Lynching
Lynching is a premeditated extrajudicial killing by a group. It is most used to characterize informal public executions by a mob in order to punish an alleged transgressor, or to intimidate a group, it is an extreme form of informal group social control such as charivari, riding the rail, tarring and feathering, conducted with the display of a public spectacle for maximum intimidation. It is to be punishable by law. Instances of lynchings and similar mob violence can be found in every society. In the United States, lynchings of African Americans by hanging, became frequent in the South during the period after the Reconstruction era and during the decades on either side of the turn of the 20th century. At the time, Southern states were passing new constitutions and laws to disenfranchise African Americans and impose legal segregation and Jim Crow rule. Most lynchings were conducted by white mobs against black victims suspects taken from jail before they were tried by all-white juries, or before arrest.
The political message—the promotion of white supremacy and black powerlessness—was an important element of the ritual. Lynchings were photographed and published as postcards, which were popular souvenirs in the U. S. to expand the intimidation of the acts. Victims were burned alive, or otherwise tortured and mutilated in the public events. In some cases the mutilated body parts were taken as mementos by the spectators. In the West, other minorities—Native Americans and Asians—were lynched. Southern states had the highest total numbers of lynchings in America; the origins of the word "lynch" are obscure, but it originated during the American revolution. The verb comes from the phrase "Lynch Law", a term for a punishment without trial. Two Americans during this era are credited for coining the phrase: Charles Lynch and William Lynch, who both lived in Virginia in the 1780s. Charles Lynch has the better claim, as he was known to have used the term in 1782, while William Lynch is not known to have used the term until much later.
There is no evidence. In 1782, Charles Lynch wrote that his assistant had administered "Lynch's law" to Tories "for Dealing with Negroes, &c."Charles Lynch was a Virginia Quaker and American Revolutionary who headed a county court in Virginia which imprisoned Loyalist supporters of the British for up to one year during the war. Although he lacked proper jurisdiction for detaining these persons, he claimed this right by arguing wartime necessity. Subsequently, he prevailed upon his friends in the Congress of the Confederation to pass a law that exonerated him and his associates from wrongdoing, he was concerned that he might face legal action from one or more of those he had imprisoned, notwithstanding the American Colonies had won the war. This action by the Congress provoked controversy, it was in connection with this that the term "Lynch law", meaning the assumption of extrajudicial authority, came into common parlance in the United States. Lynch was not accused of racist bias, he acquitted blacks accused of murder on three separate occasions.
He was accused, however, of ethnic prejudice in his abuse of Welsh miners. William Lynch from Virginia claimed that the phrase was first used in a 1780 compact signed by him and his neighbors in Pittsylvania County. While Edgar Allan Poe claimed that he found this document, it was a hoax. A 17th-century legend of James Lynch fitz Stephen, Mayor of Galway in Ireland in 1493, says that when his son was convicted of murder, the mayor hanged him from his own house; the story was proposed by 1904 as the origin of the word "lynch". It is dismissed by etymologists, both because of the distance in time and place from the alleged event to the word's emergence, because the incident did not constitute a lynching in the modern sense; the archaic verb linch, to beat with a pliable instrument, to chastise or to maltreat, has been proposed as the etymological source. Every society has had forms including murder; the legal and cultural antecedents of American lynching were carried across the Atlantic by migrants from the British Isles to colonial North America.
Collective violence was a familiar aspect of the early modern Anglo-American legal landscape. Group violence in the British Atlantic was nonlethal in intention and result. In the seventeenth century, in the context of political turmoil in England and unsettled social and political conditions in the American colonies, there arose rebellions and riots that took multiple lives. In the United States, during the decades before the Civil War, free Blacks, Latinos in the South West, runaways were the objects of racial lynching, but lynching attacks on U. S. blacks in the South, increased in the aftermath of Reconstruction, after slavery had been abolished and freed men gained the right to vote. The peak of lynchings occurred in 1892, after southern white Democrats had regained control of state legislatures. Many incidents were related to economic troubles and competition. At the turn of the 20th century, southern states passed new constitutions or legislation which disenfranchised most blacks and many poor whites, established segregation of public facilities by race, separated blacks from common public life and facilities through Jim Crow rules.
