id stringlengths 32 32 | url stringlengths 31 1.58k | title stringlengths 0 1.02k | contents stringlengths 92 1.17M |
|---|---|---|---|
672b4be0c71c75fd29f90abb3a716093 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sonal-Mansingh | Sonal Mansingh | Sonal Mansingh
Sonal Mansingh, (born April 30, 1944, Bombay [now Mumbai], India), dancer of odissi, a classical Indian dance form that originated in Orissa, and other Indian classical forms. Apart from being a dancer, she was also a teacher, researcher, choreographer, and social activist.
Mansingh’s initial lessons in dance were in manipuri and bharata natyam styles as a child. She began her professional dance career in the early 1960s. In 1965 she started training under odissi guru Kelucharan Mohapatra in Cuttack. She did not limit her study, exploring various elements of Oriyan culture and dance forms such as chhau and kuchipudi. She also underwent extensive training in abhinaya (gesture expression). Mansingh was trained in Hindustani and Carnatic classical vocal music and was proficient in the Sanskrit and German languages.
In 1977 she founded the Centre for Indian Classical Dances in Delhi. Her choreography was often rooted in Indian mythology, though she also explored contemporary topics such as women’s issues and environmentalism. Mansingh was often invited to teach and perform internationally and traveled extensively both in India and abroad.
For her work, Mansingh was the recipient of many awards, including the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award (1987) and the Padma Bhushan (1992) and Padma Vibhushan (2003), two of India’s highest civilian honours.
|
e284ab47c8cd58a6b5f971caf9cfa160 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sonia-Delaunay | Sonia Delaunay | Sonia Delaunay
Sonia Delaunay, original name Sofia Ilinitchna Terk, (born November 14, 1885, Gradizhsk, Ukraine, Russian Empire [now Ukraine]—died December 5, 1979, Paris, France), Russian painter, illustrator, and textile designer who was a pioneer of abstract art in the years before World War I.
Delaunay grew up in St. Petersburg. She studied drawing in Karlsruhe, Germany, and in 1905 moved to Paris, where she was influenced by the Post-Impressionists and the Fauvists. She married the artist Robert Delaunay in 1910, by which time she was painting in the style known as Orphism, which involved the harmonious juxtaposition of areas of pure colour. She extended Orphist principles to the design of fabrics, pottery decoration, stage sets, and other applied arts. Among her most important works were her Orphist illustrations for a poem by Blaise Cendrars entitled La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France (1913; “The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jehanne of France”); the resulting volume was a landmark in modern book production.
During the 1920s Delaunay designed textiles and dresses, and her use of abstract colour harmonies had a strong influence on international fashion. She returned to painting in the 1930s, joining the Abstraction-Création association in 1931. She and Robert Delaunay became involved in public art projects, and they collaborated on vast murals for the Paris Exposition of 1937. After her husband’s death in 1941, Delaunay continued to work as a painter and designer, and she lived to see the mounting of retrospectives of her work by major museums from the 1950s onward. In 1964 she became the only woman to have had an exhibition at the Louvre Museum in her own lifetime.
|
b9e3cc0d35dc4da4953fa711be0ac4f4 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sonny-Rollins | Sonny Rollins | Sonny Rollins
Sonny Rollins, byname Newk, original name Theodore Walter Rollins, (born September 7, 1930, New York, New York, U.S.), American jazz musician, a tenor saxophonist who was among the finest improvisers on the instrument to appear since the mid-1950s.
Rollins grew up in a neighbourhood where Thelonious Monk, Coleman Hawkins (his early idol), and Bud Powell were playing. After recording with the latter in 1949, Rollins began recording with Miles Davis in 1951. During the next three years he composed three of his best-known tunes, “Oleo,” “Doxy,” and “Airegin,” and continued to work with Davis, Charlie Parker, and others. Following his withdrawal from music in 1954 to cure a heroin addiction, Rollins reemerged with the Clifford Brown–Max Roach quintet in 1955, and the next four years proved to be his most fertile.
Beginning with a style drawn primarily from Parker, Rollins became a master of intelligent and provocative spontaneity that was combined with an excellent command of the tenor sax. The clarity of thought evident in his improvisations stands out in jazz history. Rollins displayed an interest in unaccompanied saxophone improvisation and gross manipulations of tone colour long before such techniques became common in modern jazz. He was also one of the first to successfully improvise when alternately ignoring tempo and swinging within a single solo while his accompanists adhered to a preset tempo and chord progression. In these respects he was particularly influential with avant-garde saxophonists of the 1960s and ’70s.
Rollins was the recipient of numerous honours, including several Grammy Awards. In 2010 he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. The following year Rollins received a Kennedy Center Honor.
|
61d4a3cf8ab24993a7d0587c06f469f6 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Soong-Mei-ling | Soong Mei-ling | Soong Mei-ling
Soong Mei-ling, Soong also spelled Sung, Mei-ling also spelled Mayling, also called Madame Chiang Kai-shek or Chiang Mei-ling, (born March 5, 1897, Shanghai, China—died Oct. 23, 2003, New York, N.Y., U.S.), notable Chinese political figure and second wife of the Nationalist Chinese president Chiang Kai-shek. Her family was successful, prosperous, and well-connected: her sister Soong Ch’ing-ling (Song Qingling) was the wife of Sun Yat-sen, and her brother T.V. Soong was a prominent industrialist and official of the Nationalist Chinese government.
Soong Mei-ling was educated in the United States from 1908 to 1917, when she graduated from Wellesley College, and was thoroughly Americanized. In 1927 she married Chiang Kai-shek, and she helped introduce him to Western culture and ideas and worked to publicize his cause in the West. With her husband, she launched in 1934 the New Life Movement, a program that sought to halt the spread of communism by teaching traditional Chinese values. In 1936 Chiang Kai-shek was taken captive by Chang Hsüeh-liang, a warlord who believed the Nationalist government should stop fighting China’s communists and instead concentrate on resisting Japanese aggression; Soong Mei-ling played a major role in the negotiations that led to his release (see Sian [Xi’an] Incident).
During World War II she wrote many articles on China for American journals, and in 1943, during a visit to the United States, she became the first Chinese and only the second woman to address a joint session of the U.S. Congress, where she sought increased support for China in its war against Japan (see Sino-Japanese War). Her efforts resulted in much financial aid, and Soong Mei-ling so impressed the American public that until 1967 her name appeared annually on the U.S. list of the 10 most admired women in the world.
In the mid-1940s civil war broke out in China as Nationalists and communists battled for control of the country. Chiang Kai-shek’s forces were defeated in 1949, and Soong Mei-ling and her family moved to Taiwan, where her husband established his government. Still highly influential, she continued to seek support from the United States, and her efforts helped sway the U.S. government’s policy toward China and Taiwan. After Chiang Kai-shek’s death in 1975, Soong Mei-ling moved to New York, where she lived in semi-seclusion. Following the death in 1988 of Chiang Ching-kuo, Chiang Kai-shek’s son from his first marriage and the president of Taiwan, she briefly became involved in Taiwanese politics, but by that time her influence had greatly diminished. Her published works include This Is Our China (1940), The Sure Victory (1955), and two volumes of selected speeches.
|
2ce3197e3e1f5a153dabf727afde5803 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sophia-Hayden | Sophia Hayden | Sophia Hayden
Sophia Hayden, (born October 17, 1868, Santiago, Chile—died February 3, 1953, Winthrop, Massachusetts, U.S.), American architect who fought for the aesthetic integrity of her design for the Woman’s Building of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The building was the only design of Hayden’s that was ever built.
Hayden was educated in Boston, where from age six she lived with her paternal grandparents. In 1886 she became the first woman admitted to the architecture program of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She graduated with honours in 1890 but was unable to find work as an architect and took a job teaching mechanical drawing. The following year, however, Hayden entered a design competition for the Woman’s Building of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Her design for a building in the style of the Italian Renaissance won the competition.
Hayden began work in 1891, often fending off the demands of the Board of Lady Managers, who desired to incorporate the work of other women artists whether it complemented the structure’s overall design or not. Upon completion of the building, Hayden received a fee 3 to 10 times less than that of the male architects who designed Exposition buildings. Although she was awarded a gold medal from the Board of Lady Managers, male critics were rather patronizing, remarking that the structure had such “feminine” attributes as daintiness and grace. Hayden’s absence at the building’s dedication ceremony in 1892 set off rumours that she suffered from mental exhaustion and was held up as proof that women were not suited to the field of architecture.
Because the Woman’s Building was demolished after the Exposition closed in 1893, no structural record of her career exists. Following the Exposition, Hayden moved to Winthrop, Massachusetts, where she was active in local women’s societies. About 1900 she married the artist William Blackstone Bennett.
|
9f680784129888a93f8b5b87f6d887c5 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sophie-Gay | Sophie Gay | Sophie Gay
Sophie Gay, in full Marie-Françoise-Sophie Nichault de Lavalette Gay, (born July 1, 1776, Paris, Fr.—died March 5, 1852, Paris), French writer and grande dame who wrote romantic novels and plays about upper-class French society during the early 19th century.
Gay was the daughter of a bursar to the comte de Provence (later King Louis XVIII). Her first published writings, in 1802, yielded a novel, Laure d’Estell, but she did little other writing for 11 years, during which she led a somewhat notorious life. Among her numerous later novels were Léonie de Montbreuse (1813), Malheurs d’un amant heureux (1818, 1823; “Misfortunes of a Happy Lover”), Le Moqueur amoureux (1830; “The Amorous Mocker”), La Physiologie du Ridicule (1833; “The Physiology of Ridicule”), and Le Mari confident (1849; “The Confident Husband”). Gay also wrote for the theatre, both drama and comic operas, with words and music; the play La Duchesse de Châteauroux (1834) achieved great success.
During the reign of Louis-Philippe, Gay’s salon was one of the most fashionable in Paris.
|
86b0a6d004064c3ca73dfb7aafac985c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sophocles/The-plays | The plays | The plays
Only seven of Sophocles’ tragedies survive in their entirety, along with 400 lines of a satyr play, numerous fragments of plays now lost, and 90 titles. All seven of the complete plays are works of Sophocles’ maturity, but only two of them, Philoctetes and Oedipus at Colonus, have fairly certain dates. Ajax is generally regarded as the earliest of the extant plays. Some evidence suggests that Antigone was first performed in 442 or 441 bce. Philoctetes was first performed in 409, when Sophocles was 90 years old, and Oedipus at Colonus was said to have been produced after Sophocles’ death by his grandson.
The entire plot of Ajax (Greek: Aias mastigophoros) is constructed around Ajax, the mighty hero of the Trojan War whose pride drives him to treachery and finally to his own ruin and suicide some two-thirds of the way through the play. Ajax is deeply offended at the award of the prize of valour (the dead Achilles’ armour) not to himself but to Odysseus. Ajax thereupon attempts to assassinate Odysseus and the contest’s judges, the Greek commanders Agamemnon and Menelaus, but is frustrated by the intervention of the goddess Athena. He cannot bear his humiliation and throws himself on his own sword. Agamemnon and Menelaus order that Ajax’s corpse be left unburied as punishment. But the wise Odysseus persuades the commanders to relent and grant Ajax an honourable burial. In the end Odysseus is the only person who seems truly aware of the changeability of human fortune.
Antigone is the daughter of Oedipus, the former king of Thebes. She is willing to face the capital punishment that has been decreed by her uncle Creon, the new king, as the penalty for anyone burying her brother Polyneices. (Polyneices has just been killed attacking Thebes, and it is as posthumous punishment for this attack that Creon has forbidden the burial of his corpse.) Obeying all her instincts of love, loyalty, and humanity, Antigone defies Creon and dutifully buries her brother’s corpse. Creon, from conviction that reasons of state outweigh family ties, refuses to commute Antigone’s death sentence. By the time Creon is finally persuaded by the prophet Tiresias to relent and free Antigone, she has killed herself in her prison cell. Creon’s son, Haemon, kills himself out of love and sympathy for the dead Antigone, and Creon’s wife, Eurydice, then kills herself out of grief over these tragic events. At the play’s end Creon is left desolate and broken in spirit. In his narrow and unduly rigid adherence to his civic duties, Creon has defied the gods through his denial of humanity’s common obligations toward the dead. The play thus concerns the conflicting obligations of civic versus personal loyalties and religious mores.
This play centres on the efforts of Deianeira to win back the wandering affections of her husband, Heracles, who is away on one of his heroic missions and who has sent back his latest concubine, Iole, to live with his wife at their home in Trachis. The love charm Deianeira uses on Heracles turns out to be poisonous, and she kills herself upon learning of the agony she has caused her husband. Thus, in Trachinian Women (Greek: Trachiniai) Heracles’ insensitivity (in sending his mistress to share his wife’s home) and Deianeira’s ignorance result in domestic tragedy.
The plot of Oedipus the King (Greek: Oidipous Tyrannos; Latin: Oedipus Rex) is a structural marvel that marks the summit of classical Greek drama’s formal achievements. The play’s main character, Oedipus, is the wise, happy, and beloved ruler of Thebes. Though hot-tempered, impatient, and arrogant at times of crisis, he otherwise seems to enjoy every good fortune. But Oedipus mistakenly believes that he is the son of King Polybus of Corinth and his queen. He became the ruler of Thebes because he rescued the city from the Sphinx by answering its riddle correctly, and so was awarded the city’s widowed queen, Jocasta. Before overcoming the Sphinx, Oedipus left Corinth forever because the Delphic oracle had prophesied to him that he would kill his father and marry his mother. While journeying to Thebes from Corinth, Oedipus encountered at a crossroads an old man accompanied by five servants. Oedipus got into an argument with him and in a fit of arrogance and bad temper killed the old man and four of his servants.
The play opens with the city of Thebes stricken by a plague and its citizens begging Oedipus to find a remedy. He consults the Delphic oracle, which declares that the plague will cease only when the murderer of Jocasta’s first husband, King Laius, has been found and punished for his deed. Oedipus resolves to find Laius’s killer, and much of the rest of the play centres upon the investigation he conducts in this regard. In a series of tense, gripping, and ominous scenes, Oedipus’s investigation turns into an obsessive reconstruction of his own hidden past as he begins to suspect that the old man he killed at the crossroads was none other than Laius. Finally, Oedipus learns that he himself was abandoned to die as a baby by Laius and Jocasta because they feared a prophecy that their infant son would kill his father; that he survived and was adopted by the ruler of Corinth (see video), but in his maturity he has unwittingly fulfilled the Delphic oracle’s prophecy of him; that he has indeed killed his true father, married his own mother, and begot children who are also his own siblings.
Jocasta hangs herself when she sees this shameful web of incest, parricide, and attempted child murder, and the guilt-stricken Oedipus then sticks needles into his eyes, blinding himself. Sightless and alone, he is now blind to the world around him but finally cognizant of the terrible truth of his own life (see video).
As in Aeschylus’s Libation Bearers, the action in Electra (Greek: Ēlektra) follows the return of Orestes to kill his mother, Clytemnestra, and her lover Aegisthus in retribution for their murder of Orestes’ father, Agamemnon. In this play, however, the main focus is on Orestes’ sister Electra and her anguished participation in her brother’s plans. To gain admittance to the palace and thus be able to execute his revenge, Orestes spreads false news of his own death. Believing this report, the despairing Electra unsuccessfully tries to enlist her sister Chrysothemis in an attempt to murder their mother. In a dramatic scene, Orestes then enters in disguise and hands Electra the urn that is supposed to contain his own ashes. Moved by his sister’s display of grief, Orestes reveals his true identity to her and then strikes down his mother and her lover. Electra’s triumph is thus complete. In the play Electra is seen passing through the whole range of human emotions—from passionate love to cruel hatred, from numb despair to wild joy. There is debate over whether the play depicts virtue triumphant or, rather, portrays a young woman incurably twisted by years of hatred and resentment.
In Philoctetes (Greek: Philoktētēs) the Greeks on their way to Troy have cast away the play’s main character, Philoctetes, on the desert island of Lemnos because he has a loathsome and incurable ulcer on his foot. But the Greeks have discovered that they cannot win victory over Troy without Philoctetes and his wonderful bow, which formerly belonged to Heracles. The crafty Odysseus is given the task of fetching Philoctetes by any means possible. Odysseus knows that the resentful Philoctetes will kill him if he can, so he uses the young and impressionable soldier Neoptolemus, son of the dead Achilles, as his agent. Neoptolemus is thus caught between the devious manipulations of Odysseus and the unsuspecting integrity of Philoctetes, who is ready to do anything rather than help the Greeks who abandoned him. For much of the play Neoptolemus sticks to Odysseus’s policy of deceit, despite his better nature, but eventually he renounces duplicity to join in friendship with Philoctetes. A supernatural appearance by Heracles then convinces Philoctetes to go to Troy to both win victory and be healed of his disease.
In Oedipus at Colonus (Greek: Oidipous epi Kolōnō) the old, blind Oedipus has spent many years wandering in exile after being rejected by his sons and the city of Thebes. Oedipus has been cared for only by his daughters Antigone and Ismene. He arrives at a sacred grove at Colonus, a village close by Athens (and the home of Sophocles himself). There Oedipus is guaranteed protection by Theseus, the noble king of Athens. Theseus does indeed protect Oedipus from the importunate pleadings of his brother-in-law, Creon, for Oedipus to protect Thebes. Oedipus himself rejects the entreaties of his son Polyneices, who is bent on attacking Thebes and whom Oedipus solemnly curses. Finally Oedipus departs to a mysterious death; he is apparently swallowed into the earth of Colonus, where he will become a benevolent power and a mysterious source of defense to the land that has given him final refuge. The play is remarkable for the melancholy, beauty, and power of its lyric odes and for the spiritual and moral authority with which it invests the figure of Oedipus.
Four hundred lines of this satyr play survive. The plot of Trackers (Greek: Ichneutai) is based on two stories about the miraculous early deeds of the god Hermes: that the infant, growing to maturity in a few days, stole cattle from Apollo, baffling discovery by reversing the animals’ hoof marks, and that he invented the lyre by fitting strings to a tortoise shell. In this play the trackers are the chorus of satyrs, who are looking for the cattle; they are amusingly dumbfounded at the sound of the new instrument Hermes has invented. Enough of the play survives to give an impression of its style; it is a genial, uncomplicated travesty of the tragic manner, and the antics of the chorus were apparently the chief source of amusement.
|
dda8c849f39786de747d58d227c45d9c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sophron-of-Syracuse | Sophron Of Syracuse | Sophron Of Syracuse
Sophron Of Syracuse, (flourished c. 430 bc), author of rhythmical prose mimes in the Doric dialect. Although the mimes survive mostly in fragments of only a few words, it can be seen from their titles—e.g., The Tunny-fisher, The Sempstress, etc.—that they depicted scenes from daily life. One longer fragment deals with a magical ceremony. Plato thought highly of Sophron, who had some influence on Theocritus and also on Herodas.
|
c8463df8fbf4370a49014c5fff3a2890 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sophus-Claussen | Sophus Claussen | Sophus Claussen
Sophus Claussen, (born September 12, 1865, Helletoft, Island of Langeland, Denmark—died April 11, 1931, Gentofte), one of Scandinavia’s foremost lyric poets. He was influenced by the French Symbolists and in turn greatly influenced Danish modernist poets of the 1940s and 1960s.
Claussen’s family was devoted to farming and politics, and he was intensely interested in the latter. After studying law at Copenhagen, he became a journalist for provincial newspapers, but spent much time in Paris and Italy as a freelance writer and painter.
Claussen sought aesthetic perfection in his light, rhythmical poetry, and with his ingenious symbolism he constantly tried to transform his impressions of the erotic dimension in nature and human life into visionary, religious experiences. Poetry became his gospel. Finding a permanent conflict beween the spiritually erotic and the physically erotic, Claussen strove to unify earthly desire and religious sacrifice in a verbal totality. As reality and illusion come together in his work, the loss of verisimilitude is compensated for in the act of poetic creation, and a new kind of meaning is born that rests entirely within the poem itself. This religious expression, accompanied by a sense of the loss of beauty and the seeming meaninglessness of art in the face of the brutality and materialism of modern life, reached its highest expression in Claussen’s last important collection, Heroica (1925). In defiance of his personal sense of isolation, the aging Claussen committed his artistic craft to an unqualified faith in a second coming of life.
In spite of Claussen’s close French literary connections, his humorous, romantic play with the myths of human existence in Naturbørn (1887; “Children of Nature”) and Pilefløjter (1899; “Willow Pipes”) remains in the Danish tradition. Claussen also published several travel books and lyrical prose tales of small-town life in Denmark. He translated some of his favourite poets, including Percy Bysshe Shelley, Heinrich Heine, and Charles Baudelaire.
|
631adfc08d7bfbfbc43314a0e5c564cd | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sophus-Lie | Sophus Lie | Sophus Lie
Sophus Lie, (born Dec. 17, 1842, Nordfjordeid, Norway—died Feb. 18, 1899, Kristiania), Norwegian mathematician who founded the theory of continuous groups and their applications to the theory of differential equations. His investigations led to one of the major branches of 20th-century mathematics, the theory of Lie groups and Lie algebras.
