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Ross, Sir John

(Encyclopedia)Ross, Sir John, 1777–1856, British arctic explorer and rear admiral. In 1818 he went in search of the Northwest Passage but turned back after exploring Baffin Bay. Financed by Sir Felix Booth, he co...

Victor Emmanuel I

(Encyclopedia)Victor Emmanuel I, 1759–1824, king of Sardinia (1802–21). His brother and predecessor, Charles Emmanuel IV, lost (1798) all his territories except the island of Sardinia to France in the French Re...

Grieg, Edvard Hagerup

(Encyclopedia)Grieg, Edvard Hagerup ĕdˈvär häˈgəro͞op grēg [key], 1843–1907, Norwegian composer. Grieg developed a strongly nationalistic style which made him known as “the Voice of Norway.” He receiv...

Elijah

(Encyclopedia)Elijah ēlīˈəs [key] [both: Heb.,=Yahweh is God], fl. c.875 b.c., Hebrew prophet in the reign of King Ahab. He is one of the outstanding figures of the Bible. Elijah's mission was to destroy the wo...

Ethical Culture movement

(Encyclopedia)Ethical Culture movement, originating in the Society for Ethical Culture, founded in New York City in 1876, by Felix Adler. Its aim is “to assert the supreme importance of the ethical factor in all ...

Purcell, Edward Mills

(Encyclopedia)Purcell, Edward Mills, 1912–97, American physicist, b. Taylorville, Ill., Ph.D. Harvard, 1938. During World War II, Purcell was a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Radiation La...

Francis, Dick

(Encyclopedia)Francis, Dick (Richard Stanley Francis), 1920–2010, English novelist. He was a champion steeplechase jockey (1946–57) and a racing writer for a London newspaper (1957–73). Francis parlayed his k...

Gratian, Italian legal scholar

(Encyclopedia)Gratian, fl. 1140, Italian legal scholar, founder of the science of canon law. Almost nothing is known of his life beyond the fact that he was a monk, almost certainly Camaldolite, and that he taught ...

chamber music

(Encyclopedia)chamber music, ensemble music for small groups of instruments, with only one player to each part. Its essence is individual treatment of parts and the exclusion of virtuosic elements. Originally playe...

antipope

(Encyclopedia)antipope [Lat.,=against the pope], person elected pope whose election was declared uncanonical and in opposition to a canonically chosen pontiff. Important antipopes were Novatian; Clement III (see Gu...