Alessandria

City, capital of Alessandria provincia, in the Piemonte (Piedmont) regione of northwestern Italy. The city lies at the confluence of the Bormida and Tanaro rivers, southeast of Turin (Torino). It was founded in 1168 by the towns of the Lombard League as an Alpine-valley stronghold against the Holy Roman emperor Frederick I Barbarossa. The town was first called Civitas Nova,

Amherst

Town (township), Hampshire county, west-central Massachusetts, U.S. It lies in the Connecticut River valley just northeast of Northampton. It includes the communities of North Amherst, Amherst, and South Amherst. The town of Hadley adjoins it on the west. Settled as part of Hadley in the 1730s, Amherst was recognized in 1759 as a separate district and named for Jeffrey (later Baron)

�vre Anar River National Park

Norwegian ��vre Anarj�kka Nasjonalpark, � national park in the southeastern Finnmark Plateau region, northern Norway, bordering the Lemmen River National Park of Finland. One of the largest of Norway's national parks, it covers an area of 537 square miles (1,390 square km). Low hills covered by birch and pine forest and dotted by bogs and lakes are characteristic of the area, in which large numbers of reindeer graze.

Cypress Vine

(Ipomoea quamoclit), tropical American twining climber naturalized in southern North America. It has star-shaped scarlet, pink, or white blooms amid deep green, deeply lobed leaves. It is a member of the morning glory family (Convolvulaceae) and is an annual. The closely related star ipomoea (I. coccinea), with crimson flowers and heart-shaped leaves,

Aschelminth, Associations

Bacteria form mutually beneficial associations (symbiosis) with nematodes. The insect-pathogenic nematodes Steinernema and Heterorhabditis carry different species of Xenorhabdus in their intestines, which their soil-living infective juveniles inject into any insect they can invade. Bacterial toxins kill the insect, and the nematodes then multiply for

Biblical Literature, The physical aspects of New Testament texts

To establish the reliability of the text of ancient manuscripts in order to reach the text that the author originally wrote (or, rather, dictated) involves the physical aspects of the texts: collection, collation of differences or variant readings in manuscripts, and comparison in matters of dating, geographical origins, and the amount of editing or revision noted,

Amorbach

City, Bavaria Land (state), southwestern Germany, in the Odenwald (wooded upland), southwest of W�rzburg. It originated around a Benedictine monastery in the 8th century and came under the jurisdiction of the electors of Mainz in 1272. Amorbach became the residence of the princes of Leiningen in 1803 and passed to Bavaria in 1816. The modern city is a health resort and has woodworking

Biblical Literature, Background and beginnings

The geographical theatre of the Old Testament is the ancient Near East, particularly the Fertile Crescent region, running from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers up to Syria and down through Palestine to the Nile Delta. In this area great civilizations and empires developed and seminomadic ethnic groups, such as the Hebrews, were involved in the mixture of peoples

Andover

Andover's earliest-known

Alakol, Lake

Kazak �Alak�l�, Russian �Ozero Alakol�, also called �Ozero Ala-Kul� salt lake in Kazakstan, 110 miles (180 km) east of Lake Balqash, near the border with the Uighur Autonomous Region of Sinkiang, China. Lake Alakol has a drainage basin of about 26,500 square miles (68,700 square km), an area of 1,025 square miles, reaches a depth of about 148 feet (45 m), and receives the Urdzhar River (north).

Sorby, Henry Clifton

Sorby's early investigations were concerned with agricultural chemistry, but his interests soon turned to geology. He published works dealing with the physical geography

Caucasian Languages, Vocabulary

The genetic closeness of the Kartvelian languages is evidenced by a large number of structural correspondences and of common lexical (vocabulary) and grammatical items. Though the Kartvelian languages abound in ancient loanwords from Iranian, Greek, Arabic, Turkish, and other languages, it is nevertheless possible to single out the basic vocabulary and grammatical

Roman Catholicism, History Of, The reign of Leo XIII (1878 - 1903)

Although Leo XIII was no less conservative in his theological inclinations than his predecessor, his positive appreciation of the church's opportunities in modern society gave his pontificate a significantly different cast from that of Pius. On issues of church doctrine and discipline his administration was a strict one. It was during his reign that the Modernist

Rush, Richard

The son of the noted physician Benjamin Rush, Richard graduated from Princeton in 1797 and was admitted to the bar in Philadelphia in 1800. He served as attorney general of Pennsylvania (1811), attorney

Lower Saxony

German �Niedersachsen, � constituent Land (state) of Germany. The second largest Land in size, it occupies an important band of territory across the northwestern part of the nation. Lower Saxony stretches from The Netherlands border in the west to the border of Mecklenburg - West Pomerania and Saxony-Anhalt L�nder in the east. The neck of land occupied by Schleswig-Holstein, Hamburg, and, farther

