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

McCarthy, (Charles) Cormac
(1933) US novelist. His work is full of black humour and explosive revelation, especially the sanguinary Blood Meridian (1985). Despite his difficult, unpunctuated prose, he became a cult figure in some...

McCarthy, Joe (Joseph Raymond)
(1908-1957) US right-wing Republican politician. His unsubstantiated claim in 1950 that the State Department had been infiltrated by communists started a wave of anticommunist hysteria, wild accusations, and...

McCarthy, John
(1957) English journalist who in 1986 was taken prisoner in Lebanon by the militant group Islamic Jihad. His then girlfriend, Jill Morrell, and other friends campaigned for his release, though this did not...

McCarthy, Justin
(1830-1912) Irish historian, novelist, journalist, and politician. He was Home Rule member at different periods for Longford County, North Longford, and Londonderry. He was chairman of the...

McCarthy, Mary Therese
(1912-1989) US novelist and critic. Much of her work looks probingly at US society, for example, the satirical novel The Groves of Academe (1952), which describes the anticommunist witch-hunts of the time...

McCarthyism
Period of political persecution during the 1950s, led by US senator Joe McCarthy, during which many public officials and private citizens were accused of being communists or communist sympathizers....

McCartney, Ian
(1951) British Labour politician, minister for Trade in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Department of Trade and Industry from 2006. He became MP for Makerfield in 1987 and held a succession of...

McCauley, Charles Stewart
(1793-1869) US naval officer. He was the commandant of the Norfolk, Virginia, navy yard (1860-61). He ordered the yard to be destroyed rather than allow it to fall into Confederate hands in 1861. His efforts...

McCauley, Mary Ludwig Hays
(1754-1832) US war heroine. During the American Revolution, she accompanied her first husband, John Hays, to the Battle of Monmouth in 1778 and carried water to the artillerymen in a pitcher, earning the...

McCawley, Charles G(rymes)
(1827-1891) US Marine officer. He took part in the capture of Mexico City in 1847, and, during the Civil War, in the destruction of Fort Sumter and the seizure of forts Wagner and Gregg near Charleston, South...

McCay, Winsor (Zenic)
(1869-1934) US cartoonist and animator. In 1905 he created the newspaper comic strip, `Little Nemo in Slumberland`, which he adapted to the animated cartoon film, Little Nemo, in 1911. His early...

McClellan, George Brinton
(1826-1885) US soldier. In the Civil War he was made general in chief of the Union forces 1861-62, but was dismissed by President Abraham Lincoln when he delayed five weeks in following up his victory over...

McClintock, Francis Leopold
(1819-1907) Irish polar explorer and admiral. He discovered the fate of the John Franklin expedition and further explored the Canadian Arctic. Knighted 1860. ...

McCloskey, James
(1943) US minister and social activist. After achieving success as a businessman, he entered Princeton Theological Seminary in 1979 and as student chaplain at Trenton State Prison, he came into contact...

McCloy, John (Jay)
(1895-1989) US lawyer and government official. A corporate lawyer and presidential adviser, he served as assistant secretary of war (1941-45). President of the World Bank (1947-49) and US high commissioner...

McClure, Samuel S(idney)
(1857-1949) Irish-born US editor and publisher. He established one of the earliest US newspaper syndicates in 1884 and in 1893 founded McClure's magazine, which he made especially successful with the...

McColvin, Lionel Roy
(1896-1976) English librarian. In 1942 he published his Report on the Public Library system of Great Britain, which laid the foundations for the post-war reconstruction...

McCone, John Alex
(1902-1991) US industrialist, head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 1961-65. A devout Catholic and a fervent opponent of communism, he declined to use extreme measures to secure some of the political...

McConnell, Jack
(1960) Scottish Labour politician, first minister of the Scottish Executive 2001-2007, and Labour leader in Scotland from 2001. He was general secretary of the Scottish Labour Party 1992-98 and...

McCord, David James
(1797-1855) US newspaper editor and politician. A lawyer turned editor of the Columbia Telescope (from 1823), he turned this newspaper into an extremely zealous advocate of nullification. He, in turn, became an...

