Pride, Sir Thomas

Pride's early life is obscure. Entering the Parliamentary army as a captain, he became a lieutenant

Trieste

Bathyscaphe (q.v.) launched by Auguste Piccard in 1953.

Aidan, Saint

Aidan was a monk at Iona, an island of the Inner Hebrides in Scotland, when King Oswald of Northumbria requested that he be made bishop of the newly converted Northumbrians. Consecrated in

Fore-edge Painting

Technique of painting the edges of the leaves, or folios, of a book, employed in the European Middle Ages. Manuscript books with gold-tooled bindings often had the edges of their pages gilded with burnished gold. They were also frequently goffered with heated tools and were occasionally coloured. From 1650 onward a number of London binders practiced a new decorative method

Manchuria

Prior to the 17th century, the history of Manchuria was shaped by three converging ethnic groups: the Chinese, the people collectively known as the Tungus, and the Mongols and Proto-Mongols. The Tungus (from which several groups emerged) were forest and plain dwellers who had a mixed economy of primitive agriculture, fishing, hunting, and livestock breeding. Those in Manchuria

Arts, Central Asian, The Himalayan peoples

This region, including Tibet, Bhutan, Nepal, and Sikkim (which was annexed to India in 1975), occupies an important middle ground between India and China, and its central position is reflected in the local music cultures. Of utmost importance for musical life was the introduction of Buddhism from India via Turkistan, beginning in the 7th century AD. Music became an integral part

Manchuria

Negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union that were aimed at reducing those two countries' arsenals of nuclear warheads and of the missiles and bombers capable of delivering such weapons. The START negotiations were successors to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks of the 1970s. In resuming strategic-arms negotiations with the Soviet Union in

Levanter

Also spelled  levante  strong wind of the western Mediterranean Sea and the southern coasts of France and Spain. It is mild, damp, and rainy and is most common in spring and fall. Its name is derived from Levant, the land at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, and refers to the wind's eastward direction. The levanter reaches its maximum intensities in the Strait of Gibraltar, where it sometimes

Eclipsing Variable Star

Pair of stars revolving about their common centre of mass in an orbit whose plane passes through or very near the Earth. An observer on the Earth thus sees one member of the binary pass periodically over the face of the other and diminish its light through an eclipse. The star Algol was the first recognized as an eclipsing binary, by John Goodricke, in 1782. Several thousand

Paulownia Sun, Order Of The

The badge, suspended from a green