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Davis, Mount ... De Geer, Charles

Davis, Mount: highest point in Pennsylvania, U.S., at an elevation of 3,213 feet (979 metres). The peak is on a ridge of the Allegheny and Appalachian mountains in Somerset county, 15 miles ...
Davis, Ossie; and Dee, Ruby: American husband-and-wife acting team known for their contributions to African American theatre and film and for their passionate support of civil rights and humanitarian causes. The couple was jointly awarded ...
Davis, Paulina Kellogg Wright: American feminist and social reformer, active in the early struggle for woman suffrage and the founder of an early periodical in support of that cause.
Davis, Raymond, Jr.: American physicist who, with Koshiba Masatoshi, won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2002 for detecting neutrinos. Riccardo Giacconi also won a share of the award for his work on ...
Davis, Rebecca Blaine Harding: American essayist and writer, remembered primarily for her story "Life in the Iron Mills," which is considered a transitional work of American realism.
Davis, Richard Harding: U.S. author of romantic novels and short stories and the best known reporter of his generation.
Davis, Sammy, Jr.: American singer, dancer, and entertainer.
Davis, Sir Colin: English conductor and the foremost modern interpreter of composer Hector Berlioz, whose complete orchestral and operatic works Davis recorded.
Davis, Stuart: American abstract artist whose idiosyncratic Cubist paintings of urban landscapes presaged the use of commercial art and advertising by Pop artists of the 1960s.
Davis, Thomas Osborne: Irish writer and politician who was the chief organizer and poet of the Young Ireland movement.
Davis, Victor: Canadian swimmer, an aggressive competitor who won four Olympic medals.
Davis, William Morris: U.S. geographer, geologist, and meteorologist who founded the science of geomorphology, the study of landforms.
Davison, Wild Bill: American jazz cornet player who recorded some 800 songs and traveled extensively in his 70-year career.
Davison, William: secretary to Queen Elizabeth I of England, chiefly remembered in connection with the execution of Mary Queen of Scots.
Davisson, Clinton Joseph: American experimental physicist who shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1937 with George P. Thomson of England for discovering that electrons can be diffracted like light waves, thus verifying ...
Davitt, Michael: founder of the Irish Land League (1879), which organized resistance to absentee landlordism and sought to relieve the poverty of the tenant farmers by securing fixity of tenure, fair rent, ...
Davos: town, Graubunden canton, eastern Switzerland, consisting of two villages, Davos-Platz and Davos-Dorf, in the Davos Valley, on the Landwasser River, 5,118 feet (1,560 metres) above sea level. The town is ...
Davout, Louis-Nicolas, Duc D'auerstedt, Prince D'eckmuhl: French general who was one of the most distinguished of the Napoleonic field commanders.
Davy lamp: safety lamp (q.v.) devised by Sir Humphry Davy in 1815.
Davy, Edward: physician, chemist, and inventor who devised the electromagnetic repeater for relaying telegraphic signals and invented an electrochemical telegraph (1838).
Davy, Sir Humphry, Baronet: English chemist who discovered several chemical elements (including sodium and potassium) and compounds, invented the miner's safety lamp, and became one of the greatest exponents of the scientific method.
Dawani: jurist and philosopher who was chiefly responsible for maintaining the traditions of Islamic philosophy in the 15th century.
Dawes General Allotment Act: (Feb. 8, 1887), U.S. law providing for the distribution of Indian reservation land among individual tribesmen, with the aim of creating responsible farmers in the white man's image. It was ...
Dawes Plan: arrangement for Germany's payment of reparations after World War I. On the initiative of the British and U.S. governments, a committee of experts, presided over by an American financier, Charles ...
Dawes, Charles G.: 30th vice president of the United States (1925-29) in the Republican administration of President Calvin Coolidge. An ambassador and author of the "Dawes Plan" for managing Germany's reparations payments after ...
Dawes, William Rutter: English astronomer known for his extensive measurements of double stars and for his meticulous planetary observations.