McCormack, John (William)
(1891-1980) US politician. A public school graduate who studied law privately, he became a lawyer in 1913 and a power in Democratic politics after he returned from the army in 1918. He served in both the...

McCormick, Anne Elizabeth
(1882-1954) English journalist. She won esteem as a European correspondent for the New York Times, especially for prescient stories in the 1930s on the rise of Benito Mussolini in Italy. She joined the paper's...

McCormick, Robert Rutherford
(1880-1955) US publisher. A World War I veteran, Col McCormick inherited and ran the Chicago Tribune with his cousin Joseph Medill Patterson, assuming sole control as Patterson became more preoccupied with the...

McCosh, James
(1811-1894) Scottish college president and philosopher. He left a professorship at Queen's College in Belfast, Ireland (1852-68), and as president (1868-88), he revitalized the College of New Jersey (later...

McCourt, Frank (Francis)
(1933) Irish-American writer. His memoir Angela's Ashes (1996; filmed in 1999) became the literary sensation of the 1990s, winning the National Book Critics Circle...

McCowen, Alec (Alexander Duncan)
(1925) English stage and film actor. His theatrical performances have been mostly in Shakespearean and other classical plays, in roles such as Richard II, the Fool in King Lear, and Astrov in Anton...

McCoy, Joseph (Geating)
(1837-1915) US cattleman. A cattleman, he developed the town of Abilene, Kansas, on the Kansas Pacific railroad, as the main shipping point for cattle to the East. This ushered in the Long Drive (for cattle)...

McCreery, Richard Loudon
(1898-1967) British soldier. After service in World War I and in France (1940), the Middle East (1942), and Tunisia (1943), he commanded the 8th Army in Italy 1944-45. The destruction of the `Gothic Line`...

McCudden, James Thomas Byford
(1895-1918) British fighter pilot in World War I. McCudden was credited with shooting down at least 54 enemy aircraft by the time of his death in a flying accident 8 July 1918 and was extensively decorated...

McCullers, (Lula) Carson
(1917-1967) US novelist. Most of her writing, including the novels The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) and Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), is set in her native South. Her work, like that of Flannery ...

McCulloch v. Maryland
US Supreme Court decision of 1819 that affirmed that Congress has the `implied powers` necessary to achieve the powers expressly granted to it by the US Constitution. In this case, the implied...

McCulloch, John Ramsay
(1789-1864) Scottish journalist, academic, civil servant, and economist. His Principles of Political Economy (1825), was the most successful general textbook of the day in its subject. His correspondence with...

McDonald, William C
(1858-1918) US cattle baron and politician. He was a US deputy mineral surveyor (1881-90) and then entered the cattle business. A strong Democrat, he was pushed to accept his party's nomination and was...

McDonald's
US fast-food chain, the largest in the world, specializing in hamburgers. By 2001 the chain had grown to nearly 29,000 outlets in 120 countries. In 2000, its total sales...

McDonnell Douglas
US aircraft manufacturer that produces fighter planes and the DC-10 airbus. It was formed in 1967 in a merger. Douglas, founded in 1920 by Donald W Douglas (1892-1981), was known for its DC...

McDowell, Irvin
(1818-1885) US soldier. A West Point graduate of 1838, he served in the Mexican War, on the frontier, and at army headquarters in Washington, DC. At the outbreak of the Civil War, he was given command of the...

McDuffie, John
(1883-1950) US politician. A Democrat representing Alabama, he was a congressman (1919-35), serving as minority and majority whip before becoming US district court judge in Alabama (1935-50). McDuffie was...

McEvoy, (Arthur) Ambrose
(1878-1927) Irish painter, a contemporary of John and Augustus at the Slade School. He began as a painter of restful interiors and poetic landscapes, then moved to interiors with figures and portraits, being...

McEwan, Geraldine
(1932) English actor. After a successful career as a stage player with the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, she became a television star in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1978), Mapp...

McEwan, Ian (Russell)
(1948) English novelist and short-story writer. His works often have sinister or macabre undertones and contain elements of violence and sexuality, as in the short-story collections First Love, Last...

