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100 Cards in this Set

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Washington Irving
A nineteenth-century American author. “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle” are two of his best-known works.
Henry James
An American author of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. James is known for his novels, such as The Turn of the Screw and Portrait of a Lady.
James Weldon Johnson
An African-American writer, diplomat, and civil rights leader of the early twentieth century. His novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man illustrated the difficulties of talented African-Americans. He also co-wrote “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” and encouraged writers of the Harlem Renaissance.
Sinclair Lewis
A twentieth-century American author known for using his novels to criticize aspects of American life, such as small-town narrowness, insincere preachers, and the discouragement of scientific curiosity. His books include Babbitt, Elmer Gantry, and Main Street. Lewis won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1930.
Jack London
An American writer whose best-known adventure novels are based on his experiences during the Klondike gold rush. His early works, including The Call of the Wild and White Fang, made him the most widely read author of the time. Unable to repeat his earlier success, he died of a drug overdose in 1916 at the age of forty.
Mary McCarthy
A twentieth-century American writer and critic noted for her satirical novels, such as The Groves of Academe and The Group, about the lives of eight Vassar College graduates. Memories of a Catholic Girlhood is about her childhood as an orphan raised by diverse and unsympathetic relatives.
Carson McCullers
A twentieth-century American writer whose short stories and novels, set mainly in the South, portray the spiritual loneliness of outcasts and misfits. Her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, was published when McCullers was twenty-three. The Member of the Wedding was adapted for a memorable Broadway play and a 1952 film.
Norman Mailer
A twentieth-century American writer whose first novel, The Naked and the Dead, based on his wartime experiences, established him as a major novelist. His works of New Journalism—personal, sometimes fictionalized accounts of current political events—include The Armies of the Night and The Executioner’s Song, a so-called true life novel about the death of convicted killer, Gary Gilmore.
H. L. Mencken
A twentieth-century American writer known for his works of satire, mainly essays. Mencken mocked American society for its puritanism, its anti-intellectualism, and its emphasis on conformity.
Toni Morrison
A twentieth-century American novelist and essayist on African-American themes. Among her best-known works are the novels The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and Beloved. She won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993.
Ogden Nash
A twentieth-century American author known for his witty poems, many of them published in The New Yorker. They are marked by outrageous rhymes, such as those in “The Baby” (“A bit of talcum / Is always walcum”) or in “Reflections on Ice-Breaking” (“Candy / Is dandy / But liquor / Is quicker”).
Eugene O’Neill
A twentieth-century American playwright. An important influence on the American theater, O’Neill is perhaps best known for the plays A Long Day’s Journey into Night and The Iceman Cometh.
Dorothy Parker
A twentieth-century American author known for her often sarcastic wit. Parker wrote poems, short stories, film scripts, and reviews of plays and books. Her poetry contains some often-quoted lines, such as “Men seldom make passes / At girls who wear glasses.”
Sylvia Plath
A twentieth-century American writer whose collections of poetry, including the posthumously published Ariel, strongly influenced women writers of the 1960s. Her semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, details her alienation and suicidal tendencies and presaged her own death that same year.
Pollyanna
(1913) A children’s book by the American author Eleanor H. Porter. The title character is an orphan girl who, despite the difficulties of her life, is always extremely cheerful.
Poor Richard’s Almanack
A collection of periodicals (each one was called Poor Richard or Poor Richard Improved) by Benjamin Franklin, issued from 1732 to 1757. They contain humor, information, and proverbial wisdom, such as “Early to bed and early to rise / Makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”
The Red Badge of Courage
(1895) A novel by the American author Stephen Crane, about a young man whose romantic notions of heroism in combat are shattered when he fights in the Civil War.
Alex Haley
An African-American author who became famous for his book Roots: The Saga of an American Family. Haley combined fact and fiction in tracing his family’s history to his ancestor Kunta Kinte, who was kidnaped in Africa in the eighteenth century and taken as a slave to America.
Carl Sandburg
A twentieth-century American author. His widely varied works include poems about the countryside and industrial heartland of the United States, especially “Chicago”; Rootabaga Stories, written for children; and a biography of Abraham Lincoln.
Gertrude Stein
A twentieth-century American author who lived most of her life in France. She wrote her life story as The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (Toklas was her companion), and she is said to have introduced the phrase “lost generation” to describe the Americans who wandered about Europe after World War I. Her works also include poems and the story collection Three Lives; the most famous line from her poetry is “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.”
