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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian%20Revolutionary%20Federation
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Armenian Revolutionary Federation
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The Armenian Revolutionary Federation (, abbr. ARF (ՀՅԴ) or ARF-D), also known as Dashnaktsutyun (Armenian: Դաշնակցություն, lit. "Federation"), is an Armenian nationalist and socialist political party founded in 1890 in Tiflis, Russian Empire by Christapor Mikaelian, Stepan Zorian, and Simon Zavarian. , the party operates in Armenia, Artsakh, Lebanon, Iran and in countries where the Armenian diaspora is present. Although it has long been the most influential political party in the Armenian diaspora, it has a comparatively smaller proportional presence in modern-day Armenia. , the party was represented in three national parliaments, with ten seats in the National Assembly of Armenia, three seats in the National Assembly of Artsakh and three seats in the Parliament of Lebanon as part of the March 8 Alliance.
The ARF has traditionally advocated socialist democracy and has been a full member of the Socialist International since 2003; it joined the Second International in 1907. It has the largest membership of the political parties present in the Armenian diaspora, having established affiliates in more than 20 countries. Compared to other diasporan Armenian parties which tend to primarily focus on educational or humanitarian projects, the ARF is the most politically oriented of the organizations and traditionally has been one of the staunchest supporters of Armenian nationalism. The party campaigns for the recognition of the Armenian genocide and the right to reparations. It also advocates the establishment of United Armenia, partially based on the Treaty of Sèvres of 1920.
The ARF originated as a merger of various Armenian political groups, mainly from the Russian Empire, with the declared goal of achieving "the political and economic freedom of Turkish Armenia" by means of armed rebellion. In the 1890s, the party sought to unify the various small groups in the Ottoman Empire that were advocating reform and defending Armenian villages from the massacres and banditry that were widespread in some of the Armenian-populated areas of the empire. ARF members formed groups of partisans (fedayi) that defended Armenian civilians through armed resistance. The party refrained from revolutionary activity in the Russian Empire until the decision of the Russian authorities to confiscate Armenian Church property in 1903. Initially restricting its demands to the establishment of autonomy and democratic rights for Armenians in the two empires, the party adopted an independent and united Armenia as part of its program in 1919.
In 1918, the party was instrumental in the formation of the First Republic of Armenia, which fell to the Soviet communists in 1920. After the communists exiled its leadership, the ARF established itself within Armenian-diaspora communities, where it helped Armenians to preserve their cultural identity. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the ARF reestablished its presence in Armenia. Prior to Serzh Sargsyan's election as President of Armenia in February 2008 and for a short time thereafter, the ARF was a member of the governing coalition, even though it nominated its own candidate in the 2008 presidential elections.
ARF reentered Sargsyan's cabinet in February 2016 in what was defined as a "long-term political cooperation" agreement with the Republican Party by means of which the ARF would share responsibility for all government policies. The ARF then approved of Sargsyan's nomination in April 2018 as Prime Minister, from which post he resigned six days later (23 April 2018) amid large-scale protests in what came to be known as the Velvet Revolution. By the evening of 25 April 2018, ARF-Dashnaktsutyun had withdrawn from the coalition.
Following the Velvet Revolution, the party lost support from the general public in Armenia and is now being polled at 1–2%. The party lost political representation in the 2018 Armenian parliamentary election after receiving only 3.89% of the votes, which is lower than the 5% minimum threshold required for representation in the National Assembly.
During the 2020–2021 Armenian protests, the party confirmed it would participate in the 2021 Armenian parliamentary election as part of a political alliance - the Armenia Alliance - with Reborn Armenia. In the 2021 election, the Armenia Alliance, led by the second President of Armenia, Robert Kocharyan, won 21% of the popular vote and gained 29 seats in the National Assembly.
Early history
In the late 19th century, the Russian Empire became the hub of small groups advocating reform in Armenian-populated areas in the Ottoman Empire. In 1890, recognizing the need to unify these groups in order to be more efficient, Christapor Mikaelian, Simon Zavarian and Stepan Zorian created a new political party called the "Federation of Armenian Revolutionaries" (, Hay Heghapokhakanneri Dashnaktsutyun), which would eventually be called the "Armenian Revolutionary Federation" or "Dashnaktsutiun" in 1890.
The Social Democrat Hunchakian Party, an existing Armenian socialist and revolutionary party, initially agreed to join the "Federation of Armenian Revolutionaries." However, the Hunchaks soon withdrew due to disputes over ideological and organizational questions, such as the role of socialism in the party's program. Another faction of non-socialists led by Konstantin Khatisian split from the federation early on. Despite this, the party began to organize itself in the Ottoman Empire and convened its First General Congress in 1892, where a program containing socialist principles was adopted. The original aim of the ARF was to gain autonomy for the Armenian-populated areas in the Ottoman Empire by means of armed rebellion. At the First Congress, the party adopted a decentralized modus operandi according to which the chapters in different countries were allowed to plan and implement policies in tune with their local political atmosphere. The party set its goal of a society based on the democratic principles of freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, freedom of religion and agrarian reform.
Russian Empire
The ARF gradually acquired significant strength and sympathy among Russian Armenians. Mainly because of the ARF's stance towards the Ottoman Empire, the party enjoyed the support of the central Russian administration, as tsarist and ARF foreign policy had the same alignment until 1903. On 12 June 1903, the tsarist authorities passed an edict to bring all Armenian Church property under imperial control. This was faced by strong ARF opposition, because the ARF perceived the tsarist edict as a threat to the Armenian national existence. As a result, the ARF leadership decided to defend Armenian churches by dispatching militiamen who acted as guards and by holding mass demonstrations. In 1904, the party broke with its old policy of non-struggle against the Tsarist authorities, engaging in acts of terrorism against the imperial bureaucracy and establishing separate schools, courts, and prisons in Russian Armenia.
In 1905–06, the Armenian-Tatar massacres broke out during which the ARF became involved in armed activities. Some sources claim that the Russian government incited the massacres in order to reinforce its authority during the revolutionary turmoil of 1905. The first outbreak of violence occurred in Baku, in February 1905. The ARF held the Russian authorities responsible for inaction and instigation of massacres that were part of a larger anti-Armenian policy. On 11 May 1905, Dashnak revolutionary Drastamat Kanayan assassinated Russian governor general Nakashidze, who was considered by the Armenian population as the main instigator of hate and confrontation between the Armenians and the Tatars. Unable to rely on the state for protection, the Armenian bourgeoisie turned to the ARF. Against the criticisms of their rivals to the left (the Hunchaks, Bolsheviks and Specifists), the Dashnak leaders argued that, given employment discrimination against Armenian workers in non-Armenian concerns, the defence provided to the Armenian bourgeoisie was essential to the safekeeping of employment opportunities for Armenian laborers. The Russian Tsar's envoy in the Caucasus, Vorontsov-Dashkov, reported that the ARF bore a major portion of responsibilities for perpetrating the massacres. The ARF, however, argued that it helped to organize the defence of the Armenian population against Muslim attacks. The blows suffered at the hands of the Dashnakist fighting squads proved a catalyst for the consolidation of the Muslim community of the Caucasus. During that period, the ARF regarded armed activity, including terror, as necessary for the achievement of political goals.
In January 1912, 159 ARF members, being lawyers, bankers, merchants and other intellectuals, were tried before the Russian senate for their participation in the party. They were defended by then-lawyer Alexander Kerensky, who challenged much of the evidence used against them as the "original investigators had been encouraged by the local administration to use any available means" to convict the men. Kerensky succeeded in having the evidence reexamined for one of the defendants. He and several other lawyers "made openly contemptuous declarations" about this discrepancy to the Russian press, which was forbidden to attend the trials, and this in turn greatly embarrassed the senators. The Senate eventually opened an inquiry against the chief magistrate who had brought the charges against the Dashnak members and concluded that he was insane. Ninety-four of the accused were acquitted, while the rest were either imprisoned or exiled for varying periods, the most severe being six years.
Persian Empire
The Dashnaktsutiun held a meeting on 26 April 1907, dubbed the Fourth General Congress, at which ARF leaders such as Aram Manukian, Hamo Ohanjanyan and Stepan Stepanian discussed their engagement in the Iranian Constitutional Revolution. They established that the movement was one that had political, ideological and economic components and was thus aimed at establishing law and order, human rights and the interests of all working people. They also felt that it would work for the benefit and interest of Armenian-Iranians. The final vote was 25 votes in favour and one absentia.
From 1907 to 1908, during the time when the Young Turks came to power in the Ottoman Empire, Armenians from the Caucasus, Western Armenia, and Iran started to collaborate with Iranian constitutionalists and revolutionaries. Political parties, notably the Dashnaktsutiun, wanted to influence the direction of the revolution towards greater democracy and to safeguard gains already achieved. The Dashnak contribution to the fight was mostly military, as it sent some of its well-known fedayees to Iran after the guerrilla campaign in the Ottoman Empire ended with the rise of the Young Turks. A notable ARF member already in Iran was Yeprem Khan, who had established a branch of the party in the country. Yeprem Khan was highly instrumental in the Constitutional revolution of Iran. After the Persian national parliament was shelled by the Russian Colonel Vladimir Liakhov, Yeprem Khan rallied with Sattar Khan and other revolutionary leaders in the Constitutional Revolution of Iran against Mohammad Ali Shah Qajar. Relations between Sattar Khan and the ARF oscillated between amity and resentment. Sometimes he was viewed as being ignorant, while at other times he was dubbed a great hero. Nonetheless, the ARF came to collaborate with him and alongside Yeprem Khan posted many victories including the capture of Rasht in February 1909. At the end of June 1909, the fighters arrived in Tehran and after several battles, took over the Majles building and the Sepahsalar Mosque. Yeprem Khan was then appointed chief of Tehran police. This caused tensions between the Dashnaks and Khan.
Ottoman Empire
Abdul Hamid Period (1894–1908)
The ARF became a major political force in Armenian life. It was especially active in the Ottoman Empire, where it organized or participated in many revolutionary activities. The ARF was especially influential due to their ability to educate the population through a system of "educating, explaining,and encouraging". This was a tactic used to disseminate information to gain support in terms of political elections, campaigns, or alliances to strengthen the ARF's social relations. When they weren't educating their youth and preparing the new generation for revolution, they themselves were taking part in revolutionary activities. For example, in 1894, the ARF took part in the Sasun Resistance, supplying arms to the local population to help the people of Sasun defend themselves against the Hamidian purges. In June 1896, the Armenakan Party organized the Van Rebellion in the province of Van. The Armenakans, assisted by members of the Hunchakian and ARF parties, supplied all able-bodied men of Van with weapons. They rose to defend the civilians from the attack and subsequent massacre.
To raise awareness of the massacres of 1895–96, members of the Dashnaktsutiun led by Papken Siuni, occupied the Ottoman Bank on 26 August 1896. The purpose of the raid was to dictate the ARF's demands of reform in the Armenian populated areas of the Ottoman Empire and to attract European attention to their cause since the Europeans had many assets in the bank. The operation caught European attention but at the cost of more massacres by Sultan Abdul Hamid II.
During this period, many famous intellectuals joined the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, including Harutiun Shahrigian, Avetik Isahakyan, Hakob Zavriev, Levon Shant, Karekin Khajag, Vartkes Serengülian, Abraham Gyulkhandanyan, Vahan Papazian, Siamanto, Nikol Aghbalian and many others.
The Khanasor Expedition was performed by the Armenian militia against the Kurdish Mazrik tribe on 25 July 1897. During the Defense of Van, the Mazrik tribe had ambushed a squad of Armenian defenders and massacred them. The Khanasor Expedition was the ARF's retaliation. Some Armenians consider this their first victory over the Ottoman Empire and celebrate each year in its remembrance.
On 30 March 1904, the ARF played a major role in the Second Sasun Uprising. The ARF sent arms and fedayi to defend the region for the second time. Among the 500 fedayees participating in the resistance were famed figures such as Kevork Chavush, Sepasdatsi Murad and Hrayr Djoghk. Although they managed to hold off the Ottoman army for several months, despite their lack of fighters and firepower, Ottoman forces captured Sasun and massacred thousands of Armenians.
In 1905, members of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation organized the failed Yıldız Attempt, an assassination plot on Sultan Abdul Hamid II in the capital of the Ottoman Empire, Constantinople (modern day Istanbul); the explosion missed its target by a few minutes and was helped by Belgian anarchist Edward Joris. One of Dashnaksutiun's founders Kristapor Mikaelian was killed by an accidental explosion during the planning of the operation.
Young Turk Revolution (1908–14)
In the 1890s the party used terrorism against the Ottoman Empire and Russia with the goal of gaining an independent nation, more well known attacks occurred against Bedros Kapamciyan, the mayor of Van who was assassinated in December 1912, and the assassination of archbishop Leon Tourian in New York City on December 24, 1933.
Together with the Committee of Union and Progress, a group of mostly European-educated Turks, the ARF had been one of the largest revolutionary groups trying to overthrow Sultan Abdul Hamid II. In a general assembly meeting in 1907, the ARF acknowledged that the Armenian and Turkish revolutionaries had the same goals. Although the Tanzimat reforms had given Armenians more rights and seats in the parliament, the ARF hoped to gain autonomy to govern Armenian populated areas of the Ottoman Empire as a "state within a state". The "Second congress of the Ottoman opposition" took place in Paris, France, in 1907. Opposition leaders including Ahmed Riza (liberal), Sabahheddin Bey, and ARF member Khachatur Maloumian attended. During the meeting, an alliance between the two parties was officially declared. The ARF decided to cooperate with the Committee of Union and Progress, hoping that if the Young Turks came to power, autonomy would be granted to the Armenians.
In 1908, Abdul Hamid II was overthrown during the Young Turk Revolution, which launched the Second Constitutional Era of the Ottoman Empire. Dashnaktsutiun became a legal political party and Armenians gained more seats in the 1908 parliament, but the reforms fell short of the greater autonomy that the ARF had hoped for. The Adana massacre in 1909 also created antipathy between Armenians and Turks, and the ARF cut relations with the Young Turks in 1912. Between December 1912 and 1914 ARF politicians held negotiations with the CUP about political reforms in the eastern provinces. The Armenians had the support of the Russians and the CUP accused the Armenians that their actions caused further division between Turks and Armenians. The CUP and ARF continued a close cooperation throughout the Second Constitutional Era up until 1914.
World War I and the Armenian genocide
In 1915, Dashnak leaders were deported and killed alongside other Armenian intellectuals during a purge by Ottoman officials against the leaders of the empire's Armenian communities. The ARF, maintaining its ideological commitment to a "Free, Independent, and United Armenia", led the defense of the Armenian people during the Armenian genocide, becoming leaders of the successful Van Resistance. Jevdet Bey, the Ottoman administrator of Van, tried to suppress the resistance by killing two Armenian leaders (Ishkhan and Vramian) and trying to imprison Aram Manukian, who had risen to fame and gained the nickname "Aram of Van". Moreover, on 19 April, he issued an order to exterminate all Armenians, and threatened to kill all Muslims who helped them.
About 185,000 Armenians lived in Vaspurakan. In the city of Van itself, there were around 30,000 Armenians, but more Armenians from surrounding villages joined them during the Ottoman offensive. The battle started on 20 April 1915, with Aram Manukian as the leader of the resistance, and lasted for two months. In May, the Armenian battalions and Russian regulars entered the city and successfully drove the Ottoman army out of Van. The Dashnaktsutiun was also involved in other less-successful resistance movements in Zeitun, Shabin-Karahisar, Urfa, and Musa Dagh. After the end of the Van resistance, ARF leader Aram Manukian became governor of the Administration for Western Armenia and worked to ease the sufferings of Armenians.
At the end of World War I, members of the Young Turks movement, considered executors of the Armenian genocide by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, were assassinated during Operation Nemesis.
Republic of Armenia (1918–1920)
As a result of the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917, the Armenian, Georgian, and Azerbaijani leaders of the Caucasus united to create the Transcaucasian Federation in the winter of 1918. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk had drastic consequences for the Armenians: Turkish forces reoccupied Western Armenia. The federation lasted for only three months, eventually leading to the proclamation of the Republics of Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. The negotiators for Armenia were from the ARF.
With the collapse of the Transcaucasian Federation, the Armenians were left to fend for themselves as the Turkish army approached the capital of Yerevan. At first, fearing a major military defeat and massacre of the population of Armenia, the Dashnaks wanted to evacuate the city of Yerevan. Instead, the Military Council headed by Colonel Pirumian decided that they would not surrender and would confront the Turkish army. The opposing armies met on 28 May 1918, near Sardarapat. The battle was a major military success for the Armenian army as it was able to halt the invading Turkish forces. The Armenians also stood their ground at the Battle of Kara Killisse and at the Battle of Bash Abaran. The creation of the First Republic of Armenia was proclaimed on the same day of the Battle of Sardarapat, and the ARF became the ruling party. However, the new state was devastated, with a dislocated economy, hundreds of thousands of refugees, and a mostly starving population.
The ARF, led by General Andranik, tried several times to seize Shusha (known as Shushi by Armenians), a city in Karabakh. Just before the Armistice of Mudros was signed, Andranik was on the way from Zangezur to Shusha, to control the main city of Karabakh. Andranik's forces got within of the city when the First World War ended, and Turkey, along with Germany and Austria-Hungary, surrendered to the Allies. British forces ordered Andranik to stop all military advances, assuring him that the conflict would be solved with the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. Andranik, not wanting to antagonize the British, retreated to Goris, Zangezur.
The Armenian Revolutionary Federation had a strong presence in the DRA government. Most of the important government posts, such as prime minister, defence minister and interior minister were controlled by its members.
The DRA wanted to recover the country's economy, and create new rules and regulations, but the situation required it to focus on overcoming widespread hunger in the country. The situation was complicated externally, provoked by Turkish and Azerbaijani Muslim riots. In 1920 the situation in the country became worse, with apparent rapprochement between Soviet Russia and Kemal's Turkey. When the Turkish-Armenian war started in autumn 1920, Armenia was isolated and abandoned by Western allies. The newly formed League of Nations did not provide any help. Soviet Russia intensified its pressure on Armenia. Losing the war, Armenia signed the Treaty of Alexandropol on 2 December 1920, which resulted in the recognition of large territorial losses to Turkey. The Armenia military-revolutionary committee formed in Soviet Azerbaijan. Despite their tight grip on power, the ARF ceded power to the Communist Red Army troops invading from the north, which culminated with a Soviet takeover. The ARF was banned, its leaders exiled, and many of its members dispersed to other parts of the world.
Exile
After the communists took over the short-lived First Republic of Armenia and ARF leaders were exiled, the Dashnaks moved their base of operations to where the Armenian diaspora had settled. With the large influx of Armenian refugees in the Levant, the ARF established a strong political structure in Lebanon and to a lesser extent, Syria. From 1921 to 1990, the Dashnaktsutiun established political structures in more than 200 states, including the USA, where a large number of Armenians had settled.
With political and geographic division came religious division. One part of the Armenian Church claimed it wanted to be separate from the head, whose seat was in Echmiadzin, Armenian SSR. Some Armenians in the US thought Moscow tried to use the Armenian Church to promote Communists' ideas outside the country. The Armenian Church thus separated into two branches, Echmiadzin and Cilician, and started to operate separately. In the US, Echmiadzin branch churches of the Armenian Apostolic Church would not admit members of the ARF. This was one of the reasons why the ARF discouraged people from attending these churches and brought the representatives from a different wing of the church, the Armenian Catholicosate of Cilicia, from Lebanon to the US. In 1933, members of ARF were convicted in the assassination of Armenian archbishop Levon Tourian with large butcher knives in New York City. Prior to his murder, the archbishop had been accused of being exclusively pro-Soviet by the ARF. The ARF was legally exonerated of any direct involvement in the assassination, but the incident weakened the party in the United States and led to its members being ostracized by the other Armenian political parties.
During World War II, some Berlin-based ARF members saw an opportunity to remove Soviet control from Armenia by supporting the Nazis. The Armenian Legion, composed largely of former Soviet Red Army POWs, was led by Drastamat Kanayan. It participated in the occupation of the Crimean Peninsula but was later based in the Netherlands and France a result of Adolf Hitler's distrust of their loyalty.
During the 1950s, tensions arose between the ARF and the Armenian SSR. The death of Catholicos Garegin of the Holy See of Cilicia prompted a struggle for succession. The National Ecclesiastic Assembly, which was largely influenced by the ARF, elected Zareh of Aleppo. This decision was rejected by the Echmiadzin-based Catholicos of All Armenians, the anti-ARF coalition, and Soviet Armenian authorities. Zareh extended his administrative authority over a large part of the Armenian diaspora, furthering the rift that had already been created by his election. This event split the large Armenian community of Lebanon, creating sporadic clashes between the supporters of Zareh and those who opposed his election.
Religious conflict was part of a greater conflict that raged between the two "camps" of the Armenian diaspora. The ARF still resented the fact that they were ousted from Armenia after the Red Army took control, and the ARF leaders supported the creation of a "Free, Independent, and United Armenia", free from both Soviet and Turkish hegemony. The Social Democrat Hunchakian Party and Ramgavar Party, the main rivals of the ARF, supported the newly established Soviet rule in Armenia.
Lebanon
From 1923 to 1958, conflicts erupted among Armenian political parties struggling to dominate and organize the diaspora. The ARF and Hunchakian parties struggled in 1926 for control of the newly established shanty-town of Bourj Hammoud in Lebanon; ARF member Vahan Vartabedian was assassinated. The assassination of Hunchakian members Mihran Aghazarian and S. Dekhrouhi followed in 1929 and 1931 respectively. In 1956, when Bishop Zareh was consecrated Catholicos of Cilicia, the Catholicos of Echmiadzin refused to recognize his authority. This controversy polarized the Armenian community of Lebanon. As a result, in the context of the Lebanese civil strife of 1958, an armed conflict erupted between supporters (the ARF) and opponents (Hunchakians, Ramgavars) of Zareh.
Prior to the Lebanese Civil War of 1975–90, the party was closely allied to the Phalangist Party of Pierre Gemayel and generally ran joint tickets with the Phalangists, especially in Beirut constituencies with large Armenian populations. The refusal of the ARF, along with most Armenian groups, to play an active role in the civil war, however, soured relations between the two parties, and the Lebanese Forces (a militia dominated by Phalangists and commanded by Bachir Gemayel, Pierre Gemayel's son), responded by attacking the Armenian quarters of many Lebanese towns, including Bourj Hammoud. Many Armenians affiliated with the ARF took up arms voluntarily to defend their quarters. In the midst of the Lebanese civil war, the shadowy guerrilla organization Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide emerged and carried out assassinations from 1975 to 1983. The guerrilla organization has sometimes been linked to the Dashnaks.
Ethnic Armenians are allocated six seats in Lebanon's 128-member National Assembly. The Lebanese branch of the ARF has usually controlled a majority of the Armenian vote and won most of the ethnic Armenian seats in the National Assembly. A major change occurred in the parliamentary election of 2000. With a rift between ARF and the Mustaqbal (Future) party of Rafik Hariri and the ARF was left with only one parliamentary seat, its worst result in many decades. The ARF called for a boycott of the 2005 Beirut elections. Relations soured further when on 5 August 2007 by-election in the Metn district, which includes the predominantly Armenian area of Bourj Hammoud, ARF decided to support Camille Khoury, the candidate backed by opposition leader Michel Aoun's Free Patriotic Movement against Phalangist leader Amine Gemayel and subsequently won the seat. In the 2009 Lebanese general elections, the ARF won 2 seats in parliament which it holds presently. In June 2011, a new Lebanese government was formed where ARF party members were appointed to two ministerial positions, including Ministry of Industry, as part of the March 8 alliance.
The ARF Lebanon branch is headquartered in Bourj Hammoud in the Shaghzoian Centre, along with the ARF Lebanon Central Committee's Aztag Daily newspaper and "Voice Of Van" 24-hour radio station.
Syria
During the French Mandate and under the parliamentary régime in Syria, there were reserved seats for the various religious communities, like in Lebanon, including for Armenians. This system is unofficially still living. Even when they didn't take part as such in elections, Armenian parties such as Dashnak exerted an influence on them.
Independent Armenia
The ARF has always maintained its ideological commitment to "a Free, Independent, and United Armenia". The term United Armenia refers to the borders of Armenia recognized by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and outlined in the Treaty of Sèvres. After Armenia fell under Soviet control in 1920, the ARF within the Armenian diaspora opposed Soviet rule over Armenia and rallied in support of Armenian independence. It contributed to organizing a social and cultural framework aimed at preserving the Armenian identity. However, because of tight communist control, the ARF could not operate in the Armenian SSR and the political party remained banned until 1991.
In the leadup to the reestablishment of independent Armenia, the ARF was opposed to Armenia's immediate independence from the Soviet Union, considering the threat of neighboring Turkey to be too great.
When independence was achieved in 1991, the ARF soon became one of the major and most active political parties, rivaled mainly by the Pan-Armenian National Movement. Subsequently, on 28 December 1994, President Levon Ter-Petrosyan in a famous television speech banned the ARF, which was the nation's leading opposition party, along with Yerkir, the country's largest daily newspaper. Ter-Petrosyan introduced evidence that supposedly detailed a plot hatched by the ARF to engage in terrorism against his administration, endanger Armenia's national security and overthrow the government. Throughout the evening, government security forces arrested leading ARF figures, and police seized computers, fax machines, files and printing equipment from ARF offices. In addition to Yerkir, government forces also closed several literary, women's, cultural, and youth publications. A group of eleven ARF members were arrested and accused of being members of a purported secret terrorist cell within the ARF known as the "Dro Group" (named after the Dro Committee, the group that was allegedly behind the plot), which was allegedly led by ARF member Hrant Markarian. Another group of thirty-one ARF members, including ARF Bureau member Vahan Hovhannisyan, were also arrested and charged with attempting to stage an armed coup, among other crimes.
Gerard Libaridian, an historian and close adviser of Ter-Petrosyan, collected and presented the evidence against the defendants. He later stated in an interview that he was unsure if the evidence was true, inviting the notion that the party was banned because of its increasing chances of winning seats in the July 1995 parliamentary elections. The trials were marked by accusations of misconduct, including forced confessions, and were regarded as politically motivated by the opposition and human rights groups. Several months after the elections, most of the men were found not guilty with the exception of several defendants charged for engaging in corrupt business practices. Three men from the "Dro Group" case (Arsen Artsruni, Armenak Mnjoyan, Armen Grigoryan) and one man from the group of 31 (Tigran Avetisyan) were sentenced to death for murder. Their sentences were commuted to life imprisonment in 2003. Mnjoyan died while in prison in early 2019, while Artsruni and Avetisyan continue to serve their sentences.
The ban on the party was lifted less than a week after Ter-Petrosyan fell from power in February 1998 and was replaced by Robert Kocharyan, who was backed by the Dashnaks. Most of the ARF members convicted in relation to the "Dro Group" and "Group of 31" cases were released after the relegalization of the party.
In 2007, the ARF was not part of but had a cooperation agreement in place with the governing coalition, which consisted of two parties in the government coalition, the Republican Party and Prosperous Armenia Party. The Country of Law party was also a member of the governing coalition until it pulled out in May 2006. With 16 of the 131 seats in the National Assembly of Armenia, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation became the third-largest party in parliament.
In addition to its parliamentary seats, the following governmental ministries were also headed by ARF members: Ministry of Agriculture, Davit Lokian; Ministry of Education and Science, Levon Mkrtchian; Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, Aghvan Vardanian; Ministry of Healthcare, Norair Davidian. On 13 July 2007, the ARF History Museum was inaugurated in Yerevan, displaying the history of the party and of its notable members.
In 2007, the ARF announced that it would nominate its own candidate to run for president of Armenia in the February 2008 presidential election. In an innovation on 24–25 November 2007, the ARF conducted a non-binding Armenia-wide primary election. They invited the public to vote to advise the party which of two candidates, Vahan Hovhannisyan and Armen Rustamyan, they should formally nominate for president of Armenia in the subsequent official election. What characterized it as a primary instead of a standard opinion poll was that the public knew of the primary in advance, all eligible voters were invited, and the voting was by secret ballot. Nearly 300,000 people voted in makeshift tents and mobile ballot boxes. Vahan Hovhannisyan received the most votes and was subsequently nominated for the presidential election by the ARF Supreme Council in a secret ballot. In the presidential election, Hovhannisyan placed fourth with 6.2% of the vote. In 2008, ARF re-joined the ruling political coalition in Armenia and supported strong police actions during the 2008 Armenian presidential election protests that led to ten deaths.
Due to the signature of the so-called Zurich Protocols the ARF left the coalition and became an opposition party once again in 2009, but relations with other factions in the Armenian opposition remained frosty. In 2012 parliamentary election the ARF won 5 seats losing 11 parliamentary seats from 2007.
ARF then reentered Sargsyan's cabinet in February 2016, obtaining three ministerial posts: Ministry of Economy, Local Government and Education; also, as a result of what was defined as a "long-term political cooperation" agreement with the Republican Party, ARF also got to appoint the regional governors of Aragatsotn and Shirak Provinces.
After the 2016 Nagorno-Karabakh clashes, the ARF helped the Ministry of Defense of Armenia in setting up a volunteer reserve battalion, made up mostly of party members. This unit, made up of experienced commanders and soldiers, some of them veterans from the Nagorno-Karabakh war, is one of the newest units of the Armenian military. It traces back its heritage from the Shushi independent battalion of the previous war and is called the "ARF battalion".
Following the 2017 elections, the party won 7 seats in the National Assembly with 6,58% of the votes.
Following the start of the Armenian Velvet Revolution, the ARF broke its coalition with the Republican Party of Armenia and moved into opposition; later on, the party supported Nikol Pashinyan's new cabinet. The 2018 election saw the collapse of the party. The ARF only scored 3,89% of the votes and won no seats. It was the first time since the independence of Armenia that ARF had no political representation in the National Assembly.
Since its loss in the 2018 election, the ARF has become the main extra parliamentary opposition party to the Pashinyan government.
The ARF also gained popularity by intensifying its social aid programs to those in need in Armenia, especially in the rural areas. The party has provided aid to locals during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, mainly thanks to various donation made by members of the Armenian diaspora.
During the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War, the ARF again formed volunteer battalions to fight in the war. After the conclusion of the war, the party formed a coalition with 16 other political parties (most notably the former ruling Republican Party and the parliamentary opposition party Prosperous Armenia) calling itself the "Homeland Salvation Movement", calling on Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan to resign for the defeat of the Armenian side in the war. Along with the other parties in the coalition, the ARF supported former prime minister Vazgen Manukyan as their candidate for prime minister. The Homeland Salvation Movement attempted to force Pashinyan's resignation through the organization of mass protests.
The ARF formed the Armenia Alliance electoral alliance with ex-president Robert Kocharyan and the Reborn Armenia party to participate in the 2021 snap parliamentary election. The alliance won 29 seats out of 107, 10 of which were taken by candidates put forward by the ARF.
Electoral record
In the 2000s, the party usually garnered some 10 to 15 percent of the vote in national elections. In a 2007 confidential telegram Anthony Godfrey, U.S. Embassy in Armenia chargé d'affaires, wrote that the party "has had a historically loyal following of 10 to 12 percent of the population, but probably has little chance to expand from that base." Following the 2018 Armenian Velvet Revolution, the party polled at 1–2%. The ARF, for the first time since 1999, did not win seats in parliament and effectively became an extra-parliamentary opposition party. However, the party gained 10 seats in parliament following the 2021 elections, as part of the Armenia Alliance coalition.
Electoral history
Ottoman Empire
Chamber of Deputies
Russian Republic
Russian Constituent Assembly
Republic of Armenia
Parliamentary elections
Presidential elections by popular vote
Presidential elections by parliament vote
Republic of Artsakh
Parliamentary elections
Artsakh
After the Soviet Union expanded into the South Caucasus, it established the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast (NKAO) within the Azerbaijan SSR in 1923. In the final years of the Soviet Union, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation established a branch in Nagorno-Karabakh. In January 1991, the Dashnaktsutiun won the parliamentary election and governed as the ruling party during the entirety of the Nagorno-Karabakh war. The Dashnaks actively supported the independence of Nagorno-Karabakh (or Artsakh as Armenians call it). It aided the Nagorno-Karabakh Defense Army by sending armed volunteers to the front lines and supplying the army with weapons, food, medicine and moral support. The party even had its own infantry battalion, subordinated to NKR army command, the "Shushi independent battalion", which became one of the most efficient Armenian units during the war. After deciding not to run in the second parliamentary elections, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation ran in the 1999 elections and won 9 of the 33 seats in the National Assembly of Nagorno Karabakh. At the June 2005 elections, the Dashnaktsutiun was part of an electoral alliance with Movement 88 that won 3 out of 33 seats. Following the March 2020 elections, the party won 3 seats in the National Assembly.
