R. K. Narayan (born 1906) is one of the best-known of the Indo-English writers. He created the imaginary town of Malgudi, where realistic characters in a typically Indian setting lived amid unpredictable events. Rasipuram Krishnaswami Nara...

R. M. Hare was the leading British moral philosopher of the last half of the twentieth century. His overarching aim, which he relentlessly pursued, was to demonstrate how rational argumentation about morality is possible. He achieved this ...

An alternative rock band of the 1980s and 1990s, R.E.M. served up an eclectic mix of musical styles that included punk, rock, and even country and folk. Comprised of Michael Stipe (vocals), Peter Buck (guitar), Mike Mills (bass), and Bill ...

RABBAH BAR NAHMANI (d. around 330 CE), a third-generation Babylonian amora, rabbinical colleague of Yosef bar Ḥiyyaʾ and Ḥisdaʾ. Rabbah studied with Hunaʾ and several other Babylonians, including Yehudah ...

TAM, YAʿAQOV BEN MEʾIR (c. 1100–1171), leading Jewish halakhic scholar, known as Rabbenu ("our teacher") Tam from the biblical description of the patriarch Jacob as tam (Gn. 25:27), a word often translate...

The Palestinian rabbi Akiba ben Joseph (ca. 50-ca. 135) was a founder of rabbinic Judaism. He developed a method of Hebrew scriptural interpretation. The early life of Akiba ben Joseph is enshrouded in legends, anecdotes, sayings, and nume...

The rabbinate as an institution of intellectual, spiritual, and religious leadership developed relatively late in the history of the Jewish people. It is found neither in the Bible nor in other Jewish literature from the biblical period. I...

RABBITS. The belief that a rabbit dwells in the moon is widely attested not only in Inner Asia, South Asia, and East Asia but also in North America, Mesoamerica, and southern Africa. Among the Turco-Mongol peoples of Inner Asia, the shaman...

Rabies is a rare but serious disease caused by a virus. The virus that causes rabies is carried in saliva. It is transmitted when an infected animal bites another animal. Rabies affects humans and other mammals. Another name for rabies is...

The study of race and race relations has long been a central concern of sociologists. The assignment of individuals to racial categories profoundly affects the quality and even the length of their lives. These assignments are ostensibly ma...

Race and Minorities Timeline 1890–1899 ∼ Drawing Color Lines Dawes Act calls for a redistribution of Indian reservation land (1887) / Jim Crow laws upheld in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) / Chinese immigration banned except for diplom...

Rachel Louise Carson (1907-1964) was an American biologist and writer whose book Silent Spring aroused an apathetic public to the dangers of chemical pesticides. Rachel Carson was born May 27, 1907, in Springdale, Pa. A solitary child, she...

Segregation. When people hear this word, they think back to the 60s and the civil rights movement. Segregation is still very alive today. People believe that segregation died when the civil rights movement was over. However, as many f...

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. This statement in the Declarat...

There are several causes and disparities of external traits or appearances that divide us into several groupings or categories which are called "races" (Hannaford 1996: 154; Bernier, A New Division of the Earth Extract, 1-4). In other words...

Radar stands for radio detection and ranging. It is a technology that generates radio waves, reflects them from an object, and detects the reflected waves to determine where the object is located in space. An outgrowth of the tremendous a...

Radial keratotomy (RK) is a surgical procedure in which precisely placed micro incisions are made in a patient's cornea--the clear matter which covers the eyeball--to permanently correct near-sightedness, or myopia. In myopia, the curvatur...

The term radiation broadly applied to a class of physical phenomena that share a characteristic loss of energy in the radiating body or system that results in a propagation of particles and/or waves that carry the ability to do work and th...

Radiation injuries are damage to the body caused by ionizing radiation. Ionizing radiation (IR) is given off by the sun, X-ray machines, and radioactive elements. The word radiation comes from a Latin term that means "ray of light...

Cancer is the unregulated growth of abnormal cells in the body. These cells in a cluster are called a tumor, malignant tumors are cancer. These cells grow and move fast through the body. The divide and multiple faster than the normal heal...

For some African Americans, the end of slavery came with the January 1863 signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, the document that proclaimed most of them free. For others, it came in April 1865 with the end of the Civil War (1861ȁ...

The radio's role as a source of popularizing music to mass groups of people is a quite large role. Between different types of programming and different recording industries, there are many different ways radio and recording industries infl...

Before the advent of television in the late 1940s, radio was the most popular mass medium in America. During radio's "Golden Age" from 1929 through the end of World War II, radio's comedy-variety, soap opera, an...

Radio waves are a part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Just as an optical telescope gathers visible light and magnifies it, a radio telescope is a large dish-shaped device that gathers and amplifies radio frequencies from space. Radio tel...

After Antoine Becquerel's discovery of radioactivity in 1896, there was much speculation as to the nature of the phenomenon. For one thing, it was unclear whether this was an effect produced only by uranium (and, as later discovered by Pie...