Copy of `The History Channel - Encyclopedia`

The wordlist doesn't exist anymore, or, the website doesn't exist anymore. On this page you can find a copy of the original information. The information may have been taken offline because it is outdated.

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

Flemish literature
In Belgium, Flemish literature in its written form was the same as Dutch and was stimulated by the declaration, following the revolution of 1830-39, that French was the only official language in...

Fleshly School
Name given by the writer Robert Buchanan to the Pre-Raphaelite group of poets. He applied the term particularly to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in a hostile article published in the Contemporary Review...

Fletcher, Alice Cunningham
(1838-1923) Cuban-born ethnologist and humanitarian. She worked for better treatment of the American Indians living in the West of the USA and became the first and best-informed researcher of American...

Fletcher, Andrew of Saltoun
(1655-1716) Scottish patriot, the most outspoken critic of the Union of Scotland with England of 1707. He advocated an independent Scotland, and a republic or limited monarchy, and proposed `limitations` to...

Fletcher, Frank Jack
(1885-1973) US admiral. He commanded the US naval forces in the Battle of the Coral Sea 1942 but had to withdraw from the Battle of the Midway after his flagship, USS Yorktown, was damaged. He was hostile to...

Fletcher, Giles
(c. 1588-1623) English poet. His chief work is Christ's Victory and Triumph, in Heaven, in Earth, Over and After Death 1610, a baroque poem in the epic style, divided into four cantos. The poem owes much to...

Fletcher, Giles
(1546-1611) English lawyer, diplomat, and writer. He was sent on a diplomatic mission to Russia in 1588, where, despite a hostile reception from the tsar, he secured important concessions for English merchants....

Fletcher, John
(1579-1625) English dramatist. He is remarkable for his range, which included tragicomedy and pastoral dramas, in addition to comedy and tragedy. He collaborated with Francis Beaumont in some 12 plays,...

Fletcher, John Gould
(1886-1950) US poet. He was associated with several modern movements, including Imagism. Among his volumes of verse are Irradiations Sand and Spray 1915, Breakers and Granite 1921, marking a return to American...

Fletcher, Phineas
(1582-1650) English poet. His principal work is The Purple Island: or the Isle of Man 1633. Written in 12 cantos of seven-line stanzas, it is an allegory of the human body in the style of Edmund Spenser. He...

fleur-de-lis
Heraldic device in the form of a stylized iris flower, borne on coats of arms since the 12th century and adopted by the French royal house of Bourbon. It is usually identified as a lily, though it...

Fleury, Andre Hercule de
(1653-1743) French cardinal and statesman. Fleury had been Louis XV's teacher, and in 1726 he became both a cardinal and the king's chief minister. An adept financier, he turned France's economic deficit into a...

Fleury, Claude
(1640-1723) French ecclesiastical historian. In 1691 he commenced his great work, Histoire ecclésiastique/Ecclesiastical History, published in 20 volumes. ...

Flexner, Stuart Berg
(1928-1990) US lexicographer. He was co-author of the Dictionary of American Slang (1960), and became a Random House vice-president and editor-in-chief of its reference division, editing The Random...

Flinders, Matthew
(1774-1814) English navigator who explored the Australian coasts 1795-99 and 1801-03. Named after him are Flinders Island, northeast of Tasmania, Australia; the...

flint
Compact, hard, brittle mineral (a variety of chert), brown, black, or grey in colour, found as nodules in limestone or shale deposits. It consists of cryptocrystalline (grains too small to be...

flint implement
Weapon or tool made from flint nodules which, when chipped, produce a sharp cutting edge. Flint implements, along with others of similar tough fine-grained stone, belong to the Stone Age period of...

Flipper, Henry Ossian
(1856-1940) US soldier and engineer. He became West Point's first black American graduate. Dismissed from the army in 1882 on trumped-up charges, he campaigned the rest of his life for reinstatement. He...

