Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) Washington, Walter Edward, 1915–2003, American political figure, first African-American mayor of Washington, D.C. (1975–79) and of a major American city, b. Dawson, Ga., grad. Howard Univ. (A.B., ...

(Encyclopedia) Schekman, Randy Wayne, 1948–, American cell biologist, b. St. Paul, Minn. Ph.D. Stanford, 1974. He is a professor (since 1976) at the Univ. of California, Berkeley, and an investigator of the Howard...

(Encyclopedia) Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 1723–92, English portrait painter, b. Devonshire. Long considered historically the most important of England's painters, by his learned example he raised the artist to a positi...

(Encyclopedia) Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 1809–94, American author and physician, b. Cambridge, Mass., grad. Harvard (B.A., 1829; M.D., 1836); father of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. He began his medical career as a gen...

(Encyclopedia) Barlow, Joel bärˈlō [key], 1754–1812, American writer and diplomat, b. Redding, Conn., grad. Yale, 1778. He was one of the Connecticut Wits and a major contributor to their satirical poem The Ana...

(Encyclopedia)  Grant, Mudcat, 1935-2021, African-American baseball player, b. Lacoochee, Fl., as James Timothy Grant Jr. As a teenager, Grant played baseball, footba...

(Encyclopedia) Arlington National Cemetery, 420 acres (170 hectares), N Va., across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C.; est. 1864. More than 60,000 American war dead, as well as notables including Presidents Wi...

(Encyclopedia) Butler, Richard Austen, 1902–82, British politician. Educated at Cambridge, he entered Parliament in 1929 as a Conservative. As minister of education (1941–45), he piloted through Parliament the E...

(Encyclopedia) Capecchi, Mario Renato, 1937–, American geneticist, b. Verona, Italy, Ph.D. Harvard, 1967. On the faculty at Harvard from 1967 to 1973, Capecchi became a professor at the Univ. of Utah School of Med...

(Encyclopedia) Kassebaum-Baker, Nancy Landon kăsˈəbômˌ, –boumˌ [key], 1932–, U.S. senator from Kansas (1979–97), b. Topeka, Kans. A Republican and the daughter of Kansas governor Alfred Mossman (Alf) Lan...