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861a49572ca682736b0e6a514f68a387 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/T-V-Soong | T.V. Soong | T.V. Soong
T.V. Soong, in full Soong Tzu-wen, Chinese (Pinyin) Song Ziwen or (Wade-Giles romanization) Sung Tzu-wen, (born Dec. 4, 1894, Shanghai, China—died April 24, 1971, San Francisco, Calif., U.S.), financier and official of the Chinese Nationalist government between 1927 and 1949, once reputed to have been the richest man in the world.
The son of a prominent industrialist, Soong was educated in the United States at Harvard University. He returned to China in 1917 and soon became active in banking and financial circles. After 1923 he began to fill the role his father had had, that of financing the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang). At the request of Chinese Nationalist leader Sun Yat-sen, to whom his sister Song Qingling was married, T.V. established at Guangzhou (Canton) in 1924 the Central Bank of China, reorganized four years later as a central bank of issue and a government treasury.
In 1925 Soong became finance minister in the new Nationalist government. After 1927 he cooperated with Chiang Kai-shek, who had become head of the Nationalists, and to whom another of the Soong sisters, Mei-ling, was married. As finance minister Soong reformed the taxation system, abolished the likin, or internal transit tariff, and readjusted foreign and domestic debts. Moreover, between 1928 and 1930 he returned tariff autonomy to China by negotiating a series of agreements with foreign powers, thus restoring China’s right to set tariff rates and supervise their collection, a privilege that had been forcibly taken from China in the 19th century by the Western nations. He resigned as finance minister in 1931 though his influence—largely due to his wealth and his growing international prestige—remained great. In 1936 he rejoined the government, and, during the Sino-Japanese War (1937–45), he served China in its negotiations with the foreign powers. He became minister of foreign affairs in 1942.
The following year Soong negotiated the end of extraterritoriality rights; i.e., the end of the rights of foreigners to govern themselves while on Chinese soil. In 1945 he negotiated a treaty of friendship between the Nationalist government and the Soviet Union. In 1945–46 he twice served as president of the Executive Yuan and in 1947 became the governor of Guangdong province. When the communists captured the mainland in 1949, however, Soong moved to the United States, where he was active in business and banking.
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e02cf6fcdc12f3aa2602e55825fb671f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tacitus-Roman-emperor | Tacitus | Tacitus
Tacitus, in full Marcus Claudius Tacitus, (born c. 200—died c. June 276, Tyana, Cappadocia [near modern Niğde, Tur.]), Roman emperor in 275–276.
In the 40 years before Tacitus assumed power the empire was ruled by a succession of usurpers and emperors who had been career army officers. On the murder of the emperor Aurelian in 275, the army council invited the Senate to select a nobleman as head of state. The Senate delayed six months before choosing (September 275) Tacitus, an elderly and wealthy senator who had served twice as consul. During his brief reign Tacitus was engaged in continual warfare with hostile tribes in the Eastern Empire. It is uncertain whether he was murdered by his soldiers or died of disease. His successor was his half brother, Florian, who ruled for three months before being killed by his soldiers.
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00feabad97a2add7ccf79691a6cf34b7 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Taddasa-Liban | Tāddasa Lībān | Tāddasa Lībān
Taddasa Liban wrote short stories that examine the relationship between the old and the new in Ethiopian society. Asras Asfa Wasan wrote poetry and historical novels about political events, including the military coup attempted against Emperor Haile Selassie I in December 1960. Writers such as…
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e7360defca321b9a4e4744aeea0451c3 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Taddeo-Gaddi | Taddeo Gaddi | Taddeo Gaddi
Taddeo Gaddi, (born c. 1300, Florence [Italy]—died 1366?, Florence), pupil and most faithful follower of the Florentine master Giotto. A capable artist, although lacking his teacher’s comprehensive aesthetic vision, he was, after Giotto’s death, the leading Florentine painter for three decades.
His earliest authenticated work is a small triptych with the Virgin enthroned with Child and saints, signed and dated 1334. In 1332, however, and possibly as early as 1328, he had already begun to work with Giotto on the fresco decoration of Santa Croce in Florence. The earliest of Gaddi’s works in the Baroncelli Chapel of Santa Croce were scenes from the life of the Virgin and the life of Christ, completed in 1338. Less concerned with drama and with monumental compositional clarity than his master, Gaddi gave in these works more attention to picturesque, narrative detail. Although he copied Giotto’s heavy, naturally treated figures and bare landscapes and the general sober and impressive tenor of his works, in introducing more complicating elements he went beyond the bounds that Giotto had carefully set for his own art—those of simplicity and unindividualized figures that free his scenes from the particular and allow them a dramatic and universal impact. Gaddi’s frescoes are thus less powerful, if more lively, than those of his master, although his innovative spirit led him to experiments with the representation of light that are highly effective, as in his mysteriously radiant “Annunciation to the Shepherds.”
Possibly in about 1338 Gaddi decorated the sacristy of Santa Croce with panels representing the lives of Christ and of St. Francis (Accademia, Florence). In 1341–42 he appears to have been employed in San Miniato al Monte outside Florence and in San Francesco at Pisa. At some point in the 1340s Gaddi decorated the walls of the refectory at Santa Croce, painting there one of the most impressive of his works, a “Tree of Life” surrounded by scenes from the life of St. Bonaventure, a work of much vigour, with a rich iconography. The scenes of this work, like those of the other refectory frescoes, are composed with a classical simplicity that represents a retreat from Gaddi’s earlier stylistic rebellion. Following Giotto’s death in 1337, Gaddi became the leader of Giotto’s school in Florence. Between 1347 and 1353 he painted a polyptych for San Giovanni Fuorcivitas at Pistoia, and in 1355 he executed a signed and dated “Madonna in Glory” (Uffizi, Florence) for San Lucchese at Poggibonsi. In 1366 he is mentioned in documents for the final time.
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f37b1f53eac9161286e0f42bdd0abbd0 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tadeusz-BorKomorowski | Tadeusz Bór―Komorowski | Tadeusz Bór―Komorowski
Commanded by General Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski, the Warsaw corps of 50,000 troops attacked the relatively weak German force on August 1 and within three days gained control of most of the city. The Germans sent in reinforcements, however, and forced the Poles into a defensive position, bombarding them with…
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254339bc7262c90ce655e1167b72438c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tadeusz-Rozewicz | Tadeusz Różewicz | Tadeusz Różewicz
Tadeusz Różewicz, (born October 9, 1921, Radomsko, Poland—died April 24, 2014, Wrocław), Polish poet and playwright, one of the leading writers of the post-World War II period.
Having seen service during World War II in the underground Polish Home Army, Różewicz used his experiences as inspiration for two of his early volumes of poems, Niepokój (1947; Faces of Anxiety) and Czerwona rękawiczka (1948; “The Red Glove”). Those works were notable for their lack of traditional poetic devices such as metre, stanza, and rhyme. Later volumes include Srebrny kłos (1955; “Silver Ear of Corn”), Twarz trzecia (1968; “The Third Face”), Na powierzchni poematu i w środku (1983; “On the Surface and Inside a Poem”), and Wyjście (2004; “Exit”).
In the 1960s Róẓewicz began writing plays, among them Kartoteka (1960; The Card Index) and Świadkowie; albo, nasza mała stabilizacja (1962; “The Witnesses; or, Our Little Stabilization”; Eng. trans. The Witnesses, and Other Plays). In a later play, Stara kobieta wysiaduje (1968; The Old Woman Broods, in The Witnesses, and Other Plays), the title character speaks her monologues from her seat on a growing pile of garbage. The Survivor, and Other Poems appeared in 1976; it was translated and introduced by Magnus J. Krynski and Robert A. Maguire. In addition to his plays and poetry, Różewicz was the author of novels, short stories, and works of nonfiction, notably Matka odchodzi (1999), which won Poland’s Nike Prize in 2000. He was the recipient of the 2007 European Prize for Literature.
Dealing with solitude, estrangement, and the existential situation of a poet, Różewicz’s poetry, in particular, gradually evolves toward values whose implications go beyond the contemporary to the universal. Ultimately, it expresses, in a simple, often metaphoric form, a concern with the moral issues inherent in the preoccupations and attitudes of modern society. In its simplicity the poetry is unlike Różewicz’s dramas, which are filled with a sense of the absurd.
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ba1aa81095a996a99b4285d486393321 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Takahashi-Hisako | Takahashi Hisako | Takahashi Hisako
Takahashi Hisako, (born September 21, 1927, Yokohama, Japan—died December 21, 2013), Japanese economist and government official who became the first female member of the Supreme Court of Japan (1994–97).
After graduating from Ochanomizu University, Takahashi did postgraduate work in economics at the University of Tokyo. In 1953 she entered the Women’s Bureau of the Ministry of Labour, where she was immediately named chief of the employment statistics section. She was then reassigned to head the women and youth section, where she was appalled to find that female employees were still required to perform such menial tasks as cleaning desks and serving tea. This and other instances of gender discrimination prompted Takahashi to advocate improvements in the social status of Japanese women. Years later she won a significant victory when the government passed the 1983 Equal Employment Opportunity Law, which affirmed equal rights for women.
Takahashi represented Japan at the 1980 meeting of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). In 1982 she resigned from government service to become director of the Asian Women’s Interchange Research Forum, a government affiliate established to further relations and interchange between women of Asia. The following year she was named president of a similar organization, the 21st Century Occupational Foundation.
Takahashi frequently criticized the Japanese judiciary system for its failure to appoint women. Noting the female justices serving on the U.S. Supreme Court, Takahashi also decried the absence of women on the Supreme Court of Japan. That difference was reduced and the cause of women’s rights in Japan significantly advanced when Prime Minister Hosokawa Morihiro appointed Takahashi to fill a vacancy on the 15-member Supreme Court in 1994. She retired from the bench in 1997.
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30ae292a4b4474df7ba8acc27dc584ae | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Takahata-Isao | Takahata Isao | Takahata Isao
…Tōei, he met fellow animators Takahata Isao and Ōta Akemi. The former became a lifelong friend, collaborator, and business partner, and the latter, after a one-year courtship, became his wife. Miyazaki moved through the ranks at Tōei, working on such projects as the television series Ōkami shōnen Ken (“Wolf Boy…
and directors Miyazaki Hayao and Takahata Isao and producer Suzuki Toshio. Studio Ghibli is known for the high quality of its filmmaking and its artistry. Its feature films won both critical and popular praise and influenced other animation studios. The headquarters are in Tokyo.
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8c8e70e3bf932bb59d13d661de06d9b1 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Takdir-Alisjahbana | Takdir Alisjahbana | Takdir Alisjahbana
…journal under the editorship of Takdir Alisjahbana appeared, containing poems and essays written by various authors in the new Malay, which they now called Indonesian. The editor himself later wrote in Indonesian a number of popular novels containing social criticism, which were imitated by other writers. During the Japanese occupation…
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662d4fdd399b769d741b5ba44d640537 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Takeshita-Noboru | Takeshita Noboru | Takeshita Noboru
Takeshita Noboru, (born Feb. 26, 1924, Kakeya, Shimane prefecture, Japan—died June 19, 2000, Tokyo), prime minister of Japan from November 1987 to June 1989, at which time he resigned because of his involvement in an influence-peddling scandal. A behind-the-scenes power broker, he continued to shape and control the country’s government after leaving office.
Takeshita, the son of a sake brewer, graduated from Waseda University, Tokyo, in 1947, after which he taught high school for four years. He served seven years on the Shimane prefectural council before being elected to the lower house of the Diet (parliament) in 1958; it was the first of 11 consecutive terms. His first ministerial post was as chief cabinet secretary in 1971; he later served as minister of construction (1979–80). As minister of finance (1982–86), Takeshita signed the Plaza Accord, an agreement between the world’s wealthy nations to lower the value of the dollar in an effort to reduce trade imbalances. The move sent Japan’s currency, the yen, soaring and led to a series of interest rate cuts. As a result, the country experienced a decade-long “bubble economy,” which was marked by astronomically priced stocks and real estate. In 1986 Takeshita became secretary-general of the Liberal-Democratic Party (LDP), a position he held for one year. In November 1987 he was handpicked for the post of president of the LDP by his predecessor, Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro, and thereby became prime minister of Japan.
As prime minister, Takeshita obtained the passage of a new national sales tax. In April 1988 he publicly disclosed that he and several aides had been among those politicians who had received stocks, donations, and loans from Recruit, a Japanese telecommunications firm that had made large financial contributions to many politicians in the hope of obtaining governmental favours. Deepening public dissatisfaction with Takeshita’s involvement in the scandal prompted him on April 25, 1989, to announce his intention to resign. He left office on June 2 but remained active in politics. As head of the largest faction of the LDP, Takeshita helped select a series of prime ministers, including Keizo Obuchi. He also held a seat in parliament until his retirement in May 2000.
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6084d0bac829f46afdfd857cd6fd588b | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tallulah-Bankhead | Tallulah Bankhead | Tallulah Bankhead
Tallulah Bankhead, in full Tallulah Brockman Bankhead, (born January 31, 1902, Huntsville, Alabama, U.S.—died December 12, 1968, New York, New York), American actress who was as famous for her personal life as for her theatrical achievements.
Bankhead, the daughter of Alabama congressman and future speaker of the House William Brockman Bankhead, was named after her paternal grandmother, whose name was inspired by Tallulah Falls, Georgia. In spite of a strict convent education, Bankhead was a willful, headstrong child with a remarkable facility for attracting attention. After winning a local beauty contest at age 15, she submitted her photograph to a movie fan magazine and, as a result, landed bit roles in a few silent films made in 1918. That same year, she made her Broadway debut in Squab Farm. Though she lacked training and discipline, she possessed a dazzling stage presence, her husky voice providing fascinating contrast with her good looks. Quickly ascending to stardom, she just as easily gained renown for her quick-witted outspokenness and indefatigable party going.
In 1923 she journeyed to England to appear opposite Gerald DuMaurier in The Rope Dancers and thereby launched what was perhaps the most spectacular London stage career of the 1920s. Her calculatedly outrageous public behaviour, her multiple romances, and her habit of wearing flimsy lingerie onstage whether the script called for it or not endeared her to fans—notably her own claque, “the Gallery Girls,” who showed up at every performance to express their noisy idolatry while annoying her detractors. After a succession of mediocre “sex dramas” that made few demands on her talent, Bankhead confounded her critics with her brilliant performance as a troubled young waitress in the London production of Sidney Howard’s They Knew What They Wanted (1925).
In 1931 she returned to the United States to star in films for both Paramount and MGM. Inexplicably, the studio executives tried to transform her into a “second Marlene Dietrich,” which resulted in such overwrought melodramas as My Sin (1931) and Devil and the Deep (1932). Giving up on Hollywood, Bankhead returned to Broadway, where she chalked up one stage triumph after another. Her theatrical career reached its zenith with her performances in The Little Foxes (1939) and The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), both of which earned her the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. It was also during this period that she was briefly married to actor John Emery. In 1943 she decided to give Hollywood a second try; again, the results were disappointing, with the notable exception of her superb multifaceted performance in Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat (1944). She went on to enjoy considerably more success on network radio, hosting the all-star variety series The Big Show (1950–52).
By the late 1940s and early 1950s, Bankhead’s hedonistic lifestyle and excessive drinking had taken its toll. She is quoted as having said, “My father warned me about men and booze, but he never mentioned a word about women and cocaine.” Most of her Broadway endeavours during this decade were flops, and critics complained that she had become a self-caricature. She kept her career afloat by publishing a best-selling autobiography, touring in such plays as Private Lives (1948) and Dear Charles (1955) and headlining her own nightclub act. In 1965 she made her last film appearance, playing a homicidal religious fanatic in the British thriller Die! Die! My Darling! Tallulah Bankhead’s final acting assignments included a “Special Guest Villain” stint on the TV series Batman (1966–68); when advised that the series was considered “high camp,” her response was vintage Tallulah: “Don’t tell me about camp, dahling! I invented it!”
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3afa9c60d065a36c1d3e6276b947bcad | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tamara-Press | Tamara Press | Tamara Press
Tamara Press , (born May 10, 1937, Kharkov, Ukraine, U.S.S.R. [now Kharkiv, Ukraine]), Soviet athlete who won three track-and-field Olympic gold medals and set 12 world records.
Press won her first gold medal at the 1960 Olympics in Rome, setting an Olympic record with a shot put of 17.32 metres (56 feet 10 inches). She won the silver medal in the discus (52.59 metres [172 feet 6.5 inches]), and, a week after the Olympics, she set a world record in the event (57.15 metres [187 feet 6 inches]). Her sister Irina also competed at the 1960 Olympics and won a gold medal in the 80-metre hurdles; they became the first sisters to win gold medals at the same Olympics.
At the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo, Press set a pair of Olympic records, winning the gold medal in both the discus (57.27 metres [187 feet 10.75 inches]) and the shot put (18.14 metres [59 feet 6.25 inches]).
By the time the International Amateur Athletic Federation (later called the International Association of Athletics Federations) instituted a sex-testing policy in 1966, Tamara and Irina had long faced rumours that they were actually men or that they were taking male hormones. Both sisters subsequently pulled out of the upcoming European championships, and Tamara officially announced her retirement in 1967.
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a02ebe3a4e74d2e593884232f0cda5ba | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tamas-Bakocz | Tamás Bakócz | Tamás Bakócz
Tamás Bakócz, Hungarian form Bakócz Tamás, Bakócz also spelled Bakaas, Bakocs, Bakác, or Bakáts, (born 1442, Erdod, Hung.—died June 15, 1521, Esztergom), archbishop who led a Crusade against the Ottoman Turks in 1514.
Bakócz was born into a serf family, but he benefited from the fact that his older brother Bálint was provost of Titel. Bakócz was able to study in Krakow and at various Italian universities. Matthias I took notice of Bakócz during the 1474 encampment in Boroszló (now Wrocław, Pol.), and in 1483 Bakócz served as Matthias’s secretary and closest adviser.
Mindful of the potential personal advantage, Bakócz sought to influence the selection of Matthias’s successor and ardently supported the Jagiellonian claimant, Vladislas II. In the first years of Vladislas II’s rule, Bakócz was often referred to as the “second king.” In 1491 Bakócz became bishop of Eger and high chancellor, and in 1498 he was named archbishop of Esztergom. Despite accusations by lesser nobles against him of corruption and forgery of documents, Bakócz was made a cardinal in 1500 and patriarch of Constantinople (now Istanbul) in 1507. In 1512 he went to Rome, where, during the interregnum following the death of Pope Julius II, he became a member of the governing council and where he was also a candidate for the papacy.
Giovanni de’ Medici, who became Pope Leo X in 1513, entrusted Bakócz with leadership of a Crusade against the Turks in 1514. The subsequent organization of the army and assembling of the peasantry laid the ground for the later uprising of the Hungarian peasantry.
Bakócz was a great patron of the arts. After the death of Vladislas II in 1516, Bakócz returned to Esztergom, from where he commissioned the construction of a new chancel in Eger cathedral, one of Hungary’s finest Renaissance monuments. He had his own shrine, the Bakócz chapel, built in the Esztergom cathedral. In 1823, following the demolition of the cathedral, the altar of the Bakócz chapel was transported stone by stone to the new cathedral, which was consecrated in 1856. Of Bakócz’s treasures, his pontifical chain, cross, cup, and gradual, together with one of his mass robes, have survived.
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7779010b91f1e65437d00b3c8e0edc94 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tammy-Duckworth | Tammy Duckworth | Tammy Duckworth
Tammy Duckworth, (born March 12, 1968, Bangkok, Thailand), American politician who was elected to the U.S. Senate as a Democrat in 2016 and began representing Illinois the following year. She previously was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives (2013–17).
Duckworth was born in Bangkok, the daughter of an American development-aid worker and a Thai mother of Chinese descent. The family lived in Thailand and Singapore before relocating to Hawaii when she was 16. They briefly lived on public assistance, an experience that resonated with voters when Duckworth entered electoral politics. She graduated (1989) from the University of Hawaii, then took a master’s degree (1992) in international affairs at George Washington University, where she joined the Army Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC). During this time, she met her future husband, Bryan Bowlsbey, who was also in ROTC, and the couple later had two daughters; when she had her youngest, in 2018, Duckworth became the first senator to give birth while in office.