Flitcroft, Henry
(1697-1769) English architect, born at Hampton Court. He was apprenticed as a joiner, but turned to architecture under the patronage of Richard Boyle, with whom he designed Burlington House, Piccadilly. His...

Flodden, Battle of
Defeat of the Scots by the English under the Earl of Surrey on 9 September 1513, on a site 5 km/3 mi southeast of Coldstream, in Northumberland, England. James IV of Scotland, declaring himself the...

Floire et Blanchefleur
Medieval romance, probably of oriental origin. Writers in most European countries, including Boccaccio in Italy, told the tale from the French version. The story is of two children who loved each...

Flood, Henry
(1732-1791) Irish statesman. One of Ireland's great orators, Flood entered the Irish Parliament in 1759. He allied with Henry Grattan in the hope of establishing an independent Irish parliament, and held office...

Flood, the
In the Old Testament, the Koran, and The Epic of Gilgamesh (an ancient Sumerian legend), a deluge lasting 40 days and nights, a disaster alleged to have obliterated all humanity except a chosen few...

Flora
In Roman mythology, the goddess of flowers, youth, and spring. Her festival, the Floralia, instituted in 238 BC, was initially celebrated at irregular intervals but became annual from 173 BC. It...

Florence Cathedral
Cathedral (Italian duomo) of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, Italy, begun by Arnolfo di Cambio in 1296, and consecrated in 1436, when it was called `del Fiore` (of...

Florence Court
Mid-18th-century house in County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, standing 11 km/7 m south of Enniskillen, near the Cuilcagh Mountains which form the Northern Ireland-Eire border. One of the most...

Florence, Council of
General...

Flores Facussé, Carlos Roberto
(1950) Honduran politician, president 1998-2002. A member of the centre-right Liberal Party of Honduras (PLH), he was a minister 1982-86 under president Roberto Suazo Córdova, and in 1989 an...

Flores, Juan José
(1801-1864) Ecuadorean general, president 1830-35 and 1839-45. Born in Venezuela, he joined Simón Bolívar's patriot army in his teens, and soon became one of its most trusted generals. Flores convoked the...

Flores, Patricio Fernandez
(1929) US Catholic prelate. The first Mexican-American bishop, he was ordained in 1956 and did parish work in the Houston diocese before being appointed auxiliary bishop...

Florey, Howard Walter
(1898-1968) Australian pathologist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1945 with Ernst Chain for the isolation of penicillin and its development as an antibiotic drug. His research...

Florian, Jean Pierre Claris de
(1755-1794) French poet, novelist, and dramatist. He wrote many poems and comedies, among them Le Bon Ménage, Le Bon Père, La Bonne Mère, novels of peasant life, and also Numa Pompilius and Galatée. In 1792...

florin
Coin; many European countries have had coins of this name. The first florin was of gold, minted in Florence in 1252. The obverse bore the image of a lily, which led to the coin being called fiorino...

Florio, John
(c. 1553-1625) English author and translator. His writings include his Italian-English dictionary A World of Words (1598) and his translation of Montaigne's essays (1603), dedicated to...

Floris, Cornelis
(c. 1514-1575) Netherlands sculptor and architect. He executed numerous tombs, church screens, and other ecclesiastical furnishings in the Netherlands, and as far afield as north Germany and Scandinavia. His most...

Floris, Frans
(1516-1570) Flemish painter. He visited Italy, where he was strongly influenced by the works of Michelangelo. Among his finest works are The Last Judgement (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Brussels) and The Fall of...

Flosse, Gaston
(1931) French Polynesian right-of-centre politician, head of government 1984-87 and from 1991. He founded the Tahoeraa Huiraatira (TH) as a regional offshoot of the right-wing Rally for the...

flotsam, jetsam, and lagan
In law, goods cast from ships at sea, due usually to the event or prevention of shipwreck. Flotsam is the debris or cargo found floating;jetsam is what has been thrown overboard to...

Flowers of Evil
A collection of poems by Charles Baudelaire, published in France in 1857, which deal with the conflict between good and evil. The work was condemned by the censor as endangering public morals, but...

