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

Morton, Thomas
(c. 1764-1838) English dramatist. His plays include The Way to Get Married 1796 and Speed the Plough 1798, which introduced the character Mrs Grundy, who became a byword for narrow-mindedness. ...

Moryson, Fynes
(1566-1630) English adventurer and writer. Moryson travelled extensively in Europe and the Middle East before visiting Ireland in 1600 as secretary to Lord Mountjoy, lord deputy of Ireland. His observations and...

Mosaddeq, Muhammad
(1880-1967) Iranian prime minister 1951-53. A dispute arose with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company when he called for the nationalization of Iran's oil production, and when he failed in his attempt to overthrow...

mosaic
Design or picture, usually for a floor or wall, produced by setting small pieces (tesserae) of marble, glass, or other materials in a cement ground. The ancient Greeks were the first to use...

Mosby, John Singleton
(1833-1916) US soldier. He was practising law when the Civil War began and he joined the Confederate forces in Virginia, fighting at First Bull Run and scouting for Jeb Stuart. From January 1863 to...

Mosca, Gaetano
(1858-1941) Italian jurist, politician, and political scientist. His best-known work Elementi di scienza politica (1896) (translated as The Ruling Class in 1939) set out his theory of the political elite. In...

Moschus
(lived 2nd century BC) Greek bucolic (pastoral) poet, born at Syracuse. Some of his pieces have survived, notably a short epic `Europa` and an epigram on `Love, the Runaway`. ...

Moscow, Battle for
In World War II, a failed German attack on Moscow, October 1941-January 1942. The Soviet capital was a prime objective of the German invasion plan, Operation ...

Moser, George Michael
(1704-1783) Swiss goldsmith, enameller, medallist, and gemcutter. He spent most of his life in England, where his watches and bracelets were in great demand. He was drawing master to George III and assisted in...

Moser, Lucan
(1430-1450) German painter. He worked in Ulm. His altarpiece of St Mary Magdalene (1431), in the church in Tiefenbrunn, is an advanced work for its time and place. Its realistic detail suggests some...

Moser, Mary
(1774-1819) English artist who specialized in painting flowers. She and Angelica Kauffmann were the first women to be received into the Royal Academy 1768. She was the daughter of the artist George Michael...

Moses
(lived c. 13th century BC) Hebrew lawgiver and judge who led the Israelites out of Egypt to the promised land of Canaan. On Mount Sinai he claimed to have received from Jehovah the oral and written Law, including the Ten...

Moses ben Isaac
(1388-1460) Italian Jewish doctor, philosopher, and poet. Born in Rieti, central Italy, he became the Rabbi of Rome and was also physician to Pope Pius II. Strongly influenced by t ...

Moses of Khoren
(lived 5th century?) Armenian writer, famous for his History of Armenia. The first classic of Armenian literature, it traces the country's history from mythical origins. It is the only early history to describe...

Moses, `Grandma`
(1860-1961) US painter. Born in Washington County, New York, she began full-time painting about 1927, after many years as a farmer's wife. She was self-taught, and painted naive and colourful scenes from...

Moses, Robert
(1888-1981) US public official and urban planner. As parks commissioner for New York State 1924-64 and New York City 1934-60, he oversaw the development of bridges, highways, and public facilities. Serving...

Moskowitz, Belle Lindner (Israels)
(1877-1933) US social worker and political adviser. In 1918 she became an aide to Al Smith and served him as a close political adviser during his terms as governor of New York (1919-21, 1923-29) and his...

Moslem
Alternative spelling of Muslim, a follower of Islam. ...

mosque
In Islam, a place of worship. Chief features are: the dome; the minaret, a balconied turret from which the faithful are called to prayer; the mihrab, or prayer niche, in one of the interior walls,...

Mosquera, Tomás Cipriano de
(1798-1878) Colombian general and political thinker. Active in the struggle for independence, Mosquera was made intendant (see intendencia)...

Mossad
In Israel, the organization responsible for secret national activities outside the borders of the state. Mossad's main spheres of responsibility are information collection on political, military,...

Most, Johann Joseph
(1846-1906) German-born anarchist. A magnetic speaker and writer, he became the leader of an extreme faction of US anarchists and composed the declaration adopted by the Pittsburgh convention (1883) that...

Mostaert, Jan
(1475-1556) Dutch painter. As court painter to Margaret of Austria, he produced portraits of richly dressed sitters with elaborate backgrounds; he also painted religious subjects. He was one of the first to...

motel
Type of hotel, near a motorway or main road, in which each room is accessible from the car-parking area. The first motel was built in 1925 by A Heinman in the USA. ...

Mother
First British fighting tank, developed in 1916. Originally called Big Willie (after the early prototype Little Willie), the name...

