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Delaney, Shelagh ... Delta

Delaney, Shelagh: British playwright who, at age 19, won critical acclaim and popular success with the London production of her first play, A Taste of Honey (1958). Two years later, Delaney received ...
Delano, Jane A.: American nurse and educator who made possible the enlistment of more than 20,000 U.S. nurses for overseas duty during World War I.
Delany, Martin R.: African American abolitionist, physician, and editor in the pre-Civil War period; his espousal of black nationalism and racial pride anticipated expressions of such views a century later.
Delany, Samuel R.: African-American science-fiction novelist and critic whose highly imaginative works address racial and social issues, heroic quests, and the nature of language.
Delaroche, Paul: painter whose painstakingly realistic historical subjects made him one of the most successful academic artists of mid-19th-century France. Delaroche's father was an art expert, his uncle was curator of the ...
delator: ancient Roman prosecutor or informer. The role of the informer in matters of criminal law and fiscal claims was of singular importance to the maintenance of order in Roman society, ...
Delaunay, Charles-Eugene: French mathematician and astronomer whose theory of lunar motion advanced the development of planetary-motion theories.
Delaunay, Robert: French painter who first introduced vibrant colour into Cubism and thereby originated the trend in Cubist painting known as Orphism (q.v.). He was one of the earliest completely nonrepresentational painters, ...
Delaunay, Sonia: Russian painter, illustrator, and textile designer who was a pioneer of abstract art in the years before World War I.
Delaware: county, south-central New York state, U.S., bordered by the Susquehanna River to the northwest and Pennsylvania to the southwest, the Delaware River constituting the boundary. The mountainous terrain is drained ...
Delaware: a confederation of Algonquian-speaking North American Indians who occupied the Atlantic seaboard from Cape Henlopen, Delaware, to western Long Island. They were especially concentrated in the Delaware River valley, for ...
Delaware: constituent state of the United States of America, the first of the original 13 states to ratify the federal Constitution. It occupies a small niche in the Boston-Washington, D.C., urban ...
Delaware: county, southeastern Pennsylvania, U.S., located southwest of Philadelphia and bounded to the east by Cobbs Creek and to the south by New Jersey and Delaware, the Delaware River constituting the ...
Delaware: city, seat (1808) of Delaware county, central Ohio, U.S. It lies along the Olentangy River, 25 miles (40 km) north of Columbus. The Delaware Indians had a village in the ...
Delaware Aqueduct: circular tunnel, part of the system that supplies water to New York City from the Delaware River near its source and from other streams in the Catskill Mountains. Running deep ...
Delaware Bay: inlet of the North Atlantic Ocean, on the east coast of the United States, forming part of the New Jersey-Delaware state border. The bay extends southeastward for 52 miles (84 ...
Delaware River: river of the Atlantic slope of the United States, meeting tidewater at Trenton, N.J., about 130 miles (210 km) above its mouth. Its total length (including the longest branch) is ...
Delaware State University: public, coeducational institution of higher learning in Dover, Del., U.S. It is a land-grant university consisting of a College of Arts and Sciences and schools of Management; Education and Professional ...
Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad Company: American railroad built to carry coal from the anthracite fields of northeastern Pennsylvania. Originally known as Ligget's Gap Railroad, it was chartered in 1851 as the Lackawanna and Western. Eventually ...
Delaware, University of: public, coeducational institution of higher learning in Newark, Del., U.S. It also offers courses at other sites, including Wilmington, Dover, Georgetown, and Lewes. The university consists of seven colleges offering ...
Delblanc, Sven: Swedish novelist who was notable for his use of the intrusive narrator and for the incorporation of grotesque, visionary, and mythical elements to give detailed descriptions of society in his ...
Delbruck, Berthold: German linguist who addressed himself to the problems of syntax (the patterning of words into meaningful phrases and sentences). He is credited with having founded the study of the comparative ...
Delbruck, Max: German-born U.S. biologist, a pioneer in the study of molecular genetics. With Alfred Day Hershey and Salvador Luria, he was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for ...