Fluxus
Artistic movement that emerged in New York in the early 1960s. Yoko Ono is the best-known artist associated with the movement. The work of Fluxus adherents, which includes film, music, dance,...

flying buttress
In Gothic architecture, a stone buttress in the form of an arched prop, supported at one end by the main wall of a building and at the other end by a pier, in order to resist a lateral thrust. A...

Flying Dutchman
Phantom ship supposed to haunt the waters round the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa. According to the legend, the captain, Hendrik Vanderdecken, was condemned to sail for ever round the Cape because...

Flying Tigers
Nickname given to the American Volunteer Group in World War II, a group of US pilots recruited to fight in China by Maj-Gen Chennault 1940-41. The group proved an effective force against the...

Flynn, John
(1880-1951) Australian missionary. Inspired by the use of aircraft to transport the wounded of World War I, he instituted in 1928 the flying doctor service in Australia, which can be summoned to the outback by...

FNLA
Abbreviation for Front National de Libération de l'Angola (National Front for the Liberation of Angola), Angolan nationalist movement during the struggle for independence. ...

Fo, Dario
(1926) Italian dramatist and actor. His plays are predominantly political satires combining black humour with slapstick. They include Morte accidentale di un anarchico/Accidental Death of an Anarchist...

focal point
In art, the centre of interest in an artwork that attracts the viewer's eyes first. Artists use various techniques to bring the viewer to the focal point...

Foch, Ferdinand
(1851-1929) Marshal of France during World War I. He was largely responsible for the Allied victory at the first battle of the Marne in September 1914, and commanded on the northwestern front October...

Focillon, Henri
(1881-1943) French art historian. He taught both in Europe and the USA. He was an authority on the Middle Ages, discussed in, for example, Art d'Occident/Art of the West 1938. His writings explore two themes in...

Fodor, Jerry A
(1935) US philosopher. A Princeton PhD, he taught at the University of Illinois, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Rutgers, specializing in philosophical psychology and psycholinguistics. His...

Fogazzaro, Antonio
(1842-1911) Italian poet and novelist. His novels include Il mistero del poeta/The Poet's Mystery 1888, Piccolo mondo antico/The Patriot 1895, generally considered his masterpiece, and Piccolo mondo moderno/The...

Fogel, Robert William
(1926) US economic historian who shared the Nobel Prize for Economics with Douglass North for creating `cliometrics`, or the New Quantitative Economic History. The arrival of `cliometrics`, a...

fogou
Late Iron Age underground dwelling, lined and roofed with boulders or stone slabs. Fogou is the local name given to a souterrain in Cornwall, England, particularly in the Land's End district. Carn...

Foix
Old county of France, joined to the French crown by Henry IV in 1607. Its power was increased between the 11th and 15th centuries until it became quasi-independent. It is now part...

Foix, Gaston (Phoebus) III de
(1331-1391) French soldier and governor. After a distinguished military career, Foix became governor of Languedoc until Charles VI's accession. The Duke of Berry was then selected for the post and Foix fought...

Fokis
Modern form of Phocis, the ancient region in central Greece. ...

Fokker
German military aircraft, extensively deployed in both world wars. The Fokker DR 1 triplane was famously used by Baron von Richthofen's Flying Circus during World War I; it was a highly manoeuvrable...

Folard, Jean Charles, Chevalier de
(1669-1752) French army officer and military tactician. Folard served at the Battle of Cassano in 1709 and at Malpalquet in 1709. His military writings include Traite des colonnes et de l'orde profond...

Folengo, Teofilo
(1491-1544) Italian poet. His pseudonym was Merlin Cocaio and he wrote mainly in macaronic Latin, a mixture of normal Latin and Italian words with Latinized endings. His first public ...

Foley, John Henry
(1818-1874) Irish sculptor. Among his works are the statues of the writers Oliver Goldsmith and Edmund Burke in Trinity College, Dublin; and the group Asia and the statue of...

