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Alice Springs

(Encyclopedia)Alice Springs, town, Northern Territory, Australia. It lies in a pastoral area surrounded by desert near the center of the continent and is a stop on the Adelaide Darwin Railway. The town ...

Seward Peninsula

(Encyclopedia)Seward Peninsula, W Alaska, projecting c.200 mi (320 km) into the Bering Sea between Norton Sound and Kotzebue Sound, just below the Arctic Circle. The region is mostly bleak tundra, with long, cold w...

reliquary

(Encyclopedia)reliquary rĕlˌəkwĕrˈē [key], receptacle containing the relics of saints and other sacred objects of the Christian religion. Reliquaries were often designed in shapes that reflected the nature of...

Val d'Or

(Encyclopedia)Val d'Or väl dôr [key], town (1991 pop. 23,842), SW Que., Canada, SE of Rouyn-Noranda. It is a mining center. Gold was discovered in the region in 1909; copper, zinc, lead, and molybdenum are also m...

Helena

(Encyclopedia)Helena. 1 City (2020 pop. 20,633), Jefferson and Shelby cos., central Ala.; inc. 1877. White settlers began to occupy the area after the War of ...

Mbeya

(Encyclopedia)Mbeya, city (2005 pop. 280,000), SW Tanzania. Located on the Tazara Railway, Mbeya was founded as a gold mining town in the 1920s. It is a market town for the fertile surrounding highlands, which prod...

retable

(Encyclopedia)retable rēˈtābəl [key], frame for decorative panels at the back of an altar in European churches. Retables, often sumptuously decorated in alabaster and gold, generally contained scenes from the B...

Barbary Coast

(Encyclopedia)Barbary Coast bärˈbərē [key], waterfront area of San Francisco, Calif., in the years after the 1849 gold rush. Gamblers, gangsters, prostitutes, and confidence men flourished, and the brothels, sa...

Lucas, Robert Emerson, Jr.

(Encyclopedia)Lucas, Robert Emerson, Jr., 1937–2023, American economist, b. Yakima, Wash., Ph.D. Univ. of Chicago, 1964. Lucas taught at Carnegie Mellon Univ. (1963...

Kaufman, George S.

(Encyclopedia)Kaufman, George S. kôfˈmən [key], 1889–1961, American dramatist and journalist, b. Pittsburgh as George Kaufman. As a drama critic for various New York newspapers he was influential in raising th...