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The History Channel - Encyclopedia Category: History and Culture > History Date & country: 02/12/2007, UK Words: 25833

Lee Kuan Yew
(1923) Singaporean politician, prime minister 1959-90. Lee founded the anticommunist Socialist People's Action Party in 1954 and entered the Singapore legislative assembly in 1955. He was elected the...

Lee Teng-hui
(1923) Taiwanese right-wing politician, vice-president 1984-88, president 1988-2000, and Kuomintang (see Guomindang) party leader 1988-2001. The country's first island-born leader, he was...

Lee-Enfield rifle
British service rifle. A .303-in calibre weapon, it used a bolt-action breech and a 10-round box magazine. It was first used 1893 and went through several minor modifications but remained the...

Lee, (Nelle) Harper
(1926) US writer. Her only novel, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), became a literary sensation, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961, and became an enduring classic. The film version, made in 1962, won...

Lee, Ann
(1736-1784) English religious leader and visionary. While in prison she had a `grand vision` that was later interpreted by her followers as the `second coming of Christ`. When the Shakers received a...

Lee, Canada
(1907-152) US actor. He took up acting in 1934 and played several important stage roles, including the controversial Bigger Thomas in Native Son (1941). He was the first African-American to play a...

Lee, Charles
(1731-1782) English-born US soldier. He was a British officer who, as a soldier of fortune, settled permanently in North America in 1773. He was appointed a major general in the Continental Army in 1775 and...

Lee, Eugene
(1933) US stage designer. He designed for a wide range of theatres, including the American National Theater Academy Playhouse in New York and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC....

Lee, Fitzhugh
(1835-1905) US Confederate general and politician. During the Civil War, he served throughout the Virginian campaigns of 1862 and 1863, and led the last charge of the Confederates at Farmville 1865. He was...

Lee, Gypsy Rose
(1914-1970) US entertainer. An `elegant lady` in striptease routines, she was popular in literary circles. Also a published author, she wrote two mystery novels, The G-String Murders (1941) and Mother...

Lee, Henry
(1756-1818) American military and political leader. In the cavalry during the American Revolution 1775-83, he rose to the rank of major, winning the nickname `Light-Horse Harry` for his lightning...

Lee, Jason
(1803-1845) US missionary and Oregon pioneer. He led a Methodist mission to the American Indian Salish people in 1834 and settled near present-day Salem, Oregon. He contributed to the creation of a...

Lee, Jennie (Janet)
(1904-1988) British socialist politician. She became a member of Parliament for the Independent Labour Party representing North Lanark at the age of 24, and in 1934 married Aneurin Bevan. Representing Cannock...

Lee, Laurie
(1914-1997) English writer. His autobiographical Cider with Rosie (1959) is a classic evocation of childhood; subsequent volumes are As I Walked Out One Summer Morning (1969), and A Moment of War (1991), in...

Lee, Manfred B
US writer; see Ellery Queen. ...

Lee, Ming Cho
(1930) Chinese set designer and water colourist. From 1958 he established a reputation for producing imaginative sets for scores of theatrical, opera, and dance productions on and off Broadway. For many...

Lee, Nathaniel
(c. 1653-1692) English dramatist. From 1675 on, he wrote a number of extravagant tragedies, such as The Rival Queens 1677, about the two wives of Alexander the Great. ...

Lee, Rex E
(1935) US lawyer and university president. He practised with Jennings, Strouss & Salmon (1964-72) and was founding dean of Brigham Young University's law school (1972-81). He was the US Solicitor...

Lee, Richard Henry
(1732-1794) American politican. He was a delegate to the first Continental Congress held in Philadelphia 1774, and proposed the first and second addresses to the British people. In the Congress of 1776 he...

Lee, Robert E(dward)
(1807-1870) US military strategist and Confederate general in the American Civil War. As military adviser to Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, and as commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, he...

