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

Blackwell, Benjamin Harris
(1814-1855) English bookseller who began bookselling in Oxford in 1846. The business came to an end when he died, and it was refounded in 1879. In 1912 his son Basil Henry (later Sir Basil Blackwell,...

Blackwell, Betty Talbot
(c. 1905-c. 1985) US magazine editor. As editor-in-chief of Mademoiselle magazine from 1937 to 71, Blackwell helped to bring the world of high fashion to a mass audience. ...

Blackwell, Elizabeth
(1821-1910) English-born US physician, the first woman to qualify in medicine in the USA in 1849, and the first woman to be recognized as a qualified physician in the UK in 1869. Her example inspired...

Blackwood, Algernon (Henry)
(1869-1951) English novelist. He was greatly interested in the occult and has been called `the ghost man` because of his subjects. His novels include John Silence (1908), The Human Chord (1910), and The...

Blackwood, Henry
(1770-1832) British admiral. During the Revolutionary Wars with France, he was commended by Horatio Nelson for his conduct in a sea fight 1800 between the Penelope, which Blackwood was commanding, and the...

Blackwood, William
(1776-1834) Scottish publisher. In 1817 he founded Blackwood's Magazine, which has been published monthly ever since. Its authors have included Walter Scott, Thomas De Quincey, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, George...

Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine
Scottish monthly literary magazine 1817-1980, founded by Scottish publisher William Blackwood (1776-1834) as a rival to the Edinburgh Review, founded 1802. The original editors of Blackwood's...

Bladensburg, Battle of
During the of 1812, unsuccessful American attempt to check the British advance on Washington 24 August 1814. The British entered Washington later the same day. ...

Blades, William
(1824-1890) British printer and bibliographer. His interest in the history of printing led to the publication of his Biography and Typography of William Caxton, England's First Printer (1877), in which, by a...

Blaine, James Gillespie
(1830-1893) US politician and diplomat. Elected to the House of Representatives 1862, he served as Speaker 1869-75 and senator 1876-81. Unable to secure the Republican presidential nomination in 1876 or...

Blair, Francis P(reston)
(1791-1876) US journalist and politician. In 1830, as editor of the Washington Globe and a member of the Democratic president Andrew Jackson's `kitchen cabinet` of unelected advisers, he became a powerful...

Blair, Francis Preston
(1821-1875) US Republican politician. He was a member of Congress 1856-62 in the House of Representatives and as senator for Missouri 1871-73. He was instrumental in preventing Missouri...

Blair, Montgomery
(1813-1883) US politician and lawyer. As US solicitor in the court of claims 1855-58, he was associated with Curtis in the Dred Scott Decision. He was postmaster general in the Republican president Abraham...

Blair, Robert
(1699-1746) Scottish poet and cleric. His one outstanding work is The Grave (1743), a poem in blank verse, nearly 800 lines long. In some passages it rises to sublimity, although in others it sinks to the...

Blair, Robert
(1593-1666) Scottish Presbyterian, a licensed preacher of the Scottish Presbyterian Church from 1616. In 1640 he went to England as one of the commissioners from the General Assembly...

Blair, Tony
(1953) British Labour politician, prime minister 1997-2007. He was leader of the Labour Party 1994-2007. On standing down as prime minister in 2007, he became a Middle East special envoy for the...

Blaise Hamlet
Group of ten cottages at Henbury, north of Bristol, western England. They were designed 1810-11 in the Picturesque style by John Nash for pensioners from the Blaise estate. The National Trust...

Blaize, Herbert Augustus
(1918-1989) Grenadian centrist politician, prime minister in 1967 and 1984-89. Cofounder of the centrist Grenada National Party (GNP), he led the official opposition after full independence in 1974. In hiding...

Blake, Eugene Carson
(1906-1985) US Protestant clergyman. Blake held pastorates in New York and California before becoming a senior administrator of the Presbyterian Church USA. From 1967 to 1972 he was general secretary of the...