Lie attended a broad range of science and mathematics courses at the University of Kristiania (now Oslo) from 1859 to 1865 without deciding on a subject for graduate study. He supported himself for the following few years by giving private lessons while studying astronomy, mechanics, and mathematics on his own. His interest in geometry deepened in 1868 and resulted in his first mathematical paper being published in Crelle’s Journal in 1869. Awarded a scholarship to travel abroad, Lie immediately went to the University of Berlin, where he soon began an intense collaboration with the German mathematician Felix Klein. They were working together in Paris on a unified view of geometry, among other topics, when the Franco-German War began in July 1870 and Klein returned to Berlin. (After Klein went to the University of Erlangen in 1872, the development of a unified theory of geometry became known as the Erlanger Programm.) When Lie decided to leave for Italy in August, after the French army suffered a major defeat, he was arrested near Fontainebleau and detained as a German spy—his mathematical notes were taken for coded dispatches. Freed one month later through the efforts of the French mathematician Jean-Gaston Darboux, he returned to Berlin by way of Italy.
In 1871 Lie became an assistant tutor at Kristiania and submitted his doctoral dissertation on the theory of contact transformations. Appointed extraordinary professor in 1872, he began to research continuous transformation groups in 1873. After working in virtual isolation for more than 10 years, Lie was joined by the German mathematician Friedrich Engel (1861–1941), who had just received his doctorate from the University of Leipzig in 1883. During a nine-year collaboration with Engel, Lie published Theorie der Transformationsgruppen, 3 vol. (1888–93; “Theory of Transformation Groups”), which contains his investigations of the general theory of continuous groups. In 1886 Lie succeeded Klein as professor of geometry at Leipzig, where Engel had moved in 1885. Over the next 12 years Lie attracted a number of talented students. One of these, Georg Scheffers (1866–1945), wrote three introductory texts based on Lie’s important Leipzig lecture courses, Differentialgleichungen (1891; “Differential Equations”), Vorlesungen über continuierliche Gruppen (1893; “Lectures on Continuous Groups”), and Geometrie der Berührungstransformationen (1896; “Geometry of Contact Transformations”).
In 1898 Lie returned to Kristiania to accept a special post created for him, but his health was already failing and he died soon after his arrival. Besides his development of transformation groups, he made contributions to differential geometry; his primary aim, however, was the advancement of the theory of differential equations. Lie’s mathematical papers are contained in Gesammelte Abhandlungen, 7 vol. (1922–60; “Collected Works”).
|
0d15c84fea5fb9f659d9d7371b9b7b0b | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sou-Fujimoto | Sou Fujimoto | Sou Fujimoto
Sou Fujimoto, byname of Fujimoto Sōsuke, (born August 4, 1971, Hokkaido, Japan), Japanese architect whose innovative residential structures and institutional projects represented a fresh approach to the relationship between architectural space and the human body.
Fujimoto was raised on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. His childhood explorations of the wooded landscape of the region led to an abiding interest in the natural world. That would inform his later work, which he would often describe by invoking natural spaces such as forests and caves. He graduated from the University of Tokyo with a degree in architecture in 1994 and established an eponymous firm, Sou Fujimoto Architects, in Tokyo in 2000.
Fujimoto found inspiration for his deconstructed designs by looking back to the cave as a raw space where function was determined according to human behaviour. That design philosophy, which he dubbed “primitive future,” was evident in his Final Wooden House (2008) in Kumamoto, Japan. The structure was composed of large cedar beams stacked like blocks that allowed occupants to interpret the space according to their own needs and encouraged flexible use of surfaces as, variously, walls, floors, or sitting areas. Fujimoto expounded upon that philosophy in Fujimoto Sōsuke genshotekina mirai no kenchiku (2008; Sou Fujimoto: Primitive Future).
House N, a residential structure in Ōita, Japan, was also completed in 2008. Fujimoto’s design blurred the boundaries between domestic space and the street, and between the built environment and nature, with a series of progressively more intimate living spaces nested within one another. A concrete outer shell, pierced by large unglazed windows, contained two inner boxes and an outdoor living space with trees, a garden, and a wooden patio. The interior boxes offered privacy to the inhabitants while remaining connected to nature and the surrounding environment.
Institutional projects included the Musashino Art University Museum & Library (2010) in Tokyo, a library that wrapped public spaces in massive spiraling walls of bookshelves. In 2013 Fujimoto was chosen to design the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in Kensington Gardens in London, a temporary structure commissioned by the gallery. He created an ethereal, semitransparent grid of white steel tubes that merged with the landscape, at once cloudlike and formal in its composition. The multitiered space urged the organic flow of movement and invited public exploration and interaction.
|
603041ec35bc7be61a8e2ddb9fa155d9 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Spencer-Abraham | Spencer Abraham | Spencer Abraham
…New York to work for Spencer Abraham, a Republican U.S. senator representing Michigan, in Washington, D.C.
…narrowly defeated the Republican incumbent Spencer Abraham. She entered the Senate in 2001.
|
b05747c2b5255bb2271137a3b21369cb | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stan-Barstow | Stan Barstow | Stan Barstow
Stan Barstow, byname of Stanley Barstow, (born June 28, 1928, Horbury, Yorkshire [now in West Yorkshire], England—died August 1, 2011, Port Talbot, Wales), English novelist who was noted for his unsentimental depiction of working-class life.
Barstow grew up in a working-class environment and held a job in the engineering industry until 1962, when the enormous success of his first book, A Kind of Loving (1960; film 1962; stage play 1970) enabled him to write full-time. The novel takes a frank look at a working-class man caught in an unhappy marriage. Barstow was among a group of young British writers (including Alan Sillitoe and John Braine) in the 1950s and ’60s who became known as the Angry Young Men for their socially conscious works. Barstow’s later novels included Joby (1964), The Watchers on the Shore (1966), A Raging Calm (1968), A Season with Eros (1971), The Right True End (1976), A Brother’s Tale (1980), and Just You Wait and See (1986). He also wrote short stories and adapted several stories and novels for radio and television. An autobiography, In My Own Good Time, appeared in 2001.
|
6aeb370136120bb1e2fd32fdd0cfac26 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stan-Kenton | Stan Kenton | Stan Kenton
Stan Kenton, byname of Stanley Newcomb Kenton, (born Feb. 19, 1912, Wichita, Kan., U.S.—died Aug. 25, 1979, Los Angeles), American jazz bandleader, pianist, and composer who commissioned and promoted the works of many modern composer-arrangers and thrust formal education and big-band jazz together into what became the stage (or concert) band movement of the 1960s and ’70s, involving thousands of high school and college musicians.
Kenton began writing music in his teens, was a pianist and arranger for dance bands in the 1930s, and was influenced by Earl Hines as a pianist and by Claude Thornhill and Benny Carter as an arranger. Kenton formed his own band in 1940 and continued forming bands and touring almost until his death.
Much of Kenton’s music is more like nonswing 20th-century concert music than jazz or dance music, especially the serious works of Robert Graettinger (“City of Glass”), Johnny Richards (“Cuban Fire”), and Russ Garcia (“Adventures in Emotions”) and pieces by Bill Holman, Bill Russo, and others. Kenton also featured outstanding jazz improvisers, including saxophonists Lee Konitz and Art Pepper, trumpeter Conte Candoli, and trombonist Frank Rosolino, but the emphasis was less on improvisation than on elaborate arrangements, often employing instruments uncommon to earlier jazz such as bass saxophone, tuba, French horn, strings, and mellophonium (a trumpet–French horn hybrid commissioned by Kenton). He also showed a keen interest in Latin-American music and often used a Latin percussionist. The most typical band sound involved high, loud, block-voiced trumpet playing, with five- and six-note chords, and open-voiced trombone-section harmonies. Saxophone passages written in sixteenth notes were also a Kenton trademark, as was his use of the full range of loudness levels that could be extracted from a band.
Kenton was responsible for the “progressive jazz” label that some mistake for all modern jazz and some use to identify all Kenton-linked jazz. Some critics place his music in the “cool jazz” category and, being based in California, many of his players—including Shorty Rogers, Bill Perkins, and Shelly Manne—were identified with West Coast jazz, a subcategory of cool jazz.
From 1970 Kenton ran his own combination record company, publishing house, and promotional network, called Creative World. His best-known composition is “Artistry in Rhythm,” the band’s theme. Among his most popular recordings are “Intermission Riff,” “Eager Beaver,” and “Peanut Vendor.”
|
2002da1fc2e9962c2cd868a6c166c072 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stanislas-Jean-chevalier-de-Boufflers | Stanislas-Jean, chevalier de Boufflers | Stanislas-Jean, chevalier de Boufflers
Stanislas-Jean, chevalier de Boufflers, (born May 31, 1738, Nancy, France—died January 18, 1815, Paris), French writer, soldier, and academician remembered chiefly for his picaresque romance, Aline, reine de Golconde (“Aline, Queen of Golconde”).
His mother, the Marquise de Boufflers, became the mistress of Stanisław Leszczyński, king Stanisław I of Poland and duke of Lorraine, and brought her son up at the ducal court at Lunéville. The boy was destined for a career in the church but proved temperamentally unsuited, and, while studying theology at Saint-Sulpice in Paris, he wrote his masterwork, Aline, a charming tale of a milkmaid who, after a series of improper adventures, becomes queen of Golconda. The story won its author immediate fame but caused his expulsion from Saint-Sulpice.
By joining the Knights of Malta, Boufflers managed to combine qualification for ecclesiastical benefices in Lorraine with the military career more suited to his taste. For the next 24 years he fought in campaigns in Europe, with frequent returns to the salons of Paris, where he established a reputation for wit and fell in love with the Comtesse de Sabran.
After serving as governor of the new French colony of Senegal, he returned to France and won election to the Académie Française (1788). In 1789 he was elected deputy for the nobility of Nancy to the States General, but the Revolution alarmed him, and he emigrated to Germany in 1791. The loss of his benefices permitted him to abandon his vow of celibacy and marry Mme de Sabran at Breslau. In 1800, with Napoleon’s rise to power, Boufflers returned to Paris and supervised the edition of his complete works (1803).
|
daaa8e4c95ff5023b8026e50291ddce7 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stanislaw-Ignacy-Witkiewicz | Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz | Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz
Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, pseudonym Witkacy, (born February 24, 1885, Warsaw, Poland, Russian Empire [now in Poland]—died September 18, 1939, Jeziory, Poland [now in Ukraine]), Polish painter, novelist, and playwright, well known as a dramatist in the period between the two world wars.
After studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, Witkiewicz traveled in Germany, France, and Italy. In 1914 he left for Australia as the artist and photographer of an anthropological expedition led by Bronisław Malinowski. Three years later, as a reserve officer in the Russian Army, Witkiewicz witnessed the Russian Revolution. In 1918 he settled at a provincial cultural centre, Zakopane, at the foot of the Tatra Mountains. He committed suicide at the beginning of World War II.
Witkiewicz’s plays anticipated the Theatre of the Absurd of Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett in their deliberately contorted characters and plots and their use of grotesque parody. Rapid tempos, warped time juxtapositions, and catastrophic incidents are combined with an original and symbolic use of language in such plays as Kurka wodna (1921; The Water Hen) and Wariat i zakonnica (1925; The Madman and the Nun).
Witkiewicz’s works began to be revived in Poland and the West in the 1950s and were a perennial feature of Polish and foreign theatrical repertoires. Some of his plays were published in English translation in The Witkiewicz Reader (1992). His novel Nienasycenie (1930; Insatiability) projected a vision of cruel totalitarianism gaining control over nations and individual destinies. A number of his expressionistic paintings survive, and they form part of many museum collections in Poland and abroad.
|
9d3c80c50de57f99aa0a455724a40059 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stanislaw-Wojciechowski | Stanisław Wojciechowski | Stanisław Wojciechowski
Stanisław Wojciechowski, (born March 15, 1869, Kalisz, Pol., Russian Empire—died April 9, 1953, Golabki, Pol.), one of the leaders in the struggle for Polish independence from Russia in the years before World War I. He later served as the second president of the Polish Republic (1922–26).
While a student at the University of Warsaw, Wojciechowski worked for the Polish Socialist movement, which was a major force in the independence effort. He was arrested in 1891, and upon his release a year later he went to Paris and then to London. In England he helped publish the Polish Socialist periodical Przedświt (“The Dawn”) and became friends with Józef Piłsudski. He also studied the cooperative movement, and on returning to Poland in 1906 he spent his time working to develop Polish cooperatives.
During World War I, because he saw Germany as Poland’s main enemy, Wojciechowski in 1915 went to Moscow, and there in 1917 he was elected president of the Council of Polish Parties’ Union. He returned to Warsaw at the end of the war and from January 1919 to July 1920 served as minister of the interior in three separate cabinets of the new Polish Republic. He was elected to the Sejm (Diet) as a member of the Polish Peasant Party in November 1922. When Gabriel Narutowicz, president of the republic, was assassinated in December 1922, Wojciechowski was chosen to succeed him.
In the new government Wojciechowski and Piłsudski, then military chief of staff, differed as to the direction the nation should take. Wojciechowski supported continued parliamentary government, while Piłsudski favoured a more authoritarian approach. In May 1926, Piłsudski staged a successful coup d’état. Wojciechowski then retired to private life.
|
717c1fc37c958949413ba2a3a1e6ad3b | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stanley-B-Prusiner | Stanley B. Prusiner | Stanley B. Prusiner
Stanley B. Prusiner, in full Stanley Ben Prusiner, (born May 28, 1942, Des Moines, Iowa, U.S.), American biochemist and neurologist whose discovery in 1982 of disease-causing proteins called prions won him the 1997 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.
Prusiner grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, and was educated at the University of Pennsylvania (A.B., 1964; M.D., 1968). After spending four years in biochemical research, he became (1972) a resident in neurology at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine. He joined the faculty there in 1974 and became a professor of neurology and biochemistry. While a neurology resident, he was in charge of a patient who died of a rare fatal degenerative disorder of the brain called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Prusiner became intrigued by this little-known class of neurodegenerative disorders—the spongiform encephalopathies—that caused progressive dementia and death in humans and animals. In 1974 he set up a laboratory to study scrapie, a related disorder of sheep, and in 1982 he claimed to have isolated the scrapie-causing agent. He claimed that this pathogenic agent, which he named “prion,” was unlike any other known pathogen, such as a virus or bacterium, because it consisted only of protein and lacked the genetic material contained within all life-forms that is necessary for replication.
When first published, the prion theory met with much criticism, but it became widely accepted by the mid-1990s. In 1996, when a new variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease emerged in Great Britain, Prusiner’s research was the focus of national attention. Fears abounded that the new variant of the disease might be linked to “mad cow” disease, a brain disorder that first appeared in British cattle a decade earlier. Some evidence suggested that the mad cow prion may have jumped species, infecting humans who consumed beef contaminated with the infectious agent. Because mad cow disease was believed to have been caused when the agent that causes scrapie in sheep was transmitted to cattle in feed, there was precedent for species-jumping events to occur. Prusiner’s research also could have significant implications for such disorders as Alzheimer disease and Parkinson disease, which seemed to share certain characteristics with the diseases caused by prions.
Prusiner received the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award (1994) and the Louisa Gross Horowitz Prize (1997) for his discoveries pertaining to neurodegenerative disease. After he was appointed director of the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases at the University of California, San Francisco, he founded InPro Biotechnology, Inc. (2001). The company was designed to further develop and commercialize discoveries and technologies conceived in his laboratory at the university. Among the technologies promoted by InPro was a test to detect bovine spongiform encephalopathy in cattle and sheep, chronic wasting disease in deer and elk, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. Prusiner also wrote several books during his career, including Slow Transmissible Diseases of the Nervous System (1979; cowritten by William Hadlow) and Prion Biology and Diseases (2004).
|
f96e21667b4ac38cdc65a1dd7b2dc50c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stanley-Lloyd-Miller | Stanley Lloyd Miller | Stanley Lloyd Miller
Miller, under the guidance of his professor at the University of Chicago, chemist Harold C. Urey. A mixture of methane, ammonia, water vapour, and hydrogen was circulated through a liquid solution and continuously sparked by a corona discharge mounted higher in the apparatus. The discharge…
Urey and Stanley Miller tested the Oparin-Haldane theory and successfully produced organic molecules from some of the inorganic components thought to have been present on prebiotic Earth. In what became known as the Miller-Urey experiment, the two scientists combined warm water with a mixture of four gases—water…
|
abdd7a254dbccdc5990458afcd0238a1 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stanley-Matthews-British-soccer-player | Sir Stanley Matthews | Sir Stanley Matthews
Sir Stanley Matthews, (born February 1, 1915, Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent, England—died February 23, 2000, Newcastle-under-Lyme), football (soccer) player, an outside right forward considered by many to be one of the greatest dribblers in the history of the sport. In 1965 he became the first British footballer to be knighted.
The son of a professional boxer, Matthews began his professional career with the Stoke City team in 1932. With his accurate passing, ball control, and balance, he became known as “the Wizard of Dribble.” By 1938 he was representing England in international matches, and he eventually appeared in 54 full international contests. Named the first European Footballer of the Year (1941), Matthews was transferred (traded) to Blackpool in 1946. With that team he competed in the 1953 Football Association Cup Final, considered to be his most famous game. Matthews set up Blackpool’s last three goals to help defeat the Bolton Wanderers in what became known as “the Matthews final.” In 1961 he rejoined the Stoke City team, but four years later, at the age of 50, he retired from professional play. In addition to his athletic skills, Matthews was also noted for his sportsmanship, which earned him the nickname “First Gentleman of Soccer.” An autobiography, The Stanley Matthews Story, appeared in 1960.
|
575ec5b8162b1a9020b085c52a6f01f7 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stanley-Milgram | Stanley Milgram | Stanley Milgram
Stanley Milgram, (born August 15, 1933, New York City, New York, U.S.—died December 20, 1984, New York City), American social psychologist known for his controversial and groundbreaking experiments on obedience to authority. Milgram’s obedience experiments, in addition to other studies that he carried out during his career, generally are considered to have provided important insight into human social behaviour, particularly conformity and social pressure.
Milgram was born and raised in the Bronx, the second of three children in a working-class Jewish family. As a youth, he was an exceptional student, with interests in science and the arts. At Queens College (later part of the City University of New York [CUNY]), he studied political science, in addition to taking courses in art, literature, and music. In 1953, following his third year at the college, he toured Europe and became increasingly interested in international relations. He was accepted into the graduate program in international affairs at Columbia University. However, in 1954, after completing a bachelor’s degree in political science at Queens College, Milgram instead began graduate studies in the social relations department at Harvard University.
At Harvard, Milgram took classes with leading social psychologists of the day, including Gordon Allport, Jerome Bruner, Roger Brown, and Solomon Asch, all of whom greatly influenced the direction of Milgram’s academic career. Of particular interest to Milgram were Asch’s conformity experiments, which showed that individual behaviour can be influenced by group behaviour, with individuals conforming to group perspectives, even when choices made by the group are obviously incorrect. Milgram set out to apply Asch’s group technique, with several variations, to the study of conformity on a national level, seeking to explore national stereotypes. He focused initially on the United States and Norway and later added France, using his connections at Harvard to travel to Oslo and Paris to establish study groups there. He used an auditory task to measure conformity, with participants in closed booths asked to distinguish between the lengths of two tones. Participants also heard the responses of other members of the study group, who supposedly occupied closed booths next to the participant (the group responses were recorded, and the other booths were empty). Milgram’s findings suggested that Americans and Norwegians differed little in conformity rates and that, of the three groups, the French were the least conforming.
In 1960, after earning a Ph.D. from Harvard, Milgram accepted a position as assistant professor at Yale University. There he narrowed his research to obedience. Having been acutely aware from his youth of his Jewish heritage and the tragedies suffered by Jews in Europe during the Holocaust, he was interested in understanding the factors that led people to inflict harm on others. He designed an unprecedented experiment—later known as the Milgram experiment—whereby study subjects, who believed that they were participating in a learning experiment about punishment and memory, were instructed by an authority figure (the experimenter) to inflict seemingly painful shocks to a helpless victim (the learner). Both the experimenter and the learner were actors hired by Milgram, and the shocks were simulated via an authentic-appearing shock generator that was equipped with 30 voltage levels, increasing from 15 to 450 volts. Subjects were instructed by the experimenter to deliver a shock to the learner whenever the latter gave an incorrect answer to a question. With each incorrect response, shock intensity increased. At predetermined voltage levels, the learner (usually in a separate room) either banged on the adjoining wall, cried out in pain and pleaded with the participant to stop, or complained about a fictitious heart condition.
Prior to carrying out the experiments, Milgram and Yale psychology students whom he polled about possible outcomes of such a study predicted that only a very small percentage (from 0 to 3 percent) of people would inflict the most-extreme-intensity shock. Hence, Milgram was surprised with the results of early pilot studies, in which most participants continued through to the extreme 450-volt limit. The first official experiments carried out by Milgram in 1961 yielded similar results—26 out of 40 men recruited for the study proved to be fully obedient to the experimenter, delivering shocks through 450 volts. Variations in the experimental design showed that obedience was highest when the learner was in a separate room, as opposed to being in close proximity to the subject (e.g., in the same room or near enough to touch). Subjects persisted in their obedience despite verbally expressing their disapproval of continuing with the shocks.
