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Oklahoma City

(Encyclopedia)Oklahoma City (1990 pop. 444,719), state capital, and seat of Oklahoma co., central Okla., on the North Canadian River; inc. 1890. The state's largest city, it is an important livestock market, a whol...

Talmadge, Eugene

(Encyclopedia)Talmadge, Eugene, 1884–1946, governor of Georgia (1933–37, 1941–43), b. Forsyth, Ga. In his second term as governor (1935–37) of Georgia, his staff was forbidden by Harry Hopkins to disburse f...

Whitney Museum of American Art

(Encyclopedia)Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York City, founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney with a core group of 700 artworks, many from her own collection. The museum was an outgrowth of the Whi...

stall

(Encyclopedia)stall, small division of a larger space, sometimes partly partitioned. The term is used for a booth for display and selling at an exhibition, for a compartment in a stable or kennel, or, in England, f...

Balboa, Vasco Núñez de

(Encyclopedia)Balboa, Vasco Núñez de bălbōˈə, Span. väˈskō no͞oˈnyāth dā bälbōˈä [key], c.1475–1519, Spanish conquistador, discoverer of the Pacific Ocean. After sailing with Bastidas in 1501, Ba...

Dante Alighieri

(Encyclopedia)Dante Alighieri dănˈtē, Ital. dänˈtā älēgyĕˈrē [key], 1265–1321, Italian poet, b. Florence. Dante was the author of the Divine Comedy, one of the greatest of literary classics. Dante's ...

short story

(Encyclopedia)short story, brief prose fiction. The term covers a wide variety of narratives—from stories in which the main focus is on the course of events to studies of character, from the “short short” sto...

Dirac, Paul Adrien Maurice

(Encyclopedia)Dirac, Paul Adrien Maurice dĭrăkˈ [key], 1902–84, English physicist. He was educated at the Univ. of Bristol and St. John's College, Cambridge, and became professor of mathematics at Cambridge in...

cribbage

(Encyclopedia)cribbage krĭbˈĭj [key], card game played by two persons with a deck of 52 cards and a scoring (pegging) device known as a cribbage board. The board contains four rows of 30 holes each (two rows for...

Kafka, Franz

(Encyclopedia)Kafka, Franz fränts käfˈkä [key], 1883–1924, German-language novelist, b. Prague. Along with Joyce, Kafka is perhaps the most influential of 20th-century writers. From a middle-class Jewish fami...