Long before the arrival of Christopher Columbus and before
the incursions of the Spanish explorers and conquistadores in
the 15th and 16th centuries, the Americas were home for
thousands of years to a variety of civilizations and empires.
As the understanding of agriculture improved and larger
populations could be supported, small settlements grew into
vast urban centres ruled by an aristocracy that was looked
to among other things for propitiation of the gods.
These civilizations waxed and waned (producing calendars and a
writing system as well as huge building complexes) according to
a natural order until the Spanish conquest. The resultant
colonization wrought many changes, notably an overlay of the
Spanish language, now the official language of most countries
lying south of the United States. But less obviously, it
brought cross-fertilization, a unique blending of local
cultures with that of remote Spain and later of Africa as well,
a melding that resulted in a distinctively Latin American style
that was apparent in everything from art, dance, music, and
literature to leadership. holiday in wales
We invite you to explore the people, places, events, and
traditions that have shaped and continue to shape the
vibrant Hispanic culture that thrives today in South, Central,
and North America: people such as the gifted writer and
Nobelist Octavio Paz, the talented dancer and
choreographer Alicia Alonso, the celebrated
liberator Sim n Bol var, the
notorious dictator Augusto Pinochet, and the
brilliant business leader Roberto Crispulo
Goizueta; the various countries of Latin America;
historical events such as the Mexican War
(1846 48) and the Battle of Ayacucho
(1824); and cultural celebrations such as Cinco de
Mayo and the Day of the Dead. holiday wales
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Encyclop dia Britannica is proud to present a new
feature on one of history s darkest chapters, the
Holocaust. Central to this feature is an overview article by
Britannica s Holocaust adviser, Dr. Michael Berenbaum, the
former director of the Holocaust Research Institute at the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum, former president of the Survivors of
the Shoah Visual History Foundation, and author of The
World Must Know and Witness to the Holocaust,
among other books. This feature is divided into five parts,
covering everything from the origins of the Holocaust in the
mind of Adolf Hitler to the legacy of the horror in art and
memory. Long-debated controversies are discussed, such as why
the Allies chose not to bomb Hitler s death camps, as well
as the actions of the Roman Catholic Church, and of Pope Pius
XII in particular, during the years of the Holocaust. There are
also extensive photographs and videos (warning: some of them
are graphic), an extended bibliography, and discussion
questions tied to each of the five parts and written especially
for teachers and classroom use. Photos cottage holiday in wales
26th of July Movement
revolutionary movement led by Fidel Castro that overthrew the
regime of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba (1959). Its name commemorates
an attack on the ...
3-D motion-picture process
that gives a three-dimensional quality to film images. It is based
on the fact that humans perceive depth by viewing with both ...
30 Doradus immense ionized-hydrogen region in the
Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way system
(in which the Earth is located). The nebula ...
38th parallel parallel of latitude that in East
Asia roughly demarcates North and South Korea. The line was chosen
by U.S. military planners at the Potsdam ...
4-H
Club one of an organization of clubs for youth aged 10 to
21 who engage in programs of learning by doing. The
clubs are found principally in the United ...
401(k) in the United States, a retirement savings
program organized by employers but funded primarily by workers
through paycheck deductions. Because ...
51 Pegasi fifth-magnitude star located 50
light-years away from Earth in the constellation Pegasus, the first
sunlike star confirmed to possess a planet. 51 ...
61
Cygni first star whose distance from Earth (about 11
light-years) was measured (by Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel in 1838).
The star is a visual binary the ...
9to5, National
Association of Working Women
organization established in 1973 and dedicated to improving the
working conditions and ensuring the rights of women office workers
in the United ...
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Britannica online encyclopedia article on human genome: all of
the approximately three billion base pairs of deoxyribonucleic acid
(DNA) that make up the entire set of chromosomes of the human
organism. The human genome includes the coding regions of DNA,
which encode all the genes (about 25, 000) of the human organism,
as well as the noncoding regions of DNA, which do not encode any
genes. By 2003 the DNA sequence of the entire human genome was
known.
Social impacts of human genome research Print this Table of
Contents Linked Articles polymerase chain reaction article
176 Shopping
New! Britannica Book of the
Year The Ultimate Review of 2007.
