The Australian Dictionary of Biography is a national co-operative enterprise founded and maintained by the Australian National University to produce authoritative biographical articles on eminent people in Australia's history. Published in a series of twelve hard-copy volumes between 1966 and 2005, the dictionary has been published online since 2006; the ADB project has been operating since 1957. Staff are located at the National Centre of Biography in the History Department of the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. Since its inception, 4,000 authors have contributed to the ADB and its published volumes contain 9,800 scholarly articles on 12,000 individuals. 210 of these are of Indigenous Australians, explained by Bill Stanner's "cult of forgetfulness" theory around the contributions of Indigenous Australians to Australian society. The ADB project should not be confused with the much smaller and older Dictionary of Australian Biography by Percival Serle, first published in 1949, nor with the German Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie which may be referred to as ADB in English sources.

To date, the ADB has produced eighteen hard copy volumes of biographical articles on important and representative figures in Australian history, published by Melbourne University Press. In addition to publishing these works, the ADB makes its primary research material available to the academic community and the public. On 6 July 2006, the Australian Dictionary of Biography Online was launched by Michael Jeffery, Governor-General of Australia, received a Manning Clark National Cultural Award in December 2006; the website is a joint production of the ADB and the Australian Science and Technology Heritage Centre, University of Melbourne. In 2018, Clinton Fernandes wrote that ADB is conspicuously silent on the slaveholder or slave profiting pasts of a number of influential figures in the development of Australia, including George Fife Angas, Isaac Currie, Archibald Paull Burt, Charles Edward Bright, Alexander Kenneth Mackenzie, Robert Allwood, Lachlan Macquarie, Donald Charles Cameron, John Buhot, John Belisario, Alfred Langhorne, John Samuel August, Godfrey Downes Carter.

However, the Legacies database from which Fernandes obtains this information is ambiguous as to George Fife Angas's connection with slavery. It states that he did not lodge the claims himself but collected the compensatory amount for unknown reasons; the entries await to be updated. Official website National Centre of Biography Nolan, Melanie; the ADB's Story. Canberra: Australian National University. ISBN 978-1-925021-20-2. Archived from the original on 29 October 2013. Retrieved 25 October 2013

HMS Handy was a Handy-class destroyer which served with the Royal Navy. Built by Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Company in 1895 she spent most of her time on the China Station, was sold in Hong Kong during the Great War; as part of the 1893–1894 Naval Estimates, the British Admiralty placed orders for 36 torpedo-boat destroyers, all to be capable of 27 knots, as a follow-on to the six prototype "26-knotters" ordered in the previous 1892–1893 Estimates. Of the 36 destroyers, three ships were ordered from Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Company of Govan, the first torpedo craft to be built by that shipyard; as typical for torpedo craft at the time, the Admiralty left detailed design to the builders, laying down only broad requirements. Fairfield's design was 197 feet long overall and 194 feet between perpendiculars, with a beam of 19 feet 5 inches and a draught of 7 feet 6 inches. Displacement was 275 long tons light and 310 long tons full load, while the ship's complement was 53 officers and men.

Three Thornycroft boilers fed steam at 215 pounds per square inch to two 3-cylinder triple expansion steam engines rated at 4,000 indicated horsepower and driving two propeller shafts. Two funnels were fitted. Armament consisted of a single QF 12 pounder 12 cwt gun and three 6-pounder guns, with two 18 inch torpedo tubes; as a gunboat, one of the torpedo tubes could be removed to accommodate a further two six-pounders. Handy was laid down on 7 June 1894 and was launched on 9 March 1895. Handy reached a speed of 27.04 knots during sea trials, was commissioned in October 1895. The Fairfield-built Twenty-seven knotters were considered good sea boats, so suitable for service on overseas stations. Handy was sent out to Hong Kong in 1897–1898, a year after her sister ship Hart, to serve on the China Station, remaining there for the rest of her career; the bow structure of Handy required strengthening, carried out by April 1901. In January 1901, Handy took part in the salvaging of the dredger Canton River, which had sunk in Hong Kong harbour during a Typhoon in November 1900, with Handy being used to pump air into the hull of the stricken vessel.

In November 1911, when the Xinhai Revolution caused Chang Ming-Ch'i, Governor-General of Kwangtung province to abandon his post, Handy ferried him from Canton to safety in Hong Kong. Handy was paid up in 1912, by March 1913 Handy was placed on the sale list, she was sold in Hong Kong in 1916. Brassey, T. A.. The Naval Annual 1897. Portsmouth, UK: J. Griffin and Co. Brown, D. K.. Warrior to Dreadnought: Warship Development 1860–1905. London: Caxton Editions. ISBN 1-84067-5292. Chan Lau Kit-Ching. China, Britain & Hong Kong 1895–1945. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press. ISBN 962-201-409-7. Chesneau, Roger. Conway's All The World's Fighting Ships 1860–1905. London: Conway Maritime Press. ISBN 0-85177-133-5. Crowe, George; the Commission of H. M. S. Terrible: 1898–1902. London: George Newnes. Friedman, Norman. British Destroyers: From Earliest Days to the Second World War. Barnsley, UK: Seaforth Publishing. ISBN 978-1-84832-049-9. Gardiner, Robert. Conway's All The World's Fighting Ships 1906–1921. London: Conway Maritime Press.

