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284d2007d47a867d8e53d1aca7bb23ec | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Edison | Thomas Edison | Thomas Edison
Thomas Edison, in full Thomas Alva Edison, (born February 11, 1847, Milan, Ohio, U.S.—died October 18, 1931, West Orange, New Jersey), American inventor who, singly or jointly, held a world-record 1,093 patents. In addition, he created the world’s first industrial research laboratory.
Thomas Alva Edison was born in Milan, Ohio, on February 11, 1847.
Thomas Edison died on October 18, 1931, in West Orange, New Jersey.
Thomas Edison unveiled the phonograph—which reproduced sounds by means of the vibration of a stylus following a groove on a rotating disc—in December 1877. The public’s amazement surrounding this invention was quickly followed by universal acclaim. Edison was projected into worldwide prominence and was dubbed the Wizard of Menlo Park.
Thomas Edison played a significant part in introducing the modern age of electricity. His inventions included the phonograph, the carbon-button transmitter for the telephone speaker and microphone, the incandescent lamp, the first commercial electric light and power system, an experimental electric railroad, and key elements of motion-picture equipment.
Edison was the quintessential American inventor in the era of Yankee ingenuity. He began his career in 1863, in the adolescence of the telegraph industry, when virtually the only source of electricity was primitive batteries putting out a low-voltage current. Before he died, in 1931, he had played a critical role in introducing the modern age of electricity. From his laboratories and workshops emanated the phonograph, the carbon-button transmitter for the telephone speaker and microphone, the incandescent lamp, a revolutionary generator of unprecedented efficiency, the first commercial electric light and power system, an experimental electric railroad, and key elements of motion-picture apparatus, as well as a host of other inventions.
Edison was the seventh and last child—the fourth surviving—of Samuel Edison, Jr., and Nancy Elliot Edison. At an early age he developed hearing problems, which have been variously attributed but were most likely due to a familial tendency to mastoiditis. Whatever the cause, Edison’s deafness strongly influenced his behaviour and career, providing the motivation for many of his inventions.
In 1854 Samuel Edison became the lighthouse keeper and carpenter on the Fort Gratiot military post near Port Huron, Michigan, where the family lived in a substantial home. Alva, as the inventor was known until his second marriage, entered school there and attended sporadically for five years. He was imaginative and inquisitive, but, because much instruction was by rote and he had difficulty hearing, he was bored and was labeled a misfit. To compensate, he became an avid and omnivorous reader. Edison’s lack of formal schooling was not unusual. At the time of the Civil War the average American had attended school a total of 434 days—little more than two years’ schooling by today’s standards.
In 1859 Edison quit school and began working as a trainboy on the railroad between Detroit and Port Huron. Four years earlier, the Michigan Central had initiated the commercial application of the telegraph by using it to control the movement of its trains, and the Civil War brought a vast expansion of transportation and communication. Edison took advantage of the opportunity to learn telegraphy and in 1863 became an apprentice telegrapher.
Messages received on the initial Morse telegraph were inscribed as a series of dots and dashes on a strip of paper that was decoded and read, so Edison’s partial deafness was no handicap. Receivers were increasingly being equipped with a sounding key, however, enabling telegraphers to “read” messages by the clicks. The transformation of telegraphy to an auditory art left Edison more and more disadvantaged during his six-year career as an itinerant telegrapher in the Midwest, the South, Canada, and New England. Amply supplied with ingenuity and insight, he devoted much of his energy toward improving the inchoate equipment and inventing devices to facilitate some of the tasks that his physical limitations made difficult. By January 1869 he had made enough progress with a duplex telegraph (a device capable of transmitting two messages simultaneously on one wire) and a printer, which converted electrical signals to letters, that he abandoned telegraphy for full-time invention and entrepreneurship.
Edison moved to New York City, where he initially went into partnership with Frank L. Pope, a noted electrical expert, to produce the Edison Universal Stock Printer and other printing telegraphs. Between 1870 and 1875 he worked out of Newark, New Jersey, and was involved in a variety of partnerships and complex transactions in the fiercely competitive and convoluted telegraph industry, which was dominated by the Western Union Telegraph Company. As an independent entrepreneur he was available to the highest bidder and played both sides against the middle. During this period he worked on improving an automatic telegraph system for Western Union’s rivals. The automatic telegraph, which recorded messages by means of a chemical reaction engendered by the electrical transmissions, proved of limited commercial success, but the work advanced Edison’s knowledge of chemistry and laid the basis for his development of the electric pen and mimeograph, both important devices in the early office machine industry, and indirectly led to the discovery of the phonograph. Under the aegis of Western Union he devised the quadruplex, capable of transmitting four messages simultaneously over one wire, but railroad baron and Wall Street financier Jay Gould, Western Union’s bitter rival, snatched the quadruplex from the telegraph company’s grasp in December 1874 by paying Edison more than $100,000 in cash, bonds, and stock, one of the larger payments for any invention up to that time. Years of litigation followed.
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4fb54ebf10c5f52acae07fb3afd036d6 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Egerton-Viscount-Brackley | Thomas Egerton, Viscount Brackley | Thomas Egerton, Viscount Brackley
Thomas Egerton, Viscount Brackley, (born c. 1540—died March 15, 1617, London, England), English lawyer and diplomat who secured the independence of the Court of Chancery from the common-law courts, thereby formulating nascent principles of equitable relief.
Educated at Brasenose College, Oxford, and called to the bar by Lincoln’s Inn in 1572, Egerton was promoted rapidly under Queen Elizabeth I, becoming lord keeper of the great seal in 1596, an office he held for the unprecedented term of nearly 21 years, and serving on many diplomatic missions. After the accession of James I (1603), whose view of the royal prerogative and whose ecclesiastical policy he was to support, Egerton was created Baron Ellesmere and became lord chancellor.
The chancellor’s Court of Chancery was originally set up as a tribunal to decide civil cases not served by the common law—to correct its rigidity and insufficiency—and it came into rivalry with the common-law courts. When it granted relief against judgments of common law in 1616, a conflict with Ellesmere’s antagonist, Sir Edward Coke, chief justice of the King’s Bench, ensued and was resolved only by the king’s decision in favour of equity (earl of Oxford’s case). Thereafter the equitable jurisdiction of the Court of Chancery was unquestioned.
In 1616 he was created Viscount Brackley; he declined an earldom on his deathbed the following year, but his son and heir was immediately created earl of Bridgwater.
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b735876a6d0dc6b3242a8bb8f6afcc27 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Elyot | Sir Thomas Elyot | Sir Thomas Elyot
Sir Thomas Elyot, (born c. 1490—died March 26, 1546, Carleton, Cambridgeshire, Eng.), English author and administrator, memorable for his championship and use of English prose for subjects then customarily treated in Latin. Both as a philosopher and as a lexicographer, he endeavoured to “augment our Englysshe tongue” as a medium for ideas.
He was clerk to the Privy Council (1523–30) and was knighted in 1530. A member of Sir Thomas More’s circle, Elyot was suspected of being out of sympathy with Henry VIII’s plan to divorce Catherine of Aragon and probably owed his lack of advancement to his friendship with More. In 1531 he published The Boke Named the Governour, dedicated to the king, and that autumn went as the king’s envoy to the court of the Holy Roman emperor Charles V.
Elyot’s very popular Governour, a plan for the upbringing of gentlemen’s sons who were to bear authority in the realm, was the first important treatise on education in English and did much to form the later English ideal of the gentleman. His Castel of Helth was a popular regimen of health that, written in the vernacular and by a layman (although he had received some instruction in medicine), incurred censure but was widely read. His Dictionary, the first English dictionary of Classical Latin, was published in 1538. The aim of all Elyot’s works was usefulness: he brought classics and Italian authors to the general public through his translations, he provided practical instruction in his own writings, and he added many new words to the English language.
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f7ef6617b14a0eefcc8487750b90f7f1 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Erskine-1st-Baron-Erskine | Thomas Erskine, 1st Baron Erskine | Thomas Erskine, 1st Baron Erskine
Thomas Erskine, 1st Baron Erskine, (born January 10, 1750, Edinburgh, Scotland—died November 17, 1823, Almondell, Linlithgowshire), British Whig lawyer who made important contributions to the protection of personal liberties. His defense of various politicians and reformers on charges of treason and related offenses acted to check repressive measures taken by the British government in the aftermath of the French Revolution. He also contributed to the law of criminal responsibility. He was raised to the peerage in 1806.
Erskine was the youngest son of Henry David Erskine, 10th earl of Buchan. Though he wanted to enter a learned profession, because of the straitened financial circumstances of his family he sought a career in the Royal Navy instead. He became a midshipman in 1764 but left the service in 1768 and purchased a commission in a regiment of the 1st Royals. His unsigned pamphlet, Observations on the Prevailing Abuses in the British Army (1772), gained a wide audience. Finding opportunities for advancement in the British army no more favourable than in the navy and encouraged by the friendly interest of Lord Mansfield, Erskine decided to enter the law. He was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn in 1775, and in 1778 he received an honorary M.A. degree from Trinity College, Cambridge, after which he was called to the bar.
Within a few months, his future was assured by his defense of Captain Thomas Baillie, lieutenant governor of Greenwich Hospital, who had published charges of corruption in the administration of the hospital. Those accused instituted a proceeding to show cause why Baillie should not be prosecuted for criminal libel. Erskine was retained by Baillie as his junior counsel and in his first appearance at the bar vindicated his client with remarkable eloquence and courage. He very quickly rose to the leading position in the English bar. In the following year, he successfully assisted the defense in the court-martial of Admiral Augustus Keppel. His successful defense of Lord George Gordon on the charge of high treason for instigating the anti-Catholic riots of 1780 substantially destroyed the English legal doctrine of constructive treason—i.e., treason imputed to a person from his conduct or course of actions, though none of his separate actions amounts to treason. Erskine appeared in most of the major cases that arose out of the disruption of commercial relations with France, which had entered the American Revolution against Britain in 1778.
In 1784 Erskine unsuccessfully represented a clergyman defending a charge of criminal libel, but his contention that it is for the jury, not the judge, to determine whether a publication is libelous was vindicated by the passage of the Libel Act of 1792. In 1789 he won an acquittal for a bookseller who was charged with criminal libel for selling a pamphlet criticizing the trial of Warren Hastings, a former governor-general of India who was impeached for alleged misconduct. Erskine’s speech on that occasion is one of the monuments in the literature of English freedom. His unsuccessful defense of Thomas Paine, whom William Pitt, the prime minister, had caused to be indicted for treason for publishing The Rights of Man, cost him his position as attorney general to the prince of Wales.
His defense of various politicians and reformers on charges of treason and related offenses placed a powerful check on the repressive measures taken by the ministry of William Pitt in response to the insecurity and hysteria engendered in England by the French Revolution and its aftermath. In 1800, by establishing the defendant’s insanity, he successfully defended James Hadfield, who had attempted to assassinate George III. Erskine’s argument at the trial is an important contribution to the law of criminal responsibility.
Erskine, who was an intimate of the Whig leaders Charles James Fox and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, sat in the House of Commons from 1783 to 1784 and from 1790 until he became a peer in 1806. His undistinguished parliamentary career was almost wholly devoid of the forensic triumphs that marked his legal practice. In 1806–07 he was lord chancellor during the so-called Ministry of All the Talents. His latter years were marked by private sorrows and misfortunes, which caused him almost completely to withdraw from public affairs. Toward the close of his life, however, he again achieved widespread prominence by his role in defense of Queen Caroline, whom her husband, George IV, had brought to trial before the House of Lords for adultery in order to deprive her of her rights and title.
Erskine excelled principally as a jury lawyer. His courtroom speeches are characterized by vigour, cogency, and lucidity and often by great literary merit.
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12b839c203c3580faaad3c8fcc181236 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Francis-Eagleton | Thomas Francis Eagleton | Thomas Francis Eagleton
…dynamic junior senator from Missouri, Thomas F. Eagleton. In the flurry to get the ticket set, McGovern aides had made only a cursory check of Eagleton’s background, and the senator himself assured them in a hurried telephone conversation that he had “no skeletons in his closet.” Within two weeks, however,…
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dc278faf6fe46a15c74f10539aebd888 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Frederick-Tout | Thomas Frederick Tout | Thomas Frederick Tout
Thomas Frederick Tout, (born Sept. 28, 1855, London, Eng.—died Oct. 23, 1929, London), English historian and teacher who specialized in medieval studies and, with James Tait, was a founder of the Manchester school of historiography, which stressed the importance of records and archives.
Tout taught history at St. David’s College, Lampeter (1881–90), and at Owens College, later the University of Manchester, until 1925. After 1908 he devoted himself to the specialty in which he made his principal contribution, the study of administrative history. His reputation rests chiefly on The Political History of England, 1216–1377 (1905), The Place of the Reign of Edward II in English History (1914), and his comprehensive Chapters in the Administrative History of Medieval England, 6 vol. (1920–33).
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5a1b451e400e45fbe0543fabca56fc39 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Fuller | Thomas Fuller | Thomas Fuller
Thomas Fuller, (born June 19, 1608, Aldwincle, Northamptonshire, Eng.—died Aug. 16, 1661, London), British scholar, preacher, and one of the most witty and prolific authors of the 17th century.
Fuller was educated at Queens’ College, Cambridge (M.A., 1628; B.D., 1635). Achieving great repute in the pulpit, he was appointed preacher at the Chapel Royal, Savoy, London, in 1641. He officiated there until 1643, when the deteriorating political situation, which had led to the first battles of the English Civil Wars a year before, forced him to leave London for Oxford.
For a time during the fighting, he served as chaplain to the Royalist army and, for nearly two years, was in attendance on the household of the infant princess Henrietta at Exeter. He returned to London in 1646 and wrote Andronicus, or the Unfortunate Politician (1646), a satire against Oliver Cromwell. In 1649 he was given the parish of Waltham Abbey, Essex, where he became a friend of the other leading biographer of the age, Izaak Walton.
Fuller was again appointed to a pulpit in London (1652). There he completed The Church-History of Britain (1655), notable for its number of excellent character sketches, and added to it The History of the University of Cambridge and The History of Waltham-Abbey in Essex (1655). In 1658 he was given the parish of Cranford, near London, and continued to preach in the capital. Upon the reestablishment of the monarchy (1660), all Fuller’s ecclesiastical privileges were restored, and he became a doctor of divinity at Cambridge.
By enriching his factual accounts with descriptions of psychological oddities and other details of human interest, Fuller widened the scope of English biographical writing. His History of the Worthies of England, published posthumously in 1662, was the first attempt at a dictionary of national biography. He was also a historian who gathered facts from original sources, producing works that provide much valuable antiquarian information. He acquired a reputation for quaintness because his writings abound with epigrams, anecdotes, puns, and other conceits, but he also paid careful attention to literary form.
For the modern reader, Fuller’s most interesting work is probably The Holy State, the Profane State (1642), an entertaining collection of character sketches important to the historian of English literature.
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75b04d21ac514e16089ca4e41a1e621a | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Girtin | Thomas Girtin | Thomas Girtin
Thomas Girtin, (born Feb. 18, 1775, London, Eng.—died Nov. 9, 1802, London), British artist who at the turn of the 19th century firmly established the aesthetic autonomy of watercolour (formerly used mainly to colour engravings) by employing its transparent washes to evoke a new sense of atmospheric space.
While still boys, Girtin and his friend J.M.W. Turner were employed to wash in skies for architectural drawings and in colouring prints for a printseller. Girtin made copies and sketches from the works of a number of artists, and in 1794 he began to exhibit at the Royal Academy. He went on numerous sketching tours, chiefly in the north of England, and founded a sketching club for young artists. During 1801–02 he visited Paris and produced a series of etchings of that city. His gigantic panorama of London, the Eidometropolis, was exhibited in 1802, shortly before his premature death.
Girtin’s earlier landscapes are in the 18th-century topographical manner, but in his last years he evolved a bold, spacious, and Romantic style—in spirit akin to the contemporary poetry of William Wordsworth—that greatly influenced English landscape painting. Girtin’s increasing power and consummate mastery of the art of watercolour are evident in such late works as The White House, Chelsea (1800).
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b2f02d6f85afa936fbe5a1df2f6ea1ed | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Gold | Thomas Gold | Thomas Gold
Thomas Gold, (born May 22, 1920, Vienna, Austria—died June 22, 2004, Ithaca, New York, U.S.), Austrian-born British astronomer who promulgated the steady-state theory of the universe, holding that, although the universe is expanding, a continuous creation of matter in intergalactic space is gradually forming new galaxies, so that the average number of galaxies in any part of the universe remains approximately the same. Many of Gold’s theories were unconventional, and they often generated much controversy.
Gold studied at Trinity College, Cambridge (B.A., 1942; M.Sc., 1946), and during World War II served in the British Admiralty. He was elected a fellow of Trinity College in 1947 and became university demonstrator in physics in 1949 at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge. During the late 1940s, in collaboration with Hermann Bondi and Fred Hoyle, Gold formulated the steady-state theory, of which Hoyle became the leading proponent. Later evidence, however, contradicted this theory and instead supported the big-bang model.
In 1952 Gold joined the staff of the Royal Greenwich Observatory, London. Five years later he became professor of astronomy at Harvard University. There he worked on the maser (microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation) amplifier for use with radio telescopes. In 1959 he joined the faculty of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, as professor of astronomy. He served as director of the Center for Radiophysics and Space Research from 1959 to 1981. An early supporter of space exploration, Gold contributed significant theories and conjectures on the structure of the Moon, on the effect of solar flares and storms on the Earth’s atmosphere, and on the origin of the solar system and of life. He served as a consultant to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and in the 1960s advised on the organization’s Apollo program. In the 1970s Gold began concentrating on the world’s energy supply. He generated much criticism with his theory that oil and natural gas are continually being formed through geologic processes and are not, as is commonly believed, created by decaying natural matter. The theory, which he outlined in The Deep Hot Biosphere (1999), remains unproven.
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296c8bd808521d3dc07bb6143d71d542 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Hancock | Thomas Hancock | Thomas Hancock
Thomas Hancock, (born May 8, 1786, Marlborough, Wiltshire, Eng.—died March 26, 1865, London), English inventor and manufacturer who founded the British rubber industry. His chief invention, the “masticator,” worked rubber scraps into a shredded mass of rubber that could be formed into blocks or rolled into sheets. This process, perfected in 1821, led to a partnership with the Scottish chemist and inventor of waterproof fabrics, Charles Macintosh. The best known of the waterproofed articles they produced were macintosh coats, popularly known as mackintoshes.
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c85f08d2572edb41c32aaa0cf9cae0f4 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Hardy/Late-novels | Late novels | Late novels
The closing phase of Hardy’s career in fiction was marked by the publication of Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895), which are generally considered his finest novels. Though Tess is the most richly “poetic” of Hardy’s novels, and Jude the most bleakly written, both books offer deeply sympathetic representations of working-class figures: Tess Durbeyfield, the erring milkmaid, and Jude Fawley, the studious stonemason. In powerful, implicitly moralized narratives, Hardy traces these characters’ initially hopeful, momentarily ecstatic, but persistently troubled journeys toward eventual deprivation and death.
