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Langside

(Encyclopedia)Langside, district of Glasgow, S central Scotland. At the battle of Langside (1568) the 1st earl of Murray defeated the forces of Mary Queen of Scots led by Archibald Campbell, 5th earl of Argyll. As ...

Kara Kum

(Encyclopedia)Kara Kum kärˌə ko͝omˈ [key], two deserts, one in Kazakhstan and one in Turkmenistan. The Caspian Kara Kum or Garagum, the larger desert (c.115,000 sq mi/297,900 sq km), is W of the Amu Darya Rive...

mechanism

(Encyclopedia)mechanism, philosophical theory about the nature of organic systems, holding that organisms are machines in the sense that they are material systems. Mechanism seeks to explain biological processes, i...

Daughters of the American Revolution

(Encyclopedia)Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), a Colonial patriotic society in the United States, open to women having one or more ancestors who aided the cause of the Revolution. The society was organiz...

Strathclyde, University of

(Encyclopedia)Strathclyde, University of, at Glasgow, Scotland; founded 1796 as Anderson's Institution. In 1886 its name was changed to Glasgow and West of Scotland Technical College, and in 1956 it became known as...

Smart, Christopher

(Encyclopedia)Smart, Christopher, 1722–71, English poet. A graduate of Cambridge, he lived in London writing poems, editing a humorous magazine, and producing plays. His one great poem, Song to David (1763), an i...

Pinkie

(Encyclopedia)Pinkie, battlefield, E of Edinburgh, Scotland. There the English under Edward Seymour, duke of Somerset, defeated a larger Scottish force on Sept. 10, 1547. Somerset's invasion of Scotland, to enforce...

Babington, Anthony

(Encyclopedia)Babington, Anthony băbˈĭngtən [key], 1561–86, English conspirator. A member of the Roman Catholic gentry, he served as a youth in the household of the earl of Shrewsbury at Sheffield Castle, whe...

Van Vleck, John Hasbrouck

(Encyclopedia)Van Vleck, John Hasbrouck, 1899–1980, American physicist, b. Middletown, Conn., Ph.D. Harvard, 1922. As a professor at Harvard, Van Vleck developed fundamental theories on the quantum mechanics of m...

Brannan, Charles Franklin

(Encyclopedia)Brannan, Charles Franklin, 1903–92, U.S. government official, b. Denver, LL.B. Univ. of Denver, 1929. He became a specialist in agriculture and mining law. In the Dept. of Agriculture after 1935, Br...