1.
Order of the British Empire
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There is also the related British Empire Medal, whose recipients are affiliated with, but not members of, the order. Recommendations for appointments to the Order of the British Empire were at first made on the nomination of the United Kingdom, the self-governing Dominions of the Empire, nominations continue today from Commonwealth countries that participate in recommending British honours. Most members are citizens of the United Kingdom or the Commonwealth realms that use the Imperial system of honours and awards. Honorary knighthoods are appointed to citizens of nations where the Queen is not head of state, occasionally, honorary appointees are, incorrectly, referred to as Sir or Dame – Bill Gates or Bob Geldof, for example. In particular, King George V wished to create an Order to honour many thousands of those who had served in a variety of non-combatant roles during the First World War, when first established, the Order had only one division. However, in 1918, soon after its foundation, it was divided into Military. The Orders motto is For God and the Empire, at the foundation of the Order, the Medal of the Order of the British Empire was instituted, to serve as a lower award granting recipients affiliation but not membership. In 1922, this was renamed the British Empire Medal, in addition, the BEM is awarded by the Cook Islands and by some other Commonwealth nations. The British monarch is Sovereign of the Order, and appoints all members of the Order. The next most senior member is the Grand Master, of whom there have been three, Prince Edward, the Prince of Wales, Queen Mary, and the current Grand Master, the Duke of Edinburgh. The Order is limited to 300 Knights and Dames Grand Cross,845 Knights and Dames Commander, and 8,960 Commanders. There are no limits applied to the number of members of the fourth and fifth classes. Foreign recipients, as members, do not contribute to the numbers restricted to the Order as full members do. Though men can be knighted separately from an order of chivalry, women cannot, and so the rank of Knight/Dame Commander of the Order is the lowest rank of damehood, and second-lowest of knighthood. Because of this, Dame Commander is awarded in circumstances in which a man would be created a Knight Bachelor, for example, by convention, female judges of the High Court of Justice are created Dames Commander after appointment, while male judges become Knights Bachelor. The Order has six officials, the Prelate, the Dean, the Secretary, the Registrar, the King of Arms, the Bishop of London, a senior bishop in the Church of England, serves as the Orders Prelate. The Dean of St Pauls is ex officio the Dean of the Order, the Orders King of Arms is not a member of the College of Arms, as are many other heraldic officers. From time to time, individuals are appointed to a higher grade within the Order, thereby ceasing usage of the junior post-nominal letters
2.
Time 100
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Time 100 is an annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world assembled by the American news magazine Time. First published in 1999 as the result of a debate among American academics, politicians, and journalists, although appearing on the list is often seen as an honor, Time makes it clear that entrants are recognized for changing the world, regardless of the consequences of their actions. The final list of individuals is exclusively chosen by Time editors with nominations coming from the TIME100 alumni. Only the winner of the Readers Poll, conducted days before the official list is revealed, is chosen by the general public, included in the list eleven times, Barack Obama is the person who has been listed most often. The list was started with a debate at a symposium in Washington, the list was first published in 1999, when Time magazine named the 100 most influential people of the 20th century. Based on the popularity of the installment, in 2004, Time magazine decided to make it an annual issue and those recognized fall in one of five categories, Leaders & Revolutionaries, Builders & Titans, Artists & Entertainers, Scientists & Thinkers, Heroes & Icons. A record of 41 women are included in the edition, the highest number of personalities in the lists history. The annual gala was held on April 29,2014 in New York City and they are artists and activists, reformers and researchers, heads of state and captains of industry. Their ideas spark dialogue and dissent and sometimes even revolution, welcome to this years TIME100. The announcement was celebrated with an event in New York City on April 26,2011. The honorees were joined by A-list celebrities at Frederick P. Rose Hall, Time readers contributed to the selection by an online vote of over 200 finalists. The list included familiar global newsmakers such as U. S. President Barack Obama, the list included numerous figures representing the year of upheaval in the Middle East ranging from rebels, to political leaders to news correspondents. Although the events of what has been dubbed the Arab Spring were prominent, additionally, Prince William of Wales and Kate Middleton were part of the list during the week before their wedding. The list also included Katsunobu Sakurai, mayor of Minamisōma, Fukushima, list of individuals included in the TIME100 in 2010 In its online presentation, Time introduced the list as follows, In our annual TIME100 issue, we name the people who most affect our world. Oprah Winfrey continued her streak of having been included on every Time 100 list and was one of women on the list. The list included many expected names and some such as Scott Brown. Others who were considered surprise selections included Elton John, Ashton Kutcher, the announcement of the list was celebrated by a black tie gala at the Time Warner Center in New York City on May 4,2010. The list was published the following day, Time readers contributed to the selection by an online vote of over 200 finalists
3.
Kingdom of Romania
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The Kingdom of Romania was a constitutional monarchy which existed between 13 March 1881 and 30 December 1947, specified by the first three Constitutions of Romania. As such, it is distinct from the Romanian Old Kingdom. From 1859 to 1877, Romania evolved from a union of two vassal principalities under a single prince to a full-fledged independent kingdom with a Hohenzollern monarchy. During 1918-20, at the end of World War I, Transylvania, Eastern Moldavia, in 1947 King Michael was compelled to abdicate and a socialist republic ruled by the Romanian Communist Party replaced the monarchy. The 1859 ascendancy of Alexandru Ioan Cuza as prince of both Moldavia and Wallachia under the suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire united an identifiably Romanian nation under a single ruler. On 5 February 1862 the two principalities were united to form the Principality of Romania, with Bucharest as its capital. On 23 February 1866 a so-called Monstrous coalition, composed of Conservatives and radical Liberals, the German prince Charles of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen was appointed as Prince of Romania, in a move to assure German backing to unity and future independence. He immediately adopted the Romanian spelling of his name, Carol, on 15 March 1881, as an assertion of full sovereignty, the Romanian parliament raised the country to the status of a kingdom, and Carol was crowned as king on 10 May. Abstaining from the Initial Balkan War against the Ottoman Empire, the Kingdom of Romania entered the Second Balkan War in June 1913 against the Tsardom of Bulgaria,330,000 Romanian troops moved across the Danube and into Bulgaria. One army occupied Southern Dobrudja and another moved into northern Bulgaria to threaten Sofia, Romania thus acquired the ethnically-mixed territory of Southern Dobrudja, which it had desired for years. In 1916 Romania entered World War I on the Entente side, the term came into use after World War I, when the Old Kingdom was opposed to Greater Romania, which included Transylvania, Banat, Bessarabia, and Bukovina. Nowadays, the term mainly has a historical relevance, and is used as a common term for all regions in Romania included in both the Old Kingdom and present-day borders. Romania delayed in entering World War I, but ultimately declared war on the Central Powers in 1916, War with the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919 resulted in the occupation of Budapest by Romanian troops and the end of Béla Kuns Bolshevik regime. At the Paris Peace Conference, Romania received territories of Transylvania, part of Banat, Bessarabia, thus, Romania in 1920 was more than twice the size it had been in 1914. Although the country was satisfied and had no territorial claims, it aroused the enmity of Bulgaria, and especially Hungary. Greater Romania now encompassed a significant minority population, especially of Hungarians, by contrast, the prewar Romanian state had only one real minority, Jews, but nonetheless anti-Semitism was widespread. Transylvania had significant Hungarian and German population, and with a contemptuous attitude towards Romanians. Both groups were excluded from politics as the postwar Romanian regime passed an edict stating that all personnel employed by the state had to speak Romanian
4.
Manhattan
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Manhattan is the most densely populated borough of New York City, its economic and administrative center, and the citys historical birthplace. The borough is coextensive with New York County, founded on November 1,1683, Manhattan is often described as the cultural and financial capital of the world and hosts the United Nations Headquarters. Many multinational media conglomerates are based in the borough and it is historically documented to have been purchased by Dutch colonists from Native Americans in 1626 for 60 guilders which equals US$1062 today. New York County is the United States second-smallest county by land area, on business days, the influx of commuters increases that number to over 3.9 million, or more than 170,000 people per square mile. Manhattan has the third-largest population of New York Citys five boroughs, after Brooklyn and Queens, the City of New York was founded at the southern tip of Manhattan, and the borough houses New York City Hall, the seat of the citys government. The name Manhattan derives from the word Manna-hata, as written in the 1609 logbook of Robert Juet, a 1610 map depicts the name as Manna-hata, twice, on both the west and east sides of the Mauritius River. The word Manhattan has been translated as island of hills from the Lenape language. The United States Postal Service prefers that mail addressed to Manhattan use New York, NY rather than Manhattan, the area that is now Manhattan was long inhabited by the Lenape Native Americans. In 1524, Florentine explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano – sailing in service of King Francis I of France – was the first European to visit the area that would become New York City. It was not until the voyage of Henry Hudson, an Englishman who worked for the Dutch East India Company, a permanent European presence in New Netherland began in 1624 with the founding of a Dutch fur trading settlement on Governors Island. In 1625, construction was started on the citadel of Fort Amsterdam on Manhattan Island, later called New Amsterdam, the 1625 establishment of Fort Amsterdam at the southern tip of Manhattan Island is recognized as the birth of New York City. In 1846, New York historian John Romeyn Brodhead converted the figure of Fl 60 to US$23, variable-rate myth being a contradiction in terms, the purchase price remains forever frozen at twenty-four dollars, as Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace remarked in their history of New York. Sixty guilders in 1626 was valued at approximately $1,000 in 2006, based on the price of silver, Straight Dope author Cecil Adams calculated an equivalent of $72 in 1992. In 1647, Peter Stuyvesant was appointed as the last Dutch Director General of the colony, New Amsterdam was formally incorporated as a city on February 2,1653. In 1664, the English conquered New Netherland and renamed it New York after the English Duke of York and Albany, the Dutch Republic regained it in August 1673 with a fleet of 21 ships, renaming the city New Orange. Manhattan was at the heart of the New York Campaign, a series of battles in the early American Revolutionary War. The Continental Army was forced to abandon Manhattan after the Battle of Fort Washington on November 16,1776. The city, greatly damaged by the Great Fire of New York during the campaign, became the British political, British occupation lasted until November 25,1783, when George Washington returned to Manhattan, as the last British forces left the city
5.
New York (state)
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New York is a state in the northeastern United States, and is the 27th-most extensive, fourth-most populous, and seventh-most densely populated U. S. state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south and Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont to the east. With an estimated population of 8.55 million in 2015, New York City is the most populous city in the United States, the New York Metropolitan Area is one of the most populous urban agglomerations in the world. New York City makes up over 40% of the population of New York State, two-thirds of the states population lives in the New York City Metropolitan Area, and nearly 40% lives on Long Island. Both the state and New York City were named for the 17th-century Duke of York, the next four most populous cities in the state are Buffalo, Rochester, Yonkers, and Syracuse, while the state capital is Albany. New York has a diverse geography and these more mountainous regions are bisected by two major river valleys—the north-south Hudson River Valley and the east-west Mohawk River Valley, which forms the core of the Erie Canal. Western New York is considered part of the Great Lakes Region and straddles Lake Ontario, between the two lakes lies Niagara Falls. The central part of the state is dominated by the Finger Lakes, New York had been inhabited by tribes of Algonquian and Iroquoian-speaking Native Americans for several hundred years by the time the earliest Europeans came to New York. The first Europeans to arrive were French colonists and Jesuit missionaries who arrived southward from settlements at Montreal for trade, the British annexed the colony from the Dutch in 1664. The borders of the British colony, the Province of New York, were similar to those of the present-day state, New York is home to the Statue of Liberty, a symbol of the United States and its ideals of freedom, democracy, and opportunity. In the 21st century, New York has emerged as a node of creativity and entrepreneurship, social tolerance. On April 17,1524 Verrazanno entered New York Bay, by way of the now called the Narrows into the northern bay which he named Santa Margherita. Verrazzano described it as a vast coastline with a delta in which every kind of ship could pass and he adds. This vast sheet of water swarmed with native boats and he landed on the tip of Manhattan and possibly on the furthest point of Long Island. Verrazannos stay was interrupted by a storm which pushed him north towards Marthas Vineyard, in 1540 French traders from New France built a chateau on Castle Island, within present-day Albany, due to flooding, it was abandoned the next year. In 1614, the Dutch under the command of Hendrick Corstiaensen, rebuilt the French chateau, Fort Nassau was the first Dutch settlement in North America, and was located along the Hudson River, also within present-day Albany. The small fort served as a trading post and warehouse, located on the Hudson River flood plain, the rudimentary fort was washed away by flooding in 1617, and abandoned for good after Fort Orange was built nearby in 1623. Henry Hudsons 1609 voyage marked the beginning of European involvement with the area, sailing for the Dutch East India Company and looking for a passage to Asia, he entered the Upper New York Bay on September 11 of that year
6.
University of Paris
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The University of Paris, metonymically known as the Sorbonne, was a university in Paris, France. Emerging around 1150 as an associated with the cathedral school of Notre Dame de Paris. Vast numbers of popes, royalties, scientists and intellectuals were educated at the University of Paris, following the turbulence of the French Revolution, education was suspended in 1793 whereafter its faculties were partly reorganised by Napoleon as the University of France. In 1896, it was renamed again to the University of Paris, in 1970, following the May 1968 events, the university was divided into 13 autonomous universities. Others, like Panthéon-Sorbonne University, chose to be multidisciplinary, in 1150, the future University of Paris was a student-teacher corporation operating as an annex of the Notre-Dame cathedral school. The university had four faculties, Arts, Medicine, Law, the Faculty of Arts was the lowest in rank, but also the largest, as students had to graduate there in order to be admitted to one of the higher faculties. The students were divided into four nationes according to language or regional origin, France, Normandy, Picardy, the last came to be known as the Alemannian nation. Recruitment to each nation was wider than the names might imply, the faculty and nation system of the University of Paris became the model for all later medieval universities. Under the governance of the Church, students wore robes and shaved the tops of their heads in tonsure, students followed the rules and laws of the Church and were not subject to the kings laws or courts. This presented problems for the city of Paris, as students ran wild, students were often very young, entering the school at age 13 or 14 and staying for 6 to 12 years. Three schools were especially famous in Paris, the palatine or palace school, the school of Notre-Dame, the decline of royalty brought about the decline of the first. The other two were ancient but did not have much visibility in the early centuries, the glory of the palatine school doubtless eclipsed theirs, until it completely gave way to them. These two centres were much frequented and many of their masters were esteemed for their learning, the first renowned professor at the school of Ste-Geneviève was Hubold, who lived in the tenth century. Not content with the courses at Liège, he continued his studies at Paris, entered or allied himself with the chapter of Ste-Geneviève, and attracted many pupils via his teaching. Distinguished professors from the school of Notre-Dame in the century include Lambert, disciple of Fulbert of Chartres, Drogo of Paris, Manegold of Germany. Three other men who added prestige to the schools of Notre-Dame and Ste-Geneviève were William of Champeaux, Abélard, humanistic instruction comprised grammar, rhetoric, dialectics, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. To the higher instruction belonged dogmatic and moral theology, whose source was the Scriptures and it was completed by the study of Canon law. The School of Saint-Victor arose to rival those of Notre-Dame and Ste-Geneviève and it was founded by William of Champeaux when he withdrew to the Abbey of Saint-Victor
7.
