- 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 ...
A Persian word denoting a mandate or decree; among the Turks the term is applied to such decrees as issue from the Ottoman Porte, and also to passports, the right of signing which lies with the Sultan or a Pasha; the word is also used in India to denote a permit to trade.
Industry:Language
A Philistine town, the gates of which Samson carried off by night; situated on a mound at the edge of the desert, 5 m. from the sea, a considerable place to this day.
Industry:Language
A philosopher of Crete of the 7th century B.C., of whom it is fabled that he fell asleep in a cave when a boy, and that he did not awake for 57 years, but it was to find himself endowed with all knowledge and wisdom. He was invited to Athens during a plague to purify the city, on which occasion he performed certain mysterious rites with the effect that the plague ceased. The story afforded Goethe a subject for a drama entitled "Das Epimenides Erwachen," "in which he symbolises his own aloofness from the great cause of the Fatherland, the result of want of faith in the miraculous power that resides in an enthusiastic outbreak of patriotic feeling."
Industry:Language
A place on the northern slopes of a hill 6 or 7 m. S. of Bethel, and the spot over which Joshua bade the sun stand still; its inhabitants, for a trick they played on the invading Israelites, wore condemned to serve them as "hewers of wood and drawers of water."
Industry:Language
A plain near Guisnes, where Henry VIII. had an interview with Francis I.; was so called from the magnificence displayed on the occasion on the part of both sovereigns and their retinue.
Industry:Language
A play by Beaumarchais, "issued on the stage in Paris 1784, ran its hundred nights; a lean and barren thing; succeeded, as it flattered a pruriency of the time and spoke what all were feeling and longing to speak."
Industry:Language
A poem that treats of the events in the life of a nation or a race or the founder of one, agreeably to the passion inspiring it and in such form as to kindle and keep alive the heroism thereof in the generations thereafter; or a poem in celebration of the thoughts, feelings, and feats of a whole nation or race; its proper function is to disimprison the soul of the related facts and give a noble rendering of them; of compositions of this kind the "Iliad" of Homer, the "Aeneid" of Virgil, and the "Divine Comedy" of Dante take the lead.
Industry:Language
A political economist, brought into notice by the Revolution of 1830; edited Le Temps; opposed Louis Philippe's minister, M. Guizot; held office under the Presidency of Louis Napoleon, but threw up office on the coup d'état of 1851 (1803-1854).
Industry:Language
A political party in Italy who, from the 11th to the 14th centuries, maintained the supremacy of the German emperors over the Italian States in opposition to the Guelphs.
Industry:Language
A political party which arose in the United States in 1848 to oppose slave-extension. In 1856 their principles were adopted, and the party absorbed in the newly-formed Republican party.
Industry:Language
