Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) Fifty-four forty or fight, in U.S. history, phrase commonly used by extremists in the controversy with Great Britain over the Oregon country. The rights of the United States, they maintained, extended...

(Encyclopedia) ballot, means of voting for candidates for office. The choice may be indicated on or by the ballot forms themselves—e.g., colored balls (hence the term ballot, which is derived from the Italian ball...

(Encyclopedia) Williams, Roger John, 1893–1988, American chemist, b. India, grad. Univ. of Redlands, Redlands, Calif. (B.S., 1914), Ph.D. Univ. of Chicago, 1919; brother of the chemist Robert R. Williams, Jr. He t...

(Encyclopedia) Communist party, in the United States, political party that espoused the Marxist-Leninist principles of communism. In 1945, Browder's policy was attacked as being one of the “right deviationism,�...

(Encyclopedia) Gruening, Ernest Henry grēnˈĭng [key], 1887–1974, American political leader, governor of Alaska (1939–53), and U.S. Senator (1959–69), b. New York City. He became interested in journalism and...

(Encyclopedia) United States Air Force Academy, at Colorado Springs, Colo.; for training young men and women to be officers in the U.S. air force; authorized in 1954 by Congress. Temporary quarters were opened at th...

(Encyclopedia) Athabascan both: –păsˈ– [key], group of related Native American languages forming a branch of the Nadene linguistic family or stock. In the preconquest period, Athabascan was a large and extensi...

(Encyclopedia) euthanasia yo͞oˌthənāˈzhə [key], either painlessly putting to death or failing to prevent death from natural causes in cases of terminal illness or irreversible coma. The term comes from the Gre...

(Encyclopedia) National Museum of the United States: see Smithsonian Institution. ...

(Encyclopedia) Energy, United States Department of, executive department of the federal government responsible for coordinating national activities relating to the production, regulation, marketing, and conservation...