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Southampton, Thomas Wriothesley, 1st earl of

(Encyclopedia)Southampton, Thomas Wriothesley, 1st earl of, c.1500–1550, lord chancellor of England. Appointed a clerk of the signet in 1530, he rose in the favor of Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII, who granted hi...

Brazauskas, Algirdas Mykolas

(Encyclopedia)Brazauskas, Algirdas Mykolas, 1932–2010, Lithuanian political leader. A civil engineer and economist, he rose in the Soviet Communist party bureaucracy and Lithuanian SSR government, and in 1988 bec...

Vernet

(Encyclopedia)Vernet vĕrnāˈ [key], French family of painters. Claude Joseph Vernet, 1714–89, marine painter, b. Avignon, studied with his father, Antoine Vernet, a decorative painter, and in Rome, where he acq...

Zhivkov, Todor

(Encyclopedia)Zhivkov, Todor tôˈdôr zhĭvkôfˈ [key], 1911–98, Bulgarian political leader. A printer, and a Communist party member from 1932, he rose to prominence as a partisan leader during World War II and...

pear

(Encyclopedia)pear, name for a fruit tree of the genus Pyrus of the family Rosaceae (rose family) and for its fruit, a pome. The common pear (P. communis) is one of the earliest cultivated of fruit trees, both in i...

folk song

(Encyclopedia)folk song, music of anonymous composition, transmitted orally. The theory that folk songs were originally group compositions has been modified in recent studies. These assume that the germ of a folk m...

Liu Shaoqi

(Encyclopedia)Liu Shaoqi or Liu Shao-ch'i both: lyo͞o shou-chē [key], 1898?–1969, Chinese Communist political leader. Liu joined (1920) a Comintern organization in Shanghai, where he studied Russian. While in M...

Malema, Julius Sello

(Encyclopedia)Malema, Julius Sello, 1981–, South African political leader. Involved in the African National Congress (ANC) from a young age, he rose quickly in its influential Youth League, becoming a regional ch...

Kocharian, Robert Sedraki

(Encyclopedia)Kocharian or Kocharyan, Robert Sedraki, 1954–, Armenian political leader. He served (1972–74) in the Soviet army and worked as a mechanical engineer (1977–81) before graduating (1982) from the Y...

Nanchang

(Encyclopedia)Nanchang nänˈchängˈ [key], city (1994 est. pop. 1,168,700), capital of Jiangxi prov., China, on the Gan River, near the southern end of Poyang Lake. A major transportation center, it has a port, r...