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Gun Quarter
The Gun Quarter is a district of the city of Birmingham, England, which was for many years a centre of the world's gun-manufacturing industry, specialising in the production of military firearms and sporting guns. It is an industrial area to the north of the city centre, bounded by Steelhouse Lane, Shadwell Street and Loveday Street. The first recorded gun maker in Birmingham was in 1630, and locally made muskets were used in the English Civil War. By the 1690s Birmingham artisans were supplying guns for William III of England, William III to equip the English Army (and successor British Army after 1707). The importance of the trade to the town grew rapidly throughout the 18th century, with large numbers of guns produced for the History of slavery, slave trade. The 19th century saw further expansion, with the Quarter meeting the demand for the Napoleonic Wars, Crimean War, American Civil War and the British Empire. During both the First and Second World Wars the area played a m ...
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The Bull, Gun Quarter
''The'' is a grammatical Article (grammar), article in English language, English, denoting nouns that are already or about to be mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in English. ''The'' is the Most common words in English, most frequently used word in the English language; studies and analyses of texts have found it to account for seven percent of all printed English-language words. It is derived from gendered articles in Old English which combined in Middle English and now has a single form used with nouns of any gender. The word can be used with both singular and plural nouns, and with a noun that starts with any letter. This is different from many other languages, which have different forms of the definite article for different genders or numbers. Pronunciation In most dialects, "the" is pronounced as (with the voiced dental fricative followed by a schwa) when followed by a con ...
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Sir Richard Newdigate, 2nd Baronet
Sir Richard Newdigate, 2nd Baronet (5 May 1644 – 4 January 1710) was an English landowner, entrepreneur, engineer, and politician who held the title of Commissioner for Assessment for Warwickshire, and served on the Warwickshire Commission of the Peace, as well as the Member of Parliament for Warwickshire for two separate terms. He also became well known for investing his estate’s wealth into expansions and mining ventures, and for large infrastructure projects. Family Richard Newdigate, 2nd Baronet was the eighth child and third (but only surviving) son born to Richard Newdigate, 1st Baronet (1602-1678) of Arbury Hall, Chilvers Coton, Warwickshire, and his wife Juliana Leigh (1610-1685) sister of Sir Francis Leigh of Dunsmore (1595-1653). He was the grandson of Sir John Newdigate (1571-1610), and had five sisters, who he stayed on good terms with for his entire life. His first marriage was to Mary (1646-1692), the daughter of Sir Edward Bagot of Blithfield Hall, Staff ...
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British East India Company
The East India Company (EIC) was an English, and later British, joint-stock company that was founded in 1600 and dissolved in 1874. It was formed to Indian Ocean trade, trade in the Indian Ocean region, initially with the East Indies (South Asia and Southeast Asia), and later with East Asia. The company gained Company rule in India, control of large parts of the Indian subcontinent and British Hong Kong, Hong Kong. At its peak, the company was the largest corporation in the world by various measures and had its own armed forces in the form of the company's three presidency armies, totalling about 260,000 soldiers, twice the size of the British Army at certain times. Originally Chartered company, chartered as the "Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East-Indies," the company rose to account for half of the world's trade during the mid-1700s and early 1800s, particularly in basic commodities including cotton, silk, indigo dye, sugar, salt, spices, Potass ...
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Pistol
A pistol is a type of handgun, characterised by a gun barrel, barrel with an integral chamber (firearms), chamber. The word "pistol" derives from the Middle French ''pistolet'' (), meaning a small gun or knife, and first appeared in the English language when early handguns were produced in Europe. In colloquial usage, the word "pistol" is often used as a generic term to describe ''any'' type of handgun, inclusive of revolvers (which have a single barrel and a separate cylinder (firearms), cylinder housing multiple chambers) and the pocket gun, pocket-sized derringers (which are often multiple-barrel firearm, multi-barrelled). The most common type of pistol used in the contemporary era is the semi-automatic pistol. The older single-shot and lever-action pistols are now rarely seen and used primarily for nostalgic hunting and historical reenactment. Fully-automatic machine pistols are uncommon in civilian usage because of their generally poor recoil-controllability (due to the l ...
