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

Beresina, Battle of
Partial victory of Russian forces over the French army retreating from Napoleon Bonaparte's abortive attempt on Moscow November 1812. Two Russian armies attacked the French as they crossed the...

Berezovsky, Boris Abramovich
(1958) Russian entrepreneur and associate of Boris Yeltsin, deputy secretary of the Commonwealth of Independent States from 1998. In the latter stages of Boris Yeltsin's presidency, the government came to...

Bergama
Modern form of Pergamum, an ancient city in western Turkey, often considered to be the site of Troy. ...

Bergengruen, Werner
(1892-1964) German novelist and poet. A convert to Catholicism, he had his greatest success with the novel Der Grosstyrann und das Gericht/A Matter of Conscience (1935), which denounces human weakness and...

Berger, John Peter
(1926) English left-wing art critic and writer. In his best-known book, Ways of Seeing (1972), he valued art for social rather than for aesthetic reasons. He also attacked museums for preserving what...

Berger, Meyer
(1898-1959) US journalist. As a New York Times reporter for over 30 years from 1928, he probed into varied aspects of city life with indefatigable curiosity, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1950. ...

Berger, Thomas Louis
(1924) US writer. His satirical novels include the picaresque sequence Crazy in Berlin (1958), Reinhart in Love (1961), Vital Parts (1970), and Reinhart's Women (1981). Other novels include Neighbors...

Berger, Victor Louis
(1860-1929) Austrian-born socialist, journalist, and US representative. Berger emigrated to the USA in 1878, and from 1892 onwards he dedicated himself to writing about and promoting socialist politics,...

Bergh, Henry
(1811-1888) US animal protection pioneer. Bergh founded the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) after in 1866. He later assisted in the formation...

Bergman, Hjalmar
(1883-1931) Swedish novelist and dramatist. His pessimism and realistic clarity of vision are tempered by humour, as in his novel Clownen Jack/Jack the Clown (1930), or by irony and brilliant satire, as in...

Bergmann musquete
German automatic weapon of World War I, the forerunner of the modern submachine gun. A simple automatic weapon with a short barrel and wooden stock, it fired the standard 9 mm pistol cartridge at...

Bergson, Henri Louis
(1859-1941) French philosopher. He believed that time, change, and development were the essence of reality. He thought that time was a continuous process in which one period merged imperceptibly into the next....

Bering, Vitus Jonassen
(1681-1741) Danish explorer. He was the first European to sight Alaska. He died on Bering Island in the Bering Sea, both named after him, as is the Bering Strait, which separates Asia (Russia) from North...

Berisha, Sali
(1941) Albanian political leader, president 1992-97 and prime minister from 2005. He cofounded the Democratic Party (DP), the country's first opposition party, which swept to power in the March 1992...

Beriya, Lavrenti Pavlovich
(1899-1953) Georgian communist. He was USSR commissar (minister) for internal affairs 1938-45 and deputy prime minister under Stalin, in charge of security matters, 1941-53. In 1945 he was made a marshal of...

Berkeley, George
(1685-1753) Irish philosopher and cleric who believed that nothing exists apart from perception, and that the all-seeing mind of God makes possible the continued apparent existence of things. For Berkeley,...

Berkeley, William
(1606-1677) British colonial administrator in North America. He was governor of the colony of Virginia 1641-77 but was removed from office for his brutal repression of Bacon's Rebellion 1676. When first...

Berkman, Alexander
(1870-1936) Russian anarchist and author. Berkman emigrated to the USA in 1887 where he became involved with radical Jewish labour groups. He served 14 years in prison for his attempted assassination of Henry C...

Berkowitz, Henry
(1857-1924) US rabbi. A graduate of the University of Cincinnati and Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, in 1883 Berkowitz was one of the first four rabbis to be ordained in the USA. Rabbi of Rodeph Scholem...

Berlage, Hendrik Petrus
(1856-1934) Dutch architect who became a leader of the Modern Movement in architecture. After being trained in Switzerland and travelling in Italy, he began practice in Amsterdam in 1889 where his most...

