Columbia Encyclopedia

Search results

500 results found

Rachel, French actress

(Encyclopedia)Rachel ālēˈzä fālēksˈ [key], 1821–58, French actress, b. Switzerland. Exploited by her father in her childhood, she sang in the streets with her sister Sarah. In Paris, showing great promise ...

Rachel, in the Bible

(Encyclopedia)Rachel rāˈchəl [key], in the Bible, wife of Jacob and mother of Joseph and Benjamin. She is one of the four Jewish matriarchs. An alternate form is Rahel. ...

Crothers, Rachel

(Encyclopedia)Crothers, Rachel krŭᵺˈərz [key], 1878–1958, American playwright and director, b. Bloomington, Ill., grad. Illinois State Normal Univ., 1892. Her plays, many of which were social comedies treati...

Field, Rachel

(Encyclopedia)Field, Rachel, 1894–1942, American writer, b. New York City, educated at Radcliffe. Her books for children include The Cross-Stitch Heart and Other One-Act Plays (1927), Hitty: Her First Hundred Yea...

Rachel, Russian poet who wrote in Hebrew

(Encyclopedia)Rachel, pseud. of Rachel Bluwstein, 1890–1931, Russian poet who wrote in Hebrew. She moved to Palestine in 1909 where she worked as a laborer. Her verse is simple and relates to the experience of Je...

Carson, Rachel Louise

(Encyclopedia)Carson, Rachel Louise, 1907–64, American writer and marine biologist, b. Springdale, Pa., M.A. Johns Hopkins, 1932. Her well-known books on sea life—Under the Sea-Wind (1941), The Sea around Us (1...

French Community

(Encyclopedia)French Community, established in 1958 by the constitution of the Fifth French Republic to replace the French Union. Its members consisted of the French Republic, which included metropolitan France (co...

French Union

(Encyclopedia)French Union, 1946–58, political entity established by the French constitution of 1946. It comprised metropolitan France (the 90 departments of continental France and Corsica); French overseas depar...

French language

(Encyclopedia)CEE French language, member of the Romance group of the Italic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Romance languages). It is spoken as a first language by more than 70 million p...

French Polynesia

(Encyclopedia)French Polynesia, officially Overseas Lands of French Polynesia, internally self-governing dependency (2015 est. pop. 278,000) of France, consisting of 118 islands in the South Pacific. The capital is...