Dawlish: town ("parish"), Teignbridge district, administrative and historic county of Devon, England, on the English Channel. It became fashionable in the 19th century and is featured in the novels of Charles ...
dawn horse: extinct genus (Hyracotherium) of ancestral horses that flourished in North America and Europe during the Early Eocene Epoch (57.8 to 52 million years ago). The North American species were formerly ...
dawn redwood: (species Metasequoia glyptostroboides), coniferous, nonevergreen tree and only living species of the genus Metasequoia, of the deciduous cypress family (Taxodiaceae), native to remote valleys of central China. In the dawn ...
Dawson: city, western Yukon Territory, Canada. It lies at the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon rivers, near the Alaska, U.S., boundary, 165 miles (265 km) south of the Arctic Circle. ...
Dawson Creek: city, northeastern British Columbia, Canada. The city lies along Dawson Creek near the Alberta border. It has the Mile "Zero" post marking the beginning of the Alaska Highway and is ...
Dawson River: river in eastern Queensland, Australia. It rises in the Carnarvon Range and flows southeast, northeast, and north for about 400 miles (640 km) through a 50-mile-wide valley to join the ...
Dawson, George Geoffrey: English journalist, editor of The Times from 1912 to 1919 and from 1923 until his retirement in 1941. He changed his surname from Robinson to Dawson following ...
Dawson, Sir John William: Canadian geologist who made numerous contributions to paleobotany and extended the knowledge of Canadian geology.
dawsonite: a carbonate mineral, NaAlCO₃ (OH)₂, that is probably formed by the decomposition of aluminous silicates. Of low-temperature, hydrothermal origin, it occurs in Montreal, where it was first discovered; near Monte ...
Dax: town, Landes departement, Aquitaine region, southwestern France. It lies on the left bank of the Adour River, 88 miles (142 km) southwest of Bordeaux and 50 miles (80 km) north ...
Daxue: brief Chinese text generally attributed to the ancient sage Confucius (551-479 BC) and his disciple Zengzi. For centuries the text existed only as a chapter of the Liji ("Collection of ...
day: time required for a celestial body to turn once on its axis; especially the period of the Earth's rotation. The sidereal day is the time required for the Earth to ...
day lily: any plant of the genus Hemerocallis of the family Liliaceae, consisting of about 15 species of perennial herbs distributed from central Europe to eastern Asia. Members of the genus have ...
Day of the Dead: holiday in Mexico, also observed to a lesser extent in other areas of Latin America and in the United States, honouring dead loved ones and making peace with the eventuality ...
Day, Benjamin Henry: American printer and journalist who founded the New York Sun, the first of the "penny" newspapers in the United States.
Day, Clarence: American writer whose greatest popular success was his autobiographical Life with Father.
Day, Doris: American singer and motion-picture actress whose performances in movie musicals of the 1950s and sex comedies of the early '60s made her a leading Hollywood star.
Day, Dorothy: American journalist and reformer, cofounder of the Catholic Worker and an important lay leader in its associated activist movement.
Day, John: Elizabethan dramatist whose verse allegory The Parliament of Bees shows unusual ingenuity and delicacy of imagination.
Day, Stephen: founder of the first printing press in England's North American colonies.
Day, William R.: statesman and justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1903-22).
day-care centre: institution that provides supervision and care of infants and young children during the daytime, particularly so that their parents can hold jobs. Such institutions appeared in France about 1840, and ...
Day-Lewis, C.: one of the leading British poets of the 1930s; he then turned from poetry of left-wing political statement to an individual lyricism expressed in more traditional forms.
Dayak: the non-Muslim indigenous peoples of southern and western Borneo (modern Kalimantan). Most of them live along the banks of the larger rivers. Dayak is a generic term that has no ...
Dayan, Moshe: soldier and statesman who led Israel to dramatic victories over its Arab neighbours and became a symbol of security to his countrymen.
