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- Aboriginal people
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Baltic states
The term Baltic states (also Baltics, Baltic nations or Baltic countries) refers to the Baltic territories which gained independence from the Russian Empire in the wake of World War I: primarily the contiguous trio of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania (from north to south); Finland also fell within the scope of the term from the 1920s to 1939.Estonia is only considered Baltic geographically, not linguistically or culturally, as Estonians and Finns are descendants of the Baltic Finns.
The term in the indigenous languages of the Baltic states is:
The term "Baltic" stems from the name of the Baltic Sea – a hydronym dating back to the 11th century (Adam of Bremen mentioned Latin: Mare Balticum) and earlier.
The Latvian and Lithuanian term Baltija most likely originates from the Indo-European root *bhel meaning white, fair. In modern Baltic languages, namely, Lithuanian language, baltas literally means white, and in Latvian language balts means white also.
Beginning in the Middle Ages and through the present day, the Baltic Sea appears on the maps subscribed in Germanic languages as German: Ostsee, Danish: Østersøen, Dutch: Oostzee, Swedish: Östersjön, etc. In English "Ost" is "East", and in fact, the Baltic Sea mostly lies to the east for Germany, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Clearly, part of the Baltic Sea lies to the east of Germany and Sweden, and due north of parts of Germany.
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Daugavpils
Daugavpils (pronounced [ˈdaʊɡaʊpils] (
listen)) is a city in southeastern Latvia, located on the banks of the Daugava River, from which the city gets its name. Daugavpils literally means "Daugava Castle". With a population of over 100,000, it is the second largest city in the country after the capital Riga, which is located some 230 km to its north-west. Daugavpils has a favorable geographical position as it borders Belarus and Lithuania (distances of 33 and 25 km respectively). It is located some 120 km from the Latvian border with Russia. Daugavpils is a major railway junction and industrial centre.
The city is surrounded by many lakes and nature parks.
Historically, several names in various languages have identified Daugavpils. Some are still in use today.
Here is a chronology of name changes:
The city has a moderate continental climate.
As of 1 January 2012, the city had a population of 101,057.
In Daugavpils 55% of the voters supported the proposal to make Russian the second state language in the 2012 referendum.
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Denmark
The Kingdom of Denmark (Danish: Kongeriget Danmark, pronounced [ˈkɔŋəʁiːəð ˈdanmɑɡ̊] ( listen)) is a constitutional monarchy and sovereign state consisting the country of Denmark in northern Europe and two autonomous constituent countries, the Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic and Greenland in North America. The kingdom is a unitary state with some power being devolved from Denmark proper to Greenland and the Faroe Islands; this polity is referred to as the Danish Realm. Denmark proper is the hegemonial area, where judicial, executive, and legislative power resides. The Faroe Islands are defined to be a community of people within the kingdom, and the Greenlandic people are defined as a separate people with the right to self-determination.
Denmark is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, located southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. The country consists of a large peninsula, Jutland and many islands, most notably Zealand, Funen, Lolland, Falster and Bornholm, as well as hundreds of minor islands often referred to as the Danish Archipelago.
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Duchy of Livonia
The Duchy of Livonia (Polish: Księstwo Inflanckie;Latin: Ducatus Ultradunensis; Estonian: Üleväina-Liivimaa hertsogkond; Latvian: Pārdaugavas hercogiste; also referred to as Polish Livonia or Inflanty) was a territory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania – and later the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth – that existed from 1561 to 1621. It corresponds to the present-day areas of northern Latvia and southern Estonia.
Livonia had been part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania from 1561, since the Livonian Order was secularized by the Union of Wilno and the Livonian Confederation dissolved during the Livonian Wars. Part of Livonia, formed the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia, while the south-west part of today's Estonia and north-east part of today's Latvia, covering what is now Vidzeme and Latgalia, were ceded to Lithuania.
In 1566, it was declared as the Duchy of Livonia according to the Treaty of Union between the landowners of Livonia and authorities of Lithuania; Jan Hieronimowicz Chodkiewicz became the first Governor of the Duchy (1566–1578) in Sigulda castle. It was a province of Grand Duchy of Lithuania until 1569. After the Union of Lublin in 1569, it became a joint domain of the Polish Crown and the Grand Duchy.
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Duchy of Prussia
The Duchy of Prussia or Ducal Prussia (German: Herzogtum Preußen; Latin: Ducatus Prussiae; Polish: Prusy Książęce; Lithuanian: Prūsijos kunigaikštystė; Old Prussian: Ercōgista Prūsija[citation needed]) was a duchy in the eastern part of Prussia from 1525–1701. It was the first Protestant (Lutheran) duchy with a dominant German-speaking population, as well as Polish and Lithuanian minorities. In old texts and in Latin, the term Prut(h)enia refers alike to Ducal Prussia, its western neighbor Royal Prussia, and their common predecessor, Teutonic Prussia. The adjectival form of the name was "Prut(h)enic".
In 1525 during the Protestant Reformation, the Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights, Albert, secularized the order's Prussian territory, becoming Albert, Duke of Prussia. His duchy, which had its capital in Königsberg (Polish: Królewiec), was established as fief of the Crown of Poland. It was inherited by the Hohenzollern prince-electors of Brandenburg in 1618; this personal union is referred to as Brandenburg-Prussia. Frederick William, the "Great Elector" of Brandenburg, achieved full sovereignty over the territory in the 1657 Treaty of Wehlau, which was confirmed in the 1660 Treaty of Oliva. The Duchy of Prussia was elevated to the Kingdom of Prussia in 1701.
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East Prussia
East Prussia (German: Ostpreußen, pronounced [ˈɔstˌpʁɔʏsən] ( listen); Polish: Prusy Wschodnie; Lithuanian: Rytų Prūsija or Rytprūsiai; Russian: Восточная Пруссия or Vostochnaya Prussiya; Latin: Borussia orientalis) was the main part of the region of Prussia along the southeastern Baltic Coast from the 13th century to the end of World War II in May 1945. From 1772–1829 and 1878–1945, the Province of East Prussia was part of the German state of Prussia. The capital city was Königsberg.
East Prussia enclosed the bulk of the ancestral lands of the Baltic Old Prussians. During the 13th century, the native Prussians were conquered by the crusading Teutonic Knights. The indigenous Balts who survived the conquest were gradually converted to Christianity. Because of Germanization and colonisation over the following centuries, Germans became the dominant ethnic group, while Poles and Lithuanians formed minorities. From the 13th century, East Prussia was part of the monastic state of the Teutonic Knights, which became the Duchy of Prussia in 1525. The Old Prussian language had become extinct by the 17th or early 18th century.
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Estonian SSR
The Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic (Estonian: Eesti Nõukogude Sotsialistlik Vabariik, abbreviated as Eesti NSV or ENSV; Russian: Эстонская Советская Социалистическая Республика, Estonskaya Sovetskaya Sotsalisticheskaya Respublika, abbreviated as ЭССР, ESSR), often abbreviated as Estonian SSR or ESSR, was a republic of the Soviet Union, administered by and subordinated to the Government of the Soviet Union. The ESSR was initially established on the territory of the Republic of Estonia on July 21, 1940, following the invasion of Soviet troops on June 17, 1940 and the installation of a puppet government backed by the Soviet Union, which declared Estonia a Soviet state. The Estonian SSR was subsequently incorporated into the USSR on August 9, 1940. This territory was also occupied by Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1944.
Most countriesdid not recognise the incorporation of Estonia de jure and only recognised its Soviet government de facto or not at all. A number of these countries continued to recognize Estonian diplomats and consuls who still functioned in the name of their former governments. This policy of non-recognition gave rise to the principle of legal continuity, which held that de jure, Estonia remained an independent state under illegal occupation throughout the period 1940–91.
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Finland
Coordinates: 65°N 27°E / 65°N 027°E / 65; 027
Finland
i/ˈfɪnlənd/ (
Finnish: Suomi; Swedish: Finland (help·info)), officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country situated in the Fennoscandian region of Northern Europe. It is bordered by Sweden in the west, Norway in the north and Russia in the east, while Estonia lies to its south across the Gulf of Finland.
Around 5.4 million people reside in Finland, with the majority concentrated in the southern region. It is the eighth largest country in Europe in terms of area and the most sparsely populated country in the European Union. Finland is a parliamentary republic with a central government based in Helsinki and local governments in 336 municipalities, and an autonomous region of the Åland Islands. About one million residents live in the Greater Helsinki area, which consists of Helsinki, Espoo, Kauniainen and Vantaa, and a third of the country's GDP is produced there. Other larger cities include Tampere, Turku, Oulu, Jyväskylä, Lahti and Kuopio.
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Germany
Germany (i/ˈdʒɜrməni/), officially the Federal Republic of Germany (German: Bundesrepublik Deutschland, pronounced [ˈbʊndəsʁepuˌbliːk ˈdɔʏtʃlant] ( listen)), is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate. With 81.8 million inhabitants, it is the most populous member state and the largest economy in the European Union. It is one of the major political powers of the European continent and a technological leader in many fields.
A region named Germania, inhabited by several Germanic peoples, was documented before AD 100. During the Migration Period, the Germanic tribes expanded southward, and established successor kingdoms throughout much of Europe. Beginning in the 10th century, German territories formed a central part of the Holy Roman Empire. During the 16th century, northern German regions became the centre of the Protestant Reformation while southern and western parts remained dominated by Roman Catholic denominations, with the two factions clashing in the Thirty Years' War, marking the beginning of the Catholic–Protestant divide that has characterized German society ever since. Occupied during the Napoleonic Wars, the rise of Pan-Germanism inside the German Confederation resulted in the unification of most of the German states into the German Empire in 1871 which was Prussian dominated. After the German Revolution of 1918–1919 and the subsequent military surrender in World War I, the Empire was replaced by the Weimar Republic in 1918, and partitioned in the Treaty of Versailles. Amidst the Great Depression, the Third Reich was proclaimed in 1933. The latter period was marked by Fascism and World War II. After 1945, Germany was divided by allied occupation, and evolved into two states, East Germany and West Germany. In 1990 Germany was reunified.
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Kingdom of Sweden
Sweden (i/ˈswiːdən/ SWEE-dən; Swedish: Sverige [ˈsværjɛ] ( listen)), officially the Kingdom of Sweden (Swedish: Konungariket Sverige (help·info)), is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland, and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Øresund.
At 450,295 square kilometres (173,860 sq mi), Sweden is the third largest country in the European Union by area, with a total population of about 9.4 million. Sweden has a low population density of 21 inhabitants per square kilometre (54 /sq mi) with the population mostly concentrated to the southern half of the country. About 85% of the population live in urban areas. Sweden's capital city is Stockholm, which is also the largest city.
Sweden emerged as an independent and unified country during the Middle Ages. In the 17th century, the country expanded its territories to form the Swedish Empire. The empire grew to be one of the great powers of Europe in the 17th and early 18th century. Most of the conquered territories outside the Scandinavian Peninsula were lost during the 18th and 19th centuries. The eastern half of Sweden, present-day Finland, was lost to Russia in 1809. The last war in which Sweden was directly involved was in 1814, when Sweden by military means forced Norway into a personal union. Since then, Sweden has been at peace, practicing "non-participation in military alliances during peacetime and neutrality during wartime". However, Sweden has been a member of the European Union since 1 January 1995 and is a member of the OECD.
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Latvia
Latviai/ˈlætviə/ (Latvian: Latvija), officially the Republic of Latvia (Latvian: Latvijas Republika), is a country in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by Estonia (border length 343 km), to the south by Lithuania (588 km), to the east by the Russian Federation (276 km), to the southeast by Belarus (141 km), and shares maritime borders to the west with Sweden. With 2,067,887 inhabitants and a territory of 64,589 km2 (24,938 sq mi) it is one of the least populous and least densely populated countries of the European Union. The capital of Latvia is Riga. The official language is Latvian and the currency is called Lats (Ls). The country has a temperate seasonal climate.
The Latvians are a Baltic people, culturally related to the Lithuanians. Together with the Finno-Ugric Livs (or Livonians), the Latvians are the indigenous people of Latvia.Latvian is an Indo-European language and along with Lithuanian the only two surviving members of the Baltic branch. Indigenous minority languages are Latgalian and the nearly extinct Finno-Ugric Livonian language. In terms of geography, territory and population Latvia is the middle of three Baltic states: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Latvia and Estonia share a long common history: historical Livonia, times of German (Teutonic Order), Polish-Lithuanian, Swedish, Russian, Nazi German and Soviet rule, 13th century Christianization and 16th century Protestant Reformation. Both countries are home to a large number of ethnic Russians (26.9% in Latvia and 25.5% in Estonia) of whom some are non-citizens. Latvia is historically predominantly Protestant, except for the region of Latgalia in the southeast which is historically predominantly Roman Catholic.
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Leningrad Oblast
Leningrad Oblast (Russian: Ленингра́дская о́бласть, Leningradskaya oblast) is a federal subject of Russia (an oblast). It was established on August 1, 1927, although it was not until 1946 that the oblast's borders had been mostly settled in their present position. The oblast was named after the city of Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg).
The oblast is bordered by Finland in the northwest, Estonia in the west, as well as five federal subjects of Russia: the Republic of Karelia in the northeast, Vologda Oblast in the east, Novgorod Oblast in the south, Pskov Oblast in the southwest, and the federal city of Saint Petersburg in the west.
The first governor of Leningrad Oblast was Vadim Gustov (in 1996–1998). Since 1999 he has been succeeded by Valery Serdyukov, who was replaced by Alexander Drozdenko, since 2012.
The oblast has an area of 84,500 square miles (219,000 km2) and a population of 1,716,868 (2010 Census); up from 1,669,205 recorded in the 2002 Census. The most populous town of the oblast is Gatchina, with 88,659 inhabitants (as of the 2002 Census). Leningrad Oblast is highly industrialized.
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Lithuania
Lithuania (i/ˌlɪθuːˈeɪniə/ or /ˌlɪθjuːˈeɪniə/; Lithuanian: Lietuva), officially the Republic of Lithuania (Lithuanian: Lietuvos Respublika) is a country in Northern Europe, the largest of the three Baltic states. It is situated along the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, whereby to the west lie Sweden and Denmark. It borders Latvia to the north, Belarus to the east and south, Poland to the south, and a Russian exclave (Kaliningrad Oblast) to the southwest. Lithuania has an estimated population of 3.2 million as of 2011, and its capital and largest city is Vilnius. The Lithuanians are a Baltic people, and the official language, Lithuanian, is one of only two living languages (together with Latvian) in the Baltic branch of the Indo-European language family.
For centuries, the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea was inhabited by various Baltic tribes. In the 1230s the Lithuanian lands were united by Mindaugas, who was crowned as King of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the first Lithuanian state, on 6 July 1253. During the 14th century, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was the largest country in Europe: present-day Belarus, Ukraine, and parts of Poland and Russia were territories of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. With the Lublin Union of 1569, Lithuania and Poland formed a voluntary two-state union, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Commonwealth lasted more than two centuries, until neighboring countries systematically dismantled it from 1772 to 1795, with the Russian Empire annexing most of Lithuania's territory.
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Moscow
Moscow (
/ˈmɒskaʊ/ or /ˈmɒskoʊ/; Russian: Москва́, tr. Moskva; IPA: [mɐˈskva] (
listen)) is the capital and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural and scientific center of Russia and the continent. Moscow is the northernmost megacity on Earth, the most populous city in Europe, and the 6th largest city proper in the world. Its population, according to the results of the 2010 Census, is 11,503,501. Based on Forbes 2011, Moscow has the largest community of billionaires in the world.
Moscow is situated on the Moskva River in the Central Federal District of European Russia. In the course of its history the city has served as the capital of a progression of states, from the medieval Grand Duchy of Moscow and the subsequent Tsardom of Russia to the Soviet Union. Moscow is the site of the Moscow Kremlin, an ancient fortress that is today the residence of the Russian President and of the executive branch of the Government of Russia. The Kremlin is also one of several World Heritage Sites in the city. Both chambers of the Russian parliament (the State Duma and the Federation Council) also sit in Moscow.
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NATO
Coordinates: 50°52′34.16″N 4°25′19.24″E / 50.8761556°N 4.4220111°E / 50.8761556; 4.4220111
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization or NATO ( /ˈneɪtoʊ/ NAY-toh; French: Organisation du traité de l'Atlantique Nord (OTAN)), also called the (North) Atlantic Alliance, is an intergovernmental military alliance based on the North Atlantic Treaty which was signed on 4 April 1949. The organization constitutes a system of collective defence whereby its member states agree to mutual defense in response to an attack by any external party. NATO's headquarters are in Brussels, Belgium, one of the 28 member states across North America and Europe, the newest of which, Albania and Croatia, joined in April 2009. An additional 22 countries participate in NATO's Partnership for Peace, with 15 other countries involved in institutionalized dialogue programs. The combined military spending of all NATO members constitutes over 70% of the world's defence spending.
For its first few years, NATO was not much more than a political association. However, the Korean War galvanized the member states, and an integrated military structure was built up under the direction of two U.S. supreme commanders. The course of the Cold War led to a rivalry with nations of the Warsaw Pact, which formed in 1955. The first NATO Secretary General, Lord Ismay, stated in 1949 that the organization's goal was "to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down." Doubts over the strength of the relationship between the European states and the United States ebbed and flowed, along with doubts over the credibility of the NATO defence against a prospective Soviet invasion—doubts that led to the development of the independent French nuclear deterrent and the withdrawal of the French from NATO's military structure in 1966.
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Nazi Germany
The Third Reich, also Nazi Germany, is the common name for Germany when it was a totalitarian state ruled by Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP). On 30 January 1933 Hitler became chancellor of Germany, quickly eliminating all opposition to rule as sole leader. The state idolized Hitler as its Führer ("leader"), centralizing all power in his hands. Historians have emphasized the hypnotic effect of his rhetoric on large audiences, and of his eyes in small groups. Kessel writes, "Overwhelmingly...Germans speak with mystification of Hitler's 'hypnotic' appeal..." Under the "leader principle", the Führer's word was above all other laws. Top officials reported to Hitler and followed his policies, but they had considerable autonomy. The government was not a coordinated, cooperating body, but rather a collection of factions struggling to amass power and curry favor with the Führer. In the midst of the Great Depression, the Nazi government restored prosperity and ended mass unemployment using heavy military spending and a mixed economy of free-market and central-planning practices. Extensive public works were undertaken, including the construction of the Autobahns. The return to prosperity gave the regime enormous popularity; the suppression of all opposition made Hitler's rule mostly unchallenged.
