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5d93e7d2884b2c70646efeefc0103986 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Juan-Manuel-Blanes | Juan Manuel Blanes | Juan Manuel Blanes
Juan Manuel Blanes, (born June 8, 1830, Montevideo, Uruguay—died April 15, 1901, Pisa, Italy), Uruguayan painter known for his paintings of historical events in South America and his depictions of gaucho life.
Blanes was born into a turbulent period in Uruguayan history. Although the country had been independent since 1828, it was politically unstable and fell into civil war from 1843 to 1851. The dramatic events of Uruguayan history and the history of other South American nations, including Argentina and Chile, would provide Blanes with the subject matter that would occupy his career.
He was largely self-taught as an artist. During the civil war, he worked as a typographer’s assistant at the newspaper El Defensor de la Independencia Americana. He began painting in 1844 and in 1855 moved to the city of Salto, where he taught painting. In 1857 he traveled to Buenos Aires, and in 1859 he received a prize to study in Italy. Throughout the remainder of his life, Blanes would move between Montevideo, Buenos Aires, and Europe, with an extended stay in Chile in 1873.
In a letter to his brother in 1857, Blanes declared himself an “AMERICAN” painter (in the hemispheric sense), and his career reflects his dedication to the creation of an American painting. He worked in the formal academic style of 19th-century European painting, but his work was American in subject matter. He carefully documented the major historical events of Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile, producing a huge number of military scenes. Many were panoramic and epic in scale, such as The Battle of Caseros (1856–57), which shows masses of anonymous troops and horses engaged in pitched battle. Blanes insisted that his paintings be historically accurate and detailed, and he relied on written and photographic accounts of the events he depicted. He made other historical paintings that were more intimate in scale, such as The Death of General Venancio Flores (1868), in which the assassinated general’s body sprawls in the foreground while a priest administers last rites. Even in his more majestic images, Blanes captured human detail, a reflection of the growing influence of naturalism in 19th-century painting.
In addition to making history paintings and portraits, Blanes also made images of gauchos. The independent gaucho who lived a solitary life on the Pampas became a nationalist icon for post-civil war Uruguayans. Although he strove for historical accuracy in his history paintings, Blanes romanticized gauchos, emphasizing their lives of self-reliance and freedom. He idealized the gaucho’s life in images such as Rest, in which a gaucho lies in a grassy plain while his horse patiently waits beside him. One of The Three Chiripás (c. 1881) shows a gaucho leaning on a hitching post, talking to a young woman. Other images showed gauchos working harmoniously in pairs. These romantic images ignored the violence and difficulty that dominated gaucho life. In 1898 Blanes returned to Italy and settled in Pisa, where he died three years later.
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063962d5a4054b900ca760be71b3ce95 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Juan-Montalvo | Juan Montalvo | Juan Montalvo
Juan Montalvo, (born April 13, 1832, Ambato, Ecuador—died January 17, 1889, Paris, France), Ecuadorean essayist, often called one of the finest writers of Spanish American prose of the 19th century.
After a brief period during which he served in his country’s foreign service, Montalvo spent most of his life in exile, writing powerful essays attacking a succession of Ecuador’s dictators. He was distinguished as a liberal thinker and a moralist and became famous for his Siete tratados (1882; “Seven Treatises”), which offered moral standards for the educated person. Montalvo’s Capítulos que se le olvidaron a Cervantes (1895; “Chapters That Were Omitted by Cervantes”) was published posthumously and is considered one of the finest imitations of Miguel de Cervantes’s famous novel, Don Quixote.
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1ea4e6d75bf664f27d4d089764422dbd | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Juan-Pablo-Bonet | Juan Pablo Bonet | Juan Pablo Bonet
Juan Pablo Bonet, (born 1560, Torres de Berrellen, Spain—died 1620, Torres de Berrellen), Spanish cleric and educator who pioneered in the education of the deaf.
Bonet helped develop one of the earliest and most successful methods for educating the deaf and improving their verbal and nonverbal communication skills. Bonet’s multidimensional approach, based on the work of Pedro Ponce de León (c. 1520–84), is detailed in his Reducción de las letras y arte para enseñar a hablar a los mudos (1620; “Reduction of the Letters of the Alphabet and Method of Teaching Deaf-Mutes to Speak”). Bonet used every technique available in developing this approach. Beginning with the study of written words, Bonet taught the phonetic values of the letters, emphasizing the correct positioning of the lips and tongue needed for clear articulation. He also taught manual signs and a finger alphabet.
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c0236ad6ac77c575e7cdf84c545ce74c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Juan-Ramon-Balcarce | Juan Ramón Balcarce | Juan Ramón Balcarce
…to his legal successor, General Juan Ramón Balcarce. However, Balcarce’s assumption of the office fanned sparks of dissidence among those who had pledged to uphold the principles of federalism. Balcarce was overthrown, and his successor took office with a cabinet composed of Rosas’s friends. They adopted policies that were designed…
Juan Ramón Balcarce, supporter of the revolution, burned Rosario to the ground. In 1829 the town was again nearly destroyed, this time by warships. From then until 1852, when it was declared a city, Rosario slowly rebuilt itself. Its development was further enhanced in 1860,…
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edc746d7aef8766de17c5ff21a3744b7 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Juan-T-Trippe | Juan T. Trippe | Juan T. Trippe
Juan T. Trippe, in full Juan Terry Trippe, (born June 27, 1899, Seabright, N.J., U.S.—died April 3, 1981, New York, N.Y.), American pioneer in commercial aviation and one of the founders of the company that became Pan American World Airways, Inc.
Trippe was the son of a New York banker and broker of English descent, but he was named for Juanita Terry, the wife of a great-uncle. He graduated from Yale University. A pilot in World War I, Trippe established an “air taxi” service in 1922 with several surplus government aircraft. Three years later he and two former Yale classmates and another friend formed Colonial Air Transport, which began the first airmail contract route between New York City and Boston. In 1927 he arranged a merger between Colonial Air and two other small airlines, forming Pan American Airways, with himself as president. That year Pan American inaugurated the first international air service, flying between Havana, Cuba, and Key West, Fla.
Other firsts followed as Trippe shrewdly parlayed his contacts in government both in the United States and abroad into valuable airmail contracts, extending his company’s routes to Europe, Africa, South America, and the Orient. By 1930 Pan American was the largest air-transport company in the world and, for many years, flew more route miles than any other airline. Under Trippe’s direction Pan American became the first company to order commercial jets (1955) and one of the first to buy the wide-bodied Boeing 747 jet (1966) for long-distance travel. By the time Trippe retired as president and executive director of the company in 1968, however, Pan American had lost its preeminence in the industry owing to increased competition from other U.S. airlines.
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5e2092747a5efa1f350276ecbbee35b6 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Juan-Vucetich | Juan Vucetich | Juan Vucetich
Juan Vucetich, an employee of the police of the province of Buenos Aires in 1888, devised an original system of fingerprint classification published in book form under the title Dactiloscopía comparada (1904; “Comparative Fingerprinting”). His system is still used in most Spanish-speaking countries.
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cccfade6a6098801dc40aca7be0b44be | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Juan-Zorrilla-de-San-Martin | Juan Zorrilla de San Martín | Juan Zorrilla de San Martín
Juan Zorrilla de San Martín, (born Dec. 28, 1855, Montevideo—died Nov. 3, 1931, Montevideo), Uruguayan poet famous for a long historical verse epic, Tabaré (1886; final edition after several revisions, 1926), a poem in six cantos, based upon a legend of the love between a Spanish girl and an Indian boy.
Zorrilla de San Martín was educated in various Jesuit schools throughout South America (Santiago, Santa Fé, Montevideo). His first work, Notas de un himno (1876; “Notes for a Hymn”), dealing with themes of sadness and patriotism, clearly reflects the influence of the famous Spanish Romantic poet Gustavo Adolfo Becquer and sets the tone for all his poetic work that followed. In 1878 he founded the Catholic periodical El bien público and the next year achieved renown for his patriotic ode La leyenda patria (“The Fatherland Legend”). Throughout his life he held various government posts, including Uruguayan minister to France, Portugal, Spain, and the Vatican.
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f6ed46ea50726cf59307bdba045a8606 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Judah-ben-Solomon-Hai-Alkalai | Judah ben Solomon Hai Alkalai | Judah ben Solomon Hai Alkalai
Judah ben Solomon Hai Alkalai, (born 1798, Sarajevo, Bosnia, Ottoman Empire [now Bosnia and Herzegovina]—died 1878, Jerusalem, Palestine), Sephardic rabbi and an early advocate of Jewish colonization of Palestine.
Alkalai was taken to Jerusalem at an early age, and there he was reared and educated for the rabbinate. At 25 he went to Semlin, in Croatia, as a rabbi and found himself teaching Hebrew to the young men of his congregation, whose native language was Ladino. He wrote two books in that language, in the first of which he argued that a physical “return to Israel” (i.e., to Eretz Yisraʾel, the Holy Land in Palestine) was a precondition for redemption (salvation), instead of the symbolic “return to Israel” by means of repentance and resuming the ways of God. This doctrine was unacceptable to Orthodox Jews and generated much controversy. His second book was a refutation of the heated attacks directed at his proto-Zionist views.
After the Damascus Affair, an anti-Semitic outburst of 1840, Alkalai took to admonishing Jews that the event was part of a divine design to awaken Jews to the reality of their condition in exile. Believing that Jews should migrate nowhere but to Palestine, he traveled in England and about Europe seeking support for such emigration, founding organizations wherever he went, but these came to naught. Finally in 1871 he left his congregation at Semlin and went to Palestine, where he created a new organization, a society for settlement. It too failed. But Alkalai’s writings—he was an inveterate pamphleteer—did have some effect, as did one book—his first in Hebrew—Goral Ladonai (1857; “A Lot for the Lord”). These and his personal migration helped pave the way for the coming Zionism of Theodor Herzl and others.
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706ccd5537f2f5c0afced93ba93d3380 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Judea-Pearl | Judea Pearl | Judea Pearl
Judea Pearl, (born 1936, Tel Aviv, Palestine [now Tel Aviv–Yafo, Israel]), Israeli-American computer scientist and winner of the 2011 A.M. Turing Award, the highest honour in computer science, for his “fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence.”
Pearl received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Technion–Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa in 1960 and a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Newark College of Engineering (now part of the New Jersey Institute of Technology) in 1961. He then received a master’s in physics from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and a doctorate in electrical engineering from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in New York (now the Polytechnic Institute of New York University) in 1965. He worked at the David Sarnoff Laboratories of the RCA Corporation (now the Sarnoff Corporation) in Princeton, New Jersey, and on computer memory at the manufacturer Electronic Memories, Inc. (later Electronics Memories and Magnetics Corp.), in Hawthorne, California. He became a professor of computer science at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1970.
Pearl introduced the messiness of real life to artificial intelligence. Previous work in the field had a foundation in Boolean algebra, where statements were either true or false. Pearl created the Bayesian network, which used graph theory (and often, but not always, Bayesian statistics) to allow machines to make plausible hypotheses when given uncertain or fragmentary information. He described this work in his book Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems: Networks of Plausible Inference (1988).
Pearl also worked extensively on causality—that is, cause-and-effect relationships—and on a mathematical formalism for describing those relationships. His book on the subject, Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference (2000), was influential in many different subjects, including psychology, sociology, medicine, and the philosophy of science.
In January 2002, Pearl’s son, journalist Daniel Pearl, was kidnapped in Karachi, Pakistan, by militant Islamists, and several days later, he was killed by his captors. Later that year, Judea Pearl, his family, and friends of Daniel Pearl founded the Daniel Pearl Foundation, and Pearl and his wife, Ruth, subsequently coedited the anthology of essays I Am Jewish: Personal Reflections Inspired by the Last Words of Daniel Pearl (2004).
Pearl’s work after the 1990s concentrated on the role of morality in artificial intelligence, specifically the role of counterfactual statements—that is, a statement where the premise is not true (e.g., “If the car had worked, I would have driven to the store”). He has posited that counterfactual statements are “the building blocks of scientific and moral behaviour” and thus that machines that could understand such statements would be able to take responsibility for their actions.
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98c82c125e3ce5d65b2be424a577c902 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Judi-Dench | Judi Dench | Judi Dench
Judi Dench, in full Dame Judith Olivia Dench, (born December 9, 1934, York, North Yorkshire, England), British actress known for her numerous and varied stage roles and for her work in television and in a variety of films.
Dench studied at the Central School of Speech Training and Dramatic Art in London. In 1957 she gave her first important critically acclaimed performance, as Ophelia in the Old Vic production of Hamlet. The following year she made her Broadway debut in Twelfth Night. Her performance as Lady Macbeth in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Macbeth (1977) earned her a Laurence Olivier Award from the Society of West End Theatre Managers (now the Society of London Theatre). It was her first of eight Olivier Awards; she also won for Juno and the Paycock (1980), Pack of Lies (1983), Antony and Cleopatra (1987), Absolute Hell (1996), A Little Night Music (1996), and The Winter’s Tale (2016), and in 2004 she received a special Olivier Award.
From the beginning of her career, Dench frequently acted on television, in adaptations of plays as well as in series. Among her notable credits were two romantic comedy series that aired on the BBC: A Fine Romance (1981–84), which she starred in with her husband, Michael Williams, whom she had married in 1971 and who died in 2001; and As Time Goes By (1992–2005). She later starred in the BBC miniseries Cranford (2007–09), based on works by Elizabeth Gaskell.
After making her big-screen debut in the crime drama The Third Secret (1964), Dench acted in such films as A Room with a View (1985) and A Handful of Dust (1988). She took the role of James Bond’s boss, M, in GoldenEye (1995)—the first of several Bond movies in which she appeared—and subsequently played two British queens, the recently widowed Queen Victoria in Mrs. Brown (1997) and Queen Elizabeth I in the comedy Shakespeare in Love (1998). For her role as Elizabeth I, she won an Academy Award for best supporting actress, and, for that of Queen Victoria, she won an Academy Award nomination and the Golden Globe Award for best actress in a drama. Additional Oscar nominations for best actress came for her portrayals of British writer Iris Murdoch in Iris (2001), an eccentric theatre owner in Mrs. Henderson Presents (2005), and the lonely teacher Barbara Covett in Notes on a Scandal (2006).
After appearing in the musical Nine (2009), Dench played Mrs. Fairfax in Jane Eyre (2011), an adaptation of the Charlotte Brontë novel. In Clint Eastwood’s biopic J. Edgar (2011), she portrayed the mother of J. Edgar Hoover (played by Leonardo DiCaprio), and, in the drama My Week with Marilyn (2011), she appeared as actress Sybil Thorndike. She was featured in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011) and its 2015 sequel, both of which concern the comic hijinks of a group of British retirees in India. Dench also starred alongside Steve Coogan in Philomena (2013), based on the true story of a woman’s search for a child she had given up for adoption in her youth. She earned another Oscar nomination for best actress for her work on that film.
In 2015 Dench paired with Dustin Hoffman in a BBC adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Esio Trot (1990), and the following year she had a cameo in Tim Burton’s Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. Dench then reprised the role of Queen Victoria in Victoria and Abdul (2017), which follows the aging monarch’s unlikely friendship with a young servant from India named Abdul Karim. That year she also was part of an all-star cast in Murder on the Orient Express, an adaptation of Agatha Christie’s 1933 novel. Her films from 2018 included Red Joan, a spy drama directed by Trevor Nunn, and Kenneth Branagh’s All Is True, in which she played Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare’s wife. The following year Dench appeared in Cats, a film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s hit stage musical. Her later movie credits included Six Minutes to Midnight, a World War II drama, and the comedy Blithe Spirit (both 2020), which was based on a Noël Coward play.
Dench was involved in various causes, including protecting the environment, and she starred in the documentary miniseries Judi Dench’s Wild Borneo Adventure (2019). She was created Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1970 and advanced to Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 1988. In 2011 she received the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale prize for theatre/film. The following year she announced that she suffered from macular degeneration. The memoir And Furthermore was published in 2010.
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b5d559fbfa21c8c9de3ac354f1be6f2c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Judith-Anderson | Dame Judith Anderson | Dame Judith Anderson
Dame Judith Anderson, original name Frances Margaret Anderson, (born Feb. 10, 1898, Adelaide, S.Aus., Australia—died Jan. 3, 1992, Santa Barbara, Calif., U.S.), Australian-born stage and motion-picture actress.
Anderson was only 17 years old when she made her stage debut in 1915 in Sydney and 20 when she first appeared in New York City. After her first major success in New York in 1924 in Cobra, she went on to appear as Nina Leeds in Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude (1928) and as Lavinia in O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra (1932), among other productions. Her interpretation of Gertrude opposite John Gielgud as Hamlet (1936), of Lady Macbeth in the London (1937) and New York (1941) productions of Macbeth, and in the title role of Robinson Jeffers’ version of Medea (1947) are considered the pinnacles of her stage career. Anderson specialized in character portrayals and was at her best in roles of great dramatic intensity.
Anderson also appeared in almost 30 motion pictures, typically playing an evil or sinister matriarchal figure. Among her best-known roles are Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca (1940) and Ann Treadwell in Laura (1944). Her other films include King’s Row (1941), Edge of Darkness (1943), and The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946). In 1960 she was made Dame Commander of the British Empire.
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e63d65c51b2d034cb8c98f2c3970e654 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Judy-Chicago | Judy Chicago | Judy Chicago
Judy Chicago, original name Judith Sylvia Cohen, married name Judy Gerowitz, (born July 20, 1939, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.), American feminist artist whose complex and focused installations created some of the visual context of the women’s liberation movement in the 1970s and beyond.
Reared in Chicago where she began taking art classes at a young age, Cohen later attended the University of California, Los Angeles (B.A., 1962; and M.A., 1964). Several years after her husband’s death in a car accident (1963), she announced her change of name, which served both as a gesture to her birthplace and eventually to indicate her interest in the cultural implications of patriarchal practices. Beginning in 1967, Chicago executed a series of fireworks performances (Atmospheres), some of which she said were intended to soften or feminize the California landscape. Though she ended the project in 1974, she returned to these works in her later career. In 1973 she helped found Womanhouse, a feminist art gallery in Los Angeles. Her early professional exhibitions included sculptures and abstract paintings, but it was an installation, The Dinner Party (1974–79), that made her reputation. It became an instant touchstone for the growing feminist movement in the United States.
A large mixed-media installation composed of ceramics, embroidery, weaving, and text, The Dinner Party presents a large triangular banquet table placed on 999 handmade tiles that name significant women. The table displays elaborate, unique place settings for 39 notable women, including Sacagawea, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Working collaboratively with dozens of assistants and volunteers, Chicago intended to illustrate the often overlooked breadth of women’s history and to privilege mediums, such as needlework and pottery, long associated with women and undervalued in the art world.
First shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1979, the installation was exhibited to great acclaim and considerable controversy throughout the United States and abroad. After many years out of public view, The Dinner Party was acquired by the Brooklyn Museum in 2002. Chicago continued to use large mixed-media installations and the life experiences of many women in The Birth Project (1980–85), and in The Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light (1985–93) she examined the Holocaust and her own Jewish identity. In The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction (2019), Chicago explored the end of a species, grief, and her own demise. Two volumes of autobiography are Through the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist (1975) and Beyond the Flower: The Autobiography of a Feminist Artist (1996). In addition to a number of books chronicling her various projects, she wrote Kitty City: A Feline Book of Hours (2005) and Institutional Time: A Critique of Studio Art Education (2014), drawing from her years of teaching. She also collaborated with Christian Dior to design the set for the fashion house’s spring 2020 haute couture show in Paris and on a series of bags released later that same year.
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cf459569639915b7abc0bf8257c6b72e | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Juho-Kusti-Paasikivi | Juho Kusti Paasikivi | Juho Kusti Paasikivi
Juho Kusti Paasikivi, (born Nov. 27, 1870, Tampere, Fin.—died Dec. 14, 1956, Helsinki), Finnish statesman and diplomat who, as prime minister (1918, 1944–46) and then president (1946–56) of Finland, cultivated harmonious relations with the Soviet Union in an effort to ensure some measure of independence for Finland.
Paasikivi studied law and history at the universities of Stockholm, Uppsala, and Leipzig and from 1902 to 1903 was a lecturer in law at the University of Helsinki. He subsequently turned to financial administration and banking and insurance activities. Paasikivi was a political realist who took the view that small nations could not permanently hope to oppose the power politics of large ones. Thus, in the struggle to preserve Finland’s autonomy under Russian rule (the country was then a grand duchy within the Russian Empire), he sided with the Compliers of the Old Finnish Party, who were willing to “comply” with recent illegal Russian decrees affecting Finnish internal affairs. In 1907 Paasikivi was elected a member of the Finnish Eduskunta (Parliament), and the following year he became minister of finance. He resigned in 1909 in protest against Russian attempts to illegally carry out the Russification of his country.
Paasikivi briefly served in 1918 as prime minister of the first government of newly independent Finland, in which capacity he favoured a pro-German policy and a monarchy for his country. He headed the Finnish delegation that on Oct. 14, 1920, signed at Tartu, Estonia, the peace treaty with Russia, after warning his government against trying to take advantage of Russia’s temporary weakness. In independent postwar Finland he became prominent as a banker and businessman.
In 1936 Paasikivi was appointed minister to Sweden. He was recalled from Stockholm in October 1939 to lead the delegation that unsuccessfully attempted to reach a peace settlement with the U.S.S.R. over that nation’s demands for strategically important bits of Finnish territory; he advocated acceding to the Soviets’ demands. In March 1940 Paasikivi was the logical choice to negotiate peace with the U.S.S.R. and thus end the Russo-Finnish War that Finland was clearly losing; as chairman of the Finnish–Russian Peace Commission, he signed the treaty whereby Finland ceded to Russia approximately one-tenth of its territory, with a population of almost 500,000. Soon afterward, in March 1940, he was appointed minister to Moscow, but he resigned from this position in May 1941 when it became clear that his government would side with Nazi Germany in the approaching conflict with the Soviet Union. Virtually retired from politics for the next three years, Paasikivi was recalled to service to take part in the abortive peace negotiations between Finland and the U.S.S.R. in the spring of 1944. In November 1944, after the approaching Soviet victory over Germany had become apparent even to pro-Nazi Finns, the conciliatory Paasikivi was asked to serve as prime minister of a government pledged to peaceful cooperation with the Soviet Union. Until the end of his prime ministry in March 1946 he made sure that the peace conditions of the Russo-Finnish armistice of September 1944 were faithfully carried out.
Paasikivi succeeded Marshal C.G. Mannerheim as president of the Finnish republic in March 1946, and he served in that capacity until February 1956. As president he stood more aloof from party politics than any of his predecessors. His aims, which he pursued with considerable success, were to remain absolutely uncompromising over Finnish independence while so handling Finland’s foreign relations as to avoid all conflict with Soviet interests and inspire the Soviet Union with confidence in Finnish sincerity. Paasikivi was instrumental in regaining Porkkala (1955), which had been leased to the Soviet Union for a naval base in 1944. Although pursuing a policy of cooperation with his powerful neighbour, he firmly resisted Communist penetration in Finland; Paasikivi’s strategy became the fundamental basis of Finland’s foreign policy in the post-World War II era.
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e9cb6c8363a21d99fff3b8b22e46beaf | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jules-Bastien-Lepage | Jules Bastien-Lepage | Jules Bastien-Lepage
Jules Bastien-Lepage, (born November 18, 1848, Damvillers, France—died December 10, 1884, Paris), French painter of rustic outdoor genre scenes widely imitated in France and England.
Bastien-Lepage studied under Alexandre Cabanel, first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1870, and won a medal at the Salon of 1874 for Spring Song, which stylistically owes a little to Édouard Manet. The Hayfield (1878) follows in the tradition of Jean-François Millet and reveals the sentimental element that characterizes Bastien-Lepage’s work. Joan of Arc Listening to the Voices, which represents Joan as a Lorraine peasant, typifies his subject pictures. He was also a portraitist of note.
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65e31c187869d05a792ec7427db49b5d | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jules-Cambon | Jules Cambon | Jules Cambon
Jules Cambon, in full Jules-martin Cambon, (born April 5, 1845, Paris, France—died Sept. 19, 1935, Vevey, Switz.), French diplomat who played an important role in the peace negotiations between the United States and Spain (1898) and was influential in the formation of French policy toward Germany in the decade before World War I.