Dayananda Sarasvati: Hindu ascetic and social reformer who was the founder (1875) of the Arya Samaj, a Hindu reform movement advocating a return to the temporal and spiritual authority of the Vedas, ...
dayflower: any member of the genus Commelina (family Commelinaceae), which includes about 100 species of weak-stemmed herbs of wide distribution, only a few of which are of horticultural interest. Commelina coelestis, ...
daylight saving time: system for uniformly advancing clocks, especially in summer, so as to extend daylight hours during conventional waking time. In the Northern Hemisphere, clocks are usually set ahead one hour in ...
Dayr al-Bahri: Egyptian archaeological site in the necropolis of Thebes. Comprising a bay in the cliffs, it lies on the west bank of the Nile, east of the Valley of the Kings; ...
Dayr al-Madinah: ancient site on the west bank of the Nile, at Thebes in Upper Egypt. It is known primarily as the location of a settlement for craftsmen who laboured on the ...
Dayr az-Zawr: town, eastern Syria. The town is situated on the right bank of the Euphrates River; its name, meaning "monastery of the grove" (zawr, "tamarisk"), is probably derived from the ancient ...
Dayton: city, seat (1899) of Rhea county, southeastern Tennessee, U.S. It lies on Richland Creek near the Tennessee River, 36 miles (58 km) northeast of Chattanooga. Originally called Smith's Crossroads (c. ...
Dayton: city, seat (1803) of Montgomery county, southwestern Ohio, U.S., 54 miles (87 km) northeast of Cincinnati, on a low floodplain of the Great Miami River, at the confluence of the ...
Dayton, Jonathan: youngest member of the U.S. Constitutional Convention, speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, and developer of large tracts in what later became the state of Ohio. The city of ...
Dayton, University of: private, coeducational institution of higher learning in Dayton, Ohio, U.S. The university is affiliated with the Marianist (Society of Mary) order of the Roman Catholic church. It is composed of ...
Daytona Beach: city, Volusia county, northeastern Florida, U.S., on the Atlantic Ocean and Halifax River (a tidewater lagoon, part of the Intracoastal Waterway), about 90 miles (145 km) south of Jacksonville. The ...
Dazai Osamu: novelist who emerged at the end of World War II as the literary voice of his time. His dark, wry tone perfectly captured the confusion of postwar Japan, when traditional ...
dazhuan: in Chinese calligraphy, script evolved from the ancient scripts jiaguwen and guwen by the 12th century BC and developed during the Zhou dynasty (12th ...
Dbus-Gtsang: one of three regions into which the area of Central Asia inhabited by Tibetans is traditionally divided. Dbus and Gtsang were provinces in the days of the early kings of ...
DC-3: transport aircraft, the world's first successful commercial airliner, readily adapted to military use during World War II. The DC-3, first flown in 1935, was a low-wing twin-engine monoplane that in ...
DDT: a synthetic insecticide belonging to the family of organic halogen compounds, highly toxic toward a wide variety of insects as a contact poison that apparently exerts its effect by disorganizing ...
De Amicis, Edmondo: novelist, short-story writer, poet, and author of popular travel books and children's stories.
de Beer, Sir Gavin: English zoologist and morphologist known for his contributions to experimental embryology, anatomy, and evolution.
De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd.: world's largest producer and distributor of diamonds. De Beers is closely associated with the Anglo-American Corporation of South Africa, a large holding company with major interests in gold and coal ...
De Bono, Emilio: Italian general, an early convert to Fascism who helped the party's founder and chief, Benito Mussolini, gain power.
de Broglie wave: any aspect of the behaviour or properties of a material object that varies in time or space in conformity with the mathematical equations that describe waves. By analogy with the ...
de Chirico, Giorgio: Italian painter who, with Carlo Carra and Giorgio Morandi, founded the style of Metaphysical painting.
De Forest, Lee: American inventor of the Audion vacuum tube, which made possible live radio broadcasting and became the key component of all radio, telephone, radar, television, and computer systems before the invention ...
De Gasperi, Alcide: politician and prime minister of Italy (1945-53) who contributed to the material and moral reconstruction of his nation after World War II.
De Geer, Charles: Swedish entomologist.