The Holocaust
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The Holocaust, also referred to as the Shoah, was a genocide in which some six million European Jews were killed by Adolf Hitlers Nazi Germany, and the World War II collaborators with the Nazis. The victims included 1.5 million children, and represented about two-thirds of the nine million Jews who had resided in Europe, killings took place throughout German-occupied Europe, as well as within Nazi Germany, and across all territories controlled by its allies. Other victims of Nazi crimes included ethnic Poles and other Slavs, Soviet citizens and Soviet POWs, communists, homosexuals, Freemasons, Jehovahs Witnesses, some 42,500 detention facilities were utilized in the concentration of victims for the purpose of gross violations of human rights. Over 200,000 people are estimated to have been Holocaust perpetrators, the persecution was carried out in stages, culminating in the policy of extermination of European Jews termed the Final Solution to the Jewish Question. Following Hitlers rise to power, the German government passed laws to exclude Jews from civil society, starting in 1933 the Nazis began to establish a network of concentration camps. After the outbreak of war in 1939 both German and foreign Jews were herded into wartime ghettos, in 1941, as Germany began to conquer new territory in the East, all anti-Jewish measures radicalized. Specialized paramilitary units called Einsatzgruppen murdered around two million Jews in mass shootings actions in less than a year, by mid-1942, victims were being regularly transported by freight trains to extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, most were systematically killed in gas chambers. This continued until the end of World War II in Europe in April–May 1945, the most notable exception was the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943, when thousands of poorly-armed Jewish fighters held the Waffen-SS at bay for four weeks. An estimated 20, 000–30,000 Jewish partisans actively fought against the Nazis, French Jews took part in the French Resistance, which conducted a guerilla campaign against the Nazis and Vichy French authorities. Over a hundred armed Jewish uprisings took place, the term holocaust comes from the Greek adjective holókaustos, a variant of holókautos, referring to an animal sacrifice offered to a god in which the whole animal is completely burnt. Often used substantively in apposition with the noun thysia, the term appears in a fragment of pseudo-Callisthenes, writing in Latin, Jerome Latinized the Greek word as a neuter noun holocaustum, using it to translate references to the Jewish burnt offering in his translations of Exodus and Leviticus. In his Chronicon de rebus gestis Ricardi Primi, Richard of Devizes, the English poet John Milton had used the word to denote a conflagration in his 1671 poem Samson Agonistes and the word gradually developed to mean a massacre thereon. The term was used in the 1950s by historians as a translation of the Jewish word shoah to refer specifically to the Nazi genocide of Jews, the television mini-series Holocaust is credited with introducing the term into common parlance after 1978. The biblical word shoah, meaning calamity became the standard Hebrew term for the Holocaust as early as the 1940s, especially in Europe and Israel. Shoah is preferred by some Jews for several reasons including the offensive nature of the word holocaust which they take to refer to the Greek pagan custom. The Nazis used the phrase Final Solution to the Jewish Question, all branches of Germanys bureaucracy were engaged in the logistics that led to the genocides, turning the Third Reich into what one Holocaust scholar, Michael Berenbaum, has called a genocidal state. Every arm of the countrys sophisticated bureaucracy was involved in the killing process, as prisoners entered the death camps, they were made to surrender all personal property, which was catalogued and tagged before being sent to Germany to be reused or recycled. Berenbaum writes that the Final Solution of the Jewish question was in the eyes of the perpetrators, through a concealed account, the German National Bank helped launder valuables stolen from the victims
8.
Night (book)
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If only I could get rid of this dead weight. Immediately I felt ashamed of myself, ashamed forever, in Night everything is inverted, every value destroyed. Here there are no fathers, no brothers, no friends, everyone lives and dies for himself alone. He moved to Paris after the war and in 1954 completed an 862-page manuscript in Yiddish about his experiences, the novelist François Mauriac helped him find a French publisher. Les Éditions de Minuit published 178 pages as La Nuit in 1958, fifty years later the book had been translated into 30 languages, and now ranks as one of the bedrocks of Holocaust literature. It remains unclear how much of Night is memoir, Wiesel has called it his deposition, but scholars have had difficulty approaching it as an unvarnished account. The literary critic Ruth Franklin writes that the pruning of the text from Yiddish to French transformed an angry historical account into a work of art, in Night, he said, I wanted to show the end, the finality of the event. Everything came to an end—man, history, literature, religion, and yet we begin again with night. Elie Wiesel was born on 30 September 1928 in Sighet, a town in the Carpathian mountains of northern Transylvania, to Chlomo Wiesel, a shopkeeper, the family lived in a community of 10, 000–20,000 mostly Orthodox Jews. From 5 April Jews over the age of six had to wear a 10 x 10 cm yellow badge on the side of their coats or jackets. Jews had to declare the value of their property, and were forbidden from moving home, travelling, owning cars or radios, listening to radio stations. Jewish authors could no longer be published, their books were removed from libraries, between 15 May and 8 July 1944,437,402 Hungarian Jews are recorded as having been sent there on 147 trains, most gassed on arrival. The transports comprised most of the Jewish population outside Budapest, the Hungarian capital, between 16 May and 27 June,131,641 Jews were deported from northern Transylvania. Wiesel, his parents and sisters—older sisters Hilda and Beatrice and seven-year-old Tzipora—were among them, on arrival Jews were selected for the gas chamber or forced labour, to be sent to the left meant work, to the right, the gas chamber. Sarah and Tzipora were sent to the gas chamber, Hilda and Beatrice survived, separated from the rest of the family. Wiesel and Chlomo managed to stay together, surviving forced labour, Chlomo died there in January 1945, three months before the 6th Armored Division of the United States Army arrived to liberate the camp. Night opens in Sighet in 1941, the books narrator is Eliezer, an Orthodox Jewish teenager who studies the Talmud by day, and by night weep over the destruction of the Temple. To the disapproval of his father, Eliezer spends time discussing the Kabbalah with Moshe the Beadle, in June 1941 the Hungarian government expelled Jews unable to prove their citizenship
9.
Nobel Peace Prize
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Per Alfred Nobels will, the recipient is selected by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, a five-member committee appointed by the Parliament of Norway. Since 1990, the prize is awarded on 10 December in Oslo City Hall each year, the prize was formerly awarded in the Atrium of the University of Oslo Faculty of Law, the Norwegian Nobel Institute, and the Parliament. Due to its nature, the Nobel Peace Prize has, for most of its history. Alfred Nobels will further specified that the prize be awarded by a committee of five chosen by the Norwegian Parliament. Nobel died in 1896 and he did not leave an explanation for choosing peace as a prize category, as he was a trained chemical engineer, the categories for chemistry and physics were obvious choices. The reasoning behind the peace prize is less clear, some Nobel scholars suggest it was Nobels way to compensate for developing destructive forces. His inventions included dynamite and ballistite, both of which were used violently during his lifetime, ballistite was used in war and the Irish Republican Brotherhood, an Irish nationalist organization, carried out dynamite attacks in the 1880s. Nobel was also instrumental in turning Bofors from an iron and steel producer into an armaments company and it is unclear why Nobel wished the Peace Prize to be administered in Norway, which was ruled in union with Sweden at the time of Nobels death. The Norwegian Nobel Committee speculates that Nobel may have considered Norway better suited to awarding the prize, the Norwegian Parliament appoints the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which selects the Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Each year, the Norwegian Nobel Committee specifically invites qualified people to submit nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize, the statutes of the Nobel Foundation specify categories of individuals who are eligible to make nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize. Nominations by committee members can be submitted up to the date of the first Committee meeting after this deadline. In 2009, a record 205 nominations were received, but the record was again in 2010 with 237 nominations, in 2011. Nominations from 1901 to 1956, however, have released in a database. Nominations are considered by the Nobel Committee at a meeting where a short list of candidates for review is created. Advisers usually have some months to complete reports, which are considered by the Committee to select the laureate. The Committee seeks to achieve a decision, but this is not always possible. The Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee presents the Nobel Peace Prize in the presence of the King of Norway on 10 December each year, the Peace Prize is the only Nobel Prize not presented in Stockholm. The Nobel laureate receives a diploma, a medal, and a document confirming the prize amount, as of 2013, the prize was worth 10 million SEK
10.
Presidential Medal of Freedom
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The Presidential Medal of Freedom is an award bestowed by the President of the United States and is—along with the comparable Congressional Gold Medal—the highest civilian award of the United States. The award is not limited to U. S. citizens and, while it is an award, it can also be awarded to military personnel. It was established in 1963 by President John F. Kennedy, President John F. Kennedy established the current decoration in 1963 through Executive Order 11085, with unique and distinctive insignia, vastly expanded purpose, and far higher prestige. It was the first U. S. civilian neck decoration and, in the grade of Awarded With Distinction, is the only U. S. sash and star decoration. The Executive Order calls for the medal to be awarded annually on or around July 4, and at other convenient times as chosen by the president, Recipients are selected by the president, either on his own initiative or based on recommendations. The order establishing the medal also expanded the size and the responsibilities of the Distinguished Civilian Service Awards Board so it could serve as a source of such recommendations. The medal may be awarded to a more than once. It may also be awarded posthumously, examples include John F, golden American bald eagles with spread wings stand between the points of the star. It is worn around the neck on a ribbon with white edge stripes. When the medal With Distinction is awarded, the star may be presented descending from a neck ribbon, the sash and medal of the Presidential Medal of Freedom with distinction has never been worn in public since its inception. Andrew Presidential Medal of Freedom, an article from jfklibrary. org, Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipients, a list of recipients from May 5,1993, through August 19,2009, from senate. gov, the U. S. Senates official website. Hosted on georgewbush-whitehouse. archives. gov, a section of the U. S. National Archives, Medal of Freedom Ceremony, a news release, August 12,2009, from the White House Press Secretary at whitehouse. gov, the White Houses official website. War Figures Honored With Medal of Freedom, The New York Times, December 15,2004
11.
Congressional Gold Medal
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A Congressional Gold Medal is an award bestowed by the United States Congress, the Congressional Gold Medal and the Presidential Medal of Freedom are the highest civilian awards in the United States. However, There are no permanent statutory provisions relating to the creation of Congressional Gold Medals. When a Congressional Gold Medal has been deemed appropriate, Congress has, by legislative action, American citizenship is not a requirement. Since the American Revolution, Congress has commissioned gold medals as its highest expression of appreciation for distinguished achievements. The medal was first awarded in 1776 by the Second Continental Congress to General George Washington, the medal normally is awarded to persons, but in 1979 the American Red Cross became the first organization to be honored with a gold medal. In 2014 the Civil Air Patrol was awarded a Congressional Gold Medal for the service in World War II. As of 2013 four people had been awarded more than one medal, Winfield Scott, Zachary Taylor, Lincoln Ellsworth. The Gold Medal and the Presidential Medal of Freedom are generally considered to carry the same level of prestige. The chief difference between the two is that the Freedom Medal is personally awarded by the President of the United States, a Congressional Gold Medal is designed by the United States Mint to specifically commemorate the person and achievement for which the medal is awarded. Medals are therefore different in appearance, and there is no standard design, Congressional Gold Medals are considered non-portable, meaning that they are not meant to be worn on a uniform or other clothing, but rather displayed. This was authorized in 1935 by Pub. L, 74–43 allowing the Secretary of the Navy to authorize—at his discretion—the wearing of commemorative or other special awards on Navy or Marine Corps uniforms, in military sized form. The rules have broadened since its beginning and now includes different people groups such as actors, authors, entertainers, often, bronze versions of the medals are struck for sale by the U. S. Mint, and may be available in both larger and smaller sizes. In at least one case, the John Wayne medal, private dealers bought large numbers of the bronze version and they were then gold plated and resold to the public for a significant profit. List of Congressional Gold Medal recipients Awards and decorations of the United States government Congressional Silver Medal Congressional Bronze Medal Thanks of Congress Snowden, a Description of the Medals of Washington, and of Other Objects of Interest in the Museum of the Mint. Illustrated, to Which Are Added Biographical Notices of the Directors of the Mint from 1792 to the year 1851, list of recipients Loubat, J. F. and Jacquemart, Jules, Illustrator, The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776–1876
12.
Order of the Star of Romania
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The Order of the Star of Romania is Romanias highest civil Order and second highest State decoration after the defunct Order of Michael the Brave. It is awarded by the President of Romania and it has five ranks, from lowest to the highest, Officer, Commander, Grand Officer, Grand Cross, and Grand Cross with Collar. Krétly presented a model, which was accepted by the domnitor. It was decided that the order would have five ranks, Knight, Officer, Comandor, Grand Officer, the domnitor decided that the name of the honour would be The Order of the Union. Because of this, the motto of the new order would fit the event, the obverse of the insignia would bear the numbers 5 and 24, the days of January when he was elected in both Moldova and Wallachia. Most of the insignia produced for him remained stored in the Royal Palaces dungeons, in April 1877, when Romania gained independence from the Ottoman Empire, the debate regarding the institution of Romanian decorations was revived. Mihail Kogălniceanu, Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Ion Brătianu cabinet, because of the already earlier supplied Order of The Union, it was decided that the shape of the decoration would be the same, modifying only the domnitors seal. The motto was changed, because the old one was not appropriate to the moment. Regarding the name, Kogălniceanu insisted on Steaua Dunării, the name Steaua României appeared on May 10,1887, when the law was voted in the Parliament, as the first law of the Sovereign Romania. By Royal Decree, King Carol II changed the order of precedence in the Romanian honours system, as a result, in 1932, The Star of Romania dropped in precedence from second place to fourth place. In 1937, it dropped to seventh place, in 1938, the order was given a superior rank, called Clasa I, between the Grand Officer rank and the Grand Cross rank, with a maximum of 50 civilians and 15 military personnel. The statutes established by King Carol II were changed by General Ion Antonescu, generally, the rules were the ones used during World War I. The order The Star of Romania became the second in the national hierarchy, after 1948, all the existing decorations were outlawed, and their wearing was forbidden. Just by keeping the insignia, one was considered a delinquent in the first years of communism, cumming List of military decorations National Decorations System Ordinul național Steaua României, Presidency of Romania website Recipients of the order, Presidency of Romania website
13.