Mother Ann
US religious leader; see Ann Lee. ...

Mother Jones
US labour leader; see Mary Jones. ...

Mother's Day
Day set apart in the USA, UK, and many European countries for honouring mothers. It is thought to have originated in Grafton, West Virginia, USA, in 1908 when Anna Jarvis observed the anniversary of...

Motherwell, Robert Burns
(1915-1991) US painter. He was associated with the New York school of action painting. Borrowing from Picasso, Matisse, and the surrealists, Motherwell's style...

Motherwell, William
(1797-1835) Scottish poet and journalist. He used his knowledge of the early history of Scottish ballad literature in Minstrelsy, Ancient and Modern 1827, a collection of Scottish ballads with a historical...

Motion, Andrew
(1952) English poet, biographer, and novelist, poet laureate 1999-â€Æ`. His volumes of poetry include The Price of Everything (1994). He published the authorized biography of the poet...

Motley, Arthur H(arrison)
(1900-1984) US publisher and business executive. He joined Crowell-Collier publishers in 1928, and as publisher of American Magazine (1941-46), he tripled circulation while increasing advertising revenue, a...

Motley, Constance Baker
(1921) US lawyer and judge. In 1964 she became the first black American woman to be elected to the New York state senate; she became president of Manhattan Borough (1965-66). In 1966 she became the first...

Motley, John Lothrop
(1814-1877) US historian. His book The Rise of the Dutch Republic 1856 became a standard work. His work is marked by extensive research and accuracy, and a vivid and dramatic style, which shows...

Motley, Willard (Francis)
(1912-1965) US writer. While living in Chicago's slums, he wrote Knock on Any Door (1947), a naturalistic account of the degradation of a young boy. His subsequent novels were not as well-received, but his...

motoring law
Legislation affecting the use of vehicles on public roads. It covers the licensing of vehicles and drivers, and the criminal offences that can be committed by the owners and drivers of vehicles. In...

Mott, John Raleigh
(1865-1955) US religious leader. An influential ecumenical leader for all his long life, he became honorary president of the World Council of Churches in 1948. He published 15 books, including The Larger...

Mott, Lucretia Coffin
(1793-1880) US antislavery and women's rights leader. She helped found the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. Growing frustrated by the exclusion of women in abolitionist efforts, she later devoted...

motte
Fortified mound within a castle or other fortification. At the Norman conquest, it was necessary to garrison the country at speed, and mottes, often surrounded only by ditches or wooden walls, were...

Mottisfont Abbey
Abbey in Hampshire, England, 15 km/9 mi west of Winchester. The 660 ha/1630 acre estate, which includes most of Mottisfont village, the abbey itself, and 162 ha/400 acres of woodland, was given to...

Mottram, R(alph) H(ale)
(1883-1971) English novelist. His war experiences in Belgium inspired The Spanish Farm 1924 (Hawthornden prize), one of the most impressive books about World War I. Sixty-four, Ninety-four 1925 and The...

Mould, Jacob Wrey
(1825-1886) English-born architect and designer. In New York (1852) he was an early practitioner of English High Victorian Gothic and introduced polychrome construction, including polychrome interiors. Mould...

moulding
Use of a pattern, hollow form, or matrix to give a specific shape to something in a plastic or molten state. It is commonly used for shaping plastics, clays, and glass. When metals are used, the...

Moulin, Jean
(1899-1943) French Resistance leader. A government prefect at the outbreak of World War II, he joined General Moulthrop, Ed
(1916) US woodworker. He is noted for his large bowls that he would treat and finish after turning them out of green Southern woods; his largest stands 45 inches high, is 30 inches in diameter, and weighs...

Moultrie, John
(1799-1874) English poet and clergyman. His collected Poems were published 1876. His most memorable poems are `My Brother's Grave` and `Godiva`, both printed 1820. Other verse includes The Dream of Life...

Moultrie, William
(1730-1805) US soldier and governor. A soldier, he directed military strategy in South Carolina during the American Revolution, defending Charleston in 1776. Becoming a brigadier general, he defeated the...

Moundbuilder
Member of any of the various American Indian peoples of the Midwest and the South who built earth mounds, from about 1000 BC to AD 1560. They include the Adena, Hopewell, Mississippian, and Natchez....

Mount Ievers Court
Country house at Sixmilebridge, Country Clare, Republic of Ireland, built on the site of an earlier castle by Henry Ievers to designs by the architect John Rothery. Famously resembling a doll's...

Mount Stewart House
Country house near Greyabbey, County Down, Northern Ireland. The oldest part of this Classical 1820s house dates from the early 1800s, or possibly as early as the 1780s, when the 1st Marquess of...

