Tuxtla \'tiist-la\ in full Tuxtla Gutierrez City (pop., 2000: 424,579), capital of Chiapas state, southeastern Mexico. The Spanish who arrived there in the 16th century were frequently beset by Indians, and the town grew slowly. In 1892 it was made the state capital. It is now the major commercial and manufacturing centre in the state and an agricultural dis¬ tributing point. There are archaeological remains of pre-Columbian cul¬ ture in the region.
Tuzla Vtiiz-la\ Town (pop., 1991: 83,770), northeastern Bosnia and Herzegovina. Deposits of rock salt are located nearby; in the 10th cen-
Tutankhamen, gold funerary mask found in the king's tomb, 14th century bc; in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo.
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TVA » Tyler I 1955
tury the town was called Soli (meaning “salts”), and its present name is from the Turkish tuz, “salt.” It was a Turkish garrison town from 1510 until it passed to the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the 19th century. It was incorporated into Yugoslavia in 1918. It is the centre for a mining region and an agricultural district. It was a target during the war in Bosnia in the 1990s (see Bosnian conflict).
TVA See Tennessee Valley Authority
TWA See Trans World Airlines, Inc.
Twain, Mark orig. Samuel Langhorne Clemens (b. Nov. 30, 1835, Florida, Mo., U.S.—d. April 21, 1910, Redding, Conn.) U.S. humorist, writer, and lecturer. He grew up in Hannibal, Mo., on the Mis¬ sissippi River. At age 13 he was apprenticed to a local printer. In 1856 he signed on as an apprentice to a steamboat pilot. He plied the Missis¬ sippi for almost four years before going to Nevada and California. In 1863 he took his pseudonym, the riverman’s term for water “two fathoms deep.” In a California mining camp he heard the story that he would make famous as “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865). He traveled widely, using his travels as subject matter for lectures and books, including the humorous narratives The Innocents Abroad (1869) and Roughing It (1872). He won a worldwide audience for his stories of youthful adventures, especially Tom Sawyer (1876), The Prince and the Pauper (1881), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and Huckleberry Finn (1884), one of the masterpieces of American fiction. The satirical A Con¬ necticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and increasingly grim works including Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894) and The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg (1900) followed. In the 1890s financial speculations bank¬ rupted him, and his eldest daughter died. After his wife’s death (1904), he expressed his pessimism about human character in such late works as the posthumously published Letters from the Earth (1962).
tweed Medium- to heavy-weight fabric, rough in surface texture, pro¬ duced in a great variety of colour and weave effects (see weaving). Most tweeds are made entirely of wool, but an increasing number are blends of wool with cotton, rayon, or other synthetic fibres. Most are woven from dyed yarns, but some are dyed after being woven. Technical advances in dyeing raw stock, yams, and fabrics, together with new techniques in fin¬ ishing, have resulted in a wide variety of durable cloths.
Tweed, River River, southeastern Scotland and northeastern England. It rises in the Borders region of southeastern Scotland and flows east, forming a section of the border between Scotland and England. It then crosses into England and empties into the North Sea at Berwick. It is 97 mi (156 km) long.
Tweed, William Marcy known as Boss Tweed (b. April 3, 1823, New York, N.Y., U.S.—d. April 12,
1878, New York City) U.S. politi¬ cian. He worked as a bookkeeper and volunteer firefighter. As city aider- man (1851-56), he gained influence in Tammany Hall and obtained impor¬ tant positions in city government. He appointed political cronies to key city posts and built a group later called the Tweed ring. As head of Tammany’s general committee (from 1860), he controlled the Democratic Party’s nominations to all city positions. He opened a law office to receive payments for “legal services” from city contractors and corporations. Elected to the state senate (1868), he also became Tam¬ many’s grand sachem (leader) and controlled city and state political patronage. He gained control of the city treasury and plundered sums esti¬ mated at between $30 million and $200 million. Reformers and exposure by the press, including Thomas Nast’s cartoons in Harper’s Weekly, brought prosecution, led by Samuel Tilden, that resulted in Tweed’s con¬ viction and imprisonment (1873-75, 1876-78).
Boss Tweed
COURTESY OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, WASHINGTON,
Twelve Tables, Law of the Earliest codification of ancient Roman law, traditionally dated to 451-450 bc. They were purportedly written at the demand of the plebeians, who felt that their legal rights were ham¬
pered by the fact that court judgments were rendered according to unwrit¬ ten custom preserved only within a small group of learned patricians. The Twelve Tables were not a reform or a liberalizing of old custom; they recognized the prerogatives of the patrician class and of the patriarchal family, the validity of enslavement for unpaid debt, and the interference of religious custom in civil cases. Because only random quotations from the Twelve Tables are extant, knowledge about their contents is largely derived from references in later juridical writings. Venerated by the Romans as a prime legal source, the Twelve Tables were superseded by later changes in Roman law but were never formally abolished.
Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp. U.S. movie studio. It was formed in 1935 by the merger of Twentieth Century Pictures (founded in 1933 by Joseph Schenck and Darryl F. Zanuck) and the Fox Film Corp. (founded in 1915 by William Fox). The new studio produced mainly westerns and musicals into the 1940s, as well as notable films such as The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and The Snake Pit (1948). In 1953 it introduced CinemaScope with The Robe, and later in the decade it made hits such as The King and I (1956) and South Pacific (1958). After the expensive failure of Cleopatra (1963), the studio recouped with The Sound of Music (1965), Patton (1970), MAS*/7 (1970), and Star Wars (1977), the film industry’s most profitable movie to that time. In 1981 the company was bought by the oil magnate Marvin Davis, who resold it in 1985 to Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch consolidated his American film and television com¬ panies under a holding company, Fox, Inc.