Legion of Honour
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The Legion of Honour, full name National Order of the Legion of Honour, is the highest French order of merit for military and civil merits, established 1802 by Napoléon Bonaparte. The order is divided into five degrees of increasing distinction, Chevalier, Officier, Commandeur, Grand Officier and Grand-Croix. The orders motto is Honneur et Patrie and its seat is the Palais de la Légion dHonneur next to the Musée dOrsay, in the French Revolution, all French orders of chivalry were abolished, and replaced with Weapons of Honour. The Légion however did use the organization of old French orders of chivalry, the badges of the legion also bear a resemblance to the Ordre de Saint-Louis, which also used a red ribbon. Napoleon originally created this to ensure political loyalty, the organization would be used as a facade to give political favours, gifts, and concessions. The Légion was loosely patterned after a Roman legion, with legionaries, officers, commanders, regional cohorts, the highest rank was not a grand cross but a Grand Aigle, a rank that wore all the insignia common to grand crosses. The members were paid, the highest of them extremely generously,5,000 francs to an officier,2,000 francs to a commandeur,1,000 francs to an officier,250 francs to a légionnaire. Napoleon famously declared, You call these baubles, well, it is with baubles that men are led, do you think that you would be able to make men fight by reasoning. That is good only for the scholar in his study, the soldier needs glory, distinctions, rewards. This has been quoted as It is with such baubles that men are led. The order was the first modern order of merit, under the monarchy, such orders were often limited to Roman Catholics, and all knights had to be noblemen. The military decorations were the perks of the officers, the Légion, however, was open to men of all ranks and professions—only merit or bravery counted. The new legionnaire had to be sworn in the Légion and it is noteworthy that all previous orders were crosses or shared a clear Christian background, whereas the Légion is a secular institution. The jewel of the Légion has five arms, in a decree issued on the 10 Pluviôse XIII, a grand decoration was instituted. This decoration, a cross on a sash and a silver star with an eagle, symbol of the Napoleonic Empire, became known as the Grand Aigle. After Napoleon crowned himself Emperor of the French in 1804 and established the Napoleonic nobility in 1808, the title was made hereditary after three generations of grantees. Napoleon had dispensed 15 golden collars of the legion among his family and this collar was abolished in 1815. The Légion dhonneur was prominent and visible in the French Empire, the Emperor always wore it and the fashion of the time allowed for decorations to be worn most of the time
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Knight
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A knight is a person granted an honorary title of knighthood by a monarch or other political leader for service to the monarch or country, especially in a military capacity. Historically, in Europe, knighthood was conferred upon mounted warriors, during the High Middle Ages, knighthood was considered a class of lower nobility. By the Late Middle Ages, the rank had become associated with the ideals of chivalry, often, a knight was a vassal who served as a fighter for a lord, with payment in the form of land holdings. The lords trusted the knights, who were skilled in battle on horseback, since the early modern period, the title of knight is purely honorific, usually bestowed by a monarch, as in the British honours system, often for non-military service to the country. The modern female equivalent in the United Kingdom is Dame, furthermore, Geoffroi de Charnys Book of Chivalry expounded upon the importance of Christian faith in every area of a knights life. This novel explored the ideals of knighthood and their incongruity with the reality of Cervantes world, in the late medieval period, new methods of warfare began to render classical knights in armour obsolete, but the titles remained in many nations. Some orders of knighthood, such as the Knights Templar, have become the subject of legend, each of these orders has its own criteria for eligibility, but knighthood is generally granted by a head of state or monarch to selected persons to recognise some meritorious achievement. This linkage is reflected in the etymology of chivalry, cavalier, the special prestige accorded to mounted warriors finds a parallel in the furusiyya in the Muslim world, and the Greek hippeus and Roman eques of classical antiquity. The word knight, from Old English cniht, is a cognate of the German word Knecht and this meaning, of unknown origin, is common among West Germanic languages. Middle High German had the phrase guoter kneht, which also meant knight, the Anglo-Saxon cniht had no connection to horsemanship, the word referred to any servant. A rādcniht, riding-servant, was a servant delivering messages or patrolling coastlines on horseback, a narrowing of the generic meaning servant to military follower of a king or other superior is visible by 1100. The specific military sense of a knight as a warrior in the heavy cavalry emerges only in the Hundred Years War. The verb to knight appears around 1300, and, from the same time, an Equestrian was a member of the second highest social class in the Roman Republic and early Roman Empire. This class is often translated as knight, the medieval knight, both Greek ἳππος and Latin equus are derived from the Proto-Indo-European word root ekwo-, horse. In the later Roman Empire, the classical Latin word for horse, equus, was replaced in common parlance by the vulgar Latin caballus, sometimes thought to derive from Gaulish caballos. From caballus arose terms in the various Romance languages cognate with the English cavalier, Italian cavaliere, Spanish caballero, French chevalier, Portuguese cavaleiro, the Germanic languages have terms cognate with the English rider, German Ritter, and Dutch and Scandinavian ridder. These words are derived from Germanic rīdan, to ride, in turn derived from the Proto-Indo-European root reidh-, in ancient Rome there was a knightly class Ordo Equestris from which European knighthood may have been derived. Some portions of the armies of Germanic peoples who occupied Europe from the 3rd century AD onward had been mounted, in the Early Medieval period any well-equipped horseman could be described as a knight, or miles in Latin
15.
Hebrew language
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Hebrew is a language native to Israel, spoken by over 9 million people worldwide, of whom over 5 million are in Israel. Historically, it is regarded as the language of the Israelites and their ancestors, the earliest examples of written Paleo-Hebrew date from the 10th century BCE. Hebrew belongs to the West Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic language family, Hebrew is the only living Canaanite language left, and the only truly successful example of a revived dead language. Hebrew had ceased to be a spoken language somewhere between 200 and 400 CE, declining since the aftermath of the Bar Kokhba revolt. Aramaic and to a lesser extent Greek were already in use as international languages, especially among elites and it survived into the medieval period as the language of Jewish liturgy, rabbinic literature, intra-Jewish commerce, and poetry. Then, in the 19th century, it was revived as a spoken and literary language, and, according to Ethnologue, had become, as of 1998, the language of 5 million people worldwide. After Israel, the United States has the second largest Hebrew-speaking population, with 220,000 fluent speakers, Modern Hebrew is one of the two official languages of the State of Israel, while premodern Hebrew is used for prayer or study in Jewish communities around the world today. Ancient Hebrew is also the tongue of the Samaritans, while modern Hebrew or Arabic is their vernacular. For this reason, Hebrew has been referred to by Jews as Leshon Hakodesh, the modern word Hebrew is derived from the word Ivri, one of several names for the Israelite people. It is traditionally understood to be a based on the name of Abrahams ancestor, Eber. This name is based upon the root ʕ-b-r meaning to cross over. Interpretations of the term ʕibrim link it to this verb, cross over, in the Bible, the Hebrew language is called Yәhudit because Judah was the surviving kingdom at the time of the quotation. In Isaiah 19,18 it is called the Language of Canaan, Hebrew belongs to the Canaanite group of languages. In turn, the Canaanite languages are a branch of the Northwest Semitic family of languages, according to Avraham ben-Yosef, Hebrew flourished as a spoken language in the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah during about 1200 to 586 BCE. Scholars debate the degree to which Hebrew was a vernacular in ancient times following the Babylonian exile. In July 2008 Israeli archaeologist Yossi Garfinkel discovered a ceramic shard at Khirbet Qeiyafa which he claimed may be the earliest Hebrew writing yet discovered, dating around 3000 years ago. The Gezer calendar also dates back to the 10th century BCE at the beginning of the Monarchic Period, classified as Archaic Biblical Hebrew, the calendar presents a list of seasons and related agricultural activities. The Gezer calendar is written in an old Semitic script, akin to the Phoenician one that through the Greeks, the Gezer calendar is written without any vowels, and it does not use consonants to imply vowels even in the places where later Hebrew spelling requires it
16.
American Jews
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American Jews, also known as Jewish Americans, are Americans who are Jews, either by religion, ethnicity, or nationality. The Jewish community in the United States is composed predominantly of Ashkenazi Jews and their US-born descendants, Minority Jewish ethnic divisions are also represented, including Sephardic Jews, Mizrahi Jews, and a smaller percentage of converts to Judaism. The American Jewish community manifests a wide range of Jewish cultural traditions, depending on religious definitions and varying population data, the United States is home to the largest or second largest Jewish community in the world. In 2012, the American Jewish population was estimated at between 5.5 and 8 million, depending on the definition of the term and this constitutes between 1. 7% and 2. 6% of the total U. S. population. Jews have been present in what is today the United States of America since the mid-17th century, however, they were small in number, with at most 200 to 300 having arrived by 1700. The majority were Sephardic Jewish immigrants of Spanish and Portuguese ancestry, until after 1720 when Ashkenazi Jews from Central, after passage of the Plantation Act of 1740, Jews were specifically permitted to become British citizens and immigrate to the colonies. Until about 1830, Charleston, South Carolina had more Jews than anywhere else in North America and they primarily became merchants and shop-owners. Jewish migration to the United States increased dramatically in the early 1880s, as a result of persecution, many Jews also emigrated from Romania. Over 2,000,000 Jews landed between the late 19th century and 1924, when the Immigration Act of 1924 restricted immigration, most settled in the New York metropolitan area, establishing the worlds major concentrations of Jewish population. In 1915 the circulation of the daily Yiddish newspapers was half a million in New York City alone, in addition thousands more subscribed to the numerous weekly papers and the many magazines. American Jewish writers of the time urged assimilation and integration into the wider American culture,500,000 American Jews fought in World War II, and after the war younger families joined the new trend of suburbanization. There, Jews became increasingly assimilated and demonstrated rising intermarriage, more recent waves of Jewish emigration from Russia and other regions have largely joined the mainstream American Jewish community. Americans of Jewish descent have been successful in many fields. Scholars debate whether the historical experience for Jews in the United States has been such a unique experience as to validate American exceptionalism. Korelitz shows how American Jews during the late 19th and early 20th centuries abandoned a racial definition of Jewishness in favor of one that embraced ethnicity. The key to understanding this transition from a racial self-definition to a cultural or ethnic one can be found in the ‘’Menorah Journal’’ between 1915 and 1925, siporin uses the family folklore of ethnic Jews to their collective history and its transformation into an historical art form. They tell us how Jews have survived being uprooted and transformed, many immigrant narratives bear a theme of the arbitrary nature of fate and the reduced state of immigrants in a new culture. By contrast, ethnic family narratives tend to show the more in charge of his life
17.
Auschwitz concentration camp
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Auschwitz concentration camp was a network of German Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps built and operated by the Third Reich in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany during World War II. It consisted of Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II–Birkenau, Auschwitz III–Monowitz, Auschwitz I was first constructed to hold Polish political prisoners, who began to arrive in May 1940. The first extermination of prisoners took place in September 1941, from early 1942 until late 1944, transport trains delivered Jews to the camps gas chambers from all over German-occupied Europe, where they were killed with the pesticide Zyklon B. An estimated 1.3 million people were sent to the camp, around 90 percent of those killed were Jewish, approximately 1 in 6 Jews killed in the Holocaust died at the camp. Many of those not killed in the gas chambers died of starvation, forced labor, infectious diseases, individual executions, and medical experiments. In the course of the war, the camp was staffed by 7,000 members of the German Schutzstaffel, some, including camp commandant Rudolf Höss, were executed. The Allied Powers refused to believe reports of the atrocities at the camp. As Soviet troops approached Auschwitz in January 1945, most of its population was sent west on a death march, the prisoners remaining at the camp were liberated on 27 January 1945, a day now commemorated as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. In the following decades, survivors, such as Primo Levi, Viktor Frankl, and Elie Wiesel, wrote memoirs of their experiences in Auschwitz, and the camp became a dominant symbol of the Holocaust. In 1947, Poland founded the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum on the site of Auschwitz I and II, immediately after the Nazi seizure of power in Germany, acts of violence perpetrated against Jews became ubiquitous. The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, passed on 7 April 1933 excluded most Jews from the legal profession, similar legislation soon deprived Jewish members of other professions of the right to practise. Harassment and economic pressure were used by the regime to encourage Jews to leave the country voluntarily and their businesses were denied access to markets, forbidden to advertise in newspapers, and deprived of government contracts. German Jews were subjected to violent attacks and boycotts, in September 1935 the Nuremberg Laws were enacted. The Reich Citizenship Law stated that only those of Germanic or related blood were defined as citizens, thus Jews and other minority groups were stripped of their German citizenship. The laws were expanded on 26 November 1935 to include Romani people and this supplementary decree defined Gypsies as enemies of the race-based state, the same category as Jews. By the start of World War II in 1939, around 250,000 of Germanys 437,000 Jews had emigrated to the United States, Palestine, the United Kingdom, Nazi Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. German dictator Adolf Hitler ordered that the Polish leadership and intelligentsia be destroyed, approximately 65,000 civilians, who were viewed as being inferior to the Aryan master race, were killed by the end of 1939. In addition to leaders of Polish society, the Nazis killed Jews, prostitutes, Romani, sS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, then head of the Gestapo, ordered on 21 September that Polish Jews should be rounded up and concentrated into cities with good rail links
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Buchenwald concentration camp
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From 1945 to 1950, the camp was used by the Soviet occupation authorities as an internment camp, known as NKVD special camp number 2. Today the remains of Buchenwald serve as a memorial and permanent exhibition, in 1934, the Nazis constructed Buchenwald concentration camp, near Weimar, Germany. Embedded in the main entrance gate is the slogan Jedem das Seine. The camp was operational until its liberation in 1945, between 1945 and 1950, it was used by the Soviet Union as an NKVD special camp for Germans. On January 6,1950, the Soviets handed over Buchenwald to the East German Ministry of Internal Affairs, the camp was to be named K. L. Quickly the fate of the oak became associated with the fate of Germany, if the one was to fall, between April 1938 and April 1945, some 238,380 people of various nationalities including 350 Western Allied prisoners of war s were incarcerated in Buchenwald. SS-Obersturmbannführer Karl-Otto Koch SS-Standartenführer Hermann Pister Buchenwald’s first commandant was Karl-Otto Koch and his second wife, Ilse Koch, became notorious as Die Hexe von Buchenwald for her cruelty and brutality. In February 1940 Koch, to his and his wifes delight, had a riding hall built by the prisoners who died in the dozen due to the harsh conditions of the construction site. The hall was built inside the camp, near the canteen, Koch himself was eventually imprisoned at Buchenwald by the Nazi authorities for incitement to murder. The charges were lodged by Prince Waldeck and Dr. Morgen, to which were later added charges of corruption, embezzlement, black market dealings, other camp officials were charged, including Ilse Koch. The trial resulted in Karl Koch being sentenced to death for disgracing both himself and the SS, he was executed by firing squad on April 5,1945, Ilse Koch was sentenced to a term of four years imprisonment after the war. Her sentence was reduced to two years and she was set free and she was subsequently arrested again and sentenced to life imprisonment by the post-war German authorities, she committed suicide in Aichach prison in September 1967. The second commandant of the camp was Hermann Pister and he was tried in 1947 and sentenced to death, but 28 September 1948 he died in Landsberg Prison of a heart attack before the sentence could be carried out. The number of women held in Buchenwald was somewhere between 500 and 1,000, the SS later fired the SS woman on duty in the brothel for corruption, her position was taken over by “brothel mothers” as ordered by SS chief Heinrich Himmler. The majority of prisoners, however, arrived in 1944 and 1945 from other camps, mainly Auschwitz, Ravensbrück. Only one barrack was set aside for them, this was overseen by the female block leader Franziska Hoengesberg, No female guards were permanently stationed at Buchenwald. Many, including van Pels, died sometime between April and May 1945, because the female prisoner population at Buchenwald was comparatively small, the SS only trained female overseers at the camp and assigned them to one of the female subcamps. Twenty-two known female guards had personnel files at the camp, Ilse Koch served as head supervisor of 22 other female guards and hundreds of women prisoners in the main camp
19.
