Columbia Encyclopedia

Search results

500 results found

Bragg, Sir William Henry

(Encyclopedia)Bragg, Sir William Henry, 1862–1942, English physicist, educated at King William's College, Isle of Man, and Trinity College, Cambridge. He served on the faculties of the Univ. of Adelaide in Austra...

Buell, Don Carlos

(Encyclopedia)Buell, Don Carlos, 1818–98, Union general in the Civil War, b. near Marietta, Ohio, grad. West Point, 1841. Buell was appointed brigadier general of volunteers in the Civil War (May, 1861), helped o...

Baganda

(Encyclopedia)Baganda bägänˈdə [key], also called Ganda, the largest ethnic group in Uganda. Bagandas comprise about 17% of the population and have the country's highest standard of living and literacy rate. Th...

Yonkers

(Encyclopedia)Yonkers yŏnˈkərz [key], city (1990 pop. 188,082), Westchester co., SE N.Y., on the east bank of the Hudson, in a hilly region just N of the Bronx (New York City); inc. 1855. Manufactures include ch...

Cedar Rapids

(Encyclopedia)Cedar Rapids, city (2020 pop. 137,710), seat of Linn co., E central Iowa, on the Cedar River; inc. as a city 1856. The second largest city in Iowa, it i...

divorce

(Encyclopedia)divorce, partial or total dissolution of a marriage by the judgment of a court. Partial dissolution is a divorce “from bed and board,” a decree of judicial separation, leaving the parties official...

Edward VIII

(Encyclopedia)Edward VIII, 1894–1972, king of Great Britain and Ireland (1936), known in later years as the duke of Windsor; eldest son of George V. He attended the naval colleges at Osborne and Dartmouth and Mag...

penguin

(Encyclopedia)penguin, originally the common name for the now extinct great auk of the N Atlantic and now used (since the 19th cent.) for the unrelated, generally antarctic diving birds of the Southern Hemisphere. ...

fur trade

(Encyclopedia)fur trade, in American history. Trade in animal skins and pelts had gone on since antiquity, but reached its height in the wilderness of North America from the 17th to the early 19th cent. The demand ...

New Netherland

(Encyclopedia)New Netherland, territory included in a commercial grant by the government of Holland to the Dutch West India Company in 1621. Colonists were settled along the Hudson River region; in 1624 the first p...