Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) Goldsmith, Oliver, 1730?–1774, Anglo-Irish author. The son of an Irish clergyman, he was graduated from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1749. He studied medicine at Edinburgh and Leiden, but his career ...

(Encyclopedia) civil rights, rights that a nation's inhabitants enjoy by law. The term is broader than “political rights,” which refer only to rights devolving from the franchise and are held usually only by a c...

(Encyclopedia)  Maclaine, Shirley, 1934- , American actress and author, b. Richmond, Va., as Shirley MacLean Beaty. Maclaine’s father held various jobs in education...

(Encyclopedia) Dole, Bob (Robert Joseph Dole), 1923–2021, American political leader, b. Russell, Ks., Washburn Univ. (B.A. and L.L.D., 1952); husband of Elizabeth Ha...

(Encyclopedia) Wolfe, Thomas Clayton, 1900–1938, American novelist, b. Asheville, N.C., grad. Univ. of North Carolina, 1920, M.A. Harvard, 1922. An important 20th-century American novelist, Wolfe wrote four mammot...

(Encyclopedia) screw, simple machine consisting essentially of a solid cylinder, usually of metal, around which an inclined plane winds spirally, either clockwise or counterclockwise. It is used to fasten one object...

(Encyclopedia) Miles, Nelson Appleton, 1839–1925, American army officer, b. near Westminster, Mass. In 1861, at the outbreak of the Civil War, he left his job in a Boston store and organized a company of volunteer...

(Encyclopedia) Marshall, Thurgood, 1908–93, U.S. lawyer and associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1967–91), b. Baltimore. He received his law degree from Howard Univ. in 1933. In 1936 he joined the legal ...

(Encyclopedia) Dunham, Katherine dŭnˈəm [key], 1909?–2006, American dancer, choreographer, and anthropologist, b. Chicago. She studied anthropology at the Univ. of Chicago, where she received a B.A. and Ph.D. a...

(Encyclopedia) Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna blətvătˈskē [key], 1831–91, Russian theosophist and occultist. She was the daughter of a German named Hahn who had settled in Russia and who was distantly connected wi...