Internment
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Internment is the imprisonment or confinement of people, commonly in large groups, without trial. The term is used for the confinement of enemy citizens in wartime or of terrorism suspects. Thus, while it can simply mean imprisonment, it tends to refer to preventive confinement, use of these terms is subject to debate and political sensitivities. Interned persons may be held in prisons or in known as internment camps. In certain contexts, these may also be known either officially or pejoratively, internment also refers to a neutral countrys practice of detaining belligerent armed forces and equipment on its territory during times of war under the Hague Convention of 1907. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights restricts the use of internment, article 9 states that No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile. The United States set up camps for Cherokee and other Native Americans in the 1830s. From 1863 to 1868, the U. S, military persecuted and imprisoned 9,500 Navajo and 500 Mescalero Apache. Living under armed guards, more than 3,500 Navajo and Mescalero Apache men, women, the term concentration camp saw wider use during the Second Boer War, when the British operated such camps in South Africa for interning Boers. They built 45 tented camps for Boer internees and 64 for black Africans, of the 28,000 Boer men captured as prisoners of war, the British sent 25,630 overseas. The vast majority of Boers remaining in the camps were women and children. Some of them managed to go into exile or went off to join the armies of the Allies in order to fight against the Axis powers, while others ended up in Nazi concentration camps. During the 20th century, the internment of civilians by the state reached its most notorious excesses with the establishment of the Nazi concentration camps. The Nazi concentration camp system was notable for its size, with as many as 15,000 camps. Moreover, Nazi Germany established six camps, specifically designed to kill millions
20.
Boston University
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Boston University is a private research university located in Boston, Massachusetts. The university is nonsectarian, and is affiliated with the United Methodist Church. The university has more than 3,900 faculty members and nearly 33,000 students and it offers bachelors degrees, masters degrees, and doctorates, and medical, dental, business, and law degrees through 17 schools and colleges on two urban campuses. The main campus is situated along the Charles River in Bostons Fenway-Kenmore and Allston neighborhoods, BU is categorized as an R1, Doctoral University in the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. BU is a member of the Boston Consortium for Higher Education, the University was ranked 39th among undergraduate programs at national universities, and 32nd among global universities by U. S. News & World Report in its 2017 rankings. In 1876, BU professor Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in a BU lab, American Civil Rights Movement leader and 1964 Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. received his PhD in Theology from BU in 1955. The Boston University Terriers compete in the NCAAs Division I, BU athletic teams compete in the Patriot League, and Hockey East conferences, and their mascot is Rhett the Boston Terrier. Boston University is well known for hockey, in which it has won five national championships. The University organized formal Centennial observances both in 1939 and 1969, on April 24–25,1839 a group of Methodist ministers and laymen at the Old Bromfield Street Church in Boston elected to establish a Methodist theological school. Set up in Newbury, Vermont, the school was named the Newbury Biblical Institute, in 1847, the Congregational Society in Concord, New Hampshire, invited the Institute to relocate to Concord and offered a disused Congregational church building with a capacity of 1200 people. Other citizens of Concord covered the remodeling costs, one stipulation of the invitation was that the Institute remain in Concord for at least 20 years. The charter issued by New Hampshire designated the school the Methodist General Biblical Institute, with the agreed twenty years coming to a close, the Trustees of the Concord Biblical Institute purchased 30 acres on Aspinwall Hill in Brookline, Massachusetts, as a possible relocation site. The institute moved in 1867 to 23 Pinkney Street in Boston, in 1869, three Trustees of the Boston Theological Institute obtained from the Massachusetts Legislature a charter for a university by name of Boston University. These three were successful Boston businessmen and Methodist laymen, with a history of involvement in educational enterprises and they were Isaac Rich, Lee Claflin, and Jacob Sleeper, for whom Boston Universitys three West Campus dormitories are named. Lee Claflins son, William, was then Governor of Massachusetts, on account of the religious opinions he may entertain, provided, nonetheless, that this section shall not apply to the theological department of said University. Every department of the new university was open to all on an equal footing regardless of sex, race. The Boston Theological Institute was absorbed into Boston University in 1871 as the BU School of Theology, in January 1872 Isaac Rich died, leaving the vast bulk of his estate to a trust that would go to Boston University after ten years of growth while the University was organized. Most of this bequest consisted of real estate throughout the core of the city of Boston and was appraised at more than $1.5 million, Kilgore describes this as the largest single donation to an American college or university to that time
21.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
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The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is the United States official memorial to the Holocaust. Adjacent to the National Mall in Washington, D. C. the USHMM provides for the documentation, study and it is dedicated to helping leaders and citizens of the world confront hatred, prevent genocide, promote human dignity, and strengthen democracy. The museum has a budget, as of 2015, of $104.6 million. In 2008, the Museum had a staff of about 400 employees,125 contractors,650 volunteers,91 Holocaust survivors and it had local offices in New York City, Boston, Boca Raton, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Dallas. The Museums visitors came from all over the world, and less than 10 percent of the Museums visitors are Jewish and its website had 25 million visits in 2008 from an average of 100 different countries daily. 35% of these visits were from outside the United States and it also has teacher fellows in every state in the United States and almost 400 university fellows from 26 countries since 1994. Researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum have documented 42,500 ghettos, on November 1,1978, President Jimmy Carter established the President’s Commission on the Holocaust, chaired by Elie Wiesel, a prominent author and Holocaust survivor. Its mandate was to investigate the creation and maintenance of a memorial to victims of the Holocaust, the mandate was created in a joint effort by Elie Wiesel and Richard Krieger. After a unanimous vote by the United States Congress in 1980 to establish the museum, in October 1988, President Ronald Reagan helped lay the cornerstone of the building, designed by the architect James Ingo Freed. Dedication ceremonies on April 22,1993 included speeches by American President Bill Clinton, Israeli President Chaim Herzog, Chairman Harvey Meyerhoff, on April 26,1993, the Museum opened to the general public. Its first visitor was the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet, the museum has been the target of a planned attack and a fatal shooting. On June 10,2009, 88-year-old James von Brunn, an anti-Semite, Special Police Officer Johns and von Brunn were both seriously wounded and transported by ambulance to the George Washington University Hospital. Special Police Officer Johns later died of his injuries, he is honored in an official memorial at the USHMM. Von Brunn, who had a criminal record, had been disowned by his family. He was being tried in court when he died on January 6,2010 in Butner federal prison in North Carolina. Designed by the architect James Ingo Freed of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, in association with Finegold Alexander + Associates Inc, the outside of the building disappears into the neoclassical, Georgian, and modern architecture of Washington, D. C. Upon entering, each architectural feature becomes a new element of allusion to the Holocaust, in designing the building, Freed researched post-World War II German architecture and visited Holocaust sites throughout Europe. Other partners in the construction of the USHMM included Weiskopf & Pickworth, Cosentini Associates LLP, Jules Fisher, the structural engineering firm that was chosen for this project was Severud Associates
22.
South Africa
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South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa, is the southernmost country in Africa. South Africa is the 25th-largest country in the world by land area and it is the southernmost country on the mainland of the Old World or the Eastern Hemisphere. About 80 percent of South Africans are of Sub-Saharan African ancestry, divided among a variety of ethnic groups speaking different Bantu languages, the remaining population consists of Africas largest communities of European, Asian, and multiracial ancestry. South Africa is a multiethnic society encompassing a variety of cultures, languages. Its pluralistic makeup is reflected in the recognition of 11 official languages. The country is one of the few in Africa never to have had a coup détat, however, the vast majority of black South Africans were not enfranchised until 1994. During the 20th century, the black majority sought to recover its rights from the dominant white minority, with this struggle playing a role in the countrys recent history. The National Party imposed apartheid in 1948, institutionalising previous racial segregation, since 1994, all ethnic and linguistic groups have held political representation in the countrys democracy, which comprises a parliamentary republic and nine provinces. South Africa is often referred to as the Rainbow Nation to describe the multicultural diversity. The World Bank classifies South Africa as an economy. Its economy is the second-largest in Africa, and the 34th-largest in the world, in terms of purchasing power parity, South Africa has the seventh-highest per capita income in Africa. However, poverty and inequality remain widespread, with about a quarter of the population unemployed, nevertheless, South Africa has been identified as a middle power in international affairs, and maintains significant regional influence. The name South Africa is derived from the geographic location at the southern tip of Africa. Upon formation the country was named the Union of South Africa in English, since 1961 the long form name in English has been the Republic of South Africa. In Dutch the country was named Republiek van Zuid-Afrika, replaced in 1983 by the Afrikaans Republiek van Suid-Afrika, since 1994 the Republic has had an official name in each of its 11 official languages. Mzansi, derived from the Xhosa noun umzantsi meaning south, is a name for South Africa. South Africa contains some of the oldest archaeological and human fossil sites in the world, extensive fossil remains have been recovered from a series of caves in Gauteng Province. The area is a UNESCO World Heritage site and has termed the Cradle of Humankind
23.
Nicaragua
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Nicaragua, officially the Republic of Nicaragua, is the largest country in the Central American isthmus. Nicaraguas capital, Managua, is the countrys largest city and the third-largest city in Central America, the multi-ethnic population of six million includes indigenous peoples, Europeans, Africans, and Asians. Native tribes on the eastern coast speak their own languages, the Spanish Empire conquered the region in the 16th century. Nicaragua gained independence from Spain in 1821, since its independence, Nicaragua has undergone periods of political unrest, dictatorship, and fiscal crisis—the most notable causes that led to the Nicaraguan Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. Nicaragua is a democratic republic. The biological diversity, warm climate and active volcanoes make Nicaragua an increasingly popular tourist destination. The name Nicaragua was coined by Spanish colonists based on the name Nicarao, when Spaniard Gil González Dávila came to Nicaragua in 1521 he found in the areas between Rivas and San Jorge the first pre-Columbian natives of Nicaragua. At the time the city was called Quauhcapolca and the cacique leaders name was Macuilmiquiztli. The Pipil migrated to Nicaragua from central Mexico after 500 BC, meanwhile, the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua was inhabited by other peoples, mostly Chibcha language groups. They had coalesced in Central America and migrated also to present-day northern Colombia and they lived a life based primarily on hunting and gathering. In 1502, Christopher Columbus became the first European known to have reached what is now Nicaragua as he sailed southeast toward the Isthmus of Panama, on his fourth voyage, Columbus explored the Miskito Coast on the Atlantic side of Nicaragua. The Spanish attempted to convert all three tribes to Christianity, Nicaragua and Nicarao and their people converted, but Dirangen, however, did not, the first attempt to conquer what is now known as Nicaragua was by Gil González Dávila, who arrived in Panama in January 1520. The first Spanish permanent settlements were founded in 1524, conquistador Francisco Hernández de Córdoba founded two of Nicaraguas principal towns in 1524, Granada on Lake Nicaragua was the first settlement, followed by León at a location west of Lake Managua. Córdoba soon built defenses for the cities and fought against incursions by other conquistadors, Córdoba was later publicly beheaded following a power struggle with Pedro Arias Dávila. His tomb and remains were discovered in 2000 in the ruins of León Viejo, the clashes among Spanish forces did not impede their destruction of the indigenous people and their culture. The series of battles came to be known as the War of the Captains, Pedro Arias Dávila was a winner, although he had lost control of Panama, he moved to Nicaragua and successfully established his base in León. Through adroit diplomatic machinations, he became the first governor of the colony, many indigenous people died as a result of new infectious diseases, compounded by neglect by the Spaniards, who controlled their subsistence. In 1610, the Momotombo volcano erupted, destroying the capital and it was rebuilt northwest of what is now known as the ruins of Old León
24.