Though technically belonging to the 19th century, these novels anticipate the 20th century in regard to the nature and treatment of their subject matter. Tess profoundly questions society’s sexual mores by its compassionate portrayal and even advocacy of a heroine who is seduced, and perhaps raped, by the son of her employer. She has an illegitimate child, suffers rejection by the man she loves and marries, and is finally hanged for murdering her original seducer. In Jude the Obscure the class-ridden educational system of the day is challenged by the defeat of Jude’s earnest aspirations to knowledge, while conventional morality is affronted by the way in which the sympathetically presented Jude and Sue change partners, live together, and have children with little regard for the institution of marriage. Both books encountered some brutally hostile reviews, and Hardy’s sensitivity to such attacks partly precipitated his long-contemplated transition from fiction to poetry.
Hardy seems always to have rated poetry above fiction, and Wessex Poems (1898), his first significant public appearance as a poet, included verse written during his years as a novelist as well as revised versions of poems dating from the 1860s. As a collection it was often perceived as miscellaneous and uneven—an impression reinforced by the author’s own idiosyncratic illustrations—and acceptance of Hardy’s verse was slowed, then and later, by the persistence of his reputation as a novelist. Poems of the Past and the Present (1901) contained nearly twice as many poems as its predecessor, most of them newly written. Some of the poems are explicitly or implicitly grouped by subject or theme. There are, for example, 11 “War Poems” prompted by the South African War (e.g., “Drummer Hodge,” “The Souls of the Slain”) and a sequence of disenchantedly “philosophical” poems (e.g., “The Mother Mourns,” “The Subalterns,” “To an Unborn Pauper Child”). In Time’s Laughingstocks (1909), the poems are again arranged under headings, but on principles that often remain elusive. Indeed, there is no clear line of development in Hardy’s poetry from immaturity to maturity; his style undergoes no significant change over time. His best poems can be found mixed together with inferior verse in any particular volume, and new poems are often juxtaposed to reworkings of poems written or drafted years before. The range of poems within any particular volume is also extremely broad—from lyric to meditation to ballad to satirical vignette to dramatic monologue or dialogue—and Hardy persistently experiments with different, often invented, stanza forms and metres.
In 1903, 1905, and 1908 Hardy successively published the three volumes of The Dynasts, a huge poetic drama that is written mostly in blank verse and subtitled “an epic-drama of the War with Napoleon”—though it was not intended for actual performance. The sequence of major historical events—Trafalgar, Austerlitz, Waterloo, and so on—is diversified by prose episodes involving ordinary soldiers and civilians and by an ongoing cosmic commentary from such personified “Intelligences” as the “Spirit of the Years” and the “Spirit of the Pities.” Hardy, who once described his poems as a “series of seemings” rather than expressions of a single consistent viewpoint, found in the contrasted moral and philosophical positions of the various Intelligences a means of articulating his own intellectual ambiguities. The Dynasts as a whole served to project his central vision of a universe governed by the purposeless movements of a blind, unconscious force that he called the Immanent Will. Though subsequent criticism has tended to find its structures cumbersome and its verse inert, The Dynasts remains an impressive—and highly readable—achievement, and its publication certainly reinforced both Hardy’s “national” image (he was appointed to the Order of Merit in 1910) and his enormous fame worldwide.
The sudden death of Emma Hardy in 1912 brought to an end some 20 years of domestic estrangement. It also stirred Hardy to profundities of regret and remorse and to the composition of “After a Journey,” “The Voice,” and the other “Poems of 1912–13,” which are by general consent regarded as the peak of his poetic achievement. In 1914 Hardy married Florence Emily Dugdale, who was 38 years his junior. While his second wife sometimes found her situation difficult—as when the inclusion of “Poems of 1912–13” in the collection Satires of Circumstance (1914) publicly proclaimed her husband’s continuing devotion to her predecessor—her attention to Hardy’s health, comfort, and privacy made a crucial contribution to his remarkable productivity in old age. Late in his eighth decade he published a fifth volume of verse, Moments of Vision (1917), and wrote in secret an official “life” of himself for posthumous publication under the name of his widow. In his ninth decade Hardy published two more poetry collections, Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922) and Human Shows (1925), and put together the posthumously published Winter Words (1928). Following his death, on January 11, 1928, his cremated remains were interred with national pomp in Westminster Abbey, while his separated heart was buried in the churchyard of his native parish.
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dd9729a47ecf1efb015bafb121f1fb4f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Hart-Benton-American-writer-and-politician | Thomas Hart Benton | Thomas Hart Benton
Thomas Hart Benton, (born March 14, 1782, near Hillsborough, North Carolina, U.S.—died April 10, 1858, Washington, D.C.), American writer and Democratic Party leader who championed agrarian interests and westward expansion during his 30-year tenure as a senator from Missouri.
After military service in the War of 1812, Benton settled in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1815 and became editor of the St. Louis Enquirer (1818–20). Vigorously asserting that the West must “share in the destinies of this Republic,” he appealed to a mixture of agrarian, commercial, and slaveholding interests and was elected a U.S. senator in 1820, an office he held until 1851.
Building an electoral base among small farmers and traders in the mid-1820s, Benton became a crusader for the distribution of public lands to settlers. His views on many issues grew to coincide with those of President Andrew Jackson, and he was soon acknowledged as the chief spokesman for the Democratic Party in the Senate. In the 1830s he led in Congress Jackson’s successful fight to dissolve the Bank of the United States. Benton also eschewed wildcat state banks as economically unsound; rather, he advocated a federal independent treasury and a hard-money policy.
Although he was generally considered proslavery and pro-Southern and was an early supporter of statehood for Missouri without restriction on bondage, in the 1840s he came to oppose the extension of slavery into the territories on the grounds that it inhibited the national growth and was a menace both to the Union and to his vision of the freeholder’s Arcadia. This steadfast antislavery position, applied repeatedly to emotionally charged sectional issues, finally cost him his Senate seat in 1851. He continued his opposition in the House of Representatives, however, from 1853 to 1855. Unlike many other antislavery Democrats, he rejected the newly formed Republican Party, and he went so far as to oppose his own son-in-law, John C. Frémont, as Republican presidential nominee (1856).
Benton’s imposing memoir-history of his years in the Senate, Thirty Years’ View, 2 vol. (1854–56), was eloquent with agrarian and Jacksonian Democratic faith, opposition to slavery extension, and concern for the imperiled Union. He produced a learned Examination of the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision in 1858 (which reaffirmed that the status of slaves, as property, could not be affected by federal legislation), and his 16-volume Abridgement of the Debates of Congress through 1850 is still useful.
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6989e071645866a37bd14f90c5ead873 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Hearns | Thomas Hearns | Thomas Hearns
Thomas Hearns, also called Tommy Hearns, bynames the Hitman and the Motor City Cobra, (born October 18, 1958, Memphis, Tennessee, U.S.), American boxer who became, in 1987, the first person to win world titles in four weight divisions. Renowned as a devastating puncher (rather than as a boxer who relied on textbook technique), Hearns ultimately won world titles in five weight classes (welterweight, light middleweight, middleweight, super middleweight, and light heavyweight).
Hearns grew up in Detroit, where he took up boxing at age 10. As a teenager, he began training at the Kronk Gym, which would become celebrated for turning out dozens of world champion boxers, most notably Hearns. After posting an amateur record of 155 wins and eight losses, he turned professional in 1977.
Hearns possessed an unusual body type for a world-class boxer. At 6 feet 1 inch (1.85 metres), he was very tall for his weight classes and possessed a relatively slight physique. His reach helped to compensate for his thin build, but his most notable asset was his powerful right hand, which helped Hearns knock out each of his first 13 professional opponents in no more than three rounds. He quickly ascended the boxing ranks and had his first major world title bout in 1980, a surprising second-round knockout of José (“Pipino”) Cuevas that made Hearns the World Boxing Association (WBA) welterweight champion.
Hearns’s reputation was made by two of the most famed boxing matches of the 1980s, both of which he lost. The first took place in 1981 when Hearns lost his championship belt in a grueling 14-round fight to Sugar Ray Leonard. The second was much shorter, a three-round knockout at the hands of Marvelous Marvin Hagler in 1985. Though brief, the Hagler-Hearns fight is regarded by boxing historians as one of the most ferocious and compelling bouts in the sport’s history.
Among Hearns’s other notable fights are his second-round knockout of Roberto Durán in 1984, a 1987 victory over Juan Domingo Roldán that gave Hearns the World Boxing Council (WBC) middleweight belt and a then-record fourth weight-class world championship, and a 1989 rematch with Leonard that resulted in a draw despite widespread public belief that Hearns won the bout. Hearns ended his career in 2006 with a record of 61 wins (48 by knockout), five losses, and one draw. He was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 2012.
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376bff9d47d9e71bce2c9fa828ac3a51 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Hooker | Thomas Hooker | Thomas Hooker
Thomas Hooker, (born probably July 7, 1586, Markfield, Leicestershire, England—died July 7, 1647, Hartford, Connecticut [U.S.]), prominent British American colonial clergyman known as “the father of Connecticut.” Seeking independence from other Puritan sects in Massachusetts, Thomas Hooker and his followers established one of the first major colonies in Hartford, Connecticut. A staunch supporter of universal Christian suffrage (voting rights independent of church membership), Hooker was a renowned theologian and orator who greatly shaped the early development of colonial New England.
After preaching briefly in the parish of Esher in Surrey, England, Hooker became lecturer to the Church of St. Mary at Chelmsford, Essex, around 1626, where he delivered fervent evangelical addresses. Such church lectureships, an innovation of Puritanism, came under attack from the Church of England in 1629, and in 1630 Hooker was cited to appear before the Court of High Commission. He fled to Holland, forfeiting his bond, and in 1633 immigrated to Massachusetts Bay Colony. At New Towne (now Cambridge), he became the pastor of a company of Puritans who had arrived from England the previous year; in expectation of his joining them, they had been called Mr. Hooker’s Company. Hooker and his supporters became restive under the influence of John Cotton, and in 1636 Hooker led a group to Connecticut to settle Hartford, where he served as pastor until his death.
Critical of limiting suffrage to male church members with property, Hooker sought a more-universal suffrage and told the Connecticut General Court in 1638 that the people had the God-given right to choose their magistrates. Though his view was an advanced one for his time and led some historians to call him “the father of American democracy,” Hooker had no intention of separating church and state; he declared that the privilege of voting should be exercised according to the will of God. He was active in formulating the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut (1639), which later helped shape aspects of the Constitution of the United States of America. In matters of church governance, Hooker preferred the more-autonomous Congregational model to the hierarchical structure of Presbyterianism and defended his views in A Survey of the Summe of Church Discipline (1648).
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ecede75e957cf5547c650b550c7a7a2d | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-J-Pendergast | Thomas J. Pendergast | Thomas J. Pendergast
Thomas J. Pendergast, (born July 22, 1872, St. Joseph, Mo., U.S.—died Jan. 26, 1945, Kansas City, Mo.), U.S. politician who created a powerful political machine in Missouri. Critics of Pres. Harry S. Truman frequently linked his name with Pendergast, a former associate.
Pendergast went to Kansas City in 1893, where he learned the rudiments of municipal politics from precinct captains and where, by 1916, he had become political boss of Kansas City’s Democrats, a position he held for almost 25 uninterrupted years. His political machine dominated state as well as city politics and had strong influence in Democratic national conventions. Political foes labelled him a ruthless leader of a corrupt political machine that had made Kansas City a hotbed of vice and crime.
Pendergast was toppled not by his political opponents but by the U.S. government, which found him guilty of evading payment of income taxes on $443,550. This sum allegedly included a $315,000 bribe he had received from some fire-insurance companies for favouring their side in a rate-increase dispute. Pendergast was sentenced to federal prison in May 1939 and served a year and a day.
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7c079017d619164a8a809cc2ef7ed6d6 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-J-Sargent | Thomas J. Sargent | Thomas J. Sargent
Thomas J. Sargent, in full Thomas John Sargent, (born July 19, 1943, Pasadena, California, U.S.), American economist who, with Christopher A. Sims, was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize for Economics. He and Sims were honoured for their independent but complementary research on how changes in macroeconomic indicators such as gross domestic product (GDP), inflation, investment, and unemployment causally interact with government economic policies (Sargent) and with economic “shocks,” or unexpected events (such as a sudden rise in the price of oil) with at least short-term economic consequences (Sims).
Sargent received a B.A. degree from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964 and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 1968. After serving in the U.S. Army as a systems analyst in the office of the assistant secretary of defense (1968–69), he taught at various universities in the United States until the early 1980s. He was a visiting scholar and later a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University from 1985. In the 1990s he held endowed chairs in economics at the University of Chicago and Stanford, and in 2002 he was appointed William R. Berkley Professor of Economics and Business at New York University.
In the 1970s Sargent helped to develop rational expectations theory, which holds that certain economic outcomes (e.g., commodity prices) are partly determined by what people rationally expect those outcomes to be. Sargent’s Nobel Prize-winning work focused on isolating the causes and effects of changes in long-term economic policies, such as the adoption of new inflation targets or the imposition of permanent constraints on government budgets. The main challenge faced by analysts of such changes was that economic policy is influenced by the rational expectations of policy makers about future economic performance, while economic performance is influenced by the rational expectations of business leaders and investors about future economic policy. This interplay makes it difficult to determine whether (or to what extent) a given change in performance was caused by a change in policy or by a change in private-sector behaviour undertaken in expectation of a change in policy. Sargent developed a method, based on the analysis of historical data, for describing basic relations between macroeconomic indicators and expectations of economic policy that are not affected when economic policy shifts. These relations can be incorporated into mathematical models that account for historical data and reliably predict the effects of different policies in hypothetical circumstances. Sargent also applied his method in studies of historical episodes of hyperinflation and of the stagflation that characterized the U.S. and other economies in the 1970s.
Sargent was the author of numerous books and textbooks, including Dynamic Macroeconomic Theory (1987), the anthology Rational Expectations and Inflation, 2nd ed. (1993), and, with Lars Peter Hansen, Robustness (2008).
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802db892fb3106618b7898bbf4ad5230 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-James-Wise | Thomas James Wise | Thomas James Wise
Thomas James Wise (1859–1937) had the reputation of being one of the most distinguished private book collectors on either side of the Atlantic, and his Ashley Library in London became a place of pilgrimage for scholars from Europe and the United States. He constantly exposed…
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1a012e3b282e7db371d4a7434686dba3 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-John-Barnardo | Thomas John Barnardo | Thomas John Barnardo
Thomas John Barnardo, (born July 4, 1845, Dublin, Ire.—died Sept. 19, 1905, Surbiton, Surrey, Eng.), pioneer in social work who founded more than 90 homes for destitute children. Under his direction, the children were given care and instruction of high quality despite the then unusual policy of unlimited admittance.
Barnardo’s father, of an exiled Spanish Protestant family, emigrated from Hamburg, Ger., to Ireland. Barnardo himself went to London in 1866 to train as a Protestant medical missionary to China. While studying medicine he became superintendent of a “ragged school” (free school for poor children) in the East End of London, where, in 1867, he founded a juvenile mission. The first of “Dr. Barnardo’s homes” for destitute boys was founded in 1870 and his first home for girls in 1876. The homes were chartered in 1899 as the National Incorporated Association for the Reclamation of Destitute Waif Children.
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960c7265319e77018d5fb130339ed482 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-King-writer-and-photographer | Thomas King | Thomas King
Thomas King, pseudonym Hartley GoodWeather, (born April 24, 1943, Roseville, California, U.S.), novelist, short-story writer, essayist, screenwriter, and photographer who is a Member of the Order of Canada and was nominated for the Governor General’s Awards. He is often described as one of the finest contemporary Aboriginal writers in North America.
The son of a Greek mother and a Cherokee father, King failed his first year of university and took a series of jobs that included craps dealer and bank teller. In 1964, he worked his way across the Pacific on a steamer and found employment in New Zealand and Australia as a photographer and photojournalist. Returning to the United States in 1967, King attended Chico State University (BA 1970, MA 1972), and later worked as an administrator and teacher at Humboldt State University and the University of Utah, where he received a PhD in 1986.
King immigrated to Canada in 1980, later accepting a position in Native Studies at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta. It was during this time that he began writing serious fiction. His first novel, Medicine River (1990), received considerable critical praise, and was made into a CBC film. The novel was runner-up for the 1991 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.
Two of King’s works—A Coyote Columbus Story (1992), a children’s book, and the novel Green Grass, Running Water (1993)—were nominated for a Governor General’s Award, the latter winning the 1994 Canadian Authors Award for fiction. One Good Story, That One (1993) is a collection of ten short stories, including King’s often anthologized “The One about Coyote Going West.” A second children’s book, Coyote Sings to the Moon, appeared in 1998, and the novel Truth and Bright Water was published in 1999.
In 2002, King published a detective novel, DreadfulWater Shows Up, under the pseudonym Hartley GoodWeather. Critics and reviewers praise King’s funny and poignant portrayal of the challenges facing indigenous peoples in Canada in the past and today. His characters are strong in the face of oppression and prejudice, but they are also fallible in endearingly humorous ways. In 2004, he published a follow-up to his award-winning Coyote Sings to the Moon, titled Coyote’s New Suit, in which Raven, an iconic figure in many Aboriginal cultures, questions the quality of Coyote’s snazzy brown suit. The short story collection A Short History of Indians in Canada appeared in 2005 and won the 2006 McNally Robinson Aboriginal Book of the Year Award. And in 2006, he published another book as Hartley GoodWeather, The Red Power Murders: A DreadfulWater Mystery.
King spent 1993–94 as story editor for Four Directions, a CBC Television dramatic series by and about Aboriginal people. He wrote and starred in the very funny Dead Dog Café Comedy Hour, which aired on CBC Radio in 1997–2000.
King has edited Canadian Aboriginal fiction anthologies, such as All My Relations (1990) and First Voices, First Words (2001), and collections of critical essays such as The Native in Literature (1987). In 2003 King was the first Aboriginal in Canada to deliver the Massey Lectures . His presentation, titled The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative, was later published. In 2012, King was awarded a Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal. The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America (2012) won the 2014 B.C. National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction as well as the prestigious RBC Taylor Prize.
On 30 March 2007, it was announced that King would be the New Democratic Party (NDP) candidate for Guelph, Ontario, as part of the by-election called as a result of Liberal MP Brenda Chamberlain’s resignation. King’s candidacy was endorsed by then NDP leader Jack Layton. The by-election was cancelled when, on 14 October 2008, a federal general election was called. King lost, coming in fourth behind winner Frank Valeriote of the Liberals, Conservative candidate Gloria Kovach, and Green candidate Mike Nagy.
In 2004, King was named a Member of the Order of Canada. He became professor emeritus at the University of Guelph, where he had taught at the School of English and Theatre Studies department.
An earlier version of this entry was published by The Canadian Encyclopedia .
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96997bbdbeacb4f214593ead62908bd3 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Linacre | Thomas Linacre | Thomas Linacre
Thomas Linacre, (born c. 1460, Canterbury, Kent, Eng.—died Oct. 20, 1524, London), English physician, classical scholar, founder and first president of the Royal College of Physicians of London.
Educated at the University of Oxford (1480–84), Linacre traveled extensively through Italy (1485–97), studying Greek and Latin classics under several noted scholars, and medicine at the University of Padua (M.D., 1496). Returning to England, he was appointed (1500) tutor to Prince Arthur, son of Henry VII, and served as physician (1509–20) to Henry VIII. He conducted a highly successful practice in London, numbering among his patients the humanist Desiderius Erasmus; Sir Thomas More, the author of Utopia; and Cardinal Wolsey, chief adviser to Henry VIII.