Blake, George
(1922-1994) British double agent who worked for MI6 (see intelligence) and also for the USSR. Blake was unmasked by a Polish defec ...

Blake, George
(1893-1961) Scottish novelist and journalist. In direct opposition to the sentimental Kailyard School, his novels are set in urban industrial Scotland. The Shipbuilders (1935) is about...

Blake, Peter
(1932) English painter, sculptor, and designer. He was one of the leading exponents of pop art and his work evokes the spirit...

Blake, Robert
(1599-1657) British admiral of the Parliamentary forces during the English Civil War. Appointed `general-at-sea` in 1649, the following year he destroyed Prince Rupert's privateering Royalist fleet off...

Blake, William
(1757-1827) English poet, artist, engraver, and visionary, and one of the most important figures of English Romanticism. His lyrics, often written with a childlike simplicity, as in Songs of Innocence (1789)...

Blakelock, Ralph (Albert)
(1847-1919) US painter. Blakelock studied medicine but became a landscape painter during the 1860s. He was committed to an insane asylum in 1899 and did not paint anything after his release in 1916. His moody...

Blakeslee, George H(ubbard)
(1871-1954) US professor and diplomat, Blakeslee's diplomatic career included participation in the 1932 Lytton Commission, that recommended economic sanctions against Japan, and membership in the American...

Blakeslee, Howard (Walter)
(1880-1952) US journalist and science writer. Blakeslee Expelled was a reporter and science writer for the Associated Press from 1928 to 1952. He and four colleagues received the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for Local...

Blakey, G Robert
(1936) US lawyer and professor. Blakey was chief counsel to the Select House Committee on Assassinations 1977-79. As a member of various commissions charged with reforming federal and state laws, he was...

Blamey, Thomas Albert
(1884-1951) Australian field marshal. Born in New South Wales, he served at Gallipoli, Turkey, and on the Western Front in World War I. After his recall to Australia in 1942 and appointment as...

Blanc, (Jean Joseph Charles) Louis
(1811-1882) French socialist and journalist. In 1839 he founded the Revue du progrès, in which he published his Organisation du travail, advocating the establishment of cooperative workshops and other...

Blanchard, Brand
(born 1892) US philosopher, a thinker in the tradition of British idealist philosophers such as Bernard Bosanquet and Francis Bradley. In The Nature of Thought (1939) he insists on the importance of the...

Blanchard, Edward Litt Leman
(1820-1889) English writer of dramas, farces, and burlesques. For 37 years he wrote the annual pantomime for the Drury Lane Theatre in London, and he sold plays to provincial theatres at...

Blanche of Castile
(1188-1252) Queen of France, wife of Louis VIII of France, and regent for her son Louis IX (St Louis of France) from the death of her husband in 1226 until Louis IX's majority 1234, and again from 1247 while he...

Blanchot, Maurice
(born 1907) French critic and novelist. Between 1930 and 1939 he wrote mainly for the right-wing press. Faux pas (1943) brings together some 60 of the literary essays he contributed to the Journal des débats...

Blanco, (Salvador) Jorge
(1926) Dominican Republic left-wing politician, president 1982-86. A lawyer-politician noted for defending victims of political persecution, he joined the Senate as a member of the left-wing...

Blanco, Antonio Guzmán
(1828-1899) Venezuelan soldier and president 1873-88. During the Federal Revolts of 1858-63 he was actively engaged as a leader of the Liberals. He became vice-president under Juan Crisóstomo Falcón in...

Blandrata (or Biandrata), Giorgio
(1516-1588) Italian doctor and Unitarian theologian. He promoted the anti-Trinitarian movement in Poland 1558-63 and Transylvania from 1564. He helped to secure legal recognition for Transylvanian...

blank verse
In literature, the unrhymed iambic pentameter or ten-syllable line of five stresses. First used by the Italian Gian Giorgio Trissino in his tragedy Sofonisba (1514-15), it was introduced to...

blanketeers
Manchester hand-loom weavers who began a march on London in March 1817, in protest against the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act and the economic slump after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. They...