Perc�

City, Gasp�sie - �les-de-la-Madeleine region, eastern Quebec province, Canada. It lies along the Gulf of St. Lawrence, at the east end of the Gasp� Peninsula. First visited in 1534 by Jacques Cartier, it has been the site of a Roman Catholic mission since 1670. Perc� is now a fishing port and summer resort. Offshore, but connected by a sandbar at low tide, is famed Rocher-Perc� (�Pierced

Graziani, Rodolfo, Marquess Di Neghelli

After service in Eritrea and Libya before World War I and in Macedonia and Tripolitania subsequently, Graziani became commander in chief of Italian forces in Libya (1930 - 34), governor of Italian Somaliland (1935 - 36), viceroy of Ethiopia (1936 - 37), and honorary governor of Italian East Africa

Duala

Also spelled �Douala, � Bantu-speaking people of the forest region of southern Cameroon living on the estuary of the Wouri River. By 1800 the Duala controlled Cameroon's trade with Europeans, and their concentrated settlement pattern developed under this influence. Their system of chieftaincy was partly founded on trading wealth. For much of the 19th century there were two political - commercial

Arabia

The mineral resource of greatest value is oil. The Arabian Peninsula has the largest oil reserves in the world. With the exception of deposits in Yemen, the Arabian oil fields lie in the same great sedimentary basin as the fields of Iran and Iraq. Although oil was discovered in Iran in 1908, the first field on the Arabian side of the basin, in Bahrain, was not found until 1932. This

Asante

Although some Asante now live and work in urban centres,

Wrigley, William, Jr.

Wrigley went to work as a traveling soap salesman for his father's company at age 13. In 1891 he went to Chicago as a soap distributor and there started offering baking powder as a premium with each box of soap.

Qamishli, Al-

Also spelled �Qamishliye, � town in northeastern Syria. It lies along the Turkish border. The border divides the Syrian town of Al-Qamishli from the Turkish town of Nusaybin. The town was founded in 1926 as a station on the Taurus railway. Its mixed population increased with influxes of Armenian, Assyrian Christian, and Kurdish refugees from Turkey and Iraq. The town also has Sunnite Muslims, Syriac-speaking

Kryvyy Rih

Russian �Krivoy Rog, �also spelled �Krivoi Rog, or Krivoj Rog, � city, Dnipropetrovsk oblast (province), Ukraine, situated at the confluence of the Inhulets and Saksahan rivers. Founded as a village by Zaporozhian Cossacks in the 17th century, it had only 2,184 inhabitants in 1781. In 1881 a French company began to work the local iron-ore deposits, and a railway was constructed to the Donets Basin coalfield in 1884. After that date Kryvyy Rih became a significant

Tea Act

(1773), in British American colonial history, legislative maneuver by the British ministry of Lord North to make English tea marketable in America. A previous crisis had been averted in 1770 when all the Townshend Acts (q.v.) duties had been lifted except that on tea, which had been mainly supplied to the Colonies since then by Dutch smugglers. In an effort to help the financially

Siachen Glacier

One of the world's longest mountain glaciers, lying in the Karakoram Range system of Kashmir near the India - Pakistan border, extending for 44 mi (70 km) from north-northwest to south-southeast. It has a number of fast-flowing surface streams and at least 12 medial moraines. It is the source for the 50-mi-long Nubra River, a tributary of the Shyok, which is part of the Indus River

North America, 30 to 2.5 million years ago

About 30 million years ago North America began to override the East Pacific Rise, an oceanic spreading ridge. This activity placed a progressively longer segment of the coast in contact with the plate west of the ridge. The western plate - which contains the Pacific Coast Ranges of California - has been moving to the northwest relative to North America along the San Andreas

Rocky Mountains

The human presence in the Rocky Mountains has been dated to between 10,000 and 8,000 BC. American Indian peoples inhabiting the northern mountains in modern times include the Shuswap and Kutenai of British Columbia, the Coeur d'Alene and Nez Perc� of Idaho, and the Flathead of Montana. The traditional lands of the Shoshoni in Idaho and Wyoming and the Ute in Utah and Colorado extended

Bhagirathi River

River in West Bengal state, northeastern India, forming the western boundary of the Ganges (Ganga) Delta. A distributary of the Ganges, it leaves that river just northeast of Jangipur, flows south, and joins the Jalangi at Nabadwip to form the Hooghly River after a total course of 120 miles (190 km). Until the 16th century, when the Ganges shifted eastward to the Padma, the Bhagirathi formed

Juan Jos� De Austria

Juan Jos� was the son of King Philip IV of Spain and Mar�a Calder�n, a celebrated actress. He received a princely education and a large