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8ea3c5710dce20a8c792849c07ac7ec0 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Samuel-Bailey | Samuel Bailey | Samuel Bailey
Samuel Bailey, (born 1791, Sheffield, Yorkshire, Eng.—died Jan. 18, 1870, Sheffield), English economist and philosopher remembered for his argument that value is a relationship and implies a particular state of mind.
After working a few years in his father’s business and accumulating a fortune, Bailey founded the Sheffield Banking Company in 1831, and in 1832 and 1834 he sought unsuccessfully to enter the House of Commons. His published works include pamphlets on parliamentary reform, on the right of primogeniture, and on currency restrictions.
The most significant of Bailey’s writings were his Essays on the Formation and Publication of Opinions (1821), in which he argued that an individual’s opinions are independent of his will. Sequels were Essays on the Pursuit of Truth, on the Progress of Knowledge, and on the Fundamental Principle of All Evidence and Expectation (1829) and A Critical Dissertation on the Nature, Measures, and Causes of Value (1825), which criticized the political economics of the Ricardian school, named after the English economist David Ricardo. Denying the reciprocal relationship between wages and profits, Bailey stressed the productivity of labour and sought to eliminate the pessimism inherent in Ricardo’s economic doctrines. As a politician, he opposed state interference and considered himself a Utilitarian radical. Among his other works are A Review of Berkeley’s Theory of Vision (1842) and Letters on the Philosophy of the Human Mind, 3 vol. (1855–63).
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b49450ff07a0fda47ca68a31ad201bf0 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Samuel-Baker | Samuel Baker | Samuel Baker
The founder, Samuel Baker (died 1778), a London bookseller, held his first auction (under his own name) early in 1744, selling an estate library of 457 books. Establishing the firm in York Street and handling further libraries over the years, he went into partnership with George Leigh…
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4e9556c4abb6ad7a4e7a7ad12b0bf4b1 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Samuel-Bamford | Samuel Bamford | Samuel Bamford
Samuel Bamford, (born Feb. 28, 1788, Middleton, Lancashire, Eng.—died April 13, 1872, Harpurhey, Lancashire), English radical reformer who was the author of several widely popular poems (principally in the Lancashire dialect) showing sympathy with the condition of the working class. He became a working weaver and earned great respect in northern radical circles as a reformer.
Bamford formed a Hampden Club in Middleton in 1817 and met William Cobbett, Henry Hunt, William Benbow, and Sir Francis Burdett. In 1819 he was arrested as a result of attending and speaking at the Manchester meeting known as Peterloo and was sentenced to 12 months imprisonment. Bamford became a journalist in London in about 1826. He continued to press for the reform of working-class conditions, on which his Passages in the Life of a Radical (1840–44) and Early Days (1849) are illuminating. On his death he was accorded a public funeral that was attended by thousands.
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156b082b8b5a4281ed4b13a79263cc3a | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Samuel-Blatchford | Samuel Blatchford | Samuel Blatchford
Samuel Blatchford, (born March 9, 1820, New York City—died July 7, 1893, Newport, R.I., U.S.), associate justice of the United States Supreme Court (1882–93).
Blatchford graduated from Columbia College (later Columbia University) in 1837 and served as private secretary to William H. Seward until attaining his majority. In 1842 he was admitted to the bar and began to practice with his father. He later practiced with Seward and subsequently started his own firm in New York City, becoming a noted authority on international and maritime law.
In 1867 he was appointed district judge of the southern district in New York and five years later was made a circuit judge for the second judicial district. He was elevated to the U.S. Supreme Court by Pres. Chester A. Arthur in 1882 and gained a reputation as one of the most hardworking justices, giving opinions in 430 cases. He notably gave the opinion of the majority in Cunningham v. Neagle, a case that extended federal authority. Moreover, Blatchford’s decisions on the status of design patents and his rulings regarding the infringement of design formed the basis for legislation passed by Congress in 1887 to provide remedies for patent infringement.
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44eebcbe437b6df9ac0dde388da395bd | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Samuel-Bourne | Samuel Bourne | Samuel Bourne
…three albums of well-composed images; Samuel Bourne photographed throughout India (with a retinue of equipment bearers); John Thomson produced a descriptive record of life and landscape in China; and French photographer Maxime Du Camp traveled to Egypt with Gustave Flaubert on a government commission to record landscape and monuments.
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bd1e7e7bcb2b27ec8b3726a8e0b37a60 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Samuel-Butler-English-author-1835-1902 | Samuel Butler | Samuel Butler
Samuel Butler, (born Dec. 4, 1835, Langar Rectory, Nottinghamshire, Eng.—died June 18, 1902, London), English novelist, essayist, and critic whose satire Erewhon (1872) foreshadowed the collapse of the Victorian illusion of eternal progress. The Way of All Flesh (1903), his autobiographical novel, is generally considered his masterpiece.
Butler was the son of the Reverend Thomas Butler and grandson of Samuel Butler, headmaster of Shrewsbury School and later bishop of Lichfield. After six years at Shrewsbury, the young Samuel went to St. John’s College, Cambridge, and was graduated in 1858. His father wished him to be a clergyman, and young Butler actually went as far as to do a little “slumming” in a London parish by way of preparation for holy orders. But the whole current of his highly independent and heretical nature was carrying him away from everything his father stood for: home, church, and Christianity itself—or what Christianity had appeared to mean at Langar Rectory. Butler returned to Cambridge and continued his musical studies and drawing, but after an unpleasant altercation with his father he left Cambridge, the church, and home and emigrated to New Zealand, where (with funds advanced by his father) he set up a sheep run in the Canterbury settlement.
When Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) came into his hands soon after his arrival in New Zealand, it took him by storm; he became “one of Mr. Darwin’s many enthusiastic admirers,” and a year or two later he told a friend that he had renounced Christianity altogether. Yet, as it proved, Christianity had by no means finished with him. For the next 25 years it was upon religion and evolution that Butler’s attention was mainly fixed. At first he welcomed Darwinism because it enabled him to do without God (or rather, without his father’s God). Later, having found a God of his own, he rejected Darwinism itself because it left God out. Thus, he antagonized both the church and the orthodox Darwinians and spent his life as a lonely outsider, or as Butler called himself after the biblical outcast, “an Ishmael.” To the New Zealand Press he contributed several articles on Darwinian topics, of which two—“Darwin Among the Machines” (1863) and “Lucubratio Ebria” (1865)—were later worked up in Erewhon. Both show him already grappling with the central problem of his later thought: the relationship between mechanism and life. In the former he tries out the consequences of regarding machines as living organisms competing with man in the struggle for existence. In the “Lucubratio” he takes the opposite view that machines are extracorporeal limbs and that the more of these a man can tack on to himself the more highly evolved an organism he will be.
Having doubled his capital in New Zealand, Butler returned to England (1864) and took the apartment in Clifford’s Inn, London, which was to be his home for the rest of his life. In 1865 his Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ . . . Critically Examined appeared anonymously. For a few years he studied painting at Heatherley’s art school and tried to convince himself that this was his vocation. Until 1876 he exhibited occasionally at the Royal Academy. One of his oil paintings, “Mr. Heatherley’s Holiday” (1874), is in the Tate Gallery, London, and his “Family Prayers,” in which the ethos of Langar Rectory is satirically conveyed, is at St. John’s College, Cambridge. Later he tried his hand at musical composition, publishing Gavottes, Minuets, Fugues and Other Short Pieces for the Piano (1885), and Narcissus, a comic cantata in the style of Handel—whom he rated high above all other composers—in 1888; Ulysses: An Oratorio appeared in 1904. It was typical of Butler to use his native gifts and mother wit in such exploits, and even in literature, his rightful territory, much of his work is that of the shrewd amateur who sets out to sling pebbles at the Goliaths of the establishment. “I have never,” he said, “written on any subject unless I believed that the authorities on it were hopelessly wrong”; hence his assault on the citadels of orthodox Darwinism and orthodox Christianity; hence, later, his attempt to prove that the Odyssey was written in Sicily by a woman (The Authoress of the Odyssey, 1897); and hence his new interpretation of Shakespeare’s sonnets (Shakespeare’s Sonnets Reconsidered, and in Part Rearranged, 1899).
Erewhon (1872) made whatever reputation as a writer Butler enjoyed in his lifetime; it was the only one of his many books on which he made any profit worth mentioning, and he made only £69 3s. 10d. on that. Yet Erewhon (“nowhere” rearranged) was received by many as the best thing of its kind since Gulliver’s Travels—that is to say, as a satire on contemporary life and thought conveyed by the time-honoured convention of travel in an imaginary country. The opening chapters, based upon Butler’s recollections of the upper Rangitoto Mountains in New Zealand, are in an excellent narrative style; and a description of the hollow statues at the top of the pass, vibrating in the wind with unearthly chords, makes a highly effective transition to the strange land beyond. The landscape and people of Erewhon are idealized from northern Italy; its institutions are partly utopian and partly satiric inversions of our own world. Butler’s two main themes, religion and evolution, appear respectively in “The Musical Banks” (churches) and in chapters called “Some Erewhonian Trials” and “The Book of the Machines.” The Erewhonians have long ago abolished machines as dangerous competitors in the struggle for existence, and by punishing disease as a crime they have produced a race of great physical beauty and strength.
The Fair Haven (1873) is an ironical defense of Christianity, which under the guise of orthodox zeal undermines its miraculous foundations. Butler was dogged all through life by the sense of having been bamboozled by those who should have been his betters; he had been taken in by his parents and their religion; he was taken in again by friends, who returned neither the money nor the friendship they accepted from Butler for years; life itself, and the world, sometimes seemed to him a hollow sham. Was Darwin himself, his saviour from the world of Langar Rectory, now to prove a fraud as well? This was the suspicion that dawned upon him while writing Life and Habit (1878) and envenomed the series of evolutionary books that followed: Evolution, Old and New (1879), Unconscious Memory (1880), and Luck or Cunning (1887). Darwin had not really explained evolution at all, Butler reasoned, because he had not accounted for the variations on which natural selection worked. Where Darwin saw only chance, Butler saw the effort on the part of creatures to respond to felt needs. He conceived creatures as acquiring necessary habits (and organs to perform them) and transmitting these to their offspring as unconscious memories. He thus restored teleology to a world from which purpose had been excluded by Darwin, but instead of attributing the purpose to God he placed it within the creatures themselves as the life force.
Many regard The Way of All Flesh, published in 1903, the year after Butler’s death, as his masterpiece. It certainly contains much of the quintessence of Butlerism. This largely autobiographical novel tells, with ruthless wit, realism, and lack of sentiment, the story of Butler’s escape from the suffocating moral atmosphere of his home circle. In it, the character Ernest Pontifex stands for Butler’s early self and Overton for his mature self; Theobald and Christina are his parents; Towneley and Alethea represent “nice” people who “love God” in Butler’s special sense of having “good health, good looks, good sense, experience, and a fair balance of cash in hand.” The book was influential at the beginning of the anti-Victorian reaction and helped turn the tide against excessive parental dominance and religious rigidity.
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8c8ccc4d6e55c3a23b372afc4e841530 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Samuel-Clarke | Samuel Clarke | Samuel Clarke
Samuel Clarke, (born Oct. 11, 1675, Norwich, Norfolk, Eng.—died May 17, 1729, Leicestershire), theologian, philosopher, and exponent of Newtonian physics, remembered for his influence on 18th-century English theology and philosophy.
In 1698 Clarke became a chaplain to the bishop of Norwich and in 1706 to Queen Anne. In 1704–05 he gave two sets of lectures, published as A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God (1705) and A Discourse Concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion (1706). In the first set he attempted to prove the existence of God by a method “as near to Mathematical, as the nature of such a Discourse would allow.” In the second he argued that the principles of morality are as certain as the propositions of mathematics and thus can be known by reason unassisted by faith, an approach sometimes called ethical rationalism. The criticism of religion by David Hume resulted in part from his dissatisfaction with Clarke’s effort to prove the existence of God. Clarke also spurred a vehement and prolonged controversy with his Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity (1712), which led many of his opponents to accuse him of Arianism, the belief that Christ is neither fully man nor fully God.
Clarke was a friend and disciple of Isaac Newton at the University of Cambridge and helped to spread Newton’s views. In 1697 he made a Latin translation of the physicist Jacques Rohault’s Traité de physique (1671; “Treatise on Physics”), adding numerous footnotes explaining Newton’s improvements on Rohault’s work. In 1706 he published a Latin translation of Newton’s Opticks. A correspondence of 1715–16 between Clarke and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, important for its defense of the reality of space and time, was published in 1717 and in several later editions. Clarke’s collected works were issued in four volumes in 1738–42.
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d67cfecfc7f738c5502bf1a0de141f4d | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Samuel-Crompton | Samuel Crompton | Samuel Crompton
Samuel Crompton, (born Dec. 3, 1753, Firwood, near Bolton, Lancashire, Eng.—died June 26, 1827, Bolton), British inventor of the spinning mule, which permitted large-scale manufacture of high-quality thread and yarn.
As a youth Crompton spun cotton on a spinning jenny for his family; its defects inspired him to try to invent a better device. In 1779, after devoting all his spare time and money to the effort, he produced a machine that simultaneously drew out and gave the final twisting to the cotton fibres fed into it, reproducing mechanically the actions of hand spinning. Probably the machine was called a mule because it was a cross between the machines invented by Sir Richard Arkwright and James Hargreaves.
Demand for Crompton’s yarn was heavy, but he could not afford a patent. He therefore revealed the machine’s secret to a number of manufacturers on the promise that they would pay him. All he received was £60. Years later (in 1812), when there were at least 360 mills using 4,600,000 mule spindles, Parliament granted him £5,000. He used it to enter business, unsuccessfully, first as a bleacher and then as a cotton merchant and spinner.
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d038465754c62e69a3d801577fed27af | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Samuel-Doyle-Riddle | Samuel Doyle Riddle | Samuel Doyle Riddle
His owner, Samuel Doyle Riddle, had a long-standing aversion to entering any of his horses in the classic race. Riddle detested racing in the “West” (which for him included Churchill Downs), because it was away from the stomping grounds of high society. Perhaps his most cogent reason…
War Admiral was foaled at Samuel Doyle Riddle’s Faraway Farm near Lexington, Kentucky, in 1934. His dam was Brushup, and his sire was Man o’ War, widely considered the greatest racehorse of the early 20th century. Like his Triple Crown-winning predecessors, War Admiral too was a late bloomer. His brief…
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3c462b33f764645771500f5fb319dcbb | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Samuel-Gridley-Howe | Samuel Gridley Howe | Samuel Gridley Howe
Samuel Gridley Howe, (born November 10, 1801, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.—died January 9, 1876, Boston), American physician, educator, and abolitionist as well as the founding director of the New-England Institution for the Education of the Blind (later known as the Perkins School for the Blind) and the Massachusetts School for Idiotic and Feeble-Minded Youth. Howe was known particularly for his success in teaching the alphabet to Laura Bridgman, a student who was blind and deaf. He also championed the improvement of publicly funded schools, prison reform, humane treatment for mentally ill people, oral communication and lipreading for the deaf, and antislavery efforts.
Howe graduated in 1821 from Brown University and then completed his medical education in 1824 at Harvard Medical College. Soon thereafter he left for Greece, where he participated in the Greek War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire. During that time Howe sent letters to his family and friends about the war; many of those letters appeared in American newspapers. He secured provisions from Americans that he then distributed to the citizens of war-torn Greece, and he published An Historical Sketch of the Greek Revolution (1828), which informed Americans about the causes, progress, and outcome of the war.
A few months after Howe’s return to the United States in 1831, the trustees of the New-England Institution for the Education of the Blind—a newly chartered Massachusetts blind school that was the first institution of its kind in the country—appointed Howe as their director. At the time, Howe knew little about either blindness or the education of the blind, so he sailed back to Europe to observe schools for the blind. He returned to the United States in 1832 to open the new school in Boston, and soon thereafter the school gained national fame through newspaper and magazine reports and through public exhibitions of the pupils’ skills in reading and music. In 1837, at age seven, Laura Bridgman joined the school; she had lost the ability to see, hear, taste, and smell five years earlier. Under Howe’s direction, Bridgman learned to use her sense of touch to recognize letters of the alphabet and English words and to receive and express communication. In 1842 English novelist Charles Dickens observed Bridgman and recounted his experience in his work American Notes (1842).
In 1843, while a member of the Massachusetts legislature, Howe introduced American educator, social reformer, and humanitarian Dorothea Lynde Dix’s “Memorial to the Legislature of Massachusetts” to lawmakers and the public. Through newspaper articles, Howe used Dix’s findings to call public attention to the inhumane conditions of mentally ill people in the state’s local almshouses and jails. Also in 1843, Howe married Julia Ward (later known for her 1862 poem “Battle Hymn of the Republic”). The couple honeymooned in Europe, where Howe toured charitable institutions, schools, and prisons and met with Florence Nightingale, who claimed that Howe was the first person to urge her to enter the nursing profession.
Upon his return to Boston in 1844, Howe found himself in the midst of controversies over public school reform. Along with friend and American educator Horace Mann, he championed an anti-Calvinist model of public education, which held that better student learning would be achieved with competent teachers who use patience and sympathetic guidance rather than punitive threats or corporal punishment. During the same period, he argued on behalf of the solitary-confinement model of prisoner incarceration as exemplified in Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary (see Pennsylvania system). In 1847 he became a member of the Boston Society for Aiding Discharged Convicts. The next year he received both public praise and ridicule after he convinced Massachusetts lawmakers to fund the first residential school for “idiots” (as intellectually disabled people were called at that time).
During the 1830s and ’40s, Howe developed the Perkins School for the Blind from a state to a regional institution. He traveled with his blind pupils beyond New England, venturing west to Ohio and Kentucky and as far south as Georgia and Louisiana. In state after state, Howe’s lectures—along with exhibitions of his students’ skills in reading, writing, oratory, and musical performance—encouraged state legislators to establish public facilities for the education of the blind. Twice during that period, his pupils showed their talents before the U.S. Congress. Howe urged Congress to appropriate funds for a national library for the blind, but his aspiration for such a library was never realized in his lifetime.
Howe had written against slavery as early as 1833. In 1846 he committed himself to its abolition, becoming a founder of the Boston Vigilance Committee. In doing so, Howe joined other opponents of slavery, including his close friend the future U.S senator Charles Sumner, in the effort to protect fugitive slaves from Southern slave catchers and their Northern allies. To distance themselves from so-called Cotton Whigs—those Whigs, such as U.S. Senator Daniel Webster, who were sympathetic to Southern slavery—opponents such as Howe described themselves as Conscience Whigs.