Blanqui, (Louis) Auguste
(1805-1881) French revolutionary politician. He formulated the theory of the `dictatorship of the proletariat`, used by Karl Marx, and spent a total of 33 years in...

Blanton, Ray
(1930) US governor. A construction company executive, Blanton was a Democrat representative for Tennessee, 1969-71. He went on to become governor of Tennessee, where he expanded industry and tourism. He...

Blarney Castle
Castle at Blarney, County Cork, Republic of Ireland. One of Ireland's oldest castles, it consists mainly of a massive square keep with a battlemented parapet, built by Cormac Laidir MacCarthy about...

Blasco Ibáñez, Vicente
See Ibáñez, Vicente Blasco, Spanish novelist and politician. ...

Blashfield, Edwin (Howland)
(1848-1936) US painter. Blashfield studied in Paris and returned to America to paint large murals, such as the one commissioned for the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. ...

Blashford-Snell, John
(1936) English explorer, soldier, and writer. His expeditions have included the first descent and exploration of the Blue Nile (1968); the journey north to south from Alaska to Cape Horn, the first...

Blasius, St (or St Blaise)
(lived 3rd-4th centuries AD) Bishop of Sebaste in Asia Minor, said to have been martyred in the reign of the Roman emperor Diocletian, about 303. He was the patron saint of woolcombers, as his flesh was said to have been torn...

Blaskowitz, Johann Albrecht
(1883-1948) German general in World War II. He was military governor of Poland 1939-40, but was removed after complaining about the excesses of the SS in dealing with Jews in the territory. He subsequently...

blasphemy
Written or spoken insult directed against religious belief or sacred things with deliberate intent to outrage believers. Blasphemy was originally defined in the UK as `publishing any matter which...

Blatchford, Samuel
(1820-1893) US Supreme Court justice. Blatchford was appointed to a federal district court by President Ulysses S Grant in 1867. He became a circuit judge in 1872 and was appointed to the US Supreme Court by...

Blaue Reiter, der
Loose association of German expressionist painters formed in 1911 in Munich. They were united by an interest in the expressive qualities of colour, in primitive and folk art, and in the necessity of...

Blaue Vier
Group of four expressionist painters who exhibited in Germany 1922 and the USA 1924. The artists were Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Alexei von Jawlensky, and Lyonel Feininger, all of whom had been...

Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna
(1831-1891) Russian spiritualist and mystic, co-founder of the Theosophical Society (see theosophy) in 1875, which has its headquarters near Madras (now Chennai), India. She underwent spiritual training in...

Blears, Hazel
(1956) British Labour politician, secretary of state for communities and local government from 2007, member of Parliament for Salford (Manchester) from 1997. She was minister without portfolio and Labour...

Bleeding Kansas
In US history, period in Kansas 1854-61 when it became the scene of bloody warfare between proslavery and antislavery settlers, anticipating the larger conflict of the American Civil War. When the ...

Blenheim Palace
House near Woodstock, Oxfordshire, England. Blenheim is the seat of the Duke of Marlborough. Conceived as a national monument and virtually as a royal palace, it was the gift of Queen Anne and...

Blenheim, Battle of
In the War of the Spanish Succession, decisive victory on 13 August 1704 of Allied troops under Marlborough over French and Bavarian armies near...

Bles, Herri met de
(1480-1550) Flemish painter, active in Antwerp. He is generally identified with Herri Patinir, nephew of the painter Joachim Patinir, but identification of his work is more difficult. He seems to have...

Blicher, Steen Steensen
(1782-1848) Danish novelist and poet. After translating 1807-09 the works of the Scottish poet James Macpherson attributed to the mythical Ossian, his greatest achievements were in the short story form, with...

