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

noncooperation movement
In India, a large-scale civil disobedience campaign orchestrated by Mahatma Gandhi in 1920 following the Amritsar Massacre in April 1919. Based on a policy of peaceful non-cooperation, the...

Nonjuror
Any of the priests of the Church of England who, after the revolution of 1688, refused to take the oaths of allegiance to William and Mary. They continued to exist as a rival church for over a...

Nonnus
(lived 5th century) Greek epic poet, a native of Panopolis, Egypt. His most noted work is the Dionysiaca, a history of Bacchus in 48 books. A paraphrase of St John's Gospel, written in Greek...

nonviolence
Principle or practice of abstaining from the use of violence. The Indian nationalist leader Mahatma Gandhi adopted a campaign of passive resistance 1907-14 in response to the attempts by the...

Nootka
Member of an American Indian people living on the southwest coast of Vancouver Island, near Nootka Sound, that used to hunt whales. Their language belongs to the Wakashan group and they are...

Nordau, Max Simon
(1849-1923) Hungarian physician and author. He practised medicine in Budapest and later settled in Paris as a physician. Turning to literature, he wrote novels and plays in a satirical vein to illustrate his...

Norden, Carl Lucas
(1880-1965) Mechanical engineer. Known for contributions to military hardware, in 1927 he produced the first Norden bombsight, which allowed precision bombing. He also developed the first gyrostabilizing...

Norden, Denis
(1922) English scriptwriter and broadcaster. His successful 17-year partnership with the British humorist, scriptwriter, and broadcaster Frank Muir, included the radio series Take It From Here...

Nordenskjöld, Nils Adolf Erik
(1832-1901) Swedish explorer. He made voyages to the Arctic with the geologist Torell and in 1878-79 discovered the Northeast Passage. He published the results of his voyages in a series of books, including...

Nordic
Ethnic designation for any of the various Germanic peoples, especially those of Scandinavia. The physical type of Caucasoid described under that term is tall, long-headed, blue-eyed, fair of...

Nore mutiny
British naval mutiny in 1797, caused by low pay and bad conditions. It took place at anchorage by the Nore in the Thames. ...

Norfolk, Hugh Bigod
(died 1176/77) English noble, noted for his treachery and double dealing. He received his earldom in return for helping Stephen to obtain the English crown. In 1169 he was one of the nobles excommunicated by...

Norfolk, Roger Bigod
(died 1270) English noble. He was prominent in the promulgation of the Provisions of Oxford in 1258, but later transferred his allegiance to the king. In 1264 he was one of the five earls summoned to Simon de...

Norfolk, Roger Bigod
(died 1221) English noble, son of the 1st Earl of Norfolk. He was an ambassador to France under Richard (I) the Lion-Heart and retained his power during John's reign, save for a short interval in 1213, but...

Norfolk, Thomas Howard
(1473-1554) English soldier, brother-in-law of Henry VII and a leading Catholic politician under Henry VIII and Mary Tudor. He served at the Battle of Flodden in 1513 and was appointed Lord High Admiral in...

Norfolk, Thomas Howard, 4th duke of
(1536-1572) Catholic peer who hoped to marry Mary Queen of Scots and have her declared heir to Elizabeth. Through his opposition to Secretary Cecil he was implicated in the Northern Rebellion of 1569 but...

Noricum
Ancient district south of the River Danube, between Raetia and Pannonia. Its mainly Celtic inhabitants were ruled by local princes. In 16 BC...

Noriega Morena, Manuel (Antonio)
(1940) Panamanian soldier and politician, effective ruler and dictator of Panama from 1983, as head of the National Guard, until deposed by the USA in 1989. An informer for the US Central Intelligence...

normal profit
Level of profit below which a firm would switch its resources into the production of other goods and services. If firms in a competitive industry are earning abnormal profit, which is profit greater...

Norman
Any of the descendants of the Norsemen (to whose chief, Rollo, Normandy was granted by Charles III of France in 911) who adopted French language and culture. During the 11th and 12th centuries they...

Norman architecture
Style of architecture used in England in the 11th and 12th centuries, also known as Romanesque. Norman buildings are massive, with round arches (although trefoil arches are sometimes used for small...

Norman Conquest
Invasion and settlement of England by the Normans, following the victory of William (I) the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. The story of the conquest from the Norman point of view is...

Norman yoke
Popular belief dating from the 17th century or earlier, and revived in Victorian times, that the Norman invasion and the imposition of feudalism on England destroyed a better, Saxon, system of...