Ideology and goals
The principal founders of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation were nationalist, socialists, and Marxist elements were omnipresent in the introductory section of the party's first program written by Rosdom, entitled "General Theory". The ARF first set down its ideological and political goals during the Hamidian regime. It denounced the Ottoman regime and the unbearable conditions of life for its Armenians and advocated changing the regime in power and securing more rights through revolution and armed struggle. The ARF had and still has socialism within its political philosophy. Its program expresses the entire, multifaceted make-up of the Armenian revolutionary movement, including its national-liberation, political, and social-economic aspects. Politically the ARF is aligned with Marxist socialism, being influenced by Marxist analysis of history, capitalism, and politics.
Despite subsequent modifications, the above-mentioned principles and tendencies continue to characterize the ideological world of the Dashnaktsutiun, and its approach toward issues has remained unchanged. In recent decades, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation reasserted itself ideologically and reformulated the section of its program called "General Theory", adapting it to current concepts of socialism, democracy and rights of self-determination. The party has long supported a parliamentary republican political system and campaigned for a "yes" vote in the 2015 constitutional referendum.
Its primary goals are:
Creation of a free, independent, and united Armenia. The borders of United Armenia shall include all territories designated as Armenia by the Treaty of Sèvres as well as the regions of Artsakh, Javakhk, and Nakhichevan (See map).
International condemnation of the genocide committed by the Ottoman Empire against the Armenians, return of the lands which are occupied, and just reparations to the Armenian nation
The gathering of worldwide expatriate Armenians on the lands of United Armenia.
Strengthening Armenia's statehood, institutionalization of democracy and the rule of law, securing the people's economic well-being, and establishment of social justice, and a democratic and socialistic independent republic in Armenia
In 1907, the Dashnaktsutiun joined the Second International until its dissolution during World War I. It later joined the reformed Socialist International and remained a full member until 1960, when it decided to pull out of the organization. In 1996, it was re-accepted as an observer member, and in 1999 the Dashnaks earned full membership in the international organization. The party was also a member of the Labour and Socialist International between 1923 and 1940.
A member of the ARF is called Dashnaktsakan (in Eastern Armenian) or Tashnagtsagan (in Western Armenian), or Dashnak/Tashnag for short. Other than calling each other by name, members formally address one another as Comrade (Ընկեր or Unger for boys and men, Ընկերուհի or Ungerouhi for girls and women).
The party has supported some pro-European policies which favor the European integration of Armenia. The party was in favor of Armenia's continued political association and economic integration with the European Union. However, in 2013 the ARF backed the government's decision to join the Eurasian Economic Union instead of signing an Association Agreement and DCTFA with the EU, stating that there were "security concerns" facing Armenia. In 2016, the ARF signed a memorandum of co-operation with the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D). Former S&D President Gianni Pittella stated, "Armenia deserves to benefit from both its membership of the Eurasian Economic Union and the closest relations with the European Union. The Armenian Revolutionary Federation has its place within the European social-democratic family."
Affiliate organizations
The ARF is considered the foremost organization in the Armenian diaspora, having established numerous Armenian schools, community centers, Scouting and athletic groups, relief societies, youth groups, camps, and other organs throughout the world.
The ARF also works as an umbrella organ for the Armenian Relief Society, the Homenetmen Armenian General Athletic Union, the Hamazkayin Cultural Foundation, and many other community organizations. It operates the Armenian Youth Federation, which encourages the youth of the diaspora to join the political cause of the ARF and the Armenian people.
The ARF Shant Student Association and the ARF Armen Karo Student Association are organizations of college and university students on various campuses and are the only ARF organizations whose membership is exclusively from this group.
The Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide (JCAG) was the militant arm of the ARF. It was active in from 1975 to 1987. They were responsible for a number of assassinations of Turkish diplomats with the goal of bringing attention to the Armenian genocide.
US and Canada
Armenian National Committee of America, an ARF-affiliated organization, is the strongest Armenian lobby organization in the United States. Its sister organization, the Armenian National Committee of Canada, operates in Canada as the strongest and most influential Armenian Canadian organization.
Western US Committee controversy
In December 2020, the ARF's highest body, the Bureau, appointed a new Central Committee in the Western United States, citing the limitations created by the COVID-19 pandemic as reason for the appointment without the calling of a convention. After this, a group of ARF members refused to accept the decision, convened an assembly and elected a body which claimed to be the legitimate Central Committee of the ARF in the Western United States. This group took control of the bank account and various movable and immovable properties of the ARF Western Region of the US, including the official organ Asbarez. The members of this group were expelled from the party by decision of the Bureau in March 2021. The expelled group then initiated lawsuits, including Federal RICO litigation. On July 18, 2021, at the ARF Western United States 55th Regional Convention, sanctioned and attended by the ARF Bureau, a new Central Committee of the ARF Western United States Region was elected for a two-year term. On March 8, 2022, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation's World Congress, its highest authority, issued a public statement re-affirming that "the only ARF entity operating in the Western United States region is the ARF Central Committee elected for a term of two years on July 18, 2021 at the ARF Western United States 55th Regional Convention. This entity is the only one authorized to incorporate the use of the ARF's name and use its flag, insignia and anthem." The newspaper Oragark was established as the new official publication of the organization in the Western United States in April 2022.
Other countries
Branches of the Armenian National Committee in Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Cyprus, Egypt, England, France, Georgia, Greece, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Russia, Switzerland, Syria, the Netherlands and Uruguay subsequently have played a significant role in the campaign for the recognition of the Armenian genocide in their respective countries.
Media
ARF and its affiliate organizations worldwide publish 12 newspapers: 4 daily and 8 weeklies. Also, there are two TV channels, including one online. Two radio stations are aired every day, including one online.
Periodicals
Television
Radio
See also
Armenian national movement
Armenian fedayees
List of Armenian Revolutionary Federation members
Armenian Revolutionary Federation in Lebanon
ARF History Museum
References
Notes
Sources
Sources
[a critical publication on the party's history by a Ramgavar author]
[a publication by the ARF]
External links
Official web site – Armenian Revolutionary Federation
Official English language site – Armenian Revolutionary Federation – Dashnaktsutyun (Armenian Socialist Party)
Armenian Revolutionary Federation Shant Student Association
Armenian Revolutionary Federation Archives Institute
Altintas, Toygun: Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF), in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War.
Political parties in Armenia
Transnational political parties
1890 establishments in the Russian Empire
Political parties established in 1890
Party of European Socialists member parties
Anti-communist organizations
Armenian national liberation movement
Russophilic parties in Armenia
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglass%20North
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Douglass North
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Douglass Cecil North (November 5, 1920 – November 23, 2015) was an American economist known for his work in economic history. Along with Robert Fogel, he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1993. In the words of the Nobel Committee, North and Fogel "renewed research in economic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods in order to explain economic and institutional change."
North was an influential figure in the new institutional economics, which emphasizes the impact of institutions on economic behaviors and outcomes. North argued, "Institutions provide the incentive structure of an economy; as that structure evolves, it shapes the direction of economic change towards growth, stagnation, or decline." Rational and wealth-maximizing individuals lack complete information and have difficulties monitoring and enforcing agreements. Institutions can provide information and reduce transaction costs, thus encouraging economic activity.
Biography
Douglass North was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on November 5, 1920. He moved several times as a child due to his father's work at MetLife. The family lived in Ottawa, Ontario, in Lausanne, Switzerland, in New York City, and in Wallingford, Connecticut.
North was educated at Ashbury College in Ottawa and the Choate School in Wallingford. He was accepted at Harvard at the same time that his father became the head of MetLife on the West Coast, so North chose to attend the University of California, Berkeley. During his time at Berkeley, North was a member of the Chi Phi Fraternity. In 1942, he graduated with a B.A. degree in General Curriculum-Humanities. Although his grades amounted to slightly better than a "C" average, he managed to complete a triple major in political science, philosophy and economics. That same year, he entered the US Merchant Marine Academy, graduated a year later and went to sea for three years as a deck officer.
A conscientious objector in World War II, North became a navigator in the Merchant Marine, traveling between San Francisco and Australia. During that time, he read economics and picked up his hobby of photography. He taught navigation at the Maritime Service Officers' School in Alameda during the last year of the war, and struggled with the decision of whether to become a photographer or an economist.
North returned to UC Berkeley, where he obtained a Ph.D. degree in economics in 1952. He subsequently began his career as an assistant professor at the University of Washington.
North died on November 23, 2015, at his summer home in Benzonia, Michigan from esophageal cancer at the age of 95.
Academic career
From 1951 to 1956, North was an assistant professor of economics at the University of Washington, then from 1956 to 1960, an associate professor. In 1960, North became co-editor of the Journal of Economic History, popularizing cliometrics (New Economic History), and from 1960 to 1983, he was professor of economics at the University of Washington, where he also chaired the economics department from 1967 to 1979. In 1979 he served as the Peterkin Professor of Political Economy at Rice University, and in 1981–82 as the Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University, before joining the faculty of Washington University in St. Louis in 1983 as the Henry R. Luce Professor of Law and Liberty in the Department of Economics (where he also served as director of the center for Political Economy from 1984 to 1990). He was the Bartlett Burnap Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
In 1991, he became the first economic historian to win the John R. Commons Award, which was established by the International Honors Society for Economics in 1965.
A collection of North's papers is housed at the Rubenstein Library at Duke University.
Research agenda
Along with Ronald Coase and Oliver Williamson, he helped found the International Society for the New Institutional Economics (ISNIE) which held its first meeting in St. Louis in 1997. His research included property rights, transaction costs, the institutional basis of markets, and economic organization in history as well as economic development in developing countries.
North served as an expert for the Copenhagen Consensus and as an advisor to governments around the world. He was engaged in research (with John J. Wallis of the University of Maryland and Barry Weingast of Stanford University) on how countries emerge from what they call "the natural state" and into long-run economic growth. He was a trustee of the Economists for Peace and Security and a special adviser to the non-profit organization Vipani.
Publications
Institutions
In 1991 Douglass North published a paper, entitled 'Institutions,' in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. This paper summarized much of his earlier research relating to economic and institutional change. North defines institutions as "humanly devised constraints that structure political, economic and social interactions". Constraints, as North describes, are devised as formal rules (constitutions, laws, property rights) and informal restraints (sanctions, taboos, customs, traditions, codes of conduct), which usually contribute to the perpetuation of order and safety within a market or society. The degree to which they are effective is subject to varying circumstances, such as a government's limited coercive force, a lack of organized state, or the presence of strong religious precept.
Section 2 of North's 1991 paper describes the economic development of societies as occurring in stages:
North begins with local exchange within the village. In this setting, specialization "is rudimentary and self-sufficiency characterizes most individual households", with small-scale village trade existing within dense social networks of informal constraints that facilitate local exchange, and a relatively low transaction cost. However, this confined market reduces the potential of specialization and increases production costs. In this close-knit network "people have an intimate understanding of each other, and the threat of violence is a continuous force for preserving order ..."
With growth, the market extends beyond the village into larger, interconnected regions. As the participants of a transaction become more socially distant, the terms of exchange must be made more explicit. This increase in transaction costs necessitates institutions that reduce the risks of being cheated, either by raising "the benefits of cooperative solutions or the costs of defection". With increased specialization, production costs are reduced and can justify higher transaction costs.
As long-distance trade becomes more feasible, generally through caravans or lengthy ship voyages, individuals and groups experience occupational and geographic specialization. Society also experiences a rise of formal trading centers (temporary gathering places, towns or cities). From the development of long-distance trade arise two transactional cost problems.
The first transactional cost problem is agency: the transfer of one's goods or services outside the control of local rule leaves the rules of exchange undefined, the risk of unfair trade high, and the contracts within society unenforced. For this reason, sedentary merchants often would send their kin with the product to ensure its safe arrival and the fulfillment of agreed terms of exchange by the receiving party.
The second transactional cost problem is the enforcement of contracts. Historically this problem was met with either armed forces protecting ships or caravans, or use of tolls by local coercive groups. However, in modern societies, institutions acting cooperatively in the interest of free market trade provide protection for goods and enforcement of contracts. Negotiation and enforcement in alien parts of the world require the development of a standardized system of weights and measures.
As development continues, the rise of capital markets (and the protection of associated property rights), creates social capital and enables citizens to gain wealth. Technology plays an instrumental role in the continued development of manufacturing sectors, and acts to lower transaction costs in several ways. The most substantial benefits are generally the result of transportation improvements.
Eventually, society becomes overwhelmingly urban. This final stage of development specialization requires increasing percentages of the resources of the society to be active in the market so that the transaction sector becomes a large share of gross national product. Highly specialized forms of transaction organizations emerge at this stage. Globalized specialization and division of labor demand institutions to ensure property rights even when trading in neighboring countries enabling capital markets to develop "with credible commitment on the part of the players."
North enumerates three primitive types of exchange:
Tribal Society "relies on a dense social network".(Colson 1974, p. 59)
Bazaars "high measurement costs; continuous effort at clientization; intensive bargaining at every margin"
Long-distance caravan trade illustrates the informal constraints that made trade possible in a world where protection was essential and no organized state existed.
All three methods above are found to be much less likely to evolve than large urban societies.
North's paper concludes with a few intriguing questions which his paper aimed to address:
What is it about informal constraints that give them such a pervasive influence upon the long-run character of economies?
What is the relationship between formal and informal constraints?
How does an economy develop the informal constraints that make individuals constrain their behavior so that they make political and judicial systems effective forces for third party enforcement?
Transaction Costs, Institutions, and Economic Performance
In a 1992 paper, North argues that neoclassical economic theory overlooks the institutions required to create efficient markets with low monitoring and transaction costs. He develops a framework for explaining how institutions change and become more efficient over time.
North theorizes that all transaction costs are rooted in information asymmetries between the parties to an exchange. Hence, each person must expend resources ascertaining the qualities of the good she is buying and enforcing the terms of the trade. Because these costs pose such a large barrier to economic growth, a central function of political and economic institutions is to control them, often by disincentivizing fraud, theft, and other socially detrimental behaviors. Yet those who command the political system will structure these institutions to maximize their personal benefit, rather than the social benefit, so transaction costs will not always be minimized by existing institutions.
Importantly for North, individuals and organizations make their decisions on the basis of imperfect ideologies, which are "mental models" for how the world functions. Therefore, the politicians who craft institutions will, despite their best efforts, occasionally fail to maximize their personal gain. When this happens, entrepreneurs who believe that institutional changes will significantly benefit them will enter the political realm to effect this change. The result is incremental institutional change, pushed forward by self-seeking individuals.
North argues that this change will usually be slow for two reasons. First, the powerful actors in control of the political systems made the institutions for their benefit and so will be reluctant to change them, resulting in path dependence. Second, informal institutions—like social customs and cultural practices—are by their nature slow to change, yet play a role in determining transaction costs.
North goes on to apply this framework to analyze a few historical examples, including the Green Revolution, the American Revolution, and imperial Spain, as well as to offer some general policy recommendations.
Violence and the Rise of Open-Access Orders
In Violence and the Rise of Open-Access Orders, North, Wallis, and Weingast integrate a theory of politics with a theory of economics to explain the institutions, i.e. the rules governing behavior, that develop in human societies. In their view, the primary task of any set of institutions is to limit violence among individuals. They focus on two sets of institutions—which they call social orders—that accomplish this task, but which also have different effects on economic growth.
The first set of institutions are called "limited access orders," and they are characterized by elite control of the political and economic systems to extract rents. Violence is limited because the most powerful actors maintain law and order to protect their rents. However, their means of maintaining law and order require supporting economic and political monopolies, which stunt economic growth.
The second set of institutions that North et al. propose are called "open access orders," and they limit violence through a politically controlled military. These societies allow anyone who meets some impersonal criteria to form political and economic organizations, resulting in a Schumpeterian process of "creative destruction." The military limits societal violence, and the political actors that control this military are themselves constrained by the constant competition for political and economic power that this process of creative destruction entails. Unlike limited access orders, open access orders stimulate economic growth since solutions to economic and political challenges can come from any individual in society, rather than a select few.
North et al. argue that modern open access orders emerged from limited access orders through a two-step process: first, the application of impersonal laws to elites and the consolidation of military power, and second, the extension of elite privileges to the rest of society. They apply this theory to explain the legitimacy of elections within different societies and to explain why economic growth is more consistent in modern open access orders than it is in limited access orders.
Personal life
North was married twice. His first marriage, to Lois Heister in 1944, resulted in three sons: Douglass Jr., Christopher and Malcolm. During the marriage, Heister became a notable activist and politician. The marriage ended in divorce. North remarried in 1972, to Elisabeth Case.
Legacy
As a Nobel laureate, North's reputation extended both from his own university environment to the international influences made by his research and writing. North's research in New Economic History has included such notable economists and historians as Jonathan Hughes, Richard Sutch, Lloyd Mercer, Jim Sheperd, Donald Gordon, Gary Walton, Lance E. Davis, Robert Huttenback, Roger Ransom, Gaston Rimlinger, Terry L. Anderson, P.J. Hill, Philip Coelho, and David Knowles as recorded in the 60th Anniversary dedication volume in memory of North.
Publications
North's other major publications include:
The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790–1860, Prentice Hall, 1961.
Institutional Change and American Economic Growth, Cambridge University Press, 1971 (with Lance Davis).
The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History, 1973 (with Robert Thomas).
Growth and Welfare in the American Past, Prentice-Hall, 1974.
Structure and Change in Economic History, Norton, 1981 .
Constitutions and Commitment: The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth-Century England, Cambridge University Press, 1989
Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance, Cambridge University Press, 1990 .
Also published as Nobel Prize Lecture.
Empirical Studies in Institutional Change, Cambridge University Press, 1996 (edited with Lee Alston & Thrainn Eggertsson) .
Understanding the Process of Economic Change, Princeton University Press, 2005 .
Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History, Cambridge University Press, 2009 (with John Joseph Wallis and Barry R. Weingast) .
References
Further reading
Colson, Elizabeth. Tradition and Contract: The Problem of Order. Chicago: Adeline Publishing, 1974.
S. Galiani and I. Sened (eds.), 2014. Institutions, property rights and economic growth: The legacy of Douglass North, Cambridge University Press. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/institutions-property-rights-and-economic-growth/institutions-property-rights-and-economic-growth/C036667D3EA6FE5D511A1DFC7BC46D37
Kevin Bryan. 2015. Douglass North, an economist's historian. Voxeu.
John Wallis. 2015. Structure and change in economic history: The ideas of Douglass North. Voxeu.
External links
Hoover Institution homepage
Douglass North: The NIE and Development. Essay (~ 1995), 8 p.
1920 births
2015 deaths
Academics of the University of Cambridge
American economic historians
American sailors
American Nobel laureates
Nobel laureates in Economics
Choate Rosemary Hall alumni
Fellows of Girton College, Cambridge
University of California, Berkeley alumni
New institutional economists
Washington University in St. Louis faculty
People from Cambridge, Massachusetts
University of Washington faculty
People from Benzie County, Michigan
Distinguished Fellows of the American Economic Association
Social Science Research Council
Economists from Michigan
Economists from Massachusetts
Nobel laureates affiliated with Missouri
American expatriates in Canada
Rice University faculty
Stanford University faculty
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongue%20River%20%28Montana%29
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Tongue River (Montana)
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The Tongue River is a tributary of the Yellowstone River, approximately 265 mi (426 km) long, in the U.S. states of Wyoming and Montana. The Tongue rises in Wyoming in the Big Horn Mountains, flows generally northeast through northern Wyoming and southeastern Montana, and empties into the Yellowstone River at Miles City, Montana. Most of the course of the river is through the beautiful and varied landscapes of eastern Montana, including the Tongue River Canyon, the Tongue River breaks, the pine hills of southern Montana, and the buttes and grasslands that were formerly the home of vast migratory herds of American bison.
The Tongue River watershed encompasses parts of the Cheyenne and Crow Reservations in Montana. The headwaters lie on the Bighorn National Forest in Wyoming, and the watershed encompasses the Ashland Ranger District of the Custer National Forest. The river's name corresponds to Cheyenne /vetanoveo'he/, where /vetanove/ means "tongue" and /o'he'e/ means "river".
Geography
The Tongue River is fed by winter snowpack from the higher elevations of the Big Horn Mountains, early snow runoff of the lower elevations in the drainage basin, and ground water from springs in the drainage basin. The river level rises in March and April due to snowmelt in the lower elevations, and again in June as summer weather melts the higher-elevation snowpack. The flow of water in the upper river during the summer is generally steady, but in the later months of a dry summer, irrigation can reduce the lower river to a few pools of water connected by a small trickle. The river is generally frozen during the winter months.
The source of the Tongue River is in the highlands of the Big Horn Mountains in north-central Wyoming. The river descends the eastern side of the mountains and emerges from a canyon near Dayton, Wyoming. The river then flows eastward, past Ranchester, Wyoming, and merges with Goose Creek, after which the Tongue turns to flow northeast into Montana, where it is dammed, forming the Tongue River Reservoir. Continuing northeast from the reservoir, the river flows through a prairie canyon and the Tongue River breaks, passing Birney, Montana.
The river forms the eastern boundary of the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation from about north of the reservoir to a point north of Ashland, Montana, after which the river continues to flow in a broad valley to its mouth on the Yellowstone River near Miles City, Montana. The Tongue River Valley near Decker, Montana also contains the southeast corner of the large Crow Indian Reservation.
The Tongue River headwaters are on the Bighorn National Forest. On forested buttes lying between the Tongue River and Pumpkin Creek is the Ashland Ranger District of the Custer National Forest, which has three separate ranger districts, the other two being the Beartooth Ranger District located in the area of the Beartooth uplift, and the Sioux Ranger District located in the southeast corner of Montana and the northwest corner of South Dakota.
The term "Tongue River Canyon" can refer to either the river's mountain canyon in the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming, or the river's prairie canyon in Montana, located downstream from the Tongue River Dam and Reservoir.
The major tributaries of the Tongue are Pumpkin Creek, Otter Creek, Hanging Woman Creek, Prairie Dog Creek and Goose Creek. All of these tributaries enter on the eastern side of the river, and all flow in a northerly direction.
Pumpkin Creek meets the Tongue about above the mouth of the river, and extends for into the Custer National Forest; the small community of Sonnette, Montana is at the headwaters. Otter Creek enters the Tongue River near Ashland, Montana, about upstream of the mouth of the river, and its headwaters are near the Wyoming–Montana state line about to the south. Hanging Woman Creek empties into the Tongue at Birney, Montana, about above the mouth of the Tongue, and its headwaters are away in northern Wyoming. Prairie Dog Creek and Goose Creek flow into the Tongue at the point where the Tongue turns from an eastward direction to flow toward the northeast. Goose Creek drains a scenic, well-watered basin in Wyoming, on the eastern edge of the Big Horn Mountains, where Sheridan and Big Horn, Wyoming are located.
The drainage basin to the west is the Rosebud Creek basin. The drainage basin to the east is the Powder River basin. Both rivers, like the Tongue, flow in a northerly direction into the Yellowstone River.
The Tongue and its tributaries flow through parts of Custer, Powder River, Rosebud and Big Horn counties in Montana, and Sheridan County in Wyoming.
Climate
According to the Köppen climate classification system, the Tongue River has a semi-arid climate, abbreviated "BSk" on climate maps.
Geology
The Tongue River basin is part of the larger geologic structure known as the Powder River basin. The term Powder River basin can refer to the topographic drainage basin lying to the east of the Tongue River drainage basin, but the term is used in this part to denote the larger geological structure which stretches from the Black Hills to the Big Horn Mountains and which includes the Tongue River drainage area.
The Powder River basin is shaped like a large shallow bowl, with its westernmost rock formations lying against the Big Horn Mountains. As these mountains uplifted over eons of geologic time they lifted and tilted the sedimentary rocks from the Powder River basin, which were then eroded away, creating the plains that stretch eastward from the mountains into the basin. Generally there are older sedimentary layers closer to the mountains and younger layers farther away.
As the Tongue flows out from the Big Horn Mountains it passes over the uplifted layers of increasingly younger sedimentary rocks. In the Big Horn Mountains the Tongue flows in its mountain canyon of Madison Limestone, which was deposited during Early to Middle Mississippian time, about 359 to 326 million years ago. As the Tongue leaves the mountains it flows through younger formations, including the distinctive thick red Chugwater Formation, deposited during the Triassic time, 250 to 199 million years ago. Shortly after leaving the mountains, the Tongue River enters an area dominated by a thick layer of buff-colored sandstones and silty clay. This sedmintary layer is named the Tongue River Sandstone, because its outcrops are so predominant in the Tongue River basin. The Tongue River Sandstone is the youngest of three "members" which form the Fort Union Formation, the other two members being the Lebo Shale Member and the Tullock Member.
The buff-colored sandstones and shales of the Tongue River sandstone are visible all along the greater part of the Tongue River from Dayton, Wyoming to a point north of Ashland, Montana.
In this stretch, the sandstone layers of the Tongue River member hold ground water so that the highlands on each side of the Tongue River valley are often covered with pines. As the river approaches Miles City the valley changes appearance to grassy rolling hills, as the river leaves the Tongue River formation and flows through the Lebo shale and the Tullock sedimentary formations.
The Tongue River sandstone member outcrops widely over portions of southeast Montana and northeast Wyoming and it is best known for its coal. The Tongue River member has approximately 32 coal seams with a combined thickness in excess of 300 ft. The thickness of the separate coal seams varies radically from place to place—in some places the beds are thick but over a relatively short distance the seam can pinch out to nothing. Where these coal beds are thick and also close to the surface in the Powder River Basin in northern Wyoming and southern Montana they are mined in large open pit mines, like the mines along the Tongue in the vicinity of Decker, Montana. Tongue River coal is low in sulfur content and coal-fired electric generating places throughout the United States demand Tongue River coal so they can meet federal emission standards. Because of this demand, about 40% of the coal now used to generate electricity in the United States is mined from the Tongue River sandstone coal seams in the Powder River Basin, producing 14% of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States.
Where the Tongue River now flows in Montana and Wyoming, the sedimentary rock formation that is today known as the Tongue River sandstone began to form about 60 million years ago, when mountain uplifts began rising from a shallow sea. The Black Hills uplift on the east, the Hartville uplift on the southeast, and the Big Horn Block on the west created a flat, swampy low-lying plain, with slow moving rivers flowing northwest to deltas along a shallow sea. At this time the climate in the area was subtropical, averaging approximately of rainfall a year. For some 25 million years, the floor of this plain was made up of thick deposits of sandy silt from the surrounding mountains, with many rivers, deltas, backwaters and swamps, all covered by forests and vegetation. At that time, from 35 to 60 million years ago, the area where the Tongue River now flows would have appeared as a dense swampy jungle. Over long periods of time, the heavy plant growth died and accumulated as peaty layers in the large backwaters and swamps all across the basin. Periodically more sandy silt deposits would wash in from the mountains, completely burying the layers of organic peaty materials. Eventually the climate became drier and cooler. The area passed through more long periods of geologic time, during which new sedimentary layers buried this entire sandy silty layer along with its deposits of peat, under thousands of feet of newer sediments, compressing the sandy silty deposits into the Tongue River sandstone of today, and also compressing and changing the layers of peaty organic material into thinner layers of lignite coal. Over the last several million years, much of the overlying sediment has eroded away, bringing the sandstone layer with its seams of coal to the surface again in the Tongue River area.
The Tongue River sandstone forms cliffs, hills, buttes and bluffs along the river and throughout the basin. From the Decker area downstream to about Birney the river flows through the prairie in a canyon carved from the Tongue River sandstone. The upper part of this canyon is dammed to form the Tongue River Reservoir.
The sandstone hillsides and bluffs along the Tongue and its tributaries often have reddish bands running through them or they are capped with resistant reddish layer. These red layers were formed millions of years ago. Coal seams outcropping in the Tongue River sandstone caught fire, probably from prairie fires that started by lightning. The fires burned from the outcropo back into the coal seams, and the fire finally went out when they burned so deeply into the coal seam that the fire was smothered. These fires burned for a long time and they were extremely hot, and they baked and changed the structure of the sedimentary rocks that lay just over the coal seam until it became a hard "clinker" substance and turned a reddish brick color. These red "clinker" beds are often more resistant to erosion than the silty sandstone, so they appear on the higher parts of bluffs, and buttes on either side of the valleys of the Tongue River basin are often capped by beds of this baked and fused rock that are five to twenty feet thick. Besides the beds of reddish "clinker" larger concretions can be found that appear at first glance to be similar to melted glass or even pieces of volcanic rock. Although of a different appearance than the clinker these odd-looking concretions are also formed by the burning coal beds, with the difference in appearance being due to the difference in content of the material in the overlying bed that was heated to very high temperatures. The reddish "clinker" is crushed and used to surface roads throughout the Tongue River basin.
North of the Yellowstone, dinosaur fossils have been found in Cretaceous era rock formations, but dinosaur fossils have not been found in any members of the Paleozoic Fort Union Formation, including the Tongue River sandstone. However plant fossils are common in the Tongue River sandstone, and many imprints of leaves and fronds have been found and collected by scientists and fossil hunters.
History
Early history
In about 1450, Crow leader No Intestines received a vision and separated from the ancestral tribe, which remained along the Missouri River as sedentary farmers known as Hidatsa. No Intestines led his band on a long migratory search for sacred tobacco, finally settling in southeastern Montana, where they became known as the Many Lodges or Mountain Crow. By 1490, the Crow were firmly established in a homeland that included the Tongue River valley–in south central/southeastern Montana, and northern Wyoming. To acquire control of this area, the Crow warred against Shoshone bands, and drove them westward, but allied themselves with local Kiowa and Kiowa Apache bands.
The Crow were a Northern high plains, nomadic, bison hunting culture based on the dog travois but in about 1700 they acquired horses and swiftly evolved a horse based nomadic hunting culture. The Kiowa bands migrated southward, and the Crow remained dominant in an extensive area, including the Tongue River, in south central Montana through the 18th century, 19th century and the era of the fur trade.
The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 confirmed a large area centered on the Big Horn Mountains as Crow lands—the area ran from the Big Horn Basin on the west, to the Musselshell River on the north, and east to the Powder River, and included the Tongue River basin. However, for two centuries, the Cheyenne and the many bands of Lakota people had been steadily migrating westward into the plains, and by 1851 they were established just to the south and east of Crow territory in Montana. The Lakota along with their Cheyenne allies coveted the fine hunting lands where the Crow lived and after 1851 the Lakota and Cheyenne fought the Crow and took control of their eastern hunting lands, including the Powder and Tongue River valleys, pushing the less numerous Crow to the west and northwest along the Yellowstone River.
After about 1860 the Lakota claimed all the lands lying east of the Big Horn Mountains and required the whites to deal with them regarding any intrusion into these areas. Red Cloud's War (1866 to 1868) was a challenge by the Lakota to the military presence on the Bozeman Trail, which went to the Montana gold fields along the eastern edge of the Big Horn Mountains. Red Cloud's War ended in a complete victory for the Lakota, and the 1868 Treaty of Ft. Laramie confirmed their control over all the high plains from the crest of the Big Horn Mountains eastward across the Powder River Basin to the Black Hills. Thereafter bands of Lakota led by Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and others, along with their Northern Cheyenne allies, hunted and raided throughout the length and breadth of eastern Montana and northeastern Wyoming, including the area of the Tongue River Valley, until the Great Sioux War of 1876–1877. Although early in the war on June 25, 1876 the Lakota and Cheyenne enjoyed a major victory over army forces under General George A. Custer at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, the Great Sioux War ended in the defeat of the Sioux and their Cheyenne allies, and their exodus from eastern Montana and Wyoming, either in flight to Canada or by forced removal to distant reservations.
In 1877, the Northern Cheyenne, allied with the Lakota, were ordered south to a reservation in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) with the related but separate Southern Cheyenne tribes. Plagued with disease and malnutrition, in 1878 a group of 279 Northern Cheyenne made a desperate attempt to return to the northern plains. After a running battle from Indian Territory to Montana, the battered remnants of this group arrived at Ft. Keogh, at the mouth of the Tongue, where a Northern Cheyenne band under Two Moons remained which had yet not been sent south. General Miles allowed Ft. Keogh to become a gathering point for the scattered Northern Cheyenne people. Over time Cheyenne families began to migrate south from the fort and establish homesteads up the Tongue River and on the Rosebud. By executive orders in 1884 and 1900, the federal government carved out a reservation for the Northern Cheyenne on Rosebud Creek, with the Tongue River as its eastern boundary.