Blickling Hall
Large Jacobean house near Aylsham, Norfolk, England. It was built in rose-red brick by Henry Hobart, Lord Chief Justice of England, who pulled down the 14th-century manor house in which Anne...

Bligh, William
(1754-1817) English sailor. He accompanied Captain James Cook on his second voyage around the world (1772-74), and in 1787 commanded HMS Bounty on an expedition to the Pacific. On the return voyage, in...

blight notice
In UK law, a statutory notice by which an owner-occupier can require a public authority to purchase land that is potentially liable to compulsory purchase for development. ...

Blighty
Popular name for England among British troops in World War I. The term was also used to describe serious but non-fatal wounds requiring hospitalization in Britain; for example, `He caught a...

blimp
Airship; any self-propelled, lighter-than-air craft that can be steered. A blimp with a soft frame is also called a dirigible; a zeppelin is rigid-framed. During World War I British...

Blin, Roger
(1907-1984) French actor and director. He directed and performed in numerous avant-garde plays, such as En attendant Godot/Waiting for Godot and La Dernière Bande/Krapp's Last Tape by Samuel Beckett and Les...

Blind Harry
Another name for Harry the Minstrel, Scottish poet. ...

blind-storey
In medieval architecture, an alternative name for the triforium. It is called a `blind-storey` to distinguish it from the clerestory (which is pierced with windows), because the blind-storey...

Blind, Mathilde
(1841-1896) English writer. Visits to Scotland inspired two long poems, The Prophecy of St Oran (1881) and The Heather on Fire (1886), the latter a passionate outcry against the Highland Clearances. The Ascent...

Bliss, Daniel
(1823-1916) US Protestant missionary and educator. Bliss attended Andover Theological Seminary and went to Syria as a missionary in 1855. He founded the Syrian Protestant College (now American University),...

Bliss, Henry Evelyn
(1870-1955) US librarian who developed a bibliographic classification system, described in The Organization of Knowledge and the System of the Sciences (1929) and The Organization of Knowledge in Libraries and...

Bliss, Howard Sweetser
(1860-1920) Syrian-born missionary and educator. Howard Bliss became a Congregational minister in New Jersey in 1894. He went on to succeed his father , Daniel Bliss, as president of the Syrian Protestant...

Bliss, Lizzie Plummer
(1864-1931) US art collector. Bliss began her collection of modern American and French art in 1907. A patron of the Armory Show, she was one of the founders of the Museum of Modern Art in 1929 and bequeathed...

Bliss, Tasker Howard
(1853-1930) US general and diplomat. He served in the Puerto Rican campaign of the Spanish-American War in 1898. Afterwards, he proved himself an able administrator in Cuban affairs, and in 1902 negotiated...

Blitz, the
German air raids against Britain September 1940-May 1941, following Germany's failure to establish air superiority in the Battle of Britain. It has been estimated that about 42,000 civilians were...

Blitzkrieg
Swift military campaign, as used by Germany at the beginning of World War II (1939-41). It was characterized by rapid movement by mechanized forces, supported by tactical air forces acting as...

bloc
Group, generally used to describe politically allied countries, as in the former `Soviet bloc`. ...

Bloch, Henry Wollman
(1922) and Richard A (1926) US accountants. The Bloch brothers founded the tax preparation firm H & R Block in Kansas City in 1955, opening a branch in New York City the following year. By the mid-1980s the firm, with 9,000...

Bloch, Jean-Richard
(1884-1947) French novelist, dramatist, and essayist. He established his reputation with his second novel, Et Compagnie/... & Co. (1918). He also published volumes of tales, travel books, a play (Le dernier...

Bloch, Marc
(1886-1944) French historian, leading member of the Annales school. Most of his research was into medieval European history. He held that economic structures and systems of belief were just as important to the...

block printing
Method of printing, used to decorate fabric, traditionally involving the use of carved wooden blocks. Ink or dye is applied to the raised surface of the block and this is then...

