Dames, Paix des See Treaty of Cambrai
Damiao \da-me-'au n \, Frei orig. Pio Gianotti (b. Nov. 5, 1898, Italy—d. May 31, 1997, Recife, Pernambuco estado [“state”], Braz.) Italian-born Brazilian friar. He became a Capuchin friar at age 16 and later studied in Rome. In 1931 he was sent to Brazil, where he spent the rest of his life traveling in the poverty-stricken northeastern region. He soon developed a reputation as a miracle worker whose touch or prayers could relieve pain and heal disease. Doctrinally conservative, he was at odds with the region’s left-wing priests, who supported liberation theol¬ ogy. After his death the bishop of Petrolina began the process of seeking Frei Damiao’s beatification.
Damien Vda-me-onX, Father orig. Joseph de Veuster (b. Jan. 3, 1849, Tremelo, Belg.—d. April 15, 1889, Molokai, Hawaii) Belgian priest. After training at the College of Braine-le-Comte, he joined the Society of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary in 1858. He went as a missionary to the Sandwich (Hawaiian) Islands in 1863 and was ordained there in 1864. In 1873 he volunteered to take charge of the leper colony on Molokai Island. There he served as both physician and priest, dramati¬ cally improving living conditions and building two orphanages. He con¬ tracted leprosy himself in 1884 but refused to leave his post, and he died at Molokai five years later.
Damocles \ , dam-3-,klez\ (fl. 4th century bc) Member of the court of Dionysius I the Elder at Syracuse in Sicily. Legend holds that when Damocles spoke in extravagant terms of Dionysius’s happiness, the sov¬ ereign responded by inviting Damocles to a banquet and seating him beneath a sword suspended by a thread, thereby demonstrating the pre¬ carious fortunes of people who hold power.
Damodar Vda-mo-,dar\ River River, northeastern India. It rises, with its many tributaries, in the Chota Nagpur plateau of Jharkhand and flows east 368 miles (592 km) through West Bengal to join the Hugli River south¬ west of Kolkata (Calcutta). Its valley includes India’s most important coal- and mica-mining fields and is an area of active industrial development.
Dampier, William (b. August 1651, East Coker, Somerset, Eng.—d. March 1715, London) English buccaneer and explorer. In his early years he engaged in piracy, chiefly along the western coast of South America
John Dalton, detail of an engraving by W. Worthington, after a portrait by William Allen, 1814.
COURTESY OF THE TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM; PHOTOGRAPH, J.R. FREEMAN & CO. LTD.
© 2006 Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
damping ► dance of death I 509
and in the Pacific. In 1697 he published a popular book, A New Voyage Round the World. In 1699-1701 he explored the coasts of Australia, New Guinea, and New Britain for the British Admiralty. He was court- martialed for his cruelty but later led a privateering expedition to the South Seas (1703-07). He was a keen observer of natural phenomena; one of his ship’s logs contains the earliest known European description of a typhoon.
damping In physics, the restraint of vibratory motion, such as mechani¬ cal oscillations, noise, and alternating electric currents, by dissipating energy. Unless a child keeps pumping a swing, the back-and-forth motion decreases; damping by the air’s friction opposes the motion and removes energy from the system. Viscous damping is caused by such energy losses as occur in liquid lubrication between moving parts or in a liquid forced through a small opening by a piston, as in automobile shock absorbers. Hysteresis damping involves energy loss within the moving structure itself. Other types of damping include electrical resistance, radiation, and magnetic damping.
Dana, Charles A(nderson) (b. Aug. 8, 1819, Hinsdale, N.H., U.S.—d. Oct. 17, 1897, Glen Cove, N.Y.) U.S. journalist. Dana lived at the utopian Brook Farm community for five years in the 1840s before becoming an editor for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, where he actively promoted the antislavery cause. He became a national figure as editor and part owner of the New York Sun (1868-97), which under his control was much admired and imitated. With George Ripley, he edited the New American Cyclopaedia (1857-63). He also edited a highly suc¬ cessful verse anthology and wrote books such as The Art of Newspaper Making (1895).
Dana, James D(wight) (b. Feb. 12,1813, Utica, N.Y., U.S.—d. April 14, 1895, New Haven, Conn.) U.S. geologist, mineralogist, and naturalist. He graduated from Yale University in 1833. He joined a U.S. exploring expedition to the South Seas (1838-42), acting as a geologist and zoologist. His contributions to the American Journal of Science stimulated U.S. geo¬ logic inquiry. His research into the formation of the Earth’s continents and oceans led him to believe in the progressive evolution of the Earth’s physi¬ cal features over time. By the end of his life he also came to accept the evolution of living things, as articulated by Charles Darwin. During his life¬ time, and largely under his leadership, U.S. geology grew from a collection and classification of unrelated facts into a mature science.
Dana Vda-noV Richard Henry (b. Aug. 1, 1815, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.—d. Jan. 6, 1882, Rome, Italy) U.S. writer and lawyer. Dana left Harvard College because of weakened eyesight and shipped out as a common sailor; after regaining his health, he returned and became a law¬ yer. He is remembered for his autobiographical Two Years Before the Mast (1840), which revealed the abuses endured by sailors. The Seaman’s Friend (1841) became the authoritative guide to seamen’s legal rights and duties. He also produced a scholarly edition of Henry Wheaton’s Elements
of International Law (1866), pro¬ vided free legal aid to fugitive slaves, and served as U.S. attorney for Massachusetts.
Danae Vda-no-.eV In Greek legend, the daughter of Acrisius, king of Argos. After an oracle warned her father that she would bear a son by whom he would be slain, he confined Danae in a tower. Zeus visited her in the form of a shower of gold, and she gave birth to Perseus. Mother and child were then placed in a wooden box and cast into the sea, and they drifted ashore on the island of Seri- phus. Perseus grew up there, and when the island’s king, Polydectes, desired Danae, he sent the young hero off in pursuit of the Medusa.
Perseus later rescued his mother and took her to Argos.
dance Form of expression that uses bodily movements that are rhyth¬ mic, patterned (or sometimes improvised), and usually accompanied by music. One of the oldest art forms, dance is found in every culture and is performed for purposes ranging from the ceremonial, liturgical, and magi¬ cal to the theatrical, social, and simply aesthetic. In Europe, tribal dances often evolved into folk dances, which became stylized in the social dances of the 16th-century European courts. Ballet developed from the court dances and became refined by innovations in choreography and technique. In the 20th century, modern dance introduced a new mode of expressive movement. See also allemande; ballroom dance; country dance; courante; gavotte; gigue; hula; jitterbug; landler; mazurka; merengue; minuet; morris dance; pavane; polka; polonaise; quadrille; samba; sarabande; square dance; sword dance; tango; tap dance; waltz.
dance notation Written recording of dance movements. The earliest notation, in the late 15th century, consisted of letter-symbols. Several attempts were made in later centuries to describe dance steps, but no uni¬ fied system combined both rhythm and steps until the 1920s, when Rudolf Laban devised his system of Labanotation. In the 1950s, the competing system of Benesh notation, or “choreology,” devised by Rudolf and Joan Benesh, came into use.