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

Attis
In classical mythology, a Phrygian god whose death and resurrection symbolized the end of winter and the arrival of spring; also regarded as a vegetation god. Beloved by the earth goddess Cybele,...

Attlee, Clement (Richard)
(1883-1967) British Labour politician. In the coalition government during World War II he was Lord Privy Seal 1940-42, dominions secretary 1942-43, and Lord President of the Council 1943-45, as well as...

attorney
Person who represents another in legal matters. In the USA, attorney is the formal title for a lawyer. Use of the term is largely obsolete in the UK except in Attorney General. See...

Attorney General
In the UK, principal law officer of the crown and head of the English Bar; the post is one of great political importance. In the USA, it is the chief law officer of the government and head of the...

Attossa
(lived 6th century BC) Queen of Persia, daughter of Cyrus the Great, King of Persia, and wife successively of Cambyses, Smerdis, and Darius I Hystaspis (by whom she had four sons, including the future king of Persia...

attribute
In archaeology, a characteristic element of a particular culture or group; or a specific element of an individual artifact, such as the rim of a pot or the base of a projectile point, or a type of...

Attucks, Crispus
(c. 1723-1770) American revolutionary figure. Little is known of Attuck's origins, but he is believed to have been a freed or escaped slave, possibly from Framingham, Massachusetts. He was killed by British...

Attwell, Mabel Lucie
(1879-1964) English artist. She illustrated many books for children, including her own stories and verse, with cherubic-styled figures in comic and poignant settings. Her name was also used by her daughter,...

Attwood, Thomas
(1783-1856) British Chartist politician. He founded the Birmingham Political Union 1830 and was member of parliament for Birmingham 1832-39. He presented the first Chartist Petition to parliament July 1839...

Atwater, Caleb
(1778-1867) US educator and archaeologist. An Ohio lawyer and legislator, he founded the Ohio state school system and wrote the important `Essay on Education` (1841). Atwater also made the earliest North...

Aubanel, Théodore
(1829-1886) French writer. In collaboration with Frédéric Mistral and Joseph Roumanille, he devoted himself to the work of reviving and continuing the Provençal language and Provençal literature. He also...

Aubers Ridge, Battle of
In World War I, abortive British attack on German lines in May 1915 in support of, and diversionary to, the French attack on Lens in the Battle of Artois. No gains were made and both sides sustained...

Aubigne, Jean Henri Merle d'
(1794-1872) Swiss historian of the Reformation. He became professor of church history in the newly founded theological school in Geneva 1830. He published Histoire de la Reformation au XVIe siècle/History of...

Aubrey, John
(1626-1697) English biographer and antiquary. He was the first to claim Stonehenge as a Druid temple. His Lives, begun in 1667, contains gossip, anecdotes, and valuable insights into the celebrities of his...

Aucassin et Nicolette
13th-century French tale of romantic adventure. Aucassin's obsessive love for Nicolette, a Saracen girl brought up as a Christian, is opposed by his father, the count of Beaucaire. After strange...

Auchincloss, Louis (Stanton)
(1917) US lawyer and writer. After World War II, Auchinloss took up a career as a Wall Street lawyer, a profession he continued to pursue while he gained a reputation as a writer in the...

Auchinleck, Claude John Eyre
(1884-1981) British commander in World War II. He commanded the First Battle of El Alamein in 1942 in northern Egypt, in which he held Rommel's allied German and Italian forces at bay. In 1943 he became...

Auden, W(ystan) H(ugh)
(1907-1973) English-born US poet. He wrote some of his most original poetry, such as Look, Stranger! (1936), in the 1930s when he led the influential left-wing literary group that included the writers Louis...

audience
In literature and drama, the hearers or spectators of an event, the readers of a book, or the people who regularly watch or listen to a particular television or radio programme. ...

audiencia
Institution of colonial Spanish America. Audiencias were originally high courts of appeal, nominally subject to a viceroy, but they widened their powers and became in effect general administrative...

audit
Official inspection of a company's accounts by a qualified accountant as required by law each year to ensure that the company balance sheet reflects the true state of its affairs. ...

Audit Commission
Independent body in the UK established by the Local Government Finance Act 1982. It administers the District Audit Service (established in 1844) and appoints auditors for the accounts of all UK...

Audley, Thomas
(1488-1544) Lord Chancellor of England from 1533. In 1529 he became Speaker of the House of Commons. He supported the annulment of Henry VIII's marriage to Catherine of Aragon; presided at the trials of Thomas...

