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0ef975cbf65c575c9140dcb06862f9e2 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Johann-Rudolf-Wettstein | Johann Rudolf Wettstein | Johann Rudolf Wettstein
Johann Rudolf Wettstein, (born 1594, Basel, Switz.—died April 1666, Basel), burgomaster of Basel who, at the close of the Thirty Years’ War, represented the Swiss Confederation at the Congress of Westphalia (in Münster, 1647–48), where he secured European recognition of the confederation’s independence and Habsburg renunciation of all claims to Swiss government.
A public notary, Wettstein entered the Venetian army in 1616 to escape his debts, wife, and family. Gradually gaining political prominence in Basel, he was elected burgomaster in 1645; he was officially chosen the following year to represent the Swiss Confederation at the impending peace conference at Münster. At the conference he won recognition of Swiss sovereignty and of his own diplomatic skill. Later, at Vienna (1650), he secured an imperial reaffirmation of complete Swiss autonomy.
In his capacity as burgomaster, Wettstein brutally suppressed a local peasant insurrection in 1653. He participated in the peace negotiations following the internecine Villmergen wars and opposed—ultimately without success—the continuing Swiss alliance with France.
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2bbb0abbf927a7e56e9b7892dc906be4 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Johann-Sebastian-Bach/Reputation-and-influence | Reputation and influence | Reputation and influence
For about 50 years after Bach’s death, his music was neglected. This was only natural; in the days of Haydn and Mozart, no one could be expected to take much interest in a composer who had been considered old-fashioned even in his lifetime—especially since his music was not readily available, and half of it (the church cantatas) was fast becoming useless as a result of changes in religious thought.
At the same time, musicians of the late 18th century were neither so ignorant of Bach’s music nor so insensitive to its influence as some modern authors have suggested. Emanuel Bach’s debt to his father was considerable, and Bach exercised a profound and acknowledged influence directly on Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.
After 1800 the revival of Bach’s music gained momentum. The German writer Johann Nikolaus Forkel published a study of Bach’s life and art in 1802 and acted as adviser to the publishers Hoffmeister and Kühnel, whose collected edition, begun in 1801, was cut short by the activities of Napoleon. By 1829 a representative selection of keyboard music was nonetheless available, although very few of the vocal works were published. But in that year the German musician Eduard Devrient and the German composer Felix Mendelssohn took the next step with the centenary performance of the St. Matthew Passion. It and the St. John Passion were both published in 1830; the Mass in B Minor followed (1832–45). The Leipzig publisher Peters began a collected edition of “piano” and instrumental works in 1837; the organ works followed in 1844–52.
Encouraged by Robert Schumann, the Bach-Gesellschaft (BG) was founded in the centenary year 1850, with the purpose of publishing the complete works. By 1900 all the known works had been printed, and the BG was succeeded by the Neue Bach-Gesellschaft (NBG), which exists still, organizing festivals and publishing popular editions. Its chief publication is its research journal, the Bach-Jahrbuch (from 1904). By 1950 the deficiencies of the BG edition had become painfully obvious, and the Bach-Institut was founded, with headquarters at Göttingen and Leipzig, to produce a new standard edition (the Neue Bach-Ausgabe, or NBA), a publication that eventually exceeded 100 volumes.
In retrospect, the Bach revival, reaching back to 1800, can be recognized as the first conspicuous example of the deliberate exhumation of old music, accompanied by biographical and critical studies. The revival also served as an inspiration and a model for subsequent work of a similar kind.
Among the biographical and critical works on Bach, the most important was the monumental study Johann Sebastian Bach, 2 vol. (1873–80), by the German musicologist Philipp Spitta, covering not only Bach’s life and works but also a good deal of the historical background. Although wrong in many details, the book is still indispensable to the Bach student.
The word Urtext (“original text”) may lead the uninitiated to suppose that they are being offered an exact reproduction of what Bach wrote. It must be understood that the autographs of many important works no longer exist. Therefore, Bach’s intentions often have to be pieced together from anything up to 20 sources, all different. Even first editions and facsimiles of autograph manuscripts are not infallible guides to Bach’s intentions. In fact, they are often dangerously misleading, and practical musicians should take expert advice before consulting them. Editions published between 1752 and about 1840 are little more than curiosities, chiefly interesting for the light they throw on the progress of the revival.
No comprehensive edition is trustworthy throughout: neither Peters nor the BG nor even the NBA. Nevertheless, it is advisable to begin by finding out whether the music desired has been published in the NBA.
(For additional music by Bach, see Concerto No. 2 in D Minor for Solo Keyboard, BWV 593; the Leipzig chorale “Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland” (“Now Come, Saviour of All”), BWV 659; Concerto No. 1 in D Major for Solo Keyboard, BWV 972; Sonata No. 1 in G Minor for Solo Violin, BWV 1001; Partita No. 1 in B Minor for Solo Violin, BWV 1002; Sonata No. 2 in A Minor for Solo Violin, BWV 1003; Partita No. 2 in D Minor for Solo Violin, BWV 1004; Sonata No. 3 in C Major for Solo Violin, BWV 1005; Partita No. 3 in E Major for Solo Violin, BWV 1006; Suite No. 1 in G Major for Unaccompanied Cello, BWV 1007; Suite No. 2 in D Minor for Unaccompanied Cello, BWV 1008; Suite No. 3 in C Major for Unaccompanied Cello, BWV 1009; Suite No. 4 in E-flat Major for Unaccompanied Cello, BWV 1010; Suite No. 5 in C Minor for Unaccompanied Cello, BWV 1011; Suite No. 6 in D Major for Unaccompanied Cello, BWV 1012; Concerto for Two Violins in D Minor, BWV 1043 (first movement); Concerto for Two Violins in D Minor, BWV 1043 (second movement); Brandenburg Concerto No. 4 in G Major, BWV 1049; Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 in D Major, BWV 1050; and Brandenburg Concerto No. 6 in B-flat Major, BWV 1051.
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e0a292e2cc6f525097bb7951506eb831 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Johann-Wilhelm-Lanz | Johann Wilhelm Lanz | Johann Wilhelm Lanz
Figures by J.W. Lanz, who also worked in porcelain here and at Frankenthal, are to be seen. Much work was done in the fashionable Rococo style, including objects, such as clock cases and wall cisterns, and tureens in the form of fruit and vegetables. Both faience and…
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f4388525e005fe85885173c1e22fee0f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Johann-Wolfgang-von-Goethe/Faust | Faust | Faust
Work on Faust accompanied Goethe throughout his adult life. Of a possible plan in 1769 to dramatize the story of the man who sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for earthly fulfillment, perhaps including his ultimate redemption, no firm evidence survives. In its first known form, Goethe’s version already contains the feature that most decisively differentiates it from its predecessors, the 16th-century German chapbooks about Faust and the puppet plays ultimately deriving from English dramatist Christopher Marlowe’s adaptation of those chapbooks for the stage: the tragic story of Faust’s love for a town girl, Margarete (Gretchen), and of her seduction, infanticide, and execution. This theme is entirely of Goethe’s invention; it was probably suggested to him by a case in Frankfurt in 1771–72, and it clearly links the play with other works that express his sense of guilt at abandoning Friederike Brion in 1771. This earliest manuscript version (usually called the Urfaust), to which Goethe probably added little after 1775, is a Sturm und Drang drama in a balladesque, sometimes mock-16th-century style—intensely poetic, both visually and verbally—in which the self-assertion of the magician Faust meets its nemesis in the Gretchen catastrophe. The precise nature of Faust’s agreement with the diabolical figure Mephistopheles remains inexplicit, however.
That issue was still unresolved in the scenes Goethe wrote for the first published version, Faust: ein Fragment (1790), which seems to suggest that the Gretchen story was destined to become merely a subordinate episode in Faust’s career through the gamut of human experience. Only in Faust: Part One (1808) does Goethe commit himself to his second great divergence from the traditional fable: his Faust now makes not a contract with the Devil but a wager. Faust wagers that, however much of human life the Devil shows him, he will find none of it satisfying—and if he is wrong (i.e., if he is satisfied), he is willing to give up living altogether. Faust now appears as a singularly modern figure, racing through satisfactions but condemned by his own choice to discard them all. His tragedy (from 1808 the word appears in the play’s subtitle) is that he cannot experience life as, for example, Gretchen experiences it: not as a potential source of satisfaction but as a matter of love, or of duty. This theme is common to both the first and the second parts of the play.
Goethe had always wanted to dramatize that part of the traditional story which shows Faust summoning up Helen of Troy, the quintessence of the beauty of the ancient world, and the logic of the wager required that Faust should at least taste the experience of public and political life. Faust: Part Two (1832) thus became an extraordinary poetic phantasmagoria, covering—as Goethe acknowledged—3,000 years of history and mingling evocations of Classical landscapes and mythological figures with literary allusions from Homer to Lord Byron and with satire of the Holy Roman Empire, the French Revolution, and the capitalism and imperialism of the 1820s. Yet it is all held together by the thematic device of the wager and by structural parallels with Part One, and at the end Faust is redeemed, not by his own efforts but by the intercession of Gretchen and the divine love he has known in her. Part Two is in a sense a poetic reckoning with Goethe’s own times, with their irresistible dynamism and their alienation from his Classical ideal of fulfilled humanity. As with much of Goethe’s later work, its richness, complexity, and literary daring began to be appreciated only in the 20th century.
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f953c727e89196da04d22a75eb6e3ed8 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Johann-Wolfgang-von-Goethe/Friendship-with-Schiller-1794-1805 | Friendship with Schiller (1794–1805) | Friendship with Schiller (1794–1805)
The friendship with Schiller began a new period in Goethe’s life, in some ways one of the happiest and, from a literary point of view, one of the most productive, though not all that was produced was of the highest quality. In The Horae he published a collection of short stories, Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten (“Conversations of German Émigrés”; Eng. trans. The German Refugees), which were found tedious, and the Roman Elegies, which were found scandalous, and serialized a translation of the autobiography of Florentine Mannerist artist Benvenuto Cellini, which was acceptable but unexciting. Schiller soon lost interest in the journal, which ceased publication after three years. Perhaps it had served its purpose simply by initiating the collaboration with Goethe, which was closer, longer, and on a higher level than any comparable friendship in world literature. The poets began a correspondence, which ran to over a thousand letters, and for over 10 years they discussed each other’s works and projects, as well as those of their contemporaries, in conversation and writing. Both profited incalculably from the relationship. Schiller provided a constant commentary while Goethe rewrote, completed, and published his novel begun nearly 20 years before, now titled Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–96; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship). In the new version of Wilhelm Meister’s story, his involvement with the theatre appears as an episode, perhaps an error (though errors are inevitable, Goethe suggests), on a journey toward self-determination within the limits of the given world. The novel’s structure is now provided not by the original, simple logic of the quest but by a complex series of sexual entanglements and symbolic leitmotifs. The rewriting was therefore an immensely demanding task, but, as it came to an end, Goethe seemed to get a second wind. In the spring of 1796 he inaugurated a new series of elegies with one of his finest poems, the “idyll” Alexis und Dora. In the autumn he began an epic in the Homeric manner but set in contemporary Germany and dealing with the response of ordinary small-town people to the French Revolution and the associated wars: Herrmann und Dorothea, published in 1797, one of the most successful (and lucrative) of his works. (A second hexameter epic, on the subject of Achilles, did not get beyond the first canto.) At the same time, he and Schiller jointly composed a collection of satirical epigrams in the manner of Roman poet Martial (Xenien [“Xenia”]), which caused a literary furor and temporarily made them both very unpopular.
In 1797, for the next issue of the annual almanac in which the Xenia appeared, Goethe and Schiller wrote a series of narrative poems (soon called “ballads”). With these Goethe returned to rhymed verse on a grand scale after some 10 years of writing in Classical metres and blank verse. At the same time, he took up again his great play in rhymed verse, Faust, and worked on it as the mood took him over the next five years. He decided (probably in 1800) to divide it into two parts, of which the first at least could be completed soon, since it would cover all that he had so far written and required merely that certain gaps be filled.
These new beginnings were associated with a fundamental shift in Goethe’s attitude to the Classical past. Ever since the Italian journey, Goethe had thought of Weimar as a place where Classical culture might be brought to life once more. That belief had, for example, led to the building of the Roman House, a hunting lodge in the ducal park modelled on an Italian villa—a picturesque, Palladian counterpart to Goethe’s own cottage. On a far grander scale, Goethe had been directing the rebuilding of the ducal palace, destroyed by fire in 1774: the exterior was unostentatious, but the interior decor was one of the earliest examples of the full Neoclassical style in Germany and had a lasting influence. But it was becoming obvious that the new world which had begun with the French Revolution in 1789 was going to make it ever more difficult to recover the spirit of antiquity. In 1796 Napoleon’s Italian campaign had cut Goethe off from Italy just as he was planning to return there on the 10th anniversary of his first departure from Carlsbad, and a halfhearted attempt to carry out his plan the following year was broken off in Switzerland. Because Napoleon had forced Pope Pius VI to dispatch to Paris his 100 best works of art, Goethe would not have found the Italy he had sought in 1786 anyway. Goethe never again set out to cross the Alps but accepted that everything that Italy had come to stand for in his mind—as the place of classic human perfection, in nature and in art—could be only an ideal to inspire him: he could not expect to experience it again as part of his normal life. This fundamental recognition that the accidents of history ordinarily prevent the achievement of human perfection, which is otherwise in principle wholly possible, is what Goethe came to call Entsagung (“renunciation”).
Goethe recognized that the modern world is not a Classical world, but he was also certain that the Classical ideal was infinitely superior to anything his contemporaries could offer. In 1798 he started a new journal, Die Propyläen (“The Propylaea”), to preach an uncompromising gospel of the superiority of the ancients to the moderns. It lasted only two years, but in 1799, to carry on its work, he inaugurated a series of art competitions in which subjects from Classical antiquity were judged according to a rigid canon opposed to the great changes then taking place in German art, especially in landscape and religious painting. Goethe’s position was paradoxical and ironic in the extreme. On the one hand, he thought the modern movement of revolution in politics, idealism in philosophy, and romanticism in literature was irresistible and could be ignored only at one’s peril. He was on friendly terms with the Romantic theorists August Wilhelm von Schlegel and Friedrich von Schlegel, with the Romantic artists Philipp Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich, and with the post-Kantian idealist philosophers Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who all, thanks to him, taught philosophy at Jena. On the other hand, he thought that the Classical world was the only true ideal and that the modern world was therefore profoundly misguided. Something of this new understanding went into his recasting of Faust, and Faust, as the representative of modern man, took on some of the characteristics of a philosophical idealist. Goethe’s feelings were more directly expressed in the last conventional drama he wrote, Die natürliche Tochter (“The Natural Daughter”), which he began planning in 1799 and which was finally completed, produced, and published in 1803. In it the French Revolution appears as the enemy of beauty and as inaugurating a new age in which the Classical world will survive in middle-class culture rather than in the courts that in the 18th century had been its home.
Goethe’s increasing inability to write for the stage of his own time was concealed by Schiller’s enormous productivity. Goethe had taken on the management of the Weimar court theatre in 1791, had it rebuilt to his own design in 1798, and thereafter put on first or early performances of seven major plays by Schiller in six years. But by 1803 the high point of classical Weimar culture had passed. That summer saw the opening of the new ducal palace, but it also saw the first effects of the Napoleonic reorganization of Germany, which had been set in motion by the Final Recess (Hauptschluss) drawn up by a committee of princes, the Reichsdeputation, earlier that year. One result was that the University of Jena lost many of its most distinguished professors, including Schelling, to newer and wealthier institutions elsewhere. Jena never again rose to the dominant position it had enjoyed in the 1790s. In December 1803 Herder died, and in early 1805 Schiller and Goethe both fell seriously ill. Schiller died. Goethe recovered but felt that, with Schiller dead, he had lost “the half of my existence.”
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acc765fc434fe1752c9374a58abbb6dd | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Johann-Wolfgang-von-Goethe/Italian-journey-1786-88 | Italian journey (1786–88) | Italian journey (1786–88)
On September 3, 1786, Goethe slipped away from the Bohemian spa of Carlsbad and traveled as rapidly as he could by coach to the Brenner Pass and down through the South Tirol to Verona, Vicenza, and Venice in Italy. The warm autumn, the scenery around Lake Garda, and the architecture of Andrea Palladio promised to fulfill all his hopes. There may also have been some unsatisfactory encounters with prostitutes, his first sexual relations in many years, if not in his life. But his real aim was to reach Rome, the centre of the civilized world and origin of the Holy Roman Empire; the Eternal City had become a symbolic goal for him, like the Brocken or the St. Gotthard Pass, and he expected from it some crowning revelation. On October 29 he arrived at last, only to find its ruinous state a painful disappointment. After finishing the rewriting of Iphigenia, which he was putting into blank verse before publishing it, and after sitting for what has become his best-known portrait (by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein), he decided in the spring of 1787 to move on to Naples, as his father had done before him.
As a geologist, Goethe climbed Vesuvius; as a connoisseur of ancient art, he visited Pompeii and Herculaneum. He consulted Hackert about his own drawing and joined the circle of the British ambassador in Naples, Sir William Hamilton, and the actress who was later to be, as Emma, Lady Hamilton, the ambassador’s wife and Lord Nelson’s mistress. But none of this could provide the culmination that Goethe had failed to find in Rome. He pressed on to territory his father had not touched, to Sicily, and here at last he felt “that now my journey is taking on a shape.” He had reached a landscape impregnated with a Greek past, in which Homer’s Odyssey seemed not fanciful but realistic; later he even toyed with the idea that Homer might have been a Sicilian. Goethe never went to mainland Greece, but in Sicily he thought he had seen the setting of Greek culture, and with some justification. He circled the island from Palermo, seeing the unfinished Doric temple at Segesta and the ruins of ancient Agrigentum, cutting across the interior to see Enna (where, according to myth, Proserpine was taken down into Hades), visiting the Greek amphitheatre at Taormina, and climbing one of the lesser peaks of Mount Etna, the place where the philosopher Empedocles was said to have ended his life. During this tour he drafted some scenes for a drama, Nausikaa, which was never completed but contains some of his most beautiful verse, evocative of the Mediterranean islands and, flitting about them, the almost audible ghosts of Classical antiquity. From Messina he returned to Naples, from which he visited the best-preserved of all Doric temples, at Paestum. Together with the Sicilian landscape, these temples provided him with the satisfaction for which he had been looking: a conception, or “idea,” as he called it, of the ancient world, which brought its literature alive to him as Rome had not been able to. He left Naples in June 1787 expecting to pass quickly through Rome and to be in Frankfurt in August to spend the last months of his leave with his mother.
But Charles Augustus, who had already extended Goethe’s leave, generously allowed him to live in Rome for another year. What Goethe came to value most about this time, though, was not the opportunity of seeing ancient and Renaissance works of art and architecture firsthand but rather the opportunity of living as nearly as possible what he thought of as the ancient way of life, experiencing the benign climate and fertile setting in which human beings and nature were in harmony. He was also pretending to be one of the colony of expatriate German artists in Rome (he was particularly friendly with the Swiss-born painter Angelica Kauffmann) and arranging there with a young widow of whom little is known his first protracted sexual liaison. His return to Weimar in June 1788 was extremely reluctant.
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9474323fd41ce3a3debc908a936b6b74 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Johann-Wolfgang-von-Goethe/Legacy | Legacy | Legacy
Goethe was a contemporary of thinkers—Kant, Herder, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt—who carried out an intellectual revolution that is at the basis of most modern thinking about religion, art, society, and thought itself. He knew most of these people well, furthered the careers of several of them, promoted many of their ideas, and expressed his reaction to them in his literary works. The age they helped to make was an age dominated by the idea of freedom, of individual self-determination, whether in the intellectual and moral sphere or in practical politics—the age both of German Idealism and of the American and French revolutions. If there is a single theme running through Goethe’s huge and varied literary output, it is his reflection on subjectivity—his showing how in ever-changing ways we make our own selves, the world we inhabit, and the meaning of our lives. Yet he also shows how, without leaving that self-made world, we collide all the time with the reality of things. Ultimately, Goethe believes, this reality is not alien or hostile to us, because, whatever it is, we—and our capacity for experience—ultimately derive from it too. Goethe therefore calls it Nature, that out of which we are born.
Because of his unusually independent personal circumstances, Goethe was able to live through the consequences of the intellectual revolution as a free man, with no traditional religious or social attachments. (His eminent social and political position he owed to his friendship of more than 50 years with Duke Charles Augustus, but he could have been, if he had chosen otherwise, a wealthy lawyer and man of affairs in his native city of Frankfurt.) He led a long and productive life in which his energy and originality never slackened. He was, those who met him agreed, an intensely and uncannily fascinating man, and part of the secret of his fascination was that he was always changing: he was called a chameleon or a Proteus or simply inconsistent. In particular, his writings show a remarkable, but usually discreetly phrased, awareness of the permanently shifting character of human sexuality. His public never knew what he was going to do or write next: none of his works is like any of the others—he never substantially repeated himself. Yet he remained faithful to his duke, to his wife, to Weimar (his adopted homeland), to his rejection of Christianity, and to his literary vocation. The attractive power of his writing, which has not diminished with time, perhaps lies in the extraordinary strength of personality that it radiates, the certainty it conveys of an inexplicit unity underlying all its diversity, and the promise it seems to offer of a disclosure of the secret nature of personality itself.
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cce488669b8d3237be1b5dd219128c2a | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Johann-Wolfgang-von-Goethe/Napoleonic-period-1805-16 | Napoleonic period (1805–16) | Napoleonic period (1805–16)
Goethe responded to the death of Schiller by winding up the projects that had dominated his middle years. In 1805 he started preparing a new collected edition of his literary works with the publisher Johann Friedrich Cotta (see Cotta family), who also began the separate printing of his largest work, Zur Farbenlehre (“On the Theory of Colour”; Eng. trans. Goethe’s Color Theory), and in 1806 Goethe sent to him the completed manuscript of part one of Faust. War, however, delayed publication of Faust until 1808. On October 14, 1806, Napoleon routed the Prussian armies at the Battle of Jena. Weimar, 12 miles from the battle, was subsequently occupied and sacked, though Goethe’s house was spared, thanks to Napoleon’s admiration for the author of Werther. Christiane showed great courage in keeping control of the soldiers billeted with the family, and, probably in order to secure her position in these dangerous days, Goethe formally married her in the vestry of the court church five days after the battle. In an obvious reaction against this decision finally to commit himself, Goethe shortly afterward fell briefly and passionately in love with an unremarkable young lady, Wilhelmine Herzlieb, extricating himself from the entanglement only with considerable pain.
The period after the death of Schiller and the Battle of Jena was at first a sombre one. Goethe endeavoured to maintain Weimar’s cultural position by looking for a successor to Schiller as principal dramatist but failed to appreciate the genius of Heinrich von Kleist, whose comedy Der zerbrochene Krug (The Broken Pitcher) he produced in 1808. He drew a large number of strange and threatening landscapes, began a sequel—Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (“Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Wandering”; Eng. trans. Wilhelm Meister’s Travels), with the telling subtitle oder, die Entsagenden (“or, The Renunciants”)—to his earlier Wilhelm Meister novel, and wrote his mysterious and tragic novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809; Elective Affinities) and the related tragic fragment of a “festival play,” Pandora (1810). Elective Affinities purports to tell a Romantic story of the conflict between social conventions and passion—or Fate, or animal magnetism, or chemical affinity (all explanations are canvassed)—in the lives of four comfortable and cultivated people. Through the refractive medium of an exceptionally misleading narration, however, we glimpse a much bleaker world in which moral choice is hard, in which there are no consolations, and in which Romantic paraphernalia—whether speculative science, artistic medievalism, or landscape gardening—is a delusive distraction. But as he completed the novel, Goethe’s mood began to lift. In 1808 he met Napoleon during the Congress of Erfurt and was made a knight of the Legion of Honour. He became reconciled to Napoleon’s rule, regarding it as a more or less legitimate successor to the Holy Roman Empire, and, in the relatively peaceful interval after the Austrian war against France in 1809, a new serenity entered his writing. A wryly humorous poem on the subject of impotence and marital fidelity, “Das Tagebuch” (1810; “The Journal”), suppressed by Goethe’s heirs on grounds of obscenity until the 20th century, reflects this new realism, and for the sophisticated and worldly wise Continental public that he met on his visits to the Bohemian spas of Carlsbad and Teplitz, Goethe composed and published the first three parts of his autobiography, Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit (1811–13; From My Life: Poetry and Truth).
