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Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron de ... Bedford

Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron de: French author of two outstanding comedies of intrigue that still retain their freshness, Le Barbier de Seville (1775; The Barber of Seville, 1776) and Le Mariage de Figaro (1784; The ...
Beaumont: city, seat (1838) of Jefferson county, southeastern Texas, U.S., at the head of navigation on the Neches River (an arm of the Sabine-Neches Waterway), 85 miles (137 km) east-northeast of ...
Beaumont, Elie de: geologist who prepared the great geological map of France in collaboration with the French geologist Ours Pierre Dufrenoy.
Beaumont, Francis: English Jacobean poet and playwright who collaborated with John Fletcher on comedies and tragedies between about 1606 and 1613.
Beaumont, Sir John, 1st Baronet: English poet who cultivated literary "order" and precision, together with natural simplicity of style. He wrote a drama for James I, The Theatre of Apollo (1625); a poem about the ...
Beaumont, William: U.S. army surgeon, the first person to observe and study human digestion as it occurs in the stomach.
Beaune: town, Cote-d'Or departement, Bourgogne region, east-central France, on the Bouzaise River, southwest of Dijon. Settled since prehistoric times, it prospered under the Romans as ...
Beauport: city, Quebec region, southeastern Quebec province, Canada. A northeastern suburb of Quebec city, it is situated on the north bank of the St. Lawrence River. In 1634 Robert Giffard established ...
Beauregard, P.G.T.: Confederate general in the American Civil War.
beauty bush: (Kolkwitzia amabilis), ornamental flowering shrub of the family Caprifoliaceae, native to central China; it is the only member of its genus. Its paired, bell-like flowers, one above the other, range ...
beauty leaf: (Calophyllum inophyllum), ornamental plant, of the family Clusiaceae, native to tropical Asia and cultivated as an ornamental for its handsome leathery, glossy foliage and fragrant white flowers. Beauty leaf often ...
Beauvais: town, capital of Oise departement, Picardie region, northern France, at the juncture of the Therain and Avelon rivers, north of Paris. Capital of the ...
Beauvais tapestry: any product of the tapestry factory established in 1664 in Beauvais, Fr., by two Flemish weavers, Louis Hinart and Philippe Behagle. Although it was under the patronage of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, ...
Beauvoir, Simone de: French writer and feminist, a member of the intellectual fellowship of philosopher-writers who have given a literary transcription to the themes of Existentialism. She is known primarily for her treatise ...
Beaux, Cecilia: American painter, considered one of the finest portrait painters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Beaux-Arts, Ecole des: school of fine arts founded (as the Academie Royale d'Architecture) in Paris in 1671 by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, minister of Louis XIV; it merged with the Academie Royale de Peinture et ...
Beaver: county, western Pennsylvania, U.S., bordered to the west by Ohio and West Virginia. It consists of a hilly region on the Allegheny Plateau drained by the Ohio and Beaver rivers. ...
beaver: either of two species of amphibious rodents native to North America, Europe, and Asia. Beavers are the largest North American and Eurasian rodents, with bodies up to 80 cm (31 ...
Beaver: a small, Athabascan-speaking Indian tribe living in the mountainous riverine areas of northern Alberta. In the early 18th century they were driven westward into this area by the expanding Cree, ...
Beaver Island: largest of an island group in northeastern Lake Michigan, U.S., 35 mi (56 km) west of the resort city of Charlevoix, Mich. It extends about 14 mi in length and ...
Beaver, Bruce: Australian poet, novelist, and journalist noted for his experimental forms and courageous self-examination, both of which made him one of the major forces in Australian poetry during the 1960s and ...
Beaverbrook, Sir Maxwell Aitken, 1st Baron, 1st Baronet: financier in Canada, politician and newspaper proprietor in Great Britain, one of three persons (the others were Winston Churchill and John Simon) to sit in the British cabinet during both ...
Beavers, Louise: African American film and television actress known for her character roles.
Beaverton: city, Washington county, northwestern Oregon, U.S., in the Tualatin Valley, immediately west of Portland. The area was originally home to the Atfalati (mispronounced Tualatin) band of Kalapuya (Calapooya) Indians, most ...