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Norway
Norwayi/ˈnɔrweɪ/ (Norwegian: Norge (Bokmål) or Noreg (Nynorsk)), officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and the subantarctic Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of 385,252 square kilometres (148,747 sq mi) and a population of about 5 million. It is the second least densely populated country in Europe. The majority of the country shares a border to the east with Sweden; its northernmost region is bordered by Finland to the south and Russia to the east; in its south Norway borders the Skagerrak Strait across from Denmark. The capital city of Norway is Oslo. Norway's extensive coastline, facing the North Atlantic Ocean and the Barents Sea, is home to its famous fjords.
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Poland
Polandi/ˈpoʊlənd/ (Polish: Polska), officially the Republic of Poland (Polish: Rzeczpospolita Polska; Kashubian: Pòlskô Repùblika; Silesian: Polsko Republika), is a country in Central Europe, bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north. The total area of Poland is 312,679 square kilometres (120,726 sq mi), making it the 69th largest country in the world and the 9th largest in Europe. Poland has a population of over 38 million people, which makes it the 34th most populous country in the world and the sixth most populous member of the European Union, being its most populous post-communist member. Poland is a unitary state made up of 16 voivodeships. Poland is a member of the European Union, NATO, the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), European Economic Area, International Energy Agency, Council of Europe, Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, International Atomic Energy Agency, G6, Council of the Baltic Sea States, Visegrád Group, Weimar Triangle and Schengen Agreement.
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Riga
Riga (Latvian: Rīga, pronounced [riːɡa] ( listen)) is the capital and largest city of Latvia. With 657,424 inhabitants ( 2011) Riga is the largest city of the Baltic states, one of the largest cities in Northern Europe and home to more than one third of Latvia's population. The city is an important seaport and a major industrial, commercial, cultural and financial centre of the Baltic Sea region.[citation needed] The city lies on the Gulf of Riga, at the mouth of the river Daugava. Riga's territory covers 307.17 km2 (118.60 sq mi) and lies between 1 and 10 metres (3.3 and 33 ft) above sea level, on a flat and sandy plain.
Riga was founded in 1201 and is a former Hanseatic League member. Riga's historical centre is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, noted for its Art Nouveau/Jugendstil architecture and 19th century wooden architecture. The city will be the European Capital of Culture in 2014, along with Umeå in Sweden. The city hosted the 2006 NATO Summit, the Eurovision Song Contest 2003 and the 2006 IIHF Men's World Ice Hockey Championships. It is home to the European Union's office of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC). Riga is served by Riga International Airport, the largest airport in the Baltic states.
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Russia
Russiai/ˈrʌʃə/ or /ˈrʊʃə/ (Russian: Россия, tr. Rossiya; IPA: [rɐˈsʲijə] ( listen)), also officially known as the Russian Federation (Russian: Российская Федерация, tr. Rossiyskaya Federatsiya; IPA: [rɐˈsʲijskəjə fʲɪdʲɪˈratsɨjə] ( listen)), is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects. From northwest to southeast, Russia shares borders with Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland (both via Kaliningrad Oblast), Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia, and North Korea. It also has maritime borders with Japan by the Sea of Okhotsk, and the US state of Alaska by the Bering Strait. At 17,075,400 square kilometres (6,592,800 sq mi), Russia is the largest country in the world, covering more than one eighth of the Earth's inhabited land area. Russia is also the eighth most populous nation with 143 million people. It extends across the whole of northern Asia and 40% of Europe, spanning nine time zones and incorporating a wide range of environments and landforms. Russia has the world's largest reserves of mineral and energy resources and is the largest producer of oil and natural gas globally. Russia has the world's largest forest reserves and its lakes contain approximately one-quarter of the world's fresh water.
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Saeima
Saeima is the parliament of the Republic of Latvia. It is a unicameral parliament consisting of 100 members who are elected by proportional representation, with seats allocated to political parties which gain at least 5% of the popular vote. Elections are scheduled to be held once every four years, normally on the first Saturday of October. The most recent elections were held in September 2011.
The President of Latvia can dismiss the Saeima and request early elections. The procedure for dismissing it involves substantial political risk to the president, including a risk of loss of office. On May 28, 2011, president Valdis Zatlers decided to initiate the dissolution of the current Saeima, which was to be decided in a referendum. The Saeima was dissolved on 23 July 2011.
The current Speaker of the Saeima is Solvita Āboltiņa.
The word "Saeima" meaning "a gathering, a meeting, a council" was constructed by the Young Latvian Juris Alunāns. It stems from the archaic Latvian word eima meaning "to go" (derived from the PIE *ei "to go" and also a cognate with the Ancient Greek eimi, Gaulish eimu among others)
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Saxony
The Free State of Saxony (German: Freistaat Sachsen [ˈfʁaɪʃtaːt ˈzaksən]; Upper Sorbian: Swobodny stat Sakska) is a landlocked state of Germany, bordering Brandenburg, Saxony Anhalt, Thuringia, Bavaria, the Czech Republic and Poland. It is the tenth-largest German state in area, with (18,413 square kilometres (7,109 sq mi), and the sixth most-populous (4.3 million) of Germany's sixteen states.
Located in the middle of an erstwhile German-speaking part of Europe, the history of the state of Saxony spans more than a millennium. It has been a medieval duchy, an electorate of the Holy Roman Empire, a kingdom, a republic from 1918 to 1952 and then again from 1990.
The area of the modern state of Saxony should not be confused with Old Saxony, the area inhabited by Saxons. Old Saxony corresponds approximately to the modern German states of Lower Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and the Westphalian part of North Rhine-Westphalia.
Sachsen is divided into three Direktionsbezirke — Chemnitz, Dresden, Leipzig — which are subdivided into 10 districts:
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Soviet Union
The Soviet Union (Russian: Советский Союз, tr. Sovetsky Soyuz), officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR; Russian: Сою́з Сове́тских Социалисти́ческих Респу́блик, tr. Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik; IPA: [sɐˈjus sɐˈvʲetskʲɪx sətsɨəlʲɪˈstʲitɕɪskʲɪx rʲɪsˈpublʲɪk] ( listen); abbreviated СССР, SSSR), was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991.
The Soviet Union was a single-party state ruled by the Communist Party from its foundation until 1990. A union of 15 subnational Soviet republics, the Soviet state was structured under a highly centralized government and economy.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 caused the downfall of the Russian Empire. Following the Russian Revolution, there was a struggle for power between the Bolshevik party, led by Vladimir Lenin, and the anti-communist White movement. In December 1922, the Bolsheviks won the civil war, and the Soviet Union was formed with the merger of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic.
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Sweden
Sweden (i/ˈswiːdən/ SWEE-dən; Swedish: Sverige [ˈsværjɛ] ( listen)), officially the Kingdom of Sweden (Swedish: Konungariket Sverige (help·info)), is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland, and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Øresund.
At 450,295 square kilometres (173,860 sq mi), Sweden is the third largest country in the European Union by area, with a total population of about 9.4 million. Sweden has a low population density of 21 inhabitants per square kilometre (54 /sq mi) with the population mostly concentrated to the southern half of the country. About 85% of the population live in urban areas. Sweden's capital city is Stockholm, which is also the largest city.
Sweden emerged as an independent and unified country during the Middle Ages. In the 17th century, the country expanded its territories to form the Swedish Empire. The empire grew to be one of the great powers of Europe in the 17th and early 18th century. Most of the conquered territories outside the Scandinavian Peninsula were lost during the 18th and 19th centuries. The eastern half of Sweden, present-day Finland, was lost to Russia in 1809. The last war in which Sweden was directly involved was in 1814, when Sweden by military means forced Norway into a personal union. Since then, Sweden has been at peace, practicing "non-participation in military alliances during peacetime and neutrality during wartime". However, Sweden has been a member of the European Union since 1 January 1995 and is a member of the OECD.
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Swedish Estonia
The Duchy of Estonia (Swedish: Hertigdömet Estland, Estonian: Eestimaa hertsogkond), also known as Swedish Estonia, (Swedish: Svenska Estland) was a dominion of the Swedish Empire from 1561 until 1721, when it was ceded to Russia in the Treaty of Nystad, following its capitulation in the Great Northern War. The dominion arose when the northern parts of present-day Estonia were united under Swedish rule in 1561. The city of Reval and the counties of Harjumaa, Western Virumaa, Raplamaa and Järvamaa surrendered in 1561, and Läänemaa was conquered in 1581. It is also colloquially known as the "good old Swedish times" (Estonian: vana hea Rootsi aeg) by Estonians, but this expression was not used before the following Russian rule, in the beginning of which the situation of Estonian peasantry declined rapidly (to gain support of German nobility, Russia gave them more power over peasantry).
Infantry regiments:
Cavalry regiments:
Temporary cavalry regiments:
Coordinates: 59°26′N 24°45′E / 59.433°N 24.75°E / 59.433; 24.75
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Tallink
Tallink (NASDAQ OMX: TAL1T) is an Estonian shipping company currently operating Baltic Sea cruiseferries and ropax ships from Estonia to Finland, Estonia to Sweden, Latvia to Sweden and Finland to Germany. They also own Silja Line and a part of SeaRail. It is one of the largest passenger and cargo shipping companies in the Baltic Sea region.
History of the company known today as Tallink can be traced back to the year 1965 when the Soviet Union-based Estonian Shipping Company (ESCO) started passenger traffic between Helsinki and Tallinn with MS Vanemuine. Regular around-the-year traffic was started in 1968 with MS Tallinn, which served on the route until she was replaced by the new MS Georg Ots in 1980.
In May 1989 ESCO formed a new subsidiary, Laevandusühisettevõte Tallink, together with the Finnish Palkkiyhtymä Oy. In December of the same year ESCO and Palkkiyhtymä purchased MS Scandinavian Sky from SeaEscape, and the ship began traffic on the Helsinki–Tallinn route in January 1990 as MS Tallink. Later in the same year the freighter MS Transestonia joined the Tallink on the Helsinki–Tallinn route and Tallink was established as the name of the company as well as the main ship. At the same time ESCO still operated the Georg Ots in the same route, essentially competing with its own daughter company. This conflict was resolved in September 1991 when the Georg Ots was chartered to Tallink. In the early 1990s passenger numbers on Helsinki–Tallinn traffic were steadily increasing, and during winters between 1992 and 1995 Tallink chartered MS Saint Patrick II from Irish Ferries to increase capacity on the route.
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Tallinn
Tallinn (/ˈtɑːlɪn/ or /ˈtælɪn/,Estonian pronunciation: [ˈtɑlʲˑinˑ]) is the capital and largest city of Estonia. It occupies an area of 159.2 km2 (61.5 sq mi) with a population of 416,470. It is situated on the northern coast of the country, on the shore of the Gulf of Finland, 80 km (50 mi) south of Helsinki, east of Stockholm and west of Saint Petersburg. Tallinn's Old Town is in the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites. It is ranked as a global city and has been listed among the top 10 digital cities in the world. The city was a European Capital of Culture for 2011, along with Turku, Finland.
Tallinn is the oldest capital[clarification needed] in Northern Europe. The city was known as Reval from the 13th century until the 1920s.
In 1154 a town called Qlwn or Qalaven (possible derivations of Kalevan or Kolyvan) was put on the world map of the Almoravid by the Muslim cartographer Muhammad al-Idrisi, who described it as a small town like a large castle among the towns of Astlanda. It has been suggested that the Quwri in Astlanda may have denoted the predecessor town of today's Tallinn.
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Tartu
Tartu is the second largest city of Estonia. In contrast to Estonia's political and financial capital Tallinn, Tartu is often considered the intellectual and cultural hub, especially since it is home to Estonia's oldest and most renowned university. Situated 186 km southeast of Tallinn, the city is the centre of southern Estonia. The Emajõgi river, which connects the two largest lakes of Estonia, crosses Tartu. The city is served by Tartu Airport.
Historical names of the town include Tarbatu, an Estonian fortress founded in the 5th century,Yuryev (Юрьев) named c. 1030 by Yaroslav I the Wise, and Dorpat as first known by the German crusaders in the 13th century.
As Tartu has been under control of various rulers throughout its history, there are various names for the city in different languages. Most of them derive from the earliest attested form, the Estonian Tarbatu. In German, Swedish and Polish the town has been and sometimes still is known as Dorpat (help·info), a variant of Tarbatu. In Russian, the city has been known as Юрьев (Yuryev) after Yaroslav I the Wise and Дерпт (Derpt), a variant of Dorpat (however, since 1917 the Estonian name Tartu is used). Similarly, the city has been known as Tērbata in Latvian.
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Terra Mariana
Terra Mariana (Land of Mary) was the official name for Medieval Livonia or Old Livonia (German: Alt-Livland, Estonian: Vana-Liivimaa, Latvian: Livonija) which was formed in the aftermath of the Livonian Crusade in the territories comprising present day Estonia and Latvia. It was established on February 2, 1207, as a principality of the Holy Roman Empire but lost this status in 1215 when proclaimed by Pope Innocent III as a direct subject to the Holy See.
Terra Mariana was divided into feudal principalities by Papal Legate William of Modena: the Archbishopric of Riga, Bishopric of Courland, Bishopric of Dorpat, Bishopric of Ösel-Wiek, the lands ruled by the Livonian Brothers of the Sword The northern parts became a Dominum directum to the King of Denmark, Duchy of Estonia.
After the 1236 Battle of Saule the surviving members of the brothers merged in 1237 with the Teutonic Order of Prussia and became known as the Livonian Order. In 1346 the order bought Danish Estonia. Throughout the existence of medieval Livonia there was a constant struggle over the supremacy of ruling the lands by the Church, the Order, the secular German nobility and the citizens of the Hanseatic towns of Riga and Reval. Following its defeat in the Battle of Grunwald in 1410 the Teutonic Order and the Ordenstaat fell into decline but the Livonian Order managed to maintain its independent existence. In 1561, during the Livonian war, Terra Mariana ceased to exist. Its northern parts were ceded to Sweden and formed into the Duchy of Estonia, its southern territories became part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania — and thus eventually of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth as the Duchy of Livonia and Duchy of Courland and Semigallia. The island of Saaremaa became part of Denmark.
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United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (commonly known as the United Kingdom, the UK, or Britain) is a sovereign state located off the north-western coast of continental Europe. The country includes the island of Great Britain, the north-eastern part of the island of Ireland and many smaller islands. Northern Ireland is the only part of the UK that shares a land border with another sovereign state—the Republic of Ireland. Apart from this land border the UK is surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, the North Sea, the English Channel and the Irish Sea.
The United Kingdom is a unitary state governed under a constitutional monarchy and a parliamentary system, with its seat of government in the capital city of London. It is a country in its own right and consists of four countries: England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. There are three devolved administrations, each with varying powers, based in Belfast, Edinburgh and Cardiff, the capitals of Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Associated with the UK, but not constitutionally part of it, are three Crown Dependencies. The United Kingdom has fourteen overseas territories. These are remnants of the British Empire which, at its height in 1922, encompassed almost a quarter of the world's land surface and was the largest empire in history. British influence can still be observed in the language, culture and legal systems of many of its former territories.
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United States
The United States of America (commonly abbreviated to the United States, the U.S., the USA, America, and the States) is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its forty-eight contiguous states and Washington, D.C., the capital district, lie between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, bordered by Canada to the north and Mexico to the south. The state of Alaska is in the northwest of the continent, with Canada to the east and Russia to the west, across the Bering Strait. The state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific. The country also possesses several territories in the Pacific and Caribbean.
At 3.79 million square miles (9.83 million km2) and with over 312 million people, the United States is the third or fourth largest country by total area, and the third largest by both land area and population. It is one of the world's most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, the product of large-scale immigration from many countries. The U.S. economy is the world's largest national economy, with an estimated 2011 GDP of $15.1 trillion (22% of nominal global GDP and over 19% of global GDP at purchasing-power parity). Per capita income is the world's sixth-highest.
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Vilnius
Vilnius ([ˈvʲɪlʲnʲʊs] ( listen); see also other names) is the capital of Lithuania, and its largest city, with a population of 554,060 (838, 852 together with Vilnius County) as of 2011. It is the seat of the Vilnius city municipality and of the Vilnius district municipality. It is also the capital of Vilnius County. The first known written record of Vilnius as the Lithuanian capital is known from Gediminas' letters in 1323. Vilnius is classified as a Gamma global city according to GaWC studies.
The name of the city originated from the Vilnia River. The city has also been known by many derivate spellings in various languages throughout its history. The most notable non-Lithuanian names for the city include: Polish: Wilno, Belarusian: Вiльнюс, Вiльня, German: Wilna, Latvian: Viļņa, Russian: Вильнюс, Yiddish: ווילנע (Vilne). An older Russian name was Вильна / Вильно (Vilna/Vilno), although Вильнюс (Vilnius) is now used. The names Wilno, Wilna and Vilna have also been used in older English, German, French and Italian language publications. The name Vilna is still used in Finnish, Portuguese, Spanish, and Hebrew.
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Yalta Conference
The Yalta Conference, sometimes called the Crimea Conference and codenamed the Argonaut Conference, held February 4–11, 1945 , was the wartime meeting of the heads of government of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union, represented by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and General Secretary Joseph Stalin, respectively, for the purpose of discussing Europe's post-war reorganization. The conference convened in the Livadia Palace near Yalta, in the Crimea.
The meeting was intended mainly to discuss the re-establishment of the nations of war-torn Europe. Within a few years, with the Cold War dividing the continent, Yalta became a subject of intense controversy. To some extent, it has remained controversial.
Yalta was the second of three wartime conferences among the Big Three (Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin). It had been preceded by the Tehran Conference in 1943, and it was followed by the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, which was attended by Harry S Truman, who replaced the late Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill, who was replaced mid-point by the newly elected British Prime Minister Clement Attlee.
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Šiauliai
Šiauliai ( Lithuanian (help·info)), is the fourth largest city in Lithuania, with a population of 133,900. It is the capital of Šiauliai County. Unofficially, the city is the capital of Northern Lithuania.
Šiauliai is referred to by a various names in different languages: Samogitian: Šiaulē, Latvian Saule (historic) and Šauļi (modern), German: Schaulen, Polish: Szawle, Russian: Шавли (Shavli - historic) and Шяуля́й (Shyaulyai - modern), Yiddish: שאַװל (Shavel).
