Encyclopædia Britannica Australia -

Encyclopedias since 1768

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Mary Tudor ... Mason and Dixon Line

Mary Tudor: English princess, the third wife of King Louis XII of France; she was the sister of England's King Henry VIII (ruled 1509-47) and the grandmother of Lady Jane Grey, who was titular queen of England for nine days in 1553.
Maryborough: city, central Victoria, Australia. It lies along the Pyrenees Highway and is connected by rail to Melbourne (southeast). Located on the northern slopes of the Eastern Highlands and originating (1839) as a sheep run known as Simson's or Charlotte Plains, ...
Maryborough: city, southeastern Queensland, Australia, 20 mi (32 km) above the mouth of Mary River. Founded in 1843 and named after the river, which was named after Mary, the wife of Gov. Sir Charles Fitz Roy, it was proclaimed a town ...
Maryland: constituent state of the United States of America. One of the original 13 states, it lies at the centre of the Eastern Seaboard, astride the great industrial-population complex that stretches from Maine to Virginia. Its small size-10,460 square miles (27,092 ...
Maryland, University of: state university system consisting of 11 coeducational campuses in eight cities. In 1970 the University of Maryland comprised five campuses. The University of Maryland System was created in 1988 when a merger formed the current 11-campus system. Renamed the University ...
Marylebone Cricket Club: former governing body of cricket, founded in London in 1787. Marylebone soon became the leading cricket club in England and, eventually, the world authority on laws. The MCC headquarters are at Lord's Cricket Ground in London. The Cricket Council is ...
Marysville: city, seat (1850) of Yuba county, north-central California, U.S. It is situated in the Central Valley, at the junction of the Feather and Yuba rivers, 50 miles (80 km) north of Sacramento. It was established as a trading post in ...
Maryville: city, seat (1795) of Blount county, eastern Tennessee, U.S., about 15 miles (25 km) south of Knoxville and a gateway to Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The settlement was founded in 1790 around Fort Craig (built in 1785). It was ...
Maryville: city, seat (1845) of Nodaway county, northwestern Missouri, U.S. It lies about 40 miles (65 km) north of St. Joseph. Founded in 1845, it was named for Mary Graham, an early settler. The community's economy depends on corn (maize), soybeans, ...
marzipan: a malleable confection of crushed almonds or almond paste, sugar, and whites of eggs. Soft marzipan is used as a filling in a variety of pastries and candies; that of firmer consistency is traditionally modeled into fanciful shapes, such as ...
Mas'udi, al-: historian and traveler, known as the "Herodotus of the Arabs." He was the first Arab to combine history and scientific geography in a large-scale work, Muruj adh-dhahab wa ma'adin al-jawahir ("The Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems"), a world ...
Masaccio: important Florentine painter of the early Renaissance whose frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel of the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence (c. 1427) remained influential throughout the Renaissance. In the span of only six years, Masaccio radically transformed ...
Masada: ("Ruins of Masada"), ancient mountaintop fortress in southeastern Israel, site of the Jews' last stand against the Romans after the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70.
Masai: nomadic pastoralists of East Africa. Masai is essentially a linguistic term, referring to speakers of this Eastern Sudanic language (usually called Maa) of the Nilo-Saharan language family. These include the pastoral Masai who range along the Great Rift Valley of ...
Masaka: town, southern Uganda, situated about 80 miles (130 km) southwest of Kampala (the national capital), at an elevation of 4,300 feet (1,310 m). Roads connect it with Mbirizi, Lyantonde, and Mbarara. It is a market town and important commercial centre ...
Masamune Hakucho: writer and critic who was one of the great masters of Japanese naturalist literature. Unlike others of that school, he seems to have had a basically unsentimental and skeptical view of human society that gave a notably disinterested tone to ...
Masan: city, Kyongsang-nam do (province), southeastern South Korea. It is located on Masan Bay, across from Chinhae Bay, 22 miles (35 km) west of Pusan, with which it is connected by rail and road. After 1899 Masan developed as an open ...
Masaniello: leader of a popular insurrection in Naples against Spanish rule and oppression by the nobles.
Masaoka Shiki: poet, essayist, and critic who revived the haiku and tanka, traditional Japanese poetic forms.
Masaryk, Jan: statesman and diplomat who served as foreign minister in both the Czechoslovak emigre government in London during World War II and the postwar coalition government of Czechoslovakia.
Masaryk, Tomas: chief founder and first president (1918-35) of Czechoslovakia.
Masaya: city, southwestern Nicaragua, at the eastern foot of Masaya Volcano, just east of the small Lake Masaya in the rift valley between Lakes Nicaragua and Managua. Masaya serves as a commercial and manufacturing centre for the rich agricultural hinterland. The ...
Masbate: island and town, central Philippines, part of the Visayas group, bordered by the Sibuyan (west), Visayan (south), and Samar (east) seas. The island, 30 miles (48 km) southwest of the southern tip of Luzon, is V-shaped, with the open end ...
Mascagni, Pietro: Italian operatic composer, one of the principal exponents of verismo, a style of opera writing marked by melodramatic, often violent plots with characters drawn from everyday life.
Mascara: town, northwestern Algeria, situated about 40 miles (60 km) south of the Mediterranean coast. Spread across two hills separated by the Wadi Toudman, it lies on the southern slope of the Beni Chougran Range of the Atlas Mountains. Mascara ("Mother ...
