Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) Missouri Compromise, 1820–21, measures passed by the U.S. Congress to end the first of a series of crises concerning the extension of slavery. By 1818, Missouri Territory had gained sufficient popul...

(Encyclopedia) Know-Nothing movement, in U.S. history. The increasing rate of immigration in the 1840s encouraged nativism. In Eastern cities where Roman Catholic immigrants especially had concentrated and were welc...

(Encyclopedia) Dred Scott Case, argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1856–57. It involved the then bitterly contested issue of the status of slavery in the federal territories. In 1834, Dred Scott, a black slav...

(Encyclopedia) transcontinental railroad, in U.S. history, rail connection with the Pacific coast. In 1845, Asa Whitney presented to Congress a plan for the federal government to subsidize the building of a railroad...

(Encyclopedia) bicameral system bīkămˈərəl [key], governmental system dividing the legislative function between two chambers, an “upper,” such as the U.S. Senate and the British House of Lords, and a “low...

(Encyclopedia) Douglas, Stephen Arnold, 1813–61, American statesman, b. Brandon, Vt. The Democratic national convention at Charleston, S.C., in 1860 adopted Douglas's recommendations in a platform advocating non...

(Encyclopedia) Oligocene epoch ŏlˈəgōsēnˌ [key], third epoch of the Tertiary period in the Cenozoic era of geologic time, lasting from 38 to 24 million years ago. More of North America was dry land during the ...

(Encyclopedia) corn, in botany. The name corn is given to the leading cereal crop of any major region. In England corn means wheat; in Scotland and Ireland, oats. The grain called corn in the United States is Indian...

(Encyclopedia) Sumner, Charles, 1811–74, U.S. senator from Massachusetts (1851–74), b. Boston. He attended (1831–33) and was later a lecturer at Harvard law school, was admitted (1834) to the bar, and practice...

(Encyclopedia) Emigrant Aid Company, organization formed in 1854 to promote organized antislavery immigration to the Kansas territory from the Northeast. Eli Thayer conceived the plan as early as Feb., 1854, even be...