Legal Research

Top 10 Britannica Queries in 2010

By admin

Now here’s a top ten list that makes some sense to libraries. These are the top 10 searches on Britannica and there nary a Justin Bieber or Lady Gaga there.

Via TeleRead: Top 10 Most Read Articles on Britannica for 2010

“1. French Revolution: Explore the movement that shook France between 1787 and 1799 and introduced the world to the guillotine.

2. Romanticism: This attitude or intellectual orientation that rejected the precepts of order, calm, harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality characterized many works of literature, painting, music, architecture, criticism, and historiography in Western civilization from the late 18th to the mid-19th century.

3. Civil Rights Movement: In this essay by Clayborne Carson, director of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute at Stanford University, delve into the mass U.S. protest movement against racial segregation and discrimination that came to national prominence in the mid-1950s.

4. Walt Disney: The world?s animator-in-chief changed the way that we look at the world and the way we vacation. The company he founded is now one of the world?s largest entertainment conglomerates.

5. Industrial Revolution: In this brief treatment of process that moved Europe from an agrarian, handicraft economy to one dominated by industry and machine manufacture, you?ll learn that there was not one but two industrial revolutions. (Britannica?s detailed treatment can be found in our European history article.)

6. Great Depression: With insights from Richard Pells, history professor at the University of Texas, and Christina Romer, an economist at University of California, Berkeley and former head of President Barack Obama?s Council of Economic Advisors, learn about the decade of depression between 1929 and 1939 from both an economic and cultural perspective.

7. World War II: With dozens and dozens of videos and photographs, you can grapple with this worldwide conflict that ended in the deaths of some 40,000,000 to 50,000,000 people.

8. Socialism: Terence Ball and Richard Dagger, professors of political science at Arizona State University, discuss the economic and social doctrine that calls for public rather than private ownership or control of property and natural resources. If you hear some called a socialist, especially as a pejorative, this is essential reading to know whether the label is accurate or not.

9. Danube River: It is one of the most picturesque rivers in the world, and Europe?s second longest (after the Volga), rising in Germany?s Black Forest and flowing about 1,770 miles to the Black Sea.

10. United States: With an essay on cultural life by Adam Gopnik, editor and staff writer at The New Yorker, and two dozen other contributors and the history of the United States through the passage of health care earlier this year, the midterm, and the effect of the WikiLeaks disclosures, explore in-depth this country of more than 300,000,000 people.”

“Some select other nuggets:

- Most-read article on a living person: Mikhail Gorbachev (#60)
- Barack Obama ranked at #258, while Ronald Reagan, the most-read U.S. presidential article, was 19th
- India was the 2nd-most-viewed country article; China was 29th
- Sir Isaac Newton (#42) bested Shakespeare (#43) and JFK (#44)
- Global warming rang in at #45
- Muhammad (#58) received more reads than Jesus (#255), and Islam (#84) outranked Christianity (#143), which was in turn outranked by Hinduism (#108) [Buddhism was #216, while Judaism was #339]”

Stephen

Full post as published by Stephen's Lighthouse on December 21, 2010 (boomark / email).