Duckworth eventually became a member of the National Guard, training as a helicopter pilot. While working on a doctorate at Northern Illinois University, she was called to active duty and sent to Iraq in 2004. There her helicopter was shot down by a rocket-propelled grenade, and Duckworth lost both her legs and almost lost her right arm, which was saved after a 13-hour-long emergency surgery. While undergoing extensive rehabilitation at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Duckworth was awarded (2004) the Purple Heart. In 2014 she retired from the military as a lieutenant colonel. The following year she received a doctorate in human services at Capella University.
In 2006 Duckworth ran as a Democrat for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives but was defeated. She then served as the state’s director of the Department of Veteran Affairs (2006–09). After former Illinois senator Barack Obama became president, Duckworth became assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (2009–11). She resigned to run for the House of Representatives from the 8th congressional district of Illinois, and she defeated her Republican opponent by a 10-point margin in the 2012 race.
After taking office in 2013, Duckworth proved a dependable ally of President Obama and his legislative initiatives, including various provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. She was also a leader in efforts to pass gun-control legislation. In 2016 she ran against Republican incumbent Mark Kirk for a seat in the Senate. He assailed her for adhering to the Democratic line, to which she memorably replied, “These legs are titanium. They don’t buckle. Go ahead, take a shot at me.” She was elected by a broad margin, making her the first U.S. senator born in Thailand. After taking office in 2017, Duckworth continued to pursue largely liberal policies.
In 2018 Duckworth helped defeat a Republican-sponsored bill that, according to its critics, would have weakened the Americans with Disabilities Act. The following year the House of Representatives impeached Republican Pres. Donald Trump over allegations that he withheld aid to Ukraine in order to pressure the country into opening a corruption investigation into Joe Biden (in 2020 Biden became the Democratic presidential nominee). The Senate trial was held in February, and Duckworth voted to convict Trump, though he was acquitted in a largely party-line vote. Later in 2020 Duckworth was under consideration as a running mate for Biden, but he ultimately selected Kamala Harris.
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dbe4dabf249ef70dd799a20b3f8de947 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tanaka-Kakuei | Tanaka Kakuei | Tanaka Kakuei
Tanaka Kakuei, (born May 4, 1918, Kariwa, Niigata prefecture, Japan—died Dec. 16, 1993, Tokyo), politician who was prime minister of Japan from 1972 to 1974 and who subsequently became the central figure in a major political scandal.
Tanaka was the only son of a bankrupt cattle dealer. He dropped out of school at the age of 15 and soon opened his own construction firm, the Tanaka Civil Engineering Company. His business prospered during World War II, largely because of military contracts, and he became one of the richest men in Japan. Entering politics, he was elected to a seat in the lower house of the Diet (parliament) in 1947 and rose rapidly through the ranks of the powerful Liberal-Democratic Party to become minister of postal services and communications in 1957. Resigning from that post in 1958, he then served as minister of finance from 1962 to 1964. He became one of his party’s most powerful politicians and was made secretary-general of the party in 1965 and again in 1968.
After serving as minister of international trade and industry in the cabinet of Satō Eisaku, prime minister from 1964 to 1972, Tanaka succeeded the latter in a surprising upset victory over Satō’s chosen successor, the former foreign minister Fukuda Takeo. Tanaka was a vigorous and popular prime minister; he pushed through many government projects and was responsible for economically revitalizing much of western Japan. He also established diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China. Japan’s economic growth slowed and inflation rose during his time in office, however, and in the elections of July 1974 his party made a poor showing. These problems, added to charges that he had profited illegally by means of his office, led to his resignation in December 1974.
Tanaka was arrested in July 1976 and indicted the following month on the charge of having accepted, while prime minister, about $2,000,000 in bribes from the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation in order to influence All Nippon Airways to buy that company’s jet airliners. Despite the political cloud that enveloped him after the indictment, he continued to rule over the largest faction of the Liberal-Democratic Party; he thus had a major voice in the selection of three subsequent Japanese prime ministers. After a seven-year trial, Tanaka was convicted in 1983 of bribery and another charge and was sentenced to a fine of 500 million yen and four years in prison. He suffered a serious stroke in 1985, while his conviction was on appeal, and thereafter his power and influence waned.
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48ee92a39741212db6ab68082d3d78bb | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tanaquil-LeClercq | Tanaquil LeClercq | Tanaquil LeClercq
Tanaquil LeClercq, (born October 2, 1929, Paris, France—died December 31, 2000, New York City, New York, U.S.), versatile American ballet dancer, remembered largely for her work in association with George Balanchine, to whom she was married from 1952 to 1969.
LeClercq grew up in New York City and began taking ballet lessons at age four. In 1941 she entered the School of American Ballet, where she studied under Balanchine. Her first professional performance was at Ted Shawn’s Jacob’s Pillow Festival in Lee, Massachusetts, in August 1945, and in 1946 she became an original member of the Ballet Society formed by Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein. She danced in several premieres, including Balanchine’s Four Temperaments (1946), Divertimento (1947), and Orpheus (1948). She remained a principal dancer when the company became the New York City Ballet (NYCB) in 1948.
Over the next several years LeClercq emerged as one of the company’s most individual stylists and a particularly fine exponent of Balanchine’s choreography. Among the Balanchine works in which she appeared were Bourrée fantasque (premiered 1949), with Maria Tallchief; La Valse (premiered 1951); and Western Symphony (premiered 1954). She also created roles in premieres of Frederick Ashton’s Illuminations (1950), with Melissa Hayden; Jerome Robbins’s Age of Anxiety (1950); and several others. During a European tour with NYCB in 1956, she was stricken with polio, which abruptly ended her dancing career. She later wrote Mourka: The Autobiography of a Cat (1964) and The Ballet Cook Book (1967) and taught at the Dance Theater of Harlem.
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43285faaeb859e187633793f5eb618d6 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tancred-Borenius | Tancred Borenius | Tancred Borenius
Tancred Borenius, (born July 14, 1885, Vyborg, Russia—died Sept. 2, 1948, near Salisbury, Wiltshire, Eng.), Finnish art historian who had a profound knowledge of Italian painting.
After studying at Helsinki and in Italy, Borenius was appointed in 1914 lecturer and in 1922 professor of art history at University College, London. When Finland became independent, he acted as secretary of the diplomatic mission (1918) and as representative of Finland in London (1919). His works include The Painters of Vicenza (1909), English Primitives (1924), Florentine Frescoes (1930), and English Painting in the XVIIIth Century (1938).
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2c25bbec39b04fd386eb44e83700ff8b | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tancredo-de-Almeida-Neves | Tancredo de Almeida Neves | Tancredo de Almeida Neves
…museums and a memorial to Tancredo de Almeida Neves, a popular statesman who was born in the city. Pop. (2010) 84,404.
…to support the election of Tancredo de Almeida Neves as president and of José Sarney as vice president. (Sarney was inaugurated as president after Neves died before his term of office was to begin.)
…of the Democratic Alliance coalition—Tancredo de Almeida Neves for president and José Sarney for vice president—over the ARENA candidates. Neves died before he could assume office in mid-March, and Sarney was inaugurated as Brazil’s first civilian president since 1964. The period of military dictatorship ended, and Sarney presided over…
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84377b737d08576720bba2f905b30642 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tansar | Tansar | Tansar
…and he and his priest Tosar are credited with collecting the holy texts and establishing a unified doctrine. Two treatises, The Testament of Ardashīr and The Letter of Tosar, are attributed to them. As patron of the church, Ardashīr appears in Zoroastrian tradition as a sage. As founder of the…
…of a high priest named Tansar, a contemporary of Ardashīr I, of whose activities an account is preserved in the Letter of Tansar, contained in the History of Ṭabaristān (Tārīkh-e Ṭabaristān) by the Persian writer Ibn Isfandiyār (flourished 12th–13th century). New inscriptional evidence, however, suggests that, if Tansar was, in…
…the first Sasanians: Kartēr and Tansar. Whereas Kartēr is known through contemporary inscriptions, most of which were written by himself, Tansar (or Tosar) is only remembered in later books. The latter tell us that Tansar, an ehrpat, or theologian, undertook the task, under Ardashīr’s command, of collecting the sacred texts…
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f66ca89ff5189d7314f966e62b82c708 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tansu-Ciller | Tansu Çiller | Tansu Çiller
Tansu Çiller, (born 1946, Istanbul, Turkey), Turkish economist and politician, who was Turkey’s first female prime minister (1993–96).
Çiller was born to an affluent family in Istanbul. After graduating from the University of the Bosporus with a degree in economics, she continued her studies in the United States, where she earned graduate degrees from the Universities of New Hampshire and Connecticut and attended Yale University. Çiller returned to Turkey to teach and, at age 36, became the nation’s youngest full professor. Together with her husband, she amassed some $60 million through real estate speculation.
Çiller joined the ruling True Path Party (Doğru Yol Partisi; DYP) in 1990. The following year she was elected to parliament and was named economics minister in Prime Minister Süleyman Demirel’s coalition government. Although she advocated greater privatization of state-owned firms and a balanced budget, it was during her tenure as economics minister that government debt soared and the country suffered a downgrading of its international credit rating. Despite these woes, Çiller was selected to replace Demirel as prime minister in 1993. As she assumed power, Çiller faced increased Kurdish unrest in southeastern Turkey and the pressing need to reduce government spending.
In the December 1995 general election, Necmettin Erbakan led the Welfare (Refah) Party, an Islamist party, to victory. When forming a coalition proved difficult for Erbakan, however, Çiller’s DYP and the Motherland (Anavatan) Party agreed to cooperate in an attempt to block the Islamists from power. Çiller and her rival, Motherland leader Mesut Yılmaz, agreed to rotate the premiership, with Yılmaz serving first. The coalition soon fell apart, however, and Erbakan was given another opportunity. This time it was the Welfare Party and Çiller’s DYP that agreed to a partnership in which Çiller and Erbakan would alternate as prime minister. Although the Turkish national legislature confirmed the unlikely coalition, fears that the Welfare Party was attempting to Islamicize the country soon led the military to force Erbakan to resign, and it was Yılmaz, not Çiller, who was chosen to form a new coalition. Çiller was reelected as the DYP’s leader in 1999, but, after the party fared poorly in the 2002 elections, she stepped down.
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c98d0fcb77d4a61a8b7aa3141cd054ed | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tao-Qian | Tao Qian | Tao Qian
Tao Qian, Wade-Giles romanization T’ao Ch’ien, also called Tao Yuanming, courtesy name (zi) Yuanliang, (born 365, Xunyang [now Jiujiang, Jiangxi province], China—died 427, Xunyang), one of China’s greatest poets and a noted recluse.
Born into an impoverished aristocratic family, Tao Qian took a minor official post while in his 20s in order to support his aged parents. After about 10 years at that post and a brief term as county magistrate, he resigned from official life, repelled by its excessive formality and widespread corruption. With his wife and children he retired to a farming village south of the Yangtze River. Despite the hardships of a farmer’s life and frequent food shortages, Tao was contented, writing poetry, cultivating the chrysanthemums that became inseparably associated with his poetry, and drinking wine, also a common subject of his verse.
Because the taste of Tao’s contemporaries was for an elaborate and artificial style, his simple and straightforward poetry was not fully appreciated until the Tang dynasty (618–907). A master of the five-word line, Tao has been described as the first great poet of tianyuan (“fields and gardens”), landscape poetry inspired by pastoral scenes (as opposed to the then-fashionable shanshui [“mountains and rivers”] poetry). Essentially a Daoist in his philosophical outlook on life and death, he also freely adopted the elements of Confucianism and Buddhism that most appealed to him.
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385cc51898378142b4c438b3d2c0475e | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tarja-Halonen | Tarja Halonen | Tarja Halonen
Tarja Halonen, (born December 24, 1943, Helsinki, Finland), Finnish politician who served as president of Finland (2000–12), the first woman elected to that office.
As a student at the University of Helsinki, Halonen served (1969–70) as social affairs secretary and general secretary of the National Union of Finnish Students. After earning a degree in law in 1970, she began her professional career as an attorney with the Central Organization of Finnish Trade Unions. Halonen then entered politics, serving in 1974–75 as parliamentary secretary to Prime Minister Kalevi Sorsa. Halonen later became chair of the Finnish National Organization for Sexual Equality. From 1977 to 1996 she was a member of the Helsinki City Council, and in 1979 she was elected to parliament as a candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP). In parliament Halonen broadened her experience in domestic and international politics by holding a number of cabinet posts. Before her appointment as foreign affairs minister in 1995, she served as minister of social affairs and health (1987–90), minister for Nordic cooperation (1989–91), and minister of justice (1990–91). In 2000 she was nominated as the SDP candidate for president. After topping the poll in the first round of balloting and winning the required 50 percent threshold to avoid a runoff, she narrowly defeated former prime minister Esko Aho of the Centre Party (51.6 percent to 48.4 percent) on February 6, 2000.
On March 1, 2000, the day of Halonen’s inauguration as president, a new constitution for Finland went into effect that reduced the powers of the president and emphasized the position of parliament as the strongest body in the government. The president, however, retained considerable powers in foreign policy, the area of Halonen’s greatest strength. As president, Halonen continued Finland’s pro-European Union policies, but she opposed the idea of Finnish membership in NATO. She won reelection in 2006 when she narrowly defeated Sauli Niinistö of the National Coalition Party in the second round of balloting. In 2010 Halonen was appointed cochair of the UN Secretary-General’s High-level Panel on Global Sustainability, which presented its recommendations two years later. Barred by law from seeking a third term as president, Halonen left office in 2012 and was succeeded by Niinistö.
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1795f8e69fdbca649b7de6fbc557244a | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Taryn-Simon | Taryn Simon | Taryn Simon
Taryn Simon, (born February 4, 1975, New York City, New York, U.S.), American photographer known for her formal, richly textured images, usually captured with an antique large-format camera. She typically assembled her photographs around a predetermined theme or concept and drew the often disparate results together with academically precise textual explanation in the form of captions and brief paragraphs.
Simon was raised in New York City and Long Island. Her father worked for the U.S. Department of State and frequently returned from his international expeditions with reams of photographs, allowing Simon singular insight into little-seen regions and sparking an early fascination with photography. Initially intending to go into environmental sciences upon her 1993 enrollment at Brown University, she instead obtained a bachelor’s degree in art semiotics in 1997. While at Brown, she also attended the Rhode Island School of Design, where she honed her photography skills.
Following her graduation Simon began publishing her photographs in publications that included The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair and on the Web sites of BBC News and CNN. In 2001 she applied for and received a Guggenheim fellowship. The stipend allowed her to pursue a large-scale series in collaboration with the Innocence Project, then an initiative of Yeshiva University in New York City invested in freeing wrongly convicted inmates. Simon had photographed exonerated death row inmates for The New York Times Magazine in 2000. With the additional funds from the fellowship, Simon expanded the scope of her project, traveling the country and photographing people who had been erroneously found guilty of various grave offenses and later proven innocent. She took their portraits at sites important in the cases against them, including the scenes of the actual crimes and the places where they were arrested. The resulting series, entitled The Innocents, was published as a book in 2003, and permutations of the series were exhibited at galleries and museums in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, and London.
Simon’s next effort was a series of photographs of places and things in the United States inaccessible to the average person. Among her subjects were the point at which a trans-Atlantic telecommunications cable enters the United States, a cryopreservation unit, and an inbred white tiger. The project was published as An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar (2007) and was displayed at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, as well as at other museums and galleries worldwide. In order to capture the photographs compiled in Contraband (2010), Simon installed herself at New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport for five days and photographed more than 1,000 items confiscated in customs, from bottles of date rape drugs to dead wildlife to pirated DVDs. The series was exhibited in New York City and Los Angeles and traveled to Geneva and Brussels.
A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters (2011) focused on what Simon termed “bloodlines.” The project was organized in discrete sections; the centerpiece of each was a portrait of one person. That portrait was accompanied by images of all of the person’s living descendants and ancestors as well as attendant items of significance. Among the central figures were a man who had been compelled to serve as a body double for Iraqi Pres. Ṣaddām Ḥussein’s son ʿUdayy and the titular “living men”: several men in India who had been legally declared dead by relatives attempting to seize their land. The portraits were compiled over a four-year period during which Simon traveled to 25 countries. The exhibit debuted at Tate Modern in London in 2011 and in 2012 was displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Her photograph Zahra/Farah, which depicted an actress portraying an Iraqi gang-rape victim in Brian De Palma’s film Redacted (2007) and that served as the film’s final shot, was exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2011.
Simon’s work frequently appeared in group exhibitions as well, and her photographs were in the permanent collections of institutions that included the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
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a2db9a860b78a7ef9ebbd9ce5e281086 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tasker-Howard-Bliss | Tasker Howard Bliss | Tasker Howard Bliss
Tasker Howard Bliss, (born Dec. 31, 1853, Lewisburg, Pa., U.S.—died Nov. 9, 1930, Washington, D.C.), U.S. military commander and statesman who directed the mobilization effort upon the United States’ entry into World War I.
After graduating from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1875, Bliss served in various military assignments, including that of instructor at West Point and military attaché at the U.S. legation in Madrid. During the Spanish-American War (1898), Bliss was chief of staff under General James H. Wilson in Puerto Rico and later served in Cuba. Promoted to the rank of brigadier general, he negotiated the U.S.–Cuban reciprocity treaty (1902). After service as commandant of the Army War College (1903–05) and in the Philippines (1905–09), he drew various staff assignments and in 1915 was promoted to major general.
With the United States’ entry into World War I in 1917, Bliss was made general and chief of staff. In that position he promptly expanded and upgraded the Army to battle-readiness and resisted attempts to divide the U.S. force among the various Allied commands. At the appointment of President Woodrow Wilson, he sat on the Allied Supreme War Council and was a delegate to the peace conference at Versailles. An ardent supporter of Wilson’s worldview, Bliss promoted the Fourteen Points, American participation in the League of Nations, and international arms control.
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cf26f9b432392ce880bc5680b96af334 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tassilo-von-Heydebrand-und-der-Lasa | Tassilo von Heydebrand und der Lasa | Tassilo von Heydebrand und der Lasa
…a flexible system proposed by Tassilo von Heydebrand und der Lasa, a 19th-century German player and author. Lasa proposed that each player be allowed a bank of time in which to play a predetermined number of moves, such as two hours for 30 moves. This principle, adopted for the vast…
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fc52e3941ee16f1d8d7ab3545961f2d7 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tay-Garnett | Tay Garnett | Tay Garnett
Tay Garnett, byname of William Taylor Garnett, (born June 13, 1894, Los Angeles, California, U.S.—died October 3, 1977, Los Angeles), American director who, during a career that spanned more than four decades, worked in a variety of genres but was best known for the film-noir classic The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946).
Garnett sold cartoons and stories to pulp magazines before serving in World War I as a pilot in the U.S. Navy. After the war, he broke into Hollywood as a gag writer for Hal Roach and Mack Sennett. He later contributed to the screenplays for such movies as The Strong Man (1926), directed by Frank Capra; Getting Gertie’s Garter (1927); and Skyscraper (1928). In 1928 Garnett directed his first feature-length film, Celebrity. After several forgettable movies, he found success with Her Man (1930) and the gangster epic Bad Company (1931), both of which starred Ricardo Cortez and Helen Twelvetrees. The popular One Way Passage (1932), set on an ocean liner, featured William Powell as a convict sentenced to death who falls in love with a fatally ill woman (played by Kay Francis). Destination Unknown (1933) also went to sea, but its story about a troubled rum-running schooner was less successful.
In1933 Garnett helmed S.O.S. Iceberg, a well-received adventure drama that starred Rod La Rocque as a scientist who leads a mission to Greenland; Leni Riefenstahl was featured in a supporting role. The director earned further acclaim for China Seas (1935), a lively tale about piracy that starred Clark Gable and Jean Harlow; Wallace Beery supplied the villainy. That box-office hit was followed by She Couldn’t Take It (1935), a screwball crime comedy with George Raft and Joan Bennett. Garnett’s last credit from 1935 was the adventure drama Professional Soldier, which centres on a young king (Freddie Bartholomew) who is kidnapped by a mercenary (Victor McLaglen).