Mascarene Islands: collectively, the islands of Reunion, Mauritius, and Rodrigues, which are situated in a line along a submarine ridge, the Seychelles-Mauritius Plateau, 400 to 500 miles (640 to 800 km) northeast from southern Madagascar in the western Indian Ocean. All are ...
mascon: a region of excess gravitational attraction on the surface of the Moon. The word is a contraction of mass concentration.
masculine rhyme: in verse, a monosyllabic rhyme or a rhyme that occurs only in stressed final syllables (such as claims, flames or rare, despair). Compare feminine rhyme. Emily Dickinson used the masculine rhyme to great effect in the last stanza of "After ...
Masdevallia: genus of about 300 species of tropical American orchids, family Orchidaceae, that have brightly coloured flowers with unusual shapes. Most species grow on other plants.
Masefield, John: poet, best known for his poems of the sea, Salt-Water Ballads (1902, including "Sea Fever" and "Cargoes"), and for his long narrative poems, such as The Everlasting Mercy (1911), which shocked literary orthodoxy with its phrases of a colloquial coarseness ...
maser: device that produces and amplifies electromagnetic radiation mainly in the microwave region of the spectrum. The maser operates according to the same basic principle as the laser (the name of which is formed from the acronym for "light amplification by ...
Maseru: capital and largest urban centre of Lesotho. It is on the left bank of the Caledon River near the border with Free State province, South Africa. In 1869 the chief of the Sotho (Basotho) nation, Moshoeshoe, founded the town near ...
Masham, Abigail, Baroness Masham Of Otes: favourite of Queen Anne of England. That she turned against both her patrons-Sarah Jennings, Duchess of Marlborough, and Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford-has led historians to speak harshly of her, but Jonathan Swift, who knew her intimately, spoke highly of ...
Masham, Samuel Cunliffe Lister, 1st Baron: English inventor whose contributions included a wool-combing machine that helped to lower the price of clothing and a silk-combing machine that utilized silk waste.
Mashonaland: traditional region in northeastern Zimbabwe, bordering Zambia to the north and Mozambique to the northeast and east. It is the traditional homeland of the Shona (q.v.), a Bantu-speaking people who are subsistence farmers, live in villages, and raise some cattle.
Mashriq: geographic region extending from the western border of Egypt to the western border of Iran. It includes the modern states of Egypt, The Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq and covers ...
mashriq al-adhkar: (Arabic: "place where the uttering of the name of God arises at dawn"), temple or house of worship in the Baha'i faith. The mashriq is characterized by a nine-sided construction, in keeping with the Baha'i belief in the mystical properties ...
Masina, Giulietta: Italian motion-picture actress and the wife of Italian film director Federico Fellini. Her portrayal of waiflike innocents served as the emotional focal point for some of Fellini's best films.
Masinissa: (b. c. 240 BC-d. 148), ruler of the North African kingdom of Numidia, and an ally of Rome in the last years of the Second Punic War (218-201). His influence was lasting because the economic and political development that took ...
Masirah: island of Oman, in the Arabian Sea, off the country's southeastern coast. The island is separated from the mainland by the narrow Tur'at (channel) Masirah. There is an airfield, occupied by the British until the late 1970s, at the northern ...
Masjed Soleyman: town, southwestern Iran. Oil was discovered at Masjed Soleyman in 1908, and the town early became one of Iran's leading oil centres. Pipelines, built in 1909-10, link the town with Abadan, 125 miles (200 km) southwest. Pop. (1986) 104,787.
mask: a form of disguise. It is an object that is frequently worn over or in front of the face to hide the identity of a person and by its own features to establish another being. This essential characteristic of hiding ...
Maskelyne, John Nevil: British magician whose inventions and patronage of new performers greatly influenced the development of the art of producing illusions by sleight of hand.
Maskelyne, Nevil: British astronomer noted for his contribution to the science of navigation.
Maslow, Abraham H.: American psychologist and philosopher best known for his self-actualization theory of psychology, which argued that the primary goal of psychotherapy should be the integration of the self.
masnawi: a series of distichs (couplets) in rhymed pairs (aa, bb, cc, and so on) that makes up a characteristic type of Persian verse, used chiefly for heroic, historical, and romantic epic poetry and didactic poetry.
Maso Di Banco: Florentine painter who was the most talented of Giotto's pupils. Maso's work displays a style that effectively and intelligently incorporated the teachings of the master. It was the work of Maso that Ghiberti singled out in the 15th century for ...
masochism: psychosexual disorder in which erotic release is achieved through having pain inflicted on oneself. The term derives from the name of Chevalier Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, an Austrian who wrote extensively about the satisfaction he gained by being beaten and subjugated. ...
Masolino: painter who achieved a compromise between the International Gothic manner and the advanced early Renaissance style of his own day and who owes his prominence in the history of Florentine art not to his innovations but to his lyrical style ...
Mason: an adherent of Freemasonry (q.v.).
Mason and Dixon Line: originally the boundary between Maryland and Pennsylvania in the United States. In the pre-Civil War period it was regarded, together with the Ohio River, as the dividing line between slave states south of it and free-soil states north of it. ...