Milgram suspected that subjects struggled to disengage from the experiment because of its incremental (“slippery slope”) progression—small demands, seemingly benign, became increasingly adverse. Subjects also may have been readily conforming, seeing themselves as inferior to the experimenter in their knowledge of learning, or they may have viewed themselves as being free of responsibility, simply carrying out the experimenter’s commands.
Although thought-provoking, the experiments and their findings were highly controversial. The situation placed extreme stress on the subjects, some of whom experienced nervous laughter that culminated in seizures. In debriefing, Milgram did not reveal the full truth about the experiments to his subjects, leaving some to think that they really had shocked another person; it was not until many months later that subjects learned the true nature of the experiments. The validity of the findings also was later drawn into question by reports claiming that some participants suspected that they were the subjects being studied, with the aim of the study being to see how far they would obey the experimenter.
|
fe9c92654a1dae65c3f2c8b38dd26a4c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stanley-Spencer | Sir Stanley Spencer | Sir Stanley Spencer
Sir Stanley Spencer, (born June 30, 1891, Cookham, Berkshire, England—died December 14, 1959, Taplow, Buckinghamshire), one of the leading painters in England between the World Wars. He used an expressively distorted style of drawing and often drew upon Christian subjects.
Spencer studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London from 1908 to 1912, and he first exhibited at the New English Art Club. He frequently used his hometown, Cookham, as a setting for his paintings, many of which were based on biblical themes. From 1915 to 1918 Spencer served in World War I, an experience that inspired works such as the mural The Resurrection of the Soldiers (1928–29), in which he depicted dead soldiers emerging from their tombs into a cross-strewn landscape.
In the 1930s Spencer painted a number of erotic works on the theme of love, including Love Among the Nations (1935) and a series of highly detailed nudes of his second wife. He received harsh criticism from the Royal Academy and the public for his portrayal of St. Francis of Assisi in St. Francis and the Birds (1935); it was interpreted as an offensive caricature. During World War II Spencer served as an official war artist and was assigned to document the shipbuilding yards of Port Glasgow, Scotland. His experience in this working-class community inspired a new series of paintings depicting everyday life as well as biblical themes, notably The Resurrection: Port Glasgow (1947–50). Spencer reconciled with the Royal Academy and was elected a full member in 1950; he was knighted in 1959.
|
f31994199a5551646aca332508c630c3 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stefan-Uros-III | Stefan Uroš III | Stefan Uroš III
…Dušan was the son of Stefan Uroš III, who was the eldest son of the reigning king, Stefan Uroš II Milutin. While Dušan was still a boy, his father, who governed the maritime provinces of the Serbian state, rebelled against his own father. Milutin took him prisoner, blinded him in…
|
a5a18cfaf308aad6cd1bd9640fc9c677 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stefano-della-Bella | Stefano della Bella | Stefano della Bella
Stefano della Bella, French Étienne de la Belle, (born May 18, 1610, Florence [Italy]—died July 12, 1664, Florence), Baroque printmaker noted for his engravings of military events, in the manner of Jacques Callot.
Stefano was initially apprenticed to a goldsmith but turned to engraving, studying under Remigio Cantagallina. Through Lorenzo de’ Medici he was enabled to spend three years in study at Rome. In 1642 he went to Paris, where Cardinal de Richelieu engaged him to make drawings of the siege of Arras and the taking of that town by the French army. In 1647 he went to Amsterdam, where he was influenced by the Dutch school of landscape painting and the graphics of Rembrandt. His works after this period grew more atmospheric and delicate, often being executed in small formats. About 1650 he returned to Florence. His prints number more than 1,400 and include a wide variety of subjects.
|
8649ff824d44dd2c544a816f9b179484 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stefano-Kaoze | Stefano Kaoze | Stefano Kaoze
…was inaugurated in 1910 by Stefano Kaoze, the first Congolese to gain substantial training in modern philosophy. In his essay titled “La Psychologie des Bantu” (“Bantu Psychology”), Kaoze articulated what he regarded as the Bantu way of thinking about knowledge, moral values, God, life, and the afterlife. Working in the…
|
9b250616e28e8a235a461584b54e91fc | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stella-Adler | Stella Adler | Stella Adler
Stella Adler, (born Feb. 10, 1901, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died Dec. 21, 1992, Los Angeles, Calif.), American actress, teacher, and founder of the Stella Adler Conservatory of Acting in New York City (1949), where she tutored performers in “the method” technique of acting (see Stanislavsky method).
Adler was the daughter of classical Yiddish stage tragedians Jacob and Sara Adler, who formed the organization deemed largely responsible for promoting Yiddish theatre in the early 20th-century United States, the Independent Yiddish Art Company. She made her stage debut at age four in one of her father’s productions. After that, she received little formal schooling and no formal acting training; instead she studied with her father by watching other actors and learning her craft by observation and performance. In 1919 Adler made her international debut in London, where she remained for a year. Returning to New York City, she played feature roles and performed in vaudeville, later touring Europe and South America as the head of a repertory company. Between 1927 and 1931 she performed more than 100 roles.
In 1931 Adler joined the innovative Group Theater, whose actors were trained in "method acting," a system propounded by Russian actor and theatre director Konstantin Stanislavsky and based on the idea that actors perform by invoking affective memory or a personal memory of the emotion they are trying to portray.
Adler studied with Stanislavsky in Russia in 1934 and adapted his principles, which in their original form she considered too rigid. Upon her return to the Group Theater, she taught her version of Stanislavsky’s method. In her classes Adler taught that drawing on personal experience alone was too limited. She encouraged performers to draw on their imaginations as well.
In the early 1940s Adler began teaching acting at the New School for Social Research in New York City. She remained there until 1949, when she established the Stella Adler Theater Studio (later renamed the Stella Adler Conservatory of Acting). While conducting her own school, she also taught at Yale University’s School of Drama (1966–67) and headed New York University’s drama department in the 1980s. Adler herself performed until 1961.
In addition to acting and teaching, Adler worked as an associate producer for MGM in the early 1940s, directed commercial theatre in New York City throughout the 1940s and ’50s, and wrote The Technique of Acting (1988). The second of her three marriages was to Harold Clurman, one of the founding members of the Group Theater; it lasted from 1943 to 1960.
|
c056547e44c0514a4de67babb05af9ba | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sten-Sture-the-Elder | Sten Sture, the Elder | Sten Sture, the Elder
Sten Sture, the Elder, Danish in full Sten Gustafsson Sture Den Äldre, (born c. 1440, Sweden—died 1503, Sweden), regent of Sweden (1470–97, 1501–03) who resisted Danish domination and built up a strong central administration.
Sten, a member of a powerful noble family, led forces that ended an attempt by the Danish king Christian I to gain control over Sweden in 1471, inflicting a decisive defeat on the Danish ruler in the Battle of Brunkeberg. He helped the Swedish king Charles VIII regain the throne (1467) and was appointed regent on Charles’s death (1470). He soon gained passage of measures that reduced German influence in Swedish municipal governments, and he strengthened the nation’s legal institutions. In 1477 he obtained permission from Pope Sixtus IV to found a university at Uppsala, the first Scandinavian university and still a source of national pride.
Sten contended throughout his reign with a noble faction led by the Oxenstierna family, which wanted a union with Denmark headed by the Danish king, and a weaker royal government. By the mid-1490s Sten had reduced the power of the state council controlled by dissident nobles, strengthened his control of the government, and expanded his landholdings. Although the Danish king John was accepted as king of Sweden by the state council in 1483, Sten was able to delay his coronation.
Sten’s position was weakened, however, when Ivan III, grand prince of Moscow, allied with the Danish king and invaded the Swedish territory of Finland (1495). After being defeated by Danish forces in 1497, Sten was forced to accept John as king of Sweden (1497), but Sten later overthrew the Danish king (1501) and served as regent until his own death. His efforts laid the foundation for the stability of the Swedish monarchy in the 16th century.
|
1b25311308228fcd4f2bb4882ef489f9 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stepan-Osipovich-Makarov | Stepan Osipovich Makarov | Stepan Osipovich Makarov
Stepan Osipovich Makarov, (born Dec. 27, 1848, [Jan. 8, 1849, New Style], Nikolayev, Ukraine, Russian Empire [now Mykolayiv, Ukraine]—died March 31 [April 13], 1904, at sea off Port Arthur, Manchuria [now Lü-shun, China]), Russian naval commander in charge of the Pacific fleet at the start of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904.
The son of an ensign, Makarov graduated from the Maritime Academy in 1865 and was commissioned an ensign in the Russian navy in 1869. He became a brilliant and innovative naval architect, inventor, tactician, and ship designer. During the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, his new designs and tactics for torpedo boats were used on the Black Sea with notable success. He was a pioneering Russian oceanographer, and he also designed the first mine-laying ships intended exclusively for that purpose. His armour-piercing shells, known as Makarov tips, greatly increased the penetrating force of shells. He also designed and built the icebreaker Ermak to explore the Arctic.
Makarov became Russia’s youngest admiral at age 41 in 1890, and he was promoted to vice admiral in 1896. He held a series of increasingly important posts during the 1890s; in February 1904 he was appointed commander of the Pacific Ocean squadron at the start of the Russo-Japanese War and acquitted himself ably until three months later, when he was killed as his flagship, Petropavlovsk, struck a mine and sank.
|
def900a94a21e032646b8327d48ffc1f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stephanus-Van-Cortlandt | Stephanus Van Cortlandt | Stephanus Van Cortlandt
Stephanus Van Cortlandt, (born May 7, 1643, New Amsterdam—died Nov. 25, 1700, New York City), Dutch-American colonial merchant and public official who was the first native-born mayor of New York City and chief justice of the Supreme Court of New York.
Van Cortlandt began a successful and profitable mercantile career under his father’s guidance. After the British conquest of New Netherlands in 1664, he succeeded in ingratiating himself with the new rulers and was able to continue his commercial enterprises. He was appointed a member of the governor’s council in 1674. Three years later, he became the first native-born mayor of New York City. When the Dominion of New England was established, he was selected as one of the provincial councillors to serve under Governor Sir Edmund Andros. After James II had been deposed, Jacob Leisler led a revolt against the provincial government in 1689, forcing Van Cortlandt to flee the colony. Van Cortlandt later returned to the colony and subsequently was among the New York aristocrats advocating the prosecution and execution of Leisler. Van Cortlandt amassed vast landholdings, which were incorporated in 1697 into the Manor of Cortlandt.
|
460680de6cd8d9b1904872b28fd8493f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stephen-Day | Stephen Day | Stephen Day
Stephen Day, Day also spelled Daye, (born c. 1594, London, Eng.—died Dec. 22, 1668, Cambridge, Mass.), founder of the first printing press in England’s North American colonies.
Day himself does not seem to have been a printer. He was a locksmith in Cambridge, Eng., and, in 1638, contracted with the Reverend Jose Glover, a wealthy dissenting clergyman, to set up the first printing press in the colonies. Although Glover died on the sea voyage, Day and Glover’s widow set up the press in Cambridge, Mass., and by March 1639 it was in full operation. The first printed piece from the press was The Freeman’s Oath (January 1639); the second, an Almanack by William Pierce, a mariner (1639); the third, The Whole Booke of Psalmes, now known as the Bay Psalm Book (1640). Stephen Day’s name does not appear on any of his publications. The name of his son Matthew, who was next in charge and apparently did the typesetting, appears on the title page of a later volume of the Almanack (1647). When Glover’s widow married Henry Dunster, president of Harvard College, Day’s press became the forerunner of Harvard University Press.
|
6e1a234626c1138ac8612565a32619b7 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stephen-Edelston-Toulmin | Stephen Edelston Toulmin | Stephen Edelston Toulmin
Stephen Edelston Toulmin, (born March 25, 1922, London, Eng.—died Dec. 4, 2009, Los Angeles, Calif., U.S.), English philosopher and educator noted for his study of the history of ideas. In his work on ethics, Toulmin was concerned with describing prescriptive language—that is, imperative sentences and value judgments used for ethical statements—while holding that ethics, or the logical study of moral language, cannot be reduced to subjective or objective facts but is a unique expression of duty or right.
Educated at Cambridge University (D.Phil. in philosophy, 1948), he lectured at Oxford before becoming department head and professor at the University of Leeds (1955–59) and then director of the Nuffield Foundation (1960–64). Moving to the United States in the 1960s, Toulmin taught at Brandeis University, Michigan State University, the University of California, Santa Cruz, the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and the University of Southern California. He is the author of The Uses of Argument (1958), Foresight and Understanding: An Enquiry into the Aims of Science (1961), Human Understanding (1972), The Return to Cosmology: Postmodern Science and the Theology of Nature (1982), Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (1990), and Return to Reason (2001).
|
af69d43162b82bdbb6166274f6d896fd | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stephen-Gardiner | Stephen Gardiner | Stephen Gardiner
Stephen Gardiner, (born c. 1482, Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, Eng.—died Nov. 12, 1555, London), English bishop and statesman, a leading exponent of conservatism in the first generation of the English Reformation. Although he supported the antipapal policies of King Henry VIII (ruled 1509–47), Gardiner rejected Protestant doctrine and ultimately backed the severe Roman Catholicism of Queen Mary I (ruled 1553–58).
The son of a clothmaker, he obtained his doctorate in civil and canon law from the University of Cambridge in 1520–21. Throughout a busy public life he maintained ties to Cambridge, serving as master of Trinity Hall 1525–49 and 1553–55. Gardiner became, in 1525, secretary to Henry VIII’s chief minister, Cardinal Wolsey, and in 1528–29 he was sent on missions to Pope Clement VII to negotiate for the annulment of Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon—the issue that was to cause Henry to break with Rome and declare himself head of the English Church. As a reward for his services Gardiner was made Henry’s principal secretary in 1529 and bishop of Winchester, the wealthiest see in England, in September 1531.
Gardiner, however, failed to earn the king’s trust; in 1532 Henry bypassed him to appoint as his archbishop of Canterbury the obscure Thomas Cranmer, who was to become a renowned Protestant reformer. Two years later Henry’s chief adviser, Thomas Cromwell, eased Gardiner out of his secretaryship. Thus the bishop became the inveterate enemy of both Cromwell and Cranmer. Gardiner recovered some favour at court by publishing his Episcopi de vera obedientia oratio (1535; “Bishop’s Speech on True Obedience”), a treatise attacking the papacy and upholding royal supremacy over the Church of England. In 1539, however, he led the conservative reaction that, through the Act of Six Articles, required all Englishmen to abide by the main tenets of Roman Catholic doctrine. Gardiner and his sometime colleague Thomas Howard, 3rd duke of Norfolk, had a hand in bringing about Cromwell’s downfall in June 1540, and he then succeeded Cromwell as chancellor of Cambridge. Thereafter Henry kept Gardiner on his royal council in order to counter the Protestant sympathies of some of his other advisers, but he would not allow the bishop to bring Cranmer to trial on charges of heresy. Gardiner was also frustrated in his campaign to destroy Queen Catherine Parr, and Henry did not name him to the council of regency for his son Edward.
During the rapid advance toward Protestantism that took place upon the accession of Edward VI, Gardiner was sent to prison for refusing to enforce Cranmer’s Reformist injunctions. Although released in January 1548, he was imprisoned in the Tower of London in June and remained there until Edward’s death (on July 6, 1553), being deprived of his bishopric late in 1550.
After the Catholic Mary I ascended the throne, Gardiner was restored to his see in August 1553 and appointed lord chancellor. Although he had become, in effect, chief minister of the realm, he was in a difficult position because he felt out of step in a court increasingly oriented toward Rome and—after Mary wed the Holy Roman emperor Charles V’s son Philip (King Philip II of Spain, 1556–98)—toward Spain. Gardiner approved the severe persecution of Protestants that began early in 1554, but to his credit he tried unsuccessfully to save Cranmer and others from the stake. He died two years before the persecutions ended. Gardiner had earned distinction for his legal and administrative talents; he was a powerful churchman but not a great spiritual leader.
|
396ce1fa0af34f2445f02267911f16b8 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stephen-Gary-Wozniak | Steve Wozniak | Steve Wozniak
Steve Wozniak, byname of Stephen Gary Wozniak, (born August 11, 1950, San Jose, California, U.S.), American electronics engineer, cofounder, with Steve Jobs, of Apple Computer, and designer of the first commercially successful personal computer.
Wozniak—or “Woz,” as he was commonly known—was the son of an electrical engineer for the Lockheed Missiles and Space Company in Sunnyvale, California, in what would become known as Silicon Valley. A precocious but undisciplined student with a gift for mathematics and an interest in electronics, he attended the University of Colorado at Boulder for one year (1968–69) before dropping out. Following his return to California, he attended a local community college and then the University of California, Berkeley. In 1971 Wozniak designed the “Blue Box,” a device for phreaking (hacking into the telephone network without paying for long-distance calls) that he and Jobs, a student at his old high school whom he met about this time, began selling to other students. Also during the early 1970s Wozniak worked at several small electronics firms in the San Francisco Bay area before obtaining a position with the Hewlett-Packard Company in 1975, by which time he had formally dropped out of Berkeley.
Wozniak also became involved with the Homebrew Computer Club, a San Francisco Bay area group centred around the Altair 8800 microcomputer do-it-yourself kit, which was based on one of the world’s first microprocessors, the Intel Corporation 8080, released in 1975. While working as an engineering intern at Hewlett-Packard, Wozniak designed his own microcomputer in 1976 using the new microprocessor, but the company was not interested in developing his design. Jobs, who was also a Homebrew member, showed so much enthusiasm for Wozniak’s design that they decided to work together, forming their own company, Apple Computer. Their initial capital came from selling Jobs’s automobile and Wozniak’s programmable calculator, and they set up production in the Jobs family garage to build microcomputer circuit boards. Sales of the kit were promising, so they decided to produce a finished product, the Apple II; completed in 1977, it included a built-in keyboard and support for a colour monitor. The Apple II, which combined Wozniak’s brilliant engineering with Jobs’s aesthetic sense, was the first personal computer to appeal beyond hobbyist circles. When the company went public in 1980, its market value exceeded $1 billion, at the time the fastest rise to that milestone in corporate history, and Wozniak’s stock in the company made him an instant multimillionaire.
During these years, Wozniak designed new hardware components, such as the 3.5-inch floppy disk drive for the Apple II, and various components of the Apple operating system and its software applications. This work ended in 1981 when he crashed his small airplane, leaving him temporarily with traumatic amnesia (unable to form new long-term memories), and he was forced to go on a sabbatical. He soon decided to return to Berkeley, under the pseudonym of Rocky Clark, in order to finish the computer science and electrical engineering courses needed to earn those degrees. Although he dropped out again, he eventually was given credit for his work at Apple, and the school awarded him a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering in 1987.
Wozniak returned to Apple in 1982, though he resisted efforts to involve him in management. He finally retired as an active employee in 1985, immediately after being awarded, along with Jobs, a National Medal of Technology by U.S. Pres. Ronald W. Reagan. Wozniak spent the ensuing decades engaged in philanthropic causes, especially involving the education of children, and in volunteer work teaching computer enrichment classes to preteens.
Although Wozniak was semiretired after leaving Apple, he kept up with the computing world by funding various business ventures and occasionally serving as an adviser or board member for different companies. In 2009 he became the chief scientist at Fusion-Io, an American company that produces high-capacity, solid-state storage devices. Wozniak was serving on the company’s board of directors when he decided to become a full-time employee. After Fusion-Io was sold to SanDisk in 2014, Wozniak left the company to become chief scientist at Primary Data, which was involved in data virtualization; that business shut down in 2018.
In 2006 Wozniak published his autobiography, iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It.
|
a3cb732fe7e74a95e5ca3166a561dc31 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stephen-I-king-of-Hungary | Stephen I | Stephen I
Stephen I, also called Saint Stephen, Hungarian Szent István, original name Vajk, (born c. 970–975, Esztergom, Hungary—died August 15, 1038, Esztergom; canonized 1083; feast day August 16), first king of Hungary, who is considered to be the founder of the Hungarian state and one of the most-renowned figures in Hungarian history.
Stephen was a member of the Árpád dynasty and son of the supreme Magyar chieftain Géza. He was born a pagan but was baptized and reared as a Christian, and in 996 he married Gisela, daughter of Duke Henry II of Bavaria (and sister of the future Holy Roman emperor Henry II). After the death of his father (997), Stephen combated an insurrection led by his older cousin, Koppány, who claimed the throne in accordance with Árpád succession rules. Stephen defeated Koppány at Veszprém (998) and had him executed as a pagan.
On Christmas Day, 1000 ce, Stephen was anointed king of Hungary. According to tradition, he received from Pope Sylvester II a crown that is now held as a national treasure in Hungary (see Saint Stephen’s Crown). His coronation signified Hungary’s entry into the family of European Christian nations. With the exception of an invasion by the Holy Roman emperor Conrad II in 1030 and minor disputes with Poland and Bulgaria, Stephen’s reign was peaceful.
Stephen organized his kingdom on German models. He founded bishoprics and abbeys, made the building of churches mandatory, and established the practice of tithing. He promoted agriculture, safeguarded private property with strict laws, and organized a standing army. While a ruling class was created, the institution of slavery was left virtually untouched. Stephen also opened the country to strong foreign influences, while saving it from German conquest. He treated the church as the principal pillar of his authority, dispatching missionaries throughout his realm.
