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8ee22d2b0ea7d083f9f52dbe5458c182 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Shore | Sir John Shore | Sir John Shore
Lord Cornwallis and his successor Sir John Shore (governor-general 1793–98) were eager to comply, but Cornwallis nevertheless found himself involved in the third Mysore war (1790–92) with Tippu Sultan, who possessed his father’s ability without his judgment. The cause was a combination of Tippu Sultan’s intransigence with conflicting obligations undertaken…
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9bd992abd6e653b7b2c3f02b29634766 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Siferwas | John Siferwas | John Siferwas
The style of John Siferwas, another painter active during this period, is similar, but his page decoration is usually more lavish; he produced a series of beautiful bird studies reminiscent of Lombard work. It should be noted, however, that this sort of realistic observation had long been a…
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cec8f4cc0ae863ea4ee0fabc83e204ac | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Sigismund | John Sigismund | John Sigismund
John Sigismund, German Johann Sigismund, (born Nov. 8, 1572—died Jan. 2, 1620), elector of Brandenburg from 1608, who united his domain with that of Prussia.
His marriage in 1594 to Anna, the daughter of Albert Frederick of Prussia, made him heir to the title of that duchy, and he became duke of Prussia in 1618. Through his mother-in-law he acquired rights over the Rhenish territories of Jülich, Cleves, and Berg; but his claims were challenged by the Spanish candidate, Wolfgang William of Neuburg. Supported by the Dutch, John Sigismund acquired Cleves with the counties of Mark and Ravensberg by the Treaty of Xanten (1614). He espoused Calvinism (1613) but accorded toleration to his Lutheran subjects. Like his predecessor, Joachim Frederick, he was forced to make concessions to the nobles of Brandenburg. He was succeeded by his eldest son, George William.
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2f7802dadb9b64251e9590cb904f858e | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Singleton | John Singleton | John Singleton
John Singleton, in full John Daniel Singleton, (born January 6, 1968, Los Angeles, California, U.S.—died April 29, 2019, Los Angeles), American film director and screenwriter whose films often examined urban and racial tensions. He was best known for his directorial debut, Boyz n the Hood (1991).
Singleton was raised near the violence-ridden south-central section of Los Angeles. While studying screenwriting at the University of Southern California, he won several writing awards, which led to his signing a contract with the Creative Artists Agency well before his 1990 graduation. As a student, Singleton wrote a coming-of-age screenplay— titled Boyz n the Hood—that chronicled the lives of three childhood friends growing up in the south-central area amid poverty and gang violence. It was filmed by Columbia Pictures and starred Cuba Gooding, Jr., Laurence Fishburne, and rapper-turned-actor Ice Cube. The film received widespread critical acclaim, rapidly accumulating accolades and awards. Singleton was nominated for Academy Awards for best screenplay and best director, making him the first African American to be nominated for the best director honour.
He followed up this success by directing pop superstar Michael Jackson in the music video for “Remember the Time” (1992). His next film, Poetic Justice (1993), starred Jackson’s sister, singer Janet Jackson. Singleton’s other films included Higher Learning (1995), a drama investigating a variety of social issues as it follows the lives of three college freshmen (1993); Rosewood (1997), based on a true story of racial violence in Florida in the 1920s; a remake of the landmark blaxploitation film Shaft (2000); the action film 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003); and Four Brothers (2005), starring Mark Wahlberg and Tyrese Gibson.
In the 2010s Singleton began working in television, and he directed episodes of such shows as Empire, The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, and Billions. He cocreated Snowfall (2017– ), which centres on the crack epidemic in 1980s Los Angeles.
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f7e3ae975c235cdb2a69947b05502fa2 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Smith-wrestler | John Smith | John Smith
John Smith, (born Aug. 9, 1965, Del City, Okla., U.S.), American freestyle wrestler who won six consecutive world championships (1987–92) and won two Olympic gold medals in the featherweight class.
Smith, whose three brothers were all accomplished wrestlers, competed at Oklahoma State University, winning the National Collegiate Athletic Association title in 1987 and 1988. He won five U.S. national titles (1986, 1988–91), as well as championships at the Goodwill Games (1986, 1990), the Pan-American Games (1987, 1991), and the World Cup (1991). At the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, Smith—despite a broken nose and abscessed ear—defeated Soviet Stepan Sarkisyan to win the gold. At the 1992 Games in Barcelona, Smith overcame challenges in early matches to win a second gold, defeating the Iranian Asgari Mohammadian.
Smith received the James E. Sullivan Memorial Award as the outstanding American amateur athlete of 1990. He later coached wrestling at Oklahoma State.
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077269c04354f1be7880aa6356c1868b | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Spencer-Bassett | John Spencer Bassett | John Spencer Bassett
John Spencer Bassett, (born Sept. 10, 1867, Tarboro, N.C., American—died Jan. 27, 1928, Washington, D.C.), American historian and founder of the South Atlantic Quarterly, influential in the development of historiography in the American South.
A graduate of Trinity College (now Duke University), Durham, N.C., in 1888, he received a doctorate in 1894 from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, and taught history at Trinity College (1893–1906) and at Smith College, Northampton, Mass. (1906 until his death). During his tenure at Trinity he was actively engaged in collecting historical works on the South and by 1902 had launched the South Atlantic Quarterly, a literary periodical for scholars. Under his editorship, the Quarterly became one of the more liberal periodicals in the South; his own articles deplored racial injustice and provincial isolation.
In 1906 he organized the Smith College Studies in History, and in 1919 he was elected secretary of the American Historical Association. A prolific writer, he produced, among other works, The Federalist System (1906), The Life of Andrew Jackson, 2 vol. (1911), Short History of the United States (1913), The Middle Group of American Historians (1917), and Makers of a New Nation (1928).
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6f8d261370809bfd2a7f1940264c3df0 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Stanley-Plaskett | John Stanley Plaskett | John Stanley Plaskett
John Stanley Plaskett, (born Nov. 17, 1865, Woodstock, Ont., Canada—died Oct. 17, 1941, Victoria, B.C.), Canadian astronomer remembered for his expert design of instruments and his extensive spectroscopic observations.
Plaskett, a skilled mechanic and photographer, graduated from the University of Toronto in 1899. In 1903 he joined the staff of the Dominion Observatory at Ottawa, where he initiated astrophysical research and devised a spectrograph that made the telescope at Ottawa equivalent to much larger instruments.
In 1913 Plaskett persuaded the Canadian government to finance the construction of a 72-inch (183-centimetre) reflector. That instrument, largely designed by Plaskett, was placed in operation near Victoria, B.C., in 1918. He was appointed director of the observatory at Victoria in 1917. He used the new telescope to study binary stars and the distribution of calcium in interstellar space. In 1922 he resolved a very massive binary star (Plaskett’s star), and in 1930 he deduced the distance and direction of the centre of gravity of the Milky Way Galaxy and the pattern of rotation about it. After his retirement in 1935 he supervised the grinding and polishing of the 82-inch mirror for the telescope of the McDonald Observatory, Fort Davis, Texas.
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adb2132c17bb3068edcccc4eb972dad6 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Strachan | John Strachan | John Strachan
John Strachan, (born April 12, 1778, Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire, Scot.—died Nov. 1, 1867, Toronto), educator and clergyman who, as the first Anglican bishop of Toronto, was responsible for organizing the church in Canada as a self-governing denomination within the Anglican community.
Strachan emigrated from Scotland to Canada in 1799. After teaching school in Kingston, he was ordained in 1803 and appointed curate at Cornwall and then rector of York (now Toronto). He served on the Executive Council of Upper Canada (Ontario), and in 1820 he was appointed to the Legislative Council and became part of the ruling Tory oligarchy. He became archdeacon of York in 1825 and organized the establishment of the University of Toronto in 1827.
Strachan worked to maintain a privileged position for the Church of England in Canada. Adverse criticism led him to resign from the Executive Council. In 1839 he became first bishop of the newly created diocese of Toronto, and he managed to double the number of churches and to establish many schools there. He became president of Kings College in 1843, and, after Kings College was secularized (1849), he established the University of Trinity College in 1851. Strachan created the Anglican synod of clergy and laity in the British colonial empire in 1851. His political power diminished after the granting of responsible government to the colony in 1849.
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1567de8fe3c75c76cd4e8fde900f98cf | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Sturges | John Sturges | John Sturges
John Sturges, in full John Eliot Sturges, (born January 3, 1910, Oak Park, Illinois, U.S.—died August 18, 1992, San Luis Obispo, California), American director best known for taut war movies and westerns. His films include such classics as Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), The Magnificent Seven (1960), and The Great Escape (1963).
Sturges attended Marin Junior College (now College of Marin) on a football scholarship. In 1932 he joined RKO, where he worked in the blueprint and art departments. He later was a production assistant for David O. Selznick before eventually becoming a film editor. During World War II, Sturges served as a captain in the U.S. Army Air Corps, where he directed more than 40 documentaries, most notably Thunderbolt, on which he shared the credit with William Wyler; the classic film was shown to troops in 1945 but was not released in theatres for two more years.
When the war ended, Sturges signed a contract with Columbia, where he was put to work on a number of genre pieces. The Man Who Dared, Shadowed, and Alias Mr. Twilight (all 1946) were low-budget crime dramas. In 1947 he directed For the Love of Rusty and Keeper of the Bees, both of which were child-driven human-interest stories. Best Man Wins (1948) was based on Mark Twain’s “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” and it starred Edgar Buchanan as the peripatetic gambler. The melodrama The Sign of the Ram (1948) featured a wheelchair-bound Susan Peters (who had been crippled in a real-life accident) as a manipulative wife and mother who uses her condition to control those around her. In 1949 Sturges made the first of his many westerns, The Walking Hills. The box-office hit starred Randolph Scott and Ella Raines as treasure hunters searching for buried gold in Death Valley. Next was The Capture (1950), a crime drama set in the American West, with Lew Ayres as a man who kills a coworker whom he wrongly accuses of robbery and later is himself unjustly blamed for a murder; Teresa Wright was cast as his coworker’s widow.
After moving to MGM, Sturges made Mystery Street (1950), a crime drama starring Ricardo Montalban as a Boston detective investigating a murder and Bruce Bennett as a forensics expert at Harvard. Right Cross (1950) was a boxing picture about a fighter (Montalban) who imagines prejudice because of his Mexican heritage; June Allyson played his love interest, and Dick Powell played his best friend, a cynical sports reporter. Sturges’s other film from 1950 was The Magnificent Yankee, a solid biopic about Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., with Louis Calhern portraying the jurist and Ann Harding as his wife.
Kind Lady (1951) was a period suspense film, in which Ethel Barrymore portrayed an elderly art lover who is held prisoner in her home as a group of thieves (Maurice Evans and Angela Lansbury, among others) plot to steal her collection. The People Against O’Hara (1951), adapted from an Eleazar Lipsky novel, centred on a lawyer (Spencer Tracy) who turns to alcohol to cope with the stresses of a murder trial. Sturges then contributed one of the eight episodes in the epic production It’s a Big Country (1951). The Girl in White (1952) was a modest but well-done biography of New York City’s first woman doctor, Emily Dunning, with Allyson as the hard-nosed pioneer who worked in a slum hospital. Sturges was on more-familiar ground with Jeopardy (1953), a thriller that featured Barbara Stanwyck as a wife and mother who is menaced by a killer (Ralph Meeker) while on vacation in Mexico. Fast Company (1953), a musical comedy about horse racing, was a mismatch of director and material. Escape from Fort Bravo (1953), however, was better, a solid western about the U.S. cavalry battling Native Americans; it starred William Holden and Eleanor Parker.
Sturges’s breakthrough film was Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), a taut psychological western about anti-Japanese prejudice in the postwar years; the cast included Tracy, Robert Ryan, Ernest Borgnine, Lee Marvin, and Dean Jagger. For the critically acclaimed film, Sturges received his only Academy Award nomination for best director. Underwater! (1955), however, was far less memorable; the deep-sea drama starred Jane Russell, Richard Egan, and Gilbert Roland. Slightly better was The Scarlet Coat (1955), a Revolutionary War drama about Benedict Arnold; Cornel Wilde played a colonial spy. Sturges returned to the Wild West with Backlash (1956), which starred Richard Widmark as a gunman looking to avenge his father’s death.
Sturges, who disliked studio interference, subsequently worked as a freelancer, and at Paramount he had another major hit with Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957), an epic account of the 1881 shootout in Tombstone, Arizona, that made heroes of Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. The western, which was scripted by Leon Uris, starred Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas as Earp and Holliday, respectively. As with many of Sturges’s classics, it provided exciting action without sacrificing character development. The film also centred on a common theme of Sturges’s work: men banding together to face a challenge. In his next project, The Law and Jake Wade (1958), an outlaw (Widmark) forces an old friend (Robert Taylor) to lead him to the money they stole during a bank heist.
Sturges then took over for Fred Zinnemann on the prestige project The Old Man and the Sea (1958), an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s short novel. However, despite the presence of his frequent star Tracy, whose performance was critically acclaimed, the drama was a disappointment at the box office. Last Train from Gun Hill (1959) was much better, a crackling western in which Douglas was at his best as an uncompromising sheriff determined to find the men who raped and killed his wife. The World War II drama Never So Few (1959) offered a noteworthy cast that included Frank Sinatra, Steve McQueen, Gina Lollobrigida, and Charles Bronson.
Beginning an eight-year tenure at United Artists, Sturges directed The Magnificent Seven (1960), a remake of Kurosawa Akira’s 1954 classic The Seven Samurai. It featured a legendary cast that included McQueen, Bronson, Yul Brynner, and James Coburn, all of whom played gunslingers who are hired to protect a Mexican village from a bandit (Eli Wallach). Despite various production problems, Sturges’s film was a critical and commercial success. For his follow-up, he made the somewhat surprising By Love Possessed (1961), a Lana Turner soap opera about the secrets of a small New England town. He then reunited with Sinatra on Sergeants 3 (1962), a comedic western that included other members of the “Rat Pack”: Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., Peter Lawford, and Joey Bishop.
The Tokyo-set A Girl Named Tamiko (1962) was another soap opera, with Laurence Harvey as a Eurasian photographer who, desperate to become a U.S. citizen, uses his charm to persuade an American (Martha Hyer) to marry him. That misfire, however, was quickly erased with the success of The Great Escape (1963), one of the decade’s top action pictures. James Clavell and W.R. Burnett scripted (from a novel by Paul Brickhill) that World War II thriller about Allied POWs who undertake an elaborate escape plan. Sturges was masterful in his pacing of the mammoth production and in handling the all-star cast—which included McQueen (in a definitive performance), James Garner, Bronson, Coburn, and Richard Attenborough. Elmer Bernstein’s score nearly rose to the level of his work on The Magnificent Seven.
Sturges went in another direction with his next project, The Satan Bug (1965), a suspense drama about the attempts to recover a deadly virus that is stolen from a top-secret laboratory. The Hallelujah Trail (1965) was a western spoof centring on a cavalry colonel (Lancaster) who tries to deliver 40 wagonloads of whiskey to miners in the face of stiff opposition from temperance activists (led by Lee Remick). The overlong and uneven film was widely panned. Hour of the Gun (1967), a ponderous sequel to Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, starred Garner as Earp, Jason Robards as Holliday, and Ryan as vengeance-obsessed Ike Clanton. Sturges then made Ice Station Zebra (1968), which featured an all-male cast (headed by Rock Hudson, Jim Brown, and Borgnine) on a submarine bound for an Arctic outpost as a Cold War crisis looms. The film was a commercial success. Less popular was Marooned (1969), a slow and unyielding drama about three astronauts (James Franciscus, Gene Hackman, and Richard Crenna) stranded in space after their spacecraft’s engine malfunctions.
In 1972 Sturges directed Joe Kidd, which was arguably his best film since The Great Escape. The violent western, with a strong Elmore Leonard screenplay, starred Clint Eastwood as a former bounty hunter who agrees to help a landowner (Robert Duvall) track down the man leading a peasant revolt. In the European production Valdez, il mezzosangue (1973; Chino), Bronson portrayed a horse breeder whose livelihood is threatened when he falls in love with the sister of a wealthy rancher; it was codirected by Duilio Coletti. With McQ (1974), Sturges was at last teamed with John Wayne, though the film drew mixed reviews; Wayne played a detective investigating the death of his best friend. The Eagle Has Landed (1976) showed flashes of Sturges’s old prowess. The old-fashioned suspense thriller was based on a Jack Higgins best seller about a Nazi plot to kidnap British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. As with most of Sturges’s more-popular productions, it featured a stellar cast, which included Michael Caine, Duvall, Donald Sutherland, and Anthony Quayle. Sturges subsequently retired.
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f13324f56b2d5b777ba7dabdbf644afb | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Suckling | Sir John Suckling | Sir John Suckling
Sir John Suckling, (born February 1609, Whitton, Middlesex, England—died 1642, Paris, France), English Cavalier poet, dramatist, and courtier, best known for his lyrics.
He was educated at Cambridge and inherited his father’s considerable estates at the age of 18. He entered Gray’s Inn in 1627 and was knighted in 1630. He became a prominent figure at court with a reputation for being “the greatest gallant of his time, and the greatest gamester both for bowling and cards”; and he is credited with having invented cribbage. He was a gentleman of the privy chamber to Charles I and a friend of the poets Thomas Carew, Richard Lovelace, and Sir William Davenant. When the war with the Scots broke out in 1639, Suckling raised a troop of soldiers, supplying them with horses at his own expense, and accompanied Charles I on his ill-fated expedition. The costumes of Suckling’s gaudy warriors and the troop’s poor performance in the field were the subjects of much ridicule.
In 1641 Suckling took an active part in the plot to rescue the Earl of Strafford from the Tower. When the plot was discovered, Suckling fled to France and is believed to have committed suicide.
Suckling was the author of four plays, the most ambitious of which is the tragedy Aglaura, magnificently staged in 1637 and handsomely printed at the author’s expense (1638); the best is the lively comedy The Goblins (1638). They all contain echoes of Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher.
His reputation as a poet rests on his lyrics, the best of which justifies the description of him as “natural, easy Suckling.” He inherited from Donne the tradition of the “anti-platonic” deflation of high-flown love sentiment and uses it with insouciance.
He can even be cynically chiding in such songs as this:
A Session of the Poets (1637; published 1646) is an amusing skit for which he probably took a hint from an Italian work by Traiano Boccalini; it is the prototype of a long line of similar works in the 17th and 18th centuries. His masterpiece is undoubtedly “A Ballad Upon a Wedding,” in the style and metre of the contemporary street ballad. Suckling’s extant letters are in lively, colloquial prose that anticipates that of the Restoration wits.
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5bd102f538242fa5a857524652072430 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Talbot-1st-earl-of-Shrewsbury | John Talbot, 1st earl of Shrewsbury | John Talbot, 1st earl of Shrewsbury
John Talbot, 1st earl of Shrewsbury, (born c. 1384—died July 17, 1453, Castillon, Fr.), the chief English military commander against the French during the final phase of the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453).