The city was first mentioned in written sources as Soule in Livonian Order chronicles describing the battle of Saule. Thus the city's founding date is now considered to be September 22, 1236, the same date when the battle took place, not far from Šiauliai. At first it developed as a defense post against the raids by the Teutonic and Livonian Orders. After the battle of Grunwald in 1410, the raids stopped and Šiauliai started to develop as an agricultural settlement. In 1445, a wooden church was built. It was replaced in 1634 with the brick church which can be seen in the city center today.
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Aboriginal people
Indigenous peoples are ethnic groups that are defined as "indigenous" according to one of the various definitions of the term, though there is no universally accepted definition.
In the late twentieth century, the term began to be used primarily to refer to ethnic groups that have historical ties to groups that existed in a territory prior to colonization or formation of a nation state, and which normally preserve a degree of cultural and political separation from the mainstream culture and political system of the nation state within the border of which the indigenous group is located. The political sense of the term defines these groups as particularly vulnerable to exploitation and oppression by nation states. As a result, a special set of political rights in accordance with international law have been set forth by international organizations such as the United Nations, the International Labour Organization and the World Bank. The United Nations have issued a Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples to protect the collective rights of indigenous peoples to their culture, identity, language, employment, health, education and natural resources. Depending on which precise definition of "indigenous people" used, and on the census, estimates of a world total population of Indigenous people range from 220 million Indigenous peoples in 1997 to 350 million in 2004.
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Adam of Bremen
Adam of Bremen (also: Adamus Bremensis) was a German medieval chronicler. He lived and worked in the second half of the eleventh century. He is most famous for his chronicle Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum (Deeds of Bishops of the Hamburg Church).
Little is known of his life other than hints from his own chronicles. He is believed to have come from Meissen (Latin Misnia) in Saxony.[citation needed] The dates of his birth and death are uncertain, but he was probably born before 1050 and died on 12 October of an unknown year (Possibly 1081, latest 1085). From his chronicles it is apparent that he was familiar with a number of authors. The honorary name of Magister Adam shows that he had passed through all the stages of a higher education. It is probable that he was taught at the Magdeburger Domschule.
In 1066 or 1067 he was invited by archbishop Adalbert of Hamburg to join the Church of Bremen[citation needed], since Adalbert believed he would improve the literary reputation of the diocese. Adam was accepted among the capitulars of Bremen, and by 1069 he appeared as director of the cathedral's school.[citation needed] Soon thereafter he began to write the history of Bremen/Hamburg and of the northern lands in his Gesta.
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Aestii
The Aesti (or Aestii) were a people described by the Roman historian Tacitus in his treatise Germania (ca. 98 CE). According to this account, the Aestii lived on the shore of the Suebian Sea (Baltic Sea), eastward of the Suiones (Scandinavians) and westward of the Sitones. They were a population of Suebia. Tacitus did not know whether to assign the nearby Fenni to Germania or Sarmatia (which extended as far west as the Vistula in places).
The ancient writers, beginning with Tacitus, who was the first Roman author to mention them in his Germania, provide very little information on the Aestii. Although Tacitus never travelled to Magna Germania himself and only recorded information he had obtained from others, the short ethnographic excursus below is the most detailed ancient account of the Aestii that we have:
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B.B. King
Riley B. King (born September 16, 1925), known by the stage name B.B. King, is an American songwriter, vocalist, and famed blues guitarist.
Rolling Stone magazine ranked him at No. 6 on its list of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time. and No. 17 in in Gibson's Top 50 Guitarists of All Time. According to Edward M. Komara, King "introduced a sophisticated style of soloing based on fluid string bending and shimmering vibrato that would influence virtually every electric blues guitarist that followed." King was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987.
King was born in a small cabin on a cotton plantation outside of Berclair, Mississippi, to Albert King and Nora Ella Farr on September 16, 1925.
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Balts
The Balts or Baltic peoples (People who live by the Baltic Sea), defined as speakers of one of the Baltic languages, a branch of the Indo-European language family, are descended from a group of Indo-European tribes who settled area between the Jutland peninsula in the west and Moscow, Oka and Volga rivers basins in the east. One of the features of Baltic languages is the number of conservative or archaic features retained. Among the Baltic peoples are modern Lithuanians, Latvians (including Latgalians) — all Eastern Balts — as well as the Prussians, Yotvingians and Galindians — the Western Balts — whose languages and cultures are now extinct.
Adam of Bremen was the first writer to use the term Baltic in its modern sense to mean the sea of that name. Although he must have been familiar with the ancient name, Balcia, meaning a supposed island in the Baltic Sea, and although he may have been aware of the Baltic words containing the stem balt-, "white", as "swamp", he reports that he followed the local use of balticus from baelt ("belt") because the sea stretches to the east "in modum baltei" ("in the manner of a belt"). This is the first reference to "the Baltic or Barbarian Sea, a day's journey from Hamburg."
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Björk
Björk Guðmundsdóttir ( /ˈbjɜrk/; [ˈpjœr̥k ˈkvʏðmʏntsˌtoʊhtɪr] ( listen); born 21 November 1965), known as Björk, is an Icelandic singer-songwriter. Her musical style is eclectic and she has achieved recognition in rock, jazz, electronic dance music, classical, and folk.
Björk's 1990s singles "It's Oh So Quiet", "Army of Me" and "Hyperballad" charted in the UK Top 10.[citation needed] Her record label, One Little Indian, reported that by 2003 she had sold more than 15 million albums worldwide. She has acquired a high level of critical acclaim. She has won four BRIT Awards, four MTV Video Music Awards, one MOJO Award, three UK Music Video Awards, and, in 2010, the Polar Music Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Music, in recognition for her "deeply personal music and lyrics, her precise arrangements and her unique voice".
Björk has also been nominated for twelve Grammy Awards, one Academy Award and two Golden Globe Awards. She won the Best Actress Award at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival for her performance in Dancer in the Dark. She was ranked thirty-sixth in VH1's "The 100 Greatest Women in Rock and Roll", eighth in MTV's "22 Greatest Voices in Music", and sixtieth in Rolling Stone's "100 Greatest Singers of All Time".
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Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan ( /ˈdɪlən/), born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941, is an American singer-songwriter, musician and artist. He has been an influential figure in popular music and culture for five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was an informal chronicler and a seemingly reluctant figurehead of social unrest. A number of Dylan's early songs, such as "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'", became anthems for the US civil rights and anti-war movements. Leaving his initial base in the culture of folk music behind, Dylan's six-minute single "Like a Rolling Stone" has been described as radically altering the parameters of popular music in 1965. However, his recordings employing electric instruments attracted denunciation and criticism from others in the folk movement.
Dylan's lyrics incorporated a variety of political, social, philosophical, and literary influences. They defied existing pop music conventions and appealed hugely to the then burgeoning counterculture. Initially inspired by the songs of Woody Guthrie,Robert Johnson, and Hank Williams, as well as the music and performance styles of Buddy Holly and Little Richard, Dylan has both amplified and personalized musical genres. His recording career, spanning fifty years, has explored numerous distinct traditions in American song—from folk, blues and country to gospel, rock and roll, and rockabilly to English, Scottish, and Irish folk music, embracing even jazz and swing.
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Bruce Springsteen
Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen (born September 23, 1949), nicknamed "The Boss," is an American singer-songwriter-performer who records and tours with the E Street Band. Springsteen is widely known for his brand of heartland rock, poetic lyrics, and Americana sentiments centered on his native New Jersey.
Springsteen's recordings have included both commercially accessible rock albums and more somber folk-oriented works. His most successful studio albums, Born in the U.S.A. and Born to Run, showcase a talent for finding grandeur in the struggles of daily American life; he has sold more than 65 million albums in the United States and more than 120 million worldwide and he has earned numerous awards for his work, including 21 Grammy Awards, two Golden Globes and an Academy Award. He is widely regarded by many as one of the most influential songwriters of the 20th century, and in 2004, Rolling Stone ranked him as the 23rd Greatest Artist of all time.
Springsteen was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, and spent his childhood and high school years in Freehold Borough. He lived on South Street in Freehold Borough and attended Freehold Borough High School. His father, Douglas Frederick Springsteen, was of Dutch and Irish ancestry and worked, among other vocations, as a bus driver, although he was frequently unemployed; his surname is Dutch for jump stone. His mother, Adele Ann (née Zerilli), was a legal secretary and was of Italian ancestry. His maternal grandfather was born in Vico Equense, a city near Naples. He has two younger sisters, Virginia and Pamela. Pamela had a brief film career, but left acting to pursue still photography full time; she took photos for the Human Touch and Lucky Town albums.
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Curonians
The Curonians or Kurs (Curonian: Kursi; German: Kuren; Latvian: kurši; Lithuanian: kuršiai; Estonian: kuralased; Polish: Kurowie) were a Baltic tribe living on the shores of the Baltic Sea in what are now the western parts of Latvia and Lithuania from the 5th to the 16th centuries, when they merged with other Baltic tribes. They gave their name to the region of Courland (Kurzeme), and they spoke the Old Curonian language. Curonian lands were conquered by the Livonian Order in 1266 and they eventually merged with other Baltic tribes participating in the ethnogenesis of Lithuanians and Latvians. Direct descendants of the Curonians include the Kuršininkai of the Curonian Spit and the so-called Curonian Kings of Courland.
The Curonians were known as fierce warriors, excellent sailors and pirates. They were involved in several wars and alliances with Swedish, Danish, Icelandic and Kven Vikings.
In c. 750, according to Norna-Gests þáttr from c. 1157, the king of Denmark and Sweden, Sigurd Ring, fought against the invading Curonians and Kvens in the southern part of what today is Sweden:
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Dalia Grybauskaitė
Dalia Grybauskaitė (pronounced [ˈdaːlʲæ ɡʲrʲiːbɒʊsˈkaɪtʲeː], born 1 March 1956) is the current President of Lithuania, inaugurated on 12 July 2009. She had previously been Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs, Finance Minister, and European Commissioner for Financial Programming and the Budget. Often referred to as the "Iron Lady" or the "Steel Magnolia", Grybauskaitė is Lithuania's first female head of state.
Grybauskaitė was born on 1 March 1956 in a working-class family in Vilnius. Her mother, Vitalija Korsakaitė (1922–1989), was born in the Biržai region and worked as a saleswoman; her father, Polikarpas Grybauskas (1928–2008), worked as an electrician and driver. Grybauskaitė attended Salomėja Nėris High School. She has described herself as not among the best of students, receiving mostly fours in a system where five was the highest grade. Her favourite subjects were history, geography and physics.
Grybauskaitė began participating in sport at the age of eleven, and became a passionate basketball player. At the age of nineteen, she worked for a year at the Lithuanian National Philharmonic Society as a staff inspector. She then enrolled in Saint Petersburg State University, then known as Zhdanov University, as a student of political economy. At the same time, she began working in a local factory. In 1983, Grybauskaitė graduated with a citation and returned to Vilnius, taking a secretarial position at the Academy of Sciences. Work in the Academy was scarce, however, and she moved to the Vilnius Party High School, where she lectured in political economy and global finance. Between 1983 and 1990 she was a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In 1988, she defended her PhD thesis at Moscow's Academy of Social Sciences of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (now the Russian Academy of State Service).
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Dizzy Gillespie
John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie ( /ɡɨˈlɛspi/; October 21, 1917 – January 6, 1993) was an American jazz trumpeter, bandleader, composer and, occasionally, singer.
Allmusic's Scott Yanow wrote, "Dizzy Gillespie's contributions to jazz were huge. One of the greatest jazz trumpeters of all time (some would say the best), Gillespie was such a complex player that his contemporaries ended up copying Miles Davis and Fats Navarro instead, and it was not until Jon Faddis's emergence in the 1970s that Dizzy's style was successfully recreated . . . Arguably Gillespie is remembered, by both critics and fans alike, as one of the greatest jazz trumpeters of all time."
Gillespie was a trumpet virtuoso and improviser, building on the virtuoso style of Roy Eldridge but adding layers of harmonic complexity previously unknown in jazz. His beret and horn-rimmed spectacles, his scat singing, his bent horn, pouched cheeks and his light-hearted personality were essential in popularizing bebop.
In the 1940s Gillespie, together with Charlie Parker, became a major figure in the development of bebop and modern jazz. He taught and influenced many other musicians, including trumpeters Miles Davis, Fats Navarro, Clifford Brown, Arturo Sandoval, Lee Morgan, Jon Faddis and Chuck Mangione.
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Edgar V. Saks
Edgar Valter Saks (January 25, 1910 Tartu – April 11, 1984, Montreal) was an Estonian statesman, amateur historian and author. He was Estonian Minister of Public Education in exile from May 8, 1971 until his death. His book "Estonian Vikings: a Treatise on Finno-Ugric Viking Activities" describes the ancient history of Estonians and other finno-ugric people living on the shores of the Baltic Sea. His etymological works provide information about prehistoric Estonian settlement in Northern Europe.
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Elton John
Sir Elton Hercules John, CBE (born Reginald Kenneth Dwight on 25 March 1947) is an English rock singer-songwriter, composer, pianist and occasional actor. He has worked with lyricist Bernie Taupin as his songwriter partner since 1967; they have collaborated on more than 30 albums to date.
In his four-decade career John has sold more than 250 million records, making him one of the most successful artists of all time. His single "Candle in the Wind 1997" has sold over 33 million copies worldwide, and is the best selling single in Billboard history. He has more than 50 Top 40 hits, including seven consecutive No. 1 US albums, 56 Top 40 singles, 16 Top 10, four No. 2 hits, and nine No. 1 hits. He has won six Grammy Awards, four Brit Awards, an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award and a Tony Award. In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked him Number 49 on its list of the 100 greatest artists of all time.
John was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994. Having been named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1996, John received a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II for "services to music and charitable services" in 1998.
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Ennio Morricone
Ennio Morricone, Grand Officer OMRI, Italian pronunciation: [ˈɛnnjo morriˈkoːne], (born November 10, 1928) is an Italian composer and conductor, who has written music for more than 500 motion pictures and television series, in a career lasting over 50 years. His scores have been included in over 20 award-winning films as well as several symphonic and choral pieces. Morricone is most famous for his work in the Spaghetti Westerns directed by his friend Sergio Leone, including A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) but his career includes a wide range of composition genres making him one of the film world's most versatile artists. He is considered as one of the most influential film music composers of the 20th century.
Born in Rome, Italy, Morricone took up the trumpet as a child and attended the National Academy of Santa Cecilia to take lessons on the instrument at the age of nine. He formally entered a conservatory at the age of 12, enrolling in a four-year harmony programme. He received his trumpet diploma in 1946 and started working professionally, composing the music to "Il Mattino" ("The Morning"). Morricone soon gained popularity by writing his first background music for radio dramas and quickly moved into film.
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Estonian Swedes
The Estonian Swedes, Estonia-Swedes, or Coastal Swedes (Swedish: estlandssvenskar, "Estonia Swedes", colloquially aibofolke, "Island People", Estonian: rannarootslased, i.e. "Coastal Swedes" or eestirootslased) are a Swedish-speaking linguistic minority traditionally residing in the coastal areas and islands of what is now western and northern Estonia. The beginning of the continuous settlement of Estonian Swedes in these areas (known as Aiboland) dates back to the 13th and 14th centuries, when their Swedish-speaking ancestors arrived in Estonia from what is now Sweden and Finland. Almost all of Estonia's Swedish-speaking minority fled to Sweden during World War II, and only the descendants of a few individuals who opted to stay are permanently resident in Estonia today.
The Swedish speaking population in Estonia persisted for about 650 years. The first written mention of the Swedish population in Estonia comes from 1294, in the laws of the town of Haapsalu. Further early mentions of Swedes in Estonia came in 1341 and 1345 (when an Estonian monastery in Padise sold "the Laoküla Estate" and Suur-Pakri Island to a group of Swedes). During the 13th through 15th centuries, large numbers of Swedes arrived in coastal Estonia from Finland, which was part of the Kingdom of Sweden (and would remain so for hundreds of years), often settling on Church-owned land. The first documented record of the island of Ruhnu (Swedish: Runö), and of its Swedish population, is also a 1341 letter sent by the Bishop of Courland which confirmed the islanders' right to reside and manage their property in accordance with Swedish law.
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Estonians
Estonians (Estonian: eestlased) are a Finnic people closely related to the Finns and inhabiting, primarily, the country of Estonia. They speak a Finnic language known as Estonian. Although Estonia is traditionally grouped as one of the Baltic countries, Estonians are linguistically unrelated to the Baltic peoples of Latvia and Lithuania.
Estonia was first inhabited about 10,000 years ago, just after the Baltic ice lake had retreated from Estonia. While it is not certain what languages were spoken by the first settlers, it is often maintained that speakers of early Uralic languages related to modern Estonian had arrived in what is now Estonia by about 5000 years ago. Living in the same area for more than 5000 years would put the ancestors of Estonians among the oldest permanent inhabitants in Europe. On the other hand, some recent linguistic estimations suggest that Fenno-Ugrian language arrived around the Baltic Sea considerably later, perhaps during the Early Bronze Age (ca. 1800 BCE).
The name "Eesti", or Estonia, is thought to be derived from the word Aestii, the name given by the ancient Germanic people to the Baltic people living northeast of the Vistula River. The Roman historian Tacitus in 98 A.D. was the first to mention the "Aestii" people, and early Scandinavians called the land south of the Gulf of Finland "Eistland" ("Eistland" is also the current word in Icelandic for Estonia), and the people "eistr". Proto-Estonians (as well as other speakers of the Finnish language group) were also called Chuds (чудь) in Old East Slavic chronicles.
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Finnic peoples
The Finnic or Fennic peoples (also referred to as Finnic tribes , and Russian: Chuds) were historic ethnic groups who spoke various languages traditionally classified as Finno-Permic. The number and identity of these groups varies according to the linguistic classification of the day, but generally number four or five: the Baltic Finns at the shores of Baltic sea, the Volga Finns (alternately the Mordvins and Mari), who lived near the Volga River, the Lapps at the Northern Fennoscandia, and the Permians, who live in north-central Russia.
The Permians including Komis and Udmurts are sometimes thought to belong with the Volga Finns because according to some theories their ancient homeland lies in the northern part of the Volga River basin.
The major modern representatives of the Baltic Finns who have maintained their languages are the Finns and Estonians.
The modern representatives of the Volga Finns are the Mari or Cheremis who live in Mari El Republic and the Mordvins (including the Moksha and the Erzya) from the Republic of Mordovia in the Russian Federation. Other Volga Finnic groups of which there are records, such as the Muromians, Merya and Meshchera, have long since disappeared.
