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

Camelot
In medieval romance, legendary seat of King Arthur. A possible site is the Iron Age hill fort of South Cadbury Castle in Somerset, England, where excavations...

camera lucida
In art, a common drawing aid in the 17th century that worked on similar principles to the less practical camera obscura (which transmitted an external scene through a small hole in the wall of a...

camera obscura
Darkened box with a tiny hole for projecting the inverted image of the scene outside on to a screen inside. For its development as a device for producing photographs, see photography. The camera...

Camerarius, Joachim
(1500-1574) German scholar, theologian, and diplomat. A leading figure in the Reformation, he was a close friend of Luther and Melanchthon. He took part in drawing up the Confession of Augsburg in 1530 and...

Cameron, (Mark) James Walter
(1911-1985) Scottish journalist, broadcaster, and author. He worked for papers including the Daily Express (1930-45), the Picture Post, and the News Chronicle (1952-60). He covered some of the most...

Cameron, Charles
(c. 1740-1812) Scottish architect. His work was classical in spirit and very scholarly. He trained under Isaac Ware (1717-1766) in the Palladian tradition before be ...

Cameron, David
(1966) UK Conservative Party politician, party leader from 2006. A skilled communicator, he rose rapidly within the Conservative Party to become deputy chair and head of policy coordination from 2003. In...

Cameron, John
(died 1446) Scottish cleric and statesman. He was appointed secretary to King James I of Scotland in 1424, keeper of the privy seal in 1425, keeper of the great seal in 1427, and bishop of Glasgow and...

Cameron, Richard
(c. 1648-1680) Scottish Covenanter. Converted by the field preachers from Episcopacy, he became an extreme Presbyterian, and preached in Annandale and Clydesdale. In 1678 he went to the Netherlands and returned to...

Cameron, Simon
(1799-1889) US political leader. He served two partial terms in the US Senate 1845-49 and 1857-60. A supporter of Abraham Lincoln at the 1860 Republican nominating convention, he was appointed secretary of...

Cameron, Verney Lovett
(1844-1894) British explorer who led the expedition to relieve David Livingstone, but in 1873 found him dead. He found Livingstone's records and explored Lake Tanganyika and the Congo...

Cameroon
Country in west Africa, bounded northwest by Nigeria, northeast by Chad, east by the Central African Republic, south by the Republic of the Congo, Gabon, and Equatorial Guinea, and...

Camilla
Volscian woman and warrior, enemy of Aeneas and ally of Turnus in Virgil's Aeneid. Her father, fleeing his enemies in Privernum, fastened the baby Camilla to a javelin and threw her across the River...

Camillus, Marcus Furius
(401-c. 365 BC) Roman general and statesman of the early Republic, allegedly five times dictator. Following early successes against the Etruscans, he rallied the Romans after the Gallic invasion 387 BC. Camillus...

Camolodunum
British settlement of the Trinobantes, now modern Colchester in Essex. It was Cymbeline's capital, and later a Roman town, which was sacked by the Iceni led by Boudicca in the revolt of AD 60. ...

Camorra
Italian secret society formed about 1820 by criminals in the dungeons of Naples and continued once they were freed. It dominated politics from 1848, was suppressed in 1911, but many members...

Camp David
Official country home of US presidents, situated in the Appalachian mountains, Maryland; it was originally named Shangri-la by F D Roosevelt, but was renamed Camp David by...

Camp David Agreements
Two framework accords agreed in 1978 and officially signed in March 1979 by Israeli prime minister Begin and Egyptian president Sadat at Camp David, Maryland, USA, under the guidance of US president...

Campagnola, Giulio
(c. 1482-c. 1518) Italian engraver. Trained by Andrea Mantegna, he is remembered for popularizing the works of such artists as Dürer (whose popularity in Italy derived in part from Campagnola's etchings), and...

Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
Nonparty-political British organization advocating the abolition of nuclear weapons worldwide. Since its foundation in 1958, CND has sought unilateral British initiatives to help start, and...

Campana, Pedro de
(1503-1580) Flemish artist. Although born in Brussels, he spent several years in Italy, where he worked at Bologna, Venice, and elsewhere. By 1537 he had moved to Seville in Spain, where he painted religious...

Campanella, Tommaso
(1568-1639) Italian philosopher. Born in Calabria, he was implicated in the Calabrian revolt against their Spanish ruler and was imprisoned 1599-1626. He wrote many books in prison, the best known being his...

campanile
A term applied to towers erected in close proximity, though not attached, to many churches and town halls in Italy. The earliest examples are at Ravenna (about 9th century). Other famous examples...

Campbell
Family name of the dukes of Argyll; seated at Inveraray Castle, Argyll, Scotland. ...

Campbell-Bannerman, Henry
(1836-1908) British Liberal politician, prime minister 1905-08, leader of the Liberal party 1898-1908. The Entente Cordiale was broadened to embrace Russia during his premiership, which also saw the...

Campbell, Alastair John
(1957) UK journalist and Labour Party media strategist. He was appointed to Tony Blair's staff when Blair became leader of the Labour Party in 1994 and he helped to co-ordinate the party's 1997 general...

Campbell, Alexander
(1788-1866) Irish-born US religious leader who emigrated to the USA in 1809. A Protestant exponent of a primitive Christianity based wholly on the Scriptures, he allied his church in 1832 with other...

Campbell, Colen
(1676-1729) Scottish architect. He was one of the principal figures in British Palladian architecture. His widely influential book Vitruvius Britannicus was published in 1712. Among his best-known works are...

Campbell, Colin
(1792-1863) British field marshal. He commanded the Highland Brigade at Balaclava in the Crimean War and, as commander-in-chief during the Indian Mutiny, raised the siege of Lucknow and captured Cawnpore....

Campbell, David
(1915-1979) Australian poet. His first poems were in a ballad style, but he was later influenced by surrealism and by his own translations from Russian of the work of Osip Mandelstam. The traditional collection...

Campbell, Gordon
(1886-1953) British admiral in World War I. He commanded Q-ships, armed vessels that masqueraded as merchant ships to decoy German U-boats to destruction. ...

Campbell, John Francis
(1822-1885) Scottish folklorist. Indirectly inspired by the Grimm brothers, he organized the collection of a large corpus of ballads and folk tales and published Popular Tales of the West Highlands 1860-62....

Campbell, John, 1st Baron Campbell
(1779-1861) Scottish lawyer and politician. He was called to the Bar in 1806 and entered Parliament as member for Stafford in 1830. He supported Lord John Russell's first Reform Bill, and in 1832 was appointed...

Campbell, Joseph
(1904-1987) US mythologist and educator. He wrote analyses of comparative mythology, such as The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), and the four-volume Masks of God (1959-68)....

Campbell, Joseph
(1879-1944) Irish poet. Born in Belfast, he emigrated to New York after the Irish Civil War (1922-23), but returned in 1935 to live in County Wicklow. Under the influence of Douglas Hyde and the Irish...

Campbell, Kim
(1947) Canadian Progressive Conservative politician, prime minister (briefly) in 1993. She was the country's first woman prime minister. She held the posts of minister for state affairs and northern...

Campbell, Menzies `Ming`
(1941) British Liberal Democrat politician, party leader from 2006. An MP for North East Fife, Scotland, since 1987, he was elected party leader in March 2006, having been acting leader since January 2006...

Campbell, Mrs Patrick
(1865-1940) English actor. Her roles included Paula in Pinero's The Second Mrs Tanqueray (1893) and Eliza in Pygmalion, written for her by George Bernard Shaw, with whom she had an amusing correspondence. ...

Campbell, Roy
(1901-1957) South African poet. His poetry is noted for its technical mastery and exuberant metaphor, employed to satiric ends in his attack on the South African `way of life` in The Wayzgoose (1928) and on...

