Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) Height, Dorothy Irene, 1912–2010, American civil-rights leader, b. Richmond, Va., grad. New York Univ. (B.A. 1933, M.A. 1935). A leader of the African-American and women's rights movements, she bega...

(Encyclopedia) Wilder, Thornton Niven, 1897–1975, American playwright and novelist, b. Madison, Wis., grad. Yale (B.A., 1920), Princeton (M.A., 1925). He received most of his early education in China, where his fa...

(Encyclopedia) Osborne, John (John James Osborne), 1929–94, English dramatist. He began his theatrical career as an actor and playwright in provincial English repertory theaters. Osborne's plays usually focus on a...

(Encyclopedia) Ryder, Donald P., , 1926-2021, African-American architect, b. Springfield, Oh., Univ. of Illinois (BA, 1951). Ryder was raised in Dayton, Ohio. He serve...

(Encyclopedia) Evangelical and Reformed Church, Protestant denomination formed by the merger (1934) of the Reformed Church in the United States and the Evangelical Synod of North America. Both of these bodies had or...

(Encyclopedia) oratory, the art of swaying an audience by eloquent speech. In ancient Greece and Rome oratory was included under the term rhetoric, which meant the art of composing as well as delivering a speech. Or...

(Encyclopedia) Anabaptists ănˌəbăpˈtĭsts [key] [Gr.,=rebaptizers], name applied, originally in scorn, to certain Protestant sects holding that infant baptism is not authorized in Scripture and that baptism sho...

(Encyclopedia) free will, in philosophy, the doctrine that an individual, regardless of forces external to him, can and does choose at least some of his actions. The existence of free will is challenged by determini...

(Encyclopedia) Calvin, John, 1509–64, French Protestant theologian of the Reformation, b. Noyon, Picardy. The extension of Calvinism to all spheres of human activity was extremely important to a world emerging f...

(Encyclopedia) Eisenach īˈzənäkh [key], city, Thuringia, central Germany. It is an industrial center and ...