Distressed by the indiscriminate practice of medicine by barbers, clergymen, and anyone else inclined toward the art, Linacre obtained from Henry VIII in 1518 letters patent for the institution of a body of regular physicians empowered to decide who should practice medicine in greater London. This body became the Royal College of Physicians of London. Linacre left medical practice in 1520, when he was ordained a Roman Catholic priest.
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ff4bdc9ea9cfd612b6a713c32fe7f4b1 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Loe | Thomas Loe | Thomas Loe
In Ireland William heard Thomas Loe, a Quaker itinerant, preach to his family at the admiral’s invitation, an experience that apparently intensified his religious feelings. In 1660 William entered the University of Oxford, where he rejected Anglicanism and was expelled in 1662 for his religious Nonconformity. Determined to thwart…
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4d04237f4e8c4f2f7c8a0169a5cb7880 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-May | Thomas May | Thomas May
Thomas May, (born 1595—died Nov. 13, 1650, London), English man of letters known for his historical defense of the English Parliament in its struggle against King Charles I.
After graduating from Cambridge, May began the study of law at Gray’s Inn (1615). He later abandoned law for literature. The Heir (1620), a comedy and his first dramatic work, was followed by another comedy and three tragedies and by translations of Virgil and Martial and (in 1627) of Lucan’s historical poem Pharsalia. This last impressed Charles I, who requested May to compose verse histories of the reigns of Henry II and Edward III. Disappointment at the rewards from Charles may have contributed to May’s sympathy with the Parliamentarians. As joint secretary “for the Parliaments” from 1646, he was in effect their propagandist. His History of the Parliament of England, Which Began Nov. the Third, 1640 (1647) and his Breviary of the History of the Parliament of England (1650), although impartial in tone, were, in fact, skillful defenses of the Parliamentarian position.
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29046b8a998e28bc22a34c769bf3d624 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Mayhew | Thomas Mayhew | Thomas Mayhew
Purchased by Thomas Mayhew in 1641 and settled the following year, it was considered part of New York but was ceded in 1692 to Massachusetts. In 1695 it was incorporated into Dukes county (along with the Elizabeth Islands [west], Chappaquiddick Island [east], and the island called Nomans…
… Iroquois and that of the Thomas Mayhew family encouraged the formation of supporting societies in Britain. Individual Anglicans formed the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK; 1698) and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG; 1701), whose chaplains were also to spread the Gospel among…
…from the Plymouth colony by Thomas Mayhew in 1641 and administered as part of New York. It was settled in 1659, and fishing, boatbuilding, and trading were early activities. It was ceded to Massachusetts in 1692 and named Nantucket, a Native American word probably meaning either “far-away land” or “sandy,…
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d82cce990fab7b337e328ae3085eb5d6 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-McGuane | Thomas McGuane | Thomas McGuane
Thomas McGuane, in full Thomas Francis McGuane III, (born December 11, 1939, Wyandotte, Michigan, U.S.), American author noted for his picaresque novels of violent action set amid rural landscapes.
McGuane attended the University of Michigan, Olivet (Michigan) College, Michigan State University (B.A., 1962), Yale University (M.F.A., 1965), and Stanford University. McGuane’s first three novels—The Sporting Club (1969), The Bushwhacked Piano (1971), and Ninety-two in the Shade (1973)—present the central plot and theme of his early fiction: a man, usually from a secure family, exiles himself from American society (which he despises for its materialism and triviality), removes himself to an isolated locale, and then finds a reason—alienation, attraction to a woman, rights to territory—to oppose another man in a succession of acts of escalating violence and revenge.
The locales of his novels—Key West, Florida; northern Michigan; Montana—and his scenes of fishing and personal combat suggest the influence of Ernest Hemingway. Whereas McGuane’s early novels are noted for their stylistic extravagance, a growing plainness of style developed in his later novels. They include Panama (1978), Nobody’s Angel (1981), Something to Be Desired (1984), Keep the Change (1989), and Nothing but Blue Skies (1992). After a hiatus from writing novels, McGuane returned with The Cadence of Grass (2002), which depicts a Montana clan’s colourfully tangled lives. It was followed by Driving on the Rim (2010), a freewheeling tale of a small-town doctor.
McGuane also wrote short stories, collected in To Skin a Cat (1986), Gallatin Canyon (2006), Crow Fair (2015), and Cloudbursts (2018). In addition, he penned screenplays, several of which were adaptations of his novels. His essay collections—An Outside Chance (1980; rev. ed., 1990), Some Horses (1999), and The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing (1999)—reflect mostly on leisure and the outdoors, especially his passion for fly-fishing and horseback riding. McGuane was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2010.
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f863e7219b6f22f2a4ec43ceeb0240a9 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Minton | Thomas Minton | Thomas Minton
, by Thomas Minton, who popularized the famous so-called Willow pattern. In the 1820s he started production of bone china; this early Minton is regarded as comparable to French Sèvres, by which it was greatly influenced.
…at Stoke-upon-Trent in 1793 by Thomas Minton, a Caughley engraver said to have devised for Spode the Broseley Blue Dragon and Willow patterns that are still in use. Like Coalport, the factory was much occupied in copying the work of Sèvres. From 1848 to 1895 they employed a Frenchman, Joseph-François-Léon…
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a007b4969003c557eb7d2055d0bc2364 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Moore | Thomas Moore | Thomas Moore
Thomas Moore, (born May 28, 1779, Dublin, Ire.—died Feb. 25, 1852, Wiltshire, Eng.), Irish poet, satirist, composer, and political propagandist. He was a close friend of Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley.
The son of a Roman Catholic wine merchant, Moore graduated from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1799 and then studied law in London. His major poetic work, Irish Melodies (1807–34), earned him an income of £500 annually for a quarter of a century. It contained such titles as “The Last Rose of Summer” and “Oft in the Stilly Night.” The Melodies, a group of 130 poems set to the music of Moore and of Sir John Stevenson and performed for London’s aristocracy, aroused sympathy and support for the Irish nationalists, among whom Moore was a popular hero.
Lalla Rookh (1817), a narrative poem set (on Byron’s advice) in an atmosphere of Oriental splendour, gave Moore a reputation among his contemporaries rivaling that of Byron and Sir Walter Scott. It was perhaps the most translated poem of its time, and it earned what was till then the highest price paid by an English publisher for a poem (£3,000). Moore’s many satirical works, such as The Fudge Family in Paris (1818), portray the politics and manners of the Regency period.
In 1824 Moore became a participant in one of the most celebrated episodes of the Romantic period. He was the recipient of Byron’s memoirs, but he and the publisher John Murray burned them, presumably to protect Byron. Moore later brought out the Letters and Journals of Lord Byron (1830), in which he included a life of the poet. Moore’s lifelong espousal of the Catholic cause led him to produce such brilliant works as his parody of agrarian insurgency, The Memoirs of Captain Rock (1824), and his courageous biography of the revolutionary leader of the 1798 rebellion, The Life and Death of Lord Edward Fitzgerald (1831).
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af251d4b5a81b05a33044df7d91f9c36 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Morris | Thomas Morris | Thomas Morris
Thomas Morris , byname Old Tom, (born June 17/26, 1821, St. Andrews, Fife, Scotland—died May 1908, St. Andrews), Scottish golfer who won the Open Championship (British Open) tournament four times.
Morris spent most of his life at St. Andrews as a professional player and greenskeeper (1863–1903). During his lifetime he became an almost legendary figure in golf, winning the Open in 1861, 1862, 1864, and 1867 and competing in that annual event continually from 1861 to 1896, when he was 75 years old. A noted golf architect and one of the first supporters of 18-hole courses, Morris developed more than 25 links, including courses at Muirfield and Prestwick in Scotland. He also founded a successful business that designed and sold golf clubs and balls. His son Thomas Morris, Jr., was also an accomplished golfer who won the Open four times as well.
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8f4f5b82d203573ea4c6d2ab2a37da8f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Morton | Thomas Morton | Thomas Morton
Thomas Morton, (born c. 1590—died c. 1647, Province of Maine [U.S.]), one of the most picturesque of the early British settlers in colonial America, who ridiculed the strict religious tenets of the Pilgrims and the Puritans.
He arrived in Massachusetts in 1624 as one of the owners of the Wollaston Company, which established a settlement at the site of modern Quincy. In 1626, when Wollaston and most of the settlers moved to Virginia, Morton stayed on and took charge of the colony and named it Merry Mount. Inevitably this free-living, prospering, sharp-tongued Anglican conflicted with his pious neighbours. He erected a maypole, encouraged conviviality and merriment, wrote bawdy verse, poked fun at his saintly neighbours, conducted religious services using the Book of Common Prayer, monopolized the beaver trade, and sold firearms to the Indians. The Pilgrims cut down the maypole in 1627, arrested Morton, and exiled him to the Isle of Shoals, whence he escaped to England. He returned within two years and was soon taken into custody again (1630) and his property confiscated. Exiled to England, he collaborated with the enemies of Massachusetts in an attempt to get the charter of the Puritans revoked and wrote an account of the colonies, New English Canaan (1637). On returning to Massachusetts in 1643, he was imprisoned again, fined, and exiled to Maine.
Morton has persisted as the epitome of the anti-Puritan; he appears as a character in a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Maypole of Merrymount,” two novels by John Lothrop Motley, Morton’s Hope (1839) and Merry Mount (1849), and an opera, Merry Mount (1934), by American composer Howard Hanson.
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18b9d4bd56ae8ba5f93197e06694e417 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Mowbray-1st-Duke-of-Norfolk | Thomas Mowbray, 1st duke of Norfolk | Thomas Mowbray, 1st duke of Norfolk
Thomas Mowbray, 1st duke of Norfolk, (born c. 1366—died Sept. 22, 1399, Venice [Italy]), English lord whose quarrel with Henry of Bolingbroke, Duke of Hereford (later King Henry IV, reigned 1399–1413), was a critical episode in the events leading to the overthrow of King Richard II (reigned 1377–99) by Bolingbroke. The quarrel dominates the first act of William Shakespeare’s play Richard II.
The son of John, 4th Lord Mowbray, Thomas was made Earl of Nottingham in 1383. Several years later he joined the group of powerful nobles—known as the lords appellant—who from 1387 to 1389 forced Richard II to submit to their authority. Nevertheless, after Richard regained power, he employed Mowbray on military and diplomatic missions. In 1397 Richard arrested three leading appellants, including Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester. Committed to Mowbray’s charge, Gloucester was mysteriously murdered, possibly on orders from Richard.
Although Mowbray was then created Duke of Norfolk in 1397, he feared that the king would have him arrested for his earlier disloyalty. He confided these fears to Bolingbroke, who immediately denounced him to Richard as a traitor. Mowbray denied the charges and, as the two men were about to decide the dispute by duel, Richard intervened and banished them both (Sept. 16, 1398). Norfolk died in Italy shortly before Bolingbroke forced Richard to abdicate.
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4cf799019d885c9bd1ed0b2ac0a11b8b | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Nabbes | Thomas Nabbes | Thomas Nabbes
Thomas Nabbes, (born 1605, Worcestershire, Eng.—buried April 6, 1641, London), English dramatist and writer of verse, one of a number of lesser playwrights of the period. He is perhaps best known for his masques.
Nabbes attended Exeter College, Oxford, in 1621, but he left the university without taking a degree. He began his writing career in London in about 1630. His first comedy, Covent Garden, was dedicated to Sir John Suckling and was performed in 1632 or 1633. The comedies Totenham Court (perf. 1633) and The Bride (perf. 1638) met with some success, but his tragedy The Unfortunate Mother (1640) did not find a company to act it. He wrote a number of masques and occasional verses, most of which demonstrate some skill. All of Nabbes’s works, with the exception of his continuation of Richard Knolles’s Generall Historie of the Turkes (1638), were reprinted in A.H. Bullen’s Old English Plays (1887).
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a55ec941856101e8229ab8027b9c4054 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-North | Sir Thomas North | Sir Thomas North
Sir Thomas North, (born May 28, 1535, London, Eng.—died 1601?), English translator whose version of Plutarch’s Bioi parallēloi (Parallel Lives) was the source for many of William Shakespeare’s plays.
North may have been a student at Peterhouse, Cambridge; in 1557 he was entered at Lincoln’s Inn, London, where he joined a group of young lawyers interested in translating. In 1574 North accompanied his brother on a diplomatic mission to France. Thomas North had an extensive military career: he fought twice in Ireland as captain (1582 and 1596–97), served in the Low Countries in defense of the Dutch against the Spanish (1585–87), and trained militia against the threatened invasion of England by the Spanish Armada in 1588. He was knighted about 1596–97, was justice of the peace for Cambridge, and was pensioned by Queen Elizabeth in 1601.
In 1557 North translated, under the title The Diall of Princes, a French version of Antonio de Guevara’s Reloj de príncipes o libro aureo del emperador Marco Aurelio (1529; “The Princes’ Clock, or The Golden Book of Emperor Marcus Aurelius”). Although North retained Guevara’s mannered style, he was also capable of quite a different kind of work. His translation of Asian beast fables from the Italian, The Morall Philosophie of Doni (1570), for example, was a rapid and colloquial narrative. His The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes, translated in 1579 from Jacques Amyot’s French version of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, has been described as one of the earliest masterpieces of English prose. Shakespeare borrowed from North’s Lives for his Roman plays—Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, Timon of Athens, and Coriolanus—and, in fact, he put some of North’s prose directly into blank verse, with only minor changes.
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664c28074d708964e63ac4fb1b09f72e | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Osborne-1st-duke-of-Leeds | Thomas Osborne, 1st duke of Leeds | Thomas Osborne, 1st duke of Leeds
Thomas Osborne, 1st duke of Leeds, in full Thomas Osborne, 1st duke of Leeds, marquess of Carmarthen, earl of Danby, Viscount Latimer of Danby, Viscount Osborne of Dunblane, Baron Osborne of Kiveton, also called (1647–73) Sir Thomas Osborne, 2nd Baronet, (born February 20, 1632—died July 26, 1712, Easton Neston, Northamptonshire, England), English statesman who, while chief minister to King Charles II, organized the Tories in Parliament. In addition he played a key role in bringing William and Mary to the English throne in 1689.
The son of a Royalist Yorkshire landowner, Osborne did not become active in politics until Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660. He then held local posts in Yorkshire, and in 1665 he won a seat in Parliament. Advancing in office through the patronage of the influential George Villiers, 2nd duke of Buckingham, Osborne became joint treasurer of the Royal Navy in 1668 and lord treasurer of England in 1673. His success in stabilizing the government’s financial position soon made him Charles’s chief minister and earned him the title earl of Danby (June 1674).
Danby set about using crown patronage and bribery to build in Parliament a court party based on royal (as opposed to parliamentary) supremacy, hostility to France, and strict Anglicanism (especially through enforcement of the Test Act, which required that all those seeking public office take oaths designed to be unacceptable to Catholic and to Nonconformist Protestant conscience and that they receive Holy Communion in the Church of England). As part of his anti-French and pro-Protestant policy, he engineered a marriage (1677) between Princess Mary, Charles’s niece, and William of Orange, stadholder of Holland, the foremost opponent of France on the European continent. At the same time, Charles made him secretly obtain a yearly subsidy from the French king Louis XIV. When this was made public in 1678, against the background of a nation alarmed by the Popish Plot, Danby was immediately impeached by Parliament and committed (1679) to the Tower of London.
Released in 1684, he returned to politics in June 1688, when he and six other conspirators invited William of Orange to invade England and seize power from the Roman Catholic king James II. Danby raised northern England in support of William’s cause, and he helped persuade the Convention Parliament of 1689 to make William and Mary joint sovereigns of England (though he initially favoured making Mary alone the reigning sovereign). By the spring of 1690 he had virtually reestablished himself as chief minister in the new regime. For the next four years Danby managed to maintain an uneasy balance among the feuding factions at William’s court.
He was created duke of Leeds in 1694, but in 1695 he was impeached by Parliament for taking a bribe from the East India Company. Danby’s influence thereafter declined. In 1699 he was deprived of all his offices.
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cb2f38e1cf6d0d70858c1fff01c738be | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Paine/In-Europe-Rights-of-Man | In Europe: Rights of Man | In Europe: Rights of Man
In April 1787 Paine left for Europe to promote his plan to build a single-arch bridge across the wide Schuylkill River near Philadelphia. But in England he was soon diverted from his engineering project. In December 1789 he published anonymously a warning against the attempt of Prime Minister William Pitt to involve England in a war with France over the Dutch Republic, reminding the British people that war had “but one thing certain and that is increase of taxes.” But it was the French Revolution that now filled Paine’s thoughts. He was enraged by Edmund Burke’s attack on the uprising of the French people in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, and, though Paine admired Burke’s stand in favour of the American Revolution, he rushed into print with his celebrated answer, Rights of Man (March 13, 1791). The book immediately created a sensation. At least eight editions were published in 1791, and the work was quickly reprinted in the U.S., where it was widely distributed by the Jeffersonian societies. When Burke replied, Paine came back with Rights of Man, Part II, published on February 17, 1792.
What began as a defense of the French Revolution evolved into an analysis of the basic reasons for discontent in European society and a remedy for the evils of arbitrary government, poverty, illiteracy, unemployment, and war. Paine spoke out effectively in favour of republicanism as against monarchy and went on to outline a plan for popular education, relief of the poor, pensions for aged people, and public works for the unemployed, all to be financed by the levying of a progressive income tax. To the ruling class Paine’s proposals spelled “bloody revolution,” and the government ordered the book banned and the publisher jailed. Paine himself was indicted for treason, and an order went out for his arrest. But he was en route to France, having been elected to a seat in the National Convention, before the order for his arrest could be delivered. Paine was tried in absentia, found guilty of seditious libel, and declared an outlaw, and Rights of Man was ordered permanently suppressed.
The first years that he spent in France formed a curious episode in his life. He was enthusiastically received, but, because he knew little French, translations of his speeches had to be read for him. In France Paine hailed the abolition of the monarchy but deplored the terror against the royalists and fought unsuccessfully to save the life of King Louis XVI, favouring banishment rather than execution, which he argued would alienate American sympathy. He was to pay for his efforts to save the king’s life when the radicals under Maximilien Robespierre took power. Paine was imprisoned from December 28, 1793, to November 4, 1794, when, with the fall of Robespierre, he was released and, though seriously ill, readmitted to the National Convention.
While in prison, the first part of Paine’s Age of Reason was published (1794), and it was followed by Part II after his release (1796). Although Paine made it clear that he believed in a Supreme Being and, as a Deist, opposed only organized religion, the work won him a reputation as an atheist among the orthodox. The publication of his last great pamphlet, Agrarian Justice (1797), with its attack on inequalities in property ownership, added to his many enemies in establishment circles.
Paine remained in France until September 1, 1802, when he sailed for the United States. He quickly discovered that his services to the country had been all but forgotten and that he was widely regarded only as the world’s greatest infidel. Despite his poverty and his physical condition, worsened by occasional drunkenness, Paine continued his attacks on privilege and religious superstitions. He died in New York City in 1809 and was buried in New Rochelle on the farm given to him by the state of New York as a reward for his Revolutionary writings. Ten years later, William Cobbett, the political journalist, exhumed the bones and took them to England, where he hoped to give Paine a funeral worthy of his great contributions to humanity. But the plan backfired, and the bones were lost, never to be recovered.
