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Donner Party

(Encyclopedia)Donner Party, group of emigrants to California who in the winter of 1846–47 met with one of the most famous tragedies in Western history. The California-bound families were mostly from Illinois and ...

Donner, Richard

(Encyclopedia)Donner, Richard, 1930-2021, American film director, b. Bronx, N.Y., as Richard Donald Schwartzberg. Donner came from a Russian, Jewish immigrant family....

Beddoes, Thomas Lovell

(Encyclopedia)Beddoes, Thomas Lovell, 1803–49, English poet and dramatist. After graduating from Oxford, he studied medicine and anatomy at Göttingen. His writings, inclined toward the macabre and grotesque, inc...

Woodward, Robert Burns

(Encyclopedia)Woodward, Robert Burns, 1917–80, American chemist and educator, b. Boston, grad. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (S.B., 1936; Ph.D., 1937). He taught at Harvard from 1938, becoming Donner prof...

cannibalism

(Encyclopedia)cannibalism kănˈĭbəlĭzəm [key] [Span. caníbal, referring to the Carib], eating of human flesh by other humans. The charge of cannibalism is a common insult, and it is likely that some alleged c...

Sierra Nevada, mountain range, United States

(Encyclopedia)Sierra Nevada sēĕrˈə nəväˈdə [key], mountain range, c.400 mi (640 km) long and from c.40 to 80 mi (60–130 km) wide, mostly in E Calif. It rises to 14,495 ft (4,418 m) in Mt. Whitney, the hig...

Reno

(Encyclopedia)Reno rēˈnō [key], city (1990 pop. 133,850), seat of Washoe co., W Nev., on the Truckee River; inc. 1903. Tourism has been the major industry since gambling was legalized in Nevada in 1931. With its...

Liberty party

(Encyclopedia)Liberty party, in U.S. history, an antislavery political organization founded in 1840. It was formed by those abolitionists, under the leadership of James G. Birney and Gerrit Smith, who repudiated Wi...

Labour party

(Encyclopedia)Labour party, British political party, one of the two dominant parties in Great Britain since World War I. Harold Wilson, who became leader on Gaitskell's death in 1963, was able to lead the party t...

Democratic party

(Encyclopedia)Democratic party, American political party; the oldest continuous political party in the United States. In 1960, John F. Kennedy narrowly defeated the Republican candidate, Richard M. Nixon, in the ...
 

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