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Biddle, Nicholas, American financier

(Encyclopedia)Biddle, Nicholas, 1786–1844, American financier, b. Philadelphia. After holding important posts in the American legations in France and England, he returned to the United States in 1807 and became o...

Blackstone, Sir William

(Encyclopedia)Blackstone, Sir William, 1723–80, English jurist. At first unsuccessful in legal practice, he turned to scholarship and teaching. He became (1758) the first Vinerian professor of law at Oxford, wher...

Bergson, Henri

(Encyclopedia)Bergson, Henri äNrēˈ bĕrgsôNˈ [key], 1859–1941, French philosopher. He became a professor at the Collège de France in 1900, devoted some time to politics, and, after World War I, took an inte...

Shays's Rebellion

(Encyclopedia)Shays's Rebellion, 1786–87, armed insurrection by farmers in W Massachusetts against the state government. Debt-ridden farmers, struck by the economic depression that followed the American Revolutio...

statistics

(Encyclopedia)statistics, science of collecting and classifying a group of facts according to their relative number and determining certain values that represent characteristics of the group. The most familiar stat...

stethoscope

(Encyclopedia)stethoscope stĕthˈəskōpˌ [key] [Gr.,=chest viewer], instrument that enables the physican to hear the sounds made by the heart, the lungs, and various other organs. The earliest stethoscope, devis...

Restoration, in French history

(Encyclopedia)Restoration, in French history, the period from 1814 to 1830. It began with the first abdication of Emperor Napoleon I and the return of the Bourbon king, Louis XVIII, but was interrupted (1815) by Na...

Richardson, Samuel

(Encyclopedia)Richardson, Samuel, 1689–1761, English novelist, b. Derbyshire. When he was 50 and a prosperous printer, Richardson was asked to compose a guide to letter writing. The idea of introducing a central ...

Faraday, Michael

(Encyclopedia)Faraday, Michael fârˈədē, –dāˌ [key], 1791–1867, English scientist. The son of a blacksmith, he was apprenticed to a bookbinder at the age of 14. He had little formal education, but acquired...

civil disobedience

(Encyclopedia)civil disobedience, refusal to obey a law or follow a policy believed to be unjust. Practitioners of civil disobedience usual base their actions on moral right and employ the nonviolent technique of p...