British Monarchs

Russian Tsars

1. 
   Peter I (1672-1725; ruled 1682-1725) Peter the Great is famous both for his push for Westernization and for his boisterous personality. His Grand Embassy to Europe enabled him to learn about Western life (and even to work in a Dutch shipyard); he later invited Western artisans to come to Russia, required the boyars to shave their beards and wear Western clothing, and even founded a new capital, St. Petersburg--his "window on the West." He also led his country in the Great Northern War (in which Charles XII of Sweden was defeated at Poltava), created a Table of Ranks for the nobility, and reformed the bureaucracy and army. But Peter could also be violent and cruel: he personally participated in the torture of the streltsy, or musketeers, who rebelled against him, and had his own son executed.
   
2. 
   Ivan IV (1530-1584; ruled 1533-1584) Ivan IV is known in the West as "Ivan the Terrible," but his Russian nickname ("Groznyi") could be more accurately translated as "awe-inspiring" or "menacing." Ivan was proclaimed Grand Prince of Muscovy 1533 and tsar in 1547. Scholars differ on whether Ivan was literate and on how auspiciously his reign began. Early in his reign, he pushed through a series of well-received reforms and called a zemskii sobor (or "assembly of the land"), but Ivan had an amazingly cruel streak and eventually became unstable: he temporarily abdicated in 1564, killed his favorite son, created a state-within-the-state called the oprichnina to wage war on the boyars, and participated in the torture of his enemies. Ivan combined the absolutist tendencies of his predecessors with his own violent personality, helping to plunge the country into the subsequent period of civil strife known as the "Time of Troubles."
   
3. 
   Catherine II (1729-1796; ruled 1762-1796) Catherine the Great wasn't really a Russian at all: she was born Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst (a minor German principality) and was chosen as the bride of the future Peter III. She had thoroughly Russianized herself by the time Peter became tsar, and soon had him deposed: she then dispatched several claimants to the throne and crushed a peasant uprising led by Emilian Pugachev. She also corresponded with Enlightenment philosophes, granted charters of rights and obligations to the nobility and the towns, oversaw the partition of Poland, and expanded the empire. Catherine is well known for her extravagant love life: her 21 acknowledged lovers included Grigorii Potemkin (who constructed the famous Potemkin village on an imperial inspection tour).
   
4. 
   Nicholas II (1868-1918; ruled 1894-1917) Nicholas II, the last of the Romanovs, ruled until his overthrow in the February Revolution of 1917. He is usually seen as both a kind man who loved his family and an incapable monarch who helped bring about the end of the tsarist state; he led his country through two disastrous wars, the Russo-Japanese War (which helped spark the Revolution of 1905), and World War I (which helped cause the 1917 revolutions.) He is best known for his loving marriage to Alexandra and for allowing the crazed monk Grigorii Rasputin to influence court politics while treating the hemophilia of Alexei, the heir to the throne. Nicholas abdicated in 1917 and was shot in 1918.
   
5. 
   Alexander II (1818-1881; ruled 1855-1881) Alexander II embarked on a program of Great Reforms soon after taking the throne near the end of the Crimean War. The most famous part of his program was the serf emancipation of 1861--a reform which occurred almost simultaneously with the end of American slavery (and whose gradual nature disappointed liberals.) But he also introduced a system of local governing bodies called zemstvos, tried to increase the rule of law in the court system, eased censorship, and reorganized the army. Alexander became more reactionary after an attempted 1866 assassination and was assassinated in 1881.
   
6. 
   Alexander I (1777-1825; ruled 1801-1825) Alexander I took the throne in 1801 when his repressive father Paul was assassinated and immediately set out on a more liberal course, but he left his strongest supporters disappointed. He is best known for his wars with Napoleon (first as an ally and then as an enemy), and for seeking to establish a Holy Alliance in the years that followed. Alexander was an eccentric and a religious mystic. Some even say that he didn't really die in 1825: instead, they argue, he faked his own death, became a hermit, and died in a monastery in 1864.
   
7. 
   Nicholas I (1796-1855; ruled 1825-1855) Nicholas I, who ruled Russia from the failure of the Decembrist Uprising to the middle of the Crimean War, has traditionally been portrayed as the embodiment of the Russian autocracy. His government pursued a policy of Official Nationality, defending a holy trinity of "Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and Nationality," and established a repressive secret police force known as the Third Section. Contemporaries referred to him as the "Gendarme of Europe" after he helped the Habsburgs squelch the Hungarian Revolution of 1848.
   
