1.
Kovno Governorate
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Kovno Governorate or Government of Kaunas was a governorate of the Russian Empire. It was formed on 18 December 1842 by Tsar Nicholas I from the part of Vilna Governorate. The Tsarist government had considered it a part of Northwestern Krai. The governorate included almost the entire Lithuanian region of Žemaitija and the part of Aukštaitija
2.
Russian Empire
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The Russian Empire was a state that existed from 1721 until it was overthrown by the short-lived February Revolution in 1917. One of the largest empires in history, stretching over three continents, the Russian Empire was surpassed in landmass only by the British and Mongol empires. The rise of the Russian Empire happened in association with the decline of neighboring powers, the Swedish Empire, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Persia. It played a role in 1812–14 in defeating Napoleons ambitions to control Europe. The House of Romanov ruled the Russian Empire from 1721 until 1762, and its German-descended cadet branch, with 125.6 million subjects registered by the 1897 census, it had the third-largest population in the world at the time, after Qing China and India. Like all empires, it included a large disparity in terms of economics, ethnicity, there were numerous dissident elements, who launched numerous rebellions and assassination attempts, they were closely watched by the secret police, with thousands exiled to Siberia. Economically, the empire had an agricultural base, with low productivity on large estates worked by serfs. The economy slowly industrialized with the help of foreign investments in railways, the land was ruled by a nobility from the 10th through the 17th centuries, and subsequently by an emperor. Tsar Ivan III laid the groundwork for the empire that later emerged and he tripled the territory of his state, ended the dominance of the Golden Horde, renovated the Moscow Kremlin, and laid the foundations of the Russian state. Tsar Peter the Great fought numerous wars and expanded an already huge empire into a major European power, Catherine the Great presided over a golden age. She expanded the state by conquest, colonization and diplomacy, continuing Peter the Greats policy of modernisation along West European lines, Tsar Alexander II promoted numerous reforms, most dramatically the emancipation of all 23 million serfs in 1861. His policy in Eastern Europe involved protecting the Orthodox Christians under the rule of the Ottoman Empire and that connection by 1914 led to Russias entry into the First World War on the side of France, Britain, and Serbia, against the German, Austrian and Ottoman empires. The Russian Empire functioned as a monarchy until the Revolution of 1905. The empire collapsed during the February Revolution of 1917, largely as a result of failures in its participation in the First World War. Perhaps the latter was done to make Europe recognize Russia as more of a European country, Poland was divided in the 1790-1815 era, with much of the land and population going to Russia. Most of the 19th century growth came from adding territory in Asia, Peter I the Great introduced autocracy in Russia and played a major role in introducing his country to the European state system. However, this vast land had a population of 14 million, grain yields trailed behind those of agriculture in the West, compelling nearly the entire population to farm. Only a small percentage lived in towns, the class of kholops, close to the one of slavery, remained a major institution in Russia until 1723, when Peter I converted household kholops into house serfs, thus including them in poll taxation
3.
Poland
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Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe, situated between the Baltic Sea in the north and two mountain ranges in the south. Bordered by Germany to the west, the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south, Ukraine and Belarus to the east, the total area of Poland is 312,679 square kilometres, making it the 69th largest country in the world and the 9th largest in Europe. With a population of over 38.5 million people, Poland is the 34th most populous country in the world, the 8th most populous country in Europe, Poland is a unitary state divided into 16 administrative subdivisions, and its capital and largest city is Warsaw. Other metropolises include Kraków, Wrocław, Poznań, Gdańsk and Szczecin, the establishment of a Polish state can be traced back to 966, when Mieszko I, ruler of a territory roughly coextensive with that of present-day Poland, converted to Christianity. The Kingdom of Poland was founded in 1025, and in 1569 it cemented a political association with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania by signing the Union of Lublin. This union formed the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, one of the largest and most populous countries of 16th and 17th century Europe, Poland regained its independence in 1918 at the end of World War I, reconstituting much of its historical territory as the Second Polish Republic. In September 1939, World War II started with the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany, followed thereafter by invasion by the Soviet Union. More than six million Polish citizens died in the war, after the war, Polands borders were shifted westwards under the terms of the Potsdam Conference. With the backing of the Soviet Union, a communist puppet government was formed, and after a referendum in 1946. During the Revolutions of 1989 Polands Communist government was overthrown and Poland adopted a new constitution establishing itself as a democracy, informally called the Third Polish Republic. Since the early 1990s, when the transition to a primarily market-based economy began, Poland has achieved a high ranking on the Human Development Index. Poland is a country, which was categorised by the World Bank as having a high-income economy. Furthermore, it is visited by approximately 16 million tourists every year, Poland is the eighth largest economy in the European Union and was the 6th fastest growing economy on the continent between 2010 and 2015. According to the Global Peace Index for 2014, Poland is ranked 19th in the list of the safest countries in the world to live in. The origin of the name Poland derives from a West Slavic tribe of Polans that inhabited the Warta River basin of the historic Greater Poland region in the 8th century, the origin of the name Polanie itself derives from the western Slavic word pole. In some foreign languages such as Hungarian, Lithuanian, Persian and Turkish the exonym for Poland is Lechites, historians have postulated that throughout Late Antiquity, many distinct ethnic groups populated the regions of what is now Poland. The most famous archaeological find from the prehistory and protohistory of Poland is the Biskupin fortified settlement, dating from the Lusatian culture of the early Iron Age, the Slavic groups who would form Poland migrated to these areas in the second half of the 5th century AD. With the Baptism of Poland the Polish rulers accepted Christianity and the authority of the Roman Church
4.
Nike Award
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The Nike Literary Award is one of the most prestigious awards for Polish literature. It is open for nominees from all genres, including non-fiction essays. Each year, a jury selects the laureate in a three-stage process. Twenty official nominees are accepted in May, out of seven finalists are declared in September. The final decision does not take place until the day of the ceremony in October. The award consists of a designed by the prominent Polish sculptor Gustaw Zemła. In addition to the jury award, there is an audience award based on the outcome of a vote on the seven official finalists conducted by Gazeta Wyborcza. The verdicts of the audience and jury have converged only occasionally, title and details of English translation stated where available. 2016 – Bronka Nowicka, Nakarmić kamień2015 – Olga Tokarczuk, Księgi Jakubowe 2014 – Karol Modzelewski, Zajeździmy kobyłę historii
5.
Nobel Prize in Literature
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Though individual works are sometimes cited as being particularly noteworthy, here work refers to an authors work as a whole. The Swedish Academy decides who, if anyone, will receive the prize in any given year, the academy announces the name of the chosen laureate in early October. Although the Nobel Prize in Literature has become the worlds most prestigious literature prize, many authors who have won the prize have fallen into obscurity, while others rejected by the jury remain widely studied and read. The prize has become seen as a political one - a peace prize in literary disguise, whose judges are prejudiced against authors with different political tastes to them. Tim Parks has expressed skepticism that it is possible for Swedish professors, as of 2016,16 of the 113 recipients have been of Scandinavian origin. The Academy has often been alleged to be biased towards European, Nobels vague wording for the criteria for the prize has led to recurrent controversy. In the original Swedish, the word translates as either idealistic or ideal. The Nobel Committees interpretation has varied over the years, in recent years, this means a kind of idealism championing human rights on a broad scale. Though Nobel wrote several wills during his lifetime, the last was written a little over a year before he died, Nobel bequeathed 94% of his total assets,31 million Swedish kronor, to establish and endow the five Nobel Prizes. Due to the level of surrounding the will, it was not until 26 April 1897 that the Storting approved it. The executors of his will were Ragnar Sohlman and Rudolf Lilljequist, the members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee that were to award the Peace Prize were appointed shortly after the will was approved. The prize-awarding organisations followed, the Karolinska Institutet on 7 June, the Swedish Academy on 9 June, the Nobel Foundation then reached an agreement on guidelines for how the Nobel Prize should be awarded. In 1900, the Nobel Foundations newly created statutes were promulgated by King Oscar II, according to Nobels will, the Royal Swedish Academy was to award the Prize in Literature. Each year, the Swedish Academy sends out requests for nominations of candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature and it is not permitted to nominate oneself. Thousands of requests are sent out each year, and as of 2011 about 220 proposals are returned and these proposals must be received by the Academy by 1 February, after which they are examined by the Nobel Committee. By April, the Academy narrows the field to around twenty candidates, by May, a short list of five names is approved by the Committee. The subsequent four months are spent in reading and reviewing the works of the five candidates. In October, members of the Academy vote and the candidate who receives more than half of the votes is named the Nobel laureate in Literature
6.
Neustadt International Prize for Literature
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The Neustadt International Prize for Literature is a biennial award for literature sponsored by the University of Oklahoma and its international literary publication, World Literature Today. Like the Nobel, it is awarded not for any one work, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature was established as the Books Abroad International Prize for Literature in 1969 by Ivar Ivask, editor of Books Abroad. It was subsequently renamed the Books Abroad/Neustadt Prize, and the award assumed its present name in 1976, the Prize itself presently consists of a silver eagle feather, a certificate and $50,000 USD. The awards financial endowment by Walter and Doris Neustadt of Ardmore, the prize may serve to crown a lifetimes achievement or to direct attention to an important body of work that is still developing. The prize is not open to application, candidates are selected by a jury of at least seven members. Selection is not limited by geographic area, language or genre, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature is the only international literary award of this scope to originate in the United States. It is also one of few international prizes for which poets, novelists and playwrights alike are equally eligible, source, List of literary awards Neustadt International Prize for Literature, official website Neustadt International Prize for Literature winners listed by year
7.
Poet
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POET LLC is a U. S. biofuel company that specializes in the creation of bioethanol. The privately held corporation, which was originally called Broin Companies, is headquartered in Sioux Falls, in 2007, the Renewable Fuels Association named POET the largest U. S. ethanol producer, creating 1.1 billion US gallons of fuel per year. Currently, POET produces 1.7 billion gallons of ethanol per year, POET operates 27 ethanol plants spread across Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Minnesota, and South Dakota. In 2007, the received a US$80 million grant from the U. S. Department of Energy for the creation of a cellulosic ethanol production facility in Emmetsburg. A grand opening was held for the facility on September 3rd,2014 and it is expected to produce 25 million gallons of ethanol per year from corncobs, leaves and husks provided by farmers in and around the area. POET has also collaborated with companies, including Deere & Co. and Vermeer Company. Among its products in the process are distillers grains branded Dakota Gold, Inviz, the company traces its history to the family farm in Wanamingo, Minnesota where the Broins began producing ethanol in 1983. In 1986 it became commercial launching its flagship plant in Scotland, in 2007, it was renamed POET. Then company president Jeff Broin said the new name is not an acronym, bush in Wentworth, South Dakota in April 2002 and by Barack Obama in Macon, Missouri in April 2010. POET has constructed an $8 million pilot plant to produce cellulosic ethanol made from corn cobs, a commercial scale project, based on the pilot plant, was undertaken as a joint venture with Royal DSM under the name POET-DSM Advanced Biofuels, LLC. A federal loan guarantee was obtained in July,2011 for a plant to be built in Emmetsburg. This loan guarantee was later declined when the joint venture with Royal DSM was announced. Originally scheduled to open in 2013, the facility opened a year late in September,2014
8.
Translator
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Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. While interpreting—the facilitating of oral or sign-language communication between users of different languages—antedates writing, translation began only after the appearance of written literature, there exist partial translations of the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh into Southwest Asian languages of the second millennium BCE. Translators always risk inappropriate spill-over of source-language idiom and usage into the target-language translation, on the other hand, spill-overs have imported useful source-language calques and loanwords that have enriched the target languages. Indeed, translators have helped substantially to shape the languages into which they have translated, because of the laboriousness of translation, since the 1940s engineers have sought to automate translation or to mechanically aid the human translator. The rise of the Internet has fostered a world-wide market for services and has facilitated language localization. Translation studies systematically study the theory and practice of translation, the English word translation derives from the Latin word translatio, which comes from trans, across + ferre, to carry or to bring. Thus translatio is a carrying across or a bringing across, in this case, the Germanic languages and some Slavic languages have calqued their words for the concept of translation on translatio. The Romance languages and the remaining Slavic languages have derived their words for the concept of translation from an alternative Latin word, traductio, the Ancient Greek term for translation, μετάφρασις, has supplied English with metaphrase — as contrasted with paraphrase. Metaphrase corresponds, in one of the more recent terminologies, to formal equivalence, nevertheless, metaphrase and paraphrase may be useful as ideal concepts that mark the extremes in the spectrum of possible approaches to translation. Discussions of the theory and practice of translation reach back into antiquity, the ancient Greeks distinguished between metaphrase and paraphrase. Literally graceful, it were an injury to the author that they should be changed, Dryden cautioned, however, against the license of imitation, i. e. of adapted translation, When a painter copies from the life. He has no privilege to alter features and lineaments, despite occasional theoretical diversity, the actual practice of translation has hardly changed since antiquity. The grammatical differences between languages and free-word-order languages have been no impediment in this regard. The particular syntax characteristics of a source language are adjusted to the syntactic requirements of the target language. When a target language has lacked terms that are found in a language, translators have borrowed those terms. However, due to shifts in ecological niches of words, an etymology is sometimes misleading as a guide to current meaning in one or the other language. For example, the English actual should not be confused with the cognate French actuel, the Polish aktualny, the Swedish aktuell, the translators role as a bridge for carrying across values between cultures has been discussed at least since Terence, the 2nd-century-BCE Roman adapter of Greek comedies. The translators role is, however, by no means a passive, mechanical one, the main ground seems to be the concept of parallel creation found in critics such as Cicero
9.