Berle, A(dolph) A(ugustus)
(1895-1971) US lawyer and economist. Berle became a professor of corporate law at Columbia University in 1927 and joined Franklin D Roosevelt's `brain trust` for the 1932 presidential campaign. He served as...

Berlin
Industrial city, administrative region (German Land) and capital of Germany, lying on the River Spree; population (2003 est) 3,274,500, urban agglomeration 3,933,300. Products include machine tools,...

Berlin blockade
The closing of entry to Berlin from the west by Soviet Forces from June 1948 to May 1949. It was an attempt to prevent the other Allies (the USA, France, and the UK) unifying the western part of...

Berlin Olympics
Olympic Games held in Berlin in 1936. Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party attempted to use the occasion for propaganda purposes and to demonstrate German physical prowess. ...

Berlin Wall
Dividing barrier between East and West Berlin from 1961 to 1989, erected by East Germany to prevent East Germans from leaving for West Germany. Escapers were shot on sight. Berlin had been formally...

Berlin, Battle of
Final battle of the European phase of World War II, 16 April-2 May 1945; Soviet forces captured Berlin, the capital of Germany and seat of government and site of most German military and...

Berlin, Battle of
In World War II, series of 16 heavy bombing attacks on Berlin by the RAF November 1943-March 1944. Some 9,111 bomber sorties were flown during the course of the campaign and immense damage was...

Berlin, Conference of
Conference 1884-85 of the major European powers (France, Germany, the UK, Belgium, and Portugal) called by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck to decide on the colonial partition of Africa. Also...

Berlin, Congress of
Congress of the European powers (Russia, Turkey, Austria-Hungary, the UK, France, Italy, and Germany) held in Berlin in 1878 to determine the boundaries of the Balkan states after the...

Berlin, Isaiah
(1909-1997) Latvian-born British philosopher and historian of ideas. A man of great energy, Berlin's gifts - as philosopher, broadcaster, and lecturer - were employed across the whole spectrum of...

Berlinguer, Enrico
(1922-1984) Italian communist who freed the party from Soviet influence. Secretary general of the Italian Communist Party from 1972, by 1976 he was near to the premiership, but the murder in 1978 of former...

Berlitz, Charles Frambach
(1914-2003) US educator and publisher. Berlitz took over the family business of intensive language teaching in 1936. During World War II, he restored the fortunes of Berlitz Schools of Languages and Berlitz...

Berlusconi, Silvio
(1936) Italian entrepreneur and right-of-centre politician, prime minister March-December 1994, and from 2001-06. After building up an extremely profitable business empire, Fininvest, he turned his...

Berman, Eugene
(1899-1972) Russian-born painter and scenic designer. Berman emigrated to the USA in 1935 and was a scenic designer for ballet and opera. His paintings, such as Muse of the Western World (1942), often...

Bermejo, Bartolomé
(lived 15th century) Spanish painter. He was one of the most powerful of the Spanish `primitives`. He worked in Zaragoza and Barcelona, producing altarpieces influenced by Flemish examples but with an individual...

Bermingham
Anglo-Norman family granted Irish lands in Offaly by Richard de Clare (Strongbow), soon after his arrival in Ireland in 1170. They took part in the conquest of Connacht, the Offaly branch being...

Bernadotte, Count Folke
(1895-1948) Swedish diplomat and president of the Swedish Red Cross. In 1945 he conveyed Nazi commander Heinrich Himmler's offer of capitulation to the British and US governments, and in 1948 was United Nations...

Bernadotte, Jean-Baptiste Jules
(1763-1844) Marshal in Napoleon's army who in 1818 became Charles XIV of Sweden. Hence, Bernadotte is the family name of the present royal house of Sweden. ...

Bernanos, Georges
(1888-1948) French writer. His strongly Catholic viewpoint is expressed in, for example, his Journal d'un curé de campagne/The Diary of a Country Priest (1936). His theme is almost always the struggle for the...

