Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) Houston Grand Opera, opera company in Houston, Tex., founded 1955 by the German-American impresario and conductor Walter Herbert, who was general director and conductor until 1972. The company perform...

(Encyclopedia) Abed-nego əbĕdˈnēgō [key], in the Book of Daniel, one of the Three Young Men, educated with Daniel in the court of Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. With his three companions, Abed-nego was thrown into ...

(Encyclopedia) Youngstown State University, at Youngstown, Ohio; coeducational; est. 1908 as a department of the Youngstown Association School sponsored by the Young Men's Christian Association. In 1921 the school b...

(Encyclopedia) Stuttgart Ballet, the first major German ballet company. The company, housed in the Württemberg Staatstheater, rose rapidly to fame in the 1960s under the direction of John Cranko (1927–73), who le...

(Encyclopedia) Thunberg, Greta, 2003–, Swedish climate activist. She came to public notice in 2018 when she encouraged students to skip school on Fridays to protest societal inaction on climate change. Through soc...

(Encyclopedia) Seaver, Tom (George Thomas Seaver), 1944–2020, American baseball pitcher and sportscaster, b. Fresno, Calif. During his career (1967–86), he won a total of 311 games for the New York Mets, Cincinn...

(Encyclopedia) graveyard school, 18th-century school of English poets who wrote primarily about human mortality. Often set in a graveyard, their poems mused on the vicissitudes of life, the solitude of death and the...

(Encyclopedia) O'Brien, William Smith, 1803–64, Irish revolutionary. He entered Parliament from Ireland in 1828 and worked for Catholic Emancipation, Irish poor relief, and state support of the Irish Catholic cler...

(Encyclopedia) man-o'-war bird or frigate-bird, most aerial of the water birds, found in the tropic seas. The man-o'-war bird's wingspread (71⁄2 ft/228.5 cm) is the largest in proportion to its body (3–4 lb/1.4�...

(Encyclopedia) Moore, George, 1852–1933, English author, b. Ireland. As a young man he lived in Paris, studying at various art schools. Inspired by Zola, Flaubert, Turgenev, and the 19th-century French realists, M...