The son of Richard, 4th Baron Talbot, he served in campaigns in Wales between 1404 and 1413 and as lieutenant of Ireland (1414–19), when he joined the English army in France. He fought at Verneuil in 1424 and took part in the unsuccessful siege of Orléans in 1429. Talbot’s rashness was largely responsible for the severe English defeat at Patay (June 1429), where he was taken prisoner. Released in 1433, he captured Clermont the following year. By suppressing the revolt of the Pays de Caux in 1436, he prevented Normandy from falling under French control. As a reward, King Henry VI made him marshal of France.
The mainstay of the English cause for the next five years, Talbot defeated the Burgundians near Le Crotoy (1437) and captured Harfleur (1440). In 1442 he was created earl of Salop—Shrewsbury was the name that he himself used for the title. After spending another two years (1445–47) as lieutenant of Ireland, he returned to France. Shrewsbury was captured and held hostage by the French in 1449–50; during this time the English surrendered Normandy and began to lose their hold on Aquitaine. Rushing to relieve the besieged fortress of Castillon in July 1453, Shrewsbury impetuously attacked the enemy without waiting for artillery cover. He was killed in the battle—the last of the war—and soon thereafter the English yielded almost all their French possessions.
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430b2c3576ee663311cf84b362a43268 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Tate | John Tate | John Tate
John Tate, in full John Torrence Tate, (born March 13, 1925, Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.), American mathematician awarded the 2010 Abel Prize “for his vast and lasting impact on the theory of numbers.”
Tate received an undergraduate degree in 1946 from Harvard University and a doctorate in 1950 from Princeton University, where he studied under Austro-German mathematician Emil Artin. In his doctoral dissertation, Fourier Analysis in Number Fields and Hecke’s Zeta-Function, he applied harmonic analysis (the mathematical procedure for describing and analyzing phenomena of a periodically recurrent nature) to the study of a certain class of zeta function called Hecke L-functions. Tate was an instructor at Princeton from 1950 to 1953 and a visiting professor at Columbia University from 1953 to 1954. In 1954 he became a professor at Harvard University. In the 1950s Tate became one of the few non-French members of Nicolas Bourbaki, a pseudonymous group of young French mathematicians. He moved to the University of Texas at Austin in 1990, retiring as professor emeritus in 2009.
As a testimony to Tate’s stature in the fields of number theory and algebraic geometry, many concepts used in those disciplines bear his name—e.g., the Tate twist, the Tate-Shafarevich group, the Tate module, Tate cohomology, the Tate duality theorem, the Tate trace, Hodge-Tate decompositions, and the Sato-Tate conjecture. One of his particular interests was elliptic curves, which are real number solutions to cubic polynomial equations, such as y2 − x3 = c. This work has applications in the field of cryptography in that it can be used to factor extremely large prime numbers, which are used in secure communications.
In 1956 Tate received the Cole Prize from the American Mathematical Society (AMS) for his contributions to number theory, and in 1995 the AMS also awarded him the Leroy P. Steele Prize for lifetime achievement. Tate shared the 2002–03 Wolf Prize in Mathematics, a prestigious international award presented in recognition of outstanding work in the field of mathematics, with Japanese mathematician Sato Mikio. Among his books are Class Field Theory (coauthored with Artin, 1967), Les Conjectures de Stark sur les fonctions L d’Artin en s=0 (1984; “The Stark Conjectures on the Artin L-Functions for s=0”), and Rational Points on Elliptic Curves (with Joseph H. Silverman, 1992).
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2cb354b576edc2550444c09ef2d5b99b | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Taylor-British-writer | John Taylor | John Taylor
John Taylor, (born Aug. 24, 1580, Gloucester, Gloucestershire, Eng.—died December 1653, London), minor English poet, pamphleteer, and journalist who called himself “the Water Poet.”
The son of a surgeon, Taylor was sent to a grammar school but became, as he said, “mired in Latin accidence” and was apprenticed to a Thames boatman. He served in the navy and saw action at Cádiz (1596) and Flores (1597). Returning to London, he worked as a waterman transporting passengers up and down the River Thames and also held a semiofficial post at the Tower of London for several years. Taylor won fame by making a series of whimsical journeys that he described in lively, rollicking verse and prose. For example, he journeyed from London to Queenborough, Kent, in a paper boat with two stockfish tied to canes for oars and nearly drowned in the attempt. He made other water journeys between London, York, and Salisbury, and The Pennyles Pilgrimage. . . (1618) describes a trip he made on foot from London to Edinburgh without money. In 1620 he journeyed to Prague, where he was received by the queen of Bohemia. His humorous accounts of his journeys won the patronage of Ben Jonson, among others. Taylor also amused the court and the public in his paper war with another eccentric traveler, Thomas Coryate. In 1630 he published 63 pieces in All the Works of John Taylor the Water Poet, although he continued to publish prolifically afterward.
When the English Civil Wars began Taylor moved to Oxford, where he wrote royalist pamphlets. After the city surrendered (1645), he returned to London and kept a public house, “The Crown” (later “The Poet’s Head”), until his death.
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903801f8aa477b25b61f635ec82b4efe | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Tiptoft-1st-Earl-of-Worcester | John Tiptoft, 1st earl of Worcester | John Tiptoft, 1st earl of Worcester
John Tiptoft, 1st earl of Worcester, Tiptoft also spelled Tibetot, (born c. 1427, Everton, Bedfordshire, Eng.—died Oct. 18, 1470, London), noted English Yorkist leader during the Wars of the Roses, known for his brutality and abuse of the law and called the “butcher of England.”
The son of the 1st Baron Tiptoft, he was educated at Oxford, and in 1449 he was created Earl of Worcester. In 1456–57 he was deputy of Ireland, and in 1457 and again in 1459 he was sent on embassies to the pope. He was abroad three years, during which he made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem; the rest of the time he spent in Italy, at Padua, Ferrara, and Florence, studying law, Latin, and Greek. He returned to England early in the reign of Edward IV and on Feb. 7, 1462, was made constable of England. In 1462 he condemned John de Vere, 12th Earl of Oxford, and in 1464 Sir Ralph Grey and other Lancastrians. In 1467 he was again appointed deputy of Ireland. During a year’s office there he had the Earl of Desmond attainted and cruelly put to death the earl’s two infant sons. In 1470, as constable, he condemned 20 of the Earl of Warwick’s adherents and had them impaled. On the Lancastrian restoration Worcester fled into hiding but was discovered and tried before John de Vere, 13th Earl of Oxford, son of the man whom he had condemned in 1462. He was executed on Tower Hill.
On the death of his son, Edward, in 1485 the earldom reverted to the crown.
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f016ca21de5e762e5d456b561d9336d6 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Tower | John Tower | John Tower
…commission, headed by former senator John Tower of Texas (the Tower Commission), to investigate the matter. An independent counsel, Judge Lawrence Walsh, was also appointed, and the House and Senate began joint hearings to examine both the arms sales and the military assistance to the Contras. As a result of…
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a68bac4313eefb16cd72b726d55addc6 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Turtle-Wood | John Turtle Wood | John Turtle Wood
J.T. Wood, working at Ephesus for the British Museum between 1863 and 1874, excavated the odeum and theatre. In May 1869 he struck a corner of the Artemiseum. His excavation exposed to view not only the scanty remains of the latest edifice (built after 350…
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3808e9511c8657c088a0caf76828ae54 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Tzetzes | John Tzetzes | John Tzetzes
John Tzetzes, (born c. 1110—died after 1180), Byzantine didactic poet and scholar who preserved much valuable information from ancient Greek literature and scholarship, in which he was widely read.
Tzetzes was for a time secretary to a provincial governor, then earned a meagre living by teaching and writing. He has been described as the perfect specimen of the Byzantine pedant. His literary and scholarly output was enormous, although it contained many inaccuracies—mostly because he was quoting from memory, lacking books, which he said his poverty forced him to do without.
Of his numerous and varied works the most important is the Chiliades (“Thousands”). Also known as the Book of Histories, the work is a long poem (more than 12,000 lines of 15 syllables) containing literary, historical, antiquarian, and mythological miscellanies, intended to serve as a commentary on Tzetzes’ own letters, which are addressed to friends and famous contemporaries as well as to fictitious persons. Though the whole work suffers from an unnecessary display of learning, the total number of authors quoted being more than 400, it contains much information unavailable elsewhere. Another work is Allegoriai on the Iliad and the Odyssey, two long didactic poems containing interpretations of Homeric theology. Interspersed in his learned commentaries are vignettes of everyday life in Constantinople.
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45a76d2f6ee3f25def43eeade7c7aa34 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-V-Palaeologus | John V Palaeologus | John V Palaeologus
John V Palaeologus, (born June 18, 1332, Didymoteichon, Byzantine Empire [modern Dhidhimótikhon, Greece]—died February 16, 1391, Constantinople, Byzantine Empire [now Istanbul, Turkey]), Byzantine emperor (1341–91) whose rule was marked by civil war and increased domination by the Ottoman Turks, despite his efforts to salvage the empire.
Nine years old when his father, Andronicus III, died, John was too young to rule, and a dispute over the regency broke out between his mother, Anna of Savoy, and John Cantacuzenus, chief minister under Andronicus III. Cantacuzenus won the ensuing civil war and was crowned coemperor with John V at Constantinople in 1347. Despite John V’s subsequent marriage to Helen, Cantacuzenus’s daughter, he formed an alliance with the Venetians against Cantacuzenus, forcing him to abdicate in 1354.
When the Ottoman Turks, who had gained a foothold in Europe by occupying Gallipoli, threatened Constantinople (1354), John appealed to the West for help, proposing to end the schism between the Byzantine and Latin churches. Wars with the Serbs and Turks drained the Byzantine treasury, and John was detained as an insolvent debtor when he visited Venice in 1369.
In 1371 John was forced to recognize the suzerainty of the Turks when they gained control of large parts of Macedonia. When he was deposed and imprisoned in 1376 by his son, the Turks helped him regain the throne (1379), but when John tried to rebuild the fortifications around Constantinople, the Turkish sultan ordered them destroyed, threatening to blind John’s heir, Manuel, then residing at the Turkish court. John left Manuel an empire greatly reduced in size and strength, a Turkish overlord, and a frightened populace.
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4c67f7ca7d1c607f2ebd2dbf6e72127a | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Van-Vleck | John H. Van Vleck | John H. Van Vleck
John H. Van Vleck, in full John Hasbrouck Van Vleck, (born March 13, 1899, Middletown, Conn., U.S.—died Oct. 27, 1980, Cambridge, Mass.), American physicist and mathematician who shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1977 with Philip W. Anderson and Sir Nevill F. Mott. The prize honoured Van Vleck’s contributions to the understanding of the behaviour of electrons in magnetic, noncrystalline solid materials.
Educated at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and at Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1922, Van Vleck joined the faculty of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, in 1924. He taught at Wisconsin from 1928 to 1934, and he then went to Harvard, where he eventually served as chairman of the physics department (1945–49), dean of engineering and applied physics (1951–57), and Hollis professor of mathematics and natural philosophy (1951–69).
Van Vleck developed during the early 1930s the first fully articulated quantum mechanical theory of magnetism. Later he was a chief architect of the ligand field theory of molecular bonding. He contributed also to studies of the spectra of free molecules, of paramagnetic relaxation, and other topics. His publications include Quantum Principles and Line Spectra (1926) and The Theory of Electric and Magnetic Susceptibilities (1932).
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ab7f3b1f1beee8255e346f117ca7bc22 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Vanderlyn | John Vanderlyn | John Vanderlyn
John Vanderlyn, (born October 15, 1776, Kingston, New York, U.S.—died September 23, 1852, Kingston), U.S. painter and one of the first American artists to study in Paris. He was largely responsible for introducing the Neoclassical style to the United States.
As a young man Vanderlyn copied a Gilbert Stuart portrait of Aaron Burr that attracted the attention of Burr. He sponsored Vanderlyn’s artistic training, first with Stuart and then, in 1796, at the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris. Vanderlyn returned to New York in 1801, where he did paintings of Niagara Falls. In 1803 Vanderlyn was able to return to Europe, and his best work was done during this period. Vanderlyn returned to the United States when he was 40 years of age, and the treatment accorded him was a bitter contrast to his European successes. He did not receive the federal commissions for which he had been hoping. Expecting to duplicate the European popularity of panoramas, he installed his 3,000-foot Palace and Gardens of Versailles (1816–19; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City) and other works in a rotunda built at his own expense on land leased from the city of New York. Vanderlyn realized little income from the project, and he was embittered when 10 years later the city cancelled his lease. He retired to Kingston, New York, and supported himself by painting uninspired portraits that were hardly recognizable as coming from his hand. In 1832 he finally received a commission from the U.S. government: a full-length portrait of George Washington (Capitol, Washington, D.C.). Ten years later he received another: Landing of Columbus (1842–44; Capitol Rotunda, Washington, D.C.).
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e9c1945b4f14a3916f3f31a170c3d2ba | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-VI-king-of-Portugal | John VI | John VI
John VI, (born May 13, 1767, Lisbon, Portugal—died March 10, 1826, Lisbon), prince regent of Portugal from 1799 to 1816 and king from 1816 to 1826, whose reign saw the revolutionary struggle in France, the Napoleonic invasion of Portugal (during which he established his court in Brazil), and the implantation of representative government in both Portugal and Brazil.
John was the younger son of Queen Maria I, becoming heir on the death of his elder brother and taking power in 1792 as a result of the mental illness of his mother. In 1799 her illness was declared incurable, and he assumed the title of prince regent, which he used until her death in March 1816. John married Carlota Joaquina, eldest daughter of Charles IV of Spain, and supported Spain against the French Republic. But Spain made peace at Basel in 1795 and served as a vehicle for French pressure on Portugal. In 1801 Spain finally invaded Portugal, though peace was made at Badajoz. In 1807, after his victories in central Europe, Napoleon proclaimed his European blockade, threatening to close the port of Lisbon. As French troops crossed Spain and approached Lisbon, the royal family retired to Brazil with the government (November 1807). Britain guaranteed the throne of the Braganças and in 1808 sent an army to Portugal under Arthur Wellesley (later duke of Wellington), which forced the surrender of the French. John gave full military support to Wellesley, and two French invasions were repelled. After Napoleon’s surrender in 1814, John was expected to return; but, on Napoleon’s escape from Elba, John returned to Brazil, which he made a united kingdom with Portugal. On March 20, 1816, his mother died, and he became king.
His annexation of Montevideo led to a conflict with Spain, and his stay in Brazil made the Portuguese impatient for reform. In 1820 the radical revolution in Spain spread to Portugal, and he finally agreed to leave Brazil and to sanction a liberal constitution, leaving his heir Peter (Pedro) in Rio de Janeiro. He accepted radical reform limiting his powers, but the liberals precipitated the separation of Brazil, of which his son was declared emperor. When the French intervened to suppress radicalism in Spain (1823), the Portuguese radicals were discredited and overthrown. John VI was restored to his authority but promised a constitution. The absolutists supported his queen, Carlota Joaquina, and made their son Michael (Miguel) commander-in-chief. John attempted to steer a middle course, separating from his wife and sending Michael into exile.
John then negotiated with Peter in Brazil, using the services of a British diplomat, Sir Charles Stuart. He reluctantly accepted the political separation of Brazil in 1825, dying soon after. He supported his favourite daughter, Maria Isabel, as regent, pending the decision of Peter, who attempted to resolve the dynastic and political problem by abdicating the crown of Portugal in favour of his daughter, Maria II, and bestowing his own constitution on Portugal.
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91860ec70f60be04b662cac61daf37a1 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-von-Neumann/World-War-II | World War II | World War II
In late 1943 von Neumann began work on the Manhattan Project at the invitation of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Von Neumann was an expert in the nonlinear physics of hydrodynamics and shock waves, an expertise that he had already applied to chemical explosives in the British war effort. At Los Alamos, New Mexico, von Neumann worked on Seth Neddermeyer’s implosion design for an atomic bomb. This called for a hollow sphere containing fissionable plutonium to be symmetrically imploded in order to drive the plutonium into a critical mass at the centre. The implosion had to be so symmetrical that it was compared to crushing a beer can without splattering any beer. Adapting an idea proposed by James Tuck, von Neumann calculated that a “lens” of faster- and slower-burning chemical explosives could achieve the needed degree of symmetry. The Fat Man atomic bomb, dropped on the Japanese port of Nagasaki, used this design. Von Neumann participated in the selection of a Japanese target, arguing against bombing the Imperial Palace, Tokyo.
Overlapping with this work was von Neumann’s magnum opus of applied math, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944), cowritten with Princeton economist Oskar Morgenstern. Game theory had been orphaned since the 1928 publication of “Theory of Parlor Games,” with neither von Neumann nor anyone else significantly developing it. The collaboration with Morgernstern burgeoned to 641 pages, the authors arguing for game theory as the “Newtonian science” underlying economic decisions. The book created a vogue for game theory among economists that has partly subsided. The theory has also had broad influence in fields ranging from evolutionary biology to defense planning.
In the postwar years, von Neumann spent increasing time as a consultant to government and industry. Starting in 1944, he contributed important ideas to the U.S. Army’s hard-wired ENIAC computer, designed by J. Presper Eckert, Jr., and John W. Mauchly. Most important, von Neumann modified ENIAC to run as a stored-program machine. He then lobbied to build an improved computer at the Institute for Advanced Study. The IAS machine, which began operating in 1951, used binary arithmetic—ENIAC had used decimal numbers—and shared the same memory for code and data, a design that greatly facilitated the “conditional loops” at the heart of all subsequent coding. Von Neumann’s publications on computer design (1945–51) created friction with Eckert and Mauchly, who sought to patent their contributions, and led to the independent construction of similar machines around the world. This established the merit of a single-processor, stored-program computer—the widespread architecture now known as a von Neumann machine. See also computer: Von Neumann’s “Preliminary Discussion” and BTW: Computer patent wars.
Another important consultancy was at the RAND Corporation, a think tank charged with planning nuclear strategy for the U.S. Air Force. Von Neumann insisted on the value of game-theoretic thinking in defense policy. He supported development of the hydrogen bomb and was reported to have advocated a preventive nuclear strike to destroy the Soviet Union’s nascent nuclear capability circa 1950. Despite his hawkish stance, von Neumann defended Oppenheimer against attacks on his patriotism and warned Edward Teller that his Livermore Laboratory (now the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) cofounders were “too reactionary.” From 1954 until 1956, von Neumann served as a member of the Atomic Energy Commission and was an architect of the policy of nuclear deterrence developed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration.
In his last years, von Neumann puzzled over the question of whether a machine could reproduce itself. Using an abstract model (a cellular automata), von Neumann outlined how a machine could reproduce itself from simple components. Key to this demonstration is that the machine reads its own “genetic” code, interpreting it first as instructions for constructing the machine exclusive of the code and second as data. In the second phase, the machine copies its code in order to create a completely “fertile” new machine. Conceptually, this work anticipated later discoveries in genetics.
Von Neumann was diagnosed with bone cancer in 1955. He continued to work even as his health deteriorated rapidly. In 1956 he received the Enrico Fermi Award. A lifelong agnostic, shortly before his death he converted to Roman Catholicism.
