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Encyclopedias since 1768

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Gorazde ... Goroka

Gorazde: town, southeastern Bosnia and Herzegovina, on the Drina River. It is an industrial town surrounded by fruit-producing farmlands. The site of a munitions factory, it also was of strategic importance in 1995 during the war between Muslims and Bosnian Serbs.
Gorbachev, Mikhail: Soviet official, the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) from 1985 to 1991 and president of the Soviet Union in 1990-91. His efforts to democratize his country's political system and decentralize its economy led to ...
Gorchakov, Aleksandr Mikhaylovich, Prince: (Knyaz) statesman who served as Russia's foreign minister during the quarter century following the Crimean War (1853-56), when Russia was trying to regain its stature as a powerful European nation.
Gorchakov, Mikhail Dmitriyevich, Prince: (Knyaz) Russian military officer and statesman who played a major role in the Crimean War (1853-56) and served as the Russian viceroy in Poland (1856-61).
Gordeeva, Yekaterina; and Grinkov, Sergey: Russian-born figure-skating pair who gained worldwide acclaim with four world championship titles and two Olympic gold medals.
Gordian I: Roman emperor for three weeks in March to April 238.
Gordian II: Roman emperor who ruled jointly for three weeks in March-April 238 with his father, Gordian I. He was killed in a battle with Capellianus, governor of Numidia.
Gordian III: Roman emperor from 238 to 244.
Gordian knot: knot that gave its name to a proverbial term for a problem solvable only by bold action. In 333 BC, Alexander the Great, on his march through Anatolia, reached Gordium, the capital of Phrygia. There he was shown the chariot ...
Gordimer, Nadine: South African novelist and short-story writer whose major theme was exile and alienation. She received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991.
Gordium: ancient Anatolian city, the ruins of which, along the banks of the Sakarya (ancient Sangarius) River, northwestern Turkey, have yielded important information about ancient Phrygian culture. American excavations after 1950 revealed Early Bronze Age and Hittite settlements, but the city ...
Gordon River: river in southwestern Tasmania, Australia. The Gordon River rises from Lake Richmond in the King William Range of the central highlands and flows southeast around a great bend to the southwest and finally northwest to enter the Indian Ocean at ...
Gordon, Aaron David: Zionist writer and philosopher who inculcated the idea of a return of Jews to Palestine as agriculturists.
Gordon, Adam Lindsay: one of the first poets to write in a distinctly Australian idiom.
Gordon, Anna Adams: American social reformer who was a strong and effective force in the American temperance movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Gordon, Charles George: British general, who became a national hero for his exploits in China and his ill-fated defense of Khartoum against Sudanese rebels.
Gordon, Dexter: American bop tenor saxophonist.
Gordon, Jeff: American race-car driver who dominated the sport in the 1990s and early 2000s. His aggressive driving style and knack for publicity helped popularize stock-car racing in the United States.
Gordon, John Brown: Confederate military leader and post-American Civil War politician who symbolized the shift from agrarian to commercial ideals in the Reconstruction South.
Gordon, Judah Leib: Jewish poet, essayist, and novelist, the leading poet of the Hebrew Enlightenment (Haskala), whose use of biblical and postbiblical Hebrew resulted in a new and influential style of Hebrew-language poetry.
Gordon, Laura de Force: American lawyer, editor, and reformer, one of the first women in the American West to speak and campaign for women's rights, who also pioneered in professions normally reserved for men.
Gordon, Lord George: English lord and instigator of the anti-Catholic Gordon riots in London (1780).
Gordon, Mary: American writer whose novels and short fiction deal with growing up as a Roman Catholic and with the nature of goodness and piety as expressed within that tradition.
Gordon, Patrick: Scottish soldier of fortune who became a general in the Russian army and a close friend of Peter I the Great of Russia (reigned 1682-1725).
Gordon, Richard F., Jr.: American astronaut who accompanied Charles Conrad on the September 1966 flight of Gemini 11. They docked with an Agena target on the first orbit and were propelled together to a record altitude of 850 miles (about 1,370 km). During a ...
Gordon, Ruth: American writer and actress who achieved award-winning acclaim in both pursuits. Much of her writing was done in collaboration with her second husband, Garson Kanin.
Gordon, Walter Lockhart: Canadian businessman, political leader, and finance minister who contributed greatly to the government planning of Canada's economic development.
gordonia: any of various trees in the genus Gordonia of the tea family (Theaceae). The genus is native to North America and East Asia and includes the loblolly bay and other trees with yellow-centred, white, camellia-like blooms. The loblolly bay, or ...
