Albert Sidney Burleson

Albert Sidney Burleson , 1863-1937, U.S. Postmaster General (1913-21), b. San Marcos, Tex.; grandson of Edward Burleson. He was a lawyer of Austin, Tex., and a member of the U.S. House of Representatives (1899-1913) before resigning to take a cabinet post under President Wilson. His methods of administering communications in World War I angered many: businessmen, who charged him with inefficiency and interference with private business; labor unions, because he forbade strikes of postal employees; and liberals, whose antiwar periodicals he banned from the mails. Burleson continued to exercise strict control and to advocate government ownership of communications. In 1918 he established airmail service.

Johnston, Albert Sidney (1803–62) Confederate general, born in Washington, Kentucky. Johnston was in command of the vast lands stretching from the Appalachian Mountains to the Indian Territory and was killed at Shiloh (1862). Before joining the Confederate forces, Johnston had a distinguished military career with the U.S. Army. A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, he fought in the Black Hawk War (1832) before becoming active in the Texas War of Independence (1836). He served as senior brigadier general of the Texas army. As Texas's secretary of war, he conducted the successful Cherokee campaigns of 1839. After a decade in civilian life, he returned to the military during the Mexican War (1846–48) and served with distinction at the battle of Monterrey (1846). In 1857–58 he commanded an expedition against the Mormons in Utah, marching unopposed into Salt Lake City. Johnston resigned from the U.S. Army when Texas seceded.

Johnston was the father of William Preston Johnston, who wrote his biography.

HORNBY, A(lbert) S(idney) [1898–1978]. English grammarian and EFL teacher, born in Chester, and educated at U. College London. From 1923, he taught English in Tokyo, where he worked with Harold E. Palmer at the Institute for Research in English Teaching. In 1937, with E. V. Gatenby and H. Wakefield, he began work on an innovative DICTIONARY for foreign learners that would provide lexical, syntactic, and idiomatic information. It was completed in 1940 and published in 1942 in Tokyo by Kaitakusha, as The Idiomatic and Syntactic English Dictionary. When Hornby left Japan in 1939 he joined the BRITISH COUNCIL and after the war became editor of English Language Teaching. In 1948, the dictionary was reissued by Oxford University Press as A Learner's Dictionary of Current English. In 1963, its revision was retitled The Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English, the greatest commercial success in ELT publishing. See LEARNER'S DICTIONARY.