The years 1814 to 1817 were, however, a disturbed period during which no visits to Carlsbad took place. After the overthrow of Napoleon’s dominion by allied troops at the Battle of Leipzig (1813), Goethe, who had conspicuously failed to share in the nationalist fervour of the German Wars of Liberation, was asked to write a festival play for the king of Prussia to celebrate the allies’ achievement. He obliged with Des Epimenides Erwachen (1815; “Epimenides Awakes”), but the play shows that his feelings about the great victory were ambiguous. He had to be pleased that the Treaty of Paris signed in 1815 provided for the works of art looted from Italy to be returned, but he was no friend of reaction, whether political or cultural. The Holy Alliance—a loose organization of Europe’s most repressive rulers formed in 1815 ostensibly to promote Christian principles in political affairs—was as little to his taste as the Christianizing art of the new school of Nazarene painters, and he felt that the values he esteemed had been better served in other times and places. Alienation from the modern age is the undertone in all his work of this period, which branches out in three very different directions.
First, in his autobiographical writings he took up in 1813 the story of his journey to Italy and Sicily in 1786–87 and made of it an apology for an anti-Romantic view both of art and of Italy, eliminating all the uncertainty and inconsequentiality of the actual events and stylizing the journey into a supremely self-confident tour of the Classical world (Italiänische Reise [1816–17; Italian Journey], which takes the story only as far as his final departure from Naples). Second, in 1814 Goethe accepted an invitation to visit the Neckar region and the Rhineland in western Germany, where his hosts, the brothers Boisserée, had amassed a great collection of medieval art from destroyed and secularized churches, some of it documenting the beginnings of oil painting. Goethe was overwhelmed by the art of colour in this collection, particularly by what he took to be the work of the 15th-century Flemish painter Jan van Eyck, and expressed a new appreciation of medieval and Christian culture in several major essays (“Kunst und Altertum am Rhein, Main, und Neckar” [1816; “Art and Antiquity on the Rhine, Main, and Neckar”]; “Sankt-Rochus-Fest zu Bingen” [1817; “Feast of St. Roch in Bingen”]). He also approved of the plan to complete the unfinished cathedral in Cologne according to the rediscovered original drawings. But his friends did not immediately appreciate that Goethe might recognize a past achievement but still not think it a suitable ideal to inspire the contemporary artist.
Third, just before leaving for western Germany, Goethe made a literary discovery: a translation of the medieval Persian poetry of Ḥāfeẓ. He started to write verse of his own in the style of the translation. In Frankfurt he met Marianne Jung, just 30 years old and about to marry the 54-year-old banker Johann Jakob von Willemer; Goethe and Marianne took to writing each other love poems in the Ḥāfeẓ manner and continued to write them, both after Goethe had returned to Weimar and when he visited Frankfurt again in 1815. Out of this game grew a new collection of lyric verse, of which the hybrid, self-consciously pseudo-Oriental quality was acknowledged by Goethe in its title: West-östlicher Divan (“The Parliament of East and West”; Eng. trans. Poems of the East and West). Goethe was fleeing from the upheavals of his own time. But in 1816 he was cruelly reminded that he could not flee present reality entirely. His wife died in June, probably of epilepsy. He abandoned a third visit to the Rhineland, and after 1817 only very few poems were added to the Divan, which was published in 1819.
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1ab158873b6959c8f68d424061483bfa | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Johann-Wolfgang-von-Goethe/Return-to-Weimar-and-the-French-Revolution-1788-94 | Return to Weimar and the French Revolution (1788–94) | Return to Weimar and the French Revolution (1788–94)
Charles Augustus crowned his generosity, however, by agreeing to a wholly new basis for Goethe’s presence in his duchy: Goethe was to be relieved of virtually all routine administrative tasks and freed to concentrate on the task of being a poet. Goethe resolved to preserve as much as he could of the Roman atmosphere in Weimar, set about hiring artists he had met in Italy, and at once—before there was time for any second thoughts—took himself a mistress, Christiane Vulpius, the daughter of the duke’s late archivist. She bore Goethe a son, August, on December 25, 1789. She was a busy and very competent housewife, but Weimar aristocratic society was merciless to her and grew suspicious of her lover. Goethe refused to undergo the church ceremony that was the only way of being legally married, and so her very existence could not formally be acknowledged. Frau von Stein suffered a kind of nervous collapse, and all but the most superficial communication between her and Goethe ceased.
In literary terms the Italian journey had not been a particularly successful time: Egmont had been completed, though with a shift of focus that blurred its political point, and some minor plays had been rewritten and ruined in the process. Almost no lyric poems had been written. Goethe had become taken with the notion that art was impersonal, and in this he was perhaps affected by the ideas of the aesthetician Karl Philipp Moritz, whom he had met in Rome and who freely avowed an idolatrous worship of Goethe, whom he called “God.” These ideas continued to constrain Goethe for some time, but the two years after his return from Italy saw a resurgence of personal poetry, if in a more distanced style. His misery at leaving Italy found an outlet in the play Torquato Tasso (1790; Eng. trans. Torquato Tasso), the first tragedy in European literature with a poet as its hero, which was written largely in 1788–89, though it had been begun in 1780. In richly plangent verse but at inordinately untheatrical length, Tasso descends into madness, uncomprehended by the court around him. In old age Goethe acknowledged the closeness of this story of self-destruction to that of Werther. The erotic poems Goethe wrote in the first months of his love for Christiane, some of the earliest German imitations of Classical elegiac couplets, are among his most remarkable achievements. Later published (in part) as the Römische Elegien (Roman Elegies)—their conventional, though not their original, title—they only confirmed Frau von Stein’s view of her rival as a harlot.
By his 40th birthday, in 1789, Goethe had all but completed the collected edition of his works, including a revision of Werther, 16 plays, and a volume of poems. The only fragmentary drama it contained was Faust, which he saw no chance yet of finishing and which appeared in print for the first time in 1790 as Faust: Ein Fragment. In the same year, Goethe spent two months in and around Venice, and in the autumn he accompanied Charles Augustus to Silesia and Kraków, but the literary rewards of these journeys were slight: distichs in the Classical manner on his experiences, some of them bitterly satirical of contemporary political and intellectual developments. Together with some of the shorter poems on Christiane, they appeared in 1795 in the collection now known as the Venetianische Epigramme (Venetian Epigrams).
The years from 1788 to 1794 were lonely years for Goethe. His household was warm and happy enough, though no second child survived from Christiane’s repeated pregnancies. But outside the house, apart from Herder, who was increasingly disenchanted with Weimar, his only close friend was the duke. Personal loyalty to Charles Augustus partly explains Goethe’s hostility from the start to the French Revolution, of which Herder was a vocal supporter, and his accompanying Charles Augustus on campaigns against France in 1792 and 1793. These campaigns were Goethe’s first direct experience of war, and he found them a nightmare. He was lucky to survive the disastrous retreat from Valmy, in France, and to return home in December 1792, but he was back on campaign in 1793, observing the siege and virtual destruction of French-occupied Mainz. As a reward for his loyal support, Charles Augustus presented him with the freehold of the house on the Frauenplan in Weimar, which he remodelled into the form that has been preserved to the present day and which now also houses the Goethe National Museum.
Goethe’s distance from the Revolution can be overstated, but, unlike many of his contemporaries, he clearly understood that Germany’s political, social, and economic circumstances were so different from those of France that there could be no question of simply importing Revolutionary principles. He had a distaste for the hypocrisy of German intellectuals who ate the bread of princes while preaching their abolition, and his political attitude has been well described as “enlightened feudalism.” He disliked the militarism and centralism of modern, would-be rational states such as Prussia or, later, Napoleon’s France (which he thought promised “hell on earth”); he felt at home in Germany’s multiplicity of states small enough for rulers and ruled to have a sense of personal obligation to each other; he believed in the possibility, and necessity, of gradual and rational reform. But within the federal and feudal structure he thought established authority had an overriding right and duty to impose order, and he had little interest in procedures of representation or theories of the popular will. The creed was subtle, pragmatic, and benevolently paternalist, but it would be a travesty to see Goethe as a servile courtier or unprincipled egoist, though many have seen him in this light during his lifetime and afterward.
After the remarkable effort of completing his collected edition, Goethe seems not to have known where to go next as a poet. A new prose drama, Der Gross-Cophta (1792; “The Grand Kofta”), was a failure on the stage in 1791. A satire on Freemasonry, it was also the first of several unsatisfactory or fragmentary attempts to deal in a literary form with recent events in France (Der Bürgergeneral [1793; “The Citizen-General”]; Die Aufgeregten [1817; “Agitation”], written in 1793; Das Mädchen von Oberkirch [1895; “The Maid of Oberkirch”], written in 1795). As an exercise in political satire and in German equivalents of Classical metres, he put Johann Christoph Gottsched’s prose translation of the medieval stories of Reynard the Fox into hexameters (Reineke Fuchs, written in 1793 and published the following year).
Perhaps by way of compensation for his lack of literary success, he turned to science. In 1790 he published his theory of the principles of botany, Versuch, die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären (“Essay in Elucidation of the Metamorphosis of Plants”; Eng. trans. in Goethe’s Botany), an attempt to show that all plant forms are determined by a process of alternating expansion and contraction of a basic unit, the leaf. He also began to try to apply the same principle to anatomy in order to explain the skeletal development of vertebrates. This concern with apparent structure—for which he later coined the term Morphologie (“morphology”)—was not fundamentally different from the impulse that had originally brought him to geology. In 1791, however, a completely new scientific issue began to obsess him: the theory of colour. Convinced that Sir Isaac Newton was wrong to assume that white light could be broken into light of different colours, Goethe proposed a new approach of his own. Colour was to be seen as emerging from the mingling of light and darkness. At first he attempted, unconvincingly, to expound these ideas as new, alternative laws of physics (Beiträge zur Optik [1791–92; Optical Essays]). Later, however, he saw that it is of the essence of colour to require cooperation between the physical behaviour of light and the human perceptual apparatus. Goethe’s colour theory has real originality as a theory of vision rather than as a theory of light. In making this change to what one might call a more subjective science, Goethe was greatly helped by his study of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, which was completely transforming the German intellectual landscape and was in particular being vigorously furthered in the University of Jena. The openness to Kant in turn made it easier for Goethe to respond positively when in 1794 one of Kant’s most prominent disciples, the poet and dramatist Friedrich Schiller, who was then living in Jena, suggested that he and Goethe should collaborate on a new journal, Die Horen (The Horae), intended to give literature a voice in an age increasingly dominated by politics.
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c0b49fb792465d3439cf48da219fb1ea | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Johannes-Andreas-Brinkman | Johannes Andreas Brinkman | Johannes Andreas Brinkman
Johannes Andreas Brinkman, (born March 22, 1902, Rotterdam, Neth.—died May 6, 1949, Rotterdam), Dutch architect particularly noted for his role in the design of the van Nelle tobacco factory, Rotterdam, one of the most architecturally important industrial buildings of the 1920s and one of the finest examples of modern architecture in the Netherlands.
Brinkman attended the Delft Technical University and in 1925 joined the architect Lodewijk Cornelis van der Vlugt. That firm, with the participation of Mart Stam, designed the van Nelle factory (1928–30), whose unbroken expanses of windows convey a strong feeling of lightness and transparency. The architectural firm, in association with W. van Tijen, also designed the Bergpolder apartment building in Rotterdam (1933–34), an outstanding example of modern apartment design. In 1937, after van der Vlugt’s death, Brinkman worked with J.H. van den Broek.
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0f631eeee7331ed1f77afb52848890c2 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Johannes-Bjarni-Jonasson | Jóhannes Bjarni Jónasson | Jóhannes Bjarni Jónasson
Jóhannes Bjarni Jónasson, also called Jóhannes Jónasson Úr Kötlum, (born November 4, 1899, Goddastadir, Dalasýsla, Iceland—died April 27, 1972, Reykjavík), Icelandic poet and reformer whose works reflect his resistance to the political and economic trends that he perceived as threatening Iceland’s traditional democracy.
The son of a poor farmer, Jónasson studied at Reykjavík Teacher’s Training College and worked first as a peripatetic rural teacher and later as a teacher in Reykjavík until he retired to the country as a full-time writer.
Jónasson’s poetic development mirrors the major literary and social trends in 20th-century Iceland. His early works, in the collections Bí bí og blaka (1926; “Sleep, Baby, Sleep”) and Álftirnar kvaka (1929; “The Swans Are Singing”), are Neoromantic and lyrical in form and express a love of nature. Neoromanticism gave way to socialism in the 1930s, however, as a result of the Depression in Iceland, and his third book of poetry, Ég læt sem ég sofi (1932; “I Pretend to Sleep”), reflects this change. The poem “Frelsi” (“Freedom”) was featured in the first volume of Raudir pennar (1935; “Red Pens”), a socialist literary periodical of the time.
The mood and style of Jónasson’s poetry underwent another change with the volume Sjödægra (1955; “Seven Days”), written not in traditional verse form but experimenting with modernistic imagery. The bitter collection Óljód (1962; “Anti-Poems”) dissonantly attacked the resignation and apathy of the welfare society, while Jónasson’s last book, Ný og nid (1970; “Waxing Moon and Waning Moon”), voiced the hope that Iceland’s new generation would continue the struggle to overcome the ideological confusion that had prevailed, in his view, ever since the conclusion of World War II.
After the war, Jónasson also published four novels, but his prose never reached the formal and political level of his poetry. In 1948, as “Anonymous,” he published Annarlegar tungur (“Strange Tongues”), which included translations of modern poets such as T.S. Eliot and E.E. Cummings. His authorship was not revealed until the late 1950s.
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c143e8b3d42ff1f9452fc83e839b4ff1 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Johannes-Cochlaeus | Johannes Cochlaeus | Johannes Cochlaeus
Johannes Cochlaeus, original name Johannes Dobeneck, or Dobneck, (born 1479, Wendelstein, near Nürnberg—died Jan. 10, 1552, Breslau, Silesia), German Humanist and a leading Roman Catholic opponent of Martin Luther.
Educated at the University of Cologne (1504–10), Cochlaeus became rector of the Latin School of St. Lawrence, Nürnberg (1510–15), where he published several textbooks that notably improved instructional methods. Ordained priest while in Rome (1517–19), Cochlaeus returned to Germany to become, successively, dean at Frankfurt am Main (where in 1520 he first engaged in the Reformation controversies), canon at Mainz (1526), and court chaplain to Duke George of Saxony (1529). A pamphlet against King Henry VIII of England caused him to be transferred to Meissen as canon (1535). When George died in 1539, he was succeeded by his Lutheran brother Henry, and Cochlaeus was compelled to leave Saxony, where he was no longer safe. He became canon at Breslau (1539) and, after holding benefices in Eichstätt and Mainz, he returned to Breslau in 1549.
Cochlaeus’ early sympathy with Luther changed c. 1520 into unremitting criticism. As adviser to papal nuncios and other ecclesiastical and secular dignitaries, he was prominent at several assemblies that strove to mend the religious split, including the Diet of Worms (1521); the diets of Nürnberg (1522–23) and Speyer (1526); the Diet of Augsburg (1530), where he was one of the theologians selected to refute the Lutheran Augsburg Confession; and a famous, if indecisive, conference at Worms (1540).
Cochlaeus ranked among the most zealous theologians of his time, completely dedicated to his cause. Though uneven, his production of articles on religious controversy was prolific. Noteworthy among his historical works were the History of the Hussites (1549) and Acts and Writings of Luther (1549), considered his best known book.
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62b1b6eef78ea3f0f16c00f0c955f6d9 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Johannes-Cruger | Johannes Crüger | Johannes Crüger
Johannes Crüger, (born April 9, 1598, Gross-Breesen, near Guben, Lower Lusatia [Germany]—died February 23, 1662, Berlin), German composer and theorist noted for his compilations and arrangements of several important choral collections, the best-known being Praxis pietatis melica (earliest extant edition, 1647), which was reprinted in numerous later editions. Crüger also contributed many original chorale melodies to these collections, including Jesu, meine Freude; Nun danket alle Gott; Herzliebster Jesu, was hast du verbrochen; and other well-known chorales. His most influential theoretical work was Synopsis musica (1630, enlarged 1654). From 1622 until his death he held the post of cantor at the Nikolai Church in Berlin.
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435d09896d269346ce0c222bdcb0e8b3 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Johannes-Ewald | Johannes Ewald | Johannes Ewald
Johannes Ewald, (born November 18, 1743, Copenhagen, Denmark—died March 17, 1781, Copenhagen), one of Denmark’s greatest lyric poets and the first to use themes from early Scandinavian myths and sagas.
On the death of his father, a poorhouse chaplain, Ewald was sent to school at Slesvig (Schleswig), where his reading of Tom Jones and Robinson Crusoe aroused his spirit of adventure. In 1758 he went to Copenhagen to study theology, fell in love, and, in search of quickly gained glory, ran away to fight in the Seven Years’ War. He returned to find that his beloved Arendse, whom he immortalized as his muse, had married another. He passed his final examination when he was 19 and was then already becoming known as a writer of prose and occasional poetry. When finishing Adam og Eva (1769; “Adam and Eve”), a dramatic poem in the style of French tragedy, he met the German epic poet Friedrich Klopstock, and at about the same time he read Shakespeare’s plays and James Macpherson’s Ossian. Their influence resulted in the historical drama Rolf Krage (1770), taken from an old Danish legend that was recorded by the medieval historian Saxo Grammaticus.
Ewald’s life began to show signs of serious disorder, especially an addiction to alcohol. In the spring of 1773 his mother and a Pietistic pastor secured his removal from Copenhagen to the relative isolation of Rungsted. There he produced his first mature works: “Rungsteds lyksaligheder” (1775; “The Joys of Rungsted”), a lyric poem in the elevated new style of the ode; Balders død (1775; The Death of Balder), a lyric drama on a subject from Saxo and Old Norse mythology; and the first chapters of his memoirs, Levnet og meninger (written c. 1774–78: “Life and Opinions”), explaining his enthusiasm for the adventurous and fantastic. In 1775 he was transferred to a still more solitary place near Elsinore, where he went through a religious crisis—a struggle between the Pietistic idea of self-denial and his own proud independence. In 1777 he was allowed to return to Copenhagen. His poetic genius was recognized, and his life became calmer despite increasingly severe illness. On his deathbed he wrote the heroic Pietist hymn “Udrust dig, helt fra Golgotha” (“Gird Thyself, Hero of Golgotha”).
Ewald renewed Danish poetry in all of its genres. Of his dramatic works, only Fiskerne (1779; “The Fishermen”), an operetta, is still performed. His greatest work in prose is his posthumously published memoirs, in which lyrically pathetic chapters about his lost Arendse intermingle with humorous passages. He is known best as a lyric poet, especially for his great personal odes and for songs such as “Kong Kristian stod ved højen mast” (translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow as “King Christian Stood by the Lofty Mast”), which is used as a national anthem, and “Lille Gunver” (“Little Gunver”), the first Danish romance. Both these songs form part of Fiskerne.
Ewald’s work was radical for its time in its aesthetic transformation of loss into imaginatively achieved insight and meaning. Thus, though its form is rooted in the classical tradition, his poetry heralded the works of Adam Oehlenschläger and the Romantic movement, and it anticipated the Romantics in its use of themes drawn from Old Norse literature. It was Ewald’s genius that he transformed his sense of an unreadable reality into an autonomous poetic world. While his heroic efforts to imbue his real-life experience with heightened sensibility and poetic imagery may have been tempered by an occasional retreat to Christianity and patriotism, his achievement resonates in diverse 20th-century writers such as Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen), the playwright Kaj Munk, and lyrical poets as dissimilar as Jens August Schade and Per Lange.
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645e95e7c286112f18d1cb7916b09ef7 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Johannes-graaf-van-den-Bosch | Johannes, count van den Bosch | Johannes, count van den Bosch
Johannes, count van den Bosch, (born Feb. 2, 1780, Herwijnen, Neth.—died Jan. 28, 1844, The Hague), statesman who expanded the poor-relief system and instituted the paternalistic Dutch East Indies Culture System, by which vast riches in export crops were extracted from 1830 to about 1860.
In his early years (1798–1810), Bosch served in the army in Batavia (now Jakarta, Indon.) in the Dutch East Indies, and on this experience he based his Nederlandsche bezittingen in Azië, Amerika, en Afrika (1818; “Dutch Possessions in Asia, America, and Africa”), in which he argued against a liberal colonial system and for a strongly paternalistic one, claiming that people unaccustomed to a work ethic needed strong guidance. From 1828 to 1833, he was governor-general in the Dutch East Indies, and, from 1834 to 1839, minister of the colonies. He instituted a “Culture System” that made Indonesian noblemen semiautonomous rulers, exacted compulsory labour from villagers, and required each village to devote at least one-fifth of its land to export crops.
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584dad484381bbfb47f23c4456802640 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Johannes-Hevelius | Johannes Hevelius | Johannes Hevelius
Johannes Hevelius, (Latin), German Johann Hewel, or Johann Howelcke, Polish Jan Heweliusz, (born Jan. 28, 1611, Gdańsk, Pol.—died Jan. 28, 1687, Gdańsk), astronomer who compiled an atlas of the Moon (Selenographia, published 1647) containing one of the earliest detailed maps of its surface as well as names for many of its features. A few of his names for lunar mountains (e.g., the Alps) are still in use, and a lunar crater is named for him. Hevelius also made a catalog of 1,564 stars, the most comprehensive of its time, and a celestial atlas in which several constellations, now accepted, were shown for the first time. After his death, the catalog and the atlas were published together (Prodromus Astronomiae, 1690) by his wife, Elisabetha, who had collaborated with him in his observations.
A member of a noble family of Gdańsk, Hevelius was a city councillor and a brewer. After studying at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, he returned to Gdańsk and built an observatory atop his house and equipped it with fine instruments of his own making. Although he built and used telescopes, he preferred to measure celestial positions without the aid of lenses. In 1679 the English astronomer Edmond Halley visited Hevelius and compared the use of a sextant having telescopic sights with Hevelius’ sextant with open sights. Hevelius showed that he could determine stellar positions about as accurately without a telescope as Halley could with one.
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accd2f86562608f612a8957d5bc929de | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Johannes-Jorgensen | Johannes Jørgensen | Johannes Jørgensen
Johannes Jørgensen, in full Jens Johannes JØrgensen, (born Nov. 6, 1866, Svendborg, Den.—died May 29, 1956, Svendborg), writer known in Denmark mainly for his poetry (Digte 1894–98, 1898, and Udvalte Digte, 1944) but best known in other countries for his biographies of St. Francis of Assisi (1907) and St. Catherine of Siena (1915).
As a student at the University of Copenhagen, Jørgensen became a follower of the influential critic Georg Brandes but soon became an outspoken critic of Brandes’ materialistic realism. He became an advocate of poetic symbolism and, soon after, developed an interest in mystical and religious literature. He converted to Roman Catholicism in 1896 and lived mostly in Italy thereafter. His later life was spent largely writing his autobiography, Mit livs legende, 7 vol. (1916–28; Jörgensen: An Autobiography).
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3f18b588b80a79b9693e8ba6b8622a57 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Johannes-Magnus | Johannes Magnus | Johannes Magnus
Johannes Magnus, (born March 19, 1488, Linköping, Swed.—died March 22, 1544, Rome), Roman Catholic archbishop and historian, one of the most distinguished scholars of his time, who was exiled as a consequence of the Reformation.
