Encyclopædia Britannica Australia -

Encyclopedias since 1768

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Williston ... Wilson, William Julius

Williston: city, seat (1891) of Williams county, northwestern North Dakota, U.S. It lies on the Missouri River, 20 miles (30 km) east of the Montana state line and 65 miles (105 km) south of the Canadian border. The Lewis and Clark ...
Williston Basin: large sedimentary basin along the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains in western North Dakota, eastern Montana, and southern Saskatchewan, Can. The basin is characterized by thick sequences of sediments that underlie an area of about 285,000 square kilometres (110,000 ...
Willkie, Wendell L.: U.S. Republican presidential candidate in 1940, who tried unsuccessfully to unseat President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He subsequently became identified with his famous "One World" concept of international cooperation.
Willmar: city, seat (1871) of Kandiyohi county, southwest-central Minnesota, U.S. It is situated on Foot and Willmar lakes, in a lake region about 60 miles (95 km) southwest of St. Cloud. Settlers began arriving in the area in 1856, but the ...
Willoughby, Francis Willoughby, 5th Baron: governor of Barbados who in 1651 brought about the settlement of Suriname (then nominally Spanish territory) by immigrants from Caribbean and other South American colonies. Originally a supporter of Parliament in the English Civil War, he joined the Royalist side ...
willow: shrubs and trees of the genus Salix, family Salicaceae, mostly native to north temperate areas, valued for ornament, shade, erosion control, and timber. Salicin, source of salicylic acid used in pain relievers, is derived from certain willows. All species have ...
willow oak: any of several species of North American ornamental and timber trees belonging to the red oak group of the genus Quercus, in the beech family (Fagaceae), which have willowlike leaves.
Willow Palisade: ditch and embankment planted with willows built across part of southeastern Manchuria during the early Ch'ing (1644-1911/12) dynasty. The Chinese (Han) in Manchuria, possibly from as early as 1,000 BC, were localized almost entirely in a triangular area in southern ...
Willow pattern: landscape design developed by Thomas Turner at Caughley, Shropshire, Eng., in 1779 in imitation of the Chinese. Its classic components are a weeping willow, pagoda-like structures, three men on a quaint bridge, and a pair of swallows, and the usual ...
Wills, Bob: American bandleader, fiddler, singer, and songwriter whose Texas Playboys popularized western swing music in the 1930s and '40s.
Wills, Helen: outstanding American tennis player who was the top female competitor in the world for eight years (1927-33 and 1935).
Wills, Maury: U.S. professional baseball player and manager, who set base-stealing records in his playing career.
Willstatter, Richard: German chemist whose study of the structure of chlorophyll and other plant pigments won him the 1915 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.
Wilmette: village, Cook county, northeastern Illinois, U.S. Lying on Lake Michigan, it is a primarily residential suburb of Chicago, about 15 miles (24 km) north of downtown. Illinois and later Potawatomi Indians were early inhabitants of the area, which was visited ...
Wilmington: largest city in Delaware, U.S., and seat of New Castle county at the influx of the Christina River and Brandywine Creek into the Delaware River. It is the state's industrial, financial, and commercial centre and main port.
Wilmington: city, seat of New Hanover county, southeastern North Carolina, U.S. It is the state's chief seaport and lies on the Cape Fear River, about 30 miles (48 km) above its mouth. Settled in the early 1730s and called New Carthage ...
Wilmington, Spencer Compton, earl of, Viscount Pevensey: also called (1728-30) Baron Wilmington British politician, favourite of King George II and nominal prime minister of Great Britain from February 1742 to July 1743.
Wilmot Proviso: in U.S. history, important congressional proposal in the 1840s to prohibit the extension of slavery into the territories, a basic plank upon which the Republican Party was subsequently built. Soon after the Mexican War, Pres. James K. Polk asked Congress ...
Wilson: city, seat (1855) of Wilson county, east-central North Carolina, U.S. It lies roughly midway between Rocky Mount (north) and Goldsboro (south) and is about 45 miles (70 km) east of Raleigh. The area was settled in the mid-18th century around ...
Wilson's Creek, Battle of: (Aug. 10, 1861), in the American Civil War, successful Southern engagement fought between 5,400 Union troops under General Nathaniel Lyon and a combined force of more than 10,000 Confederate troops and Missouri Militia commanded by General Benjamin McCulloch and General ...
Wilson's disease: a hereditary defect associated with the metabolism of copper and characterized by the progressive degeneration of the basal ganglia of the brain (large group of nuclei involved in the control of movement), the development of a brownish ring at the ...
Wilson's Promontory: southernmost point of the Australian mainland, in Victoria, 110 miles (177 km) southeast of Melbourne. A granite peninsula, 22 miles long with a maximum width of 14 miles, it projects into Bass Strait and is almost an island, being linked ...
Wilson, A.N.: English essayist, journalist, and author of satiric novels of British society and of scholarly biographies of literary figures. His characters are typically eccentric, sexually ambiguous, and aimless.
