Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) eyeglasses or spectacles, instrument or device for aiding and correcting defective sight. Eyeglasses usually consist of a pair of lenses mounted in a frame to hold them in position before the eyes. Th...

(Encyclopedia) Declaration of Independence, full and formal declaration adopted July 4, 1776, by representatives of the Thirteen Colonies in North America announcing the separation of those colonies from Great Brita...

(Encyclopedia) Northwest Passage, water routes through the Arctic Archipelago, N Canada, and along the northern coast of Alaska between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Even though the explorers of the 16th cent. de...

(Encyclopedia) Lewis, John Llewellyn, 1880–1969, American labor leader, b. Lucas co., Iowa; son of a Welsh immigrant coal miner. He became a miner and after 1906 rose through the union ranks to become president (1...

(Encyclopedia) Munich Pact, 1938. In the summer of 1938, Chancellor Hitler of Germany began openly to support the demands of Germans living in the Sudetenland (see Sudetes) of Czechoslovakia for an improved status. ...

(Encyclopedia) National Recovery Administration (NRA), in U.S. history, administrative bureau established under the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933. In response to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's cong...

(Encyclopedia) Douglas, William Orville, 1898–1980, American jurist, associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1939–75), b. Maine, Minn. He received his law degree from Columbia in 1925 and later was professo...

(Encyclopedia) Galbraith, John Kenneth gălˈbrāth [key], 1908–2006, American economist and public official, b. Ontario, Canada, grad. Univ. of Toronto (B.S., 1931), Univ. of California, Berkeley (M.S., 1933; Ph....

(Encyclopedia) daylight saving time (DST), time observed when clocks and other timepieces are set ahead so that the sun will rise and set later in the day as measured by civil time. The amount of daylight on a given...

(Encyclopedia) Acheson, Dean Gooderham ăchˈĭsən [key], 1893–1971, U.S. secretary of state (1949–53), b. Middletown, Conn., grad. Yale, Harvard Law School. He was (1919–21) private secretary to Louis Brande...