Big NAQT you gotta know list

Horus (Pantheon)

The god of the sky and light and the son of Isis and Osiris. In earlier myth he was the brother of Set, and son of Ra. His mother impregnated herself by the dead Osiris, then hid Horus. When he was grown, he avenged his father's death, driving away Set. In the battle, he lost his eye, but regained it thanks to the god Thoth. Thus Horus came to rule over the earth. He was known to have two faces, that of the falcon, Harsiesis, and that of a child, Harpocrates.

Ribosomes

These are the machines that coordinate protein synthesis, or translation. They consist of several RNA and protein molecules arranged into two subunits. Ribosomes read the messenger RNA copy of the DNA and assemble the appropriate amino acids into protein chains.

Worship of Aton

This is actually a historical episode: during the reign of Amenhotep III (1390-1353 BC), worship of the god Aton (or Aten) — a representation of the disk of the sun — was resurrected. This process was carried to its extreme conclusion by his successor, Amenhotep IV, who eventually declared Aton to be the only god, thereby creating one of the earliest known monotheistic religions. The pharaoh even changed his name to Akhenaton, meaning "Aton is satisfied." The worship of Aton was centered on the capital city Tell-al-Amarna, and was largely confined to upper classes and the pharaonic court; it did not survive Amenhotep. Under his successor, Tutankhamen (King Tut), traditional religious practices were restored.

Nucleus

This is the "command central" of the cell because it contains almost all of the cell's DNA, which encodes the information needed to make all the proteins that the cell uses. The DNA appears as chromatin through most of the cell cycle, but condenses to form chromosomes when the cell is undergoing mitosis. Within the nucleus there are dense bodies called nucleoli, which contain ribosomal RNA. In eukaryotes, the nucleus is surrounded by a selectively-permeable nuclear envelope.

Chikamatsu Monzaemon

(1653-1725): He was Japan's first professional dramatist. Originally named Sugimori Nobumori, he wrote more than 150 plays for both the bunraku (puppet theater) and the kabuki (popular theater). Chikamatsu's scripts fall into two categories: historical romances (mono) and domestic tragedies (wamono). One of Chikamatsu's most popular plays was The Battles of Coxinga, an historical melodrama about an attempt to re-establish the Ming dynasty in China. He is also largely responsible for developing the sewamono (contemporary drama on contemporary themes) in the joruri, a style of chanted narration adapted to bunraku.

Eddie Shore

(1902-1985): Born in Fort Qu'Appele, Saskatchewan, "The Edmonton Express" is the epitome of "Old-Time Hockey," as stated in the 1977 film Slap Shot. As a blue-liner for the Boston Bruins he was named a first-team NHL All-Star for eight of nine years during the 1930s, and is the only defenseman to win four Hart Trophies as NHL MVP. He later went on to be the owner/GM of the AHL's Springfield Indians, and the anecdotes about his stingy ways are now hockey lore.

Bobby Hull

(1939-present): Born in Point Anne, Ontario; "The Golden Jet" was the star of the Chicago Blackhawks of the 1960s, he won three Art Ross Trophies and led the NHL in goals seven times. In June 1972, he defected to the fledgling WHA's Winnipeg Jets for a record ten-year, $2.75 million deal, where he helped make Winnipeg one of the four WHA teams to merge with the NHL in 1978-1979. He is also the father of Brett Hull; the duo is the only father-son combination to score 500 each in NHL history.

Michel Platini

(1955-present; France; midfielder) Arguably France's greatest footballer, this midfielder won three straight European Footballer of the Year Awards beginning in 1983. He led Italian side Juventus FC to success in both Series A (Italy's First Division) and UEFA (European) competitions. In 1985, he led Series A in scoring for a third straight year, a unique achievement, as well as leading Juventus to its only European Cup triumph, the tragic game at Heysel (Belgium) against Liverpool in which 39 Italian supporters were fatally crushed in the stands. He also led his French national side to triumph in the Euro 1984, setting the Euro scoring record. After his retirement in 1987, he was instrumental in organizing France's bid for the 1998 World Cup.

Zinedine Zidane

(1972-present; France; midfielder) Known the world over as "Zizou," the 1998 World and European Footballer of the Year as an all-around player is France's midfield. He was a critical player in the World Cup '98 (he scored a pair of header goals in the final against Brazil) and Euro 2000 (a game-winning overtime penalty kick in the semi-finals against Portugal), both triumphs for the French national side. Like fellow French legend Platini, Zizou played for the Italian team Juventus, where he has helped it win two Series A titles.

Centrioles

Not found in plant cells, these are paired organelles with nine sets of microtubule triplets in cross section. They are important in organizing the microtubule spindle needed to move the chromosomes during mitosis.

Golgi apparatus

The stack of flattened, folded membranes that forms the this cellular organelles which acts as the "post office of the cell." Here proteins from the ribosomes are stored, chemically modified, "addressed" with carbohydrate tags, and packaged in vesicles for delivery.

Cnidaria

(10,000 species): Also called Coelenterata see-LEN-tur-AH-tuh, the cnidarians develop from a diploblastic (two-layered) embryo, and have two separate tissue layers and radial body symmetry. Many cnidarians have two life stages, the mobile, usually bell-like medusa and the sessile polyp. All cnidarians have nematocysts, or stinging cells, for capturing prey, and some can inflict painful stings on swimmers. Examples include the hydras, sea anemones, corals, jellyfishes, and Portuguese man-o-war (which is actually an aggregation of colonial cnidarians)

William I

(1028-1087, r. 1066-1087) House of Normandy. Duke of Normandy from 1035, he was promised succession to the throne by Edward the Confessor, but when Edward gave the throne to Harold II in 1066, William invaded England, killing Harold and defeating the Anglo-Saxons at the Battle of Hastings. An able administrator, he authorized a survey of his kingdom in the 1086 Domesday Book. By that time William had replaced Anglo-Saxon nobles and clergy with Normans and other continentals.

Cicero

(106 BC-43 BC) Though he is better remembered today for his role in the political life of the Roman Republic,(sometimes known as "Tully") was also a significant philosopher. He described the ideal state in such dialogues as On the Republic and On the Laws, while he discussed Epicurean and Stoic views on religion in On the Nature of the Gods. Through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Cicero was considered one of the most important of ancient philosophers. Indeed, Saint Augustine asserted that he turned to philosophy as a result of reading a now-lost work by Cicero known as the Hortensius.

Annelida

(11,500 species): The annelids are segmented worms and represent the first lineage of truly eucoelomate (having a body cavity lined with mesoderm-derived tissue) animals; their body cavities are lined with tissue derived from the embryonic mesoderm. Annelid classes include the marine Polychaeta, as well as the mostly terrestrial Oligochaeta (including the earthworms, Lumbricus) and the mostly aquatic Hirudinea, or leeches. Characteristics of annelids include nephridia (kidney-like structures), blood vessels, and, in some classes, hermaphroditism.

John Lackland

(1167-1216, r. 1199-1216) House of Plantagenet. Though he tried to seize the crown from his brother Richard while the latter was in Germany, Richard forgave John and made him his successor. Excommunicated by the Pope for four years for refusing to accept Stephen Langton as Archbishop of Canterbury, John was also weak as a fighter, as French King Philip II routed him at Bouvines in 1214. A year later, England's barons forced John to sign the Magna Carta at Runnymede, an event that marked the beginning of the development of the British constitution.

Lorenzo Ghiberti

(1378-1455): A Florentine sculptor and goldsmith who taught both Donatello and Filippo Brunelleschi. He is best known for two pairs of bronze doors on the Florence Baptistery (associated with the Duomo, or Florentine Cathedral). He produced a single, low-relief panel to win a 1401 competition (defeating Brunelleschi) for the commission to design the 28 panels for the north doors. After that, he was given another commission to design ten panels for the east doors. This latter work, by far his most famous, was dubbed the "Gates of Paradise" by Michelangelo.

Donatello

(1386-1466): A Florentine sculptor who helped define Renaissance sculpture as distinct from that of the Gothic period. He is known for St. Mark and St. George in the Orsanmichele OR-sahn mee-KAY-lay (a Florentine church), the bald Zuccone (which means "pumpkin-head," though it depicts the prophet Habbakuk), and the first equestrian statue to be cast since Roman times, the Gattamelata in Padua. He is also known for mastering the low-relief form schiacciato.

Richard III

(1452-1485, r. 1483-1485) House of York. He was made Duke of Gloucester in 1461 when his brother Edward IV deposed the Lancastrian king Henry VI, as part of the Wars of the Roses. Upon Edward's death in 1483, Richard served as regent to his nephew Edward V, but likely had the boy murdered in the Tower of London that year. Two years later, Richard died at the hands of Henry Tudor's Lancastrian forces at Bosworth Field, ending the Wars of the Roses and beginning the reign of Henry VII.

Michelangelo

(1475-1564): A Florentine "Renaissance man" also known for architecture (the dome of St. Peter's Basilica), painting (The Last Judgment and the Sistine Chapel ceiling), poetry, and military engineering. His sculpted masterpieces include David, a Pietà, Bacchus, and a number of pieces for the tomb of Pope Julius II (including Dying Slave and Moses). He preferred to work in Carraran marble.

Henry VIII

(1491-1547, r. 1509-1547) House of Tudor. The son of Tudor founder Henry VII, he brought England into both the Renaissance and the Reformation. Henry patronized the philosopher Erasmus the painter Hans Holbein the Younger, and the writer Thomas More. Originally a supporter of the Catholic Church — the Pope had named him "Defender of the Faith" — he named himself head of the Church of England in 1533 so that he could divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. Henry executed top ministers who crossed him, including Thomas Cromwell and Thomas More. He married six times, but only his third wife, Jane Seymour, bore him a son, the sickly Edward VI.

Treaty of Tordesillas

(1494) ostensibly divided the New World (and, in later interpretations, the entire world) between Spain and Portugal. It resulted from a bull by (Spanish-born) Pope Alexander VI granting lands to Spain and established a line west of the Cape Verde islands between future Spanish possessions (west) and Portuguese possessions (east). The line passed through Brazil, allowing the Portuguese to establish a colony there, while Spain received the rest of the Americas. Endless wrangling and repeated revisions ensued.

Platyhelminthes

(15,000 species): The flatworms are the most primitive phylum to develop from a triploblastic (three-layered) embryo. They have bilateral body symmetry, and are acoelomate (lacking a true body cavity), so that the space between the digestive tract and the body wall is filled with tissue. As the name implies, they are generally flat-bodied. They have a true head and brain, but the digestive system has only one opening, which functions as both mouth and anus. Most are hermaphroditic. This phylum includes parasites such as the tapeworms and flukes, as well as free-living (i.e., non-parasitic) organisms such as the planarians.

Nemotoda

(15,000 species): The roundworms are unsegmented worms that live in a variety of habitats. They are pseudocoelomate; the three tissue layers are concentric, but the body cavity is not lined with tissue derived from the mesoderm (middle embryonic layer). They include both free-living and parasitic species; human parasites include hookworms and the causative agents of elephantiasis, trichinosis, and river blindness. Soil nematodes may be crop pests, while others are beneficial predators on other plant pests. The nematode species Caenorhabdis elegans is a common subject in genetics and developmental-biology labs.

Ivan IV

(1530-1584; ruled 1533-1584): He is known in the West as "Ivan the Terrible," but his Russian nickname, Groznyi, would be more accurately translated as "awe-inspiring" or "menacing" (the original meaning of the English word "terrible"). Ivan was proclaimed Grand Prince of Muscovy in 1533 and tsar in 1547. Scholars differ on whether Ivan was literate and on how auspiciously his reign began. Early in his reign, he pushed through a series of well-received reforms and called a zemskii sobor (assembly of the land), but Ivan had an amazingly cruel streak and eventually became unstable: he temporarily abdicated in 1564, killed his favorite son, created a state-within-the-state called the oprichnina to wage war on the boyars, and participated in the torture of his enemies. Ivan combined the absolutist tendencies of his predecessors with his own violent personality, helping to plunge the country into the subsequent period of civil strife known as the "Time of Troubles."

Elizabeth I

(1533-1603, r. 1558-1603) House of Tudor. Known as the "Virgin Queen" because she never married, as Henry VIII's daughter by Anne Boleyn, the Catholic Church considered her illegitimate. After the death of her Catholic sister Mary I, Elizabeth I tried to restore religious order by declaring England a Protestant state but naming herself only "Governor" of the Church. She foiled attempts at her throne by Spanish king Philip II and Mary, Queen of Scots; the latter Elizabeth reluctantly executed in 1587. Her reign saw great expansion of the English navy and the emergence of William Shakespeare, but when she died, the Crown went to Scottish king James VI, the son of Mary, Queen of Scots.

James I

(1566-1625, r. 1603-1625) House of Stuart. At age one James succeeded his mother Mary as King James VI of Scotland. As the great-great-grandson of Henry VII, he claimed the English throne upon the death of Elizabeth I. James was the intended target of Catholic fanatic Guy Fawkes' failed Gunpowder Plot in 1605. A believer in absolutism, James dissolved Parliament from 1611 to 1621, favoring ministers Robert Cecil and the Duke of Buckingham instead. His rule saw English expansion into North America, through royal charter in Virginia and Puritan protest in Massachusetts.

Michael

(1597-1645; ruled 1613-1645): In 1613, near the end of the Time of Troubles, a zemskii sobor elected the 16-year-old as the new tsar. He was a grandnephew of Ivan the Terrible's "good" wife Anastasia and the son of a powerful churchman named Filaret (who soon became patriarch); as tsar, he has usually been seen as a nonentity dominated by Filaret and other relatives. Nevertheless, his election marked the return of relative stability and the succession of the Romanov dynasty.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini

(1598-1680): A Roman who — with the rarely asked-about Francesco Borromini — defined the Baroque movement in sculpture. Bernini is principally known for his freestanding works, including David and The Ecstasy of St. Theresa. Bernini's David differs from that of Michelangelo in that the hero is shown "in motion," having twisted his body to sling the rock. Bernini is also known for his massive fountains in Rome, including the Triton and the Fountain of the Four Rivers.

Charles I

(1600-1649, r. 1625-1649) House of Stuart. The last absolute English monarch, Charles ran into trouble almost immediately. His minister, the Duke of Buckingham, asked Parliament for money to fight costly foreign wars, and when Parliament balked, Charles had to sign the Petition of Right. From 1630 to 1641 he tried to rule solo, but financial troubles forced him to call the Short and Long Parliaments. His attempt to reform the Scottish Church was the last straw, as Parliament entered into the English Civil War. They defeated Charles, convicting him of treason and executing him. England became a Commonwealth with Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector.

Pierre de Fermat

(1601-1665, French) is remembered for his contributions to number theory including his little theorem, which states that if p is a prime number and a is any number at all, then ap - a will be divisible by p. He studied Fermat primes, which are prime numbers that can be written as 22n + 1 for some integer n, but is probably most famous for his "last theorem," which he wrote in the margin of Arithmetica by the ancient Greek mathematician Diophantus with a note that "I have discovered a marvelous proof of this theorem that this margin is too small to contain." The theorem states that there is no combination of positive integers x, y, z, and n, with n > 2, such that xn + yn = zn, and mathematicians struggled for over 300 years to find a proof until Andrew Wiles completed one in 1995. (It is generally believed that Fermat did not actually have a valid proof.) Fermat and Blaise Pascal corresponded about probability theory.

Charles II

(1630-1685; r. 1660-1685) House of Stuart. While Oliver Cromwell ruled the Commonwealth, Charles was crowned King of Scotland in 1651. After Cromwell died, Charles used the Declaration of Breda to restore himself to the English throne. He fought two lackluster wars against the Dutch, and needed protection from Louis XIV through the Treaty of Dover. His wife Catherine of Braganza produced no legitimate heirs, but this "Merry Monarch" has as many as 14 illegitimate children. Tolerant of Catholics, he dissolved Parliament over the issue in 1681 and refused to prevent his brother James from succeeding him.

James II

(1633-1701; r. 1685-1688) House of Stuart. The 1678 Popish Plot against Charles II would have elevated the Roman Catholic James to the throne, had it been real and not fabricated by Titus Oates. James's three years, however, did feature heavy favoritism toward Catholics, so much so that Protestants invited James's son-in-law William of Orange to rule England, deposing James in the bloodless Glorious Revolution. Exiled to Louis XIV's court, he made an attempt to regain his crown in 1690 but was routed at the Battle of the Boyne.

Isaac Newton

(1643-1727, English) in pure math includes generalizing the binomial theorem to non-integer exponents, doing the first rigorous manipulation with power series, and creating Newton's method for finding roots of differentiable functions. He is best known, however, for a lengthy feud between British and Continental mathematicians over whether he or Gottfried Leibniz invented calculus (whose differential aspect Newton called the method of fluxions). It is now generally accepted that they both did, independently.

Gottfried Leibniz

(1646-1716, German) is known for his independent invention of calculus and the ensuing priority dispute with Isaac Newton. Most modern calculus notation, including the integral sign and the use of d to indicate a differential, originated with Leibniz. He also did work with the binary number system and did fundamental work in establishing boolean algebra and symbolic logic.

The Peace of Westphalia

(1648) is the collective name for two treaties ending the Thirty Years' War that were signed by the Holy Roman Empire, minor German states, Spain, France, Sweden, and the Dutch Republic. It confirmed the principle of "cuius regio eius religio" (that a ruler's religion determined that of his country) introduced by the Peace of Augsburg, but mandated relative tolerance of other (Christian) faiths. It adjusted the borders of German states and strengthened their princes with respect to the Emperor, and transferred most of Lorraine and some of Alsace to France.

Leonhard Euler

(1707-1783, Swiss) is known for his prolific output and the fact that he continued to produce seminal results even after going blind. He invented graph theory by solving the Seven Bridges of Königsberg problem, which asked whether there was a way to travel a particular arrangement of bridges so that you would cross each bridge exactly once. (He proved that it was impsosible to do so.) Euler introduced the modern notation for e, an irrational number about equal to 2.718, which is now called Euler's number in his honor (but don't confuse it for Euler's constant, which is different); he also introduced modern notation for i, a square root of -1, and for trigonometric functions. He proved Euler's formula, which relates complex numbers and trigonometric functions: ei x = cos x + i sin x, of which a special case is the fact that ei π = -1, which Richard Feynman called "the most beautiful equation in mathematics" because it links four of math's most important constants.

Treaty of Utrecht

(1713) was a series of treaties signed in the Dutch city of Utrecht that (mostly) ended the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714). They were signed by France and Spain for one side and by Britain, Savoy, and the United Provinces (The Netherlands) for the other. The treaty confirmed a Bourbon prince (Philip, Duke of Anjou) on the Spanish throne, ending Habsburg control, but took steps to prevent the French and Spanish thrones from being merged. Some Spanish possessions — including Sicily, the Spanish Netherlands, Naples, and Gibraltar — were given to the victors.

Catherine II

(1729-1796; ruled 1762-1796): Catherine the Great wasn't really a Russian at all: she was born Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst (a minor German principality) and was chosen as the bride of the future Peter III. She had thoroughly Russianized herself by the time Peter became tsar, and soon had him deposed; she then dispatched several claimants to the throne and crushed a peasant uprising led by Emilian Pugachev. She also corresponded with Enlightenment philosophes, granted charters of rights and obligations to the nobility and the towns, oversaw the partition of Poland, and expanded the empire. Catherine is well known for her extravagant love life: her 21 acknowledged lovers included Grigorii Potemkin (who constructed the famous Potemkin village on an imperial inspection tour).

George III

(1738-1820, r. 1760-1820) House of Hanover. Though he lost the American colonies in the Revolutionary War, Britain's economic empire expanded during his reign. While George's ministers kept their lives, they fell from power frequently, including William Pitts, Lord Bute, and Lord North. Popular at home, he suffered from porphyria, causing the "madness" that ultimately led to the Regency period (1811-1820) of his son George IV.

Mary Wollstonecraft

(1759-1797) She was a British author and philosopher who is best known for writing A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792). In that text, she argued that women are inherently equal to men, but appear inferior because they do not have the same access to education. Two years before, she had responded to Edmund Burke's conservative Reflections on the Revolution in France with her own A Vindication of the Rights of Men. Her daughter, Mary Shelley, is famous as the author of Frankenstein.

Alexander I

(1777-1825; ruled 1801-1825): He took the throne in 1801 when his repressive father Paul was assassinated and immediately set out on a more liberal course, but he left his strongest supporters disappointed. He is best known for his wars with Napoleon (first as an ally and then as an enemy), and for seeking to establish a Holy Alliance in the years that followed. Alexander was an eccentric and a religious mystic. Some even say that he didn't really die in 1825: instead, they argue, he faked his own death, became a hermit, and died in a monastery in 1864.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

(1777-1855, German) is considered the "Prince of Mathematicians" for his extraordinary contributions to every major branch of mathematics. His Disquisitiones Arithmeticae systematized number theory and stated the fundamental theorem of arithmetic (every integer greater than 1 has a prime factorization that is unique nonwithstanding the order of the factors). In his doctoral dissertation, he proved the fundamental theorem of algebra (every non-constant polynomial has at least one root in the complex numbers), though that proof is not considered rigorous enough for modern standards. He later proved the law of quadratic reciprocity, and the prime number theorem (that the number of primes less than n is is approximately n divided by the natural logarithm of n). Gauss may be most famous for the (possibly apocryphal) story of intuiting the formula for the summation of an arithmetic sequence when his primary-school teacher gave him the task — designed to waste his time — of adding the first 100 positive integers.

Lucretia Mott

(1793-1880) He was a Quaker who agitated for both abolitionism and women's rights. When she attended the World's Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840, the male delegates excluded Mott and the other female delegates from the convention and made them sit in a segregated area. He then turned her attention to women's rights. She was older than many of the other prominent delegates to the Seneca Falls Convention, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, whom she mentored. Mott briefly served as the first president of the American Equal Rights Association. She was also one of the Quakers who founded Swarthmore College.

Nicholas I

(1796-1855; ruled 1825-1855): He ruled Russia from the failure of the Decembrist Uprising to the middle of the Crimean War, has traditionally been portrayed as the embodiment of the Russian autocracy. His government pursued a policy of Official Nationality, defending a holy trinity of "Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and Nationality," and established a repressive secret police force known as the Third Section. Contemporaries referred to him as the "Gendarme of Europe" after he helped the Habsburgs squelch the Hungarian Revolution of 1848.

Sojourner Truth

(1797-1883) She was born into slavery as Isabella Baumfree in Dutch-speaking New York. She gave herself the name "Sojourner Truth" in 1843 when she converted to Methodism and informed her friends that the spirit had called her. She was already well known as an abolitionist speaker when she attended the 1851 Ohio Women's Rights Convention and declared that she had "as much muscle as any man" in her most famous speech, "Ain't I a Woman?".

William Rowan Hamilton

(1805-1865, Irish) is known for a four-dimensional extension of complex numbers, with six square roots of -1 (±i, ±j, and ±k), called the quaternions.

Treaty of Ghent

(1814) ended the War of 1812 between the U.S. and Britain. It was signed in the Belgian city Ghent but, due to the distances involved, could not prevent the Battle of New Orleans two weeks later. The treaty made no boundary changes and had minimal effect; both sides were ready for peace and considered the war a futile and fruitless endeavor.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

(1815-1902) He is most famous for writing the "Declaration of Sentiments" that she presented at the first women's rights conference in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. Stanton based the text of her declaration on the Declaration of Independence; it included the line, "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal." Stanton was a close collaborator for many years with Susan B. Anthony.

Alexander II

(1818-1881; ruled 1855-1881): He embarked on a program of Great Reforms soon after taking the throne near the end of the Crimean War. The most famous part of his program was the serf emancipation of 1861 — a reform which occurred almost simultaneously with the end of American slavery (and whose gradual nature disappointed liberals), But he also introduced a system of local governing bodies called zemstvos, tried to increase the rule of law in the court system, eased censorship, and reorganized the army. Alexander became more reactionary after an attempted assassination in 1866, and was successfully assassinated in 1881.

Adam-Onis Treaty

(1819) settled a boundary dispute between the U.S. and Spain that arose following the Louisiana Purchase. It was negotiated by then-Secretary of State John Quincy Adams and most notably sold Florida to the U.S. in exchange for the payment of its citizens' claims against Spain. It also delineated the U.S.-Spain border to the Pacific Ocean leading to its alternate name, the Transcontinental Treaty.

Alexandria Victoria

(1819-1901, r. 1837-1901; Empress of India 1876-1901) House of Hanover. The second-longest-reigning monarch in British history (after Elizabeth II), she relinquished much of the remaining royal power, both to her husband Albert and to her favored prime ministers, Lord Melbourne, Robert Peel, and Benjamin Disraeli. After Albert's death in 1861, Victoria largely went into seclusion, though she influenced the passage of the Reform Act of 1867, which doubled the number of Britons who could vote.

Susan B. Anthony

(1820-1906) She was one of the most outspoken and most famous proponents of women's suffrage in the United States. Along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she co-founded the first women's temperance society in the 1850s after they were excluded from an all-male temperance society. Together, in 1868, the two women founded a journal called The Revolution, which was dedicated to promoting women's rights. The following year, Stanton and Anthony formed the National Woman Suffrage Association. In 1872, Anthony gained fame when she was arrested for voting in the presidential election. She defended herself by quoting the Fourteenth Amendment, but she was convicted.

Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi

(1834-1904): A French sculptor primarily known as the creator of Liberty Enlightening the World, better known as the Statue of Liberty. He also executed The Lion of Belfort and a statue of the Marquis de Lafayette in New York's Union Square.

Auguste Rodin

(1840-1917): A French sculptor known for stormy relationships with "the establishment" of the École des Beaux-Arts ay-kohl day boh-zar and his mistress, fellow artist Camille Claudel. His works include The Age of Bronze, Honoré de Balzac, The Burghers of Calais, and a massive pair of doors for the Museum of Decorative Arts (the Gates of Hell) inspired by Dante's Inferno. That latter work included his most famous piece, The Thinker.

Alexander III

(1845-1894; ruled 1881-1894): Those who hoped that the assassination of Alexander II would lead to liberalization saw the error of their ways when the new tsar, launched his program of "counter-reforms." Under him, the state enacted a series of Temporary Regulations (giving it the power to crack down on terrorism), increased censorship, tightened controls on Russia's universities, created a position of "land captain" to exert state control in the countryside, and either encouraged or ignored the first anti-Jewish pogroms.

Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo

(1848) ended the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) and was signed in its namesake neighborhood of Mexico City. Its most significant result was the "Mexican Cession" transferring California, Nevada, Utah, and parts of four other states to the U.S. It also made the Rio Grande the boundary between Texas and Mexico.

Daniel Chester French

(1850-1931): An American who created The Minute Man for Concord, Massachusetts and Standing Lincoln for the Nebraska state capitol, but who is best known for the seated statue in the Lincoln Memorial.

Jose Marti

(1853-1895, Cuba): Best known as a poet and a revolutionary, he fought tirelessly for Cuban independence. Imprisoned at age sixteen and exiled from the island several times, he settled in New York for the last fifteen years of his life, where he wrote essays on Walt Whitman, Jesse James, and the threat of Latin American economic dependence on the United States. His Ill-Omened Friendship (1885) is considered the first Spanish modernist novel, and his poetry collections include Our America and Simple Verses, which contains the poem "Guantanamera," the inspiration for several songs. Martí was killed in a skirmish at Dos Ríos while participating in an invasion with other Cuban exiles.

James Frazer

(1854-1941) He was a Scottish anthropologist who primarily studied mythology and comparative religion. His magnum opus, The Golden Bough, analyzed a wide range of myths that center on the death and rebirth of a solar deity; the original publication controversially discussed the crucifixion of Jesus as one such myth. The work's title refers to a gift given to Proserpine (Persephone) by Aeneas so that he could enter the underworld in the Aeneid.

Franz Boas

(1858-1942) Often called the founder of modern anthropology, this first professor of anthropology at Columbia University trained Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Alfred Kroeber, author Zora Neale Hurston, and many others. He conducted fieldwork on the Inuits of Baffin Island and the Kwakiutl (now referred to as Kwakwaka'wakw) on Vancouver Island. His publications include 1911's The Mind of Primitive Man, which describes a gift-giving ceremony known as the "potlatch."

Maz Planck

(1858-1947) He allowed quantum theory to move forward in the early 20th century by correctly modeling how an object radiates heat, solving the ultraviolet catastrophe, which was a predicted unbounded increase in the amount of radiation emitted at high frequencies. Planck's Law of Radiation superseded the Rayleigh-Jeans Law. He suggested that electromagnetic energy could only be emitted in specific packages, called quanta (singular quantum, from the Latin for "how much"), positing that the energy of this photon was equal to its frequency times a fixed value h, now known as Planck's constant.

Gutzon Borglum

(1867-1941): An American known for crafting Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota. He is also known for The Mares of Diomedes and an unfinished (and later replaced) tribute to Confederate heroes on Stone Mountain in Georgia.

Nicholas II

(1868-1918; ruled 1894-1917): The last of the Romanovs, ruled until his overthrow in the February Revolution of 1917. He is usually seen as both a kind man who loved his family and an incapable monarch who helped bring about the end of the tsarist state; he led his country through two disastrous wars, the Russo-Japanese War (which helped spark the Revolution of 1905), and World War I (which helped cause the 1917 revolutions), He is best known for his loving marriage to Alexandra and for allowing the crazed monk Grigorii Rasputin to influence court politics while treating the hemophilia of Alexei, the heir to the throne. Nicholas abdicated in 1917 and was shot in 1918.

Ernest Rutherford

(1871-1937) His gold foil experiment provided the first evidence that each atom is made up of a large, positively-charged nucleus, surrounded by a cloud of negatively-charged electrons. Rutherford won the 1908 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this work. Rutherford was also an early leader in nuclear fission techniques, having discovered the decay of carbon-14 and providing the impetus for modern carbon dating. As part of this research, he discovered the proton and neutron, the latter in cooperation with James Chadwick. He is also the only native New Zealander with an element named after him (Rutherfordium, atomic number 104).

Ralph Vaughan Williams

(1872-1958). Best known for reviving the Tudor style and folk traditions in English music, as exemplified in his Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (1909). he completed nine symphonies, the foremost his Second (London) in 1914; other principal symphonies included the First (Sea), Third (Pastoral) and Seventh (Sinfonia Antarctica). His orchestral work The Lark Ascending was based on a George Meredith poem, while Sir John in Love (1924) was a Shakespearean opera that featured the "Fantasia on Greensleeves." Hugh the Drover and The Pilgrim's Progress are other major Vaughan Williams operas.

Sergei Rachmaninoff

(1873-1943). A highly skilled pianist and conductor, he twice turned down conductorship of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He failed to reap the monetary benefits of his early pieces (notably the C-Sharp Minor Prelude of 1892), because he sold them cheaply to a publisher. Treated by hypnosis in 1901, Rachmaninoff began a productive period with his Second Piano Concerto and the symphonic poem The Isle of the Dead (1909). He moved to the U.S. in 1917, after the Bolshevik Revolution. There his output decreased, though he did complete the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini in 1934.

Arnold Schoenberg

(1874-1951). This Austrian pioneered dodecaphony, or the twelve-tone system, which treated all parts of the chromatic scale equally. Schoenberg's early influences were Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss, as evident in his Transfigured Night (1900) for strings. Yet by 1912, with the Sprechstimme (halfway between singing and speaking) piece Pierrot lunaire, he broke from Romanticism and developed expressionist pieces free from key or tone. His students, especially Alban Berg and Anton Webern, further elaborated on his theories. Fleeing Nazi persecution in 1933, he moved from Berlin to Los Angeles, where he completed A Survivor from Warsaw. The first two acts of his unfinished opera, Moses und Aron, are still frequently performed.

Charles Ives

(1874-1954). He learned experimentation from his father George, a local Connecticut businessman and bandleader. He studied music at Yale but found insurance sales more lucrative; his firm of Ives and Myrick was the largest in New York during the 1910s. Privately, Ives composed great modern works, including the Second Piano (Concord) Sonata (with movements named after Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, and Henry David Thoreau); and Three Places in New England (1914). His Third Symphony won Ives a Pulitzer Prize in 1947, while his song "General William Booth Enters Into Heaven" was based on a Vachel Lindsay poem. Poor health ended both his insurance and music careers by 1930.

Maurice Ravel

(1875-1937). His Basque mother gave him an affinity for Spanish themes, as evident in "Rapsodie espagnole" and his most popular piece, "Bolero" (1928). He produced Pavane for a Dead Princess while a student of Gabriel Fauré, but was frustrated when the French Conservatory overlooked him for the Prix de Rome four times. He completed the ballet Daphnis et Chloé (1912) for Sergei Diaghilev, and followed it with Mother Goose and La Valse. He also re-orchestrated Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. His health declined after a 1932 taxi accident; unsuccessful brain surgery ended his life.

Constatin Brancusi

(1876-1957): A Romanian sculptor who was a major figure in Modernism. He is best known for The Kiss (not to be confused with the Rodin work or the Klimt painting), Sleeping Muse, and Bird in Space. U.S. customs taxed his works as "industrial products" since they refused to

Albert Einstein

(1879-1955) In one year — 1905, called his annus mirabilis, or "miracle year" — this physicist authored four papers that revolutionized modern physics. The first explained the photoelectric effect in terms of quantized electromagnetic radiation. The second formed the foundation for modern statistical physics by explaining the seemingly-random motion of particles in a fluid, a behavior called Brownian motion. The third reconciled Maxwellian electrodynamics with classical mechanics by positing a finite, constant speed of light, a theory now known as special relativity. The fourth paper contained his statement that the energy of a body is equal to its mass times the speed of light squared (that is, E = mc2). Ten years later, in 1915, Einstein published his theory of general relativity, which generalized special relativity to account for gravitational fields.

Margaret Sanger

(1879-1966) She was an early advocate of birth control and reproductive rights; she founded the American Birth Control League, which evolved into Planned Parenthood. As a young nurse living in New York City, Sanger wrote columns about sexual education for the New York Call titled "What Every Mother Should Know" and "What Every Girl Should Know." Sanger gave up nursing after one of her patients died of a self-induced abortion, and instead dedicated herself to educating women about contraception. In 1914, she began writing a newsletter called The Woman Rebel, in part to challenge the Comstock Act, which prohibited the sending of "obscene" material by mail, since she considered education about contraception to be an issue of free speech.

Bela Bartok

(1881-1945). A young girl singing a folk tune to her son in 1904 inspired him to roam the Hungarian countryside with Zoltan Kodály, collecting peasant tunes. This influence permeated his music, including the opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle (1911) and the ballets The Wooden Prince (1916) and The Miraculous Mandarin (1919). A virtuoso pianist and an innovative composer, Bartók refused to teach composition, contributing to financial problems, especially after he fled Nazi-allied Hungary for the U.S. in 1940. Bartók wrote many prominent instrumental pieces; best known are six string quartets, the educational piano piece Mikrokosmos, and Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta (1936).