2007 Britannica
Encyclopedia Set (32-Volume Set) Revised, updated, and
still unrivaled.
Special Offer! Activate a FREE trial to
Britannica Online, your complete (re)search engine
for when you need to be right. The human genome, like the genomes
of all other living animals, is a collection of long polymers of
DNA. These polymers are maintained in duplicate copy in the form of
chromosomes in every human cell and encode in their sequence of
constituent bases (
guanine [G],
adenine [A],
thymine [T], and
cytosine
Bloody
Sunday ), the country exploded in
rebellion, which, ebbing and flowing in response
to news from the front, reached a climax in October 1905. On
October 17 (October 30, New Style), faced with a general strike,
Emperor
Nicholas II issued a manifesto that
promised the country a legislative parliament. The
October
Manifesto in effect ended the autocratic system. The
following year Russia was given a constitution. Elections took
place to a representative body, the State
Duma,
which was empowered to initiate and veto legislative proposals. The
population received guarantees of fundamental civil liberties.
Censorship was abolished.
Between 1906 and 1911 Russia was administered by the greatest
statesman of the late imperial era,
Pyotr
Stolypin. Stolypin both ruthlessly suppressed disorders
and carried out extensive reforms. The most important of these were
laws allowing peasants to withdraw from the commune and establish
independent farmsteads. Stolypin hoped to create a self-reliant
yeomanry to act as a stabilizing force in the countryside. He also
had other social and political reforms in mind. These were
frustrated by the hostility of the court as well as of the
opposition parties. He was murdered by a revolutionary in 1911.
The constitution of 1906 was frequently violated by both the
government and the opposition. The former misused its emergency
clauses to adjourn the Duma and rule by decree. The latter,
especially the radical parties, sabotaged the legislative process.
Even so, in its last decade Russia enjoyed greater freedom than
ever before. It also enjoyed relative prosperity: on the eve of
World War I it was the world's leading producer of petroleum and
exporter of grain. Conditions in the countryside gradually
improved, and in 1916 peasants owned or rented 90 percent of the
arable land.
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Store! More from Britannica on "Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics"... 50 Encyclop dia Britannica articles, from the
full 32 volume encyclopedia Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics former northern Eurasian empire
(1917/22 1991) stretching from the Baltic and Black seas to
the Pacific Ocean and, in its final years, consisting of 15 Soviet
Socialist Republics (S.S.R.'s) Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belorussia
(now Belarus), Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kirgiziya (now
Kyrgyzstan), Latvia, Lithuania, Moldavia (now Moldova), Russia,
Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, ...
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, flag of
national flag consisting of a red field with a crossed gold hammer
and sickle in the upper hoist corner and beneath a gold-bordered
red star. The flag's width-to-length ratio is 1 to 2.
Communist Party of the Soviet Union the major
political party of Russia and the Soviet Union from the Russian
Revolution of October 1917 to 1991.
Writers' Union of the U.S.S.R. organization
formed in 1932 by a decree of the Central Committee of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union that abolished existing
literary organizations and absorbed all professional Soviet writers
into one large union. The union supported Communist Party policies
and was the defender and interpreter of the single Soviet literary
method, Socialist Realism. Besides ...
Commonwealth of Independent States
trophic
level), by which the energy of food is transferred through
a series of organisms, from green plants (the producers) up to
several levels of animals (the consumers). An English animal
ecologist,
Charles Elton (1927), further developed
this approach with the concept of ecological
niches and pyramids of numbers. In the 1930s,
American freshwater biologists Edward Birge and Chancey Juday, in
measuring the energy budgets of lakes, developed the idea of
primary productivity, the rate at which food
energy is generated, or fixed, by
photosynthesis.
In 1942 Raymond L. Lindeman of the United States developed the
trophic-dynamic concept of ecology, which details the flow of
energy through the ecosystem. Quantified field studies of
energy flow through ecosystems were further
developed by the brothers Eugene Odum and Howard Odum of the United
States; similar early work on the cycling of
nutrients was done by J.D. Ovington of England and
Australia. (
See community ecology: Trophic pyramids
and the flow of energy;
biosphere: The flow of
energy and
nutrient cycling.)