The Captive Mind
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The Captive Mind is a 1953 work of nonfiction by Polish writer, academic and Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz, published in the English translation originally by Secker and Warburg. The work was written in Polish soon after the author received political asylum in Paris following his break with Polands Communist government. It draws upon his experiences as a writer during World War II. The book attempts to both the intellectual allure of Stalinism and the temptation of collaboration with the Stalinist regime among intellectuals in post-war Central. Miłosz describes the book as having been written under great inner conflict, the four chapters at the heart of the book then follow, each a portrayal of four different gifted Polish men who capitulated, in some fashion, to the demands of the Communist state. They are identified only as Alpha, the Moralist, Beta, The Disappointed Lover, Gamma, the Slave of History, and Delta, the Troubadour. However, each of the four portraits is easily identifiable, Alpha is Jerzy Andrzejewski, Beta is Tadeusz Borowski, Gamma is Jerzy Putrament and Delta is Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński. The book elaborates the idea of enslavement through consciousness in the penultimate chapter and its list of chapters includes,1. Gamma, the Slave of History,7, the Captive Mind was an immediate success which was to bring its author international renown. While banned in Poland, it circulated underground there, Miłosz being among those whose name could not be mentioned even in order to denounce. The book is described by historian Norman Davies as a study which totally discredited the cultural and psychological machinery of Communism. In that the book represents the view of an insider and draws on analysis, it has been compared to Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler. Miłosz has said of the book It was considered by anti-communists as suspect because I didnt attack strongly enough the communists, I tried to understand the processes and they didnt like that. And it also created the idea, particularly in the West and this was a misunderstanding because my poetry was unknown. I have never been a writer and I worked hard to destroy this image of myself
10.
Anti-Stalinism
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Associates and followers of Leon Trotsky were organised in the Left Opposition within the Communist parties before they were purged in the Moscow Trials in the 1930s. Subsequently, his followers formed the Fourth International in opposition to the Stalinist Third International, Trotsky saw the Stalinist states as deformed workers states, where a political structure gave most workers very little power in decision making. Less orthodox Trotskyists and other critics of Stalin have seen it as a new form of class state, the communist left was initially enthusiastic about the Bolshevik revolution, but lines of tension between the communist left and the leadership of the Communist International opened up very soon. Left communists such as Sylvia Pankhurst and Rosa Luxemburg were among the first left-wing critics of Bolshevism, Left communists see communism as something that can only be achieved by the proletariat itself, and not through the dictatorship of a vanguard party acting on its behalf. A reformist communism, and a branch of Maoism, however it is criticised by traditional Maoists. In order to encourage and promote the advancement of the productivity by creating competition and innovation, but at the same time, private ownership is allowed and encouraged in industries of finished goods and services. According to the Dengism theory, private owners in those industries are not bourgeois, because as Marx teaches, bourgeois owns land and raw materials. Therefore, in a Dengist country, private owners are called minyinqiyejia. The Peoples Republic of China was the first country which adopted this belief and it boosted its economy and achieved the China Miracle. It has increased the Chinese GDP growth rate to over 8% per year for 30 years, due to the influence of Dengism, Vietnam and Laos have also adopted this belief, which allowed Laos to increase its real GDP growth rate to 8. 3%. Cuba is also starting to embrace this idea, dengists also take a very strong position against any form of personality cults which appeared in the Soviet Union during Stalins rule and the current North Korea. However, the relations between the anarchists and the Bolsheviks soured in Soviet Russia, anarchists and Stalinist Communists were also in armed conflict during the Spanish civil war. Anarchists are critical of the statist, totalitarian nature of Stalinism, a significant current of the democratic socialist movement has defined itself in opposition to Stalinism. This includes George Orwell, H. N. Brailsford, Fenner Brockway, there were also a number of anti-Stalinist socialists in France, including writers such as Simone Weil and Albert Camus as well as the group around Marceau Pivert. In America, the New York Intellectuals around the journals Partisan Review, another major split in the international Communist movement was that between Stalin and the Right Opposition. In several countries parallel Communist parties were formed that either were rejected by the Comintern or distanced themselves from it and their criticism did in some ways become similar to positions raised by the Trotskyists, but as a tendency they were far less coherent. The Right Opposition developed contacts with groups that did not fit into either the international Social democracy or Comintern. This tendency largely died out at the time of the Second World War, in other cases dissident Marxist trends developed outside of the established Communist movement, such as the Anushlian Marxists in India
11.
Slavic Languages
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The Slavic languages are the Indo-European languages native to the Slavic peoples, originally from Eastern Europe. The Slavic languages are divided intro three subgroups, East, West, and South, which constitute more than twenty languages. Furthermore, the diasporas of many Slavic peoples have established isolated minorities of speakers of their languages all over the world, the number of speakers of all Slavic languages together is estimated to be 315 million. The Old Novgorod dialect may have reflected some idiosyncrasies of this group, mutual intelligibility also plays a role in determining the West, East, and South branches. Speakers of languages within the branch will in most cases be able to understand each other at least partially. The tripartite division of the Slavic languages does not take account the spoken dialects of each language. For example, Slovak and Ukrainian are bridged by the Rusyn of Eastern Slovakia, similarly, Polish shares transitional features with both western Ukrainian and Belarusian dialects. The Croatian Kajkavian dialect is similar to Slovene than to the standard Croatian language. Within the individual Slavic languages, dialects may vary to a degree, as those of Russian, or to a much greater degree. The secession of the Balto-Slavic dialect ancestral to Proto-Slavic is estimated on archaeological and glottochronological criteria to have occurred sometime in the period 1500–1000 BCE, the imposition of Church Slavonic on Orthodox Slavs was often at the expense of the vernacular. The use of such media hampered the development of the languages for literary purposes. Lockwood also notes that these languages have enriched themselves by drawing on Church Slavonic for the vocabulary of abstract concepts, the situation in the Catholic countries, where Latin was more important, was different. The Polish Renaissance poet Jan Kochanowski and the Croatian Baroque writers of the 16th century all wrote in their respective vernaculars, although Church Slavonic hampered vernacular literatures, it fostered Slavonic literary activity and abetted linguistic independence from external influences. Only the Croatian vernacular literary tradition nearly matches Church Slavonic in age, the most important early monument of Croatian literacy is the Baška tablet from the late 11th century. It is a stone tablet found in the small Church of St. Lucy, Jurandvor on the Croatian island of Krk. The independence of Dubrovnik facilitated the continuity of the tradition, more recent foreign influences follow the same general pattern in Slavic languages as elsewhere and are governed by the political relationships of the Slavs. In the 17th century, bourgeois Russian absorbed German words through direct contacts between Russians and communities of German settlers in Russia, in the 19th century, Russian influenced most literary Slavic languages by one means or another. The Proto-Slavic language existed until around AD500, by the 7th century, it had broken apart into large dialectal zones
12.
University of California, Berkeley
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The University of California, Berkeley, is a public research university located in Berkeley, California. In 1960s, UC Berkeley was particularly noted for the Free Speech Movement as well as the Anti-Vietnam War Movement led by its students. S, Department of Energy, and is home to many world-renowned research institutes and organizations including Mathematical Sciences Research Institute and Space Sciences Laboratory. Faculty member J. R. Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, Lawrence Livermore Lab also discovered or co-discovered six chemical elements. The Academic Ranking of World Universities also ranks the University of California, Berkeley, third in the world overall, in 1866, the private College of California purchased the land comprising the current Berkeley campus. Ten faculty members and almost 40 students made up the new University of California when it opened in Oakland in 1869, billings was a trustee of the College of California and suggested that the college be named in honor of the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkeley. In 1870, Henry Durant, the founder of the College of California, with the completion of North and South Halls in 1873, the university relocated to its Berkeley location with 167 male and 22 female students and held its first classes. In 1905, the University Farm was established near Sacramento, ultimately becoming the University of California, by the 1920s, the number of campus buildings had grown substantially, and included twenty structures designed by architect John Galen Howard. Robert Gordon Sproul served as president from 1930 to 1958, by 1942, the American Council on Education ranked UC Berkeley second only to Harvard University in the number of distinguished departments. During World War II, following Glenn Seaborgs then-secret discovery of plutonium, UC Berkeley physics professor J. Robert Oppenheimer was named scientific head of the Manhattan Project in 1942. Along with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley is now a partner in managing two other labs, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, originally, military training was compulsory for male undergraduates, and Berkeley housed an armory for that purpose. In 1917, Berkeleys ROTC program was established, and its School of Military Aeronautics trained future pilots, including Jimmy Doolittle, both Robert McNamara and Frederick C. Weyand graduated from UC Berkeleys ROTC program, earning B. A. degrees in 1937 and 1938, in 1926, future fleet admiral Chester W. Nimitz established the first Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps unit at Berkeley. The Board of Regents ended compulsory military training at Berkeley in 1962, during the McCarthy era in 1949, the Board of Regents adopted an anti-communist loyalty oath. A number of faculty members objected and were dismissed, ten years passed before they were reinstated with back pay, in 1952, the University of California became an entity separate from the Berkeley campus. Each campus was given autonomy and its own Chancellor. Then-president Sproul assumed presidency of the entire University of California system, Berkeley gained a reputation for student activism in the 1960s with the Free Speech Movement of 1964 and opposition to the Vietnam War. In the highly publicized Peoples Park protest in 1969, students and the school conflicted over use of a plot of land, then governor of California Ronald Reagan called the Berkeley campus a haven for communist sympathizers, protesters, and sex deviants. Modern students at Berkeley are less active, with a greater percentage of moderates and conservatives
13.
Iron Curtain
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The Iron Curtain was the name for the boundary dividing Europe into two separate areas from the end of World War II in 1945 until the end of the Cold War in 1991. A term symbolizing the efforts by the Soviet Union to block itself and its satellite states from open contact with the West, on the east side of the Iron Curtain were the countries that were connected to or influenced by the Soviet Union. The most notable border was marked by the Berlin Wall and its Checkpoint Charlie, the events that demolished the Iron Curtain started in discontent in Poland, and continued in Hungary, the German Democratic Republic, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. Romania became the only communist state in Europe to overthrow its government with violence. The use of the iron curtain as a metaphor for strict separation goes back at least as far as the early 19th century. It originally referred to fireproof curtains in theaters, various usages of the term iron curtain pre-date Churchills use of the phrase. The term iron curtain has since been used metaphorically in two different senses - firstly to denote the end of an era and secondly to denote a closed geopolitical border. The source of these metaphors can refer to either the safety curtain deployed in theatres or to roller shutters used to secure commercial premises. The first metaphorical usage of iron curtain, in the sense of an end of an era, perhaps should be attributed to British author Arthur Machen, who used the term in his 1895 novel The Three Impostors. The door clanged behind me with the noise of thunder, and I felt that an iron curtain had fallen on the passage of my life. Queen Elisabeth of the Belgians used the term Iron Curtain in the context of World War I to describe the situation between Belgium and Germany in 1914. The passage runs, With clanging, creaking, and squeaking, time to put on your fur coats and go home. We looked around, but the fur coats and homes were missing, chesterton used the phrase in a 1924 essay in The Illustrated London News. Chesterton, while defending Distributism, refers to that iron curtain of industrialism that has cut us off not only from our neighbours condition, how, a moment before the iron curtain was wrung down on it, did the German political stage appear. All German theatres had to install an iron curtain as a precaution to prevent the possibility of fire spreading from the stage to the rest of the theatre. Such fires were common because the decor often was very flammable. In case of fire, a wall would separate the stage from the theatre. Douglas Reed used this metaphor in his book Disgrace Abounding, The bitter strife had only hidden by the iron safety-curtain of the Kings dictatorship
14.