Garnett returned to screwball comedies with the popular Love Is News (1937), in which an heiress (Loretta Young) outwits an obnoxious reporter (Tyrone Power). After Slave Ship (1937), a costume drama about a mutiny on the high seas, the director made Stand-In (1937), an entertaining satire of Hollywood; Leslie Howard played a humourless accountant sent to save a floundering movie studio whose chief assets appear to be a hotheaded producer (Humphrey Bogart) and an attractive stand-in (Joan Blondell). In the musical comedy Joy of Living (1938), Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., played a wealthy shipowner who teaches a repressed musical star (Irene Dunne) how to enjoy life. Trade Winds (1938) follows a detective (Fredric March) as he chases a murder suspect (Joan Bennett) from San Francisco to Asia; the drama featured extensive stock footage Garnett had shot during a vacation. Less successful was Eternally Yours (1939), which starred David Niven as a work-obsessed magician who tries to win back his wife (Young) after she divorces him; Garnett cast himself as an airplane pilot.
Garnett began the decade with Seven Sinners (1940), the first of several films to feature John Wayne and Marlene Dietrich, who played, respectively, a navy officer and Bijou, the café singer who loves him. Cheers for Miss Bishop (1941) was a departure for Garnett; the sentimental piece centres on a schoolteacher (Martha Scott) who devotes herself to her students to make up for the emptiness of her personal life. He turned to World War II for Bataan (1943), a superior drama that featured a top-notch cast headlined by Robert Taylor, Thomas Mitchell, Desi Arnaz, and Robert Walker. The Cross of Lorraine (1943) also illuminated the horrors of war; Peter Lorre played a sadistic Nazi, and Gene Kelly was a tortured American prisoner of war. Garnett then made two films with Greer Garson: Mrs. Parkington (1944), an adaptation of Louis Bromfield’s novel, and The Valley of Decision (1945), a socially conscious melodrama set in 1870s Pittsburgh. In the latter movie, the actress portrayed a housemaid who falls in love with the son (Gregory Peck) of her employer, a steel magnate who owns the mill where her father suffered a serious injury that left him crippled.
In 1946 Garnett directed his most noteworthy film, The Postman Always Rings Twice, an adaptation of James M. Cain’s crime novel. John Garfield was perfectly cast as Frank, the drifter who cannot say no to his employer’s seductive wife, even when it means committing murder, and Lana Turner gave the performance of her career as the glamorous Cora. The movie was an enormous hit and became a defining example of film noir.
Garnett also had box-office success with A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1949), an adaptation of Mark Twain’s novel that starred Bing Crosby.
Garnett’s subsequent films, however, were largely forgettable. The modest sports drama The Fireball (1950) featured Mickey Rooney as an orphan who becomes a roller-derby champion; the film was arguably best remembered for Marilyn Monroe, who had a minor role. While Cause for Alarm! (1951) was a solid thriller, Soldiers Three (1951) was a disappointing remake of Gunga Din (1939). The Korean War drama One Minute to Zero (1952) also failed to attract moviegoers, despite the presence of Robert Mitchum. The Black Knight (1954), however, was a serviceable entry in the then-popular medieval adventure genre.
After directing the India sequence of the documentary Seven Wonders of the World (1956), Garnett focused largely on television, helming episodes of such series as The Loretta Young Show, Rawhide, Bonanza, Gunsmoke, and Death Valley Days. His few film credits during this time included The Night Fighters (1960), a tale about the Irish Republican Army starring Mitchum and Richard Harris; Cattle King (1963); and The Delta Factor (1970), a low-budget adaptation of a spy novel by Mickey Spillane. After Challenge to Be Free and Timber Tramps (both 1975), Garnett retired from directing.
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bfb87f040268cef53d6bfc9b7691ad6d | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ted-Hoff | Ted Hoff | Ted Hoff
Three Intel engineers—Federico Faggin, Marcian (“Ted”) Hoff, and Stan Mazor—considered the request of the Japanese firm and proposed a more versatile design.
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59ae937748fbb9fc1f6d73f1cd60fa41 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ted-Hughes | Ted Hughes | Ted Hughes
Ted Hughes, byname of Edward J. Hughes, (born August 17, 1930, Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire, England—died October 28, 1998, London), English poet whose most characteristic verse is without sentimentality, emphasizing the cunning and savagery of animal life in harsh, sometimes disjunctive lines.
At Pembroke College, Cambridge, he found folklore and anthropology of particular interest, a concern that was reflected in a number of his poems. In 1956 he married the American poet Sylvia Plath. The couple moved to the United States in 1957, the year that his first volume of verse, The Hawk in the Rain, was published. Other works soon followed, including the highly praised Lupercal (1960) and Selected Poems (1962, with Thom Gunn, a poet whose work is frequently associated with Hughes’s as marking a new turn in English verse).
Hughes stopped writing poetry almost completely for nearly three years following Plath’s suicide in 1963 (the couple had separated the previous year), but thereafter he published prolifically, with volumes of poetry such as Wodwo (1967), Crow (1970), Wolfwatching (1989), and New Selected Poems, 1957–1994 (1995). In his Birthday Letters (1998), he addressed his relationship with Plath after decades of silence. As the executor of her estate, Hughes also edited and published several volumes of her work in the period 1965–98, but he was accused of censoring her writings after he revealed that he had destroyed several journals that she had written before her suicide.
Hughes wrote many books for children, notably The Iron Man (1968; also published as The Iron Giant; film 1999). Remains of Elmet (1979), in which he recalled the world of his childhood, is one of many publications he created in collaboration with photographers and artists. He translated Georges Schehadé’s play The Story of Vasco from the original French and shaped it into a libretto. The resulting opera, from which significant portions of his text were cut, premiered in 1974. A play based on Hughes’s original libretto was staged in 2009. His works also include an adaptation of Seneca’s Oedipus (1968), nonfiction (Winter Pollen, 1994), and translations. He edited many collections of poetry, such as The Rattle Bag (1982, with Seamus Heaney). A collection of his correspondence, edited by Christopher Reid, was released in 2007 as Letters of Ted Hughes. A selection of his poems concerning animal life was published as A Ted Hughes Bestiary (2014). In 1984 Hughes was appointed Britain’s poet laureate.
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4acf21464fc4da9c44da84d770b8064c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ted-Stevens | Ted Stevens | Ted Stevens
Ted Stevens, in full Theodore F. Stevens, (born Nov. 18, 1923, Indianapolis, Ind., U.S.—found dead Aug. 10, 2010, near Dillingham, Alaska), American politician who served as a Republican U.S. senator from Alaska (1968–2009).
Stevens served in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II. He graduated from the University of California at Los Angeles with a bachelor’s degree in political science in 1947 and from Harvard Law School in 1950. After working for the Department of the Interior (1956–61) in Washington, D.C., he moved to Anchorage, Alaska, to practice law. He was twice defeated (1962, 1968) in bids for the U.S. Senate. Elected to the Alaska State House of Representatives in 1964, he became majority leader in 1966. On Dec. 24, 1968, he was appointed to the U.S. Senate to fill the seat left vacant by the death of Sen. E.L. Bartlett.
In his 40 years as senator, Stevens earned a reputation as a powerful advocate for Alaskan industry. In 1971 he helped to draft the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, which enabled construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline (completed 1977). Despite concerns voiced by environmentalists, in the early 1980s he brokered legislation that opened the Tongass National Forest to logging and mandated millions of dollars in federal payments to Alaska for prohibiting development in other large wilderness areas. (The federal government cut the earmark in 2009.) After the tanker Exxon Valdez spilled some 10.9 million gallons of crude oil in Alaska’s Prince William Sound in 1989, Stevens introduced a bill to allocate more federal money to cleanup efforts, arguing that Exxon Corporation had not done enough. In 1993 Stevens convinced Congress to allot $10 million for research to determine the effects of large amounts of nuclear waste reportedly dumped into the oceans by the former Soviet Union. Stevens was a fierce advocate of allowing oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, though his efforts did not meet success. In a passionate speech on the Senate floor, Stevens warned his colleagues: “People who vote against this today are voting against me. I will not forget it.” He was more successful in directing federal funds toward his state, particularly as chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee (1997–01, 2003–05), funneling more than $3 billion to Alaska between 1995 and 2008.
In 2003 an article in the Los Angeles Times suggested that Stevens had invested his own money in Alaskan companies that benefited from legislation he sponsored and from earmarks he obtained. Stevens responded by insisting that his actions had not violated any Senate rules. In 2007 the Justice Department announced that it was investigating the senator’s ties to Bill J. Allen, a former oil-service company executive who had been accused of bribing members of the state legislature. After Allen claimed that he had paid for renovations to Stevens’s home in Girdwood, Alaska, and even had provided workers for the job, Stevens was indicted in July 2008 for failing to disclose those gifts. The ensuing corruption trial cast a shadow not only on Stevens’s own 2008 reelection campaign—which he lost—but also on the vice presidential campaign of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the running mate of Republican Sen. John McCain in the 2008 presidential election. Although jurors returned a guilty verdict in Stevens’s trial, in 2009 a federal judge overruled the conviction, citing prosecutorial misconduct.
Stevens died after an airplane he was traveling in crashed on Aug. 9, 2010; he had survived a 1978 crash that killed his first wife.
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24b5f5f80a37cc66bea85ed7cf158807 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ted-Turner | Ted Turner | Ted Turner
Ted Turner, byname of Robert Edward Turner III, (born November 19, 1938, Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.), American broadcasting entrepreneur, philanthropist, sportsman, and environmentalist who founded a media empire that included several television channels that he created, notably CNN.
Turner grew up in an affluent family; his father owned a successful billboard-advertising company. In 1956 Turner enrolled at Brown University but was expelled three years later, reportedly for having a woman in his dormitory room. Turner joined the family business, which was based in Atlanta, and became the general manager of one of the company’s branch offices in 1960. Following his father’s suicide in 1963, Turner took over the ailing business and restored it to profitability.
In 1970 Turner purchased a financially troubled UHF television station in Atlanta, and within three years he made it one of the few truly profitable independent stations in the United States. In 1975 Turner’s company was one of the first to use a new communications satellite to broadcast his station (later renamed WTBS, or TBS, the Turner Broadcasting System) to a nationwide cable television audience, thereby greatly increasing revenues. To reflect the business’s shift from billboards, Turner renamed it Turner Communications Company, and in 1979 the venture became known as Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. Turner went on to create two other highly successful and innovative cable television networks: CNN (Cable News Network; 1980), the first 24-hour news channel, and TNT (Turner Network Television; 1988). Through the Turner Broadcasting System, he also purchased the Atlanta Braves major league baseball team in 1976 and the Atlanta Hawks professional basketball team in 1977. In 1986 he bought the MGM/UA Entertainment Company, which included Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s library of more than 4,000 films. Turner set off a storm of protest when he authorized the “colourizing” of some of the library’s black-and-white motion pictures.
The large debt burden sustained from these purchases compelled Turner to almost immediately sell off not only MGM/UA but also a share of the Turner Broadcasting System, Inc., though he retained control of it. He also kept ownership of the MGM movie library, which included many Hollywood classics. In 1991 he married actress-activist Jane Fonda; they divorced in 2001.
Turner resumed the expansion of his media empire in the 1990s with the creation of the Cartoon Network (1992) and Turner Movie Classics (1994). He also oversaw the purchase (1993) of two motion-picture production companies, New Line Cinema and Castle Rock Entertainment. In 1996 the media giant Time Warner Inc. acquired the Turner Broadcasting System for $7.5 billion. As part of the agreement, Turner became a vice-chairman of Time Warner and headed all of the merged company’s cable television networks. When Time Warner merged with Internet company AOL in 2001, Turner became vice-chairman and senior adviser of AOL Time Warner Inc. In 2003 he resigned as vice-chairman of that company, and three years later Turner announced that he would not seek reelection to its board of directors.
Turner was a noted philanthropist and environmentalist. He donated some $1 billion to establish (1998) the United Nations Foundation, and he created (2001) the Nuclear Threat Initiative, which sought to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction. He provided extensive funding to conservation efforts through his Turner Foundation (created 1990). Turner was one of the largest landowners in the United States, and many of his ranches were involved in sustainability and ecotourism. He oversaw efforts to rebuild and promote the country’s bison herd, and in 2002 he cofounded Ted’s Montana Grill, a restaurant chain that reportedly had the world’s “largest bison menu.” He also cocreated and cowrote the animated children’s series Captain Planet and the Planeteers (1990–96), which centres on teenaged environmental activists.
In addition, Turner was an avid sportsman, especially known as a yachtsman. He piloted Courageous to win the America’s Cup in 1977. He also founded and sponsored the Goodwill Games (1986–2001), citing his hope of easing Cold War tensions through friendly athletic competition.
Turner was the recipient of numerous honours, including a Peabody Award in 1997. In 2006 he received the Bower Award for Business Leadership from the Franklin Institute—a premier science and technology education and development centre in Philadelphia. In April 2007 Junior Achievement—a nonprofit educational organization that provides hands-on business training programs to youths throughout the world—inducted Turner into its U.S. Business Hall of Fame. In 2008 Turner released his autobiography, Call Me Ted.
In 2018 Turner announced that he had been diagnosed with Lewy body dementia.
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991d20d9998866692f4589ffe60d8b26 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Teddy-Pendergrass | Teddy Pendergrass | Teddy Pendergrass
Teddy Pendergrass, in full Theodore DeReese Pendergrass, (born March 26, 1950, Kingstree, South Carolina, U.S.—died January 13, 2010, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania), American rhythm-and-blues singer who embodied the smooth, Philly soul sound of the 1970s as lead vocalist for Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes before embarking on a successful solo career.
Beginning as a gospel singer in Philadelphia churches, Pendergrass taught himself to play drums and joined the Blue Notes in 1969. In 1971 the group signed with producers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff at Philadelphia International Records, and a string of hits followed. The group’s 1972 eponymous debut album for Philadelphia International produced the singles “I Miss You” and Grammy-nominated “If You Don’t Know Me by Now,” and Pendergrass joined the ranks of R&B’s elite male vocalists. While he lacked the vocal range of Al Green or the musical virtuosity of Stevie Wonder, Pendergrass brought an unbridled masculinity to his stage presence. Embarking on a solo career in 1976, Pendergrass capitalized on his baritone lothario image, most notably with his trademark “ladies only” concerts. He scored hits with the singles “I Don’t Love You Anymore” and “Love T.K.O.”
After an automobile accident in 1982 left him paralyzed from the waist down, his recording future appeared to be in doubt. But after a year of rehabilitation, he released a new album that ultimately went gold. He returned to the stage in 1985, performing in his wheelchair at the Live Aid benefit concert in Philadelphia. Although he never matched the success of his earlier work, later singles such as “Joy” (1988) and “It Should’ve Been You” (1991) reached the top of the Billboard R&B charts. He retired from recording in 2006, devoting much of his time to the Teddy Pendergrass Alliance, a charity that he founded to assist others who had suffered spinal cord injuries.
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bb10989d988df79ae19433d4b4d0e96e | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Teddy-Wilson | Teddy Wilson | Teddy Wilson
Teddy Wilson, byname of Theodore Shaw Wilson, (born Nov. 24, 1912, Austin, Texas, U.S.—died July 31, 1986, New Britain, Conn.), American jazz musician who was one of the leading pianists during the big band era of the 1930s and ’40s; he was also considered a major influence on subsequent generations of jazz pianists.
Wilson’s family moved to Alabama in 1918, where his father found employment at the Tuskegee Institute. He played several instruments in high school, and he entered Talladega College as a music major. After a year he left college, moving to Detroit in 1929 and joining Speed Webb’s band; in 1931 he moved to Chicago. Beginning in 1933, Wilson recorded and worked with Louis Armstrong, Jimmie Noone, Benny Carter, and Willie Bryant. He made a breakthrough in 1935. After playing in an informal jam session with Benny Goodman and Gene Krupa, Wilson became an original member of the Benny Goodman Trio (soon to become a quartet with the addition of vibraphonist Lionel Hampton), one of the first racially integrated groups in popular music. Wilson also began leading a series of small-group recordings (1935–42) produced by John Hammond, including classic series with Billie Holiday and with Mildred Bailey.
Wilson started his own big band in 1939 but disbanded it in 1940 and turned to small-group work. The pianist had many reunions with Goodman through the years, but he mostly led his own trio after 1944. He also taught at the Juilliard School (1945–52), worked on radio shows (1946–55), and occasionally took part in big band nostalgia shows. He appeared in the film The Benny Goodman Story (1955).
Wilson’s admitted models were Earl Hines, Fats Waller, and Art Tatum, but he went on to follow his own musical path. The critic Jon Pareles wrote after his death that he “showed how…melodies could glide and pirouette, with graceful delicacy and just a hint of the blues.” His impeccable and lightly swinging piano style was widely influential in the jazz and popular music worlds. In 1996 his book Teddy Wilson Talks Jazz (with Arie Lighthart and Humphrey van Loo) was published.
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cd8bc29bc1df399f24cb48811e22cde0 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Telipinus-king-of-Aleppo | Telipinus | Telipinus
…his capital, leaving his son Telipinus, known as Telipinus the Priest, to arrange the defense of the Syrian provinces. His task may have been complicated by a new situation that had arisen in the remnants of the Mitannian state. The Mitannian king, Tushratta, was assassinated, and his successor, King Artatama,…
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,…
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a0592cf4145559e6217ac0ec7228cb60 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Teodoro-Obiang-Nguema-Mbasogo | Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo | Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo
Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, and executed. Obiang led a Supreme Military Council, to which he added some civilians in 1981. A less authoritarian constitution was instituted in 1982, followed by the election of 41 unopposed candidates to the legislature in 1983. Although another new constitution…
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59c9ee872e89ec1e3ffcbdae0b9dacbb | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Terence-Rattigan | Sir Terence Rattigan | Sir Terence Rattigan
Sir Terence Rattigan, in full Sir Terence Mervyn Rattigan, (born June 10, 1911, London, Eng.—died Nov. 30, 1977, Hamilton, Bermuda), English playwright, a master of the well-made play.
Educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Oxford, Rattigan had early success with two farces, French Without Tears (performed 1936) and While the Sun Shines (performed 1943). The Winslow Boy (performed 1946), a drama based on a real-life case in which a young boy at the Royal Naval College was unjustly accused of theft, won a New York Critics award. Separate Tables (performed 1945), perhaps his best known work, took as its theme the isolation and frustration that result from rigidly imposed social conventions. Ross (performed 1960) explored the life of T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) and was less traditional in its structure. A Bequest to the Nation (performed 1970) reviewed the intimate, personal aspects of Lord Nelson’s life. The radio play Cause Célèbre was his final work; first broadcast in 1975, it was performed onstage in 1977.
Rattigan’s works were treated coldly by some critics who saw them as unadventurous and catering to undemanding, middle-class taste. Several of his plays do seriously explore social or psychological themes, however, and his plays consistently demonstrate solid craftsmanship. Rattigan was knighted in 1971 for his services to the theatre. He had many screenplays to his credit, including film versions of The Winslow Boy (1948) and Separate Tables (1958), among others, and The Yellow Rolls Royce (1965) and Goodbye Mr. Chips (1968).
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f15999d74bde5a50ff5c4271a1b11057 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Teresa-Teng | Teresa Teng | Teresa Teng
Teresa Teng, Chinese (Wade-Giles romanization) Teng Li-Chün or (Pinyin) Deng Lijun, (born January 29, 1953, Yün-lin county, Taiwan—died May 8, 1995, Chiang Mai, Thailand), Taiwanese singer who was a superstar throughout East Asia and was especially admired in Taiwan and China. Her clear, sweet voice and her heartrending love songs were immensely popular in the 1970s and ’80s.
Teng’s parents were born in China. Her father was an officer in the Nationalist army, and the family moved to Taiwan in 1949. While an elementary school student, Teng won a singing contest, and in her teens she began performing in public. She appeared frequently on television in the late 1960s and early ’70s, which helped her gain wide recognition. Teng began appearing in films and recording albums, and she quickly achieved stardom.