Augean stables
In Greek mythology, the stables of Augeas, king of Elis in southern Greece. The yards, containing 3,000 cattle, had not been swept for 30 years. Heracles had to clean them as one of 12 labours set...

auger
Tool for boring holes. Originally, a carpenter's tool, with a cutting edge and a screw point, manipulated by means of a handle at right angles to the shank. In archaeology a large auger is used to...

Aughrim, Battle of
On 12 July 1691, a clash between the armies of James II under the Irish general St Ruth (who was killed), and those of William III under Gen Ginkell (later Earl of Athlone). The battle, won by the...

Augier, (Guillaume Victor) Émile
(1820-1889) French dramatist. Reacting against Romanticism, in collaboration with Jules Sandeau he wrote Le Gendre de M Poirier 1854, a realistic delineation of bourgeois society. ...

Augmentation, Court of
In English history, a court set up by Henry VIII in 1536 and dissolved in 1554. Its object was to manage the revenues and possessions of all monasteries under £200 a year, which by a previous...

Augsburg, Confession of
Statement of the Lutheran faith composed by Philip Melanchthon. Presented to...

Augsburg, Peace of
Religious settlement following the Diet of Augsburg of 1555, which established the right of princes in the Holy Roman Empire (rather than the Emperor himself) to impose a religion on their subjects...

augur
Member of a college of Roman priests who interpreted the will of the gods from signs or `auspices` such as the flight, song, or feeding of birds, the condition of the entrails of sacrificed...

Augustales
In ancient Rome and other parts of the Roman empire, games (ludi Augustales) held in honour of the emperor Augustales
In Roman times, a college of priests, established by the emperor Tiberius, concerned originally with...

Augustan Age
Age of the Roman emperor Augustus (31 BC-AD 14), during which art and literature flourished. It is also used to characterize the work of 18th-century writers who adopted the style, themes, and...

Augustin, Eugène
(1791-1861) French dramatist. He was the originator and exponent of `well-made` plays, which achieved success but were subsequently forgotten. He wrote Une Nuit de la Garde Nationale 1815. ...

Augustine of Hippo, St
(354-430) One of the early Christian leaders and writers known as the Fathers of the Church. He was converted to Christianity by Ambrose in Milan and became bishop of Hippo (modern Annaba, Algeria) in 396....

Augustine, St
(died 605) First archbishop of Canterbury, England. He was sent from Rome to convert England to Christianity by Pope Gregory I. He landed at Ebbsfleet in Kent in 597 and soon after baptized Ethelbert, King of...

Augustinian
Member of a religious community that follows the Rule of St Augustine of Hippo. It includes the Canons of St Augustine, Augustinian Friars and Hermits,...

Augustov, Battle of
At the start of World War I, successful Russian counterattack after the disaster at Tannenberg in October 1914 to recapture Augustov, a town in western Poland about 60 km/38 mi north of...

Augustus II
(1670-1733) Elector of Saxony (1694-1733) and King of Poland (1697-1733). He converted to Catholicism and joined forces with Russia and Denmark in 1700 to begin the Great Northern War against Sweden. This...

Augustus III
(1696-1763) Elector of Saxony and King of Poland 1733-63. In his reign, the city of Dresden developed into a centre of baroque art and culture, but Poland's prestige continued to decline. The joint monarchy...

Auld Alliance
Intermittent alliance between Scotland and France that lasted from the end of the 13th century until 1560, when Protestantism displaced Catholicism as the dominant faith in Scotland. ...

Aulic Council
Legislative and executive body established by Emperor Maximilian I in 1497, to assist in governing the Holy Roman Empire. At first its business was very wide, including every question, domestic or...

Aulis
Anchorage on the east coast of Greece, opposite the island of Euboea. In Greek mythology, it was the point of departure for the Greek expedition against Troy. ...

Aum Shinrikyo
Millennial Buddhist-Hindu sect founded in 1987 in Japan. Members believed that the world would end in 1997 or 1999 with a bloody war or nuclear explosion. Its leaders were held responsible for the...

Aumale, Count of
French title first granted by William the Conqueror to his brother-in-law Odo of Champagne. After passing through many hands, the title came into the possession of Louis XIV, who gave it to the...

