily journalism in favour of the monthly journal he founded, Review of Reviews. He was known for his crusades in the journal’s pages on behalf of such diverse causes as British-Russian friendship, ending child prostitution, the reform of England’s criminal codes, and the maintenance of international peace. As editor and publisher of the Review of Reviews, he wrote on psychic phenomena, spiritualism, the “civic church,” and many other subjects. In 1894, Stead traveled to Chicago to attend the World’s Fair. He was horrified by the conditions he observed behind the glamour of the Fair and made a thorough investigation of the city’s underworld. His findings, published in If Christ Came to Chicago!: A Plea for the Union of All Who Love in the Service of All Who Suffer (1894), are recognized as a model of journalistic research. In 1904 Stead tried to found a newspaper, The Daily Paper, but it failed, and he narrowly avoided bankruptcy.
Stead was a passenger on the British transatlantic liner Titanic when the ship struck an iceberg and sank, and he was one of the approximately 1,500 passengers who perished.
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9802ff86eaece3ae88677649eaa3f6e5 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-V-count-of-Holland | William V | William V
William V of Jülich, through his marriage in 1328 to the daughter of Count William III of Holland, became the brother-in-law of Emperor Louis IV, who made Jülich a margravate in 1336, and of Edward III of England, whom he helped to secure an alliance…
…1037; the victories of Count William V (1351) near the town established the Bavarian line of the house of Holland. Vlaardingen developed in the 20th century into one of the largest seaports of the Netherlands. The completion in 1958 of a large shipyard on nearby Rozenburg Island greatly increased the…
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13b037fcef11c28f0193686cec70bc26 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-V-duke-of-Aquitaine | William V | William V
…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 Aquitaine by promoting alliances with the monasteries and imposing his…
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bda40c320bb20780d08cdf2fbd22ad48 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Van-Alen | William Van Alen | William Van Alen
…New York City, designed by William Van Alen and often cited as the epitome of the Art Deco skyscraper. Its sunburst-patterned stainless steel spire remains one of the most striking features of the Manhattan skyline. Built between 1928 and 1930, the Chrysler Building was briefly the tallest in the world,…
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8c6515e110e9a75df687309a73da5547 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Vickrey | William Vickrey | William Vickrey
William Vickrey, in full William Spencer Vickrey, (born June 21, 1914, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada—died October 11, 1996, Harrison, New York, U.S.), Canadian-born American economist who brought innovative analysis to the problems of incomplete, or asymmetrical, information. He shared the 1996 Nobel Prize for Economics with British economist James A. Mirrlees.
Vickrey’s family moved from Canada to New York when he was three months old. He was educated at Yale University (B.S., 1935) and Columbia University (M.A., 1937; Ph.D., 1947), where he taught throughout his career. A Quaker, he was a conscientious objector during World War II and spent those years performing public service and developing an inheritance tax for Puerto Rico.
Vickrey had a keen interest in human welfare, often choosing projects with practical applications. His studies of traffic congestion concluded that pricing on commuter trains and toll roads should vary according to usage, with higher fees levied during peak-use periods. This congestion pricing was later adopted by electric and telephone utilities and airlines. In his doctoral thesis, published as Agenda for Progressive Taxation (1947), he advocated an “optimal income tax” that would be based on long-term earnings rather than on yearly income.
In awarding him the 1996 Nobel Prize, the selection committee specifically cited his novel approach to auctioneering (now known as a “Vickrey auction”), which, through sealed bidding, awards the auctioned item to the highest bidder but at the price submitted by the second highest bidder. This method, said Vickrey, benefits both buyer and seller by guaranteeing bids that reflect the fair value of the item. Vickrey did not live to receive the Nobel Prize. In the flurry of activity that followed the Nobel announcement, he died of a heart attack just three days after being named.
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127825ee28a007f4d1587b1abc5ab554 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Walker | William Walker | William Walker
William Walker, (born May 8, 1824, Nashville, Tenn., U.S.—died Sept. 12, 1860, Trujillo, Honduras), adventurer, filibuster, and revolutionary leader who succeeded in making himself president of Nicaragua (1856–57).
In 1850 he migrated to California, where his interest in a colonization scheme in Lower California developed into filibustering plans. On Oct. 15, 1853, he sailed from San Francisco with a small force. After landing at La Paz, he proclaimed Lower California and Sonora an independent republic. Lack of supplies and Mexican resistance forced him back to the United States in May 1854. Exactly a year later he sailed again, this time to Nicaragua at the invitation of a revolutionary faction. By the end of 1855 his military successes made him virtual master of Nicaragua, which was then a key transport link between Atlantic and Pacific ocean shipping.
When Walker arrived in Nicaragua, Cornelius K. Garrison and Charles Morgan, officers of Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Accessory Transit Company, gave Walker financial assistance in a plot to gain control of the company. In return, Walker seized the company’s property on the pretext of a charter violation and turned it over to Garrison and Morgan. Walker became president of Nicaragua on July 12, 1856, and maintained himself against a coalition of Central American states until May 1, 1857. In order to avoid capture, he surrendered to the United States Navy and returned to the United States.
In November he led another foray but was arrested and returned to the United States as a prisoner on parole. On his third descent on Central America (1860), he landed in Honduras, where he was taken prisoner by the British Navy. He was then turned over to Honduran authorities, who executed him.
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6da689413281f821416d167bd4c73897 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Wetmore-Story | William Wetmore Story | William Wetmore Story
William Wetmore Story, (born Feb. 12, 1819, Salem, Mass., U.S.—died Oct. 7, 1895, Vallombrosa, Italy), sculptor now remembered as the centre of a circle of literary, theatrical, and social celebrities and for his “Cleopatra.” A description of this work in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Marble Faun (1860) contributed to its wide popularity in the United States and Great Britain. There is a replica of it in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
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76eb237caaf46f2debf7d4857a182809 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Whewell | William Whewell | William Whewell
William Whewell, (born May 24, 1794, Lancaster, Lancashire, England—died March 6, 1866, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire), English philosopher and historian remembered both for his writings on ethics and for his work on the theory of induction, a philosophical analysis of particulars to arrive at a scientific generalization.
Whewell spent most of his career at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied, tutored, and served as professor of mineralogy (1828–32), professor of moral philosophy (1838–55), and college master (1841–66). He was also vice chancellor of the university (1842).
His interests in the physical sciences ranged from mechanics and dynamics to tidal phenomena, all subjects for his early writings. Later studies in history and the philosophy of science were followed, after 1850, by his writings on moral theology and by an intensive analysis of the work of Immanuel Kant.
Whewell is best known for his History of the Inductive Sciences, from the Earliest to the Present Time, 3 vol. (1837), and The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded upon Their History (1840), which later was expanded to three separate books: History of Scientific Ideas, 2 vol. (1858), Novum Organon Renovatum (1858), and On the Philosophy of Discovery (1860). The second of these books refers to Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620), dealing with inductive reasoning.
Although his work on the theory of induction was overshadowed by that of John Stuart Mill, Whewell’s contribution lay in his resurrection of inductive reasoning as an important issue for philosophers and scientists alike. In particular, he stressed the need to see scientific progress as a historical process and asserted that inductive reasoning could be employed properly only if its use throughout history was closely analyzed.
Whewell’s theological views, which gave rise to his ethical theories, have been assigned an importance secondary to his work in induction. Among his writings in moral philosophy are The Elements of Morality, Including Polity (1845) and Lectures on Systematic Morality (1846). Whewell also wrote sermons, poetry, essays, and several editions and translations of others’ works.
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df0e68754fc16caf9ddefcf3ad994ae2 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-White | William White | William White
William White, (born April 4, 1748, Philadelphia, Pa. [U.S.]—died July 17, 1836, Philadelphia, Pa., U.S.), first bishop consecrated in England for the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States (also called the Episcopal Church in the United States of America [ECUSA]) and the first presiding bishop of that church.
Educated at the College and Academy of Philadelphia (later the University of Pennsylvania), White was ordained in England as an Anglican priest in 1772. During the American Revolution, after the loyalist rector of Christ Church, Philadelphia, had returned to England, White received the position and held it until his death. After the war he also served as chaplain to the Continental Congress.
In his pamphlet of 1782, The Case of the Episcopal Churches in the United States Considered, White noted that, before the Revolution, Americans went to England for ordination, and he suggested that if the American church could not obtain bishops from England it would have to establish its own episcopate. Although he favoured a continuation of the spiritual legacy of the Church of England, he preferred to sever jurisdictional connections with it and the crown. After the Revolution the scattered remnants of the Church of England in the United States organized as the Protestant Episcopal Church. White was sent to England for consecration as a bishop (1787). Two years later he became the first presiding bishop of the church and served a second time in the same capacity from 1795 until his death.
Highly influential in the development of the new church, White wrote on doctrinal matters and assisted in the revision of The Book of Common Prayer for use in the United States.
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631f7ac8aa0d67b2dad1af073bbfc72c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Whittingham | William Whittingham | William Whittingham
…almost certainly be identified as William Whittingham, the brother-in-law of Calvin’s wife, and his assistants Anthony Gilby and Thomas Sampson. The Geneva Bible was not printed in England until 1576, but it was allowed to be imported without hindrance. The accession of Elizabeth in 1558 put an end to the…
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1cce940dc1642c118b6be081ed6d5304 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Wilkins-British-architect | William Wilkins | William Wilkins
One of the earliest was William Wilkins’s Downing College, Cambridge (1806–11), with details closely copied from the Erechtheum on the Acropolis at Athens. Following this were Sir Robert Smirke’s Covent Garden Theatre (1809), London’s first Greek Doric building; Wilkins’s Grange Park, Hampshire (1809), a monumental attempt to cram an English…
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e0a20301f072b46c48b090049aa654e2 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Willcocks | Sir William Willcocks | Sir William Willcocks
Sir William Willcocks, (born Sept. 27, 1852, India—died July 28, 1932, Cairo), British civil engineer who proposed and designed the first Aswān (Assuan) Dam and executed major irrigation projects in South Africa and Turkey.
In 1872 he entered the Indian Public Works Department and in 1883 began work in the Egyptian Public Works Department. While serving as director general of reservoirs for Egypt, he completed studies and plans on the Aswān Dam, which was completed in 1902.
Willcocks retired from his Egyptian post in 1897 and four years later went to South Africa to plan irrigation systems for the arid regions. Part of his scheme was implemented and brought him a knighthood. He became head of irrigation for the Turkish government and in 1911 proposed a plan to bring water to the area of ancient Chaldea, now southern Iraq. As a result, the Hindīyah Barrage was built on the Euphrates River, near the site of ancient Babylon, and 3,500,000 acres were brought under irrigation.
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15ca8a227b95b478ec943ca8d56e3caf | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Willett | William Willett | William Willett
In 1907 an Englishman, William Willett, campaigned for setting the clock ahead by 80 minutes in four moves of 20 minutes each during April and the reverse in September. In 1909 the British House of Commons rejected a bill to advance the clock by one hour in the spring…
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597831d971e63c7e5ce91fa927b11e6d | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Williams | William Williams | William Williams
William Williams, also called Williams Pantycelyn, (born 1717, Cefn Coed, Llanfair-ar-y-bryn, Carmarthenshire, Wales—died Jan. 11, 1791, Pantycelyn), leader of the Methodist revival in Wales and its chief hymn writer.
His parents were Nonconformists, and he was educated at a Nonconformist academy at Llwyn-llwyd, near Hay. While there he was converted by the preaching of the religious reformer Howell Harris (1714–73) and in 1740 was ordained deacon; he became a curate, but because of his Methodist affinities he was finally refused priestly orders in 1743. Although he still considered himself an Anglican clergyman, he spent the rest of his life in evangelistic tours as a Methodist preacher and in writing hymns, religious poems, and prose treatises. After his marriage (c. 1748) he lived at Pantycelyn, near Llandovery, his mother’s home, and became known as “Williams Pantycelyn.”
