Dresden

Dresden (German pronunciation: [ˈdʁeːsdn̩]) is the capital city of the Free State of Saxony in Germany. It is situated in a valley on the River Elbe, near the Czech border.

Dresden has a long history as the capital and royal residence for the Electors and Kings of Saxony, who for centuries furnished the city with cultural and artistic splendour. The city was known as the Jewel Box, because of its baroque and rococo city centre. The controversial British and American bombing of Dresden in World War II towards the end of the war killed approximately 25,000, many of whom were civilians, and destroyed the entire city centre. The bombing gutted the city, as it did for other major German cities. After the war restoration work has helped to reconstruct parts of the historic inner city, including the Katholische Hofkirche, the Semper Oper and the Dresdner Frauenkirche as well as the suburbs.

Before and since German reunification in 1990, Dresden was and is a cultural, educational, political and economic center of Germany and Europe. The Dresden University of Technology is one of the 10 largest universities in Germany and part of the German Universities Excellence Initiative.

Bezirk Dresden

The Bezirk Dresden was a district (Bezirk) of East Germany. The administrative seat and the main town was Dresden.

History

The district was established, with the other 13, on July 25, 1952, substituting the old German states. After October 3, 1990, it was disestablished due to the German reunification, becoming again part of the state of Saxony.

Geography

Position

The Bezirk Dresden, mainly correspondent to the area of the actual Direktionsbezirk Dresden and the easternmost one of DDR, bordered with the Bezirke of Cottbus, Leipzig and Karl-Marx-Stadt. It bordered also with Czechoslovakia and Poland.

Subdivision

The Bezirk was divided into 17 Kreise: 2 urban districts (Stadtkreise) and 15 rural districts (Landkreise):

See also

References

External links

Media related to Bezirk Dresden at Wikimedia Commons

Dresden, Maine

Dresden is a town in Lincoln County, Maine, United States that was incorporated in 1794. The population was 1,672 at the 2010 census.

History

The town was originally settled in 1752 under the name Frankfort by French and German Huguenots, who were part of the first wave of French speaking immigrants to arrive in Maine, but were distinguished from later arrivals by their Protestant faith. William Shirley built Fort Shirley in the community at the same time Fort Halifax (Maine) was built. First called Frankfort, so that the new French immigrants could pretend to be German, the town was incorporated as Pownalborough in 1760, when Lincoln County was created in the Maine District of Massachusetts. Pownalborough included the Town of Wiscasset, which was soon set off on its own as the shire town of the county. When the present territory was incorporated in 1794, Lincoln County Probate Judge Jonathan Bowman chose Dresden as the new name of the town because he liked the sound of it.

Dresden is located on the eastern side of the Kennebec River. Dresden also offers some historical sites as well, including an old, brick school building and the Pownalborough Courthouse, which is now used as a museum and is open to the public. The Pownalborough Courthouse was built in 1760 and was the first seat of government east of the Kennebec River. The families who settled Dresden and those who were soon afterward sent there by the government of Massachusetts played a crucial role in the battle for American independence in Maine. Robert Treat Paine, John Hancock, and John Adams appeared at the Court House in the Revolutionary Era. Well known local families included the Goodwins, Houdlettes, Mayerses, Bridges, Bowmans, Percys, Johnsons, and Trussells, who variously left their marks on the history of the town, the state, and the country.

Word chain

Word chain, also known as Grab on Behind, Last and First, Alpha and Omega, and The Name Game. is a word game in which players come up with words that begin with the letter or letters that the previous word ended with. A category of words is usually chosen, there is a time limit such as five seconds, and words may not be repeated in the same game. An example chain for food would be: Soup - Peas - Sugar - Rice.

It is used as a tool for teaching English as a second language and as a car game.

The version of the game in which cities are used is called Geography.

Related games

A similar Japanese game is Shiritori, in which the word must begin with the last syllable, or kana, of the previous word. It includes a rule for loss: words ending with N may not be used since the kana is never used in the beginning of words. The game Antakshari (ant means end, akshar means letter), played in India, Pakistan and Nepal also involves chaining, but with verses of movie songs (usually Bollywood songs). In Russia a game similar to the Word chain is called Words (Russian: слова).

Geography (Ptolemy)

The Geography (Greek: Γεωγραφικὴ Ὑφήγησις, Geōgraphikḕ Hyphḗgēsis, lit. "Geographical Guidance"), also known by its Latin names as the Geographia and the Cosmographia, is a gazeteer, an atlas, and a treatise on cartography, compiling the geographical knowledge of the 2nd-century Roman Empire. Originally written by Ptolemy in Greek at Alexandria around AD 150, the work was a revision of a now-lost atlas by Marinus of Tyre using additional Roman and Persian gazetteers and new principles. Its translation into Arabic in the 9th century and Latin in 1406 was highly influential on the geographical knowledge and cartographic traditions of the medieval Caliphate and Renaissance Europe.

Manuscripts

Versions of Ptolemy's work in antiquity were probably proper atlases with attached maps, although some scholars aver that the references to maps in the text were later additions.

No Greek manuscript of the Geography survives from earlier than the 13th century. A letter written by the Byzantine monk Maximus Planudes records that he searched for one for Chora Monastery in the summer of 1295; one of the earliest surviving texts may have been one of those he then assembled. In Europe, maps were sometimes made redrawn using the coördinates provided by the text, as Planudes was forced to do. Later scribes and publishers could then copy these new maps, as Athanasius did for the emperor Andronicus II Palaeologus. The three earliest surviving texts with maps are those from Constantinople (Istanbul) based on Planudes's work.

Geography (disambiguation)

Geography is the study of the earth and its features, inhabitants, and phenomena.

Geography may also refer to: