Vladimir Kosma Zworykin

Zworykin, Vladimir Kosma (1889-1982), American physicist and electronic engineer, known for his developmental work in television. Zworykin was born in Murom, Russia, and educated at the Institute of Technology in Saint Petersburg, the Collège de France, and, after his immigration to the United States in 1919, at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He became an American citizen in 1924. In 1929 he became director of the Electronic Research Laboratory of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) at Princeton, New Jersey. Important contributions were made by Zworykin to both the transmission and the reception of television. He was largely responsible for the development, during the 1920s and ’30s, of the television camera and picture tube. He also directed the group that in 1939 successfully produced a powerful electron microscope

Boris Yeltsin

Yeltsin, Boris Nikolayevich (1931-2007 ), Russian politician, who became the first popularly elected president of Russia in 1991. Born in Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg) and trained as a construction engineer, Yeltsin became a Communist party member in 1961. He was brought to Moscow by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and installed as first secretary of the Moscow City Party Committee in 1985. He quickly alienated party reactionaries and, with Gorbachev’s acquiescence, he was stripped of his post in 1987. Critical both of Gorbachev and of the party, Yeltsin gained a wide following during the late 1980s, and in June 1991 he was elected president.

When reactionaries moved to depose Gorbachev in August, Yeltsin led the fight to resist the coup and dismantle the party apparatus. He subsequently directed efforts to replace the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) with the more loosely constituted Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), which was established in December 1991. Gorbachev’s resignation as Soviet president confirmed Yeltsin as the dominant figure in the former Soviet republics. In January 1992, Yeltsin met with other world leaders at the United Nations (UN) to determine the future of the UN Security Council. He urged arms control and Western investment in Russia.
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Xenocrates

Xenocrates (396-314 BC), Greek philosopher and student of Plato, who was head of the Greek, or Platonic, Academy. Born in Athens, he was named in 339 BC to succeed Speusippus as head of the academy, an office he held until his death.

Xenocrates’ writings, apparently influenced by Plato, survive only in fragments. His contributions to philosophy include several important tripartite classifications.

Philosophy, for example, he divided into the fields of logic or dialectic, physics, and ethics. Reality, he claimed, consists of objects of perception, knowledge, and opinion. Xenocrates is regarded by some as the first to posit distinctions between mind, body, and soul. Another of his doctrines posits the evolution of all reality from the interaction of two opposing principles, the “One” and the “indeterminate dyad.” Whereas the One establishes unity, rest, and good, the dyad contributes multiplicity, motion, and evil.

Laura Ingalls Wilder

Wilder, Laura Ingalls (1867-1957), American writer, famous for a series of historical novels for children known collectively as the “Little House” books. Laura Ingalls was born near Pepin, Wisconsin. She trained to be a teacher and taught for several years before marrying farmer Almanzo Wilder in 1885. After enduring a series of hardships, they moved to Missouri in 1894 and settled on Rocky Ridge Farm near Mansfield.

When Wilder was in her sixties, her daughter urged her to write down her vivid childhood memories of growing up on the American frontier. The “Little House” series, loosely based on Wilder’s life, gives a detailed and realistic portrayal of pioneer family life, full of warmth, humor, and drama. Beginning with Little House in the Big Woods (1932), the Wisconsin cabin in which she was born, Wilder chronicles her family’s westward migration to the Little House on the Prairie (1935) in Kansas, to Minnesota On the Banks of Plum Creek (1937), and finally to the Dakota Territory By the Shores of Silver Lake (1939). The Long Winter (1940), Little Town on the Prairie (1941), and These Happy Golden Years (1943) describe Laura’s teenage years, her first teaching assignment, and her marriage to Wilder, whose childhood story is told in Farmer Boy (1933).
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Hebert George Wells

Wells, H(erbert) G(eorge) (1866-1946), English author and political philosopher, most famous for his science-fantasy novels with their prophetic depictions of the triumphs of technology as well as the horrors of 20th-century warfare.

Wells was born September 21, 1866, in Bromley, Kent, and educated at the Normal School of Science in London, to which he won a scholarship. He worked as a draper’s apprentice, bookkeeper, tutor, and journalist until 1895, when he became a full-time writer. Wells’s 10-year relationship with Rebecca West produced a son, Anthony West, in 1914. In the next 50 years he produced more than 80 books. His novel The Time Machine (1895) mingled science, adventure, and political comment. Later works in this genre are The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), and The Shape of Things to Come (1933); each of these fantasies was made into a motion picture.
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William Wallace

Wallace, Sir William (1272?-1305), Scottish national hero. The only source of information concerning his early life is a 15th-century biographical poem by the Scottish poet Henry the Minstrel, who was known as Blind Harry. According to this work Wallace was outlawed by the English because of a quarrel that resulted in the death of an Englishman. He subsequently burned an English garrison and led an attack upon the English justiciar, an officer for the king, at Scone, Scotland. In 1297 his name appeared in a treaty of submission to England that was signed by the Scottish nobles who took part in his rebellion. Wallace captured many English fortresses north of the Forth River, and on September 11, 1297, in the Battle of Stirling Bridge, he severely defeated English forces attempting to cross the Forth. He was then elected to the office of guardian of the kingdom. In 1298 Scotland was invaded by a large English force led by the English king Edward I. On July 22, 1298, Edward defeated Wallace’s army in the Battle of Falkirk, and Wallace was forced into hiding. He lived in France for a time but returned and was captured near Glasgow by the Scottish knight Sir John de Menteith (died after 1329). He was brought to London, tried for treason, and executed.