Berkeley, California
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Berkeley is a city on the east shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California. It is named after the 18th-century Anglo-Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley and it borders the cities of Oakland and Emeryville to the south and the city of Albany and the unincorporated community of Kensington to the north. Its eastern border with Contra Costa County generally follows the ridge of the Berkeley Hills, the 2010 census recorded a population of 112,580. It also has the Graduate Theological Union, one of the largest religious studies institutions in the world and it is one of the most politically liberal cities in the United States. The site of todays City of Berkeley was the territory of the Chochenyo/Huchiun band of the Ohlone people when the first Europeans arrived, other artifacts were discovered in the 1950s in the downtown area during remodeling of a commercial building, near the upper course of the creek. The first people of European descent arrived with the De Anza Expedition in 1776, today, this is noted by signage on Interstate 80, which runs along the San Francisco Bay shoreline of Berkeley. The De Anza Expedition led to establishment of the Spanish Presidio of San Francisco at the entrance to San Francisco Bay, luis Peralta was among the soldiers at the Presidio. For his services to the King of Spain, he was granted a vast stretch of land on the east shore of San Francisco Bay for a ranch, luis Peralta named his holding Rancho San Antonio. The primary activity of the ranch was raising cattle for meat and hides, eventually, Peralta gave portions of the ranch to each of his four sons. What is now Berkeley lies mostly in the portion that went to Peraltas son Domingo, with a little in the portion that went to another son, no artifact survives of the Domingo or Vicente ranches, but their names survive in Berkeley street names. However, legal title to all land in the City of Berkeley remains based on the original Peralta land grant, the Peraltas Rancho San Antonio continued after Alta California passed from Spanish to Mexican sovereignty after the Mexican War of Independence. The lands of the brothers Domingo and Vicente were quickly reduced to reservations close to their respective ranch homes, the rest of the land was surveyed and parceled out to various American claimants. Politically, the area that became Berkeley was initially part of a vast Contra Costa County, on March 25,1853, Alameda County was created from a division within Contra Costa County, as well as from a small portion of Santa Clara County. The area of Berkeley was at this period mostly a mix of land, farms and ranches. It was not yet Berkeley, but merely the part of the Oakland Township subdivision of Alameda County. In 1866, Oaklands private College of California looked for a new site, according to the Centennial Record of the University of California, In 1866…at Founders Rock, a group of College of California men watched two ships standing out to sea through the Golden Gate. Although the philosophers name is pronounced bark-lee, the pronunciation of the name has evolved to suit American English as burk-lee. The College of Californias College Homestead Association planned to raise funds for the new campus by selling off adjacent parcels of land, to this end, they laid out a plat and street grid that became the basis of Berkeleys modern street plan
15.
Lithuanian language
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Lithuanian is the official state language of Lithuania and is recognized as one of the official languages of the European Union. There are about 2.9 million native Lithuanian speakers in Lithuania, Lithuanian is a Baltic language, related to Latvian. It is written in a Latin alphabet, Lithuanian is often said to be the most conservative living Indo-European language, retaining many features of Proto-Indo-European now lost in other Indo-European languages. Anyone wishing to hear how Indo-Europeans spoke should come and listen to a Lithuanian peasant, among Indo-European languages, Lithuanian is extraordinarily conservative, retaining many archaic features otherwise found only in ancient languages such as Sanskrit or Ancient Greek. For this reason, it is one of the most important sources in the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European language despite its late attestation, the Proto-Balto-Slavic languages branched off directly from Proto-Indo-European, then branched into Proto-Baltic and Proto-Slavic. Proto-Baltic branched off into Proto-West Baltic and Proto-East Baltic, according to some glottochronological speculations, the Eastern Baltic languages split from the Western Baltic ones between AD400 and AD600. The Greek geographer Ptolemy had already written of two Baltic tribe/nations by name, the Galindai and Sudinoi in the 2nd century AD, the differentiation between Lithuanian and Latvian started after AD800, for a long period, they could be considered dialects of a single language. At a minimum, transitional dialects existed until the 14th or 15th century, also, the 13th- and 14th-century occupation of the western part of the Daugava basin by the German Sword Brethren had a significant influence on the languages independent development. The earliest surviving written Lithuanian text is a translation dating from about 1503–1525 of the Lords Prayer, the Hail Mary, printed books existed after 1547, but the level of literacy among Lithuanians was low through the 18th century, and books were not commonly available. Brought into the country by book smugglers despite the threat of prison sentences. Jonas Jablonskis made significant contributions to the formation of the standard Lithuanian language and his proposal for Standard Lithuanian was based on his native Western Aukštaitijan dialect with some features of the eastern Prussian Lithuanians dialect spoken in Lithuania Minor. These dialects had preserved archaic phonetics mostly intact due to the influence of the neighbouring Old Prussian language, Lithuanian has been the official language of Lithuania since 1918. During the Soviet era, it was used in official discourse along with Russian, Lithuanian is one of two living Baltic languages, along with Latvian. An earlier Baltic language, Old Prussian, was extinct by the 18th century, such an opinion was first represented by the likes of August Schleicher, and to a certain extent, Antoine Meillet. Endzelīns thought that the similarity between Baltic and Slavic was explicable through language contact while Schleicher, Meillet and others argued for a kinship between the two families. An attempt to reconcile the opposing stances was made by Jan Michał Rozwadowski and he proposed that the two language groups were indeed a unity after the division of Indo-European, but also suggested that after the two had divided into separate entities, they had posterior contact. The genetic kinship view is augmented by the fact that Proto-Balto-Slavic is easily reconstructible with important proofs in historic prosody, vyacheslav Ivanov and Vladimir Toporov believed in the unity of Balto-Slavic, but not in the unity of Baltic. In the 1960s, they proposed a new division, that into East-Baltic, West-Baltic, the Ivanov–Toporov theory is gaining ground among students of comparative-historic grammar of Indo-European language, and seems to be replacing the previous two stances in most PIE textbooks
16.
Lithuania
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Lithuania, officially the Republic of Lithuania, is a country in Northern Europe. One of the three Baltic states, it is situated along the shore of the Baltic Sea, to the east of Sweden. It is bordered by Latvia to the north, Belarus to the east and south, Poland to the south, Lithuania has an estimated population of 2.9 million people as of 2015, and its capital and largest city is Vilnius. The official language, Lithuanian, along with Latvian, is one of two living languages in the Baltic branch of the Indo-European language family. For centuries, the shores of the Baltic Sea were inhabited by various Baltic tribes. In the 1230s, the Lithuanian lands were united by Mindaugas, the King of Lithuania, and the first unified Lithuanian state, with the Lublin Union of 1569, Lithuania and Poland formed a voluntary two-state union, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Commonwealth lasted more than two centuries, until neighboring countries systematically dismantled it from 1772–95, with the Russian Empire annexing most of Lithuanias territory. As World War I neared its end, Lithuanias Act of Independence was signed on 16 February 1918, in the midst of the Second World War, Lithuania was first occupied by the Soviet Union and then by Nazi Germany. As World War II neared its end and the Germans retreated, Lithuania is a member of the European Union, the Council of Europe, a full member of the Eurozone, Schengen Agreement and NATO. It is also a member of the Nordic Investment Bank, the United Nations Human Development Index lists Lithuania as a very high human development country. Lithuania has been among the fastest growing economies in the European Union and is ranked 21st in the world in the Ease of Doing Business Index, the first people settled in the territory of Lithuania after the last glacial period in the 10th millennium BC. Over a millennium, the Indo-Europeans, who arrived in the 3rd – 2nd millennium BC, mixed with the local population, the first written mention of Lithuania is found in a medieval German manuscript, the Annals of Quedlinburg, in an entry dated 9 March 1009. Initially inhabited by fragmented Baltic tribes, in the 1230s the Lithuanian lands were united by Mindaugas, after his assassination in 1263, pagan Lithuania was a target of the Christian crusades of the Teutonic Knights and the Livonian Order. Despite the devastating century-long struggle with the Orders, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania expanded rapidly, by the end of the 14th century, Lithuania was one of the largest countries in Europe and included present-day Belarus, Ukraine, and parts of Poland and Russia. The geopolitical situation between the west and the east determined the multicultural and multi-confessional character of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the ruling elite practised religious tolerance and Chancery Slavonic language was used as an auxiliary language to the Latin for official documents. In 1385, the Grand Duke Jogaila accepted Polands offer to become its king, Jogaila embarked on gradual Christianization of Lithuania and established a personal union between Poland and Lithuania. It implied that Lithuania, the fiercely independent land, was one of the last pagan areas of Europe to adopt Christianity, after two civil wars, Vytautas the Great became the Grand Duke of Lithuania in 1392. During his reign, Lithuania reached the peak of its expansion, centralization of the state began
17.
Samogitia
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Samogitia or Žemaitija is one of the five ethnographic regions of Lithuania. Žemaitija is located in northwestern Lithuania, Žemaitija has a long and distinct cultural history, reflected in the existence of the Samogitian dialect. Ruthenian sources mentioned the region as жемотьская земля, samotska semla, this rise to its Polish form, Żmudź. In Latin texts, the name is written as Samogitia, Samogetia etc. The area has long known to its residents and to other Lithuanians exclusively as Žemaitija. The region is known in English as Lower Lithuania or, in reference to its Yiddish names. The largest city is Šiauliai, or Klaipėda if the latter is considered in the region, telšiai is the capital, although Medininkai was once the capital of the Duchy of Samogitia. Samogitian has northern and southern subdialects, after World War II, the territory of the western subdialect was resettled mainly by northern and southern Žemaičiai and by other Lithuanians. Samogitian has an intonation similar to that of the Latvian language. Žemaitija is one of the most ethnically homogeneous regions of the country, during the first part of 19th century, Žemaitija was a major center of Lithuanian culture. The local religion is predominantly Roman Catholic, although there are significant Lutheran minorities in the south, the modern concept of dialectological Žemaitija appeared only by the end of 19th century. The territory of ancient Samogitia was much larger than current ethnographic or dialectological Žemaitija and embraced all of central, the very term Samogitians is a Latinized form of the ancient Lithuanian name for the regions lowlanders, who dwelt in Central Lithuanias lowlands. The original subethnic Samogitia, i. e. the Central Lithuanias flat burial grounds culture, was formed as early as the 5th-6th centuries, before that, it was inhabited by southern Semigallians and southern Curonians. The western part of historical Žemaitija became ethnically Lithuanian between the 13th and 16th centuries, the primal eastern boundary of historical Samogitia was the Šventoji River since the end of the 13th century. Because during the 13th through 16th centuries the Teutonic Order and the Livonian Order bordered Žemaitija, as such, Samogitian territory was offered to these orders, or exchanged in peace treaties, a number of times. Lithuania would then regain Žemaitija during subsequent conflicts, for more than two hundred years, old Samogitia played a central role in Lithuania’s wars against the crusading order of the Teutonic Knights. Invasions started in Lithuania in 1229, combined military forces undertook numerous campaigns against Samogitians and Lithuanians. Saule, Skuodas, Durbe, Lievarde are just a few of the battles took place
18.
Grand Duchy of Lithuania
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The Grand Duchy of Lithuania was a European state from the 13th century until 1795. The state was founded by the Lithuanians, one of the polytheistic Baltic tribes from Aukštaitija, the Grand Duchy later expanded to include large portions of the former Kievan Rus and other Slavic lands, including territory of present-day Belarus, parts of Ukraine, Poland and Russia. At its greatest extent in the 15th century, it was the largest state in Europe and it was a multi-ethnic and multi-confessional state with great diversity in languages, religion, and cultural heritage. Consolidation of the Lithuanian lands began in the late 12th century, Mindaugas, the first ruler of the Grand Duchy, was crowned as Catholic King of Lithuania in 1253. The pagan state was targeted in the crusade by the Teutonic Knights. The multi-ethnic and multi-confessional state emerged only at the reign of Gediminas. The reign of Vytautas the Great marked both the greatest territorial expansion of the Grand Duchy and the defeat of the Teutonic Knights in the Battle of Grunwald in 1410 and it also marked the rise of the Lithuanian nobility. After Vytautass death, Lithuanias relationship with the Kingdom of Poland greatly deteriorated, Lithuanian noblemen, including the Radvila family, attempted to break the personal union with Poland. However, the unsuccessful Muscovite–Lithuanian Wars with the Grand Duchy of Moscow forced the union to remain intact, eventually, the Union of Lublin of 1569 created a new state, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. In this federation, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania maintained its political distinctiveness and had separate government, laws, army, shortly after, the unitary character of the state was confirmed by adopting the Reciprocal Guarantee of Two Nations. The newly reformed Commonwealth was invaded by Russia in 1792 and partitioned between the neighbours, with a truncated state remaining only nominally independent, after the Kościuszko Uprising, the territory was partitioned among the Russian Empire, the Kingdom of Prussia, and Austria in 1795. The Statutes of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania name the name of the state as Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Ruthenia and Samogitia. The title of Grand Duchy was consistently applied to Lithuania from the 14th century onward, in the 12th century, Slavic chronicles refer to Lithuania as one of the areas attacked by the Rus. Pagan Lithuanians initially paid tribute to Polotsk, but they grew in strength. The sudden spark of military raids marked consolidation of the Lithuanian lands in Aukštaitija, the Livonian Order and Teutonic Knights, crusading military orders, were established in Riga in 1202 and in Prussia in 1226. The Christian orders posed a significant threat to pagan Baltic tribes, the peace treaty with Galicia–Volhynia of 1219 provides evidence of cooperation between Lithuanians and Samogitians. This treaty lists 21 Lithuanian dukes, including five senior Lithuanian dukes from Aukštaitija, although they had battled in the past, the Lithuanians and the Žemaičiai now faced a common enemy. Likely Živinbudas had the most authority and at least several dukes were from the same families, the formal acknowledgment of common interests and the establishment of a hierarchy among the signatories of the treaty foreshadowed the emergence of the state
19.