Norman, Montagu Collet
(1871-1950) British banker. Governor of the Bank of England 1920-44, he handled German reparations (financial compensation exacted by the Allies) after World War I, and, by his advocacy of a return to the...

Normandy
Former duchy of northwest France now divided into two regions: Haute-Normandie and Basse-Normandie; area 29,900 sq km/11,544 sq mi; population (both parts, 1999 est) 3,202,400. Normandy was...

Normandy landings
Alternative name for D-day. ...

Norn
In Norse mythology, any of three goddesses of fate:Urd, goddess of the past;Verdandi, goddess of the present; and Skuld, goddess of the future. They fixed the destiny of every child at birth. The...

Norris, Charles Gilman
(1881-1945) US novelist. His novels deal with such themes as hereditary influences, eugenics, modern education, business morality, and the place of women in business. They include Salt 1917, Brass 1921, Bread...

Norris, Frank (Benjamin Franklin)
(1870-1902) US novelist. A naturalist writer, he wrote McTeague (1899), about a brutish San Francisco dentist and the love of gold (filmed as Greed in 1923). He completed only two parts of his projected...

Norris, George William
(1861-1944) US representative and senator. In 1913 he began a stormy 30-year career in the US Senate (1913-43). A progressive in domestic matters, he gained national notoriety for his opposition to US entry...

Norris, John
(c. 1547-1597) English soldier. He served in conflicts in the Low Countries, France, and Ireland, and in 1589 commanded, with Francis Drake, the fleet that ravaged...

Norris, John
(1657-1711) English philosopher and Anglican minister. He was an idealist (see idealism) and a student of Plato and Nicolas Malebranche. Though critical of the English philosopher John Locke, he agreed with him...

Norris, Kathleen
(1880-1966) US novelist. Her sentimental novels include Mother 1911, High Holiday 1949, and Miss Harriet Townshend 1955. She married novelist Charles Norris in 1909. ...

Norse
Early inhabitant of Norway or Scandinavia; also referring to their language and culture. ...

Norsemen
Early inhabitants of Norway. The term Norsemen is also applied to Scandinavian Vikings who traded, explored, and raided far afield from their homelands during the 8th-11th centuries, settling in...

North Africa Campaign
Allied military campaign 1940-42 during World War II. Shortly after Italy declared war on France and Britain in June 1940, an Italian offensive was launched from Libya towards Egypt and the Suez...

North American Free Trade Agreement
Trade agreement between the USA, Canada, and Mexico, intended to promote trade and investment between the signatories, agreed in August 1992, and effective from January 1994. The first trade pact of...

North Atlantic Treaty
Agreement signed on 4 April 1949 by Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the UK, and the USA, in response to the Soviet blockade of Berlin...

North Atlantic Treaty Organization
Military association of major Western European and North American states set up under the North Atlantic Treaty of 4 April 1949. The original signatories were Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France,...

North Briton
Weekly periodical June 1762-April 1763, published by the radical John Wilkes. It achieved notoriety when issue 45 accused George III of lying in a speech to parliament. Wilkes and the magazine...

North Korea
Country in East Asia, bounded northeast by Russia, north and northwest by China, east by the Sea of Japan, south by South Korea, and west by the Yellow Sea. Government Under the 1972 constitution,...

North-South divide
Geographical division of the world that theoretically demarcates the rich from the poor. The South includes all of Asia except Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Brunei, and the South East Asian...

North, Christopher
Pseudonym of the Scottish writer John Wilson. ...

North, Dudley
(1614-1691) English economist. He is remembered for his Discourses upon Trade (1691). This work anticipated Adam Smith's doctrines and those of the free trade school, while being free from the prejudices and...

North, Frederick
(1732-1792) English Tory politician. He entered Parliament in 1754, became chancellor of the Exchequer in 1767, and was prime minister in a government of Tories and `king's friends` from 1770. His hard line...

North, Oliver
(1943) US Marine lieutenant colonel. In 1981 he joined the staff of the National Security Council (NSC), where he supervised the mining of Nicaraguan harbours...

North, Thomas
(c. 1535-c. 1601) English translator. His translations include Plutarch'sLives, which appeared in 1579 as Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. Northampton, Battle of
In the Wars of the Roses, defeat and capture of Henry VI in an early attack by the Yorkists under Richard Neville, Duke of Warwick, 10 July 1460. The Lancastrian Duke of Buckingham was killed in the...

Northampton, William Parr
(1513-1571) English noble, brother of Catherine Parr, the sixth wife of Henry VIII. During the reign of Edward VI he supported the causes of the Duke of Somerset and the Duke of Northumberland. On the death of...

