OpenLLM-France/wikimedia huggingface dataset:
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Liudprand

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​LIUDPRAND (Liutprand, Luitprand) (c. 922–972), Italian historian and author, bishop of Cremona, was born towards the beginning of the 10th century, of a good Lombard family. In 931 he entered the service of King Hugo of Italy as page; he afterwards rose to a high position at the court of Hugo’s successor Berengar, having become chancellor, and having been sent (949) on an embassy to the Byzantine court. Falling into disgrace with Berengar on his return, he attached himself to the emperor Otto I., whom in 961 he accompanied into Italy, and by whom in 962 he was made bishop of Cremona. He was frequently employed in missions to the pope, and in 968 to Constantinople to demand for the younger Otto (afterwards Otto II.) the hand of Theophano, daughter of the emperor Nicephorus Phocas. His account of this embassy in the Relatio de Legatione Constantinopolitana is perhaps the most graphic and lively piece of writing which has come down to us from the 10th century. The detailed description of Constantinople and the Byzantine court is a document of rare value—though highly coloured by his ill reception and offended dignity. Whether he returned in 971 with the embassy to bring Theophano or not is uncertain. Liudprand died in 972.
He wrote (1) Antapodoseos, seu rerum per Europam gestarum, Libri VI, an historical narrative, relating to the events from 887 to 949, compiled with the object of avenging himself upon Berengar and Willa his queen; (2) Historia Ottonis, a work of greater impartiality and merit, unfortunately covering only the years from 960 to 964; and (3) the Relatio de Legatione Constantinopolitana (968–969). All are to be found in the Monum. Germ. Hist. of Pertz, and in the Rer. Ital. Script. of Muratori; there is an edition by E. Dümmler (1877), and a partial translation into German, with an introduction by W. Wattenbach, is given in the second volume of the Geschichtsschreiber der deutschen Vorzeit (1853). Compare Wattenbach, Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen im Mittelalter. Three other works, entitled Adversaria, Chronicon, 606–960, and Opusculum de vitis Romanorum pontificum, are usually, but wrongly, assigned to Liudprand. An English translation of the embassy to Constantinople is in Ernest Henderson’s Select Documents of the Middle Ages (Bohn series, 1896). A complete bibliography is in A. Potthast’s Bibl. Hist. Medii Aevi (Berlin, 1896).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Live Oak

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​LIVE OAK, a city and the county-seat of Suwannee county, Florida, U.S.A., 81 m. by rail W. of Jacksonville. Pop. (1890) 687; (1900) 1659; (1905) 7200; (1910) 3450. Live Oak is served ​by the Atlantic Coast Line, the Seaboard Air Line, the Live Oak, Perry & Gulf and the Florida railways. There are extensive areas of pine lands in the vicinity, and large quantities of sea-island cotton are produced in the county. Lumber and naval stores are also important products. The first settlement on the site of the city was made in 1865 by John Parshley, of Massachusetts, who erected a large saw-mill here. Live Oak was first incorporated as a town in 1874, and in 1903 was chartered as a city.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Livermore, Mary Ashton

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​LIVERMORE, MARY ASHTON [RICE] (1821–1905), American reformer, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on the 19th of December 1821. She studied at the female seminary at Charlestown, Mass.; taught French and Latin there, taught in a ​plantation school in southern Virginia; and for three years conducted a school of her own in Duxbury, Mass. Upon returning from Virginia she had joined the abolitionists, and she took an active part in the Washingtonian temperance movement. In 1845 she married Daniel Parker Livermore (1819–1899), a Universalist clergyman. In 1857 they removed to Chicago, Illinois, where she assisted her husband in editing the religious weekly, The New Covenant (1857–1869). During the Civil War, as an associate member of the United States Sanitary Commission, and as an agent of its North-western branch, she organized many aid societies, contributed to the success of the North-western Sanitary Fair in Chicago in 1863, and visited army posts and hospitals. After the war she devoted herself to the promotion of woman’s suffrage and to temperance reform, founding in Chicago in 1869 The Agitator, which in 1870 was merged into the Woman’s Journal (Boston), of which she was an associate editor until 1872. She died in Melrose, Mass. on the 23rd of May 1905. She had been president of the Illinois, the Massachusetts and the American woman’s suffrage associations, the Massachusetts Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the Woman’s Congress, and a member of many other societies. She lectured in the United States, England and Scotland, contributed to magazines and wrote: The Children’s Army (1844), temperance stories; Thirty Years Too Late (1848), a temperance story; A Mental Transformation (1848); Pen Pictures (1863), short stories; What Shall We Do With Our Daughters? and Other Lectures (1883); My Story of the War (1888); and The Story of My Life (1897). With Frances E. Willard, she edited A Woman of the Century: Biographical Sketches of Leading American Women (1893).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Littleton, Edward, Baron

