Laurens
Laurens names 2 different subjects across the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf. Each is set out below.
Laurens JOHN, an American military officer
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
JOHN, an American military officer; son of the preceding; born rein South Carolina in 1754. After ceiving his education in England he Joined the American Continental Army In 1777, becoming aide-de-camp and secretary to Washington. Laurens so highly listinguished himself in the battles of Germantown and Monmouth, and in other operations as to earn the title of the "Bayard of the Revolution." In 1780 he was sent to France to negotiate a loan. He was killed in action at the Combahee river, S. C., Aug. 27, 1782. vast GROUP, LAURENTIAN a series of rocks, 30,000 feet in thickness, least 200,000 and covering an area of at square miles N. of the St. Lawrence It is lower, and consequently river. consists of older, than the Cambrian. It an immense series of crystalline rocks, gneiss, micaschist, quartzite, and limestone. It is divided into Upper and Lower Laurentian. The Upper, more of stratithan 10,000 feet thick, consists fied crystalline rocks. It mainly consists of felspars. The Lower Laurentian, about 20,000 feet in thickness, is unconformable with the Upper. It consists mainly of a reddish gneiss, with orthoclase felspar; interstratified with thin hornblendic and micaceous schists, with beds of usually crystalline origin, and others of plumbago. The Laurentian volcanic rocks of Ottawa, Argenteuil, etc., in Canada, consist of finegrained dark greenstone or dolerite.
Laurens HENRY, an American statesman
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
HENRY, an American statesman; born in Charleston, S. C., in 1724. Descended from a French Huguefortune in not family, he early realized a business. On the outbreak of the American Revolution, Laurens, in 1776, was State elected a delegate from his native to the Continental Congress, and became its president, which office he held till the close of 1778. Next year, being appointed minister-plenipotentiary to Holland, he was captured on his way thither to Lonby a British frigate, and taken don, where he was confined as a prisoner in the Tower; and his papers having proved the complicity of Holland in the between Great colonial revolt, a war Britain and Holland followed. On his release, Laurens was appointed one of the commissioners for negotiating peace, 30, and proceeded to Paris, where, Nov. 1782, he, conjointly with Franklin and the Jay, signed the preliminaries of treaty. Died in Charleston, Dec. 8, 1792.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Collier's says in 1921 only that Henry Laurens "early realized a fortune in business": that business was Austin & Laurens of Charleston, among the largest slave-trading houses in North America, a fact now central to how he is remembered, along with his instruction that his body be burned rather than buried. His son John is likewise remembered today less as the "Bayard of the Revolution" than as the officer who pressed Congress and South Carolina in 1779 to raise a regiment of enslaved men who would be freed for their service, a plan the state rejected; the 2015 musical Hamilton made him widely known again. The geological entry has been superseded outright: "Laurentian" is no longer used as a formal system, the shield rocks north of the St Lawrence are grouped as Precambrian, and radiometric dating gives ages up to about 4 billion years for the oldest of them, far beyond anything the 1921 stratigraphic scheme could express. The name survives instead as Laurentia, the ancient continental core of North America in plate-tectonic reconstructions.
Written for this edition, 2026.