Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) water rights, in law, the qualified privilege of a landowner to use the water adjacent to or flowing through his property. The privilege, also known as riparian rights, may be modified or even denied ...

(Encyclopedia) Kennedy, John Fitzgerald, 1917–63, 35th President of the United States (1961–63), b. Brookline, Mass.; son of Joseph P. Kennedy. On Nov. 22, 1963, President Kennedy was shot and killed while ...

(Encyclopedia) Sherbrooke, University of, at Sherbrooke, Que., Canada; French language; founded 1954. It has faculties of letters and human sciences, science, administration, law, applied science, medicine, educatio...

(Encyclopedia) housing, in general, living accommodations available for the inhabitants of a community. Throughout the 19th cent., with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, housing as a problem worsened as urban...

(Encyclopedia) foreign aid, economic, military, technical, and financial assistance given on an international, and usually intergovernmental level. U.S. foreign aid programs have included at least three different ob...

(Encyclopedia) Pacific scandal, 1873, a major event in Canadian political history. Charges were made in Parliament that the Conservative administration of Sir John A. Macdonald had accepted campaign funds from Sir H...

(Encyclopedia) Stassen, Harold Edward stăsˈən [key], 1907–2001, American public official and university president, b. West St. Paul, Minn. A Republican lawyer, he held his first public office at the age of 23. ...

(Encyclopedia) Copperheads, in the American Civil War, a reproachful term for those Northerners sympathetic to the South, mostly Democrats outspoken in their opposition to the Lincoln administration. They were espec...

(Encyclopedia) Kavanaugh, Brett Michael, 1965–, associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (2018–), b. Washington, D.C., grad. Yale (B.A. 1987, J.D. 1990). He clerked for Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy a...

(Encyclopedia) periscope pĕrˈĭskōp [key] [Gr.,=view around], instrument to enable a person to see objects not in his direct line of vision or concealed by some intervening body. Its essential parts are a tube, p...