Tarzan
A character in popular novels by the twentieth-century American author Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Tobacco Road
(1932) A novel by the American author Erskine Caldwell, about a family of sharecroppers from Georgia and their many tragedies.
transcendentalism
A movement in nineteenth-century American literature and thought. It called on people to view the objects in the world as small versions of the whole universe and to trust their individual intuitions. The two most noted American transcendentalists were Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
A twentieth-century American writer whose novels often include elements of humor and fantasy within a framework of the violence and alienation of modern life. His best-known works include Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse Five.
Alice Walker
A twentieth-century African-American writer whose works often deal with personal and family relationships and with black women in a racially oppressive society. Her highly acclaimed novel The Color Purple won a Pulitzer Prize and was adapted by Steven Spielberg for a successful film.
Eudora Welty
A twentieth-century American writer known for her short stories and novels that depict the people and life of the rural South. Her works include such collections as The Golden Apples and the novels Ponder the Heart and the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Optimist’s Daughter.
Walt Whitman
A nineteenth-century American poet. His principal work is Leaves of Grass, a collection of poems that celebrates nature, democracy, and individualism.
Thornton Wilder
A twentieth-century American author best known for his play Our Town, dealing with everyday life in a small town in New England.
Tennessee Williams
A twentieth-century American author. Williams is famous for his plays, which portray violent passions in ordinary people; these plays include A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and The Glass Menagerie.
Edward Albee
A twentieth-century American playwright whose early plays reflected the influence of the theater of the absurd. His psychological dramas include Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Tiny Alice, and A Delicate Balance.
American Gothic
A painting by the twentieth-century American artist Grant Wood. It shows a gaunt farmer and a woman standing in front of a farmhouse; the man holds a pitchfork, and both wear severe expressions.
Marian Anderson
A twentieth-century African-American contralto, known for her roles in opera and also for her performances of spirituals.
Barrymore family
A family of American actors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The most famous of them were John and Lionel Barrymore and their sister, Ethel, all of whom appeared frequently on the stage and in films. The dashing-looking John was known as the “Great Profile.” His granddaughter Drew continued the acting tradition into the twenty-first century.
Count Basie
A twentieth-century African-American jazz pianist and bandleader. His real first name was William. Count Basie was known particularly for the “Big Band” sound that was popular in the 1930s and 1940s.
“Battle Hymn of the Republic”
An American patriotic hymn from the Civil War by Julia Ward Howe, who wrote it after a visit to an encampment of the Union army. It starts, "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the lord..."
Beale Street
A street in an African-American section of Memphis, Tennessee, famous for its blues music. It is memorialized in the famous “Beale Street Blues.”
Jack Benny
A twentieth-century American comedian best known for his weekly radio and television programs. Benny was admired for his sense of timing and for his deliberately slow delivery. His shows contained many “running gags”—jokes continuing from one show to another—often concerning his age, his stinginess, and his inability to play the violin.
Irving Berlin
A twentieth-century American writer of popular songs (words and music). His songs include “God Bless America,” “White Christmas,” and “There’s No Business like Show Business.”
Chuck Berry
An African-American rock ’n’ roll musician and composer, who influenced many musicians of the 1950s and 1960s, including the Beatles and Bob Dylan.
Buffalo Bill
William F. Cody, an American adventurer, soldier, and showman of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His popular “Wild West Show,” begun in the 1880s, featured acts such as the marksmanship of Annie Oakley, mock battles between Native Americans and army troops, and breathtaking displays of cowboy skills and horsemanship. It toured the United States, Canada, and Europe. Buffalo Bill’s “Wild West Show” was a major influence in the creation of the popular image of the romantic and exciting old West.
Archie Bunker
The central character in the 1970s television comedy series “All in the Family.” Bunker’s family appreciated and loved him, even though he was bad tempered, ill informed, and highly prejudiced against virtually all minority groups.
George M. Cohan
An American songwriter and entertainer of the early twentieth century, known for such rousing songs as “Over There,” “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” and “You’re a Grand Old Flag.”
Bing Crosby
A twentieth-century American singer and actor. He appeared several times in films with Fred Astaire and with Bob Hope and received an Academy Award for his part in Going My Way in 1944. His most successful song recording was “White Christmas.”
Isadora Duncan
A twentieth-century American dancer who won fame mainly in Europe. Her choreography, improvisational and unfettered, rebelled against traditional ballet and was highly influential in the formation of modern dance.