Economist Paul Samuelson judged von Neumann “a genius (if that 18th century word still has a meaning)—a man so smart he saw through himself.” Von Neumann was part of a serial exodus of Hungarians who fled to Germany and then to America, forging remarkable careers in the sciences. His friend Stanislaw Ulam recalled von Neumann attributing this Hungarian phenomenon to “a subconscious feeling of extreme insecurity in individuals, and the necessity of producing the unusual or facing extinction.” Von Neumann’s shift to applied mathematics after the midpoint of his career mystified colleagues, who felt that a genius of his calibre should concern himself with “pure” mathematics. In an essay written for James Newman’s The World of Mathematics (1956), von Neumann made an eloquent defense of applied mathematics. He praised the invigorating influence of “some underlying empirical, worldly motif” in mathematics, warning that “at a great distance from its empirical source, or after much abstract inbreeding, a mathematical subject is in danger of degeneration.” With his pivotal work on quantum theory, the atomic bomb, and the computer, von Neumann likely exerted a greater influence on the modern world than any other mathematician of the 20th century.
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8230b84743fd01fbb51ef2f7a53a61ca | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-W-Davis | John W. Davis | John W. Davis
John W. Davis, in full John William Davis, (born April 13, 1873, Clarksburg, W.Va., U.S.—died March 24, 1955, Charleston, S.C.), conservative Democratic politician who was his party’s unsuccessful candidate for the presidency of the United States in 1924.
Davis was admitted to the Virginia bar in 1895 but returned to his birthplace two years later. In 1899 he was elected to the West Virginia House of Delegates, and in 1910 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. From 1913 to 1918 he served as solicitor general of the United States, and he was one of Pres. Woodrow Wilson’s advisers at the Paris Peace Conference following World War I (1919). He also served as ambassador to Great Britain (1918–21), after which he accepted a partnership in a New York law firm.
At the Democratic National Convention of 1924, neither the supporters of New York Gov. Alfred E. Smith nor those of the more traditional William G. McAdoo would yield their votes in order to settle on a presidential candidate. After 102 ballots the party compromised by choosing Davis, who went down to overwhelming defeat that fall before Republican Calvin Coolidge.
Returning to private law practice, Davis appeared in many cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. The capstone of his career was his victory in 1952 when the Supreme Court ruled that Pres. Harry S. Truman had exceeded his constitutional powers in seizing control of the nation’s steel mills.
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0db0e4a0b245f36935d3d5e7a9f7d8df | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Waller | John Waller | John Waller
…that of American medical historian John Waller, who laid out in several papers his reasons for believing that the dancing plague was a form of mass psychogenic disorder. Such outbreaks take place under circumstances of extreme stress and generally take form based on local fears. In the case of the…
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20c65e99d1f3abb0ea2af93e42278d80 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Weaver | John Weaver | John Weaver
John Weaver, (baptized July 21, 1673, Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England—died September 24, 1760, Shrewsbury), dancer, ballet master, choreographer, and theorist known as the father of English pantomime.
Like his father, a dance teacher at Shrewsbury, Weaver began his career as a dance master in the town. In 1700 he went to London, where he became a specialist in comic roles. In his initial choreographic effort, The Tavern Bilkers (1702), a burlesque and the first English pantomime ballet, he used Italian commedia dell’arte characters such as Harlequin and Scaramouche. At the time, dance was generally considered a form of amusement, but Weaver viewed dance as more than entertainment. In his outstanding serious work The Loves of Mars and Venus (1717) he combined an interest in classical literature with the drama that characterized Italian pantomime and English theatre. The story was told through gesture and movement without spoken or sung explanation. Because of the experimental nature of the ballet, its libretto appeared concurrently; it was the first formal libretto published for a dance drama.
Weaver continued to explore ancient mythology and the narrative potential of dance in his subsequent ballets, such as Orpheus and Eurydice (1718) and The Judgement of Paris (1733). Because of commercial pressures and changing tastes, Weaver’s later productions did not maintain a purist approach to movement as a means of expression. Instead, song and speech were incorporated, albeit to a limited extent. Because his best productions featured plots and acting instead of the then-popular displays of technical virtuosity, Weaver was an important precursor of Jean-Georges Noverre and Gasparo Angiolini, innovative choreographers who, later in the 18th century, would demand unity of plot, choreography, and decor in their ballets d’action.
Weaver’s writings on dance are of major significance. His Orchesography (1706) was the first English version of the French choreographer Raoul-Auger Feuillet’s Chorégraphie. The work included the most widely adopted dance notation system of the period. Its introduction to an English-speaking audience enabled more widespread communication of dance compositions and promoted a uniform set of standards in dance throughout England. A Small Treatise of Time and Cadence in Dancing (1706) was an expansion of the musical section in Orchesography. In An Essay Towards an History of Dancing (1712) Weaver drew from diverse sources to document the history of dance from its ancient traditions to the 18th century and argued for dance’s importance as a means of expression and a sign of social accomplishment. Weaver also wrote about the physical aspects of dance in Anatomical and Mechanical Lectures upon Dancing (1721), in which he emphasized the need to understand human anatomy in order to use the body as a tool of expression. Weaver’s contributions helped to establish dance in England as a narrative form and a respected method of artistic expression.
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bee7b1e43f51d9d19d4f066292b2cf8c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Wesley-Hardin | John Wesley Hardin | John Wesley Hardin
John Wesley Hardin, (born May 26, 1853, Bonham county, Texas, U.S.—died Aug. 19, 1895, El Paso, Texas), most notorious killer and quick-draw gunman of the Texas frontier. He killed at least 21 men in gun duels and ambushes in the period 1868–77.
Reaching adolescence as the defeated South entered the Reconstruction period, Hardin was virulently antiblack and anti-Yankee and, in 1868 at the age of 15, killed his first man, an ex-slave. From then on he led a life of gunslinging, dueling, gambling, and drinking. In the course of his career he outgunned and killed at least eight Union soldiers and four black policemen pursuing him on various murder charges. Finally, in flight from Texas, he was caught in a Pensacola, Fla., train depot and returned to Austin, Texas, for trial in September 1877. He was sentenced to 25 years at hard labour in the state prison at Huntsville. In 1894 he was pardoned and retired to a peaceful life in Gonzales, Texas, with his three children (the wife whom he married in 1872 had died while he was in prison). He married again but then abandoned his wife and moved on to El Paso, where he began a life of dissipation and thievery. On Aug. 19, 1895, while standing at the bar of the Acme Saloon, he was shot in the back of the head by John Selman, Sr., an El Paso policeman and thief, with whom he had had a long feud. Subsequently tried, Selman was acquitted of murder.
Hardin’s career and exploits were self-advertised in an autobiography published posthumously, The Life of John Wesley Hardin as Written by Himself (1896).
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09d82291c12065a54f77883fc704de6e | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Westlake | John Westlake | John Westlake
John Westlake, (born Feb. 4, 1828, Lostwithiel, Cornwall, Eng.—died April 14, 1913, London), English lawyer and social reformer who was influential in the field of law dealing with the resolution of problems between persons living in different legal jurisdictions (private international law, or conflict of laws).
Trained as an equity and conveyance lawyer, Westlake helped establish the Working Men’s College, London, in 1854 and was one of the founders of the Institut de Droit International (Institute of International Law) in 1873. He was a Liberal member of Parliament (1885–86) and Whewell professor of international law at the University of Cambridge (1888–1908). Among the social reforms for which he fought was woman suffrage; he also worked actively for the restoration of the constitution of Finland (1899–1900).
Westlake’s Treatise on Private International Law (1858) was a pioneering work in the field as practiced in England, and it exercised profound influence on numerous subsequent judicial decisions. His other works include International Law (part 1, Peace, 1904; part 2, War, 1907). His Collected Papers were published in 1914.
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ee8b62cacaeaef8bba12381d3f193fa9 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Wetton | John Wetton | John Wetton
… (King Crimson and ELP), and John Wetton (King Crimson, U.K., and Asia). Some of the experimental rock by such American and British artists as Laurie Anderson, David Bowie, Brian Eno, the Velvet Underground, and Frank Zappa is also often categorized as art rock.
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1d487893e07a2ec7238b3408392e14e8 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Wheelock | John Wheelock | John Wheelock
…of a religious controversy, removed John Wheelock as college president in 1815. In response, the New Hampshire legislature passed an act amending the charter and establishing a board of overseers to replace the trustees. The trustees then sued William H. Woodward, college secretary and ally of Wheelock, but lost in…
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20e0f594cd98eb06216b993476a9f187 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Wildman | Sir John Wildman | Sir John Wildman
Sir John Wildman, (born c. 1621–23—died June 4, 1693), English agitator and Leveler associate who outlasted vicissitudes under three British kings and two protectors.
Wildman was of obscure ancestry. Educated at Cambridge, he first came into prominence in October 1647, when he helped to write the first Agreement of the People. These expressed the political program of the democratic republican, or Leveler, section of the army, which opposed all compromise with Charles I. In the debates that took place during 1647 in the general council of the army he defended this program against Henry Ireton and Oliver Cromwell. Afterward he violently attacked these two in Putney Projects and with John Lilburne agitated for the abolition of the monarchy and the House of Lords. He was thereupon imprisoned (January–August 1648). After his release he helped to draw up the second Agreement of the People. He acquiesced in the establishment of the Commonwealth and devoted most of his time to building up a considerable fortune by land speculation.
In 1654 he was returned to the first Protectorate Parliament, but his election was disallowed. Thereupon he began to conspire with malcontent army officers for a rising against Cromwell and was again imprisoned (February–July 1655). Thereafter he occupied himself chiefly in trying vainly to organize a Leveler and Royalist rising with Spanish aid and to get Cromwell assassinated.
After the restoration of Charles II, Wildman obtained great influence in the post office, but was again imprisoned (November 1661) for six years on suspicion of using it as a centre for republican plotting. He owed his release to the Duke of Buckingham, with whom he had intrigued before the Restoration and whom he continued to support. He was again imprisoned in 1683 on suspicion of complicity in the Rye House Plot. He took no active part in Monmouth’s rebellion (1685) but afterward fled to Holland.
In 1688 he wrote the influential pamphlet A Memorial of Protestants and, returning to England with William of Orange (William III), became a member of the 1689 Convention Parliament. He was appointed postmaster general in April 1689 but fell once more under suspicion and was dismissed in February 1691. Nevertheless he was knighted in 1692.
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12768d946066ac6e1e95eb39ac29f5cb | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Wilkes/The-Middlesex-elections | The Middlesex elections. | The Middlesex elections.
For the next four years Wilkes pursued a profligate career on the Continent, chiefly in Paris, vainly hoping that a change of ministry would bring in friends who would secure him relief and advancement. The ministries of Rockingham, Chatham, and Grafton all failed him, and in 1767 his disappointments had led to a slashing attack on Chatham in his “Letter to the Duke of Grafton.” Early in 1768, in desperation, his indebtedness making a longer stay in Paris unsafe, he staked all on the hazardous chance of securing reelection to Parliament and determined to stand for London as an opponent of the government in the name of public liberty. The ministers, perhaps unwisely, failed to arrange his immediate arrest. Though defeated in London, he was elected for Middlesex, amid a rising tide of popular antiministerial fervour. At the end of April he gave himself up to the authorities, and early in June his outlawry was reversed on a technical point. Then, waiving his privilege as a member of Parliament, he submitted to sentences totalling two years in jail and fines of £1,000 on the two charges on which he had been convicted in 1764.
Having made this gesture he wanted a pardon and restitution, and he was ready to bully the ministers if he did not get them. In the following months he published inflammatory squibs against their use of the military against rioters, and he attempted to reopen the whole question of his conviction by a petition to the Commons complaining of illegality in the proceedings against him. The ministers once more secured his expulsion from the Commons on Feb. 3, 1769. The popularity in the metropolis of his stand against the government ensured his reelection for Middlesex on February 16, and again on March 16 after a further expulsion, regardless of a Commons’ resolution that he was incapable of being elected to serve in the present Parliament. After a last reelection, on April 13, the House declared his defeated opponent, Henry Luttrell, the duly elected member. Wilkes was finally expelled on inconclusive precedents and by a method undoubtedly fraught with danger to the constitution, since it set aside in the name of parliamentary privilege the right of the elector to choose his representative.
Friends and sympathizers of Wilkes early in 1769 formed the Society for the Defence of the Bill of Rights to uphold his cause and pay his debts. During 1770 it became a political machine at his command. Shut out of Parliament he pursued his ambitions and his vendetta with the ministers in the City of London, becoming an alderman in 1769, sheriff in 1771, and lord mayor in 1774. It may be that expediency rather than principle made him embrace the radical program adopted in 1771 by the Bill of Rights men, which called for shorter Parliaments, a wider franchise, and the abolition of aristocratic “pocket boroughs.” In 1771 he successfully exploited the judicial privileges of the city to prevent the arrest for breach of privilege of printers who reported parliamentary debates. As a magistrate of the city he frequently showed himself to be conscientious and enlightened, though he remained characteristically irresponsible in financial matters.
Reelected for Middlesex in 1774, after pledging himself to the radical program, he spoke on a number of occasions against the American Revolutionary War and once (1776) in support of parliamentary reform. He soon acquired a reputation for insincerity and was reported to have admitted that his speeches against the ministers were solely to retain his popularity in London. From about 1779 his popularity noticeably waned. In 1780, during the Gordon Riots against Roman Catholics, he took firm action to put down the rioters, from whom a few years before he had been glad to receive support. In Middlesex he remained popular, being reelected on his radical platform in 1780 and in 1784. In 1782 the expunging from the Commons journals of the resolution of 1769 against him vindicated his defense of the rights of parliamentary electors. After 1784 the issues that had made him popular were cold, his fire was spent, and in 1790 he found so little support in Middlesex that he declined to fight the election. He died in London in 1797.
Wilkes was extremely ugly, with a hideous squint, but had a charm that carried all before it. He boasted that it “took him only half an hour to talk away his face” and would declare that “a month’s start of his rival on account of his face” would secure him the conquest in any love affair. He had a gift for the bon mot: once during his fight with George III’s government, when invited to make up a table at cards, he replied: “Do not ask me, for I am so ignorant that I cannot tell the difference between a king and a knave.” Sandwich’s laughing assertion that Wilkes would die either of the pox or on the gallows brought the lightning response: “That depends, my lord, whether I embrace your mistress or your principles.” When one of his city associates lost patience and declared in a rage, “I’ll be your butt no longer”—“With all my heart,” said Wilkes, “I never like an empty one.” Loaded often with malice, his jokes told against his enemies but also lost him friends. As an opposition journalist and pamphleteer he was hard-hitting and incisive, but he lacked either voice or talent for debate in the House of Commons. His real achievement lay in extending the liberties of the press. His challenge led to the court findings that general warrants as hitherto used by government against the press were illegal, and he effectively destroyed the power of the Houses of Parliament to exact retribution for the reporting of parliamentary debates.
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cd16ea13da89fc7f7f2a5fd6cd0d55bf | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Wilkins | John Wilkins | John Wilkins
…first important exponent in Bishop John Wilkins, whose Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language was published in 1668. A plan of this sort was carried out by Peter Mark Roget with his Thesaurus, published in 1852 and many times reprinted and reedited. Although philosophically oriented, Roget’s work…
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f28dd23ea9c247d64cb74ba3c581ae70 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Wilkinson | John Wilkinson | John Wilkinson
John Wilkinson, (born 1728, Clifton, Cumberland, Eng.—died July 14, 1808, Bradley, Staffordshire), British industrialist known as “the great Staffordshire ironmaster” who found new applications for iron and who devised a boring machine essential to the success of James Watt’s steam engine.
At the age of 20 Wilkinson moved to Staffordshire and built Bilston’s first iron furnace. It was at his father’s factory at Bersham, Denbigh, Wales, that he constructed his new machine (1775) that could bore engine cylinders and cannon barrels with unequaled accuracy. Its precision enabled Watt to perfect his steam engine. Wilkinson, in turn, used the first steam engine built by Watt and James Moulton to drive a large air pump in his large-scale manufacture of wrought iron at Broseley, Shropshire.
Another Wilkinson innovation (1787) was an iron-hulled barge—a sensation at the time—to transport the heavy ordnance he was manufacturing for the government. Wilkinson taught the French how to bore cannon from solid castings; and he cast all the tubes, cylinders, and ironwork required for the Paris waterworks. Fittingly, he was buried in a cast-iron coffin of his own design.
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74b9f61cf33873fd59514090768977d4 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-William-Dawson | Sir John William Dawson | Sir John William Dawson
Sir John William Dawson, (born Oct. 30, 1820, Pictou, Nova Scotia [now in Canada]—died Nov. 20, 1899, Montreal, Que., Can.), Canadian geologist who made numerous contributions to paleobotany and extended the knowledge of Canadian geology.
During his term as superintendent of education for Nova Scotia (1850–53), Dawson studied the geology of all parts of the province, making a special investigation of the fossil forests of the coal-bearing strata. In the same year that he published the results of his studies in Acadian Geology (1855), he became professor of geology and principal of McGill University, Montreal. During the following 38 years he transformed McGill from an understaffed, insignificant school into a progressive university with a worldwide reputation. In addition, he maintained a rapid pace of scientific writing, averaging more than 10 papers a year, and he helped found the Montreal Normal School, serving as its principal for 13 years.
In 1859 he announced his discovery of the then-earliest-known land plant, Psilophyton, which he found in Devonian strata (dating from 408 to 360 million years ago). In Air Breathers of the Coal Period (1863) he described newly discovered fossil animals. Dawson was knighted in 1884.
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6d806b2b1095de40a1f584ef65b285b9 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Williams-English-bishop | John Williams | John Williams
His lifelong conflict with John Williams, later bishop of Lincoln and archbishop of York, began when both sought advancement through the patronage of Charles’s favourite, the Duke of Buckingham. During Buckingham’s years of power, Laud was his chaplain and confidant, and he established a dominant voice in church policies…
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0b071860da3edd6f26c0844129386124 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Willis | John Willis | John Willis
…important inventors of shorthand systems: John Willis, who is considered to be the father of modern shorthand; Thomas Shelton, whose system was used by Samuel Pepys to write his famous diary; Jeremiah Rich, who popularized the art by publishing not only his system but also the Psalms and the New…
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2167d939dfa916d15d693c65fdef32de | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Wilmot-2nd-earl-of-Rochester | John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester | John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester
John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester, (born April 1, 1647, Ditchley Manor House, Oxfordshire, Eng.—died July 26, 1680, Woodstock, Eng.), court wit and poet who helped establish English satiric poetry.
Wilmot succeeded his father to the earldom in 1658, and he received his M.A. at Oxford in 1661. Charles II, probably out of gratitude to the 1st earl, who had helped him to escape after the Battle of Worcester (1651), gave the young earl an annual pension and appointed Sir Andrew Balfour, a Scottish physician, as his tutor. They travelled on the Continent for three years until 1664.
