Hanover

/han"oh veuhr/, n.

1. a member of the royal family that ruled Great Britain under that name from 1714 to 1901.

2. a former province in NW Germany; now a district in Lower Saxony. 14,944 sq. mi. (38,705 sq. km).

3. a city in and the capital of Lower Saxony, in N central Germany. 495,300.

4. a city in S Pennsylvania. 14,890.

5. a town in SE Massachusetts. 11,358.

German, Hannover /hah noh"veuhrdd/ (for defs. 2, 3).

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▪ New Hampshire, United States

      town (township), Grafton county, western New Hampshire, U.S. It lies along the Connecticut River and includes the communities of Hanover and Etna. It was settled in 1765 and named for Hanover, Connecticut, the home of many of its early settlers. Hanover is the seat of Dartmouth College (founded 1769) and the Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital. Dartmouth's Baker Library, on the campus green, has frescoes by the Mexican artist José Clemente Orozco. Annual collegiate events include the Dartmouth Winter Carnival. Nearby are the home of the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens (Saint-Gaudens, Augustus) (national historic site; authorized 1964), Wilder Dam and Boston Lot Lake, and the Dartmouth Skiway. Area 49 square miles (127 square km). Pop. (2000) 10,850; (2006 est) 11,151.

▪ Pennsylvania, United States

      borough (town), York county, southern Pennsylvania, U.S. It lies in the Conewago Creek valley, 20 miles (32 km) southwest of York. Laid out in 1763 by Colonel Richard McAllister, it was incorporated as a borough in 1815 and named for Hanover, Germany. Earlier it had been known as McAllistertown. Later it was called Rogue's Roost, and Rogue's Harbour, because of its lack of law enforcement over boundary disputes between Pennsylvania and Maryland. The first American Civil War battle north of the Mason-Dixon Line was fought there on June 30, 1863, when General J.E.B. Stuart's (Stuart, Jeb) Confederate cavalry clashed with Union forces under General Hugh J. Kilpatrick and General George A. Custer (Custer, George Armstrong).

      A trading point for rich farmlands, the borough also has light manufactures (shoes, machine tools, snack foods, and furniture). Nearby Hanover Shoe Farms breeds Standardbred horses. The nearby Conewago Chapel, established as a Jesuit mission and originally built of logs in 1741, was rebuilt of stone in 1787 and designated a Sacred Heart Basilica in 1962. Pop. (1990) 14,399; (2000) 14,535.

▪ Virginia, United States

      village, seat of Hanover county, east-central Virginia, U.S. It lies immediately east of Ashland, near the Pamunkey River, 15 miles (24 km) north of Richmond. Founded in 1720 and named for the elector of Hanover (afterward King George I of England), it is known for its association with Patrick Henry (Henry, Patrick), orator of the American Revolution, who was largely responsible for the passage of the Bill of Rights (Rights, Bill of). Henry was born (May 29, 1736) at Studley, 1.5 miles (2.4 km) to the south, and in the Hanover Courthouse (1733) he gained fame as an orator by effectively pleading (December 1, 1763) the colony's case against the Parson's Cause. In 1775 he organized Virginia's first military company, the Hanover County Volunteers, in the village. The Hanover Tavern (c. 1723), operated by John Shelton, Henry's father-in-law, has been restored and is now the home of the Barksdale Theatre.

      Scotchtown, to the northwest, was one of Henry's homes (1771–78) and also the girlhood home of Dolley Madison (née Payne), wife of President James Madison (Madison, James). Henry Clay (Clay, Henry), the statesman and orator, was born (1777) at Clay Spring, 4.5 miles (7 km) to the south. A few miles north of Hanover is Paramount's Kings Dominion, a 400-acre (162-hectare) amusement complex with WaterWorks, a water park.