Stephen is Hungary’s patron saint. Although his feast day is August 16, Hungarians celebrate the translation of his relics to Buda on August 20.
|
a67a8e40045208b73fa68f9597e8d8a2 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stephen-II-unconsecrated-pope | Stephen (II) | Stephen (II)
Stephen (II), (born, Rome—died March 25, 752, Rome), unconsecrated pope from March 23 to March 25, 752. He was a priest when he was elected on March 23, 752, to succeed Pope St. Zacharias, but he died of apoplexy two days later without having been consecrated. Because consecration is the act considered necessary to mark the official beginning of a pontificate, Stephen was listed neither in the official list of the popes nor in the Liber Pontificalis (“Book of the Popes”). Although he was offically recognized by the church in the 16th century as Stephen II, his name was removed from the official list of popes during the pontificate of John XXIII (1958–63). Consequently, his successor, who also took the name Stephen, is called both Stephen II and Stephen III. The succession of Stephens is thus somewhat irregular.
|
976403fe06858d15878145643222e93d | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stephen-IV-or-V | Stephen IV (or V) | Stephen IV (or V)
Stephen IV (or V), (born, Rome—died Jan. 24, 817, Rome), pope from June 816 to January 817.
Of noble birth, he succeeded Pope St. Leo III in June 816. Immediately after his consecration he ordered the Romans to swear fidelity to the Carolingian emperor Louis I the Pious, whom he informed of his election and asked to meet in Gaul.
Louis had been crowned by his father Charlemagne in 813. In Reims Stephen anointed Louis as Holy Roman emperor, an act that solidified the alliance between the papacy and the Franks and created effects crucial to European history; the papacy became the agency that created emperors, symbolized by the coronation and anointing, and this became one of the papacy’s most treasured prerogatives. Stephen died soon after returning to Rome.
|
d6dc7e31184892a27b7c661f9566a766 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stephen-Jay-Gould | Stephen Jay Gould | Stephen Jay Gould
Stephen Jay Gould, (born September 10, 1941, New York, New York, U.S.—died May 20, 2002, New York), American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and science writer.
Gould graduated from Antioch College in 1963 and received a Ph.D. in paleontology at Columbia University in 1967. He joined the faculty of Harvard University in 1967, becoming a full professor there in 1973. Gould’s own technical research focused on the evolution and speciation of West Indian land snails. With Niles Eldredge, he developed in 1972 the theory of punctuated equilibrium, a revision of Darwinian theory proposing that the creation of new species through evolutionary change occurs not at slow, constant rates over millions of years but rather in rapid bursts over periods as short as thousands of years, which are then followed by long periods of stability during which organisms undergo little further change. Gould’s theory was opposed by many, including American biologist Edward O. Wilson, who believed that evolution is essentially progressive, leading from the simple to the complex and from the worse-adapted to the better.
Gould also argued that population genetics is useful—indeed, all-important—for understanding relatively small-scale or short-term evolutionary changes but that it is incapable of yielding insight into large-scale or long-term ones, such as the Cambrian explosion. One must turn to paleontology in its own right to explain those changes, which might well involve extinctions brought about by extraterrestrial forces (e.g., comets) or new kinds of selection operating only at levels higher than the individual organism. As with Gould’s theory on evolutionary change, much of his later work drew criticism from other scientists.
Apart from his technical research, Gould became widely known as a writer, polemicist, and popularizer of evolutionary theory. In his books Ontogeny and Phylogeny (1977), The Mismeasure of Man (1981), Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle (1987), and Wonderful Life (1989), he traced the course and significance of various controversies in the history of evolutionary biology, intelligence testing, geology, and paleontology. From 1974 Gould regularly contributed essays to the periodical Natural History, and these were collected in several volumes, including Ever Since Darwin (1977), The Panda’s Thumb (1980), and Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes (1983). In Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (1999), Gould, who was then president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, rejected the work of individuals who tried to integrate science and religion. According to Gould, science and religion were never at war but should remain separate. Gould’s science writing is characterized by a graceful literary style and the ability to treat complex concepts with absolute clarity.
|
b1ce2abb415d54da047e408349885fc1 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stephen-Leacock | Stephen Leacock | Stephen Leacock
Stephen Leacock, in full Stephen Butler Leacock, (born Dec. 30, 1869, Swanmore, Hampshire, Eng.—died March 28, 1944, Toronto, Ont., Can.), internationally popular Canadian humorist, educator, lecturer, and author of more than 30 books of lighthearted sketches and essays.
Leacock immigrated to Canada with his parents at the age of six. He attended Upper Canada College (1882–87) and later received a B.A. degree from the University of Toronto (1891). After teaching for eight years at Upper Canada College, he entered the University of Chicago and was awarded a Ph.D. in 1903. Appointed that same year to the staff of McGill University in Montreal, he became head of the department of economics and political science in 1908 and served in that capacity until his retirement in 1936. Although Leacock was the author of nearly 20 works on history and political economy, his true calling was humour, both as a lecturer and as an author.
His fame now rests securely on work begun with the beguiling fantasies of Literary Lapses (1910) and Nonsense Novels (1911). Leacock’s humour is typically based on a comic perception of social foibles and the incongruity between appearance and reality in human conduct, and his work is characterized by the invention of lively comic situations. Most renowned are his Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), which gently mocks life in the fictional town of Mariposa, Ont., and Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich (1914).
He also wrote Humour: Its Theory and Technique (1935), a discussion of his humour, and The Boy I Left Behind Me (1946), an uncompleted autobiography.
|
4d6a0c18f888079aed9d02d3b1556e5c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stephen-Malkmus | Stephen Malkmus | Stephen Malkmus
…singer, guitarist, and principal songwriter Stephen Malkmus (also known as S.M.; b. May 30, 1966, Santa Monica, California, U.S.) and guitarist Scott Kannberg (also known as Spiral Stairs; b. August 30, 1966, Stockton, California). Manic original drummer Gary Young (b. c. 1954, Marmaroneck, New York), a counterculture veteran who ran…
…of former Pavement front man Stephen Malkmus) and Quasi. In addition, she and Brownstein—who had spent the intervening years as a writer and an actress—helped found the band Wild Flag, which debuted with a self-titled album in 2011. In addition, Brownstein was a creator, writer, and actress on the popular…
|
e75c3a47a08317d381393c898eb68ed8 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stephen-Marshall | Stephen Marshall | Stephen Marshall
Stephen Marshall, (born c. 1594, Godmanchester, Huntingdonshire, Eng.—died Nov. 19, 1655, London), Presbyterian minister and popular Puritan leader. He was an influential preacher to the English Parliament and a participant in the formulation of his church’s creed.
By 1629 Marshall had become a vicar at Finchingfield, Essex, a position he held until 1651, when personal dissatisfaction caused him to move to Ipswich as town preacher. From 1640 he was also lecturer at St. Margaret’s, Westminster. The following year he joined in an attack, published under the name Smectymnuus (q.v.), on the policies of church government and liturgy.
In 1643 Marshall became a member of the Westminster Assembly, a body of clerics and laymen convened by Parliament to determine the nature and doctrine of the English church. When in 1646 Parliament ordered that Presbyterianism be established in England, he was nominated to serve as an elder in his local classis, or district ruling body.
Marshall was influential primarily through his sermons. Though he never held an official position in London, his ability as a spokesman enabled him to win support in the House of Commons for liturgical and episcopal reforms. He was also active in the preparation of the Shorter Westminster Catechism (1647), still a major statement of Presbyterian belief.
|
00c6fd8bd0c6677b488a61b5c5372086 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stephen-Rea | Stephen Rea | Stephen Rea
…1980 Friel cofounded (with actor-director Stephen Rea) the Field Day Theatre Company in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, and in 1983 the company began publishing pamphlets, and later anthologies, aimed at the academic community on a wide variety of historical, cultural, and artistic topics. He was elected Saoi of Aosdána, Ireland’s highest…
…Angel, a drama that starred Stephen Rea, who later appeared in a number of Jordan’s films. The director continued to earn praise for such films as The Company of Wolves (1984) and Mona Lisa (1986). The Crying Game (1992), a psychological thriller based on one of his own short stories,…
|
99e814cad1cf3e550467bc8e28425696 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stephen-Samuel-Wise | Stephen Samuel Wise | Stephen Samuel Wise
Stephen Samuel Wise, (born March 17, 1874, Budapest, Hung., Austria-Hungary—died April 19, 1949, New York, N.Y., U.S.), Reform rabbi, a leader of the Zionist movement in the United States, and a liberal activist who influenced the development of Reform Judaism in that country.
Wise earned his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1901 and received his rabbinical training from private teachers. After serving as rabbi to congregations in New York City (1893–1900) and Portland, Ore. (1900–06), he was invited to become rabbi of Temple Emanu-El (New York City), then the most influential Reform congregation in the country. He declined the appointment, however, after receiving inadequate assurances of free speech in the pulpit, and he founded the influential Free Synagogue (1907) instead, which he led until his death. Wise became a noted civic reformer in New York City politics in subsequent decades and was famous for his brilliant and timely sermons, which he preached to large audiences at Carnegie Hall for many years.
Wise was one of the first Jewish leaders in the United States to become active in the Zionist movement. He attended the Second Zionist Congress in Basel, Switz., in 1898, and that same year he helped found the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), of which he served as president in 1936–38. He also helped found and led the permanent American Jewish Congress and the World Jewish Congress (1936). As a prominent member of the Democratic Party and an acquaintance of President Woodrow Wilson, Wise influenced the U.S. government toward approval of the Balfour Declaration. He was a leader in the struggle to marshal American public opinion against Adolf Hitler in the 1930s.
In 1922 Wise founded the Jewish Institute of Religion in New York City, a seminary that was especially designed to train liberal rabbis for the New York area; this school merged with Hebrew Union College in 1950.
|
2a123cf898c3a3e914420402b03bb09b | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stephen-Smale | Stephen Smale | Stephen Smale
Stephen Smale, (born July 15, 1930, Flint, Michigan, U.S.), American mathematician who was awarded the Fields Medal in 1966 for his work on topology in higher dimensions.
Smale grew up in a rural area near Flint. From 1948 to 1956 he attended the University of Michigan, obtaining B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in mathematics. As an instructor at the University of Chicago from 1956 to 1958, Smale achieved notoriety by proving that there exists an eversion of the sphere (meaning, in a precise theoretical sense, that it is possible to turn a sphere inside out).
In 1960 Smale obtained his two most famous mathematical results. First he constructed a function, now known as the horseshoe, that serves as a paradigm for chaos. Next Smale proved the generalized Poincaré conjecture for all dimensions greater than or equal to five. (The classical conjecture states that a simply connected closed three-dimensional manifold is a three-dimensional sphere, a set of points in four-dimensional space at the same distance from the origin.) The two-dimensional version of this theorem (the two-dimensional sphere is the surface of a common sphere in three-dimensional space) was established in the 19th century, and the three-dimensional version was established at the start of the 21st century. Smale’s work was remarkable in that he bypassed dimensions three and four to resolve the problem for all higher dimensions. In 1961 he followed up with the h-cobordism theorem, which became the fundamental tool for classifying different manifolds in higher-dimensional topology.
In 1965 Smale took a six-month hiatus from mathematical research to join radical activist Jerry Rubin in establishing the first campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience directed at ending U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Smale’s mathematical and political lives collided the following year at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Moscow, where he received the Fields Medal. There Smale held a controversial press conference in which he criticized the actions of both the U.S. and Soviet governments.
Smale’s mathematical work is notable for both its breadth and depth, reaching the areas of topology, dynamical systems, economics, nonlinear analysis, mechanics, and computation. In 1994 Smale retired from the University of California at Berkeley and then joined the faculty of the City University of Hong Kong. In 2007 he was awarded the Wolf Prize in Mathematics.
Smale’s publications include Differential Equations, Dynamical Systems, and Linear Algebra (1974; with Morris W. Hirsch), The Mathematics of Time: Essays on Dynamical Systems, Economic Processes, and Related Topics (1980), and The Collected Papers of Stephen Smale (2000).
|
cb164adb1f83310cd815f61fac5d25b1 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stephen-Storace | Stephen Storace | Stephen Storace
Stephen Storace, in full Stephen John Seymour Storace, (born April 4, 1762, London, Eng.—died March 19, 1796, London), composer whose comic operas were highly popular in 18th-century England.
Storace was the son of an Italian double-bass player and an English mother. About 1776 he went to Naples in order to study the violin, and, after a few years back in London, in 1784 he went to Vienna, where, it is believed, he studied with Mozart, whom he had met through his sister. He produced two operas in Vienna and in 1787 returned to London, where he spent the rest of his life writing comic operas for Drury Lane. The most successful of these included The Haunted Tower (1789), The Pirates (1792), and the afterpiece No Song, No Supper (1790). Storace also published chamber music, songs, and an anthology, Storace’s Collection of Original Harpsichord Music (1787–89), which included music brought from Vienna. His operas show the influence of the Italianate style of Vienna as well as that of Mozart.
His sister, Anna Selina (Nancy) Storace (1765–1817), was a noted soprano who sang her first leading role in Florence at age 15. She also created the role of Susanna in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro (1786) after singing the role of Rosina in the Viennese production of Giovanni Paisiello’s The Barber of Seville in 1783.
|
ac3e7adc54f3e6c6c91e67495acbbc71 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stephen-V | Stephen V | Stephen V
Stephen V, (born 1239—died Aug. 6, 1272), king of Hungary (1270–72), the eldest son of Béla IV.
In 1262, as crown prince, he compelled his father, whom he had assisted in the Bohemian war, to surrender 29 counties to him, virtually dividing Hungary into two kingdoms; while afterward he seized the southern banate of Macso, which led to a fresh war between father and son in which the latter triumphed. In 1268 he invaded Bulgaria and assumed the title of king of Bulgaria.
During his father’s lifetime Stephen had a double matrimonial alliance with the Neapolitan princes of the House of Anjou, the chief partisans of the pope. He certainly needed exterior support; for on his accession to the Hungarian throne he encountered almost universal hostility because of his alleged pagan leanings, due largely to the influence of his Cuman wife Elizabeth, to whom his father had married him for political reasons in 1255. The malcontents combined with Otakar II of Bohemia and invaded western Hungary; but Stephen routed Otakar at Mosony (1271) and was preparing to recover his infant son Ladislas (the future Ladislas IV), whom the rebels had kidnapped, when he died suddenly.
|
524495b62032115e84c5af33754bc6fe | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stephen-Watts-Kearny | Stephen Watts Kearny | Stephen Watts Kearny
Stephen Watts Kearny, (born Aug. 30, 1794, Newark, N.J., U.S.—died Oct. 31, 1848, St. Louis, Mo.), U.S. Army officer who conquered New Mexico and helped win California during the Mexican War (1846–48).
After serving in the War of 1812, Kearny spent most of the next 30 years on frontier duty. At the beginning of the Mexican War, he was ordered to lead an expedition from Fort Leavenworth, Kan., to seize New Mexico and California for the United States. Lacking seasoned troops, he used diplomacy rather than arms to defeat the 3,000 Mexicans lying in wait en route to Santa Fe. Persuading them to withdraw, he marched unopposed into Santa Fe on Aug. 18, 1846. He promptly proclaimed a civil government for the entire province and won popular support by his promise of a democratic administration.
Heading toward California, Kearny was informed that the conquest had already been completed by Commodore Robert F. Stockton and Lieutenant Colonel John C. Frémont. With a force reduced to only 120 dragoons, Kearny arrived in early December to discover that rebellious Mexican-Californians had retaken most of the province. Stockton had proclaimed himself governor of California and refused to accept Kearny’s authority. Because he wished to preserve harmony and because Stockton’s men constituted the bulk of available U.S. forces, Kearny accepted the situation and led the combined army-navy command to Los Angeles, defeating the Mexicans at San Gabriel (Jan. 8, 1847) and the Mesa (January 9), thus ending the resistance.
Kearny’s position was complicated by the insubordination of Frémont, who had persuaded Stockton to appoint him governor. The arrival of reinforcements enabled Kearny to finally impose his will on Frémont without bloodshed. At the same time, he pacified California, establishing a stable and efficient civil government. He then returned to Fort Leavenworth (August 22) accompanied by a reluctant Frémont, whom he arrested and sent to Washington, D.C., for court-martial.
Kearny was next ordered to Mexico, where he served as military commander at Veracruz and later at Mexico City until an attack of yellow fever ended his career.
|
0b7ff2f7e788babb7e7b26df2318b525 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Steve-Ditko | Steve Ditko | Steve Ditko
…writer Stan Lee and artist Steve Ditko. The character first appeared in a backup strip in Strange Tales no. 110 in July 1963 but soon blossomed into one of the cult characters of the decade and a staple in the Marvel pantheon.
…time, and Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko were the most important and influential artists.
Writer Stan Lee and illustrator Steve Ditko created Spider-Man as a filler story for a canceled anthology series. At the time, a teenage lead hero was unheard of in comic books. However, young readers responded powerfully to Peter Parker, prompting an ongoing title and, ultimately, a media empire, including video…
|
034bb83a5a4c6b684424bca69d1cdd20 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Steve-Forbes | Steve Forbes | Steve Forbes
Steve Forbes, in full Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Jr., (born July 18, 1947, Morristown, New Jersey, U.S.), American publishing executive who twice sought the Republican Party’s presidential nomination (1996, 2000).
Forbes graduated from Princeton University in 1970 with a B.A. degree in American history. He then went to work as a researcher for Forbes magazine, which was headed by his father, Malcolm S. Forbes, Sr. In 1973 he began writing a column for the magazine, and in 1980 he became the president and chief operating officer of Forbes, Inc. After the death of his father in 1990, Forbes became the chief executive officer of the company as well as editor in chief of the magazine, and under his leadership the company expanded its publishing ventures.
In 1985 he was appointed by Pres. Ronald Reagan to head the Board for International Broadcasting, which oversaw Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe, and he was reappointed to the position by Pres. George H.W. Bush. In 1993, with Jack Kemp, a former congressman and fellow proponent of free-market economics, he founded Empower America, a group advocating so-called supply-side policies, including low taxes and deregulation, as the best means of stimulating growth.
In the 1996 campaign for the Republican nomination, Forbes emphasized his economic policies, prominent among them a drastically simplified income tax code that would include a single tax rate. He also advocated reliance on individual retirement accounts as a substitute for Social Security and the use of medical savings accounts in place of traditional employee health benefits. He supported conservative positions on a number of other issues, including term limits for members of Congress, school vouchers, and an end to affirmative-action policies. He did not, however, take a firm stance against abortion. Criticized for spending $37 million of his own money on the campaign, he withdrew in March 1996 after having had only mixed results in state primaries.
In 1999 Forbes announced his candidacy for the nomination in 2000. Although he continued to emphasize economic policies and conservative positions, he attempted to broaden his appeal by adopting stances on certain issues that were important to the social and religious right. These included a tougher position against abortion and advocating the posting of the Ten Commandments in classrooms. Poor showings in several state primaries, however, led Forbes to drop out of the presidential race in February 2000.
In 2001 Forbes joined the board of trustees of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. In 2006 he joined the board of directors of FreedomWorks, a conservative, nonprofit advocacy group based in Washington, D.C. During the 2008 U.S. presidential primaries, Forbes served as national cochair and senior policy advisor in the campaign of Republican candidate and former mayor of New York City Rudy Giuliani.
|
9fbd38dba8a665893bbd77f008586ffd | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Steve-Largent | Steve Largent | Steve Largent
Steve Largent, byname of Stephen Michael Largent, (born September 28, 1954, Tulsa, Oklahoma, U.S.), American gridiron football player who is considered one of the greatest wide receivers of all time. He retired from the sport as the owner of all the major career National Football League (NFL) receiving records.
Although he was a standout high-school football player and all-around athlete, Largent was not heavily recruited by college scouts, so he enrolled at the lesser-known University of Tulsa in his hometown. After graduating in 1976, following one of the most outstanding careers in the history of Tulsa’s football program, Largent was selected by the Houston Oilers in the NFL draft. He never appeared in a Houston uniform, however, as the Oilers dealt him to the Seattle Seahawks in a preseason trade.
Largent had an immediate influence with the Seahawks, catching 54 passes in his rookie season. Although he had always been a good overall athlete, he did not excel physically in any one area. At the professional level, he was never the fastest man on the field, never the best jumper, and never the quickest off the line of scrimmage. What made him a great receiver was his excellent hands, the intelligence and ability to run crisp routes that got him into the open, and the strength to gain extra yards after catching the ball. It was this extra effort that earned him the respect and admiration of opponents and fans alike. Largent’s incredible durability—he missed only four games because of injury in his first 13 seasons—made him an institution at the wide receiver position.
Over the course of his 14 seasons, Largent raised the bar by which other receivers were measured. He caught 70 or more passes six times and caught at least 50 in 10 seasons. He set a record by catching at least one pass in 177 straight games (broken in 1994) and led the NFL in receiving twice (1979 and 1985). He recorded 819 pass receptions for 13,089 total receiving yards and collected 100 receiving touchdowns, all of which were NFL records that have since been broken. Largent was named to the Pro Bowl seven times during the course of his career, and he was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1995.