Nearly 3,500 African Americans and 1,300 whites were lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1968. Lynching in the British Empire dur
Regicide
The broad definition of regicide is the deliberate killing of a monarch, or the person responsible for the killing of a person of royalty. In the British tradition, it refers to the judicial execution of a king after a trial, reflecting the historical precedent of the trial and execution of Charles I of England. More broadly, it can refer to the killing of an emperor or any other reigning sovereign. Before the Tudor period, English kings had been murdered while imprisoned or killed in battle by their subjects, but none of these deaths are referred to as regicide; the word regicide seems to have come into popular use among foreign Catholics when Pope Sixtus V renewed the papal bull of excommunication against the "crowned regicide" Queen Elizabeth I, for—among other things—executing Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1587. Elizabeth had been excommunicated by Pope Pius V, in Regnans in Excelsis, for converting England to Protestantism after the reign of Mary I of England; the defeat of the Spanish Armada and the "Protestant Wind" convinced most English people that God approved of Elizabeth's action.
After the First English Civil War, King Charles I was a prisoner of the Parliamentarians. They tried to negotiate a compromise with him, but he stuck steadfastly to his view that he was King by Divine Right and attempted in secret to raise an army to fight against them, it became obvious to the leaders of the Parliamentarians that they could not negotiate a settlement with him and they could not trust him to refrain from raising an army against them. On 13 December 1648, the House of Commons broke off negotiations with the King. Two days the Council of Officers of the New Model Army voted that the King be moved from the Isle of Wight, where he was prisoner, to Windsor "in order to the bringing of him speedily to justice". In the middle of December, the King was moved from Windsor to London; the House of Commons of the Rump Parliament passed a Bill setting up a High Court of Justice in order to try Charles I for high treason in the name of the people of England. From a Royalist and post-restoration perspective this Bill was not lawful, since the House of Lords refused to pass it and it failed to receive Royal Assent.
However, the Parliamentary leaders and the Army pressed on with the trial anyway. At his trial in front of The High Court of Justice on Saturday 20 January 1649 in Westminster Hall, Charles asked "I would know by what power I am called hither. I would know by what authority, I mean lawful". In view of the historic issues involved, both sides based themselves on technical legal grounds. Charles did not dispute that Parliament as a whole did have some judicial powers, but he maintained that the House of Commons on its own could not try anybody, so he refused to plead. At that time under English law if a prisoner refused to plead this was treated as a plea of guilty, he was found guilty on Saturday 27 January 1649, his death warrant was signed by 59 Commissioners. To show their agreement with the sentence of death, all of the Commissioners who were present rose to their feet. On the day of his execution, 30 January 1649, Charles dressed in two shirts so that he would not shiver from the cold, lest it be said that he was shivering from fear.
His execution was delayed by several hours so that the House of Commons could pass an emergency bill to make it an offence to proclaim a new King, to declare the representatives of the people, the House of Commons, as the source of all just power. Charles was escorted through the Banqueting House in the Palace of Whitehall to a scaffold where he would be beheaded, he forgave those who had passed sentence on him and gave instructions to his enemies that they should learn to "know their duty to God, the King - that is, my successors - and the people". He gave a brief speech outlining his unchanged views of the relationship between the monarchy and the monarch's subjects, ending with the words "I am the martyr of the people", his head was severed from his body with one blow. One week the Rump, sitting in the House of Commons, passed a bill abolishing the monarchy. Ardent Royalists refused to accept it on the basis. Others refused because, as the bill had not passed the House of Lords and did not have Royal Assent, it could not become an Act of Parliament.