Mount Usher Gardens
Gardens created by the Walpole family near Ashford, County Wicklow, Republic of Ireland. They date from 1868, cover about 8 ha/20 acres, and contain many exotic tender plant species as well as...

Mount, William Sidney
(1807-1868) US painter. He was one of the first and most popular US genre painters, his speciality being humorous and sentimental scenes of rural life. His pictures were made popular through the prints of...

mountain man
Name given to beaver trappers working in the Rocky and Sierra Nevada mountains of the USA, between the Great Plains, California, and Oregon, in the 1820s and 1830s. Their travels were crucial to the...

Mountbatten, Edwina Cynthia Annette
(1901-1960) English philanthropist. During the London Blitz (1940-42) she rendered distinguished service to the Red Cross and St John Ambulance Brigade, and became super ...

Mounties
Popular name for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. ...

Mountjoy Castle
Square castle on the shores of Lough Neagh, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. It was built in the early 1600s for Charles Blount, 8th Baron Mountjoy. A central keep and two corner towers survive. The...

Mourning Becomes Electra
Trilogy of plays by Eugene O'Neill in 1931 that retells the Orestes legend, dramatized by Aeschylus (see Oresteia), setting it in the world of 19th-century New England. The three are considered...

Mousetrap, The
Murder mystery play by Agatha Christie, which has run continuously in London since it was first performed at the Ambassador's Theatre in 1952, making it the world's longest-running play. Since...

Mousterian
Middle Palaeolithic (Old Stone Age) culture producing distinctive flint implements, mainly from flakes. The name derives from a Neanderthal rock shelter at Le Moustier in the Dordogne, France....

Moustier, Le
Rock shelter in the Dordogne, southwestern France, with prehistoric remains. It gave the name Mousterian to a type...

Mow Cop
Hill at the southern end of the Pennines on the Cheshire-Staffordshire border, central England; height 300 m/984 ft. It was the site of an open-air religious gathering on 31 May 1807 that is...

Mowlam, Marjorie
(`Mo`) (1949-2005) British Labour politician, secretary of state for Northern Ireland 1997-99 and minister for the Cabinet Office and chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster from 1999. After her appointment, she made...

Moya, Jacko (John Hidalgo)
(1920-1994) US-born British architect. His modernist work, in partnership with others, includes housing developments, for example, Churchill Gardens, Pimlico, London (1956-92); and Oxbridge college...

Moynihan, Daniel Patrick
(1927-2003) US Democrat politician and diplomat. A senator for New York from 1977, he became chair of the Senate Finance Committee in January 1993. In 1995 he led the opposition to Republican attempts to cut...

Mozambique
Country in southeast Africa, bounded north by Zambia, Malawi, and Tanzania; east and south by the Indian Ocean; southwest by South Africa and Swaziland; and west by Zimbabwe. Government Mozambique...

MP
Abbreviation for member of Parliament. ...

MPLA
Socialist organization founded in the early 1950s that sought to free Angola from Portuguese rule 1961-75 before being involved in the civil war against its former allies UNITA and FNLA 1975-76....

Mr X
US explorer and journalist; see George Kennan. ...

MRBM
Abbreviation for medium-range ballistic missile. ...

Mrozek, S&lsla;awomir
(1930-1993) Polish dramatist. His political allegories include Policja/The Police (1958), Na pe&lsla;nym morzu/Out at Sea (1961), Striptease (1961), and Tango (1965),...

Mrs Dalloway
Novel (1925) by Virginia Woolf. Clarissa Dalloway, a middle-aged `society woman`, drifts through a summer's day in London, preparing for the party she is to give that evening. A visit from a...

Mtskheta
Small historical town in Georgia, 21 km/13 mi northwest of Tbilisi; population (1990 est) 10,000. It is a treasury of Georgian architecture dating from the 6th-11th centuries. Mtskheta has been...

MU
In economics, abbreviation for monetary unit. ...

Mu-Chi (or Muqi)
(c. 1180-c. 1270) Chinese painter of the Song dynasty. A Chan Buddhist, he employed a technique based on intuition and spontaneity. One of his best-known works is Six Persimmons (early 13th century; Daitoku-ji,...

Mu'allaqat (or Moallakat)
Collection of 6th-century Arabic odes compiled in the 8th century. They are written in the qasida form, and are a record of the spirit of the age in pre-Islamic Arabia. The subject matter...

Mubarak, (Muhammad) Hosni (Said)
(1928) Egyptian soldier and politician, president from 1981. Vice-president to Anwar Sadat from 1975, Mubarak succeeded him on Sadat's assassination. He continued to pursue Sadat's moderate policies,...