Lee, Samuel Phillips
(1812-1897) US naval officer. He commanded the North Atlantic blockading squadron (1862-64) and the Mississippi Squadron (1864-65). He became a rear admiral in 1870 and retired in 1873. Lee, the grandson of...

Lee, Sophia
(1750-1824) English writer and dramatist. The success of her play The Chapter of Accidents (1780), enabled her to open a girls' school in Bath. Other works include the verse tragedy Almeyda, Queen of Grenada...

Lee, Willis A(ugustus), Jr
(1888-1945) US naval officer. The highlight of his naval career (1904-45) was his command of the South West Pacific task force during the naval battle of Guadalcanal (November, 1942). He used radar to defeat...

Leech, John
(1817-1864) English caricaturist. He illustrated many books, including Dickens's novel A Christmas Carol, and during 1841-64 contributed about 3,000 humorous drawings and political cartoons to Punch magazine....

Leeds Castle
Castle in Kent, England, 7 km/4 mi southeast of Maidstone. Leeds Castle is situated on two islands in a lake, formed by the River Len. The earliest buildings on...

Leese, Oliver William Hargreaves
(1894-1978) English soldier who was engaged in many theatres of conflict during World War II, including North Africa and Burma. For a long time, he served under Montgomery, in the British Expeditionary Force in...

Leeson, Nick
(1967) English derivatives trader, who was responsible for the collapse in 1995 of London's oldest merchant bank, Baring Brothers, which was subsequently bought by Dutch group ING for a nominal fee of one...

leet
In medieval East Anglia, England, administrative subdivision of a hundred for the purposes of collecting tax, roughly corresponding to a hide. ...

Lefebvre, Marcel François
(1905-1991) French Catholic priest in open conflict with the Roman Catholic Church. In 1976, he was suspended by Pope Paul VI for the unauthorized ordination of priests at his Swiss headquarters. He continued...

Lefebvre, Pierre François Joseph
(1755-1820) French soldier who served during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. He helped Napoleon come to power in the coup d'etat of 1799, and was made a marshal of France by the emperor in 1804. In the...

Lefkowitz, Mary Rosenthal
(1935) US classicist. Lefkowitz's books Women in Greece and Rome (1977), Heroines and Hysterics (1981), and Women's Life in Greece and Rome (1982) were among the first influential works published in the...

Left Book Club
Book club formed in Britain 1936 to circulate to its members political books intended to counter the upsurge of fascism. Its founder was the publisher Victor Gollancz. It produced mainly...

left wing
In politics, the socialist parties. The term originated in the French national assembly of 1789, where the nobles sat in the place of honour to the right of the president, and the commons sat to the...

legacy
In law, a gift of personal property made by a testator in a will and transferred on the testator's death to the legatee. Specific legacies are definite named objects; a general legacy is a sum of...

legal aid
Public assistance with legal costs. In Britain it is given only to those below certain thresholds of income and unable to meet the costs. There are separate provisions for civil and criminal cases....

legal tender
Currency that must be accepted in payment of debt. Cheques and postal orders are not included. In most countries, limits are set on the amount of coinage, particularly of small denominations, that...

Legaré, Hugh Swinton
(1797-1843) US lawyer and public official. He served two years as his state's attorney general (1830-32), represented the Whig party in the US House of Representatives (1837-39), and was attorney general in...

legend
Traditional or undocumented genre of story about famous people, commonly religious in character and frequently posing problems of authenticity. Legends are typically narrative, in the f ...

Legend of St Ursula, The
Series of paintings by the Italian artist Vittore Carpaccio 1490-98 (Accademia, Venice). They represent episodes from the story (see Ursula, St) of the daughter of a British king going on...