McFadden, Daniel L
(1937) US economist. McFadden developed theories and methods widely used in analysing work and living habits. He shared the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2000 with US economist James Heckman for creating...

McFarland, Ernest W(illiam)
(1894-1984) US judge and politician. A state superior court judge, he was elected to the US Senate as a Democrat representative of California (1941-53), where he served as majority leader (1951-53). He...

McFarlane, Robert
(1937) US national security adviser to Ronald Reagan 1983-87. He became well known as a champion of the MX nuclear missile programme. In 1984, he initiated the review of US policy towards Iran that led...

McGahern, John
(1934-2006) Irish novelist. He won early acclaim for The Barracks (1963), a study of the mind of a dying woman. His books explore Irish settings and the effects of the political situation of the country on its...

McGee, Anita Newcomb
(1864-1940) US physician. Appointed assistant army surgeon in 1898, the first woman to hold such a position, she organized the Army Nurse Corps (1898-1900) for service in the Spanish-American War and...

McGill, Donald
(1875-1962) English comic-postcard artist. His saucy cartoons, captioned with double meanings, featured outsize women in bathing costumes, paddling alongside weedy henpecked husbands. He drew his first comic...

McGillivray, Alexander
(c. 1759-1793) US Creek leader and trader. After the American Revolution, he would spend the rest of his life trying to build up a `united front` of the American Indians of the southeast against the...

McGinley, Phyllis
(1905-1978) Canadian-born US writer of light verse. She was a contributor to the New Yorker magazine and published many collections of social satire. Her works include One More Manhattan (1937) and The Love...

McGivney, Michael (Joseph)
(1852-1890) US Catholic priest. As a parish priest in New Haven, Connecticut, he founded the Knights of Columbus in 1882, a Catholic men's fraternal organization, serving as its national chaplain until his...

McGonagall, William
(1830-1902) Scottish poet. He is noted for the unintentionally humorous effect of his extremely bad serious verse: for example, his poem on the Tay Bridge disaster of 1879. His Poetic Gems were published in...

McGough, Roger
(1937) English poet, dramatist, songwriter, and performer. Along with Adrian Henri and Brian Patten he was one of the group known as the `Liverpool Poets`. He came to prominence in the late 1960s as a...

McGovern, George (Stanley)
(1922) US Democratic politician. He was elected to the US House of Representatives in 1956, served as an adviser to the Kennedy administration, and was a senator 1963-81. A strong opponent of the Vietnam...

McGrath, James Howard
(1903-1966) US politician. A three-term Rhode Island governor (1940-45), he was named solicitor general of the USA in 1945 and elected as a Democrat US senator representing Rhode Island (1947-49). As...

McGrath, John Peter
(1935-2002) Scottish dramatist, director, and producer. He founded the socialist 7:84 Theatre Companies in England in 1971 and in Scotland in 1973, and is the author of such plays as Events While Guarding the...

McGuane, Thomas (Francis III)
(1939) US writer. He began his writing career as a flamboyant satirist, as seen in The Bushwhacked Piano (1971). After a serious car accident in 1972, he worked as a scriptwriter in Hollywood and directed...

McHarg, Ian
(1920) Scottish landscape architect. He worked in the USA as a teenage apprentice landscape architect (1936-39), then studied at Harvard University after World War II (1946-50). Back in Scotland, he...

McIndoe, Archibald Hector
(1900-1960) New Zealand plastic surgeon. He became known in the UK during World War II for his remodelling of the faces of badly burned pilots. Knighted 1947. ...

McInerney, Jay
(1955) US novelist. His first novel, Bright Lights, Big City (1984), was a richly comic portrait of a bright young man in Manhattan society, and became a literary sensation. It was followed by Ransom...

McIntosh, William
(c. 1775-1825) US American Indian leader and soldier. The son of a British officer and a Creek Indian, he led the Lower Creeks in alliance with US forces during the War of 1812 and served under Andrew Jackson in...

McKay, Claude
(1889-1948) Jamaican-born US poet and novelist. He was a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance of...

