A-Z Browse

  • Rawalpindi (Pakistan)
    city, Punjab province, northern Pakistan. It was the capital of Pakistan from 1959 to 1969. The city lies on the Potwar Plateau 9 miles (14 km) southwest of Islamabad, the national capital....
  • Rawalpindi, Treaty of (British-Afghani history)
    Amānollāh launched the inconclusive Third Anglo-Afghan War in May 1919. The month-long war gained the Afghans the conduct of their own foreign affairs. The Treaty of Rawalpindi was signed on August 8, 1919, and amended in 1921. Before signing the final document with the British, the Afghans concluded a treaty of friendship with the new Bolshevik regime in the Soviet Union;......
  • Rāwandīyah (Islamic sect)
    Islamic religiopolitical sect of the 8th–9th century ad, instrumental in the ʿAbbāsid overthrow of the Umayyad caliphate. The movement appeared in the Iraqi city of Kūfah in the early 700s among supporters (called Shīʿites) of the fourth caliph ʿAlī, who believed that succession to ʿAlī’s ...
  • Rawayfī ibn Thābit (Companion of Muḥammad)
    town, northeastern Libya. It is a new town lying on a high ridge 20 miles (32 km) from the Mediterranean Sea. Built in the late 1950s on the site of the tomb of Rawayfī ibn Thābit (a Companion of the Prophet Muḥammad), it was planned as the future national capital. Although Zāwiyat al-Bayḍāʾ contains a parliament building, ministerial offices, a......
  • Rawdon-Hastings, Francis (British colonial administrator)
    British soldier and colonial administrator; as governor-general of Bengal he conquered the Maratha states and greatly strengthened British rule in India....
  • Rawhide (American television program)
    ...Eastwood held various jobs and served in the U.S. Army before becoming a bit player in Hollywood. He first attracted notice as the second lead in the television western series Rawhide (1959–66). He achieved international stardom during this same period when he played “The Man With No Name”—a laconic, fearless gunfighter whose stoicism mask...
  • rāwī (Islamic literature)
    (Arabic: “reciter”), in Arabic literature, professional reciter of poetry. The rāwīs preserved pre-Islāmic poetry in oral tradition until it was written down in the 8th century....
  • rawinsonde (measuring instrument)
    The characteristics of upper-level wind systems are known mainly from an operational worldwide network of rawinsonde observations. (A rawinsonde is a type of radiosonde designed to track upper-level winds and whose position can be tracked by radar.) Winds measured from Doppler-radar wind profilers, aircraft navigational systems, and sequences of satellite-observed cloud imagery have also been......
  • Rawl, Lawrence (American businessman)
    American business executive (b. May 4, 1928, Lyndhurst, N.J.—d. Feb. 13, 2005, Fort Worth, Texas), served as chairman and chief executive officer of Exxon Corp. from 1987 to 1993. During his tenure Rawl consolidated the company’s assets and enlarged its oil and gas reserves by exploring new drilling sites. He also directed the company through a public relations crisis when on March 2...
  • Rawley, Callman (American poet and psychotherapist)
    American poet and psychotherapist (b. Nov. 6, 1903, Berlin, Ger.—d. June 24, 2004, San Francisco, Calif.), with George Oppen, Louis Zukovsky, and Charles Reznikoff formed a poetic movement known as Objectivism. (The movement placed emphasis on viewing poems as objects that could be considered and analyzed in terms of mechanical features.) Rakosi changed his name to Callman Rawley in 1926, k...
  • Rawlings, Jerry J. (head of state, Ghana)
    military and political leader in Ghana who twice (1979, 1981) overthrew the government and seized power. His second period of rule (1981–2001) afforded Ghana political stability and competent economic management....
  • Rawlings, Jerry John (head of state, Ghana)
    military and political leader in Ghana who twice (1979, 1981) overthrew the government and seized power. His second period of rule (1981–2001) afforded Ghana political stability and competent economic management....
  • Rawlings, Marjorie Kinnan (American author)
    American short-story writer and novelist who founded a regional literature of backwoods Florida....
  • Rawlins (Wyoming, United States)
    city, seat (1886) of Carbon county, south-central Wyoming, U.S. It lies just east of the Continental Divide at an elevation of 6,755 feet (2,059 metres). Founded in 1868 when the Union Pacific Railroad arrived, it was first named Rawlins Springs for U.S. Army Chief of Staff General John A. Rawlins, who requested a freshwater spring there bea...