With the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Howe’s antislavery activities increased. Between 1851 and 1853 he launched the Boston Commonwealth newspaper. Along with his wife, Howe used the newspaper to support the cause of Free Soil opposition to the extension of slavery into the western territories. Following the enactment of the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, he joined the New England Emigrant Aid Company (also called the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company, or Kansas Emigrant Aid Company), an organization that provided assistance to Northerners who had migrated to Kansas in order to keep the territory free of slavery. His involvement with the company solidified what became Howe’s decadelong involvement in Kansas politics. Traveling to the state in 1856, Howe began his acquaintance with American abolitionist John Brown. The acquaintance developed into Howe’s membership in the Secret Six, a group of antislavery activists who provided Brown with funding and arms that he later used in his 1859 raid at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (later in West Virginia).
Howe spent the Civil War years as a member of both the U.S. Sanitary Commission and the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Committee. During those years he also reestablished the Boston Commonwealth, using its pages to champion the causes of the immediate emancipation of slaves and the arming of freed blacks for service in the Union army. In 1865 he became the chair of the Massachusetts Board of State Charities, taking advantage of his position to begin the practice of unannounced inspections of state-operated poorhouses and asylums.
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d9a65031bcfc801f9abf723762fe5a27 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Samuel-Henzi | Samuel Henzi | Samuel Henzi
Samuel Henzi, (born 1701, Bern—died July 17, 1749, Bern), principal organizer of the “Henzi conspiracy” (June 1749) that sought to overturn the patrician government of the Swiss canton of Bern.
After service in Italy under the Duke of Modena (1741–43), Henzi returned to his native city, where he became embroiled in the affair of the Memorial (1744), a petition by the Bernese lower bourgeoisie to have opened to them more positions in government administration. For his part in the imbroglio, he was accused of treason and was banished for five years. Retiring to Neuchâtel, in western Switzerland, he worked for a time on the Journal helvétique, but on receiving his pardon he returned to Bern (1748). There, his career ambitions thwarted by patrician privilege, he organized a conspiracy with 60 to 70 other burghers to overthrow the government and establish a petit bourgeois oligarchy. His plan was prematurely revealed, however, and he was arrested and subsequently executed. Although it was crushed, the conspiracy aroused attention throughout Europe.
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c5727b3f3d1fc09cc5edad0bb2397154 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Samuel-Huntington | Samuel Huntington | Samuel Huntington
Samuel Huntington, (born July 3, 1731, Windham, Conn.—died Jan. 5, 1796, Norwich, Conn., U.S.), signer of the Declaration of Independence, president of the Continental Congress (1779–81), and governor of Connecticut. He served in the Connecticut Assembly in 1765 and was appointed as a judge of the Superior Court in 1775. He was a member of the governor’s council (1775–83) concurrently with his service in the Continental Congress. Huntington returned in 1783 to Connecticut, where he became chief justice of the state Supreme Court in 1784, lieutenant governor in 1785, and governor in 1786. He was re-elected governor each year thereafter until his death.
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e9343221535cd7d0dc7273653a51eee8 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Samuel-J-Tilden | Samuel J. Tilden | Samuel J. Tilden
Samuel J. Tilden, (born Feb. 9, 1814, New Lebanon, N.Y., U.S.—died Aug. 4, 1886, Greystone, N.Y.), lawyer, governor of New York, and Democratic presidential candidate in the disputed election of 1876.
Tilden attended Yale College and the University of the City of New York for brief periods and studied law. He began to practice law in New York City in 1841. Despite frequent illnesses, he soon became a corporation and railroad lawyer of great skill and a leader in Democratic politics. He was a member of the New York Assembly in 1846 and was a member of the state constitutional conventions (1846 and 1867). He was a leader of the Free-Soil element among New York Democrats and supported the Union cause in the American Civil War (1861–65). He played a prominent role in the reorganization of the Democratic Party in the decade from 1865 to 1875, serving as the party chairman of New York state. During this period he played a major role in the overthrow of the notorious Tweed Ring, a circle of corrupt politicians who had defrauded New York City of an estimated $30,000,000–$200,000,000, and in the removal of several corrupt judges. Elected governor (1874) on a reform platform, he won national recognition for his efficient administration and for exposing the Canal Ring, a conspiracy of politicians and contractors engaged in defrauding the state.
In 1876 Tilden was the Democratic nominee for the presidency. The bitterly fought campaign ended in a disputed election in which Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Oregon reported two sets of returns. To settle the controversy, an Electoral Commission was created by Congress. Tilden reluctantly consented to the formation of the commission but failed to provide vigorous and direct leadership in the crisis. The commission decided all questions by a strictly partisan vote, thus giving the presidency to the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes. There is evidence that the Republicans entered into a secret deal with Southern Democratic leaders to withdraw Federal troops from the South (where they were safeguarding Reconstruction) if the disputed electoral votes could be counted for Hayes. Tilden, who had received a clear majority of the popular vote, nevertheless accepted the verdict to avoid possible violence.
Tilden was a distant, secretive, dilatory, and cautious man who possessed marked intellectual ability. His frail health and characteristic indecision forced him into the background of politics after 1877, though he retained great influence in the Democratic Party. His law practice and investments had brought him great wealth, and he left the bulk of his estate in trust for the establishment of a free public library for New York City.
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a554b5838d22b4e35eb0f0e78e440aff | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Samuel-Johnson/The-Lives-of-the-Poets | The Lives of the Poets | The Lives of the Poets
Johnson’s last great work, Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets (conventionally known as The Lives of the Poets), was conceived modestly as short prefatory notices to an edition of English poetry. When Johnson was approached by some London booksellers in 1777 to write what he thought of as “little Lives, and little Prefaces, to a little edition of the English Poets,” he readily agreed. He loved anecdote and “the biographical part” of literature best of all. The project, however, expanded in scope; Johnson’s prefaces alone filled the first 10 volumes (1779–81), and the poetry grew to 56 volumes. Johnson was angered by the appearance of his name on the spines, because he had neither “recommended” nor “revised” these poets, except for adding Isaac Watts, Sir Richard Blackmore, John Pomfret, Thomas Yalden, and James Thomson to the list.
The lives are ordered chronologically by date of death, not birth, and range in length from a few pages to an entire volume. Among the major lives are those of Abraham Cowley, John Milton, John Dryden, Joseph Addison, and Alexander Pope; some of the minor ones, such as those of William Collins and William Shenstone, are striking. Johnson’s personal dislike of some of the poets whose lives he wrote, such as John Milton and Thomas Gray, has been used as a basis for arguing that he was prejudiced against their poetry, but too much has been made of this. His opinions of a poet and his work diverge at times as, for example, in the case of Collins. Johnson liked the man but disapproved of his poetic manner: “he puts his words out of the common order, seeming to think, with some later candidates for fame, that not to write prose is certainly to write poetry.” He was justly proud of The Life of Cowley, especially of its lengthy discussion of the 17th-century Metaphysical poets, of whom Cowley may be considered the last representative.
The Life of Pope is at once the longest and best. Pope’s life and career were fresh enough and public enough to provide ample biographical material. Johnson found Pope’s poetry highly congenial. His moving, unsentimental account of Pope’s life is sensitive to his physical sufferings and yet unwilling to accept them as an excuse. His riposte to Pope’s detractors, such as the poet Joseph Warton, is vigorous and memorable: “It is surely superfluous to answer the question that has once been asked, whether Pope was a poet? otherwise than by asking, in return, if Pope be not a poet, where is poetry to be found?” Yet in his masterly comparison of Pope and Dryden he acknowledges Dryden as the greater poet.
Johnson divided his biographies into three distinct parts: a narrative of the poet’s life, a presentation of his character (summarized traits), and a critical assessment of his main poems. He adopted this method not because he failed to perceive relationships between a poet’s life and his works but because he did not think that a good poet was necessarily a good man. His method allowed him to make use of his recognition that “a manifest and striking contrariety between the life of an author and his writings” can exist and to assign different purposes to his analysis of his subjects’ lives and their poetry. Johnson expressed a hope that the biographical parts of his lives were composed “in such a manner, as may tend to the promotion of Piety,” and his moral intent is borne out in his readiness to chastise failings and to commend virtue. Johnson responded most favourably to the works of poets from Dryden to Pope and was skeptical of those produced in his own generation, including the poetry of Gray, Collins, and Shenstone, though he admired Gray’s An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard.
Throughout much of his adult life Johnson suffered from physical ailments as well as depression (“melancholy”). After the loss of two friends, Henry Thrale in 1781 and Robert Levett in 1782, and the conclusion of The Lives of the Poets, his health deteriorated. Above all, his chronic bronchitis and “dropsy” (edema), a swelling of his legs and feet, caused great discomfort. In 1783 he suffered a stroke. His last year was made still bleaker by his break with Mrs. Thrale over her remarriage. He compared himself at one point to those from whom confessions were extorted by the placement of heavy stones upon their chests. Yet he insisted on fighting: “I will be conquered; I will not capitulate.” A profoundly devout Anglican, Johnson was in dread at the prospect of death and judgment, for he feared damnation. Yet in the winter of 1784, following a day of prayer after which his edema spontaneously disappeared, he entered into a previously unknown state of serenity. He accepted this release from illness as a sign that he might be saved after all and referred to it as a “late conversion.” He died on December 13 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
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1429c278e0a055d4cdef31664436fb02 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Samuel-P-Huntington | Samuel P. Huntington | Samuel P. Huntington
Samuel P. Huntington, in full Samuel Phillips Huntington, (born April 18, 1927, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died Dec. 24, 2008, Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.), American political scientist, consultant to various U.S. government agencies, and important political commentator in national debates on U.S. foreign policy in the late 20th and early 21st century.
Huntington earned a bachelor’s degree from Yale University in 1946 and then served in the U.S. Army. Afterward he attended the University of Chicago, where he received a master’s degree in 1948, and Harvard University, where he earned a doctorate in 1951 and joined the faculty. In 1959 Huntington became associate director of the Institute for War and Peace Studies at Columbia University, but he returned to Harvard in 1962. At Harvard he served as chairman of the Department of Government (1967–69; 1970–71) and was director of the Center for International Affairs (1978–89) and of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies beginning in 1989. From 1996 to 2004 he served as chair of the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies.
Although Huntington began his career as a specialist in American politics, his research and analysis branched into comparative politics, foreign policy, international relations, and modernization. His first major work, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (1957), examined the relationship between military professionalism and political power and the contradiction between American liberalism and military conservatism and helped to set the terms of debate about the proper form of civil-military relations. Perhaps his most important work is Political Order in Changing Societies (1968), in which he argued that in developing countries political decay and instability were at least as likely as the development of liberal democracy and that the “most important political distinction among countries concerns not their form of government but their degree of government.”
Huntington founded the journal Foreign Policy in 1970 and later served as president of the American Political Science Association (1986–87). He was an adviser to Vice President Hubert Humphrey during Humphrey’s unsuccessful 1968 presidential campaign, chairman of the Democratic Party’s Foreign Policy Advisory Committee in the mid-1970s, and coordinator of security planning in the National Security Council (1977–79) during the administration of President Jimmy Carter.
Emphasizing the rise of East Asia and Islam, he argued in the controversial The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996) that conflict between several large world civilizations was replacing conflict between states or ideologies as the dominant cleavage in international relations. Although he cautioned against intervention in non-Western cultures in The Clash of Civilizations, Huntington was generally identified with hawkish opinions on foreign policy and had been a target of leftist student protesters during the Vietnam War.
He published major works on various subjects, including national security strategy, defense policy making, American political ideology, transnational organizations, conservatism, the governability of democracies, processes of democratization, and the comparison of U.S. and Soviet governments. His books include The Common Defense: Strategic Programs in National Politics (1961); American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony (1981), which assessed periodic attempts to make American political institutions and behaviour conform to the traditional national creed of liberty, equality, and hostility to authority; The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (1991), which explained the process of widespread democratization of countries in the 1970s and ’80s and compared it with previous historical periods; and Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity (2004), which examined sources of U.S. political culture and emerging threats to unified national identity.
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214679d039d42f057e17e2604efb9dc7 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Samuel-Smiles | Samuel Smiles | Samuel Smiles
Samuel Smiles, (born Dec. 23, 1812, Haddington, Berwickshire, Scot.—died April 16, 1904, London), Scottish author best known for his didactic work Self-Help (1859), which, with its successors, Character (1871), Thrift (1875), and Duty (1880), enshrined the basic Victorian values associated with the “gospel of work.”
One of 11 children left fatherless in 1832, Smiles learned the meaning of self-reliance. Although he qualified in medicine at Edinburgh in 1832, he soon abandoned medical practice for journalism, moving to Leeds, where from 1838 to 1842 he edited the progressive and reformist Leeds Times. His radicalism was a practical application of the doctrines of the utilitarian philosophers (“philosophical radicals”) Jeremy Bentham and James Mill. He was a zealous advocate of material progress based on individual enterprise and free trade. From 1845 to 1866 he was engaged in railway administration, and in 1857 he published a life of the inventor and founder of the railways, George Stephenson. He followed this with Self-Help, with Illustrations of Character and Conduct, the outcome of a series of lectures on self-improvement given to young men in Leeds; 250,000 copies had been sold by the end of the century, and it was widely translated. Smiles wrote many other books, including Lives of the Engineers (3 vol., 1861–62; 5 vol., enlarged ed., 1874), a pioneer study in economic history; and an Autobiography (ed. by T. Mackay, 1905).
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958a413838964d0156ffdb4f3c18d01e | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Samuel-Wallis | Samuel Wallis | Samuel Wallis
In 1767 Samuel Wallis and Philip Carteret followed, but their ships were separated as they entered the Pacific. Wallis reached Tahiti, more of the Tuamotus, and the Society Islands, while Carteret found Pitcairn Island and revisited the Solomons that Mendaña had visited, although he did not so…
Samuel Wallis in 1767 reached Tahiti, Moorea, and Maiao Iti. The Society Islands were named for the Royal Society, which had sponsored the expedition under Capt. James Cook that observed from Tahiti the 1769 transit of the Sun by the planet Venus. Cook reached Tubuai…
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cde9867e0ef005232330212ec231f8f9 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Samuel-Wesley | Samuel Wesley | Samuel Wesley
Samuel Wesley, (born Feb. 24, 1766, Bristol, Gloucestershire, Eng.—died Oct. 11, 1837, London), composer and organist who helped introduce the music of J.S. Bach into England. The son of Charles Wesley, the hymn writer, and the nephew of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, he began an oratorio, Ruth, at the age of 6 and at age 11 published Eight Lessons for the Harpsichord. Though he suffered from 1787 onward from an injury to his skull, he became one of the finest organists and extemporizers of his time. With K.F. Horn he published an English edition of Bach’s Das Wohltemperierte Klavier (The Well-Tempered Clavier). A man of wide culture, he also won renown as a conductor and lecturer. His many compositions include symphonies, concerti, services, anthems, and motets, of which Exultate Deo and In exitu Israel are outstanding.
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ef82577788a555378ef36f9c2fa03b54 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Samuel-White-Baker | Sir Samuel White Baker | Sir Samuel White Baker
Sir Samuel White Baker, (born June 8, 1821, London, Eng.—died Dec. 30, 1893, Sanford Orleigh, Devon), English explorer who, with John Hanning Speke, helped to locate the sources of the Nile River.
The son of a merchant, Baker lived on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius (1843–45) and in Ceylon (1846–55) before traveling through the Middle East (1856–60). In 1861, with Florence von Sass (who later became his second wife), he went to Africa and for about a year explored the Nile tributaries around the Sudan and Ethiopia border. Using maps supplied by Speke, the Baker expedition set out in February 1863 to find the source of the Nile. In March 1864 Baker determined the source to be a lake, which he named Albert Nyanza (Lake Albert), lying between modern Uganda and Congo (Kinshasa). He was knighted in 1866, the year after he returned to England.
In 1869 the Ottoman viceroy of Egypt, Ismāʿīl Pasha, asked Baker to command a military expedition to the Nile equatorial regions. There the explorer helped to put down the slave trade and annexed territories of which he was appointed governor general for four years. His books include The Rifle and the Hound in Ceylon (1854) and The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia (1867).
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6c336215dfe42fcd90ff1f05587c32ce | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Samuel-Whitehall-Putnam | Samuel Putnam | Samuel Putnam
Samuel Putnam, (born Oct. 10, 1892, Rossville, Ill., U.S.—died Jan. 15, 1950, Lambertville, N.J.), American editor, publisher, and author, best known for his translations of works by authors in Romance languages.
After incomplete studies at the University of Chicago, Putnam worked for various Chicago newspapers and became a literary and art critic for the Chicago Evening Post (1920–26). Moving to Europe in 1927, he financed his ventures as an editor and publisher by translating numerous works by French and Italian writers. He founded and edited a critical magazine, The New Review (1931–32), which had an eclectic mix of contributors ranging from Ezra Pound to James T. Farrell.
Returning to the United States in 1933, Putnam contributed regularly to such left-wing magazines as Partisan Review, the New Masses, and The Daily Worker until the mid-1940s, when his interests shifted to Latin American and Spanish literature. His authoritative translation of Euclides da Cunha’s Brazilian prose epic Os Sertões appeared in 1944 under the title Rebellion in the Backlands, and in 1949 his translation of Miguel Cervantes’ Don Quixote, on which he had spent 17 years, appeared to high praise. Putnam’s survey of the history of Brazilian literature, entitled Marvelous Journey, was published in 1948. Another important work, Paris Was Our Mistress (1947), is a realistic depiction of the American expatriate community in Paris during the late 1920s and early ’30s.
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07d3adf87e44b918f6ee2dabd2f52854 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Samuel-Wilberforce | Samuel Wilberforce | Samuel Wilberforce
Samuel Wilberforce, (born Sept. 7, 1805, London, Eng.—died July 19, 1873, near Leatherhead, Surrey), British cleric, an Anglican prelate and educator and a defender of orthodoxy, who typified the ideal bishop of the Victorian era. He was a major figure in the preservation of the Oxford Movement, which sought to reintroduce 17th-century High Church ideals into the Church of England.
The son of the politician and antislavery philanthropist William Wilberforce, he was ordained an Anglican priest in 1829 and served as rector at Brighstone, Isle of Wight (1830–40), and at Alverstoke, Hampshire (1840–45). In 1845, during the critical period in the Oxford Movement when its leader John Henry Newman converted to Roman Catholicism, Wilberforce was appointed bishop of Oxford. Though only partially supportive of the aims of the Oxford Movement, he exerted his influence to prevent its disintegration.