Brother of the ecclesiastic Olaus Magnus, author of a celebrated history of Scandinavia, Johannes was made papal emissary to Scandinavia by Pope Adrian VI, his former teacher at the Catholic University of Leuven (Louvain), Belg. In 1523 he investigated the dispute between the new Swedish king, Gustav I Vasa, and Archbishop Trolle of Uppsala, Swed., who was accused of supporting the claim of King Christian II of Denmark to the Swedish throne. In 1524 Pope Clement VII made Magnus administrator of the Uppsala archdiocese, but he was subsequently arrested and exiled amidst Gustav’s conflicts with the papacy during the period when Sweden was veering toward Lutheranism. The Magnus brothers lived in Danzig, Pol., and, from 1541, in Rome. In 1533 Johannes was made archbishop of Uppsala, but he never lived in his see. His Historia de omnibus gothorum sueonumque regibus (1555; “History Concerning All the Gothic and Swedish Kings”) is the primary source for the history of several Scandinavian kings.
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b7b24b6b84fef1ab114ee59038b065ab | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Johannes-Robert-Becher | Johannes Robert Becher | Johannes Robert Becher
Johannes Robert Becher, (born May 22, 1891, Munich, Germany—died October 11, 1958, Berlin), poet and critic, editor, and government official who was among the most important advocates of revolutionary social reform in Germany during the 1920s and who later served as minister of culture for the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).
Becher studied medicine, literature, and philosophy and, in 1918, joined the German Communist Party (KPD). He was already an established commentator on the social and artistic scene and a leader of the movement to transform German society through a revolution of the proletariat. Involved in the Expressionist school that dominated German writing in the period 1910–20, he wrote romantic, emotionally complex poetry that mirrored both his personal turmoil and his visions of a new social order. Becher later wrote the lyrics for East Germany’s national anthem, “Auferstanden aus Ruinen” (“Rising from the Ruins”).
Though elected to the German Reichstag in 1933, Becher was forced into exile with the advent of Nazi power and went to Moscow, where he edited a German-language newspaper (1935–45). Life in Moscow disillusioned him about Joseph Stalin’s version of communism but not about communist ideology itself. Returning to Germany in 1945, he was made president of the Association for the Democratic Rebirth of Germany. In 1954 he became East German minister of culture. Becher’s diaries in the decade 1945–55 give intimate insights into the many personal and ideological conflicts that tormented his life as a poet and as a political activist.
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338fa429caf369ac8471d9cb38703af3 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Adams-president-of-United-States/Political-philosophy | Political philosophy | Political philosophy
Because he was the official embodiment of American independence from the British Empire, Adams was largely ignored and relegated to the periphery of the court during his nearly three years in London. Still brimming with energy, he spent his time studying the history of European politics for patterns and lessons that might assist the fledgling American government in its efforts to achieve what no major European nation had managed to produce—namely, a stable republican form of government.
The result was a massive and motley three-volume collection of quotations, unacknowledged citations, and personal observations entitled A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (1787). A fourth volume, Discourses on Davila (1790), was published soon after he returned to the United States. Taken together, these lengthy tomes contained Adams’s distinctive insights as a political thinker. The lack of organization, combined with the sprawling style of the Defence, however, made its core message difficult to follow or fathom. When read in the context of his voluminous correspondence on political issues, along with the extensive marginalia he recorded in the several thousand books in his personal library, that message became clearer with time.
Adams wished to warn his fellow Americans against all revolutionary manifestos that envisioned a fundamental break with the past and a fundamental transformation in human nature or society that supposedly produced a new age. All such utopian expectations were illusions, he believed, driven by what he called “ideology,” the belief that imagined ideals, so real and seductive in theory, were capable of being implemented in the world. The same kind of conflict between different classes that had bedeviled medieval Europe would, albeit in muted forms, also afflict the United States, because the seeds of such competition were planted in human nature itself. Adams blended the psychological insights of New England Puritanism, with its emphasis on the emotional forces throbbing inside all creatures, and the Enlightenment belief that government must contain and control those forces, to construct a political system capable of balancing the ambitions of individuals and competing social classes.
His insistence that elites were unavoidable realities in all societies, however, made him vulnerable to the charge of endorsing aristocratic rule in America, when in fact he was attempting to suggest that the inevitable American elite must be controlled, its ambitions channeled toward public purposes. He also was accused of endorsing monarchical principles because he argued that the chief executive in the American government, like the king in medieval European society, must possess sufficient power to check the ravenous appetites of the propertied classes. Although misunderstood by many of his contemporaries, the realistic perspective Adams proposed—and the skepticism toward utopian schemes he insisted upon—has achieved considerable support in the wake of the failed 20th-century attempts at social transformation in the communist bloc. In Adams’s own day, his political analysis enjoyed the satisfaction of correctly predicting that the French Revolution would lead to the Reign of Terror and eventual despotism by a military dictator.
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6d1ee2774432823fd0391be25ba5b74f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Adams-president-of-United-States/Vice-presidency-and-presidency | Vice presidency and presidency | Vice presidency and presidency
Soon after his return to the United States, Adams found himself on the ballot in the presidential election of 1789. Washington was the unanimous selection of all electors, while Adams finished second, signaling that his standing as a leading member of the revolutionary generation was superseded only by that of Washington himself. Under the electoral rules established in the recent ratified Constitution, Adams was duly elected America’s first vice president.
This meant that Adams was the first American statesman to experience the paradox of being a heartbeat away from maximum power while languishing in the political version of a cul-de-sac. Adams himself described the vice presidency as “the most insignificant office that ever the Invention of man contrived or his Imagination conceived.” His main duty was to serve as president of the Senate, casting a vote only to break a tie. During his eight years in office, Adams cast between 31 and 38 such votes, more than any subsequent vice president in American history. He steadfastly supported all the major initiatives of the Washington administration, including the financial plan of Alexander Hamilton, the Neutrality Proclamation (1793), which effectively ended the Franco-American Alliance of 1778, the forceful suppression of an insurrection in western Pennsylvania called the Whiskey Rebellion (1794), and the Jay Treaty (1795), a highly controversial effort to avoid war with England by accepting British hegemony on the high seas. When Washington announced his decision not to seek a third term in 1796, Adams was the logical choice to succeed him.
In the first contested presidential election in American history, Adams won a narrow electoral majority (71–68) over Jefferson, who thereby became vice president. Adams made an initial effort to bring Jefferson into the cabinet and involve him in shaping foreign policy, but Jefferson declined the offer, preferring to retain his independence. This burdened the Adams presidency with a vice president who was the acknowledged head of the rival political party, the Republicans (subsequently the Democratic-Republicans). Additional burdens included: inheritance of Washington’s cabinet, whom Adams unwisely decided to retain, and whose highest loyalty was to Washington’s memory as embodied in Hamilton; a raging naval conflict with the French in the Caribbean dubbed the “quasi-war”; and the impossible task of succeeding—no one could replace—the greatest hero of the revolutionary era.
Despite Washington’s plea for a bipartisan foreign policy in his farewell address (1796), the “quasi-war” produced a bitter political argument between Federalists, who preferred war with France to alienating Britain, and Democratic-Republicans, who viewed France as America’s only European ally and the French Revolution as a continuation of the American Revolution on European soil. Adams attempted to steer a middle course between these partisan camps, which left him vulnerable to political attacks from both sides. In 1797 he sent a peace delegation to Paris to negotiate an end to hostilities, but when the French directory demanded bribes before any negotiations could begin, Adams ordered the delegates home and began a naval buildup in preparation for outright war. The Federalist-dominated Congress called for raising a 30,000-man army, which Adams agreed to reluctantly. If Adams had requested a declaration of war in 1798, he would have enjoyed widespread popularity and virtually certain reelection two years later. Instead, he acted with characteristic independence by sending yet another, and this time successful, peace delegation to France against the advice of his cabinet and his Federalist supporters. The move ruined him politically but avoided a costly war that the infant American republic was ill-prepared to fight. It was a vintage Adams performance, reminiscent of his defense of British soldiers after the Boston Massacre, which was also principled and unpopular.
If ending the “quasi-war” with France was Adams’s major foreign policy triumph, his chief domestic failure was passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798), which permitted the government to deport foreign-born residents and indict newspaper editors or writers who published "false, scandalous, and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States." A total of 14 indictments were brought against the Republican press under the sedition act, but the crudely partisan prosecutions quickly became infamous persecutions that backfired on the Federalists. Although Adams had signed the Alien and Sedition Acts under pressure from the Federalists in Congress, he shouldered most of the blame both at the time and in the history books. He came to regard the sedition act as the biggest political blunder of his life.
The election of 1800 again pitted Adams against Jefferson. Adams ran ahead of the Federalist candidates for Congress, who were swept from office in a Republican landslide. However, thanks to the deft maneuvering of Aaron Burr, all 12 of New York’s electoral votes went to Jefferson, giving the tandem of Jefferson and Burr the electoral victory (73–65). Jefferson was eventually elected president by the House of Representatives, which chose him over Burr on the 36th ballot. In his last weeks in office, Adams made several Federalist appointments to the judiciary, including John Marshall as chief justice of the United States. These “midnight judges” offended Jefferson, who resented the encroachment on his own presidential prerogatives. Adams, the first president to reside in the presidential mansion (later called the White House) in Washington, D.C., was also the first—and one of the very few—presidents not to attend the inauguration of his successor. On March 4, 1801, he was already on the road back to Quincy.
At age 65 Adams did not anticipate a long retirement. The fates proved more generous than he expected, providing him with another quarter century to brood about his career and life, add to the extensive marginalia in his books, settle old scores in his memoirs, watch with pride when John Quincy assumed the presidency, and add to his already vast and voluminous correspondence. In an extensive exchange of letters with Benjamin Rush, the Philadelphia physician and patriotic gadfly, Adams revealed his preoccupation with fame and developed his own theory of the role ambition plays in motivating man to public service. Along the way he placed on the record his own candid and often critical portraits of the other vanguard members of the revolutionary generation.
In 1812, thanks in part to prodding from Rush, he overcame his bitterness toward Jefferson and initiated a correspondence with his former friend and rival that totaled 158 letters. Generally regarded as the most intellectually impressive correspondence between American statesmen in all of American history, the dialogue between Adams and Jefferson touched on a host of timely and timeless subjects: the role of religion in history, the aging process, the emergence of an American language, the French Revolution, and the party battles of the 1790s. Adams put it most poignantly to Jefferson: “You and I ought not to die, before We have explained ourselves to each other.”
More than the elegiac tone of the letters, the correspondence dramatized the contradictory impulses generated by the American Revolution and symbolized by the two aging patriarchs. Adams was the realist, the skeptic, the principled pessimist. Jefferson was the idealist, the romantic, the pragmatic optimist. As if according to a script written by Providence, the “Sage of Quincy” and the “Sage of Monticello” died within hours of each other on July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary to the day of the Declaration of Independence.
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c6d0346b969f1306a1534f2005554b6f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Adolphus-Bernard-Dahlgren | John Adolphus Bernard Dahlgren | John Adolphus Bernard Dahlgren
John Adolphus Bernard Dahlgren, (born Nov. 13, 1809, Philadelphia, Pa., U.S.—died July 12, 1870, Washington, D.C.), American inventor of the smooth-bore cannon that was, from its shape, familiarly known as the “soda-water bottle.” The shape resulted from a design in which the thickness of metal was varied to match the differences in internal pressure occurring when the cannon was fired. The pressures were determined by boring holes in the walls of the gun and inserting as gauges such objects as pistons or musket balls. Dahlgren’s cannons were widely used in the American Civil War.
Dahlgren entered the U.S. Navy in 1826 and in 1847 became ordnance officer at the Washington Navy Yard, where he established a full-fledged ordnance department and began manufacturing cannon of his new type. His cannon were first mounted in an experimental vessel that cruised (1857–59) under his command. When the Civil War broke out, he was one of three officers in the Washington Navy Yard who did not resign because of Confederate sympathies. Promoted to captain, he saw active sea duty and in 1863 became a rear admiral. He was in command of the Washington Navy Yard at the time of his death.
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86ff081a2a43f54722b708029d6724aa | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Agar | John Agar | John Agar
…age of 17, she married John Agar, who launched an acting career of his own while Temple appeared in The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947), with Cary Grant and Myrna Loy, and That Hagen Girl (1947), with Ronald Reagan. In 1949 Temple made her last feature film, A Kiss for…
Peter Conway (John Agar), a cocky college graduate who considers Stryker cruel and inhuman for failing to rescue a wounded soldier during the Battle of Tarawa—not realizing that such an attempt would have given away the position of the entire squadron and put all of the men…
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5d2365248b9b48c14415baa4c7b900e9 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Albion-Andrew | John Albion Andrew | John Albion Andrew
John Albion Andrew, (born May 31, 1818, Windham, Maine, U.S.—died Oct. 30, 1867, Boston), U.S. antislavery leader who, as governor of Massachusetts during the Civil War, was one of the most energetic of the Northern “war governors.”
Andrew entered political life as a Whig opposed to the Mexican War (1846–48). In 1848 he joined the Free-Soil movement against the spread of slavery. After the passage of the Kansas–Nebraska Act (1854), which permitted those territories to choose between slavery and freedom, he helped organize the Republican Party in Massachusetts. In 1859 he defended the abolitionist John Brown so vigorously that he was summoned to Washington to appear before an investigating committee of the Senate. In 1860 he led the Massachusetts delegation at the Republican convention at Chicago, which nominated Lincoln for the presidency; from 1861 to January 1866 he was governor of Massachusetts.
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9e099eb46b96c735da5796112f3dd441 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Alcock | John Alcock | John Alcock
John Alcock, (born c. 1430, Beverley, Yorkshire, Eng.—died Oct. 1, 1500, Wisbech Castle, Isle of Ely, Cambridgeshire), architect, bishop, and statesman who founded Jesus College, Cambridge, and who was regarded as one of the most eminent pre-Reformation English divines.
Educated at Cambridge, Alcock was made dean of Westminster (1461), and thereafter his promotion was rapid in religious and secular posts. In 1470 he was sent as ambassador to the court of Castile. He became successively bishop of Rochester (1472), Worcester (1476), and Ely (1486). He also held the office of chancellor and conducted negotiations with King James III of Scotland, besides filling other posts under Edward IV and Henry VII.
In addition to founding a charity at Beverley, Yorkshire, a grammar school at Kingston-upon-Hull, Yorkshire, and Jesus College, he worked to restore churches and colleges. His surviving published works include Mons perfectionis (1497;“The Hill of Perfection”) and Gallicantus Johannis Alcock episcopi Eliensis ad fratres suos curatos in sinodo apud Barnwell (1498;“Gallicantus [Song of the Cock] of John Alcock Bishop of Ely to His Brother Clergy in the Synod at Barnwell”). The last is a little treatise written in allusion to his name and decorated with figures of the rooster; it is also a good specimen of early English printing and illustration.
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647cfcb397ae89fde89236b22b2efa89 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Allen-Eddy | John Allen Eddy | John Allen Eddy
In 1976 American astronomer John Allen Eddy used extensive historical data to show that 17th- and 18th-century astronomers had indeed been careful and diligent observers of the Sun. Eddy also conducted detailed analysis of levels of carbon-14 (a radioactive isotope whose abundance increases during periods of low solar activity)…
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289d4c34ddebd797ab8cb410f0624388 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Amos-Comenius/Social-reform | Social reform | Social reform
The Peace of Westphalia (1648), which ended the Thirty Years’ War, was a blow to Comenius and other Czech exiles, who thereby lost their last hope of a restoration of ethnic and religious liberty in their homeland. Few of them returned, since they would have been required to recant their beliefs. Comenius left Elbing and returned to Poland, where the Brethren at Leszno had been cast into despair. In 1648 he was consecrated presiding bishop of the Moravians, the last of the Bohemian-Moravian clergy to hold this office.
His next invitation came from Hungary, where the young prince Zsigmond Rákóczi wanted to establish a model pansophic school at Sárospatak. Comenius, arriving there in 1650, received a warm reception. The school opened with about 100 pupils, but it proved unsuccessful. The students were ill-prepared to learn anything beyond the rudiments of reading and writing, and the teachers soon lost interest in a scheme they could not understand. The prince died in 1652, and at about the same time war broke out in Poland.
Comenius returned to Leszno, carrying with him the manuscript of a picture textbook he had written for his pupils but for which he had not yet been able to obtain the necessary woodcuts. He sent the manuscript to Nürnberg in Germany, where the cuts were made. The resulting book, Orbis Sensualium Pictus (1658; The Visible World in Pictures), was popular in Europe for two centuries and was the forerunner of the illustrated schoolbook of later times. It consisted of pictures illustrating Latin sentences, accompanied by vernacular translations. For example, the chapter “The Head and the Hand” began with a picture of a head and two hands followed by sentences such as:
Comenius had not been back in Leszno long before it was occupied and destroyed, with the loss of many of his manuscripts. He escaped to Amsterdam, where he remained for the rest of his life. In 1657 he gathered together most of his writings on education and published them as a collection, Didactica Opera Omnia. He devoted his remaining years to completing his great work, Consultation. He managed to get parts of it published, and when he was dying in 1670 he begged his close associates to publish the rest of it after his death. They failed to do so, and the manuscripts were lost until 1935, when they were found in an orphanage in Halle, Ger.
During his lifetime the fame of Comenius rested chiefly on his two popular textbooks, the Janua and the Orbis Sensualium Pictus. He himself would have set more store by his influence as a social reformer, which reached its peak during his visit to England. Men all over Europe had looked to Comenius as a leader; his vision had impressed both those who were seeking a more dynamic form of religion and those who looked to science as an avenue of reform. His pansophism, on the other hand, was not influential either during his lifetime or afterward. His dream of universal harmony was too vague and too grandiose for the mental outlook of the 17th century, which was already shifting in a utilitarian and materialistic direction; it has had even less appeal in modern times.
As a religious leader Comenius helped keep alive the faith of his church in its darkest hour, and he provided the inspiration that led to its subsequent revival as the Moravian Church under Nikolaus, Graf von Zinzendorf, in the 18th century. He was no sectarian but a champion of the church universal. He was also, for all of his internationalism, a Czech patriot at a time when the Czechs had been nearly crushed. He wrote: “I love my country and its language, and my greatest wish is that it should be cultivated.”
In the 19th century Comenius’ reputation was revived by the increasing attention given to the study of pedagogy, especially in Germany. At the present day he remains of interest as a prototype of the international citizen. His patriotic feelings for Bohemia did not prevent him from feeling himself a European and from believing profoundly in the unity of mankind.
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3245dce47acfba8e3c8a333806ae6db7 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Arbuthnot | John Arbuthnot | John Arbuthnot
John Arbuthnot, (born April 1667, Inverbervie, Kincardine, Scot.—died Feb. 27, 1735, London, Eng.), Scottish mathematician, physician, and occasional writer, remembered as the close friend of Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and John Gay and as a founding member of their famous Scriblerus Club, which aimed to ridicule bad literature and false learning.
After taking a medical degree in 1696 at the University of St. Andrews, Arbuthnot became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1704 and was one of Queen Anne’s physicians from 1705 until her death. Though he published mathematical and other scientific works, his fame rests on his reputation as a wit and on his satirical writings. The most important of the latter fall into two groups. The first consists of a political allegory dealing with the political jockeying of the British, French, Spanish, and Dutch that led up to the Treaty of Utrecht (1713). Published in five pamphlets, the earliest appearing in 1712, it was collected in 1727 under the composite title Law is a Bottom-less Pit; or, The History of John Bull, and it established and popularized for the first time the character who was to become the permanent symbol of England in cartoon and literature. An edition by A.W. Bower and R.A. Erickson was published in 1976.
The other satire in which Arbuthnot had an important share was the Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, a mocking exposure of pedantry, first published in the 1741 edition of Pope’s works but largely written as early as 1713–14 by the members of the Scriblerus Club. The other members of the club acknowledged Arbuthnot as the chief contributor and guiding spirit of the work. Arbuthnot was indifferent to literary fame, and many of his witticisms and ideas for satires were later developed by and credited to his more famous literary friends.
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16893d305fbd3aa5d3252484818eec30 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Archibald-Campbell | John Archibald Campbell | John Archibald Campbell
John Archibald Campbell, (born June 24, 1811, Washington, Ga., U.S.—died March 12, 1889, Baltimore, Md.), American jurist and Supreme Court justice (1853–61). He also was assistant secretary of war for the Confederacy.
At age 11 Campbell entered Franklin College (now the University of Georgia), and after graduating at age 14 he entered the U.S. Military Academy. Called home upon the death of his father, Campbell then began to study law. He was admitted to the bar at age 18 (by a special act of the legislature) and soon moved to Alabama, where he married. In addition to maintaining a large private practice, Campbell served two terms in the Alabama legislature.
At age 41 Campbell was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. He was known as a strict constructionist, and his views on states’ rights were decidedly Jeffersonian. His tenure was also notable for his concurring opinion in the Dred Scott decision, which made slavery legal in all the territories and fanned the flames of sectional controversy that led to the American Civil War. Though he opposed as imprudent the Southern states’ secession from the Union, Campbell resigned his Supreme Court appointment in 1861 and cast his lot with the South. In 1862 the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, appointed him assistant secretary of war for the Confederacy, a position that he held until the South was defeated. When he was released from Fort Pulaski, where he had been held for four months on false charges, Campbell—who had lost his possessions in the war—moved to New Orleans, La., and established a law practice there. He made his home in New Orleans for the remainder of his life, arguing a number of cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.
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7b03cb444a29af09fc1817403d65811e | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Avery-Pitts | John Avery Pitts | John Avery Pitts
Pitts of Winthrop, Maine, U.S., was operated by horsepower. Large stationary threshers powered by steam engines or tractors, common in the early part of the 20th century, were part of harvesting systems in which the grain was cut either by binders or by headers. In…
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b19f298f82e1e8dbbcfb1109385fd6c8 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Aylmer | John Aylmer | John Aylmer
John Aylmer, (born 1521, Tivetshall St. Mary, Norfolk, Eng.—died June 3, 1594, London), Anglican bishop of London in the reign of Elizabeth I, known for his vigorous enforcement of the Act of Uniformity (1559) within his Church of England diocese. His harsh treatment of all (whether Puritan or Roman Catholic) who differed with him on ecclesiastical questions caused him to be attacked in the anti-episcopal Marprelate Tracts (1588–89) and to be characterized as “Morrell,” the bad shepherd, in Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender (1579).
Aylmer served as chaplain to Henry Grey (later the Duke of Suffolk) and as tutor to Grey’s daughter Lady Jane Grey. During Queen Mary’s vigorous restoration of Roman Catholicism, Aylmer, who had been given an archdeaconate in 1553, lost his post because of his opposition to the doctrine of transubstantiation. While living in exile in Strassburg and then in Zürich, he wrote a reply, entitled An Harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe Subjectes (1559), to John Knox’s famous First blast of the trumpet against the monstruous regiment of women. Knox had argued that by both natural law and revealed religion, women were unfit to rule. After the accession of the Protestant queen Elizabeth I, he returned to England.
Aylmer became archdeacon of Lincoln in 1562 and was appointed a member of the convocation that reformed and settled the doctrine and discipline of the Church of England. He was consecrated as bishop of London in 1577. His vindictiveness toward personal as well as doctrinal enemies aroused so much opposition that he attempted to be transferred to a quieter see. Although Elizabeth is thought to have considered such a move, he remained in London until his death.
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726fdb0dac3d1788d4abae34a87a1c34 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Ayres | John Ayres | John Ayres
1680) by John Ayres; he identifies “bastard Italians” as “round-hands,” and his alphabets are nearly exact copies of Barbedor’s italienne bastarde. In A Tutor to Penmanship (1697/98), Ayres praises Materot, van den Velde, and Barbedor as great penmen who revived and disseminated the art of writing. Ayres…
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869eaddabbee8dd47e07f22a189eb476 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-B-Murphy | John B. Murphy | John B. Murphy
John B. Murphy, in full John Benjamin Murphy, (born Dec. 21, 1857, Appleton, Wis., U.S.—died Aug. 11, 1916, Mackinac Island, Mich.), American surgeon who was notable for his advances in abdominal surgery.
