Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) Hull, officially Kingston upon Hull, city and unitary authority, NE England, on the north shore of the Humber estuary at the influx of the small Hul...

(Encyclopedia) Cox, Jacob Dolson, 1828–1900, Union general in the Civil War and American statesman, b. Montreal, of a New York City family. Admitted to the Ohio bar in 1853, he was active in organizing the new Rep...

(Encyclopedia) Kitchen Cabinet, in U.S. history, popular name for the group of intimate, unofficial advisers of President Jackson. Early in his administration Jackson abandoned official cabinet meetings and used hea...

(Encyclopedia) Biddle, Nicholas, 1786–1844, American financier, b. Philadelphia. After holding important posts in the American legations in France and England, he returned to the United States in 1807 and became o...

(Encyclopedia) Banat bäˈnät [key], region extending across W Romania, NE Serbia, and S Hungary. The term banat originally referred to any of several frontier provinces of Hungary and Croatia that were ruled by ba...

(Encyclopedia) Raleigh rôlˈē, rälˈē [key], city (1990 pop. 207,951), state capital, and seat of Wake co., central N.C.; the site was selected for the capital in 1788, and the city was laid out and inc. 1792. I...

(Encyclopedia) spoils system, in U.S. history, the practice of giving appointive offices to loyal members of the party in power. The name supposedly derived from a speech by Senator William Learned Marcy in which he...

(Encyclopedia) Liberal party, former British political party, the dominant political party in Great Britain for much of the period from the mid-1800s to World War I. By 1914 the Liberal government had passed subst...

(Encyclopedia) Mabinogion măbĭnōˈgēən [key], title given to a collection of medieval Welsh stories. Scholars differ as to the meaning of the word mabinogion: some think it to be the plural of the Welsh word ma...

(Encyclopedia) Phillips, Wendell, 1811–84, American reformer and orator, b. Boston, grad. Harvard (B.A., 1831; LL.B., 1834). He was admitted to the bar in 1834 but, having sufficient income of his own, he abandone...