Gordy, Berry, Jr.: American businessman, founder of the Motown Record Corporation (1959), the most successful black-owned music company in the United States. Through Motown, he developed the majority of the great rhythm-and-blues performers of the 1960s and '70s, including Diana Ross and the ...
Gore, Al: 45th vice president of the United States (1993-2001) in the Democratic administration of President Bill Clinton. In the 2000 presidential election, one of the most controversial elections in American history, Gore won the nationwide popular vote over George W. Bush ...
Gore, Charles: English theologian, Anglican bishop, and an exponent of the liberal tendency within the Anglo-Catholic movement. He demonstrated a willingness to accept historical criticism of the Bible.
Goree Island: small island just south of Cape Verde Peninsula, Senegal, that was the site of one of the earliest European settlements in Western Africa and long served as an outpost for slave and other trading. It is a rather barren volcanic ...
Goren, Charles H.: American contract bridge authority whose innovative system of point-count bidding and repeated successes in tournaments made him one of the world's most famous and influential players.
Gorey, Edward: American writer, illustrator, and designer, noted for his arch humour and gothic sensibility. Gorey drew a pen-and-ink world of beady-eyed, blank-faced individuals whose dignified Edwardian demeanour is undercut by silly and often macabre events. His nonsense rhymes recall those of ...
Gorgan: town, north-central, Iran. It is situated along a small tributary of the Qareh River, 23 miles (37 km) from the Caspian Sea. The town, in existence since Achaemenian times, long suffered from inroads of the Turkmen tribes who occupied the ...
Gorgas, Josiah: army officer who directed the production of armaments for the Confederacy during the American Civil War.
Gorgas, William Crawford: U.S. Army surgeon who contributed greatly to the building of the Panama Canal by introducing mosquito control to prevent yellow fever and malaria.
Gorges, Sir Ferdinando: British proprietary founder of Maine, who promoted, though unsuccessfully, the colonization of New England along aristocratic lines.
Gorgey, Artur: Hungarian army officer famous for his role in the Revolution of 1848-49.
Gorgon: monster figure in Greek mythology. Homer spoke of a single Gorgon-a monster of the underworld. The later Greek poet Hesiod increased the number of Gorgons to three-Stheno (the Mighty), Euryale (the Far Springer), and Medusa (the Queen)-and made them the ...
Gorgonzola: town, Milano provincia, Lombardy regione, northern Italy, northeast of Milan city. The town is famous for the making of Gorgonzola cheese, which is soft when freshly made; after being drained twice, it is then oven dried for 20 days and ...
Gori: city, administrative centre of Gori rayon (sector), Georgia, on the Kura River. Gori is one of the oldest cities in Georgia, founded in the 7th century AD as Tontio. Before the Russian Revolution of 1917 it was a small administrative ...
gorilla: largest of the apes and the closest living relative to humans, with the exception of the chimpanzee. Gorillas live only in tropical forests of equatorial Africa. Most authorities recognize a single species, Gorilla gorilla, with three races: the western lowland ...
Goring, Hermann: a leader of the Nazi Party and one of the primary architects of the Nazi police state in Germany. He was condemned to hang as a war criminal by the International Military Tribunal at Nurnberg in 1946 but took poison ...
Gorizia: capital of Gorizia provincia, Friuli-Venezia Giulia regione, northeastern Italy, on the Isonzo River north of Trieste. From the 11th century Gorizia was the seat of the independent county of Gorizia until it passed to Austria in 1500. A noted cultural ...
Gorj: judet (county), southwestern Romania, occupying an area of 2,178 square miles (5,641 square km). The Transylvanian Alps (Southern Carpathians) and the sub-Carpathians rise above settlement areas in the valleys and lowlands. The county is drained southward by the Jiu River ...
Gorky, Arshile: American painter, important as the direct link between the European Surrealist painters and the painters of the American Abstract Expressionist movement.
Gorky, Maksim: Russian short-story writer and novelist who first attracted attention with his naturalistic and sympathetic stories of tramps and social outcasts and later wrote other stories, novels, and plays, including his famous The Lower Depths.
Gorlitz: city, Saxony Land (state), extreme eastern Germany. It lies along the Neisse River, opposite the Polish town of Zgorzelec (which before 1945 was part of Gorlitz), east of Dresden. It originated as the Slav settlement of Gorelic ...
Gorno-Altaysk: city and administrative centre of Altay republic, southern Russia. It lies in the foothills of the Altai Mountains, along the Mayma River near its confluence with the Katun. Gorno-Altaysk is an agricultural centre and has a woodworking industry and cloth ...
Goroka: town, east-central Papua New Guinea. Proclaimed a town in 1953, Goroka is a centre of European settlement in the central highlands. It has an airport and also lies on the Highlands Highway, an important truck route leading 110 miles (180 ...