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Georg Nesselmann
Georg Heinrich Ferdinand Nesselmann (February 14, 1811 Fürstenau (now Kmecin, within Nowy Dwór Gdański), January 7, 1881,Königsberg) was a German orientalist, philologist with interests in Baltic languages, and a mathematics historian.
He suggested the term "Baltic languages".
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Germanic languages
The Germanic languages constitute a sub-branch of the Indo-European (IE) language family. The common ancestor of all of the languages in this branch is called Proto-Germanic (also known as Common Germanic), which was spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe. Proto-Germanic, along with all of its descendants, is characterized by a number of unique linguistic features, most famously the consonant change known as Grimm's law. Early varieties of Germanic enter history with the Germanic peoples moving south from northern Europe in the 2nd century BC, to settle in north-central Europe.
The most widely spoken Germanic languages are English and German, with approximately 300–400 million and over 100 million native speakers respectively. They belong to the West Germanic family. The West Germanic group also includes other major languages, such as Dutch with 23 million and Afrikaans with over 6 million native speakers;. The North Germanic languages include Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, and Faroese, which have a combined total of about 20 million speakers. The SIL Ethnologue lists 53 different Germanic languages.
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Germans
The Germans (Deutsche) are a Germanic ethnic group native to Central Europe. The English term Germans has referred to the German-speaking population of the Holy Roman Empire since the Late Middle Ages. Legally, Germans are citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Of approximately 100 million native speakers of German in the world, about 66–75 million consider themselves Germans. There are an additional 80 million people of German ancestry mainly in the United States, Brazil, Canada, Argentina, France, Russia, Chile, Poland, Australia and Romania who most likely are not native speakers of German. Thus, the total number of Germans worldwide lies between 66 and 160 million, depending on the criteria applied (native speakers, single-ancestry ethnic Germans, partial German ancestry, etc.).
Today, peoples from countries with a German-speaking majority or significant German-speaking population groups other than Germany, such as Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Luxembourg, have developed their own national identity and usually do not refer to themselves as "Germans" in a modern context.
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György Ligeti
György Sándor Ligeti (Hungarian: Ligeti György Sándor, [ˈliɡɛti ˈɟørɟ ˈʃaːndor]; May 28, 1923 – June 12, 2006) was a composer of contemporary classical music. Born into a Hungarian Jewish family in Transylvania, Romania, he lived in Hungary before emigrating and becoming an Austrian citizen.
Ligeti was born in Dicsőszentmárton, which was renamed Târnăveni in 1945, in Transylvania to a Hungarian Jewish family. Ligeti recalls that his first exposure to languages other than Hungarian came one day while listening to a conversation among the Romanian-speaking town police. Before that he hadn't known that other languages existed. He moved to Kolozsvár (Cluj) with his family when he was 6, and he was not to return to the town of his birth until the 1990s.
Ligeti received his initial musical training in the conservatory at Kolozsvár (Cluj), and during the summers privately with Pál Kadosa in Budapest.
In 1940, Northern Transylvania was occupied by Hungary following the Second Vienna Award. In 1944, Ligeti's education was interrupted when he was sent to a forced labor brigade by the Horthy regime. His brother, age 16, was deported to the Mauthausen concentration camp, and both of his parents were sent to Auschwitz. His mother was the only other survivor of his immediate family.
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Hunter-gatherer
A hunter-gatherer or forager society is one in which most or all food is obtained from wild plants and animals, in contrast to agricultural societies which rely mainly on domesticated species.
Hunting and gathering was the ancestral subsistence mode of Homo, and all modern humans were hunter-gatherers until around 10,000 years ago. Following the invention of agriculture hunter-gatherers have been displaced by farming or pastoralist groups in most parts of the world. Only a few contemporary societies are classified as hunter-gatherers, and many supplement, sometimes extensively, their foraging activity with farming and/or keeping animals.
The earliest humans probably lived primarily on scavenging, not actual hunting. Early humans in the Lower Paleolithic lived in mixed habitats which allowed them to collect seafood, eggs, nuts, and fruits besides scavenging. Rather than killing large animals themselves for meat, they used carcasses of large animals killed by other predators or carcasses from animals that died by natural causes.
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Isaac Stern
Isaac Stern (Ukrainian: Исаак Стерн, Russian: Айзек Стерн; July 21, 1920 – September 22, 2001) was a Ukrainian-born violinist and conductor. He was renowned for his recordings and for discovering new musical talent.
Isaac Stern was born into a Jewish family in Kremenets, Ukraine. He was fourteen months old when his family moved to San Francisco. He received his first music lessons from his mother, then in 1928 enrolled at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where he studied until 1931 before going on to study privately with Louis Persinger. He returned to the San Francisco Conservatory to study for five years with Naoum Blinder, to whom he said he owed the most. At his public début on February 18, 1936, aged 15, he played Saint-Saëns' Violin Concerto No. 3 in B minor with the San Francisco Symphony under the direction of Pierre Monteux. Reflecting on his background, Stern once memorably quipped that cultural exchanges between the US and Soviet Russia were simple affairs: "They send us their Jews from Odessa, and we send them our Jews from Odessa."
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Joni Mitchell
Joni Mitchell, CC (born Roberta Joan Anderson; November 7, 1943) is a Canadian musician, singer songwriter, and painter. Mitchell began singing in small nightclubs in Saskatchewan and Western Canada and then busking in the streets and dives of Toronto. In 1965 she moved to the United States and, touring constantly, began to be recognized when her original songs ("Urge for Going," "Chelsea Morning," "Both Sides, Now," "The Circle Game") were covered by notable folk singers, allowing her to sign with Reprise Records and record her own debut album in 1968. Settling in Southern California, Mitchell and her popular songs like "Big Yellow Taxi" and "Woodstock" helped define an era and a generation. Her more starkly personal 1971 recording Blue has been called one of the best albums ever made. Musically restless, Mitchell switched labels and began moving toward jazz rhythms by way of lush pop textures on 1974's Court and Spark, her best-selling LP, featuring her radio hits "Help Me" and "Free Man in Paris."
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José Antonio Abreu
José Antonio Abreu (born May 7, 1939 in Valera) is a Venezuelan pianist, economist, educator, activist, and politician.
Born in the city of Valera in 1939, Abreu graduated ¨Summa Cum Laude¨ as an Economist at Universidad Católica Andres Bello and he was awarded a PhD degree in Petroleum Economics from the same university in 1961. Abreu also did some graduate work at the University of Michigan. He served as a Deputy at the Chamber of Deputies in the Congress of Venezuela. After his political career, he also worked as a professor of economics and law at Universidad Simón Bolívar and his Alma Mater. He would return to politics briefly in 1983 to serve as Minister of Culture.
Abreu began to study music with Doralisa Jiménez de Medina in Barquisimeto. Later, he attended the Caracas Musical Declamation Academy in 1957, where he studied piano with Moisés Moleiro, organ and harpsichord with Evencio Castellanos, and composition with Vicente Emilio Sojo. In 1967, he received the Symphonic Music National Prize for his musical ability. It was in 1975 that he founded El Sistema, formally known as the Foundation for the National Network of Youth and Children Orchestras of Venezuela.
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Keith Jarrett
Keith Jarrett (born May 8, 1945, in Allentown, Pennsylvania) is an American pianist and composer who performs both jazz and classical music.
Jarrett started his career with Art Blakey, moving on to play with Charles Lloyd and Miles Davis. Since the early 1970s he has enjoyed a great deal of success in jazz, jazz fusion, and classical music; as a group leader and a solo performer. His improvisations draw not only from the traditions of jazz, but from other genres as well, especially Western classical music, gospel, blues, and ethnic folk music.
In 2003, Jarrett received the Polar Music Prize, the first (and to this day only) recipient not to share the prize with a co-recipient, and in 2004 he received the Léonie Sonning Music Prize.
In 2008, he was inducted into the Down Beat Hall of Fame in the magazine's 73rd Annual Readers' Poll.
Jarrett grew up in suburban Allentown, Pennsylvania, with significant early exposure to music. He possessed absolute pitch, and he displayed prodigious musical talents as a young child. He began piano lessons just before his third birthday, and at age five he appeared on a TV talent program hosted by the swing bandleader Paul Whiteman. The young Jarrett gave his first formal piano recital at the age of seven, playing works by composers including Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, and Saint-Saëns, and ending with two of his own compositions. Encouraged especially by his mother, Jarrett took intensive classical piano lessons with a series of teachers, including Eleanor Sokoloff of the Curtis Institute.
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Latvians
Latvians or Letts (Latvian: latvieši; Livonian: leţlizt) are the indigenous Baltic people of Latvia.
Latvians occasionally refer to themselves by the ancient name of Latvji, which may have originated from the word Latve which is a name of the river that presumably flowed through what is now eastern Latvia. A Finnic-speaking tribe known as the Livs settled among the Latvians and modulated the name to "Latvis," meaning "forest-clearers," which is how medieval German settlers also referred to these peoples. The German colonizers changed this name to "Lette" and called their initially small colony Livland. The Latin form, Livonia, gradually referred to the whole territory of the modern-day Latvia as well as southern Estonia, which had fallen under German dominion. Latvians and Lithuanians are the only surviving members of the Baltic peoples and Baltic languages of the Indo-European family.
The paternal haplogroup N1c1 is the most frequent (45%[citation needed]) among Latvians and is shared with other Northern European nations, primarily of Finno-Ugric stock, namely Finns, Estonians and others; and also the fellow Baltic Lithuanians. It is also common in Asia, primarily among Yakuts and Finno-Ugrics.
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Lithuanians
Lithuanians (Lithuanian: lietuviai, singular lietuvis/lietuvė) are the Baltic ethnic group native to Lithuania, where they number around 2,765,600 people. Another million or more make up the Lithuanian diaspora, largely found in countries such as the United States, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Russia, United Kingdom and Ireland. Their native language is Lithuanian, one of only two surviving members of the Baltic language family. According to the census conducted in 2001, 83.45% of the population of Lithuania proper identified themselves as Lithuanians, 6.74% as Poles, 6.31% as Russians, 1.23% as Belarusians, and 2.27% as members of other ethnic groups. Most Lithuanians belong to the Roman Catholic Church, while the Lietuvininkai who lived in the northern part of East Prussia prior to World War II, were mostly Evangelical Lutherans.
The territory of the Balts, including modern Lithuania, was once inhabited by several Baltic tribal entities (Aukštaitians, Sudovians, Old Lithuanians, Curonians, Semigallians, Selonians, Samogitians, Skalvians, Old Prussians (Nadruvians)), as attested by ancient sources and dating from prehistoric times. Over the centuries, and especially under the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, some of these tribes consolidated into the Lithuanian nation, mainly as a defence against the marauding Teutonic Order and Eastern Slavs. One of the last Pagan peoples in Europe, they were eventually converted to Christianity in 1387.
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Mikhail Gorbachev
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (Russian: Михаи́л Серге́евич Горбачёв, tr. Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachyov; IPA: [mʲɪxɐˈil sʲɪrˈɡʲejəvʲɪtɕ ɡərbɐˈtɕof] ( listen); born 2 March 1931) is a former Soviet statesman, having served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991, and as the last head of state of the Soviet Union, having served from 1988 until its dissolution in 1991. He was the only general secretary in the history of the Soviet Union to have been born during the Communist rule.
Gorbachev was born in Stavropol Krai into a peasant Ukrainian–Russian family, and in his teens operated combine harvesters on collective farms. He graduated from Moscow State University in 1955 with a degree in law. While he was at the university, he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and soon became very active within it. In 1970, he was appointed the First Party Secretary of the Stavropol Kraikom, First Secretary to the Supreme Soviet in 1974, and appointed a member of the Politburo in 1979. Within three years of the deaths of Soviet Leaders Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko, Gorbachev was elected General Secretary by the Politburo in 1985. Before he reached the post, he had occasionally been mentioned in western newspapers as a likely next leader and a man of the younger generation at the top level.
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Nikolaus Harnoncourt
Nikolaus Harnoncourt (Count Nikolaus de la Fontaine und d'Harnoncourt-Unverzagt) (born 6 December 1929) is an Austrian conductor, particularly known for his historically informed performances of music from the Classical era and earlier. Starting out as a classical cellist, he founded his own period instrument ensemble in the 1950s, and became a pioneer of the Early Music movement. Around 1970, Harnoncourt started to conduct opera and concert performances, soon leading renowned international symphony orchestras, and appearing at leading concert halls, operatic venues and festivals. His repertoire has since widened to include composers of the 19th and 20th century. In 2001 and 2003, he conducted the Vienna New Year's Concert. Harnoncourt is also the author of several books, mostly on questions of performance history and musical aesthetics.
Harnoncourt was born in Berlin, Germany. He was raised in Graz, Austria and studied music in Vienna. His mother, Ladislaja Gräfin von Meran, Freiin von Brandhoven, was the granddaughter of the Habsburg Archduke Johann, the 13th child of the Emperor Leopold II. He is thus descended from various Holy Roman Emperors and other European royalty. His father, Eberhard de la Fontaine Graf d'Harnoncourt-Unverzagt, was an engineer working in Berlin who had two children from a previous marriage. Two years after Nikolaus's birth, his brother Philipp was born. The family eventually moved to Graz, where Eberhard had obtained a post in the state-government (Landesregierung) of Styria.
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Patti Smith
Patricia Lee "Patti" Smith (born December 30, 1946) is an American singer-songwriter, poet and visual artist, who became a highly influential component of the New York City punk rock movement with her 1975 debut album Horses.
Called the "Godmother of Punk", her work was a fusion of rock and poetry. Smith's most widely known song is "Because the Night", which was co-written with Bruce Springsteen and reached number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1978. In 2005, Patti Smith was named a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture, and in 2007, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. On November 17, 2010, she won the National Book Award for her memoir Just Kids. She is also a recipient of the 2011 Polar Music Prize.
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Paul McCartney
Sir James Paul McCartney, MBE, Hon RAM, FRCM (born 18 June 1942) is an English musician, singer-songwriter and composer. Formerly of the Beatles (1960–1970) and Wings (1971–1981), he has been described by Guinness World Records as "The Most Successful Composer and Recording Artist of All Time", with 60 gold discs and sales of over 100 million albums and 100 million singles. With John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr, he gained worldwide fame as a member of the Beatles, and with Lennon formed one of the most celebrated songwriting partnerships of the 20th century. After leaving the Beatles, he began a solo career and later formed the band Wings with his first wife, Linda Eastman, and singer-songwriter Denny Laine.
According to the BBC, his Beatles song "Yesterday" has been covered by over 2,200 artists—more than any other song. Wings' 1977 release, "Mull of Kintyre", became one of the best-selling singles ever in the UK, and he is "the most successful songwriter" in UK chart history, according to Guinness. As a songwriter or co-writer, he is included on thirty-one number one titles on the Billboard Hot 100, and as of 2012 he has sold over 15.5 million RIAA certified units in the United States.
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Peter Gabriel
Peter Brian Gabriel (born 13 February 1950) is an English singer, musician, and songwriter who rose to fame as the lead vocalist and flautist of the progressive rock group Genesis. After leaving Genesis, Gabriel went on to a successful solo career. His 1986 album, So, is his most commercially successful, and the album's biggest hit, "Sledgehammer", won a record nine MTV Awards at the 1987 MTV Video Music Awards, and the song is the most played music video in the history of the station.
More recently, Gabriel has focused on producing and promoting world music and pioneering digital distribution methods for music. He has also been involved in various humanitarian efforts. Gabriel has won numerous music awards throughout his career, including three Brit Awards—winning Best British Male in 1987, six Grammy Awards, thirteen MTV Video Music Awards, and in 2007 he was honoured as a BMI Icon at the 57th annual BMI London Awards for his “influence on generations of music makers.” Gabriel was also awarded the Polar Music Prize in 2009, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Genesis in 2010.
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Peter the Great
Peter the Great, Peter I or Pyotr Alexeyevich Romanov (Russian: Пётр Алексе́евич Рома́нов, Пётр I, Pyotr I, or Пётр Вели́кий, Pyotr Velikiy) (9 June [O.S. 30 May] 1672 – 8 February [O.S. 28 January] 1725) ruled the Tsardom of Russia and later the Russian Empire from 7 May [O.S. 27 April] 1682 until his death, jointly ruling before 1696 with his half-brother. In numerous successful wars he expanded the Tsardom into a huge empire that became a major European power. According to historian James Cracraft, he led a cultural revolution that replaced the traditionalist and medieval social and political system with a modern, scientific, Europe-oriented, and rationalist system.
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Pierre Boulez
Pierre Boulez (French pronunciation: [pjɛʁ bu.lɛːz]) (born 26 March 1925) is a French composer of contemporary classical music, a pianist, and a conductor.
Boulez was born in Montbrison, Loire, France. As a child he began piano lessons and demonstrated aptitude in both music and mathematics. He pursued the latter at Lyon before pursuing music at the Paris Conservatoire under Olivier Messiaen and the wife of Arthur Honegger, Andrée Vaurabourg.
Through Messiaen, Boulez discovered twelve-tone technique — which he would later study privately with René Leibowitz — and went on to write atonal music in a post-Webernian serial style. Boulez was initially part of a cadre of early supporters of Leibowitz, but due to an altercation with Leibowitz, their relations turned divisive, as Boulez spent much of his career promoting the music of Messiaen instead.
The first fruits of this were his cantatas Le visage nuptial and Le soleil des eaux for female voices and orchestra, both composed in the late 1940s and revised several times since, as well as the Second Piano Sonata of 1948, a well-received 32-minute work that Boulez composed at the age of 23. Thereafter, Boulez was influenced by Messiaen's research to extend twelve-tone technique beyond the realm of pitch organization, serialising durations, dynamics, mode of attack, and so on. This technique became known as integral serialism.
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Quincy Jones
Quincy Delight Jones, Jr. (born March 14, 1933) is an American record producer, conductor, arranger, film composer, television producer, and trumpeter. His career spans five decades in the entertainment industry and a record 79 Grammy Award nominations, 27 Grammys, including a Grammy Legend Award in 1991. He is particularly recognized as the producer of the album Thriller, by pop icon Michael Jackson, which has sold more than 110 million copies worldwide, and as the producer and conductor of the charity song “We Are the World”.