A frequent critic of liberal bishops, dissenters, and biblical scholars, Wilberforce attacked Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution in an exchange with the biologist Thomas Huxley in 1860 and was generally viewed as the loser of the debate. Like others in the Oxford Movement, he encouraged the revival of religious communities within Anglicanism, and at Cuddesdon, in 1854, he founded one of the first Anglican theological colleges. He was briefly a chaplain to the House of Lords and from 1847 to 1869 served as lord high almoner to Queen Victoria. In 1869 he was named bishop of Winchester, and in 1870 he initiated the movement to modernize the language of the King James Version of the Bible, a project that resulted in the Revised Version (New Testament, 1881; Old Testament, 1885; Apocrypha, 1895). Among Wilberforce’s numerous writings are (with his brother Robert) The Life of William Wilberforce, 5 vol. (1838), Agathos, and Other Sunday Stories (1840), and The History of the Protestant Episcopal Church in America (1844).
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f53c27bb41e3563ab4e82009e33e603b | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Samuel-Wilderspin | Samuel Wilderspin | Samuel Wilderspin
…notably by the British educator Samuel Wilderspin, who wrote some of the earliest and most widely disseminated monographs on infant education.
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b905b3b2584e90dcacc4f80a113e7d31 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Samuel-Wilson | Samuel Wilson | Samuel Wilson
…beef were filled by businessman Samuel Wilson (locally called “Uncle Sam”) of Troy. Government purchasers stamped “U.S. Beef” on the barrels, misinterpreted as “Uncle Sam’s beef”; according to tradition, this gave rise to the popular symbol.
…businessman from Troy, New York, Samuel Wilson, known affectionately as “Uncle Sam” Wilson. The barrels of beef that he supplied the army during the War of 1812 were stamped “U.S.” to indicate government property. That identification is said to have led to the widespread use of the nickname Uncle Sam…
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cade0cff80b5ac0728299f90af34fa35 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Samuel-Woodhead | Samuel Woodhead | Samuel Woodhead
…that a friend of Dawson’s, Samuel Woodhead, was a confederate, having access to bones and to chemicals for supplying and doctoring the specimens. Another possible participant in the scheme was Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit priest and paleontologist who accompanied Dawson on his first joint excavations at Piltdown…
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89a05aca054ceeb4a4489b8671d4fa5e | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sandro-Botticelli/Late-works | Late works | Late works
An incipient mannerism appears in Botticelli’s late works of the 1480s and in works such as the magnificent Cestello Annunciation (1490) and the small Pietà (late 1490s) now in the Poldi-Pezzoli Museum. After the early 1490s his style changed markedly; the paintings are smaller in scale, the figures in them are now slender to the point of idiosyncrasy, and the painter, by accentuating their gestures and expressions, concentrates attention on their passionate urgency of action. This mysterious retreat from the idealizing naturalism of the 1480s perhaps resulted from Botticelli’s involvement with the fiery reformist preacher Girolamo Savonarola in the 1490s. The years from 1494 were dramatic ones in Florence: its Medici rulers fell, and a republican government under Savonarola’s dominance was installed. Savonarola was an ascetic idealist who attacked the church’s corruption and prophesied its future renewal. According to Vasari, Botticelli was a devoted follower of Savonarola, even after the friar was executed in 1498. The spiritual tensions of these years are reflected in two religious paintings, the apocalyptic Mystic Crucifixion (1497) and the Mystic Nativity (1500), which expresses Botticelli’s own faith in the renewal of the church. The Tragedy of Lucretia (c. 1499) and The Story of Virginia Romana (1499) appear to condemn the Medici’s tyranny and to celebrate republicanism.
Botticelli, according to Vasari, took an enduring interest in the study and interpretation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. He made some designs to illustrate the first printed edition of 1481 and worked intermittently over the following years on an uncompleted set of large drawings that matched each canto with a complete visual commentary. He was also much in demand by engravers, embroiderers, and tapestry workers as a designer; among his few surviving drawings are some that can be associated with these techniques.
Although Vasari describes Botticelli as impoverished and disabled in his last years, other evidence suggests that he and his family remained fairly prosperous. He received commissions throughout the 1490s and was still paying his dues, if belatedly, to the Company of Saint Luke, the Florentine painters’ guild, in 1505. But the absence of any further commissions and the tentativeness of the very last Dante drawings suggest that he was perhaps overtaken by ill health. Upon his death in 1510 he was buried in the Church of Ognissanti. About 50 paintings survive that are either wholly or partly from his own hand. The Uffizi Gallery’s magnificent collection of his works includes many of his masterpieces.
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1e0261193ca863ad8d5894c801d09bd9 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sandy-Dennis | Sandy Dennis | Sandy Dennis
…marked the screen debuts of Sandy Dennis and Phyllis Diller. The title of the movie is from a line in the poem “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” by William Wordsworth.
Burton, George Segal, and Sandy Dennis—received Oscar nominations.
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2fb07f5d7c8329766d78e8988a1355d9 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sandy-Koufax | Sandy Koufax | Sandy Koufax
Sandy Koufax, byname of Sanford Koufax, original name Sanford Braun, (born Dec. 30, 1935, Brooklyn, N.Y., U.S.), American professional baseball player who, despite his early retirement due to arthritis, was ranked among the sport’s greatest pitchers. A left-hander, he pitched for the Brooklyn Dodgers in the National League (NL) from 1955 to 1957, continuing, after they became the Los Angeles Dodgers, from 1958 to 1966.
Born Sanford Braun, he was given his stepfather’s surname when his mother remarried. The young Koufax first excelled in basketball, which earned him a scholarship to the University of Cincinnati. There he earned a spot on the school’s varsity baseball team, and his pitching prowess led to tryouts with a number of professional teams. Koufax was signed by the Dodgers, and he left school after one year to immediately join the team’s major league roster.
Koufax pitched sparingly in his first two seasons with the Dodgers, and his performance was pedestrian in the following four: through his first six seasons as a professional, he had a cumulative record of 36–40 and an earned run average (ERA) of 4.10. His breakthrough came in 1961, when—after changing his pitching technique in spring training—he won 18 games, was named an NL all-star for the first of six consecutive times, and broke Christy Mathewson’s 58-year-old NL strikeout record with 269. From 1962 through 1965 Koufax had the lowest ERA in the NL, winning the NL Most Valuable Player (MVP) award in 1963 and the NL Cy Young Award in 1963 and 1965. He led the Dodgers to World Series titles in both 1963 and 1965, winning World Series MVP honours on both occasions. The devoutly Jewish Koufax famously refused to pitch in game one of the 1965 World Series, which fell on Yom Kippur, but he returned to pitch in games two, five, and seven, throwing complete-game shutouts in the latter two contests. In his last season, 1966, he won 27 games and posted a 1.73 ERA, both career bests, and he took home his third Cy Young Award. On Sept. 9, 1965, he pitched his fourth no-hit game, a major league record (until 1981); the fourth no-hitter, against the Chicago Cubs, was also a perfect game (no player reached first base).
During his career Koufax struck out 2,396 batters in 2,324 innings; his average of more than one strikeout per inning is a rare accomplishment. In each of three seasons—1963, 1965, and 1966—he struck out more than 300 hitters; his 382 strikeouts in 1965 set a major league record that remained unbroken until 1973. Twice he struck out 18 batters in a nine-inning game. After his playing career ended, Koufax worked as a television broadcaster and as a minor league pitching coach and adviser for the Dodgers. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1971, the first year that he was eligible.
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6d977a4a1a2405c1a6b6dc79e3e58df7 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sanford-I-Weill | Sanford I. Weill | Sanford I. Weill
Sanford I. Weill, byname Sandy Weill, (born March 16, 1933, Brooklyn, N.Y., U.S.), American financier and philanthropist whose company, Travelers Group, merged with Citicorp to form Citigroup in 1998—the largest merger in history at the time.
Weill was born to Polish immigrants and was the first in his family to earn a college degree, graduating from Cornell University in 1955. Afterward, he worked his way up from Wall Street messenger to stockbroker to cofounder of Carter, Berlind, Potoma & Weill, a small brokerage firm, in 1960. During the next two decades, Weill aggressively bought securities houses and amassed his first financial services network, Shearson Loeb Rhoades. His steady rise came to a halt, however, in the 1980s, when he sold Shearson to American Express. He served as president of American Express for a short time, but in 1985 he left the company.
At that time, in his 50s and financially secure, Weill would not have been begrudged his retirement. Instead he started over, buying the Commercial Credit division of Control Data Corporation in 1986. It was not an auspicious rebirth of an empire, as the small division was a faltering reject of its parent company. Weill, however, displayed a talent for rebuilding such organizations through cost cutting and employee motivation, and two years later he was expanding again, merging Commercial Credit with the larger, but struggling, Primerica and acquiring the securities firm Smith Barney in the process. The new company, using the name Primerica, acquired Travelers Insurance and repurchased Shearson from American Express during 1992–93. Primerica then renamed itself Travelers Group.
In 1996 Weill expanded Travelers Group when he bought the casualty and property insurance businesses of the Aetna Life and Casualty Company. In October 1997 he gained widespread attention for Travelers Group’s $9 billion purchase of Salomon Inc., parent company of the prestigious Salomon Brothers investment bank. It was at the time the second largest acquisition in Wall Street history. But, even as Weill’s comeback was hailed on Wall Street, he still sought the greater size and diversity that a merger with Citicorp, the largest American bank, would bring. The huge, international, and diversified financial services institution that would be created through the merger of the Travelers Group and Citicorp was what he had been dreaming about for more than a decade. When the proposed merger was announced in April 1998, the news stunned the financial industry, but the decision was in step with Weill’s reputation as a corporate visionary who was as savvy as he was fearless.
The completion of the merger was stalled, however, because of the Glass-Steagall Act, a Great Depression-era law that prohibited banks from selling insurance. To overcome this obstacle, Weill and Citicorp Chairman John S. Reed initiated a lobbying campaign to fully repeal the act, something that U.S. financial companies had been attempting to do for decades. Meanwhile, they were able to secure a waiver that allowed the two companies to merge temporarily. In 1999 the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act was signed into law; it repealed the barriers of the Glass-Steagall Act. Thus, the merger was able to be completed, and in 1999 Weill became cochairman and co-CEO of Citigroup, then the largest financial services company in the world.
By 2000 Weill was the sole chairman and CEO of Citigroup. Under his leadership the company experienced unprecedented growth, and subsidiaries were acquired in Asia and eastern Europe. Weill stepped down as CEO in 2003 and as chairman in 2006. Following his retirement, he concentrated on his longtime philanthropic endeavours, including the National Academy Foundation, a network of career academies for high school students, which he had founded in 1982. Weill also raised money to renovate Carnegie Hall in New York City, and he had endowed the medical school at his alma mater, Cornell University. In 2009 Weill and his wife were awarded the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy, named for Andrew Carnegie, the millionaire industrialist and philanthropist.
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9cf9723e37472a5bc496a9f5b13f5d81 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sangoule-Lamizana | Sangoulé Lamizana | Sangoulé Lamizana
) Sangoulé Lamizana, ousted the elected government of Maurice Yaméogo. Lamizana dominated the country’s politics until November 1980, when a series of strikes launched by workers, teachers, and civil servants led to another coup, this time headed by Col. Saye Zerbo.
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3a77bf2531be06f26aab5efef32fe3de | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sangs-rgyas-rgya-mtsho | Sangs-rgyas rgya-mtsho | Sangs-rgyas rgya-mtsho
…completed by another great figure, Sangs-rgyas-rgya-mtsho, who in 1679 succeeded as minister regent just before the death of his patron the fifth Dalai Lama. By then a soundly based and unified government had been established over a wider extent than any for eight centuries.
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deba36f1a3e709b8634a5cb2dd4a8125 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sanjo-Sanetomi | Sanjō Sanetomi | Sanjō Sanetomi
Sanjō Sanetomi, in full Kōshaku (Prince) Sanjō Sanetomi, (born Jan. 3, 1838, Kyōto, Japan—died Feb. 18, 1891, Tokyo), radical court noble who was instrumental in the Meiji Restoration (1868), which ended the 264-year domination of Japan by the Tokugawa family and reestablished ruling authority with the emperor. After the restoration Sanjō became an important leader of the new government.
In his youth he was a political leader of the court nobles gathered around the emperor. In 1862, when the emperor Kōmei tried to reassert his authority over the shogunate (the military dictatorship through which the Tokugawa family ruled Japan), Sanjō acted as the emperor’s messenger, ordering the shogun to expel all foreigners from the country. The next year, when Satsuma, one of the feudal fiefs into which Japan was then divided, effected a coup d’etat at the imperial court and forced the emperor to reverse his radical policy, Sanjō took shelter in the more sympathetic Chōshū domain in western Honshu.
After the restoration Sanjō was chief minister of the Council of State throughout most of the period between 1871 and 1885. Theoretically, that position revived the ancient and privileged role of imperial adviser. In fact, Sanjō served chiefly as spokesman for the bureaucracy that ruled in the name of the emperor Meiji.
In 1873, when the government faction seeking war with Korea pressed him for imperial approval, Sanjō was unable to bear the pressure of the decision and relinquished his post to his colleague Iwakura Tomomi, who was able to defeat the plans of the war party. Finally, in 1885, when the modern cabinet system was instituted in preparation for constitutional government, Sanjō was elevated to the post of lord keeper of the privy seal (naidaijin), a position above the cabinet entitling its holder to speak in the emperor’s name.
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ccedfa275c13953eb870130b9eb21097 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sappho-Greek-poet | Sappho | Sappho
Sappho, also spelled (in the Aeolic dialect spoken by the poet) Psappho, (born c. 610, Lesbos [Greece]—died c. 570 bce), Greek lyric poet greatly admired in all ages for the beauty of her writing style. She ranks with Archilochus and Alcaeus, among Greek poets, for her ability to impress readers with a lively sense of her personality. Her language contains elements from Aeolic vernacular speech and Aeolic poetic tradition, with traces of epic vocabulary familiar to readers of Homer. Her phrasing is concise, direct, and picturesque. She has the ability to stand aloof and judge critically her own ecstasies and grief, and her emotions lose nothing of their force by being recollected in tranquillity.
Sappho was a Greek lyric poet who flourished in the 6th century BCE on Lesbos and has been greatly admired since antiquity for the beauty of her writing style. Her phrasing is concise, direct, and picturesque, and her themes are personal—primarily concerned with the female religious and educational community that met under her leadership.
Sappho had at least two brothers, Larichus and Charaxus, and may have had a third. A fragment from Sappho that is dedicated to Charaxus has survived. One of her poems mentions a daughter named Cleis or Claïs. According to legend, Sappho was married to Cercylas, a wealthy man from the island of Andros.
Sappho’s legacy is her poetry, though most of it is lost. In the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE her writings were collected in a nine-book edition of lyrics, but that work did not endure beyond the 8th or 9th century CE. Our knowledge of Sappho comes from quotations in other authors and from papyrus finds.
The exact time, place, and cause of Sappho’s death are unknown. According to an often repeated, though unlikely, legend, Sappho leaped from the Leucadian rock to certain death in the sea because of her unrequited love for Phaon, a younger man who was a sailor.
Legends about Sappho abound, many having been repeated for centuries. She is said, for example, to have been married to Cercylas, a wealthy man from the island of Andros. But many scholars challenge this claim, finding evidence in the Greek words of the bawdry of later Comic poets. Most modern critics also consider it legend that Sappho leaped from the Leucadian rock to certain death in the sea because of her unrequited love of Phaon, a younger man and a sailor. She had at least two brothers, Larichus and Charaxus, and may have had a third. A fragment from Sappho that is dedicated to Charaxus has survived. One of her poems mentions a daughter named Cleis or Claïs. The tradition that she fled the island or was banished and went to Sicily may be true, but she lived most of her life in her hometown of Mytilene on Lesbos.
Her work contains only a few apparent allusions to the political disturbances of the time, which are so frequently reflected in the verse of her contemporary Alcaeus. Her themes are invariably personal—primarily concerned with her thiasos, the usual term (not found in Sappho’s extant writings) for the female community, with a religious and educational background, that met under her leadership. Sappho herself attacks in her poems other thiasoi directed by other women.
The goal of the Sapphic thiasos is the education of young women, especially for marriage. Aphrodite is the group’s tutelary divinity and inspiration. Sappho is the intimate and servant of the goddess and her intermediary with the girls. In the ode to Aphrodite, the poet invokes the goddess to appear, as she has in the past, and to be her ally in persuading a girl she desires to love her. Frequent images in Sappho’s poetry include flowers, bright garlands, naturalistic outdoor scenes, altars smoking with incense, perfumed unguents to sprinkle on the body and bathe the hair—that is, all the elements of Aphrodite’s rituals. In the thiasos the girls were educated and initiated into grace and elegance for seduction and love. Singing, dancing, and poetry played a central role in this educational process and other cultural occasions. As was true for other female communities, including the Spartan, and for the corresponding masculine institutions, the practice of homoeroticism within the thiasos played a role in the context of initiation and education. In Sappho’s poetry love is passion, an inescapable power that moves at the will of the goddess; it is desire and sensual emotion; it is nostalgia and memory of affections that are now distant, but shared by the community of the thiasos. There is a personal poetic dimension, which is also collective because all the girls of the group recognize themselves in it. An important part of Sappho’s poetic oeuvre is occupied by epithalamia, or nuptial songs.
It is not known how her poems were published and circulated in her own lifetime and for the following three or four centuries. In the era of Alexandrian scholarship (3rd and 2nd centuries bce), what survived of her work was collected and published in a standard edition of nine books of lyrical verse, divided according to metre. This edition did not endure beyond the early Middle Ages. By the 8th or 9th century ce Sappho was represented only by quotations in other authors. Only the ode to Aphrodite, 28 lines long, is complete. The next longest fragment is 16 lines long. Since 1898 these fragments have been greatly increased by papyrus finds, though, in the opinion of some scholars, nothing equal in quality to the two longer poems.
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6bc1ff942566e48a33286fc21bd29bc4 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sara-Adler | Sara Adler | Sara Adler
Sara Adler, née Sara Levitzky, (born 1858, Odessa, Russia—died April 28, 1953, New York, N.Y., U.S.), Russian-born American actress, one of the most celebrated figures in the American Yiddish theatre.