Largent retired from football in 1989 after spending his entire career in Seattle. He worked as a marketing consultant for the Sara Lee Corporation from 1991 to 1994 and, after a lifetime of community involvement and interest in politics, decided to run for national office. In 1994 Largent was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Oklahoma’s first district. He was reelected on three occasions before leaving his office to mount an unsuccessful bid for the Oklahoma governorship in 2002. From 2003 to 2014 he was CEO and president of a cellular communications lobbying group.
|
ee2d3b5662623bfe095a8623ebdf5ef6 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Steve-McNair | Steve McNair | Steve McNair
Steve McNair, in full Steve LaTreal McNair, byname Air McNair, (born February 14, 1973, Mount Olive, Mississippi, U.S.—died July 4, 2009, Nashville, Tennessee), American gridiron football player who threw 174 touchdown passes during his 13 National Football League (NFL) seasons (1995–2008), primarily while playing for the Tennessee Titans.
McNair grew up in Mississippi and chose to attend the rural Alcorn State University, a historically black Division I-AA (now Football Championship Subdivision [FCS]) school where he could play quarterback, rather than serve as defensive back at a major university. He was the starting quarterback for Alcorn State for all but one game in his four-year college football career. Over that time, McNair threw 119 touchdown passes and set an FCS record by throwing and running for a combined 16,823 yards. In his senior year alone, he set a single-season FCS mark by totaling 5,799 yards and finished third in the balloting for the 1994 Heisman Trophy.
McNair was selected with the third pick in the 1995 NFL draft by the Houston Oilers—who became the Tennessee Titans in 1999. He led the Titans to the franchise’s first Super Bowl berth in 2000. There he guided his team to a comeback from a 16-point deficit, and the Titans came within a yard of the tying touchdown, only to ultimately lose to the St. Louis Rams. McNair played with the Titans franchise for 11 seasons before finishing his career with the Baltimore Ravens (2006–08)
Over the course of his NFL career, McNair passed for 31,304 yards, rushed for 3,590 yards, played in three Pro Bowls, and was named joint Most Valuable Player in 2003, along with Indianapolis Colts quarterback Peyton Manning. McNair was known for his tenacity in playing through injuries and his dexterity as a scrambler or passer. His early death became fodder for tabloids: the married McNair was found dead in a condominium alongside a woman he had been dating whom police believed killed him and then herself.
|
85a5a95a835e75f2b8323d093282f394 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Steve-Reeves | Steve Reeves | Steve Reeves
Steve Reeves, in full Steven Reeves, (born January 21, 1926, Glasgow, Montana, U.S.—died May 1, 2000, Escondido, California), American bodybuilder and actor. He was one of the handsomest and best-built men of his era. By Reeves’s own account, at his bodybuilding peak he stood 6 feet 1 inch (1.85 metres) tall, weighed 216 pounds (98 kg), had 18.25-inch (46.4-cm) biceps, a 52-inch (132-cm) chest, a 29-inch (74-cm) waist, and 38-inch (96.5-cm) hips. He reigned as Mr. America of 1947, Mr. World of 1948, and Mr. Universe of 1950 before parlaying his spectacular physique into a bonanza at the box office.
Reeves’s movie career began with small roles in 1954 but did not take off until he traveled to Europe, where, under the guidance of Italian producer Federico Teti, he took the lead role in Le fatiche di Ercole (1957; Hercules, 1959). Hercules was a box-office success in America and set the stage for a series of swashbuckling “sword-and-sandal” epics that showcased Reeves as a heroic strongman. Although Reeves had other Italian-American hits—Agi Murad il diavolo bianco (1959; The White Warrior, 1961), Gli ultimi giorni di Pompeii (1959; The Last Days of Pompeii, 1960), Il terrore dei barbari (1959; Goliath and the Barbarians, 1960), and La battaglia di Maratona (1959; The Giant of Marathon, 1960)—his thick wavy black hair, bright blue eyes, and Olympian physique seemed the very personification of Hercules. His stardom helped initiate a host of cheaply made Italian films for American consumption that eventually resulted in Sergio Leone’s “spaghetti westerns.” Reeves’s last film, of a total of 18, was A Long Ride from Hell (1968). Although reportedly the highest-paid actor in Europe in 1967, he retired two years later to his estate in California to raise Morgan horses. Reeves was virtually the only bodybuilder prior to Arnold Schwarzenegger to translate his muscles into money and international renown through a successful film career.
|
e6e79985d760bcf380bd1786b121d120 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Steve-Waugh | Steve Waugh | Steve Waugh
Steve Waugh, byname of Stephen Rodger Waugh, (born June 2, 1965, Canterbury, New South Wales, Australia), Australian cricketer who set the record for most international Test appearances (168; later broken by Sachin Tendulkar) and who, with his twin brother, Mark, helped lead the resurgence of the Australian national team in the late 20th century.
Waugh made his debut at the age of 20 against India in 1985 but did not score a century (100 runs in a single innings) in his first 26 Tests. He was a key member of Australia’s 1987 Cricket World Cup-winning team, but his true breakthrough came in England in 1989 when he made 177 not out and 152 not out in the first two Tests and finished the series with an average of 126. Despite another successful Ashes tour (Australia’s long-standing Test competition against England) four years later, it was not until the tour to the West Indies in 1995 that Waugh fully matured into the complete Test batsman and was considered one of the greatest batsmen in the world. His 200 against a strong West Indian attack answered the critics who had consistently questioned his technique against short-pitched bowling. Against England in 1997, he became only the third Australian to score two centuries in the same Test.
Waugh became Australia’s Test captain in 1999, and he led Australia’s One Day International (ODI) team to another World Cup victory that year. Also in 1999, the Australian side began a world-record streak of 16 consecutive Test wins (a mark that was equaled by another Australian team from 2005 to 2008). In 2002 he was removed from Australia’s ODI team but remained captain of the Test squad, which won the Ashes in 2002–03. He retired in 2004 and turned to philanthropy, establishing the Steve Waugh Foundation for sick children. His autobiography, Out of My Comfort Zone, was published in 2005.
|
4184e5dfd5e53079d48d7c488d68b222 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Steve-Winwood | Steve Winwood | Steve Winwood
Principal members included singer-keyboardist Steve Winwood (b. May 12, 1948, Birmingham, Warwickshire, England), flautist-saxophonist Chris Wood (b. June 24, 1944, Birmingham—d. July 12, 1983, Birmingham), guitarist Dave Mason (b. May 10, 1946, Worcester, Worcestershire, England), and drummer Jim Capaldi (b. August 2, 1944, Evesham, Worcestershire—d. January 28, 2005, London).
|
d1df07b3c839437dd22876f97afd4a18 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Steven-Avery | Steven Avery | Steven Avery
Steven Avery, in full Steven Allen Avery, (born July 9, 1962, Manitowoc county, Wisconsin, U.S.), American labourer who served 18 years in prison (1985–2003) for rape and attempted murder before his conviction was overturned because of DNA evidence. In 2005 he was charged with murder in a different case and was found guilty two years later. Avery was the subject of the hugely popular TV documentary series Making a Murderer (2015 and 2018).
Avery grew up in Manitowoc county, Wisconsin, and his family owned a salvage yard in Two Rivers. He reportedly had an IQ of 70, and he dropped out of high school. In 1981 he was convicted of burglarizing a bar and later served 10 months in jail. The following year he pled guilty to animal cruelty after he poured gasoline on a cat and tossed it into a bonfire; he was sentenced to nine months. In 1985 he again ran afoul of the law when he forced a car driven by Sandra Morris—a cousin who was the wife of a sheriff’s deputy—off the road and pointed a gun at her. Avery claimed that he wanted her to stop “spreading rumors” about him; in 1984 she had filed a complaint alleging that he had exposed himself on several occasions. He received a six-year sentence for the car incident but was granted bail.
On July 29, 1985, Penny Beernsten was raped on a beach near Two Rivers. She provided a description of the assailant, and police believed it resembled Avery. After Beernsten picked him out of a photo array, Avery was arrested. Although 16 people testified that he was elsewhere at the time of the attack, a state forensic official claimed that a hair found on one of Avery’s shirts was consistent with that of the victim. In December 1985 Avery was convicted of the crime and sentenced to 32 years. However, some had doubts about his guilt, believing that Gregory A. Allen, an area man who strongly resembled Avery and was suspected in other sex crimes, might be the assailant. However, law enforcement officials never investigated Allen.
Avery maintained his innocence, and in 2001 the Wisconsin Innocence Project became involved in his case. The following year it was granted a court order for DNA testing of a pubic hair found on the victim. In September 2003 a state lab—using newer technology—matched the hair to Allen, who was then in prison for sexual assault. All charges against Avery were dropped, and he was released from prison. Soon thereafter, he filed a $36 million wrongful conviction lawsuit against the county, the district attorney, and the sheriff. During the legal proceedings, it was discovered that in 1995 detectives had learned that Allen, a prisoner in nearby Brown county, confessed to having committed a sexual assault in Manitowoc county for which someone else was convicted. Authorities, however, never pursued the claim.
On October 31, 2005, while the civil case was still ongoing, Teresa Halbach, a freelance photographer, drove to the Avery’s Auto Salvage—where Avery and other family members lived—in order to photograph a van that he wanted to list in Auto Trader magazine. Avery claimed that he talked to her but that she left after taking the photographs. She was never seen alive again. On November 3 a missing persons report was filed, and a search was undertaken to locate Halbach. Two days later her vehicle was found at the family’s salvage yard. Over the following week Halbach’s car key was discovered in Avery’s house, and blood—later determined to be his—was found in her car. In addition, human bones were recovered from a burn pit near Avery’s home; they were soon determined to belong to Halbach. Additional evidence included a bullet, found in Avery’s garage, that had Halbach’s DNA. Avery was arrested, and while in jail he settled his civil suit for $400,000.
In March 2006 Brendan Dassey, Avery’s 16-year-old nephew who reportedly had an IQ of 73, told police detectives that he and Avery had raped and murdered Halbach before burning her body. As on several subsequent occasions, Dassey was interviewed without legal representation or a parent. He later recanted, claiming that the confession was coerced. However, Dassey was charged with the various crimes, although there was no physical evidence against him.
Avery maintained his innocence, accusing law officials of framing him in order to undermine his civil suit. Chief among the allegations was that evidence had been planted. Notably, his attorneys argued that the blood in Halbach’s car had actually come from a sample Avery had provided during the 1985 case, though it was debated whether someone had tampered with the vial. In addition, it was noted that Halbach’s car key had been found by two Manitowoc deputies—who had been required to testify in Avery’s civil suit—although several earlier searches had been fruitless. After a 27-day trial, Avery was found guilty of murder and illegal possession of a firearm in March 2007. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Later that year Dassey was also found guilty and given a life term, though he was eligible for parole in 2048.
In 2015 Avery—and Dassey—drew international attention with the airing of Making a Murderer on Netflix. The 10-part series was made by Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi, who first began working on the project in December 2005. While the program was an immediate hit with viewers—many of whom became amateur sleuths—a number of those involved in the case objected to how they were portrayed and claimed that the series omitted evidence that supported Avery’s conviction.
In August 2016 a federal judge overturned Dassey’s conviction, ruling that the confession—the only evidence against him—was illegally obtained. An appellate court upheld the decision in September and gave authorities 90 days to either schedule a new trial or free him. Wisconsin authorities appealed both to restore his conviction and to prevent the release of Dassey. In November another court blocked the latter order. The case continued to make its way through the courts, reaching the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in 2017. While a panel of that court ruled in his favour in June, the full court upheld his conviction six months later. In June 2018 the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Dassey’s appeal. Later that year the legal battles of Avery and Dassey were chronicled in Making a Murderer: Part Two.
|
39ef0dcbff485e96628ed07d3ff74fb7 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Steven-Chu | Steven Chu | Steven Chu
Steven Chu, (born February 28, 1948, St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.), American physicist who, with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William D. Phillips, was awarded the 1997 Nobel Prize for Physics for their independent pioneering research in cooling and trapping atoms using laser light. He later served as secretary of energy (2009–13) in the administration of U.S. Pres. Barack Obama. Chu is an author of the Encyclopædia Britannica article on spectroscopy.
Chu graduated from the University of Rochester, New York, in 1970 with a B.S. in physics and an A.B. in mathematics. He received a doctorate in physics in 1976 from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a postdoctoral fellow from 1976 to 1978. He joined the staff at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey, in 1978 and became the head of the quantum electronics research department at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Holmdel, New Jersey, in 1983.
In 1985 Chu and his coworkers at Bell Labs used an array of intersecting laser beams to create an effect they called “optical molasses,” in which the speed of target atoms was reduced from about 4,000 km per hour to about 1 km per hour, as if the atoms were moving through thick molasses. The temperature of the slowed atoms approached absolute zero (−273.15 °C, or −459.67 °F). Chu and his colleagues also developed an atomic trap using lasers and magnetic coils that enabled them to capture and study the chilled atoms. Phillips and Cohen-Tannoudji expanded on Chu’s work, devising ways to use lasers to trap atoms at temperatures even closer to absolute zero. These techniques make it possible for scientists to improve the accuracy of atomic clocks used in space navigation, to construct atomic interferometers that can precisely measure gravitational forces, and to design atomic lasers that can be used to manipulate electronic circuits at an extremely fine scale.
In 1987 Chu joined the faculty of Stanford University, where he continued his work on laser trapping of atoms and branched into biophysics and biology. He served twice as chair of the physics department and helped to establish research institutes such as the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology and Bio-X, the latter being a program for interdisciplinary research into biology and medicine.
In 2004 Chu returned to Berkeley as director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, an institution with a long history of research in atomic and nuclear physics that is now part of the system of national laboratories supported by the U.S. Department of Energy. There he encouraged research into renewable energy, particularly the use of solar energy to create biofuels and generate electricity.
In December 2008 Chu was selected by President-elect Barack Obama to serve as secretary of energy, partly on the basis of his administrative experience and scientific credentials and partly because of his commitment to using science to develop alternative energies and combat climate change. Chu was confirmed by the U.S. Senate in a unanimous voice vote on January 20, 2009. Under Chu’s leadership, the energy department took a central role in implementing funding for renewable energies as part of the president’s large economic stimulus bill passed in February 2009, attempting to redirect the country’s energy consumption away from traditional fossil fuels. Chu stepped down as secretary of energy in April 2013. He subsequently rejoined the faculty at Stanford.
|
3962387219b94c4e9593f7679342a18d | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Steven-Spielberg/The-1990s | The 1990s | The 1990s
Spielberg’s opening film of the 1990s was Hook (1991), a retelling of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. Despite a cast that included major stars Robin Williams and Julia Roberts, the movie was a critical and commercial failure. Spielberg, however, returned to form in dramatic fashion with not one but two enormously popular 1993 releases. The first, Jurassic Park, was an adaptation of Michael Crichton’s best-selling novel (1990) about dinosaurs re-created and running amok on a remote isle. Its scenes of peril are less deftly blended with character-focused downtime activity than in Jaws, but technology is employed to great effect, and there are enough potent shocks to indicate that Spielberg was still a master of Alfred Hitchcock-worthy suspense.
Spielberg’s second film from 1993, Schindler’s List, tells the true story of a group of Polish Jews who avoided Nazi extermination camps with the aid of German industrialist Oskar Schindler during World War II. The drama—which featured notable performances by Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, and Ralph Fiennes—quieted many of Spielberg’s critics. It was shot with unflinching detail in black and white, and it won Spielberg his first Academy Award for best director. In addition, the film garnered six other Oscars, including best picture.
In 1994 Spielberg joined with multimedia moguls Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen to found a new studio, DreamWorks, which was particularly successful as a creator of such popular animated films as Antz (1998), the Shrek series (2001, 2004, 2007, and 2010), and Puss in Boots (2011). In 2006 the partners sold the company to Viacom for $1.6 billion.
On the directorial front, Spielberg’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) failed to attain the majesty of Jurassic Park, but it had many compelling moments. Based on a 1995 best seller by Crichton, who reportedly wrote the book at the behest of Spielberg himself, the film repeats the Jurassic Park formula with a largely new cast—Julianne Moore, Vince Vaughn, Pete Postlethwaite, and Arliss Howard—and returnee Jeff Goldblum, who again plays a scientist who knows this manipulation of nature for profit is both crass and morally indefensible. There are numerous thrills, and the dinosaur special effects equal those of the earlier film.
Amistad (1997) found Spielberg in social historian mode. The film centres on the slave revolt that took place aboard the Spanish slave ship Amistad in 1839 and the subsequent trial in the United States for which the slaves were tried for insurrection on the high seas only to be ruled by the court to have been kidnap victims. Matthew McConaughey was effective as a defense lawyer, and Anthony Hopkins earned an Academy Award nomination for his showy role as former U.S. president John Quincy Adams, who is importuned to defend the slaves before the Supreme Court. As Cinque, the leader of the Africans, Djimon Hounsou gave a memorable performance. The film was well received critically, but it did only modest business at the box-office.
In 1998 Spielberg returned to World War II with Saving Private Ryan. The drama stands as one of the high points of his career, both praised and criticized for presenting some of the most realistic battle scenes staged in a Hollywood war movie. Of particular note is the 27-minute-long opening that depicts the invasion by U.S. troops at Omaha Beach on D-Day. After that harrowing sequence, the film settles into a more conventional narrative as a group of soldiers search for a paratrooper named Ryan in order to extract him from combat before he is killed, just as his three brothers recently were. Tom Hanks portrayed Captain John Miller, who leads the mission, and the strong cast also includes Matt Damon in the title role, along with Tom Sizemore, Edward Burns, Barry Pepper, Adam Goldberg, Giovanni Ribisi, Ted Danson, and Vin Diesel. Saving Private Ryan was nominated for 11 Academy Awards, including best picture, and Spielberg won his second Academy Award as best director. The film was the biggest commercial success of any release in the United States that year.
|
8ffb59b7927d016d900fda7bd99d73e2 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Steven-Tyler | Steven Tyler | Steven Tyler
Principal members were lead singer Steven Tyler (byname of Steven Tallarico; b. March 26, 1948, New York, New York, U.S.), lead guitarist Joe Perry (b. September 10, 1950, Boston, Massachusetts), guitarist Brad Whitford (b. February 23, 1952, Winchester, Massachusetts), bassist Tom Hamilton (b. December 31, 1951, Colorado Springs, Colorado), and…
…such musicians as Jennifer Lopez, Steven Tyler (of Aerosmith), Mariah Carey, Keith Urban, Nicki Minaj, and Harry Connick, Jr. In 2014, his last year on the show, Jackson moved into a mentorship role, leaving the judging to Urban, Lopez, and Connick. In 2015 it was announced
|
b6e3f4454cd40818efbaae965def53a1 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stevie-Smith | Stevie Smith | Stevie Smith
Stevie Smith, pseudonym of Florence Margaret Smith, (born Sept. 20, 1902, Hull, Yorkshire, Eng.—died March 7, 1971, London), British poet who expressed an original and visionary personality in her work, combining a lively wit with penetrating honesty and an absence of sentiment.
For most of her life Smith lived with an aunt in the same house in Palmers Green, a northern London suburb. After attending school there, she worked, until the early 1950s, as a secretary in the London offices of a magazine publisher. She then lived and worked at home, caring for her elderly aunt who had raised her and who died at age 96 in 1968. Palmers Green and the people there are subjects for some of her poetry.
In the 1960s Smith’s poetry readings became popular, and she made radio broadcasts and recordings. She also wrote three novels as well as short stories, literary reviews, and essays, but she is remembered chiefly for her poetry.
The Collected Poems of Stevie Smith (1975), illustrated with her Thurber-like sketches, includes her first book of poems, A Good Time Was Had by All (1937) and Not Waving but Drowning (1957), the title poem of which appears in many anthologies. The lines of her verse are often short and telling. They slip in and out of metre and rest on assonance and broken rhyme in ways that arrest attention. She addresses serious themes with a clarity critics often call childlike. The theme of death recurs often. Me Again: Uncollected Writings of Stevie Smith, Illustrated by Herself (1981) is a posthumous compilation of her prose writings, letters, and previously uncollected poetry.
|
9ec154b455656a6693cbb1d703da200a | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stigand | Stigand | Stigand
Stigand, (died Feb. 21/22, 1072), archbishop of Canterbury, probably the English king Canute’s priest of this name whom he placed over the minster of Ashingdon in Essex in 1020.
Stigand was consecrated bishop of Elmham in 1043 but was deposed later in the year when Queen Emma, mother of Edward the Confessor, fell into disgrace, because he was her adviser. He was reinstated in 1044. In 1047 he became bishop of Winchester, and Elmham was given to his brother Aethelmaer. Stigand mediated the peace between King Edward and Earl Godwine in 1052 and was made archbishop of Canterbury in place of the Norman Robert of Jumièges, who had fled. He did not, however, relinquish Winchester. As he had been intruded into Canterbury while his predecessor was alive, his position was regarded as uncanonical; hence, he did not receive the pallium until 1058, and then only from the antipope Benedict X, after whose deposition (1059) Stigand was excommunicated by Pope Nicholas II. His continuance as archbishop was one of the reasons for the papal support given to William I the Conqueror’s invasion in 1066; he probably crowned Harold II as king. Yet he was too powerful for William to remove him at once, and he was not deposed until 1070. Domesday Book shows him to have had extensive lands and many men commended to him.
|
7eb411cf786c9aeae26fbb93a2ec7f63 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stipe-Mesic | Stipe Mesić | Stipe Mesić
Stipe Mesić, byname of Stjepan Mesić, (born Dec. 24, 1934, Orahovica, Croatia, Kingdom of Yugoslavia), Croatian politician who served as president of Croatia (2000–10).
