Encyclopædia Britannica Australia -

Encyclopedias since 1768

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Baltimore ... Banat

Baltimore: city, north-central Maryland, U.S., about 40 miles (65 km) northeast of Washington, D.C. It lies at the head of the Patapsco River estuary, 15 miles (25 km) above Chesapeake Bay. Baltimore is Maryland's largest city and economic centre and constitutes ...
Baltimore: county, north-central Maryland, U.S. It almost surrounds (but excludes) the city of Baltimore and is bounded by Pennsylvania to the north, the Gunpowder River and Chesapeake Bay to the southeast, and the Patapsco River to the south and southwest. The ...
Baltimore and Ohio Railroad: first steam-operated railway in the United States to be chartered as a common carrier of freight and passengers (1827). The B&O Railroad Company was established by Baltimore (Md.) merchants to compete with New York merchants and their newly opened Erie ...
Baltimore clipper: small, fast sailing ship developed by Chesapeake Bay (U.S.) builders in the 18th century. Its speed made it valuable for use as a privateer, for conveying perishables, and in the slave trade, and its hull design gives it claim as ...
Baltimore Sun, The: morning newspaper published in Baltimore, long one of the most influential dailies in the United States. It was founded in Baltimore in 1837 by A.S. Abell as a four-page tabloid. Abell dedicated The Sun to printing the ...
Baltimore, Cecilius Calvert, 2nd Baron: founder of the colony of Maryland. He was the eldest son of the 1st Baron Baltimore, who had initiated the idea of a sanctuary for Roman Catholics in the Americas.
Baltimore, Charles Calvert, 3rd Baron: English statesman who was commissioned governor of the American colony of Maryland in 1661 and succeeded as proprietor of the colony in 1675.
Baltimore, David: American virologist who shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1975 with Howard M. Temin and Renato Dulbecco. Working independently, Baltimore and Temin discovered reverse transcriptase, an enzyme that synthesizes DNA from RNA. Baltimore also conducted research that ...
Baltimore, George Calvert, 1st Baron: English statesman who projected the founding of the North American province of Maryland, in an effort to find a sanctuary for practicing Roman Catholics.
Baltistan: geographic region of the Northern Areas, in the Pakistani-administered sector of the Kashmir region, in the northern part of the Indian subcontinent. Drained by the Indus River and tributaries such as the Shyok River, Baltistan is situated on the high ...
Baltiysk: city and port, Kaliningrad oblast (province), northwestern Russia. It lies at the entrance to the tip of the narrow peninsula separating Frisches Lagoon from the Baltic Sea. Originally the German East Prussian town of Pillau (1686-1946), Baltiysk is connected by ...
Balto-Slavic languages: hypothetical language group comprising the languages of the Baltic and Slavic subgroups of the Indo-European language family. Those scholars who accept the Balto-Slavic hypothesis attribute the large number of close similarities in the vocabulary, grammar, and sound systems of the ...
Baltra Island: one of the smaller of the Galapagos Islands, with an area of 8 square miles (21 square km). It lies in the eastern Pacific Ocean, about 600 miles (1,000 km) west of Ecuador. Before volcanic faulting occurred, the island was ...
Baluchi rug: floor covering woven by the Balochi people living in Afghanistan and eastern Iran. The patterns in these rugs are highly varied, many consisting of repeated motifs, diagonally arranged across the field. Some present a maze of intricate latch-hooked forms. Prayer ...
Balue, Jean: French cardinal, the treacherous minister of King Louis XI.
Balurghat: town, northern West Bengal state, northeastern India, just east of the Atrai River. Connected by road with English Bazar (India) and Dinajpur and Rajshahi (Bangladesh), it is a regional distributing centre, trading mainly in rice, jute, sugarcane, and oilseeds. It ...
balustrade: low screen formed by railings of stone, wood, metal, glass, or other materials and designed to prevent falls from roofs, balconies, terraces, stairways, and other elevated architectural elements.
Baluze, Etienne: French scholar, notable both as a historian and as the collector and publisher of documents and manuscripts.
Balzac, Honore de: French literary artist who produced a vast number of novels and short stories collectively called La Comedie humaine (The Human Comedy). He helped to establish the orthodox classical novel and is generally considered to ...
Balzac, Jean-Louis Guez de: man of letters and critic, one of the original members of the Academie Francaise; he had a great influence on the development of Classical French prose.
Bamako: capital city, southwestern Mali, on the Niger River. When occupied for the French in 1880 by Captain Joseph-Simon Gallieni, Bamako was a settlement of a few hundred inhabitants, grouped in villages. It became the capital of the former colony of ...
Bambara: ethnolinguistic group of the upper Niger region of Mali whose language, Bambara (Bamana), belongs to the Mande branch of the Niger-Congo language family. The Bambara are to a great extent intermingled with other tribes, and there is no centralized organization. ...
Bambara states: two separate West African states, one of which was based on the town of Segou, between the Senegal and Niger rivers, and the other on Kaarta, along the middle Niger (both in present-day Mali). According to tradition, the Segu kingdom ...
Bambara, Toni Cade: American writer, civil-rights activist, and teacher who wrote about the concerns of the African-American community.
Bamberg: county, south-central South Carolina, U.S. Bordered to the northeast by the South Fork Edisto River and to the southwest by the Salkehatchie River, it is also drained by the Little Salkehatchie River. The county is largely agricultural, with wetlands in ...
