Columbia Encyclopedia

Search results

500 results found

Fargo, William George

(Encyclopedia)Fargo, William George, 1818–81, American pioneer expressman, b. Pompey, N.Y. He had been successively a postrider, freight agent, messenger, and resident agent (1843) for an express company in Buffa...

Royal Tunbridge Wells

(Encyclopedia)Royal Tunbridge Wells, town (1991 pop. 57,699), Kent, SE England. Mineral springs were discovered in 1606, and the town developed as a fashionable inland resort. Visitors have included many of the roy...

Wells-Barnett, Ida Bell

(Encyclopedia)Wells-Barnett, Ida Bell, 1862–1931, African-American civil-rights advocate and feminist, b. Holly Springs, Miss. Born a slave, she attended a freedman's school and was orphaned at 16. She moved (188...

Wells, David Ames

(Encyclopedia)Wells, David Ames, 1828–98, American economist, b. Springfield, Mass., grad. Williams, 1847, and Lawrence Scientific School, Cambridge, Mass., 1851. Early in life he wrote several popular books on s...

Brown, William Wells

(Encyclopedia)Brown, William Wells, 1814–84, African-American abolitionist, writer, and doctor, b. near Lexington, Ky. Born into slavery, the child of a black slave mother and a white slaveholding father, Brown f...

Carey, George Leonard

(Encyclopedia)Carey, George Leonard, 1935–, archbishop of Canterbury (1991–2002). From a working-class background, he graduated from the London School of Divinity in 1962 and was ordained the same year. Carey w...

George

(Encyclopedia)George, river, c.345 mi (560 km) long, rising in a lake on the Quebec-Labrador boundary, E Canada. It flows N through Indian Lake (125 sq mi/324 sq km) to Ungava Bay (an arm of Hudson Strait). ...

George, Saint

(Encyclopedia)George, Saint, 4th cent.?, perhaps a soldier in the imperial army who died for the faith in Asia Minor. His life is cloaked in legends; Gibbon's identification of him with George of Cappadocia is fals...

Villiers, George

(Encyclopedia)Villiers, George: see Buckingham, George Villiers, 1st duke of; Buckingham, George Villiers, 2d duke of. ...

Browse by Subject