Since 1964, many commentators have been speaking of a crisis of confidence in the United States, a malaise marked by widespread public belief that major institutions—businesses, labor unions, and especially the government, political...

The Rolling Stones, having outlasted nearly all of their 1960s contemporaries, continue to belt out hits well into middle age. Original members included lead singer Mick Jagger (Michael Philip Jagger, born July 26, 1943, in Dartford, Kent,...

Apr. 1820 Federal law allows settlers to purchase lands in western United States. Dec. 1823 Monroe Doctrine established. Mar. 1824 Supreme Court establishes federal authority over interstate commerce. May, 1824 Uni...

One of the most enduring accomplishments of early civilizations was the creation of monumental architecture in the form of pyramids, a shape that has fascinated humans ever since. The Greeks and Romans considered the Great Pyramid at Giza...

(born Aug. 4, 1961, Honolulu, Hawaii, U.S.) U.S. senator (2005– ). Obama graduated from Columbia University (1983) and Harvard Law School (1991), where he was the first African American to serve as president of the Harvard Law Review...

E. Annie Proulx (born 1935) won the 1993 PEN/Faulkner Award for her novel Postcards and a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for her next novel, The Shipping News. While she was certainly not an overnight sensation, having written stories from the age...

Any of a class of natural or synthetic organic compounds with a molecular core, or nucleus, of 17 carbon atoms in a characteristic three-dimensional arrangement of four rings. The configuration of the nucleus, the nature of the groups atta...

Michael Frayn is a satirist who has moved from newspaper columns to novels to television productions to stage plays. Judging from the critical responses, he seems to have conquered each medium. His plays have been popular with audiences wh...

fragrant product that results from the artful blending of certain odoriferous substances in appropriate proportions. The word is derived from the Latin per fumum, meaning “through smoke.” The art of perfumery was apparently kno...

Although Sherwood Anderson is not one of the major figures in twentieth-century American literature, he is for several reasons a writer of very considerable significance. At his best in short fiction, this "teller of tales" produced many r...

Sonnet 18, often alternately titled Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?, is one of the best-known of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. Part of the Fair Youth sequence (which comprises sonnets 1-...

Tillie Olsen is a feminist and working-class author who began writing in the 1930s. Robert Coles commented in The Nation, "Everything Tillie Olsen has written has become almost immediately a classic." Though she is most famous for her shor...

A confederacy, or confederation, is a political system originating in an agreement made between several independent entities that wish to retain a high degree of autonomy. The idea of confederalism is usually contrasted with that of federa...

(July 2, 1839) Slave rebellion aboard the schooner Amistad. The revolt took place off the coast of Cuba when 53 Africans who had been abducted from Sierra Leone for the slave trade, seized control of the ship, killed the captain and cook, ...

Apartheid Apartheid, an Afrikaans word meaning literally Schuster, 1998. Neville, Alexander. An Ordinary Country. Issues in the Transition from Apartheid to Democracy in South Africa. New York: Berghahn Books, 2003....

Group of connective-tissue diseases in which the bones are very fragile. Several forms probably reflect different degrees of expression of the same disorder. Persons with osteogenesis imperfecta type I are normal at birth, but fractures oc...