PEN Club
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PEN International is a worldwide association of writers, founded in London in 1921 to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere. The association has autonomous International PEN centers in over 100 countries and it is the worlds oldest human rights organization and the oldest international literary organization. The first PEN Club was founded in London in 1921 by Catherine Amy Dawson Scott and its first members included Joseph Conrad, Elizabeth Craig, George Bernard Shaw, and H. G. Wells. Past presidents of PEN International have included Alberto Moravia, Heinrich Böll, Arthur Miller, Mario Vargas Llosa, Homero Aridjis, Jiří Gruša, the current President is Jennifer Clement. It is a organization in formal consultative relations with UNESCO and Special Consultative Status with the Economic. In all circumstances, and particularly in time of war, works of art and libraries, PEN declares for a free press and opposes arbitrary censorship in time of peace. It believes that the advance of the world toward a more highly organized political and economic order renders a free criticism of governments, administrations. PEN International Writers in Prison Committee works on behalf of persecuted writers worldwide and it publishes a bi-annual Case List documenting free expression violations against writers around the world. The Committee also coordinates the PEN International memberships campaigns that aim towards an end to these attacks and it is also a member of IFEXs Tunisia Monitoring Group, a coalition of twenty-one free expression organisations that began lobbying the Tunisian government to improve its human rights record in 2005. Since the Arab Spring events that led to the collapse of the Tunisian government, TMG has worked to ensure constitutional guarantees of free expression, the various PEN affiliations offer many literary awards across a broad spectrum. A grove of trees beside Lake Burley Griffin forms the PEN International memorial in Canberra, the dedication reads, The spirit dies in all of us who keep silent in the face of tyranny. The memorial was opened on 17 November 1997. A cast-iron sculpture entitled Witness, commissioned by English PEN to mark their 90th anniversary and created by Antony Gormley and it depicts an empty chair, and is inspired by the symbol used for 30 years by English PEN to represent imprisoned writers around the world. It was unveiled on 13 December 2011, English PEN - The founding centre of PEN International, located in London PEN American Center – Largest of the PEN centers, located in New York City. PEN Center USA – Second largest of the PEN centers, located in Los Angeles, PEN Canada - Located in Toronto, Canada. Sydney PEN – One of the three PEN centers of Australia, located in Sydney, PEN literary awards – as awarded by and in conjunction with PEN centers around the world. German Writers in French Exile, 1933–1940
20.
Sigismund Augustus
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Sigismund II Augustus was the King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, the only son of Sigismund I the Old, whom Sigismund II succeeded in 1548. Married three times, the last of the Jagiellons remained childless, and through the Union of Lublin introduced an elective monarchy. Lord and heir From the outset of his reign, Sigismund came into collision with the countrys nobility, so violent was the agitation at Sigismunds first sejm that the deputies threatened to renounce their allegiance unless the King repudiated his wife Barbara. He refused and won the day, Sigismund soon lost all hope of children by his third bride, he was the last male Jagiellon in the direct line so the dynasty was threatened with extinction. He sought to remedy this by adultery with two of the most beautiful of his countrywomen, Barbara Giżanka and Anna Zajączkowska but was unable to either of them. The sejm was willing to legitimatize, and acknowledge as Sigismunds successor, any male heir who might be born to him, however, the Kings marriage was a matter of great political import to Protestants and Catholics alike. The Polish Protestants hoped that he would divorce and remarry and thus bring about a breach with Rome at the crisis of the religious struggle in Poland. He was not free to remarry until Queen Catherines death on 28 February 1572, Sigismunds reign was a period of internal turmoil and external expansion. A less imposing figure than his father, the elegant and refined Sigismund II Augustus was nevertheless an even more effective statesman than the stern and majestic Sigismund I the Old. Sigismund II possessed to a degree the tenacity and patience that seem to have characterized all the Jagiellons. No other Polish king seems to have so understood the nature of the Polish sejm. Both the Austrian ambassadors and the papal legates testify to the care with which he controlled his nation, everything went as he wished, they said, because he seemed to know everything in advance. Like his father, a pro-Austrian by conviction, he contrived even in respect to carry with him the nation. He avoided serious complications with the powerful Turks, Sigismund II mediated for twenty years between the Catholic Church and the Protestants. His most striking memorial may have been the Union of Lublin, also, German-speaking Royal Prussia and Prussian cities were included. This achievement might well have been impossible without Sigismund, Sigismund died at his beloved Knyszyn on 6 July 1572, aged 51. In 1573, Henry III of Valois was elected King of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth for a few months, shortly thereafter, Sigismunds sister Anna of Poland married Stefan Batory, and they ruled as King and Queen of Poland. In addition to his connections, Sigismund II was allied to the Imperial Habsburgs by his pledge as member of the Order of the Golden Fleece
21.
Gymnasium (school)
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In its current meaning, it usually refers to secondary schools focused on preparing students to enter a university for advanced academic study. In the US, the German Gymnasium curriculum was used at a number of universities such as the University of Michigan as a model for their undergraduate college programs. The word γυμνάσιον was used in Ancient Greece, meaning a locality for both physical and intellectual education of young men, in the Polish educational system the gimnazjum is a middle school for pupils aged 13 to 16. The same applies in the Greek educational system, with the option of Εσπερινό Γυμνάσιο for adults. The gymnasium is a school which prepares the student for higher education at a university. They are thus meant for the more academically minded students, who are sifted out at about the age of 10–13, in addition to the usual curriculum, students of a gymnasium often study Latin and Ancient Greek. Some gymnasiums provide general education, others have a specific focus, today, a number of other areas of specialization exist, such as gymnasiums specializing in economics, technology or domestic sciences. In some countries, there is a notion of progymnasium, which is equivalent to beginning classes of the full gymnasium, here, the prefix pro indicates that this curriculum precedes normal gymnasium studies. The term was derived from the classical Greek word gymnasion, which was applied to an exercising ground in ancient Athens. Here teachers gathered and gave instruction between the hours devoted to exercises and sports, and thus the term became associated with. This use of the term did not prevail among the Romans, but was revived during the Renaissance in Italy, in 1538, Johannes Sturm founded at Strasbourg the school which became the model of the modern German gymnasium. In 1812, a Prussian regulation ordered that all schools which had the right to send their students to the university should bear the name of gymnasia, by the 20th century, this practice was followed in almost the entire Austrian-Hungarian, German, and Russian Empires. In the modern era, many countries which have gymnasiums were once part of three empires. In Albania a gymnasium education takes three years following a compulsory nine-year elementary education and ending with an aptitude test called Matura Shtetërore. The final test is standardized at the level and serves as an entrance qualification for universities. There are both public and private schools in these countries. Therefore, gymnasiums often base their admittance criteria on an entrance exam, in Austria the Gymnasium has two stages, from the age of 11 to 14, and from 15 to 18, concluding with Matura. The Humanistisches Gymnasium focuses on Ancient Greek and Latin, the Neusprachliches Gymnasium puts its focus on actively spoken languages
22.
Wilno
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Vilnius is the capital of Lithuania and its largest city, with a population of 542,664 as of 2015. Vilnius is located in the southeast part of Lithuania and is the second largest city in the Baltic states, Vilnius is the seat of the main government institutions of Lithuania as well as of the Vilnius District Municipality. Vilnius is classified as a Gamma global city according to GaWC studies and its Jewish influence until the 20th century has led to it being described as the Jerusalem of Lithuania and Napoleon named it the Jerusalem of the North as he was passing through in 1812. In 2009, Vilnius was the European Capital of Culture, together with the Austrian city of Linz, the name of the city originates from the Vilnia River. The city has also known by many derivate spellings in various languages throughout its history. The most notable names for the city include, Polish, Wilno, Belarusian, Вiльня, German, Wilna, Latvian, Viļņa, Russian, Вильнюс, Yiddish, ווילנע , Czech. A Russian name from the time of the Russian Empire was Вильна/Вильно, the name Vilna is still used in Finnish, Portuguese, Spanish, and Hebrew. Wilna is still used in German, along with Vilnius, the neighborhoods of Vilnius also have names in other languages, which represent the languages spoken by various ethnic groups in the area. Historian Romas Batūra identifies the city with Voruta, one of the castles of Mindaugas, during the reign of Vytenis a city started to emerge from a trading settlement and the first Franciscan Catholic church was built. These letters contain the first unambiguous reference to Vilnius as the capital, According to legend, Gediminas dreamt of an iron wolf howling on a hilltop and consulted a pagan priest for its interpretation. He was told, What is destined for the ruler and the State of Lithuania, is thus, the Iron Wolf represents a castle and a city which will be established by you on this site. This city will be the capital of the Lithuanian lands and the dwelling of their rulers, the location offered practical advantages, it lay within the Lithuanian heartland at the confluence of two navigable rivers, surrounded by forests and wetlands that were difficult to penetrate. The duchy had been subject to intrusions by the Teutonic Knights, Vilnius was the flourishing capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the residence of the Grand Duke. Gediminas expanded the Grand Duchy through warfare along with strategic alliances and marriages, at its height it covered the territory of modern-day Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Transnistria, and portions of modern-day Poland and Russia. His grandchildren Vytautas the Great and Jogaila, however, fought civil wars, during the Lithuanian Civil War of 1389–1392, Vytautas besieged and razed the city in an attempt to wrest control from Jogaila. The two later settled their differences, after a series of treaties culminating in the 1569 Union of Lublin, the rulers of this federation held either or both of two titles, Grand Duke of Lithuania or King of Poland. In 1387, Jogaila acting as a Grand Duke of Lithuania and King of Poland Władysław II Jagiełło, the city underwent a period of expansion. The Vilnius city walls were built for protection between 1503 and 1522, comprising nine city gates and three towers, and Sigismund August moved his court there in 1544
23.
Second Polish Republic
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The Second Polish Republic, also known as the Second Commonwealth of Poland or interwar Poland, refers to the country of Poland between the First and Second World Wars. Officially known as the Republic of Poland or the Commonwealth of Poland and it had access to the Baltic Sea via a short strip of coastline either side of the city of Gdynia. Between March and August 1939, Poland also shared a border with the then-Hungarian governorate of Subcarpathia, the Second Republic was significantly different in territory to the current Polish state. It included substantially more territory in the east and less in the west, the Second Republics land area was 388,634 km2, making it, in October 1938, the sixth largest country in Europe. After the annexation of Zaolzie, this grew to 389,720 km2, according to the 1921 census, the number of inhabitants was 27.2 million. By 1939, just before the outbreak of World War II, almost a third of population came from minority groups,13. 9% Ukrainians, 10% Jews,3. 1% Belarusians,2. 3% Germans and 3. 4% Czechs, Lithuanians and Russians. At the same time, a significant number of ethnic Poles lived outside the country borders, Poland maintained a slow but steady level of economic development. By 1939, the Republic had become one of Europes major powers, the victorious Allies of World War I confirmed the rebirth of Poland in the Treaty of Versailles of June 1919. It was one of the stories of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. Poland solidified its independence in a series of wars fought by the newly formed Polish Army from 1918 to 1921. The extent of the half of the interwar territory of Poland was settled diplomatically in 1922. In the course of World War I, Germany gradually gained overall dominance on the Eastern Front as the Imperial Russian Army fell back, German and Austro-Hungarian armies seized the Russian-ruled part of what became Poland. In a failed attempt to resolve the Polish question as quickly as possible, Berlin set up a German puppet state on 5 November 1916, with a governing Provisional Council of State, the Council administered the country under German auspices, pending the election of a king. A month before Germany surrendered on 11 November 1918 and the war ended, the Regency Council had dissolved the Council of State, with the notable exception of the Marxist-oriented Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, most Polish political parties supported this move. On 23 October the Regency Council appointed a new government under Józef Świeżyński, in 1918–1919, over 100 workers councils sprang up on Polish territories, on 5 November 1918, in Lublin, the first Soviet of Delegates was established. On 6 November socialists proclaimed the Republic of Tarnobrzeg at Tarnobrzeg in Austrian Galicia, the same day the Socialist, Ignacy Daszyński, set up a Provisional Peoples Government of the Republic of Poland in Lublin. On Sunday,10 November at 7 a. m, Józef Piłsudski, newly freed from 16 months in a German prison in Magdeburg, returned by train to Warsaw. Piłsudski, together with Colonel Kazimierz Sosnkowski, was greeted at Warsaws railway station by Regent Zdzisław Lubomirski, next day, due to his popularity and support from most political parties, the Regency Council appointed Piłsudski as Commander in Chief of the Polish Armed Forces
24.
