Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) Kitchen Cabinet, in U.S. history, popular name for the group of intimate, unofficial advisers of President Jackson. Early in his administration Jackson abandoned official cabinet meetings and used hea...

(Encyclopedia) Korean, language of uncertain ancestry. It is thought by some scholars to be akin to Japanese, by others to be a member of the Altaic subfamily of the Ural-Altaic family of languages (see Uralic and A...

(Encyclopedia) Kunstler, William Moses, 1919–95, American lawyer, b. New York City, grad. Yale (1941), Columbia law school (1948). Flamboyant and often brilliant, Kunstler defended the unpopular and unfailingly su...

(Encyclopedia) Ypres ēˈprə [key], Du. Ieper, commune (1991 pop. 35,235), West Flanders prov., SW Belgium, near the French border. It is an agricultural market and an industrial center. Manufactures include textil...

(Encyclopedia) Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York City, founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney with a core group of 700 artworks, many from her own collection. The museum was an outgrowth of the Whi...

(Encyclopedia) Tarnovsky, Andrei, 1932–86, Soviet film director, grad. State Institute of Cinematography (1960), where he made several notable short films. The son of poet Arseni Tarkovsky, he is perhaps the fines...

(Encyclopedia) spire, high, tapering structure crowning a tower and having a general pyramidal outline. The simplest spires were the steeply pitched timber roofs capping Romanesque towers and campaniles. In later Ro...

(Encyclopedia) bull [Lat. bulla=leaden seal], papal letter. As the diplomatic organization of the papal chancery progressed in the Middle Ages, the papal bull came to be more solemn than the papal brief or encyclica...

(Encyclopedia) Gilbert, Sir Humphrey, 1537?–1583, English soldier, navigator, and explorer; half-brother of Sir Walter Raleigh. Knighted (1570) for his service in the campaigns in Ireland, he later (1572) served i...

(Encyclopedia) Golding, William (Sir William Gerald Golding), 1911–93, English novelist, grad. Oxford (B.A. 1934). Praised for his highly imaginative and original writings, Golding was basically concerned with the...