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34791b14ea7cc44e155a3e5e7e4252b7 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-G-Carlisle | John G. Carlisle | John G. Carlisle
John G. Carlisle, in full John Griffin Carlisle, (born September 5, 1835, Campbell county, Kentucky, U.S.—died July 31, 1910, New York City, New York), lawyer, legislator, and government official. He served as speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives (1883–89) and secretary of the Treasury (1893–97).
Carlisle was admitted to the Kentucky bar in 1858 and practiced law in Covington before his election to a term in the state legislature (1859–61); he also served in the Kentucky state senate (1866–71) and as lieutenant governor (1871–75). Carlisle, a Democrat, was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1876; he championed tariff reduction and rose to the post of speaker (1883). In 1890 he resigned from the House to fill an unexpired term in the Senate.
In 1893 Pres. Grover Cleveland appointed him secretary of the treasury. Carlisle’s hard-money policy during the depression that followed the Panic of 1893 was extremely unpopular in the growing free-silver wing of the Democratic Party. In 1896 he abandoned the party’s nominee for president, William Jennings Bryan, champion of the free-silver movement, to support John M. Palmer, candidate of the National Democratic Party (Gold Democrats). As a result of this switch of allegiance, Carlisle lost popular support in his native Kentucky; from 1897 he practiced law in New York City.
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b3f0969021be06b54f1a9d8543ccbad9 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Galliano | John Galliano | John Galliano
John Galliano, in full John Charles Galliano, (born November 28, 1960, Gilbraltar), British fashion designer known for his ready-to-wear and haute-couture collections for such fashion houses as Christian Dior, Givenchy, and Maison Margiela.
Galliano, the son of a Spanish plumber, at age six moved with his family from Gibraltar to south London, where he was educated. At age 16 he left Wilson’s Grammar School for Boys, where he had been an undistinguished student, to study textile design at East London College. In 1980 he entered St. Martin’s School of Art, London, where he became enamoured of historical costuming. His 1984 graduate collection, Les Incroyables, inspired by the French Revolution, was purchased straight off the college’s catwalk by the owner of an exclusive London fashion boutique. After graduating with first-class honours, Galliano set up a studio in a warehouse in London’s East End and established himself as the “boy wonder” of British fashion. He was British Fashion Council Designer of the Year in 1987 and 1994, and in 1991 he made his Paris catwalk debut.
Twice bankrupted, Galliano’s business was rescued in 1994 by John A. Bult, a Swiss-born New York-based investment banker, and Galliano was set up in an atelier near Place de la Bastille in Paris. In 1995 Galliano was appointed to replace Hubert de Givenchy, the refined founder of the house. Galliano revealed his first couture collection featuring sumptuous bouffant ball gowns, bowed dresses, and belted suits, and in 1995, for the third time and second consecutive year, he was named British Designer of the Year.
Upon Galliano’s appointment as designer in chief at Dior fashion house in 1996, the luxury-goods conglomerate Louis Vuitton Möet Hennessy (LVMH) bought Galliano’s company from Bult. Bernard Arnault, head of LMVH, which owned both Givenchy and Dior, hoped that the then 36-year-old Galliano would attract a younger clientele, not only to couture but also to the seasonal ready-to-wear lines produced by both houses. Indeed, the arrival of Galliano heralded a fresh start for the beleaguered reputation of haute couture and, as designer in chief of two fashion houses, Galliano enjoyed an unrivaled position among British designers. He confessed, however, that Dior’s New Look—an ensemble that paired jackets with padded shoulders and ample ankle-length skirts—was closer to his own aesthetic than were the conservative linear designs of Givenchy.
In 1996 English fashion designer Alexander McQueen succeeded Galliano at Givenchy, and the following year they jointly received the British Designer of the Year award. In 2009 Galliano was awarded the French Legion of Honor, the country’s highest honour.
In February 2011 Galliano was accused of anti-Semitism after he allegedly made racist insults in a Paris café. In March Dior fired the designer, and the following month Galliano was also fired from his namesake fashion house. During this time Galliano entered rehab for drug and alcohol addiction, and he later apologized for his comments. In September 2011 he was found guilty of making “public insults based on origin, religious affiliation, race, or ethnicity” and received a suspended fine. For the next two years, Galliano was largely shunned by the fashion world, though he notably designed model Kate Moss’s wedding gown in 2011. In 2013, however, he collaborated on Oscar de la Renta’s fall collection, and the following year he was named creative director of Maison Martin Margiela (the Belgian fashion house dropped Martin from its name in 2015).
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c3e0ffcc256346c745d755d30e856c66 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-George-Bartholomew | John George Bartholomew | John George Bartholomew
John George Bartholomew, (born March 22, 1860, Edinburgh, Scotland—died April 13, 1920, Cintra, Portugal), cartographer and map and atlas publisher who improved the standards of British cartography and introduced into Great Britain the use of contours and systematic colour layering to show relief.
The eldest son of the Edinburgh map publisher John Bartholomew (1831–93), he concerned himself with producing new geographical works as well as with technical improvements in map production. He published major atlases of Scotland (1895) and England and Wales (1903) and initiated a great physical atlas, but only two volumes appeared, the Atlas of Meteorology (1899) and the Atlas of Zoogeography (1911). He also began compiling The Times Survey Atlas of the World, published in 1921 by his son John Bartholomew (1890–1962), who also edited the new Times Atlas of the World (1955).
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6dc3952df1279deaf2f8128783bb2a39 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-George-III | John George III | John George III
John George III, (born June 20, 1647, Dresden, Saxony [Germany]—died September 12, 1691, Tübingen, Württemberg), elector of Saxony (1680–91).
He forsook the vacillating foreign policy of his father, John George II, and in June 1683 joined an alliance against France. Having raised the first standing army in the electorate, he helped to drive the Turks from Vienna in September 1683, leading his men with great gallantry, but, disgusted with the attitude of the emperor Leopold I after the victory, he returned at once to Saxony. However, he sent aid to Leopold in 1685. When Louis XIV’s armies invaded Germany in September 1688, John George was one of the first to take up arms against the French, and, after sharing in the capture of Mainz, he was appointed commander in chief of the imperial forces. He had not, however, met with any notable success when he died at Tübingen.
Like his father, he was very fond of music, but he appears to have been less extravagant. His wife was Anna Sophia, daughter of Frederick III, king of Denmark, and both his sons, John George IV and Frederick Augustus, became electors of Saxony, the latter also becoming king of Poland as Augustus II.
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62dd6f5ee24f09f234f3c270120cabe2 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Gilbert-American-actor | John Gilbert | John Gilbert
John Gilbert, original name John Cecil Pringle, (born July 10, 1899, Logan, Utah, U.S.—died January 9, 1936, Los Angeles, Calif.), romantic leading man of the silent era, known as the “Great Lover.” In retrospect, his acting career has been overshadowed by his identification as the tragic star who failed to make the transition to sound.
The son of a small-time acting family, Gilbert began his screen career in 1916 as an extra at Inceville, the Los Angeles studio headed by film pioneer Thomas Ince. For eight years, Gilbert toiled at different studios in front of and behind the camera. At first unchallenged by acting, he served as a writer at Paralta studios and then as a production assistant to director Maurice Tourneur. In 1921 he became a featured player at the Fox Film Corporation and then a star shortly after signing a contract in 1924 with the newly formed MGM.
After Rudolph Valentino died, Gilbert inherited the title of the screen’s greatest romantic lover, epitomizing male glamour of the 1920s. Though slender, graceful, and sleek, he suggested virility through the intensity of his love scenes, which he played with exaggerated romantic gestures and impassioned expressions. He reached the heights of his stardom when cast opposite his real-life lover Greta Garbo in three successive screen romances: Flesh and the Devil (1926), Love (1927), and A Woman of Affairs (1928). It is his more subtle performance in the classic antiwar drama The Big Parade (1925), however, that has stood the test of time.
Much speculation exists as to why Gilbert did not make the transition to sound films. Early accounts characterized his voice as being “high-pitched” or “prissy,” which did not match his image as the Great Lover. Yet his voice quality in such sound films as Queen Christina (1933) belies that explanation. Revisionist historians consider the MGM executive Louis B. Mayer the person responsible for ending Gilbert’s career. Mayer despised the rebellious and womanizing Gilbert and allegedly sabotaged the actor’s early sound work by saddling him with inferior material. More recent accounts suggest that Gilbert’s performance style was too presentational and old-fashioned and his enunciation too clipped for sound films. In addition, the costume melodramas with which he had been associated in silent films were out of style by the dawn of the sound era. Consequently, the public quickly found other idols, and Gilbert lost his box office power. Ill feelings between Mayer and Gilbert exacerbated the situation as Mayer did nothing to help Gilbert construct a new image for a new age.
Whatever the exact cause, Gilbert’s career path provides an example of the worst effects of the Hollywood star system, which touted image over talent.
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33af3b43fe4a22c65e0f8afa892e8456 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Goodlad | John Goodlad | John Goodlad
John Goodlad, in full John Inkster Goodlad, (born August 19, 1920, North Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada—died November 29, 2014, Seattle, Washington, U.S.), Canadian-born educator and author who, as a critic of the U.S. educational system, argued that the fundamental focus of education should not be on the promotion of standards-based testing but instead be on preparing young people to be active and engaged citizens in a participatory democracy.
After earning a teaching certificate in 1939, Goodlad began teaching in a one-room rural school and eventually held posts at several other schools in Canada. He earned both a bachelor’s (1945) and a master’s (1946) degree from the University of British Columbia before moving to the United States and earning a Ph.D. (1949) at the University of Chicago. He then held various teaching positions at Emory University, Agnes Scott College, and the University of Chicago. In 1960 he became both a professor of education and the director of a laboratory school at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Goodlad was named dean of the Graduate School of Education at UCLA in 1967, a position he held until 1983.
In 1984 Goodlad moved to the University of Washington. There, in collaboration with Kenneth A. Sirotnik and Roger Soder, he created (1985) the research-focused Center for Educational Renewal and in subsequent years added two other organizations as affiliates of the centre: the National Network for Educational Renewal (1986) and the Institute for Educational Inquiry (1992). Through those various groups, Goodlad advocated for a redesign of the U.S. educational system that would be grounded on four “Moral Dimensions” that he helped to identify. Goodlad paid particular attention to the preparation of teachers, believing that a teacher’s personality and approach to students are the keys to effective teaching and learning. That led Goodlad to support close collaborations between colleges and universities that prepare teachers and the schools that serve as real-world settings for the teacher candidates.
Goodlad wrote prolifically, and his books include A Place Called School (1984), an extensive four-year study of thousands of American classrooms; Teachers for Our Nation’s Schools (1990); In Praise of Education (1997); and Education for Everyone: Agenda for Education in a Democracy (2004; cowritten with Corinne Mantle-Bromley and Stephen John Goodlad). The memoir Romances with Schools: A Life of Education was published in 2004.
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d22b546d97a4a70510a505689c41a07c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Gould | John Gould | John Gould
John Gould, (born Sept. 14, 1804, Lyme Regis, Dorsetshire, Eng.—died Feb. 3, 1881, London), English ornithologist whose large, lavishly illustrated volumes on birds commanded ever-mounting prices among bibliophiles.
Gould learned taxidermy at Windsor Castle, where his father was foreman of gardeners. In 1827 he became taxidermist to the Zoological Society of London. The arrival in 1830 of a collection of exotic bird skins from the Himalayas enabled him to produce the first of many folio volumes, A Century of Birds from the Himalaya Mountains (1831–32). Gould’s sketches were transferred to the lithographer’s stone by his wife, the former Elizabeth Coxon, whose artistic talents were to enhance many of his works until her death in 1841. The five-volume Birds of Europe (1832–37) and Monograph of the Ramphastidae (Toucans) (1834) were so successful that the Goulds were able to spend two years (1838–40) in Australia, where they made a large collection of birds and mammals. The collection resulted in Gould’s most famous work, The Birds of Australia, 7 vol. (1840–48; supplements 1851–69), and in Mammals of Australia, 3 vol. (1845–63). He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1843.
Gould’s lifetime work comprised more than 40 volumes, with more than 3,000 coloured plates. His many scientific papers, mostly devoted to descriptions of new species, established his professional reputation, but he is best known today for his folios.
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6c250d8917b278acce5182e5233df73b | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Greenleaf-Whittier | John Greenleaf Whittier | John Greenleaf Whittier
John Greenleaf Whittier, (born December 17, 1807, near Haverhill, Massachusetts, U.S.—died September 7, 1892, Hampton Falls, New Hampshire), American poet and abolitionist who, in the latter part of his life, shared with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow the distinction of being a household name in both England and the United States.
Born on a farm into a Quaker family, Whittier had only a limited formal education. He became an avid reader of British poetry, however, and was especially influenced by the Scot Robert Burns, whose lyrical treatment of everyday rural life reinforced his own inclination to be a writer.
Whittier’s career naturally divides into four periods: poet and journalist (1826–32), abolitionist (1833–42), writer and humanitarian (1843–65), and Quaker poet (1866–92). At age 19 he submitted his poem “The Exile’s Departure” to the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison for publication in the Newburyport Free Press, and it was accepted. Garrison encouraged other poetic contributions from Whittier, and the two men became friends and associates in the abolitionist cause. Whittier soon turned to journalism. He edited newspapers in Boston and Haverhill and by 1830 had become editor of the New England Weekly Review in Hartford, Connecticut, the most important Whig journal in New England. He also continued writing verse, sketches, and tales, and he published his first volume of poems, Legends of New England, in 1831. In 1832, however, a failed romance, ill health, and the discouragement he felt over his lack of literary recognition caused him to resign and return to Haverhill.
Deciding that his rebuffs had been caused by personal vanity, Whittier resolved to devote himself to more altruistic activities, and he soon embraced Garrisonian abolitionism. His fiery antislavery pamphlet Justice and Expediency made him prominent in the abolition movement, and for a decade he was probably its most influential writer. He served a term in the Massachusetts legislature, spoke at antislavery meetings, and edited the Pennsylvania Freeman (1838–40) in Philadelphia. In 1840 he returned to live in Amesbury with his mother, aunt, and sister.
By 1843 Whittier had broken with Garrison, having decided that abolitionist goals could be better accomplished through regular political channels. He became more active in literature, in which new avenues of publication were now open to him. In the next two decades he matured as a poet, publishing numerous volumes of verse, among them Lays of My Home (1843), Voices of Freedom (1846), Songs of Labor (1850), The Panorama (1856), and Home Ballads and Poems (1860). Among his best-known poems of this period is “Maud Muller” (1854), with its lines “Of all sad words of tongue and pen/ The saddest are these, ‘It might have been.’ ” Most of his literary prose, including his one novel, Leaves from Margaret Smith’s Journal (1849), was also published during this time, along with numerous articles and reviews.
Whittier’s mother and his beloved younger sister died in the period from 1857 to 1864, but his personal grief, combined with the larger national grief of the Civil War, furthered his literary maturity. The publication in 1866 of his best-known poem, the winter idyll Snow-Bound, was followed by other triumphs in the verse collections The Tent on the Beach (1867), Among the Hills (1868), and The Pennsylvania Pilgrim (1872). Whittier’s 70th birthday was celebrated at a dinner attended by almost every prominent American writer, and his 80th birthday became an occasion for national celebration.
After outgrowing the Romantic verse he wrote in imitation of Robert Burns, Whittier became an eloquent advocate of justice, tolerance, and liberal humanitarianism. The lofty spiritual and moral values he proclaimed earned him the title of “America’s finest religious poet,” and many of his poems are still sung as church hymns by various denominations. After the Civil War he changed his focus, depicting nature and homely incidents in rural life. Whittier’s best poems are still read for their moral beauty and simple sentiments.
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544f6aa88e1a595ac3221e09696c292c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Grisham | John Grisham | John Grisham
John Grisham, (born February 8, 1955, Jonesboro, Arkansas, U.S.), American writer, attorney, and politician whose legal thrillers often topped best-seller lists and were adapted for film. Grisham became one of the fastest-selling writers of modern fiction.
Grisham grew up in Southaven, Mississippi. After he was admitted to the Mississippi bar in 1981, he practiced law and served (1984–89) as a Democrat in the Mississippi state legislature. Then, inspired by a trial he observed in 1984, Grisham took three years to write his first novel, A Time to Kill (1989; film 1996), which deals with the legal, social, and moral repercussions when a Mississippi Black man is tried for the murder of two white men who raped his 10-year-old daughter. Despite good reviews for its skillfully crafted dialogue and sense of place, the novel failed to sell.
Grisham vowed to “take a naked stab at commercial fiction” with his next novel, The Firm (1991; film 1993, TV series 2012), about a law school graduate who is seduced into joining a Memphis law firm that turns out to be a front for the Mafia. The selling of the film rights prompted a bidding war for publishing rights, and within weeks of the book’s release it appeared on The New York Times best-seller list, where it stayed for nearly a year, allowing Grisham to give up his law practice and move with his family to a farm in Oxford, Mississippi. In the meantime, A Time to Kill, reissued in paperback, sold more than three million copies.
Grisham wrote his third novel—The Pelican Brief (1992; film 1993), about a female law student investigating the assassinations of two Supreme Court justices—in only three months. There were 5.5 million copies of the book in print by March 1993. Film rights to the novel were sold for more than $1 million. Another novel, The Client (1993; film 1994), sacrificed roller-coaster suspense for humour and slapstick energy. Critics almost universally agreed that the plot, dealing with an 11-year-old boy who uncovers a mob-related murder plot, read as though it had been tailor-made for the screen. Indeed, the film rights to the novel sold for $2.5 million, while the novel itself sold 2.6 million copies within 15 weeks. Grisham continued his success with such titles as The Chamber (1994; film 1996), The Rainmaker (1995; film 1997), The Runaway Jury (1996; film 2003), and The Testament (1999).
In 2001 Grisham detoured from his formulaic legal thrillers with A Painted House (television film 2003), the story of a farm boy from rural Arkansas who discovers a troubling secret in his small town. Other nonlegal novels followed, including Skipping Christmas (2001; film 2004 as Christmas with the Kranks), Bleachers (2003), Playing for Pizza (2007), and Calico Joe (2012). The crime thrillers Camino Island (2017) and Camino Winds (2020) centre on a female writer.
However, Grisham also maintained his steady output of legal fiction, with The Summons (2002), The Last Juror (2004), The Appeal (2008), The Litigators (2011), The Racketeer (2012), and Gray Mountain (2014) among his later works in the genre. In Sycamore Row (2013)—a follow-up to A Time to Kill, centring on the lawyer from that book, Jake Brigance—Grisham returned to the racial politics that drove the events of the first novel, this time examining their impact on a case involving a contested will. Rogue Lawyer (2015) chronicles the adventures of a criminal defense attorney who enjoys taking on seemingly hopeless cases, and The Whistler (2016) is about judicial misconduct. The Rooster Bar (2017) centres on three law students struggling with debt who discover that both their school and their student-loan bank are owned by a questionable Wall Street investor. Grisham’s later legal thrillers included The Reckoning (2018), about a decorated World War II soldier who kills a pastor after returning to Mississippi, and The Guardians (2019), in which a lawyer attempts to exonerate a man convicted of murder. In A Time for Mercy (2020), Grisham continued the story of Jake Brigance, who defends a teenager accused of murder.
His first nonfiction book, The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town (2006), explores a 1982 murder case that resulted in two Oklahoma men being wrongfully sentenced to death row. In 2009 Grisham published the short-story collection Ford County. The following year saw Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer, the first installment in a series of young-adult novels. Sequels included Theodore Boone: The Abduction (2011), Theodore Boone: The Accused (2012), Theodore Boone: The Activist (2013), Theodore Boone: The Fugitive (2015), and Theodore Boone: The Scandal (2016).
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296100debfdd44ae356f81ea6cd88cf9 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Gully | John Gully | John Gully
John Gully, (born August 21, 1783, Wick, Gloucestershire, England—died March 9, 1863, Durham, Durham), prizefighter, racehorse fancier, and politician, a major personage of the 19th-century British sporting world.
In 1805, having failed as a butcher, Gully was in prison for his debts when he was visited by his pugilist friend Henry Pearce, “the Game Chicken.” As the result of an informal bout between them in jail, Gully’s debts were paid, and he was matched against Pearce. They met at Hailsham, Sussex, on October 8, 1805, before the duke of Clarence (afterward King William IV). Gully lost in 64 rounds, but his fine showing enhanced his reputation. When Pearce retired because of ill health, Gully was recognized as his successor as heavyweight champion. In 1807–08 Gully twice defeated the huge Bob Gregson and then retired from the prize ring.
Thereafter he took to horse racing and executed betting commissions for important patrons, among them the prince regent (later King George IV). In 1827 he lost £40,000 in backing Mameluke (which he had bought for 4,000 guineas) in the St. Leger. Gully’s horses won the Derby and St. Leger in 1832, the Two Thousand Guineas race in 1844, the Derby and the Oaks in 1846, and the Two Thousand Guineas and the Derby in 1854. Because his horses were trained at Danebury, Hampshire, he and his betting associates were called the Danebury Confederacy.
From 1832 to 1837 Gully was a member of Parliament for the pocket borough of Pontefract, Yorkshire. In 1862 he bought the Wingate estate and coal mines in County Durham. Gully married twice and had 24 children, a dozen by each wife.