W. C. Fields
A twentieth-century American film comedian noted for his comic timing and drawling speech. He frequently played a cynical swindler. His films include The Bank Dick, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, and My Little Chickadee, in which he played opposite Mae West.
Benny Goodman
A twentieth-century American jazz clarinetist (see clarinet) and bandleader. He was known as the “King of Swing.”
D. W. Griffith
An innovative American filmmaker of the early twentieth century. He is famous for his epic silent films, such as The Birth of a Nation, which required huge casts and enormous sets.
Woody Guthrie
A twentieth-century American songwriter and folksinger. Guthrie flourished in the 1930s, writing numerous songs about social injustice and the hardships of the Great Depression years. Two of his best-remembered songs are “This Land Is Your Land” and “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Yuh.”
Laurel and Hardy
Stanley Laurel and Oliver Hardy, two twentieth-century film comedians who almost always played their movie roles under their own names. Wearing derby hats and neckties, Laurel appeared as a thin, dim-witted Englishman and Hardy as an overweight American, often irritable and pompous. In their films, they constantly get in each other’s way and are usually involved in hopeless business undertakings or doomed personal adventures.
Glenn Miller
A twentieth-century American composer and bandleader. His band was noted for its smooth but sophisticated performances of dance numbers such as “In the Mood” and “Moonlight Serenade.”
Grandma Moses
A twentieth-century American artist who painted scenes of farm life; her style, which seems childlike, is a noted example of primitivism. She began to paint in her late seventies, when she was too old for farm work.
Cole Porter
A twentieth-century American songwriter. Porter’s songs, such as “Anything Goes,” “I Get a Kick out of You,” and “I’ve Got You under My Skin,” are renowned for their witty, sophisticated lyrics.
Paul Robeson
A twentieth-century African-American actor and singer, best known for his roles in Porgy and Bess and in the movie version of Show Boat, in which he sang “Ol’ Man River.” Robeson was politically controversial because he compared the treatment of black people in the United States unfavorably with their treatment in the Soviet Union. He lived outside the United States for many years.
Will Rogers
A twentieth-century American humorist known for his folksy but sharp social and political commentary. One of the statements for which he is remembered is “All I know is just what I read in the papers.”
Isaac Stern
A celebrated twentieth-century American violinist. He is known for his work to save Carnegie Hall from destruction, as well as for his musical performances.
James Stewart
A twentieth-century American film actor, known for his gangly figure and halting, even stammering style of speech. Stewart appeared in a great variety of movies, including Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Harvey, Anatomy of a Murder, and several of the films of Alfred Hitchcock. He won an Academy Award for his part in The Philadelphia Story in 1940.
Gilbert Stuart
An eighteenth-century American painter. Stuart was especially known for his portraits, including those of George Washington.
Tiffany glass
Lamps and other glass objects created by Louis Tiffany, an American artisan of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These objects are greatly prized and have been much imitated.
Orson Welles
A twentieth-century American actor and filmmaker. His masterpiece is Citizen Kane, the story of a newspaper tycoon (widely thought to be based on William Randolph Hearst), which he directed and in which he played the title role.
Mae West
A twentieth-century American actress. Mae West was a blonde, busty sex symbol, whose seductiveness was usually very funny because she overstated it so greatly. The popular version of her most celebrated line is, “Why don’cha come up and see me sometime?” She appeared memorably opposite W. C. Fields in My Little Chickadee.
Andrew Wyeth
A twentieth-century American painter, best known for works such as Christina’s World.
Bay of Bengal
Arm of the Indian Ocean between India and Sri Lanka on the west, Bangladesh on the north, and Southeast Asia on the east.
Bay of Biscay
Arm of the Atlantic Ocean in western Europe, bordered by the west coast of France and the north coast of Spain.
Black Sea
Sea between Europe and Asia, bordered on the north by Moldova and Ukraine, on the northeast by Russia, on the east by Georgia, on the south by Turkey, and on the west by Bulgaria and Romania. It receives many great rivers, including the Danube, the Dnieper, and by way of the Sea of Azov, the Don.
Caspian Sea
Saltwater lake between Europe and Asia, bordered by Azerbaijan, and Russia to the west, Kazakhstan to the north and east, Turkmenistan to the east, and Iran to the south and west; the largest inland body of water in the world. The Volga River empties into the Caspian Sea.
Ceylon
Former name for the nation now called Sri Lanka.