Vilnius University
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Vilnius University is the oldest university in the Baltic states and one of the oldest in Northern Europe. It is the largest university in Lithuania, the university was founded in 1579 as the Jesuit Academy of Vilnius by Grand Duke of Lithuania and King of Poland, Stephen Báthory. It was the third oldest university in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, in the aftermath of the Third Partition of Poland and the November Uprising, the university was closed down and suspended its operation until 1919. In the aftermath of World War I the university saw failed attempts to restart it by Lithuania, in 1945 the Polish community of students and scholars of Stefan Batory University was transferred to Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. After Lithuania regained its independence in 1990, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the wide-ranging Vilnius University ensemble represents all major architectural styles that predominated in Lithuania, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque and Classicism. The university has been known by many names during its history, due to its long history of Jewish, Polish and Russian influence or rule, the city portion of its name is rendered as Vilna, Wilna or Wilno, in addition to the modern Lithuanian Vilnius. 1579–1782, Alma Academia et Universitas Vilnensis Societatis Iesu, the Latin name is rendered into English as Jesuit Academy, Jesuit College, or Academy of Vilnius. 1782–1803, Schola Princeps Magni Ducatus Lithuaniae, Principal School of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania 1803–1832, the following year Walerian Protasewicz, the bishop of Vilnius, purchased several buildings in the city center and established the Vilnian Academy. Initially, the academy had three divisions, humanities, philosophy, and theology, the curriculum at the college and later at the academy was taught in Latin. At the beginning of the 17th century there are records about special groups that taught Lithuanian-speaking students Latin, the first students were enrolled into the Academy in 1570. A library at the college was established in the same year, in its first year of existence the college enrolled 160 students. His edict was approved by Pope Gregory XIIIs bull of October 30,1579, the first rector of the Academy was Piotr Skarga. Lithuanians at the time comprised about one third of the students, others were Germans, Poles, Swedes, in 1575, Duke Mikołaj Krzysztof Radziwiłł and Elżbieta Ogińska sponsored a printing house for the academy, one of the first in the region. The printing house issued books in Latin and Polish and the first surviving book in Lithuanian printed in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was in 1595 and it was Kathechismas, arba Mokslas kiekvienam krikščioniui privalus authored by Mikalojus Daukša. The academys growth continued until the 17th century, the following era, known as The Deluge, led to a dramatic drop in the number of students who matriculated and in the quality of its programs. In the middle of the 18th century, education authorities tried to restore the academy and this led to the foundation of the first observatory in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, in 1753, by Tomasz Żebrowski. The Commission of National Education, the worlds first ministry of education, took control of the academy in 1773, the language of instruction changed from Latin to Polish. Thanks to the rector of the academy, Marcin Poczobutt-Odlanicki, the academy was granted the status of Principal School in 1783, the commission, the secular authority governing the academy after the dissolution of the Jesuit order, drew up a new statute
25.
Oscar Milosz
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Oscar Vladislas de Lubicz Milosz was a French-Lithuanian poet, playwright, essayist and representative of Lithuania at the League of Nations. A recluse and metaphysician, his poems were visionary and tormented, concerned with love and loneliness and he was a distant cousin of Polish writer Czesław Miłosz, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980. I am a Lithuanian poet, writing in French Oscar Milosz was born in Čareja, earlier these lands had belonged to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and later to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but at the time was part of the Russian Empire. It was here that he spent his childhood and he was baptized on July 2,1886, at St. Alexanders Church in Warsaw. His father, Vladislas de Lubicz Milosz, was an officer in the Russian army and his mother. His parents did not marry until Oscar Milosz was 17, in 1889, Miloszs parents placed him at the Lycée Janson de Sailly in Paris. He began writing poems in 1894 and started to frequent artistic circles, meeting Oscar Wilde, after finishing at the Lycée, he enrolled at the École des langues orientales, where he studied Syriac and Hebrew. His first book of verse, Le Poème des Décadences, appeared in 1899, Milosz travelled widely in Europe and North Africa and explored many foreign literatures. He was an excellent linguist and was fluent in English, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian and Polish, as well as being able to read Latin, later in life, he would learn Lithuanian and Basque too. He chose to write his works in French, on the wake of this vision, his poetry became more hermetic and more mature. He began the study of alchemy, the Kabbalah, Jacob Boehme, Paracelsus, at the same time, he engaged in Catholic meditative practices. In 1916, during World War I, Milosz was conscripted to the Russian division of the French army and was assigned to the press corps, here he learned about the growing movement for Lithuanian independence. After the Russian revolution of 1917, Miloszs estate at Čareja came under Soviet control and was seized by the Bolsheviks, in 1920 when France recognized the independence of Lithuania, he was appointed officially as Chargé dAffaires for the new state. In 1931 he became a French citizen and was awarded the Légion dhonneur, ill with cancer, he died of a heart attack at his house in Fontainebleau in 1939. Milosz collected Lithuanian folk tales, and wrote fiction, drama, largely neglected during his lifetime, Milosz has increasingly come to be considered as an important figure in French poetry. ″He tried to integrate into Christian metaphysics the mystical writings of the Kabbalah, Neoplatonic tradition, in this regard, Milosz considered himself the disciple and follower of Renaissance alchemists. In a letter of 1926 to James Chouvet, he confesses that, studies taught me the only thing they could, namely, that the truth is one and that some respect and love are enough to discover it in the depths of our consciousness. Some of his works in French,1899, Le Poème des Décadences 1906, Les Sept Solitudes 1910, LAmoureuse Initiation 1911, Les Éléments 1913,1952 The Fourteen Poems of O. V
26.
Swedenborgian
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Swedenborg claimed to have received a new revelation from Jesus Christ through continuous heavenly visions which he experienced over a period of at least twenty-five years. In his writings, he predicted that God would replace the traditional Christian Church, establishing a New Church, the New Church doctrine is that each person must actively cooperate in repentance, reformation, and regeneration of ones life. The movement was founded on the belief that God explained the meaning of the Scriptures to Swedenborg as a means of revealing the truth of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Swedenborg claimed divine inspiration for his writings and followers believe that Swedenborg witnessed the Last Judgment in the spiritual world, therefore, it is thought that any Christian holding these beliefs is part of this New Church movement. Other names for the movement include Swedenborgian, New Christians, Neo-Christians, Church of the New Jerusalem, Swedenborg spoke of a New Church that would be founded on the theology in his works, but he himself never tried to establish an organization. In 1768, a trial was initiated in Sweden against Swedenborgs writings. It essentially concerned whether Swedenborgs theological writings were consistent with the Christian doctrines, a royal ordinance in 1770 declared that Swedenborgs writings were clearly mistaken and should not be taught even though his system of theological thought was never examined. Swedenborg then begged the King for grace and protection in a letter from Amsterdam, a new investigation against Swedenborg stalled and was eventually dropped in 1778. At the time of Swedenborgs death, few efforts had made to establish an organized church, but on May 7,1787,15 years after Swedenborgs death. It was a country Swedenborg had often visited and where he died, by 1789 a number of Churches had sprung up around England, and in April of that year the first General Conference of the New Church was held in Great Eastcheap, London. New Church ideas were carried to United States by missionaries, one famous missionary was John Chapman, also known as Johnny Appleseed. Early missionaries also traveled to parts of Africa, at the time these concepts of African enlightenment were judged highly liberal, Swedenborgians accepted freed African converts to their homes as early as 1790. Several of them were involved in abolitionism. In the 19th century, occultism became increasingly popular especially in France, some followers blended Swedenborgs writings with theosophy, alchemy and divination. What fascinated these followers most was Swedenborgs mystical side and they concentrated on his work Heaven and Hell which tells of Swedenborgs visit to Heaven and Hell to experience and report the conditions there. In structure, it was related to Dantes The Divine Comedy, some continue to combine the theology of the New Church with ideas from other systems, including Jungian psychology and Spiritualism. In the U. S. the church was organized in 1817 with the founding of the General Convention of the New Church now also known as the Swedenborgian Church of North America, the movement in the United States grew stronger until the late 19th century. There was a New-Church Theology School in Cambridge, a controversy about doctrinal issues and the authority of Swedenborgs writings caused a faction to split off to form the Academy of the New Church
27.
Psalms
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The Book of Psalms, commonly referred to simply as Psalms or the Psalms, is the first book of the Ketuvim, the third section of the Hebrew Bible, and a book of the Christian Old Testament. The title is derived from the Greek translation, ψαλμοί psalmoi, meaning instrumental music and, by extension, the book is an anthology of individual psalms, with 150 in the Jewish and Western Christian tradition and more in the Eastern Christian churches. Many of the psalms are linked to the name of David, over a third appear to be musical directions, addressed to the leader or choirmaster, including such statements as with stringed instruments and according to lilies. Others appear to be references to types of composition, such as A psalm and Song. Many superscriptions carry the names of individuals, the most common being of David, others named include Moses, Asaph, the Sons of Korah and Solomon. A natural way of understanding these attributions is as a claim to authorship, Psalms are usually identified by a sequence number, often preceded by the abbreviation Ps. Numbering of the Psalms differs—mostly by one digit, see table—between the Hebrew and it is generally admitted that Pss.9 and 10 were originally a single acrostic poem, they have been wrongly separated by Massorah, rightly united by the Septuagint and Vulgate. On the other hand, Ps.144 is made up of two songs — verses 1–11 and 12–15, Pss.42 and 43 are shown by identity of subject, of metrical structure and of refrain, to be three strophes of one and the same poem. The Hebrew text is correct in counting as one Ps.146, later liturgical usage would seem to have split up these and not a few other psalms. Zenner combines into what he deems were the original choral odes,1,2,3,4,6 +13,9 +10,19,20,21,56 +57,69 +70,114 +115,148,149,150. A choral ode would seem to have been the form of Pss.14 +70. The two strophes and the epode are Ps,14, the two antistrophes are Ps.70. It is noteworthy that, on the breaking up of the ode, each portion crept twice into the Psalter, Ps.14 =53, Ps.70 =40. Other such duplicated psalms are Ps and this loss of the original form of some of the psalms is allowed by the Biblical Commission to have been due to liturgical uses, neglect of copyists, or other causes. The Septuagint bible, present in Eastern Orthodox churches, includes a Psalm 151, Some versions of the Peshitta include Psalms 152–155. There are also the Psalms of Solomon, which are a further 18 psalms of Jewish origin, likely written in Hebrew. These and other indications suggest that the current Western Christian and Jewish collection of 150 psalms were selected from a wider set, gunkel divided the psalms into five primary types, Hymns, songs of praise for Gods work in creation or in history. They typically open with a call to praise, describe the motivation for praise, two sub-categories are enthronement psalms, celebrating the enthronement of Yahweh as king, and Zion psalms, glorifying Mount Zion, Gods dwelling-place in Jerusalem
28.
Warsaw
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Warsaw is the capital and largest city of Poland. It stands on the Vistula River in east-central Poland, roughly 260 kilometres from the Baltic Sea and 300 kilometres from the Carpathian Mountains. Its population is estimated at 1.750 million residents within a metropolitan area of 3.101 million residents. The city limits cover 516.9 square kilometres, while the area covers 6,100.43 square kilometres. In 2012 the Economist Intelligence Unit ranked Warsaw as the 32nd most liveable city in the world and it was also ranked as one of the most liveable cities in Central Europe. Today Warsaw is considered an Alpha– global city, an international tourist destination. Warsaws economy, by a variety of industries, is characterised by FMCG manufacturing, metal processing, steel and electronic manufacturing. The city is a significant centre of research and development, BPO, ITO, the Warsaw Stock Exchange is one of the largest and most important in Central and Eastern Europe. Frontex, the European Union agency for external security, has its headquarters in Warsaw. It has been said that Warsaw, together with Frankfurt, London, Paris, the city is positioning itself as Eastern Europe’s chic cultural capital with thriving art and club scenes and serious restaurants. The first historical reference to Warsaw dates back to the year 1313, after the Third Partition of Poland in 1795, Warsaw was incorporated into the Kingdom of Prussia. In 1806 during the Napoleonic Wars, the city became the capital of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. In accordance with the decisions of the Congress of Vienna, the Russian Empire annexed Warsaw in 1815, only in 1918 did it regain independence from the foreign rule and emerge as a new capital of the independent Republic of Poland. Warsaw gained the title of the Phoenix City because it has survived wars, conflicts. Most notably, the city required painstaking rebuilding after the damage it suffered in World War II. On 9 November 1940, the city was awarded Polands highest military decoration for heroism, the historic city-centre of Warsaw with its picturesque Old Town in 1980 was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Buildings represent examples of nearly every European architectural style and historical period, folk etymology attributes the city name to a fisherman, Wars, and his wife, Sawa. According to legend, Sawa was a living in the Vistula River with whom Wars fell in love
29.