McKellar, Kenneth (Douglas)
(1869-1957) US politician. A Democrat serving Tennessee, he was elected to the US House of Representatives (1911-17) and to the US Senate (1917-53), where he exercised power through his positions on crucial...

McKenna, Joseph
(1843-1926) US Supreme Court justice. He served the California state legislature (1875-76) and the US House of Representatives (1884-92), resigning to accept a federal judgeship. He served as US attorney...

McKenna, Reginald
(1863-1943) English statesman and financier. He was chancellor of the Exchequer 1915-16. Through a series of new loans, import duties, and taxes he managed to meet the rising cost of the war. In 1919 he...

McKenna, Siobhán
(1922-1986) Irish actor who made her reputation on the stage of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. McKenna gave memorable performances in such works as George Bernard Shaw's St Joan and J M Synge's The Playboy of the...

McKenzie Friend Case
Divisional court case that held that the `right` of having a McKenzie friend (named after this case) to assist in court is subject to the discretion of the court and therefore may be forbidden....

McKie, Judy
(1944) US furniture designer. By the mid-1970s she was selling her individually designed wooden pieces and by 1979 was gaining national recognition in shows, commissions, and awards. Her fascination with...

McKim, Charles Follen
(1847-1909) US architect. His principal buildings, mainly monumental and classical in style, were designed in partnership with William Rutherford Mead (1846-1928) and Stanford White (1853-1906); together...

McKinley, Ida
(1847-1907) US first lady. She married future US president William McKinley in 1871. Following the untimely deaths of her mother and two daughters 1873-75, she developed epilepsy and became an invalid....

McKinley, John
(1780-1852) US Supreme Court justice. He served the Alabama legislature (1820, 1831), the US Senate as a Democrat representative of Alabama (1826, 1836), and the US House of Representatives (1832). He was...

McKinley, William
(1843-1901) 25th president of the USA 1897-1901, a Republican. His term as president was marked by the USA's adoption of an imperialist foreign policy, as exemplified by...

McKinnon, Donald
(1939) New Zealand politician and diplomat, secretary-general of the Commonwealth from 2000. A former foreign minister 1990-2000 and deputy prime minister 1990-96 in New Zealand's conservative...

McKissick, Floyd B
(1922) US civil rights leader, lawyer, and business executive. He practised law in Durham, North Carolina (1952-66), and specialized in hundreds of civil rights cases brought before the courts in the...

McLaughlin, Audrey
(1936) Canadian politician who was the first woman leader of a federal political party in Canada. She was entered the House of Commons in 1987 as a member of parliament for Yukon, after a by-election...

McLaughlin, Mary Louise
(1847-1939) US ceramist. A pioneer of the art pottery movement, she founded the Cincinnati Pottery Club in 1879 and received international awards for her china painting and decorative metalwork. McLaughlin was...

McLaws, Lafayette
(1821-1897) US soldier. An 1842 West Point graduate, he served in the Mexican War and in the West. He went over to the Confederate army in 1861 and as a regimental, brigade, and finally division commander, he...

McLeish, Henry
(1948) Scottish Labour party politician, who became Scotland's first minister in October 2000 after the sudden death of Donald Dewar. McLeish, who had previously been deputy leader of the Scottish Labour...

McManus, Francis Patrick Vincent
(1905-1983) Australian politician. He was deputy leader of the Australian Labor party in the Senate (1956-57), before founding the left-wing Democratic Labor (DLP) party...

McMaster, James A(lphonsus)
(1820-1886) US religious journalist. An archconservative Catholic convert and antiabolitionist, he founded the Catholic Freeman's Journal in 1848 and edited it thereafter. In 1861 he was imprisoned, and his...

McMurtry, Larry Jeff
(1936) US writer. Many of his works were made into films, including The Last Picture Show (1966, filmed 1971) and Terms of Endearment (1975), the film of which won the 1983 Academy Award for Best Picture....

McNair, Lesley (James)
(1883-1944) US soldier. A 1904 West Point graduate, he served with Gen John Pershing's expedition into Mexico (1916-17) and then at Pershing's headquarters in France in World War I. Making his way through a...