In 1968, Jones and his songwriting partner Bob Russell became the first African Americans to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song "The Eyes of Love" from the Universal Pictures film Banning. That same year, he became the first African American to be nominated twice within the same year when he was nominated for Best Original Score for his work on the music of the 1967 film In Cold Blood. In 1971, Jones would receive the honor of becoming the first African American to be named musical director/conductor of the Academy Awards ceremony. He was the first African American to win the Academy's Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, in 1995. He is tied with sound designer Willie D. Burton as the most Oscar-nominated African American, each of them having seven nominations. At the 2008 BET Awards, Quincy Jones was presented with the Humanitarian Award. He was played by Larenz Tate in the 2004 biopic about Ray Charles, Ray.
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Ravi Shankar
Ravi Shankar (Bengali: রবি শংকর; born Robindro Shaunkor Chowdhury on 7 April 1920), often referred to with the title Pandit, is an Indian musician and composer who plays the plucked string instrument sitar. He has been described as the most known contemporary Indian musician by Hans Neuhoff in Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart.
Shankar was born in Varanasi and spent his youth touring Europe and India with the dance group of his brother Uday Shankar. He gave up dancing in 1938 to study sitar playing under court musician Allauddin Khan. After finishing his studies in 1944, Shankar worked as a composer, creating the music for the Apu Trilogy by Satyajit Ray, and was music director of All India Radio, New Delhi, from 1949 to 1956.
In 1956, he began to tour Europe and America playing Indian classical music and increased its popularity there in the 1960s through teaching, performance, and his association with violinist Yehudi Menuhin and George Harrison of The Beatles. Shankar engaged Western music by writing concerti for sitar and orchestra and toured the world in the 1970s and 1980s. From 1986 to 1992 he served as a nominated member of the upper chamber of the Parliament of India. Shankar was awarded India's highest civilian honor, the Bharat Ratna, in 1999, and received three Grammy Awards. He continues to perform in the 2000s, often with his daughter Anoushka.
wn.com/Ravi_Shankar -
Ray Charles
Ray Charles Robinson (September 23, 1930 – June 10, 2004), known by his shortened stage name Ray Charles, was an American musician. He was a pioneer in the genre of soul music during the 1950s by fusing rhythm and blues, gospel, and blues styles into his early recordings with Atlantic Records. He also helped racially integrate country and pop music during the 1960s with his crossover success on ABC Records, most notably with his Modern Sounds albums. While with ABC, Charles became one of the first African-American musicians to be given artistic control by a mainstream record company.Frank Sinatra called Charles “the only true genius in show business.”
The influences upon his music were mainly jazz, blues, rhythm and blues and country artists of the day such as Art Tatum, Nat King Cole, Louis Jordan, Charles Brown, Louis Armstrong. His playing reflected influences from country blues and barrelhouse, and stride piano styles.
Rolling Stone ranked Charles number ten on their list of "100 Greatest Artists of All Time" in 2004, and number two on their November 2008 list of "100 Greatest Singers of All Time". In honoring Charles, Billy Joel noted: "This may sound like sacrilege, but I think Ray Charles was more important than Elvis Presley. I don't know if Ray was the architect of rock & roll, but he was certainly the first guy to do a lot of things . . . Who the hell ever put so many styles together and made it work?"
wn.com/Ray_Charles -
Renée Fleming
Renée Fleming (born February 14, 1959) is an American soprano specializing in opera and lieder. Fleming has a full lyric soprano voice. Fleming has performed coloratura, lyric, and lighter spinto soprano repertoires. She has sung roles in Italian, German, French, Czech, and Russian, aside from her native English. She also speaks fluent German and French, along with limited Italian. Her signature roles include Countess Almaviva in Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro, Desdemona in Verdi's Otello, Violetta in Verdi's La traviata, the title role in Dvořák's Rusalka, the title role in Massenet's Manon, the title role in Massenet's Thaïs, the Marschallin in Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier, and the title role in Arabella.
A Richard Tucker Award winner, she regularly performs in opera houses and concert halls worldwide. In 2008 she was awarded the Swedish Polar Music Prize for her services in music.
Conductor Sir Georg Solti said of Fleming, "In my long life, I have met maybe two sopranos with this quality of singing; the other was Renata Tebaldi."
wn.com/Renée_Fleming -
Robert Moog
Robert Arthur "Bob" Moog (/ˈmoʊɡ/ MOHG; May 23, 1934 – August 21, 2005), founder of Moog Music, was an American pioneer of electronic music, best known as the inventor of the Moog synthesizer.
Bob Moog's innovative electronic design is employed in numerous synthesizers including the Minimoog Model D, Minimoog Voyager, Little Phatty, Moog Taurus Bass Pedals, Moog Minitaur, and the Moogerfooger line of effects pedals.
A native of New York City, Moog attended the Bronx High School of Science in New York, graduating in 1952. Moog earned a bachelor's degree in physics from Queens College, New York in 1957, another in electrical engineering from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in engineering physics from Cornell University. Moog's awards include honorary doctorates from Polytechnic Institute of New York University (New York City) and Lycoming College (Williamsport, Pennsylvania).
During his lifetime, Moog founded two companies for manufacturing electronic musical instruments. He also worked as a consultant and vice president for new product research at Kurzweil Music Systems from 1984 to 1988, helping to develop the Kurzweil K2000. He spent the early 1990s as a research professor of music at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.
wn.com/Robert_Moog -
Sofia Gubaidulina
Sofia Asgatovna Gubaidulina, (Russian: Софи́я Асгатовна Губайду́лина, Tatar Cyrillic: София Әсгать кызы Гобәйдуллина, Latin: Sofia Äsğät qızı Ğöbäydullina) (born October 24, 1931) is a Russian composer of half Russian, half Tatar ethnicity.
Gubaidulina's music is marked by the use of unusual instrumental combinations. In Erwartung combines percussion (bongos, güiros, temple blocks, cymbals and tam-tams among others), bayan and saxophone quartet.
Gubaidulina was born in Chistopol, in the Tatar ASSR. She studied composition and piano at the Kazan Conservatory, graduating in 1954. In Moscow she undertook further studies at the Conservatory with Nikolay Peyko until 1959, and then with Shebalin until 1963. She was awarded with Stalin-fellowship. Her music was deemed "irresponsible" during her studies in Soviet Russia, due to its exploration of alternative tunings. She was supported, however, by Dmitri Shostakovich, who in evaluating her final examination encouraged her to continue down her "mistaken path". However, she was allowed to express her modernism in various scores she composed for documentary films, including the 1968 production, On Submarine Scooters, a 70mm film shot in the unique Kinopanorama widescreen format.
wn.com/Sofia_Gubaidulina -
Sonny Rollins
Theodore Walter "Sonny" Rollins (born September 7, 1930 in New York City) is an American jazz tenor saxophonist. Rollins is widely recognized as one of the most important and influential jazz musicians. A number of his compositions, including "St. Thomas", "Oleo", "Doxy", and "Airegin", have become jazz standards.
Although Rollins was born in New York City, his parents were born in the United States Virgin Islands. Rollins received his first saxophone at age 13. He attended Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem. He said that a concert by Frank Sinatra there, accompanied by a plea for racial harmony, changed his life.
Rollins started as a pianist, changed to alto saxophone, and finally switched to tenor in 1946. During his high-school years, he played in a band with other future jazz legends Jackie McLean, Kenny Drew and Art Taylor. He was first recorded in 1949 with Babs Gonzales ( J. J. Johnson was the arranger of the group). In his recordings through 1954, he played with performers such as Miles Davis, Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk.
wn.com/Sonny_Rollins -
Steve Reich
Stephen Michael "Steve" Reich ( /ˈraɪʃ/; born October 3, 1936) is an American composer who is one of the pioneering composers of minimal music along with La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass.
His innovations include using tape loops to create phasing patterns (examples are his early compositions, "It's Gonna Rain" and "Come Out"), and the use of simple, audible processes to explore musical concepts (for instance, "Pendulum Music" and "Four Organs"). These compositions, marked by their use of repetitive figures, slow harmonic rhythm and canons, have significantly influenced contemporary music, especially in the US. Reich's work took on a darker character in the 1980s with the introduction of historical themes as well as themes from his Jewish heritage, notably the Grammy Award-winning Different Trains.
Reich's style of composition influenced many other composers and musical groups. Reich has been described, in The Guardian by music critic Andrew Clements, as one of "a handful of living composers who can legitimately claim to have altered the direction of musical history", and the critic Kyle Gann has said Reich "may...be considered, by general acclamation, America's greatest living composer."
wn.com/Steve_Reich -
Stevie Wonder
Stevland Hardaway Morris (born May 13, 1950 as Stevland Hardaway Judkins), known by his stage name Stevie Wonder, is an American singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist, a child prodigy who developed into one of the most creative musical figures of the late 20th century. Blind since shortly after birth, Wonder signed with Motown's Tamla label at the age of eleven, and continues to perform and record for Motown to this day.
Among Wonder's best known works are singles such as "Superstition", "Sir Duke", "I Wish" and "I Just Called to Say I Love You". Well known albums also include Talking Book, Innervisions and Songs in the Key of Life. He has recorded more than thirty U.S. top ten hits and received twenty-two Grammy Awards, the most ever awarded to a male solo artist. Wonder is also noted for his work as an activist for political causes, including his 1980 campaign to make Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday a holiday in the United States. In 2009, Wonder was named a United Nations Messenger of Peace. In 2008, Billboard magazine released a list of the Hot 100 All-Time Top Artists to celebrate the US singles chart's fiftieth anniversary, with Wonder at number five.
wn.com/Stevie_Wonder -
Swedes
Swedes (Swedish: svenskar) are a nation and ethnic group native to Sweden, mostly inhabiting Sweden and the other Nordic countries, with descendants living in a number of countries.
Most scholars agree that Suiones and the attested Germanic forms of the name derive from the same Proto-Indo-European reflexive pronominal root, *s(w)e, as the Latin suus. The word must have meant "one's own (tribesmen)". In modern Scandinavian, the same root appears in words such as svåger (brother-in-law) and svägerska (sister-in-law). The same root and original meaning is found in the ethnonym of the Germanic tribe Suebi, preserved to this day in the name Schwaben.
Sweden enters proto-history with the Germania of Tacitus in AD 98. In Germania 44, 45 he mentions the Swedes (Suiones) as a powerful tribe (distinguished not merely for their arms and men, but for their powerful fleets) with ships that had a prow in both ends (longships). Which kings (kuningaz) ruled these Suiones is unknown, but Norse mythology presents a long line of legendary and semi-legendary kings going back to the last centuries BC. As for literacy in Sweden itself, the runic script was in use among the south Scandinavian elite by at least the 2nd century AD, but all that has come down to the present from the Roman Period is curt inscriptions on artefacts, mainly of male names, demonstrating that the people of south Scandinavia spoke Proto-Norse at the time, a language ancestral to Swedish and other North Germanic languages.
wn.com/Swedes -
Tacitus
Publius (or Gaius) Cornelius Tacitus (AD 56 – AD 117) was a senator and a historian of the Roman Empire. The surviving portions of his two major works—the Annals and the Histories—examine the reigns of the Roman Emperors Tiberius, Claudius, Nero and those who reigned in the Year of the Four Emperors. These two works span the history of the Roman Empire from the death of Augustus in AD 14 to (presumably) the death of emperor Domitian in AD 96. There are substantial lacunae in the surviving texts, including one four books long in the Annals.
Other writings by him discuss oratory (in dialogue format, see Dialogus de oratoribus), Germania (in De origine et situ Germanorum), and the life of his father-in-law Agricola, mainly focusing on his campaign in Britannia (see De vita et moribus Iulii Agricolae).
Tacitus is considered to be one of the greatest Roman historians. He lived in what has been called the Silver Age of Latin literature, and as well as the brevity and compactness of his Latin prose, he is known for his penetrating insights into the psychology of power politics.
wn.com/Tacitus -
Timothy Garton Ash
Timothy Garton Ash (born 12 July 1955) is a British historian, author and commentator. He is currently serving as Professor of European Studies at Oxford University. Much of his work has been concerned with the late modern and contemporary history of Central and Eastern Europe. He has written about the Communist dictatorships of that region, their experience with the secret police, the Revolutions of 1989 and the transformation of the former Eastern Bloc states into member states of the European Union. He has examined the role of Europe in an increasingly post-Western world and the challenge of combining freedom and diversity—especially in relation to free speech.
Garton Ash was educated at Sherborne School, an independent school for boys in the market town of Sherborne in Dorset in South West England, followed by Exeter College at the University of Oxford, where he studied Modern History. For post-graduate study, he went to St Antony's College, Oxford, and then, in the still divided Berlin, the Free University in West Berlin and the Humboldt University in East Berlin.
wn.com/Timothy_Garton_Ash -
Toomas Hendrik Ilves
Toomas Hendrik Ilves (Estonian pronunciation: [ˈtoːmɑs ˈhendrik ˈilves]; born 26 December 1953) is the fourth and current President of Estonia. He is a former diplomat and journalist, was the leader of the Social Democratic Party in the 1990s and later a member of the European Parliament. He was elected to the post by an electoral college on 23 September 2006 and his term as President began on 9 October 2006.
Ilves was born in Stockholm, Sweden; his parents were Estonian refugees. He grew up in the United States in Leonia, New Jersey and graduated from Leonia High School in 1972 as valedictorian. He received a bachelor's degree in psychology from Columbia University in 1976 and a master's degree in the same subject from the University of Pennsylvania in 1978. In addition to his native Estonian, he is fluent in English, German and Spanish.
During the 1980s, Ilves worked as a journalist for Radio Free Europe and became actively involved in politics prior to Estonia's independence in 1991. Ilves subsequently became Ambassador of Estonia to the United States in 1993; he also served as Ambassador to Canada and Mexico for several years.
wn.com/Toomas_Hendrik_Ilves -
Valery Gergiev
Valery Abisalovich Gergiev PAR (Russian: Валерий Абисалович Гергиев, Ossetic: Гергиты Абисалы фырт Валери/Gergity Abisaly Fyrt Valeri; born 2 May 1953) is a Russian conductor and opera company director. He is general director and artistic director of the Mariinsky Theatre, principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, and artistic director of the White Nights Festival in St. Petersburg.
Gergiev, born in Moscow, is the son of Tamara Tatarkanovna and Abisal Zaurbekovich. He and his siblings were raised in Vladikavkaz in their native North Ossetia in the Caucasus. He began piano at secondary school, before going on to study at the St. Petersburg Conservatory in Leningrad from 1972 to 1977. His principal conducting teacher was Prof. Ilya Musin (Илья Мусин), one of the greatest conductor-makers in Russian musical history. His sister, Larissa Gergieva, is a pianist and director of the Mariinsky's singers' academy.
In 1978, he became assistant conductor at the Kirov Opera, now the Mariinsky Opera, under Yuri Temirkanov, where he made his debut conducting Sergei Prokofiev's War and Peace. He was chief conductor of the Armenian Philharmonic Orchestra from 1981 until 1985 – the year he made his debut in the United Kingdom, along with pianist Evgeny Kissin, and violinists Maxim Vengerov and Vadim Repin, at The Lichfield Festival.
wn.com/Valery_Gergiev -
Witold Lutosławski
Witold Lutosławski (Polish pronunciation: [ˈvitɔld lutɔsˈwafski]; January 25, 1913 – February 7, 1994) was one of the major European composers of the 20th century, and one of the preeminent Polish musicians during his last three decades. He earned many international awards and prizes, including the Order of the White Eagle, Poland's highest honour.
During his youth, Lutosławski studied piano and composition in Warsaw. His early works were influenced by Polish folk music. His style demonstrates a wide range of rich atmospheric textures. He began to develop his own characteristic composition techniques in the late 1950s. His music from this period onwards incorporates his own methods of building harmonies from small groups of musical intervals. It also uses aleatoric processes, in which the rhythmic coordination of parts is subject to an element of chance. His compositions (of which he was a notable conductor) include four symphonies, a Concerto for Orchestra, a string quartet, several instrumental concertos and orchestral song cycles.
wn.com/Witold_Lutosławski
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Dispatch: Divergent Views of the EU and Russia in the Baltic States
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:01
- Updated: 26 Nov 2012
For more analysis, visit: www.stratfor.com Analyst Eugene Chausovsky, currently visiting Riga, Latvia, explores the different approaches taken by Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania toward relations with Russia and the European Union.
http://wn.com/Dispatch_Divergent_Views_of_the_EU_and_Russia_in_the_Baltic_States
For more analysis, visit: www.stratfor.com Analyst Eugene Chausovsky, currently visiting Riga, Latvia, explores the different approaches taken by Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania toward relations with Russia and the European Union.
Trollbeads World Tour - The Baltic States
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:41
- Updated: 06 Dec 2012
We invite you on an unforgettable journey to the Baltic States! Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are called the Baltic Sisters - they have much in common yet they are very different - just as sisters can be. This collection explores Lithuania - the Baltic Heart. Take a walk on a beach sparkling with amber, taste the most delicious beer in the world, and cheer on the amazing basketball players' victories. At night, take a stroll through Vilnius, the capital city of Lithuania, and hear the thrilling howl of the iron wolf.
http://wn.com/Trollbeads_World_Tour_The_Baltic_States
We invite you on an unforgettable journey to the Baltic States! Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are called the Baltic Sisters - they have much in common yet they are very different - just as sisters can be. This collection explores Lithuania - the Baltic Heart. Take a walk on a beach sparkling with amber, taste the most delicious beer in the world, and cheer on the amazing basketball players' victories. At night, take a stroll through Vilnius, the capital city of Lithuania, and hear the thrilling howl of the iron wolf.
- published: 19 May 2011
- views: 12669
- author: TrollbeadsTV
Official US State Recognition of the Baltic States of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:17
- Updated: 06 Dec 2012
President Bush announces the official state recognition of the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia in a press conference at his vacation home in Kennebunkport, ME on September 2, 1991. Copyright: C-SPAN.
http://wn.com/Official_US_State_Recognition_of_the_Baltic_States_of_Lithuania,_Latvia,_and_Estonia
President Bush announces the official state recognition of the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia in a press conference at his vacation home in Kennebunkport, ME on September 2, 1991. Copyright: C-SPAN.