Wilson, Alexander: Scottish-born ornithologist and poet whose pioneering work on North American birds, American Ornithology, 9 vol., (1808-14), established him as a founder of American ornithology and one of the foremost naturalists of his time.
Wilson, August: American playwright, author of a cycle of plays, each set in a different decade of the 20th century, about black American life. He won Pulitzer Prizes for Fences (1986) and for The Piano Lesson ...
Wilson, Augusta Jane Evans: American author whose sentimental, moralistic novels met with great popular success.
Wilson, C.T.R.: Scottish physicist who, with Arthur H. Compton, received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1927 for his invention of the Wilson cloud chamber, which became widely used in the study of radioactivity, X rays, cosmic rays, and other nuclear phenomena.
Wilson, Colin: English novelist and writer on philosophy, sociology, music, literature, and the occult.
Wilson, Dover: British Shakespearean scholar and educator.
Wilson, Edith: American first lady (1915-21), the second wife of Woodrow Wilson, 28th president of the United States. When he was disabled by illness during his second term, she fulfilled many of his administrative duties.
Wilson, Edmund: American critic and essayist recognized as the leading critic of his time.
Wilson, Edmund Beecher: American biologist known for his researches in embryology and cytology.
Wilson, Edward O.: American biologist recognized as the world's leading authority on ants. He was also the foremost proponent of sociobiology, the study of the genetic basis of the social behaviour of all animals, including humans.
Wilson, Ellen: American first lady (1913-14), the first wife of Woodrow Wilson, 28th president of the United States. Although far less famous than her husband's second wife, Edith Galt Wilson, Ellen played a large part in Woodrow's career and significantly changed the ...
Wilson, Flip: American comedian whose comedy variety show, The Flip Wilson Show, was one of the first television shows hosted by an African American to be a ratings success. The show ran from 1970 to 1974, reached number two ...
Wilson, Godfrey: British anthropologist and analyst of social change in Africa.
Wilson, Harold, Baron Wilson Of Rievaulx: Labour Party politician who was prime minister of the United Kingdom from 1964 to 1970 and from 1974 to 1976.
Wilson, Harriet E.: one of the first African Americans to publish a novel in English in the United States. Her work, entitled Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story White House, North. Showing That Slavery's Shadows ...
Wilson, Henry: 18th vice president of the United States (1873-75) in the Republican administration of President Ulysses S. Grant and a national leader in the antislavery movement.
Wilson, Henry Maitland Wilson, 1st Baron: British field marshal, commander in chief in the Middle East (February-December 1943), and supreme Allied commander in the Mediterranean (December 1943-November 1944), popularly known as "Jumbo" because of his great height and bulk.
Wilson, J. Tuzo: Canadian geologist and geophysicist who established global patterns of faulting and the structure of the continents. His studies in plate tectonics had an important bearing on the theories of continental drift, seafloor spreading, and convection currents within the Earth.
Wilson, Jackie: American singer who was a pioneering exponent of the fusion of 1950s doo-wop, rock, and blues styles into the soul music of the 1960s.
Wilson, James: colonial American lawyer and political theorist, signer of the Declaration of Independence, and member of the Constitutional Convention of 1787.
Wilson, Kenneth Geddes: American physicist who was awarded the 1982 Nobel Prize for Physics for his development of a general procedure for constructing improved theories concerning the transformations of matter called continuous, or second-order, phase transitions.
Wilson, Lanford: American playwright, a pioneer of the Off-Off-Broadway and regional theatre movements. His plays are known for experimental staging, simultaneous dialogue, and deferred character exposition. He won a 1980 Pulitzer Prize for Talley's Folly (1979).
Wilson, Mount: peak (5,710 feet [1,740 metres]) in the San Gabriel Mountains of the Angeles National Forest, southern California, U.S. It lies just northeast of Pasadena. A highway leads to the summit, an eroded plateau that is the site of a famous ...
Wilson, Richard: one of the earliest major British landscape painters, whose works combine a mood of classical serenity with picturesque effects.
Wilson, Robert Woodrow: American radio astronomer who shared, with Arno Penzias, the 1978 Nobel Prize for Physics for a discovery that supported the big-bang model of creation. (Soviet physicist Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa also shared the award, for unrelated research.)
Wilson, Sir Angus: British writer whose fiction-sometimes serious, sometimes richly satirical-portrays conflicts in contemporary English social and intellectual life.
Wilson, Sir Henry Hughes, Baronet: British field marshal, chief of the British imperial general staff, and main military adviser to Prime Minister David Lloyd George in the last year of World War I. While in the War Office as director of military operations (1910-14), he ...
Wilson, William Julius: American sociologist whose views on race and urban poverty helped shape U.S. public policy and academic discourse.