Columbia Encyclopedia

Search results

500 results found

Mohawk, river, United States

(Encyclopedia)Mohawk, river, c.140 mi (230 km) long, rising in central New York and flowing S then SE past Utica and Schenectady to enter the Hudson River at Cohoes. The Mohawk is canalized from Rome to its mouth (...

Lebanon, mountain range, Asia

(Encyclopedia)Lebanon, ancient Libanus, mountain range, c.100 mi (160 km) long, paralleling the Mediterranean Sea from S Lebanon N into Syria and rising steeply from the coast. Qurnet as Sawda (10,131 ft/3,088 m) i...

Peace

(Encyclopedia)Peace, river, 945 mi (1,521 km) long, formed by the junction of the Finlay and Parsnip rivers at Williston Lake, N central British Columbia, Canada. It flows east through the Rocky Mts., then generall...

Wilderness Road

(Encyclopedia)Wilderness Road, principal avenue of westward migration for U.S. pioneers from c.1790 to 1840, blazed in 1775 by the American frontiersman Daniel Boone and an advance party of the Transylvania Company...

Sierra Nevada, mountain range, United States

(Encyclopedia)Sierra Nevada sēĕrˈə nəväˈdə [key], mountain range, c.400 mi (640 km) long and from c.40 to 80 mi (60–130 km) wide, mostly in E Calif. It rises to 14,495 ft (4,418 m) in Mt. Whitney, the hig...

fasces

(Encyclopedia)fasces făsˈēz [key] [Lat.,=bundles], ancient Roman symbol of the regal and later the magisterial authority. The fasces were cylindrical bundles of wooden rods, tied tightly together, from which an ...

Gildas, Saint

(Encyclopedia)Gildas, Saint gĭlˈdəs [key], d. 570, British historian, possibly a Welsh monk. Shortly before 547 he wrote the De excidio et conquestu Britanniae, a Latin history of Britain dealing with the Roman ...

Focillon, Henri

(Encyclopedia)Focillon, Henri äNrēˈ fôsēyôNˈ [key], 1881–1943, French art historian. Focillon, who was professor of art history at the Collège de France, was an authority on medieval art, the subject of h...

Masson, Frédéric

(Encyclopedia)Masson, Frédéric, 1847–1923, French historian, an authority on Napoleon I and his family. His work is uncritically laudatory with regard to Napoleon himself; his admiration, however, did not deter...

Menzel, Donald Howard

(Encyclopedia)Menzel, Donald Howard, 1901–76, American astrophysicist, b. Florence, Colo. From 1926 to 1932 he was with the Lick Observatory in Calif. In 1932 he joined the faculty at Harvard, where he became pro...

Browse by Subject