Educated in law, Cambon entered the prefectorial administration after service in the Franco-German War (1870–71). In June 1878 he was appointed prefect of Constantine (Algeria) and then served as secretary-general of the prefecture of Paris and prefect of the départements of Nord (1882) and Rhône (1887). In January 1891 he returned to Algeria as governor-general.
After a conspicuously successful term in Algeria, Cambon was appointed ambassador to the United States (October 1897) and helped negotiate the peace after the Spanish-American War. As ambassador to Spain (1902–07) and to Germany (1907–14), he was concerned in the disputes between France and Germany at Algeciras (1906) and after the Agadir crisis (1911). Together with his brother Paul, who was ambassador to Great Britain, he laboured to avoid war with Germany. When the hostilities began (1914), he returned to Paris to become secretary-general of the Foreign Ministry (1915). During the Versailles peace conferences, he served as chairman of the commissions for Greek, Czech, and Polish matters. In 1918 he was elected to the French Academy and during 1919–31 served as chairman of the Council of Ambassadors, which was designed to supervise the application of the Versailles peace agreements.
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6db55749b30c0c72b27bcc21d303f40e | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jules-Francois-Camille-Ferry | Jules Ferry | Jules Ferry
Jules Ferry, (born April 5, 1832, Saint-Dié, France—died March 17, 1893, Paris), French statesman of the early Third Republic, notable both for his anticlerical education policy and for his success in extending the French colonial empire.
Ferry pursued his father’s profession of law and was called to the Paris bar in 1855. Soon, however, he made a name for himself as a biting critic of the Second Empire, especially by his articles (1867–68) in the newspaper Le Temps attacking Baron George-Eugène Haussmann’s administration of Paris.
During the Franco-German War (1870–71), Ferry administered the département of Seine, holding the powers of prefect, and was appointed mayor of Paris in November 1870. His administration of the besieged and hungry capital won him the nickname “Ferry-la-Famine,” which haunted him the rest of his life. Ferry was minister to Greece (1872–73) and thereafter for six years was in the republican opposition to the conservative governments and to the presidency of Patrice Mac-Mahon. He then held several offices, serving twice (1880–81, 1883–85) as premier and once (1883–85) as minister of foreign affairs.
Ferry is best known for his government’s establishment of free, compulsory, secular education, brought about mainly by a law of 1882. This policy was accompanied by other anticlerical measures, notably decrees (1880–81) dissolving the Jesuits and other congregations not authorized under the Concordat of 1801 between France and the papacy and forbidding their members to direct or teach in any educational establishment. Ferry also played a major part in the dramatic extension of France’s colonial territories. Ferry and a few enthusiastic colonialists, in the face of popular apathy or hostility, were largely responsible for France acquiring Tunisia (1881), northern and central Vietnam (Tonkin and Annam; 1883), Madagascar (1885), and the French Congo (1884–85). Public anger over the continuing expenditures needed to complete the conquest of Tonkin swept Ferry from office in March 1885. Despite continuing unpopularity, he was elected to the Senate by Vosges in 1891 and became its president in 1893. The violent polemics aroused against him at this time, however, caused a madman to shoot him, and he died from the wound.
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95d1b8c4f73883f3049eb85f1551d286 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jules-Laforgue | Jules Laforgue | Jules Laforgue
Jules Laforgue, (born Aug. 16, 1860, Montevideo, Uruguay—died Aug. 20, 1887, Paris), French Symbolist poet, a master of lyrical irony and one of the inventors of vers libre (“free verse”). The impact of his work was felt by several 20th-century American poets, including T.S. Eliot, and he also influenced the work of the Surrealists. His critical essays, though somewhat neglected, are also notable.
Laforgue was brought up by relatives at Tarbes, Fr., from 1866 to 1876, when he joined his family in Paris. After finishing his schooling at the Lycée Fontanes, he attended the lectures of the literary critic and historian Hippolyte Taine at the École des Beaux-Arts. Through the writer Paul Bourget he became secretary to Charles Ephrussi, an art collector and editor of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, who introduced him to Impressionist painting. In November 1881 he was appointed reader to the Empress Augusta in Berlin and remained in Germany for almost five years, during which time he wrote most of his works. He married an English woman, Leah Lee, in London on Dec. 31, 1886, and they returned to Paris, where, poverty-stricken, Laforgue died of tuberculosis the following year.
In the verse of Les Complaintes (1885), L’Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune (1886; “The Imitation of Our Lady the Moon”), and Le Concile féerique (1886; “The Fairy Council”), Laforgue gave ironical expression to his obsession with death, his loneliness, and his boredom with daily routine. He was attracted by Buddhism and by German philosophy, especially by Arthur Schopenhauer’s pessimism and Edward von Hartmann’s theory of the unconscious. Inspired by the example of Tristan Corbière and Arthur Rimbaud, he forged new words, experimented with common speech, and combined popular songs and music-hall tags with philosophic and scientific terms to create an imagery that appears surprisingly modern. His search for new rhythms culminated in the vers libre that he and his friend Gustave Kahn invented almost simultaneously. He reinterpreted William Shakespeare, Richard Wagner, Gustave Flaubert, and Stéphane Mallarmé in a collection of short stories, Moralités légendaires (1887; Six Moral Tales From Jules Laforgue). His art criticism, published in the Symbolist reviews and subsequently in Mélanges posthumes (1923), testifies to his remarkable understanding of the Impressionist vision.
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5cb2c607b7f98ac3d76d87ed0ec00768 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jules-Sebastien-Cesar-Dumont-dUrville | Jules-Sébastien-César Dumont d'Urville | Jules-Sébastien-César Dumont d'Urville
Jules-Sébastien-César Dumont d’Urville, (born May 23, 1790, Condé-sur-Noireau, Fr.—died May 8, 1842, near Meudon), French navigator who commanded voyages of exploration to the South Pacific (1826–29) and the Antarctic (1837–40), resulting in extensive revisions of existing charts and discovery or redesignation of island groups.
In 1820, while on a charting survey of the eastern Mediterranean, d’Urville helped the French government gain possession of what became one of the best-known Greek sculptures, the Venus de Milo, which had been unearthed on the Aegean island of Mílos in that year. In 1822 he served on a voyage around the world and returned to France in 1825. His next mission took him to the South Pacific, where he searched for traces of explorer Jean-François La Pérouse, lost in that region in 1788. On this voyage he charted parts of New Zealand and visited the Fiji and Loyalty islands, New Caledonia, New Guinea, Amboyna, Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania), the Caroline Islands, and the Celebes. In February 1828 d’Urville sighted wreckage, believed to be from the frigates of La Pérouse, at Vanikoro in the Santa Cruz Islands. The expedition returned to France on March 25, 1829. The voyage resulted in extensive revision in charts of South Sea waters and redesignation of island groups into Melanesia, Micronesia, Polynesia, and Malaysia. D’Urville also returned with about 1,600 plant specimens, 900 rock samples, and information on the languages of the islands he had visited. Promoted to capitaine de vaisseau (captain) in 1829, he conveyed the exiled king Charles X to England in August 1830.
In September 1837 d’Urville set sail from Toulon on a voyage to Antarctica. He hoped to sail beyond the 74°15′ S reached by James Weddell in 1823. After surveying in the Straits of Magellan, d’Urville’s ships reached the pack ice at 63°29′ S, 44°47′ W, but they were ill-equipped for ice navigation. Unable to penetrate the pack, they coasted it for 300 miles to the east. Heading westward, they visited the South Orkneys and the South Shetlands and discovered Joinville Island and Louis Philippe Land before scurvy forced them to stop at Talcahuano, Chile. After proceeding across the Pacific to the Fiji and Pelew (now Palau) islands, New Guinea, and Borneo, they returned to the Antarctic, hoping to discover the magnetic pole in the unexplored sector between 120° and 160° E. In January 1840 they sighted the Adélie coast, south of Australia, and named it for Mme d’Urville. The expedition reached France late in 1841. The following year d’Urville was killed, with his wife and son, in a railway accident.
Dumont d’Urville’s chief works include (with others) Voyage de la corvette “l’Astrolabe,” 1826–1829 (1830–34; “Voyage of the Corvette ‘Astrolabe,’ 1826–1829”), Voyage au Pole Sud et dans l’Océanie, 1837–1840 (1841–54; “Voyage to the South Pole and in Oceania, 1837–1840”), and An Account in Two Volumes of Two Voyages to the South Seas (1987).
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7a649fdb932cba8488da731d0eb3d5c5 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jules-Supervielle | Jules Supervielle | Jules Supervielle
Jules Supervielle, (born Jan. 16, 1884, Montevideo, Uruguay—died May 17, 1960, Paris, France), poet, dramatist, and short-story writer of Basque descent who wrote in the French language but in the Spanish tradition.
Supervielle’s themes are the love of a lonely but fraternal man for the pampas and for the open spaces of his South American childhood and his nostalgia for a cosmic brotherhood of men. His poems (Gravitations, 1925; Les Amis inconnus, 1934 [“The Unknown Friends”]; La Fable du monde, 1938 [“Fable of the World”]) are sensitive, sometimes humorous, sometimes precious. In his novels Le Voleur d’enfants (1926; “The Kidnapper”) and L’Enfant de la haute mer (1931; “The Child of the High Seas”), he allies fantasy and simplicity. His plays La Belle au bois (1932; “The Beauty of the Wood”) and Robinson (1949) constitute an escape into a land of fantasy.
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b4be443bca0b544dd93a699b7a935180 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Julia-Carabias-Lillo | Julia Carabias Lillo | Julia Carabias Lillo
Julia Carabias Lillo, (born Aug. 11, 1954, Mexico City, Mex.), Mexican ecologist and environmentalist who served as Mexico’s secretary of the environment, natural resources, and fisheries from 1994 to 2000.
Carabias earned both bachelor’s (1977) and master’s (1981) degrees in biology from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City. In 1977 she began teaching at UNAM, and in 1981 she became a full professor of science there, concentrating her research on such subjects as rainforest regeneration, environmental restoration, and the use of natural resources. She was asked by the Mexican government in 1982 to coordinate a program to address the low standard of living in Guerrero, one of Mexico’s poorest states, while still accounting for the delicate ecology of the region. With the help of a team of economists and ecologists, Carabias later adapted the successful program to four other areas of Mexico. She served as a member of UNAM’s University Council from 1989 to 1993.
Among the works she coauthored were Manejo de recursos naturales y pobreza rural (1994; “Handling Natural Resources and Rural Poverty”), Areas naturales prioritarias para la conservación en la región II (1997; “Region II’s Priority Natural Areas for Conservation”), and Desarrollo sustentable (1999; “Sustainable Development”). She coauthored For Earth’s Sake for the UN Conference on Environment and Development, held in Brazil in 1992. Carabias entered government service in early 1994 as president of Mexico’s National Institute of Ecology. She was a member of the advisory council for the National Conservation Fund and in late 1994 became secretary of fisheries. A month later the Ministry of Environment, Natural Resources, and Fisheries was formed, and she became secretary, a position she held until late 2000.
In June 2000 she arranged a meeting of officials from Mexico and the United States to work on the problem of restoring natural water flows to the Rio Grande, and she helped create an international task force to deal with a water crisis in the middle section of that river. In addition, she played an important role in enforcing the environmental provisions of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Upon completion of her term as secretary, she returned to UNAM to head the master’s program in restoration ecology.
In January 2001 the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) awarded the J. Paul Getty Wildlife Conservation Prize to Carabias. The WWF commended Carabias for her efforts to promote public participation in the development of environmental policy. During her term as secretary, she had doubled the size of the country’s protected-area system to more than 6 percent of the total area of the country and thereby safeguarded such species as the gray whale (Eschrichtius robustus) and the pronghorn (Antilocapra americana) of Baja California and the manatee (Trichechus manatus) and jaguar (Panthera onca) of Yucatán. After receiving the WWF prize, Carabias donated the $100,000 cash portion of it to the protection of the Chajul region of southern Mexico’s Lacandon forests.
From 2001 to 2004 Carabias served on the board of directors of Resources for the Future, an international environmental research organization, and from 2002 to 2004 she served as chair of the Scientific and Technical Advisory Panel of the Global Environment Facility. She was awarded the International Cosmos Prize in 2004 and in 2005 received the United Nations Environmental Programme Champions of the Earth Prize.
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01ee044ce9ed47e5642e4a76a5223a8b | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Julia-Clifford-Lathrop | Julia Clifford Lathrop | Julia Clifford Lathrop
Julia Clifford Lathrop, (born June 29, 1858, Rockford, Ill., U.S.—died April 15, 1932, Rockford), American social welfare worker who was the first director of the U.S. Children’s Bureau.
Lathrop attended Vassar College, graduating in 1880. Over the next 10 years she worked in her father’s law office and interested herself in various reform movements. In 1890 she moved to Chicago and joined Jane Addams at the newly established Hull House settlement. In July 1893, at Governor John P. Altgeld’s appointment, she took a place on the Illinois Board of Charities. It was her first opportunity to undertake the sort of arduous, detailed, and passionately devoted work that would come to characterize her career. Lathrop immediately began a personal inspection of all 102 county almshouses and farms in the state. She interrupted that work during the winter of 1893–94 to make an inspection of the county charity institutions in Cook county. Her stark descriptions of the Cook county infirmary, asylum, and other institutions were printed as a chapter in Hull-House Maps and Papers (1895). Lathrop was particularly disturbed by the treatment of the mentally ill, who were often thrown in with the physically ill, with no provision for separating the young and the old. From the time of her inspections she was a strong advocate of extramural care for mental patients, and later, in 1909, she became a charter member of Clifford W. Beers’s National Committee for Mental Hygiene. In 1901 she resigned from the Illinois Board of Charities in protest against the low quality of the staffs of most of the institutions under its purview. She served again on the board from 1905 until her plan for its reorganization was adopted in 1909.
Lathrop’s interest in the problem of finding trained personnel to staff public institutions led her to join Graham Taylor in organizing the Chicago Institute of Social Science in 1903–04. She lectured regularly at the school, which shortly was renamed the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy, and in 1907, assisted by Sophonisba Breckinridge, she established its research department and served for a year as its director. She continued as a trustee of the school until it became the School of Social Service Administration of the University of Chicago in 1920. She was active in other fields as well: in 1899 she joined Lucy Flower in the campaign that secured the creation in Cook county of the world’s first juvenile court system. In 1908 she joined Breckinridge and Grace Abbott in forming the Immigrants’ Protective League.
In 1912 President William Howard Taft appointed Lathrop to head the newly created U.S. Children’s Bureau of the Department of Commerce and Labor. She was the first woman to head a statutory federal bureau at the appointment of the president with consent of the Senate. With a limited budget and staff, she first undertook a study of infant mortality and developed a plan for uniform birth registration. Subsequent studies by the bureau centred on child labour, mothers’ pensions, illegitimacy, juvenile delinquency, nutrition, and the treatment of the mentally retarded. Following passage of the Keating-Owen Child Labor Act in 1916, a Child Labor Division was created within the bureau to enforce it, and Lathrop brought in her old associate Abbott to direct the division. (The law was declared unconstitutional in 1918, as was a second law of 1919 in 1922.) During World War I the bureau took on added responsibilities for children of servicemen and of working mothers and other matters. During 1918–19 Lathrop also served as president of the National Conference of Social Work.
Lathrop also campaigned hard for the Sheppard-Towner Act, offering federal funds to states for programs of maternity and infant care, which was passed shortly after her resignation for reasons of health in 1921. (She was succeeded by Abbott.) From 1922 she lived in Rockford, Illinois. In that year she was elected president of the Illinois League of Women Voters, and in the same year she was appointed to a presidential commission investigating conditions at the immigration station at Ellis Island, New York. She contributed articles to various periodicals and a chapter to The Child, the Clinic, and the Court (1925). From 1925 to 1931 she served as an assessor for the Child Welfare Committee of the League of Nations.
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fcd4ff6e2431cbdec6e088b697a4f1c5 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Julia-daughter-of-Augustus | Julia | Julia
Julia, (born 39 bc—died ad 14, Rhegium [present-day Reggio di Calabria, Italy]), the Roman emperor Augustus’ only child, whose scandalous behaviour eventually caused him to exile her.
Julia’s mother was Scribonia, who was divorced by Augustus when the child was a few days old. Julia was brought up strictly, her every word and action being watched. After a brief marriage to Marcus Marcellus, who died in 23 bc, Julia wedded Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, Augustus’ chief lieutenant, in 21 bc. Their two eldest sons were adopted by Augustus in 17 bc and given the names Gaius and Lucius Caesar. Julia had a third son, Agrippa Postumus, and two daughters, Julia and Vipsania (later known as Agrippina the Elder).
With Agrippa’s death in 12 bc, Augustus’ wife, Livia, was able to convince him to favour her own sons by a former marriage, Tiberius and Drusus, as possible successors; Augustus forced Tiberius to divorce his wife and marry Julia in 11 bc. It was an unwanted and unhappy marriage for both of them. After an infant son by Julia perished in 6 bc, Tiberius went into voluntary exile, leaving Julia in Rome. Julia was accused of leading a promiscuous life, her adulteries becoming common knowledge in Rome. An affair with Mark Antony’s son Jullus Antonius was politically dangerous.
Finally Augustus discovered how Julia was behaving. After threatening her with death, he banished her to Pandataria, an island off the coast of Campania, in 2 bc. In ad 4 she was moved to Rhegium. Upon becoming emperor, Tiberius withheld her allowance, and Julia eventually died of malnutrition.
Julia’s faithlessness is not in question, but, according to the 5th-century-ad Roman author Macrobius (Saturnalia), she was a witty and intelligent woman and was loved by the people. Augustus showed her no mercy, however, calling her a “disease in my flesh.”
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e08ab315de911aef65fe9655af9e33ff | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Julia-Roberts | Julia Roberts | Julia Roberts
Julia Roberts, in full Julia Fiona Roberts, (born October 28, 1967, Smyrna, Georgia, U.S.), American actress whose deft performances in varied roles helped make her one of the highest-paid and most-influential actresses in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Although Roberts’s parents briefly ran an actors’ workshop when she was a child, she had no acting experience or formal training when she moved to New York City after high school to pursue a career in show business. She signed with a modeling agency upon her arrival but failed to land any jobs. Her first film role turned up after she was recommended by her older brother, actor Eric Roberts, for a bit part as his on-screen sister in Blood Red (1989), a drama set in the late 1800s; although the film was completed in 1986, its release was delayed for several years. She next made several television appearances before securing her first leading part, in Mystic Pizza (1988).
Roberts’s career took off after she was cast in Steel Magnolias (1989), which featured such veteran actresses as Shirley MacLaine, Olympia Dukakis, and Sally Field. Roberts received an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress for her heartrending portrayal of Field’s diabetic daughter. In 1990 she starred in Pretty Woman, an upbeat comedy about a romance between a prostitute and a business tycoon, played by Richard Gere. A huge hit, it made Roberts a household name and earned her a second Academy Award nomination.
Roberts continued to work steadily throughout the 1990s, starring in Flatliners (1990), Sleeping with the Enemy (1991), The Pelican Brief (1993), Something to Talk About (1995), Mary Reilly (1996), My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997), and Stepmom (1998), for which she also served as executive producer. Her personal life at times overshadowed her professional career, however, as when her highly publicized marriage to singer Lyle Lovett abruptly ended in 1995. In 1999 Roberts starred in two popular romantic comedies, Notting Hill and Runaway Bride, the latter of which again paired her with Gere.
In 2000 Roberts launched her own production company, Shoelace Productions, and that same year she commanded $20 million for her starring role in Erin Brockovich. The film portrayed the real-life story of a law-office clerk who helped the citizens of a California town win a multimillion-dollar settlement against a utility company for health problems caused by the company’s pollution of their drinking water. For her performance, Roberts won an Academy Award for best actress. She later starred opposite Brad Pitt, George Clooney, and Matt Damon in the blockbuster comedy Ocean’s Eleven (2001) and its sequel Ocean’s Twelve (2004). She also appeared in the relationship drama Closer (2004).
In 2006 Roberts supplied the voice for the spider Charlotte in the animated film adaptation of E.B. White’s beloved children’s book Charlotte’s Web. That year she made her Broadway debut in Three Days of Rain, earning mixed reviews. Roberts next appeared with Tom Hanks in Charlie Wilson’s War (2007), a film based on true events surrounding the U.S. government’s involvement in the Afghan resistance to the Soviets in the 1980s. Her subsequent movies included the family drama Fireflies in the Garden (2008); Duplicity (2009), in which she played a corporate spy; and the romantic comedy Valentine’s Day (2010).
After starring in Eat Pray Love (2010), which was adapted from Elizabeth Gilbert’s best-selling memoir of the same name, Roberts, playing a community-college professor, reteamed with Hanks in Larry Crowne (2011). In Mirror Mirror (2012), a comedic version of the Snow White tale, she inhabited the role of the evil queen. She then crossed swords with Meryl Streep—who played her savagely critical mother—in the family drama August: Osage County (2013), based on the play by Tracy Letts; the role earned Roberts an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress. She later assumed the role of a doctor assisting gay men during the early years of the AIDS crisis in New York City in The Normal Heart (2014), a television adaptation of Larry Kramer’s play.
In the feature film Secret in Their Eyes (2015), Roberts portrayed an FBI agent whose daughter is raped and murdered. She then joined the cast of the ensemble comedy Mother’s Day (2016) as a hard-driving businesswoman. In Jodie Foster’s Wall Street thriller Money Monster (2016), her character is the producer of a financial advice show who is taken hostage along with the host (Clooney) and their crew. In 2017 Roberts lent her voice to the animated film Smurfs: The Lost Village and played the mother of a child with a rare facial condition in Wonder. The following year she starred as a therapist working at a facility to help veterans adjust to civilian life in Homecoming, her first television series, and as a mother whose son skips his rehabilitation program to return home for Christmas in Ben Is Back.
Throughout her career, Roberts lent her support to numerous charitable organizations, including UNICEF and the American Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund. In order to raise awareness for threatened species of wildlife, she narrated the documentary In the Wild: Orangutans with Julia Roberts (1998), and for Wild Horses of Mongolia (2000) she lived with Mongolian nomads for several weeks; both programs appeared on American television.
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fb5ea116f1ee2dbf3c08fe26d847da8c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Julian-Barnes | Julian Barnes | Julian Barnes
Julian Barnes, in full Julian Patrick Barnes, pseudonyms Edward Pygge and Dan Kavanagh, (born January 19, 1946, Leicester, England), British critic and author of inventive and intellectual novels about obsessed characters curious about the past.
Barnes attended Magdalen College, Oxford (B.A., 1968), and began contributing reviews to the Times Literary Supplement in the 1970s while publishing thrillers under his Kavanagh pseudonym. These books—which include Duffy (1980), Fiddle City (1981), Putting the Boot In (1985), and Going to the Dogs (1987)—feature a man named Duffy, a bisexual ex-cop turned private detective.
The first novel published under Barnes’s own name was the coming-of-age story Metroland (1980). Jealous obsession moves the protagonist of Before She Met Me (1982) to scrutinize his new wife’s past. Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) is a humorous mixture of biography, fiction, and literary criticism as a scholar becomes obsessed with Flaubert and with the stuffed parrot that Flaubert used as inspiration in writing the short story “Un Coeur simple.” Barnes’s later novels included A History of the World in 101/2 Chapters (1989), Talking It Over (1991), The Porcupine (1992), and Cross Channel (1996). In the satirical England, England (1998), Barnes skewers modern England in his portrayal of a theme park on the Isle of Wight, complete with the royal family, the Tower of London, Robin Hood, and pubs.
Critics thought Barnes showed a new depth of emotion in The Lemon Table (2004), a collection of short stories in which most of the characters are consumed by thoughts of death. He explored why some people are remembered after their death and others are not in the historical novel Arthur & George (2005), in which one of the title characters is based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In 2011 Barnes published Pulse, a collection of short stories, as well as The Sense of an Ending, a Booker Prize-winning novel that uses an unreliable narrator to explore the subjects of memory and aging. The Noise of Time (2016) fictionalizes episodes from the life of Russian composer Dmitry Shostakovich. In The Only Story (2018), Barnes explored memory and first love as a man looks back on his relationship with an older woman.
Barnes’s nonfiction work included Something to Declare (2002), a collection of essays about France and French culture; The Pedant in the Kitchen (2003), which explores his love of food; Through the Window (2012), an exploration of his literary influences; and Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art (2015). His memoir Nothing to Be Frightened Of (2008) is an honest, oftentimes jarringly critical look at his relationship with his parents and older brother. Levels of Life (2013)—which pays tribute to his wife, who died in 2008—is a series of linked essays. Barnes used the story of the pioneering surgeon Samuel Pozzi to explore Belle Époque Paris in The Man in the Red Coat (2019).