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85415fb60df7e88955ac674f9402f548 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Gunther | John Gunther | John Gunther
John Gunther, (born Aug. 30, 1901, Chicago—died May 29, 1970, New York City), journalist and author who became famous for his series of sociopolitical books describing and interpreting for American readers various regions of the world, beginning with Inside Europe (1936).
Gunther attended the University of Chicago, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and earned a Ph.B. degree in 1922. Without waiting to receive his diploma, he embarked on a cattle boat bound for Europe. On his return he took a reporting job with the Chicago Daily News but relinquished it when the management declined to assign him as a European correspondent. He made his way to London and managed to gain a position on the Daily News London bureau, where he worked from 1924 to 1936. For the next nine years he covered various European capitals, the Balkan region, and the Middle East.
With the success of Inside Europe, Gunther quit the newspaper business to devote full time to book writing. He travelled widely while researching his books and in 1941 became a war correspondent, covering Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s headquarters in Europe and the British 8th Army. From 1942 to 1945 he reported on the war as a radio commentator on the National Broadcasting Company’s Blue Network. He travelled in central and eastern Europe in 1948 for the New York Herald Tribune and Look magazine.
Gunther’s other books—all highly successful—include Inside Asia (1939), The High Cost of Hitler (1939), Inside Latin America (1941), D-Day (1944), Inside U.S.A. (1947), Roosevelt in Retrospect (1950), Inside Africa (1955), Inside Russia Today (1958), Inside Europe Today (1961), and Inside South America (1967). His book Death Be Not Proud (1949) was a reminiscence of his son who died in youth.
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6ea9bacfe903bad776fa5b0265195f93 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Halas-and-Joy-Batchelor | John Halas and Joy Batchelor | John Halas and Joy Batchelor
John Halas and Joy Batchelor, (respectively, born April 16, 1912, Budapest, Hungary—died Jan. 20/21, 1995, London, England; born May 12, 1914, Watford, Hertfordshire, England—died May 14, 1991, London), British husband-and-wife production team, noted for their influential animated films.
Halas was educated in Hungary and Paris and apprenticed to George Pal; he moved to England as an animator in 1936. After art school Batchelor became a commercial artist and met Halas in 1936 while working on Music Man (1938). They later married and in 1940 established Halas and Batchelor Animation, Ltd., which became the largest cartoon film studio in Great Britain.
The collaborators directed and coproduced their greatest work in 1955, an animated version of the George Orwell novel Animal Farm, England’s first full-length colour feature cartoon. Their other projects included The History of the Cinema (1956); Automania 2000 (1963); Dilemma (1982), the first fully digitized film; and more than 2,000 other animated films. Many later cartoons, documentaries, and educational shorts were commissioned specifically for television. Halas was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1972.
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bddfd422ed01409e86dd42b36ce79f54 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Hall-English-educator | John Hall | John Hall
John Hall, (born August 1627, Durham, County Durham, Eng.—died Aug. 1, 1656, Durham), educational reformer in Cromwellian England.
Educated at St. John’s College, Cambridge, and Gray’s Inn, London, Hall became associated as a young man with the circle of reformers around Samuel Hartlib. He was also a friend of Thomas Hobbes. A versatile writer, he worked for the newspapers Mercurius Britannicus and Mercurius Politicus (1650–53), a state publication, and thereafter served Oliver Cromwell’s government as a pamphleteer. In his major work, An Humble Motion to the Parliament of England Concerning the Advancement of Learning and Reformation of the Universities (1649), which was influenced by John Milton, Hall called for sweeping educational reform, especially in the universities. His emphasis was on the new science, mathematics, and foreign languages, while he criticized the university statutes because they hindered the introduction of new subjects and methodology. He complained of the misuse of the revenues of the universities and suggested that they be used to support more professorships and fewer fellowships. His publications include poetry, essays, satire (especially on Presbyterianism), and translations of historical, humanistic, and utopian works.
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d62729c659db9455d9bae5eb162d7de4 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Hammond | John Hammond | John Hammond
John Hammond, in full John Henry Hammond, Jr., (born December 15, 1910, New York, New York, U.S.—died July 10, 1987, New York), American record producer, promoter, talent scout, and music critic who discovered and promoted several major figures of popular music, from Count Basie and Billie Holiday in the 1930s to Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen during the rock era. A tireless crusader for racial integration in the music business, he is regarded as the most important nonmusician in the history of jazz.
Born into a wealthy New York family, Hammond studied piano and violin as a child and later attended Yale University as a music major. From the age of 10 or 11, he often sneaked away from home or school to visit Harlem, listening to street music, buying records of Black artists, or wandering around. He was enormously moved by blues singer Bessie Smith’s performance at the Alhambra Theater in 1927; this event was a catalyst in Hammond’s lifelong dedication to music promotion, especially the music of Black artists. He dropped out of Yale and took a job as a correspondent for Melody Maker magazine. In his first successful venture as a record producer, in 1931 he personally funded the recordings of pianist Garland Wilson.
In 1933 Hammond produced a series of recordings with Fletcher Henderson, Benny Carter, and Benny Goodman. In the same year, Hammond produced Bessie Smith’s final recording session and Billie Holiday’s first. Hammond continued to produce Holiday’s sessions through 1937, most of them featuring pianist Teddy Wilson, another Hammond discovery. A lifelong crusader for integration in the music business (and an officer in the NAACP), Hammond was instrumental in persuading Benny Goodman to accept Wilson and percussionist Lionel Hampton into his small groups and to hire Fletcher Henderson as his main arranger. In 1936 Hammond heard the Count Basie orchestra on a radio broadcast and subsequently helped bring the band to national prominence. Two years later Hammond organized the first of two historic “Spirituals to Swing” concerts, which chronicled the history of Black jazz and blues, at New York City’s Carnegie Hall. Hammond’s last major discovery of the 1930s was pioneering electric guitarist Charlie Christian, who became a member of Goodman’s small groups in 1939.
Hammond worked for several record labels during his career, most importantly with Columbia Records, with which he was associated for many years, on and off. He served in the military in World War II. After the war he showed little interest in the bebop movement. During the 1950s he produced a highly regarded series of recordings with several swing-era veterans, he was affiliated with the Newport Jazz Festival (begun in 1954), and he wrote articles for newspapers and magazines.
Hammond’s enthusiasm returned as he discovered rock and other related music, and he promoted the careers of several great musicians—including Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, Leonard Cohen, and Bruce Springsteen—during the 1960s and early ’70s. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986. His autobiography (with Irving Townsend), John Hammond on Record, was published in 1977.
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d20c51bfc3f212fea611f605f298900e | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Hawkwood | Sir John Hawkwood | Sir John Hawkwood
Sir John Hawkwood, Italian byname Giovanni Acuto, (born c. 1320, Sible Hedingham, Essex, Eng.—died March 16/17, 1394, Florence [Italy]), mercenary captain who for 30 years played a role in the wars of 14th-century Italy.
The son of a tanner, Hawkwood chose a soldier’s career, serving in the French wars of Edward III, who probably bestowed a knighthood on him. After the Treaty of Brétigny temporarily ended Anglo-French hostilities (1360), Hawkwood became the leader of a free company, going to Italy three years later to join the English band known as the White Company in the service of Pisa. He was elected captain general in January 1364. Using the English longbow and tactics developed by the English in France, he became famous for the rapidity of his movements, made possible by lighter armour and equipment, for his handling of infantry, and for the discipline of his troops.
Between 1372 and 1378 he alternately served the pope and the duke of Milan, whose illegitimate daughter he married in 1377. The following year he became captain general of Florence, fighting for other clients when his services were not needed by the Florentine republic.
In 1382 he sold lands given him by the pope in the Romagna (near Ravenna) and bought estates in the vicinity of Florence; nine years later he became an honorary Florentine citizen. In 1394, in preparation to return to England to spend his last years, he sold his Italian properties but died before his plan could be carried out.
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11151db891116a6f63af10c685fb0754 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Hay-Whitney | John Hay Whitney | John Hay Whitney
John Hay Whitney, byname Jock Whitney, (born August 17, 1904, Ellsworth, Maine, U.S.—died February 8, 1982, Manhasset, New York), American multimillionaire and sportsman who had a multifaceted career as a publisher, financier, philanthropist, and horse breeder.
Whitney was born into a prominent family; his maternal grandfather was U.S. Secretary of State John Hay, and his father’s side included some of the wealthiest individuals in the United States. After attending Groton Preparatory School and Yale University (1922–26), Whitney entered the University of Oxford, but, upon the death of his father in 1927, he returned to manage the vast family fortune. Meanwhile, he had become a keen sportsman and an internationally ranked polo player, joining the renowned Greentree polo team in 1924 and remaining an active player until the team broke up in 1940. He eventually took a leading role in many horse-breeding and racing organizations, and his own stables, Greentree, produced several notable winning racehorses.
Whitney was also interested in the arts. He invested in Broadway plays, including the long-running hit Life with Father; ventured into films with Pioneer Pictures, which demonstrated the value of Technicolor; and, in 1935, helped form the Selznick International Motion Picture Company, which, through Whitney’s efforts, obtained screen rights to the novel Gone with the Wind even before its publication. He served as a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City from its inception in 1931 and himself eventually formed one of the finest art collections in the United States.
With the outbreak of World War II in Europe, Whitney joined Nelson Rockefeller and others in forming what eventually became the U.S. Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. In 1942 he joined the Eighth U.S. Army Air Force as a captain in the Combat Intelligence Division and saw duty in England and the Mediterranean before being captured by the Nazis in southern France. He escaped and in 1945 was awarded the Legion of Merit. That year he became special adviser to the U.S. Department of State’s Public and Cultural Relations Division and to the International Information Service, and in 1956 he was appointed U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, where he served until 1961.
In the years after World War II, Whitney also pursued business opportunities in the communications industry, acquiring interests in numerous newspapers, television and radio stations, and magazines. His greatest disappointment was his inability to revitalize the New York Herald Tribune, which he acquired in 1958 and which he served (1961–66) as publisher and editor in chief until the newspaper folded.
As a philanthropist, in 1946 he set up the John Hay Whitney Foundation, to which he contributed $1 million annually, and in 1970 he donated $15 million to his alma mater, Yale.
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221e3009a9cf74cae18c23bc76f4c8d5 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Hays-Hammond | John Hays Hammond | John Hays Hammond
John Hays Hammond, (born March 31, 1855, San Francisco—died June 8, 1936, Gloucester, Mass., U.S.), U.S. mining engineer who helped develop gold mining in South Africa and California.
In 1880 he was engaged by the U.S. Geological Survey for a study of the California goldfields; afterward, as a consulting engineer, he visited most of the countries of North and South America. Acting as a consulting engineer for British gold interests from 1893, he became a leader of the mining faction whose protests against government policies led to the Jameson Raid (January 1896), an abortive attempt to overthrow the Transvaal government and set up a South African federation under the British flag. Hammond was arrested and condemned to death but was later released. He organized and was chairman from 1914 to 1915 of the World Court League, an organization that carried on an intensive campaign for an international court, and was chairman of the U.S. Coal Commission in 1922.
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1bf9c3539070d3f56c68d3883c3cad0b | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Held-Jr | John Held, Jr. | John Held, Jr.
John Held, Jr., (born Jan. 10, 1889, Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S.—died March 2, 1958, Belmar, N.J.), cartoonist whose work epitomized the “jazz age” of the 1920s in the United States.
At the age of 16 he was drawing sports and political cartoons for the Salt Lake Tribune, and at 19 he sold his first cartoon to a national magazine. Shortly afterward he went to New York City, where he worked in the art department of a newspaper.
After service in the U.S. Navy during World War I, Held returned to New York City, where he gained fame and wealth for his drawings in the popular humour magazines Life, Judge, and College Humor. These drawings conveyed a spirit of the era comparable to that in the writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald. In particular, Held created such immortal characters as the short-skirted, short-haired “flapper,” who rolled her stockings and used a long cigarette holder, and her escort, who wore a raccoon coat, had patent-leather hair parted in the middle, smoked a pipe, and carried a hip flask. Held’s ability to point up the foibles of the time without sentimentality or bitterness made his cartoons notable. Also during the 1920s, he drew two comic strips: “Merely Margie, an Awfully Sweet Girl” and “Rah, Rah, Rosalie,” both of which ended with the Depression.
During the 1930s Held wrote novels and short stories and did sculpture and woodcuts. His woodcuts, often evoking the “Gay Nineties,” appeared in The New Yorker magazine. During World War II he served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps and was stationed in Belmar, N.J., where he made his home after the war. Held’s Angels (1952), illustrated by Held, with text by Frank Bunker Gilbreth, Jr., was a word and picture evocation of the 1920s.
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84b8c430d7f2fd04002fae6b60b83e65 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Henry-Anderson | John Henry Anderson | John Henry Anderson
John Henry Anderson, (born July 14, 1814, Craigmyle, Aberdeen, Scot.—died Feb. 5, 1874, Darlington, Durham, Eng.), Scottish conjurer and actor, the first magician to demonstrate and exploit the value of advertising.
Described on playbills as “Professor Anderson, the Wizard of the North,” he first performed in 1831. Seasons at Edinburgh (1837) and Glasgow (1838–39) followed. In London (1840) he made use of the most elaborate collection of magical apparatus ever seen there. During a U.S. tour (1851–53) Anderson first did his famous “gun trick,” by which he appeared to catch a bullet fired by someone in the audience. On his return to Great Britain he performed before Queen Victoria and then took the title role in the melodrama Rob Roy at the Lyceum and Covent Garden theatres (1855–56). The three-day “Grand Carnival” with which the Covent Garden seasons were concluded ended in disaster in 1857 when Anderson tried to dispel drunken revelers by lowering the gaslights. The ceiling caught fire, and the theatre was burned down. This only added to his fame, and he continued to tour widely, his style of presentation gradually becoming less flamboyant.
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121820104e32ea2d69be5a69d7473047 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Henry-Dallmeyer | John Henry Dallmeyer | John Henry Dallmeyer
John Henry Dallmeyer, (born Sept. 6, 1830, Loxten, Westphalia [Germany]—died Dec. 30, 1883, at sea off New Zealand), British inventor and manufacturer of lenses.
Showing an aptitude for science, Dallmeyer was apprenticed to an Osnabrück optician, and in 1851 he went to London, where he obtained work with an optician and later with Andrew Ross, a lens and telescope manufacturer. After a year spent in a commercial post, he was reengaged by Ross as scientific adviser. He married Ross’s second daughter, Hannah, and in 1859 inherited part of his employer’s large fortune and the telescope-manufacturing portion of the business. Turning to the making of photographic lenses, he introduced improvements in both portrait and landscape lenses, in object glasses for the microscope, and in condensers for the optical lantern. He constructed several photoheliographs (telescopes adapted for photographing the Sun).
His son Thomas Rudolphus Dallmeyer (1859–1906) introduced telephoto lenses into ordinary practice (patented 1891) and wrote a standard book on the subject (Telephotography, 1899).
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da66827343186ef689b3c326a65994d1 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Henry-Holland | John Henry Holland | John Henry Holland
John Henry Holland, (born February 2, 1929, Fort Wayne, Indiana, U.S.—died August 9, 2015, Ann Arbor, Michigan), one of the pioneering theorists in nonlinear mathematics and the use of new mathematical techniques in understanding problems in disciplines as diverse as economics, biology, and computer science.
In 1950 Holland received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He then entered the graduate school in communication science at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he received a master’s degree in mathematics in 1954 and what was arguably the first Ph.D. in computer science, in 1959. He remained at Michigan and played an active role in the development of computer science as a department and discipline. He played a fundamental role in creating Michigan’s Center for the Study of Complex Systems, and in 1988 he became a professor of psychology as well. Outside of his Michigan activities, Holland became an active member of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, a novel research institution established in 1984 to further the study of nonlinear phenomena.
Holland made his career through the study of nonlinear, or complex, systems. Unlike a linear system, which can be broken into simpler subsystems, studied, and reassembled to predict the full system’s behaviour, a nonlinear system displays behaviour that is inexplicable in terms of any of its separate subsystems. This nonlinear phenomenon is known as emergence, and Holland was among the first to realize the connection between emergence and individual and organizational adaptation. For example, beginning about 1977, Holland developed an artificial market based on a few simple rules and with competing “agents.” In addition to developing a system of payments and rewards for his agents, he “bred” them by creating the first genetic algorithms—essentially enabling his system of agents to evolve and learn from experience in a manner analogous to living systems. Holland’s views on emergence emphasized the dynamic character of complex systems and the ways such systems change over time.
Holland’s work is at one with other research in artificial intelligence and artificial life that emphasizes how lower-order activities are the building blocks out of which higher-level phenomena emerge. Just as the robotic pioneer Rodney Brooks argued that intelligence is not the result of a mind following internal rules and representations but the result of interaction with a particular environment, Holland argued that complex social and physical systems are not the product of abstract rules but the consequence of diverse agents and their interactions.
Among Holland’s published works are Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems (1975), Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity (1995), and Emergence: From Chaos to Order (1998). The latter two were written for the lay reader.
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5c9b5248a978cc16f755e760c1312fc5 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Henry-Lloyd | John Henry Lloyd | John Henry Lloyd
John Henry Lloyd, (born April 15/25, 1884, Palatka, Florida, U.S.—died March 19, 1964/65, Atlantic City, New Jersey), American baseball player and manager in the Negro leagues, considered one of the greatest shortstops in the game.
Lloyd’s well-traveled Negro league career began in 1905, when he was a catcher for the Macon Acmes. He played second base for the Cuban X-Giants the following year. For the bulk of his career, Lloyd played shortstop and was often compared to Honus Wagner, the star shortstop of the Pittsburgh Pirates of major league baseball.
Later in his career, Lloyd moved back to second base and then to first base. Although he played during the deadball era of baseball, when home runs were rare, he was one of the best long-ball hitters of the day. Additionally, he was a skilled bunter, had good bat control, and could run the bases well. Playing winter baseball in Cuba, Lloyd and his Havana Reds excelled against the Detroit Tigers and the Philadelphia Athletics of the major leagues. In 1910 he batted .500 against the Tigers in 12 games.
Lloyd became a player-manager in 1911, often staying only one season with a team. With the New York Lincoln Giants in 1930, he played against the Baltimore Black Sox in the first Negro league game at Yankee Stadium in New York City. During his career Lloyd played with about a dozen Negro league teams, including the Brooklyn Royal Giants, the Philadelphia Hilldales, and the Atlantic City Bacharach Giants. The left-handed hitter, who was called “Pop” in his later years, finished with a Negro league batting average of about .350. In Cuba, where he was known as el Cuchara (“the Shovel”), he hit over .320.
Lloyd retired to Atlantic City, New Jersey, where he was active in Little League baseball. In 1949 the city named a baseball stadium for him. Lloyd was posthumously inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1977.
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35ae7257cfabe9930e5c8b434ec6afe9 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Henry-Poynting | John Henry Poynting | John Henry Poynting
John Henry Poynting, (born September 9, 1852, Monton, Lancashire, England—died March 30, 1914, Birmingham, Warwickshire), British physicist who introduced a theorem that assigns a value to the rate of flow of electromagnetic energy known as the Poynting vector.
He was a professor of physics at Mason Science College (later the University of Birmingham) from 1880 until his death. In papers published in 1884–85, he showed that the flow of energy at a point can be expressed by a simple formula in terms of the electric and magnetic forces at that point. This is Poynting’s theorem. He also wrote papers on radiation and the pressure of light. After 12 years of experiments he determined in 1891 the mean density of the Earth and in 1893 the gravitational constant, a measure of the effect of gravity. He published his results in The Mean Density of the Earth (1894) and The Earth; Its Shape, Size, Weight and Spin (1913).
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da5edf8d09a66fe3c6d3dfc6697fe075 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Henry-Twachtman | John Henry Twachtman | John Henry Twachtman
John Henry Twachtman, (born August 4, 1853, Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.—died August 8, 1902, Gloucester, Massachusetts), painter and etcher, one of the first American Impressionists.
Twachtman went to Munich, Germany, in 1875 to study painting and adopted the broad brushwork and warm, dark colouring of the Munich school. In 1883 he moved to Paris, where he studied at the Académie Julian. During this period he came into contact with Impressionism and began to paint with broken dabs of colour. Like many artists at the time, Twachtman was exposed to Japanism, the contemporary art world’s interest in Japanese aesthetics.
At first unsuccessful as a professional painter, he supported himself after 1889 by teaching at the Art Students League in New York City. During that year he mastered his lyrical interpretation of landscape. He usually painted scenes of nature veiled in cool, shimmering light—e.g., The White Bridge (1895). Among his best-known works are landscapes depicting winter or early spring scenes with delicate, high-keyed colour and strong, underlying formal construction—e.g., Hemlock Pool (c. 1902). Like the work of other American Impressionists, including William Merritt Chase and Childe Hassam, Twachtman’s mature art had a strong regionalist appeal. He composed many of his strongest paintings in the landscape surrounding his home in Greenwich, Connecticut. Twachtman was a prominent member of a small group of American painters known as The Ten.
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fc4bc13a086248fc617b0a90eeda61f2 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Henry-Wigmore | John Henry Wigmore | John Henry Wigmore
John Henry Wigmore, (born March 4, 1863, San Francisco, California, U.S.—died April 20, 1943, Chicago, Illinois), American legal scholar and teacher whose 10-volume Treatise on the Anglo-American System of Evidence in Trials at Common Law (1904–05), usually called Wigmore on Evidence, is generally regarded as one of the world’s great books on law.
