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

Sigismund
(1368-1437) Holy Roman Emperor from 1411, king of Hungary 1387-1437, and king of Bohemia 1419-37. Sigismund's reign was overshadowed by two religious issues: the Great Schism and the agitation of the...

Signorelli, Luca
(c. 1450-1523) Italian painter from Cortona in Tuscany. His tense line and carefully defined musculature brought a new sense of energy and movement to the nude human figure, and his frescoes of The End of the...

Sigourney, Lydia
(1791-1865) US poet. Sigourney was an immensely prolific and popular writer. She wrote pious sentimental poems and edited religious and juvenile publications. ...

Sigurd
Hero of Norse legend; see Siegfried. ...

Sigurdsson, Jon
(1811-1879) Icelandic statesman and scholar. He spent his life fighting for the commercial and political freedom of Iceland and the cultural and economic advancement of his people. The abolition of the Danish...

Sihanouk, Norodom
(1922) Cambodian politician, king 1941-55 and from 1993. He was prime minister 1955-70, when his government was overthrown in a military coup led by Lon Nol. With Pol Pot's resistance front, he...

Sikandar Hayat Khan
(1892-1942) Indian politician. He was elected to the Punjab legislative council in 1921, and was appointed chair of the Punjab Reforms Committee to work with the Somon Commission. Elected chief minister of the...

Sikelianos, Angelos
(1884-1951) Greek poet. His first mature poem, The Light-Shadowed 1907, shows his identification with nature. Mother of God and Easter of the Greeks both 1917 reveal a deepening mysticism. Many of his finest...

Sikh ethics
Questions of right and wrong considered according to Sikhism. Sikhs believe that the purpose of life is to love God, and to use self-discipline to replace greed, desire, anger, and pride, with...

Sikh Wars
Two wars in India between the Sikhs and the British: The First Sikh War 1845-46 followed an invasion of British India by Punjabi Sikhs. The Sikhs were defeated and part...

Sikhism
Religion professed by 14 million Indians, living mainly in the Punjab. Sikhism was founded by Guru Nanak. Sikhs believe in a single God (monotheism)...

Silayev, Ivan Stepanovich
(1930) Soviet politician, prime minister of the USSR August-December 1991. A member of the Communist Party 1959-91 and of its Central Committee 1981-91, Silayev emerged as a reformer in 1990,...

Silbury Hill
Artificial mound of the Neolithic (New Stone Age) period, around 2800 BC, situated just south of Avebury in Wiltshire, England. Steep and rounded, it towers 40 m/130 ft high with a surrounding ditch...

Silchester
Archaeological site, a major town in Roman Britain. It is 10 km/6 mi north of Basingstoke, Hampshire. ...

Silenus
In Greek mythology, an aged satyr, son of Hermes or Pan, and companion of Dionysus. He is represented as jovial, fat, lecherous, and drunk, and had a reputation for song and prophecy. Unable to...

Siles Zuazo, Hernán
(1914-1996) Bolivian president 1956-60 and 1982-85), conservative politician, and lawyer. He founded the National Revolutionary Movement (MNR) and led the bloody revolt that brought the MNR into power in...

Silesia
Region of Europe that has long been disputed because of its geographical position, mineral resources, and industrial potential; now in Poland and the Czech Republic with met ...

silhouette
Profile or shadow portrait filled in with black or a dark colour. A common pictorial technique in Europe in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, it was named after Etienne de Silhouette...

Silistria, Siege of
In the Russo-Turkish war, unsuccessful Russian siege of a Turkish fortress December 1853-March 1854 at Silistria, Bulgaria, about 110 km/70 mi northwest of Varna; the incident provoked France...

silk
In UK law, a Queen's Counsel, a senior barrister entitled to wear a silk gown in court. ...

silk
Natural fibre made from fine soft thread produced by the larva of the silkworm moth when making its cocoon. It is soaked, carefully unwrapped, and used in the manufacture of textiles. The...

Silk Road
Ancient and medieval overland route of about 6,400 km/4,000 mi by which silk was brought from China to Europe in return for trade goods; it ran west via the Gobi Desert, Samarkand, and Antioch to...

silk-screen printing
Method of printing based on stencilling. It can be used to print on most surfaces, including paper, plastic, fabric, and wood. A fine mesh (originally silk) is stretched across a wooden frame to...

Silkin, Jon
(1930-1997) English poet. His works include The Re-ordering of the Stones (1961) and Nature With Man (1965). His mature style is marked by slow, rhythmic movements alternating with sharp, dramatic statements,...

Silko, Leslie
(1948) US writer and poet. Born of Laguna Indian, Mexican, and Anglo-American heritage, Silko was raised on a Pueblo Indian Reservation. Her work includes poetry, short stories, and novels which draw on...