Bernard de Ventadour
(lived late 12th century) Provençal troubadour, probably born at the château of Ventadour. His father is said to have been a soldier and his mother a kitchen maid. He is known to have attended the coronation of Henry II of...

Bernard of Clairvaux, St
(1090-1153) Christian founder in 1115 of Clairvaux monastery in Champagne, France. He reinvigorated the Cistercian order, preached in support of the Second Crusade in 1146, and had the scholastic philosopher...

Bernard, Jean-Jacques
(1888-1972) French dramatist. He was a chief exponent of the `school of silence`, in which the characters' real attitudes are expressed less through their words than through what they leave unspoken. His...

Bernard, Tristan (Paul)
(1866-1947) French writer and dramatist. His early plays were vaudevilles of irony and mocking humour, such as L'Anglais tel qu'on le parle/English as It Is Spoken (1899); his later plays include Triplepatte...

Bernardin, Joseph L(ouis)
(1928) US Catholic prelate. Bernardin was named auxiliary bishop of New Orleans in 1966. He later became general secretary of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB) and archbishop of...

Bernardino of Siena, St
(1380-1444) Italian Franciscan. He became one of the most popular preachers of his day, his impassioned attacks on corruption and political violence winning wide approval. A keen reformer, he restored the...

Bernays, Edward L
(1891-1995) Austrian-born public relations executive. Bernays emigrated to the USA as a child. After creating US World War I propaganda, he founded the country's first public relations firm in 1919. He was...

Bernbach, William
(1911-1982) US advertising executive. He was variously president, chairman, and chief executive officer of his own New York advertising agency, Doyle Dane Bernbach, 1949-82. A copywriter credited with...

Berners, Juliana
English writer. She is the supposed author of the hunting treatises in The Boke of St Albans, printed 1486. ...

Bernhardt, Sarah
(1844-1923) French actor. She dominated the stage in her day, frequently performing at the Comédie Française in Paris. She excelled in tragic roles, including Cordelia in Shakespeare's King Lear, the title...

Berni, Francesco
(1497-1535) Italian poet. A writer of comic verse, burlesque poetry is known after him as poesia bernesca. He is most notable, however, for a work which was not burlesque: his...

Bernier, François
(1620-1688) French traveller who journeyed through Palestine, Egypt, and India, and was physician for eight years to the Mogul Emperor Aurangzeb. On his return he wrote a History of the Empire of the Great...

Bernstein, Carl
(1944) US journalist. With fellow Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, he unmasked the Watergate scandal and cover-up, and co-authored the best-seller All the President's Men (1974). ...

Bernstein, Eduard
(1850-1932) German socialist thinker, journalist, and politician. He propounded a reformist as opposed to a revolutionary socialism, notably in his Die Voraussetzung des Sozialismus/The Preconditions of...

Bernstein, Henry
(1876-1953) French dramatist. His opposition to socialism and his bitter feelings towards anti-Semites are apparent in some of his plays. Among his works are La Rafale/The Whirlwind 1906 and Le Voleur/The...

Bernstein, Herman
(1876-1935) Russian-born US writer and diplomat. He became a correspondent for the New York Herald with the American Expeditionary Force in Siberia. His sensational Willy-Nicky Correspondence (1918) printed...

Bernstein, Jeremy
(1929) US science writer. A mathematical physicist, he has written many articles and books on various topics of pure and applied science for the nonspecialist reader. He has also sought to give a...

Beroaldo, Filippo the Elder
(1453-1505) Italian humanist lecturer and writer. From 1472 until his death he was professor of rhetoric at Bologna University. He produced a series of editions and commentaries on classical texts, the most...

Beroaldo, Filippo the Younger
(1472-1518) Italian humanist editor, nephew of Filippo Beroaldo the Elder. He was appointed secretary to Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici, who was elected Pope Leo X in 1513 and made Beroaldo prefect of the Vatican...

