Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) Haldane, Frederick Duncan Michael, 1951–, British physicist, b. London, England, Ph.D. Cambridge, 1978. Haldane taught at the Univ. of Southern California (1981–85, 1987–90) and worked at Bell L...

(Encyclopedia) eye fly, common name for a group of small flies of the family Chloropidae. Eye flies are common in parts of California and in the S United States. They inhabit grasslands and meadows and breed mainly ...

(Encyclopedia) fair-trade laws, in the United States, a former group of statutes that permitted manufacturers to specify the minimum retail price of a commodity. The first fair-trade law was adopted (1931) by Califo...

(Encyclopedia) greenling, common name for any of several species of carnivorous, spiny-finned fishes of the family Hexagrammidae, common in the Pacific Ocean, especially in the waters N of Monterey, Calif. Greenling...

(Encyclopedia) affirmative action, in the United States, programs to overcome the effects of past societal discrimination by allocating jobs and resources to members of specific groups, such as minorities and women....

(Encyclopedia) hunger strike, refusal to eat as a protest against existing conditions. Although most often used by prisoners, others have also employed it. For example, Mohandas Gandhi in India and César Chávez in...

(Encyclopedia) Steinbeck, John, 1902–68, American writer, b. Salinas, Calif., studied at Stanford. He is probably best remembered for his strong sociological novel The Grapes of Wrath, considered one of the great ...

(Encyclopedia) Southern Pacific Company, transportation system chartered (1865) in California and later reincorporated in Kentucky (1885) and Delaware (1947). Small railroads—known collectively as the Southern Pac...

(Encyclopedia) Ashe, Arthur Robert, 1943–93, American tennis player, b. Richmond, Va. Ashe rose from his hometown's public courts to become the first African-American male to reach prominence in tennis. He won the...

(Encyclopedia) Lamb, Willis Eugene, Jr., 1913–2008, American physicist, b. Los Angeles, Ph.D. Univ. of California, Berkeley, 1938. Lamb was a professor at Columbia (1938–51), Stanford (1951–56), Oxford (1956�...