Williams has been called the first Welsh Romantic poet. In more than 800 hymns, published in booklets between 1744 and 1787, and in an “epic” poem, Bywyd a Marwolaeth Theomemphus, he interpreted the religious experience of the Methodist movement with sensitivity and intense feeling. Earlier Welsh poetic tradition was almost unknown to him, and his bare metre, burning sincerity of language, mystical reflection, and spiritual longing were new to Welsh poetry. Many of his prose works and pamphlets complement his hymns, but he was aware of contemporary secular studies in English, and some of his books were written to educate the Welsh in their own tongue and for his own use in teaching them to read. In Pantheologia (1762–c. 1799) he attempted a history of world religions. Many of his hymns remain in regular use, the best known in English being “Guide me, O Thou Great Jehovah,” in a considerably altered version.
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40813b4eb1d52822775361d3e19f28cc | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Wirt-American-educator | William Wirt | William Wirt
William Wirt, in full William Albert Wirt, (born January 21, 1874, Markle, Indiana, U.S.—died March 11, 1938, Gary, Indiana), innovative American educator best known for his “platoon” system of alternating two groups of students between classroom and recreational or vocational activities.
Wirt graduated from DePauw University in 1898, attended graduate school there and at the University of Chicago, and then went to Europe to study educational methods. He began his professional career while in college in Indiana; he was superintendent of schools in Redkey (1895–97), taught mathematics at Greencastle (1897–99), and then served as superintendent at Bluffton (1899–1907). He introduced his system at Bluffton, but it was as superintendent of the Gary public schools (1907–38) that Wirt attracted national attention with his idea of splitting the student body into platoons. In its time Wirt’s idea, known as the Gary Plan, or platoon system, caused the city to be known as a centre for progressive education.
Wirt intended his plan to make more efficient use of school facilities. Among other changes, Wirt’s system led to greater emphasis on recreational and vocational activities in school, lengthened school hours from six to eight, created class levels based on age, and encouraged teachers in subject-area specialization. In 1914 New York City hired Wirt as an adviser to implement his system there, but controversy among New York educators over the Gary Plan led to its repudiation in 1918. The number of schools following Wirt’s program dwindled from more than 1,000 (in more than 200 cities) in 1930 to a handful within two decades. Nevertheless, certain aspects of Wirt’s system were lasting and widely used—for example, the use of testing for multiple student classifications (such as determining whether a student should be placed in a specific class) and the open shaping of curriculum by business concerns, as seen in vocational education programs.
In the 1930s Wirt charged that school leaders were becoming communists and spreading communist propaganda. In 1934 Wirt declared that certain people in the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration were preparing a revolution. That led to a congressional investigation (by a House committee chaired by Alfred L. Bulwinkle), which found no evidence to support Wirt’s allegations.
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0522ed5d33523c614c76303e9cd5f90f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Wirt-American-politician | William Wirt | William Wirt
, nominated William Wirt for president, and announced a party platform condemning Masonry for its secrecy, exclusivity, and undemocratic character.
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cd2a9f375da4f991608f82a4a888dcec | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Wood-English-ironmaster-circa-1648 | William Wood | William Wood
…was described in 1634 by William Wood in his New England’s Prospect as “fittest for such as can Trade into England, for such commodities as the Country wants, being the chiefe place for shipping and Merchandize.” With the triumph of the Puritan Party in England in 1648, people moved freely…
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02d0fb442d5c2676721964d05375ba24 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Wood-English-ironmaster-circa-1723 | William Wood | William Wood
” William Wood, an English manufacturer, had been authorized to mint coins for Ireland; the outcry against this alleged exploitation by the arbitrary creation of a monopoly became so violent that it could be terminated only by withdrawing the concession from Wood.
…granted to the English entrepreneur William Wood to mint a debased Irish coinage, derisorily termed “Wood’s halfpence.” Under pressure from, among others, Jonathan Swift, the satirist, whose “Drapier’s Letters” furiously attacked him, Wood revoked his patent in 1725 (see below Coins of the United States). Irish coinage was discontinued in…
…Rosa Americana pieces, struck by William Wood of Wolverhampton under royal patent dated July 12, 1722, received a disappointingly small circulation in New York and New England. Another coinage by Wood in 1722–24, intended for Ireland but rejected there because of scandalous circumstances surrounding his purchase of the royal patent,…
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85ea0cfa037a4f7371be3999937a8b48 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Woodville | William Woodville | William Woodville
…the doctors George Pearson and William Woodville. Difficulties arose, some of them quite unpleasant; Pearson tried to take credit away from Jenner, and Woodville, a physician in a smallpox hospital, contaminated the cowpox matter with smallpox virus. Vaccination rapidly proved its value, however, and Jenner became intensely active promoting it.…
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d516dfd31cc11b3325bc9859dbe9a2f1 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Woodward | William Woodward | William Woodward
William Woodward, (born April 7, 1876, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died Sept. 26, 1953, New York City), American banker and an influential breeder, owner, and racer of horses.
Woodward was educated at Groton School, Groton, Mass., and Harvard College and, upon graduation from Harvard Law School in 1901, became secretary to Joseph H. Choate, U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James. In 1903 he returned to New York to join the Hanover Bank, where he became vice president in 1904 and president in 1910. He also became a member of the first Federal Reserve Board in 1914 and, from 1927 to 1929, was president of the New York Clearing House. Thereafter, he served as board chairman of Central Hanover Bank and Trust Company but retired in 1933 to devote his time to his stud farm and Thoroughbred nursery, Belair, near Annapolis, Md., where the first English Thoroughbred racehorses imported into Maryland had been bred. At Belair, with the help of the outstanding trainer James (“Sunny Jim”) Fitzsimmons, he bred two winners of the U.S. Triple Crown: Gallant Fox, who captured the three events in 1930, and Gallant Fox’s colt Omaha, who won in 1935. Among his other successful horses were Happy Gal, Faireno, Granville, Vagrancy, and Nashua. In 1939 Woodward’s horse Johnstown won the Kentucky Derby and the Belmont Stakes. Woodward also entered horses in the English classic races. Every year he sent some of his yearling foals to his English trainer Cecil Boyd-Rochfort. Among his winners in the English classic races were Boswell, 1936, the Saint Leger; Black Tarquin, 1948, the Saint Leger; Hycilla, 1944, the Oaks; and Flares, 1938, the Ascot Gold Cup.
A member of the U.S. Jockey Club from 1917, Woodward served as chairman of the board of stewards from 1930 until 1950. During his chairmanship horse racing turned from a questionable gambling operation into a major spectator sport.
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e1ae24961c566f8b0fa8564455b6b2c2 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Wordsworth-British-administrator | William Wordsworth | William Wordsworth
…president of the Congress, and William Wordsworth, principal of Elphinstone College, both appeared as observers. Most Britons in India, however, either ignored the Congress Party and its resolutions as the action and demands of a “microscopic minority” of India’s diverse millions or considered them the rantings of disloyal extremists. Despite…
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45cff1aa9ca538093a8855735249e1fd | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Wordsworth/The-Recluse-and-The-Prelude | The Recluse and The Prelude | The Recluse and The Prelude
The second consequence of Wordsworth’s partnership with Coleridge was the framing of a vastly ambitious poetic design that teased and haunted him for the rest of his life. Coleridge had projected an enormous poem to be called “The Brook,” in which he proposed to treat all science, philosophy, and religion, but he soon laid the burden of writing this poem upon Wordsworth himself. As early as 1798 Wordsworth began to talk in grand terms of this poem, to be entitled The Recluse. To nerve himself up to this enterprise and to test his powers, Wordsworth began writing the autobiographical poem that would absorb him intermittently for the next 40 years, and which was eventually published in 1850 under the title The Prelude; or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind. The Prelude extends the quiet autobiographical mode of reminiscence that Wordsworth had begun in “Tintern Abbey” and traces the poet’s life from his school days through his university life and his visits to France, up to the year (1799) in which he settled at Grasmere. It thus describes a circular journey—what has been called a long journey home. But the main events in the autobiography are internal: the poem exultantly describes the ways in which the imagination emerges as the dominant faculty, exerting its control over the reason and the world of the senses alike.
The Recluse itself was never completed, and only one of its three projected parts was actually written; this was published in 1814 as The Excursion and consisted of nine long philosophical monologues spoken by pastoral characters. The first monologue (Book I) contained a version of one of Wordsworth’s greatest poems, “The Ruined Cottage,” composed in superb blank verse in 1797. This bleak narrative records the slow, pitiful decline of a woman whose husband had gone off to the army and never returned. For later versions of this poem, Wordsworth added a reconciling conclusion, but the earliest and most powerful version was starkly tragic.
In the company of Dorothy, Wordsworth spent the winter of 1798–99 in Germany, where, in the remote town of Goslar, in Saxony, he experienced the most intense isolation he had ever known. As a consequence, however, he wrote some of his most moving poetry, including the “Lucy” and “Matthew” elegies and early drafts toward The Prelude. Upon his return to England, Wordsworth incorporated several new poems in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800), notably two tragic pastorals of country life, “The Brothers” and “Michael.” At about this time Wordsworth also wrote the brilliant lyrics that were assembled in his second verse collection, Poems, in Two Volumes (1807), including the enduringly popular ““I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”” (also known as “Daffodils”). All of these poems make up what is now recognized as his great decade, stretching from his meeting with Coleridge in 1797 until 1808.
One portion of a second part of The Recluse was finished in 1806 but, like The Prelude, was left in manuscript at the poet’s death. This portion, Home at Grasmere, joyously celebrated Wordsworth’s taking possession (in December 1799) of Dove Cottage, at Grasmere, Westmorland, where he was to reside for eight of his most productive years. In 1802, during the short-lived Treaty of Amiens, Wordsworth returned briefly to France, where at Calais he met his daughter and made his peace with Annette. He then returned to England to marry Mary Hutchinson, a childhood friend, and start an English family, which had grown to three sons and two daughters by 1810.
In 1805 the drowning of Wordsworth’s favorite brother, John, the captain of a sailing vessel, gave Wordsworth the strongest shock he had ever experienced. “A deep distress hath humanized my Soul,” he lamented in his “Elegiac Stanzas” on Peele Castle. Henceforth he would produce a different kind of poetry, defined by a new sobriety, a new restraint, and a lofty, almost Miltonic elevation of tone and diction. Wordsworth appeared to anticipate this turn in ““Tintern Abbey,”” where he had learned to hear “the still, sad music of humanity,” and again in the “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” (written in 1802–04; published in Poems, in Two Volumes). The theme of this ode is the loss of his power to see the things he had once seen, the radiance, the “celestial light” that seemed to lie over the landscapes of his youth like “the glory and freshness of a dream.” Now, in the Peele Castle stanzas, he sorrowfully looked back on the light as illusory, as a “Poet’s dream,” as “the light that never was, on sea or land.”
These metaphors point up the differences between the early and the late Wordsworth. It is generally accepted that the quality of his verse fell off as he grew more distant from the sources of his inspiration and as his Anglican and Tory sentiments hardened into orthodoxy. Today many readers discern two Wordsworths, the young Romantic revolutionary and the aging Tory humanist, risen into what John Keats called the “Egotistical Sublime.” Little of Wordsworth’s later verse matches the best of his earlier years.
In his middle period Wordsworth invested a good deal of his creative energy in odes, the best known of which is “On the Power of Sound.” He also produced a large number of sonnets, most of them strung together in sequences. The most admired are the Duddon sonnets (1820), which trace the progress of a stream through Lake District landscapes and blend nature poetry with philosophic reflection in a manner now recognized as the best of the later Wordsworth. Other sonnet sequences record his tours through the European continent, and the three series of Ecclesiastical Sketches (1822) develop meditations, many sharply satirical, on church history. But the most memorable poems of Wordsworth’s middle and late years were often cast in elegiac mode. They range from the poet’s heartfelt laments for two of his children who died in 1812—laments incorporated in The Excursion—to brilliant lyrical effusions on the deaths of his fellow poets James Hogg, George Crabbe, Coleridge, and Charles Lamb.
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430f75304048e58fc99ce5862fda1c58 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Worrall-Mayo | William Worrall Mayo | William Worrall Mayo
William Worrall Mayo (b. May 31, 1819, near Manchester, Eng.—d. March 6, 1911, Rochester, Minn., U.S.) was the father of the doctors Mayo who developed a large-scale practice of medicine.