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7fc27e0d3ab3f43c7cdadf704a3cb9c2 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Julian-bishop-of-Halicarnassus | Julian | Julian
…extreme; it was proclaimed by Julian, bishop of Halicarnassus, who asserted that the body of Christ was divine and therefore naturally incorruptible and impassible; Christ, however, was free to will his sufferings and death voluntarily. Severus, patriarch of Antioch, himself a condemned Monophysite, vigorously challenged Julian on the ground that…
His contemporary Julian of Halicarnassus taught the more radical doctrine that, through union with the Word, Christ’s body had been incorruptible and immortal from the moment of the Incarnation.
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1b22a93d0e792a4d5f4fa5d3c0800e88 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Julian-Bond | Julian Bond | Julian Bond
Julian Bond, in full Horace Julian Bond, (born January 14, 1940, Nashville, Tennessee, U.S.—died August 15, 2015, Fort Walton Beach, Florida), U.S. legislator and Black civil rights leader, best known for his fight to take his duly elected seat in the Georgia House of Representatives.
Bond, who was the son of prominent educators, attended Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, where he helped found a civil rights group and led a sit-in movement intended to desegregate Atlanta lunch counters. In 1960 he joined in creating the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and he later served as communications director for the group. In 1965 he won a seat in the Georgia state legislature, but the body refused to seat him because of his endorsement of SNCC’s statement opposing U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. The voters in his district reelected him in both a special election and a regular election in 1966, but the legislature barred him each time. Finally, in December 1966, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the exclusion unconstitutional, and Bond was sworn in on January 9, 1967.
Bond maintained that African Americans were being excluded from power within the Democratic organization in Georgia, and therefore he helped lead an insurgent delegation at the Democratic National Convention in 1968; Georgia’s official delegation was forced to yield half its seats to members of Bond’s group. He seconded the nomination of Eugene McCarthy and became the first Black man to have his name placed in nomination for the vice presidential candidacy of a major party. Younger than the minimum age required for the position under the Constitution, however, Bond withdrew his name.
Bond served in the Georgia House of Representatives from 1967 to 1975 and in the Georgia Senate from 1975 to 1987. In 1986 he ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. In addition to his legislative activities, Bond served as the first president (1971–79) of the Southern Poverty Law Center. He also served as president (1978–89) of the Atlanta chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and then as chairman (1998–2010) of the national organization.
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f4a0d2536d15469c0817593905f25ee3 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Julian-Schnabel | Julian Schnabel | Julian Schnabel
Julian Schnabel, (born October 26, 1951, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.), American painter, printmaker, sculptor, and filmmaker who was one of a number of international painters—including David Salle in the United States, Georg Baselitz in Germany, and Francesco Clemente in Italy—to emerge in the late 1970s whose bold expressive style was termed Neo-Expressionist. He became an instant art-world success when he was marketed by the young New York dealer Mary Boone.
Schnabel was known for culling imagery from a variety of sources, from both fine art and popular culture, in keeping with the emerging postmodern practice of denying authorial originality and intent through acts of appropriation. Schnabel’s art in particular was characterized by its chaotic profusion of styles and sources. He often painted on velvet and applied such materials as broken crockery. He was a bigger-than-life figure in the thriving art-star scene and, with the marketing help of Boone, his first one-person show in New York (1979) was sold out before it even opened. He was 29 years old.
Schnabel grew up in Texas and studied at the University of Houston from 1969 to 1973. He then moved to New York, where he entered the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program until 1974. His developing aesthetic was much influenced by his subsequent travels to Europe.
He first became known for his paintings on velvet and for canvases whose painting surface was built up of shattered crockery and other found materials. This he attributed to the influence of Antoni Gaudí’s tile work in Barcelona. His large velvet paintings—meant to carry the association of cheap popular art of a type sold from the backs of vans parked on empty lots—were intended to challenge preconceptions about “good” and “bad” art. The broken crockery works were also intended as an affront to the austerity of high modernism and as a metaphor for the fragmentary nature of postmodern existence. On these two types of surface, Schnabel might mix an image appropriated from Oskar Kokoschka or Caravaggio with a comic book figure and a pair of real antlers. His inclusion of many varieties of material culture, often in the same work of art, had its roots in the art of Robert Rauschenberg and others. Some of Schnabel’s work seemed to address mythical and religious themes.
In 1983 he began making sculpture, but he made more of an impression by directing the films Basquiat (1996), about the American painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Before Night Falls (2000), about the Cuban poet and novelist Reinaldo Arenas. In 2007 Schnabel directed Le Scaphandre et le papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) and Lou Reed’s Berlin. The former, which won two Golden Globe Awards—one for best director and the other for best foreign-language film—concerns a style-magazine editor who suffers a stroke, which leaves him almost completely paralyzed, and dictates his memoirs by blinking his left eye. The film on singer-songwriter Lou Reed is a documentary that features Reed’s live performance in 2006 of his 1973 record album Berlin. In Miral (2010) Schnabel explored the Arab-Israeli conflict through the eyes of four Palestinian women living in Israel in the mid-to-late 20th century. He later considered the last years of 19th-century painter Vincent van Gogh (portrayed by Willem Dafoe) in At Eternity’s Gate (2018).
Schnabel’s personal life as well as his art and films were explored in the documentary Julian Schnabel: A Private Portrait (2017), which was directed by Pappi Corsicato.
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f5ba5ce241d394e20b5f69204cfe48f2 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Julie-Andrews | Julie Andrews | Julie Andrews
Julie Andrews, in full Dame Julie Andrews, original name Julia Elizabeth Wells, (born October 1, 1935, Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, England), English motion-picture, stage, and musical star noted for her crystalline four-octave voice and her charm and skill as an actress.
At the age of 10, Andrews began singing with her pianist mother and singer stepfather (whose last name she legally adopted) in their music-hall act. Demonstrating a remarkably powerful voice with perfect pitch, she made her solo professional debut in 1947 singing an operatic aria in Starlight Roof, a revue staged at the London Hippodrome.
Andrews made her Broadway debut in 1954 in the American production of the popular British musical spoof The Boy Friend. In 1956 she created the role of the Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle in Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s classic musical My Fair Lady. Andrews’s performance was universally acclaimed, and the production became one of the biggest hits in Broadway history, as well as a huge success in Britain. In 1957, during the show’s run, Andrews appeared on American television in a musical version of Cinderella, written for her by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. In 1960 she had another hit in a role developed especially for her, that of Queen Guinevere in Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot.
Although Andrews lost the part of Eliza in the film version of My Fair Lady (1964), she did make her movie debut that year. After seeing her performance in Camelot, Walt Disney went backstage and offered Andrews the title role of the magical proper English nanny in his Mary Poppins (1964). The picture became one of Disney’s biggest moneymakers, and Andrews won both a Grammy and an Academy Award for her performance. The wholesome role and image, however, would prove difficult for Andrews to shed. Her portrayal of the governess and aspiring nun Maria in The Sound of Music (1965), one of the top-grossing films of all time, earned Andrews another Academy Award nomination and further reinforced her sweet, “goody-goody” image.
Andrews attempted to change that image with dramatic, nonmusical roles in such films as The Americanization of Emily (1964) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain (1966), but these were overshadowed by her musicals, whose success made her one of the biggest stars of the decade. By the late 1960s, however, traditional film musicals were declining in popularity. Andrews starred in two expensive musical flops—Star! (1968) and Darling Lili (1970), the latter produced, directed, and cowritten by Blake Edwards, whom she married in 1970—and was considered by many to be a has-been. She continued to make television and concert appearances, and, using the name Julie Edwards, she wrote two children’s books—Mandy (1971) and The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles (1974). She did not, however, have another notable film role until 1979, when she played a supporting part in Edwards’s popular comedy 10 (1979). Beginning with that picture, audiences began to accept Andrews in a wider range of roles.
She proved herself a versatile actress, adept at both comedy and drama, and she received an Academy Award nomination for her performance as a woman impersonating a male female-impersonator in Edwards’s Victor/Victoria (1982). She was also widely praised for her portrayal of a violinist struggling with multiple sclerosis in Duet for One (1986). Her later films included the family comedies The Princess Diaries (2001) and its sequel, The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement (2004). She also narrated the fantasy Enchanted (2007) and provided the voice of the queen in several of the animated Shrek films (2004, 2007, and 2010). In addition, Andrews voiced characters in Despicable Me (2010), Despicable Me 3 (2017), and Aquaman (2018). In 2011 she won a Grammy Award for Julie Andrews’ Collection of Poems, Songs, and Lullabies, a spoken-word album for children, and she was honoured with a special Grammy for lifetime achievement.
Andrews reprised her Victor/Victoria role on Broadway in 1995 and stirred up controversy when she refused to accept a Tony nomination for her performance—the only nomination the show received—because she felt that the rest of the cast and crew, which included director Edwards, had been “egregiously overlooked.” In 1997 Andrews was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame. Three years later she was made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE). She wrote the autobiographies Home: A Memoir of My Early Years (2008) and Home Work: A Memoir of My Hollywood Years (2019); the latter was written with her daughter Emma Walton Hamilton.
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111be419567634dbabc9db989f20ad7d | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Julie-de-Lespinasse | Julie de Lespinasse | Julie de Lespinasse
Julie de Lespinasse, in full Julie-Jeanne-Éléonore de Lespinasse, (born 1732, Lyon, France—died May 23, 1776, Paris), French hostess of one of the most brilliant and emancipated of Parisian salons and the author of several volumes of passionate letters that reveal her romantic sensibility and literary gifts.
Born out of wedlock to the comtesse d’Albon, she was sent to convent school and made governess to the marquise de Vichy, her mother’s legitimate daughter. The marquise du Deffand, one of the reigning aristocratic Parisian hostesses, recognized Lespinasse’s intelligence and charm and persuaded her in 1754 to come to Paris and assist at her literary salon. By 1764 she had become jealous of her younger companion’s popularity and dismissed her.
Lespinasse set up her own salon in the rue Saint-Dominique, and the philosopher and mathematician Jean Le Rond d’Alembert eventually joined her there. She nursed him through a serious illness but never returned his deep love for her. She, in turn, found her affection for the comte de Guibert, a man of fashion, unrequited. At her death she left d’Alembert the letters she had intended for Guibert. Her Lettres (1809) show her intensely experienced emotions of love, remorse, and despair. Denis Diderot wrote of her in his Rêve de d’Alembert (written 1769, published 1830; D’Alembert’s Dream), which she requested him to suppress.
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2eddc433b0c39a4bf40eb82092ef6887 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Julie-Newmar | Julie Newmar | Julie Newmar
…role that was shared with Julie Newmar) were among the celebrities who made appearances as Batman’s foes. The show was an immediate hit, spawning an unprecedented wave of Bat-merchandise. The Batman newspaper strip resumed, and a theatrical movie was churned out for the summer of 1966. Late in the series,…
…versions of Batman, portrayed by Julie Newmar and Eartha Kitt in the campy 1960s television series, Lee Meriwether in its 1966 movie spin-off, Michelle Pfeiffer in the 1992 feature Batman Returns, Halle Berry in the 2004 film
…boost, changed her name to Julie Newmar, and went on to play Catwoman in the Batman TV series.
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8e1c80c8db01dada2813b0ed739609c0 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Julie-Taymor | Julie Taymor | Julie Taymor
Julie Taymor, (born December 15, 1952, Newton, Massachusetts, U.S.), American stage and film director, playwright, and costume designer known for her inventive use of Asian-inspired masks and puppets. In 1998 she became the first woman to win a Tony Award for best director of a musical, for her Broadway production of The Lion King, derived from the Disney animated film of the same name.
Taymor showed an early interest in theatre when she and her sister began putting on productions in their backyard for friends and family. Taymor joined the Boston Children’s Theatre and performed as Hermia in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In high school she began attending the experimental theatre workshops given by playwright and theatre educator Julie Portman, in which she learned the art of “living theatre,” creating theatre from ideas or from scratch and using personal experience as the primary inspiration. Finishing high school at age 16, Taymor traveled to Paris to attend to Jacques Lecoq’s mime school. After one year, Taymor returned to the U.S. and began studies at Oberlin College, where she pursued folklore and mythology. Though not pursuing an academic course in theatre, she auditioned for and was accepted into a newly formed company on campus, KRAKEN, led by the experimental director and scholar Herbert Blau. .
With a Thomas J. Watson Foundation fellowship (1974), a one-year grant, Taymor left the U.S. to travel and study theatre. Her travels took her to eastern Europe, Japan, and finally to Indonesia, where she had planned to stay three months but instead stayed for four years. In Bali, with funding from a Ford Foundation grant, she founded Teatr Loh—a group of German, American, French, Sudanese, Javanese, and Balinese puppeteers, musicians, dancers, and actors—and developed her first theatre works, Way of Snow and Tirai. In 1980 and ’81 Taymor restaged both of those works in New York City. In 1980 she met composer Elliot Goldenthal, who became her life partner and artistic collaborator. One of their first projects was the original musical Liberty’s Taken (1985), an irreverent retelling of the story of the American Revolution. Other early collaborations included a stage adaptation (1986) of The Transposed Heads: A Legend of India, by Thomas Mann, and Juan Darién: A Carnival Mass (1988), based on the short story “Juan Darién,” by the Uruguayan author Horacio Quiroga. The latter earned Taymor an Obie Award (given for Off-Broadway theatre) for best direction. In 1996 she restaged it for Broadway and incorporated her soon-to-become-trademark puppets and masks. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Taymor also directed several plays by Shakespeare, including The Tempest (1986), The Taming of the Shrew (1988), and Titus Andronicus (1994), each of which ran at Theatre for a New Audience, a venue in Brooklyn devoted to Shakespeare and classic drama.
In the early 1990s Taymor began branching out to directing films and staging operas. Her first production of an opera, Igor Stravinsky’s opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex, based on the play by Sophocles and conducted by Seiji Ozawa, was recorded in 1993. The film of the performance was screened at a few film festivals and aired on television; for the latter it won an Emmy Award (1993). She staged Mozart’s The Magic Flute in Florence in 1993, with conductor Zubin Mehta, and the following year she took on Richard Strauss’s Salomé, conducted by Valery Gergiev in St. Petersburg. In 1995 she staged Richard Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman, conducted by Klaus Weise for the Los Angeles Opera. Taymor’s first film, Fool’s Fire—based on the short story “Hop-Frog” (1849) by Edgar Allan Poe—aired on television in 1992 and was screened at the Sundance Film Festival later that year.
In 1996 Taymor staged Carlo Gozzi’s play The Green Bird, in which she experimented with Bunraku, a form of Japanese puppet theatre that has the puppeteers in view of the audience but silent and cloaked in black so that their presence recedes into the background. In The Green Bird Taymor introduced her own version of Bunraku, which eliminated masks and involved speaking parts for her actor-puppeteers, a model she used again for The Lion King (1997).
Taymor was considered an unusual choice to design the staging of Disney’s The Lion King for Broadway, given how dissimilar her aesthetic was to the whimsical and sentimental style of Disney animation. However, she won over the Disney executives with her innovative use of life-size puppets paired with actors. She designed traditional African costumes for the actors and animal masks that rested on their heads, allowing the performers’ facial expressions to be visible. For some of her costumes, she created what appeared to be full-body puppets that were worn by the performers. The giraffes, for example, were actors on stilts wearing tall conical masks. In sum, Taymor created more than 100 puppets for the show, which came together into a fantastic spectacle that made The Lion King one of the longest-running musicals on Broadway. She won the Tony Award for best costume design in 1998.
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93d7b4b2ed4961066fbe6331933ea5a1 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Julie-Taymor/Feature-films-and-beyond | Feature films and beyond | Feature films and beyond
Following the critical and financial success of The Lion King, Taymor dedicated more of her time to feature films, releasing her first, Titus, based on Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, in 1999. The score was composed by Goldenthal, and the film starred Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange. Taymor followed up with Frida (2002), a visually stunning film about artist Frida Kahlo, portrayed by Salma Hayek. The biopic won Academy Awards (2003) for best original score and best makeup. Other films directed by Taymor included Across the Universe (2007), a Vietnam War-era love story set to a soundtrack of the Beatles; The Tempest (2010), based on the play by Shakespeare and for which she changed the male role of Prospero to a female Prospera, portrayed by Helen Mirren; and The Glorias (2020), a biopic about feminist icon Gloria Steinem. Taymor also worked with Goldenthal on two more operas during this period: another staging of The Magic Flute for the Metropolitan Opera in New York City and an original work, Grendel (2006), based on the Old English epic poem Beowulf.
She next began work on Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, a Broadway musical that she signed on to direct, with Bono and the Edge of the band U2 as its composers. The production, nine years in the making, was riddled with problems, and Taymor was fired from her position in March 2011 after reportedly clashing with both her collaborators and the show’s producers. The show opened under new direction in June of that year. Though it was reasonably successful, it closed in January 2014 with the dubious distinction of being, at that time, the most expensive Broadway musical ever produced, at a cost of $75 million.
After a long hiatus, Taymor returned to directing Shakespeare onstage with her 2013 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Theatre for a New Audience. She then helmed a 2015 production of Grounded, a one-person show featuring Anne Hathaway as a fighter pilot, at the Public Theater. Her production of M. Butterfly, starring Clive Owen, received middling ticket sales and reviews and ended its run soon after premiering in 2017.
Among her many nominations and awards, Taymor received a MacArthur fellowship (1991) and a Guggenheim fellowship for creative arts—drama and performance art (1989). She also won the first Dorothy B. Chandler Performing Arts Award (1989) and a Muse Award from the New York Women in Film & Television (2007).
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17a6c22db29c33261fd3b33b4c154440 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Julien-David-LeRoy | Julien-David LeRoy | Julien-David LeRoy
…Nollet and studied architecture under J.-D. Leroy. He visited England at least once, and the sketchbook that survives is a rare record of the view by a French architect of late 18th-century England.
…by a French architecture student, Julien-David LeRoy. Faced with the problem of discussing Athenian buildings constructed in the time of Vitruvius, he decided to discuss them twice, by treating them separately under two different headings. Before this date, “history” was of architectural importance only as a means of justifying, by…
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53e08281d2cfc528f612b5a1a14e73cf | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Julien-Gracq | Julien Gracq | Julien Gracq
The novelists Julien Green, Julien Gracq (pseudonym of Louis Poirier), and Yourcenar (discussed above) were among several figures of an earlier generation who began in the 1970s to publish journals and memoirs rather than fiction, and the film versions of Marcel Pagnol’s 1950s recollections of his Provençal childhood met…
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4d90aade9382b23996501592b2d9ec29 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Juliet-Prowse | Juliet Prowse | Juliet Prowse
…meets a cabaret dancer (Juliet Prowse). After the military musical All Hands on Deck (1961), Taurog helmed three more Elvis films: Blue Hawaii (1961), with the signature tune “Can’t Help Falling in Love”; Girls! Girls! Girls! (1962), which featured “Return to Sender”; and It Happened at the World’s Fair
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ae8ea919f61fc3b82e90a3f3cb0b163f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Juliette-Gordon-Low | Juliette Gordon Low | Juliette Gordon Low
Juliette Gordon Low, née Juliette Magill Kinzie Gordon, (born October 31, 1860, Savannah, Georgia, U.S.—died January 18, 1927, Savannah), founder of the Girl Scouts of the United States of America.
Juliette Gordon was born into a prominent Georgia family. She was educated at private schools in Virginia and New York City and for some years thereafter traveled widely. She married William M. Low, a fellow native of Savannah, Georgia, who was living in England, in 1886. Her interest in the Scout movement stemmed from her friendship with Robert and Agnes Baden-Powell, who had organized the Boy Scouts and its sister organization, the Girl Guides, in England. After forming a small troop of Girl Guides in Scotland and two in London, Low returned to the United States and organized the nation’s first troop of Girl Guides in Savannah in March 1912. In 1913 she established a headquarters in Washington, D.C. (later moved to New York City), and the movement grew rapidly.
In 1915, by which time the name had been changed to the Girl Scouts of the United States of America, the movement was formally organized on a national basis, and Low was elected president, a post she retained until 1920. Low traveled throughout the United States, donating and soliciting funds and organizing troops. In 1919 she represented the United States at the first International Council of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts. At her retirement in 1920 she was honoured with the title of founder, and her birthday was set aside as Girl Scouts Founder’s Day. Her devotion to the movement continued unabated after her retirement. By the time of her death in 1927 there were more than 140,000 Girl Scouts, in troops in every U.S. state, and by the early 21st century the organization had grown to include some 3.7 million members. In 2012 Low was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
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31a831987d34d6e3a644c3ea96bd806c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Julio-Adalberto-Rivera | Julio Adalberto Rivera | Julio Adalberto Rivera
Julio Adalberto Rivera (1962–67) to power. PRUD was dismantled and replaced by the National Conciliation Party (Partido de Conciliación Nacional; PCN), which would control the national government for the next 18 years. Under the banner of the Alliance for Progress, Rivera advanced programs aimed at…
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1885b7da797d4ea8061829053dc34293 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Julius-Caesar-Roman-ruler/Antecedents-and-outcome-of-the-civil-war-of-49-45-bce | Antecedents and outcome of the civil war of 49–45 bce | Antecedents and outcome of the civil war of 49–45 bce
During his conquest of Gaul, Caesar had been equally busy in preserving and improving his position at home. He used part of his growing wealth from Gallic loot to hire political agents in Rome.
Meanwhile the cohesion of the triumvirate had been placed under strain. Pompey had soon become restive toward his alarmingly successful ally Caesar, as had Crassus toward his old enemy Pompey. The alliance was patched up in April 56 bce at a conference at Luca (Lucca), just inside Caesar’s province of Cisalpine Gaul. It was arranged that Pompey and Crassus were to be the consuls for 55 bce and were to get laws promulgated prolonging Caesar’s provincial commands for another five years and giving Crassus a five-year term in Syria and Pompey a five-year term in Spain. These laws were duly passed. Crassus was then eliminated by an annihilating defeat at the Parthians’ hands in 53 bce. The marriage link between Pompey and Caesar had been broken by Julia’s death in 54 bce. After this, Pompey irresolutely veered further and further away from Caesar, until, when the breach finally came, Pompey found himself committed to the nobility’s side, though he and the nobility never trusted each other.
The issue was whether there should or should not be an interval between the date at which Caesar was to resign his provincial governorships and, therewith, the command over his armies and the date at which he would enter his proposed second consulship. If there were to be an interval, Caesar would be a private person during that time, vulnerable to attack by his enemies; if prosecuted and convicted, he would be ruined politically and might possibly lose his life. Caesar had to make sure that, until his entry on his second consulship, he should continue to hold at least one province with the military force to guarantee his security.
This issue had already been the object of a series of political manoeuvres and countermanoeuvres at Rome. The dates on which the issue turned are all in doubt. As had been agreed at Luca in 56 bce, Caesar’s commands had been prolonged for five years, apparently until February 28, 49 bce, but this is not certain. In 52 bce, a year in which Pompey was elected sole consul and given a five-year provincial command in Spain, Caesar was allowed by a law sponsored by all 10 tribunes to stand for the consulship in absentia. If he were to stand in 49 bce for the consulship for 48 bce, he would be out of office, and therefore in danger, during the last 10 months of 49 bce. As a safeguard for Caesar against this, there seems to have been an understanding—possibly a private one at Luca in 56 bce between him and Pompey—that the question of a successor to Caesar in his commands should not be raised in the Senate before March 1, 50 bce. This manoeuvre would have ensured that Caesar would retain his commands until the end of 49 bce. However, the question of replacing Caesar was actually raised in the Senate a number of times from 51 bce onward; each time Caesar had the dangerous proposals vetoed by tribunes of the plebs who were his agents—particularly Gaius Scribonius Curio in 50 bce and Mark Antony in 49 bce.
The issue was brought to a head by one of the consuls for 50 bce, Gaius Claudius Marcellus. He obtained resolutions from the Senate that Caesar should lay down his command (presumably at its terminal date) but that Pompey should not lay down his command simultaneously. Curio then obtained on December 1, 50 bce, a resolution (by 370 votes to 22) that both men should lay down their commands simultaneously. Next day Marcellus (without authorization from the Senate) offered the command over all troops in Italy to Pompey, together with the power to raise more; and Pompey accepted. On January 1, 49 bce, the Senate received from Caesar a proposal that he and Pompey should lay down their commands simultaneously. Caesar’s message was peremptory, and the Senate resolved that Caesar should be treated as a public enemy if he did not lay down his command “by a date to be fixed.”
