Columbia Encyclopedia

Search results

500 results found

Branford

(Encyclopedia)Branford, town (2020 pop. 28,273), New Haven co., S Conn., on Long Island Sound; settled 1644, inc. as a town 1930. Branford is mainly residential. Tour...

perestroika

(Encyclopedia)perestroika pərˈĕstroyˈkə [key], Soviet economic and social policy of the late 1980s. Perestroika [restructuring] was the term attached to the attempts (1985–91) by Mikhail Gorbachev to transfo...

Burbank

(Encyclopedia)Burbank, city (2020 pop.107,337), Los Angeles co., S Calif.; inc. 1911. Tourism and the entertainment industry are central to its economy; several motio...

Barnsley

(Encyclopedia)Barnsley bärnzˈlē [key], metropolitan borough, N England. Coal mining, engineering, and cl...

Cotton Belt

(Encyclopedia)Cotton Belt, former agricultural region of the SE United States where cotton was the main cash crop throughout the 19th and much of the 20th cent. Located on the Atlantic and Gulf coastal plains and o...

Ellison, Ralph

(Encyclopedia)Ellison, Ralph (Ralph Waldo Ellison), 1914–94, African-American author, b. Oklahoma City, studied Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee Univ.). Originally a trumpet player and aspiring composer, he moved...

Athabascan

(Encyclopedia)Athabascan both: –păsˈ– [key], group of related Native American languages forming a branch of the Nadene linguistic family or stock. In the preconquest period, Athabascan was a large and extensi...

Starr, Belle

(Encyclopedia)Starr, Belle, 1848?–89, American outlaw, b. near Carthage, Mo. Her original name was Myra Belle (or Maybelle) Shirley. Her family members were Confederate sympathizers, and her father was a farmer w...

Thomas, Clarence

(Encyclopedia)Thomas, Clarence, 1948–, associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1991–), b. Pin Point (Savannah), Ga. Raised in a poor family, he graduated (1974) from the Yale Law School and became a promin...

Sequoyah

(Encyclopedia)Sequoyah sĭkwoiˈə [key], c.1766–1843, Native North American leader, creator of the Cherokee syllabary, b. Loudon co., Tenn. Although many historians believe that he was the son of a Cherokee woma...