  • Rawlins, Easy (fictional character)
    ...College and Johnson State College, and he became a computer programmer before publishing his first novel, Devil in a Blue Dress (1990; film 1995). Set in 1948, the novel introduces Ezekiel (“Easy”) Rawlins, an unwilling amateur detective from the Watts section of Los Angeles. It presents period issues of race relations and mores as the unemployed Rawlins is hired to.....
  • Rawlins, Ezekiel (fictional character)
    ...College and Johnson State College, and he became a computer programmer before publishing his first novel, Devil in a Blue Dress (1990; film 1995). Set in 1948, the novel introduces Ezekiel (“Easy”) Rawlins, an unwilling amateur detective from the Watts section of Los Angeles. It presents period issues of race relations and mores as the unemployed Rawlins is hired to.....
  • Rawlins, John A. (United States general)
    ...the Continental Divide at an elevation of 6,755 feet (2,059 metres). Founded in 1868 when the Union Pacific Railroad arrived, it was first named Rawlins Springs for U.S. Army Chief of Staff General John A. Rawlins, who requested a freshwater spring there bear his name. In 1874 “Rawlins Red” pigment from the local paint mines was sent 2,000 miles (3,220 km) to be used on the Brookl...
  • Rawlins Springs (Wyoming, United States)
    city, seat (1886) of Carbon county, south-central Wyoming, U.S. It lies just east of the Continental Divide at an elevation of 6,755 feet (2,059 metres). Founded in 1868 when the Union Pacific Railroad arrived, it was first named Rawlins Springs for U.S. Army Chief of Staff General John A. Rawlins, who requested a freshwater spring there bea...
  • Rawlins, Thomas (English engraver)
    ...10-shilling pieces in silver, the large gold £3 pieces of Oxford, and the fine Oxford silver crown, with a view of Oxford below the usual type of the king on horseback, made by the engraver Thomas Rawlins, employed at the Oxford Mint (1642–46) under its master, Thomas Bushell; the siege pieces rudely struck on silver plate at various Royalist strongholds show to what straits the.....
  • Rawlinson, Sir Henry Creswicke (British orientalist)
    British army officer and Orientalist who deciphered the Old Persian portion of the trilingual cuneiform inscription of Darius I the Great at Bīsitūn, Iran. His success provided the key to the deciphering, by himself and others, of Mesopotamian cuneiform script, a feat that greatly expanded knowledge of the ancient Middle East....
  • Rawls, Betsy (American golfer)
    American golfer who set a record by winning the U.S. Women’s Open four times (tied by Mickey Wright in 1964)....
  • Rawls, Elizabeth Earle (American golfer)
    American golfer who set a record by winning the U.S. Women’s Open four times (tied by Mickey Wright in 1964)....
  • Rawls, John (American philosopher)
    American political and ethical philosopher, best known for his defense of egalitarian liberalism in his major work, A Theory of Justice (1971). He is widely considered the most important political philosopher of the 20th century....
  • Rawls, John Bordley (American philosopher)
    American political and ethical philosopher, best known for his defense of egalitarian liberalism in his major work, A Theory of Justice (1971). He is widely considered the most important political philosopher of the 20th century....
  • Rawls, Lou (American singer)
    American singer (b. Dec. 1, 1933, Chicago, Ill.—d. Jan. 6, 2006, Los Angeles, Calif.), was a versatile performer whose smooth baritone adopted easily to jazz, soul, gospel, and rhythm and blues. Though Rawls began his career singing gospel music with Sam Cooke, he, like Cooke, later veered toward more secular music. Following his first hit single, “Love Is a Hurtin’ Thing...
  • “Rawshana’ināme” (work by Nāṣir-i Khusraw)
    ...is of a didactic and devotional character and consists mainly of long odes that are considered to be of high literary quality. His philosophical poetry includes the Rawshana’ināme (Book of Lights). Nāṣir’s most celebrated prose work is the Safarnāme (Diary of a Journey Through Syria and Palestine), a diary describing his seve...
  • Rawson (Argentina)
    town and port, capital of Chubut provincia (province), southern Argentina. It lies along the Chubut River near the latter’s mouth, about 5 miles (8 km) upriver from the Atlantic Ocean coast. It was founded in 1865 by Welsh settlers and named for Guillermo Rawson (1821–90), then Argentine minister of the int...
