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McDougall, Alexander

(Encyclopedia)McDougall, Alexander məkdo͞oˈgəl [key], 1731–86, American Revolutionary political leader and general, b. Islay, Inner Hebrides, Scotland. He was taken (1738) as a child to New York. He became a ...

Barber, Samuel

(Encyclopedia)Barber, Samuel, 1910–81, American composer, b. West Chester, Pa. Barber studied at the Curtis Institute of Music, Philadelphia. His music is lyrical and generally tonal; his later works are more chr...

Alien and Sedition Acts

(Encyclopedia)Alien and Sedition Acts, 1798, four laws enacted by the Federalist-controlled U.S. Congress, allegedly in response to the hostile actions of the French Revolutionary government on the seas and in the ...

modernism

(Encyclopedia)modernism, in religion, a general movement in the late 19th and 20th cent. that tried to reconcile historical Christianity with the findings of modern science and philosophy. Modernism arose mainly fr...

Quebec, city, Canada

(Encyclopedia)Quebec, Fr. Québec, city (1991 pop. 167,517), provincial capital, S Que., Canada, at the confluence of the St. Lawrence and St. Charles rivers. The population is largely French speaking, and the town...

elegy

(Encyclopedia)elegy, in Greek and Roman poetry, a poem written in elegiac verse (i.e., couplets consisting of a hexameter line followed by a pentameter line). The form dates back to 7th cent. b.c. in Greece and poe...

Dürrenmatt, Friedrich

(Encyclopedia)Dürrenmatt, Friedrich frēˈdrĭkh dürˈənmät [key], 1921–90, Swiss playwright and novelist. Dürrenmatt's writings depict a world both comic and grotesque. As a young German-speaking playwright...

figured bass

(Encyclopedia)figured bass, in music, a system of shorthand notation in which figures are written below the notes of the bass part to indicate the chords to be played. Called also thorough bass and basso continuo, ...

Montgomery, Richard

(Encyclopedia)Montgomery, Richard, 1738?–1775, American Revolutionary general, b. Swords, Co. Dublin, Ireland. After entering the British army, he was sent (1757) to Canada in the French and Indian Wars and saw a...

Winter, Sir Gregory Paul

(Encyclopedia)Winter, Sir Gregory Paul, 1951–, British biochemist, Ph.D. Cambridge, 1976. He has spent most of his career as a researcher at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, where since ...