Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) Stuart or Stewart, royal family that ruled Scotland and England. The Stuart lineage began in a family of hereditary stewards of Scotland, the earliest of whom was Walter (d. 1177), grandson of a Norma...

(Encyclopedia) Gladstone, William Ewart, 1809–98, British statesman, the dominant personality of the Liberal party from 1868 until 1894. A great orator and a master of finance, he was deeply religious and brought ...

(Encyclopedia) Wharton, Edith Newbold Jones, 1862–1937, American novelist, b. New York City, noted for her subtle, ironic, and superbly crafted fictional studies of New York society at the turn of the 20th cent. T...

(Encyclopedia) fingerprint, an impression of the underside of the end of a finger or thumb, used for identification because the arrangement of ridges in any fingerprint is thought to be unique and permanent with eac...

(Encyclopedia) Woolf, Virginia, 1882–1941, English novelist and essayist, b. Adeline Virgina Stephen; daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen. A successful innovator in the form of the novel, she is considered a significan...

(Encyclopedia) electronics industry, the business of creating, designing, producing, and selling devices such as radios, televisions, stereos, computers, semiconductors, transistors, and integrated circuits (see ele...

(Encyclopedia) Irish Land Question, name given in the 19th cent. to the problem of land ownership and agrarian distress in Ireland under British rule. The long-term result of conquest, confiscation, and colonization...

(Encyclopedia) Delacroix, Eugène (Ferdinand-Victor-Eugène Delacroix) fĕrdēnäNˈ-vēktôrˈ-özhĕnˈ dəläkrwäˈ [key], 1798–1863, French painter. Delacroix is considered the foremost painter of the romanti...

(Encyclopedia) marsupial märso͞oˈpēəl [key], member of the order Marsupialia, or pouched mammals. With the exception of the New World opossums and an obscure S American family (Caenolestidae), marsupials are no...

(Encyclopedia) protozoan prōˌtəzōˈən [key], informal term for the unicellular heterotrophs of the kingdom Protista. Protozoans comprise a large, diverse assortment of microscopic or near-microscopic organisms ...