  • Rawson, Arturo (president of Argentina)
    ...of whether to remain neutral or choose sides in the war. It also had to decide between the restoration of a representative system and the installation of a long-term military dictatorship. General Arturo Rawson was made president but resigned after two days when his anticonservative stance and his advocacy of the United Nations won no military support....
  • Rawsthorne, Alan (British composer)
    English composer best known for his finely structured orchestral and chamber music written in a restrained, unostentatious style....
  • Rawstron, Claire Mary Teresa (New Zealander opera singer)
    critically acclaimed lyric soprano best known for her repertoire of works by Mozart and Richard Strauss....
  • ray (plant anatomy)
    A transverse section of trunk also shows linear features called rays radiating from pith to bark and ranging in width from very distinct, as in oak, to indistinct to the naked eye, as in pine and poplar. Certain softwoods, such as pine, spruce, larch, and Douglas fir, possess resin canals. In a transverse section examined with the naked eye or a hand lens, resin canals appear as small dark or......
  • raʾy (Islam)
    ...life and utterances), and ijmāʿ (scholarly consensus). In the early Muslim community every adequately qualified jurist had the right to exercise such original thinking, mainly raʾy (personal judgment) and qiyās (analogical reasoning), and those who did so were termed mujtahids. But with the crystallization of legal schools (madhabs) under ...
  • Ray (ancient city, Iran)
    formerly one of the great cities of Iran. The remains of the ancient city lie on the eastern outskirts of the modern city of Shahr-e-Rey, which itself is located just a few miles southeast of Tehrān....
  • ray (Slavic religion)
    ...forms in order to bring them abundance. These forms are: bog (“god”); sporysh, anciently an edible herb, today a stalk of grain with two ears, a symbol of abundance; ray (“paradise”); and dobro (“the good”). The word bog is an Indo-Iranian word signifying riches, abundance, and good fortune. Sporysh symbolizes t...
  • ray (selenology)
    conspicuous impact crater lying at the centre of the most extensive system of bright rays on the near side of the Moon. The rays, which are light-coloured streaks formed of material ejected from the impact, dominate the southern highlands and extend for more than 2,600 km (1,600 miles) across the Moon’s surface....
  • ray (flower part)
    ...marginal rows of another kind of flower, the ray flower. The corolla of ray flowers is very irregular. It is tubular at the base but prolonged on the outer side into a generally flat projection, the ray, or ligule. These rays are the petal-like parts, in a comparison of the flower head to an ordinary flower. The ray in radiate heads represents only three lobes of the corolla; often there are tw...
  • ray (fish)
    any of the cartilaginous fishes of the order Batoidei, related to sharks and placed with them in the class Chondrichthyes. The order includes 534 species....
  • Ray (film by Hackford [2004])
    Other Nominees...
  • Ray, Charlotte E. (American lawyer and teacher)
    American teacher and the first black female lawyer in the United States....
  • Ray, Dixy Lee (American zoologist and politician)
    (MARGARET RAY), U.S. zoologist and government official (b. Sept. 3, 1914, Tacoma, Wash.--d. Jan. 2, 1994, Fox Island, near Seattle, Wash.), was a colourful and outspoken supporter of the nuclear industry, critic of the environmental movement, and proponent of making science more accessible to nonscientists. A childhood fascination with the sea led to academic degrees in zoology from Mills College,...
  • ray flower (plant anatomy)
    The radiate head has disk flowers in the centre surrounded by one or more marginal rows of another kind of flower, the ray flower. The corolla of ray flowers is very irregular. It is tubular at the base but prolonged on the outer side into a generally flat projection, the ray, or ligule. These rays are the petal-like parts, in a comparison of the flower head to an ordinary flower. The ray in......
  • Ray Gun (American magazine)
    ...his work there earned him more than 150 design awards. By that time, Carson’s work had caught the eye of Marvin Scott Jarrett, publisher of the alternative-music magazine Ray Gun, and he hired Carson as art director in 1992. Over the next three years, with the help of Carson’s radical design vision, Ray Gun’s cir...
  • ray gun (electronics)
    ...Transistors, microcircuits, and lasers, all products of space-age technology, have revolutionized the art of electronic eavesdropping. One group of the new investigative tools takes the shape of a ray gun that transmits radio waves or laser beams. The ray is directed at the object of the investigation from hundreds of feet away and can imperceptibly pick up a conversation and return it to the.....
