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Putumayo

(Encyclopedia)Putumayo ēsäˈ [key], river, c.1,000 mi (1,600 km) long, rising in the Andes, S Colombia, and flowing SE to the Amazon in NW Brazil. Mostly navigable, it marks part of Colombia's boundary with Ecuad...

Nelson, Knute

(Encyclopedia)Nelson, Knute kəno͞otˈ [key], 1843–1923, U.S. Senator (1895–1923), b. Voss, Norway. He was brought to the United States at the age of six, grew up on a Wisconsin farm, and served in the Union a...

concentration camp

(Encyclopedia)concentration camp, a detention site outside the normal prison system created for military or political purposes to confine, terrorize, and, in some cases, kill civilians. The term was first used to d...

Gulag

(Encyclopedia)Gulag, system of forced-labor prison camps in the USSR, from the Russian acronym [GULag] for the Main Directorate of Corrective Labor Camps, a department of the Soviet secret police (originally the Ch...

villein

(Encyclopedia)villein vĭlˈən [key] [O.Fr.,=village dweller], peasant under the manorial system of medieval Western Europe. The term applies especially to serfs in England, where by the 13th cent. the entire unfr...

Phillips, Wendell

(Encyclopedia)Phillips, Wendell, 1811–84, American reformer and orator, b. Boston, grad. Harvard (B.A., 1831; LL.B., 1834). He was admitted to the bar in 1834 but, having sufficient income of his own, he abandone...

Galle

(Encyclopedia)Galle gäl [key], city (1995 est. pop. 87,000), capital of Southern prov., extreme S Sri Lanka, on the Indian Ocean. An agricultural market center, it exports tea, rubber, coconut oil, cloves, and oth...

Golding, Bruce

(Encyclopedia)Golding, Bruce, 1947–, Jamaican political leader. The son of Tacius Golding, a member of parliament and speaker of the house in the 1960s, he is a graduate of the Univ. of the West Indies (B.Sc., 19...

Hammurabi

(Encyclopedia)Hammurabi hämo͝oräˈbē [key], fl. 1792–1750 b.c., king of Babylonia. He founded an empire that was eventually destroyed by raids from Asia Minor. Hammurabi may have begun building the tower of B...

Medan, city, Indonesia

(Encyclopedia)Medan mādänˈ [key], city (1990 pop. 1,730,052), capital of North Sumatra prov., NE Sumatra, Indonesia, on the Deli River, c.15 mi (25 km) from its mouth, where the city's port (Belawan) is situated...
 

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