- Industry: Library & information science
- Number of terms: 49473
- Number of blossaries: 0
- Company Profile:
Project Gutenberg (PG) is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, to encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks. It was founded in 1971 by Michael S. Hart and is the oldest digital library. Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of public domain books. The ...
The fourteenth President of the United States, born in New Hampshire, was the lifelong friend of Nathaniel Hawthorne; bred to the bar; served in the Mexican War, and was elected President in 1852; his period of office was one of trouble, he supported the States' rights doctrine, and served with the South in the Civil War (1804-1869).
Industry:Language
The German name for the Palatinate, the name of two States, originally one, of the old German empire, one called the Lower Palatinate or the Palatinate of the Rhine, partitioned in 1815 among the States of Baden, Bavaria, Prussia, and Hesse-Darmstadt, and the other called the Upper Palatinate, now nearly all included in Bavaria; the former has for principal towns Spires and Landau, and the latter Ratisbon.
Industry:Language
The gift of penetrating into the inner soul or secret of a thing, and bodying it forth rhythmically so as to captivate the imagination and the heart.
Industry:Language
The god of riches, son of Jason and Demeter. Zeus is said to have put out his eyes that he might bestow his gifts without respect to merit, that is, on the evil and the good impartially.
Industry:Language
The great Athenian statesman, born in Athens, of noble parentage; was a devoted disciple of Anaxagoras; entered public life 467 B.C. as a democrat, and soon became head of the democratic party, to the increase of the power of the citizens and annihilation of the domination of the oligarchy centred in the Areopagus; hostile to territorial aggrandisement, he sought, as his chief ambition, the unification of Greece in one grand confederacy, but was defeated in this noble aim by the jealousy of Sparta; he put down all rivalry, however, in Athens itself, and established himself as absolute ruler with the consent of the citizens, reforming the laws, adorning the city, and encouraging literature and the arts, masters, many wise in the one and skilful in the other, he had at his disposal, such as few or none of the cities of the world had ever before or have had since; the resulting prosperity did but enhance the envy of the other States, Sparta in particular, and two years before he died the spirit of hostility took shape in the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War; he had surrounded the city with walls, and his policy was to defend it from within them rather than face the enemy in the field, but it proved fatal, for it tended to damp rather than quicken the ardour of the citizens, and to add to this a plague broke out among them in 430 B.C., which cut down the most valiant of their number, and he himself lay down to die the year after; he was a high-souled, nobly-bred man, great in all he thought and did, and he gathered around him nearly all the noble-minded and noble-hearted men of his time to adorn his reign and make Athens the envy of the world; d. 429 B.C.
Industry:Language
The great event in the history of Europe in the 16th century, characterised as a revolt of light against darkness, on the acceptance or the rejection of which has since depended the destiny for good or evil of the several States composing it, the challenge to each of them being the crucial one, whether they deserved and were fated to continue or perish, and the crucial character of which is visible to-day in the actual conditions of the nations as they said "nay" to it or "yea," the challenge to each at bottom being, is there any truth in you or is there none? Austria, according to Carlyle, henceforth "preferring steady darkness to uncertain new light"; Spain, "people stumbling in steep places in the darkness of midnight"; Italy, "shrugging its shoulders and preferring going into Dilettantism and the Fine Arts"; and France, "with accounts run up on compound interest," had to answer the "writ of summons" with an all too indiscriminate "Protestantism" of its own.
Industry:Language
The great philosopher, born in Athens, of noble birth, the year Pericles died, and the second of the Peloponnesian War; at 20 became a disciple of Socrates, and passed eight years in his society; at 30, after the death of Socrates, quitted Athens, and took up his abode at Megara; from Megara he travelled to Cyrene, Egypt, Magna Graecia, and Sicily, prolonging his stay in Magna Graecia, and studying under Pythagoras, whose philosophy was then at its prime, and which exercised a profound influence over him; after ten years' wandering in this way he, at the age of 40, returned to Athens, and founded his Academy, a gymnasium outside the city with a garden, which belonged to his father, and where he gathered around him a body of disciples, and had Aristotle for one of his pupils, lecturing there with undiminished mental power till he reached the advanced age of 81; of his philosophy one can give no account here, or indeed anywhere, it was so unsectarian; he was by pre-eminence the world-thinker, and though he was never married and left no son, he has all the thinking men and schools of philosophy in the world as his offspring; enough to say that his philosophy was philosophy, as it took up in its embrace both the ideal and the real, at once the sensible and the super-sensible world (429-347 B.C.).
Industry:Language
The greatest lyric poet of Greece, and for virgin purity of imagination ranked by Ruskin along with Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Scott; born near Thebes, in Boeotia, of a musical family, and began his musical education by practice on the flute, while he was assisted in his art by the example of his countrywoman Corinna, who competed with and defeated him more than once at the public festivals; he was a welcome visitor at the courts of all the Greek princes of the period, and not the less honored that he condescended to no flattery and attuned his lyre to no sentiment but what would find an echo in every noble heart; he excelled in every department of lyric poetry, hymns to the gods, the praises of heroes, paeans of victory, choral songs, festal songs and dirges, but of these only a few remain, his Epinikia, a collection of triumphal odes in celebration of the successes achieved at the great national games of Greece; he was not only esteemed the greatest of lyric poets by his countrymen, but is without a rival still; when Alexander destroyed Thebes he spared the house of Pindar (522-442 B.C.).
Industry:Language
The greatest sculptor and statuary of ancient Greece, born at Athens; flourished in the time of Pericles, and was appointed by him to direct the works of art projected to the beautifying of the city, and expressly commissioned to execute certain of these works himself; the chief work that he superintended was the erection of the Parthenon, much of which he himself adorned; and of the statues he executed the most famous were one of Athena of ivory and gold for the Parthenon, and a colossal one of Zeus, his masterpiece, also of ivory and gold, for Olympia; accused of having appropriated some of the gold intended for the statue of Athena he was acquitted, but was afterwards charged with impiety for carving his own likeness and that of Pericles on the shield of the goddess, and was thrown into prison, where he died, 432 B.C.
Industry:Language
The head of the Achaecan League, born at Megalopolis, and the last of the Greek heroes; fought hard to achieve the independence of Greece, but having to struggle against heavy odds, was overpowered; rose from a sick-bed to suppress a revolt, was taken prisoner, thrown into a dungeon, and forced to drink poison (252-183 B.C.).
Industry:Language