Bamberg: city, Bavaria Land (state), south-central Germany. It lies along the canalized Regnitz River, 2 miles (3 km) above the latter's confluence with the Main River, north of Nurnberg. First mentioned in 902 as the seat of the ...
Bamberger, Ludwig: economist and publicist, a leading authority on currency problems in Germany. Originally a radical, he became a moderate liberal in Bismarck's Germany.
Bambocciati: group of relatively small, often anecdotal, paintings of everyday life, made in Rome in the mid-17th century. The word derives from the nickname "Il Bamboccio" ("Large Baby"), applied to the physically malformed Dutch painter Pieter van Laer (1592/95-1642). Generally regarded ...
bamboo: any of the tall, treelike grasses comprising the subfamily Bambusoideae of the family Poaceae. More than 75 genera and 1,000 species of bamboos have been proposed in botanical literature, but many names are synonymous and thus not considered legitimate.
Bamboo Annals: set of records written on bamboo slips, from the state of Chin, one of the many small states into which China was divided during the late, or Eastern, Chou dynasty (770-256/255 BC). The Chin state was destroyed about the middle ...
bamboo rat: any of four Asiatic species of burrowing, slow-moving, nocturnal rodents. Bamboo rats have a robust, cylindrical body, small ears and eyes, and short, stout legs. The three species of Rhizomys are 23 to 50 cm (9.1 to ...
Bamburgh: coastal village, Berwick-upon-Tweed borough, administrative and historic county of Northumberland, England. The site is dominated by Bamburgh Castle, which stands on a cliff 150 feet (45 metres) above the North Sea. The fortress was founded in the 6th century by ...
Bambuti: a group of Pygmies of the Ituri Forest of eastern Congo (Kinshasa). They are the shortest group of Pygmies in Africa, averaging under 4 feet 6 inches (137 cm) in height, and are perhaps the most famous. In addition to ...
Bamenda: town, northwestern Cameroon. It is situated in the volcanic Bamenda highlands. Although communications are difficult because of heavy rainfall and rugged relief, the town serves as a trade and export centre for local agricultural products such as hides, coffee, and ...
Bamford, Samuel: English radical reformer who was the author of several widely popular poems (principally in the Lancashire dialect) showing sympathy with the condition of the working class. He became a working weaver and earned great respect in northern radical circles as ...
Bamian: town, central Afghanistan. It lies northwest of Kabul, the nation's capital, in the Bamian valley at an elevation of 8,495 feet (2,590 metres).
Bamileke: any of about 90 West African peoples in the Bamileke region of Cameroon. They speak a language of the Benue-Congo branch of the Niger-Congo family. They do not refer to themselves as Bamileke but instead use the names of the ...
Bampton, John: English clergyman who gave his name to one of Protestant Christendom's most distinguished lectureships, the Bampton lectures at Oxford University.
Bamum: a West African people speaking a language that is often used as a lingua franca and belongs to the Benue-Congo branch of the Niger-Congo family. Their kingdom, with its capital at Foumban (q.v.) in the high western grasslands of Cameroon, ...
ban: former Hungarian title denoting a governor of a military district (banat) and later designating a local representative of the Hungarian king in outlying possessions, e.g., Bosnia and Croatia. Originally a Persian word, ban was introduced into Europe by the Avars. ...
Ban Zhao: renowned Chinese scholar and historian of the Dong (Eastern) Han dynasty.
Bana: one of the greatest masters of Sanskrit prose, famed principally for his chronicle, Harsacarita ("Deeds of Harsa"), depicting the court and times of the Buddhist emperor Harsa (reigned c. 606-647) of northern India.
Banaba: coral and phosphate formation 250 miles (400 km) west of the nearest Gilbert Islands, part of Kiribati, in the west central Pacific Ocean. It has a circumference of 6 miles and an area of 2 square miles (6 square km). ...
Banach, Stefan: Polish mathematician who founded modern functional analysis and helped develop the theory of topological vector spaces.
Banana: port on the Atlantic coast in far southwestern Congo (Kinshasa), central Africa, at the mouth of the Congo River. One of the nation's older towns, it was known as a trading centre in the 19th century, mainly during the slaving ...
banana: fruit of the genus Musa, of the family Musaceae, one of the most important food crops of the world. The banana is consumed extensively throughout the tropics, where it is grown, and is also valued in the temperate zone for ...
Bananal Island: island, Tocantins estado ("state"), central Brazil. The island is formed by the Araguaia River, which for 200 miles (320 km) divides into major (western) and minor (eastern) branches, with Bananal Island lying between them. The major branch of the Araguaia ...
bananaquit: (Coereba flaveola), bird of the West Indies (except Cuba) and southern Mexico to Argentina. It is usually placed with honeycreepers in the family Emberizidae (order Passeriformes), but it may belong with woodwarblers (Parulidae). About 11 cm (4.5 inches) long, the ...
Banaras, Treaties of: (1773; 1775), two agreements regulating relations between the British government of Bengal and the ruler of the Muslim state of Oudh. The defense of Oudh had been guaranteed in 1765 on the condition that the state's ruler, Shuja'-ud-Dawlah, pay the ...
Banas River: river in Rajasthan state, northwestern India. It rises near Kumbhalgarh and cuts its way tortuously through the Aravali Range. It then flows in a northeasterly course onto the plains and joins the Chambal River, just north of Sheopur, after a ...
Banat: ethnically mixed historic region of eastern Europe; it is bounded by Transylvania and Walachia in the east, by the Tisza River in the west, by the Mures River in the north, and by the Danube River in the south. After ...