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4d84ffcdddc26647907cb73ecab3d480 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Wrede | William Wrede | William Wrede
…interpretation by the German scholar William Wrede (Das Messiasgeheimnis in den Evangelien, 1901) and the medical missionary theologian Albert Schweitzer (The Quest of the Historical Jesus, Eng. trans., 1910), who revolutionized New Testament scholarship with his emphasis on the eschatological orientation of Jesus’ mind and message. The writings of the…
According to William Wrede, a German scholar, the messianic secret motif was a literary and apologetic device by which the Christological faith of the early church could be reconciled with the fact that Jesus never claimed to be the Messiah. According to Wrede, Mark’s solution was: Jesus…
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1c17509858761f183e6973386133eeb5 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Wyndham-Grenville-Baron-Grenville | William Wyndham Grenville, Baron Grenville | William Wyndham Grenville, Baron Grenville
William Wyndham Grenville, Baron Grenville, (born Oct. 25, 1759—died Jan. 12, 1834, Dropmore Lodge, Buckinghamshire, Eng.), British politician, son of prime minister George Grenville; he was himself head of the coalition “Ministry of all the Talents,” Feb. 11, 1806–March 25, 1807. His greatest achievement was the abolition of the British overseas slave trade by a bill that became law the day he left office.
Entering the House of Commons in 1782, Grenville became its speaker in January 1789, home secretary in June of that year, and president of the Board of Control in March 1790. Created Baron Grenville on Nov. 25, 1790, he then became leader of the House of Lords. From June 8, 1791, to Feb. 10, 1801, he served under his cousin William Pitt the Younger as secretary of state for foreign affairs. To crush English radicalism encouraged by the French Revolution, Grenville introduced the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act (1794) and other measures. He and Pitt resigned (1801) when King George III refused to consider granting political rights to Roman Catholics.
When Pitt resumed the premiership in May 1804, Grenville declined to join the government because his greatest political ally, Charles James Fox, was excluded from office at the king’s insistence. After Pitt’s death (Jan. 23, 1806) Grenville formed a coalition of the former prime minister Henry Addington’s followers, Foxites, and his own friends. His government failed to make peace with Napoleonic France and otherwise accomplished little apart from outlawing the slave trade in 1807. Its advocacy of a Catholic Relief Bill caused George III to dismiss Grenville in March 1807 after the latter refused to pledge himself never again to trouble the king on the subject. Grenville’s refusal kept him out of office in 1809 and again in 1812. Until 1817, when he supported the government’s measures to suppress radicalism, he generally voted with the Whigs in opposition. A paralytic stroke ended his active political career in 1823. Grenville was chancellor of Oxford University from 1810 to 1834. He died without male issue, and his title became extinct.
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1dcdd513088603dd5dec0132fb19a0b6 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-X | William X | William X
William X, (born 1099, Toulouse, Fr.—died April 9, 1137, Santiago de Compostela, Spain), duke of Aquitaine and of Gascony (1127–37), son of William IX.
In 1131 he recognized the antipope Anaclet and supported him until 1134. In 1136 he ravaged Normandy. The following year he went on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, where he died. His daughter, Eleanor of Aquitaine, inherited all his lands and, first, through her marriage to Louis VII of France, united Aquitaine with the Capetian line and, then, through her marriage to Duke Henry of Normandy (the future Henry II of England) united Aquitaine to the Plantagenet line.
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de297315a564a5ffe45c840186e6650d | https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Yarborough | William Yarborough | William Yarborough
William Yarborough, (born May 12, 1912, Seattle, Washington, U.S.—died December 7, 2005, Southern Pines, North Carolina), U.S. Army officer decorated for his service in World War II and highly influential as a special forces pioneer. He is often called the father of the Green Berets.
Yarborough was raised in a military family; his father served with the Army Expeditionary Forces in Siberia during the Russian Civil War. Yarborough enlisted in the army in 1931 and gained admission to the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, the following year. He graduated in 1936, with a class that included William C. Westmoreland and Creighton W. Abrams, Jr. Yarborough was commissioned in the infantry, and his first assignment was in the Philippines. In 1940 he volunteered for the nascent U.S. Army airborne forces being formed at Fort Benning, Georgia, and served as a company commander in the 501st Parachute Battalion. An innovative and creative officer, he designed the jump boot, qualification badge, and uniform adopted by the airborne service.
After the United States entered World War II, Yarborough planned the first army airborne assault into Algeria as part of Operation Torch in 1942. Yarborough jumped with the initial assault forces, and he made additional combat jumps during the campaigns in North Africa, Sicily, and southern France. He commanded the 473rd Regimental Combat Team in 1945 and held that role until the end of the war in Europe. Appointed provost marshal of Vienna, he instituted the “four men in a jeep” international patrol program, which saw American, Soviet, French, and British troops collectively policing the occupied city. Yarborough attended the British Army Staff College in 1950, taught at the U.S. Army War College, and later served in Cambodia and Germany.
After returning to the United States, Yarborough was assigned to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, as commander of the U.S. Army Special Warfare Center in 1961. On October 12 of that year, he briefed U.S. Pres. John F. Kennedy during the president’s visit to Fort Bragg. During his meeting with Kennedy, Yarborough wore the then little-known (and still unauthorized) green beret. Impressed with Yarborough and his efforts, Kennedy called the beret “a symbol of excellence, a badge of courage, a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom” and authorized it as the official headgear of the Army Special Forces. That group soon became colloquially known as the Green Berets. Over the subsequent decade, Yarborough oversaw a major expansion of Army Special Forces, their deployment to the Vietnam War, and the standardization of special forces training. After four years at the Special Warfare Center, he went on to service in Korea, the Pentagon, and Hawaii before retiring in 1971.
He remained a forceful advocate of the army’s unconventional warfare capability while in retirement, writing, speaking, and also serving as a State Department consultant. He authored Bail Out over North Africa (1980), an account of his early airborne service with the 509th Parachute Infantry Regiment. His awards and decorations included the Distinguished Service Medal, the Silver Star, the Legion of Merit, the Purple Heart, the Bronze Star, and the Master Parachute Badge with four combat jump stars. The Yarborough knife, a distinctive edged weapon named in his honour, was first presented to graduates of the U.S. Army Special Forces Qualification Course in 2002. In 2012 a life-size bronze statue of the Yarborough-Kennedy meeting was dedicated at the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg.
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7c447adbe27287704db7c7c5906592d1 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Willibald-Alexis | Willibald Alexis | Willibald Alexis
Willibald Alexis, pseudonym of Georg Wilhelm Heinrich Häring, (born June 29, 1798, Breslau, Silesia, Prussia [now Wrocław, Pol.]—died Dec. 16, 1871, Arnstadt, Ger.), German writer and critic best known for his historical novels about Brandenburg and Prussia.
Alexis grew up in Berlin. After service as a volunteer in the campaign of 1815, he studied law at Berlin and Breslau but abandoned his legal career for writing after the success of his literary hoax Walladmor (1824), a parody of Scott published as “freely translated from the English of Walter Scott.” The joke, detrimental to Alexis’ literary reputation, was repeated in the more ambitious and original novel Schloss Avalon (1827). Although his home was in Berlin, where he edited the Berliner Konversationsblatt (1827–35) and contributed essays and reviews to literary journals, he traveled widely in Europe and recounted his experiences in travel books, among them Herbstreise durch Skandinavien (1828; “Autumn Journey Through Scandinavia”).
With Cabanis (1832), a story of the age of Frederick the Great, Alexis embarked on a cycle of novels intended to bring to light forgotten but significant periods of Prussian history. He continually experimented with methods of presentation. Der Roland von Berlin (1840) portrays the struggle for power in the 15th century between the municipal authorities of Berlin-Kölln and the ruler of Brandenburg; Der falsche Woldemar (1842; “The False Woldemar”) recounts the rise and fall of a 14th-century pretender. In the first part of Die Hosen des Herrn von Bredow (1846–48; “The Trousers of the Lord of Bredow”), Alexis reveals qualities as a humorist, though the concluding section, describing the elector Joachim’s ineffectual opposition to Luther’s teaching, strikes a more serious note. In Ruhe ist die erste Bürgerpflicht (1852; “To Remain Calm Is the First Civic Duty”), the activities of criminals are presented as symptomatic of Prussian degeneracy in 1806. The sequel, Isegrimm (1854), foreshadows a rebirth of patriotism.
Alexis was the first writer to reveal the poetic aspects of the Brandenburg landscape. His writing is uneven; effective realistic description alternates with a romantic mysticism. From 1842 until 1860 he edited, almost singlehandedly, a remarkable collection of famous lawsuits, Der neue Pitaval (“The New Pitaval”). He suffered a stroke in 1856 and later retired permanently to Arnstadt.
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58a0112f89fc69ad1a7f65a06457611b | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Willie-Lanier | Willie Lanier | Willie Lanier
Willie Lanier, in full Willie Edward Lanier, (born August 21, 1945, Clover, Virginia, U.S.), American professional gridiron football player who was an outstanding defensive player for the Kansas City Chiefs in the 1960s and ’70s, overturning the stereotype that African Americans could not handle the key defensive position of middle linebacker.
Lanier was named to the Little All-America team (for players in small-college programs) while at Morgan State University (Baltimore, Maryland). In 1967 the Kansas City Chiefs selected him in the second round of the first combined American Football League (AFL) and National Football League (NFL) draft. The Chiefs had lost 35–10 to the Green Bay Packers in the first Super Bowl earlier that year and focused on defensive players in the draft.
Lanier became the starting middle linebacker in his rookie season, which was cut short by an injury. The next year, the Chiefs were 12–2, and Lanier began a streak of eight consecutive Pro Bowl selections. In his third season, Lanier led the Chiefs to the final AFL championship prior to the league’s merging with the NFL. As AFL champions, the Chiefs unexpectedly defeated the Minnesota Vikings in Super Bowl IV in 1970, with Lanier making an interception and the defense shutting out Minnesota in the first half on the way to a 23–7 victory.
Although the Chiefs made the play-offs just one more time in his career, Lanier remained a defensive star in the league. Called “Honey Bear” by his teammates, Lanier was a ferocious tackler. After concussions early in his career, he wore a specially padded helmet to protect himself from his own tremendous collisions. He had 15 career fumble recoveries and 27 pass interceptions, with 2 returned for touchdowns. He was enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1986.
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5df961aae1153bee3b3d860c16b6df0e | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Willie-McCovey | Willie McCovey | Willie McCovey
Willie McCovey, in full Willie Lee McCovey, byname Stretch, (born January 10, 1938, Mobile, Alabama, U.S.—died October 31, 2018, Stanford, California), American professional baseball player who played 22 years in the major leagues between 1959 and 1980, all but three of which were spent with the San Francisco Giants.
McCovey was a power-hitting first baseman and holds the record for most seasons played at that position with 22. In 1959 he was named the National League Rookie of the Year. McCovey had 521 career home runs and is tied with Ted Williams on the upper rungs of the all-time list. He was selected to the National League All-Star team six times, and in 1969 he was named Most Valuable Player in the National League after batting .320 with 45 home runs. He was enormously popular with the San Francisco fans and held several public relations positions with the Giants after his retirement. The portion of San Francisco Bay beyond right field in the Giants’ home field, AT&T Park, was named McCovey Cove in his honour. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, in 1986.
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e844da6b6ec312146c62dfc1e4c4dfe6 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Willie-Nelson | Willie Nelson | Willie Nelson
Willie Nelson, (born April 29, 1933, Fort Worth, Texas, U.S.), American songwriter and guitarist who was one of the most popular country music singers of the late 20th century.
Nelson learned to play guitar from his grandfather and at the age of 10 was performing at local dances. He served in the U.S. Air Force before becoming a disc jockey in Texas, Oregon, and California during the 1950s. He also was performing in public and writing songs then. By 1961 he was based in Nashville, Tennessee, and playing bass in Ray Price’s band. Price was among the first of dozens of country, rhythm-and-blues, and popular singers to achieve hit records with Nelson’s 1960s tunes, which included the standards “Hello Walls,” “Night Life,” “Funny How Time Slips Away,” and, most famously, “Crazy.” By contrast, Nelson achieved only modest success as a singer in that decade.