Kosovo
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Kosovo is a disputed territory and partially recognised state in Southeastern Europe that declared independence from Serbia in February 2008 as the Republic of Kosovo. Kosovo is landlocked in the central Balkan Peninsula, with its strategic position in the Balkans, it serves as an important link in the connection between central and south Europe, the Adriatic Sea, and Black Sea. Its capital and largest city is Pristina, and other urban areas include Prizren, Pejë. It is bordered by Albania to the southwest, the Republic of Macedonia to the southeast, Montenegro to the west, while Serbia recognises administration of the territory by Kosovos elected government, it still continues to claim it as its own Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija. In antiquity, the Dardanian Kingdom, and later the Roman province of Dardania was located in the region, the area was inhabited by several ancient Illyrian tribes. In the Middle Ages, it was part of the Byzantine, Bulgarian and Serbian Empires, Kosovo was the core of the medieval Serbian state and it has been the seat of the Serbian Orthodox Church from the 14th century when its status was upgraded into a patriarchate. After being part of the Ottoman Empire from the 15th to the early 20th century, the war ended with a military intervention of NATO, which forced the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to withdraw its troops from Kosovo, which became a UN protectorate under UNSCR1244. On 17 February 2008 Kosovos Parliament declared independence and it has since gained diplomatic recognition as a sovereign state by 111 UN member states, Taiwan, the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, the Cook Islands and Niue. Serbia refuses to recognise Kosovo as a state, although with the Brussels Agreement of 2013 it has accepted the legitimacy of Kosovar institutions, the entire region is commonly referred to in English simply as Kosovo and in Albanian as Kosova or Kosovë. The name of the plain was applied to the Kosovo Province created in 1864, Albanians refer to Kosovo as Dardania, the name of a Roman province located in Central Balkans that was formed in 284 AD which covered the territory of modern Kosovo. The name is derived from the Albanian word dardha/dardā which means pear, the former Kosovo President Ibrahim Rugova had been an enthusiastic backer of a Dardanian identity and the Kosovan flag and presidential seal refer to this national identity. However, the name Kosova remains more widely used among the Albanian population, the official conventional long name of the state is Republic of Kosovo, as defined by the Constitution of Kosovo, and is used to represent Kosovo internationally. This arrangement, which has dubbed the asterisk agreement, was agreed in an 11-point arrangement agreed on 24 February 2012. By the independence declaration in 2008, its long name became Republic of Kosovo. In prehistory, the succeeding Starčevo culture, Vinča culture, Bubanj-Hum culture, the area in and around Kosovo has been inhabited for nearly 10,000 years. During the Neolithic age, Kosovo lay within the area of the Vinča-Turdaş culture which is characterised by West Balkan black, bronze and Iron Age tombs have been found in Metohija. However, life during the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age is not confirmed yet, therefore, until arguments of Paleolithic and Mesolithic man are confirmed, Neolithic man, respectively the Neolithic sites are considered as the chronological beginning of population in Kosovo. From this period until today Kosovo has been inhabited, and traces of activities of societies from prehistoric, ancient, whereas, in some archaeological sites, multilayer settlements clearly reflect the continuity of life through centuries
25.
War in Darfur
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The government responded to attacks by carrying out a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Darfurs non-Arabs. The other side is made up of groups, notably the SLM/A and the JEM, recruited primarily from the non-Arab Muslim Fur, Zaghawa. The African Union and the United Nations also have a joint peacekeeping mission in the region, estimates of the number of human casualties range up to several hundred thousand dead, from either combat or starvation and disease. Mass displacements and coercive migrations forced millions into refugee camps or across the border, former US Secretary of State Colin Powell described the situation as a genocide or acts of genocide. The Sudanese government and the JEM signed an agreement in February 2010. The JEM has the most to gain from the talks and could see semi-autonomy much like South Sudan, however, talks were disrupted by accusations that the Sudanese army launched raids and air strikes against a village, violating the Tolu agreement. The JEM, the largest rebel group in Darfur, vowed to boycott negotiations, Darfur, Arabic for the home of the Fur—was not a traditional part of the states organized along the upper Nile valley but instead organized as an independent sultanate in the 14th century. It was first annexed to the Egyptian Sudan in 1875 and then surrendered by its governor Slatin Pasha to the Mahdia in 1883, subsequently, Darfur remained a province of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and the independent Republic of the Sudan. There are several different explanations for the origins of the present conflict, one explanation involves the land disputes between semi-nomadic livestock herders and those who practice sedentary agriculture. Water access has also identified as a major source of the conflict. The Darfur crisis is also related to a second conflict, in southern Sudan, civil war has raged for decades between the northern, Arab-dominated government and Christian and animist black southerners. Yet another origin is conflict between the Islamist, Khartoum-based national government and two groups based in Darfur, the Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement. In early 1991, non-Arabs of the Zaghawa tribe of Sudan attested that they were victims of an intensifying Arab apartheid campaign, Sudanese Arabs, who controlled the government, were widely referred to as practicing apartheid against Sudans non-Arab citizens. The government was accused of deftly manipulat Arab solidarity to carry out policies of apartheid, american University economist George Ayittey accused the Arab government of Sudan of practicing acts of racism against black citizens. The Arabs monopolized power and excluded blacks – Arab apartheid, many African commentators joined Ayittey in accusing Sudan of practising Arab apartheid. Alan Dershowitz labeled Sudan an example of a government that actually deserve the appellation apartheid, former Canadian Minister of Justice Irwin Cotler echoed the accusation. The rebels first military action was an attack on an army garrison on 25 February 2002. The government had been aware of a rebel movement since an attack on the Golo police station in June 2002
26.
Armenian Genocide
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Driven forward by military escorts, the deportees were deprived of food and water and subjected to periodic robbery, rape, and massacre. Most Armenian diaspora communities around the world came into being as a result of the genocide. Raphael Lemkin was explicitly moved by the Armenian annihilation to define systematic and premeditated exterminations within legal parameters, Turkey, the successor state of the Ottoman Empire, denies the word genocide as an accurate term for the mass killings of Armenians that began under Ottoman rule in 1915. It has in recent years been faced with repeated calls to them as genocide. To date,29 countries have recognized the mass killings as genocide, as have most genocide scholars. The western portion of historical Armenia, known as Western Armenia, had come under Ottoman rule following the Peace of Amasya, henceforth, the region was also alternatively referred to as Turkish Armenia or Ottoman Armenia. The Armenian community was made up of three denominations, Armenian Catholic, Armenian Protestant, and Armenian Apostolic, the religion of a vast majority of Armenians. Through the millet system, the Armenian community were allowed to rule themselves under their own system of governance with fairly little interference from the Ottoman government, Ottoman census figures clash with the statistics collected by the Armenian Patriarchate. According to the latter, there were almost three million Armenians living in the empire in 1878, in the Ottoman Empire, in accordance with the dhimmi system implemented in Muslim countries, they, like all other Christians and also Jews, were accorded certain freedoms. The dhimmi system in the Ottoman Empire was largely based upon the Pact of Umar, while the Pact of Umar prohibited non-Muslims from building new places of worship, it was not enforced in all regions of the Ottoman Empire. Since there were no laws concerning religious ghettos, the prohibition of non-Muslims building new places of worship led to their clustering around existing ones and it did not mean religious persecution, it meant unutterable contempt. They were dogs and pigs, and their nature was to be Christians, to be spat upon, if their shadow darkened a Turk, to be outraged, in addition to other legal limitations, Christians were not considered equals to Muslims and several prohibitions were placed on them. They were forbidden to carry weapons or ride horses and camels. Their houses could not overlook those of Muslims, and their religious practices were severely circumscribed, from 1839 to the declaration of a constitution in 1876, the Ottoman government instituted the Tanzimat, a series of reforms designed to improve the status of minorities. Nevertheless, most of the reforms were never implemented because the empires Muslim population rejected the principle of equality for Christians. By the late 1870s, the Greeks, along several other Christian nations in the Balkans, frustrated with their conditions, had, often with the help of the great powers. The Armenians remained, by and large, passive during these years, in the mid-1860s and early 1870s this passivity gave way to new currents of thinking in Armenian society. The Ottoman government considered these grievances and promised to punish those responsible, under growing pressure, the government of Sultan Abdul Hamid II declared itself a constitutional monarchy with a parliament and entered into negotiations with the powers
27.
Los Angeles Times
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The Los Angeles Times, commonly referred to as the Times or LA Times, is a paid daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008, the Times is owned by tronc. The Times was first published on December 4,1881, as the Los Angeles Daily Times under the direction of Nathan Cole Jr. and it was first printed at the Mirror printing plant, owned by Jesse Yarnell and T. J. Unable to pay the bill, Cole and Gardiner turned the paper over to the Mirror Company. Mathes had joined the firm, and it was at his insistence that the Times continued publication, in July 1882, Harrison Gray Otis moved from Santa Barbara to become the papers editor. Otis made the Times a financial success, in an era where newspapers were driven by party politics, the Times was directed at Republican readers. As was typical of newspapers of the time, the Times would sit on stories for several days, historian Kevin Starr wrote that Otis was a businessman capable of manipulating the entire apparatus of politics and public opinion for his own enrichment. Otiss editorial policy was based on civic boosterism, extolling the virtues of Los Angeles, the efforts of the Times to fight local unions led to the October 1,1910 bombing of its headquarters, killing twenty-one people. Two union leaders, James and Joseph McNamara, were charged, the American Federation of Labor hired noted trial attorney Clarence Darrow to represent the brothers, who eventually pleaded guilty. Upon Otiss death in 1917, his son-in-law, Harry Chandler, Harry Chandler was succeeded in 1944 by his son, Norman Chandler, who ran the paper during the rapid growth of post-war Los Angeles. Family members are buried at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery near Paramount Studios, the site also includes a memorial to the Times Building bombing victims. The fourth generation of family publishers, Otis Chandler, held that position from 1960 to 1980, Otis Chandler sought legitimacy and recognition for his familys paper, often forgotten in the power centers of the Northeastern United States due to its geographic and cultural distance. He sought to remake the paper in the model of the nations most respected newspapers, notably The New York Times, believing that the newsroom was the heartbeat of the business, Otis Chandler increased the size and pay of the reporting staff and expanded its national and international reporting. In 1962, the paper joined with the Washington Post to form the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service to syndicate articles from both papers for news organizations. During the 1960s, the paper won four Pulitzer Prizes, more than its previous nine decades combined, eventually the coupon-clipping branches realized that they could make more money investing in something other than newspapers. Under their pressure the companies went public, or split apart, thats the pattern followed over more than a century by the Los Angeles Times under the Chandler family. The papers early history and subsequent transformation was chronicled in an unauthorized history Thinking Big and it has also been the whole or partial subject of nearly thirty dissertations in communications or social science in the past four decades. In 2000, the Tribune Company acquired the Times, placing the paper in co-ownership with then-WB -affiliated KTLA, which Tribune acquired in 1985
28.
Norwegian Nobel Committee
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The Norwegian Nobel Committee selects the recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize each year on behalf of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobels estate, based on instructions of Nobels will. Its five members are appointed by the Norwegian Parliament and today represent the political makeup of that body. In his will, Alfred Nobel tasked the Parliament of Norway with selecting the winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, at the time, Norway and Sweden were in a loose personal union. Despite its members being appointed by parliament, the committee is a body tasked with awarding a private prize. In recent decades, most committee members have been retired politicians, the committee is assisted by the Norwegian Nobel Institute, its secretariat, and the committee holds their meetings in the institutes building, where the winner is also announced. The award ceremony, however, takes place in Oslo City Hall, Alfred Nobel died in December 1896, and in January 1897 the contents of his will were unveiled. It was written as early as in 1895, the Nobel Foundation manages the assets. A new body had to be created—the Norwegian Nobel Committee, jurist Fredrik Heffermehl has noted that a legislative body could not necessarily be expected to handle a judicial task like managing a legal will. The task of a parliament is to create and change laws whereas a will can not be changed unless the premises are clearly outdated. However, this question was not debated in depth, out of fear that the donated money might be lost in legal battles if the body was not created soon. On 26 April 1897 the Norwegian Parliament accepted the assignment and on 5 August the same year it formalized the process of election, the first Peace Prize was awarded in 1901 to Henri Dunant and Frédéric Passy. In the beginning, the committee was filled with active parliamentarians and these ties to the Norwegian Parliament were later weakened so that the committee became more independent. Accordingly, the name was changed from the Norwegian Nobel Committee to the Nobel Committee of the Norwegian Parliament in 1901, now, active parliamentarians cannot sit on the committee, unless they have explicitly stated their intent to step down shortly. Nonetheless, the committee is composed mainly of politicians. A1903 proposition to elect a law scholar was rejected, in late 1948, the election system was changed to make the committee more proportional with parliamentary representation of Norwegian political parties. The Norwegian Labour Party, which controlled a majority of seats in the Norwegian Parliament orchestrated this change. This practice has been cemented, but sharply criticized, there have been propositions about including non-Norwegian members in the committee, but this has never happened. The Norwegian Nobel Committee is assisted by the Norwegian Nobel Institute, the committee might receive well more than a hundred nominations and asks the Nobel Institute in February every year to research about twenty candidates
29.
Adolf Hitler
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Adolf Hitler was a German politician who was the leader of the Nazi Party, Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and Führer of Nazi Germany from 1934 to 1945. As dictator of the German Reich, he initiated World War II in Europe with the invasion of Poland in September 1939 and was central to the Holocaust, Hitler was born in Austria, then part of Austria-Hungary, and raised near Linz. He moved to Germany in 1913 and was decorated during his service in the German Army in World War I and he joined the German Workers Party, the precursor of the NSDAP, in 1919 and became leader of the NSDAP in 1921. In 1923 he attempted a coup in Munich to seize power, the failed coup resulted in Hitlers imprisonment, during which he dictated the first volume of his autobiography and political manifesto Mein Kampf. Hitler frequently denounced international capitalism and communism as being part of a Jewish conspiracy, by 1933, the Nazi Party was the largest elected party in the German Reichstag, which led to Hitlers appointment as Chancellor on 30 January 1933. Hitler aimed to eliminate Jews from Germany and establish a New Order to counter what he saw as the injustice of the post-World War I international order dominated by Britain, Hitler sought Lebensraum for the German people in Eastern Europe. His aggressive foreign policy is considered to be the cause of the outbreak of World War II in Europe. He directed large-scale rearmament and on 1 September 1939 invaded Poland, resulting in British, in June 1941, Hitler ordered an invasion of the Soviet Union. By the end of 1941 German forces and the European Axis powers occupied most of Europe, failure to defeat the Soviets and the entry of the United States into the war forced Germany onto the defensive and it suffered a series of escalating defeats. In the final days of the war, during the Battle of Berlin in 1945, Hitler married his long-time lover, on 30 April 1945, less than two days later, the two killed themselves to avoid capture by the Red Army, and their corpses were burned. Hitler and the Nazi regime were also responsible for the killing of an estimated 19.3 million civilians, in addition,29 million soldiers and civilians died as a result of military action in the European Theatre of World War II. The number of civilians killed during the Second World War was unprecedented in warfare, Hitlers father Alois Hitler Sr. was the illegitimate child of Maria Anna Schicklgruber. The baptismal register did not show the name of his father, in 1842, Johann Georg Hiedler married Aloiss mother Maria Anna. Alois was brought up in the family of Hiedlers brother, Johann Nepomuk Hiedler, in 1876, Alois was legitimated and the baptismal register changed by a priest to register Johann Georg Hiedler as Aloiss father. Alois then assumed the surname Hitler, also spelled Hiedler, Hüttler, the Hitler surname is probably based on one who lives in a hut. Nazi official Hans Frank suggested that Aloiss mother had been employed as a housekeeper by a Jewish family in Graz, and that the familys 19-year-old son Leopold Frankenberger had fathered Alois. No Frankenberger was registered in Graz during that period, and no record has been produced of Leopold Frankenbergers existence, Adolf Hitler was born on 20 April 1889 in Braunau am Inn, a town in Austria-Hungary, close to the border with the German Empire. He was one of six born to Alois Hitler and Klara Pölzl
30.
