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Pogodin, Nikolai

(Encyclopedia)Pogodin, Nikolai fyôˈdərəvĭch sto͞okäˈlôf [key], 1900–1962, Russian dramatist. Pogodin wrote many colorful, optimistic, and popular plays generally dealing with the theme of man's conquest ...

Putumayo

(Encyclopedia)Putumayo ēsäˈ [key], river, c.1,000 mi (1,600 km) long, rising in the Andes, S Colombia, and flowing SE to the Amazon in NW Brazil. Mostly navigable, it marks part of Colombia's boundary with Ecuad...

concentration camp

(Encyclopedia)concentration camp, a detention site outside the normal prison system created for military or political purposes to confine, terrorize, and, in some cases, kill civilians. The term was first used to d...

Gulag

(Encyclopedia)Gulag, system of forced-labor prison camps in the USSR, from the Russian acronym [GULag] for the Main Directorate of Corrective Labor Camps, a department of the Soviet secret police (originally the Ch...

Phillips, Wendell

(Encyclopedia)Phillips, Wendell, 1811–84, American reformer and orator, b. Boston, grad. Harvard (B.A., 1831; LL.B., 1834). He was admitted to the bar in 1834 but, having sufficient income of his own, he abandone...

villein

(Encyclopedia)villein vĭlˈən [key] [O.Fr.,=village dweller], peasant under the manorial system of medieval Western Europe. The term applies especially to serfs in England, where by the 13th cent. the entire unfr...

Hammurabi

(Encyclopedia)Hammurabi hämo͝oräˈbē [key], fl. 1792–1750 b.c., king of Babylonia. He founded an empire that was eventually destroyed by raids from Asia Minor. Hammurabi may have begun building the tower of B...

Golding, Bruce

(Encyclopedia)Golding, Bruce, 1947–, Jamaican political leader. The son of Tacius Golding, a member of parliament and speaker of the house in the 1960s, he is a graduate of the Univ. of the West Indies (B.Sc., 19...

Galle

(Encyclopedia)Galle gäl [key], city (1995 est. pop. 87,000), capital of Southern prov., extreme S Sri Lanka, on the Indian Ocean. An agricultural market center, it exports tea, rubber, coconut oil, cloves, and oth...

Mond, Alfred Moritz, 1st Baron Melchett

(Encyclopedia)Mond, Alfred Moritz, 1st Baron Melchett mŏnd, mĕlˈchĭt [key], 1868–1930, English industrialist and politician; son of Ludwig Mond. He played a leading part in the centralization of the English c...