A graduate of Harvard University, Wigmore taught at Keio University in Tokyo (1889–92) and at Northwestern University Law School in Evanston, Illinois (from 1893; dean, 1901–29). He also served as a colonel on the judge advocate general’s staff during World War I and as an Illinois commissioner on uniform state laws (1908–24, 1933–43).
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3fa6d362c54a6eeba2adec0453ba732f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Henry-Williams | John Henry Williams | John Henry Williams
John Henry Williams, (born June 21, 1887, Wales—died Dec. 24, 1980, Southbridge, Mass., U.S.), American economist, banker, and government adviser who achieved world renown as an expert on international trade.
Williams was educated at Brown University and Harvard, where he obtained his Ph.D. (1919). He was a professor of economics at Harvard (1921–57) and then became professor emeritus. For 10 years (1937–47) Williams served as the first dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Public Administration. He also taught at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy (1957–63). Outside of academia, Williams was economic adviser to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (1933–56) and vice president (1936–47). Throughout World War II and afterward, he was a top government adviser on economics.
Williams’ principal fame as an economist rests upon his writings in the field of international trade. A major early work was Argentine International Trade under Inconvertible Paper Money (1920), which successfully tested the classical theory of international transfer and takes its place alongside classic studies by Frank Taussig and Jacob Viner. He had earlier produced, with others, pioneering data on the historical development of the U.S. balance of payments. He contributed vigorously to the debates during and after World War II on the postwar monetary arrangements and is regarded as the inventor of the key-currency principle that stressed the pivotal role of the dollar in the international monetary system.
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3ac36b843aa744b37c473366b8ae478b | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Hersey | John Hersey | John Hersey
John Hersey, in full John Richard Hersey, (born June 17, 1914, Tientsin, China—died March 24, 1993, Key West, Fla., U.S.), American novelist and journalist noted for his documentary fiction about catastrophic events in World War II.
Hersey lived in China, where his father was a secretary for the Young Men’s Christian Association and his mother was a missionary, until he was 10, at which time his family returned to the United States. He graduated from Yale University in 1936, and he served as a foreign correspondent in East Asia, Italy, and the Soviet Union for Time and Life magazines from 1937 to 1946. His early novel A Bell for Adano (1944), depicting the Allied occupation of a Sicilian town during World War II, won a Pulitzer Prize. Hersey’s next books demonstrated his gift for combining a reporter’s skill for relaying facts with imaginative fictionalization. Both The Wall (1950), about the Warsaw ghetto uprisings, and Hiroshima (1946), an objective account of the atomic bomb explosion in that city as experienced by survivors of the blast, are based on fact, but they are also personal stories of survival in Poland and Japan in World War II.
Hersey’s later novels encompass a wide variety of subjects and range from treatments of contemporary political and social issues to moral parables set in the world of the future. These works interweave social criticism and their author’s moralistic aims with imaginative plots and premises. The novel The Call (1985) is largely the expression of its protagonist, an articulate missionary in China whose journals and letters make up much of the book. Blues (1987), a series of dialogues between characters identified only as Fisherman and Stranger, echoes Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler (1653) in its exploration of the practice and philosophy of fishing.
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5e0b5d7af4637c6da395d532be20789c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Hewson | John Hewson | John Hewson
…secretary for Liberal Party leader John Hewson in 1990. When the Liberals were defeated in 1993 in an election that they were widely expected to win, Hewson became a pariah within the party, and Abbott found himself out of work. From 1993 to 1994 he served as executive director for…
…being with their losing chieftain, John Hewson. They overlooked the clear call for new blood focused around the personality of the populist Bishop, and, accordingly, throughout 1993 the conservatives were destabilized by continued rumours and suggestions of a possible leadership challenge.
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611c042d64b17f3a4d1f46d3ca7acffa | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Holt | John Holt | John Holt
John Holt, in full John Caldwell Holt, (born April 14, 1923, New York, New York, U.S.—died September 14, 1985, Boston, Massachusetts), American critic of public education who became one of the most-prominent advocates for homeschooling in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Raised in New England, Holt graduated from Yale University in 1943 with a degree in engineering. Despite his excellent academic record, Holt came to consider his experiences in formal education largely worthless, concluding that most of his learning had happened outside the classroom. After Yale, Holt served in the U.S. Navy, then joined a pacifist group, and finally traveled through Europe. After his return to the United States, he taught for four years at the Colorado Rocky Mountain School in Carbondale, Colorado, before moving back to the East Coast. There he met his intellectual comrade and collaborator Bill Hull while teaching at a private school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. For seven years Holt and Hull observed one another’s classes, taking notes that became the basis for many of Holt’s books.
How Children Fail (1964), Holt’s first book, contended that compulsory schooling destroys children’s native curiosity and replaces it with a self-conscious and fearful desire to please the teacher. His How Children Learn (1967) contrasted the informal education children receive in the home with compulsory school education. Holt’s critiques of the educational establishment, developed in those books and elsewhere, were unpopular with his teaching colleagues and superiors, although he became a mainstream figure in the mid-1960s, contributing articles to magazines such as Life, The Saturday Evening Post, and Redbook. He was dismissed, however, from several schools for refusing to accommodate the administration, attempting to run his classes without assessments, and suggesting pedagogical reforms that scandalized even progressives. He left teaching in 1968 to lecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the University of California, Berkeley.
Holt’s views became more radical in the early 1970s. His optimism that schools could be improved through a variety of reforms changed to pessimism in 1970 when he met and studied the writings of the philosopher and social critic Ivan Illich, who held that the concept of mass education was inherently self-defeating. Holt also became an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War and refused to pay taxes. He turned down an honorary doctorate from Wesleyan University in 1970, arguing that colleges were “among the chief enslaving institutions” in the United States. Holt’s Freedom and Beyond (1972) showcased his increasing doubts that any schools could challenge the racism and classism that he associated with modern life. Echoing Illich, Holt argued that children need to be liberated from schools altogether. In Escape from Childhood (1974) he argued that children should be granted 11 basic rights, including the right to sue and be sued, to choose their own guardians, and to learn as they wished.
Increasingly marginalized, Holt found himself at the forefront of the burgeoning homeschooling movement after he published Instead of Education: Ways to Help People Do Things Better (1976), which explored a number of possible alternatives to institutional schooling. The following year he founded Growing Without Schooling (1977–2001), the first newsletter in the country for homeschoolers. He worked to build bridges between disparate subgroups within the homeschooling movement such as Christian fundamentalists, Mormons, Adventists, and secularists, and by December 1978, when Time magazine published an article on homeschooling and Holt appeared on The Phil Donahue Show with a homeschooling family, he had again gained the attention of the American mainstream. Holt’s final years were largely spent securing homeschooling’s legal foundation through frequent appearances before courts and legislatures and at rallies across the United States.
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4afe6da231fad85c4e6481b2646649be | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Howard-Northrop | John Howard Northrop | John Howard Northrop
John Howard Northrop, (born July 5, 1891, Yonkers, N.Y., U.S.—died May 27, 1987, Wickenberg, Ariz.), American biochemist who received (with James B. Sumner and Wendell M. Stanley) the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1946 for successfully purifying and crystallizing certain enzymes, thus enabling him to determine their chemical nature.
Northrop was educated at Columbia University, where he received his doctorate in chemistry in 1915. In World War I he was a captain in the U.S. Army Chemical Warfare Service.
During World War I Northrop conducted research on fermentation processes suitable for the industrial production of acetone and ethyl alcohol. This work led to a study of enzymes essential for digestion, respiration, and general life processes. At that time the chemical nature of enzymes was unknown, but through his research Northrop was able to establish that enzymes obey the laws of chemical reactions. He crystallized pepsin, a digestive enzyme present in gastric juice, in 1930 and found that it is a protein, thus resolving the dispute over what enzymes are. Using the same chemical methods, he isolated in 1938 the first bacterial virus (bacteriophage), which he proved to be a nucleoprotein. Northrop also helped isolate and prepare in crystalline form pepsin’s inactive precursor pepsinogen (which is converted to the active enzyme through a reaction with hydrochloric acid in the stomach); the pancreatic digestive enzymes trypsin and chymotrypsin; and their inactive precursors trypsinogen and chymotrypsinogen.
Northrop was first an assistant at, and then a member of, the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York City from 1916 until his retirement in 1961, when he became professor emeritus. He was also a visiting professor of bacteriology and biophysics at the University of California at Berkeley (1949–58). His book Crystalline Enzymes (1939) was an important text.
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58db97badc94c1138950fc01c4f53904 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Hunt-Morgan | John Hunt Morgan | John Hunt Morgan
John Hunt Morgan, (born June 1, 1825, Huntsville, Alabama, U.S.—died September 4, 1864, Greeneville, Tennessee), Confederate guerrilla leader of “Morgan’s Raiders,” best known for his July 1863 attacks in Indiana and Ohio—the farthest north a Confederate force penetrated during the American Civil War.
In 1830 Morgan’s parents moved from Alabama to a farm near Lexington, Kentucky. He received a public school education in Lexington. In 1846 he enlisted in the army and saw action at Buena Vista during the Mexican-American War. In the 1850s Morgan concentrated on his prosperous hemp-manufacturing business.
In September 1861 he joined the Confederate army as a scout, and by early 1862 he held the rank of captain and had a cavalry squadron under his command. He then launched lightninglike raids on Union supply lines in Kentucky and Tennessee, avoiding open combat whenever possible. Swift movement, interruption of enemy telegraphic communications, destruction of Union transportation facilities, and the dismounting of horse soldiers for combat characterized Morgan’s cavalry methods. By April 1862 he had been promoted to colonel, and before the end of the year he was a brigadier general in command of a cavalry division.
Morgan began a new series of raids in spring 1863 and was authorized to raid Kentucky with 2,000 men in June and July, but he went beyond his authorization and on July 8 crossed the Ohio River into Indiana. Hotly pursued by Union troops and local forces, Morgan and his men were unable to inflict much damage and suffered heavy casualties. The raid succeeded only in taking Union pressure off Gen. Braxton Bragg’s army and prolonging Confederate control of eastern Tennessee.
On July 19 most of Morgan’s men surrendered, but Morgan rode on until surrounded and captured near New Lisbon, Ohio, on July 26. Four months later he escaped from the Ohio State Penitentiary, and by spring 1864 he was back in command of a Confederate army (the Department of Southwest Virginia). He began raiding Kentucky once again and then decided to attack Union forces at Knoxville, Tennessee. On September 4, 1864, he was surprised by a Federal force at Greeneville and was killed while trying to join his men.
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bc0d416fe4ffb4f2c4452e2496d845c0 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Hurt | John Hurt | John Hurt
John Hurt, in full Sir John Vincent Hurt, (born January 22, 1940, Chesterfield, Derbyshire, England—died January 25, 2017, Cromer, Norfolk), British actor known for his insightful and sensitive portrayals of damaged or eccentric characters.
Hurt, whose father was an Anglican minister, grew up in northern England. He studied art in London before enrolling at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, from which he graduated in 1962. He made his film and stage debuts that same year and won raves for his performance in Harold Pinter’s one-act play The Dwarfs (1963). A role in Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs during its original West End run (1966) led to his being cast as Richard Rich in the acclaimed historical film A Man for All Seasons (1966). Hurt later gained attention for supporting turns in such movies as the crime dramas 10 Rillington Place (1971) and Midnight Express (1978). For his magnetic performance in the latter as a heroin addict in a Turkish prison, he received a British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Award and was nominated for an Academy Award. After a memorable role in the science-fiction film Alien (1979), Hurt starred, under layers of makeup, as the famously disfigured Joseph Merrick (called John in the film) in The Elephant Man (1980) and garnered another BAFTA Award and his second Oscar nomination.
Hurt continued to act onstage in England, notably appearing as Romeo in a 1973 production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and as Dada founder Tristan Tzara in Tom Stoppard’s Travesties (1974). He also found steady work in British television, winning particular praise for his portrayals of gay icon Quentin Crisp in the movie The Naked Civil Servant (1975) and Caligula in the series I, Claudius (1976).
For most of the 1980s and ’90s, Hurt focused on his screen career. He starred as Winston Smith in a 1984 film adaptation of George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-four; as a charming status seeker in Scandal (1989), which was based on the Profumo affair; and as a stuffy author who becomes enamoured of a young male movie idol in Love and Death on Long Island (1997). Hurt also enjoyed smaller parts in such films as The Field (1990), a drama set in an Irish village, and Rob Roy (1995), about the Scottish outlaw. On television he appeared as the title character in the children’s series The Storyteller (1987–88).
Hurt’s films of the 21st century included the Australian western The Proposition (2005), the futuristic thriller V for Vendetta (2006), the action-adventure movie Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), and the espionage drama Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011). He also appeared as the wand maker Ollivander in multiple installments of the popular Harry Potter film series, based on J.K. Rowling’s books.
In 2004 Hurt starred as British politician Alan Clark in the BBC miniseries The Alan Clark Diaries. He later portrayed former U.S. secretary of state Warren Christopher in Recount (2008), a TV movie about the aftermath of the 2000 U.S. presidential election, and he reprised his revered characterization of Crisp in the TV movie An Englishman in New York (2009). His subsequent credits included the television miniseries Labyrinth (2012); Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), in which he played a vampiric Christopher Marlowe; and the dark sci-fi thriller Snowpiercer (2013). Hurt also starred as an incarnation of the Doctor in the 50th-anniversary episodes (2013) of the sci-fi TV series Doctor Who.
Hurt’s later stage roles included the title character in Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, which he performed in multiple productions beginning in 1999. Throughout his career, Hurt also provided voices for a number of films and television programs, including the series Watership Down (1999–2000), an animated adaptation of Richard Adams’s classic novel, and Merlin (2008–12).
In 2012 Hurt was honoured with the BAFTA Award for outstanding British contribution to cinema. He was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2004 and was named a knight bachelor in 2015. That year he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and he died in 2017. Hurt’s last roles were an elderly barfly in My Name Is Lenny, a terminally ill screenwriter in That Good Night, and the head of the Israeli intelligence agency in Damascus Cover, all of which premiered later that year.
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91d30996871ef04982db929d44204d6c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-I-Albert | John I Albert | John I Albert
John I Albert, Polish Jan Olbracht, (born Dec. 27, 1459, Kraków, Pol.—died June 17, 1501, Toruń), king of Poland and military leader whose reign marked the growth of Polish parliamentary government.
The second son of King Casimir IV of Poland and Elizabeth of Habsburg, John Albert received a comprehensive education. He proved his military ability by defeating the Tatars at Kopystrzyn in 1487 and at Zasław in 1491. After his father’s death he was elected king of Poland by nobles in the privy council. Beset by financial problems, in 1493 he convened the privy council, which was henceforth called the senate, along with a new legislative body, the chamber of deputies, representing the szlachta (gentry) in the first national Sejm (legislature). In return for subsidies he agreed to preserve traditional privileges of nobles and gentry and granted extensive legislative powers to the Sejm.
John Albert also tried to extend his power. Having purchased some lands and acquired others through diplomacy, he embarked on a campaign in Moldavia in 1497. Initiating the campaign in response to the hospodar (ruler) Stephen the Great’s request for aid against the Tatars, John Albert also hoped to capture the towns of Kilia and Belgorod (Akkerman) at the mouths of the Danube and Dniester rivers. But Stephen, fearing John Albert’s ambitions, suspected that he intended to depose him and put his own brother, the Polish prince Sigismund (later king, as Sigismund I the Old), on the Moldavian throne. When the Polish forces entered Moldavia, they met fierce resistance from Stephen’s army and suffered a heavy defeat at Suceava in 1497. From 1498 to 1501 the king was occupied with repelling Tatar attacks on Poland’s eastern border. When he died, he was preparing to invade the Prussian lands of his recalcitrant vassal, Frederick of Saxony, grand master of the Teutonic Order.
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b495e838e1d17a4c60f95418294503f3 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-I-king-of-Aragon | John I | John I
John I, (born Dec. 27, 1350—died May 16, 1395), king of Aragon (1387–1395), son of Peter IV. Influenced by his wife, Violante, he pursued a pro-French policy but refused to become involved in the Hundred Years’ War. He died by a fall from his horse, like his namesake, cousin, and contemporary of Castile, John I. He was a man of insignificant character, with a taste for artificial verse.
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6323441e88a742480436b93cad23ea70 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-I-of-Brabant | John I of Brabant | John I of Brabant
…militarily and sold them to John I of Brabant. After five years of war against Reinald and his ally, John was victorious. Limburg was united with Brabant under his rule but maintained its separate institutions and laws. In 1430 the duchy of Limburg was united with the rest of the…
…during the 13th century, while John I, Duke of Brabant, sought expansion toward the Rhine valley, which offered protection for the growing trade that moved from Cologne overland through Brabant. Duke John II, however, left such formidable debts that Brabant merchants were arrested abroad, which made them claim control over…
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a24b16e68c9cf08117e6e8e5ae8933e1 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-I-Tzimisces | John I Tzimisces | John I Tzimisces
John I Tzimisces, (born 925—died Jan. 10, 976, Constantinople), Byzantine emperor (969–976) whose extension of Byzantine influence into the Balkans and Syria and maintenance of domestic tranquillity assured the prestige and stability of the empire for his immediate successors.
Descended from an aristocratic Armenian family, John was related through his mother to the general, and later emperor, Nicephorus II Phocas. He entered the imperial army and fought with Nicephorus against the Arabs in Cilicia and Syria. Having helped Nicephorus gain the throne, he was rewarded with the supreme command of Byzantine forces in the East. His ambition for the throne later led him into the conspiracy with his mistress, Theophano (the Emperor’s wife), that led to the assassination of Nicephorus in December 969. Forced to do penance by Polyeuctus, patriarch of Constantinople, in order to receive the imperial crown, John banished Theophano to a convent and punished the murderers.
John I strengthened the empire by coupling diplomatic skill with military strength. In 970 he married Theodora, sister of Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, the legitimate claimant to the throne, to offset challenges to his rule at home. When the Bulgars attacked the empire in 971, he led his forces against their capital, captured their tsar, and forced them to recognize Byzantine suzerainty. In July 971 he defeated the Russian prince Svyatoslav, ending threats to Byzantine rule in the north. To preserve the Byzantine position in the West, he arranged a marriage between one of his relatives and the future Holy Roman emperor Otto II. Turning to the East, he reduced the Fāṭimid strength around Antioch in 974–975, taking Antioch, Damascus, and other cities in Syria. Before he could retake Jerusalem he died, probably of typhoid.
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25bf82263e2ca00ff8250e62a3013c58 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-II-king-of-Aragon-and-Navarre | John II | John II
John II, (born 1398, Medina del Campo, Leon—died 1479, Barcelona), king of Aragon (1458–79) and also king of Navarre (1425–79); he was the instigator of the union of Castile and Aragon through the historic marriage of his son Ferdinand with Isabella of Castile.
John was a younger son of Ferdinand of Antequera, elected king of Aragon (as Ferdinand I) in 1412. John and his brothers retained their positions and revenues in Castile, and he married Blanche, the heiress to Navarre, of which he claimed the kingship (1425–79). On his wife’s death, he married Juana Enriques, daughter of the admiral of castile (1447), whose ambitions led to a conflict between John and his eldest son by his first marriage, Charles, prince of Viana.
In 1458 John succeeded his elder brother Alfonso V as king of Aragon, with Sicily and Sardinia. He was blamed for the mysterious death of his son Charles, who had a strong following in Catalonia, where John’s policies were deeply resented. The Catalans offered the crown to Peter of Portugal, who died, after which they appealed to the French for aid. In October 1469 John arranged for his son by his second marriage, Ferdinand, to marry Isabella, the recognized heiress to Castile, despite the opposition of her brother, Henry IV of Castile. This marriage led to the union of Castile and Aragon and the creation of the modern state of Spain. In Aragon, John’s rule deepened the rift between Aragon proper and Catalonia.
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032c1a68238538d14d8fdcf6dd52825b | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-II-king-of-France | John II | John II
John II, byname John the Good, French Jean le Bon, (born April 16, 1319, near Le Mans, Fr.—died April 8, 1364, London), king of France from 1350 to 1364. Captured by the English at the Battle of Poitiers on Sept. 19, 1356, he was forced to sign the disastrous treaties of 1360 during the first phase of the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453) between France and England.
After becoming king on Aug. 22, 1350, John continued a truce with the English until later that year, when he had an English hostage, Raoul de Brienne, comte d’Eu, former constable of France, executed. By March 1351 King Edward III of England realized the impossibility of remaining at peace; but John committed the first act of hostility by attacking and recapturing Saint-Jean-d’Angély in western France that September 7. John signed a new truce with England on Sept. 12, 1351, but broke it by supporting the partisans of Charles of Blois (a pretender to Brittany, then held prisoner by Edward) in August 1352; the peace, however, was extended until September 23.
John’s other bitter enemy was Charles II the Bad, king of Navarre, to whom John gave his daughter Joan as an offer of alliance; the enmity still remained strong, however, because John never paid a dowry or recognized a rent of 15,000 livres due to Charles. John further irritated Charles by giving the new constable of France, Charles de La Cerda, lands that were claimed by Charles of Navarre. In revenge, the latter had the new constable assassinated; but in spite of John’s rage, the two kings made a superficial peace in February 1354. Charles desired an alliance with Edward, which so frightened John that he made another peace with Charles on Sept. 10, 1355. On April 16, 1356, at Rouen, John took his revenge on Charles by having him imprisoned.
