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Johnson, Samuel, American clergyman, educator, and philosopher

(Encyclopedia)Johnson, Samuel, 1696–1772, American clergyman, educator, and philosopher, b. Guilford, Conn., grad. Collegiate School (now Yale), 1714; father of William Samuel Johnson. He became a Congregationali...

Sully, Thomas

(Encyclopedia)Sully, Thomas, 1783–1872, American painter, b. England. Having come to the United States as a child, he first studied with his brother Lawrence, a miniaturist, and later for a brief time with Gilber...

Wanamaker, John

(Encyclopedia)Wanamaker, John wŏnˈəmāˌkər [key], 1838–1922, American merchant, b. Philadelphia. He went into the men's clothing business in Philadelphia with Nathan Brown, his brother-in-law, in 1861. The f...

Whiskey Ring

(Encyclopedia)Whiskey Ring, in U.S. history, a group of distillers and public officials who defrauded the federal government of liquor taxes. Soon after the Civil War these taxes were raised very high, in some case...

Carey, Mathew

(Encyclopedia)Carey, Mathew, 1760–1839, American publisher, bookseller, and economist, b. Dublin. In his Dublin journal he violently attacked English rule of Ireland, was imprisoned for a month, fled to France, w...

vaporization

(Encyclopedia)vaporization, change of a liquid or solid substance to a gas or vapor. There is fundamentally no difference between the terms gas and vapor, but gas is used commonly to describe a substance that appea...

pragmatism

(Encyclopedia)pragmatism prăgˈmətĭzəm [key], method of philosophy in which the truth of a proposition is measured by its correspondence with experimental results and by its practical outcome. Thought is consid...

Motion, Sir Andrew Peter

(Encyclopedia)Motion, Sir Andrew Peter, 1952–, English poet and biographer, poet laureate of England (1999–2009), grad. University College, Oxford (B.A., 1974; M.Litt., 1977). He writes poems that are both lyri...

MacLeod, Alistair

(Encyclopedia)MacLeod, Alistair məkloudˈ [key], 1936–2014, Canadian fiction writer, b. John Alexander Joseph MacLeod, Ph.D. Notre Dame, 1968. He taught at the Univ. of Windsor from the late 1960s until his reti...

Macy, Anne Sullivan

(Encyclopedia)Macy, Anne Sullivan, 1866–1936, American educator, friend and teacher of Helen Keller, b. Feeding Hills, Mass. Placed in Tewksbury almshouse (1876), she was later admitted (1880) to Perkins Institut...