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d133fe62e5c60eedcb53f37d1897ad39 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Percy-Earl-of-Worcester | Thomas Percy, earl of Worcester | Thomas Percy, earl of Worcester
Thomas Percy, earl of Worcester, (born c. 1344—died July 23, 1403), English noble, brother of Henry Percy, 1st Earl of Northumberland, and uncle of Sir Henry Percy, called “Hotspur,” and a party to their rebellions against Henry IV of England.
Thomas Percy served with distinction in France during the reign of Edward III; he also held an official position on the Scottish borders, and under Richard II he was the admiral of a fleet. He deserted Richard II in 1399 and was employed and trusted by Henry IV, but in 1403 he joined the other Percys in their revolt; he was taken prisoner at the Battle of Shrewsbury (July 21, 1403) and subsequently beheaded, the earldom becoming extinct.
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69e3bed6ab83af937e07777eced81d31 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Pinckney | Thomas Pinckney | Thomas Pinckney
Thomas Pinckney, (born Oct. 23, 1750, Charleston, S.C. [U.S.]—died Nov. 2, 1828, Charleston), American soldier, politician, and diplomat who negotiated Pinckney’s Treaty (Oct. 27, 1795) with Spain.
After military service in the American Revolutionary War, Pinckney, a younger brother of the diplomat Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, turned to law and politics. He served as governor of South Carolina (1787–89) and as president of the state convention that ratified the U.S. Constitution. As U.S. minister to Great Britain (1792–96) and envoy extraordinary to Spain in 1795, he negotiated the Treaty of San Lorenzo, or Pinckney’s Treaty.
Pinckney was the unsuccessful Federalist candidate for vice president in 1796. He was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives (1797–1801) and a major general in the War of 1812. Upon retiring from public life, he practiced law and was a frequent contributor to the Southern Agriculturist.
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3dffb05f0e01bc5c2f9435422300f43e | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Pitt | Thomas Pitt | Thomas Pitt
Thomas Pitt, byname Diamond Pitt, (born July 5, 1653, Blandford St. Mary, Dorset, Eng.—died April 28, 1726, Swallowfield, Berkshire), British merchant whose involvement in the East India trade brought him into conflict with the British East India Company; later, the company made him governor of Madras, India. Pitt was the grandfather of William Pitt, the Elder, the great 18th-century British statesman.
Without receiving permission from the East India Company, Pitt began to trade out of Balasore, India, in 1674. The company retaliated by having him arrested (1683) and fined (1687). Nevertheless, he was elected to Parliament in 1689 and 1690, when he bought the manor of Old Sarum, thereby securing control of this parliamentary seat for his family.
In 1693 Pitt embarked on another trading venture in the East. Failing to put an end to his activities, the East India Company took him into its service in 1694 and appointed him president of Fort St. George, Madras (now Chennai), three years later. Dismissed from his post in 1709, he returned to England and resumed his seat for Old Sarum. In 1717 he sold an extremely valuable diamond to Philippe II, duc d’Orléans, regent of France; now known as the “Regent,” the jewel is in the Louvre Museum, Paris.
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ac878b51cbb9ef2b6928721318e81933 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Platter | Thomas Platter | Thomas Platter
Thomas Platter, (born Feb. 10, 1499, Grächen, Switz.—died Jan. 26, 1582, Basel), Swiss writer and humanist known for his autobiography.
After years of hardship, spent as a goatherd in the Alps and as a scholar’s assistant in Germany, Platter was initiated at Zürich into Huldrych Zwingli’s teachings and the newly discovered world of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew culture. Moving to Basel, Platter first made his living as a ropemaker but contributed to the renown of this great centre of humanistic learning by teaching Hebrew, working as partner to the printer Andrew Cratander, and, after 1541, reforming Basel grammar school. His autobiography, completed in 1576, an important document of the period, tells the story of his lifelong struggle against heavy odds in self-education.
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5a020f53851afee5d427e62ef0684e09 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Rymer | Thomas Rymer | Thomas Rymer
Thomas Rymer, (born 1641, near Northallerton, Yorkshire, Eng.—died Dec. 14, 1713, London), English literary critic who introduced into England the principles of French formalist Neoclassical criticism. As historiographer royal, he also compiled a collection of treaties of considerable value to the medievalist.
Rymer left Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, without taking a degree and began to study law at Gray’s Inn, London. Although called to the bar in 1673, he almost immediately turned his attention to literary criticism. He translated René Rapin’s Réflexions sur la poétique d’Aristote as Reflections on Aristotle’s treatise of Poesie, in 1674. He required that dramatic action be probable and reasonable, that it instruct by moral precept and example (it was Rymer who coined the expression “poetic justice”), and that characters behave either as idealized types or as average representatives of their class. In 1678 he wrote The Tragedies of the Last Age, in which he criticized plays by the Jacobean dramatists Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher for not adhering to the principles of classical tragedy. He himself published in the same year a play in rhyming verse, Edgar; or, The English Monarch. In 1693 he published A Short View of Tragedy, in which his Neoclassicism was at its narrowest (and in which he criticized Shakespeare’s Othello as “a . . . Bloody farce, without salt or savour”). In A Short View, Rymer rejected all modern drama and advocated a return to the Greek tragedy of Aeschylus. Rymer’s influence was considerable during the 18th century, but he was ridiculed in the 19th century; Thomas Babington Macaulay called him “the worst critic that ever lived.”
In 1692 Rymer was appointed historiographer royal, and, when William III’s government decided to publish for the first time copies of all past treaties entered into by England, Rymer was appointed editor of the project. The first volume, which covered the years 1101–1273, was published in 1704. The 15th volume, covering 1543–86, appeared in 1713, the year of Rymer’s death. His successor brought out a further five volumes. Despite its deficiencies, the work, whose short title is Foedera (“Treaties”), is a considerable and valuable achievement.
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b6186628d5f44e4d4db9d8b09826f9a2 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Sheridan | Thomas Sheridan | Thomas Sheridan
Thomas Sheridan, (born 1719, Dublin, Ire.—died Aug. 14, 1788, Margate, Kent, Eng.), Irish-born actor and theatrical manager and father of the dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan.
While an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin, Sheridan wrote a farce, The Brave Irishman, or Captain O’Blunder, and after a successful appearance as Richard III at the Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin, in 1743, determined on an acting career. His first London appearance came in 1744 at Covent Garden, where he played a number of leading roles, including Hamlet. In 1747 he became manager of the Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin and married Frances Chamberlaine, a novelist. As an actor, he was described as having conceptions superior to his powers of execution but occasionally rising to greatness. Through Sheridan’s efforts, Samuel Johnson was given a pension. John Stuart, Lord Bute, was impressed with Sheridan’s scheme for a pronouncing dictionary and granted him a pension of £200 a year. In 1764 Sheridan took his family to France, returning after his wife’s death in 1766. He published A Plan of Education for the Young Nobility and Gentry (1769) and A general dictionary of the English language (1780). He also assisted in the management of Drury Lane Theatre.
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6cbfc0b551db242e7858ddffe8a3775a | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Spencer-Monson | Thomas Spencer Monson | Thomas Spencer Monson
Thomas Spencer Monson, (born August 21, 1927, Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S.—died January 2, 2018, Salt Lake City), American religious leader who was the 16th president (2008–18) of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), also known as the Mormon church.
Monson was the second of six children. He joined the U.S. Naval Reserve at age 17 and served one year of active duty, including a few weeks at the end of World War II. He completed a business degree cum laude at the University of Utah in 1948. In the same year, he married and began his career in publishing; he eventually rose to the post of general manager of Deseret Press, then the largest publishing company west of the Mississippi River.
Monson’s rise in church affairs was equally notable. He was made bishop of a ward (ecclesiastical jurisdiction) in Salt Lake City at age 22, and in 1959 he became president of the Canadian Mission. In 1963 he was elevated to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, the LDS’s second highest executive body. In later years Monson was active with LDS mission work in the South Pacific and especially in eastern Europe, where he helped in the construction of a temple (dedicated in 1985) in Freiberg, Germany, and in gaining permission for the LDS to proselytize behind the Iron Curtain. He also was active in LDS church publishing activities, including the preparation of new versions of basic Mormon texts. He served for many years on the National Executive Board of the Boy Scouts of America and received numerous awards from national and international scouting bodies.
In 1985 Monson was appointed to the church’s highest executive body, the First Presidency (consisting of the president and two counselors), for which he served as second counselor (1985–95) and then as first counselor (1995–2008). From 1995 he also served as president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, a position that placed him in line for the presidency of the denomination. He was appointed president of the LDS following the death of his predecessor, Gordon B. Hinckley, on January 27, 2008. He assumed office on February 3 of that year.
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2959de9bfbeb3dabb84b0539ff5ced1d | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Stanley-1st-earl-of-Derby | Thomas Stanley, 1st earl of Derby | Thomas Stanley, 1st earl of Derby
Thomas Stanley, 1st earl of Derby, also called (1459–85) 2nd Baron Stanley, (born c. 1435—died July 29, 1504, Lathom, Lancashire, England), a prominent figure in the later stage of England’s Wars of the Roses.
Great-grandson of Sir John Stanley (died c. 1414), who created the fortunes of the Stanley family, Thomas Stanley began his career as a squire to King Henry VI in 1454. At the Battle of Blore Heath in August 1459, Stanley, though close at hand with a large force, did not join the royal army, while his brother William fought openly for York. In 1461 Stanley was made chief justice of Cheshire by Edward IV, but 10 years later he sided with his brother-in-law Warwick in the Lancastrian restoration. Nevertheless, after Warwick’s fall, Edward IV made Stanley steward of his household. About 1482 he married Margaret Beaufort (as his second wife), mother of the exiled Henry Tudor (the future Henry VII).
Stanley was one of the executors of the will of Edward IV and was at first loyal to the young king Edward V. However, he acquiesced in Richard III’s accession and retained his office as steward, avoiding entanglement in the rebellion (1483) on behalf of Henry Tudor in which his wife was deeply involved. He was made constable of England and was granted possession of his wife’s estates with a charge to keep her safe in some secret place at home. Richard III could not well afford to quarrel with so powerful a noble, but he became suspicious when, early in 1485, Stanley asked leave to retire to his estates in Lancashire, and in the summer Richard asked Stanley to send his son Lord Strange to court as a hostage. After Henry Tudor had landed, Stanley made excuses for not joining the King. On the morning of Bosworth (August 22), when Richard summoned Stanley to join him, he received an evasive reply and thereupon ordered Lord Strange to be executed, although his order was neglected and Strange escaped. After the Battle of Bosworth Field, Stanley, who had taken no part in the fighting, placed the crown on Henry’s head. Henry VII confirmed him in all his offices and created him earl of Derby. Because his son George had died in 1503, Thomas was succeeded by his grandson Thomas as the 2nd earl of Derby.
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02d38c1ab758cf4fa55b568dcb0c8330 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Struth | Thomas Struth | Thomas Struth
Thomas Struth, (born 1954, Geldern, North Rhine-Westphalia, West Germany), German photographer known best for his series Museum Photographs, monumental colour images of people viewing canonical works of art in museums. His photographs are characterized by their lush colour and extreme attention to detail, which, because of their large size—often measuring about 5 × 5 feet (1.5 × 1.5 metres) or more but sometimes as large as 10 × 12 feet (3 × 3.6 metres)—have a mesmerizing effect. Together with Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, and Thomas Ruff, Struth was associated with the Düsseldorf School of Photography in Düsseldorf, Germany, led by Bernd and Hilla Becher.
Struth initially studied painting with German painter Gerhard Richter at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. Struth’s earliest photographs, black-and-white cityscapes of Düsseldorf, were made to aid his painting. They used a straightforward, central perspective. The airless, static images bore a striking similarity to the “typologies” of industrial structures that the Bechers were creating. In a 1976 exhibition of student work, Struth displayed his work in a grid, as the Bechers had been doing since the 1960s, even though he was still studying with Richter and had not yet seen the Bechers’ work. Following that exhibition, it became clear to Struth that he was not interested in painting, and he joined the first photography class being offered at the Kunstakademie. It was taught by the Bechers, who had founded the photography department in 1976.
The Kunstakademie awarded Struth a scholarship to live and work during 1977–78 in New York City. There he continued working on cityscapes: unusual images of streets devoid of people, traffic, and the unceasing movement typical of a major metropolis. Following his scholarship, Struth traveled widely, creating photographs of streets in such cities as Paris, Rome, Munich, and Tokyo as well as Charleroi, Belgium, and Cologne, Germany, always avoiding well-known locations and tourist attractions. In each of these cities he researched the right locations to photograph and made his images by using a large-format view camera on a tripod, often standing in the middle of a street. With the locations he chose and the architecture and other elements he included in his compositions, he hoped to convey more about the city and its current physical state and character than about his own personal perspective.
Struth’s first experiments in colour occurred about 1980, and by the middle of that decade, Struth had stopped exhibiting his work in grids, instead hanging each print as an individual work.
Struth began his family portraits in the late 1980s. In this series, the families are situated inside their home or in a garden. They look straight at the camera and are often expressionless. Struth photographed them in both colour and black-and-white, using the same large-format camera he had used for his city photographs. The identities of the family members are communicated through the razor-sharp details included in the image. The viewer must piece together the critical elements to shape a narrative. Like the portraits created several decades before by German photographer August Sander (1876–1964), Struth’s photographs reveal identity, history, and (often) psychological state through posture and gesture, dress, and the subjects’ physical environment. Struth’s portraits became an ongoing series that took him around the world to document families from Europe to Peru to the United States. These portraits were not typically commissioned, but in 2002 he was asked by his former teacher, Richter, to photograph him with his family for an article about his work that appeared in The New York Times magazine. And in 2011 Struth was commissioned to make the official portrait of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip for her Diamond Jubilee, the 60th anniversary of her coronation. Both commissioned photos were included in the family portrait series.
In 1989 Struth began a series he called Museum Photographs. It consisted of images of museum and gallery visitors in the act of viewing art. The first group of these photographs, created 1989–90, was not staged. Struth simply waited and observed patiently, sometimes returning to the museum for several days in a row, until he was able to get the shot he wanted. Some photos are contemplative, such as Kunsthistorisches Museum 3, Vienna (1989), which shows a man inspecting Rembrandt’s Portrait of a Man. Other photographs in the series are crowded with masses of people trying to get a glimpse of the work of art, as in Stanze di Raffaello 2 (1990), taken at the Vatican in the fresco rooms painted by Italian Renaissance master Raphael. Struth took a hiatus from the museum series to serve from 1993 to 1996 as the first professor of photography at the recently founded Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design. He returned to the series in the mid-1990s. For some of his later images, Struth orchestrated the composition, placing the people where he wanted them.
As an offshoot of that series, Struth created Audiences (2004), for which he photographed people from the perspective of the work of art on display. For example, he placed his camera below Michelangelo’s sculpture David to capture the facial expressions of the viewers looking up at the artist’s masterpiece. Struth finished the museum series in 2005, after photographing at the Prado Museum in Madrid in front of Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656), the famous portrait of King Philip IV’s daughter, Infanta Margarita, attended by her servants and maids.
Struth’s next project was to explore places that are much less public, documenting the sites and equipment used to conduct the world’s most complex scientific research. He photographed sites such as pharmaceutical plants, space stations, and nuclear facilities at the same magnitude and with the same precision and explosive use of colour as he had with previous subjects. His goal was to examine and expose with extreme clarity the structures of advanced technology that were primarily closed to public view but had an enormous global impact. In 2014 he photographed an unpopulated Disneyland as a way of investigating the theme of fantasy and the industry responsible for manufacturing dreams and encouraging imagination.
Several large-scale solo exhibitions of Struth’s work were held at museums around the world from the mid-1980s, including a major retrospective in 2010—Thomas Struth: Photographs 1978–2010. The exhibition originated at the Kunsthaus Zürich and traveled to Düsseldorf, London, and Porto, Portugal.
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092a2b59536f8c90fc24494bb1f09342 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Tooke | Thomas Tooke | Thomas Tooke
Thomas Tooke, (born Feb. 29, 1774, Kronshtadt, near St. Petersburg, Russia—died Feb. 26, 1858, London, Eng.), British financier and economist who championed free trade.
Tooke was in business throughout most of his adult life, beginning in St. Petersburg at the age of 15 and finally retiring as governor of the Royal Exchange Assurance Corporation in 1852. He often gave evidence before Parliament on economic matters. In 1821 he helped found the Political Economy Club, whose members included David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, and John Stuart Mill.
Tooke figured prominently in the great British monetary debates of the 19th century—bullionists versus antibullionists. He began as a supporter of the Bullion Report of 1810, which recommended a return to the gold standard, convertibility of the note issue, and control of the supply of paper money. His works High and Low Prices (1823) and Considerations on the State of the Currency (1826) traced the causes of low prices to underlying cyclic conditions. He continued work along these lines in his monumental History of Prices, 6 vol. (1838–57), in the last two volumes of which he collaborated with William Newmarch.
Although Tooke’s support of the gold standard remained unwavering, his study of prices gradually led him to the view that bank-created money is a result and not a cause of price changes, thereby adopting one of the basic tenets of the antibullionist position. Thus, unlike the other bullionists and in contrast to his earlier views, Tooke opposed the Bank Charter Act of 1844, which greatly limited the discretion of the Bank of England over the supply of currency. Tooke held that its rigid limits neglected deposits and caused damaging fluctuations in the rate of interest.
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629fc757c2ef859703574d3ed71960cb | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Warner | Sir Thomas Warner | Sir Thomas Warner
…who were sent there by Sir Thomas Warner, the first British governor of Saint Kitts. More Irish immigrants subsequently arrived from Virginia. Plantations were set up to grow tobacco and indigo, followed eventually by cotton and sugar. The early settlers were repeatedly attacked by French forces and Carib Indians. The…
…Saint Kitts by settlers under Sir Thomas Warner, who, arriving from England in 1623, established the first successful English colony in the West Indies at Old Road on the west coast. The French first arrived on the island in 1625 and established a colony of their own in 1627 under…
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db5ccd8acb07c08119bc80e69daf898c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Wentworth-1st-Earl-of-Strafford | Thomas Wentworth, 1st earl of Strafford | Thomas Wentworth, 1st earl of Strafford
Thomas Wentworth, 1st earl of Strafford, also called (1611–28) Sir Thomas Wentworth, or (from 1628) Viscount Wentworth, Baron Wentworth of Wentworth Woodhouse, Baron of Newmarch and Oversley, (born April 13, 1593, London—died May 12, 1641, London), leading adviser of England’s King Charles I. His attempt to consolidate the sovereign power of the king led to his impeachment and execution by Parliament.
Wentworth was the eldest surviving son of Sir William Wentworth, a Yorkshire landowner. Educated at St. John’s College, Cambridge, and at the Inner Temple, he was knighted by James I in 1611. His marriage to Lady Margaret Clifford, daughter of the impoverished earl of Cumberland, established a link with an ancient and noble family still influential in the north.
Wentworth represented Yorkshire in the parliaments of 1614 and 1621 and Pontefract in 1624. His wife died childless (1622), and he married Arabella Holles, daughter of John, earl of Clare, a peer out of favour at court who brought Wentworth into touch with the critics of the King’s expensive and inefficient policy of war against Spain and, from 1627, against France. Along with other critics of the court he was prevented from sitting in the Parliament of 1626, and later in the year he refused to subscribe to the forced loan imposed to pay for the war, and was for some time under arrest. Despite his record of opposition to the King’s policy, Wentworth was approached by the crown—anxious to strengthen its position in the north—with the offer of a barony (1628). He was appointed lord president of the north (virtually governor of England north of the Humber) and in 1629 was given a seat on the Privy Council.