Meanwhile Edward, displeased by the 1355 alliance between John and Charles, invaded France later that year but then returned to England before any confrontations. At the same time, Edward’s son Edward, prince of Wales (later called the Black Prince), attacked southern France. Unable to halt the English invasions because he lacked funds, John gathered the States General to seek money and to impose an unpopular salt tax. John first went to defend Paris and Chartres. He and the Prince of Wales finally met near Poitiers in September 1356. The French army was decimated, and John was taken prisoner.
John was taken to London in April 1357, where he was lodged in the Savoy palace; there he concluded treaties (January 1358 and March 1359) so harsh that they were repudiated in France. Finally the treaties of Brétigny and of Calais (May and October 1360) fixed John’s ransom at 3,000,000 gold écus and surrendered most of southwestern France to Edward. On Oct. 9, 1360, John was released to raise a ransom that France could not afford to pay, and hostages were accepted in his place. When one of the hostages (John’s own son) escaped, John, feeling dishonoured, returned to England on his own volition as a prisoner.
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7dee37fa24147079c27f038d8f2095da | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-king-of-Denmark-Norway-and-Sweden | John | John
John, Danish Hans, (born June 5, 1455, Denmark—died Feb. 20, 1513, Ålborg, Den.), king of Denmark (1481–1513) and Norway (1483–1513) and king (as John II) of Sweden (1497–1501) who failed in his efforts to incorporate Sweden into a Danish-dominated Scandinavian union. He was more successful in fostering the commercial development of Danish burghers to challenge the power of the nobility.
John succeeded his father, Christian I, king of Denmark and Norway, in 1481, but only by agreeing to a stringent charter imposed by the Danish nobles to limit royal power. Although he was also recognized as sovereign by the Swedish state council (1483), the Swedish regent, Sten Sture the Elder, was able to postpone John’s coronation as king of Sweden. In 1490 John divided the territories of Schleswig and Holstein with his brother Frederick (later king of Denmark as Frederick I).
Ignoring the royal charter of 1483, John expanded the authority of his office and further offset the nobles’ power by supporting the Danish merchant class against its chief rivals, the traders of the Hanseatic League (a north German trading confederation). His anti-Hanseatic policy was furthered by trade agreements with England, the Netherlands (1490), and the merchants of the south German house of Fugger.
John was able to force Sten Sture to resign the regency of Sweden (1497) and was crowned king after allying himself with Ivan III, grand prince of Moscow, in 1493. He then ordered the building of a navy to control the Baltic Sea but suffered a serious military defeat in 1500 in a peasant uprising in Dithmarschen (now in Germany). The defeat helped persuade dissident Swedish nobles to rebel and reinstall Sten Sture as regent of Sweden, but Norwegian and Danish uprisings against John’s rule were suppressed.
John’s commercial treaty with England led to a war against Sweden and the Hanseatic city of Lübeck (1510–12), in which the new Danish navy scored repeated victories.
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c2f26c74325093206c231e1f5b7f70a5 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-king-of-Scotland-1250-1313 | John | John
John, also called John De Balliol, or Baliol, (born c. 1250—died April 1313, Château Galliard, Normandy, Fr.), king of Scotland from 1292 to 1296, the youngest son of John de Balliol and his wife Dervorguilla, daughter and heiress of the lord of Galloway.
His brothers dying childless, he inherited the Balliol lands in England and France in 1278 and succeeded to Galloway in 1290. In that year, when the heiress to the kingdom of Scotland, Margaret, the Maid of Norway, died, Balliol became one of 13 competitors for the crown. He at once designated himself “heir of the kingdom of Scotland,” clearly anticipating the vindication of his claim, which was derived from his mother, daughter of Margaret, eldest daughter of David, earl of Huntingdon, brother to kings Malcolm IV and William I the Lion. His chief rival was Robert de Bruce (grandfather of King Robert I).
The English king Edward I met the Scottish baronage at Norham in Northumberland and insisted that as adjudicator between the claimants he should be recognized as overlord of Scotland. His court of 104 persons discussed the rival titles for more than a year, but Balliol’s simple claim by primogeniture ultimately prevailed. Edward I confirmed the decision on Nov. 17, 1292, and Balliol was enthroned at Scone on November 30, doing homage to Edward at Newcastle on December 26. John, however, soon proved rebellious; and when in June 1294 Edward demanded military aid from Scotland for his projected war in Gascony, the Scottish reaction was to conclude a treaty of mutual aid with the French. When Edward I sent an army to Gascony in January 1296, the Scots raided northern England. Edward reacted quickly; he took Berwick on March 30. Castle after castle fell to the English king, and at Montrose, John resigned his kingdom to Edward. He was stripped of his arms and knightly dignity in a ceremony which later earned him the nickname “Toom (empty) Tabard.” John was a prisoner in the Tower of London until July 1299, when papal intervention secured his release. Thereafter, he lived in Normandy.
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88b12fea49b0f5c5a9796d23dfd04903 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Knowles-Paine | John Knowles Paine | John Knowles Paine
John Knowles Paine, (born Jan. 9, 1839, Portland, Maine, U.S.—died April 25, 1906, Cambridge, Mass.), composer and organist, the first American to win wide recognition as a composer and the first professor of music at an American university.
After a thorough musical grounding in Portland, Paine completed his studies in Berlin (1858–61). In 1861 he initiated a series of organ recitals and lectures in Boston that led to his appointment in 1862 as instructor (later professor) of music at Harvard University. The music department he organized there became a model for those of many other American universities.
Both as a teacher and as a composer he was a major influence on the development of music in the United States. His works, generally modeled on the German classics, include two symphonies, a Mass in D (1866–67), and the oratorio St. Peter (1872).
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32adda86148eae6a3a32aba439467d5d | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-L-Hall | John L. Hall | John L. Hall
John L. Hall, (born 1934, Denver, Colo., U.S.), American physicist, who shared one-half of the 2005 Nobel Prize for Physics with Theodor W. Hänsch for their contributions to the development of laser spectroscopy, the use of lasers to determine the frequency (colour) of light emitted by atoms and molecules. (The other half of the prize went to Roy J. Glauber.)
Hall studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (B.S., 1956; M.S., 1958; Ph.D., 1961) in Pittsburgh. In 1961 he joined the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (now known as JILA), a research institute operated by the National Bureau of Standards (later called the National Institute of Standards and Technology) and the University of Colorado at Boulder. He later taught at the university.
Working with Hänsch, Hall conducted prizewinning research on measuring optical frequencies (frequencies of visible light). Although a procedure (the optical frequency chain) had already been developed to make such measurements, it was so complex that it could be performed in only a few laboratories. The two men focused on developing Hänsch’s idea for the optical frequency comb technique. In the technique, ultrashort pulses of laser light create a set of precisely spaced frequency peaks that resemble the evenly spaced teeth of a hair comb, thereby providing a practical way of obtaining optical frequency measurements to an accuracy of 15 digits, or one part in one quadrillion. Offering important contributions, Hall helped Hänsch work out the details of the theory in 2000.
Practical applications of the work of Hall and Hänsch included the development of very accurate clocks, improved satellite-based navigation systems such as the Global Positioning System, and the synchronization of computer data networks. Their research was also used by physicists to verify Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity to very high levels of precision and to test whether the values of fundamental physical constants related to optical frequencies were indeed constant or changed slightly over time.
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7684818a239b7cb9d5f4797668aa8ad3 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-L-Worden | John L. Worden | John L. Worden
John L. Worden, (born March 12, 1818, Westchester county, N.Y., U.S.—died Oct. 18, 1897, Washington, D.C.), U.S. naval officer who commanded the Union warship Monitor against the Confederate Virginia (formerly Merrimack) in the first battle between ironclads (March 9, 1862) in the American Civil War (1861–65).
Appointed a midshipman in 1834, Worden received his early naval training with the Brazilian squadron (1835–38). He served on the Pacific Coast during the Mexican War (1846–48) and afterward in both the Mediterranean and the home fleets.
On Jan. 16, 1862, Worden was appointed to command John Ericsson’s experimental ship, the Monitor. In March he took the cumbersome “cheese box on a raft” down the Atlantic Coast in perilous, stormy weather and engaged the larger ironclad Virginia at the mouth of the James River. The three-hour battle ended when both withdrew from the conflict. Worden, stationed in the pilothouse, had been wounded in the face, however, and nearly blinded by a shell.
For the rest of the war, he commanded monitors stationed with the South Atlantic blockading squadron. Afterward he was promoted to rear admiral (1872) and commanded the European squadron (1875–77). He was retired by Congress in 1886 at full pay for life.
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7751dbe1a57c61917d44f82b1137ad7f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-La-Farge | John La Farge | John La Farge
John La Farge, (born March 31, 1835, New York, New York, U.S.—died November 14, 1910, Providence, Rhode Island), American painter, muralist, and stained-glass designer.
After graduating from St. Mary’s College in Maryland, La Farge studied law, but in 1856 he went to Europe to study art. He worked independently, studying briefly in Paris with Thomas Couture and coming under the influence of the work of the Pre-Raphaelites in England. Returning to the United States, in 1859 La Farge went to Newport, Rhode Island, where he studied with the artist William Morris Hunt.
La Farge produced landscapes and figure compositions in the 1860s and was among the earliest American painters to adopt the stylistic elements derived from progressive French landscape painting of the mid-19th century as well as from Japanese prints, which he collected. He took up mural painting in 1876 with a commission to decorate the interior of Trinity Church in Boston. His finest mural is the Ascension (1887), in the Church of the Ascension in New York City. He also decorated the homes of William Watts Sherman and Cornelius Vanderbilt II and painted murals in New York’s Union League Club. About the same time, he became interested in stained glass. Through his invention of opalescent glass and his imaginative designing, he contributed to a revival of the art of stained glass in America and gained an international reputation.
In later life La Farge traveled to exotic places, painting a notable series of watercolour scenes during his trips to Japan and the South Pacific in the late 1880s and early ’90s. His writings include Considerations on Painting (1895), An Artist’s Letters from Japan (1897), and The Higher Life in Art (1908).
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a0db022f25d5c6f8715bc6bd01c400fa | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Laird-Mair-Lawrence-1st-Baron-Lawrence | John Laird Mair Lawrence, 1st Baron Lawrence | John Laird Mair Lawrence, 1st Baron Lawrence
John Laird Mair Lawrence, 1st Baron Lawrence, (born March 4, 1811, Richmond, Yorkshire, England—died June 27, 1879, London), British viceroy and governor-general of India whose institution in the Punjab of extensive economic, social, and political reforms earned him the sobriquet “Saviour of the Punjab.”
In 1830 Lawrence traveled to Calcutta (now Kolkata) with his brother Henry and then to Delhi, where he served for 19 years as an assistant judge, magistrate, and tax collector and where he came to oppose the oppression of the peasantry by the talukdars (tax collectors). After home leave (1840–42) he successfully organized the transport of supplies from Delhi to the Indo-British army fighting in the Punjab in the First Sikh War (1845–46). He was rewarded at age 35 with promotion to the commissionership of the newly annexed district of Jullundur. In this capacity he subdued the hill chiefs, prepared a revenue settlement, established courts and police posts, curbed female infanticide and suttee (self-destruction by widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres), and trained a group of officials. He twice deputized for his brother as resident at Lahore.
Impatient with the Sikh council, Lawrence was eager to place financial reform under British control. As a member of the Punjab board of administration under Henry, after the Second Sikh War (1848–49), he made a first summary revenue settlement, abolished internal duties, introduced a uniform currency and postal system, and encouraged road and canal construction. This sort of infrastructural development was a vital component of British rule in India. To finance this work he economized, curtailing the privileges of chiefs’ estates and thus coming into conflict with his brother Henry. James Ramsay, Lord Dalhousie, governor-general, dissolved the Punjab board in 1853, appointing John Lawrence chief commissioner in the executive branch.
On the outbreak of the mutiny in 1857, Lawrence restricted the sepoy (Indians employed as soldiers) battalions to the Punjab and negotiated a successful treaty with the Afghan ruler Dōst Moḥammad Khān, for which he was made a baronet and Knight Grand Cross of the Bath. After a brief visit to England, he returned to India in 1864 as a member of the civil service and was appointed viceroy and governor-general.
Lawrence sought British security in a sepoy army of divided loyalty and in the weakening of princely forces; he resisted the appointment of Indians to high civil service posts but promoted increased educational opportunities. He refrained from intervening in the succession dispute in Afghanistan after the death of Amīr Dōst Moḥammad in 1863, rejected entanglements in the affairs of Arabia and the Persian Gulf, and recognized any chief who secured power. He was created Baron Lawrence of the Punjab and of Grately, Hampshire, after his return to England in 1869.
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08baffcc71c817c2fc4aedee64633948 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Langalibalele-Dube | John Langalibalele Dube | John Langalibalele Dube
John Langalibalele Dube, (born February 22, 1871, near Inanda Mission Station, Natal [now in South Africa]—died February 11, 1946, Umhlanga, Natal, South Africa), South African minister, educator, journalist, and author of Insila ka Shaka (1930; Jeqe, the Bodyservant of King Shaka), the first novel published by a Zulu in his native language.
After studying at Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio, U.S., and being ordained a minister, Dube returned to Natal with the goal of establishing a school for his fellow Africans similar to Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute. In the early 1900s he founded Ohlange Institute, 15 miles (25 km) from Durban, South Africa, and several years later he founded a girls’ school nearby. His work with the institute and on Ilanga lase Natal (“The Natal Sun”), the first Zulu newspaper (which he helped to found in 1903), made him widely known. In 1912 he was elected the first president general of the South African Native National Congress (later the African National Congress).
Political involvement occupied much of the rest of his life, but he also found time to write a biography of the prophet Isaiah Shembe (U-Shembe) and Insila ka Shaka, his historical novel about Shaka, the great 19th-century chief who brought the Zulus to power. Dube received a Ph.D. from the University of South Africa in 1936, and from 1937 until his death he represented Natal at the biannual meetings of the Native Representative Council in Pretoria.
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854d605767349ebf1b9a5f5b7c99271c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Lascaris-Greek-scholar | John Lascaris | John Lascaris
John Lascaris, also called Janus Lascaris, (born c. 1445, Constantinople, Byzantine Empire [now Istanbul, Turkey]—died c. 1535, Rome, Papal States [Italy]), Greek scholar and diplomat whose career shows the close connections that linked political interests and humanist effort before the Protestant Reformation.
A librarian to Lorenzo de’ Medici, Lascaris toured the Levant (1489–92), and his records of the manuscripts he sought, examined, or purchased are of great value for the history of learning. Simultaneously, he collected information about the Ottoman Empire, producing some useful first printed editions, including ones of the Greek Anthology, Callimachus, Musaeus, and Lucian. His knowledge, connections, and devotion to Greek freedom were appreciated by rulers contemplating an active eastern policy. After the temporary decline of the Medici family he served the French court in various diplomatic posts, helped Pope Leo X to establish in Rome the short-lived Quirinal college for training young Greeks, and was chosen in 1525 to present Pope Clement VII’s appeal for a crusade to the emperor Charles V. Appointed French ambassador in Venice in 1503, he helped Aldus Manutius with his edition of the Rhetores Graeci, and through his friendships with Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples and Guillaume Budé he presided over the beginnings of the French Renaissance.
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2e47b92131ac84338587ede771d37777 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-LeConte | John LeConte | John LeConte
…initiated by the American scientist John LeConte, who in the 1850s developed a technique for observing the existence of ultrasonic waves with a gas flame. This technique was later used by the British physicist John Tyndall for the detailed study of the properties of sound waves. The piezoelectric effect, a…
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f3cd452f1b444b0038d6328b39876500 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Leech | John Leech | John Leech
John Leech, (born Aug. 29, 1817, London, Eng.—died Oct. 29, 1864, London), English caricaturist notable for his contributions to Punch magazine.
Leech was educated at Charterhouse, where he met William Makepeace Thackeray, who was to be his lifelong friend. He then began to study medicine but soon drifted into the artistic profession and in 1835 published Etchings and Sketchings by A. Pen, Esq., comic character studies from the London streets. In 1840 Leech began contributing to magazines with a series of etchings in Bentley’s Miscellany; he also collaborated with George Cruikshank, whose work his own resembled in both style and subject. Later, however, he excluded the horrific and satirical elements present in the tradition of English caricature established in the late 18th and early 19th centuries by James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson. Leech developed in his caricatures a comfortable, warmly humorous middle-class urbanity, in which character is underlined by emphatic contrasts of stock types. These qualities emerge from the four etchings illustrating Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol (1844), the Comic History of England (1847–48), and the woodcuts for the Comic History of Rome (1852). These were followed by numerous etchings and woodcuts of sporting scenes in the novels of his friend R.S. Surtees.
Leech’s first contribution to Punch appeared in the issue of Aug. 7, 1841. This was the beginning of a fruitful connection that resulted in about 3,000 caricatures and other illustrations for the magazine. Leech concentrated on social caricature, as in Pictures of Life and Character from the Collection of Mr. Punch (1854, 1860, and 1863). Leech and the English illustrator Sir John Tenniel were the creators of the conventional image of John Bull—a jovial and honest Englishman, solid and foursquare, sometimes in a Union Jack waistcoat and with a bulldog at heel. He also contributed to Punch almanacs and pocketbooks, to Once a Week, and to The Illustrated London News, as well as to numerous novels and miscellaneous volumes.
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b6c22ed74584491ce20ff52c8f24a654 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Lehmann | John Lehmann | John Lehmann
John Lehmann, in full John Frederick Lehmann, (born June 2, 1907, Bourne End, Buckinghamshire, Eng.—died April 7, 1987, London), English poet, editor, publisher, and man of letters whose book-periodical New Writing and its successors were an important influence on English literature from the mid-1930s through the 1940s.
Educated at Eton and at Trinity College, Cambridge, Lehmann worked as a journalist and poet in Vienna from 1932 to 1936 and returned to England to found New Writing, which was issued under various titles until 1950. New Writing published the work of W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, V.S. Pritchett, and others. Lehmann was general manager of the Hogarth Press (1938–46), founded by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, and advisory editor of The Geographical Magazine (1940–45). He and his sister, the novelist Rosamond Lehmann, directed the publishing firm of John Lehmann Ltd. (1946 to 1953). In 1954 he founded The London Magazine, a literary review that he edited until 1961.
His first volume of poems, A Garden Revisited, appeared in 1931, and several other volumes preceded his Collected Poems (1963). His autobiography, which throws much light on the literary life of his time, appeared in three volumes—The Whispering Gallery (1955), I Am My Brother (1960), and The Ample Proposition (1966)—and in a condensed one-volume version in the United States—In My Own Time (1969). Thrown to the Woolfs (1978) details his difficulties with Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press. Lehmann also published a biography of the poet Rupert Brooke in 1980.
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7915e1f0aa1a45bb30b9a3eedab3184f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Leland | John Leland | John Leland
John Leland, Leland also spelled Leyland, (born c. 1506, London—died April 18, 1552, London), chaplain and librarian to King Henry VIII. He was the earliest of a notable group of English antiquarians.
Leland was educated at St. Paul’s School and Christ’s College, Cambridge (B.A., 1522), later studying at All Souls’ College, Oxford, and in Paris. He took holy orders and by 1530 was chaplain and librarian to Henry VIII; the special position of king’s antiquary was created for him in 1533, and he was authorized to search cathedral and monastic libraries for manuscripts of historical interest. Probably from 1534 and certainly from 1536 to 1542 he was engaged on an antiquarian tour of England and Wales. He supported Henry VIII’s church policy (though the havoc that resulted among the monastic manuscripts at the dissolution of the monasteries caused him great distress), and his loyalty was rewarded with his presentation to the rectory of Haseley in Oxfordshire, a canonry at King’s College (afterward Christ Church), Oxford, and a prebend at Salisbury. But he resided mainly in London, where he was certified insane in March 1550. He did not regain his reason before he died.
At the conclusion of his tour of England and Wales, Leland presented to the king a plan of his proposed works, a volume later edited as The Laboryouse Journey and Serche of J. Leylande for Englandes Antiquities, Given of Hym as a Newe Yeares Gyfte to Kinge Henry the VIII (1549). He intended to write a book (“History and Antiquities of the Nation”) that would provide a topographical account of the British Isles and the adjacent islands, and to add a description of the nobility and of the royal palaces. Illness and death intervened, however, before these works were prepared. After passing through various hands, the bulk of Leland’s manuscripts—including his important five-volume Collectanea, with notes on antiquities, catalogs of manuscripts in monastic libraries, and Leland’s account of British writers—was deposited (1632) in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. They had in the meantime been freely drawn upon by many other antiquarians, notably by John Bale (who edited the Newe Yeares Gyfte).
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384710d9f8eaa56d4a438eb76487d2e3 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Leslie-Scottish-physicist-and-mathematician | Sir John Leslie | Sir John Leslie
Sir John Leslie, (born April 10, 1766, Largo, Fife, Scot.—died Nov. 3, 1832, Coates), Scottish physicist and mathematician who first created artificial ice.