Alfred Radcliffe-Brown

(1881-1955) He is considered the founder of a school of anthropology known as structural functionalism, which focuses on identifying the groups within a society and the rules and customs that define the relationships between people. His own early fieldwork was conducted in the Andaman Islands and Western Australia, where he studied the social organization of Australian tribes. After teaching in Australia, South Africa, and at the University of Chicago, he returned to England, where he founded the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Oxford.

Virginia Woolf

(1882-1941) She was an author who comes up in quiz bowl most often because of her novels, especially Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927). She makes this list, however, because of her essay "A Room of One's Own" (1929), in which she argued that a woman must have money and space in order to write and express herself. In the essay, Woolf famously created the character of Judith Shakespeare, William Shakespeare's imagined sister, who could not achieve the status of her brother because she did not have the same access to education. Woolf also addressed these themes in Three Guineas (1938).

Igor Stravinsky

(1882-1971). He studied under Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and completed two grand ballets for Sergei Diaghilev: The Firebird and Petrushka. His Paris premiere of The Rite of Spring (1913), however, is what inaugurated music's Modern era. A pagan story featuring polytonal music, The Rite of Spring shocked the audience so much that riots ensued, leading him to pursue rational, "neoclassical" music, such as his Symphony of Psalms. In 1940 he moved to Hollywood, where he composed his one full-length opera, The Rake's Progress, with libretto by W. H. Auden. Late in life, he adopted the serialist, twelve-tone style of Anton Webern, producing the abstract ballet Agon (1957).

Niels Bohr

(1885-1962) He reconciled Rutherford's results from the gold foil experiment with Max Planck's quantum theory to create a model of the atom (the Bohr model) in which electrons resided in specific energy levels at specific stable radii. This model was the basis for Johann Balmer's work with spectroscopy and Johannes Rydberg's energy formula, which explicitly stated the frequency of light that an electron would emit if it went from a higher energy to a lower energy. Bohr and his son fled to the U.S. in World War II under the pseudonym "Baker," and contributed to the Manhattan Project.

Ruth Benedict

(1887-1948) A colleague and friend of Margaret Mead, he studied the Zuni, Dobu, and Kwakiutl cultures in Patterns of Culture, using them to illustrate the idea of a society's culture as "personality writ large." She also described Japanese culture in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, a work written during World War II at the request of the U.S. government.

Erwin Schrodinger

(1887-1961) He contributed to the early formulations of quantum theory as a foil to Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, and Paul Dirac, criticizing their Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics with thought experiments like his famous Schrödinger's Cat argument. He formulated both the time-independent and time-dependent Schrödinger equations, which are partial differential equations that describe how quantum systems behave. Schrödinger's work was the basis for Heisenberg's matrix formalism, Feynman's path-integral formalism, and quantum mechanical perturbation theory, which considers the effects of a small disturbance to a quantum system.

Joe McCarthy

(1887-1978; manager) began managing the Yankees in 1931. They finished second, beginning a nine-year run of second or better. From 1936 to 1939 his Yankees won four World Series in a row; from 1936 to 1943, seven pennants and six World Series. His .615 winning percentage (2125-1333) is tops for a big league skipper, and he is tied with Casey Stengel for most world championship teams managed (7). Besides winning — McCarthy never had a losing season in the majors — his teams are best remembered for their offense. The 1931 Yankees scored 1,067 runs, the most of any team since 1900, while his 1936 club scored the second most, with 1,065.

Gabriela Mistral

(1889-1957, Chile; Nobel 1945): The first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, Mistral was actually named Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, but took her pen name from the Italian and French poets Gabriele D'Annunzio and Frédéric Mistral respectively. At first a prominent educator, she wrote "Sonnets of Death" (1914) after the suicide of her fiancé. Those sonnets later appeared in her most famous collection, Desolation (1922). A native Chilean, she served as a diplomat both in the United States and Europe. Langston Hughes translated a portion of Mistral's poetry into English just after she died.

Casey Stengel

(1889-1975; manager) He managed the Yankees to ten pennants and seven championships, including a record five in a row from 1949 to 1953. The "Old Perfessor" did not use a set lineup or pitching rotation, instead using a bewildering number of platoon arrangements. Somehow this did not undermine his defense, as Stengel's Yankees lead the league in double plays six times. Remembered as a player for his two game-winning homeruns, one an inside-the-parker, against the Yankees in the 1923 World Series, off the field his vaudevillian personality involved him in many famous incidents. When in 1958 he was called in front of the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly to testify on why baseball should be exempt from antitrust regulation, he testified with an hour's worth of classic "Stengelese." When the baffled politicians let Stengel go and called on Mickey Mantle to answer their questions, he replied, "My views are about the same as Casey's."

Eddie Rickenbacker

(1890-1973) Before becoming a pilot, he achieved fame as a race car driver; "Fast Eddie" competed in the Indianapolis 500 on four separate occasions. During World War I, he joined the U.S. Army as a driver, but was admitted to flight school with the help of Colonel Billy Mitchell, and went on to win the Medal of Honor and finish as the top American ace of the war, with 26 kills. Rickenbacker bought the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 1927 and Eastern Airlines in 1938. While on a military mission in the Pacific in 1942, Rickenbacker's plane crashed, but he and all but one crewman survived a brutal 24-day ordeal aboard small life rafts.

Sergei Prokofiev

(1891-1953). He wrote seven symphonies, of which the First ("Classical," 1917) is the most notable. While in Chicago, he premiered the opera The Love for Three Oranges, based on Italian commedia dell'arte. He moved to Paris in 1922, where he composed works for Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, including The Prodigal Son. In 1936 he returned to the USSR, where he completed the popular children's work Peter and the Wolf and the score for the film Alexander Nevsky. When Stalin denounced Prokofiev as "decadent," the composer was forced to write obsequious tributes to the premier. Prokofiev survived Stalin, but only by a few hours; both died on March 5, 1953.

Manfred von Richthofen

(1892-1918) Better known as the "Red Baron," he was credited with shooting down 80 enemy aircraft, making him the top overall ace of World War I. Richthofen's personal command, Jagdgeschwader 1, became known as "Richthofen's Flying Circus" due to the variety of colors used on its planes. Richthofen died on April 21, 1918, when he was shot aboard his red Fokker triplane; though the Royal Air Force credited Canadian ace Roy Brown with the kill, it is more likely that he was brought down by ground fire from Australian troops in the trenches.

Walter Hagen

(1892-1969) Nicknamed "The Haig," he was the first great pro golfer, appearing in over 2,500 exhibitions. A five-time PGA Champion, including four straight from 1924 to 1927, he won eleven majors overall, and he was known most for his showmanship and his ability to recover from poor shots with spectacular ones. Hagen captained the U.S. Ryder Cup team six of the first seven times the event was held.

Louis de Broglie

(1892-1987) His work quantifying the wave-particle duality of quantum mechanics earned him the 1929 Nobel Prize in Physics. His doctoral thesis, which proposed that all particles have a characteristic wavelength dependent on their momentum, was so groundbreaking that the reviewers passed it directly to Albert Einstein, who endorsed it. In opposition to the probabilistic interpretation of quantum mechanics, de Broglie later worked to define a purely causal interpretation, but his work remained unfinished until David Bohm refined it in the 1950s.

Bill Tilden

(1893-1953). Between 1920 and 1925, he was almost unstoppable: He won six straight U.S. championships and took Wimbledon both times he played. He was nicknamed "Big Bill" for two reasons: He stood 6-foot-2 with his trademark "cannonball" serve and he faced "Little Bill" Johnston in six out of seven U.S. finals. In all, he won ten majors (seven U.S., three Wimbledon) and turned professional in 1930 — winning a pro title at age 42 and competing in barnstorming tours until he was 50. Tilden also loved the theater; he performed in several Broadway shows (including the lead in "Dracula"), but lost a lot of money backing failed ventures.

Jimmy Doolittle

(1896-1993) He served as a flight instructor for the U.S. Army during World War I, and after the war became a celebrated race pilot, reaching a world-record speed of 296 miles per hour in 1932. Rejoining the military after Pearl Harbor, he personally led the "Doolittle Raid," in which 16 B-25 bombers took off from the aircraft carrier USS Hornet and bombed the Japanese home islands in April 1942. Following the raid, he commanded the Eighth Air Force that launched massive bombing raids against Germany.

Wiley Post

(1898-1935) In 1931, him and navigator Harold Gatty completed a circumnavigation of the globe aboard the Winnie Mae, an experience that the two wrote about in Around the World in Eight Days. Two years later, he became the first solo pilot to complete an around-the-world trip. He then began investigating the possibility of high-altitude flight and, using a pressurized suit of his own design, reached a height of 50,000 feet and may have been the first to encounter and use the jet stream. Today, Post is mainly remembered for the circumstances of his death; while flying through Alaska with world-famous humorist Will Rogers as his passenger, Post crashed near Point Barrow, Alaska, and both men died.

George Gershwin

(1898-1937). Known at first for producing popular songs and musicals with his older brother Ira, he successfully melded jazz and popular music with classical forms, most famously the Rhapsody in Blue (1924), the Concerto in F for Piano and Orchestra (1925), and the folk opera Porgy and Bess (1935), based on a story by DuBose Heyward. Gershwin's first major hit was 1919's "Swanee," sung by Al Jolson, and his 1931 musical Of Thee I Sing was the first musical to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Gershwin died of a brain tumor at age 38.

Miguel Asturias

(1899-1974, Guatemala; Nobel 1967): He left his native Guatemala in 1923 to study in Paris. There he discovered Mayan mythology, and translated the Popol Vuh into Spanish; the theme would pervade his work, such as 1963's Mulata de tal. He most famous novel, El señor presidente (1946), was a satire against the oppressive Guatalemalan dictatorship. Asturias also completed a trilogy that blasted exploitation by the American-led United Fruit Company, and the short-story collection Weekend in Guatemala (1956), based on the CIA-led overthrow of president Jacobo Arbenz's liberal government.

Jorge Luis Borges

(1899-1986, Argentina): One-quarter English, he learned that language before he learned Spanish. Educated in Europe during World War I, he met a circle of avant-garde poets in Spain, which inspired him to found the ultraismo movement and publish the collection Fervor of Buenos Aires (1923) when he returned to Argentina. While working in a library, Borges developed his greatest short stories, collected in A Universal History of Infamy (1935), Ficciones (1944), and The Aleph (1949). By his fifties, a disorder inherited from his father had taken Borges's eyesight, but in 1962 he completed the influential story collection Labyrinths.

Aaron Copland

(1900-1990). At first a modernist, he was the first American student of Nadia Boulanger in Paris in the 1920s, where he finished his Organ Symphony and Music for the Theater. By the 1930s, Copland turned to simple themes, especially the American West: El Salón Mexico was followed by the ballets Billy the Kid, Rodeo, and Appalachian Spring (1944), the last containing the Shaker hymn "Simple Gifts." his Third Symphony contained his Fanfare for the Common Man, while Lincoln Portrait featured spoken portions of Abraham Lincoln's writings. Copland wrote several educational books, beginning with 1939's What to Listen For in Music.

Enrico Fermi

(1901-1954) He is best known to the public as a main contributor to the Manhattan Project. His work with statistical physics laid the groundwork for modern electronics and solid-state technologies. He applied the Pauli exclusion principle to subatomic particles to create Fermi-Dirac statistics, which accurately predicted the low-temperature behavior of electrons. Particles that obey Fermi-Dirac statistics are called fermions in his honor. Fermi also suggested the existence of the neutrino in order to balance nuclear beta-decay chains.

Werner Heisenberg

(1901-1976) He is most known for his matrix interpretation of quantum theory, which constructs observable quantities as operators that act on a system. His famous uncertainty principle (better translated, however, as "indeterminacy principle") states that the more accurately an object's position can be observed, the less accurately its momentum can. This is because shorter wavelengths of light (used as a sort of measuring-stick) have higher energies, and disrupt a particle's momentum more strongly. Heisenberg earned the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the allotropic forms of hydrogen.

Margaret Mead

(1901-1978) For her best-known work, Coming of Age in Samoa, she interviewed young girls on the island Ta'u, which led her to conclude that adolescence in Samoan society was much less stressful than in the United States; in The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead, Derek Freeman claimed that she was lied to in those interviews. She also studied three tribes in New Guinea — the Arapesh, Mundugumor, and Tchambuli — for her book on Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies.

"Bobby" Jones

(1902-1971) An Atlanta native, and the greatest amateur golfer of all time, he never turned pro, but won thirteen major championships in eight years, including four U.S. Amateurs. In 1930 he won what was then considered the Grand Slam, taking both the British and U.S. Amateur and Open Championships. After that season, Jones retired from golf to practice law, but helped design a golf course in Augusta, Georgia that became the permanent site of the Masters in 1934.

Gene Sarazen

(1902-1999) Born Eugene Saraceni, he came to prominence in the early 1920s, winning the PGA Championship in 1922 and 1923, as well as the U.S. Open in 1922. Bobby Jones and Walter Hagen then dominated golf until the early 1930s, when Sarazen returned to form, winning four more majors. At the 1935 Masters, he carded an albatross (three under par) from the fairway of the par-5 15th hole to force a playoff; when he won, Sarazen became the first golfer to complete the modern career Grand Slam.

George Gamow

(1904-1968) He was one of the first to explain the implications of the Big Bang theory of cosmology. He correctly predicted the abundance of hydrogen and helium in the early universe, nicknamed Alpher-Bethe-Gamow theory (an intentional pun on the first three letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha, beta, and gamma, for which the otherwise unrelated physicist Hans Bethe was included), and also theorized that the the heat from the Big Bang would still be visible as the cosmic microwave background radiation. Although Gamow received no Nobel for this prediction, the CMB's discoverers, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, as well as two later observers, John Mather and George Smoot, did receive Nobels.

Pablo Neruda

(1904-1973, Chile; Nobel 1971): Born Neftali Reyes, he adopted the surname of the 19th-century Czech poet Jan Neruda. Gabriela Mistral was the head of his school in the small city Temuco. In 1923 his best-known work, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, was published, which led to diplomatic appointments. As a penniless consul in Burma in the 1930s, he wrote the surrealist collection Residence on Earth. He served in the Chilean senate in the 1940s, though government opponents forced him into exile over his Communist views. Crossing the Andes on horseback inspired his epic Canto general (1950). He died of cancer days after his friend Salvador Allende was deposed.

Treaty of Portsmouth

(1905) ended the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905). It was signed at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Maine after negotiations brokered by Theodore Roosevelt (for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize). Japan had dominated the war and received an indemnity, the Liaodong Peninsula in Manchuria, and half of Sakhalin Island, but the treaty was widely condemned in Japan because the public had expected more.

Howard Hughes

(1905-1976) Subject of the 2004 film The Aviator, he was a skilled aircraft pilot and designer who in the 1930s set speed records for flights across the United States and around the world. His most famous plane was the H-4 Hercules, or "Spruce Goose," a massive wooden plane that to this day holds the record for longest wingspan on an operational craft. Meant to carry as many as 750 troops, Hughes himself was the pilot during its lone flight, a one-minute hop in 1947. Also a movie producer, Hughes is widely remembered for the various eccentricities, such as a pathological fear of germs and a refusal to cut his hair or nails, that he exhibited late in life.

Helen Wills Moods

(1905-1998). A California native nicknamed "Little Miss Poker Face" because her expression rarely changed on the court, Her play contrasted with that of the other great woman of the era, the emotional Suzanne Lenglen of France, though they met only once (as Lenglen turned pro). Nonetheless, Wills dominated her competition; between 1927 and 1932 she did not even drop a set! She won 19 major singles crowns — out of 22 entered — including eight Wimbledons, six U.S., and four French championships, in 1928 becoming the first player to win three Grand Slams in one season. Wills also swept the singles and doubles gold medals at the 1924 Paris Olympics.

Dmitri Shostakovich

(1906-1975). His work was emblematic of both the Soviet regime and his attempts to survive under its oppression. his operas, such as The Nose (1928) and Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, were well received at first—until Joseph Stalin severely criticized his work in Pravda in 1936. Fearful for his security, Shostakovich wrote several conciliatory pieces (Fifth, Seventh/Leningrad, and Twelfth Symphonies) in order to get out of trouble. He made enemies, however, with his Thirteenth Symphony ("Babi Yar"). Based on the Yevgeny Yevtushenko poem, Babi Yar condemned anti-Semitism in both Nazi Germany and the USSR.

Kurt Godel

(1906-1978, Austrian) was a logician best known for his two incompleteness theorems, which state that if a formal logical system is powerful enough to express ordinary arithmetic, it must contain statements that are true yet unprovable. Gödel developed paranoia late in life and eventually refused to eat because he feared his food had been poisoned; he died of starvation.

Simone de Beauvoir

(1908-1986) She was a French writer and philosopher perhaps best known for her feminist treatise The Second Sex (1949). In that work, de Beauvoir argued that "womanhood" is defined by its differences from masculinity, which is perceived as normal. The Second Sex contains the famous line, "One is not born a woman, but becomes one." The book is divided into two parts, titled "Facts and Myths" and "Lived Experience." One fact about de Beauvoir often mentioned in quiz bowl questions is that she was a lover of Jean-Paul Sartre. She is often considered one of the pioneers of "second-wave" feminism, which emphasizes sexuality, the workplace, and other forms of inequality over the first-wave focus on voting and property rights.

Claude Levi-Strauss

(1908-2009) In the 1930s, he did fieldwork with the Nambikwara people of Brazil, which formed the basis for his thesis on "The Elementary Structures of Kinship." He held the chair in social anthropology at the Collèege de France from 1959 to 1982, during which time he published such books as The Savage Mind and a tetralogy about world mythology whose volumes include The Raw and the Cooked. He pioneered in applying the structuralist methods of Ferdinand de Saussure to anthropology, which led him to study cultures as sets of binary oppositions.

John Cage

(1912-1992). An American student of Arnold Schoenberg, he took avant-garde to a new level, and may be considered a Dada composer because he believed in aleatory, or "chance" music. His Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (1951) used twelve radios tuned to different stations; the composition depended on what was on the radio at that time. The following year's 4′33″ required a pianist to sit at the piano for that length of time and then close it; audience noise and silence created the music. Cage also invented the prepared piano, in which screws, wood, rubber bands, and other items are attached to piano strings in order to create a percussion sound.

Ben Hogan

(1912-1997) The PGA Tour's leading money winner from 1940-1942 and in 1946 and 1948, two events interrupted his playing career: service in World War II and a near-fatal 1949 head-on car accident. After each, though, he rose to the top of his game; he won nine majors overall (six after the accident), including four U.S. Opens. In 1953 he accomplished a feat matched only by Tiger Woods: winning three modern major championships in one season (the Masters, U.S. Open, and British Open).

Sam Snead

(1912-2002) No golfer has won more PGA Tournaments than his 81, and he amassed 135 victories worldwide. Nicknamed "Slammin' Sammy," he won seven major professional championships between 1942 and 1954, but he is known more for the one he never won: the U.S. Open. In 1939 Snead led the Open for 71 holes but lost on the last hole when he took an eight. In the 1960s and '70s he won a record six Senior PGA Championships.

Benjamin Britten

(1913-1976). Reviver of the opera in the U.K., most notably with Peter Grimes (1945), the story of a fisherman who kills two of his apprentices. he broke through with Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge (1937), a tribute to his composition teacher, and wrote incidental music for works by his friend W. H. Auden. With his companion, the tenor Peter Pears, Britten founded the Aldeburgh Festival of Music and wrote operas such as Billy Budd, The Turn of the Screw, and Death in Venice. Britten's non-operatic works include The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra (1946) and War Requiem (1961), based on the anti-war poems of Wilfred Owen, who was killed during World War I.

Octavio Paz

(1914-1998, Mexico; Nobel 1990): A prominent poet and essayist, Paz supported leftist causes in Mexico; he fought briefly for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. He published the poetry collection Luna silvestre at age 19, and his 584-line poem The Sun Stone deals with the planet Venus, an important symbol to the Aztecs. While studying in Los Angeles, Paz observed flamboyantly-dressed Mexican-American pachucos ("zoot-suiters"), who inspired him to write about Mexico and its Native American/mestizo heritage in his pivotal essay collection The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950). Another prose work, In the Light of India (1997), reflected Paz's part-(East) Indian heritage.

Joe DiMaggio

(1914-1999; center field) left the San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League and joined New York for the 1936 season, where he helped Lou Gehrig drive the Yankees to their fifth championship and the first of nine that he would win with the Bombers. "The Yankee Clipper" won three Most Valuable Player awards (1939, 1941, 1947), two batting titles (1939, 1940), and two homer titles (1937, 1948). In 1941 "Joltin' Joe" hit safely in 56 consecutive games, a record that has never been challenged (he once hit in 61 straight for the Seals in 1933). His career totals are abbreviated because of his military service (1943-1945) and because of the distance to Yankee Stadium's left-field power alley, in those days known as Death Valley. He married Marilyn Monroe in 1954, but they divorced after nine months.

Thor Heyerdahl

(1914-2002) In 1947, him and five companions sailed across the Pacific Ocean — going from Peru to the Tuamotu Islands — on a balsa-wood raft named Kon-Tiki, after the Incan sun god Kon-Tiki Viracocha. He later built two boats from papyrus (Ra, which failed in 1969, and Ra II, which succeeded in 1970) to sail across the Atlantic Ocean. These voyages demonstrated the possibility that ancient people could have migrated around the globe using only primitive rafts.

Treaty of Brest-Litovsk

(1918) was a "separate peace" signed by the Bolshevik government of the new USSR and Germany. The USSR needed to make peace to focus on defeating the "Whites" (royalists) in the Russian Civil War, and it gave up Ukraine, Belarus, and the three Baltic countries after Germany invaded, an outcome worse than a German offer which chief Soviet negotiator Leon Trotsky had rejected. The treaty was negotiated in Brest (in what is now Belarus) and was nullified by the subsequent Treaty of Versailles following Germany's defeat.

Richard Feynman

(1918-1988). He developed a mathematical formalism called the path integral formulation of quantum theory that utilized the "sum over histories," taking into account all possible paths a particle could take. This constituted the creation of quantum electrodynamics and earned him the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics. He also used the sum over histories in developing Feynman diagrams, which illustrate the interaction of subatomic particles. Aside from being a prolific physicist, Feynman was also an accomplished bongo player and sketch artist.

Betty Friedan

(1921-2006) She was a writer and activist best known as the author of The Feminine Mystique (1963) and as the most prominent co-founder of the National Organization for Women. In 1957, Smith conducted a survey of graduates of her alma mater, Smith College, and found that many of them were unhappy with their lives. Friedan labeled this general unhappiness "the problem with no name." She then began writing The Feminine Mystique, in which she argued that being a housewife is unfulfilling and advocated for women to seek education and work outside the home.

Helen Gurley Brown

(1922-2012) He was best known as the editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazine from 1965 until 1997. Gurley Brown first came to prominence when she argued in Sex and the Single Girl (1962) that women ought to achieve financial security and pursue sexual relationships prior to marriage. As editor of Cosmopolitan, she asserted that women could "have it all," by which she meant love, sex, and money.

Chuck Yeager

(1923-present) During World War II, he served in the U.S. Army Air Corps, earning "ace in a day" status by shooting down five German aircraft in one mission. On October 14, 1947, Yeager — piloting a Bell X-1 plane nicknamed (in tribute to his wife) Glamorous Glennis — became the first pilot to exceed the speed of sound in level flight. Profiled in Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff, Yeager re-set the speed record at more than Mach 2 in 1953, and he remained active in the Air Force, even flying combat missions over Vietnam in his mid-40s.

Yogi Berra

(1925-2015; catcher) was notorious for swinging at bad pitches, but his bat collided with them often enough to hit a catcher's record 306 homeruns that lasted for more than 30 years (since passed by Johnny Bench, Carlton Fisk, and Mike Piazza). His hitting, fielding, and ability to lead the Yankee pitching staff earned him three MVP awards (1951, 1954, 1955). He also stared in the World Series, collecting 71 hits while playing on 10 championship teams, both records. Hired as Yankee manager in 1964, he lead the Yanks to the pennant but was fired following their Series loss to the Cardinals. His 1973 pennant with the Mets made him the only manager besides Joe McCarthy to take home the flag in both leagues. Like Casey Stengel, he was famous for his quotes, including "It aint' over 'til it's over," "It's deja vu all over again," and "Little League baseball is a very good thing because it keeps the parents off the streets."

Clifford Geertz

(1926-2006) He is best known for his work in symbolic anthropology, a view that he expounded in his book The Interpretation of Cultures. In that book, he introduced the term "thick description" to describe his method of analyzing behavior within its social context. One such "thick description" appears in his essay "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight," in which Geertz discusses cockfighting as a symbolic display of a certain kind of masculinity.

Elizabeth II

(1926-present, r. 1952-present) House of Windsor. Representative of the modern ceremonial monarchy, she and her husband "Prince" Philip Mountbatten have traveled the globe representing British interests. Marital failures by her sons Charles, Prince of Wales and Andrew have plagued her reign. She superseded Victoria as the longest-reigning British monarch.

Whitey Ford

(1926-present; pitcher) was called "The Chairman of the Board" because of the cool, corporate-like efficiency of his pitching style. His 236 wins against 106 defeats yields a .690 winning percentage, third best, and first for a pitcher with 200 or more victories. In the 1960, 1961, and 1962 World Series, he pitched 33 consecutive scoreless innings, breaking Babe Ruth's World Series record of 29 ⅔ innings of shutout ball. His other World Series records include wins (10), losses (8), innings pitched (146), hits (132), bases on balls (34), and strikeouts (94). Under Casey Stengel he was commonly rested against poor teams so that he could be used against contenders (or in relief), making his 2.75 career ERA even more impressive. He won the Cy Young award in 1961.

Billy Martin

(1928-1989; second base and manager). The alert, combative second baseman for the Yankees from 1950 to 1957, he made a famous catch in the seventh game of the 1952 World Series when Jackie Robinson lifted a bases-loaded pop-up near the pitcher's mound. In 1953 he was named World Series MVP after batting .500 and winning the final game with a single in the bottom of the ninth. As Yankee manager, he won two pennants and one World Series>/span> (1977). Strung extremely tight — he almost came to blows with Reggie Jackson during a nationally televised game — his barroom brawls and arguments with the Yankee front office repeatedly got him fired (and re-hired). His five terms managing one club is tied for the major league record.

Carlos Fuentes

(1928-2012, Mexico): Though born into a well-to-do family, Fuentes often dealt with the betrayed ideals from the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the subject of both his first novel, Where the Air is Clear (1958), and his most successful book, The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962). Other notable novels include Terra nostra, set during the reign of King Philip II of Spain, and The Old Gringo, which portrays Ambrose Bierce's last days in Mexico. Fuentes also wrote absurdist plays and essay collections on Mexican and American art and literature.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

(1928-2014, Colombia; Nobel Prize for Literature 1982): The master of magic realism, his birthplace, Aracataca was the model for the fictional town Macondo. The town played a prominent role in many of his works, such as Leaf Storm and his seminal novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), which details the decline of the Buendía family over seven generations. A newspaper journalist in the 1950s, García Marquez exposed a naval scandal (chronicled in The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor). Other prominent novels include In Evil Hour, Love in the Time of Cholera, and The General in His Labyrinth, a depiction of Simón Bolívar's final years.

Lateran treaty

(1929) created the independent country of the Vatican City, made Catholicism the state religion of Italy (ended in 1984), and determined the proper remuneration for Church property taken by Italy. It was signed by Benito Mussolini and a representative of Pope Pius XI in the namesake papal residence, and ended the so-called "Roman Question" that arose out of the unification of Italy and the dissolution of the Papal States.

Arnold Palmer

(1929-2016) A native of Latrobe, Pennsylvania, Palmer made golf popular with the masses, as his fans were known as "Arnie's Army." He won seven majors, including four Masters, and was the first golfer to earn one million dollars on the PGA Tour. Later he became one of the stars of the Senior Tour, winning the Senior PGA Open in 1980 and 1981. In 2002 he played in his last competitive Masters.

Mickey Mantle

(1931-1995; center field) was born to play baseball — his father named him for Hall of Fame catcher Mickey Cochrane — but his left leg wasn't. In high school it was nearly amputated because of osteomyelitis, the first of his many leg problems. Known as the "Commerce Comet" because of his speed and because he grew up in Commerce, Oklahoma, he became the Yankee center fielder following DiMaggio's retirement in 1951. Mantle played on twelve pennant winners and seven World Championship clubs. He holds World Series records for home runs (18), RBI (40), runs (42), walks (43), extra-base hits (26), and total bases (123). During the regular season, his switch-hitting powered 536 homeruns and won him four homer titles (1955, 1956, 1958, 1960), three MVP awards (1956, 1957, 1962), and a triple crown (1956). In 1961 he and teammate Roger Maris both had a chance of passing Ruth's 1927 mark (60), but injuries forced him out of the race (Maris hit 61). He was elected to the Hall of Fame alongside Whitey Ford in 1974.

Gloria Steinem

(1934-present) She is a journalist who founded and edited Ms. magazine. For an article in Show magazine in 1963, she went undercover as a Playboy bunny. Having had an abortion herself, she became a prominent advocate of abortion rights. She worked as a writer for New York magazine when she founded Ms., a feminist magazine devoted to women's issues. The magazine also popularized the use of the title "Ms." to address women regardless of marital status. Steinem also wrote the book Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (1983), and the phrase "a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle" is often attributed to her.

Gary Player

(1935-present) The most successful non-American golfer in history, this South African has won nine majors. When Player took his only U.S. Open crown in 1965, he not only became the first non-American to win that tournament in 45 years, but he also became one of three (now five) golfers (along with Nicklaus, Woods, Hogan, and Gene Sarazen) to win all four modern Grand Slam events. Nicknames include "The Black Knight" for his dress and "Mr. Fitness" for his devotion to exercise.

Mario Vargas Llosa

(1936-present, Peru): While attending military school in Lima, he wrote the play The Escape of the Inca (1952), but the harsh treatment he received there was the basis for his novel The Time of the Hero. Conversation in the Cathedral (1969) was Vargas Llosa's serious take on living under the dictatorship of Manuel Odría, while in 1977 he published the lighter, autobiographical Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, about soap operas. Other important works include The War of the End of the World and A Fish in the Water, which discusses his political career; Vargas Llosa ran for president of Peru in 1990 but was defeated by Alberto Fujimori.

Rod Laver

(1938-present). Australia produced many talented players (Emerson, Rosewall, Newcombe, Stolle, Hoad) but he was the best of all. He weighed just 145 pounds in his playing days but his massive left arm generated incredible topspin shots. The only player to win the Grand Slam twice — in 1962 as an amateur, and in 1969 as a professional — Laver took 11 major singles titles overall. Turning pro in 1963, Laver won five U.S. Pro Championships; had he been allowed to play the majors from 1963 to 1967, he likely would hold the wins record instead of Pete Sampras. Martina Navratilova and Sampras both idolized Laver, the first to earn $1 million in a career.

Lee Trevino

(1939-present) Nicknamed "Supermex" for his Mexican-American heritage, he came from a poor Dallas family and served in the Marines, but came from nowhere to win the 1968 U.S. Open. He won six majors: the U.S. Open, the British Open, and the PGA Championship twice each, his second PGA in 1984 at age 44. That last win was most impressive because it came after the 1975 Western Open, where Trevino was struck by lightning on the golf course.

Jack Nicklaus

(1940-present) Nicknamed "The Golden Bear," he won the U.S. Amateur twice (1959 and 1961), and was the 1961 NCAA champion at Ohio State. He took his first major the following year at the U.S. Open, beating Arnold Palmer on Palmer's home course. He became the youngest Masters champion at the time in 1963, and 23 years later became the oldest champion with a final round 65 in 1986. He has a record 18 major pro championships overall, including six Masters, five PGA Championships, four U.S. Opens, and three British Opens. Nicklaus is still somewhat active on the Senior PGA Tour, and as a golf course architect.

Margaret Smith Court

(1942-present). The most prolific winner, male or female, she amassed 62 Grand Slam titles, 24 of them in singles (3 Wimbledon, 5 French, 5 U.S., and 11 in her native Australia). Billie Jean King called her "The Arm" because of her long reach, aided by her height of nearly six feet. In 1970 she became the second woman (after Maureen Connolly) to win the Grand Slam, taking 21 singles championships overall that year; less impressive was her 1973 loss to 55-year old Bobby Riggs. Court did defeat King, Riggs's nemesis, 22 of 32 times. She retired in 1977 and became a lay minister.

Isabel Allende

(1942-present, Chile): Actually born in Peru, at age three she moved to her mother's native Chile. A successful news reporter in her twenties, she and her family fled to Venezuela after General Augusto Pinochet deposed her uncle Salvador Allende, setting up a dictatorship. Her formal literary career began at age 40, when she published The House of the Spirits, a magical-realist work that chronicles several generations of the Trueba family. Other works of fiction include the short-story collection Eva Luna (1989) and Paula (1995), which detailed Allende's care for her terminally ill daughter.

Arthur Ashe

(1943-1993). He once claimed that he would consider himself a failure if he were remembered only for tennis. The first black man to win either the U.S. Championship (1968) or Wimbledon (1975), he was also the first American tennis player to earn over $100,000 in one year (1970). The author of Hard Road to Glory, a history of black athletes, Ashe announced in 1992 that tainted blood from a 1983 heart surgery had given him the AIDS virus. Arthur Ashe Stadium, the current home of the U.S. Open, was named for him in 1997.

Burt Rutan

(1943-present) A legendary aircraft designer, he gained worldwide attention in 1986 when his Voyager plane, piloted by his brother Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager (no relation to Chuck Yeager), completed a non-stop, around-the-world flight without refueling. More recently, Rutan designed the Global Flyer, aboard which Steve Fossett made a solo, non-stop circumnavigation without refueling in 2005, and SpaceShipOne, which in 2004 won the $10 million Ansari X Prize by making the first privately funded space flights.

Billie Jean King

(1943-present). Her records themselves are impressive: 12 Grand Slam singles wins (including six Wimbledons) and 20 overall Wimbledon titles. King, however, is best known for advancing women's athletics. Her brother, Randy Moffitt, pitched for the San Francisco Giants; she herself reached a #4 world ranking in 1960 and turned pro eight years later. At the time, prize money for women was paltry, so she co-founded the Virginia Slims Tour, and in 1971 became the first female athlete to earn $100,000 in a year. Two years later, in front of over 30,000 at the Astrodome, she whipped Bobby Riggs in the "Battle of the Sexes." King retired in 1983, but not before winning a singles tournament at age 39.