Beawar: town, Rajasthan state, northwestern India. A major rail and road junction, Beawar is an agricultural and woollen market centre. Industries include cotton ginning, handloom weaving, hosiery manufacture, and wood carving. ...
Bebel, August: German Socialist, cofounder of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) of Germany and its most influential and popular leader for more than 40 years. He is one of the leading figures ...
Bebey, Francis: Cameroonian-born writer, guitarist, and composer, one of the best-known singer-songwriters of Africa. He is sometimes called the father of world music.
bebop: the first kind of modern jazz, which split jazz into two opposing camps in the last half of the 1940s. The word is an onomatopoeic rendering of a staccato two-tone ...
becard: any of many tropical American birds belonging to the family Cotingidae (order Passeriformes) that usually builds its large ball nest on an exposed branch near a colony of stinging wasps. ...
Beccafumi, Domenico: Italian painter and sculptor, a leader in the post-Renaissance style known as Mannerism.
Beccaria, Cesare: Italian criminologist and economist whose Dei delitti e delle pene (Eng. trans. J.A. Farrer, Crimes and Punishment, 1880) was a celebrated volume on the reform of criminal justice.
Beccles: town ("parish"), Waveney district, administrative and historic county of Suffolk, England, on the River Waveney. The land was given to St. Edmund's Church at Bury about 956, and Beccles was ...
Bechar: town, western Algeria. It lies in the northern reaches of the Sahara, 36 miles (58 km) south of the Moroccan border. The town is named for nearby Mount Bechar, rising ...
Beche, Sir Henry Thomas De La: geologist who founded the Geological Survey of Great Britain, which made the first methodical geologic survey of an entire country ever undertaken.
beche-de-mer: boiled, dried, and smoked flesh of sea cucumbers (phylum Echinodermata) used to make soups. Most beche-de-mer comes from the southwestern Pacific, where the animals (any of a dozen species of ...
Becher, Johann Joachim: chemist, physician, and adventurer whose theories of combustion influenced Georg Stahl's phlogiston theory. Becher believed substances to be composed of three earths, the vitrifiable, the mercurial, and the combustible. He ...
Becher, Johannes Robert: poet and critic, editor, and government official who was among the most important advocates of revolutionary social reform in Germany during the 1920s and who later served as minister of ...
Bechet, Sidney: jazz musician known as a master of the soprano saxophone.
Bechtel, Friedrich: classical scholar who contributed substantially to Greek dialectology and Homeric criticism.
Bechtel, Stephen D: American construction engineer and business executive, president (1936-60) of W.A. Bechtel Company and its successor, Bechtel Corp., one of the world's largest construction and engineering firms. Projects to which his ...
Beck, Jozef: Polish army officer and foreign minister from 1932 to 1939, one of Jozef Pilsudski's most trusted confidants, who attempted to maintain friendly relations with both the Soviet Union and Germany ...
Beck, Ludwig: German general who, as chief of the army general staff (1935-38), opposed Adolf Hitler's expansionist policies and who was a central figure in the unsuccessful July Plot to assassinate Hitler ...
Beck, Max Wladimir, Baron von: premier (1906-08) of Austria whose administration introduced universal male suffrage to the Austrian half of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.
Becke, Friedrich Johann Karl: mineralogist who in 1903 presented to the International Geological Congress a paper on the composition and texture of the crystalline schists. Published in amplified form in 1913, his paper contained ...
Beckenbauer, Franz: German football (soccer) player who is the only man to have both captained and managed World Cup-winning teams (1974 and 1990, respectively). Nicknamed "der Kaiser," Beckenbauer dominated German football in ...
Becker, Boris: German tennis player who, on July 7, 1985, became the youngest champion in the history of the men's singles at Wimbledon. At the same time, he became the only unseeded ...
Becker, Carl: American historian known for his work on early American intellectual history and on the 18th-century Enlightenment.
Becker, Gary S.: American economist, awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1992. He applied the methods of economics to aspects of human behaviour previously considered more or less the exclusive domain of ...
Becker, George Ferdinand: geologist who advanced the study of mining geology from physical, chemical, and mathematical approaches.
Becker, Wilhelm Adolf: German classical archaeologist, remembered for his works on the everyday life of the ancient Romans and Greeks.