On January 10–11, 49 bce, Caesar led his troops across the little river Rubicon, the boundary between his province of Cisalpine Gaul and Italy proper. He thus committed the first act of war. This was not, however, the heart of the matter. The actual question of substance was whether the misgovernment of the Greco-Roman world by the Roman nobility should be allowed to continue or whether it should be replaced by an autocratic regime. Either alternative would result in a disastrous civil war. The subsequent partial recuperation of the Greco-Roman world under the principate suggests, however, that Caesarism was the lesser evil.
The civil war was a tragedy, for war was not wanted either by Caesar or by Pompey or even by a considerable part of the nobility, while the bulk of the Roman citizen body ardently hoped for the preservation of peace. By this time, however, the three parties that counted politically were all entrapped. Caesar’s success in building up his political power had made the champions of the old regime so implacably hostile to him that he was now faced with a choice between putting himself at his enemies’ mercy or seizing the monopoly of power at which he was accused of aiming. He found that he could not extricate himself from this dilemma by reducing his demands, as he eventually did, to the absolute minimum required for his security. As for Pompey, his growing jealousy of Caesar had led him so far toward the nobility that he could not come to terms with Caesar again without loss of face.
The first bout of the civil war moved swiftly. In 49 bce Caesar drove his opponents out of Italy to the eastern side of the Straits of Otranto. He then crushed Pompey’s army in Spain. Toward the end of 49 bce, he followed Pompey across the Adriatic Sea and retrieved a reverse at Dyrrachium by winning a decisive victory at Pharsalus on August 9, 48 bce. Caesar pursued Pompey from Thessaly to Egypt, where Pompey was murdered by an officer of King Ptolemy. Caesar wintered in Alexandria, fighting with the populace and dallying with Queen Cleopatra. In 47 bce he fought a brief local war in northeastern Anatolia with Pharnaces, king of the Cimmerian Bosporus, who was trying to regain Pontus, the kingdom of his father, Mithradates. Caesar’s famous words, Veni, vidi, vici (“I came, I saw, I conquered”), are his own account of this campaign.
Caesar then returned to Rome, but a few months later, now with the title of dictator, he left for Africa, where his opponents had rallied. In 46 he crushed their army at Thapsus and returned to Rome, only to leave in November for Farther Spain to deal with a fresh outbreak of resistance, which he crushed on March 17, 45 bce, at Munda. He then returned to Rome to start putting the Greco-Roman world in order. He had less than a year’s grace for this huge task of reconstruction before his assassination in 44 bce in the Senate House at Rome on March 15 (the Ides of March).
Caesar’s death was partly due to his clemency and impatience, which, in combination, were dangerous for his personal security. Caesar had not hesitated to commit atrocities against “barbarians” when it had suited him, but he was almost consistently magnanimous in his treatment of his defeated Roman opponents. Thus clemency was probably not just a matter of policy. Caesar’s earliest experience in his political career had been Sulla’s implacable persecution of his defeated domestic opponents. Caesar amnestied his opponents wholesale and gave a number of them responsible positions in his new regime. Gaius Cassius Longinus, who was the moving spirit in the plot to murder him, and Marcus Junius Brutus, the symbolic embodiment of Roman republicanism, were both former enemies. “Et tu, Brute” (“You too, Brutus”) was Caesar’s expression of his particular anguish at being stabbed by a man whom he had forgiven, trusted, and loved.
There were, however, also a number of ex-Caesareans among the 60 conspirators. They had been goaded into this volte-face by the increasingly monarchical trend of Caesar’s regime and, perhaps at least as much, by the aristocratic disdain that inhibited Caesar from taking any trouble to sugar the bitter pill. Some stood to lose, rather than to gain, personally by the removal of the autocrat who had made their political fortunes. But even if they were acting on principle, they were blind to the truth that the reign of the Roman nobility was broken beyond recall and that even Caesar might not have been able to overthrow the old regime if its destruction had not been long overdue. They also failed to recognize that by making Caesar a martyr they were creating his posthumous political fortune.
If Caesar had not been murdered in 44 bce, he might have lived on for 15 or 20 years. His physical constitution was unusually tough, though in his last years he had several epileptic seizures. What would he have done with this time? The answer can only be guessed from what he did do in the few months available. He found time in the year 46 bce to reform the Roman calendar. In 45 bce he enacted a law laying down a standard pattern for the constitutions of the municipia, which were by this time the units of local self-government in most of the territory inhabited by Roman citizens. In 59 bce Caesar had already resurrected the city of Capua, which the republican Roman regime more than 150 years earlier had deprived of its juridical corporate personality; he now resurrected the other two great cities, Carthage and Corinth, that his predecessors had destroyed. This was only a part of what he did to resettle his discharged soldiers and the urban proletariat of Rome. He was also generous in granting Roman citizenship to aliens. (He had given it to all of Cisalpine Gaul, north of the Po, in 49 bce.) He increased the size of the Senate and made its personnel more representative of the whole Roman citizenry.
At his death, Caesar was on the point of starting out on a new military campaign to avenge and retrieve Crassus’s disastrous defeat in 53 bce by the Parthians. Would Caesar have succeeded in recapturing for the Greco-Roman world the extinct Seleucid monarchy’s lost dominions east of the Euphrates, particularly Babylonia? The fate of Crassus’s army had shown that the terrain in northern Mesopotamia favoured Parthian cavalry against Roman infantry. Would Caesar’s military genius have outweighed this handicap? And would Rome’s hitherto inexhaustible reservoir of military manpower have sufficed for this additional call upon it? Only guesses are possible, for Caesar’s assassination condemned the Romans to another 13 years of civil war, and Rome would never again possess sufficient manpower to conquer and hold Babylonia.
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c2d976327891f2df07cf00205267e270 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Julius-Caesar-Roman-ruler/The-first-triumvirate-and-the-conquest-of-Gaul | The first triumvirate and the conquest of Gaul | The first triumvirate and the conquest of Gaul
The value of the consulship lay in the lucrative provincial governorship to which it would normally lead. On the eve of the consular elections for 59 bce, the Senate sought to allot to the two future consuls for 59 bce, as their proconsular provinces, the unprofitable supervision of forests and cattle trails in Italy. The Senate also secured by massive bribery the election of an anti-Caesarean, Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus. But they failed to prevent Caesar’s election as the other consul.
Caesar now succeeded in organizing an irresistible coalition of political bosses. Pompey had carried out his mission to put the East in order with notable success, but after his return to Italy and his disbandment of his army in 62 bce, the Senate had thwarted him—particularly by preventing him from securing land allotments for his veterans. Caesar, who had assiduously cultivated Pompey’s friendship, now entered into a secret pact with him. Caesar’s master stroke was to persuade Crassus to join the partnership, the so-called first triumvirate. Crassus—like Pompey, a former lieutenant of Sulla—had been one of the most active of Pompey’s obstructors so far. Only Caesar, on good terms with both, was in a position to reconcile them. Early in 59 bce, Pompey sealed his alliance with Caesar by marrying Caesar’s only child, Julia. Caesar married Calpurnia, daughter of Lucius Piso, who became consul in 58 bce.
As consul, Caesar introduced a bill for the allotment of Roman public lands in Italy, on which the first charge was to be a provision for Pompey’s soldiers. The bill was vetoed by three tribunes of the plebs, and Caesar’s colleague Bibulus announced his intention of preventing the transaction of public business by watching the skies for portents whenever the public assembly was convened. Caesar then cowed the opposition by employing some of Pompey’s veterans to make a riot, and the distribution was carried out. Pompey’s settlement of the East was ratified en bloc by an act negotiated by an agent of Caesar, the tribune of the plebs Publius Vatinius. Caesar himself initiated a noncontroversial and much-needed act for punishing misconduct by governors of provinces.
Another act negotiated by Vatinius gave Caesar Cisalpine Gaul (between the Alps, the Apennines, and the Adriatic) and Illyricum. His tenure was to last until February 28, 54 bce. When the governor-designate of Transalpine Gaul suddenly died, this province, also, was assigned to Caesar at Pompey’s instance. Cisalpine Gaul gave Caesar a military recruiting ground; Transalpine Gaul gave him a springboard for conquests beyond Rome’s northwest frontier.
Between 58 and 50 bce, Caesar conquered the rest of Gaul up to the left bank of the Rhine and subjugated it so effectively that it remained passive under Roman rule throughout the Roman civil wars between 49 and 31 bce. This achievement was all the more amazing in light of the fact that the Romans did not possess any great superiority in military equipment over the north European barbarians. Indeed, the Gallic cavalry was probably superior to the Roman, horseman for horseman. Rome’s military superiority lay in its mastery of strategy, tactics, discipline, and military engineering. In Gaul, Rome also had the advantage of being able to deal separately with dozens of relatively small, independent, and uncooperative states. Caesar conquered these piecemeal, and the concerted attempt made by a number of them in 52 bce to shake off the Roman yoke came too late.
Great though this achievement was, its relative importance in Caesar’s career and in Roman history has been overestimated in Western tradition (as have his brief raids on Britain). In Caesar’s mind his conquest of Gaul was probably carried out only as a means to his ultimate end. He was acquiring the military manpower, the plunder, and the prestige that he needed to secure a free hand for the prosecution of the task of reorganizing the Roman state and the rest of the Greco-Roman world. This final achievement of Caesar’s looms much larger than his conquest of Gaul, when it is viewed in the wider setting of world history and not just in the narrower setting of the Greco-Roman civilization’s present daughter civilization in the West.
In 58 bce Rome’s northwestern frontier, established in 125 bce, ran from the Alps down the left bank of the upper Rhône River to the Pyrenees, skirting the southeastern foot of the Cévennes and including the upper basin of the Garonne River without reaching the Gallic shore of the Atlantic. In 58 bce Caesar intervened beyond this line, first to drive back the Helvetii, who had been migrating westward from their home in what is now central Switzerland. He then crushed Ariovistus, a German soldier of fortune from beyond the Rhine. In 57 bce Caesar subdued the distant and warlike Belgic group of Gallic peoples in the north, while his lieutenant Publius Licinius Crassus subdued what are now the regions of Normandy and Brittany.
In 56 bce the Veneti, in what is now southern Brittany, started a revolt in the northwest that was supported by the still unconquered Morini on the Gallic coast of the Strait of Dover and the Menapii along the south bank of the lower Rhine. Caesar reconquered the Veneti with some difficulty and treated them barbarously. He could not finish off the conquest of the Morini and Menapii before the end of the campaigning season of 56 bce; and in the winter of 56–55 bce the Menapii were temporarily expelled from their home by two immigrant German peoples, the Usipetes and Tencteri. These peoples were exterminated by Caesar in 55 bce. In the same year he bridged the Rhine just below Koblenz to raid Germany on the other side of the river, and then crossed the Channel to raid Britain. In 54 bce he raided Britain again and subdued a serious revolt in northeastern Gaul. In 53 bce he subdued further revolts in Gaul and bridged the Rhine again for a second raid.
The crisis of Caesar’s Gallic war came in 52 bce. The peoples of central Gaul found a national leader in the Arvernian Vercingetorix. They planned to cut off the Roman forces from Caesar, who had been wintering on the other side of the Alps. They even attempted to invade the western end of the old Roman province of Gallia Transalpina. Vercingetorix wanted to avoid pitched battles and sieges and to defeat the Romans by cutting off their supplies—partly by cavalry operations and partly by “scorched earth”—but he could not persuade his countrymen to adopt this painful policy wholeheartedly.
The Bituriges insisted on standing siege in their town Avaricum (Bourges), and Vercingetorix was unable to save it from being taken by storm within one month. Caesar then besieged Vercingetorix in Gergovia near modern Clermont-Ferrand. A Roman attempt to storm Gergovia was repulsed and resulted in heavy Roman losses—the first outright defeat that Caesar had suffered in Gaul. Caesar then defeated an attack on the Roman army on the march and was thus able to besiege Vercingetorix in Alesia, to the northwest of Dijon. Alesia, like Gergovia, was a position of great natural strength, and a large Gallic army came to relieve it; but this army was repulsed and dispersed by Caesar, and Vercingetorix then capitulated.
During the winter of 52–51 bce and the campaigning season of 51 bce, Caesar crushed a number of sporadic further revolts. The most determined of these rebels were the Bellovaci, between the Rivers Seine and Somme, around Beauvais. Another rebel force stood siege in the south in the natural fortress of Uxellodunum (perhaps the Puy d’Issolu on the Dordogne) until its water supply gave out. Caesar had the survivors’ hands cut off. He spent the year 50 bce in organizing the newly conquered territory. After that, he was ready to settle his accounts with his opponents at home.
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7020b6ef2bf3b95bdbeec7ede9dfce76 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Julius-Curtius | Julius Curtius | Julius Curtius
Julius Curtius, (born Feb. 7, 1877, Duisburg, Ger.—died Nov. 10, 1948, Heidelberg), German statesman, foreign minister of the Weimar Republic (1929–31).
Following the completion of his legal studies at Berlin, Curtius became a lawyer at Duisburg in 1905 but moved to Heidelberg in 1911. After distinguishing himself in World War I, he served until 1921 as city councillor at Heidelberg, at the same time continuing his law practice, especially as an industrial counsel. As a member of the German People’s Party (Deutsche Volkspartei), he sat in the Weimar Reichstag (national parliament) from 1920 to 1932 and in 1926 was named economics minister for the republic. After the death of the foreign minister, Gustav Stresemann, in 1929, Curtius succeeded to the foreign office. As executor of the policies of his predecessor, he pressed for readjustment of war reparations and for foreign evacuation of the Rhineland; but his qualified support of the new reparations settlement—the Young Plan (1929)—won him the ill will of the German right-wing parties. His subsequent attempt to forge an Austro-German customs union elicited strong international disapproval, especially from France, and the official condemnation of this plan by the Permanent Court of International Justice was followed shortly by his resignation (October 1931).
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2376acb4caca31956c7bb3426afdda5d | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Julius-Plucker | Julius Plücker | Julius Plücker
Julius Plücker, (born June 16, 1801, Elberfeld, Duchy of Berg [Germany]—died May 22, 1868, Bonn), German mathematician and physicist who made fundamental contributions to analytic and projective geometry as well as experimental physics.
Plücker attended the universities in Heidelberg, Bonn, Berlin, and Paris. In 1829, after four years as an unsalaried lecturer, he became a professor at the University of Bonn, where he wrote Analytisch-geometrische Entwicklungen, 2 vol. (1828–31; “The Development of Analytic Geometry”). This work introduced abridged notation (a flexible type of mathematical “shorthand”) and exploited the possibility of taking lines rather than points as the fundamental geometric elements. Through this idea, he developed the principle of duality in projective geometry, which states that if a theorem is true, then its dual theorem—obtained by switching dual elements (lines and points) and their corresponding statements—is also true. In 1834 Plücker became a professor of mathematics at the University of Halle before returning to Bonn two years later. In Theorie der algebraischen Curven (1839; “Theory of Algebraic Curves”), he presented the famous “Plücker formulas” relating the number of singularities (points at which a function is not defined or is infinite) on algebraic curves to those of their dual curves. His System der analytischen Geometrie (1835; “System of Analytic Geometry”) introduced the use of linear functions in place of the usual coordinate systems. Plücker’s System der Geometrie des Raumes in neuer analytischer Behandlungsweise (1846; “System of the Geometry of Space in a New Analytical Treatment”) contains a more systematic and polished rendering of his earlier results.
These geometric investigations ran against the strong current associated with mathematician Jakob Steiner’s synthetic school based in Berlin. Sensing this, Plücker turned away from geometry and concentrated on physics. In 1847 he began research on the behaviour of crystals in a magnetic field, establishing results central to a deeper knowledge of magnetic phenomena. At first alone and later with the German physicist Johann W. Hittorf, Plücker investigated the magnetic deflection of cathode rays. Together they made many important discoveries in spectroscopy, anticipating the German chemist Robert Bunsen and the German physicist Gustav R. Kirchhoff, who later announced that spectral lines were characteristic for each chemical substance. In 1862 Plücker pointed out that the same element may exhibit different spectra at different temperatures. According to Hittorf, Plücker was the first to identify the three lines of the hydrogen spectrum, which a few months after his death were recognized in the spectrum of solar radiation.
Following Steiner’s death in 1863, Plücker returned to the study of mathematics with his pioneering work on line geometry, Neue Geometrie des Raumes gegründet auf die Betrachtung der geraden Linie als Raumelement (1868–69; “New Geometry of Space Founded on the Treatment of the Straight Line as Space Element”). He died before finishing the second volume, which was edited and brought to completion by his gifted young pupil Felix Klein.
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cc1cdf88bb3fb41d6970a72bc03e91d9 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Julius-Rosenwald | Julius Rosenwald | Julius Rosenwald
Julius Rosenwald, (born August 12, 1862, Springfield, Illinois, U.S.—died January 6, 1932, Chicago), American merchant and unorthodox philanthropist who opposed the idea of perpetual endowments and frequently offered large philanthropic gifts on condition that they be matched by other donations. He was especially noted for his aid to the education of blacks.
After moderate success in the clothing business in New York City (1879–85) and Chicago (1885–95), Rosenwald bought a one-fourth interest in Sears, Roebuck and Co., which became the world’s largest mail-order house and chain of retail stores. In 1910 he succeeded Richard Warren Sears as president, and in 1925 he was named chairman of the Sears board of directors. Rosenwald and A.H. Loeb, treasurer of the company, established an exemplary savings and profit-sharing program for employees. Under Rosenwald’s leadership, Sears began to manufacture its own merchandise and instituted the policy of guaranteeing full refunds to dissatisfied customers.
Generous to Jewish charities, Rosenwald nonetheless opposed Zionism. From the early 1900s he was concerned with the welfare of U.S. blacks, and in 1917 he established the Julius Rosenwald Fund (to be expended within 25 years after his death and liquidated in 1948), the chief purpose of which was the improvement of education for blacks. Augmented by local taxes and private gifts, the fund paid for the construction of more than 5,000 schools in 15 southern states. In Chicago he established (1929) the Museum of Science and Industry, contributed heavily to the University of Chicago, and founded dental infirmaries in the public schools.
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4dd11f8165f61022274ec13d7d64c0cc | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Julius-von-Hann | Julius von Hann | Julius von Hann
Austrian meteorologist Julius von Hann, working with data from balloon ascents and climbing in the Alps and Himalayas, concluded in 1874 that about 90 percent of all the water vapour in the atmosphere is concentrated below 6,000 metres—from which it follows that high mountains can be barriers…
For example, Julius Hann’s massive Handbuch der Klimatologie (“Handbook of Climatology”), first issued in 1883, is mainly a compendium of works published in the Meteorologische Zeitschrift (“Journal of Meteorology”). The Handbuch was kept current in revised editions until 1911, and this work is still sometimes called the…
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1b1d8ceb16d7fb9cb02134ce2d08ed50 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Julius-Wagner-Jauregg | Julius Wagner-Jauregg | Julius Wagner-Jauregg
Julius Wagner-Jauregg, original name Julius Wagner, Ritter (Knight) von Jauregg, (born March 7, 1857, Wels, Austria—died Sept. 27, 1940, Vienna), Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist whose treatment of syphilitic meningoencephalitis, or general paresis, by the artificial induction of malaria brought a previously incurable fatal disease under partial medical control. His discovery earned him the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1927.
While a member of the psychiatric staff (1883–89) at the University of Vienna, Wagner-Jauregg noted that persons suffering from certain nervous disorders showed a marked improvement after contracting febrile (characterized by fever) infections. In 1887 he suggested that such infections be deliberately induced as a method of treatment for the insane, especially recommending malaria because it could be controlled with quinine. As professor of psychiatry and neurology at the University of Graz, Austria (1889–93), he attempted to induce fevers in mental patients through the administration of tuberculin (an extract of the tubercle bacillus), but the program met with only limited success. In 1917, while occupying a similar post at the University of Vienna, where he also directed the university hospital for nervous and mental diseases (1893–1928), Wagner-Jauregg was able to produce malaria in paresis victims, with dramatically successful results.
Although malaria treatment of the disease was later supplanted largely by administration of antibiotics, his work led to the development of fever therapy and shock therapy for a number of mental disorders. He was also known as an authority on cretinism and other thyroid disorders.
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b0de59d2bf5ba724d23a913cac391e2d | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Julius-Wellhausen | Julius Wellhausen | Julius Wellhausen
Julius Wellhausen, (born May 17, 1844, Hameln, Hanover [Germany]—died Jan. 7, 1918, Göttingen, Ger.), German biblical scholar best known for his analysis of the structure and dating of the Pentateuch.
Wellhausen studied at the University of Göttingen and taught there briefly before becoming professor of the Old Testament at Greifswald in 1872, a position he resigned 10 years later because of conflicts with his academic superiors. After teaching at other German universities, he returned to Göttingen in 1892, remaining there until his death.
His major writings put forth the view that the books of the Pentateuch were not written by Moses but were the result of oral traditions that evolved over time from a nomadic religion through the prophets to the law, rather than from the law through the prophets, as it is presented in the Old Testament. He dissected two distinct narrative structures from Genesis, determining that these narratives were the oldest portion of the Pentateuch, while the laws and rituals were the latest elements.
His New Testament studies, particularly his assertion of the priority of the Gospel According to Mark over the hypothetical “Q” document believed to be the basis for the gospels of both Matthew and Luke, were not as well accepted as his Old Testament work.
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32792739daed60cb71f08262df03f285 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Junnin | Junnin | Junnin
…Oi, who ruled as Emperor Junnin. In 761 she met Dōkyō when he was lecturing at the imperial palace. Her attempts to promote the career of the priest, who was presumably her lover, brought him into conflict with Junnin’s favourite minister, the powerful Oshikatsu.
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d09632b4e9dbf167c4bc6c8c9737ede5 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Juste-Aurele-Meissonier | Juste-Aurèle Meissonier | Juste-Aurèle Meissonier
Juste-Aurèle Meissonier, (born 1693/95, Turin, Savoy—died July 31, 1750, Paris), French goldsmith, interior decorator, and architect, often considered the leading originator of the influential Rococo style in the decorative arts.
Early in his career Meissonier migrated to Paris, receiving a warrant as master goldsmith from King Louis XV in 1724 and an appointment as designer for the king’s bedchamber and cabinet in 1726. He had a powerful and fertile imagination; his fantastic grottoes and swirling, animated, asymmetrical metalwork designs combined contrasting and original motifs. As a goldsmith, he was remarkable for the boldness of his designs for such objects as snuffboxes, watch cases, sword hilts, and tureens. He prepared three fine sets of sketches for interior decoration, furniture, and goldsmith designs. He also developed a plan for the facade of the church of Saint-Sulpice, Paris, in 1726, but few of his architectural ideas were realized.
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1cf571c3f2bbac054cc8472441431045 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Justin-Ahomadegbe | Justin Ahomadégbé | Justin Ahomadégbé
…Sourou-Migan Apithy (president in 1964–65), Justin Ahomadégbé (1972), and Hubert Maga (1960–63 and 1970–72), drawing their principal support respectively from Porto-Novo, Abomey, and the north. After independence in 1960, these political problems were exacerbated by economic difficulties, reflected in student and trade union unrest. The ensuing instability resulted in six…
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5c5d976b79ffbe3be871fe20d342c8fd | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Justin-Dart-Jr | Justin Dart, Jr. | Justin Dart, Jr.
Justin Dart, Jr., in full Justin Whitlock Dart, Jr., (born August 29, 1930, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.—died June 21, 2002, Washington, D.C.), American advocate for the disabled who was widely recognized as the “father” of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA; 1990).
Dart was born into a prominent family; his grandfather Charles R. Walgreen established the Walgreens drugstore chain. At age 18 Dart contracted polio, and the illness left him confined to a wheelchair. After graduating (1954) from the University of Houston, Dart briefly studied law at the University of Texas before undertaking several business ventures. During that time he also became active in the disability rights movement.
In 1981 U.S. Pres. Ronald Reagan appointed him vice-chairman of the National Council on Disability. Dart and other council members drafted a national policy on equal rights for disabled people, and the document ultimately became the foundation of the ADA. In 1986 Dart became head of the federal Rehabilitation Services Administration, but he was forced to resign the following year after he criticized the department during a congressional hearing. After the ADA was signed into law on July 26, 1990, Dart promoted the legislation and fought later efforts to amend it.
Dart was the recipient of numerous awards, notably the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1998).