Campbell, Thomas
(1777-1844) Scottish poet. After the successful publication of his philosophical poem The Pleasures of Hope (1799), he travelled in Europe, where he wrote the stirring song `Ye Mariners of England` and...

Camperdown
Village on the northwestern Netherlands coast, off which a British fleet defeated the Dutch 11 October 1797 in the Revolutionary Wars; the battle effectively marked the end of significant Dutch...

Campin, Robert
(c. 1378-1444) Early Netherlandish painter, active in Tournai from 1406. The few works attributed to him are almost as revolutionary in their naturalism as the van Eyck brothers' Ghent altarpiece, which they may...

Campíns, Luis Herrera
(1925) Venezuelan politician and president 1979-83. During his presidency, Campíns sought to cool down the economy as the market for oil exports weakened and economic recession become more pronounced,...

Campion, Edmund
(1540-1581) English Jesuit and Roman Catholic martyr. He became a Jesuit in Rome in 1573 and in 1580 was sent to England as a missionary. He was betrayed as a spy in 1581, imprisoned in the Tower of London, and...

Campion, Thomas
(1567-1620) English poet and musician. He was the author of the critical Art of English Poesie (1602) and four books of Ayres (1601-17), for which he composed both words and music. The Art of Engl ...

Campistron, Jean Galbert de
(1656-1723) French dramatist. An imitator of Racine, he wrote a number of tragedies including Virginie 1683 and Andronic 1685. ...

Campo-Formio, Treaty of
Peace settlement 1797 during the Revolutionary Wars between Napoleon and Austria, by which France gained the region that is now Belgium and Austria was compensated with Venice and part of an area...

Cámpora, Héctor
(1909-1980) Argentine left-wing politician and president May-July 1973. His election came against a background of growing discontentment among supporters of Juan Perón concerned with increasing civil...

Campos, Alvaro de
Assumed name, or `heteronym`, of Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. ...

Campus Martius
Large level space outside the city walls on the northwestern side of ancient Rome. It had an altar to Mars, the Roman god of war, and was used for military manoeuvres and contests. During the later...

Camrose, William Ewert Berry
(1879-1954) Welsh journalist and newspaper proprietor. With his brother, James Gomer Berry, he acquired the Sunday Times in 1915 and later the Financial Times. Together they built up the vast aggregation of...

Camus, Albert
(1913-1960) Algerian-born French writer. His works, such as the novels L'Etranger/The Outsider (1942) and La Peste/The Plague (1948), owe much to existentialism in their emphasis on the absurdity and...

Canaan
Ancient region between the Mediterranean and the Dead Sea, called in the Bible the `Promised Land` of the Israelites. It was occupied as early as the 3rd millennium BC by the Canaanites, a...

Canaanite mythology
Body of tradition and beliefs held by the ancient Canaanites of the western Mediterranean. Cuneiform texts from the 14th century BC found at Ras Shamra (ancient Ugarit) contain lively narratives...

Canada
Country occupying the northern part of the North American continent, bounded to the south by the USA, north by the Arctic Ocean, northwest by Alaska, east by the Atlantic Ocean, and west by the...

Canadian art
Both French and English tradition contributed to development of art in Canada from the 17th century onwards. In the colony of New France, c. 1670, Frère Luc (Claude François) transplanted the...

Canadian literature
Canadian literature in English began early in the 19th century in the Maritime Provinces with the humorous tales of T C Haliburton (1796-1865). Charles Heavysege (1816-1876) published poems...

canal
Artificial waterway constructed for drainage, irrigation, or navigation. Irrigation canals carry water for irrigation from rivers, reservoirs, or wells, and are designed to maintain an even flow of...

Canaletto, Antonio
(1697-1768) Italian painter. He painted highly detailed views (vedute) of Venice (his native city), and of London and the River Thames (1746-56). Typical of his Venetian works is Venice: Regatta on the Grand...