Mucha, Alphonse Maria
(1860-1939) Czech painter and designer, one of the leading figures of art nouveau. His posters and decorative panels brought him international fame, presenting idealized images of young women with long, flowing...

Muckrakers, the
Movement of US writers and journalists about 1880-1914 who aimed to expose political, commercial, and corporate corruption, and record frankly the age of industrialism, urban poverty, and...

Muckross Abbey
Franciscan abbey situated on a peninsula separating the upper and lower Lakes of Killarney, County Kerry, Republic of Ireland. It was founded about 1440 by Donal MacCarthy, the chieftain of Desmond....

Mudéjar
In Spanish and Portuguese architecture and decorative arts, a style that combined Gothic and Islamic elements. It flourished during the conquest of the peninsula from the Moors in the 11th-15...

Mudge, Isadore Gilbert
(1875-1957) US librarian and bibliographer. Mudge is credited with virtually creating modern US academic and reference library services. She edited four editions of the Guide to Reference Works (1917, 1923,...

mudra
In Hindu religious dance, any of a number of ritualized body gestures, especially of the hand and fingers. In Buddhist art, the symbolic hand gestures of Buddhas and bodhisattvas are known as...

Mueller, Otto
(1874-1930) German expressionist painter and graphic artist. One of the die Brücke group in Dresden, he aimed to express a `primitive innocence`. His most distinctive works are studies of young women...

mufti
Muslim legal expert who guides the courts in their interpretation. In Turkey the grand mufti had supreme spiritual authority until the establishment of the republic in 1924. ...

Mugabe, Robert (Gabriel)
(1924) Zimbabwean politician, prime minister from 1980 and executive president from 1987. He was detained and imprisoned in Rhodesia (as Zimbabwe was then known) for nationalist activities 1964-74, then...

Muggeridge, (Thomas) Malcolm
(1903-1990) English journalist and author. He worked for the Guardian, the Calcutta Statesman, the London Evening Standard, and the Daily Telegraph before becoming editor of Punch 1953-57. ...

mugwump
In US political history, a colloquial name for the reform Republicans who voted in the 1884 presidential election for Grover Cleveland, the Democratic candidate, rather than for the Republican...

Muhammad II
(1430-1481) Sultan of Turkey 1451-81. He took the city of Constantinople from the Byzantines in 1453 and renamed it Istanbul, fortified the Dardanelles, conquered Greece and most of the Balkans, and at sea...

Muhammad V
(1844-1918) Sultan of Turkey 1909-18. When the Turkish revolution occurred in 1909 at the instigation of the Young Turks, the army under Shefket Pasha took possession of Constantinople, deposed and exiled the...

Muhammad VI
(1963) King of Morocco from 1999. He succeeded the throne after the death of his father, Hassan II. As the 23rd king of the Alaouite Dynasty, whose reign started in the mid-17th century, Muhammad VI...

Muhammad, Elijah
(1897-1975) US religious movement leader. Having had his own spiritual revelation about 1930, he fell in with the Nation of Islam, a movement founded by Wallace D Fard (or Farad), a somewhat mysterious black...

Muhammad, Murtala Ramat
(1938-1976) Nigerian army officer and politician. He succeeded Gen Yakubu Gowon as head of state in July 1975, but was assassinated in February 1976 in an abortive and irrational coup...

Muhoho, George Kamau
(1938) Kenyan theologian and administrator. He was director of the National Environment Secretariat and director of information for the United Nations Environment Programme until 1987, and was appointed...

muhrim
The close relatives of the opposite sex, detailed by the Koran, whom a Muslim may not marry. A Muslim may not mix freely with any member of the opposite sex outside these prohibited degrees. ...

Muir, Edwin
(1887-1959) Scottish poet. He drew mystical inspiration from his Orkney childhood. First Poems (1925) was published after an extended period of travel and residence in Europe, which also resulted in...

Muir, John
(1838-1914) Scottish-born US conservationist. From 1880 he headed a campaign that led to the establishment of Yosemite National Park. He was named adviser to the National Forestry Commission 1896 and...

Muir, John Ramsay Brice
(1872-1941) British historian and politician. He was a Liberal member of Parliament for Rochdale 1923-24, and chair 1931-33, then president 1933-36, of the National Liberal Federation. His chief...

Mujahedin
Islamic fundamentalist guerrillas of contemporary Afghanistan and Iran. ...

Mukden incident
A surprise attack on 18 September 1931 by the Japanese on the Chinese garrison of Mukden (now called Shenyang), capital city of Manchuria, that marked the beginning of their invasion of China. ...

Mukden, Battle of
Japanese victory over the Russians during the Russo-Japanese War, February ...