General Government
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The territory was expanded in 1941 to include the District of Galicia. The General Government was run by Nazi Germany as an administrative unit for logistical purposes. Within days, Eastern Galicia was overrun and renamed Distrikt Galizien, until 1945 the General Government comprised much of central and southern Poland, including the major Polish cities of Warsaw, Kraków, Lwów, Lublin, Tarnopol and Stanisławów, among others. The Nazi German rulers of the Generalgouvernement territory had no intention of sharing power with the Poles or Ukrainians throughout the war, the authorities rarely even mentioned the name Poland in government correspondence. The only exception to this was the General Governments Bank of Issue in Poland, on 31 July 1940 governor Hans Frank, on Hitlers authority, shortened the name to just Generalgouvernement. A more literal translation of Generalgouvernement, which is a borrowing from French, the correct translation of the term Gouvernement is not government but actually governorate, which is a type of administrative division or territory. The area was known colloquially as the Restpolen. The designation General Government was chosen in reference to the Government General of Warsaw, after Germanys attack on Poland, all areas occupied by the German army including the Free City of Danzig initially came under the military rule. To settle the deviation from the agreement, the German. Under this revised version of the pact the territory concerned was exchanged for the inclusion in the Soviet sphere of Lithuania, with the new agreement the entire central part of Poland, including the core ethnic area of the Poles, came under exclusively German control. Hitler decreed the annexation to the German Reich of large parts of the occupied Polish territory in the western half of the German zone. Germany organized most of areas as two new Reichsgaue, Danzig-West Prussia and Wartheland. The remaining three regions, the areas of Zichenau, Eastern Upper Silesia and the Suwałki triangle. Draconian measures were introduced by both RKF and HTO, to facilitate the immediate Germanization of the territory, typically resulting in mass expulsions. The remaining parts of the former Poland were to become a German Nebenland as a frontier post of German rule in the east, a Führers decree of October 12,1939 established the General Government, the decree came into force on October 26,1939. Hans Frank was appointed as the Governor-General of the General Government, German authorities made a sharp contrast between the new Reich territory and a supposedly occupied rump state that could serve as a bargaining chip with the Western powers. The Germans established a border between the two German zones to heighten the difficulty of cross-frontier communication between the different segments of the Polish population. The official name chosen for the new entity was the Generalgouvernement für die besetzten polnischen Gebiete, however, this name did not imply anything about the actual nature of the administration
30.
Education in Poland during World War II
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This article covers the topic of underground education in Poland during World War II. Secret learning prepared new cadres for the reconstruction of Poland and countered the German. According to Nazi racial theories the Slavs needed no higher education, the only schools that remained opened were trade schools and courses for factory workers. Himmler prescribed, For the non-German population of the East there can be no type of school above the four-grade rudimentary school, reading I do not consider essential. By 1941, the number of attending elementary school in the General Government was half of the pre-war number. On the territories incorporated into the Reich, education in Polish was banned and punished with death, throughout Polish territory the Germans abolished all university education for non-Germans. All institutions of education were closed. Their equipment and most of the laboratories were taken to Germany and divided among the German universities while the buildings were turned into offices and military barracks. However, many teachers, professors and educational activists organized underground courses all around the country and those who survived the A-B Action and were not sent to concentration camps actively lectured to small groups in private apartments. The attendants were constantly risking deportation and death, most of the underground education was organized by the Secret Teaching Organization, which took care of the underground primary and secondary level education. Norman Davies notes that the Organization undertook the education of a million children, the net of underground university faculties spread rapidly and by 1944 there were more than 300 lecturers and 3,500 students at various courses at the Warsaw University alone. The main universities included the University of Lwów, Warsaw University, Stefan Batory University in Wilno, a new University of Western Lands was created in Warsaw, with branches in Kielce, Jędrzejów, Częstochowa and Milanówek. The latter university was composed mostly of the professors of Adam Mickiewicz University of Poznań and included 17 different units, among them the faculty of medicine, almost 10,000 students received masters degrees at the secret universities and several hundred others received doctorates. Secret printing houses that sprang up across Poland shortly after the war started, provided the facilities of secret learning with handbooks, the professors organized a net of secret high schools, trade schools and special courses on forbidden subjects, such as the Polish language, history and geography. A special case were the secret talmudic schools organized in ghettos, until 1944 there were more than a million secret high school students in Poland. At least 18,000 students passed their final school exams and this led to a bizarre situation in which students of formally non-existent high schools entered formally non-existent universities. Most of these certificates were issued on pre-war forms with the dates forged to indicate either 1938 or 1939 and these were later accepted by post-war Polish universities. There was also a net of secret military colleges in most major cities, until 1944, most of Armia Krajowa regiments had their military schools for Non-commissioned officers while the regional headquarters organized officer courses and special training
31.
Aesthetics
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Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy that explores the nature of art, beauty, and taste, with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgements of sentiment. More broadly, scholars in the field define aesthetics as critical reflection on art, in modern English, the term aesthetic can also refer to a set of principles underlying the works of a particular art movement or theory, one speaks, for example, of the Cubist aesthetic. The word aesthetic is derived from the Greek αἰσθητικός, which in turn was derived from αἰσθάνομαι, for some, aesthetics is considered a synonym for the philosophy of art since Hegel, while others insist that there is a significant distinction between these closely related fields. In practice, aesthetic judgement refers to the sensory contemplation or appreciation of an object, philosophical aesthetics has not only to speak about art and to produce judgments about art works, but has also to give a definition of what art is. Art is an entity for philosophy, because art deals with the senses. Hence, there are two different conceptions of art in aesthetics, art as knowledge or art as action, any aesthetic doctrines that guided the production and interpretation of prehistoric art are mostly unknown. Western aesthetics usually refers to Greek philosophers as the earliest source of aesthetic considerations. Plato believed in beauty as a form in which beautiful objects partake and he felt that beautiful objects incorporated proportion, harmony, and unity among their parts. Similarly, in the Metaphysics, Aristotle found that the elements of beauty were order, symmetry. From the late 17th to the early 20th century Western aesthetics underwent a revolution into what is often called modernism. German and British thinkers emphasized beauty as the key component of art and of the aesthetic experience, and saw art as necessarily aiming at absolute beauty. For Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten aesthetics is the science of the experiences, a younger sister of logic. For Immanuel Kant the aesthetic experience of beauty is a judgment of a subjective but similar human truth, however, beauty cannot be reduced to any more basic set of features. For Friedrich Schiller aesthetic appreciation of beauty is the most perfect reconciliation of the sensual and rational parts of human nature, for Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, the philosophy of art is the organon of philosophy concerning the relation between man and nature. So aesthetics began now to be the name for the philosophy of art, Friedrich von Schlegel, August Wilhelm Schlegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel also gave lectures on aesthetics as philosophy of art after 1800. For Hegel, all culture is a matter of absolute spirit coming to be manifest to itself, stage by stage, Art is the first stage in which the absolute spirit is manifest immediately to sense-perception, and is thus an objective rather than subjective revelation of beauty. It is thus for Schopenhauer one way to fight the suffering, the British were largely divided into intuitionist and analytic camps
32.
Home Army
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The Home Army was the dominant Polish resistance movement in Poland occupied by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during World War II. It was formed in February 1942 from the Związek Walki Zbrojnej, over the next two years, it absorbed most other Polish underground forces. Its allegiance was to the Polish Government-in-Exile, and it constituted the armed wing of what became known as the Polish Underground State, estimates of the Home Armys 1944 strength range between 200,000 and 600,000, the most commonly cited number being 400,000. This last number would make the Home Army not only the largest Polish underground resistance movement, the Home Army was disbanded on 19 January 1945, after the Soviet Red Army had largely cleared Polish territory of German forces. The Home Army sabotaged German operations such as transports headed for the Eastern Front in the Soviet Union and it also fought several full-scale battles against the Germans, particularly in 1943 and in Operation Tempest in 1944. The Home Army, in support of the Soviet military effort, tied down substantial German forces, the most widely known Home Army operation was the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. The Army also defended Polish civilians against atrocities perpetrated by German, because the Home Army was loyal to the Polish Government-in-Exile, the Soviet Union saw it as an obstacle to a Soviet takeover of Poland. Consequently, over the course of the war, conflict grew between the Home Army and Soviet forces, all the while, however, many other resistance organizations remained active in Poland. Most of them merged with the Armed Resistance or with its successor. The Polish Government in Exile envisioned the Home Army as an apolitical, Home Army plans envisioned, at wars end, the seizure of power in Poland by the Government Delegation for Poland and by the Government in Exile itself, which expected to return to Poland. In addition to the Polish government in London, an organization operated in Poland itself - a deliberative body of the resistance. The Political Consultative Committee formed in 1940 pursuant to an agreement between several political parties, the Socialist Party, Peoples Party, National Party and Labor Party. In 1943 it was renamed to Home Political Representation and in 1944 to Council of National Unity, after Germany started its invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, the Soviet Union joined the Allies and signed an Anglo-Soviet Agreement on 12 July 1941. This put the Polish Government in a position, since it had previously pursued a policy of two enemies. Though a Polish-Soviet agreement was signed in August 1941, cooperation continued to be difficult, until the major rising in 1944, the Home Army concentrated on self-defense and on attacks against German forces. The Home Army supplied valuable intelligence to the Allies, 43% of all received by the British secret services from continental Europe in between 1939 and 1945 came from Polish sources. Until 1942 most British intelligence on Germany came from Home Army reports, until the end of the war, the Home Army remained Britains main source of news from Central and Eastern Europe. Home Army intelligence provided the Allies with information on German concentration camps and on the V-1 flying bomb,242, photographs, eight key V-2 parts, and drawings of the wreckage
33.
Warsaw Uprising (1944)
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The Warsaw Uprising was a major World War II operation by the Polish resistance Home Army to liberate Warsaw from German occupation. The uprising was timed to coincide with the Soviet Unions Red Army approaching the eastern suburbs of the city and the retreat of German forces. However, the Soviet advance stopped short, enabling the Germans to regroup and demolish the city while defeating the Polish resistance, the Uprising was the largest single military effort taken by any European resistance movement during World War II. The Uprising began on 1 August 1944, as part of a plan, Operation Tempest. The main Polish objectives were to drive the Germans from the city and help with the fight against Nazi Germany. Also, short-term causes included the threat of a German round-up of able-bodied Poles, initially, the Poles established control over most of central Warsaw, but the Soviets ignored Polish attempts to establish radio contact and did not advance beyond the city limits. Intense street fighting between the Germans and Poles continued, arthur Koestler called the Soviet attitude one of the major infamies of this war which will rank for the future historian on the same ethical level with Lidice. Winston Churchill pleaded with Stalin and Franklin D. Roosevelt to help Britains Polish allies, then, without Soviet air clearance, Churchill sent over 200 low-level supply drops by the Royal Air Force, the South African Air Force, and the Polish Air Force under British High Command. Later, after gaining Soviet air clearance, the U. S. Army Air Force sent one high-level mass airdrop as part of Operation Frantic, the Soviet Union refused to allow American bombers from Western Europe to land on Soviet airfields after dropping supplies to the Poles. Although the exact number of remains unknown, it is estimated that about 16,000 members of the Polish resistance were killed. In addition, between 150,000 and 200,000 Polish civilians died, mostly from mass executions, Jews being harboured by Poles were exposed by German house-to-house clearances and mass evictions of entire neighbourhoods. German casualties totalled over 8,000 soldiers killed and missing, during the urban combat approximately 25% of Warsaws buildings were destroyed. Following the surrender of Polish forces, German troops systematically levelled another 35% of the city block by block, by July 1944, Poland had been occupied by the forces of Nazi Germany for almost five years. The Polish Home Army, which was loyal to the Polish government-in-exile, had planned some form of insurrection against the occupiers. Germany was fighting a coalition of Allied powers, led by the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, the initial plan of the Home Army was to link up with the invading forces of the Western Allies as they liberated Europe from the Nazis. However, in 1943 it became apparent that the Soviets, rather than the Western Allies, in this country, we have one point from which every evil emanates. If we didnt have Warsaw in the General Government, we wouldnt have four-fifths of the difficulties with which we must contend and it became obvious that the advancing Soviet Red Army might not come to Poland as an ally but rather only as the ally of an ally. The Soviets and the Poles distrusted each other, and Soviet partisans in Poland often clashed with Polish resistance increasingly united under the Home Armys front, afterwards, Stalin created the Rudenko Commission, whose goal was to blame the Germans for the war crime at all costs
34.
People's Republic of Poland
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The Polish Peoples Republic covers the history of Poland under Communist control between 1952 and 1990. The name was defined by the Constitution of 1952 which was based on the 1936 Soviet Constitution, between 1947 and 1952, the name of the Polish state was the Republic of Poland, in accordance with the temporary Constitution of 1947. The Soviet Union had much influence over internal and external affairs, and Red Army forces were stationed in Poland. In 1945, Soviet generals and advisors formed 80% of the cadre of the Polish Armed Forces. The Polish United Workers Party became the dominant political party, officially making the country a Communist state, at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Stalin was able to present his western allies, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, with a fait accompli in Poland. His armed forces were in occupation of the country, and his agents, the USSR was in the process of incorporating the lands in eastern Poland which it had occupied between 1939 and 1941. In compensation, the USSR awarded Poland German territories in Pomerania, Silesia and these awards were confirmed at the Tripartite Conference of Berlin, otherwise known as the Potsdam Conference in August 1945 after the end of the war in Europe. Stalin was determined that Polands new government would become his tool towards making Poland a Soviet puppet state controlled by the communists. He had severed relations with the Polish government-in-exile in London in 1943, the communists held a majority of key posts in this new government, and with Soviet support they soon gained almost total control of the country, rigging all elections. This important victory would be their last, however, as the communists, tightening their grip on power, many of their opponents decided to leave the country, and others were put on staged trials and sentenced to many years of imprisonment or execution. In June 1946 the Three Times Yes referendum was held on a number of issues—abolition of the Senate of Poland, land reform, the communist-controlled Interior Ministry issued results showing that all three questions passed overwhelmingly. Years later, however, evidence was uncovered showing that the referendum had been tainted by massive fraud, Gomułka then took advantage of a split in the Polish Socialist Party. One faction, which included Prime Minister Edward Osóbka-Morawski, wanted to join forces with the Peasant Party, another faction, led by Józef Cyrankiewicz, argued that the Socialists should support the Communists in carrying through a socialist program, while opposing the imposition of one-party rule. Pre-war political hostilities continued to influence events, and Mikołajczyk would not agree to form a front with the Socialists. The Communists played on these divisions by dismissing Osóbka-Morawski and making Cyrankiewicz Prime Minister, between the referendum and the January 1947 general elections, the opposition was subjected to persecution. Only the candidates of the pro-government Democratic Bloc were allowed to campaign completely unmolested, meanwhile, several opposition candidates were prevented from campaigning at all. Mikołajczyks Polish Peoples Party in particular suffered persecution, it had opposed the abolition of the Senate as a test of strength against the government, although it supported the other two questions, the Communist-dominated government branded the PSL traitors. This massive oppression was overseen by Gomułka and the provisional president, the official results of the election showed the Democratic Bloc with 80.1 percent of the vote
35.