Fur trading era
In September 1833 on the Tongue River, a chapter was written in the rivalry between the Rocky Mountain Fur Company (RMF) and the American Fur Company (AFC). Tom Fitzpatrick, a mountain man and fur trader with the RMF, rode to Crow camps on Tongue River with a band of about 30 other trappers to trade for furs and to ask permission of the chiefs to make his fall hunt in their country. The Crows invited Tom to camp with them. He cautiously declined and pitched his camp three miles off. Then he rode over with a few men to visit the chief, who received and entertained him cordially. The AFC was a rival of Tom Fitzpatrick's RMF Company and they had agents in the Crow villages including the notorious James Beckwourth, who was an adopted member of the tribe. While Fitzpatrick was visiting the Crow camp, young Crow warriors, probably instigated by AFC agents, rode to Fitzpatrick's camp and proceeded to steal all of his horses, rifles, traps, and equipment, as well as his beaver pelts and trade goods. Fitzpatrick's camp was being guarded by 25 of his men under Captain William Drummond Stewart, a former British officer (and veteran of Waterloo) and no pushover. Upon entering the trappers camp, the collection of Crow warriors probably first affected an excessive cordiality and when their demonstrations of friendship and claims of affection had literally and figuratively disarmed the trappers, "then the knives, clubs, bows and guns were out, and a Crow was attached to everything of value." The warriors even took Capt. Stewart's watch. Upon meeting Tom Fitzpatrick as he returned from the village, the young warriors completed their work by robbing him of his capote coat. The next day, Fitzpatrick, always a realist, returned to the Crow camp and begged his former friend, the Crow Chief for help and received back some of his horses, rifles, traps and other equipment, and a small amount of ammunition per man, but no furs or trade goods.
In 1835 Samuel Tullock of the American Fur Company (AFC) built Fort Van Buren on the right bank of the Yellowstone. Although the precise location of this fort is in dispute, it was located along the Yellowstone River, in an area near the mouth of the Tongue River. At the fort, AFC agents traded for furs with Indians from the surrounding area. The fort was abandoned in 1842, and later burned.
Indian wars
Bozeman Trail and Red Cloud's War
In 1864, the Bozeman Trail was opened to the Montana gold fields. A portion of the trail entered the Tongue River Basin at Prairie Dog Creek and crossed over to Goose Creek and went on to the Tongue River beyond present day Ranchester, Wyoming then up the Tongue River to the Pass Creek divide. After the Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado in November 1864, depredations by Cheyenne, Arapahoe and Sioux increased along the Oregon Trail and the Bozeman Trail, which was then closed to civilian traffic. The army launched a punitive campaign, and Brigadier General Patrick Edward Connor led a column up the Bozeman Trail. On August 29, 1865, General Conner, with a force variously estimated at about 300 soldiers, surprised an Arapahoe village of about 500 to 700 under Chiefs Old David and Black Bear camped on the Bozeman Trail, on the south side of the Tongue near present-day Ranchester, Wyoming. In what is now known as the Battle of the Tongue River the soldiers charged into the Indian camp firing indiscriminately, surprising the Indians who were breaking camp. The Indians first fled up Wolf Creek, but then regrouped and counter-attacked. The soldiers destroyed about 250 lodges, then retreated down the Tongue River Valley driving from 700 to 1000 captured horses, repulsing attacks of Arapahoe warriors seeking to get back some of their horses.
Two days after the battle with Conner, on August 31, 1865, warriors from the same Arapahoe village attacked a large wagon train of road-builders led by "Colonel" James A. Sawyers, who were traveling on the Bozeman Trail, improving it as they went. The wagon train was besieged for 13 days at the Bozeman Trail ford on the Tongue River about halfway between Ranchester, Wyoming and Dayton, Wyoming. As the siege dragged on and a number of men were killed, Sawyers faced mutiny from his employees. Sawyers had started to retreat down the trail, when he met a contingent of army cavalry moving up the trail, who agreed to escort them to the Big Horn River, after which the wagon train proceeded on to the Montana gold fields.
In 1866, the army determined to erect a series of forts along the Bozeman Trail. The scout Jim Bridger recommended a fort site in the Tongue River Valley, near Ranchester, Wyoming. Col. Henry B. Carrington rejected the Tongue River site for a site to the south on Little Piney Creek, in the Powder River drainage, where Fort Phil Kearny was erected.
From 1865 through 1868 during Red Cloud's War, Cheyenne and Lakota Sioux bands harassed, attacked and killed travelers on the Bozeman Trail and soldiers at Fort Phil Kearny and Fort C. F. Smith. These bands often located their base camps on the Tongue River because they could camp far enough down the river from the forts to be secure from counterattack, and the lower Tongue River Valley afforded a wide variety of camp sites with the three necessities of the nomadic Indians – wood for fires, abundant water, and adequate grass for grazing their large horse herds.
1873 Yellowstone Expedition (1873 Northern Pacific railroad survey)
Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer, with Companies A and B of the Seventh Cavalry, engaged and held off a larger Sioux force, including Hunkpapas, Oglalas, Miniconjous and Cheyennes at the Battle of Honsinger Bluff on August 4, 1873 about above the mouth of the Tongue on the Yellowstone River. Custer's command was part of the Stanley military column which was accompanying and protecting Northern Pacific Railroad survey parties in the summer months of 1873. Many of the Indian leaders and army officers who participated in the Battle of Honsinger Bluff were present at the more famous Battle of the Little Big Horn on June 25, 1876, three years later.
Great Sioux War of 1876–77
In a June 9, 1876 engagement called the Skirmish at Tongue River Heights, during the Great Sioux War of 1876-77 General George Crook was camped on the Tongue near the mouth of Prairie Dog Creek with about 950 soldiers, when Sioux fired into his camp from a bluff across the Tongue. A battalion under Captain Anson Mills responded, crossing the river and driving the Sioux force from the bluffs. As a consequence of this engagement, on June 11, General Crook moved his base camp to the junction of Big and Little Goose Creeks, some 7 miles south of the junction of Goose Creek and the Tongue River, where Sheridan, Wyoming is now located. On June 16, after being joined on the Tongue by some 260 Crow and Shoshone scouts, Crook moved his forces north, across the Tongue, and on June 17, 1876 engaged a large Sioux and Cheyenne force at the Battle of the Rosebud. After the battle Crook returned south of the Tongue River to the base camp on Goose Creek, and he was still there on June 25, 1876 when General George A. Custer was defeated at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, some 65 miles to the north.
After remaining idle for more than two weeks on Goose Creek, on July 6, 1876 General George Crook ordered Second Lieutenant Frederick W. Sibley to take 25 men and two scouts, Big Bat Pourier and Frank Grouard, and make a reconnaissance to the north to locate the hostile Indian forces. While traveling up the Tongue River in the vicinity of (present day) Dayton, Wyoming, the patrol discovered a large party of Sioux and Cheyenne warriors moving south and very close to them. The only chance was to turn aside and take a trail near Dayton that led up into the adjacent Big Horn Mountains. The war party followed closely, and after surviving attacks by pursuing Indians, the patrol abandoned their horses and traveled deep into the rough steep terraine of the Tongue River Canyon system on foot. Over several days the group was able to evade the Indian force, after which they walked over thirty miles out of the mountains and back to the Goose Creek camp, arriving worn out and fatigued but with no casualties. The "Sibley Scout" became another incident of the Great Sioux War of 1876 that took place along the Tongue River.
In the fall of 1876 following the defeat of Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the army determined to garrison the area, and Colonel Nelson A. Miles and elements of infantry units constructed the Tongue River Cantonment at the mouth of the Tongue River. A community formed nearby named "Milestown" after Col. Miles who banished the settlement to a point three miles away from the cantonment. In the following year, after a vigorous winter campaign, the army increased the commitment of forces and Col. Miles constructed Fort Keogh about west of the Tongue. After the fort was finished, Miles permitted civilians to settle on the eastern bank of the Tongue. Immediately, Milestown moved west forming Miles City. Today, the Tongue joins with the Yellowstone within the city limits of Miles City.
On December 16, 1876 five Sioux chiefs from Crazy Horse's village approached the Tongue River Cantonment to discuss terms of surrender for their bands. The Sioux were the hereditary enemies of the Crow, and the five Sioux were suddenly attacked and killed by some of the army's Crow scouts. The attack occurred within sight of the Cantonment, but was so swift and unexpected that the army could not intervene to save the chiefs. The Crow scouts involved immediately fled from the area. This episode delayed surrender of Sioux and Cheyenne bands, and extended the Great Sioux War of 1876–1877.
On January 8, 1877 Colonel Miles and infantry units engaged in one of the last battles of the Great Sioux War of 1876-77 near Birney, Montana in the Tongue River Valley. Colonel Miles, leading elements of the 5th and 22nd infantry, avoided an ambush by Oglala Sioux under Crazy Horse, and segments of Cheyenne under White Bull and Two Moons, and then engaged the Indian forces driving them back up the Tongue River. The battle is officially referred to as the Battle of the Wolf Mountains, although this is a misnomer. The battle is also referred to by various other names, including the Battle of Pyramid Butte, the Battle of the Butte, and Miles Battle on the Tongue River. The Wolf Mountains are actually several drainages to the west from the battle site, but General Miles' report stated the battle was in the Wolf Mountains, and that name has stuck. The battle site is about 4.5 road miles west of the town of Birney, on the Tongue River road.
Lumber
A sawmill operates at Ashland, cutting timber which is harvested from the broken highlands, between the stream valleys in the surrounding area.
Agriculture and irrigation
The Tongue River basin is prime livestock country. Limited farm lands that exist along flowing streams in the basin are usually irrigated from diversion dams, and produce crops which support the livestock industry—hay and feed stocks (corn, barley, alfalfa). Dry land wheat farming, which is prevalent elsewhere in eastern Montana, occurs only in limited and scattered acreages in the Tongue River basin. Cattle represent the great bulk of the total livestock production from the Tongue River basin with sheep a distant second.
Cattle ranches in the Tongue River Basin are predominantly "cow calf" instead of "yearling" operations. The yearly cycle of a "cow calf" operation begins with the birth of calves from February to May. At spring roundup the calves are branded. Bulls are put with the cows to start the nine-month gestation cycle to produce next year's calf crop on the month chosen by the rancher, after which the bulls are again separated from the herds. The herds are moved to summer pasture, and in June and July attention focuses on cutting and storing hay for the next winter. Feed crops are harvested in late summer or fall. The late fall roundup separates the calves which are sold to cattle buyers and shipped by truck. The herd is moved to the pasture where they will be fed for the winter, and in about the first week of December enough snow accumulates to start the process of feeding hay to carry the herd through the winter. Ranch chores, repairs and maintenance, work on building projects, doctoring cattle and the like go on all year round.
One of the oldest irrigation projects on the Tongue River is the T&Y Ditch, which dates from 1886. The diversion dam from the T&Y ditch was recently altered to include a fish ladder, which now allows fish from the Tongue and Yellowstone Rivers below the dam to migrate upriver, for the first time in 125 years.
Coal deposits and coal mines
Historically, underground coal mines existed along the Tongue River at the communities of Monarch, Kleenburn and Acme, about 7 to 10 miles north of Sheridan, Wyoming. These mines were based on seams of coal that outcropped in this area, in the Tongue River valley or on small tributaries off the valley. The CB&Q railroad ran from Sheridan, Wyoming past these mines and on to Billings, Montana, allowing for easy shipment of coal. These underground mines were economically operated from about 1900 to the late 1940s. Miners lived in these communities or in Sheridan, Wyoming. Miners in Sheridan commuted the 7 to 10 miles to reach the mines by trolly.
The same coal seams that used to be mined by tunnels are now accessed for mining by large open surface excavations. Several large coal strip mines are presently operating in the area around the Tongue River Reservoir, near the small town of Decker, Montana about 20 to 23 miles northeast from Sheridan, Wyoming. These mines are operated by the Kiewit Corporation and produce subbituminous low sulfur Powder River basin coal. There are no electrical generating facilities at this site. A rail spur line extends to the mine sites from the BNSF main line near Sheridan, Wyoming allows this coal to be shipped by rail to coal-fired electric generating plants all over the United States.
Large undeveloped private and federally owned coal deposits are located along Otter Creek, a tributary of the Tongue River. These coal deposits are located south of Ashland, which is at the junction of the Tongue River and Otter Creek. These coal deposits are sufficiently thick, and are located under sufficiently thin overburden, as to be economically viable. Drawbacks for production are the lack of a rail spur to transport the coal, and the lack of an established community of sufficient size in the area to support the work force needed to develop the coal mines. A railroad spur line, if built, would have to come up the Tongue River from Miles City, a distance of some 65 to 70 miles. Extensive infrastructure improvements would have to be added to the community of Ashland before it could support the number of worker's families that the mine would draw to the area. These deposits on Otter Creek are the source of much debate over the future of energy development in southeastern Montana. Arch Coal has submitted an application to develop a coal mine in the area, but it has not, as of 2015, been approved by state regulators. The Tongue River Railroad project, planned to move coal from the mine to Colstrip, is also in the permitting stage.
Undeveloped but extensive coal deposits exist along Youngs Creek and adjacent creeks, which flow into the Tongue River just upstream from the Tongue River Reservoir. This large and (as yet) untapped deposit of coal is just a few miles south of the large open pit coal mines already being operated by Kiewit. The upper 15 miles of Youngs Creek lies on the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana, and the Crow Tribe owns the coal beds underlying this portion of the creek. The last 3 miles of the creek lie between the reservation boundary and the Tongue River, in Wyoming. As to the coal beds on the Crow reservation, the Secretary of the Interior approved a coal lease negotiated by the Crow Tribe with Shell Oil Company in 1983 to develop this coal resource. The lease had extensive long term benefits for the Crow tribe, and required payments to the tribe to start at a future point of time even in the event the coal was not mined. Shell paid the tribe a bonus to cancel this lease in 1985, because of poor market conditions, and because of Shell's uncertainties on how Montana's severance tax would be applied to coal owned by the Crow Tribe. Compared to Otter Creek these coal resources are easier to develop—the coal resources of Young's creek lies within five to ten miles of the railroad spur line which is used to ship coal from the nearby open pit mines being operated by Kiewit in the Decker, Montana area, and the communities of Sheridan and Ranchester already exist to serve as a base for the work force needed to develop coal mines at Youngs Creek.
Transportation and access
Roads and travel conditions
I-94, an east–west interstate artery carrying U.S. Highway 12, crosses the Tongue at its mouth at Miles City. I-90, also an east–west interstate artery carrying U.S. Highway 87 and U.S. Highway 14, crosses the upper reaches of the Tongue between Ranchester and Dayton, and continues to Sheridan. U.S. Highway 212 extends east and west from Ashland bisecting the middle of the Tongue River basin from side to side.
The Tongue River has a road running along almost all of its length, as do the major tributaries, but the predominance of gravel roads over paved roads is a testament to the remoteness of the region. In the Tongue River valley, starting from Miles City and going up the river there are about 30 miles of pavement to the community of Garland, then 35 miles of gravel, followed by about 7 miles of paved road into Ashland, where U.S. Highway 212 is encountered. South of Ashland, continuing up the valley, there is another 20 miles of paved road, then another 38 miles of gravel roads to the pavement above the Tongue River Reservoir, followed by 10 miles of pavement to the Montana/Wyoming state line. In Wyoming a network of paved roads follow the Tongue river westward to Ranchester and Dayton, where the Tongue comes out of the Big Horn Mountains. A road from Dayton goes up the Tongue for a short distance into the mountains, after which contact with the Tongue River and its mountain branches is by hiking trail.
The lower major tributaries of the Tongue (Pumpkin Creek, Ottor Creek, Hanging Woman Creek, Prairie Dog Creek) all have gravel roads branching off the Tongue River Road and running along their length, providing access to local ranches. In Wyoming, the major tributary is Goose Creek, which flows out of a basin with Sheridan, Wyoming at its center, and so this entire basin area has well-developed paved and gravel roads. In addition to the roads that run along the Tongue and its major tributaries, there is a network of gravel roads that cross the highlands between the stream valleys.
During the winter, travel along the roads in the basin can become difficult to impossible depending on snow accumulation, particularly on the more remote gravel roads that are not regularly plowed. If road conditions or car trouble strand a motorist in the more remote areas of the basin, during the pulses of intense winter cold common to this area, there is a real risk of death or injury by freezing. The Tongue River basin does not have the "gumbo" type mud that affects road travel in wet weather on the north side of the Yellowstone River. Traffic on the gravel and dirt roads of the Tongue River basin is a problem at sharp corners, blind hilltops, concealed entrances to side roads, and when suddenly encountering oversized slow ranch/farm vehicles. In warm weather it is a good idea to keep an eye out ahead for dust clouds indicating approaching vehicles. The motorist traveling in the Tongue River basin should keep a constant look out for livestock on the road, and especially for deer (particularly at dawn, dusk and at night).
There are good roadside services at Miles City, Montana at the mouth of the Tongue River basin, and also in the upper reaches of the basin at Dayton and Ranchester and in the vicinity of Sheridan, Wyoming. There are limited roadside services in Ashland, located about the center of the basin, where U.S. 212 goes east and west. For the rest of the Tongue River basin, the motorist is on his or her own.
Railroads
Since the settlement of Miles City, at the mouth of the Tongue, and the related settlement of Sheridan, Wyoming, located approximately 125 air miles to the south there has been much discussion of a north–south railroad connecting the cities and corridored along the Tongue River valley. This has been the subject of many promotional business ventures over the years.
From 1923 to 1935 the North and South Railway promoted a rail line south from Miles City, Montana through Sheridan to Casper, Wyoming. The northern segment was to run along the Tongue between Miles City, Montana and Sheridan, Wyoming. The southern segment was to run from Casper to Sheridan, Wyoming. Track was only laid on a portion of the southern segment. However, grading was done on the northern segment, and cuts and embankments can still be seen approximately 7 miles south of Miles City on the east side of the Tongue River. Financial problems caused the entire railroad project to be abandoned in 1935.
The current venture is the Tongue River Railroad, in various stages of planning for more than 30 years and intended to move coal from near Ashland to Colstrip.
The BNSF railroad operating between Sheridan, Wyoming and Billings, Montana runs along the Tongue for a distance of about 10 miles, starting from a point about 7 miles north of Sheridan, Wyoming. Though this segment of rail line along the Tongue was limited, from 1900 to 1940 coal was shipped by the railroad from underground coal mines located in the Tongue River valley, along this stretch of track. This railroad was a part of the former Chicago, Burlington & Quincy (CB&Q, or "Burlington") railroad system, which has now been merged in the present Burlington, Northern, Santa Fe (BNSF) railroad system.
The Northern Pacific Railroad built track to Miles City, crossing the Tongue River in 1881, about a mile from the junction of the Tongue and the Yellowstone. This construction was part of the mainline from St. Paul, Minnesota to the Pacific port of Tacoma, Washington completed in 1883, and it is still in operation today as part of the BNSF (Burlington Northern Santa Fe) railroad.
The Milwaukee Road (the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railway) completed its mainline from the midwest to Puget Sound in 1909. This line also passed through Miles City and crossed the Tongue River between the existing NP tracks and the Yellowstone River. This line failed in the early 1980s and is no longer in use today.
Wildlife and fisheries
The Tongue River Valley, before it reaches the Big Horn Mountains, is part of an extensive drainage basin which is an environment in which wild game thrives. In this area of rolling prairies, sandstone outcrops and ponderosa pines, there are plentiful numbers of whitetail deer and mule deer, many of trophy quality. Antelope are found throughout this area. On the more southern tributaries, particularly in the Custer National Forest area, there are growing herds of prairie elk, an animal originally native to the plains of eastern Montana. Throughout the area are upland game birds, notably pheasant and grouse, and increasingly abundant flocks of wild turkeys.
The headwaters of the Tongue located in the Big Horn National Forest, in the Big Horn Mountains provide resources for deer, elk, bear and mountain lion hunting.
The grey wolf is an issue if not yet a reality in the Tongue River Basin, and there have been unconfirmed sightings of wolves in the more remote areas of the basin. Livestock, particularly sheep and calves, are vulnerable to wolves and, according to reports, livestock suffered significant depredations by wolves and coyotes in the last part of the 19th and the first part of the 20th century. This led to a war on these predators, with bounties paid by livestock associations and state agencies. By the mid-1930s wolves had been exterminated completely in the Tongue River basin (and indeed throughout the stockgrowing west). Times changed, and sympathy grew for the wolf, as well as his cousin the coyote. Since the release of wolves in Yellowstone Park in 1995, there has been increasing concern by stockgrowers in surrounding areas that wolf packs would migrate out of the park to cattle country and re-establish themselves where the pickings were better. In cattle and sheep country like the Tongue River basin, the debate about wolf reintroduction is ongoing and far from resolved.
The Tongue River Reservoir is popular among fishermen for a variety of fish. Very large catfish have been caught at the reservoir. In its upper reaches above the Tongue River Reservoir, and extending into the Big Horn Mountains, the Tongue River is fished for trout. Follow the footnote for six access points in Wyoming, five of them in the mountain section of the Tongue.
The Tongue is a Class I river from Tongue River Dam to its confluence with the Yellowstone River for public access and for recreational purposes.
Literary references
Otter Creek and Goose Creek, tributaries of the Tongue, are the location of Sam Morton's historical novel, "Where the Rivers Run North".
Ernest Hemingway wrote a short story, "Wine of Wyoming" that references coal miners living at Sheridan, Wyoming during the era of prohibition, who worked at the underground coal mines in the Tongue River valley, a few miles north of Sheridan. The story "Wine of Wyoming" was published in 1933 as part of a collection of Ernest Hemingway's short stories entitled "Winner Take Nothing".
The Tongue River valley and surrounding area is the setting for "A Bride Goes West", an autobiography of Nannie Alderson, which relates her life as a ranch wife in the late 19th century in south central Montana.
Edmund Randolph wrote a book "Hell Among the Yearlings" about his experiences living on a ranch on the Tongue River in the 1920s, and getting into the cattle business.
See also
List of Wyoming rivers
List of rivers of Montana
Montana Stream Access Law
North and South Railway
Grey wolf and Wolf reintroduction
Ashland, Montana
Birney, Montana
Miles City, Montana
Sheridan, Wyoming
Ranchester, Wyoming
Dayton, Wyoming
Big Horn, Wyoming
Tongue River Cave
Notes
There are five "woman" creeks in Wyoming and Montana.
Hanging Woman Creek is a tributary of the Tongue River, and joins that river at the small community of Birney, Montana.
Crazy Woman Creek lies to the south of the Tongue River Basin, in Wyoming and is a tributary of the Powder River.
Swimming Woman Creek flows from the south facing slopes of Montana's Snowy Mountains into Careless Creek and then into the Musselshell River.
Dirty Woman Creek is a short drainage starting just east of Rock Springs, Montana, and ending just east of Angela, Montana.
Kill Woman Creek is a short creek flowing into the Ft. Peck Reservoir (Missouri River Drainage) just east of Herman Point, near the UL Bend Wilderness area.
External links
Wyoming Fishing Net; Access Points for fishing the Tongue River in Wyoming
Fishing information about the upper Tongue river in the Big Horn Mountains
USGS data for the Tongue River watershed
Custer National Forest homepage
Northern Cheyenne Tribe, official website
Crow Tribe, official website
Sheridan Wyoming Tourism website
Website devoted to Miles City, Montana
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish%20Workers%27%20Party
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Polish Workers' Party
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The Polish Workers' Party (, PPR) was a communist party in Poland from 1942 to 1948. It was founded as a reconstitution of the Communist Party of Poland (KPP) and merged with the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) in 1948 to form the Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR). From the end of World War II the PPR ruled Poland, with the Soviet Union exercising moderate influence. During the PPR years, the conspiratorial as well as legally permitted centers of opposition activity were largely eliminated, while a communist (also characterized as socialist) system was gradually established in the country.
Arriving from the Soviet Union, a group of Polish communists was parachuted into occupied Poland in December 1941. With Joseph Stalin's permission, in January 1942 they established the Polish Workers' Party, a new communist party. The PPR established a partisan military organization Gwardia Ludowa, later renamed Armia Ludowa. In November 1943, Władysław Gomułka became secretary (chief executive) of the Central Committee of the PPR. On 1 January 1944 the party created the State National Council (KRN), proclaimed to be a wartime parliament of Poland; the body was chaired by Bolesław Bierut. In June 1944 the Union of Polish Patriots, a rival to the PPR Polish-communist organization operating in the Soviet Union, recognized the KRN as "the true representation of the Polish nation". The PPR was initially a small party with marginal support; it grew because of its alliance with the victorious Soviet Union.
In July 1944 the Polish communists, working in close cooperation with Stalin and other Soviet leaders, established and declared in liberated Lublin a provisional executive quasi-government of Poland, which they called the Polish Committee of National Liberation (PKWN). In the PKWN Manifesto issued at that time, the PKWN claimed its authority in Poland and promised post-war reconstruction as well as land reform. The KRN and the PKWN were established when the Polish government-in-exile in London was the internationally recognized government of Poland. By the end of 1944, the PKWN was replaced with the Provisional Government of the Republic of Poland, recognized by the Soviet Union, with which it signed in April 1945 a 20-year friendship, alliance and cooperation treaty. As a result of the Yalta Conference Allied determinations, the Provisional Government was converted to a formally coalition Provisional Government of National Unity (TRJN) in June 1945. The Polish government-in-exile was excluded from participation and the PPR ended up controlling the new government, which was soon recognized by the United States, the United Kingdom, and other countries. Establishment of a permanent government was conditioned on national elections being held, as mandated by the Allies. In the meantime the PPR engaged in a massive program of rebuilding the country and its industry, in combating and containing the various forms and manifestations of opposition to its rule, but also in manipulating the election preparation process to ensure the party's lasting domination.
The 1946 Polish people's referendum, followed by the 1947 Polish legislative election, were rigged and declared a decisive victory of the PPR's "Democratic Bloc". The only legal opposition, the Polish People's Party, was marginalized. Gomułka's victory, however, was short-lived. Pressured by the Cold War, Stalin had no more patience for the Polish leader's national brand of communism, and from August 1948 the PPR was led by Bierut. In December 1948, the PPR and the purged PPS were merged to form the PZPR. What was left of democratic and pluralistic practices and pretenses was abandoned and Poland entered its period of Stalinist rule.
Communist Party of Poland and its demise
The Communist Party of Poland (KPP, until 1925 the Communist Workers' Party of Poland) was an organization of the far-left. The views adhered to and promulgated by its leaders (Maria Koszutska, Adolf Warski, Maksymilian Horwitz, Edward Próchniak) led to the party's difficult relationship with Joseph Stalin already in 1923–24. The Communist International (Comintern) condemned the KPP for its support of Józef Piłsudski's May Coup of 1926 (the party's "May error"). From 1933, the KPP was increasingly treated with suspicion by the Comintern. The party structures were seen as compromised due to infiltration by agents of the Polish military intelligence. Some of the party leaders, falsely accused of being such agents, were subsequently executed in the Soviet Union. In 1935 and 1936, the KPP undertook a formation of a unified worker and peasant front in Poland and was then subjected to further persecutions by the Comintern, which also arbitrarily accused the Polish communists of harboring Trotskyists elements in their ranks. The apogee of the Moscow-held prosecutions, aimed at eradicating the various "deviations" and ending usually in death sentences, took place in 1937–38, with the last executions carried out in 1940. The KPP members were persecuted and often imprisoned by the Polish Sanation regime, which turned out to likely save the lives of a number of future Polish communist leaders, including Bolesław Bierut, Władysław Gomułka, Edward Ochab, Stefan Jędrychowski and Aleksander Zawadzki. During the Great Purge, seventy members and candidate members of the party's Central Committee fled or were brought to the Soviet Union and were shot there, along with a large number of other activists (almost all prominent Polish communists were murdered or sent to labor camps). The Comintern, in reality directed by Stalin, had the party dissolved and liquidated in August 1938.
The PPR's World War II foundations
On 28 June 1940, soon after the Katyn massacre, Stalin received Wanda Wasilewska, an unofficial leader of Polish communists, at the Moscow Kremlin. The event initiated a reorientation of Soviet policies in regard to Poles. As a result, a wide range of official political, military, social, cultural, educational and other Soviet-Polish projects and activities commenced in 1940 and continued during the years that followed.
The German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 changed the course of World War II and with it the nature of Polish-Soviet governmental relations. Pressured by the British government, the London-based Polish government-in-exile, led by Władysław Sikorski, signed an agreement with the Soviet Union, which included a Soviet recognition of the Polish government. A Polish army was formed in the Soviet Union, but was soon taken out of there and into the Middle East by Władysław Anders. The Katyn massacre perpetrated by the Soviets on Polish POWs was revealed and the Soviet Union "suspended" diplomatic relations with the Polish government. Prime Minister Sikorski was killed in an airplane crash in July 1943. These and other factors, including disagreements about future borders, caused the Polish-Soviet relations to deteriorate.
Meanwhile, Stalin, beginning in the summer of 1941, pursued other Polish options, utilizing Polish communists and other Poles willing to cooperate, many of whom were present at that time in the Soviet Union. Polish language radio broadcasts began in August 1941; they called upon the Poles in Poland to unconditionally engage in anti-German resistance. Some prewar Polish officers were transferred to occupied Poland to conduct pro-Soviet conspiratorial activities and the Polish communists worked in November on organizing the Poles in the Soviet Union. Among the communist groups that became active in Poland after Operation Barbarossa was the Union for Liberating Struggle (Związek Walki Wyzwoleńczej), whose leaders included Marian Spychalski.
A September 1941 attempt to transport activists from the Soviet Union to Poland was unsuccessful, but beginning in late December, a group of Polish communists which included Marceli Nowotko, Paweł Finder, Bolesław Mołojec and Małgorzata Fornalska, was parachuted into Poland. They had Stalin's permission to create a new Polish communist party. In Polish society the communists could count on marginal support only, so to avoid negative connotations it was decided not to include the word "communist" in the party's title. The party took the name "Polish Workers' Party." The PPR, intended in some sense as a continuation of the prewar KPP, was established in Warsaw on 5 January 1942, when some of the new arrivals met with local communist activists.
The new party, which presented itself as an anti-Nazi Polish patriotic front, distributed a manifesto printed in Moscow entitled To workers, peasants and intelligentsia! To all Polish patriots!, in which it called for an uncompromising struggle against the German occupier. A leftist, formally democratic program was proposed and the party, whose operations concentrated mostly in the General Government, grew to about six thousand members by the summer of 1942. From 1943, an affiliated youth organization existed; it was called the Union for the Struggle of the Youth (Związek Walki Młodych).
The PPR operated under the Central Committee led by Secretary Marceli Nowotko. Nowotko was killed on 28 November 1942. Mołojec took over as secretary (party chief), but he was suspected of arranging Nowotko's murder and subsequently condemned and executed by the ruling of the party court. In January 1943, Finder became secretary and the three-person Secretariat also included Władysław Gomułka and Franciszek Jóźwiak.
Gwardia Ludowa (the People's Guard) military organization originated together with the party it served. It was led by Mołojec and then Jóźwiak. Gwardia Ludowa attacked Germans in Warsaw and organized partisan units in the countryside, primarily to destroy the German communication facilities.
In February 1943 the PPR undertook talks with the Government Delegation for Poland, which represented in occupied Poland the Polish government-in-exile, and the central command of the underground Home Army, on possible cooperation. The negotiations made no progress because of the irreconcilable points of view of the two sides. After the Soviet Union broke diplomatic relations with the Polish government (25 April 1943), the contacts were terminated and the PPR's attitude toward the exile government-led Polish authority became hostile.
The war progressively radicalized Polish society and the communists tried to take advantage of the situation by forming a coalition with other leftist and agrarian forces. However, a common "democratic front", meant as a platform for the future power struggle, failed to materialize because the rival parties were generally unwilling to cooperate with the PPR.
