Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) Williams, Tennessee (Thomas Lanier Williams), 1911–83, American dramatist, b. Columbus, Miss., grad. State Univ. of Iowa, 1938. One of America's foremost 20th-century playwrights and the author of m...

(Encyclopedia) basketball, game played generally indoors by two opposing teams of five players each. Basketball was conceived in 1891 by Dr. James Naismith, a physical education instructor at the YMCA college in Spr...

(Encyclopedia) Melville, Herman, 1819–91, American author, b. New York City, considered one of the great American writers and a major figure in world literature. Like Moby-Dick, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (18...

(Encyclopedia) Colorado [1] kŏlərădˈə, –rădˈō, –räˈdō [2] kŏlərāˈdə, –räˈdə [key]. 1 Great river of the SW United States, 1,450 mi (2,334 km) long, rising in the Rocky Mts. of N Colo., and f...

(Encyclopedia) Stonehenge stōnˈhĕnjˌ [key], group of standing stones on Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire, S England. Preeminent among megalithic monuments in the British Isles, it is similar to an older and larger mon...

(Encyclopedia) progressive education, movement in American education. Confined to a period between the late 19th and mid-20th cent., the term “progressive education” is generally used to refer only to those educ...

(Encyclopedia) pigmentation, name for the coloring matter found in certain plant and animal cells and for the color produced thereby. Pigmentation occurs in nearly all living organisms. Almost all plants synthesize ...

(Encyclopedia) monsters and imaginary beasts. The mythologies and legends of ancient and modern cultures teem with an enormous variety of monsters and imaginary beasts. A great number of these are composites of diff...

(Encyclopedia) Chinese music, the classical music forms of China. Throughout the political and social turmoil following World War I, Western (classical and popular) and Japanese sources dominated Chinese music. At...

(Encyclopedia) Saratoga campaign, June–Oct., 1777, of the American Revolution. Lord George Germain and John Burgoyne were the chief authors of a plan to end the American Revolution by splitting the colonies along ...