Mesić earned a degree in law from the University of Zagreb (1961), after which he returned to his hometown of Orahovica in eastern Croatia, which was then part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and served as mayor. In 1971, however, the Yugoslav communist authorities jailed him as a counterrevolutionary for supporting the “Croatian Spring,” a liberal nationalist awakening. He spent a year in the harsh Croatian Stara Gradiska political prison camp. Afterward, as a political outcast, Mesić focused his energies on serving as general manager of a small architectural firm in Zagreb.
In 1989 Mesić again became active in opposition politics, joining Franjo Tudjman and other antiregime dissidents, and became secretary of the new pro-independence and nationalist Croatian Democratic Union (Hrvatska Demokratska Zajednica; HDZ), which won power the following year. Mesić was appointed president of the new government and represented Croatia at the federal Yugoslav level, having the distinction of serving as the last president of the large Yugoslav Federation. He resigned on Dec. 5, 1991, following attacks on Croatia by the Serb-dominated Yugoslav armed forces. Upon the creation of an independent Croatian state, Mesić became president of the parliament; Tudjman was elected president of Croatia.
By 1994 Mesić had broken with the HDZ over Tudjman’s autocratic rule. Thus, he began another period of political wandering. He failed in an attempt to forge a new party among HDZ dissidents, and in 1997 he joined the small Croatian National Party (Hrvatska Narodna Stranka; HNS) and soon became its vice president. In 1999 the HNS joined other opposition parties to contest parliamentary elections that resulted in the HDZ’s defeat. In late 1999 Tudjman died, and in the presidential elections of 2000 Mesić’s folksy and populist campaign, as well as his well-honed political instincts, struck a chord with an electorate tired of government corruption and abuse of authority. Mesić won in a runoff, and he was sworn in as president on Feb. 18, 2000.
Facing a fractious six-party coalition government, Mesić promised to reduce the powers of the presidency, scale back the intelligence services, reform a corrupt privatization process, restore friendly ties with Croatia’s neighbours, and integrate Croatia into NATO and European institutions. In 2003 he visited Serbia and Montenegro, which marked the first presidential visit between the former warring countries. Mesić was easily reelected president in 2005. Government corruption slowed Croatia’s attempt to join the European Union, and in 2006 Mesić led renewed efforts to combat malfeasance. In 2009 he oversaw Croatia’s entrance into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). At the end of his second term in February 2010, Mesić was succeeded as president by Ivo Josipović, a member of the opposition Social Democratic Party of Croatia (Socijaldemokratska partija Hrvatske; SDP).
|
352fa6a39f9ed79846a65a2f77ea8526 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stone-Gossard | Stone Gossard | Stone Gossard
), rhythm guitarist Stone Gossard (b. July 20, 1966, Seattle, Washington), bassist Jeff Ament (b. March 10, 1963, Havre, Montana), lead guitarist Mike McCready (b. April 5, 1966, Pensacola, Florida), and drummer Dave Krusen (b. March 10, 1966, Tacoma, Washington). Later members included Jack Irons (b. July 18,…
|
a233a0b84acb317f833407bf570d0a7a | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Straton-of-Lampsacus | Straton Of Lampsacus | Straton Of Lampsacus
Straton Of Lampsacus, Straton also spelled Strato, Latin Strato Physicus, (died c. 270 bc), Greek philosopher and successor of Theophrastus as head of the Peripatetic school of philosophy (based on the teachings of Aristotle). Straton was famous for his doctrine of the void (asserting that all substances contain void and that differences in the weight of substances are caused by differences in the extension of the void), which served as the theoretical base for the Hellenistic construction of air and steam engines as described in Hero of Alexandria’s work. An orthodox Aristotelian, Straton tempered his master’s interpretation of nature with an insistence on causality and materialism, denying any theological force at work in the processes of nature. Straton’s writings as a whole are lost.
|
558b2db6063ecbc623d2b86f1db72aff | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stringer-Lawrence | Stringer Lawrence | Stringer Lawrence
Stringer Lawrence, (born March 6, 1697, Hereford, Herefordshire, Eng.—died Jan. 10, 1775, London), British army captain whose transformation of irregular troops into an effective fighting force earned him credit as the real founder of the Indian army under British rule.
During 20 years of army service, Lawrence rose from ensign to captain and served at Gibraltar, in Flanders (Belgium), and at the Battle of Culloden (1746; Inverness, Scot.). He joined the East India Company early in 1748 and commanded company troops at Madras (Chennai). He so trained his mixed force of Europeans, topasses (Christian Indo-Portuguese), and sepoys (Indian soldiers in British employ) that by June 1748 he was able to foil a French attack on Cuddalore; he was captured by the French, however, and released after the Treaty of Aix-la-Chappelle (1748). In the capture of Devakottai in 1749, his subordinate officer was Robert (afterward Lord) Clive, who eventually became a lifelong friend. In 1750 Lawrence resigned from service to the British government over a pay dispute and dissatisfaction with the company’s management. Lawrence left for England shortly thereafter, but the company’s directors called on him just a few months later to be the commander in chief of their military forces in the East Indies.
Promoted to lieutenant colonel in 1752, Lawrence returned to Madras and immediately relieved the town of Tiruchchirappalli. With Clive’s assistance he then destroyed the French force under Jacques Law, won another victory at Bahur, and for 17 months in 1753–54 successfully defended Tiruchchirappalli in campaigns that frustrated French plans. In Madras in 1758 he again repulsed the French. In 1761 he was made commander in chief of all East India Company forces, with a seat on the council and a royal commission as major general. In 1766 he left India for retirement. Robert Clive, when presented a gift sword by the East India Company, refused to accept it unless a similar honour was presented to his veteran commander, Lawrence, who had been ignored. Later Clive helped relieve Lawrence’s financial straits by arranging an early pension of £500 for him.
|
31515a997f31fd7c0b3b4283e6e428df | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stuart-Rosenberg | Stuart Rosenberg | Stuart Rosenberg
Stuart Rosenberg, (born August 11, 1927, New York City, New York, U.S.—died March 15, 2007, Beverly Hills, California), American television and film director who was best known for the 1967 classic Cool Hand Luke.
Rosenberg studied Irish literature at New York University before working in television as an editor. In 1957 he helmed episodes of Decoy, and he subsequently became a sought-after TV director, working on such notable series as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Untouchables, Naked City, Twilight Zone, and The Defenders. During that time he made his first feature film, Murder, Inc. (1960), though it was completed by producer Burt Balaban when an actors’ strike interrupted filming for several months. The drama, which starred Stuart Whitman and Peter Falk, was a taut account of a real-life gang of killers for hire that flourished in the 1930s. After the low-budget West German production Question 7 (1961), Rosenberg returned to television. In addition to his work on episodic shows, he directed the TV movies Fame Is the Name of the Game and A Small Rebellion (both 1966).
Rosenberg returned to the big screen in impressive fashion with Cool Hand Luke (1967), an enormously popular updating of the rebel-within-a-prison formula. Paul Newman gave one of his most charismatic performances as the antihero Luke, an irrepressible, indomitable convict who gives new hope to his chain-gang compatriots; Strother Martin was the warden who tries but fails to break him. The film received four Academy Award nominations, and George Kennedy won an Oscar for his work as Dragline, a fellow inmate who becomes allies with Luke. Rosenberg had less success with The April Fools (1969), a flat romantic comedy that offered the unlikely pairing of Jack Lemmon and Catherine Deneuve as illicit lovers who intend to run away together; the notable supporting cast included Charles Boyer and Myrna Loy.
Rosenberg began the decade with Move (1970), an irreverent black comedy starring Elliott Gould as a failed playwright who writes pornographic novels for a living. Somewhat better was WUSA (1970), a political drama starring Newman as Rheinhardt, a drifter who becomes an announcer at a right-wing radio station, which he discovers has an alarming agenda. Although didactic, the film had an exceptional cast that included Joanne Woodward, Anthony Perkins, Laurence Harvey, and Cloris Leachman. The slight comedy Pocket Money (1972) had Newman again, now as a modern-day cowboy who, desperate for money, agrees to drive cattle from Mexico to the United States, though things do not go as planned; Lee Marvin was cast as a friend who joins him. The Laughing Policeman (1973) was a police procedural with Walter Matthau and Bruce Dern as partners investigating a mass slaying on a bus. Rosenberg reteamed with Newman on The Drowning Pool (1975), a sequel to the hit crime drama Harper (1966). Newman reprised the role of private detective Lew Harper, and Woodward was cast as a former girlfriend.
Voyage of the Damned (1976) was more ambitious, a dramatization of the 1939 voyage of the ocean liner St. Louis, which transported German Jewish refugees who hoped to land in Havana; when permission to dock was denied there and elsewhere, the ship had to return to Germany. The international cast included Max von Sydow, Faye Dunaway, James Mason, Oskar Werner, Maria Schell, Ben Gazzara, and Julie Harris. Rosenberg took on less-serious fare with Love and Bullets (1979), a Charles Bronson action film.
After more than a decade without a major hit, Rosenberg found box-office success with The Amityville Horror (1979). The thriller was based on Jay Anson’s nonfiction book about a Long Island house that was allegedly possessed by demons. James Brolin and Margot Kidder starred as the homeowners, and Rod Steiger was the priest who tries to exorcize the forces of darkness. Although widely panned by critics, The Amityville Horror was one of the year’s top-grossing films.
Rosenberg replaced Bob Rafelson on the prison exposé Brubaker (1980), which starred Robert Redford as the new warden of a corrupt and abusive prison. He poses as a convict in order to experience the manifold horrors firsthand and later encounters resistance when he tries to implement much-needed reforms. The unrelenting fact-based drama was a critical and commercial success. Also popular was The Pope of Greenwich Village (1984), a crime comedy based on Vincent Patrick’s novel set in Little Italy. Mickey Rourke gave a strong performance as a small-timer who aspires to greater things, and Eric Roberts was typically over-the-top as his hopelessly ill-fated cousin.
Let’s Get Harry (1986) was a little-seen action film about a soldier of fortune (Robert Duvall) hired to rescue a man kidnapped in South America. Unhappy with changes made by the studio, Rosenberg had his name removed from the film; the directorial credit is given to “Alan Smithee.” In 1991 Rosenberg made his last film, My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys, a serviceable take on the aging-rodeo-star tale, with Scott Glenn as a bone-weary circuit veteran and Ben Johnson as his ailing father.
After retiring from filmmaking, Rosenberg taught at the American Film Institute. Among his students were Darren Aronofsky and Todd Field.
|
079caf8e65e11761fc5f6fa229e053ce | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Suiko | Suiko | Suiko
Suiko, in full Suiko Tennō, (born 554, Yamato, Japan—died April 15, 628, Yamato), first reigning empress of Japan in recorded history, the wife of the emperor Bidatsu (reigned 572–585) and the daughter of the emperor Kimmei.
Bidatsu was succeeded on the throne by Emperor Yōmei, but when the latter died after a short reign, a feud erupted between the Soga clan and the Mononobe and Nakatomi families over the succession. The Soga clan was victorious, and the emperor Sushun, whose mother had been a Soga, succeeded to the throne. Sushun proved too independent, however, and Soga Umako, the head of the Soga family, had Sushun murdered in 592, replacing him on the throne with the empress Suiko, who was Sushun’s younger sister and Umako’s own niece. Suiko’s reign represented a great break with tradition, for although Japan had in legend been ruled by several women, in recent centuries the ruling line had been male; moreover, several sons of Bidatsu could have been chosen for the throne.
Because the Soga family were ardent Buddhists, Buddhism became established in Japan during Suiko’s reign. Other aspects of Chinese civilization were also introduced, owing mainly to the efforts of Crown Prince Shōtoku, whom Umako appointed regent for Suiko. Chinese and Korean craftsmen were brought to Japan, the Chinese calendar was introduced, the Chinese bureaucratic system replaced the old Japanese system of purely hereditary awards and ranks, and the total supremacy of the emperor was recognized.
|
02ec592ee038a16a50f837ac5b9e51e6 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sulayman-ibn-Abd-al-Malik | Sulaymān ibn ʿAbd al-Malik | Sulaymān ibn ʿAbd al-Malik
…fleeing to the protection of Sulaymān, al-Walīd’s brother. When in 715 Sulaymān himself became caliph, Yazīd was named governor of Iraq and embarked on a persecution of the followers of al-Ḥajjāj, who had died in 714. Later he was also named governor of Khorāsān, while retaining supreme command in Iraq.…
…in 716 by the caliph Sulaymān ibn ʿAbd al-Malik (reigned 715–717), who made it the administrative capital of Palestine, replacing nearby Lod (Lydda). He built marketplaces, fortifications, and, above all, the White Mosque (Al-Jāmiʿ al-Abyaḍ). Only ruins of these remain, but the minaret of the White Mosque, the so-called White…
|
ad959a702ce75cc9ac756be0f7cce77a | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Suleiman-Franjieh | Suleiman Franjieh | Suleiman Franjieh
Suleiman Franjieh, in full Sulaymān Qabalān Franjiyyah, (born June 15, 1910, Zgharta, Lebanon, Ottoman Empire—died July 23, 1992, Beirut, Lebanon), Lebanese politician who, as a leader of one of Lebanon’s powerful Maronite Christian clans and president of Lebanon (1970–76), was considered to be in large part responsible for the country’s descent into civil war in the mid-1970s.
Franjieh was educated in Tripoli and Beirut and operated an import-export firm in Beirut. In 1957 he was implicated in the murder of several members of a rival clan and fled to Syria, where he became friends with Ḥafiz al-Assad, later to become president of Syria (1971). Franjieh soon returned to Lebanon to succeed his elder brother, Hamid, as clan leader, and he held a succession of ministerial posts after being elected to his brother’s former seat in parliament (1960).
On August 17, 1970, parliament elected Franjieh president by one vote on the third ballot, but he soon alienated Muslims and Christians alike by his autocratic rule and his promotion of inept and corrupt clansmen, notably his son Tony. In June 1976, shortly before he left office, Franjieh reportedly invited Assad to send troops into Lebanon to assist the Maronite Christians in their growing war against left-wing Muslim and Palestinian forces. Rival clans who opposed Syrian intervention, especially the Gemayel family, allied themselves with Israel. In June 1978, members of the Phalange, a rival Christian militia, murdered Tony along with his wife and daughter, thus cementing the rift between the clans and precluding a quick end to the war.
In the years that followed Franjieh continued to lead his clan while gradually transferring control to his grandson, also named Suleiman. He made another bid for the presidency in the late 1980s, but he became ill before the election could be held. Suffering several ailments, he died of pneumonia in 1992.
|
f334a9ee227d5cdd39a0bc3efbb417b3 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Suliyavongsa | Suliyavongsa | Suliyavongsa
Suliyavongsa, also spelled Soulignavongsa, (born 1613—died 1694), Lao king of Lan Xang during its golden age of prosperity, who welcomed the first European visitors to Laos.
Suliyavongsa came to the throne in 1637 at a time of dynastic conflict and instability and authoritatively restored peace and delimited Lan Xang’s frontiers with its neighbours. Dutch visitors to his capital, Vientiane, in the 1640s, and Italian Jesuits in the 1660s, described a vigorous, powerful, and prosperous kingdom. Suliyavongsa’s execution of his crown prince for a romantic indiscretion left the kingdom without an immediate heir to the throne, and Lan Xang soon was divided between rival claimants.
|
1e50ea875f5cb2f3e5711dce170be22c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sumuabum | Sumuabum | Sumuabum
bce by the Amorite king Sumuabum, whose successors consolidated its status. The sixth and best-known of the Amorite dynasts, Hammurabi (1792–50 bce), conquered the surrounding city-states and raised Babylon to the capital of a kingdom comprising all of southern Mesopotamia and part of Assyria (northern Iraq). Its political importance, together…
|
665475bf1b1b128499240778faa0693f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sun-Quan | Sun Quan | Sun Quan
Sun Quan, Wade-Giles romanization Sun Ch’üan, posthumous name (shi) Dadi, temple name (miaohao) Taizu, (born ad 181, China—died 252, China), founder and first emperor of the Wu dynasty, one of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguo) into which China was divided at the end of the Han period (206 bc–ad 220). The Wu occupied the area in eastern China around Nanjing and lasted from 222 to 280. Its capital, Jianye, became Nanjing.
|
72eb572e999c33dd58753f992463dc9d | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sun-Ra | Sun Ra | Sun Ra
Sun Ra, byname of Le Sony’r Ra, original name Herman Blount ,byname Sonny, (born May 22, 1914, Birmingham, Ala., U.S.—died May 30, 1993, Birmingham), American jazz composer and keyboard player who led a free jazz big band known for its innovative instrumentation and the theatricality of its performances.
Sun Ra, who claimed to have been born on the planet Saturn, grew up in Birmingham, studied piano under noted teacher Fess Wheatley, and attended Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical College (now University). By the mid-1940s he was living in Chicago and scoring music for nightclub floor shows. In 1946–47 he was apprenticed to swing bandleader-arranger Fletcher Henderson. From the 1950s he led his own bands, the variously constituted Arkestras, which played his own music: an expanded hard bop that included tympani, electric piano, and flute—instruments then rare in jazz. He also was a pioneer of modal jazz settings; among his early works, “Ancient Aiethopia” most successfully unites the diverse strands of his composing.
Sun Ra’s music became increasingly exotic with the addition of African and Latin-American instruments. After the Arkestra moved to New York about 1960, he became wholly involved with free jazz; he dispensed with composition entirely, creating works by conducting his improvisers. Among his free jazz recordings, The Magic City (1965/66) is the most significant. The Arkestra, which included dancers, dressed in fantastical costumes inspired by ancient Egyptian attire and the space age, and Sun Ra conducted while wearing flowing robes and futuristic helmets. He was highly regarded for his atonal solos on synthesizer, an instrument that he virtually pioneered in jazz.
During the 1970s and ’80s Sun Ra’s Arkestra made increasing use of earlier compositions of his own and of composers such as Henderson, Duke Ellington, and Thelonious Monk. He and his music are featured in the films The Cry of Jazz (1959), Space Is the Place (1971), and Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise (1980).
|
f72f2bf30db69d0d9f6151a03f2c16ef | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sundar-Pichai | Sundar Pichai | Sundar Pichai
Sundar Pichai, in full Pichai Sundararajan, (born July 12, 1972, Madras [now Chennai], Tamil Nadu, India), Indian-born American executive who was CEO of both Google, Inc. (2015– ), and its holding company, Alphabet Inc. (2019– ).
As a boy growing up in Madras, Pichai slept with his brother in the living room of the cramped family home, but his father, an electrical engineer at the British multinational GEC, saw that the boys received a good education. At an early age Pichai displayed an interest in technology and an extraordinary memory, especially for telephone numbers. After earning a degree in metallurgy (B.Tech., 1993) and a silver medal at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, he was awarded a scholarship to study at Stanford University (M.S. in engineering and materials science, 1995). He remained in the United States thereafter, working briefly for Applied Materials (a supplier of semiconductor materials) and then earning an M.B.A. (2002) from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Following a short stint at the management consulting firm McKinsey & Co., Pichai joined Google in 2004 as the head of product management and development. He initially worked on the Google Toolbar, which enabled those using the Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox Web browsers to easily access the Google search engine. Over the next few years, he was directly involved in the development of Google’s own browser, Chrome, which was released to the public in 2008. That same year Pichai was named vice president of product development, and he began to take a more-active public role. By 2012 he was a senior vice president, and two years later he was made product chief over both Google and the Android smartphone operating system.
In 2011 Pichai reportedly was aggressively pursued for employment by microblogging service Twitter, and in 2014 he was touted as a possible CEO for Microsoft, but in both instances he was granted large financial packages to remain with Google. He also was known to have helped negotiate Google’s $3.2 billion deal to acquire Nest Labs in 2014. Therefore, when Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin announced the creation of Alphabet Inc., in August 2015, it came as no surprise to industry insiders that Pichai was named CEO of Google, which was reorganized as a subsidiary. In December 2019 he also was named CEO of Alphabet, replacing Page, who stepped down.
|
795046ce4b811a4c8c79713bb0d02512 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Suppiluliumas-I | Suppiluliumas I | Suppiluliumas I
Suppiluliumas I, also spelled Shuppiluliumash, or Subbiluliuma, (flourished 14th century bc), Hittite king (reigned c. 1380–c. 1346 bc), who dominated the history of the ancient Middle East for the greater part of four decades and raised the Hittite kingdom to Imperial power. The son and successor of Tudhaliyas III, Suppiluliumas began his reign by rebuilding the old capital, Hattusas (Boğazköy in modern Turkey), and consolidating the Hittite heartland.