Sillanpää, Frans Eemil
(1888-1964) Finnish novelist. His works include Hurskas kurjuus/Meek Heritage (1919), dealing with events that led to World War I, and Nuorena nukkunut/Fallen Asleep While Young (1931) and Miehen tie/One Man's...

Sillitoe, Alan
(1928) English novelist. One of the Angry Young Men of the 1950s, he wrote Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), about a working-class man in Nottingham; the character, Arthur Seaton, returned in...

Silone, Ignazio
(1900-1978) Italian novelist. His novel Fontamara 1933 deals with the hopes and disillusionment of a peasant village from a socialist viewpoint. His other works include Una manciata di more/A Handful of...

Silures
Celtic tribe of southeast Wales which joined with the Ordovices tribe in resisting the Romans. They were eventually subjugated abaout AD 75 and were recognized as a civitas, with their capital at...

Silva, Antonio José da
(1705-1739) Portuguese dramatist. His comedies display verbal and situational humour and biting social satire. They include Guerras do Alecrim e da Mangerona 1737. He was tortured by the Inquisition during his...

Silvanus
In Roman mythology, an ancient Italian woodland god, originally of uncultivated fields and forests, especially as protector of their boundaries. Later his patronage...

silver age
Former name for the period of Latin literature from the death of the emperor Augustus to the fall of Rome, embracing authors as diverse as Seneca, Lucan, Tacitus, Juvenal, Martial, Pliny, and...

Silver, Abba Hillel
(1893-1963) Lithuanian-born rabbi and Zionist leader. Silver was taken to the USA in 1902. A militant Zionist, he headed many organizations including the Zionist Organizations of America, American Zionist...

Silverman, (Samuel) Sidney
(1896-1968) British lawyer and Labour politician. He was Labour member of Parliament for Nelson and Colne 1935-1968. He served as chair of the British section of the World Jewish Congress and argued strongly...

Silverman, Sime
(1873-1933) US newspaper publisher. Silverman founded Variety, a weekly newspaper dedicated to show business, in 1905. It soon became an institution, and its slangy and often original style added many words to...

Silverman, Sydel
(1933) US anthropologist. Sydel taught at Queens College in New York City before becoming president of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research in 1987. A specialist in Italian peasant...

silverpoint
Drawing instrument consisting of silver wire encased in a holder, used on paper prepared with opaque white. An example of silverpoint is Dürer's Self-portrait (1484; Albertina, Vienna). The...

Silverstein, Shel(by)
(1932-1999) US poet, cartoonist, and composer. Silverstein served in the US armed forces in Japan and Korea as a cartoonist for Stars and Stripes in the 1950s. On his return to the USA he published several...

Silvert, Kalman H(irsch)
(1921-1976) US political scientist. Silvert is credited with introducing quantitative techniques to political analysis, influencing changes in the US government's Latin America policy in the 1970s, and...

Simchat Torah
One-day Jewish festival that celebrates the joy of the Jewish religion, and receiving the Torah from God. It is held the day after the eight-day festival of Succoth, the last of the Simenon, Georges Joseph Christian
(1903-1989) Belgian crime writer. Initially a pulp fiction writer, in 1931 he created Inspector Maigret of the Paris Sûreté who appeared in a series of detective novels. ...

Simeon (I) the Great
(died 927) Tsar of the Bulgars. He succeeded Prince Vladimir in 893. Under Simeon Bulgar power reached its zenith. He twice captured Adrianople (modern-day Edirne, Turkey), and in 923 forced the Byzantine...

Simeon II
(1937) Prime minister and former king of Bulgaria, whose political party won the country's 2001 general election. Simeon succeeded to the throne at the aged of six in 1943, after his father Boris III's...

Simeon of Durham
(c. 1070-c. 1130) English chronicler, precentor of Durham. He was the author of Historia Ecclesiae Dunelmensis (the history of the church in Durham, printed in 1732). ...

Simeon Stylites, St
(c. 390-459) Syrian Christian ascetic who practised his ideal of self-denial by living for 37 years on a platform on top of a high pillar (Greek stulos). Feast day 5 January. ...

Simeon, Charles
(1759-1836) English cleric. After being elected a fellow of King's College, Cambridge University, he was ordained, and in 1783 became perpetual curate of Holy Trinity, Cambridge. He was one of...

Simic, Charles
(1938) Yugoslavian-born poet. Simic emigrated to the USA with his family in 1954. Simic taught at several institutions, notably the University of New Hampshire. He is praised for his translations of the...

Simitis, Costas
(1936) Greek politician, prime minister 1996-2004. Entering parliament in 1985, he served under Andreas Papandreou as minister of agriculture 1981-85, minister...

Simmonds, Kennedy Alphonse
(1936) St Kitts' centre-right politician, prime minister 1980-95. He helped form the centre-right People's Action Movement (PAM) in 1965 and became its leader in 1976, challenging the dominant St...