Although Teng never performed in China, pirated recordings of her songs could be found even in remote villages. Her popularity was so great that it was said to rival that of Deng Xiaoping, then China’s paramount leader, with whom she shared a surname. A popular saying was that Old Deng ruled the day and Little Teng the night. In 1973 she began focusing on performing in Japan, where she also quickly became popular. Her transnational success was attributed in part to her multilingualism (she sang in Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, and English), and she won legions of fans in such far-flung locations as Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia.
Some of Teng’s most popular albums included Dandan youqing (“Faded Feelings”; 1983), which set classical poems to music; I’m in Your Debt (1984); and The Unforgettable Teresa Teng (1992). Her best-known song was “The Moon Represents My Heart,” from Love in Hong Kong (1977). Her other top songs included “Goodbye My Love” (1974), “Tian Mi Mi” (1979), “May We Be Together Forever” (1983), and “I Only Care About You,” which she released in Japanese (1986) and in Mandarin (1987).
Teng retired from music in the early 1990s and took up residence in France. She was vacationing in Thailand when she suffered a fatal asthma attack.
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02d3b7758f1cc49f8bc4dd7aba70300e | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Terrence-Malick | Terrence Malick | Terrence Malick
Terrence Malick, in full Terrence Frederick Malick, (born November 30, 1943, Ottawa, Illinois, U.S.), American filmmaker whose reclusive, sporadic career was marked by films that were celebrated for their poetic beauty.
Malick was raised in Texas and Oklahoma and graduated with a degree in philosophy from Harvard University in 1965. After Harvard, he was a Rhodes scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford, but he did not finish his thesis. Instead, he returned to the United States, where he worked as a freelance journalist for various magazines, including Life and The New Yorker, and briefly taught philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Interested in phenomenology, he translated German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s essay “Vom Wesen des Grundes” (“The Essence of Reasons”) for a bilingual edition of the text published in 1969. That same year Malick returned to school at the American Film Institute’s fledgling Center for Advanced Film Studies (now the AFI Conservatory), receiving an M.F.A. in 1971.
Malick first worked in Hollywood as an uncredited writer on Drive, He Said (1971), directed by Jack Nicholson. His own directorial debut, Badlands (1973), which he also scripted, starred Martin Sheen as a small-town hoodlum who persuades a naive teenage girl (played by Sissy Spacek) to run away with him as he embarks on a string of dispassionate murders. The film (one of several to be inspired by the real-life murder spree of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate in 1957–58) was hailed for its majestic cinematography and quietly haunting tone, and its prominent use of voice-over would become a hallmark of Malick’s work. His next film, Days of Heaven (1978), about day labourers in early 20th-century Texas, featured a similarly lush visual style and won even more critical acclaim, earning Malick the best director award at the Cannes film festival.
The public would have to wait 20 years, however, for Malick’s next movie. With The Thin Red Line (1998), based on James Jones’s novel about the World War II Battle of Guadalcanal, he relied on an ensemble cast to present an existential meditation on war. Malick was nominated for best adapted screenplay and best director Academy Awards, though he won neither, and the film was largely overshadowed that year by another World War II movie, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan.
Several more years would pass before Malick’s The New World (2005) hit screens. The film, which portrayed the founding of the Jamestown settlement and starred Christian Bale and Colin Farrell, was noted for its historical accuracy. Malick’s next production, The Tree of Life (2011), was an impressionistic essay on humankind’s place in the universe, presented through the lens of a troubled family in 1950s Texas. The film, which featured Brad Pitt and Sean Penn, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival, and Malick was again nominated for an Oscar for best director. Appearing to ramp up his productivity as he approached his seventies, he soon followed with the romantic melodrama To the Wonder (2012). Although it was Malick’s first film set entirely in the present day, it echoed his previous work in its elliptical, atmospheric style. Knight of Cups (2015) chronicled the surreal wanderings and encounters of a dissipated film-industry professional (Christian Bale) in a series of chapters named after tarot cards. Malick followed up with Song to Song (2017), a whirling depiction of a love triangle between two Austin, Texas, musicians and a high-powered music producer. He then returned to World War II for A Hidden Life (2019), a drama based on the life of Austrian farmer Franz Jägerstätter, a conscientious objector who refused to swear an oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler.
Between writing and directing his own films, Malick occasionally worked on scripts for others, and in the late 1990s he cofounded a production company. However, he had little to say to the press or public, which made him an enigma among Hollywood’s elite directors.
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3add48c3f61edbba4c33a343221bee25 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Terry-McGovern | Terry McGovern | Terry McGovern
Terry McGovern, in full John Terrence McGovern, byname Terrible Terry, (born March 9, 1880, Johnstown, Pa., U.S.—died Feb. 26, 1918, Brooklyn, N.Y.), American professional boxer, world bantamweight (118 pounds) champion, 1899–1900, and featherweight (126 pounds) champion, 1900–01.
Two years after starting his professional boxing career at age 17, McGovern won the vacant world bantamweight championship on Sept. 12, 1899, with a first-round knockout of Thomas (“Pedlar”) Palmer of England. McGovern vacated his title to fight American George Dixon for the world featherweight championship on Jan. 9, 1900, which McGovern won with an eighth-round knockout. Following six title defenses, all won by knockouts, he lost the title on Nov. 28, 1901, when he was knocked out in the second round by American Young Corbett II (William Rothwell). McGovern continued boxing through 1908 on a sporadic basis. He was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1990.
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91d4ee3ab7f78bbed043a23b7a2c83f4 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Terry-Melcher | Terry Melcher | Terry Melcher
Out in Los Angeles, Terry Melcher produced the Byrds’ chart-topping version of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man.” The song launched the West Coast’s version of folk rock, which culminated in the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, where Columbia’s new managing director, Clive Davis, proved willing to pay more than anyone…
…its previous tenant, music producer Terry Melcher, had earlier considered and then decided against giving Manson a recording contract. Watson drove to the estate with Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Linda Kasabian. When they arrived on the property after midnight, they encountered a car driven by Steven Parent, an 18-year-old…
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1907b6bda328e44fbc64b2f3fe9d41e2 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Teuta | Teuta | Teuta
…of his son, his widow, Teuta, acted as regent. Queen Teuta attacked Sicily and the coastal Greek colonies with part of the Illyrian navy. Simultaneously, she antagonized Rome, which finally sent a large fleet to the eastern shores of the Adriatic. Although Teuta submitted in 228, the Illyrian kingdom of…
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380b21790cd4b41bd468306189831ef1 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thaksin-Shinawatra | Thaksin Shinawatra | Thaksin Shinawatra
Thaksin Shinawatra, (born July 26, 1949, Chiang Mai, Thailand), Thai politician and businessman who served as prime minister of Thailand (2001–06).
A descendant of Chinese merchants who settled in the area before World War I, Thaksin originally planned for a career in the police force, although his father was a politician. He graduated from the Police Cadet Academy in 1973 and won a scholarship to study criminal justice at Eastern Kentucky University in the United States. On his return to Thailand, Thaksin first taught at the Police Cadet Academy before being tapped for special duties in the office of Prime Minister Seni Pramoj. Thaksin returned to the United States and in 1978 completed a doctorate at Sam Houston (Texas) State University. Back in Thailand, he worked in police planning and public relations positions and became adept in computer technology. After having attained the rank of lieutenant colonel in the police force, he left the force in 1987 to run his business in the computer field alongside his wife, Potjaman.
After a brush with bankruptcy, Thaksin eventually obtained a monopoly on satellite communications and a cell phone concession, and he rapidly translated these into a vast fortune. He first turned to politics in 1994, when he was asked to be foreign minister. Thaksin served three months until the fall of the government. The following year he assumed leadership of the Palang Dharma Party after winning a legislative seat in Bangkok. On the party’s entrance into Prime Minister Banharn Silpaarcha’s government coalition in 1995, he served briefly as deputy prime minister. Thaksin served as deputy prime minister a second time under Chavalit Yongchaiyudh in 1997.
Thaksin, who campaigned on a populist platform, led his newly created Thai Rak Thai (TRT) Party to a convincing win in national elections on January 6, 2001. He was appointed prime minister by King Bhumibol Adulyadej on February 9. Thaksin’s tenure in office, however, came close to an abrupt end when the independent National Countercorruption Commission prosecuted him on April 3 before the Constitutional Court on charges of having concealed assets in a mandatory declaration of wealth. He was acquitted by a vote of 8–7 on August 3, 2001. The following year he consolidated power after his party merged with two smaller coalition members to secure an enormous parliamentary majority. Despite allegations of cronyism and corruption, Thaksin generally enjoyed great public support, and his popularity increased with his swift response to the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami that struck Thailand in December 2004. The following year the TRT won an absolute majority in the parliament, the first time any party had achieved such a feat. With the majority, Thaksin formed a one-party government, another unprecedented event in Thailand, where coalition governments had been the norm.
In 2006 Thaksin sold his family-owned telecommunications corporation for nearly two billion dollars, and questions concerning the tax-free deal resulted in mass protests. Faced with calls for his resignation, he dissolved parliament in late February 2006 and called an election for April. Although his party won a majority, the election had been boycotted by major opposition parties, which ultimately led the Supreme Court to declare the results invalid. Thaksin, in turn, did not assume office but nevertheless remained in charge of an interim government, and elections were called for mid-October 2006. In September, while traveling abroad, Thaksin was ousted from the government by a military coup, and he subsequently went into exile.
The Thai government froze Thaksin’s assets in June 2007, and the following February he returned to Thailand to face corruption charges. In August, shortly after his wife was convicted of tax evasion and while both were out on bail, the couple fled the country. Thaksin was tried in absentia, and in October 2008 he was found guilty of corruption and sentenced to two years in prison. The couple subsequently divorced, and Potjaman returned to Thailand, where her sentence was suspended. In February 2010 Thailand’s Supreme Court ruled that the government would seize some $1.4 billion (U.S.) of Thaksin’s frozen assets (about 60 percent of the total) as part of his 2008 conviction. Several months earlier, in November 2009, the Cambodian government had appointed Thaksin as a special economic adviser. Thaksin resided mostly in Dubai and Britain after fleeing the country.
Despite living in exile, Thaksin maintained a strong following in his home country. In July 2011 For Thais Party (Phak Puea Thai), a pro-Thaksin party headed by Thaksin’s younger sister, Yingluck Shinawatra, won the majority of parliamentary seats in the country’s general elections, and in August Yingluck became prime minister. That victory opened the door for Thaksin’s possible return to Thailand, and in 2013 Yingluck’s government attempted to grant amnesty to those involved in the political tensions between 2006 and 2010, which, it was believed, would include her brother. The proposal, however, caused massive protests. Yingluck was ousted in 2014, and she later joined her brother in exile after being charged with (and later convicted of) corruption.
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285529721d465dd10727f13ef80ce131 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thein-Sein | Thein Sein | Thein Sein
Thein Sein, in full U Thein Sein, (born April 20, 1945, Kyonku, Burma [now Myanmar]), military officer and politician of Myanmar who served as president of the country (2011–16).
Few details are known about Thein Sein’s early life. He was born and raised in a small village in southern Myanmar in the western part of the vast Irrawaddy River delta, about 25 miles (40 km) south of Pathein. His family was poor. His father wove bamboo mats and worked on the riverside docks, and his mother helped out in a family-owned tea shop. His father, however, was said to be educated, and Thein Sein attended the prestigious Defence Services Academy, graduating in 1968.
Thein Sein appears to have advanced steadily through the officer ranks, completed a training course at the Command and General Staff College (1989), and commanded various army units around the country—although, in that latter capacity, he seems to have been characterized more as a staff officer than as a field commander. In 1992–95 he served as a general staff officer in the country’s War Office (defense department), and by 1997 he had been promoted to brigadier general while he headed an army unit in eastern Shan state. By 2001 he was back at the War Office as adjutant general of the army.
Thein Sein’s appointment as adjutant general marked his entry into government service in the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), the ruling military regime in Myanmar at the time. In 2003 he was appointed second secretary of the SPDC, and a year later he became first secretary. In April 2007 Thein Sein—by then a full general— became acting prime minister for ailing Prime Minister Soe Win, and he formally took office upon Soe Win’s death in October. Thein Sein concurrently served as head of the government’s emergency-response agency and was reportedly deeply shocked by how poorly officials handled relief efforts during the Cyclone Nargis disaster in 2008, which killed some 138,000 people in Myanmar.
In 2010 Thein Sein resigned from the military to lead the newly formed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) as it contested seats in multiparty parliamentary elections held in November. The pro-military USDP swept to victory, with Thein Sein himself winning a seat. The new legislature met early in 2011 and elected Thein Sein president of the country’s first civilian government in nearly 50 years. He took office on March 30, and his government embarked on an agenda of political and social reforms, including relaxing press restrictions, releasing political prisoners, and concluding cease-fire accords with rebel ethnic groups. Most notably, the civil liberties of activist Aung San Suu Kyi were restored, and in early 2012 she was allowed to run for and win a seat in a legislative by-election. In addition, Thein Sein’s government sought to end diplomatic isolation and began implementing reforms aimed at ending years of economic stagnation.
Thein Sein oversaw the implementation of what proved to be Myanmar’s first-ever fairly contested parliamentary elections, which were held in early November 2015. The outcome was disastrous for the USDP, as Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) won an overwhelming number of seats in both legislative chambers. Thein Sein remained in office until late March 2016, when the new NLD government was formed.
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c3cabb97e5d1215921dc3396a623c4ae | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Theobald-I-king-of-Navarre | Theobald I | Theobald I
Theobald I, also called Theobald the Troubadour or the Posthumous, French Thibaud le Chansonnier or le Posthume, Spanish Teobaldo el Trovador or el Póstumo, (born May 3, 1201, Troyes, France—died July 8, 1253, Pamplona, Navarre [now in Spain]), count of Troyes and of Champagne (from 1201), as Theobald IV, and king of Navarre (from 1234), the most famous of the aristocratic trouvères.
He was the son of Theobald III of Champagne, who died before his son was born, and Blanche of Navarre. He lived for four years at the court of King Philip II of France, to whom he did feudal homage in 1214. After Philip’s death (1223), he supported Philip’s son Louis VIII but deserted him in 1226 at the siege of Avignon, conducted by the king as part of his campaign against the Albigenses, a religious sect deemed heretical. On the death of Louis a few months later, Theobald joined a dissident league of barons who opposed Louis’s widow and regent of France, Blanche of Castile. He soon abandoned the league and became reconciled with Blanche. It was rumoured that he was her lover and had poisoned her husband, and many of his poems are thought to be addressed to her. He led the Crusade of 1239–40 and, after his return, spent the rest of his life in Champagne and Navarre, where he introduced several French administrative innovations.
Theobald left about 60 lyrics, mainly love songs and debates in verse, with two pastourelles (love songs between knight and shepherdess) and nine religious poems. Perhaps he found his true level in the jeu-parti (courtly love debate) in which he discusses with a crony from the Crusades whether it is better to embrace one’s love in the dark or to see her without embracing her, with wry allusions to the crony’s crutch and his own potbelly. Theobald’s lyrics, with their music, have survived in six manuscripts.
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72953f156175f0b672014a0e117e0258 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Theocritus | Theocritus | Theocritus
Theocritus, (born c. 300 bc, Syracuse, Sicily [Italy]—died after 260 bc), Greek poet, the creator of pastoral poetry. His poems were termed eidyllia (“idylls”), a diminutive of eidos, which may mean “little poems.”
There are no certain facts as to Theocritus’s life beyond those supplied by the idylls themselves. Certainly he lived in Sicily and at various times in Cos and Alexandria and perhaps in Rhodes. The surviving poems by Theocritus that are generally held to be authentic comprise bucolics (pastoral poetry), mimes with either rural or urban settings, brief poems in epic or lyric metres, and epigrams.
The bucolics are the most characteristic and influential of Theocritus’s works. They introduced the pastoral setting in which shepherds wooed nymphs and shepherdesses and held singing contests with their rivals. They were the sources of Virgil’s Eclogues and much of the poetry and drama of the Renaissance and were the ancestors of the famous English pastoral elegies, John Milton’s “Lycidas,” Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Adonais,” and Matthew Arnold’s “Thyrsis.” Among the best known of his idylls are Thyrsis (Idyll 1), a lament for Daphnis, the original shepherd poet, who died of unrequited love; Cyclops, a humorous depiction of ugly Polyphemus vainly wooing the sea nymph Galatea; and Thalysia (“Harvest Home,” Idyll 7), describing a festival on the island of Cos. In this the poet speaks in the first person and introduces contemporary friends and rivals in the guise of rustics.
Theocritus’s idylls have none of the artificial prettiness of the pastoral poetry of a later age. They have been criticized as attributing to peasants sentiments and language beyond their capacity, but Theocritus’s realism was intentionally partial and selective. He was not trying to write documentaries of peasant life. Even so, comparison with modern Greek folk songs, which owe little to literary influences, reveals striking resemblances between them and Theocritus’s bucolics, and there can be little doubt that both derive from real life.
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d9d3573d73782a133ba8c79a5a80450c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Theodor-Baron-Neuhof | Theodor, Baron Neuhof | Theodor, Baron Neuhof
Theodor, Baron Neuhof, Neuhof also spelled Neuhoff, (born Aug. 24/25, 1694, Cologne—died Dec. 11, 1756, London), German adventurer. An indefatigable intriguer in military, political, and financial affairs throughout Europe, he was for a time (1736–43) the nominal king of Corsica under the style of Theodore I.
After serving in the French and Bavarian armies, Neuhof went to England and then to Spain to conduct negotiations on behalf of Sweden. Later he was involved in the speculations of the Scottish financier John Law. In Genoa he convinced some Corsican prisoners that he would free their island from Genoese tyranny if they made him king. With their help and that of merchants in Tunis, he landed on Corsica, where he was proclaimed king. At first he fought successfully against Genoa, but, after his defeat, a civil war broke out on Corsica, and he fled late in 1736. Twice, in 1738 and 1743, he returned to the island but failed to reestablish his authority. Imprisoned in London for debt, he secured his release by mortgaging his “kingdom.”
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9d9eca0c5f2085612feab16a9b14f67c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Theodor-Billroth | Theodor Billroth | Theodor Billroth
Theodor Billroth, in full Christian Albert Theodor Billroth, (born April 26, 1829, Bergen auf Rügen, Prussia [Germany]—died Feb. 6, 1894, Abbazia, Austria-Hungary [now Opatija, Croatia]), Viennese surgeon, generally considered to be the founder of modern abdominal surgery.
Billroth’s family was of Swedish origin. He studied at the universities of Greifswald, Göttingen, and Berlin, Germany, and received his degree from the last in 1852. From 1853 to 1860 he was assistant in B.R.K. Langenbeck’s surgical clinic in Berlin, and in 1860 he received the double appointment of regular professor of surgery and director of the surgical clinic at the University of Zürich, Switzerland.
While at Zürich (1860–67), Billroth published his classic Allgemeine chirurgische Pathologie und Therapie (1863; General Surgical Pathology and Therapeutics). After he joined the faculty at the University of Vienna (1867–94), founding a surgical clinic in the city, he began making major contributions to the practice. He was a pioneer in the study of the bacterial causes of wound fever, as evidenced by Untersuchungen über die Vegetationsformen von Coccobacteria septica (1874; “Investigations of the Vegetal Forms of Coccobacteria septica”), and was quick to use antiseptic techniques in his surgical practice. With the threat of fatal surgical infections lessened through his work and others’, Billroth proceeded to alter or remove organs that had previously been considered inaccessible. In 1872 he was first to remove a section of the esophagus, joining the remaining parts together; a year later he performed the first complete excision of a larynx.
By 1881 he had made intestinal surgery seem almost commonplace and was ready to attempt what appeared in his time as the most formidable abdominal operation conceivable: excision of a cancerous pylorus (the lower end of the stomach). His successful execution of the operation helped to initiate the modern era of surgery.