  • ray initial (plant cell)
    ...tapering cells that give rise to all cells of the vertical system of the secondary phloem and xylem (secondary tracheary elements, fibres, and sieve cells and the associated companion cells). The ray initials are isodiametric cells—about equal in all dimensions—and they produce the vascular rays, which constitute the horizontal system of secondary tissues; this horizontal system.....
  • Ray, James Earl (American assassin)
    American assassin of the black civil-rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr....
  • Ray, Jean (Belgian author)
    Belgian novelist, short-story writer, and journalist who is known for his crime fiction and narratives of horror and the fantastic in both French and Flemish (Dutch)....
  • Ray, John (English naturalist)
    leading 17th-century English naturalist and botanist who contributed significantly to progress in taxonomy. His enduring legacy to botany was the establishment of species as the ultimate unit of taxonomy....
  • Ray, John (British egyptologist)
    The Carian script defied analysis until 1981, when Egyptologist John Ray successfully exploited Carian-Egyptian bilingual tomb inscriptions to put decipherment on a sound basis. Subsequent analysis has confirmed the basic validity of Ray’s work, but many questions remain. The long-held suspicion that Carian is an Indo-European language of the Anatolian group has at least been confirmed by t...
  • Ray, Man (American photographer)
    photographer, painter, and filmmaker who was the only American to play a major role in both the Dada and Surrealist movements....
  • Ray, Margaret (American zoologist and politician)
    (MARGARET RAY), U.S. zoologist and government official (b. Sept. 3, 1914, Tacoma, Wash.--d. Jan. 2, 1994, Fox Island, near Seattle, Wash.), was a colourful and outspoken supporter of the nuclear industry, critic of the environmental movement, and proponent of making science more accessible to nonscientists. A childhood fascination with the sea led to academic degrees in zoology from Mills College,...
  • Ray, Nicholas (American author and director)
    American motion-picture writer and director who showed great promise with such early low-budget films as They Live by Night (1948–49), Knock on Any Door (1949), and Johnny Guitar (1954)....
  • Ray of Light (recording by Madonna)
    In 1998 Madonna released her first album of new material in four years, Ray of Light. A fusion of techno music and self-conscious lyrics, it was a commercial and critical success, earning the singer her first musical Grammy Awards (her previous win had been for a video). Her experimentation in electronica continued with Music (2000).......
  • Ray of Light (work by Beyer)
    ...cottons to make a traditional Grandmother’s Flower Garden quilt, giving it a distinctly different flavour from the typical American styles of that time. One of her India-inspired designs, “Ray of Light,” took the grand prize in Good Housekeeping magazine’s 1977 Bicentennial quilt contest, which drew 9,954 entries, and it launched Beyer ...
  • Ray, Rachael (American chef and television personality)
    American chef and television personality, who promoted quick, easy-to-prepare meals through her television programs, lifestyle magazine, and extensive line of cookbooks....
  • Ray, Rachael Domenica (American chef and television personality)
    American chef and television personality, who promoted quick, easy-to-prepare meals through her television programs, lifestyle magazine, and extensive line of cookbooks....
  • Ray, Satyajit (Indian film director)
    Bengali motion-picture director, writer, and illustrator who brought the Indian cinema to world recognition with Pather Panchali (1955; The Song of the Road) and its two sequels, known as the Apu Trilogy. As a director Ray was noted for his humanism, his versatility, and his detailed control over his films and their music. He was one of the greatest filmmakers of the 20th century....
  • ray spider
    any spider of the family Theridiosomatidae (order Araneida), known for their conelike webs. Most ray spiders are less than 3 mm (0.125 inch) in body length and are usually found near streams or in damp areas. The strands of the ray spider’s web extend outward in raylike groups of three or four. The web is pulled into a cone shape by a strand attached from the web centre to a nearby twig. T...
  • ray tracing (optical technique)
    In 1621 Willebrord Snell, a professor of mathematics at Leiden, discovered a simple graphical procedure for determining the direction of the refracted ray at a surface when the incident ray is given. The mathematical form of the law of refraction, equation (1) above, was announced by the French mathematician René Descartes some 16 years later....