Polish communist institutions in the Soviet Union
Facilitated by Stalin, communist-controlled Polish civilian and military institutions were also formed in the Soviet Union. The leading roles in them were initially assumed by Wanda Wasilewska, a daughter of former Polish minister and Piłsudski's associate, herself a friend of Stalin, and the Polish officer Zygmunt Berling. From October 1940, Berling led a group of Polish officers working to establish a Polish division within the Soviet Red Army. The Union of Polish Patriots, proposed and organized from January 1943, had its founding congress in June 1943 and was led by Wasilewska. Berling, Alfred Lampe, Stefan Jędrychowski, Andrzej Witos and Bolesław Drobner were among the communists and individuals of other political orientations active in the organization, people willing to participate in a communist-dominated undertaking. After the Soviet authorities closed the branches of the Polish government's delegation in Soviet controlled territories, the union, assisted by a Soviet agency, established a social welfare department to look after the Poles scattered throughout its range of operations. The Polish 1st Tadeusz Kościuszko Infantry Division, commanded by Berling, was formed beginning in May 1943. The division fought at the Battle of Lenino in October 1943. The Polish National Committee, intended to develop into a communist government, was organized under Wasilewska from December 1943, but its formation was abandoned when Moscow found out about the existence of the State National Council in Warsaw. The Polish civilian and military activities in the Soviet Union were managed from January 1944 by the Central Bureau Communists of Poland. Its important members were Chairman Aleksander Zawadzki, Wasilewska, Karol Świerczewski, Jakub Berman, Stanisław Radkiewicz, Roman Zambrowski, Hilary Minc and Marian Spychalski. Some of them would later form the core of the Stalinist and strictly pro-Soviet (internationalist in outlook) faction of Poland's ruling communists, who worked closely with Bolesław Bierut and were opposed to the national PPR current led by Gomułka. On the military side, the First Polish Corps was formed from the Kościuszko Division and expanded into the First Polish Army in March 1944, still under command of General Berling. The army was incorporated into the 1st Belorussian Front.
Gomułka's leadership, State National Council, Polish Committee of National Liberation
In November 1943 Finder and Fornalska were arrested by the Gestapo, which also took the PPR's radio equipment. Communication between Warsaw and Moscow was no longer possible. Władysław Gomułka became secretary of the Central Committee of the PPR on 23 November 1943 and Bierut became a member of the Secretariat.
The PPR published the "What are we fighting for" (O co walczymy) program declaration. Democratic ideas and future elections were proclaimed there, while the government-in-exile and the Underground State were denied the right to represent the Polish nation. Territorial changes after the war were indicated and nationalization of industry was promised together with land reform.
At that time the Central Committee decided to create the State National Council (Krajowa Rada Narodowa, KRN), a quasi-parliament rival to the government-in-exile and the Underground State institutions. The council was established on 1 January 1944 and was chaired by Bierut. Members of splinter socialist and peasant groups were co-opted to participate. The communist partisan military formation was now named Armia Ludowa (AL); it was placed under command of General Michał Rola-Żymierski.
After communications with Moscow were restored, a KRN delegation left for Moscow. Upon arriving there, they were officially greeted by Soviet officials and in June the Union of Polish Patriots had to recognize the KRN as the "true representation of the Polish nation". After the second KRN delegation arrived in Moscow, the Polish communists, in close cooperation with Stalin and other Soviet leaders, began working on a temporary executive government to administer the Polish lands (west of the Bug River) liberated by the Soviet and Polish communist armies. On 22 July 1944 the new organ, named the Polish Committee of National Liberation (PKWN), was officially established in the Lublin province. The PKWN Manifesto was issued, in which the committee claimed its authority in liberated Poland and announced fundamental and wide-ranging reconstruction and systemic changes, most prominently a land reform, to be implemented in the country. The socialist Edward Osóbka-Morawski was the PKWN's head and General Żymierski led the defense department, which diminished the role of General Berling. Most of the remaining PPR and KRN leaders left Warsaw and entered the Soviet-controlled territory. Zenon Kliszko and few others stayed in the capital to coordinate communist activities in the still occupied part of Poland.
Government-in-exile after Sikorski's death
After the death of Prime Minister Sikorski, the important figures in the exile government in London were President Władysław Raczkiewicz, the newly nominated Prime Minister Stanisław Mikołajczyk and Commander-in-chief Kazimierz Sosnkowski. During the Tehran Conference (November–December 1943) Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill determined the geographic location of the future Polish state (between the Oder River and the Curzon Line) without consulting or even notifying the Polish leaders. Czechoslovakia, previously Poland's partner for a planned confederation, signed in December 1943 a friendship treaty with the Soviet Union. As a result of the developing Soviet wartime advantage, the Polish government was gradually abandoned by its allies.
Early in January 1944, the Soviet forces crossed the 1939 border of Poland. The British pressured the Polish government to accept the Soviet conditions for a resumption of Polish-Soviet diplomatic relations and practical cooperation (a recognition of the Curzon Line border and removal of anti-Soviet politicians from the Polish government), but the Polish side balked. Mikołajczyk advocated compromising with the Soviets for the sake of preserving the country's independence, while Sosnkowski, counting on the outbreak of war between the Allies, rejected making any concessions. In February Churchill publicly announced his government's support for a Curzon Line Polish-Soviet border anyway.
In June 1944, Mikołajczyk officially traveled to the United States, where President Roosevelt suggested that he visits the Soviet Union to conduct political discussions. Roosevelt also asked Stalin to invite the Polish prime minister for talks on a resumption of bilateral relations. On 30 July Mikołajczyk arrived in Moscow accompanied by Foreign Minister Tadeusz Romer and Stanisław Grabski, chairman of the National Council. The PKWN had already been established and Stalin proposed negotiations between the two Polish representations aimed at their unification. The talks with Bierut, Osóbka-Morawski and Wasilewska did take place, but Mikołajczyk found the communist ideas and demands unacceptable, even though he was offered the job of prime minister in a combined government. The PKWN leaders were willing to grant the pro-Western Poles only four out of the eighteen discussed ministerial seats. Mikołajczyk reported to the government delegate in Poland that the Soviets would consider establishing diplomatic relations if the Poles first agreed between themselves, that "the Soviet government has not yet finally sided with the (Polish) communists", but "Polish communists are determined to exploit the situation for turning Poland into a communist state". Thus the prime minister, himself unable to convince his government of the necessity of offering significant concessions to victorious communists, believed that Polish communist leaders were effectively blocking his deal with Stalin. After Mikołajczyk's return to London, the government-in-exile came up with its own version of compromise proposals which included the PPR's participation in the government, but they were rejected by the PKWN.
Defeat of Operation Tempest and the Warsaw Uprising
In 1944, the lack of Polish-Soviet diplomatic relations and the resultant inability to conduct negotiations forced the Polish leadership to undertake political and military actions in an attempt to create a fait accompli situation in Poland that the Soviets would be compelled to accept. According to the planned Operation Tempest, the retreating German forces would be attacked by the Home Army, temporary Polish civilian administration would be installed in the liberated areas and its members, representing the government-in-exile, would greet the incoming Soviets as the rightful hosts. Consequently, in the spring and summer of 1944, the Polish underground waged numerous military operations in the areas where the Soviet advance was taking place. The actions resulted in military and political defeats, because the Soviets disarmed, arrested and deported the Home Army fighters, while the Western Allies cultivated good relations with the Soviet Union and were not interested in investigating the Polish claims of mistreatment or lending the Poles practical support. Fighting and winning a battle for Warsaw seemed the only opportunity left for the mainstream Polish independence movement.
The establishment of the PKWN provided an additional motivation for starting the Warsaw Uprising on 1 August 1944. The Soviets did not join the battle and stopped their offensive. The insurgents were being overpowered by the Germans and the belated rescue attempt in September by the 1st Infantry Division of Berling's First Polish Army ended in a bloody defeat. The Home Army capitulated on 2 October, Warsaw was subsequently largely demolished per Adolf Hitler's orders, and the Polish government-in-exile was no longer capable of staging major armed demonstrations in Poland. General Sosnkowski, having criticized the lack of effective aid to the Warsaw Uprising participants from the Allies, was removed from his top command position in September 1944.
Mikołajczyk's resignation, Provisional Government
In October, Churchill and Anthony Eden went to Moscow, as did Mikołajczyk, Grabski and Romer. They negotiated again with Bierut, Osóbka-Morawski and Rola-Żymierski. Mikołajczyk resisted the British and Soviet pressure to accept the communist territorial and other demands. In November in London, the Polish government rejected the Curzon Line border again. President Roosevelt disappointed the Poles by designating the Polish, British and Soviet governments as the proper forum for border discussions, but Prime Minister Mikołajczyk, unable to convince his colleagues of the need for further compromises, resigned on 24 November 1944. The Polish government, now led by Tomasz Arciszewski, was no longer seriously considered by the Allies.
On 31 December 1944, the State National Council converted the PKWN to the Provisional Government of the Republic of Poland, with Osóbka-Morawski as the prime minister. The Soviet Union recognized the new institution and the Western Allies did not object. The KRN and the Provisional Government gradually strengthened their position, as the Soviet NKVD facilitated the process by performing large scale arrests of opponents of communist rule.
The Provisional Government signed a 20-year friendship, alliance and cooperation treaty with the Soviet Union on 21 April 1945.
Communist-led war effort
The leftist, Soviet-allied Polish armed forces, placed under the authority of the PKWN and then the Provisional Government, were rapidly expanded, ultimately to about 400,000 people in two armies. In the summer of 1944, the First Polish Army established bridgeheads on the Vistula'a left bank south of Warsaw and in August its 1st Armoured Brigade fought the Germans at the Battle of Studzianki.
Many diversionary military actions and other combat operations were undertaken by Armia Ludowa and the Soviet partisans in September and October 1944, especially, but not only, in the Kielce province. At the end of October, led by the AL commander Mieczysław Moczar, most units broke through the front lines to the Soviet-Polish side.
The Soviet offensive was resumed on 12 January 1945. On 17 January the First Polish Army led by General Stanisław Popławski entered the destroyed Warsaw. It fought on the 1st Belorussian Front and during the following month participated in overcoming strongly fortified German defenses at the Pomeranian Wall, losing 6,500 soldiers; in March it took Kolberg. The 1st Armoured Brigade fought within the 2nd Belorussian Front and contributed to the liberation of Gdańsk and Gdynia. The First Army forced its way across the Oder River on 16–17 April and reached the Elbe near Spandau on 3 May. Its 1st Tadeusz Kościuszko Infantry Division and other Polish formations participated in the final Battle of Berlin. The Second Polish Army, led by General Karol Świerczewski, operated with the 1st Ukrainian Front. It crossed the Lusatian Neisse on 16 April and heading for Dresden suffered heavy losses at the Battle of Bautzen, due to poor command. However, a German rescue force heading for Berlin was stopped. Helping to defeat Nazi Germany in Poland, the two Polish armies suffered losses equal to the Polish military losses encountered during the September Campaign of 1939—66,000 soldiers killed (according to Antoni Czubiński).
Provisional Government of National Unity
The Polish social Left was critical with respect to the prewar Sanation-ruled Second Polish Republic and called for the establishment of a more just and democratic post-war Poland. A return to the March Constitution of 1921 was advocated. These postulates and the Soviet demand for Poland's eastern Kresy territories were accepted by the PPR and allied Polish Socialist Party (PPS) leaders, with considerable support from the agrarian movement politicians, who were also opposed to the April Constitution (1935) regime. Leftist sentiments, increasingly prevalent in Poland in 1944 and 1945, mixed with the widespread unease and fear regarding Poland's expected domination by the Soviet Union.
Further determinations regarding the future of Poland were made at the Yalta Conference in February 1945. The United States and Britain accepted the Soviet position in respect to postwar borders (the extent of Poland's western expansion at the expense of Germany was not specified), but differed with the Soviets on the issue of participation of the London-based government-in-exile in the formation of Poland's new compromise government. The Allied leaders ultimately authorized converting the existing in Poland, communist-dominated Provisional Government to Provisional Government of National Unity (TRJN), with greater participation of democratic and pro-Western forces, but no formal role for the government-in-exile. The TRJN was charged with conducting free elections soon, based on which a permanent Polish government would be established. As for the practical implementation, a commission representing the three great powers negotiated the issue of the TRJN in Moscow and the talks had been stalled for a long time, until joined by former Prime Minister Mikołajczyk of the government-in-exile. In June Mikołajczyk agreed to a temporary deal, which turned out to permanently favor the communist side.
The exact shape of the TRJN was determined during talks in Moscow on 16–21 June 1945. The KRN and the Provisional Government were represented there by seven politicians, including Bierut and Gomułka, three representatives, including Mikołajczyk, came from the emigrant circles and there were five non-communists from Poland. Mikołajczyk unsuccessfully tried to limit the dominant role of the communists and became only a deputy prime minister. Mikołajczyk's People's Party was granted the right to nominate ⅓ of the KRN members; Wincenty Witos and Stanisław Grabski were the new vice-chairmen of that body. On 28 June 1945, Chairman Bierut of the KRN created the TRJN, and on 5 July the US and the United Kingdom withdrew their recognition of the government-in-exile.
The TRJN was led by the socialist Prime Minister Osóbka-Morawski of the previous Provisional Government. Gomułka and Mikołajczyk were included as deputy prime ministers. The formally coalition government had seven PPR members, six from the peasant People's Party and Polish Socialist Party each, and two from the centrist Democratic Alliance (SD). The government was controlled by the PPR and other politicians reconciled to the reality of Soviet domination. Mikołajczyk's party however, aware of its popularity, counted on winning the planned parliamentary elections and was the only participant that actually thought of the TRJN as being temporary.
Formation of a new sociopolitical system, PPR's role and program
Operating within the Soviet-controlled international environment, regardless of the results of the upcoming mandated elections, the Polish communists had no intention of giving up political power and made no secret of it. Nonetheless, many of them believed that the reforms they undertook under the evolving new system would remain popular and would enable them to win future elections.
The PPR invoked the tradition of social struggle in the Second Polish Republic and the party gained support of many politicians of leftist orientation from the peasant and socialist movements, who shared that point of view. The PPR promised radical land ownership and agrarian reforms as well as nationalization of the industry, banking and trade. The communists used nationalistic rhetoric of the prewar National Democracy movement in regard to the post-German "Recovered Territories".
A "Democratic Bloc" of parties was organized around the PPR; it included pro-communist factions of the socialist, agrarian and centrist movements. Mikołajczyk's Polish People's Party was legalized and functioned independently as the only formal opposition; other political formations were banned and their supporters persecuted.
The PPR itself comprised different factions, reflecting different experiences of its members. Some of the PPR leaders referred to the Communist International tradition and proclaimed internationalist ideas. They believed in strict hegemony of the Soviet Union, which they saw as both necessary and desirable. This group was led by activists of Jewish origin: Jakub Berman, Hilary Minc and Roman Zambrowski, and by Bolesław Bierut. Berman, Minc and Zambrowski spent the war in the Soviet Union and were leaders of Polish-communist organizations formed there under Joseph Stalin's supervision. PPR chief Władysław Gomułka led the faction that also believed in the (politically necessary) Polish-Soviet alliance, but wanted to form it on more pragmatic bases. They stressed the Polish national interest and wished to pursue a more limited cooperation, as conditioned by that interest. All PPR factions were actually strongly dependent on and therefore practically dominated by Stalin's regime.
In a broader historical perspective, the cooperation of Polish communists, other leftists and some non-leftist politicians with Stalin prevented a territorial reduction of the Polish state of great magnitude. In geopolitical reality, such reduction would be irreversible.
Incorporation of post-German territories, postwar reconstruction and state socialist reforms
Poland's eastern borders had not become a major international issue, as the Western powers accepted the Soviet position in this regard. Decisions concerning the Polish–German border were made at the Potsdam Conference, where Stalin lobbied for Poland's maximal extension in the west, arranged for the Polish government delegation to present their point of view and in the end thwarted the long-standing British policy (aimed at keeping some of the lands in question for the future German state). In Poland, the PPR led the massive "Recovered Territories" propaganda campaign, the Allied-authorized expulsion of ethnic Germans and the repopulation of the region by Poles "repatriated" from the lost Kresy eastern areas. The exact eastern boundary was determined in the Polish–Soviet treaty signed on 16 August 1945, which finalized the contested issue of Lviv (the city stayed on the Soviet Ukrainian side of the border). The resettlement of Ukrainians who lived on the Polish side followed.
The settlement and development of post-German lands was considered a high priority and the Ministry of the Recovered Territories, established in November 1945, was led by Gomułka himself. Being convinced of the crucial importance of the acquired areas for Poland, he energetically pursued their economic development and integration with the rest of the country. After the war, Polish officials had to engage in complicated bargaining with the Soviet authorities, who considered industrial installations in former Germany their war loot and wanted to take as much of it as possible to the Soviet Union.
The land reform decree was issued by the PKWN on 6 September 1944. Over one million peasant families benefited from the parcellation of larger estates and post-German property (6 million hectares of land). The act and its implementation concluded the various land reform attempts and partial realizations that went back to the partitioned Poland and Second Polish Republic periods. Thousands of State Agricultural Farms were also established (1.5 million hectares). They were intended as model farming enterprises, demonstrating, in addition to their role in food production, the progressive ways of agriculture. The reforms, whose consequences fundamentally altered the antiquated social and economic structure of Polish society, were sharply criticized by advocates of the inviolability of property rights. Existence as a social class of ziemiaństwo (large scale land owners) was undercut, while the free market economic system was for the most part still functioning in the country.
Reforms of more moderate nature were undertaken in regard to private industry. Various, sometimes chaotic developments took place in 1944–45, including the taking over of thousands of enterprises by workers' councils. A charged national debate that followed resulted in the KRN statute of 3 January 1946. It was decided that the state would take over enterprises that employed over 50 people on a given shift, but the owners who were Polish or foreign (not German) would be paid compensation. Based on that statute, 5,870 enterprises were nationalized by 1948, while 15,700 were left in private hands.
Central planning got started with the establishment of the Central Planning Office in November 1945, directed by socialist Czesław Bobrowski. The Economic Committee of the Council of Ministers was led by Hilary Minc. The economic reconstruction of Poland was undertaken, combined with prospective planning for the next 12 years. 230,000 residential apartments were built in the cities and 300,000 in the country in 1945–47, which resulted in more evenly spread population, living under considerably improved conditions.
Compulsory general education was brought back and higher education was tuition free. A shortage of teachers had to be addressed first and many were needed, given the massive program of elimination of illiteracy and part-time evening schooling for the employed. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) helped with food, clothes and equipment for the Polish people (the assistance amounted to 22% of the country's national income in 1946). Inflation went up to 38% in 1947, but was brought down to 4% in 1949. In late 1946 Poland's economy approached the 1938 prewar level, which allowed gradual discontinuation of the previously imposed rationing of mass consumption products.
Legislation concerning the Three-Year Plan (1947–49) for economic development was passed by the KRN in 1946 and again in 1947 by the new "Legislative Sejm" (parliament) that replaced the KRN after the 1947 Polish legislative election. In 1947, the Sejm proclaimed the right to work. Unemployment was eliminated and real wages increased by 58% during the plan years, but still lagged behind their 1938 level. The public sector produced 50% of the national income in 1947, which went up to 64% in 1949. The private sector was being reduced, while the network of cooperative enterprises experienced significant growth in the area of trade.
Political struggle and persecution of opposition
Politicians in Poland connected in the past to the Sanation and National Democracy formations did not recognize the new realities and waged a determined campaign against the communist authorities, boycotting decisions of the government, especially the ones having to do with the establishment of administrative and military structures. This led to conflicts and intensified repressions. Polish internal security organs were created and resolved, in cooperation with their Soviet counterparts, to disable the opposition using persecution and terror. The political confrontations were accompanied by armed activity of anti-government conspiracy groups.
The Polish Catholic Church, led by Cardinal August Hlond until his death in 1948, took an anti-regime stand. It coped with difficulties related to the lack of Polish church organization in the Recovered Territories. In the fall of 1945, with permission from the Vatican, the Church embarked on the establishment of provisional administrative structures in the territories taken from Germany. Authorization for permanent Polish church administration there was not forthcoming and the instability in this area added to the existing German-Polish antagonisms.
In April 1946, a new volunteer citizen militia ORMO was formed to help the police (Milicja Obywatelska), political police (UBP), the Internal Security Corps, the Polish army, the Soviet political police (NKVD), and the Soviet army to eliminate armed opposition to the government. The NKVD killed, arrested, harassed, and used propaganda to suppress and discredit opponents of the regime. Already during the 1944–48 period, many were imprisoned or taken to the Soviet Union, some executed under court rulings. The whole security system was directed by Soviet politician Lavrentiy Beria.
Government authorities offered two amnesties for fighters from the opposition militia groups, which originated from remnants of the disbanded Home Army and other organizations. Tens of thousands of oppositionists took advantage of the amnesties declared in 1945 and 1947. Some were subjected to further prosecution and imprisonment, but the amnesties effectively terminated the anti-communist armed resistance movement.
Elections of 1947 and elimination of legal opposition
The replacement of postwar cooperation among the great powers with the Cold War derailed the planned peace conference—the issue of Poland's western border was not going to be amicably resolved. In the West only France clearly upheld its support for Poland in the border dispute. "Revisionist" circles had a prominent voice in what was becoming West Germany and the PPR, for existential reasons, felt compelled to strengthen its policy of reliance on the Soviet Union. The TRJN was now in no position to maneuver any degree of independence for itself.
The PPR delayed nationwide parliamentary elections because it believed that the ongoing implementation of reforms would move the public opinion in its favor. The party strengthened its position by first holding a referendum in June 1946, intended as a plebiscite for or against the new system. For the election, the PPR-dominated Democratic Bloc prepared a unified list of candidates; the Polish Socialist Party agreed to join the bloc, but the Polish People's Party, led by Mikołajczyk, refused. The bloc was also opposed by other groups, some of which were not legally registered, while other were semi- or fully conspiratorial and hostile to the bloc.
The referendum asked three questions: about abolishing the Senate (parliament's upper chamber), future constitutional moderate socialist reforms, and the permanency of Poland's western and northern borders. The ruling regime needed to show an overwhelming support for its program before the elections. Accordingly, the referendum was conducted under considerable pressure (such as heavy military and police presence) and the results were falsified to give the Democratic Bloc a strong majority it wanted.
The PPR and its allies in the bloc were large parties, each with membership in hundreds of thousands, supported in addition by the several million-strong trade union structure. They had public security forces at their disposal. The also large and popular People's Party invoked Poland's Western connections and its tradition of struggles for independence. It was supported by the Catholic clergy. The campaign was harsh and the PPR was often subjected to antisemitic Żydokomuna accusations. Given the Soviet pressure, the bloc could not just have won elections by receiving a majority of the votes; it had to produce a result impressive enough for propaganda purposes.
The communists feared losing the elections to Mikołajczyk's party and that this outcome would cause a complete Soviet occupation of Poland. During the election campaign, the PPR targeted the People's Party, the Democratic Bloc's main (but not only) election rival, arresting its candidates, harassing them, and denying them public exposure. About one hundred opposition party activists were murdered; many PPR members were also killed.
In the 1947 Polish legislative election the bloc claimed to have won 80% of the votes, but the election was widely seen as fraudulent. Factors such as the scale of the fraud or who actually received the largest number of votes are not known. The campaign and election results eliminated the People's Party from the political scene, which left Poland with no legally functioning opposition. Mikołajczyk, harassed and threatened, fled the country in October 1947.
Removal of Gomułka, Stalinism, Polish United Workers' Party
In accordance with the announced election results, the PPS, which competed within the Democratic Bloc, received two more legislative mandates than the PPR. The Presidency of Poland was reestablished by the Sejm and Bolesław Bierut, previously chairman of the KRN, was given that job. Józef Cyrankiewicz, a socialist, became the new prime minister and Gomułka was kept as deputy prime minister. The intermediate Small Constitution of 1947 was passed by the Sejm. The newly created Council of State had emergency powers and was led by the president. Despite the elections conducted under communist control and amnesty for armed and political opponents declared by the Sejm, the situation in Poland underwent further polarization.
Because of the deepening division in international politics and the emergence of two mutually hostile blocs, Stalin demanded stricter loyalty in the Soviet sphere; purges of circles and individuals considered ideologically corrupt or otherwise unreliable were pursued. Gomułka's criticism of Soviet policies was now seen as inappropriately nationalistic. Gomułka's "Polish road to socialism", adapting to conditions specific to Poland, was no longer tolerated as Stalin tightened his control over the PPR. Gomułka and his group were removed from positions of responsibility and in August 1948 the Central Committee installed Bierut as general secretary of the PPR. Bierut would strictly follow the Soviet lead and remold Polish society on the Stalinist model.
The PPR pressured the remaining left-wing faction of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) to merge the two parties. The merger occurred in December 1948 and the Polish United Workers' Party (Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza, PZPR) was formed. The merger was conducted almost entirely on PPR terms; the PPS had by then been "purified" with the expulsion of hundreds of its members.
The Polish People's Party managed to survive for another year, albeit under growing harassment. In 1949, its remains merged with a pro-communist splinter party to form the United People's Party (Zjednoczone Stronnictwo Ludowe, ZSL).
Under PPR rule, the Republic of Poland was a declared "people's democracy" and was not officially considered a socialist entity. Private property and free market functionality were tolerated and the role of the state was not overly exposed. All this had changed with the establishment of the PZPR: the Six-Year Plan of heavy industrial development was imposed and the building of state socialist system and society commenced in earnest.
Election results
Sejm
See also
List of Polish Workers' Party politicians
References
1942 establishments in Poland
1948 disestablishments in Poland
Aftermath of World War II in Poland
Defunct communist parties in Poland
Poland in World War II
Political parties disestablished in 1948
Political parties established in 1942
Polish United Workers' Party
Stalinism in Poland
World War II resistance movements
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec%20comics
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Quebec comics
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Quebec comics (, or BDQ) are French language comics produced primarily in the Canadian province of Quebec, and read both within and outside Canada, particularly in French-speaking Europe.
In contrast to English language comics in Canada, which largely follow the American model, Quebec comics are mostly influenced by the trends in Franco-Belgian comics. There is little crossover between the French and English comics worlds in Canada.
Overview
The majority language of Quebec is French, and Quebec comics refers to those comics published in French—English-language comics are considered to be part of the English-language part of Canadian comics history. The two traditions have little crossover, with the English tradition following mainly American trends, and the French tradition following mainly European ones, especially the French language Franco-Belgian trends, although newspaper comic strips have tended to be French translations of syndicated American strips.
In the early 2000s, most comics consumed within Quebec were of European or American origin, with local comics only making up 5% of the total market, which had been true since the early 1970s. However, a number of comics of Québécois origin have found success overseas, like Michel Rabagliati's Paul series and Maryse Dubuc's Les Nombrils (The Bellybuttons), some of these cartoonists have had success with English translations, as when Montreal-based English publisher Drawn & Quarterly picked up Julie Doucet's Dirty Plotte, which won acclaim and awards in the English-speaking comics world.
History
Native Quebec comics have had a long up-and-down history, alternating between periods of flourishing and periods languishing under the deluge of foreign comics.
19th century
Caricatures have appeared in newspapers in Quebec since at least the 18th century. A political poster using speech balloons from 1792 has been attested. Most were anonymous, but one, titled "La Ménagerie annexionniste", by William Augustus Leggo was another early francophone use of speech balloons. Speech balloons thereafter became more common in caricatures and advertising, and humorous and satirical publications also proliferated.
By the end of the century, one could buy compilations of these cartoons and illustrations—the roots of comic albums in Quebec. Between 1878 and 1884, Henri Julien published two books of political caricatures, L’album drolatique du journal Le Farceur. In 1900, Morissette published Petit chien sauvage et savant, and in 1901 Raoul Barré put out En roulant ma boule. Following this, the number of cartoonists increased in newspapers in Quebec City and Montreal.
What has been called the first comic strip in Quebec appeared in 1866. The woodcut serial strip was called Baptiste Pacôt and has been attributed to the sculptor Jean-Baptiste Côté. A number of other pantomime or captioned strips appeared throughout the rest of the century. In 1902, Raoul Barré drew the captioned eight-panel strip, "Pour un dîner de Noël", which was the first known strip to appear in a daily Quebec newspaper. Barré created a strip called Noah's Ark in 1912 for the New York-based McClure Syndicate, which he brought to La Patrie the next year in French. Soon after he moved into animation, becoming an innovative pioneer in the field.
Hector Berthelot was a cartoonist and the publisher of Le Canard, where Berthelot started running satirical material signed Père Ladébauche ("Father Debauchery") starting in 1878. Berthelot would bring Ladébauche with him from newspaper to newspaper, and in 1904, Joseph Charlebois's comic strip version of Le Père Ladébauche debuted in La Presse, a popular strip that would last until 1957. Le Canard published the works of a number of other notable cartoonists, such as Henri Julien, and it was there that the oldest known comic strip using a speech balloon appeared, an unsigned strip printed on 22 September 1883.
Early 20th century comic strips
The popular press began to flourish at the turn of the century, and, as photographic reproduction was still in its infancy, the papers hired cartoonists and illustrators to liven up their pages, with the Montreal Star employing up to eight artists. La Patrie had convinced Albéric Bourgeois to give up his job at the Boston Globe and create comic strips for them back in Quebec. 1904 saw, in La Patrie, the publication of his Les Aventures de Timothée (The Adventures of Timothée), said to be the first French-language comic to feature speech balloons consistently. This began what historian Michel Viau calls "The Golden Age of the BDQ".
La Presse, in response to La Patrie'''s success with Timothée, added a weekly children's section, "La Ruche enfantine", which included comic strips. Charlebois's Père Ladébauche had begun, and after 43 instalments was taken over by Bourgeois, who continued to create other strips as well for La Presse, to which he soon moved and stayed with until his 1955 retirement. Théophile Busnel took over Timothée and continued it until his sudden death in 1908. It was replaced with a translation of American Richard F. Outcault's Buster Brown. Soon, other native strips were being replaced with translations of popular American strips, and by 1909, the "Golden Age" that had started in 1904 had come to an end. Native strips didn't disappear entirely, but those that remained lost the distinct flavour of contemporary life in Quebec, and began to imitate the silent films and vaudeville that were inundating popular culture in the province.
Québécois cartoonists would unsuccessfully propose a number of strips to compete with the American strips that dominated the Sundays and dailies. The native Quebec presence on those pages would become more dominant after 1940, however, with the introduction of the War Exchange Conservation Act, which restricted the import of foreign strips. Comic strips disappeared more-or-less from the dailies during World War I, and didn't really return until Arthur Lemay revived Timothée for a number of years starting in 1920. Weekend supplements grew, some to as many as 40 pages, but were filled with translations of American strips, which were well-distributed by the growing syndicates, as well as some strips from France. Some native strips continued to appear, however, and in 1935 Albert Chartier made his cartooning debut with a strip called Bouboule. In 1943, he created the comical character Onésime, a strip that would have the longest run of any in Quebec, and which replaced The Captain and the Kids when it first appeared. It starred a naïve and clumsy country person and his plump and authoritarian wife.
While the adventure strip flourished in the 1930s, papers in Quebec were unwilling to pay local artists more than what they would pay for a syndicated American strip, which made it hard for local artists to survive, due to the economies of scale that made it cheaper for them to buy the American strips. A few commissioned propaganda works and adaptations of "novels of the homeland" appeared. Rodolphe and Odette Vincent, under the banner of Éditions Vincent, produced some adaptations of adventure novels that they managed to sell to some papers, and were collected into albums by Quebec Éditions de l'A. B. After the end of World War II, however, Éditions Vincent found themselves unable to compete with the flood of American comics that returned after trade restrictions were loosened. The longest-running of the adventure strips was Les Aventures de Robert et Roland by Roberto Wilson, which debuted in 1956 and lasted until 1965.
Paulin Lessard, at the age of sixteen, had his Les Deux Petits Nains published in Le Progrès du Saguenay in 1947 and 1948. This was the first science fiction BDQ, about two brothers who were only a few centimetres tall, but were endowed with enormous strength, and met with people of other minuscule races.
Post-war era
The end of World War II brought with it a loosening in trade restrictions with the US, and American comics came flooding into the province. Whereas in English Canada this had meant the death toll for the local industry, in Quebec local production was paradoxically stimulated by the influx of foreign material. At the height of the "Great Darkness", a time of conservative government policies mixed with close government ties with the Catholic Church, the violence in many American comics at the time led to a belief that they promoted juvenile delinquency, and as it had in English Canada and the US, the belief prompted the authorities and concerned parents to crack down on comics. Gérard Tessier, with the support of Cardinal Paul-Émile Léger, published Face à l'imprimé obscène in 1955, in the vein of Fredric Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent.