Folger, Emily Clara
(1858-1936) US Shakespeare collector. Her husband, Henry Clay Folger, collected Shakespeare folios. Together, they amassed 100,000 books and manuscripts and she became a Shakespearean scholar, authenticating...

Folger, Henry Clay
(1857-1930) US book collector and philanthropist. An industrialist who was president and then chairman of Standard Oil, he and his wife Emily Clara Folger assembled an outstanding Shakespeare collection, which...

Folgore da San Gimignano
(c. 1270-1330) Italian poet. His humorous and satirical poems, mostly sonnets, are written in a smooth, polished style. They concern knightly customs and political questions. ...

Folies-Bergère
Music hall in Paris, France, built 1869, named after its original proprietor. In the 20th century, it featured lavish productions and striptease acts. ...

folk art
Art produced by ordinary people, usually without formal artistic education, that often reflects traditional culture and has practical use. Folk artists often remain anonymous and create objects for...

folk religion
Popular religion that may be divergent from the official teachings and doctrines of the majority faith. Folk religions often combine the ancient indigenous beliefs of a region with a sophisticated...

folklore
Oral traditions and culture of a people, expressed in legends, riddles, songs, tales, and proverbs. The term was coined in 1846 by W J Thoms (1803-1885), but...

Follain, Jean
(1903-1971) French writer. His prose writings include L'Epicerie de l'enfance 1938, Canisy 1942, and Chef-lieu 1950; and his volumes of poetry include La main chaude 1933, Chants terrestres 1937, Exister...

Follett, Ken
(1949) English writer of historical epic sagas and suspense thrillers such as Eye of the Needle (1978), an international best-seller. His thriller Jackdaws was published in 2001. Other works include...

folly
Building with little or no practical purpose built as a curiosity or to catch the eye, popular in the 18th and 19th centuries. A sign of superfluous wealth, many examples take the form of ruined...

Folquet de Marseille
(died 1231) Provençal troubadour. His output consists mainly of love songs, sober in tone and moralizing in content. The son of a wealthy merchant, he became a Cistercian monk and,...

Folsom
Site in New Mexico, USA, where in 1926 a flint point was found embedded among the bones of an extinct type of bison, thus proving that humans had existed in the Americas in the Palaeolithic period. ...

Folsom, James Elisha
(1908-1987) US governor. As Democratic governor of Alabama (1947-50, 1955-59), `Big Jim` was a racial moderate, who legally removed the Ku Klux Klan's hoods and met secretly with Martin Luther King Jr...

Fomorians
In Irish legend, a race of demonic beings who lived in Ireland and fought off successive waves of settlers. They were finally expelled by the Tuatha Dé Danann (people of the goddess Danu) in the...

Fon
A people living mainly in Benin, and also in Nigeria, numbering about 2.5 million. The Fon language belongs to the Kwa branch of the Niger-Congo family. The Fon founded a kingdom which became...

Fonblanque, Albany William
(1793-1872) British journalist. From 1828 to 1847 he was editor and then proprietor of The Examiner, enhancing the reputation that it had won under Leigh Hunt. His work was collected as England under Seven...

Fonck, René
(1896-1953) French fighter ace of World War I. He shot down his first German aircraft 6 August 1916 and on 9 May 1918, over Montdidier, he shot down six German aircraft in one dogfight. By the end of the war he...

Fonseca, Eleanora, Marchesa de
(c. 1768-1799) Neapolitan patriot. Married to the marchese de Fonseca in 1784, Eleanor's salon was the focus of the opposition to the Italian court. She founded and edited Monitore Napoletano during the brief rule...

Fonseca, Manoel Deodoroda
(1827-1892) President of Brazil. Fonseca was leader of the republican movement, overthrowing the Brazilian monarchy in 1889. He became chief executive of the provisional government that followed; and in 1891...

font
Complete set of printed or display characters of the same typeface, size, and style (bold, italic, underlined, and so on). Fonts used in computer setting are of two main types: bit-mapped and...