Washington, D.C.
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Washington, D. C. formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, the District, or simply D. C. is the capital of the United States. The signing of the Residence Act on July 16,1790, Constitution provided for a federal district under the exclusive jurisdiction of the Congress and the District is therefore not a part of any state. The states of Maryland and Virginia each donated land to form the federal district, named in honor of President George Washington, the City of Washington was founded in 1791 to serve as the new national capital. In 1846, Congress returned the land ceded by Virginia, in 1871. Washington had an population of 681,170 as of July 2016. Commuters from the surrounding Maryland and Virginia suburbs raise the population to more than one million during the workweek. The Washington metropolitan area, of which the District is a part, has a population of over 6 million, the centers of all three branches of the federal government of the United States are in the District, including the Congress, President, and Supreme Court. Washington is home to national monuments and museums, which are primarily situated on or around the National Mall. The city hosts 176 foreign embassies as well as the headquarters of international organizations, trade unions, non-profit organizations, lobbying groups. A locally elected mayor and a 13‑member council have governed the District since 1973, However, the Congress maintains supreme authority over the city and may overturn local laws. D. C. residents elect a non-voting, at-large congressional delegate to the House of Representatives, the District receives three electoral votes in presidential elections as permitted by the Twenty-third Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1961. Various tribes of the Algonquian-speaking Piscataway people inhabited the lands around the Potomac River when Europeans first visited the area in the early 17th century, One group known as the Nacotchtank maintained settlements around the Anacostia River within the present-day District of Columbia. Conflicts with European colonists and neighboring tribes forced the relocation of the Piscataway people, some of whom established a new settlement in 1699 near Point of Rocks, Maryland. 43, published January 23,1788, James Madison argued that the new government would need authority over a national capital to provide for its own maintenance. Five years earlier, a band of unpaid soldiers besieged Congress while its members were meeting in Philadelphia, known as the Pennsylvania Mutiny of 1783, the event emphasized the need for the national government not to rely on any state for its own security. However, the Constitution does not specify a location for the capital, on July 9,1790, Congress passed the Residence Act, which approved the creation of a national capital on the Potomac River. The exact location was to be selected by President George Washington, formed from land donated by the states of Maryland and Virginia, the initial shape of the federal district was a square measuring 10 miles on each side, totaling 100 square miles. Two pre-existing settlements were included in the territory, the port of Georgetown, Maryland, founded in 1751, many of the stones are still standing
36.
Paris
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Paris is the capital and most populous city of France. It has an area of 105 square kilometres and a population of 2,229,621 in 2013 within its administrative limits, the agglomeration has grown well beyond the citys administrative limits. By the 17th century, Paris was one of Europes major centres of finance, commerce, fashion, science, and the arts, and it retains that position still today. The aire urbaine de Paris, a measure of area, spans most of the Île-de-France region and has a population of 12,405,426. It is therefore the second largest metropolitan area in the European Union after London, the Metropole of Grand Paris was created in 2016, combining the commune and its nearest suburbs into a single area for economic and environmental co-operation. Grand Paris covers 814 square kilometres and has a population of 7 million persons, the Paris Region had a GDP of €624 billion in 2012, accounting for 30.0 percent of the GDP of France and ranking it as one of the wealthiest regions in Europe. The city is also a rail, highway, and air-transport hub served by two international airports, Paris-Charles de Gaulle and Paris-Orly. Opened in 1900, the subway system, the Paris Métro. It is the second busiest metro system in Europe after Moscow Metro, notably, Paris Gare du Nord is the busiest railway station in the world outside of Japan, with 262 millions passengers in 2015. In 2015, Paris received 22.2 million visitors, making it one of the top tourist destinations. The association football club Paris Saint-Germain and the rugby union club Stade Français are based in Paris, the 80, 000-seat Stade de France, built for the 1998 FIFA World Cup, is located just north of Paris in the neighbouring commune of Saint-Denis. Paris hosts the annual French Open Grand Slam tennis tournament on the red clay of Roland Garros, Paris hosted the 1900 and 1924 Summer Olympics and is bidding to host the 2024 Summer Olympics. The name Paris is derived from its inhabitants, the Celtic Parisii tribe. Thus, though written the same, the name is not related to the Paris of Greek mythology. In the 1860s, the boulevards and streets of Paris were illuminated by 56,000 gas lamps, since the late 19th century, Paris has also been known as Panam in French slang. Inhabitants are known in English as Parisians and in French as Parisiens and they are also pejoratively called Parigots. The Parisii, a sub-tribe of the Celtic Senones, inhabited the Paris area from around the middle of the 3rd century BC. One of the areas major north-south trade routes crossed the Seine on the île de la Cité, this place of land and water trade routes gradually became a town
37.
Albert Camus
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Albert Camus was a French philosopher, author, and journalist. His views contributed to the rise of the known as absurdism. He wrote in his essay The Rebel that his life was devoted to opposing the philosophy of nihilism while still delving deeply into individual freedom. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, Camus did not consider himself to be an existentialist despite usually being classified as a follower of it, even in his lifetime. In a 1945 interview, Camus rejected any ideological associations, No, Sartre and I are always surprised to see our names linked. Camus was born in French Algeria to a Pied-Noir family and studied at the University of Algiers, in 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons to denounce two ideologies found in both the USSR and the USA. Albert Camus was born on 7 November 1913 in Dréan in French Algeria and his mother was of Spanish descent and could only hear out of her left ear. His father, Lucien, an agricultural worker of Alsatian descent, was wounded in the Battle of the Marne in 1914 during World War I. Lucien died from his wounds in an army hospital on 11 October. Camus and his mother, a house cleaner, lived without many basic material possessions during his childhood in the Belcourt section of Algiers. In 1923, Camus was accepted into the Lycée Bugeaud and eventually was admitted to the University of Algiers, after he contracted tuberculosis in 1930, he had to end his football activities, he had been a goalkeeper for a prominent Algerian university team. In addition, he was able to study part-time. To earn money, he took odd jobs, as a tutor, car parts clerk. Camus joined the French Communist Party in early 1935, seeing it as a way to fight inequalities between Europeans and natives in Algeria. He did not suggest he was a Marxist or that he had read Das Kapital, in 1936, the independence-minded Algerian Communist Party was founded. Camus joined the activities of the Algerian Peoples Party, which got him into trouble with his Communist party comrades, Camus then became associated with the French anarchist movement. The anarchist André Prudhommeaux first introduced him at a meeting in 1948 of the Cercle des Étudiants Anarchistes as a sympathiser familiar with anarchist thought, Camus wrote for anarchist publications such as Le Libertaire, La révolution Prolétarienne, and Solidaridad Obrera, the organ of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT. Camus stood with the anarchists when they expressed support for the uprising of 1953 in East Germany and he again allied with the anarchists in 1956, first in support of the workers uprising in Poznań, Poland, and then later in the year with the Hungarian Revolution
38.
Pablo Neruda
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Pablo Neruda was the pen name and, later, legal name of the Chilean poet-diplomat and politician Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto. He derived his pen name from the Czech poet Jan Neruda, Neruda won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. Neruda became known as a poet when he was 10 years old and he often wrote in green ink, which was his personal symbol for desire and hope. The Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez once called Neruda the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language, harold Bloom included Neruda as one of the 26 writers central to the Western tradition in his book The Western Canon. On July 15,1945, at Pacaembu Stadium in São Paulo, Brazil, during his lifetime, Neruda occupied many diplomatic positions and served a term as a Senator for the Chilean Communist Party. When President González Videla outlawed communism in Chile in 1948, a warrant was issued for Nerudas arrest, friends hid him for months in the basement of a house in the port city of Valparaíso. Later, Neruda escaped through a pass near Maihue Lake into Argentina. Years later, Neruda was an advisor to Chiles socialist President Salvador Allende. When Neruda returned to Chile after his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Neruda died in his house in Isla Negra on 23 September 1973 six and a half hours after that injection. Pinochet, backed by elements of the forces, denied permission for Nerudas funeral to be made a public event. However, thousands of grieving Chileans disobeyed the curfew and crowded the streets, soon after her death, Reyes moved to Temuco, where he married Trinidad Candia Marverde, a woman with whom he had had another child nine years earlier, a boy named Rodolfo. Neruda grew up in Temuco with Rodolfo and a half-sister, Laura and he composed his first poems in the winter of 1914. During this winter, he wrote often about dinosaurs, on July 18,1917, at the age of thirteen, he published his first work, an essay entitled Entusiasmo y perseverancia in the local daily newspaper La Mañana, signed Neftalí Reyes. From 1918 to mid-1920 he published poems, such as Mis ojos. In 1919, he participated in the literary contest Juegos Florales del Maule, by mid-1920, when he adopted the pseudonym Pablo Neruda, he was a published author of poems, prose, and journalism. He is thought to have named himself Neruda after the Czech poet Jan Neruda, the young poets intention in publishing under a pseudonym was to avoid his fathers disapproval of his poems. In 1921, at the age of 16, Neruda moved to Santiago to study French at the Universidad de Chile, both works were critically acclaimed and have been translated into many languages. Over the decades, Veinte poemas sold millions of copies and became Nerudas best-known work, almost one hundred years later, Veinte Poemas still retains its place as the best selling poetry book in the Spanish language
39.
McCarthyism
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McCarthyism is the practice of making accusations of subversion or treason without proper regard for evidence. It originated with President Trumans Executive Order 9835 of March 21,1947, McCarthyism soon took on a broader meaning, describing the excesses of similar efforts. The term is now used more generally to describe reckless, unsubstantiated accusations. The primary targets of such suspicions were government employees, those in the entertainment industry, educators, many people suffered loss of employment or destruction of their careers, some even suffered imprisonment. McCarthyism was a social and cultural phenomenon that affected all levels of society and was the source of a great deal of debate. The historical period that came to be known as the McCarthy era began well before Joseph McCarthys own involvement in it, many factors contributed to McCarthyism, some of them extending back to the years of the First Red Scare, inspired by Communisms emergence as a recognized political force. While the United States was engaged in World War II and allied with the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union tested an atomic bomb in 1949, earlier than many analysts had expected. That same year, Mao Zedongs Communist army gained control of mainland China despite heavy American financial support of the opposing Kuomintang, in 1950, the Korean War began, pitting U. S. U. N. and South Korean forces against Communists from North Korea and China. The following year saw several significant developments regarding Soviet Cold War espionage activities. In January 1950, Alger Hiss, a high-level State Department official, was convicted of perjury, in Great Britain, Klaus Fuchs confessed to committing espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union while working on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos National Laboratory during the War. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested in 1950 on charges of stealing atomic bomb secrets for the Soviets and were executed in 1953, there were also more subtle forces encouraging the rise of McCarthyism. It had long been a practice of conservative politicians to refer to progressive reforms such as child labor laws. This tendency increased in the 1930s in reaction to the New Deal policies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in general, the vaguely defined danger of Communist influence was a more common theme in the rhetoric of anti-Communist politicians than was espionage or any other specific activity. He produced a piece of paper which he claimed contained a list of known Communists working for the State Department and this speech resulted in a flood of press attention to McCarthy and established the path that made him one of the most recognized politicians in the United States. The first recorded use of the term McCarthyism was in a cartoon by Washington Post editorial cartoonist Herbert Block. The cartoon depicted four leading Republicans trying to push an elephant to stand on a platform atop a stack of ten tar buckets. Block later wrote that there was nothing particularly ingenious about the term, if anyone has a prior claim on it, hes welcome to the word and to the junior senator from Wisconsin along with it. I will also throw in a set of dishes and a case of soap
40.