He was also a man of strong artistic bent and was a lifelong friend of the composer Johannes Brahms.
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b5f4fa1b135eaaff4198641b3843b72d | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Theodor-Heinrich-Boveri | Theodor Heinrich Boveri | Theodor Heinrich Boveri
Theodor Heinrich Boveri, (born October 12, 1862, Bamberg, Bavaria [Germany]—died October 15, 1915, Würzburg), German cytologist whose work with roundworm eggs proved that chromosomes are separate, continuous entities within the nucleus of a cell.
Boveri received an M.D. degree (1885) from the University of Munich and from 1885 until 1893 was engaged in cytological research at the Zoological Institute in Munich. In 1885 he began a series of studies on chromosomes. His first major report (1887) described the development of an unfertilized egg, including the formation of polar bodies (small cells that result from the division of an unfertilized egg). Later he described finger-shaped lobes that appeared in the nuclei of eggs of the roundworm Ascaris during early cleavage stages. These structures, he decided, were chromosomes, previously believed to be part of the nucleus and present only during nuclear division. Boveri’s third report proved the theory—introduced by Belgian cytologist Edouard van Beneden—that the ovum and sperm cell contribute equal numbers of chromosomes to the new cell created during fertilization.
Later, Boveri introduced the term centrosome and demonstrated that this structure is the division centre for a dividing egg cell. He also proved that a single chromosome is responsible for particular hereditary traits and demonstrated the importance of cytoplasm by showing that chromosomes are influenced by the cytoplasm surrounding the nucleus. In 1893 he was appointed professor at the University of Würzburg.
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f73f1337e97087f4c95c5bef590fc648 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Theodor-Svedberg | Theodor H.E. Svedberg | Theodor H.E. Svedberg
Theodor H.E. Svedberg, byname The Svedberg, (born Aug. 30, 1884, Fleräng, near Gävle, Sweden—died Feb. 25, 1971, Örebro), Swedish chemist who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1926 for his studies in the chemistry of colloids and for his invention of the ultracentrifuge, an invaluable aid in those and subsequent studies.
After receiving his doctorate from the University of Uppsala in 1907, Svedberg joined the faculty there. When he retired in 1949 he was named director of the new Gustaf Werners Institute for Nuclear Chemistry, a post he held until 1967.
Svedberg’s early research was on colloids, in which particles too small to be resolved by ordinary light microscopes are dispersed throughout water or some other substance. The particles in colloid solutions are so small that the jostling of the surrounding water molecules keeps them from settling out in accord with gravity. To better study the particles, Svedberg used centrifugal force to mimic the effects of gravity on them. His first ultracentrifuge, completed in 1924, was capable of generating a centrifugal force up to 5,000 times the force of gravity. Later versions generated hundreds of thousands of times the force of gravity. Svedberg found that the size and weight of the particles determined their rate of settling out, or sedimentation, and he used this fact to measure their size. With an ultracentrifuge, Svedberg went on to determine precisely the molecular weights of highly complex proteins such as hemoglobin. In later years he made studies in nuclear chemistry, contributed to the improvement of the cyclotron, and helped his student Arne Tiselius in the development of the use of electrophoresis to separate and analyze proteins.
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e26f65f878e2849446f61d0275146f47 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Theodore-Baker | Theodore Baker | Theodore Baker
Theodore Baker, (born June 3, 1851, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died Oct. 13, 1934, Dresden, Ger.), American music scholar and lexicographer.
Trained as a young man for business, Baker preferred to study music and went to Germany in 1874 for that purpose. He became a pupil of Oskar Paul at the University of Leipzig and received his Ph.D. there in 1882. His dissertation, based on field research among the Seneca Indians in New York, was the first serious study of American Indian music and provided themes for Edward MacDowell’s Second (Indian) Suite for Orchestra.
Baker lived in Germany until 1890, returning to the United States the following year and becoming (1892) the literary editor and translator for the publishing house of G. Schirmer, Inc. He remained at Schirmer until his retirement in 1926, when he returned again to Germany.
In addition to his many English translations of books, librettos, and articles (especially those appearing in the Musical Quarterly, a Schirmer publication), Baker compiled a useful and popular Dictionary of Musical Terms (1895) and Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians (1900), the work for which he is best known. This last volume included the names of many musicians never previously mentioned in musical reference works. A second edition was published in 1905, and the dictionary underwent several revisions, the 8th edition being published in 1992.
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6d7e07c1357b5bb86f8e1dce40787587 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Theodore-Balsamon | Theodore Balsamon | Theodore Balsamon
Theodore Balsamon, also called Balsamo, (born c. 1130–40, Constantinople, Byzantine Empire [now Istanbul, Turkey]—died c. 1195, Constantinople), the principal Byzantine legal scholar of the medieval period and patriarch of Antioch (c. 1185–95).
After a long tenure as law chancellor to the patriarch of Constantinople, Balsamon preserved the world’s knowledge of many source documents from early Byzantine political and theological history through his commentary (c. 1170) on the nomocanon, the standard annotated collection (since the 7th century) of Eastern Orthodox ecclesiastical and imperial laws and decrees.
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22845ccb3760ed0f0771bb57067fd7e3 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Theodore-Dubois | Théodore Dubois | Théodore Dubois
Théodore Dubois, in full François-Clément-Théodore Dubois, (born Aug. 24, 1837, Rosnay, Fr.—died June 11, 1924, Paris), French composer, organist, and teacher known for his technical treatises on harmony, counterpoint, and sight-reading.
He studied under the cathedral organist at Rheims and at the Paris Conservatoire. In 1871 he succeeded César Franck as organist at the church of Sainte-Clotilde. In 1868 he was choirmaster at the Church of the Madeleine and later succeeded Camille Saint-Saëns as organist there. He taught harmony at the Paris Conservatoire (1871–90) and was director there (1896–1905). He wrote music of all types, including operas and choral and orchestral works; his outstanding composition is his oratorio, Les sept parole du Christ (1867; “The Seven Words of Christ”).
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211f4be8a11446fab012148f5fa9220a | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Theodore-Dwight-Woolsey | Theodore Dwight Woolsey | Theodore Dwight Woolsey
Theodore Dwight Woolsey, (born Oct. 31, 1801, New York City—died July 1, 1889, New Haven, Conn., U.S.), American educator and scholar, president of Yale (1846–71), whose many innovations later became common in institutions of higher learning.
Woolsey graduated as head of his class at Yale in 1820, and in 1831 he was appointed professor of Greek there. Elected president of Yale in 1846, Woolsey improved scholarly standards and expanded the university. Under his leadership the scientific school was founded, the first American Ph.D. was awarded (1861), the first college school of fine arts was established, the law and divinity schools were rejuvenated, the corporation was reorganized, and the “government of the faculty” was affirmed.
Woolsey’s editions of the Greek tragedies brought the advanced methods of German scholarship to American colleges, and his Introduction to the Study of International Law (1860) and Essay on Divorce and Divorce Legislation (1869) went through many editions. After retirement he wrote Political Science (1877) and Communism and Socialism (1880) and headed an American commission for revision of the New Testament.
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7f49b07451307ebcf8e63cd3989c19ad | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Theodore-M-Hesburgh | Theodore M. Hesburgh | Theodore M. Hesburgh
Theodore M. Hesburgh, in full Theodore Martin Hesburgh, (born May 25, 1917, Syracuse, New York, U.S.—died February 26, 2015, South Bend, Indiana), American Roman Catholic priest and educator under whose presidency (1952–87) the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, became as respected for its academic record as for its athletic one and who achieved national prominence through his public service work.
Hesburgh, who said he knew from early childhood that he wanted to be a priest, joined the Order of the Congregation of Holy Cross in 1934. He was ordained a priest in 1943, and in 1945 he was assigned to teach religion and serve as chaplain at Notre Dame. He was promoted to head of the department of religion in 1948, executive vice president of the university in 1949, and president in 1952. As president, a post he held until his retirement in 1987, Hesburgh liberalized the rules regulating student life, promoted academic freedom, and worked toward making Notre Dame one of the top universities in the country, doubling its enrollment and greatly increasing its endowment. In addition, he transferred its governance (1967) from the Congregation of the Holy Cross to a mixed lay and religious board and oversaw the admittance of women students in 1972.
Outside the university, Hesburgh served as a member, chairman, director, or trustee of—among others—the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, the American Council on Education, the Rockefeller Foundation, the United Negro College Fund, the U.S. Overseas Development Council, the U.S. Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, and the Harvard University Board of Overseers. He received numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1964) and a Congressional Gold Medal (1999), and more than 150 honorary degrees. His publications include Thoughts for Our Times (1962), The Humane Imperative (1974), The Hesburgh Papers: Higher Values in Higher Education (1979), and an autobiography, God, Country, Notre Dame (1990).
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8ddfbc37185d86ec4b9d63acdb88f093 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Theodore-Maiman | Theodore H. Maiman | Theodore H. Maiman
Theodore H. Maiman, in full Theodore Harold Maiman, (born July 11, 1927, Los Angeles, Calif., U.S.—died May 5, 2007, Vancouver, B.C., Can.), American physicist, who constructed the first laser, a device that produces monochromatic coherent light, or light in which the rays are all of the same wavelength and phase. The laser has found numerous practical uses, ranging from delicate surgery to measuring the distance between the Earth and the Moon.
After receiving a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1955, Maiman accepted a position with the Hughes Research Laboratories (now HRL Laboratories, LLC), where he became interested in a device developed and built by Charles H. Townes and colleagues and known as a maser (acronym for “microwave [or molecular] amplification by stimulated emission of radiation”). Maiman made design innovations that greatly increased the practicability of the solid-state maser. He then set out to develop an optical maser, or laser, which is based on the maser principle but produces visible light rather than microwaves. He operated the first successful laser in 1960 and two years later established Korad Corporation for research, development, and manufacture of lasers. Maiman later sold Korad and worked as a consultant at TRW, a technology corporation. His autobiography, The Laser Odyssey, was published in 2000.
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804ad1c436e54602dfcc123d75955c22 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Theodore-Metochites | Theodore Metochites | Theodore Metochites
Theodore Metochites, (born c. 1270, Nicaea, Nicaean empire [now İznik, Turkey]—died March 13, 1332, Constantinople, Byzantine Empire [now Istanbul, Turkey]), Byzantine prime minister, negotiator for Emperor Andronicus II Palaeologus, and one of the principal literary and philosophical scholars of the 14th century.
The son of George Metochites, a prominent Eastern Orthodox cleric under Emperor Michael VIII Palaeologus and a leading advocate of union with the Latin church, Theodore became a favourite of Emperor Andronicus II and undertook various diplomatic missions to enlist help against the encroaching Ottoman Turks. In a vain attempt to reverse Byzantium’s military and political decline through an alliance with Serbia, Metochites, in 1298, led an embassy to the Serbian court at Skoplje and arranged the marriage of Andronicus’s five-year-old daughter, Simonis, to Tsar Milutin. As a result, Serbia, although militarily stronger than Byzantium and acknowledged as ruler of formerly Byzantine Macedonia, admitted the universal sovereignty of the Eastern emperor. In his Presbeutikos (“Embassy Papers”), Metochites left a valuable historical account of these negotiations as well as a concrete description of Byzantine influence on Slavic royalty.
Promoted to megas logothetes (“grand logothete,” or “chancellor”), Metochites married Irene Palaeologus and, as a relative of the ruling dynasty, directed Byzantine political affairs from 1321 to 1328, when Andronicus fell from power. Because of his fidelity to Andronicus II, he was deprived of his wealth and exiled by Andronicus III. In 1331 he retired to the Chora Monastery (now Kariye Museum), in Constantinople, to continue his scholarly pursuits. He directed the material and artistic restoration of the monastery, the mosaic work of which, particularly the extant piece showing him offering the church of Chora to an enthroned Christ, represents the acme of 14th-century Byzantine mosaic art.
Metochites’ voluminous writings range from scientific to theological matters. His best-known work, Hypomnematismoi kai semeioseis gnomikai (“Personal Comments and Annotations”), commonly designated the “Philosophical and Historical Miscellany,” is an encyclopaedic collection of tracts and essays on classical thought, history, and literature, comprising more than 80 Greek authors. Other treatises on physics, astronomy, physiology, and Aristotelian psychology survive only in Latin translations. His commentaries on the Dialogues of Plato were an important influence on the 15th-century Platonic renaissance.
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13c4a65f42ba8b9d5d9a4637b1aa9c8b | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Theodore-R-Sizer | Theodore R. Sizer | Theodore R. Sizer
Theodore R. Sizer, in full Theodore Ryland Sizer, byname Ted Sizer, (born June 23, 1932, New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.—died October 21, 2009, Harvard, Massachusetts), American educator and administrator who was best known for founding (1984) the Coalition of Essential Schools (CES), which advocated greater flexibility within schools and more-personalized instruction, among other reforms.
After earning a B.A. (1953) at Yale University, Sizer joined the U.S. Army, and his experiences as a training officer contributed to his decision to pursue a career in education. He later attended Harvard University, earning an M.A. (1957) in teaching and a Ph.D. (1961) in education and American history. Sizer then began teaching at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, where he was made dean in 1964. He left Harvard in 1972 to become headmaster of Phillips Academy, a prep school in Andover, Massachusetts; he held the post until 1981. In 1983 he accepted a teaching position at Brown University, where he founded (1994) the Annenberg Institute for School Reform. After retiring from Brown in 1997, he designed the Francis W. Parker Charter Essential School in Devens, Massachusetts, and took a one-year position as coprincipal with his wife, Nancy Faust Sizer.
Although he was engaged in numerous educational reform efforts, Sizer’s work with the Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) was the hallmark of his career. Starting with a dozen schools in 1984, CES grew to more than 600 formal members by the early 21st century. As the Essential School movement gained momentum, regional centres were created to coordinate the reforms, coach teachers and administrators, and evaluate schools for membership.
Three of Sizer’s books—Horace’s Compromise (1984), Horace’s School (1992), and Horace’s Hope (1996)—explore the fundamental components of Sizer’s Essential School reform effort. Like John Dewey, Sizer insisted on the give-and-take dialogue between teachers and students, rather than the traditional lecture, and he saw teaching as coaching. He particularly wanted bureaucratized, comprehensive high schools replaced by smaller institutions. His call for longer class periods, depth over breadth, and more student-driven curriculum forced educators to frame the discussion of curriculum in completely different ways, and interdisciplinary studies, in-depth projects, and collaboration between students and teachers became more commonplace in American schools as a result of his efforts.
Sizer’s other works included Secondary Schools at the Turn of the Century (1964), Places for Learning, Places for Joy: Speculations on American School Reform (1973), The Students Are Watching: Schools and the Moral Contract (1999; cowritten with his wife), and The Red Pencil: Convictions from Experience in Education (2004).
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b714a2aa917321da612b22307a9ccb35 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Theodore-Roethke | Theodore Roethke | Theodore Roethke
Theodore Roethke, in full Theodore Huebner Roethke, (born May 25, 1908, Saginaw, Mich., U.S.—died Aug. 1, 1963, Bainbridge Island, Wash.), American poet whose verse is characterized by introspection, intense lyricism, and an abiding interest in the natural world.
Roethke was educated at the University of Michigan (B.A., 1929; M.A., 1935) and Harvard University. He taught at several colleges and universities, notably the University of Washington, where he was a professor from 1947 until 1963. His later career was interrupted by hospitalizations for bipolar disorder, but he nevertheless mentored a number of influential poets in his time at Washington, including Carolyn Kizer, James Wright, and David Wagoner.
Roethke had a number of his poems published in periodicals soon after finishing his undergraduate degree at the University of Michigan in 1929. His poetic style ranged from rigid, rhyming stanzas to ebullient free verse. His first book of poetry, Open House, which W.H. Auden called “completely successful,” was published in 1941. It was followed by The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948) and Praise to the End! (1951). The Waking: Poems 1933–1953 (1953) was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for poetry; Words for the Wind (1957) won a Bollingen Prize and a National Book Award. Roethke won a second National Book Award for The Far Field (1964). His collected poems were published in 1966. His essays and lectures were collected in his On the Poet and His Craft (1965), and selections from his personal notebooks were published as Straw for the Fire (1972).
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18036024eed599b96921b3861866453a | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Theodore-Schultz | Theodore William Schultz | Theodore William Schultz
Theodore William Schultz, (born April 30, 1902, near Arlington, South Dakota, U.S.—died February 26, 1998, Evanston, Illinois), American agricultural economist whose influential studies of the role of “human capital”—education, talent, energy, and will—in economic development won him a share (with Sir Arthur Lewis) of the 1979 Nobel Prize for Economics.
Schultz graduated from South Dakota State College in 1927 and earned his Ph.D. in 1930 at the University of Wisconsin, where he was influenced by John R. Commons and other reform-minded thinkers. He taught at Iowa State College (1930–43) and at the University of Chicago (1943–1972), where he was head of the economics department from 1946 to 1961.
In Transforming Traditional Agriculture (1964), Schultz challenged the prevailing view, held by development economists, that farmers in developing countries were irrational in their unwillingness to innovate. He argued that, to the contrary, the farmers were making rational responses to high taxes and artificially low crop prices set by their governments. Schultz also noted that governments in developing countries lacked the agricultural extension services critical for training farmers in new methods. He viewed agricultural development as a precondition for industrialization.
As an empirical economist, Schultz visited farms when he traveled to gain a better understanding of agricultural economics. After World War II, he met an elderly and apparently poor farm couple who seemed quite content with their life. He asked them why. They answered that they were not poor; earnings from their farm had allowed them to send four children to college, and they believed that education would enhance their children’s productivity and, consequently, their income. That conversation led Schultz to formulate his concept of human capital, which he concluded could be studied by using the same terms applied to nonhuman capital. Human capital, however, could be expressed in the form of productive knowledge.
Among his publications were Agriculture in an Unstable Economy (1945), The Economic Value of Education (1963), Economic Growth and Agriculture (1968), Investment in Human Capital (1971), and Investing in People: The Economics of Population Quality (1981).
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dfdedfa0b4631ede1bdbe412124838fb | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Theodoric-I-king-of-Visigoths | Theodoric I | Theodoric I
…agreement with the Visigothic king, Theodoric I, to combine their forces in resisting the Huns. Many legends surround the campaign that followed. It is certain, however, that Attila almost succeeded in occupying Aurelianum (Orléans) before the allies arrived. Indeed, the Huns had already gained a footing inside the city when…
…and he was succeeded by Theodoric I, who ruled them until he was killed in 451 fighting against Attila in the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains. Theodoric I is the first Visigothic leader who can properly be described as a monarch.
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b06f73301449b0b8e3bda45e1e292e39 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Theodoric-king-of-Italy | Theodoric | Theodoric
Theodoric, Late Latin Theodoricus, byname Theodoric The Great, (born ad 454—died Aug. 30, 526, Ravenna), king of the Ostrogoths (from 471), who invaded Italy in 488 and completed the conquest of virtually the entire peninsula and Sicily by 493, making himself king of Italy (493–526) and establishing his capital at Ravenna. In German and Icelandic legend, he is the prototype of Dietrich von Bern (q.v.).
Theodoric was the son of the Ostrogothic chieftain Theodemir and as a boy lived as a hostage in Constantinople, then the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. Although he thus had some of the advantages of a Roman upbringing, he was said to have remained illiterate. This is undoubtedly an exaggeration: what is meant is that he never attained the skill in calligraphy that was expected of a ruler in the 5th and 6th centuries. At the time of his birth the Ostrogoths had recently escaped from the empire of the Huns, who had fiercely oppressed them, uprooting them from their homes in the Ukraine, transferring them to Pannonia, and taking away their grain. For more than 30 years after Theodoric’s birth, the chief aim of the Ostrogoths was to find new land upon which they could settle and live in peace. In northern Pannonia they fought endlessly against other Germanic peoples, acted for and against the emperors at Constantinople, and sometimes received and sometimes were refused financial subsidies from the imperial government. On the death of his father in 471, Theodoric became his successor and soon led his people to new homes in Lower Moesia (in what is now Bulgaria), where they entered into relations, usually hostile, with another group of Ostrogoths led by Theodoric Strabo. Conditions in the Balkan provinces at this time were chaotic. Theodoric guided his people through the confusion with considerable skill but was unable to settle them safely and permanently on the land. The emperor Zeno gave him the title of patrician and the office of master of the soldiers and even appointed him as consul in 484; but in vain efforts to achieve his aims Theodoric frequently ravaged the imperial provinces and actually threatened Constantinople itself. In 488 Zeno ordered him to make his way to Italy, overthrow its barbarian ruler Odoacer, and govern the peninsula in the Emperor’s name. With his people, who may have numbered 100,000 persons, Theodoric arrived in Italy in late August 489. In the following year he defeated Odoacer in three pitched battles and won control of nearly all Italy, but he could not take Ravenna, where Odoacer held out for more than three years. This war caused untold damage to city and countryside alike in northern Italy.