The Declaration of Breda 11 years paved the way for the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. At the restoration, thirty-one of the fifty-nine Commissioners who had signed the death warrant were living. A general pardon was given by Charles II and Parliament to his opponents, but the regicides were excluded. A number fled the country. Some, such as Daniel Blagrave, fled to continental Europe, while others like John Dixwell, Edward Whalley, William Goffe fled to New Haven, Connecticut; those who were still available were put on trial. Six regicides were found guilty and suffered the fate of being hanged and quartered: Thomas Harrison, John Jones, Adrian Scrope, John Carew, Thomas Scot, Gregory Clement; the captain of the guard at the trial, Daniel Axtell who encouraged his men to barrack the King when he tried to speak in his own defence, an influential preacher Hugh Peters, the leading prosecutor at the trial John Cook were executed in a similar manner. Colonel Francis Hacker who signed the order to the executioner of the king and commanded the guard around the scaffold and at the trial was hanged.
Concern amongst the royal ministers over the negative impact on popular sen
John William, Duke of Jülich-Cleves-Berg
Johann Wilhelm of Jülich-Cleves-Berg was a Duke of Jülich-Cleves-Berg. His parents were William the Rich, Duke of Jülich-Cleves-Berg and Maria of Austria, a daughter of Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor and Anna of Bohemia and Hungary, he was educated in Xanten. Johann Wilhelm became Bishop of Münster. However, after the unexpected death of his elder brother Karl Friedrich, Wilhelm was needed to succeed his father as Duke of Jülich-Cleves-Berg, a secular fief, he was Count of Altena. The United Duchies of Jülich-Cleves-Berg was a combination of reichsfrei states within the Holy Roman Empire. Johann Wilhelm was first married in 1585 to Jakobea of Baden, daughter of Philibert, Margrave of Baden, he was secondly married to daughter of Charles III, Duke of Lorraine. Johann Wilhelm entered into a morganatic marriage with Anna op den Graeff of the Op den Graeff family, with whom he had a son, Herman op den Graeff; because Anna op den Graeff was of low social rank, Johann Wilhelm's titles and privileges were not passed on to her or their son.
He was subject to mental illness. Upon Duke Johann William's death in 1609, his inheritance was claimed by the heirs of his two eldest sisters: the heir of Maria Eleonora of Cleves, the eldest sister and married to Albert Frederick, Duke of Prussia, was Anna of Prussia, the Electress of Brandenburg, a Protestant; the second sister was Anna of Cleves, married with Philipp Ludwig, Count Palatine of Neuburg, her son and heir was the Count Palatine of Neuburg, a Catholic. The disputes of the epoch between Protestants and Catholics escalated, leading to the Thirty Years' War in 1618. Brandenburg received Cleves-Mark and Neuburg received Jülich-Berg, after the lands had been trampled under military several times and lost much of the fabled wealth so renowned in Duke Wilhelm's time. Among his court servants and employees were the composer Konrad Hagius
Pope
The pope known as the supreme pontiff, is the Bishop of Rome and ex officio leader of the worldwide Catholic Church. Since 1929, the pope has been head of state of Vatican City, a city-state enclaved within Rome, Italy; the current pope is Francis, elected on 13 March 2013, succeeding Benedict XVI. While his office is called the papacy, the episcopal see and ecclesiastical jurisdiction is called the Holy See, it is the Holy See, the sovereign entity of international law headquartered in the distinctively independent Vatican City State, established by the Lateran Treaty in 1929 between Italy and the Holy See to ensure its temporal and spiritual independence. The primacy of the Bishop of Rome is derived from his role as the apostolic successor to Saint Peter, to whom primacy was conferred by Jesus, giving him the Keys of Heaven and the powers of "binding and loosing", naming him as the "rock" upon which the church would be built; the apostolic see of Rome was founded by Saint Peter and Saint Paul in 1st century, according to Catholic tradition.
