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

Bon
The pre-Buddhist faith of many of the Tibetan peoples. Probably originally shamanistic in origin, it underwent a transformation in reaction to the arrival of Buddhism in Tibet in the 8th and 9th...

Bona Dea
In classical mythology, a chaste and prophetic goddess worshipped in Rome. She revealed her oracles only to women. She was variously described as the sister, wife, or daughter of Faunus, and was...

bona fide
Legal phrase used to signify that a contract is undertaken without intentional misrepresentation. ...

bona vacantia
In law, the property of a person who dies without making a will and without relatives or dependants who would be entitled or might reasonably expect to inherit. In the UK, in such a case the...

Bonampak
Site of a Classic Mayan city in Mexico, on...

Bonaparte
Corsican family of Italian origin that gave rise to the Napoleonic dynasty: see Napoleon I, Napoleon II, and Napoleon III. Others were the brothers and sister of Napoleon I: Joseph (1768-1844)...

Bonaparte, Charles Joseph
(1851-1921) US lawyer and reformer. Bonaparte practised law in Baltimore. He founded the Civil Service Reform Association of Maryland and the National Civil Service Reform League in 1881. These reform...

Bonapartism
Political system of military dictatorship by an individual, ostensibly based on popular appeal, with frequent use of the plebiscite. Derived from Napoleon's system of rule (1799-1815), the term...

Bonar Law
British Conservative politician; see Law, Andrew Bonar. ...

Bonaventura, St
(1221-1274) Italian Roman Catholic theologian. He entered the Franciscan order in 1243, became professor of theology in Paris, and in 1256 general of his order. In 1273 he was created cardinal and bishop of...

bond
In commerce, a security issued by a government, local authority, company, bank, or other institution on fixed interest. Usually a long-term security, a bond may be irredeemable (with no date of...

Bond, (Horace) Julian
(1940) US civil-rights activist and state legislator. Bond helped to found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960. He served in local politics until 1987 when he gave up his seat in...

Bond, (J) Max (Jr)
(1935) US architect. Bond co-founded Bond Ryder Associates, a firm specializing in urban structures, in 1969. In 1990 Bond became a partner in Davis, Brody & Associates. He became dean of the...

Bond, (Thomas) Michael
(1926) English children's author. He is the creator of the enormously popular Paddington Bear, the hapless hero of almost 40 stories since his debut in A Bear called Paddington (1958); the small bear's...

Bond, Edward
(1934) English dramatist. His early work aroused controversy because of the savagery of some of his imagery, for example, the brutal stoning of a baby by bored youths in Saved (1965). Other works include...

Bondevik, Kjell Magne
(1947) Norwegian politician, prime minister 1997-2000 and 2001-05, chair of the Christian People's Party (KrF) 1983-95. He became politically active as a theology student, and was elected to...

Bondfield, Margaret Grace
(1873-1953) British Labour politician and trade unionist. She became a trade-union organizer to improve working conditions for women. She helped to found the National Federation of Women Workers in 1906 and...

bonding
Method of producing fabric in which synthetic fibres or filaments are stuck together. Fibres may be bonded in several different ways. One method is to apply adhesive to a web of fibres which is then...

bondservant
Another term for a slave or serf used in the Caribbean in the 18th and 19th centuries; a person who was offered a few acres of land in return for some years of compulsory service. The system was a...

bone china
Semiporcelain made of 5% bone ash added to 95% kaolin. It was first made in the West in imitation of Chinese porcelain, whose formula was kept secret by the Chinese. ...

Bone, David William
(1874-1959) Scottish novelist. He went to sea at 15 and rose to become commodore of the Anchor Line fleet. His novels are all about the sea. Merchantmen at Arms (1919), illustrated by his brother Muirhead Bone,...

Bone, Muirhead
(1876-1953) Scottish graphic artist. As official war artist from 1916 to 1918, during World War I, he made drawings of the Western Front and battleships (Imperial War Museum and Tate Gallery, London). He also...

Bonestell, Chesley
(1888-1986) US artist who specialized in such realistic-looking astronomical illustrations that many believe they were instrumental in persuading the US government that...

Bonfigli, Benedetto
(1420-1496) Italian painter. He worked mainly in Perugia, and was a follower of Benozzo di Lese in style. His main work was a series of frescoes for the Priors' Chapel in the town hall of Perugia, not entirely...

Bongo, Omar
(1935) Gabonese politician, president from 1967. Minister of national defence 1964-65 and vice-president in 1967 under President Léon M'ba, he succeeded as president, prime minister, and secretary...

Bonham-Carter, (Helen) Violet
(1887-1969) British president of the Liberal party 1945-47. A close supporter of Winston Churchill, she published Winston Churchill as I Knew Him in 1965. She w ...