The circumstances of Odoacer’s death illustrate the crueller side of Theodoric’s character, a side he normally concealed. When the Ostrogoths had failed to take Ravenna, the two leaders agreed to govern Italy jointly, and Odoacer admitted Theodoric into the impregnable city on March 5, 493. In the palace of Lauretum 10 days later, two Goths, pretending to be suppliants, suddenly seized Odoacer by the hands, and Theodoric cut him down with a sword. Theodoric went on to murder the dead man’s wife and son and to massacre his followers remorselessly throughout northern Italy.
Whether Theodoric governed Italy as an independent king or as an official of the Roman emperor at Constantinople has been much debated. The truth appears to be that in theory he recognized the overlordship of the Eastern emperor; in practice, however, he was king both of the Romans and of the barbarians in Italy. In his official documents, he is simply “king” without qualification; he never defined of whom or of what he was the king. But there were some limits to his powers. He could not appoint legitimate consuls without confirmation by the emperor; he could issue edicts but not laws, though in practice there was little difference between the two; he could not confer Roman citizenship upon a Goth or appoint a Goth to a Roman civilian office or to the Senate; and his people could not legally intermarry with Romans. Early in his reign Theodoric put aside the skins or furs that Germanic rulers usually wore and surrounded his throne with something of Byzantine pomp. Unlike Odoacer, he dressed himself in the purple of the emperors.
Theodoric maintained peace in Italy throughout his 33-year reign. The Goths were settled in northern and central Italy, while Sicily and southern Italy as far north as Naples were free of them, but some of them lived in such overseas Ostrogothic dominions as Dalmatia and Pannonia. The Goths were divided from the Romans by language, for Gothic in the middle of the 6th century was both a spoken and a written language, used both for secular and for ecclesiastical matters. And they were further divided from the Romans by religion because they were Arian Christians, not Catholics, and they accepted the doctrines of the 4th-century heretical Gothic bishop Ulfilas.
Early in the 6th century Theodoric published his Edict, a collection of 154 rules and regulations. With one or two exceptions, these were not new laws but brief restatements in simple language of Roman laws that were already in existence. The Edict was a handbook issued for the convenience of judges, and it covered the cases that in the King’s opinion were likely to come most frequently before the courts. The rules of the Edict applied to Goths as well as to Romans: in other words, the Goths were to be subject to Roman law, though not to Roman judges, and no provision was made for the recognition of their own national customs and usages. This was a discrepancy in Theodoric’s policy of keeping Goths and Romans separate and of preventing fusion of the two nationalities.
Goths alone served in the army, and Romans were forbidden to carry arms. The Goths lived on the income of the estates on which they had been planted and also received an annual donative from the King. The warriors apparently went each year to Ravenna or wherever the King happened to be to receive the money from his own hand. On these occasions Theodoric would review the deeds of his troops, praising the brave and reprimanding the cowardly. Gothic soldiers on active service also received rations, either in kind or in the equivalent cash. Thus, the Ostrogoths of Theodoric’s reign lived a very different life from that of their forebears, who had starved under the rule of the Huns; entering the Roman Empire and taking over one of its provinces had been profitable for them. The Romans of the kingdom continued to be governed by the old Roman civil service, which continued to exist more or less unchanged.
The great aim of Theodoric’s administration was to preserve harmony between Goths and Romans. He was never guilty of religious persecution. In his letters of appointment and elsewhere, he stressed above all else that the Goths must not oppress the Roman population, must not plunder their goods or ravage their fields, and must try to live amicably with them. He made endless high-minded appeals to the warriors to behave decently. He even stooped to point out that “it is in your interests that the Romans should be undisturbed, for while they enrich our Treasury they multiply your donatives.” In fact, the animosity of the Gothic rank and file against the Romans was made clear over and over again, and no plea that might have held it in check was left unused by the King. He never missed an opportunity to propagate the idea of civilitas (“civilized life” or “civilization”), a concept that includes the maintenance of peace and order, racial harmony, and the outlawing of oppression and violence. “We do not love anything that is uncivilized,” says one of his documents, “we hate wicked pride and its authors. Our Piety execrates men of violence. In a law suit let justice prevail, not the strong arm.”
The end of Theodoric’s reign was disgraced by the murder of the Roman scholar Boethius, which the King later regretted. Theodoric died in August 526 and was buried in a remarkable tomb that still exists in Ravenna. He was succeeded by Athalaric, the son of his daughter Amalasuntha.
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e73f625eebdd36072b4b033f023b5cf9 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Theophile-Bonet | Théophile Bonet | Théophile Bonet
Théophile Bonet of Geneva (1620–89) collated from the literature the observations made in 3,000 autopsies. Many specific clinical and pathologic entities were then defined by various observers, thus opening the door to modern practice.
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ed64569a2bfaaa8b8919e4b6729a8cf2 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Therese-Bonney | Thérèse Bonney | Thérèse Bonney
Thérèse Bonney, in full Mabel Thérèse Bonney, (born 1894?, Syracuse, New York, U.S.—died January 15, 1978, Paris, France), American photographer and writer remembered chiefly for her pictures portraying the ravages of World War II in Europe.
Bonney grew up in New York and California. She graduated from the University of California, took a master’s degree in Romance languages at Harvard University, and, after a short time at Columbia University in New York City, completed her doctorate of letters at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1919 she founded the European branch of the American Red Cross Correspondence Exchange.
In the early 1930s Bonney amassed an impressive collection of photographs and organized several exhibitions to put them on display. During that period she also established the Bonney Service, a press service supplying illustrations to newspapers and magazines in 33 countries. In 1935 Bonney moved to New York City to become director of the new Maison Française, a gallery in Rockefeller Center dedicated to fostering better cultural understanding between France and the United States. Within a few years, Bonney herself took up photography, and in 1938 she published a behind-the-scenes series of photographs of the Vatican for Life (later published as a book in 1939).
When Bonney traveled to Finland in November 1939 to photograph preparations for the 1940 Olympic Games, she instead became the only photojournalist at the scene of the Russian invasion of Finland. In May 1940, while in France, she was the only foreign journalist present at the battle between French and German forces at the Meuse River. Her photographs of the war were exhibited at the Library of Congress and across the United States.
In 1941 Bonney traveled again throughout Europe. Her photos from that trip were published as Europe’s Children (1943)—a moving, even shocking, portrayal of the effects of war. In 1944 the photographs from her first solo exhibition were published in book form. After the war she resumed residence in France, where she continued to photograph, wrote a column for Le Figaro, and translated a number of French plays for Broadway production.
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b830d9a67ad39723b362884a0d5972df | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Therkel-Mathiassen | Therkel Mathiassen | Therkel Mathiassen
Therkel Mathiassen, (born Sept. 5, 1892, Favrbo, Den.—died 1967), Danish archaeologist and ethnographer whose excavations during 1921–23 to the west and north of Hudson Bay revealed the existence of the Thule prehistoric Eskimo culture.
His doctoral dissertation for the University of Copenhagen, Archaeology of the Central Eskimos (1927), laid the groundwork for further study of Eskimo archaeology. Between 1929 and 1955 he conducted six expeditions to Greenland, where he continued his work with Eskimo remains. Mathiassen served as curator (1941–46) and as chief curator (1946–62) of the prehistoric department of the Danish National Museum, Copenhagen.
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3d3e55c47ed72c221e350f60abf75683 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thierry | Thierry | Thierry
Thierry, also called Thierry of Alsace, French Thierry d’Alsace, Dutch Diederik (Dirk) van den Elzas, (born 1100—died Jan. 4, 1168, Grevelingen, Flanders), count of Flanders (1128–68), son of Thierry II, duke of Upper Lorraine, and Gertrude, daughter of Robert I the Frisian, count of Flanders. He contested the county of Flanders with William Clito on the death of Charles the Good in 1127. He was recognized by Ghent, Bruges, and Ypres and consolidated his position when William was killed at Alost in 1128. He married the widow of Charles the Good, Marguerite of Clermont, and proved himself at home a wise and prudent prince, encouraging the growth of popular liberty and of commerce. In 1146 he took part in the Second Crusade and distinguished himself by his exploits. In 1157 he resigned the countship to his son Philip of Alsace and betook himself once more to Jerusalem. On his return from the East, Thierry retired to a monastery to die in his own land.
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057f30f58e6120dc939975b0742703f0 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thierry-de-Chartres | Thierry de Chartres | Thierry de Chartres
Thierry de Chartres, also called Thierry the Breton, Latin Theodoricus, or Terricus, Carnotensis, or Brito, (born c. 1100, France—died c. 1150, Chartres, Fr.), French theologian, teacher, encyclopaedist, one of the foremost thinkers of the 12th century.
According to Peter Abelard, Thierry attended the Council of Soissons in 1121, at which Abelard’s teachings were condemned. He taught at Chartres, where his brother Bernard of Chartres, a celebrated Platonist, was chancellor. Sometime after 1136 he began teaching in Paris, where he had the Latinist, John of Salisbury, among his pupils. In 1141 he became archdeacon and chancellor of Chartres. After attending the Diet of Frankfurt in 1149, he later retired to a monastic life.
His unpublished Heptateuchon (“Book in Seven Volumes”) contains the “classics” of the seven liberal arts, including works by Cicero on rhetoric and by Aristotle on logic. His cosmology, mainly expounded in his commentary on Genesis, attempts to harmonize Scripture with Platonic and other physical or metaphysical doctrines; it teaches that God—who is everything—is the ultimate form from which all other forms were created. In the Latin West, he was among the first to promote the Arabian knowledge of science, thus contributing to that important movement beginning in the 11th century in which Eastern science was—through Latin translations of Arabic works—introduced into the West, where science had disappeared with the Latin Roman Empire.
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b17b5915a461a271963499cef7b384f6 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Third-False-Dmitry | Third False Dmitry | Third False Dmitry
In March 1611 a third False Dmitry, who has been identified as a deacon called Sidorka, appeared at Ivangorod. He gained the allegiance of the Cossacks (March 1612), who were ravaging the environs of Moscow, and of the inhabitants of Pskov, thus acquiring the nickname Thief of Pskov. In…
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d9ee8066e50d2c9110607f764c0fa2fd | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thom-Tillis | Thom Tillis | Thom Tillis
Thom Tillis, in full Thomas Roland Tillis, (born August 30, 1960, Jacksonville, Florida, U.S.), American politician who was elected as a Republican to the U.S. Senate in 2014 and began representing North Carolina in that body the following year.
Tillis’s family struggled financially and moved often, mostly in the Gulf Coast region. He earned high grades and served as president of his high-school class, but, without sufficient funds for college, he went to work as a warehouse clerk. During that time, he married and divorced his high-school girlfriend twice. In the late 1980s he married his second wife, Susan, and the couple had two children, He later earned a bachelor’s degree (1997) from the online University of Maryland University College and then worked as a management consultant and executive at IBM and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Tillis entered politics in 2003, when he successfully ran for the board of commissioners for Cornelius, a city in the greater Charlotte, North Carolina, metropolitan area, where he and his family had moved in 1998. He completed his two-year term in 2005, and the following year he was elected as a Republican to the North Carolina House of Representatives. Tillis took office in 2007, and he became known for his conservative views. Notably, he opposed same-sex marriage and abortion and advocated drug testing for welfare recipients. From 2011 to 2014 he served as speaker of the House.
In 2014 Tillis entered the U.S. Senate race, and his campaign platform included repealing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and requiring a balanced federal budget. After narrowly defeating the Democratic incumbent, Kay Hagan, he took office in 2015. Two years later Republican Donald Trump became president, and Tillis initially opposed some of Trump’s policies, including those on immigration. While Trump adopted a hard-line approach, Tillis favoured bipartisan legislation on immigration reform. In 2017 Tillis sought to protect special counsel Robert Mueller, who was investigating possible interference by Russia in the 2016 election. Tillis took that position amid speculation that Trump wanted to fire Mueller.
However, Tillis subsequently became more aligned with the president. Notably, in March 2019 the senator changed his stance on Trump’s emergency declaration to fund a border wall, voting to support it. Several months later Trump endorsed Tillis’s 2020 reelection bid. The senator subsequently opposed the U.S. House of Representatives’ impeachment of Trump, who had been accused of withholding aid to Ukraine in order to pressure the country into opening a corruption investigation into Joe Biden (in 2020 Biden became the Democratic presidential nominee). In the Senate trial in February 2020, Tillis voted not to convict Trump, and the president was acquitted in a largely party-line vote. Shortly thereafter COVID-19 was designated a global pandemic, and in October 2020 Tillis tested positive for the disease. The following month he won a second term in a hotly contested election.
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993113a88c13b3053ba1bde4f512dd09 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Addison | Thomas Addison | Thomas Addison
Thomas Addison, (born April 1793, Longbenton, Northumberland, Eng.—died June 29, 1860, Bristol, Gloucestershire), English physician after whom Addison’s disease, a metabolic dysfunction caused by atrophy of the adrenal cortex, and Addison’s (pernicious) anemia were named. He was the first to correlate a set of disease symptoms with pathological changes in one of the endocrine glands.
In 1837 Addison became a full physician at Guy’s Hospital, London, and a joint lecturer on medicine with Richard Bright, with whom he wrote Elements of the Practice of Medicine (1839). He gave a preliminary account in 1849 of the two diseases named after him and in 1855 wrote On the Constitutional and Local Effects of Disease of the Supra-Renal Capsules. He was author, with John Morgan, of An Essay on the Operation of Poisonous Agents upon the Living Body (1829), the first English book on the subject.
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ede7a1a61a2a21336cdfd975f132165d | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Andrews-Irish-ship-designer | Thomas Andrews | Thomas Andrews
Thomas Andrews, (born February 7, 1873, Comber, near Belfast, Northern Ireland—died April 15, 1912, at sea, northern Atlantic Ocean), Irish shipbuilder who was best known for designing the luxury liners Olympic and Titanic.
Andrews was born into a prominent family; his brother John later became prime minister of Northern Ireland, and his uncle William James Pirrie was head owner of the Belfast shipbuilding firm Harland and Wolff. From 1889 to 1894 Andrews worked as an apprentice at the firm. Well liked and hardworking, he quickly rose within the company. In the late 1890s he headed the repair department, and he subsequently was involved in the construction of numerous vessels, including the Baltic and the Oceanic. Noted for his innovative designs, Andrews was later named chief of the design department, and in 1907 he also became managing director of Harland and Wolff. In addition, Andrews was a member of various organizations, notably the Royal Institution of Naval Architects (1901).
In 1907 the White Star Line decided to create a class of luxury liners, and Harland and Wolff was tasked with building the vessels. Ultimately, Andrews became the main designer of both the Olympic and the Titanic, which upon completion were the largest and arguably most luxurious liners of their time. The final plans included 16 watertight compartments featuring doors that could be closed from the bridge, sealing off the compartments if necessary; four could flood, and the ship would still stay afloat. This system, in part, led White Star to describe the vessels as practically unsinkable.
When the Olympic undertook its maiden voyage amid great fanfare in June 1911, Andrews was aboard, making notes for improvements. In April 1912 he was also a passenger when the Titanic sailed on its first voyage. After the ship struck an iceberg on April 14, Andrews assessed the damage and determined that the vessel would sink. He subsequently urged people to get to lifeboats; although the ship exceeded the number of lifeboats required by the British Board of Trade, it had enough for only about half of those onboard. Andrews was reportedly last seen in the first-class smoking room, though some claimed that at the end he was on the deck, throwing chairs to those in the water. The Titanic sank on April 15 at approximately 2:20 am. Andrews’s body was never recovered.
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20b5ba7da8527d65ffd2ea7223722a2d | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Arnold | Thomas Arnold | Thomas Arnold
Thomas Arnold, (born June 13, 1795, East Cowes, Isle of Wight, Eng.—died June 12, 1842, Rugby, Warwickshire), educator who, as headmaster of Rugby School, had much influence on public school education in England. He was the father of the poet and critic Matthew Arnold.
Thomas Arnold was educated at Winchester and at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He was elected a fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, in 1815. After ordination and marriage he settled at Laleham, Middlesex, in 1819, becoming a tutor to university entrants. During his tenure as Rugby School’s headmaster (from 1828 until his death), Arnold gradually raised Rugby to the rank of a great public school.
Arnold was not an innovator in teaching method; his aim was to reform Rugby by making it a school for gentlemen. He used prefects more fully than any previous headmaster. Under the prefect system the older boys served as house monitors to keep discipline among the younger boys; this system was adopted in most English secondary schools. The Arnold tradition spread to other schools through Rugby pupils and masters, and many schools established after Arnold’s death were modeled on Rugby.
Arnold was the author of five volumes of sermons, an edition of Thucydides, and a three-volume history of Rome.
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f1199fdea2008800fb584496e5ffc06c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Bailey-Aldrich | Thomas Bailey Aldrich | Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Thomas Bailey Aldrich, (born Nov. 11, 1836, Portsmouth, N.H., U.S.—died March 19, 1907, Boston), poet, short-story writer, and editor whose use of the surprise ending influenced the development of the short story. He drew upon his childhood experiences in New Hampshire in his popular classic The Story of a Bad Boy (1870).
Aldrich left school at 13 to work as a merchant’s clerk in New York City and soon began to contribute to various newspapers and magazines. After publication of his first book of verse, The Bells (1855), he became junior literary critic on the New York Evening Mirror and later subeditor of the Home Journal. From 1881 to 1890 he was editor of The Atlantic Monthly.
His poems, which reflect the cultural atmosphere of New England and his frequent European tours, were published in such volumes as Cloth of Gold (1874), Flower and Thorn (1877), Mercedes and Later Lyrics (1884), and Windham Towers (1890).
His best known prose is Marjorie Daw and Other People (1873), a collection of short stories.
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f1b56cd8a28b99901e33840240b432ed | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Baines | Thomas Baines | Thomas Baines
Thomas Baines, (born 1820, King’s Lynn, Norfolk, Eng.—died May 8, 1875, Durban, Natal [now in South Africa]), English-born artist, explorer, naturalist, and author who spent most of his life in Southern Africa.
Love of adventure took him in 1842 to Cape Colony, where he served as an artist during the Cape Frontier Wars from 1850 until 1853. His success as an artist led to his joining an expedition to northern Australia in 1855 and an invitation to take part in a Zambezi expedition under David Livingstone in 1858. In 1861 Baines accompanied the British hunter and explorer James Chapman in his travels from South West Africa (now Namibia) to Victoria Falls, a journey on which his drawings and his book Explorations in South-West Africa (1864) were based. With his fame established, he opened a studio in London in 1865. Returning to Africa in 1868, he led an expedition to explore the goldfields of Matabeleland, where in 1870 he won a mining concession from the Ndebele king, Lobengula, over an extensive area of neighbouring Mashonaland that later was acquired by Cecil Rhodes. Baines’s accurate map, scientific data, and illustrations of the scenery and people were published posthumously in The Gold Regions of South-Eastern Africa (1877).
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e6d538c43641848b89a13d3ebbbaf03d | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Ball | Thomas Ball | Thomas Ball
Thomas Ball, (born June 3, 1819, Charlestown, Mass., U.S.—died Dec. 11, 1911, Montclair, N.J.), sculptor whose work had a marked influence on monumental art in the United States, especially in New England.
