body of law regulating family relationships, including marriage and divorce, the treatment of children, and related economic matters. In the past, family law was closely connected with the law of property and succession (&see; property law...

The longest running black sitcom in history, Family Matters debuted in 1989 and aired on prime-time television for a total of nine years. Created by William Bickley and Michael Warren, the show featured a multi-generational, working-class ...

The dramatic growth in the industrial capacities and economic power of the United States and the countries of Western Europe since World War II has demonstrably improved the per capita income and quality of life of the average citizen in t...

Family size may be considered from two perspectives. At the individual (micro) level, it defines one aspect of an individual's family background or environment. As such, it represents a potential influence on the development and acc...

President Reagan once named NBC's Family Ties his favorite show, despite the fact that the show was originally intended as a parody of Reagan-style values. The premise of the Emmy-winning series, which ran from 1982 to 1989, was the...

Famine is a result of multiple political, economic, social, and ecological disorders that combine to produce an increase in the number of deaths from starvation and epidemic disease. An examination of Chinese famines and Chinese official r...

1949- Taiwanese-American mathematician who earned her Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1974 and worked for 20 years at Bell Labs in the area of combinatorics. She is well respected for her teaching, research, and...

Although many fields of endeavor such as sports, auto racing, radio, and music have all spawned "interest magazines" that provide inside information for devotees of a particular subject or pursuit, it is to the motion picture...

Fanny Brice (1891-1951) was a vaudeville, Broadway, film, and radio singer and comedienne. Fanny Brice was born on October 29, 1891, on New York's Lower East Side. She was the daughter of Charles Borach, a saloonkeeper, and Rose Stern, a r...

The English novelist and diarist Fanny Burney (1752-1840) was one of the most popular novelists of the late 18th century. She was also an important chronicler of English manners, morals, and society. Fanny Burney, originally named Frances,...

A seminal film in the development of animated features, and a cultural cornerstone in leading children to classical music, Walt Disney's Fantasia (1940) has entranced six generations of viewers in America and Europe. Named as one of...

Mental images or imaginary narratives that distort or entirely depart from reality. Primary fantasies arise spontaneously from the unconscious, while secondary fantasies are consciously summoned and pursued. Sigmund Freud saw fantasy as a ...

Debuting in 1980, The Far Side, a single-panel comic strip written and drawn by Gary Larson, was different from anything previously seen on a comics page. Its offbeat and obscure humor drew epithets such as "tasteless," �...

“Farahat’s Republic” by Yusuf Idris Born in 1927 in Al-Bayrum, a village in Egypt’s Nile Delta, Yusuf Idris moved to Cairo in 1945 to study medicine. As a student he joined the nationalist movement against Britis...

In A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway introduces to the reader a character by the name of Frederick Henry. Henry had a goal to become a hero, and throughout the novel I feel that he proved he was. Henry also started out not having a rel...

In order to gain a piece of his father-in-law's fortune, a financially desperate husband (William H. Macy) hires two hitmen (Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare) to fake a kidnapping of his wife in Joel and Ethan Coen's 1996 noi...

Farming Timeline 1900–1919 ∼ Migration of the Farm Population Pure Food and Drug Act sets standards for food and drug control (1906) / Mass migration of workers across the nation depletes the farm population (1915–1919) / Af...

Hay is grass that has been cut and dried for use as fodder for farm animals. Numerous tools and machines have been designed over the years to process it. The earliest haying tools were homemade for manual field work. Scythes were used to c...

During the late nineteenth century, the agrarian movement evolved into a political force that energized American farmers to voice their political and economic grievances like never before. Although the movement essentially died after Willi...

Best known for her role in the television series Charlie's Angels, which ran on ABC from 1976-1981, Farrah Fawcett became one of the biggest influences on American style during the late 1970s. With a plot that revolved around a trio...

The Farsi-Tajiki or Tajiki language, the name given to one of the Iranian languages spoken in Central Asia, is also called Persian, Tajik, or Tajik Persian. This variety of names reflects the rather complicated history of the language. Fa...

Fluke infections are diseases of the digestive tract and other organ systems caused by parasitic flatworms (Trematodes) that involve hosts other than human beings. Trematode comes from a Greek word that means having holes and refers to the...

Any mode of dressing or adornment that is popular during a particular time or in a particular place (i.e., the current style). It can change from one period to the next, from generation to generation. It serves as a reflection of social an...

The liquid metal fast breeder reactor (LMFBR) is a nuclear reactor that has been modified to increase the efficiency at which non-fissionable uranium-238 is converted to fissionable plutonium-239, which can be used as fuel in the product...

The fast Fourier transform is an equation that relates the amplitude, or strength, of an electrical signal as a function of frequency, instead of as a function of time. The computation of the transform has been one of the seminal events in...