Wentworth’s return to the service of the court, coming so soon after his vehement opposition to it in Parliament, startled even some of his closest friends. His conduct was no doubt partly inspired by personal ambition, though he had logical reasons for his change of front since in the summer of 1628 the King gradually abandoned his war policy.
On the Privy Council Wentworth seems to have advocated the paternalist government that distinguished the early years of the King’s personal rule: closer supervision of justices of the peace and more effective implementation of the Poor Laws, of laws against enclosure, and of measures for dealing with famine, though he was not above privately making profit out of the corn shortage of 1631. As lord president of the north he quelled all defiance of his authority and made many enemies by his insistence on the honour due to him as the King’s representative, but his administration was on the whole just and efficient; he supervised the local justices and curbed the often tyrannous excesses of local magnates. In 1631 he was deeply distressed by the death of his much-loved wife, though he provoked scandalous rumours not long afterward by secretly marrying (October 1632) Elizabeth Rodes, the young daughter of a neighbouring squire.
The King meanwhile had appointed him lord deputy of Ireland. Taking up his office in the summer of 1633, he immediately set himself to consolidate the royal authority, break the power of the dominant clique of “new English” landowners, extend English settlement, improve methods of agriculture, increase the productivity of the land, and stimulate industry and trade. His ultimate goal was to assimilate Irish law and customs to the English system and to make a prosperous Protestant Ireland into a source of revenue to the English crown.
Wentworth continued his effective and firm-handed administration of Ireland until 1639, when he was recalled to England by King Charles. The King needed advice and support in handling a Scottish revolt precipitated by an ill-conceived attempt to enforce episcopacy on the Scots. Wentworth was created earl of Strafford (1640) and was expected to resolve the crisis. But his policy of making war on Scotland proved disastrous for both himself and the King. The English Parliament, called especially to vote money for the war, proved recalcitrant, and Strafford, in command of the English army, failed to prevent the Scots from overrunning the northern counties. The King, unable to pay his own troops or to buy off the Scots, was compelled by joint English and Scottish action to call a new Parliament in November 1640.
Strafford was the chief target of attack from both nations. He was advised to leave the country, but the King relied on his help and assured him that he should not suffer in life or fortune. Detained by illness, he reached Westminster on November 10 with the intention of impeaching the King’s opponents in Parliament for treasonable correspondence with the Scots. The leader of the Commons, John Pym, acted first by impeaching Strafford before he could take his seat in the House of Lords.
His trial began in March 1641. The basic accusation was that of subverting the laws and was supported by a charge that he had offered to bring over the Irish army to subdue the King’s opponents in England. More detailed charges rested on his administration in Ireland and the north. He conducted his defense with great skill, and it looked at one point as though he might be acquitted. Pym therefore introduced a bill of attainder (i.e., a summary condemnation to death by special act of Parliament). The Commons passed it by a large majority; the Lords, intimidated by popular rioting, passed it, too, but by a much smaller majority.
While an angry mob surged around Whitehall, Strafford wrote to the King releasing him from his promise of protection, and Charles, afraid for the safety of the Queen, gave his consent to the bill. Strafford went to the scaffold on May 12, 1641, in the presence of an immense and jubilant crowd. In his last speech he once more professed his faith in “the joint and individual prosperity of the king and his people,” for which, in his view, he had always worked.
He remains an enigmatic figure in English history: ambitious, greedy for power and wealth, ruthless, and sometimes dishonest, but with a vision of benevolent authoritarian government and efficient administration to which he often gave persuasive expression. He made innumerable enemies, but his few close friends were deeply attached to him. In the last weeks of his life his dignity, eloquence, and loyalty to the King made a deep impression even on some of his enemies.
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f02a3cf5473dbd42fcd2fded6a46fe3a | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Whieldon | Thomas Whieldon | Thomas Whieldon
…Staffordshire, joined in 1754 with Thomas Whieldon of Fenton Low, Staffordshire, probably the leading potter of his day. This became a fruitful partnership, enabling Wedgwood to become a master of current pottery techniques. He then began what he called his “experiment book,” an invaluable source on Staffordshire pottery.
The English potter Thomas Whieldon greatly improved agateware in the 1740s by using white clays stained with metallic oxides. Repeated mixing of different layers of brown, white, and green or blue clay yielded a striated marbling throughout the substance; the clay “cake,” difficult to manipulate without blurring, was…
Thomas Whieldon (1719–95) of Fenton Low, Staffordshire, manufactured agateware—that is, ware made by combining differently coloured clays or by combing together different colours of slip. In the former method the clays were usually laid in slabs, one on the other, and beaten out to form…
…Staffordshire potters, John Astbury and Thomas Whieldon. Instead of the more common stamped relief decoration, the ornament was achieved by applying pre-molded relief motifs to the surface of the pottery object and connecting them by curled stems formed of threads of thinly rolled clay. The process was known as sprigging.
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d38dc56738cba2c7b3e257ffdefe5e00 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-William-Lamont | Thomas William Lamont | Thomas William Lamont
Thomas William Lamont, (born Sept. 30, 1870, Claverack, N.Y., U.S.—died Feb. 2, 1948, Boca Grande, Fla.), American banker and financier who began his career by reorganizing corporations and went on to help establish financial stability in countries around the world.
Lamont graduated from Harvard University in 1892 and, after a brief stint on the financial desk of the New York Tribune, began working for Cushman Brothers Co., a New York food importer and exporter. The firm suffered financial problems, and Lamont came to its rescue with a reorganization plan and new capital, thus creating in 1898 the firm of Lamont, Corlis & Co. with his brother-in-law. Lamont’s success earned him a reputation as a financial problem solver.
In 1903, when the Bankers Trust Co. was formed, Lamont was asked to be its secretary and treasurer by Henry P. Davison, who had been impressed with Lamont’s handling of the Cushman reorganization. Within two years he was vice president of the new bank. Before leaving the bank in 1909, Lamont went to Europe for the American Bankers Association to establish an internationally accepted system of drafts known as travelers’ checks. Two years later he became the youngest partner in the bank of J.P. Morgan, a relationship that he maintained until his death, serving for the last five years of his life as chairman of the board. In 1918 Lamont satisfied his lifelong fascination with journalism by purchasing the New York Evening Post, only to sell it four years later at a significant loss.
During World War I Lamont, with his friend Davison, arranged the financing and purchasing of supplies in the United States to be sent to France and England. After the war he negotiated reconstruction financing and the conditions for German reparations payments as a member of the American delegation to the Paris Peace Conference (1919) and as one of the participants in the drafting of the Dawes (1924) and Young (1929) plans. In the mid-1920s Lamont helped stabilize the French franc and the Italian lira by arranging $100 million lines of credit. After a devastating earthquake in Japan in 1923, he helped arrange a loan for that country for $250 million. He traveled annually to Europe, South America, and East Asia to help solve international monetary problems and consult with world and financial leaders.
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73f4aa21754dec413f40b975c755633f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Wilson-British-bishop | Thomas Wilson | Thomas Wilson
Bishop Thomas Wilson’s Principles and Duties of Christianity appeared in English and Manx in 1699, and 22 of his sermons appeared in a Manx translation in 1783. More interesting are Pargys Caillit, the paraphrase translation of Milton’s Paradise Lost, which was published in 1794 and reprinted…
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eef6791de78c6f739d4be66e6657a618 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Wilson-English-politician | Sir Thomas Wilson | Sir Thomas Wilson
…second holder of this office, Sir Thomas Wilson, established the division of the state papers into foreign and domestic. As departments of state proliferated during the 18th and 19th centuries, they developed their own archives. In 1838 all the public legal archives were placed in a Public Record Office under…
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37008e23481477db46c4e043bace23ae | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Winter | Thomas Winter | Thomas Winter
…together with his four coconspirators—Thomas Winter, Thomas Percy, John Wright, and Guy Fawkes—were zealous Roman Catholics angered by James’s refusal to grant more religious toleration to Catholics. They apparently hoped that the confusion that would follow the murder of the king, his ministers, and the members of Parliament would…
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b8c3e284df8bc3e286e4cf08063de631 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Witherings | Thomas Witherings | Thomas Witherings
” Thomas Witherings, a London merchant, was given the task of organizing regular services to run by day and night along the great post roads.
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10a754fe2f56a8fbfa4b38ef115e2201 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Woolston | Thomas Woolston | Thomas Woolston
Thomas Woolston, (born 1670, Northampton, Northamptonshire, Eng.—died Jan. 27, 1733, London), English religious writer and Deist.
Woolston became a fellow at the University of Cambridge in 1691. After studying the work of Origen, a 3rd-century theologian of Alexandria who in his allegorical interpretation of Scripture stressed the spiritual qualities of creation over the material, Woolston also began to interpret Scripture allegorically rather than literally. He soon came into conflict with the government, and, when it was reported that his mind had become defective, he was deprived of his fellowship, and in 1721 went to live in London. He formally entered into the Deist controversy with his book The Moderator Between an Infidel and an Apostate (1725). In addition to questioning prophecies and the Resurrection of Christ, Woolston insisted on an allegorical interpretation of biblical miracles. He applied his principles in particular in A Discourse on Our Saviour’s Miraculous Power of Healing (1730), which reportedly sold 30,000 copies. Woolston thus played a pivotal role in the denial of the miracles in the Gospel. In 1729 Woolston was arrested and tried for publishing the series, sentenced to a year’s imprisonment, and ordered to pay a fine, with imprisonment until the fine was paid. Unable to raise funds to pay the penalty, he died in confinement.
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7d9f43e888b6f746368faa0c3b883048 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thurston-Dart | Thurston Dart | Thurston Dart
Thurston Dart, (born Sept. 3, 1921, London, Eng.—died March 6, 1971, London), English musicologist, harpsichordist, and conductor.
A specialist in early music, Dart studied at the Royal College of Music and University College, Exeter, and later went to Belgium where he worked with Charles van den Borren. He taught at the University of Cambridge from 1947 to 1964, after which he moved to King’s College of the University of London. He also served as editor of the Galpin Society Journal, secretary of the series Musica Britannica, and artistic director of the Philomusica in London.
As a scholar and as a performer, Dart concentrated on the music of J.S. Bach and John Bull and the keyboard and consort music of the 16th to 18th century. He made more than 80 recordings, both as a soloist and in ensembles; they are of particular interest because his research in primary sources produced controversial interpretations of Bach’s orchestral works.
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e63dad0c355776642226e212dc060ce9 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tiberius-II-Constantinus | Tiberius II Constantinus | Tiberius II Constantinus
Tiberius II Constantinus, (born, Thrace—died August 14, 582, Constantinople), Byzantine emperor from 578 to 582 who succeeded in defending the empire against the Persians to the east but suffered reverses in conflicts with the Avars and Slavs to the north and west.
Tiberius served in campaigns against the Avars in the Balkans under Justin II. About the year 574, Justin became subject to fits of insanity; the empress Sophia and Tiberius then took over control of the government. Justin adopted Tiberius as his son, named him Caesar on December 7, 574, and crowned him emperor (September 26, 578). Justin died soon after (October 4), leaving Tiberius sole ruler.
Meanwhile, in 578, Byzantium and Persia had entered into peace negotiations to settle the Armenian question. The Persian king Khosrow I seemed about to make a settlement on Byzantium’s terms when he died in the early spring of 579. His successor, Hormizd IV, however, rejected Tiberius’s proposals, and hostilities resumed, continuing throughout Tiberius’s reign. On the northern frontier, Tiberius attempted to pacify the Avars by an annual tribute, but, after a two-year siege by the Avars, he was forced (582) to surrender Sirmium (now Sremska Mitrovica, Serbia). Meanwhile, the Slavs poured into Thrace, Thessaly, Illyricum, and other regions of Greece.
The mortally ill Tiberius in 582 recognized Maurice, his commander in the Persian War, as his successor and crowned him emperor on August 13, one day before his own death.
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7322d8e3ab4f581cdb89215f58f88c4e | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tiglath-pileser-I | Tiglath-pileser I | Tiglath-pileser I
Tiglath-pileser I, (flourished 11th century bc), one of the greatest of the early kings of Assyria (reigned c. 1115–c. 1077 bc).
Tiglath-pileser ascended the throne at the time when a people known as the Mushki, or Mushku (Meshech of the Old Testament), probably Phrygians, were thrusting into Asia Minor (now Turkey). Their invasion constituted a serious threat to Middle Eastern civilization because Asia Minor was the principal source of iron, which was then coming into general use. Tiglath-pileser defeated 20,000 Mushki in the Assyrian province of Kummukh (Commagene). He also defeated the Nairi, who lived west of Lake Van, extending Assyrian control farther into Asia Minor than any of his predecessors had done. He subdued various seminomadic Aramaean tribes living along the routes to the Mediterranean and reached the Syrian coast, where the Phoenician trading cities paid him tribute. Egypt, closely linked by trade with the Syrian coast, made overtures of friendship. After 1100 Tiglath-pileser conquered northern Babylonia.
Tiglath-pileser I carried out extensive building work in Ashur, Nineveh, and other cities, and texts from his library are still extant. His territorial conquests, however, did not outlast his reign, and after his death Assyria entered a period of decline.
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d1a198ee809412428b069c5c144e8fed | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tillie-Olsen | Tillie Olsen | Tillie Olsen
Tillie Olsen, in full Tillie Lerner Goldfarb Olsen, née Tillie Lerner, (born January 14, 1912, Omaha, Nebraska, U.S.—died January 1, 2007, Oakland, California), American writer and social activist known for her powerful fiction about the inner lives of the working poor, women, and minorities. Her interest in long-neglected women authors inspired the development of academic programs in women’s studies, especially at the university level in the United States.
During her lifetime Olsen gained considerable fame, particularly among scholars. The American Academy of Arts and Letters cited Olsen in 1975 for creating a freshly poetic form of fiction. She held nine honorary doctorates, and she won grants from the Ford (1959–61) and Guggenheim (1975) foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts (1967), and the National Endowment for the Humanities (1983), as well as countless residencies at artists’ colonies. Yet she never finished high school, and her modest output and complicated relationship with her own past have generated a mixed legacy.
Tillie Lerner was the second child of Ida Goldberg and Sam Lerner, who had been members of the Bund, a largely Jewish and socialist self-defense league founded in 1897 that sought to end injustice and the brutal pogroms of tsarist Russia. Both lived in what is today Minsk voblasts (province), Belarus, and each played a part in the failed Russian Revolution of 1905. Samuel Lerner was arrested and faced death or exile in Siberia before he escaped to England, where he quickly picked up the language before immigrating to New York City in 1906. Hashka Goldberg followed him in 1907 and was given the name Ida by immigration officials. By 1908 they had moved to Omaha, Nebraska, where Sam Lerner’s maternal relatives lived. In 1913–16 they made an unsuccessful attempt at farming on the Nebraska plains. At the end of 1916 they returned to North Omaha, a neighbourhood filled with eastern European, mostly Jewish, immigrants. Though Ida and Sam never married, they had six children between 1910 and 1921. They remained reformists as members of the Workmen’s Circle, an organization akin to the Bund.
In Omaha, Tillie Lerner entered Kellom Elementary School in 1917. She was a brilliant, though wild, child and moved rapidly through the first eight grades, transferring to Long School in 1921 and graduating at the end of 1924. She entered Omaha’s Central High School in January 1925 and within a year began a humour column that earned her popularity as well as notoriety. Her free spirit led her to sexual experimentation at age 15 and an unintended pregnancy at 16. In April 1928 she withdrew from school, citing “illness,” before having an abortion. She later returned, but on April 30, 1929, she left Central without graduating; it remains unclear whether she withdrew or was expelled.
Though deeply influenced by her parents’ socialist values, Tillie Lerner began to live independently of them. At the beginning of 1930 she joined the Young Communist League. Her parents detested bolshevism, but she came to revere communism, especially as practiced by several men, including Abraham Jevons Goldfarb, who took her to Stockton, California, where his parents lived, the day after her 18th birthday. She spent the rest of 1930 crusading for the Communist Party of the United States in the Midwest. In 1931, on Valentine’s Day, in Reno, Nevada, she married Goldfarb. They lived in Stockton until the autumn, when they returned to the Midwest. While attending a communist training school in Kansas City, Kansas, Tillie Lerner was arrested late in 1931 for fomenting worker protests. During her incarceration she contracted what probably was pleurisy or incipient tuberculosis.
Early in 1932, illness purchased her release. Goldfarb took her first to Omaha, where her picture appeared in a local newspaper, identified by an alias with the initials TL. Goldfarb then took her to Faribault, Minnesota, where his sister offered a commodious and peaceful residence where Tillie Lerner Goldfarb began to recover and to write.
Tillie Lerner’s high-school humour column exhibited her exuberant wit, and her poems—often profound, sometimes maudlin—illustrate considerable sophistication. While in high school, she also began a story about a character called Fuzzy who, like the story’s author, had an abortion. In Faribault in 1932 she began a novel about a family experiencing the deprivations and indignities of poor workers in Great Depression-ravaged America. She was inspired not only by contemporary proletarian novels but by past women authors who had written about the sufferings of women and the poor. Work on her novel, however, was interrupted by Communist Party activities and pregnancy. On December 20, 1932, a daughter was born to Tillie Lerner and Abe Goldfarb; they named her Karla (after Karl Marx) Barucha Goldfarb. In the autumn of 1933 the family moved back to Stockton, where a sister-in-law cared for Karla while Tillie worked on her novel and was her husband’s part-time secretary in the Civil Works Administration, a U.S. government program designed to ease poverty with decent-paying jobs.
After hearing a young longshoreman named Jack Olsen call for a major strike on San Francisco’s waterfront, Tillie and Abe Goldfarb moved there to help support the strikers. Under her maiden name she submitted two angry political poems to the Partisan magazine and the Daily Worker newspaper, which accepted them immediately, and she sent a chapter of her novel to the Partisan Review. That journal published the beginning of her novel as a story called “The Iron Throat.” From May 1934 she wrote skits and songs and typed up fliers and newsletters for the strike, which soon shut down all West Coast shipping. She and a group of activists that included Olsen were arrested on July 22, 1934. She was jailed under another alias, again using the initials TL, so that when an article in The New Republic hailed “The Iron Throat” as a work of “early genius,” few knew that the young woman in San Francisco’s city jail was its author. After nationwide publicity revealed her identity and secured her release, she wrote powerful articles on her arrest and the strike for The New Republic and the Partisan Review. After intense competition between publishing houses for her novel, she signed with Random House, which in 1934–36 paid her handsome advances. But she failed to submit a finished novel.
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d400f3cf052aebd4ed1cc6ce68f61f23 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tilman-Riemenschneider | Tilman Riemenschneider | Tilman Riemenschneider
Tilman Riemenschneider, (born c. 1460, Heiligenstadt or Osterode, Domain of the Teutonic Order [Germany]—died July 7, 1531, Würzburg), master sculptor whose wood portrait carvings and statues made him one of the major artists of the late Gothic period in Germany; he was known as the leader of the Lower Franconia school.
Riemenschneider was the son of the mint master of Würzburg and opened a highly successful workshop there in 1483. As a civic leader, he was councillor (1504–20) and burgomaster (1520–25). During the Peasants’ War (1524–25), he sympathized with the revolutionaries and was imprisoned for a short time, during which he temporarily lost his civic responsibilities and patrons.
