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White

Specialty Definition: White

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Specialty Definition: Byron White

(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)

Byron White (June 8, 1917 - April 15, 2002) was best known as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Appointed to the court by John F. Kennedy in 1962, he served until his retirement in 1993.

He was born in Fort Collins, Colorado and died in Denver at the age of 84 from complications of pneumonia.

In the 1930s, White played football for the University of Colorado, where he acquired the nickname "Whizzer". He was also a running back for the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Detroit Lions, while putting himself through Yale law school, where he graduated first in his class. He won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford (Hertford College), where he met President Kennedy, who had come to visit White's father, then U.S. ambassador to Britain.

During his service on the high court, he was a vocal conservative. He consistently opposed restrictions on the police, dissenting in the landmark 1966 case of Miranda v. Arizona. He also dissented in the 1973 case of Roe v. Wade, and continued to call for overturning that decision.

White wrote the opinion in Bowers v. Hardwick, upholding Georgia's anti-sodomy law in 1986, which was viewed as a setback for gay rights.

Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "Byron White."

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Caucasian

(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)

In physical anthropology, Caucasian is a purported race that includes most of the natives of Europe, West Asia, North Africa, and as far east as the Indian subcontinent. This category was first proposed by the German scientist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who coined the term in his treatise "On the Natural Varieties of Mankind" in 1775. His studies based the classification of the Caucasian race primarily on skull features, which Blumenbach claimed were optimized by the inhabitants of Georgia in the Caucasus mountains.

Later anthropologists such as Carleton Coon have further expanded upon the classification of the Caucasian race proposed by Blumenbach, and have subdivided the group into Nordic, Alpine, Mediterranean, and at times Dinaric and Baltic subdivisions. However, it is clearly observable that many people do not correspond easily to one such subracial type or another.

There is currently extensive debate on the scientific validity of racial classifications, and many people now reject systems of racial classification as inherently arbitrary and subject to wide divergences in most populations. But Caucasian remains a common term in North America to describe whites of western European descent. However Caucasian peoples of Asian, African, or Mediterranean origin are generally excluded from the popular definition of Caucasian. As a matter of fact, the term retains some accuracy only when applied to forensic anthropology in North America. Its relevance is debatable as a physical anthropological, ethnic/cultural or socio-political concept.

While the term Caucasian is still used for the lack of a better word in describing the peoples of western Eurasia, careful speakers generally limit the term to describe the inhabitants of the Caucasus region of Eastern Europe and Western Asia, especially when describing any specific ethnic or cultural traits.

Popularly, the word "white" is used synonymously with "Caucasian" in North America.

Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "Caucasian."

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E. B. White

(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)

E. B. White, born Elwyn Brooks White (July 12, 1899 - October 1, 1985), was an American essayist, author, and noted prose stylist. He is most famous today for a writers' style guide, and for three children's books generally considered to be classics of the field.

White was born in Mount Vernon, New York and graduated from Cornell University (his nickname "Andy" derives from Cornell cofounder Andrew Dickson White). He spent several years working as a newspaper writer and ad man before returning to New York City in 1924.

He published his first article in the newly founded The New Yorker magazine in 1925, then joined the staff in 1927. This made his fame for the next few decades, as he produced a long series of essays for them that were widely read as the magazine grew in influence. Over time he became the most important contributor to The New Yorker at a time when it was arguably the most important American literary magazine. He also served as a columnist for Harper's Magazine from 1938 to 1943.

In the late 1930s, he turned his hand to children's fiction on behalf of a niece. His first children's book Stuart Little was published in 1945, and Charlotte's Web appeared in 1952. Both were highly acclaimed, and in 1970 jointly won the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal, a major prize in the field of children's literature. In the same year, he published his third children's novel, The Trumpet of the Swan.

In 1959, he edited and updated the classic The Elements of Style. Originally written and published in 1918 by William Strunk Jr, the book is a handbook of grammatical and stylistic dos and don'ts for written American English. White had studied under Strunk while at Cornell in the years following World War I. Further editions of the work followed in 1972, 1979, and 2000. It is a standard accessory for students and writers.

In 1978 he was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize for his work as a whole. Other awards he received included a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963, and memberships in a variety of literary societies throughout the United States.

He died on October 1, 1985, of Alzheimer's Disease at his farm home in North Brooklin, Maine. He married Katharine Sergeant Angell in 1929, also an editor at the magazine and author (as Katharine White) of Onward and Upward in the Garden. They had a son, Joel, a boatbuilder. Katharine's son from her first marriage, Roger Angell, was a fiction editor for the New Yorker, but is perhaps better known as a baseball writer.

White's style was stereotypically "Yankee": wry, understated, thoughtful, and informed. He was widely regarded as a master of the English language as writer's tool, noted for clear, well-constructed, and charming prose.

INDEX

1. Definition 2. Synonyms 3. Crosswords 4. Usage: Modern

5. Usage: Commercial 6. Images: Slideshow 7. Images: Photo Album 8. Images: Digital Art

9. Sounds 10. Quotations: Familiar 11. Quotations: Historic 12. Quotations: Fiction

13. Quotations: Non-fiction 14. Quotations: Spoken 15. Quotations: Speeches 16. Usage Frequency

17. Names: Frequency 18. Names: Derived from 19. Names: Company Usage 20. Cities

21. Expressions 22. Expressions: Internet 23. Translations: Modern 24. Translations: Ancient

25. Bible Trace 26. Abbreviations 27. Acronyms 28. Derivations

29. Rhymes 30. Anagrams 31. Bibliography

Copyright © Philip M. Parker, INSEAD. Terms of Use.