Columbia Encyclopedia

Search results

433 results found

Henry IV, Holy Roman emperor and German king

(Encyclopedia)Henry IV, 1050–1106, Holy Roman emperor (1084–1105) and German king (1056–1105), son and successor of Henry III. He was the central figure in the opening stages of the long struggle between the ...

Gregory VII, Saint

(Encyclopedia)Gregory VII, Saint, d. 1085, pope (1073–85), an Italian (b. near Rome) named Hildebrand (Ital. Ildebrando); successor of Alexander II. He was one of the greatest popes. Feast: May 25. Gregory's co...

Burke, Edmund

(Encyclopedia)Burke, Edmund, 1729–97, British political writer and statesman, b. Dublin, Ireland. Burke left, in his many and diverse writings, a monumental construction of British political thought that had fa...

Reichstag

(Encyclopedia)Reichstag rīkhsˈtäk [key] [Ger.,=imperial parliament], name for the diet of the Holy Roman Empire, for the lower chamber of the federal parliament of the North German Confederation, and for the low...

Italian architecture

(Encyclopedia)Italian architecture, the several styles employed in Italy after the Roman period. Nineteenth-century Italian architecture, such as Giuseppe Sacconi's Victor Emmanuel monument, shows a decline in qu...

Naples, city, Italy

(Encyclopedia)Naples, Ital. Napoli, city (1991 pop. 1,067,365), capital of Campania and of Naples prov., S central Italy, on the Bay of Naples, an arm of the Tyrrhenian Sea. It is a major seaport, with shipyards, a...

exploration

(Encyclopedia)exploration, travel to a part of the earth that is relatively unknown to the traveler's culture, historically often motivated by a desire for colonization, conquest, or trade. See also space explorati...

nucleus, in physics

(Encyclopedia)nucleus, in physics, the extremely dense central core of an atom. Following the discovery of radioactivity by A. H. Becquerel in 1896, Ernest Rutherford identified two types of radiation given off b...

little magazine

(Encyclopedia)little magazine, term used to designate certain magazines that have as their purpose the publication of art, literature, or social theory by comparatively little-known writers. The little-magazine m...

organ

(Encyclopedia)CE5 Organ organ, a musical wind instrument in which sound is produced by one or more sets of pipes controlled by a keyboard, each pipe producing only one pitch by means of a mechanically produced ...