Sara Levitzky was born of a well-to-do Jewish family. She studied singing at the Odessa Conservatory for a time and then joined a Yiddish theatre troupe managed by Maurice Heine, whom she shortly thereafter married. The repressions that followed the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 bore heavily on the Jews of Russia, and in September 1883 Yiddish plays were expressly forbidden. Early the next year the Heine troupe immigrated to the United States, where Sara soon gained a following in the Yiddish theatre in New York City. In 1890 she divorced Heine and married Jacob Adler, the leading tragic actor on the American Yiddish stage. Jacob Adler, together with playwright Jacob Gordin, was undertaking to revitalize the Yiddish theatre, then overburdened by outmoded stock material, with modern drama reflecting the urban milieu of Jews in the United States. Sara and Jacob Adler’s productions over the next several decades, mainly at their own theatre on the Bowery, were the rebirth of serious Yiddish theatre. Sara played some 300 leading roles, including many from the popular theatrical repertoire of the day. Her greatest role, and the one that established her preeminence on the Yiddish stage, was that of Katusha Maslova in Gordin’s dramatization of Leo Tolstoy’s Resurrection. A close second was her starkly realistic portrayal of the abandoned and unbalanced wife in Gordin’s Homeless. She performed infrequently after Jacob Adler’s death in 1926. In 1939 she re-created her role in Resurrection at a tribute to her at the New Yorker Theatre. Not the least of her contributions to the theatre were her children Stella Adler and Luther Adler.
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c2d94a6646e9120228218d61abd4cd65 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sara-Blakely | Sara Blakely | Sara Blakely
Sara Blakely, (born February 21, 1971, Clearwater, Florida, U.S.), American inventor and entrepreneur who created Spanx, a brand of body-slimming women’s undergarments, and in 2012 became the world’s youngest female self-made billionaire.
Blakely graduated from Florida State University with a bachelor’s degree in communications. She subsequently held various jobs during a three-month stint at Walt Disney World before becoming first a salesperson and then a national sales trainer at the office-supply company Danka. When she wanted an undergarment that was undetectable beneath her clothing, was comfortable, made her appear slimmer, and could be worn with open-toed shoes, she cut the feet off of a pair of panty hose and found that she had created a garment that other women would want. In 2000 Blakely used $5,000 in personal savings to market her invention. She worked during the day at Danka and devoted nights to researching fabric types, patents, and trademark designs. She ultimately found a hosiery factory willing to produce her footless hose, wrote her own patent application, and chose a playfully endearing product name, “Spanx,” and logo, a young blonde woman modeled on herself. Rather than invest in advertising, Blakely traveled across the United States, meeting and modeling for the boards of stores such as Neiman Marcus.
A major break came in late 2000 when Oprah Winfrey featured Spanx on her popular nationally syndicated television talk show. Thereafter sales skyrocketed, and the charismatic Blakely rapidly built an empire without advertising or outside investment. Her salesmanship was complemented by her unabashed showmanship. Never able to pass up a chance to market Spanx, Blakely served as her own model both on television and at in-store public appearances across the U.S. She drew increased attention to Spanx when she appeared as a contestant on the 2004–05 reality television program Rebel Billionaire, which was hosted by the British entrepreneur and philanthropist Sir Richard Branson. Blakely finished second but impressed Branson enough that the host gave her $750,000; with this money she established the Sara Blakely Foundation, a philanthropic organization providing scholarships and grants to aspiring female entrepreneurs. Subsequent media appearances spurred increased sales, and by the end of the decade, annual sales of Spanx had reached hundreds of millions of dollars. In early 2012 the company, of which Blakely was the sole owner, was valued at $1 billion. Three years later she was among a group of investors who purchased the Atlanta Hawks of the National Basketball Association.
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e4fb183bab4e9c0a11bf28e76786a26f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sara-Payson-Willis-Parton | Sara Payson Willis Parton | Sara Payson Willis Parton
Sara Payson Willis Parton, née Grata Payson Willis, pseudonym Fanny Fern, (born July 9, 1811, Portland, Maine, U.S.—died Oct. 10, 1872, New York, N.Y.), American novelist and newspaper writer, one of the first woman columnists, known for her satiric commentary on contemporary society.
Grata Payson Willis early changed her first name to Sara. Her family had a strong literary and journalistic tradition: her father, Nathaniel Willis, founded the Youth’s Companion in 1827, and her elder brother, Nathaniel Parker Willis, was later a poet and editor of the New York Mirror. Sara Willis was educated in Boston and at Catharine Beecher’s seminary in Hartford, Connecticut. She then worked for the Youth’s Companion until her marriage in 1837 to Charles H. Eldredge, who died nine years later. In 1849 she married Samuel P. Farrington (divorced 1852). By that time she had begun contributing paragraphs and articles, under the name Fanny Fern, to various periodicals, including True Flag, Olive Branch, and Mother’s Assistant, and in 1853 a collection of her witty and chatty pieces was published in volume form as Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Port-Folio. The book sold some 80,000 copies and was quickly followed by a second series of Fern Leaves (1854) and by Little Ferns for Fanny’s Little Friends (1854) for children.
In 1855 Willis published her first novel, Ruth Hall, a roman à clef that satirized her brother Nathaniel and his set. In that year she was engaged by the New York Ledger to write a weekly column for the unprecedented sum of $100 each; she maintained that association for the rest of her life. Willis was not only one of the first woman columnists in the field of journalism, but she was also one of the first to employ satire to comment on affairs of the day, particularly the position of women and the poor in society. Her columns were collected in Fresh Leaves (1857), Folly as It Flies (1868), Ginger Snaps (1870), and Caper-Sauce (1872). Shortly after beginning her Ledger connection, she moved to New York City, where in 1856 she married James Parton, the eminent biographer. Other books by Fanny Fern were the novel Rose Clark (1856) and two children’s books. In 1868 she joined Jane Croly, Alice Cary, and others in founding the women’s club Sorosis.
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71e88c3dfecad8b5b4779a4a384a4754 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sarah-Brightman | Sarah Brightman | Sarah Brightman
…(“Time to Say Goodbye”) with Sarah Brightman, and both versions became hits. Bocelli’s popularity in the United States grew in 1997 with the release of Romanza—which collected songs from his previous albums and eventually sold more than 15 million copies worldwide—and with repeated PBS airings of his live show Romanza…
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d1acfc80cabf7d05c6bc6c333c36139f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sarah-Frances-Whiting | Sarah Frances Whiting | Sarah Frances Whiting
Sarah Frances Whiting, (born Aug. 23, 1847, Wyoming, N.Y.—died Sept. 12, 1927, Wilbraham, Mass.), American physicist and astronomer who advanced the scientific education of women in the 19th century.
Whiting was the daughter of Joel Whiting, a teacher, and Elizabeth Comstock. In 1865 she graduated from Ingham University (the first university for women in the United States) at LeRoy, N.Y. She then taught classes at Ingham and later in Brooklyn, N.Y., where she began to attend scientific lectures.
In 1876 Whiting became professor of physics at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, a new institution of higher education for women that had opened the year before. To learn about the new method of laboratory physics in which students were required to use laboratory instruments to make measurements, she became a guest in the physics classes of Edward Pickering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The physics laboratory that Whiting subsequently established at Wellesley in 1878 was the first for women and only the second in the United States.
In 1880 Whiting began teaching astronomy classes at Wellesley. One of her earliest—and most famous—students was the American astronomer Annie Jump Cannon. In 1895, inspired by newspaper accounts of German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen’s discovery of X-rays, Whiting made the first X-ray photographs in the United States. In 1900 the Whitin Observatory was built, of which Whiting was the first director. The observatory contained a 12-inch (30-cm) refracting telescope purchased from the Clark family of telescope makers, as well as a transit telescope and several spectroscopes. (Spectroscopy was a particular interest of hers.) In 1912 she retired from the physics department, and in 1916 she retired from the directorship of the Whitin Observatory.
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a07437975eadf9c302d6cdfd2f8a52eb | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sarah-Huckabee-Sanders | Sarah Huckabee Sanders | Sarah Huckabee Sanders
…August 18, 2017, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced that “White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and Steve Bannon have mutually agreed today would be Steve’s last day,” though it was widely thought that Bannon had been forced to resign.
Huckabee’s daughter, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, worked on Trump’s campaign and later served as White House press secretary. In 2017 the show Huckabee returned to television, airing on the Christian-based Trinity Broadcast Network.
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43224cd836ea625a48b817c757ba5546 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sarah-Jennings-Duchess-of-Marlborough | Sarah Jennings, Duchess of Marlborough | Sarah Jennings, Duchess of Marlborough
Sarah Jennings, Duchess of Marlborough, also called (1689–1702) Countess of Marlborough, (born May 29, 1660, Sandridge, Hertfordshire, Eng.—died Oct. 18, 1744, London), wife of the renowned general John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough; her close friendship with Queen Anne bolstered her husband’s career and served to aid the Whig cause.
As a child, Sarah Jennings formed a friendship with the Princess Anne (the future queen of Great Britain) and entered the household of Anne’s father, the Duke of York (the future James II) in 1673. Her romance with John Churchill, who was also at court, began late in 1675. Churchill’s parents opposed an unremunerative match, but with the assistance of the Duchess of York the couple were married secretly during the winter of 1677–78. Sarah was devoted to the Princess Anne, who came to depend upon her; they addressed each other as Mrs. Morley and Mrs. Freeman; and, upon Anne’s marriage in 1683, Sarah became one of the ladies of the bedchamber. Sarah escorted Anne to meet the Prince of Orange in 1688 and persuaded her to accept the statutory settlement of the succession. Upon Marlborough’s disgrace in 1692, Queen Mary compelled Anne to dismiss Sarah from her offices and excluded her from court; but after Mary’s death in 1694, Anne and William III were reconciled and the Marlboroughs returned to favour.
After Anne’s accession, the Marlboroughs enjoyed great favour. But Sarah’s favour was in the balance: for the queen had High Church sympathies, while Sarah was a strong Whig. This difference came to a head after 1705; the high Tories had fallen from office but the queen, supported by Robert Harley (later Earl of Oxford), stoutly resisted taking in the Whigs. Sarah persistently urged her to bring the Earl of Sunderland into office in 1706, and mutual irritation showed that the friendship of Anne and Sarah was cooling. Harley was clearly using Mrs. (later Lady) Abigail Masham to supplant Sarah in Anne’s affections by 1707. When Anne’s husband, the Prince of Denmark, died in 1708, relations between Anne and Sarah temporarily improved, but Mrs. Masham’s power grew.
The Whigs and Sarah thoroughly lost influence in 1710. Anne dismissed her, and they never met again. The Marlboroughs settled at Frankfurt am Main in 1713. After the Hanoverian accession they returned to Blenheim, and after the duke’s death in 1722, Sarah completed the building of the palace. She died at Marlborough House in London.
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6c7b896680acea686ff57a092d6c646c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sarah-Kirby-Trimmer | Sarah Kirby Trimmer | Sarah Kirby Trimmer
Sarah Kirby Trimmer, whose Fabulous Histories specialized in piety, opposed the presumably free-thinking Rousseau on religious grounds but was in other respects strongly influenced by him. The same is true of Anna Laetitia Barbauld, with her characteristically titled Lessons for Children. But Mary Martha Sherwood…
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96d4dd7874319a71db43e215f8763620 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sarah-Porter | Sarah Porter | Sarah Porter
Sarah Porter, (born August 16, 1813, Farmington, Connecticut, U.S.—died February 17, 1900, Farmington), American educator and founder of Miss Porter’s School, still one of the leading preparatory schools for girls in the United States.
Porter was a younger sister of Noah Porter, later president of Yale College. She was educated at the Farmington Academy, where she was the only girl student, and at age 16 she became an assistant teacher in the school. She studied privately under a Yale Latin professor (1832–33) and for several years studied on her own while teaching in schools in New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania.
In 1843 Porter opened her own school in Farmington. For many years she was the only teacher at Miss Porter’s School, but her intellectual curiosity had fitted her to teach Latin, French, German, chemistry, natural science, mathematics, history, geography, and music, in addition to the basic subjects. The school thus had a reputation for academic excellence almost unique among girls’ schools of the day. Porter also encouraged healthful exercise, and she was deeply concerned with the character development of all her charges.
As the school grew rapidly, Porter acquired new facilities to keep pace, although she took care to limit the student body to about 100. In later years she hired additional teachers, but she continued to teach her chosen subjects until just a few years before her death in 1900.
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2ebc0e356abe3cd6c8159a7903781e9c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sarah-Winnemucca | Sarah Winnemucca | Sarah Winnemucca
Sarah Winnemucca, also called Sarah Hopkins Winnemucca or Sally Winnemucca, original name Thoc-me-tony, Thocmectony, or Tocmectone (“Shell Flower”), (born c. 1844, Humboldt Sink, Mexico [now in Nevada, U.S.]—died October 16, 1891, Monida, Montana, U.S.), Native American educator, lecturer, tribal leader, and writer best known for her book Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883). Her writings, valuable for their description of Northern Paiute life and for their insights into the impact of white settlement, are among the few contemporary Native American works.
A granddaughter of Truckee and daughter of Winnemucca, both Northern Paiute chiefs, she lived during part of her childhood in the San Joaquin valley of California, where she learned both Spanish and English. After her return to Nevada she lived for a time with a white family and adopted the name Sarah. In 1860 she briefly attended a convent school in San Jose, California, until objections from the parents of white students forced her to leave. During the Paiute War of 1860 and the subsequent increasingly frequent clashes between Native Americans and whites, she suffered the loss of several family members. She attempted the role of peacemaker on a few occasions and from 1868 to 1871 served as an interpreter at Camp McDermitt in northeastern Nevada. In 1872 she accompanied her tribe to a new reservation, the Malheur, in southeastern Oregon.
Winnemucca for a time was an interpreter for the reservation agent, but the appointment of a new and unsympathetic agent in 1876 ended her service as well as a period of relative quiet on the reservation. On the outbreak of the Bannock War in 1878, she learned that her father and others had been taken hostage and offered to help the army scout the Bannock territory. Covering more than a hundred miles of trail through Idaho and Oregon, Winnemucca located the Bannock camp, spirited her father and many of his companions away, and returned with valuable intelligence for General O.O. Howard. She was scout, aide, and interpreter to Howard during the resulting campaign against the Bannocks.
In 1879 she lectured in San Francisco on the plight of her tribe—many of whose members had been exiled along with belligerent Bannocks to a reservation in Washington Territory—and on the wrongs perpetrated by dishonest civilian Indian agents. Despite slanderous responses by agents and their friends, Winnemucca attracted the attention of President Rutherford B. Hayes. She was promised the return of her people to the Malheur reservation and a severalty allotment of land there, but the order issued to that effect was never executed.
After a year of teaching in a school for Native American children at Vancouver Barracks, Washington Territory, and her marriage late in 1881 to L.H. Hopkins, an army officer, Winnemucca, often known among whites as “the Princess,” went on an eastern lecture tour to arouse public opinion. Aided by General Howard, Elizabeth Peabody, and others, the tour was a success, and sales of her Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims raised money for Winnemucca’s expenses. She secured thousands of signatures on a petition calling for the promised allotment of reservation lands to individual Paiutes. Congress passed a bill to that end in 1884, but once again promises came to nothing. From 1883 to 1886 Winnemucca taught at a Paiute school near Lovelock, Nevada. In 1886 her husband died, and ill herself, Winnemucca moved to a sister’s home in Monida, Montana, where she died in 1891.
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a2e75620eb362e9a64a6d7221b8725e0 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sasaki-Kojiro | Sasaki Kojirō | Sasaki Kojirō
…1612, against his arch rival Sasaki Kojirō, a swordsman whose skill was reported to be equal to his own. The contest took place on a small island off the coast of Japan. While being rowed out to the dueling site, Musashi fashioned a wooden sword out of an oar. When…
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85bbbb98976154586a8f67980032528b | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Satyendra-Prassano-Sinha-1st-Baron-Sinha-of-Raipur | Satyendra Prassano Sinha, 1st Baron Sinha of Raipur | Satyendra Prassano Sinha, 1st Baron Sinha of Raipur
Satyendra Prassano Sinha, 1st Baron Sinha of Raipur, (born June 1864, Raipur, India—died March 6, 1928, Berhampur), Indian lawyer and statesman who had an extremely successful legal career, won high esteem in Indian nationalist circles, and was appointed to high office under the British government.
Sinha was educated at the Presidency College, Calcutta (now Kolkata), and was called to the bar from Lincoln’s Inn in London. He was the first Indian to be appointed advocate general of Bengal (1907) and the first to be appointed to the governor-general’s Executive Council, in which he served as law member during 1909–10. He was knighted in 1914, presided over the Indian National Congress party’s session at Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1915, and subsequently served in the Imperial War Cabinet of Britain. In 1919 he joined the Lloyd George ministry as undersecretary for India, being raised to the peerage as Baron Sinha of Raipur. He steered through the House of Lords the Government of India Act of 1919, based on the Montagu-Chelmsford proposals for the reform of the Indian constitution. In 1920 he was appointed governor of the province of Bihar and Orissa, becoming the first Indian to hold such office under the British. Ill health forced his resignation the following year. He was appointed a member of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in 1926.
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41ff31f6d57f501f09bb365bc1a0c0e3 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saul-Bass | Saul Bass | Saul Bass
Saul Bass, (born May 8, 1920, Bronx, New York, U.S.—died April 25, 1996, Los Angeles, California), American graphic designer and filmmaker who introduced a new art form with his imaginative film title sequences that conveyed the essence of a movie and prepared audiences for what they were about to see.
Bass was a creative child who enjoyed drawing. After completing high school, he studied at the Art Students League in New York City and later attended Brooklyn College, where he was taught by the notable designer Gyorgy Kepes. He worked as an advertising designer before moving to Los Angeles in 1946.
Bass continued to do graphic design for advertising and by 1952 was able to set up his own practice. He began his association with Hollywood by designing advertising posters for movies. His poster for Carmen Jones (1954) so impressed its director, Otto Preminger, that he asked Bass to also create the movie’s opening credits. It was the animated opening sequence that he created for Preminger’s The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) that made Bass’s reputation. His other well-known title sequences included those for Around the World in 80 Days (1956); Preminger’s Bonjour Tristesse (1958), Anatomy of a Murder (1959), and Exodus (1960); the Alfred Hitchcock films Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), and Psycho (1960); Spartacus (1960); West Side Story (1961); and Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990), Cape Fear (1991), and Casino (1995).
