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Smith, Zadie

(Encyclopedia)Smith, Zadie, 1975–, British writer. The biracial daughter of an English father and Jamaican mother, Smith burst on the literary scene in 2000 with her first novel, White Teeth, the award-winning be...

Tanzimat

(Encyclopedia)Tanzimat tänˈzēmät [key], [Turk.,=reorganization], the name referring to a period of modernizing reforms instituted under the Ottoman Empire from 1839 to 1876. In 1839, under the rule of Sultan Ab...

Suzman, Helen

(Encyclopedia)Suzman, Helen, 1917–2009, South African politician and anti-apartheid activist, b. Helen Gavronsky, grad. Univ. of Witwatersrand (1940). The daughter of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, she taught at h...

Bolt, Usain St. Leo

(Encyclopedia)Bolt, Usain St. Leo, 1986–, Jamaican sprinter. Unusually tall (6 ft 5 in./1.96 m) for his sport, he won the gold medal for the 200-m sprint at the 2002 world junior championships and then broke the ...

Bond, Julian

(Encyclopedia)Bond, Julian (Horace Julian Bond), 1940–2015, U.S. civil-rights leader, b. Nashville, Tenn. As a student at Morehouse College, he participated in sit-ins at segregated Atlanta restaurants. He was a ...

Jim Crow laws

(Encyclopedia)Jim Crow laws, in U.S. history, statutes enacted by Southern states and municipalities, beginning in the 1880s, that legalized segregation between blacks and whites. The name is believed to be derived...

Collins, Patricia Hill

(Encyclopedia)Collins, Patricia Hill, 1948–, American sociologist and social theorist, b. Philadelphia, Ph.D. Brandeis University, 1984. A noted ...

sharecropping

(Encyclopedia)sharecropping, an agricultural system in which a landowner allows a tenant to use their land in return for a share of the crop produced. In the United S...

Lagos Escobar, Ricardo

(Encyclopedia)Lagos Escobar, Ricardo rēkärˈdō läˈgōs āskōbärˈ [key], 1938–, Chilean political leader. A lawyer and economist, he was an academic and served as secretary-general of the Univ. of Chile un...

Mnangagwa, Emmerson Dambudzo

(Encyclopedia)Mnangagwa, Emmerson Dambudzo, 1942?–, Zimbabwean political leader. A guerrilla leader during the struggle against white-minority rule, he received military training in China and was imprisoned (1965...