Chongqing
City in south-central China on the Yangtze River; commercial center for western China, commanding a large river trade.
Don River
River in southwestern Russia.
Euphrates River
River in southwestern Asia that flows through eastern Turkey, Syria, and Iraq before uniting with the Tigres River and emptying into the Persian Gulf.
Guangzhou
City in southern China; a transportation, industrial, financial, and trade center of southern China; a major deep-water port.
Strait of Magellan
Strait separating South America from Tierra del Fuego and other islands south of the continent.
Nanjing
City in eastern China on the Yangtze River, northeast of Shanghai; an industrial and transportation center. It has been China’s capital on several occasions. During the Second Sino-Japanese War in the 1930s, Nanjing was the scene of a Japanese massacre (the Rape of Nanking) and became the seat of a puppet regime established by the Japanese.
Volga River
River in western Russia, originating in hills northwest of Moscow and flowing generally southeastward for more than 2,200 miles before emptying into the Caspian Sea.
Volgograd
City located in southern Russia, amid the lower Volga and Don Rivers. The city is a major commercial and industrial center. From 1925 to 1961, it was named Stalingrad.
Yangtze River
River in China, flowing from the highlands of Tibet in western China generally eastward through central China and emptying into the Pacific Ocean at Shanghai. At about four thousand miles, it is the longest river of China and of Asia. It is a major east-west trade and transportation route in China.
Salvador Allende
A Marxist who was elected president of Chile in 1970. He set the country on a radical course, which aroused opposition from the middle class and the army. He was overthrown and died during an army coup supported by the CIA in 1973.
Hafez al-Assad
The president of Syria from 1971 to 2000. Assad was recognized as a hard-liner among Arab politicians for his hostility to Israel. At home he brutally suppressed Islamic fundamentalism. He gave active support to terrorism, but he cast his lot with the United Nations against Iraq in the Persian Gulf War. He long insisted that Israel hand back to Syria the Golan Heights, which it had conquered in the Six-Day War.
David Ben-Gurion
An Israeli political leader of the twentieth century. Active in the movements toward the formation of Israel in the early twentieth century, he was chosen to be the country’s first prime minister, and he served until the early 1960s.
Leonid Brezhnev
A Soviet political leader of the twentieth century. He seized the leadership of the Soviet Communist party from Nikita Khrushchev in 1964. Brezhnev eventually became the head of government of the Soviet Union and served until his death in 1982. Brezhnev had the Soviet army invade Afghanistan in 1979 to keep a government friendly to the Soviets in power. He also sent soldiers into Czechoslovakia in 1968 to depose a government he considered unacceptable. He reached agreements with the United States on reducing the two nations’ stock of nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union under Brezhnev was marked by a stagnating economy and widespread corruption.
Battle of Britain
A series of air battles in World War II between the German air force, the Luftwaffe, and the British Royal Air Force, or RAF, during the summer and fall of 1940. Poised for an invasion of Britain after the fall of France, the Germans sought to gain control of the air, but they were thwarted by heroic British resistance and abandoned their plans for an invasion.
Neville Chamberlain
A British prime minister who tried to avoid war between Britain and Germany by negotiating the Munich Pact in 1938, under which Germany, led by Adolf Hitler, was allowed to extend its territory into parts of Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain proclaimed that the pact had secured “peace in our time,” but his political foes called the pact appeasement. World War II broke out less than a year later.
Georges Clemenceau
A French political leader of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the premier of France at the end of World War I and afterward. He presided at the peace conference after the war, which produced the Treaty of Versailles. Less forgiving than the American president, Woodrow Wilson, Clemenceau wanted a peace treaty that would punish Germany for having started the war and would compensate France for its losses.
Congress party
A political party in India, formally the Indian National Congress, established in the late nineteenth century. It was the party of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. After India achieved independence from Britain in 1947, the Congress party dominated India’s politics for two decades.
Cultural Revolution
A movement in China, beginning in the mid-1960s and led by Mao Zedong, to restore the vitality of communism in China. Mao, who gave the Cultural Revolution its name, sought to dismantle the complex governmental structure that had developed after the Chinese Revolution of the 1940s. During the Cultural Revolution, many government officials and intellectuals were sent out to work in the fields alongside the peasants. For a time, zealous young communists called Red Guards had considerable power. Many artworks, architectural treasures, and other cultural monuments associated with precommunist China were deliberately destroyed by the Red Guard.
