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coup
coup [Fr.,=blow], among Native North Americans of the Plains culture, a war honor, awarded for striking an enemy in such a way that it was considered an extreme act of bravery. Generally, coups were awarded according to the degree of difficulty and danger involved; the most extreme, such as strikin...
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Giovanni Battista Martini
Giovanni Battista Martini , 1706-84, Italian composer and teacher, also known as Padre Martini. Martini became a priest in 1722. He acquired great prestige as a teacher, particularly of counterpoint. His students included J. C. Bach, Gluck, Grétry, and Mozart. Martini built up a vast library ...
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Shawnee Prophet
Shawnee Prophet 1775?-1837?, Native North American of the Shawnee tribe; brother of Tecumseh . His Native American name was Tenskwautawa. He announced himself as a prophet bearing a revelation from the Native American master of life. The message urged the renunciation of the acquired ways of the w...
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Lindley Murray
Lindley Murray 1745-1826, American grammarian, b. Pennsylvania. Murray practiced law until the Revolution, during which he acquired a fortune, and in 1784 went to live in England. A Quaker minister, he devoted his time to writing books on English grammar and religious essays. His most popular book ...
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Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village , residential district of lower Manhattan, New York City, extending S from 14th St. to Houston St. and W from Washington Square to the Hudson River. North of the main settlement of New York City in colonial times, in the 1830s it became an exclusive residential section, described i...
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Alcatraz
Alcatraz [Sp. Álcatraces =pelicans], rocky island in San Francisco Bay, W Calif, about one mile (1.61 km) north of San Francisco. Alcatraz was first sighted by the Spanish in 1772 (and possibly three years earlier). Its name derives from the presence of a pelican colony, but Spanish and Mex...
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Trofim Denisovich Lysenko
Trofim Denisovich Lysenko , 1898-1976, Russian agronomist. As president of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences he became the scientific and administrative leader of Soviet agriculture. In 1937 he was made a member of the Supreme Soviet and head of the Institute of Genetics of the So...
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Melville Weston Fuller
Melville Weston Fuller 1833-1910, American jurist, 8th Chief Justice of the United States (1888-1910), b. Augusta, Maine. He studied at Harvard law school, and after 1856 he became a prominent lawyer in Chicago and acquired a national reputation in Democratic politics. Fuller was appointed Chief Ju...
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John William Mackay
John William Mackay , 1831-1902, American financier, b. Dublin, Ireland. He immigrated to the United States in 1840. In 1859 he joined the rush to Nevada, where silver had been discovered. He and J. G. Fair , later joined by William Shoney O'Brien and J. C. Flood, acquired control of valuable silve...
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mestizo
mestizo [Span.,=mixture], person of mixed race; particularly, in Mexico and Central and South America, a person of European (Spanish or Portuguese) and indigenous descent. The mestizos constitute a large part of the population in several Latin American countries; they are in various places also cal...
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