Columbia Encyclopedia

Search results

500 results found

Fuller, Margaret

(Encyclopedia)Fuller, Margaret, 1810–50, American writer, lecturer, and public intellectual, b. Cambridgeport (now part of Cambridge), Mass. She was one of the most influential personalities in the American liter...

Blake, William

(Encyclopedia)Blake, William, 1757–1827, English poet and artist, b. London. Although he exerted a great influence on English romanticism, Blake defies characterization by school, movement, or even period. At the...

Webb, Mary (Meredith)

(Encyclopedia)Webb, Mary (Meredith), 1881–1927, English novelist. Her native Shropshire is the scene of all her novels, which are somber, passionate, and infused with an intense feeling for the countryside. Altho...

Guevara, Che

(Encyclopedia)Guevara, Che (Ernesto Guevara) chā gāväˈrä, ārnĕsˈtō [key], 1928–67, Cuban revolutionary and political leader, b. Argentina. Trained as a physician at the Univ. of Buenos Aires, he took par...

charleston, dance

(Encyclopedia)charleston, social dance of the United States popular in the mid-1920s. The charleston is characterized by outward heel kicks combined with an up-and-down movement achieved by bending and straightenin...

Gadsden Purchase

(Encyclopedia)Gadsden Purchase gădzˈdən [key], strip of land purchased (1853) by the United States from Mexico. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) had described the U.S.-Mexico boundary vaguely, and Presiden...

Broch, Hermann

(Encyclopedia)Broch, Hermann hĕrˈmän brôkh [key], 1886–1951, Austrian novelist. Broch is one of the masters of European modernism. Influenced by Immanuel Kant and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Kraus, and the Vien...

Lowell, Robert

(Encyclopedia)Lowell, Robert (Robert Traill Spence Lowell 4th), 1917–77, American poet and translator, widely considered the preeminent American poet of the mid-20th cent., b. Boston, grad. Kenyon College (B.A., ...

Bohr, Niels Henrik David

(Encyclopedia)Bohr, Niels Henrik David bōr [key], 1885–1962, Danish physicist, one of the foremost scientists of modern physics. He studied at the Univ. of Copenhagen (Ph.D. 1911) and carried on research on the...

Seven Days battles

(Encyclopedia)Seven Days battles, in the American Civil War, the week-long Confederate counter-offensive (June 26–July 2, 1862) near Richmond, Va., that ended the Peninsular campaign. After the battle of Fair Oak...