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

business cycle
Period of time that includes a peak and trough of economic activity, as measured by a country's national income. The economy passes through phases of boom and recession, causing changes in the...

Business Expansion Scheme
UK government scheme, launched 1981, offering tax relief to encourage private investment in high-risk ventures, later extended to forms of investment in property. ...

business plan
Key management tool that focuses on business objectives, the products or services involved, estimated market potential, expertise in the firm, projected financial results, the money required from...

business rate
Tax levied on commercial property in an area. Business rates are set and collected by central government and the money is then distributed to local authorities to help finance their expenditure....

Bussy, Roger de Rabutin
(1618-1693) French writer. Banished from the court 1659, he wrote the Histoire amoureuse des Gaules/History of Love Affairs of the Gauls for the amusement of his mistress. This offended the king and Bussy was...

bust
Sculptured representation of the head, shoulders, and breast of a person. The traditional bust form appeared in Etruscan art of the 5th century BC, having originated in the herms of ancient Greece,...

Butcher, Samuel Henry
(1850-1910) Irish classical scholar. He collaborated with Andrew Lang in a translation into English prose of Homer's Odyssey (1879). His works include Some Aspects of the Greek Genius (1891) and Aristotle's...

Bute, John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute
(1713-1792) British Tory politician, prime minister 1762-63. On the accession of George III in 1760, he became the chief instrument in the king's policy for breaking...

Buthelezi, Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha
(1928) South African Zulu leader and politician, president of the Zulu-based Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), which he founded as a paramilitary organization for attaining a nonracial democratic society in...

Butinone, Bernardino
(died 1507) Italian painter of the Milanese School. Active from 1484, he was associated with Bernardo Zenale in painting frescoes in S Pietro in Gessate, Milan, and an altarpiece in Treviglio. He appears to...

Butler-Sloss, Elizabeth (Oldfield)
(1933) English judge. After chairing the Cleveland Sex Abuse Inquiry (1987-88), she became the first woman lord justice of appeal. She was a divorce registrar from 1970 until her appointment in 1979 to...

Butler, Alban
(1711-1773) English Roman Catholic hagiographer. He was ordained a priest in 1735. In 1746 he was on the English mission. He was also, at some stage, chaplain to the Duke of Norfolk. His chief work is the...

Butler, Basil Christopher
(1902-1986) English Benedictine. He was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1928, and in 1929 joined the Benedictine order at Downside Abbey in England. He was ordained a priest in 1933, and was...

Butler, Benjamin Franklin
(1818-1893) US soldier and politician. In the Civil War he was a volunteer officer in the Union forces. He was a member of Congress in the 1860s and 1870s, and was elected governor of Massachusetts 1882. Butler...

Butler, Charles
(1750-1832) English lawyer and writer. From 1782-91 he was secretary of the committee for the repeal of penal laws, and in 1791 was the first to be called to the Bar under the terms of the Catholic Relief...

Butler, David C
(1829-1891) US Republican governor. As Nebraska's first governor 1867-71, he developed the railroads and built state office buildings in Lincoln, the new capital. He was impeached for appropriating state...

Butler, Elizabeth Southerden
(1846-1933) English painter. Popular in the Victorian era for her images of military life and warfare, she made her reputation with Roll Call (1874) and Inkermann (1877) but is perhaps best known...

Butler, Howard Crosby
(1872-1922) US archaeologist. He led three expeditions to Syria from 1899 to 1909. His supervision of the excavations at Sardis, Turkey, 1910-22, generated his most important published...

Butler, Joseph
(1692-1752) English priest and theologian who became dean of St Paul's in 1740 and bishop of Durham in 1750; his Analogy of Religion 1736 argued that it is no more rational to accept ...

Butler, Josephine Elizabeth
(1828-1906) English social reformer. She promoted women's education and the Married Women's Property Act, and campaigned against the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1862-70, which made women in garrison towns...

Butler, Pierce
(1866-1939) US Supreme Court justice. He gained prominence as an expert in railroad law. He was appointed by President Harding to the US Supreme Court 1923-39, and often voted aga ...

Butler, Reg(inald Cotterell)
(1913-1981) English sculptor. He taught architecture from 1937 to 1939 and was then a blacksmith for many years before becoming known for cast and forged iron works, both abstract...

Butler, Richard Austen
(1902-1982) British Conservative politician. As minister of education 1941-45, he was responsible for the 1944 Education Act that introduced the 11-plus examination for selection of grammar school pupils;...

Butler, Samuel
(1835-1902) English writer. He made his name in 1872 with a satiric attack on contemporary utopianism, Erewhon (an anagram of nowhere). He is now remembered for his unfinished, semi-autobiographical...

Butler, Samuel
(1612-1680) English satirist. His best-known poem Hudibras, published in three parts in 1663, 1664, and 1678, became immediately popular for its biting satire against the Puritans and...