Catholic comics reached their highest point at this time. The Centrale de la Jeunesse étudiante catholique ("The Centre for Young Catholic Students") put out the biweekly François beginning in 1943, printing mostly humorous strips. It was joined by Claire in 1957, the girls' version of François, which was almost identical in content. Hérauts began in 1944, at first printing translations of American strips from the religious Timeless Topix. The publication, which had a circulation of 100,000, had a mission to battle the "bad" American comics, and was distributed in schools starting in 1947, which resulted in fewer comics being included in its pages. Hérauts was also the first BDQ to be exported to the European market, although only briefly. By the mid-1950s, Hérauts was publishing local comics by the likes of Gabriel de Beney and Maurice Petitdidier. Almost all the strips from Hérauts, Québécois and American, were reprinted in comics albums during this time, and they also launched a younger version called Le Petit Hérauts in 1958, in which Petitdidier's Fanchon et Jean-Lou was particularly popular.
BDQ of this period flourished only between 1955 and 1960. After this time, the Catholic magazines once again took to reprinting American comics, and the market was flooded with glossy, full-colour Franco-Belgian comics magazines like Tintin, Spirou, Vaillant, Pif, and Pilote. By the mid-1960s, the Catholic publications were gone.
Spring of BDQ
The revolutionary 1960s and the Quiet Revolution in Quebec saw new vigour in BDQ. The so-called printemps de la BD québécoise ("Spring of Quebec comics") is said to have begun in 1968 with the creation of the group Chiendent, who published in La Presse and Dimanche-Magazine. Jacques Hurtubise (Zyx), Réal Godbout, Gilles Thibault ("Tibo"), and Jacques Boivin were particularly notable cartoonists, and publications appeared with names like Ma®de in Québec, L'Hydrocéphale illustré, La Pulpe, B.D., and L'Écran. The comics no longer focused on younger audiences, instead seeking confrontation or experimenting with graphics. The first modern Quebec comic book is said to be Oror 70 (Celle qui en a marre tire) by André Philibert, which dealt with countercultural topics like what were being seen in the underground comix of Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton. During the 1970s, BDQ were sometimes called "BDK", bande dessinée kébécoise.
Numerous short-lived, small press titles popped up here and there throughout the province. The artists who made them set out to challenge society, and the comics abounded in taboos, like sex and drugs. Lack of distribution, irregular publishing scales, and a relatively small market led eventually to the demise of these publications. Albums, on the other hand, had become incredibly popular, and large European publishers began to open Quebec divisions to deal with the demand for titles like The Adventures of Tintin, Asterix and Blueberry. Quebec publishers scrambled to get in on the boom, and published a number of albums, many based on TV characters, some aimed at adults.
This period saw an increased interest in Quebec of local comics, and a number of events were first held: the Salon international de la caricature de Montréal added a comic strip section to their annual exhibit in 1971; Festival de la bande dessinée de Montréal ("Festival of Comics of Montreal") was held for four years starting in 1975 at the University of Montreal; and the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal mounted its first major retrospective of Quebec comics, presented at the Angoulême International Comics Festival in France. Richard Langlois developed a course called "Bande dessinée et figuration narrative" in Sherbrooke that was offered in post-secondary schools throughout the province, which sparked a number of other practical and theoretical courses to be offered in colleges and universities. An issue of the literary journal La Barre du Jour dedicated an entire 260-page issue to Quebec comics, and certain arts and sociological magazines ran articles on the subject, as well as some popular newspapers and periodicals. A fanzine called B.D.K., published by Michel Ouellette and dedicated exclusively to Quebec comics, ran for three years beginning in 1975. Increasingly over this period, comics became increasingly deeply analyzed, and began to be taken seriously and scholarly as an artform.
In 1979, with the help of an $80,000 grant from the ministère des Affaires culturelles du Québec ("Quebec Ministry of Cultural Affairs"), Jacques Hurtubise, Pierre Huet and Hélène Fleury would establish the long-lived, satirical Croc ("Fang" in French), which published many leading talents of the era, many of whom were able to launch their careers through the magazine's help. Croc begat another magazine, Titanic, dedicated entirely to comics, and in 1987, Safarir (a pun, which combines "safari" with ça fait rire—"it makes you laugh"), a Mad-like publication patterned after the French Hara-Kiri, rose in competition with Croc, eventually putting the older magazine out of business. By the mid-1980s, a number of professional comics publishers began to flourish.
Adult and Underground comics of the time began to multiply, with notable titles including Cocktail, Tchiize! présente, Tchiize! bis, and the fanzine Iceberg appearing in the early 1980s, giving an outlet to young cartoonists like Henriette Valium and Julie Doucet. Fanzines, which had earlier focused on superheroes, now began to feature science fiction instead.
Since the 1990s
In Montreal in the 1980s and 1990s, in parallel to mainstream humour magazines, a healthy underground scene developed, and self-published fanzines proliferated. Julie Doucet, Henriette Valium, Luc Giard, Éric Thériault, Gavin McInnes and Siris were among the names that were discovered in the small press publications.
In the 21st century, some Québécois cartoonists who have seen success in Canada and abroad are Michel Rabagliati and his semi-autobiographical Paul series, Maryse Dubuc and Delaf's Les Nombrils (The Bellybuttons), aimed at teenaged girls, and Guy Delisle with various travelogue comics. All of these series have seen English translations. An increasing number of cartoonists also took to online webcomics.
Around the turn of the century, the government of Quebec mandated La Fondation du 9e art ("The 9th Art Foundation") to promote francophone cartoonists in North America. There have also emerged events such as the Festival de la bande dessinée francophone de Québec in Quebec City and la Zone internationale du neuvième art (ZINA).
Publication, promotion and distribution
Comics publications tend to follow the Franco-Belgian model, with books printed as albums with either soft- or hardcovers. When aimed at children, they are usually in full-colour, while comics aimed at adults are often in black-and-white and have softcovers.
Traditionally, comics publishing in Quebec has centred in Montreal, Quebec City, Sherbrooke and, since the 1990s, in Gatineau. Fanzines are also produced throughout the province. There are a number of French-language comics publishers based in Quebec, such as Éditions Mille-Îles, La Pastèque, Les 400 coups, Mécanique Générale, and Glénat Québec, the Quebec arm of the France-based publisher Glénat. Translations into English of Québécois comics such as Michel Rabagliati's Paul series have been published by the English-language, Montreal-based Drawn & Quarterly, and Conundrum Press, also based in Montreal, has put much of its focus on publishing translations of Quebec comics.
The Prix Bédélys ("Bédélys Prize") has been awarded to French language comics since 2000. It comes with bursaries for the Prix Bédélys Québec for Best Book from Quebec and the Prix Bédélys Fanzine. The Joe Shuster Awards are open to all Canadian comics in any language, not limited to either French or English, and a number of francophone comics and publishers have won the awards.
The government of Quebec mandated La Fondation du 9e art ("The 9th Art Foundation") to promote francophone cartoonists in North America. Events such as the Festival de la bande dessinée francophone de Québec in Quebec City and la Zone internationale du neuvième art (ZINA) celebrate francophone comics in Quebec.
See also
List of Canadian comics creators
Culture of Quebec
Montreal Comiccon
References
Notes
Works cited
Bell, John. Invaders from the North: How Canada Conquered the Comic Book Universe. Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2006.
Carpentier, André, et al., La Bande dessinée kébécoise, La barre du jour, 1975
Further reading
In French:
Tessier, Gérard. Face à l'imprimé obscène. Plaidoyer en faveur d'une littérature saine. Montréal: Éditions de la Feuille d'érable, 1955
Dubois, B. Bande dessinée québécoise : répertoire bibliographique à suivre. éditions D.B.K., Sillery, 1996
Falardeau Mira. La Bande dessinée au Québec. Boréal, 1994
Falardeau, Mira. Histoire de la bande dessinée au Québec. VLB éditeur, collection Études québécoises, Montréal, 2008
Giguère, M. La bande dessinée, populaire et méconnue, Cahier de référence du programme de perfectionnement professionnel ALQ, 2005
Viau, Michel. BDQ : Répertoire des publications de bandes dessinées au Québec des origines à nos jours. Milles Îles, 1999.
Viau, Michel. Grande presse et petits bonhommes, la naissance de la BDQ, in Formule Un, Mécanique Générale, 2007
External links
Quebecois Comics, history at Collections Canada
La bande dessinée québécoise, history at Collections Canada
La BD au Québec
A long response to Marc Tessier's history of the Montreal comics since that appeared in The Comics Journals 2005 Special EditionComics festivals and conventions in Quebec'''
Montréal Comicon
Expozine (website of Expozine press fair)
Festival de la bande dessinée francophone de Québec
Otakuthon
Quebec comics
Culture of Quebec
Canadian comic strips
History of Canadian comics
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System%20Shock%202
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System Shock 2
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System Shock 2 is a 1999 action role-playing survival horror video game designed by Ken Levine and co-developed by Irrational Games and Looking Glass Studios. Originally intended to be a standalone title, its story was changed during production into a sequel to the 1994 game System Shock. The alterations were made when Electronic Arts—who owned the System Shock franchise rights—signed on as publisher.
The game takes place on board a starship in a cyberpunk depiction of 2114. The player assumes the role of a soldier trying to stem the outbreak of a genetic infection that has devastated the ship. Like System Shock, gameplay consists of first-person combat and exploration. It incorporates role-playing elements, in which the player can develop skills and traits, such as hacking and psionic abilities.
System Shock 2 was originally released in August 1999 for Microsoft Windows. The game received critical acclaim but failed to meet commercial sales expectations. Many critics later determined that the game was highly influential in subsequent game design, particularly on first-person shooters, and considered it far ahead of its time. It has been included in several "greatest games of all time" lists. In 2007, Irrational Games released a spiritual successor to the System Shock series, titled BioShock, to critical acclaim and strong sales.
System Shock 2 had been in intellectual property limbo following the closure of Looking Glass Studios. Nightdive Studios were able to secure the rights to the game and the System Shock franchise in 2013 to release an updated version of System Shock 2 for modern operating systems, including for OS X and Linux, and announced plans to release an Enhanced Edition of the game. OtherSide Entertainment announced in 2015 that they had acquired the rights from Nightdive Studios to produce a sequel, System Shock 3, but as of 2020 the rights have since been transferred to Tencent.
Gameplay
As in its predecessor, System Shock, gameplay in System Shock 2 is an amalgamation of the action role-playing game and survival horror genres. The developers achieved this gameplay design by rendering the experience as a standard first-person shooter and adding a character customization and development system, which are considered signature role-playing elements. The player uses melee and projectile weapons to defeat enemies, while the role-playing system allows the development of useful abilities. Navigation is presented from a first-person view and complemented with a heads-up display that shows character and weapon information, a map, and a drag and drop inventory.
The backstory is explained progressively through the player's acquisition of audio logs and encounters with ghostly apparitions. At the beginning of the game, the player chooses a career in a branch of the Unified National Nominate, a fictional military organization. Each branch of service gives the player a set of starting bonuses composed of certain skills, though may thereafter freely develop as the player chooses. The Marine begins with bonuses to weaponry, the Navy officer is skilled in repairing and hacking, and the OSA agent gets a starting set of psionic powers.
The player can upgrade their skills by using "cyber-modules" given as rewards for completing objectives such as searching the ship and spend them at devices called "cyber-upgrade units" to obtain enhanced skills. Operating system (O/S) units allow one-time character upgrades to be made (e.g. permanent health enhancement). An in-game currency called "nanites" may be spent on items at vending machines, including ammunition supplies and health packs. "Quantum Bio-Reconstruction Machines" can be activated and reconstitute the player for 10 nanites if they die inside the area in which the machine resides. Otherwise, the game ends and progress must be resumed from a save point. The player can hack devices, such as keypads to open alternate areas and vending machines to reduce prices. When a hack is attempted, a minigame begins that features a grid of green nodes; the player must connect three in a straight row to succeed. Optionally, electronic lock picks, called "ICE-picks", can be found that will automatically hack a machine, regardless of its difficulty.
Throughout the game, the player can procure various weapons, including melee weapons, pistols, shotguns, and alien weapons. Non-melee weapons degrade with use and will break if they are not regularly repaired with maintenance tools. There are a variety of ammunition types, each of which is most damaging to a specific enemy. For example, organic enemies are vulnerable to anti-personnel rounds, while mechanical foes are weak against armor-piercing rounds. Similarly, energy weapons cause the most damage against robots and cyborgs, and the annelid-made exotic weaponry is particularly harmful to organic targets. Because ammunition is scarce, to be effective the player must use it sparingly and carefully search rooms for supplies.
The game includes a research function. When new objects are encountered in the game, especially enemies, their organs can be collected and, when combined with chemicals found in storage rooms, the player can research the enemies and thus improve their damage against them. Similarly, some exotic weapons and items can only be used after being researched. OSA agents effectively have a separate weapons tree available to them. Psionic powers can be learned, such as invisibility, fireballs, and teleportation.
Plot
Backstory
In 2072, after the Citadel Station's demise in System Shock, TriOptimum's attempts to cover up the incident were exposed to the media and the corporation was brought up on charges from multiple individuals and companies for the ensuing scandal. The virus developed there killed the station's population; the ruthless malevolent AI supercomputer named SHODAN controlled, and eventually destroyed the Citadel Station in hopes of enslaving and destroying humanity. After a large number of trials, the company went bankrupt and their operations were shut down. The United Nations Nominate (UNN), a UN successor, was established to combat the malevolence and corruption of power-hungry corporations, including TriOptimum. Artificial intelligence was reduced to most rudimentary tasks in order to prevent the creation of another SHODAN-like malevolent AI, and development of new technologies was halted. Meanwhile, the hacker (System Shocks main protagonist), who became the most famous person in the world, vanished from the public eye.
In 2100, 28 years later, the company's failed stocks and assets were bought by a Russian oligarch named Anatoly Korenchkin, a former black market operator who sought to make money in legitimate ways. He re-licensed and restored the company to its former status in the following decade. Along with producing healthcare and consumer products, Korenchkin signed weapons contracts with various military organizations, private and political-owned. The new UNN was almost virtually powerless with Korenchkin exercising control over them.
In January 2114, 42 years after the Citadel events and 14 years into rebuilding TriOptimum, the company created an experimental FTL starship, the Von Braun, which is on its maiden voyage. The ship is followed by a UNN space vessel, the Rickenbacker, which is controlled by Captain William Bedford Diego, son of Edward Diego, the Citadel Station's infamous commander, and public hero of the Battle of the Boston Harbor during the Eastern States Police Action. Because the Rickenbacker does not have an FTL system of its own, the two ships are attached for the trip. However, Korenchkin was egotistical enough to make himself the captain of the Von Braun despite being inexperienced.
In July 2114, five months into the journey, the ships respond to a distress signal from the planet Tau Ceti V, outside the Solar System. A rescue team is sent to the planet's surface where they discover strange eggs; these eggs, found in an old ejection pod, infect the rescue team and integrate them into an alien communion known as "the Many" - a psychic hive mind generated by parasitic worms which can infect and mutate a human host. The parasites eventually spread to both ships and take over or kill most of their crews.
Story
Owing to a computer malfunction, the remaining soldier awakens with amnesia in a cryo-tube on the medical deck of the Von Braun, being implanted with an illegal cyber-neural interface. He is contacted by another survivor, Dr. Janice Polito, who guides him to safety before the cabin depressurizes. She demands that he meets her on deck 4 of the Von Braun. Along the way, the soldier battles the infected crew members. The Many telepathically communicate with him, attempting to convince him to join them. After restarting the ship's engine core, the soldier reaches deck 4 and discovers that Polito is dead. He is confronted by SHODAN. It is revealed she has been posing as Polito to gain the soldier's trust.
SHODAN mentions that she is responsible for creating the Many through her bioengineering experiments on Citadel Station. The Hacker, who freed her from her ethical restraints, ejected the grove that contained her experiments to prevent them contaminating Earth, an act that allowed part of SHODAN to survive in the grove. The grove crash-landed on Tau Ceti V. While SHODAN went into forced hibernation, the Many evolved beyond her control. SHODAN tells the soldier that his only chance for survival lies in helping destroy her creations. Efforts to regain control of XERXES, the main computer on the Von Braun, fail. SHODAN informs the soldier that destroying the ship is their only option, but he must transmit her program to the Rickenbacker first. While en route, the soldier briefly encounters two survivors, Thomas "Tommy" Suarez and Rebecca Siddons, who flee the ship aboard an escape pod.
With the transfer complete, the soldier travels to the Rickenbacker and learns both ships have been enveloped by the infection's source, a gigantic mass of bio-organic tissue that has wrapped itself over the two ships. The soldier enters the biomass and destroys its core, stopping the infection. SHODAN congratulates him and tells of her intentions to merge real space and cyberspace through the Von Brauns faster-than-light drive. The soldier confronts SHODAN in cyberspace and defeats her. The final scene shows Tommy and Rebecca receiving a message from the Von Braun. Tommy responds, saying they will return and noting that Rebecca is acting strange. Rebecca is shown speaking in a SHODAN-like voice, asking Tommy if he "likes her new look", as the screen fades to black.
History
Development
Development of System Shock 2 began in 1997 when Looking Glass Studios approached Irrational Games with an idea to co-develop a game. The development team were fans of System Shock and sought to create a similar game. Early story ideas were similar to the novella Heart of Darkness. In an early draft, the player was tasked with assassinating an insane commander on a starship. The original title, according to its pitch document, was Junction Point. The philosophy of the design was to continue to develop the concept of a dungeon crawler, like Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss, in a science fiction setting, the basis for System Shock. However, the press mistook System Shock to be closer to a Doom clone which was cited for its poor financial success. With Junction Point, the goal was to add in significant role-playing elements and a persistent storyline as to distance the game from Doom.
The title took 18 months to create with a budget of $1.7 million and was pitched to several publishers until Electronic Arts—who owned the rights to the System Shock franchise—responded by suggesting the game become a sequel to System Shock. The development team agreed; Electronic Arts became the publisher and story changes were made to incorporate the franchise. The project was allotted one year to be completed and to compensate for the short time frame, the staff began working with Looking Glass Studio's unfinished Dark Engine, the same engine used to create Thief: The Dark Project.
The designers included role-playing elements. Similar to Ultima Underworld, another Looking Glass Studios project, the environment in System Shock 2 is persistent and constantly changes without the player's presence. Paper-and-pencil role-playing games were influential; the character customization system was based on Travellers methodology and was implemented in the fictional military branches which, by allowing multiple character paths, the player could receive a more open-ended gameplay experience. Horror was a key focus and four major points were identified to successfully incorporate it. Isolation was deemed primary, which resulted in the player having little physical contact with other sentient beings. Secondly, a vulnerability was created by focusing on a fragile character. Last were the inclusion of moody sound effects and "the intelligent placement of lighting and shadows". The game's lead designer, Ken Levine, oversaw the return of System Shock villain SHODAN. Part of Levine's design was to ally the player with her. Levine sought to challenge the player by having SHODAN betray the player: "Sometimes characters are betrayed, but the player never is. I wanted to violate that trust and make the player feel that they, and not [only] the character, were led on and deceived". This design choice was controversial with the development team.
Several problems were encountered during the project. Because the team comprised two software companies, tension emerged regarding job assignments and some developers left the project. Additionally, many employees were largely inexperienced, but in retrospect project manager Jonathan Chey felt this was advantageous, stating "inexperience also bred enthusiasm and commitment that might not have been present with a more jaded set of developers." The Dark Engine posed problems of its own. It was unfinished, forcing the programmers to fix software bugs when encountered. In contrast, working closely with the engine code allowed them to write additional features. Not all setbacks were localized; a demonstration build at E3 was hindered when it was requested all guns be removed from the presentation due to then-recent Columbine High School massacre.
Release
A demo for the game, featuring a tutorial and a third of the first mission, was released on August 2, 1999. Nine days later, System Shock 2 was shipped to retailers. An enhancement patch was released a month later and added significant features, such as co-operative multiplayer and control over weapon degradation and enemy respawn rates. A port was planned for the Dreamcast but was canceled.
End-of-support
Around 2000, with the end-of-support for the game by the developer and publisher, remaining bugs and compatibility with newer operating systems and hardware became a growing problem. To compensate the missing support, some fans of the game became active in the modding community to update the game. For instance, the "Rebirth" graphical enhancement mod replaced many low-polygonal models with higher quality ones, a "Shock Texture Upgrade Project" increased the resolution of textures, and an updated level editor was released by the user community.
Intellectual property debacle and re-release
The intellectual property (IP) rights of System Shock 2 were caught for years in complications between Electronic Arts and Meadowbrook Insurance Group (the parent company of Star Insurance Company), the entity that acquired the assets of Looking Glass Studios on their closure, though according to a lawyer for Star Insurance, they themselves have since acquired the lingering intellectual property rights from EA.
In the player community, attempts had been made to update and patch System Shock 2 for known issues on newer operating systems and limitations that had been hard-coded into the game. In 2009, a complete copy of System Shock 2s Dark Engine source code was discovered in the possession of an ex-Looking Glass Studios employee who was at the time continuing his work for Eidos Interactive. In late April 2010, a user on the Dreamcast Talk forum disassembled the contents of a Dreamcast development kit he had purchased, and among the content he received into some of the source code for Looking Glass games, including System Shock. An unknown user, going only as "Le Corbeau" (The Raven), issued a patch for System Shock 2 and Thief 2 in 2012 that resolved several of the known issue with the Dark engine and other features. It is believed that the patches were enabled by the Dreamcast kit, using a combination of the available source code and by disassembling libraries off the development kit. The patch became known informally as the "NewDark" patch to distinguish it from other efforts to improve the game.
At about the same time, Stephen Kick of Night Dive Studios had been seeking to license the System Shock property as to create System Shock 3. Star Insurance had not been willing to grant that license but did agree to allow Night Dive Studios to bring System Shock 2 to modern systems. Shortly after getting this approval, the NewDark patch had been released, and Kick attempted to contact "Le Corbeau" to discuss the use of their patch, but the user was impossible to contact. Kick decided to approach GOG.com for a timed-exclusive release on their digital distribution website in February 2013, where the game was the most requested to be added to the catalog. This version, considered by GOG.com to be a "collector's edition", included the "Le Corbeau" NewDark patch. In addition, the updates allow user-made modifications to be applied more seamlessly. The release also contains additional material such as the game's soundtrack, maps of the Von Braun, and the original pitch document for the game. The update rights also allowed a Mac OS X version of System Shock 2 to be subsequently released on June 18, 2013, through GOG.com. The title became available on Steam on May 10, 2013. In April 2014 a Linux version was also released. "Le Corbeau" has continued to update the game since 2012, with their patches being incorporated into the versions that Night Dive distributes through GOG.com and Steam.
Since then, Night Dive Studios acquired the rights to System Shock, releasing an enhanced version in September 2015. Kick has reported they have acquired full rights to the series since then.
Reception
System Shock 2 received critical acclaim. It received over a dozen awards, including seven "Game of the Year" prizes. Reviews were very positive and lauded the title for its hybrid gameplay, moody sound design, and engaging story. System Shock 2 is regarded by critics as highly influential, particularly on first-person shooters and the horror genre. In a retrospective article, GameSpot declared the title "well ahead of its time" and stated that it "upped the ante in dramatic and mechanical terms" by creating a horrific gameplay experience. Despite critical acclaim and being the tenth best selling PC game in the US the month of its release, the title did not perform well commercially; only 58,671 copies were sold by April 2000.
Several publications praised the title for its open-ended gameplay. With regard to character customization, Trent Ward of IGN stated the best element of the role-playing system was allowing gamers to "play the game as completely different characters", and felt this made each play-through unique. Erik Reckase writing for Just Adventure agreed, saying "There are very few games that allow you [to] play the way you want". Alec Norands of Allgame believed that the different character classes made the game “diverse enough to demand instant replayability". Robert Mayer from Computer Games Magazine called System Shock 2 "a game that truly defies classification in a single genre", and ensured that "the action is occasionally fast-paced, it's more often tactical, placing a premium on thought rather than on reflexes."
Buck DeFore reviewed the PC version of the game for Next Generation, rating it four stars out of five, and stated that "Bluntly put, System Shock 2 is a welcome visit to the lost arts of the good old days, and an immersive experience as long as you don't mind some of the cobwebs that come along with it."
A number of critics described the game as frightening. Computer and Video Games described the atmosphere as "gripping" and guaranteed readers they would "jump out of [their] skin" numerous times. Allgame found the sound design particularly effective, calling it “absolutely, teeth-clenchingly disturbing", while PC Gamers William Harms christened System Shock 2 as the most frightening game he had ever played. Some critics found the weapon degradation system to be irritating, and members of the development team have also expressed misgivings about the system. The role-playing system was another point of contention; GameSpot described the job system as "badly unbalanced" because the player can develop skills outside their career choice. Allgame felt similarly about the system, saying it "leaned towards a hacker character".
Along with Deus Ex, Sid Shuman of GamePro christened System Shock 2 "[one of the] twin barrels of modern [first-person shooter] innovation", owing to its complex role-playing gameplay. IGN writer Cam Shea referred to the game as "another reinvention of the FPS genre", citing the story, characters, and RPG system. PC Zone lauded the game as a "fabulous example of a modern-day computer game" and named it "a sci-fi horror masterpiece". The title has been inducted into a number of features listing the greatest games ever made, including ones by GameSpy, Edge, Empire, IGN, GameSpot and PC Gamer. IGN also ranked System Shock 2 as the 35th greatest first-person shooter of all time. X-Play called it the second scariest game of all time, behind Silent Hill 2. SHODAN has proven to be a popular character among most critics, including IGN, GameSpot and The Phoenix.
System Shock 2 won PC Gamer USs 1999 "Best Roleplaying Game" and "Special Achievement in Sound" awards, and was a runner-up in the magazine's overall "Game of the Year" category. The editors of Computer Gaming World nominated it for their "Role-Playing Game of the Year" prize, which ultimately went to Planescape: Torment.
Legacy
Enhanced edition
On a stream during the 20th anniversary of System Shock 2 on August 11, 2019, Night Dive announced an Enhanced Edition of the game was in development. Night Dive had been able to acquire and use the original game's source code, allowing them to improve upon the original. They plan to port the game to their KEX engine, the same engine they are using for the System Shock enhanced edition, and will work to make sure that the co-operative play features are better implemented. The enhanced version will aim to support all existing mods and custom maps developed by the gaming community, though will require work with the community to help with compatibility. Kick has stated that while they would like to work with "Le Corbeau" to incorporate their patches into the Enhanced Edition, they will likely need to deviate so that Night Dive can improve upon the original title. Kick later confirmed on Twitter that the enhanced edition will release for all platforms.
Alongside development of the Enhanced Edition will be a virtual reality (VR) version, though this will release at a later time as the Enhanced Edition. The VR version will use gameplay features that were introduced with Half-Life: Alyx, and will be cross-play compatible in its multiplayer mode with PC users that are not using VR modes.
Sequel projects
System Shock 2 has amassed a cult following, with fans asking for a sequel. On January 9, 2006, GameSpot reported that Electronic Arts had renewed its trademark protection on the System Shock name, leading to speculation that System Shock 3 might be under development. Three days later, Computer and Video Games reported a reliable source had come forward and confirmed the title's production. Electronic Arts UK made no comment when confronted with the information. PC Gamer UK stated the team behind The Godfather: The Game (EA Redwood Shores) was charged with its creation. Ken Levine, when asked whether he would helm the third installment, replied: "that question is completely out of my hands". He expressed optimism at the prospect of System Shock 3, but revealed that EA had not shown interest in his own proposal for a sequel, and was not optimistic with regards to their abilities. Electronic Arts did not confirm a new title in the series and allowed the System Shock trademark registration to lapse. Redwood Shores' next release was 2008's Dead Space, a game with noted similarities in theme and presentation to the System Shock series. According to Dead Space designers Ben Wanat and Wright Bagwell, their project was originally intended to be System Shock 3, before the release of Resident Evil 4 inspired them to go back to the drawing board and develop it into something more along those lines, eventually becoming Dead Space.
In March 2015, System Shock Infinite, a fan mod considered a downloadable content campaign or sequel to System Shock 2 created by xdiesp and was fully released to the public.
In November 2015, Night Dive Studios, after acquiring the rights to the System Shock franchise, stated they were considering developing a third title in the series. In December 2015, OtherSide Entertainment, a studio founded by former Looking Glass Studios designer Paul Neurath, announced they were developing System Shock 3 with rights granted to them by Night Dive Studios. OtherSide had acquired rights to make sequels to System Shock some years before this point but did not have the rights to the series name, which Night Dive was able to provide. The sequel will feature Terri Brosius reprising her voice for SHODAN, and will include work from original System Shock concept artist Robb Waters. Warren Spector, the producer of the first System Shock, announced in February 2016 that he has joined OtherSide Entertainment and will be working on System Shock 3. According to Spector, the narrative will pick up immediately from the end of System Shock 2, with SHODAN having taken over Rebecca's body. System Shock 3 will use the Unity game engine, with a teaser shown during Unity's press event at the 2019 Game Developers Conference.
Starbreeze Studios was originally planning to provide a $12 million "publishing-only" investment in System Shock 3, allowing OtherSide to retain all rights while seeking a 120% return on investment followed by equal shares of revenue splitting. Starbreeze's investment would allow the game to be developed for consoles in addition to the planned personal computer versions. However, in the wake of several financial problems in late 2018, Starbreeze has given back the publishing rights to System Shock 3 to OtherSide, and separated itself from the project. OtherSide stated they had the capability to self-publish System Shock 3 should they be unable to find a publishing partner but would prefer to have a publishing partner. At least twelve OtherSide employees working on System Shock 3, including several in lead roles, left the studio between late 2019 and early 2020. One former employee stated that the game's development team was "no longer employed"; however, in April 2020, OtherSide's vice president of marketing and development, Walter Somol, stated that the team was "still here" and progress on the project was "coming along nicely", but they were working remotely, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. After several journalists noted that the System Shock 3 websites had been transferred to ownership under Tencent in May 2020, Otherside confirmed that they had been unable to continue the series as a smaller studio and transferred the licensed rights to Tencent to continue its development, though Spector affirmed that OtherSide is still involved in its development alongside Tencent.
Warren Spector has stated that OtherSide stopped working on System Shock 3 in 2019, and that they are now working on an immersive simulation based on a new intellectual property developed by OtherSide.
In 2022, during Gamescon, Stephen Kick, Night Dive's CEO, stated in an interview after he finished the System Shock remake, that he intended to begin development on a System Shock 2 remake.
Spiritual successors
In 2007, Irrational Games—briefly known as 2K Boston/2K Australia—released a spiritual successor to the System Shock series, entitled BioShock. The game takes place in an abandoned underwater utopian community destroyed by the genetic modification of its populace and shares many gameplay elements with System Shock 2: reconstitution stations can be activated, allowing the player to be resurrected when they die; hacking, ammo conservation, and exploration are integral parts of gameplay; and unique powers may be acquired via plasmids, special abilities that function similarly to psionics in System Shock 2. The two titles share plot similarities and employ audio logs and encounters with ghostly apparitions to reveal backstory. In BioShock Infinite, Irrational Games included a gameplay feature called "1999 Mode", specifically in reference to System Shock 2s release year, designed to provide a similar game experience with a higher difficulty and long-lasting effects of choices made that would remind players of System Shocks unforgiving nature.
In 2017, Arkane Studios published Prey, which takes place on a space station named Talos I, similar to System Shock. It, too, features psionic abilities, in the form of "Neuromods", as a fundamental gameplay feature, and uses a mixture of audio logs and pieces of text to advance the game's backstory. Prey features elements like hacking, crafting, and features a heavy emphasis on side-quest exploration and careful conservation of ammunition and "Psi Points", player stat that controls how many psi abilities can be used. The game features crew members who have become infected, though, not as the result of an AI, but instead as the result of a failure of containment around a mysterious alien species known as the Typhon. Within the game, references are made to System Shocks developers, such as the "Looking Glass" technology that plays a significant role in the story's plot.
References
Notes
External links
(archived)
System Shock 2 at Ghost Story Games
1999 video games
Action role-playing video games
Cancelled Dreamcast games
Cooperative video games
Cyberpunk video games
Fiction set around Tau Ceti
First-person shooters
Immersive sims
Irrational Games
Linux games
Looking Glass Studios games
MacOS games
Multiplayer and single-player video games
1990s horror video games
Survival horror video games
System Shock
Windows games
Video game sequels
Video games developed in the United States
Video games scored by Eric Brosius
Video games scored by Ramin Djawadi
Video games set in outer space
Video games set in the 22nd century
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s%20United%20Party
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People's United Party
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The People's United Party (PUP) is one of two major political parties in Belize. It is currently the governing party of Belize after success in the 2020 Belizean general election, winning a majority of 26 seats out of 31 in the Belizean House of Representatives. It is a centre-left Christian democratic party. The party leader is Johnny Briceño, who currently serves as the Prime Minister of Belize.