Bass also created iconic logos for the American Bell Telephone Company, AT&T, Continental Airlines, Girl Scouts of America, and Quaker Oats, among others. In addition to his design work, Bass directed the sci-fi thriller feature film Phase IV (1974) and wrote, produced, and directed several short films. His Why Man Creates (1968) won the Academy Award for best short-subject documentary.
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7beebfb51bdee22bd2f196332c3ebd82 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saul-Steinberg | Saul Steinberg | Saul Steinberg
Saul Steinberg, (born June 15 [June 28, New Style], 1914, Râmnicu Sărat, Romania—died May 12, 1999, New York, New York, U.S.), Romanian-born American cartoonist and illustrator, best known for his line drawings that suggest elaborate, eclectic doodlings.
Steinberg studied sociology and psychology at the University of Bucharest and architecture in Milan. From 1936 to 1939 he published his cartoons in Italian magazines. Settling in New York City in 1942, Steinberg worked as a freelance artist, cartoonist, and illustrator, mainly for The New Yorker magazine, and exhibited his drawings in Paris, New York City, and other cities. Steinberg’s subject matter ranged from the whimsical (e.g., a wicker chair overtaken by its curlicues) to the satirical (sinister, overgrown gadgets) to the philosophical (a tiny figure perched on a giant question mark balanced at the edge of an abyss).
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0c574920cc6113577883484d25791993 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saunders-Mac-Lane | Saunders Mac Lane | Saunders Mac Lane
Saunders Mac Lane, (born August 4, 1909, Taftville, Connecticut, U.S.—died April 14, 2005, San Francisco, California), American mathematician who was a cocreator of category theory, an architect of homological algebra, and an advocate of categorical foundations for mathematics.
Mac Lane graduated from Yale University in 1930 and then began graduate work at the University of Chicago. He soon moved to Germany, where he, with a dissertation on mathematical logic, received a doctorate degree in 1933 from the University of Göttingen. While in Germany, he stayed in the homes of Hermann Weyl and Richard Courant, and he saw his dissertation adviser Paul Bernays barred from teaching by the Nazis. Mac Lane returned home and taught at various universities before settling permanently at the University of Chicago in 1947.
About 1940 Mac Lane made some purely algebraic calculations in group theory, and the Polish American mathematician Samuel Eilenberg noticed that they applied to the topology of infinitely coiled curves called solenoids. To understand and generalize this link between algebra and topology, the two men created category theory, the general cohomology of groups, and the basis for the Eilenberg-Steenrod axioms for homology of topological spaces. Mac Lane worked with categorical duality and defined categorical universal properties. He defined and named Abelian categories, further developed by Alexandre Grothendieck to become central to homological algebra.
From the 1960s Mac Lane pursued aspects of category theory, including the work of the American mathematician F. William Lawvere on categorical foundations for mathematics. Mac Lane served as president of the Mathematical Association of America (1951–52), the American Philosophical Society (1968–71), and the American Mathematical Society (1973–74). He served as vice president of the National Academy of Sciences (1973–81). His works include A Survey of Modern Algebra (1941; with Garrett Birkhoff), Homology (1963), Categories for the Working Mathematician (1971), and Sheaves in Geometry and Logic: A First Introduction to Topos Theory (1992; with Ieke Moerdijk).
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2351a0626ed827f4afb5cc443c59d061 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sawa-Homare | Sawa Homare | Sawa Homare
Sawa Homare, (born September 6, 1978, Tokyo, Japan), Japanese football (soccer) player who led Japan to victory in the 2011 Women’s World Cup.
Sawa’s brother taught her the basics of football. By the time she was 12, she was playing in Japan’s first division, and at 15 she had an immediate impact on the national team, scoring four goals in a match against the Philippines. Despite her small stature—she stood just 5 feet 4 inches (1.64 metres) tall—Sawa was an aggressive midfield player. Her first club in Japan was Yomiuri Beleza, where she played for seven years and scored 79 goals in 136 matches. She moved to the United States and in 2001 joined the Women’s United Soccer Association (WUSA) Atlanta Beat, scoring the franchise’s first goal. When the WUSA folded in 2003, she returned to Japan and played for NTV Beleza, scoring 40 goals in 64 appearances. The advent of the Women’s Professional Soccer league in 2008 sent her back to the United States, and she played for the Washington Freedom until the team relocated to Florida in 2010. She subsequently joined INAC Kobe Leonessa in Japan, where she played until she retired from domestic football in December 2015.
In international play, Sawa competed in her first World Cup in 1995, with Japan losing in the quarterfinals. In the next three tournaments, Japan failed to make it out of group play. After winning the gold medal at the 2010 Asian Games, Japan entered the 2011 World Cup ranked fourth. During the tournament, Sawa scored five goals, most notably the tying goal in overtime during the finals against the highly favoured United States. Japan prevailed in the ensuing shoot-out to win Asia’s first major honour in the sport. As the tournament’s outstanding player and top scorer, Sawa was awarded the Golden Ball and Golden Boot, respectively. She later was named FIFA’s 2011 Player of the Year. She briefly left international football after helping Japan win a silver medal at the 2012 London Olympic Games but returned in time to guide the national team to a victory at the 2014 Women’s Asian Cup. Sawa retired after helping Japan reach the final of the 2015 Women’s World Cup (where the team lost to the United States), which was the record-tying sixth time she had played in that tournament. She ended her international career with 205 appearances and 83 goals, both of which were Japanese records.
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bce675f66dc0ba9f1f9cdf8219475638 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saya-San | Saya San | Saya San
Saya San, Saya also spelled Hsaya, original name Ya Gyaw, (born Oct. 24, 1876, East Thayet-kan, Shwebo district, Burma [Myanmar]—died Nov. 16, 1931, Tharrawaddy), leader of the anti-British rebellion of 1930–32 in Burma (Myanmar).
Saya San was a native of Shwebo, a centre of nationalist-monarchist sentiment in north-central Burma that was the birthplace of the Konbaung (or Alaungpaya) dynasty, which controlled Myanmar from 1752 until the British annexation in 1886. He was a Buddhist monk, physician, and astrologer in Siam (Thailand) and Burma before the rebellion. Saya San joined the extreme nationalist faction of the General Council of Burmese Associations led by U Soe Thein. Saya San organized peasant discontent and proclaimed himself a pretender to the throne who, like Alaungpaya, would unite the people and expel the British invader. He organized his followers into the “Galon Army” (Galon, or Garuḍa, is a fabulous bird of Hindu mythology), and he was proclaimed “king” at Insein, near Rangoon (Yangon), on Oct. 28, 1930.
On the night of December 22/23 the first outbreak occurred in the Tharrawaddy district; the revolt soon spread to other Irrawaddy delta districts. The Galon army rebels, like the Boxers of China, carried charms and tattoos to make themselves invulnerable to British bullets. Armed only with swords and spears, Saya San’s rebels were no match for British troops with machine guns.
As the revolt collapsed, Saya San fled to the Shan Plateau in the east. On Aug. 2, 1931, however, he was captured at Hokho and brought back to Tharrawaddy to be tried by a special tribunal. Despite the efforts of his lawyer, Ba Maw, he was sentenced to death in March 1931 and was hanged at Tharrawaddy jail. The revolt was crushed, but more than 10,000 peasants were killed in the process.
Although Saya San’s revolt was basically political (it was the last genuine attempt to restore the Burmese monarchy) and possessed strong religious characteristics, its causes were basically economic. The peasants of southern Burma had been dispossessed by Indian moneylenders, were burdened with heavy taxes, and were left penniless when the price of rice dropped in an economic depression. Widespread support for Saya San betrayed the precarious and unpopular position of British rule in Burma.
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1c820be53e8ce0e90350b6568372fc2e | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sayyid-Ahmad-Khan | Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan | Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan
Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Sayyid also spelled Syad, orSyed, Ahmad also spelled Ahmed, (born Oct. 17, 1817, Delhi—died March 27, 1898, Alīgarh, India), Muslim educator, jurist, and author, founder of the Anglo-Mohammedan Oriental College at Alīgarh, Uttar Pradesh, India, and the principal motivating force behind the revival of Indian Islām in the late 19th century. His works, in Urdu, include Essays on the Life of Mohammed (1870) and commentaries on the Bible and on the Qurʾān. In 1888 he was made a Knight Commander of the Star of India.
Sayyid’s family, though progressive, was highly regarded by the dying Mughal dynasty. His father, who received an allowance from the Mughal administration, became something of a religious recluse; his maternal grandfather had twice served as prime minister of the Mughal emperor of his time and had also held positions of trust under the East India Company. Sayyid’s brother established one of the first printing presses at Delhi and started one of the earliest newspapers in Urdu, the principal language of the Muslims of northern India.
The death of Sayyid’s father left the family in financial difficulties, and after a limited education Sayyid had to work for his livelihood. Starting as a clerk with the East India Company in 1838, he qualified three years later as a subjudge and served in the judicial department at various places.
Sayyid Ahmad had a versatile personality, and his position in the judicial department left him time to be active in many fields. His career as an author (in Urdu) started at the age of 23 with religious tracts. In 1847 he brought out a noteworthy book, Āthār aṣṣanādīd (“Monuments of the Great”), on the antiquities of Delhi. Even more important was his pamphlet, “The Causes of the Indian Revolt.” During the Indian Mutiny of 1857 he had taken the side of the British, but in this booklet he ably and fearlessly laid bare the weaknesses and errors of the British administration that had led to dissatisfaction and a countrywide explosion. Widely read by British officials, it had considerable influence on British policy.
His interest in religion was also active and lifelong. He began a sympathetic interpretation of the Bible, wrote Essays on the Life of Mohammed (translated into English by his son), and found time to write several volumes of a modernist commentary on the Qurʾān. In these works he sought to harmonize the Islāmic faith with the scientific and politically progressive ideas of his time.
The supreme interest of Sayyid’s life was, however, education—in its widest sense. He began by establishing schools, at Muradabad (1858) and Ghāzīpur (1863). A more ambitious undertaking was the foundation of the Scientific Society, which published translations of many educational texts and issued a bilingual journal—in Urdu and English.
These institutions were for the use of all citizens and were jointly operated by the Hindus and the Muslims. In the late 1860s there occurred developments that were to alter the course of his activities. In 1867 he was transferred to Benares, a city on the Ganges with great religious significance for the Hindus. At about the same time a movement started at Benares to replace Urdu, the language cultivated by the Muslims, with Hindi. This movement and the attempts to substitute Hindi for Urdu in the publications of the Scientific Society convinced Sayyid that the paths of the Hindus and the Muslims must diverge. Thus, when during a visit to England (1869–70) he prepared plans for a great educational institution, they were for “a Muslim Cambridge.” On his return he set up a committee for the purpose and also started an influential journal, Tahdhīb al-Akhlāq (“Social Reform”), for the “uplift and reform of the Muslim.” A Muslim school was established at Alīgarh in May 1875, and, after his retirement in 1876, Sayyid devoted himself to enlarging it into a college. In January 1877 the foundation stone of the college was laid by the Viceroy. In spite of conservative opposition to Sayyid’s projects, the college made rapid progress. In 1886 Sayyid organized the All-India Muhammadan Educational Conference, which met annually at different places to promote education and to provide the Muslims with a common platform. Until the founding of the Muslim League in 1906, it was the principal national centre of Indian Islām.
Sayyid advised the Muslims against joining active politics and to concentrate instead on education. Later, when some Muslims joined the Indian National Congress, he came out strongly against that organization and its objectives, which included the establishment of parliamentary democracy in India. He argued that, in a country where communal divisions were all-important and education and political organization were confined to a few classes, parliamentary democracy would work only inequitably. Muslims, generally, followed his advice and abstained from politics until several years later when they had established their own political organization.
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40f03b75d07b5d98af6f5bbdf55e4183 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sayyid-Amir-Ali | Sayyid Amir Ali | Sayyid Amir Ali
Sayyid Amir Ali, (born April 6, 1849, Cuttack, India—died Aug. 3, 1928, Sussex, Eng.), jurist, writer, and Muslim leader who favoured British rule in India rather than possible Hindu domination of an independent India.
Amir Ali, who traced his ancestry to the Prophet Muhammad’s daughter Fāṭimah, received his law degree from the University of Calcutta. He was called to the bar of the Inner Temple (1873) in England and returned to practice in Calcutta (now Kolkata), becoming a judge of the High Court in 1890. A permanent resident of England from 1904, he was appointed to the judicial committee of the Privy Council in 1909. The following year he helped establish the first mosque in London.
Amir Ali founded the National Mohammedan Association (1877) to provide Muslims with experience in Western political techniques and to protect their interests, and he helped secure in 1909 the first communal electorates for his people. He also founded the British Red Crescent Society to aid Muslims in need, and he furthered Western understanding of Islam by writing the first presentation of Islam by a Muslim in the English language, The Critical Examination of the Life and Teachings of Mohammed (1873). His Spirit of Islam (1891) remains a Muslim classic.
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b668168ac4d5731272fcb2e6be0d7932 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Scipio-Africanus-the-Younger/Destruction-of-Carthage | Destruction of Carthage | Destruction of Carthage
As the war against Carthage dragged on without decisive result, Scipio resolved to return to Rome in 148 to stand for the curule aedileship, but such was his military record and the general disappointment with the conduct of the war that the Roman people wanted to see him in command. Because he was at least five years under the legal minimum age for the consulship and had not been praetor, his election as consul for 147 was contrary to the rules for holding office (cursus honorum). When a tribune, voicing the popular enthusiasm, threatened to veto the consular elections unless Scipio was accepted as a candidate, the Senate gave way and allowed the tribunes to introduce a bill to exempt Scipio from the legal restrictions; he was thus elected consul and given the African command.
Once back in Africa, he determined to starve out Carthage with a blockade by land and sea; gradually the cordon was drawn tighter around the beleaguered city, and in the spring of 146 it fell to his final assault: after six days of street fighting the citadel was captured and Carthage was destroyed. As Scipio surveyed the burning city and meditated on the fall of great nations, he wept and, grasping the hand of Polybius (the historian himself records the incident), said: “it is glorious, but I have a dread foreboding that some time the same doom will be pronounced upon my own country.” After arranging for the organization of Carthaginian territory as the new Roman province of Africa, Scipio returned to Rome for a triumph and to be hailed as the second Africanus.
Thus, before the age of 40, Scipio had gained Rome’s final victory over Carthage and had become a popular hero, but he still had many opponents in the Senate. He soon reached the crown of a noble’s career by his election to the censorship of 142, though the other censor—Lucius Mummius, who had brought peace to Greece by his sack of Corinth—was not a welcome colleague. Scipio carried out his censorial duties with sternness, in the spirit of the censorship of Cato, who had lived just long enough to express approval of Scipio’s African command.
The background of the next phase of Scipio’s life was again Spain, where for years Rome had been engaged in war with the Celtiberians and had suffered a series of defeats and humiliating setbacks. One such scandal concerned the Senate’s repudiation of a truce arranged by the commander Gaius Hostilius Mancinus and his young quaestor Tiberius Gracchus, which had saved a Roman army from destruction. The story cannot be repeated here, but, while Mancinus was shamefully condemned for his conduct, Gracchus was spared, thanks to his popularity at Rome for having rescued a trapped army. Scipio helped in Gracchus’ escape, possibly because of their family relationship: Gracchus was his cousin and also his brother-in-law, though in fact Scipio’s marriage to Sempronia had been a private failure. Scipio also urged the adoption of a more effective policy in Spain. This led to his own election to a second consulship for 134 and the command of the Celtiberian war; special legislation was needed, because a second consulship was unconstitutional.
Scipio took with him to Spain a number of volunteers and a corps of 500 friends and dependents as a kind of bodyguard (an embryonic praetorian cohort): these were perhaps all the more necessary because his first task was to rediscipline the Roman troops in Spain, who were in a shocking state. His main objective was to reduce the Celtiberian capital, the hill town of Numantia, which could not be stormed but had to be blockaded and starved out. Around the town he built seven camps, linked by a strong wall (traces of these works still survive), and, with overwhelming forces after an eight-month siege, he finally forced the 4,000 besieged to capitulate (133). The town was burned, and the survivors were sold into slavery. Thus Rome’s dominion in Spain was established beyond question, and Scipio returned to Rome for a second triumph in 132.
In the meanwhile, Rome had been shaken by a constitutional crisis. The tribune Tiberius Gracchus introduced a bill for the distribution of public lands among the poor of the city. His disregard of constitutional procedure and custom in forcing through his bill had provoked the Senate to use force to crush him and his supporters and thus initiated a period of increasing political upheaval and revolution (133). Absent in Spain during the crisis, Scipio was spared the necessity for actively taking sides. In view of his friend Laelius’ earlier attempted land law, it may be conjectured that he would not have opposed the bill as such. But surely he did not approve of Tiberius’ methods; when forced to give a public opinion he quoted Homer’s line, “So perish all who do the like again,” and he admitted that Tiberius “had been killed justly.”
By his anti-Gracchan attitude Scipio lost much popularity, the more so when he helped to defeat a bill to legalize reelection to the tribunate. He then took up the cause of the Italian allies of Rome, who were discontented with the effects of Gracchus’ land bill; he took some action to modify its working, at least as far as it concerned the allies. Then suddenly one morning, when he was due to make a speech on the Italian question, he was found dead in his bedroom (129 bc). His death remained an unsolved mystery. Various eminent people were suspected at the time or later—e.g., Gaius Gracchus and even Sempronia (his wife and Gracchus’ sister) or Cornelia (Gracchus’ mother). The funeral oration delivered by his best friend, Gaius Laelius, although unclear in its surviving form, is believed to say, “A disease carried him off.”
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235fb15e6192eaf387762077353d4efc | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Scott-Allen | Scott Allen | Scott Allen
…the men’s figure skating competition, Scott Allen (U.S.) captured the bronze two days before his 15th birthday, becoming the youngest athlete to win a Winter Games medal. Tragedy struck the men’s downhill as an Australian skier was killed during a practice run. The event was won by Egon Zimmermann (Austria),…
…the men’s figure skating competition, Scott Allen (U.S.) captured the bronze two days before his 15th birthday, becoming the youngest athlete to win a Winter Games medal. Tragedy struck the men’s downhill as an Australian skier was killed during a practice run. The event was won by Egon Zimmermann (Austria),…
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d532a73d268508909b9c1bef470feed7 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Scott-Carpenter | Scott Carpenter | Scott Carpenter
Scott Carpenter, in full Malcolm Scott Carpenter, (born May 1, 1925, Boulder, Colorado, U.S.—died October 10, 2013, Denver, Colorado), American test pilot and astronaut who was one of the original seven astronauts in NASA’s Project Mercury and the fourth to be launched into space. As the second U.S. astronaut to make an orbital spaceflight, he circled Earth three times on May 24, 1962, in Aurora 7.
