Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) Popper, Sir Karl Raimund, 1902–94, Anglo-Austrian philosopher, b. Vienna. He became familiar with the Vienna circle of logical positivists (see logical positivism) while a student at the Univ. of Vi...

(Encyclopedia) Sephardim səfärˈdəm [key], one of the two major geographic divisions of the Jewish people, consisting of those Jews whose forebears in the Middle Ages resided in the Iberian Peninsula, as distingu...

(Encyclopedia) Bacon, Francis, 1910–92, English painter, b. Dublin. A self-taught artist, Bacon rejected abstraction in painting to explore a repertoire of strange, fractured, and often bizarre figurative images, ...

(Encyclopedia) English language, member of the West Germanic group of the Germanic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Germanic languages). Spoken by about 470 million people throughout the world...

(Encyclopedia) Remington, Frederic, 1861–1909, American painter, sculptor, illustrator, and writer, b. Canton, N.Y., studied at the Yale School of Fine Arts and the Art Students League. His subjects, drawn largely...

(Encyclopedia) Collins, Wilkie (William Wilkie Collins), 1824–89, English novelist. Although trained as a lawyer, he spent most of his life writing. He produced some 30 novels, the best known of which are two myst...

(Encyclopedia) Leonidas lēŏnˈĭdəs [key], d. 480 b.c., king of Sparta. He succeeded (c.491 b.c.) his half-brother, Cleomenes I. When the Persians invaded Greece under Xerxes (480 b.c.), Leonidas with 300 Spartan...

(Encyclopedia) Nabataea năbˌətēˈə [key], ancient kingdom of Arabia, south of Edom, in present-day Jordan. It flourished from the 4th cent. b.c. to a.d. 106, when it was conquered by Rome. The history of Nabata...

(Encyclopedia) nursery rhymes, verses, generally brief and usually anonymous, for children. The best-known examples are in English and date mostly from the 17th cent. A popular type of rhyme is used in “counting-o...

(Encyclopedia) McCutcheon, John Tinney məkŭchˈən [key], 1870–1949, American cartoonist, b. Tippecanoe co., Ind. He had been associated with the Chicago Record and Record-Herald when in 1903 he joined the staff...