Overview
The PUP was founded in 1950 out of the Nationalist Movement, as an anti-colonial party while the country was ruled by the United Kingdom as British Honduras. Under George Cadle Price the PUP played a major role in negotiating Belize's self-government in 1964 and eventual independence in 1981. The PUP dominated local British Honduran and later Belizean politics from the mid-1950s until 1984, when it lost to the centre-right opposition United Democratic Party (UDP). The UDP has been the party's main opposition since the early 1970s. Under Price's leadership, the PUP returned to power in 1989 but was defeated by the UDP again in 1993.
After Price's retirement in 1996, the PUP won a landslide victory in 1998 under the leadership of Said Musa. The PUP won 22 of the 29 seats in the House of Representatives in 2003. It subsequently held 21 seats after losing one to the UDP in a by-election in October 2003 after the death of one of its House members.
After nearly 10 years in power under Musa the PUP decisively lost the February 2008 election to the UDP, winning only six out of 31 seats. The party remained in opposition after the 2012 election, in which it gained 8 seats but was narrowly defeated by the UDP, and then lost 2 seats in the 2015 election. In the 2020 elections they won an overwhelming victory, gaining 14 seats and winning in almost all local councils.
Leaders
John Smith (1950–1952)
Leigh Richardson (acting) (1953–1956)
George Cadle Price (1956–1996)
Said Musa (1996–2008)
Francis Fonseca (29 October 2011 – 31 January 2016)
Johnny Briceño (2008–2011, 2016–present)
Early history (1941–1952)
1940s politics: the trade unions
Belizean politics in the 1940s was dominated by activists from the trade unions, particularly the Workers and Tradesmen's Union (later the General Workers Union, GWU), which had just received its right to organise British Honduran workers. Among the Union's leaders (some of whom would later be prominent in the PUP) were Clifford Betson, Antonio Soberanis, Henry Middleton and Nicholas Pollard Sr.
Coalescing against the British
Among the favourite places for anti-British sentiment to manifest itself was the Belize Town Board (now City Council), which offered opportunities for anti-colonial elements to gather strength and support from British Hondurans. A group of college-educated students, led by John Smith, George Price, Herbert Fuller and Herman Jex were all elected to positions on the Board and later the Legislative Council, assuring that they would be well placed to act. On December 31, 1949, an incident occurred that would force them to act.
Devaluation and the People's Committee
On this date, a Saturday, the Governor devalued the British Honduras dollar after previously insisting he would not do so. An ad hoc committee, the People's Committee (PC), was formed in January 1950 and began to speak out against this unwelcome act in particular and colonialism in general. Such members as Price and Smith in street corner meetings and Goldson and Richardson behind the printing press of the sympathetic daily the Belize Billboard, pressed the issue and sought the support of the Belizean people. A wave of anti-British and anti-colonial sentiment struck British Honduras (or Belize as the PC called it for the first time) that had never before been seen, not even in the 1930s at the height of Belize's Labour Movement. The PC found that almost overnight it had become the salvation of the people.
Formation
Belizeans rapidly accepted the new party's statements against colonialism and exploitation of the masses. On February 12, 1950, a crowd of 10,000 marched to Government House in Belize City and proceeded to stone the houses of supposed pro-British elements. A meeting at the Battlefield Park in central Belize City was teargassed by police, and a state of emergency was imposed until July. It was the first time that Belizeans had spoken so forcefully against British colonial policy and on a national level, featuring men and women. By April, the PC/PUP had infiltrated the General Workers Union and sought to turn it toward a nationalist, socialist perspective. By September 1950, an overworked PC was forced to admit that it had overreached itself and that the work of enlightening British Hondurans was the vein of a political party. Its members agreed unanimously to the dissolving of the PC and the birth of the PUP on September 29, 1950.
Colonialist response
A draft constitutional report prepared to examine Belize's readiness for development appeared in April 1951. It argued that the British system allowed Belizeans to "(enjoy) the fruits of their labours" and argued that rapid political development in such a multi-ethnic society as Belize's was "premature". Among its complaints was that development was not uniform among all ethnic groups, the dominance of the Creoles, widespread illiteracy, and overall "backwardness' of Belizeans, especially outside of Belize City. Its views reflected those of the middle class of merchants and colonial supporters who saw no reason for change. The PUP attacked the report, mobilized its supporters against it and declared a break with all things colonial, including the name "British Honduras"; PUP leaders routinely referred to the country as Belize thereafter until the name was officially changed in 1973.
The colonialists also sought to mobilise support, and created a National Party in August 1951 to oppose the PUP; this party drew its support from middle-class Belizeans and British officials. One month earlier the colonial government dissolved the PUP-dominated Belize City Council for neglecting to place a portrait of King George VI in its chambers, and in October jailed PUP leaders Richardson and Phillip Goldson for an article in a local newspaper justifying revolution. Leader John Smith left immediately after that, having failed to persuade the party to fly a "Union Jack" at its meeting to counter statements that Guatemala had been aiding the PUP. In City Council elections of 1952, the party won just three of nine seats, with four going to the National Party and two to independents. The National Party had managed to recruit respectable anti-PUP elements from among women's leaders, trade unions and middle-class representatives and presented a better front. Nevertheless, George Price, the only leader to escape the colonial attack, topped the polls. since then the PUP took advantage
Expansion and dissension (1953–1969)
General strike
The PUP for the moment turned its attention to the labour front. George Price was named head of the GWU in April 1952, and returning leaders Richardson and Goldson called for a "Crusade against Colonialism". The national holiday, on September 10, was dominated by a PUP-sponsored parade that clearly showed how much it had grown beyond its early years. Another opportunity came in October 1952 after workers at a Stann Creek citrus factory called a strike and were joined by their fellows in the Colonial Development Cooperation, United Fruit Company, Public Works Department and Belize Estate Company sawmill operations. Originally called for two days, the strike lasted 49 days on the support of Belizeans across the country, forcing the colonial government to capitulate and call for negotiations with all of the managements except for the BEC, which shut down its sawmill and left 268 workers jobless. Calls for scab labour were met with violence from demonstrators and a number of people were arrested, but by December 8 some 48 workers were on the job and the GWU called off the strike. Membership in the GWU (and support for the PUP) rose dramatically.
First national elections
The new constitution envisioned by the 1951 draft report called for universal adult suffrage and a Legislative Council of nine members. General elections, the nation's first, were called for April 28, 1954 and were contested by the PUP, the NP and independent candidates. The PUP stressed anti-colonialism and stood against the proposed British West Indies Federation which they claimed would destroy Belize's economy; their opponents continued to argue that the PUP was a front for Guatemala. The GWU proved important in getting out the vote in the districts and provided candidates in certain areas. On election day, 70% of the electorate voted, awarding the PUP eight seats and the National Party 1. A chagrined colonial government pledged to work with the PUP; the cautious victors replied that such a partnership would be welcomed only if it "did not retard the campaign against the colonial system". The colonials sought every opportunity to wreak havoc within the party. Already, the PUP was divided between a faction led by Richardson and Goldson, who advocated accepting the offer, and Price, who refused to compromise himself.
Party dissension and colonial mind games
This party dispute came to a head in the summer of 1956, in which ten central committee members left the Party, including Richardson and Phillip Goldson. A majority in the elected government, they nonetheless felt threatened by the overwhelming support in the street for Price, who controlled the rank and file through his connection with the GWU. Price was thereafter undisputed leader of the party, and went unchallenged for nearly four decades as such. As a minor result of the resignations, the GWU lost its popularity and this signalled the end of Labour's attempt to control the country's movement. The prodigal members had an equally hard time of it: their new party, in elections of March 1957, managed just 17% of voter popularity and overall voter turnout dropped to 63%.
A pleased colonial government now turned up the heat full blast on George Price. They dismissed him from the Executive Council on the old charge of selling out to Guatemala, giving his opponents something to work with; although Belizeans still debate the relationship between Price and Guatemala, the charges were not immediately serious. In March 1958, a protracted charge of sedition was laid on him for supposedly uncomplimentary remarks about the possible reception of Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom in Belize. A jury acquitted him and the charges backfired. Moreover, the PUP achieved its greatest electoral dominance in 1961 elections, sweeping all eighteen seats from the hapless National Independence Party.
Working toward self-government
In contrast with its early years of mass action against the colonial order, the PUP of the 1960s was more focused on change from within. In October 1961, Hurricane Hattie arrived on the shores of Belize City, causing destruction in the de facto capital. The PUP immediately began calling for the moving of the capital to higher ground, to escape flooding. This demand led to the construction of Belize's current capital, Belmopan, later in the decade, and of the village of Hattieville, 16 miles from the city, to host the hurricane's evacuees. It also showed that George Price's vision for the country was national, rather than insular.
As of 1959, a women's arm of the Party, the United Women's Group (UWG), was created under Gwendolyn Lizarraga, later Belize's first female Minister; its task was to mobilise Belize's women to eradicate poor conditions in housing and urban development. Its efforts were mixed at best and illustrate the PUP's unwillingness to allow women much room in the march to development, preferring them to depend on their male counterparts in government.
On January 1, 1963, Belize achieved internal self-government, the last step before full independence. All matters outside of foreign affairs and national defence would now be the province of the government. The British also retained the public service, including bureaucrats and police, and internal security, meaning that loyalty was a higher priority than development and forcing Price to actively recruit the middle class to the PUP's side.
The PUP in this era presided over the shift from forestry to agriculture, the rise of the sugar industry, reforms to labour laws, land distribution, infrastructural development and increased social services contributing to a general improvement in the standard of living.
1970s and early 1980s: new challenges
As the PUP moved into the 1970s, it controlled the nation of Belize like never before. It had not lost an election, general or municipal, ever, and enjoyed the confidence of the Belizean people. But new challenges arose that would ultimately lessen Belizeans' confidence in the PUP.
UBAD and PAC
In 1968, students began returning from abroad with a serious sense of the kind of development Belize needed to stay afloat in the modern world. Evan X Hyde, a young black middle-class Creole, graduated Dartmouth College, a predominantly white school, with an A.B. in English in 1968. He formed the United Black Association for Development (UBAD) in early 1969 and began seriously attacking the PUP's economic and social policies, equating them with neo-colonialism and denouncing them as "politricks". He joined trained lawyers Said Musa and Assad Shoman in the formation of their People's Action Committee (PAC), which was against "the North Atlantic economic domination (of Belize)" (Shoman) and in the analogue movement RAM (Revolutionary Action Movement) formed by a fusion of the two. Though none of these movements lasted for very long, they all left serious impressions on the psyche of the PUP, which prided itself on being the party of the people. The PUP first tried to silence them, stripping the latter of their jobs and laying charges of sedition, housebreaking and robbery on the former, all of which he dodged. When that did not work, they tried coopting them: Shoman and Musa later played prominent roles in the PUP and Hyde was thereafter relatively quiet in defence of or opposition to them. However, the party was shown to be indecisive in its handling of the two groups.
UDP and dwindling fortunes
At the formation of the United Democratic Party, a combination of the NIP, PDM and Liberal oppositions, it was thought that they could not present a worthy challenge to the ruling party. What happened next proved otherwise. The UDP proceeded, under Dean Lindo, to come within 18 votes of throwing the 18 seat Belize House of Representatives into deadlock, seized control of the Belize City Council from the PUP (for the first time in two decades) and winning municipal votes in 1975, 1977 and 1978. While Belizeans still wanted independence, it was felt that the UDP needed an opportunity to prove themselves in government. The results of the 1979 elections showed that the UDP had not quite passed that test, particularly because of their demands for a delayed independence due to Guatemala's claim to Belize remaining unsettled. While the PUP eventually fended off this initial UDP challenge, their policy on Guatemala and independence at any cost would prove the party's undoing.
Heads of Agreement and decline
On January 30, 1981, Premier Price presented to the house a paper with suggestions for the new constitution to come into effect on the eve of independence, which the United Nations maintained had to be no later than the end of 1981 when it supported Belize in a resolution at its 1980 meeting. On March 11, Price, Assad Shoman and other Belizean negotiators returned with a series of proposals they called the "Heads of Agreement", though nothing had actually been agreed on. The sixteen clauses called for Belize to make tough choices in order for the claim to be dropped, but Belizeans rebelled and set the country afire, forcing a state of emergency. It was under this state of emergency that Belize gained independence on September 21, 1981, a hollow victory that came at the price of losing Belizeans' trust. The PUP, hanging on for three more years despite economic losses and general discontent, finally called a general election for December 1984, and lost, 21–7, to the UDP. In many ways, it was the end of an era.
Reform and resurgence
The PUP for much of the 1980s was heavily divided and out of ideas, characterised by intra-party fights such as the 1983 national convention in which Said Musa challenged Louis Sylvester, or occasional disputes between the so-called "left wing" of Shoman and Musa and the "right wing" of Sylvester, Ralph Fonseca and persons considered to be the chief financiers of the PUP. In 1986, Musa won the chairmanship position and began recruiting new faces into the party. The immediate result of this was improvement in municipal elections in the late 1980s and a close general election victory in 1989. In its first post-independence term the PUP hardly shied away from the same economic policy the UDP had utilised, involving economic growth by improving services. An early election in 1993 cost the PUP a chance to stay in power; a victorious alliance of the UDP and National Alliance for Belizean Rights forced the PUP to become the opposition party for a second time. The party lost the 1993 elections despite polling more votes overall than the UDP. The PUP had only been outpolled in popular votes previously in 1984. The PUP did internal repairs to the party hierarchy at national conventions in May 1994 and November 1996; the latter saw the resignation of George Price as party leader. Said Musa defeated Florencio Marin Sr. in the ensuing convention to name a new leader. After winning municipal votes in 1996 and 1997 and the general elections in 1998, the PUP were riding high once again.
Today
The PUP led Belize to eight consecutive years of growth, despite serious external and internal shocks to the traditional and non-traditional bases of the economy.
In 2004, several ministers resigned from Cabinet citing inability to work within the current system. The party wooed them back almost immediately, but aftershocks from this incident continue to affect the party.
Belizeans today are more sceptical of the party than ever before due to constant accusations of corruption which it says are falsified. The 2005 protests in Belize highlighted some of these claims.
Following the PUP's defeat in the 2008 election, Musa and Fonseca announced that they were resigning from their leadership positions. Musa said that the PUP needed to "renew itself from the top."
On March 30, 2008, Johnny Briceño was elected as the leader of the PUP at a party convention in Belmopan, succeeding Musa. He defeated Francis Fonseca, who was considered to be the candidate preferred by the party establishment, receiving 330 votes against 310 for Fonseca.
A special convention was called for April 13, 2008 in Briceño's stronghold of Orange Walk.
On October 17, 2010, the PUP held their national convention in Dangriga in which Hon. Johnny Briceno was endorsed as the Party Leader. Carolyn Trench-Sandiford, a former party chair, was elected the PUP's (and Belize's) first ever female deputy leader.
On October 20, 2011, Francis Fonseca was endorsed at a meeting of the party's National Executive in Belize City as the new PUP leader following the resignation of Hon. Johnny Briceno on October 7. Fonseca was formally endorsed as party leader of the People's United Party at a special convention on October 29, 2011.
Following the general election in November 2015, Fonseca resigned as party leader. A national convention was held on January 31, 2016 to elect a new leader. Johnny Briceño returned as leader as the party with 1122 votes to Fonseca's 917.
Media
The Belize Times was established by George Price in 1956 and publishes once a week from party headquarters at Queen Street. Its current editor is Alberto Vellos. Vibes Radio was established in 2002 as the official party station. Its manager is Gerald Garbutt.
Electoral history
House of Representatives elections
References
External links
Website of Belize Times
Website of The Party
Political parties in Belize
Political parties established in 1950
1950 establishments in British Honduras
Consultative member parties of the Socialist International
Christian democratic parties in North America
Republicanism in Belize
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408415
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hussein%20bin%20Ali%2C%20King%20of%20Hejaz
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Hussein bin Ali, King of Hejaz
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Hussein bin Ali al-Hashimi (; 1 May 18544 June 1931) was an Arab leader from the Banu Qatadah branch of the Banu Hashim clan who was the Sharif and Emir of Mecca from 1908 and, after proclaiming the Great Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire, King of the Hejaz, even if he refused this title, from 1916 to 1924. He proclaimed himself Caliph after the abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924 and stayed in power until 1925 when Hejaz was invaded by the Saudis. He is usually considered as the father of modern pan-Arabism.
In 1908, in the aftermath of the Young Turk Revolution, Hussein was appointed Sharif of Mecca by the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II. In 1916, with the promise of British support for Arab independence, he proclaimed the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire, accusing the Committee of Union and Progress of violating tenets of Islam and limiting the power of the sultan-caliph. In the aftermath of World War I, Hussein refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles, in protest of the Balfour Declaration and the establishment of British and French mandates in Syria, Iraq, and Palestine. He later refused to sign the Anglo-Hashemite Treaty and thus deprived himself of British support when his kingdom was attacked by Ibn Saud.
In March 1924, when the Ottoman Caliphate was abolished, Hussein proclaimed himself "Caliph of all Muslims". His sons Faisal and Abdullah were made rulers of Iraq and Transjordan respectively in 1921. In October 1924, facing defeat by Ibn Saud, he abdicated and was succeeded as king by his eldest son Ali. After the Kingdom of Hejaz was invaded by the Al Saud-Wahhabi armies of the Ikhwan, on 23 December 1925 King Hussein bin Ali surrendered to the Saudis, bringing the Kingdom of Hejaz, the Sharifate of Mecca and the Sharifian Caliphate to an end. His Caliphate was opposed by the British Empire, the Zionists and the Wahhabis alike. However, he received support from a large part of the Muslim population of that time and from Mehmed VI.
Hussein went into exile to Cyprus, where the British kept him prisoner until his health deteriorated so much that they allowed him to go back to Amman, next to his son Abdallah I of Jordan. He died in Amman in 1931 and was buried as a Caliph in the Al-Aqsa mosque compound.
Early life
Hussein bin Ali bin Muhammad bin Abd al-Mu'in bin Awn was born in the Ottoman capital of Constantinople in 1853 or 1854 as the eldest son of Sharif Ali bin Muhammad, who was the second son of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Mu'in, the former Emir of Mecca. As a sharif, he was a descendant of Muhammad through his grandson Hasan ibn Ali and a member of the ancient Hashemite house. His mother Bezm-i Cihan, the wife of Ali, was a Circassian.
He belonged to the Dhawu Awn clan of the Abadilah, a branch of the Banu Qatadah tribe. The Banu Qatadah had ruled the Emirate of Mecca since the assumption of their ancestor Qatadah ibn Idris in 1203, and were the last of four dynasties of sharifs that altogether had ruled Mecca since the 10th century.
In 1827 Sharif Muhammad bin Abd al-Mu'in was appointed to the emirate, becoming the first emir from the Dhawu Awn and bringing an end to the centuries-long dominance of the Dhawu Zayd. He reigned until 1851, when he was replaced by Sharif Abd al-Muttalib ibn Ghalib of the Dhawu Zayd. After being deposed he was sent along with his family and sons to reside in the Ottoman capital of Constantinople. It was there that Hussein was born to Muhammad's son Ali in 1270 AH (1853–1854). Muhammad was reappointed to the emirate in 1856, and Hussein, then aged two or three, accompanied his father and grandfather back to Mecca. However, Muhammad died in 1858 and was succeeded by his eldest son Sharif Abd Allah Pasha. A few years later, in 1278 AH (1861–1862), Ali was recalled to Constantinople while Hussein remained in the Hejaz under the care of his uncle Abd Allah.
Hussein was raised at home unlike other young sharifs, who were customarily sent outside of the city to grow up among the nomadic Bedouin. Reportedly a studious youth, he mastered the principles of the Arabic language and was also educated in Islamic law and doctrine. Among his teachers was Shaykh Muhammad Mahmud at-Turkizi ash-Shinqiti, with whom he studied the seven Mu'allaqat. With Shaykh Ahmad Zayni Dahlan he studied the Qur'an, completing its memorization before he was 20 years old.During Abd Allah's reign, Hussein became familiar with the politics and intrigue surrounding the sharifian court. He also participated in numerous expeditions to Nejd and the eastern regions of the Hejaz to meet with the Arab tribes, over whom the emir exerted a loose form of control. He learned the ways of the Bedouin, including the skills needed to withstand the harsh desert environment. In his travels, he gained a deep knowledge of the desert flora and fauna, and developed a liking for humayni verse, a type of vernacular poetry (malhun) of the Bedouin. He also practiced horse-riding and hunting.
In 1287 AH (1871–1872) Hussein traveled to Constantinople to visit his father, who had fallen ill. He returned to Mecca after his father's death later that year.
In 1875, he married Abd Allah's daughter Abdiyah. In 1877 Abd Allah died, and Hussein and his cousin Ali ibn Abd Allah were conferred the rank of pasha.
Abd Allah was succeeded by his brother, Sharif Husayn Pasha. After Husayn was assassinated in 1880, the Sultan reinstated Abd al-Muttalib of the Dhawu Zayd as Emir. Displeased at the removal of the Dhawu Awn line from the emirate, Hussein traveled to Constantinople with two cousins, Ali and Muhammad, and their uncle Abd al-Ilah. However they were ordered to return to Mecca by the Sultan, whose intelligence services suspected that the sharifs were conspiring with European powers, particularly the British, to return the Sharifate to their clan.
The emirate returned to the Dhawu Awn in 1882 with the deposition of Abd al-Muttalib and the appointment of Sharif Awn ar-Rafiq Pasha, the next eldest of the remaining sons of Sharif Muhammad.
As Emir
Following the removal of his predecessor in October and the sudden death of his successor shortly thereafter, Hussein was appointed grand sharif by official decree of the sultan Abdülhamid on 24 November 1908.
Theology
Theologically and juridically, Hussein bin Ali is difficult to classify. His main teacher was Ahmad Zayni Dahlan, with whom he became a Hafiz. He had a Shafi'i and Hanafi education, but also allied with the Malikis and opposed both the Hanbalis and Wahhabis, at a time when adherence to a madhhab was more fluid. Thus, one can find elements of all three schools of fiqh in his thought.
For example, he advocated for the return of the Caliphate to a Quraysh, a Shafi'i idea, whereas he chose to be elected at that position, which was more of an Hanafite idea and was not necessary for Shafi'ism.
Pan-Arabism and Relationship with the Ottomans
Although there is no formal evidence suggesting that Hussein bin Ali was inclined towards Arab nationalism before 1916, the rise of Turkish nationalism towards the end of the Ottoman Empire, culminating in the Young Turks Revolution of 1908, strongly displeased the Hashemites and Bedouins. Additionally, the increasing centralization of the Ottoman Empire, the progressive prohibition of Arabic in teaching, Turkification policies, and the settlement of Turkish colonists in Arab areas worried and frightened Arabs throughout the empire.
In 1908, the Hejaz Railway was completed, allowing the Turks to strengthen their control over the Hejaz and provide a rapid response capability to reinforce their garrisons in Mecca and Medina. It was built under constant threat of Arab raids, such as those from the Harb tribe, which demonstrated their hostility towards the project. Furthermore, in April 1915, the Ottoman government began a policy of extermination of the minorities in the Ottoman Empire through various genocides. This frightened the Arabs, who were the largest minority in the Empire, and was openly criticized by Hussein bin Ali.
These oppositions with the Turks became so violent that they overshadowed those that existed in Arab society and Bedouin society; and many rival tribes to the Hashemites rallied behind their leadership.
An independentist and anti-colonial Arab movement developed, mainly in Ottoman Syria, where Arab intellectuals and newspapers called for the restoration of the caliphate in the hands of a Quraysh, and especially for the acquisition of Arab independence from the Ottoman Empire.
All of these points led to a violent rupture between Arab elites and the Ottoman political class, and are reflected in Hussein's later proclamation of independence, where he presented his struggle as a religious and anti-colonial one.
Twenty days after the start of the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire, Hussein bin Ali's son, Faisal, met with the leaders of the revolutionary organization Al-Fatat in Damascus. They assured him of their support in case of revolt and recognized Hussein as the representative of the Arab nation.
When Hussein took up the pan-Arab claims in 1916, after his proclamation of independence, he became the leading figure behind whom the pan-Arabs rallied, and is therefore frequently regarded as the father of pan-Arabism.
During World War I, Hussein initially remained allied with the Ottomans but began secret negotiations with the British on the advice of his son, Abdullah, who had served in the Ottoman parliament up to 1914 and was convinced that it was necessary to separate from the increasingly nationalistic Ottoman administration.
Relationship with the British
Following deliberations at Ta'if between Hussein and his sons in June 1915, during which Faisal counselled caution, Ali argued against rebellion and Abdullah advocated action and encouraged his father to enter into correspondence with Sir Henry McMahon; over the period 14 July 1915 to 10 March 1916, a total of ten letters, five from each side, were exchanged between Sir Henry McMahon and Sherif Hussein. McMahon was in contact with British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey throughout, and Grey was to authorise and be ultimately responsible for the correspondence.The British Secretary of State for War, Field Marshal Lord Kitchener, appealed to him for assistance in the conflict on the side of the Triple Entente. Starting in 1915, as indicated by an exchange of letters with Lieutenant Colonel Sir Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in the Sultanate of Egypt, Hussein seized the opportunity and demanded recognition of an Arab nation that included the Hejaz and other adjacent territories as well as approval for the proclamation of an Arab Caliphate of Islam. High Commissioner McMahon accepted and assured him that his assistance would be rewarded by an Arab empire encompassing the entire span between Egypt and Persia, with the exception of British possessions and interests in Kuwait, Aden, and the Syrian coast. However, at that time, the British scarcely thought about the promises made; their primary concern was winning the war and dismantling the Ottoman Empire. The fate of the Arab populations and the division of territory were left for a future date.
King of Hejaz
The US State Department quotes an aide-mémoire dated 24 October 1917 given by the Arab Bureau to the American Diplomatic Agency in Cairo confirming that "...Britain, France and Russia agreed to recognize the Sherif as lawful independent ruler of the Hejaz and to use the title of "King of the Hejaz" when addressing him, and a note to this effect was handed to him on December 10, 1916".
When Hussein declared himself King of the Hejaz, he also declared himself King of the Arab lands (malik bilad-al-Arab). This only aggravated his conflict with Abdulaziz ibn Saud, which was already present because of their differences in religious beliefs and with whom he had fought before the First World War, siding with fellow anti-Saudis, the Ottomans in 1910.
Reforms
Hussein initiated a series of reforms, including measures to avoid offending Muslims from French or British colonies who undertook the Hajj. He also addressed the issue of stray dogs, attempted to ensure the security of the Hajj routes, and sought to combat the prevalent slave markets in the Hejaz region.
Arab Revolt
On 30 October 1916, Emir Abdullah called a meeting of majlis where he read a letter in which "Husayn ibn Ali was recognized as sovereign of the Arab nation. Then all those present arose and proclaimed him Malik al-Arab, King of the Arabs."
Armenian Genocide
In April 1918, as part of his conquest of the Syrian territories in which the Armenian genocide took place, he issued a decree to protect Armenians from persecution and allow them to settle in peace, in which he ordered :"What is requested of you is to protect and to take good care of everyone from the Jacobite Armenian community living in your territories and frontiers and among your tribes; to help them in all of their affairs and defend them as you would defend yourselves, your properties and children, and provide everything they might need whether they are settled or moving from place to place, because they are the Protected People of the Muslims (Ahl Dimmat al-Muslimin) – about whom the Prophet Muhammad (may God grant him His blessings and peace) said: "Whosoever takes from them even a rope, I will be his adversary on the day of Judgment." This is among the most important things we require of you to do and expect you to accomplish, in view of your noble character and determination."The Armenian National Institute considers it to be the oldest declaration by a head of state to recognize the Armenian genocide. Alongside this, he gave citizenship to his Armenian subjects.
Following World War I
In the aftermath of the war, the Arabs found themselves freed from centuries of Ottoman rule. Hussein's son Faisal was made King of Syria, but this kingdom proved short-lived, as the Middle East came under mandate rule of France and the United Kingdom. The British Government subsequently made Faisal and his brother Abdullah kings of Iraq and Transjordan, respectively.
Deterioration in British relationship
In January and February 1918, Hussein received the Hogarth Message and Bassett Letter in response to his requests for an explanation of the Balfour Declaration and Sykes-Picot Agreement respectively.
Having received a British subsidy totalling £6.5m between 1916 and April 1919, in May 1919, the subsidy was reduced to £100K monthly (from £200K), dropped to £75K from October, £50K in November, £25K in December until February 1920 after which no more payments were made.
The British weren't disposed to fullfill their promises to Hussein, as Colonel Wilson stated in secret correspondance :"At one time, our Arabic copies of Sir H. MacMahon's letters to the Grand Sherif could not be found; if they are still unavailable it may be somewhat awkward when King Hussein produces the originals. (...) Failing a satisfactory solution King Hussein will have some grounds for considering that Great Britain has broken her pledged word."In 1919, King Hussein refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles. In August 1920, five days after the signing of the Treaty of Sèvres, Curzon asked Cairo to procure Hussein's signature to both treaties and agreed to make a payment of £30,000 conditional on signature. Hussein declined and in 1921, stated that he could not be expected to "affix his name to a document assigning Palestine to the Zionists and Syria to foreigners."
However, even after an assurance by McMahon, Hussein did not receive the lands promised by their British allies. McMahon claimed that the proposed lands to be taken in by the new Arab State were not purely Arab. In actuality, McMahon refused to hand over the new lands as the areas in question had already been claimed by the new British ally, France.
Caliphate
Two days after the Caliphate was abolished by the Turkish Grand National Assembly on 3 March 1924, Hussein declared himself Caliph at his son Abdullah's winter camp in Shunah, Transjordan. The claim to the title was recognized by a large part of the Hejazi and Levantine Muslim population. He also received the support of Mehmed VI, on March 18, 1924 one of the last Ottoman Caliphs and the last Ottoman Sultan, according to The Times and Vatan, that reported that: "According to a deespatch to The Times from Jerusalem, Vehideddin, who is in the Italian city of San Remo, has sent a telegram to King Hussein and announced that he recognizes Hussein as Caliph." In an effort to legitimize his proclamation and establish legal foundations for his caliphate, he convened a Consultative Council consisting of thirty-one representatives from the Muslim world, elected by the ulama and the inhabitants of the Haramayn. This Council met twelve times before being adjourned indefinitely in the face of the advance of Saudi forces.
His Caliphate only lasted for a few months, though, because he was invaded and defeated quickly by Abdulaziz ibn Saud.
Abdication
Although the British had supported Hussein from the start of the Arab Revolt and the McMahon–Hussein Correspondence, they chose not to help him to repel the Saudi conquest of Hejaz and even supported them militarily, giving weapons to Ibn Saud, which eventually took Mecca, Medina, and Jeddah. The British offered several times to assist him and to stop supporting the Saudis, in exchange for his recognition of the Balfour Declaration, which he refused each time. After his abdication, another of his sons, Ali, briefly assumed the throne of the Hejaz, but then he too had to flee from the encroachment of the Saudi forces. Another of Hussein's sons, Faisal, was briefly King of Syria and later King of Iraq, while Abdullah was Emir of Transjordan. While he was in exile, he still used the title of caliph until his death.
Exile
King Hussein was then forced to flee to Amman, Transjordan, where his son Abdullah was Emir. During this period, King Hussein is described as having taken over control that his son wielded, and therefore was sent to live in Aqaba (which was recently transferred from Hijazi to Transjordanian sovereignty by the British). Britain – responding to Ibn Saud's plea that the Sharif be expelled from Aqaba – exiled him from Aqaba to British-controlled Cyprus.
He lived in Nicosia from 1925, with his sons coming to visit him at some times, even if his relationships with them were strained, except for Zayd. who came to visit him the most. According to the British governor of Cyprus, Ronald Storrs, when he went to see Hussein, he found his son Zeid reading him the commentary of al-Bukhari on the Quran. He rarely left his home, lived an austere lifestyle, and read the Quran, religious books, he also read Arabic newspapers in the mornings. However, he still went to see horse-races and had brought Arabic horses in his exile that he treated "like his own family". Hussein also did some interviews with the press during his exile. He received some visitors, such as Sheikh Fuad al-Khatib, Muhammad Jamil Bayham, who wanted to write his biography, or the Jordanian poet Mustafa Wahbi Tal, among others. Hussein was ruined, but the local Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot population considered him to be a very wealthy man and therefore tried to win his favors. Meanwhile, he was entangled in legal matters regarding property income in Egypt, among other things.
