Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) Peninsular War, 1808–14, fought by France against Great Britain, Portugal, Spanish regulars, and Spanish guerrillas in the Iberian Peninsula. The Peninsular War immeasurably raised Britain's mi...

(Encyclopedia) ice skating, gliding along an ice surface on keellike runners known as ice skates. The earliest skates (c.9th cent.), made of bone, were found in Sweden. Wooden skates with iron facings appeared in ...

(Encyclopedia) Jay, John, 1745–1829, American statesman, 1st chief justice of the United States, b. New York City, grad. King's College (now Columbia Univ.), 1764. He was admitted (1768) to the bar and for a time ...

(Encyclopedia) Tea Party, in the early 21st cent., U.S. political movement that arose in reaction to the economic crisis of 2008 and the government rescue and aid measures for the financial, automobile, and other in...

(Encyclopedia) little magazine, term used to designate certain magazines that have as their purpose the publication of art, literature, or social theory by comparatively little-known writers. The little-magazine m...

(Encyclopedia) Bohr, Niels Henrik David bōr [key], 1885–1962, Danish physicist, one of the foremost scientists of modern physics. He studied at the Univ. of Copenhagen (Ph.D. 1911) and carried on research on the...

(Encyclopedia) James, William, 1842–1910, American philosopher, b. New York City, M.D. Harvard, 1869; son of the Swedenborgian theologian Henry James and brother of the novelist Henry James. In 1872 he joined the ...

(Encyclopedia) Neptune, in astronomy, 8th planet from the sun at a mean distance of about 2.8 billion mi (4.5 billion km) with an orbit lying between those of Uranus and the dwarf planet Pluto; its period of revolut...

(Encyclopedia) steel industry, the business of processing iron ore into steel, which in its simplest form is an iron-carbon alloy, and in some cases, turning that metal into partially finished products or recycling ...

(Encyclopedia) Cheyenne shīănˈ, –ĕnˈ [key], indigenous people of North America whose language belongs to the Algonquian branch of the Algonquian-Wakashan linguistic stock (see Native American languages). The ...