Inorganic compound of sodium and chlorine, a salt in which ionic bonds hold the two components in the familiar white crystals. Salt is essential to health as a source of sodium; blood and all other physiological fluids are dilute salt solu...

Carolina Maria de Jesus (1914-1977) was a Brazilian peasant who lived most of her life in the favela (slums) of São Paulo, Brazil. She is best known for her diary, which was published as Child of the Dark in 1960 after coming to the attent...

Alice Sebold's first published book was a memoir of her rape as an eighteen-year-old college freshman. Titled Lucky because one of the policemen told her that she was lucky to be alive--not long before Sebold's attack, another young woman ...

Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston is the title of a seminal book by Ernest Callenbach, published in 1975. The society described in the book is one of the first ecological utopias and was influential on the counterculture...

Deng Xiaoping (Teng Hsiao-p'ing) (1904-1997) became the most powerful leader in the People's Republic of China (PRC) in the 1970s. He served as the chairman of the Communist party's Military Commission and was the chief architect of China'...

Countries of South America and North America (including Central America and the islands of the Caribbean Sea) south of the U.S.; the term is often restricted to countries where either Spanish or Portuguese is spoken. The colonial era in La...

During the 1960s, the architects of the black arts movement--Imamu Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Larry Neal, Haki R. Madhubuti (Don L. Lee), Addison Gayle, and others--demanded that black writers use their talents and works for the betterment of t...

The Italian author, courtier, and diplomat Baldassare Castiglione (1478-1529) is known primarily for his "Book of the Courtier." This work, which portrays the ideal courtier, was a chief vehicle in spreading Italian humanism into England a...

An early manuscript describing dance is the Natya Shastra on which the modern interpretation classical Indian dance (e.g. Bharathanatyam) is based. The ancient chronicle, the Sinhalese (Sri Lankans), the Mahavamsa states when King Vijaya la...

Since 1968 when Once, her first work, was published, Alice Walker has sought to bring closer that day for which her maternal ancestors waited-"a day when the unknown thing that was in them would be known." In five collections of poetry, tw...

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,...