8. 
   Alexander III (1845-1894; ruled 1881-1894) Those who hoped that the assassination of Alexander II would lead to liberalization saw the error of their ways when the new tsar, Alexander III, launched his program of "counter-reforms." Under him, the state enacted a series of Temporary Regulations (giving it the power to crack down on terrorism), increased censorship, tightened controls on Russia's universities, created a position of "land captain" to exert state control in the countryside, and either encouraged or ignored the first anti-Jewish pogroms.
   
9. 
   Boris Godunov (ca. 1551-1605; ruled 1598-1605) Boris Godunov began his career as a boyar in Ivan the Terrible's oprichnina, and eventually became tsar himself. Boris first cemented his influence by marrying a daughter of one of Ivan's court favorites and arranging his sister Irina's marriage to Ivan's son Fyodor; then he became regent under Fyodor, and was elected tsar when Fyodor died in 1598. But Boris was rumored to have arranged the murder of Fyodor's brother Dmitrii, and the first of several "False Dmitriis" launched a revolt against him. Boris died in the midst of growing unrest and is now best known as the subject of a Pushkin play and a Mussorgsky opera.
   
10. 
    Michael (1597-1645; ruled 1613-1645) In 1613, near the end of the Time of Troubles, a zemskii sobor elected the 16-year-old Michael Romanov as the new tsar. Michael was a grandnephew of Ivan the Terrible's "good" wife Anastasia and the son of a powerful churchman named Filaret (who soon became patriarch); as tsar, he has usually been seen as a nonentity dominated by Filaret and other relatives. Nevertheless, his election marked the return of relative stability and the succession of the Romanov dynasty.
    

Programming Languages

1. 
   C++ is a popular, compiled, high-level language developed by Bjarne Stroustrup in 1985 at Bell Labs. C++ is similar to C, but adds object-oriented features (classes), generic programming (templates), and exception handling to the language. It is a popular language for developing business applications and, increasingly, games.
   
2. 
   Java is a popular high-level language developed by Sun Microsystems in the early 1990s. The language was originally named OAK and unsuccessfully used for set-top devices, but hit it big after being renamed in 1995 and introduced to the World Wide Web. It is a relatively pure object-oriented language with syntax similar to C++. Instead of being compiled to object code, it is compiled to Java bytecode, which is then interpreted or compiled on the fly. This use of machine-independent bytecode gives it its "write once, run everywhere" property. Java is principally used for client-side web application ("applets") and server-side web application ("servlets") that make use of J2EE technology. The success of Java inspired Microsoft to introduce its C# language and .NET framework.
   
3. 
   BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a high-level language developed by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz at Dartmouth College in the mid 1960s. It is easy to use but its relative lack of structure makes maintaining programs difficult. There have been many versions of BASIC and some more modern ones (TurboBasic, QuickBasic Visual Basic) have added advanced features. Stereotypical programs like 10 PRINT "HELLO" and 10 GOTO 10 are written in BASIC.
   
4. 
   C, a compiled successor to the B programming language, was developed by Dennis Ritchie in 1972. It is a high-level and highly standardized language that remains very "close to the hardware" and allows the programmer to perform useful, fast, and dangerous tricks. It is widely used for business applications, games, operating systems (particularly UNIX and Linux), and device drivers.
   
5. 
   Perl is an interpreted language designed principally to process text. It was written by Larry Wall and first released in 1988. It is intended to be practical and concise rather than theoretically elegant and is sometimes lampooned as "write one, read never" because of its heavy use of symbols and idiom. It is often used for web CGI scripts and parsing log files. "Perl" is an unofficial retronym for "Practical Extraction Report Language."
   
6. 
   ALGOL (ALGOrithmic Language) was created in the late 1950s and was the first procedural language intended for solving mathematical and scientific problems. Formalized in a report titled ALGOL 58, it progressed through ALGOL 60 and ALGOL 68 before waning in popularity. ALGOL was sufficiently advanced and respected that most modern procedural languages reflect its overall structure and design; some, like Pascal, are very closely related.
   
7. 
   Pascal is a high-level, compiled language built upon ALGOL. It is named after the 17th-century mathematician Blaise Pascal and was developed by Niklaus Wirth during 1967-71. Pascal is best known for its emphasis on structured programming techniques and strong typing; because of this, it was extremely popular as a teaching language in the 1980s and early 1990s, though it was never popular for business or scientific applications. The object-oriented language Delphi was based on Pascal.
   
8. 
   LISP (LISt Processing) is the ancestor of the family of functional languages that emphasize evaluating expressions rather than executing imperative commands. It was developed in 1950-1960 by John McCarthy and is used primarily for symbolic manipulations of complicated structures rather than numerical calculation. It and its descendants (Scheme, CommonLisp, etc.) continue to be used in academic research, particularly artificial intelligence.
   