The study of both energy flow and nutrient cycling was stimulated
by the development of new materials and
techniques radioisotope tracers, microcalorimetry, computer
science, and applied mathematics that enabled ecologists to
label, track, and measure the movement of particular nutrients and
energy through ecosystems. These modern methods (
see below
Methods in ecology) encouraged a new stage in the
development of ecology systems ecology, which is concerned
with the structure and function of ecosystems.
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Encyclop dia Britannica articles, from the full 32 volume
encyclopedia ecology study of the
relationships between organisms and their environment. Some of the
most pressing problems in human affairs expanding populations,
food scarcities, environmental pollution including global warming,
extinctions of plant and animal species, and all the attendant
sociological and political problems are to a great degree
ecological.
human ecology man's collective interaction
with his environment. Influenced by the work of biologists on the
interaction of organisms within their environments, social
scientists undertook to study human groups in a similar way. Thus,
ecology in the social sciences is the study of the ways in which
the social structure adapts to the quality of natural resources and
to the existence of ...
community ecology study of the organization
and functioning of communities, which are assemblages of
interacting populations of the species living within a particular
area or habitat.
population ecology study of
the processes that affect the distribution and abundance of animal
and plant populations.
autecology the study
of the interactions of an individual organism or a single species
with the living and nonliving factors of its environment.
Autecology is primarily experimental and deals with easily measured
variables such as light, humidity, and available nutrients in an
effort to understand the needs, life history, and behaviour of the
organism or species. Compare synecology.
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Store! More from Britannica on "Missouri"... 825
Encyclop dia Britannica articles, from the full 32 volume
encyclopedia
Missouri constituent state of
the United States of America. To the north lies Iowa; across the
Mississippi River to the east, Illinois, Kentucky, and Tennessee;
to the south, Arkansas; and to the west, Oklahoma, Kansas, and
Nebraska. With the exception of Tennessee, Missouri has more
neighbouring states than any other U.S. state. The area of Missouri
is 69, 697 square miles ...
North American Indian people of the Chiwere branch of the Siouan
language family. In their historic past the Missouri people,
together with the Iowa and the Oto, separated from the Ho-Chunk
(Winnebago) and moved southwest. The Missouri tribe settled at the
confluence of the Grand and Missouri rivers in what is now
Missouri, U.S., while the Oto continued to travel up the ...
flagship of the U.S. Pacific Fleet in World War II and scene of the
Japanese surrender. One of the four battleships of the Iowa class
that were completed during the war, the USS Missouri numbered among
the largest warships afloat, displacing 58, 000 tons, carrying a
main battery of nine 16-inch guns, and capable of a speed of 35
knots. The ship participated in combat ...
Missouri Plan method of selecting judges that
originated in the state of Missouri and subsequently was adopted by
other U.S. jurisdictions. It involves the creation of a nominating
commission that screens judicial candidates and submits to the
appointing authority (such as the governor) a limited number of
names of individuals considered to be qualified. The appointing
authority ...
Missouri River longest tributary of the
Mississippi River, formed by the confluence of the Jefferson,
Madison, and Gallatin rivers in the Rocky Mountain area of
southwestern Montana (Gallatin county), U.S., about 4, 000 feet (1,
200 m) above sea level. The Missouri flows eastward to central
North Dakota, where it turns southward across South Dakota to form
a section of the South ...
More results 282 Student Encyclopedia
Britannica articles, specially written for elementary and high
school students
Missouri The middle-of-the-road
state of Missouri stands nearly midcenter in the coterminous United
States. It shares its borders with eight states of the Midwest,
South, and Southwest Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois,
Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Oklahoma.
Missouri Compromise In February 1819 the slavery
issue in the United States was dramatically brought to everyone's
attention. People were awakened to the gravity of the issue, in the
words of elder statesman Thomas Jefferson, as though a fire
bell had rung in the night.
Lutheran Church-Missouri
Synod American denominational branch of Lutheranism;
founded 1849 in Chicago by German immigrants; first president was
C.F.W. Walther; based in St. Louis, Mo.; strong emphasis on
education, with large system of parochial schools, colleges, and
seminaries; conservative stance often separates it from other
Lutheran bodies; underwent internal strife beginning in 1969 over
...
Missouri, University of
monebaggasse
A new look at the people and history behind the movies Encyclopedia Britannica Presents Hollywood and the World of Movies ......