Carpenter studied aeronautical engineering at the University of Colorado but left just short of graduation. He entered the U.S. Navy in 1949 and served as a surveillance pilot in the Korean War. He later became a navy test pilot, and he attended the Navy Air Intelligence School in the late 1950s.
NASA selected him as a Mercury astronaut in April 1959. He directed part of the 1962 flight by manual control. It was initially feared that he had not survived the capsule’s atmospheric reentry, but after a 40-minute search it was discovered that he had splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean more than 400 km (about 250 miles) from his projected location. In 1964 he broke his left arm in a motorcycle accident. The resultant inability to rotate his arm properly forced his removal from spaceflight status.
In 1965 Carpenter was detached from the space program to lead two teams in the Sealab II experiment, living and working 205 feet (62.5 metres) under the Pacific Ocean as part of the U.S. Navy’s effort to find better rescue methods for submarines. In 1967 he helped set up Sealab III but retired from naval duty in 1969 to enter private oceanography and energy research.
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6982c48eb81c7198cd32ff580cc126d0 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Scott-E-Fahlman | Scott E. Fahlman | Scott E. Fahlman
…came from American computer scientist Scott E. Fahlman on September 19,1982. He suggested that :-) could indicate humorous posts on a message board and :-( could indicate serious posts.
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a409459ac1a6db34e73be5f36bc7567e | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Scott-Kelly | Scott Kelly | Scott Kelly
Scott Kelly, in full Scott Joseph Kelly, (born February 21, 1964, Orange, New Jersey, U.S.), American astronaut who made four spaceflights, the longest of which lasted 340 days. He is the twin brother of American astronaut and senator Mark Kelly.
Scott Kelly received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the State University of New York Maritime College at Throggs Neck, New York, in 1987. Scott and Mark became pilots in the U.S. Navy in 1987 and 1989, respectively. Both brothers graduated from the U.S. Navy Test Pilot School in Patuxent River, Maryland, in 1994. Scott received a master’s degree in aviation systems from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in 1996.
Scott and Mark Kelly began their astronaut training in August 1996. Scott first flew into space as the pilot of the space shuttle Discovery on the STS-103 mission (December 19–27, 1999), which replaced the gyroscopes and computer on the Hubble Space Telescope. He made a subsequent flight to the International Space Station (ISS) as a mission commander. On the STS-118 mission (August 8–21, 2007) of the space shuttle Endeavour, a truss was added to the ISS.
Scott launched to the ISS on the Russian spacecraft Soyuz TMA-01M on October 8, 2010. He served as a flight engineer on Expedition 25 and became the commander of Expedition 26, which lasted from November 26, 2010, to March 16, 2011. Mark was originally scheduled to arrive at the ISS in February 2011 as commander of the space shuttle Endeavour’s last mission, STS-134, and the Kelly twins would then have become the first siblings in space at the same time. However, delays in launching an earlier mission pushed STS-134’s launch to May 16, 2011.
On March 27, 2015, Scott returned to the ISS aboard Soyuz TMA-16M as part of a special mission in which he and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Korniyenko spent 340 days in space, which was the longest spaceflight by an American astronaut. Scott broke the American record for most cumulative time in space, having spent 520 days in orbit on his four flights. A special part of the mission was the twins study, in which Scott was compared with the earthbound Mark to understand the medical effects of long spaceflight, such as astronauts would experience on a yearlong flight to Mars. Scott and Korniyenko returned to Earth on March 2, 2016. He retired from NASA the following month. Scott published the memoir Endurance: A Year in Space, a Lifetime of Discovery (2017).
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cf2fd5cdb773835a06e82b84f7ef2128 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Scott-McNealy | Scott McNealy | Scott McNealy
…have zero privacy—get over it,” Scott McNealy, the CEO of Sun Microsystems, memorably remarked in 1999 in response to a question at a product show at which Sun introduced a new interactive technology called Jini. Sun’s cheerful Web site promised to usher in the “networked home” of the future, in…
…William Joy, Vinod Khosla, and Scott McNealy founded Sun Microsystems, Inc., in 1982 for the purpose of selling low-cost high-performance desktop computers running the UNIX operating system. Those computer workstations found immediate acceptance among engineers, software developers, and scientists who benefited from having dedicated machines rather than sharing more expensive…
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37d35674e9bd3189bfa1f526e76cdc65 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Scottie-Pippen | Scottie Pippen | Scottie Pippen
Scottie Pippen, (born September 25, 1965, Hamburg, Arkansas, U.S.), American professional basketball player who won six National Basketball Association (NBA) titles (1991–93, 1996–98) as a member of the Chicago Bulls.
Pippen played high school basketball but stood just 6 feet 1 inch (1.85 metres) upon graduation. However, he had grown 2 inches (5 cm) by the time he entered the University of Central Arkansas, where he initially served as manager of the basketball team before earning a spot on the roster. By his senior year he was 6 feet 7 inches (2 metres) tall and was the team’s best player. In 1987 the Seattle SuperSonics selected Pippen in the first round of the NBA draft and traded him to Chicago. During his rookie season (1987–88), he became a regular in the Bulls’ lineup. Pippen possessed a notably multifaceted skill set: his size and strength served him well under the basket, while his ball-handling skills and shooting touch made him a threat from the outside. On defense, his long arms and quick footwork made him an imposing force and helped Pippen earn selection to the NBA’s All-Defensive first team eight times over the course of his career.
When Pippen arrived in Chicago, he was overshadowed by teammate Michael Jordan, who already had been an All-Star in each of his first three years in the NBA. Playing alongside possibly the greatest player of all time, Pippen nevertheless began to draw attention for his own stellar play and was named to the first of seven career All-Star games in 1990. Pippen was a key contributor to the Bulls’ three consecutive NBA championships from 1991 to 1993, and, with Jordan’s retirement after the third title-winning season, Pippen became the primary star on the team. He led the Bulls to a 55–27 record during the 1993–94 season and was named first team All-NBA, but his first season in the spotlight was marred by his refusal to reenter a crucial play-off game with 1.8 seconds remaining because coach Phil Jackson diagrammed the final play to go to another player. Pippen was again first team All-NBA in 1994–95, but his dominance and Jordan’s late-season return to basketball were not enough to advance the Bulls past the second round of the play-offs. Pippen and Jordan were joined by forward Dennis Rodman before the 1995–96 season, and the trio guided the Bulls to another three straight NBA titles (1996–98).
With Jordan’s second retirement and Jackson’s departure from the team, the Bulls entered into rebuilding mode and traded Pippen to the Houston Rockets in 1998. The following year, he was traded to the Portland Trail Blazers, where he had four fairly productive seasons, though no longer at an All-Star level. Before the start of the 2003–04 season, he signed again with Chicago but played only 23 games owing to injuries. In 2004 he retired from the NBA.
Pippen won two Olympic gold medals playing for the U.S. men’s basketball team, including a stint as a member of the famed “Dream Team” at the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona (his second gold came in 1996). He was named one of the 50 greatest players in NBA history in 1996, and he was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2010.
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4b6608d3bdd7f0d7ce01b61e92c22f57 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Scotty-Moore | Scotty Moore | Scotty Moore
…band consisting of Presley, guitarist Scotty Moore, and bassist Bill Black. Their repertoire consisted of the kind of material for which Presley would become famous: blues and country songs, Tin Pan Alley ballads, and gospel hymns. Presley knew some of this music from the radio, some of it from his…
…with producer Sam Phillips, guitarist Scotty Moore, and bassist Bill Black for in Memphis were less about any one style than about a feeling. For decades African Americans had used the term rock and roll as a euphemism for sex, and Presley’s music oozed sexuality. Presley was hardly the only…
…Hotel” was due partly to Scotty Moore’s bluesy electric guitar and D.J. Fontana’s up-front drums, and he kept on experimenting.
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74b07d7d7ee54c69a3e1033218139f54 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sean-F-Lemass | Seán F. Lemass | Seán F. Lemass
Seán F. Lemass, in full Seán Francis Lemass, (born July 15, 1899, Dublin, Ire.—died May 11, 1971, Dublin), Irish patriot and politician, who served as taoiseach (prime minister) of Ireland from 1959 to 1966.
As early as the age of 16, Lemass became a freedom fighter in the streets of Dublin, engaging in the Easter Rising (April 1916) and other hostilities and landing in jail again and again. He opposed the establishment of the Irish Free State as a dominion under the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 and became a member of the headquarters staff of the Irish Republican Army in the civil war of 1922–23. He played a key role in persuading Eamon de Valera to found a new republican party, Fianna Fáil, in 1926. After de Valera rose to the premiership in 1932, Lemass held portfolios in all his cabinets for 21 of the next 27 years, notably as minister of industry and commerce and then as tánaiste (deputy prime minister).
When de Valera became president in 1959, Lemass inherited the office of taoiseach. Under him the country took a more outward-looking approach, and he especially pressed for Ireland’s entry into the European Economic Community (EEC, now the European Community, embedded in the European Union) and for reconciliation with Northern Ireland. Ill health, however, forced him to relinquish the leadership of his party in 1966, and he withdrew from politics in 1969. His greatest legacy, Ireland’s membership in the EEC, was not secured until 1973, after his death.
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eceb16665ae85299d4ce6690d1651c75 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sebastian-Barba-de-Padilla | Sebastián Barba de Padilla | Sebastián Barba de Padilla
…in 1574 by the conquistador Sebastián Barba de Padilla, it was elevated to city status in 1786 and renamed Cochabamba, the Quechua name (Khocha Pampa) for the area, meaning “a plain full of small lakes.” A favourable climate and attractive setting have helped make it one of Bolivia’s largest cities.…
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0bfb1dc1f7b87119b48f0e4f4401e80d | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sebastian-de-Benalcazar | Sebastián de Benalcázar | Sebastián de Benalcázar
Sebastián de Benalcázar, Benalcázar also spelled Belalcázar, or Belaicázar, also called Sebastián Moyano, (born c. 1495, Benalcázar, Spain—died 1551, Cartagena, New Granada [now in Colombia]), Spanish conqueror of Nicaragua, Ecuador, and southwestern Colombia. He captured Quito and founded the cities of Guayaquil in Ecuador and Popayán in Colombia.
Going to the New World in 1519, Benalcázar became an officer in the forces of Pedro Arias Dávila and in 1524 conquered Nicaragua. Joining Francisco Pizarro’s expedition to Peru in 1531, he was given command of the supporting base at Piura. In 1533 he set out to conquer what is now Ecuador. Defeating the Inca chief Rumiñahui, Benalcázar occupied the Indian city of Quito on Dec. 6, 1534. In 1535 he founded a settlement that was later moved to a more healthful site and developed into the modern Guayaquil. Benalcázar led an expedition in search of the mythical Eldorado, believed to be a region abounding in gold. He entered the Popayán region of Colombia, founded the city of Popayán in 1537, and became governor of the district.
The close of Benalcázar’s life was embittered by disputes with other Spanish leaders. He died while under indictment for the killing of one of them, Jorge Robledo.
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9b798023f266ab9d9f94c6508fa5bc1f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sebastian-Lerdo-de-Tejada | Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada | Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada
Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada, (born April 25, 1827, Jalapa, Veracruz, Mex.—died April 1889, New York, N.Y., U.S.), president of Mexico from 1872 to 1876.
Lerdo, orphaned and impoverished as a child, struggled to obtain an education and became professor of jurisprudence and rector of the College of San Ildefonso in Mexico City. A political liberal, he joined Benito Juárez during the period of French intervention in Mexico (1861–67), becoming president of the Tribunal Supremo (Supreme Court) and de facto vice president of the Mexican republic after its restoration in 1867.
After Juárez’ death in 1872, Lerdo became president of Mexico, only to be immediately challenged by Porfirio Díaz, another of Juárez’ lieutenants. Opposed by provincial chieftains who resented Lerdo’s increasingly centralized government, by the church for his connection with the anticlerical reforms of Juárez, and by progressives who criticized his failure to undertake public works, Lerdo was driven into exile by an uprising led by Díaz in 1877.
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efcddcafa4e43b6d81776a74da577ea3 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sebastian-Vizcaino | Sebastián Vizcaíno | Sebastián Vizcaíno
…de Henares in 1602 by Sebastián Vizcaíno. Gaspar de Portolá founded a presidio (military post) there on July 16, 1769, and, on the same day, Father Junípero Serra dedicated the first of the California missions (restored 1931). Settlement was confined inside the presidio walls until the 1820s, when residents began…
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09006f99e800d6db2b8cfdd25801fcd7 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sebastien-Erard | Sébastien Érard | Sébastien Érard
Sébastien Érard, (born April 5, 1752, Strasbourg, Fr.—died Aug. 5, 1831, near Passy), French piano and harp maker whose improvements in both instruments were largely responsible for their modern forms.
The son of a cabinetmaker, Érard was apprenticed to a harpsichord builder in Paris; there, about 1775, he invented a mechanical harpsichord and earned the patronage of the Duchess of Villeroi. At a workshop on her estate he made the first French square piano (1777; a piano with a rectangular case and horizontal stringing). Thereafter, with his brother Jean-Baptiste, he opened his first shop, and success led to the opening of a London branch in 1786.
Eventually the business passed to Sébastien’s nephew Pierre, who continued to enhance the firm’s reputation with mechanical innovations. Among the Érard inventions were a novel grand piano action (key mechanism) that allowed quicker repetition of notes (1809), a double-action pedal harp that allowed greater ease of changing key while playing (1801–10), and new methods of constructing harp and piano frames. The firm had produced about 100,000 instruments by the end of the 19th century and pioneered in building harpsichords in the early 20th century.
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bb244a38e37c52e7ce839a0fb3925e52 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sebestyen-Tinodi | Sebestyén Tinódi | Sebestyén Tinódi
Perhaps the most important was Sebestyén Tinódi, by temperament more historian than poet. He described the wars against the Turks with remarkable accuracy, but his verse was monotonous. Péter Ilosvai Selymes was the author of a romance, Az híres nevezetes Toldi Miklósnak jeles cselekedetiről (1574; “The Story of the Remarkable…
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a4e154abc8c6f9a74dfacae0219f0cc0 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Second-False-Dmitry | Second False Dmitry | Second False Dmitry
Although the second False Dmitry bore no physical resemblance to the first, he gathered a large following among Cossacks, Poles, Lithuanians, and rebels who had already risen against Shuysky. He gained control of southern Russia, marched toward Moscow, and established his headquarters (including a full court and…
…went over to a second False Dmitry, who had ridden a wave of discontent and freebootery from the Cossack south into the centre of Muscovy. A kind of shadow government was formed in the village of Tushino, 9 miles (14 km) west of Moscow, in which the boyars and bureaucrats…
…was unable to prevent the second False Dmitry, who had gained support from Poles, anti-Shuysky boyars, and many of the defeated rebels, from establishing a court and government at Tushino that rivalled Vasily’s (spring 1608). Only with aid obtained from Sweden was Vasily able to restore his control over northern…
…many new pretenders, particularly the Second False Dmitry, who was supported by the Poles, small landholders, and peasants. Claiming to have escaped assassination in 1606 and recognized by the wife of the First False Dmitry as her husband, the new Dmitry established a camp at Tushino (1608) and besieged Moscow…
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a946cab96a0acaeef095a7714fe17425 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Secundus-of-Tigisi | Secundus of Tigisi | Secundus of Tigisi
The primate of Numidia, Secundus of Tigisi, who had acquired in the previous 40 years the right of consecrating the bishop of Carthage, arrived in Carthage with 70 bishops and in solemn council declared Caecilian’s election invalid. The council then appointed a reader (lector), Majorinus, to replace Caecilian.
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356202f5b719b99faf4c9e1ff7ac195f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Seiji-Ozawa | Seiji Ozawa | Seiji Ozawa
Seiji Ozawa, (born September 1, 1935, Hoten, Manchukuo [now in China]), Japanese American conductor especially noted for his energetic style and his sweeping performances of 19th-century Western symphonic works.
Ozawa showed interest in Western music as a child in Japan and hoped to become a pianist. At age 16 he sustained injuries to his hands and turned to conducting, studying with Hideo Saito at the Toho School in Tokyo. After conducting with the NHK (Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai, or Japan Broadcasting System) Symphony Orchestra of Japan and the Japanese Philharmonic, in 1959 he went to Europe, where he won the Besançon International Conductors’ Competition. During the following summer he studied with Charles Munch at the Berkshire Music Center (now Tanglewood [Massachusetts] Music Center). There he won the Koussevitzky Prize, awarded to the best student conductor.
Ozawa was music director of the Ravinia Festival in Chicago from 1964 to 1968, of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra from 1965 to 1969, and of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra from 1970 to 1976. For an extraordinarily long period (1973–2002) Ozawa served as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra; during this period he was guest conductor for major opera and symphony orchestras around the world.
In 1984 he established the Saito Kinen Orchestra to honour his teacher at the Toho School, and in 1992 he cofounded the Saito Kinen Festival in Matsumoto, Japan. He was principal conductor of the Vienna State Opera from 2002 to 2010. Early in 2010 Ozawa underwent surgery for esophageal cancer, which forced him to retreat from the public stage for the better part of the year. Ozawa made his return to public performance at the Saito Kinen Festival that September, conducting the opening movement for each of four orchestral programs. Ongoing health issues continued to severely restrict his performance schedule, but he nonetheless made occasional appearances, notably at the Saito Kinen Festival, which was renamed the Seiji Ozawa Matsumoto Festival in his honour in 2015.
In 2011 Ozawa received the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale prize for music. He was named a Kennedy Center honoree in 2015.
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84ce273eeb3dc05bb1023aaf548d6353 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Seiwa | Seiwa | Seiwa
…the throne as the emperor Seiwa at the age of nine. Yoshifusa, thereupon, had himself appointed regent—the first instance in Japanese history of a person not of royal blood being named to this position. This led to the practice of the Fujiwara persuading emperors to retire at a comparatively early…
…mid-9th century, however, when nine-year-old Seiwa ascended the throne, his maternal grandfather, Fujiwara Yoshifusa, created the office of sesshō, based on the post once held by imperial family members such as the empress Jingū and the princes Nakano Ōe and Shōtoku. Yoshifusa’s son Mototsune became sesshō during the minority of…
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ee39b0a456e9e6dcd81384581bab7f22 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Seki-Takakazu | Seki Takakazu | Seki Takakazu
Seki Takakazu, also called Seki Kōwa, (born c. 1640, Fujioka, Japan—died October 24, 1708, Edo [now Tokyo]), the most important figure of the wasan (“Japanese calculation”) tradition (see mathematics, East Asian: Japan in the 17th century) that flourished from the early 17th century until the opening of Japan to the West in the mid-19th century. Seki was instrumental in recovering neglected and forgotten mathematical knowledge from ancient Chinese sources and then extending and generalizing the main problems.