Block, Herbert (Lawrence)
US editorial cartoonist. See Herblock. ...

Block, Martin
(1903-1967) US radio disc jockey. Block was an instant success as a disc jockey on radio stations in New York City when he began in 1934. He helped to popularize vocalists such as Frank Sinatra, and his...

blockade
Cutting-off of a place by hostile forces by land, sea, or air so as to prevent any movement to or fro, in order to compel a surrender without attack or to achieve some other political aim (for...

blocking in
In art, the initial broad indications of line, colour, and tone in a picture which help the artist make decisions about the organization, composition, and overall effect of the final piece. ...

Bloemaert, Abraham
(1564-1651) Dutch painter and etcher. Working in Paris and Amsterdam and later in Utrecht, he produced biblical and historical pictures, portraits, and still lifes. His style was influenced by the Italian...

Bloemen, van
Family of Flemish painters; see Orizonte. ...

blog
Online journal on the World Wide Web. Blogs started in the USA in 1997 and became ubiquitous in the early 2000s, driven by the ease with which new blogs can be created on hosting services with...

Blok, Alexander Alexandrovich
(1880-1921) Russian poet. As a follower of the French Symbolist movement, he used words for their symbolic rather than actual meaning. He backed the 1917 Revolution, as in his poems The Twelve (1918) and The...

Blomberg, Werner Eduard Fritz von
(1878-1943) German field marshal. After a sound but unremarkable career in World War I, Blomberg became minister of war January 1933 and commander-in-chief of German armed forces May 1935. Hitler forced him...

Blomefield, Francis
(1705-1752) English topographer, born at Fersfield, Norfolk. He is known principally for An Essay Towards a Topographical History of the County of Norfolk (1739-75), which gives extensive information about...

Blomfield, Charles James
(1786-1857) English bishop and classical scholar. He was bishop of Chester 1824-28 and London from 1828, where he engaged in the long overdue reforming of the organization of the church. He was particularly...

Blomfield, Reginald Theodore
(1856-1942) English architect and writer on architecture, born at Bow, Devon. He rebuilt the Quadrant in Regent Street, London, and remodelled several country houses and their gardens, for example Chequers, the...

Blondel
French poet, probably from Nesle in Picardy. There is a legend that it was he who discovered the English king Richard (I) the Lion-Heart at the castle of Dürnstein, Austria, where the king had...

Blood, Thomas
(1618-1680) Irish adventurer, known as Colonel Blood. In 1663 he tried to seize the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland at Dublin Castle, and in 1670 he attempted to assassinate the Duke of Ormond in 1670, possibly on...

Bloody Assizes
Courts held by judges of the High Court in the west of England under the Lord Chief Justice, Judge Bloody Sunday
Shooting dead of 13 unarmed demonstrators in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, on 30 January 1972, by soldiers from the British Army's 1st Parachute Regiment. One wounded man later died from an illness...

Bloom, Allan David
(1936-1992) US political scientist and author. Bloom was an obscure translator of Plato until the publication of his Closing of the American Mind (1987), a neoconservative polemic against what he perceived as...

Bloom, Claire
(1931) English actor. She formed the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1948, and moved to the Old Vic in 1952, establishing a reputation as a distinguished Shakespearean actor. Her...

Bloom, Sol
(1870-1949) US representative. Bloom became a Democratic congressman in 1923. He was chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, 1939-49, and sponsored the Lend Lease Act and the Marshall Plan. Before going...

Bloomberg, Michael Rubens
(1942) US entrepreneur and politician, mayor of New York City from 2002. One of the USA's richest people, he heads a global media and financial-data empire and spent nearly US$70 million on his...

Bloomer, Amelia
(1818-1894) US campaigner for women's rights. In 1849, when unwieldy crinolines were the fashion, she introduced a knee-length skirt combined with loose trousers gathered at the ankles, which became known as...