On his return, as a leader of the court wits, Rochester became known as one of the wildest debauchees at the Restoration court, the hero of numerous escapades, and the lover of various mistresses. Among them was the actress Elizabeth Barry, whom he is said to have trained for the stage, and an heiress, Elizabeth Malet. He volunteered for the navy and served with distinction in the war against the Dutch (1665–67). In 1667 he married Elizabeth Malet and was appointed a gentleman of the bedchamber to the king. In 1673 John Dryden dedicated to Rochester his comedy Marriage A-la-Mode in complimentary terms, acknowledging his help in writing it.
Rochester is generally considered to be the most considerable poet and the most learned among the Restoration wits. A few of his love songs have passionate intensity; many are bold and frankly erotic celebrations of the pleasures of the flesh. He is also one of the most original and powerful of English satirists. His “History of Insipids” (1676) is a devastating attack on the government of Charles II, and his “Maim’d Debauchee” has been described as “a masterpiece of heroic irony.” A Satyr Against Mankind (1675) anticipates Swift in its scathing denunciation of rationalism and optimism and in the contrast it draws between human perfidy and folly and the instinctive wisdom of the animal world.
In 1674 Rochester was appointed ranger of Woodstock Forest, where much of his later poetry was written. His health was declining, and his thoughts were turning to serious matters. His correspondence (dated 1679–80) with the Deist Charles Blount shows a keen interest in philosophy and religion, further stimulated by his friendship with Gilbert Burnet, later bishop of Salisbury. Burnet recorded their religious discussions in Some Passages of the Life and Death of John, Earl of Rochester (1680). In 1680 he became seriously ill and experienced a religious conversion, followed by a recantation of his past; he ordered “all his profane and lewd writings” burned.
His single dramatic work, the posthumous Valentinian (1685), an attempt to rehandle a tragedy of John Fletcher’s, contains two of his finest lyrics. His letters to his wife and to his friend Henry Savile are among the best of the period and show an admirable mastery of easy, colloquial prose.
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b3a5db1f71c997f4375487b71c4b6add | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Wilson-Croker | John Wilson Croker | John Wilson Croker
John Wilson Croker, (born Dec. 20, 1780, Galway, Ire.—died Aug. 10, 1857, Hampton, Middlesex, Eng.), British politician and writer noted for his critical severity as a reviewer and for his rigid Tory principles.
After graduating from Trinity College, Dublin, and studying law at Lincoln’s Inn, London, Croker was called to the Irish bar in 1802. He entered Parliament in 1807 and from 1810 to 1830 was secretary of the Admiralty during the long Tory predominance. From the first he had the backing of Arthur Wellesley, lst Duke of Wellingson, and the friendship continued between them until the duke’s death. Strongly opposed to the Reform Bill of 1832, Croker resigned from Parliament when it was passed (though he continued thereafter his close contacts with Tory leaders). From about this period there began the lifelong antagonism between Croker and Lord Macaulay, a major champion of the Reform Bill and Whiggism.
From 1831 to 1854 Croker was one of the chief writers for the Quarterly Review, to which he contributed about 270 articles on a variety of subjects. His literary tastes were largely those of the 18th century, as may be seen from his severe criticism of John Keats’s Endymion, Alfred Tennyson’s Poems of 1832, and of course the first two volumes of Macaulay’s History of England (1849). For some years before his death he accumulated material for an annotated edition of Alexander Pope’s works; this passed to Whitwell Elwin, who began the edition later completed by W.J. Courthope. Croker also edited the collected letters or memoirs of various 18th-century figures.
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b386deb951793ecc6f9191b6d5f6c56e | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Winthrop-American-mathematician | John Winthrop | John Winthrop
…the American mathematician and astronomer John Winthrop, following his experience of the “Boston” earthquake of 1755, that the ground shaking was due to a disturbance propagated like sound through the air.)
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6d19d7f1623213d944a82554a7ec8674 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Withals | John Withals | John Withals
…appeared the first edition by John Withals of A Short Dictionary for Young Beginners, which gained greater circulation (to judge by the frequency of editions) than any other book of its kind. Many other lexicographers contributed to the development of dictionaries. Certain dictionaries were more ambitious and included a number…
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984f93d59d5f5bb21c23c94a21810379 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Wolfe | John Wolfe | John Wolfe
…abortive revolt was led by John Wolfe, who maintained his right to print whatever he pleased. Wolfe was twice imprisoned, but he was finally bought off by admission to the Stationers’ Company. In 1584 to still the discontent, some of the rich patentees surrendered a number of copies to the…
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def137c82ecb6d08790e21746011e7b3 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Woo | John Woo | John Woo
John Woo, Chinese Wu Yusen, (born May 1 or September 23, 1946?, Guangzhou, China), Chinese film director noted for action movies that combine copious stylized violence with lyrical melodramatic depictions of male bonding.
Woo was born in China, though the exact date of his birth is uncertain. In 1950 Woo and his family immigrated to Hong Kong, where they lived in a crime-ridden slum. To escape his surroundings, Woo often went to either the local Chinese Christian church or a movie theatre. He was particularly fond of American musicals and later the films of Sergio Leone, Kurosawa Akira, Sam Peckinpah, and Jean-Pierre Melville.
In 1969 Woo became a script supervisor at Cathay Film Company, and around that time he also made several experimental short films. Moving to Shaw Brothers in 1971, he became assistant to the prominent martial-arts film director Chang Cheh. Chang’s films, with their bloody violence and emphasis on male bonding, were a significant influence on Woo.
The first feature film directed by Woo, Tiehan rouqing (The Young Dragons), was completed in 1973 but not released until 1975 because of its violent content. In 1973 Woo became a contract director with the Golden Harvest studio, for which he made a popular Cantonese opera, Dinü hua (1976; Princess Chang Ping), and Shaolin men (1976; The Hand of Death), which gave actor Jackie Chan one of his first major roles. Faqian han (1977; Money Crazy) established Woo as a director of slapstick comedies. Even after Woo left Golden Harvest in 1983 because he had grown tired of the genre, his new studio, Cinema City, compelled him to make two more comedies in Hong Kong.
In 1986, aided by producer-director Tsui Hark (Xu Wenguang), Woo made the gangster film Yingxiong bense (A Better Tomorrow). A huge box-office success, it initiated a series of action films that won Woo international acclaim for their unprecedented mixture of expressive slow motion, nostalgia for lost codes of honour, Christian symbolism, melodramatic emotions, and hyperbolic violence. Chow Yun-Fat (Zhou Runfa) became one of Hong Kong’s most popular actors by playing a character unique to Woo’s work—a chivalrous mythic hero suited to a Chang Cheh film but exuding the 20th-century cool of Humphrey Bogart. Woo and Chow collaborated on a sequel, Yingxiong bense II (1987; A Better Tomorrow II); Diexue shangxiong (1989; The Killer), in which hit man Chow tries to do one last job to restore the sight of a singer he accidentally blinded; Zongheng sihai (1991; Once a Thief), a caper comedy set partly on the French Riviera; and Lat sau san taam (1992; Hard Boiled), in which a police inspector (Chow) and an undercover cop fight arms smugglers. During this period, Woo also made Diexue jietou (1990; Bullet in the Head), about friendships torn apart by greed and the horror of the Vietnam War.
Woo had some initial difficulties adjusting to Hollywood filmmaking when he began working in the United States in 1993. His first American film, Hard Target (1993), was submitted to the ratings board of the Motion Picture Association of America seven times before it received a commercially acceptable R rating. His next film, Broken Arrow (1996), about stolen nuclear weapons, was his first with a major American star, John Travolta. Face/Off (1997), which starred Travolta and Nicolas Cage as a federal agent and a terrorist, respectively, who switch faces, was a critical and commercial success. Mission: Impossible II (2000) was an even greater box-office hit, having grossed more than $215 million in the U.S. Windtalkers (2002), a portrayal of Navajo code talkers during World War II starring Cage, and Paycheck (2003), a science-fiction thriller, were less successful.
Dissatisfied with Hollywood, Woo went to China to make a two-part production, Chibi (2008; Red Cliff) and Chibi II (2009; Red Cliff II), which, with a budget of $80 million, was the most expensive Chinese-language production to date. A historical epic set during the unstable ancient period of the Three Kingdoms, it balances tough action scenes with convincing characters. The two parts of Red Cliff were a box-office success, grossing more than $200 million worldwide. In 2010 Woo codirected with Su Chao-Bin (Su Zhaobin) another film set in ancient China, Jianyu Jianghu (Reign of Assassins). That same year he was honoured with a Golden Lion lifetime achievement award from the Venice Film Festival.
Woo turned to romantic drama with The Crossing (2014) and The Crossing 2 (2015). The two-part historical epic culminated in the 1949 sinking of the Taiping, a ship that transported individuals fleeing communist rule at the end of the Chinese Civil War. Woo later returned to action movies with the self-referential cop thriller Zhuibu (2017; Manhunt).
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e18a07ec2aa118373b1c50a9145fb536 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Wood-English-potter | John Wood | John Wood
…in partnership with his brother John (1746–97), but in 1787 John started his own pottery at Brownhills; 10 years later he was murdered by a rejected suitor for his daughter’s hand. Ralph Wood III (1781–1801) continued the firm after his father’s death.
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480afac78a286aa88c972d270579369b | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Wood-the-Younger | John Wood the Younger | John Wood the Younger
John Wood the Younger , (born Feb. 25, 1728, Bath, Somerset, Eng.—died June 18, 1782, Batheaston, Somerset), British architect whose work at Bath represents the culmination of the Palladian tradition initiated there by his father, John Wood the Elder. Bath is one of the most celebrated achievements in comprehensive town design.
The younger Wood apparently served as assistant to his father, being entrusted with completion of the elder Wood’s design for the Exchange, Liverpool (1748–55). Upon his father’s death in 1754, Wood became Bath’s principal architect. He completed the work on the Circus, after his father’s design, and planned the Royal Crescent (1767–75), the latter being an enormous ellipse of 30 attached townhouses facing a broad park. The unified facade of the imposing structure conveys a palatial effect; it was the first such design in English town architecture and was widely imitated. A well-known individual structure by Wood at Bath is the Assembly Rooms (1769–71), with great two-story interiors containing screens of columns.
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09346fa2a88fb203f14c5e55124bcc13 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Wooden | John Wooden | John Wooden
John Wooden, in full John Robert Wooden, byname Wizard of Westwood, (born October 14, 1910, Hall, Indiana, U.S.—died June 4, 2010, Los Angeles, California), American basketball coach who directed teams of the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) to 10 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) championships in 12 seasons (1964–65, 1967–73, 1975). Several of his UCLA players became professional basketball stars, notably Lew Alcindor (afterward Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), Bill Walton, and Gail Goodrich.
At Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, Wooden, a guard, gained All-America honours as a basketball player for three seasons (1930–32) and won a Western Conference (Big Ten) medal for athletic and scholastic excellence. He coached high school basketball in Kentucky and Indiana before entering the U.S. Navy in 1943. After World War II, in which he served as a physical education instructor, he was head basketball coach and athletic director at Indiana State Teachers’ College (now Indiana State University) in Terre Haute from 1946 to 1948. He was appointed head coach at UCLA in 1948 and retired in 1975, with a record of 620 wins and 147 losses, for an .808 percentage. His 40-year record was 885 wins and 203 losses, a percentage of .813. Among Wooden’s most notable accomplishments at UCLA are two record-winning streaks: 88 consecutive games (over the course of four seasons) and 38 consecutive NCAA tournament games. He was named the NCAA’s College Basketball Coach of the Year on six occasions (1964, 1967, 1969–70, 1972–73). Wooden was the first person to be elected to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame as both a player and a coach. The John R. Wooden Award annually honours the nation’s outstanding player as chosen by a media poll.
Wooden, with Steve Jamison, wrote two books on lessons from his experience as a coach: Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections on and off the Court (1997) and Wooden on Leadership (2005).
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ad43d1eab7d607d3ed8dcd5620169548 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Woolman | John Woolman | John Woolman
John Woolman, (born October 19, 1720, Ancocas, New Jersey [U.S.]—died October 7, 1772, York, Yorkshire, England), British-American Quaker leader and abolitionist whose Journal is recognized as one of the classic records of the spiritual inner life.
Until he was 21 Woolman worked for his father, a Quaker farmer. He then moved to Mount Holly, New Jersey, to enter trade. At that time he made his first appearance as a preacher of Quaker doctrine, exercising his ministry without financial remuneration, in keeping with his religion’s practice. In 1743 he took up tailoring, which afforded a modest income, augmented at times by other work. From 1743 he made frequent and often arduous preaching journeys, visiting, among other places, Maryland’s east shore, where he carried his message against slaveholding, and the Rhode Island coast, where he brought his antislavery doctrine to the attention of shipowners. In Indian villages of the Pennsylvania frontier, he supported Moravian missionary attempts, sought to curtail the sale of rum to the Indians, and worked for a more just Indian land policy.
Woolman maintained a strict manner of life, making his trips on foot whenever possible, wearing undyed garments, and abstaining from the use of any product connected with the slave trade. He was successful in getting Quaker communities to go on record against slavery and in persuading many individuals to free their slaves.
Woolman’s Journal, published in 1774, was begun in his 36th year and continued until his death; it is a major document of his religious experience, written in a style distinguished by purity and simplicity of expression. He also wrote several other works expressing his spiritual and antislavery convictions. All his writings were collected in The Works of John Woolman (1774). The most complete edition of the Journal is that of A.M. Gummere (1922).
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b475ba63733dd46a6e9ded2f29844609 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Wright-American-missionary | John Wright | John Wright
…site was settled (1726) by John Wright, a Quaker missionary to the Native Americans, who bought land and became a ferryman and judge. Known as Wright’s Ferry, the town was laid out in 1788 by Wright’s grandson, Samuel, and was named Columbia shortly thereafter. It was one of the places…
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1d334ff37ae44dba21b0f408cd831f1a | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Wright-English-conspirator | John Wright | John Wright
Winter, Thomas Percy, John Wright, and Guy Fawkes—were zealous Roman Catholics angered by James’s refusal to grant more religious toleration to Catholics. They apparently hoped that the confusion that would follow the murder of the king, his ministers, and the members of Parliament would provide an opportunity for…
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1744de14b58e94fcce51ba7a5ba31d73 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Wyatt | John Wyatt | John Wyatt
John Wyatt, (born April 1700, Thickbroom?, Staffordshire, Eng.—died Nov. 29, 1766, Birmingham, Warwickshire), English mechanic who contributed to the development of power spinning.
Wyatt began his career as a carpenter in the village of Thickbroom, near Lichfield, but by 1730, with financial support from the Birmingham inventor Lewis Paul, he was working on machines for boring metal and making files. The spinning machine, first patented in 1738, was almost certainly Paul’s idea, with Wyatt providing the technical skill. The principle was to draw the fibres through sets of rollers turning at different speeds. It was successful for a time but was superseded by Richard Arkwright’s water frame in the 1770s. Wyatt later worked at Matthew Boulton’s Soho foundry.
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9121b32e67e3ddf9c88e37e58ff1c02f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Wycliffe/Translation-of-the-Bible | Translation of the Bible | Translation of the Bible
From August 1380 until the summer of 1381, Wycliffe was in his rooms at Queen’s College, busy with his plans for a translation of the Bible and an order of Poor Preachers who would take Bible truth to the people. (His mind was too much shaped by Scholasticism, the medieval system of learning, to do the latter himself.) There were two translations made at his instigation, one more idiomatic than the other. The most likely explanation of his considerable toil is that the Bible became a necessity in his theories to replace the discredited authority of the church and to make the law of God available to every person who could read. This, allied to a belief in the effectiveness of preaching, led to the formation of the Lollards. The precise extent to which Wycliffe was involved in the creation of the Lollards is uncertain. What is beyond doubt is that they propagated his controversial views.
In 1381, the year when Wycliffe finally retired to Lutterworth, the discontent of the labouring classes erupted in the Peasants’ Revolt. His social teaching was not a significant cause of the uprising because it was known only to the learned, but there is no doubt where his sympathies lay. He had a constant affection for the deserving poor. The archbishop of Canterbury, Simon of Sudbury, was murdered in the revolt, and his successor, William Courtenay (1347–96), a more vigorous man, moved against Wycliffe. Many of his works were condemned at the synod held at Blackfriars, London, in May 1382; and at Oxford his followers capitulated, and all his writings were banned. That year, Wycliffe suffered his first stroke at Lutterworth; but he continued to write prolifically until he died from a further stroke in December 1384.
It is no wonder that such a controversial figure produced—and still produces—a wide variety of reactions. The monks and friars retaliated, immediately and fiercely, against his denunciations of them, but such criticism grew less as the Reformation approached. Most of Wycliffe’s post-Reformation, Protestant biographers see him as the first Reformer, fighting almost alone the hosts of medieval wickedness. There has now been a reaction to this, and some modern scholars have attacked this view as the delusion of uncritical admirers. The question “Which is the real John Wycliffe?” is almost certainly unanswerable after 600 years.
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80420ceb2baae605ce404049995936fd | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-X | John X | John X
John X, (born, Tossignano, near Imola, Romagna [Italy]—died 929, Rome), pope from 914 to 928. He was archbishop of Ravenna (c. 905–914) when chosen to succeed Pope Lando about March 914.
John approved the severe rule of the newly founded Benedictine order of Cluny. To drive the Saracens (Muslim enemies) from southern Italy, John allied with the Byzantine emperor Constantine IV and King Berengar I of Italy. In August 915, with the Roman senator Theophylactus and Duke Alberic I of Spoleto, John’s forces defeated the Saracens on the Garigliano River. In December 915 he crowned Berengar as Holy Roman emperor. When Berengar was assassinated in 924, John allied with King Hugh of Italy in order to distance himself from Rome’s noble families. This enraged Theophylactus’ daughter, Marozia, herself a powerful Roman senator; she ordered John imprisoned in Castel Sant’Angelo, Rome, where he was probably smothered to death.
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396b33a01a010d788142d8f35d0d71bb | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-XI | John XI | John XI
John XI, (born 910?, Rome [Italy]—died December 935/January 936, Rome), pope from 931 to late 935 or early 936.
He was the son of Marozia (dominant lady of the Roman Crescentii family) perhaps by her reputed lover, Pope Sergius III. John was consecrated in February/March 931. He served his mother’s political ends until 932/933, when his half-brother Alberic II (Marozia’s son by Duke Alberic I of Spoleto), the self-proclaimed prince of Rome, deposed, arrested, and imprisoned her in Castel Sant’Angelo, Rome, and confined John to the Lateran. He remained a prisoner until his death.
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266cb2b30081e1c919da23c6818ea2bb | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-XIII | John XIII | John XIII
John XIII, (born, Rome—died Sept. 6, 972, Rome), pope from 965 to 972.
He was bishop of Narni, Papal States, when chosen pope on Oct. 1, 965, by Emperor Otto I, and as pope he strongly supported Otto’s ecclesiastical and political policies. Although John was a pious and learned man, the Roman nobles opposed Otto’s choice and kidnapped John (December 965). In 966 Otto saved him and took savage vengeance on his enemies. John crowned Otto’s 12-year-old son Otto II as emperor (Christmas 967). Immediately before the Byzantine princess Theophano married Otto II (972), John crowned her as empress. John’s alliance with the imperial family made his pontificate peaceful, and the emperor restored considerable territory to the Papal State.