9. 
   Fortran (FORmula TRANslation) is the oldest high-level language. Designed by John Backus for IBM during the late 1950s, it was once in use on virtually every computer in the world and is still used today for engineering and scientific applications because of the quality of its compilers and numerical libraries. The most popular Fortran versions are Fortran IV, 77, and 90. The name "Fortran" was originally entirely capitalized, but the ANSI Fortran Committee has since declared the "initial capital" spelling official.
   
10. 
    COBOL (COmmon Business-Oriented Language) was developed in 1959 by CODASYL (Conference on Data Systems Languages) under the direction of Rear Admiral Grace Hopper and is the second-oldest high-level language. It emphasized record-processing and database access and uses an English-like syntax, all attributes that led to widespread use in business, particularly the financial sector. It is characterized as especially wordy (just as C and Perl are characterized as terse). The vast majority of Year 2000 problems involved programs written in COBOL.
    

Artistic Creations

Rank	Title	Genre	Creator	Date	Freq.
1	Louvre	Building	Pierre Lescot Francis I of France (patron)	1546	137
2	Parthenon	Building	Ictinus and Callicrates Pericles (patron)	447 BC	136
3	Notre Dame Cathedral	Building	unknown	1160-1345	108
4	Mona Lisa	Painting	Leonardo da Vinci	1500	104
5	Statue of Liberty	Sculpture	Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi	1886	100
6	Guernica	Painting	Pablo Picasso (y Ruiz)	1937	89
7	Westminster Abbey	Building	Henry III of England (patron)	1245	78
8	Taj Mahal	Building	Ustad Ahmad Lahori Shah Jahan (patron)	1632	77
9	Sistine Chapel	Building	Giovanni Del Dolci Pope Sixtus IV (patron)	1473	76
10	The Birth of Venus	Painting	Sandro Botticelli	1480	76
11	Saint Paul's Cathedral	Building	Sir Christopher Wren	1708	74
12	Mount Rushmore	Sculpture	(John) Gutzon (de la Mothe) Borglum	1927-1941	74
13	Nighthawks	Painting	Edward Hopper	1942	70
14	Empire State Building	Building	(Firm of) Shreve, Lamb & Harmon	1931	68
15	St. Peter's Basilica	Building	Donato Bramante et al.	1626	66
16	The Persistence of Memory	Painting	Salvador (Felipe Jacinto) Dalí (y Domenech)	1931	65
17	Abraham Lincoln Memorial	Building	Henry Bacon	1922	64
18	The Thinker	Sculpture	(René-François-)Auguste Rodin	1900	64
19	The Shooting Company of Captain Franz Banning Cocq	Painting	Rembrandt (Harmenszoon Van Rijn)	1642	64
20	Fallingwater	Building	Frank Lloyd (Lincoln) Wright	1936	63
21	School of Athens	Painting	Raphael	1509	61
22	Last Supper	Painting	Leonardo da Vinci	1495-1498	60
23	American Gothic	Painting	Grant Wood	1930	60
24	David	Sculpture	Donatello	c. 1440	59
25	The Arnolfini Wedding	Painting	Jan van Eyck	1434	57
26	The Death of Marat	Painting	Jacques-Louis David	1793	56
27	Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum	Building	Frank Lloyd Wright	1959	56
28	Uffizi Palace	Building	Giorgio Vasari Cosimo I de' Medici (patron)	1560-1581	55
29	The Gates of Hell	Sculpture	(René-François-)Auguste Rodin	1880	55
30	The Third of May, 1808	Painting	Francisco (José) de Goya (y Lucientes)	1814	53
31	Chrysler Building	Building	William Van Alen	1930	52
32	Starry Night	Painting	Vincent (Willem) Van Gogh	1889	50
33	Arrangement in Gray and Black, No. 1: The Artist's Mother	Painting	James (Abbott) McNeill Whistler	1871	50
34	Alhambra	Building	Mahomet Ibn Al Ahmar (patron)	1354	49
35	Gateway Arch	Building	Eero Saarinen	1965	49
36	Eiffel Tower	Building	(Alexandre-)Gustave Eiffel	1889	49
37	Cathedral of Florence	Building	Filippo Brunelleschi	1420	49
38	Temple of Jerusalem	Building	Solomon (patron)	10th century BC	49
39	United States Capitol	Building	Wiliam Thornton (original) Benjamin Latrobe, Charles Bullfinch, et al. (revisions)	1793-1811 (reconstructed 1815-1826)	49
40	Las Meninas	Painting	Diego (Rodríguez de Silva y) Velázquez	1656	48