Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) Ingersoll, Robert Green, 1833–99, American orator and lawyer, b. Dresden, N.Y. The son of a Congregational minister who eventually settled in Illinois, Ingersoll was admitted (1854) to the bar and b...

(Encyclopedia) Kidd, William, 1645?–1701, British privateer and pirate, known as Captain Kidd. He went to sea in his youth and later settled in New York, where he married and owned property. In 1691 he was rewarde...

(Encyclopedia) Wright, Richard, 1908–60, American author. An African American born on a Mississippi plantation, Wright struggled through a difficult childhood and worked to educate himself. He moved to Chicago in ...

(Encyclopedia) Gurkha go͝orˈkə [key], ethnic group of Nepal and neighboring areas. They claim descent from the Rajputs of N India and entered Nepal from the west after being driven from India. They conquered (ear...

(Encyclopedia) Nobel Prizes

(Encyclopedia) Bacow, Lawence Seldon, 1951–, American educator and lawyer, b. Detroit, S.B. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1972, J.D., M.P.P. Harvard, 1976, Ph.D. Harvard, 1978. Bacow was on the faculty at...

(Encyclopedia) Paine, Thomas, 1737–1809, Anglo-American political theorist and writer, b. Thetford, Norfolk, England. The son of a working-class Quaker, he became an excise officer and was dismissed from the servi...

(Encyclopedia) obscenity, in law, anything that tends to corrupt public morals by its indecency. The moral concepts that the term connotes vary from time to time and from place to place. In the United States, the wo...

(Encyclopedia) bilingual education, the sanctioned use of more than one language in U.S. education. The Bilingual Education Act (1968), combined with a Supreme Court decision (1974) mandating help for students with ...

(Encyclopedia) commercial paper, type of short-term negotiable instrument, usually an unsecured promissory note, that calls for the payment of money at a specified date. Because it is not backed by collateral, comme...