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01201ab4085502e2430d0700fb59160a | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-XIX | John XIX | John XIX
John XIX, original name Romano, Latin Romanus, (died November/December 1032), pope from 1024 to 1032.
A member of the Tusculani family that followed the powerful Crescentii as rulers of Rome, he was a layman when he succeeded his brother Pope Benedict VIII in April/May 1024; he was accused of obtaining the office through bribery. On Easter 1027 he crowned as Holy Roman emperor the German king Conrad II, who controlled his ecclesiastical affairs except in Rome. Generally considered inept as pope because of his greed, John, according to a contemporary account of questionable reliability, consented to be paid for recognizing the patriarch of Constantinople. A public outcry forced him to withdraw the agreement.
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745db0d8c9691a305bd114e3e47af9bc | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-XV | John XV (or XVI) | John XV (or XVI)
John XV (or XVI), (died March 996, Rome), pope from 985 to 996, who carried out the first solemn canonization in history by papal decree.
His election, August 985, came during one of the darkest periods in papal history, shadowed by the murders of the popes Benedict VI and John XIV by the antipope Boniface VII. Boniface had been the candidate of the powerful Roman Crescentii family, and his sudden death in 985 consequently caused the family a political setback. Crescentius II’s success in swaying John’s election revived that family’s good fortune. John’s pontificate, marked by greed and nepotism, was thus dominated by Crescentius, except during the interpositions of Empress Theophano, the Holy Roman emperor Otto II’s widow. Eventually John appealed to the German king Otto III, later Holy Roman emperor, against Crescentius but died before Otto could intervene. John’s solemn canonization of Bishop St. Ulrich of Augsburg in 993 was the first recorded.
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c6409c1c8fc8e00f5c2470809471436d | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-XVIII | John XVIII (or XIX) | John XVIII (or XIX)
John XVIII (or XIX), original name Fasano, (born, Rome—died June/July 1009, Rome), pope from 1003 to 1009.
Like his predecessor, Pope John XVII, his election was influenced by the Roman patrician John Crescentius III. More independent of the powerful Italian Crescentii family than John XVII, he eventually abdicated for unknown reasons and died shortly thereafter at the monastery of St. Paul Outside the Walls, Rome.
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568674120795a268e418e021d49ad593 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Zoffany | John Zoffany | John Zoffany
John Zoffany, also spelled Johann Zoffani, original name probably Johann Joseph Zauffely, also spelled Zauphaly, (born c. 1733, Frankfurt am Main [Germany]—died Nov. 11, 1810, Strand-on-the-Green, Middlesex, Eng.), German-born portrait painter who in late 18th-century England made his reputation with paintings depicting episodes from contemporary theatre and with portraits and conversation pieces (i.e., paintings of groups of people in their customary surroundings).
Zoffany, after studying in Germany and Italy, went to England about 1758. Following the lead of William Hogarth, he painted scenes from London’s theatrical productions. Notable in this genre are his paintings of the famed actor David Garrick in his many West End successes—e.g., “The Farmer’s Return” (1762). His portraits were popular with George III, who became his patron and for whom he produced “Queen Charlotte with Her Sons, the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York.”
In 1772 Zoffany went to Italy with the king’s financial help and there, during a seven-year stay, executed “The Tribuna of the Uffizi” (1780) for the royal family. This celebrated work shows a group of connoisseurs admiring paintings and sculptures in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. He worked as a portraitist in India from 1783 to 1789, and when he returned to England he painted such notable portraits as “Charles Towneley Among His Marbles” (1790). Zoffany was a founder-member of the Royal Academy (1768). He possessed brilliant technical skills and introduced greater liveliness and personal anecdote into English conversation pieces.
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72d4ab2d88be529556e2ff54dc90881e | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Johnny-Depp | Johnny Depp | Johnny Depp
Johnny Depp, in full John Christopher Depp II, (born June 9, 1963, Owensboro, Kentucky, U.S.), American actor and musician who was known for his eclectic and unconventional film choices. He achieved perhaps his greatest success as Capt. Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean series.
At age 16 Depp dropped out of high school to pursue a music career. His band, the Kids, relocated from Florida, where he spent the majority of his childhood, to Los Angeles. In 1983 Depp married Lori Anne Allison, who worked as a makeup artist while he struggled as a musician. Allison had her friend the actor Nicolas Cage arrange for Depp to audition with director Wes Craven, and Depp made his film debut as a teenager eaten by his own bed in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). He divorced Allison the following year.
Depp’s professional break came in 1987 with the premiere of 21 Jump Street, a television police series that starred Depp as Officer Tom Hanson, a young cop who frequently went undercover in high schools and colleges to catch troubled youths. The show was a hit, though Depp resented his promotion as a teen heartthrob. In 1990 he left the series and appeared in John Waters’s Cry-Baby and Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands, two films by maverick directors that showcased Depp’s range. Scissorhands began a long association between the actor and director that led to Depp’s appearance in several other Burton films, including Ed Wood (1994), Sleepy Hollow (1999), and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005); in the latter film Depp played the reclusive candy baron Willy Wonka. In addition, Depp provided the voice of the unfortunate groom in Burton’s macabre animated tale Corpse Bride (2005).
Depp continued to show his versatility with roles as a 19th-century accountant in Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995) and as an FBI agent who infiltrates the Mafia in Donnie Brasco (1997). In 1998 Depp, a longtime friend and fan of gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, starred in Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a film based on Thompson’s pseudo-autobiographical novel of the same name; Depp later received top billing in another Thompson adaptation, The Rum Diary (2011). He interviewed gonzo artist Ralph Steadman, who illustrated much of Thompson’s work, in the documentary For No Good Reason (2012). Other notable films include Roman Polanski’s The Ninth Gate (1999) and Ted Demme’s Blow (2001).
In 2003 Depp appeared as Capt. Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003). His performance, which was modeled on Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, earned Depp his first Academy Award nomination. He was nominated again the following year for his portrayal of Peter Pan creator James M. Barrie in Finding Neverland (2004). Depp reprised the role of Sparrow in later installments of the Pirates of the Caribbean series: Dead Man’s Chest (2006), At World’s End (2007), On Stranger Tides (2011), and Dead Men Tell No Tales (2017), which were among the highest-grossing films ever. During this time Depp reteamed with Burton for Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), a film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s musical; as the serial killer Sweeney, Depp earned praise for both his acting and his singing, and he received another Oscar nomination.
In Public Enemies (2009) Depp played John Dillinger, a criminal who became legendary for robbing a string of American banks during the Great Depression. Depp later joined Colin Farrell and Jude Law in contributing an alternate portrayal of Heath Ledger’s character to The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009), a conceit engineered to salvage Ledger’s incomplete final performance and made plausible by the fantasy premise of the film.
In 2010 Depp portrayed the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland, Burton’s adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s classic novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Later that year he starred opposite Angelina Jolie in the thriller The Tourist. In the animated western Rango (2011), Depp provided the voice of the title character, a chameleon who becomes the sheriff of a colourful desert town. He then played an 18th-century vampire awakening in the 1970s in Dark Shadows (2012), Burton’s comedic adaptation of the cult-favourite soap opera of the same name. In The Lone Ranger (2013), Depp sported a headdress and war paint as the titular lawman’s laconic Native American sidekick, Tonto.
In 2014 Depp assumed the roles of an artificial-intelligence researcher in the thriller Transcendence, a detective in the horror film Tusk, and a wolf in the cinematic adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s musical fairy tale Into the Woods. In 2015 Depp evinced a talent for the farcical as the title character in the comic spy caper Mortdecai before exuding menace as gangster Whitey Bulger in Black Mass. He reprised his cheerfully loony take on the Mad Hatter in Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016) and later was part of an all-star cast in Murder on the Orient Express (2017), based on Agatha Christie’s 1933 novel. In 2018 Depp lent his voice to the title character in the animated feature Sherlock Gnomes. Later that year he assumed the role of the eponymous dark wizard in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, the second installation of a movie series based on J.K. Rowling’s world of Harry Potter. In Minamata (2020) Depp portrayed photojournalist W. Eugene Smith, who in the early 1970s documented the impact of industrial pollution on the residents of a Japanese village.
Maintaining his early interest in music, Depp played acoustic guitar in the film Chocolat (2000) and on the soundtrack to Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003). His work as a guitarist also appeared on albums by the Pogues and Oasis. While working on The Ninth Gate, he met French actress and singer Vanessa Paradis, with whom he had a long-term relationship (1998–2012) and two children. He then wed the actress Amber Heard in 2015, and their tumultuous marriage became tabloid fodder. Heard notably accused him of physically assaulting her and alleged that he had substance abuse issues. They divorced in 2016, and two years later The Sun, a British newspaper, referred to Depp as a “wife beater.” He sued for libel, and the trial ended in 2020 with the judge ruling against Depp, stating, “I accept that Mr. Depp put [Heard] in fear of her life.”
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9b05eb528a817c8d5632ae01310fb7b6 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Johnny-Hodges | Johnny Hodges | Johnny Hodges
Johnny Hodges, birth name Cornelius Hodges, bynames Jeep and Rabbit, (born July 25, 1906, Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.—died May 11, 1970, New York, New York), American jazz saxophonist who was a featured soloist in Duke Ellington’s orchestra. Renowned for the beauty of his tone and his mastery of ballads, Hodges was among the most influential sax players in the history of jazz.
Initially Hodges was a self-taught musician, playing drums and piano before taking up the soprano saxophone at age 14. He then received instruction from the legendary Sidney Bechet, one of the first important jazz soloists and perhaps Hodges’s only major influence. He worked in Boston and New York during the mid-1920s, playing in bands led by Lloyd Scott, Chick Webb, Bobby Sawyer, Luckey Roberts, and Bechet. He joined Duke Ellington’s orchestra in 1928 and was the band’s most-featured soloist for the next four decades.
Hodges played lead alto in Ellington’s sax section; his melody lines were an important component in the band’s palette of sounds. He was featured on countless Ellington recordings, demonstrating his skill at ballads (“Warm Valley,” “Passion Flower,” “In a Sentimental Mood”) and up-tempo numbers (“Things Ain’t What They Used to Be,” “The Jeep Is Jumpin’”). He projected sensuous elegance through a commanding sound and perfected the use of portamento (or “smearing” in jazz vernacular), in which the instrument glides from note to note in the manner of a slide trombone. His basic style did not change throughout the years, but his considerable technique and harmonic sense ensured that his solos always sounded fresh and contemporary.
Hodges was so closely associated with Ellington that jazz fans were taken by surprise when he left the band in 1951 to form his own combo. Other Ellington veterans such as Lawrence Brown and Sonny Greer, as well as the young John Coltrane, played in Hodges’s band. They had one hit recording, “Castle Rock,” but lasting success proved elusive, and they disbanded in 1955. Hodges rejoined the Ellington orchestra and remained with Ellington until his death, although he continued to engage in side projects and lead occasional recording sessions under his own name.
Hodges’s influence was so pervasive in American jazz that subsequent generations of saxophone players, even those who never heard him play, have emulated his style. He was a true original, about whom Ellington once said: “Johnny Hodges has complete independence of expression. He says what he wants to say on the horn,…in his language, from his perspective.”
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809dda505aca61fded57208082e769d9 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Johnny-Marr | Johnny Marr | Johnny Marr
…musicians, including former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr for several years. Brock, who had once worked as an artists-and-repertoire (A&R) agent for Seattle label Sub Pop Records, founded his own label in 2005, and he devoted much of his energy to signing and promoting emerging artists.
…22, 1959, Manchester, England), guitarist Johnny Marr (original name John Maher; b. October 31, 1963, Manchester), bassist Andy Rourke (b. 1963, Manchester), and drummer Mike Joyce (b. June 1, 1963, Manchester).
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8eb65dd0bfc615f37c7a366781977602 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Johnson-T-U-Aguiyi-Ironsi | Johnson T. U. Aguiyi-Ironsi | Johnson T. U. Aguiyi-Ironsi
…of staff by Major General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi, the new leader. Northern officers staged a countercoup in July 1966, and Gowon emerged as the compromise head of the new government.
Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi, but his plan to abolish the regions and impose a unitary government met with anti-Igbo riots in the north. The military intervention worsened the political situation, as the army itself split along ethnic lines, its officers clashed over power, and the instigators and…
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c103f76d92c9ec3c785bc91c9b4f7510 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jon-Arason | Jón Arason | Jón Arason
Jón Arason, (born 1484, Eyjafjördur, Ice.—died Nov. 7, 1550, Skálholt), poet and last Roman Catholic bishop in Iceland, remembered as a national as well as a religious hero.
The son of poor parents, he rose quickly to eminence in the church and was consecrated bishop of Hólar, the northern diocese of Iceland, in 1522. He administered his diocese prosperously until Christian III of Denmark began to impose Lutheranism on all his subjects. The two Icelandic bishops, Jón in the north and Ögmundr in the south, protested (1537). Ögmundr was deported by the Danes in 1541, but Jón continued his resistance. He captured the Lutheran bishop Marteinn and seized his see (1549–50) but was soon afterward taken by the King’s agents and beheaded with two of his sons. Jón was the author of splendid religious and satirical poetry; he brought the first printing press to Iceland. His life was the subject of novels and plays by later Icelandic writers.
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d5bdd85a99cb183ed14a438bd0ec082f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jon-Corzine | Jon Corzine | Jon Corzine
…defeated the Democratic Party incumbent, Jon S. Corzine, by a comfortable margin. Although a Republican candidate in a staunchly Democratic state, Christie connected with a wide spectrum of voters, in part because he projected the image of a regular middle-class man who could be seen as more approachable than Corzine,…
Jon Corzine appointed him to fill a vacant seat in the U.S. Senate. Menendez won a special election later that year to retain the seat.
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f883cc6187ed809f3ff723bc418ab237 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jon-Gruden | Jon Gruden | Jon Gruden
Jon Gruden, in full Jon David Gruden, (born August 17, 1963, Sandusky, Ohio, U.S.), American gridiron football coach and television broadcaster who led the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to a Super Bowl championship in 2003.
Gruden was raised around football: his father, Jim, was an assistant coach at Indiana University (1973–77) and at the University of Notre Dame (1978–80). Jon played baseball, basketball, and football in high school and then moved on to the University of Dayton, Ohio, where he played quarterback for three years. He began his coaching career as a graduate assistant at the University of Tennessee (1986–87), and he was an offensive assistant for other collegiate football programs before joining the staff of the San Francisco 49ers of the National Football League (NFL) in 1990. In 1991 Gruden returned to the collegiate level at the University of Pittsburgh, but in 1992 the NFL’s Green Bay Packers hired him as their wide receivers coach. Three years later he became the offensive coordinator for the Philadelphia Eagles. Gruden’s rapid ascent up the coaching ladder culminated in 1998, when he was named head coach of the Oakland Raiders.
The animated Gruden became a favourite target for television cameras as he stalked the Raiders’ sideline, and his frequent angry outbursts combined with his still-boyish good looks earned him the nickname “Chucky,” after a devilish, homicidal doll featured in the Child’s Play series of horror movies. In 2000 and 2001 Gruden guided Oakland to division titles, and he compiled a record of 40–28 in his first four years as a head coach. Despite his achievements on the field, Gruden felt that he was underappreciated and underpaid by Raiders’ owner Al Davis, and he let it be known after his contract expired at the end of the 2002 season. At the same time, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers fired coach Tony Dungy, and the two clubs made an unusual trade in February 2002 that saw the Buccaneers obtain Gruden from the Raiders for $8 million and four draft picks.
While some observers questioned the decision of bringing in the offensive-minded Gruden to take over a Buccaneers team known for its dominating defense, the transition was seamless: Tampa Bay won 12 games in Gruden’s first year and advanced to the franchise’s first Super Bowl. In Super Bowl XXXVII, the Buccaneers faced the Raiders, and Gruden guided Tampa Bay to a commanding 48–21 victory. He experienced his first losing seasons as head coach the following two years, but Tampa Bay rebounded in 2005 to win a division title. The Buccaneers lost their first-round play-off game at home that postseason, an ignoble feat they repeated after the 2007 season, which increased criticism of Gruden’s coaching style in the Tampa media. The Buccaneers’ 2008 campaign was an early success, with the team winning 9 of its first 12 games. However, a late-season collapse that saw the Buccaneers lose their final four games—including a home loss to the Raiders in the last week of the season when a play-off berth was on the line—led to Gruden’s firing in January 2009. In May of that year, Gruden was announced as part of the television broadcast team for the program Monday Night Football.
Gruden was the subject of coaching rumours during nearly every off-season of his broadcasting career. He was finally lured back to the sidelines in January 2018 when he was given a 10-year $100 million contract—the longest and richest coaching contract in NFL history—to again become the head coach of the Raiders.
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3d2112c06ba397c2da5f09319603e69b | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jon-Hamm | Jon Hamm | Jon Hamm
Jon Hamm, byname of Jonathan Daniel Hamm, (born March 10, 1971, St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.), American actor who was best known for his work as the mercurial and brilliant adman Don Draper on the television series Mad Men (2007–15). He also found success in film, often harnessing his magnetism to soften complicated characters or for comedic effect.
Hamm had a difficult upbringing. His parents divorced when he was two years of age, and his mother, with whom he lived, died when he was 10. He moved in with his father and grandmother, but she soon died, and during Hamm’s sophomore year at the University of Texas, his father passed away. Unsettled, he dropped out of school and returned to his hometown. He entered the University of Missouri, where he performed in stage productions (as well as in a repertory company during two summers). After Hamm received a B.A. in English (1993), he taught (1993–95) in St. Louis at the exclusive John Burroughs School, which he had earlier attended.
Hamm moved to Hollywood in 1995. In 2000 the actor made both his TV debut (The Hughleys) and his film bow (Space Cowboys). His star began to rise when he reprised his lead role in the Los Angeles play Lipschtick for the film Kissing Jessica Stein (2001), which was written by Jennifer Westfeldt, with whom he became romantically involved. (The pair would separate in 2015.) He spent two years (2002–04) on the TV police procedural The Division, and after the series was canceled, he landed recurring roles in 2006–07 on both the military drama The Unit and the dramedy What About Brian.
Hamm was then cast on Mad Men, portraying the duplicitous Don Draper, a serially adulterous Madison Avenue advertising executive who harbours the secret that he had assumed the identity of a fellow soldier killed in combat. The show premiered in 2007 and was an immediate success with critics and viewers. Hamm earned particular praise, winning two Golden Globe Awards (2008 and 2016) for best performance by an actor in a dramatic role and receiving eight Emmy Award nominations for best actor. He finally won the latter award in 2015, for the final season of the series. Other TV credits included 30 Rock (as Dr. Drew Baird), Children’s Hospital, A Young Doctor’s Notebook, Parks and Recreation, and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. In 2019 he appeared as the archangel Gabriel in the Amazon miniseries Good Omens. Hamm narrated the sports documentary series All or Nothing: The Philadelphia Eagles (2020).