  • ray-finned fish (fish taxon)
    ...scales; paired nostrils with or without internal nares; lateral-line system; mostly oviparous with external fertilization; some ovoviviparous or viviparous.Subclass Actinopterygii (ray-finned fishes)Generally lack choanae; no fleshy base to paired fins; no internal nares; air sacs usually function as swim......
  • raya (Ottoman social class)
    The situation of the Christian reaya (literally “flock”) was not one of unmitigated oppression. Christians were exempted from military service, and in some regions the tax burden was lighter than it had been previously, although they were taxed more heavily than the Muslim population. It was even possible for subject peoples to rise within the......
  • Raʿya Mehemana (Jewish writing)
    ...doctrine. The book inspired nearly contemporary imitations that were incorporated into it or appended to it but were sometimes of a markedly different theological orientation: the Raʿya mehemana (“Faithful Shepherd”—i.e., Moses the prophet), the particular subject of which is the interpretation and theosophic justification of the precepts of ...
  • Raya, Mount (mountain, Indonesia)
    The Schwaner Mountains and the Muller Mountains run parallel to the northwestern boundary of the province, and an offshoot of the Muller range skirts the northern boundary. Mount Raya, the highest peak in the Schwaner range, reaches 7,474 feet (2,278 m). South of these mountains is an expanse of alluvial plain that constitutes the central and southern parts of the province. The southern coastal......
  • rayah (Ottoman social class)
    The situation of the Christian reaya (literally “flock”) was not one of unmitigated oppression. Christians were exempted from military service, and in some regions the tax burden was lighter than it had been previously, although they were taxed more heavily than the Muslim population. It was even possible for subject peoples to rise within the......
  • Rayburn, Sam (American politician)
    American political leader, who served as speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives for nearly 17 years. In 1912 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and served there continuously for 48 years and 8 months, which, at the time of his death, was a record tenure. He was elected to Congress 25 consecutive times....
  • Rayburn, Samuel Taliaferro (American politician)
    American political leader, who served as speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives for nearly 17 years. In 1912 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and served there continuously for 48 years and 8 months, which, at the time of his death, was a record tenure. He was elected to Congress 25 consecutive times....
  • Raychikhinsk (Russia)
    ...centre is Blagoveshchensk. Wheat is the dominant crop of the lowland. Soybeans, sunflowers, and flax are the main industrial crops. Open-pit coal mining is carried on in the south around Raychikhinsk, and gold and iron ore are found farther north. There is also some timber production. The Zeya dam and hydroelectric station on the Zeya River, completed in 1978 with a rated capacity of......
  • Raydāʾ (region, Saudi Arabia)
    ...Persian Gulf. The Al-Dibdibah region once was the delta of Wadi Al-Rimah–Al-Bāṭin, and Al-Budūʿ Plain was the delta of Wadi Al-Sahbāʾ. The gravel plains of Raydāʾ and Abū Baḥr, and adjacent areas covered by sand, formed the delta of the Dawāsir-Jawb system. Several of the deltas formed by these ancient rivers ar...
  • Raydānīyah, Battle of (Turkish history)
    ...rulers of Syria and Egypt, who regarded Dulkadir as their protégé. Selim defeated the Mamlūk armies at the battles of Marj Dābiq (north of Aleppo; Aug. 24, 1516) and Raydānīyah (near Cairo; Jan. 22, 1517), thus bringing Syria, Egypt, and Palestine under Ottoman rule. In Cairo the sharif of Mecca presented Selim with the keys to that holy city, a......
  • Raye, Martha (American entertainer)
    (MARGARET TERESA YVONNE REED), U.S. entertainer (b. Aug. 27, 1916, Butte, Mont.--d. Oct. 19, 1994, Los Angeles, Calif.), established her reputation as an irrepressible comic in a career that encompassed radio shows, theatre, film, and entertaining U.S. troops stationed overseas. Raye began performing at the age of three, when she joined the family vaudeville act. She made her feature film debut in...
  • Rayet, Georges-Antoine-Pons (French astronomer)
    ...Only a few hundred are known, located mostly in the spiral arms of the Milky Way Galaxy. The type was first distinguished in 1867 by the French astronomers Charles-Joseph-Étienne Wolf and Georges-Antoine-Pons Rayet....
  • Rayganj (India)
    city, northern West Bengal state, northeastern India, on the Kulik River. An important agricultural-trade and jute-exporting centre, it is connected by road with English Bāzār and with Dinājpur (in Bangladesh). Rice milling is an important industry. Raiganj was declared a municipality in 1951 and has a college affiliated with the University of North Bengal. Pop. (1991 prelim.)...
