Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) Gentileschi, Artemisia ärˌtāmēˈzhə jānˌtēlĕsˈkē [key], c.1597–c.1652, Tuscan painter, daughter and pupil of Orazio Gentileschi, b. Rome. She studied with her father's collaborator, Agost...

(Encyclopedia) Gilgamesh gĭlˈgəmĕsh [key], in Babylonian legend, king of Uruk. He is the hero of the Gilgamesh epic, written on 12 tablets c.2000 b.c. and discovered among the ruins at Nineveh. The epic was lost...

(Encyclopedia) Griffith, D. W. (David Llewelyn Wark Griffith), 1875–1948, American movie director and producer, b. La Grange, Ky. Griffith was the first major American film director. He began his film career as an...

(Encyclopedia) Austen, Jane ôˈstən [key], 1775–1817, English novelist. The daughter of a clergyman, she spent the first 25 years of her life at “Steventon,” her father's Hampshire vicarage. Here her first n...

(Encyclopedia) Staël, Germaine de zhĕrmĕnˈ də stäl [key], 1766–1817, French-Swiss woman of letters, whose full name was Anne Louise Germaine Necker, baronne de Staël-Holstein. Born in Paris, the daughter of...

(Encyclopedia) Godard, Jean-Luc zhäN-lük gôdärˈ [key], 1930–, French film director and scriptwriter, b. Paris. He wrote criticism for a number of Parisian cinema journals in the early 1950s before embarking o...

(Encyclopedia)  CE5 Yukon, territory (2001 pop. 28,674), 207,076 sq mi (536,327 sq km), NW Canada. The territory's history began with the explorations in the 1840s of Robert Campbell and John Bell, fur traders f...

(Encyclopedia) Polk, James Knox pōk [key], 1795–1849, 11th President of the United States (1845–49), b. Mecklenburg co., N.C. To the surprise of many, the new President proved to be his own man; he even ignor...

(Encyclopedia) Tynan, Kenneth Peacock tīˈnən [key], 1927–80, English drama critic, author, and theatrical executive, b. Birmingham, England. During the 1950s, while writing for The Observer, Tynan was widely re...

(Encyclopedia) Progressive party, in U.S. history, the name of three political organizations, active, respectively, in the presidential elections of 1912, 1924, and 1948. At Philadelphia in July, 1948, a new...