Columbia Encyclopedia

Search results

500 results found

Hue

(Encyclopedia)Hue hwā [key], city (1989 pop. 260,489), former capital of the historic region of Annam, Vietnam, in a rich farming area on the Hue River near the South China Sea. Probably founded in the 3d cent. a....

Allawi, Ayad

(Encyclopedia)Allawi, Ayad ĕyädˈ äläˈwē [key], 1946–, Iraqi political leader. A doctor and prominent secular Shiite, he was a Ba'ath party member but went into exile in 1971. After a 1978 assassination att...

Royal Opera

(Encyclopedia)Royal Opera, one of the principal British opera companies, based at the Royal Opera House (which it shares with the Royal Ballet) in Covent Garden, London. Formed in 1946 as the Covent Garden Opera Co...

Neutrality Act

(Encyclopedia)Neutrality Act, law passed by the U.S. Congress and signed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Aug., 1935. It was designed to keep the United States out of a possible European war by banning shi...

Parthenopean Republic

(Encyclopedia)Parthenopean Republic pärˌthənōpēˈən [key] [from Parthenope, an ancient name of Naples], state set up in Naples in Jan., 1799, by the French Revolutionary army under General Championnet and by ...

Thomas, George Henry

(Encyclopedia)Thomas, George Henry, 1816–70, Union general in the American Civil War, b. Southampton co., Va. He served in the Seminole War and in the Mexican War. Later he taught at West Point and served in Texa...

autogiro

(Encyclopedia)autogiro jīˈrəplān [key], type of aircraft supported in the air by a horizontally mounted airfoil similar to that of a helicopter but unpowered. Invented by the Spaniard Juan de la Cierva, it was ...

World Trade Organization

(Encyclopedia)World Trade Organization (WTO), international organization established in 1995 as a result of the final round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) negotiations, called the Uruguay Roun...

Year 2000 problem

(Encyclopedia)Year 2000 problem, Y2K problem, or millennium bug, in computer science, a design flaw in the hardware or software of a computer that caused erroneous results when working with dates beyond Dec. 31, 1...

Slavonia

(Encyclopedia)Slavonia sləvōˈnēə [key], Croatian Slavonija, historic region, part of Croatia. It is a fertile agricultural and forested lowland bounded, in part, by the Drava River in the north and the Sava Ri...