Suppiluliumas’ military career was almost exclusively devoted to struggles with the kingdom of Mitanni in the east and the reestablishment of a firm Hittite foothold in Syria. After an unsuccessful exploratory raid, he schemed to circumvent the Mitanni defenses in northern Syria by crossing the Euphrates River farther north and approaching its capital, Wassukkani, from the rear. Suppiluliumas’ new tactics were successful, and he was able to capture and sack Wassukkani. He then turned south across the Euphrates and secured the allegiance of the Syrian princelings.
Suppiluliumas left his son Telipinus in charge of Syrian affairs and returned to Hattusas to resume religious duties. In the meantime, however, the debilitated Mitanni kingdom underwent a series of upheavals abetted by the renascent Assyrian kingdom, which had long been a tributary of the Mitanni. In the end, Assyria gained its independence, infiltrated Mitanni, and emerged as a new power in the region.
Suppiluliumas immediately returned to Syria, besieging the city of Carchemish. Hittite power was thus consolidated in all of northern Syria, where Suppiluliumas installed his sons Telipinus and Piyassilis as kings of Aleppo and Carchemish. In addition, Suppiluliumas concluded with Mattiwaza, son of the murdered Mitannian king Tushratta, a treaty of mutual assistance. A Mitannian buffer state was set up to shield the Hittite dominions in Syria from the growing Assyrian menace.
Suppiluliumas’ preeminent international reputation is shown by an event that occurred during his siege of Carchemish. Ankhesenamen, daughter of the Egyptian king Akhenaton and childless widow of his successor Tutankhamen, wrote to the Hittite king and asked for one of his sons in marriage. Under Egypt’s matrilinear succession laws, the new husband was to be the pharaoh. Suppiluliumas agreed and sent one of his sons, who on his way to Egypt was murdered by adversaries of the Queen’s plans. This outrage was probably never completely avenged, for Suppiluliumas soon died in a plague brought into central Anatolia by Egyptian prisoners of war.
|
7713c57db0978ade88c7d16cb483d6a2 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Susan-Blow | Susan Blow | Susan Blow
Susan Blow, in full Susan Elizabeth Blow, (born June 7, 1843, Carondelet [now part of St. Louis], Missouri, U.S.—died March 27, 1916, New York, New York), American education reformer who was an ardent advocate of German educational ideas and who launched the first public kindergarten in the United States.
Blow was reared in a deeply religious home. She was educated by tutors and at a private school in New York City. While traveling in Germany in 1870, she became interested in the revolutionary kindergarten methods developed by the German Idealist philosopher Friedrich Froebel. After a year of study under Froebel devotee Maria Kraus-Boelté in New York, Blow opened the first public kindergarten in the United States at the Des Peres School in St. Louis, Missouri, in September 1873. The next year she established a training school for kindergarten teachers, and within a few years St. Louis had become the focal point of the U.S. kindergarten movement. Throughout this period Blow remained the unofficial and unpaid supervisor of the system. Froebelian doctrine tended toward rigidity, and her expression of it, shaped by the influence of German Idealism, was perhaps more so; consequently she was unsympathetic to innovation in method. When younger kindergarten teachers began nonetheless to experiment in the mid-1880s, at a time when her health was precarious, she soon lost contact with the schools.
In 1889 Blow moved east and thereafter lived in Cazenovia, New York, in Boston, and then in New York City. She lectured widely on Froebelian thought, of which she remained the leading American exponent (even Madame Kraus-Boelté was less rigidly doctrinaire than she), and published several books on orthodox kindergarten practice, including Symbolic Education (1894), a two-volume translation of Froebel’s Mother Play (1895), Letters to a Mother on the Philosophy of Froebel (1899), Kindergarten Education (1900), and Educational Issues in the Kindergarten (1908). In 1905–09 she was a lecturer at Teachers College, Columbia University, where the kindergarten innovator Patty Smith Hill was also teaching.
|
77174d9c2dbb3dd8f787b339b2ce8ec2 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Susan-Bogert-Warner | Susan Bogert Warner | Susan Bogert Warner
In 1851 Susan published a novel entitled The Wide, Wide World under the pseudonym Elizabeth Wetherell. Sentimental and moralistic, the book proved highly popular; it was widely sold in several translations and was reputedly the first book by an American author to sell one million copies. Susan…
|
786035688c30a72454ef40ae0b763372 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Susan-Catherine-Koerner-Wright | Susan Catherine Koerner Wright | Susan Catherine Koerner Wright
…United Brethren in Christ, and Susan Catherine Koerner Wright, whom Milton had met while he was training for the ministry and while Susan was a student at a United Brethren college in Hartsville, Indiana. Two boys, Reuchlin (1861–1920) and Lorin (1862–1939), were born to the couple before Wilbur was born…
|
0c0574565fec1f24ae607feef4a02b12 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Susan-L-Lindquist | Susan L. Lindquist | Susan L. Lindquist
Susan L. Lindquist, in full Susan Lee Lindquist, née Susan McKenzie, (born June 5, 1949, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.—died October 27, 2016, Cambridge, Massachusetts), American molecular biologist who made key discoveries concerning protein folding and who was among the first to discover that in yeast inherited traits can be passed to offspring via misfolded proteins known as prions.
Lindquist received a bachelor’s degree (1971) in microbiology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a doctorate (1976) in biology from Harvard University. She then became a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago, where she later joined the faculty (1978) of the department of molecular genetics and cell biology. She remained there until 2001, when she became a professor in the department of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). From 2001 to 2004, she served as director of the MIT-affiliated Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.
While working as a graduate student at Harvard in the laboratory of American molecular biologist Matthew Stanley Meselson, Lindquist learned of heat-shock proteins—proteins synthesized rapidly and in large quantities following cellular exposure to sudden increases in temperature. Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, Lindquist explored heat-shock proteins in various model organisms, including the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and the flowering plant Arabidopsis thaliana. Her studies revealed that heat-shock proteins directly regulate RNA splicing (the removal of introns from messenger RNA), RNA transport across the nuclear membrane, and RNA degradation in order to prevent new RNA transcripts from being processed while the cell is under stress. Lindquist and colleagues concluded that those activities reset the cell’s damaged regulatory systems and thereby restore protein homeostatis following stress. Once the cell resets, the heat-shock response is turned off. Lindquist’s characterization of that process was groundbreaking, providing scientists with what was then the most complete example of gene regulation for eukaryotic cells (cells possessing a clearly defined nucleus).
In the mid-1990s, Lindquist’s research on heat-shock proteins led her to several major discoveries about prions that shed light on nongenetic mechanisms of inheritance and evolution. In 1995, for example, she and colleagues reported that a heat-shock protein known as Hsp104 was required for the production of a yeast protein called [PSI+], which was thought to be prionlike. The following year, she published evidence indicating that [PSI+] was in fact a prionlike aggregate of a conformationally altered cellular protein, that it was cytoplasmically inherited in yeast, and that it modified and triggered the aggregation of newly formed proteins of the same kind. She also found that yeast prions do not cause disease in their host, are inherited without changes in genotype (genetic constitution), and expose hidden genetic variation, giving rise to new phenotypes (observable traits) that enable yeast to adapt and evolve in response to environmental change. Lindquist subsequently applied that knowledge to investigations of the cellular mechanisms driving cancer progression, since cancer cells are also able to adapt and mutate rapidly in response to environmental factors.
Lindquist later investigated prions and prionlike proteins found in the mammalian brain. Working with Austrian-born American neurobiologist and Nobelist Eric Kandel, she discovered a neuronal protein that could be converted naturally to a prionlike state and hypothesized that the prion form maintained changes at synapses (neuronal junctions) required for memory storage. She also studied a protein known as amyloid to determine its role in memory and inheritance. That work led to her discovery of a yeast protein capable of breaking down amyloid—a discovery that opened up new avenues of research into the development of treatments for neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer disease and Parkinson disease, which are associated with the formation of abnormal amyloid aggregates.
Lindquist was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and was elected to membership in multiple organizations, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1996) and the National Academy of Sciences (1997). She also received a number of awards, including the National Medal of Science (2009), the Max Delbrück Medal (2010), and the Mendel Medal (2010).
|
db2a1ea9fd94bb24c03e40223cc84af6 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Susan-Polgar | Susan Polgar | Susan Polgar
Susan Polgar, original name Zsuzsanna Polgár, (born April 19, 1969, Budapest, Hung.), Hungarian-born American chess player who won the women’s world championship in 1996 from Xie Jun of China. In 1999 Polgar was stripped of her title by the Fédération Internationale des Échecs (FIDE; the international chess organization) for failing to agree to match conditions.
At 4 years of age, Polgar won the under-11 chess championship of Budapest with a perfect score of 10–0. Although she was only 12 at the time, Polgar won the girl’s under-16 section of the 1981 FIDE World Youth Chess Festival for Peace, held in Embalse, Arg. Polgar attained the (men’s) International Master (IM) title in 1984. In a much criticized move, FIDE added 100 rating points to every female chess player except for Polgar at the end of 1986, which had the immediate effect of keeping a Russian atop the January 1987 women’s rating list instead of Polgar and a long-term effect of causing a noticeable inflation in all chess ratings.
Playing first board for the Hungarian women’s chess team, along with her younger sisters Zsófia (Sofia) and Judit Polgár on the lower boards, Susan Polgar led Hungary to gold medals at the 1988 Chess Olympiad, held in Thessaloníki, Greece, and the 1990 Chess Olympiad, held in Novi Sad, Yugos. Susan Polgar earned the (men’s) International Grandmaster (GM) title in 1991 and, after her sister Judit, is generally considered the best female player of all time.
With Judit slated to make a run at the men’s world championship, Susan Polgar pursued the women’s championship by winning the 1992 Women’s Candidates Tournament, held in Shanghai, China, to determine a challenger to Xie Jun. Polgar finished ahead of two Georgians, the former champion Maya Chiburdanidze and the runner-up Nana Ioseliani, with whom she was required to play a match for the right to face Xie. Their eight-game match, which was played in 1993 in Monaco, ended with two wins apiece and three draws, forcing a two-game extension that was split, leading to yet another two-game extension, which also was split. At that point, FIDE decided to determine the winner with a lottery, which Ioseliani won.
Without Judit, who was playing first board for the Hungarian men’s team, Susan and Zsófia, on first and second boards respectively, led Hungary to the women’s silver medal at the 1994 Chess Olympiad, held in Moscow.
Susan Polgar married Jacob Shutzman, an American computer consultant, in 1994 and moved to New York City, where the two opened a private chess club. Polgar renewed her quest for the world championship; the first step was accomplished by sharing first place with Maya Chiburdanidze at the 1994 Women’s Candidate Tournament, held in Tilburg, Neth. In their 1995 play-off, held in St. Petersburg, Russia, Polgar defeated Chiburdanidze by a score of 4 wins, 3 draws, and 0 losses. In 1996, at Jaén, Spain, Polgar defeated Xie Jun for the world title by a score of 6 wins, 5 draws, and 2 losses. Following her victory, Polgar collaborated with her husband in writing her autobiography, Queen of the Kings Game (1997).
FIDE failed to find funding for the women’s world championship in 1998, and Polgar proceeded with plans to have a child. Funding was later obtained, and FIDE rescheduled the match to take place in China in 1999. Polgar was denied a deferment for her pregnancy and lost the title when she refused to comply with match conditions.
Polgar returned to active chess play in 2003, and she played first board for the United States women’s team at the 2004 FIDE Chess Olympiad, held in Calvià, Majorca, Spain. The U.S. team took the silver medal, and Polgar won the gold medal for her individual performance. Polgar extended her record streak to 56 consecutive games without a loss in Chess Olympiads. In 2006 Polgar won the FIDE Women’s World Cup, defeating Elisabeth Pähtz of Germany in the final match by a score of 1 win, 1 draw, and 0 losses.
The nonprofit Susan Polgar Foundation was formed in 2004 to promote chess among girls in the United States. It sponsors many tournaments, including the annual Susan Polgar National Invitational for Girls, which has awarded full scholastic scholarships to winners. In 2005 Polgar started a regular Internet blog, Polgar Chess Daily News and Information. In 2007 Polgar ran for the executive board of the United States Chess Federation and was elected its first chairman. In 2007 she also became director of the new Susan Polgar Institute for Chess Excellence (SPICE), located at Texas Tech University in Lubbock.
|
2efba77de22c939cd8d01270d8c08f03 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sutan-Sjahrir | Sutan Sjahrir | Sutan Sjahrir
Sutan Sjahrir, (born March 5, 1909, Padangpandjang, Sumatra, Dutch East Indies [now in Indonesia]—died April 9, 1966, Zürich, Switz.), influential Indonesian nationalist and prime minister who favoured the adoption of Western constitutional democracy for Indonesia.
Sjahrir, son of a public prosecutor, received a Dutch education in Sumatra and Java and attended the Law Faculty at the University of Leiden. In the Netherlands he was a member of a socialist student group and secretary of the student group Perhimpunan Indonesia (“Indonesian Union”), which numbered among its members many of Indonesia’s future political leaders. He returned to the Dutch East Indies in 1931 and helped establish the Pendidikan Nasional Indonesia, a rival group to Partindo, the nationalist organization formed from remnants of the suppressed Partai Nasional Indonesia (“Indonesian Nationalist Party”), founded by Sukarno, the foremost Indonesian nationalist leader. The groups differed on the goals and means appropriate to nationalists, with Pendidikan opposed to Partindo’s concept of a united front of left-wing parties, and were divided by personal antagonisms as well. Early in 1934 Sjahrir and Pendidikan’s coleader Mohammad Hatta were exiled by the Dutch authorities and remained isolated from Indonesian politics until the arrival of Japanese occupation forces in 1942. Sjahrir was opposed to the Japanese but chose to withdraw from public life rather than actively resist. He pressed for the country to declare independence before the Japanese surrender.
Sjahrir’s pamphlet “Perdjuangan Kita” (1945; “Our Struggle”) won for him the support of militant nationalists in the capital, as well as the office of prime minister in the postwar government at a time when executive power had been stripped from the president, then Sukarno, and given to the prime minister. That was done at Sjahrir’s instigation, as he feared Sukarno’s cooperation with the Japanese would hurt the republic’s image in international opinion, on which the success of negotiations with the Dutch largely depended. Sjahrir negotiated the Linggadjati Agreement, under which the Dutch acknowledged Indonesia’s authority in Java and Sumatra. His conciliatory policies were not in keeping with the temper of the times, however, and in February 1946 he had to resign briefly, and in June 1947 he was forced to resign permanently. He then became a member of the Indonesian delegation to the United Nations. In 1948 he formed a Socialist party, Partai Sosialis Indonesia (PSI), which opposed the Communist Party, but it failed to win popular support and was banned by Sukarno in 1960. On Jan. 17, 1962, Sjahrir was arrested on charges of conspiracy. He was held without trial until 1965, when he was allowed to travel to Switzerland for medical treatment following a stroke.
|
5ad1acd289da339bf3ddf4a5ab9da59d | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Suzanne-Bachelard | Suzanne Bachelard | Suzanne Bachelard
Suzanne Bachelard, who in 1957 translated Husserl’s Formale und transzendentale Logik: Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft (1929; Formal and Transcendental Logic), pointed to the significance of Husserl for modern logic; and Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, combined phenomenology and structuralism in his interpretation…
|
65958d88442c8dbf79c85ed0fe8ea0f2 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Suzuki-Akira | Suzuki Akira | Suzuki Akira
Suzuki Akira, (born September 12, 1930, Mukawa-chō, Japan), Japanese chemist who was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his work in using palladium as a catalyst in producing organic molecules. He shared the prize with fellow Japanese chemist Negishi Ei-ichi and American chemist Richard F. Heck.
Suzuki received both a bachelor’s degree (1954) and a doctorate (1959) from Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan. He became an assistant professor in the department of chemical process engineering there in 1961. He joined the applied chemistry department as a professor in 1973.
In 1979 Suzuki modified the technique of palladium catalysis of organic molecules by using a boron atom to transfer a carbon atom to the palladium atom. The carbon atom then joins to another carbon atom to form a new molecule. This became known as the Suzuki reaction.
He retired from Hokkaido University in 1994 and was a professor at the Okayama University of Science in Okayama prefecture until 1995. From 1995 to 2002 he was a professor at Kurashiki University of Science and the Arts, in nearby Kurashiki.
|
66c166d025251befe34e0a50cb04e259 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Suzuki-Kantaro | Danshaku Suzuki Kantarō | Danshaku Suzuki Kantarō
Danshaku Suzuki Kantarō, (born Jan. 18, 1868, Ōsaka, Japan—died April 17, 1948, Chiyō), the last premier (April–August 1945) of Japan during World War II, who was forced to surrender to the Allies.
A veteran of the Sino-Japanese (1894–95) and Russo-Japanese (1904–05) wars, Suzuki was promoted to the rank of admiral in 1923 and became chief of the Naval General Staff two years later. He was appointed grand chamberlain (jijūchō) in 1929, but he resigned this post after narrowly surviving the young officers’ revolt in 1936.
Suzuki became prime minister upon the resignation of Koiso Kuniaki on April 5, 1945, four days after U.S. forces had landed on Okinawa. Though adamant and unyielding in public, Suzuki secretly asked the Soviets to help negotiate peace between the United States and Japan and was rebuffed by them. In early August the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. On August 14 Suzuki’s cabinet decided to accept the Allies’ call for unconditional surrender. He resigned shortly after the surrender.
|
c7e8f3f58efbdaf318254b1d395cd0dc | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Suzuki-Zenko | Suzuki Zenkō | Suzuki Zenkō
Suzuki Zenkō, (born January 11, 1911, Yamada, Iwate prefecture, Japan—died July 19, 2004, Tokyo), prime minister of Japan (1980–82), who worked closely with the United States and other Western countries.
The son of a fisherman, Suzuki attended the former Imperial Fisheries Institute and joined the Japan Fisheries Association. At the second postwar general election, in 1947, Suzuki won a seat in the lower house of the Diet (parliament) as a socialist. Two years later he switched to the conservative Liberal Party, forerunner of the Liberal-Democratic Party (LDP), and he won reelection 12 times, during which period he held several cabinet posts. His abilities as a mediator brought him the chairmanship of the LDP’s executive council a record 10 times, but he was virtually unknown abroad when elected prime minister on July 17, 1980. When his predecessor, Ōhira Masayoshi, unexpectedly died 10 days before an election, a three-week battle for succession resulted within the LDP. Suzuki, a loyal and longtime party worker, was the dark-horse winner of the LDP presidency, which assured him the prime ministership.
In office Suzuki upheld his political slogan, “politics of harmony,” while stressing moderate internationalism. In 1981 he attended a summit with U.S. President Ronald Reagan in which the two countries’ relationship was defined as an “alliance.” The following year, however, Suzuki drew criticism for Japan’s struggling economy and for his handling of the controversy that ensued after Japanese textbooks were revised to downplay the country’s aggression against China during World War II. Suzuki lost support within the LDP, and in 1982 he decided not to seek reelection as the party’s leader and thereby relinquished the post of prime minister. He retained his seat in the Diet, however, and continued to lead a sizable faction of the LDP. Suzuki remained active in politics until his retirement in 1990.
|
33fd4636dc01a3fa924d654ee67a9245 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sverker | Sverker | Sverker
…Christian during the reign of Sverker (c. 1130–56). Sweden’s Eric IX controlled Finland and in 1155 required the Finns to be baptized, but only in 1291, with the appointment of Magnus, the first Finnish bishop, was evangelization completed.
About 1130 Sverker, a member of a magnate family from Östergötland, was acknowledged as king, and this province now became the political centre of Sweden. Sverker sided with the church and established several cloisters staffed by French monks; he was murdered about 1156. During the later years…
|
51456525c2ccf7c2599186c5a135b934 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Svyatoslav-I | Svyatoslav I | Svyatoslav I
Svyatoslav I, also spelled Sviatoslav, Russian in full Svyatoslav Igorevich, (died 972), grand prince of Kiev from 945 and the greatest of the Varangian princes of early Russo-Ukrainian history.
He was the son of Grand Prince Igor, who was himself probably the grandson of Rurik, prince of Novgorod. Svyatoslav was the last non-Christian ruler of the Kievan state. After coming of age he began a series of bold military expeditions, leaving his mother, Olga, to manage the internal affairs of the Kievan state until her death in 969.
The Russian Primary Chronicle (Povest vremennykh let) says that Svyatoslav “sent messengers to the other lands announcing his intention to attack them.” Between 963 and 965 he defeated the Khazars along the lower Don River and the Ossetes and Circassians in the northern Caucasus; he also attacked the Volga Bulgars. In 967 he defeated the Balkan Bulgars at the behest of the Byzantines, to whom he then refused to cede his conquest. He declared his intention of establishing a Russo-Bulgarian empire with its capital at Pereyaslavets on the Danube River. In 971, however, his comparatively small army was defeated by a Byzantine force under the emperor John I Tzimisces, and Svyatoslav was compelled to abandon his claim to Balkan territory.
In the spring of 972, while Svyatoslav was returning to Kievan Rus with a small retinue, he was ambushed and killed by the Pechenegs (a Turkic people) near the cataracts of the Dnieper River.
|
a1a0bdb51e7f978edc397251c2e8de07 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sy-Oliver | Sy Oliver | Sy Oliver
Sy Oliver, byname of Melvin James Oliver, (born Dec. 17, 1910, Battle Creek, Mich., U.S.—died May 28, 1988, New York, N.Y.), jazz trumpeter, composer, and bandleader who was one of the leading music arrangers of the 1930s and ’40s.
