Amroha

Town, northwestern Uttar Pradesh state, northern India, west-northwest of Moradabad town, on the Sot River. A marketplace for agricultural produce, its chief industries are hand-loom weaving, pottery making, and sugar milling. Colleges of Agra University are located there, as is the shrine of Sheikh Saddu, a Muslim saint. Amroha is connected by rail with Moradabad and Delhi. Pop.

Waite, Morrison Remick

Seventh chief justice of the United States (1874 - 88), who frequently spoke for the Supreme Court in interpreting the post-Civil War constitutional amendments and in redefining governmental jurisdiction over commerce in view of the great expansion of American business. Reacting against the extreme nationalism predominant during

Wicklow Mountains

Extensive mountain range in County Wicklow, Ireland, forming part of the Leinster Chain. The mountain area comprises a vast anticline (upwarp of rock strata), with granite exposed at the centre, and also slates and sandstones. Igneous intrusions form the Little Sugar Loaf (1,123 ft [342 m]) and the Great Sugar Loaf (1,654 ft [504 m]). The main summits of the range rise over 2,000 ft and consist of smoothly

Pala Dynasty

Ruling dynasty in Bihar and Bengal, India, from the 8th to the 12th century. Its founder, Gopala, was a local chieftain who rose to power in the mid-8th century during a period of anarchy. His successor, Dharmapala (reigned c. 770 - 810), greatly expanded the kingdom and for a while was in control of Kannauj. Pala power was maintained under Devapala (reigned c. 810 - 850), who carried out raids in the north, the

Holbein, Hans, The Elder

Nothing is known of Holbein's early life and training, but he was married and established as a

Saigyo

Also called �Sato Norikiyo � Japanese Buddhist priest-poet, one of the greatest masters of the tanka (a traditional Japanese poetic form), whose life and works became the subject matter of many narratives, plays, and puppet dramas. He originally followed his father in a military career, but, like others of his day, he was oppressed by the sense of disaster that overwhelmed Japan as

Min River

Wade - Giles romanization �Min Chiang, �Pinyin �Min Jiang, � river in Fukien sheng (province), China. The Min River and its various tributaries rise in the mountains of the Fukien - Kiangsi border area and flow to the sea across the grain of the southwest to northeast mountain ranges that cross the province; this flowage results in a trellislike drainage pattern, with lateral tributaries following the direction of the valleys.

R.e.m.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

English lyrical poet, critic, and philosopher. His Lyrical Ballads, written with William Wordsworth, heralded the English Romantic movement, and his Biographia Literaria (1817) is the most significant work of general literary criticism produced in the English Romantic period.

Croix

Town, southwestern suburb of Roubaix, Nord d�partement, Nord-Pas-de-Calais region, northern France, on the Roubaix Canal and Marque River. The lordship and village of Croix existed before the 12th century and was mentioned in early archives. The Ch�teau de la Fontaine (17th century) was a fief of the lordship, which became a countship in 1617. Croix remained a small village until

Forced Labour

Forced labour has existed in various forms throughout history, but it was a peculiarly prominent feature

Biblical Literature, Astrology

There were elements in the Greek world that may have come from the East, partly Egyptian and Babylonian, which gave rise to astrology. The basic conviction of astrology was that the heavenly bodies were deities that in a direct way control life and events on earth. An older idea of tyche, or �fate,� originally signified the chance element in the universe, a capriciousness

Ma, Yo-yo

Born to Chinese parents, Ma was a child prodigy and at age five gave his first public recital. He later moved to New York

'abbas I

L.L. Bellan, Chah 'Abbas I: sa vie, son histoire (1932), the only biography of Shah 'Abbas I in any European language - generally accurate; R.M. Savory, � 'Abbas I� in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed., vol. 1, pp. 7 - 8 (1960); for general background to the period of Shah 'Abbas, the reader is referred to: J. Chardin, Voyages du Chevalier Chardin, 4th ed., 4 vol. (1811); Sir John Malcom, The History of Persia from the Early Period to the Present Time, 2 vol. (1815); and V. Minorsky, Tadhkirat al-Muluk (1943), especially the introduction, commentary, and appendixes.