Alice Walker

(1944-present) She is best known as the author of the novel The Color Purple (1982), but she is also renowned for her non-fiction writing about women's issues. She joined the writing staff for Ms. magazine, for which she wrote "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" (1975), stimulating interest in the then-forgotten Harlem Renaissance writer. Walker collected her critical essays on women's fiction in In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (1983). Among other arguments, she memorably contrasted Virginia Woolf and Phyllis Wheatley, noting that the latter had none of the advantages Woolf considered necessary in "A Room of One's Own." Along with Maxine Hong Kingston and other female authors, Walker was arrested in March 2003 for protesting the Iraq War on the grounds that it would unfairly punish Iraqi women and children.

Reggie Jackson

(1946-present; right field) Known as "Mr. October" because of his World Series slugging, in the sixth game of the 1977 World Series he hit three homeruns off three different pitchers on three consecutive swings of his bat. He and Babe Ruth, who did it twice, are the only players to homer three times in one World Series game. His .755 slugging average is the highest in World Series history. Soon after joining the Yankees in 1977 he created a sensation by proclaiming himself "the straw that stirs the drink." The wild atmosphere surrounding Jackson and the Yankees was captured by a teammate in a book called The Bronx Zoo. Jackson won four home run titles (1973, 1975, 1980, 1983), hit 563 home runs, and set a major-league record for strikeouts (2,597).

Tom Watson

(1949-present) He became the major rival to Jack Nicklaus in the second half of the Golden Bear's career. His greatest achievements were at the British Open, a tournament he won five times between 1975 and 1983. He took eight major championships overall.

I Love Lucy

(1951-1957): During its six-season run, this show was one of America's most watched shows. It centered on Lucy Ricardo, played by comedian Lucille Ball, and her husband Ricky Ricardo, who was played by Ball's real-life husband Desi Arnaz. The show's other major characters were the Ricardos' neighbors, Fred and Ethel Mertz. In one of the show's most famous episodes, Lucy was hired to do a TV commercial for a health tonic called "Vitameatavegamin"; after drinking too much of it, Lucy becomes inebriated and is unable to pronounce the word correctly.

Andrew Wiles

(1953-present, British) is best known for proving the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture that all rational semi-stable elliptic curves are modular forms. When combined with work already done by other mathematicians, this immediately implied Fermat's last theorem (see above).

Chris Evert

(1954-present). Queen of the Clay Courts, she won the French Open a record seven times and rolled off a 125-match win streak on the surface. As a 15-year old, she upset Margaret Court, who had just won the Grand Slam. 1974 was the first of a record 13 straight years in which she won a major — several of them hard-fought against her rival, Martina Navratilova. In all, Evert took 18 Grand Slam singles titles, and was the first female player to win $1 million in her career. She was married to British tennis player John Lloyd for eight years, but they divorced in 1987, and she then wed Olympic skier Andy Mill.

The Honeymooners

(1955-1956): This show is considered the first TV spinoff, as it centered on a character — Brooklyn bus driver Ralph Kramden — who had previously been introduced on The Jackie Gleason Show. Ralph's wife Alice was frequently the recipient of his bombastic threats, such as "Bang zoom, straight to the moon!". Like I Love Lucy, the show also centrally featured a neighbor couple — in this case, Ed and Trixie Norton. Although The Honeymooners is now considered a classic sitcom, it was not very popular at the time, and only 39 episodes aired in its original one-season run.

Martina Navratilova

(1956-present). Born in Prague, she defected to the United States in 1975 because the Czech Tennis Federation had taken most of her earnings. A bit heavy early in her career, she won the first two of her nine Wimbledons in 1978-79 but subsequent losses led her to pursue a grueling fitness regimen. This paid off: She won 18 singles Grand Slams (58 overall), 167 total singles titles, and even more doubles crowns, many with partner Pam Shriver. A Wimbledon finalist at 37, Navratilova retired from singles in 1994, but returned to play doubles in 2000. In 2003 she tied Billie Jean King with 20 overall Wimbledons, taking the mixed doubles at age 46.

Bjorn Borg

(1956-present). On both grass and clay in the late 1970s, resistance to this player was futile; he won Wimbledon five straight years (1976-80) and the French Open six times, for a total of 11 majors. Borg got started at age nine, after his father won a tennis racket in a ping-pong tournament and gave it to him. He took his first French in 1974 and dominated through 1981, when John McEnroe finally knocked him off at Wimbledon. Borg then inexplicably retired at 26; he tried an unsuccessful comeback in the early 1990s. Despite his great success, Borg never won the U.S. Open (reaching the final four times). He played at the Australian Open only once, usually preferring to take the winter months off.

Mr. Ed

(1958-1966): This classic sitcom centered on the title talking horse — a palomino whose voice was provided by Allan Lane — and his owner, the architect Wilbur Post. Much of the show's humor derived from the fact that Mr. Ed would solely speak to Wilbur, which naturally led to hijinks. Mr. Ed should not be confused with Francis the Talking Mule, who would solely speak to his owner Peter Stirling; he appeared in a number of film comedies during the 1950s.

The Twilight Zone

(1959-1964): Rod Serling created this anthology series, whose iconic opening credits featured a theme composed by Bernard Herrmann and a narration warning that the viewer was "about to enter another dimension." One of its most famous episodes, "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," starred a young William Shatner as a salesman who becomes convinced that a gremlin nobody else can see is trying to crash the airplane on which he is flying.

John McEnroe

(1959-present). Though perhaps best known for his fiery temper and abuse of referees (with taunts like "You can't be serious!"), he was the dominant player of the early 1980s. As a 17-year old amateur qualifier, he made the semifinals of Wimbledon, and in 1979 he won the first of three straight U.S. Opens. He almost ended Borg's run of Wimbledons in a five-set thriller in 1980, but succeeded the following year. In 1984, McEnroe compiled an 82-3 record, winning Wimbledon and his fourth U.S. Open, for a total of seven majors. An outstanding doubles player as well, he won 77 titles, many with partner Peter Fleming. He also played in the Davis Cup 12 times, captaining the U.S. team in 2000.

Don Mattingly

(1961-present; first base) was the best first baseman in baseball for most of the 1980's. He holds the major league record for most grand slams in a season (6 in 1987, tied by Travis Hafner in 2006). He twice led the league in hits (1984 and 1985), won the league batting title by edging out teammate Dave Winfield on the final day of the 1984 season, and drove in the most runs in 1985 to win the MVP award. "Donnie Baseball" also won nine Gold Gloves, but World Series glory eluded "the Hitman." His Yankees never played in the Fall Classic. He managed the Dodgers from 2011 to 2015, and as of 2016 is the manager of the Marlins.

Steffi Graf

(1969-present). Her most devastating shot earned her the moniker "Fraulein Forehand." She turned pro at age 13 and steadily rose through the rankings, garnering the #1 ranking and her first major (French) in 1987. The following year, Graf made history by winning the Grand Slam and the gold medal at the Seoul Olympics, the only player ever to go 5-for-5 in one year. Seven Wimbledons, six French, five U.S., and four Australians add up to 22 major career singles crowns — the last coming at the French in 1999 after two years of major back injuries. Graf retired that fall, and is now raising her son Jaden with her husband Andre Agassi.

The Mary Tyler Moore Show

(1970-1977): This sitcom centered on Mary Richards, a young woman who moves to Minneapolis, where she goes to work in the newsroom at WJM-TV. No fewer than three supporting characters eventually got their own spinoffs: Phyllis, which starred Cloris Leachman; Rhoda, which starred Valerie Harper; and Lou Grant, which — unlike both the other two spinoffs and The Mary Tyler Moore Show itself — was a drama rather than a sitcom. The show is considered groundbreaking for its portrayal of Mary as an independent single woman.

Andre Agassi

(1970-present). His father boxed for Iran in the 1948 and 1952 Olympics; his own Olympic exploits included the 1996 tennis gold. Born in Las Vegas, he reached the world's #3 ranking at age 18 but was better known for his image than for his play. Perhaps the greatest returner and baseline player ever, he won his first major on Wimbledon grass in 1992. Briefly married to Brooke Shields, he fell to #141 in the world in 1997, but after they divorced, Agassi rededicated himself to the game. In 1999 he won the French Open, becoming just the fifth man to complete the career Grand Slam. In all, Agassi has won eight major singles titles (five since 1999), and is now married to women's great Steffi Graf.

All in the family

(1971-1979): Producer Norman Lear created this sitcom, which was based on the successful British series Till Death Us Do Part. It starred Carroll O'Connor and Jean Stapleton as the central couple, Archie and Edith Bunker; Archie was notable for his prejudicial attitudes, while Edith — whom Archie would refer to as his "dingbat" — was his long-suffering wife. The show also featured Sherman Hemsley as George Jefferson, who would later be given his own spinoff, The Jeffersons, in which he and his wife "moved on up to a deluxe apartment in the sky" on the East Side of Manhattan.

Pete Sampras

(1971-present). "Pistol Pete" burst onto the scene in 1990, when he became the youngest man ever to win the U.S. Open. He would take five U.S. Opens and two Australian Opens, but his greatest accomplishments came on the Wimbledon grass. Starting in 1993 he won Wimbledon seven times in eight years, losing only to Richard Krajicek in the quarterfinals in 1996. The last Wimbledon win (2000) gave Sampras the all-time men's major record, passing Roy Emerson's 12. Married to actress Bridgette Wilson, Sampras silenced his critics (who thought he was washed up) by defeating Andre Agassi for the 2002 U.S. Open title — then he retired.

M*A*S*H

(1972-1983): Like The Mary Tyler Moore Show and All in the Family, M*A*S*H was a highly successful CBS sitcom that dealt with controversial social issues — in this case, war. Centering on the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in South Korea, it was adapted from the 1970 feature film of the same name directed by Robert Altman. Major characters included Hawkeye Pierce, a wisecracking surgeon played by Alan Alda; Sherman Potter, who was added to the show in season 4 after the previous commanding officer, Henry Blake, was killed off; and Corporal Klinger, who would dress in women's clothing in an attempt to be discharged from the army.

Derek Jeter

(1974-present; shortstop) became the starting shortstop for the Yanks in 1996, winning the Rookie of the Year Award and helping New York capture its first championship since 1978. More post-season highlights followed, including three more titles (1998, 1999, 2000), the 2000 World Series MVP award, and a controversial homer against the Baltimore Orioles in Game One of the 1996 ALCS when a twelve-year-old fan turned his fly ball into a homerun by reaching over the right-field wall to catch it. Jeter's junior-high yearbook dubbed him "most likely to play shortstop for the New York Yankees."

Tiger Woods

(1975-present) Born to an African-American father and a Thai mother, he appeared on The Mike Douglas Show with a golf club at age two. He won three straight U.S. Junior Amateurs, and then became the only golfer to win three straight U.S. Amateurs (1994-1996). In 1997 Woods became the youngest ever to win the Masters — by a whopping 12 strokes. At the 2000 U.S. Open, when he won by 15 strokes, Woods began a remarkable run of four straight major championships: British Open (by eight strokes, making him the youngest ever to complete the career Grand Slam), PGA Championship, and the 2001 Masters. Woods added a third Masters in 2002, giving him seven major pro titles.

The Camp David Accords

(1978) were negotiated at the presidential retreat Camp David by Egypt's Anwar Sadat and Israel's Menachem Begin; they were brokered by U.S. President Jimmy Carter. They led to a peace treaty the next year that returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt, guaranteed Israeli access to the Red Sea and Suez Canal, and more-or-less normalized diplomatic and economic relations between the two countries. This isolated Egypt from the other Arab countries and led to Sadat's assassination in 1981.

Venus and Serena Williams

(1980-present and 1981-present). Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe may have preceded them as trailblazing African-American players, but the sisters have taken the game to new levels and to more people. Born in Compton, California and coached from an early age by father Richard, Venus broke through first, reaching the final of the U.S. Open in 1997. Serena won a Grand Slam before Venus did (1999 U.S. Open), but Venus hit #1 by sweeping Wimbledon and the U.S. Opens in both 2000 and 2001. For a long time Serena could not beat her older sister, but that changed in 2002, when she took four straight major finals against Venus. With her 2003 win at Wimbledon, Serena now has six majors to Venus's four. On the side, both are fashion designers, while Venus also designs interiors.

The final battle of the Second Punic War, Zama

(202 BC) was fought near Carthage in what is now Tunisia. Scipio Africanus's victory at the Battle of the Great Plains in 203 BC forced Hannibal to leave Italy and return to North Africa for the final showdown. Prior to the battle, the Numidian king Masinissa switched sides, and brought his considerable cavalry force to join the Romans. This, coupled with Scipio's strategy of opening up his lines to allow Carthaginian elephants through without harming his troops, led to a complete Roman victory.

The largest battle of the Second Punic War, Cannae

(216 BC) represented one of the worst defeats in Roman history. The Carthaginians were led by Hannibal, while the Romans were led by the consuls Lucius Aemilius Paullus and Gaius Terentius Varro. Hannibal employed a double-envelopment tactic, surrounded the Roman army, and destroyed it. Although a total disaster for the Romans, it resulted in their adopting of the Fabian strategy, in which battles are avoided in favor of a war of attrition. This eventually wore down Hannibal's army, and the Carthaginians had to leave Italy.

Archimedes

(287-212 BC, Syracusan Greek) is best known for his "eureka" moment, in which he realized he could use density considerations to determine the purity of a gold crown; nonetheless, he was the preeminent mathematician of ancient Greece. He found the ratios between the surface areas and volumes of a sphere and a circumscribed cylinder, accurately estimated pi, and developed a calculus-like technique to find the area of a circle, his method of exhaustion.

Actium

(31 BC), the fleet of Octavian defeated the combined forces of Cleopatra and Mark Antony at this battle near what is now Preveza in the Ambracian Gulf of Greece. Marcus Agrippa commanded Octavian's fleet, which consisted of small, nimble Liburnian ships. Antony's fleet consisted of massive Quinqueremes, which were less mobile. Following his victory in the battle, Octavian titled himself Princeps, and later Augustus. To some, Actium signals the end of the Roman Republic.

Battle of Granicus, Issus

(333 BC) was the second major battle between Alexander the Great and the Persian Empire, and the first to feature Darius III. The battle was fought along the Pinarus River near what is now Iskenderun in Turkey's Hatay province. Before the battle, Darius was able to surprise Alexander and cut him off from the main force of Macedonians. However, the battle ended with Darius fleeing the field and the capture of his tent and family. The battle was the subject of a 1528 painting by Albrecht Altdorfer, the leader of the Danube School.

Epicurus

(341 BC-270 BC) His namesake school, Epicureanism, believed that pleasure was the highest (or only) good, and that the absence of pain (aponia) was the highest pleasure. They also believed that human happiness consisted of a kind of tranquillity known as ataraxia. Critics of Epicureanism accused his school of promoting hedonism and making selfishness into a good, though Epicureans did not believe themselves to be hedonists.

Battle of Aegopotami

(405 BC) on the Hellespont (Dardanelles) ended the Peloponnesian War and the Athenian Empire. After a setback at the Battle of Arginusae in 406 BC, the Spartans reinstated Lysander as the commander of their fleet. The result was a complete victory for Sparta; only a fraction of the Athenian fleet survived, including the general Conon, and the ship Paralus, which brought the news of defeat to Athens. Following the battle, the Spartans besieged Athens and forced its surrender.

Chordata

(44,000 species): The phylum that contains humans, Chordata is divided into three subphyla: Urochordata, the sea squirts; Cephalochordata, the lancelets, and Vertebrata, the true vertebrates, which is the most diverse subphylum. Defining traits of chordates include pharyngeal gill slits, a notochord, a post-anal tail, and a dorsal hollow nerve cord. In vertebrates, some of these structures are found only in embryonic stages. The lancelet Amphioxus (Branchiostoma) is often used as a demonstration organism in biology labs.

The naval battle at Salamis

(480 BC) was a major turning point in the Greco-Persian Wars, as it signaled the beginning of the end of Persian attempts to conquer Greece. The battle is named after an island in the Saronic Gulf near Athens. Xerxes was so confident in victory that he watched the battle from a throne on the slopes of Mount Aegaleus. The Athenian general Themistocles devised a plan to lure the large, slow Persian ships into the narrow straits, where the Greek ships were able to outmaneuver and destroy much of the Persian fleet. The Persian admiral Ariabignes was killed in hand-to-hand combat, and the Queen of Halicarnassus, Artemisia, had to sink some of her allies' ships to escape.

Thermopylae

(480 BC) was the first battle of the second Persian invasion of Greece. Although the Persians under Xerxes I and his general Mardonius defeated the Spartans, King Leonidas and his Spartan troops put up a heroic defense of the pass at Thermopylae (the "hot gates"). The Greeks were betrayed by Ephialtes, who told the Persians about a path that led behind the Spartans. The battle was part of Themistocles' plan to halt the advance of the Persians. The other part of his plan was to block the Persian navy at Artemisium; a battle occurred there simultaneously.

Porifera

(5,000 species): The sponges are all water-dwellers (98% marine, 2% freshwater), and are sometimes classified separately from other animals because of their asymmetric bodies and lack of distinct tissues. They are sessile (immobile) except in early dispersing stages, and collect food particles via the sweeping motions of flagellated cells called choanocytes

Antartica

(5.4 million mi2) Because it is covered with (solid) water, it is somewhat surprising that it is considered a desert, but it is classified as such due to its lack of precipitation. Players should be familiar with its tallest mountain, Vinson Massif in the Ellsworth Mountains; its active volcano Mount Erebus; the surrounding Ross and Weddell Seas; and the Ross Ice Shelf. The Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen was the first to reach the South Pole (1911), while the Englishman Robert Scott died trying to reach it. Ernest Shackleton had to abandon his ship, the Endurance, during an attempt to cross Antarctica on foot.

Mollusca

(50,000 species): The molluscs are second in diversity only to the arthropods. Body plans within this phylum are diverse, but general characteristics include a soft body covered by a thin mantle, with a muscular foot and an internal visceral mass. There are two fluid-filled body cavities derived from mesodermal tissue: a small coelom and a large hemocoel that functions as an open circulatory system. Many molluscs have a shell composed of calcium carbonate and proteins, secreted by the mantle. Familiar groups within the Mollusca include the classes Gastropoda (slugs, snails), Bivalvia (clams, oysters, scallops), and Cephalopoda (nautilus, squids, octopi).

Alesia

(52 BC), Julius Caesar defeated the Celtic peoples of Gaul, establishing Roman rule of the lands beyond the Alps. The battle began when Caesar besieged Vercingetorix in the town of Alesia, shortly after the Roman defeat at Gergovia. The Romans built a wall to surround the city (a "circumvallation") and a second wall around that (a "contravallation") to protect themselves from the Gaulish relief army under Commius. When Commius launched a massive attack on the Romans, Caesar was able to defeat him and force the surrender of Vercingetorix. Although the Romans were outnumbered by as much as four to one, they proved victorious in what was the turning point of the Gallic Wars.

Echinodermata

(6,500 species): Characteristics of this phylum include an endoskeleton composed of many ossicles of calcium and magnesium carbonate, a water vascular system, a ring canal around the esophagus, and locomotion by tube feet connected to the water vascular system. Unique to echinoderms is the five-fold radial symmetry obvious in sea stars (starfish), sea urchins, and sea lilies. Others, like sea cucumbers, have varying degrees of bilateral symmetry. In the echinoderm body plan, a true head is absent; the anatomical terms oral (mouth-bearing) and aboral (away from the mouth) are used to describe orientation of the body surfaces. Feeding adaptations include particle feeding through the water vascular system, everting the stomach to engulf prey (sea stars), and a scraping device called Aristotle's lantern (sea urchins).

Alfred the Great

(849-899; r. 871-899) Saxon House. Actually just the King of Wessex in southwestern England, he expelled the rival Danes from the Mercian town of London in 886, eventually conquering most of the Danelaw territory. Alfred also kept England from the worst of the Dark Ages by encouraging his bishops to foster literacy; in addition, he translated Boethius, Augustine, and the Venerable Bede's works into Anglo-Saxon.

Battle of Milvian Bridge

(AD 312) was part of the civil war that ensued when Maxentius usurped the throne of the western half of the Roman Empire from Constantine. Prior to the battle, Constantine supposedly had a vision of God promising victory to his forces if he painted his shields with the Chi-Rho, a Christian symbol. Constantine was indeed victorious, and Maxentius drowned in the Tiber River during the battle. Eventually, Constantine was able to abolish the Tetrarchy, become the sole ruler of the Roman Empire, and end persecution of Christians.

Battle of Adrianople

(AD 378) signalled the beginning of the spread of Germanic peoples into the Western Roman Empire. The Romans were led by the eastern emperor Valens, while the Goths were led by Fritigern. Eager for glory, Valens decided not to wait on reinforcements from the western emperor Gratian, and instead attacked the Goths. In the battle, over two-thirds of the Roman army was killed, including Valens. The battle was chronicled by Ammianus Marcellinus, who thought it so important that he ended his history of the Roman Empire with the battle.

Battle of Chalons

(AD 451) was an epic battle between the Romans and the Huns fought in what is now France. The Roman army was commanded by Flavius Aetius and included Visigoths under Theodoric I, who was killed by an Ostrogoth during the battle. The Hunnic army was led by Attila, who was rampaging through Gaul. The battle ended with a victory for the Roman-Visigothic alliance, which stopped the Huns' advance into Gaul. The next year, Attila invaded Italy; however, in 453, Attila died and his empire broke up shortly after.

Thorstein Veblen

(American, 1857-1929): He is primarily remembered for his The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), which introduced phrases like "conspicuous consumption." He is remembered for likening the ostentation of the rich to the Darwinian proofs of virility found in the animal

John B. Watson

(American, 1878-1958): He was the first prominent exponent of behaviorism; he codified its tenets in Behavior: An Introduction to Comparative Psychology, arguing that psychology could be completely grounded in objective measurements of events and physical human reactions. His most famous experiment involved conditioning an eleven-month-old boy to be apprehensive of all furry objects by striking a loud bell whenever a furry object was placed in his lap.

B. F. Skinner

(American, 1904-1990): He was one of the leading proponents of behaviorism in works like Walden II and Beyond Freedom and Dignity. He argued that all human actions could be understood in terms of physical stimuli and learned responses, and that there was no need to study — or even believe in — internal mental states or motivations; in fact, doing so could be harmful. Guided by his ideas, he trained animals to perform complicated tasks, including teaching pigeons to play table tennis.

Abraham Maslow

(American, 1908-1970): He is principally known for two works, Motivation and Personality and Toward a Psychology of Being, that introduced his theory of the hierarchy of needs (food, shelter, love, esteem, etc.) and its pinnacle, the need for self-actualization. Self-actualized people are those who understand their individual needs and abilities and who have families, friends, and colleagues that support them and allow them to accomplish things on which they place value. The lowest unmet need on the hierarchy tends to dominate conscious thought.

Stanley Milgram

(American, 1933-1984): Though he did the work that created the idea of "six degrees of separation" and the "lost-letter" technique, he is mainly remembered for his experiments on obedience to authority that he performed at Yale in 1961-1962. Milgram found that two thirds of his subjects were willing to administer terrible electric shocks to innocent, protesting human beings simply because a researcher told them the experimental protocol demanded it.

Cats

(Andrew Lloyd Webber based on poems by T. S. Eliot; 1981): The Jellicle tribe of cats roams the streets of London. They introduce the audience to various members: Rum Tum Tugger, Mungojerrie, Rumpleteazer, Mr. Mistoffelees, and Old Deuteronomy. Old Deuteronomy must choose a cat to be reborn, and he chooses the lowly Grizabella after she sings "Memory." It is adapted from Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot.

The Phantom of The Opera

(Andrew Lloyd Webber; Charles Hart & Richard Stilgoe; Richard Stilgoe & Andrew Lloyd Webber; 1986): At the Paris Opera in 1881, the mysterious Phantom lures the soprano Christine Daaé to his lair ("The Music of the Night"). Christine falls in love with the opera's new patron, Raoul, so the Phantom drops a chandelier and kidnaps Christine. They kiss, but he disappears, leaving behind only his white mask. Adapted from the 1909 novel of the same name by Gaston Leroux, it is the longest-running show in Broadway history.

Evita

(Andrew Lloyd Webber; Tim Rice; Tim Rice; 1978): Che (possibly Che Guevara, but it's also South American slang for just "a guy") narrates the life story of Eva "Evita" Perón, a singer and actress who marries Juan Perón. Juan becomes President of Argentina, and Eva's charity work makes her immensely popular among her people ("Don't Cry for Me Argentina") before her death from cancer. It was made into a 1996 film starring Madonna and Antonio Banderas.

Battle of Okinawa

(April 1945 - June 1945): The largest amphibious assault of the Pacific Theater, the Battle of Okinawa featured massive casualties among both combatants and civilians. The Japanese launched over 1,500 kamikaze attacks against the U.S. fleet, and even sent the massive battleship Yamato on a suicide mission; it was sunk by aircraft before reaching Okinawa. On the American side, both war correspondent Ernie Pyle and Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr., the commander-in-chief of the ground forces, were killed. Somewhat uniquely, the battle also saw large numbers of Japanese troops surrender, although many were native Okinawans forced into fighting.

Vicksburg Campaign

(April 29 - July 4, 1863). This campaign was launched by Ulysses S. Grant to take control of the Mississippi River and cut off the western Confederate states from the east. Grant ordered forces led by James McPherson, John McClernand, and William Tecumseh Sherman through bayous west of the Mississippi to Hard Times, Louisiana. They were up against Confederate defenders under Joseph Johnston and John Pemberton. Sherman and McPherson drove Johnston from Jackson, Mississippi on May 14, and the Union scored a victory at Champion's Hill two days later, but could not drive the Southerners out of Vicksburg, so Grant laid siege to the town. Outnumbered 71,000 to 20,000 and on the brink of starvation, Pemberton finally surrendered his men; Johnston withdrew east.

Shiloh

(April 6-7, 1862). This battle was named after a church in Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee (100 miles southwest of Nashville). Confederate commander Albert Sidney Johnston led a force north from Corinth, Mississippi. Ulysses S. Grant, who had just captured Fort Donelson, brought five Union divisions to face him. At first, the South's surprise attack drove Union troops back, but Grant's soldiers held the "Hornets' Nest" for hours, killing Johnston in the process. P. G. T. Beauregard took over, but by the second day Northern Generals Don Carlos Buell and Lew Wallace (who wrote Ben-Hur) brought reinforcements, causing the Confederates to retreat. More than 13,000 Union and 10,000 Confederate soldiers were killed, wounded, or captured at Shiloh.

Rub al-Khali

(Arabian Peninsula; 250,000 mi2) Its name means "Empty Quarter" in English, is sometimes considered the most inhospitable place on earth. It is known for the world's largest oil field, the Ghawar, and for once being part of the frankincense trade.

Death of a Salesman

(Arthur Miller, 1949). This play questions American values of success. Willy Loman is a failed salesman whose firm fires him after 34 years. Despite his own failures, he desperately wants his sons Biff and Happy to succeed. Told in a series of flashbacks, the story points to Biff's moment of hopelessness, when the former high school star catches his father Willy cheating on his mother, Linda. Eventually, Willy can no longer live with his perceived shortcomings, and commits suicide in an attempt to leave Biff with insurance money.

The Crucible

(Arthur Miller, 1953). Miller chose the 1692 Salem witch trials as his setting, but the work is really an allegorical protest against the McCarthy anti-Communist "witch-hunts" of the early 1950s. In the story, Elizabeth Proctor fires the servant Abigail Williams after she finds out Abigail had an affair with her husband. In response, Abigail accuses Elizabeth of witchcraft. She stands trial and is acquitted, but then another girl accuses her husband, John, and as he refuses to turn in others, he is killed, along with the old comic figure, Giles Corey. Also notable: Judge Hathorne is a direct ancestor of the author Nathaniel Hawthorne.

The Mikado

(Arthur Sullivan; W. S. Gilbert; 1885): The Mikado (Emperor of Japan) has made flirting a capital crime in Titipu, so the people have appointed an ineffectual executioner named Ko-Ko. Ko-Ko's ward, Yum-Yum, marries the wandering musician Nanki-Poo, and the two lovers fake their execution. The Mikado visits the town and forgives the lovers of their transgression. It includes the song "Three Little Maids From School Are We."

1896 Summer

(Athens, Greece): The first edition of the modern Olympics was the brainchild of Baron Pierre de Coubertin of France; winners were awarded silver medals. Some of the stranger events included one-handed weightlifting and 100-meter freestyle swimming for members of the Greek navy. Appropriately, Greek shepherd Spiridon Louis became the hero of the Games by winning the marathon.

1996 Summer

(Atlanta, Georgia, United States): In what have been called "The Coke Games," due to their exceptional commercialization in the city of Coke's business headquarters, the sweltering Georgia heat and organizational problems made these Games a veritable nightmare. But a bombing in Centennial Olympic Park that killed one person and injured 100 remains the Games' most memorable event. The bombing was eventually traced to Eric Rudolph. Irish swimmer Michelle Smith won three gold medals in the pool, only to be plagued by rumors of steroid use. Carl Lewis got his ninth gold by winning the long jump for the fourth consecutive Games, while American sprinter Michael Johnson became the first man to win the 200-meter and 400-meter races, the former in a world-record 19.32 seconds.

Battle of Stalingrad

(August 1942 - February 1943): With about two million casualties, this battle is often cited as the bloodiest battle in history. The battle arose out of Germany's summer campaign to capture vital oil supplies in the Caucasus Mountains, but Friedrich Paulus's 6th Army became bogged down in intense street fighting in the city, allowing Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov to launch Operation Uranus, which encircled Paulus's men by defeating the Italian, Hungarian, and Romanian forces guarding their flank. In the final days of the battle, Hitler promoted Paulus to field marshal, a not-so-subtle suggestion that Paulus should either fight to the death or commit suicide, as no German field marshal had ever been captured; Paulus surrendered anyway.

Second Bull Run

(August 29-30, 1862). This resounding victory by Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson pushed Union forces back to Washington, D.C. President Abraham Lincoln gathered forces in northern Virginia under General John Pope, who would protect the capital until George McClellan's Army of the Potomac returned from the Peninsula Campaign. Lee maneuvered Jackson's troops behind those of Pope; Jackson detained Pope's men at Manassas while Lee sent James Longstreet to crush Pope's left flank. Pope's and McClellan's joint forces retreated to defend Washington, ceding all of Virginia to the Confederacy and marking a low point in the Union effort.

Sigmund Freud

(Austrian, 1856-1939): He founded the extremely influential discipline psychoanalysis, which used the free-association technique to identify fears and repressed memories. He argued that many problems were caused by mental states rather than by biochemical dysfunction — a purely materialist viewpoint then in vogue. He separated the psyche into the id (illogical passion), ego (rational thought), and superego (moral and social conscience). His best-known works are The Interpretation of Dreams and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.

Alfred Adler

(Austrian, 1870-1937): He was another close associate of Freud who split with him over Freud's insistence that sexual issues were at the root of neuroses and most psychological problems. Adler argued in The Neurotic Constitution that neuroses resulted from people's inability to achieve self-realization; in failing to achieve this sense of completeness, they developed "inferiority complexes" that inhibited their relations with successful people and dominated their relations with fellow unsuccessful people, a theory given the general name "individual psychology."

1936 Summer

(Berlin, Germany): These games are best remembered for Alabama native Jesse Owens' amazing work on the track against a backdrop of Nazi propaganda emphasizing Aryan superiority. The American athlete won the 100-meter dash, 200-meter dash, long jump, and 4×100-meter sprint relay. Despite the growing strength of the Nazi state, the German people became enamored with Owens and named a Berlin street for him after his 1980 death. On other fronts, the Olympics were broadcast on television for the first time (as seen in the film Contact) and also saw the introduction of the relay of the Olympic torch.

Kalahari Desert

(Botswana, Namibia, South Africa; 360,000 mi2) It is a large region, not all of which is arid enough to qualify as a desert. It is known for its red sand, large game reserves (meerkats, gemsbok, springbok, steenbok), and mineral deposits (notably uranium). Its San Bushmen speak a click language.

John Kenneth Galbraith

(Canadian, 1908-2006): His liberal popular writings like The Affluent Society and The New Industrial State (with their emphasis on public service and the limitations of the marketplace) ensure his coming up again and again.

Atacama Desert

(Chile; 70,000 mi2) The Atacama's chief claim to fame is the rain shadow of the Andes, which makes it the driest hot desert in the world. The desert was the primary bone of contention in the War of the Pacific (1879 1883; Chile defeated Peru and Bolivia) that sought to control its nitrate resources, which were necessary for the production of explosives.

Gobi Desert

(China and Mongolia; 500,000 mi2) Asia's second largest desert (after the Arabian Desert), is bounded on the north by the Altai Mountains. It is known for its role in the Silk Road trading route and the Nemegt Basin, where fossilized dinosaur eggs and human artifacts have been found.

Fredericksburg

(December 13, 1862). At this site, about 50 miles south of Washington, Union commander Ambrose Burnside (who had replaced George McClellan) tried to take the initiative and cross the Rappahannock River in a march toward Richmond. He met Robert E. Lee's forces, which were well entrenched on Marye's Heights behind the town. Burnside's army took heavy losses assaulting the heights, and fell back across the Rappahannock. A later attempt to flank the Confederate position was foiled by heavy rain during the so-called "Mud March" of January 1863.

Battle of the Bulge

(December 1944 - January 1945): This battle resulted from Germany's last major offensive operation on the Western Front. The German plan to sweep through the Ardennes Forest and capture the port city Antwerp, Belgium, benefited from Allied aircraft being grounded due to poor weather. During the battle, English-speaking German troops under Otto Skorzeny attempted to disguise themselves as Allied troops and infiltrate enemy lines. German forces also besieged the Belgian town Bastogne and requested its surrender, to which U.S. Army Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe replied "Nuts!"; the siege was eventually lifted by forces commanded by George Patton.

Attack on Pearl Harbor

(December 7, 1941): On what President Franklin Roosevelt declared would be "a date which will live in infamy," Japanese carrier-based aircraft launched — without a formal declaration of war — a surprise attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor on the Hawaiian island Oahu. The attack sank four battleships, most notably the USS Arizona, but all of the U.S. Navy's carriers were at sea and were unattacked. Shortly after the attack, Japan began invasions of Guam, Wake Island, the Philippines, and the British colony of Singapore. On December 8, with only Montana Representative Jeannette Rankin dissenting, the U.S. Congress declared war on Japan.