Delbruck, Rudolph von: statesman and chief executor of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck's free-trade policy for Prussia and then for imperial Germany. He entered government service in 1837 and in 1848 was transferred to ...
Delcasse, Theophile: French foreign minister (1898-1905 and 1914-15) who was a principal architect of the new system of European alliances formed in the years preceding World War I.
Deledda, Grazia: novelist who was influenced by the verismo (q.v.; "realism") school in Italian literature. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926.
Delehaye, Hippolyte: Belgian scholar who was the foremost exponent of biographical church history based on archaeological and documentary work.
Delemont: capital of Jura canton, northwestern Switzerland, situated in a wide valley at the confluence of the Sorne and Birse rivers. First mentioned in historical records in 727, Delemont was annexed ...
Delescluze, Charles: French revolutionary figure who participated in the uprisings of 1830 and 1848 and who was an important leader in the Paris Commune (1871).
Deleuze, Gilles: French writer and antirationalist philosopher.
Delft: gemeente (commune), Zuid-Holland provincie, western Netherlands. It lies along the canalized Schie River between Rotterdam and The Hague. Founded in 1075 and chartered in ...
delftware: tin-glazed earthenware first made early in the 17th century at Delft, Holland. Dutch potters later brought the art of tin glazing to England along with the name delft, which now ...
Delhi: city and national capital territory, north-central India. Popularly known as Old Delhi, it is the country's second largest city, surpassed in population only by Greater Mumbai (Bombay). New Delhi, the ...
Delhi Pact: pact made on April 8, 1950, following the state of tension that had arisen between India and Pakistan in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) after economic relations between the two countries ...
Delhi sultanate: principal Muslim sultanate in North India from the 13th to the 16th century. Its creation owed much to the campaigns of Muhammad of Ghur (brother of Sultan Ghiyas-ud-Din of Ghur) ...
Delhi Zoological Park: zoo founded in 1957 in New Delhi, India. Its facilities are funded and administered by the national government. More than 1,700 specimens representing at least 185 species are exhibited and ...
Delhi, University of: state-controlled institution of higher education located at Delhi, India. Founded in 1922 as a residential university, it developed into a teaching and affiliating body and is now designated as one ...
Delia: ancient quadrennial festival of the Ionians, held on Delos (hence the name) in honour of the Greek god Apollo. The local title was Apollonia, which seems always to have been ...
Delian League: confederacy of ancient Greek states under the leadership of Athens, with headquarters at Delos, founded in 478 BC during the Greco-Persian wars. The original organization of the league, as sketched ...
Delibes, Leo: French opera and ballet composer who was the first to write music of high quality for the ballet. His pioneering symphonic work for the ballet opened up a field for ...
delict: in Roman law, an obligation to pay a penalty because a wrong had been committed. Not until the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD were public crimes separated from private crimes ...
Deligne, Pierre Rene: Belgian mathematician who was awarded the Fields Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Helsinki, Fin., in 1978 for his work in algebraic geometry.
Delilah: in the Old Testament, the central figure of Samson's last love story (Judges 16). She was a Philistine who, bribed to entrap Samson, coaxed him into revealing that the secret ...
Delille, Jacques: poet and classicist who enjoyed an impressive reputation in his day as the "French Virgil."
DeLillo, Don: American novelist whose postmodernist works portray the anomie of an America cosseted by material excess and stupefied by empty mass culture and politics.
delinquency: criminal behaviour, especially that carried out by a juvenile. Depending on the nation of origin, a juvenile becomes an adult anywhere between the ages of 15 to 18, although the ...
deliquescence: the process by which a substance absorbs moisture from the atmosphere until it dissolves in the absorbed water and forms a solution. Deliquescence occurs when the vapour pressure of the ...
delirium: a mental disturbance marked by disorientation and confused thinking in which the patient incorrectly comprehends his surroundings. The delirious person is drowsy, restless, and fearful of imaginary disasters. He may ...
Delisle, Guillaume: mapmaker who led the reform of French cartography.
