Gregory X, Blessed

Also called  Steller's sea cow  very large aquatic mammal, now extinct, that once inhabited nearshore areas of the Komandor Islands in the Bering Sea. Steller's sea cows were wiped out by hunters in the 18th century less than 30 years after they were first discovered by Arctic explorers. Today, the term sea cow is sometimes used to refer to other sirenians, namely, the manatee and the

Black Death

Originating in China and Inner Asia, the plague was transmitted to Europeans (1347) when a Kipchak army, besieging a Genoese trading post in the Crimea, catapulted

Kabbala

By the mid-16th century the unchallenged centre of Kabbala was Safed, Galilee, where one of the greatest of all Kabbalists, Isaac ben Solomon Luria, spent the last years of his life. According to Gershom Gerhard Scholem, a modern Jewish scholar of Kabbala, Luria's influence was surpassed only by that of the Sefer ha-zohar. Lurianic Kabbala developed several basic doctrines:

Saarinen, Eero

Eero was the son of the noted architect Eliel Saarinen and Loja Gesellius, a sculptor. The Saarinen family of four, including a sister, Eva-Lisa, moved to the United States in 1923. Eero attended public schools in Michigan. In 1929 he studied sculpture at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris but, as he recounted years later, “it never occurred to me to do anything but follow

Arabia, History Of, Himyarites

Himyar is the Arabic form of the name of a people who appear in the inscriptions as Hmyr and in Greek sources as Homeritai. They occupied the extreme southwest of the peninsula and had their capital at Zafar, a site some nine miles southeast of present-day Yarim, on the motor road from Aden and Ta'izz to San'a'. The first appearance of Himyar in history is in Pliny's Naturalis

La Grande

City, seat (1905) of Union county, northeastern Oregon, U.S., between the Blue Mountains (west) and Wallowa Mountains (east), on the Grande Ronde River. The region was once roamed by Umatilla Indians. The city was founded in 1864 as a way station along the Oregon Trail. It developed as a shipping centre for ores, timber, and cattle; the cattle and lumber industries remain the economic mainstays

Peru, Achievement of independence

The Napoleonic invasion of Spain in 1808 sparked the Creoles (those of European descent born in America) in other Spanish colonies to struggle for independence between 1810 and 1821. But Peru remained loyal because of the conservative attitude of the Peruvian aristocracy, the presence of many Spaniards in Peru, the concentration of Spanish military power in Lima, and the effective