  • rayḥānī script (Arabic calligraphy)
    Arabic calligrapher of the ʿAbbāsid Age (750–1258) who reputedly invented the cursive rayḥānī and muḥaqqaq scripts. He refined several of the calligraphic styles invented a century earlier by Ibn Muqlah, including the naskhī and tawqī scripts, and collected and preserved for his students numerous original......
  • rayl (unit of measurement)
    The unit of specific acoustic impedance is the pascal second per metre, often called the rayl, after Lord Rayleigh. The unit of acoustic impedance is the pascal second per cubic metre, called an acoustic ohm, by analogy to electrical impedance....
  • Rayleigh distillation (chemistry)
    ...important geochronological and environmental measurements. A disadvantage of thermal ionization is the possible change in isotopic composition during the measurement. This effect is caused by Rayleigh distillation, wherein light isotopes evaporate faster than heavy ones. Studies done on isotopes that come from radioactive decay, such as those used in determining the ages of rocks,......
  • Rayleigh interference refractometer (instrument)
    In 1896 the British physicist Lord Rayleigh described the Rayleigh interference refractometer, still widely used for determining the refractive indices of gases and liquids. It is a split-beam instrument, like the Michelson interferometer. One beam serves as a reference, while the other is passed first through a material of known index of refraction and then through the unknown. The index of......
  • Rayleigh limit (optics)
    As noted above, when a perfect lens forms an image of a point source of light, the emerging wave is a sphere centred about the image point. The optical paths from all points on the wave to the image are therefore equal, so that the expanding wavelets are all in phase (vibrating in unison) when they reach the image. In an imperfect lens, however, because of the presence of aberrations, the......
  • Rayleigh, Lord (British scientist)
    English physical scientist who made fundamental discoveries in the fields of acoustics and optics that are basic to the theory of wave propagation in fluids. He received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1904 for his successful isolation of argon, an inert atmospheric gas....
  • Rayleigh number (physics)
    ...through a dimensionless combination of some of the relevant parameters, ρgαD3(T1 - T2)/ηκ, which is known as the Rayleigh number. If the Rayleigh number is less than 1,708, the fluid is stable—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it is metastable—even though it is warmer at the bot...
  • Rayleigh of Terling Place, John William Strutt, 3rd Baron (British scientist)
    English physical scientist who made fundamental discoveries in the fields of acoustics and optics that are basic to the theory of wave propagation in fluids. He received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1904 for his successful isolation of argon, an inert atmospheric gas....
  • Rayleigh scattering (physics)
    dispersion of electromagnetic radiation by particles that have a radius less than approximately 110 the wavelength of the radiation. The process has been named in honour of Lord Rayleigh, who in 1871 published a paper describing this phenomenon....
  • Rayleigh wave (seismology)
    The other principal surface waves are called Rayleigh waves after the British physicist Lord Rayleigh, who first mathematically demonstrated their existence. Rayleigh waves travel along the free surface of an elastic solid such as the Earth. Their motion is a combination of longitudinal compression and dilation that results in an elliptical motion of points on the surface. Of all seismic waves,......
  • Raymond (prince of Antioch)
    prince of Antioch (1136–49) who successfully resisted the attempts of the Byzantine emperor John II to establish control over the principality....
  • Raymond, Alex (American cartoonist)
    U.S. comic-strip artist notable for his creation of a number of outstanding and successful adventure comic strips....
  • Raymond, Alexander Gillespie (American cartoonist)
    U.S. comic-strip artist notable for his creation of a number of outstanding and successful adventure comic strips....
  • Raymond, Arthur Emmons (American engineer)
    American engineer who was the leader of the group at Douglas Aircraft Co. that designed the DC-3, which became one of the most popular and most durable airplanes ever; he also helped design the DC-4, DC-6, DC-7, and DC-8 planes, was a consultant to NASA, and helped found the RAND Corporation (b. March 24, 1899, Boston, Mass.—d. March 22, 1999, Santa Monica, Calif.)....