Both of Oliver’s parents were music teachers in Ohio, where he grew up. He played the trumpet as a boy and at the age of 17 took a job (1927–30) with Zack Whyte and his Chocolate Beau Brummels. He joined the Jimmie Lunceford orchestra in 1933. There he established his reputation for innovative arranging characterized by imaginative instrumentation and a full-bodied sound. He also developed a distinctive sound, sometimes called “growl” trumpet, in his own playing. In 1939 he joined the orchestra of Tommy Dorsey as a singer and arranger. He led a band while in the army during World War II and returned to Dorsey’s orchestra after the war. From the late 1940s to the early ’70s Oliver held a variety of jobs, including a decade as musical director of Decca Records. In the early ’70s he formed a nine-piece orchestra that continued to perform until 1984.
|
8da5ed5d88a852cc9208d6b014bd3d74 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Syagrius | Syagrius | Syagrius
…Salian Franks (reigned 481/482–511), expelled Syagrius, the last Roman, from Soissons, took Alsace and the Palatinate from the Alemanni (496), and killed Alaric II, king of the Visigoths, at Vouillé (507). His conversion to Catholicism assured him the support of the bishops, and Frankish domination was established in Gaul. At…
…of Gaul were ruled by Syagrius, a Roman king (rex) with his capital at Soissons.
|
b3aaf23099bb023f5ed4fb980a3e6b03 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Syd-Barrett | Syd Barrett | Syd Barrett
Nick Drake, and Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd.
…principal members were lead guitarist Syd Barrett (original name Roger Keith Barrett; b. January 6, 1946, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England—d. July 7, 2006, Cambridge), bassist Roger Waters (b. September 6, 1943, Great Bookham, Surrey), drummer Nick Mason (b. January 27, 1945, Birmingham, West Midlands), keyboard player Rick Wright (in full Richard…
…later tragically collapsed into schizophrenia, Syd Barrett, lead singer and composer of early Pink Floyd, enthusiastically pursued the acid rock ethics of musical exploration and experimentation on his band’s first album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967). Lush, hypnotic, and groundbreaking, it was a classic of the psychedelic…
|
826b9a00a802f7598adb55ae4a1e6d29 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sylvain-Levi | Sylvain Lévi | Sylvain Lévi
Sylvain Lévi, (born March 28, 1863, Paris—died Oct. 30, 1935, Paris), French Orientalist who wrote on Eastern religion, literature, and history and is particularly noted for his dictionary of Buddhism.
Appointed a lecturer at the school of higher studies in Paris (1886), he taught Sanskrit at the Sorbonne (1889–94) and wrote his doctoral dissertation, Le Théâtre indien (1890; “The Indian Theatre”), which became a standard treatise on the subject. After his appointment as professor at the Collège de France (1894–1935), he toured India and Japan (1897 and 1898) and published La Doctrine du sacrifice dans les Brâhmanas (1898; “The Doctrine of Sacrifice in the Brāhmaṇas”). Another book resulting from these travels was Le Népal: Étude historique d’un royaume hindou, 3 vol. (1905–08; “Nepal: Historical Study of a Hindu Kingdom”). In L’Inde et le monde (1926; “India and the World”), he discussed India’s role among nations.
Subsequent travels to East Asia (1921–23) generated his major work, Hôbôgirin. Dictionnaire du Bouddhisme d’après les sources chinoises et japonaises (1929; “Hōbōgirin. Dictionary of Buddhism Based on Chinese and Japanese Sources”), produced in collaboration with the Japanese Buddhist scholar Takakusu Junjirō.
Lévi also worked with the French linguist Antoine Meillet on pioneer studies of the Tocharian languages spoken in Chinese Turkistan in the 1st millennium ad. He determined the dates of texts in Tocharian B and published Fragments de textes koutchéens . . . (1933; “Fragments of Texts from Kucha”).
|
15866758817a8928a87b8f32fa3d51ad | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sylvia-Townsend-Warner | Sylvia Townsend Warner | Sylvia Townsend Warner
Sylvia Townsend Warner, (born Dec. 6, 1893, Harrow, Middlesex, Eng.—died May 1, 1978, Maiden Newton, Dorset), English writer who began her self-proclaimed “accidental career” as a poet after she was given paper with a “particularly tempting surface” and who wrote her first novel, Lolly Willowes; or, The Loving Huntsman (1926), because she “happened to find very agreeable thin lined paper in a job lot.”
Educated privately, Warner originally intended to follow a career as a musicologist. One of the editors of the 10-volume Tudor Church Music (c. 1923–29), she was also a contributor to Grove’s Dictionary of Music.
Her fiction is acclaimed for its wit and whimsical charm and for its elegant language. Many of her stories are peopled with eccentric characters. Lolly Willowes was the first selection of the Book of the Month Club. In addition to her short stories, 144 of which appeared in The New Yorker magazine, Warner also published many collections of short fiction, novels, volumes of poetry, and works of nonfiction, including Jane Austen: 1775–1817 (1951) and the semiautobiographical, posthumously published Scenes of Childhood (1981). Her novels, some of which are based on historical events, include Mr. Fortune’s Maggot (1927), The True Heart (1929), and The Flint Anchor (1954). Her final story collections are Kingdoms of Elfin (1977) and the posthumously published One Thing Leading to Another (1984). Warner also translated two books from French, Marcel Proust’s By Way of Saint-Beuve (1958) and Jean-René Huguenin’s A Place of Shipwreck (1963).
|
90134ebb8e7feb23f24bc2f614c8b14f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sylvie-Kinigi | Sylvie Kinigi | Sylvie Kinigi
Sylvie Kinigi, (born c. 1952, Burundi), economist and politician who served as prime minister of Burundi from July 1993 to February 1994.
Kinigi studied economics at the University of Burundi and held civil service jobs before becoming an adviser to the prime minister in 1991. After Melchior Ndadaye, a member of the Hutu ethnic majority, was elected president in June 1993, he appointed Kinigi, a member of the Tutsi minority, as prime minister. She was the first woman to hold the position. The president was killed in a coup in October 1993, and Kinigi was asked to form a caretaker government. In January 1994, however, the National Assembly elected a new president, Cyprien Ntaryamira, who appointed a new prime minister, Anatole Kanyenkiko, the following month. Kinigi then left government service.
|
9458fa3bd9edb21834dc406f6c0ae40e | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Synesius-of-Cyrene | Synesius of Cyrene | Synesius of Cyrene
…the pagan writer and philosopher Synesius. The people of Cyrene selected him as the most able man of the city to be their bishop, and he was able to accept the election without sacrificing his intellectual honesty. In his pagan period he wrote hymns that closely follow the fire theology…
The best-known Cyrenaican is Synesius, a citizen of Cyrene with philosophic tastes who was made bishop of Ptolemais in 410 partly because of his ability to obtain help for his province from the imperial authorities. Under Justinian a number of defensive works were constructed as elsewhere in Africa—e.g., Taucheira,…
|
b36f35a9974260429a243f2984abaaea | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Syngman-Rhee | Syngman Rhee | Syngman Rhee
Syngman Rhee, (born March 26, 1875, P’yŏngsan, Hwanghae province, Korea [now in North Korea]—died July 19, 1965, Honolulu, Hawaii, U.S.), first president of the Republic of Korea (South Korea).
Rhee completed a traditional classical Confucian education and then entered a Methodist school, where he learned English. He became an ardent nationalist and, ultimately, a Christian. In 1896 he joined with other young Korean leaders to form the Independence Club, a group dedicated to asserting Korean independence from Japan. When right-wing elements destroyed the club in 1898, Rhee was arrested and imprisoned until 1904. On his release he went to the United States, where in 1910 he received a Ph.D. from Princeton University, becoming the first Korean to earn a doctorate from an American university. He returned home in 1910, the year in which Korea was annexed by Japan.
Rhee found it impossible to hide his hostility toward Japanese rule, and, after working briefly in a YMCA and as a high-school principal, he emigrated to Hawaii, which was then a U.S. territory. He spent the next 30 years as a spokesman for Korean independence, trying in vain to win international support for his cause. In 1919 he was elected (in absentia) president of the newly established Korean Provisional Government, in Shanghai. Rhee relocated to Shanghai the following year but returned to Hawaii in 1925. He remained president of the Provisional Government for 20 years, eventually being pushed out of the leadership by younger Korean nationalists centred in China. (Rhee had refused to recognize an earlier impeachment, for misuse of his authority, by the Provisional Government in the 1920s.) Rhee moved to Washington, D.C., and spent the World War II years trying to secure Allied promises of Korean independence.
After the war, since Rhee was the only Korean leader well known to Americans, he was returned to Korea ahead of the other members of the Provisional Government. He campaigned for a policy of immediate independence and unification of the country. He soon built up a mass political organization supported by strong-arm squads and a following among the police. With the assassination of the major moderate leaders, including Song Jin Woo and Chang Duk Soo, Rhee remained the most influential leader, and his new party won the elections in South Korea. In 1948 he became president of the Republic of Korea, a post to which he was reelected in 1952, 1956, and 1960.
As president, Rhee assumed dictatorial powers, tolerating little domestic opposition to his program. Rhee purged the National Assembly of members who opposed him and outlawed the opposition Progressive Party, whose leader, Cho Bong Am, was executed for treason. He controlled the appointment of mayors, village headmen, and chiefs of police. He even defied the United Nations (UN) during the Korean War (1950–53). Hoping that UN forces would continue to fight and eventually unite North and South Korea under one government, Rhee hindered the truce talks by ordering the release in June 1953 of some 25,000 anticommunist North Korean prisoners. (Under the agreed-upon truce settlement, these men were to have been repatriated to North Korea.) Stunned, the communists broke off the negotiations and renewed their attack, largely ignoring the UN forces and concentrating their fire on Rhee’s South Korean troops. Having made their point, the communists then resumed negotiations, and a truce settlement was speedily signed.
In spite of his authoritarian policies, Rhee failed to prevent the election of an opposition vice president, Chang Myŏn, in 1956. Government claims that the March 1960 elections gave Rhee more than 90 percent of the popular vote (55 percent in 1956) provoked student-led demonstrations against election fraud, resulting in heavy casualties and demands for Rhee’s resignation. These demands were supported by the unanimous vote of the National Assembly and by the U.S. government. Rhee resigned on April 27, 1960, and went into exile in Hawaii.
|
057b3d17cd0a9552731a2148f2c90831 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Syphax | Syphax | Syphax
Syphax, (died 201 bc, Tibur [now Tivoli, Italy]), king of the Masaesyli, a Numidian tribe (in North Africa). Formerly a Carthaginian dependent, he rebelled in 214 bc in consultation with Publius Cornelius Scipio and his brother Gnaeus, who were fighting Carthaginian forces in Spain at the time. In 206 Syphax expelled his neighbour and rival Masinissa. When Syphax married Sophonisba—daughter of the Carthaginian commander Hasdrubal, son of Gisgo—Syphax returned his allegiance to Carthage.
When Scipio Africanus, the son of Publius, invaded Africa near the end of the Second Punic War, Syphax opposed him at Utica, on the coast of what is now Tunisia. Scipio burned Syphax’s camp there, and Scipio’s friend Gaius Laelius defeated Syphax at the Battle of the Great Plains near Utica (203). Syphax fled to Numidia, where he was defeated and captured by Masinissa. He was handed over to the Romans and deported to Italy, where he died.
|
e8bc7d7d1203f3fe0ee428326538bbe6 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/T-Bone-Burnett | T Bone Burnett | T Bone Burnett
T Bone Burnett, byname of Joseph Henry Burnett, (born January 14, 1948, St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.), American producer and musician, one of popular music’s most prolific and successful producers, known for his work in a wide range of genres including rock, country, and folk.
Burnett spent his childhood in Fort Worth, Texas, and it was there that he acquired the nickname “T Bone” and became involved in the local music scene, initially as a guitarist with local blues bands and later as the founder of his own recording studio. He moved to Los Angeles in the early 1970s and recorded his debut solo album, The B-52 Band & the Fabulous Skylarks (1972), a straightforward collection of bluesy rock tunes. In 1975 he received his major break into the industry, touring as a guitarist on Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour. His second solo album, Truth Decay (1980), shows Burnett’s maturation as an artist, but he found greater success in the production booth than he did as a performer.
In 1984 Burnett produced the critically acclaimed major-label debut from Los Lobos, How Will the Wolf Survive?, and soon after he worked with Elvis Costello, whose King of America (1986) and Spike (1989) feature Burnett as both producer and performer. While these and other projects helped to establish Burnett professionally, his work on The Turning (1987), an album by Christian pop artist Leslie Phillips, proved significant personally. Burnett and Phillips—who recorded as Sam on later albums—became involved romantically, and the two were married in 1989 (they divorced in 2004).
Burnett continued to record solo material, with the Grammy Award-nominated The Criminal Under My Own Hat (1992) providing an excellent window into Burnett’s evolving lyrical sensibilities, but he remained outside the mainstream of popular music. That changed dramatically when he selected and composed the music for the Coen brothers’ film O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000). Burnett earned four Grammy Awards and was thrust into the public spotlight. He later won Grammys for the Tony Bennett and k.d. lang duet “A Wonderful World” (2002) and for the sound track of the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line (2005). In 2009 Burnett received three Grammys for his work on the Alison Krauss and Roger Plant album Raising Sand and one award for B.B. King’s One Kind Favor.
Although Raising Sand boasted impressive sales and near-universal critical acclaim, Burnett was unimpressed with the sound quality of the final recording. In an era in which many producers were mixing music to be louder and denser for the low-fidelity iPod and ringtone markets, Burnett returned to the basics of audio engineering on subsequent albums, using his XOΔE (rendered in English as “CODE”) technology. CODE offered a listening experience that replicated the original studio master recording as faithfully as possible, with no additional cost to the consumer. CODE audio DVDs were included in the standard CD package, and listeners could thus compare the two formats side-by-side. CODE was further refined for the 2009 debut album from the psychedelic rock supergroup Moonalice.
That year Burnett also worked with Costello on the album Secret, Profane & Sugarcane and produced the Jeff Bridges film Crazy Heart, a project for which he also scored the sound track. The film’s title track, “The Weary Kind (Theme from Crazy Heart),” dominated the awards circuit, as songwriters Burnett and Ryan Bingham collected an Academy Award, a Golden Globe (2010), and a Grammy (2011). Burnett earned additional Grammys for his production work on the Crazy Heart sound track and for having cowritten a song performed by Taylor Swift on the sound track of the movie The Hunger Games (2012). Ghost Brothers of Darkland County, a Southern gothic musical he created with Stephen King and John Mellencamp, premiered in 2014.
Although he spent most of the 1990s and early 2000s involved in producing, Burnett continued to perform. His later albums included True False Identity (2006), Tooth of Crime (2008), and The Invisible Light: Acoustic Space (2019).
|
37b43261e20858f0d1907b998e1d6b5a | https://www.britannica.com/biography/T-E-Lawrence/Legacy | Legacy | Legacy
Lawrence became a mythic figure in his own lifetime even before he published his own version of his legend in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. His accomplishments themselves were solid enough for several lives. More than a military leader and inspirational force behind the Arab revolt against the Turks, he was a superb tactician and a highly influential theoretician of guerrilla warfare. Besides The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, his sharply etched service chronicle, The Mint, and his mannered prose translation of the Odyssey added to a literary reputation further substantiated by an immense correspondence that establishes him as one of the major letter writers of his generation.
Lawrence found despair as necessary as ambition. He lived on the masochistic side of asceticism, and part of his self-punishment involved creating within himself a deep frustration to immediately follow, and cancel out, high achievement by denying to himself the recognition he had earned. At its most extreme, this impulse involved a symbolic killing of the self, a taking up of a new life and a new name. Under whatever guise, he was a many-sided genius whose accomplishments precluded the privacy he constantly sought. By the manufacture of his myth, however solidly based, he created in his own person a characterization rivaling any in contemporary fiction.
|
1df052e649bd2564df4b44ec8f355897 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/T-H-Green | T.H. Green | T.H. Green
T.H. Green, in full Thomas Hill Green, (born April 7, 1836, Birkin, Yorkshire, England—died March 26, 1882, Oxford, Oxfordshire), English educator, political theorist, and Idealist philosopher of the so-called Neo-Kantian school. Through his teaching, Green exerted great influence on philosophy in late 19th-century England. Most of his life centred at Oxford, where he was educated, elected a fellow in 1860, served as a lecturer, and in 1878 was appointed professor of moral philosophy. His lectures provided the basis for his most significant works, Prolegomena to Ethics (1883) and Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation, published in the collected Works, 3 vol. (1885–88).
Green’s metaphysics begins with the question of man’s relation to nature. Man, he said, is self-conscious. The simplest mental act involves consciousness of changes and of distinctions between the self and the object observed. To know, Green asserted, is to be aware of relations between objects. Above man—who can know only a small portion of such relations—is God. This “principle which renders all relations possible and is itself determined by none of them” is an eternal self-consciousness.
Green based his ethics on the spiritual nature of man. He maintained that man’s determination to act upon his reflections is an “act of will” and is not externally determined by God or any other factor. According to Green, freedom is not the supposed ability to do anything desired but is the power to identify one’s self with the good that reason reveals as one’s own true good.
Green’s political philosophy enlarged upon his ethical system. Ideally, political institutions embody the community’s moral ideas and help develop the character of individual citizens. Although existing institutions do not fully realize the common ideal, the analysis that exposes their deficiencies also indicates the path of true development. His original view of personal self-realization also contained the notion of political obligation, for citizens intent upon realizing themselves will act as if by duty to improve the institutions of the state. Because the state represents the “general will” and is not a timeless entity, citizens have the moral right to rebel against it in the state’s own interest when the general will becomes subverted.
Green’s influence on English philosophy was complemented by his social influence—in part through his efforts to bring the universities into closer touch with practical and political affairs and in part through his attempt to reformulate political liberalism so that it laid more stress on the need for positive actions by the state than on the negative rights of the individual. His address “Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract” (1881) gave early expression to ideas central to the modern “welfare state.”
|
ece7476462b3b228d1002a79bbc2a011 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/T-H-White | T. H. White | T. H. White
T. H. White, (born May 29, 1906, Bombay, India—died Jan. 17, 1964, Piraeus, Greece), English novelist, social historian, and satirist who was best known for his brilliant adaptation of Sir Thomas Malory’s 15th-century romance, Morte Darthur, into a quartet of novels called The Once and Future King.
White was educated at Cheltenham College and at Cambridge. He taught at Stowe School (1930–36), and while there he attained his first real critical success with an autobiographical volume, England Have My Bones (1936). He afterward devoted himself exclusively to writing and to studying such recondite subjects as the Arthurian legends, which were to provide the material for his books. White was by nature a recluse, for long periods isolating himself from human society and spending his time hunting, fishing, and looking after his strange collection of pets.
The Once and Future King (1958) comprises The Sword in the Stone (1939), The Queen of Air and Darkness—first published as The Witch in the Wood (1940)—The Ill-Made Knight (1941), and The Candle in the Wind. The Once and Future King was adapted in 1960 into a highly successful musical play, Camelot; a motion picture, also called Camelot (1967), was based on the play. White’s other works include The Goshawk (1951), a study of falconry, and two works of social history, The Age of Scandal (1950) and The Scandalmonger (1951).
|
e2de497dabf03a0580b3f6b86e5169b4 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/T-M-Aluko | T.M. Aluko | T.M. Aluko
T.M. Aluko, in full Timothy Mofolorunso Aluko, (born June 14, 1918, Ilesha, Nigeria—died May 1, 2010, Lagos), Nigerian writer whose short stories and novels deal with social change and the clash of cultures in modern Africa.
A civil engineer and town planner by profession, Aluko was educated in Ibadan, Lagos, and London and held positions as director of public works for western Nigeria and faculty member at the University of Lagos. He first became known through his short stories, several of which were awarded British prizes and were broadcast by the British Broadcasting Corporation African service.
Aluko’s One Man, One Wife (1959), a satirical novel about the conflict of Christian and Yoruba ethics, relates the disillusionment of a village community with the tenets of missionary Christianity. A second novel, One Man, One Matchet (1964), humorously presents the clash of an inexperienced district officer with an unscrupulous politician. Kinsman and Foreman (1966) incorporates Aluko’s professional experiences into a penetrating study of an idealistic young engineer’s battle against the corrupt practices of his highly respected public works foreman, who is also his uncle. Chief the Honourable Minister (1970) satirizes the calamity resulting from a schoolmaster’s appointment as minister of works in a newly independent country. His subsequent novels include His Worshipful Majesty (1973), Wrong Ones in the Dock (1982), and A State of Our Own (1986). The economy of style, graceful prose, and gentle irony of Aluko’s novels brought him critical acclaim. He also published My Years of Service (1994) and The Story of My Life (2006), both volumes of autobiography.
|
4bea4368c74f6396ef4f16d146a482c5 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/T-M-Marshall | T. M. Marshall | T. M. Marshall
Marshall on The Colonization of North America, 1492–1783, which emphasized non-English colonies and English colonies other than the original 13. His concept of the Americas was most fully expressed in his presidential speech to the American Historical Association in 1932, “The Epic of Greater America,”…
|
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.