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Perovsky-Petrovo-Solovovo
Count Mikhail Mikhailovich Perovsky-Petrovo-Solovovo (граф Михаил Михайлович Перовский-Петрово-Соловово; 1868–1954) was a Russian diplomat, psychical researcher and skeptic. Career Mikhail Petrovo-Solovovo, a scion of an ancient aristocratic family that owned a Neoclassical palace on Nevsky Avenue, inherited the comital title from his maternal grandfather, General Boris Perovsky, in 1907. He held the rank of chamberlain at the imperial court and, for some time, was the first secretary of the Foreign Ministry of the Russian Empire. Solovovo joined the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in 1890. He published several controversial papers in the SPR Journal arguing that many spiritualist mediums had been caught in fraud. In 1936 he moved to London. In 1904–1905, Solovovo translated Frank Podmore's ''Modern Spiritualism'' (two volumes) into Russian with a new supplement that included an exposure of the fraudulent medium Jan Guzyk ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Daniel Dunglas Home
Daniel Dunglas Home (pronounced ''Hume''; 20 March 183321 June 1886) was a Scottish physical medium with the reported ability to levitate to a variety of heights, speak with the dead, and to produce rapping and knocks in houses at will. His biographer Peter Lamont opines that he was one of the most famous men of his era. Harry Houdini described him as "one of the most conspicuous and lauded of his type and generation" and "the forerunner of the mediums whose forte is fleecing by presuming on the credulity of the public." Home conducted hundreds of séances, which were attended by many eminent Victorians. There have been eyewitness accounts by séance sitters describing conjuring methods and fraud that Home may have employed. Frederick Merrifield. (1903). ''A Sitting With D. D. Home''. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 11: 76–80. Quoted in Joseph McCabe. (1920). ''Spiritualism: A Popular History from 1847''. Dodd, Mead and Company. pp. 110-112. A Mr. Merrifield was ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jan Guzyk
Jan Guzyk (1875–1928), also known as Jan Guzik was a Polish spiritualist medium known for his alleged ability of psychokinesis.Brower, M. Brady. (2010). ''Unruly Spirits: The Science of Psychic Phenomena in Modern France''. University of Illinois Press. pp. 133-135. Guzyk was exposed as a fraud by psychical researchers Harry Price and Max Dessoir. Biography Guzyk was born in the village of Rączna, near Kraków. He was the son of a weaver. He became a medium at the age of fifteen. It was alleged he could materialize spirits and perform levitation and psychokinesis of objects. Guzyk was endorsed by the psychical researcher Gustav Geley who attended his séances. Investigations Skeptical investigator Paul Heuzé and a professional illusionist known as Professor Dicksonn suspected that Guzyk was fraudulent and that Geley and other psychical researchers had been duped by trickery. In November 1923, Heuzé organized five scientists, including French physicist Paul Langevin to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Parapsychology
Parapsychology is the study of alleged psychic phenomena (extrasensory perception, telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, psychokinesis (also called telekinesis), and psychometry) and other paranormal claims, for example, those related to near-death experiences, synchronicity, apparitional experiences, etc. Criticized as being a pseudoscience, the majority of mainstream scientists reject it. Parapsychology has also been criticised by mainstream critics for many of its practitioners claiming that their studies are plausible in spite of there being no convincing evidence for the existence of any psychic phenomena after more than a century of research. Parapsychology research rarely appears in mainstream scientific journals; instead, most papers about parapsychology are published in a small number of niche journals. Terminology The term ''parapsychology'' was coined in 1889 by philosopher Max Dessoir as the German . It was adopted by J. B. Rhine in the 1930s as a replacement fo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1954 Deaths
Events January * January 1 – The Soviet Union ceases to demand war reparations from West Germany. * January 3 – The Italian broadcaster RAI officially begins transmitting. * January 7 – Georgetown-IBM experiment: The first public demonstration of a machine translation system is held in New York, at the head office of IBM. * January 10 – BOAC Flight 781, a de Havilland Comet jet plane, disintegrates in mid-air due to metal fatigue, and crashes in the Mediterranean near Elba; all 35 people on board are killed. * January 12 – Avalanches in Austria kill more than 200. * January 15 – Mau Mau leader Waruhiu Itote is captured in Kenya. * January 17 – In Yugoslavia, Milovan Đilas, one of the leading members of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, is relieved of his duties. * January 20 – The US-based National Negro Network is established, with 46 member radio stations. * January 21 – The first nuclear-powered subm ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1868 Births
Events January–March * January 2 – British Expedition to Abyssinia: Robert Napier leads an expedition to free captive British officials and missionaries. * January 3 – The 15-year-old Mutsuhito, Emperor Meiji of Japan, declares the ''Meiji Restoration'', his own restoration to full power, under the influence of supporters from the Chōshū and Satsuma Domains, and against the supporters of the Tokugawa shogunate, triggering the Boshin War. * January 5 – Paraguayan War: Brazilian Army commander Luís Alves de Lima e Silva, Duke of Caxias enters Asunción, Paraguay's capital. Some days later he declares the war is over. Nevertheless, Francisco Solano López, Paraguay's president, prepares guerrillas to fight in the countryside. * January 7 – The Arkansas constitutional convention meets in Little Rock. * January 9 – Penal transportation from Britain to Australia ends, with arrival of the convict ship ''Hougoumont'' in Western Aus ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ministry Of Foreign Affairs (Imperial Russia)