Little is known about Seki’s life and intellectual formation. He was the second son of Nagaakira Uchiyama, a samurai; he was adopted at an early age by Seki Gorōzaemon, a samurai official with the Bureau of Supply in Edo, to carry on the Seki family name. Seki Takakazu assumed various positions as an examiner of accounts for the lord of Kōfu, Tokugawa Tsunashige (until 1678), and then his son, the future shogun Tokugawa Ienobu (see Tokugawa period). The functions that he carried out were relatively modest, although some anecdotes mention special rewards conferred on him; even though some of these accounts may be disputed, they do suggest that his scientific and technical skills were encouraged.
The exact source of Seki’s early education is unknown, but, as a resident of Edo, the political and cultural centre of the times, he was well placed for access to the latest publications, and his first writings testify to an uncommon knowledge of contemporary mathematics. Zhu Shijie’s Suanxue qimeng (1299; “Introduction to Mathematical Science”), Yang Hui’s Yang Hui suanfa (13th century; “Yang Hui’s Mathematical Methods”), and Cheng Dawei’s Suanfa tongzong (1592; “Systematic Treatise on Arithmetic”) were among the Chinese treatises that inspired him.
Seki’s most productive research was in algebra, a field in which he created powerful new tools and provided many definitive solutions. A concern for generality can be observed throughout his work, especially in his way of reformulating and extending traditional problems. He substituted a tabular notational system for the cumbersome Chinese method of counting rods (see mathematics, East Asian: The Nine Chapters), thereby simplifying the handling of equations in more than one unknown. In his Kaifukudai no hō (1683; “Method for Solving Concealed Problems”) he described some important properties related to such computations. Another topic of Seki’s research was the extraction of roots (solutions) of higher-degree polynomial equations; in Kaiindai no hō (1685; “Method for Solving Hidden Problems”) he described an ancient Chinese method for obtaining a root and extended the method to get all the real roots of the equation.
Because of his disciples’ zealous diffusion of his work, Seki had an immediate impact on his contemporaries. In particular, Takebe Katahiro and his brother Kataaki helped to deepen and consolidate Seki’s work, making it difficult now to apportion credit properly. The publication of Katsuyō sanpō (1712; “Compendium of Mathematics”), containing Seki’s research on the measure of circle and arc, is due to another disciple who used this work to open a Seki School of Mathematics—a prestigious centre that attracted the best mathematicians in the country until the 19th century.
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b1308531c0db44911ed2539db5711d2e | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Selena-American-singer | Selena | Selena
…after the popular Tejano singer Selena Quintanilla-Perez, was raised in suburban Dallas. Inspired by her mother, an amateur actress, Gomez tried out for a role on the PBS children’s television series Barney & Friends and, as a result, appeared regularly on the program in 2002–04. After making her big-screen debut…
Grupo’s most famous performer, Selena, became an international celebrity before being killed in 1995. A reflection of the growing Mexican American cultural pride in the last half of the 20th century, all three forms of Tejano have continued their popularity into the 21st century.
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558b6ad8624d755e036c5e70f8ef6151 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Seleucus-IV-Philopator | Seleucus IV Philopator | Seleucus IV Philopator
Seleucus IV Philopator, (born c. 217 bc—died 175 bc), seventh king (reigned 187–175 bc) of the Seleucid dynasty, son of Antiochus III the Great.
Although the empire that Seleucus inherited was not so great as the one over which his father had ruled before the war with Rome (190–189), it was still large, consisting of Syria (including Cilicia and Palestine), Mesopotamia, Babylonia, and nearer Iran (Media and Persia). Because of financial difficulties, created in part by the heavy war indemnity exacted by Rome, Seleucus was compelled to pursue a policy devoid of expensive adventures. His unambitious policy and care were also dictated by the fact that his son and heir, Demetrius, had been sent to Rome as a hostage for his father. When Seleucus was assassinated in 175 by his chief minister Heliodorus, his brother Antiochus seized the throne.
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628810c0e407424639fa45f2ac22e032 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Semseddin-Yaman-Candar | Şemseddin Yaman Candar | Şemseddin Yaman Candar
…dynasty took its name from Şemseddin Yaman Candar, who served in the army of the Seljuq sultan Masʿūd II (reigned 1283–98) and was awarded the Eflani region, west of Kastamonu, in return for his services. Candar’s son Süleyman captured Kastamonu and Sinop and in 1314 accepted the suzerainty of the…
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303f8c1811ac1b5526c8d60842edd975 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Senenmut | Senenmut | Senenmut
The sculptures of Senenmut, steward of Hatshepsut, exemplify the development. At least 23 votive statues (some fragmentary) of this royal favourite are known, exhibiting many different forms.
…Mentuhotep II, the queen’s architect Senenmut designed (c. 1473) a series of colonnades and courts on three levels. The approach from the valley led through an avenue of sphinxes, and in the forecourt was a garden planted with trees and vines. On either side of the sloping ramp leading to…
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40f15ef63bd617f0341142474b5373ab | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sengzhao | Sengzhao | Sengzhao
…result of the teachings of Sengzhao, Kumarajiva’s disciple, and later of Jizang. Both of these Chinese Madhyamika masters commented on Nagarjuna’s thesis in numerous influential works.
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473f6e7b17adbf5c00dda7bc2f67c736 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Senkei | Senkei | Senkei
…discipline through the influence of Senkei, a Buddhist priest and master of the Ikenobō school.
…introduced by the Ikenobō master Senkei around 1460. The early rikka style symbolized the mythical Mt. Meru of Buddhist cosmology. Rikka represented seven elements: peak, waterfall, hill, foot of the mountain, and the town, and the division of the whole into in (shade) and yō (sun). (In Chinese the characters…
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a3a7959a7079e332d9174e6a2638e608 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Senzangakona | Senzangakona | Senzangakona
Shaka was the son of Senzangakona, chieftain of the Zulu, and Nandi, an orphaned princess of the neighbouring Langeni clan. Because his parents belonged to the same clan, their marriage violated Zulu custom, and the stigma of this extended to the child. The couple separated when Shaka was six, and…
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b7d74d2c10e2f7c2d2f972dadf935380 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Serafin-Alvarez-Quintero | Serafín Álvarez Quintero | Serafín Álvarez Quintero
Spanish brothers who collaborated in almost 200 dramas depicting the life, manners, and speech of Andalusia. Serafín Álvarez Quintero (b. March 26, 1871, Utrera, Sevilla, Spain—d. April 12, 1938, Madrid) and Joaquín Álvarez Quintero (b. Jan. 20, 1873, Utrera, Sevilla, Spain—d. June 14, 1944, Madrid)…
Serafín and Joaquín Alvarez Quintero appropriated the latter’s popular costumbrista setting for comedy, while Carlos Arniches developed it in satirical pieces (often compared with the 18th-century sainete) and Pedro Muñoz Seca used it in popular farces. More-intellectual theatrical experiments by Unamuno attempted the drama of…
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fe60a6c1ca2b3287026d3f390afe6c11 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Serge-Poliakoff | Serge Poliakoff | Serge Poliakoff
Serge Poliakoff, (born Jan. 8, 1906, Moscow—died Oct. 13, 1969, Paris), painter and lithographer, one of the most widely recognized of the abstract colourists who flourished after World War II.
Educated in Moscow and London, he left Russia in 1918 and resided in Sofia, Belgrade, Vienna, and Berlin until 1923, when he made Paris his permanent home. First a guitarist and then a figurative painter, he was converted to abstract art by the examples of Robert Delaunay and Wassily Kandinsky, both of whom he met in 1937. Poliakoff held his first one-man Paris exhibition in 1945.
His abstractions generally consist of irregular, adjoining geometric shapes in striking, self-revealing colours. Technical and decorative in conception, they earned Poliakoff a significant place among the postwar abstract painters.
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cea8ab29b4f54b53a1a902113b8fe4c5 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sergey-Bubka | Sergey Bubka | Sergey Bubka
Sergey Bubka, Ukrainian Serhiy Bubka, (born December 14, 1963, Voroshilovgrad, Ukraine, U.S.S.R. [now Luhansk, Ukraine]), Ukrainian athlete, the first pole-vaulter to clear 6.1 metres (20 feet).
Bubka began pole-vaulting at age 9. When his coach, Vitaly Petrov, was transferred to Donetsk, Ukraine, Bubka, at age 15, followed. Bubka won the pole vault at the 1983 world track-and-field championships in Helsinki, Finland, with a vault of 5.7 metres (18 feet 8.25 inches). In subsequent years, Bubka changed the standards of pole-vaulting, setting numerous world records.
Bubka first cleared 6 metres (19 feet 8.25 inches), long considered an unattainable height, in Paris on July 13, 1985. In 1988 in Nice, France, he neared the 6.1-metre barrier with a vault of 6.06 metres (19 feet 10.5 inches), which was his second world record in five weeks. Bubka was unable to better his leap at the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul, but his vault of 5.9 metres (19 feet 4.25 inches) won the gold medal. Bubka had increased the world record by 21 cm (8.25 inches) between 1984 and 1988, a greater gain in 4 years than other pole-vaulters had achieved in the previous 12. During this period he was named the Soviet Union’s top sportsman three years in a row (1984–86).
In 1991 in San Sebastián, Spain, he became the first pole-vaulter to jump 6.1 metres, but a year later, at the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona, Bubka failed to place in the event. In 1994 in Sestriere, Italy, he broke his previous world record with a jump of 6.14 metres (20 feet 1.75 inches). Bubka attended the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, but an injury prevented him from competing. In 1997, however, Bubka won an unprecedented sixth world championship in pole vaulting. At the 2000 Games in Sydney, Bubka competed but failed to qualify for the final. He retired from competition and became an active member of the International Olympic Committee.
Bubka’s speed and strength enabled him to use poles that were unusually long and stiff for better catapulting action. He was noted for a vaulting style in which he gripped his pole several inches higher than other competitors.
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570fdf68db7922e87f50032006d79405 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sergey-Ivanovich-Muravyov-Apostol | Sergey Ivanovich Muravyov-Apostol | Sergey Ivanovich Muravyov-Apostol
Sergey Ivanovich Muravyov-Apostol, Muravyov-Apostol also spelled Muravev-apostol, (born Sept. 28 [Oct. 9, New Style], 1796, St. Petersburg, Russia—died July 13 [July 25], 1826, St. Petersburg), Russian army officer and republican, executed for his leading role in the Decembrist (Dekabrist) uprising of 1825–26.
The son of a diplomat and writer, Muravyov-Apostol graduated from the St. Petersburg Institute of Railway Engineers and fought against the French invasion of Russia in 1812 and in subsequent foreign campaigns. He was among the founders of the Union of Salvation and was a company commander in the Semenovskoye Guards regiment at the time of its uprising in 1820, after which he was transferred to the regiment at Chernigov (now Chernihiv, Ukraine).
In 1822 he was recruited to the radical, antimonarchical Southern Society of the Decembrist movement, in which he played an active role thenceforth. He soon became head of its Vasilkov council and was instrumental, along with M.P. Bestuzhev-Ryumin, in its merger with the Society of United Slavs in 1825. He participated in a number of plans for uprisings by the military during 1823–25 and, by late 1825, had come to advocate the assassination of the tsar.
In November 1825 he was appointed director of the Southern Society, and by December 20 he was planning a military uprising in southern Russia when he learned of the defeat of the Northern Society’s revolt on December 14. He organized and led the December 29 rebellion of about 1,100 officers and troops of the Chernigov regiment, who were crushed by loyal government forces on Jan. 3, 1826. During the battle Muravyov-Apostol was seriously wounded, and he was later one of the five Decembrist leaders to be hanged.
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0ea9f0ad0054cb48f8ed80d704c6cf85 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sergey-Lukyanenko | Sergey Lukyanenko | Sergey Lukyanenko
Sergey Lukyanenko, in full Sergey Vasilyevich Lukyanenko, (born April 11, 1968, Karatau, Kazakhstan, U.S.S.R. [now in Kazakhstan]), Russian author of science fiction and fantasy, best known for his six-volume Night Watch series, a seminal body of work in the genre of urban fantasy.
Lukyanenko was the son of a Russian Ukrainian father and a Tatar mother. He completed his secondary education in the town of Dzhambul, Kazakhstan, and continued his studies (1986–92) at the Alma-Ata State Medical Institute (now Kazakh National Medical University), where he graduated with a degree in psychotherapy. Though trained as a child psychiatrist, he soon abandoned the medical profession to pursue a career as a writer. Influenced by Russian authors such as Vladislav Krapivin and the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky as well as American counterparts Robert A. Heinlein and Stephen King, Lukyanenko began writing in the mid-1980s. He garnered a fan base as well as critical attention with his early collections, including Lord s planety Zemlya (1992; “A Lord from the Planet Earth”), Ostrov Rus (1993–94; “Island of Russia”), coauthored with Julius Burkin, and the immensely popular Labirint otrazheny (1996–2000; “Labyrinth of Reflections”), which evolved into a cult classic in Russia and earned Lukyanenko near-legendary status as a writer.
Lukyanenko solidified his reputation with the publication of the Night Watch series, which offered a futuristic vision of life in post-Soviet Moscow: “bleak and cold and made grim by economic malaise, a calcified political system, and the massive corruption unleashed by the fall of the Soviet Union and subsequent ‘liberalization.’ ” The initial volume, Nochnoy dozor (1998; Night Watch), transformed him into a literary celebrity, and the 2004 screen adaptation, directed by Timur Bekmambetov, set a box-office record at the time as the highest-grossing film in Russian cinematic history. Lukyanenko’s follow-up, Dnevnoy dozor (2000; Day Watch), coauthored with Vladimir Vasilyev, was adapted by Bekmambetov in 2006. The other books in the series include Sumerechny dozor (2004; Twilight Watch), Posledny dozor (2006; Last Watch), Novy dozor (2012; New Watch), and Shestoy dozor (2015; Sixth Watch).
Lukyanenko was the recipient of numerous literary prizes in Russia; in 1999 he became the youngest writer to win the prestigious Aelita Award for his contribution to science fiction. He likened literature to a “fantasy of ideas” and simplified his affinity for his craft as a sense of wonderment: “What draws me to science fiction is mystery. What would happen if Earth were visited by aliens—kind and good sort of aliens—that put up Star Gates all over the planet, so that we could travel anywhere we wished?”
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940142185dad593a8dec749a4b6ebe21 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sergey-Vasilyevich-Zubatov | Sergey Vasilyevich Zubatov | Sergey Vasilyevich Zubatov
Sergey Vasilyevich Zubatov, (born 1864, Moscow, Russia—died March 15 [March 2, Old Style], 1917, Moscow), tsarist colonel of the Russian gendarmes known for his establishment of a system of surveillance to monitor the activities of revolutionary organizations.
Zubatov became an agent of the Moscow department of the Okhranka, the tsarist secret police that was a division of the Ministry of the Interior, in 1884. From 1896 to 1902 he was the head of the Moscow Okhranka.
Between 1901 and 1903 Zubatov established the legal progovernment workers’ organizations that were later given his name. His tactic is now referred to as Zubatovism, or Zubatovshchina. The aim of these organizations was to divert workers from social agitation by drawing them into organizations making purely economic demands for reform and operating under the secret surveillance of the police. The first of these societies was the Society of Mutual Aid of Workers in Mechanical Production, created in 1901 in Moscow and followed in the same year by the Jewish Independent Workers Party in Minsk and Vilna. The rhetoric of their organizers caused the radical press to brand the movement “police socialism.” On Feb. 19, 1902, these organizations held a mass demonstration at the monument to Alexander II.
As Zubatov’s organizations attracted more workers, they became more difficult to control. After a series of demonstrations degenerated into the general strike of 1903, the organizations were liquidated, and Zubatov, who had also been involved in unsuccessful intrigues against the interior minister, was relieved of his duties and banished to Vladimir.
His banishment was rescinded the following year. During the revolution of 1917, fearing that he would be the victim of the revolutionaries, Zubatov shot himself.
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b87dab34ad16dd31c289e09eb37ab07a | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sergey-Yulyevich-Graf-Witte/Legacy | Legacy | Legacy
Witte’s reputation was at first eclipsed through the collapse of tsarism, but he is now appreciated as a successor to Peter I the Great in the drive to modernize a backward empire and as a forerunner of the Communists in the policy of implementing an industrial revolution from above. The “Witte period” of 1892–1903 may well be compared to the period of the First Five-Year Plan. But Witte worked in an unsympathetic political context that was perhaps incompatible with industrialization and by which he was ultimately defeated.
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5233433dc7004a24e71eb65dee7c3a42 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sergius | Sergius | Sergius
Sergius, Russian Sergy, original name Ivan Nikolayevich Stragorodsky, (born Jan. 23, 1867, Arzamas, Novgorod region, Russia—died May 15, 1944, Moscow), theologian and patriarch of Moscow and the Russian Orthodox church who, by his leadership in rallying the church membership in a united effort with the Soviet government to repel the German invasion of 1941, obtained substantial advantages for the church in the postwar period.
The son of an Orthodox priest, Ivan Stragorodsky became a monk after his theological studies, taking the name Sergius, and was nominated successively to several bishoprics, including Finland in 1905 and Nizhny Novgorod, where he became metropolitan, or archbishop, in 1917. Elected a member of the Holy Synod, or Orthodox administrative-theological council, Sergius supported the pro-Soviet schismatic faction of the clergy, called the “Living Church,” in 1922–23, during the political imprisonment of the Moscow patriarch Tikhon, but he publicly repudiated the affiliation after Tikhon’s release in June 1923. Sergius went into exile at the patriarch’s death in 1925 but returned two years later. After a brief imprisonment he was made patriarchal administrator when he influenced the Orthodox Synod to issue a declaration of solidarity with the Soviet regime, enjoining the faithful to dutifully support the system and directing the clergy to declare their political loyalty or face deposition. Objecting to political pressure, a conservative Orthodox group, the Josephites, led by metropolitan Joseph of Leningrad, refused to recognize Sergius’ authority.