Canaris, Wilhelm Franz
(1887-1945) German admiral and intelligence expert. A U-boat commander during World War I, he remained in the navy after the war and became an intelligence specialist. He ran the Abwehr, the German armed...

Canary Wharf
420,000-sq m/4.5 million-sq ft office development on the Isle of Dogs in London's Docklands, the first phase of which was completed in 1992, along with the foundations for a further 740,000 sq...

Canby, Edward Richard Sprigg
(1817-1873) US soldier. He commanded the Union's Department of New Mexico and defeated a Confederate attempt to take California. As commander of the Department of the Gulf, he accepted the surrender of the last...

Canby, Henry Seidel
(1878-1961) US editor and author. He helped found the Saturday Review of Literature and as its first editor 1924-36, made it into a top literary magazine; he...

cancionero
Collection of early lyrical poems, especially those collections made by the poetic guilds that flourished in Spain and Portugal in the Middle Ages. The ol ...

Cancún
Resort in Yucatan, Mexico, created on a barrier island 1974 by the Mexican government to boost tourism; population around 30,000 (almost all involved in the tourist industry). It is Mexico's most...

Candela, (Outeriño) Félix
(1910-1997) Spanish-born architect-engineer. His most outstanding work was carried out in Mexico, where he emigrated 1939; since 1970 he has lived in the USA. He has pioneered, and excelled in the artistic...

Candella
Rajput dynasty; see Chandela. ...

Candia
Italian name for the Greek island of Crete. Also, formerly the name of Crete's largest city, Iraklion, founded about AD 824. ...

Candide
Satire by Voltaire, published in 1759. The hero experiences extremes...

Candlemas
In the Christian church, the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Presentation of the Infant Christ in the Temple, celebrated on 2 February; church candles are blessed on...

Cane, Facino
(c. 1350-1412) Italian mercenary (condottiere). From 1397 he was employed by the Visconti of Milan and, under...

Canetti, Elias
(1905-1994) Bulgarian-born writer. He was exiled from Austria in 1937 and settled in England in 1939. His books, written in German, include Die Blendung/Auto da Fé (1935). He was concerned with crowd...

Canfield, Cass
(1897-1986) US editor and publisher. Associated with Harper & Brothers from 1924 until his death, he was an active editor who attracted such notable authors as John Gunt ...

Canfield, Dorothy Frances
US writer. See Fisher, Dorothy Canfield. ...

Caniff, (Milton) Milt
(1907-1988) US cartoonist. He was the creator of the action-adventure newspaper comic strips Dickie Dare 1933-34, and Terry and the Pirates (1934-46). His Steve Canyon, featuring the adventures of an...

Cannae
In the 2nd Punic War, Roman defeat by the Carthaginian general Hannibal 2 August 216 BC at the ancient city of Cannae, in Apulia, now a village in Puglia, Italy. The classic demonstration of...

Canning, Charles John
(1812-1862) British administrator, son of George Canning and first viceroy of India from 1858. As governor general of India from 1856, he suppressed...

Canning, George
(1770-1827) British Tory politician, foreign secretary 1807-10 and 1822-27, and prime minister in 1827 in coalition with the Whigs. He was largely responsible, during...

Canning, Stratford
(1786-1880) British nobleman and diplomat. He negotiated the treaty of Bucharest between Russia and Turkey 1812 and helped establish a federal government in Switzerland 1815. He was minister to the USA...

Cannon, Clarence Andrew
(1879-1964) US representative and historian. A professor of history and a lawyer, he served as a Democrat for Missouri in the US House of Representatives 1923-64, and wrote Cannon's Procedure (1928). He was...

Cannon, Joseph G (Gurney)
(1836-1926) US Republican representative. A conservative congressman for Illinois 1873-91, 1893-1913, and again 1917-23, he chaired the Committee on Appropriations; he offended fellow committee members by...