Aethelbald

King of Wessex (from 855/856), the son of Aethelwulf, with whom he led the West Saxons to victory against the Danes at Aclea (851). He reportedly rebelled against his father either before (855) or on the latter's return from Rome in 856 and deprived him of Wessex, which he ruled until his death. On his father's death in 858 he married his stepmother, Judith.

Earle, John

An outstanding book of �characters,� it avoids didacticism and displays genuine personalities, such as a �child,� a �Good old Man,� a �young raw Preacher,� and a �Grave Divine.� It is alive with its humour, perception, and epigrammatic

Resistor

Electrical component that opposes the flow of either direct or alternating current, employed to protect, operate, or control the circuit. Voltages can be divided with the use of resistors, and in combination with other components resistors can be used to make electrical waves into shapes most suited for the electrical designer's requirements. Resistors can have

Corbel Table

In architecture, a continuous row of corbels (a block of stone projecting from a wall and supporting some heavy feature), usually occurring just below the eaves of a roof in order to fill in beneath a high-pitched roof and to give extra support. It was a popular architectural feature in early medieval churches, particularly in Romanesque buildings, in which the corbels

Togo, Government

The military coup d'�tat of 1967 abolished the constitution of 1963 and dissolved the National Assembly. Togo had been ruled since 1969 by the Rally of the Togolese People, the sole political party until 1991 when parties were legalized. A new constitution in 1992 established the president as head of state and an elected multiparty National Assembly. The president appoints the prime minister

Beira

Former principality and historical province, north-central Portugal, extending from the banks of the Douro River in the north to the upper course of the Tagus in the southeast and from the Spanish frontier in the east to the Atlantic Ocean in the west. The region was reconquered from the Moors in the 8th century, but Moorish attacks continued until the 15th. It was also

Joule

Unit of work or energy in the International System of Units (SI); it is equal to the work done by a force of one newton acting through one metre. Named in honour of the English physicist James Prescott Joule, it equals 107 ergs, or approximately 0.7377 foot-pounds. In electrical terms, the joule equals one watt-second - i.e., the energy released in one second by a current of one ampere through

Audiovisual Education

Audiovisual education has developed rapidly since the 1920s by drawing on new technologies of communication, most recently the computer. History has shown that pictures, specimens, demonstrations,

Andrea Da Firenze

Andrea studied at the Arte dei Medici e degli Speziali in Florence. At the end of 1365 he was commissioned to decorate the chapter house of the church of Sta. Maria Novella. Also attributed to him are the decorations in the Spanish chapel and

Computers, Time-sharing from Project MAC to UNIX

In 1959 Christopher Strachey in the United Kingdom and John McCarthy in the United States independently described something they called time-sharing. Meanwhile, computer pioneer J.C.R. Licklider at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) began to promote the idea of interactive computing as an alternative to batch processing. Batch processing was the normal

Performing Arts, U.S. and Canada.

It was a year of economic and creative recuperation for the American theatre in 2002, and both the commercial and the not-for-profit sectors of the field seemed willing to accept a little help from their friends across the Atlantic in order to get by. The British influence was palpable on Broadway and beyond during this unsettled post-September 11 period. London-originated

Ghanimah

In the early Islamic community (7th century AD), booty taken in battle in the form of weapons, horses, prisoners, and movable goods. In pre-Islamic Bedouin society, where the ghazw (razzia, or raid) was a way of life and a point of honour, ghanimah helped provide the material means of existence. After the leader of the ghazw received a fourth or a fifth of the booty, the rest was divided

Restionales

Nearly all plants in the group exhibit reduced (simplified) flowers with a one- to three-chambered ovary containing only one pendulous ovule per chamber. There are one to three stamens (male

Protist

The protists include all unicellular organisms not included with the prokaryotes. Protists also embrace a number of forms of syncytial (coenocytic) or multicellular composition, generally manifest as filaments, colonies, coenobia (a type of colony with a fixed number of interconnected cells embedded in a common matrix before release from the parental colony),