- published: 29 Aug 2011
- views: 1252
- author: USEmbassyTallinn
Latvia Riga Baltic States DestMgt
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 6:09
- Updated: 20 Nov 2012
Highlights of Latvia section of Toursgallery Baltic States small group escorted tour. Includes Riga, the capital of Latvia, famed for its remarkable collection of Art Nouveau buildings, carrot festival and bustling market. Additional visits include the 18th century Rundale Palace, Gauja National Park, a natural wonderland of forested hills, riverside cliffs and bogs; Sigulda, a picturesque town spanned by a string of medieval castles and legendary caves; Cesis, a well preserved medieval market town of ancient stone and wood houses. We also visit, Palanga, Liepaja, Kuldiga, Venta Rumba, Riezupa, Jugendstil, Jugla Lake, Gutmanis Cave, Kropotkin Turaida Castle anf Jurmala Resort with its Baltic Sea beach. More videos by Anna Osetroff from Timeline Films can be seen on DestMgt youtube site. Destination Management and Toursgallery operate escorted small group tours ... our website is www.toursgallery.com and Toursgallery is also on facebook
http://wn.com/Latvia_Riga_Baltic_States_DestMgt
Highlights of Latvia section of Toursgallery Baltic States small group escorted tour. Includes Riga, the capital of Latvia, famed for its remarkable collection of Art Nouveau buildings, carrot festival and bustling market. Additional visits include the 18th century Rundale Palace, Gauja National Park, a natural wonderland of forested hills, riverside cliffs and bogs; Sigulda, a picturesque town spanned by a string of medieval castles and legendary caves; Cesis, a well preserved medieval market town of ancient stone and wood houses. We also visit, Palanga, Liepaja, Kuldiga, Venta Rumba, Riezupa, Jugendstil, Jugla Lake, Gutmanis Cave, Kropotkin Turaida Castle anf Jurmala Resort with its Baltic Sea beach. More videos by Anna Osetroff from Timeline Films can be seen on DestMgt youtube site. Destination Management and Toursgallery operate escorted small group tours ... our website is www.toursgallery.com and Toursgallery is also on facebook
- published: 03 Mar 2012
- views: 219
- author: DestMgt
Baltic States Trip (Jan 2012 )
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:12
- Updated: 29 Oct 2012
Video Montage of my trip to the Baltic States (Lithuania, Latvia & Estonia) from the 20th Jan to the 29th Jan.
http://wn.com/Baltic_States_Trip_Jan_2012_
Video Montage of my trip to the Baltic States (Lithuania, Latvia & Estonia) from the 20th Jan to the 29th Jan.
- published: 01 Feb 2012
- views: 220
- author: Shawn Litruthe
NATO Air Power in the Baltic States
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 5:02
- Updated: 24 Jun 2012
NATO has extended its Air Policing mission to the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. The agreement is a good example of Smart Defense. It shows how the Alliance can balance political and military needs in difficult economic times. Produced by Mike Muhlberger.
http://wn.com/NATO_Air_Power_in_the_Baltic_States
NATO has extended its Air Policing mission to the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. The agreement is a good example of Smart Defense. It shows how the Alliance can balance political and military needs in difficult economic times. Produced by Mike Muhlberger.
- published: 06 Apr 2012
- views: 235
- author: alliefox25
Baltic boom busts as mass unemployment spurs brain drain
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:37
- Updated: 27 Nov 2012
Formerly known as a booming Baltic, Latvia's economic gains have masked a greater problem, concerning the very survival of the nation. EU accession has become something of a roller-coaster ride for Latvia. Hopes of a Baltic boom have instead given way to a brain drain - with the country's young and talented leaving in search of better opportunities elsewhere. Many young jobless dream only of departing. RT's Jacob Greaves reports. RT on Twitter twitter.com RT on Facebook www.facebook.com
http://wn.com/Baltic_boom_busts_as_mass_unemployment_spurs_brain_drain
Formerly known as a booming Baltic, Latvia's economic gains have masked a greater problem, concerning the very survival of the nation. EU accession has become something of a roller-coaster ride for Latvia. Hopes of a Baltic boom have instead given way to a brain drain - with the country's young and talented leaving in search of better opportunities elsewhere. Many young jobless dream only of departing. RT's Jacob Greaves reports. RT on Twitter twitter.com RT on Facebook www.facebook.com
- published: 01 Apr 2012
- views: 23685
- author: RussiaToday
Baltic States Part 1
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 50:35
- Updated: 18 May 2012
Join Cheryll as she journeys to Estonia. With some of the cheapest prices in Europe and a vibrant, modern art scene, Cheryll checks out the multitudes of handcrafted works of art and samples her share of sweet treats along the way. Episode highlights include: Ivo Nikkolo, a top designer that focuses on designing body conscious designs and attention to detail. The work of Dominic Caines, which is dominated by cool, Northern inspired colors painted on textiles. The Marzipan Museum, where stunning works of art are made out of the classic candy. Asuurkeraamika, an open gallery where you can watch artists create stunning ceramics. Koppel and Keerdo Galerii, where glass is blown by hand and you can buy exquisite, colorful glasswork. Tekstili studio, where artists hand paint silk scarves. Throughout the episode you will also experience: Leather journals, Hats that transcend time periods, A variety of small art galleries. Let's Shop brings you the best shopping experiences from top travel destinations all over the world. Join host Cheryll Gillespie as she explores the funkiest boutiques, hippest malls, and most exclusive shops the world over. Packed with historical information and travel tips, Cheryll lends her keen eye and sage advice to make each trip an unforgettable combination of luxury, culture, and fun.
http://wn.com/Baltic_States_Part_1
Join Cheryll as she journeys to Estonia. With some of the cheapest prices in Europe and a vibrant, modern art scene, Cheryll checks out the multitudes of handcrafted works of art and samples her share of sweet treats along the way. Episode highlights include: Ivo Nikkolo, a top designer that focuses on designing body conscious designs and attention to detail. The work of Dominic Caines, which is dominated by cool, Northern inspired colors painted on textiles. The Marzipan Museum, where stunning works of art are made out of the classic candy. Asuurkeraamika, an open gallery where you can watch artists create stunning ceramics. Koppel and Keerdo Galerii, where glass is blown by hand and you can buy exquisite, colorful glasswork. Tekstili studio, where artists hand paint silk scarves. Throughout the episode you will also experience: Leather journals, Hats that transcend time periods, A variety of small art galleries. Let's Shop brings you the best shopping experiences from top travel destinations all over the world. Join host Cheryll Gillespie as she explores the funkiest boutiques, hippest malls, and most exclusive shops the world over. Packed with historical information and travel tips, Cheryll lends her keen eye and sage advice to make each trip an unforgettable combination of luxury, culture, and fun.
- published: 09 Jan 2010
- views: 593
- author: TravelVideoStore
Baltic States Celebrate 20 Years of Independence
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:37
- Updated: 06 Aug 2012
For more news visit ☛ english.ntdtv.com Follow us on Twitter ☛ http Follow us on Facebook ☛ me.lt On the 18th of October, European Union officials, along with representatives of EU member states and Non-Government Organizations, celebrate the 20th anniversary of independence of the Baltic States with a conference in the European Parliament. The Baltic States - or Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania - gained independence from the communist-ruled Soviet Union in 1991. Tunne Kelam is an Estonian politician and Member of the European Parliament. He also founded the first non-communist party in the Soviet Union. [Tunne Kelam, Estonian Politician and MEP]: "Because in 1987, people used to think that only communist party would be able - and [be] experienced [enough] - to bring about reforms. But then there emerged alternatives in genuine popular movement within the Baltic States and they culminated with an establishment of the first noncommunist political party within the Soviet Union in August 88. This was called the Estonian National Independence Party." Sandra Kalniete created the Latvian 'Popular Front', the biggest non-communist organisation at the time, and launched a quit-the-communist-party movement. [Sandra Kalniete, Latvian Politician and MEP]: "And finally it was evident that we can appeal to our members to put down their membership card and to quit the Communist Party. That was a very massive exodus, which really weakened the Communist Party. And finally they just had ...
http://wn.com/Baltic_States_Celebrate_20_Years_of_Independence
For more news visit ☛ english.ntdtv.com Follow us on Twitter ☛ http Follow us on Facebook ☛ me.lt On the 18th of October, European Union officials, along with representatives of EU member states and Non-Government Organizations, celebrate the 20th anniversary of independence of the Baltic States with a conference in the European Parliament. The Baltic States - or Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania - gained independence from the communist-ruled Soviet Union in 1991. Tunne Kelam is an Estonian politician and Member of the European Parliament. He also founded the first non-communist party in the Soviet Union. [Tunne Kelam, Estonian Politician and MEP]: "Because in 1987, people used to think that only communist party would be able - and [be] experienced [enough] - to bring about reforms. But then there emerged alternatives in genuine popular movement within the Baltic States and they culminated with an establishment of the first noncommunist political party within the Soviet Union in August 88. This was called the Estonian National Independence Party." Sandra Kalniete created the Latvian 'Popular Front', the biggest non-communist organisation at the time, and launched a quit-the-communist-party movement. [Sandra Kalniete, Latvian Politician and MEP]: "And finally it was evident that we can appeal to our members to put down their membership card and to quit the Communist Party. That was a very massive exodus, which really weakened the Communist Party. And finally they just had ...
- published: 24 Oct 2011
- views: 257
- author: NTDTV
10 biggests cities of The Baltic States LT LV EE
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:18
- Updated: 04 Jun 2012
10 biggests cities of The Baltic States from Riga to Liepaja. Whit audio track "Bunda jau Baltija" (Blatic wakes up). i think this song is very important for baltish people. So what can i say - i love Lithuania , Latvia and Estonia. Baltic power for ever :) comment :)
http://wn.com/10_biggests_cities_of_The_Baltic_States_LT_LV_EE
10 biggests cities of The Baltic States from Riga to Liepaja. Whit audio track "Bunda jau Baltija" (Blatic wakes up). i think this song is very important for baltish people. So what can i say - i love Lithuania , Latvia and Estonia. Baltic power for ever :) comment :)
- published: 24 Dec 2008
- views: 3611
- author: Lithuanian008
The Baltic States
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 0:36
- Updated: 21 Nov 2012
Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.
http://wn.com/The_Baltic_States
Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.
- published: 16 Aug 2011
- views: 995
- author: EmperorTigerstar
History Book Review: The Baltic States from the Soviet Union to the European Union: Identity, Dis...
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:53
- Updated: 27 Jul 2012
www.HistoryBookMix.com This is the summary of The Baltic States from the Soviet Union to the European Union Identity, Discourse and Power in the Post-Communist Transition of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania ... Series on Russian and East European Studies) by Richard Mole.
http://wn.com/History_Book_Review_The_Baltic_States_from_the_Soviet_Union_to_the_European_Union_Identity,_Dis
www.HistoryBookMix.com This is the summary of The Baltic States from the Soviet Union to the European Union Identity, Discourse and Power in the Post-Communist Transition of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania ... Series on Russian and East European Studies) by Richard Mole.
- published: 27 Jul 2012
- views: 63
- author: HistoryBookMixCom
FIFA 12 Ultimate Team | Subscriber Squad Builder | Baltic States Squad
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 8:33
- Updated: 19 Sep 2012
69 Rated 3 Star Baltic States Squad (Cost: 22k) Send me your squads if you would like to get involved Check the comments below for the top squads! Owner's PSN Name: Balonbrista The Squad: easf.www.easports.com Twitter @jackatack45 to figure out when I stream @ www.twitch.tv Looking for more FIFA 12 action? Come check out my channel for more everyday! :P A Pack Attack with almost 700 likes? WTF? www.youtube.com
http://wn.com/FIFA_12_Ultimate_Team_|_Subscriber_Squad_Builder_|_Baltic_States_Squad
69 Rated 3 Star Baltic States Squad (Cost: 22k) Send me your squads if you would like to get involved Check the comments below for the top squads! Owner's PSN Name: Balonbrista The Squad: easf.www.easports.com Twitter @jackatack45 to figure out when I stream @ www.twitch.tv Looking for more FIFA 12 action? Come check out my channel for more everyday! :P A Pack Attack with almost 700 likes? WTF? www.youtube.com
- published: 22 Oct 2011
- views: 12953
- author: jackattack45
reporter - EU Baltic states struggle with recession
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 8:01
- Updated: 29 Nov 2012
Despite gloom over growth, deficits and jobs, falling inflation may advance euro membership.
http://wn.com/reporter_EU_Baltic_states_struggle_with_recession
Despite gloom over growth, deficits and jobs, falling inflation may advance euro membership.
- published: 18 Jan 2009
- views: 1697
- author: Euronews
vw golf meeting Baltic states - Latvia 2009
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 5:44
- Updated: 06 Oct 2012
"vw Golf club Latvia" celebrating 10 year`s birthday party, at 1.august of 2009 was organized a first "Baltic Volkswagen Golf meet Nr.1" ever! Together came 82 vw golfs from Latvia and Estonia. Thanks to our sponsors - vw dealer "auto ile and herbst". See You next year at "Baltic Volkswagen Golf meet Nr.2"! www.vwGolfKlubs.lv / info@vwgolfklubs.lv / mob. +371 29944443
http://wn.com/vw_golf_meeting_Baltic_states_Latvia_2009
"vw Golf club Latvia" celebrating 10 year`s birthday party, at 1.august of 2009 was organized a first "Baltic Volkswagen Golf meet Nr.1" ever! Together came 82 vw golfs from Latvia and Estonia. Thanks to our sponsors - vw dealer "auto ile and herbst". See You next year at "Baltic Volkswagen Golf meet Nr.2"! www.vwGolfKlubs.lv / info@vwgolfklubs.lv / mob. +371 29944443
- published: 15 Dec 2009
- views: 1962
- author: Martins Bokmanis
WSF CIS and Baltic States Strongman Cup 2008. Chelyabinsk, Russia. 1st part.
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:46
- Updated: 24 Nov 2012
WSF CIS and Baltic States Strongman Cup 2008. Chelyabinsk, Russia. 1st part. 2 Russian teams, Latvian team, Estonian team, Uzbekistan`s team. kononets and Co.
http://wn.com/WSF_CIS_and_Baltic_States_Strongman_Cup_2008_Chelyabinsk,_Russia_1st_part
WSF CIS and Baltic States Strongman Cup 2008. Chelyabinsk, Russia. 1st part. 2 Russian teams, Latvian team, Estonian team, Uzbekistan`s team. kononets and Co.
- published: 20 Jul 2009
- views: 598
- author: WSFWorldCup
Why do baltic states shield with nacizm
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:49
- Updated: 23 Nov 2012
if you have any comments please leave one in the formu, if you have anything bad or good to say dont hesitate to do so. Oh and since its international video pleas speak or write in english and if you cant write english use google translator. Tank you
http://wn.com/Why_do_baltic_states_shield_with_nacizm
if you have any comments please leave one in the formu, if you have anything bad or good to say dont hesitate to do so. Oh and since its international video pleas speak or write in english and if you cant write english use google translator. Tank you
- published: 10 May 2011
- views: 495
- author: LTpolitician
some of the supercars in LITHUANIA (Baltic States)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:40
- Updated: 19 Nov 2012
Lietuva
http://wn.com/some_of_the_supercars_in_LITHUANIA_Baltic_States
Lietuva
- published: 12 Feb 2009
- views: 20475
- author: ledas0
SUPERcars in LATVIA (BALTIC STATES) PART1
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:15
- Updated: 27 Oct 2012
some supercars in LATVIA capital
http://wn.com/SUPERcars_in_LATVIA_BALTIC_STATES_PART1
some supercars in LATVIA capital
- published: 10 Feb 2009
- views: 19746
- author: ledas0
March Baltic states volunteers legions & partisanen - Baltijos šalių gynėjai
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:52
- Updated: 04 Dec 2012
LATVIJA-LETTLAND-LATVIA, ESTIMA-ESTLAND-ESTONIA WAFFEN SS divisions : No.15, 19 (Latvia SS No. 1, 2). No.20 (Estonia SS No.1). And plus in Wehrmacht 72-80 tousand estonians solders. LIETUVA-LITAUEN-LITHUANIA PARTISANS : after Deutschland and others Europe states capituliation Lithuania no capitulated never - organized partisans army 1944 autumn - 12 thousands, 1945 autumn - 30 thousands, 1946 - 4,5 thousands, 1950 - 1,2 thousands. Last partisan died in action battle 1965.
http://wn.com/March_Baltic_states_volunteers_legions_partisanen_Baltijos_šalių_gynėjai
LATVIJA-LETTLAND-LATVIA, ESTIMA-ESTLAND-ESTONIA WAFFEN SS divisions : No.15, 19 (Latvia SS No. 1, 2). No.20 (Estonia SS No.1). And plus in Wehrmacht 72-80 tousand estonians solders. LIETUVA-LITAUEN-LITHUANIA PARTISANS : after Deutschland and others Europe states capituliation Lithuania no capitulated never - organized partisans army 1944 autumn - 12 thousands, 1945 autumn - 30 thousands, 1946 - 4,5 thousands, 1950 - 1,2 thousands. Last partisan died in action battle 1965.
- published: 17 Nov 2007
- views: 18264
- author: Lietuvai
AdventureRide Equestrian Horseback Riding Vacation in Baltic States untouched nature
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:29
- Updated: 14 Sep 2012
Follow our Trails and Adventures at www.adventureride.eu AdventureRide full day horseback riding training with a ride through beautiful forest trails and wild landscapes in Latvia. The video illustrates the first introductory day of our horseback riding routes for beginners where safety briefing and refreshing equestrian skills are an importart part before leaving for the trail. AdventureRide is about passion for horses; desire to be close to the nature and willingness to discover! For the first time in Baltics, we offer to explore beautiful nature and wilderness on horseback. AdventureRide are equestrian professionals with highest level of service. Every part of your adventure will be specially selected -- horses, guides, accommodation and routes. Every of route has its own feature -- be it seaside, forests, meadows or lakes. Find out more when exploring the days and choose the best for you! There are only a very few places in central and northern Europe that could offer a nature enthusiast as many pristine habitats and as much natural serenity as the Baltic states (Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania). After seeing and exploring the untouched nature of the Baltic States, many visitors may return home with the impression they have just spent their vacation in Europe's biggest nature park. Geographically, the three Baltic States have much in common. Forests and lakes cover a vast amount (50%) of the countryside -- just to highlight the diversity of possibilities, there are 2800 ...
http://wn.com/AdventureRide_Equestrian_Horseback_Riding_Vacation_in_Baltic_States_untouched_nature
Follow our Trails and Adventures at www.adventureride.eu AdventureRide full day horseback riding training with a ride through beautiful forest trails and wild landscapes in Latvia. The video illustrates the first introductory day of our horseback riding routes for beginners where safety briefing and refreshing equestrian skills are an importart part before leaving for the trail. AdventureRide is about passion for horses; desire to be close to the nature and willingness to discover! For the first time in Baltics, we offer to explore beautiful nature and wilderness on horseback. AdventureRide are equestrian professionals with highest level of service. Every part of your adventure will be specially selected -- horses, guides, accommodation and routes. Every of route has its own feature -- be it seaside, forests, meadows or lakes. Find out more when exploring the days and choose the best for you! There are only a very few places in central and northern Europe that could offer a nature enthusiast as many pristine habitats and as much natural serenity as the Baltic states (Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania). After seeing and exploring the untouched nature of the Baltic States, many visitors may return home with the impression they have just spent their vacation in Europe's biggest nature park. Geographically, the three Baltic States have much in common. Forests and lakes cover a vast amount (50%) of the countryside -- just to highlight the diversity of possibilities, there are 2800 ...