Brown v. Board of Education

(Earl Warren, 9-0, 1954): The suit was filed on behalf of Linda Brown, a third grader, who had to walk a mile to a blacks-only school when a whites-only school was much closer. Future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall argued the case for the plaintiff. The court overturned Plessy v. Ferguson and ruled that "separate but equal" facilities were not constitutional. A second case in 1955 required that desegregation proceed "with all deliberate speed" but Southern schools were notoriously slow in complying; it was not until 1970 that a majority had complied with the ruling.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

(Edward Albee, 1962). The author Virginia Woolf has little to do with the story, except that Martha sings the title to George when she is mad at him in Act I. In fact, Albee got the title from graffiti he saw on a men's room wall. In the drama, George is a professor who married Martha, the college president's daughter, but the two dislike each other. Martha invites another couple, the instructor Nick and his wife Honey, for drinks after a party for her father. All four of them get drunk, and they end up bickering over their flawed marriages: Besides George and Martha's problems, Honey is barren, and Nick married her for her money.

Mourning Becomes Electra

(Eugene O'Neill, 1931). This play is really a trilogy, consisting of "Homecoming," "The Hunted," and "The Haunted." Though it is set in post-Civil War New England, O'Neill used Aeschylus's tragedy The Oresteia as the basis for the plot. Lavinia Mannon desires revenge against her mother, Christine, who with the help of her lover Adam Brant has poisoned Lavinia's father Ezra; Lavinia persuades her brother Orin to kill Brant. A distressed Christine commits suicide, and, after Orin and Lavinia flee to the South Seas, Orin cannot stand the guilt and kills himself as well, leaving Lavinia in the house alone.

The Iceman Cometh

(Eugene O'Neill, 1939). A portrait of drunkenness and hopeless dreams. Regular patrons of the End of the Line Café anticipate the annual arrival of Theodore "Hickey" Hickman, but in 1912 he returns to them sober. After the patrons reveal their "pipe dreams," Hickey implores them to give up those dreams and lead productive lives. The "Iceman" is supposed to represent the "death" found in reality.

Long Day's Journey Into Night

(Eugene O'Neill, 1956). O'Neill wrote it fifteen years earlier and presented the manuscript to his third wife with instructions that it not be produced until 25 years after his death. Actually produced three years after he died, it centers on Edmund and the rest of the Tyrone family, but is really an autobiographical account of the dysfunction of O'Neill's own family, set on one day in August 1912. The father is a miserly actor, while the mother is a morphine addict, and the brother is a drunk; they argue and cut each other down throughout the play.

Battle of Iwo Jima

(February 1945 - March 1945): The Allies sought to capture Iwo Jima, a small island midway between the Mariana Islands and the Japanese home islands, to provide an airbase for the eventual invasion of Japan. Under the leadership of General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, the island's defenders built a complex network of underground tunnels and well-camouflaged artillery pieces that enabled them to hold out for a month against vastly superior forces. The battle is best known for Joe Rosenthal's photograph showing six American servicemen raising a flag atop Mount Suribachi.

Cabaret

(Fred Kander; John Ebb; Jon Masteroff; 1966): Cabaret is set in the seedy Kit-Kat Club in Berlin during the Weimer era. The risqué Master of Ceremonies presides over the action ("Wilkommen"). The British lounge singer Sally Bowles falls in love with the American writer Cliff Bradshaw, but the two break up as the Nazis come to power. Adapted into an Academy Award-winning 1972 film starring Liza Minelli and Joel Grey, it is based on Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin.

My Fair Lady

(Frederick Loewe; Alan Jay Lerner; Alan Jay Lerner; 1956): As part of a bet with his friend Colonel Pickering, the phonetics professor Henry Higgins transforms the Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle into a proper lady. After Eliza falls for Freddy Eynsforth-Hill, Higgins realizes he is in love with Eliza. Eliza returns to Higgins' home in the final scene. It is adapted from George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion, and its most famous songs are "The Rain in Spain" and "Get Me to the Church on Time."

Erik Erikson

(German-born American, 1902-1994): He is best known for his theories on how social institutions reflect the universal features of psychosocial development; in particular, how different societies create different traditions and ideas to accommodate the same biological needs. He created a notable eight-stage development process and wrote several "psychohistories" explaining how people like Martin Luther and Mahatma Gandhi were able to think and act the way they did.

Roe v. Wade

(Harry Blackmun, Warren Burger, 7-2, 1973): Norma McCorvey (under the alias Jane Roe), a rape victim, sued Dallas County attorney Henry Wade for the right to an abortion. When the case reached the Supreme Court, the plaintiff depended on the growing recognition of a "right to privacy," which began with the 1965 case Griswold v. Connecticut. The court struck down state anti-abortion laws as "unconstitutionally vague," held that the word "person" in the Constitution "does not include the unborn," and legalized abortion in the first trimester. McCorvey later joined the pro-life movement and claimed that she was not actually raped and that she was pressured into filing the case by her ambitious attorney Sarah Weddington.

Plessy v. Ferguson

(Henry B. Brown, Melville Fuller, 7-1, 1896): Homer Plessy (who was legally classified as an "octoroon," meaning one-eighth black) bought a first-class ticket on the East Louisiana Railway. He sat in the whites-only car in violation of an 1890 Louisiana law mandating separate accommodations. He was convicted, but appealed to the Supreme Court against John Ferguson, a Louisiana judge. The court upheld the law provided that "separate but equal" facilities were provided. John Marshall Harlan issued a famous dissent claiming "Our constitution is color-blind." Plessy was overturned by Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.

Gideon v. Wainwright

(Hugo Black, Earl Warren, 9-0, 1963): Clarence Earl Gideon was accused of breaking into a pool hall in Florida. Because his crime was not capital, the court declined to provide him with an attorney. He was convicted, sued Louie Wainwright — the director of the corrections office — and took his case to the Supreme Court. The court overruled Betts v. Brady and held that the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments required appointed counsel in all trials. Gideon was retried and found innocent. The case is the subject of the book Gideon's Trumpet.

Negev Desert

(Israel; 4,700 mi2) The triangular desert covers the southern half of Israel.

Fiddler on the Roof

(Jerry Bock; Sheldon Harnick; Joseph Stein; 1964): Tevye is a lowly Jewish milkman in tsarist Russia ("If I Were a Rich Man"), and his daughters are anxious to get married ("Matchmaker"). Tzeitel marries the tailor Motel ("Sunrise, Sunset," "The Bottle Dance"), Hodel gets engaged to the radical student Perchik, and Chava falls in love with a Russian named Fyedka. The families leave their village, Anatevka, after a pogrom. It is adapted from Tevye and his Daughters by Sholem Aleichem.

Marbury v. Madison

(John Marshall, 4-0, 1803): On his final day in office in 1801, John Adams signed commissions for 42 federal judges (the so-called "midnight judges"). His successor, Thomas Jefferson, opted to not deliver most of the commissions. One appointee, William Marbury, sued the new secretary of state, James Madison, to force the delivery of his commission. The Judiciary Act of 1789 had granted the court original jurisdiction in such cases, but the Constitution did not. The court ruled that the Judiciary Act conflicted with the Constitution and was therefore void. Therefore Marbury's request was denied for lack of jurisdiction. This case established the principle of judicial review, the power of the court to nullify unconstitutional laws.

Fletcher v. Peck

(John Marshall, 6-0, 1810): In 1795 the Georgia legislature corruptly sold land along the Yazoo River (now in Mississippi) to private citizens in exchange for bribes. The legislators were mostly defeated in the next elections and the incoming politicians voided the sales. In the meantime, John Peck sold some of the land in question to Robert Fletcher, who then sued him, claiming that he did not have clear title. The Supreme Court held that the state legislature did not have the power to repeal the sale. This was one of the earliest cases in which the Supreme Court struck down a state law.

McCulloch v. Maryland

(John Marshall, 9-0, 1819): After the Second Bank of the United States began calling in loans owed by the states, Maryland passed a law taxing out-of-state banks. The federal bank refused to pay, so the state sued its Baltimore cashier, James McCulloch. The court ruled that the federal government had the right to establish the bank even though it was not expressly enumerated in the Constitution and also noted that since "the power to tax was the power to destroy," Maryland could not tax the bank without destroying federal sovereignty.

Gettysburg

(July 1-3, 1863). This marked both the farthest northward advance by the Confederacy and the turning point that led to its defeat. Robert E. Lee, along with James Longstreet, A. P. Hill, and Richard Ewell, led the attack into southern Pennsylvania; J. E. B. Stuart was supposed to monitor Union movement with his cavalry, but strayed so far east of Gettysburg that his force did not return (exhausted) until the second day of battle. George Meade replaced Joseph Hooker as leader of the Union army; Southern forces drove Northerners through the town of Gettysburg but could not secure key positions at Cemetery Ridge and Little and Big Round Tops. Low on supplies, on the third and final day Lee ordered an attack on the center; George Pickett led his famous "charge" through open fields, where the Union mowed down one-third of his 15,000 men. The Confederates lost 20,000 and Lee retreated to Virginia.

Battle of Kursk

(July 1943 - August 1943): Fought in western Russia, this battle was the largest tank battle in history, with about 6,000 tanks engaged. Thanks to a complex spy network, the Soviet leadership was well-informed about German plans to launch Operation Citadel against the Kursk salient, and constructed massive defensive fortifications. After the German advance was stopped, a successful Soviet counterattack was launched. The German Army never again was able to mount a major attack on the Eastern Front.

First Bull Run

(July 21, 1861). Fought at a creek near Manassas, Virginia (30 miles west of Washington, D.C.), this was the first major showdown of the war. P. G. T. Beauregard led an army against Union commander Irwin McDowell and received reinforcements from Joseph Johnston's troops (whom Union General Robert Patterson failed to detain). The Confederacy routed the Union when Thomas Jackson's brigade held the left line at Henry House Hill; this effort earned him the nickname "Stonewall." Congressmen and reporters, who had expected to watch a Union victory, fled in panic back to D.C.

Petersburg Campaign

(June 1864 - April 1865). After Cold Harbor, Ulysses S. Grant moved south to lay siege to this railroad hub, 25 miles from Richmond. The trenches in which much of the fighting took place were similar to those later used in World War I. On July 30, Pennsylvania coal miners detonated four tons of powder in a tunnel underneath the Confederate line; this "Battle of the Crater" killed many defenders. Although the South held the city of Petersburg, its supplies ran thin in the winter of 1865. Grant finally destroyed the Confederate right flank at Five Forks (April 1-2), 14 miles southwest of Petersburg. This resounding defeat led to Robert E. Lee's surrender to Grant at Appomattox Court House one week later, effectively ending the Civil War.

Battle of Midway

(June 1942): Universally considered the turning point in the Pacific Theater, the Battle of Midway saw the Japanese lose four aircraft carriers, a blow from which they never fully recovered. Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto planned to lure the U.S. fleet into a trap, but the Americans had broken the Japanese code, allowing them to pull off a stunning victory, with dive bombers from the Enterprise sinking the carriers Kaga, Akagi, and Hiryu, while those from the hastily-repaired Yorktown sank the carrier Soryu.

D-Day

(June 6, 1944): The largest amphibious assault in history, as Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower's forces attacked the German Atlantic Wall defenses on the beaches of Normandy, France. Due to his wife's birthday, German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel was absent at the start the invasion, which saw American forces land at Utah and Omaha Beaches, British forces land at Gold and Sword Beaches, and Canadian forces land at Juno Beach. After the landings, Allied forces erected prefabricated artificial Mulberry harbors to aid in transporting goods to France.

West Side Story

(Leonard Bernstein; Stephen Sondheim; Arthur Laurents; 1957): Riff and Bernardo lead two rival gangs: the blue-collar Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks. Tony, a former Jet, falls in love with Bernardo's sister Maria and vows to stop the fighting, but he kills Bernardo after Bernardo kills Riff in a "rumble." Maria's suitor Chino shoots Tony, and the two gangs come together. Notable songs include "America," "Tonight," "Somewhere," "I Feel Pretty," and "Gee, Officer Krupke." Adapted from Romeo and Juliet, it was made into an Academy Award-winning 1961 film starring Natalie Wood.

1994 Winter

(Lillehammer, Norway): Massachusetts native Nancy Kerrigan and Oregonian Tonya Harding were among America's leading hopes for gold in women's figure skating. During the Olympic Trials in Detroit, Kerrigan was viciously attacked by an unknown assailant, who would later be traced back to Harding. In the ensuing media circus, both Kerrigan and Harding were sent to Norway, but their thunder was stolen by Ukrainian skate Oksana Baiul, who edged out silver medalist Kerrigan, while Harding placed eighth. Sweden won the ice hockey gold by defeating Canada in a shootout; future Colorado Avalanche forward Peter Forsberg's game-winning effort against Canadian goalie Sean Burke was immortalized on a Swedish postage stamp. In speed skating, Bonnie Blair won her third straight gold in the 500-meters and second straight in the 1,000-meters, perennial hard-luck kid Dan Jansen won Olympic gold in his last race, the 1,000 meters, and Norwegian Johann Olav Koss won three gold medals, all in world-record times.

The Little Foxes

(Lillian Hellman, 1939). Set on a plantation in 1900, Hellman attempts to show that by this time any notion of antebellum Southern gentility has been destroyed by modern capitalism and industrialism. Three Hubbard siblings (Regina and her two brothers) scheme to earn vast riches at the expense of other family members, such as Regina's husband Horace and their daughter Alexandra. The title is taken from the Old Testament Song of Solomon: "the little foxes that spoil the vines."

A Raisin In The Sun

(Lorraine Hansberry, 1959). Her father's 1940 court fight against racist housing laws provided the basis for Hansberry's play about the Younger family, who attempt to move into an all-white Chicago suburb but are confronted by discrimination. The first play by an African-American woman to be performed on Broadway, it also tore down the racial stereotyping found in other works of the time. The title comes from the Langston Hughes poem "Harlem" (often called "A Dream Deferred")

1984 Summer

(Los Angeles, California, United States): Virtually every Communist nation skipped these games, leaving the door open for a "USA all the way" feeling, as the Americans took home 83 gold medals out of a total of 174. Among the highlights were American sprinter Carl Lewis' repeat of Jesse Owens' 1936 performance: winning the 100-meter dash, 200-meter dash, long jump, and 4×100 meter sprint relay. In gymnastics, West Virginia native Mary Lou Retton won the all-around gold medal.

Hampton Roads

(March 9, 1862). A channel in southeastern Virginia was the site of the first major fight between two ironclad ships. The Confederates raised an old wooden boat, the Merrimack, and fit it with ten guns and iron armor plates. Renamed the Virginia, it was captained by Franklin Buchanan. The Union countered by constructing a large oval with a rotating gun, called the Monitor and piloted by John Worden. The Virginia tore through Union wooden ships (the Cumberland, Congress, and Minnesota) but when the Monitor arrived, the two ironclads fought to a stalemate; the Union thus maintained its naval blockade of the Confederacy. The South deliberately destroyed the Virginia two months later. The Monitor sank in a storm off Cape Hatteras in December 1862.

Peninsular Campaign

(March-July 1862). Union commander George McClellan devised this plan to capture the Confederate capital at Richmond, Virginia by sending 110,000 men up the peninsula between the York and James Rivers. Advised of Northern maneuvers, Southern commander Joseph Johnston detached a force to defend the peninsula. He also sent a small unit (led by Stonewall Jackson) that crushed Union reinforcements in the Shenandoah Valley. After Johnston was wounded at Seven Pines (June 1), Davis replaced him with Robert E. Lee. Lee concentrated his force north of the Chickahominy River; in the Seven Days' Battles (June 25 - July 1), the Confederates broke through Union defenses, leading to McClellan's retreat down the James toward Harrison's Landing, and the failure of the campaign.

Chancellorsville

(May 1-4, 1863). A victory for the South, but with great cost, as Stonewall Jackson lost his life. Lincoln called on "Fighting Joe" Hooker to command the Union army; Hooker took a force of 134,000 and provoked Robert E. Lee and Jackson's 60,000 men into battle. Jackson moved around Hooker and counterattacked the Union flank on May 2. That night, while Jackson was on reconnaissance, his own men mistook him for a Northerner and shot him; he died of pneumonia eight days later. The following morning, a cannonball blast hit the Chancellor House, knocking Hooker unconscious; Union troops, led by John Sedgwick, then retreated. Casualties for the North outnumbered those of the South, 17,000 to 13,000.

Battle of Coral Sea

(May 1942): Resulting from a Japanese plan to capture Port Moresby, New Guinea, the Battle of the Coral Sea was fought entirely by carrier-based aircraft, making it the first major naval battle in history in which the two opposing fleets never directly fired upon (or even sighted) each other. The U.S. Navy's carrier Lexington was sunk, and the Yorktown heavily damaged, while the Japanese navy lost the light carrier Shoho and saw its large carriers Shokaku and Zuikaku damaged. Ultimately, the invasion of Port Moresby was cancelled and the temporary loss of two Japanese carriers gave the U.S. an edge at the subsequent Battle of Midway.

Wilderness Campaign

(May 5 - June 12, 1864). The first clash between Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, this series of conflicts started with the Battle of the Wilderness, fought in a dense forest 50 miles northwest of Richmond. At Spotsylvania Court House, George Meade assaulted Robert E. Lee's men, but Lee's troops were able to hold on near the "Bloody Angle." Advancing within ten miles of Richmond, Grant met Lee at Cold Harbor (June 3); he lost 7,000 men to Lee's 1,500. By the end of the campaign, Grant's army approached the James River and Lee's army had suffered severely from a "war of attrition."

1968 Summer

(Mexico City, Mexico): In addition to being the first Olympics to be held at high altitude, these Games saw U.S. long jumper Bob Beamon set a record of 8.90 meters that would remain untouched for 23 years. The Games ended on a controversial note: to protest the Mexican government's killing of at least 250 unarmed demonstrators on the eve of the Games, Tommie Smith and John Carlos staged a silent protest with a black-gloved, raised-fist "Black Power" salute during the award ceremony for the 200-meter race. This didn't sit well with the International Olympic Committee, who promptly ordered them home.

1980 Winter

(Moscow, Soviet Union): Despite the glow from the Lake Placid Games, these Games were marred by a United States boycott ordered by President Jimmy Carter in response to the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. This lead was followed by Canada, West Germany, Japan, Kenya, and China, while other Western nations left it up to their individual athletes, many of whom chose to partake. The result was an Eastern Bloc field day, with all 54 East German rowers earning a medal and the Soviets totaling 80 gold medals. British distance runner Sebastian Coe produced the West's best performance by winning the 1500-meter race.

1972 Summer

(Munich, West Germany): One of the most tragic Olympics ever, these Games saw the kidnapping and killing of eleven Israeli athletes by eight Palestinian terrorists, five of whom were shot dead by West German police. Jim McKay of ABC Sports remained on the air for hours, bringing American viewers up to date on the situation. Though the Olympics paused for 34 hours, the IOC ordered the games to continue, and memorable performances were turned in by American swimmer Mark Spitz, who won seven gold medals, and Russian gymnast Olga Korbut, who captivated audiences en route to winning three gold medals.

Namib Desert

(Namibia and Angola; 30,000 mi2) A coastal desert, is known for its bizarre Welwitschia and medicinal Hoodia plants. It is thought to be the oldest desert in the world.

Sahara Desert

(Northern Africa; 3.5 million mi2) It is the world's second largest desert, but its largest hot desert. The Atlas Mountains bound the western Sahara on the north, and the Sahel — a savannah-like strip — bounds it on the south. It is dominated by rocky regions (hamada), sand seas (ergs), and salt flats (shatt) and dry river valleys (wadi) that are subject to flash floods. The Berber and Tuareg peoples are native to the Sahara.

The Painted Desert

(Northern Arizona) Shared by Grand Canyon and Petrified Forest National Parks, is known for its colorful, banded rock formations.

Battle of El Alamein

(October 1942 - November 1942): This battle marked the turning point in the African campaign. Named for an Egyptian coastal town 65 miles west of Alexandria, it saw the British Eighth Army under Bernard Montgomery defeat the German Afrika Korps under Erwin Rommel, preventing the Nazis from capturing the Suez Canal and oil fields in the Middle East. Following the battle, Allied forces landed in Morocco and Algeria as part of Operation Torch, and by May 1943 all Axis forces in North Africa had surrendered.

Battle of Leyete Gulf

(October 1944): By some measures the largest naval battle in history, this battle resulted from the Japanese Sho-Go plan to halt the American reconquest of the Philippines. The plan nearly worked when American Admiral William "Bull" Halsey was baited into moving all of his battleships and large carriers away from the landing site, but an American force of small escort carriers and destroyers held off a Japanese task force that included four battleships. Another Japanese force tried to pass through the Surigao Strait, but — in the last-ever combat between opposing battleships — the American Seventh Fleet crossed their 'T' and annihilated the force.

The Sound of Music

(Richard Rodgers; Oscar Hammerstein II; Howard Lindsey & Russel Crouse; 1959): Maria, a young woman studying to be a nun in Nazi-occupied Austria, becomes governess to the seven children of Captain von Trapp. She teaches the children to sing ("My Favorite Things," "Do-Re-Mi"), and she and the Captain fall in love and get married. After Maria and the von Trapps give a concert for the Nazis ("Edelweiss"), they escape Austria ("Climb Ev'ry Mountain"). It was adapted into an Academy Award-winning 1965 film starring Julie Andrews.

Oklahoma!

(Richard Rodgers; Oscar Hammerstein II; Oscar Hammerstein II; 1943): On the eve of Oklahoma's statehood, cowboy Curly McLain and sinister farmhand Judd compete for the love of Aunt Eller's niece, Laurey. Judd falls on his own knife after attacking Curly, and Curly and Laurey get married. A subplot concerns Ado Annie, who chooses cowboy Will Parker over the Persian peddler Ali Hakim. Featuring the songs "Oh What a Beautiful Mornin'" and "Oklahoma," it is often considered the first modern book musical.

Ex Parte Merryman

(Roger Taney, 1861): This was not actually a Supreme Court case, but a federal court case heard by Chief Justice Roger Taney while "circuit-riding" when the court was not in session. Lieutenant John Merryman of the Maryland cavalry took an active role in evicting Union soldiers from Maryland following the attack on Fort Sumter. Abraham Lincoln declared a secret suspension of the writ of habeas corpus and had a number of opposition leaders, including Merryman, arrested. Taney found the president had acted unconstitutionally (only Congress can suspend the writ), but Lincoln simply ignored his ruling.

Ivan Pavlov

(Russian 1849-1936): He was more of a physiologist than a psychologist, but questions about him are more often classified as psychology than biology by question writers. He is largely remembered for his idea of the conditioned reflex, for example, the salivation of a dog at the sound of the bell that presages dinner, even though the bell itself is inedible and has no intrinsic connection with food. He won the Nobel Prize in 1904 for Physiology or Medicine for unrelated work on digestive secretions.

Antietam

(September 17, 1862). The bloodiest single day of the Civil War: 12,000 Union and 10,000 Confederate casualties. Robert E. Lee invaded Maryland, but a Union soldier discovered Lee's battle plans wrapped around three discarded cigars. After the Battle of South Mountain (September 14), Lee's forces retired toward Antietam Creek. Meanwhile, Stonewall Jackson's forces captured Harper's Ferry, Virginia, and rushed north to rejoin Lee's main army. George McClellan had a substantial numerical superiority over Lee's Confederates, but failed to effectively coordinate his army's attacks. Antietam thus was actually a series of several distinct clashes, near the Dunker Church, along the Bloody Lane, and around Burnside's Bridge. After the battle's conclusion, Lee's battered army retreated across the Potomac into Virginia; the Union victory allowed President Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.

Chattanooga Campaign

(September-November 1863). It began when Union General William Rosecrans forced Confederate commander Braxton Bragg out of the city on September 9. Ten days later, at Chickamauga (in Georgia), Bragg and James Longstreet turned the tables by whipping Rosecrans, forcing him into a siege position at Chattanooga. Only George Thomas (the "Rock of Chickamauga") saved Rosecrans's army from annihilation. Well-developed railroad networks, however, allowed Ulysses S. Grant, Joseph Hooker, and William Tecumseh Sherman to bring reinforcements. On November 24 Hooker took Lookout Mountain in the southwest, in the "Battle Above the Clouds." The next day, Thomas ran right over the Southern force at Missionary Ridge, securing Tennessee for the North.

1912 Summer

(Stockholm, Sweden): While the Swedes introduced electronic timers to the games, the athletic hero was United States decathlete and Native American Jim Thorpe. He won the pentathlon, placed fourth in the high jump, and seventh in the long jump. Finally, Thorpe went on to win the decathlon with a score so astounding that it would still have won him the silver medal in 1948. During the medal presentation, Swedish king Gustav V said, "Sir, you are the greatest athlete" to which Thorpe purportedly replied "Thanks, King."

Carl Jung

(Swiss, 1875-1961): He was a close associate of Freud's who split with him over the degree to which neuroses had a sexual basis. He went on to create the analytic psychology movement and introduced the controversial notion of the collective unconscious — a socially shared area of the mind. Quiz bowlers should be familiar with anima, animus, introversion, extroversion, and archetypes, all terms that occur frequently in questions on Jung. (Of course, being familiar with them entails knowing what specifically they mean, and how they relate to Jung's work.)

Jean Piaget

(Swiss, 1896-1980): He is generally considered the greatest figure of 20th-century developmental psychology; he was the first to perform rigorous studies of the way in which children learn and come to understand and respond to the world around them. He is most famous for his theory of four stages of development: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. His most famous works are The Language and Thought of a Child and The Origins of Intelligence in Children.

The Glass Menagerie

(Tennessee Williams, 1944). Partly based on Williams' own family, the drama is narrated by Tom Wingfield, who supports his mother Amanda and his crippled sister Laura (who takes refuge from reality in her glass animals). At Amanda's insistence, Tom brings his friend Jim O'Connor to the house as a "gentleman caller" for Laura. While O'Connor is there, the horn on Laura's glass unicorn breaks, bringing her into reality, until O'Connor tells the family that he is already engaged. Laura returns to her fantasy world, while Tom abandons the family after fighting with Amanda.

A Streetcar Named Desire

(Tennessee Williams, 1947). Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski represent Williams's two visions of the South: declining "old romantic" vs. the harsh modern era. Blanche is a Southern belle who lost the family estate, and is forced to move into her sister Stella's New Orleans apartment. Stella's husband Stanley is rough around the edges, but sees through Blanche's artifice; he ruins Blanche's chance to marry his friend Mitch by revealing to Mitch that Blanche was a prostitute. Then, after Blanche confronts Stanley, he rapes her, driving her into insanity. The drama was developed into a movie, marking the breakthrough performance of method actor Marlon Brando.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

(Tennessee Williams, 1955). Centers on a fight between two sons, Gooper and Brick, over the estate of their father "Big Daddy" Pollitt, who is dying of cancer. After his friend Skipper dies, ex-football star Brick turns to alcohol and will not have sex with his wife Maggie ("the cat"). Yet Maggie announces to Big Daddy that she is pregnant in an attempt to force a reconciliation with—and win the inheritance for—Brick.

Our Town

(Thornton Wilder, 1938). A sentimental story that takes place in the village of Grover's Corners, New Hampshire just after the turn of the 20th century, Our Town is divided into three acts: "Daily Life" (Professor Willard and Editor Webb gossip on the everyday lives of town residents); "Love and Marriage" (Emily Webb and George Gibbs fall in love and marry); and "Death" (Emily dies while giving birth, and her spirit converses about the meaning of life with other dead people in the cemetery). A Stage Manager talks to the audience and serves as a narrator throughout the drama, which is performed on a bare stage.

Great Sandy Desert

(Western Australia; 140,000 mi2) Part of the Western Desert, and the ninth largest in the world.

Baker v. Carr

(William J. Brennan Jr., Earl Warren, 6-2, 1962): Charles W. Baker, a Tennessee citizen, sued the Tennessee secretary of state, Joe Carr, claiming that the state's electoral districts had been drawn to grossly favor one political party. The defendant argued that reapportionment issues were political, not judicial, matters, but the court disagreed and declared the issue justiciable before remanding the case to a lower court. Two years later, in Reynolds v. Sims, the court mandated the principle of "one man, one vote."

Hammer v. Dagenhart

(William R. Day, Edward Douglass White, 5-4, 1918): The Keating-Owen Act prohibited the interstate sale of goods produced by child labor, leading Roland Dagenhart to sue U.S. attorney W. C. Hammer in Charlotte since his two sons would be put out of work. The court ruled that the federal government did not have the right to regulate child labor; Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote a notable dissent focusing on the lack of proper state regulation. The case was overturned by the 1941 case U.S. v. Darby Lumber Company case upholding the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Jane Goodall

(born 1934) She is a British primatologist who is best known for her work with chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania. Her first research was carried out with Louis Leakey at Olduvai Gorge. In her pioneering work with primates, which is detailed in such books as In the Shadow of Man, she discovered that chimpanzees have the ability to use tools, such as inserting grass into termite holes to "fish" for termites.

Euclid

(c. 300 BC, Alexandrian Greek) is principally known for the Elements, a textbook on geometry and number theory, that has been used for over 2,000 years and which grounds essentially all of what is taught in modern high school geometry classes. The Elements includes five postulates that describe what is now called Euclidean space (the usual geometric space we work in); the fifth postulate — also called the parallel postulate — can be broken to create spherical and hyperbolic geometries, which are collectively called non-Euclidean geometries. The Elements also includes a proof that there are infinitely many prime numbers.

Aristotle

(c. 384 BC-322 BC) He was a student of Plato; in turn, he was a tutor to Alexander the Great. Many of his works come to us in the form of lectures he gave at his school, known as the Lyceum. His philosophical output includes the Nicomachean Ethics, which argues that virtues consist in a "golden mean" between two extremes; the Physics, which describes motion and change in terms of "four causes" that make a given thing what it is; and the Metaphysics, which describes the structure of reality. Aristotle's Poetics discusses the types of drama and considers an effect of tragedies known as catharsis, or the purging of bad feelings.

Diogenes

(c. 410s BC-323 BC) He was a student of Antisthenes, who founded the ancient school of philosophy known as Cynicism. (The term "cynic" comes from the Greek for "dog-like," and is thought to have originated as an insult to the school's members.) The Cynics rejected conventional social norms in search of a truly virtuous life. Diogenes himself was something of an eccentric—according to legend, he lived in a tub or a barrel on the street, and wandered Athens holding a lamp in his futile search for an honest man.

Plato

(c. 429 BC-347 BC) his Socratic dialogues are our main source both for Socrates's philosophy and his own; he often put his own thoughts in Socrates' mouth. Plato's dialogues include the Republic (about justice and the ideal city-state), the Symposium (about the nature of love), and the Meno (about whether virtue can be taught). Plato believed in a world of "forms"—or ideal versions of real things that lie beyond the human senses—which he discussed in such works as the Phaedo. Plato founded a school called the Academy, from which we get the common word.

Socrates

(c. 469 BC-399 BC) We have no writings from his own hand, and know about him largely from the dialogues of his student Plato. Proclaiming his own ignorance of all things, Socrates went around Athens engaging in question-and-answer sessions to search for truths or draw out contradictions (the "Socratic method"). The Athenian state disapproved of his conduct; he was put on trial for corrupting the city's youth, and sentenced to death by drinking hemlock. Socrates' trial, imprisonment, and death are recounted in Plato's Apology, Crito, and Phaedo, respectively.

Phidias

(c. 480 - c. 430 BC): An Athenian considered the greatest of all Classical sculptors. He created the chryselephantine (gold and ivory) Statue of Zeus at Olympia (one of the Wonders of the Ancient World, now lost) and the statue of Athena in the Parthenon (now lost). He was supported by money from the Delian League (that is, the Athenian Empire) run by his friend Pericles; he was later ruined by charges of corruption generally considered to be part of a political campaign against Pericles.

Zeno of Elea

(c. 490 BC-430 BC) He was a student of Parmenides, who founded the Eleatic school in a Greek colony of the Italian peninsula. He is most famous today for "Zeno's paradoxes," the best-known of which involve an arrow in flight and a race between Achilles and a tortoise. Zeno's paradoxes purport to show that physical movement is impossible, since any attempt to travel a distance must be preceded by moving half that distance, which must be preceded by moving half of half that distance, and so on. (Zeno of Elea is not to be confused with Zeno of Citium, who founded the philosophical school of Stoicism two centuries later.)

Thales

(c. 620 BC-546 BC) He was a pre-Socratic thinker from the Greek colony of Miletus who many consider to be the "first philosopher." Rejecting mythical explanations of the universe's nature, he believed that the first principle of all existence, the natural element from which all things emerged, was water. Thales was also a civil engineer and mathematician, and is credited with discovering that if a circle goes through all three vertices of a triangle and one side of the triangle is a diameter of the circle, then the triangle is a right triangle. He is sometimes thought of as the founder of a "Milesian school" of philosophy, whose other members include Anaximander and Anaximenes.

Boris Gudunov

(ca. 1551-1605; ruled 1598-1605): He began his career as a boyar in Ivan the Terrible's oprichnina, and eventually became tsar himself. Boris first cemented his influence by marrying a daughter of one of Ivan's court favorites and arranging his sister Irina's marriage to Ivan's son Fyodor; then he became regent under Fyodor, and was elected tsar when Fyodor died in 1598. But Boris was rumored to have arranged the murder of Fyodor's brother Dmitrii, and the first of several "False Dmitris" launched a revolt against him. Boris died in the midst of growing unrest and is now best known as the subject of a Pushkin play and a Mussorgsky opera.

Tao Te Ching

(or The Way and Its Power): Philosophical text behind Daoism, a religion-philosophy founded by the semi-legendary Lao Tzu in the sixth century BC, though scholars now believe it was written about 200 years later, during the Warring States period of the late Zhou dynasty. The Tao Te Ching instructs adherents in restraint and passiveness, allowing the natural order of the universe to take precedent.

Arthropoda

(over 800,000 species described; estimates of actual diversity vary but go as high as 9 million species): The most diverse and successful animal phylum on earth (incorporating about 75% of all described animal species), the Arthropoda are characterized by jointed legs and a chitinous exoskeleton. Like annelids, they are segmented, but unlike annelids, their segments are usually fused into larger body parts with specialized functions (such as the head, thorax, and abdomen of an insect). Arthropods are often divided into four subphyla: Uniramia (insects, centipedes, millipedes); Chelicerata (arachnids, sea spiders, horseshoe crabs); Crustacea (shrimps, lobsters, crabs, crayfish, barnacles, pillbugs), and Trilobitomorpha (the trilobites, now extinct).