Intellectuals
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Socially, intellectuals constitute the intelligentsia, a status class organised either by ideology, or by nationality. Man of Letters The English term Man of Letters derives from the French term belletrist, the term Man of Letters distinguished the literate man from the illiterate man, in a time when literacy was a rare form of cultural capital. In late 19th century, the term became common usage to denote the defenders of the falsely accused artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus. Likewise, in Tsarist Russia, there arose the intelligentsia, who were the class of white-collar workers. As such, politically radical thinkers already had participated in the French Revolution, Robert Darnton said that they were not societal outsiders, but respectable, domesticated, moreover, some intellectuals were anti-academic, despite universities being synonymous with intellectualism. Habermas Structural Transformation of Public Sphere made significant contribution to the notion of public intellectual by historically and conceptually delineating the idea of private, such civil servants earned academic degrees by means of imperial examination, and also were skilled calligraphers, and knew Confucian philosophy. Historian Wing-Tsit Chan concludes that, Generally speaking, the record of these scholar-gentlemen has been a worthy one and it was good enough to be praised and imitated in 18th century Europe. Nevertheless, it has given China a tremendous handicap in their transition from government by men to government by law, and personal considerations in Chinese government have been a curse. In Joseon Korea, the intellectuals were the literati, who knew how to read and write, socially, they constituted the petite bourgeoisie, composed of scholar-bureaucrats who administered the dynastic rule of the Joseon dynasty. The Italian Communist theoretician Antonio Gramsci developed Karl Marx’s conception of the intelligentsia to include political leadership in the public sphere and that, because all knowledge is existentially-based, the intellectuals, who create and preserve knowledge, are spokesmen for different social groups, and articulate particular social interests. That intellectuals occur in social class and throughout the right wing, the centre. That, as a class, the intellectuals view themselves as autonomous from the ruling class of their society. Therefore, the leadership of intellectuals is required for effecting and realizing social change, because, in the formal codification of Leninism, the Hungarian Marxist philosopher, György Lukács identified the intelligentsia as the privileged social class who provide revolutionary leadership. By means of intelligible and accessible interpretation, the intellectuals explain to the workers, the How. and the Why. of the social, economic, and political status quo—the ideological totality of society—and its practical, revolutionary application to the transformation of their society. The term public intellectual describes the intellectual participating in the discourse of society. In Representations of the Intellectual, Edward Saïd said that the … true intellectual is, therefore, always an outsider, living in self-imposed exile, and on the margins of society. An intellectual usually is associated with an ideology or with a philosophy and that intellectuals be mindful of the social and cultural ties created with their words, insights, and ideas, and should be heard as social critics of politics and power. In journalism, the term usually connotes a university academic of the humanities—especially a philosopher—who addresses important social and political matters of the day
41.
Cold War
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The Cold War was a state of geopolitical tension after World War II between powers in the Eastern Bloc and powers in the Western Bloc. Historians do not fully agree on the dates, but a common timeframe is the period between 1947, the year the Truman Doctrine was announced, and 1991, the year the Soviet Union collapsed. The term cold is used there was no large-scale fighting directly between the two sides, although there were major regional wars, known as proxy wars, supported by the two sides. The Cold War split the temporary alliance against Nazi Germany, leaving the Soviet Union. The USSR was a Marxist–Leninist state ruled by its Communist Party and secret police, the Party controlled the press, the military, the economy and all organizations. In opposition stood the West, dominantly democratic and capitalist with a free press, a small neutral bloc arose with the Non-Aligned Movement, it sought good relations with both sides. The two superpowers never engaged directly in full-scale armed combat, but they were armed in preparation for a possible all-out nuclear world war. The first phase of the Cold War began in the first two years after the end of the Second World War in 1945, the Berlin Blockade was the first major crisis of the Cold War. With the victory of the communist side in the Chinese Civil War and the outbreak of the Korean War, the USSR and USA competed for influence in Latin America, and the decolonizing states of Africa and Asia. Meanwhile, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was stopped by the Soviets, the expansion and escalation sparked more crises, such as the Suez Crisis, the Berlin Crisis of 1961, and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The USSR crushed the 1968 Prague Spring liberalization program in Czechoslovakia, détente collapsed at the end of the decade with the beginning of the Soviet–Afghan War in 1979. The early 1980s were another period of elevated tension, with the Soviet downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007, the United States increased diplomatic, military, and economic pressures on the Soviet Union, at a time when the communist state was already suffering from economic stagnation. In the mid-1980s, the new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev introduced the reforms of perestroika and glasnost. Pressures for national independence grew stronger in Eastern Europe, especially Poland, Gorbachev meanwhile refused to use Soviet troops to bolster the faltering Warsaw Pact regimes as had occurred in the past. The result in 1989 was a wave of revolutions that peacefully overthrew all of the communist regimes of Central, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union itself lost control and was banned following an abortive coup attempt in August 1991. This in turn led to the dissolution of the USSR in December 1991. The United States remained as the only superpower. The Cold War and its events have left a significant legacy and it is often referred to in popular culture, especially in media featuring themes of espionage and the threat of nuclear warfare
42.
William F. Buckley, Jr.
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William Frank Buckley Jr. was an American conservative author and commentator. Former Senate Republican leader Bob Dole said Buckley lighted the fire, Buckley wrote God and Man at Yale and more than fifty other books on writing, speaking, history, politics, and sailing, including a series of novels featuring CIA agent Blackford Oakes. Buckley referred to himself as either a libertarian or conservative and he resided in New York City and Stamford, Connecticut. His mother, from New Orleans, was of Swiss-German, German, the sixth of ten children, Buckley moved as a boy with his family to Mexico, and then to Sharon, Connecticut, before beginning his formal schooling in Paris, where he attended first grade. By age seven, he received his first formal training in English at a day school in London, his first and second languages were Spanish, as a boy, Buckley developed a love for music, sailing, horses, hunting, and skiing. All of these interests would be reflected in his later writings, just before World War II, at age 13, he attended high school at the Catholic preparatory school Beaumont College in England. During the war, Buckleys family took in the future British historian Alistair Horne as a child war evacuee and he and Horne remained lifelong friends. Buckley and Horne both attended the Millbrook School, in Millbrook, New York, and graduated as members of the Class of 1943, at Millbrook, Buckley founded and edited the schools yearbook, The Tamarack, his first experience in publishing. When Buckley was a man, his father was an acquaintance of libertarian author Albert Jay Nock. William F. Buckley, Sr. encouraged his son to read Nocks works, as a youth, Buckley developed many musical talents. He played the very well, later calling it the instrument I love beyond all others. He was an accomplished pianist and appeared once on Marian McPartlands National Public Radio show Piano Jazz, a great admirer of Johann Sebastian Bach, Buckley said that he wanted Bachs music played at his funeral. Buckley was homeschooled through the 8th grade using the Calvert School of Baltimores Homeschool Curriculum, Buckley attended the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 1943. The following year upon his graduation from the U. S. Army Officer Candidate School, in his book, Miles Gone By, he briefly recounts being a member of Franklin Roosevelts honor guard upon the Presidents death. He served stateside throughout the war at Fort Benning, Georgia, Fort Gordon, Georgia, with the end of World War II in 1945, he enrolled in Yale University, where he became a member of the secret Skull and Bones society and was a masterful debater. He was an member of the Conservative Party of the Yale Political Union. Buckley studied political science, history, and economics at Yale and he excelled on the Yale Debate Team, and under the tutelage of Yale professor Rollin G. Osterweis, Buckley honed his acerbic style. These two officers remained lifelong friends, in a November 1,2005, column for National Review, Buckley recounted that while he worked for the CIA, the only employee of the organization that he knew was Hunt, his immediate boss
43.
Totalitarianism
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Totalitarianism is a political system in which the state recognizes no limits to its authority and strives to regulate every aspect of public and private life wherever feasible. A distinctive feature of totalitarian governments is an ideology, a set of ideas that gives meaning. The concept of totalitarianism was first developed in the 1920s by the Weimar German jurist, and later Nazi academic, Carl Schmitt, Schmitt used the term, Totalstaat, in his influential work on the legal basis of an all-powerful state, The Concept of the Political. The concept became prominent in Western political discourse as a concept that highlights similarities between Fascist states and the Soviet Union, the term was later assigned a positive meaning in the writings of Giovanni Gentile, Italy’s most prominent philosopher and leading theorist of fascism. He used the term “totalitario” to refer to the structure and goals of the new state, according to Benito Mussolini, this system politicizes everything spiritual and human, Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state. Churchill was then a backbencher MP representing the Epping constituency, in a radio address two weeks later Churchill again employed the term, this time applying the concept to a Communist or a Nazi tyranny. And went on to say Democracy is not an end but a means to the conquest of the new state, when the time comes, either parliament submits or we will eliminate it. G. Wells, Henry Miller or twopenny color postcards, every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. During a 1945 lecture series entitled The Soviet Impact on the Western World, only the blind and incurable could ignore the trend towards totalitarianism, said Carr. Isabel Paterson, in The God of the Machine, used the term in connection with the Soviet Union, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt argued that Nazi and State communist regimes were new forms of government, and not merely updated versions of the old tyrannies. According to Arendt, the source of the appeal of totalitarian regimes is their ideology, which provides a comforting, single answer to the mysteries of the past, present. For Nazism, all history is the history of race struggle, once that premise is accepted, all actions of the state can be justified by appeal to Nature or the Law of History, justifying their establishment of authoritarian state apparatus. In addition to Arendt, many scholars from a variety of academic backgrounds, each one of these describes totalitarianism in slightly different ways. Is only concerned with power and as long as that is not contested it gives society a certain degree of liberty. Authoritarianism does not attempt to change the world and human nature, in contrast, a totalitarian regime attempts to control virtually all aspects of the social life, including the economy, education, art, science, private life, and morals of citizens. The officially proclaimed ideology penetrates into the deepest reaches of societal structure and it also mobilizes the whole population in pursuit of its goals. Friedrich and Brzezinski argue that a system has the following six, mutually supportive, defining characteristics. Single mass party, typically led by a dictator, system of terror, using such instruments as violence and secret police
44.
Nazi occupation of Poland
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In summer-autumn of 1941 the lands annexed by the Soviets were overrun by Nazi Germany in the course of the initially successful German attack on the USSR. After a few years of fighting, the Red Army was able to repel the invaders and drive the Nazi forces out of the USSR and across Poland from the rest of Eastern and Central Europe. Both occupying powers were equally hostile to the existence of sovereign Poland, Polish culture, about 6 million Polish citizens—nearly 21. 4% of Polands population—died between 1939 and 1945 as a result of the occupation, half of whom were Polish Jews. Over 90% of the death came through non-military losses, as most of the civilians were targeted by various deliberate actions by Germans. Overall, during German occupation of pre-war Polish territory, 1939–1945, in September 1939 Poland was invaded and occupied by two powers, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, acting in accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Germany acquired 48. 4% of the former Polish territory, under the terms of two decrees by Hitler, with Stalins agreement, large areas of western Poland were annexed by Germany. The size of these territories was approximately 92,500 square kilometres with approximately 10.5 million inhabitants. The remaining block of territory was placed under a German administration, of about the size and inhabited by about 11.5 millions, were called the General Government. A German lawyer and prominent Nazi, Hans Frank, was appointed Governor-General of this area on 12 October 1939. Most of the administration outside strictly local level was replaced by German officials, non-German population on the occupied lands were subject to forced resettlement, Germanization, economic exploitation, and slow but progressing extermination. A small strip of land, about 700 square kilometres with 2000,000 inhabitants that was part of Czechoslovakia before 1938 was also returned by Germany to its ally, many of them welcomed the Soviets, alienated in the interwar Poland. Nonetheless Poles comprised the largest single group in all territories annexed by the Soviet Union. By the end of the invasion the Soviet Union had taken over 51. 6% of the territory of Poland, with over 13,200,000 people. The ethnic composition of these areas were as follows, 38% Poles, there were also 336,000 refugees who fled from areas occupied by Germany, most of them Jews. Following German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, most of the Polish territories annexed by the Soviets was attached to the enlarged General Government, following the end of the war, borders of Poland were significantly shifted westwards. The occupation goal was to turn former Poland into ethnically German living space, by deporting or exterminating non-German populace, at the plans fulfillment, there would be no Slavs or Jews remaining in Eastern Europe. Over a longer period, only about 3–4 million Poles, suitable for Germanization, were supposed to be residing in the former Poland. Those plans began to be implemented almost immediately after the German troops took control of Poland, as early as October 1939, many Poles were expelled from the annexed lands to make room for German settlers
listen); 30 June 1911 – 14 August 2004) was a Polish[1][2] poet, prose writer, translator and diplomat. His World War II-era sequence The World is a collection of twenty "naïve" poems. Following the war, he served as Polish cultural attaché in Paris and Washington, D.C., then in 1951 defected to the West. His nonfiction book The Captive Mind (1953) became a classic of anti-Stalinism, from 1961 to 1998 he was a professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. He became a U.S. citizen in 1970.[3] In 1978 he was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and in 1980 the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1999 he was named a Puterbaugh Fellow,[4] after the fall of the Iron Curtain, he divided his time between Berkeley, California, and Kraków, Poland.
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