Northcote, James
(1746-1831) English painter. He was the pupil of the portraitist Joshua Reynolds, of whom he wrote a biographical memoir 1813. He is of less note for his portraits than as a conversationalist on art and...

Northcote, Stafford Henry
(1818-1887) British politician, leader of the Conservative Party 1880-85. He was chancellor of the Exchequer 1874-80 and foreign secretary 1886-87. As party leader he pursued a policy of conciliation with...

Northern and Southern Dynasties
Period in Chinese history 317-581, the last part of the unsettled era known as the Three Kingdoms. ...

Northern draft riots
In US history, violent protests in the North against the draft during the American Civil War. During the worst riot, in July 1863, armed protesters in New York City set fire to buildings and held...

Northern Ireland
Constituent part of the United Kingdom, in the northeast of the island of Ireland; area 13,460 sq km/5,196 sq mi; population (2001) 1,685,300. It is comprised of six of the nine counties that form...

Northern Ireland Assembly
Power-sharing assembly based in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The Assembly came into being as a result of the 10 April 1998 Good Friday peace agreement between the contending Unionist and Irish...

Northern Ireland peace process
Process leading to peace, the establishment of the Northern League, The
See Lombardy League. ...

Northern rebellion
In English history, rising in 1569-70 led by the earls of Northumberland and Westmorland in support of the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots. They dem ...

Northern Wei dynasty
Hereditary Chinese rulers 386-535, in one of the Three Kingdoms. ...

Northumbria
Anglo-Saxon kingdom that covered northeast England and southeast Scotland. Comprising the 6th-century kingdoms of Bernicia (Forth-Tees) and Deira (Tees-Humber), united in the 7th century, it...

Northwest Indian
Member of a regional grouping of American Indian peoples occupying the shores and rivers of the Pacific coast from southern Alaska to northern California. They include Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian,...

Northwest Ordinances
Three US Congressional acts 1784-87 setting out procedures for the sale and settlement of lands still occupied by American Indians. The lands, making up the Northwest Territory, lay between the...

Northwest rebellion
Revolt against the Canadian government March-May 1885 by the métis (people of mixed French-Canadian and American Indian descent). Led by their political leader Louis Riel and his military...

Norton, Andrew
(1786-1853) US biblical scholar and Unitarian theologian. His Evidences of the Genuineness of the Gospels (3 volumes 1837-44) was one of the earliest critical studies of the Bible published...

Norton, Caroline
(1808-1877) British writer and social reformer. She was one of several minor poets whose works of the 1830s and early 1840s prefigure the more famous `social-problem novels` of the 1840s. Her chief...

Norton, Charles Eliot
(1827-1908) US scholar and writer. He is chiefly remembered for his translation and studies of Dante's Divina Commedia 1891-92, his History of Ancient Art 1891, and his Letters 1913. He also published...

Norton, Eleanor Holmes
(1937) US civil-rights activist. A lawyer by profession, as assistant director of the American Civil Liberties Union (1965-70), she defended the freedom of speech rights of the civil-rights activist...

Norton, Gale
(1954) US public servant and Republican politician, secretary of the interior 2001-06 under President George W Bush. The first woman to head the interior department, she favoured leaving the...

Norton, Mary
(1903-1992) English writer of books of children. The Magic Bedknob (1943) and Bonfires and Broomsticks (1947) were later adapted for film and reissued as Bedknobs and Broomsticks in 1970. She established her...

Norton, Mary Alice
(1860-1928) US home economist. She was a Smith College graduate and associate of the US engineer and chemist Ellen Richards, with whom she helped to prepare Home Sanitation (1887). She taught domestic science...

Norton, Mary Teresa
(1875-1959) US representative. Entering politics in 1920, Norton was one of the first women in the US House of Representatives (Democrat, New Jersey; 1924-51). She chaired the House Labor Committee...

Norton, Thomas
(1532-1584) English dramatist. He collaborated with Thomas Sackville in the composition of the tragedy Gorboduc (1561). Norton...

Norval, Morris
(1923) New Zealand-born criminologist and scholar. Adviser to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, he chaired the National Institute of Corrections (1986-89). He was coeditor of Crime and Justice: An Annual...

Norway
Country in northwest Europe, on the Scandinavian peninsula, bounded east by Sweden, northeast by Finland and Russia, south by the North Sea, west by the Atlantic Ocean, and north...

Norwegian
People of Norwegian culture. There are 4-4.5 million speakers of Norwegian (including some in the USA), a Germanic language belonging to the Indo-European family. The seafaring culture of the...