In 1802 Leslie’s explanation of capillary action was the first that is consistent with present-day theory. Two years later he published An Experimental Inquiry into the Nature and Propagation of Heat. In 1810 he froze water by using an air pump. Elected to the chair of mathematics at the University of Edinburgh in 1805, he was transferred to the chair of natural philosophy in 1819 and was knighted in 1832.
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48fb1d58ad34d28d34e842f554a2f46c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Lewis-American-musician | John Lewis | John Lewis
John Lewis, in full John Aaron Lewis, (born May 3, 1920, La Grange, Illinois, U.S.—died March 29, 2001, New York, New York), American jazz pianist and composer-arranger who was an influential member of the Modern Jazz Quartet, one of the longest-lived and best-received groups in jazz history.
Reared in New Mexico by academically oriented parents, Lewis studied piano from childhood and, until 1942, anthropology and music at the University of New Mexico. He served in the U.S. Army (1942–45) and subsequently worked as a pianist with Dizzy Gillespie, arranging “Two Bass Hit,” “Emanon,” “Minor Walk,” and his own “Toccata for Trumpet and Orchestra” for Gillespie’s big band. His restrained piano style, which was influenced by classical music, made him a highly sought-after sideman, and he worked with Miles Davis (having arranged “Move,” “Budo,” and “Rouge” for Davis’s album Birth of the Cool), Charlie Parker, Lester Young, and Illinois Jacquet.
In 1952 Lewis became the leader of the Modern Jazz Quartet (known as the M.J.Q.), which featured vibraphonist Milt Jackson, bassist Percy Heath, and drummer Connie Kay. It was active throughout most of the 1950s and ’60s, disbanded in 1974, and resumed performing on a part-time basis in 1981, giving its last concert in the late 1990s. The M.J.Q.’s music was subtle and polite, quite close to Baroque chamber music, and often classed in the “cool jazz” category. Lewis also composed for nonjazz settings and wrote musical scores for cinema, ballet, and theatre. “Django” is the Lewis composition most frequently played by others. Among his solo recordings are Midnight in Paris (1988) and Evolution (1999), and he made several albums, including The Chess Game, Vol. 1–2, with his wife, Mirjana, a harpsichordist.
Lewis also was noted for promoting jazz among younger performers. After receiving a master’s degree from the Manhattan School of Music in 1953, he taught at several institutions and helped establish the Lenox School of Jazz in Massachusetts. In addition, he served as the musical director for the Monterey Jazz Festival in California (1958–82) and for the American Jazz Orchestra (1985–92).
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4129e0d3a27b6f093b7dfad5001c9b46 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Lindley | John Lindley | John Lindley
John Lindley, (born February 5, 1799, Old Catton, Norfolk, England—died November 1, 1865, London), British botanist whose attempts to formulate a natural system of plant classification greatly aided the transition from the artificial (considering the characters of single parts) to the natural system (considering all characters of a plant).
In 1819 Lindley arrived in London where, with the help of the botanist Sir William Jackson Hooker, he obtained a position as an assistant librarian. In 1822 he became garden assistant secretary at the Horticultural Society for which, in 1830, he organized the first flower shows to be held in England. He then served as the first professor of botany at the University of London (University College), where he remained until 1860.
Lindley’s investigation in 1838 of the conditions at the Kew Gardens in London led him to recommend that the gardens be turned over to the nation and used as the botanical headquarters for the United Kingdom. His famous collection of orchids was eventually housed in the Kew herbarium. His Theory and Practice of Horticulture (1842) is considered to be one of the best books ever written on the physiological principles of horticulture. He developed his own natural system of plant classification for his best-known book, The Vegetable Kingdom (1846). Although his system was never adopted by other botanists, it did much to enhance the popularity of the natural system in England.
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97f64cf6608f43c351093c5c6bc737ca | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Lloyd-Stephens | John Lloyd Stephens | John Lloyd Stephens
John Lloyd Stephens, (born Nov. 28, 1805, Shrewsbury, N.J., U.S.—died Oct. 12, 1852, New York City), American traveler and archaeologist whose exploration of Maya ruins in Central America and Mexico (1839–40 and 1841–42) generated the archaeology of Middle America.
Bored with the practice of law and advised to travel for reasons of health, in 1834 he set out on a journey that took him through eastern Europe and the Middle East, where he was particularly drawn to many of the archaeological sites. Two popular books resulted, Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land, 2 vol. (1837), and Incidents of Travel in Greece, Turkey, Russia, and Poland, 2 vol. (1838), with drawings by the English illustrator and archaeologist Frederick Catherwood.
Reports of the existence of ancient ruins in Central America and Yucatán stirred Stephens’ curiosity to locate and explore them. He obtained an appointment as U.S. chargé d’affaires to Central America through the influence of President Martin Van Buren, and in 1839, accompanied by Catherwood, he went to Central America, then torn by political upheaval and civil war. Their progress to Copán, Honduras, was imperiled first by local strife and then by the hazards and extreme hardships of travel through dense, dark jungle. At times they nearly despaired of finding what they sought, but their perseverance was vastly rewarded. After coming upon a wall of uncertain significance, they were stunned by the appearance of a magnificently carved stone stela (slab).
Other discoveries—more stelae, terraces, stairways, and walls with strange and fantastic ornamentation—came in quick succession. Stephens “purchased” the extensive site for $50, and work progressed in clearing away the jungle overgrowth. There and elsewhere, including Uxmal and Palenque in Mexico, Catherwood set about drawing the Maya remains. The report of the first expedition, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan, 2 vol. (1841), and the subsequent publication of Catherwood’s superb drawings caused a storm of popular and scholarly interest and precipitated much study of earlier, mostly forgotten accounts of the lands of the Maya by Spanish conquerors and explorers.
After their second expedition, Stephens and Catherwood published Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, 2 vol. (1843), containing accounts of visits to the remains of 44 ancient sites. Stephens’ last years were devoted to directing the first American transatlantic steamship company and to developing a railroad across the Isthmus of Panama.
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e80f6020a5e8012de19f795e87399a28 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-M-Chivington | John M. Chivington | John M. Chivington
John M. Chivington.
John M. Chivington then determined to take matters into his own hands, reportedly hoping that a victory over the Indians would jump-start his political career. Camped near Sand Creek, Colorado Territory, were about 500 Cheyenne and Arapaho followers of Black Kettle, who was known to…
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a8e507ae926b85877cd3ddbf9993ad9f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Maitland-Duke-of-Lauderdale | John Maitland, duke of Lauderdale | John Maitland, duke of Lauderdale
John Maitland, duke of Lauderdale, (born May 24, 1616, Lethington [now Lennoxlove], East Lothian, Scotland—died August 20/24, 1682, Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England), one of the chief ministers of King Charles II of England (reigned 1660–85); he earned notoriety for his repressive rule in Scotland during Charles II’s reign.
The son of a Scottish lord, Maitland signed the Solemn League and Covenant (1643), pledging to protect Scottish Presbyterianism against encroachments by England’s King Charles I. During the first phase (1642–47) of the English Civil War between Charles I and Parliament, he helped ally Scotland with the Parliamentarians. Nevertheless, after Charles I was taken captive by Parliament in 1647, Maitland secured from the king a secret agreement, known as the Engagement, by which Charles promised to impose Presbyterianism on England in exchange for aid against the rebels. Maitland helped the Scottish Engagers mount their ill-fated invasion of England in 1648, and in 1651 he was captured while fighting with Charles II (the late Charles I’s son and successor) against Oliver Cromwell’s forces at the Battle of Worcester.
Imprisoned in England, Maitland was released upon the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. Over the course of the next few years he became Charles’s principal administrator in Scotland and a member of the king’s ministry known as the Cabal. He was not privy to the secret Treaty of Dover (1670), in which Charles promised to convert to Catholicism in return for French funds.
Although Maitland was created duke of Lauderdale in the Scottish peerage in 1672, he was widely hated for the ruthlessness with which he suppressed Covenanters who resisted the restoration of episcopacy in Scotland. Fears were sparked in the English Parliament that his policies would lay the foundation for arbitrary government enforced by a standing army. Ill health caused him to resign in 1680.
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a185e53ac2eab6f9b4043ff7cdf6a0e6 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Marshall-Harlan-United-States-jurist-1833-1911 | John Marshall Harlan | John Marshall Harlan
John Marshall Harlan, (born June 1, 1833, Boyle County, Ky., U.S.—died Oct. 14, 1911, Washington, D.C.), associate justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1877 until his death and one of the most forceful dissenters in the history of that tribunal. His best known dissents favoured the rights of blacks as guaranteed, in his view, by the post-Civil War constitutional amendments (Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth). In the 20th century the Supreme Court vindicated his positions on civil rights and on many other issues in which he was in dissent at the time.
In the 1850s Harlan, a lawyer and county judge in Kentucky, was active in the Know-Nothing Party. From 1861 to 1863 he commanded a Union infantry regiment in the American Civil War. In 1863 and again in 1865 he was elected attorney general of Kentucky. Critical of the Emancipation Proclamation and other wartime emergency measures taken by President Abraham Lincoln, Harlan opposed Lincoln’s reelection in 1864 and supported the unsuccessful Democratic Party candidate, General George B. McClellan. After the war he attacked the Thirteenth Amendment (1865), which abolished slavery, although as Kentucky attorney general he showed moderation toward the freed blacks. Later in the decade he was appalled by white-racist violence and espoused the Radical Republicans’ policy for reconstructing the South. As a Republican he was defeated for governor of Kentucky in 1871 and 1875.
On Nov. 29, 1877, Harlan was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Rutherford B. Hayes. He wrote 1,161 opinions (including 316 dissents) in nearly 34 years and was the Court’s outstanding liberal justice during that time. He issued a famous dissent in Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan and Trust Co. (1895), in which the Court ruled the federal income tax to be unconstitutional, and in various cases arising under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890, he insisted that Congress had intended to destroy monopolies entirely, not merely to keep them under control.
Harlan dissented from the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Civil Rights cases (1883) that Congress could not punish discrimination against blacks by private persons but only by those acting in an “official” or “state” capacity. In his dissents in the Insular cases involving overseas territories recently annexed by the United States, he opposed the withholding of the Bill of Rights from those unincorporated territories.
Perhaps the most famous of Harlan’s dissents was that in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the case in which the Supreme Court established the “separate but equal” principle of racial segregation. Asserting that “our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens,” he expressed the justified fear that the majority of the court was consigning black citizens of the United States to a permanent “condition of legal inferiority.” From 1954, when the school segregation cases (Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka and Bolling v. Sharpe) were decided, the court repudiated the “separate but equal” doctrine and other theories of racial discrimination.
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42454f228fc4fe91dcfa337e3dc46da3 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Marston | John Marston | John Marston
John Marston, (baptized Oct. 7, 1576, Oxfordshire, Eng.—died June 25, 1634, London), English dramatist, one of the most vigorous satirists of the Shakespearean era, whose best known work is The Malcontent (1604), in which he rails at the iniquities of a lascivious court. He wrote it, as well as other major works, for a variety of children’s companies, organized groups of boy actors popular during Elizabethan and Jacobean times.
Marston was educated at the University of Oxford and resided from 1595 at the Middle Temple, London. He began his literary career in 1598 with The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image and Certaine Satyres, an erotic poem in the newly fashionable Ovidian style. In the same year, the rough-hewn, obscure verses of The Scourge of Villanie, in which Marston referred to himself as a “barking satirist,” were widely acclaimed.
In 1599 Marston began writing for the theatre, producing Histrio-mastix (published in 1610), probably for performance at the Middle Temple. In his character Chrisoganus, a “Master Pedant” and “translating scholler,” the audience was able to recognize the learned Ben Jonson. A brief, bitter literary feud developed between Marston and Jonson—part of “the war of the theatres.” In Poetaster (produced 1601) Jonson depicted Marston as Crispinus, a character with red hair and small legs who was given a pill that forced him to disgorge a pretentious vocabulary.
For the Children of Paul’s, a theatre company, Marston wrote Antonio and Mellida (1600); its sequel, Antonio’s Revenge (1601); and What You Will (1601). The most memorable is Antonio’s Revenge, a savage melodrama of a political power struggle with elements of parody and fantasy.
In 1604 Marston transferred his allegiance to the boy company at the Blackfriars Theatre (i.e., the Children of the Queen’s Revels, later Children of the Blackfriars), for which he wrote his remaining plays. The Dutch Courtezan (produced 1603–04) as well as The Malcontent earned him his place as a dramatist. The former, with its coarse, farcical counterplot, was considered one of the cleverest comedies of its time. Although Marston used all the apparatus of contemporary revenge tragedy in The Malcontent, the wronged hero does not kill any of his tormentors and regains power by sophisticated Machiavellian stratagems.
In 1605 Marston collaborated with Jonson and with George Chapman on Eastward Ho, a comedy of the contrasts within the life of the city. But the play’s satiric references to opportunistic Scottish countrymen of the newly crowned James I gave offense, and all three authors were imprisoned.
After another imprisonment in 1608, presumably once again for libel, Marston left unfinished The Insatiate Countesse, his most erotic play, and entered the Church of England. He took orders in 1609, married the daughter of James I’s chaplain, and in 1616 accepted an ecclesiastical post in Christchurch, Hampshire. In 1633 he apparently insisted upon the removal of his name from the collected edition of six of his plays, The Workes of John Marston, which was reissued anonymously the same year as Tragedies and Comedies.
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9946062e5aaf923b80be3d6849ef8543 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Martin-American-dance-critic | John Martin | John Martin
…The New York Times engaged John Martin (he became a full-time critic the following year).
John Martin, the 20th-century dance critic, almost ignored the formal aspect of dance in emphasizing its role as a physical expression of inner emotion. In doing so, he betrayed his own sympathy toward the Expressionist school of modern American dance: “At the root of all…
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e79971166a01d496071ed611cb4d541c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Maynard-Keynes | John Maynard Keynes | John Maynard Keynes
John Maynard Keynes, (born June 5, 1883, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England—died April 21, 1946, Firle, Sussex), English economist, journalist, and financier, best known for his economic theories (Keynesian economics) on the causes of prolonged unemployment. His most important work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1935–36), advocated a remedy for economic recession based on a government-sponsored policy of full employment.
John Maynard Keynes studied at Eaton College (1897–1902) and at King’s College, Cambridge, where he received a B.A. in mathematics in 1905. Having completed a revised dissertation on probability, he was elected a fellow of King’s College in 1909.
John Maynard Keynes was an economic analyst in the India Office, a teacher at Cambridge, the de facto financial manager of Britain’s war effort during World War I, and (in an unpaid capacity) the country’s chief economic representative to the United States and international fora during and immediately after World War II.
John Maynard Keynes’s most influential work was The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1935–36). His other works included Indian Currency and Finance (1913), The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), Treatise on Probability (1921), A Tract on Monetary Reform (1923), A Treatise on Money (1930), and many scholarly and journalistic articles.
The basic and revolutionary idea of Keynesian economics—that recessions can be mitigated and unemployment more effectively reduced by government spending designed to increase aggregate demand—strongly influenced the fiscal policies of Western governments until the 1970s and later inspired successful responses by many governments to the Great Recession of 2007–09.
Keynes was born into a moderately prosperous family. His father, John Neville Keynes, was an economist and later an academic administrator at the King’s College, Cambridge. His mother was one of the first female graduates of the same university, which Keynes entered in 1902.
At Cambridge he was influenced by economist Alfred Marshall, who prompted Keynes to shift his academic interests from mathematics and the classics to politics and economics. Cambridge also introduced Keynes to an important group of writers and artists. The early history of the Bloomsbury group—an exclusive circle of the cultural elect, which counted among its members Leonard and Virginia Woolf, the painter Duncan Grant, and the art critic Clive Bell—centred upon Cambridge and the remarkable figure of Lytton Strachey. Strachey, who had entered Cambridge two years before Keynes, inducted the younger man into the exclusive private club known simply as “the Society.” Its members and associates (some of them homosexual, like Keynes himself) were the leading spirits of Bloomsbury. Throughout his life Keynes was to cherish the affection and respond to the influence of this group.
After earning a B.A. in 1905 and an M.A. in 1909, Keynes became a civil servant, taking a job with the India Office in Whitehall. His experience there formed the basis of his first major work, Indian Currency and Finance (1913), a definitive examination of pre-World War I Indian finance and currency. He then returned to Cambridge, where he taught economics until 1915. With the onset of World War I, Keynes returned to government employment, this time in the Treasury (an agency even more powerful than its American counterpart), where he studied relations with allies and recommended means of conserving Britain’s scant supply of foreign currencies.
His performance may have marked Keynes for a public career, but the Versailles Peace Conference changed his aspirations. Accompanying Prime Minister David Lloyd George to France as an economic adviser, Keynes was troubled by the political chicanery and burdensome policies that were to be imposed upon the defeated Germany. He resigned his post, depressed, to quote from a letter to his father, by the impending “devastation of Europe.”
He took an activist’s stance, however, by transforming personal distress into public protest. In two summer months he composed the indictment of the Versailles settlement that reached the bookstores by Christmas 1919 as The Economic Consequences of the Peace. The permanent importance of this polemical essay lies in its economic analysis of the stringent reparations placed upon Germany and the corresponding lack of probability that the debts would ever be paid. The popular success of the book, however, came from the blistering sketches of Woodrow Wilson, Georges Clemenceau, and Keynes’s old chief, Lloyd George. As a consequence, in some Whitehall circles Keynes was considered a man not quite to be trusted, an iconoclast willing to rock any boat into which he had imprudently been invited.
Keynes’s reputation at Cambridge was quite different. He was esteemed as the most brilliant student of Marshall and fellow economist A.C. Pigou, authors of large, definitive works explaining how competitive markets functioned, how businesses operated, and how individuals spent their incomes. After publication of The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Keynes resigned his lecture post but stayed on as a fellow of King’s College, dividing his time between Cambridge and London.
Although the tone of Keynes’s major writings in the 1920s was occasionally skeptical, he did not directly challenge the conventional wisdom of the period that favoured laissez-faire—only slightly tempered by public policy—as the best of all possible social arrangements. Two of Keynes’s opinions did foreshadow the theoretical revolution he triggered in the 1930s. In 1925 he opposed Britain’s return to the gold standard at the prewar dollar–pound ratio of $4.86; and, long before the Great Depression, Keynes expressed concern over the persistent unemployment of British coal miners, shipyard workers, and textile labourers. Reconciled by this time with Lloyd George (who was never to return to office), he supported the Liberal Party’s program of public works to take the unemployed off welfare by placing them in useful jobs. But “respectable” economists still expected the automatic adjustments of the free market to solve these problems, and the Treasury was convinced that public works were useless because any increase in the government deficit would likely cause an equal decline in private investment. Although Keynes could not offer a theoretical refutation of his colleagues’ opinions, he agitated for public works nevertheless.
It was only later, in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, that Keynes provided an economic basis for government jobs programs as a solution to high unemployment. The General Theory, as it has come to be called, is one of the most influential economics books in history, yet its lack of clarity still causes economists to debate “what Keynes was really saying.” He appeared to suggest that a reduction in wage rates would not reduce unemployment; instead, the key to reducing unemployment was to increase government spending and to run a budget deficit. Governments, many of them looking for excuses to increase spending, wholeheartedly accepted Keynes’s views. Most of his professional colleagues also accepted his views.
Interestingly, Keynes believed that the kinds of policies he advocated would work best in a totalitarian society. In his preface to the German edition of General Theory, Keynes wrote:
Keynes’s long-run influence has not been as significant as his short-run impact. The Keynesian model was a core part of economics textbooks from the late 1940s until the late 1980s. But as economists have become more concerned about economic growth, and more informed about inflation and unemployment, the Keynesian model has lost prominence.
The General Theory was Keynes’s last major written work. In 1937 he suffered a severe heart attack. Two years later, though not completely recovered, he returned to teaching at Cambridge, wrote three influential articles on war finance entitled How to Pay for the War (1940; later reprinted as Collected Writings, vol. 9, 1972), and served once more in the Treasury as an all-purpose adviser. He also played a prominent role at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944. But the institutions that resulted from that conference, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, were more representative of the theories of the United States Treasury than of Keynes’s thinking.
His last major public service was his negotiation in the autumn and early winter of 1945 of a multibillion-dollar loan granted by the United States to Britain. Keynes died the following year.
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e7058e8fd4a4e94c1020be72b38e0b46 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-McEnroe | John McEnroe | John McEnroe
John McEnroe, in full John Patrick McEnroe, Jr., (born February 16, 1959, Wiesbaden, West Germany [now in Germany]), American tennis player who established himself as a leading competitor in the late 1970s and the ’80s. He also was noted for his poor behaviour on court, which resulted in a number of fines and suspensions and, on January 21, 1990, in his default at the Australian Open.
McEnroe grew up in Douglaston, New York, and received tennis training at the Port Washington Tennis Academy nearby. He first attracted international attention as an amateur in 1977, when at the age of 18 he became the youngest man to reach the Wimbledon semifinals. He enrolled at Stanford University in 1977, but, after winning the U.S. collegiate title in 1978, he left school and turned professional. In his first six months on the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) tour, McEnroe acquired a record of 49 wins and only 7 losses.
In 1978 McEnroe helped the United States win the Davis Cup for the first time in five years by beating the Chilean competitors with doubles partner Brian Gottfried and by winning the singles over John Lloyd and Buster Mottram, both from Great Britain. McEnroe subsequently led the U.S. team to four more Davis Cup titles.
