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Spartacus
Spartacus , d. 71 BC, leader in an ancient Italian slave revolt, b. Thrace. He broke out (73 BC) of a gladiators' school at Capua and fled to Mt. Vesuvius, where many fugitives joined him. Their army defeated several Roman forces and moved north, devastating S Italy and Campania; Spartacus' aim was ...
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Spartacus party
Spartacus party or Spartacists, radical group of German Socialists, formed c.Mar., 1916, and led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg . The name was derived from the pseudonym Spartacus used by Liebknecht in his pamphlets denouncing World War I, the government, and the majority section of t...
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Karl Liebknecht
Karl Liebknecht , 1871-1919, German socialist, leader of the Spartacus party ; son of Wilhelm Liebknecht . His antimilitaristic writings caused his conviction (1907) for high treason. Released from prison, Liebknecht entered the Prussian lower house in 1908 and the Reichstag in 1912. As a member o...
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Aram Ilich Khachaturian
Aram Ilich Khachaturian , 1903-78, Russian composer of Armenian parentage, b. Tiflis (now Tbilisi). Khachaturian moved to Moscow in the early 1920s and attended (1929-34) the Moscow Conservatory. At first studying the cello, he began to compose c.1926. Colorful, energetic, emotionally powerful, and ...
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Bolshoi Ballet
Bolshoi Ballet , one of the principal ballet companies of Russia; part of the Bolshoi Theater, which also includes Russia's premier opera company. The Bolshoi Ballet began as a dancing school for the Moscow Orphanage in 1773. The Bolshoi Theatre, which opened permanently in 1856, in its early decade...
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Friedrich Ebert
Friedrich Ebert , 1871-1925, first president (1919-25) of the German republic. A Social Democratic deputy in the Reichstag, in 1913 he became party leader, succeeding Bebel ; a gradualist, or moderate, he was seen as pragmatic and non-ideological. Ebert supported the war effort during World War I. ...
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Howard Fast
Howard Fast 1914-2003, American author, b. New York City. A prolific writer, he is best known for historical novels that mainly concern rebellion against various forms of tyranny. They include Citizen Tom Payne (1943), Freedom Road (1944), My Glorious Brothers (1948), Spartacus (1951), and ...
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gladiators
gladiators [Lat.,=swordsmen], in ancient Rome, class of professional fighters, who performed for exhibition. Gladiatorial combats usually took place in amphitheaters. They probably were introduced from Etruria and originally were funeral games. Gladitorial combats, which took place in the Colosseu...
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Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick , 1928-99, American film director, writer, and producer, b. New York City. His visually stunning, thematically daring, boldly idiosyncratic, and darkly compelling films generally portray a deeply flawed humanity. Kubrick made several documentary shorts in the 1950s, turning to film n...
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Rosa Luxemburg
Rosa Luxemburg , 1871-1919, German revolutionary, b. Russian Poland. Her revolutionary activities forced her to flee to Switzerland in 1889, where she became a Marxist. One of the founders of the Polish Socialist party (1892), she formed (1894) a splinter group (later known as the Social Democratic ...
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