Murphy served as professor of surgery at Rush Medical College, Chicago (1905–08), and at the Northwestern University Medical School, Chicago (1901–05, 1908–16). He was a pioneer in recognizing the symptoms for appendicitis, and he strongly urged immediate removal of the appendix when this symptomatic pattern appeared. He also introduced (1892) the anastomosis (Murphy’s) button to join segments of the intestine without sutures.
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e603c943ca40a6e49f672572b79040fc | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Bachman | John Bachman | John Bachman
John Bachman, (born Feb. 4, 1790, Rhinebeck, N.Y., U.S.—died Feb. 24, 1874, Columbia, S.C.), naturalist and Lutheran minister who helped write the text of works on North American birds and mammals by renowned naturalist and artist John James Audubon.
Ordained in 1814, Bachman obtained a parish in Charleston, S.C., the following year. Long a natural-history enthusiast, he published studies of southern animals and works on botany and agriculture. He met Audubon in 1831 and helped him write the text of The Birds of America (1840–44). After visiting the German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt at the University of Berlin in 1838, Bachman did much of the writing and edited all of Audubon’s Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America, 3 vol. (1845–49). In 1850 he wrote The Unity of the Human Race, in which he insisted correctly that all humans constitute a single species.
In his work as a clergyman, Bachman founded the Lutheran Synod of South Carolina, served as its first president, and founded the state’s Lutheran theological seminary.
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4465ba5dc069d2f0dc89d7b1421cdc1f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Bacon-American-clergyman-and-legislator | John Bacon | John Bacon
John Bacon, (born April 9, 1738, Canterbury, Conn., U.S.—died Oct. 25, 1820, Stockbridge, Mass.), American clergyman, legislator, and judge who was an early advocate of civil and religious liberty.
After graduating from the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University) in 1765, Bacon preached in Delaware. In 1771 he was named minister of Old South Church in Boston, Mass., where, however, his views on certain points of theological doctrine proved unacceptable to the members of the church, and he was dismissed in 1775. Thereafter he lived on a farm in Stockbridge. Though not a lawyer, Bacon served as associate judge and later as presiding judge of a Massachusetts county court of common pleas; he also served in both houses of the state legislature (a total of 22 terms) and for one term as a U.S. representative.
Bacon indicated his concern for civil and religious liberty while he was still pastor of Old South Church and later opposed provisions that denied suffrage to blacks and Indians in the proposed state constitution of 1778. The discriminatory clause was absent from the constitution adopted two years later.
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7dc0b3f27d14295c1998ea9b83f7fa48 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Bacon-British-sculptor-1740-1799 | John Bacon | John Bacon
John Bacon, (born Nov. 24, 1740, London—died Aug. 4, 1799, London), British Neoclassical sculptor who perfected certain sculpturing techniques.
In 1754 Bacon was apprenticed in a porcelain works at Lambeth, London. There he was at first employed in painting small ornamental pieces of china, but he soon became modeler to the works. During his apprenticeship he improved the method of working statues in artificial stone, an art that he afterward carried to perfection. Bacon first attempted working in marble about 1763 and improved the method of transferring the form of the model to the marble by the invention of a more accurate instrument for the purpose. This instrument was more exact, took a correct measurement in every direction, was contained in a small compass, and could be used upon either the model or the marble. In 1769 he won the first gold medal for sculpture given by the Royal Academy, his work being a bas-relief representing the escape of Aeneas from Troy. In 1770 he exhibited a figure of Mars, which gained him the gold medal of the Society of Arts and his election as associate of the Royal Academy. Some of his best works are found in Westminster Abbey.
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6461d507195b5d76776e243b08a4e71f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Baconthorpe | John Baconthorpe | John Baconthorpe
John Baconthorpe, also called John Bacon, Johannes De Baconthorpe, or Johannes De Anglicus, byname Doctor Resolutus, (born c. 1290, Baconsthorpe, Norfolk, England—died 1346?, London), English theologian and philosopher who, although he did not subscribe to the heterodox doctrine of the great Muslim philosopher Averroës, was regarded by the Renaissance Averroists as Princeps Averroistarum (“the prince of the Averroists”), and who strongly influenced the Carmelite scholastics for two centuries.
Reared in the Carmelite monastery of Blakeney, Norfolk, Baconthorpe studied at the University of Oxford and at Paris and then taught at the University of Cambridge and possibly at Oxford. He was provincial of the English Carmelites from 1329 to 1333 and thereafter devoted his life to study.
A learned and sharp critic of such theologians as St. Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and Henry of Ghent, he failed to oppose them with constructive work. He was, however, familiar with and an excellent commentator on the works of Aristotle and Averroës, favourably interpreting them even though he dissented on fundamentals. Averroism, which was subsequently attacked by orthodox Christian thinkers for advocating the superiority of reason and philosophy over faith and knowledge founded on faith, retained a stronghold in northern Italy, and Baconthorpe’s interpretations of Averroës were treasured by the Renaissance Averroists.
Baconthorpe also wrote commentaries on the Sentences of the theologian Peter Lombard, bishop of Paris (first published in Paris, 1484); on De Trinitate (“On the Trinity”) and De civitate Dei (The City of God) of St. Augustine of Hippo; on De incarnatione Verbi (“On the Incarnation of the Word”) and Cur Deus homo (“Why God Man . . .”) of St. Anselm of Canterbury; and on Matthew and the Pauline Letters. His Quodlibeta (“Miscellanies”) was first published in Venice, 1527.
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c1fe853172cd3f14bd6de941e9b21438 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Baildon | John Baildon | John Baildon
…master, Jean de Beauchesne, and John Baildon (or Basildon), about whom nothing further is known. Divers Sortes of Hands has characteristics of both writing manuals and copybooks: it includes instructions on how to make ink, cut a quill for writing, hold the pen (illustrated), and sit at a writing desk.…
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62899b70f4ed8d5aff80d6afaae5a9e9 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Ballance | John Ballance | John Ballance
John Ballance, (born March 27, 1839, Glenavy, County Antrim, N.Ire.—died April 27, 1893, Wellington, N.Z.), prime minister of New Zealand (1891–93) who unified the Liberal Party, which held power for 20 years; he also played a major role in the enactment of social welfare legislation.
After working as an ironmonger in Birmingham, Eng., the self-educated Ballance emigrated to Wanganui, N.Z., in 1865. There he was editor of the Wanganui Herald and fought against the native Maoris. Entering Parliament in 1875, he advocated abolition of provincial governments. As colonial treasurer in 1878, he introduced a land tax to raise revenue more equitably. As minister of lands, defense, and native affairs in 1884–87, he tried to shift landownership from monopolists to small farmers and to retain crown land while preventing abuses in the sale of Maori land.
During his term as prime minister, Ballance imposed progressive land and income taxes and gained for the government the right to repurchase private land for development. He combatted the lingering depression by limiting government borrowing and won reduction of life membership in the upper house to a seven-year term, curtailing the power of his opponents. His cabinet was noted for its distinguished ministers, including William Pember Reeves, who sponsored pioneering labour-protection legislation; John McKenzie, who fought against land monopolies; and Ballance’s successor, Richard John Seddon.
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dfd06d6cd4d5223e7f812d2edbe3ec1c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Bampton | John Bampton | John Bampton
John Bampton, (born 1690?—died June 2, 1751), English clergyman who gave his name to one of Protestant Christendom’s most distinguished lectureships, the Bampton lectures at Oxford University.
Bampton studied at Trinity College, Oxford, and was a prebendary of Salisbury Cathedral from 1718 until his death. The Bampton lectures were established in accordance with his will. They consist of eight lecture-sermons preached on Sunday mornings between the beginning of the last month in Lent term and the third week in Act term, upon specified topics of Christian doctrine. The lecturer is chosen by the heads of colleges during Easter term. Since 1895 the Bampton lectures have been given every other year.
Also supported by the Bampton fund are the “Sarum lectures,” which were established to enable other than Anglican theologians to lecture.
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f10e23244a1180b858f88dbdb968d048 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Banister | John Banister | John Banister
John Banister, (born c. 1625, London, Eng.—died Oct. 3, 1679, London), violinist and composer, a prominent musician of his day and organizer of the first public concerts in England.
Banister learned the violin from his father and in 1660 joined the king’s band of 24 violinists. After further training in France he became leader of a group of 12 court violinists and, later, of the 24. In 1667, after showing too much preference for English players, he was replaced by a French musician, Louis Grabu. The diarist Samuel Pepys recorded Banister’s fury at this eclipse by foreign musicians, though he continued in the royal service.
Banister gave the first of his daily public concerts on Dec. 30, 1672, at his own home, charging one shilling for admission. His compositions include instrumental music and songs for plays by John Dryden, William Wycherley, Thomas Shadwell, and other Restoration dramatists, as well as settings of four of Ariel’s songs from Shadwell’s adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
Banister’s son John (d. 1725?) was also a violinist, in the service of Charles II, James II, William and Mary, and Anne.
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e3ad4a5b72535c243ea1f677870a21c5 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Barber | John Barber | John Barber
…a system was issued to John Barber of England in 1791. Barber’s design called for separate reciprocating compressors whose output air was directed through a fuel-fired combustion chamber. The hot jet was then played through nozzles onto an impulse wheel. The power produced was to be sufficient to drive both…
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d3201a1f056f67c363040dde456f1c1c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Barbirolli | Sir John Barbirolli | Sir John Barbirolli
Sir John Barbirolli, original name Giovanni Battista Barbirolli, (born Dec. 2, 1899, London, Eng.—died July 29, 1970, London), English conductor and cellist.
Barbirolli was the son of an émigré Italian violinist and his French wife. He began playing the violin when he was 4 (later switching to the cello) and, at the age of 10, became a scholar at the Trinity College of Music. He attended the Royal Academy of Music from 1912 to 1916 and established himself as an orchestral and solo cellist. During his mid-20s he devoted himself to chamber work. He then turned to opera as a full-time conductor, taking seasons at Covent Garden and Sadler’s Wells and making appearances at the British National Opera. He also conducted with the London Symphony Orchestra and the Scottish Orchestra. Invited for the 1936–37 season of the New York Philharmonic, he won the permanent post of music director in succession to Arturo Toscanini and held it through that organization’s memorable centenary season, 1941–42.
His subsequent appointments included conductorships (1943–70) with the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester, Eng., where he gained international recognition as a conductor. A decade of deteriorating health did not prevent him from continuing guest conducting, recording, and worldwide touring with major orchestras. He was principal conductor for the Houston Symphony Orchestra (1961–67) and was a favourite guest conductor with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra (1961–70). He was knighted in 1949.
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6b5204525258116e61103ec88b9897a3 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Barbour | John Barbour | John Barbour
John Barbour, Barbour also spelled Barbere, orBarbier, (born 1325?—died March 13, 1395, Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire, Scot.), author of a Scottish national epic known as The Bruce, the first major work of Scottish literature.
Records show that Barbour became archdeacon of Aberdeen while still a young man and in 1357 was granted a safe conduct by Edward III of England to study at Oxford. That same year he participated in the negotiations for ransoming King David II, who had been a prisoner in England after his capture in the Battle of Neville’s Cross (1346). In 1364 and 1368 Barbour studied in France. Throughout his life he enjoyed royal favour and in 1388 was given a life pension.
Barbour completed The Actes and Life of the most Victorious Conqueror, Robert Bruce King of Scotland, a metrical historical romance in 20 books, in 1376. The background of The Bruce is the political history of the Scottish struggle for independence, from the death of Alexander III (1286) to the death of Douglas and the burial of Bruce’s heart (1332). The story emphasizes the chivalry and idealism of the Scottish heroes and exhorts their successors to emulate “thair nobill elderis.” But the Battle of Bannockburn (1314) was still within the memory of his contemporaries, and The Bruce remains a harshly realistic story of recent events in the style of the chansons de geste rather than a romance of chivalry. The style of the poem is vigorous, direct, and admirably suited to the matter. Barbour evidently took some trouble to collect firsthand accounts of the Battle of Bannockburn, which is the highlight of the poem. His narrative manner is similar to that of the Scottish border ballads.
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7490b1657cbeea7c500df6bb4d1afc94 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Baret | John Baret | John Baret
…number of languages, such as John Baret’s work of 1573, An Alveary, or Triple Dictionary, in English, Latin, and French. In his preface Baret acknowledged that the work was brought together by his students in the course of their exercises, and the title Alveary was to commemorate their “beehive” of…
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14249f74de5adff39a2416f87a3302bd | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Barnwell | John Barnwell | John Barnwell
…region of plantations named for John Barnwell, who early in the 18th century had led settlers in subduing a Tuscarora Indian uprising. In 1865, during the American Civil War, Federal troops occupied and set fire to the county seat, the town of Barnwell.
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8db0fa62dd5a07454af0dc664ebb4e6b | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Barran | John Barran | John Barran
It was invented by John Barran of Leeds, the founder of the Leeds clothing industry, who substituted a knife edge for the saw edge of a woodworking machine. The resulting increased cutting productivity motivated the development of spreading machines to spread fabric from long bolts in lays composed of…
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a91501671e37d71019605bb31f870bcf | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Barrymore | John Barrymore | John Barrymore
John Barrymore, original name John Sidney Blyth, (born February 15, 1882, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died May 29, 1942, Hollywood, California), American actor, called “The Great Profile,” who is remembered both for his film and stage roles as a debonair leading man and for his interpretations of William Shakespeare’s Richard III and Hamlet. (See Barrymore reading from Henry VI, Part 3.)
John was born into a theatrical family; his parents, Maurice and Georgiana Barrymore, were stage actors, and his siblings, Ethel and Lionel, also became noted actors. John studied painting in Paris but returned to the United States to make his stage debut in 1903. He became a popular light comedian, but it was in serious roles that he scored his greatest stage triumphs. The most important of these were Justice (1916), Peter Ibbetson (1917), The Jest (1919), Richard III (1920), and Hamlet (New York, 1922; London, 1925). These roles led to his being acclaimed as the greatest tragedian of his generation.
Barrymore appeared in motion pictures from 1913 and gave notable performances in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920), The Beloved Rogue (1927), Moby Dick (1930), Rasputin and the Empress (1932; the only film in which Barrymore appeared with his siblings), Grand Hotel (1932), Dinner at Eight (1933), Counsellor-at-Law (1933), Romeo and Juliet (1936), and The Great Profile (1940), in which he lampooned his own image. Though his talents were prodigious and he was considered one of the greatest and handsomest actors of the age, Barrymore became better known for his flamboyant and often outrageous behaviour, and his excessive drinking took a toll on his health and his career.
Barrymore had two children, both of whom turned to the stage. Diana (1921–60) was an actress whose promising career was frequently interrupted by alcoholism; she committed suicide. Her autobiography, Too Much, Too Soon (1957), was made into a motion picture in 1958. His son, John Blyth Barrymore, Jr. (1932–2004), known as John Drew Barrymore, was also a film actor and was the father of actress Drew Barrymore (born 1975).
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c87888413e43f6b4e1e73ead5020405f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Bartholomew-Scottish-cartographer-and-publisher-1831-1893 | John Bartholomew | John Bartholomew
In 1856 his son John Bartholomew (1831–93), the well-known Scottish cartographer, assumed control of the management, and the company developed into a larger, more prosperous business and acquired its own printing press (1860). He was succeeded by his son John George Bartholomew (1860–1920). After 1890 production was devoted mainly…
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68da5680cf0e6cba169209931c168b85 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Bartlett | John Bartlett | John Bartlett
John Bartlett, (born June 14, 1820, Plymouth, Massachusetts, U.S.—died December 3, 1905, Cambridge, Massachusetts), American bookseller and editor best known for his Familiar Quotations.
At the age of 16, Bartlett became an employee of the Harvard University bookstore, where he became so versed in book knowledge that the advice “Ask John Bartlett” became common on the Harvard campus. Eventually he came to own the store, and in 1855 he published the first edition of his Familiar Quotations, based largely on the notebook that he kept for the benefit of his customers. Later editions of the work were greatly expanded, and, from the fourth edition on, these were published by Little, Brown and Company, Boston, which Bartlett joined in 1863. The book went through nine editions in his lifetime and appeared in a centennial edition, the 13th, in 1955. Bartlett also wrote books on chess and angling and, after many years of labour, a Complete Concordance to Shakespeare’s Dramatic Works and Poems (1894), a standard reference work that surpassed any of its predecessors in the number and fullness of its citations. In 1992, the 16th edition appeared with quotes from 340 new people.
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4f6405d4c10f16998750c9bb699fba0b | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Bates | John Bates | John Bates
…after the judges ruled in Bate’s case (1606) that the king could make impositions on imported commodities without the consent of Parliament. Two years later, under the direction of James’s able minister Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, impositions were levied on an expanded list of goods, and a revised book…
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7d6ec0add64f064fdbb4a251bbc47789 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Bell-American-politician | John Bell | John Bell
John Bell, (born Feb. 15, 1797, near Nashville, Tenn., U.S.—died Sept. 10, 1869, Dover, Tenn.), American politician and nominee for president on the eve of the American Civil War.
Bell entered the U.S. House of Representatives in 1827 and served there as a Democrat until 1841. He broke with Pres. Andrew Jackson in 1834 and supported Hugh Lawson White for president in 1836. After White’s defeat Bell became a Whig and, in March 1841, as a reward for party services, was made secretary of war in Pres. William Henry Harrison’s Cabinet. A few months later, after the death of President Harrison, he resigned in opposition to Pres. John Tyler’s break with the Whigs.
After six years’ retirement from political life, Bell was elected as a U.S. senator for Tennessee in 1847, serving in the Senate until 1859. Although a large slaveholder, Bell opposed efforts to expand slavery to the U.S. territories. He vigorously opposed Pres. James Knox Polk’s Mexican War policy and voted against the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas–Nebraska bill (1854), and the attempt to admit Kansas as a slave state. Bell’s temperate support of slavery combined with his vigorous defense of the Union brought him the presidential nomination on the Constitutional Union ticket in 1860, but he carried only Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. He initially opposed secession; however, following Pres. Abraham Lincoln’s call for troops, he openly advocated resistance and henceforth classed himself a rebel. Bell spent the war years in retirement in Georgia, returning to Tennessee in 1865.
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58b4001a1d51f5f3560ac4fe9b76eae2 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Berrien-Montgomery | John Berrien Montgomery | John Berrien Montgomery
…along the Rio Grande, Captain John B. Montgomery sailed the sloop of war Portsmouth into the bay on June 3, 1846, anchored in Yerba Buena Cove, and later went ashore with a party of sailors and marines to raise the U.S. flag in the plaza. On January 30, 1847, Yerba…
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4ded518eb00b044bed9adc0bae56e024 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Berryman | John Berryman | John Berryman
John Berryman, (born Oct. 25, 1914, McAlester, Okla., U.S.—died Jan. 7, 1972, Minneapolis, Minn.), U.S. poet whose importance was assured by the publication in 1956 of the long poem Homage to Mistress Bradstreet.
Berryman was brought up a strict Roman Catholic in the small Oklahoma town of Anadarko, moving at 10 with his family to Tampa, Fla. When the boy was 12, his father killed himself. Berryman attended a private school in Connecticut and graduated from Columbia University, where he was influenced by his teacher, the poet Mark Van Doren. After study at the University of Cambridge in 1938, he returned to the U.S. to teach at Wayne State University, Detroit, beginning a career that included posts at Harvard, Princeton, and the University of Minnesota.
He began to publish in little magazines during the late 1930s, and in 1940 Five Young American Poets contained 20 of his poems. Two other volumes of poetry—Poems (1942) and The Dispossessed (1948)—followed. A richly erotic autobiographical sequence about a love affair, Berryman’s Sonnets, appeared in 1967. Berryman was a versatile man of letters: “The Lovers” appeared in The Best American Short Stories of 1946, and his story “The Imaginary Jew” (1945) is often anthologized. His biography of Stephen Crane was published in 1950.
Homage to Mistress Bradstreet is a monologue that pays tribute to Anne Bradstreet, the first American woman poet: sometimes her voice is heard, sometimes Berryman’s, and throughout a loving and intimate grasp of the details of American history is manifest. His new technical daring was also evident in 77 Dream Songs (1964), augmented to form a sequence of 385 “Dream Songs” by His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (1968). Berryman’s work bears some relation to the “confessional” school of poetry that flourished among many of his contemporaries, but in his case bursts of humour sporadically light up the troubled interior landscape. This autobiographical note continued to be sounded in Love & Fame (1970), in which he conveys much in a deceptively offhand manner.
Berryman committed suicide by jumping from a bridge onto the ice of the Mississippi River. Recovery, an account of his struggle against alcoholism, was published in 1973.
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9f1ef04d9eca5e91b1322f8a2f2ac3a8 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Bevis | John Bevis | John Bevis
…taken by the English astronomer John Bevis in 1747 when he replaced the water by metal foil forming a lining on the inside surface of the glass and another covering the outside surface. This form of the capacitor with a conductor projecting from the mouth of the jar and touching…
…English physician and amateur astronomer John Bevis in about 1731. In 1758 it was the first object listed (M1) in Charles Messier’s catalog of nebulous objects. It acquired its name, suggested by its form, in the mid-19th century. In 1921 it was discovered to be still expanding; the present rate…
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f708bc119382aac9cca2695cbdab4bba | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Bidwell | John Bidwell | John Bidwell
John Bidwell, (born Aug. 5, 1819, Chautauqua County, N.Y., U.S.—died April 4, 1900, near Sacramento, Calif.), California civic and political leader who ran unsuccessfully for U.S. president in 1892 as the candidate of the Prohibition Party.
The Bidwell family moved from New York to Pennsylvania in 1829 and to Ohio in 1831. In 1836 Bidwell walked 300 miles from the family home in Ashtabula to enroll at Kingsville Academy—of which he was made principal the following year at the age of 17.
After returning to Ashtabula to accept a teaching position, Bidwell moved west, settling temporarily in Missouri before joining the first emigrant group to travel by wagon train from the town of Independence to California. On arrival there, Bidwell went to work at Sutter’s Fort and, after a few years, became a naturalized Mexican citizen. Reluctant to join the Bear Flag revolt of Americans in California against Mexico, he nonetheless helped draw up the Bear Flag Republic’s resolution of independence in July 1846.
Bidwell fought in the Mexican War, marching to Monterey (California) with Colonel John C. Frémont, serving as civil magistrate in Los Angeles, and finally assisting Commodore Robert F. Stockton in the recapture of Los Angeles in 1847. At the end of the war he returned to Sutter’s Fort and became the first to find gold on the Feather River.
With his newly discovered wealth Bidwell purchased a 22,000-acre ranch, Rancho Chico, north of Sacramento. There he became the state’s leading agriculturalist while simultaneously taking a prominent role in California politics. He served in the state senate and was a delegate to several Democratic Party national conventions. With the advent of the Civil War, Bidwell, a staunch Unionist, became a supporter of Lincoln.
Elected to the House of Representatives in 1864, Bidwell declined renomination in order to run for governor of California on the Republican ticket in 1867; his bid was unsuccessful, as were his two others, one in 1875 as an anti-monopolist independent and another in 1890 as a candidate of the Prohibition Party, which nominated him for president in 1892.
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704ded92e30750aaec9ff93a8e0fbbc2 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Blair | John Blair | John Blair
John Blair, (born 1732, Williamsburg, Virginia [U.S.]—died August 31, 1800, Williamsburg, Virginia, U.S.), associate justice of the United States Supreme Court (1790–96).
A member of one of Virginia’s most prominent landed families and a close friend of George Washington, Blair studied law at the Middle Temple in London and in 1766 was elected to represent William and Mary College in the Virginia House of Burgesses. He served in the Burgesses until 1770, and then for five years he was clerk of the royal governor’s Council.