In 1979 McEnroe’s powerful volley helped him to win his first U.S. Open, and by the year’s end he was rated one of the best players in the world. He repeated his U.S. Open victory in 1980 and 1981—becoming the first man since Bill Tilden to win that title three consecutive times—and again in 1984. He also won the Wimbledon singles in 1981, 1983, and 1984. With partner Peter Fleming, McEnroe won several doubles titles at the U.S. Open and Wimbledon, as well as Championship Tennis tournaments. From 1983 to 1985 he won 75 matches on indoor carpet, setting a record for most consecutive victories on one surface; his record was broken in 2007 by Rafael Nadal of Spain (competing on clay).
McEnroe’s temper tantrums, invective, and “racket abuse” were characteristic features of his performances. At the 1990 Australian Open, he became the first player to be ejected from a Grand Slam event in nearly 30 years. In 1992 he retired from professional play and subsequently became a television announcer. He was also involved in music, forming the Johnny Smyth Band; the name was partly inspired by rocker Patty Smyth, whom McEnroe wed in 1997; he had earlier been married (1986–94) to actress Tatum O’Neal. During this time he continued to play on the seniors tour, and in 1999 he returned to the professional tour, competing in the mixed-doubles event with Steffi Graf; they reached the semifinals but Graf withdrew, citing an injury. In 2006 McEnroe competed in two ATP doubles events, winning a tournament in San Jose, California.
The autobiographies You Cannot Be Serious and But Seriously were published in 2002 and 2017, respectively. McEnroe was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1999.
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546761a8ff2953475c6bcec43fe5f901 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-McLean | John McLean | John McLean
John McLean, (born March 11, 1785, Morris county, N.J., U.S.—died April 4, 1861, Cincinnati, Ohio), cabinet member and U.S. Supreme Court justice (1829–61) whose most famous opinion was his dissent in the Dred Scott decision (1857). He was also perhaps the most indefatigable seeker of the presidency in U.S. history; although he was never nominated, he made himself “available” in all eight campaigns from 1832 through 1860.
After two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives (1812–16), McLean was appointed as a judge in the Supreme Court of Ohio, a position he resigned in 1822 to become commissioner of the General Land Office under Pres. James Monroe. In 1823 he was named postmaster general and became noted for his efficiency and nonpartisanship in that office. After Pres. Andrew Jackson took office, McLean resigned in protest over Jackson’s open advocacy of the spoils system of political patronage, which undermined McLean’s recent reforms. Jackson thereupon appointed him an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
In Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), McLean insisted, in a minority opinion, that a slave became free when his owner took him into a state where slavery was not legally established. In McLean’s view, a free black was a citizen and thus was able to sue, in a case involving diversity of state citizenship, in a federal court. His position was reflected in the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (1868).
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a1fb3ea665cc36ad73fcca3b71f198d8 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Middleton-Murry | John Middleton Murry | John Middleton Murry
John Middleton Murry, (born August 6, 1889, London, England—died March 13, 1957, Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk), English journalist and critic whose romantic and biographical approach to literature ran counter to the leading critical tendencies of his day. He wrote at least 40 books and a large body of journalistic works in which his pronounced—though changeable—views on social, political, and religious questions were constantly before the public.
Murry was the husband of short-story writer Katherine Mansfield and a close associate of D.H. Lawrence, both of whom influenced his development as a writer. During World War I the Murrys and the Lawrences were neighbours in Cornwall, and something of the relationship between the two couples appears in Lawrence’s Women in Love. Murry also appears, harshly lampooned, as the character Burlap in Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point.
Murry began his career as editor of Rhythm while at Brasenose College, Oxford. He was editor of Athenaeum (1919–21) and founding editor of Adelphi (1923–48), both literary magazines. Among his numerous critical works are studies of Mansfield (Katherine Mansfield and Other Literary Portraits, 1949) and Lawrence (Son of Woman, the Story of D.H. Lawrence, 1931), as well as several works on Keats. Murry’s autobiography, Between Two Worlds (1935), is strikingly revealing about his own life. A large selection of his letters to Mansfield, edited by C.A. Hankin, was published in 1983. Murry’s son, John Middleton Murry (1926–2002), was a noted novelist, writing science fiction under the name Richard Cowper; he also wrote general fiction as Colin Middleton Murry.
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9f3348e45c78e0f7f7e9fe2999a0a900 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Milton | John Milton | John Milton
John Milton, (born December 9, 1608, London, England—died November 8?, 1674, London?), English poet, pamphleteer, and historian, considered the most significant English author after William Shakespeare.
John Milton (1608–74) is considered the most significant English writer after William Shakespeare. His epic Paradise Lost, classical tragedy Samson Agonistes, and pastoral elegy Lycidas are widely regarded as the greatest poems of their kind in English. He is also known for such prose works as Areopagitica—a fierce defense of freedom of speech.
When he was 11, John Milton entered St. Paul’s School, London, where he excelled in Greek, Latin, and Italian. He composed Latin verse and translated a psalm from Hebrew into English verse and later into Greek. He sharpened his rhetorical skills at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and stayed in Florence, meeting Galileo and befriending Italian literati.
When John Milton’s Paradise Lost appeared in 1667, only people close to him commended it. By the early 1700s, however, John Dryden had written an operatic adaptation of it, and Alexander Pope had parodied it in The Rape of the Lock. Later Percy Bysshe Shelley modeled Prometheus in Prometheus Unbound (1820) on Milton’s Satan.
Milton is best known for Paradise Lost, widely regarded as the greatest epic poem in English. Together with Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, it confirms Milton’s reputation as one of the greatest English poets. In his prose works Milton advocated the abolition of the Church of England and the execution of Charles I. From the beginning of the English Civil Wars in 1642 to long after the restoration of Charles II as king in 1660, he espoused in all his works a political philosophy that opposed tyranny and state-sanctioned religion. His influence extended not only through the civil wars and interregnum but also to the American and French revolutions. In his works on theology, he valued liberty of conscience, the paramount importance of Scripture as a guide in matters of faith, and religious toleration toward dissidents. As a civil servant, Milton became the voice of the English Commonwealth after 1649 through his handling of its international correspondence and his defense of the government against polemical attacks from abroad.
Milton’s paternal grandfather, Richard, was a staunch Roman Catholic who expelled his son John, the poet’s father, from the family home in Oxfordshire for reading an English (i.e., Protestant) Bible. Banished and disinherited, Milton’s father established in London a business as a scrivener, preparing documents for legal transactions. He was also a moneylender, and he negotiated with creditors to arrange for loans on behalf of his clients. He and his wife, Sara Jeffrey, whose father was a merchant tailor, had three children who survived their early years: Anne, the oldest, followed by John and Christopher. Though Christopher became a lawyer, a Royalist, and perhaps a Roman Catholic, he maintained throughout his life a cordial relationship with his older brother. After the Stuart monarchy was restored in 1660, Christopher, among others, may have interceded to prevent the execution of his brother.
The elder John Milton, who fostered cultural interests as a musician and composer, enrolled his son John at St. Paul’s School, probably in 1620, and employed tutors to supplement his son’s formal education. Milton was privately tutored by Thomas Young, a Scottish Presbyterian who may have influenced his gifted student in religion and politics while they maintained contact across subsequent decades. At St. Paul’s Milton befriended Charles Diodati, a fellow student who would become his confidant through young adulthood. During his early years, Milton may have heard sermons by the poet John Donne, dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, which was within view of his school. Educated in Latin and Greek there, Milton in due course acquired proficiency in other languages, especially Italian, in which he composed some sonnets and which he spoke as proficiently as a native Italian, according to the testimony of Florentines whom he befriended during his travel abroad in 1638–39.
Milton enrolled at Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1625, presumably to be educated for the ministry. A year later he was “rusticated,” or temporarily expelled, for a period of time because of a conflict with one of his tutors, the logician William Chappell. He was later reinstated under another tutor, Nathaniel Tovey. In 1629 Milton was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree, and in 1632 he received a Master of Arts degree. Despite his initial intent to enter the ministry, Milton did not do so, a situation that has not been fully explained. Possible reasons are that Milton lacked respect for his fellow students who were planning to become ministers but whom he considered ill-equipped academically or that his Puritan inclinations, which became more radical as he matured, caused him to dislike the hierarchy of the established church and its insistence on uniformity of worship; perhaps, too, his self-evident disaffection impelled the Church of England to reject him for the ministry.
Overall, Milton was displeased with Cambridge, possibly because study there emphasized Scholasticism, which he found stultifying to the imagination. Moreover, in correspondence with a former tutor at St. Paul’s School, Alexander Gill, Milton complained about a lack of friendship with fellow students. They called him the “Lady of Christ’s College,” perhaps because of his fair complexion, delicate features, and auburn hair. Nonetheless, Milton excelled academically. At Cambridge he composed several academic exercises called prolusions, which were presented as oratorical performances in the manner of a debate. In such exercises, students applied their learning in logic and rhetoric, among other disciplines. Milton authorized publication of seven of his prolusions, composed and recited in Latin, in 1674, the year of his death.
In 1632, after seven years at Cambridge, Milton returned to his family home, now in Hammersmith, on the outskirts of London. Three years later, perhaps because of an outbreak of the plague, the family relocated to a more pastoral setting, Horton, in Buckinghamshire. In these two locations, Milton spent approximately six years in studious retirement, during which he read Greek and Latin authors chiefly. Without gainful employment, Milton was supported by his father during this period.
In 1638, accompanied by a manservant, Milton undertook a tour of the Continent for about 15 months, most of which he spent in Italy, primarily Rome and Florence. The Florentine academies especially appealed to Milton, and he befriended young members of the Italian literati, whose similar humanistic interests he found gratifying. Invigorated by their admiration for him, he corresponded with his Italian friends after his return to England, though he never saw them again. While in Florence, Milton also met with Galileo, who was under virtual house arrest. The circumstances of this extraordinary meeting, whereby a young Englishman about 30 years old gained access to the aged and blind astronomer, are unknown. (Galileo would become the only contemporary whom Milton mentioned by name in Paradise Lost.) While in Italy, Milton learned of the death in 1638 of Charles Diodati, his closest boyhood companion from St. Paul’s School, possibly a victim of the plague; he also learned of impending civil war in England, news that caused him to return home sooner than anticipated. Back in England, Milton took up residence in London, not far from Bread Street, where he had been born. In his household were John and Edward Phillips—sons of his sister, Anne—whom he tutored. Upon his return he composed an elegy in Latin, “Epitaphium Damonis” (“Damon’s Epitaph”), which commemorated Diodati.
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0a47f73dbdbca863c995ae5c1eac477c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Mitchell-Mason | John Mitchell Mason | John Mitchell Mason
John Mitchell Mason, (born March 19, 1770, New York City—died Dec. 26, 1829, New York City), U.S. minister and educator, who is best known for his work in raising standards of Protestant theological education in the U.S. He also was noted for his prowess as an orator.
Mason developed a plan for theological education and in 1804 founded a seminary of the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church in New York City. He believed that the entire student—body, mind, and spirit—should be strengthened, that Scriptures should be studied in their original languages, that a teacher should aid the student in making up his own mind, and that intellectual creativity was more important than the absorption of inflexible dogma. His collected writings were published in four volumes (1832; enlarged 1849).
Mason became president of Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pa. (1821–24); he was also a trustee (1795–1811, 1812–24) and provost (teacher and administrator) of Columbia College (1811–16). In addition, he served as pastor of two churches in New York City.
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d52990715288eb552aff98cb1996bd8a | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Money | John Money | John Money
For example, American psychologist John Money considered the social environment to be of overriding importance in gender identity. In treating children whose sex was ambiguous at birth, such as those with underdeveloped genitalia, he recommended that they be raised according to the parents’ initial perceptions of the child’s gender…
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0cd2667cbe86f6b9124372166915088d | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Moresby | John Moresby | John Moresby
…charted and individually named by Capt. John Moresby of HMS Basilisk in 1873. Copra is produced in fertile coastal patches.
John Moresby, who named it after Commodore James Graham Goodenough. During World War II it was occupied by Japanese troops for several months in 1942 and then captured by Allied forces, who built an airstrip at Vivigani (open to commercial service since 1963). Goodenough was…
In 1873 the British navigator Capt. John Moresby named it for Adm. Alexander Milne. European interest in the area increased during the gold-rush years of 1889–99. Samarai, an island in the China Strait, became a boom town from which prospectors spread through the islands of Milne Bay and to the…
…visited in 1873 by British Capt. John Moresby, who named it after the marquess of Normanby, a governor of Queensland, Austl. The island may have been a secret British military base during World War II. Having once produced gold, Normanby now exports copra and some timber; newly discovered gold deposits…
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862496d045fbe972d7d5bd98d086ed9b | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Mortimer | Sir John Mortimer | Sir John Mortimer
Sir John Mortimer, in full Sir John Clifford Mortimer, (born April 21, 1923, Hampstead, London, Eng.—died Jan. 16, 2009, near Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, Eng.), English barrister and writer who wrote plays for the stage, television, radio, and motion pictures, as well as novels and autobiographical works.
Mortimer was educated at Harrow and at Brasenose College, Oxford, and began writing before he was called to the bar in 1948. In 1949 he married Penelope Ruth Fletcher (the novelist Penelope Mortimer; divorced 1972). Mortimer began his writing career as a novelist, with Charade (1947). Many of his short stories and novels drew on his legal experience, and the television production of his play The Dock Brief established his reputation.
Mortimer wrote many other plays, including The Wrong Side of the Park (performed 1960) and The Judge (performed 1967). He successfully adapted the farce A Flea in Her Ear (1965, from Georges Feydeau) and the novel Brideshead Revisited (1981, from Evelyn Waugh). One of his finest works is A Voyage Round My Father (1970), an autobiographical play about his relationship with his blind father.
Throughout his writing career Mortimer maintained a thriving law practice and became known as one of Great Britain’s principal defenders in free-speech and civil-rights cases. As a writer he had popular success in the late 1970s and ’80s with the television series Rumpole of the Bailey and short stories featuring the crusty old British barrister Horace Rumpole. His novels include Paradise Postponed (1985) and Dunster (1992). Clinging to the Wreckage (1982) is a frank autobiography. Mortimer was knighted in 1998.
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aeba087138018a0aaf7aa4892c9322c4 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Morton | John Morton | John Morton
John Morton, (born c. 1420, Bere Regis or Milborne St. Andrew, Dorset, Eng.—died Oct. 12, 1500, Knole, Kent), archbishop of Canterbury and cardinal, one of the most powerful men in England in the reign of King Henry VII.
During the Wars of the Roses between the houses of York and Lancaster, Morton favoured the Lancastrian cause. He received minor ecclesiastical posts under the Lancastrian monarch Henry VI, but upon the accession of the Yorkist Edward IV, in 1461, he was declared a traitor and forced to sue for a pardon. In 1470 Morton helped assemble the coalition of Lancastrians and disaffected Yorkists that drove Edward IV from the country. Nevertheless, after Edward regained his throne in 1471, Morton was given ambassadorial posts and appointed bishop of Ely (1479). When Edward’s brother seized the throne as King Richard III in 1483, Morton became one of Richard’s bitterest enemies. While imprisoned by Richard in Brecon (Brecknock) Castle, the bishop helped plot the unsuccessful uprising led by Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham (October 1483). Morton then escaped to Flanders.
Upon his return to England after Henry VII assumed the throne in 1485, he became one of the most trusted and influential royal advisers. He was made archbishop of Canterbury in 1486, lord chancellor in 1487, and cardinal in 1493. Traditionally, Morton has been known as the inventor of “Morton’s Fork,” a sophistical dilemma imposed on both rich and poor by Henry’s tax commissioners in order to extort funds for the crown. The rich were told that they could afford to contribute, and the poor were accused of having concealed wealth.
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4bbb6631ca7a437412317b8ae60375f1 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Mundy | John Mundy | John Mundy
John Mundy, (born c. 1555—died June 29, 1630, Windsor, Berkshire, England), organist and composer of choral and keyboard music. The son of the composer William Mundy, he was an organist at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor. He received a bachelor of music degree at the University of Oxford in 1586 and the doctorate in 1624.
Of his music, a few apparently incomplete works in Latin survive. They are often deeply expressive. About 20 English anthems survive (many incomplete). Some of his best-known works, printed in Songs and Psalmes (1594), are pleasant and fluent. Five of his instrumental works are included in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book.
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dc4d451281b94ca7a43f69eb96909839 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Napier-Turner | John Napier Turner | John Napier Turner
John Napier Turner, (born June 7, 1929, Richmond, Surrey, England—died September 18, 2020, Toronto, Canada), Canadian lawyer and politician who in June 1984 succeeded Pierre Elliott Trudeau as head of the Liberal Party and prime minister of Canada. In general elections of September of the same year, his party was routed by the Progressive Conservatives under Brian Mulroney.
Turner’s family immigrated to Canada in 1932, and Turner gained his early education in Ottawa. After graduating in political science from the University of British Columbia (A.B., 1949), he studied for a year in Paris and attended the University of Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, receiving a degree in law in 1952 and a master’s degree in 1957.
Turner returned to Canada and worked for various corporations, winning his first election to the House of Commons as a Liberal Party member in June 1962. In 1965 he was appointed to his first cabinet post but lost a bid for leadership of the Liberals in 1968 to Trudeau. Under Trudeau, Turner first served as justice minister and in 1972 was appointed minister of finance, a post he abruptly resigned in September 1975, followed by his resignation from Parliament in February 1976. He returned to corporate law and for the next eight years also served as director of several companies while retaining close connections with political associates.
When Trudeau announced in February 1984 that he would not seek reelection as head of the Liberal Party, Turner ran for the leadership and won. His premiership, however, was brief, lasting less than three months, since the general elections he called were won by the Progressive Conservatives. Turner resigned as leader of the Liberal Party in 1989 after his party lost a second general election to the Conservatives in the previous year. He continued to serve in the House of Commons until 1993. Thereafter he resumed his legal career.
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dab9902f24b8e0149c95eac9fa6f69c2 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Nevil-Maskelyne | John Nevil Maskelyne | John Nevil Maskelyne
John Nevil Maskelyne, (born December 22, 1839, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, England—died May 18, 1917, London), British magician whose inventions and patronage of new performers greatly influenced the development of the art of producing illusions by sleight of hand.
Trained as a watchmaker, Maskelyne became famous in 1865 when he, aided by George A. Cooke, exposed the Davenport Brothers as fraudulent spiritualists. For eight years he and Cooke performed a show featuring Maskelyne’s box trick, juggling, and automata. After Cooke died in 1904, Maskelyne took as a partner David Devant, the most famous magician in England. Maskelyne’s son Nevil collaborated with Devant on Our Magic (1911), an important source book on the theory of magic.
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7418e1f04f2685c593323a35b2073cbf | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-of-Ephesus | John of Ephesus | John of Ephesus
John of Ephesus, also called John of Asia, (born c. 507, near Amida, Mesopotamia—died 586 or 588, Chalcedon, Bithynia, Asia Minor), miaphysite bishop of Ephesus, who was a foremost early historian and leader of miaphysites in Syria (see Syriac Orthodox Church).
A Syrian monk, he became a deacon at Amida in 529, but because of the Byzantine persecution of the miaphysites he was forced to lead a nomadic life. Later, at the Eastern imperial court of Constantinople, John was able to gain the support of the empress Theodora and, through her, the favour of the emperor Justinian. As a result, he was appointed about 542 as a missionary to pagan areas around Ephesus and the mountainous region of central Asia Minor. He succeeded, according to his own estimate, in baptizing more than 70,000 persons and in building numerous churches and monasteries in place of pagan temples that he caused to be destroyed. About 558 he was ordained a bishop of the Miaphysite church. Justinian’s successor, the emperor Justin II, a supporter of the orthodox cause, imprisoned John and later banished him to Chalcedon.
John wrote an ecclesiastical history, recording events from the time of Julius Caesar (died 44 bce) to 586ce, in three volumes, of which only the third, treating the period 571–586, survives intact. He also wrote circa 568 a description of the lives of 58 Eastern saints, of signal value as a primary source for miaphysite Christian history.
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1b4d74f4acb7e80da58fadff8c899e84 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Oliver-Killens | John Oliver Killens | John Oliver Killens
John Oliver Killens, (born January 14, 1916, Macon, Georgia, U.S.—died October 27, 1987, Brooklyn, New York), American writer and activist known for his politically charged novels—particularly Youngblood (1954)—and his contributions to the Black Arts movement and as a founder of the Harlem Writers Guild.
From an early age Killens was exposed to African American writers and thinkers. His father encouraged him to read Langston Hughes, and his mother introduced him to the work of poet and novelist Paul Laurence Dunbar. Growing up in Georgia under Jim Crow law had a profound impact on Killens’s political and social outlook and provided source material for his writings.
Between 1934 and 1936 Killens attended many colleges and universities, including Edward Waters College in Jacksonville, Florida, and Morris Brown College in Atlanta. In 1936 he moved to Washington, D.C., and, while working for the National Labor Relations Board (through 1942), he took night classes and completed a bachelor’s degree at Howard University. He then began to pursue a law degree with evening classes at Terrell Law School but was interrupted by military service during World War II. The racism he experienced while serving in the South Pacific in the highly segregated U.S. Army inspired later writings, especially the novel And Then We Heard the Thunder (1963).
