Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) Cresap, Michael krēˈsăp [key], 1742–75, American frontiersman and soldier, b. Allegany co., Md. A Native American fighter, he was accused by Thomas Jefferson and others of massacring the family o...

(Encyclopedia) Judah ha-Levi or Judah Halevy häˌlēˈvī [key], c.1075–1141, Jewish rabbi, poet, and philosopher, b. Tudela, Spain. His poems—secular, religious, and nationalist—are filled with a serene and ...

(Encyclopedia) River Brethren, name used to designate certain Christian bodies originating in 1770, during a revival movement among German settlers in E Pennsylvania. In the 1750s, Mennonite refugees from Switzerlan...

(Encyclopedia) Rosenfeld, Morris rōˈzənfĕlt [key], 1862–1923, Jewish poet, b. Russian Poland. His name was originally Moshe Jacob Alter. He worked as a tailor in London and as a diamond grinder in Amsterdam be...

(Encyclopedia) perestroika pərˈĕstroyˈkə [key], Soviet economic and social policy of the late 1980s. Perestroika [restructuring] was the term attached to the attempts (1985–91) by Mikhail Gorbachev to transfo...

(Encyclopedia) Bustamante, Sir Alexander bŭsˌtəmănˈtē [key], 1884–1977, prime minister of Jamaica (1962–67). Born William Alexander Clarke, the son of an Irish father and a Jamaican mother, he was adopted...

(Encyclopedia) Voronin, Vladimir vlädēˈmēr vōrōnˈyĭn [key], 1941–, Moldovan political leader. Voronin rose through the ranks of the Communist party in what was then the USSR's Moldavian SSR to become the r...

(Encyclopedia) Lew, Jack (Jacob Joseph Lew), 1955–, American government official, b. New York City, grad. Harvard (1978), Georgetown Univ. Law School (1983). A Democrat, he first worked politics at 17 in Eugene Mc...

(Encyclopedia) Ladysmith Black Mambazo mämbäzˈō [key], choral group formed in 1965 in Ladysmith, South Africa, founded and led (until 2014) by Joseph Shabalala (1941–2020). The group, which sings with a precis...

(Encyclopedia) Wise, Stephen Samuel, 1874–1949, American Reform rabbi and Zionist leader, b. Budapest, grad. College of the City of New York, 1891, Ph.D. Columbia, 1901. He served as a rabbi in New York City (1893...