Common ingredients: lamb, seafood, beef, chicken, vegetables, rice, lentils, spices Popular dishes: curried fish or meat; kebabs; lentil soup, potatoes with gravy; basmati rice; cheese; sweet deserts made from milk More Information:

People in GroupsCollecting PeopleVery Old PeopleMORE… Mothers of InventionWomen on PedestalsFemale IngenuityMORE… How to Write a BiographySports PersonalitiesFamous African AmericansEntertainment BiographiesMORE… Biographies by Category Arts and EntertainmentBusiness, Labor, and PhilanthropyPolitics and GovernmentScience and TechnologySociety, Culture, and ScholarshipSports George WashingtonFranklin D. RooseveltJohn F. KennedyMORE… The Royal Family King Charles III of EnglandQueen Elizabeth II: Reign and Life More than 30,000 biographies from our almanacs, dictionary, and encyclopedia. [Search Tips]

August The first African slaves, around 20-30, arrived in Jamestown, Virginia. The slaves were taken as a prize from a defeated Portuguese warship by the British Empire and transported via Mexico to the USA. The USA was still under colonial rule at this point and Britain was one of the largest slave traders in the world. African slaves had been brought to the U.S. mainland in the 1500s, but this was done so by the Spanish and they were part of a group of other slaves of other ethnicities....

A variation on the hoop skirt, a farthingale was a support that extended a skirt horizontally from the waist. The French equivalent of this structure was called a pannier. Jerseys are knitted shirts that originated on the island of Jersey in the English Channel. They are commonly worn for sports. Also called boilers and sirens, these one-piece outfits were first worn in Britain during World War II nighttime air raids by civilians who worked to keep the lights out in London....

In 2009, the National Governors Association (NGA) asked a team of administrators, educators, and parents to develop a common set of rigorous standards for grades K-12 in order “to provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn, so teachers and parents know what they need to do to help them.” Once the team came up with the standards, they were copyrighted by the NGA Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO)....

Coordinating Conjunctions A coordinating conjunction is a word that connects two words or two groups of words that are used in the same way—that is, they are the same part of speech or they are grammatically alike. The coordinating conjunctions are and, but, for, nor, or, so, and yet. Correlative Conjunctions Correlative conjunctions are always used in pairs. They connect two words or two groups of words that are used in the same way—that is, they are the same part of speech or they are grammatically alike....

Peter Gabriel Clark Gable Ernesto Galarza James Galway Andy Garcia Jerry Garcia Rupert García Ava Gardner Art Garfunkel Michael Gambon Judy Garland Janeane Garofalo Greer Garson Jennie Garth Costa-Gavras Marvin Gaye Mitzi Gaynor Sarah Michelle Gellar Richard Gere George Gershwin Alice Ghostley Hoot Gibson Mel Gibson Kathie Lee Gifford Yolande Cornelia “Nikki” Giovanni Scott Glenn Danny Glover Louise Glück Paulette Goddard Whoopi Goldberg Jeff Goldblum E. H. Gombrich Cuba Gooding, Jr....

The two long-term goals of the Favorite Poem Project were to promote the reading and appreciation of poetry and encourage the teaching of poetry in schools nationwide. The Project recorded nearly 1,000 Americans saying poems that they love. Mr. Pinsky has delivered fifty audio and video segments to the Library of Congress which have become a permanent part of the Library’s Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature. “This will be a gift to the nation’s future: an archive that may come to represent, in a form both individual and public, the collective cultural consciousness of the American people at the turn of the century,” said Mr....

Not so, says the 29-year-old, who becomes the first actor under 30 to play the role onscreen. “The piece is so rich, I just feel that any actor had something to bring it,” he explained. “I had a very clear idea of why now, why to do it again. It wasn’t really about who was playing Hamlet so much as … the play as a whole. If the point is just to go see another actor doing it, who cares?...

Luis Walter Alvarez, Nobel Prize-winning physicistFranklin Chang-Dìaz, astronautMario Molina, Nobel Prize-winning chemistCarlos Noriega, astronautEllen Ochoa, astronautSevero Ochoa, Nobel Prize-winning biochemist

More from the Lemony Snicket Page

The Copernicum System In 1543, while on his deathbed, Polish astronomer Nicholas Copernicus published his theory that the Sun is a motionless body at the center of the solar system, with the planets revolving around it. Before the Copernicum system was introduced, astronomers believed the Earth was at the center of the universe. Gravity Isaac Newton, an English mathematician and physicist, is considered the greatest scientist of all time. Among his many discoveries, the most important is probably his law of universal gravitation....

Advertisement

Common Nouns and Proper Nouns Common nouns refer to common, everyday things. A proper noun refers to specific things that are unique or have names. Proper nouns begin with capital letters. Concrete Nouns and Abstract Nouns A concrete noun names something you can experience with at least one of your senses (sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell). Most nouns are concrete nouns. An abstract noun names something you cannot experience with your senses....

In January 2000 an oil spill near Phillip Island, Australia, threatened the tiny penguins who live there. The penguins’ home was already at risk—in the past 80 years, the penguins have lost more than ¾ of their Phillip Island breeding area, mostly as a result of human actions. Rescue workers at the Phillip Island Nature Park tried different ways to keep the penguins warm and to stop them from swallowing the deadly oil....

The finest weaves of Ice Age seamstresses are comparable not only to Neolithic but even later Bronze and Iron Age products and, in fact, to some of the thin cotton and linen worn today. The new evidence comes in part from a study of 80 textile impressions found on tiny clay fragments in the Czech Republic. The impressions are the earliest evidence for cordage and textile production in the world and reflect technologies heretofore only associated with fine garments of later periods....