McNally, Terrence
(1939) US dramatist, considered one of the leading playwrights of the 1990s. He began writing plays in the 1960s, but his first major commercial success was in 1987 with Frankie and Johnny at the Clair de...

McNamee, Graham
(1888-1942) US broadcaster. A pioneer radio sportscaster, he covered the World Series as early as 1923, and in 1927 he was the announcer for the first coast to coast broadcast of the American football Rose...

McNary, Charles (Linza)
(1874-1944) US politician. A Republican serving Oregon, he was originally appointed and then elected to the US Senate (1917-44), where he prompted legislation involving agriculture, reforestation, irrigation,...

McNaughton, Andrew George Latta
(1887-1966) Canadian soldier and administrator. On the outbreak of World War II in 1939, he commanded the 1st Division Canadian Overseas Force. He commanded the Canadian Corps 1940-42, and was...

McNeile, (Herman) Cyril
Real name of English writer Sapper. ...

McNeill, William H(ardy)
(1917) Canadian historian. Running counter to the trend of his contemporary academics, who tended to specialize in ever smaller periods and topics, he took on a wide variety of subjects in such books as...

McNicholas, John T(imothy)
(1877-1950) Irish-born US Catholic prelate. He was ordained a Dominican priest in 1901. He was a New York City pastor and national director of the Holy Name Society before becom ...

McNichols, Stephen L R
(1914-1997) US lawyer and politician. An assistant US attorney general (1946-48), he became a Democrat Colorado state senator (1948-54). As state governor (1957-63), he improved conditions for migrant...

McNickle, (William) D'Arcy
(1904-1977) US Salish-Flathead author, historian, and anthropologist. A founding member of the National Congress of American Indians in 1944, he also worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs (1936-52),...

McNulty, John Augustine
(1895-1956) US journalist and author. A longtime reporter, he launched a new career writing stories and articles especially for the New Yorker, after the success of his 1941 story `Atheist Hit by a Truck`....

McPartland, Marian
(1920) English-born US jazz musician. A versatile pianist, she moved to the USA in 1945 and led a trio from 1951. In 1973 she began an adjunct career as the host of jazz radio programs. McPartland was...

McPhee, John (Angus)
(1931) US writer. He worked as a television playwright for Robert Montgomery Presents (1955-57) and as an associate editor for Time magazine (1957-64). In 1964 he became a staff writer for the New...

McPherson, Aimee Semple
(1890-1944) Canadian-born US religious leader. As a popular preacher, `Sister Aimee` reached millions through radio broadcasts of her weekly sermons, in which she emphasized the power of faith. She...

McPherson, James (Birdseye)
(1828-1864) US soldier. First in his class at West Point in 1853, he served with the Corps of Engineers. He joined Gen Ulysses Grant's staff as chief engineer in the Tennessee campaign of 1862, then commanded...

McQuaid, Bernard (John)
(1823-1909) US Catholic prelate. He was a cofounder in 1856 and first president of Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey, before being named bishop of Rochester, New York, in 1868. Regarded as a...

McQueen, Steve
(1969) British artist. He works primarily in film and was the winner of the 1999 Turner Prize for his black-and-white silent film Deadpan, in which a house collapses in front of him over and over...

McReynolds, James Clark
(1862-1946) US Supreme Court justice. As assistant US attorney general (1903-07) and as a federal prosecutor, he gained a reputation as a `trustbuster`. President Woodrow Wilson named him attorney general...

McTaggart, John McTaggart Ellis
(1866-1925) English philosopher. A follower of Hegel, he argued for atheism, the immortality of the soul, and the unreality of time. McTaggart's ingenious arguments give his...

McVeigh, Timothy
(1968-2001) Former US Army soldier who was convicted for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing in Oklahoma, the worst terrorist attack in US history. He was executed...

McWhirter, Norris Dewar
(1925-2004) English editor and compiler; with his twin brother, Ross McWhirter (1925-1975), he was founding editor of the Guinness Book of Records in 1955. ...