In 1776 he took part in the convention to frame a constitution and plan of government for the new commonwealth of Virginia and was elected to the state Privy Council. In 1778 he was elected one of the judges of the state General Court and later became its chief justice. He subsequently served as a judge of the High Court of Chancery and was a judge of the Court of Appeals when it heard the case of Commonwealth of Virginia v. Caton in 1782. He sided with the majority when it laid down the principle that a court can annul a law deemed to conflict with the constitution. Blair took part in the Constitutional Convention of 1787, and in 1789 he was appointed by President Washington to the U.S. Supreme Court (taking his oath of office the following year). He was a judicial conservative and served on the court until his retirement in 1796.
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8b80147a89234dd2e4cbbe1884251bce | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Blow | John Blow | John Blow
John Blow, (baptized Feb. 23, 1649, Newark-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire, Eng.—died Oct. 1, 1708, Westminster, London), organist and composer, remembered for his church music and for Venus and Adonis, which is regarded as the earliest surviving English opera.
He was probably educated at the Magnus Song School in Nottinghamshire and in 1660 became a chorister at the Chapel Royal. He was appointed organist of Westminster Abbey (1668), and in 1669 he became one of the king’s musicians for virginals. In March 1674 he was sworn in as a gentleman of the Chapel Royal and became master of the children, a position he held until his death. He had great influence on the choristers under him and also on his student, Henry Purcell. In 1676 or 1677 he became one of the Chapel Royal organists, and in 1677 the dean and chapter of Canterbury conferred on him a doctorate of music—the first instance of what became known as a Lambeth Degree in music.
In 1679 Blow was succeeded as organist at Westminster Abbey by Purcell; he was reappointed after Purcell’s death in 1695. The years 1680–1700 were the most productive and prosperous of his life. In 1687 he became master of the children of St. Paul’s, a position he held for 16 years; and in 1699 he received his last appointment, as first composer to the Chapel Royal.
Blow’s official positions entailed the writing of much religious and secular ceremonial music. At least 10 services and more than 100 anthems are extant, and many remain in regular use. He was at his best in the writing of full anthems in a simple chordal or contrapuntal style with melodies of great strength and sweetness developed over a ground bass. He excelled also in the writing of services; outstanding is his Service in G Major. His Venus and Adonis, written between 1680 and 1685 for performance at court and called by him A Masque for the Entertainment of the King, was important in the development of English opera. It is the first surviving dramatic work with English text in which the whole text is set to music without either spoken dialogue or extraneous musical entertainment. His songs for one, two, three, and four voices, which appear in many contemporary collections and in his own Amphion Anglicus (1700), are notable for their charm of melody.
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54c0f41d01c40dc464ce56c06414d02a | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Bonham | John Bonham | John Bonham
John Bonham, in full John Henry Bonham, byname Bonzo, (born May 31, 1947, Redditch, Worcestershire, England—died September 25, 1980, Windsor), British rock musician and famed heavy-handed drummer of the Led Zeppelin rock band.
Bonham joined Led Zeppelin when it was formed in 1968. His aggressive drumming provided the rhythmical base for the group’s music and contributed largely to the success of the band, which gained an international reputation as pioneers of “acid rock.” During the late ’60s and early ’70s the group made many successful tours in Europe and the U.S. Bonham’s career started with the group Band of Joy, which also included Robert Plant, Led Zeppelin’s lead singer. Led Zeppelin made few public appearances after 1977, but it toured Europe shortly before Bonham’s accidental death, brought on by excessive drinking.
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28b749ea593e18e6fb2f3135d3847e28 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Bool | John Bool | John Bool
Alfred and John Bool and Henry Dixon worked for the Society for Photographing Old London, recording historical buildings and relics. In the 1850s the French government commissioned several photographers to document historical buildings. Working with cameras making photographs as large as 20 by 29 inches (51 by…
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f9618f3d72c0f578d5c9125e79f126ec | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Boorman | John Boorman | John Boorman
John Boorman, (born January 18, 1933, Shepperton, Middlesex [now Surrey], England), British director who was one of the most distinctive stylists of his generation.
Boorman began writing film reviews while a teenager. After a stint in the British military, he moved to television in 1955, editing and filming documentaries. He joined the BBC a few years later, rising to the head of their documentary division by 1962. He had great critical success with his series of documentaries Citizen 63, which describe what the British citizen in 1963 was really like, rather than how he described himself. In 1964 Boorman directed The Newcomers, a popular six-part study of a couple from Bristol.
Boorman’s first feature film, Catch Us If You Can (1965; also known as Having a Wild Weekend), followed the British rock group the Dave Clark Five through Bristol, using the cityscape as backdrop. Although inspired by the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night (1964), it highlighted the director’s innovative style. With his next film, Point Blank (1967), Boorman employed elements of the French New Wave, notably jump cuts and a fractured narrative. The gangster drama starred Lee Marvin as a small-time criminal out for revenge against his wife (played by Angie Dickinson) and the syndicate that left him for dead. Considered a minor genre release at the time, it later became a cult favourite, hailed as a paradigm of nihilistic violence. Marvin returned for Hell in the Pacific (1968), a World War II drama that portrayed the antagonism and mutual dependence of two men, an American soldier and a Japanese soldier (Mifune Toshirō), who are marooned on a Pacific island. Leo the Last (1970) was a quirky philosophical tale about an exiled monarch (Marcello Mastroianni) who returns to his family’s London home and finds the surrounding area has become impoverished. Although initially self-absorbed, he slowly becomes involved in the lives of his neighbours. The dramedy won Boorman the best director prize at the Cannes film festival, though it was not a commercial success. Leo the Last was the first of numerous films that he cowrote.
In 1972 Boorman directed Deliverance, arguably his best-known work. Adapted by James Dickey from his 1970 novel, it tells the story of four businessmen—played by Burt Reynolds, Jon Voight, Ronny Cox, and Ned Beatty—whose weekend canoe trip down a Georgia river turns into a nightmare as they battle both nature and the locals. Despite some controversy—the film features a brutal scene in which one of the male characters is raped and ordered to “squeal like a pig”—Deliverance was a major box-office hit and is widely considered a classic. It received an Academy Award nomination for best picture, and Boorman earned his first Oscar nod for directing. He had less success with his next films, however. The science-fiction drama Zardoz (1974), with Sean Connery and Charlotte Rampling, was long on stunning visuals but short on logic. The horror thriller Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), a sequel to the blockbuster hit The Exorcist (1973), was widely panned, though it later developed a cult following.
Turning to Arthurian legend, Boorman found commercial and critical success with Excalibur (1981), an ambitious production that featured breathtaking cinematography and a top-notch cast: Nicol Williamson, Patrick Stewart, Helen Mirren, and Liam Neeson. Just as visually distinctive—and oddly mystical—was The Emerald Forest (1985), the story of a boy (Charley Boorman, John’s son, in a strong performance) who is kidnapped and raised by an Amazonian tribe until his father (Powers Boothe) finds him after a 10-year search. The film was inspired by a true story. Boorman left primeval nature for Hope and Glory (1987), a semiautobiographical story about a boy growing up in London during the air raids of World War II. He earned an Academy Award nomination for directing and another for his screenplay; the movie also received a best-picture nod.
After several forgettable films, including the comedy Where the Heart Is (1990) and the political thriller Beyond Rangoon (1995), Boorman directed The General (1998), a biopic about the legendary Irish criminal Martin Cahill, portrayed by Brendan Gleeson; Voight was cast as the policeman who has sworn to bring him to justice. The acclaimed crime drama earned Boorman another best director award from Cannes. He next helmed The Tailor of Panama (2001), a well-received adaptation of John le Carré’s best-selling espionage thriller. Pierce Brosnan was effective as a British operative who is sent to Panama only to become embroiled with an untrustworthy source of local intelligence (Geoffrey Rush).
Boorman’s later credits included In My Country (2004), a well-intentioned drama about the consequences of apartheid in South Africa, and The Tiger’s Tail (2006), with Gleeson well cast as a driven Irish businessman whose ruthless real-estate dealings begin to take a toll on his sanity. The drama Queen & Country (2014) is a sequel to Hope and Glory. Boorman also cowrote the drama The Professor and the Madman (2019).
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607ce5ddb26c39456ed3b21b9df2da04 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Bowen | John Bowen | John Bowen
John Bowen, in full John Griffith Bowen, (born November 5, 1924, Calcutta [now Kolkata], India—died April 18, 2019), British playwright and novelist noted for examining the complexity and ambivalence of human motives and behaviour.
Bowen was the son of a British business manager working in India. He spent much of his childhood in England but returned to India during World War II, serving as a captain in the Maratha Light Infantry (1943–47). After attending Pembroke and St. Anthony’s College, Oxford (B.A., 1951; M.A., 1952), he went to Ohio State University for a year’s study. While in the United States, he was revolted by the investigations of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. That experience inspired his first novel, The Truth Will Not Help Us (1956), about an unjust trial of three Englishmen in Scotland in 1705 for piracy.
Back in England, Bowen worked in journalism and advertising (1953–60) and was a television drama consultant for Associated Television (1960–67). His early scripts for television films were preoccupied with self-delusion and self-discovery. Among them were A Holiday Abroad (1960), The Essay Prize (1960), The Candidate (1961), and The Jackpot Question (1961). The former three were collected as The Essay Prize, with A Holiday Abroad and The Candidate: Plays for Television (1962), which also contained a much-remarked essay on television writing. He also wrote the TV programs The Guardians (1971), about a futuristic dystopian England, and Heil Caesar! (1973), which modernized Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Bowen adapted Noël Coward’s script for the film Brief Encounter (1946) for television in 1974. It starred Richard Burton and Sophia Loren as adulterous lovers. He cocreated (with David Cook) the television series Hetty Wainthropp Investigates (1996–98). The show revolved around a retired woman who becomes a private detective; the character was taken from one of Cook’s novels.
Bowen was a prolific producer of stage drama as well. I Love You, Mrs. Patterson (1964) concerned the romantic entanglement of a student and his teacher’s wife, and After the Rain (1966), adapted from Bowen’s 1958 novel of that name, was about survivors of a worldwide flood. Little Boxes (1968) consisted of two one-acts, the first about aging vaudevillians and the second about the attempts of a young lesbian couple to conceal their affair. The Disorderly Women (1969) was a modernization of Euripides’ Bacchae. The Corsican Brothers (1970) was based on the story by Alexandre Dumas père; Bowen’s script was originally performed on television in 1965. Later plays included Spot the Lady (1981), The Oak Tree Tea-Room Siege (1990), and Cold Salmon (1998).
Bowen also maintained a steady output of novels. Among them were Storyboard (1960), The McGuffin (1984), The Girls: A Story of Village Life (1986), Fighting Back (1989), and The Precious Gift (1992).
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0a610a17760c52bb1a2b0fc51eca5e09 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Bradshaw | John Bradshaw | John Bradshaw
John Bradshaw, (born 1602, Stockport, Cheshire, Eng.—died Oct. 31, 1659, London), president of the court that condemned King Charles I of England to death.
Bradshaw, the son of a country gentleman, became a lawyer and in 1643 was appointed judge of the sheriff ’s court in London. During the early years of the English Civil Wars, he used his legal talents to aid the Parliamentarians’ cause. He became chief justice of Chester, Cheshire, in 1647, and in January 1649 the Independents (radical Puritans), who controlled the House of Commons, made him president of the court assembled to try Charles for treason. Charles repeatedly refused to plead, though he sought to have his case heard before Parliament—a request denied by Bradshaw. Charles was convicted and executed (Jan. 30, 1649).
In March 1649 Bradshaw became president of the Council of State, the executive body of the Commonwealth. Following Oliver Cromwell’s establishment of the Protectorate in 1653, Bradshaw openly expressed his dissatisfaction with the new government and retired from politics (1654). In May 1659, following the death of Cromwell and the abdication of Cromwell’s son Richard, Bradshaw was again made a member of the Council of State, and in June he became commissioner of the great seal.
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10e1caaa5c699054a659cf33f631652e | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-C-Slater | John C. Slater | John C. Slater
…bonds was rapidly developed by John C. Slater and Linus C. Pauling in the United States. Slater proposed a simple general method for constructing multiple-electron wave functions that would automatically satisfy the Pauli exclusion principle. Pauling introduced a valence-bond method, picking out one electron in each of the two combining…
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4a72c5f92e92ba220b1f50030d3a7948 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Cabot | John Cabot | John Cabot
John Cabot, Italian Giovanni Caboto, (born c. 1450, Genoa? [Italy]—died c. 1499), navigator and explorer who by his voyages in 1497 and 1498 helped lay the groundwork for the later British claim to Canada. The exact details of his life and of his voyages are still subjects of controversy among historians and cartographers.
On June 24, 1497, Cabot and his crew aboard the Matthew reached North America—either Labrador, Newfoundland, or Cape Breton Island. He took possession of the land for the English king and later may have explored the present-day Cabot Strait, believing that he had reached the northeast coast of Asia, before returning to England.
In early 1498 Cabot received permission for a second expedition to North America, which likely consisted of five ships and hundreds of men. After setting out in 1498, one ship was damaged (possibly by a severe storm) and sought anchorage in Ireland. The fates of the others, including the one carrying Cabot, remain unknown.
Cabot’s voyages demonstrated the viability of a short route across the North Atlantic. Although he did not discover a route to Asia, his efforts—namely his first, successful voyage from Bristol to North America during the summer of 1497—would later prove important in the establishment of British colonies in North America.
Cabot moved to Venice in 1461, or possibly earlier, and became a citizen of that city in 1476. While employed by a Venetian mercantile firm, he traveled to the eastern shores of the Mediterranean and visited Mecca, a great trading centre where Oriental and Western goods were exchanged. He became skilled in navigational techniques and seems to have envisaged, independently of Christopher Columbus, the possibility of reaching Asia by sailing westward.
Cabot’s whereabouts and activities from the mid-1480s to the mid-1490s are in doubt, but it is believed that he moved with his family to England and had taken up residence in Bristol by the end of 1495. On March 5, 1496, King Henry VII of England issued letters patent to Cabot and his sons, authorizing them to voyage in search of unknown lands, to return their merchandise by the port of Bristol, and to enjoy a monopoly of any trade they might establish there. The news of Columbus’ recent discoveries on behalf of Spain was a spur to English action and secured some support for Cabot from Bristol merchants.
In 1496 Cabot made a voyage from Bristol with one ship, but he was forced to turn back because of a shortage of food, inclement weather, and disputes with his crew. In May 1497, however, he set sail from Bristol in the small ship Matthew, with a crew of 18 men. He proceeded around Ireland and then north and west, making landfall on the morning of June 24. The exact landing place has never been definitely established: it has been variously believed to be in southern Labrador, Newfoundland, or Cape Breton Island. On going ashore, he noticed signs indicating that the area was inhabited but saw no people. Taking possession of the land for the English king, he unfurled both the English and Venetian flags. He conducted explorations from the ship along the coastline, naming various features Cape Discovery, Island of St. John, St. George’s Cape, the Trinity Islands, and England’s Cape. These may be, respectively, the present Cape North, St. Paul Island, Cape Ray, St. Pierre and Miquelon, and Cape Race, all in the area of Cabot Strait.
In the mistaken belief that he had reached the northeast coast of Asia, Cabot returned to Bristol on August 6, 1497. He reported that the land was excellent, the climate temperate, and the sea covered with enough fish to end England’s dependence on Iceland’s fish. In the midst of an enthusiastic welcome, he announced his plans to return to his landing place and from there sail westward until he came to Japan, the reputed source of spices and gems. On February 3, 1498, he received new letters patent for a second expedition. Cabot’s second expedition probably consisted of five ships and about 200 men. Soon after setting out in 1498, one ship was damaged and sought anchorage in Ireland, suggesting that the fleet had been hit by a severe storm. By 1499 Cabot had been given up for dead.
The effect of Cabot’s efforts was to demonstrate the viability of a short route across the North Atlantic. This would later prove important in the establishment of British colonies in North America.
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126f0266e83d85ef4a9fba831447aa79 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Cairncross | John Cairncross | John Cairncross
John Cairncross, (born July 25, 1913, Lesmahagow, Scotland—died October 8, 1995, Herefordshire, England), British literary scholar and civil servant who was identified in the 1990s as the “fifth man” in the notorious Cambridge spy ring that included Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and Anthony Blunt.
The son of an ironmonger and a schoolteacher, Cairncross graduated from the University of Glasgow in 1933 with a degree in German and French. He studied modern languages at the Sorbonne in Paris and then at Trinity College, Cambridge. At Cambridge he frequented left-wing circles and met other members of the future spy ring, but he did not fit in with the polished young men and pursued his future careers apart from them.
Cairncross entered the Foreign Office in 1936, having passed the entrance examinations with outstanding marks. Shortly after, he was introduced by James Klugmann, a communist from Cambridge, to a Soviet agent who invited him to aid the antifascist movement. Cairncross was transferred in 1938 to the Treasury and in 1940, after the start of World War II, to the Cabinet Office, where he became the private secretary of Sir Maurice Hankey, the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. In this latter capacity Cairncross may have passed to the Soviets a copy of the MAUD report, which evaluated Britain’s prospects for building an atomic bomb.
In 1942 he was assigned as a German translator to Bletchley Park, a government research centre north of London where encrypted German military communications were decoded and disseminated to intelligence services. Cairncross smuggled many decrypted German communiqués to the Soviets, including vital messages on army movements on the Eastern Front that helped the Red Army to prepare for the Germans’ huge tank offensive at the Battle of Kursk (July–August 1943).
Cairncross transferred in 1944 to MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence agency, where for a time he worked under Philby. In 1945 he returned to the Treasury. After the war he may have passed plans for the new NATO alliance to the Soviets. In 1951, after Maclean and Burgess had fled England to escape investigation, notes written by Cairncross were found in Burgess’s home, and Cairncross was interrogated by MI5, the British domestic security agency. He denied having spied for the Soviets, but he agreed to resign from the Civil Service.
Cairncross began a new career as a literary scholar, teaching in the United States at Northwestern University in Illinois and at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. Over the following decades he published a number of translations and studies of the great French playwrights Racine, Corneille, and Molière, as well as a history of Christian attitudes toward polygamy, After Polygamy Was Made a Sin (1974).
In 1964, after Philby had defected to the Soviet Union, Cairncross was again interrogated by MI5, and this time he confessed to espionage. British authorities decided not to prosecute him, perhaps in exchange for receiving information from Cairncross, and both sides agreed to remain silent on his past. Cairncross continued his literary studies and writing and also worked for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome. In 1990 and 1995 he was named as the “fifth man” in books by two former Soviet intelligence officers. Cairncross moved back to England and prepared his memoirs, which were published after his death as The Enigma Spy (1997). Cairncross insisted to the last that he had never betrayed secrets that damaged Britain, and he was not ashamed to admit that he had given the Soviet Union information it used to win its great victory at the Battle of Kursk.
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b5be161b7112c0eec6d7c4aef14fa5c5 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Calvin | John Calvin | John Calvin
John Calvin, French Jean Calvin or Jean Cauvin, (born July 10, 1509, Noyon, Picardy, France—died May 27, 1564, Geneva, Switzerland), theologian and ecclesiastical statesman. He was the leading French Protestant reformer and the most important figure in the second generation of the Protestant Reformation. His interpretation of Christianity, advanced above all in his Institutio Christianae religionis (1536 but elaborated in later editions; Institutes of the Christian Religion), and the institutional and social patterns he worked out for Geneva deeply influenced Protestantism elsewhere in Europe and in North America. The Calvinist form of Protestantism is widely thought to have had a major impact on the formation of the modern world.
John Calvin was a French lawyer, theologian, and ecclesiastical statesman who lived in the 1500s. He was the most important figure in the second generation of the Protestant Reformation.
John Calvin is known for his influential Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536), which was the first systematic theological treatise of the reform movement. He stressed the doctrine of predestination, and his interpretations of Christian teachings, known as Calvinism, are characteristic of Reformed churches.
John Calvin died in 1564 at age 54. He requested to be buried in an unmarked grave and is believed to be interred somewhere in the Cimetière des Rois in Geneva.
This article deals with the man and his achievements. For further treatment of Calvinism, see Calvinism and Protestantism.
Calvin was of middle-class parents. His father, a lay administrator in the service of the local bishop, sent him to the University of Paris in 1523 to be educated for the priesthood but later decided that he should be a lawyer; from 1528 to 1531, therefore, Calvin studied in the law schools of Orléans and Bourges. He then returned to Paris. During these years he was also exposed to Renaissance humanism, influenced by Erasmus and Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, which constituted the radical student movement of the time. This movement, which antedates the Reformation, aimed to reform church and society on the model of both classical and Christian antiquity, to be established by a return to the Bible studied in its original languages. It left an indelible mark on Calvin. Under its influence he studied Greek and Hebrew as well as Latin, the three languages of ancient Christian discourse, in preparation for serious study of the Scriptures. It also intensified his interest in the classics; his first publication (1532) was a commentary on Seneca’s essay on clemency. But the movement, above all, emphasized salvation of individuals by grace rather than good works and ceremonies.
Calvin’s Paris years came to an abrupt end late in 1533. Because the government became less tolerant of this reform movement, Calvin, who had collaborated in the preparation of a strong statement of theological principles for a public address delivered by Nicolas Cop, rector of the university, found it prudent to leave Paris. Eventually he made his way to Basel, then Protestant but tolerant of religious variety. Up to that point, however, there is little evidence of Calvin’s conversion to Protestantism, an event difficult to date because it was probably gradual. His beliefs before his flight to Switzerland were probably not incompatible with Roman Catholic orthodoxy. But they underwent a change when he began to study theology intensively in Basel. Probably in part to clarify his own beliefs, he began to write. He began with a preface to a French translation of the Bible by his cousin Pierre Olivétan and then undertook what became the first edition of the Institutes, his masterwork, which, in its successive revisions, became the single most important statement of Protestant belief. Calvin published later editions in both Latin and French, containing elaborated and in a few cases revised teachings and replies to his critics. The final versions appeared in 1559 and 1560. The Institutes also reflected the findings of Calvin’s massive biblical commentaries, which, presented extemporaneously in Latin as lectures to ministerial candidates from many countries, make up the largest proportion of his works. In addition he wrote many theological and polemical treatises.
The 1536 Institutes had given Calvin some reputation among Protestant leaders. Therefore, on discovering that Calvin was spending a night in Geneva late in 1536, the reformer and preacher Guillaume Farel, then struggling to plant Protestantism in that town, persuaded him to remain to help in this work. The Reformation was in trouble in Geneva, a town of about 10,000 where Protestantism had only the shallowest of roots. Other towns in the region, initially ruled by their prince-bishops, had successfully won self-government much earlier, but Geneva had lagged behind in this process largely because its prince-bishop was supported by the neighbouring duke of Savoy. There had been iconoclastic riots in Geneva in the mid-1520s, but these had negligible theological foundations. Protestantism had been imposed on religiously unawakened Geneva chiefly as the price of military aid from Protestant Bern. The limited enthusiasm of Geneva for Protestantism, reflected by a resistance to religious and moral reform, continued almost until Calvin’s death. The resistance was all the more serious because the town council in Geneva, as in other Protestant towns, exercised ultimate control over the church and the ministers, all French refugees. The main issue was the right of excommunication, which the ministers regarded as essential to their authority but which the council refused to concede. The uncompromising attitudes of Calvin and Farel finally resulted in their expulsion from Geneva in May 1538.
Calvin found refuge for the next three years in the German Protestant city of Strasbourg, where he was pastor of a church for French-speaking refugees and also lectured on the Bible; there he published his commentary on the Letter of Paul to the Romans. There too, in 1540, he married Idelette de Bure, the widow of a man he had converted from Anabaptism. Although none of their children survived infancy, their marital relationship proved to be extremely warm. During his Strasbourg years Calvin also learned much about the administration of an urban church from Martin Bucer, its chief pastor. Meanwhile Calvin’s attendance at various international religious conferences made him acquainted with other Protestant leaders and gave him experience in debating with Roman Catholic theologians. Henceforth he was a major figure in international Protestantism.