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10dd7cbbf64e52fe0d63dee919378c7c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Justin-Kaplan | Justin Kaplan | Justin Kaplan
Justin Kaplan, in full Justin Daniel Kaplan, (born September 5, 1925, New York, New York, U.S.—died March 2, 2014, Cambridge, Massachusetts), American writer, biographer, and book editor who was best known for his acclaimed literary biographies of Mark Twain, Lincoln Steffens, and Walt Whitman and for his editing of the 16th edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (1992).
Kaplan grew up in New York City. After graduating from Harvard University (B.S., 1945), he attended graduate school but left in 1947 and worked for various publishers, including Simon & Shuster, where he rose to senior editor. In that capacity he worked with such authors as Bertrand Russell, Will Durant, Níkos Kazantzákis, and the sociologist C. Wright Mills.
In 1959 Kaplan left publishing to write his first book, a biography of Mark Twain titled Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain (1966), which won both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. Kaplan began the biography with Clemens at age 31 rather than at the beginning of his life, a device that was later emulated by other biographers. Also well regarded were Kaplan’s Lincoln Steffens: A Biography (1974), about the prominent journalist and muckraker of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and Walt Whitman: A Life (1980), which won a National Book Award.
Kaplan lectured at Harvard and at Emerson College, Boston, and was biographer in residence at the Institute for Modern Biography at Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia. He edited several anthologies. As general editor for Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (1992), he preferred more-contemporary quotes, including ones by filmmaker Woody Allen (“It’s not that I’m afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”) and Kermit the Frog (“It’s not that easy bein’ green.”) as well as one attributed to debonair actor Cary Grant (“Everybody wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant.”).
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438c4e8baeab7e029bdc370663ffb91b | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Justin-Lekhanya | Justin Lekhanya | Justin Lekhanya
Justin Lekhanya, deposed Chief Jonathan and established military rule, making the king head of state.
Justin Lekhanya, who subsequently suspended Moshoeshoe’s executive powers. In 1990 Moshoeshoe went into exile in England.
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d4e2e37a1a87cf5f6c461abfe01d5f02 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Justin-Peck | Justin Peck | Justin Peck
Justin Peck, (born 1987, Washington, D.C.), American ballet dancer and choreographer who earned acclaim as a soloist but was better known for crafting ballets in which complex structures frame clearly articulated classical steps. He became resident choreographer of New York City Ballet (NYCB) in 2014.
Peck grew up in San Diego. As a youngster, he traveled annually with his family to New York City. During one visit he saw tap dancer Savion Glover perform. That experience prompted Peck to study the dance form along with musical theatre. At age 13 Peck appeared in San Diego as a supernumerary in a weeklong run of American Ballet Theatre’s (ABT’s) Giselle. ABT’s strong male principals inspired Peck to begin classical training at California Ballet. At age 15 Peck began attending NYCB’s School of American Ballet (SAB). As an SAB student, Peck studied music and attended nightly performances that showcased NYCB cofounder George Balanchine’s choreography. Those opportunities allowed Peck to hone his musicality and sharpen his eye for structure and pattern. In 2006 Peck became an NYCB apprentice, and he joined the company’s corps de ballet the following year. He was promoted to the rank of soloist in 2013.
While Peck excelled as a dancer, he achieved stardom as a choreographer. In 2009 he created his first work, A Teacup Plunge, for the Columbia Ballet Collaborative. That year he also participated in the New York Choreographic Institute, an NYCB affiliate founded in 2000. Then, in 2011, Peter Martins, NYCB ballet master in chief, awarded Peck his first choreographic residency. Peck produced six works for the company in the following two years. Notable among them were Year of the Rabbit (2012), an ensemble piece set to the music of Sufjan Stevens, and Paz de la Jolla (2013), an exuberant number for 18 dancers inspired by California’s beach culture.
In 2014 Peck assumed the post of NYCB’s resident choreographer. By the end of 2015, he had more than two dozen creations to his credit, including Everywhere We Go (2014), a second collaboration with Stevens, and the commissions Debonair (2014) for Pacific Northwest Ballet and Heatscape (2015) for Miami City Ballet. In addition, NYCB premiered his ‘Rōdē,ō: Four Dance Episodes and New Blood in 2015. Peck’s pieces not only brought him critical acclaim but also attracted a new audience of twentysomethings to the ballet. Peck made his Broadway debut in 2018, choreographing the revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel. He won a Tony Award that year for his work.
Peck’s accomplishments in the dance world and beyond earned him the moniker wunderkind. He was the subject of filmmaker Jody Lee Lipes’s Ballet 422 (2014), a documentary that followed Peck for two months as he created NYCB’s 422nd original dance, Paz de la Jolla. That year 2wice Arts Foundation also partnered with Peck and NYCB principal Daniel Ulbricht to develop the iPad app Passe-Partout. The program allowed users to remix movement phrases choreographed by Peck and performed by him and Ulbricht. Peck, whose career showed no sign of slowing down, remained an NYCB soloist; he was the second dance maker to hold the position of resident choreographer.
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6b303de54f583b0fd740e96ec49cbc8a | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Justin-S-Morrill | Justin S. Morrill | Justin S. Morrill
Justin S. Morrill, in full Justin Smith Morrill, (born April 14, 1810, Strafford, Vt., U.S.—died Dec. 28, 1898, Washington, D.C.), U.S. Republican legislator who established a record for longevity by serving 43 years in both houses of the Congress; his name is particularly associated with the first high protective tariff and with federal support of land-grant colleges.
Following a modest career in local business, Morrill became active in Whig politics in the 1850s. Struck by the internal dissension within the party, he devoted himself afterward to preserving harmony within the Republican Party, which he helped found in Vermont (1855). He then went on to serve 12 years in the House of Representatives (1855–67) and 31 years in the Senate (1867–98).
A financial conservative, Morrill sponsored the Tariff Act of 1861 and succeeding years, usually referred to as the Morrill tariffs, which introduced high import duties not for the traditional purpose of national revenue but to protect American industry from overseas competition. A consistent champion of “sound” currency, he opposed the resort to paper money during and after the U.S. Civil War (1861–65). He also opposed the various proposals for the use of silver as a monetary standard.
Many considered that Morrill’s most important legislative contribution was the Morrill Act of 1862, which provided grants of land to state colleges, whose “leading object” would be to teach subjects “related to agriculture and the mechanic arts,” without excluding the general sciences and classical studies. Morrill was henceforth called the “Father of the Agricultural Colleges,” many of which have become leading educational institutions.
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e13a27d71356d0a64a5aee4bf8d16091 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Justin-Trudeau/Prime-ministership | Prime ministership | Prime ministership
Among Trudeau’s campaign promises was a pledge to appoint a gender-balanced cabinet, which he followed up on, bringing 15 women into his 30-member cabinet. When asked by a reporter why he had taken this approach, Trudeau made headlines around the world with his matter-of-fact but trenchant response: “Because it’s 2015.” Another of Trudeau’s campaign promises, a pledge to decriminalize recreational marijuana, moved a step closer to fruition when Minister of Health Jane Philpott announced in April 2016 that in spring 2017 the government would be introducing legislation to legalize and regulate marijuana. The prime minister emphasized that this policy was founded upon two principal goals: (1) the desire to protect children (Trudeau acknowledged a study of 29 countries that indicated that young people in Canada already had the easiest access to obtaining illegal marijuana) and (2) a commitment to preventing organized crime from profiting from the sales of illegal marijuana.
Also in April, Trudeau called “heartbreaking” the news that 11 young members of the Attawapiskat First Nation (Native American) community in remote northern Ontario had tried to commit suicide on a single day. The incident brought to 100 the number of Attawapiskat who had attempted suicide since September 2015 and followed a rash of suicide attempts that had resulted in six deaths in Manitoba’s Pimicikamak community. Underemployment, lack of educational opportunities, drug abuse, and high incidences of mental depression had contributed to the transformation of self-inflicted injuries and suicide into the number one cause of death among First Nations people under age 45. Tweeting, Trudeau promised to “improve living conditions for all Indigenous peoples,” and in June his government dedicated $53 million over three years to improving mental health and combating suicide in indigenous communites.
On April 25 Trudeau expressed outrage in response to the beheading in the Philippines of John Ridsdel, a Canadian former mining executive, by the Abu Sayyaf Group, a Filipino militant Islamist organization. Ridsdel, who had been taken hostage in September 2015, was executed after the deadline passed for payment of a ransom of some $6 million demanded by the kidnappers. In a video posted online in March 2016, Ridsdel, appearing with two other hostages, beseeched Trudeau to pay the abductors. Although negotiations had been undertaken with the militants, it was the official policy of the Canadian government not to pay ransoms for hostages.
Earlier, in March, Trudeau and his family had paid a state visit to Washington, D.C. The amiable comradeship that was much on display between Trudeau and U.S. Pres. Barack Obama was a marked contrast to the chilly relationship that had existed between Obama and Harper. Trudeaumania appeared capable of crossing borders, as the buzz that accompanied Trudeau’s visit was reminiscent of the excitement that so often had seemed to be in evidence around Obama early in his tenure as president. Trudeau and Obama both shared a concern for protecting the environment against climate change. In December 2016 Trudeau’s announcement that Canada was declaring a five-year ban on the licensing of drilling in all of its Arctic waters—with climate and marine science-based review to come at the end of that time—coincided with Obama’s issuing a pair of memorandums that indefinitely banned oil and gas development in the entirety of the U.S. portion of the Chukchi Sea, the majority of the Beaufort Sea, and some 4 million acres (1.6 million hectares) along the Atlantic coast.
The U.S. presidential election of 2016 left Trudeau facing the challenge of finding common ground with Obama’s successor, Republican Donald Trump, who was Trudeau’s opposite ideologically on most issues and who came into office having pledged to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). When Trump signed an executive order in January 2017 barring all refugees from seeking asylum in the United States for a 120-day period and blocking entry by citizens of Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Libya, Yemen, and Syria for 90 days, Trudeau responded on Twitter, saying, “To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength.”
On January 29 Canadians were shaken by a violent response to that diversity when a “lone wolf” shooter attacked a mosque in Quebec city during evening prayers, killing six individuals and wounding a number of others. The suspected attacker was an anti-immigrant student and admirer of right-wing nationalists such as Marine Le Pen of France. Calling the incident a “terrorist attack on Muslims,” Trudeau once again reaffirmed his belief that Canada drew strength from its diversity and that religious tolerance was a core value for Canadians.
The Trump administration’s immigration policy prompted thousands of immigrants to the United States to flee to Canada in 2017. Asylum seekers walked into Canada (mostly through Quebec) away from the official crossings, thus circumventing the Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA), which barred asylum-seeking immigrants to the United States from entering Canada at regular ports of entry on the border. As the influx of migrants continued in 2018, the Canadian government’s ability to process their requests for asylum and provide for their needs was strained. The opposition accused the Trudeau government of having lost control of immigration, and the government began trying to dissuade potential border crossers.
In February 2018 Trudeau, his wife, and their children took an eight-day trip to India, which proved to be something of a public relations disaster. Trudeau had worn traditional Indian clothing before to celebrations of Diwali in Canada, but he and his family were accused of overdressing and courting gratuitous photo opportunities when they donned ornate traditional clothing (suitable only for weddings, some Indian observers argued) several times during their visit. More problematic was the condemnation that accompanied the discovery that a Sikh separatist who been part of an attempt to assassinate an Indian politician in Canada in 1986 had been invited to two receptions hosted by the Canadian government in India during Trudeau’s visit. The invitation was withdrawn after Canadian officials became aware of the man’s history, but not before the incident had further tarnished Trudeau’s image.
When Trump set the stage for a potential trade war between the United States and Canada in April 2018 by announcing the imminent imposition of import tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum, Trudeau called Trump’s justification of the action on the grounds of national security “insulting and unacceptable.” Tensions between Trudeau and Trump escalated as a result of the summit of the Group of Seven (G7) leaders hosted by Trudeau in Charlevoix, Quebec, in early June. Trump was at loggerheads with the other leaders over a variety of issues, especially trade, but he initially supported the group’s end-of-summit communiqué. He withdrew U.S. support, however, after becoming indignant at remarks made by Trudeau at a post-summit news conference. Trump took particular umbrage at Trudeau’s statement that, if necessary, Canada would reluctantly impose counter-tariffs on the United States “because Canadians, we’re polite, we’re reasonable, but we also will not be pushed around.”
On Twitter Trump accused Trudeau of having made false statements and characterized him as “dishonest & weak.” Moreover, Larry Kudlow, Trump’s economic advisor, followed up by calling Trudeau a backstabber. Canadian government spokespeople responded by saying that Trudeau had not said anything that had not already been said in public or in person to Trump. In the aftermath of the diplomatic dustup, the House of Commons unanimously passed a motion condemning the U.S. president’s personal attacks on Trudeau.
In mid-June the House of Commons and the Senate fulfilled one of Trudeau’s central campaign promises by voting to approve legalization of recreational marijuana use throughout Canada. Pending formal approval of the legislation by the governor-general, details remained to be worked out.
At the end of August, Mexico and the United States announced that they had reached agreement on a new trade accord that preserved much of NAFTA but that also introduced significant changes. Just about one month later, in the waning hours of September 30, Canada also agreed to join the new trade accord, which was branded the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA). Trudeau characterized the agreement as a “good deal,” even though it required Canada to open long-denied access to its market for dairy products. On the other hand, the agreement preserved a dispute resolution system for companies that felt they were unfairly taxed, a pivotal issue for Canadian negotiators. Despite the agreement, the Trump-imposed tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum remained in place, and there was speculation that Trudeau might not attend the ceremony to sign the agreement on the sidelines of the Group of 20 (G20) summit in Argentina in November. Ultimately, he did join Trump and outgoing Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto in Buenos Aires on November 30 to sign the agreement, but their actions were largely ceremonial, given that none of the three countries’ legislatures had yet approved the deal.
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95ef270b40da980402563b864cca7d92 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Justin-Trudeau/SNC-Lavalin-affair | SNC-Lavalin affair | SNC-Lavalin affair
Beginning in February 2019, Trudeau faced arguably the biggest political crisis of his premiership as allegations surfaced that members of his staff had improperly pressed Jody Wilson-Raybould, who was attorney general and justice minister, to take actions to halt the prosecution of SNC-Lavalin, a huge Quebec-based construction and engineering company. In 2015 the firm had been charged with corruption and fraud stemming from allegations that it had used bribery to win contracts from the Libyan government during the regime of Muammar al-Qaddafi. A change to the Canadian criminal code—promulgated in September 2018—established plea-bargain-like deferred prosecution agreements (DPA) that allowed corporations facing prosecution to enter into “remediation agreements” under which they could forestall prosecution by paying fines and taking steps to redress previous wrongdoing. SNC-Lavalin had applied to negotiate a DPA even before the legislation that changed the criminal code had been enacted, and the firm had been turned down by the Public Prosecution Service. Conviction threatened SNC-Lavalin with the possibility of being banned from competing for government contracts, a potentially catastrophic consequence for the huge company, which provided thousands of jobs for Canadian workers.
On February 7, 2019, The Globe and Mail newspaper reported that Trudeau aides had tried to pressure Wilson-Raybould into interceding in the SNC-Lavalin matter and that her refusal to do so played a role in her reassignment in January as veterans affairs minister as part of a cabinet reshuffle. Trudeau claimed that there had been no improprieties and that in his own discussion with Wilson-Raybould about the prosecution of SNC-Lavalin he had left the decision on the matter to her discretion. Having resigned from the cabinet on February 12, Wilson-Raybould told the House of Commons justice committee on February 27 that there had been a “consistent and sustained effort” to pressure her to intervene to obtain a DPA for SNC-Lavalin. She also testified that she had received “veiled threats” relating to the matter from the Prime Minister’s Office, the Privy Council Office, and the finance minister’s office. Among those whom Wilson-Raybould said had sought to unduly influence her were Clerk of the Privy Council Michael Wernick and Trudeau’s close friend and principal secretary Gerald Butts, who had resigned on February 18. When Butts testified before the justice committee on March 6, he said that he interpreted his conversations with Wilson-Raybould very differently than she had characterized them and denied that her refusal to intercede in the prosecution of SNC-Lavalin had prompted her change of cabinet portfolio. Two days earlier, Jane Philpott, the Treasury Board president and one of the most respected members of Trudeau’s cabinet, resigned her post, saying, “Sadly, I have lost confidence in how the government has dealt with this matter and in how it has responded to the issues raised,” an indication that Trudeau’s integrity was being increasingly questioned by members of his own party. Conservative leader Andrew Scheer had already called on Trudeau to resign.
Following parliamentary testimony by Butts, Wernick, and the deputy justice minister, Nathalie Drouin, on March 7 Trudeau, whose public approval rating had dipped considerably in recent opinion polling, held a press conference in which he attributed the controversy to an “erosion of trust” between Butts and Wilson-Raybould and to a general breakdown in communication. Short of issuing an apology to Wilson-Raybould, the prime minister explained that he had asked members of his staff to raise the matter of the SNC-Lavalin prosecution with Wilson-Raybould and to emphasize the potential ramifications of her decision on the matter but that, in hindsight, he should have engaged with her personally. Trudeau acknowledged that he had not been aware of the erosion of trust and that it was his responsibility to have been so. He also raised the possibility of separating the positions of attorney general and justice minister to remove the political dimension from the former.
In August the affair returned to the headlines and further damaged Trudeau’s reputation when a 58-page report issued by Canadian Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner Mario Dion found that Trudeau and his staff had indeed pressured Wilson-Raybould to intervene in the SNC-Lavalin case, thus violating Canada’s conflict of interest law for public office holders. The harshly critical report said, “The authority of the Prime Minister and his office was used to circumvent, undermine and ultimately attempt to discredit the decision of the Director of Public Prosecutions as well as the authority of Ms. Wilson-Raybould as the Crown’s chief law officer.” It noted that Trudeau had flagrantly attempted to influence Wilson-Raybould in the matter both “directly and indirectly.” Responding to the report, Trudeau said, “I take responsibility for the mistakes I have made,” but he did not apologize for his actions, claiming that they had been taken to prevent the loss of Canadian jobs that would result from legal action against SNC-Lavalin.
This was not the first time that Trudeau was judged to have violated the ethics law. In December 2017 Ethics Commissioner Mary Dawson found Trudeau to have broken the law by vacationing with his family on an island owned by the Aga Khan IV. The two instances marked the first time that a Canadian prime minister had been found to have broken the ethics law. Dion’s report did not offer potential sanctions for Trudeau’s actions, but Scheer called on the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to open a criminal investigation of the matter.
The report threatened Trudeau and the Liberal Party’s prospects in the imminent regularly scheduled federal election. In mid-September 2019 Trudeau chose to call for that election to be contested on October 21. At the time, opinion polls showed the Liberals and Conservatives to be effectively in a dead heat, followed distantly by the NDP and the Green Party.
Just days into the campaign, on September 18, Trudeau’s reputation as a progressive suffered another hit when Time magazine published a photo from the 2001 yearbook of the Vancouver private school at which Trudeau taught, showing him wearing “brownface” as part of his costume as Aladdin at an “Arabian Nights”-themed party. A contrite Trudeau repeatedly apologized to the country, saying “This is something I shouldn’t have done many years ago” and “It was something that I didn’t think was racist at the time, but now I recognize it was something racist to do, and I am deeply sorry.” The incident prompted Trudeau to acknowledge and apologize for another photo taken of him as a high-school student in the 1990s while he was wearing “blackface” during his performance in a school show. Shortly after Trudeau’s apology a new video, also said to be from the 1990s, emerged in which Trudeau was again shown wearing blackface. For critics, these images brought into question the authenticity of Trudeau’s outspoken championing of inclusivity and tolerance. Scheer accused Trudeau of lacking judgment and integrity and of being unfit to govern Canada. NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, a Sikh, characterized Trudeau’s Aladdin costume as “insulting” and questioned whether the public and private Trudeau were the same person.
When voters finally went to the polls, Trudeau and the Liberals were left breathing a sigh of relief, as they held on to power, albeit as a minority rather than majority government. Although the Conservatives narrowly won the popular vote, capturing about 34 percent of the vote compared with roughly 33 percent for the Liberals, Trudeau’s party won enough first-past-the-post races to secure 157 seats in the House of Commons, 13 seats shy of a majority and 27 seats fewer than they won in the 2015 election. The Conservatives won 121 seats, 22 more than they took in 2015. Opinion polling before the election had shown the NDP on the rise, but, when the votes were counted, it lost its status as the second opposition party to the Bloc Québécois, which trounced it in voting in Quebec, where the Bloc jumped from 10 seats to 32. Nationwide the NDP saw its representation in the House of Commons fall from 44 seats to 24.
More than a few pundits noted the similarity between these results and those of the 1972 election, in which Trudeau’s father saw his own majority government reduced to minority rule after four years in power. The 2019 election marked the fourth election in the last six to result in a minority government. Henceforth Trudeau would have to rely on support from other parties to advance his policy objectives.
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9cdffbda2994b17459f779de9ad0534c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Justinus-Andreas-Christian-Kerner | Justinus Andreas Christian Kerner | Justinus Andreas Christian Kerner
Justinus Andreas Christian Kerner, (born Sept. 18, 1786, Ludwigsburg, Württemberg—died Feb. 21, 1862, Weinsberg), German poet and spiritualist writer. He and the poet Ludwig Uhland founded the so-called Swabian group of late Romantic poets.
After the death of his father (1799), Kerner worked in a cloth factory until he was able to study medicine at Tübingen. There he met Uhland and spent most of his time reading and writing poetry. He became a practicing physician and in 1818 settled in Weinsberg, where he frequently entertained the leading poets of the time; he influenced his contemporaries more by his personality than by his written work.
His first book, Reiseschatten: von dem Schattenspieler Luchs (1811; “Travel Shadows: Of the Shadow Player Luchs”), is characterized by a typically Romantic mixture of poetry and prose, seriousness and humour. The first collection of his Gedichte (“Poems”) in 1826 reveals an uncharacteristic melancholy and mystic longing for death. The influence of the Volkslied (“folk song”) is also clear in this poetry. Interested in somnambulism, he examined the somnambulist and clairvoyant Friederike Hauffe from 1826 to 1829 and published his results in Die Seherin von Prevorst. Eröffnungen über das innere Leben der Menschen und über das Hereinragen einer Geisterwelt in die unsere (1829; The Seer of Prevorst. Disclosures About the Inner Life of Men and the Projection of a Spiritworld into Ours).
Kerner had close relationships with the poets Friedrich Hölderlin and Nikolaus Lenau. He played an important role in gathering Hölderlin’s work for publication, and Lenau considered Kerner a mentor. In 1856 Kerner also published a work on the physician and hypnotist Franz Anton Mesmer and animal magnetism. A fifth and enlarged edition of his poetry, Lyrische Gedichte, appeared in 1854.
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1200b01517a3d483747feacc654166b5 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Justo-Rufino-Barrios | Justo Rufino Barrios | Justo Rufino Barrios
Justo Rufino Barrios, (born 1835, San Lorenzo, Guatemala—died April 2, 1885, Chalchuapa, El Salvador), president of Guatemala (1873–85), who carried out liberal domestic policies by dictatorial means and persistently advocated Central American unity, to be imposed by force if diplomacy proved inadequate.
Trained for the law, Barrios became Guatemalan army commander and the power behind the president, Miguel García Granados, in 1871, when the Conservative Party government was overthrown. After replacing García Granados in 1873, Barrios carried out sweeping reforms based on his liberal philosophies. His presidency became known as “the Reform.” He subjugated the local aristocracy; expelled the Jesuits and confiscated church property; established civil marriage and divorce; enlarged and laicized the school system; built highways, railroads, and telegraph lines; encouraged the growing of coffee as the basis of the country’s agriculture; and promulgated a new constitution (1876).
Barrios intervened repeatedly in the affairs of the other Central American republics in an effort to restore the five-nation federation that had collapsed in 1838. When political persuasion failed, he attempted to bring about unification by force, but he was killed in battle while invading neighbouring El Salvador.
His nephew José María Reina Barrios was president of Guatemala from 1892 until his assassination in 1898.