Cano, Alonso
(1601-1667) Spanish sculptor, painter, and architect, a leading figure in Spanish baroque art. He was active in Seville, Madrid, and Granada, and designed the facade of Granada cathedral 1667. He also created...

Cano, Juan Sebastian del
(c. 1476-1526) Spanish voyager. It is claimed that he was the first sea captain to sail around the world. He sailed with Ferdinand Magellan in 1519 and, after the latter's death in the Philippines, brought the...

Cano, Melchior
(1509-1560) Spanish theologian. A Dominican friar at Salamanca from 1523, he taught at Valladolid from 1533, and in 1543 became the first professor of theology at Alcalá. He came to prominence when he defended...

canon
In theology, the collection of writings that is accepted as authoritative in a given religion, such as the Tripitaka in Theravada Buddhism. In the Christian church, it comprises the...

canon
In the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches, a type of priest. Canons, headed by the dean, are attached to a cathedral and constitute the chapter. Originally, in the Catholic Church, a canon was a...

canon law
Rules and regulations of the Christian church, especially the Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Anglican churches. Its origin is sought in the declarations of Jesus and the apostles. In 1983 Pope...

canonical hours
In the Catholic Church, seven set periods of devotion:matins and lauds, prime, terce, sext, nones, evensong or vespers, and compline. In the Anglican church, it is the period 8 a.m.âˆ`6 p.m. within...

canonization
In the Catholic Church, the admission of one of its members to the Calendar of Saints. The evidence of the candidate's exceptional piety is contested before the Congregation for the Causes of Saints...

Canopic jars
In ancient Egypt, four containers for holding a dead person's embalmed organs. Each lid represented the head of one of the four sons of Horus, protecting their allotted organ - the human Imset...

Canossa
Ruined castle 19 km/12 mi southwest of Reggio, Italy. The Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV did penance here before Pope Gregory VII 1077 for having opposed him in the question of investitures. ...

Canova, Antonio, Marquese d'Ischia
(1757-1822) Italian neoclassical sculptor. He was based in Rome from 1781. He received commissions from popes, kings, and emperors for his highly finished marble portrait busts and groups of figures. He made...

Cánovas del Castillo, Antonio
(1828-1897) Spanish politician and chief architect of the political system known as the turno politico through which his own Conservative party, and that of the Liberals under Práxedes Sagasta, alternated in...

Cantarini, Simone
(1612-1648) Italian painter. He was the most important of Guido Reni's followers in Bologna. He was a distinguished portrait painter, one of his finest works being a portrait of Guido Reni. His religious...

Cantelupe, Walter de
(died 1266) English bishop. He held several rich rectories in plurality and strongly resisted the interference of the papacy in England. Consecrated bishop of Worcester at Viterbo, Italy, in 1237, he defended...

Cantemir, Demetrie
(1673-1723) Moldavian statesman and linguist. He was the most distinguished member of an originally Tatar family which emigrated from the Crimea to Moldavia in the 17th century. He ruled Moldavia for one year...

Canterbury
Historic cathedral city in Kent, southeast England, on the River Stour, 100 km/62 mi southeast of London; population (2001) 135,300. The city is the centre of the Anglican community and seat of the...

Canterbury Cathedral
Cathedral in Canterbury, Kent, England. It is in the form of a double cross, with a central and two west towers. The total length is 160 m/525 ft, the east transept measuring 47 m/154 ft. The finest...

Canterbury Tales, The
Unfinished collection of stories in prose and verse (c. 1387) by Geoffrey Chaucer, told in Middle English by a group of pilgrims on their way to Thomas àBecket's tomb at Canterbury. The tales and...

Canterbury, archbishop of
Archbishop of the Church of England (Anglican), the primate (archbishop) of all England, and first peer of the realm, ranking next to royalty. He crowns the sovereign, has a seat in the House of...