Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) Polanski, Roman, 1933–, Polish-French film director, b. Paris. His family returned to Kraków, Poland, when he was three. His parents were imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps and his mother died ...

(Encyclopedia) basketball, game played generally indoors by two opposing teams of five players each. Basketball was conceived in 1891 by Dr. James Naismith, a physical education instructor at the YMCA college in Spr...

(Encyclopedia) pigmentation, name for the coloring matter found in certain plant and animal cells and for the color produced thereby. Pigmentation occurs in nearly all living organisms. Almost all plants synthesize ...

(Encyclopedia) monsters and imaginary beasts. The mythologies and legends of ancient and modern cultures teem with an enormous variety of monsters and imaginary beasts. A great number of these are composites of diff...

(Encyclopedia) Chinese music, the classical music forms of China. Throughout the political and social turmoil following World War I, Western (classical and popular) and Japanese sources dominated Chinese music. At...

(Encyclopedia) Saratoga campaign, June–Oct., 1777, of the American Revolution. Lord George Germain and John Burgoyne were the chief authors of a plan to end the American Revolution by splitting the colonies along ...

(Encyclopedia) adaptation, in biology, has several meanings. It can mean the adjustment of living matter to environmental conditions and to other living things either in an organism's lifetime (physiological adaptat...

(Encyclopedia) Great Depression, in U.S. history, the severe economic crisis generally considered to have been precipitated by the U.S. stock-market crash of 1929. Although it shared the basic characteristics of oth...

(Encyclopedia) dinosaur dīˈnəsôr [key] [Gr., = terrible lizard], extinct land reptile of the Mesozoic era. The dinosaurs, which were egg-laying animals, ranged in length from 21⁄2 ft (91 cm) to about 127 f...

(Encyclopedia) Ai Weiwei īˈ wāwā [key], 1957–, Chinese artist, architect, filmmaker, and political activist. He is the son of poet Ai Ch'ing, who was internally exiled (1958–76) to work camps with his family...