Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) Book of Common Prayer, title given to the service book used in the Church of England and in other churches of the Anglican Communion. The first complete English Book of Common Prayer was produced, mai...

(Encyclopedia) Baraka, Amiri amērē bəräˈkə [key], 1934–2014, American poet, playwright, and political activist, b. Newark, N.J., as Everett LeRoy Jones, studied at Rutgers Univ., Howard Univ. In college he a...

(Encyclopedia) Emigrant Aid Company, organization formed in 1854 to promote organized antislavery immigration to the Kansas territory from the Northeast. Eli Thayer conceived the plan as early as Feb., 1854, even be...

(Encyclopedia) Free State, formerly Orange Free State, province, 50,126 sq mi (129,825 sq km), E central South Africa. It was renamed Free State shortly after the 1994...

(Encyclopedia) American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), a federation of autonomous labor unions in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Panama, and U.S. dependencies, formed in ...

(Encyclopedia) mercury poisoning, tissue damage resulting from exposure to more than trace amounts of the element mercury or its compounds. Elemental mercury (the silver liquid familiar from thermometers) is the mos...

(Encyclopedia) Paine, Thomas, 1737–1809, Anglo-American political theorist and writer, b. Thetford, Norfolk, England. The son of a working-class Quaker, he became an excise officer and was dismissed from the servi...

(Encyclopedia) Memphis mĕmˈfĭs [key], city (1990 pop. 610,337), seat of Shelby co., SW Tenn., on the Fourth, or Lower, Chickasaw Bluff above the Mississippi, at the mouth of the Wolf River; inc. 1826. A river por...

(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) child labor, use of the young as workers in factories, farms, mines, and other facilities, especially in work that is physically hazardous or morally, socially, or mentally harmful, involves a form of...