Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) Floyd, John Buchanan, 1807–63, U.S. Secretary of War (1857–60) and Confederate general, b. Smithfield, Va. After failing as a lawyer and cotton planter in Arkansas, he returned to Virginia and pra...

(Encyclopedia) Wolfe, Thomas Clayton, 1900–1938, American novelist, b. Asheville, N.C., grad. Univ. of North Carolina, 1920, M.A. Harvard, 1922. An important 20th-century American novelist, Wolfe wrote four mammot...

(Encyclopedia) Stout, Rex, 1886–1975, American writer, b. Noblesville, Ind. He served in the navy and worked in New York City as founder and director of the Vanguard Press. His best-known works are nearly 70 myste...

(Encyclopedia) Gibbs, Josiah Willard, 1839–1903, American mathematical physicist, b. New Haven, Conn., grad. Yale, 1858. He studied abroad and was professor of mathematical physics at Yale from 1871. His great con...

(Encyclopedia) Macarthur, Mary Reid, 1880–1921, British labor organizer, b. Glasgow, Scotland. Working in her father's draper's shop, she became prominent in the shop assistants' union. As the representative of th...

(Encyclopedia) mechanism, philosophical theory about the nature of organic systems, holding that organisms are machines in the sense that they are material systems. Mechanism seeks to explain biological processes, i...

(Encyclopedia) Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), a Colonial patriotic society in the United States, open to women having one or more ancestors who aided the cause of the Revolution. The society was organiz...

(Encyclopedia) Smart, Christopher, 1722–71, English poet. A graduate of Cambridge, he lived in London writing poems, editing a humorous magazine, and producing plays. His one great poem, Song to David (1763), an i...

(Encyclopedia) Strathclyde, University of, at Glasgow, Scotland; founded 1796 as Anderson's Institution. In 1886 its name was changed to Glasgow and West of Scotland Technical College, and in 1956 it became known as...

(Encyclopedia) Brannan, Charles Franklin, 1903–92, U.S. government official, b. Denver, LL.B. Univ. of Denver, 1929. He became a specialist in agriculture and mining law. In the Dept. of Agriculture after 1935, Br...