In September 1541 Calvin was invited back to Geneva, where the Protestant revolution, without strong leadership, had become increasingly insecure. Because he was now in a much stronger position, the town council in November enacted his Ecclesiastical Ordinances, which provided for the religious education of the townspeople, especially children, and instituted Calvin’s conception of church order. It also established four groups of church officers: pastors and teachers to preach and explain the Scriptures, elders representing the congregation to administer the church, and deacons to attend to its charitable responsibilities. In addition it set up a consistory of pastors and elders to make all aspects of Genevan life conform to God’s law. It undertook a wide range of disciplinary actions covering everything from the abolition of Roman Catholic “superstition” to the enforcement of sexual morality, the regulation of taverns, and measures against dancing, gambling, and swearing. These measures were resented by a significant element of the population, and the arrival of increasing numbers of French religious refugees in Geneva was a further cause of native discontent. These tensions, as well as the persecution of Calvin’s followers in France, help to explain the trial and burning of Michael Servetus, a Spanish theologian preaching and publishing unorthodox beliefs. When Servetus unexpectedly arrived in Geneva in 1553, both sides felt the need to demonstrate their zeal for orthodoxy. Calvin was responsible for Servetus’s arrest and conviction, though he had preferred a less brutal form of execution.
The struggle over control of Geneva lasted until May 1555, when Calvin finally prevailed and could devote himself more wholeheartedly to other matters. He had constantly to watch the international scene and to keep his Protestant allies in a common front. Toward this end he engaged in a massive correspondence with political and religious leaders throughout Protestant Europe. He also continued his commentaries on Scripture, working through the whole New Testament except the Revelation to John and most of the Old Testament. Many of these commentaries were promptly published, often with dedications to such European rulers as Queen Elizabeth, though Calvin had too little time to do much of the editorial work himself. Committees of amanuenses took down what he said, prepared a master copy, and then presented it to Calvin for approval. During this period Calvin also established the Genevan Academy to train students in humanist learning in preparation for the ministry and positions of secular leadership. He also performed a wide range of pastoral duties, preaching regularly and often, doing numerous weddings and baptisms, and giving spiritual advice. Worn out by so many responsibilities and suffering from a multitude of ailments, he died in 1564.
Unlike Martin Luther, Calvin was a reticent man; he rarely expressed himself in the first person singular. This reticence has contributed to his reputation as cold, intellectual, and humanly unapproachable. His thought, from this perspective, has been interpreted as abstract and concerned with timeless issues rather than as the response of a sensitive human being to the needs of a particular historical situation. Those who knew him, however, perceived him differently, remarking on his talent for friendship but also on his hot temper. Moreover, the intensity of his grief on the death of his wife, as well as his empathic reading of many passages in Scripture, revealed a large capacity for feeling.
Calvin’s facade of impersonality can now be understood as concealing an unusually high level of anxiety about the world around him, about the adequacy of his own efforts to deal with its needs, and about human salvation, notably including his own. He believed that every Christian—and he certainly included himself—suffers from terrible bouts of doubt. From this perspective the need for control both of oneself and the environment, often discerned in Calvinists, can be understood as a function of Calvin’s own anxiety.
Calvin’s anxiety found expression in two metaphors for the human condition that appear again and again in his writings: as an abyss in which human beings have lost their way and as a labyrinth from which they cannot escape. Calvinism as a body of thought must be understood as the product of Calvin’s effort to escape from the terrors conveyed by these metaphors.
Historians are generally agreed that Calvin is to be understood primarily as a Renaissance humanist who aimed to apply the novelties of humanism to recover a biblical understanding of Christianity. Thus he sought to appeal rhetorically to the human heart rather than to compel agreement, in the traditional manner of systematic theologians, by demonstrating dogmatic truths. His chief enemies, indeed, were the systematic theologians of his own time, the Scholastics, both because they relied too much on human reason rather than the Bible and because their teachings were lifeless and irrelevant to a world in desperate need. Calvin’s humanism meant first that he thought of himself as a biblical theologian in accordance with the Reformation slogan scriptura sola. He was prepared to follow Scripture even when it surpassed the limits of human understanding, trusting to the Holy Spirit to inspire faith in its promises. Like other humanists, he was also deeply concerned to remedy the evils of his own time; and here too he found guidance in Scripture. Its teachings could not be presented as a set of timeless abstractions but had to be brought to life by adapting them to the understanding of contemporaries according to the rhetorical principle of decorum—i.e., suitability to time, place, and audience.
Calvin’s humanism influenced his thought in two other basic ways. For one, he shared with earlier Renaissance humanists an essentially biblical conception of the human personality, comprehending it not as a hierarchy of faculties ruled by reason but as a mysterious unity in which what is primary is not what is highest but what is central: the heart. This conception assigned more importance to will and feelings than to the intellect, and it also gave new dignity to the body. For this reason Calvin rejected the ascetic disregard of the body’s needs that was often prominent in medieval spirituality. Implicit in this particular rejection of the traditional hierarchy of faculties in the personality, however, was a radical rejection of the traditional belief that hierarchy was the basis of all order. For Calvin, instead, the only foundation for order in human affairs was utility. Among its other consequences this position undermined the traditional one subordinating women to men. Calvin believed that, for practical reasons, it may be necessary for some to command and others to obey, but it could no longer be argued that women must naturally be subordinated to men. This helps to explain the rejection in Geneva of the double standard in sexual morality.
Second, Calvin’s utilitarianism, as well as his understanding of the human personality as both less and more than intellectual, was also reflected in deep reservations about the capacity of human beings for anything but practical knowledge. The notion that they can know anything absolutely, as God knows, so to speak, seemed to him highly presumptuous. This conviction helps to explain his reliance on the Bible. Calvin believed that human beings have access to the saving truths of religion only insofar as God has revealed them in Scripture. But revealed truths were not given to satisfy human curiosity but were limited to meeting the most urgent and practical needs of human existence, above all for salvation. This emphasis on practicality reflects a basic conviction of Renaissance humanism: the superiority of an active earthly life devoted to meeting practical needs to a life of contemplation. Calvin’s conviction that every occupation in society is a “calling” on the part of God himself sanctified this conception. Calvin thus spelled out the theological implications of Renaissance humanism in various ways.
But Calvin was not purely a Renaissance humanist. The culture of the 16th century was peculiarly eclectic, and, like other thinkers of his time, Calvin had inherited a set of contrary tendencies, which he uneasily combined with his humanism. He was an unsystematic thinker not only because he was a humanist but also because 16th-century thinkers lacked the historical perspective that would have enabled them to sort out the diverse materials in their culture. Thus, even as he emphasized the heart, Calvin continued also to think of the human personality in traditional terms as a hierarchy of faculties ruled by reason. He sometimes attributed a large place to reason even in religion and emphasized the importance of rational control over the passions and the body. The persistence of these traditional attitudes in Calvin’s thought, however, helps to explain its broad appeal; they were reassuring to conservatives.
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60c969448e4222399960f46426441eea | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Carroll-American-bishop | John Carroll | John Carroll
John Carroll, (born Jan. 8, 1735, Upper Marlboro, Maryland [now in the U.S.]—died Dec. 3, 1815, Baltimore), first Roman Catholic bishop in the United States and the first archbishop of Baltimore. Under his leadership the Roman Catholic church became firmly established in the United States.
Carroll was the son of a prominent Maryland family. Because there were no schools for the training of priests in the American colonies, he was sent abroad for his education, first to France and then to Belgium, where he was ordained (c. 1767). He taught philosophy and theology at the Jesuit colleges in Liège and Bruges, but the suppression of Jesuits by the papal brief of July 1773, vigorously enforced on the Continent, prompted him to seek refuge in England. By that time, however, the deteriorating relations between England and the Colonies were evident, and, sensing the climate of unrest, Carroll returned to Baltimore in the spring of 1774.
In the post-Revolutionary years, Carroll, who did not take an active part in the war, was instrumental in the reorganization of American Roman Catholics, no longer under the jurisdiction of the English church, and in efforts to establish satisfactory relations with Rome. On Nov. 6, 1789, he was appointed bishop of Baltimore—a diocese at that time encompassing the entire United States; he was consecrated the following year. He worked for the establishment in the United States of institutions for the training and ordination of native-born priests. In 1791 he founded the Sulpician seminary in Baltimore. He also encouraged Roman Catholic religious orders to establish branches in the United States, and, with the aid of George Washington, he secured federal funds for missionaries to the Indians of the West. In 1806 Carroll laid the cornerstone of the Baltimore cathedral, having collaborated with Benjamin Latrobe in the planning and design of the building. Following the erection of four new sees (Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Bardstown, Ky.) in 1808, Carroll became archbishop (1811). During his years as head of the American church, the Roman Catholic population of the country grew from about 25,000 to 200,000.
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3e07921bf4eae75648162df92b5ca60b | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Carswell | John Carswell | John Carswell
…in Gaelic in Scotland: Bishop John Carswell’s Foirm na n-Urrnuidheadh a translation of John Knox’s liturgy, in Classical Common Gaelic.
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97f962175aa7917aae3f3b0d4424efdb | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Cassavetes | John Cassavetes | John Cassavetes
John Cassavetes, (born December 9, 1929, New York, New York, U.S.—died February 3, 1989, Los Angeles, California), American film director and actor regarded as a pioneer of American cinema verité and as the father of the independent film movement in the United States. Most of his films were painstakingly made over many months or years and were financed by Cassavetes’s acting, which was much sought after by the same studios that were reluctant to back his filmmaking projects. As a result, Cassavetes essentially carved out his own one-man domain in independent filmmaking, which, while not truly part of Hollywood, eventually earned the industry’s respect and admiration. He was one of the few filmmakers in the history of the Academy Awards to be nominated for directing, acting, and writing awards.
Cassavetes was the son of Greek immigrants. He grew up on Long Island, New York. He studied English at Mohawk College and Colgate University before becoming an acting student at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, from which he graduated in 1950. He began his acting career in earnest with a small role in the motion picture Taxi (1953) and an appearance on television the next year in an episode of Omnibus. By the end of 1955, he had acted in many live television shows. In 1956 Cassavetes appeared in Crime in the Streets, Don Siegel’s drama about juvenile delinquency. That year he also began teaching a Method acting class. In 1957 Cassavetes starred alongside Sidney Poitier in Martin Ritt’s Edge of the City, a high-profile role that helped him land the lead as the eponymous private eye in the television series Johnny Staccato (1959–60).
Cassavetes’s low-budget directorial debut, Shadows (1959), was financed partly by some $20,000 sent to the fledgling filmmaker after he made an appeal for donations during an appearance on a radio program. Made over a period of about two and a half years and shot on 16-mm film stock, this semi-improvised downbeat slice of cinema verité focused on three African American siblings. The older brother, a jazz musician (played by Hugh Hurd), encounters greater racial discrimination than his lighter-complected younger sister (who dates white men) and brother. Shadows’s jazz score was composed by Charles Mingus. The film was first shown to a few audiences in November 1958 and was exhibited again about a year later after the addition of some new scenes and reediting. When Cassavetes could not find an American distributor for the film, he entered it in the 1960 Venice Film Festival, where it won the Critics Award. After it finally received distribution in the United States in 1961, critics were effusive in their praise of Shadows, which is generally acknowledged to have inaugurated the American independent filmmaking movement.
Fresh from the success of Shadows, Casssavetes signed with Paramount to produce and direct Too Late Blues (1961), another downbeat film about a jazz musician, this time with teen singing idol Bobby Darin as the leader of a jazz combo waiting for its big break. Although critics liked Stella Stevens in her role as the love interest, they generally found the rest of the performances wanting. Nevertheless, Paramount gave Cassavetes a multifilm contract, which he subsequently broke in the interest of gaining greater creative autonomy.
Independent producer Stanley Kramer then signed Cassavetes to direct A Child Is Waiting (1963), an earnest drama written by Abby Mann. Burt Lancaster played a psychologist and Judy Garland a new teacher who disagree in their approaches to working with developmentally challenged children. After Kramer took the film out of Cassavetes’s hands and reedited it as a sentimental “social problem” film, Cassavetes broke with Hollywood to pursue filmmaking his own way. He was determined to make motion pictures grounded in character development that would depict real-life situations with real-world consequences. He also was committed to involving the cast and crew in an organic improvisatory process. No matter how dark his subject matter, he was also not beyond punctuating the proceedings with humour.
Faces, which Cassavetes wrote in 1965 and shot in black and white in 1966, starred John Marley and Lynn Carlin as a husband and wife facing a split after 14 years of marriage. Both have one-night stands, the husband with a prostitute (played by Cassavetes’s wife, Gena Rowlands) and the wife with a hippie (Seymour Cassel). Originally six hours long, the film was painstakingly edited down over the next two years to slightly more than two hours and released in 1968 to rave reviews. Cassavetes received an Academy Award nomination for his screenplay, and Carlin and Cassel were nominated as best supporting actors. Cassavetes had helped finance Faces by acting in films such as Robert Aldrich’s World War II drama The Dirty Dozen (1967), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award as best supporting actor, and Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968).
As a director, Cassavetes was a master at dramatizing marital problems. For Husbands (1970), his first colour 35-mm effort, he assembled his first high-profile cast. Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara, and Cassavetes himself portrayed a triumvirate of suburban husbands who, shocked by the sudden death of a friend, treat themselves to a spree of boozing, basketball, and sex that includes a quick trip to London. Husbands was dismissed by influential critic Pauline Kael as “agonizingly banal,” but other critics likened it to the work of Ingmar Bergman and found moments of uncommon power in the mostly improvised interaction between the principals.
The modest commercial success of Husbands helped Cassavetes secure a deal with Universal to make Minnie and Moskowitz (1971). More hopeful and romantic than any of his other films, Minnie and Moskowitz was Cassavetes’s version of a screwball comedy. Cassel played a slightly demented parking-lot attendant with a crush on a museum curator (Rowlands), who is trying to pull herself together after being dumped by her married lover (Cassavetes).
After this lighter fare, Cassavetes returned to psychodrama with A Woman Under the Influence (1974), a harrowing, unrelievedly raw portrait of a Los Angeles housewife’s nervous breakdown. Although the story was originally intended as a stage vehicle for Rowlands, it was brought to the screen instead by Cassavetes’s newly formed Faces International production company. Falk was appropriately detestable as the brutish husband, and Rowlands’s majestic portrayal of the tortured woman at the centre of the film earned her an Academy Award nomination for best actress. Despite some critics’ judgment that Cassavetes had dissipated the power of the performances by letting some scenes go on too long, A Woman Under the Influence was still his biggest hit up to that point. Moreover, it earned Cassavetes his only Academy Award nomination for best director. It seemed as if Cassavetes had beaten the system: he was making deeply personal movies entirely on his own terms and still winning the admiration of the industry on which he had turned his back.
Cassavetes was less sure-footed when he ventured into genre filmmaking with the crime drama The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), in which Gazzara played the debt-ridden owner of a strip joint forced by the mob to commit a murder. The ambitious Opening Night (1977) also had its problems, including one that often plagued Cassavetes’s films, the perception of excessive length. Nevertheless, Rowlands again excelled as a stage actress suffering an existential crisis after a fan dies on the opening night of her new play. Cassavetes the actor (every bit the equal of Cassavetes the director) also gave a notably strong performance, as did veteran character actress Joan Blondell.
Gloria (1980), made for Columbia rather than Faces International, featured yet another superb effort by Rowlands as a former prostitute who goes on the lam with an eight-year-old boy after his family is killed by the mobsters who employed his dad as an accountant. In between killings the film offers plenty of Cassavetes’s distinctive humour. Though the narrative was more loosely structured than that of the standard crime drama, Gloria remained one of Cassavetes’s most accessible films.
Cassavetes’s most significant turns as an actor in the late 1970s came in Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky (1976) and Brian De Palma’s The Fury (1978). In 1982 he and Rowlands played the leads in Paul Mazursky’s 1982 Tempest, the first time they had acted together in a picture not directed by Cassavetes. They then starred together in Cassavetes’s moving and unusual love story Love Streams (1984) as a brother and sister who lead wildly differing lifestyles but who care deeply about each other.
Cassavetes’s final project was the little-seen mainstream comedy Big Trouble (1985), in which Alan Arkin starred as an insurance salesman who becomes involved in a scheme to fake the death of another man (Falk). It provided an unfortunate and premature end to Cassavetes’s adventurous filmmaking career. He died of cirrhosis of the liver at age 59.
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3e971de7380e46878809edb98a4df775 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Clements | John Clements | John Clements
Harry Faversham (played by John Clements), a young British army officer, is descended from a line of military heroes. However, he resigns his commission rather than ship out with his comrades to avenge the death and beheading of the legendary general Charles George Gordon, killed during the Sudanese rebellion…
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49bc0b5e8b52fcfce91320cfe82c24b1 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Cocke | John Cocke | John Cocke
John Cocke, (born May 30, 1925, Charlotte, N.C., U.S.—died July 16, 2002, Valhalla, N.Y.), American mathematician and computer scientist and winner of the 1984 A.M. Turing Award, the highest honour in computer science, for “significant contributions in the design and theory of compilers, the architecture of large systems and the development of reduced instruction set computers (RISC); for discovering and systematizing many fundamental transformations now used in optimizing compilers including reduction of operator strength, elimination of common subexpressions, register allocation, constant propagation, and dead code elimination.”
Cocke earned a bachelor’s degree (1946) in mechanical engineering and a doctorate (1953) in mathematics from Duke University. His whole professional career was as an industrial researcher for IBM (1956–92). Cocke was named a fellow of IBM (1974) and awarded an IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award (1989), a U.S. National Medal of Technology (1991), and a U.S. National Medal of Science (1994). He was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (1979), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1986), and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (1993).
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046b1ad5910c7f5d784c0bf7b712c6cf | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Cockerill | John Cockerill | John Cockerill
Two Englishmen, William and John Cockerill, brought the Industrial Revolution to Belgium by developing machine shops at Liège (c. 1807), and Belgium became the first country in continental Europe to be transformed economically. Like its British progenitor, the Belgian Industrial Revolution centred in iron, coal, and textiles.
In 1817 the English industrialist John Cockerill founded in Seraing what was to become one of the largest ironmaking and machinery complexes in Europe. The Cockerill works built the first steam locomotives on the European continent (1835) and was the first to use the Bessemer process in steel production (1863).…
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a856f77a66e15c502c6e3d92849d4a67 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Coit-Spooner?anchor=ref | John Spooner | John Spooner
John Spooner, (born Jan. 6, 1843, Lawrenceburg, Ind., U.S.—died June 11, 1919, New York City), U.S. senator from Wisconsin (1885–91; 1897–1907), a powerful conservative force in his state and in Congress.
Spooner moved to Wisconsin as a youth. After service in the Union Army during the Civil War, he was admitted to the bar (1867). He began a law practice at Hudson, Wis., and eventually became best known in legal circles as counsel for railroad interests. A member of the Wisconsin legislature (1872), he was elected by that body to represent the state of Wisconsin in the U.S. Senate, where he served from 1885 to 1891 and from 1897 to 1907.
Spooner emerged as a leading conservative voice in the Senate, consistently opposing labour reform and other progressive measures. With senators Nelson W. Aldrich of Rhode Island, William B. Allison of Iowa, and Orville H. Platt of Connecticut, he formed a core of conservative leadership that exerted strong influence on national affairs at the turn of the century. He was author of the Spooner Act (1902), which authorized Pres. Theodore Roosevelt to purchase rights to build the Panama Canal. At the 1904 Republican national convention in Chicago, Spooner, as the head of the regular Wisconsin delegation, became embroiled in a bitter credentials fight with state Progressives led by Robert M. La Follette. Spooner survived the challenge, but the ascendency of Progressivism, especially in Wisconsin, was inevitable. The change in the political climate contributed to Spooner’s decision to retire from public life in 1907. He thereafter practiced law in New York City.
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b6735aefd81b18c5b02c03f87e640859 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Colet | John Colet | John Colet
John Colet, (born 1467, London—died Sept. 16, 1519, Sheen, Surrey, Eng.), theologian and founder of St. Paul’s School, London, who, as one of the chief Tudor Humanists, promoted Renaissance culture in England.
The son of a prosperous merchant who had been Lord Mayor of London, Colet studied mathematics and philosophy at Oxford and then travelled and studied for three years in France and Italy. He returned to England c. 1496 and was ordained in 1498. He lectured at Oxford University, to which he invited Desiderius Erasmus, the brilliant Humanist of the northern Renaissance. In addition to Erasmus, Colet collaborated with and influenced such prime Humanists as Sir Thomas More and Thomas Linacre, prototype of the scholar-physicians of the Renaissance. Colet was appointed dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1504 and founded St. Paul’s School c. 1509.
Colet’s devotion to Humanism was diversely expressed. His insistence that the classics be taught diffused a sounder knowledge of Greek and Latin and of ancient life and thought. He revered the 3rd-century philosopher Plotinus, founder of the Neoplatonist school; Marsilio Ficino, one of the leaders of Renaissance Platonism; and Dionysius the Areopagite, allegedly an early Christian convert regarded as the author of The Mystical Theology of the Celestial Hierarchies, on which Colet wrote a treatise. His contempt for contemporary ecclesiastical abuses was so intense that his denunciation of the sins of the clergy caused him to be suspected of heresy.
Colet’s works, mainly unpublished until the 19th-century editions of J.H. Lupton (1867–76), include commentaries on Romans and Corinthians and treatises on the sacraments and the church. With Erasmus and John Lily, he wrote a Latin grammar that was widely used for many years.
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5853d028046c5ecb7e0f6cbac2a0891c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Cornforth | Sir John Cornforth | Sir John Cornforth
Sir John Cornforth, (born September 7, 1917, Sydney, Australia—died December 8, 2013, Sussex, England), Australian-born British chemist who was corecipient, with Vladimir Prelog, of the 1975 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his research on the stereochemistry of enzyme-catalyzed reactions. Stereochemistry is the study of how the properties of a chemical compound are affected by the spatial arrangement of atoms in molecules and complexes.
Cornforth suffered since childhood from a progressive hearing loss which later rendered him completely deaf. He graduated from the University of Sydney in 1937 and earned his doctorate from Oxford University in 1941, and in that same year he married Rita Harradence, an organic chemist, who helped him communicate and was his constant collaborator. During World War II he worked to determine the structure of the central molecule of the antibiotic penicillin. Cornforth remained at Oxford until 1946 and then joined the staff of the National Institute for Medical Research in London, where he remained until 1962.
He was codirector (1962–68) and director (1968–75) of the Milstead Laboratory of Chemical Enzymology for Shell Research Ltd., in Sittingbourne, Kent. He concurrently served as a professor at the University of Warwick (1965–71) and the University of Sussex (1971–82).
Cornforth investigated enzymes that catalyze change in organic compounds (substrates) by taking the place of hydrogen atoms in a substrate’s chains and rings. In his syntheses and descriptions of the structure of various terpenes, olefins, and steroids, he determined specifically which cluster of hydrogen atoms in a substrate is replaced by an enzyme to cause a given change in the substrate. This allowed Cornforth to detail the biosynthesis of cholesterol, an exceptionally complex molecule. He received the Nobel Prize in 1975 and was knighted in 1977.
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f01ec0c0b53f73ab79346499ae876806 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Cotton | John Cotton | John Cotton
John Cotton, (born Dec. 4, 1585, Derby, Derbyshire, Eng.—died Dec. 23, 1652, Boston, Mass. [U.S.]), influential New England Puritan leader who served principally as “teacher” of the First Church of Boston (1633–52) after escaping the persecution of Nonconformists by the Church of England.
Educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, Cotton became vicar of the parish church of St. Botolph’s in Boston, Lincolnshire, in 1612 and remained in that post for 21 years. During this time he gradually became more Puritan in his outlook, and he ceased to observe certain Anglican religious rituals in his performance of his duties. In 1632 legal action was taken against him for his Nonconformism, and in July 1633 he emigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where he became “teacher” of the First Church of Boston, remaining so until his death. His popularity in the colony was unbounded, and his influence in both civil and ecclesiastical affairs was probably greater than that of any other minister in theocratic New England.
Cotton wrote several works that constitute an invaluable exposition of New England Congregationalism, including The Way of the Churches of Christ in New England (1645) and The Way of Congregational Churches Cleared (1648). The catechism he wrote, Milk for Babes, Drawn out of the Breasts of Both Testaments (1646), was widely used for many years in New England for the religious instruction of children.
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877b089621871921d087f28cbf54c319 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Cromwell | John Cromwell | John Cromwell
John Cromwell, original name Elwood Dager Cromwell, (born December 23, 1887, Toledo, Ohio, U.S.—died September 26, 1979, Santa Barbara, California), American actor and director of stage and screen who, during a career that spanned more than 70 years, helmed a number of classic movies, including Of Human Bondage (1934), Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940), and Anna and the King of Siam (1946).
Cromwell began acting on the stage while still in his teens, and by 1910 he was appearing on Broadway. He assumed the first name John in 1912, around the time he began acting and directing for the New York Repertory Company. His entire career might have been played out on the stage but for a touring production of the crime drama The Racket, which showcased him and Edward G. Robinson. The exposure helped Cromwell become a dialogue director at Paramount, and he moved to Hollywood in 1928. He continued acting, and in 1929 he made his film debut in The Dummy, a comedy starring Fredric March, Ruth Chatterton, and Zasu Pitts. That year he also codirected (with A. Eddie Sutherland) his first features, Close Harmony and The Dance of Life. His first solo project was The Mighty (1929), starring George Bancroft; Cromwell played a small part in the film.
Cromwell directed four pictures in 1930, including Tom Sawyer, featuring Jackie Coogan in the title role; The Texan, a western starring Gary Cooper; and Street of Chance, one of Jean Arthur’s first talkies. Four more movies followed in 1931, notably Scandal Sheet and The Vice Squad, both with Kay Francis. The drama World and the Flesh (1932) centres on a sea captain (played by Bancroft) who comes to the aid of a ballerina (Miriam Hopkins) during the Russian Revolution of 1917. Following a dispute with Paramount, Cromwell went to RKO, which was reeling from the exit of George Cukor. Cromwell was put to work on Sweepings, with Lionel Barrymore, Gloria Stuart, and Gregory Ratoff; and on The Silver Cord (both 1933), a romantic drama starring Irene Dunne and Joel McCrea. Cromwell’s other 1933 films were Ann Vickers, an adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s novel about a prison reformer (Dunne) who falls in love with a progressive judge (Walter Huston), and the comedy Double Harness, starring William Powell and Ann Harding.
Cromwell’s first films released in 1934 were largely forgettable. Spitfire starred a miscast Katharine Hepburn as an Ozarks faith healer who falls for a suave (and married) city slicker (Robert Young), and This Man Is Mine was a soap opera featuring Dunne and Ralph Bellamy. However, Of Human Bondage, a gritty adaptation of the W. Somerset Maugham novel, was a revelation. The acclaimed drama was especially notable for a breakthrough performance by Bette Davis. Cromwell closed out 1934 with The Fountain, a romantic drama featuring Harding.
In 1935 Cromwell directed three films, including the musical I Dream Too Much, which featured real-life opera star Lily Pons as a student who falls in love with an opera conductor (Henry Fonda). David O. Selznick, who had formed his own production company, hired Cromwell to direct Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936), a tasteful treatment of the popular novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett; the family drama starred Freddie Bartholomew and Mickey Rooney. Later in 1936 Cromwell made two films for Twentieth Century-Fox: To Mary—with Love, a marital drama starring Myrna Loy and Warner Baxter, and Banjo on My Knee, an entertaining riverboat musical with Barbara Stanwyck and McCrea.
Cromwell’s own personal golden age began in 1937 with the classic The Prisoner of Zenda for Selznick. The swashbuckler was based on Anthony Hope’s novel, and it starred Ronald Colman and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Cromwell then directed Algiers (1938), a remake of French director Julien Duvivier’s classic Pépé le Moko. If not quite at the level of the original, it was still a fine production, starring Charles Boyer and the Austrian actress Hedy Lamarr in her American screen debut. The tearjerker Made for Each Other starred James Stewart and Carole Lombard, while In Name Only (both 1939) was virtually a companion piece, with Lombard as a widow who falls in love with an unhappily married man (Cary Grant). Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940) was based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Robert E. Sherwood. The moving drama featured an Academy Award-nominated performance by Raymond Massey as the future president; Ruth Gordon was Mary Todd Lincoln, and Cromwell played John Brown. Victory (1940), from Joseph Conrad’s novel, was somewhat less successful, although March was excellent as the island loner who is forced to fight for his life.
So Ends Our Night (1941) starred March again, this time in a fine thriller about a German trying to escape his homeland as Nazi agents pursue him, and Son of Fury (1942) was one of Tyrone Power’s best costume pictures; Gene Tierney supplied the love interest and George Sanders the villainy. Cromwell then was reunited with Selznick for his prestigious Since You Went Away (1944), a lengthy but engrossing rendering of a family’s trials and tribulations during the war years. A critical and commercial success, it received a number of Oscar nominations, including a nod for best picture. The Enchanted Cottage (1945) was much more modest, a love story with fantasy elements that starred Dorothy McGuire and Robert Young.
Cromwell served as president of the Screen Directors Guild (later Directors Guild of America) from 1944 to 1946. During the latter year he made Anna and the King of Siam, an elaborate production of the real-life story of a British governess (Dunne) who dares to challenge the ruler of Siam (Rex Harrison). Although highly praised, Cromwell’s film was almost completely overshadowed by Walter Lang’s 1956 musical remake, The King and I. Dead Reckoning (1947) was a change of pace for Cromwell. The film noir starred Humphrey Bogart as a war hero who is betrayed by a femme fatale (Lizabeth Scott).
Cromwell had gone more than 10 years without a misfire, an incredible streak that even the greatest directors would be hard pressed to match, but Night Song (1947), with Dana Andrews as a blind pianist, ended his run. He rebounded in 1950 with Caged, one of the best (and most harrowing) of the women’s prison pictures; Eleanor Parker was cast against type as the new inmate who must learn the ropes.
Returning to RKO, Cromwell made The Company She Keeps (1951), with Scott as a parole officer and Jane Greer as an ex-convict, both of whom have set their sights on a newspaper columnist (Dennis O’Keefe). Later in 1951 he directed The Racket, which was based on the play that had helped launch his Hollywood career. However, Cromwell left the production before the film wrapped, and Nicholas Ray was among several directors who oversaw some of the later scenes.
Amid the House Un-American Activities Committee’s Hollywood witchhunts, Cromwell’s career soured. Howard Hughes accused him of being a communist, and although the charge was false, Cromwell was blacklisted. Unable to work in motion pictures, he returned to the stage, where he had occasionally performed between directing assignments. In 1952 he appeared with Fonda in the Broadway production of Point of No Return, for which he won a Tony Award.
In 1958 Cromwell was removed from the blacklist, and that year he directed The Goddess, writer Paddy Chayefsky’s dissection of the Marilyn Monroe phenomenon, with Kim Stanley as a troubled actress. The Scavengers (1959) was his last Hollywood film, and in 1961 he ended his film-directing career with A Matter of Morals, a low-budget drama made in Sweden. Cromwell continued to act on the stage, however, and late in life he returned to the screen in two Robert Altman films, 3 Women (1977) and A Wedding (1978). In 1960 Cromwell was honoured with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. His son James Cromwell was a noted actor.
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d476aaaa2f68360d5ef1036a55efac44 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Crowe-Ransom | John Crowe Ransom | John Crowe Ransom
John Crowe Ransom, (born April 30, 1888, Pulaski, Tenn., U.S.—died July 4, 1974, Gambier, Ohio), American poet and critic, leading theorist of the Southern literary renaissance that began after World War I. Ransom’s The New Criticism (1941) provided the name of the influential mid-20th-century school of criticism (see New Criticism).
Ransom, whose father was a minister, lived during his childhood in several towns in the Nashville, Tenn., area. He attended Vanderbilt University in Nashville for two years, then dropped out to teach because he felt his father should not continue to support him. He later returned to the university and graduated in 1909 at the head of his class. Subsequently he went to Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar. From 1914 to 1937 he taught English at Vanderbilt, where he was the leader of the Fugitives, a group of poets that published the influential literary magazine The Fugitive (1922–25) and shared a belief in the South and its regional traditions.
Ransom was also among those Fugitives who became known as the Agrarians. Their I’ll Take My Stand (1930) criticized the idea that industrialization was the answer to the needs of the South.
Ransom taught from 1937 until his retirement in 1958 at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, where he founded and edited (1939–59) the literary magazine The Kenyon Review. Ransom’s literary studies include God Without Thunder (1930); The World’s Body (1938), in which he takes the position that poetry and science furnish different but equally valid knowledge about the world; Poems and Essays (1955); and Beating the Bushes: Selected Essays, 1941–1970 (1972). Ransom’s poetry, which one critic has applauded as exhibiting weighty facts “in small or delicate settings,” often deals with the subjects of self-alienation and death. His poetry is collected in Chills and Fever (1924) and Two Gentlemen in Bonds (1927). Thereafter he published only five new poems; his Selected Poems (1945; rev. ed., 1969), which won a National Book Award, contains revisions of his earlier work. T.D. Young edited his critical essays (1968). Selected Essays of John Crowe Ransom appeared in 1984.
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7f2efc041aa08ecf1582b6b1dc8dce67 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Curtin | John Curtin | John Curtin
John Curtin, in full John Joseph Curtin, (born January 8, 1885, Creswick, Victoria, Australia—died July 5, 1945, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory), statesman, prime minister of Australia during most of World War II, and leader of the Australian Labor Party (1934–45).
After involving himself in trade union and anticonscription activity in Melbourne (1911–15), Curtin became editor of a Perth newspaper, the Westralian Worker. In 1928 he entered the federal Parliament as a member of the Labor Party, becoming its leader in 1935. By unifying the party thereafter, Curtin prepared for its assumption of power in 1941.
Curtin served as a member of the Advisory War Council in 1940 and became prime minister and minister for defense the following year. He led a full-scale national mobilization for war, winning difficult political battles in 1942–43 for expansion of federal taxation and broader conscription. He changed Australia’s traditional military dependence on Great Britain when Japanese advances to the south in 1941–42 led him to appeal principally to the U.S. for aid and to transfer Australian troops from the Middle East, a move that angered British prime minister Winston Churchill. When Curtin died, he had already established welfare-state economic policies that guided Australia’s growth during the postwar period.
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f46e8a08721606937eb0aca76befa97f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-D-Ehrlichman | John D. Ehrlichman | John D. Ehrlichman
John D. Ehrlichman, in full John Daniel Ehrlichman, (born March 20, 1925, Tacoma, Washington, U.S.—died February 14, 1999, Atlanta, Georgia), assistant for domestic affairs during the administration of U.S. Pres. Richard M. Nixon, was best known for his participation in the Watergate scandal that led to Nixon’s resignation.
Ehrlichman grew up in Washington and California and held several jobs before enlisting in the United States Army Air Forces in 1943. He was discharged a first lieutenant in 1945. He graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1948, received a law degree from Stanford University in 1951, and with associates established a law firm in Seattle, Washington.
In 1969 Ehrlichman was appointed Nixon’s domestic affairs adviser. With chief of staff H.R. Haldeman, he formed the so-called palace guard to insulate the president from the public and from other members of the government. The two exercised authority in the president’s name and filtered information from all levels of government.
Early in the Nixon administration, Ehrlichman established a group known as the “plumbers,” whose purpose was to acquire political intelligence and repair “information leaks.” In 1971 Daniel Ellsberg, a research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for International Studies, leaked to the The New York Times a top-secret study of the role that the United States had played in Indochina. This history, dubbed the “Pentagon Papers,” was an embarrassment to Nixon, and, in an attempt to obtain damaging information about Ellsberg, the plumbers burglarized the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in September 1971. On June 17, 1972, five members of the group were apprehended at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate complex—they had previously planted listening devices in the headquarters and were returning to repair them.
Ehrlichman initially counseled a confession of White House involvement, but he later became an active participant in covering it up. When his complicity became clear, Ehrlichman resigned from the administration in April 1973. He went on trial the following year, charged with conspiracy, perjury, and obstruction of justice. He was convicted and served 18 months of his 2 1/2- to 5-year sentence before being released in April 1978.
After his release Ehrlichman wrote several books based on his experiences as a presidential aide during the Nixon administration: The Company (1976), The Whole Truth (1979), and Witness to Power: The Nixon Years (1982).
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2c17c3f1493c3abc0221e2210ccd8159 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-D-MacDonald | John D. MacDonald | John D. MacDonald
John D. MacDonald, in full John Dann MacDonald, (born July 24, 1916, Sharon, Pa., U.S.—died Dec. 28, 1986, Milwaukee, Wis.), American fiction writer whose mystery and science-fiction works were published in more than 70 books. He is best remembered for his series of 21 crime novels featuring private investigator Travis McGee.
After MacDonald graduated from Syracuse (New York) University (B.S., 1938) and Harvard Graduate School of Business (M.B.A., 1939), he served in World War II in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He began contributing science-fiction and suspense stories to pulp magazines in the mid-1940s. From 1950 he began publishing full-length novels, beginning with The Brass Cupcake.
In The Deep Blue Good-By (1964), MacDonald introduced Travis McGee—a tough, eccentric “salvage consultant” who typically defends a beautiful woman against a large, corrupt organization. Going beyond the usual formula of sex and violence, the author investigated contemporary social and moral concerns through McGee and his erudite sidekick, Meyer. Books in the series include One Fearful Yellow Eye (1966), A Tan and Sandy Silence (1971), and Cinnamon Skin (1982). Among his science-fiction novels are Wine of the Dreamers (1951), Ballroom of the Skies (1952), and The Girl, the Gold Watch, and Everything (1962). Other notable works by MacDonald include The Neon Jungle (1953), A Key to the Suite (1962), Condominium (1977), and One More Sunday (1984).
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f065bb3d7c560997c28b0191ac1cd493 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-de-Balliol | John de Balliol | John de Balliol
John de Balliol, Balliol also spelled Baliol, (died 1268/69), Scottish magnate of Norman descent, one of the richest landowners of his time in Britain, who is regarded as the founder of Balliol College, Oxford; he was the father of John de Balliol, king of Scots. The elder John served (1251–55) as guardian of the young Scottish king Alexander III. His loyalty to King Henry III of England in the Barons’ War (1264–67, against rebellious nobles led by Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester) cost him the temporary loss of his lands and a period of imprisonment after his capture in the Battle of Lewes (May 14, 1264). About that time (perhaps in 1263) he began to support several students at Oxford, apparently as penance for a quarrel with the Bishop of Durham. After his death, his widow completed his endowment of scholars, and their house was formally chartered as Balliol College in 1282.
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e1931de1ea7bd52e70ea34e78883635e | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-de-Lancie | John de Lancie | John de Lancie
The piece was inspired by John de Lancie, an American serviceman who in civilian life was a professional oboist.
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be9681b2ba413fd280cc2fa160e9a509 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Demjanjuk | John Demjanjuk | John Demjanjuk
John Demjanjuk, original name Ivan Demjanjuk, (born April 3, 1920, Makharintsy, Ukraine, U.S.S.R.—died March 17, 2012, Bad Feilnbach, Germany), Ukrainian-born autoworker who was accused of being a Nazi camp guard during World War II.
Demjanjuk served in the Soviet army during World War II. In 1942 he was captured by Germany and was sent to a prisoner-of-war camp. After the war, he moved to the United States in 1952 and became an American citizen in 1958. He eventually settled in Ohio, where he worked at an automobile factory.
In the 1970s Demjanjuk was investigated by U.S. officials after Holocaust survivors identified him as “Ivan the Terrible,” a Nazi guard who operated the gas chambers at the Treblinka extermination camp in Poland. In 1981 a U.S. court revoked his citizenship. Five years later he was extradited to Israel to stand trial for war crimes. Prosecutors alleged that Demjanjuk, after becoming a prisoner of war, had volunteered to serve as a concentration camp guard and later worked at Treblinka, where his cruelty earned him the nickname Ivan the Terrible. He denied the allegations, but in 1988 he was found guilty and sentenced to hang. In 1993, however, the Israeli Supreme Court overruled the decision, based on evidence that another man was Ivan the Terrible.
Demjanjuk returned to the United States in 1993, and his citizenship was restored in 1998. His legal struggles continued, however. In 2002 a federal judge determined that he had worked as a Nazi camp guard, and Demjanjuk was again stripped of his U.S. citizenship. Three years later he was ordered to be deported to Germany, Poland, or Ukraine. Demjanjuk appealed the decision, but it was upheld. In 2009 a Munich court charged him as being an accessory in the murder of some 28,000 Jews at the Sobibor extermination camp in Poland, and Germany requested his extradition. After the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear his last appeal, Demjanjuk was deported in May 2009. Three months later Demjanjuk, who had health issues, was deemed fit to stand trial. His trial began in November 2009, and in May 2011 he was convicted and sentenced to a five-year prison term. While awaiting an appeal, Demjanjuk was released to a nursing home, where he died in March 2012.
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9e18cdf4e842026aa3f788810c5bbb43 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Desborough | John Desborough | John Desborough
John Desborough, Desborough also spelled Desborow, or Disbrowe, (baptized November 13, 1608, Eltisley, Cambridgeshire, England—died 1680, London), English soldier, Oliver Cromwell’s brother-in-law, who played a prominent part in Commonwealth politics.
Desborough married Cromwell’s sister Jane in June 1636. He was a member of Cromwell’s cavalry regiment at the beginning of the Civil War and distinguished himself in succeeding campaigns. He fought at the Battle of Worcester (September 1651) as major general and almost captured Charles II near Salisbury.
During the Commonwealth, Desborough held many high offices and was a member of the Parliaments of 1653, 1654, and 1656. In 1655 he was the major general in charge of administering the six western counties of England. In spite of his near relationship to Cromwell, Desborough violently opposed the suggestion that Cromwell should assume the crown. After Cromwell’s death he was, with Charles Fleetwood, the chief instigator and organizer of the hostility of the army toward Richard Cromwell’s administration and forced Cromwell to dissolve his Parliament in April 1659.
After the Restoration Desborough escaped to the Netherlands, where he engaged in republican intrigues. He was ordered home in April 1666, on pain of incurring the charge of treason, and was imprisoned in the Tower of London from July 1666 to February 1667.
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ba1c2eadda56291f4fa7c5bbd6ca8a02 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Dinkeloo | John Dinkeloo | John Dinkeloo
…Roche and his future partner, John Dinkeloo (1918–81), completed Saarinen’s incomplete projects, including the Dulles International Airport terminal building near Washington, D.C. (1962), the Vivian Beaumont Repertory Theater for the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in Manhattan (opened 1965), and the stainless steel Gateway Arch of the Jefferson National…
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dea6655f5ea966e2ee1bb63a3d31deda | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Donne | John Donne | John Donne
John Donne, (born sometime between Jan. 24 and June 19, 1572, London, Eng.—died March 31, 1631, London), leading English poet of the Metaphysical school and dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London (1621–31). Donne is often considered the greatest love poet in the English language. He is also noted for his religious verse and treatises and for his sermons, which rank among the best of the 17th century.
Donne was born of Roman Catholic parents. His mother, a direct descendant of Sir Thomas More’s sister, was the youngest daughter of John Heywood, epigrammatist and playwright. His father, who, according to Donne’s first biographer, Izaak Walton, was “descended from a very ancient family in Wales,” was a prosperous London merchant. Donne was four when his father died, and shortly thereafter his mother married Dr. John Syminges, who raised the Donne children. At age 12 Donne matriculated at the University of Oxford, where he studied for three years, and he then most likely continued his education at the University of Cambridge, though he took no degree from either university because as a Roman Catholic he could not swear the required oath of allegiance to the Protestant queen, Elizabeth. Following his studies Donne probably traveled in Spain and Italy and then returned to London to read law, first at Thavies Inn (1591) and then at Lincoln’s Inn (1592–94). There he turned to a comparative examination of Roman Catholic and Protestant theology and perhaps even toyed with religious skepticism. In 1596 he enlisted as a gentleman with the earl of Essex’s successful privateering expedition against Cádiz, and the following year he sailed with Sir Walter Raleigh and Essex in the near-disastrous Islands expedition, hunting for Spanish treasure ships in the Azores.
After his return to London in 1597, Donne became secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, lord keeper of the great seal, in whose employ Donne remained for almost five years. The appointment itself makes it probable that Donne had become an Anglican by this time. During his tenure with the lord keeper, Donne lived, according to Walton, more as a friend than as a servant in the Egerton household, where Sir Thomas appointed him “a place at his own table, to which he esteemed [Donne’s] company and discourse to be a great ornament.” Donne’s contemporary, Richard Baker, wrote of him at this time as “not dissolute [i.e., careless], but very neat; a great visitor of Ladies, a great frequenter of Plays, a great writer of conceited Verses.”
While in Egerton’s service, Donne met and fell in love with Anne More, niece of Egerton’s second wife and the daughter of Sir George More, who was chancellor of the garter. Knowing there was no chance of obtaining Sir George’s blessing on their union, the two married secretly, probably in December 1601. For this offense Sir George had Donne briefly imprisoned and dismissed from his post with Egerton as well. He also denied Anne’s dowry to Donne. Because of the marriage, moreover, all possibilities of a career in public service were dashed, and Donne found himself at age 30 with neither prospects for employment nor adequate funds with which to support his household.
During the next 10 years Donne lived in poverty and humiliating dependence, first on the charity of Anne’s cousin at Pyrford, Surrey, then at a house in Mitcham, about 7 miles (11 km) from London, and sometimes in a London apartment, where he relied on the support of noble patrons. All the while he repeatedly tried (and failed) to secure employment, and in the meantime his family was growing; Anne ultimately bore 12 children, 5 of whom died before they reached maturity. Donne’s letters show his love and concern for his wife during these years: “Because I have transplanted [her] into a wretched fortune, I must labour to disguise that from her by all such honest devices, as giving her my company, and discourse.” About himself, however, Donne recorded only despair: “To be part of no body is as nothing; and so I am. … I am rather a sickness or a disease of the world than any part of it and therefore neither love it nor life.”
In spite of his misery during these years, Donne wrote and studied assiduously, producing prose works on theology, canon law, and anti-Catholic polemics and composing love lyrics, religious poetry, and complimentary and funerary verse for his patrons. As early as 1607 friends had begun urging him to take holy orders in the Church of England, but he felt unworthy and continued to seek secular employment. In 1611–12 he traveled through France and the Low Countries with his newfound patron, Sir Robert Drury, leaving his wife at Mitcham. Upon their return from the European continent, the Drurys provided the Donnes with a house on the Drury estate in London, where they lived until 1621.
In 1614 King James I refused Donne’s final attempt to secure a post at court and said that he would appoint him to nothing outside the church. By this time Donne himself had come to believe he had a religious vocation, and he finally agreed to take holy orders. He was ordained deacon and priest on Jan. 23, 1615, and preferment soon followed. He was made a royal chaplain and received, at the king’s command, the degree of doctor of divinity from Cambridge. On Nov. 22, 1621, Donne was installed as dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, at which he carried out his duties with efficiency and integrity. But this turnabout in Donne’s professional life was accompanied by searing personal grief. Two years after his ordination, in 1617, Anne Donne died at age 33 after giving birth to a stillborn child. Grief-stricken at having lost his emotional anchor, Donne vowed never to marry again, even though he was left with the task of raising his children in modest financial circumstances at the time. Instead, his bereavement turned him fully to his vocation as an Anglican divine. The power and eloquence of Donne’s sermons soon secured for him a reputation as the foremost preacher in the England of his day, and he became a favourite of both Kings James I and Charles I.