Hamm continued to appear in feature films, notably the crime thriller The Town (2010); Friends with Kids (2011), which featured Westfeldt, who also wrote and directed the romantic comedy; and Million Dollar Arm (2014), a drama in which he portrayed a sports agent. He later was cast as a government spy in the comedy Keeping Up with the Joneses (2016). Hamm’s film credits from 2017 included the action comedy Baby Driver, in which he played a bank robber. The next year he starred in Beirut, portraying Mason Skiles, a former U.S. diplomat mediating a hostage situation in the midst of the Lebanese civil war, and the ensemble comedy Tag, playing a member of a group of friends involved in an epic match of the children’s game. Hamm assumed the role of a salesman staying at a hotel with a storied history in Bad Times at the El Royale (2018). His movies from 2019 included Lucy in the Sky, a drama centring on an astronaut who struggles to adjust to life back on Earth; The Report, a true story about an investigation into the CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation strategies; and Richard Jewell, Clint Eastwood’s biopic about a security guard who was wrongly accused of orchestrating the Atlanta Olympic Games bombing of 1996.
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f4bb312a1c315ccbe2bd9c7d1f638643 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jon-Huntsman-Jr | Jon Huntsman, Jr. | Jon Huntsman, Jr.
Jon Huntsman, Jr., in full Jon Meade Huntsman, Jr., (born March 26, 1960, Palo Alto, California, U.S.), American politician who served as governor of Utah (2005–09) and as U.S. ambassador to China (2009–11) and to Russia (2017–19). He sought the Republican presidential nomination in 2012.
Huntsman was the eldest of nine children in an upper-class Mormon family. He grew up in California and, for a time, near Washington, D.C., when his father, Jon Huntsman, Sr., worked in the administration of U.S. Pres. Richard M. Nixon. In the 1970s the family moved to Utah, where Huntsman, Sr., founded the petrochemical company Huntsman Chemical Corporation (later called Huntsman Corporation), which grew into a multibillion-dollar business. Huntsman, Jr., dropped out of high school a few months shy of graduation to play in a rock band called Wizard (he later earned his GED). In 1978 Huntsman enrolled at the University of Utah.
His academic career was interrupted the following year when he, like many young members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, embarked on a two-year mission. Huntsman undertook his mission in Taiwan, where he became fluent in Mandarin Chinese and Taiwanese Hokkien. He later enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, earning a B.A. in international politics in 1987. In the early 1980s Huntsman worked as a staff assistant in the administration of U.S. Pres. Ronald Reagan. He also held several positions under Pres. George H.W. Bush, notably that of U.S. ambassador to Singapore (1992–93), and was a deputy U.S. trade representative (2001–03) for Pres. George W. Bush.
In 2004 Huntsman made a successful bid for the governorship of Utah. He took office in 2005, and in 2008 he was reelected to the post with more than three-fourths of the vote. During his tenure as governor, Huntsman emerged as a moderate voice on such issues as civil unions for same-sex couples, climate change, and immigration. However, he sided with his party on other issues, notably opposing both abortion and gun control. A fiscal conservative, Huntsman implemented large tax cuts. He also oversaw health care reform and increased education funding. In 2009 Huntsman was nominated by Democratic U.S. Pres. Barack Obama to serve as ambassador to China. After being unanimously confirmed by the Senate, he formally stepped down as governor in August. At the time of his resignation, Huntsman’s approval rating was more than 80 percent.
In January 2011 Huntsman announced that he would be stepping down from his ambassadorship, raising speculation that he would make a bid for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. He officially left the post in April 2011, and two months later he announced his candidacy. However, his campaign struggled amid more-conservative and better-known candidates. In January 2012 Huntsman did not contest the Iowa caucuses—in which he received less than 1 percent of the vote—but instead focused on New Hampshire. In that state’s primary he placed third with some 17 percent. Later that month Huntsman suspended his campaign and endorsed Mitt Romney.
In 2017 U.S. Pres. Donald Trump nominated Huntsman to serve as ambassador to Russia. He was easily confirmed by the Senate in September, and shortly thereafter he was sworn into office. His tenure began as the United States investigated allegations that Russia had meddled in the 2016 presidential election to benefit Trump. Relations between the two countries grew tenser after U.S. intelligence agencies later confirmed Russian interference. In August 2019 Huntsman announced that he was stepping down, and he left the post in October. The following month Huntsman announced that he was running for a third term as governor of Utah. However, he was defeated in the Republican primary in 2020.
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dbfc75349452b82ee45a22e02221a7c4 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jon-Kyl | Jon Kyl | Jon Kyl
Jon Kyl, in full Jon Llewellyn Kyl, (born April 25, 1942, Oakland, Nebraska, U.S.), American politician who served as a Republican congressman from Arizona in the U.S. House of Representatives (1987–95) and in the U.S. Senate (1995–2013; 2018). He was Senate minority whip from 2007 to 2013.
Kyl earned bachelor’s (1964) and law (1966) degrees from the University of Arizona, where he served as president of the Arizona Law Review. After being admitted to the state bar in 1966, he practiced at a Phoenix law firm for the next 20 years before running for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1986. In 1994 he successfully campaigned for a seat in the U.S. Senate.
Early in his career as a senator, Kyl pushed for a constitutional amendment that would require a two-thirds majority in both the House and the Senate before federal taxes could be raised. He also advocated for repealing the estate tax. From the late 1990s Kyl was a vocal opponent of research using stem cells taken from human embryos, and he supported the rights of Medicare recipients to negotiate private contracts with their doctors. In 1998 Kyl and Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein proposed a constitutional amendment in the form of a crime victims’ bill of rights, which Pres. Bill Clinton first supported and later opposed. When Vice Pres. Al Gore championed a very similar amendment during his 2000 presidential campaign, Kyl harshly criticized him for ensuring the earlier amendment’s failure.
In 2006 Kyl voted in favour of a bill to authorize the construction of a 700-mile (1,130-km) fence along the U.S.-Mexico border in order to limit illegal immigration. A year later, however, he angered many of his constituents by compromising with Democratic senators, including Edward M. Kennedy, to support a bill that would provide a path to citizenship and temporary guest-worker status for illegal immigrants in the country. The bill failed in the Senate in a June 2007 vote, though Kyl remained active in efforts to reform immigration. In late 2007 he was elected Senate minority whip. Three years later he voiced his support for a controversial Arizona law that cracked down on illegal immigrants. Kyl retired from the Senate in January 2013 after the completion of his third term in office.
In September 2018 Kyl returned to the Senate, appointed to replace John McCain, who had recently died. A special election was scheduled for 2020, though Kyl indicated that he would not run, and on December 31, 2018, he resigned.
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797cabc7531edf670b9b128144de3371 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jon-Landau-American-record-producer-and-manager | Jon Landau | Jon Landau
…more albums followed, including the Jon Landau-produced Back in the U.S.A. (1970), before the band broke up in 1972. Louder and brasher than the other political bands of their era, the MC5 were extremely influential despite their limited popularity, and their sound can be heard in heavy metal, punk rock,…
…spectaculars best described by critic Jon Landau as an apotheosis of American musical comedy, he remained a big money earner. He now lacked the ambition and power of his early work, but that may have been a good thing—he never seemed a dated relic of the 1950s trying to catch…
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18602fada190083a1b1fe1743f02bf5b | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jon-Sigurdsson | Jón Sigurdsson | Jón Sigurdsson
Jón Sigurdsson, (born June 17, 1811, western Iceland—died Dec. 7, 1879, Copenhagen, Den.), Icelandic scholar and statesman who collected and edited many Old Norse sagas and documents. He was also the leader of the 19th-century struggle for Icelandic self-government under Denmark.
Sigurdsson was educated in classical philology, ancient history, and political theory and economics at the University of Copenhagen. He spent much of his life gathering and editing old Icelandic manuscripts as a member and then as secretary of the Arnamagnaean Foundation, which had been established for that purpose. Alone or with others he edited such collections as Íslendinga sögur (vol. 1–2, 1843–47; “Icelandic Sagas”) and Lovsamling for Island (1853–57; “Collection of Icelandic Laws”).
An advocate of Icelandic autonomy under Denmark, Sigurdsson took part in discussions that led to the Danish king Christian IX’s restoration of the old Icelandic Althing (parliament) as an advisory body in 1843. Sigurdsson was elected to that body for its first session in 1845, later becoming its speaker. As a leader of the Patriotic Party, Sigurdsson successfully agitated for Iceland’s freedom of trade (1854); he also led in the modernization of Iceland’s agriculture and fishing techniques. Always pressing Denmark for self-government, he undoubtedly influenced the granting by Denmark in 1874 of a constitution that provided for Iceland’s control of its finances and for legislative power shared with the Danish crown.
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75e02e2f218746e950d5fee0fd5fc34b | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jonah-biblical-figure | Jonah | Jonah
…north over its neighbour, and Jonah’s prophecy that Jeroboam would extend Israel’s borders from the Dead Sea to the entrance to Hamath (Syria) was borne out. The well-to-do expressed their relief in lavish attentions to the institutions of worship and to their private mansions. But the strain of the prolonged…
The Book of Jonah, containing the well-known story of Jonah in the stomach of a fish for three days, is a narrative about a reluctant prophet. This fifth book of the Twelve (Minor) Prophets contains no oracles and is thus unique among prophetic books.…
…Jonah, also spelled Jonas, the fifth of 12 Old Testament books that bear the names of the Minor Prophets, embraced in a single book, The Twelve, in the Jewish canon. Unlike other Old Testament prophetic books, Jonah is not a collection of the prophet’s oracles but primarily a narrative about…
…sages; the story of how Jonah was swallowed by a “great fish” but was subsequently disgorged intact finds a parallel in the Indian tale of the hero Shaktideva, who endured the same experience during his quest for the Golden City. On the other hand, it should be observed that many…
…scenes from the story of Jonah, symbolic animals, such as the deer and the lamb, and a representation of the bread and the wine. Before long, pictures of this character were banished from floors, and simpler and more general symbols took their place.
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eda0a1c2b063cd5d80b333c44734eb91 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jonas-Aistis | Jonas Aistis | Jonas Aistis
Jonas Aistis, also called Jonas Kossu-aleksandravičius, or Jonas Kuosa-aleksandriškis, pseudonym of Jonas Aleksandravičius, (born July 7, 1904, Kampiškės, near Kaunas, Lithuania, Russian Empire—died June 13, 1973, Washington, D.C., U.S.), poet whose lyrics are considered among the best in Lithuanian literature and who was the first modern Lithuanian poet to turn to personal expression.
Aistis studied literature at the University of Kaunas and in 1936 went to France to study French literature at the University of Grenoble, receiving his doctorate in 1944. Because of the Soviet occupation, he did not return to Lithuania but went in 1946 to the United States, where, in 1958, he joined the staff of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Aistis’ early collections of verse, written while he was still in Lithuania, contain his finest work; especially noteworthy is his fourth collection, Užgesę chimeros akys (1937; “The Dead Eyes of the Chimera”). His patriotic verse, written in exile, was not as successful as his earlier work. Three collections of his essays were also published, and he edited several collections of poetry, among them Lietuvių poezijos antologija (1950; “Anthology of Lithuanian Poetry”). Poezija (1961; “Poetry”) contains his collected poems to that time.
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daf1b1fdc545d936732394811701f68a | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jonas-Furrer | Jonas Furrer | Jonas Furrer
Jonas Furrer, (born March 3, 1805, Winterthur, Switz.—died July 25, 1861, Bad Ragaz), Swiss statesman, president of the Swiss Confederation four times.
A doctor of jurisprudence and lawyer of national renown, Furrer became, after 1839, leader of the Zürich liberals but only reluctantly aspired to political office. In the cantonal assembly, he rose to the vice presidency (1842) and later the presidency (1846), serving also in 1846 as president of the confederation Diet. During the Sonderbund War (1847), in which seven Catholic cantons formed a separatist confederation, he was a partisan of moderation. Following the adoption of a new federal constitution (September 1848), he was elected first president of the confederation (Bundespräsident) and was subsequently reelected three times (1852, 1855, 1858).
After the European revolutions of 1848, Furrer chose a moderate course in granting asylum to foreign revolutionaries in the face of conflicting demands of foreign powers and native radicals. Between his terms as Bundespräsident, he headed the Department of Justice, where his decisions helped define the proper spheres of federal and cantonal power.
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37728fa294961720dd3e86e64e11dec9 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jonathan-Boucher | Jonathan Boucher | Jonathan Boucher
Jonathan Boucher, (born March 12, 1738, Cumberland [now Cumbria], England—died April 27, 1804, Epsom, Surrey), English clergyman who won fame as a loyalist in America.
In 1759 Boucher went to Virginia as a private tutor. After a visit to London in 1762 for his ordination, he became rector of Annapolis, Maryland, and tutored George Washington’s stepson, thus becoming a family friend. His loyalist views cost him his position: by 1775 he was keeping pistols on his pulpit cushion while conducting services, and he was forced to return to England. He nevertheless dedicated to Washington A View of the Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution (1797), consisting of 13 of the eloquent sermons that he had preached in America urging loyalty to England, and he received a friendly acknowledgment.
Having obtained a pension and become vicar of Epsom, Surrey, Boucher devoted his leisure to writing and to philology. He contributed to William Hutchinson’s The History of the County of Cumberland, 2 vol. (1794), and spent 14 years compiling a “Glossary of Archaic and Provincial Words,” intended to supplement Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language. It was published only in part but was later used for Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language. Boucher’s autobiography, Reminiscences of an American Loyalist, 1738–1789 (edited by his grandson Jonathan Bouchier), appeared in 1925.
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7c193e476925d64619df6d397ee67319 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jonathan-Dickinson | Jonathan Dickinson | Jonathan Dickinson
Jonathan Dickinson, (born April 22, 1688, Hatfield, Mass., U.S.—died Oct. 7, 1747, Elizabethtown, N.J.), prominent Presbyterian clergyman of the American colonial period and the first president of Princeton University.
Joining the newly founded Presbyterian body in the Middle Colonies in 1717, he soon became a leader in theological thought and debate. When in 1721–29 its synod deliberated over adoption of a constitution, it was largely through Dickinson’s efforts that the undefined powers were given to the presbyteries rather than to the synod, or central body. When the two factions, known as the Old Side and the New Side, differed over the extent to which ministers must accept creedal statements, he proposed a compromise that proved unacceptable, and controversy ensued. The church was further plagued by differences of opinion on the Great Awakening revival of the 1730s and ’40s; Dickinson, after some hesitation, gave his support to the group that approved the new movement. In 1746 the New Side founded the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University), and Dickinson served as its first president for the brief period before his death.
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6ba4cd0d655c490a1dba00325f4852ad | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jonathan-Eybeschutz | Jonathan Eybeschütz | Jonathan Eybeschütz
Jonathan Eybeschütz, (born c. 1690, Kraków, Pol.—died 1764, Altona, Den.), rabbi and religious scholar noted for his bitter quarrel with Rabbi Jacob Emden, a dispute that split European Jewry and ended the effectiveness of rabbinic excommunication during Eybeschütz’s time.
As a rabbi in a number of European towns, Eybeschütz became a celebrated master of the Talmud (the rabbinical compendium of law, lore, and commentary), and he attracted a large, fiercely loyal corps of disciples. He was also learned in Kabbala, an esoteric form of Jewish mysticism.
When Eybeschütz accepted the pulpit in the triple community of Altona, Hamburg, and Wandsbek (then a domain of the Danish king), the women there hoped that his reputed mystic powers would save them from death in childbirth. He gave them amulets that were claimed to have contained, among other incantations, a prayer in cipher to Shabbetai Tzevi (1626–76), the most famous of the false Jewish messiahs, who had tried to abolish the Talmud. One of these amulets fell into the hands of Rabbi Jacob Emden, a strict follower of the Talmud, who publicly denounced the amulet’s maker (without specifying Eybeschütz) as a heretic.
The Polish rabbinate sided with Eybeschütz, the German with Emden. Charges and countercharges, appeals to the Danish king and to the civil courts, brawls between the adherents of each side, and excessive use by opposing rabbis of excommunication all figured in a dispute that masked a more fundamental opposition—between those who saw the pseudomessianic movement as a danger to Judaism and those who saw it as a fulfillment of Judaism. Eybeschütz succeeded in maintaining his rabbinic post, if not actually in triumphing over Emden. The quarrel in which he had played a leading role weakened rabbinic authority among the people, and repercussions were felt for a long time to come.
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43b8fdad1d16996bb77c4f32b622a1fa | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jonathan-Hickman | Jonathan Hickman | Jonathan Hickman
…Michael Bendis (Daredevil, The Avengers), Jonathan Hickman (Fantastic Four), and Ed Brubaker (Captain America), became well known for their mature and sometimes controversial takes on Marvel’s characters. The 2010s saw the emergence of another new wave of talent, with writer Matt Fraction and artist David Aja turning in a visually…
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d352191d6205f01475df7e048f1151ab | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jonathan-Ive | Jony Ive | Jony Ive
Jony Ive, in full Sir Jonathan Paul Ive, (born February 1967, London, England), British industrial designer who, while holding various posts at Apple Inc. (1992–2019), made design as integral to the appeal of a personal computer as its power and speed.
Ive studied art and design at Newcastle Polytechnic (now Northumbria University). After graduating in 1989, he cofounded Tangerine, a London-based design consultancy that counted Apple among its clients. In 1992 Apple offered Ive a full-time position at its headquarters in Cupertino, California. He accepted, but it was not until Apple cofounder Steve Jobs returned to the troubled company as CEO in 1997 that the real impact of Ive’s design ethos began to be felt.
Working on the belief that the computer had become the centre of home life, Ive, from 1997 Apple’s vice president of industrial design, fashioned machines that were sleek, touchable, and amenable to display. Ease and simplicity of use—his watchwords—were achieved by devoting “obsessive attention to details that are often overlooked.” Ive’s design for the 1998 iMac, for example, stunned consumers and critics alike with its translucent candy colours and a seductively rounded exterior over a functional core that was itself a product of high design. The design also called for reshaping the processor to fit within the machine’s colourful shell and thus dramatically shrank the computer’s footprint. After two million iMacs were sold in 1998, the design gave Apple its first profitable year since 1995.
Subsequent designs reflected Ive’s continuing effort to maximize efficiency and convenience for the user. The 2000 Power Mac G4 Cube could be easily removed from its one-piece plastic housing for internal access, and air circulated freely through its suspended core, obviating the need for noisy fans. Processor, drives, wireless technology, and even the power supply were incorporated into the 26.9-cm- (10.6-inch-) wide base of the 2002 flat-panel iMac computer, which became Apple’s top-selling product for that year. The 2003 PowerBook G4, launched as the world’s lightest and slimmest laptop computer, included a 43-cm (17-inch) LCD screen, a backlit keyboard, the latest wireless technology, and a bevy of other features that brought Ive’s vision of the comforts of home to computing on the road. In 2003 Ive was named the Designer of the Year by the Design Museum. The prize, worth £25,000 (about $41,000) and awarded annually by the London museum to a designer born or based in the United Kingdom, recognized Ive’s pioneering designs for the 2002 flat-panel iMac.