Aumann, Robert John
(1930) Israeli mathematician and economist. A professor at the Center for Rationality at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel, he won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2005 for his work on aumbry
A cupboard or niche in a wall of a church. It is sometimes written in the form `almery`, being confused with `almonry` and taken to mean a place for alms. This word is usually applied to a...

Aumonier, Stacy
(1887-1928) English writer. His novel The Querrils (1919) tells of a wartime family. His collections of stories include Heartbeat (1922), Overheard: Fifteen Tales (1924), The Baby Grand (1926), and Little...

Aung San
(1916-1947) Burmese (Myanmar) politician. He was a founder and leader of the Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League, which led Burma's fight for independence from the UK. During World War II he collaborated...

Aung San Suu Kyi
Burmese (Myanmar) politician; see Suu Kyi. ...

Aungerville, Richard
(1287-1345) English politician, cleric, and writer. In 1333 he became bishop of Durham. He was Lord Chancellor 1334-35 and lord treasurer 1336. He used his office as a minister of state to further his...

Aunis
Former province of France, corresponding to parts of the present départements of Charente-Maritime and Deux-Sèvres. It was united to the French crown in 1271 after having been...

aura
In parapsychology, an emanation surrounding the human body, particularly the head. The aura is said to be visible to clairvoyants and other similarly psychic individuals. It is believed to be the...

Aurangzeb (or Aurungzebe)
(1618-1707) Mogul emperor of northern India from 1658. Third son of Shah Jahan, he made himself master of the court by a palace revolution. His reign was the most brilliant period of the Mogul dynasty, but his...

Aurelian
(c.AD 215-275) Roman emperor 270-75. A successful soldier, he was proclaimed emperor by his troops on the death of Claudius II. He campaigned on the Danube and...

Aurelian Wall
Fortified wall surrounding ancient Rome. This defensive structure was begun by the emperor Aurelius Antoninus
Full name of Caracalla, Roman emperor from 211. ...

Aurelius, Marcus
Roman emperor; see Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. ...

Aurelius, Victor Sextus
Roman historian. He wrote biographies of the emperors from Augustus to Constantius II. ...

aureole
Another word for halo. ...

Aurignacian
In archaeology, an Old Stone Age culture in Europe that came between the Mousterian and the Solutrean in the Upper Palaeolithic. The name is derived from a rock-shelter at Aurignac in the Pyrenees...

Auriol, Vincent
(1884-1966) French Socialist politician. He was president of the two Constituent Assemblies of 1946 and first president of the Fourth Republic 1947-54. ...

Aurora
In Roman mythology, goddess of the dawn (Greek Eos). Preceded by her sons, the fresh morning winds, she would fly or drive a chariot across the sky to announce the approach of Apollo's chariot...

Auroras of Autumn, The
Collection of poems 1950 by US poet Wallace Stevens. The title poem is a dense, meditative lyric on the poet's anxieties about religious belief. It uses the Northern Lights as an image for a world...

Auschwitz
Town near Kraków in Poland; the site of the notorious Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp used by the Nazis in World War II to exterminate Jews and other political and social minorities, as...

Ausgleich
Compromise between Austria and Hungary on 8 February 1867 that established the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy under Habsburg rule. It endured until the collapse of Austria-Hungary in 1918. ...

Ausonia
Name given by ancient Greek writers to Latium and Campania, the regions of ancient Italy, and sometimes by the Augustan poets to the whole of Italy. ...

Ausonius, Decimus Magnus
(c. 310-c. 395) Latin poet, son of a physician from Burdigala (Bordeaux), where he received his education. He first became an advocate, and later a professor of grammar and rhetoric. He was so successful that the...

auspices
Signs interpreted by the Roman augurs. ...

Austen, Jane
(1775-1817) English novelist. She described her raw material as `three or four families in a Country Village`. Sense and Sensibility was published in 1811, Pride and Prejudice in 1813, Mansfield Park in...

Auster, Paul
(1947) US writer. Making experimental use of detective story techniques, he has explored modern urban identity in his acclaimed New York Trilogy:City of Glass (1985), Ghosts...

Austerlitz, Battle of
Battle on 2 December 1805, in which the French forces of Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte defeated those of Alexander I of Russia and Francis II of Austria at a small town...

Austin, Alfred
(1835-1913) English poet. His satirical poem The Season (1861) was followed by plays and volumes of poetry little read today. The Garden that I Love (1894) is a prose idyll. He...