Emmeline Pankhurst

1858-1928) She was the most prominent advocate for women's voting rights in the United Kingdom. As one of the founders of the Women's Social and Political Union, she called for direct action and frequent protests to force male politicians to grant votes to women. Her protests frequently got her arrested, and while in jail she and other suffragettes often went on hunger strikes. Initially, prison officials brutally force-fed the hunger-striking suffragettes. In 1913, Parliament passed the Cat and Mouse Act, which provided for hunger strikers to be released from jail and re-arrested after they regained their health. As a result of the advocacy of Pankhurst and others, Parliament began to grant voting rights to women in 1918.

George Herman "Babe" Ruth

1895-1948; pitcher and outfield), the rough son of a saloon keeper, grew up on the Baltimore waterfront and in the St. Mary's Industrial School for Boys. Released after signing a baseball contract with the minor-league Baltimore Orioles, he was bought by the Boston Red Sox and played with them for six seasons, winning 89 games and three World Series, and, in 1919, setting a new single-season home-run record: 29. Already famous as a player, eater, and carouser, Boston sold him to New York for the 1920 season, where his fame became legend. Moved from the pitcher's mound to the outfield, he won nine home-run titles and four World Series from 1920 to 1934. In 1927 he hit 60 home runs and led the "Murderers' Row" Yankee lineup to a sweep of the Pittsburgh Pirates in the World Series. He hit his controversial "Called Shot" homer against the Cubs during the third game of the 1932 World Series after allegedly gesturing towards the centerfield stands. Since his retirement from baseball in 1935, many of his most famous pitching and batting records have been surpassed, but power hitting as a legitimate approach towards playing baseball continues. Before Ruth, the homer was a rare occurrence.

Lou Gehrig

1903-1941; first base) was born in Manhattan to German immigrants. A football and baseball player at Columbia University, he signed with the Yankees in 1923. He became a regular in 1925, replacing Wally Pipp at first base and beginning his streak of 2130 consecutive games played (since broken by Cal Ripken Jr. in 1995) that earned him the nickname "The Iron Horse." His batting feats include 184 RBI in 1931 (the AL record), 23 career grand slams (the ML record for many decades, since broken by Alex Rodriguez), a triple crown in 1934, and a .340 career batting average. When it was discovered that he was suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis — now commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease — he delivered his famous "Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the Earth" speech at Yankee Stadium on July 4, 1939. In deference to Lou, no Yankee was appointed captain until Thurman Munson in 1976.

Byron Nelson

1912-2006) He won five major championships overall, but he is best known for having the single most dominant year in golf history. In 1945 he won a record 18 tournaments in 30 starts, including 11 consecutive tournaments, a feat no one has come close to matching. Nelson was so even-tempered and mechanically sound that the USGA named its mechanical club and ball-testing device, the "Iron Byron," after him.

The Ed Sullivan Show

1948-1971): This long-running CBS variety show occupied the same time slot — Sunday night at 8 pm — for over two decades. For most of that time, it broadcast live from what is now called the Ed Sullivan Theater on Broadway, which is currently the home of the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Among the characters it bequeathed to American popular culture were a Spanish ventriloquist known as "Señor Wences" and an Italian mouse puppet named Topo Gigio. In 1964, the Beatles appeared on the show for three straight weeks, appearances which are credited with launching the "British Invasion" in popular music.

The Andy Griffith Show

1960-1968): One of the most popular TV series of its decade, The this show starred its title actor as Andy Taylor, the sheriff in the sleepy small town of Mayberry, North Carolina. The show is almost as well known for its distinctive supporting characters, including a gas station attendant named Gomer Pyle and Andy's awkward deputy sheriff, Barney Fife. Ron Howard rose to fame as a child actor on the show, playing Andy's son Opie, before going on to an adult career as a prolific actor and director.

Filippo Brunelleschi

A friend of Donatello, he was a skilled sculptor and goldsmith, whose 1401 competition with Lorenzo Ghiberti for the commission of the bronze doors of the Florence Baptistery is a frequent question topic (Ghiberti got the chief commission). As an architect, he is mainly known for the extraordinary octagonally-based dome of the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore (also known as the Florence Cathedral and often called the Duomo, though that is just the general Italian term for a cathedral), which dominates the Florentine skyline and is across the street from the Florence Baptistery. The task required an innovative supporting framework and occupied much of his career (as described in detail in Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists). Other projects include the Spedale degli Innocenti (a hospital), the Old Sacristy at San Lorenzo, and the Pazzi Chapel in the Cloisters of Santa Croce, all from 1421 to 1430.

Delaware River

A historically significant river of the eastern United States. From its source in the Catskills, this river flows 301 miles, forming the border between Delaware and New Jersey. The Delaware flows past Trenton, New Jersey and Philadelphia, where it receives the Schuylkill River before emptying into the Atlantic. George Washington crossed the Delaware on Christmas night in 1776 to surprise the Hessians at the Battle of Trenton.

USS Arizona

A lead ship of the honor escort for President Wilson's trip to France in 1918, she was on Battleship Row at Pearl Harbor when Japanese aircraft appeared just before 8:00 am on Sunday, December 7, 1941. The Arizona came under attack almost immediately, and at about 8:10 was hit by an 800-kilogram bomb just forward of turret two on the starboard side. Within a few seconds the forward powder magazines exploded, killing 1,177 of the crew, and the ship sank to the bottom of the harbor. In 1962 the USS Arizona memorial opened and is now administered by the National Park Service.

Snake River

A major river of the northwestern United States. Rising in Yellowstone National Park, the Snake bisects southern Idaho along its 1,078-mile route. Flowing through Pocatello and Boise, the Snake River forms much of the border between Idaho and Oregon, including the famous Hells Canyon. The Snake River was a vital route for travelers headed west on the Oregon Trail, who followed the river most of the way to its mouth on the Columbia River.

Red River of the South

A major river of the southern Great Plains. The Red River forms most of the border between Oklahoma and Texas along its 1,360-mile length. That border formed part of the border between Mexico (and later the Republic of Texas) and the United States after the 1819 Adams-Onís Treaty. The Red runs through the Louisiana cities Shreveport and Alexandria before emptying into the Mississippi south of Natchez, Mississippi.

Confucius

A pivotal thinker from China's Spring and Autumn period, his views on proper conduct and filial piety influence China to this day. Many sayings attributed to Confucius were compiled by his disciples following his death in a text known as the Analects. Confucius put much importance on ren, the inner state which allows one to behave compassionately toward others, and on a concept called li, which can help individuals attain ren.

Ymir

A primordial giant who formed in the void Ginnungagap from fire and ice. He gave birth to the frost giants and created the primordial cow Audhumla. He was killed by Odin and his brothers, who used his body to construct most of the universe.

Lao Tzu

A quasi-mythical thinker of the Taoist tradition, to whom the pivotal Tao te Ching is attributed. Concepts associated with him include that of the Tao, or "the way," and wu wei, or a life of non-action in accordance with the Tao. In later centuries, Lao Tzu was accorded godlike status as one of the Three Pure Ones of Taoism, and is frequently depicted as an old man with a donkey. To Lao Tzu is attributed the quote "The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."

Thor

A son of Odin and the giantess Jord, he is the god of thunder, weather, and crops. One of the most popular of the Norse gods, he travels in a chariot pulled by two goats, and wields the hammer Mjölnir. He is married to Sif, and his special nemesis is the Midgard Serpent.

Columbia River

A vital waterway of the Pacific Northwest. Rising in the Rockies of British Columbia, this river flows through Lake Revelstoke before entering Washington state. Grand Coulee Dam along the Columbia in Washington forms Lake Roosevelt. When it was completed in 1943, Grand Coulee was the largest hydroelectric plant in the world; it is still America's largest electric power plant. The Columbia receives the Yakima and Snake Rivers before forming much of the Washington-Oregon border, receiving the Willamette River in Portland before emptying into the Pacific where Lewis and Clark sighted the ocean.

Patroclus

Achilles' foster brother and closest friend. Although he is a formidable hero, he is valued for his kind and gentle nature. He is killed by Hector while wearing the armor of Achilles.

Lake Victoria

Africa's largest and the world's second-largest freshwater lake by area, Lake Victoria lies along the Equator and is shared among Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania. Located on a plateau between two rift valleys, its lone outlet is the Victoria Nile, a precursor of the White Nile. Named by the British explorer John Hanning Speke after Queen Victoria, the introduction of the predatory Nile perch in the 1950s has caused environmental degradation, sending many native cichlid species into extinction.

Lake Tanganyika

Africa's second-largest lake by area, it is also the second-deepest in the world, surpassed only by Lake Baikal. Due its extreme depth (over 4,700 feet), Lake Tanganyika contains seven times as much water as Lake Victoria. A source of the Lualaba River, it is shared by Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi, and Zambia. On its Tanzanian shore is the town of Ujiji, at which Henry Morton Stanley "found" Dr. David Livingstone in 1871.

Congo River

Africa's second-longest river, it flows in a counterclockwise arc some 2,900 miles to the Atlantic Ocean. The Upper Congo's principal sources are the Lualaba, which rises in the Democratic Republic of the Congo's Katanga province, and Zambia's Chambeshi River. Boyoma Falls (formerly Stanley Falls), a section of seven cataracts near Kisangani, marks the beginning of the Congo River proper. Forming the Malebo Pool near the world capitals of Kinshasa and Brazzaville, the Lower Congo flows past Angola's Cabinda exclave as it enters the ocean. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness depicts the often cruel conditions the Congo basin endured as a Belgian colony.

Lake Malawi

Africa's third-largest lake by area and the southernmost of the Great Rift Valley lakes, it is wedged between the nations of Malawi, Tanzania, and Mozambique. Fed by the Ruhuhu River, its lone outlet is the Shire River, a tributary of the Zambezi. Lake Malawi contains hundreds of species of endemic fish, especially cichlids.

Niger River

Africa's third-longest, it flows in a great clockwise arc through Guinea, Mali, Niger, and Nigeria before entering the Gulf of Guinea. The medieval Mali and Songhai Empires were centered on the Niger, whose course was mapped by the Scottish explorer Mungo Park in the 1790s. In Nigeria, it receives the Benue River, its main tributary. The massive Niger Delta, known for its fisheries, wildlife, and petroleum, is an area of increasing social unrest.

Oder

Along with the Neisse, this river forms the Germany-Poland border, as dictated at the Potsdam Conference in July and August of 1945. One of the largest rivers to enter the Baltic, it has been a major transport route for centuries. Ostrava in the Czech Republic and Breslau in Poland are on the river. Near its mouth is Stettin, which Churchill used as the northern terminus of his "Iron Curtain" (Trieste, in the South, is an Adriatic port not near a major river). At the mouth of the Oder are Usedom Island, Swinemuende, and Peenemuende, which were primary test sites for the German V-2 rocket in the 1940s.

Upanishads

Also called Vedanta, or "last part of the Vedas," the Upanishads were written in Sanskrit between 900 and 500 BC. Part poetry but mainly prose, the earlier Upanishads laid the foundation for the development of several key Hindu ideas, such as connecting the individual soul (atman) with the universal soul (Brahman). Spiritual release, or moksha, could be achieved through meditation and asceticism. The name "Upanishads" means "to sit down close," as pupils did when a teacher recited them.

Shiva

Also known as Lord Mahesh, she is the Destroyer in the Trimurti. Developed from Rudra, the Vedic god of death, Shiva is often shown sitting on a tiger skin and riding the bull Nandi. He is also associated with a lingam (phallus). He has three eyes, of which the third (in the middle of his head) is all-knowing; when it opens, the world is destroyed and regenerated. Lord of all underworld beings, he wears a necklace of skulls and another made of a snake. He carries a trident as a weapon and has a blue throat, the result of drinking poison while the ocean churns. Parvati, one of his several consorts, bears him two sons: Kartikeya (the god of war) and Ganesha.

Paris

Also the son of Priam and Hecuba, he is destined to be the ruin of his country. He fulfills this destiny by accepting a bribe when asked to judge which of three goddesses is the fairest. When he awards Aphrodite the golden apple, Aphrodite repays him by granting him the most beautiful woman in the world; unfortunately, Helen is already married to Menelaus. Known less for hand-to-hand fighting than for mastery of his bow, he kills Achilles with an arrow but dies by the poisoned arrows of Philoctetes.

Qur'an

Arabic for "recitation," it is the most sacred scripture of Islam. The Qur'an is subdivided into 114 chapters, called suras, which — except the first one — are arranged in descending order of length. According to Muslim belief, the angel Jibril (Gabriel) visited the prophet Muhammad in AD 610 and revealed the work to him. Various suras discuss absolute submission to Allah (God), happiness in paradise versus torture in hell, and the mercy, compassion, and justice of Allah. The third caliph, Uthman (644-656), formalized the text after many of his oral reciters were killed in battle.

Nighthawks, by Edward Hopper

As is often the case with his works, Hopper uses a realistic approach (including such details as the fluorescent light of the diner, the coffee pots, and the Phillies cigar sign atop the diner) to convey a sense of a loneliness and isolation, even going so far as to depict the corner store without a door connecting to the larger world. Hopper's wife Jo served as the model for the woman at the bar. Nighthawks is housed at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Shannon

At 230 miles, this river is Ireland's longest river. It flows from Lough Allen, and Loughs Ree and Derg are also on its course. At Limerick, the river widens into its namesake estuary and runs for 50 more miles before it enters the Atlantic. Peat bogs and marshes line the river for much of its course, and this river is considered a dividing line between Ireland's more cultivated east and wild west. A chief tributary is the Suck River. The Shannon does not pass through Dublin, although the Liffey does.

The Yellow River

At 3,400 miles, China's second-longest; it is also the most important to the northern half of the country. It rises in Qinghai province and flows into the Bohai Gulf of the Yellow Sea. The river's name comes from the extraordinary amount of loess silt that it carries, an average of 57 pounds for every cubic yard of water. Among its notable features is the Grand Canal, rebuilt during the Ming Dynasty, that links it to the Yangtze.

Museum of Modern Art

Better known as "MoMA" and situated in Manhattan, it has been connected with the Rockefeller family since its founding in 1929. Its collection includes Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night, Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Salvador Dalí's The Persistence of Memory, and Piet Mondrian's Broadway Boogie-Woogie.

USS Constitution

Better known as "Old Ironsides," the warship was one of the first six ships commissioned by the U.S. Navy after the American Revolution. Launched from Boston in 1797, the Constitution first saw action as the squadron flagship in the Quasi-War with France from 1799-1801 and also fought in the Barbary War and the War of 1812. She later served many years as the nation's flagship in the Mediterranean. Retired from active duty in 1846, the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes' poem "Old Ironsides" saved her from the scrap yard—she became the training ship of the U.S. Naval Academy until the mid-1880s. She became the symbolic flagship of the U.S. Navy in 1940 and is now a floating museum in Boston.

Andrea Palladio

Born Andrea di Pietro della Gondola, he designed villas in and near Venice, including the Villa Rotonda and Villa Barbaro. He integrated Greco-Roman ideas of hierarchy, proportion, and order with contemporary Renaissance styles. His Four Books on Architecture from 1570 relates his theoretical principles. Among architects heavily influenced by Palladio were Inigo Jones and Thomas Jefferson.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Born in Wisconsin, he worked under Louis Sullivan before founding a Chicago practice. His early homes, like the Robie House — which is adjacent to the campus of the University of Chicago — are in the "Prairie" style: horizontal orientation and low roofs. His "organic architecture" tries to harmonize with its inhabitants and site; examples include the Kaufmann House (also known as Fallingwater) in Pennsylvania; the Johnson Wax Building in Racine, Wisconsin; and Taliesin, his home and studio in Spring Green, Wisconsin. (There is also a Taliesin West, his home and studio in Arizona.) Other notable Wright works are the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, the Larkin Building in Buffalo, the Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois, and the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, which was one of few buildings to survive a 1923 earthquake (though it has since been demolished).

Fort Sumter

Built on an island in 1829, the fort was one of three that the United States maintained in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. In order to claim true independence from the Union, Jefferson Davis decided that the forts needed to be taken; a Confederate force under P. G. T. Beauregard ordered the small Union garrison, controlled by Major Robert Anderson, to surrender. Anderson refused, shots were fired, and the Union commander surrendered two days later with only one soldier killed. The Union made two unsuccessful attempts to recapture the fort with ironclad ships in 1863, but Confederate forces finally abandoned Sumter when they left Charleston in February 1865.

Passover

Celebrated for seven or eight days beginning on the 15th day of Nissan (the seventh month), Passover commemorates the Exodus from Egypt. It is also the ancient Hebrew New Year. On the first day or two days, Jews have a festival dinner called a seder, where they retell the story of the Exodus from a book called a hagaddah. Jews are required to abstain from eating or owning leavened bread, and anything made with leaven, for the duration of the festival; matzah (a flat unleavened bread) is eaten instead. On Passover, the Song of Songs is recited. Passover also begins a period of seven weeks called the Omer, a period of semi-mourning that leads into Shavuot.

Purim

Celebrated on the 14th of Adar (the sixth month) and commemorating the victory of the Jews — led by Esther and her cousin Mordechai — against Haman, who tried to destroy the Jews because of his anger at Mordechai. The story, recorded in the Book of Esther (read from a scroll, or megillah), takes place in Shushan, the capital city of the kingdom of the Persian King Ahasuerus (Achashvayrosh). On Purim, it is traditional to dress up, get drunk, give to charity, eat triangular pastries called hamentaschen (meaning "Haman's ears" or "Haman's pockets" in German), and exchange gifts (mishloach manot) with friends.

Sukkot

Celebrated on the 15th of Tishrei, it commemorates the sukkot (booths) that the Israelites lived in following the Exodus from Egypt; it also celebrates the harvest. Traditionally, Jews build outdoor booths in which they live and eat for seven days. In synagogue, four symbolic species — the palm, a yellow citrus called the etrog, the myrtle, and the willow — are waved in seven directions. Each night, in the sukkah, it is traditional to invite a Biblical figure to be the guest for that night.

Rosh HaShanah

Celebrated on the first and second days of the month of Tishrei, this holiday marks the beginning of the Jewish civil year. (The beginning of the ecclesiastic year is Pesach.) It is believed that on Rosh HaShanah, people's souls are judged, and God "temporarily" decides their fate for the coming year. Between Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur are the Ten Days of Repentance, when people are given a chance to reflect and repent. On Rosh HaShanah, it is customary to wear white clothes and eat apples with honey for a sweet year, and pomegranates to represent being as fruitful as its many seeds. Other customs include the blowing of the shofar (an instrument made from a ram's horn) and a ceremony called Tashlich, in which Jews throw bread crumbs into running water to symbolize the cleansing of their sins.

Shavuot

Celebrated on the sixth day of Sivan (the ninth month), the 50th day of the Omer that began after Passover. The word Shavuot means "weeks," (seven weeks of the Omer), hence the name of the homologous Christian holiday Pentecost. Shavuot commemorates the giving of the Torah to the Israelites at Mount Sinai, as well as the beginning of the harvest in ancient Israel. Sukkot, Passover, and Shavuot are the three pilgrimages, when Jews would all gather at the Temple each year; on Shavuot, Jews would dedicate their first harvest fruits to the Temple. The Book of Ruth is read in synagogue on Shavuot, and it is traditional to study all night on this festival.

Yom Kippur

Celebrated on the tenth day of Tishrei, it is the Jewish Day of Atonement; at the end of Yom Kippur, it is believed that one's fate is sealed. Jews are required to abstain from eating, drinking, washing, and sex, as well as indulgent dress such as jewelry, make-up, and leather. One traditionally wears white clothes to symbolize purity. In the afternoon, the Book of Jonah is read. A full day of prayers begins with the Kol Nidre, which releases Jews from vows or promises to God. As on Rosh HaShanah, the shofar is blown unless it is Shabbat, in which case the shofar is blown only during the final service, N'ila (meaning "closing," since the Temple gates were closed for this service).

Taklamakan Desert

China; 105,000 mi2) This desert is an extremely cold, sandy desert known for splitting the Silk Road into branches running north and south of it. It is bounded by the Kunlun, Pamir, and Tian Shan mountain ranges.

Vedas

Consist strictly of four hymnbooks: the Rig (prayers in verse), Sama (musical melodies), Yajur (prose prayers), and Atharva (spells and incantations). Each Veda, though, also contains a Brahmana (interpretation), and the Vedas also incorporate treatises on meditation (Aranyakas) as well as the Upanishads. Written in an archaic form of Sanskrit by early Aryan invaders, possibly between 1500 and 1200 BC, the Vedas concentrate on sacrifices to deities, such as Indra (god of thunder), Varuna (cosmic order), and Agni (fire). The major gods Vishnu and Shiva appear as minor deities in the Vedas; their elevation, as well as the concept of karma, does not develop until the Upanishads.

The Barber of Seville

Count Almaviva loves Rosina, the ward of Dr. Bartolo. Figaro (who brags about his wit in "Largo al factotum") promises to help him win the girl. He tries the guise of the poor student Lindoro, a drunken soldier, and then a replacement music teacher, all of which are penetrated by Dr. Bartolo. Eventually they succeed by climbing in with a ladder and bribing the notary who was to marry Rosina to Dr. Bartolo himself. This opera is also based on a work of Pierre de Beaumarchais and is a prequel to The Marriage of Figaro.

Phobos

Discovered by Asaph Hall III in 1877. At just 3,700 miles above the Martian surface, Phobos orbits more closely to its planet than any other moon in the Solar System. Because it orbits Mars faster than Mars rotates, each day it appears (from the Martian surface) to set twice in the east. Geological features on Phobos, including the Stickney Crater, are primarily named for either astronomers (Stickney was the maiden name of Asaph Hall's wife) or characters from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. In 1971 the U.S.'s Mariner IX became the first spacecraft to provide close-up photos of Phobos.

St. Lawrence River

Drains the Great Lakes and serves as a major waterway of eastern Canada. First explored and named by Jacques Cartier in the early 16th century, the St. Lawrence emerges from the northeastern corner of Lake Ontario in the Thousand Islands archipelago, forming the border between Ontario and New York. The St. Lawrence receives the Ottawa and Saguenay Rivers and flows through Montréal and Quebec City. At its mouth, the Gulf of St. Lawrence is one of the world's largest estuaries.

Richard I

English King; went on the third Crusade; made treaty with Saladin

The Marriage of Figaro

Figaro and Susanna are servants of Count Almaviva who plan to marry, but this plan is complicated by the older Marcellina who wants to wed Figaro, the Count — who has made unwanted advances to Susanna —, and Don Bartolo, who has a loan that Figaro has sworn he will repay before he marries. The issues are resolved with a series of complicated schemes that involve impersonating other characters, including the page Cherubino. The opera is based on a comedy by Pierre de Beaumarchais. Be careful: Many of the same characters also appear in The Barber of Seville!

The Persistence of Memory, by Salvador Dalí

First shown in 1931, The Persistence of Memory is probably the most famous surrealist painting. The landscape of the scene echoes Port Lligat, Dalí's home. The ants, flies, clocks, and the Port Lligat landscape are motifs in many other Dalí paintings, and the trompe l'oeil depiction of figures is typical of his works. It currently belongs to the MOMA; its 1951 companion piece, The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, hangs at the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Ohio river

Flows 981 miles through a significant industrial region of the central United States. Historically seen as the border between the northern and southern United States, the Ohio is formed in downtown Pittsburgh by the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers, flowing past Wheeling, Cincinnati, Louisville, and Evansville, forming borders of five states before emptying into the Mississippi at Cairo, Illinois. Other major tributaries of the Ohio include the Kanawha, Kentucky, Tennessee, Wabash, and Cumberland Rivers.

Missouri river

Formed in western Montana by the confluence of the Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin Rivers. It flows past Bismarck, North Dakota and Kansas City before emptying into the Mississippi just north of St. Louis. Lewis and Clark used the Missouri as a route for exploration of the Louisiana Purchase. The Missouri is regulated by a number of major dams, including Fort Peck in Montana and Oahe Dam in South Dakota.

Lake Chad

Formerly Africa's fourth-largest lake, its surface area has been reduced by over 90% since the 1960s due to droughts and diversion of water from such sources as the Chari River. The lake is at the intersection of Chad, Cameroon, Niger, and Nigeria, but most of the remaining water is in Chad and Cameroon. This lake is very shallow and has no outlet, so seasonal rainfall causes large fluctuations in its area.

Chloroplast

Found only in plants and certain protists, these organelles contains the green pigment chlorophyll and is the site of photosynthesis. Like the mitochondrion, a chloroplast is a double-membrane-bound organelle, and it has its own DNA and ribosomes in the stroma. Chloroplasts contain grana, which are stacks of single membrane structures called thylakoids on which the reactions of photosynthesis occur.

Hermitage

Founded in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1764 by Catherine the Great, its buildings include the Winter Palace, which was once the residence of Russia's tsars. Its most famous pieces include Rembrandt's The Return of the Prodigal Son and Henri Matisse's Red Room.

Loire

France's longest river, this river begins in the Cevennes range of southern France, flows north to the center of the country, then flows due west to the Bay of Biscay. Many notable cities are on the river, including Nevers, Orleans, Blois, Tours, and Nantes. The river is sometimes called the "last wild river in Western Europe," and many proposed dams on the river have not been built because of opposition to the flooding of land and to interference with Atlantic salmon. The Loire Valley is particularly known for its vineyards and for its châteaux, a collection of over 300 castles dating to the 16th and 17th centuries.

Hudson River

Has been a historically significant American river since the early 17th century. Named for the English explorer Henry Hudson, it flows 315 miles through eastern New York state. After receiving the Mohawk River, the Hudson flows past New York's capital, Albany, and West Point before forming the boundary between Manhattan and New Jersey. The Hudson is also culturally significant as an inspiration for Washington Irving and the Hudson River School of American landscape painters.

The Rio Grande

Has formed the border between Texas and four Mexican states since 1848. It flows south out of Colorado through New Mexico before reaching the international boundary near El Paso. Texas's Big Bend National Park is named for the sweeping curve the Rio Grande cuts through the Sierra Madre Oriental. After leaving the mountains, the river flows past Laredo and Brownsville before it empties into the Gulf of Mexico.

Don Giovanni

He attempts to seduce Donna Anna, but is discovered by her father, the Commendatore, whom he kills in a swordfight. Later in the act, his servant Leporello recounts his master's 2,000-odd conquests in the "Catalogue Aria." Further swordfights and assignations occur prior to the final scene, in which a statue of the Commendatore comes to life, knocks on the door to the room in which Don Giovanni is feasting, and then opens a chasm that takes him down to hell.

Antoni Gaudi

He created many extraordinary buildings in Barcelona in the early 20th century. His Art Nouveau-inspired works include the Casa Mila and Casa Batllo apartments, known from their undulating façades, and several works for patron Eusebi Guell, including the Parc Guell, a park in Barcelona. He spent 40 years working on the Expiatory Church of the Holy Family (also known as La Sagrada Familia), which will be finished in 2026. He was also fond of using hyperbolic paraboloids in his work.

Louis Sullivan

He did not design the first skyscraper, but did become a vocal champion of skyscrapers as reflections of the modern age. Though most associated with Chicago, his best-known work is the 1891 Wainwright Building in St. Louis. His partnership with Dankmar Adler produced over 100 buildings. Later works, such as the Babson, Bennett, and Bradley Houses, reflect an organic architecture distinct from that of his onetime employee Frank Lloyd Wright. Sullivan's dictum that "form should follow function" strongly influenced modern architecture; his writings helped break the profession from classical restraints.

I.M. Pei

He is among the most famous living architects. Born in China, he emigrated to the U.S. in 1935. Though he has also designed moderate-income housing, Pei is best known for large-scale projects. His works include the Mile High Center in Denver, the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, the John Hancock Building in Boston, the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Fragrant Hill Hotel in Beijing, and the recent Miho Museum of Art in Shiga, Japan. He may be best known for two fairly recent works: the glass pyramid erected outside the Louvre in 1989, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, completed in 1995.

John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill

He was an utilitarian philosopher who comes up in quiz bowl most often in conjunction with his works On Liberty (1859) and Utilitarianism (1863). He makes this list, however, because he wrote one of the most influential philosophical defenses of women's rights, The Subjection of Women (1869). He claimed that his wife, Harriet Taylor, co-authored this text with him, a claim which is debated by historians. The husband and wife did write several essays together, including a tract advocating women's suffrage titled The Enfranchisement of Women (1851), and Mill recognized his wife as a major contributor to all his greatest works.

Loki

He's actually giant-kin, but lives with the Aesir and is Odin's blood-brother. The god of fire and trickery, his many pranks include duping Hoder into killing Balder. His children include the wolf Fenrir, the Midgard Serpent Jormungandr, Hel (the ruler of the underworld), and Sleipnir. After killing Balder he was chained to three boulders with snakes dripping poison onto him.

Talmud

Hebrew for "instruction," the Talmud is a codification of Jewish oral law, based on the Torah. It consists of the Mishnah (the laws themselves), and the Gemara (scholarly commentary on the Mishnah). The Gemara developed in two Judaic centers, Palestine and Babylonia, so there are two Talmuds (Palestinian and Babylonian), the latter considered more authoritative. Rabbis and lay scholars finished the Babylonian Talmud around 600.

Henry II

House of Plantagenet. The son of Geoffrey of Anjou and Matilda, he married Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1152, and invaded England the following year, forcing Stephen of Blois to acknowledge Henry as his heir. While king he developed the common law and due process, but fought with Thomas à Becket over submission to the Pope; Henry had Becket executed in 1170 but performed penance at Canterbury. Eleanor and his four sons conspired with French king Philip II against Henry on several occasions.

Museo el Prado

In 1785, Spanish King Charles III commissioned a building to house a natural history museum, but his grandson Ferdinand VII completed the Prado as an art museum in 1819. Deriving its name from the Spanish for "meadow," the Prado's holdings include not only what is universally regarded as the best collection of Spanish paintings, but also a number of works from Flemish masters, such as Diego Velázquez's Las Meninas, Francisco Goya's The Third of May, 1808, and Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights.

USS Nautilus

In 1951 Congress authorized construction of the world's first nuclear-powered submarine. On December 12 of that year, the Navy Department announced that she would be the sixth ship of the fleet to bear the name Nautilus. She was launched on January 21, 1954. Eight months later, on September 30, 1954, the Nautilus became the first commissioned nuclear-powered ship in the U.S. Navy. On the morning of January 17, 1955, Nautilus' Commander Wilkinson signaled "Underway on Nuclear Power." In 1958 she departed Pearl Harbor under top-secret orders to conduct "Operation Sunshine," the first crossing of the North Pole by a ship.

The National Gallery

In Trafalgar Square in London houses a synoptic collection of pre-1900 paintings assembled by government purchase and donation. It is home to British masterpieces including John Constable's The Haywain and both Rain, Steam and Speed and The Fighting Temeraire by J. M. W. Turner. The museum also boasts several major highlights of European painting, from arguably the best known of Vincent van Gogh's Sunflowers series to exemplar Baroque works like Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus, The Judgment of Paris by Peter Paul Rubens, and the Rokeby Venus of Diego Velázquez. Major works of the Italian and north European Renaissance are also represented, including Jan van Eyck's The Arnolfini Wedding, Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors, Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne, Raphael's Portrait of Pope Julius II, and the later of Leonardo's two versions of Madonna of the Rocks.

Diomedes

In his day of glory, he kills Pandarus and wounds Aeneas before taking on the gods. He stabs Aphrodite in the wrist and, with Athena as his charioteer, wounds Ares in the stomach. Along with Odysseus, he also conducts a successful night raid against King Rhesus.

Po

Italy's longest river at 405 miles, it passes through Piedmont and Lombardy before entering the Adriatic 30 miles south of Venice. It flows through Turin and Cremona, and it passes near Milan, Padua, Pavia, and Mantua. The river has a long history of floods, and the manmade levees called argini which protect towns and crops can exacerbate the floods. Pollution, especially from Milan, is becoming a major environmental concern.

Salome

Jokanaan (John the Baptist) is imprisoned in the dungeons of King Herod. Herod's 15-year-old step-daughter Salome becomes obsessed with the prisoner's religious passion and is incensed when he ignores her advances. Later in the evening Herod orders Salome to dance for him (the "Dance of the Seven Veils"), but she refuses until he promises her "anything she wants." She asks for the head of Jokanaan and eventually receives it, after which a horrified Herod orders her to be killed; his soldiers crush her with their shields.

Battle of Britain

July 1940 - October 1940): This battle saw the British Royal Air Force (RAF) defeat the German air force, known as the Luftwaffe, effectively saving Britain from a proposed German amphibious invasion codenamed Operation Sea Lion. The primary German fighter plane was the Messerschmitt Bf 109, which engaged in numerous dogfights against British pilots flying Hurricane and Spitfire aircraft. Effective use of radar helped to repel German forces, forcing the Luftwaffe into nighttime raids against civilian targets, a campaign known as the Blitz.

Rijksmuseum

Located in Amsterdam, this is the national museum of The Netherlands. Currently housed in a Gothic Revival building designed by P. J. H. Cuypers and completed in 1885, its most distinguished works include Rembrandt's Night Watch, Franz Hals's The Merry Drinker, and Jan Vermeer's The Milkmaid.

Uffizi Gallery

Located in Florence, Italy, the Uffizi Gallery was originally designed by Giorgio Vasari to serve as offices for the Florentine magistrates under Cosimo de' Medici — hence the name uffizi, meaning "offices." After Cosimo I died in 1574, the new grand duke, Francis I, commissioned the conversion of its top floor into a galley. Its outstanding Renaissance holdings include The Birth of Venus and La Primavera, both by Sandro Botticelli, and Titian's Venus of Urbino.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Located on the edge of Central Park and colloquially known as "the Met," its main building on Fifth Avenue was designed by Richard Morris Hunt. Its collection includes El Greco's View of Toledo, Jacques-Louis David's The Death of Socrates, and John Singer Sargent's Madame X.

The Art institute of Chicago

Located on the western edge of Grant Park in Chicago, the main building of the Art Institute was built for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition and features two lion statues at its entrance (which are often decorated for special occasions, e.g. with jerseys when Chicago sports teams are in the playoffs). It has an outstanding collection of French Impressionist and American works such as Georges Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's At the Moulin Rouge, Grant Wood's American Gothic, and Edward Hopper's Nighthawks.

Danube

Most of this river is in Eastern Europe, but it begins in Germany's Black Forest (Schwarzwald) near Freiburg, crossing Bavaria before it enters Austria. In all, it passes through (or touches the borders of) 10 nations on its 1,785-mile course ending at the Black Sea. Chief tributaries include the Drava and Sava, and it passes through four national capitals: Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest, and Belgrade. Formerly known as the Ister, the Danube was often used to define a northern border for the Roman Empire.