Ive became Apple’s senior vice president of industrial design in 2005. At Apple he continued to develop the design of such popular products as the iPod portable MP3 player (first introduced in 2001) and the iPhone (2007). By 2008 Ive had won six Black Pencils, the prestigious D&AD (Design & Art Direction) awards. In 2012 Ive and his team were named the best design studio of the past 50 years by D&AD. Three years later he handed over much of his day-to-day management responsibilities when he became chief design officer. However, in 2017 he reassumed direct control of product design. Two years later Ive left Apple to open (with Marc Newson) the design firm LoveFrom, though the computer company was among its clients.
Ive was made Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2006 and Knight Commander (KBE) in 2012.
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520c58ff596bbbfc168905bcb69d9785 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jonathan-Odell | Jonathan Odell | Jonathan Odell
Jonathan Odell, (born Sept. 25, 1737, Newark, N.J., U.S.—died Nov. 25, 1818, Fredericton, N.B., Can.), Canadian writer whose works are among the few extant expressions of American Tory sentiment during the Revolutionary War.
Educated in New Jersey, he was a surgeon in the British army, resigning to become an Anglican priest. During the Revolution he served as chaplain to a loyalist regiment, wrote bitterly satiric verses against the revolutionists, and played an active role in the negotiations between the American traitor Benedict Arnold and the British. His political satires and patriotic poems were collected and published in The Loyal Verses of Joseph Stansbury and Doctor Jonathan Odell (1860).
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5b1c6687dca0f495dbe18a8f18d0141a | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Joni-Ernst | Joni Ernst | Joni Ernst
Joni Ernst, née Joni Kay Culver, (born July 1, 1970, Red Oak, Iowa, U.S.), American politician who was elected as a Republican to the U.S. Senate in 2014 and began her first term representing Iowa the following year. She was the first female combat veteran to serve in the Senate and the first woman to represent Iowa in Congress.
Culver was raised on a farm near Red Oak in southwestern Iowa. She was valedictorian of her high-school class, and she later (1992) earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology at Iowa State University, where she joined the university’s Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) program. In 1992 she married Gail Ernst, who was an army officer; he had two children from a previous marriage, and the couple later had a daughter. Upon graduating, Ernst joined the U.S. Army Reserves, and she served (2003–04) as a company commander in Kuwait and Iraq during the Iraq War (2003–11). She later became a lieutenant colonel in the Iowa Army National Guard.
From 2005 to 2011, Ernst served as auditor of Montgomery county, and she was then elected to the Iowa Senate, a seat she held from 2011 to 2014. Her political positions were steadfastly conservative, and she notably argued for the nullification of federal laws that were in conflict with states’ rights. When she entered the U.S. Senate race in 2014, Ernst forged an alliance of Tea Party and traditional Republicans to win the party’s nomination. During the campaign, she focused on her experience both in politics and on the farm, and in one memorable advertisement she said, “I grew up castrating hogs on an Iowa farm, so when I get to Washington I’ll know how to cut pork…. Washington’s full of big spenders; let’s make them squeal.” Her platform included passing a balanced budget amendment, abolishing both the U.S. Department of Education and the Energy Protection Agency, and repealing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). Ernst easily won the election, and she took office in January 2015. Later that month, she delivered the Republican response to Pres. Barack Obama’s State of the Union.
During the 2016 presidential election, Ernst supported Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, though she was critical of his remarks concerning women. Although she was approached by the Trump campaign about possibly being his running mate, she withdrew her name from consideration. After Trump won the general election, she supported many of his policies. In 2017 she voted to repeal the PPACA, though the legislation failed. That year she also helped pass a massive tax-reform bill. In 2019 Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives following allegations that he had extorted a foreign country to investigate one of his political rivals. The proceedings then moved to the Republican-controlled Senate. In February 2020 Ernst voted against conviction, and Trump was acquitted in a near party-line vote.
During this time coronavirus cases began increasing, eventually resulting in a global pandemic. As schools and businesses closed, the U.S. economy entered an economic downturn that rivaled the Great Depression. In March 2020 Ernst supported a $2 trillion relief package, the largest stimulus bill in U.S. history. During this time she faced an increasingly tough reelection bid as Democrats targeted her seat. With a huge influx of money from members of both parties, it become one of the most expensive races in Senate history. Ernst ultimately prevailed in the November 2020 election.
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ac9887b996fb1c3d29ab3e989f7d1e31 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jons-Jacob-Berzelius/Atomism-and-nomenclature | Atomism and nomenclature | Atomism and nomenclature
The project of specifying substances had several important consequences. In order to establish and display the laws of stoichiometry, Berzelius invented and perfected more exacting standards and techniques of analysis. His generalization of the older acid/base chemistry led him to extend chemical nomenclature that Lavoisier had introduced to cover the bases (mostly metallic oxides), a change that allowed Berzelius to name any compound consistently with Lavoisier’s chemistry. For this purpose, he bypassed the French names that Lavoisier and his colleagues had devised as well as their translations into Swedish introduced by Berzelius’s colleagues at Uppsala, Pehr Afzelius and Anders Gustav Ekeberg. Instead, Berzelius created a Latin template for translation into diverse vernacular languages.
The project of specifying substances also led Berzelius to develop a new system of notation that could portray the composition of any compound both qualitatively (by showing its electrochemically opposing ingredients) and quantitatively (by showing the proportions in which the ingredients were united). His system abbreviated the Latin names of the elements with one or two letters and applied superscripts to designate the number of atoms of each element present in both the acidic and basic ingredients. In his own work, however, Berzelius preferred to indicate the proportions of oxygen with dots placed over the letters of the oxidized elements, but most chemists rejected that practice. Instead, they followed Berzelius’s younger German colleagues, who replaced his superscripts with subscripts and thus created the system still used today. Berzelius’s new nomenclature and notation were prominently displayed in his 1819 Essai, which presented a coherent, compelling system of chemical theory backed by a vast body of analytical results that rested on improved, highly precise laboratory methods.
Berzelius applied his analytical method to two primary areas, mineralogy and organic chemistry. Both of these areas needed better ways to specify and discriminate between substances. Cultivated in Sweden for its industrial utility, mineralogy had long stimulated Berzelius’s analytical interest. Berzelius himself discovered several new elements, including cerium (1803) and thorium (1828), in samples of naturally occurring minerals, and his students discovered lithium, vanadium, lanthanum, didymium (later resolved into praseodymium and neodymium), erbium (later resolved into erbium, ytterbium, scandium, holmium, and thulium), and terbium. Berzelius also discovered selenium (1818), though this element was isolated in the mud resulting from the manufacture of sulfuric acid rather than from a mineral sample. Berzelius’s interest in mineralogy also fostered his analysis and preparation of new compounds of these and other elements.
Native minerals, however, were more complex in their makeup than laboratory chemicals, and therefore they were more difficult to characterize. Previous Swedish mineralogists had considered mineral species to be chemical compounds, but they had become frustrated in their attempts to discriminate one compound from another and from other mixtures. In 1813 Berzelius received a mineral collection from a visiting British physician, William MacMichael, that prompted him to take up the analysis and classification of minerals. His major contribution, reported in 1814, was recognizing that silica, formerly seen as a base, frequently served as the electronegative or acidic constituent of minerals and that the traditional mineralogical class of “earths” could be reduced primarily to silicate salts. Distinguishing mineral species therefore demanded a knowledge of the stoichiometry of complex silicates, a conviction that led Berzelius in 1815 to develop his dualistic doctrine, which now anticipated a dualistic structure for substances formerly seen as “triple salts” and for other complex minerals.
Many remaining problems in the specification of minerals were resolved by the law of isomorphism, the recognition that chemically similar substances possess similar crystal forms, discovered in 1818 by the German chemist Eilhardt Mitscherlich. Berzelius had provided both the patronage and the foundational concepts for Mitscherlich’s own career. In contemporary mineralogy disputes, Berzelius frequently sided with René-Just Haüy, who based his crystallography on the existence of distinct compounds as interpreted through Lavoisier’s chemistry, and against the school of Abraham Gottlob Werner, who relied on external characters such as colour, texture, and hardness to discriminate between species of minerals. Without completely subordinating mineralogy to chemistry, Berzelius transformed the field and established a flourishing tradition of chemical mineralogy.
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88f8153b5f648e3a967cf99101ac18ba | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jons-Jacob-Berzelius/Organic-chemistry | Organic chemistry | Organic chemistry
Organic chemistry also posed problems in the discrimination between substances. Berzelius originally devoted his career to physiological chemistry, a field based upon the application of chemistry and physiology to substances derived from animals and plants. To that end, he mastered traditional extractive analysis and published papers on these analyses between 1806 and 1808 that became highly regarded by his peers. However, he found that extractive analysis provided no fundamental insight into organic matter, since its products were not distinct substances but, rather, mixtures of broadly similar compounds. Meanwhile, his interest in organic composition was overshadowed by his forays into mineral chemistry. Only about 1814, after considerable investigation of inorganic chemistry, did he again turn his attention to organic analysis. At this point, he isolated stoichiometric compounds and worked to determine their elemental constituents. Berzelius argued that, despite differences between organic and inorganic matter, organic compounds could be assigned a dualistic composition and therefore could be specified in the same manner as inorganic ones. He improved analytical methods and, together with younger colleagues from France and Germany, fostered the advance of organic chemistry by interpreting compounds and their reactions dualistically. The application of his precept that organic chemistry could be understood in terms of the principles that govern inorganic chemistry reached its zenith in the 1830s, especially as it was embodied in the older theory of radicals. However, it was also at this time that younger chemists, including Jean-Baptiste-André Dumas and Auguste Laurent, discovered phenomena such as chlorine substitution and began to recast inorganic chemistry in the light of organic substances. Berzelius’s strong resistance to this move tarnished his reputation at the close of his career and fostered pejorative assessments of his work that historians have only recently shown to be exaggerated and misleading.
Berzelius had a profound influence on chemistry, stemming in part from his substantial achievements and in part from his ability to enhance and project his authority. Throughout his life he cultivated professional relationships in diverse ways. He trained both Swedish students, including Nils Gabriel Sefström and Carl Gustaf Mosander, and foreign students, including Heinrich Rose, Gustav Rose, and Friedrich Wöhler. He also aided the careers of protégés such as Mitscherlich. Berzelius visited foreign colleagues, meeting Davy and William Hyde Wollaston in London in 1812 and Claude-Louis Berthollet, Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac, and Pierre-Louis Dulong in Paris in 1818 and 1819. He also maintained a vast correspondence with professional colleagues. Berzelius was equally industrious in disseminating information about his ideas, methods, and results. To this end, he published his scientific articles in French, German, and English and frequently revised his Textbook of Chemistry in French and German editions that were often prepared with the help of current or former students. Finally, as perpetual secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, he issued annual reports from 1821 to 1848 (in Swedish, German, and French) on the progress of science. These reports not only announced his major findings but also offered Olympian pronouncements that were eagerly anticipated, sometimes feared, but long highly respected.
Among Berzelius’s other accomplishments were his improvements of laboratory apparatuses and techniques used for chemical and mineral analysis, especially solvent extraction, elemental analysis, quantitative wet chemistry, and qualitative mineral analysis. His mastery of technique in mineral chemistry derived from his close working relationship with the Swedish mining technologist Johan Gottlieb Gahn, who had served as assistant to Berzelius’s predecessor, Torbern Bergman. Berzelius used his textbooks and his classic, widely translated monograph On the Use of the Blowpipe (1820) to standardize and disseminate Gahn’s methods. Berzelius also characterized and named two new concepts: “isomerism,” in which chemically diverse substances possess the same composition; and “catalysis,” in which certain chemical reactions are facilitated by the presence of substances that are themselves unaffected. He also coined the term protein while attempting to apply a dualistic organic chemistry to the constituents of living things.
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c657f05ca31cfe49eceb62d0e2b06e63 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jordan-Spieth | Jordan Spieth | Jordan Spieth
Jordan Spieth, (born July 27, 1993, Dallas, Texas, U.S.), American professional golfer who, at age 21, won the 2015 Masters Tournament and the U.S. Open, two of golf’s most-prestigious events. He captured a third major title when he won the 2017 British Open.
Spieth began hitting a golf ball at age four and began playing the sport regularly at age 10 after his family joined a country club. Spieth’s talent became apparent in 2009 when he won the U.S. Junior Amateur Championship. He earned a second U.S. Junior Amateur title in 2011, making him the second golfer, after Tiger Woods, to win that event multiple times. Spieth played golf collegiately at the University of Texas. During his freshman year, in 2012, he led the team in scoring and helped it win the National Collegiate Athletic Association men’s golf national championship. That year Spieth also qualified for the U.S. Open and registered the low amateur score, tying for 21st place in the tournament. His Open success and ranking as the number one amateur golfer in the world contributed to Spieth’s decision to turn professional later that year.
Spieth won his first Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA) tournament, the John Deere Classic, in July 2013, becoming (at age 19) the youngest PGA winner in 82 years. He made headlines again the following year when he finished second at the 2014 Masters Tournament, becoming the youngest runner-up in the event’s history. The following year, he made 28 birdies during Masters play to set a new tournament record, and he became the only golfer in the tournament’s history to reach 19 under par at any point during the four days of play. By bogeying the final hole, Spieth finished at 18 under par, tying Woods for the best all-time final score at the Masters while winning his first major title. He followed that feat by winning the U.S. Open by one stroke and spurring speculation that he might capture a “Grand Slam” by winning all four major tournaments in a calendar year. While he did not achieve that historic feat, he finished tied for fourth at the British Open and second at the PGA Championship, which made him, for a time, the top-ranked golfer in the world.
Spieth’s 2016 season was marred by a disastrous performance at the Masters, where he squandered a five-shot lead going into the final nine holes of the tournament, resulting in a disappointing second-place finish. He eventually won two PGA events that season but failed to place higher than 13th place in any of the subsequent major tournaments that year. In 2017 Spieth earned a measure of redemption by battling through another pending final-round collapse to win the British Open by three strokes.
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9793254f120361ade178a9159b49e96a | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jordi-Pujol-i-Soley | Jordí Pujol i Soley | Jordí Pujol i Soley
…and ’90s, the CiU and Jordí Pujol i Soley, the president of Catalonia from 1980 to 2003, supported the national government led by the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), which in return agreed to generous tax transfers to the Catalonian government. However, in 1994, demanding that greater autonomy and more…
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36c0b511f79b9e95f9af25ef1aa0c637 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jorg-Haider | Jörg Haider | Jörg Haider
Jörg Haider, (born Jan. 26, 1950, Bad Goisern, Austria—died Oct. 11, 2008, near Klagenfurt), controversial Austrian politician who served as leader of the far-right Freedom Party of Austria (1986–2000) and Alliance for the Future of Austria (2005–08) and as governor of the Bundesland (federal state) of Kärnten (1989–91; 1999–2008).
Haider studied at the University of Vienna, where he received a law degree in 1973 and subsequently taught law. As a student, he became chairman of the youth organization of the Freedom Party of Austria (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs; FPÖ). He later was elected secretary of the party in Kärnten (Carinthia). In 1979, at age 29, he was elected to the national parliament. In 1983 Haider was chosen to be chairman of the FPÖ in Kärnten; in 1986 he became chairman of the federal party. The charismatic Haider transformed the party, increasing its popular appeal. Prior to his leadership, it had performed poorly, while the country’s two main parties, the Social Democratic Party of Austria (Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreichs; SPÖ) and the conservative Austrian People’s Party (Österreichische Volkspartei; ÖVP), had dominated at both state and federal levels. Following state elections in 1989, however, the FPÖ finished second to the SPÖ and formed a coalition with the ÖVP, enabling Haider’s election as governor of Kärnten. But in 1991, partly as a result of Haider’s praise for the employment policies of Adolf Hitler, the coalition dissolved, and he was forced to resign.
Nevertheless, under Haider’s leadership, the FPÖ had a virtually unbroken string of successes in increasing its strength at all levels, as well as in elections for the European Parliament. Some observers attributed a measure of his support to the Austrian people’s disgust with their government, which had become an entrenched bureaucracy known for mismanagement and for a succession of scandals. Haider virulently denounced immigration and opposed the expansion of the European Union (EU) to the east—positions that were applauded by a wide spectrum of Austrians. Moreover, he was charismatic and a skillful orator. Yet many observers expressed alarm that the sentiments to which he gave voice could find such a large audience in Austria. Particularly controversial were the number of statements he made about Hitler and the Nazis. In a speech in 1995, for example, he defended and praised members of the Waffen-SS, calling them “decent people of good character.” He also described Nazi concentration camps as “punishment camps.” Still, he maintained that he was not anti-Semitic and that he deplored the Holocaust.
Haider was reelected governor of Kärnten in March 1999, when the FPÖ won the state elections with 42 percent of the vote. In the national parliamentary elections held that October, the FPÖ registered its strongest showing to date; garnering 27 percent of the national vote, it overtook the ÖVP for second place. Its success threatened the national coalition of the ÖVP and the SPÖ. After months of unsuccessful negotiations with the SPÖ, the ÖVP unexpectedly formed a coalition government with the FPÖ. This development sparked protests throughout Vienna and in the international community; it prompted the Israeli government to recall its ambassador, and the EU imposed political sanctions against the country. Haider was forced to resign as leader of the FPÖ, though he remained active in the party and continued as governor of Kärnten. Despite the FPÖ’s poor showing in the 2002 national elections, Haider was reelected governor in 2004. His final split with the FPÖ occurred when he announced he was forming a new party, the Alliance for the Future of Austria (Bündnis Zukunft Österreich; BZÖ), in 2005.
In the 2006 national elections the BZÖ won 4 percent of the vote, capturing seven seats. Two years later the party showed strong gains, garnering 11 percent, and Haider seemed poised for a comeback on the national stage. On Oct. 11, 2008, however, he died from injuries sustained in a car accident.
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a7094e8fbd6d0ada18a16e5560eae61f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jorge-Alessandri-Rodriguez | Jorge Alessandri Rodríguez | Jorge Alessandri Rodríguez
Ibáñez was succeeded (1958–64) by the son of Arturo Alessandri Palma, Jorge Alessandri Rodríguez, who won the support of the Conservative and Liberal parties. To satisfy popular demands without altering profoundly the structures of the country, he launched a public works program…
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7ed61003409dca5c57cdcd45590098e5 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jorge-Barbosa | Jorge Barbosa | Jorge Barbosa
Jorge Barbosa, (born May 25, 1902, Praia, Santiago, Cape Verde Islands—died January 6, 1971, Cova da Piedade), African poet who expressed in Portuguese the cultural isolation and the tragic nature of life on the drought-stricken Cape Verdean islands. In delicately phrased verse that became a model for later poets, he often praised the stoic endurance of a people caught in an inhospitable, forgotten land.
Barbosa spent his early years on the island of São Vicente, excluding his years of study in Lisbon. He resided for many years on the island of Sal, working as a civil servant of the customhouse. He was one of the three founders of the literary journal Claridade (“Clarity”) in the 1930s, which marked the beginning of modern Cape Verdean literature. His poetry was published as Arquipélago (1935), Ambiente (1941; “The Circle”), and Caderno de um Ilhéu (1956; “An Islander’s Notebook”).
