The Gulag is the central administrative department of the Soviet security service. It was established in 1930 and is responsible for maintaining prisons and forced labour camps. Research Gulag
Kiwanis International is an originally American and now international organisation of service clubs, composed of business and professional people, founded to render service to the community and to promote better business and professional standards. The name is derived from the Indian word keewanis (meaning 'to make oneself known') . The club motto is 'We build'. Local clubs are active in their communities, supporting law-enforcement and public-service agencies and promoting good citizenship. Many local clubs send underprivileged children to summercamps. The first Kiwanis club was organised in Detroit in 1915. In 1917 Kiwanis clubs were chartered in Canada; the name Kiwanis International was adopted at the 1924 national convention.
Kiwanis International now comprises several thousand local clubs in many countries. The Kiwanis Magazine, a monthly, is published from the national headquarters in Chicago. Research Kiwanis International More information about Kiwanis International
Obedience is the carrying out instructions or commands; submitting to authority.
Obedience became an important topic in social psychology in the 1960s and 1970s as a result of extensive research by American psychologist Stanley Milgram which showed that a high proportion of ordinary individuals would obey instructions that involved inflicting severe pain on, and even the murder of others. Milgram had sought to show that German guards working at concentration camps during the Second World War were responsible for their actions, and that they couldn't use the argument that they were simply following orders. However, his research showed the opposite in a dramatic way. Obeying orders when disobedience results in punishment is understandable (even if not always morally justifiable), but Milgram claimed that many people would willingly obey orders, even if not threatened with punishment.
The subjects in his experiments were required to act as ' teachers' for a 'learner' who, unknown to them, was a confederate of the experimenter. Using a simulated shock generator, they were told to administer electric shocks, of increasing strengths, every time the 'learner' made a mistake. In some experiments as many as 60% of the subjects, when the experimenter told them to continue, administered shocks that they believed would seriously harm or kill the 'learner'. Although distressed by their actions, the subjects felt the experimenter was responsible. Milgram's work has not been accepted uncritically, most of the criticisms being levelled at the ethics of the experiment which led people to believe they had in fact killed an innocent man, although after the experiment they were reassured, but it has generated much discussion and stimulated further research. Research Obedience
Torture, in a legal sense, means the application of bodily pain so as to force evidence from witnesses, or confessions from persons accused of crimes. It was applied to slaves in Athens and the Athenian and Rhodian laws allowed it to be applied even to citizens and freemen. In popular terms, torture is also the infliction of pain as a punishment. Torture is simultaneously universally condemned and practised. In Norway following the Second World War during the late 1940s and 1950s the children of unmarried Norwegian mothers and German soldiers were forcibly detained in mental institutions, one survivor recounting how she was forced to sleep in a straight jacket every night for three years. Following the American war against Afghanistan in 2001, the subsequent prisoners of war were held shackled, in small cages and in 2005 the USA was scandalised by the revelation that the American government operated secret prison camps around the world where 'suspects' - many of them kidnapped - were taken and tortured, contrary to American and international law. Research Torture
An Alcalde or Alcaide is the magistrate in the Spanish and Portuguese towns, to whom the administration of justice and the regulation of the police is committed. His office nearly corresponds to that of the British justice of the peace. The name and the office are of Moorish origin.
An Alcalde was the principal officer in the local government of the earlier towns of California, USA. The office was borrowed from the Spanish settlements, and was first introduced in the mining camps, where the miners made laws and elected officers to enforce them. Research Alcalde
Clara Mass was an American nurse. She was born in 1876 at East Orange, New Jersey and died in 1901 at Havana, Cuba of yellow fever. She was the only woman and the only American to die during the yellow fever experiments of 1900 to 1901. After graduating from the Newark German Hospital School of Nursing in 1895 she volunteered to serve as a contract nurse with the U.S. Army Medical Department at the outbreak of the Spanish-American war of 1898. During her first term of service she worked at army camps in Florida, Georgia, and Cuba. She volunteered again in 1900 and was sent first to the Philippines and then back to Cuba, where at the Las AnimasHospital in Havana, she volunteered to take part in an experiment conducted by Major William C Gorgas and John Guiteras on yellow fever immunization. The experiment involved her being infected with the disease, from which she promptly died ten days later. Research Clara Mass
Field-marshal is the highest rank in the British army. The position was formed in 1736 from a marshal who was previously responsible for order in court and for supervising the camps of an army in the field. Research Field-marshal
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher. He was born in 1770 at Stuttgart and died in 1831. He is renowned for creating a fundamentally influential system of thought - The Hegelian dialectic.
He studied at the theological institute of Tubingen from 1788 until 1793, and was next a private tutor at Berne from 1793 to 1796, and subsequently at Frankfort-on-the-Main from 1797 until 1800.
Having moved to Jena, and contracted an intimacy with Schelling, he devoted himself to metaphysical study. After the Battle of Jena, Georg Hegel was employed on a newspaper at Bamberg until 1808, when he became successively rector of NurnbergGymnasium, professor of philosophy at Heidelberg in 1816, and at Berlin from 1818 until his death in 1831.
Among his works the most important are his Phanomenologie des Geistes (1807), Wissenschaft der Logik (1812-16), Encyclopadie der philosophischen Wissenschaften (1817), and Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts oder Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft (1821).
The philosophy of Hegel followed that of Schelling, in adopting as a presupposition the identity of Knowing and Being, of Thought and Reality, of Subjective and Objective. But he differs from Schelling, who contemplates this identity with its inner opposites through the medium of a purely intellectual intuition, for Hegel seems rather to revert to Kant's Transcendental Logic. He thus asserts that if the order and connection of our thoughts is involved in the order and connection of things, the universal form in the course of objective action must exactly agree with the form of the development of our thoughts, and vice versa. As there are, according to him, three stages in the process of thought and existence, his system has necessarily a threefold division: logic; the philosophy of nature; and mental philosophy. Hegelianism has been more influential in the direction of the philosophy of religion than in any other department; but it is divided into three camps, representing respectively the supernatural, the rational, and the mystical. Research Georg Hegel
Pierre de Bourdeilles (Seigneur de Brantome) was a French writer. He was born in about 1540 at Perigord and died in 1614. He was of an old and noble family, and early entered the profession of arms. After a brilliant life in courts and camps he withdrew to his estate in Perigord, and spent his time in writing memoirs, which give an admirable picture of an age, with particulars which a chaster and more fastidious pen could hardly have set down. His memoirs consist of Vies des Hommes illustres et des grands Capitaines Francais; Vies des grands Capitaines Etrangers; Vies des Dames illustres; Vies des Dames galantes. Research Pierre de Bourdeilles
Vladek Sheybal (real name Wladislaw Sheybal) is a Polish actor and television director. He was born in 1932. after twice escaping from concentration camps during the Second World War, he came to England where he took up directing before returning to acting in 1965. Research Vladek Sheybal
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