See also Edward Littleton, 1st Baron Lyttelton on Wikipedia; the 9th edition; and our 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica disclaimer.
​LITTLETON (or Lyttelton), EDWARD, Baron (1589–1645), son of Sir Edward Littleton (d. 1621) chief-justice of North Wales, was born at Munslow in Shropshire; he was educated at Oxford and became a lawyer, succeeding his father as chief-justice of North Wales. In 1625 he became a member of parliament and acted in 1628 as chairman of the committee of grievances upon whose report the Petition of Right was based. As a member of the party opposed to the arbitrary measures of Charles I. Littleton had shown more moderation than some of his colleagues, and in 1634, three years after he had been chosen recorder of London, the king attached him to his own side by appointing him solicitor-general. In the famous case about ship-money Sir Edward argued against Hampden. In 1640 he was made chief-justice of the common pleas and in 1641 lord keeper of the great seal, being created a peer as Baron Lyttelton. About this time, the lord keeper began to display a certain amount of indifference to the royal cause. In January 1642 he refused to put the great seal to the proclamation for the arrest of the five members and he also incurred the displeasure of Charles by voting for the militia ordinance. However, he assured his friend Edward Hyde, afterwards earl of Clarendon, that he had only taken this step to allay the suspicions of the parliamentary party who contemplated depriving him of the seal, and he undertook to send this to the king. He fulfilled his promise, and in May 1642 he himself joined Charles at York, but it was some time before he regained the favour of the king and the custody of the seal. Littleton died at Oxford on the 27th of August 1645; he left no sons and his barony became extinct. His only daughter, Anne, married her cousin Sir Thomas Littleton, Bart. (d. 1681), and their son Sir Thomas Littleton (c. 1647–1710), was speaker of the House of Commons from 1698 to 1700, and treasurer of the navy from 1700 to 1710. Macaulay thus sums up the character of Speaker Littleton and his relations to the Whigs: “He was one of their ablest, most zealous and most steadfast friends; and had been, both in the House of Commons and at the board of treasury, an invaluable second to Montague” (the earl of Halifax).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Luqmān

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​LUQMĀN, or Lokman, the name of two, if not of three (cf. note to Terminal Essay in Sir Rd. Burton’s translation of the Arabian Nights), persons famous in Arabian tradition. The one was of the family of ʽĀd, and is said to have built the great dike of Mārib and to have received the gift of life as long as that of seven vultures, each of which lived eighty years. The name of the seventh vulture—Lubad—occurs in proverbial literature. The name of the second Luqmān, called “Luqmān the Sage,” occurs in the Koran (31, 11). Two accounts of him are current in Arabian literature. According to Masʽūdī (i. 110) he was a Nubian freedman who lived in the time of David in the district of Elah and Midian. According to some commentators on the Koran (e.g., Baidāwī) he was the son of Bāʽūrā, one of the sons of Job’s sister or maternal aunt. Derenbourg in his Fables de Loqmân le sage (1850) identifies Bāʽūrā with Beoi, and believes the name Luqmān to be a translation of Balaam. The grave of Luqmān was shown on the east coast of the lake of Tiberias, also in Yemen (cf. Yāqūt, vol. iii. p. 512).
The so-called Fables of Luqmān are known to have existed in the 13th century, but are not mentioned by any Arabian writer. They were edited by Erpenius (Leiden, 1615) and have been reprinted many times. For the relation of these to similar literature in other lands, see J. Jacobs’s edition of Caxton’s Fables of Aesop, vol. i. (London, 1889). The name of Luqmān also occurs in many old verses, anecdotes and proverbs; cf. G. Freytag’s Arabum Proverbia (Bonn, 1838–1843) and such Arabian writers as Tabarī, Masʽūdī, Damīrī and the Kitāb al-Muʽammarīn (ed. by I. Goldziher, Leiden, 1899).  (G. W. T.)
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Luristan