Léger, Fernand
(1881-1955) French painter and designer. He was associated with cubism. From around 1909 he evolved a characteristic style of simplified forms, clear block outlines, and bold colours. Mechanical forms are...

legion
Roman army unit. In the later Republic and the empire a legion comprised 5,000-6,000 men, mainly foot soldiers, organized in centuries (units of 60-100). Legions were designated by numbers and...

legislative process
Procedures by which the laws of a country are enacted. In the UK, legislation can be initiated in either the House of Commons or the House of Lords, but usually in the former. It is introduced as a...

legislature
Lawmaking body or bodies in a political system. Some legislatures are unicameral (having one chamber), and some bicameral (with two). In most democratic countries with bicameral legislatures the...

legitimacy
The justification of a ruling group's right to exercise power. Principles of legitimacy have included divine right, popular approval, and, in the case of communist parties, an insight into the true...

Legitimist
Party in France that continued to support the claims of the house of Bourbon after the revolution of 1830. When the direct line became extinct in 1883, the majority of the party transferred...

Legnano, Battle of
Defeat of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa by members of the Lombard League in 1176 at Legnano, northwest of Milan. It was a major setback to the emperor's plans for imperial domination over...

Legros, Alphonse
(1837-1911) French painter, etcher, and sculptor. His landscapes and views of peasant life combine acute observation and a mood of sombre religious piety. In this he was strongly influenced by the realism of...

Leguía, Agusto Bernardino
(1863-1932) Peruvian politician and president 1908-12 and 1919-30. During his first term, he actively embarked on a programme of fiscal, social and public infrastructural reform. He participated in the...

Lehman, Adele Lewisohn
(1882-1965) US philanthropist, art collector, and painter. She became active in the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, of which her husband was a founder; after he died she founded the Arthur Lehman...

Lehman, Herbert Henry
(1878-1963) US Democratic politician. In 1932 he became governor of New York, and his subsequent support of F D Roosevelt's reform policies earned his own administration the name `Little New Deal`. In 1942...

Lehmann, Beatrix
(1903-1979) English actor. Following her debut in 1924 at the Lyric, Hammersmith, she appeared in many successful plays, including Family Reunion, Peter Ustinov's No Sign of the Dove, and Waltz of the...

Lehmann, John Frederick
(1907-1987) English poet and essayist. His volumes of verse include A Garden Revisited 1931, The Noise of History 1934, Forty Poems 1942, The Sphere of Glass 1944, The Age of the Dragoon 1951, and Collected...

Lehmann, Karl
(1894-1960) German-born US classical archaeologist. From 1938 he directed the expedition to excavate the ancient Greek sanctuary at Samothrace. In 1954 he directed the building of a museum there. He wrote the...

Lehmann, Phyllis
(1912) US classical archaeologist. She was assistant field director of the excavations in Samothrace, of which her husband, Karl Lehmann, was director. She wrote a number of books, articles, and catalogues...

Lehmann, Rosamond Nina
(1901-1990) English novelist. Her books include Dusty Answer (1927), The Weather in the Streets (1936), The Echoing Grove (1953), and, following a long silence, A Sea-Grape Tree (1976), a sequel to The Ballad...

Lehmbruck, Wilhelm
(1881-1919) German sculptor, painter, and printmaker. He was a leading expressionist of the early 1900s, whose elongated, sorrowing figures carry great emotional power. His principal works are a distillation of...

Lehtonen, Joel
(1881-1934) Finnish poet and novelist. His finest work is a series of novels about events surrounding the Finnish civil war 1918 and its aftermath. In Kuolleet omenapuut 1918 and Putkinotko 1918-19, he...

Lei Kung
In Taoist mythology, the god of thunder. ...

Leib, Michael
(1760-1822) US politician and physician. A surgeon, he served as a Democrat-Republican representative of Pennsylvania in the US House of Representatives (1799-1806) and the US Senate (1809-14). He was...

Leibenstein, Harvey
(1922) Ukranian-born Canadian economist. His early work focused on development economics, especially in backward economies and in relation to population growth. He summed up his groundbreaking ideas in...