USS Lawrence/USS Niagara

Oliver Hazard Perry's decisive victory over the British fleet in the Battle of Lake Erie on September 10, 1813 ensured American control of the Great Lakes during the War of 1812. In the battle, Perry's flagship was severely damaged and four-fifths of her crew killed or wounded. Commodore Perry and a small contingent rowed a half-mile through heavy gunfire to another American ship. Boarding and taking command, he brought her into battle and soundly defeated the British fleet. Perry summarized the fight in a now-famous message to General William Henry Harrison: "We have met the enemy and they are ours."

Potomac River

One of America's most historic waterways. Rising at Fairfax Stone in West Virginia, the Potomac runs 405 miles, forming the border between Virginia and Maryland. Washington, D.C. was sited on the Potomac at its confluence with the Anacostia River. George Washington's plantation Mount Vernon was on the Potomac, while Robert E. Lee's two invasions north of the Potomac were major events of the Civil War.

Rhone

One of Europe's few major rivers to flow directly into the Mediterranean (via the Gulf of Lion), the it originates in the Swiss Alps and flows into Lake Geneva. It emerges from Geneva and flows south, passes through Lyon, Avignon, and Arles, and enters the sea just west of Marseille. At Arles, the river splits into "grand" and "petit" branches that encircle the island Camargue. The river's valley is famous for its red wine, and because it is navigable for 300 miles, the Rhone is the key access route of southern France.

Analects

One of the "Four Books" used by the ancient Chinese for civil service study, it contains the sayings (aphorisms) of Confucius. The philosopher Confucius did not write or edit the words that make up the Analects; his disciples compiled them in the 5th or 4th century BC. Confucianism is more of a philosophical system than a religion, and Confucius thought of himself more as a teacher than as a spiritual leader. The Analects also contain some of the basic ideas found in Confucianism, such as ren (benevolence) and li (proper conduct).

Vishnu

One of the Trimurti (the holy trinity of Hindu gods), he is the Preserver, protecting the world. When needed, Vishnu descends to Earth as an avatar, or incarnation. Nine have appeared so far: Matsya, Kurma (tortoise), Varah (boar), Narasimha (man-lion), Vamana (dwarf), Parashurama, Rama, Krishna, and Buddha. A tenth, Kalki, will appear with a flaming sword to save humans from the darkness. Some cult followers worship Vishnu as Narayana, the primal being. Vishnu has dark blue skin, rides with the eagle Garuna, and sits on the snake Shesha. His symbols are the conch, disc, club, and lotus; his chief wives are Lakshmi and Bhu (the Earth). Kama, the god of love, may be his son.

The Battle of Kadesh

One of the earliest battles in recorded history, this battle (1274 BC) was fought near the Orontes River in what is now Syria between Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II and the Hittite king Muwatalli II. Although Ramses proclaimed a great victory for himself, he was lucky to achieve a stalemate after being ambushed by Hittite chariots. Kadesh was probably the largest chariot battle in history, with over 5,000 chariots engaged. The Egyptian chariots were smaller and faster than those used by the Hittites, which gave the Egyptians an advantage.

Deimos

One-seventh the mass of Phobos and further away from the Martian surface, this moon was found by Asaph Hall at the U.S. Naval Observatory six days before he discovered Phobos. Its largest and only named craters are Swift and Voltaire; Deimos's surface doesn't appear as rough as Phobos's because regolith has filled in some of the craters. A still-controversial and unproven hypothesis holds that Deimos (and possibly Phobos as well) were asteroids perturbed out of their orbit by Jupiter and then captured by the gravity of Mars.

Tate

Originally known as the National Gallery of British Art when opened in 1897, it was renamed for its benefactor, sugar tycoon Sir Henry Tate. The original Tate Gallery has been renamed Tate Britain, and there are now three additional branches: Tate Modern in London, Tate Liverpool, and Tate St. Ives in Cornwall. The Tate awards the Turner Prize, a highly publicized award for British artists, and its collection includes Whaam! by Roy Lichtenstein and many works by J. M. W. Turner.

I and the Village, by Marc Chagall

Painted in 1911, this painting among Chagall's earliest surviving paintings. It is a dreamlike scene that includes many motifs common to Chagall, notably the lamb and peasant life. In addition to the two giant faces—a green face on the right and a lamb's head on the left—other images include a milkmaid, a reaper, an upside-down peasant woman, a church, and a series of houses, some of them upside-down. I and the Village is currently housed at MOMA.

Agni

Part of a trinity with Surya (the sun) and Vaayu (the wind), he can be brought to life by rubbing two sticks together. Since he is responsible for sacrificial fires, he is the patron of priests. He has a red body, two heads, three legs, four arms, and seven tongues; he often carries a flaming javelin. In the Mahabharata, Agni's grandfather is one of seven great sages; with the help of Krishna, he devours the Khandav forest.

Louvre

Perhaps the world's most famous museum, the Musée du Louvre is located on the right bank of the Seine River in the heart of Paris. Housed in the Louvre Palace, which was a royal residence until 1682, the Louvre was permanently opened to the public as a museum by the French Revolutionary government in 1793. During renovations carried out in the 1980s, a controversial steel-and-glass pyramid designed by I. M. Pei was installed at its entrance. Works housed within the Sully, Richelieu, and Denon Wings of the Louvre include ancient Greek sculptures such as the Winged Victory of Samothrace and the Venus de Milo, Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, and Eugène Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People.

Peter I

Peter I (1672-1725; ruled 1682-1725): Peter the Great is famous both for his push for Westernization and for his boisterous personality. His Grand Embassy to Europe enabled him to learn about Western life (and even to work in a Dutch shipyard); he later invited Western artisans to come to Russia, required the boyars (aristocrats) to shave their beards and wear Western clothing, and even founded a new capital, St. Petersburg — his "window on the West." He also led his country in the Great Northern War (in which Charles XII of Sweden was defeated at Poltava), created a Table of Ranks for the nobility, and reformed the bureaucracy and army. But Peter could also be violent and cruel: he personally participated in the torture of the streltsy, or musketeers, who rebelled against him, and had his own son executed.

Campbell's Soup Can, by Andy Warhol

Pop Art parodies (or perhaps reflects) a world in which celebrities, brand names, and media images have replaced the sacred; Warhol's series of Campbell's Soup paintings may be the best illustration of this. Like the object itself, the paintings were often done by the mass-produceable form of serigraphy (silk screening). Also like the subject, the Warhol soup can painting existed in many varieties, with different types of soup or numbers of cans; painting 32 or 100 or 200 identical cans further emphasized the aspect of mass production aspect in the work. The same approach underlies Warhol's familiar series of prints of Marilyn Monroe, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and other pop culture figures.

Le Corbusier

Possibly more influential even than Wright, he wrote the 1923 book Towards a New Architecture, standard reading in architectural theory courses. One famous quote from him is "A house is a machine for living in." His floor plans were influenced by Cubist principles of division of space, and the Villa Savoye (Poissy, France) is his best-known early work. He wrote of the "Radiant City" begun anew, a completely planned city with skyscrapers for residents. Applications of his approach to government buildings (such as in Brasilia or in Chandigarh, India), however, largely failed, as did many urban renewal projects produced on the same ideological foundation. Nonetheless, he influenced every other 20th-century figure on this list.

Apocrypha

Protestants and Jews assign lower authority to the Apocrypha because it was written between 300 and 100 BC, but Catholics and Orthodox Christians consider the books that make up the Apocrypha to be "deuterocanonical," meaning that they are just as important and divinely-inspired as other parts of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible. "Apocryphal" in general means "something outside an accepted canon," and, in particular, in ancient Greek it meant "hidden things." Denominations differ as to which books make up the Apocrypha, but Tobit, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Wisdom, Sirach (or Ecclesiasticus), and Baruch are almost always included.

Book of Mormon

Published in 1830 by the founder of the Mormon Church, Joseph Smith. Mormons believe that the prophet Moroni revealed the location of the Book of Mormon to Smith, and then Smith translated it from a "reformed Egyptian" language. The Book of Mormon is inscribed on thin gold plates, and documents the history of a group of Hebrews who migrated to America around 600 BC. This group divided into two tribes: the Lamanites (ancestors of American Indians), and the highly civilized Nephites, a chosen people instructed by Jesus but killed by the Lamanites around AD 421.

Limpopo River

Rising as the Crocodile (or Krokodil) River in South Africa's Witwatersrand region, it forms the Transvaal's border with Botswana and Zimbabwe, then crosses through Mozambique. Deforestation in Mozambique contributed to massive flooding of the Limpopo in 2000. Perhaps the most famous description of the Limpopo comes from Rudyard Kipling, who in "The Elephant's Child" referred to it as "the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees."

Elbe

Rising in the Krkonose Mountains of the Sudetenland in the Czech Republic, the river flows near Prague, then enters eastern Germany and flows northwest to the North Sea. It receives the Vltava (or Moldau), the Saale, and the Havel/Spree, and the many large cities on its course include Dresden, Dessau, Magdeburg, Wittenberg, and Hamburg. Like the Oder, the Elbe has been a key transportation route for many centuries.

Thames

Running from Thames Head near Cirencester to an estuary near Southend in Essex, this river is the principal river of England and flows through central London. The Houses of Parliament and the London Eye overlook the Thames, as does Big Ben. Flowing through Reading, Oxford, and Swindon, the Thames is prevented from flooding London by its namesake Barrier near the Isle of Dogs. Though it is the longest river entirely in England, the Thames trails the Severn (which also flows into Wales) as the longest river in the United Kingdom.

Avesta

Sacred scripture of Zoroastrianism. It consists of five parts: Gathas (poems written by Zoroaster), Visparat (homages to spiritual leaders), Vendidad (legal and medical doctrine), Yashts (hymns to angels and heroes), and Khurda (lesser rituals and hymns). The Gathas may be as old as the 7th century BC, when Zoroaster is thought to have lived, but most of the Avesta was put together by the Sassanid Persian dynasty, between AD 200 and 640. Zoroastrianism centers on the eternal struggle between a good entity (Ahura Mazda, or Ormuzd) and its evil counterpart (Angra Mainyu, or Ahriman); the religion is still practiced by about 120,000 Parsees in Bombay and a few thousand adherents in Iran and Iraq.

Bhagavad-Gita

Sanskrit for "The Song of God," it is a poem found in Book Six of the Hindu epic Mahabharata. Likely formalized in the 1st or 2nd century, the Bhagavad-Gita begins on the eve of a battle, when the prince Arjuna asks his charioteer Krishna (an avatar of Vishnu) about responsibility in dealing with the suffering that the impending battle will cause. Krishna tells Arjuna that humans possess a divine self within a material form, and that Arjuna's duty is to love God and do what is right without thinking of personal gain — some of the main tenets of Hinduism.

Iapetus

Saturn's third-largest moon after Titan and Rhea and, like Rhea, was discovered by Giovanni Cassini in 1671. It was named based upon a suggestion from John Herschel (son of the discoverer of Uranus, William Herschel) for the Titans of Greek mythology, the brothers and sisters of Cronos (Saturn). Iapetus has a distinctive two-tone coloration; part of it is red-brown, while part is bright gray. Features on Iapetus are named for people and places from the French Song of Roland, including Charlemagne Crater and the bright northern region Roncevaux Terra. In 2004 the Cassini orbiter found an equatorial ridge running over 800 miles long and 10 miles wide that gives Iapetus some of the highest peaks in the solar system; its existence has not yet been explained.

Thoth (Pantheon)

Serving the gods as the supreme scribe, the ibis-headed, he was known as the "tongue of Ptah" for his knowledge of hieroglyphics, and as the "Heart of Re" for his creative powers. His knowledge of science and calculation made him the creator of the calendar, and his symbol was the moon due to his knowledge of how to calculate its path. His knowledge of magic led to his association with the Greek Hermes. Thoth was consulted by Isis when attempting to resurrect Osiris, and was again consulted when the young Horus was stung by a scorpion.

Shiva's consort

Several incarnations of the "mother goddess" take this moniker. Parvati, the most benevolent form, is the reincarnation of Sati, who threw herself into the fire. Durga is a demon-slayer who rides a lion into battle and carries a weapon in each of her many arms. Kali is a black-skinned goddess of destruction, who defeats the demon leader Raktavija by drinking all of his blood. Although Kali's dance can destroy the world, Shiva throws himself at her feet to calm her, turning her into Parvati.

Hathor

She (or Athor or Athyr) was the patron of women. Hathor was the daughter of Ra and the wife of Horus. She fulfilled many functions as goddess of the sky, goddess of fertility, protector of marriage, and goddess of love and beauty. In that final role she became equated with Aphrodite and Venus. Pictures of Hathor show the goddess with the head of a cow.

Isis (pantheon)

She is the daughter of Geb and Nut, protected love, motherhood, and fate in the Egyptian mythos. Many of her roles are similar to those of the goddess Hathor, but she is often equated with the Greek Demeter. Her powers were gained through tricking the god Ra. By placing a snake in his path, which poisoned him, she forced him to give some power to her before she would cure him.

Hanuman

Son of the wind god Vaayu and Queen Anjana, he has a human body with a monkey's head. As a boy he swallows the sun (mistaking it for a piece of fruit); the angry Indra whips him with a thunderbolt. In response, the wind god Vaayu refuses to breathe air into the world, prompting Indra to apologize and the other gods to bestow immortality and shapeshifting ability on Hanuman. He figures prominently in the Ramayana, where he flies to Lanka to tell Sita that Rama will rescue her from Ravana.

Odin

The "All-Father," he is the leader of the Aesir, the principal group of Norse gods. He is a god of war, death, wisdom, poetry, and knowledge, and rides the eight-legged horse Sleipnir. He hung himself for nine days on the world-tree Yggsdrasil, pierced by his own spear, to gain knowledge, and traded one of his eyes for a drink from Mimir's well to gain wisdom.

Madama Butterfly

The American naval lieutenant Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton is stationed in Nagasaki where, with the help of the broker Goro, he weds the young girl Cio-Cio-San (Madame Butterfly) with a marriage contract with a cancellation clause. He later returns to America, leaving Cio-Cio-San to raise their son "Trouble" (whom she will rename "Joy" upon his return). When Pinkerton and his new American wife Kate do return, Cio-Cio-San gives them her son and stabs herself with her father's dagger. The opera is based on a play by David Belasco.

Christina's World, by Andrew Wyeth

The Christina of the title is Christina Olson, who lived near the Wyeths' summer home in Cushing, Maine. In the 1948 painting, Christina lays in the cornfield wearing a pink dress, facing away from the viewer, her body partly twisted and hair blowing slightly in the wind. In the far distance is a three-story farmhouse with dual chimneys and two dormers, along with two sheds to its right. A distant barn is near the top middle of the painting. One notable aspect is the subtle pattern of sunlight, which strikes the farmhouse obliquely from the right, shines in the wheel tracks in the upper right, and casts very realistic-looking shadows on Christina's dress. The Olson house was the subject of many Andrew Wyeth paintings for 30 years, and it was named to the National Register of Historic Places for its place in Christina's World.

Afterlife

The Egyptians believed that the soul had three components, the ba, ka, and akh, each of which had different roles after death. The ka remained near or within the body (which is why mummification was required). The ba went to the underworld where it merged with aspects of Osiris, but was allowed to periodically return (which is why Egyptian tombs often contained narrow doors). The akh could temporarily assume different physical forms and wander the world as a ghost of sorts. In the underworld, the ba was subjected to the Judgment of Osiris in the Hall of Double Justice, where the heart of the deceased was weighed against Ma'at, commonly represented as an ostrich feather.

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

The Guggenheim Bilbao opened in 1997 and is — like its sister instutition in New York — less famous for its collection than its building, a Frank Gehry design that seems to be an abstract sculpture all its own. Richard Serra's The Matter of Time is permanently installed here.

Bronislaw Malinowski

The Polish-born anthropologist studied at the London School of Economics, where he would later spend most of his career. He described the "kula ring" gift exchanges found in the Trobriand Islands in Argonauts of the Western Pacific, and the use of magic in agriculture in Coral Gardens and Their Magic. He also argued, in opposition to Sigmund Freud, that the Oedipus complex was not a universal element of human culture in his book on Sex and Repression in Savage Society.

Guggenheim

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is located in Manhattan's Upper East Side. Founded as "The Museum of Non-Objective Painting," in 1959 it moved into its current home, a Frank Lloyd Wright building that features a spiral ramp connecting the exhibition areas. Focusing on modern art, its holdings include the world's largest collection of paintings by Wassily Kandinsky.

Yijing

The basis for ancient Chinese philosophy and religion, the Yijing was created between 1500 and 1000 BC, though legend has it that the dragon-emperor Fuxi derived its eight trigrams from a turtle shell. The trigrams consist of three either broken (yin) or unbroken (yang) lines, and by reading pairs of these trigrams randomly, one could learn about humans, the universe, and the meaning of life. The Qin emperor Shi Huangdi burned most scholarly books, but the Yijing escaped because it was not seen as threatening.

Boris Godunov

The chief adviser of Ivan the Terrible, being pressured to assume the throne after Ivan's two children die. In the first act the religious novice Grigori decides that he will impersonate that younger son, Dmitri (the [first] "false Dmitri"), whom, it turns out, Boris had killed. Grigori raises a general revolt and Boris' health falls apart as he is taunted by military defeats and dreams of the murdered tsarevich. The opera ends with Boris dying in front of the assembled boyars (noblemen).

Arjuna

The chief hero of the Mahabharata, he is the son of Indra and one of five Pandava brothers, who fight a bitter war against their 100 cousins, Kauravas, culminating at the battle on "Kuru's Field." Before the battle, Arjuna asks his charioteer (Krishna) why he must fight. Krishna responds that Arjuna must follow a devotion to god (bhakti), and that even as he slays his brethren, it is for a just cause. Along with the rest of the Pandavas, Arjuna is married to Draupadi.

Freya

The daughter of Njord and twin sister of Frey, she is also a Vanir hostage living with the Aesir. The goddess of love, passion, and human fertility, her possessions include a cloak that allows her to turn into a falcon, and the necklace Brisingamen. She travels in a chariot drawn by two cats.

Balder

The fairest of the Aesir, he is the god of light, joy, and beauty. He dreamed of his own death, so Frigga extracted promises from everything not to harm Balder, but she skipped mistletoe. Loki tricked Balder's blind brother Hoder into killing him with a spear of mistletoe.

Indra

The god of rain, thunder, and war, he wields the thunderbolt (vajra) and rides Airavat, the four-tusked white elephant. In early Vedic times he was king of the gods who ruled swarga; many Rig Veda hymns are devoted to him. With the aid of both the Marut storm gods and his favorite drink, soma, Indra leads the Aryan conquest of India. He also defeats the dragon Vritra, who had stolen the world's water.

Norns

The goddesses of destiny, represented as the three sisters Urd (or Wyrd), Verdandi (or Verthandi), and Skuld. The counterparts of the Greek Fates, they tend the Well of Fate at the roots of Yggdrasil.

Io

The innermost of the four Galilean moons of Jupiter (the moons discovered by Galileo), the fourth-largest moon in the solar system, the densest moon, and the most geologically active body in the solar system, with more than 400 volcanoes. Io's features are named for characters from the Io story in Greek mythology; fire, volcano, and thunder deities from other mythologies; and characters from Dante's Inferno. Io plays a significant role in shaping Jupiter's magnetosphere. Pioneer 10 first passed by Io in December 1973.

Agamemnon

The king of Mycenae, he shares supreme command of the Greek troops with his brother, Menelaus. An epithet of his, "king of heroes," reflects this status. As a commander, however, he often lacks good public relations skills, as shown by his feud with Achilles (book 1) and by his ill-considered strategy of suggesting that all the troops go home (book 2). Upon his return home, Agamemnon is murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus.

Nestor

The king of Pylos, he is too old to participate in the fighting of the Trojan War, but serves as an advisor. He tells tales of "the good old days" to the other heroes.

Menelaus

The king of Sparta, he is the husband of Helen, the cause celebre of the war. He tries to win Helen back by fighting Paris in single combat, but Aphrodite carried Paris off when it seemed that Menelaus would win. Despite his notionally equal say in commanding the troops with his brother Agamemnon, in practice Agamemnon often dominates.

Priam

The king of Troy and son of Laomedon, he has 50 sons and 12 daughters with his wife Hecuba (presumably she does not bear them all), plus at least 42 more children with various concubines. Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles, kills him in front of his wife and daughters during the siege of Troy.

Lake Volta

The largest man-made lake (by area) in the world, this lake was created by the construction of Ghana's Akosombo Dam across the Volta River in the 1960s. The lake covers the area where the Black Volta and White Volta rivers formerly converged. The Akosombo Dam can provide over a gigawatt of power, enough to supply nearby aluminum smelters utilizing the energy-intensive Hall-Héroult process and the needs of the rest of the country.

Ganymede

The largest moon in the solar system and the only one known to have its own magnetosphere. The third of the Galilean satellites, Ganymede was also first photographed close-up by Pioneer 10 in 1973. Galileo made six flybys of Ganymede between 1996 and 2000. Based on a suggestion from Simon Marius, Ganymede (along with many of the Jovian satellites) is named for one of Jupiter's lovers in Roman mythology; Ganymede is the only such moon named for a male figure. Many of Ganymede's features, including the Enki Catena, are given names from Egyptian and Babylonian mythology, although its largest dark plain is Galileo Regio. Ganymede is scheduled to be orbited by the European Space Agency's Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer (JUICE), currently slated for a 2022 launch.

Triton

The largest moon of Neptune and the only large moon with a retrograde orbit (that is, an orbit opposite to the rotation of its planet), this moon is the seventh-largest moon in the solar system and is thought to have been captured from the Kuiper Belt. For over 100 years after its 1846 discovery, Triton was thought to be Neptune's only moon; Nereid wasn't discovered until 1949. (There are thirteen known satellites now.) Triton is geologically active and has geysers that are assumed to erupt nitrogen. Because of the activity, impact craters on Triton are relatively scarce; most of the larger craters were formed by volcanic activity. Triton orbits around Neptune in almost a perfect circle. Voyager 2 visited Triton in 1989 and is the only space probe to have done so (and no more are currently planned). Much of Triton's western hemisphere consists of an unexplained series of fissures and depressions sometimes called "cantaloupe terrain." Triton's features are named after various water spirits, monsters, and sacred waters from mythology.

Titan

The largest moon of Saturn and the second largest in the solar system. Until Voyager 1 visited in 1980, it was thought to be larger than Ganymede. It is the only known satellite with a dense atmosphere — so dense that it makes observation of surface features nearly impossible except from close up — and also the only known satellite for which there is evidence of stable bodies of surface liquid. Discovered in 1655 by Christiaan Huygens, it was visited by the Cassini-Huygens mission in 2004. Titan's albedo features, such as the highly reflective area Xanadu, are named for sacred or enchanted places from world literature and mythology. Because of its nitrogen-rich atmosphere and the presence of surface liquid, Titan is often thought to be the most likely place in the solar system for microbial life to exist outside of Earth.

Lakshmi

The last and greatest treasure born from the "churning of the ocean," she is the goddess of prosperity and patron to moneylenders. The epitome of feminine beauty, she sits or stands on a lotus flower and appears in her own avatars alongside Vishnu: Sita to his Rama; Padma the lotus to Vamana the dwarf; Radha (or Rukmini) to Krishna. A form of the mother goddess (Shakti, or Devi), she also represents virtue and honesty.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

The leading architect of the International Style of skyscraper design, he (like Walter Gropius) worked in the office of Peter Behrens. He directed the Bauhaus from 1930 to 1933, shutting it down before the Nazis could do so. His works include the Barcelona Pavilion for the 1929 International Exposition; two adjacent apartment buildings at 860 and 880 North Lake Shore Drive in Chicago; the New National Gallery in Berlin; and the Seagram Building in New York, which he co-designed with Philip Johnson. Mies asserted that "less is more" as a principle of his architectural style. His glass-covered steel structures influenced the design of office buildings in nearly every major city in the U.S.

Mackenzie River

The longest river of Canada. Flowing 1,080 miles out of the Great Slave Lake, the river flows past Fort Providence and Fort Simpson in Canada's Northwest Territories, emptying into a vast delta on the Beaufort Sea. The Mackenzie is the largest river flowing into the Arctic Ocean from North America. The river was named for Scottish explorer Alexander Mackenzie, who crossed Canada to the Pacific ten years before Lewis and Clark.

Earth's moon

The moon, also called Luna, is the fifth-largest satellite in the solar system, the largest relative to the size of the planet it orbits, and the second densest. The USSR's Luna unmanned spacecraft first reached the moon in 1959, and Apollo 8 became the first manned mission to orbit the moon, in 1968. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty guarantees the rights of all nations to explore the moon for peaceful purposes.

Colorado River

The most significant river of the southwestern United States. Beginning in Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, this river runs southwest for 1,450 miles to the Gulf of California in northwestern Mexico. The Colorado formed numerous canyons along much of its length, most notably the Grand Canyon in Arizona. The Colorado also has significant dams, including Hoover Dam near Las Vegas (forming Lake Mead) and Glen Canyon Dam in Arizona (forming Lake Powell).

Rama

The seventh avatar of Vishnu is hero of the Ramayana. Born as a prince to King Dasharatha and Queen Kaushalya, Rama wins the hand of his wife Sita in a competition held by Sita's father, King Janaka; only he can string Shiva's bow. When his aunt Kaikeyi schemes to deprive him of Dasharatha's throne by putting her son Bharata there, Rama and Sita are banished to a forest for 14 years. During that time, the ten-headed demon Ravana kidnaps Sita, but Rama rescues her and kills Ravana. Bharata abdicates; Rama makes Sita walk through fire to prove that Ravana had not corrupted her.

Frey

The son of Njord, and twin brother of Freya. He is one of the Vanir, a second group of Norse gods, but lives with the Aesir as a hostage. The god of fertility, horses, sun, and rain, his possessions include the magic ship Skidbladnir. He travels in a chariot drawn by the golden boar Gullinbursti, and had to give away his magic sword to win the hand of the giantess Gerda.

Hector

The son of Priam and Hecuba, he is probably the noblest character on either side. A favorite of Apollo, this captain of the Trojan forces exchanges gifts with Ajax after neither can conquer the other in single combat. He kills Patroclus when Patroclus goes into battle wearing the armor of his friend, Achilles. Killed by Achilles to avenge the death of Patroclus, he is greatly mourned by all of Troy. Funeral games take place in his honor.

Eero Saarinen

The son of architect Eliel Saarinen, he was born in Finland but spent most of his life in the U.S. and died in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He designed many buildings on the campuses of MIT and Yale, as well as Dulles International Airport in Washington, D.C. and the TWA terminal at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York. Saarinen may be best known for designing the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, though he died before it was completed. Many of his works are characterized by elegant, sweeping forms, such as the Kresge Auditorium at MIT.

Heimdall

The son of nine sisters, he is the god of light and guardians. He guards Bifrost, the rainbow bridge into Asgard. His senses are so sharp, he can see 100 miles by night or day and hear grass growing. He will call the Aesir into battle at Ragnarok with his horn Gjall (or Gjallerhorn).

Brahma

The third of the Trimurti, he is the Creator. By dropping an egg into the cosmic waters, he hatches a younger form of Brahma that creates other beings. Also the chief priest, he has four heads that each point in a cardinal direction, representing the Four Vedas. Brahma has a fifth head until Shiva plucked it off; as punishment for that act, Shiva is forced to wander as a beggar and carry Brahma's severed skull as a bowl. Brahma's wife is Savitri, who curses him after he lets a cow-maiden stand in for her at an important ritual. Few people worship Brahma, either because of the curse or because he lost a power struggle to Vishnu.

Andromache

The wife of Hector and mother of Astyanax, she futilely warns Hector about the war, then sees both her husband and son killed by the Greeks. After the war she is made concubine to Neoptolemus, and later marries the Trojan prophet Helenus.

Frigg

The wife of Odin, and mother by him of Balder, Hoder, Hermod, and Tyr. She is the goddess of the sky, marriage, and motherhood, and often works at her loom, spinning clouds.

Hecuba

The wife of Priam, she suffers the loss of most of her children but survives the fall of Troy. She is later turned into a dog.

Achilles

This "swift-footed" warrior is the greatest on the Greek side. His father is Peleus, a great warrior in his own right, and his mother is Thetis, a sea nymph. The consequences of his rage at Agamemnon for confiscating his geras (prize of honor) are the subject of the Iliad. Achilles kills Hector, but is killed by a poisoned arrow in the heel, the only vulnerable place on his body.

Cassandra

This daughter of Priam and Hecuba has an affair with Apollo, who grants her the gift of prophecy. Unable to revoke the gift after they quarrel, Apollo curses her by preventing anyone from believing her predictions. Among her warnings is that the Trojan horse contains Greeks. After Troy falls she is given to Agamemnon, who tactlessly brings her home to his wife Clytemnestra. Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus then kill Agamemnon and her, leaving Agamemnon's son Orestes (egged on by sister Electra) to avenge the deaths and kill Clytemnestra and Aegisthus.

Krishna

This eighth avatar of Vishnu is born when Vishnu plucks two of his own hairs — one light, one dark — and uses the dark hair to impregnate Devaki. Her husband Vasudeva saves Krishna from evil King Kansa by carrying him across the river Yamuna to safety in Gokula. Krishna can be depicted as a child, adolescent, or adult. As an infant, he plays pranks such as stealing butter. As a youthful lover, he plays the flute and dances with the gopis (cow-maidens) in the Vrindavana forest. As an adult, he is a dark-skinned warrior with a light, angelic face, charioteer to Arjuna (in the Mahabharata). In the Bhagavad-Gita it is he who reveals the importance of dharma and bhakti. His consort is the cowherd girl Radha.

Ganesha

This elephant-headed god of wisdom and learning is often shown riding a rat. Parvati "gives birth" to him by creating him from the saffron paste she scrubbed off of herself after bathing. When Parvati instructs him not to let anyone in as she took another bath, he prevents Shiva from entering, prompting Shiva to cut off his head. To calm Parvati, Shiva tells servants to take the head of the first baby found whose mother had her back turned; the servants bring back the head of a baby elephant. He has two wives (Riddhi and Siddhi), two sons, and a daughter. People pray to this remover of obstacles and bringer of good fortune before they commence business.

Hanukkah

This festival lasts for eight days, starting on the 25th day of Kislev (the third month). It celebrates the victory of the small Maccabee army against the large Greek army of Antiochus, and the Maccabees' recapture and re-purification of the Temple in Jerusalem (c. 168 BC). When they did so, they found only a small amount of oil to light the menorah in the Temple, and it would take a week to make more; miraculously, the oil burned for the full week. To commemorate this, on each night, observers use a "helper candle" called the shamash to light candles in a menorah (more properly called a chanukiah, as a menorah only has six branches while a chanukiah has nine): one candle (besides the shamash) on the first night, two on the second night, and so on. Furthermore, it is traditional to eat foods fried in oil; in the United States, potato pancakes called latkes are popular; in Israel, fried jelly donuts called sufganiyot are more common. Children play a game with a spinning a top called the dreidel, which contains the Hebrew letters that form the initials of a phrase that translates as "a great miracle happened there" (in Israel, they say "a great miracle happened here"). Exchanging presents is only a recent tradition developed in the U.S. to make Jewish children feel less left out as their Christian peers get Christmas presents (or, if you are cynical, the tradition was invented by toymakers to sell more toys).

Tisha B'Av

This is a day of mourning for the destructions of the First and Second Temples, as well as a number of other calamities in Jewish history. It is traditional to fast and to keep oneself in a solemn mood. The Book of Lamentations is read in a mournful tone, traditionally while sitting on the floor and with candles as the only lights.

La Boheme

This opera tells the story of four extremely poor friends who live in the French (i.e., Students') Quarter of Paris: Marcello the artist, Rodolfo the poet, Colline the philosopher, and Schaunard the musician. Rodolfo meets the seamstress Mimì who lives next door when her single candle is blown out and needs to be relit. Marcello is still attached to Musetta, who had left him for the rich man Alcindoro. In the final act, Marcello and Rodolfo have separated from their lovers, but cannot stop thinking about them. Musetta bursts into their garret apartment and tells them that Mimi is dying of consumption (tuberculosis); when they reach her, she is already dead. La Bohème was based on a novel by Henry Murger and, in turn, formed the basis of the hit 1996 musical Rent by Jonathan Larson.

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, by Pablo Picasso

This painting depicts five women in a brothel. However, the images of the women are partly broken into disjointed, angular facets. The degree of broken-ness is rather mild compared to later Cubist works, but it was revolutionary in 1907. The rather phallic fruit arrangement in the foreground reflects the influence of Paul Cézanne's "flattening of the canvas." The two central figures face the viewer, while the other three have primitive masks as faces, reflecting another of Picasso's influences. It is currently housed at the MOMA.

Ajax

This prince of Salamis is the son of Telamon. He once fights all afternoon in single combat with Hector; since neither one can decisively wound the other, they part as friends. Ajax's most glorious achievement is fighting the Trojans back from the ships almost singlehandedly. He commits suicide after the armor of Achilles is awarded to Odysseus rather than to himself.

Okavango River

This river flows for about 1,000 miles from central Angola, through Namibia's Caprivi Strip, and into the Kalahari Desert of Botswana. There, rather than flowing into the sea, it terminates in a massive inland swamp known as the Okavango Delta, an area that — especially during the wet season — teems with wildlife in an otherwise inhospitable region.

Aeneas

This son of Aphrodite and Anchises often takes a beating but always gets up to rejoin the battle. Knocked unconscious by a large rock thrown by Diomedes, he is evacuated by Aphrodite and Apollo. He succeeds the late Hector as Trojan troop commander and survives the fall of Troy, ultimately settling in Italy. His son Iulus founds Alba Longa, near the site of Rome. That bloodline is the basis of Julius Caesar's claim to have descended from Venus.

Odysseus

This son of Laertes is known for his cleverness and glib tongue. His accomplishments include a successful night raid against King Rhesus, winning the armor of Achilles, and engineering the famous Trojan Horse. His ten-year trip home to Ithaca (where his wife, Penelope, awaits) is the subject of the Odyssey.

USS Missouri

This was the last battleship completed by the United States; she was laid down January 6, 1941 by New York Naval Shipyard. The Missouri was launched on January 29, 1944 and received her sponsorship from Miss Margaret Truman, daughter of the then-Missouri Senator, Harry S. Truman. Commissioned on June 11, 1944, the "Mighty Mo," as she became known, sailed for the Pacific and quickly became the flagship of Admiral Halsey, which is why she was chosen as the site of the formal surrender of the Empire of Japan on the morning of September 1, 1945.