Norwich Cathedral
Cathedral in Norwich, Norfolk, England, dating from the 11th century. The original church was begun in 1096 as part of a Benedictine house by Herbert de Losinga, first bishop of Norwich. The spire,...

Norwich School
English regional school of landscape painters, inspired by the 17th-century Dutch realist tradition of landscape painting, notably the work of Ruisdael. Founded in 1803, the school was made up of...

Norwid, Cyprian Kamil
(1821-1883) Polish poet, dramatist, and prose writer. He wrote a poetic treatise on art, Promethidion 1851, and the play Zwolon 1851. His experimental poetic cycle Vade-mecum 1866 failed to find a publisher...

Nosaka, Sanzo
(1892-1993) Japanese Communist Party leader. He was first elected to the lower house of the Diet (parliament) in 1946 and to the upper house in 1956. At the very end of his life in 1992 he was expelled from the...

Nossack, Hans Erich
(1901-1977) German writer. His sober `reports`, set in a mixture of the real and mythically surreal world, analyse the morally debilitating features of a contemporary German society with which he is totally...

Nostell Priory
Outstanding Palladian house in West Yorkshire, England, 8 km/5 mi east of Wakefield. It was built in 1733 by James Nostradamus, Michael
(1503-1566) French physician and astrologer who was consulted by Catherine de' Medici and Charles IX of France. His book of prophecies in verse, Centuries (1555), makes cryptic predictions about world events up...

Nota, Alberto
(1775-1847) Italian dramatist. He was greatly influenced by Molière and Carlo Goldoni and followed these models very closely. Of his 40 or so plays, the most popular were I primi passi al mal costume/The First...

notary public
Legal practitioner who attests or certifies deeds and other documents. British diplomatic and consular officials may exercise notarial functions outside the UK. ...

Notestein, Wallace
(1878-1969) US historian. He specialized in English history, and his studies of the history of the House of Commons have become standard works. They include The Winning of the Initiative by the...

nothingness
Nonbeing. The concept is much used in existentialism, as in the title of Jean-Paul Sartre's work L'Etre et le néant/Being and Nothingness 1943. In logic, it is an error to assume that every...

Notman, John
(1810-1865) Scottish-born architect. Practising in Philadelphia after 1831, he early adopted the Italianate style and incorporated technological innovations like residential central heating and plumbing. He...

Notre-Dame de Paris
Cathedral in Paris, France, situated at the southeast end of the Ile-de-la-Cité. The first stone of the cathedral was laid by Pope Alexander III and Louis VII in 1163, on the site of an...

Nott William Frederick, John
(1932) British Conservative politician, minister for defence 1981-83 during the Falkland Islands conflict with Argentina. KCB 1983. ...

Nourse, Edwin (Griswold)
(1883-1974) US economist and government official. An academic, he directed economic research at the Brookings Institute (1929-46), publishing a study that recommended lowering prices and increasing wages. As...

Nouveau, Germain
(1851-1920) French poet who used the pseudonym Humilis. A Catholic writer, his collections include Poèmes d'Humilis (1911) and the posthumous Poésies d'Humilis et vers inédits (1926). ...

Nouvel, Jean
(1945) French architect. He uses the language of high-tech building in novel and highly distinctive ways. His celebrated Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, 1981-87, adapts traditional Islamic motifs to...

Novak, Michael (John)
(1933) US Catholic educator and author. He wrote numerous books on Catholicism, identity, and spiritual growth, and became an increasingly more prominent, and outspoken, conservative critic of contemporary...

Novalis
(1772-1801) Pioneer German Romantic poet. He wrote Hymnen an die Nacht/Hymns to the Night (1800), prompted by the death of his fiancée Sophie von Kühn. Feeling himself ecstatically united with his dead...

novel
Extended fictional prose narrative, usually between 30,000...

November criminals
Name given by right-wing nationalists in post-1918 Germany to the socialist politicians who had taken over the government after the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II and had signed the armistice...

Novgorod school
Russian school of icon and mural painters active from the late 14th to the 16th century in Novgorod, inspired by the work of the refugee Byzantine artist Theophanes the Greek. Russian artists...

Novgorodtsev, Pavel Ivanovich
(1866-1924) Russian jurist and philosopher. He advocated the revival of the doctrine of Novikov, Nikolai Ivanovich
(1744-1818) Russian journalist, philanthropist, and publisher. He tried to improve social conditions by means of satirical attacks on evils such as serfdom, and on foreign influence in Russia. He published...

Noyes, Alfred
(1880-1958) English poet. He wrote poems about the sea, including the popular sea epic Drake (1906-08), and the anthology favourites `The Barrel-Organ` (1904), with its refrain `Go down to Kew in...