His first documented work was the altar for the Münnerstadt parish church (1490–92), which was later dismantled. He had a continuous flow of commissions. His major work, the Altar of the Virgin (c. 1505–10) in Herrgotts Church at Creglingen, is a wood altar, 32 feet (10 metres) high, depicting the life of Mary. Riemenschneider employed numerous assistants on the massive monument, but he executed the dominant life-size figures himself. Other major works are Adam and Eve, stone figures from the Würzburg Lady Chapel; the Altar of the Holy Blood (1501–05), in the church of St. Jacob, Rothenburg; and the Tomb of Henry II and Kunigunde (1499–1513), in Bamberg Cathedral.
Although wood was his major medium, he also created pieces in marble, limestone, and alabaster. The sharply folded, flowing drapery on Riemenschneider’s figures make his work easily identifiable. His later years in Kitzingen were spent restoring altarpieces and carving.
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c6e7e3a4878fcf0c30ad4d4ca64014a3 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tim-Burton | Tim Burton | Tim Burton
Tim Burton, byname of Timothy William Burton, (born August 25, 1958, Burbank, California, U.S.), American director known for his original, quirky style that frequently drew on elements of the fantastic and the macabre.
Burton, who became interested in drawing and filmmaking while quite young, attended the California Institute of the Arts and later worked as an animator at Disney Productions. After making a series of short films, including the horror-movie homage Frankenweenie (1984), Burton directed his first feature film, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, in 1985. A box-office success, the family movie centred on a man-child (played by Paul Reubens) looking for his stolen bicycle. With the dark comedy Beetlejuice (1988), Burton established himself as an unconventional filmmaker. He turned to more mainstream fare with the big-budget Batman (1989) and its sequel Batman Returns (1992). Both films were major hits. Burton was also responsible for the concept and general design of the stop-motion animation film The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), which was directed by Henry Selick.
Edward Scissorhands (1990) marked Burton’s first collaboration with actor Johnny Depp. The two subsequently worked on such movies as Ed Wood (1994), a biopic about a cross-dressing filmmaker who was called the worst director ever; Sleepy Hollow (1999), which was based on Washington Irving’s story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”; and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s children’s book of the same name.
In 2001 Burton’s remake of the science-fiction classic The Planet of the Apes (1968) was released. During its filming, he had begun a romantic relationship with one of its stars, Helena Bonham Carter, and the two became longtime partners. After directing Big Fish (2003), he made Corpse Bride (2005), which was nominated for an Academy Award for best animated feature. The film featured voice work by Depp and Bonham Carter, both of whom subsequently reteamed with Burton on Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), based on Stephen Sondheim’s musical; Alice in Wonderland (2010), a special-effects-enhanced adaptation of the Lewis Carroll story; and Dark Shadows (2012), a comedic interpretation of a cult-favourite soap opera from the 1960s.
A feature-length stop-motion remake of Frankenweenie, directed by Burton, was released in 2012. Big Eyes (2014) told the true story of painter Margaret Keane, whose husband took credit for her work during the early part of her career. Burton next directed the adventure fantasy Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2016), a film adaptation of the first book in a popular young adult series by Ransom Riggs. In 2019 he received mixed reviews for Dumbo, a live-action remake of the 1941 Disney classic.
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701a2fd0d2a544349507795fe905527b | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tim-D-White | Tim D. White | Tim D. White
Tim D. White, (born Aug. 24, 1950, Los Angeles, Calif., U.S.), American paleoanthropologist whose findings of ancient hominin remains in Africa helped clarify the early stages of human evolution.
The passion for hunting ancient remains came to White at a young age. He spent much time in his early years around Lake Arrowhead, California, scouring Native American campsites for artifacts. After studying anthropology and biology at the University of California, Riverside, he earned a Ph.D. in biological anthropology in 1977 from the University of Michigan and went on to become a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
White developed his interest in Africa during his years as a graduate student, when he took part in an expedition to Tanzania headed by anthropologist Richard Leakey. He later worked with Leakey’s mother, Mary Douglas Leakey, studying fossilized hominin footprints. White continued his engagement with Africa, returning to the continent many times over the following decades. Some of his most significant finds were made in the early 1990s in the middle Awash River valley of northern Ethiopia; in Maka, a town to the west of the archaeological site of Aramis, he uncovered the 3.4-million-year-old remains of Australopithecus afarensis, a hominin species of which specimens (including the famous partial skeleton Lucy) had been discovered earlier in Ethiopia and Tanzania. White’s find helped quell the controversy over whether the specimens from the two countries were indeed of one species.
In 1994 White and his research team discovered—again near Aramis—what they initially believed to be the oldest, most apelike hominin fossils yet found. White named the 4.4-million-year-old bones Australopithecus ramidus, which classified the new primate among the australopithecine hominins and gave it the status of a potential root species for the human family. In May 1995, however, after finding more bones and hearing his colleagues’ criticisms, White appeared less sure and changed its name to Ardipithecus ramidus, thus creating a new genus for it. Although “Ardi” proved not to be a direct human ancestor, it presented a significant piece of the puzzle of human evolution. Working again in the middle Awash River valley in the early 21st century, White’s team unearthed the oldest known fossils of Homo sapiens.
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0dbaaee1b1b47b125b79973c5b33e02a | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tim-Darvill | Tim Darvill | Tim Darvill
Wainwright and Darvill were convinced that the great effort required to move the bluestones that make up much of the monument from the Preseli Mountains in Wales to Stonehenge meant that the stones must have been regarded as extraordinarily significant. They learned that the stones…
In 2008 British archaeologists Tim Darvill and Geoffrey Wainwright suggested—on the basis of the Amesbury Archer, an Early Bronze Age skeleton with a knee injury, excavated 3 miles (5 km) from Stonehenge—that Stonehenge was used in prehistory as a place of healing. However, analysis of human remains from around…
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40a77ddb443b8ed1ab24c9650eb433d7 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tim-OReilly | Tim O’Reilly | Tim O’Reilly
…conferences, first organized by publisher Tim O’Reilly in 2004. The term’s popularity waned in the 2010s as the features of Web 2.0 became ubiquitous and lost their novelty.
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16803cfa9701d54f1103fbc21680b3a0 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Timbaland | Timbaland | Timbaland
Timbaland, byname of Timothy Z. Mosley, (born March 10, 1971, Norfolk, Virginia, U.S.), influential American producer and hip-hop and rhythm-and-blues performer who contributed to the chart-scaling success of a host of recording artists in the early 21st century.
Mosley grew up in Virginia with rappers Missy (“Misdemeanor”) Elliot and Magoo. At age 19, he began to learn how to use studio equipment under the direction of producer and musician DeVante Swing, whose mispronunciation of the shoe manufacturer Timberland resulted in a new name for his protégé. Timbaland’s inventive production skills were first evidenced on Aaliyah’s 1996 hit “One in a Million.” Soon afterward Timbaland signed with Blackground Records as both a solo act and part of the rap duo Timbaland and Magoo. In 1997 the two put out their first album, Welcome to Our World; featuring the contributions of Elliot and Aaliyah, along with the hit song “Up Jumps da Boogie,” it achieved platinum sales status.
By the late 1990s Timbaland had developed a signature sound that made him a much sought-after and often-imitated hip-hop and rhythm-and-blues producer. He used original beats—rather than samples—to create complex syncopated rhythms and complemented them with quiet background rapping or obscure sounds, such as a whinnying horse. With an uncanny knack for crafting commercially successful singles and albums, Timbaland produced hits for Jay-Z, Ginuwine, Elliot, Ludacris, and Snoop Dogg. In the early 2000s Timbaland moved beyond the genres of hip-hop and rhythm and blues to produce albums for rock and pop stars, including Nelly Furtado, Justin Timberlake, Beck, Bjork, and Madonna. In addition to his notable work as a producer, Timbaland continued to release albums, both as a solo artist and in conjunction with Magoo. He created new record labels under the umbrella of Interscope—Beat Club and Mosley Music Group—and received three Grammy Awards for his work with Timberlake, on “SexyBack” (2006), “LoveStoned/I Think She Knows” (2007), and “Pusher Love Girl” (2013). He also earned a Grammy for his contributions to Beyoncé’s “Drunk in Love” (2013).
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be7a45acb551b86483cc04469129823d | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Timothy-Findley | Timothy Findley | Timothy Findley
Timothy Findley, in full Timothy Irving Frederick Findley, (born October 30, 1930, Toronto, Ontario, Canada—died June 20, 2002, France), Canadian author known for his intelligent writing and storytelling. His subject matter is often the lives of troubled individuals.
Poor health caused Findley to abandon formal education after the ninth grade. At age 17 he began a 15-year acting career that led to roles in several television dramas and Shakespeare productions; a protégé of British actor Alec Guinness, he appeared on the English and American stage. He also began writing short stories during the 1950s. His first two novels are set in southern California, where he lived for a time. The Last of the Crazy People (1967) is about a despairing, obsessive boy whose attempts to cope with his dysfunctional family lead to murder and madness, while The Butterfly Plague (1969) presents a late-1930s Hollywood family whose members embody the world’s ills.
In the early 1970s Findley wrote radio and television scripts and a play, Can You See Me Yet? (produced 1976), then followed with his two most acclaimed novels. The Wars (1977) features the dilemmas of soldier Robert Ross as he attempts to cope with an officer and 130 doomed horses in the midst of World War I. Famous Last Words (1981) is narrated by Ezra Pound’s character Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and features noted real (as well as fictional) characters trying to manipulate the catastrophes of World War II for their personal ends. Not Wanted on the Voyage (1984) is the story of Noah’s ark, told from the viewpoints of its animal passengers. The Telling of Lies (1986) is a mystery story. Dinner Along the Amazon (1984), Stones (1988), and Any Time at All and Other Stories (1993) are collections of Findley’s short stories. He also wrote Inside Memory: Pages from a Writer’s Notebook (1990) and the novels Headhunter (1993) and The Piano Man’s Daughter (1995). His autobiography, From Stone Orchard, was published in 1998.
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0b441a182418d0b66fa7b4bcfc69b113 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Timothy-Parsons | Timothy Parsons | Timothy Parsons
Timothy Parsons, in full Timothy Richard Parsons, (born Nov. 1, 1932, Colombo, Ceylon [now Sri Lanka]), Canadian marine biologist who advocated a holistic approach to studying ocean environments.
Parsons attended McGill University, Montreal, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in agriculture (1953), a master’s degree in agricultural chemistry (1955), and a doctorate in biochemistry (1958). He took a position as a research scientist at the Fisheries Research Board of Canada in 1958 but left in 1962 for a post in the Office of Oceanography at UNESCO in Paris; he returned to the Fisheries Research Board in 1964. In 1971 Parsons joined the faculty at the University of British Columbia, where he remained until he retired to the post of professor emeritus in 1992. He served as president of the American Society of Limnology and Oceanography (1969–70) and of the International Association of Biological Oceanography (1971–76). Parsons also became honorary scientist emeritus at the Institute of Ocean Sciences in Sidney, B.C., in 1992.
In contrast to the traditional population-dynamics approach to fishery management, Parsons’s work concentrated on the entire marine ecosystem and led to methods for nurturing the environment to help increase fish populations that had become depleted owing to overfishing and pollution. His advances helped create an alternative, holistic approach to marine conservation and management and influenced a new school of oceanographers and fishery managers. Parsons also conducted important research on the effects of pollution on the marine environment through the innovative use of mesocosms—large floating tubes of water that simulated natural ecosystems—and computer modeling.
Parsons coauthored several widely used textbooks, including Biological Oceanographic Processes (1973), A Manual of Biological and Chemical Methods for Seawater Analysis (1984), and Biological Oceanography: An Introduction (1993). He published a memoir, The Sea’s Enthrall, in 2004.
Parsons won numerous awards and honours, including a fellowship from the Royal Society of Canada (1979), the Oceanographic Society of Japan Prize (1988), and the Killam Research Prize (1990). Parsons became the first Canadian to win the Japan Prize, in 2001. The award, given by the Science and Technology Foundation of Japan, recognized Parsons’s pioneering exploration of the complex relationships between fish and the physical, chemical, and biological aspects of their environment and the application of that new understanding to reversing the decline in fishery resources. The Timothy R. Parsons Medal was established in 2005 by the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans, with Parsons and fellow marine biologist Daniel M. Ware as the first recipients. He was made Officer of the Order of Canada in 2006.
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a8237af6895d2c11be809696bfbb4339 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tiridates-III-king-of-Parthia | Tiridates III | Tiridates III
Tiridates III, (flourished 1st century ad), grandson of the Parthian king Phraates IV and an unsuccessful contender for the Parthian throne. He was captured by the Romans, taken to Rome as a hostage, and educated there. In ad 35 the Roman emperor Tiberius sent him and an army under Lucius Vitellius, governor of Syria, against the Parthian ruler Artabanus III, hoping to place Tiridates on the Parthian throne. The Romans entered Seleucia, and Tiridates was crowned king. In 36, however, Artabanus III returned to Mesopotamia, and Tiridates fled to Syria.
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ebe642df1258e8bed10cdccb08fd8cad | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Titus-Annius-Milo | Titus Annius Milo | Titus Annius Milo
Titus Annius Milo, (died 48 bc, near Thurii, Bruttium [Italy]), Roman politician, a supporter of the Optimates and bitter rival of Publius Clodius Pulcher and Julius Caesar.
Milo supported Pompey and thus became pitted against Clodius, a reckless and disruptive politician who had allied himself with Julius Caesar. Milo organized gangs of mercenaries and gladiators and led them in clashes against the partisans of Clodius in Rome from 57 to 52 bc. As tribune of the plebs in 57, Milo actively promoted the recall of Cicero, whom Clodius had managed to have exiled. Milo tried unsuccessfully to prosecute Clodius and prevent his election to the aedileship, and Clodius, in turn, failed in an attempt to press charges against Milo. After serving as praetor in 55, Milo in 53 was a candidate for the consulship, while Clodius was seeking the praetorship. A confrontation between the two leaders at Bovillae ended with the murder of Clodius (January 52).
Milo’s guilt in the murder was clear. Pompey was made sole consul for 52 and passed a strict law against public violence (vis), under which charges were brought against Milo. He was impeached and prosecuted, his enemies using a variety of means to intimidate the judges and his supporters. Cicero broke down and was unable to deliver an effective defense at the trial; his extant oration Pro Milone is an expanded form of the unspoken defense. Milo retired into exile at Massilia (now Marseille, France). He joked that if Cicero had delivered the speech in his defense, he would never have been able to enjoy the fine mullets of Massilia. Milo was the only man barred from Julius Caesar’s general amnesty. Joining Marcus Caelius Rufus in 48 in an uprising against Caesar, Milo was killed near Thurii.
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13312caa3a2d98c241fe9e722d48c6fb | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tobias-Dantzig | Tobias Dantzig | Tobias Dantzig
Tobias Dantzig, (born Feb. 19, 1884, Latvia, Russian Empire—died Aug. 9, 1956, Los Angeles, Calif., U.S.), Latvian-born American mathematician, best known for his science and mathematics books written for the general public.
As a young man, Dantzig was caught distributing anti-tsarist political tracts and fled to Paris, where he studied mathematics under Henri Poincaré and met and married Anja Ourisson. In 1910 they moved to the United States, where at first he worked as a lumberjack in Oregon because of his lack of familiarity with the English language. During this period, their first son was born; George Dantzig would go on to become the father of linear programming. Tobias later attended Indiana University, from which he received a doctorate (1917) in mathematics. Dantzig subsequently taught at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., Columbia University in New York City, and the University of Maryland.
Dantzig’s major works include Number: The Language of Science (1930), Aspects of Science (1937), Henri Poincaré, Critic of Crisis: Reflections on His Universe of Discourse (1954), and The Bequest of the Greeks (1955). Two of Dantzig’s essays, “Fingerprints” and “The Empty Column,” are included in Encyclopædia Britannica’s Gateway to the Great Books (1963).
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a5c16c4e3771f308ce42dd08ddfdb342 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tobias-Matthay | Tobias Matthay | Tobias Matthay
Tobias Matthay, (born Feb. 19, 1858, London, Eng.—died Dec. 15, 1945, High Marley, Surrey), English pianist, teacher, and composer noted for his detailed examination of the problems of piano technique, the interpretation of music, and the psychology of teaching.
Matthay studied at the Royal Academy of Music and then taught there from 1876 to 1925, when he left to devote his full attention to the piano school that he had founded in 1900. His teaching method stressed development of proper piano touch and was based on a detailed analysis of arm movements. His books include The Act of Touch in All Its Diversity (1903), The First Principles of Pianoforte Playing (1905), Relaxation Studies (1908), Musical Interpretation (1913), and On Method in Teaching (1921). Together with his own teaching, his books brought him international fame and many pupils of distinction, including Myra Hess.
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0f4e731eb6b9d5f132220fde763013d9 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Toghto | Toghto | Toghto
Toghto, (flourished 1340–55, China), High government official during the later years of China’s Yuan dynasty (1206–1368). He followed his uncle as minister of the right (1340–44) and favoured a centralized approach to government. Under him, positions that had been closed to the Chinese were reopened, many literati returned to the capital, and the Chinese examination system was restored. He was called back to office for another term (1349–55), during which time he oversaw projects to reroute the Huang He (Yellow River) and to develop an apparatus for quelling the many popular uprisings of the 1350s.
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a339acca7d067e62acf22412688c3d7f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Togon-temur | Togon-temür | Togon-temür
Togon-temür, posthumous name (shi) (Yuan) Shundi, Wade-Giles romanization Shun-ti, (born 1320, China—died 1370, China), last emperor (reigned 1333–68) of the Yuan (Mongol) dynasty (1206–1368) in China, under whom the population was provoked into rebellion.
Togon-temür became emperor at the age of 13 but proved to be a weak ruler who preferred to spend his time exploring the religious cult of Lamaism and dallying with his harem rather than governing the country. In the early years of his reign, power was held by the anti-Chinese minister Bayan, who suspended the civil-service examinations, prohibited Chinese from wearing certain colours or using certain ideographs, and even proposed mass execution of Chinese on the basis of their names. Bayan’s discriminatory policies, together with the deteriorating economic situation of the country, caused widespread rebellion. In 1339 the minister was banished and many of his policies reversed.
But the emperor still showed little interest in governing, and the situation continued to deteriorate. Togon-temür’s son, the heir apparent, became alarmed at the increasing power his father was putting into the hands of Buddhist priests and eunuchs and plotted unsuccessfully to depose him. In 1368, when the foremost rebel leader, Zhu Yuanzhang (1328–98), advanced on the capital at Dadu (now Beijing), Togon-temür disregarded appeals urging him to stay and defend his inheritance. Instead he fled into the steppes of Inner Mongolia and died there two years later, ending the dynasty. He was given the posthumous name of Huizong (“Gracious Ancestor”) by the Mongols but is usually known as Shundi (“Favourable Emperor”), a title given him by the Ming dynasty (1368–1644).
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68f11e76b47519434f292c6a8ec6f820 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tokugawa-Hidetada | Tokugawa Hidetada | Tokugawa Hidetada
Tokugawa Hidetada, (born May 2, 1579, Hamamatsu, Japan—died March 15, 1632, Edo [now Tokyo]), second Tokugawa shogun, who completed the consolidation of his family’s rule, eliminated Christianity from Japan, and took the first steps toward closing the country to all trade or other intercourse with foreign countries.