Walter Gropius

Though he designed the Fagus Factory (Alfeld, Germany) and the Pan American Building (New York City), he is best known for founding the Bauhaus. Beginning in Weimar in 1919 and moving to a Gropius-designed facility in Dessau in 1925, the Bauhaus school emphasized functionalism, the application of modern methods and materials, and the synthesis of technology and art. Its faculty included artists Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Josef Albers. Gropius would later head Harvard's architecture department from 1938 to 1952, shifting its focus to incorporate modern design and construction techniques.

Seine

Though only the second-longest river in France (behind the Loire), this river is of key importance, as it flows through Paris. Starting on the Plateau de Langres near Dijon, the Seine weaves northwest for 485 miles to enter the English Channel near Le Havre. Along the way, it passes through Troyes, Fontainebleau, and Rouen. The Seine is France's chief transport waterway, along with its tributaries the Marne and Oise.

Titania and Oberon

Uranus's largest moons, these moons are named for characters from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. (Other Uranian moons are named for characters from either Shakespeare or Alexander Pope.) They were discovered on the same day in 1787 by William Herschel, who also discovered Uranus itself in 1781. In 1986 Voyager 2 became the only spacecraft to date to visit the Uranian moons. Because Uranus orbits the sun almost on its side and Titania and Oberon orbit Uranus in the same plane as its equator, the moons have extreme seasons: Titania's poles spend over 42 years in nonstop sunlight followed by 42 years of darkness. Most of Titania's features are named for settings or female characters from Shakespeare — its largest crater is Gertrude Crater, after Hamlet's mother — while most of Oberon's are named after settings or male characters from Shakespeare. However, Oberon's largest feature is Mommur Chasma, which is named from a French epic poem.

Nile River

Usually cited as the longest river in the world, the Nile flows about 4,132 miles in a generally south-to-north direction from its headwaters in Burundi to Egypt's Mediterranean Sea coast, where it forms a prototypical delta. Over 80% of the Nile's flow comes from the shorter Blue Nile headstream, which arises from Ethiopia's Lake Tana and meets the longer White Nile — whose headwaters include Lake Victoria — at Khartoum. At the first of the Nile's six cataracts is the Aswan High Dam, which forms Lake Nasser and greatly reduces the annual floods.

Zambezi River

Weaving across southern Africa, the Zambezi rises in eastern Angola, passes through Zambia, flows along the borders of Namibia, Botswana, and Zimbabwe, crosses through Mozambique, and enters the Indian Ocean's Mozambique Channel near Chinde. Namibia's Caprivi Strip was created to allow access to the Zambezi. The Cabora Bassa and Kariba Dams form large lakes of the same name. The most spectacular feature of the Zambezi is Victoria Falls, or Mosi-oa-Tunya ("the smoke that thunders"), which is over a mile wide and is the largest waterfall by flow rate in Africa.

Sir Christopher Wren

When fire destroyed much of London in 1666, he was an Oxford astronomy professor who had designed his first building just four years earlier. Charles II named him the King's Surveyor of Works in 1669, and he was involved in rebuilding more than 50 London churches in the next half-century, including Saint Paul's Cathedral. An inscription near his tomb in Saint Paul's declares "Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you."

Broadway Boogie Woogie, by Piet Mondrian

While Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and other Cubist paintings represent an extension of Paul Cézanne's division-of-space approach to the canvas, Mondrian's De Stijl works are a still further abstraction, such that the canvas is often divided up into rectangular "tile patterns," as in Composition with Red Blue and Yellow. The painting simultaneously echoes the bright lights of a marquee, resembles a pattern of streets as seen from above, and creates a feeling of vitality and vibrancy, not unlike the music itself. This work can also be found at the MOMA.

Frank Gehry

Winner of the 1989 Pritzker Prize, he is best-known today for large-scale compositions like the EMP Museum (formerly known as the Experience Music Project) in Seattle, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and the recent, controversial Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. (Bilbao natives describe the latter as "the artichoke," because of its layers of abstract titanium structures.) Gehry often uses uncommon materials such as plywood and limestone; his designs range from Kobe's Fishdance Restaurant, shaped like a giant fish, to the soft-sculpture look of the so-called "Fred and Ginger" buildings in Prague. He also designs furniture: the Easy Edges line is made of laminated cardboard; the Gehry Collection consists of chairs named for hockey terms (e.g. Cross Check and Power Play).

Gunsmoke

With 635 episodes that aired over 20 seasons, this show was the longest-running prime-time series in American television history until The Simpsons overtook it. Set in Dodge City, Kansas in the late 19th century, it centered on U.S. marshal Matt Dillon. For several seasons in the early 1960s, it featured a young Burt Reynolds as the blacksmith Quint Asper.

American Gothic, by Grant Wood

Wood painted his most famous work after a visit to Eldon, Iowa, when he saw a Carpenter Gothic-style house with a distinctive Gothic window in its gable. Upon returning to his studio, he used his sister Nan and his dentist, Dr. Byron McKeeby, as the models for the two figures. The pitchfork and the clothing were more typical of 19th-century farmers than contemporary ones. American Gothic is among the most familiar regionalist paintings, and it is said to be the most parodied of all paintings. It hangs at the Art Institute of Chicago, where it was submitted for a competition by Wood upon its completion in 1930 (Wood won a bronze medal and a $300 prize).

Laocoon

Yet another son of Priam and Hecuba, this priest of Apollo shares Cassandra's doubt about the merits of bringing the Trojan horse into the city. "Timeo danaos et dona ferentes," he says (according to Vergil), "I fear the Greeks, even bearing gifts." Later, while sacrificing a bull, two serpents from the sea crush both him and his two young sons. The death of him is often blamed on Athena (into whose temple the serpent disappeared) but more likely the act of Poseidon, a fierce Greek partisan.

William Tell

a 14th-century Swiss patriot who wishes to end Austria's domination of his country. In the first act he helps Leuthold, a fugitive, escape the Austrian governor, Gessler. In the third act, Gessler has placed his hat on a pole and ordered the men to bow to it. When Tell refuses, Gessler takes his son, Jemmy, and forces Tell to shoot an apple off his son's head. Tell succeeds, but is arrested anyway. In the fourth act, he escapes from the Austrians and his son sets their house on fire as a signal for the Swiss to rise in revolt. The opera was based on a play by Friedrich von Schiller.

Hadith

a report of the words or actions of a Muslim religious figure, most frequently the prophet Muhammad. Each consists of a matn, or text of the original oral law itself, as well as an isnad, or chain of authorities through which it has been passed by word of mouth through the generations. Collectively, the hadith point Muslims toward the Sunna, or practice of the Prophet, which together with the Qur'an forms the basis for shari'a, usually translated as Islamic law.

USS Maine

a second-class armored battleship, was launched in 1889. A part of the "Great White Fleet," in 1897 the Maine sailed for Havana to show the flag and protect American citizens. Shortly after 9:40 pm on February 15, 1898, the battleship was torn apart by a tremendous explosion. The court of inquiry convened in March was unable to obtain evidence associating the blast with any person or persons, but public opinion—inflamed by "yellow journalism"—was such that the Maine disaster led to the declaration of war on Spain on April 21, 1898.

Carmen

a young gypsy who works in a cigarette factory in Seville. She is arrested by the corporal Don José for fighting, but cajoles him into letting her escape. They meet again at an inn where she tempts him into challenging his captain; that treason forces him to join a group of smugglers. In the final act, the ragtag former soldier encounters Carmen at a bullfight where her lover Escamillo is competing (the source of the "Toreador Song") and stabs her. The libretto was based on a novel by Prosper Merimée.

USS Monitor/CSS Virginia

also known as the USS Merrimack After departing Union forces burned the Gosport Navy Yard in Norfolk in April 1861, yard workers salvaged the USS Merrimack and converted her into the ironclad CSS Virginia. On March 8, 1862, the CSS Virginia left the shipyard and sank two Union warships in Hampton Roads. The South's ironclad rammed and sank the USS Cumberland and set fire to and sank the USS Congress. The Monitor was sent to end its rampage and the two ironclads battled for 3½ hours before the Virginia ran aground in its attempt to ram the USS Minnesota. Visibly damaged, the Virginia retreated and the Monitor withdrew to protect the Minnesota. The Confederates destroyed the Virginia soon after to prevent her capture by Union forces. The Monitor, victorious in her first battle, sank in a storm off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. The shipwreck is a national underwater sanctuary under the purview of the NOAA.

Aida

an Ethiopian princess who is held captive in Egypt. She falls in love with the Egyptian general Radamès and convinces him to run away with her; unfortunately, he is caught by the high priest Ramphis and a jealous Egyptian princess, Amneris. Radamès is buried alive, but finds that Aida has snuck into the tomb to join him.

Partons

an older name that was used for the "internal parts" of hadrons before the discovery and widespread acceptance of the quark model. Models based on partons are still used but, for the most part, it was determined that partons were quarks and the term is rarely used at the high school level except in historical contexts.

Quarks

another class of fundamental particle. They also come in six flavors: up, down, charm, strange, top (occasionally called "truth"), and bottom (occasionally "beauty"). The up, charm, and top quarks have a charge of +2/3, while the down, strange, and bottom have a charge of -1/3. All quarks are fermions, and they combine in pairs to form mesons and in triples to form baryons. The enormous mass of the top quark (178 GeV) made it difficult to create in particle accelerators, but its discovery in 1995 confirmed an essential element of the Standard Model of particle physics. The name "quark" comes from the line "Three quarks for Muster Mark" in Finnegans Wake that appealed to Murray Gell-Mann. The study of quarks (and of the strong nuclear force) is quantum chromodynamics.

Hadrons

any particles made out of quarks (alternatively, any particle affected by the strong nuclear force). Generally, this means the baryons and the mesons. All hadrons are colorless (in the sense of the combined color of their constituent quarks). The name "hadron" comes from the Greek for "thick."

Rhine

begins in the Swiss Alps, passes through Lake Constance (in German, the Bodensee), flows west along the German-Swiss border, then turns north to form part of the German-French border. The river then flows north and joins with the Meuse and Scheldt to enter the North Sea at a delta in the Netherlands. Cities along its course include Basel, Strasbourg, Mainz, Bonn, Cologne, and Rotterdam, and tributaries include the Main, Mosel, and Ruhr. This river has played a strategic role in most German conflicts since the time of the Gallic Wars, but was not established as an international waterway until the Rhine Commission of 1815. German myth tells of the Lorelei, a nymph who lured sailors on the Rhine to their deaths.

Baryons

composite (i.e., non-fundamental) particles made from three quarks. The most common examples are the proton (two up quarks and one down quark) and the neutron (two down quarks and one up). All baryons are fermions. Quarks possess a characteristic called "color" (which has nothing to do with visual color) which can be either red, green, or blue (arbitrary names; again, no relation to the colors we see). A baryon must have one quark of each color so that the "total color" (analogous to mixing red, green, and blue light) is colorless (i.e., "white"). The word "baryon" comes from the Greek for "heavy." The total number of baryons is conserved (again, counting anti-baryons as -1).

Mesons

composite particles generally made from a quark and an anti-quark. There are dozens of examples including the pion, kaon, J/Psi, Rho, and D. All mesons are bosons. The quark and anti-quark must have the same color (such as red and anti-red) so that the resulting meson is colorless (or "white"). It is also possible to make mesons out of two (or more) quarks and the same number of anti-quarks, but this kind of particle (a "tetraquark") is rare, both in nature and in quiz bowl.

The Euphrates

defines the western border of Mesopotamia; it also rises in the Zagros Mountains of Turkey and its shores are home to Fallujah and Babylon. It is the longer of the two rivers, with a course of 1,740 miles (compared to the Tigris' 1,180). Both the Tigris and the Euphrates have changed courses several times, leaving ruins in the desert where cities have been abandoned.

Treaty of Paris

ended the Spanish-American War and transferred Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico to the U.S. while making Cuba (ostensibly) independent. The treaty was the beginning of American imperialism, and underwent a lengthy and contentious ratification.

Persian King Darius I's invasion of mainland Greece

ended with a decisive victory for Miltiades and the Athenians at Marathon (490 BC). The defeated Persian commanders were Datis and Artaphernes. Among the few Athenian dead of the battle were archon Callimachus and the general Stesilaos. Legend has it that the Greek messenger Pheidippides ran to Athens with news of the victory, but collapsed upon arrival. This is the inspiration for the modern race known as the "marathon."

Gauge Bosons

fundamental bosons that carry the forces of nature. That is, forces result from particles emitting and absorbing gauge bosons. The strong nuclear force is carried by gluons, the weak nuclear force is carried by the W, Z-, and Z+ particles, the electromagnetic force is carried by the photon, and gravity is carried by the (as yet unobserved) graviton. The name comes from the role of "gauge theories" in describing the forces (which are beyond the scope of this article).

The Ganges

is the holiest river of Hinduism. It rises in the Himalayas and flows a comparatively short 1,560 miles to the world's largest delta, on the Bay of Bengal. Among that delta's distributaries are the Hooghly (on whose banks Kolkata — formerly Calcutta — may be found) and the Padma (which enters Bangladesh). Approximately one in every twelve human beings lives in the Ganges Basin, a population density that is rapidly polluting the river; a significant source of that pollution is cremated remains.

Charles Lindbergh

made the first non-stop, solo, trans-Atlantic flight in the Spirit of St. Louis, a single-engine Ryan aircraft. Lindbergh took off from Roosevelt Field on Long Island and landed at Le Bourget Field in Paris 33½ hours later. Lindbergh married Anne Morrow in 1929, and the 1932 kidnapping and murder of their son Charles Jr. was called "The Crime of the Century"; ultimately, Bruno Hauptmann was convicted and executed. Prior to the U.S.'s entry into World War II, Lindbergh urged the U.S. to remain neutral and was active with the America First Committee, though during the war he flew 50 combat missions in the Pacific.

Mojave Desert

mostly California, and some of Arizona, Utah, and Nevada; 25,000 mi2) It is bounded by the San Gabriel and San Bernardino mountain ranges along the San Andreas and Garlock Faults. It is between the Great Basin and the Sonoran Desert, and it contains the lowest and driest point of North America, Death Valley. It is most strongly associated with the Joshua tree (Yucca brevifolia).

Treaty of Versailles

officially ended World War I between the Allies and Germany. It was signed at its namesake French palace after the Paris Peace Conference. It is noted for the "Big Four" (Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George, Georges Clemenceau, and Vittorio Orlando) who headed the Allies' delegations, discussions of Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points (particularly the League of Nations), and its controversial disarmament, war guilt, and reparations clauses. The conference was also notable for up-and-coming world figures who attended (John Maynard Keynes, Ho Chi Minh, Jan Smuts, etc.).

Leptons

one of the classes of "fundamental particles" (meaning that they cannot be broken down into smaller particles). There are six "flavors" of leptons: the electron, the muon, the tauon, the electron neutrino (usually just called "the neutrino"), the muon neutrino, and the tauon neutrino. The three neutrinos are neutral and nearly massless (they were once thought to be entirely massless), while the other three have a charge of -1. All neutrinos are fermions, and the total number of leptons is always conserved (counting regular leptons as +1 particle and anti-leptons as -1 particle). The word "lepton" comes from the Greek for "light" (the opposite of "heavy," not illumination), even though the muon and tauon are relatively massive.

Wright Brothers

operated a bicycle repair shop in Dayton, Ohio before creating the first successful, powered, heavier-than-air, manned airplane. For several years, utilizing both a wind tunnel they built as well as test flights, they created and refined gliders before adding an engine to their design. Finally, on December 17, 1903, with Orville at the controls, the Flyer I made a 12-second flight at Kill Devil Hills near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. They made several more launches that day, with Wilbur staying aloft for 59 seconds on the fourth, and last, flight.

Fermions

particles with half-integral spin. Spin is a form of "intrinsic angular momentum," possessed by particles as if they were spinning around their axis (but they aren't). The values cited for spin are not (usually) the real magnitude of that angular momentum, but the component of the angular momentum along one axis. Quantum mechanics restricts that component to being n/2 times Planck's constant divided by 2π for some integer n. If n is even, this results in "integral" spin, if it is odd, it results in "half-integral" spin. Note that the exact value of the spin itself is a real number; it's the multiplier of h/2π that determines whether it is "integral" or not. The most significant thing about fermions is that they are subject to the Pauli Exclusion Principle: No two fermions can have the same quantum numbers (i.e., same state). The name "fermion" comes from the name of the Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi.

Bosons

particles with integral spin. All particles are either bosons or fermions. The spin of a composite particle is determined by the total spin (i.e., the component of its intrinsic angular momentum along one axis) of its particles. For instance, an alpha particle (two protons and two neutrons) has four half-integral spin values. No matter how they are added up, the result will be an integral spin value (try it!), so an alpha particle is a (composite) boson. The Pauli Exclusion Principle does not apply to bosons (in fact, bosons prefer to be in the same quantum state). The name "boson" comes from the name of the Indian-American physicist Satyendra Nath Bose.

Abbasid

reigned as caliphs from Baghdad from 750-1258, and later from Cairo from 1261-1517. They rode to power on widespread disaffection with the Umayyads and the sense that a member of the Prophet's family was best qualified to lead the community. Their greatest rulers were al-Mansur, Harun ar-Rashid, and al-Mamun the Great. During the 9th century, however, power began to devolve onto increasingly autonomous local dynasties, and the Abbasids fell under the control of outside forces such as the Buyids and Seljuqs. When the Mongols destroyed Baghdad in 1258, the caliph as-Mustazim was wrapped in a carpet and trampled to death by horses.

Amelia Earhart

remains the most famous female aviator. In 1932 she became the first woman to make a trans-Atlantic solo flight, and three years later she became the first pilot of any gender to fly solo from Hawaii to California. In June 1937, she and navigator Fred Noonan embarked on a 29,000-mile, around-the-world flight in a twin-engine Lockheed Electra. They completed most of the journey, but became lost and eventually disappeared on the leg between Lae, New Guinea, and Howland Island in the Pacific Ocean. Speculation as to their ultimate fate continues to this day.

The Jordan River

rises in Syria from springs near Mount Hermon. It flows south to Lake Merom, through the Sea of Galilee, and into the Dead Sea, which is 1,300 feet below sea level. The river forms the nation of Jordan's boundary with the West Bank and northern Israel. In the New Testament, the river was the site of the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist. In modern times, about 80% of its water is diverted for human use, a figure that has led to the shrinking of the Dead Sea and serious contention among bordering nations.

Umayyad

ruled as caliphs from Damascus from 661-750. They came to power in the civil war following the death of Uthman when Mu'awiyah Ibn Abu Sufyan defeated the forces of Ali Ibn Abi Talib after the latter's assassination. Denounced in traditional Islamic historiography for their secular rule, they introduced hereditary transmission of office into Islam and favored Arabs at the expense of other Muslims. Under 'Abd al-Malik, the Umayyad Mosque was constructed in Damascus. In the 10th century, an Umayyad scion re-established the dynasty in Cordoba, Spain.

Mughal

ruled most of India from the early 16th until the mid-18th century, and claimed descent from both Genghis Khan and Tamerlane. Their empire was founded by Babur and expanded under his grandson Akbar. The Taj Mahal was built under Shah Jahan, who brought the empire to the brink of bankruptcy. Aurangzeb excluded Hindus from public office, and the empire began to break up soon after his death in 1707.

The Brahmaputra

runs 1,800 miles from its source in the Tibetan Himalayas; it starts eastward across the plateau, then turns south into the Indian state of Assam, and then enters Bangladesh, where it merges with the Ganges to form the world's largest delta. While serving as a historical route to Tibet, the river is also prone to disastrous flooding.

The Irrawaddy

the chief river of Myanmar (also known as Burma). It flows 1,350 miles past Yangon (formerly Rangoon) and Mandalay to the Gulf of Martaban, an arm of the Bay of Bengal. Its delta is one of the world's most important rice-growing regions, and its name is thought to come from the Sanskrit word for "elephant."

The Indus

the chief river of Pakistan and the source of the name of India. It rises in Tibet and flows 1,800 miles to a delta on the Arabian Sea southeast of Karachi. The five major tributaries of the Indus — the Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej Rivers — are the source of the name of the Punjab region, which is Persian for "land of the five rivers." The Indus is the cradle of the Indus Valley Civilization, one of the world's earliest urban areas, whose main cities were Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa.

The Mekong

the chief river of Southeast Asia. It originates in eastern Tibet, forms much of the Laos-Thailand border, flows south through Cambodia, and enters the South China Sea in southern Vietnam just south of Ho Chi Minh City. The capital cities Vientiane and Phnom Penh are on the Mekong. The building of dams and clearing of rapids are a source of diplomatic conflict among China, Laos, and Cambodia.

The Tigris

the eastern of the two rivers that define the historic region Mesopotamia (meaning "the Land Between Two Rivers"), which was home to the ancient civilizations Sumer and Akkad. It rises in Turkey, then flows southeast by Mosul, Tikrit, and Baghdad before joining the Euphrates to make the Shatt-al-Arab, which empties into the Persian Gulf.

Gluons

the gauge bosons that carry the strong nuclear force and bind hadrons together. Gluons have no charge and no mass, but do have color (in the sense of quarks). This color cannot be observed directly because the gluons are part of the larger hadron. The name comes from their role in "gluing" quarks together.

Mississippi River

the longest or second-longest in North America, depending on how you count. (The Missouri River could be considered longer.) Referred to by Abraham Lincoln as "the father of waters," the Mississippi begins at Lake Itasca, Minnesota, and flows 2,340 miles to a vast delta on the Gulf of Mexico, forming portions of ten state borders and the world's third-largest drainage basin. The Mississippi picks up numerous major tributaries including the Illinois, Missouri, Ohio, Arkansas, and Red Rivers, and flows past numerous major cities, including Minneapolis, St. Louis, Memphis, and New Orleans.

The Yangtze

the longest river in China and Asia, and the third longest in the world. It rises in the Kunlun Mountains, flows across the Tibetan Plateau, passes the cities of Chongqing, Wuhan, Nanjing, and Shanghai, and empties into the South China Sea. Its basin is China's granary and is home to nearly a third of Chinese citizens. The river is dammed by the Three Gorges Dam, the world's largest, which reduced flooding but displaced 1.5 million people and buried over 1,300 known archaeological sites.

Tagus

the principal river of the Iberian Peninsula. Rising in east-central Spain, it flows west for roughly 645 miles to the Atlantic, passing through Lisbon, Portugal on the way. The cities of Toledo and Santarém are on the Tagus, and hydroelectric dams on the river produce huge artificial lakes, including the Sea of Castile.

USS Chesapeake

was built at what is now the Norfolk Naval Shipyard, between 1798 and 1799. The Chesapeake was attacked by the British Leopard off Cape Henry in 1807 (which led to the duel between Commodores James Barron and Stephen Decatur), one of the causes of the War of 1812. She was captured off Boston in 1813 by the British frigate Shannon, on which occasion her commander, Captain James Lawrence, uttered his celebrated dying words, "Don't give up the ship," which have become a tradition in the U.S. Navy.

Fatimid

were Isma'ili Shi'ite Imams who founded their state in North Africa in 909 under the caliph al-Mahdi. They conquered Egypt in 969 under al-Muizz and built Cairo, becoming the Abbasids' rivals. At its height their regime reached into Yemen and Syria, and they had a network of missionaries spreading Isma'ili doctrines into Abbasid territory and beyond. In the eleventh century, the caliph al-Hakim — considered insane — disappeared, giving rise to the Druze religion. A later succession dispute gave rise to the sect of the Assassins. The last caliph, al-Adil, died in 1171.

Ayyubid

were Kurds who took control of Egypt under the Zengids. In 1171 Salah ad-Din (Saladin) abolished the Fatimid caliphate, and later took Damascus as well. He retook Jerusalem from the Crusader kingdoms; however, subsequent Crusades undid some of these gains. It was in Ayyubid times that the Sunni revival came to Egypt. The sultan al-Kamil gave Jerusalem to Frederick II in a peace treaty and was visited by St. Francis of Assisi. The Ayyubids followed the practice of collective sovereignty, and were often politically divided. Shajar ad-Durr, a woman, was the last to rule Egypt.

Ottoman

were Turks of uncertain origin who conquered the Balkans and the Middle East and brought the central Islamic lands into the European state system. Their key military victories were the defeat of the Serbs in the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, the capture of Constantinople in 1453, and the defeat of the Mamluks in 1517. During the 15th century their lands replaced Palestine as the major target of the Crusades. They reached their height under Suleiman the Magnificient, who beseiged Vienna in 1529. The empire's remnants became Turkey after World War I.

Seljuq

were a family of Ghuzz Turks who invaded the Middle East in the eleventh century and came to control the Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad. Following their defeat of the Byzantines at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, they settled in Anatolia as well, where they founded the Sultanate of Rum. Following the Central Asian model of "collective sovereignty," they divided territory among the ruling family, which prevented strong political unity. Their rule saw the beginning of the Sunni revival and the spread of religious schools called madrasas in the Islamic world, giving uniformity to elite beliefs and practices. By 1200 their power was all but extinct.

Safavid

were founded by a Sunni Sufi (mystic) order under Shah Ismail, and ruled Iran from 1502 until 1736. They forcibly converted Iran to Shi'ism, and later converted themselves (this sounds strange, and is — it's one of history's mysteries). They, the Ottomans, and the Mughals comprise the three "Gunpowder Empires" in what scholars of Islamic history consider the late medieval period. Under Abbas I, a European expert was hired to reform the military following defeats by both their Ottoman and Uzbek rivals. Abbas later captured Baghdad and expelled the Portugese from the Persian Gulf. Esfahan was their capital during their height.

Mamluk

were slave soldiers of foreign origin who deposed the Ayyubids in 1250. Baybars, who turned back the Mongols at the Battle of Ayn Jalut, is a popular figure in Arabic heroic literature. In 1291 they drove the last Crusaders from Palestine. Their reign is divided into a "Bahri" period from 1250-1382 and a "Circassian" period from 1382-1517. They were defeated by the Ottomans, who conquered Egypt in 1517.

John Burgoyne

"Gentleman Johnny," as he was known due to his cultural tastes (He was also a playwright), he began his Revolutionary War career under Gage, returning to England after ineffectiveness in 1774-1775. Sent to reinforce Canada, he formulated a plan to isolate New England with the help of Barry St. Leger and William Howe. The plan worked as far as capturing Fort Ticonderoga, but met resistance when he sent his Hessians to attack Bennington. Exhausted, his troops met trouble at Saratoga, being repulsed at Freedman's Farm, and being forced to surrender after Bemis Heights. Paroled on condition he returned to England, Burgoyne was later appointed commander-in-chief of Ireland.

Philip II

(1165-1223, reigned 1179-1223; house of Capet): He was the first of the great Capetian kings of France. Fighting and negotiating against Henry II, Richard I, and John of England, Philip won back Normandy, Brittany, Anjou, and other territories. He also took part in the famous Third Crusade (with Richard I and Frederick Barbarossa) and made use of the Albigensian crusade to pave the way for the annexation of Languedoc by his successor.

St Louis IX

(1214-1270, reigned 1226-1270; house of Capet): Louis led the Seventh Crusade, which ended in military disaster, but after his ransoming he remained in the Holy Land to successfully negotiate for what he couldn't win. He returned to Europe with his reputation intact and negotiated a peace with England under which Henry III become his vassal. He stabilized the French currency and is generally held to have reduced corruption in the kingdom. He died leading a crusade against Tunisia. St. Louis is the only canonized king of France.

Charles V

(1338-1380, reigned 1364-1380; house of Valois): He had an inauspicious start (before his reign even began) with having to ransom his father, John II, from England for three million crowns and most of southwestern France. Later, with military advisor Bertrand du Guesclin, he recaptured almost all of that territory. He also concluded alliances with Portugal, Spain, and Flanders, reorganized the army, and restructured the collection of taxes while leading France's recovery from the devastation of the early period of the Hundred Years' War.

Zeami

(1363-1443), also called Kanze Motokiyo: The second master of the Kanze theatrical school, which had been founded by his father, he is regarded as the greatest playwright of the No theater. He provided 90 of the approximately 230 plays in the modern repertoire. Among his best works are Atsumori, The Robe of Feathers, Birds of Sorrow, and Wind in the Pines. Also a drama critic, he established the aesthetic standards by which plays have been judged ever since. His Fushi kaden (The Transmission of the Flower of Acting Style) is a manual for his pupils.

Henry III

(1551-1589, reigned 1574-1589; house of Valois): His reign was suffused with blood, at first because of the continuous Wars of Religion that pitted Catholics against Huguenots, but later because of the struggles that arose when it became clear that he was going to be the last of the Valois line. The War of the Three Henries broke out after his brother died and the then-Protestant Henry of Navarre (later Henry IV) became heir, leading the Catholic Holy League to strike out of fear for its interests. Henry III was assassinated by a crazed friar in 1589.

Endo Shusaku

(1923-1996): He converted to Catholicism at the age of 11, and majored in French literature. His first works, White Man and Yellow Man, explored the differences between Japanese and Western values and national experiences. Silence tells of the martyrdom of the Catholic converts of Portuguese priests. The Samurai recounts the tale of a samurai sent to establish trade relations between his shogun and Mexico, Spain, and Rome. The latter two novels are generally considered to be Shusaku's greatest achievements.

David Beckham

(1975-present; England; midfielder) Midfielder for Manchester United FC, known as much for his talent as his marriage to Victoria Adams, better known as "Posh Spice." One of the FA Premiership's finest midfielders, he was named runner-up for both the 1999 European Footballer of the Year and the 1999 World Footballer of the Year. He also helped guide Manchester United to the rare 1999 "Treble," helping the Red Devils secure the FA Cup (Open Cup competition for all English sides), Carling FA Premiership Title (regular season champion of England's top division) and UEFA Champions' League (championship for national league champions of UEFA countries). These three titles made ManU only the fourth team (and first English team) to accomplish the feat. His results with the English national side have been mixed, including his now infamous booking against rival Argentina in World Cup '98, and his obscene gesture to English fans at the opening game of Euro 2000.

Ronaldo

(1976-present; Brazil; forward) He was twice World Footballer of the Year, winning those honors in 1997 (while with FC Barcelona) and 1998 (with Inter). While he was on the Brazil squad that won World Cup '94 in the US, he was expected to star in the 1998 World Cup, where he helped Brazil to the finals, winning the Golden Ball Award as tournament MVP. That MVP performance was tarnished slightly by a poor showing (one blamed by the media on a supposed all-night session of Tomb Raider on PlayStation) that kept Brazil from its fifth title.

Milton Friedman

(American, 1912-2006): Conservative thinker famous for his advocacy of monetarism (a revision of the quantity theory of money) in works like A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960 (1963). He is strongly associated with the ideals of laissez-faire government policy.

John Stuart Mill

(English, 1806-1873): Also a social philosopher, he is mainly known in economic circles today for his work extending the ideas of Ricardo in Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy (1844) (for example, the relationship between profits and wages), and also for exhaustively examining the necessity of private property in his Principles of Political Economy (1848).

Alfred Marshall

(English, 1842-1924): His magnum opus, 1890's Principles of Economics, introduced the notions of consumer surplus, quasi-rent, demand curves, and elasticity, all fundamental concepts in introductory macro- and microeconomics.

John Paul Jones

A Scotsman who had fled Britain after killing two people, he added the last name Jones to his given name, to hide from law enforcement. At the outbreak of conflict, he was commissioned to outfit the Alfred, which he then used to help capture New Providence in the Bahamas. The next month, April 1776, he led the Alfred against the HMS Glasgow, leading him to promotion and command of the Providence. Ordered to raid until his provisions were expended, he sank and captured ships in operations along the Atlantic coast. Commissioned captain of the Ranger, he sailed to France to acquire new ships, and captured the HMS Drake. Leaving Europe in August 1779, he met the British ship Serapis in battle on September 23, 1779.

Amon (Pantheon)

He began as a local god of Thebes, governing the air, fertility, and reproduction. His wife was Mut, and his son was Khon. Later, Amon became linked with the sun god Ra, and the two combined as Amon-Ra. In this form, he became worshipped beyond Egypt, and identified with Zeus and Jupiter. His appearance in art was as a man in a loincloth, with a headdress topped by feathers, but other appearances show him with the head of a ram. The temple of Amon-Ra at Karnak was the largest ever built.

1876

Republican Rutherford B. Hayes faced Democrat Samuel Tilden, best known for battling Tammany Hall and the Tweed Ring in New York. Tilden won the popular vote and seemed to win the election, but results in Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana were contested, as was one vote in Oregon; if Hayes swept these votes, he would win the electoral count 185-184. In Congress, an informal bargain was reached (often called the Compromise of 1877) in which Hayes won the election in exchange for Reconstruction being brought to an end.

Anubis

Son of Osiris and Nepthys, and god of embalming to the Egyptians, he was typically pictured with the head of a jackal. He also served as the god of the desert and the watcher of the tombs. He also served to introduce the dead to the afterlife, and as their judge. To decide the fate of the dead, Anubis would weigh the heart of the dead against the feather of truth. Anubis is sometimes identified with Hermes or Mercury.

Ma'at

The daughter of Ra, she predated the universe and served over the creation of it, ensuring balance between everything. Primarim/ was responsible for seasons, day and night, rainfall, and star movements. A symbolic offering of Ma'at, in the form a statuette was given to the gods, as Ma'at encompassed all other offerings. Ma'at's aspect as god of justice also showed through her role in death ritual, where her ostrich feather was weighed against the hearts of the dead in the underworld. Judges wore effigies of Ma'at, and the supreme head of courts was said to be the priest of Ma'at.

Mitochondria

The powerhouses of the cell. They are double-membrane-bound organelles that are the site of respiration and oxidative phosphorylation, processes that produce energy for the cell in the form of ATP. The inner membrane of a mitochondrion forms folds called cristae, which are suspended in a fluid called the matrix. The mitochondrial matrix contains DNA and ribosomes.

Benedict Arnold

Volunteering for service following the Battle of Lexington, he joined Ethan Allen in the attack on Fort Ticonderoga. Appointed by Washington to capture Quebec, he was severely wounded in the failed December 1775 assault that also saw the death of General Richard Montgomery. Arming a flotilla on Lake Champlain, he attacked the British forces at Valcour Island, earning accolades — perhaps at the cost of the support of other officers. Passed over for promotion, Washington personally persuaded him not to resign. Promoted following his defense of Danbury, he again considered resignation, but won victory at Ft. Stanwix, and commanded advance battalions at Saratoga, where he was wounded in the fight. Sent to command Philadelphia, he lived extravagantly among Loyalists, and skirted several regulations to raise money, prompting investigations. After marrying Peggy Shippen, he made overtures to the British, alerting them to a plan to invade Canada, and planning to betray his expected command of West Point. When his contact, Major John Andre was captured, he escaped. Later, as part of the British army he raided New London, Connecticut, and led several raids on Virginia.

