Zabdiel Boylston (1679-1766) was the first American physician to use inoculation against smallpox in 1721 during a Boston epidemic. Zabdiel Boylston was born March 9, 1679, near the present city of Brookline, Mass., and studied medicine wi...

The integration of Koreans into Japanese society has always been a major social, economic, and political issue. The following description of Korean housing in Japan in the late nineteenth century indicates that house style was one cultural...

ZALMOXIS was the founder, possibly legendary, of a priestly line of succession closely linked with kingship of the Getae and the Dacians, the northernmost Thracian peoples of the ancient world. Whether he is a figure of legend or of histor...

The Zambales Mountains in the Philippines stretch from the northern part of Zambales Province to the northern edge of Bataan Province. This range comprises nearly the whole province of Zambales. There are eight named mountains in the range...

Port city (pop., 2000: metro. area, 601,794), western Mindanao, Philippines. Founded in 1635 as a fort by the Spanish, it later became the chief market of the southern Philippines. In World War II it was a Japanese defense headquarters and...

Considered by pop-culture critics to be the quintessential underground comic book of the 1960s, Zap Comix can trace its genealogy to the publication of Jack Jaxon's God Nose in 1963. By 1999, there were estimated to be more than two...

Shaykh Zayid bin Sultan Al-Nahyan (born 1923) served for 18 years as the governor of the Buraimi Oasis and for five years as the ruler of the emirate of Abu Dhabi, one of the Trucial States, before becoming president of the United Arab Emi...

ZEALOTS. The Zealots were Jewish revolutionaries in first-century Israel whose religious zeal led them to fight to the death against Roman domination and to attack or kill other Jews who collaborated with the Romans. Scholars disagree as t...

Any member of two unrelated groups of fishes: freshwater species in the genus Brachydanio (family Cyprinidae) and saltwater species in the genus Pterois (family Scorpaenidae). The zebra danio (Brachydanio rerio), a popular freshwater aquar...

Zebu, or brahminy cattle (Bos indicus; sometimes called humped oxen or Brahman), are a species of domesticated livestock native to India. According to some, they are the same species as common cattle (Bos taurus), but others think that the...

The career of Zebulon Pike (1779-1813), American soldier and explorer, was dominated by ambiguously motivated explorations of the American West. During one of these he unsuccessfully tried to climb the Colorado mountain named for him, Pike...

Splitting of a spectral line (&see; spectrum) into two or more lines of different frequencies. The effect occurs when the light source is placed in a magnetic field. It has helped identify the energy levels in atoms; it also provides a mea...

(from Sanskrit dhyana, “meditation”) important school of East Asian Buddhism that constitutes the mainstream monastic form of Mahayana Buddhism in China, Korea, and Vietnam and accounts for approximately 20 percent of the Buddh...

Zen'kovskii, Vasilii Vasil'evich(1881–1962) Vasilii Vasil'evich Zen'kovskii, a Russian philosopher and theologian, was born in Proskurov into the family of a teacher. Zen'kovskii studied natural sci...

The Greek philosopher Zeno of Citium (335-263 BC) was the founder of Stoicism. His teachings had a profound influence throughout the ancient world and in important respects helped pave the way for Christianity. Zeno the son of Mnaseas, was...

c. 150-c. 70 B.C. Greek Near Eastern philosopher noted for his penetrating critique of Euclid (c. 325-c. 250 B.C.). A thinker of the Epicurean school, Zeno was predisposed against mathematics and the sciences, but unlike Epicurus (341-270 ...

200?-140? B.C. Greek mathematician who wrote about plane and solid figures of equal perimeter or surface, but with different areas and volumes (isometric figures). While his texts are lost, it is known from other writers that he proved the...

Any member of a family of hydrated aluminosilicate minerals that have a framework structure enclosing interconnected cavities occupied by large metal cations (positively charged ions)—generally sodium, potassium, magnesium, calcium, ...

The German mathematician Georg Cantor (1845-1918) began a revolution in mathematics when invented the theory of sets in the 1870s. The parts of his theory dealing with infinite sets were the most controversial at that time. In an 1874 arti...

Zero discharge is the goal of eliminating discharges of pollutants by industry, government, and other agencies to air, water, and land with a view to protect both public health and the integrity of the environment. Such a goal is difficult...

A concept allied to, but less stringent than, that of zero discharge. Zero risk permits the release to air, water, and land of those pollutants that have a threshold dose below which public health and the environment remain undamaged. Such...

Vibrational energy retained by molecules even at a temperature of absolute zero. Since temperature is a measure of the intensity of molecular motion, molecules would be expected to come to rest at absolute zero. However, if molecular motio...

in ancient Greek religion, chief deity of the pantheon, a sky and weather god who was identical with the Roman god Jupiter. His name clearly comes from that of the sky god Dyaus of the ancient Hindu Rigveda. Zeus was regarded as the sende...

(born &AD; 34?, Pei, Jiangsu province, China—died 156?, Hanzhong) Founder and first patriarch of organized religious Daoism. Zhang composed a Daoist work that attracted many followers among Chinese and indigenous groups in Sichuan. L...

ZHANG JUE (d. 184 CE), founder of the Yellowa Turban sect. Zhang Jue was heir to the doctrines of Yu Ji, a sorcerer and healer who preached and practiced in Shandong and who was probably the author of the Taiping qingling shu (Book of Grea...