In the early 1970s Nelson moved back to Texas and, with Waylon Jennings, spearheaded the country music movement known as outlaw music. Beginning with the narrative album Red Headed Stranger (1975), which featured the hit song “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” he became one of the most popular performers in country music as a whole. Nelson’s performances featured a unique sound, of which his relaxed behind-the-beat singing style and gut-string guitar were the most distinctive elements. Unusual for a country album, songs by Hoagy Carmichael, Irving Berlin, and other mainstream popular songwriters made up his Stardust (1978), which eventually sold more than five million copies in the United States. Nelson found further crossover success with the album Always on My Mind (1982) and the single “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before” (1984), a duet with Julio Iglesias. After making his film acting debut in The Electric Horseman (1979), Nelson appeared in such movies as Honeysuckle Rose (1980)—which introduced what would become his signature song, “On the Road Again”—and Red Headed Stranger (1986), a drama based on his album.
In 1990 the Internal Revenue Service, claiming Nelson owed $16.7 million in unpaid taxes, seized his assets. To raise money, he recorded the album The IRS Tapes: Who’ll Buy My Memories (1991), which initially was available only through phone orders but was sold in stores beginning in 1992. Despite that setback, he continued to record at a prolific pace into the 21st century. His subsequent albums included Across the Borderline (1993), the atmospheric Teatro (1998), and the reggae-tinged Countryman (2005).
As Nelson aged into the role of a musical elder statesman, his recordings increasingly focused on traditional songs and covers. Among them were Heroes (2012); Let’s Face the Music and Dance (2013), a collection of standards; To All the Girls… (2013), a series of duets with female singers; and Summertime (2016), a set of George Gershwin songs. In 2014 Nelson issued Band of Brothers, which comprised largely new material, and Willie’s Stash, Vol. 1: December Day, the first in a series of releases from his vast catalogue of recordings. The latter record focused on his collaborations with his sister and pianist, Bobbie. God’s Problem Child (2017) and Last Man Standing (2018) are collections of original meditations on mortality. Nelson’s later albums included My Way (2018), a tribute to Frank Sinatra, and Ride Me Back Home (2019). Throughout his career he recorded with dozens of other singers and released album-length collaborations with such musicians as Jennings, Merle Haggard, and jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. He was the recipient of numerous Grammy Awards.
In addition to his own performance career, Nelson produced annual Fourth of July country music festivals in Texas and elsewhere, and in 1985 he cofounded Farm Aid, which organized festivals to raise money for farmers. Nelson was a well-known and enthusiastic connoisseur of marijuana, and, after a few states legalized the drug’s sale and purchase, he launched (2015) a marijuana supply company, Willie’s Reserve. He penned several memoirs (with coauthors), including Willie: An Autobiography (1988), Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die: Musings from the Road (2012), and It’s a Long Story: My Life (2015). Me and Sister Bobbie: True Tales of the Family Band (2020) was written by the siblings, and it chronicles their relationship.
Nelson was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1993. He accepted a Kennedy Center Honor in 1998, and in 2015 he received the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song.
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ce7ec0b2a4c5bcc41e57ebd09827eb57 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Willis-Rodney-Whitney | Willis Rodney Whitney | Willis Rodney Whitney
Willis Rodney Whitney, (born Aug. 22, 1868, Jamestown, N.Y., U.S.—died Jan. 9, 1958, Schenectady, N.Y.), American chemist and founder of the General Electric Company’s research laboratory, where he directed pioneering work in electrical technology and was credited with setting the pattern for industrial scientific laboratory research in the United States.
Whitney studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, and earned his Ph.D. from the University of Leipzig in 1896. Upon joining General Electric, Whitney founded (1900) its research laboratory at Schenectady, N.Y., and was its director (1900–28) and later vice president in charge of research (1928–41). There he found, in 1902, that metallized carbon filament for incandescent lamps produced 25 percent more light than had earlier filaments. He also directed work that led to the development of the modern electric light bulb and to improvements in vacuum tubes. He developed an electrochemical theory of corrosion that was widely used in the analysis of corrosion reactions.
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0a8c535a3ae93b84ed1d97ff5d56fa9b | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Willy-Brandt | Willy Brandt | Willy Brandt
Willy Brandt, original name Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm, (born December 18, 1913, Lübeck, Germany—died October 8/9, 1992, Unkel, near Bonn), German statesman, leader of the German Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or SPD) from 1964 to 1987, and chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany from 1969 to 1974. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1971 for his efforts to achieve reconciliation between West Germany and the countries of the Soviet bloc.
Brandt passed his university entrance examination in 1932. A year later, however, when the Nazis came to power, his activities as a young Social Democrat brought him into conflict with the Gestapo, and he was forced to flee the country to escape arrest. It was at this time, while living in Norway and earning a living as a journalist, that he assumed the name Willy Brandt. When the Germans occupied Norway he escaped to Sweden, where he remained for the duration of World War II. After the war he returned to Germany as a Norwegian citizen and for a time was press attaché at the Norwegian mission in Berlin.
Pressed to return to politics, he became a German citizen again and, after a period as Berlin representative of the Social Democratic Party Executive Committee, was elected a member of the federal parliament in 1949. Eight years later he became the mayor of West Berlin (1957–66), a post in which he achieved world fame. He showed great moral courage when in 1958 the Soviet Union demanded that West Berlin be given the title of a demilitarized free city and especially when the Berlin Wall was built in 1961. He succeeded Erich Ollenhauer as chairman of the SPD in 1964 and campaigned for the office of chancellor of West Germany three times—in 1961, 1965, and 1969.
When the grand coalition government of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the SPD was formed in 1966, Brandt became foreign minister and vice-chancellor. His party improved its performance in the federal election in 1969 and formed a coalition government with the small Free Democratic Party, pushing the CDU into the role of opposition party for the first time. His government’s first major decisions included the revaluing of the West German mark and the signing of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.
The year following his election as chancellor, Brandt concentrated on foreign affairs, and he particularly sought to improve relations with East Germany, other communist countries in eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union, formulating a policy known as Ostpolitik (“eastern policy”). His efforts led to a treaty with the Soviet Union in August 1970 calling for mutual renunciation of force and the acceptance of current European borders; to a nonaggression treaty with Poland in December 1970 recognizing the Oder-Neisse Line as Poland’s western boundary; and to the Big Four agreement in September 1971 on the status of Berlin. His treaty with Poland was controversial; detractors claimed that it signaled West Germany’s acceptance of the permanent loss of those eastern lands stripped from Germany after World War II, while supporters praised it for opening the possibility of reuniting West and East Germany and stabilizing relations with eastern Europe. A firm supporter of a united Europe, Brandt exerted his influence to break down French objections to enlarging the European Economic Community (EEC). More than any other statesman, he helped promote the entry of Britain and other countries to the EEC.
Brandt resigned in May 1974 after his close aide Günter Guillaume was unmasked as an East German spy. He remained the chairman of the SPD until 1987 and was also head of the Socialist International (the Social Democrats’ umbrella organization) from 1976 to 1992. From 1979 he also headed the Independent Commission on International Development Issues, known as the Brandt Commission, a prestigious independent panel that studied world economic policies.
Brandt received the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1971 for his continuing work toward reconciliation between West Germany and East Germany, Poland, and the Soviet Union. He wrote several books, including Willy Brandt in Exile: Essays, Reflections and Letters, 1933–1947, translated from the German by R.W. Last (1971), and People and Politics: The Years 1960–1975, translated by J.M. Brownjohn (1978). The latter comprises Brandt’s political memoirs.
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941993f1c15a361d269c937dc4869ee8 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Willy-Claes | Willy Claes | Willy Claes
Willy Claes, (born November 24, 1938, Hasselt, Belgium), Belgian statesman who served as secretary-general (1994–95) of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
After studying at the Free University of Brussels, Claes was elected to the Hasselt City Council in 1964. A Flemish Socialist, Claes was elected to the national parliament in 1986. He became spokesman for the Belgian Socialist Party (whose Flemish- and French-speaking wings later split into two independent parties) in 1971 and was named minister of education the following year. In 1973 Claes accepted his first appointment as minister of economic affairs, and he was praised for his handling of the Belgian economy during the 1973–74 oil crisis.
After his party’s return to power, Claes served his second term as minister of economic affairs (1977–82). In 1979 Claes was also appointed deputy prime minister, a post he held five times. Claes developed a reputation as a talented diplomat, and he was enlisted by King Baudouin I to aid in the formation of a coalition government during a period of political turmoil in the 1980s. In 1992, following a third term as economics minister (1988–92), Claes became minister of foreign affairs. That same year he was elected chairman of the Party of European Socialists.
A lifelong socialist, Claes had spoken out against the deployment of U.S. missiles in Europe during the 1980s and had been a senior figure in the Belgian government that had refused to take part in the Persian Gulf War (1990–91). As a member of the European Union’s Council of Ministers, he had also spoken strongly against Europe’s ineffectuality in dealing with the Bosnian conflict in the former Yugoslavia. As the conflict threatened to engulf the Balkans in the early 1990s, NATO became a key player in efforts to end the fighting, and in late 1994 Claes was chosen as the new secretary-general of NATO.
Following his appointment, Claes reaffirmed his commitment to the alliance as the bedrock of European security. The war in Bosnia was his dominant concern. Although Claes preferred a diplomatic solution, NATO launched air strikes against Bosnian Serb targets in 1995. In October 1995 Claes visited the United States to urge its participation in the formation of a NATO-led peacekeeping force in Bosnia. He also advocated for the future enlargement of NATO (through the acceptance of central and eastern European countries) and for more cooperation with Russia.
On October 20, 1995, after only one year at NATO, Claes resigned from his post to face Belgian charges of corruption during his third term as economics minister. In 1998 Claes was found guilty of bribery and sentenced to a suspended three-year jail term. He also was barred from voting or holding public office for five years.
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dad594981222108d26cd0cf3899bde01 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Willy-Messerschmitt | Willy Messerschmitt | Willy Messerschmitt
Willy Messerschmitt, (born June 26, 1898, Frankfurt am Main—died Sept. 17, 1978, Munich), German aircraft engineer and designer.
Messerschmitt was educated at the Munich Institute of Technology, where he received a degree in engineering in 1923. From 1926 he was employed as chief designer and engineer at the Bayerische Flugzeugwerke in Augsburg. His interest in gliders and sailplanes was carried into his early designs, which included the Bf 109 single-seat monoplane.
In 1938 the Augsburg company became the Messerschmitt-Aktien-Gesellschaft. The new company produced Messerschmitt’s first military aircraft, the Me 109 (based on the Bf 109), which in 1939 set the world speed record at 481 miles (775 km) per hour. During World War II, about 35,000 Me 109s were produced for the German Luftwaffe. Other military designs produced during the war included the Me 110, a two-seater bomber and night fighter; the Me 163, the first operational rocket-propelled aircraft; and the Me 262, Germany’s first operational jet-propelled aircraft.
After the war, Messerschmitt was detained by the U.S. occupation forces for two years; during the postwar ban on aircraft production, his firm produced prefabricated housing and sewing machines. In 1952 he served as an adviser to the Spanish government, and in 1958 he resumed aircraft production. In 1968–69 the Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm company was formed with Messerschmitt as honorary chairman. The firm produced satellites, helicopters, missiles, and aircraft.
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3955b4946259756da778ea832c8293a1 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Wilma-Pearl-Mankiller | Wilma Pearl Mankiller | Wilma Pearl Mankiller
Wilma Pearl Mankiller, (born Nov. 18, 1945, Tahlequah, Okla., U.S.—died April 6, 2010, Adair county, Okla.), Native American leader and activist, the first woman chief of a major tribe.
Mankiller was of Cherokee, Dutch, and Irish descent; the name Mankiller derives from the high military rank achieved by a Cherokee ancestor. She grew up on Mankiller Flats, the farm granted to her grandfather as part of a government settlement after the forced relocation of his tribe. After the failure of the farm, the family moved to California. During the 1960s Mankiller studied sociology and got a job as a social worker. In 1969 she became active in the Native American Rights movement. She moved back to Oklahoma to reclaim Mankiller Flats in the mid-1970s and in 1977 took a job as economic stimulus coordinator for the Cherokee Nation. Completing her degree in social science and taking courses in community planning at the University of Arkansas, she initiated a number of projects aimed at greater development of the Cherokee communities in Oklahoma.