  • Raymond, Claude (Haitian general)
    Haitian general (b. 1929—d. Feb. 9, 2000, Port-au-Prince, Haiti), was army chief of staff under Haitian dictator François (“Papa Doc”) Duvalier and defense and interior minister under Duvalier’s son and successor, Jean-Claude (“Baby Doc”) Duvalier. After the younger Duvalier was forced into exile in 1986, Raymond tried to run for president, but elec...
  • Raymond, Don (Spanish archbishop)
    archbishop and leading prelate of the 12th-century Spanish Christian church, whose patronage of the Toledan school of translators contributed greatly to medieval learning....
  • Raymond, Eric (American computer engineer)
    In 1997 computer programmer Eric Raymond (the author of this article) proposed a new theory of open source in his paper The Cathedral & the Bazaar. Raymond compared the centralization, secrecy, slow release tempo, and vertical management of traditional software development to a cathedral with its top-down hierarchal structure; the decentralization, transparency,....
  • Raymond, Henry Jarvis (American journalist)
    U.S. journalist and politician who, as first editor and chief proprietor of The New York Times (from 1851), did much to elevate the style and tone of contemporary newspapers and who was prominent in forming the Republican Party....
  • Raymond III (count of Tripoli)
    count of the crusaders’ state of Tripoli (1152–87) and twice regent of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (1174–77, 1184–85)....
  • Raymond III Pons (count of Toulouse)
    Toulouse had been a centre of delegated Frankish power from the 8th century, but its pretension to princely status dated from 924, when Raymond III Pons (924–after 944) added control of coastal Gothia to that of Toulouse and its hinterland. Dynastic continuity, here as elsewhere, however, was badly interrupted, and none of the succeeding counts were able to organize a coherent lordship.......
  • Raymond IV (count of Toulouse)
    count of Toulouse (1093–1105) and marquis of Provence (1066–1105), the first—and one of the most effective—of the western European rulers who joined the First Crusade. He is reckoned as Raymond I of Tripoli, a county in the Latin East which he began to conquer from 1102 to 1105....
  • Raymond of Burgundy (Spanish count)
    ...monks and clerics found opportunities for ecclesiastical advancement in Spain, numerous French knights came to take part in the wars of the Reconquista. The most fortunate among them, the cousins Raymond and Henry of Burgundy, married Alfonso VI’s daughters, Urraca and Teresa, and thereby became the ancestors of the dynasties that governed León and Portugal until the late 14th......
  • Raymond of Peñafort, Saint (Spanish friar)
    Catalan Dominican friar who compiled the Decretals of Gregory IX, a body of medieval legislation that remained part of church law until the Code of Canon Law was promulgated in 1917....
  • Raymond of Poitiers (prince of Antioch)
    prince of Antioch (1136–49) who successfully resisted the attempts of the Byzantine emperor John II to establish control over the principality....
  • Raymond of Saint-Gilles (count of Toulouse)
    count of Toulouse (1093–1105) and marquis of Provence (1066–1105), the first—and one of the most effective—of the western European rulers who joined the First Crusade. He is reckoned as Raymond I of Tripoli, a county in the Latin East which he began to conquer from 1102 to 1105....
  • Raymond, Paul (British entertainment mogul)
    British entertainment mogul who opened (1958) the U.K.’s first private striptease club, the Raymond Revuebar, in London’s Soho district, making it and himself mainstays of the swinging London scene of the 1960s. He expanded his empire to other strip clubs and shows and soft-core pornography magazines, including Men Only, Club International, and Mayfair. In 1968 h...
  • Raymond Terrace (New South Wales, Australia)
    town, eastern New South Wales, Australia, on the east bank of the Hunter River (near its junction with the Williams), just north of Newcastle. Founded in the 1830s, the town was named after a member of an exploring expedition in 1812 led by Gov. Lachlan Macquarie. An important wool river port in the 1840s, Raymond Terrace was proclaimed a municipality and in 1937 merged into the...
  • Raymond Trencavel (French noble)
    ...of Angoulême (King John’s widow); it was only in 1243, after a revolt planned to coincide with an uprising in Languedoc, that the adjudication of 1202 was fulfilled in Aquitaine. The revolt of Raymond Trencavel, dispossessed heir to the viscounty of Béziers, halfheartedly supported by Raymond VII of Toulouse, was no more successful; its failure resulted in the vindictive de...
  • Raymond, Usher, IV (American musician)
    American musician whose smooth vocals and sensual ballads helped establish him as a rhythm-and-blues superstar beginning in the late 1990s....

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