The papacy is one of the most enduring institutions in the world and has had a prominent part in world history. In ancient times the popes helped spread Christianity, intervened to find resolutions in various doctrinal disputes. In the Middle Ages, they played a role of secular importance in Western Europe acting as arbitrators between Christian monarchs. In addition to the expansion of the Christian faith and doctrine, the popes are involved in ecumenism and interfaith dialogue, charitable work, the defense of human rights. In some periods of history, the papacy, which had no temporal powers, accrued wide secular powers rivaling those of temporal rulers. However, in recent centuries the temporal authority of the papacy has declined and the office is now exclusively focused on religious matters. By contrast, papal claims of spiritual authority have been firmly expressed over time, culminating in 1870 with the proclamation of the dogma of papal infallibility for rare occasions when the pope speaks ex cathedra—literally "from the chair"—to issue a formal definition of faith or morals.
Still, the Pope is considered one of the world's most powerful people because of his extensive diplomatic and spiritual influence on 1.3 billion Catholics and beyond, as well as the official representative of the Catholic Church being the largest non-government provider of education and health care in the world, with a vast international network of charities. The word pope derives from Greek πάππας meaning "father". In the early centuries of Christianity, this title was applied in the east, to all bishops and other senior clergy, became reserved in the west to the Bishop of Rome, a reservation made official only in the 11th century; the earliest record of the use of this title was in regard to the by deceased Patriarch of Alexandria, Pope Heraclas of Alexandria. The earliest recorded use of the title "pope" in English dates to the mid-10th century, when it was used in reference to the 7th century Roman Pope Vitalian in an Old English translation of Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum.
The Catholic Church teaches that the pastoral office, the office of shepherding the Church, held by the apostles, as a group or "college" with Saint Peter as their head, is now held by their successors, the bishops, with the bishop of Rome as their head. Thus, is derived another title by which the pope is known, that of "Supreme Pontiff"; the Catholic Church teaches that Jesus appointed Peter as leader of the Church, the Catholic Church's dogmatic constitution Lumen gentium makes a clear distinction between apostles and bishops, presenting the latter as the successors of the former, with the pope as successor of Peter, in that he is head of the bishops as Peter was head of the apostles. Some historians argue against the notion that Peter was the first bishop of Rome, noting that the episcopal see in Rome can be traced back no earlier than the 3rd century; the writings of the Church Father Irenaeus who wrote around AD 180 reflect a belief that Peter "founded and organized" the Church at Rome.
Moreover, Irenaeus was not the first to write of Peter's presence in the early Roman Church. Clement of Rome wrote in a letter to the Corinthians, c. 96, about the persecution of Christians in Rome as the "struggles in our time" and presented to the Corinthians its heroes, "first, the greatest and most just columns", the "good apostles" Peter and Paul. St. Ignatius of Antioch wrote shortly after Clement and in his letter from the city of Smyrna to the Romans he said he would not command them as Peter and Paul did. Given this and other evidence, such as Emperor Constantine's erection of the "Old St. Peter's Basilica" on the location of St. Peter's tomb, as held and given to him by Rome's Christian community, many scholars agree that Peter was martyred in Rome under Nero, although some scholars argue that he may have been martyred in Palestine. First-century Christian communities would have had a group of presbyter-bishops functioning as leaders of their local churches. Episcopacies were established in metropolitan areas.
Antioch may have developed such a structure before Rome. In Rome, there were many who claimed to be the rightful bishop, though again Irenaeus stressed the validity of one line of bishops from the time of St. Peter up to his contemporary Pope Victor I and listed them; some writers claim that the emergence of a single bishop in Rome did not occur until the middle of the 2nd century. In their view, Linus and Clement were prominent presbyter-bishops
Canon (priest)
A canon is a member of certain bodies subject to an ecclesiastical rule. A canon was a cleric living with others in a clergy house or in one of the houses within the precinct of or close to a cathedral and conducting his life according to the orders or rules of the church; this way of life grew common in the eighth century. In the eleventh century, some churches required clergy thus living together to adopt the rule first proposed by Saint Augustine that they renounce private wealth; those who embraced this change were known as Augustinians or Canons Regular, whilst those who did not were known as secular canons. In the Roman Catholic Church, the members of the chapter of a cathedral or of a collegiate church are canons. Depending on the title of the church, several languages use specific titles, e.g. in German Domherr or Domkapitular in a Dom, Stiftsherr in a prelature that has the status of a Stift. One of the functions of the cathedral chapter in the Roman Catholic Church was to elect a vicar capitular to serve during a sede vacante period of the diocese.