Simmons, Furnifold (McLendel)
(1854-1940) US senator. After leading a movement to deny African-Americans the right to vote, he was elected to the US House of Representatives in 1887 and to the US Senate in 1901. ...

Simms, George Otto
(1910-1991) Irish archbishop of Armagh and primate of all Ireland from 1969. His ministry in the north coincided with the outbreak of `the Troubles` in 1969. Urbane, scholarly, and sophisticated, he had no...

Simms, William Gilmore
(1806-1870) US writer. He wrote several historical romances, including The Yemassee 1835. His revolutionary romances depict social life in Charleston, South Carolina, with faithful portraits of the political...

Simnel, Lambert
(c. 1475-c. 1535) English impostor, a carpenter's son who under the influence of an Oxford priest claimed to be Prince Edward, one of the Princes in the Tower. Henry VII discovered the plot and released the real...

Simon Commission
British all-party group set up November 1927 to examine the working of government in India and recommend future policy. Chaired by the Liberal Sir John Simon (1873-1954), it was entirely drawn...

Simon Stock, St
(c. 1165-1265) English Carmelite friar, sixth general of the order from 1247. He established houses in the chief university cities of Europe (Cambridge, 1248; Oxford, 1253; Paris, 1260; Bologna, 1260) and modified...

Simon, (Marvin) Neil
(1927) US dramatist and screenwriter. His stage plays (which were made into films) include the wryly comic Barefoot in the Park (1963; filmed 1967), The Odd Couple (1965; filmed 1968), and The Sunshine...

Simon, Claude Eugène Henri
(1913-2005) French novelist. Originally an artist, he abandoned `time structure` and story line in such innovative novels as La Route de Flandres/The Flanders Road (1960), Le Palace (1962), and...

Simon, Herbert Alexander
(1916-2001) US social scientist, computer scientist, and economic psychologist. Much of Simon's career was focused on attacking the economist's concept of rational behaviour. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for...

Simon, John
(1816-1904) English surgeon and public health reformer who cleaned up the City of London in the 19th century. The eight annual reports that Simon presented to the Corporation of London are the most famous...

Simon, Jules François
(1814-1896) French politician and philosopher. He was prime minister 1876-77. As minister of the interior, he put down the resistance of Léon ...

Simon, Richard (Leo)
(1899-1960) US publisher. With his friend, Max Schuster, he founded the publishing firm of Simon and Schuster in 1924 and helped develop it through such best-selling ideas as the...

Simon, William (Edward)
(1927-2000) US financier and cabinet member. He became extremely rich with Salomon Brothers 1968-72, dealing in government securities. As director of the Federal Energy Office 1973-74, he instituted fuel...

Simonds, Ossian Cole
(1855-1926) US landscape architect. He was superintendent of Chicago's Graceland Cemetery, which he turned into a park-like masterpiece in the 1880s before go ...

Simone Martini
(c. 1284-1344) Italian painter. A master of the Sienese school, he was a pupil of Duccio and continued the bright colours and graceful linear patterns of Sienese painting while introducing a fresh element of...

Simonides
(c. 556-c. 468 BC) Greek choral poet and epigrammatist. His longer poems include hymns composed to celebrate victories in the athletic games of Greece, and other competition pieces for choral performance. He was...

Simonstown
Town and naval base in Western Cape province, South Africa, situated on False Bay, 37 km/23 mi south of Cape Town; population (1991) 58,300. There are extensive dry-docks and harbour works. The...

simony
In the Christian church, the buying and selling of church preferments, now usually regarded as a sin. First condemned 451, it remained widespread until the Reformation. The term is derived from...

Simpson, (Cedric) Keith
(1907-1985) British forensic scientist, head of department at Guy's Hospital, London 1962-72. His evidence sent John Haig (an acid-bath murderer) and Neville Heath to the gallows. In 1965 he identified the...

Simpson, James Young
(1811-1870) Scottish physician, the first to use ether as an anaesthetic in childbirth in 1847, and the discoverer, later the same year, of the anaesthetic properties of chloroform, which he tested by...

Simpson, N(orman) F(rederick)
(1919) English dramatist. His plays A Resounding Tinkle (1957), The Hole (1958), and One Way Pendulum (1959) show the logical development of an abnormal situation, and belong to the theatre of the Absurd....

Simpson, O(renthal) J(ames)
(1947) US American football player, film and television actor, and sports commentator. In 1995 he was charged with two counts of first-degree murder relating to the June 1994 fatal stabbings of his wife...

Sims, William Sowden
(1858-1936) US admiral. He joined the US navy 1878, was naval attaché to France 1898, and later became fleet intelligence officer to the Asiatic Fleet. On the entry of the USA...

