A guildhall, also known as a "guild hall" or "guild house", is a historical building originally used for tax collecting by municipalities or merchants in Great Britain and the Low Countries. These buildings commonly become town halls and in some cases museums while retaining their original names. Guildhalls as town hall in the United Kingdom In the United Kingdom, a guildhall is usually a town hall: in the vast majority of cases, the guildhalls have never served as the meeting place of any specific guild. A suggested etymology is from the Anglo Saxon "gild", or "payment"; the guildhall being where citizens came to pay their rates. The London Guildhall was established around 1120. For the Scottish municipal equivalent see tolbooth. List of guildhalls in the United Kingdom ...

Heme, or haem (pronounced /hi:m/ HEEM), is a precursor to hemoglobin, which is necessary to bind oxygen in the bloodstream. Heme is biosynthesized in both the bone marrow and the liver.In biochemical terms, heme is a coordination complex "consisting of an iron ion coordinated to a porphyrin acting as a tetradentate ligand, and to one or two axial ligands." The definition is loose, and many depictions omit the axial ligands. Among the metalloporphyrins deployed by metalloproteins as prosthetic groups, heme is one of the most widely used and defines a family of proteins known as hemoproteins. Hemes are most commonly recognized as components of hemoglobin, the red pigment in blood, but are also found in a number of other biologically important hemoproteins such as myoglobin, cytochromes, catalases, heme peroxidase, and endothelial nitric oxide synthase.The word haem is derived from Greek αἷμα haima meaning "blood". Function Hemoproteins have diverse biological...

The Battle of Plataea was the final land battle during the second Persian invasion of Greece. It took place in 479 BC near the city of Plataea in Boeotia, and was fought between an alliance of the Greek city-states (including Sparta, Athens, Corinth and Megara), and the Persian Empire of Xerxes I (allied with Greece's Boeotians, Thessalians, and Macedonians). The previous year the Persian invasion force, led by the Persian king in person, had scored victories at the battles of Thermopylae and Artemisium and conquered Thessaly, Phocis, Boeotia, Euboea and Attica. However, at the ensuing Battle of Salamis, the allied Greek navy had won an unlikely but decisive victory, preventing the conquest of the Peloponnesus. Xerxes then retreated with much of his army, leaving his general Mardonius to finish off the Greeks the following year. In the summer of 479 BC the Greeks assembled a huge (by ancient standards) army and marched out of the Peloponnesus. The Persians retreated to Boeotia and built a fortified camp near Plataea. The Greeks, however, refused to be drawn into the prime cavalry terrain around the Persian camp, resulting in a stalemate...

Russia Leaves the War (1956) is a book by George F. Kennan, which won the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for History, the 1957 National Book Award for Nonfiction, the 1957 George Bancroft Prize, and the 1957 Francis Parkman Prize. The first of two volumes discussing Soviet-American relations from 1917–1920, it covers the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the departure of Russia from World War I in 1918. The second volume, The Decision to Intervene (1958) explores U.S. involvement in Siberia. References

City on Fire is a 2015 novel by Garth Risk Hallberg, published by Alfred A. Knopf. The novel takes place in New York City in the 1970s. It is Hallberg's first published novel. Hallberg received an advance of $2 million for the novel, which was rumored at the time to be the highest ever for a debut novel. However, other debut novels acquired around the same time also received seven-figure advances. Summary City on Fire follows the investigation of a Central Park shooting that took place on New Year's Eve during the 1970s.This book was a New York Times Notable Book and named one of the Best Books of the Year by The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, NPR, Vogue, San Francisco Chronicle, and The Wall Street Journal. Television series A television adaptation of the novel will air on Apple TV+. Reception City on Fire received a mixed reception from critics. The novel received praise from Megan O'Grady in Vogue, who called it "the kind of exuberant, Zeitgeisty New...