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​LURISTAN, in the wider sense (as its name implies) the “Land of the Lurs,” namely that part of western Persia which is bounded by Turkish territory on the west and extends for about 400 m. N.W.-S.E. from Kermanshah to Fars with a breadth of 100 to 140 m. It is chiefly mountainous, being intersected by numerous ranges running N.W.-S.E. The central range has many summits which are almost within the line of perpetual snow, rising to 13,000 ft. and more, and in it are the sources of Persia’s most important rivers, as the Zayendeh-rud, Jarahi, Karun, Diz, Abi, Kerkheh. Between the higher ranges are many fertile plains and low hilly districts, well watered but comparatively little cultivated in consequence of intertribal feuds. The Lurs are thought to be aboriginal Persians with a mixture of Semitic blood. Their language is a dialect of Persian and does not differ materially from Kurdish. Outwardly they are Mussulmans of the Shiah branch, but most of them show little veneration for either Prophet or Koran, and the religion of some of them seems to be a mixture of Ali-Illahism involving a belief in successive incarnations combined with mysterious, ancient, heathen rites. The northern part of Luristan, which was formerly known as Lurikuchik (little Luristan), is inhabited by the Feili Lurs and these are divided into the Pishkuh (cis-montane) Lurs in the east and Pushtkuh (ultra-montane) Lurs in the west adjoining Turkish territory. They number about 350,000. Little Luristan was governed by a race of independent princes of the Khurshidi dynasty, and called atabegs, from 1155 to the beginning of the 17th century when the last atabeg, Shah Verdi Khan, was removed by Shah Abbas I. and the government of the province given to Husain Khan, the chief of a rival tribe, with the title of vali in exchange for that of atabeg. The descendants of Husain Khan have retained the title but now govern only the Pushtkuh Lurs, to whom only the denomination of Feili is at present applied. The southern part of Luristan was formerly known as Lur i Buzurg (great Luristan) and is composed of the Bakhtiari division of the Arabistan province and the districts of the Mamasennis and Kuhgilus which belong to Fars. The Bakhtiaris number about 200,000, the others 40,000. Great Luristan was an independent state under the Fazlevieh atabegs from 1160 until 1424, and its capital was Idaj, now represented by mounds and ruins at Malamir 60 m. S.E. of Shushter.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Lurch

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​LURCH, a word with several meanings, the etymological relationships of which are obscure. The chief uses which survive are—(1) in the phrase “to leave in the lurch,” to abandon some one, to leave him in a position of great difficulty; (2) a stagger, sudden leaning over, originally a nautical expression of a sudden “list” made by a ship; (3) the name of a dog, the “lurcher” used by poachers, properly a cross between a sheepdog or collie and a greyhound. In (1) “lurch” is the name of a game, of which nothing is known (it is supposed to have resembled backgammon), and also of a state of the score in various games, in which the loser either scores nothing or is beaten by very heavy points. In this sense the term is practically obsolete. ​It was taken from Fr. lourche, connected with many German forms, now only dialectical such as Lortsch, Lurtsch, Lorz, Lurz, all for some kind of game, but also meaning left-hand, wrong, which the New English Dictionary thinks is the origin of the word, it being first used as a term in gambling. In (2) “lurch” occurs first in the form “lee-lurches,” sudden rolls a ship takes to leeward in a heavy sea, which may be a corruption of “lee-latch,” defined in Smyth’s Sailor’s Word Book as dropping to leeward of the course. In (3) “lurch” is probably another form of “lurk,” to lie in wait for, watch stealthily, hence to pilfer, steal.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Lussin

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​LUSSIN, a small island in the Adriatic Sea, in the Gulf of Quarnero, forming together with the adjacent islands of Veglia and Cherso an administrative district in the Austrian crownland of Istria. Pop. (1900) 11,615. The island is 24 m. in length, is of an average breadth of 1.64 m., being little more than 300 yds. wide at its narrowest point, and has an area of 29 sq. m. The chief town and principal harbour is Lussinpiccolo (pop. 7207), which is the most important trading centre in the Quarnero group. The town has become a favourite winter resort, its climate resembling that of Nice. To the south-east of it is Lussingrande (pop. 2349), with an old Venetian palace and a shipbuilding wharf. The island was first peopled at the end of the 14th century. Its inhabitants are renowned seamen.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Lushai Hills

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​LUSHAI HILLS, a mountainous district of Eastern Bengal and Assam, south of Cachar, on the border between Assam and Burma. Area, 7227 sq. m.; pop. (1901) 82,434. The hills are for the most part covered with dense bamboo jungle and rank undergrowth; but in the eastern portion, owing probably to a smaller rainfall, open grass-covered slopes are found, with groves of oak and pine interspersed with rhododendrons. These hills are inhabited by the Lushais and cognate tribes, but the population is extremely scanty. From the earliest known times the original inhabitants were Kukis, and the Lushais were not heard of until 1840, when they invaded the district from the north. Their first attack upon British territory took place in November 1849, and after that date they proved one of the most troublesome tribes on the north-east frontier of India; but operations in 1890 resulted in the complete pacification of the northern Lushai villages, and in 1892 the eastern Lushais were reduced to order. The management of the South Lushai hill country was transferred from Bengal to Assam in 1898. To obtain more efficient control over the country the district has been divided into eighteen circles, each in charge of an interpreter, through whom all orders are transmitted to the chiefs. The Welsh Presbyterian Mission began work at Aijal in 1897, and the people have shown unexpected readiness to accept education. According to the census of 1901 the total number of Lushais in Assam was 63,452.
See Colonel T. H. Lewin, Wild Races of N.E. India (1870); Lushai Hills Gazetteer (Calcutta, 1906).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Lurgan

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​LURGAN, a market-town of Co. Armagh, Ireland, well situated on high ground overlooking Lough Neagh a few miles to the north; 20 m. S.W. of Belfast by the Great Northern railway. Pop. (1901) 11,782. The parish church of Shankill (this parish including Lurgan) has a finely proportioned tower. Contiguous to the town is Lurgan Castle, a fine modern Elizabethan structure, the seat of Lord Lurgan. Lurgan is famed for its diapers, and the linen trade is of the first importance, but there are also tobacco factories and coach factories. It is governed by an urban district council. Lurgan was founded by William Brownlow, to whom a grant of the town was made by James I. In 1619 it consisted of forty-two houses, all inhabited by English settlers. It was burned by the insurgents in 1641, and again by the troops of James II. After its restoration in 1690 a patent for a market and fair was obtained.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/German Evangelical Synod of North America

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​GERMAN EVANGELICAL SYNOD OF NORTH AMERICA, a Protestant church dating from October 1840, and known, in its early years, as the German Evangelical Association of the West. It was formed by six German ministers who had been ordained in Prussia and were engaged in missionary and pioneer work in Missouri and Illinois. The original organization was strengthened in 1858 by amalgamation with the German Evangelical Church Association of Ohio, and later by the inclusion of the German United Evangelical Synod of the East (1860), the Evangelical Synod of the North-West (1872) and the United Evangelical Synod of the East (1872). The church bases its position on the Bible as interpreted by the symbols of the Lutheran and Reformed churches so far as they are in agreement, points of difference being left to “that liberty of conscience which, as a component part of the basis of man’s ultimate ​responsibility to God himself, is the inalienable privilege of every believer.” The church, which has (1909) 985 ministers and some 238,000 communicant members, is divided into seventeen districts, with officers responsible to the General Synod, which meets every four years. There are boards for home and foreign missions, the latter operating chiefly in the Central Provinces of India. The literature of the church is mainly in German, though English is rapidly gaining ground.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/German Silver

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​GERMAN SILVER or Nickel Silver, an alloy of copper, nickel and zinc, prepared either by melting the copper and nickel together in a crucible, and adding piece by piece the previously heated zinc, or by heating the finely divided metals under a layer of charcoal. To destroy its crystalline structure and so render it fit for working, it is heated to dull redness, and then allowed to cool. German silver is harder than silver; it resembles that metal in colour, but is of a greyer tinge. Exposed to the air it tarnishes slightly yellow, and with vinegar affords a crust of verdigris. At a bright red heat it melts, losing its zinc by oxidation unless protected from the atmosphere. At a heat above dull redness it becomes exceedingly brittle. German silver in various modifications of composition is much used in the arts. Alloys, of which about 50% is copper and the residue zinc and nickel in about equal proportions take a fine polish, and are used as imitation silver for knives and forks. With a somewhat higher proportion of copper an alloy is formed suitable for rolling and for wire. In Chinese white silver or packfong (paktong) the amount of copper is smaller, about 40%, with about 32% of nickel, 25 of zinc, and 2 or 3 of iron. German silver for casting contains 2 or 3% of lead, which like iron increases the whiteness of the alloy. German silver, having a high specific resistance and a low temperature coefficient, has been used for electrical resistance coils, and these qualities are possessed in a still greater degree in manganin, which contains manganese in place of zinc, its composition being 84% of copper, 12 of manganese and 4 of nickel. The addition of a trace of tungsten to German silver, as in platinoid, also largely increases the resistance.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/German Reed Entertainment

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​GERMAN REED ENTERTAINMENT. The dramatic and musical entertainment which for many years was known in London by the title of “German Reed” was a form of theatrical enterprise deserving of commemoration in connexion with those who made it successful. Mr Thomas German Reed (born in Bristol in 1817, died 1888) married in 1844 Miss Priscilla Horton (1818–1895), and in 1855 they started their entertainment at the “Gallery of Illustration,” in Waterloo Place, London. From 1860 to 1877 they were assisted by John Orlando Parry (1810–1879), an accomplished pianoforte player, mimic, parodist and humorous singer; and the latter created a new type of musical and dramatic monologue which became very popular. His tradition was carried on after 1870 by Mr Corney Grain (1844–1895), who, as a clever, refined, and yet highly humorous society entertainer (originally a barrister), was one of the best-known figures of his day. After the retirement of the elder German Reeds, their son, Alfred German Reed (1846–1895), himself a capital actor, carried on the business in partnership with Corney Grain. The “German Reed Entertainment”—which was always patronized by a large class of people, many of whom objected on principle to going or taking their children to a regular theatre or a music-hall—retained its vogue for forty years at Waterloo Place and at the St George’s Hall, Regent Street. But the death of Mr Corney Grain almost simultaneously with Mr Alfred German Reed, in 1895, together with the changed public attitude towards the regular theatre, ended its career.