gambling, and extensive development in Atlantic City provided a huge influx of money to the resort, but much of the surrounding area remained impoverished.
Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway Navigable route, coastal eastern U.S. Authorized by Congress in 1919 to provide sheltered passage for both commercial shipping and pleasure craft, and constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers, it was originally planned to form a continuous chan¬ nel from New York City to Brownsville, Texas. Because the link through Florida was never completed, it remains in two separate sections (see Gulf Intracoastal Waterway). The Atlantic portion consists of rivers, bays, and canals from Cape Cod to Florida Bay, including the Cape Cod Canal and the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal.
Atlantic languages formerly West Atlantic languages Branch of the Niger-Congo language family. Atlantic comprises some 45 lan¬ guages spoken by some 30 million people living mainly in Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. About half of these people speak Fula, the language of the Fulani. The languages of the Wolof of Senegal and The Gambia and the Temne of northwest Sierra Leone are spoken by more than 1 million people.
Atlantic Monthly, The Monthly journal of literature and opinion, one of the oldest and most respected of U.S. reviews. Published in Boston, it was founded in 1857 by Moses Dresser Phillips. It soon became noted for the quality of its fiction and general articles, contributed by distinguished editors and authors such as James Russell Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry W. Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. In the early 1920s it expanded its scope to political affairs, featuring articles by figures such as Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Booker T. Washington. In the 1970s increasing costs nearly shut down the magazine; it was pur¬ chased in 1980 by Mortimer B. Zuckerman and was sold to the National Journal Group in 1999.
Atlantic Ocean Ocean separating North and South America from Europe and Africa. The second largest of the world’s oceans, the Atlan¬ tic has an area of 31,830,000 sq mi (82,440,000 sq km). With its marginal seas, including the Baltic, North, Black, and Mediterranean to the east, and Baffin Bay, Hudson Bay, the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Gulf of Mexico, and Caribbean Sea to the west, it covers some 41,100,000 sq mi (106,450,000 sq km). Including these latter bodies of water, its average depth is 10,925 ft (3,330 m); its maximum depth is 27,493 feet (8,380 m) in the Puerto Rico Trench. Its most powerful current is the Gulf Stream.
Atlantic salmon Oceanic trout species ( Salmo salar ), a highly prized game fish. It averages about 12 lbs (5.5 kg) and is marked with round or cross-shaped spots. Found on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, it enters streams in the fall to spawn. The young enter the sea in about two years and mature in about four. Adults may return to the sea and, after a year or two, spawn again. The ouananiche of rivers and the sebago, or lake, salmon are landlocked subspecies that are also prized for sport. The Atlan¬ tic salmon has been successfully introduced into the U.S. Great Lakes.
Atlantic, Battle of the Contest in World War II between Britain (and later the U.S.) and Germany for the control of Atlantic sea routes. Ini¬ tially the Anglo-French coalition drove German merchant shipping from the Atlantic, but with the fall of France in 1940, Britain was deprived of French naval support. The U.S. then assisted Britain with the lend-lease program. Early in 1942, the Axis began a large-scale submarine offensive against coastal shipping in U.S. waters, and German U-boats also oper¬ ated in force along the South Atlantic ship lanes to India and the Middle East. Allied shipping losses were severe, but the Allies succeeded in tight¬ ening their blockade of Axis Europe and combating the Axis war on ship¬ ping. By mid-1943 the Allies had recovered control of the sea routes.
Atlantis Legendary sunken island in the Atlantic Ocean west of Gibral¬ tar. The main sources for the legend are two of Plato’s dialogues, Timaeus and Critias. According to Plato, Atlantis had a rich civilization, and its princes made many conquests in the Mediterranean before earthquakes destroyed the island and it was swallowed up by the sea. Plato also sup¬ plied a history of its ideal commonwealth, and Atlantis is sometimes imagined as a utopia. The legend may have originated with the eruption c. 1500 bc of a volcano on ThIra, which was so powerful that it gave rise to earthquakes and tidal waves.
atlas Collection of maps or charts, usually bound together. The name derives from a custom—initiated by Gerardus Mercator in the 16th century—of using the figure of the Titan Atlas, holding the globe on his
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126 I atlas ► atomic bomb
shoulders, as a frontispiece for books of maps. Abraham Ortelius’s Epitome of the Theater of the World (1570) is generally thought to be the first modern atlas. Atlases often contain pictures, tabular data, facts about areas, and indexes of place-names keyed to coordinates of latitude and longitude or to a locational grid with numbers and letters along the sides of maps.
atlas Male figure used as a column to support an entablature, balcony, or other projection, originating in Classical architecture. Such figures are posed as if supporting great weights, like Atlas bearing the world. The related telamon of Roman architecture, the male counterpart of the cary¬ atid, is also a weight-bearing figure but does not usually appeal - in an atlas pose.
Atlas In Greek mythology, the strong man who supported the weight of the heavens on his shoulders. He was the son of the Titan Iapetus and the nymph Clymene (or Asia) and the brother of Prometheus. According to Hesiod, Atlas was one of the Titans who waged war against Zeus, and as punishment he was condemned to hold aloft the heavens.
Atlas, Charles orig. Angelo Siciliano (b. Oct. 30, 1893, Acri, Italy—d. Dec. 24, 1972, Long Beach, N.Y., U.S.) Italian-born U.S. body¬ builder. Atlas immigrated to the U.S. at age 10. In 1929 he and the adver¬ tiser Charles P. Roman launched a course involving isotonic exercises and nutritional maintenance. Their mail-order bodybuilding course became legendary through advertisements in three generations of pulp comic books, the standard ad depicting scenes in which a skinny boy loses his girlfriend to a well-built lifeguard (who kicks sand in his face) and regains her after taking the Atlas course.
Atlas Mountains Mountain system, northwestern Africa. It extends some 1,200 mi (2,000 km) from the Moroccan port of Agadir in the southwest to the Tunisian capital of Tunis in the northeast. It comprises several ranges, rising to various elevations, including the High Atlas in Morocco; the Tell, or Maritime, Atlas, which runs along the coast from Morocco to Tunisia; and the Saharan Atlas in Algeria, located farther inland and running adjacent to the Sahara. Among these ranges are situ¬ ated numerous plateaus and plains that support diverse ecologies. The system’s highest peak is Morocco’s Mount Toubkal, elevation 13,665 ft (4,165 m).
Atlas rocket Any of a series of U.S. expendable space launch vehicles. The Atlas was originally designed as a liquid-fueled ICBM and first tested in an operational version in 1959. Early versions launched most of the Mercury manned missions and, coupled with upper-stage rockets, a num¬ ber of Ranger, Surveyor, Mariner, and Pioneer probes on lunar and plan¬ etary missions. Later generations have become workhorses of the U.S. space program and carry a wide variety of scientific, military, and com¬ mercial spacecraft.
atman Vat-msnX (Sanskrit: “breath” or “self’) Basic concept in Hindu philosophy, describing that eternal core of the personality that survives death and transmigrates to a new life or is released from the bonds of existence. Atman became a central philosophical concept in the Upan- ishads. It underlies all aspects of personality, as Brahman underlies the working of the universe. The schools of Samkhya, Yoga, and Vedanta are particularly concerned with atman. See also soul.