Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) Battle of the Bulge, popular name in World War II for the German counterattack in the Ardennes, Dec., 1944–Jan., 1945. More than a million men fought in what is also known as the Battle of the Ard...

(Encyclopedia) Tibetan language, member of the Tibeto-Burman subfamily of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages (see Sino-Tibetan languages). It is spoken by 5 million people in the Tibet autonomous region and the Qi...

(Encyclopedia) Urdu o͞orˈdo͞o [key], language belonging to the Indic group of the Indo-Iranian subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. The official tongue of Pakistan, Urdu is also one of the 15 langu...

(Encyclopedia) Garnet, Henry Highland gärˈnĭt [key], 1815–82, American abolitionist clergyman, b. Kent co., Md. Born a slave, he escaped in 1824 and was educated at the Oneida Institute, Whitesboro, N.Y. He was...

(Encyclopedia) rock carvings and paintings, designs inscribed on rock surfaces and huge stone monuments in many parts of the world by prehistoric or preindustrial peoples. They have been found on every continent and...

(Encyclopedia) Hogarth, William, 1697–1764, English painter, satirist, engraver, and art theorist, b. London. At the age of 15 he was apprenticed to a silver-plate engraver. He soon made engravings on copper for b...

(Encyclopedia) Carver, Raymond, 1938–88, American short-story writer, b. Clatskanie, Oreg. He was raised in the Pacific Northwest, where he often set his sparely written tales of everyday blue-collar life. His per...

(Encyclopedia) Didion, Joan dĭdˈēŏn [key], 1934–2021, American writer, b. Sacramento, Calif., Univ. of ...

(Encyclopedia) Crane, Hart (Harold Hart Crane), 1899–1932, American poet, b. Garrettsville, Ohio. He published only two volumes of poetry during his lifetime, but those works established Crane as one of the most o...

(Encyclopedia) Spender, Sir Stephen, 1909–95, English poet and critic, b. London. His early poetry—like that of W. H. Auden, C. Day Lewis, and Louis MacNeice, with whom he became associated at Oxford—was inspi...