Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) excommunication, formal expulsion from a religious body, the most grave of all ecclesiastical censures. Where religious and social communities are nearly identical it is attended by social ostracism, ...

(Encyclopedia) murder, criminal homicide, usually distinguished from manslaughter by the element of malice aforethought. The most direct case of malicious intent occurs when the killer is known to have adopted the d...

(Encyclopedia)  CE5 Supreme Court, United States, highest court of the United States, established by Article 3 of the Constitution of the United States. With the emergence of a working conservative majority,...

(Encyclopedia) Nečas, Petr pĕtˈər nĕˈchäs [key], 1964–, Czech politician. Trained as a physicist, he graduated (1988) from Brno's Uherske Science Univ. and taught (1983–88) at Masaryk Univ., Brno. After w...

(Encyclopedia) Olah, George Andrew, 1927–2017, American chemist, b. Budapest, Ph.D. Budapest Univ. of Technology and Economics, 1949. Olah was a researcher at Dow Chemical from 1957 to 1965 and a professor at West...

(Encyclopedia) Marbury v. Madison, case decided in 1803 by the U.S. Supreme Court. William Marbury had been commissioned justice of the peace in the District of Columbia by President John Adams in the “midnight ap...

(Encyclopedia) Carranza de Miranda, Bartolomé de bärtōlōmāˈ dā käränˈthä dā mēränˈdä [key], 1503–76, Spanish churchman. He joined the Dominicans (1520) and taught at Valladolid. He was active in th...

(Encyclopedia) Devolution, War of, 1667–68, undertaken by Louis XIV for the conquest of the Spanish Netherlands. On her marriage to Louis, Marie Thérèse, daughter of Philip IV of Spain, had renounced her rights ...

(Encyclopedia) dowry douˈrē [key], the property that a woman brings to her husband at the time of the marriage. The dowry apparently originated in the giving of a marriage gift by the family of the bridegroom to t...

(Encyclopedia) Bradlaugh, Charles brădˈlô [key], 1833–91, British social reformer, a secularist. Editor of the free-thinking weekly National Reformer from 1860 and later associated with Annie Besant, he was an ...