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich
(1906-1945) German Lutheran theologian and opponent of Nazism. Involved in a plot against Hitler, he was executed by the Nazis in Flossenburg concentration camp. His Letters and Papers from Prison (1953) became...

Boniface of Savoy
(died 1270) English cleric, a Carthusian, archbishop of Canterbury from 1241, enthroned in 1249. His reforms met with strong resistance from the clergy and he retired to Rome until 1252. In 1256 he took part...

Boniface V
(died 625) Pope 619-25. According to the English theologian and historian Bede, he did much for the conversion of England; he is said to have fixed upon Canterbury as the metropolitan see, although St...

Boniface VIII
(c. 1235-1303) Pope from 1294. He clashed unsuccessfully with Philip IV of France over his taxation of the clergy, and also with Henry III of England. Boniface exempted the clergy from taxation by the secular...

Boniface, St
(680-754) English Benedictine monk, known as the `Apostle of Germany`; originally named Wynfrith. After a missionary journey to Frisia in 716, he was given the task of bringing Christianity to Germany in...

Bonifacio, Andres
(1861-1897) Filipino revolutionary leader. He was the leader of the Katipunan, a secret nationalist society organized to overthrow Spanish colonial control over the Philippines. He precipitated the Philippine...

Bonington, Chris(tian) John Storey
(1934) English mountaineer. Known particularly for his expeditions to the Himalayas, he took part in the first ascent of Annapurna II in 1960 and was the leader of an Everest expedition...

Bonington, Richard Parkes
(1801-1828) English painter who worked in France from 1817. He painted fresh, atmospheric seascapes and landscapes in oil and watercolour. A leading spirit in the formation of the French Romantic School, he was...

Bonior, David (Edward)
(1945) US representative. A Vietnam veteran and social worker before coming to Congress as a Democrat in 1976, he opposed aid to the Contras in Nicaragua In the 1980s and became majority whip...

Bonnard, Pierre
(1867-1947) French painter, designer, and graphic artist. Influenced by Gauguin and Japanese prints, he specialized in intimate domestic scenes and landscapes, his paintings shimmering with colour and light....

Bonnefoy, Yves
(1923) French poet, literary critic, art critic, and translator. Best known in English-speaking countries for his poetry, he has also translated Shakespeare and published several collections of essays on...

Bonner, Neville Thomas
(1922-1999) Aboriginal elder and Australian Liberal senator 1971-83. Bonner was the first Aborigine to be elected to Australia's federal parliament. He lived in poverty in the New South Wales outback before...

Bonner, Robert
(1824-1899) Irish-born newspaper editor. Emigrating to the USA in 1839, he bought the New York Ledger newspaper in 1851 and made it prosper, attracting articles from the literary giants of the day. ...

Bonner, Yelena
(1923) Russian human-rights campaigner. Disillusioned by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, she resigned from the Communist Party (CPSU) after marrying her second husband, Andrei Sakharov in...

Bonnet, Charles
(1720-1793) Swiss naturalist and philosopher. He observed leaves and aphids and other insects, and published Traité d'insectologie/Treatise on Insectology (1745) and Recherches sur l'usage des feuil ...

Bonney, William H
US outlaw known by the name of Billy the Kid. ...

Bonnie and Clyde
Infamous US criminals who carried out a series of small-scale robberies in Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Missouri between August 1932 and May 1934. They were eventually betrayed and then killed...

Bonnie Prince Charlie
Scottish name for Charles Edward Stuart, pretender to the throne. ...

Bonnin, Gertrude
(1876-1938) American Indian writer and activist. A teacher and later a professional violinist, she wrote stories, many of which were published in Harper's Monthly, and also autobiographical sketches, which...

Bono da Ferrara
(lived 15th century) Italian painter. He worked in the studio of Francesco Squarcione in Padua and contributed the fresco St Christopher Carrying the Infant Christ to the paintings by Andrea Mantegna and others in the...

Bono, Sonny
(1935-1998) US pop singer and Republican politician. He was the male half of the popular 1960s musical duo Sonny and Cher, who rose to fame with the 1965 hit record `I Got You Babe`. Bono's latter-day...

Bonomi, Ivanoe
(1873-1952) Italian socialist politician, prime minister 1921-22 and 1944-45. An opponent of Mussolini's seizure of power, he left politics in 1924, but after 1942 was a leading figure in the anti-fascist...

Bonpland, Aime Jacques Alexandre
(1773-1858) French botanist and explorer of South America who, with Alexander von Humboldt, travelled 9,650 km/6,301 mi in South America and collected over 6,000 new species of plants. Their travels and...