Austin, Horatio Thomas
(1801-1865) British navigator and explorer who served under Sir William Edward Parry in 1824-25, in his unsuccessful attempt to find the Northwest Passage. In 1850-51 he commanded an expedition in the...

Austin, J(ohn) L(angshaw)
(1911-1960) British philosopher, a pioneer in the investigation of the way words are used in everyday speech. His later work was influential on the philosophy of language. According to Austin's theory of speech...

Austin, John
(1790-1859) English jurist. His analysis of the chaotic state of the English legal system led him to define law as the enforceable command of a sovereign authority, thus distinguishing it from other kinds of...

Austin, Moses
(1761-1821) US merchant and colonist. Following the American depression of 1819, Austin applied for a permit from the Spanish authorities to settle 300 hundred American families in Texas. ...

Austin, Stephen Fuller
(1793-1836) US pioneer and political leader. A settler in Texas 1821, he was a supporter of the colony's autonomy and was imprisoned 1833-35 for his opposition to Mexican rule. Released during the Australia
Country occupying all of the Earth's smallest continent, situated south of Indonesia, between the Pacific and Indian oceans. Government Australia is an independent sovereign nation within the...

Australia Day
Australian national day and public holiday in Australia, the anniversary of Captain Phillip's arrival on 26 January 1788 at Sydney Cove in Port Jackson and the founding...

Australia Felix
Term applied by the explorer Thomas Mitchell in 1836 to the lush area south of the Murray River (now western Victoria), Australia. ...

Australia First Movement
Right-wing nationalist organization formed in Sydney in 1941 to support the World War II defence of Australia by recalling Australian forces from overseas, even at the expense of the general war...

Australian Aboriginal religions
Beliefs associated with the creation legends recorded in the Dreamtime stories. ...

Australian Aborigine
Member of any of the 500 groups of indigenous inhabitants of the continent of Australia, who migrated to this region from South Asia about 40,000 years ago. Traditionally hunters and gatherers, they...

Australian architecture
The architecture of the Australian continent. Traditionally, Aboriginal settlements tended to be based around caves, or a construction of bark huts, arranged in a circular group; there was some...

Australian art
Art in Australia appears to date back at least 40,000 years, judging by radiocarbon dates obtained from organic material trapped in varnish covering apparently abstract rock engravings in South...

Australian Imperial Force
Volunteer military force formed at the outbreak of World War I, the major Australian contribution to the war. It was organized into infantry divisions (eventually five), five light horse divisions,...

Australian literature
Australian literature begins with the letters, journals, and memoirs of early settlers and explorers. The first poet of note was Charles Harpur (1813-1868); idioms and rhythms typical of the...

Australopithecus
The first hominid, living 3.5-4 million years ago; see human species, origins of. ...

Austria
Landlocked country in central Europe, bounded east by Hungary, south by Slovenia and Italy, west by Switzerland and Liechtenstein, northwest by Germany, north by...

Austrian School
An approach to economics originated by Austrian economist Carl Menger (1840-1921). He put forward a theory of value based on marginal utility which contributed to the development of Austrian Succession, War of the
War 1740-48 between Austria (supported by England and Holland) and Prussia (supported by France and Spain). The Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI died in 1740 and the succession of his daughter Maria...

Austro-Hungarian Empire
The Dual Monarchy established by the Habsburg Franz Joseph in 1867 between his empire of Austria and his kingdom of Hungary (including territory that became Czechoslovakia as well as parts of...

autarchy
National economic policy that aims at achieving self-sufficiency and eliminating the need for imports (by imposing tariffs, for example). Such a goal may be difficult, if not impossible, for a...

authoritarianism
Rule of a country by a dominant elite who repress opponents and the press to maintain their own wealth and power. They are frequently indifferent to activities not affecting their security, and...

authority
In a political system, the capacity to take and enforce decisions. The nature, sources, and limitations of political authority have been much debated questions since the time of the ancient Greeks. ...

authorized capital
The total amount of money that a company is allowed to raise through the issue of shares as stated in its memorandum of association. The authorized capital may differ from issued capital if the...

auto-da-fé
Religious ceremony, including a procession, solemn mass, and sermon, which accompanied the sentencing of heretics by the Spanish Inquisition be ...

autobiography
A person's own biography, or written account of his or her life, distinguished from a journal or diary by being a connected prose narrative, and distinguished from memoirs by dealing less with...