6,078 articles
Lord
Lord: British title of nobility used for peers of the realm (baron to marquess, not dukes); today mostly life peers in the House of Lords after the 2026 hereditary exclusion.
Lorenzo Sewell
Lorenzo Sewell, also Pastor Zo, Detroit pastor of non-denominational 180 Church; Trump 2024 ally, RNC 2024 speaker, benediction at Trump's January 2025 inauguration quoting Martin Luther King Jr.
Loretta Ross
Loretta J. Ross, born 1953, is an African American activist and Smith College professor who co-created the reproductive justice framework in 1994, co-founded SisterSong, and won a MacArthur Fellowship in 2022.
Lotta Hitschmanova
Lotta Hitschmanova, born Lotta Hitschmann (1909–1990), was a Czech-born Canadian humanitarian who founded the Unitarian Service Committee of Canada in 1945, raising a reported $128.9 million for relief work.
Lou Andreas-Salomé
Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937), Russian-born German-writing essayist, novelist, and one of the first female psychoanalysts; friend of Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud; author of Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken (1894) and Narzissmus als Doppelrichtung (1921).
Lou Henry Hoover
Lou Henry Hoover (1874-1944), First Lady 1929-1933, wife of Herbert Hoover; first woman geology graduate of Stanford, Mandarin speaker, De Re Metallica translator, Girl Scouts president, first First Lady to speak on radio.
Louisa Durrell
Louisa Florence Durrell (née Dixie), Anglo-Irish matriarch born in British India, widowed 1928, moved her family from Bournemouth to Corfu in 1935; mother of Lawrence and Gerald Durrell, later portrayed by Keeley Hawes in ITV's The Durrells.
Louise Hay
Louise Hay (1926-2017), American self-help author of You Can Heal Your Life (50+ million copies) and founder of Hay House; led the Hayride AIDS support group; taught affirmations heal illness, a claim lacking scientific evidence.
Louisiana Creole people
Louisiana Creole people, also called Creoles of color and white Creoles, are the native people of colonial Louisiana of French, Spanish, African, and Native American descent, defined historically by Louisiana birth, Catholic faith, and French or Kouri-Vini language, not by race.
Love at first sight
Love at first sight (LAFS) is the reported experience of instant romantic love on first seeing someone. Research, chiefly Zsok et al. 2017, finds it reflects strong physical attraction and infatuation, not passion, intimacy, or commitment.
Love bombing
Love bombing is excessive early-relationship affection, gifts, and flattery used to gain control; described as emotional abuse, linked to narcissism and insecure attachment, and lacking a clinical definition.
Love lock
Love lock (love padlock): padlock inscribed with a couple's names, locked to a bridge or public structure with the key thrown into water, popularized by Moccia's 2006 novel; Pont des Arts collapse and mass removals made it a contested global custom.
Love marriage
Love marriage, or choice marriage, is a marriage in which partners choose each other based on romantic attraction, contrasting with arranged marriage; it rose in the 18th-century West, and satisfaction studies versus arranged marriage show mixed results.
Love triangle
Love triangle: a three-person romantic structure, either two rivals for one person or one person involved with two others. Covers jealousy research, Sternberg's triangular theory of love, and its use from Arthurian romance to telenovelas and Wattpad fiction.
Lovesickness
Lovesickness: intense negative emotions and physical symptoms when unable to be with a loved person; also called xiangsi bing in Chinese tradition. Not a medical diagnosis today, but treated as a real disorder, amor hereos, from antiquity through the 19th century.
Loyal Order of Moose
Loyal Order of Moose, fraternal order founded 1888 in Louisville, Kentucky by Dr. John Henry Wilson; revived by James J. Davis, runs Mooseheart school and Moosehaven retirement home, over 1,000,000 members.
LSQ study
LSQ study: validation research on the Lipedema Screening Questionnaire, a nine-item, 0-20 score lipedema screening tool by Amato et al.; the 2026 Turkish validation reported alpha 0.866, AUC 0.970, cut-off 8.5.
Lucien Carr
Lucien Carr (1925-2005), American journalist and UPI news editor who brought together Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Burroughs at Columbia in 1944, founding the Beat circle, and served prison time for manslaughter in the killing of David Kammerer.
Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd
Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd (1891-1948), Eleanor Roosevelt's social secretary, was Franklin D. Roosevelt's longtime love; their 1918-discovered affair reshaped the Roosevelt marriage, and she was with FDR at Warm Springs when he died in 1945.
Luhya people
The Luhya (Luyia, Abaluhya) are Kenya's second-largest ethnic group, about 5.3 million Bantu-speaking people in western Kenya, comprising roughly 17-18 sub-groups such as the Bukusu and Maragoli, with no single Luhya language.
Lumad
Lumad (Lumadnon) is the collective name for Mindanao's non-Moro indigenous peoples, adopted June 26, 1986 in Cotabato; Cebuano for native. Covers 15-plus groups, IPRA land rights, and school-closure conflict.
Lumbee
The Lumbee are a North Carolina tribe recognized by the state since 1885, descended per congressional findings from the Cheraw and related Siouan tribes; the 1956 Lumbee Act withheld federal benefits until full recognition on December 18, 2025.
Luo migration
The Luo migration was the southward movement of Luo-speaking peoples from a Nile homeland in South Sudan into Uganda, western Kenya, and northern Tanzania over roughly five centuries.
Luo people
The Luo are a Nilotic-speaking people of East Africa, over 3 million in western Kenya around Lake Victoria, speaking Dholuo, migrated from Sudan over 500 years, organized in clans, farming, herding, and fishing.
Lurker
Lurker: a member of an online community who reads regularly but seldom or never posts; also called silent majority. Defined by the Jargon Dictionary, quantified by Nielsen's 90-9-1 participation inequality rule, studied by Nonnecke and Preece.
Lurs
Lurs (Lor) are an Iranian people of the southern Zagros, western Iran, speaking Northern and Southern Luri related to Persian, mostly Twelver Shi'ite, historically pastoral nomads, ~3.5-4 million, including Bakhtiaris (Lur-e Bozorg), Mamasani, and Kuhgiluya.
Lusitanians
The Lusitanians (Latin Lusitani) were an ancient Indo-European people of western Iberia between the Tagus and Douro rivers, speakers of the non-Celtic Lusitanian language, famed for Viriathus's resistance to Rome and for giving their name to the Roman province of Lusitania.
Lykov family
Lykov family: Russian Old Believers who fled Soviet persecution in 1936 and lived over 40 years in total isolation in the Siberian taiga until geologists found them in 1978; Agafia Lykova survives.
Lyle Stevik
Lyle Stevik is the alias of a man found at Lake Quinault Inn, Amanda Park, Washington, in 2001. He was identified by genetic genealogy in 2018.
Lynching
Lynching, extrajudicial mob killing; in the US chiefly racial terror lynching of Black Americans, 1865–1950. EJI documents nearly 6,500 lynchings; federal law came only with the 2022 Emmett Till Antilynching Act.