In 1983 Mankiller won election as deputy principal Cherokee chief, and, when the principal chief became head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1985, Mankiller succeeded him as principal chief. She thereby became the first woman ever to serve as chief of a major Native American tribe. Two years later she was elected chief in her own right. Her victory ushered in an administration that focused on lowering the high unemployment rate and increasing educational opportunities, improving community health care, and developing the economy of northeastern Oklahoma. She emphasized the necessity of retaining certain Cherokee traditions by creating the Institute for Cherokee Literacy. Mankiller was reelected in 1991, but she did not run in 1995. She was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1993, and in 1998 she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Her autobiography, Mankiller: A Chief and Her People, was published in 1993.
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765660ea7d4e8b22f866e7308f69aa57 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Wilson-Harris | Wilson Harris | Wilson Harris
Wilson Harris, in full Theodore Wilson Harris, byname Kona Waruk, (born March 24, 1921, New Amsterdam, British Guiana [now Guyana]—died March 8, 2018, Chelmsford, Essex, England), Guyanese author noted for the broad vision and abstract complexity of his novels.
Harris attended Queen’s College in Georgetown, British Guiana (1934–39). From 1942 until 1958 he was a government surveyor, and he used his intimate knowledge of the savannas and vast, mysterious rain forests of the country’s interior to create the settings for his fiction. In 1959 he moved to London. He first wrote poetry, which is collected in Fetish (1951) and The Well and the Land (1952). He then wrote and abandoned several manuscripts before publishing The Guyana Quartet, composed of Palace of the Peacock (1960), The Far Journey of Oudin (1961), The Whole Armour (1962), and The Secret Ladder (1963).
Harris’s novels are full of ambiguous metaphors, puns, symbols with changing meanings, and the confusions of memory, imagination, dream, and reality. His characters reflect humanity’s wholeness; an archetypical figure such as Ulysses, for example, belongs not to a single culture but to all. Harris’s many novels included a trio set in London (Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness, 1977; The Tree of the Sun, 1978; The Angel at the Gate, 1982) and another trilogy comprising Carnival (1985), The Infinite Rehearsal (1987), and The Four Banks of the River of Space (1990). Jonestown (1996) centres on a survivor of the Jonestown massacre (1978). Later novels included The Mask of the Beggar (2003) and The Ghost of Memory (2006). Harris also wrote short stories and essays.
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3d08d5d108c387530987fff85e4b049c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Wiman | Wiman | Wiman
Wiman, Chinese Wei Man, (flourished c. 190 bc), Chinese general, or possibly a Korean in Chinese service, who took advantage of the confusion that existed around the time of the founding of the Han dynasty in China to usurp the throne of the Korean state of Chosŏn. He moved the capital to the present-day site of P’yŏngyang on the Taedong River, dominating the area on the Korean-Manchurian border, and extended his influence down the Korean peninsula.
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632db14395abeb468116b276702ec0be | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Wincenty-Witos | Wincenty Witos | Wincenty Witos
Wincenty Witos, (born Jan. 22, 1874, Wierzchosławice, Galicia, Pol., Austria-Hungary—died Oct. 30, 1945, Kraków), Polish statesman and leader of the Peasant Party, who was three times prime minister of Poland (1920–21, 1923, 1926).
Witos sat during 1908–14 in the Galician Sejm (Diet) of Austria-Poland and in 1911–18 in the Austrian Reichsrat (lower house of parliament). After World War I he was elected to the Sejm of the newly established republic of Poland and soon became the leader of the Peasant Party, then the strongest political group in the Sejm. From July 1920 to September 1921 he served as prime minister of an all-party coalition. In May–December 1923 he headed his second government but was unable to halt inflation and national unrest. Although initially identified with the parties of the left, Witos gradually emerged as a force for conservatism and in May 1926 formed his third administration on an exclusively right-of-centre base. Within a few days, however, his Cabinet was overthrown by a coup led by the national hero Józef Piłsudski.
Thereafter, Witos remained in opposition to Piłsudski’s thinly veiled dictatorship. He was imprisoned for political reasons in 1930 and again in 1932 was put under sentence, which was quashed as illegal (1933). Fearing a new arrest, however, he fled to Czechoslovakia. He subsequently returned to Poland but was imprisoned by the Germans in 1939. Arrested by the Russians in 1945, he was freed shortly before his death.
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4e7ccce791a0e60aa6eee07af0046e50 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Winfield-Scott-Hancock | Winfield Scott Hancock | Winfield Scott Hancock
Winfield Scott Hancock, (born Feb. 14, 1824, Montgomery County, Pa., U.S.—died Feb. 9, 1886, Governor’s Island, N.Y.), Union general during the American Civil War (1861–65), whose policies during Reconstruction military service in Louisiana and Texas so endeared him to the Democratic Party that he became the party’s presidential candidate in 1880.
A West Point graduate (1844), he served with distinction in the Mexican War (1846–48). Hancock was appointed a brigadier general of volunteers on the outbreak of the Civil War and served in the Peninsular campaign of 1862. In May 1863 he was made head of the II Corps, Army of the Potomac, which he led for most of the remaining two years of the war. He served with distinction at the Battle of Gettysburg (July 1863) and participated in the drive on Richmond, Va., the following spring. As a major general after the war, he commanded (1866–68) various army departments, including the military division composed of Louisiana and Texas. Although great discretionary power had been conferred upon him, Hancock insisted on the maintenance of the civil authorities in their “natural and rightful dominion.” This stand enraged some Republicans, who were counting on military power to protect black and white Republicans in the South, but his policy won him the support of the Democrats, who nominated him for the presidency in 1880. After narrowly losing the election to the Republican candidate, James A. Garfield, he returned to military life.
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c934701162afa7fb4462543342da4f2c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Wipo | Wipo | Wipo
…encouraged studies at the court: Wipo, the preceptor of Henry III, set out a program of education for the laity in his Proverbia. Rediscovering the ancient moralists, chiefly Cicero and Seneca, he praised moderation as opposed to warlike brutality or even the ascetic strength of the monks. The same tendency…
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d7e07c02b2a14b5eb182ca29e4eba89c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Witelo | Witelo | Witelo
Witelo, Latin Vitello, (born 1220, Silesia—died after 1278), Polish natural scientist and philosopher, best known for his Perspectiva (c. 1274). He studied arts at Paris and canon law at Padua and spent some time at the papal court in Viterbo.
One of the first analyses of space perception, the Perspectiva was incorporated into Opticae thesaurus (1572; “Thesaurus of Optics”), the principal textbook on this subject in the West until the 17th century. Witelo also did original work in the physics of light refraction. In philosophy he upheld the Neoplatonic metaphysics of light that viewed material reality as reflections of a primordial form radiating light identical with God.
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54e956ad845ca17506833d0114f3e7b1 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Wladyslaw-I-Herman | Władysław I Herman | Władysław I Herman
Under Bolesław’s brother and successor, Władysław I Herman, claims to the royal crown and a more ambitious foreign policy were abandoned. Efforts by the palatine, Sieciech, to maintain centralized power clashed with the ambitions of the rising magnate class. Following a period of internal conflict, Bolesław III (the Wry-Mouthed) emerged…
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5fd2deda5f61cc5db810f526ed94193a | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Wladyslaw-II-the-Exile | Władysław II the Exile | Władysław II the Exile
…rule of the Piast prince Władysław II (the Exile). Much of the city south of the Oder River was devastated during the Mongol invasion in 1241. At the invitation of Silesian authorities in the 13th century, many Germans migrated to Wrocław. The city received self-governing rights in 1261, when it…
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761466d094aec501e4dfa1e8ab83e47e | https://www.britannica.com/biography/WoduridaR | WoduridaR | WoduridaR
…the runes in memory of WoduridaR. The latter part of the inscription tells how WoduridaR was honoured after his death and that he left three daughters, but no sons or male relatives.
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6cca96233afab853b21147d82606adb9 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Wodziwob | Wodziwob | Wodziwob
…in 1869 around the dreamer Wodziwob (died c. 1872) and in 1871–73 spread to California and Oregon tribes; it soon died out or was transformed into other cults. The second derived from Wovoka (c. 1856–1932), whose father, Tavibo, had assisted Wodziwob. Wovoka had been influenced by Presbyterians on whose ranch…
…led by the Paiute prophet Wodziwob, centred in Nevada and California. It was an elaboration of the round dance, a traditional ceremony for the renewal and abundance of life. Wodziwob’s vision indicated that the dance would resurrect the victims of an epidemic that had decimated the region a year earlier.
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68577e7479b3a2bc317f0fa56d2705ea | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Wolf-Huber | Wolf Huber | Wolf Huber
Wolf Huber, (born c. 1485, Feldkirch?, Tirol [Austria]—died 1553, Passau, Bishopric of Passau [Germany]), Austrian painter, draftsman, and printmaker who was one of the principal artists associated with the Danube school of landscape painting.
After 1509 Huber’s career was centred in Passau, Ger., where he was court painter to the prince-bishop. Among his important paintings was the altarpiece of St. Anne for the Church of St. Nikolaus in his native Feldkirch in Vorarlberg, Austria (1515–21). Some of Huber’s most expressive and poetic works are his landscapes, especially drawings he made of the Danube River valley on a trip (c. 1529) from Passau to Vienna.
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25dd6bef154f88771551a94975b7063d | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Wolfgang-Amadeus-Mozart/Mannheim-and-Paris | Mannheim and Paris | Mannheim and Paris
It must have been abundantly clear by this time to Mozart as well as his father that a small provincial court like that at Salzburg was no place for a genius of his order. In 1777 he petitioned the archbishop for his release and, with his mother to watch over him, set out to find new opportunities. The correspondence with his father over the 16 months he was away not only gives information as to what he was doing but also casts a sharp light on their changing relationship; Mozart, now 21, increasingly felt the need to free himself from paternal domination, while Leopold’s anxieties about their future assumed almost pathological dimensions.
They went first to Munich, where the elector politely declined to offer Mozart a post. Next they visited Augsburg, staying with relatives; there Mozart struck up a lively friendship with his cousin Maria Anna Thekla (they later had a correspondence involving much playful, obscene humour). At the end of October they arrived at Mannheim, where the court of the Elector Palatine was musically one of the most famous and progressive in Europe. Mozart stayed there for more than four months, although he soon learned that again no position was to be had. He became friendly with the Mannheim musicians, undertook some teaching and playing, accepted and partly fulfilled a commission for flute music from a German surgeon, and fell in love with Aloysia Weber, a soprano, the second of four daughters of a music copyist. He also composed several piano sonatas, some with violin. He put to his father a scheme for traveling to Italy with the Webers, which, naive and irresponsible, met with an angry response: “Off with you to Paris! and that soon, find your place among great people—aut Caesar aut nihil.” The plan had been that he would go on alone, but now Leopold felt that he was not to be trusted and made the ill-fated decision that his mother should go too. They reached Paris late in March 1778, and Mozart soon found work. His most important achievement was the symphony (K 297) composed for the Concert Spirituel, a brilliant D Major work in which he met the taste of the Parisian public (and musicians) for orchestral display without sacrifice of integrity; indeed he exploited the devices they admired (such as the opening coup d’archet—a forceful, unanimous musical gesture) to new formal ends.
By the time of its premiere, on June 18, his mother was seriously ill, and on July 3 she died. Mozart handled the situation with consideration, first writing to his father of her grave illness, then asking an abbé friend in Salzburg to break the news. He went to stay with Friedrich Melchior, Baron von Grimm, a German friend. Soon after, Grimm wrote pessimistically to Leopold about his son’s prospects in Paris, and Leopold negotiated a better post for him in Salzburg, where he would be court organist rather than violinist as before, though still nominally Konzertmeister. Mozart had in fact secured a position in Paris that might well have satisfied his father but which clearly did not satisfy Mozart himself; there is no evidence, in any case, that he informed his father of either the offer or his decision to refuse it. Summoned home, Mozart reluctantly obeyed, tarrying en route in Mannheim and in Munich—where the Mannheim musicians had now mostly moved and where he was coolly received by Aloysia Weber. He reached Salzburg in mid-January 1780.
Back in Salzburg, Mozart seems to have been eager to display his command of international styles: of the three symphonies he wrote in 1779–80, K 318 in G Major has a Parisian premier coup d’archet and crescendos of the type favoured in Mannheim, and K 338 in C Major shows many features of the brilliant Parisian manner. His outstanding orchestral work of this period was, however, the sinfonia concertante for violin and viola K 364; the genre was popular in both cities, and there are many features of the Mannheim style in the orchestral writing, but the character of the work, its ingenious instrumental interplay, and its depth of feeling are unmistakably Mozartian. Also from this time came the cheerful two-piano concerto and the two-piano sonata, as well as a number of sacred works, including the best-known of his complete masses, the Coronation Mass.
But it was dramatic music that attracted Mozart above all. He had lately written incidental music to a play by Tobias Philipp von Gebler, and during 1779–80 he composed much of a singspiel, known as Zaide, although with no sure prospects of performance. So Mozart must have been delighted, in the summer of 1780, to receive a commission to compose a serious Italian opera for Munich. The subject was to be Idomeneus, king of Crete, and the librettist the local cleric Giambattista Varesco, who was to follow a French text of 1712. Mozart could start work in Salzburg as he already knew the capacities of several of the singers, but he went to Munich some 10 weeks before the date set for the premiere. Leopold remained at home until close to the time of the premiere and acted as a link between Mozart and Varesco; their correspondence is accordingly richly informative about the process of composition. Four matters dominate Mozart’s letters home. First, he was anxious, as always, to assure his father of the enthusiasm with which the singers received his music. Second, he was concerned about cuts: the libretto was far too long, and Mozart had set it spaciously, so that much trimming—of the recitative, of the choral scenes, and even of two arias in the final acts—was needed. Third, he was always eager to make modifications that rendered the action more natural and plausible. And fourth, he was much occupied with accommodating the music and the action to the needs and the limitations of the singers.
In Idomeneo, rè di Creta Mozart depicted serious, heroic emotion with a richness unparalleled elsewhere in his operas. Though influenced by Christoph Gluck and by Niccolò Piccinni and others, it is not a “reform opera”: it includes plain recitative and bravura singing, but always to a dramatic purpose, and, though the texture is more continuous than in Mozart’s earlier operas, its plan, because of its French source, is essentially traditional. Given on January 29, 1781, just after Mozart’s 25th birthday, it met with due success. Mozart and his father were still in Munich when, on March 12, he was summoned to join the archbishop’s retinue in Vienna, where the accession of Joseph II was being celebrated.
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e74df5ff37a70446fcb1fc40bffa1fb4 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Wolfgang-Amadeus-Mozart/Mozarts-place | Mozart’s place | Mozart’s place
At the time of his death Mozart was widely regarded not only as the greatest composer of the time but also as a bold and “difficult” one; Don Giovanni especially was seen as complex and dissonant, and his chamber music as calling for outstanding skill in its interpreters. His surviving manuscripts, which included many unpublished works, were mostly sold by Constanze to the firm of André in Offenbach, which issued editions during the 19th century. But Mozart’s reputation was such that even before the end of the 18th century two firms had embarked on substantial collected editions of his music. Important biographies appeared in 1798 and 1828, the latter by Constanze’s second husband; the first scholarly biography, by Otto Jahn, was issued on Mozart’s centenary in 1856. The first edition of the Köchel catalog followed six years later, and the first complete edition of his music began in 1877.
The works most secure in the repertory during the 19th century were the three operas least susceptible to changes in public taste—Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Die Zauberflöte—and the orchestral works closest in spirit to the Romantic era—the minor-key piano concertos (Beethoven wrote a set of cadenzas for the one in D Minor) and the last three symphonies. It was only in the 20th century that Mozart’s music began to be reexamined more broadly. Although up to the middle of the century Mozart was still widely regarded as having been surpassed in most respects by Beethoven, with the increased historical perspective of the later 20th century he came to be seen as an artist of a formidable, indeed perhaps unequaled, expressive range. The traditional image of the child prodigy turned refined drawing-room composer, who could miraculously conceive an entire work in his head before setting pen to paper (always a distortion of the truth), gave way to the image of the serious and painstaking creative artist with acute human insight, whose complex psychology demanded exploration by writers, historians, and scholars. The 1980 play Amadeus (written by Peter Shaffer) and especially its film version of 1984 (directed by Miloš Forman), although they did much to promote interest in Mozart, reinforced certain myths—i.e., that even as an adult Mozart remained an inappropriately childish vessel for divinely inspired music and that his premature death was brought about by Salieri. Yet even in this indulgent appropriation of Mozart’s legacy, his full-blooded humanity at times emerges with haunting vividness.
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2a3f816a1952c6db0edcb258eb1c55d0 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Wolfgang-Amadeus-Mozart/The-central-Viennese-period | The central Viennese period | The central Viennese period
Back in Vienna Mozart entered on what was to be the most fruitful and successful period of his life. He had once written to his father that Vienna was “the land of the piano,” and his greatest triumphs there were as a pianist-composer. During one spell of little more than five weeks he appeared at 22 concerts, mainly at the Esterházy and Galitzin houses but including five concerts of his own. In February 1784 he began to keep a catalog of his own music, which suggests a new awareness of posterity and his place in it (in fact his entries are sometimes misdated). At concerts he would normally play the piano, both existing pieces and improvisations; his fantasias—such as the fine C Minor one (K 475) of 1785—and his numerous sets of variations probably give some indication of the kind of music his audiences heard. He would also conduct performances of his symphonies (using earlier Salzburg works as well as the two written since he had settled in Vienna, the Haffner of 1782, composed for the Salzburg family, and the Linz [Symphony No. 36 in C Major]), but above all the piano concertos were the central products of his concert activity.
In 1782–83 Mozart wrote three piano concertos (K 413–415), which he published in 1785 with string and optional wind parts (so that they were suitable for domestic use) and described as “a happy medium between what is too easy and too difficult.” Six more followed in 1784, three each in 1785 and 1786 and one each in 1788 and 1791. With the 1784 group he established a new level of piano concerto writing; these concertos are at once symphonic, melodically rich, and orchestrally ingenious, and they also blend the virtuoso element effectively into the musical and formal texture of the work. Much melodic material is assigned to the wind instruments, and a unique melodic style is developed that lends itself to patterns of dialogue and instrumental interplay. After the relatively homogeneous 1784 group (K 449, 450, 451, 453, 456, and 459), all of which begin with themes stated first by the orchestra and later taken up by the piano, Mozart moved on in the concertos of 1785 (K 466, 467, and 482) to make the piano solo a reinterpretation of the opening theme. These concertos are increasingly individual in character—one a stormy and romantic D Minor work, the next a closely argued concerto in C Major with a slow movement remarkable for its troubled beauty, and the third, in E-flat Major, notable for its military rhythms and wind colouring. The 1786 group begins with the refined but conservatively lyrical K 488, but then follow two concertos with a new level of symphonic unity and grandeur, that in C Minor (K 491), using the largest orchestra Mozart had yet called for in the concert hall, and the imperious concerto in C Major (K 503). The two final concertos (K 537 and 595) represent no new departures.
Mozart’s other important contributions of this time come in the fields of chamber and piano music. The outpouring of 1784 included the fine piano sonata K 457 and the piano and violin sonata K 454 (written for a visiting violin virtuoso, it was produced in such haste that Mozart could not write out the piano part and played from blank paper at the premiere). He also wrote, in a style close to that of the concertos, a quintet for piano and wind instruments (K 452), which he considered his finest work to date; it was first heard at a concert in the house of his pupil Barbara Ployer, for whom two of the 1784 concertos had been written (K 449 and 453). The six string quartets on which he had embarked in 1782 were finished in the first days of 1785 and published later that year, dedicated to Haydn, now a friend of Mozart’s. In 1785 Haydn said to Leopold Mozart, on a visit to his son in Vienna, “Your son is the greatest composer known to me in person or by name; he has taste, and what is more the greatest knowledge of composition.” It was during Leopold’s visit that Mozart performed his D Minor concerto (K 466), which is marked by a particularly willful piano part that resists conformity more insistently than in any other Mozart concerto; small wonder that Mozart would return to D Minor to set his most intransigent operatic hero—Don Giovanni—and that this would be Beethoven’s favourite among Mozart’s concertos.
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060b128491bf6ed60758eca86e9d1c12 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Wolfgang-Amadeus-Mozart/The-last-travels | The last travels | The last travels
On his return from Prague in mid-November 1787, Mozart was at last appointed to a court post, as Kammermusicus, in place of Gluck, who had died. It was largely a sinecure, the only requirement being that he should supply dance music for court balls, which he did, in abundance and with some distinction, over his remaining years. The salary of 800 gulden seems to have done little to relieve the Mozarts’ chronic financial troubles. Their debts, however, were never large, and they were always able to continue employing servants and owning a carriage; their anxieties were more a matter of whether they could live as they wished than whether they would starve. In 1788 a series of letters begging loans from a fellow Freemason, Michael Puchberg, began; Puchberg usually obliged, and Mozart seems generally to have repaid him promptly. He was deeply depressed during the summer, writing of “black thoughts”; it has been suggested that he may have had a cyclothymic personality, linked with manic-depressive tendencies, which could explain not only his depression but also other aspects of his behaviour, including his spells of hectic creativity.
During the time of this depression Mozart was working on a series of three symphonies, in E-flat Major (K 543), G Minor (K 550), and C Major (the Jupiter, K 551), usually numbered 39, 40, and 41; these, with the work written for Prague (K 504), represent the summa of his orchestral output. It is not known why they were composed; possibly Mozart had a summer concert season in mind. The Prague work was a climax to his long series of brilliant D Major orchestral pieces, but the closely worked, even motivic form gives it a new power and unity, adding particular force to its frequently dark tone. The E-flat Major work, scored with clarinets and more lyrical in temper, makes fewer departures, except in the intensity of its slow movement, where Mozart used a new palette of darker orchestral colours, and the epigrammatic wit of its finale. In the G Minor work the tone of passion and perhaps of pathos, in its constant falling figures, is still more pronounced. The Jupiter (the name dates from the early 19th century) summarized the series of C Major symphonies, with their atmosphere of military pomp and ceremony, but it went far beyond them in its assimilation of opera buffa style, profundity of expression (in its andante), and richness of working—especially in the finale, which incorporates fugal procedures and ends with a grand apotheosis in five-voice fugal counterpoint.
Early in 1789 Mozart accepted an invitation to travel to Berlin with Prince Karl Lichnowsky; they paused in Prague, Dresden (where he played at court), and Leipzig (where he improvised on the Thomaskirche organ). He appeared at the Prussian court and probably was invited to compose piano sonatas for the princess and string quartets with a prominent cello part for King Friedrich Wilhelm II. He did in fact write three quartets, in parts of which he allowed the individual instruments (including the royal cello) special prominence, and there is one sonata (his last, K 576) that may have been intended for the Prussian princess. But it is unlikely that Mozart ever sent this music or was paid for it.
The summer saw the composition of the clarinet quintet, in which a true chamber style is warmly and gracefully reconciled with the solo writing. Thereafter Mozart concentrated on completing his next opera commission, the third of his Da Ponte operas, Così fan tutte, which was given on January 26, 1790; its run was interrupted after five performances when theatres closed because of the death of Joseph II, but a further five were given in the summer. This opera, the subtlest, most consistent, and most symmetrical of the three, was long reviled (from Beethoven onward) on account of its subject, female fickleness; but a more careful reading of it, especially in light of the emotional texture of the music, which gains complexity as the plot progresses, makes it clear that it is no frivolous piece but a penetrating essay on human feelings and their mature recognition. The music of Act 1 is essentially conventional in expression, and conventional feeling is tellingly parodied in certain of the arias; but the arias of Act 2 are on a deeper and more personal level. Features of the music of Così fan tutte—serenity, restraint, poise, irony—may be noted as markers of Mozart’s late style, which had developed since 1787 and may be linked with his personal development and the circumstances of his life, including his Masonic associations, his professional and financial situation, and his marriage.
The year 1790 was difficult and unproductive: besides Così fan tutte, Mozart completed two of the “Prussian” quartets, arranged works by Handel for performance at van Swieten’s house (he had similarly arranged Messiah in 1789), and wrote the first of his two fantasy-like pieces, in a variety of prelude-and-fugue form, for a mechanical organ (this imposing work, in F Minor [K 594], is now generally played on a normal organ). In the autumn, anxious to be noticed in court circles, he went to Frankfurt for the imperial coronation of Leopold II, but as an individual rather than a court musician. His concert, which included two piano concertos and possibly one of the new symphonies, was ill timed, poorly attended, and a financial failure. Anxieties about money were a recurrent theme in his letters home.