Butler, Smedley D (Darlington)
(1881-1940) US marine officer. He fought in the Far East, Central America, and the Caribbean for more than 20 years, but missed combat in World War I. Later he became a prominent isolationist spokesperson. He...

Butler, William Francis
(1838-1910) Irish soldier and writer. Born in Suirville, Tipperary, he joined the British army in 1858, and served in Canada 1867-73, where his experiences provided the material for his popular work The Great...

Butor, Michel Marie François
(1926) French writer. He was one of the nouveau roman novelists who made radical changes in the traditional form. His works include Passage de Milan/Passage from Milan (1954), L'Emploi du temps/Passing...

Butskellism
UK term for political policies tending towards the middle ground in an effort to gain popular support; the term was coined 1954 after R A Butler (moderate Conservative) and Hugh Gaitskell (moderate...

Butt, Isaac
(1813-1879) Irish Protestant lawyer who founded the idea of home rule for Ireland. He became a lawyer 1838 and Tory MP for Youghal 1851, and defended Fenian prisoners from 1865-69. He was converted to...

Butterfield, William
(1814-1900) English Gothic Revival architect. His work is characterized by vigorous, aggressive forms and multicoloured striped and patterned brickwork. He held original views as to colour in architecture,...

button
Fastener for clothing, originating with Bronze Age fasteners. In medieval Europe buttons were replaced by pins but were reintroduced in the 13th century...

Button, Thomas
(died 1634) English navigator who achieved fame when he led an expedition sent to look for the Northwest Passage in 1612. As captain of the Resolution and accompanied by the pinnace Discovery, he explored the...

buttonhole
Fastener for clothing, used with a button. There are two main types of buttonhole. In one type, a slit in buttress
In architecture, a vertical mass of masonry that acts as a support or brace, projecting from the outer face of a wall at intervals. Its presence helps to resist the outward thrust of a vault,...

Buxar, Battle of
Battle 1764 at Buxar, in Bihar, northeastern India, in which the British East India Company secured dominance of northern India. It defeated the triple forces of the Mogul emperor Shah Alam II...

Buxton, Thomas Fowell
(1786-1845) English philanthropist and politician. Though he worked strenuously for prison reform, and tried to carry a scheme for bettering the condition of the African negroes, his life work was to promote...

Buxtorf, Johannes (I)
(1564-1629) German Hebrew scholar. Professor of Hebrew at Basel 1591-1629, he brought a new discipline and depth to Hebrew studies, largely by drawing on rabbinical scholarship. His published works include...

buyer's market
Market having an excess of goods and services on offer and where prices are likely to be declining. The buyer benefits from the wide choice and competition available. ...

Buyoya, Pierre
(1949) Burundian soldier and head of state 1987-93. In 1987 he led a military coup against his close colleague President Jean-Baptiste Bagaza. A member of the Tutsi ethnic group, Buyoya promised fairer...

Buytewech, Willem Pietersz.
(c. 1591-1625) Dutch painter and etcher. His works, which are very rare (only about ten are known), have much in common with the work of Frans Buzek, Jerzy Karol
(1940) Polish politician, prime minister of Poland from 1997. A chemical-engineering professor and a veteran trade-union activist, he was named prime minister of a new centre-right coalition in...

by-election
See electoral system: UK. ...

Byatt, A(ntonia) S(usan)
(1936) English novelist and critic. Her fifth novel, Possession (1990, filmed 2002) won the Booker Prize. The Virgin in the Garden (1978) is a confident, zestfully handled account of a varied group of...

Byblos
Ancient Phoenician city (modern Jebeil), 32 km/20 mi north of Beirut, Lebanon. Known to the Assyrians and Babylonians as Gubla, it had a thriving export of cedar and pinewood to Egypt as early as...

Büchner, Georg
(1813-1837) German dramatist. His characters were often individuals pitted against the forces of society. Büchner's plays include Danton's Death 1835, which chronicles the power struggle between Danton and...

Byers, Stephen (John)
(1953) British Labour politician, secretary of state for transport, local government, and the regions 2001-02. A former law lecturer and local councillor for Tyneside North, he served as school standards...

Bykau, Vasil
(1924-2003) Belorussian writer. In novels such as The Ordeal (1970) and The Mark of Doom (1982) Bykau seeks to crystallize a specifically Belorussian sense of identity by exploring the severe wartime ordeals of...

Byland Abbey
Large ruined Cistercian abbey, 32 km/20 mi north of York, England. It was built from around 1170, and its west end and monastery foundations still survive. Byland follows Roche as the second Gothic...

Bülow, Karl Wilhelm Paul von
(1846-1921) German field marshal. In World War I, he commanded the German 2nd Army in the invasion of Belgium, before advancing into France. He was heavily defeated in the Battle of the Marne September 1914 and...

