Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) Ur ûr [key], ancient city of Sumer, S Mesopotamia. The city is also known as Ur of the Chaldees. It was an important center of Sumerian culture (see Sumer) and is identified in the Bible as the home ...

(Encyclopedia)  Spector, Phil (Harvey Philip), 1939-2021, American record producer, b. Bronx, NY. The child of Russian Jewish immigrants, Spector’s father passed awa...

(Encyclopedia) aggression, a form of behavior characterized by physical or verbal attack. It may appear either appropriate and self-protective, even constructive, as in healthy self-assertiveness, or inappropriate a...

(Encyclopedia) eugenics yo͞ojĕnˈĭks [key], study of human genetics and of methods to improve the inherited characteristics, physical and mental, of the human race. Efforts to improve the human race through bette...

(Encyclopedia) Chamberlain, Neville (Arthur Neville Chamberlain), 1869–1940, British statesman; son of Joseph Chamberlain and half-brother of Sir Austen Chamberlain. The first half of his career was spent in busin...

(Encyclopedia) Ohio Company of Associates, organization for the purchase and settlement of lands on the Ohio River, founded at Boston in 1786. Its organizers were a group of New England men, most of them former Amer...

(Encyclopedia) Ackroyd, Peter, 1949–, British author, b. London; studied Clare College, Cambridge (M.A., 1971) and Yale. A literary journalist, he wrote for the Spectator (1973–82), where he was literary and the...

(Encyclopedia) Breyer, Stephen Gerald brīˈər [key], 1938–, associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court ...

(Encyclopedia) Portsmouth, Treaty of, 1905, treaty ending the Russo-Japanese War. It was signed at the Portsmouth Naval Base, New Hampshire, on Sept. 5, 1905. Negotiations leading up to the treaty began in the sprin...

(Encyclopedia) idealism, the attitude that places special value on ideas and ideals as products of the mind, in comparison with the world as perceived through the senses. In art idealism is the tendency to represent...