When Killens returned from the war, he settled in Brooklyn and began taking writing classes first at Columbia University and later at New York University. At that time, during the late 1940s, he began meeting regularly with other young socially conscious African American writers. In 1950, with John Henrik Clarke, Rosa Guy, and Walter Christmas, he founded the Harlem Writers Club, which became the Harlem Writers Guild two years later. In 1954 Killens published the Pulitzer Prize-nominated novel Youngblood, for which he is best known. The story focuses on the Youngbloods, an African American family that faces the struggle of living in the South under Jim Crow law in the first decades of the 20th century. The inspiration for the characters and their experiences, at least in part, stemmed from Killens’s own upbringing. Youngblood was the first book published by a guild member and became a landmark protest novel of the American civil rights movement. It also launched his role as a leader among African American activist writers.
Killens was active in the civil rights movement, participating in the Montgomery bus boycott and associating with Martin Luther King, Jr. However, by the early 1960s Killens had become more interested in the philosophy of Malcolm X, and in 1964 he helped cofound the Organization of Afro-American Unity, which encouraged African Americans to look to and embrace their African heritage. That year he also received a Pulitzer Prize nomination for his book about facing racism in the U.S. Army, And Then We Heard the Thunder. Killens’s affiliation with black nationalism and his new, more-militant perspective on fighting racism was apparent in his 1965 collection of essays Black Man’s Burden, which addressed the African American experience in the United States and denounced the nonviolent approach to facing oppression.
In 1967 Killens became a writer in residence at Nashville’s Fisk University, the first of many teaching positions he would hold over the next 20 years. While there he organized what would be his first major black writers conference. It was held in both 1966 and 1967. In its first year important figures in the Black Arts movement such as Ossie Davis, Arna Bontemps, and Margaret Walker were in attendance. While at Fisk he also wrote ’Sippi (1967), which tells the story of a college student embroiled in the struggle to achieve the right to vote. Though its characters are from the South, the story takes place in New York City, Killens’s first novel to be set in the North. From 1968 to 1974 Killens taught writing at Columbia University.
Killens continued writing prolifically as well as teaching, at Trinity College (1970–71) in Hartford, Connecticut, and Howard University (1971–77) in Washington, D.C. While at Howard, he organized another black writers conference (1974) and wrote his fourth novel, The Cotillion; or, One Good Bull Is Half the Herd (1971), which, from his strong black nationalist perspective, examined class division among African Americans in two communities in New York. The novel, though it received mixed reviews, earned him another Pulitzer Prize nomination. He next wrote a book for young adults, Great Gittin’ Up Morning (1972), a biography of Denmark Vesey, an African American slave who in 1822 led the largest slave rebellion in U.S. history. In 1975 Killens wrote a book for a younger audience titled A Man Ain’t Nothin’ but a Man: The Adventures of John Henry. He taught from 1978 to 1983 at Bronx Community College and from 1983 to 1987 at Medgar Evers College at the City University of New York, where in 1986 he established the National Black Writers Conference, which continued into the 21st century. The Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College sponsored the Killens Review of Arts & Letters, a biannual publication launched in 2010 in honour of the author. His final book, Great Black Russian: A Novel on the Life and Times of Alexander Pushkin, was published posthumously in 1989. (According to Pushkin family tradition, the writer’s mother was the granddaughter of an Abyssinian princeling bought as a slave at Constantinople and adopted by Peter the Great.)
Killens, though prolific, was largely underappreciated. The reception of his work was varied after his first two novels. Critics largely objected to his writing style, which, because of his highly charged messages, was often perceived as didactic and inauthentic. Many of his works went out of print throughout the 1980s and ’90s. And, further, in the three years in which in he earned nominations for the Pulitzer Prize (1954, 1964, and 1971), no award was issued. Beyond his essays and works of fiction (and two screenplays: Odds Against Tomorrow [1959] and Slaves [1969]), Killens was noted for his teaching, especially for the impact he had on young African American writers such as Ntozake Shange and Nikki Giovanni, who both studied with him. He also served as the vice president of the Black Academy of Arts and Letters from its founding in 1969 and was instrumental in the formation of the Junior Black Academy of Arts and Letters in 1977.
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9901a9f5317ea03117beb8df74ce5da9 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Parker-Hale | John Parker Hale | John Parker Hale
John Parker Hale, (born March 31, 1806, Rochester, N.H., U.S.—died Nov. 19, 1873, Dover, N.H.), American lawyer, senator, and reformer who was prominent in the antislavery movement.
Educated at Phillips Exeter Academy and Bowdoin College, Hale went on to study law and was admitted to the bar in 1830. He became a successful jury lawyer in Dover, N.H., and was known for his oratory and his frequently radical democratic principles.
After a term in the state legislature, Hale was in 1834 appointed U.S. district attorney, a position he held until 1841. The following year he won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives as a Democrat. In the House, Hale came to prominence as a champion of the antislavery forces. In 1846, running as an independent, Hale won a seat in the U.S. Senate. While he maintained his antislavery activity, his major achievement as a senator was the passage of a bill abolishing flogging in the Navy. But it was his prominence in the antislavery movement that led to his receiving the presidential nomination of the Liberty Party in 1847. Hale withdrew his candidacy the following year, when the Free Soil Party absorbed the Liberty Party and ran Martin Van Buren for president. In 1852, however, Hale was the Free Soil candidate and garnered 150,000 votes.
From 1852 to 1855 Hale returned to private law practice. In 1855 he was elected to fill the unexpired term of a deceased New Hampshire senator, and in 1858 he won reelection to a full term in the Senate. By this time he had switched to the new Republican Party and was regarded as one of its leaders.
Shortly before his assassination, Pres. Abraham Lincoln appointed Hale minister to Spain. Hale did not do well as a diplomat, however, and he was recalled in 1869.
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eda0472f27dbb06ccd57b0e3edfff845 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Paul-I | John Paul I | John Paul I
John Paul I, Latin Johannes Paulus, original name Albino Luciani, (born October 17, 1912, Forno di Canale, Italy—died September 28, 1978, Rome), pope whose 33-day pontificate in 1978 was the shortest in modern times. He was the first pope to choose a double name and did so in commemoration of his two immediate predecessors, John XXIII and Paul VI. He was the first pope in centuries who refused to be crowned, opting instead for the simple pallium of an archbishop, and he was known affectionately as “the Smiling Pope” on account of the smile he often displayed in public.
Born of a poor family, Luciani was ordained a priest in 1935. Appointed deputy director of the seminary in the Belluno diocese, he taught moral theology, canon law, and sacred art. He earned a doctorate in sacred theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University in 1947 and was made vicar-general of his diocese the following year. He remained concerned with the teaching of church doctrine and wrote Catechetica in briciole (1949; “Catechism in Crumbs”) in order to instruct less-educated Roman Catholics.
In 1958 Luciani was appointed bishop of Vittorio Veneto. He was made archbishop of Venice in 1969 and became a cardinal in 1973. In 1976 he published a creative work, Illustrissimi (“To the Illustrious Ones”), a compilation of letters addressed both to historical figures such as Jesus and Mark Twain and to fictional characters such as those in Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers.
Luciani was elected pope on August 26, 1978, becoming the first pope since Pius X (reigned 1903–14) to have a pastoral rather than a diplomatic or scholarly background. His sudden death, the apparent result of a heart attack, led to rumours of foul play. He was succeeded by Pope John Paul II.
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4e9caae43a8390c2b8d6017326873125 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Paul-Jones-British-musician | John Paul Jones | John Paul Jones
…1948, West Bromwich, West Midlands), John Paul Jones (original name John Baldwin; b. January 3, 1946, Sidcup, Kent), and John Bonham (b. May 31, 1948, Redditch, Hereford and Worcester—d. September 25, 1980, Windsor, Berkshire).
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47a5dcaf504de2ff10ac7d4a6ad4f764 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Peale-Bishop | John Peale Bishop | John Peale Bishop
John Peale Bishop, (born May 21, 1892, Charles Town, W.Va., U.S.—died April 4, 1944, Hyannis, Mass.), American poet, novelist, and critic, a member of the “lost generation” and a close associate of the American expatriate writers in Paris in the 1920s.
At Princeton University, from which he graduated in 1917, Bishop formed lifelong friendships with Edmund Wilson, the future critic, and with the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, who depicted Bishop as the highbrow writer Tom D’Invilliers in This Side of Paradise. Bishop published his first volume of verse, Green Fruit, in 1917. After military service in World War I, he was an editor at Vanity Fair magazine in New York City from 1920 to 1922. He married into wealth and traveled throughout Europe. From 1926 to 1933, he lived in France and acquired a deep admiration for French culture. His collection of stories about his native South, Many Thousands Gone (1931), was followed with a volume of poetry, Now with His Love (1933). Act of Darkness, a novel tracing the coming of age of a young man, and Minute Particulars, a collection of verse, both appeared in 1935. He became chief poetry reviewer for The Nation magazine in 1940. That year he published perhaps his finest poem, “The Hours,” an elegy on the death of F. Scott Fitzgerald. His Collected Poems (1948) was edited by the poet Allen Tate and his Collected Essays (1948) by Edmund Wilson.
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2201178f00c198a59534615fa2525d79 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Peel | John Peel | John Peel
John Peel, byname of John Robert Parker Ravenscroft, (born Aug. 30, 1939, Heswall, Cheshire, Eng.—died Oct. 25, 2004, Cuzco, Peru), popular British disc jockey who for nearly 40 years, beginning in mid-1960s, was one of the most influential tastemakers in rock music. Peel was renowned for discovering and championing emerging artists and for his connossieurship of groundbreaking offbeat music and performers.
The son of a cotton merchant, he grew up in upper-middle-class comfort near Liverpool, for whose powerhouse football (soccer) team he developed a lifelong obsession. After attending boarding school and a stint in the military, he emigrated to the United States in 1960—to Dallas, Texas, where, still using his given last name, Ravenscroft, he worked at the Cotton Exchange and then sold insurance. In 1961 he landed his first (unpaid) job as a disc jockey, at station WRR. Thereafter, as the British Invasion, led by the Liverpudlian Beatles, swept the United States, he capitalized on his Scouse accent, and, though he had left England before the advent of “Merseybeat,” he became its authentic ambassador on local American airwaves.
After working at radio stations in Dallas, Oklahoma City, and San Bernadino, Calif., he returned to the United Kingdom in 1967 to host his late-night, hippy-trippy Perfumed Garden on pirate Radio London. While his fellow deejays cultivated wild and crazy personalities, Ravenscroft, having adopted the last name Peel as a pirate mask, was droll and unflappable but ever the iconoclast. Still, when the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) established Radio 1 in September 1967 in response to the challenge of pirate radio, Peel was one of the new network’s original recruits. From then until the early 21st century, Peel was the advocate for new and often challenging music, playing recordings to which a less adventurous broadcaster or less committed music enthusiast would likely not have given airtime. In the process he became enamoured of everything from art rock to punk, post-punk, and beyond, introducing his audience to previously “unknown” artists such as David Bowie, Joy Division, the Smiths, Billy Bragg, and countless performers who flooded his mailbox with demo tapes. Meanwhile, he remained steadfastly loyal to an eclectic array of personal favourites that included Captain Beefheart, oddball poet-singer Ivor Cutler, unconventional songwriter Kevin Coyne, abrasive rockers the Fall, Northern Ireland’s Undertones (whose “Teenage Kicks” was Peel’s all-time favourite song), the ethereal Cocteau Twins, and PJ Harvey. Yet the same breadth of taste that tested the boundaries of what could be broadcast on the BBC could also find room for a good-time group like the Faces—Peel famously mimed the mandolin part from Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May” (1971) on Top of the Pops—and an unlikely love affair with the Eurovision Song Contest, the annual competition sponsored by state-run European television stations to determine the best new pop song.
Never particularly adept technologically (he occasionally played records at the wrong speed), Peel was nevertheless seemingly ageless and effortlessly hip. He was a perennial choice as NME magazine’s favourite deejay of the year, and his year-end “best-of” playlist, the Festive 50, conferred significant cachet for those who found their way onto it, much as his longtime involvement with the Glastonbury Festival helped ensure its status as one of the world’s premiere rock festivals. Likewise, being chosen to record a live Peel Session for his show was a sign of arrival. Those thousands of sessions—many of which were released as commercial recordings—originated as a work-around response to needle time, a longtime requirement of British broadcasting that limited the amount of airtime that could be devoted to playing records. Even after the repeal of this requirement, Peel Sessions remained the signature and mainstay of his program. Peel was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1998. He died of a heart attack while on vacation in South America in 2004. On the anniversary of his last appearance on BBC, the network annually presents an annual celebration, John Peel Day.
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3bd2a3eb5b10e5eb919b7b9675c9d9f9 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Pehle | John Pehle | John Pehle
Under the direction of John Pehle, a Treasury Department lawyer who had worked to expose the State Department’s alleged cover-up of the Holocaust, the WRB set out to find a haven for rescued Jews. The board elicited statements from Roosevelt condemning the murder of Jews, drew up plans for…
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d1789eb79aa482c605901a0d0a6d36d9 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Percy | John Percy | John Percy
John Percy, (born March 23, 1817, Nottingham, Nottinghamshire, England—died June 19, 1889, London), British metallurgist. He turned to metallurgy after obtaining a medical degree, and in 1848 he devised a process for extracting silver from its ores, which soon came into widespread use. He improved the Bessemer process for making steel, and he was the first to survey British iron ores. At London’s Metropolitan School of Sciences, he trained a generation of metallurgists. His multivolume Treatise on Metallurgy (1861–80), though unfinished, quickly attained classic status.
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3d6a726007b0c8bded41825f19e2ee44 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Perry-Barlow | John Perry Barlow | John Perry Barlow
John Perry Barlow, (born October 3, 1947, near Pinedale, Wyoming, U.S.—died February 7, 2018, San Francisco, California), American author, lyricist, and cyberspace activist who cofounded (1990) the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which sought to protect the rights and freedoms of individuals in the digital world.
Barlow spent his childhood on his family’s cattle ranch in Wyoming, and he later attended Fountain Valley School of Colorado, where he became friends with Bob Weir, future guitarist for the Grateful Dead. He then studied at Wesleyan University, graduating with a degree in comparative religion in 1969. In 1971 Barlow began writing lyrics for the Grateful Dead, and with Weir he later penned such songs as “Cassidy” and “Mexicali Blues.” That year Barlow returned to Wyoming, and after his father died in 1972, he ran the family cattle ranch until 1988, when it was sold.
In the late 1980s Barlow began using the Internet, and he became a frequent poster at The WELL, an online community. It discussed a variety of topics—Grateful Dead fans were frequent users, which was what originally drew Barlow to the community—and in 1990 he began posting about the U.S. Secret Service’s series of raids that were intended to combat computer hacking. Believing that people’s constitutional rights were being violated, Barlow—together with Mitch Kapor and John Gilmore—founded the EFF. Its first major case involved Steve Jackson Games, which the Secret Service alleged was the recipient of an illegally copied computer file relating to BellSouth’s 911 emergency system. Agents seized several of the firm’s computers, and although they were eventually returned, some data had been deleted. The EFF provided legal aid, and in 1993 the court ruled that Jackson’s rights had been violated. The EFF was later involved with a number of cases, dealing with such issues as music copyright, trademark law, and anonymity relating to cyberspace.
Among Barlow’s extensive writings about the Internet is a 1990 essay in which he used the word cyberspace—taken from William Gibson’s science-fiction novels—to describe the Internet; that essay is credited with being the first such use of the word. He was an early contributor to Wired magazine, in which he published “The Economy of Ideas” (1994), a hugely influential article in which he argued that the nature of digital information and the Internet made traditional intellectual property and copyright laws obsolete. Following the passage of the controversial Communications Decency Act (1996), which attempted to place prohibitions on Internet speech in various ways, Barlow wrote the widely disseminated “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” in which he argued that cyberspace should be freed from outdated notions of property, expression, and identity. (Portions of the act were later struck down in various legal challenges.)
In 1997 Barlow was a fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard. The following year he became a fellow at the university’s law school.
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44013f4c98bfbf2ef041fdac946fdd1c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Philip-Kemble | John Philip Kemble | John Philip Kemble
John Philip Kemble, (born Feb. 1, 1757, Prescot, Lancashire, Eng.—died Feb. 26, 1823, Lausanne, Switz.), popular English actor and manager of the Drury Lane and Covent Garden theatres in London, where his reforms improved the status of the theatrical profession. He played heavy dramatic roles in the artificial and statuesque style then in vogue. His most famous roles were Shakespeare’s Brutus in Julius Caesar and the title roles in Hamlet and, above all, Coriolanus. He excelled in declamation but could not express strong or subtle emotions.
Eldest son in an acting family, Kemble spent his childhood on the stage. Later he trained for the priesthood in France, where he acquired a certain severity and asceticism that influenced his acting style. Finding that he had no vocation for the priesthood, he returned to England and the theatre, making his first adult appearance on the stage in 1776. After several years in the provinces, he played Hamlet in Dublin on Nov. 2, 1781, and made his London debut in the same role at Drury Lane on Sept. 30, 1783, with mixed results. It was, however, his performance in Macbeth on March 31, 1785, opposite his sister, the great tragedian Sarah Siddons, that established him as a popular favourite.
Appointed manager of the Drury Lane Theatre in 1788, Kemble made important reforms in costumes, scenery, and management, introducing live animals and aquatic effects to the stage for the first time. As an actor, Kemble’s tall and imposing figure, impressive countenance, and grave and solemn demeanour made him uniquely suited for the Roman characters in Shakespeare’s plays. Because of conflicts with Richard Brinsley Sheridan, a dramatist and the proprietor of Drury Lane, Kemble resigned his position as manager, and though he resumed his duties temporarily at the beginning of the 1800–01 season, the connection between the two was permanently severed at the end of 1802. In 1803 he became manager of the Covent Garden, in which he had acquired a sixth share; when the playhouse burned down on Sept. 20, 1808, he suffered financially. The increase in prices after the opening of the new theatre in 1809 led to riots that practically suspended performances for three months. Kemble was saved from ruin by the sale of his fine library and by a large loan, afterward converted into a gift, from the Duke of Northumberland. Troubled by gout and threatened by the rising popularity of the great Romantic actor Edmund Kean, he retired to the European continent after his last performance as Coriolanus on June 23, 1817.
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83de44ba19d468f4c211a6025e328cea | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Phillips-American-musician | John Phillips | John Phillips
The original members were John Phillips (b. August 30, 1935, Parris Island, South Carolina, U.S.—d. March 18, 2001, Los Angeles, California), Michelle Phillips (original name Holly Michelle Gilliam; b. April 6, 1944, Long Beach, California, U.S.), (“Mama”) Cass Elliot (original name Ellen Naomi Cohen; b. September 19, 1943, Baltimore,…
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22795628c7b4e29d8b4c5f7ee6d99e51 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Pierpont-Morgan-Jr | John Pierpont Morgan, Jr. | John Pierpont Morgan, Jr.
John Pierpont Morgan, Jr., (born Sept. 7, 1867, Irvington, N.Y., U.S.—died March 13, 1943, Boca Grande, Fla.), American banker and financier, the head of the Morgan investment banking house after the death of his father, John Pierpont Morgan, Sr.
He graduated from Harvard University in 1889 and became a member of his father’s banking firm, J.P. Morgan and Company, in 1892, working in the firm’s London branch for eight years. He succeeded his father as head of the firm in 1913 upon the latter’s death, becoming heir to an estate of more than $50,000,000.
Morgan had developed a deep affection for England during his stay there. As a consequence, during the first three years of World War I, he became the sole purchasing agent in the United States for the British and French governments, buying about $3,000,000,000 worth of military and other supplies from American firms on behalf of those countries. To finance the Franco–British requirements for credits in the United States, he organized more than 2,000 banks to underwrite a total of more than $1,500,000,000 in Allied bonds. After the end of the war his firm floated loans totaling more than $10,000,000,000 for European reconstruction work. Though not the dominant, masterful personality his father had been, J.P. Morgan, Jr., was still the most important American financier of his day.
During the stock market crash of October 1929, Morgan and several other major bankers pooled their funds and tried to stem the decline of stock prices, but to no avail. In 1933 the Banking Act of that year compelled his firm to separate its investment banking activities from its commercial (deposit) banking activities. Accordingly, Morgan, Stanley and Company became a new investment banking firm, while Morgan himself remained head of J.P. Morgan and Company, which thenceforth became strictly a commercial banking firm.
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ab41d062743ed8ce02dceeed9944e608 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Platyn | John Platyn | John Platyn
…already bribed the imperial exarch John Platyn, who first effected Paschal’s nomination against a minority favouring Theodore but who then approved the higher clergy’s candidate, Sergius, from whom he extorted the gold that Paschal originally promised. Sergius reluctantly paid and was consecrated on December 15, 687; Theodore ceded, but Paschal…
…supported Sergius was Paschal’s patron, John Platyn, the imperial deputy at Ravenna; having been bribed by Paschal into influencing his original nomination, Platyn was also bribed with gold to support Sergius, who was consecrated on Dec. 15, 687. Theodore ceded, but Paschal refused to submit and was deposed and imprisoned…
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1e8d3d886542ba98808b1483f6adf635 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Playford | John Playford | John Playford
John Playford, (born 1623, Norwich, Norfolk, Eng.—died November 1686?, London), English music publisher and bookseller whose popular and frequently expanded collection of music and dance steps remains the principal source of knowledge of English country dance steps and melodies. His book, The English Dancing-Master (1650, but dated 1651; critical ed., M. Dean-Smith, 1958), originally contained 104 dances and accompanying tunes set to the fiddle; its 18th and last edition (1728, published by John Young) held about 700. Many of the Playford dances were revived in the 20th century.