He tried to be friendly towards the various ethnic communities on the island but was particularly close to the Armenians of the island, seeing them as victims, like himself, of the Young Turks. Hussein didn't have any documented connection with the Turkish Cypriot community, although it is possible that such a connection exists, and there is no mention of him having visited a Turkish mosque in Nicosia. He met with the Armenian Archbishop of Nicosia in 1926 and received a warm welcome, after that, he donated drums and instruments to the Armenian community of the island, including the Armenian Philarmonic Melkonian School.
He began to fall ill as early as 1928, but his favorite wife, Adila Khanum, passed away in 1929, which exacerbated his illness. She was buried at Hala Sultan Tekke, the largest Muslim shrine on the island. His two sons, Ali and Abdallah, attended the funeral and started making preparations and requesting the British for his repatriation, believing that he didn't have much time left to live and that they needed to be by his side.
Return and death
As his health continued to deteriorate and as he was paralyzed by a stroke at age 79 in 1930, the British became increasingly inclined to send him back to the Middle East. They feared that his death would not only stir resentment among Arabs towards the United Kingdom but also potentially strain their relationships with the Hashemite rulers, all of whom were allies in the Middle East. The Saudis expressed their displeasure with rumors of Hussein's repatriation, especially after Hussein expressed his wish to be buried in Mecca, an event the Saudis feared would lead to "pro-Hashemite gatherings." Eventually, the British decided to repatriate him to Amman, with Baghdad as another option they had considered. Upon his arrival, he was greeted by a large crowd that cheered him and followed him to the Raghadan Palace.
After a procession where 30,000 people took part, he was buried in Jerusalem: inside the Arghūniyya, a building on the Haram esh-Sharif or "Temple Mount", in a walled enclosure decorated with white marble and carpets. His son Faisal, with whom the relationship was the worse at that point, didn't attend his funerals, claiming he had "government business" to attend to.
On the window above his tomb is written the following inscription: "هذا قبر أمير المؤمنين الحسين بن علي" which means "Here is the tomb of the Commander of the Faithful, Hussein bin Ali".
Marriage and children
Hussein, who had four wives, fathered five sons and three daughters with three of his wives:
Sharifa Abidiya bint Abdullah (died Constantinople, Ottoman Empire, 1888, buried there), eldest daughter of his paternal uncle, Amir Abdullah Kamil Pasha, Grand Sharif of Mecca;
Madiha, a Circassian;
Sharifa Khadija bint Abdullah (1866 – Amman, Transjordan, 4 July 1921), second daughter of Amir Abdullah Kamil Pasha, Grand Sharif of Mecca;
Adila Khanum (Constantinople, Ottoman Empire, 1879 – Larnaca, Cyprus, 12 July 1929, buried there at the Hala Sultan, Umm Haram, Tekke), daughter of Salah Bey and granddaughter of Mustafa Rashid Pasha, sometime Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire;
With his first wife Abidiya bint Abdullah, he had:
Prince Ali, last King of Hejaz married to Nafisa bint Abdullah. Parents of Aliya bint Ali. Grandparents of Sharif Ali bin al-Hussein.
Hasan bin Hussein, died young.
Prince Abdullah, Emir (later King) of Transjordan, married to Musbah bint Nasser, Suzdil Hanum, and Nahda bint Uman.
Princess Fatima, married a European Muslim businessman from France.
Prince Faisal, later King of Iraq and Syria, married to Huzaima bint Nasser. Parents of Ghazi, King of Iraq born 1912 died 4 April 1939, married his first cousin, Princess Aliya bint Ali, daughter of HM King Ali of Hejaz.
With his second wife Madiha, he had:
Princess Saleha, married Abdullah bin Muhammed.
With his third wife Adila, he had:
Princess Sara, married Muhammad Atta Amin in July 1933, divorced September 1933.
Prince Zeid, who succeeded in pretense King Faisal II of Iraq upon his assassination in 1958, but never actually ruled as Iraq became a republic. Married to Fahrelnissa Kabaağaç.
Legacy
Art
Several poets wrote about him, including Ahmed Shawqi, nicknamed the Prince of Poets, who wrote a poem about his funerals and Mustafa Wahbi Tal, one of the most prominents Jordanian poets, who wrote a poem about him.
Others
Several mosques bear his name to the present day, such as the Hussein bin Ali mosque in Aqaba or the Hussein bin Ali mosque in Ma'an. In 2020, a documentary was made about him and his life by Al-Araby, which was seen more than five million times on Youtube as of May 2023.
His role in the support of Armenian refugees, especially during the Armenian genocide, led him to be cited in 2014 and 2020 by Armenian Presidents Serzh Sargsyan and Armen Sarkissian as an example of tolerance and friendship between peoples.
Decorations
Grand-cordon of the Order of Muhammad Ali (Egypt)
Grand Cordon of the Order of Leopold (Belgium)
Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour (France)
First Class of the Order of Osmanieh (Ottoman Empire)
First Class of the Order of the Medjidie (Ottoman Empire)
Grand Cross of the Order of the Nichan Iftikhar (Ottoman Empire)
Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath (United Kingdom)
Ancestry
See also
Battle of Mecca 1916
Sharifian Caliphate
Siege of Medina
Suleiman Mousa
References
Notes
Citations
Sources
– Total pages: 473
Teitelbaum, Joshua (2001). The Rise and Fall of the Hashemite Kingdom of the Hijaz. C. Hurst & Co. Publishers.
Further reading
External links
1850s births
1931 deaths
19th-century Arab people
20th-century Arab people
20th-century caliphs
Arab independence activists
Arab Revolt
Arab people from the Ottoman Empire
Dhawu Awn
Flag designers
Hasanids
Honorary Knights Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath
House of Hashim
Kings of Hejaz
Ottoman Arab nationalists
Ottoman Arabia
Ottoman Sunni Muslims
Pan-Arabism
People from Istanbul
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Politics of the Ottoman Empire
Self-proclaimed monarchy
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Arab people of Circassian descent
Recipients of the Order of Leopold II
Recipients of the Order of the Medjidie
Knights Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath
Recipients of the Legion of Honour
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New%20Patriotic%20Party
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New Patriotic Party
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The New Patriotic Party (NPP) is a centre-right and liberal-conservative political party in Ghana. Since the democratisation of Ghana in 1992, it has been one of the two dominant parties in Ghanaian politics, with its leading rival being the centre-left National Democratic Congress (NDC). John Kufuor of the NPP was President of Ghana from 2001 to 2009. At the elections held on 7 December 2004, the party won 129 out of 230 seats. The NPP candidate was Kufuor, who was re-elected as president with 52.75% of the vote. The New Patriotic Party symbol is the African elephant and the New Patriotic Party colours are red, white, and blue.
In the 2008 general election, the NPP candidate Nana Akufo-Addo conceded to losing in the closely contested presidential election runoff amidst accusations of vote rigging, with Akufo-Addo receiving 49.77% of the votes, versus 50.23% for John Atta Mills, the NDC candidate. In the 2012 general election, the NPP faced a similar situation from vote results provided by the Electoral Commission of Ghana (EC). Nana Akufo-Addo received 47.74% of the vote, while NDC candidate John Mahama received 50.7% amidst accusations of electoral fraud. Akufo-Addo was chosen as the NPP's candidate for a third time in the 2016 elections and defeated Mahama in the first round (winning 53.83% of the votes).
The New Patriotic Party has so far contested every national general election in Ghana since the commencement of the fourth republic in 1992, with the exception of the parliamentary elections of 1992. The New Patriotic boycotted the 1992 parliamentary elections, alleging that the 1992 presidential election held earlier was rigged. The New Patriotic Party wrote a book title 'Stolen Verdict' to register its protest against the 1992 presidential election.
The New Patriotic Party is considered as an offshoot of the United Gold Coast Convention, which effectively evolved into the United Party in the late 1950s, the Progress Party in the late 1960s, the Popular Front Party in the 1970s and the All People's Party in the early 1980s.
After more than a decade of military rule by Jerry John Rawlings, the government, along with some stakeholders, drafted a constitution for which a Referendum election was organized. After the people of Ghana approved the new constitution in an election (held on 28 April 1992), the ban on party politics in Ghana was lifted, allowing other parties including the NPP to be officially launched. The NPP's flagbearer was Professor Albert Adu Boahen, a scholar and a long-time critic of the Rawlings military government. However, the NPP lost the 1992 election overwhelmingly to the Progressive alliance of the National Democratic Congress, Eagle and the National Convention Party whose candidate was Jerry John Rawlings. The NPP boycotted the parliamentary elections and hence won no seats in the new Parliament.
The NPP also lost the 1996 elections again to Rawlings' party but this time, their flagbearer was John Kufuor. In the 2000 and 2004 elections, John Kufuor won both elections ushering in a new government for the first time in the fourth republic of Ghana.
Electoral history
1992 elections
The New Patriotic Party (NPP) Kukurudu lost the 1992 presidential elections to the National Democratic Congress led by Jerry John Rawlings. Despite the elections being declared as free and fair by international observers, Professor Adu Boahen, the NPP candidate, alleged that there was heavy rigging by the Interim National Electoral Commission headed by Nana Oduro Nimapau and hence the NPP as well as the National Independence Party, People's Heritage Party and the People's National Convention boycotted the parliamentary elections. The decision to not contest in the parliamentary elections which was held a couple of weeks after the presidential election at the time meant that the National Democratic Congress, National Convention Party and the Eagle Party which was already a coalition won almost all the parliamentary seats available. One seat was actually won by an independent candidate, Hawa Yakubu.
This protest however led to some reforms in the electoral system, notably the use of transparent ballot boxes at polling stations, issuing of voter ID cards and the use of indelible ink (which lasted for a month) to mark people who had been registered to avoid double voting.
After more than a decade of military rule by Jerry John Rawlings, the government, along with some stakeholders, drafted a constitution for which a Referendum election was organized. After the people of Ghana approved the new constitution in an election (held on 28 April 1992), the ban on party politics in Ghana was lifted, allowing other parties including the NPP to be officially launched. According to the NPP leadership, figures in certain constituencies had been massaged, hence the results published by the Electoral Commission and the Ghana press (mostly Peace FM online and Ghanaweb) were not accurate.
1996 elections
After the defeat in 1992, the NPP chairman at the time, Peter Ala Adjetey, stated that the party was resolved to do their homework and wrestle power from the NDC in the 1996 election. They made the decision that regardless of the results, they would contest for parliamentary seats to stop what was seen as an NDC monopoly in Parliament.
Prior to the party convention, it appeared that the overwhelming favourite to become the next presidential candidate was a well renowned economist known as Kwame Pianim. However, some members of the party led by Florence Ekwam challenged Pianim's eligibility due to a prior conviction during the PNDC era. The Supreme Court of Ghana declared Pianim as ineligible and hence he couldn't be considered for nomination. On 20 April 1996, John Kufuor was nominated as the NPP presidential candidate with 1034 out of 2000 delegates drawn from all the 200 Constituencies to run for the presidency in the general election held on 10 December 1996. This time, both presidential and parliamentary elections were held on the same day, unlike the previous election, as part of the reforms by the National Electoral Commission headed by Kwadwo Afari-Gyan.
The NPP gained an unlikely association from the vice-president of Ghana, Kow Nkensen Arkaah, whose party (National Convention Party) had severed their alliance with the National Democratic Congress. The NPP hence formed what was deemed as the "Great Alliance" with the NCP and Vice-president Arkaah was nominated to be the running mate of Kuffuor. After campaigning for less than nine months, Kufuor polled 39.62% of the popular votes to Jerry Rawlings' 57% in the 1996 election. Despite the elections being declared as free and fair by international observers, the New Patriotic Party alleged that the election had been rigged by the National Electoral Commission and President Rawlings. The NPP however won a substantial number of seats in the Ghana parliament and effectively ended the NDC monopoly.
2000 elections
On 23 October 1998, Kufuor was re-nominated by the New Patriotic Party to run again for the presidency. President Rawlings, facing term limits, was due to retire after the 2000 elections. Pianim, however, resigned from the NPP and Peter Ala Adjetey, the party chairman, handed over the chairmanship to Samuel Odoi-Sykes. Aliu Mahama stood as the running mate of John Kufuor. The NDC in turn nominated Vice-president John Atta Mills as its presidential candidate.
Kufuor won the first round of the presidential election, held on 7 December 2000, with 48.4% of the popular votes. His closest challenger was Atta Mills with 44.8% of the votes. The electoral rules in Ghana mandate that the winner of elections must cross a 50% threshold. A run off election was hence organised. All the parties came together to support the NPP including the Convention People's Party, Reform Party and the United Ghana Movement against the NDC.
In the second round, held on 28 December 2000, Kufour was victorious, taking 56.9% of the vote. When Kufuor was sworn in on 7 January 2001, it marked the first time in history that an incumbent government had peacefully surrendered power to the opposition.
2000 election
The NPP also lost the 1996 elections again to Rawlings' party but this time, their flagbearer was John Kufuor. In the 2000 elections, John Kufuor won both elections ushering in a new government for the first time in the fourth republic of Ghana.
2004 elections
The New Patriotic Party's president, John Agyekum Kufuor was once again re-elected in the Ghana general election, 2004, presidential and parliamentary elections held on 7 December 2004, earning 52.45% of the popular vote in the first round and thus avoiding a run-off, while at the same time, the New Patriotic Party, was able to secure more seats in the Parliament.
2008 elections
Several government officials within the Kufuor administration resigned their cabinet positions to contest for the NPP flagbearership in July 2007. This included the likes of Nkrabea Effah Dartey, Nana Akufo-Addo, Alan John Kyerematen and 13 other contenders. Akufo-Addo and Kyerematen were the two leading candidates according to the pundits. However, Akufo-Addo won 48% of the votes in the first round of the party delegates election. The NPP set aside a provision in the party's constitution which required that candidates obtain 50% + one vote of delegates to secure the party's nomination thus making Nana Akufo-Addo the New Patriotic party's candidate for the 2008 presidential elections.
In the 7 December 2008 presidential elections, Akufo-Addo placed first and received more votes than John Atta Mills, amassing 4,159,439 votes, representing 49.13% of the total votes cast; however, he fell short of the 50% needed for an outright victory. It was the best-ever performance for a first-time presidential candidate since the beginning of Ghana's Fourth Republic in 1992. In the run-off election, however, Mills received 4,521,032 votes, representing 50.23%, and thus defeated Akufo-Addo.
The run-off elections were marred with controversy and once again, although international observers had expressed satisfaction with the way and manner the elections were conducted, the NPP alleged voter fraud. According to the NPP leadership, figures in certain constituencies had been massaged, hence the results published by the Electoral Commission and the Ghana press (mostly Peace FM online and Ghanaweb) were not accurate. Also, NPP activists like Kwabena Agyapong and Elizabeth Ohene were allegedly intimidated in areas of the Volta Region of Ghana, a region where the NPP had never won any constituency. The complaint led to a delay in the declaration of the results, sparking angry NDC demonstrators onto the streets of the capital city Accra. Tony Aidoo, an NDC activist, fired up these NDC protesters by dismissing the NPP claims as "stupid". The chairman of the electoral commission, Kwadwo Afari Djan, eventually organised a press conference and claimed that the Tain Constituency had some issues and hence another run-off election had to be organised in that constituency alone. After revising the figures, he asserted that although John Atta Mills was leading in the popular votes, the number of registered voters in the Tain constituency were enough to swing the election the other way. Therefore, the final results would be declared after the Tain constituency results had been certified and declared. An election was held in that constituency on 2 January 2009 and Mills won by a very comfortable margin of 90.6% to 4%.
The NPP officially went back into opposition in January 2009 when John Kufuor handed over power to John Atta Mills.
2012 elections
On Saturday, 7 August 2010, the New Patriotic Party re-elected Akufo-Addo as its presidential candidate for the 2012 presidential election. Akufo-Addo received the votes of 79% of the delegates. The electoral convention was the largest that any political party had ever convened in any African state. The New Patriotic Party campaigned on an anti-corruption platform, and to provide free SHS (Secondary High School) education for the population of Ghana.
Following Akufo-Addo's defeat in the presidential election, the New Patriotic Party and Akufo-Addo contested the vote results provided by the Electoral Commission of Ghana, alleging that the 2012 general elections were rigged. They cited tampered vote counts and vote rigging from polling stations in South Ghana. The New Patriotic Party unsuccessfully asked the Electoral Commission of Ghana and its chairman Kwadwo Afari-Gyan to use the "72 hours withdrawal of election results law" that is written in the constitution of Ghana to "investigate" electoral fraud. The party decided not to concede defeat until an external investigation and a vote recount were completed.
The New Patriotic Party filed a writ with the Supreme Court of Ghana requesting that the results declared by the electoral commission be invalidated. Despite claiming publicly that the election was rigged by the ruling NDC government, their writ in court alleged that there were inconsistencies and irregularities at certain polling stations. Therefore, they wanted the results at those stations to be invalidated. These were in effect polling stations that the NDC won comfortably. Therefore, with figures from those stations (over 11000 of them) invalidated, it would mean that NPP would mathematically be the winners. The Supreme Court of Ghana, headed by Justice Atuguba, gave its final verdict, with the majority opinion stating that even if there were inconsistencies, they were unimportant and could not have altered the election's result. Akufo-Addo conceded defeat after the verdict, on 29 August 2013.
Party Constitution
The party have a constitution, registered under law which governs how they operate. The party's constitution was first registered with the Electoral Commission on June 24, 1992. It underwent amendments on August 29, 1998, August 22, 2009, and December 17, 2017.
National executives
The New Patriotic Party (NPP) elects national executives for a four-year duration. According to the New Patriotic Party's constitution, Article 10(2) & (3) mandates that the National Annual Delegates shall meet at least four weeks after the last Regional Annual Delegates Conference.
2000
The National Chairman elect was Mr Harona Esseku
First National Vice-chairman Mr Stephen Ntim
The Second National Vice-chairperson Mrs Agnes Adzo Okudzeto
The Third National Vice-chairman Mr Edmund Annan
The General Secretary elect was Mr Dan Botwe
The National Treasurer elect was Mr Michael Dugau
The National Organiser elect was Mr Lord Commey
2014
The National Delegates Congress was slated for 12 April 2014 in Tamale Sports Stadium. About 5,265 delegates were expected to partake in the internal elections of the party.
The National Chairman position was contested by four persons; Paul Afoko, Stephen Ntim, Fred Oware and jake Obetsebi-Lamptey. The results are as follows; Paul Afoko 2,034, Stephen Ntim 1,503, Fred Oware 1,135 and Jake Obetsebi-Lamptey 66.
The Vice-chairman had three competitors; Freddie Blay, Sammy Crabbe and Fredua F. Antoh. The results are as follows; Freddie Blay 2,933, Sammy Crabbe 2,358, and Fredua F. Antoh 1,813.
The General Secretary had four contestants; Kwabena Agyei Agyepong, Kwadwo Owusu Afriyie, Yaw Buaben Asamoa, and Nkrabea Effah Darteh, The results are as follows;Kwabena Agyei Agyepong 2,529, Kwadwo Owusu Afriyie 1,990, Yaw Buaben Asamoa 181 and Nkrabea Effah Darteh 46.
Three persons competed in the National Organiser role, John Boadu, Hopeson Yaovi Adorye, and Alhaji Moctar Bamba. The results are as follows; John Boadu 3,279, Hopeson Yaovi Adorye 986 and Alhaji Moctar Bamba 476.
One person contested in the National Youth Organiser thus Sammy Awuku 471.
Also, one person contested in the National Nasara Coordinator, thus Kamal-deen Abdulai 84.
The National Treasurer position was contested by three persons; Emmanuel Abankwa Yeboah, Hajia Ruka, and Suzzy Mensah. The results are as follows; Emmanuel Abankwa Yeboah 2,488, Hajia Ruka 1,162 and Suzzy Mensah 595.
Three people contested in the National Women's Organiser; Otiko Afisah Djaba, Gifty Tina Mensah, and Mawusi Awity. The results are as follows; Otiko Afisah Djaba 276, Gifty Tina Mensah 250 and Mawusi Awity 113.
2018
The NPP organised the national delegates congress in Eastern region from 15 June 2018 to 17 June 2018.
In the National Chairman category, there were three contestants; Freddie Blay, Stephen Ayesu Ntim and Dr Richard Amoako Baah. The results are as follows; Freddie Blay – 3,021, Stephen Ayesu Ntim – 2,515 and Dr Richard Amoako Baah – 18.
The National Vice-chairman category consisted of seven competitors; Rita Asobayire, Frederick Fredua Antoh, Michael Omari Wadie, Emmanuel Ken-Wuud, George Isaac Amoo, Vida Agyekum and Mrs Agnes Asangalisa Chigabatia. The results are as follows; Rita Asobayire – 3671, Frederick Fredua Antoh – 3,125, Michael Omari Wadie – 3,028, Emmanuel Ken-Wuud – 1,325, George Isaac Amoo – 1,222, Vida Agyekum – 1,107, and Mrs Agnes Asangalisa Chigabatia – 836.
Two contestants battled in the General Secretary role; John Boadu and Richard Ahiagbah. The results are as follows; John Boadu – 4,277 and Richard Ahiagbah – 1,274.
The National Treasurer had six individuals competing; Kwabena Abankwa-Yeboah, Nuhu Bayorbo Mahama, Mary Posch-Oduro, Hajia Ruka Ahmeed, Abraham Obeng Amoakohene, and Kwabena Oppong Frimpong. The results are as follows; Kwabena Abankwa-Yeboah – 2,492, Nuhu Bayorbo Mahama – 1,050, Mary Posch-Oduro – 1,012, Hajia Ruka Ahmeed – 467, Abraham Obeng Amoakohene – 447, and Kwabena Oppong Frimpong – 50.
Three people contested in the National Organiser position; Sammi Awuku, Suleiman Sadik, and Emmanuel Kodua. The results are as follows; Sammi Awuku – 4,913, Suleiman Sadik – 942, and Emmanuel Kodua – 266.
The National Youth Organiser had four persons; Henry Nana Boakye, Dominic Eduah, Kamal-Deen Abdulai, and Emmanuel Nana Appiah. The results are as follows; Henry Nana Boakye – 423, Dominic Eduah – 245, Kamal-Deen Abdulai – 102, and Emmanuel Nana Appiah – 1.
The National Women's Organiser role had two persons contesting; Kate Gyamfua and Joyce Konokie Zemapare. The results are as follows; Kate Gyamfua – 686 and Joyce Konokie Zempare – 109.
The Nasara Coordinator position had 14 participants. The results are as follows; Abdul Aziz Haruna Futa – 201, Ahmed Zaruk Nuhu – 123, Alhaji Baba Gado Mohammed – 82, Alhaji Salihu Yahaya Bo – 39, Rashid Adam – 23, Alhaji Musah Sheriff – 19, Aminu Abu – 12, Abubakari Suleimana – 8, Alhaji Iddrisu Abdulai Dipantiche – 4, Kazeem Ibrahim – 1, Abdul-Rahman Diallo – 1, Alhaji Dauda Abdul Rahman Duodu – 0, Ali Suraj - 0, Sulemana Alhassan Atakpo - 0
2022
The national executives elections for 2022 was held on the 17th of July at the Accra Sports Stadium.
In the National Chairman category, these were the contestants; Gifty Asantewa Ayeh— 44, Sammy Crabbe— 32, Professor Christopher Ameyaw-Ekumfi— 101, Akwasi Osei Adjei— 20, Stephen Ayensu Ntim— 4014, Stephen Asamoah-Boateng—1010, Kwabena Abankwa-Yeboah—294. With Stephen Ayensu Ntim emerging as the winner.
The National Vice-chairman category consisted of Ismail Yahuza—613, McJewels J. Annan—155, Dankwah Smith Buttey—2,982, Rita Talata Asobayire—2,927, Edmond Oppong-Peprah—479, Kiston Akomeng Kissi—2,069, Derek Kwaku Nkansah—491, Michael Owari Wadie—1,635, Ken-Wuud Nuworsu—520, Alhaji Masawudu Osman—2,128 The Vice Chair positions were taken by; 1st Vice Chair: Dankwah Smith Buttey, 2nd Vice Chair: Rita Talata Asobayire and 3rd Vice Chair: Alhaji Masawudu Osman.
Five contestants battled for the position of the General Secretary. The results are as follows; John Boadu—2524, Iddrisu Musah—104,Ramseyer Ahmed Agyeman-Prempeh—8, Frederick Opare Ansah—50,Justin Frimpong Kodua—2,837 With Justin Frimpong Kodua taking the position
The National Treasurer had four individuals competing; Dr Charles Dwamena—2,917, Mary Posche-Oduro—1,303,Dr Yusif Tedam—125, Collins N. Nuamah—1,197. With Dr Charles Dwamena emerging as the winner
Six people contested in the National Organiser position; Bright Essilfie Kumi—137, Seth Adu-Adjei—25, Daniel Nii Kwartey Titus-Glover—2274, Eric Amoako Twum—185, Henry Nana Boakye—2870, Nana Owusu Fordjour—44 With Henry Nana Boakye emerging as the winner.
The National Youth Organiser had four persons; Abanga Fusani Yakubu—153, Salam Mohammed Mustapha—255, Prince Kamal Gumah—101, Michael Osei Boateng—120. With Salam Mohammed Mustapha emerging as the winner.
The National Women's Organiser role had three people contesting; Kate Gyamfua—620, Ellen Ama Daaku—9, Hajia Sawadatu Saeed—32. With Kate Gyamfua taking it for the second time.
The Nasara Coordinator position had Haruna Maiga—5, Abdul-Rahman Diallo—2, Issaku Muaza Kunata—199, Awal Mohammed—24, Sulemana Alhassan Atakpo—9, Abdul Aziz Haruna Futa—328. Also havig Abdul Aziz Haruna Futa emerging as the winner for the second time.
Name and symbol
Founded on July 28, 1992, the party's mission is to unite citizens in the pursuit of freedom, justice, and the protection of human rights through true democracy. The New Patriotic Party (NPP) is a political party in Ghana that aligns with center-right and liberal conservative ideologies. Their symbol is an African elephant, and their official colors are red, white, and blue.
Electoral history
Presidential elections
Parliamentary elections
See also
Kufuor government
Liberalism
Contributions to liberal theory
Liberalism worldwide
List of liberal parties
Liberal democracy
Peter Mac Manu
Dr J. B. Danquah
J.B. Machator
2011 New Patriotic Party Primaries
Malik Yakubu
Notes
External links
1992 establishments in Ghana
Conservative parties in Africa
International Democrat Union member parties
Liberal conservative parties
Liberal parties in Africa
Political parties established in 1992
Political parties in Ghana
20th-century establishments in Ghana
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick%20Pitino
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Rick Pitino
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Richard Andrew Pitino (; born September 18, 1952) is an American basketball coach who is the men's head coach for St. John's Red Storm. He was also the head coach of Greece's senior national team. He has been the head coach of several teams in NCAA Division I and in the NBA, including Boston University (1978–1983), Providence College (1985–1987), the New York Knicks (1987–1989), the University of Kentucky (1989–1997), the Boston Celtics (1997–2001), the University of Louisville (2001–2017), Panathinaikos of the Greek Basket League and EuroLeague (2018–2020), and Iona University (2020–2023).
Pitino led Kentucky to an NCAA championship in 1996. He was the first coach to lead three different schools (Providence, Kentucky, and Louisville) to the NCAA Final Four, and is the only coach to win a national championship at two different schools (Kentucky and Louisville*). * Vacated by the NCAA
In 2013, he was elected to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
In June 2017, the NCAA suspended Pitino for five games of the 2017–18 season for his lack of oversight in an escort sex scandal at the University of Louisville involving recruits. Louisville's national championship from 2013 was eventually vacated as well. In September, Pitino was implicated in a federal investigation involving bribes to recruits, which resulted in Louisville firing him for cause.
On March 20, 2023, he was named head basketball coach at St. John's University.
Early years and education
Pitino was born in New York City, and was raised in Bayville, New York. He was the team captain of the St. Dominic High School basketball team in Oyster Bay, Long Island.
Pitino enrolled at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1970. At a listed height of tall, he was a standout point guard for the Minutemen basketball team. Pitino held the tenth spot at UMass for career assists, with 329, until Chaz Williams (2011-2014) became the leader in career assists following his final season with the Minutemen. He led the team in assists as a junior and senior. The 168 assists as a senior is the eighth-best single season total ever there.
Pitino was a freshman at the same time future NBA legend Julius Erving spent his junior (and final) year at UMass, although the two never played on the same team because freshmen were ineligible to play varsity basketball at the time. Other teammates of Pitino's include Al Skinner, who also went on to become a successful college coach, and baseball player Mike Flanagan, who went on to pitch in the major leagues and win the AL Cy Young Award in 1979. Pitino earned his degree from UMass in 1974.
Career
Pitino's college coaching assignments include Boston University, Providence College, the University of Kentucky, the University of Louisville and Iona University. As a collegiate head coach, Pitino has compiled a 684–282 record, for a .708 winning percentage that is ranked 11th among active coaches and 34th all-time among all collegiate basketball coaches following the 2021–22 season.
Pitino is considered by many to be one of the first coaches to promote fully taking advantage of the 3-point shot, first adopted by the NCAA in 1987. By exploiting the 3-point shot, his teams at Kentucky in the early 1990s were known as Pitino's Bombinos, as a significant portion of the offensive points came from the 3-point shot. Even now, Pitino's teams are known for the 3-point threat and all of his teams rank towards the top in 3-point attempts per season. Additionally, his teams are known for their signature use of the full court press and 2-3 zone defensive schemes, as well as their general aggressive defensive style.
Many of Pitino's players and assistant coaches have gone on to become successful collegiate coaches. In total, 21 former Pitino players and coaches have become Division I head coaches, including former University of Florida coach Billy Donovan (now head coach of the Chicago Bulls), former High Point University coach Tubby Smith, Santa Clara University's Herb Sendek, UCLA's Mick Cronin, New Mexico's Richard Pitino (his son), Maryland's Kevin Willard, former Cal State Northridge coach Reggie Theus and BYU's Mark Pope.
University of Hawaii (1974–1976)
Pitino started his coaching career as a graduate assistant at the University of Hawaii in 1974, and became a full-time assistant in 1975. Pitino served as Hawaii's interim head coach late in the 1975–76 season. Coach Bruce O'Neil was fired after the Rainbow Warriors' started the season 9–12. Pitino led Hawaii for their final six games, going 2–4 in the span.
Scandal and investigation
Pitino's time at Hawaii was marred by a 1977 NCAA report on sanctions against the program. According to the report, Pitino was implicated in 8 of the 64 infractions that led the university to be placed on probation. The violations involving Pitino included providing round-trip air fare for a player between New York and Honolulu, arranging for student-athletes to receive used cars for season tickets, and handing out coupons to players for free food at McDonald's. He was also cited, along with the head coach, Bruce O'Neil, for providing misinformation to the NCAA and University of Hawaii officials. Also in 1977, the NCAA infractions committee recommended that Pitino and O'Neil be disassociated from Hawaii athletics. In 1989, Pitino would dismiss the report, saying "I didn't make any mistakes, I don't care what anybody says."
Syracuse (1976–1978)
Pitino was the first assistant hired by Jim Boeheim in 1976 as Boeheim began his tenure at Syracuse University.
Boston University (1978–1983)
Pitino's first head coaching job came in 1978 at Boston University. In the two seasons before his arrival, the team had won a mere 17 games. During his 5-year tenure, Boston U's team slogan was, “The hardest working coach, for the hardest working team in the country”. Pitino used the full court press for almost the entirety of each game, eventually leading the Terriers to their first NCAA tournament appearance in 24 years.
New York Knicks (1983–1985)
Pitino left Boston University to become an assistant coach with the New York Knicks under Hubie Brown.
Providence (1985–1987)
In 1985, Pitino returned to college coaching to become head coach at Providence College after being hired by then-athletic director Lou Lamoriello. Providence had gone a dismal 11–20 in the year before he took over. Two years later, Pitino led the team to the Final Four. That Final Four team featured point guard Billy Donovan, who would go on to be an assistant coach under Pitino at the University of Kentucky and then win back-to-back national championships as head coach at the University of Florida.
New York Knicks (1987–1989)
Pitino became head coach of the New York Knicks on July 14, 1987. The year before he arrived, the team had only won 24 games. In just two years, Pitino led the Knicks to their first division title in nearly twenty years. He resigned from the Knicks on May 30, 1989.
