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The Devil And Daniel Webster
"The Devil and Daniel Webster" (1936) is a short story by American writer Stephen Vincent Benét. He tells of a New Hampshire farmer who sells his soul to the devil and is later defended by Daniel Webster, a fictional version of the noted 19th-century American statesman, lawyer and orator. The narrative refers to factual events in the lives of Webster and his family. The story appeared in ''The Saturday Evening Post'' (October 24, 1936) and was published in book form by Farrar & Rinehart the following year. The story won the O. Henry Award. The author also adapted it in 1938 as a folk opera, with music by Douglas Stuart Moore, a fellow Yale University alumnus. Plot summary Farmer Jabez Stone, from the small town of Cross Corners, New Hampshire, is plagued with unending bad luck. He finally says, "it's enough to make a man want to sell his soul to the devil!" The next day he is visited by a stranger, identified as " Mr. Scratch", who offers to give him seven years of prosperi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
WikiProject Novels
A WikiProject, or Wikiproject, is a Wikimedia movement affinity group for contributors with shared goals. WikiProjects are prevalent within the largest wiki, Wikipedia, and exist to varying degrees within sister projects such as Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikidata, and Wikisource. They also exist in different languages, and translation of articles is a form of their collaboration. During the COVID-19 pandemic, CBS News noted the role of Wikipedia's WikiProject Medicine in maintaining the accuracy of articles related to the disease. Another WikiProject that has drawn attention is WikiProject Women Scientists, which was profiled by '' Smithsonian'' for its efforts to improve coverage of women scientists which the profile noted had "helped increase the number of female scientists on Wikipedia from around 1,600 to over 5,000". On Wikipedia Some Wikipedia WikiProjects are substantial enough to engage in cooperative activities with outside organizations relevant to the field at issue. F ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Simon Girty
Simon Girty (November 14, 1741 – February 18, 1818) was an American-born frontiersman, soldier and interpreter from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, who served as a liaison between the British and their Indian allies during the American Revolution. He was portrayed as a villain, and was also featured this way in 19th and early 20th-century fiction from the United States. As children, Girty and his brothers were taken captive in Pennsylvania in a Seneca raid and adopted. He lived with the Seneca for seven years and became fully assimilated, preferring their culture. He was returned to his birth family but retained a sympathy for the Indians. Early life Simon Girty was born to Simon Girty the Elder and Mary Newton near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Simon Girty the Elder arrived in North America in 1730 from Ireland. The accepted spelling of Girty's name was most likely a "colonial derivation of McGearty, Gearty, Garrity, Garrarghty, Geraghty or Girtee" and a corruption and Anglicization of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Show Trial
A show trial is a public trial in which the judicial authorities have already determined the guilt or innocence of the defendant. The actual trial has as its only goal the presentation of both the accusation and the verdict to the public so they will serve as both an impressive example and a warning to other would-be dissidents or transgressors. Show trials tend to be retributive rather than corrective and they are also conducted for propagandistic purposes. When aimed at individuals on the basis of protected classes or characteristics, such trials are examples of political persecution. The term was first recorded in 1928. China During the Land Reform Movement, between 1 and 2 million landlords were executed as counterrevolutionaries during the early years of Communist China. After the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, show trials were given to "rioters and counter-revolutionaries" involved in the protests and the subsequent military massacre. Chinese Nobel Peac ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Salem Witch Trials
The Salem witch trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. More than 200 people were accused. Thirty people were found guilty, 19 of whom were executed by hanging (14 women and five men). One other man, Giles Corey, was pressed to death after refusing to enter a plea, and at least five people died in jail. Arrests were made in numerous towns beyond Salem and Salem Village (known today as Danvers), notably Andover and Topsfield. The grand juries and trials for this capital crime were conducted by a Court of Oyer and Terminer in 1692 and by a Superior Court of Judicature in 1693, both held in Salem Town, where the hangings also took place. It was the deadliest witch hunt in the history of colonial North America. Only fourteen other women and two men had been executed in Massachusetts and Connecticut during the 17th century. The episode is one of Colonial America's most ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Hathorne
John Hathorne (August 1641 – May 10, 1717) was a merchant and magistrate of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and Salem, Massachusetts. He is best known for his early and vocal role as one of the leading judges in the Salem witch trials. Hathorne was absent from the list of men appointed to the Court of Oyer & Terminer in June 1692. That court relied heavily on the spectral evidence, examinations, interrogations, and affidavits previously conducted by Hathorne, co-signed by Jonathan Corwin, and recorded by Rev. Samuel Parris and/or Ezekiel Cheever Jr. On September 22, 1692, the date of the final eight executions, Hathorne was present at a meetingSewall Diary with Stoughton and Cotton Mather to discuss using court records in a new publication designed to promote the trials. Unlike Samuel Sewall, Hathorne is not known to have repented for his actions. He was a patrilineal ancestor of writer Nathaniel Hawthorne. Life Hathorne's father, Major William Hathorne, was among the earl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Benedict Arnold
