Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) My Lai incident mē lī [key], a massacre of Vietnamese civilians by U.S. soldiers in the Vietnam War. On Mar. 16, 1968, a unit of the U.S. army's Americal division, led by Lt. William L. Calley, inva...

(Encyclopedia) pasta, generic name for thin pieces of hardened, unleavened dough that are molded into various shapes and boiled, not baked. Pasta is commonly associated with Italian cuisine, though similar wheat flo...

(Encyclopedia) Mallarmé, Stéphane stāfänˈ mälärmāˈ [key], 1842–98, French poet. Mallarmé's great importance is as the chief forebear of the symbolists; the influence of his poetry was particularly felt b...

(Encyclopedia) Laffite, Jean zhäN läfētˈ [key], c.1780–1826?, leader of a band of privateers and smugglers. The name is often spelled Lafitte. He and his men began operating (1810) off the Baratarian coast S o...

(Encyclopedia) Lavoisier, Antoine Laurent äNtwänˈ lōräNˈ lävwäzyāˈ [key], 1743–94, French chemist and physicist, a founder of modern chemistry. He studied under eminent men of his day, won early recognit...

(Encyclopedia) matriarchy, familial and political rule by women. Many contemporary anthropologists reject the claims of J. J. Bachofen and Lewis Morgan that early societies were matriarchal, although some contempora...

(Encyclopedia) Mondrian, Piet pēt mônˈdrēän [key], 1872–1944, Dutch painter. He studied at the academy in Amsterdam and passed through an early naturalistic phase. In 1910 he went to Paris, where the influenc...

(Encyclopedia) Powell, Anthony pōˈəl [key], 1905–2000, English novelist, grad. Eton and Baillol College, Oxford. A distinguished writer of social comedy, he is best known for his 12-volume novel sequence collec...

(Encyclopedia) revolution, in a political sense, fundamental and violent change in the values, political institutions, social structure, leadership, and policies of a society. The totality of change implicit in this...

(Encyclopedia) Borah, William Edgar bôrˈə [key], 1865–1940, U.S. Senator (1907–40), b. near Fairfield, Ill. Admitted to the bar in Kansas in 1887, after 1890 he became prominent in law and politics at Boise, ...