Horatio Gates

Wounded in the disastrous French and Indian War attack on Fort Duquesne, it was there he first met George Washington. Recommended by Washington to be adjutant general of the army at the outbreak of revolution, he organized the army around Boston into an effective force. Promoted to major general in 1776, he was assigned to command troops in New York originally intended to invade Canada. Briefly put in charge of Philadelphia, he then directed the defense of New York against Burgoyne's invasion attempt, leading to victory at Saratoga. Following this he became involved in the Conway cabal, an attempt to replace Washington, which led to coldness between the two. Placed in command of the South over Washington's objections by Congress, he tried to raise adequate forces, but lost the battle of Camden to Cornwallis, and was replaced by Nathaniel Greene. Washington then accepted Gates back as his deputy, a position he held until the end of the war.

Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, by Marcel Duchamp

painted in 1912 and created a sensation when shown at the 1913 Armory Show in New York, where one critic referred to it as "an explosion in a shingle factory." Painted in various shades of brown, Nude Descending a Staircase portrays a nude woman in a series of broken planes, capturing motion down several steps in a single image. The painting reflects a Cubist sense of division of space, and its portrait of motion echoes the work of the Futurists.

Louis VIII

(1187-1226, reigned 1223-1226; house of Capet): Though he reigned for only three years, his contributions to the rise of French power were enormous. He annexed Languedoc and captured Poitou from England. Perhaps more importantly, he established the systems of appanages (land grants) which replaced the older, local nobles with barons who owed their fiefs to the crown. This allowed for the subsequent rise in French royal (and national) power.

Charles VIII

(1470-1498, reigned 1483-1498; house of Valois): Hos short reign is remarkable for the enormous cost in men and money of his Italian campaign, but more so for the number of his successors that followed his catastrophic lead. Charles was motivated by a desire to govern Naples, which he had theoretically inherited. He died before he could surpass or absolve his disastrous first campaign with another.

Francis I

(1494-1547, reigned 1515-1547; house of Valois): His early military victories (like the Battle of Marignano), his lavish court, and his support of luminaries like Leonardo da Vinci augured a splendid reign. His rivalry with Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire, however, spelled his doom. He was captured in battle in 1525 and held for a humiliating ransom. Wars continued after his release, but bankruptcy and religious strife laid France low.

Henry IV

(1553-1610, reigned 1589-1610; founder of the house of Bourbon): He was the king of Navarre, became the heir to the throne when Henry III's brother died in 1584. After fighting Catholic opposition in the War of the Three Henries, he renounced Protestantism and accepted Catholicism (supposedly saying "Paris is well worth a mass") to become king. With the help of Maximilien Sully he erased the national debt and removed much of the religious strife with the Edict of Nantes (1598).

Louis XIII

(1601-1643, reigned 1610-1643; house of Bourbon): Sometimes working with his chief minister Cardinal Richelieu and sometimes against, He turned France into the pre-eminent European power during his reign. This was largely achieved via French victories in the Thirty Years' War. The Three Musketeers is set in the early years of his reign.

Louis XIV

(1638-1715, reigned 1643-1715; house of Bourbon): His reign is often cited as the best historical example of an absolute monarchy. Louis led France against most of the rest of Europe to win the throne of Spain for his grandson (the War of the Spanish Succession). He championed classical art, religious orthodoxy, and instituted a great program of building throughout France. Known as the "Sun King," his 72-year reign is among the longest in recorded history.

Matsuo Basho

(1644-1694), a pseudonym of Matsuo Munefusa: Generally acknowledged as the master of the haiku form, the most notable influences on his work were Zen Buddhism and his travels throughout Japan. He is noted for works like The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Oku no hosomichi), which includes descriptions of local sights in both prose and haiku. He took his pseudonym from the name of the simple hut where he retired: Basho-an, which means "Cottage of the Plaintain Tree."

Akutagawa Ryunosuke

(1892-1927): His mother died insane while he was a child, and his father was a failure who gave him up to relatives. Despite this inauspicious childhood, his 1915 short story "Rashomon" brought him into the highest literary circles and started him writing the macabre stories for which he is known. In 1927 he committed suicide by overdosing on pills, and his suicide letter "A Note to a Certain Old Friend" became a published work. "Rashomon" also was key to his international fame, as in 1951 Kurosawa Akira made a film entitled Rashomon, though the film's plot is more based on Akutagawa's other short story "In a Grove." One of Japan's two most prestigious literary prizes is named for Akutagawa; it is awarded for the best serious work of fiction by a new Japanese writer.

Kawabata Yasunari

(1899-1972): Recipient of the 1968 Nobel Prize for Literature, he was the first Japanese author to win the Nobel. His works combine classic Japanese values with modern trends, and often center on the role of sex in people's lives. His works are often only a few pages long, a form given the name "palm-of-the-hand." He is best known for three novels: Thousand Cranes, based on the tea ceremony and inspired by The Tale of Genji; The Sound of the Mountain, about the relationship of an old man and his daughter-in-law; and Snow Country, about an aging geisha. A friend of Mishima Yukio, he was also associated with right-wing causes and openly protested the Cultural Revolution in China. He committed suicide two years after Mishima.

Sir Stanley Matthews

(1915-2000; England; winger) Known as "Wizard of the Dribble," the winger debuted for England as a 19-year-old, and closed his international career in 1956 at the age of 41, when he was named the first-ever European Footballer of the Year. Though he played for unfashionable northern first division clubs like Blackpool and Stoke City, he was the most popular player of his era. In the 1953 F.A. Cup final against Bolton at Wembley, thereafter always called "The Matthews Final," he led a rousing comeback from a 3-1 deficit with 30 minutes remaining, setting up three goals. He is also one of the most gentlemanly players in history, having never been sent off with a red card during his entire career. In 1961, he became the first English footballer to be knighted. In 1963, at the age of 48, he helped Stoke City back into the F.A. First Division by scoring the goal that clinched promotion. He retired, quite reluctantly, from the game in 1965 at the age of 50.

Maurice Richard

(1921-2000): Born in Montreal, Quebec, "The Rocket" was one of the most gifted offensive players in NHL history. He was the first NHL player to score 50 goals in a single season, doing so in 1944-1945, and also the first to score 500 goals in a career. The winner of eight Stanley Cups, his suspension by league president Clarence Campbell in 1955 led to "The Richard Riot" on March 17, 1955, which was quelled only by an appeal by Richard for peace. Many sociologists credit the Richard Riot with starting the Quebec independence movement. The NHL began awarding the Rocket Richard Trophy in 1999 for the league's top regular-season goal scorer.

Mishima Yukio

(1925-1970), a pseudonym of Hiraoka Kimitake: He was a novelist whose central theme was the disparity between traditional Japanese values and the spiritual emptiness of modern life. He failed to qualify for military service during World War II, so worked in an aircraft factory instead. Mishima's first novel, Confessions of a Mask (Kamen no kokuhaku), was successful enough to allow him to write full-time. His four-volume epic The Sea of Fertility (Hojo no umi, consisting of Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn, and The Decay of the Angel), is about self-destructive personalities and the transformation of Japan into a modern, but sterile, society. Mishima, who organized the Tate no kai — a right-wing society stressing physical fitness and the martial arts — committed ritual suicide after a public speech failed to galvanize the armed forces into overthrowing the government.

Gordie Howe

(1926-2016): Born in Floral, Saskatchewan, "Mr. Hockey," was equally adept with his stick as he was with his fists. A "Gordie Howe hat trick" was later joked to consist of a goal, an assist, and a fight. A six-time Art Ross Trophy winner, he played 26 seasons with the Detroit Red Wings, retiring in 1971. After a two-year retirement, he returned to the fledgling WHA, to play with his sons on the Houston Aeros. He played his last NHL season at the age of 52 in 1980 with the Hartford Whalers, finishing as the NHL's career points leader until 1989.

Terry Sawchuk

(1929-1970): Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, "Ukey" played more games (971), won more games (447), and recorded more shutouts (103) than any other netminder in NHL history. In 1952, he recorded eight straight wins, including four shutouts, in the playoffs for Detroit. Winning five Vezina Trophies in his career for lowest team GAA (the criteria during his era), Sawchuk also won the Calder Trophy as NHL rookie of the year in 1950-1951. Always deeply psychologically troubled, he died in a household accident in 1970 while a member of the New York Rangers.

Oe Kenzaburo

(1935-present): Novelist and recipient of the 1994 Nobel Prize for Literature. His first work, Shiiku (The Catch in the Shadow of the Sunrise), describes a friendship between a Japanese boy and a black American POW, and won him the Akutagawa award while he was still a student. His early works are filled with insanity, abuse, perverse sex, and violence, but his later works — including A Personal Matter (Kojinteki-na taiken) and The Silent Cry (Man'en gannen no futtoboru) — reflect the experience of being the father of a brain-damaged child. His fiction centers on the alienation following Japan's surrender, and his political writings focus on the search for cultural and ideological roots.

Franz Beckenbauer

(1945-present; West Germany; sweeper) Nicknamed "Der Kaiser," he invented the position of attacking sweeper, helping him to become the only man ever to win the World Cup as both team captain and as manager (1974 as a player, 1990 as manager). Beckenbauer's first World Cup saw him help West Germany to the 1966 World Cup Final, where they lost to host England 4-2 at Wembley Stadium. 1972 saw West Germany win the European Championship and Beckenbauer named European Footballer of the Year. Two years later, Beckenbauer had one of the single greatest football years in history, captaining FC Bayern München to the Bundesliga (German First Division), European Cup (now known as the UEFA Champions League) championships and West Germany to the World Cup, the nation's second triumph. In 1976, he left Germany for the NASL's New York Cosmos, where he teamed with Pelé and was named 1977 NASL MVP. He now serves as the FC Bayern München club president.

Johann Cruyff

(1947-2016; The Netherlands; midfielder) A stringent believer that "the game should be played beautifully," Cruyff helped usher in the system of "total football" into the world game, in which all positions should be equally willing and adept to play all portions of the game. Despite being both gawky and a chain-smoker, Cruyff helped Ajax Amsterdam to three European Cups (now known as the UEFA Champions' League) as well as being named European Footballer of the Year in 1971 and 1973. His greatest international success came in 1974 when he helped the "Orange" to their first appearance in the World Cup Final, where they lost to West Germany in Munich. "The Orange" would also make the 1978 World Cup Finals, this time without Cruyff, who retired from international play after the qualification stage. This was followed by a brief stint in the NASL, where he earned 1979 NASL MVP honors. In 1984, at the age of 37, he helped Ajax's archrival Feyenoord to its first Dutch league title in a decade before moving into coaching at former club FC Barcelona, where he led the team to four Spanish League titles and a European Cup in a nine-year stint.

Ken Dryden

(1947-present): Born in Hamilton, Ontario, he had a standout career at Cornell University before joining the Montreal Canadiens organization in 1970. In 1970-1971, he starred in the playoffs, winning Conn Smythe Trophy honors (playoff MVP), before going on to win Calder Trophy (Rookie of the Year) honors the next season. Along with Tony Esposito, he served as Canada's goalie during the legendary 1972 Summit Series with the USSR. He sat out the entire 1973-1974 season in a contract dispute, and worked as a legal clerk and obtaining his law degree from McGill. He currently serves as the President of the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Bobby Orr

(1948-present): Born in Parry Sound, Ontario, he revolutionized the position of defenseman. The first blue liner to win the Art Ross Trophy (scoring title), he also won the Norris (best defenseman), Hart (league MVP), and Conn Smythe (playoff MVP) in the same season (1969-1970). That same year, he led the Bruins to their first Stanley Cup in three decades with the now famous "Goal." He recorded the highest ± rating ever for a single season, +124 in 1970-1971, and won eight straight Norris Trophies from 1968-1975. Unfortunately, his bad knees forced him into early retirement in 1979.

Vladislav Tretiak

(1952-present): Born in Moscow, USSR, he is the first Russian player in Hockey Hall of Fame. He came to North American prominence when he starred in 1972 Summit Series against Canada. A ten-time World Champion, he also won three gold medals (1972, 1976, and 1984). The decision to pull Tretiak after the first period of the U.S./USSR game in the 1980 Olympics is considered to be part of the reason the U.S. went on to win the gold. He played for CSKA Moscow (Central Red Army) for 15 years and, after retiring, served as the goaltending coach for the Chicago Blackhawks.

Diego Maradona

(1960-present; Argentina; forward) The oft-controversial strike helped Argentina to the 1986 World Cup Championship with two amazing goals against England in the semi-finals, including the infamous "Hand of God" goal, in which he directed the ball into the net with his hand illegally, undetected by officials on the pitch. A two-time South American Player of the Year (1978 and 1979) before joining FC Barcelona in 1982 after the World Cup in Spain, in 1984, he moved on to FC Napoli, where he would help his side claim two Series A Championships and a UEFA Cup win in 1989. He was banned for failing a drug test in 1991, and by the time he returned he was no longer his old playing self, though he did lead a stirring performance for Argentina at the 1994 World Cup in the U.S., before being banned again for failing another drug test during the tournament. Maradona finally retired in 1997 from his original team, Argentina's Boca Juniors.

Wayne Gretzky

(1961-present): Born in Brantford, Ontario, "The Great One" was named Canada's athlete of the century. Gretzky holds or shares 61 NHL records, including career goals (894), assists (1,963), and points (2,857). The winner of ten scoring titles (Art Ross Trophies) and nine NHL MVP's (Hart Trophies), his #99 was retired league-wide. He won four Stanley Cups with Edmonton in the 1980s before a major trade sent him to Los Angeles in 1988. After a brief stint in St. Louis, he would finish career with the New York Rangers in 1999.

Mario Lemieux

(1965-present): Born in Montreal, Quebec, "Super Mario" scored his first NHL goal on the first shift of his first game, against Boston in 1984. He led the Pittsburgh Penguins to consecutive Stanley Cups in 1991-1992. After a bout with Hodgkin's disease, he returned to lead the NHL in scoring in 1995-1996 and 1996-1997. He then later helped bail the Penguins out of bankruptcy by becoming the lead owner of the team in 1999.

Mia Hamm

(1972-present; United States; forward) The youngest American, male or female, ever to play for a U.S. National team, She was a member of both the 1991 and 1999 Womens' World Cup Champions and the 1996 Olympic Gold Medal winning side. A UNC-Chapel Hill alum (BS 1994, Political Science), and two-time Hermann Trophy winner and Missouri Athletic Club Player of the Year winner (1992 and 1993), her #19 was retired by the Tar Heels, where she won 4 NCAA titles. In international play, she holds the all-time international scoring record, for men and women, when she scored career goal 108 on May 16, 1999, against Brazil in Orlando. One of People's 50 Most Beautiful People in 1997, the largest building on Nike's Corporate Campus in Beaverton, Oregon, is named for her.

Pelé

(Edson Arantes do Nascimento) (1940-present; Brazil; forward) Also known as "the Black Pearl," he led the Brazilian national team to three World Cup victories in 1958, 1962, and 1970 (though he was injured for most of '62 finals) and to permanent possession of the Jules Rimet Trophy. In his professional and international career, he played in 1,363 matches and scored 1,282 goals. He made his professional debut with Brazil's Santos in 1956 and played with them until 1974. In 1975, he came out of retirement to promote the game in the United States by starring for the NASL's New York Cosmos, earning him 1976 NASL MVP honors; his retirement game in 1977 at Giants Stadium against his old club Santos drew over 75,000 people, the largest crowd to see a soccer match in the U.S. before the 1984 Olympics. He later became Brazil's Minister of Sport and, in 1999, the National Olympic Committees named Pelé the IOC's Athlete of the Century, despite having never partaken in an Olympic Games.

David Ricardo

(English, 1772-1823): He is best known for Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, which introduced more-or-less modern notions of comparative advantage and its theoretical justification for unfettered international trade. He also put forth the so-called iron law of wages.

John Manyard Keynes

(English, 1883-1946): He is most famous for The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), which judged most of classical economic analysis to be a special case (hence "General Theory") and argued that the best way to deal with prolonged recessions was deficit spending.

Francois Quesnay

(French, 1694-1774): He was the undisputed leader of the Physiocrats, the first systematic school of economic thought. Among its tenets were the economic and moral righteousness of laissez-faire policies and the notion that land is the ultimate source of all wealth.

Karl Marx

(German, 1818-1883): Also a historian and social philosopher, his principal contribution to economic thought was extending the labor theory of value to its logical conclusion, his theory of surplus value. This theory, along with his defense of economic materialism, appeared in Das Kapital (1867, 1885, 1894).

Adam Smith

(Scottish, 1723-1790): Though he wrote on nearly every subject of moral and social philosophy, he is basically remembered as the author of An Inquiry into the nature and causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) and as the creator of the metaphor of the "invisible hand." This work more-or-less single-handedly founded the Classical school of economics.

Sei Shonagon

(c. 966 - c. 1013): Like Lady Murasaki, she was a lady-in-waiting of the Empress. Since Lady Murasaki and Sei Shonagan were contemporaries and known for their wit, they were often rivals*. Sei Shonagan's only work is the Pillow Book (Makura no soshi), which is considered the best source of information about life at the Japanese court during the Heian period (784-1185).

Lady Murasaki Shikibu

(c. 978 -c. 1015): Novelist, diarist, and lady-in-waiting. She was the author of the Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari), the first known novel; the diary Murasaki Shikibu nikki; and a collection of tanka poems. The daughter of the court official Fujiwara Tametoki, she sat in on the classical Chinese literature lessons that her brother received, in spite of the Heian traditions against higher education for women.

Nathanael Greene

A prominent Rhode Island politician prior to the revolution, he raised a militia company but was not elected their captain due to his partial lameness. Following his work in the siege of Boston, he marched his army to Long Island, where they aided in the battles around New York. Following the loss of Fort Washington, Greene led forces into victory at the Battle of Trenton, and then again distinguished himself by protecting Washington's force at the Battle of Brandywine. Greene then led the main force at Germantown, and led the evacuation of positions along the Delaware River in fall 1777. The next year, Greene's logistical talents led Washington to appoint him quartermaster general, a position he only accepted if he were allowed to retain field troops. He then led those troops as the right wing in the Battle of Monmouth. The quartermaster general position led to conflicts with the Continental Congress, and Greene resigned in 1780. Appointed to command to replace the traitor Benedict Arnold, he was sent south following Gates' loss at Camden. Joining with Daniel Morgan, he retreated from Cornwallis' forces for two months until a crippling counterattack at Guilford Courthouse, which gave a costly victory to the British. Until the end of the war, Greene led a spirited offensive against Lord Rawdon's — and later Duncan Stuart's — forces, besieging Augusta and Ninety-Six, and establishing headquarters in Charleston following Washington's victory at Yorktown.

Sir William Howe

A veteran of the siege of Louisbourg, and the leader of the ascent to the Plains of Abraham (Quebec, 1759), he was dispatched in 1775 as second-in-command to Gage. After directing the attack on Bunker Hill, he succeeded Gage as commander, and coordinated a strategic retreat from Boston to Halifax. In Halifax, he coordinated a joint army-navy attack with his brother, Richard, an admiral, resulting in a campaign which allowed the British to control New York City. After his attempts to secure a peace in 1777 failed, he led the attack on Philadelphia, defeating Washington at Brandywine. After this, he wintered in Philadelphia, waiting for acceptance of his resignation, due to the failed peace negotiations. On May 25, 1778, he relinquished command to Sir Henry Clinton and returned home.

1968

After Lyndon Johnson declined to run for re-election, and after Robert F. Kennedy was killed in California, the Democratic nomination went to Hubert Humphrey. Richard Nixon, gradually returning from political obscurity over the past six years, gained the Republican nomination. Alabama governor George Wallace ran as the American Independent candidate, becoming the last third-party candidate to win multiple electoral votes. Nixon edged Humphrey by half a million popular votes and a 301—191 electoral count, while Wallace won nearly ten million votes. Wallace's presence may well have tipped the election to the Republicans, who, after being out of power for 28 of the last 36 years, would hold the presidency for all but four years through 1992.

Tadeuz Kosciuszko

After receiving military training in his native Poland and France, he resigned his commission due to poor advancement prospect. Offering his assistance to the Americans, he helped fortify the Delaware River in 1776, earning himself the rank of colonel. That winter, he planned the building of Fort Mercer, and the next spring headed north with General Gates, becoming commander of the northern army and building fortifications that helped win the battle of Saratoga. In 1780, he worked on building defenses for West Point, then headed south when Gates was appointed command of the Southern Department. Serving under Nathaniel Greene, he distinguished himself in the Race to the Dan River, and at Charleston, but mishandled the siege of Ninety-Six. Following the war, he was granted American citizenship but returned home to Poland. Back home he resisted partition, and attempted to liberate the nation afterward.

Charles Cornwallis

An aristocrat and ensign in 1756, he fought in the battle of Minden, and by the end of the Seven Years' War he was a captain. Made aide-de-camp to George III, he made colonel, and was promoted to major general before being sent to America. After a failed assault on Charleston, he served under Sir Henry Clinton in the battle of Long Island, but made his mark in fighting at Manhattan and pursued Washington across the Hudson, being outmaneuvered by Washington at Princeton (January 3, 1777). Following this defeat he directed the main attack on Brandywine Creek, and reinforced Germantown as part of the plan to capture Philadelphia. Promoted to second-in-command under Clinton after the Philadelphia campaign, he led the Battle of Monmouth before returning home to attend his sick wife. Sent south in 1780 to capture Charleston, he bested Horatio Gates at Camden (North Carolina) and Nathaniel Greene at Guilford Courthouse, the latter a pyrrhic victory that likely led to his defeat in attempts to contain Lafayette in Virginia. Following this, he occupied Yorktown in August 1781, where he was surrounded by American and French forces, and forced to surrender. Following the war, he was appointed governor-general of India, and proved to be a capable administrator.

1860

Another four-candidate election, with Republican Abraham Lincoln, (northern) Democrat Stephen Douglas, (southern) Democrat John C. Breckinridge, and Constitutional Unionist John G. Bell. The Republican Party, founded in 1854, won in its second election (its first candidate being John C. Frémont in 1856), aided by the fragmenting of the Democrats. Bell took Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia, Breckinridge swept the other slave states, and Lincoln nearly swept the free states. Though winning under 40% of the total popular vote, Lincoln dominated the electoral count with 180 to a combined 123 for his opponents (Breckinridge 72, Bell 39, Douglas 12). Seven southern states seceded before Lincoln even took office, and war soon followed.

Marquis de Lafayette

Approached by the U.S. Minister to France, Silas Deane, he arrived in April 1777 with Baron de Kalb. First seeing action at Brandywine, his primary early action was in supporting Washington during the winter at Valley Forge. After participating at the battles of Barren Hill, Monmouth, and Newport, he returned to France, raising support for an expeditionary force. Returning to America a colonel, he served on the board that sentenced Major Andre to death, and then faced Andre's confederate Benedict Arnold in battle in 1781. Working in Virginia, he evaded Cornwallis' forces, until reinforcements arrived in June. Coordinating with Anthony Wayne, the two combined forces against Cornwallis in the battle of Green Spring. Pursuing Cornwallis to Yorktown, Lafayette helped the siege there until Cornwallis' surrender.

Set (Pantheon)

Created in opposition to the forces of Ma'at, Set (termed Typhon by Plutarch) fought the demon Apopis each day, emerging victorious, symbolic of the struggle of forces that brought harmony. In later times, this struggle led Set to be associated with the serpent itself, and Set became the personification of violence and disorder, and the cause of all disasters. Having killed his brother Osiris, Set did battle with Osiris' son Horus, being emasculated in the fight. His cult was diminished over time, due to reaction against violence. His effigies were destroyed by some, while others were changed into representations of Amon, by replacing the ears with horns.

1800

Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson narrowly beat the incumbent Federalist John Adams 73-65, marking the ascent of that party's power. At the time, one electoral vote each was cast for president and vice president, so Democratic-Republican VP candidate Aaron Burr also had 73 votes, but Burr refused to step aside. In the House of Representatives, neither man won the necessary nine state delegations outright until the 36th ballot, when James Bayard of Delaware changed his vote to Jefferson. The debacle led to the passage of the 12th amendment in 1804. The Federalists never recovered; Alexander Hamilton's opposition to Adams led to a permanent split between the two, and Hamilton's opposition to Burr was one cause of their 1804 duel, in which Burr (then the vice president) killed Hamilton. This was the first peaceful transfer of power from one party to another.

Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben

Formerly part of Frederick the Great's staff, the Prussian Steuben was recommended by Ben Franklin to George Washington. Accepted by the Continental Congress, Steuben joined Washington at Valley Forge, and began training the army. Appointed major general and inspector general in May 1777, he aided in the Battle of Monmouth, then spent two years writing the Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States, an army training manual. Sent to Virginia in 1780 to oppose Benedict Arnold's actions, illness caused him to turn over his troops to Lafayette, but Steuben recovered in time to aid in the siege of Yorktown.

Vacuoles

Found mainly in plants and protists, these are liquid-filled cavities enclosed by a single membrane. They serve as storage bins for food and waste products. Contractile vacuoles are important for freshwater protists to rid their cells of excess water that accumulates because of salt imbalance with the environment.

Osiris (Pantheon)

Husband of Isis, father of Horus, and brother of Set, he served as god of the underworld and protector of the dead. In addition to his role as the chief and judge of the underworld (as a result of the above-mentioned murder by Set), Osiris also served as a god of vegetation and renewal; festivals honoring his death occurred around the time of the Nile flood's retreat. Statues representing him were made of clay and grain, which would then germinate. Osiris was represented either as a green mummy, or wearing the Atef, a plumed crown.

1896

In the election itself, Republican William McKinley swept the North and Northeast to beat Democrat William Jennings Bryan, but the campaign was the interesting part. The most prominent issue, the gold standard versus free silver coinage, led to Bryan's famous "Cross of Gold" speech. Shunned by Eastern press, Bryan — a legendary orator — traveled 18,000 miles through 27 states and was heard by some three million people. McKinley would not accept Bryan's challenge to debate, comparing it to putting up a trapeze and competing with a professional athlete. McKinley instead had a "front porch" campaign, as railroads brought voters by the thousands to hear him speak in his hometown, Canton, Ohio. Mark Hanna, McKinley's campaign manager, is often considered the first modern campaign manager. The election also represented the demise of the Populist Party and ushered in a 16-year period of Republican rule. The gold question would disappear soon after the election with gold strikes in Australia and Alaska.

1948

In the most recent election with four significant candidates, Democrat Harry Truman beat Republican Thomas Dewey, contrary to the famous headline of the Chicago Tribune, which was printed before results from the West came in. Dewey dominated the northeast, but Truman nearly swept the West to pull out the victory. Former vice president Henry Wallace earned over a million votes as the Progressive candidate, and Strom Thurmond took over a million popular votes and 39 electoral votes as the States' Rights (or Dixiecrat) candidate.

Sir Guy Carleton

Irish-born, he led grenadiers across the Plains of Abraham in the 1759 siege of Quebec under his close friend General Wolfe. He entered the war as second-in-command to Thomas Gage before taking command after Gage's 1775 recall. Carleton then directed British troops from Canada to Boston after the Battle of Concord, resulting in a revolt. Carleton repulsed efforts by Montgomery and Benedict Arnold to capture Montréal and Quebec, routing a second attempt by Arnold, by defeating an American naval buildup on Lake Champlain. Following this, he attempted to support Burgoyne's failed plan to isolate New England. Brought back to Britain to govern Armagh in Ireland in 1777, he sat out all but the end of the war, returning in 1782 as commander-in-chief after Cornwallis' surrender.

1960

John F. Kennedy defeated vice president Richard Nixon 303-219 in a tight election, winning the popular vote by just two-tenths of a percent. The first Kennedy-Nixon debate (September 26, 1960) is a classic in political science; those who saw the calm, handsome Kennedy and the tired, uncomfortable-looking Nixon on television were more likely to select Kennedy as the winner than were those who listened on radio. (Theodore White's notable The Making of the President series began with the 1960 election.) Voting irregularities in Texas and Illinois (especially in Richard Daley's Chicago) led to allegations of fraud, but a recount would not have been feasible, and Nixon did not press the issue. Nixon would go on to lose the 1962 California gubernatorial race (occasioning his famous statement "You won't have Dick Nixon to kick around any more").

The family quarrel of Osiris and set

Osiris took Isis, his sister, for his wife, and ruled over the earth. Set grew jealous of his brother and killed him, afterwards cutting his body into 14 pieces and hiding them in various places around Egypt. He then claimed kingship over the land. Isis searched the breadth of the land until she had recovered all of the pieces and, with the help of Anubis, embalmed the body. She conceived a son, Horus, by the (still dead) Osiris, then resurrected him. Horus defeated Set to regain the kingship, and all subsequent pharaohs were said to be aspects of him.

Ra (Pantheon)

Personification of the midday sun, he was also venerated as Atum (setting sun) and Khepri (rising sun), which were later combined with him. He traveled across the sky each day and then each night, the monster Apep would attempt to prevent his return. Other myths held that Ra spent the night in the underworld consoling the dead. The god of the pharaohs, from the fourth dynasty onward all pharaohs termed themselves "sons of Ra," and after death they joined his entourage. He was portrayed with the head of a falcon, and crowned with the sun disk.

Francis Marion

Previously an Indian fighter, he was given command of Fort Sullivan in 1776. Commanding the 2nd South Carolina, he fought at Savannah, and escaped capture when the British retook Charleston. From there, Marion fought a successful guerilla campaign against British troops, forcing Cornwallis to appoint Colonel Banastre Tarleton to eliminate Marion. Tarleton's frustration at the task led to the remark "But as for this damned old fox, the devil himself could not catch him," creating Marion's nickname, "Swamp Fox." Promoted to brigadier general in 1781, and later given command of the North and South Carolina militias, Marion fought the British at Eutaw Springs.

Ptah

Principal god of the city of Memphis, he was portrayed as a mummy, or wearing the beard of the gods on his chin. His godhood was achieved by himself, much like his creation power, done merely by act of will. A patron of craftsmen, he also was seen as a healer, in the form of a dwarf. In the death trilogy (Anubis, Osiris, Ptah), he was seen as the god of embalming. His wife was the cat-headed Sekhmet, and his son was the lotus god Nefertem.

George Washington

Selected by the Continental Congress to serve as general-in-chief, his first actions were to blockade Boston. Key to the success in Boston was the capture of Dorchester Heights, allowing cannon fire against the British and forcing the withdrawal of Howe. After failing to defend New York, Washington retreated toward Pennsylvania, extending British supply lines and allowing a successful counterattack on Hessian mercenaries at Trenton. Following victory at Princeton, Washington retired to winter quarters at Morristown. Sending his best forces north to deal with Burgoyne's attack in spring 1777, he kept Howe engaged in the mid-Atlantic. Autumn setbacks at Brandywine and Germantown led to a demoralized winter camp at Valley Forge, countered by the work of Lafayette, Steuben, and others. After a costly draw with Sir Henry Clinton's forces at Monmouth, Washington sent Greene south to replace Gates, and worked with the French general Jean Baptiste Rochambeau to plan the Yorktown campaign. The success of this campaign led to Cornwallis' surrender on October 19, 1781.

Nephthys

Termed the "lady of the castle," for her role as guardian of tombs, she sided against her own husband, Set, in his battle against Osiris, but when Set was destroyed, she collected the bits of his body and brought him back to life, much as Isis had done for Osiris. In addition to being Isis' sister, she was also said to be Osiris' mistress, leading to much complaint from Isis. Due to her close ties to all the other gods, she was rarely associated with a cult of her own.

1824

The candidates were John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, William Crawford, and Andrew Jackson, all Democratic-Republicans. After John C. Calhoun decided to seek the vice presidency and Crawford (from Georgia) had a stroke, Jackson took most of the South and won the popular vote. Jackson had 99 electoral votes, Adams 84, Crawford 41, and Clay 37, but since none had more than 50% of the vote, the House decided the election. Adams won in the House with support from Clay, and Jacksonians cried foul when Clay was made Secretary of State (the so-called "corrupt bargain"), giving fuel to Jackson's victorious 1828 campaign. Jackson is the only candidate to lose a presidential race despite having the most electoral votes, and he is one of five (with Tilden, Cleveland, Gore, and Hillary Clinton) to lose despite winning the popular vote. The election also led to the founding of the Democratic Party.

2000

The closest election in American history. Al Gore won the popular vote but lost the electoral vote to George W. Bush by a final count of 271—266 (one Gore elector abstained). Ralph Nader of the Green Party won an important 2.7% of the vote, while Pat Buchanan of the Reform Party placed fourth. New Mexico and Oregon were initially too close to call but went to Gore, and Florida became the center of attention. Ballot confusion in Palm Beach County, intimidation of vote recounters in Miami-Dade County, and absentee ballots throughout Florida became significant issues, as Americans had to hear about butterfly ballots, hanging chads, and Florida Secretary of State Katharine Harris for the next five weeks. Gore officially conceded the election on December 13, 2000.

Endoplasmic Reticulum (ER)

These are a network of tube-like membranes continuous with the nuclear envelope. Part of it are "rough" because they are covered in ribosomes, while other parts are "smooth" because they aren't. In the ER, proteins undergo modifications and folding to yield the final, functional protein structures.

cilia and flagella

These are important organelles of motility, that is, they allow the cell to move. Flagella are long, whip-like structures, while cilia are short, hair-like projections. Both contain a 9 + 2 arrangement of microtubules in cross-section (two microtubules in the middle, nine pairs in a circle around the outside) and are powered by molecular motors of kinesin and dynein molecules.

Lysosomes

These are membrane-bound organelles that contain digestive enzymes that break down proteins, lipids, carbohydrates, and nucleic acids. They are important in processing the contents of vesicles taken in from outside the cell. It is crucial to maintain the integrity of the lysosomal membranes because the enzymes they contain can digest cellular components as well.

Guernica, by Pablo Picasso

This painting was a Basque town bombed by the Germans during the Spanish Civil War in April 1937. Picasso had already been commissioned to paint a mural for the Spanish Pavilion at the World's Fair, and he completed his massive, black, white, and grey anti-war mural by early June 1937. Picasso's Cubist approach to portraying the figures adds to the sense of destruction and chaos. Guernica was in the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York until 1981, when it was returned to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Spain.

1912

Three presidents — Teddy Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson — earned electoral votes. Roosevelt, displeased with his successor Taft, returned to lead the progressive Republican faction; after Taft got the Republican nomination, Roosevelt was nominated by the Progressive Party (nicknamed the "Bull Moose" Party). Wilson won with 435 electoral votes to Roosevelt's 88 and Taft's 8, making Taft the only incumbent to finish third in a re-election bid. Though Wilson did set forth his New Freedom program, his dominating win must be credited largely to the splitting of the Republican vote by Roosevelt and Taft.