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Sommer, William

(Encyclopedia)Sommer, William, 1867–1949, American painter and lithographer, b. Detroit. He was apprenticed as a lithographer and studied drawing with Julius Melchers in Detroit and drawing and painting in Munich...

Cavalcaselle, Giovanni Battista

(Encyclopedia)Cavalcaselle, Giovanni Battista jōvänˈnē bät-tēsˈtä kävälkäsĕlˈlā [key], 1820–97, Italian art critic and writer. Cavalcaselle studied painting at the Academy of Venice and traveled ext...

Cenis, Mont

(Encyclopedia)Cenis, Mont môN sənēˈ [key], Ital. Moncenisio, Alpine pass, 6,831 ft (2,082 m) high, on the French-Italian border. It is one of the great invasion routes in Italian history. Napoleon I built a new...

carding

(Encyclopedia)carding, process by which fibers are opened, cleaned, and straightened in preparation for spinning. The fingers were first used, then a tool of wood or bone shaped like a hand, then two flat pieces of...

Potter, Beatrix

(Encyclopedia)Potter, Beatrix, 1866–1943, English author and illustrator. She published her first animal stories, The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902) and The Tailor of Gloucester (1903), at her own expense before she...

propylaeum

(Encyclopedia)propylaeum prŏpĭlēˈəm [key], in Greek architecture, a monumental entrance to a sacred enclosure, group of buildings, or citadel. A roofed passage terminated by a row of columns at each end formed...

Dogon

(Encyclopedia)Dogon dōgänˈ [key], African people who live on the bend of the Niger River in the Republic of Mali in West Africa. A patrilineal, sedentary agricultural people, they number over 360,000. They depen...

compurgation

(Encyclopedia)compurgation kŏmˌpərgāˈshən [key], in medieval law, a complete defense. A defendant could establish his innocence or nonliability by taking an oath and by getting a required number of persons to...

Dahlak Archipelago

(Encyclopedia)Dahlak Archipelago däläkˈ ärkĭpĕlˈəgō [key], island group, Eritrea, in the Red Sea off Massawa. There are two large, inhabited islands and more than 200 small, largely uninhabited islands. Th...

Collins, William

(Encyclopedia)Collins, William, 1721–59, English poet. He was one of the great lyricists of the 18th cent. While he was still at Oxford he published Persian Ecologues (1742), which was written when he was 17. Uns...