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Work Projects Administration

(Encyclopedia)Work Projects Administration (WPA), former U.S. government agency, established in 1935 by executive order of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt as the Works Progress Administration; it was renamed th...

solid

(Encyclopedia)solid, one of the three commonly recognized states in which matter occurs, i.e., that state, as distinguished from liquid and gas, in which a substance has both a definite shape and a definite volume....

Zsigmond, Vilmos

(Encyclopedia)Zsigmond, Vilmos, 1930–2016, Hungarian-American cinematographer. As a film student in Budapest, he and fellow student (and later cinematographer) Laszlo Kovacs secretly filmed the street fighting as...

Zuccaro

(Encyclopedia)Zuccaro tso͞okˈkārō [key], Italian painters, two brothers, who were leading exponents of the late mannerist style in Rome. Taddeo Zuccaro, 1529–66, won recognition by his decorative paintings in...

lanthanum

(Encyclopedia)lanthanum lănˈthənəm [key] [Gr.,=to lie hidden], metallic chemical element; symbol La; at. no. 57; at. wt. 138.90547; m.p. about 920℃; b.p. about 3,460℃; sp. gr. 6.19 at 25℃; valence +3. Lan...

Lanzmann, Claude

(Encyclopedia)Lanzmann, Claude, 1925–2018, French filmmaker and journalist, b. Paris. While his Jewish family was in hiding in rural France during World War II, Lanzmann joined the Resistance and fought the Nazis...

Mesozoic era

(Encyclopedia)Mesozoic era mĕzˌəzōˈĭk [key] [Gr.,=middle life], major division of geologic time (see Geologic Timescale, tablegeologic timescale, table) from 65 to 225 million years ago. Great crustal disturb...

Lowell Observatory

(Encyclopedia)Lowell Observatory, astronomical observatory located in Flagstaff, Ariz.; it was founded in 1894 by Percival Lowell, the American astronomer who popularized the idea that Mars might support intelligen...

Macmillan, (Maurice) Harold, 1st earl of Stockton

(Encyclopedia)Macmillan, (Maurice) Harold, 1st earl of Stockton, 1894–1986, British statesman. A descendant of the founder of the publishing house of Macmillan and Company, he was educated at Eton and at Oxford a...

Kiarostami, Abbas

(Encyclopedia)Kiarostami, Abbas ăbôˈsā kēyôˈrōmămēˌ [key], 1940–2016, Iranian filmmaker. Widely acclaimed as Iran's greatest film director, he typically explores the lives of ordinary Iranians in his f...