Since the 1983 revision of the Code of Canon Law, this responsibility belongs to the college of consultors, unless the national bishops conference decides that the functions that canon law ascribes to the college of consultors, including this one, are to be entrusted to the cathedral chapter. All canons of the Church of England have been secular since the Reformation, although an individual canon may be a member of a religious order. However, they are ordained, that is, priests or other clergy. Today, the system of canons is retained exclusively in connection with cathedral churches. A canon is a member of the chapter of priests, headed by a dean, responsible for administering a cathedral or certain other churches that are styled collegiate churches; the dean and chapter are the formal body which has legal responsibility for the cathedral and for electing the bishop. The title of Canon is not a permanent title and when no longer in a position entitling preferment, it is dropped from a cleric's title nomenclature.
However, it is still given in many dioceses to senior parish priests as a honorary title. It is awarded in recognition of long and dedicated service to the diocese. Honorary canons are members of the chapter in name but are non-residential and receive no emoluments, they are entitled to call themselves canon and may have a role in the administration of the cathedral. Speaking, canons in the Anglican Communion are of this sort, thus are equivalent to a monsignor in the Roman Catholic Church wearing the violet or violet-trimmed cassock, associated with that rank. In some Church of England dioceses, the title Prebendary is used instead of canon when the cleric is involved administratively with a cathedral. Honorary canons within the Roman Catholic Church may still be nominated after the Second Vatican Council. Priests of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta and the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre are, in fact, titular or honorary canons of these respective Orders and have the right to the honorific title of "Canon" and "Monsignor" in addition to the choir dress of a canon, which includes the mozetta (black with purple piping for Malta and white with a red Jerusalem cross for Holy Sepulchre.
Since the reign of King Henry IV, the heads of state of France have been granted by the pope the title of sole honorary canon of Saint John Lateran and Saint Peter's. On the demise of the Kingdom of France this honour became transferred to the Presidents of the Republic, hence is held by Emmanuel Macron; this applies when the French President is not a Catholic or is an atheist. The proto-canon of the papal basilica of Saint Mary Major is the King of Spain Felipe VI. Before the Reformation, the King of England was a canon of the basilica of Saint Paul outside the Walls. In addition to canons who are clerics in holy orders, cathedrals in the Anglican Communion may appoint lay persons as canons; the rank of "lay canon" is conferred upon diocesan chancellors. It has traditionally been said that the King of England is a canon or prebendary of St David's Cathedral, Wales. However, this is based on a misconception; the canonry of St Mary’s College, St David's became the property of the Crown on the dissolution of the monasteries.
The Sovereign was never a canon of St David’s as a layman, though he or she may occupy the first prebendal stall, assigned for the monarch's use. A canon professor is a canon at an Anglican cathedral who holds a university professorship. There are four canon professorships in the University of Oxford in conjunction with Christ Church Cathedral and two in Durham University in conjunction with Durham Cathedral, although academics titled "canon professor" may be found at other universities where the appointments as canon and professor have been made independently. Section 2 of the Church of England Measure 1995 was passed for the express purpose of enabling Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, to appoint not more than two
Robert-François Damiens
Robert-François Damiens was a French domestic servant whose attempted assassination of King Louis XV in 1757 culminated in his notorious and controversial public execution. He was the last person to be executed in France by drawing and quartering, the traditional and gruesome form of death penalty reserved for regicides. Damiens was born on 9 January 1715 in a village near Arras in northern France, he enlisted in the army at an early age. After his discharge, he became a domestic servant at the college of the Jesuits in Paris, was dismissed from this as well as from other employments for misconduct, earning him the epithet of Robert le Diable. Damiens' motivation has always been debated, with some historians considering him to have been mentally unstable. From his answers under interrogation, Damiens seems to have been put into a state of agitation by the uproar that followed the refusal of the French Catholic clergy to grant the holy sacraments to members of the Jansenist sect, he appears to have laid the ultimate blame for this on the king, so to have formed a plan to punish him.