Fontainas, André
(1865-1948) Belgian poet and critic. He spent much of his life in France. A Symbolist writer (see Symbolism), his informative memoirs, Mes souvenirs du symbolisme 1929 and Confessions d'un poète 1936, are now...

Fontainebleau
Town in Seine-et-Marne département, France, situated 60 km/37 mi southeast of Paris near the River Seine; population (1990) 35,500. Its royal palace was founded by Philip the Good, but, as it...

Fontainebleau School
French school of Mannerist painting and sculpture. It was established at the court of François I, who brought Italian artists to Fontainebleau, near Paris, to decorate his hunting lodge: Rosso...

Fontana, Lavinia
(1552-1614) Italian painter, from Bologna; the daughter of Prospero Fontana. Along with Sophonisba Anguisciola, Fontana was one of the few female Italian artists of the 16th century. She produced portraits and...

Fontana, Lucio
(1899-1968) Italian painter and sculptor. He developed a unique abstract style, presenting bare canvases with straight parallel slashes. His White Manifesto 1946 argued for the blending of scientific ideas with...

Fontana, Prospero
(1512-1597) Italian painter. A leading Mannerist in Bologna, he conducted a school of art there; Ludovico and Agostino Carracci were among his pupils. His Adoration of the Magi is in the church of Sta Maria...

Fontane, Theodor
(1819-1898) German novelist. His best work, such as the historical novel Vor den Sturm/Before the Storm (1878), a critical but sympathetic account of Prussian aristocratic life, and Effi Briest (1898), is...

Fontanne, Lynn
(1887-1983) US actor. She was one half of the husband-and-wife acting partnership known as the `Lunts` with her husband Alfred Lunt. ...

Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de
(1657-1757) French philosopher and poet. Fontenelle had a reputation for popularizing science and philosophy in a lively and elegant way. He was admitted to the French Academy in 1691, in spite of the...

Fontenoy, Battle of
In the War of the Austrian Succession 1745, French victory under Marshal Maurice de Saxe over a comb ...

Food and Agriculture Organization
United Nations specialized agency that coordinates activities to improve food and timber production and levels of nutrition throughout the world. It is also concerned with investment in agriculture...

food-rent
In Anglo-Saxon England, the requirement of royal manors to provide provisions for the king's household. The system is recorded in Domesday as a form of payment in kind in the absence of any real...

Foot, Dingle Mackintosh
(1905-1978) British lawyer and Labour politician, solicitor general 1964-67. He was the brother of Michael Foot. Knighted 1964. ...

Foot, Hugh Mackintosh
(1907-1990) British Labour politician. As governor of Cyprus 1957-60, he guided the independence negotiations, and he represented the UK at the United Nations 1964-70. He was the son of Isaac Foot and...

Foot, Isaac
(1880-1960) British Liberal politician. A staunch Nonconformist, he was minister of mines 1931-32. He was the father of Dingle, Hugh, and Michael Foot. ...

Foot, Michael Mackintosh
(1913) British Labour politician and writer. A leader of the left-wing Tribune Group, he was secretary of state for employment 1974-76, Lord President of the Council...

Football War
Popular name for a five-day war between El Salvador and Honduras which began on 14 July 1969, when Salvadorean planes bombed Tegucigelpa. Its army entered Honduras, but the Foote, Henry Stuart
(1804-1880) US senator and governor. Elected to the US Senate as a Democrat for Mississippi, he resigned to serve as governor of Mississippi. A Union-Democrat, he later represented Tennessee in the...

Foote, Shelby
(1916-2005) US historian and novelist. After establishing himself as a novelist with five well-received books, he spent twenty years crafting his epic, three-volume The Civil War: A Narrative (1958, 1963,...

footpad
Thief or mugger, operating on foot, who robbed travellers on the highway in the 18th and 19th centuries in Britain. Thieves on horseback were termed highwaymen. ...