Benedict Arnold ( Brandt (1994), p. 4June 14, 1801) was an American military officer who served during the Revolutionary War. He fought with distinction for the American Continental Army and rose to the rank of major general before defecting to the British side of the conflict in 1780. General George Washington had given him his fullest trust and had placed him in command of West Point in New York. Arnold was planning to surrender the fort there to British forces, but the plot was discovered in September 1780, whereupon he fled to the British lines. In the later part of the conflict, Arnold was commissioned as a brigadier general in the British Army, and placed in command of the American Legion. He led the British army in battle against the soldiers whom he had once commanded, after which his name became synonymous with treason and betrayal in the United States. Rogets (2008) Arnold was born in Connecticut. In 1775, when the war began, he was a merchant operating ships ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Blackbeard
Edward Teach (alternatively spelled Edward Thatch, – 22 November 1718), better known as Blackbeard, was an English pirate who operated around the West Indies and the eastern coast of Britain's North American colonies. Little is known about his early life, but he may have been a sailor on privateer ships during Queen Anne's War before he settled on the Bahamian island of New Providence, a base for Captain Benjamin Hornigold, whose crew Teach joined around 1716. Hornigold placed him in command of a sloop that he had captured, and the two engaged in numerous acts of piracy. Their numbers were boosted by the addition to their fleet of two more ships, one of which was commanded by Stede Bonnet; but Hornigold retired from piracy toward the end of 1717, taking two vessels with him. Teach captured a French slave ship known as , renamed her ''Queen Anne's Revenge'', equipped her with 40 guns, and crewed her with over 300 men. He became a renowned pirate. His nickname derived ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pilgrims (Plymouth Colony)
The Pilgrims, also known as the Pilgrim Fathers, were the English settlers who came to North America on the '' Mayflower'' and established the Plymouth Colony in what is today Plymouth, Massachusetts, named after the final departure port of Plymouth, Devon. Their leadership came from the religious congregations of Brownists, or Separatist Puritans, who had fled religious persecution in England for the tolerance of 17th-century Holland in the Netherlands. They held many of the same Puritan Calvinist religious beliefs but, unlike most other Puritans, they maintained that their congregations should separate from the English state church, which led to them being labeled Separatists (the word "Pilgrims" was not used to refer to them until several centuries later). After several years living in exile in Holland, they eventually determined to establish a new settlement in the New World and arranged with investors to fund them. They established Plymouth Colony in 1620, where they ere ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Plymouth Colony
Plymouth Colony (sometimes Plimouth) was, from 1620 to 1691, the first permanent English colony in New England and the second permanent English colony in North America, after the Jamestown Colony. It was first settled by the passengers on the '' Mayflower'', at a location that had previously been surveyed and named by Captain John Smith. The settlement served as the capital of the colony and developed as the town of Plymouth, Massachusetts. At its height, Plymouth Colony occupied most of the southeastern portion of Massachusetts. Many of the people and events surrounding Plymouth Colony have become part of American folklore, including the American tradition of Thanksgiving and the monument of Plymouth Rock. Plymouth Colony was founded by a group of Puritan Separatists initially known as the Brownist Emigration, who came to be known as the Pilgrims. It was the second successful colony to be founded by the English in the United States after Jamestown in Virginia, and it wa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thomas Morton (colonist)
Thomas Morton (c. 1579–1647) was an early colonist in North America from Devon, England. He was a lawyer, writer, and social reformer known for studying American Indian culture, and he founded the colony of Merrymount, located in Quincy, Massachusetts. Biography Early years Thomas Morton was born in Devon in 1579, into a conservative Anglican family belonging to the landed gentry. Devon at that time was seen as the "dark corner of the land" by Protestant reformers, for its traditionalist intransigence, which included not only a High Church Anglicanism that shared many traits with Catholicism, but a paternalistic populism combined with rural folk tradition that to the Puritans seemed close to paganism. To locals, however, it was merely "Old England"a culture firmly ingrained in them. In the late 1590s Morton studied law at London's Clifford's Inn, where he made influential contacts and lasting friendships. He was also exposed to a popular Renaissance Classicism and to the " ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thomas Dale
Sir Thomas Dale ( 1570 − 19 August 1619) was an English naval commander and deputy-governor of the Virginia Colony in 1611 and from 1614 to 1616. Governor Dale is best remembered for the energy and the extreme rigour of his administration in Virginia, which established order and in various ways seems to have benefited the colony, although he was criticised for high-handedness. He is also credited with the establishment of Bermuda Hundred, Bermuda Cittie, and the Cittie of Henricus. Biography Early career From about 1588 to 1609, Thomas Dale was in the service of the Low Countries (the Netherlands and parts of modern Belgium) with the English army originally under Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. Because of his ability and ambition, he became friends with many people in positions of authority. In 1599 Thomas Dale was recruited by the Earl of Essex for England's army, and was knighted by King James to become "Sir Thomas Dale of Surry" on 16 June 1606. While Dale was s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wampanoag
The Wampanoag , also rendered Wôpanâak, are an Indigenous people of the Northeastern Woodlands based in southeastern Massachusetts and historically parts of eastern Rhode Island,Salwen, "Indians of Southern New England and Long Island," p. 171. Their territory included the islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. Today there are two federally recognized Wampanoag tribes: * Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe * Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah). The Wampanoag language was a dialect of Masschusett, a Southern New England Algonquian language. At the time of their first contact with the English in the 17th century, they were a large confederation of at least 24 recorded tribes. Their population numbered in the thousands; 3,000 Wampanoag lived on Martha's Vineyard alone. From 1615 to 1619, the Wampanoag suffered an epidemic, long suspected to be smallpox. Modern research, however, has suggested that it may have been leptospirosis, a bacterial infection that can develop into W ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