During World War II, Sergius directed financial drives to outfit Russian tank units and assisted in setting up field hospitals and refuges for the homeless. With the archbishops of Leningrad and Kiev, he was called to an audience with the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin on Sept. 4, 1943, to reach an agreement normalizing church-state relations, the first since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. He received permission to open a limited number of religious schools and to convene on September 8 a national synod that elected him patriarch of Moscow and all Russia. The acknowledged status thus given the Russian Orthodox effectively neutralized any claim of legitimacy by the schismatic “Living Church.”
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3e7a3171041c277d9ac3e18d3bbe056c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sergius-I | Sergius I | Sergius I
Sergius I, (died Dec. 9, 638, Constantinople [now Istanbul, Tur.]), Greek Orthodox theologian and patriarch of Constantinople (610–638), one of the most forceful and independent churchmen to hold that office, who not only supported the emperor Heraclius (610–641) in the victorious defense of the Eastern Roman Empire against Persian and Avar invaders but also strove in the Christological controversy to achieve doctrinal unity throughout Eastern Christendom by submitting a compromise formula, later condemned as unorthodox.
Assisting Heraclius in his campaigns of 622–28 with moral support and with the donation of the church treasury, Sergius functioned as regent and galvanized Byzantine resistance to enemy attacks west and east of Constantinople while the emperor was taking the field against the Persians in the outer provinces.
In religious matters, particularly concerning Christology, Sergius was preoccupied in reconciling dissident monophysite Christians with the orthodox decrees of the general council of Chalcedon (451). The monophysites, however, steadfastly resisted Sergius’ indoctrination because he continued to maintain a functional humanity in Christ. About 633 Sergius won recognition for his theory of monoenergism (that though Christ had two natures, there was but one operation or energy) from Heraclius, who then ordered that doctrine propagated throughout the Byzantine Empire. Further support came about 633 from Cyrus, patriarch of Alexandria, Egypt. Though at first tolerated by Pope Honorius I (625–638), who responded to Sergius’ appeal that the terminology needed clarification, monoenergism met strong opposition led by Sophronius, patriarch of Jerusalem, and later was definitively rejected by both the Latin and Greek churches at the third Council of Constantinople (680/681). Still seeking a mediatory solution, Sergius formulated in 638 the doctrine of monothelitism, which asserted that Christ has both divine and human natures but only one (divine) will. Although this teaching was incorporated in Heraclius’ imperial edict, the Ecthesis, that same year, it was repudiated by both monophysite and Orthodox parties, and later the Latin church declared it heretical at a Roman council in 649.
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776cab226b1a06869fc72243da224cab | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sergius-IV-pope | Sergius IV | Sergius IV
Sergius IV, original name Pietro Buccaporci, byname Bucca Porci (“Pig’s Snout”), (born, Luna, Tuscany [Italy]—died May 12, 1012, Rome), pope from 1009 to 1012. He became bishop of Albano, Papal States, about 1004. Elected to succeed Pope John XVIII, he was consecrated on July 31, 1009; he changed his name from Peter to Sergius out of deference to the first pope. He was powerless in the hands of the Roman nobles and the patrician Crescentius II, head of the Crescentii, an infamously powerful Roman family that manipulated the papacy from the mid-10th to the early 11th century.
While temporally weak, Sergius was particularly noted for his aid to the poor and for granting privileges to several monasteries. After his death there was speculation that he had been murdered. He was buried in the St. John Lateran Basilica, Rome.
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4d5776825399d9783b368d51268c4b7d | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sesostris-II | Sesostris II | Sesostris II
Sesostris II, (flourished 19th century bce), king of ancient Egypt (reigned 1844–37 bce) of the 12th dynasty (1938–c. 1756) who devoted himself to the peaceful exploitation of Nubia, Egypt’s territory to the south, and initiated the development of Al-Fayyūm, a great oasis-like depression west of the Nile River and southwest of Cairo.
Following the established practice of his dynasty, Sesostris spent three years as his father’s coregent. In year 1 of this period, a trading expedition to Punt—on the east African coast—recorded its trip on the rocks at Egypt’s Red Sea port.
Early in Sesostris’s sole reign, the fortresses of Lower Nubia, built by the king’s grandfather, were inspected, and in year 6 the fort at Aniba, near the gold-mining region of Nubia, was rebuilt. As attested by commemorative stelae and inscriptions, diorite, copper, and possibly amethysts were extracted at a number of sites in Nubia. Inscriptions at Sinai indicate that the king’s miners were also active there.
Contacts with Palestine and Syria were also maintained, as is shown by the scene of Asiatic traders in a provincial tomb at Beni Hasan, in Middle Egypt. During this reign the noble family at this site increased its influence through intermarriage with neighbouring potentates.
Sesostris’s greatest achievement was his beginning of the development of Al-Fayyūm, the rich area near the royal residence. There, where the lake in Al-Fayyūm received its inflow from a branch stream off the Nile, the king constructed waterworks that were designed to regulate the lake’s level and partly reclaim the marshy ground around its shores. The project was later widely extended by Amenemhet III.
Nearby at Al-Lāhūn, Sesostris built his pyramid, which exhibits great craftsmanship; part of the workmen’s village has survived, yielding town-planning evidence and documents that reveal something of Egypt’s social conditions.
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2ec0e785e49ba44cbf220c846bac21ab | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Setthathirat-I | Setthathirat I | Setthathirat I
Setthathirat I, also called Sai Setthathirat I, or Setthavong, (born 1534—died 1571, southern Laos), sovereign of the Lao kingdom of Lan Xang who prevented it from falling under Burmese domination and whose reign was marked by notable achievements in domestic and foreign affairs.
As the son of King Photisarath, Setthathirat was placed on the throne of the principality of Chiang Mai (now in northern Thailand) in 1546. When Photisarath died in the following year, Setthathirat returned to Laos to assume his father’s throne but remained king of Chiang Mai until 1551. He made Vientiane his capital in 1560 and had the Emerald Buddha—a green jasper statue of the Buddha and the most sacred object of Chiang Mai—brought there, where he built a majestic temple to house it. He continued his father’s policy of promoting Buddhism by edict, and it flourished during his reign.
Setthathirat married a princess from Ayutthaya (Thailand) and formed a political alliance with the Thai against their common enemy, Burma. During a Burmese invasion in about 1565, Setthathirat’s military strategy preserved the autonomy of his kingdom. Still regarded by the Lao as a national hero, Setthathirat is a central figure in the spiritual cult of some mountain peoples in southern Laos.
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3df2e8e0d2c6d1aadb64337d1d36071b | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Seve-Ballesteros | Seve Ballesteros | Seve Ballesteros
Seve Ballesteros, in full Severiano Ballesteros, (born April 9, 1957, Pedreña, Spain—died May 7, 2011, Pedreña), Spanish golfer who was one of the sport’s most prominent figures in the 1970s and ’80s. He was known for his flamboyant and imaginative style of play and accumulated more than 85 wins in international golf tournaments, including 50 European Tour victories and 5 major championships.
Ballesteros, one of four brothers who became professional golfers, was a precocious talent. He started playing at age 7 and went pro at age 16, in 1974. His fame was secured when he tied with Jack Nicklaus for second place at the 1976 British Open (Open Championship) at Royal Birkdale, behind Johnny Miller. Also that year he received the Professional Golfers’ Association of America (PGA) European Tour’s Order of Merit (as the season’s top moneymaker), which he would eventually be awarded six times. He won his first Masters Tournament in 1980 and followed with a second win in 1983. Two years later he was on the European team that broke American dominance of the prestigious Ryder Cup, marking Europe’s first victory in that event. His other victories included three British Open wins (1979, 1984, and 1988) and five World Match Play Championships (1981, 1982, 1984, 1985, and 1991).
Ballesteros was elected to the World Golf Hall of Fame in 1999, and the following year he was named European Player of the Century. Back problems as well as personal issues kept him largely out of play over the next several years, and in 2007 he made his retirement official. In October 2008 he began receiving treatment for a cancerous brain tumour.
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a3f4168cb74183035e6484c14f85912a | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Severo-Ochoa | Severo Ochoa | Severo Ochoa
Severo Ochoa, (born Sept. 24, 1905, Luarca, Spain—died Nov. 1, 1993, Madrid), biochemist and molecular biologist who received (with the American biochemist Arthur Kornberg) the 1959 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for discovery of an enzyme in bacteria that enabled him to synthesize ribonucleic acid (RNA), a substance of central importance to the synthesis of proteins by the cell.
Ochoa was educated at the University of Madrid, where he received his M.D. in 1929. He then spent two years studying the biochemistry and physiology of muscle under the German biochemist Otto Meyerhof at the University of Heidelberg. He also served as head of the physiology division, Institute for Medical Research, at the University of Madrid (1935). He investigated the function in the body of thiamine (vitamin B1) at the University of Oxford (1938–41) and became a research associate in medicine (1942) and professor of pharmacology (1946) at New York University, New York City, where he became professor of biochemistry and chairman of the department in 1954. From 1974 to 1985 he was associated with the Roche Institute of Molecular Biology; thereafter he taught at the Autonomous University of Madrid. Ochoa became a U.S. citizen in 1956.
Ochoa made the discovery for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1955, while conducting research on high-energy phosphates. He named the enzyme he discovered polynucleotide phosphorylase. It was subsequently determined that the enzyme’s function is to degrade RNA, not synthesize it; under test-tube conditions, however, it runs its natural reaction in reverse. The enzyme has been singularly valuable in enabling scientists to understand and re-create the process whereby the hereditary information contained in genes is translated, through RNA intermediaries, into enzymes that determine the functions and character of each cell.
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d12e62d07ecb30a9b876440a1d386996 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sewall-Wright | Sewall Wright | Sewall Wright
Sewall Wright, (born Dec. 21, 1889, Melrose, Mass., U.S.—died March 3, 1988, Madison, Wis.), American geneticist, one of the founders of population genetics. He was the brother of the political scientist Quincy Wright.
Wright was educated at Lombard College, Galesburg, Ill., and at the University of Illinois, Urbana, and, after earning his doctorate in zoology at Harvard University (Sc.D., 1915), he worked as a senior animal husbandman for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (1915–25). He was a professor at the University of Chicago (1926–54) and then at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (1955–60). He continued to publish scientific papers after his retirement.
Wright’s earliest studies included investigation of the effects of inbreeding and crossbreeding among guinea pigs, animals that he later used in studying the effects of gene action on coat and eye colour, among other inherited characters. Along with the British scientists J.B.S. Haldane and R.A. Fisher, Wright was one of the scientists who developed a mathematical basis for modern evolutionary theory, using statistical techniques toward this end. He also originated a theory that could guide the use of inbreeding and crossbreeding in the improvement of livestock. Wright is perhaps best known for his concept of genetic drift, called the Sewall Wright effect, which says that when small populations of a species are isolated, out of pure chance the few individuals who carry certain relatively rare genes may fail to transmit them. The genes may therefore disappear and their loss may lead to the emergence of new species, although natural selection has played no part in the process.
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2aed9cb6a1f5741c8ad43a43a02a0e89 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sextus-Afranius-Burrus | Sextus Afranius Burrus | Sextus Afranius Burrus
Sextus Afranius Burrus, (died ad 62), praetorian prefect (51–62) and, with Seneca, the chief adviser of the Roman emperor Nero (reigned 54–68).
Burrus came from Vasio (now Vaison, France). After brief service in the army, he held posts in the households of Livia (the widow of the emperor Augustus) and the emperors Tiberius and Claudius; he probably worked in the household of Caligula as well. After Julia (also called Agrippina the Younger) married Claudius (49), she secured Burrus’s appointment as sole prefect of the Praetorian Guard (there were usually two prefects), whose loyalty he ensured when in 54 Nero succeeded to the throne at age 16. Burrus, in cooperation with Seneca, at first submitted to Agrippina but then removed her from power. Although unwilling to endorse her assassination by Nero in 59, Burrus again kept the Praetorian Guard loyal after her murder. Burrus and Seneca, who had been largely responsible for formulating Nero’s policies at the beginning of his reign, gradually lost influence. When Burrus died in 62, it was alleged that Nero had poisoned him, and Seneca was moved to resign immediately.
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d535cc1c390c435645f8913b21095bb4 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sextus-Aurelius-Victor | Sextus Aurelius Victor | Sextus Aurelius Victor
The works of Sextus Aurelius Victor and Eutropius, who ably abridged earlier historical works, are fairly accurate and more reliable than the Scriptores historiae Augustae, a collection of imperial biographies of unequal value, undoubtedly composed under Theodosius but for an unknown purpose. Erudition was greatly prized in aristocratic…
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af23b36de85547f238463f55e276aa87 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sextus-Empiricus | Sextus Empiricus | Sextus Empiricus
Sextus Empiricus, (flourished 3rd century), ancient Greek philosopher-historian who produced the only extant comprehensive account of Greek Skepticism in his Outlines of Pyrrhonism and Against the Mathematicians.
As a major exponent of Pyrrhonistic “suspension of judgment,” Sextus elaborated the 10 tropes of Aenesidemus and attacked syllogistic proofs in every area of speculative knowledge. Almost all details of his life are conjectural except that he was a medical doctor and headed a Skeptical school during the decline of Greek Skepticism. The first printing of his Outlines in 1562 had far-reaching effects on European philosophical thought. Indeed, much of the philosophy of the 17th and 18th centuries can be interpreted in terms of diverse efforts to grapple with the ancient Skeptical arguments handed down through Sextus.
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565469ec498be6bf12be70fedbd55099 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Seymour-Cassel | Seymour Cassel | Seymour Cassel
…wife with a hippie (Seymour Cassel). Originally six hours long, the film was painstakingly edited down over the next two years to slightly more than two hours and released in 1968 to rave reviews. Cassavetes received an Academy Award nomination for his screenplay, and Carlin and Cassel were nominated…
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eac60c80e60094a908031ade23d940f1 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Seymour-Hersh | Seymour Hersh | Seymour Hersh
Seymour Hersh, in full Seymour Myron Hersh, (born April 8, 1937, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.), American journalist whose reporting generally focused on the U.S. government and its involvement abroad. He was especially noted for his investigations into the My Lai Massacre and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.
Hersh was the son of Polish and Lithuanian immigrants whose deep belief in American democracy had long informed his idealistic muckraking. After graduating from the University of Chicago (1958) and dropping out of law school, he landed at the City News Bureau of Chicago. Following military service, Hersh cofounded a suburban newspaper and then worked for United Press International and the Associated Press before a brief stint in 1967 as press secretary for presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy. In 1969, acting on a tip, Hersh interviewed U.S. Army Lieut. William L. Calley, who recounted the killing in March 1968 of hundreds of South Vietnamese villagers in the hamlet of My Lai by U.S. troops under his command. Hersh’s syndicated account helped end U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War (1954–75) and provided the basis for his Pulitzer Prize-winning book My Lai 4 (1970).
Joining the staff of the New York Times in 1972, Hersh did groundbreaking reporting on the Watergate scandal, though most of the credit for that story went to Carl Bernstein and Hersh’s longtime rival Bob Woodward. Nonetheless, Hersh’s investigation led him to write The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (1983), a damning portrait of Henry Kissinger that won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Among the subjects of Hersh’s other books were the Soviet downing of a Korean Air Lines plane, Israel’s acquisition of nuclear arms, and a much-criticized behind-the-scenes portrayal of Pres. John F. Kennedy.
In 1993 Hersh became a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine, for which he wrote a series of articles on the war on terrorism and the U.S.-led war in Iraq (2003–11). Those articles—later collected in Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib (2004)—culminated in Hersh’s earthshaking exposé of inmate abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, which he traced beyond the U.S. soldiers involved to policy formulated at the highest levels of the administration of Pres. George W. Bush. Hersh characterized Bush’s prosecution of the war as the product of misguided neoconservative idealism. Having built his career on earning the trust of sources (usually unnamed) in the government, the military, and the intelligence community, Hersh described his mission as holding public officials “to the highest possible standard of decency and of honesty.”
In May 2015 Hersh made headlines again with his allegations— published in an article in the London Review of Books that cited Pakistani and anonymous U.S. sources—that officials of the U.S. and Pakistani governments, including U.S. Pres. Barack Obama, had lied regarding details of the 2011 raid on the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in which Osama bin Laden, leader of al-Qaeda, was killed. Among the allegations made by Hersh was that the Pakistani intelligence service had been holding bin Laden prisoner since 2006 and that Pakistani officials knew about the raid before it happened. The Central Intelligence Agency and the Obama administration denied the allegations.
In the course of his career, Hersh was the recipient of numerous honours. In addition to a Pulitzer Prize, he also garnered five George Polk Awards. The memoir Reporter was published in 2018.
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52871a261bf2975d085c75efe558dac0 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Seyni-Kountche | Seyni Kountché | Seyni Kountché
…later became aide-de-camp to President Seyni Kountché. Extremely loyal to the president, Maïnassara was appointed commander of the Presidential Guard in 1976 and in 1978 was given charge of the army’s prestigious airborne regiment. He held a series of overseas posts, including military attaché to the Nigerois embassy in Paris…
…military dictatorship headed first by Seyni Kountché (until his death in 1987) and then by Ali Seibou. Mahamane Ousmane of the Social Democratic Convention became president in the country’s first multiparty presidential elections in 1993. Meanwhile, a Tuareg rebellion that had begun in the northern part of the country in…
…chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel Seyni Kountché. Diori was imprisoned by the new government from 1974 to 1980 and then held under house arrest until 1987.
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8ce4936b00878193af4a149cf1a33a83 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Shabonee | Shabonee | Shabonee
Shabonee, also spelled Shabbona, (born c. 1775, near Maumee River [Ohio, U.S.]—died July 17, 1859, Morris, Ill., U.S.), Potawatomi Indian chief, hero of a Paul Revere-style ride through northern Illinois in 1832, the purpose of which was to warn white settlers of an imminent Indian raid during the Black Hawk War.
By birth an Ottawa Indian, Shabonee married the daughter of a Potawatomi chief and succeeded him as tribal leader. Although an adherent of Tecumseh, whom he had assisted in forming an intertribal confederation, he was disinclined to violence against whites and is credited with saving many northern Illinois residents from death in the Indian massacre of August 1812. He also assumed a protective role during the Winnebago uprising of 1827. He was ill repaid for his efforts; legal maneuvers by whites deprived him of his land. Shabbona State Park in LaSalle County, Ill., established in 1906, is named in his honour.
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