Becket, Frederick Mark: metallurgist who developed a process of using silicon instead of carbon as a reducing agent in metal production, thus making low-carbon ferroalloys and certain steels practical.
Becket, Saint Thomas: chancellor of England (1155-62) and archbishop of Canterbury (1162-70) during the reign of King Henry II. His career was marked by a long quarrel with Henry that ended with Becket's ...
Beckett, Margaret: British politician who served as foreign secretary of the United Kingdom (from 2006), the first woman to hold the post.
Beckett, Samuel: author, critic, and playwright, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. He wrote in both French and English and is perhaps best known for his plays, especially En ...
Beckett, Sister Wendy: South African-born British nun who appeared on a series of popular television shows and wrote a number of books as an art critic. Nicknamed the "Art Nun," she offered eloquent ...
Beckford, William: gentleman merchant, member of Parliament, and lord mayor of London (1762-63, 1769-70) who was particularly noted as a pioneer of the radical movement.
Beckford, William: eccentric English dilettante, author of the Gothic novel Vathek (1786). Such writers as George Gordon, Lord Byron, and Stephane Mallarme acknowledged his genius. He also is renowned for having built ...
Beckley: city, seat (1850) of Raleigh county, southern West Virginia, U.S., approximately 50 miles (80 km) southeast of Charleston. The first settlement was established by General Alfred Beckley in 1838, but ...
Beckmann, Max: German Expressionist painter and printmaker whose works are notable for the boldness and power of their symbolic commentary on the tragic events of the 20th century.
Becknell, William: trader of the American West who established the Santa Fe Trail.
Beckwourth, Jim: American mountain man who lived for an extended period among the Indians.
Becque, Henry-Francois: dramatist and critic whose loosely structured plays, based on character and motivation rather than on closely knit plots, provided a healthy challenge to the "well-made plays" that held the stage ...
Becquer, Gustavo Adolfo: poet and author of the late Romantic period who is considered one of the first modern Spanish poets.
Becquerel, Henri: French physicist who discovered radioactivity through his investigations of uranium and other substances. In 1903 he shared the Nobel Prize for Physics with Pierre and Marie Curie.
bed: piece of furniture upon which a person may recline or sleep, for many centuries considered the most important piece of furniture in the house and a prized status symbol. In ...
Bedard, Myriam: Canadian biathlete who was the first North American to medal in the Olympic biathlon, earning a bronze medal at the 1992 Winter Games in Albertville, France. She later won two ...
Bedaux, Charles Eugene: French-born American efficiency engineer who developed the Bedaux plan for measuring and compensating industrial labour.
bedbug: any member of the approximately 75 species of nocturnal insects of the family Cimicidae (order Heteroptera) that feed by sucking the blood of humans and other warm-blooded animals. The reddish ...
Bedde: traditional emirate, Yobe state, northern Nigeria. Although Bade (Bedde, Bede) peoples settled in the vicinity of Tagali village near Gashua as early as the 14th century, they shortly thereafter came ...
Beddoes, Thomas Lovell: poet best known for his haunting dramatic poem Death's Jest-Book; or, The Fool's Tragedy.
Bede the Venerable, Saint: Anglo-Saxon theologian, historian, and chronologist, best known today for his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum ("Ecclesiastical History of the English People"), a source vital to the history of ...
Bedford: town (township), Middlesex county, northeastern Massachusetts, U.S. It lies near the Concord River, just northwest of Boston. Settled in 1642, it developed around an Algonquian Indian trading post called the ...
Bedford: borough (district), administrative county of Bedfordshire, south-central England. The borough lies almost entirely within the historic county of Bedfordshire, except for a small area northwest of Pertenhall that belongs to ...
Bedford: county, southern Pennsylvania, U.S., bordered to the south by Maryland and to the east by Town Hill and Rays Hill. It is a mountainous region lying mostly in the Appalachian ...
Bedford: town, Bedford borough, administrative and historic county of Bedfordshire, England, in the fertile valley of the River Ouse. A Roman fording station and a Saxon town (cemetery of Kempston), it ...
Bedford: city, seat of Lawrence county, southern Indiana, U.S., 25 miles (40 km) south of Bloomington. Founded in 1825 as the county seat and named by Joseph Rawlins for his home ...