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99a85900c84e884baa97ed10a83e744f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jorge-de-Lima | Jorge de Lima | Jorge de Lima
Jorge de Lima, (born April 23, 1895, União dos Palmares, Braz.—died Nov. 15, 1953, Rio de Janeiro), Brazilian poet and novelist who became one of the foremost representatives of regionalist poetry in Brazil in the 1920s.
Raised on a sugar plantation in northeastern Brazil, Lima practiced as a medical doctor. His earliest verses show the marked influence of the French Parnassian poets, but the volume O Mundo do Menino Impossível (1925; “The World of the Impossible Child”) signals his break with European tradition and his adherence to the Modernist movement in Latin-American literature. He became an active collaborator with Gilberto Freyre and others in the northeastern regionalist movement and produced a great deal of “Afro-Brazilian” poetry in that vein throughout the 1930s.
Following his religious conversion in 1935, Lima sought to “restore poetry in Christ” and added metaphysical and expressionist poetry and fiction to his literary production. His best known collections of poems include A Túnica Inconsútil (1938; “The Seamless Tunic”), Poemas Negros (1947; “Black Poems”), and Invenção de Orfeu (1952; “The Invention of Orpheus”). In fiction, he is best known for Calunga (1935) and A Mulher Obscura (1939; “The Obscure Woman”).
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ba17093de2889bdfc582e03c9b61d8e2 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jorge-Eliecer-Gaitan | Jorge Eliécer Gaitán | Jorge Eliécer Gaitán
Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, (born Jan. 26, 1902, Bogotá—died April 9, 1948, Bogotá), political leader who was considered a champion of the Colombian people and was revered as a martyr after his assassination.
Gaitán studied law at the National University of Colombia, Bogotá, and continued his studies in Rome. There he was greatly influenced by Benito Mussolini, paying careful attention to his techniques for arousing and organizing the populace. Returning to Colombia, he organized a short-lived party called Union Nacional Izquierdista Revolucionaria (Left Revolutionary National Union). His maiden speech as a congressman was a polemic attack on the plantations owned by the United Fruit Company (q.v.). He served as mayor of Bogotá (1936) and minister of education (1940).
In 1946, as the leader of the more radical factions of Liberals, he ran for the office of president in opposition to the official Liberal Party candidate Gabriel Turbay. That split among the Liberals gave the victory to the Conservative Party candidate Mariano Ospina Pérez. It was expected that Gaitán would be elected president in the next election, but he was killed by an assassin in 1948 during the International Conference of American States meeting in Bogotá. This murder led to a major popular uprising known as the bogotazo and exacerbated a period of civil unrest called the violencia.
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119e5de7c36cff443e0f5786482e64b7 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jose-Americo-de-Almeida | José Américo de Almeida | José Américo de Almeida
José Américo de Almeida, (born Jan. 10, 1887, Paraíba, Brazil—died March 10, 1980, Rio de Janeiro), novelist whose works marked the beginning of a major Brazilian generation of northeastern regional writers. Their fiction presents a largely socioeconomic interpretation of life in Brazil’s most impoverished and drought-stricken region and is filled with local colour and appeals for justice and concern.
Almeida’s literary career was paralleled by a career in politics; he served in the first cabinet of President Getúlio Vargas as minister of public works and transportation (1930–34) and was governor of the state of Paraíba (1951–54).
The problems endemic to the Brazilian northeast, including banditry in the arid backlands and the poverty and ignorance of the sugarcane workers in the more fertile coastal zone, are the focus of Almeida’s novels. A Bagaceira (1928; Trash), his best-known work, deals with a group of sertanejos (independent smallholders) forced by drought to leave their own ranches for a life of near-slavery on tropical sugar plantations. Other works in the same vein are O Boqueirão (1935; “The Canyon”) and Coiteiros (1935; “Bandit-hiders”).
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4e9e526d4a9582a8d92476453d524ed7 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jose-Angel-Valente | José Ángel Valente | José Ángel Valente
José Ángel Valente, (born April 25, 1929, Orense, Galicia, Spain—died July 18, 2000, Geneva, Switz.), Spanish lyric poet and essayist who published translations and criticism in addition to more than 20 books of his own verse. The themes of his often philosophical poems are exile, death, and poverty in modern Spain. He is considered by some to be Spain’s best postwar poet.
Valente graduated in 1953 from the University of Madrid and later studied and lectured at the University of Oxford in England. From 1958 to 1980 he worked as a translator for several international organizations headquartered in Geneva.
Valente’s earliest work is characterized by simple verse devoid of artifice and by an objective representation of reality. A modo de esperanza (1955; “In the Manner of Hope”) confronts the problems of death and loss while presenting many scenes from everyday life. La memoria y los signos (1966; “The Memory and the Signs”) deals in part with the Spanish Civil War and contains many biographical and historical sections.
In his later works Valente began to experiment with more complex and allusive verse. Presentación y memorial para un monumento (1970; “Presentation and Memorial for a Monument”), for example, discusses the dogmatism of modern society and the agony of the individual. In Material memoria (1979; 2nd ed., expanded, 1995) Valente meditates on life and art. The 54 prose poems in No amanece el cantor (1992; “The Singer Does Not Awake”) are abstract and elliptical, playing with the concept of negatives and positives, such as dark and light, absence and presence, silence and speech. Two of his volumes, Poemes de Lázaro (1960; “Poems of Lazarus”) and Tres lecciones de tinieblas (1980; “Three Lessons of Darkness”), won prestigious literary awards in Spain. Valente also wrote two series of essays on a variety of subjects, including the Catholic mystic Saint Teresa of Ávila and the German painter Matthias Grünewald. They are collected in Variaciones sobre el pájaro y la red; precedido de la piedra y el centro (1991; “Variations on the Bird and the Net; Preceded by the Stone and the Centre”).
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cde91eda10131e7af99cf519befe00ac | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jose-Bento-Monteiro-Lobato | José Bento Monteiro Lobato | José Bento Monteiro Lobato
José Bento Monteiro Lobato, (born April 18, 1882, Taubaté, Brazil—died July 4, 1948, São Paulo), writer and publisher, forerunner of the Modernist movement in Brazilian literature.
Originally a lawyer and coffee planter in the interior of São Paulo state, Monteiro Lobato wrote an unpretentious letter to a São Paulo newspaper, describing the droughts and brushfires in the interior. The editor asked for more articles and Lobato replied with the sketches and short stories, later collected in his book Urupês (1918; “Mushrooms”). In these he introduced the character Jeca Tatu (“Joe Armadillo”), who became the symbol of the Brazilian backlander. “Poor Jeca Tatu,” Lobato comments. “You are so handsome in novels and so ugly in real life! You don’t talk; you don’t sing; you don’t love.”
A man of action, Monteiro Lobato moved to São Paulo, founded the literary review Revista do Brasil and a publishing house, and gathered around him a circle of new literary talents. Critical and rebellious, he was in and out of prison and exile many times. He also wrote children’s books enjoyed equally well by adults.
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05ecc35bec37c172654dc358458a6448 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jose-Calvo-Sotelo | José Calvo Sotelo | José Calvo Sotelo
…eclipsed there by the monarchist José Calvo Sotelo. He was an intended victim of the plot responsible for Calvo Sotelo’s murder (July 1936). Soon after the outbreak of the civil war, he went to Lisbon to set up a mission with Nicolás Franco for the purchase of arms for the…
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f817ff871b718ea3136f495cc9c46677 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jose-Craveirinha | José Craveirinha | José Craveirinha
José Craveirinha, pseudonym of José G. Vetrinha, (born May 28, 1922, Lourenço Marques, Portuguese East Africa [now Maputo, Mozambique]—died February 6, 2003, South Africa), Mozambican journalist, story writer, and poet.
Craveirinha was the son of a Portuguese father and a black Mozambican mother. He was an ardent supporter of the anti-Portuguese group Frelimo during the colonial wars and was imprisoned in 1966. He was one of the pioneers of Negritude poetry in Mozambique, a poetry that concentrated on an examination of past African traditions and the emphatic reaffirmation of African values.
Craveirinha’s poetry utilizes imagistic appeals to the African landscape, the African languages, and, above all, to an Africa governed by Africans. His poem “Grito negro” (“Black Shout”) is an outcry against colonialism that blends a sense of African rhythms with the nasal sounds of the Portuguese language. Craveirinha’s literary works are chiefly of a political nature. They appeared in various anthologies and in such collections as Chigubo (1964), Cantico a un dio di Catrane (1966; “Canticle to a Catrane God”), Karingana ua Karingana (1974; “Once Upon a Time”), Cela I (1980; “Cell I”), and Obra poética (1999; “Poetic Work”). He also wrote for Noticias da Beira, O brado Africano, voz de Moçambique, and Caliban.
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2018d672baa3cf2afd50630b8c422377 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jose-de-Acosta | José de Acosta | José de Acosta
José de Acosta, (born 1539, Medina del Campo, Spain—died February 15, 1600, Salamanca), Jesuit theologian and missionary to the New World known chiefly for his Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590; Natural and Moral History of the Indies), the earliest survey of the New World and its relation to the Old. His works, missionary and literary, mark the zenith of the period of religious and scientific incorporation of the newly discovered lands into Western culture.
Acosta joined the Jesuits in 1570 and went as a missionary to Peru in 1571. He served as provincial of his order there (1576–81), was appointed theological adviser to the Third Provincial Council of Lima (1582), and later wrote a catechism in Spanish and in the Quechuan and Aymaran languages—the first book printed in Peru. He also founded a number of colleges throughout Peru and a mission near Lake Titicaca. On returning to Spain in 1587, he wrote Historia natural y moral de las Indias, which attempted to place his observations of the physical geography and natural history of Mexico and Peru (including the native religious and political institutions) in the context of contemporary Jesuit and scientific thought. Acosta’s work is especially valuable as a firsthand account of western South America at this time, based on his 16 years in the region. He was also one of the first writers to suggest that human migration into the Americas was facilitated by a land bridge from Asia.
Acosta led the opposition to Claudio Aquaviva (the general of the Jesuits), helping to call the fifth Jesuit congregation to redress alleged grievances. The reformers’ proposals were rejected, and Acosta was imprisoned (1592–93). After submitting in 1594 Acosta became superior of the Jesuits at Valladolid and rector of the Jesuit college at Salamanca (1598), where he remained until his death.
Acosta’s other significant study is the De procuranda indorum salute (1588), a systematic examination of the problems of missionary work among the newly discovered “pagans” of the Americas. It was one of the most influential works for Catholic missionaries to the New World.
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d91ebe26c3040727dcabb7fc7608a06b | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jose-de-Cadalso-y-Vazquez | José de Cadalso y Vázquez | José de Cadalso y Vázquez
José de Cadalso y Vázquez, Cadalso also spelled Cadahlso, (born Oct. 8, 1741, Cádiz, Spain—died Feb. 27, 1782, Gibraltar), Spanish writer famous for his Cartas marruecas (1793; “Moroccan Letters”), in which a Moorish traveler in Spain makes penetrating criticisms of Spanish life. Educated in Madrid, Cadalso traveled widely and, although he hated war, enlisted in the army against the Portuguese during the Seven Years’ War. His prose satire Los eruditos a la violeta (1772; “Wise Men Without Learning”), directed against the pseudo-learned, was his most popular work.
Although influenced by the classics, as seen in his neoclassical drama Sancho García (1771) and his anacreontic verse in Ocios de mi juventud (1773; “Diversions of My Youth”), Cadalso is considered a forerunner of Spanish Romanticism because of his Noches lúgubres (1789–90; “Sombre Nights”), an autobiographical prose work inspired by the death of his love, the actress María Ignacia Ibáñez.
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e719adc9ffc14480569cf2a835013e1e | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jose-Emilio-Pacheco | José Emilio Pacheco | José Emilio Pacheco
José Emilio Pacheco, (born June 30, 1939, Mexico City, Mexico—died January 26, 2014, Mexico City), Mexican critic, novelist, short-story writer, translator, and poet. Early in his career he created verse that used surrealist and symbolic imagery to address such hot-topic issues as pollution, poverty, and government bureaucracy, but later he adopted a simpler, more forthright approach that reinforced his concept of history as a cyclic series of events that continue to haunt humankind. His canon of work was rewarded with the 2009 Cervantes Prize, the highest accolade in Spanish letters.
Pacheco was educated at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He wrote several plays there that were never produced, and he edited (1957–58) the literary supplement of the review Estaciones. His first published work, a collection of short stories—La sangre de Medusa (1958; “The Blood of Medusa”)—shows the influence of Jorge Luis Borges. Los elementos de la noche (1963; “The Elements of the Night”) is a collection of his poems and essays published in periodicals from 1958 to 1962. The poems of El reposo del fuego (1966; “The Sleep of the Fire”) contemplate a world in disintegration, and the novel Morirás lejos (1967; “You Will Die Far Away”) documents the purges of Jews throughout history. No me preguntes cómo pasa el tiempo (1969; Don’t Ask Me How the Time Goes By) includes poems in which there is a nostalgic desire to relive the past, sometimes coupled with a fine sense of irony. The short stories in El principio del placer (1972; “The Pleasure Principle”) are united by the recurrent theme of anguish. In the poems of Islas a la deriva (1976; “Islands Adrift”), Pacheco reinterpreted history and mythology.
Pacheco’s later books include Ayer es nunca jamás (1978; “Yesterday Is Not Ever”), Desde entonces: poemas 1975–1978 (1980; “Since Then: Poems 1975–1978”), Tarde o temprano (1980; “Sooner or Later”), Ciudad de la memoria: poemas 1986–1989 (1989; “City of Memory: Poems 1986–1989”), La arena errante: poemas 1992–1998 (1999; “The Shifting Sands: Poems 1992–1998), and Siglo pasado (desenlace): poemas 1999–2000 (2000; “Century of the Past (Denouement): Poems 1999–2000”). His works in English translation include Tree Between Two Walls (1969), The Lost Homeland (1976), and Signals from the Flames (1980). He also edited La poesía mexicana de siglo XIX (1965) and Antología del Modernismo, 1884–1921 (1978).
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ca7534dde92e2cc93e0a01f02415d1a2 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jose-Guadalupe-Posada | José Guadalupe Posada | José Guadalupe Posada
José Guadalupe Posada, (born Feb. 2, 1851, Aguascalientes, Mex.—died Jan. 20, 1913, Mexico City), printmaker whose works, often expressionistic in content and style, were influential in the development of 20th-century graphic art.
As a child, Posada worked as a farm labourer and in a pottery factory. He taught school for a short time and then began to draw, inspired largely by posters for the Rea Circus. Gradually he was attracted to printmaking. He became a kind of pictorial journalist with the publication of thousands of broadside illustrations and popular book and song covers. He is perhaps best known for his animated skeletons (calaveras). Most of his works were engraved or etched in relief on type metal. A museum dedicated to his work is located in Aguascalientes.
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1b4c7e4873dd97778dba955619af9099 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jose-Iturbi | José Iturbi | José Iturbi
José Iturbi, (born November 28, 1895, Valencia, Spain—died June 28, 1980, Hollywood, California, U.S.), Spanish-born pianist, conductor, and actor, known for his hectic concert schedule and for his roles (usually as himself) in several musical motion pictures.
Iturbi was a child prodigy at the piano. He began performing professionally at age seven, and graduated with honours from the Paris Conservatory at 17. In 1919 he was named head of the piano department at the Geneva Conservatory and in 1923 began touring Europe and South America playing Spanish music. He made his U.S. debut in 1929 and received rave reviews from the critics. His 1930 American tour was even more exhilarating: he gave 77 concerts. While in Mexico in 1933, Iturbi first exhibited his conducting ability. Three years later he was chosen to lead the Rochester (New York) Philharmonic Orchestra, a position he held until 1944. He often delighted audiences by appearing in a dual role as conductor and pianist. His flamboyant personality attracted the motion-picture industry, which signed Iturbi to a series of films in the 1940s. Playing classical, jazz, and popular music, he appeared in such films as Thousands Cheer (1943), Music for Millions (1944), and Anchors Aweigh (1945). He also wrote a number of musical compositions in the Spanish style, most notably Pequeña danza española. Iturbi, who enjoyed being different from other classical musicians, liked to fly airplanes, box, and ride motorcycles.
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029a61b7bfb31471d25ec156c93247c5 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jose-Lopez-Portillo | José López Portillo | José López Portillo
José López Portillo, in full José López Portillo y Pacheco, (born June 16, 1920, Mexico City, Mexico—died February 17, 2004, Mexico City), Mexican lawyer, economist, and writer, who was president of Mexico from 1976 to 1982.
López Portillo attended the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the University of Chile. He then practiced law and later was professor of law, political science, and public administration at the National University of Mexico before beginning his political career. He held various administrative positions under Presidents Gustavo Díaz Ordaz and Luis Echeverría before becoming minister of finance in 1971. In this position he modernized tax-collection procedures, pursued tax evaders, and reduced public spending.
As president of Mexico, López Portillo followed a more conservative approach than that of his predecessor, Echeverría, deemphasizing land redistribution and favouring the creation of nonagricultural jobs, exploitation of oil and natural gas, tax concessions to stimulate industrial development, and attraction of foreign investment. He continued Echeverría’s population-control program, which achieved a modest reduction in the country’s high birth rate. López Portillo’s most significant political reform was to increase the size of the Chamber of Deputies to 400 members, with a minimum of 100 seats reserved for opposition parties. This measure was designed to permit more minority participation in Mexican politics, which had been dominated by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) since 1929.
López Portillo mounted an ambitious program for the exploitation of huge, newly discovered petroleum reserves in Veracruz and Tabasco states by Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex), the state-owned Mexican oil agency. The program resulted in rapid economic growth and a dramatic increase in Mexico’s oil exports, but much of the resulting wealth was squandered on inefficient state-run enterprises or was pocketed by government and labour union officials. Rampant government corruption and unrestrained government borrowing resulted in $60 billion in foreign debt, and when world oil prices collapsed in 1981 Mexico defaulted on its debt, triggering a global debt crisis. By the time his term ended in 1982, his administration had been discredited, and López Portillo lived abroad for several years to escape the animosity Mexicans felt toward him. He eventually returned to Mexico and published his memoirs, Mis tiempos: Biografía y testimonio político (1988; “My Times: Biography and Political Testament”).
López Portillo adopted a somewhat conciliatory approach toward supplying the United States with oil and gas while exerting pressure for the easing of U.S. trade and immigration restrictions. In 1978 Mexico reopened diplomatic relations with Spain after a 38-year hiatus. In 1983 President Miguel de la Madrid dissociated himself from López Portillo’s administration, accusing it of aggravating the “grotesque” maldistribution of wealth and defrauding Pemex.
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975f95ed21c76276f29545bfab62492f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jose-Maria-Cordoba | José María Córdoba | José María Córdoba
…one of Bolívar’s most-honoured generals, José María Córdoba, staged a revolt. It was crushed, but Bolívar was disheartened by the continued ingratitude of his former adherents. In the fall of 1829 Venezuela seceded from Gran Colombia.
…led by the daring Colombian José María Córdoba, and in a short time the royalist army had been routed, with about 2,000 men killed. The Spanish viceroy and his generals were taken prisoner. The terms of surrender stipulated that all Spanish forces be withdrawn from both Peru and Charcas (Bolivia);…
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