In 1623 Donne fell seriously ill with either typhus or relapsing fever, and during his sickness he reflected on the parallels between his physical and spiritual illnesses—reflections that culminated during his recovery in the prose Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, published in 1624. On Feb. 25, 1631, Donne, who was fatally ill with stomach cancer, left his sickbed to preach a final sermon at court; this was published posthumously as “Death’s Duell” and is sometimes considered to be his own funeral sermon. He returned to his sickbed and, according to Walton, had a drawing made of himself in his shroud, perhaps as an aid to meditating on his own dissolution. From this drawing Nicholas Stone constructed a marble effigy of Donne that survived the Great Fire of 1666 and still stands today in St. Paul’s Cathedral.
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496163cb351ca931f9c972e7d03e1641 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Doyle-Lee | John Doyle Lee | John Doyle Lee
…some Mormon settlers led by John Doyle Lee. The attackers, promising safe conduct, persuaded the emigrants to lay down their arms. Then, as the band of 137 proceeded southward toward Cedar City, they were ambushed, and all except the young children were massacred. Details of the atrocity leaked out, but…
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e57527ebe799098fe58ce4b08e8029b7 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-E-W-Keely | John E.W. Keely | John E.W. Keely
John E.W. Keely, in full John Ernst Worrell Keely, (born Sept. 3, 1827—died Nov. 18, 1898, Philadelphia, Pa., U.S.), fraudulent American inventor.
Keely was orphaned in early childhood. He is said to have been an orchestra leader, a circus performer, and a carpenter. In 1873 he announced that he had discovered a new physical force, one that, if harnessed, would produce unheard-of power. He claimed, for example, to be able to produce from a quart of water enough fuel to move a 30-car train from Philadelphia to New York City. He began construction of an engine to perform this feat and by 1874 was able to give preliminary demonstrations of his machine. He made a great show of guarding the secret of the motor he was developing to obtain power “from intermolecular vibrations of ether,” and scientists and engineers scoffed at his unverified claims. Organizing the Keely Motor Company, Philadelphia, he sold stock to some 3,000 trusting shareholders and was also supported for a time by a wealthy Philadelphia patroness.
After his death, an investigation was carried out, and examination of his apparatus showed that, rather than a new force, tubes of compressed air or a form of hydraulic power activated the machinery.
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aa671a132adcbc736183e57006884297 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Edward-Redmond | John Redmond | John Redmond
John Redmond, in full John Edward Redmond, (born Sept. 1, 1856, Dublin, Ire.—died March 6, 1918, London, Eng.), leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party (commonly called the Irish Nationalist Party, or the Nationalists) who devoted his life to achieving Home Rule for Ireland.
After he was elected to the House of Commons for New Ross, Wexford (1881), Redmond set a record by taking his seat, making his maiden speech, and being suspended all within 24 hours. On missions in 1883–84 to Australia and the United States, he collected money to further the Irish cause.
As a fervent admirer of Charles Stewart Parnell, Redmond became Parnell’s party whip. When the Irish Parliamentary Party split after the Parnell divorce scandal (November 1890), Redmond became the leader of the minority Parnellite faction. He was elected to Parliament for Waterford (1891), which he represented until his death. His eloquence and arguments converted many in England to Home Rule.
When a Liberal ministry became dependent on Irish Nationalist support after the 1910 elections, Redmond enjoyed a balance of power favourable to the Irish. In 1912 he saw the introduction of a third Home Rule Bill, and its passage seemed assured by 1914. In the northeastern Irish counties, however, pro-English sentiment was high among the Ulster Unionists, and an armed opposition to the bill began to form. When a counteropposition began to take up arms in Dublin (November 1913), Redmond feared civil war. By March 1914 he reluctantly agreed that those northeastern counties voting against Home Rule could be excluded from it briefly, but the Unionists demanded exclusion for all nine Ulster counties.
Redmond promised full Irish support to the Allies in World War I, but his proposal that the home defense of Ireland be entrusted to the southern Irish, as well as to the Ulster Volunteers, was ignored, and his efforts to recruit southern brigades for service overseas were hampered in London. The Easter Rising, the republican insurrection in Dublin on Easter Monday, 1916, took Redmond by surprise and shattered his policy. He served in the Irish constitutional convention (July 1917), but it became virtually deadlocked by early 1918. Shortly afterward, disillusioned by the collapse of his life’s work, he died after an operation for gallstones.
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1e6cb55fca3e1ee042c629f4f2ea500b | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Eliot-British-missionary | John Eliot | John Eliot
John Eliot, (born 1604, Widford, Hertfordshire, England—died May 21, 1690, Roxbury, Massachusetts Bay Colony [now in Massachusetts, U.S.]), Puritan missionary to the Native Americans of Massachusetts Bay Colony whose translation of the Bible in the Algonquian language was the first Bible printed in North America.
Educated in England, Eliot graduated from Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1622 and emigrated to Boston in 1631. From 1632 to his death he was pastor of the church at nearby Roxbury. With the support of his congregation and fellow ministers, he began a mission to the Native Americans, preaching at Nonantun (Newton) and at other towns. Groups of “praying Indians” soon arose, and by 1674 there were 14 villages with 4,000 converts. The following year, however, the communities suffered serious setbacks from persecutions that occurred during King Philip’s War, and the villages never fully recovered.
Eliot’s work was financed chiefly from England, where his activities inspired the creation of the Company for Propagating the Gospel in New England and Parts Adjacent in North America (1649). This was the first genuine missionary society. Eliot’s methods set the pattern of subsequent “Indian missions” for almost two centuries. Civilization, he believed, was closely bound up with evangelization. His converts were gathered into Christian towns, governed by a biblical code of laws, and gradually introduced to the English manner of life. Each village had a school where the Indians were taught English and the handicrafts by which they could support themselves. After severe testing, believers were organized by covenant into a Puritan “church-state,” and native teachers and evangelists were trained. Eliot himself, called the “Apostle to the Indians,” produced the needed literature in the Massachusets Algonquian language, beginning with his primer or catechism of 1654. His translation of the New Testament appeared in 1661, the Old Testament in 1663. Among his other works are The Christian Commonwealth (1659) and The Harmony of the Gospels (1678).
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20ba5c63b9267f3966ba0bafb6c01ff2 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Evans-British-antiquarian-and-archaeologist | Sir John Evans | Sir John Evans
Sir John Evans, (born Nov. 17, 1823, Burnham, Buckinghamshire, Eng.—died May 31, 1908, Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire), British antiquarian, numismatist, and a founder of prehistoric archaeology.
A partner in a paper manufacturing firm (1850–85), about 1860 Evans began devoting much time to searching for traces of early man in Britain and gathered an outstanding collection of prehistoric stone and bronze implements. He also assembled an exceptional collection of ancient Roman, Anglo-Saxon, and British coins. His major works were The Coins of the Ancient Britons (1864); The Ancient Stone Implements, Weapons, and Ornaments, of Great Britain (1872; 2nd. ed., 1897); and The Ancient Bronze Implements, Weapons and Ornaments, of Great Britain and Ireland (1881). He was knighted in 1892. His son was the archaeologist Sir Arthur (John) Evans.
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3f7e0062dc471e43c932fb81b9968ef0 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-F-Wagner | John F. Wagner | John F. Wagner
Humphrey of Minnesota, and Mayor John F. Wagner of New York City. Kefauver finished on top in the first ballot but without enough delegates to win outright. In the second ballot, Kennedy finished first but also without the requisite number of delegates. Following Gore’s withdrawal in favour of Kefauver, Kefauver…
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25fee4dfde86804b94620601beee4456 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Fletcher | John Fletcher | John Fletcher
John Fletcher, (baptized December 20, 1579, Rye, Sussex, England—died August 29, 1625, London), English Jacobean dramatist who collaborated with Francis Beaumont and other dramatists on comedies and tragedies between about 1606 and 1625.
His father, Richard Fletcher, was minister of the parish in which John was born and became afterward queen’s chaplain, dean of Peterborough, and bishop successively of Bristol, Worcester, and London, gaining a measure of fame as an accuser in the trial of Mary, Queen of Scots, and as the chaplain sternly officiating at her execution. When not quite 12, John was apparently admitted pensioner of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and two years later became a Bible clerk. From the time of his father’s death (1596) until 1607 nothing is known of him. His name is first linked with Beaumont’s in Ben Jonson’s Volpone (1607), to which both men contributed encomiums.
Fletcher began to work with Beaumont probably about 1607, at first for the Children of the Queen’s Revels and its successor and then (from c. 1609 until Beaumont’s retirement in 1613) mainly for the King’s Men at the Globe and Blackfriars theatres. After 1613 he often collaborated with or had his plays revised by Philip Massinger, who actually succeeded him in 1625 as chief playwright of the King’s Men; other collaborators included Nathan Field and William Rowley. Throughout his career he also wrote plays unaided. He died in the London plague of 1625 that killed some 40,000 others; the antiquarian John Aubrey claimed that he had lingered in the city to be measured for a suit of clothes instead of making his escape to the country.
The canon of the Beaumont and Fletcher plays is approximately represented by the 52 plays in the folio Fifty Comedies and Tragedies… (1679); but any consideration of the canon must omit one play from the 1679 folio (James Shirley’s Coronation) and add three not to be found in it (Henry VIII, Sir John van Olden Barnavelt, A Very Woman). Of these 54 plays not more than 12 are by Beaumont or by Beaumont and Fletcher in collaboration. Another 3 were probably collaborations with Beaumont and Massinger. The others represent Fletcher either unaided or in collaboration with dramatists other than Beaumont, principally Massinger.
The masterpieces of the Beaumont and Fletcher collaboration—Philaster, The Maides Tragedy, and A King and No King—show, most clearly in the last, the emergence of most of the features that distinguish the Fletcherian mode from that of Shakespeare, George Chapman, or John Webster: the remote, often pseudohistorical, fairy-tale setting; the clear, smooth speech rising to great emotional arias of declamatory rhetoric; the basically sensational or bizarre plot that faces the characters with wild “either–or” choices between extremes and that can be manipulated toward a sad or a happy ending as the playwrights choose; the sacrifice of consistency and plausibility in characterization so that patterns can be made out of constantly shifting emotional states and piquant situations can be prolonged.
Of Fletcher’s unaided plays, The Faithfull Shepheardesse, The Mad Lover, The Loyall Subject, The Humorous Lieutenant, Women Pleas’d, The Island Princesse, and A Wife for a Moneth (all between c. 1608 and c. 1624) are perhaps the best. Each of these is a series of extraordinary situations and extreme attitudes, displayed through intense declamations. The best of these are perhaps The Loyall Subject and A Wife for a Moneth, the latter a florid and loquacious play, in which a bizarre sexual situation is handled with cunning piquancy, and the personages illustrate clearly Fletcher’s tendency to make his men and women personifications of vices and virtues rather than individuals. The best of Fletcher’s comedies, for urbanity and consistency of tone, is probably The Wild-Goose Chase, a play of episodes rather than of intricate intrigue, but alive with irony and easy wit.
Lastly, there are the Fletcherian plays in which others besides Beaumont had a hand. Wit at Several Weapons is a comedy that might have been written wholly by Thomas Middleton; and The Captaine (to which Beaumont may, however, have contributed) is a lively, complex play of sexual intrigue, with tragic dilemmas too. Notable among the numerous plays in this group are The False One and The Beggars Bush. The former is an original, incisive, and moderately subtle treatment of the story of Caesar and Cleopatra, which may well have aided John Dryden to compose All for Love and for which the greater credit goes to Massinger. The latter is worth reading for its “version of pastoral,” which genially persuades the audience that it is better to be a country beggar than a tyrannical king.
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31003cf4e78132c5b6e9b494261939a1 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Ford-American-director | John Ford | John Ford
John Ford, original name John Martin Feeny, though he often claimed Sean Aloysius O’Feeney or O’Fearna, (born February 1, 1894, Cape Elizabeth, Maine, U.S.—died August 31, 1973, Palm Desert, California), iconic American film director, best known today for his westerns, though none of the films that won him the Academy Award for best direction—The Informer (1935), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), How Green Was My Valley (1941), and The Quiet Man (1952)—were of this genre. His films, whether westerns or in other genres, are notable for a turn-of-the-20th-century ideal of American masculinity—loyal, self-deprecating yet competent, dependable in a scrap, bound by duty, courtly if somewhat tongue-tied with the ladies, with a winking fondness for alcohol but no patience for foul language or sloppy behaviour. Because of their popularity (as well as the continued popularity of many of the actors whose careers Ford helped spawn) and the skill he brought to their creation, his films had a powerful influence on Americans’ conception of their own history and values.
Ford was an Irish American and a New Englander, born to immigrant parents. He began his movie work in the silent era, serving as a jack-of-all-trades apprentice on many early pictures made by his actor-director brother Francis. By the end of the silents, Ford had directed more than 60 films (many “two-reelers” and a handful of films approaching what is now considered feature length), including dozens of westerns, often starring Harry Carey in the persona of “Cheyenne Harry,” a hard-drinking, often down-at-the-heels outlaw with a weakness for helping the defenseless. Ford proved able to satisfy the expectations of producers and audiences alike while adding small touches, whether gritty or sentimental, that gave his films an extra human dimension often lacking in the generic programmers of the day. He gambled with his reputation as an efficient, no-nonsense helmer-for-hire in the production of The Iron Horse (1924), his over-budget schedule-busting epic about the construction of the transcontinental railroad in the 1860s. Ford was pressured by the studio but allowed to finish, and the film became a huge financial and critical success, placing Ford in the Olympian company of predecessors D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille.
And then came the talkies. Ford made another 60-plus sound-era features, a format that introduced a tension between the visual storyteller and the loquacious, poetically sentimental Irish yarn-spinner. Acting styles age more rapidly than visual mechanics, and works highly regarded at the time—such as The Informer (1935) and The Long Voyage Home (1940)—are less valued today than Ford’s generically terse westerns. Although Ford was often only a contract director who did his best with the material at hand, he recognized and valued a good story and, when possible, bought literary material and developed it with able screenwriters. When the budget allowed, he was able to work on a large canvas, placing his characters—singly or in groups—as elements in huge indifferent, if not hostile, natural settings. This approach is as effective in The Lost Patrol (1934) or The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936) as it is in the westerns that he shot in Utah and Arizona’s Monument Valley. Ford’s stately, carefully staged and composed medium and long shots of groups of characters interacting (with a relatively spare use of “star” close-ups) are deceptively simple. Famous for shooting few takes and no extraneous angles, Ford was notoriously stingy with information for the cast or crew regarding what would be happening next or why, and he was quick to publicly chastise those who dared to ask for it. His contrariness became a personal trademark. Ford was likely to play either the erudite student of history and culture or the blunt, no-frills working stiff whenever insulted that the opposite was supposed of him.
World War II was a watershed for Ford: he finally had the opportunity (or perhaps the inescapable duty) to live up to the masculine code he had helped define in his many films. Already in the Naval Reserve, he made films for the Navy Department’s photographic unit—two of which, The Battle of Midway (1942) and December 7th (1943), won Academy Awards for best documentary—and, working for the Office of Strategic Services, he was present at Omaha Beach on D-Day. Having been personally under fire and a witness to slaughter, he was so proud of his military service and status that his gravestone memorializes him as Admiral John Ford (he had left active service with the rank of captain and was later made honorary rear admiral). His one true World War II movie, They Were Expendable (1945), is a remarkable film, though he sometimes derided it. It chronicles an American defeat (the rout of U.S. troops by the Japanese in the Philippines) and contains the quintessential Ford character scene. A group of officers considered “vital” to the war effort sit on a transport plane, waiting to be flown out of the debacle to relative safety. At the very last moment, a pair of more valued men arrive, and two of the junior officers are asked to step out of the plane (and most likely into what became known as the Bataan Death March). They do so quietly, uncomplaining, willing to sacrifice personal survival for the common good. Ford, acutely aware of the sham aspect of Hollywood mythmaking, underplays the moment that provides the backbone of the film.
The postwar Ford took care of some debts and omissions. Cheyenne Autumn (1964) recognizes the brutal treatment he believed the various American Indian nations had suffered at the hands of white men, Sergeant Rutledge (1960) involves buffalo soldiers, the African American troops who fought in the West, and Ford overtly challenged his own legacy in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). Without a lavish budget and shot in black and white, this film is somewhat visually claustrophobic but notable in how the persona developed by John Wayne in the many films he starred in for Ford hardened over the years. Gone is grinning Ringo Kid from Stagecoach (1939), who marches down the street to face the three Plummer brothers in a “fair fight.” In his place, at the end of Liberty Valance, Wayne’s Tom Doniphon bushwhacks Lee Marvin’s Liberty from a side street, shot-gunning him like a rabid dog, and then allows the book-toting Easterner played by James Stewart, who has stolen the love of Doniphon’s life, to take credit for killing the outlaw in a face-to-face gunfight. Doniphon sinks into alcohol and misery while Stewart’s character launches a successful political career. There is no cynicism here—both characters are presented as brave, honourable men—but the idea of silent sacrifice to a notion of “what’s right” receives here its most extreme celebration in all of Ford’s work, and the film’s famous tagline (“This is the West, sir—when the legend becomes fact, print the legend”) does not seem ironic. The master storyteller was comfortable with the public’s hunger for defining myths.
Though a maker of stars, Ford was never—if his one directorial dance with Shirley Temple in Wee Willie Winkie (1937) is discounted—a maker of star vehicles. This is no more apparent than in his Wagon Master (1950). Its protagonists are a pair of cowpokes played by the familiar character actors Ben Johnson and Harry Carey, Jr., amiable and uncomplicated. Their heroic moment is both reluctant and over in a flash, leaving viewers to assume that they go back to being simple cowpokes. Frontier values found in common men, in a situation that is morally clear-cut—this was the attraction of the western in the first half of the 20th century. As that simple comforting vision grew less viable in the years of McCarthyism, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War, a more nihilistic western evolved, finding its iconic figure in Clint Eastwood’s “Man with No Name.” Although Ford drifted from being a Franklin D. Roosevelt Democrat to a Richard M. Nixon Republican, his films were neither reactionary nor even basically conservative, and never, ever, amoral. More attracted to questions of individual character than collective politics or cultural shifts, Ford helped create an archetypical code of masculine ethics and behaviour that has profoundly affected the American psyche.
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62fe864b8f048207cbbd8f24d426f891 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Forsythe | John Forsythe | John Forsythe
…Investigation agent Alvin Dewey (John Forsythe), attempt to track down the killers and finally apprehend them in Las Vegas. They are quickly put on trial and, after being convicted, are sentenced to be executed. Five years later, they are hanged.
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fba615d143a79e23646cf63d089cd779 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Frederick-Amelung | John Frederick Amelung | John Frederick Amelung
…1784 to about 1795 by John Frederick Amelung, a native of Bremen in Germany. Financed by German and American promoters, Amelung founded the New Bremen Glassmanufactory near Frederick, Md., U.S., and attempted to establish a self-sufficient community, importing glassworkers and other craftsmen from Germany. The enterprise was encouraged by such…
…Bremen (Maryland) Glassmanufactory, founded by John Frederick Amelung and Company, is of special interest as many of its presentation pieces are both signed and dated as well as being among the finest produced in the United States before 1800. Originally from Bremen, Germany, Amelung was persuaded to go to America…
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aa4fcf4a70bcc6b55f821ba05501d0cd | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Frederick-elector-of-Saxony | John Frederick | John Frederick
John Frederick, byname John Frederick the Magnanimous, German Johann Friedrich der Grossmütige, (born June 30, 1503, Torgau, Saxony—died March 3, 1554, Weimar, Saxe-Weimar), last elector of the Ernestine branch of the Saxon House of Wettin and leader of the Protestant Schmalkaldic League. His wars against the Holy Roman emperor Charles V and his fellow princes caused him to lose both the electoral rank and much of his territory.
The elder son of the elector John the Steadfast, John Frederick succeeded to the Ernestine lands in 1532. As head of the Schmalkaldic League (q.v.) for the defense of the reformers, he hesitated to oppose the Holy Roman emperor Charles V, in whose pacific intentions he believed. His Naumburg coup, when he forced the replacement of an elected Catholic bishop by a Protestant one, however, helped convince Charles V to take up arms against the Reformation. Furthermore, by seizing the town of Wurzen, John Frederick ignored the rights of his second cousin Maurice, Saxon duke of the rival Albertine branch of the House of Wettin.
The ensuing enmity helped split Germany’s Protestant princes. When the Emperor defeated the Schmalkaldic League at the Battle of Mühlberg (1547) with the aid of Maurice, the electoral dignity was granted to the Albertines. John Frederick, wounded and taken prisoner, was condemned to death but saved himself by acquiescing to electoral and territorial losses. He refused to compromise on religious issues, however, and enjoined his sons to refuse peace with Maurice. In 1552, during a war between the Emperor and Maurice, John Frederick was freed. After the death of Maurice (1553), he hoped to regain the electorship but was disappointed when Maurice’s successor Augustus was granted the title. Considered a martyr of Protestantism, John Frederick continued to enjoy the respect of his people and fellow princes until his death.
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07020a5e7cf9ca1f33e617296a4fde22 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-G-Avildsen | John G. Avildsen | John G. Avildsen
John G. Avildsen , in full John Guilbert Avildsen, (born December 21, 1935, Oak Park, Illinois, U.S.—died June 16, 2017, Los Angeles, California), American film director best known for the aspirational boxing classic Rocky (1976) and the Karate Kid martial-arts film franchise.
Avildsen began working in the 1960s as an assistant director on various films while holding a day job as a director of television commercials for an advertising agency. His first directing credits were on sexploitation movies, but he garnered attention with the low-budget drama Joe (1970); it starred Peter Boyle as a virulent racist who reacts violently to the hippie counterculture that seems to be hemming him in. Joe captured the country’s polarized mood and became a surprise hit, but neither the low-budget Cry Uncle! (1971), starring Allen Garfield as a private detective, nor The Stoolie (1972), with Jackie Mason in the title role, enjoyed the same result. Avildsen’s next project, the drama Save the Tiger (1973), failed to connect with moviegoers, but Jack Lemmon won an Academy Award for his performance as a businessman wallowing in a midlife crisis. The lively W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings (1975) found Burt Reynolds playing an amiable Southern con man, with supporting performances by Jerry Reed and Ned Beatty.
In 1976 Avildsen scored a major box-office hit with Rocky, the now-legendary Sylvester Stallone project about inarticulate but sensitive boxer Rocky Balboa, who dreams of becoming a champion. Avildsen won an Oscar for best director, and the film was also named best picture. However, the romantic drama Slow Dancing in the Big City (1978) and The Formula (1980), a conspiracy thriller with Marlon Brando and George C. Scott, illustrated Avildsen’s unfortunate tendency to follow victory with defeat. His adaptation of Thomas Berger’s novel Neighbors (1981), starring John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, was also a critical and commercial disappointment, as was the romance A Night in Heaven (1983).
In 1984, however, Avildsen again found box-office success, with The Karate Kid. The immensely popular Rocky-ish tale centres on a teenage weakling (played by Ralph Macchio) whose life turns around after some tutelage in philosophy and martial arts from an unassuming Japanese janitor (Pat Morita); Avildsen edited the picture himself. The Karate Kid, Part II (1986) fared even better at the box office.
Happy New Year (1987) and For Keeps (1988) disappeared without a trace, but Lean on Me (1989), an inspirational biopic based on the exploits of New Jersey school principal Joe Clark (Morgan Freeman), was a hit. The Karate Kid, Part III (1989), Rocky V (1990), and The Power of One (1992) were all sports-themed, as was the little-seen 8 Seconds (1994), starring Luke Perry as a doomed rodeo star. In 1999 Avildsen ventured into the thriller genre again with Desert Heat (also released as Inferno), which starred Jean-Claude Van Damme; the film was loosely based on the 1961 classic Yojimbo by Kurosawa Akira.
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