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48368b4e40a7751bed2a9957914d7748 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Justus-Freiherr-von-Liebig/Developments-in-agricultural-animal-and-food-chemistry | Developments in agricultural, animal, and food chemistry | Developments in agricultural, animal, and food chemistry
Liebig’s realization that organic chemistry could be used as a tool to investigate living processes led him to abandon pure chemistry in 1840. In that year he published Die organische Chemie in ihrer Anwendung auf Agricultur und Physiologie (Chemistry in Its Applications to Agriculture and Physiology). In this German publication, which soon appeared in English and French translations, Liebig claimed that because “perfect agriculture is the true foundation of all trade and industry,” a “rational system of agriculture cannot be formed without the application of scientific principles.” Only the chemist, he argued dogmatically, could tell the farmer the best means of feeding plants, the nature of the different soils, and the action of particular manures upon them. By analyzing soils, Liebig showed that the prevailing “humus theory” in which a plant’s carbon content was claimed to have originated principally from leaf mould, and not from atmospheric photosynthesis, was fallacious. On the other hand, Liebig argued incorrectly for years that atmospheric ammonia and nitrates in the soil were more important direct sources of plant nitrogen than manures, whose principal function he viewed as providing trace minerals from the products of decomposition that remained in the soil. In order to provide these minerals more efficiently, Liebig began to develop “chemical manures” in 1845. Although Liebig’s claim was later proven to be incorrect, and his fertilizers were shown to be inefficient and uneconomic, investigations conducted at the Rothamsted Experimental Station in Hertfordshire by his English pupil J.H. Gilbert, together with the landowner John Bennet Lawes, led to the discovery of superphosphates, which were readily developed as fertilizers.
Sulfuric acid production for fertilizers accelerated both the industrialization of Europe and the vertical integration of chemical industries. Liebig’s aphorism of 1843, that the measure of a country’s civilization lay in the amount of sulfuric acid it consumes every year, became widely known. Both directly and indirectly, Liebig was an influential figure in the development of scientific agriculture and, thus, in increasing food production at a time when a rising European population was undergoing vast urban and industrial expansion.
In 1842 Liebig published a sequel, Die organische Chemie in ihrer Anwendung auf Physiologie und Pathologie (Animal Chemistry or Organic Chemistry in Its Applications to Physiology and Pathology), which is considered to be a foundational writing of modern biochemistry. In this work, Liebig employed analyses and highly speculative equations in an attempt to unravel the metabolic routes by which foodstuffs were transformed into flesh and blood and whereby tissues were degraded into animal heat, muscular work, and secretions and excretions. Although many of the details were later shown to be wrong, his novel approach of examining metabolism from a chemical viewpoint inspired decades of further research. A false hypothesis in science can often be fruitful; by demonstrating the errors of Liebig’s schemes, many important principles were discovered. For instance, Liebig was wrong in claiming that fermentation and putrefaction were merely dynamic reshufflings of the constituent parts of chemical substances; yet his claim prompted many physicians to espouse a chemical theory of disease that challenged the predominant sanitarian view that disease was spread by the poisonous miasma that arose from accumulated sewage.
Liebig grew increasingly interested in the chemistry of food, especially in discovering better ways to cook meat in order to preserve its nutritional qualities. In his 1847 publication Chemische Untersuchung über das Fleisch (Research on the Chemistry of Food), Liebig described a particular “extract of meat” prepared by low-pressure evaporation of the soup from lean meat, and he claimed it to be a valuable restorative for the sick, wounded, and ill-nourished. In later editions of his popular Chemische Briefe (Familiar Letters on Chemistry), he pointed out that in countries such as South America and Australia, where cattle were routinely slaughtered for their hides or tallow, his meat extract could be prepared extremely economically. Belgian railway engineer Georg Giebert followed up this suggestion and, in 1865, began to market, with Liebig’s promotional assistance, Liebig’s extract of meat as a nutritious food for invalids and the labouring classes. In the same decade Liebig also improved the commercial processing of artificial milk for infants, the baking of whole-meal bread, and the silvering of mirrors.
Liebig remained in Giessen for 28 years, where the Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt made him a baron in 1845. In 1852, fatigued from teaching, he moved to the University of Munich, where he no longer offered practical instruction but pursued his own interests and concentrated upon popular lecturing and writing. Through the popularity of his Familiar Letters on Chemistry, he became viewed as an elder statesman of science, and he regularly commented on broader issues including scientific methodology, the opposition to materialism, and the dangers of failing to recycle sewage or replace soil nutrients that were harvested as animal and human food.
Liebig was frequently hot-tempered and quarrelsome by nature, and he tenaciously upheld his own particular viewpoints. As editor of the monthly Annalen der Pharmacie und Chemie, which he founded in 1832 and which continued until 1998 as Liebigs Annalen, he publicized both his own work and that of his pupils while also using its pages to criticize the work of other chemists. A giant among 19th-century German chemists, his charismatic power as a teacher and friend was aptly conveyed by his former student A.W. Hofmann: “Each word of his carried instruction, every intonation of his voice bespoke regard; his approval was a mark of honour, and of whatever else we might be proud, our greatest pride of all was having him for our master.”
Liebig was buried in Munich’s Südfriedhof Cemetery. Statues were erected in his honour at Darmstadt, Giessen, and Munich. Liebig’s former laboratories in Giessen are now the Liebig Museum.
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61adbf6353b22b814096a0e3a4c5dd0b | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kaarlo-Bergbom | Kaarlo Bergbom | Kaarlo Bergbom
Kaarlo Bergbom, (born Oct. 2, 1843, Vyborg, Russia—died Jan. 17, 1906, Helsinki, Fin.), activist in the struggle to enhance Finnish-language institutions, and founder-director of the first stable Finnish-language theatre, the Finnish National Theatre. Bergbom, himself the author of a romantic tragedy, directed the first performance of Aleksis Kivi’s one-act biblical drama Lea (1869), the event cited as the beginning of professional theatre in the Finnish language.
In 1872 Bergbom founded the Finnish National Theatre as a touring troupe; with the lifelong assistance of his sister, Emilie, he managed the theatre until his death. During the first year of its existence, the National Theatre performed 36 plays, of which only 13, all single-act, were native works; by its 20th season the ratio was reversed, two-thirds of the plays being Finnish and including the premieres of six full-length Finnish plays. Bergbom also produced notable Finnish versions of classics and works by foreign authors, among them the first Finnish-language productions of Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet, 1881) and Goethe (Faust, 1885). In 1902 a permanent building was constructed in Helsinki as home for the theatre. Bergbom was assisted in his endeavours by such company members as the actress Ida Aalberg and by the important Finnish playwright Minna Canth, whose works concerning the emancipation of women were premiered by the company.
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eabdadc50f3976cb5a11021e38b5688e | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kab-al-Ahbar | Kaʿb al-Aḥbār | Kaʿb al-Aḥbār
For example, the Jewish convert Kaʿb al-Aḥbār brought much of the Isrāʾīliyyāt—narratives said to originate from Jewish sources—into Islamic tradition. Later on, the mystics’ commentaries expressed some gnostic (a dualistic viewpoint in which spirit is viewed as good and matter as evil) and Hellenistic concepts, of which the Hellenistic idea…
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2a159ecc2a98664f039329d593f6b0b6 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kai-Winding | Kai Winding | Kai Winding
…to tour with fellow trombonist Kai Winding; their duets have been recognized as watersheds in the evolution of jazz trombone technique.
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368756257ab1b5565690b9792ca2c06d | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kalidasa | Kalidasa | Kalidasa
Kalidasa, (flourished 5th century ce, India), Sanskrit poet and dramatist, probably the greatest Indian writer of any epoch. The six works identified as genuine are the dramas Abhijnanashakuntala (“The Recognition of Shakuntala”), Vikramorvashi (“Urvashi Won by Valour”), and Malavikagnimitra (“Malavika and Agnimitra”); the epic poems Raghuvamsha (“Dynasty of Raghu”) and Kumarasambhava (“Birth of the War God”); and the lyric “Meghaduta” (“Cloud Messenger”).
As with most classical Indian authors, little is known about Kalidasa’s person or his historical relationships. His poems suggest but nowhere declare that he was a Brahman (priest), liberal yet committed to the orthodox Hindu worldview. His name, literally “servant of Kali,” presumes that he was a Shaivite (follower of the god Shiva, whose consort was Kali), though occasionally he eulogizes other gods, notably Vishnu.
A Sinhalese tradition says that he died on the island of Sri Lanka during the reign of Kumaradasa, who ascended the throne in 517. A more persistent legend makes Kalidasa one of the “nine gems” at the court of the fabulous king Vikramaditya of Ujjain. Unfortunately, there are several known Vikramadityas (Sun of Valour—a common royal appellation); likewise, the nine distinguished courtiers could not have been contemporaries. It is certain only that the poet lived sometime between the reign of Agnimitra, the second Shunga king (c. 170 bce) and the hero of one of his dramas, and the Aihole inscription of 634 ce, which lauds Kalidasa. He is apparently imitated, though not named, in the Mandasor inscription of 473. No single hypothesis accounts for all the discordant information and conjecture surrounding this date.
An opinion accepted by many—but not all—scholars is that Kalidasa should be associated with Chandra Gupta II (reigned c. 380–c. 415). The most convincing but most conjectural rationale for relating Kalidasa to the brilliant Gupta dynasty is simply the character of his work, which appears as both the perfect reflection and the most thorough statement of the cultural values of that serene and sophisticated aristocracy.
Tradition has associated many works with the poet; criticism identifies six as genuine and one more as likely (“Ritusamhara,” the “Garland of the Seasons,” perhaps a youthful work). Attempts to trace Kalidasa’s poetic and intellectual development through these works are frustrated by the impersonality that is characteristic of classical Sanskrit literature. His works are judged by the Indian tradition as realizations of literary qualities inherent in the Sanskrit language and its supporting culture. Kalidasa has become the archetype for Sanskrit literary composition.
In drama, his Abhijnanashakuntala is the most famous and is usually judged the best Indian literary effort of any period. Taken from an epic legend, the work tells of the seduction of the nymph Shakuntala by King Dushyanta, his rejection of the girl and his child, and their subsequent reunion in heaven. The epic myth is important because of the child, for he is Bharata, eponymous ancestor of the Indian nation (Bharatavarsha, “Subcontinent of Bharata”). Kalidasa remakes the story into a love idyll whose characters represent a pristine aristocratic ideal: the girl, sentimental, selfless, alive to little but the delicacies of nature, and the king, first servant of the dharma (religious and social law and duties), protector of the social order, resolute hero, yet tender and suffering agonies over his lost love. The plot and characters are made believable by a change Kalidasa has wrought in the story: Dushyanta is not responsible for the lovers’ separation; he acts only under a delusion caused by a sage’s curse. As in all of Kalidasa’s works, the beauty of nature is depicted with a precise elegance of metaphor that would be difficult to match in any of the world’s literatures.
The second drama, Vikramorvashi (possibly a pun on vikramaditya), tells a legend as old as the Vedas (earliest Hindu scriptures), though very differently. Its theme is the love of a mortal for a divine maiden; it is well known for the “mad scene” (Act IV) in which the king, grief-stricken, wanders through a lovely forest apostrophizing various flowers and trees as though they were his love. The scene was intended in part to be sung or danced.
The third of Kalidasa’s dramas, Malavikagnimitra, is of a different stamp—a harem intrigue, comical and playful, but not less accomplished for lacking any high purpose. The play (unique in this respect) contains datable references, the historicity of which have been much discussed.
Kalidasa’s efforts in kavya (strophic poetry) are of uniform quality and show two different subtypes, epic and lyric. Examples of the epic are the two long poems Raghuvamsha and Kumarasambhava. The first recounts the legends of the hero Rama’s forebears and descendants; the second tells the picaresque story of Shiva’s seduction by his consort Parvati, the conflagration of Kama (the god of desire), and the birth of Kumara (Skanda), Shiva’s son. These stories are mere pretext for the poet to enchain stanzas, each metrically and grammatically complete, redounding with complex and reposeful imagery. Kalidasa’s mastery of Sanskrit as a poetic medium is nowhere more marked.
A lyric poem, the “Meghaduta,” contains, interspersed in a message from a lover to his absent beloved, an extraordinary series of unexcelled and knowledgeable vignettes, describing the mountains, rivers, and forests of northern India.
The society reflected in Kalidasa’s work is that of a courtly aristocracy sure of its dignity and power. Kalidasa has perhaps done more than any other writer to wed the older, Brahmanic religious tradition, particularly its ritual concern with Sanskrit, to the needs of a new and brilliant secular Hinduism. The fusion, which epitomizes the renaissance of the Gupta period, did not, however, survive its fragile social base; with the disorders following the collapse of the Gupta Empire, Kalidasa became a memory of perfection that neither Sanskrit nor the Indian aristocracy would know again.
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81f9a5184893491a785d421f37324c4e | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kamau-Brathwaite | Kamau Brathwaite | Kamau Brathwaite
Kamau Brathwaite, original name Lawson Edward Brathwaite, also published as Edward Brathwaite and Edward Kamau Brathwaite, (born May 11, 1930, Bridgetown, Barbados—died February 4, 2020, Barbados), Barbadian author whose works are noted for their rich and complex examination of the African and indigenous roots of Caribbean culture.
Brathwaite was educated at Harrison College, Barbados, and Pembroke College, Cambridge (B.A., 1953; Cert. Ed., 1954). After working from 1955 to 1962 for the Education Ministry of what is now Ghana, he did postgraduate work at the University of Sussex (D.Phil., 1968). From 1963 he taught mainly at the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica.
Brathwaite first published his poetry in the 1950s in England and the West Indies. His collections Rights of Passage (1967), Masks (1968), and Islands (1969) brought him international recognition. These volumes, later published together as The Arrivants (1973), record a West Indian’s search for cultural identity. Another trilogy—Mother Poem (1977), Sun Poem (1982), and X/Self (1987)—also examines the issues of identity. In addition to several later collections of poetry, notably Barabajan Poems, 1492–1992 (1994), Brathwaite produced a number of cultural, historical, and literary studies, among them Folk Culture of the Slaves in Jamaica (1970; rev. ed., 1981), The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica 1770–1820 (1971), History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone and Caribbean Poetry (1984), and Roots (1986).
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46765709f181963ee8db47ef38885283 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kamehameha-III | Kamehameha III | Kamehameha III
Kamehameha III, also called Kauikeaouli, (born March 7, 1814, Hawaiian Islands—died Dec. 15, 1854, Honolulu, Oahu), king of Hawaii from 1825 to 1854, brother of Kamehameha II.
Only 10 years of age when he succeeded to the throne, he was initially under the regency of Kamehameha I’s favourite wife, Kaahumanu, who had been regent ever since Kamehameha II had visited England in 1824 and died there. Converted to Christianity in 1824, she became known for her wise and beneficent rule. On her death in 1832 the regency fell to Kamehameha I’s daughter Kinau, but in the following year Kamehameha III assumed power in his own right.
After hearing a series of lectures on government delivered by an American clergyman, William Richards, Kamehameha III promulgated the Declaration of Rights, called Hawaii’s Magna Carta, on June 7, 1839, the Edict of Toleration on June 17, 1839, and the first constitution on Oct. 8, 1840. This first written constitution for Hawaii contained several innovations, including a representative body of legislators elected by the people. It also set up a supreme court. The first compilation of laws was published in 1842. With Richards’ aid, Kamehameha also obtained diplomatic recognition of Hawaiian independence by the United States (1842) and by Great Britain and France (1843).
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c05b9ea38e7faadb10c04f952af247b1 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kamel-Daoud | Kamel Daoud | Kamel Daoud
Kamel Daoud, (born June 17, 1970, Mostaganem, Algeria), Algerian writer and journalist who won the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman for his novel Meursault, contre-enquête (2013; The Meursault Investigation).
Daoud, the eldest of six children, was born into an Arabic-speaking Muslim family in Algeria. As a teenager he embraced the emerging Islamic movement during the early 1980s, but he became disillusioned and openly opposed to religious fervour. He later was outspoken in his criticism of contemporary Algerian society and rejected the tenets of what he saw as misguided nationalism and Islamism that denied self-expression and intellectual freedom. After having studied French literature at the University of Oran, Daoud decided on a career as a writer. He established himself as a journalist, and in 1996 he became affiliated with Le Quotidien d’Oran, a French-language newspaper, to which he contributed a regular column under the title “Raina Raikoum” (“My Opinion, Your Opinion”). He published a selection of his commentary in 2002, followed by the novellas La Fable du nain (2003; “The Fable of the Dwarf”) and Ô Pharaon (2004; “Pharaoh”). In 2008 he released La Préface du nègre (“The Preface of the Negro”), a collection of short stories that was republished in 2011 as Le Minotaure 504.
In 2013 Daoud published his debut novel, Meursault, contre-enquête, which was conceived as a fictional “counterinvestigation” or retelling of Albert Camus’s L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger). Narrated by the imagined brother of the nameless “Arab” senselessly murdered by the detached and dispassionate Meursault, Daoud’s novel presents a dual portrait of the human condition as envisioned by Camus and reenvisioned by Daoud. In addition to the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman, the work also received the Prix François Mauriac and the Prix des Cinq Continents for Francophone writing (both 2014). However, the novel was not without controversy. Offended by the narrator’s vehement rebuke of religion in Meursault, contre-enquête, Islamists voiced outrage, denounced the work as blasphemy, and demanded retribution. In 2014 a fatwa, or religious decree, was issued by a radical Salafist imam in Algeria who deemed Daoud an “apostate” and an “enemy” of Islam.
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53cab07f8f4255847a47794b9b9f6b28 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kander-and-Ebb | Kander and Ebb | Kander and Ebb
Kander and Ebb, American songwriting duo made up of John Kander (b. March 18, 1927, Kansas City, Missouri, U.S.) and Fred Ebb (b. April 8, 1928?, New York, New York, U.S.—d. September 11, 2004, New York City), who collaborated for more than 40 years—from the mid-1960s to the early 2000s—to produce scores for many successful musicals and films. Kander composed the music, and Ebb supplied the lyrics.
Kander was born into a musical household. He began studying piano at age six and performed with family and friends during his youth. Kander ultimately received a bachelor’s degree from Oberlin College (Ohio) in 1951 and a master’s degree from Columbia University (New York) in 1954; both degrees were in music. He worked as a pianist, dance music arranger, and summer-stock musical conductor before joining lyricists James and William Goldman to write the score for the musical A Family Affair (1962).
Ebb developed a love for the city’s theatrical scene at a young age. After receiving an undergraduate degree from New York University in 1955 and a master’s degree in English literature from Columbia University in 1957, he penned nightclub pieces and teamed with Paul Klein and Norman Martin to write songs for the revue From A to Z (1960).
When Kander and Ebb met in 1962, their styles and personalities meshed, and they soon began writing songs together. Two of their earliest tunes were “My Coloring Book” and “I Don’t Care Much,” both of which were subsequently recorded by Barbra Streisand. Flora, the Red Menace (1965), the story of a department store worker whose boyfriend convinces her to join the Communist Party, marked the Broadway debut of Kander and Ebb as well as Liza Minnelli, who was cast in the lead through the songwriters’ persistent lobbying of the director. Minnelli later appeared in the Kander and Ebb stage musicals The Act (1977) and The Rink (1984) and in the film version of their Cabaret (1972).
The duo won their first Tony Award for the score of Cabaret (1966), which also was named best musical of the season. The film version, which contained some new Kander and Ebb tunes, received multiple Academy Awards, including one for Minnelli. The show was revived onstage in 1987. Kander and Ebb received Tony Awards for their scores of Woman of the Year (1981) and Kiss of the Spider Woman (1993), which also was honoured as best musical.
Other Kander and Ebb stage works included The Happy Time (1968), Zorba (1968, revival 1981), Seventy Girls Seventy (1971), and Steel Pier (1997). Chicago, a vaudeville-influenced production about a showgirl who murders her lover, had a significant run when it opened in 1975. A new production earned the 1997 Tony Award for best revival of a musical.
The duo earned an Oscar nomination for the song “How Lucky Can You Get” from the film Funny Lady (1975). Another of their memorable screen tunes was the title song from the film New York, New York (1977), which became a standard for Frank Sinatra. They also wrote material for the Emmy Award-winning Liza with a Z: A Concert for Television (1972) and other television specials. In 1991 Kander and Ebb were inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame in New York City. That same year a compilation show of Kander and Ebb songs titled And the World Goes Round opened Off Broadway. The two songwriters received yet another Academy Award nomination in 2003 for “I Move On,” from the film version of Chicago (2002), which won six Oscars, including that for best picture.
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733c61f42520b08f3489b26ed105138f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kang-Youwei | Kang Youwei | Kang Youwei
Kang Youwei, Wade-Giles romanization K’ang Yu-wei, original name Kang Zuyi, courtesy name (zi) Guangxia, literary name (hao) Changsu, (born March 19, 1858, Nanhai, Guangdong province, China—died March 21, 1927, Qingdao, Shandong province), Chinese scholar, a leader of the Reform Movement of 1898 and a key figure in the intellectual development of modern China. During the last years of the empire and the early years of the republic he sought to promote Confucianism as an antidote against “moral degeneration” and indiscriminate Westernization.
Kang Youwei came from a scholarly gentry family in the district of Nanhai in Guangdong province. His teacher imbued him with the Confucian ideal of service to society, and his study of Buddhism impressed him with its spirit of compassion. He rebelled against convention, Neo-Confucian authoritarianism, and the demands of the civil service examination system. After reading about the outside world, he came to admire Western civilization. In the 1880s he began to conceive some of his basic ideas: ideas of historical progress, social equality, a world government, and the nature of the universe.
Kang’s first venture in social reform was in 1883, when he tried to abolish in his village the custom of foot-binding imposed on women. The decay of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911/12) prompted Kang and other concerned Chinese to urge fundamental institutional reforms. After his plans for the salvation of China—submitted in 1888 to the Qing court—were ignored, Kang set out to convert the educated class to his views and to arouse the people from their lethargy. In 1890 he opened a school in Guangzhou (Canton) to teach new learning. Assisted by his students, among whom was Liang Qichao, who collaborated in his reform movement, he wrote The Forged Classics (1891), which reveals that the Confucian Classics held sacrosanct as bases of the state cult had been tampered with in the Han period (206 bc–ad 220). This book was followed by Confucius as a Reformer (1897), which expounded Kang’s belief that Confucius was concerned with contemporary problems and stood for change and that the progress of mankind was inevitable. His interpretation of Confucian teachings and researches on ancient texts later inspired modern scholarship in the reappraisal of China’s past, although critics have charged that he invoked Confucius to further his aims and was undermining the established way of life.
When China was defeated by Japan in 1895, Kang mobilized hundreds of provincial graduates then in Beijing to protest against the humiliating peace terms and to petition for far-reaching reforms to strengthen the empire. To arouse the people to the dangers confronting China, he and his associates published newspapers and founded the Society for the Study of National Strengthening, the archetype of political parties in modern China. The society was suppressed in 1896.
In 1898, when foreign powers threatened to partition China, Kang and his followers suggested an alliance with Britain and Japan to check Russia’s advance and insisted that only institutional reforms could save China. He urged the clearing of channels for the expression of public opinion, the convocation of assemblies, and even the acceptance of popular sovereignty and the separation of state powers, and he organized the Society to Preserve the Nation to marshal support. Finally, he prevailed upon the Guangxu emperor to launch the reform program. Among the many measures that were promulgated were streamlining the government, strengthening the armed forces, creating new standards in the civil service examination system, developing commerce and industry, promoting local self-government, and opening Peking University and modern schools.
The reform measures were annulled, however, when the dowager empress Cixi reasserted control. The emperor was placed in confinement, six of the reform leaders, including Kang’s brother, were executed, and scores were arrested. Kang and Liang Qichao escaped to Japan. Unable to persuade the Japanese and British governments to intervene for the emperor, Kang went to Canada and founded the China Reform Association (Zhongguo Weixinhui; popularly known as the Save the Emperor Association and in 1907 renamed the Constitutional Party) to carry on his plans.
After the failure of the revolts instigated by the reformers in 1900 in Anhui and Hubei provinces to restore the emperor, Kang resumed his writing in exile. His most significant work completed at this time was The Great Commonwealth (Datongshu), in which he envisaged a utopian world attainable through successive stages of human development, a world where the barriers of race, religion, state, class, sex, and family would be removed and where there would be an egalitarian, communal society under a universal government.
Kang emerged from his retreat in 1903. To help the overseas Chinese and to unite them in a common effort, he and his colleagues founded an international business firm and established schools and newspapers. These activities, conducted in the United States, Mexico, Japan, and Southeast Asia, brought them into sharp competition with the Chinese revolutionists.
During his exile, Kang traveled extensively. His stay in Europe and his study of Western history moved him to shun the violence and destructiveness of revolution as means of political change, and he proposed as an alternative course the promotion of science, technology, and industry to rebuild China.