By 1648 Playford had established his business in London, where he became a clerk of the Temple Church and moved to the Inner Temple. The friend as well as the publisher of most of the English composers of the time, Playford was himself a competent musician and often included his own song and psalm music in his collections of music. His Brief Introduction to the Skill of Musick, a handbook on music theory and practice, went into many editions between 1654 and 1730 and was revised in 1694 by the composer Henry Purcell. An elegy on Playford’s death, “Gentle shepherds, you that know,” by Nahum Tate, was set to music by Purcell.
Playford’s son Henry Playford (1657–1709) continued the family business. His publications include two posthumous collections of music by Purcell.
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dece4bffec1efbb1c7851b1e623a8744 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Pope | John Pope | John Pope
John Pope, (born March 16, 1822, Louisville, Ky., U.S.—died Sept. 23, 1892, Sandusky, Ohio), Union general in the American Civil War who was relieved of command following the Confederate triumph at the Second Battle of Bull Run.
A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1842, Pope served as a topographical engineer with the army throughout most of the 1840s and ’50s. He did, however, see combat during the Mexican War, serving with distinction in the campaigns of General Zachary Taylor.
Following the outbreak of the Civil War, Pope was appointed brigadier general of volunteers in 1861 and was promoted to major general in 1862. After securing the Mississippi River for the Union almost as far south as Memphis, Pope attracted the admiration of President Abraham Lincoln. He was made a brigadier general of the regular army and transferred to Washington, D.C., where he was given command of the Army of Virginia.
In August 1862 a Confederate force under General Stonewall Jackson moved toward Pope’s army. Jackson’s force was reinforced by troops under generals James Longstreet and Robert E. Lee, and Pope—misgauging the number and location of the enemy—issued muddled and confusing orders. The result was the decisive defeat at the Second Battle of Bull Run, August 29–30, and the loss of about 15,000 Union troops. Pope attempted to blame his subordinate officers—especially General Fitz-John Porter—for the debacle, but in September Pope was relieved of his command and sent to Minnesota to quell a Sioux uprising.
After the Civil War, Pope served in various posts, notably as commander of the Department of the Missouri (1870–83), in which he was primarily engaged in protecting settlers in the Northwest and Southwest from Indian attacks. On Oct. 26, 1882, he was promoted to major general of the regular army, a rank he held until he retired in 1886.
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16ffba096ba54fcf4e345aab0da3529a | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Quincy-Adams/Break-with-the-Federalists | Break with the Federalists | Break with the Federalists
Up to this time John Quincy Adams was regarded as belonging to the Federalist Party, but he found its general policy displeasing. He was frowned upon as the son of his father by the followers of Alexander Hamilton and by reactionary groups, and he soon found himself practically powerless as an unpopular member of an unpopular minority. Actually he was not then, and indeed never was, a strict party man; all through his life, ever aspiring to higher public service, he considered himself a “man of my whole country.” Adams arrived in Washington too late to vote for ratification of the treaty for the purchase of Louisiana, which had been opposed by the other Federalist senators, but he voted for the appropriations to carry it into effect and announced that he would have voted for the purchase treaty itself. Nevertheless, he joined his Federalist colleagues in voting against a bill to enable the president to place officials of his own appointment in control of the newly acquired territory; such a bill, Adams vainly protested, overstepped the constitutional powers of the presidency, violated the right of self-government, and imposed taxation without representation. In December 1807 he supported President Jefferson’s suggestion of an embargo to essentially stop all commerce with other nations (an attempt to gain British recognition of American rights) and vigorously urged instant action, saying: “The President has recommended the measure on his high responsibility. I would not consider, I would not deliberate; I would act!” Within five hours the Senate had passed the embargo bill and had sent it to the House of Representatives. Support of this measure, hated by the Federalists and unpopular in New England because it stifled the region’s economy, cost Adams his seat in the Senate. His successor was chosen on June 3, 1808, several months before the usual time of electing a senator for the next term, and five days later Adams resigned. In the same year he attended the Republican congressional caucus, which nominated James Madison for the presidency, and thus he allied himself with that party. From 1806 to 1809 Adams was Boylston professor of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard College.
In 1809 President Madison sent Adams to Russia to represent the United States at the court of Tsar Alexander I. He arrived at St. Petersburg at the psychologically important moment when the tsar had made up his mind to break with Napoleon. Adams therefore met with a favourable reception and a disposition to further the interests of American commerce in every possible way. From this vantage point he watched and reported Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and the final disastrous retreat and dissolution of France’s Grand Army. On the outbreak of the war between the United States and England in 1812, he was still in St. Petersburg. That September the Russian government suggested that the tsar was willing to act as mediator between the two belligerents. Madison precipitately accepted this proposition and sent Albert Gallatin and James Bayard to act as commissioners with Adams, but England would have nothing to do with it. In August 1814, however, these men, with Henry Clay and Jonathan Russell, began negotiations with English commissioners that resulted in the signing of the Treaty of Ghent on December 24 of that year. Adams then visited Paris, where he witnessed the return of Napoleon from Elba, and next went to London, where, with Clay and Gallatin, he negotiated (1815) a “Convention to Regulate Commerce and Navigation.” Soon afterward he became U.S. minister to Great Britain, as his father had been before him, and as his son, Charles Francis Adams, was to be after him. After accomplishing little in London, he returned to the United States in the summer of 1817 to become secretary of state in the cabinet of President James Monroe. This appointment was primarily due to his diplomatic experience but also due to the president’s desire to have a sectionally well-balanced cabinet in what came to be known as the Era of Good Feelings.
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741b9a77dec498f2c05d6c79af776336 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Quincy-Adams/Second-career-in-Congress | Second career in Congress | Second career in Congress
Adams’s long second career in Congress was at least as important as his earlier career as a diplomat. Throughout, he was conspicuous as an opponent of the expansion of slavery and was at heart an abolitionist, though he never became one in the political sense of the word. In 1839 he presented to the House of Representatives a resolution for a constitutional amendment providing that every child born in the United States after July 4, 1842, should be born free; that, with the exception of Florida, no new state should be admitted into the Union with slavery; and that neither slavery nor the slave trade should exist in the District of Columbia after July 4, 1845. The “gag rules,” a resolution passed by Southern members of Congress against all discussion of slavery in the House of Representatives, effectively blocked any discussion of Adams’s proposed amendment. His prolonged fight for the repeal of the gag rules and for the right of petition to Congress for the mitigation or abolition of slavery was one of the most dramatic contests in the history of Congress. These petitions, from individuals and groups of individuals from all over the Northern states, increasingly were sent to Adams, and he dutifully presented them. Adams contended that the gag rules were a direct violation of the First Amendment to the federal Constitution, and he refused to be silenced on the question, fighting indomitably for repeal in spite of the bitter denunciation of his opponents. Each year the number of antislavery petitions received and presented by him grew greatly. Perhaps the climax was in 1837 when Adams presented a petition from 22 slaves and, threatened by his opponents with censure, defended himself with remarkable keenness and ability. At each session the majority against him decreased until, in 1844, his motion to repeal the standing 21st (gag) rule of the House was carried by a vote of 108 to 80, and his long battle was over.
Another spectacular contribution by Adams to the antislavery cause was his championing of the cause of Africans arrested aboard the slave ship Amistad—slaves who had mutinied and escaped from their Spanish owners off the coast of Cuba and had wound up bringing the ship into United States waters near Long Island, New York. Adams defended them as freemen before the Supreme Court in 1841 against efforts of the administration of President Martin Van Buren to return them to their masters and to inevitable death. Adams won their freedom.
As a member of Congress—in fact, throughout his life—Adams supported the improvement of the arts and sciences and the diffusion of knowledge. He did much to conserve the bequest of James Smithson (an eccentric Englishman) to the United States and to create and endow the Smithsonian Institution with the money from Smithson’s estate.
Perhaps the most dramatic event in Adams’s life was its end. On February 21, 1848, in the act of protesting an honorary grant of swords by Congress to the generals who had won what Adams considered a “most unrighteous war” with Mexico, he suffered a cerebral stroke, fell unconscious to the floor of the House, and died two days later in the Capitol building. His obsequies in Washington and in his native Massachusetts assumed the character of a nationwide pageant of mourning. Senator Thomas Hart Benton, the main eulogist at the service in the Capitol, asked: “Where would death have found him except at the place of duty?”
Few men in American public life have possessed more independence, more public spirit, and more ability than did Adams. Still, throughout his political career he was handicapped by a certain personal reserve and austerity and coolness of manner that prevented him from appealing to the imaginations and affections of the people. He had few intimate friends, and not many men in American history have been regarded, during their lifetimes, with so much hostility or attacked with so much rancour by their political opponents.
The table provides a list of cabinet members in the administration of President John Quincy Adams.
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8b55c1b52323df47a57e318bd2af5c7b | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Ray-British-Egyptologist | John Ray | John Ray
…analysis until 1981, when Egyptologist John Ray successfully exploited Carian-Egyptian bilingual tomb inscriptions to put decipherment on a sound basis. Subsequent analysis has confirmed the basic validity of Ray’s work, but many questions remain. The long-held suspicion that Carian is an Indo-European language of the Anatolian group has at least…
…of the script by Egyptologist John Ray, who found several grammatical features suggesting that Carian is related to Hittite and Luwian and is part of the Anatolian group. His approach was successfully continued by Ignacio Adiego Lajara and fully confirmed by the discovery of a Carian-Greek bilingual in Kaunos in…
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697d804d1426b35285549c96ca4eee01 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Rich | John Rich | John Rich
John Rich, (born c. 1682—died Nov. 26, 1761, London, Eng.), English theatre manager and actor, the popularizer of English pantomime and founder of Covent Garden Theatre.
Rich was a manager by inheritance; he received a three-quarter share in Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre from his father, Christopher Rich, in 1714, and, after running that house successfully for 18 years, he founded Covent Garden Theatre in 1732. At both theatres he staged entertainments of a new type based on Italian foundations known as pantomime. In these he combined a classical fable with a grotesque story in commedia dell’arte style involving Harlequin and his beloved Columbine. From 1717 until the year before his death, he played Harlequin under his stage name of Lun and thus helped develop the harlequinade of English pantomime tradition. After Rich’s death, David Garrick paid tribute to the matchless expressiveness of his miming.
In 1727 Rich produced John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, which ran for a record number of 62 performances and, as was said at the time, “made Gay rich and Rich gay.”
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7116a89320b8749d941b3cc53a8887d6 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Russell-Bartlett | John Russell Bartlett | John Russell Bartlett
John Russell Bartlett, (born Oct. 23, 1805, Providence, R.I., U.S.—died May 28, 1886, Providence), bibliographer who made his greatest contribution to linguistics with his pioneer work, Dictionary of Americanisms: A Glossary of Words and Phrases, Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States (1848). It went through four editions and was translated into Dutch and German.
Appointed commissioner for the survey of the boundary between the United States and Mexico in 1850–53, he wrote as a result Personal Narrative of Explorations and Incidents in Texas, New Mexico, California, Sonora and Chihuahua . . ., 2 vol. (1854, reprinted 1965). Robert V. Hine, Bartlett’s West: Drawing the Mexican Boundary (1965), assesses Bartlett’s drawings and his stature as an interpreter of the West. As secretary of the state of Rhode Island he rearranged and classified the state records and prepared bibliographies and compilations on state history. Bartlett assisted John Carter Brown in acquiring and cataloging his noted book collection, now in the John Carter Brown Library on the campus of Brown University.
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1290066948518765d80ba3198462906e | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Schofield | Schofield, John | Schofield, John
John Schofield at its head. Hood first engaged Schofield on November 29 at Spring Hill, Tennessee, just north of the Duck River. He intended to sever Schofield’s access to the Nashville road, but communication between Hood and his subordinates broke down and Schofield slipped past…
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baff02f11a31031aa46059cbbd21fd7f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Scott-Haldane | John Scott Haldane | John Scott Haldane
John Scott Haldane, (born May 3, 1860, Edinburgh, Scot.—died March 14/15, 1936, Oxford, Oxfordshire, Eng.), British physiologist and philosopher chiefly noted for his work on the physiology of respiration.
Haldane developed several procedures for studying the physiology of breathing and the physiology of the blood and for the analysis of gases consumed or produced by the body. Among his most widely used devices were the hemoglobinometer, an apparatus for the analysis of blood gas, and an apparatus for the analysis of mixtures of gases.
In 1905 Haldane reported his fundamental discovery that the regulation of breathing is usually determined by the effect of the tension of carbon dioxide in the blood on the respiratory centre in the brain. In 1911 he led an expedition to Pikes Peak, Colo., where he studied the physiological effects of low barometric pressure. He investigated the action of gases that caused suffocation in coal miners and the pathological effects of carbon monoxide present after a mine explosion. His report in 1896 on the causes of death resulting from mine explosions and fires was an important contribution to mine safety. In 1907 he developed a method of stage decompression that made it possible for a deep-sea diver to ascend to the surface safely. Haldane was also a notable thinker who throughout his life tried to clarify the philosophical basis of biology, its relation to physics and chemistry, and the problems of mechanism and personality.
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b1b0f6e190a9aae761b981e4ff3f1be6 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Sealy-Townsend | Sir John Sealy Townsend | Sir John Sealy Townsend
Sir John Sealy Townsend, in full Sir John Sealy Edward Townsend, (born June 7, 1868, Galway, County Galway, Ireland—died February 16, 1957, Oxford, England), Irish physicist who pioneered in the study of electrical conduction in gases and made the first direct measurement of the unit electrical charge (e).
In 1895 he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, becoming a research student at the Cavendish Laboratory under J.J. Thomson. In 1899 he became a fellow of Trinity College and the following year was appointed the first Wykeham Professor of Experimental Physics at Oxford University.
In 1897 Townsend developed the falling-drop method for measuring e. His procedure, which used saturated clouds of water, was later improved and ultimately led to the highly accurate oil-drop method developed by Robert A. Millikan of the United States. In 1901 he discovered that gas molecules can be ionized by collision with ions.
After 1908 Townsend concentrated on the study of the properties of electron swarms. He also deduced the collision cross section (probability) for momentum transfer in terms of the mean energy. Independently of the German physicist Carl Ramsauer, he discovered the Ramsauer–Townsend effect: that the mean free path of electrons depends on their energy. This effect was later of extreme importance in understanding the electron’s wavelike nature as described in the quantum theory.
Although Townsend retired in 1941 (the year that he was knighted), he continued his work and writing. His books include The Theory of Ionisation of Gases by Collision (1910); Motion of Electrons in Gases (1925); Electricity and Radio Transmission (1943); and Electromagnetic Waves (1951).
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11a3372542cb12abab38236f5d65446c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Selden | John Selden | John Selden
John Selden, (born Dec. 16, 1584, Salvington, Sussex, Eng.—died Nov. 30, 1654, London), legal antiquarian, Orientalist, and politician who was the leading figure in the Antiquarian Society, the centre of English historical research during the 17th century.
Called to the bar in 1612, Selden practiced as a conveyancer, rarely appearing in court. His first major book, Titles of Honour (1614), has remained a useful reference. Analecton Anglo-Britannicon (1615) was a history of civil government in Britain before the Norman Conquest (1066). His reputation as an Orientalist was based on De diis Syris Syntagmata (1617), which was chiefly concerned with Middle Eastern polytheism, and on later works dealing with the calendar, marriage law, and judicial administration of the ancient Jews. With Patrick Young and Richard James he compiled (1628) a catalog of the sculpture collection known as the Arundel marbles. In 1647 he published the first printed edition of the old English lawbook Fleta.
Selden’s History of Tythes (1618), although conceding the legal right of the Church of England to collect tithes, denied divine authority for the practice. The book was suppressed, and the Privy Council forced the author to recant. Twice he was imprisoned for taking the side of the House of Commons (to which he was elected in 1623) against King Charles I. Later becoming a Royalist, however, Selden dedicated to the king Mare clausum (1635), a justification of a single nation’s rule over the high seas, in rebuttal to Hugo Grotius’ Mare liberum (1609). From 1640, having reversed his political position once more, he took part in the Commons’ proceedings against William Laud, archbishop of Canterbury, and against Charles I himself.
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cd64dc04c66a234db24f51e6a4e43bf2 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Shalikashvili | John Shalikashvili | John Shalikashvili
John Shalikashvili, in full John Malchase David Shalikashvili, (born June 27, 1936, Warsaw, Poland—died July 23, 2011, Tacoma, Washington, U.S.), U.S. Army officer who served as supreme allied commander of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces in Europe (1992–93) and as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1993–97).
Shalikashvili was descended from Georgian aristocracy. His maternal grandfather was a general in the tsarist Russian army, and his father was an officer in the Polish army until its defeat by the Germans in 1939, after which he joined a German-backed battalion of ethnic Georgians. Shalikashvili and his mother fled to Germany in 1944 to escape advancing Soviet troops. When Shalikashvili was age 16, he and his family immigrated to the United States, settling in Peoria, Illinois, where he learned English, partly by watching John Wayne films. He was drafted into the army as a private in 1958 and was commissioned a second lieutenant in 1959.
Following service at a variety of domestic posts throughout the 1960s, he was sent to Vietnam in 1968. By then a major, Shalikashvili served as a senior district adviser to South Vietnamese forces. Rising steadily through the ranks, he spent most of the 1970s and ’80s serving in various capacities in Europe. In 1991 Shalikashvili took command of Operation Provide Comfort—the campaign to airlift food and medical supplies to Kurdish refugees in Iraq in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War. He won praise for his leadership of the multinational force that not only helped supply the Kurds but also protected them from aggression by Ṣaddām Ḥussein’s Iraqi forces.
In 1992 Shalikashvili took up the post of supreme commander of NATO forces in Europe, dealing with the changes wrought by the end of the Cold War. The conflict in the former Yugoslavia threatened to spread throughout the Balkan region, while the collapse of the Soviet empire had created a power vacuum in that area. Shalikashvili performed ably in this role, and, when Gen. Colin Powell announced that he was going to step down as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Pres. Bill Clinton tapped Shalikashvili to succeed him. At Shalikashvili’s Senate confirmation hearings in September 1993, he seemed more willing to employ the threat of force as an instrument of policy than Powell had, but he also stressed his belief that U.S. troops should be committed only to regions where the United States had a clearly defined interest. He was unanimously confirmed by the Senate on October 5, 1993, becoming the first immigrant—as well as the first soldier to rise from the enlisted ranks—to hold the top command in the U.S. military.
As chairman, Shalikashvili and the Clinton administration were criticized for failing to use the threat of force to head off the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. The following year, however, U.S. troops were deployed to the Balkans, where the situation had become tenuously stable after the warring parties had agreed to the terms of the Dayton Accords. The U.S. forces, under NATO command, were key in preserving the fragile peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the mission was one of the major successes of Shalikashvili’s term as head of the Joint Chiefs.
He retired from the military in 1997 and went on to serve on the boards of a number of corporations. Shalikashvili entered the political arena in 2004, when he acted as an adviser in the presidential campaign of Democratic nominee John Kerry. In the late 2000s he became a vocal critic of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, which theoretically lifted a ban on homosexual service in the armed forces, provided that individuals kept their sexuality private, and resulted in the discharge of thousands of people. He argued that, although he had supported the rule during his time as chairman, the culture within the military had evolved since that time and that the enforcement of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” led to a drain on talent the armed services could not afford.
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8d2c46902f7d08b0601801a9e9dfe8ac | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Sherman | John Sherman | John Sherman
John Sherman, (born May 10, 1823, Lancaster, Ohio, U.S.—died Oct. 22, 1900, Washington, D.C.), American statesman, financial administrator, and author of major legislation concerning currency and regulation of commerce.
A younger brother of General William Tecumseh Sherman, he practiced law in Ohio before entering politics. He served in the U.S. House of Representatives (1855–61) and in the U.S. Senate (1861–77, 1881–97) and was secretary of the Treasury under President Rutherford B. Hayes (1877–81) and secretary of state under President William McKinley (1897–98).
Early in his congressional career Sherman gained a reputation as a fiscal expert. He was chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee (1859–61) and of the Senate Finance Committee (1867–77). He consistently preferred conservative financial policies but was often forced to balance his own convictions with the preferences of his constituents, many of whom favoured inflationary measures. He played a leading role in the establishment of the national banking system (1863), in the enactment of the bill (1873) that discontinued the coinage of silver dollars (denounced by critics as the “the crime of ’73”) and of the Specie Payment Resumption Act (1875), which provided for the redemption of Civil War greenbacks in gold. It was thus largely through his efforts that the United States returned to the gold standard. During the administration of President Benjamin Harrison, the Antitrust Act of 1890 and the Silver Purchase Act of the same year bore his name, but both represented compromises that had only his qualified approval.
Sherman’s name was presented as a presidential consideration to three Republican national conventions (1880, 1884, and 1888). His lack of popular appeal, however, and his middle-of-the-road course on monetary policies, which suited neither the inflationist West nor the conservative East, prevented his winning the nomination.
In 1897 President William McKinley appointed Sherman secretary of state, but partly for reasons of health and partly for reasons of principle, he resigned on April 25, 1898, the day Congress declared war against Spain.
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