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1ea81485b240e61b897f2c5d1395a5d9 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Wolfgang-Amadeus-Mozart/Vienna-the-early-years | Vienna: the early years | Vienna: the early years
Fresh from his triumphs in Munich, where he had mixed freely with noblemen, Mozart now found himself placed, at table in the lodgings for the archbishop’s entourage, below the valets if above the cooks. Furthermore, the archbishop refused him permission to play at concerts (including one attended by the emperor at which Mozart could have earned half a year’s salary in an evening). He was resentful and insulted. Matters came to a head at an interview with Archbishop Colloredo, who, according to Mozart, used unecclesiastical language; Mozart requested his discharge, which was eventually granted at a stormy meeting with the court steward on June 9, 1781.
Mozart, who now went to live with his old friends the Webers (Aloysia was married to a court actor and painter), set about earning a living in Vienna. Although eager for a court appointment, he for the moment was concerned to take on some pupils, to write music for publication, and to play in concerts (which in Vienna were more often in noblemen’s houses than in public). He also embarked on an opera, Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio). (Joseph II currently required that German opera, rather than the traditional Italian, be given at the court theatre.) In the summer of 1781, rumours began to circulate, as far as Salzburg, that Mozart was contemplating marriage with the third of the Weber daughters, Constanze; but he hotly denied them in a letter to his father: “I have never thought less of getting married…besides, I am not in love with her.” He moved lodgings to scotch the gossip. But by December he was asking for his father’s blessing on a marriage with Constanze, with whom he was now in love and to whom, probably through the machinations of her mother and her guardian, he was in some degree committed. Because Constanze later destroyed Leopold’s letters, for reasons that are easy to imagine, only one side of the correspondence exists; Leopold’s reactions can, however, be readily inferred, and it would seem that this period marked a low point in the relationship between father and son.
Musically, Mozart’s main preoccupation was with Die Entführung in the early part of 1782. The opera, after various delays, reached the Burgtheater stage on July 16. The story of the emperor’s saying “very many notes, my dear Mozart” may not be literally true, but the tale is symptomatic: the work does have far more notes than any other then in the German repertory, with fuller textures, more elaboration, and longer arias. Mozart’s letters to his father give insight into his approach to dramatic composition, explaining, for example, his use of accompanying figures and key relationships to embody meaning. He also had the original text substantially modified to strengthen its drama and allow better opportunities for music. Noteworthy features are the Turkish colouring, created by “exotic” turns of phrase and chromaticisms as well as janissary instruments; the extended Act 2 finale, along the lines of those in opera buffa but lacking the dramatic propulsion of the Italian type; the expressive and powerful arias for the heroine (coincidentally called Constanze); and what Mozart called concessions to Viennese taste in the comic music, such as the duet “Vivat Bacchus.”
Die Entführung enjoyed immediate and continuing success; it was quickly taken up by traveling and provincial companies—as La finta giardiniera had been, to a lesser degree—and carried Mozart’s reputation widely around the German-speaking countries. He complained, however, that he had not made enough money from the opera, and he began to devote more time and energy in other directions. Later in the year he worked on a set of three piano concertos and began a set of six string quartets, the latter inspired by Haydn’s revolutionary Opus 33. He also started work on a mass setting, in C Minor, which he had vowed to write on his marriage (a vow he renewed when his wife survived a difficult childbirth) but of which only the first two sections, “Kyrie” and “Gloria,” were completed. Among the influences on this music, besides the Austrian ecclesiastical tradition, was that of the Baroque music (Bach, Handel, and others) that Mozart had become acquainted with, probably for the first time, at the house of his patron Baron Gottfried van Swieten, a music collector and antiquarian. The Baroque influence is noticeable especially in the spare textures and austere lines of certain of the solo numbers, though others are squarely in the decorative, south German late Rococo manner (this interest in “old-fashioned” counterpoint can also be seen in some of Mozart’s piano music of the time and in his string arrangements of music from Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier). Mozart and his wife visited Salzburg in the summer and autumn of 1783, when the completed movements were performed, with (as always intended) Constanze singing the solo soprano parts, at St. Peter’s Abbey. On the way back to Vienna Mozart paused at Linz, where he hastily wrote the symphony known by that city’s name for a concert he gave there.
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df19ae418a0cb3ae5e31dc2cc70ff5e3 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Wolfgang-Borchert | Wolfgang Borchert | Wolfgang Borchert
Wolfgang Borchert, (born May 20, 1921, Hamburg, Ger.—died Nov. 20, 1947, Basel, Switz.), playwright and short-story writer who gave voice to the anguish of the German soldier after World War II.
As a young man Borchert wrote several plays and a large number of poems, but he was determined to be an actor. In 1941 he was drafted into the army. The rigours of his army service resulted in jaundice, frostbite, malnutrition, and progressive liver degeneration. He spent much of his military career in jail, accused of self-mutilation (he lost a finger). From his cell he wrote anti-Nazi letters and mocked propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Borchert returned to Hamburg after the war, but ill health forced him to leave an acting troupe he had cofounded. He began writing short stories in January 1946 and, though bedridden, produced most of the body of his work in the remaining two years of his life. He died the day before his most famous work, the play Draussen vor der Tür (1947; “Outside the Door”; Eng. trans. The Man Outside), was first staged. It presents a wounded former prisoner’s attempt to discover a reason to keep on living.
Many of Borchert’s stories, first collected in Die Hundeblume: Erzählungen aus unseren Tagen (1947; “The Dandelions: Tales of Our Days”), are based on personal experience. They include boyhood memories as well as the war and prison stories for which he is best known. The heroes of his stories, who are victims and are often in physical pain, seek meaning but find death and ruin.
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ad6cf97efc5815e4ce359e4ca8e37e25 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Wolfman-Jack | Wolfman Jack | Wolfman Jack
…jockeys such as the iconic Wolfman Jack into homes across North America. The outsize personalities that typified the border blasters, combined with playlists that emphasized rock and roll and rhythm and blues, captivated audiences on both sides of the Atlantic.
Possessed of one of the most distinctive voices and styles in radio, Wolfman Jack played rhythm and blues and partied wildly in the studios—or at least it sounded like he did. He told listeners that he was “nekkid” and urged them to disrobe as well.…
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c0a0fa07f86e5cfe2adb04e5c2f1b4e0 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Wolfram-von-Eschenbach | Wolfram von Eschenbach | Wolfram von Eschenbach
Wolfram von Eschenbach, (born c. 1170—died c. 1220), German poet whose epic Parzival, distinguished alike by its moral elevation and its imaginative power, is one of the most profound literary works of the Middle Ages.
An impoverished Bavarian knight, Wolfram apparently served a succession of Franconian lords: Abensberg, Wildenberg, and Wertheim are among the places he names in his work. He also knew the court of the landgrave Hermann I of Thuringia, where he met the great medieval lyric poet Walther von der Vogelweide. Though a self-styled illiterate, Wolfram showed an extensive acquaintance with French and German literature, and it is probable that he knew how to read, if not how to write.
Wolfram’s surviving literary works, all bearing the stamp of his unusually original personality, consist of eight lyric poems, chiefly Tagelieder (“Dawn Songs,” describing the parting of lovers at morning); the epic Parzival; the unfinished epic Willehalm, telling the history of the Crusader Guillaume d’Orange; and short fragments of a further epic, the so-called Titurel, which elaborates the tragic love story of Sigune from book 3 of Parzival.
Parzival, probably written between 1200 and 1210, is a poem of 25,000 lines in 16 books. Almost certainly based on an unfinished romance of Chrétien de Troyes, Perceval; ou, le conte du Graal, it introduced the theme of the Holy Grail into German literature. Its beginning and end are new material, probably of Wolfram’s own invention, although he attributes it to an unidentified and probably fictitious Provençal poet, Kyot (also spelled Kiot and Guiot). The story of the ignorant and naive Parzival, who sets out on his adventures without even knowing his own name, employs the classic fairy-tale motif of “the guileless fool” who, through innocence and artlessness, reaches a goal denied to wiser men. Wolfram uses Parzival’s dramatic progress from folk-tale dunce to wise and responsible keeper of the Grail to present a subtle allegory of man’s spiritual education and development. The complexity of Wolfram’s theme is matched by his eccentric style, which is characterized by rhetorical flourishes, ambiguous syntax, and the free use of dialect.
Wolfram’s influence on later poets was profound, and he is a member, with Hartmann von Aue and Gottfried von Strassburg, of the great triumvirate of Middle High German epic poets. Parzival also figures as the hero of Richard Wagner’s last opera, Parsifal (1882).
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b9c1442e146adaec7436b8d2ba7e35ef | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Wols | Wols | Wols
…of the 20th-century German artist Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze), which are sensitive to the slightest stirring of the hand, this theme leads to a new dimension transcending all traditional concepts of a representational art of drawing.
Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze) and also the English artist Graham Sutherland may actually be called spiritual draftsmen who put their faith in the magic of the line. Finally, drawing occupies a considerable place in the work (including all its variants of style and form)…
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fd23e9590596de6dd20285b63ae59c2b | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Wonhyo | Wŏnhyo | Wŏnhyo
Wŏnhyo, also called Wŏnhyo Taesa or Wonhyo Daesa, (born 617, Korea—died 686, Korea), Buddhist priest who is considered the greatest of the ancient Korean religious teachers.
A renowned theoretician, Wŏnhyo was the first to systematize Korean Buddhism, bringing the various Buddhist doctrines into a unity that was sensible to both the philosophers and the common people. The comprehensibility of his doctrines is seen in the five commandments he formulated for the people to follow in order to achieve enlightenment (nirvana). Those commandments are noteworthy not only for the systematic way in which they show how to achieve the final land of true peace, unity, and freedom but also for their common-sense approach to the everyday problems of achieving spiritual harmony.
Wŏnhyo’s realization of the need to practice a life that maintains harmony between the ideal and the real is illustrated by an anecdote that tells how he, as a priest, assumed to be practicing asceticism, one night slept with a beautiful royal princess. Rather than chastise himself the next morning, he merely admitted that true spirituality was obtained not by pursuing unreal ends but by admitting the limitations of one’s person. He is said to have led the people in dancing and singing in the streets to show how to lead this harmonized life of the present and the eternal.
Wŏnhyo’s works had profound influence on Chinese and Japanese as well as on Korean Buddhists. Most famous among them are “A Commentary on the Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana,” “A Commentary on the Avatamsaka-sutra,” “A Study on the Diamond Samadhi Sutra,” and “The Meaning of Two Desires.”
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66d42fb3aa06e2907371fc46b0c629ec | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Woody-Allen/The-1980s | The 1980s | The 1980s
In the 1980s Allen enjoyed the admiration of filmgoers, critics, and film industry professionals alike. Actors almost universally seemed willing to come to New York City at the drop of a hat to work with him for “scale” (the Screen Actors Guild minimum required compensation). Allen’s minimal direction of his actors was well known, and some performers fared better than others—though, by 2012, 15 different actors had received Academy Award nominations for their work with him. After a decade of working with United Artists, Allen switched the financing of his films to Orion Pictures. Producers Arthur Krim and Eric Pleskow, whom Allen followed from United Artists to Orion, continued to allow him the creative freedom to make movies his way: with relatively modest budgets, exquisite scripts that still left room for improvisation by actors, and intricately coordinated movement and cinematography that allowed for long takes so that much of Allen’s editing was done with the camera rather than in postproduction. The expectation was that his films would earn significantly more in foreign release than in the United States.
Stardust Memories (1980), in which Allen plays a filmmaker who is becoming increasingly contemptuous of his fans and his work, was apparently his attempt to wed the storytelling style of Federico Fellini (another of his idols) to his own particular vision. However, some critics found the film’s visual surrealism an uneasy companion to Allen’s familiar obsessions. Better received but unremarkable was A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982), a roundelay among six turn-of-the-20th-century vacationers (and an homage to Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night), which paired Allen on-screen with Mia Farrow for the first time.
Zelig (1983) created considerably more excitement, largely because of its groundbreaking use of period film footage as the backdrop for what is basically an amusing faux documentary (Robert Zemeckis would use an advanced form of this technique in Forrest Gump [1994]). Allen plays “human chameleon” Leonard Zelig, who has an uncanny ability to appear at the most critical junctures of history in the 1920s—listening to Adolf Hitler stir a crowd, watching Babe Ruth swat a home run—although he himself desires only anonymity.