Ball began his career as a wood engraver and miniaturist. An accomplished musician, he fashioned many early cabinet busts of musicians. Among his best-known works are an equestrian statue of George Washington (Public Garden, Boston) and the Lincoln “Emancipation” group (Washington, D.C.). He published his autobiography, My Threescore Years and Ten, in 1891.
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cf7f66744acb89086d34923c8c96beae | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Baring | Thomas Baring | Thomas Baring
…the house were managed by Thomas Baring (1799–1873), a grandson of Sir Francis. Thomas Baring was a managing partner of the firm from 1828 and was also a member of Parliament from 1844 until his death. His elder brother, Sir Francis Thornhill Baring (1796–1866), was a member of Parliament from…
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f71e18dfe9078736345b3d997f34fefb | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Bartholin | Thomas Bartholin | Thomas Bartholin
Thomas Bartholin, Latin Bartholinus, (born Oct. 20, 1616, Copenhagen, Den.—died Dec. 4, 1680, Copenhagen), Danish anatomist and mathematician who was first to describe fully the entire human lymphatic system (1652).
He and his elder brother, Erasmus Bartholin, were the sons of the eminent anatomist Caspar Bartholin. A student of the Dutch school of anatomists, Bartholin supported the English physician William Harvey’s theory of blood circulation. He taught at the University of Copenhagen (1646–61) and served as physician to King Christian V (1670–80).
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3eeb63d4bd0d6c38eb7b5bb67ce98c0f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Bernhard | Thomas Bernhard | Thomas Bernhard
Thomas Bernhard, (born Feb. 9/10, 1931, Cloister Heerland, Neth.—died Feb. 12, 1989, Gmunden, Austria), Austrian writer who explored death, social injustice, and human misery in controversial literature that was deeply pessimistic about modern civilization in general and Austrian culture in particular.
Bernhard was born in a Holland convent; his mother, unwed at the time, had fled there from Austria to give birth. After a year, she returned to her parents in Vienna, where her father, writer Johannes Freumbichler (1881–1949), became the major influence on Bernhard. After surviving a life-threatening coma and repeated hospitalizations (1948–51) in tuberculosis sanatoriums, he studied music and drama in Salzburg and Vienna.
Bernhard achieved little success with several collections of poetry in the late 1950s, but in 1963 he gained notoriety with his first novel, Frost (Eng. trans. Frost). In such novels as Verstörung (1967; “Derangement,” Eng. trans. Gargoyles), Das Kalkwerk (1970; The Lime Works), and Korrektur (1975; Corrections), he combined complex narrative structure with an increasingly misanthropic philosophy. In 1973 Bernhard withdrew his drama Die Berühmten (“The Famous”) from the prestigious Salzburg Festival because of a controversy over staging. After its publication in 1984 his novel Holzfällen (Woodcutters, or Cutting Timber: An Irritation) was seized by police for allegedly criticizing a public figure. Even before its premiere in November 1988, Bernhard’s last play, Heldenplatz (“Heroes’ Square”), a bleak indictment of anti-Semitism in contemporary Austria, provoked violent protests. His other plays include Ein Fest für Boris (1968; A Party for Boris), Die Jagdgesellschaft (1974; The Hunting Party), Die Macht der Gewohnheit (1974; The Force of Habit), and Der Schein trügt (1983; Appearances Are Deceiving).
Bernhard’s memoirs were translated in Gathering Evidence (1985), a compilation of five German works published between 1975 and 1982.
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f3084858183c0ab4524f20206c5f3665 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Bilney | Thomas Bilney | Thomas Bilney
Tyndale, Robert Barnes, Thomas Bilney, and, above all, Cranmer, who by 1525 included among his prayers one for the abolition of papal power in England.
…of the group’s spiritual leader, Thomas Bilney. After gaining royal favour by speaking out in support of the efforts of King Henry VIII to obtain an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, Latimer received the benefice of West Kington, Wiltshire, in 1531. He soon befriended two rising Reformers:…
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0a020a255f5d19713913f01dab48d13e | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Blanchard | Thomas Blanchard | Thomas Blanchard
Thomas Blanchard, (born June 24, 1788, Sutton, Mass., U.S.—died April 16, 1864, Boston, Mass.), American inventor who made major contributions to the development of machine tools.
Blanchard began as a self-taught tinkerer. As a boy he invented an apple parer and a tack-making machine for his brother’s factory. Later he designed a lathe capable of turning both the regular and irregular sections of gun barrels. In 1818, as an employee of the Springfield (Mass.) Arsenal, he invented the lathe that duplicated the form of a pattern object by transmitting to the cutting tool the motion of a friction wheel rolling over the pattern. His lathe was an essential step in the development of mass-production techniques. The success of his device led to piracy of his design, however, and Blanchard spent several years fighting for Congressional renewal of his patent. In 1825 he designed a steam carriage, and later he became interested in railroads but received no encouragement. He then turned to designing shallow-draft steamboats and produced several successful designs.
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cceee07d1b871623efdeec34a5650ba2 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Blount | Thomas Blount | Thomas Blount
…fuller than its predecessors was Thomas Blount’s work of 1656, Glossographia; or, A Dictionary Interpreting All Such Hard Words…As Are Now Used in Our Refined English Tongue. He made an important forward step in lexicographical method by collecting words from his own reading that had given him trouble, and he…
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dfbf4e30007c5f0f64e448e24d6bc189 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Bodley | Sir Thomas Bodley | Sir Thomas Bodley
…the library was restored by Sir Thomas Bodley (a collector of medieval manuscripts) and reopened in 1602. Bodley added new buildings, surrounding university buildings were taken over, and additions were made at various times up to the 19th century. A new building, connected with the old buildings by an underground…
…including Sir Robert Cotton and Sir Thomas Bodley. As a result, a considerable portion of the libraries that had been scattered at the suppression was, by 1660, reassembled in collections—Parker’s eventually went to Corpus Christi College at Cambridge; Cotton’s to the British Museum library, which now forms part of the…
Sir Thomas Bodley opened his famous library at Oxford in 1602, and in 1610 the Stationers’ Company undertook to give it a copy of every book printed in England. Later, Acts of Parliament required the delivery of copies of every book to a varying number…
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062694e83bf2ebf1fc2e77293c6050af | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Boreman | Thomas Boreman | Thomas Boreman
…start from merchants such as Thomas Boreman, of whom little is known, and especially John Newbery, of whom a great deal more is known. Research has established that at least as early as 1730 Boreman began publishing for children (largely educational works) and that in 1742 he produced what sounds…
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dcf450c1cc1f9830c731f4407c7c5fbe | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Boulsover | Thomas Boulsover | Thomas Boulsover
Thomas Boulsover, Boulsover also spelled Bolsover, (born 1706, Elkington, Derbyshire, Eng.—died September 1788, Sheffield), English inventor of fused plating, or “old Sheffield plate.”
After an apprenticeship in Sheffield, Boulsover became a member of the Cutlers Company, i.e., a full-fledged craftsman, in 1727. In 1743, while repairing a copper and silver knife handle, he discovered that the two metals could be fused and, equally important, the fact that when the fused metals were rolled in a rolling mill, they expanded in unison, behaving as if they were a single metal. Previously, coating or plating one metal with another had involved fabricating the article into a finished shape and then soldering a thin sheet of the plating to it. Boulsover’s invention opened the way to economical production of a great variety of plated objects, from buttons and snuffboxes, which Boulsover himself made, to hollow ware and utensils, which were soon manufactured in large quantity by other Sheffield workers. Boulsover later invented a method of rolling saw-blade steel, previously made only by hand hammering.
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0e1f3404fb05b8725a76d03842651998 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Bourchier | Thomas Bourchier | Thomas Bourchier
Thomas Bourchier, (born c. 1412—died March 30, 1486, Knole, Kent, Eng.), English cardinal and archbishop of Canterbury who maintained the stability of the English church during the Wars of the Roses (1455–85) between the houses of York and Lancaster.
Bourchier was the son of William Bourchier, made Count of Eu in 1419, and Anne, a granddaughter of King Edward III. Bourchier was bishop of Worcester (1435–43) and of Ely (1443–54). Because he won acceptance from both the feuding Yorkist and Lancastrian parties, he was elected archbishop of Canterbury in 1454. He served as chancellor (1455–56) during the opening months of the Wars of the Roses and arranged a temporary reconciliation between the two sides in 1458. Nevertheless, after the defeat of the Lancastrians in 1461, Bourchier became a loyal supporter of the newly crowned Yorkist monarch Edward IV, who made him a cardinal in 1467. In 1483 he persuaded Edward’s widow to hand over her youngest son, Richard, Duke of York—a potential claimant to the throne—to Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who shortly thereafter usurped the throne as King Richard III. Bourchier was not implicated, however, in the mysterious disappearance of the Duke of York and his elder brother, Edward V, from the Tower of London in August 1483.
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30b023b0d66a71a2dbd4997d0b34d4dd | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Carew | Thomas Carew | Thomas Carew
Thomas Carew, (born 1594/95, West Wickham, Kent, Eng.—died March 22, 1639/40, London), English poet and first of the Cavalier song writers.
Educated at the University of Oxford and at the Middle Temple, London, Carew served as secretary at embassies in Venice, The Hague, and Paris. In 1630 Carew received a court appointment and became server at table to the king. The Earl of Clarendon considered him as “a person of pleasant and facetious wit” among a brilliant circle of friends that included the playwright Ben Jonson.
Carew’s only masque, Coelum Britannicum, was performed by the king and his gentlemen in 1634 and published the same year. Music for it was composed by Henry Lawes, who, among others, set some of Carew’s songs to music.
Carew’s poems, circulated in manuscript, were amatory lyrics or occasional poems addressed to members of the court circle, notable for their ease of language and skillful control of mood and imagery. His longest poem was the sensuous Rapture, but his lyrics are among the most complex and thoughtful of any produced by the Cavalier poets. He was a meticulous workman, and his own verses addressed to Ben Jonson show that he was proud to share Jonson’s creed of painstaking perfection. He greatly admired the poems of John Donne, whom he called king of “the universal monarchy of wit” in his elegy on Donne (deemed the outstanding piece of poetic criticism of the age). Carew was also indebted to Italian poets, particularly Giambattista Marino, whose libertine spirit, brilliant wit, and technical facility were much akin to his own, and on whose work he based several of his lyrics. He translated a number of the Psalms and is said to have died with expressions of remorse for a life of libertinism. His poems were published a few weeks after his death. The definitive edition is The Poems of Thomas Carew, with His Masque “Coelum Britannicum,” edited by Rhodes Dunlap (1949).
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05a8590e94567d55a632fbed8ad57cde | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Chandler-Haliburton | Thomas Chandler Haliburton | Thomas Chandler Haliburton
Thomas Chandler Haliburton, (born December 17, 1796, Windsor, Nova Scotia [Canada]—died August 27, 1865, Isleworth, Middlesex, England), Canadian writer best known as the creator of Sam Slick, a resourceful Yankee clock peddler and cracker-barrel philosopher whose encounters with a variety of people illuminated Haliburton’s view of human nature.
Haliburton was admitted to the bar in 1820 and, as a member of the Nova Scotia Legislative Assembly (1826–29), led a popular movement for liberal reform. He later reverted to his early Tory convictions and resigned from the Assembly. As a judge of the Supreme Court (1841–54), he maintained the strongly conservative political and social views that inform his writings. In 1856 he moved to England, where he was a member of the House of Commons from 1859 until his death.
The escapades of Sam Slick were first revealed serially in the newspaper Nova Scotian (1835) but subsequently published in book form (1836, 1838, 1840) as The Clockmaker; or, The Sayings and Doings of Samuel Slick of Slickville. The dialogues between Sam Slick and the squire are satirical attacks on the shiftlessness of the Nova Scotians, mobocracy, the levelling tendencies of the age, and Yankee brashness. They are enriched by the tremendous vitality of Sam’s colloquial speech and by his fund of anecdotes and tall tales. Many of Sam Slick’s sayings, such as “This country is going to the dogs” and “barking up the wrong tree,” have become commonplace in English idiom. Haliburton shifted his attacks to a variety of other topics in his subsequent works: The Attaché; or, Sam Slick in England, 4 vol. (1843–44), Sam Slick’s Wise Saws and Modern Instances; or, What He Said, Did, or Invented (1853), and Nature and Human Nature (1855).
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d4d51b405bb90756c6c639fee08cd103 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Chatterton | Thomas Chatterton | Thomas Chatterton
Thomas Chatterton, (born November 20, 1752, Bristol, Gloucestershire, England—died August 24, 1770, London), chief poet of the 18th-century “Gothic” literary revival, England’s youngest writer of mature verse, and precursor of the Romantic Movement.
At first considered slow in learning, Chatterton had a tearful childhood, choosing the solitude of an attic and making no progress with his alphabet. One day, seeing his mother tear up as wastepaper one of his father’s old French musical folios, the boy was entranced by its illuminated capital letters, and his intellect began to be engaged. He learned to read far in advance of his age but only from old materials, music folios, a black-letter Bible, and muniments taken by his father from a chest in the Church of St. Mary Redcliffe. At age seven Chatterton entered Colston’s Hospital, but his learning was acquired independently.
Chatterton’s first known poem was a scholarly Miltonic piece, “On the Last Epiphany,” written when he was 10. About a year later an old parchment he had inscribed with a pastoral eclogue, “Elinoure and Juga,” supposedly of the 15th century, deceived its readers, and thereafter what had begun merely as a childish deception became a poetic activity quite separate from Chatterton’s acknowledged writings. These poems were supposedly written by a 15th-century monk of Bristol, Thomas Rowley, a fictitious character created by Chatterton. The name was taken from a civilian’s monument brass at St. John’s Church in Bristol. The poems had many shortcomings both as medieval writings and as poetry. Yet Chatterton threw all his powers into the poems, supposedly written by Rowley, in such a manner as to mark him a poet of genius and an early Romantic pioneer, both in metrics and in feeling.
In 1767 Chatterton was apprenticed to a Bristol attorney but spent most of his time on his own writing, which for a while he turned to slight profit in Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal and Town and Country Magazine. The life was irksome to him, however, and pressures began to build up, compounded of a fight for a free press, contempt for Bristol and his dowdy family, a philandering attitude to local girls, and the “death” of Rowley.
Chatterton sent James Dodsley, the publisher, letters offering some of Rowley’s manuscripts, but Dodsley ignored him. Horace Walpole received similar offers and at first was enchanted with the “old” poems; but, when advised by friends that the manuscripts were modern, he treated Chatterton with chilly contempt, advising him in a letter to stick to his calling. Chatterton rewarded him with bitter but noble lines. By a mock suicide threat (“The Last Will and Testament of me, Thomas Chatterton of Bristol”), he forced his employer, John Lambert, to release him from his contract and set out for London to storm the city with satires and pamphlets. A lively burletta (comic opera), The Revenge, brought some money, but the death of a prospective patron quenched Chatterton’s hopes. At this time he wrote the most pathetic of his Rowley poems, “An Excelente Balade of Charitie.” Though literally starving, Chatterton refused the food of friends and, on the night of August 24, 1770, took arsenic in his Holborn garret and died.
The aftermath was fame. The just tributes of many poets came after controversy between the “Rowleians” and those who rightly saw Chatterton as the sole author. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote a monody to him; William Wordsworth saw him as “the marvelous boy”; Percy Bysshe Shelley gave him a stanza in “Adonais”; John Keats dedicated Endymion: A Poetic Romance to him and was heavily influenced by him; and George Crabbe, Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti added their praise. In France the Romantics hailed his example, and Alfred de Vigny’s historically inaccurate play Chatterton was the model for an opera by Ruggero Leoncavallo.
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6c76357486d82564a4c5270a9d03e140 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Chippendale | Thomas Chippendale | Thomas Chippendale
Thomas Chippendale, (baptized June 5, 1718, Otley, Yorkshire, England—buried November 13, 1779, London), one of the leading cabinetmakers of 18th-century England and one of the most perplexing figures in the history of furniture. His name is synonymous with the Anglicized Rococo style.
Nothing is known of Chippendale’s early life until his marriage to Catherine Redshaw in London in 1748. In 1753 he moved to St. Martin’s Lane, where he maintained his showrooms, workshops, and home for the rest of his life. In 1754 he published his celebrated Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director. This work was the most important collection of furniture designs theretofore published in England, illustrating almost every type of mid-18th-century domestic furniture. The first and second (1755) editions contained 160 plates, and the third edition (published in weekly parts, 1759–62) had 200. The designs largely were Chippendale’s improvements on the fashionable furniture styles and designs of the time.
Chippendale was elected to the Society of Arts in 1759 but declined reelection in the following year. Meanwhile he had become a partner with James Rannie, apparently an upholsterer, who died in 1766. Chippendale continued the business alone until he took Thomas Haig, Rannie’s former clerk, into partnership in 1771. Chippendale’s first wife died in 1772, and he married Elizabeth Davis in 1777. He died of tuberculosis two years later.
Although head of an important firm, Chippendale was not the greatest of all English furniture makers, and his exaggerated posthumous reputation is attributable largely to the Director. A 20th-century scholarly investigation revealed him as essentially a collector and extremely talented modifier of already existing styles, notably Rococo, which is characteristically used in Chippendale’s many designs for mahogany chairs with intricately pierced slats and for elaborately carved case furniture. Other designs in the Director show the Rococo adaptations of Chinese and Gothic styles, some to be carved in softwood and gilded or japanned (an East Asian process, similar to lacquering). Though the plates in the Director are signed by Chippendale, it is now accepted that some were by other designers in the Rococo style, notably Henry Copland, who had published designs earlier, and Matthias Lock, whom Chippendale had hired to provide special designs for clients.
Chippendale’s name is given indiscriminately to great quantities of mid-18th-century furniture, but, in fact, only comparatively few pieces can be assigned with certainty to his workshop. Once established as head of a large firm, he did not make furniture himself. Even pieces that resemble designs in the Director cannot be attributed to his shop without further evidence, for the designs were available to contemporary cabinetmakers, some of whose names appear in the original list of subscribers. Where a piece corresponds to a Director plate and where the original owner was a subscriber to the Director or is known to have employed Chippendale, a tentative attribution may be made, such as the extraordinary bedroom suite at Badminton House, Gloucestershire, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Cabinetmakers in the American colonies borrowed heavily from the Director.
From the 1760s onward, influenced by the great English designer Robert Adam, Chippendale adopted the new Neoclassical style. Existing bills for work carried out by his firm at Nostell Priory and Harewood House, Yorkshire, during this final phase of his career identify the fine Neoclassical mahogany and marquetried satinwood furniture with which he supplied these houses and show that, as cabinetmakers and upholsterers, his firm undertook all branches of interior decoration. His cornice for a Venetian window, sofas, and dressing tables canopied with overdrapes are characteristic of the upholsterer’s art in the mid-18th century. The superb satinwood and inlaid commodes (possibly designed by his son Thomas Chippendale II) and other furniture at Harewood House are masterpieces of the cabinetmaker’s craft, upon which his reputation may safely rest.
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e9ff8c996fb5ae997678fc4a9ef4feab | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Chubb | Thomas Chubb | Thomas Chubb
Thomas Chubb, (born Sept. 29, 1679, East Harnham, Wiltshire, Eng.—died Feb. 8, 1747, Salisbury, Wiltshire), self-taught English philosopher and proponent of Deism, regarded by Voltaire as one of the most logical of his school.
The son of a maltster, Chubb was apprenticed to a glovemaker and later worked for a tallow chandler. He read widely and began to write on rationalism in the early 1700s; his first publication was an essay, “The Supremacy of the Father Asserted,” written in 1715 in response to the Arian controversy. He then went to London to live for a time, apparently as a servant, in the house of the master of the rolls, Sir Joseph Jekyll, but eventually returned to Salisbury. Chubb’s other works, which include Discourse Concerning Reason (1731), The True Gospel of Jesus Christ Vindicated (1739), and Discourse on Miracles (1741), betray the deficiencies of his being self-taught, and he was often treated disparagingly by more erudite theological controversialists. His tracts tended to limit the Christian religion to three fundamental tenets: belief in the divinely ordained moral law, belief in the need of sincere repentance for sin, and belief in future rewards and punishments. The Discourse on Miracles took the position that miracles provide merely a “probable proof” of revelation. His Posthumous Works, in two volumes, appeared in 1748.