Bonsignori, Francesco
(1455-1519) Italian painter. He produced religious works and portraits. He was court painter to the Gonzagas in Mantua from about 1490, and was influenced by Andrea Mantegna. ...

Bontempelli, Massimo
(1878-1960) Italian writer. From classical beginnings, he became a Futurist and humorist, and described his art as `magic realism`. He wrote several novels, numerous volumes of verse, plays, and various...

Bonus Army
In US history, a march on Washington, DC, by unemployed ex-servicemen during the Great Depression to lobby Congress for immediate cash payment...

bonus issue
Another term for scrip issue, or the issue of free shares to existing shareholders. ...

Bony, Jean
(1908-1995) French architectural historian. A scholar of French and English Gothic architecture, his publications include The English Decorated Style (1979) and French Gothic Architecture of the 12th and 13th...

book
Portable written record. Substances used to make early books included leaves, bark, linen, silk, clay, leather, and papyrus. In about AD 100-150, the codex or paged book, as opposed to the roll or...

Book of Changes
Another name for the I Ching, a Chinese book of divination. ...

Book of Common Prayer
Former name of the service book of the Church of England and the Episcopal Church, renamed the Book of Common Worship in November 2000. ...

Book of Common Worship
Service book of the Church of England and the Episcopal Church, based largely on the Roman breviary. The first service book in English, published in 1549, was known as the First Prayer Book of...

Book of Hours
See Hours, Book of. ...

Book of the Dead
Ancient Egyptian book of magic spells, known as the Book of Coming Forth by Day, buried with the dead as a guide to reaching the kingdom of Osiris, the god of the underworld. Similar practices were...

Book Trust
British association of authors, publishers, booksellers, librarians, and readers, to encourage the reading and production of better books. Founded as...

book value
Value at which an item is entered into the accounts of a company. Book values can sometimes differ from actual values, especially if the prices of goods are changing rapidly. For example, the book...

book-keeping
Process of recording commercial transactions in a systematic and established procedure. These records provide the basis for the preparation of accounts. The earliest known work on double-entry...

bookbinding
Securing of the pages of a book between protective covers by sewing and/or gluing. Cloth binding was first introduced in 1822, but from the mid-20th century synthetic bindings were increasingly...

Booker Prize for Fiction
British literary prize of £50,000 awarded annually (from 1969) to a Commonwealth writer by the Booker company (formerly Booker McConnell) for a novel published in the UK...

boom
In economics, a period in the trade cycle when the economy is expanding and aggregate demand (total demand for goods and services) is rising quickly. It is characterized by falling or low...

boomerang
Hand-thrown, flat wooden hunting missile shaped in a curved angle, formerly used throughout the world but developed by the Australian Aborigines to a great degree of diversity and elaboration. It...

Boon, Louis-Paul
(born 1912) Flemish novelist. His pessimistic view of social injustice is relieved by humorous irony in his most accomplished and structurally complex novels, De Kapellekensbaan (1953) and its sequel Zomer to...

Boorde (or Borde), Andrew
(c. 1490-1549) English physician and author. He travelled widely throughout Europe and wrote the first travel handbook of Europe, the earliest modern work on hygiene, and the first printed specimen...

Booth, (Evangeline Cory) Eva
(1865-1950) English Salvation Army general and social worker. One of the eight children of the founders of the Salvation Army, Booth became commander-in-chief of the US Salvation Army in 1904. Her social...

Booth, Albert Edward
(1928) British Labour politician, secretary of state for Employment 1976-79. An engineering draughtsman, he was Labour MP for Barrow-in-Furness 1966-83. After serving as chair of the select...

Booth, Catherine
(1829-1890) English co-founder of the Salvation Army with her husband William Booth. In about 1860...

Booth, Charles
(1840-1916) English shipowner and sociologist; author of the study Life and Labour of the People in London (1902) conducted from 1889, in which he found that 30% of Londoners lived in unacceptable conditions....

Booth, Edwin Thomas
(1833-1893) US actor. He was one of America's most acclaimed Shakespearean performers, famous for his portrayal of Hamlet. As lead actor, theatre manager, and producer, he successfully brought to the New York...

Booth, George G
(1864-1949) US publisher and philanthropist. Booth was the publisher of the Detroit News. In the 1920s he established an experimental art educational community, the Cranbrook Academy of Art, in Michigan with...

Booth, John Wilkes
(1838-1865) US actor and Confederate sympathizer who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln 14 April 1865. Booth had earlier conceived a plan to kidnap Lincoln and decided to kill him in vengeance when the plan...

Booth, Junius Brutus
(1796-1852) English-born US actor. He appeared in London 1817-20, at Covent Garden and Drury Lane theatres, in such Shakespearean parts as Richard III, Shylock, King Lear, and Iago, the last to Edmund...