Delisle, Joseph-Nicolas: French astronomer who proposed that the series of coloured rings sometimes observed around the Sun is caused by diffraction of sunlight through water droplets in a cloud. He also worked ...
Delius, Frederick: composer, one of the most distinctive figures in the revival of English music at the end of the 19th century.
Dell, Floyd: novelist and radical journalist whose fiction examined the changing mores in sex and politics among American bohemians before and after World War I.
Della Falls: series of three cascades from Della Lake to the valley of Drinkwater Creek on Vancouver Island, B.C., Can. They are located approximately 37 miles (60 km) northwest of the mill ...
Della Robbia, Andrea: Florentine sculptor who was the nephew of Luca Della Robbia and assumed control of the family workshop after his uncle's death in 1482.
Della Robbia, Giovanni: Florentine sculptor, son of Andrea Della Robbia and grandnephew of Luca Della Robbia who, upon the death of his father in 1525, assumed control of the family workshop.
Della Robbia, Luca: sculptor, one of the pioneers of Florentine Renaissance style, who was the founder of a family studio primarily associated with the production of works in enameled terra-cotta.
della Scala family: noted family that ruled Verona during the late 13th and the 14th centuries. Although the family had been prominent in Verona since the 11th century, the founder of the ruling ...
Della Valle, Federico: Italian dramatist and poet, recognized in the 20th century as a major literary figure. Little is known of his life at the Savoy court in Turin and in Milan, where ...
Della-cruscan: any of the members of a late 18th-century school of English writers of pretentious, affected, rhetorically ornate poetry. The school was centred on Robert Merry, who belonged to the Italian ...
Dello Joio, Norman: American composer in the neoclassical style.
Delmarva Peninsula: portion of the Atlantic Coastal Plain of the United States, extending southward between the Chesapeake Bay (west) and the Delaware River, Delaware Bay, and Atlantic Ocean (east). Encompassing parts of ...
Delmenhorst: city, Lower Saxony Land (state), northwestern Germany. It lies on the Delme River, just west of Bremen. First mentioned in 1254, Delmenhorst developed around a moated castle ...
Deloney, Thomas: writer of ballads, pamphlets, and prose stories that form the earliest English popular fiction.
Delorme, Marion: celebrated French courtesan.
Delorme, Philibert: one of the great Renaissance architects of the 16th century and, possibly, the first French architect to possess some measure of the universal outlook of the Italian masters but without ...
Delors, Jacques: French statesman who was president of the European Commission, the executive body of the European Community (EC), from 1985 to 1995.
Delos: island, one of the smallest of the Cyclades, Greece, an ancient centre of religious, political, and commercial life in the Aegean Sea. Now largely uninhabited, it is a rugged granite ...
Delphi: ancient town and seat of the most important Greek temple and oracle of Apollo. It lay in the territory of Phocis on the steep lower slope of Mount Parnassus, about ...
Delphin Classics: an edition of the Latin classics prepared in the reign of Louis XIV of France. The series was supervised by Pierre-Daniel Huet from 1670 to 1680, when he was working ...
Delphinium: any of several tall garden flowers often called larkspur (q.v.).
Delray Beach: city, Palm Beach county, southeastern Florida, U.S. It lies along the Atlantic Ocean about 20 miles (30 km) south of West Palm Beach. Settlers from Michigan arrived in 1894 and ...
Delta: American three-stage space-launch vehicle; its development began in 1959. The first version was capable of placing a 480-pound (220-kilogram) payload into a 300-mile (480-kilometre) orbit. In the early 1960s, Delta ...
Delta: state, southern Nigeria. It is bounded by Edo state to the north, Anambra state to the east, Rivers state to the southeast and south, the Bight of Benin of the ...
Delta: city, Millard county, west-central Utah, U.S. Delta is one of the few Utah towns to have been founded in the 20th century with little involvement from the Mormon church, which ...
delta: low-lying plain that is composed of stream-borne sediments deposited by a river at its mouth.
Delta: district municipality, southwestern British Columbia, Canada. It is situated in the southern Vancouver metropolitan area, between the Fraser River delta and Boundary Bay (an arm of the Strait of Georgia). ...