Leibl, Wilhelm
(1844-1900) German realist painter. He depicted Bavarian peasant life with a precision of detail recalling that of the British Pre-Raphaelites. Three Women in Church 1881 (Kunsthalle, Hamburg) is typical. ...

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm
(1646-1716) German mathematician, philosopher, and diplomat. Independently of, but concurrently with, English scientist Isaac Newton, he developed the branch of mathematics known as calculus and was one of the...

Leif Ericsson
(lived c. 970) Norse explorer, son of Eric the Red, who sailed west from Greenland to find a country first sighted by Norsemen 986. He visited Baffin Island then sailed along the Labrador coast to Newfoundland,...

Leigh light
Airborne searchlight used by the RAF in World War II. They were carried in Wellington bombers and, guided by radar, were used to illuminate submarines prior to attacking...

Leigh-Mallory, George
(1887-1924) British mountaineer who made some of the earliest attempts to climb Mount Everest. He made a reconnaissance of the mountain in 1921, and in the following year succeeded in reaching nearly 8,230...

Leigh-Mallory, George
(1746-1820) English diplomat. He was ambassador to St Petersburg 1777-82, and became minister at The Hague (1788). He was employed to negotiate the marriage between the Prince of Wales and Caroline of...

Leigh-Mallory, Trafford Leigh
(1892-1944) British air chief marshal in World War II. He took part in the Battle of Britain and was commander-in-chief of Allied air forces during the invasion of France. He ensured complete Allied air...

Leighton, Frederic Stretton
(1830-1896) English painter and sculptor. One of the most highly respected artists of his day, he specialized in recreations of classical Greek subjects, such as his Captive Andromache (1888; Manchester City...

Leighton, Margaret
(1922-1976) English actor. The leading lady in many stage and film productions, she became one of the best-known actors of her era. Her major plays include Terence Rattigan's Separate Tables in 1956 and...

Leighton, Robert
(1611-1684) Scottish churchman, principal and professor of divinity at Edinburgh University 1653-61, and archbishop of Glasgow 1671-72. During his lifetime, the Church of Scotland was split between those...

Leino, Eino
(1878-1926) Finnish poet. A leading exponent of the neo-Romantic idiom, his two collections of ballads and legends Helkavirsiä/Whitsongs 1903, 1916 remain the finest verse ever written in the traditional ...

Leisler, Jacob
(1640-1691) German-born colonial administrator in America. Taking advantage of the political instability caused by England's Glorious Revolution of 1688, he took command of New York in the name of William and...

leisure class
Term applied by Thorstein Veblen in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) to those people (aristocrats, bourgeoisie, nouveaux riches) who regarded work, particularly manual labour, as beneath them....

Leith Hall
House in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, 10 km/6 mi south of Huntly. The Hall is built around a courtyard and dates from 1650. Each successive generation of the Leith family has added to the house, which...

Lejeune, John A(rcher)
(1867-1942) US marine officer. A brilliant combat commander and a reforming commandant, he oversaw the marine corps' conversion in the 1920s from a colonial police agency into a modern expeditionary force....

Leland, Charles Godfrey
(1824-1903) US poet and folklorist. His Hans Breitmann's Ballads 1914 recounts the adventures of the hero in a regional dialect of German known as Pennsylvania Dutch. ...

Leland, John
(c. 1506-1552) English antiquary whose manuscripts have proved a valuable source for scholars. He became chaplain and librarian to Henry VIII, and during 1534-43 toured England collecting material for a history...

Lely, Peter
(1618-1680) Dutch painter. He was active in England from 1641, painting fashionable portraits in the style of van Dyck. His subjects included Charles I, Cromwell, and Charles II. He painted a series of...

Lem, Stanislaw
(1921-2006) Polish science fiction writer, philosopher, and essayist. His works include the novels Astronauci/The Astronauts (1951) and Solaris (1961; filmed 1971), and the story cycle Cyberiade (1965). Lem's...

