6,078 articles
Betty Hemings
Betty (Elizabeth) Hemings, 1735–1807, matriarch of the enslaved Hemings family at Monticello; daughter of an English sea captain, mother of twelve including Sally Hemings, six likely by John Wayles.
Betty Williams
Betty Williams, born Elizabeth Smyth, was a Northern Irish peace activist who co-founded the Peace People in 1976 and shared the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize with Mairead Corrigan.
Beverly Vance
Beverly Vance, also Beverly Aikins (born 1961), American registered nurse and mother of Vice President JD Vance; featured in Hillbilly Elegy, recovered from addiction, now a recovery advocate living in Middletown, Ohio.
Bezanozano
The Bezanozano are an ethnic group of Madagascar living in the Mangoro valley around Moramanga, on the main trade route between Imerina and the eastern coast.
Bhanwari Devi (भंवरी देवी)
Bhanwari Devi (भंवरी देवी), Rajasthani saathin social worker gang-raped in 1992 for stopping a child marriage; her case led to the Vishakha guidelines and India's POSH Act 2013.
BharatMatrimony
BharatMatrimony is an Indian online matrimonial service, the flagship brand of NSE/BSE-listed Matrimony.com Limited founded by Murugavel Janakiraman. It runs 15 regional language portals, free registration with paid Gold/Diamond/Platinum/Assisted tiers, mandatory mobile verification, and 9.95 lakh paid profiles as of March 2025.
Bhat (भट्ट)
Bhat (भट्ट, Sanskrit bhaṭṭa) is a South Asian surname and title meaning lord or learned one, borne by Brahmin, bard, and Muslim communities; Bhatt ranks about 2,021st worldwide with roughly 271,000 bearers, concentrated in India and Nepal.
Bhoodan movement
The Bhoodan movement was a Gandhian land-reform effort in India, starting in 1951. It evolved into the Gramdan movement, where entire villages renounced private land ownership.
Bhumihar
Bhumihar (Babhan) is a landowning Hindu caste of Bihar, eastern Uttar Pradesh, and Jharkhand claiming Brahmin status; dominant agrarian caste with caste associations, militias, and shifting forms of caste assertion.
Bias
Bias, in psychology, a systematic deviation of judgment from rational norms; cognitive bias arises from heuristics, mental shortcuts studied since Kahneman and Tversky's 1974 heuristics-and-biases program, with documented effects in medicine, economics, and fact-checking.
Bias against left-handed people
Bias against left-handed people: stigma, forced right-hand conversion, and tool design disadvantaging the roughly 10.6% left-handed minority, rooted in right-good/left-bad symbolism and debunked pathology myths.
Bias blind spot
Bias blind spot: the tendency to see cognitive and motivational biases in others more than in oneself, named by Pronin, Lin, and Ross (2002), explained by naive realism, self-enhancement, and the introspection illusion, and unattenuated by cognitive sophistication.
Bibi Aisha
Bibi Aisha (Aesha Mohammadzai) is an Afghan woman whose nose and ears were cut off in 2009 for fleeing a forced child marriage; her 2010 TIME cover photograph by Jodi Bieber won World Press Photo of the Year.
Bicycling and feminism
Bicycling and feminism covers the bicycle's role in women's emancipation from the 1890s safety-bike craze, bloomers and Susan B. Anthony's famous claim, to today's cycling gender gap, safety research, and male-dominated bike industry.
Bidar Kadın
Bidar Kadın (Bidâr Kadınefendi, 1858–1918), Circassian consort of Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II, mother of Naime Sultan and Şehzade Abdülkadir, second kadınefendi from 1895, died in Erenköy, Istanbul.
Bidhoba Bibaha
Bidhoba Bibaha (বিধবা বিবাহ, "widow marriage") was the nineteenth-century movement in colonial Bengal to legalize Hindu widow remarriage, led by Ishvarchandra Vidyasagar and culminating in the Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act of 1856.
Big Five personality traits
Big Five personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism; the consensus five-factor taxonomy of personality derived from lexical studies, with HEXACO's Honesty-Humility as the main alternative.
Big Nose Kate
Big Nose Kate (Mary Katherine Horony, Mária Katalin Horony, 1850–1940) was a Hungarian-born frontier dance hall woman and common-law wife of Doc Holliday; she implicated him in the 1881 Tombstone stage robbery, later married George Cummings, and died at the Arizona Pioneers' Home in Prescott.
Big Pharma conspiracy theories
Big Pharma conspiracy theories allege pharmaceutical companies, regulators, and politicians secretly conceal cures or falsify safety data for profit. Common claims include hidden cancer cures, microchipped vaccines, and preplanned pandemics; surveys and models document their prevalence and implausibility.
Big U
Big U is the nickname of Eugene Henley Jr., a Los Angeles music executive, community activist, and former Rollin' 60s Neighborhood Crips leader, indicted in 2025 on federal RICO charges.
Bigamy
Bigamy: contracting a marriage while still legally married to another person; a crime in monogamy-recognizing countries, made felony by England's 1604 Act, a ground of annulment, and treated variously where personal law permits polygamy.
Biharis
Biharis, also called Stranded Pakistanis, are Urdu-speaking Muslims who migrated from Bihar and other Indian states to East Pakistan at the 1947 partition; after 1971 most were confined to camps in Bangladesh, gained court-confirmed citizenship in 2008, and still face discrimination. The term also names the people of Bihar state and Grierson's Maithili-Magahi-Bhojpuri dialect group.
Biito clan
The Biito (Babiito) are the Luo-origin royal clan of Bunyoro-Kitara and Tooro in western Uganda, named for the biito tree, founded by Isingoma Mpuga Rukidi, with about 27 kings ruling roughly 600 years.
Bill Morgan lottery win
Bill Morgan lottery win: 1999 story of Australian Melbourne truck driver Bill Morgan, clinically dead 14 minutes after a 1998 heart attack, who won a car scratchcard, then A$250,000 live on Nine News during a televised re-enactment.
Bimbo
Bimbo: English slang from Italian bambino ("little child"); originally a 1919 contemptuous term for a man, shifted by the 1920s to an offensive word for an attractive but unintelligent woman, revived in 1980s scandals, reclaimed on TikTok.
Bin Laden family
The Bin Laden family is a wealthy Saudi family of Yemeni origin that founded the kingdom's largest construction firm, held exclusive rights to Islamic holy-site construction, and was globally known after Osama bin Laden founded al Qaeda; the Saudi state now controls over 92% of its holding group.
Binet–Simon Intelligence Test
Binet-Simon Intelligence Test (Echelle Binet-Simon): 1905 scale by Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon, the first practical intelligence test, built to identify Paris schoolchildren needing educational support; 30 items, mental age scoring, revised 1908 and 1911, basis of the Stanford-Binet.
Binibining Pilipinas
Binibining Pilipinas (Bb. Pilipinas), Filipino for Miss Philippines, is an annual national beauty pageant in the Philippines, first held in 1964, whose winners represent the country at international pageants.
Binibining Pilipinas 2026
Binibining Pilipinas 2026 is the 62nd edition of the Philippine national beauty pageant run by BPCI, held July 18, 2026 at the Smart Araneta Coliseum with 36 candidates, staged by Stella Marquez Araneta's organization that lost its Miss Universe franchise in 2019.
Bioenergetic analysis
Bioenergetic analysis is a body-oriented psychotherapy founded by Alexander Lowen and colleagues in New York in 1956, combining verbal therapy with breathing, movement, and stress positions to release chronic muscular tension.