Byng, George
(1663-1733) British admiral. He captured Gibraltar in 1704; commanded the fleet that prevented an invasion of England by the `Old Pretender` James Francis Edward Stuart in 1708; and destroyed the Spanish...

Byng, John
(1704-1757) British admiral. Byng failed in the attempt to relieve Fort St Philip when in 1756 the island of Menorca was invaded by France. He was court-martialled and shot. The French writer Voltaire...

Byng, Julian Hedworth George
(1862-1935) British general in World War I, commanding troops in Turkey and France, where, after a victory at Vimy Ridge, he took command of the Third Army. On 20 November-7 December 1917 he led the...

Byrd, Harry F (Flood)
(1887-1966) US Democratic governor and senator. As governor of Virginia 1926-30, he established the first antilynching law in the South in 1928. He promoted rural electrification while eliminating Virginia's...

Byrd, Richard Evelyn
(1888-1957) US aviator and explorer. The first to fly over the North Pole (1926), he also flew over the South Pole (1929) and led five overland expeditions in Antarctica. ...

Byrd, Robert C (Carlyle)
(1917) US Democratic senator. He was elected to the US House of Representatives for West Virginia, 1953-58, and to the US Senate in 1958. A conservative opponent of civil rights and welfare spending in...

Byrd, William
(1674-1744) American politician and historian. In 1709 he became a member of the Council of State. He was one of the commissioners appointed 1728 to make out a dividing line between Virginia...

Bürger, Gottfried August
(1747-1794) German Romantic poet. He may be said to have introduced the ballad into German literature, and is remembered for his ballad Lenore (1773). Such works as Lenore, Der wilde Jäger, and Das Lied vom...

Byrne, Jane (born Burke)
(1934) US Democratic mayor. As mayor of Chicago 1980-84, she became the first woman to head a major American city. The city experienced serious financial problems during her tenure and she lost in the...

Byrnes, James F (Francis)
(1879-1972) US secretary of state and public official. As a Senator he promoted the passage of landmark legislation such as the Neutrality Act in 1935, and the Lend-Lease Act in 1941. He accompanied President...

Byrns, Joseph (Wellington)
(1869-1936) US Democratic representative. In the US House of Representatives 1909-36, he championed governmental economy and tariff reductions, although he secured the massive wartime appropriations requested...

Byron, Annabella
(1792-1860) English philanthropist. A committed advocate of schemes for improving women's education, many of which she funded, Byron was also involved in agricultural and industrial reforms, co-operative...

Byron, John
(1723-1786) English vice-admiral, grandfather of the poet Lord Byron. Having distinguished himself in the wars against France, he was put in command of an expedition of discovery to the South Seas. In the...

Byron, Robert
(1905-1941) English writer on travel and architecture, including The Byzantine Achievement 1929 and The Road to Oxiana 1937, an account of a journey from Iran to Afghanistan 1933-34. ...

Byzantine
Style in the visual arts and architecture that originated in the 4th-5th centuries in Byzantium (capital of the Eastern Roman Empire; renamed Constantinople in 330; now Istanbul). It spread to...

Byzantine Empire
The Eastern Roman Empire 395-1453, with its capital at Constantinople (formerly Byzantium, modern Istanbul). It was the direct continuation of the Roman Empire in the East, and inherited many of...

Byzantine literature
Literature of the Byzantine Empire, 4th-15th centuries. It was written mainly in the Greek koinē, a form of Greek accepted as the literary language of the 1st century and increasingly archaic and...

Byzantium
Ancient Greek city on the Bosporus, founded as a colony of the Greek city of Megara on an important strategic site at the entrance to the Black Sea about 660 BC. In AD 330 the capital of the Roman...

CAB
Acronym for citizens advice bureau. ...

Cabal, the
Group of politicians, the English king Charles II's counsellors 1667-73, whose initials made up the word by coincidence - Clifford (Thomas Clifford 1630-1673), Ashley (Anthony Ashley Cooper,...

Caballero, Fernan
(1796-1877) Spanish novelist, born at Morges, Switzerland. Her first novel, La gaviota (1849), created the type of the Andalusian village romances in Spain. She published many other works, including Cuentos y...

cabaret
Theatrical revue traditionally combining satire and song and performed in cafés or bars. Originating in Paris in the late 19th century in venues such as the Moulin Rouge, cabaret was embraced by...

Cabbala
Alternative spelling of Kabbalah. ...

Cabell, James Branch
(1879-1958) US novelist. He made his name with Jurgen (1919). Many of his stories are set in the imaginary country of Poictesme, and the series entitled the `Biography of Manuel` traces the lineage of its...

Cabet, Étienne
(1788-1856) French-born Utopian, social reformer, and author. In France he published a Utopian romance, Voyage en Icarie (1839), which outlined what he called the Icarian doctrine, a detailed blueprint for a...

cabinet
In politics, the group of ministers holding a country's highest executive positions who decide government policy. In Britain the cabinet system originated under the Stuarts in the 17th century....

cabinet government
Alternative term for parliamentary government. ...

Cabot, George
(1752-1823) US merchant and senator. He made a substantial fortune as a shipper and merchant; he also worked with his family's cotton mills. As a staunch Federalist, he became a close associate of George...

Cabot, John M (Moors)
(1901-1981) US diplomat. He specialized in Eastern Europe and Latin America and was assistant secretary of state for Inter-American Affairs 1953-54. He wrote The Racial Conflict in Transylvania (1926) and...

Cabot, Sebastian
(1474-1557) Italian navigator and cartographer, the second son of Giovanni Caboto. He explored the Brazilian coast and the Rio de la Plata for the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V 1526-30. Cabot was also employed...

Caboto, Giovanni
(c. 1450-c. 1498) Italian navigator. Commissioned, with his three sons, by Henry VII of England to discover unknown lands, he arrived at Cape Breton Island on 24 June 1497, thus becoming...

Cabral, Amilcar
(1924-1973) Guinean nationalist leader. He founded the African Party for the Independence of Portuguese Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) in 1956 and, after abortive constitutional discussions with the Portuguese...

Cabral, Luiz de Almeida
(1931) Guinean nationalist leader and politician, first president of the republic of Guinea-Bissau 1974-80. As a member of the African Party for the Independence of Portuguese Guinea and Cape Verde...

Cabral, Pedro Alvares
(1460-1526) Portuguese explorer who made Brazil a Portuguese possession in 1500 and negotiated the first commercial treaty between Portugal and India. Cabral set sail from Lisbon for the East Indies in March...

Cabrini, Frances
(1850-1917) First Roman Catholic US citizen to become a saint. Born in Lombardy, Italy, she founded the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart, and established many schools and hospitals in the care of her...

cacique
Person involved in nepotism or fraud. Originally a word for Indian chiefs in colonial Spanish America, in late 19th- and early 20th-century Spain it came to mean the local political boss who...

CACM
Abbreviation for Central American Common Market. ...

Cacus
In Roman mythology, a giant son of Vulcan who stole some of Hercules' oxen and was killed by Hercules. ...

CAD
Use of computers in creating and editing design drawings. CAD also allows such things as automatic testing of designs and multiple or animated three-dimensional views of designs. CAD systems are...

Caddoan
Branch of the American Indian Macro-Siouan language family in the Midwestern USA. It was named after the Caddo, a confederacy of American Indian peoples who originally occupied the Red River area...

Cade, Jack
(died 1450) English rebel. He was a prosperous landowner, but led a revolt in 1450 in Kent against the high taxes and court corruption of Henry VI and demanded the recall from Ireland of Richard, Duke of York....

Cádiz
Spanish city and naval base, capital and seaport of the province of Cádiz, sited on a peninsula on the south side of Cádiz Bay, an inlet of the Atlantic Ocean, 103 km/64 mi south of Seville;...

Cádiz, Raid on
A naval raid by Francis Drake on the Spanish fleet in the harbour of Cádiz in April 1587. Philip II of Spain was gathering the fleet together for the invasion of England. Taking advantage of...

Cadmus
In Greek legend, the son of Phoenician king Agenor of Tyre, and brother of Europa, who was abducted by Zeus. Cadmus sought to retrieve her, but was advised by the Delphic oracle to follow a heifer...

Cadmus, Paul
(1904-1999) US painter. He was a provocative artist who combined wit and social protest. His most famous (and notorious) paintings are The Fleet's In (1934), which was controversial because of its overt...

Cadoc the Wise, St
(died c. 570) Welsh martyr. He founded the abbey and school of Llancarvan in Glamorganshire, Wales. According to the most trustworthy accounts, he later migrated to Brittany. Having returned to Britain he was...

Cadorna, Count Luigi
(1850-1928) Italian soldier. He was appointed commander-in-chief of Italian forces on Italy's entry into World War I 1915. He held this post until after the Battle of Caporetto November 1917, when he was...

caduceus
In classical mythology, a staff with three shoots, one of which made the handle, the other two being intertwined at the top. The messenger Hermes, or Mercury,...

Cadwalader
(died c. 664) Semi-mythical British king, the son of Cadwallon, king of Gwynedd, North Wales, described by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his book Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain). ...

Cadwallon (or Caedwalla)
(lived 6th century) King of Gwynedd (c. 625-34), in North Wales. He allied with Penda of Mercia and in 632 defeated and killed Edwin of Northumbria at Hatfield Chase. The following year he was himself defeated and...