Sin
Babylonian moon god, the son of Enlil and father of Shamash, the sun god, and of Ishtar. The Babylonian or Sumerian calendar was regulated by the Moon, and Sin was...

sin
Transgression of the will of God or the gods, as revealed in the moral code laid down by a particular religion. In Roman Catholic theology, a distinction is made between mortal sins, which, if...

sin eater
In Wales and neighbouring English counties, a person who partook of food and drink (often bread and ale) laid upon the coffin or breast of a corpse. This action was believed to lift the burden of...

Sinai, Battle of
Battle 6-24 October 1973 during the Yom Kippur War between Israel and Egypt. It was one of the longest tank battles in history. Israeli troops crossed the Suez Canal 16 October, cutting off the...

Sinan
(1489-1588) Ottoman architect. He was chief architect to Suleiman the Magnificent from 1538. Among the hundreds of buildings he designed are the Suleimaniye mosque complex in Istanbul 1551-58 and the Selimiye...

Sinbad the Sailor
In the Arabian Nights, an adventurer who makes seven eventful voyages. He encounters the Old Man of the Sea and, on his second voyage, is carried aloft by the roc, a giant bird. ...

Sinclair, May
(1870-1946) English writer. Her realistic novels include The Divine Fire (1904) and The Creators (1910), both about the artist in society. Mary Olivier: A Life (1919), which is autobiographical, and Life and...

Sinclair, Upton Beall
(1878-1968) US novelist. His polemical concern for social reform was reflected in his prolific output of documentary novels. His most famous novel, The Jungle (1906), is an important example of naturalistic...

Sinden, Donald Alfred
(1923) English actor. A performer of great versatility and resonant voice, his roles ranged from Shakespearean tragedies to light comedies, such as There's a Girl in My Soup (1966), Present Laughter...

Sindhi
The majority ethnic group living in the Pakistani province of Sind. The Sindhi language is spoken by about 15 million people. Since the partition of India and Pakistan 1947, large numbers of...

Sing Sing
Name until 1901 of the village of Ossining, New York, USA, with a state prison of that name 1825-1969, when it was renamed the Ossining State Correctional Facility. ...

Singapore
Country in southeast Asia, off the tip of the Malay Peninsula. Government Singapore has a single-tier system of government. The constitution of 1965, amended in 1991, provides for a one-chamber...

Singer, Isaac Bashevis
(1904-1991) Polish-born US novelist and short-story writer. He lived in the USA from 1935. His works, written in Yiddish, often portray traditional Jewish life in Poland and the USA, and the loneliness of...

Singer, Israel Joshua
(1893-1944) Polish-born US writer who emigrated to New York in 1934. There he wrote novels depicting the conflict between European and American cultures, as in The Family Carnovsky (1943). A master of the...

Singh, Gobind
Sikh guru; see Gobind Singh. ...

Singh, Karan
(1931) Indian politician and author. In 1949, his father, Maharaja Hari, appointed him regent of Jammu and Kashmir. In November 1952 he was elected head of state of Jammu and Kashmir and was re-elected...

Singh, Manmohan
(1932) Indian politician and economist, prime minister from 2004. A member of the Sikh faith, Singh became India's first non-Hindu prime minister - heading a Congress party-led coalition government...

Singh, Vishwanath Pratap
(1931) Indian politician, prime minister 1989-90. As a member of the Congress (I) Party, he held ministerial posts under Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi, and from 1984 led an anti-corruption drive. W ...

single European currency
Former name for the euro. ...

single European market
Single market within the European Union. Established under the Single European Act, it was the core of the process of European economic integration, involving the removal of obstacles to the free...

single-party state
Another name for one-party state. ...

Singleton, Charles S(outhward)
(1909-1985) US translator, author, and educator. A scholar of Italian Renaissance literature, of his many translations, essays, and critical works, the masterwork was the definitive prose translation of Dante's...

Singleton, Valerie
(1937) English presenter who came to the fore in the 1960s as a presenter of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) children's programme Blue Peter (1962-71) and subsequently presented The Money...

Sinhalese
The majority ethnic group of Sri Lanka (70% of the population). Sinhalese is the official language of Sri Lanka; it belongs to the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family, and is written...

sinking fund
Money set aside for the repayment of debt. For a company, a sinking fund is used to allow annually for depreciation; in the case of a nation, a sinking fund pays off a part of the national debt. ...

Sinn Fein
Irish political party founded in 1905, whose aim is the creation of a united republican Ireland. The driving political force behind Irish nationalism between 1916 and 1921, Sinn Fein returned to...

Sino-Japanese Wars
Two wars waged by Japan against China 1894-95 and 1931-45 to expand to the mainland. Territory gained in the First Sino-Japanese War (Korea) and in the 1930s (Manchuria, Shanghai) was returned...

Sino-Soviet split
Period of strained relations between the two major communist powers, China and the USSR, during the early 1960s, thus dividing the communist world. The tension was based partly on differences in...