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Saint Pierre, town, St. Pierre and Miquelon

(Encyclopedia)Saint Pierre săN pyĕr [key], town (2006 pop. 5,509), capital of the French territorial collectivity of St. Pierre and Miquelon, on the E coast of St. Pierre island. St. Pierre is the administrative ...

Rochester, town, England

(Encyclopedia)Rochester, town, SE England, on the Medway River, chief town of the borough of Medway, which also includes Chatham and Gillingham. Cement, heavy machinery, electronic equipment, precision tools, and c...

castle

(Encyclopedia)castle, type of fortified dwelling characteristic of the Middle Ages. Fortification of towns had been in practice since antiquity, but in the 9th cent. feudal lords began to develop the private fortre...

Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation

(Encyclopedia)Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, commonly known as Freddie Mac, government-sponsored enterprise that uses private capital to buy home mortgages as a means to help lower housing costs. A sister ...

Fowles, John

(Encyclopedia)Fowles, John, 1926–2005, English writer, b. Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, grad. Oxford, 1950. A complex, cerebral writer and a superb storyteller, Fowles was interested in manipulating the novel as a genre. ...

Hopkins, Stephen

(Encyclopedia)Hopkins, Stephen, 1707–85, colonial governor of Rhode Island and political leader in the American Revolution, b. Providence, R.I. A member of the colonial assembly for many years, he also served as ...

American Legion

(Encyclopedia)American Legion, national association of male and female war veterans, founded (1919) in Paris. Membership is open to veterans of World Wars I and II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. The preamble...

folk high school

(Encyclopedia)folk high school, type of adult education that in its most widely known form originated in Denmark in the middle of the 19th cent. The idea as originally conceived by Bishop Nikolai Grundtvig was to s...

Edward the Confessor

(Encyclopedia)Edward the Confessor, d. 1066, king of the English (1042–66), son of Æthelred the Unready and his Norman wife, Emma. After the Danish conquest (1013–16) of England, Edward grew up at the Norman c...

Whitewater, in U.S. history

(Encyclopedia)Whitewater, popular name for a failed 1970s Arkansas real estate venture by the Whitewater Development Corp., in which Gov. (later President) Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, were pa...