- published: 15 Dec 2011
- views: 2455
- author: AdventureBaltic
Andres Kasekamp. The Baltic States: Moving Together or Apart? Part 1
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 11:37
- Updated: 12 Jul 2012
The Director of Estonian Foreign policy Institute (Tallinn) and Professor of Political Science at Tartu University, Andres Kasekamp talks on the common history and current political affairs of the Baltic States at the Institute of International Relations and Political Science of Vilnius University.
http://wn.com/Andres_Kasekamp_The_Baltic_States_Moving_Together_or_Apart?_Part_1
The Director of Estonian Foreign policy Institute (Tallinn) and Professor of Political Science at Tartu University, Andres Kasekamp talks on the common history and current political affairs of the Baltic States at the Institute of International Relations and Political Science of Vilnius University.
- published: 13 Nov 2010
- views: 569
- author: VUTSPMI
expensive CARS in BALTIC STATES (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:25
- Updated: 22 Nov 2012
BALTIC STATES LT,LV,EST
http://wn.com/expensive_CARS_in_BALTIC_STATES_Lithuania,_Latvia,_Estonia
BALTIC STATES LT,LV,EST
- published: 10 Dec 2008
- views: 43602
- author: ledas0
photo: AP / Todd Williamson
10 Dec 2012
MÉXICO, D.F., diciembre 9 (EL UNIVERSAL).- La Voz México, programa de talentos de Televisa, confirmó la muerte de la cantante Jenni Rivera, a través de su Twitter. "Que toquen fuerte las bandas, suelten por mí mariposas, apláudanme con sus palmas... http.//twitpic.com/bkmhl0 .Descanse en paz Jenni Rivera" ... Además, anunció un homenaje luctuoso dedicado a la cantante ... Descanse en Paz" ... ....(size: 2.1Kb)
photo: AP / Khalil Hamra
09 Dec 2012
Syria's rebel leaders have agreed to come under a united command in a bid to integrate diverse fighting groups and streamline the route for arms essential to their struggle against President Bashar al-Assad ... While some say they want a civil, democratic government, others advocate an Islamic state ... 378 Source. ... Tensions in the aftermath of the Bosnian war are exposed through a widow's fight against the state, police and church....(size: 18.6Kb)
photo: AP / Narciso Contreras
10 Dec 2012
(CNN) -- Syria is raising concern in two letters to the United Nations that the United States may be attempting to frame it for the use of chemical weapons, Syrian state-run media reported Monday ... The United States and other nations have warned that the use of such weapons by al-Assad's forces is a "red line" that would prompt a swift international response....(size: 11.5Kb)
photo: AP / Gustavo Ferrari
09 Dec 2012
Tens of thousands of Kuwaitis have staged a peaceful protest against the parliament elected last week under voting rules deemed unfair by the opposition ... The Gulf state has been rocked by a series of political disputes since mid-2006 between parliamentarians and the government. 349 Source. ... Share ... Tensions in the aftermath of the Bosnian war are exposed through a widow's fight against the state, police and church ... State of play....(size: 18.5Kb)
Stockhouse
10 Dec 2012
In Europe, Couche-Tard is a leader in convenience store and road transportation fuel in Scandinavian countries and in the Baltic States while it has a growing presence in Poland ... Its North-American network consists of 13 business units, including nine in the United States covering 40 states and the District of Columbia and four in Canada covering all ten provinces....(size: 5.5Kb)
noodls
10 Dec 2012
In Europe, Couche-Tard is a leader in convenience store and road transportation fuel in Scandinavian countries and in the Baltic States while it has a growing presence in Poland ... Its North-American network consists of 13 business units, including nine in the United States covering 40 states and the District of Columbia and four in Canada covering all ten provinces....(size: 6.6Kb)
Yahoo Daily News
10 Dec 2012
The Sverdlovsk Region is ITERA’s primary gas market ... In addition to its energy services in Russia, ITERA also has real estate, timber, and natural gas interests in the United States and throughout Europe. ABOUT.. ITERA International Group of Companies is a vertically integrated corporation founded in 1992, with dozens of enterprises in the NIS, Baltic States, Western Europe, Asia, and the United States ... Dr. Lonya Finker. Itera USA ... ....(size: 3.6Kb)
Wall Street Journal
10 Dec 2012
By NEIL SHAH. Enlarge Image. Close. Even among the surprising number of Rolling Stones fans who have built museums or shrines to their favorite rock band, Slavko Franca stands out ... But there is one relic missing from Mr. Franca's museum. A ticket to a Stones show in his own country. Mr ... Mr ... Close ... The Stones have expanded the list of countries where they perform—including trips to China, South Africa and even the Baltic state of Estonia....(size: 6.8Kb)
noodls
10 Dec 2012
(Source. University of Latvia). Contents include.. China celebrates Minjona ... Janis Pleps. I enjoy scientific research, and scientific writing in particular ... As a child, he dreamt of a suit, gray hair and glasses; today all except the gray hair has come true ... The first specialized kendo dojo (base) sports hall in the Baltic States was opened in October at the University of Latvia, Faculty of Education, Psychology and Art ... www.naba.lv ... (noodl....(size: 11.7Kb)
noodls
10 Dec 2012
Heads of State and Government, ... Leaders of six States assembled to open a new future, in Rome, città eterna… ... And he added it is "a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice" ... It incarnates, as a political project, that particular state of mind that Spinoza was referring to ... It was felt later in Central and Eastern Europe and in the Baltic States when they regained their independence....(size: 21.5Kb)
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
09 Dec 2012
In the topsy-turvy world of postwar Eastern European politics, the fact that the Polish YMCA had no obvious political agenda made Communist officials even more suspicious of its intentions ... Ms ... "Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state." ... Then came 1989, when millions of people in Eastern Europe and within the Soviet Union, including the Baltic states, rose up and brought down the system ... ....(size: 5.1Kb)
BBC News
07 Dec 2012
A 66-page report by the foreign ministry surveys all 27 member states, citing EU publications and non-governmental organisations ... EU leaders have criticised the Kremlin for years over its human rights record ... By contrast, EU states took four out of the top five rankings. 'Not adequate' ... In its follow-up this week, it repeated long-held concerns about the treatment of the ethnic Russian minorities in the ex-Soviet Baltic states ... ....(size: 2.7Kb)
Bloomberg
07 Dec 2012
Nordea Bank AB (NDA), Scandinavia’s largest lender, needs to cut its workforce by 10 percent and close branches to mitigate the impact of stricter regulatory requirements, Chief Executive Officer Christian Clausen said ... “It comes from operating costs, to become more efficient,” Clausen said ... Nordea currently employs about 34,000 people in the Nordic region, the Baltic states, Russia and Poland, according to its website ... ....(size: 2.9Kb)
PR Newswire
07 Dec 2012
Google. , December 7, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --. • Mediterranean remains popular cruise option for upcoming holidays. • New cruise routes from Thomas Cook to service popular destinations. • Thomas Cook offer range of cruise and stay holidays for 2013 ... Fly and Sail ... The first of these visits areas such as the Scandinavian Peninsula, and Baltic states whilst the latter connects holidaymakers to cities such as , , and ... ....(size: 4.1Kb)
photo: UN / UN
07 Dec 2012
The UN General Assembly has now voted, by 138 votes to 9, with 41 abstentions and 5 no-shows, to recognize the existence as a state “of the State of Palestine on the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967” ... All ten of the new “Eastern” members (the three Baltic states, formerly part of the Soviet Union, the six former members of the Warsaw Pact and Slovenia) abstained or, in one case, voted against Palestine....(size: 5.9Kb)
noodls
05 Dec 2012
12/05/2012. Brenntag announce a new distribution agreement with Evonik Industries. Brenntag is pleased to announce that from 1st January 2013, it will distribute the full range of products from Evonik Household Care in Austria, Baltic States, Belarus, Croatia, Cyprus, Scandinavia, Russian Fed., Serbia, Slovakia, Spain, Turkey, Ukraine and the UK. "This is an exciting complementary addition to our product portfolio", comments Dr ... T ... F ... Fax....(size: 5.4Kb)
noodls
01 Dec 2012
... of the Baltic states. "It is in the interests of all of us for the Baltic states to be free from the status of energy island of the European Union," he emphasised ... "These are all important issues for the Baltic states and the Baltic Sea region in general, and more extensively the European Union," told the Estonian Head of State....(size: 2.3Kb)
For other uses, see Baltic (disambiguation).
| Baltic states | ||
|---|---|---|
![Location of Baltic states (dark green)in Europe (dark grey) — [Legend]](http://web.archive.org./web/20121210211608/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Baltic_states.svg) |
||
| Capitals | Tallinn; Riga; Vilnius | |
| Official languages | Estonian; Latvian; Lithuanian | |
| Membership |  Estonia Latvia Lithuania |
|
| Area | ||
| - | Total | 175,015 km2 (91st) 67,523 sq mi |
| - | Water (%) | 2.23% (3,909 km²) |
| Population | ||
| - | 2010 estimate | 6,607,400 (100th) |
| - | Density | 39.5/km2 (172nd) 102.4/sq mi |
| GDP (PPP) | 2011 estimate | |
| - | Total | $119.567 billion[1] (62nd) |
| - | Per capita | $17,465 (50th) |
| GDP (nominal) | 2011 estimate | |
| - | Total | $86.799 billion[1] (65th) |
| - | Per capita | $12,679 (47th) |
The term Baltic states (also Baltics, Baltic nations or Baltic countries) refers to the Baltic territories which gained independence from the Russian Empire in the wake of World War I: primarily the contiguous trio of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania (from north to south); Finland also fell within the scope of the term from the 1920s to 1939.[2] Estonia is only considered Baltic geographically, not linguistically or culturally, as Estonians and Finns are descendants of the Baltic Finns.
The term in the indigenous languages of the Baltic states is:
- Estonian: Balti riigid,
- Latvian: Baltijas valstis, and
- Lithuanian: Baltijos valstybės.
Contents |
Etymology and toponymic history[link]
The term "Baltic" stems from the name of the Baltic Sea – a hydronym dating back to the 11th century (Adam of Bremen mentioned Latin: Mare Balticum) and earlier.
The Latvian and Lithuanian term Baltija most likely originates from the Indo-European root *bhel meaning white, fair. In modern Baltic languages, namely, Lithuanian language, baltas literally means white, and in Latvian language balts means white also.
Beginning in the Middle Ages and through the present day, the Baltic Sea appears on the maps subscribed in Germanic languages as German: Ostsee, Danish: Østersøen, Dutch: Oostzee, Swedish: Östersjön, etc. In English "Ost" is "East", and in fact, the Baltic Sea mostly lies to the east for Germany, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Clearly, part of the Baltic Sea lies to the east of Germany and Sweden, and due north of parts of Germany.
In the 17th century, the Kingdom of Sweden grew to be one of the great powers of Northern Europe.[3] However, at the beginning of the 18th century "the Great Power Era" (Swedish: Stormaktstiden) of the Swedish Empire was challenged by the Russian Empire which was seeking to restore its access to the Varangians Sea—as the Baltic Sea was called in the Land of Novgorod. De facto in 1700 - 09, and de jure beginning in 1721, Swedish Livonia (today the northern parts of Latvia and Estonia, and the western part of the Leningrad Oblast) which had been acquired by Sweden in accordance with Treaty of Oliva of 1660, came under the rule of the Russian Empire. Legalizing this acquisition by the Treaty of Nystad, instead of taking an indemnity from the defeated Swedes, the Russian Empire paid Sweden two million jefimoks, or about 980 kilograms of silver.[4] The first collective name for two administrative units established here in 1713 was Ostsee Governorates (Russian: Остзейские губернии).
Initially these were two governorates named after the largest cities: Riga and Reval (now Tallinn). After the Partitions of Poland which took place in the last quarter of the 18th century the third Ostsee Governorate was set, the one of Courland (presently a part of Latvia). This toponym stems from Curonians, one of Finnic[5] or Baltic[6] indigenous tribes. Accordingly, two others were renamed to the Governorate of Livland and the Governorate of Estland.
The presence of the Germanic morpheme "Ostsee" within the Russian collective name of those provinces is not limited to the personal inclination to the Western lexics which was shown by Peter the Great who conquered these lands from the Swedes. In fact, since the Livonian Crusade at the turn of the 12th to 13th century "Terra Mariana", Livland and Estland were under the German influence. These were Germans who formed the backbone of the local gentry, and for centuries German was the language of international communication and record keeping there.[7]
By coincidence, it was German philologist Georg Nesselmann living at the Baltics (in East Prussia) who in the middle of the 19th century substantiated the concept of Baltic languages[8] using the name of one of the local pagan tribes, the Balts. Endre Bojtár (1999) argues that it was around 1840s when the German gentry of the Governorate of Livonia devised the term "Balts" to mean themselves, the German upper classes of Livonia, excluding the Latvian and Estonian lower classes. They spoke an exclusive dialect, baltisch-deutsch, legally spoken by them alone.[7] Thus the usage of "Baltic" and similar terms to denote this region dates back not earlier than 1840s.
Simultaneously, in 1840s the usage "Ostsee" was superseded by "Baltic" in Russian. The article "Прибалтийский край" ("Baltic Krai") in the Brockhaus encyclopedia[9] and other sources[10] notes that 1840s mark a shift of the local population towards Russian language and, to a certain extent, to orthodoxy.
Lithuania occupies a specific place within the scope of the region named "Baltic states". Through many centuries of its history Lithuania was more than a state at a Baltic seacoast. Born at a turn of the 12th to 13th century[11] the Grand Duchy of Lithuania encompassed most part of Kievan Rus' and by the middle of 16th century stretched to the Black Sea. From 1569 it has been a backbone element of such large and strong geo-political power as Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, so it is not incidental that up to 1920s Lithuania was treated separately from the Baltic states. Only after Lietuvos Taryba proclaimed its independence in 1918, Lithuania began to be mentioned in the same list with her two northern neighbours.
In the 1920s, the newly established countries of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Finland, formerly territories of the Russian empire, were referred to as the Baltic states.[12]
The United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names defines a Baltic Division.[13]
Cultures and languages[link]
Estonians and the nearly linguistically extinct Livonian people in Latvia are descended from the Baltic Finns, sharing closely related languages and a common cultural ancestry. The Latvians and Lithuanians, linguistically and culturally related to each other, are descended from the Balts, an Indo-European people and culture. The peoples comprising the Baltic states have together inhabited the eastern coast of the Baltic Sea for millennia, although not always peacefully in ancient times, over which period their populations, Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian, have remained remarkably stable within the approximate territorial boundaries of the current Baltic states. While separate peoples with their own customs and traditions, historical factors have introduced cultural commonalities across and differences within them.
The population of the Baltic countries belong to different Christian denominations, a reflection of historical circumstances. Both Western and Eastern Christianity had been introduced by the end of the first millennium. The current divide between Lutheranism to the north and Catholicism to the south is the remnant of Swedish and Polish hegemony, respectively, with Orthodox Christianity remaining the dominant faith among Russian and other Slavic minorities.
The languages of Baltic nations belong to two distinct language families. The Latvian and Lithuanian languages make up the group of Baltic languages which belongs to the Indo-European language family. The Estonian language and the nearly extinct Livonian language, on the other hand, are not Indo-European languages and instead they belong to the Baltic-Finnic subgroup of the Finno-Ugric languages, sharing close ethnic and historical ties with the Finnish language and people.
The Baltic states have historically been in the Swedish (or, in Lithuania's case, Polish), German (historically: The Holy Roman Empire and Saxony), Danish, and Russian spheres of influence.
Apart from the indigenous languages, German was the dominant language in Estonia and Latvia in academics, professional life, and upper society from the 13th century until World War I. Polish served a similar function in Lithuania. Swedish remains spoken in Estonia, particularly among the Estonian Swedes of northern Estonia and the islands. Numerous Swedish loanwords have made it into the Estonian language; it was under the Swedish rule that schools were established and education propagated in 17th century. There is also significant proficiency in Finnish in Estonia owing to its closeness to the native Estonian and also the widespread practice of listening to Finnish broadcasts during the Soviet era. Russian also achieved significant usage particularly in commerce.
Russian was the most commonly studied foreign language at all levels of schooling during the Soviet era. The Soviet Union conducted a policy of Russification by encouraging Russians and other Russian-speaking ethnic groups of the Soviet Union to settle in the Baltic Republics. As they were neither encouraged nor motivated to learn the official local languages, knowledge of Russian became a practical necessity in daily life despite schooling available and administration conducted in local languages. Today ethnic Russian immigrants from the former Soviet Union and their descendants make up a sizable minority in the Baltic states, particularly in Latvia (about one-third of the total population and majority in the capital Riga) and Estonia (one-quarter of the population).
Currently, the Baltic states have considerable Slavic populations, and knowledge of Slavic languages (particularly Russian). Latvia is 34.6% Slavic (including 26.9% Russian, 3.3% Belarusian, 2.2% Ukrainian, and 2.2% Polish), and 1,822,327 (76.7% of the population of Latvia) can fluently speak Russian. 28.8% of Estonia is Slavic (mostly Russian), and 12.3% of Lithuania is Slavic (mostly Polish).
Economies[link]
Main article: Baltic Tiger
File:Tallinn-Tornimae.jpg
Tornimäe business area in Tallinn
Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have been members of both the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization since 2004. Today the three countries are liberal democracies and their market economies in recent years have undergone rapid expansion in early 2000s (decade). However, the economies were hard-hit by the financial crisis of 2007–2010. According to projections by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the GDP based on purchasing-power-parity decreased by 13% to 17% from 2008 to 2009.[14]
The Baltic states had the highest growth rates in Europe between 2000 and 2006, and this continued in 2007. In 2006 the economy in Estonia grew by 11.2% in gross domestic product, while the Latvian economy grew by 11.9% and Lithuania by 7.5%. All three countries saw their rates of unemployment fall below the EU average by February 2006. Additionally, Estonia is among the ten most liberal economies in the world and in 2006 switched from being classified as an upper-middle income economy to a high-income economy by the World Bank. Estonia adopted the euro in January 2011 whilst Latvia and Lithuania do not have a specified date, but Lithuania hopes to do the same in the following years and Latvia in 2014.