George Washington

Washington, George (1732-99), commander in chief of the Continental army during the American Revolution, and later the first president of the United States. He symbolized qualities of discipline, aristocratic duty, military orthodoxy, and persistence in adversity that his contemporaries particularly valued as marks of mature political leadership.

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Lech Walesa

Walesa, Lech (1943- ), Polish labor union activist, Nobel laureate, and president of Poland (1990- ). He was born in Popowo and trained in a state technical college; he worked as an electrician at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk. Walesa participated in a strike in 1970, and in 1976 he was fired for his role in organizing new protests. Employed only intermittently during the next four years, he intensified his labor-organizing activities and emerged as a leader of the 1980 strikes that led to the formation of the national Solidarity trade federation. When in December 1981 the Polish government suspended Solidarity and imposed martial law, Walesa was arrested; released in November 1982, he remained under government surveillance. In 1983 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Walesa played a prominent role in the installation of a Solidarity-led coalition government in Poland during 1989 and was elected president in 1990.
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Vicent van Gogh

Gogh, Vincent Willem van (1853-1890), Dutch postimpressionist painter, whose work represents the archetype of expressionism, the idea of emotional spontaneity in painting. Van Gogh was born March 30, 1853, in Groot-Zundert, son of a Dutch Protestant pastor. Early in life he displayed a moody, restless temperament that was to thwart his every pursuit. By the age of 27 he had been in turn a salesman in an art gallery, a French tutor, a theological student, and an evangelist among the miners at Wasmes in Belgium. His experiences as a preacher are reflected in his first paintings of peasants and potato diggers; of these early works, the best known is the rough, earthy Potato Eaters (1885, Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh, Amsterdam). Dark and somber, sometimes crude, these early works evidence van Gogh’s intense desire to express the misery and poverty of humanity as he saw it among the miners in Belgium.

In 1886 van Gogh went to Paris to live with his brother Théo van Gogh, an art dealer, and became familiar with the new art movements developing at the time. Influenced by the work of the impressionists (see Impressionism) and by the work of such Japanese printmakers as Hiroshige and Hokusai, van Gogh began to experiment with current techniques (see Ukiyo-E). Subsequently, he adopted the brilliant hues found in the paintings of the French artists Camille Pissarro and Georges Seurat.

In 1888 van Gogh left Paris for southern France, where, under the burning sun of Provence, he painted scenes of the fields, cypress trees, peasants, and rustic life characteristic of the region. During this period, living at Arles, he began to use the swirling brush strokes and intense yellows, greens, and blues associated with such typical works as Bedroom at Arles (1888, Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh), and Starry Night (1889, Museum of Modern Art, New York City). For van Gogh all visible phenomena, whether he painted or drew them, seemed to be endowed with a physical and spiritual vitality. In his enthusiasm he induced the painter Paul Gauguin, whom he had met earlier in Paris, to join him. After less than two months they began to have violent disagreements, culminating in a quarrel in which van Gogh wildly threatened Gauguin with a razor; the same night, in deep remorse, van Gogh cut off part of his own ear. For a time he was in a hospital at Arles. He then spent a year in the nearby asylum of Saint-Rémy, working between repeated spells of madness. Under the care of a sympathetic doctor, whose portrait he painted (Dr. Gachet, 1890, Louvre, Paris), van Gogh spent three months at Auvers. Just after completing his ominous Crows in the Wheatfields (1890, Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh), he shot himself on July 27, 1890, and died two days later.

The more than 700 letters that van Gogh wrote to his brother Théo (published 1911, translated 1958) constitute a remarkably illuminating record of the life of an artist and a thorough documentation of his unusually fertile output-about 750 paintings and 1600 drawings. The French painter Chaïm Soutine, and the German painters Oskar Kokoschka, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Emil Nolde, owe more to van Gogh than to any other single source. In 1973 the Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh, containing over 1000 paintings, sketches, and letters, was opened in Amsterdam.

Jules Verne

Verne, Jules (1828-1905), French author, who is regarded as the father of science fiction. He was born in Nantes, studied law in Paris, and from 1848 until 1863 wrote opera librettos and plays. In 1863 he achieved his first real success with the publication of Cinq semaines en ballon (Five Weeks in a Balloon, 1869), a short fantasy that anticipated his later work.

Verne rode a wave of 19th-century interest in science and invention to enormous popular favor. Laying a carefully documented scientific foundation for his fantastic adventure stories, he forecast with remarkable accuracy many scientific achievements of the 20th century. He anticipated flights into outer space, submarines, helicopters, air conditioning, guided missiles, and motion pictures long before they were developed. Among his most popular books are Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864; trans. 1874), From the Earth to the Moon (1865; trans. 1873), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1870; trans. 1873), Mysterious Island (1870; trans. 1875), and Around the World in 80 Days (1872; trans. 1873). Beginning with A Trip to the Moon, by the pioneer French film director Georges Méliès, Verne’s works have been the source of many films.

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