Columbia Encyclopedia

Search results

500 results found

Le Duan

(Encyclopedia)Le Duan lā dwän [key], 1908–86, Vietnamese Communist party leader. Imprisoned by the French colonial regime, he organized Communist forces in the South after the French withdrawal from Vietnam in ...

Beechey, Frederick William

(Encyclopedia)Beechey, Frederick William, 1796–1856, British admiral and Arctic explorer. He accompanied an expedition N of Spitsbergen in 1818 and wrote an account of it in his Voyage of Discovery towards the No...

Prespa, Lake

(Encyclopedia)Prespa, Lake prĕsˈpä [key], Albanian Prespës, Macedonian Prespansko, 112 sq mi (290 sq km), SW North Macedonia, NW Greece, and E Albania; highest lake (alt. 2,798 ft/853 m) of the Balkans. It is c...

Peary, Robert Edwin

(Encyclopedia)Peary, Robert Edwin pērˈē [key], 1856–1920, American arctic explorer, b. Cresson, Pa. In 1881 he entered the U.S. navy as a civil engineer and for several years served in Nicaragua, where he was ...

Americas, antiquity and prehistory of the

(Encyclopedia)Americas, antiquity and prehistory of the, study of the origins of the aboriginal peoples of the Americas. Archaeologists believe humans had entered and occupied much of the Americas by the end of the...

Atlantic Ocean

(Encyclopedia)CE5 Atlantic Ocean [Lat.,=of Atlas], second largest ocean (c.31,800,000 sq mi/82,362,000 sq km; c.36,000,000 sq mi/93,240,000 sq km with marginal seas). The North Atlantic Ocean has some of the w...

latitude

(Encyclopedia)latitude, angular distance of any point on the surface of the earth north or south of the equator. The equator is latitude 0°, and the North Pole and South Pole are latitudes 90°N and 90°S, respect...

Murdoch, Dame Iris

(Encyclopedia)Murdoch, Dame Iris (Dame Jean Iris Murdoch) mûrˈdŏk [key], 1919–99, British novelist and philosopher, b. Dublin, Ireland, grad. Oxford (1942). In 1948 she was named lecturer in philosophy at Oxfo...

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

(Encyclopedia)Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 1807–82, American poet, b. Portland, Maine, grad. Bowdoin College, 1825. He wrote some of the most popular poems in American literature, in which he created a new body o...

holly

(Encyclopedia)holly, common name for members of the Aquifoliaceae, a family of widely distributed trees and shrubs, most numerous in Central and South America. The evergreen English holly (Ilex aquifolium), the com...