Lemaître, Jules
(1853-1914) French critic and writer. His critical articles were collected as Impressions de théâtre 1888-1920 and Les Contemporains 1886-1918, and he published La Comédie après Molière et le théâtre...

Leman, Gerart Matheu Joseph Georges
(1851-1920) Belgian general. He was director of studies at the Belgian military academy 1899 and commandant 1905. He was commandant of the fortress at Liège 1914 and directed its defence when the Germans...

Lemass, Seán Francis
(1899-1971) Irish nationalist politician and Taoiseach (prime minister) 1959-66. A long time associate of Éamon de Valera, he was a founder member of the Fianna Fáil party (1926),...

Lemberg, Battles of
In World War I, fighting between Austrian and Russian forces 1914-15 around the fortress town of Lemberg in Galicia (now Lviv, Ukraine). The Russians were driven out of the area by German forces...

Lemercier, Jacques
(1585-1654) French architect, born at Pontoise. He built the Pavillon de l'Horloge at the Louvre, Paris (1624); then, for Cardinal Richelieu, the château and town of Richelieu in Poitou (1625-35); the...

Lemke, William (Frederick)
(1878-1959) US politician. Son of a homesteader, he practised law in Fargo, North Dakota (1905-20) where he joined the populist Nonpartisan League to create institutions that would benefit small farmers. He...

Lemoyne, François
(1688-1737) French painter. He is remembered for the decoration of the vault of the Salon d'Hercules at Versailles, containing 142 pictures. His Time Revealing Truth (Wallace Collection, London) was painted...

lemures
In Roman mythology, ghosts of the dead. They were exorcized at the annual three-day festival of Lemuria, or Lemuralia, in May. ...

Lenbach, Franz
(1836-1904) German painter. Noted for his realism, he was one of the most popular portraitists of his day, his sitters including Bismarck (whom he painted about 80 times), Gladstone,...

Lenclos, Ninon (Anne) de
(1615-1705) French courtesan. As the recognized leader of Parisian society, she was the mistress of many highly placed men, including General Condé and the writer La Rochefoucauld. ...

lend-lease
In US history, an act of Congress passed in March 1941 that gave the president power to order `any defense article for the government of any country whose...

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich
(1870-1924) Russian revolutionary, first leader of the USSR, and communist theoretician. Active in the 1905 Revolution, Lenin had to leave Russia when it failed, settling in Switzerland in 1914. He returned to...

Leningrad, Siege of
In World War II, German siege of the Soviet city of Leningrad (now St Petersburg, Russia) 1 September 1941-27 January 1944. Some 1 million inhabitants of...

Leninism
Modification of Marxism by Lenin which argues that in a revolutionary situation the industrial proletariat is unable to develop a truly revolutionary consciousness without strong leadership. The...

Lennep, Jacob van
(1802-1868) Dutch poet and novelist. His emulation of Walter Scott at a time when the historical novel was very popular gained him a reputation which he has not subsequently maintained. His romantic novel...

Lenni Lenape
Alternative name for a member of the American Indian Delaware people. ...

Lennox, Charlotte
(1730-1804) English novelist. Her popular novel The Female Quixote 1752 describes how the beautiful and intelligent Arabella creates comic misunderstandings through interpreting real life as if it were a French...

Leno, Dan
(1860-1904) English comedian. A former acrobat, he became the idol of the music halls, and was considered the greatest of pantomime`dames`. ...

Lenormand, Henri René
(1882-1951) French dramatist. His work is profoundly influenced by the psychoanalytical discoveries of Sigmund Freud, and his plays show individuals driven by their subconscious instincts. They include Le Temps...

Lenox, James
(1800-1880) US book collector and philanthropist. A wealthy merchant and real estate investor, he amassed an impressive collection of Bibles, 15th-century books, and art, which he donated to the Lenox Library...

Lens, Battle of
In World War I, battle May-August 1917 between Allied and German forces around the French town of Lens, an important railway junction and engineering town in a mining area, which was the scene of...