Berri, Nabih
(1939) Lebanese politician and soldier, leader of Amal (`Hope`), the Syrian-backed Shiite nationalist movement. He became minister of justice in the government of President Amin Gemayel in 1984. In...

Berrigan
US Roman Catholic priests. The brothers, opponents of the Vietnam War, broke into the draft-records offices at Catonsville, Maryland, to burn the files with napalm. They were sentenced in 1968 to...

Berrios Martínez, Rubén
(1930-1993) Puerto Rican politician and public official. An accomplished orator, he was the head of the Puerto Rican Independence Party 1970-93, and a member of the Puerto Rican Senate 1972-73. In 1971 he...

Berruguete
Spanish family of painters and sculptors. Pedro Berruguete (died about 1503) was influenced by Italian Renaissance art and may have worked at the Ducal Palace, Urbino. He was later court painter to...

Berry
Family name of Viscount Camrose, Viscount Kemsley, and Baron Hartwell. ...

Berry, Edward
(1768-1831) British naval officer. During the Revolutionary Wars against France, he was captain of Horatio Nelson's flagship in 1798 at the Battle of Aboukir Bay, of which he later wrote an account. Berry was...

Berry, James
(1924) West Indian author. Many of Berry's stories and poems reflect his West Indian background and celebrate the cultural identity of West Indians living in both the UK and the Caribbean. He won the...

Berry, Mary
(1763-1852) English writer. She collected and edited the Works of Horace Walpole (1798) and published England and France: A Comparative View of the Social Condition of both Countries (1844). Also of interest...

Berry, Sara S(weezy)
(1940) US economist. Berry joined the faculty of Johns Hopkins University in 1990. Her works on the economics of development and on property rights and natural resources in western Africa include Cocoa,...

Berryman, John
(1914-1972) US poet. His emotionally intense, witty, and personal works often deal with sexual torments and are informed by a sense of suffering. After collections of short poems and sonnets, he wrote Homage to...

berserker
Legendary Norse warrior whose frenzy in battle caused their transformation into a wolf or bear, made them howl and foam at the mouth (hence `to go berserk`), and granted immunity to sword and...

Bersuire, Pierre
(c. 1290-1362) French scholar. A friend of the Italian writer Petrarch, whom he met at Avignon, he is remembered as the author of a very early and widely influential translation of the Roman historian Livy...

Bertaut, Jean
(1552-1611) French court poet under Henry III and Henry IV. He imitated Pierre de Ronsard and Philippe Desportes and wrote both love poetry and religious verse (including paraphrases of the psalms). He became...

Berthold von Regensburg
(1220-1272) German Franciscan preacher. His teaching was mainly directed against luxury, the abuses of so-called chivalry, and the vices of the clergy. His sermons were edited and published between 1862 and...

Bertillon system
System of classifying individuals for identification, invented by Alphonse Bertillon (1853-1914). It consisted of measurements of certain parts of the human body that do not change in adulthood....

Bertin, Louis François
(1766-1841) French journalist, known as the `father of French journalism`. He founded the Journal des débats in 1799. In 1801 he was banished for suspected royalist tendencies but returned to France three...

Bertoia, Harry
(1915-1978) Italian-born sculptor and designer. Bertoia emigrated to the USA in 1930. He worked for the Evans Products Company, Venice, California in the 1940s before establishing his own workshop. Although...

Bertoldo di Giovanni
(c. 1440-1491) Italian sculptor and medallist. He worked for the Medici family in Florence, one of his most original medals illustrating the assassination of Giuliano de' Medici in Florence Cathedral during the...

Bertram, Master
(lived late 13th to early 14th century) German painter. Trained in the 14th-century School of Prague, he settled in Hamburg around 1367, where he had a busy workshop. His naive realism shows a tendency towards the Gothic manner. His...

Bertrand de Born
(c. 1140-c. 1215) Provençal troubadour. He was viscount of Hautefort in Périgord, accompanied Richard the Lionheart to Palestine, and died a monk. ...