In order to assure a smooth succession, the first Tokugawa shogun, Ieyasu, named his third and most even-tempered son, Hidetada, to the shogunate in 1605, two years after the establishment of the Tokugawa regime. Hidetada ruled in name only, however, for Ieyasu continued to control the actual workings of the government until his death in 1616, after which Hidetada finished the restructuring of the central government administration.
Apparently fearful of rebellion by Japanese Christians (Kirishitan), who were aided by Spain, Hidetada immediately repeated his father’s ban on Christianity. When his edict was ignored, he had four missionaries executed (1617), the first Christians to be martyred in Japan. In 1622 he ordered the execution of 120 missionaries and Japanese converts. Moreover, he banned all Christian literature and forced his vassals, several of whom were pursuing pro-Christian policies, to institute similar persecutions in their own realms.
In order to regulate outside influence and prevent the further spread of Christianity, Hidetada decreed that foreign vessels, except those from China, enter Japan only through the ports of Nagasaki and Hirado. He severed relations with the Spanish; the English had already closed their unprofitable trading base in Japan. Hidetada’s efforts to isolate Japan were successfully completed by his son and successor, Tokugawa Iemitsu.
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9c780e47d1a3558fbbd14d7b7a511714 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tokugawa-Tsunayoshi | Tokugawa Tsunayoshi | Tokugawa Tsunayoshi
Tokugawa Tsunayoshi, (born Feb. 23, 1646, Edo, Japan—died Feb. 19, 1709, Edo), fifth Tokugawa shogun of Japan, known as the “Dog Shogun” because of his obsession with dogs.
Proclaimed shogun in 1680, Tsunayoshi presided over one of the most prosperous and peaceful periods in Japanese history. His major accomplishments were in cultural affairs, in which he worked to promote the Neo-Confucianism of the 12th-century Chinese scholar Chu Hsi, whose philosophy emphasized loyalty to the government as man’s first duty. Toward the end of his career, however, Tsunayoshi tended to ignore the duties of government for the pleasures of his palace, and the government became somewhat lax and at times eccentric, as evident in his notorious decrees relating to the welfare of dogs.
Born in the Year of the Dog, Tsunayoshi was influenced by a Buddhist monk who told him he had been a dog in his previous existence. As a result, Tsunayoshi decreed the death penalty for anyone who harmed a dog, insisted that dogs be addressed only in honorific terms, and kept an estimated 50,000 of them at government expense, feeding them on a choice diet of rice and dried fish.
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1bc0b07ee1446f384bf414911e9f764a | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tolbert-Lanston | Tolbert Lanston | Tolbert Lanston
…in 1885 another American inventor, Tolbert Lanston, perfected the Monotype (q.v.), a machine in which type is cast in individual letters. Both machines were made possible by the development of machine tools, specifically, the mechanical punch cutter. A third process, the Intertype (q.v.), developed later, also sets type by the…
…also in the United States, Tolbert Lanston invented the Monotype, which casts individual pieces of type for a line and justifies each line by a system of counting in units the width of the spaces taken up by the pieces of type. The matrices are indefinitely reusable, and the pieces…
…the Monotype, by an American, Tolbert Lanston, in 1887) had much to do with the look of the 20th century book. The Arts and Crafts Movement, whose leader in typography as in other aspects was William Morris, had an equally great influence on the quality of modern book printing.
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695d95baae385191307d9307fb8b769d | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tolui | Tolui | Tolui
…Xinjiang and western Mongolia; and Tolui was awarded eastern Mongolia. Ögödei dominated his brothers and undertook further conquests. In the west the Golden Horde under Jochi’s successor, Batu, controlled Russia and terrorized eastern Europe; in the east advances were made into China. With Ögödei’s death in 1241 the branches fell…
The youngest, Tolui, inherited the ancient Mongol homeland of eastern Mongolia. Two years later, in 1229, a great Mongol assembly confirmed the succession of Ögödei as the great khan (khagan).
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908b11810b5586117ebb425432ffb766 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tom-C-Clark | Tom C. Clark | Tom C. Clark
Tom C. Clark, in full Thomas Campbell Clark, (born September 23, 1899, Dallas, Texas, U.S.—died June 13, 1977, New York, New York), U.S. attorney general (1945–49) and associate justice of the United States Supreme Court (1949–67).
Clark studied law after serving in the U.S. Army during World War I and graduated from the University of Texas law school in 1922 to enter private practice in Dallas. He served as civil district attorney for the county and became heavily involved in Democratic Party politics. In 1937 he joined the U.S. Department of Justice as a special assistant and remained with the department for eight years, working primarily on antitrust and war-fraud cases. In 1945 President Harry S. Truman appointed him attorney general, in which capacity he gained a reputation for vigorous antisubversive programs and the broadening of FBI powers. In 1949 he was appointed to the Supreme Court by Truman. On the court he maintained his strong views on the question of subversive activities, evident in Irvine v. California (1954) and Breithaupt v. Abram (1957) as well as in his dissents in the 1960s.
Although often at odds with the liberal majority under Chief Justice Earl Warren, Clark was nonetheless a frequent supporter of civil liberties. In the famous Mapp v. Ohio (1961) decision, Clark wrote the majority opinion that evidence obtained by illegal seizure could not be used in state courts, thereby greatly broadening the constitutional protection available to defendants. In School District of Abington v. Schempp (1963), Clark wrote the majority opinion that prohibited the reading of the Bible in public schools. His three 1964 civil rights opinions, Anderson v. Martin, Heart of Alabama Motel, Inc. v. United States, and Hamm v. Rock Hill, provided the foundation for many subsequent civil rights legal battles. Clark resigned from the court in 1967 upon the appointment of his son, Ramsey Clark, as attorney general.
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0a31b4afdec498741398fc7151d32364 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tom-Cavalier-Smith | Tom Cavalier-Smith | Tom Cavalier-Smith
…and in 1998 British zoologist Thomas Cavalier-Smith presented yet another classification scheme, the six-kingdom system, which contained kingdom Bacteria with two subdivisions, Eubacteria and Archaebacteria. In 2015 Cavalier-Smith and others revised the system to include seven kingdoms, whereby kingdom Bacteria was split into two separate kingdoms—Bacteria (containing the eubacteria) and…
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35ba4a50084150855d1e44d604461967 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tom-Hamilton | Tom Hamilton | Tom Hamilton
…23, 1952, Winchester, Massachusetts), bassist Tom Hamilton (b. December 31, 1951, Colorado Springs, Colorado), and drummer Joey Kramer (b. June 21, 1950, New York City).
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344db5542da902fdaa4674384b0e561a | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tom-Landry | Tom Landry | Tom Landry
Tom Landry, byname of Thomas Wade Landry, (born September 11, 1924, Mission, Texas, U.S.—died February 12, 2000, Dallas, Texas), American professional gridiron football coach, notably with the National Football League (NFL) Dallas Cowboys from 1960 to 1989. He molded the Cowboys into a dominant team from the late 1960s to the early ’80s.
Landry began his professional career as a player with the All-America Football Conference New York Yankees (1949) and moved to the NFL New York Giants (1950–55) as a cornerback. He was a player-coach in 1954–55, and, as an assistant coach in charge of defense through the 1959 season, his 4–3 alignment revolutionized defensive play, making it a glamorous part of the game.
Landry became coach of the newly formed Cowboys team in 1960, and in his first season they won no games, lost 11, and tied 1. Losing seasons continued for the team through 1964. The Cowboys then went on to 20 consecutive winning seasons. They competed in 2 NFL championship games, 10 National Football Conference championship games, and 5 Super Bowls, losing 3 of them (1971, 1976, and 1979) and winning 2 (1972 and 1978). While his teams were celebrated for their innovative play (the Cowboys revived the shotgun formation and pioneered situational substitutions) and computer-aided efficiency, Landry himself was known for his bland demeanour, his conservative dress (he was rarely seen without a sport coat and a fedora) on the sidelines, and, away from football, his religious piety. His overall record was 270 wins, 178 losses, and 6 ties, a .601 winning percentage.
After several consecutive losing seasons, Landry was dismissed as coach of the Cowboys in 1989 when the team was sold to a new owner. In 1990 he was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
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781d966e7ab01ad4c644729a1c471661 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tom-Mix | Tom Mix | Tom Mix
Tom Mix, byname of Thomas Hezikiah Mix, (born Jan. 6, 1880, Mix Run, Pa., U.S.—died Oct. 12, 1940, near Florence, Ariz.), American film actor, a celebrated star of western cowboy films during the silent era.
Mix worked as a cowhand in Texas, Arizona, Wyoming, and Montana and served in the U.S. Army in the Spanish-American War and in the pursuit of Pancho Villa during the Mexican Revolution. He was also a deputy sheriff in Oklahoma and served in the Texas Rangers. In 1906 he joined a Wild West show and, three years later, the Sells-Floto Circus. He began to act in motion pictures in 1910, playing the part of a roughriding hero, defender of right and justice. Over the years his horse “Tony” became almost as famous as Mix himself. Mix appeared in more than 200 one- and two-reelers and feature films, many of which he also produced or directed.
After gaining riches and worldwide fame during the silent era, Mix suffered a decline with the coming of sound, appearing in only a few pictures after 1929. In 1933 he organized Tom Mix’s Circus and Wild West Show, but, by the time of his death in an automobile accident seven years later, his wealth had largely disappeared.
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d70301ee6e2ee99b098c4411c5c8b47b | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tom-Robbins | Tom Robbins | Tom Robbins
Tom Robbins, in full Thomas Eugene Robbins, (born July 22, 1932, Blowing Rock, North Carolina, U.S.), American novelist noted for his eccentric characters, playful optimism, and self-conscious wordplay.
Robbins was educated at Washington and Lee University, Richmond Professional Institute, and the University of Washington. He served in the U.S. Air Force, hitchhiked across the United States, and worked as a journalist and art critic. His first two novels became popular only when they were released in paperback editions. Another Roadside Attraction (1971), anchored by extensive research into early Christianity, is about a native of rural Washington who steals the mummy of Jesus Christ. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976; filmed 1994) is the story of a female hitchhiker with enormous thumbs who visits a woman’s spa in South Dakota.
Robbins’s later novels included Still Life with Woodpecker (1980); Jitterbug Perfume (1984), which centres on a medieval king who lives for 1,000 years before becoming a janitor in Albert Einstein’s laboratory; Skinny Legs and All (1990), a fantastical novel that follows five inanimate objects on a journey to Jerusalem while exploring the Arab-Israeli conflict and religious fundamentalism, among other political themes; Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas (1994); Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates (2000), the story of a hedonistic CIA operative who is cursed by a Peruvian shaman to forever keep his feet off the ground lest he die; and Villa Incognito (2003). Wild Ducks Flying Backward (2005) is a collection of assorted writings that includes essays, travelogues, and poems. The memoir Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life was published in 2014.
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4c8c15a944bc64a267fb0e368b028d3e | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tom-Watson | Tom Watson | Tom Watson
Tom Watson, in full Thomas Sturges Watson, (born September 4, 1949, Kansas City, Missouri, U.S.), American golfer who was one of the sport’s dominant figures in the 1970s and early ’80s.
Watson studied psychology at Stanford University, where he competed on the school’s golf team. After graduating in 1971, he joined the Professional Golfers’ Association of America (PGA). Mentored by Byron Nelson, Watson won his first PGA event, the Western Open, in 1974. The following year he captured the first of five British Open (Open Championship) titles; he also won in 1977, 1980, 1982, and 1983. His other major championships include the Masters (1977, 1981) and the U.S. Open (1982). He was also part of three Ryder Cup-winning teams (1977, 1981, 1983). A six-time PGA Player of the Year (1977–80, 1982, 1984), he was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 1988.
Watson, known for his putting and chipping abilities, won his 39th PGA event in 1998. The following year he joined the Champions Tour, which is for golfers age 50 or older. In 2009 Watson made headlines when—at age 59—he led throughout most of the Open Championship before losing in a four-hole play-off on the final day. He is the author of several books on golf.
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e4167a5cd0c50dfb4b45386a86c06f5f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tomas-Cipriano-de-Mosquera | Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera | Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera
Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera, (born Sept. 20, 1798, Popayán, New Granada [Colombia]—died Oct. 7, 1878, Coconuco), president of New Granada from 1845 to 1849 and of Colombia from 1864 to 1867 who, as a Conservative during his first term and a Liberal during his second, embodied the leftward shift in Colombian politics in his time.
Scion of a powerful family long influential in New Granada, Mosquera began his career in the army, serving under Simón Bolívar at 15 and becoming a brigadier general at 30. He entered politics in 1834 and was elected a deputy to Congress. He was the presidential choice of the ruling Conservative Party in 1845, and during his tenure he instituted many economic reforms. He left office in 1849.
By the end of the 1850s, Colombia was torn by civil war as the Liberals and Conservatives fought for control. Mosquera took the side of the Liberals. With the army under his command, he took Bogotá (July 1861) and declared himself president. He ruled as a dictator until a new Liberal constitution was adopted (1863), which provided for a two-year presidential term and changed the name of the country to the United States of Colombia. Not fully trusting Mosquera, the Liberals limited his first term to one year (1864–65). He was reelected in 1865, however, and soon imposed a dictatorship. His rule was overthrown in 1867, and he was exiled for two years. He returned to Colombia to serve as president of the state of Cauca and as senator, retiring from public life in 1876.
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fdc61cbebc88db74ec64cbfefa8f1155 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tomas-Estrada-Palma | Tomás Estrada Palma | Tomás Estrada Palma
Tomás Estrada Palma, (born July 9, 1835, near Bayamo, Cuba—died Nov. 14, 1908, Oriente province), first president of Cuba, whose administration was noted for its sound fiscal policies and progress in education.
As a general in the revolutionary army, Estrada Palma served during the Ten Years’ War (1868–78) against Spain and became president of the provisional government in 1875. He was captured by the Spanish in 1877. Upon his release he moved to Orange County, New York, to become principal of the Central Valley School for Boys. From that base he led the Cuban junta in New York City and later, on the death of José Martí, became the actual head of the revolution.
After the Spanish–American War (1898) the United States turned the island over to the Cubans (1902), and Estrada Palma became president. He had aligned himself with no party, nor had he campaigned for the position, returning to Cuba only after the election. In the 1905 election Estrada Palma was forced by the need for the cooperation of Congress to align himself with a political party—the Conservatives (later known as the Moderates). The opposition Liberals accused the Conservatives of using fraudulent means to win the election, and the revolution of 1906 followed. Estrada Palma resigned in September, and the United States intervened, taking temporary control.
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d0ec30f5fe523c45b484999dde755495 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tomas-Guardia | Tomás Guardia | Tomás Guardia
Tomás Guardia, who dominated the country from 1870 until 1882. His government curtailed liberty and added to the debt, but it also brought increases in coffee and sugar exports as well as widespread construction of schools. A new constitution, adopted in 1871, remained in effect,…
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89682cb6887a4a0052f0bf813d449af7 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tomas-Gudmundsson | Tómas Gudmundsson | Tómas Gudmundsson
Tómas Gudmundsson, (born January 6, 1901, Efri-Brú, Iceland—died November 14, 1983, Reykjavík), poet best known for introducing Reykjavík as a subject in Icelandic poetry. His poetic language is characterized by Neoromantic expressions and colloquial realism.
Gudmundsson, who was born in the countryside, graduated in law from the University of Iceland in Reykjavík and subsequently became a civil servant in 1928. His first collection of poems, Vid sundin blá (1924; “Beside the Blue Waters”), caused no great stir but revealed his control of poetic form and an intelligent, thoughtful, slightly nostalgic voice. His next publication, Fagra veröld (1933; “The Fair World”), established him as an outstanding poet. It won immediate attention for its appreciation of the city and urban life, and Gudmundsson was unofficially adopted as poet laureate of Reykjavík.
Travel in the Mediterranean, afforded him by the city of Reykjavík, gave him a new stimulus, apparent in Stjörnur vorsins (1940; “Stars of Spring”). After 1943 he devoted himself to writing. From 1943 to 1946 and in 1954 he coedited a literary magazine, Helgafell. During this period Fljótid helga (1950; “The Holy River”) was published. It addressed many of the social issues that were brought to light by World War II and revealed Gudmundsson as a mature philosopher of loss and resignation, though his light touch and rich humour remained. An edition of his collected poems was published in 1953. His later works include Heim til thín, Ísland (1977; “Home to You, Iceland”), containing personal reflections on life and death, as well as several poems written for specific occasions. In addition to writing poetry, he translated works in German and Italian into Icelandic. Many of his own poems are in translation in the Scandinavian languages, French, German, and English.
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c47cf2ea73cd4b172eee2894d03a2c27 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tonegawa-Susumu | Tonegawa Susumu | Tonegawa Susumu
Tonegawa Susumu, (born September 5, 1939, Nagoya, Japan), Japanese molecular biologist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1987 for his discovery of the genetic mechanisms underlying the great diversity of antibodies produced by the vertebrate immune system.
Tonegawa earned a B.S. degree from Kyōto University in 1963 and a Ph.D. in molecular biology from the University of California, San Diego, U.S., in 1969. He was a member of the Basel Institute for Immunology in Switzerland from 1971 to 1981. During that time Tonegawa applied the newly devised recombinant DNA techniques of molecular biology to immunology and began to tackle one of the greatest unsolved immunological questions of the day: how antibody diversity is generated. Prior to Tonegawa’s discovery, it was unclear how a limited number of genes—there are believed to be about 100,000 in the human genome—could produce the total human antibody repertoire, which numbers in the trillions. According to Tonegawa’s research, each antibody protein is not encoded by a specific gene, as one theory contended; instead, antibodies are constructed from a relatively small number of gene fragments that are rearranged randomly to generate different antibody molecules.
In 1981 Tonegawa moved to the United States to become a professor of biology at the Center for Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In addition to conducting immunological investigations, Tonegawa studied molecular and cellular aspects of neurobiology, and in 1994 he joined MIT’s Center for Learning and Memory (now the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory). His research focused on the role of the hippocampus in the processes of memory formation and recall. To conduct these studies, Tonegawa developed a genetically engineered mouse model in which the animals were no longer able to produce an enzyme called calcineurin. Calcineurin plays important roles in the immune system and in the brain, where it is associated with receptors that bind chemicals involved in neural synaptic transmission. Tonegawa’s mice unexpectedly displayed symptoms characteristic of schizophrenia. Further studies indicated that genetic variations in the calcineurin gene contribute to the development of schizophrenia in humans. Tonegawa’s mouse model has since been employed for the discovery of pharmacological agents for the treatment of schizophrenia. Tonegawa also identified genes and proteins involved in long-term memory storage, and he developed techniques to facilitate the study of neuronal circuits involved in cognition and behaviour.
Tonegawa received numerous awards throughout his career, including the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize (1982), the Person of Cultural Merit prize (Bunka Korosha; 1983), conferred by the Japanese government, and the Order of Culture (Bunka Kunsho; 1984).
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ffb0e64ef9b277f77c61bd01035e5fa7 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tony-Accardo | Tony Accardo | Tony Accardo
…Capone’s successors, Frank Nitti and Tony Accardo. He was the Chicago representative in the formation of the national crime syndicate in 1934, led by Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, and other New York bosses.
