Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) Presley, Elvis (Elvis Aaron Presley), 1935–77, American popular singer, b. Tupelo, Miss. Exposed to gospel music from childhoo...

(Encyclopedia) Mugabe, Robert Gabriel mo͞ogäˈbē, –bā [key], 1924–2019, president of Zimbabwe (1987–2017). A founder of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) in 1963 and a guerrilla leader, he was imp...

(Encyclopedia) United States Military Academy, at West Point, N.Y.; for training young men and women to be officers in the U.S. army; founded and opened in 1802. The original act provided that the Corps of Engineers...

(Encyclopedia) computer music, term used to describe music composed or performed with the aid of a computer. The first substantial piece of music composed on a computer was the Illiac Suite (1956) by the avant-garde...

(Encyclopedia) Oceanic art, works produced by the island peoples of the S and NW Pacific, including Melanesia (New Guinea and the islands to its north and east), Micronesia (Mariana, Caroline, Marshall, and Gilbert ...

(Encyclopedia) Peninsular War, 1808–14, fought by France against Great Britain, Portugal, Spanish regulars, and Spanish guerrillas in the Iberian Peninsula. The Peninsular War immeasurably raised Britain's mi...

(Encyclopedia) Bohr, Niels Henrik David bōr [key], 1885–1962, Danish physicist, one of the foremost scientists of modern physics. He studied at the Univ. of Copenhagen (Ph.D. 1911) and carried on research on the...

(Encyclopedia) James, William, 1842–1910, American philosopher, b. New York City, M.D. Harvard, 1869; son of the Swedenborgian theologian Henry James and brother of the novelist Henry James. In 1872 he joined the ...

(Encyclopedia) Neptune, in astronomy, 8th planet from the sun at a mean distance of about 2.8 billion mi (4.5 billion km) with an orbit lying between those of Uranus and the dwarf planet Pluto; its period of revolut...

(Encyclopedia) steel industry, the business of processing iron ore into steel, which in its simplest form is an iron-carbon alloy, and in some cases, turning that metal into partially finished products or recycling ...