After his return in 1913 to a weak and troubled China, he was soon involved in the campaign to thwart the monarchical scheme of the Chinese statesman Yuan Shikai. In 1917, in line with his idea of a constitutional monarchy to bridge the transition to a truly democratic republic, he participated in the abortive restoration of the Qing ruler. In the years that followed, animated by the fear of a divided country, he opposed the South China government of the revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925). He called for the preservation of the best of China’s heritage and the establishment of a reformed Confucian church to provide the people with spiritual guidance. Partisan writers have criticized him for holding to these views. In his later years, he renewed his philosophic reflections, completing his last book, The Heavens, in which he blended astronomy with his own metaphysical musing, a year before his death at Qingdao in 1927.
Besides prolific writings on the Chinese Classics, politics, and economics, Kang also left travel accounts and an anthology of his poems; he was also a famous calligrapher.
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28379480edd050a752182e047b2130e9 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kano-Sanraku | Kanō Sanraku | Kanō Sanraku
Kanō Sanraku, , original name Kanō Mitsuyori, (born 1559, Japan—died Oct. 30, 1635, Kyōto), sixth-generation member of the famous Kanō family of painters to the Japanese shoguns.
He produced some of the greatest screen paintings of the Azuchi-Momoyama period (1574–1600). Sanraku was the disciple and adopted son of the leading painter of the day, Kanō Eitoku, and like him excelled in large-scale decorative designs executed in bold, sweeping lines and brilliant colours against gold-leaf backgrounds. He painted many folding screens and sliding panels, used to decorate the interiors of temples, castles, and palaces. Much of Sanraku’s work still remains: “Birds of Prey,” on the screens in the J. Nishimura collection, Kumamoto City; legendary Chinese figures on a pair of screens in the Tokyo National Museum; and “Trees, Flowers, and Tigers,” on the walls of the Tenkyū-in chapel, Kyōto (designated as a national treasure). Sanraku also introduced a subject that became popular with later Kanō artists, historical figures selected from the Chinese book Ti chien t’u shuo (1573; “Illustrations of Exemplary Emperors”; Japanese trans., Teikan zusetsu, 1606).
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45e05a1e4ae7754040629b95a2e6f317 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kara-DioGuardi | Kara DioGuardi | Kara DioGuardi
…of a fourth judge, songwriter Kara DioGuardi. Judges were also given the power to directly influence the final rounds of competition with the “judges’ save rule,” which allowed the panel to override the votes of the viewing public once per season to give a deserving contestant a second chance. In…
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8e1be3fe26f16a307a1e21fa44c03336 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Karel-Appel | Karel Appel | Karel Appel
Karel Appel, (born April 25, 1921, Amsterdam, Netherlands—died May 3, 2006, Zürich, Switzerland), Dutch painter of turbulent, colourful, and semiabstract compositions, who was a cofounder (1948) of the COBRA group of northern European Expressionists. He was also a noted sculptor and graphic artist.
Appel attended the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Amsterdam (1940–43), and helped found the “Reflex” group, which became known as COBRA (for Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam), in 1948. He moved to Paris in 1950 and by the 1960s had settled in New York City; he later lived in Italy and Switzerland. Partly in reaction against what they perceived as the sterile academicism of the de Stijl movement, the COBRA artists assimilated a variety of more-impulsive influences, including folk art, children’s art, and l’art brut (“raw art”) of Jean Dubuffet. They exploited the spontaneity and intensity of the contemporary American Action painting while maintaining a degree of representation. Appel’s style is characterized by thick layering of pigment, violent brushwork, and a crude, reductive figuration.
Appel first visited the United States in 1957, where he painted portraits of prominent jazz musicians, including Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie. His public works include a mural in the UNESCO building in Paris. His figurative sculptures in wood and metal share with the paintings a brutal, imaginative expressionism.
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d2a75d1bc0f1879c8e0cb03afcb09d61 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Karel-van-de-Woestijne | Karel van de Woestijne | Karel van de Woestijne
Karel van de Woestijne, (born March 10, 1878, Ghent, Belg.—died Aug. 23, 1929, Zwijnaarde), Flemish poet whose body of work constitutes a symbolic autobiography.
Van de Woestijne studied Germanic philology. He worked as a journalist and government official in Brussels (1907–20) and as a professor of literature at Ghent from 1920 until his death. His poetry stems from the neo-Romantic and Symbolist tradition, but his style evolved from sensualist and melancholic to more ascetic and contemplative. His early, subjective poetry includes Het vaderhuis (1903; “The Father House”), about his childhood; De boomgaard der vogelen en der vruchten (1905; “The Orchard of Birds and Fruit”), on his youth and courtship; and De gulden schaduw (1910; “The Golden Shadow”), on his marriage and fatherhood.
The tormented awareness of the conflict between sense and spirit, inherent in all his works, reaches a bitter climax in De modderen man (1920; “The Man of Mud”) and still resonates in the more subdued Het berg-meer (1928; “The Mountain Lake”). His poetry—powerfully conveying the spirit’s longing for liberation from the compulsive desires of the flesh—ranks among the finest achievements of European Symbolism.
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784e2203ecc6f24f2d7c004b15a737af | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Karl-Abraham | Karl Abraham | Karl Abraham
Karl Abraham, (born May 3, 1877, Bremen, Germany—died December 25, 1925, Berlin), German psychoanalyst who studied the role of infant sexuality in character development and mental illness.
While serving as an assistant to the psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler at the Burghölzli Mental Hospital in Zürich (1904–07), Abraham met the psychoanalyst Carl Jung and was introduced to the ideas of Sigmund Freud. His first psychoanalytic paper dealt with childhood sexual trauma in relation to the symptoms of schizophrenia.
Abraham entered psychoanalytic practice in Berlin (1907), where he helped to establish the first branch of the International Psychoanalytic Institute (1910). His studies contributed to theories about symbols and myths; in a major paper published in 1909, he connected myths with dreams and viewed both as wish-fulfillment fantasies.
Abraham devoted himself chiefly to pioneering efforts in the psychoanalytic treatment of manic depression (known today as bipolar disorder). He suggested that the libido, or sexual drive, develops in six stages: earlier oral, oral-sadistic, anal expulsive, anal retentive, phallic, and adult genital. If an infant’s development becomes arrested at any of the earlier stages, mental disorders will most likely result from a libidinal fixation at that level.
Abraham’s most important work, Versuch einer Entwicklungsgeschichte der Libido auf Grund der Psychoanalyse seelischer Störungen (1924; A Short Study of the Development of the Libido, Viewed in the Light of Mental Disorders), appeared in English in his Selected Papers (1953). “Character-Formation on the Genital Level of Libido-Development,” also contained in the Selected Papers, is a translation of his last major paper (1925).
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ced8150bdba9f4d38853ffe493949be8 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Karl-Anton-von-Terzaghi | Karl Terzaghi | Karl Terzaghi
Karl Terzaghi, (born Oct. 2, 1883, Prague—died Oct. 25, 1963, Winchester, Mass., U.S.), civil engineer who founded the branch of civil engineering science known as soil mechanics, the study of the properties of soil under stresses and under the action of flowing water.
He studied mechanical engineering at the Technical University in Graz, graduating in 1904, then worked as an engineer for several years; he was awarded a doctorate in engineering by the same institution in 1911. After visiting the United States, he served in the Austrian Air Force during World War I, but in 1916 he accepted a position with the Imperial School of Engineers, Istanbul. When the war was over, he took a post (1918–25) with Robert College, a U.S. institution, also in Istanbul. Much research had been done on foundations, earth pressure, and stability of slopes, but Terzaghi set out to organize the results and, through research, to provide unifying concepts. The results were published in his most noted work, Erdbaumechanik (1925; Introduction to Soil Mechanics, 1943–44).
In 1925 he went to the United States, where—as a member of the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge—he worked unceasingly for the acceptance of his ideas, serving also as consulting engineer for many construction projects.
In 1929 he accepted the newly created chair of soil mechanics at Vienna Technical University. He returned to the United States in 1938 and served as professor of civil engineering at Harvard University from 1946 until his retirement in 1956. His consulting practice grew to encompass the world, including the chairmanship of the Board of Consultants of Egypt’s Aswān High Dam project until 1959.
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f1a912dd5dbc271e3480f835b79a2b2f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Karl-Augustus-Menninger | Karl Augustus Menninger | Karl Augustus Menninger
…in practice by his son Karl Augustus Menninger (born July 22, 1893, Topeka—died July 18, 1990, Topeka), who received a medical degree from Harvard Medical School in 1917 and spent two years working under Ernest Southard at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital. In 1919 the two Menningers established the Menninger Diagnostic…
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1f88426d34a807dfa91f95302293881f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Karl-Baedeker | Karl Baedeker | Karl Baedeker
Karl Baedeker, (born Nov. 3, 1801, Essen, Duchy of Oldenburg—died Oct. 4, 1859, Koblenz, Prussia), founder of a German publishing house known for its guidebooks.
Baedeker was the son of a printer and bookseller. In 1827 he started a firm at Koblenz and two years later brought out a guidebook to the town. It was in the second edition of a guide to the Rhine from Mainz to Cologne (which had appeared in 1828) that Baedeker evolved the system on which he based his series. His aim was to give the traveller the practical information necessary to enable him to dispense with paid guides. He checked the reliability of his publications by making incognito journeys and by consulting the best sources and experts. A notable feature of Baedeker’s guides was the use of “stars” to indicate objects and views of special interest, as well as to designate reliable hotels. By the time of his death much of Europe had been covered by his guidebooks.
Under the ownership of his sons, Ernst (1833–61), Karl (1837–1911), and, especially, Fritz (1844–1925), the firm expanded still more. The first French edition appeared in 1846, and the first English one followed in 1861. The house moved to Leipzig in 1872, to Hamburg in 1948, and to Freiburg im Breisgau in 1956.
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f1ddcc27f478e11271d88aea3f3ec887 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Karl-Barth/Church-Dogmatics | Church Dogmatics | Church Dogmatics
Of his theological works, perhaps the best-remembered is Barth’s massive study Kirchliche Dogmatik (1932–67; Church Dogmatics), a remarkable contribution to 20th-century theology. Church Dogmatics grew year by year out of his class lectures; though incomplete, it eventually filled four volumes in 12 parts, of which Barth regarded volume 2, parts 1 and 2, which are devoted to the doctrine of God, as the highlight. It is particularly notable for its powerful epistemology and his account of the Act and Being of God, in which he integrated dynamic and ontological factors in theological knowledge.
As a theologian, Barth was concerned to establish the truth that God can be known only in accordance with his nature and to reject the 19th-century view that saw an identity between the Spirit of God and religious self-consciousness or between the laws of God and the natural structures of man’s life and history. Drawing on the Church Fathers and the Reformers, Barth demanded a return to the prophetic teaching of the Bible (in Jeremiah and the writings of Paul), of which he believed the Reformers were authentic exponents. He accepted much trenchant criticism of historical Christianity from John Calvin, Martin Luther, Søren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Franz Overbeck and found positive help in the writings of Isaak Dorner, Wilhelm Vilmar, Friedrich Kohlbrügge, and Johann and Christoph Blumhardt. The essence of the Christian message, he affirmed, was the overwhelming love of the absolutely supreme, transcendent God, who comes in infinite condescension to give himself to mankind in unconditional freedom and grace.
After the war, Barth was invited back to Bonn, where he delivered the course of lectures published in 1947 as Dogmatik im Grundriss (Dogmatics in Outline), one of the most influential of his smaller works. He continued to interest himself keenly in current theological discussion, participating in controversies regarding baptism, hermeneutics, “demythologizing,” and others. His authority and prestige made a profound impression when he spoke at the opening meeting of the Conference of the World Council of Churches in Amsterdam in 1948 and later when he gave the celebrated lectures published as Einführung in die evangelische Theologie (Evangelical Theology: An Introduction) in Princeton, New Jersey, and Chicago in 1962. Another notable event in his later years was a visit to Rome following the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), of which he wrote with characteristic grace and humour in Ad Limina Apostolorum: An Appraisal of Vatican II (ad limina apostolorum is the term for a pilgrimage to the tombs of St. Peter and St. Paul in Rome).
Barth made regular visits to the prison in Basel, and his sermons to the prisoners, Den Gefangenen Befreiung; Predigten aus den Jahren 1954–59 (1959; Deliverance to the Captives), reveal in a unique way the combination of evangelical passion and social concern that had characterized all of his life. Barth died in Basel at age 82.
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865ca694b02dc9f3f648cfba530ffed5 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Karl-Blossfeldt | Karl Blossfeldt | Karl Blossfeldt
Karl Blossfeldt, (born June 13, 1865, Schielo, Germany—died December 9, 1932, Berlin), German photographer known best for his stark close-up portraits of plants, twigs, seeds, leaves, and other flora.
In 1881 Blossfeldt began his studies as an apprentice at the Art Ironworks and Foundry in Mägdesprung, Germany, where he studied sculpture and iron casting. He then moved to Berlin to study at the School of the Museum of Decorative Arts (Kunstgewerbemuseum). In 1890 Blossfeldt received a scholarship to study in Rome under Moritz Meurer, a decorative artist and professor of ornament and design. Along with several other assistants, Blossfeldt created and photographed casts of botanical specimens in and around Rome. He continued to work with Meurer through 1896 and traveled beyond Italy to North Africa and Greece to collect specimens. Beginning in 1898 Blossfeldt taught design at the School of the Museum of Decorative Arts (Kunstgewerbeschule), and in 1930 he became professor emeritus. There he established a plant photography archive that he used to teach his students about design and patterns found in nature.
Blossfeldt had no formal training as a photographer and used homemade cameras that he outfitted with lenses capable of magnifying his subjects up to 30 times their natural size. The use of magnification resulted in images of extreme detail and clarity. With the precision of a botanist, Blossfeldt photographed the natural world for scientific and pedagogical purposes and inadvertently became a modern artist. His work was considered the forerunner to Neue Sachlichkeit photography, which favoured sharply focused documentarian images. In 1926, when Blossfeldt was already in his 60s, his work was exhibited to the public for the first time at Berlin’s avant-garde Galerie Nierendorf.The works exhibited there were published in the book Urformen der Kunst (1928; Art Forms in Nature [2003]). The first of his three photo books (the other two were Wundergarten der Natur, 1932; and Wunder in der Natur, 1942, the last published posthumously), it was enormously successful and remains one of the most-significant photo books of the 20th century.
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6936c4f8d474dd05abe5f43e77257c39 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Karl-Bohm | Karl Böhm | Karl Böhm
Karl Böhm, (born Aug. 28, 1894, Graz, Austria—died Aug. 14, 1981, Salzburg), Austrian conductor who earned an international reputation for his concert performances and recordings of Richard Strauss, Richard Wagner, W.A. Mozart, and other composers.
Böhm studied law but also studied music in Vienna with Eusebius Mandyczewski and Guido Adler. His debut at the Graz Opera House in 1917 was followed three years later by his appointment there as its first conductor. In 1921 he joined the Munich Opera. Böhm became musical director at Darmstadt in 1927, at Hamburg in 1931, and at Dresden in 1934. He made his London debut at Covent Garden in 1936. Böhm came under public criticism for taking the Dresden position because he had replaced Fritz Busch, who had been forced to resign by the Nazis; Böhm replaced Bruno Walter at Salzburg in 1938 under similar circumstances.
After conducting at Dresden until 1943, Böhm directed the State Opera in Vienna from 1943 to 1945 and again from 1954 to 1956. In 1957 he conducted Don Giovanni in his debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. From the early 1960s he was perhaps the best-known interpreter of Wagner through his work at the Bayreuth Festivals. He recorded the complete symphonies of Mozart. Böhm’s recordings and performances elicited admirable qualities of warmth, subtlety, and lyricism.
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8d13442a145684a0e70ab4d56823026e | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Karl-Brugmann | Karl Brugmann | Karl Brugmann
Karl Brugmann, in full Friedrich Christian Karl Brugmann, (born March 16, 1849, Wiesbaden, Nassau [Germany]—died June 29, 1919, Leipzig, Ger.), German linguist who gained a position of preeminence in comparative Indo-European linguistics during the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a result of his comprehensive and still-authoritative research in this field.
Brugmann was the central figure of the Junggrammatiker, or Neogrammarians, who in the 1870s rejected a doctrinaire approach to language science, asserted the inviolability of phonetic laws, and adhered to strict research methodology. His own contribution to establishing the ascendancy of the Neogrammarian position was the publication of a highly original study of nasal sounds (1876). The first volume of Morphologische Untersuchungen (1878; “Morphological Investigations”), edited by Brugmann and Hermann Osthoff (1847–1919), contained his statement of the Neogrammarian views. In 1891 he founded, with Wilhelm Streitberg, the journal Indogermanische Forschungen (“Indo-European Researches”).
During most of his professional life (1887–1919), Brugmann was professor of Sanskrit and comparative linguistics at the University of Leipzig. An enormously productive researcher, a keenly perceptive original investigator, and a vigorous defender of theoretical principles, he came to be the greatest synthesist among the Indo-European grammarians of his time. Of his 400 publications, the work on which his fame most securely rests is the two volumes on sounds and forms he prepared for the Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen, 5 vol. (1886–93; Outline of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-Germanic Languages). The three volumes on syntax were prepared by Berthold Delbrück. A second, greatly enlarged edition was issued between 1897 and 1916. Not only has the Grundriss remained probably the most authoritative grammar ever written, but it also stands as one of the great schemes of knowledge concerning the Indo-European languages.
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85f8545411c318c9e1a1b97b07c8033f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Karl-Ernst-Haushofer | Karl Haushofer | Karl Haushofer
Karl Haushofer, (born Aug. 27, 1869, Munich, Bavaria [Germany]—died March 13, 1946, Pähl, W.Ger.), German army officer, political geographer, and leading proponent of geopolitics, an academic discipline prominent in the period between the two World Wars but later in disrepute because of its identification with Nazi doctrines of world domination.
During his stay as an army officer in Japan (1908–10), Haushofer studied that nation’s expansionist policies in Asia; several of his books, including his most ambitious study in political geography, Geopolitik des Pazifischen Ozeans (1924; “Geopolitics of the Pacific Ocean”), dealt with Japan’s role in 20th-century politics. Retiring from the army in 1919 with the rank of major general, he dedicated himself to the regeneration of Germany. He founded (1924), and was editor of and principal contributor to, the Zeitschrift für Geopolitik (“Journal for Geopolitics”) and directed the Institute of Geopolitics at the University of Munich. A mixture of sound observations and hazy theories, geopolitics was based on the works of the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel, who compared the state to a biological organism, and on the less-scientific theories of the Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kjellen, who took Ratzel’s metaphor literally and viewed the state as an actual organism with a natural right to growth and to Lebensraum (“living space”).
Haushofer’s influence in military circles was considerable. As a disciple of the “heartland” theory of Sir Halford J. Mackinder, he stressed Germany’s need to join forces with Russia until he was silenced by Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union in 1941. Throughout World War II he attempted to justify Germany and Japan in their drives for world power, although his marriage to a woman of Jewish extraction probably made this task increasingly distasteful. In 1945 his son Albrecht, professor of geopolitics at the University of Berlin and active in the underground against Adolf Hitler, was executed by the Gestapo. After Germany’s defeat, when Haushofer was investigated for alleged war crimes, he and his wife committed suicide.
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dc4f679d1d33f6284647303a4db5ae02 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Karl-Goldmark | Karl Goldmark | Karl Goldmark
Karl Goldmark, (born May 18, 1830, Keszthely, Hung.—died Jan. 2, 1915, Vienna, Austria), Austro-Hungarian composer whose opera Die Königin von Saba (1875; “The Queen of Sheba”) was highly popular in the late 19th century.
The son of a poor Jewish cantor, Goldmark studied violin in Vienna under Georg Böhm and theory under Gottfried Preyer; in composition he was self-taught. During his long career in Vienna he became a leading musical figure of the city, directing the Eintracht Choral Society, writing music criticism, and rallying support for the faction of Richard Wagner—in opposition to Johannes Brahms and Eduard Hanslick. He composed in all the standard genres, sometimes in a vaguely Hungarian idiom but nearly always showing a dependence upon Wagner. His most successful works are the overture Sakuntala (1860) and the opera Die Königin von Saba. Among his other works are five operas, notably Das Heimchen am Herd (1896; “The Cricket on the Hearth,” after Charles Dickens); two symphonies; and chamber works.
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94706d4a2e596e2ce5c79233ee557eca | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Karl-Jansky | Karl Jansky | Karl Jansky
Karl Jansky, in full Karl Guthe Jansky, (born October 22, 1905, Norman, Oklahoma, U.S.—died February 14, 1950, Red Bank, New Jersey), American engineer whose discovery of radio waves from an extraterrestrial source inaugurated the development of radio astronomy, a new science that from the mid-20th century greatly extended the range of astronomical observations.
In 1928 Jansky joined the Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey, where his assignment was to track down and identify the various forms of interference that were plaguing telephone communications. He built a linear, directional antenna by which he was able to identify all the sources of interference except one. After months of study he discovered in 1931 that the source of the unidentified radio interference came from the stars. By the following spring he concluded that the source lay in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius, which Harlow Shapley and Jan Oort had established as the direction of the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy.
Jansky published his findings in late 1932 but did not pursue the further development of radio astronomy, a task performed by the American engineer and amateur astronomer Grote Reber. In honour of Jansky’s epoch-making discovery, the unit of radio-wave emission strength was named the jansky.
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ad3b629d1c54863c20ec5d613174ae06 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Karl-Karlovich-Klaus | Karl Karlovich Klaus | Karl Karlovich Klaus
Karl Karlovich Klaus, also called Carl Ernst Claus, (born Jan. 23, 1796, Dorpat, Russia [now Tartu, Estonia]—died March 24, 1864, Dorpat), Russian chemist (of German origin) credited with the discovery of ruthenium in 1844.
Klaus was educated at Dorpat, where he became a pharmacist; later he taught chemistry and pharmacy at the universities of Dorpat and Kazan. Klaus was noted for his researches on the platinum metals osmium, palladium, iridium, and rhodium, and it was in the course of investigating the waste residues of the platinum refinery in St. Petersburg that he discovered ruthenium.
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49344ed36ae1431513ef7fedbde9859b | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Karl-Marx/Character-and-significance | Character and significance | Character and significance
At Marx’s funeral in Highgate Cemetery, Engels declared that Marx had made two great discoveries, the law of development of human history and the law of motion of bourgeois society. But “Marx was before all else a revolutionist.” He was “the best-hated and most-calumniated man of his time,” yet he also died “beloved, revered and mourned by millions of revolutionary fellow-workers.”
The contradictory emotions Marx engendered are reflected in the sometimes conflicting aspects of his character. Marx was a combination of the Promethean rebel and the rigorous intellectual. He gave most persons an impression of intellectual arrogance. A Russian writer, Pavel Annenkov, who observed Marx in debate in 1846 recalled that “he spoke only in the imperative, brooking no contradiction,” and seemed to be “the personification of a democratic dictator such as might appear before one in moments of fantasy.” But Marx obviously felt uneasy before mass audiences and avoided the atmosphere of factional controversies at congresses. He went to no demonstrations, his wife remarked, and rarely spoke at public meetings. He kept away from the congresses of the International where the rival socialist groups debated important resolutions. He was a “small groups” man, most at home in the atmosphere of the General Council or on the staff of a newspaper, where his character could impress itself forcefully on a small body of coworkers. At the same time he avoided meeting distinguished scholars with whom he might have discussed questions of economics and sociology on a footing of intellectual equality. Despite his broad intellectual sweep, he was prey to obsessive ideas such as that the British foreign minister, Lord Palmerston, was an agent of the Russian government. He was determined not to let bourgeois society make “a money-making machine” out of him, yet he submitted to living on the largess of Engels and the bequests of relatives. He remained the eternal student in his personal habits and way of life, even to the point of joining two friends in a students’ prank during which they systematically broke four or five streetlamps in a London street and then fled from the police. He was a great reader of novels, especially those of Sir Walter Scott and Balzac; and the family made a cult of Shakespeare. He was an affectionate father, saying that he admired Jesus for his love of children, but sacrificed the lives and health of his own. Of his seven children, three daughters grew to maturity. His favourite daughter, Eleanor, worried him with her nervous, brooding, emotional character and her desire to be an actress. Another shadow was cast on Marx’s domestic life by the birth to their loyal servant, Helene Demuth, of an illegitimate son, Frederick; Engels as he was dying disclosed to Eleanor that Marx had been the father. Above all, Marx was a fighter, willing to sacrifice anything in the battle for his conception of a better society. He regarded struggle as the law of life and existence.
