Sir Moses I. Finley CBE (May 20, 1912–June 23, 1986) was an American and English classical scholar. His most notable work is The Ancient Economy (1973), where he argued that status and civic ideology governed the economy in anti...

The American anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn (1905-1960) is known for his field work among the Navaho Indians, his contributions to the theory of culture, and his attempts to unify social sciences through interdisciplinary communication. Cl...

The term Victorian architecture can refer to one of a number of architectural styles predominantly in the Victorian era. As with the latter, the period of building that it covers may slightly overlap the actual reign of Queen Victoria after...

Tarzan of the Apes is a novel written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the first in a series of books about the title character Tarzan. It was first published in the pulp magazine All-Story Magazine in October, 1912; the first book edition was publ...

SOURCE: “John Steinbeck: Journeyman Artist,” in American Fiction, 1920-1940, The Macmillan Company, 1948, pp. 309-26. In the following excerpt from an essay originally published in 1941, Beach compares “The Chrysanthemums” to the wo...

if (window.showTocToggle) { var tocShowText = "show"; var tocHideText = "hide"; showTocToggle(); } Culture Hacker has multiple common meanings as relates to computing, unified only in that it refers to someone who is an avid computer enthu...

The British general Douglas Haig, 1st Earl Haig (1861-1928), commanded British forces on the Western front in Europe during World War I. He is credited with the final British victories over the German armies in 1918. Douglas Haig was born ...

Sheet metal is simply metal formed into thin and flat pieces. It is one of the fundamental forms used in metalworking, and can be cut and bent into a variety of different shapes. Countless everyday objects are constructed of the material. T...

John Smith (ca. 1580-1631), English colonist in America, was president of the governing council of Jamestown, Va. His writings about Virginia and New England have considerable historical and literary merit. John Smith's life is known mainl...

Robin McKinley has been described by her friends Terri Windling and Mark Alan Arnold in Horn Book as a "person who approaches every instant and event with such boisterousness, energy, and vehemence that even the most mundane aspects of her...

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'...

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 the beginning of recorded history, humans have attempted to mask or enhance their own odor by using perfume which emulates nature's pleasant smells. Many natural and man-made materials have been used to make perfume to apply to the s...

A Hero of Our Time (Russian: Герой нашего времени) is a short novel by Mikhail Lermontov, written in 1839 and revised in 1841. It is an example of the superfluous man novel, noted for its compelling Byronic hero (or anti-h...

SOURCE: "The Teen-Ager Speaks," in The Saturday Review (New York), January 27, 1968, p. 34. In the following essay, Sutherland examines the controversy surrounding The Outsiders, providing comments excerpted from a newspaper article by Hint...

Human progeria comes in two major forms, Werner's syndrome (adult-onset progeria) and Hutchinson-Gilford syndrome (juvenile-onset progeria). Werner's patients are usually diagnosed in early maturity and have an average life s...