Human Rights Foundation
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HRF is a non-profit organization that promotes and protects human rights globally, with a focus on closed societies. HRF organizes the Oslo Freedom Forum, HRF was founded in 2005 by Thor Halvorssen Mendoza, a Venezuelan film producer and human rights advocate. The Foundations head office is in New York City, New York, HRFs mission is to unite people in the common cause of defending human rights and promoting liberal democracy. Our mission is to ensure that freedom is both preserved and promoted, jurist and law professor Kenneth Anderson is also on HRFs International Council. Anderson was a director of the Human Rights Watch Arms Division. HRFs International Council was chaired by Václav Havel until his passing in December 2011, the Council is currently chaired by chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov. According to the New York Times, HRF has helped smuggle activists out of countries, provided many with broader exposure and connected others with prominent financiers. If an individual or foundation has contributed to HRF’s work, this does not mean that HRF necessarily endorses said individual or foundations views or opinions, HRF is also supported by the Brin Wojcicki Foundation, which was created by Google co-founder Sergey Brin and biotechnology analyst Anne Wojcicki. The Oslo Freedom Forum is also endorsed by the Nobel Peace Center, the University of Oslo, the Norwegian Authors Union, and it also received financial support from the government of Norway. HRF declared Mr. Samartino a prisoner of conscience, shortly after, Mr. Samartino was granted political asylum in Norway. In the same year, HRF also produced a report about communal justice, in October 2008, HRF published a report addressing the causes of politically motivated violence that resulted in the deaths of at least 21 people and injured hundreds more in Bolivia. The report found that the discourse by the Bolivian government violated freedom of expression, as it provoked attacks against the media. On January 15,2008, HRF published a report expressing concern over an apparent increase in illegal practices such as lynching, lashing, beating, stoning, hanging, and burning. HRF expressed concern because these forms of torture and corporal punishment were carried out in areas in Bolivia under the banner of “communal justice. The 39 people indicted – many of whom have since been granted asylum in different countries, such as Brazil – were charged with crimes of separatism. They included Mr. Hugo Achá, a Bolivian lawyer and television commentator who was the pro bono chairman of HRF-Bolivia’s board until May 2009. Achá denied any involvement, claiming that he had met Mr. Rósza a few times when the latter had approached him in his capacity as a journalist and he received political asylum in the USA. In 2011, HRF announced its membership in the International Committee to Support Liu Xiaobo and it was reported that in October 2012 Urban Outfitters removed the merchandise in response to the outrage
31.
Carpathian Mountains
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The Carpathian Mountains or Carpathians are a mountain range system forming an arc roughly 1,500 km long across Central and Eastern Europe, making them the second-longest mountain range in Europe. The Carpathians and their foothills also have many thermal and mineral waters, the Carpathians consist of a chain of mountain ranges that stretch in an arc from the Czech Republic in the northwest through Slovakia, Poland, Hungary and Ukraine to Romania and Serbia. The highest range within the Carpathians is the Tatras, on the border of Slovakia and Poland, the second-highest range is the Southern Carpathians in Romania, where the highest peaks exceed 2,500 m. The divisions of the Carpathians are usually in three sections, Western Carpathians — Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia. Eastern Carpathians — southeastern Poland, eastern Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania, the term Outer Carpathians is frequently used to describe the northern rim of the Western and Eastern Carpathians. The most important cities in or near the Carpathians are, Bratislava and Košice in Slovakia, Kraków in Poland, Cluj-Napoca, Sibiu and Braşov in Romania, and Uzhhorod in Ukraine. In modern times, the range is called Karpaty in Czech, Polish, Slovak and Карпати in Ukrainian, Carpați in Romanian, Karpaten in German, Kárpátok in Hungarian and Karpati or Карпати in Serbian. Although the toponym was recorded already by Ptolemy in the 2nd century CE, for instance, Havasok was its medieval Hungarian name, Rus and Romanian chronicles referred to it as Hungarian Mountains. The archaic Polish word karpa meant rugged irregularities, underwater obstacles/rocks, the more common word skarpa means a sharp cliff or other vertical terrain. In late Roman documents, the Eastern Carpathian Mountains were referred to as Montes Sarmatici, the Western Carpathians were called Carpates, a name that is first recorded in Ptolemys Geographia. In the Scandinavian Hervarar saga, which relates ancient Germanic legends about battles between Goths and Huns, the name Karpates appears in the predictable Germanic form as Harvaða fjöllum, inter Alpes Huniae et Oceanum est Polonia by Gervase of Tilbury, has described in his Otia Imperialia in 1211. Thirteenth- to fifteenth-century Hungarian documents named the mountains Thorchal, Tarczal or less frequently Montes Nivium, the northwestern Carpathians begin in Slovakia and southern Poland. They surround Transcarpathia and Transylvania in a semicircle, sweeping towards the southeast. The total length of the Carpathians is over 1,500 km, the highest altitudes of the Carpathians occur where they are widest. The Carpathians cover an area of 190,000 km2 and, after the Alps, although commonly referred to as a mountain chain, the Carpathians do not actually form an uninterrupted chain of mountains. Rather, they consist of several orographically and geologically distinctive groups, the Carpathians at their highest altitude are only as high as the middle region of the Alps, with which they share a common appearance, climate, and flora. The Carpathians are separated from the Alps by the Danube, the two ranges meet at only one point, the Leitha Mountains at Bratislava. The river also separates them from the Balkan Mountains at Orşova in Romania, the valley of the March and Oder separates the Carpathians from the Silesian and Moravian chains, which belong to the middle wing of the great Central Mountain System of Europe
32.
Romania
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Romania is a sovereign state located in Southeastern Europe. It borders the Black Sea, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Hungary, Serbia and it has an area of 238,391 square kilometres and a temperate-continental climate. With over 19 million inhabitants, the country is the member state of the European Union. Its capital and largest city, Bucharest, is the sixth-largest city in the EU, the River Danube, Europes second-longest river, rises in Germany and flows in a general southeast direction for 2,857 km, coursing through ten countries before emptying into Romanias Danube Delta. The Carpathian Mountains, which cross Romania from the north to the southwest are marked by one of their tallest peaks, Moldoveanu, modern Romania was formed in 1859 through a personal union of the Danubian Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. The new state, officially named Romania since 1866, gained independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1877, at the end of World War I, Transylvania, Bukovina and Bessarabia united with the sovereign Kingdom of Romania. Romania lost several territories, of which Northern Transylvania was regained after the war, following the war, Romania became a socialist republic and member of the Warsaw Pact. After the 1989 Revolution, Romania began a transition back towards democracy and it has been a member of NATO since 2004, and part of the European Union since 2007. A strong majority of the population identify themselves as Eastern Orthodox Christians and are speakers of Romanian. The cultural history of Romania is often referred to when dealing with artists, musicians, inventors. For similar reasons, Romania has been the subject of notable tourist attractions, Romania derives from the Latin romanus, meaning citizen of Rome. The first known use of the appellation was attested in the 16th century by Italian humanists travelling in Transylvania, Moldavia, after the abolition of serfdom in 1746, the word rumân gradually fell out of use and the spelling stabilised to the form român. Tudor Vladimirescu, a leader of the early 19th century. The use of the name Romania to refer to the homeland of all Romanians—its modern-day meaning—was first documented in the early 19th century. The name has been officially in use since 11 December 1861, in English, the name of the country was formerly spelt Rumania or Roumania. Romania became the predominant spelling around 1975, Romania is also the official English-language spelling used by the Romanian government. The Neolithic-Age Cucuteni area in northeastern Romania was the region of the earliest European civilization. Evidence from this and other sites indicates that the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture extracted salt from salt-laden spring water through the process of briquetage
33.
Yiddish
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Yiddish is the historical language of the Ashkenazi Jews. Yiddish is written with a fully vocalized alphabet based on the Hebrew script, the earliest surviving references date from the 12th century and call the language לשון־אַשכּנז or טײַטש, a variant of tiutsch, the contemporary name for Middle High German. Colloquially, the language is sometimes called מאַמע־לשון, distinguishing it from לשון־קדש, the term Yiddish, short for Yiddish-Teitsch, did not become the most frequently used designation in the literature until the 18th century. In the late 19th and into the 20th century the language was commonly called Jewish, especially in non-Jewish contexts. Modern Yiddish has two major forms, Eastern Yiddish is far more common today. It includes Southeastern, Mideastern, and Northeastern dialects, Eastern Yiddish differs from Western both by its far greater size and by the extensive inclusion of words of Slavic origin. Western Yiddish is divided into Southwestern, Midwestern, and Northwestern dialects, the term Yiddish is also used in the adjectival sense, synonymously with Jewish, to designate attributes of Ashkenazi culture. Prior to the Holocaust, there were over 10 million speakers of Yiddish, 85% of the Jews who died in the Holocaust were Yiddish speakers, assimilation following World War II further decreased the use of Yiddish both among survivors and Yiddish-speakers from other countries. However, the number of speakers is increasing in global Hasidic communities, the established view is that, as with other Jewish languages, Jews speaking distinct languages learned new co-territorial vernaculars, which they then Judaized. Exactly what German base lies behind the earliest form of Yiddish is disputed, both Weinreich and Solomon Birnbaum developed this model further in the mid-1950s. In Weinreichs view, this Old Yiddish substrate later bifurcated into two versions of the language, Western and Eastern Yiddish. They retained the Semitic vocabulary needed for religious purposes and created a Judeo-German form of speech, recent linguistic research has finessed, contested, or challenged the Weinreich model, providing alternative approaches to the origins of Yiddish. Some theorists argue that the fusion occurred with a Bavarian dialect base, the two main candidates for the germinal matrix of Yiddish, the Rhineland and Bavaria, are not necessarily incompatible. There may have been developments in the two regions, seeding the Western and Eastern dialects of Modern Yiddish. Dovid Katz proposes that Yiddish emerged from contact between speakers of High German and Aramaic-speaking Jews from the Middle East, wexlers model has met with little academic support, and strong critical challenges, especially among historical linguists. Alternative theories recognize the extent of Yiddishs Germanic vocabulary. Ashkenaz was centered on the Rhineland and the Palatinate, in what is now the westernmost part of Germany and its geographic extent did not coincide with the German principalities of the time, and it included northern France. Ashkenaz bordered on the inhabited by another distinctive Jewish cultural group, the Sephardim or Spanish Jews
34.
Hungarian language
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Hungarian is the official language of Hungary and one of the 24 official languages of the European Union. Outside Hungary it is spoken by communities of Hungarian people in neighbouring countries. Like Finnish and Estonian, it belongs to the Uralic language family, its closest relatives being Mansi and it is one of several European languages not part of the Indo-European languages, and the most widely-spoken European language that does not belong to the Indo-European family. The Hungarian name for the language is magyar or magyar nyelv, the word Magyar is used as an English and Hungarian word to refer to Hungarian people as an ethnic group. Hungarian is a member of the Uralic language family, the name of Hungary could be a result of regular sound changes of Ungrian/Ugrian, and the fact that the Eastern Slavs referred to Hungarians as Ǫgry/Ǫgrove seemed to confirm that. Current literature favors the hypothesis that it comes from the name of the Turkic tribe Onogur, there are numerous regular sound correspondences between Hungarian and the other Ugric languages. For example, Hungarian /aː/ corresponds to Khanty /o/ in certain positions, for example, Hungarian ház house vs. Khanty xot house, and Hungarian száz hundred vs. Khanty sot hundred. The distance between the Ugric and Finnic languages is greater, but the correspondences are also regular, during the later half of the 19th century, a competing hypothesis proposed a Turkic affinity of Hungarian. Following an academic debate known as Az ugor-török háború, the Finno-Ugric hypothesis was concluded the sounder of the two, foremost based on work by the German linguist Josef Budenz. The traditional view argues that the Hungarian language separated from its Ugric relatives in the first half of the 1st millennium b. c. e. in western Siberia, east of the southern Urals. The Hungarians gradually changed their lifestyle from settled hunters to nomadic pastoralists, in Hungarian, Iranian loans date back to the time immediately following the breakup of Ugric and probably span well over a millennium. Among these include tehén ‘cow’, tíz ‘ten’, tej ‘milk’, increasing archaeological evidence from present-day southern Bashkortostan found in the previous decades confirms the existence of Hungarian settlements between the Volga River and Ural Mountains. The Onogurs later had a influence on the language, especially between the 5th-9th centuries. This layer of Turkic loans is large and varied, and includes words borrowed from Oghur Turkic, e. g. borjú ‘calf’, dél ‘noon, many words related to agriculture, to state administration or even to family relations have such backgrounds. Hungarian syntax and grammar were not influenced in a dramatic way during these 300 years. After the arrival of the Hungarians into the Carpathian Basin the language came into contact with different speech communities, Turkic loans from this period come mainly from the Pechenegs and Cumanians who settled in Hungary during the 12th-13th centuries, e. g. koboz ‘cobza’, komondor ‘mop dog’. Hungarian borrowed many words from especially the neighbouring Slavic languages, in exchange, these languages also borrowed words from Hungarian, e. g. Serbo-Croatian ašov from Hung ásó ‘spade’. Approximately 1. 6% of the Romanian lexicon is of Hungarian origin, on the basis of the growing genetic evidence, the accepted origin theory is contested by geneticists too
35.