The influence of Marx’s ideas has been enormous. Marx’s masterpiece, Das Kapital, the “Bible of the working class,” as it was officially described in a resolution of the International Working Men’s Association, was published in 1867 in Berlin and received a second edition in 1873. Only the first volume was completed and published in Marx’s lifetime. The second and third volumes, unfinished by Marx, were edited by Engels and published in 1885 and 1894. The economic categories he employed were those of the classical British economics of David Ricardo, but Marx used them in accordance with his dialectical method to argue that bourgeois society, like every social organism, must follow its inevitable path of development. Through the working of such immanent tendencies as the declining rate of profit, capitalism would die and be replaced by another, higher, society. The most memorable pages in Das Kapital are the descriptive passages, culled from Parliamentary Blue Books, on the misery of the English working class. Marx believed that this misery would increase, while at the same time the monopoly of capital would become a fetter upon production until finally “the knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.”
Marx never claimed to have discovered the existence of classes and class struggles in modern society. “Bourgeois” historians, he acknowledged, had described them long before he had. He did claim, however, to have proved that each phase in the development of production was associated with a corresponding class structure and that the struggle of classes led necessarily to the dictatorship of the proletariat, ushering in the advent of a classless society. Marx took up the very different versions of socialism current in the early 19th century and welded them together into a doctrine that continued to be the dominant version of socialism for half a century after his death. His emphasis on the influence of economic structure on historical development has proved to be of lasting significance.
Although Marx stressed economic issues in his writings, his major impact has been in the fields of sociology and history. Marx’s most important contribution to sociological theory was his general mode of analysis, the “dialectical” model, which regards every social system as having within it immanent forces that give rise to “contradictions” (disequilibria) that can be resolved only by a new social system. Neo-Marxists, who no longer accept the economic reasoning in Das Kapital, are still guided by this model in their approach to capitalist society. In this sense, Marx’s mode of analysis, like those of Thomas Malthus, Herbert Spencer, or Vilfredo Pareto, has become one of the theoretical structures that are the heritage of the social scientist.
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bcb7bc24d33c1afe781bb780f1526dec | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Karl-Otfried-Muller | Karl Otfried Müller | Karl Otfried Müller
Karl Otfried Müller, (born Aug. 28, 1797, Brieg, Silesia [now in Poland]—died Aug. 1, 1840, Athens), German professor and scholar of classical Greek studies whose considerations of ancient Greece in a broad historical and cultural context began an important era in the development of Hellenic scholarship.
Müller was a pupil of August Boeckh, founder of a famous school of philology. His first published work, Aegineticorum liber (1817; “On the Isle of Aegina”), was of such brilliance that within two years he was made adjunct professor of ancient literature at the University of Göttingen (1819), where he lectured on archaeology and the history of ancient art. His most important work, Geschichten hellenischer Stämme und Städte (1820; “History of Greek Peoples and Cities”), provides a cultural history of the civilizations of ancient Greece and emphasizes the study of myths, successfully combining the historical and allegorical methods. His other works include numerous archaeological papers, historical surveys on the Dorians and Etruscans, and valuable methodological studies. Among the more noteworthy are his Prolegomena zu einer wissenschaftlichen Mythologie (1825; “Prolegomena to a Scientific Mythology”), which prepared the way for the scientific investigation of myths, and his edition of Aeschylus’ Eumenides (1833), in which he attacks the prevalent philological criticisms of the classics. As political troubles made his position at Göttingen difficult, Müller left Germany for archaeological visits in Greece, where he succumbed to fever.
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db6173ed60311007c7500c0d2399837d | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Karl-Pribram | Karl Pribram | Karl Pribram
…1960 Miller, Eugene Galanter, and Karl Pribram proposed that stimulus-response (an isolated behavioral sequence used to assist research) be replaced by a different hypothesized behavioral sequence, which they called the TOTE (test, operate, test, exit). In the TOTE sequence a goal is first planned, and a test is performed to…
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ebaa3ff5321e8d310ece3ee02b03c4ae | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Karl-Renner | Karl Renner | Karl Renner
Karl Renner, (born Dec. 14, 1870, Unter-Tannowitz, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary [now in Czech Republic]—died Dec. 31, 1950, Doebling, Austria), Social Democratic statesman, chancellor (1918–20, 1945) and president (1945–50) of Austria, who after World War I advocated the Anschluss (union) between Germany and Austria. He played a major role in reestablishing Austrian home rule after the end of the German occupation in 1945.
Of peasant stock, Renner studied law at the University of Vienna and became a member of the moderate wing of the Austrian Social Democratic Party. A deputy to the Reichsrat (lower house of parliament) from 1907, Renner became the first chancellor of the new Austrian republic after the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy in November 1918 at the end of World War I. As chancellor in two successive coalition ministries from November 1918 to June 1920, he proved unable to prevent sizable territorial losses to Italy, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. On Sept. 10, 1919, Renner signed the Treaty of Saint-Germain, which further prohibited Austria’s union with Germany, a project he had initially supported. He advocated Austrian entry into the League of Nations, a policy of fulfillment of treaty obligations, and strict neutrality in foreign affairs. The leader of the Social Democratic Party’s right wing during the 1920s, he served as president of the Nationalrat (lower house of parliament) from 1930 to 1933. In 1938 he supported Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria.
With the collapse of Germany in 1945 and the occupation of Austria by Soviet troops, Renner worked with Soviet officials to reconstitute an Austrian government, formed a provisional regime, and became the first chancellor of the reborn Austria in April 1945. On Dec. 20, 1945, the Reichsrat unanimously elected him president of the republic.
Renner published a number of works, the most significant of which were Staat und Nation (1899; “State and Nation”); Österreichs Erneuerung, 3 vol. (1916–17; “Austria’s Renewal”); and his memoirs, An der Wende zweier Zeiten (1946; “At the Junction of Two Eras”).
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0e3557a919c3f865103373293e2abf42 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Karl-Schwarzschild | Karl Schwarzschild | Karl Schwarzschild
Karl Schwarzschild, (born October 9, 1873, Frankfurt am Main, Germany—died May 11, 1916, Potsdam), German astronomer whose contributions, both practical and theoretical, were of primary importance in the development of 20th-century astronomy.
Schwarzschild’s exceptional ability in science became evident at the age of 16, when his paper on the theory of celestial orbits was published. In 1901 he became professor and director of the observatory at the University of Göttingen, and eight years later he was appointed director of the Astrophysical Observatory at Potsdam.
While at Göttingen, Schwarzschild introduced precise methods in photographic photometry. The results of his studies clearly demonstrated the relationship between the spectral type and colour of a star. He pioneered in the use of a coarse grating (for example, a glass plate with closely spaced parallel lines etched into it) in the course of measurement of the separation of double stars; the technique has found widespread use in determining stellar magnitude and colour. He also developed certain basic methods for the analysis of solar spectra obtained during eclipses.
Schwarzschild enunciated the principle of radiative equilibrium and was the first to recognize clearly the role of radiative processes in the transport of heat in stellar atmospheres. His hypothesis of stellar motion is one of the most important results to come out of his fundamental work in modern statistical methods in astronomy. He also made theoretical studies of the pressure exerted on small, solid particles by radiation.
Schwarzschild made fundamental contributions to theoretical physics and to relativity. He was one of the great pioneers in developing the theory of atomic spectra proposed by Niels Bohr. Independently of Arnold Sommerfeld, Schwarzschild developed the general rules of quantization, gave the complete theory of the Stark effect (the effect of an electric field on light), and initiated the quantum theory of molecular spectra.
Schwarzschild gave the first exact solution of Albert Einstein’s general gravitational equations, which led to a description of the geometry of space in the neighbourhood of a mass point. He also laid the foundation of the theory of black holes by using the general equations to demonstrate that bodies of sufficient mass would have an escape velocity exceeding the speed of light and, therefore, would not be directly observable.
While serving in the imperial German army during World War I, Schwarzschild contracted a fatal illness.
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43c132e24b303be9cb758e35ebf7e794 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Karol-Bacilek | Karol Bacílek | Karol Bacílek
…moved into power in Slovakia; Karol Bacílek, who was compromised by the purges in the 1950s, was replaced as first secretary of the Slovak Communist Party by Alexander Dubček. When the rehabilitated Slovaks, among whom was Gustav Husák, began to clamour for a federal solution to their problem, Novotný could…
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e7fb47aa00d5a7ad8b7f34e48f072bce | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Katarina-Witt | Katarina Witt | Katarina Witt
Katarina Witt, (born December 3, 1965, Karl-Marx-Stadt, East Germany [now Chemnitz, Germany]), German figure skater who was the first woman to win consecutive Olympic gold medals (1984 and 1988) in singles figure skating since Sonja Henie in 1936. The charismatic Witt defined the sport in the 1980s with her flirtatious and graceful performances. She won four world titles (1984–85 and 1987–88) and six European championships (1983–88).
Witt began skating at age five and soon attracted the attention of East German sports officials, who placed her in the country’s special training program. She practiced with Jutta Müller, one of the world’s premier figure-skating coaches, who encouraged Witt to express her engaging personality on the ice. In 1981 Witt won her first major competition, capturing the East German national championship, a title she would hold for the next seven years.
Witt entered the 1984 Olympics in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia (now in Bosnia and Herzegovina), as a favourite to medal even though she had never won a world title. Coming from behind during her forte, the long program, Witt defeated American Rosalynn Sumners by only 0.1 point to capture the gold. At the 1988 Olympics in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, Witt faced the only skater to have defeated her in five years, American Debi Thomas. Both women skated to music from Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen in the long program, but Witt’s masterly interpretation of the heroine brought a new style of sensual grace and theatre to the ice, and she retained the Olympic title.
After winning her final world championship in 1988, Witt retired from amateur skating. In 1990 she starred in the television special Carmen on Ice, a performance that garnered her an Emmy Award. In the same year, Witt and Brian Boitano developed a skating show that toured the United States. She also toured with Stars on Ice and Champions on Ice. A change in Olympic rules allowed Witt to return to the ice at the 1994 Olympic Games in Lillehammer, Norway, where she placed seventh. She then returned to her touring schedule and entered many professional competitions. She also worked as a commentator at various national and international skating events.
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7ae30c835a2a5f8db877cfd9243fc6e6 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kate-Barnard | Kate Barnard | Kate Barnard
Kate Barnard, (born May 23, 1875, Geneva, Neb., U.S.—died Feb. 23, 1930, Oklahoma City, Okla.), Oklahoma welfare leader and the first woman to hold statewide elective office in the United States.
Barnard began her public career as an officer of the Provident Association, an Oklahoma benevolent organization. She soon became interested in such social legislation as compulsory education and the abolition of child labour. Those concerns led her to actively lobby for progressive issues at the Oklahoma constitutional convention in 1906. She was elected in 1907 to the state office of commissioner of charities and corrections, leading the state Democratic ticket while becoming the first woman in the world to hold such a post.
While state commissioner from 1907 to 1914, Barnard won national attention for her promotion of reform legislation on such issues as child labour, prison reform, Indian rights, and the improved care of the insane.
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1ca1794fccbba77a3eeb400fe2057278 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kate-Bateman | Kate Bateman | Kate Bateman
…and his two eldest daughters, Kate and Ellen, aged six and four, respectively, began to tour widely as stars. Later Ellen played Richard III, Shylock, and Macbeth to Kate’s Richmond, Portia, and Lady Macbeth. In 1855 Bateman managed a St. Louis theatre and later, as Kate’s manager, moved to New…
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cbeff401401ae00e042f03a1294fa3b1 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kate-Harwood-Waller-Barrett | Kate Harwood Waller Barrett | Kate Harwood Waller Barrett
Kate Harwood Waller Barrett, née Katherine Harwood Waller, (born January 24, 1857, Falmouth, Virginia, U.S.—died February 23, 1925, Alexandria, Va.), American physician who directed the rescue-home movement for unwed mothers in the United States.
Barrett became interested in the issue of prostitution while helping her husband, Robert S. Barrett, a minister whom she married in 1876. She earned an M.D. from the Women’s Medical College of Georgia in 1892. The next year she opened a rescue home in Atlanta, which became affiliated with Charles Crittenton’s national chain of Florence Crittenton homes for unwed mothers.
In 1897 Barrett became vice president of the Florence Crittenton Mission, which operated more than 50 homes nationwide, and from 1909 until her death she served as the organization’s president. She guided the rescue-home movement away from its focus on prostitute reformation and toward a concern with the social welfare of the unwed mother, a shift that helped to make the unwed mother an acceptable subject of philanthropy.
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d4d683242dd887950a26db94dbb51294 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Katharine-Anthony | Katharine Anthony | Katharine Anthony
Katharine Anthony, in full Katharine Susan Anthony, (born November 27, 1877, Roseville, Arkansas, U.S.—died November 20, 1965, New York, New York), American biographer best known for The Lambs (1945), a controversial study of the British writers Charles and Mary Lamb. The greater portion of her work examined the lives of notable American women.
A college teacher of geometry, Anthony was deeply interested in psychiatry. Eventually this interest came to shape her approach to biography, and her books centred increasingly on the psychological development and motivation of her subjects. Some of these works include Margaret Fuller, A Psychological Biography (1920); Catherine the Great (1925); Louisa May Alcott (1938); Dolly Madison, Her Life and Times (1949); and Susan B. Anthony, Her Personal History and Her Era (1954). Anthony’s readers were scandalized by The Lambs, subtitled A Story of Pre-Victorian England, in which she theorized that incestuous feelings within the Lamb family were reflected in the lives and literary collaborations of Charles Lamb and his sister, Mary. As with her previous biographies, The Lambs brought a mixed response from critics, many of whom objected to her unscholarly approach to biography and her unprofessional application of psychoanalytic theory.
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d54e9ecbfa060f5e2c891c57c4c6c053 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Katharine-Hepburn | Katharine Hepburn | Katharine Hepburn
Katharine Hepburn, in full Katharine Houghton Hepburn, (born May 12, 1907, Hartford, Connecticut, U.S.—died June 29, 2003, Old Saybrook, Connecticut), indomitable American stage and film actress, known as a spirited performer with a touch of eccentricity. She introduced into her roles a strength of character previously considered to be undesirable in Hollywood leading ladies. As an actress, she was noted for her brisk upper-class New England accent and tomboyish beauty.
Katharine Hepburn was a spirited film and stage actress with a touch of eccentricity. Outspoken and iconoclastic, she introduced into her roles a strength of character previously considered to be undesirable in Hollywood leading ladies. As an actress, she was noted for a distinctive speech pattern, quirky mannerisms, and tomboyish beauty.
Katherine Hepburn holds the record for most Academy Awards (Oscars) won (4), having been nominated for 12 (a record until 2003, broken by Meryl Streep). She won the Oscars for best actress for her performances in Morning Glory (1933), Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), The Lion in Winter (1968), and On Golden Pond (1981).
Katharine Hepburn’s father was a wealthy and prominent Connecticut surgeon, and her mother was a leader in the women’s suffrage movement. From early childhood Hepburn was continually encouraged to expand her intellectual horizons, speak nothing but the truth, and keep herself in top physical condition. She was a graduate of Bryn Mawr College.
Despite winning an Academy Award for her performance in Morning Glory (1933) and sparkling in the screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby (1938), Katharine Hepburn had a reputation as box-office poison until she jump-started her film career with the commercially and critically successful comedy The Philadelphia Story (1940).
Hepburn’s father was a wealthy and prominent Connecticut surgeon, and her mother was a leader in the women’s suffrage movement. From early childhood, Hepburn was continually encouraged to expand her intellectual horizons, speak nothing but the truth, and keep herself in top physical condition at all times. She would apply all of these ingrained values to her acting career, which began in earnest after her graduation from Bryn Mawr College in 1928. That year she made her Broadway debut in Night Hostess, appearing under the alias Katharine Burns. Hepburn scored her first major Broadway success in The Warrior’s Husband (1932), a comedy set in the land of the Amazons. Shortly thereafter she was invited to Hollywood by RKO Radio Pictures.
Hepburn was an unlikely Hollywood star. Possessing a distinctive speech pattern and an abundance of quirky mannerisms, she earned unqualified praise from her admirers and unmerciful criticism from her detractors. Unabashedly outspoken and iconoclastic, she did as she pleased, refusing to grant interviews, wearing casual clothes at a time when actresses were expected to exude glamour 24 hours a day, and openly clashing with her more-experienced coworkers whenever they failed to meet her standards. She nonetheless made an impressive movie debut in George Cukor’s A Bill of Divorcement (1932), a drama that also starred John Barrymore. Hepburn was then cast as an aviator in Dorothy Arzner’s Christopher Strong (1933). For her third film, Morning Glory (1933), Hepburn won an Academy Award for her portrayal of an aspiring actress.
However, Hepburn’s much-publicized return to Broadway, in The Lake (1933), proved to be a flop. And while moviegoers enjoyed her performances in homespun entertainments such as Little Women (1933) and Alice Adams (1935), they were largely resistant to historical vehicles such as Mary of Scotland (1936), A Woman Rebels (1936), and Quality Street (1937). Hepburn recovered some lost ground with her sparkling performances in the screwball comedies Bringing Up Baby (1938) and Holiday (1938), both of which also starred Cary Grant. However, it was too late: a group of leading film exhibitors had already written off Hepburn as “box office poison.”
Undaunted, Hepburn accepted a role written specifically for her in Philip Barry’s 1938 Broadway comedy The Philadelphia Story, about a socialite whose ex-husband tries to win her back. It was a huge hit, and she purchased the motion picture rights to the play. The 1940 film version—in which she reteamed with Cukor and Grant—was a critical and commercial success, and it jump-started her Hollywood career. She continued to make periodic returns to the stage (notably as the title character in the 1969 Broadway musical Coco), but Hepburn remained essentially a film actor for the remainder of her career. Her stature increased as she chalked up such cinematic triumphs as John Huston’s The African Queen (1951), in which she played a missionary who escapes German troops with the aid of a riverboat captain (Humphrey Bogart), and David Lean’s Summertime (1955), a love story set in Venice. In Long Day’s Journey into Night (1962), an adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s acclaimed play, Hepburn was cast as a drug-addicted mother.
Hepburn won a second Academy Award for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), a dramedy about interracial marriage; a third for The Lion in Winter (1968), in which she played Eleanor of Aquitaine; and an unprecedented fourth Oscar for On Golden Pond (1981), about long-married New Englanders (Hepburn and Henry Fonda). Her 12 Academy Award nominations also set a record, which stood until 2003, when it was broken by Meryl Streep.
In addition, Hepburn appeared frequently on television in the 1970s and ’80s. She was nominated for an Emmy Award for her memorable portrayal of Amanda Wingfield in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1973), and she won the award for her performance opposite Laurence Olivier in Love Among the Ruins (1975), which reunited her with her favourite director, Cukor. Though hampered by a progressive neurological disease, Hepburn was nonetheless still active in the early ’90s, appearing prominently in films such as Love Affair (1994), which was her last movie.
Hepburn was married once, to Philadelphia broker Ludlow Ogden Smith, but the union was dissolved in 1934. While filming Woman of the Year in 1942, she began an enduring intimate relationship with her costar, Spencer Tracy, with whom she would appear in films such as Adam’s Rib (1949) and Pat and Mike (1952); both were directed by Cukor. Tracy and Hepburn never married—he was Roman Catholic and would not divorce his wife—but they remained close both personally and professionally until his death in 1967, just days after completing the filming of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Hepburn had suspended her own career for nearly five years to nurse Tracy through what turned out to be his final illness. Hepburn was a 1990 Kennedy Center honoree, and in 1999 the American Film Institute named her the top female American screen legend of all time. She wrote several memoirs, including Me: Stories of My Life (1991).
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a55b5bba7f06e5a8f1923668c61e8fbe | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Katharine-Lee-Bates | Katharine Lee Bates | Katharine Lee Bates
Katharine Lee Bates, (born Aug. 12, 1859, Falmouth, Mass., U.S.—died March 28, 1929, Wellesley, Mass.), author and educator who wrote the text of the national hymn “America the Beautiful.”
She was educated at Wellesley College, Wellesley, Mass., where she taught English literature from 1885 to 1925. Among her many works are The College Beautiful and Other Poems (1887), English Religious Drama (1893), and The Pilgrim Ship (1926). Her America the Beautiful and Other Poems was published in 1911.
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b86c8cf56d0ef72d9b291f3eb3d8f6d7 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Katherina-von-Bora | Katherina von Bora | Katherina von Bora
…June 13, 1525, Luther married Katherine of Bora, a former nun. Katherine had fled her convent together with eight other nuns and was staying in the house of the Wittenberg town secretary. While the other nuns soon returned to their families or married, Katherine remained without support. Luther was likewise…
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2f41d619c154d7864380bdd8db390cb8 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kathleen-Battle | Kathleen Battle | Kathleen Battle
Kathleen Battle, in full Kathleen Deanne Battle, (born Aug. 13, 1948, Portsmouth, Ohio, U.S.), American opera singer, among the finest coloratura sopranos of her time.
As a child and young adult Battle was both a good student and a good singer. She was awarded a scholarship to the University of Cincinnati College–Conservatory of Music in Ohio, where she earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music education. While teaching, she continued to study voice privately; when Thomas Schippers (then conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra) heard her sing, he hired her to perform at the 1972 Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy.
Battle’s debut at the festival in Johannes Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem was very well received. Not long after, Schippers introduced Battle to the conductor James Levine, who was to become influential in her performing career, and by 1976 she was singing supporting roles in major American opera houses. In 1977 she made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City as the Shepherd in Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser. Critics immediately recognized that Battle’s lyric soprano was exceptionally pure and consistent throughout her range. She dispatched the virtuosic coloratura of George Frideric Handel and Henry Purcell; excelled in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s operas, playing such roles as Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro, Zerlina in Don Giovanni, and Despina in Così fan tutte; and was celebrated for her interpretation of African American spirituals. She recorded a wide variety of music and won five Grammy Awards between 1986 and 1993; in 1992 she won an individual Emmy Award for her performance in the televised 1991 Metropolitan Opera season opening gala.
In 1994 the Metropolitan Opera dismissed Battle for what it termed “unprofessional actions.” After that she rarely appeared on the opera stage, although she continued to make recordings and sing in concerts (live and televised) and on movie sound tracks, including Fantasia 2000 (1999) and House of Flying Daggers (2004).
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d54dbee58312979c029495219b0bf67c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kathleen-Parker | Kathleen Parker | Kathleen Parker
…year he began cohosting (with Kathleen Parker) the nightly talk show Parker Spitzer on CNN. In February 2011 Parker left the program, which was subsequently retitled In the Arena. It struggled in the ratings, and in July Spitzer stepped down as host after CNN announced that the show would be…
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97e83516774fc0b035451dac4e919c6a | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kathleen-Raine | Kathleen Raine | Kathleen Raine
Kathleen Raine, in full Kathleen Jessie Raine, (born June 14, 1908, London, England—died July 6, 2003, London), English poet, scholar, and critic noted for her mystical and visionary poetry.
Raine studied psychology and the natural sciences at Girton College in Cambridge (M.A., 1929) and in the 1930s was one of a group of Cambridge poets. Inspired by Plato, W.B. Yeats, William Blake, and other mystical and visionary writers, she sought to abandon the everyday world for a world of feeling in her works. Her gift for exactness of observation and precision of diction is evident in her first book of poems, Stone and Flower (1943), as well as in her later poetry. Her work, which has been characterized as meditative and lyrical, is concerned with universal themes such as nature, life, death, and eternity. Raine’s many volumes of poems include The Pythoness (1949), The Hollow Hill (1965), The Lost Country (1971), The Oval Portrait (1977), The Oracle in the Heart, and Other Poems, 1975–1978 (1980), Autobiographies (1991), Living with Mystery (1992), and Collected Poems (2000). Among her critical works are Blake and Tradition, 2 vol. (1968), From Blake to a Vision (1978), The Human Face of God: William Blake and the Book of Job (1982), and Yeats the Initiate (1986). Four volumes of autobiography are Farewell Happy Fields (1973), The Land Unknown (1975), The Lion’s Mouth (1977), and India Seen Afar (1989). Under the patronage of Charles, Prince of Wales, Raine founded in 1990 Temenos Academy, a teaching institution that rejected the “secular materialism” of the current age; the Temenos Academy Review was created in 1999 and included lectures given at the academy. Raine was made a Commander of the British Empire in 2000.
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