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aef828088859c6ff377dfc14d02ff27c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Clarkson | Thomas Clarkson | Thomas Clarkson
Thomas Clarkson, (born March 28, 1760, Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, Eng.—died Sept. 26, 1846, Ipswich, Suffolk), abolitionist, one of the first effective publicists of the English movement against the slave trade and against slavery in the colonies.
Clarkson was ordained a deacon, but from 1785 he devoted his life to abolitionism. His An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1786) brought him into association with Granville Sharp, William Wilberforce, and other foes of slavery. In 1787 he joined them in forming a society for the abolition of the slave trade. His essay also gained him the sympathy of Edmund Burke, Charles James Fox, and the younger William Pitt.
Clarkson visited British ports to collect facts for his pamphlet “A Summary View of the Slave Trade and of the Probable Consequences of Its Abolition” (1787). The evidence that he gathered was used in the antislavery campaign led by Wilberforce in Parliament. Little progress was made during the early years of warfare with France because many members of Parliament believed that the slave trade provided essential wealth for the nation and valuable training for the navy.
In 1807 a bill for the abolition of the slave trade finally was passed, and the next year Clarkson’s two-volume history of the trade was published. Partly as a result of Clarkson’s continued efforts, Viscount Castlereagh in 1815 secured the condemnation of the trade by the other European powers, though at the congress of Aix-la-Chapelle (1818) measures for enforcing international abolition were discussed without effect. When the Anti-Slavery Society was founded (1823), Clarkson was chosen a vice president.
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d5e9acbbc6bd1023ea62c82a4455e076 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Coke | Thomas Coke | Thomas Coke
Thomas Coke, (born Sept. 9, 1747, Brecon, Brecknockshire, Wales—died May 3, 1814, at sea en route from Liverpool to Ceylon), English clergyman, first bishop of the Methodist Church, founder of its missions, and friend of Methodism’s founder, John Wesley, who called Coke his “right hand.”
Coke was ordained an Anglican priest in 1772 and served as curate at South Petherton, Somerset, from 1772 to 1776. After meeting Wesley, however, he was dismissed from his curacy for conducting the open-air and cottage services Wesley recommended.
In 1777 Coke formally joined the Methodists. He became the first president of the Irish Conference of Methodists in 1782 and two years later was named by Wesley as superintendent of the new missions to North America.
In 1787, during one of Coke’s nine visits to America, he was designated “bishop” despite Wesley’s protest. As president of the English conference in 1797 and 1805, he sought to introduce the title among English Methodists. Rebuffed, he asked the prime minister, Lord Liverpool, to make him a bishop of the Anglican church in India. This request denied, Coke raised funds for his own Methodist mission and was en route to India when he died. A prolific writer, he was author of Commentary on the Old and New Testaments, 5 vol. (1801–03); A History of the West Indies (1808–11); several volumes of sermons; and a Life of John Wesley (with Henry Moore; 1792). Coke ardently opposed slavery.
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dbc817699e08a7c4f79fe767681a5af8 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Cook | Thomas Cook | Thomas Cook
Thomas Cook, (born November 22, 1808, Melbourne, Derbyshire, England—died July 18, 1892, Leicester, Leicestershire), English innovator of the conducted tour and founder of Thomas Cook and Son, a worldwide travel agency. Cook can be said to have invented modern tourism.
Cook left school at the age of 10 and worked at various jobs until 1828, when he became a Baptist missionary. In 1841 he persuaded the Midland Counties Railway Company to run a special train between Leicester and Loughborough for a temperance meeting on July 5. It was believed to have been the first publicly advertised excursion train in England. Three years later the railway agreed to make the arrangement permanent if Cook would provide passengers for the excursion trains. During the Paris Exposition of 1855, Cook conducted excursions from Leicester to Calais, France. The next year he led his first Grand Tour of Europe.
In the early 1860s he ceased to conduct personal tours and became an agent for the sale of domestic and overseas travel tickets. His firm took on military transport and postal services for England and Egypt during the 1880s. On his death the business passed to his only son, John Mason Cook (1834–99), who had been his father’s partner since 1864. The company passed to Cook’s grandsons in 1899 and remained in the family until 1928. In 1972 the company was renamed Thomas Cook, and in 2001 it was wholly owned by Thomas Cook AG, one of the largest travel groups in the world.
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c31f3d2f8fb84e9e2c1bfa496a4c6232 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Cooper-British-writer | Thomas Cooper | Thomas Cooper
Thomas Cooper, (born March 20, 1805, Leicester, Leicestershire, Eng.—died July 15, 1892, Lincoln, Lincolnshire), English writer whose political epic The Purgatory of Suicides (1845) promulgated in verse the principles of Chartism, Britain’s first specifically working-class national movement, for which Cooper worked and suffered imprisonment.
While working as a shoemaker, Cooper read widely, and in 1827 he became a schoolmaster and in 1829 a Methodist preacher. In 1836 he became a journalist, working on newspapers in Lincoln, London, and Leicester, until his embrace of Chartism led to his dismissal in 1841. He then began to edit various Chartist weeklies. In 1842 he toured potteries to urge support for a general strike. He was convicted of sedition in 1843 and spent two years in a Stafford jail, where he wrote The Purgatory of Suicides, a verse epic in which a Dantean vision of the famous suicides of the ancient and modern world is combined with the anticipation of a coming age of liberty and happiness. After his release Cooper worked as a lecturer, and he turned to Christian topics after the recovery of his faith in 1856. He also published three novels (two under the name Adam Hornbook) and wrote an autobiography, The Life of Thomas Cooper (1872). The Paradise of Martyrs, a Christian sequel to The Purgatory of Suicides, was published in 1873. His collected Poetical Works appeared in 1877.
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4c11c0ca4ed7623c8f780191ef139155 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Cooper-English-bishop-and-author | Thomas Cooper | Thomas Cooper
Thomas Cooper, Cooper also spelled Couper, (born c. 1517, Oxford—died April 29, 1594, Winchester, Hampshire, Eng.), English bishop and author of a famous dictionary.
Educated at the University of Oxford, Cooper became master of Magdalen College school and afterward practiced as a physician in Oxford. In 1565 appeared the first edition of his most notable work, Thesaurus Linguae Romanae et Britannicae. Three other editions followed in 1573, 1578, and 1584.
Queen Elizabeth I was greatly pleased with the Thesaurus, which became known as Cooper’s Dictionary. Cooper, who had been ordained about 1559, was made dean of Christ Church, Oxford, in 1567. Two years later he became dean of Gloucester, in 1571 bishop of Lincoln, and in 1584 bishop of Winchester. Cooper defended the practice and precept of the Church of England against the Roman Catholics on the one hand and against the Martin Marprelate writings and the Puritans on the other.
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a2f03266b40410e8490a2e91efb39740 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Cranmer-archbishop-of-Canterbury/Archbishop-of-Canterbury | Archbishop of Canterbury | Archbishop of Canterbury
The year 1532 proved to be a critical one altogether, for William Warham, the aged archbishop of Canterbury, died in August. At first the usual practice of extending the vacancy for the benefit of the king’s finances was followed, but by the end of the year it was apparent that the see would have to be filled because the divorce question was coming to a head. Thomas Cromwell’s arrival in power as chief adviser in ecclesiastical matters had heralded a more energetic policy, and by January 1533 the act against appeals to Rome was being drafted, and Anne Boleyn was pregnant. Since Stephen Gardiner, the obvious candidate for the archbishopric, was out of favour, the king chose Cranmer; by March 1533 he was consecrated and instituted at Canterbury, with the assistance of confirmatory papal bulls and after a declaration that he took the obligatory oath to the pope without feeling bound by it. He proceeded to do what was expected of him. In May he convened his court at Dunstable, declared the king’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon void from the beginning, and pronounced the marriage to Anne Boleyn valid.
In 1536, convinced by the dubious evidence of Anne’s alleged adulteries, he in turn invalidated that marriage; in 1540 he assisted in the freeing of Henry VIII from his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves; and in 1542 he was forced to be prominent in the proceedings that resulted in Catherine Howard’s execution for treasonable unchastity. There is no question that in these matrimonial politics he did as he was told, though it is improbable that his private opinions on the issues in question in any way contradicted his public doings.
More significant are his activities as archbishop in the reconstructed church. Cranmer had not sought high promotion. His marriage just before his elevation to the archbishopric is fair proof that he expected no such career in the priesthood, in which a necessarily unacknowledged wife would be nothing but an embarrassment. Not until 1548 was he able to recognize her publicly. A story of his carrying her about with him in a chest with air holes is, however, part of the scurrilous legend that grew up around him. Once put in power, however, he could not avoid the consequences; a convinced Reformer with leanings toward a succession of Continental theological changes, he found himself assisting at the shaping of the Church of England under a master who on the whole had no taste for change. In cooperation with Cromwell, he promoted the publication of an English Bible, made compulsory in the parishes by Cromwell’s Injunctions of 1538.
Even before Henry VIII died (1547), Cranmer had drifted far in the direction of Protestantism. In 1545 he had composed a litany for the Reformed church in England, one of his masterpieces, still in use; and by 1538 he had abandoned the traditional Roman Catholic belief in transubstantiation—that Christ is rendered substantially present by the Eucharist (although the properties of bread and wine remain the same)—but retained his belief in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. As early as 1536 he was recognized by the northern religious rebels as the leading innovator. His position was, in consequence, far from comfortable after the Act of Six Articles (1539), which attacked those advocating marriage of the clergy and those denying transubstantiation, and Cromwell’s fall in 1540.
During Henry’s last years, Cranmer’s enemies laid at least three elaborate plots to destroy him by convicting him of heresy, but on each occasion they were foiled by Henry’s curious attachment to him. In Cranmer this king, who as a rule kept himself entirely free from personal feelings for his servants and advisers, found a man whom he both trusted and liked. Unlike the rest of them, the archbishop was neither greedy nor devious; he sought nothing for himself, alone was willing to plead for those who fell into disfavour (a service he performed with equal courage and futility for Sir Thomas More, Anne Boleyn, Thomas Cromwell, and others), and miraculously retained Henry’s goodwill throughout. The king regarded him with that mixture of awe and amusement that the worldly and selfish bestow on those who appear simple in affairs; he liked him, listened to him, protected him, but allowed him no political influence whatsoever. It was not surprising that he turned to Cranmer when death came.
With the accession of Edward VI (Henry’s only child by his third wife, Jane Seymour) in 1547, Cranmer’s time really arrived. From the first, the young king’s guardian, Edward Seymour, duke of Somerset, demonstrated his intention to transform the Church of England into a Protestant church. When he fell in 1549, the expected Catholic reaction did not take place, because John Dudley (later the duke of Northumberland), who had ousted Seymour, decided to introduce an even more extreme brand of Reformed religion.
In the doctrinal labours demanded by these changes, Cranmer took the chief and directing part. In 1547 he was responsible for the publication of a Book of Homilies designed to meet the notorious grievance that the unreformed clergy did not preach enough. The first prayer book, moderately Protestant, appeared in 1549, to be followed in 1552 by the second, which was more outspokenly Protestant. Cranmer was personally responsible for much of the work, but he had the assistance of a number of foreign theologians for whom Edward VI’s England acted as a magnet. The most influential of these was probably Martin Bucer from Strasbourg, whose position on the Eucharist is reflected especially in the Communion service of the second prayer book. It was not so much Bucer, however, who persuaded Cranmer away from the vague Lutheranism, which seems to have been his position in 1547, as either the Pole Jan Laski the Younger or the Englishman Nicholas Ridley, both men possessed of a more determined and unquestioning temper than was the archbishop. The ferment of those years also produced Cranmer’s Forty-two Articles (1553), a set of doctrinal formulas defining the dogmatic position of the Church of England on current religious controversies. All clergy, schoolmasters, and degree candidates in the universities were compelled to subscribe to the articles, which were later reduced to 39 and officially accepted by the Anglican church.
At this time Cranmer also attempted to revise the canon law of the English church, a proposal never enacted but published in 1571 as the Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum (“The Reformation of Ecclesiastical Laws”). Though still deprived of any serious influence in affairs of state, Cranmer dominated and guided the religious revolution of the reign by his learning, authority, and diligence. He settled in turn the doctrine, ritual, and law of his church in a manner that was to remain. Above all, the Church of England owed to him the beauty of its liturgy, which shows him to have been not only a theologian but something of a poet.
Edward VI’s approaching death (July 1553) at long last involved Cranmer fatally in politics. After prolonged resistance, he allowed himself to be forced by the dying king to subscribe the document by which Northumberland hoped to upset custom, statute law, and the will of Henry VIII in order to transfer the succession from the princess Mary (Henry’s daughter by Catherine of Aragon) to his daughter-in-law, the great-niece of Henry, Lady Jane Grey. Although proclaimed queen, she was deposed nine days later, and Mary I acceded to the throne. The failure of the plot brought charges of treason against Cranmer, and he was condemned by Mary’s government in November 1553. It had in any case become obvious before this that his future held no more bright promises. Mary’s accession temporarily destroyed the English Reformation; Cranmer’s embittered enemy Stephen Gardiner was at once released from imprisonment and promoted to the chancellorship, and in November 1554 Cardinal Reginald Pole arrived to occupy Canterbury and direct the extirpation of heresy.
Cranmer’s trial for treason was but a pretext; the queen and her advisers did not intend him to die for the technical offense of having supported Northumberland’s insane conspiracy but meant to destroy him for his long-standing offense in promoting Protestantism. They had to wait until they could get Parliament to repeal the acts of Henry VIII and Edward VI and to reintroduce the laws that enabled the secular arm to burn heretics. With Ridley and Hugh Latimer, a Protestant who had formerly been bishop of Worcester, Cranmer in March 1554 was removed to Oxford, where the Counter-Reformation felt safer than in Cranmer’s own university. Late in that year the heresy laws were revived, and in September 1555, after enfeebling imprisonment, Cranmer was subjected to a long trial in which he stoutly defended himself against the charge of having unjustifiably departed from his own earlier position on the sacraments and the papacy. The foregone conclusion was arrived at after a variety of technical processes; on February 14, 1556, in a ceremony full of carefully designed humiliation, he was degraded from his episcopal and sacerdotal offices and handed over to the state.
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054802ed0c84fd11a852204ad705e3f1 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Crofton-Croker | Thomas Crofton Croker | Thomas Crofton Croker
Thomas Crofton Croker, (born Jan. 15, 1798, Cork, Ire.—died Aug. 8, 1854, London, Eng.), Irish antiquary whose collections of songs and legends formed a storehouse for writers of the Irish literary revival.
The son of an army major, Croker had little school education but did read widely while working in merchant trade. During rambles in southern Ireland from 1812 to 1816, Croker collected legends, folk songs, and keens (dirges for the dead), some of which he sent to the poet Thomas Moore, who acknowledged a debt to him in his Irish Melodies. This collection formed the basis of Researches in the South of Ireland (1824), a pioneering work of vast ethnography, and of his major publication, Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (1825–28), which was translated into German by the brothers Grimm and admired by Sir Walter Scott, who described Croker as “little as a dwarf, keen-eyed as a hawk, and of easy prepossessing manners.” After 1818 Croker lived in England, working as clerk in the Admiralty until 1850. His later works included Popular Songs of Ireland (1839).
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1b191f92f61e9befc87138a2d3ae58a9 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Darcy-Lord-Darcy | Thomas Darcy, Lord Darcy | Thomas Darcy, Lord Darcy
Thomas Darcy, Lord Darcy, also called Lord Darcy of Darcy, or Lord Darcy of Temple Hurst, (born c. 1467—died June 30, 1537, London, Eng.), powerful English nobleman who, disliking the separation of England from papal jurisdiction, was implicated in the rebellion in 1536, in the north, against the ecclesiastical policy of Henry VIII.
Darcy served in several military and ambassadorial posts for Henry VII and in 1504 (or perhaps 1509) was raised to the peerage. Darcy led English troops to Spain in 1511 to help Ferdinand and Isabella against the Moors, but his forces never left Cádiz; and during Henry VIII’s French campaign in 1513 he took part in the siege of Thérouanne. In 1529 he turned against his former friend Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, the lord chancellor, by asserting, contrary to the policy of Wolsey and Henry VIII, that the papacy was the only proper judge of matrimonial cases. In 1535 he corresponded with the ambassador of the Holy Roman emperor Charles V about a possible invasion of England by the continental Catholic powers.
The northern pro-Catholic rebellion, called the Pilgrimage of Grace, began on Oct. 1, 1536, in Lincolnshire. Darcy held the castle of Pontefract, Yorkshire, for the king until October 21, but he surrendered it to the rebel leader Robert Aske sooner than its strength warranted. Although he may have aided in suppressing a renewal of the rising in January 1537, Darcy was still suspected by Henry of treason, probably with justification. At a trial in London he was found guilty and was beheaded.
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27a0fc5c102675207207ce50642a2dd9 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Davidson | Thomas Davidson | Thomas Davidson
Thomas Davidson, (born May 17, 1817, Edinburgh, Scot.—died Oct. 14, 1885, Brighton, Sussex, Eng.), Scottish naturalist and paleontologist who became known as an authority on lamp shells, a phylum of bottom-dwelling marine invertebrates (Brachiopoda) whose fossils are among the oldest found.
Davidson studied at the University of Edinburgh (1835–36) and on the Continent, where he participated in several geologic tours. Soon afterward, he began a study of brachiopods that was to occupy his entire life. An accomplished painter, Davidson prepared 250 excellent plates for his classic Monograph of the British Fossil Brachiopoda, 6 vol. (1851–86). He is also known for his exhaustive memoir Recent Brachiopoda.
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bccd69bd881c0ba0e18c1c7102439e2c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-de-Keyser | Thomas de Keyser | Thomas de Keyser
Thomas de Keyser, (born c. 1596, Amsterdam, Neth.—buried June 7, 1667, Amsterdam), Dutch Baroque painter and architect, best known for his portraiture of leading civic figures in Amsterdam.
He was the son of the distinguished architect and sculptor Hendrick de Keyser. De Keyser chiefly excelled as a portrait painter, though he also executed historical and mythological pictures, such as the Theseus and Ariadne in the Amsterdam Town Hall. His portraiture is lively and expressive and is often distinguished by elegant composition and a rich chiaroscuro. Some of his portraits are life-size, but the artist generally preferred to keep them on a considerably smaller scale, even when full-length, as in Constantijn Huygens and His Secretary (1627). He painted few pictures during the last 27 years of his life. De Keyser’s major architectural work is the tower of the Amsterdam Town Hall.
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2590e471dfb8e6decd3ace7d72683128 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Deloney | Thomas Deloney | Thomas Deloney
Thomas Deloney, (born 1543?, Norwich?, Eng.—died 1600), writer of ballads, pamphlets, and prose stories that form the earliest English popular fiction.
By trade a silk weaver, probably of Norwich, Deloney wrote topical ballads and, through his pamphlets, took part in religious controversy. He was proscribed in London for alleged sedition but, as an itinerant weaver and ballad seller, collected material in the provinces for his prose stories. His “many pleasant songs and pretty poems to new notes” appeared as The Garland of Good Will (1593). His Jacke of Newberie (1597), The Gentle Craft, parts i and ii (1597–c. 1598), and Thomas of Reading (1599?) furnished plots for such dramatists as Thomas Dekker. The Gentle Craft is a collection of stories, each devoted to glorifying one of the crafts: the clothiers, the shoemakers, the weavers.
Though widely read, Deloney was condemned by the university-educated writers as a mere ballad maker and purveyor of plebeian romance, and his literary merits went unrecognized until the 20th century.
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f6229e5419a0d72629492c4e2828797d | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-E-Watson | Thomas E. Watson | Thomas E. Watson
…separate from the Democrats, nominated Thomas E. Watson as their vice presidential candidate.
Thomas E. Watson, a congressman from Georgia, pushed through legislation for an RFD system in 1893. Local shopkeepers, fearing competition from mail-order merchandisers, sought to delay establishment of the service, and not until October 1896 did the first five riders go out on delivery routes…
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