Romanian language
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Romanian is a Romance language spoken by around 24 million people as a native language, primarily in Romania and Moldova, and by another 4 million people as a second language. It has official status in Romania and the Republic of Moldova and it is one of the official languages of the European Union and the Latin Union. Romanian is a part of the Balkan-Romance group that evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin separated from the Western Romance during the 5th–8th centuries. To distinguish it within that group in comparative linguistics it is called Daco-Romanian as opposed to its closest relatives, Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Istro-Romanian. Eastern Romance languages, like the branches of Romance languages, descend from Vulgar Latin. These vestiges of military usage are unique to Romanian in its language family. s. o, sat village, șes plain, a supune, tindă veranda, țară homeland a. s. o. This linguistic evidence challenges the Roeslerian theory, the vestiges from sermo castrensis particularize the Romanian language in the neolatin area, together with its isolated history. e. With Rom. māgurā and Alb. magulë etc, the Roman Empire withdrew from Dacia in 271–272 AD, leaving it to the Goths. The history of Eastern Romance between the 3rd century and the development of Proto-Romanian by the 10th century, when the area came under the influence of the Byzantine Empire, is unknown. It is a matter of debate whether Proto-Romanian developed among Romanized people who were left behind in Dacia by the Roman withdrawal or among Latin-speakers in the Balkans south of the Danube, during the Middle Ages, Romanian became influenced by the Slavic languages and to some degree by Greek. Romanian remains unattested throughout the Middle Ages, and only enters the record in the early 16th century. The use of the denomination Romanian for our language and use of the demonym Romanians for speakers of this language predates the foundation of the modern Romanian state. In 1534, Tranquillo Andronico notes, Valachi nunc se Romanos vocant, francesco della Valle writes in 1532 that Romanians are calling themselves Romans in their own language, and he subsequently quotes the expression, Știi Românește. After travelling through Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania Ferrante Capecci accounts in 1575 that the population of these regions call themselves românești. Pierre Lescalopier writes in 1574 that those who live in Moldavia, Wallachia, the Transylvanian Saxon Johann Lebel writes in 1542 that Vlachi se numeau între ei Romuini and the Polish chronicler Stanislaw Orzechowski notes in 1554 that în limba lor walachii se numesc romini. In Palia de la Orăștie stands written «, că văzum cum toate limbile au și înfluresc întru cuvintele slăvite a lui Dumnezeu numai noi românii pre limbă nu avem. și le-au dăruit voo fraților români. », nevertheless, the oldest extant document written in Romanian remains Neacșus letter and was written using Cyrillic letters. There are no records of any documents written in Romanian from before 1521
36.
Vizhnitz (Hasidic dynasty)
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Vizhnitz is the name of a Hasidic dynasty founded by Rabbi Menachem Mendel Hager. Vizhnitz is the Yiddish name of Vyzhnytsia, a town in present-day Ukraine, followers of the rebbes of Vizhnitz are called Vizhnitzer Hasidim. Menachem Mendel Hager was born on May 17,1830 in Kosiv and he was the son of Rabbi Chaim Hager of Kosiv and the son-in-law of Rabbi Israel Friedman of Ruzhyn. He was appointed Rebbe at the age of 24, and soon after he moved to Vyzhnytsia, as his reputation grew, so did his followers. He became known and admired for his acts, sincerity in prayer. In his older years he endeavored to emigrate there and he had two sons, Reb Boruch and another, Reb Yaakov Dovid, who died during his lifetime. His son-in-law was the son of Rabbi Yehoshua Rokeach of Belz and his Torah thoughts were published under the title Tzemach Tzaddik. He died on October 18,1884 and was buried in Vyzhnytsia and his son Reb Boruch took his place becoming the second Rebbe of Vizhnitz. Boruch Hager was born in 1845 and was named after Rabbi Boruch of Medzhybizh at the behest of his grandfather, in 1885, aged 40 he inherited the mantle of leadership from his father, Menachem Mendel Hager, and became rebbe to thousands of Hasidim. He led them for eight years until his death in 1892. His Torah thoughts were collected in Imrei Boruch by his son-in-law, another son, Reb Sholom, died in his youth. His sons-in-law were Reb Shmuel Dov Chodorov of Petriva, Reb Mordechai Chodorov of Kolomea, Yisroel Hager was born on August 20,1860. He was the son of Rabbi Boruch Hager. He married the daughter of Rabbi Meir Horowitz of Dzhikov, in 1875 he moved to his father-in-laws house and studied at great length with his brother-in-law Rabbi Yehoshua of Dzikov. Three years later he returned to Vyzhnytsia and became close to his grandfather. In 1893 he was appointed as rebbe in Vyzhnytsia, the young rebbe invigorated the dynasty and attracted many more followers from the surrounding provinces. He established many Talmud Torahs, and also a yeshiva, to which he appointed his son Rabbi Menachem Mendel as rosh yeshiva, when World War I broke out he was forced to move to Grosswardein. He lived there until his death on 2 June 1936, in 1949, his remains were transferred to Israel and re-interred in Zichron Meir, Bnei Brak
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Hasidic Judaism
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Hasidism, sometimes Hasidic Judaism, is a Jewish religious sect. It arose as a revival movement in contemporary Western Ukraine during the 18th century. Today most affiliates reside in the United States, Israel, Israel Ben Eliezer, the Baal Shem Tov, is regarded as its founding father, and his disciples developed and disseminated it. Current Hasidism is a sub-group within Ultra-Orthodox Judaism and is noted for its religious conservatism, Hasidic thought draws heavily on Lurianic Kabbalah and to an extent is a popularization of it. Hasidim, the adherents of Hasidism, are organized in independent sects known as courts or dynasties, each headed by its own hereditary leader, a Rebbe. Reverence and submission to the Rebbe are key tenets, as he is considered an authority with whom the follower must bond to gain closeness to God. The various courts share basic convictions but operate apart and possess unique traits, there are several courts with many thousands of member households each, and dozens of smaller ones. The terms hasid and hasidut, meaning pietist and piety, have a history in Judaism. The Talmud and other old sources refer to the Pietists of Old who would contemplate an entire hour in preparation for prayer, the phrase denoted extremely devoted individuals who did not only observe the Law to its letter but performed good deeds even beyond it. Adam himself is honored with the title in tractate Eruvin 18b by Rabbi Meir, Adam was a great hasid, the title continued to be applied as an honorific for the exceptionally devout. In the 16th century, when Kabbalah spread, the title became associated with it. Jacob ben Hayyim Zemah wrote in his glossa on Isaac Lurias version of the Shulchan Aruch that one who wishes to tap the hidden wisdom, the movement founded by Israel Ben Eliezer in the 18th century adopted the term hasidim in the original connotation. But when the sect grew and developed specific attributes, from the 1770s and its common adherents, belonging to groups each headed by a spiritual leader, were henceforth known as Hasidim. Yet eventually, the sect gained such a mass following that the old connotation was sidelined. In popular discourse at least, Hasid came to someone who follows a religious teacher from the movement. It also entered Modern Hebrew as such, meaning adherent or disciple, one was not merely a hasid anymore, observed historian David Assaf, but a Hasid of someone or some dynasty in particular. Originally denoting an observant, moral person, in Hasidic literature Tzaddiq became synonymous with the often hereditary master heading a sect of followers, as noted by Joseph Dan, every attempt to present such a body of ideas has failed. The difficulty of separating the movements philosophy from that of its inspiration, Lurianic Kabbalah
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Humanism
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The term was coined in 1808 by the early nineteenth century German educational reformer and theologian Friedrich Niethammer and gradually adopted into English. Niethammer had wished to introduce into German education the humane values of ancient Greece, the word Humanism is ultimately derived from the Latin concept humanitas, and, like most other words ending in -ism, entered English in the nineteenth century. Those who earnestly desire and seek after these are most highly humanized. For the desire to pursue of that kind of knowledge, and the training given by it, has granted to humanity alone of all the animals. Gellius says that in his day humanitas is commonly used as a synonym for philanthropy – or kindness and he himself was involved in public affairs. By assigning pride of place to Paideia in his comment on the etymology of humanitas, gelliuss writings fell into obscurity during the middle ages, but during the Italian Renaissance, Gellius became a favorite author. Teachers and scholars of Greek and Latin grammar, rhetoric, philosophy, during the French Revolution, and soon after, in Germany, humanism began to refer to an ethical philosophy centered on humankind, without attention to the transcendent or supernatural. The designation Religious Humanism refers to organized groups that sprang up during the late-nineteenth and it is similar to Protestantism, although centered on human needs, interests, and abilities rather than the supernatural. The first Humanist Manifesto was issued by a conference held at the University of Chicago in 1933, signatories included the philosopher John Dewey, but the majority were ministers and theologians. But in the century, during the French Enlightenment, a more ideological use of the term had come into use. In 1765, the author of an article in a French Enlightenment periodical spoke of The general love of humanity. A virtue hitherto quite nameless among us, and which we will venture to call humanism, for the time has come to create a word for such a beautiful and necessary thing. The latter part of the 18th and the early 19th centuries saw the creation of numerous philanthropic and benevolent societies dedicated to human betterment. Humanism began to acquire a negative sense, the Oxford English Dictionary records the use of the word humanism by an English clergyman in 1812 to indicate those who believe in the mere humanity of Christ, i. e. Unitarians and Deists. Human-centered philosophy that rejected the supernatural may also be found circa 1500 BCE in the Lokayata system of Indian philosophy, nasadiya Sukta, a passage in the Rig Veda, contains one of the first recorded assertions of agnosticism. Another instance of ancient humanism as a system of thought is found in the Gathas of Zarathustra. Zarathustras philosophy in the Gathas lays out a conception of humankind as thinking beings, dignified with choice, in China, Yellow Emperor is regarded as the humanistic primogenitor. Sage kings such as Yao and Shun are humanistic figures as recorded, king Wu of Zhou has the famous saying, Humanity is the Ling of the world
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Torah
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The Torah is the central reference of Judaism. It has a range of meanings and it can most specifically mean the first five books of the twenty-four books of the Tanakh, and it usually includes the rabbinic commentaries. In rabbinic literature the word Torah denotes both the five books and the Oral Torah, the Oral Torah consists of interpretations and amplifications which according to rabbinic tradition have been handed down from generation to generation and are now embodied in the Talmud and Midrash. According to the Midrash, the Torah was created prior to the creation of the world, traditionally, the words of the Torah are written on a scroll by a scribe in Hebrew. A Torah portion is read publicly at least once every three days in the presence of a congregation, reading the Torah publicly is one of the bases for Jewish communal life. The word Torah in Hebrew is derived from the root ירה, the meaning of the word is therefore teaching, doctrine, or instruction, the commonly accepted law gives a wrong impression. Other translational contexts in the English language include custom, theory, guidance, the earliest name for the first part of the Bible seems to have been The Torah of Moses. This title, however, is neither in the Torah itself. It appears in Joshua and Kings, but it cannot be said to refer there to the entire corpus, in contrast, there is every likelihood that its use in the post-Exilic works was intended to be comprehensive. Other early titles were The Book of Moses and The Book of the Torah, Christian scholars usually refer to the first five books of the Hebrew Bible as the Pentateuch, a term first used in the Hellenistic Judaism of Alexandria, meaning five books, or as the Law. The Torah starts from the beginning of Gods creating the world, through the beginnings of the people of Israel, their descent into Egypt, and it ends with the death of Moses, just before the people of Israel cross to the promised land of Canaan. Interspersed in the narrative are the teachings given explicitly or implicitly embedded in the narrative. This is followed by the story of the three patriarchs, Joseph and the four matriarchs, God gives to the patriarchs a promise of the land of Canaan, but at the end of Genesis the sons of Jacob end up leaving Canaan for Egypt due to a regional famine. They had heard there was a grain storage and distribution facility in Egypt. Exodus begins the story of Gods revelation to his people of Israel through Moses, Moses receives the Torah from God, and teaches His laws and Covenant to the people of Israel. It also talks about the first violation of the covenant when the Golden Calf was constructed, Exodus includes the instructions on building the Tabernacle and concludes with its actual construction. Leviticus begins with instructions to the Israelites on how to use the Tabernacle, leviticus 26 provides a detailed list of rewards for following Gods commandments and a detailed list of punishments for not following them. Numbers tells how Israel consolidated itself as a community at Sinai, set out from Sinai to move towards Canaan, even Moses sins and is told he would not live to enter the land
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Rashi
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His commentary on the Talmud, which covers nearly all of the Babylonian Talmud, has been included in every edition of the Talmud since its first printing by Daniel Bomberg in the 1520s. His commentary on Tanakh—especially on the Chumash —is an indispensable aid to students of all levels, the latter commentary alone serves as the basis for more than 300 supercommentaries which analyze Rashis choice of language and citations, penned by some of the greatest names in rabbinic literature. Rashis surname, Yitzhaki, derives from his fathers name, Yitzhak, the acronym is sometimes also fancifully expanded as Rabban Shel YIsrael which means the rabbi of Israel, or as Rabbenu SheYichyeh. He may be cited in Hebrew and Aramaic texts as Shlomo son of Rabbi Yitzhak, Shlomo son of Yitzhak, Shlomo Yitzhaki, in older literature, Rashi is sometimes referred to as Jarchi or Yarhi, his abbreviated name being interpreted as Rabbi Shlomo Yarhi. Simon and Wolf claimed that only Christian scholars referred to Rashi as Jarchi, bernardo de Rossi, however, demonstrated that Hebrew scholars also referred to Rashi as Yarhi. The evolution of this term has been thoroughly traced, Rashi was an only child born at Troyes, Champagne, in northern France. His mothers brother was Simon the Elder, Rabbi of Mainz, Simon was a disciple of Rabbeinu Gershom Meor HaGolah, who died that same year. In his voluminous writings, Rashi himself made no claim at all. The main early rabbinical source about his ancestry, Responsum No.29 by Solomon Luria and his fame later made him the subject of many legends. One tradition contends that his parents were childless for many years, Rashis father, Yitzhak, a poor winemaker, once found a precious jewel and was approached by non-Jews who wished to buy it to adorn their idol. Yitzhak agreed to travel with them to their land, but en route, another legend also states that Rashis parents moved to Worms, Germany while Rashis mother was pregnant. As she walked down one of the streets in the Jewish quarter. She turned and pressed herself against a wall, which opened to receive her and this miraculous niche is still visible in the wall of the Worms Synagogue. According to tradition, Rashi was first brought to learn Torah by his father on Shavuot day at the age of five and his father was his main Torah teacher until his death when Rashi was still a youth. At the age of 17 he married and soon went to learn in the yeshiva of Rabbi Yaakov ben Yakar in Worms. When Rabbi Yaakov died in 1064, Rashi continued learning in Worms for another year in the yeshiva of his relative, Rabbi Isaac ben Eliezer Halevi, Rashis teachers were students of Rabbeinu Gershom and Rabbi Eliezer Hagadol, leading Talmudists of the previous generation. From his teachers, Rashi imbibed the traditions pertaining to the Talmud as they had been passed down for centuries, as well as an understanding of the Talmuds unique logic. Rashi took concise, copious notes from what he learned in yeshiva and he returned to Troyes at the age of 25, after which time his mother died, and he was asked to join the Troyes Beth din
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Montreal