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Empire (russian: Министе́рство иностранных дел Российской империи) was a ministry of the Russian Empire responsible for relations with foreign states from 1802 to 1917. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs was established by decree of the Emperor Alexander I of Russia on 8 September 1802 by Manifesto "On the establishment of ministries." With the formation of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the preceding Collegium of Foreign Affairs was not disbanded and continued to exist until April 1832 as a child agency of the Ministry. According to the decree "On the formation of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs" from 1832, the Ministry included the Council, the Asian Department, the Department of External Relations, the Department of Internal Affairs and the Department of Economic and Accounting Affairs, as well as three main archives: two in Saint Petersburg and one in Moscow. The Ministry of Foreign Aff ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Macmillan Publishers
Macmillan Publishers (occasionally known as the Macmillan Group; formally Macmillan Publishers Ltd and Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC) is a British publishing company traditionally considered to be one of the 'Big Five' English language publishers. Founded in London in 1843 by Scottish brothers Daniel and Alexander MacMillan, the firm would soon establish itself as a leading publisher in Britain. It published two of the best-known works of Victorian era children’s literature, Lewis Carroll's ''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'' (1865) and Rudyard Kipling's ''The Jungle Book'' (1894). Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Harold Macmillan, grandson of co-founder Daniel, was chairman of the company from 1964 until his death in December 1986. Since 1999, Macmillan has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Holtzbrinck Publishing Group with offices in 41 countries worldwide and operations in more than thirty others. History Macmillan was founded in London in 1843 by Daniel ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Charles Richet
Charles Robert Richet (25 August 1850 – 4 December 1935) was a French physiologist at the Collège de France known for his pioneering work in immunology. In 1913, he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "in recognition of his work on anaphylaxis". Richet devoted many years to the study of paranormal and spiritualist phenomena, coining the term " ectoplasm". He also believed in the inferiority of Black people, was a proponent of eugenics and presided over the French Eugenics Society towards the end of his life. The Richet line of professorships of medical science would continue through his son Charles and his grandson Gabriel. Gabriel Richet was one of the great pioneers of European nephrology. Career He was born on 25 August 1850 in Paris the son of Alfred Richet. He was educated at the Lycee Bonaparte in Paris then studied Medicine at university in Paris. Richet spent a period of time as an intern at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, where he observed Jean-Marti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
McFarland & Company
McFarland & Company, Inc., is an American independent book publisher based in Jefferson, North Carolina, that specializes in academic and reference works, as well as general-interest adult nonfiction. Its president is Rhonda Herman. Its former president and current editor-in-chief is Robert Franklin, who founded the company in 1979. McFarland employs a staff of about 50, and had published 7,800 titles. McFarland's initial print runs average 600 copies per book. Subject matter McFarland & Company focuses mainly on selling to libraries. It also utilizes direct mailing to connect with enthusiasts in niche categories. The company is known for its sports literature, especially baseball history, as well as books about chess, military history, and film. In 2007, the ''Mountain Times'' wrote that McFarland publishes about 275 scholarly monographs and reference book titles a year; Robert Lee Brewer reported in 2015 that the number is about 350. List of scholarly journals The following ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Little, Brown And Company
Little, Brown and Company is an American publishing company founded in 1837 by Charles Coffin Little and James Brown in Boston. For close to two centuries it has published fiction and nonfiction by American authors. Early lists featured Emily Dickinson's poetry and ''Bartlett's Familiar Quotations''. Since 2006 Little, Brown and Company is a division of the Hachette Book Group. 19th century Little, Brown and Company had its roots in the book selling trade. It was founded in 1837 in Boston by Charles Little and James Brown. They formed the partnership "for the purpose of Publishing, Importing, and Selling Books". It can trace its roots before that to 1784 to a bookshop owned by Ebenezer Battelle on Marlborough Street. They published works of Benjamin Franklin and George Washington and they were specialized in legal publishing and importing titles. For many years, it was the most extensive law publisher in the United States, and also the largest importer of standard English law a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Peter Lamont (historian)
Peter Karl Lamont is a research fellow at the University of Edinburgh, working on the history, theory and performance of magic. . He is a magician, Member of The Magic Circle, and a former of the |
Gordon Stein
Gordon Stein (April 30, 1941 – August 27, 1996) was an American author, physiologist, and activist for atheism and religious skepticism. Biography Stein was born in New York to Jewish parents, and from an early age took an interest in science. He earned degrees in psychology and zoology, a doctorate in physiology from Ohio State University and master's degrees in Management and Library Science from University of Rochester, Adelphi College, and the University of California at Los Angeles. He was an author of books for secular humanist and rationalist publications, he also was a critic of claims of paranormal phenomena. Stein was an outspoken atheist and publicly debated Christian apologists such as Greg Bahnsen. He served as editor of the '' American Rationalist'' and was the librarian of the Center for Inquiry, which houses both the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) and the Council for Secular Humanism (CSH). Stein died of lung c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