Shot in black and white, the often zany Broadway Danny Rose (1984) was marred by an unevenness of tone. In it Allen played a marginal booker of oddball burlesque acts opposite Farrow, cast against type as a mobster’s girlfriend. Metaphysical musing is often central to Allen’s films, and in Broadway Danny Rose his character makes one of the filmmaker’s most epigrammatic postulates: “Acceptance, forgiveness, and love…that is a philosophy of life.” Charming but ultimately downbeat, The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) was the poignant story of a cinema-going Depression-era shop girl (Farrow) whose lacklustre life is enlivened when a swashbuckling actor (Jeff Daniels) literally walks off the screen and into her world.
After earning Academy Award nominations for the screenplays of Broadway Danny Rose and The Purple Rose of Cairo, Allen won that award for his next film, Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), a complex modern romance that examined the travails of three couples. Its superb ensemble cast included Farrow as Hannah; Michael Caine as her husband, who is smitten by one of Hannah’s sisters (Barbara Hershey); Dianne Wiest as another sister; and Allen, in a self-effacingly sweet performance as Hannah’s ex-husband. Radio Days (1987) was a nostalgic but rambling valentine to the New York City of Allen’s youth in the early 1940s and to the glory days of radio. Allen received yet another Academy Award nomination for its screenplay.
While September (1987) was an unwieldy return to the psychodramatic territory of Interiors, Allen fared better when he took a Bergmanesque approach with Another Woman (1988), in which Gena Rowlands was superb as a philosophy professor who undergoes a life-changing epiphany. Much of the credit for the film’s impact was due to the contribution of Sven Nykvist, the cinematographer for many of Bergman’s greatest films. Allen’s hilarious contribution to the triptych New York Stories (1989)—“Oedipus Wrecks,” about an attorney whose nagging mother (Mae Questel) transmogrifies into an omniscient spectre—was widely acknowledged to be the film’s strongest segment. Allen’s next project, Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), ranks among his finest films. An ambitious Fyodor Dostoyevsky-like meditation on the nature of evil and culpability, it centred on Martin Landau’s portrayal of an ophthalmologist who wrestles with guilt after ordering the murder of his mistress (Anjelica Huston) to prevent her from revealing their affair to his wife (Claire Bloom). In counterpoint, Allen plays a married documentary filmmaker who lusts after a producer (Farrow).
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9dbb7fe3368d83739bc35fe8f4ad0bd5 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Woody-Strode | Woody Strode | Woody Strode
Woody Strode, byname of Woodrow Wilson Woolwine Strode, (born July 28, 1914, Los Angeles, California, U.S.—died December 31, 1994, Glendora, California), American character actor who was part of director John Ford’s "family" of actors, appearing in nearly a dozen of Ford’s films. Strode also had a brief career as a professional gridiron football player and was among the first African Americans to play in the National Football League.
While a student at the University of California, Los Angeles, Strode starred on the football team along with two other African American players, Jackie Robinson and Kenny Washington. In 1946 Strode and Washington signed with the Los Angeles Rams, thus (along with two others) integrating professional football in the United States. After a single season with the Rams, Strode played football in Canada and also did a stint as a professional wrestler. He made his film debut in Sundown in 1941, but it was not until the 1950s that he worked regularly in the movie industry. He appeared as the king of Ethiopia in The Ten Commandments (1956). He also gave memorable performances in Spartacus (1960) and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), as well as the Ford-directed films Sergeant Rutledge (1960), Two Rode Together (1961), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). In Sergeant Rutledge Strode played the lead role of a cavalry officer wrongly accused of rape and murder. In 1968 he starred in Black Jesus, an Italian production of a story based on the life of African nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba.
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ec5a4f7a90847972c98028111437a229 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Woon-hyung-Lyuh | Woon-hyung Lyuh | Woon-hyung Lyuh
…of Korean Independence, headed by Woon-hyung Lyuh (Yŏ Un-hyŏng), who was closely associated with the leftists. On September 6 the delegates attending a “national assembly” that was called by the committee proclaimed the People’s Republic of Korea. But the U.S. military government, under Lieut. Gen. John R. Hodge, the commanding…
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a72b06018303618f5e53ea0b380138ca | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Wovoka | Wovoka | Wovoka
Wovoka, also called Jack Wilson, (born 1858?, Utah Territory—died October 1932, Walker River Indian Reservation, Nevada), Native American religious leader who spawned the second messianic Ghost Dance cult, which spread rapidly through reservation communities about 1890.
Wovoka’s father, Tavibo, was a Paiute shaman and local leader; he had assisted Wodziwob, a shaman whose millenarian visions inspired the Round Dance movement of the 1870s. Wovoka (whose name means “the Cutter”) worked during his early teens for a rancher, David Wilson, whose family name he adopted while among whites. The Wilsons employed a number of Paiutes (including Wovoka) on a seasonal basis. These employees resided together in a camp they built on the Wilson ranch, and they generally maintained traditional cultural practices throughout their employment.
By 1888 Wovoka himself had acquired a reputation as a spiritual leader; he began leading Round Dances about this time. In 1889 Wovoka told others that he had fallen into a trance state during which God informed him of momentous changes to come—that in two years the ancestors of his people would rise from the dead, buffalo would once again fill the plains, and the white colonizers would vanish. Wovoka also reported that God had provided instructions for ensuring these events: Indians were to accept American colonial hegemony, remain peaceful, and profess their faith in the resurrection of the dead (or ghosts) by taking part in a ritual dance, the so-called Ghost Dance. Wovoka’s following increased quickly, and belief in his prophecies spread to other tribes. Wovoka was worshipped far and wide as a new messiah, but in some areas his pacifist message became distorted through repeated retellings. Notable among his new followers were the Sioux, many of whom were militant and saw the movement as a promise of ultimate revenge against American usurpers.
The religious frenzy engendered by Ghost Dancing frightened American and immigrant settlers, particularly in the Dakotas, the traditional home of most of the Sioux tribes; concurrently, the U.S. military was concerned that Sitting Bull would try to exploit the movement to engineer an uprising. Relations between Native Americans and settlers grew increasingly hostile, culminating in the massacre of about 200 Sioux men, women, and children by U.S. troops at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on December 29, 1890. After this tragic incident many of Wovoka’s more militant followers despaired of Ghost Dance redemption, while others, particularly those from west of the Rocky Mountains, continued to practice Ghost Dance rituals as an integral part of indigenous culture. Though the popularity of the Ghost Dance religion waxed and waned over the 20th century and evolved toward a set of practices centred increasingly on individual rather than group worship, its tenets continued to be observed by some Native Americans in the early 21st century.
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72e7df139dd5768af83f4947945e92c4 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Wright-brothers | Wright brothers | Wright brothers
Wright brothers, American brothers, inventors, and aviation pioneers who achieved the first powered, sustained, and controlled airplane flight (1903). Wilbur Wright (April 16, 1867, near Millville, Indiana, U.S.—May 30, 1912, Dayton, Ohio) and his brother Orville Wright (August 19, 1871, Dayton—January 30, 1948, Dayton) also built and flew the first fully practical airplane (1905).
The Wright brothers invented the first airplane that could be controlled by the pilot. Among their many creations, they built the 1902 Wright glider, which was the first controlled glider with a movable rudder that allowed the pilot to more precisely control yaw, and the 1905 Wright flyer, which was the first practical flying machine.
Orville and Wilbur Wright made the first successful self-propelled sustained flight on December 17, 1903. The flight lasted 12 seconds, and the aircraft flew approximately 20 feet (6 metres) above the ground for 120 feet (36 metres).
The Wright brothers’ first successful self-propelled sustained flight occurred at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, in 1903. They had previously tested gliders at Kitty Hawk, a village on the Outer Banks of North Carolina.
On his mission to the Moon in 1969, U.S. astronaut Neil Armstrong took along small pieces of fabric and propeller from the original 1903 Wright flyer in his “personal preference kit,” a bag of items that each astronaut is allowed to take on a mission.
Katharine Wright was the younger sister of Orville and Wilbur Wright. She was instrumental in the promotion of the Wright brothers’ inventions in Europe, where she was seen as more charismatic and outgoing than her brothers. Along with her brothers, she was awarded the Legion of Honor in France.
Wilbur and Orville were the sons of Milton Wright, an ordained minister of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, and Susan Catherine Koerner Wright, whom Milton had met while he was training for the ministry and while Susan was a student at a United Brethren college in Hartsville, Indiana. Two boys, Reuchlin (1861–1920) and Lorin (1862–1939), were born to the couple before Wilbur was born on a farm near Millville. The young family then moved to Dayton, Ohio, so that Milton could take up duties as the editor of a church newspaper. In that city a pair of twins, Otis and Ida, were born and died in 1870. Orville arrived a year later, followed by Katharine (1874–1929).
Elected a bishop of the church in 1877, Milton spent long periods of time away from home visiting the Brethren congregations for which he was responsible. The family moved often: to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1878; to a farm near Richmond, Indiana, in 1881; and back to Dayton in 1884. The Wright children were educated in public schools and grew up, as Orville later explained, in a home where “there was always much encouragement to children to pursue intellectual interests; to investigate whatever aroused curiosity.” In a less-nourishing environment, Orville believed, “our curiosity might have been nipped long before it could have borne fruit.”
These were not tranquil years for Bishop Wright. As the leader of a conservative faction opposed to modernization in the church, he was involved in a 20-year struggle that led to a national schism in 1889 and was followed by multiple lawsuits for possession of church property. Even as these decades of crisis were approaching a conclusion, an entirely new conflict developed, this time within the small schismatic branch that Bishop Wright had led away from the original church. The resulting church disciplinary hearings and civil court cases continued up to the time of the bishop’s retirement in 1905.
Bishop Wright exercised an extraordinary influence on the lives of his children. Wilbur and Orville, like their father, were independent thinkers with a deep confidence in their own talents, an unshakable faith in the soundness of their judgment, and a determination to persevere in the face of disappointment and adversity. Those qualities, when combined with their unique technical gifts, help to explain the success of the Wright brothers as inventors. At the same time, the bishop’s rigid adherence to principle and disinclination to negotiate disputes may have had some influence on the manner in which the brothers, later in life, conducted the marketing of their invention.
Wilbur and Orville were the only members of the Wright family who did not attend college or marry. Wilbur’s plans to enter college came to an end when he was injured in a hockey accident in the winter of 1885–86. He spent the following three years recovering his health, reading extensively in his father’s library, assisting the bishop with his legal and church problems, and caring for his invalid mother, who died of tuberculosis in 1889.
Following their mother’s death, Orville, who had spent several summers learning the printing trade, persuaded Wilbur to join him in establishing a print shop. In addition to normal printing services, the brothers edited and published two short-lived local newspapers. They also published another newspaper, The Tattler, for Dayton’s African American community, which was edited by poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, a high-school classmate of Orville’s. They developed a local reputation for the quality of the presses that they designed, built, and sold to other printers. These printing presses were one of the first indications of the Wright brothers’ extraordinary technical ability and their unique approach to the solution of problems in mechanical design.
In 1892 the brothers opened a bicycle sales and repair shop, and they began to build bicycles on a small scale in 1896. They developed their own self-oiling bicycle wheel hub and installed a number of light machine tools in the shop. Profits from the print shop and the bicycle operation eventually were to fund the Wright brothers’ aeronautical experiments from 1899 to 1905. In addition, the experience of designing and building lightweight, precision machines of wood, wire, and metal tubing was ideal preparation for the construction of flying machines.
In later years the Wrights dated their fascination with flight to a small helicopter toy that their father had brought home from his travels when the family was living in Iowa. A decade later, they had read accounts of the work of the German glider pioneer Otto Lilienthal. But it was news reports of Lilienthal’s death in a glider crash in August 1896 that marked the beginning of their serious interest in flight. By 1899 the brothers had exhausted the resources of the local library and had written to the Smithsonian Institution for suggestions as to further reading in aeronautics. The following year they wrote to introduce themselves to Octave Chanute, a leading civil engineer and an authority on aviation who would remain a confidant of the brothers during the critical years from 1900 to 1905.
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