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Montreal, officially Montréal, is the most populous municipality in the Canadian province of Quebec and the 2nd-most populous in Canada as a whole. Originally called Ville-Marie, or City of Mary, it is believed to be named after Mount Royal, the city has a distinct four-season continental climate, with warm-to-hot summers and cold, snowy winters. In 2016, Montreal had a population of 1,704,694, Montreals metropolitan area had a population of 4,098,927 and a population of 1,958,257 in the urban agglomeration, with all of the municipalities on the Island of Montreal included. Legally a French-speaking city,60. 5% of Montrealers speak French at home,21. 2% speak English and 19. 8% speak neither, Montreal is one of the most bilingual cities in Quebec and Canada, with 56% of the population able to speak both official languages. Montreal is the second-largest primarily French-speaking city in the world after Paris, historically the commercial capital of Canada, it was surpassed in population and economic strength by Toronto in the 1970s. It remains an important centre of commerce, aerospace, finance, pharmaceuticals, technology, design, education, culture, tourism, gaming, film, Montreal was also named a UNESCO City of Design. In 2009, Montreal was named North Americas leading host city for international events, according to the 2009 preliminary rankings of the International Congress. According to the 2015 Global Liveability Ranking by the Economist Intelligence Unit, in the 2017 edition of their Best Student Cities ranking, Quacquarelli Symonds ranked Montreal as the worlds best city to study abroad. Also, Montreal has 11 universities with 170,000 students enrolled, the Greater Montréal region has the highest number of university students per capita among all metropolitan areas in North America. It is the only Canadian city to have held the Summer Olympics, currently, the city hosts the Canadian Grand Prix of Formula One, the Montreal International Jazz Festival and the Just for Laughs festival. In 2012, Montreal was ranked as a Beta+ world city, in Kanien’kéha, or Mohawk language, the island is called Tiohtià, ke Tsi or Ka-wé-no-te. In Anishinaabemowin, or Ojibwe language, the land is called Mooniyaang, though the city was first named by French colonizers Ville Marie, or City of Mary, its current name comes from Mount Royal, the triple-peaked hill in the heart of the city. The most popular theory is that the name derives from Mont Réal, Cartiers 1535 diary entry, naming the mountain, according to the Commission de toponymie du Québec and the Geographical Names Board of Canada, Canadian place names have only one official form. Thus, Montreal is officially spelled with an accent over the e in both English and French. In practice, this is limited to governmental uses. English-speaking Montrealers, including English-language media, regularly omit the accent when writing in English, archaeological evidence demonstrates that First Nations native people occupied the island of Montreal as early as 4,000 years ago. By the year AD1000, they had started to cultivate maize, within a few hundred years, they had built fortified villages. Archeologists have found evidence of their habitation there and at locations in the valley since at least the 14th century
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Quebec
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Quebec is the second-most populous province of Canada and the only one to have a predominantly French-speaking population, with French as the sole provincial official language. Quebec is Canadas largest province by area and its second-largest administrative division and it also shares maritime borders with Nunavut, Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia. Quebec is Canadas second-most populous province, after Ontario, most inhabitants live in urban areas near the Saint Lawrence River between Montreal and Quebec City, the capital. Approximately half of Quebec residents live in the Greater Montreal Area, the Nord-du-Québec region, occupying the northern half of the province, is sparsely populated and inhabited primarily by Aboriginal peoples. Even in central Quebec at comparatively southerly latitudes winters are severe in inland areas, Quebec independence debates have played a large role in the politics of the province. Parti Québécois governments held referendums on sovereignty in 1980 and 1995, in 2006, the House of Commons of Canada passed a symbolic motion recognizing the Québécois as a nation within a united Canada. These many industries have all contributed to helping Quebec become an economically influential province within Canada, early variations in the spelling of the name included Québecq and Kébec. French explorer Samuel de Champlain chose the name Québec in 1608 for the colonial outpost he would use as the seat for the French colony of New France. The province is sometimes referred to as La belle province, the Province of Quebec was founded in the Royal Proclamation of 1763 after the Treaty of Paris formally transferred the French colony of Canada to Britain after the Seven Years War. The proclamation restricted the province to an area along the banks of the Saint Lawrence River, the Treaty of Versailles ceded territories south of the Great Lakes to the United States. After the Constitutional Act of 1791, the territory was divided between Lower Canada and Upper Canada, with each being granted an elected legislative assembly, in 1840, these become Canada East and Canada West after the British Parliament unified Upper and Lower Canada into the Province of Canada. This territory was redivided into the Provinces of Quebec and Ontario at Confederation in 1867, each became one of the first four provinces. In 1898, the Canadian Parliament passed the first Quebec Boundary Extension Act that expanded the provincial boundaries northward to include the lands of the aboriginal peoples. This was followed by the addition of the District of Ungava through the Quebec Boundaries Extension Act of 1912 that added the northernmost lands of the Inuit to create the modern Province of Quebec. In 1927, the border between Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador was established by the British Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. Located in the part of Canada, and part of Central Canada. Its topography is very different from one region to another due to the composition of the ground, the climate. The Saint Lawrence Lowland and the Canadian Shield are the two main regions, and are radically different
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History of the Jews in Hungary
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Jews have a long history in the country now known as Hungary, with some records even predating the 895 AD Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian Basin by over 600 years. Written sources prove that Jewish communities lived in the medieval Kingdom of Hungary, Jewish officials served the king during the reign of Andrew II. From the second part of the 13th century the religious tolerance decreased. The Jews of Hungary were fairly well integrated into Hungarian society by the time of the First World War, by the early 20th century, the community had grown to constitute 5% of Hungarys total population and 23% of the population of the capital, Budapest. Jews became prominent in science, the arts and business, starting in 1938, Hungary under Miklós Horthy passed a series of anti-Jewish measures in emulation of Germanys Nürnberg Laws. The vast majority of Jews who were deported were massacred in Kameniec-Podolsk, in the massacres of Újvidék and villages nearby,2, 550–2,850 Serbs, 700–1,250 Jews and 60–130 others were murdered by the Hungarian Army and Csendőrség in January 1942. A Jew living in the Hungarian countryside in March 1944 had a less than 10% chance of surviving the following 12 months, in Budapest, a Jews chance of survival of the same 12 months was about 50%. Jews from the Hungarian provinces outside Budapest and its suburbs were rounded up, the first transports to Auschwitz began in early May 1944 and continued even as Soviet troops approached. During the last years of World War II, they suffered severely, the 2011 Hungary census data had 10,965 people who self-identified religious Jews, of whom 10,553 declared themselves as ethnic Hungarian. Other media sources estimate an Hungarian population with Jewish ethnicity of around 48,200 mostly concentrated in Budapest, the intermarriage rates for Hungarian Jews is around 60%. It is not definitely known when Jews first settled in Hungary, According to tradition, King Decebalus permitted the Jews who aided him in his war against Rome to settle in his territory. Dacia included part of modern-day Hungary as well as Romania and Moldova and smaller areas of Bulgaria, Ukraine, prisoners of the Jewish Wars may have been brought back by the victorious Roman legions normally stationed in Provincia Pannonia. Marcus Aurelius ordered the transfer of some of his rebellious troops from Syria to Pannonia in 175 A. D and these troops had been recruited partly in Antioch and Hemesa, which still had a sizable Jewish population at that time. The Antiochian troops were transferred to Ulcisia Castra, while the Hemesian troops settled in Intercisa, stone inscriptions referring to Jews were found in Brigetio, Solva, Aquincum, Intercisa, Triccinae, Savaria, Sopianae and elsewhere in Pannonia. A Latin inscription, the epitaph of Septima Maria, discovered in Siklós, the Intercisa tablet was inscribed on behalf of Cosmius, chief of the Spondilla customhouse, archisynagogus Iudeorum during the reign of Alexander Severus. In 2008, a team of archeologists discovered a 3rd-century AD amulet in the form of a scroll with the words of the Jewish prayer Shema Yisrael inscribed on it in Féltorony. Hungarian tribes settled the territory 650 years later, in the Hungarian language, the word for Jew is zsidó, which was adopted from one of the Slavic languages. The first historical document relating to the Jews of Hungary is the letter written about 960 A. D, about the same time Ibrahim ibn Jacob says that Jews went from Hungary to Prague for business purposes
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Deportation
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Deportation is the expulsion of a person or group of people from a place or country. The term expulsion is often used as a synonym for deportation, through expulsion is often used in the context of international law. Definitions of deportation apply equally to nationals and foreigners, transportation is by way of punishment of one convicted of an offense against the laws of the country. Extradition is the surrender to another country of one accused of an offense against its laws, there to be tried, deportations widely occurred in ancient history. Deportation was practiced as a policy toward rebellious people in Achaemenid Empire, one notable example was the deportaion of the Mards in Charax, near Rhages by Phraates I. The 10,000 Roman prisonors of war after the Battle of Carrhae appear to have been deported to Alexandria Margiana near the border in 53 BC. It is hypothesized that some of them founded the Chinese city of Li-Jien after becoming soldiers for the Hsiung-nu, Deportation was widely used by the Sasanians, especially during the wars with the Romans and the Byzantines. During Shapur Is reign, the Romans who were defeated at the Battle of Edessa were deported to Persis, other destinations were Parthia, Khuzestan, and Asorestan. There were cities which were founded and were populated by Romans prisoners of war, including Shadh-Shapur in Meshan, Bishapur in Persis, Wuzurg-Shapur, agricultural land were also given to the deportees. These deportations initiated the sread Christianity in the Sassanian empire, in Rēw-Ardashīr, Persis, there was a church for the Romans and another one for Carmanians. After the Arab incursion into Persia during Shapur IIs reign, he scattered the defeated Arab tribes by deporting them to other regions, some where deported to Bahrain and Kirman, possibly to both populate these unattractive regions and bringing the tribes under control. The author of the text Liber Calipharum has praised the king Yazdegerd I for his treatment of the deportees, major deportations occurred during the Anastasian War. Major deportations occurred during the campaigns of Khosrau I from the Roman cities of Sura, Beroea, Antioch, Apamea, Callinicum, the city was founded near Ctesiphon especially for them, and Khosrow reportedly did everything in his power to make the residents want to stay. The number of the deportees is recorded to be 292,000 in another source, in 1954, the executive branch of the U. S. government implemented Operation Wetback, a program created in response to public hysteria about immigration and immigrants from Mexico. Operation Wetback led to the deportation of nearly 1.3 million Mexicans from the United States, already in natural law of the 18th century, philosophers agreed that expulsion of a nation from the territory that it historically inhabits is not allowable. Deportation often requires a process that must be validated by a court or senior government official. It should not be confused with administrative removal, which is the process of a country denying entry to an individual at a port of entry and expelling them. Deportation can also happen within a state, when an individual or a group of people is forcibly resettled to a different part of the country, if ethnic groups are affected by this, it may also be referred to as population transfer
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Oprah Winfrey
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Orpah Gail Winfrey, better known as Oprah Winfrey, is an American media proprietor, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist. She is best known for her talk show The Oprah Winfrey Show, several assessments rank her as the most influential woman in the world. In 2013, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama and honorary degrees from Duke. Winfrey was born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a single mother and later raised in an inner-city Milwaukee neighborhood. She has stated that she was molested during her childhood and early teens and became pregnant at 14, her son died in infancy. Sent to live with the man she calls her father, a barber in Tennessee, Winfrey landed a job in radio while still in high school, by the mid-1990s, she had reinvented her show with a focus on literature, self-improvement, and spirituality. From 2006 to 2008, her endorsement of Obama, by one estimate, Winfrey was named Orpah on her birth certificate after the biblical figure in the Book of Ruth, but people mispronounced it regularly and Oprah stuck. Winfrey was born in Kosciusko, Mississippi, to a teenage mother. She later said that her conception was due to a sexual encounter. Her mother, Vernita Lee, was a housemaid, Winfreys biological father is usually noted as Vernon Winfrey, a coal miner turned barber turned city councilman who had been in the Armed Forces when she was born. However, Mississippi farmer and World War II veteran Noah Robinson, a genetic test in 2006 determined that her matrilineal line originated among the Kpelle ethnic group, in the area that today is Liberia. Her genetic makeup was determined to be 89% Sub-Saharan African, 8% Native American, however, the East Asian may, given the imprecision of genetic testing, actually be Native American markers. Her grandmother taught her to read before the age of three and took her to the church, where she was nicknamed The Preacher for her ability to recite Bible verses. When Winfrey was a child, her grandmother would hit her with a stick when she did not do chores or if she misbehaved in any way. Around this time, Lee had given birth to daughter, Winfreys younger half-sister. By 1962, Lee was having difficulty raising both daughters so Winfrey was temporarily sent to live with Vernon in Nashville, Tennessee, while Winfrey was in Nashville, Lee gave birth to a third daughter who was put up for adoption and later also named Patricia. Winfrey did not learn she had a second half-sister until 2010, by the time Winfrey moved back in with Lee, Lee had also given birth to a boy named Jeffrey, Winfreys half-brother, who died of AIDS-related causes in 1989. When Winfrey discussed the alleged abuse with family members at age 24, Winfrey once commented that she had chosen not to be a mother because she had not been mothered well
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Identification in Nazi camps
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Identification of inmates in Nazi concentration camps was performed mostly with identification numbers marked on clothing, or later, tattooed on the skin. More specialized identification was done with specific cloth emblems on the clothing, a practice was established to tattoo the inmate identification numbers. Initially, in Auschwitz, the numbers were sewn on the clothes. With the increased death rate it became difficult to identify corpses, therefore, the medical personnel started to write the numbers on the corpses chests with indelible ink. Difficulties increased in 1941 when Soviet prisoners of war came in masses, and this was done with a special stamp with the numbers to be tattooed composed of needles. The tattoo was applied to the left part of the breast. In March 1942, the method was used in Birkenau. The common belief that all concentration camps put tattoos on inmates is not true, the misconception is because many times Auschwitz inmates were sent to other camps and that is where they were liberated from. They would show a number, but it came from their time at Auschwitz, metal stamps turned out to be impractical, and later numbers were tattooed with a single needle on the left forearm. The tattoo was the camp number, sometimes with a special symbol added, some Jews had a triangle. In May 1944, the Jewish men received the letters A or B to indicate particular series of numbers, for unknown reasons, this number series for women never began again with the B series after they had reached the number limit of 20,000 for the A series. ID numbers Colored inverted triangles were used in the camps in the Nazi-occupied countries to identify the reason the prisoners had been placed there. The triangles were made of fabric and were sewn on jackets and shirts of the prisoners and these mandatory badges had specific meanings indicated by their color and shape. The system of badges varied somewhat between the camps, someone with an escape suspect mark usually would not be assigned to work squads operating outside the camp fence. Someone wearing an F could be called upon to help translate guards spoken instructions to a trainload of new arrivals from France, detainees wearing civilian clothing instead of the striped uniforms were often marked with a prominent X on the back. This made for a prisoner uniform. For permanence, such Xs were made with oil paint, with sewn-on cloth strips. Detainees would be compelled to sew their number and an emblem onto the fronts of such X-ed clothing
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