▪ historical state, Germany

German  Hannover,  

      former state of northwestern Germany, first an electorate (1692–1806) of the Holy Roman Empire, then a kingdom (1814–66), and finally a Prussian province (1866–1945). After World War II the state was administratively abolished; its former territory formed about 80 percent of the Land (state) of Lower Saxony.

      Hanover grew out of the early 17th-century division of territories of the Welf house of Brunswick-Lüneburg. Created in 1638 as the principality of Brunswick-Calenberg-Göttingen, it came to be named after its principal town, Hanover. Ernest Augustus I (1630–98), duke from 1680, united the principality with that of Lüneburg, marrying his son George Louis to Sophia Dorothea of Celle, only daughter of George William, duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg; upon the latter's death in 1705 the two states were formally joined. Ernest Augustus in 1692 had obtained from the Holy Roman emperor Leopold I the designation of his principality as the ninth electorate of the empire, called officially Brunswick-Lüneburg but commonly Hanover.

      Ernest Augustus had married Sophia of the Palatinate, granddaughter of James I of Great Britain. The British Act of Settlement (Settlement, Act of) (1701) designated her heiress of the British crown after Queen Anne, but, because Sophia died shortly before Anne in 1714, her son George Louis succeeded as George I, the first of five monarchs of the house of Hanover to rule both Hanover and Great Britain. The court of the electress Sophia had been a cultural centre, embellished especially by George Frideric Handel and G.W. Leibniz. George I (d. 1727) and George II (d. 1760) frequently visited their homeland; but George III (d. 1820) never did so, and George IV (d. 1830) and William IV (d. 1837) did so only once each. The electorate was ruled well in their absence by a ministry in Hanover, associated with the German chancellery in London.

      Hanover was expanded to the North Sea by the addition of Bremen and Verden in 1715 and the bishopric of Osnabrück in 1803. Called Britain's “Achilles' heel” in continental Europe, Hanover suffered invasions during Britain's wars, especially during the Seven Years' War (1756–63) and the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars from 1793. The Prussians seized it in 1801 and 1805 and the French in 1803 and 1806, after which part of it was incorporated into the French empire and the rest into the Kingdom of Westphalia, created by Napoleon I for his brother Jérôme Bonaparte. After the fall of Napoleon in 1814, Hanover was reconstituted as a kingdom largely because of British influence and acquired Hildesheim, Eichsfeld, East Frisia, Bentheim, Lingen, and Emsland. It was the fourth largest German state after Austria, Prussia, and Bavaria. The constitution imposed on Hanover by George IV in 1819 did little to alter the nobles' domination of the state, and only after a rising in 1830 did William IV (in 1833) grant a new charter extending political power to the middle class and (to a minor extent) to the peasantry and submitting state finances and royal revenues to parliamentary control.

      The death of William IV on June 20, 1837, terminated the personal union between Great Britain and Hanover. Because of the Hanoverian law prohibiting female succession if there was a male heir, Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland (1771–1851) and brother of William IV, became king of Hanover upon William's death, while William's niece Victoria succeeded to the British throne. A reactionary, Ernest Augustus overthrew the Hanoverian constitution, but the revolution of 1848–49 forced him to grant a new one. In 1851 Hanover joined the German Customs Union (Zollverein).

       George V (1819–78), blind from the age of 14, became king on his father's death in 1851. The rise of Prussia undid his kingdom: he tried to remain neutral in the Seven Weeks' War in 1866 between Austria and Prussia but was driven from Hanover by Prussian forces. The kingdom was then annexed by Prussia (Sept. 20, 1866) and accorded limited self-government. The German Hanoverian party continued to demand a separate status for Hanover in the Reichstag throughout the period of the German Empire (1871–1918), but Hanover remained part of Prussia until 1945.

      Hanover was briefly reestablished as a state in August 1946, but on November 1 of that year it was united with Oldenburg, Brunswick, and Schaumburg-Lippe to form the Land (state) of Lower Saxony (Niedersachsen). The name Hannover now applies to a district within that state.

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