On 5 January 1757, as the King was entering his carriage at the Palace of Versailles, Damiens rushed past the King's bodyguards and stabbed him with a penknife, inflicting only a slight wound. He made no attempt to escape, was apprehended at once. Louis XV's thick winter clothes were protective, the knife penetrated less than half an inch into his chest. Louis was bleeding and called for a confessor to be brought to him, as he feared he might die; when the Queen ran to Louis's side, he asked forgiveness for his numerous affairs. Damiens was arrested on the spot and taken away to be tortured to force him to divulge the identity of any accomplices or those who had sent him; this effort was unsuccessful. He was tried and condemned as a regicide by the Parlement of Paris, sentenced to be drawn and quartered by horses at the Place de Grève. Fetched from his prison cell on the morning of 28 March 1757, Damiens said "La journée sera rude", he was first subjected to a torture in which his legs were painfully compressed by devices called "boots".
He was tortured with red-hot pincers. He was remanded to the royal executioner, Charles Henri Sanson, who harnessed horses to his arms and legs to be dismembered, but Damiens' limbs did not separate easily: the officiants ordered Sanson to cut Damiens' tendons, once, done the horses were able to perform the dismemberment. Once Damiens was dismembered, to the applause of the crowd, his still-living torso was burnt at the stake. After his death, the remains of Damiens' corpse were scattered in the wind, his house was razed, his brothers and sisters were forced to change their names, his father and daughter were banished from France. France had not experienced an attempted regicide since the killing of Henry IV in 1610. Damiens' infamy endured. Forty years after his death, the memory of Arras' most notorious citizen was used against another Arras native, Maximilien Robespierre; the polarizing figure of the French Revolution was described by his enemies as the nephew of Damiens. Though untrue, the libel held considerable credibility among foreign sympathizers.
The execution was witnessed by famous 18th-century adventurer Giacomo Casanova, who included an account in his memoirs: We had the courage to watch the dreadful sight for four hours... Damiens was a fanatic, with the idea of doing a good work and obtaining a heavenly reward, had tried to assassinate Louis XV. I was several times obliged to turn away my face and to stop my ears as I heard his piercing shrieks, half of his body having been torn from him, but the Lambertini and Mme XXX did not budge an inch. Was it because their hearts were hardened? They told me, I pretended to believe them, that their horror at the wretch's wickedness prevented them feeling that compassion which his unheard-of torments should have excited; the philosopher Cesare Beccaria explicitly cited Damiens' fate when he condemned torture and the death penalty in his classic treatise On Crimes and Punishments. Thomas Paine in Rights of Man mentions Damiens' execution as an example of the cruelty of despotic governments. Damiens's execution is described and discussed at length by Michel Foucault in illustration of the shift which took place in western culture in attitudes toward punishment in the 100 years following.
Science fiction writer James Morrow draws on the incident for the trial of God in his novel Blameless in Abaddon. There is a description of the death of Damiens in Peter Weiss' play Marat/Sade; the incident figures prominently in Hanns Heinz Ewers' frame story "The Execution of Damiens". An allusion to Damiens' attack and execution, Casanova's account of it, are used by Mark Twain to suggest the cruelty and injustice of aristocratic power in chapter XVIII of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Baroness Orczy refers to the incident in Mam'zelle Guillotine, which features the fictionalised character of his daughter Gabrielle Damiens. Th
Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition
The Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition is a 29-volume reference work, an edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. It was developed during the encyclopaedia's transition from a British to an American publication; some of its articles were written by the best-known scholars of the time. This edition of the encyclopedia, containing 40,000 entries, is now in the public domain, many of its articles have been used as a basis for articles in Wikipedia. However, the outdated nature of some of its content makes its use as a source for modern scholarship problematic; some articles have special value and interest to modern scholars as cultural artifacts of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The 1911 eleventh edition was assembled with the management of American publisher Horace Everett Hooper. Hugh Chisholm, who had edited the previous edition, was appointed editor in chief, with Walter Alison Phillips as his principal assistant editor. Hooper bought the rights to the 25-volume 9th edition and persuaded the British newspaper The Times to issue its reprint, with eleven additional volumes as the tenth edition, published in 1902.
