Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) Thomas à Becket, Saint, or Saint Thomas Becket, 1118–70, English martyr, archbishop of Canterbury, b. London. He is called St. Thomas of Canterbury and occasionally St. Thomas of London. In exi...

(Encyclopedia) Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804–64, American novelist and short-story writer, b. Salem, Mass., one of the great masters of American fiction. His novels and tales are penetrating explorations of moral and...

(Encyclopedia) Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel ...

(Encyclopedia) Baptists, denomination of Protestant Christians holding a distinctive belief with regard to the ordinance of baptism. Since 1644 the name has been applied to those who maintain that baptism should be ...

(Encyclopedia) Naples, kingdom of, former state, occupying the Italian peninsula south of the former Papal States. It comprised roughly the present regions of Campania, Abruzzi, Molise, Basilicata, Apulia, and Calab...

(Encyclopedia) Constitutional Convention, in U.S. history, the 1787 meeting in which the Constitution of the United States was drawn up. The convention at Philadelphia drew up one of the most influential document...

(Encyclopedia)  CE5 Supreme Court, United States, highest court of the United States, established by Article 3 of the Constitution of the United States. With the emergence of a working conservative majority,...

(Encyclopedia) Clay, Henry, 1777–1852, American statesman, b. Hanover co., Va. In 1828, Clay again supported Adams for President, and Jackson's success bitterly disappointed him. Although he intended to retir...

(Encyclopedia) name. Personal identifying names are found in every known culture, and they often pass from one language to another. Hence the occurrence of Native American place names throughout the United States an...

(Encyclopedia) outsider art, artwork created by typically unconventional and untrained artists from the margins of society and the art world. The term was coined in 1972 by British scholar and art critic Roger Cardi...