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African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church

(Encyclopedia)African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, Methodist denomination. It was founded in 1796 by black members of the Methodist Episcopal Church in New York City and was organized as a national body in 1821...

Boker, George Henry

(Encyclopedia)Boker, George Henry bōˈkər [key], 1823–90, American poet and playwright, b. Philadelphia, grad. Princeton, 1842. He is best remembered for his romantic and heroic tragedies, written in the manner...

Windsor Locks

(Encyclopedia)Windsor Locks wĭnˈzər [key], town (1990 pop. 12,358), Hartford co., N Conn., on the Connecticut River; settled 1663, set off from Windsor and inc. 1854. Once a tobacco-farming center, it still prod...

Wilmot Proviso

(Encyclopedia)Wilmot Proviso, 1846, amendment to a bill put before the U.S. House of Representatives during the Mexican War; it provided an appropriation of $2 million to enable President Polk to negotiate a territ...

Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act

(Encyclopedia)Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act, 1909, passed by the U.S. Congress. It was the first change in tariff laws since the Dingley Act of 1897; the issue had been ignored by President Theodore Roosevelt. The Repub...

Nye, Edgar Wilson

(Encyclopedia)Nye, Edgar Wilson nī [key], known as Bill Nye, 1850–96, American humorist and journalist, b. Shirley Mills, Maine. He lived in Wisconsin from 1852 to 1876, when he went to Wyoming. There he was adm...

nutation

(Encyclopedia)nutation, in astronomy, a slight wobbling motion of the earth's axis. The causes of nutation are similar to those of the precession of the equinoxes, involving the varying attraction of the moon on th...

geranium

(Encyclopedia)geranium, common name for some members of the Geraniaceae, a family of herbs and small shrubs of temperate and subtropical regions. Their long, beak-shaped fruits give them the popular names crane's-b...

Graham, Robert

(Encyclopedia)Graham, Robert, later Robert Cunninghame Graham, c.1735–1797, Scottish poet and politician. He is best known for the lyric “If Doughty Deeds My Lady Please.” He inherited sizable estates and ser...

Deukmejian, George

(Encyclopedia)Deukmejian, George (Courken George Deukmejian, Jr.), 1928–2018, American political leader, b. Menands, N.Y., grad. St. Bernardine of Siena College (now Siena College), 1949, St. John's Univ. law sch...