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Carbine
A carbine ( or ) is a long gun that has a barrel shortened from its original length. Most modern carbines are rifles that are compact versions of a longer rifle or are rifles chambered for less powerful cartridges. The smaller size and lighter weight of carbines make them easier to handle. They are typically issued to high-mobility troops such as special operations soldiers and paratroopers, as well as to mounted, artillery, logistics, or other non-infantry personnel whose roles do not require full-sized rifles, although there is a growing tendency for carbines to be issued to front-line soldiers to offset the increasing weight of other issued equipment. An example of this is the M4 carbine, the standard issue carbine of the United States Armed Forces. Etymology The name comes from its first users — cavalry troopers called " carabiniers", from the French ''carabine'', from Old French ''carabin'' (soldier armed with a musket), whose origin is unclear. One theory connects ...
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Atlantic Slave Trade
The Atlantic slave trade or transatlantic slave trade involved the transportation by slave traders of Slavery in Africa, enslaved African people to the Americas. European slave ships regularly used the triangular trade route and its Middle Passage. Europeans established a coastal slave trade in the 15th century and trade to the Americas began in the 16th century, lasting through the 19th century. The vast majority of those who were transported in the transatlantic slave trade were from Central Africa and West Africa and had been sold by West African slave traders to European slave traders, while others had been captured directly by the slave traders in coastal raids. European slave traders gathered and imprisoned the enslaved at slave fort, forts on the African coast and then brought them to the Americas. Some Portuguese and Europeans participated in slave raids. As the National Museums Liverpool explains: "European traders captured some Africans in raids along the coast, but bou ...
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Digbeth
Digbeth is an area of central Birmingham, England. Following the remodelling of the Birmingham Inner Ring Road, Inner Ring Road, Digbeth is now considered a district within Birmingham City Centre. As part of the Big City Plan, Digbeth is undergoing a large redevelopment scheme that will regenerate the old industrial buildings into apartments, retail premises, offices and arts facilities. The district is considered to be Birmingham's "Creative Quarter". History The modern site of Digbeth was first settled upon in the 7th century. Historically the land to the west of the river River Rea, Rea was in the parish of Birmingham. This is Digbeth. The land to the east was in the more significant parish of Aston, and is called Deritend. Birmingham's oldest secular building, The Old Crown, Birmingham, The Old Crown, is there. The area around Digbeth and Deritend was the first centre of industry in Birmingham and became one of the most heavily industrialised areas in the town, historica ...
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Hundredweight
The hundredweight (abbreviation: cwt), formerly also known as the centum weight or quintal, is a British imperial and United States customary unit of weight or mass. Its value differs between the United States customary and British imperial systems. The two values are distinguished in American English as the short and long hundredweight and in British English as the cental and imperial hundredweight. * The short hundredweight or cental of is defined in the United States customary system. * The long or imperial hundredweight of 8  stone or is defined in the British imperial system. Under both conventions, there are 20 hundredweight in a ton, producing a " short ton" of 2,000 pounds (907.2 kg) and a " long ton" of 2,240 pounds (1,016 kg). History The hundredweight has had many values. In England in around 1300, different hundreds (''centum'' in Medieval Latin) were defined. The Weights and Measures Act 1835 formally established the present imperial hundr ...
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Shillings
The shilling is a historical coin, and the name of a unit of modern currencies formerly used in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, other British Commonwealth countries and Ireland, where they were generally equivalent to 12 pence or one-twentieth of a pound before being phased out during the 1960s and 1970s. Currently the shilling is used as a currency in five east African countries: Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Somalia, and the ''de facto'' country of Somaliland. The East African Community additionally plans to introduce an East African shilling. History The word ''shilling'' comes from Anglo-Saxon phrase "Scilling", a monetary term meaning literally "twentieth of a pound", from the Proto-Germanic root skiljaną meaning literally "to separate, split, divide", from (s)kelH- meaning "to cut, split." The word "Scilling" is mentioned in the earliest recorded Germanic law codes, the Law of Æthelberht (). In origin, the word '' schilling'' designated the ''so ...
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Musket
A musket is a muzzle-loaded long gun that appeared as a smoothbore weapon in the early 16th century, at first as a heavier variant of the arquebus, capable of penetrating plate armour. By the mid-16th century, this type of musket gradually disappeared as the use of heavy armour declined, but ''musket'' continued as the generic term for smoothbore long guns until the mid-19th century. In turn, this style of musket was retired in the 19th century when rifled muskets (simply called rifles in modern terminology) using the Minié ball (invented by Claude-Étienne Minié in 1849) became common. The development of breech-loading firearms using self-contained Cartridge (firearms), cartridges, introduced by Casimir Lefaucheux in 1835, began to make muskets obsolete. The first reliable repeating rifles, the 1860 Henry rifle and its 1866 descendent the Winchester rifle, superseded muskets entirely. Repeating rifles quickly established themselves as the standard for rifle design, ending the ...
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