Deng Xiaoping
A long-time leader of the Communist party in China, he was purged during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution for criticizing the excesses of Mao Zedong, but he returned to power in the 1970s and guided China on a course of pragmatic economic reforms.
Dienbienphu
A place in Indochina, now Vietnam, where Vietnamese communists decisively defeated French forces in 1954. The defeat led to the French withdrawal from Indochina.
Dunkirk
The scene of a remarkable, though ignominious, retreat by the British army in World War II. Dunkirk, a town on the northern coast of France, was the last refuge of the British during the fall of France, and several hundred naval and civilian vessels took the troops back to England in shifts over three days.
Friedrich Engels
A German socialist of the nineteenth century who collaborated with Karl Marx on The Communist Manifesto and on Das Kapital.
Enlightenment
An intellectual movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries marked by a celebration of the powers of human reason, a keen interest in science, the promotion of religious toleration, and a desire to construct governments free of tyranny. Some of the major figures of the Enlightenment were David Hume, Immanuel Kant, John Locke, the Baron de Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Voltaire.
Indira Gandhi
An Indian political leader of the twentieth century. She was the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, and she served herself as prime minister of India from 1966 to 1977. Indira connected with the poor and dispossessed of India, and she was instrumental in securing the independence of Bangladesh. Yet her record for helping the dispossessed was marred by the State of Emergency, which she imposed from 1975 to 1977, when democratic norms were suspended and the press censored. She served as prime minister again from 1980 until 1984, when she was assassinated by her own bodyguards.
Mahatma Gandhi
A political figure of the twentieth century in India; the leader of India’s drive for independence from Britain. Gandhi used methods of passive resistance and nonviolent disobedience, such as boycotts and hunger strikes, to influence British rulers. He was assassinated in 1948, just after India secured its independence. The title mahatma means “great soul.”
Gang of Four
Four Chinese political leaders of the twentieth century who were closely associated with Mao Zedong (one of the four was his wife). They were denounced when moderates came to power in China in 1976 and were convicted in 1981 of committing crimes, such as torture, during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
Joseph Goebbels
A German political leader of the twentieth century. Goebbels was propaganda minister of the Nazi government and a close confidant of the leader, Adolf Hitler. Goebbels’s policy was based on the notion that a lie, repeated often and forcibly, gains the legitimacy of truth. When the defeat of Germany seemed inevitable, he killed himself and his family.
Hermann Goering
A German political leader and general of the twentieth century. Goering, a close friend of Adolf Hitler, held several high positions in the Nazi government, including leadership of the air force, the Luftwaffe; until the Battle of Britain, his aerial warfare methods were enormously successful (see blitzkrieg). At the Nuremberg trials for war criminals after the German defeat, Goering was sentenced to death, but he committed suicide before he could be executed.
Dag Hammarskjöld
A Swedish diplomat of the twentieth century; the secretary-general of the United Nations from 1953 to 1961. Hammarskjöld was intensely involved with settling differences between nations that arose from the cold war and from the movement toward independence for African nations.
Heinrich Himmler
A German police official of the twentieth century. Himmler, a confidant of the leader Adolf Hitler, organized the Nazi elite forces (SS) and secret police (Gestapo). He supervised the execution of millions of Jews in concentration camps during World War II. He committed suicide in 1945.
Hirohito
Japanese emperor who came to the throne in the 1920s. He reigned over the Japanese in World War II. After the war, he was forced to give up the claim to divine status that previous emperors had made. He died in 1989, after long outliving all the other major figures associated with the war.
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini
An Iranian religious and political leader of the twentieth century. Imposing rule by Islamic law and determined to rid Iran of foreign, and especially American, influences, he became virtual dictator of Iran in 1979. With his blessing, Iranian militants held American diplomats as hostages from 1979 to 1981. He died in 1989.
Kuomintang
A Chinese nationalist (see nationalism) political party founded by Sun Yat-sen, which gained control of China in the early twentieth century. Later, under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek, it was defeated by the Chinese communists and became the ruling party of Taiwan, the island to which Chiang and his supporters had fled.
Lawrence of Arabia
T. E. Lawrence, an English soldier and author of the twentieth century, known for leading a rebellion of Arabs against the Turks in World War I and for his book describing the experience, Seven Pillars of Wisdom. At the negotiations that produced the Treaty of Versailles, he argued unsuccessfully for independence for the Arab nations.