However, due to the global economic crisis, the Baltic economies in 2008 were fragile and the previous fast growth had switched to recession in Estonia and Latvia by the end of 2008, followed by Lithuania in 2009.
In 2009, unemployment rate rose to 13.7% in Lithuania, 17.3% in Latvia and 13.8% in Estonia, as compared to a "Advanced Europe" level of 8.8% (the 2009 unemployment rate in so called "Emerging Europe" countries was higher but still below that found in the Baltic states). Over the course of 2011, the unemployment rates are expected to rise even further, despite an expected recovery in output.[15]
In 2009, real aggregate GDP fell by 14.8% in Lithuania, by 18% in Latvia and 13.9% in Estonia, compared to an overall fall of 3.7% among all countries in the "Emerging Europe" group. Output is expected to recover somewhat in Lithuania and Estonia, with projected growth rates of 1.3% and 1.8% respectively, while in Latvia GDP is expected to fall by further 1%.[15]
Although Estonia has so far succeeded on keeping its debt-levels one of the lowest in the European Union, the southern Baltic states are in a more difficult situation. Rather defaulting on debt in the lead-up to the sub-prime mortgage crash, the Latvian government has responded to EU and IMF pressure by taking on private debt. Latvia accepted a 7.5 billion euro EU-IMF loan.
Histories[link]
At 8000–5000 BC mesolithic hunter-gatherer communities of the Kunda culture at the southern shores of the Mastogloia Sea may have witnessed its transfiguration into Littorina Sea and finally to what is the Baltic Sea now.[16] Traces of Comb Ceramic Culture found on these territories date back to the beginning of the 4th millennium BC, and of the Corded Ware culture (pottery with corded decoration and well-polished boat-shape stone axes) to the beginning of the Late Neolithic Period. Fossils of the Bronze Age show the separation between the Finnic peoples and the Balts.
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Duchy of Prussia, Polish fief
Duchy of Courland, Lithuanian fief
In the 1st century, AD the people living in the area were first denoted by Tacitus as a form of Aestii.
In the 13th century, Christianity and feudalism were effectively forced upon modern Estonia and Latvia by the invasion of the crusaders from the west (German Sword Brethren, Denmark) and the conversion of Lithuania's rulers from Paganism to Christianity. While in Latvia and most of Estonia Livonian Confederation was established, Lithuania established its own state as the Grand Duchy of Lithuania some time before 1252. It later was a major political power of the region.
After the Livonian War in the 16th century, the Confederation ceased to exist, and its lands were incorporated into the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. In 1621 most of the Duchy of Livonia was incorporated into the Swedish empire. During the Great Northern War the Dominions of Sweden of Swedish Estonia and Swedish Livonia were conquered by Russia and then ceded by Sweden in the Treaty of Nystad in 1721.
The Russian Empire gained control of most of the present-day Baltic states in the 18th century when the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth was partitioned in three stages by the Russian Empire, the Kingdom of Prussia, and the Habsburg Monarchy, while western parts of Lithuania were incorporated into Prussia.
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania became sovereign nations in the aftermath of World War I. They declared independence in 1918, fought independence wars against German Freikorps and Bolshevist Russia, and were recognized as independent countries in 1920.
After independence, the Baltic States were sometimes referred to as limitrophe states[17] between the two World Wars, from the French, indicating their collectively forming a rim[18] along Bolshevik Russia's, later the Soviet Union's, western border. They were also part of what Clemenceau considered a strategic cordon sanitaire, the entire territory from Finland in the north to Romania in the south, standing between Western Europe and potential Bolshevik territorial ambitions.
Following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, the Soviet Army entered eastern Poland as well as military bases in the Baltic states which were granted after U.S.S.R. had threatened the three countries with military invasion. In June 1940, the Red Army occupied all of the territory of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and the Red Army installed new, pro-Soviet governments in all three countries. Following rigged elections, in which only pro-communist candidates were allowed to run, the newly "elected" parliaments of the three countries formally applied to "join" the Soviet Union in August 1940 and were annexed into it as the Estonian SSR, the Latvian SSR, and the Lithuanian SSR.
Repressions, executions and mass deportations followed after that in the Baltics.[19][20] Deportations were used as a part of the Soviet Union's attempts, along with instituting the Russian Language as the only working language and other such tactics, at sovietization of its occupied territories. More than 200,000 people were deported by the Soviet government from the Baltic in 1940-1953 to remote, inhospitable areas of the Soviet Union. In addition, at least 75,000 were sent to Gulag. 10% of the entire adult Baltic population was deported or sent to labor camps.[21][22] (See June deportation, Soviet deportations from Estonia, Sovietization of the Baltic states)
The Soviet control of the Baltic states was interrupted by Nazi German invasion of this region in 1941. Initially, many Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians considered the Germans as liberators from the Soviet Union. The Balts hoped for the restoration of independence, but instead the Germans established civil administration, known as the Reichskommissariat Ostland. During the occupation the Germans carried out discrimination, mass deportations and mass killings generating Baltic resistance movements. The German occupation lasted until late 1944 (in Courland, until early 1945), when the countries were reoccupied by the Red Army and Soviet rule was re-established, with the passive agreement of the United States and Britain (see Yalta Conference and Potsdam Agreement).
The forced collectivisation of agriculture began in 1947, and was completed after the mass deportation in March 1949 (see Operation Priboi). Private farms were confiscated, and farmers were made to join the collective farms. In all three countries, Baltic partisans, known colloquially as the Forest Brothers, Latvian national partisans, and Lithuanian partisans, waged unsuccessful guerrilla warfare against the Soviet occupation for the next eight years in a bid to regain their nations' independence. Although the armed resistance was defeated, the population remained anti-Soviet.
In the late 1980s a massive campaign of civil resistance against Soviet rule, known as the Singing revolution, began. Baltic Way was one of the most spectacular events when a two-million-strong human chain stretched for 600 km from Tallinn to Vilnius on August 23, 1989. In the wake of this campaign « Gorbachev's government had privately concluded that the departure of the Baltic republics had become ‘inevitable’».[23] This process contributed to the dissolution of the Soviet Union setting a precedent for the other Soviet republics to secede from the USSR. Soviet Union recognized the independence of three Baltic states on September 6, 1991. The last Russian troops were withdrawn from there in August 1994.[24]
Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were considered to be under Soviet occupation by the United States, the United Kingdom [25], Canada, NATO, and many other countries and international organizations.[26]
Politics[link]
All three countries are parliamentary democracies, which have unicameral parliaments that are elected by popular vote to serve four-year terms – Riigikogu of Estonia, Saeima of Latvia and Seimas of Lithuania. In Latvia and Estonia, the president is elected by parliament while Lithuania has a semi-presidential system and the president is elected by popular vote.
Each of the three countries has declared itself to be the restoration of the sovereign nations which existed already in 1918 – 40, emphasizing their contention that Soviet domination over the Baltic nations during the Cold War period had been an illegal occupation and annexation.
The same legal interpretation is shared by the United States, the United Kingdom, and all other Western democracies, who always considered the forcible incorporation of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania into the Soviet Union to be illegal. At least formally, the Western democracies never considered the three Baltic states to be constituent parts of the Soviet Union. Australia was a brief exception to this support of Baltic freedom: in 1974, the Labor government of Australia did recognize Soviet dominion, but this decision was reversed by the next Australian Parliament.[27]
After the Baltic states had restored independence, integration with Western Europe was chosen as the main strategic goal. In 2002 the Baltic nations applied to become members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU). Membership of NATO was duly achieved on 29 March 2004, and accession to the EU took place on 1 May 2004. The Baltic States have been the only former-Soviet states to join either NATO or the EU at that time.
During the Baltic fight for freedom 1989-1992, a personal friendship developed between the (at that time unrecognized) Baltic ministers of foreign affairs and the Nordic ministers of foreign affairs. This friendship led to the creation of the Council of the Baltic Sea States in 1992, and the EuroFaculty in 1993.[28]
Currently governments of Baltic states cooperate in multiple ways. There is active cooperation among Presidents, parliament speakers, heads of government, and foreign ministers. On 8 November 1991, the Baltic Assembly was established for co-operation among parliaments. 15 to 20 MPs from each parliament represent their countries in the Assembly. For co-operation among governments Baltic Council of Ministers was established on 13 June 1994. Since 2003 Baltic Assembly is co-ordinated with the Baltic Council of Ministers.[29]
Statistics[link]
| Flag | |
|
|
| Country | Estonia | Latvia | Lithuania |
| Capital | Tallinn | Riga | Vilnius |
| Independence | -Until 13th century -24 February 1918 -restored 20 August 1991 |
-Until 13th century -18 November 1918 - restored 21 August 1991 |
-Until 18th century -16 February 1918 - restored 11 March 1990 |
| Current leaders | Toomas Hendrik Ilves | Andris Bērziņš | Dalia Grybauskaitė |
| Population (2011) | 1 340 194 (2011) | 2 067 900 (2011) | 3 199 342 (2011) |
| Population (2000) | 1,376,743 | 2,375,000 | 3,490,800 |
| Density | 29/km² = 75/sq mi | 36/km² = 93/sq mi | 52/km² = 134/sq mi |
| Area | 45,227 km² = 17,413 sq mi | 64,589 km² = 24,937 sq mi | 65,200 km² = 25,173 sq mi |
| Water area % | 4.56% | 1.5% | 1.35% |
| GDP (PPP) total | $26.85 billion (2007) | $41.108 billion (2007) | $66 billion (2008) |
| GDP (PPP) per capita | $21,800 | $18,103 | $19,730 |
| GDP (nominal) total(2009) | $19.100 billion | $26.200 billion | $37.200 billion |
| GDP (nominal) per capita | $18,274(2010) | $14,330(2010) | $16,997(2010) |
| Gini Index | 34 | 37.7 | 36 |
| HDI | 0.835 (Very High) | 0.805 (Very High) | 0.810 (Very High) |
| Internet TLD | .ee | .lv | .lt |
| Calling code | +372 | +371 | +370 |
| Currency | EUR | LVL | LTL |
- The largest cities by population (2010)
- Riga (703 581)
- Vilnius (548 816)
- Tallinn (413,727)
- Kaunas (348 635)
- Klaipėda (182 752)
- Šiauliai (125 461)
- Panevėžys (109 999)
- Tartu (103 284)
- Daugavpils (103 053)
- Liepāja (83 884)
See also[link]
- Balts, Baltic Germans and Baltic Russians
- Baltic Entente
- Baltic Free Trade Area
- Baltic provinces
- Baltic region
- Baltic Tiger
- Baltic Way
- Baltia
- Baltoscandia
- Scandinavia
- List of cities in the Baltic states by population
- United Baltic Duchy
- Occupation of Baltic states
- June deportation
- Operation Priboi
- Soviet deportations from Estonia
References and notes[link]
- ^ a b "Report for Selected Countries and Subjects". Imf.org. 2006-09-14. http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2009/02/weodata/weorept.aspx?sy=2007&ey=2014&scsm=1&ssd=1&sort=country&ds=.&br=1&pr1.x=100&pr1.y=6&c=946%2C939%2C941&s=NGDPD%2CPPPGDP%2CLP&grp=0&a=. Retrieved 2011-06-03.
- ^ George Maude. "Aspects of the Governing of the Finns", Peter Lang, 2010, p. 114
- ^ Frost 2000, pp. 133–134
- ^ "Ништадтский мир [Treaty of Nystad]". Great Soviet Encyclopedia. 30: Николаев – Олонки (2nd ed.). М.: Сов. энциклопедия. 1954.
- ^ Saks, Edgar V. (2005). Eesti viikingid. Tallinn. p. 31. ISBN 978-9985-66-411-7.
- ^ Matthews, W. K. "Nationality and Language in the East Baltic Area", American Slavic and East European Review, Vol. 6, No. 1/2 (May 1947), pp. 62–78
- ^ a b Bojtár, Endre (1999). Foreword to the Past: A Cultural History of the Baltic People. Budapest and New York: Central European University Press. p. 9. ISBN 963-9116-42-4, 9789639116429.
- ^ Moritz Cantor, "Nesselmann: Georg Heinrich Ferdinand". In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie. Vol. 23, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1886, p. 445.
- ^ "Прибалтийский край". http://gatchina3000.ru/brockhaus-and-efron-encyclopedic-dictionary/082/82977.htm.
- ^ Ср.: Сборник материалов по истории Прибалтийского края. Рига. 1894. ; Форстен. (1894). Балтийский вопрос. СПб. ; Пассир Г. (1892). Из истории православия в Прибалтийском крае. Рига. ; Краткая история Прибалтийского края (2-е изд. ed.). Рига. 1894. и др.
- ^ T. Baranauskas. Lietuvos valstybės ištakos. Vilnius, 2000
- ^ Finland, New Human Interest Library, Midland Press, Chicago. 1922
- ^ United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names, UNGEGN Divisions
- ^ World Economic Outlook Database, October 2009
- ^ a b International Monetary Fund, World Economic Outlook
- ^ Niskanen, Markku (2002). "The Origin of the Baltic-Finns". The Mankind Quarterly. http://www.mankindquarterly.org/samples/niskanenbalticcorrected.pdf. Retrieved 2008-10-06.
- ^ Smele, John (1996). Civil war in Siberia: the anti-Bolshevik government of Admiral Kolchak, 1918–1920. London: Cambridge University Press. p. 305. http://books.google.com/books?id=VNFiD_v6fj4C&pg=PA305&dq=limitrophe+Baltic&hl=en#v=onepage&q=limitrophe%20Baltic&f=false.
- ^ Calvo, Carlos (2009). Dictionnaire Manuel de Diplomatie et de Droit International Public et Privé. The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd.. p. 246. http://books.google.ru/books?id=T7DXvH0k3lcC&pg=PA102&lpg=PA102&dq=territoire+de+l'Etat+limitrophe&source=bl&ots=kcDG7wTEwz&sig=1zZdxj7tJkoNWzKjCDJZgQBjubc&hl=en#v=onepage&q=limitrophe&f=false.
- ^ These Names Accuse—Nominal List of Latvians Deported to Soviet Russia
- ^ The White Book - Losses Inflicted On The Estonian Nation By The Occupation Regimes 1940-1991
- ^ The Baltic States
- ^ Communism and Crimes against Humanity in the Baltic states
- ^ Beissinger, Mark R. (2009). "The intersection of Ethnic Nationalism and People Power Tactics in the Baltic States". In Adam Roberts and Timothy Garton Ash (eds.). Civil resistance and power politics: the experience of non-violent action from Gandhi to the present. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 231–246. ISBN 978-0-19-955201-6. http://books.google.com/books?id=BxOQKrCe7UUC&pg=PR10&dq=%22People+Power+Tactics+in+the+Baltic+States%22&hl=en#v=onepage&q=%22People%20Power%20Tactics%20in%20the%20Baltic%20States%22&f=false.
- ^ Baltic Military District globalsecurity.org
- ^ Country Profiles: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania at UK Foreign Office
- ^ U.S.-Baltic Relations: Celebrating 85 Years of Friendship at state.gov
- ^ 'The Latvians in Sydney' (2008)
- ^ Kristensen, Gustav N. 2010. Born into a Dream. EuroFaculty and the Council of the Baltic Sea States. Berliner Wissentshafts-Verlag. ISBN 978-3-8305-1769-6.
- ^ Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Latvia: Co-operation among the Baltic States
Journals, book series, media[link]
International peer-reviewed journals and book series dedicated to the Baltic region include:
- On the Boundary of Two Worlds: Identity, Freedom, and Moral Imagination in the Baltics (book series)
- Journal of Baltic Studies, journal of the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies (AABS)
- Lituanus, journal dedicated to Lithuanian and Baltic art, history, language, literature and related cultural topics
- The Baltic Course, International Internet Magazine. Analysis and background information on Baltic markets
- Baltic Reports, English-language daily news website that covers all three Baltic states
- The Baltic Times, independent weekly newspaper that covers latest political, economic, business, and cultural events in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania
External links[link]
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Baltic states |
- The Baltic Sea Information Centre
- GDP in the Baltic States and international comparison chart.
- Statistical data based on 2000/2001 censuses
- vifanord – a digital library that provides scientific information on the Nordic and Baltic countries as well as the Baltic region as a whole.
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 |
Look up baltic in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. |
Baltic may refer to:
Geography[link]
Northern Europe[link]
- The Baltic Sea, a sea in Europe
- Baltic states (also Baltics, Baltic countries or Baltic republics): Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia
- The Baltic region, an ambiguous term referring to the general area surrounding the Baltic Sea
- Baltic governorates or provinces, former parts of the Russian Empire (modern Latvia, Estonia)
- The Baltic Shield, the exposed Precambrian northwest segment of the East European Craton
- The Baltic Plate, an ancient tectonic plate that is now fused onto the Eurasian Plate
North America[link]
- Baltic, Connecticut
- Baltic, Ohio
- Baltic, South Dakota
- Baltic, Kings County, Prince Edward Island, Canada
- Baltic, Prince County, Prince Edward Island, Canada
People and their languages[link]
- Baltic languages, a subfamily of Indo-European languages, including Lithuanian, Latvian and extinct Old Prussian language
- Balts (or Baltic peoples), ethnic groups speaking the Baltic languages and/or originating from the Baltic countries
- Baltic Germans, historical ethnic German minority in Latvia and Estonia
- Baltic Russians, Russian immigrant community of post World War II origin in the Baltic countries
Ships and related[link]
- Baltic (steamship)
- Baltic (tug), a German emergency tow vessel
- Baltic Exchange, a UK company that operates as a marketplace for shipbrokers, ship owners and charterers
- Baltic Dry Index, a daily shipping index published by the Baltic Exchange
- Baltic Fleet, the Russian Navy's presence in the Baltic Sea
- Baltic Shipyard, one of the oldest shipyards in Russia
Other[link]
- Baltics (poem), a 1974 long poem by Tomas Tranströmer
- Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, United Kingdom
- Baltic State Opera, the Opera House in Gdańsk, Poland
- Baltic Basketball League, a Baltic states basketball league founded in 2004
- Baltic Mining Company, a copper mining operation in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan
- Baltic, a locomotive with a 4-6-4 wheel arrangement
See also[link]
- Baltica (disambiguation)
- Baltiysk, town in Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia
- Baltiysky (disambiguation)
 |
This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article. |
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