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Shoshone

(Encyclopedia)Shoshone or Shoshoni shəshōˈnē [key], Native North Americans whose language belongs to the Shoshonean group of the Uto-Aztecan branch of the Aztec-Tanoan linguistic stock (see Native American lang...

Dazai, Osamu

(Encyclopedia)Dazai, Osamu sho͞oˈjē tso͞oˈshĭmä [key], 1909–48, Japanese novelist. Considered one of the foremost fiction writers of 20th-century Japan, Dazai was noted for his ironic and gloomy wit, his o...

Farah, Nuruddin

(Encyclopedia)Farah, Nuruddin, 1945–, Somali novelist, playwright, and essayist. Educated in Ethiopia, India, and England, he writes in English. His first novel, From a Crooked Rib (1970), was about a girl who fl...

Urban VIII

(Encyclopedia)Urban VIII, 1568–1644, pope (1623–44), a Florentine named Maffeo Barberini; successor of Gregory XV. Throughout his pontificate the Thirty Years War raged in Germany. For various political reasons...

Eddington, Sir Arthur Stanley

(Encyclopedia)Eddington, Sir Arthur Stanley, 1882–1944, British astronomer and physicist. He was chief assistant (1906–13) at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, and was from 1913 Plumian professor of astronomy a...

Bath, city, England

(Encyclopedia)Bath, city (2021 pop. 88,859), Bath and North East Somerset, SW England, in the Avon River valley. Britain's leading winter resort, Bath has the only na...

Broad, Eli

(Encyclopedia) Broad, Eli, 1933-2021, American financier and philanthropist, Bronx, N.Y., Michigan State College (BA, 1954). Broad was the son of poor Lithuania-Jewis...

byliny

(Encyclopedia)byliny bĭlēˈnē [key] [Rus.,=what has happened], Russian scholarly term first applied in the 1840s to a great body of narrative and heroic poems. They are called by the folk stariny [Rus.,=what is ...

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi

(Encyclopedia)Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, 1977–, one of the leading African writers of her generation, b. Enugu, Nigeria. She left Nigeria for the United States in 1997 to study, and since has split her time betwe...

Li Tsung-jên

(Encyclopedia)Li Tsung-jên lē dzo͞ong-jŭn [key], 1890–1969, Chinese Nationalist general and political leader. For 25 years (1925–49) he was a leader of the military clique that ruled Guangxi prov. The Guang...