Hooper's association with The Times ceased in 1909, he negotiated with the Cambridge University Press to publish the 29-volume eleventh edition. Though it is perceived as a quintessentially British work, the eleventh edition had substantial American influences, not only in the increased amount of American and Canadian content, but in the efforts made to make it more popular. American marketing methods assisted sales; some 14% of the contributors were from North America, a New York office was established to coordinate their work. The initials of the encyclopedia's contributors appear at the end of selected articles or at the end of a section in the case of longer articles, such as that on China, a key is given in each volume to these initials; some articles were written by the best-known scholars of the time, such as Edmund Gosse, J. B. Bury, Algernon Charles Swinburne, John Muir, Peter Kropotkin, T. H. Huxley, James Hopwood Jeans and William Michael Rossetti. Among the lesser-known contributors were some who would become distinguished, such as Ernest Rutherford and Bertrand Russell.
Many articles were carried over from some with minimal updating. Some of the book-length articles were divided into smaller parts for easier reference, yet others much abridged; the best-known authors contributed only a single article or part of an article. Most of the work was done by British Museum scholars and other scholars; the 1911 edition was the first edition of the encyclopædia to include more than just a handful of female contributors, with 34 women contributing articles to the edition. The eleventh edition introduced a number of changes of the format of the Britannica, it was the first to be published complete, instead of the previous method of volumes being released as they were ready. The print type was subject to continual updating until publication, it was the first edition of Britannica to be issued with a comprehensive index volume in, added a categorical index, where like topics were listed. It was the first not to include long treatise-length articles. Though the overall length of the work was about the same as that of its predecessor, the number of articles had increased from 17,000 to 40,000.
It was the first edition of Britannica to include biographies of living people. Sixteen maps of the famous 9th edition of Stielers Handatlas were translated to English, converted to Imperial units, printed in Gotha, Germany by Justus Perthes and became part this edition. Editions only included Perthes' great maps as low quality reproductions. According to Coleman and Simmons, the content of the encyclopedia was distributed as follows: Hooper sold the rights to Sears Roebuck of Chicago in 1920, completing the Britannica's transition to becoming a American publication. In 1922, an additional three volumes, were published, covering the events of the intervening years, including World War I. These, together with a reprint of the eleventh edition, formed the twelfth edition of the work. A similar thirteenth edition, consisting of three volumes plus a reprint of the twelfth edition, was published in 1926, so the twelfth and thirteenth editions were related to the eleventh edition and shared much of the same content.
However, it became apparent that a more thorough update of the work was required. The fourteenth edition, published in 1929, was revised, with much text eliminated or abridged to make room for new topics; the eleventh edition was the basis of every version of the Encyclopædia Britannica until the new fifteenth edition was published in 1974, using modern information presentation. The eleventh edition's articles are still of value and interest to modern readers and scholars as a cultural artifact: the British Empire was at its maximum, imperialism was unchallenged, much of the world was still ruled by monarchs, the tragedy of the modern world wars was still in the future, they are an invaluable resource for topics omitted from modern encyclopedias for biography and the history of science and technology. As a literary text, the encyclopedia has value as an example of early 20th-century prose. For example, it employs literary devices, such as pathetic fallacy, which are not as common in modern reference texts.
In 1917, using the pseudonym of S. S. Van Dine, the US art critic and author Willard Huntington Wright published Misinforming a Nation, a 200+