Booth, William Bramwell
(1856-1929) Eldest son of William Booth. He succeeded his father as `general` of the Salvation Army in 1912 and extended the movement's missionary and social activities. In 1883 he joined with the...

Boothe, Clare
US journalist, playwright, and politician; see Clare Boothe Luce. ...

Boothroyd, Betty
(1929) British Labour politician, Speaker of the House of Commons 1992-2000. A Yorkshire-born daughter of a textile worker and weaver, and a...

bootlegging
Illegal manufacture, distribution, or sale of a product. The term originated in the USA, when the sale of alcohol to American Indians was illegal and bottles were hidden for sale in the legs of the...

Bor-Komorowski, Tadeusz
(1895-1956) Polish general and resistance leader during the German occupation of Poland in World War II. He went underground after the Polish defeat 1939 and organized resistance groups, taking the cover-name...

Borah, William Edgar
(1865-1940) US Republican politician. He was a senator for Idaho 1907-40. An arch-isolationist `irreconcilable`, he campaigned successfully against US entry into the League of Nations...

Borchard, Edwin Montefiore
(1884-1951) US professor of international law. Borchard advised the US delegation to the international court at the Hague and was law librarian of the US Congress before becoming a professor of international...

Borchert, Wolfgang
(1921-1947) German dramatist and prose writer. He was wounded during World War II while serving on the Russian front, where he had been sent for making anti-Nazi comments. Draussen vor der Tür/The Outsider...

Borchgrevink, Carsten Egeberg
(1864-1934) Norwegian explorer. When the Antarctic sailed from Melbourne in 1894 under Captain Christensen, Borchgrevink shipped as an ordinary seaman, and was one of the first men to set foot on the Antarctic...

Bordaz, Jacques
(1926) French-born archaeologist. Bordaz taught at New York University (the University of Montréal before joining the anthropology faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in 1972. His research focused...

Bordeaux, Henry
(1870-1963) French novelist. His works, many of which are set in his native Savoie, include La Peur de vivre (1902), La Croisée des chemins (1909),...

Borden, (Neil Hopper) Pete
(1895-1980) US advertising and marketing educator. Borden's eight books on advertising, including The Economic Effects of Advertising (1942), were influential in developing the fields of marketing and...

Borden, Lizzie (Andrew)
(1860-1927) US alleged murderess from Fall River, Massachusetts. Borden was arrested and tried for the axe-murders of her father and stepmother in 1892. She was acquitted in 1893. Her alleged deed was...

Borden, Mary
(1887-1968) US novelist, a British subject from 1918. Her intelligent novels about human relationships include The Romantic Woman (1919), Flamingo (1927), and Martin Merriedew (1952). Forbidden Zone (1929) is a...

Borden, Robert Laird
(1854-1937) Canadian Conservative politician, prime minister 1911-20. Throughout World War I he represented Canada at meetings of the Imperial War Cabinet, and he was the chief Canadian delegate at the Paris...

Border Ruffians
In US history, group of around 5,000 pro-slavery Missourians who entered Kansas in 1855 and took over the legislature. They enacted harsh laws against opponents of slavery, such as the death...

Bordone (or Bordon), Paris
(1500-1571) Italian painter. He was a pupil of Titian, active in Venice. He painted particularly portraits, but also religious, mythological, and allegorical scenes. His The Fisherman Presenting the Ring of St...

Boreas
In Greek mythology, the god of the north wind, who carried off Oreithyia, daughter of a legendary king of Athens. Their children were Calais and Zetes, two of the Borel, Petrus
(1809-1859) French novelist and poet. He was one of the most devoted and extravagant followers of the Romantic school. His chief works are a book of poems, Rhapsodies (1832), a volume of short stories,...

Boreman, Arthur I(ngram)
(1823-1896) US governor and senator. A Virginia lawyer opposed to Secession (the withdrawal of 11 southern states from America), he led the Wheeling Convention in 1861 to establish a pro-union government in...

Borges, Jorge Luis
(1899-1986) Argentine poet and short-story writer. He was an exponent of magic realism. In 1961 he became director of the National Library, Buenos Aires, and was professor of English literature at the...

Borgese, Giuseppe Antonio
(1882-1952) Italian writer and critic. His novel Rubè (1921) set out to portray the duel between the warlike idealism and the basic pacifism of the Italians. He was an opponent of fascism, and in 1931 went to...

Borghese
Sienese family dating from the 13th century. Camillo Borghese (1552-1621) became Pope Paul V in 1605, and greatly advanced the family's fortunes. Camillo Filippo Ludovico, Prince Borghese...