Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) Pollock, Oliver, 1737–1823, American merchant, b. Ireland. He arrived in America at the age of 23 and became a successful merchant. After moving to New Orleans, Pollock speculated advantageously in ...

(Encyclopedia) Hänsch, Theodor Wolfgang, 1941–, German physicist, Ph.D. Heidelberg, 1969. He was a professor at Stanford from 1975 to 1986 and then became head of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, Garc...

(Encyclopedia) epigram, a short, polished, pithy saying, usually in verse, often with a satiric or paradoxical twist at the end. The term was originally applied by the Greeks to the inscriptions on stones. The epigr...

(Encyclopedia) Licking, river, c.320 mi (515 km) long, rising in E Ky. and flowing NW to the Ohio River opposite Cincinnati; the North and South Forks are its chief tributaries. The Licking was an important means of...

(Encyclopedia) Croghan, George, 1791–1849, American military officer, b. near Louisville, Ky.; nephew of George Rogers Clark and William Clark. He won public acclaim and a congressional award for his defense of Fo...

(Encyclopedia) Bright, John, 1811–89, British statesman and orator. He was the son of a Quaker cotton manufacturer in Lancashire. A founder (1839) of the Anti-Corn Law League, he rose to prominence on the strength...

(Encyclopedia) McBain, Howard Lee, 1880–1936, American political scientist, b. Toronto, Ont., grad. Richmond (Va.) College, 1900, Ph.D. Columbia, 1907. After teaching at George Washington and Wisconsin universitie...

(Encyclopedia) vaudeville vôdˈvĭl [key], originally a light song, derived from the drinking and love songs formerly attributed to Olivier Basselin and called Vau, or Vaux, de Vire. Similar to the English music ha...

(Encyclopedia) Lomond, Loch lŏkh lōˈmənd, –mən [key], largest freshwater lake in Great Britain, 23 mi (37 km) long and from 1 to 5 mi (1.6–8.1 km) wide, in Argyll and Bute, West Dunbartonshire, and Stirling...

(Encyclopedia) Boulanger, Nadia bo͞oläNzhāˈ [key], 1887–1979, French conductor and musician, b. Paris. Boulanger was considered an outstanding teacher of composition. She studied at the Paris Conservatory, wh...