ISBN 0-85177-245-5. Lyon, David; the First Destroyers. London: Caxton Editions. ISBN 1-84067-3648. Manning, T. D.. The British Destroyer. London: Putnam & Co. March, Edgar J.. British Destroyers: A History of Development, 1892–1953. London: Seeley Service. OCLC 164893555

United States Senator Joseph S. Clark and Senator Robert F. Kennedy toured the Mississippi Delta on April 10, 1967. At the behest of civil rights lawyer Marian Wright and Kennedy, together with two other Senators, traveled to Mississippi to investigate reports of extreme poverty and starvation. Following a field hearing, they drove from Greenville to Clarksdale and touring impoverished communities as they went. Disturbed by what they saw, the senators returned to Washington D. C. and began pushing for a series of reforms to alleviate the situation. Extensive media coverage of the event exposed the American public to real instances of malnutrition and starvation; the country was shocked and hunger became an important topic nationwide as people began looking for solutions. Efforts by the government and political action groups resulted in the problem being reduced by the 1970s. In 1967, the majority of legislative program supporting the United States government's "War on Poverty" was due to expire.

In an attempt to generate national interest in renewing funding for the effort, the United States Senate Committee on Labor's Subcommittee on Poverty held a series of hearings related to hunger, starting March 15. One of first the testifying witnesses was Marian Wright, a 27-year-old Yale Law School graduate working with the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund in Mississippi, she told the subcommittee that increased mechanization and requirements that cotton fields lie fallow under federal subsidy stipulations had put thousands of black sharecroppers out of work in the Mississippi Delta. In addition to this, two-parent families were ineligible for many welfare benefits, most counties in Mississippi had switched welfare programs from one that distributed surplus food to an alternative that required a monthly purchase of food stamps. With little to no income, most households could not produce the necessary funds; as a result, Wright argued, Mississippians were "starving. They're starving, those who can get the bus fare to go north are trying to go north...

I wish that would have a chance to go and just look at the empty cupboards in the Delta and the number of people who are going around and begging just to feed their children."Chairman Joseph S. Clark suggested that the subcommittee travel to Mississippi to verify Wright's testimony. Of the subcommittee's nine members, Senators Robert F. Kennedy, Jacob Javits, George Murphy agreed to the idea and accompanied him. Kennedy dispatched Peter Edelman, to get an advanced view on the situation. Edelman spoke extensively with Wright; the subcommittee members flew into Jackson on April 9. That evening the senators dined with prominent Mississippians, including Oscar Carr and Charles Evers. Carr described Kennedy as "a shy man" who "continuously asked questions." Evers said "We talked and talked and he listened." Local civil rights activist. A field hearing was scheduled for April 10. Mississippi Senator John Stennis, a staunch segregationist, was scheduled to be interviewed, he disapproved of the federal efforts to improve the economic situation of black people and sought to discredit them by attacking the Head Start program's parent agency, the Child Development Group of Mississippi.

The Head Start project provided services to impoverished children and was funded with grants from the federal government, thereby preventing state authorities from interfering with its activities. By improving the socioeconomic status of black Mississippians, Head Start threatened the white political power base that dominated the state. Just days after money for the program had been appropriated and state officials began scrutinizing it and requesting financial records. In the days before Stennis' scheduled testimony Jackson's two newspapers, both supportive of segregation, ran several stories about the senator's planned critique. Upon the poverty subcommittee's arrival in the city, Clark announced that he considered questions concerning Head Start and funding irregularities to be answered and that the hearing would not spend significant time discussing the issue. Stennis responded by leaking his draft testimony to the press; the subcommittee hearing took place in the Olympic Ballroom of Hotel Heidelberg in Jackson.

It was supposed to take place in a room meant to accommodate 300 persons, but the subcommittee relocated after local media attention stirred enough interest to bring the crowd to about 1,000 people. In his opening remarks, Clark stated that the hearing intended to be "neither a witch hunt or a whitewash. We are here to find out the basic facts." Stennis was called as the first witness. He admitted that there was poverty in his state, but posited that federal anti-poverty programs were overrunning expected costs and that he wished to support taxpayers, he declared that the federal government had bypassed "responsible, capable local leadership" and in favor of northerners and as a result its offices had become "a stake hold of beatniks and immorality". He requested that the governor be empowered to suspend "any project he determines not in the public interest" and finished by highlighting the fact that $500,000–$650,000 dollars worth of CDGM's funds were proclaimed by a government audit to be unaccounted for.

Clark allowed members of the subcommittee to question Stennis. Kennedy presented a private report conducted by a New York-based firm at the behest of the college that hosted CDGM. According to the new audit, the amount of wasted funds was deemed to be "relatively minor" and no evidence was found to substantiate the government's allegation. Stennis was flustered and declared that the Senate Committee on Appropriations—of which he was a member—should ha