Bérulle, Pierre de
(1575-1629) French cardinal and statesman. One of the leading figures in the Catholic Counter-Reformation, in 1611 he established the Congregation of the French Oratory in Paris for the study of the Bible and...

Berwick, treaties of
Three treaties between the English and the Scots signed at Berwick, on the border of the two countries. In the first treaty, made in January 1560, Queen Elizabeth I of England and the Calvinist...

Berzin, Jan
(1881-1938) Latvian communist. After 1918 he was active as a Soviet diplomat. Later he became one of the main organizers of the forced labour camp system in the USSR, and from 1932 was the head of the Dal'stroy...

Bes
In Egyptian mythology, the god of music and dance, and patron of mirth and birth. He is usually depicted as a grotesque dwarf with leonine features, often wearing a feather headdress. A popular...

Besant, Walter
(1836-1901) English writer. He wrote novels in partnership with James Rice (1843-1882), and produced an attack on the social evils of the East End of London, All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882), and an...

Beseler, Hans von
(1850-1921) German general. In World War I he commanded the force attacking Antwerp, which he captured October 1915, before going to the Eastern Front to command the siege artillery. He was subsequently...

Bessarion, Johannes
(c. 1403-1472) Greek-born humanist scholar, churchman and philosopher. Collecting, editing and translating Greek texts, he became a major figure in Renaissance scholarship (Renaissance Greek studies), and helped...

Bessemer process
First cheap method of making steel, invented by Henry Bessemer in England in 1856. It has since been superseded by more efficient steel-making processes, such as the basic-oxygen process. In the...

Bessemer, Henry
(1813-1898) English engineer and inventor who developed a method of converting molten pig iron into steel (the Bessemer process) in 1856. Knighted 1879. Bessemer was born near Hitchin, Hertfordshire, and moved...

Bessmertnykh, Aleksandr
(1934) Soviet politician, foreign minister January-August 1991. He began as a diplomat and worked mostly in the USA, at the United Nations headquarters in New York and the Soviet embassy in Washington,...

Bessus
(died 327 BC) Satrap (governor) of the ancient region of Bactria in the Persian empire (now northern Afghanistan and central Asia), under King Darius III (ruled 336-330 BC). Bessus captured and killed Darius...

best-seller
Book that achieves large sales. Listings are based upon sales figures from bookstores and other retail stores. The Bible has sold more copies worldwide than any other book over time, but popular and...

Best, George
(died c. 1584) English navigator and chronicler of the three Arctic voyages of Martin Frobisher. He took part in the voyages of 1577 and 1578, when Frobisher attempted to establish gold mining settlements on...

Best, Roy
(1900-1954) US prison warden. He ran the Colorado state penitentiary in Canon City, 1932-52. He won a national reputation by instituting an innovative dietary and work regimen that included the liberal use of...

bestiary
In medieval times, a book with stories and illustrations which depicted real and mythical animals or plants to illustrate a (usually Christian) moral. The stories were initially derived from the...

bet ha-knesset
In Judaism, house of meeting or assembly; an alternative term for a synagogue. ...

bet ha-tefillah
In Judaism, house of prayer; another name for a synagogue. ...

bet midrash
In Judaism, house of study; the study hall in a synagogue. ...

beta share
On the stock exchange, a share traded less actively than an alpha share. ...

Betancourt, Rómulo
(1908-1981) Venezuelan president 1959-64 whose rule was plagued by guerrilla violence and economic and political division. He expanded welfare programmes, increased expenditure on education, encouraged...

Betancur Cuartas, Belisario
(1923) Colombian conservative politician and president 1982-1986. He was the first president to have open and direct negotiations with the insurgent guerrilla groups with the aim of incorporating them...

Bethlen, Gabor
(1580-1629) Prince of Transylvania from 1613. When the Thirty Years' War began he invaded Hungary proper as an ally of the Bohemians, and was proclaimed king of Hungary in 1620. Later, on making peace with the...