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0fe7687b16bd5f84ff595e6bcce0d41c | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tony-Dungy | Tony Dungy | Tony Dungy
…late 1990s as head coach Tony Dungy built one of the best defenses in the NFL, featuring tackle Warren Sapp, linebacker Derrick Brooks, and defensive backs John Lynch and Ronde Barber. The Bucs made four postseason appearances in the five seasons between 1997 and 2001, but the offensively limited team…
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cda1e583b2e460243943faedc9a14255 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tony-La-Russa | Tony La Russa | Tony La Russa
Tony La Russa, byname of Anthony La Russa, Jr., (born October 4, 1944, Tampa, Florida, U.S.), American professional baseball manager who led his teams to three World Series titles (1989, 2006, and 2011) and accumulated the third most managerial wins (2,728) in major league history.
La Russa signed to play baseball with the Kansas City Athletics (or “A’s”) out of high school. He spent the majority of his 16-season playing career in the minor leagues, but he appeared sporadically in the majors with the A’s (both in Kansas City and, later, in Oakland, where the franchise moved), the Atlanta Braves, and the Chicago Cubs. He was named the manager of a minor-league affiliate of the Chicago White Sox in 1978, and his first big-league managerial job came the following year, when he took over the White Sox late in the 1979 season.
The cerebral La Russa—who earned a law degree shortly before assuming managerial duties in Chicago—proved to be a natural leader in the clubhouse. He developed a managerial style that consisted of frequent in-game situational substitutions that came in response to the great attention he paid to the nuances and flow of a particular game (which occasionally led to criticism that La Russa “overmanaged”). In 1983 he guided the White Sox to a 99-win season and the team’s first play-off appearance in 24 years. However, a slow start to the 1986 campaign and a strained working relationship with the team’s new general manager (former outfielder Ken Harrelson, who left the announcing booth to spend only one tumultuous season running the White Sox) led to La Russa’s being fired three months into the season. He was out of work for less than a month before he was hired to manage the A’s.
La Russa quickly turned the A’s into the most-dominant team in baseball. He led Oakland to the highest win total in the major leagues for three straight seasons (1988–90), each of which also ended with the Athletics’ winning the American League (AL) pennant. The team was upset in two of its World Series appearances during that period, but the A’s did defeat the San Francisco Giants to win a championship in 1989. La Russa and the A’s won another division title in 1992, but after the team posted three consecutive losing seasons (1993–95), he opted out of his contract and signed with the St. Louis Cardinals.
La Russa’s third managerial stint was even more successful than his first two. In his initial season in St. Louis, he guided the Cardinals to the first of seven division titles the team would win during his tenure. The Cardinals won a National League (NL) pennant in 2004, and in 2006 the team beat the Detroit Tigers to win the World Series. In 2011 La Russa led St. Louis on improbable comebacks to clinch a postseason berth (after trailing in the Wild Card standings by 8 1/2 games with a month remaining in the regular season) and to win the World Series (after twice being one strike away from elimination). La Russa retired soon after earning his third championship ring. He had been named the AL’s Manager of the Year three times (1983, 1988, and 1992) and won the NL’s version of the award in 2002. Three years after his retirement from managing, he joined the Arizona Diamondbacks as the team’s chief baseball officer. He was demoted to an advisory role with the franchise following the 2016 season after the Diamondbacks ran off three consecutive losing campaigns during his tenure, and he left the team after the 2017 season. La Russa then joined the Boston Red Sox as an assistant to the team’s general manager.
La Russa published a memoir, One Last Strike: Fifty Years in Baseball, Ten and a Half Games Back, and One Final Championship Season (written with Rick Hummel), in 2012. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2014.
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e8e2637bf0a66d5eef46e316a0e39425 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tony-Lockett | Tony Lockett | Tony Lockett
Tony Lockett, in full Anthony Howard Lockett, byname Plugger, (born March 9, 1966, Ballarat, Vic., Austl.), Australian rules football player who holds the record for most goals scored in a career (1,360).
After making his senior-level debut with North Ballarat in 1982, Lockett began his Australian Football League (AFL) career with St. Kilda in 1983. He became a powerful and often controversial full-forward, and some of his rugged exchanges on the ground led to Tribunal suspensions. Nevertheless, in 1987 Lockett won Australian rules football’s highest individual award, the Brownlow Medal. His departure from St. Kilda (where he played in 183 games and scored 898 goals) after the 1994 season caused something of a sensation.
In 1995 Lockett headed to Sydney. Rugby League (see rugby) was the city’s most popular sport, but Australian rules football had made huge inroads, and the arrival of Lockett to play for the Sydney Swans hastened its progress. He quickly became a household name, and the Sydney fans, like the St. Kilda supporters in the past, cheered every Lockett goal. Lockett topped the AFL’s season goal-kicking list on four occasions in addition to topping St. Kilda’s list 10 times and Sydney’s list 5 times. He also kicked 100 goals in a season 6 times, his most notable effort being 132 for St. Kilda in 1992.
His remarkable goal-kicking career culminated in the 1999 season, in which Lockett, at age 33, kicked his 1,300th goal, breaking the previous record of 1,299 goals set by Gordon Coventry of Collingwood. That record had been a fixture in the history books since Coventry’s retirement in 1937. By the end of the season, Lockett had amassed a career total of 1,357 goals, and he announced his retirement from the sport. Though he left retirement briefly in 2002, he did not play the entire season and scored only three goals. Lockett was inducted into the Australian Football Hall of Fame in 2006.
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1e98597a2e573bb2308b04b09bd3ad5b | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tony-Parker | Tony Parker | Tony Parker
…international players, French point guard Tony Parker and Argentine shooting guard Manu Ginobili, who, along with Duncan, were the linchpins for the Spurs as they beat the Detroit Pistons 4–3 to win the NBA championship in 2005 and swept the Cleveland Cavaliers 4–0 in the best-of-seven series championship in 2007.
…rising stars Manu Ginobili and Tony Parker (who both played complementary roles in the Spurs’ 2003 title) during championship runs in 2005 and 2007. In 2010–11 the Spurs tied an all-time NBA mark by recording their 12th consecutive season with at least 50 victories, but they were met with disappointment…
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50ef84f6d36561f64bce98549130e37e | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tony-Pastor | Tony Pastor | Tony Pastor
Tony Pastor, in full Antonio Pastor, (born May 28, 1837, New York, New York, U.S.—died August 26, 1908, Elmhurst, New York), American impresario and comic singer, considered the father of vaudeville in the United States.
An entertainer from the age of six, Pastor appeared at P.T. Barnum’s American Museum in New York City as a child prodigy and then appeared in minstrel shows and in the circus before he first performed in a variety show in 1861. He opened his own variety theatre in New York City in 1865 and the Fourteenth Street Theatre (New York City) in 1881. Though at the time variety shows featured coarse humour and were considered to be unsuitable entertainment for ladies, Pastor advertised his Fourteenth Street Theatre as “the first specialty and vaudeville theatre of America, catering to polite tastes, aiming to amuse, and fully up to current times and topics.” His unexpected success encouraged other theatre managers to adopt his code of prohibitions, and a more wholesome form of vaudeville soon replaced the earlier form.
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4ef1729711507f2fbd72498efb70dc43 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tony-Scott | Tony Scott | Tony Scott
…movies he made with director Tony Scott. During this time he also frequently worked with director Spike Lee, starring in Mo’ Better Blues (1990), He Got Game (1998), and most significantly Malcolm X (1992). Portraying the civil rights activist Malcolm X, Washington gave a complex and powerful
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5e5fc9f46fc52f851a7de35cf39728f9 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tony-Shalhoub | Tony Shalhoub | Tony Shalhoub
Tony Shalhoub, in full Anthony Marcus Shalhoub, (born October 9, 1953, Green Bay, Wisconsin, U.S.), American actor who was perhaps best known for his comedic roles, most notably the “defective detective” (a sufferer from obsessive-compulsive disorder) Adrian Monk in the USA network television series Monk (2002–09).
Shalhoub was the son of a Lebanese immigrant, and he was drawn to acting at an early age, making his debut in a high-school production of The King and I. Shalhoub attended the University of Southern Maine (B.A., 1977) and Yale University’s School of Drama (M.A., 1980). Early in his career, he focused on stage work, performing with the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in several theatrical productions at the New York Shakespeare Festival. He found success on Broadway in Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles (1989) and earned a Tony Award nomination for his performance in Herb Gardner’s Conversations with My Father (1992).
Shalhoub ventured into television acting in 1986, playing a terrorist in one episode of the series The Equalizer, and in 1988 he appeared in his first television movie, Alone in the Neon Jungle. He quickly moved on to more-substantial roles, portraying Enrico Fermi in the Emmy Award-winning Day One (1989) and the romantic taxi driver Antonio Scarpacci in the series Wings (1991–97).
Shalhoub’s versatility allowed him to transfer easily to the big screen, where his most-memorable performances included playing a pawnbroker with a surprisingly regenerative head in the first two Men in Black films (1997, 2002), a Muslim antiterrorist FBI agent in The Siege (1998), and the comic villain Alexander Minion in three installments (2001–03) of the Spy Kids series. Shalhoub demonstrated his command of foreign dialects and talent for comedy as a non-English-speaking cab driver in Quick Change (1990), opposite Bill Murray, and he costarred as the moody chef Primo in Big Night (1996).
It was Shalhoub’s ability to absorb himself totally in character roles that proved key to the success of his portrayal of Monk. During Monk’s eight-season run, Shalhoub earned numerous honours, including multiple Emmy Awards (2003, 2005, 2006) and Screen Actors Guild Awards (2004, 2005) as well as a Golden Globe Award (2003).
Shalhoub’s later big-screen roles included the voice of the vehicle Luigi in the animated Cars (2006) and its sequels (2011, 2017), a psychiatrist in the romantic comedy How Do You Know (2010), and an arrogant entrepreneur whose kidnapping drives the plot of the action comedy Pain & Gain (2013). He also portrayed real-life figures in two movies that aired on HBO. In Too Big to Fail (2011), about the economic crisis of 2008, he played the CEO of financial-services firm Morgan Stanley, and in Hemingway & Gellhorn (2012) he appeared as the Soviet journalist Mikhail Koltsov, who was friends with Ernest Hemingway. He provided the voice of the computer-animated ninja master Splinter in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014) and its 2016 sequel. In 2017 Shalhoub appeared in the film Final Portrait, portraying the younger brother of famed Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti. During this time he also had recurring roles on a number of TV series, including Nurse Jackie. In addition, he portrayed the uptight father of a female comedian in the 1950s in the Amazon show The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2017– ). For that series, he received an Emmy in 2019.
In 2010 Shalhoub returned to the Broadway stage in the farce Lend Me a Tenor, and three years later he earned a Tony Award nomination for his performance in Clifford Odets’s Golden Boy as the hero’s Italian immigrant father. Shalhoub also received a Tony nod for his performance in Act One (2014), in which he appeared as American playwright Moss Hart, and he won the award for his work (2017–18) in The Band’s Visit, a musical about an Egyptian police band stranded in an Israeli desert village.
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066c4328f43cb5adf2954b6e26c3246f | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tony-Sirico | Tony Sirico | Tony Sirico
(Tony Sirico), and Sil (Steve Van Zandt) form Tony’s trusted inner circle, through whom Tony’s business deals are played out. The themes of identity, guilt, and denial are highlighted by the selective acknowledgment of the harsh realities of Tony’s crime world by his wife, Carmela…
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364bd6e1c2076f6b73fc4a768d9110c1 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tony-Smith | Tony Smith | Tony Smith
Tony Smith, in full Anthony Peter Smith, (born September 23, 1912, South Orange, New Jersey, U.S.—died December 26, 1980, New York, New York), American architect, sculptor, and painter associated with Minimalism as well as Abstract Expressionism and known for his large geometric sculptures.
As a child, Smith was quarantined with tuberculosis and did not emerge into public life until high school. While living behind his parents’ home in New Jersey, he had a private tutor and nurse, and he later recalled building small models out of his medicine boxes during that period of his life. According to the artist, that long-term seclusion and a visit to the pueblos near Taos, New Mexico, at a young age were “formative influences” on his art. He later attended Fordham University in New York City in 1930 and Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., from 1931 to 1932. He returned to New Jersey and opened a bookstore in Newark and later worked for the family waterworks company. In the evenings Smith took classes at the Art Students League in Manhattan.
After deciding to pursue a career in architecture, Smith moved to Chicago in 1937 to enroll at the New Bauhaus school, a short-lived design school established and directed by Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy. After just a short stint in school, the aspiring architect took a job with Frank Lloyd Wright, starting at the bottom as a bricklayer and carpenter. He eventually climbed the ranks to clerk of the works, or site supervisor. Taking what he had learned in two years of work with Wright, Smith established an independent architecture firm in New York City that he maintained into the mid-1960s. Though he never earned official certification as an architect, Smith designed more than 20 private residences in that period, with his earlier commissions paying tribute to Wright’s aesthetic. One of Smith’s most-recognized residences is the home and studio he built on Long Island, New York, for Abstract Expressionist artist Theodoros Stamos in the early 1950s. Raised high above the ground on stilts, the spaceshiplike structure allowed for privacy as well as excellent views and sunlight.
Beginning in 1946 and continuing well into the 1970s, Smith taught at institutions with noteworthy art and architecture schools, including Hunter College (now part of the City University of New York [CUNY]), Cooper Union, Pratt Institute, and New York University, where he taught up-and-coming artists Larry Rivers and Robert Goodnough. Smith’s teaching career gave him the time and resources necessary to continue to make art and the freedom to explore a range of media. During the late 1940s Smith was also further developing ties within the art world and formed strong personal relationships with Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko—artists who had an impact on his work throughout his life.
In 1951 Smith had an epiphany about art. One night he took an unsanctioned ride on the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike, without lights, guardrails, and lane markers. The shadowy landscape was punctuated by looming shapes of towers and stacks that were for him invested with mystery and power. By his own account, the experience freed him of many notions he had about art and revealed something to him that art had never shown. It was a turning point for him, and his recollection of the event influenced younger artists, such as Robert Smithson, too.
Between 1953 and 1955, while living in Germany, Smith created the Louisenberg series of paintings. The Louisenberg paintings—colourful geometric grids of repetitive organic shapes—can be viewed as a two-dimensional exercise in understanding sculptural forms. They are considered the works that prefigured the transition to Smith’s next pursuit.
In 1961, while recovering from a serious car accident, Smith gave up his architecture practice and turned his attention to sculpture. The initial period of this artistic shift was marked by the development of a distinct geometric style. Smith began by taping together handmade tetrahedral figures, much as he had done in quarantine as a child. As he would do for most of his three-dimensional work thereafter, he had assistants create large-scale plywood shapes from the final models. They then covered the structure with thick black paint. Works such as The Snake Is Out (1962) were made using that method, but their smooth, hard-edged surfaces made them appear as though they were constructed from sheet metal. Soon after, Smith’s first sculpture truly made from steel, Black Box (1962), was executed by a commercial fabricator. Smith’s often monumental sculptures, which he called “presences,” were based on geometric principles and simplicity of form, fundamental characteristics of Minimalist art. Smith was inspired by the works of James Joyce, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, and Friedrich Nietzsche, among other writers.
Smith did not exhibit his work until 1964, at age 52, when he was included as a relative unknown in the exhibition “Black, White, and Gray” at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. The exhibition featured artists working in a new, monochromatic, and seemingly dispassionate aesthetic, showing a marked departure from the Abstract Expressionists, who had dominated the art world for much of the post-World War II era. Two years later Smith participated in the Jewish Museum’s group show “Primary Structures”—the landmark exhibition that helped establish the Minimalist movement—alongside such artists as Donald Judd, Judy Chicago, Carl Andre, and Dan Flavin. In 1967 Smith had his first solo exhibition, at the Wadsworth Atheneum, and then appeared on the cover of the October issue of Time magazine.
Smith is considered a pioneer of Minimalism and a rare example of an artist who excelled in multiple media. He received the Award of Merit Medal for sculpture in 1978 from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and he was elected a member in 1979. His sculptures are found mostly outdoors and within private and museum collections throughout North America, Europe, and Asia. Two of Smith’s three daughters, Kiki Smith and Seton Smith, also became visual artists.
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405e83874785e43fce2f898d2af757a6 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tony-Wilding | Tony Wilding | Tony Wilding
He and his doubles partner, Tony Wilding of New Zealand, wrested the Davis Cup from Great Britain in 1907 and held it until 1911, arousing enduring public interest in Australia and New Zealand.
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fe8697c830cc225abd2c0d88cf8e15a5 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tony-Wilson | Tony Wilson | Tony Wilson
Tony Wilson, in full Anthony Howard Wilson, (born Feb. 20, 1950, Salford, Lancashire, Eng.—died Aug. 10, 2007, Manchester), British music industry entrepreneur who, as cofounder of Factory Records and founder of the Hacienda nightclub in Manchester, was the ringleader of the so-called “Madchester” postpunk music and club scene of the 1980s and early ’90s.
Wilson was a cultural reporter for Manchester’s Granada Television when in the mid-1970s he was given his own pop music show, So It Goes. He was galvanized by a 1976 Sex Pistols concert and booked the band on his show. In 1978 he cofounded the record label Factory Records, signing Durutti Column, Happy Mondays, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, and Joy Division (later New Order), which released its first album with the company. In 1983 New Order released on the Factory label “Blue Monday,” which became the best-selling 12-inch single ever released in the United Kingdom. Wilson opened the Hacienda in 1982 to showcase local music as well as dance music; it was the first British venue to play American house music. Wilson’s lack of interest in profits was among the factors that led to Factory Records’ bankruptcy in 1992; the Hacienda closed in 1997. Wilson’s life and the rise and fall of Factory Records were the subjects of the fictionalized biography 24 Hour Party People (2002).
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235fb349cc56a8f1d835e29cfa490fcb | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tonya-Harding | Tonya Harding | Tonya Harding
…on Americans Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding. About a month before the Games were to begin, Harding was implicated in an attempt to injure Kerrigan. Harding filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Olympic Committee, seeking an injunction against being barred from the Olympics. However, the legal dispute temporarily abated, and…
…on Americans Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding. About a month before the Games were to begin, Harding was implicated in an attempt to injure Kerrigan. Harding filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Olympic Committee, seeking an injunction against being barred from the Olympics. However, the legal dispute temporarily abated, and…
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caa21898d20d7dcb7bc00846d56e5c12 | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tore-Orjasaeter | Tore Ørjasæter | Tore Ørjasæter
Tore Ørjasæter, (born March 3, 1886, Skjåk, Norway—died February 29, 1968, Skjåk), Norwegian regional poet who worked in the tradition of the ballad and of folk and nature lyrics.
Ørjasæter was a teacher’s son from a village in central Norway. His concern with the conflict between individual and heritage, self and other, will and destiny provides the underlying theme of his main works, Gudbrand Langleite (1913; the title is the name of the poet’s alter ego), Brumillom (1920; “The Bridge Between”), and Skuggen (1927; “The Shadow”), which were published as an epic lyric trilogy in a revised edition of his collected works in 1941. Ørjasæter’s finest poetry is found in his collection Elvesong (1932; “Song of the River”), a cycle of poems about a drop of water on its way to the sea that symbolized the individual longing for freedom and human solidarity.
Modernist trends that were evident in much European poetry of the 1930s are reflected in Ørjasæter’s work. He also wrote several dramas, including Christophoros (1948) and Den lange bryllaupsreisa (1949; “The Long Honeymoon”). The latter, whose action partly occurs after death, is an expressionistic play dealing with contemporary problems such as the atom bomb.
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