Kentucky (1989–1997)
After spending two years coaching in the NBA, Pitino returned to the college level again in 1989, becoming the coach at Kentucky. The Kentucky program was recovering from a major recruiting scandal brought on by former coach Eddie Sutton that left it on NCAA probation. Pitino quickly restored Kentucky's reputation and performance, leading his second school to the Final Four in the 1993 NCAA tournament, and winning a national title in the 1996 NCAA tournament, Kentucky's 6th NCAA Championship. The following year, Pitino's Kentucky team made it back to the national title game, losing to Arizona in overtime in the finals of the 1997 NCAA tournament. Pitino's fast-paced teams at Kentucky were favorites of the school's fans, implementing his signature style of full-court pressure defense. The following year, he left Kentucky for the NBA and Kentucky went on to win the 1998 national title. He would later refer to Kentucky as "the Roman Empire of college basketball".
Boston Celtics (1997–2001)
Pitino returned to the NBA in 1997 when the Boston Celtics hired him as head coach on May 6, 1997. He resigned on January 8, 2001. His NBA coaching experience often demonstrated a deep frustration with the dynamics of the league, especially in Boston, where he amassed a 102–146 record from 1997 to 2001. After being beaten by the Toronto Raptors on March 1, 2000, on a buzzer-beater by Vince Carter, Pitino's frustration reached critical mass as he addressed the press. Referring to the expectations of Boston Celtics fans and media, Pitino challenged each of them to let go of the past and focus on the future:
Pitino struggled in Boston, and statistics like 1998–99's 19–31 record made him little better in the eyes of many Boston fans than his inexperienced predecessor, M. L. Carr. Pitino's remarks became a cornerstone of Celtics lore, and has served as a metaphor for other sports franchises and their inability to relive past successes. Pitino himself reprised the speech in a tongue-in-cheek manner at Louisville in November 2005, challenging his freshmen players to play as tough as past seniors and drawing laughter from sportswriters in a postgame press conference. During his time in Boston, he also served as team president, with complete control over basketball operations.
Louisville (2001–2017)
Pitino returned to college—and his adopted home state—on March 21, 2001, to coach the University of Louisville following the retirement of Hall of Fame coach Denny Crum. In the 2005 season, Pitino led Louisville to their first Final Four in 19 years, and became the first men's coach in NCAA history to lead three different schools to the Final Four. Immediately following their Final Four run, several players graduated or entered the 2005 NBA draft. The inexperience caused the Cardinals to limp into the Big East tournament seeded 12th, and miss the NCAA tournament. They made the semifinals of the National Invitation Tournament (NIT), where they were defeated by eventual champions University of South Carolina. The 2007 Cardinal team was primarily the same team, with added freshmen. Picked to finish towards the bottom of the Big East Conference again, Pitino led them to a second-place finish, 12–4 (tied with the University of Pittsburgh, who had been beaten by the Cardinals during the regular season) in the conference standings and a first round bye in the conference tournament. Pitino implemented a 2–2–1 and 2–3 zone defense midway through the season. The 2007 team's season ended when the Cardinals lost to Texas A&M in the second round of the NCAA tournament. The 2008 Cardinals finished second in the Big East and ranked 13th in both the AP and Coaches' polls. Louisville was the third seed in the 2008 NCAA tournament's East region. They defeated Boise State, Oklahoma and Tennessee to advance to the Elite Eight, where they were defeated by North Carolina. Louisville was the top seed overall in the 2009 NCAA tournament and was planted as the first seed in the Midwest region. They defeated Morehead State, Siena and Arizona to advance to the Elite Eight, where they were defeated by Michigan State. In 2010 the Cardinals suffered a disappointing 15-point loss to their first round opponent, the California Golden Bears. In 2011, Louisville was upset by 13th-seeded Morehead State in the second round of the NCAA Tournament.
In 2012, Pitino coached the Cardinals to the Big East tournament championship and a berth as No. 4 seed in the West region of the NCAA tournament. The Cardinals defeated Davidson, New Mexico, and top seed Michigan State to advance to the regional final against Florida and his former player and friend Billy Donovan. The Cardinals would go on to win that game, but lost to arch-rivals and eventual national champions Kentucky in the 2012 Final Four.
In 2013, Pitino led the Louisville Cardinals to their third national championship in an 82–76 win over Michigan to become the first NCAA Division I coach in history to win a championship with two different schools.
The University of Louisville self-imposed a postseason ban for the 2015–16 season amid an ongoing NCAA investigation over an escort sex scandal involving recruits between 2010 and 2014. The ban included both the ACC tournament and the NCAA tournament. On June 15, 2017, the NCAA charged Pitino for failure to monitor his basketball program, which was involved in a sex-for-pay scandal. He was suspended for the first five games of the ACC season in 2017–18. On February 20, 2018, the NCAA officially announced that the 2013 National Championship and their 2012 Final Four appearance had been vacated. It was the first time the NCAA vacated a men's basketball national title.
Scandal and ouster
On September 26, 2017, federal prosecutors announced that the school was under investigation for an alleged "pay for play" involving recruits at Louisville. The allegations state that an Adidas executive conspired to pay $100,000 to the family of a top-ranked national recruit to play at Louisville and to represent Adidas when he turned pro. The criminal complaint does not name Louisville specifically but appears to involve the recruitment of Brian Bowen, who committed on June 3, 2017, to the school.
A day later, Louisville placed Pitino on unpaid administrative leave, while athletic director Tom Jurich was placed on paid administrative leave. According to a letter interim president Greg Postel sent to Pitino, the information spelled out by prosecutors amounted to a "material breach" of his contract. Pitino's lawyer, Steve Pence, told The Courier-Journal that as he understood it, Pitino had been "effectively fired". Under the terms of Pitino's contract, Louisville was required to give him 10 days' notice and "an opportunity to be heard" before firing him for cause. According to CBS Sports' Gary Parrish, school officials did not intend for Pitino to ever return to the sidelines again, and planned to cut ties with him as soon as they could legally do so.
On October 2, the board of the University of Louisville Athletic Association voted to formally begin the process of firing Pitino for cause. On the same day, Pitino, through his lawyer, claimed that Louisville officials should have given him 10 days notice and a chance to respond before placing him on leave. On October 16, the ULAA board voted unanimously to fire Pitino for cause.
On September 18, 2019, nearly two years after his dismissal and his lawsuit for $38.7 million against the ULAA, Pitino settled with the university and dropped the case. As a result, his termination was changed from a firing on October 16, 2017, to a resignation on October 3, 2017, citing "zero liability" between both parties.
Panathinaikos (2018–2020)
On December 26, 2018, Panathinaikos announced Pitino as the head coach of the team until the end of the season, marking his debut in the EuroLeague. On February 17, 2019, they won the 2018–19 Greek Cup against PAOK in the final. In the EuroLeague Regular Season, they managed to make a comeback after a 6–8 start, to finish in sixth place and reach the playoffs, after they registered ten wins in their last 16 games. In the EuroLeague Playoffs, Panathinaikos fell for a second consecutive year against defending champions Real Madrid, thus failing to qualify for the 2019 EuroLeague Final Four. The season ended with Panathinaikos winning the 2018–19 Greek Basket League's season championship, after they swept Promitheas Patras 3–0 in the League's Finals. After the season, Panathinaikos made an offer to coach Pitino to extend his stay, and although he showed willingness to stay in Greece for another season, he declined the offer, due to a family matter.
On November 26, 2019, Pitino was rehired by Panathinaikos as the team's head coach on a two-year deal after the firing of Argyris Pedoulakis. He remained with the team until March 2020 when the 2019–20 EuroLeague season
was suspended due to the COVID-19 pandemic, leaving Panathinaikos at sixth place.
Iona (2020–2023)
On March 14, 2020, Pitino was named head coach of Iona College after Tim Cluess stepped down from the position due to health issues on March 13. Despite the hiring, Pitino was scheduled to finish his commitments to Panathinaikos, however on March 20, Panathinaikos announced mutual agreement to terminate the contract.
St. John's (2023–present)
On March 20, 2023, Pitino was named the head coach of St. John's, just a week after Mike Anderson was fired after four years.
National team career
Puerto Rico
On December 20, 2010, Pitino was hired as head coach of the senior Puerto Rico national team. On April 29, 2011, it was announced that Pitino would not coach the Puerto Rico national team, due to scheduling conflicts and NCAA regulations disallowing it. Pitino coached the Puerto Rican national team at the 2015 FIBA Americas Championship, in Mexico City, Mexico. They finished the tournament in 5th place.
Greece
On November 8, 2019, Pitino was hired as head coach of Greece's senior national team. The Hellenic Basketball Federation announced that Pitino would be Greece's head coach at the 2020 FIBA Victoria Olympic qualifying tournament and the 2020 Summer Olympics, should Greece qualify, while Thanasis Skourtopoulos would serve as Greece's head coach for the 2021 EuroBasket qualification tournament.
Personal life
Pitino married the former Joanne Minardi in 1976. They have five living children, one of whom, Richard, is currently the head coach with the New Mexico Lobos. Another son, Daniel, died from congenital heart failure in 1987 at the age of six months. Rick and Joanne established the Daniel Pitino Foundation (along with a Daniel Pitino shelter in Owensboro, Kentucky) in his memory, which has raised millions of dollars for children in need.
Their son's death was not the last tragedy for Rick and Joanne. Both were especially hard-hit by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as Joanne's brother and Rick's closest friend, Billy Minardi, was working as a bond trader for Cantor Fitzgerald on the 105th floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center when it was struck by American Airlines Flight 11. Since 2002, the University of Louisville has designated a December home game as the Billy Minardi Classic, and the university named a dorm on campus as "Billy Minardi Hall". Only a few months earlier, another brother-in-law of Rick, Don Vogt, was killed after being hit by a New York City cab.
Author and accomplishments
Pitino is the author of a motivational self-help book (and audio recording) named Success is a Choice. He published an autobiography in 1988 entitled Born to Coach, describing his life up until his time with the Knicks. His book Rebound Rules, was the top seller at the 2008 Kentucky Book Fair. His most recent book, Pitino: My Story, was published in 2018. A detailed biography, it also delivers his version of events regarding the Adidas sneaker scandal and his subsequent ouster as the University of Louisville men's basketball coach.
In 2005, Pitino's Louisville team posted a tie for the most single-season wins in school history (33)—since surpassed by the 35 total wins by the 2013 NCAA title-winning Cardinals team—while he is one of two men's coaches in NCAA history to lead three separate schools (Providence, Kentucky, and Louisville) to the Final Four. The other coach is his in-state rival, John Calipari (UMass Amherst, Memphis, Kentucky), though both final four appearances at UMass and Memphis were later vacated (as was Louisville's 2013 title under Pitino).
As of 2022, Pitino's .730 winning percentage in 74 NCAA Tournament games ranked seventh among all coaches.
Thoroughbred horse racing
Beyond basketball, Pitino has been involved in the sport of Thoroughbred horse racing as the lead partner in Celtic Pride Stable and the Ol Memorial Stable. Among his notable horses have been A P Valentine and Halory Hunter. Pitino, through the stable name of RAP Racing, owns a 5 percent share of Goldencents. Goldencents, who won the $750,000 2013 Santa Anita Derby, ran in the 2013 Kentucky Derby and finished 17th despite having 8/1 odds of winning.
Extortion attempt against Pitino
On April 18, 2009, Pitino announced that he was the target of an extortion attempt. On April 24, Karen Cunagin Sypher, the wife of Louisville equipment manager Tim Sypher, was arraigned and charged in US District Court with extortion and lying to federal agents. The federal government alleged that Cunagin demanded vehicles and tuition money for her children from Pitino and later demanded $10 million from him. According to the federal complaint, the demands arose from an unspecified encounter between Sypher and Pitino.
On August 11, Pitino admitted that he had sexual relations with Cunagin on August 1, 2003, at Porcini, a Louisville restaurant. Several weeks later, Cunagin told Pitino that she was pregnant and wanted to have an abortion, but added she did not have health insurance. Pitino paid her $3,000 for the abortion. During the trial, Pitino downplayed the pair's sexual escapade, testifying that the entire act did not take more than 15 seconds. Cunagin claimed that her estranged husband, Tim Sypher, was paid to marry her.
At a press conference on August 12, Pitino apologized for his indiscretion and stated that he would remain as coach. While Pitino's contract allowed for his firing for "acts of moral depravity or misconduct that damages the university's reputation," University of Louisville president James Ramsey announced on August 13 that Pitino would remain in his position.
On August 6, 2010, a federal district court found Cunagin guilty of extortion and lying to federal agents. She was eventually sentenced to 87 months in prison. Cunagin was released to a halfway house in January 2017. After her conviction, Cunagin hired new attorneys and accused the judge, prosecutors, her former attorneys, and Pitino of taking part in a conspiracy to ensure that she was found guilty. She later expressed "exceptional remorse and contrition regarding her commission of her offenses".
Head coaching record
College
^abcde Kentucky was ineligible for both the NCAA and SEC Tournaments in 1990 and 1991 due to sanctions from the Eddie Sutton-era.
^a Kentucky finished first in the SEC standings. However, due to their probation, they were ineligible for the regular-season title; it was awarded to second-place LSU instead.
^ab Pitino did not coach in one win (January 28, 2004 vs. Houston) due to medical leave, but is credited with the victory.
^abcdefghijkl Louisville has vacated all of its victories and three losses from the 2011–12, 2012–13, 2013–14, 2014–15 seasons. These 123 wins and three losses are not included in Pitino's all-time record.
^aLouisville self-imposed ineligibility for the 2015–16 postseason due to an ongoing NCAA investigation.
Under current NCAA official records, Pitino's official record as of the end of the 2021–22 season is .
NBA
|-
| style="text-align:left;"|New York
| style="text-align:left;"|
| || style="text-align:center;"|2nd in Atlantic || 4 || 1 || 3 ||
| style="text-align:center;"|Lost in first round
|-
| style="text-align:left;"|New York
| style="text-align:left;"|
| || style="text-align:center;"|1st in Atlantic || 9 || 5 || 4 ||
| style="text-align:center;"|Lost in Conference semifinals
|-
| style="text-align:left;"|Boston
| style="text-align:left;"|
| || style="text-align:center;"|6th in Atlantic || — || — || — || —
| style="text-align:center;"|Missed playoffs
|-
| style="text-align:left;"|Boston
| style="text-align:left;"|
| || style="text-align:center;"|5th in Atlantic || — || — || — || —
| style="text-align:center;"|Missed playoffs
|-
| style="text-align:left;"|Boston
| style="text-align:left;"|
| || style="text-align:center;"|5th in Atlantic || — || — || — || —
| style="text-align:center;"|Missed playoffs
|-
| style="text-align:left;"|Boston
| style="text-align:left;"|
| || style="text-align:center;"|(resigned) || — || — || — || —
| style="text-align:center;"|—
|- class="sortbottom"
| style="text-align:center;" colspan="2"|Career
| || || 13 || 6 || 7 || ||
EuroLeague
|-
| style="text-align:left;"|Panathinaikos
| style="text-align:left;"|2018–19
| 19 || 10 || 9 || || style="text-align:center;"|Lost in Quarterfinals
|-
| style="text-align:left;"|Panathinaikos
| style="text-align:left;"|2019–20
| 18 || 8 || 10 || || style="text-align:center;"|Season suspended due to the COVID-19 pandemic
|- class="sortbottom"
| style="text-align:center;" colspan="2"|Career || 37 || 18 ||19 || ||
See also
List of college men's basketball coaches with 600 wins
List of NCAA Division I Men's Final Four appearances by coach
References
External links
Iona profile
Euroleague.net profile
Louisville profile
1952 births
Living people
American expatriate basketball people in Greece
American men's basketball coaches
American men's basketball players
American people of Italian descent
American racehorse owners and breeders
Basketball coaches from New York (state)
Basketball players from New York City
Boston Celtics executives
Boston Celtics head coaches
Boston University Terriers men's basketball coaches
College basketball announcers in the United States
College men's basketball head coaches in the United States
Greece national basketball team coaches
Hawaii Rainbow Warriors basketball coaches
Iona Gaels men's basketball coaches
Kentucky Wildcats men's basketball coaches
Louisville Cardinals men's basketball coaches
Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame inductees
National Basketball Association executives
New York Knicks assistant coaches
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Panathinaikos B.C. coaches
People from Bayville, New York
Point guards
Providence Friars men's basketball coaches
St. John's Red Storm men's basketball coaches
Syracuse Orange men's basketball coaches
UMass Minutemen basketball players
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Swedish%20War%20%281788%E2%80%931790%29
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Russo-Swedish War (1788–1790)
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The Russo-Swedish War of 1788–1790 was fought between Sweden and Russia from June 1788 to August 1790. The war was ended by the Treaty of Värälä on 14 August 1790 and took place concomitantly with both the Austro-Turkish War (1788–1791), Russo-Turkish War (1787–1792) and Theatre War. The war was, overall, mostly insignificant for the parties involved.
King Gustav III of Sweden initiated the war for domestic political reasons, hoping to gain support from the opposition. Despite forming an alliance with the Ottoman Empire, Sweden failed to secure support from Great Britain, the Dutch Republic, and Prussia. Sweden's initial plan to attack Saint Petersburg and instigate a coup to depose Empress Catherine II did not materialize. The war led to Denmark–Norway declaring war on Sweden, but peace was eventually signed on 9 July 1789 after diplomatic intervention by Great Britain and Prussia.
During the Russo-Swedish War of 1788–1790, Sweden attempted to prevent Russian ships from cutting off coastal sea routes by building fortifications at Hangö and on its surrounding islands. Both Swedish and Russian navies engaged in multiple indecisive battles throughout the conflict, such as the Battle of Öland and the First and Second Battle of Svensksund. The last-mentioned naval battle was the biggest success of the Swedes in this war, whereas the highest Russian success at sea was the Battle of Reval. The war on land was marked by numerous skirmishes and shifting front lines but ultimately remained a stalemate. King Gustav III of Sweden, realizing the difficulty of defeating Russia and facing mounting war expenses, sought peace. Empress Catherine II of Russia, distracted by other conflicts and concerns, also desired peace. Overall, the war did not provide any lasting solutions to their respective domestic issues.
Background
The conflict was initiated by King Gustav III of Sweden for domestic political reasons, as he believed that a short war would leave the opposition with no recourse but to support him. Despite establishing himself as an autocrat in a bloodless coup d'état that ended parliamentary rule in 1772, his political powers did not give him the right to start a war. He was also becoming increasingly unpopular, an issue which became obvious during the parliament session of 1786. This unpopularity was also encouraged by Russia, which believed an autocratic king to be a threat to its interests. However, Russian support for his opposition did not go unnoticed by Gustav III, and was one of the reasons why he thought of the war as inevitable. The Western powers — such as Great Britain, the Dutch Republic and the Kingdom of Prussia — were alarmed by a string of Russian victories in the Russo-Turkish War (1787–1792) and lobbied for the war in the north, which would have diverted the attention of Catherine II of Russia from the Southern theatre. It was at their instigation that Gustav concluded an alliance with the Ottoman Empire in the summer of 1788. However, only the Ottoman Empire was willing to ally with Sweden while Great Britain, the Dutch Republic, and Prussia rejected efforts to form an alliance.
Before the grand opening of the Riksdag in 1789, King Gustav III had the Riksdag Music commissioned. The Parliament then decided on the creation of a National Debt Office to raise funds and finance the war, a move that gave rise to a wave of inflation of the Swedish riksdaler.
Preparations for the war
The Swedes initially planned a naval assault on Saint Petersburg. One Swedish army was to advance through Finland; a second army, accompanied by the Swedish coastal flotilla, was to advance along the Finnish coast into the Gulf of Finland; while a third army sailed with the Swedish battlefleet in order to land at Oranienbaum to advance on Saint Petersburg. The goal was to instigate a coup de état in Russia and depose Empress Catherine II. Sveaborg was set as the forward base of operations for the campaign. However, the whole concept was based on the assumption that the Swedish open sea fleet would be able to decisively defeat its Russian counterpart. Incidentally, Russian forces were not totally unprepared for the war since the bulk of the Russian Baltic Fleet was planned to be transferred against the Ottoman Empire and had made preparations of its own for war.
War was far from popular, even less so in the eastern part of Sweden (Finland). Even senior military leaders voiced their opposition to the plans to go to war. Especially amongst the officers of the army, unrest spread widely. This could partly be explained by the still remaining supporters of Georg Magnus Sprengtporten's plans for Finnish independence.
In 1788, a head tailor of the Royal Swedish Opera received an order to sew a number of Russian military uniforms that later were used in an exchange of gunfire at Puumala, a Swedish outpost on the Russo-Swedish border, on 27 June 1788. The staged attack, which caused outrage in Stockholm, was to convince the Riksdag of the Estates and to provide Gustav with an excuse to declare a "defensive war" on Russia. This was important since Gustav III did not have the constitutional right to start an offensive war without the agreement of the estates, who had already made clear that their acceptance would not be forthcoming.
The war
1788
The Swedish open sea fleet sailed from Karlskrona on 9 June 1788, with Duke Charles of Södermanland as its commander. On 21 June the fleet met a Russian squadron off Saaremaa island and after chasing the Russians down tried to provoke a conflict by demanding Russians render honours to the Swedes from which Russians had been exempted in the previous peace treaties. Vice Admiral Wilhelm von Dessin who commanded the small Russian squadron agreed to render honours to Duke Charles but not to the Swedish flag and managed to dissolve the threatening situation and continue towards Copenhagen. Since the Swedish wanted to avoid initiating the conflict they had lost their chance to provoke the Russians into war and were left empty-handed.
On 7 July the Swedish fleet was notified that a state of war with Russia was in effect, and already on 8 July surprised two unprepared Russian frigates – 32-gun Jaroslavets (Jarislawits) and 24-gun Hektor (Gektor) – which were promptly captured together with their crew of 450 men. The Swedish fleet met a Russian fleet sailing under the command of Admiral Samuel Greig and fought an engagement, the Battle of Hogland, in which neither side managed to gain advantage. Upon return to Sveaborg to repair and resupply Duke Charles' fleet, the Swedes found that Sveaborg had been stocked only with coastal fleet in mind, which amongst other things meant that it did not store ammunition for the heavy cannons of the open sea fleet and lacked suitable stocks of equipment required to repair large sailing ships.
The coastal fleet's Stockholm's squadron departed for Finland on 25 June, carrying over 9,000 troops. It reached its destination of Sveaborg on 2 July and started constructing an encampment on the island of Sandhamn, next to Helsingfors. The coastal fleet's Sveaborg squadron under Colonel Michael Anckarsvärd had been readied for action already by mid-June. On 26 July, the coastal fleet under Colonel Anckarsvärd departed for Frederikshamn, carrying 6,000 men, while a 4,000-strong unit advanced on land under General Gustaf Mauritz Armfelt. The Swedish coastal fleet clashed briefly with a group of Russian galleys outside Frederikshamn on 28 July, and forced them to retire within the protection of the fortifications. Initial Swedish landing attempts began on 2 August but bad weather prevented the main force from landing and a Russian counterattack forced the 300-man Swedish landing party to return to their ships. On 3 August, landings were successful, some 10 km south-east of the town, and by the evening Swedish forces were advancing towards Frederikshamn. However, inspired Russian resistance in the early hours of 4 August convinced the Swedish landing force to return to its ships. Attempts to swiftly capture Frederikshamn ended in total failure for several reasons, one of the most glaring being the increasing unrest against the king amongst the officers.
Attempts by Colonel 's 1,700-man-strong to storm Nyslott by surprise on 2 July ended in a siege which, given the besiegers' total lack of siege artillery, caused the Swedish advance to bog down. The siege had to be abandoned on 21 August. General 's 4,000 men were to support the coastal fleet's capture of Frederikshamn and crossed the border on 18 July, reaching its staging ground just north of Frederikshamn on 20 July. A further 1,100 men were under the command of Colonel Gustaf Mauritz Armfelt. When the failure at Frederikshamn became apparent, the Swedish troops were pulled back to the border. The war being perceived illegal as it did not have the support of the estates, along with its lack of success, contributed to rising unrest. Already on 9 August, a group of officers had pleaded for peace with Russia, and on 12 August had signed what became known as the Anjala declaration, with the whole matter being later known as the Anjala conspiracy. King Gustav III's position, surrounded by rebellious officers, was greatly improved when news of a threat of war from Denmark–Norway became known and he could head back to Sweden on 25 August without being accused of deserting his troops.
The Swedish attack on Russia caused Denmark–Norway to declare war on Sweden in August, in accordance with its treaty obligations to Russia. A Norwegian army briefly invaded Sweden and won the Battle of Kvistrum Bridge, before peace was signed on 9 July 1789, following the diplomatic intervention of Great Britain and Prussia. Under their pressure, Denmark–Norway declared itself neutral in the conflict, bringing the Theatre War to an end.
The Russian fleet had already in early August, soon after the Battle of Hogland, moved to blockade the Swedish open sea fleet in Sveaborg, as the Swedes were unable to get their fleet ready for battle. A small detachment, under command of James Travene, from the Russian fleet cut the safe coastal sea route past Hangö in late August 1788. This caused severe supply troubles for the Swedish fleets and armies, which were mostly east of the cape. A small coastal fleet detachment under Lieutenant-Colonel sortied to drive off the Russians, but lacked the strength to do so. After receiving reinforcements, the Swedes managed on 17 October to engage large Russian units for long enough for the small gunboats to slip past the blockade and protect the transports west of the cape, which probably saved the transports containing army and fleet supplies from capture. A few days later, the Russians abandoned their position, allowing Swedish transports to deliver supplies unhindered. Since Sveaborg could not repair and refit the ships of the open sea fleet, it had to set sail for Karlskrona. However, preparations and unsuitable weather delayed departure until 20 November, when the sea at Sveaborg was already frozen over and some ships had to be freed by sawing the ice open for them. The fleet, however, reached Karlskrona one week later without any losses, just days before that port also froze over.
1789
In an attempt to prevent Russian ships from cutting off coastal sea routes, the Swedes built several fortifications at Hangö and on its surrounding islands during the winter of 1788/1789. Additional fortifications were constructed west of Hangö, near Korpo. However, Porkala cape was left without fortifications. The bulk of the Swedish army in Finland, consisting of 13,000 men under General Johan August Meijerfeldt the Younger, was placed at the Kymmene river, with a further 5,000 men in Savolax. While the troops still lacked supplies, their discipline and morale had been greatly improved from what it had been in 1788. On the naval front, Sweden had not been so lucky; the crews of the open sea fleet based at Karlskrona suffered heavily from fever, making both fitting and manning the ships very difficult, and it took until 6 July before the fleet was able to set sail, under command of Duke Charles of Södermanland, who had the experienced naval officer Admiral as his flag-captain.
In stark contrast to Swedish troubles, the Russian open sea fleet had set sail already in mid-May; by 22 May a few ships reconnoitered the Swedish defences at Hangö, but after a short engagement the Russian ships chose to break off. The main body of the Russian fleet under Admiral Vasily Chichagov met the Swedish fleet on 26 July, and engaged it in what became known as the Battle of Öland. As in the previous year, the battle was indecisive, with the Swedes heading to Karlskrona and the Russian fleet joining up with a Russian squadron from Danish waters. The raging epidemic then confined the Swedish fleet to Karlskrona for most of the year.
The Swedish coastal fleet had been unable to sail for Sweden for the winter and had to be fitted out in Finland. In addition to the problems, the commander of the coastal fleet Colonel Anckarsvärd was arrested for being involved with the Anjala conspiracy and replaced with Admiral Carl August Ehrensvärd. The Swedish coastal fleet was able to sail from Sveaborg in late May and moved to the vicinity of Frederikshamn. However, after Hangö had been fortified, the Russians had moved in to blockade the coastal sea route at Porkala on 10 June. This effectively split the Swedish coastal fleet, as reinforcements from Sweden were unable to join with the main body, putting the coastal fleet at a severe disadvantage against the Russian coastal fleet.
In mid-June 1789, the Russians attacked Savolax from three different directions, with total forces of roughly 10,000 men against 4,000 Swedish defenders. Despite a clear victory at the Battle of Porrassalmi, the Swedish army was forced to withdraw, leaving the important Puumala straits to the Russians. Meanwhile, King Gustav III had assumed control of the main body of the Swedish army and started an offensive towards Villmanstrand on 25 June. The Swedes won a resounding victory at Utti on 28 June, but instead of advancing to Villmanstrand, the king headed for Frederikshamn. Once again, however, the Swedish offensive was bogged down. It took until 18 July for Russian defences outside Frederikshamn to be cleared, and during this time the Russian army had kept moving its forces south from Savolax. Small detachments (roughly 2,000 men) sent to stop the Russians were defeated at Kaipiainen and the Swedish army had to withdraw to the border once again. The Russian departure from Savolax enabled Swedish units in the area under the command of Colonel Curt von Stedingk to go onto the offensive. His forces advanced towards Nyslott and won several engagements against the Russians, first at Parkuinmäki Hill and later at Laitaatsilta. When forces moved to their winter encampments, very little had changed from the spring, with the Savolax Brigade having recaptured lost land, and only Puumala had remaining in Russian control.
The Russian coastal fleet under Karl Heinrich von Nassau-Siegen started attacking the Swedish coastal fleet on 15 August, by driving away the Swedish squadron which was scouting the area near Frederikshamn. This was followed by an attack against the main staging ground of the Swedish coastal fleet at Svensksund, leading to the first Battle of Svensksund. The Russians tried to take advantage of their victory over the Swedes with a co-ordinated offensive of both the coastal fleet and the army, which managed to drive the remaining Swedes beyond the Kymmene river. The battered Swedish coastal fleet was soon reinforced with ships from Sveaborg, while its commander Admiral Carl August Ehrensvärd was replaced, first by Colonel , who oversaw the repairs, and later by Lieutenant-Colonel .
The Russian blockade caused considerable trouble to the Swedes. Starting already in early July, Swedish gunboats engaged the much larger Russians on a daily basis, under the command of Admiral Salomon von Rajalin, who was in overall command of the Swedish coastal fleet in the Porkala region. Since von Rajalin's forces lacked the strength to overpower the Russian blockade, they instead covered the Swedish transports in their passage through the Barösund strait. The Swedish forces were repeatedly reinforced during the summer and already in mid-July consisted of 2 frigates, 10 galleys and several gunboats. Several artillery batteries were constructed to protect the area. Fighting at sea near Porkala cape continued until September. The Russian blockade at Porkala was after 24 August 1789 under the command of Captain James Trevenen, who started the effort to break the Swedish hold on Barösund. The Russian attack against Barösund started on 18 September. The attacking force consisted of 4 ships of the line, 1 frigate and 6 cutters. Fighting continued for two hours and cost the Swedes a single galley and the Russians one ship of the line (Severny Oryol) and several others damaged, but it gained the Russians the control of the Barösund strait. Sporadic fighting in the archipelago near Porkala continued and on 23 September the Russians captured the island of Älgsjön from the Swedes, but lost it on 30 September when Swedish reinforcements under Colonel Gustaf Mauritz Armfelt arrived. The Russian fleet left the area suddenly on 23 October, possibly due to the news that the Swedish open sea fleet had set sail, which it had done on 13 October, only to return to Karlskrona on 22 October. The Russian departure opened the safe coastal sea route to Swedish transports.
1790
In 1790, King Gustav III revived the plan for a landing close to Saint Petersburg, this time near Vyborg. In addition, a determined effort was made to bolster the strength of the fleets as much as possible so as to be able to get them under sail as soon as possible. The coastal fleet especially was being reinforced with new and stronger ships, some of them donated by the various Swedish towns. The first action took place on 17 March 1790, when two Swedish frigates plundered the Russian-controlled port of Rågersvik (Baltiyskiy Port). Swedish squadrons from Stockholm started towards Sveaborg on 21 April and also from Pommern on 3 May. Even though the Swedish main effort was on the sea, they attacked also on land, where Swedes led by Colonel Gustaf Mauritz Armfelt defeated Russian defenders on 15 April in southern Savolax, while the army led by King Gustav III and Colonel Gustaf Wachtmeister won another victory in the Battle of Valkeala. A Russian attack on 5 May close to the Kymmene river gained some success, capturing Anjala, but was thrown back before the end of the month. Fighting on land, however, reached stalemate, and already in June had turned into static warfare.
The Swedish open sea fleet under Duke Charles arrived on 10 May at Hangö and moved on 12 May to the vicinity of Reval. As some ships of the fleet were still separated from the main body, Duke Charles refused to carry out the attack on 12 May, when favourable winds still existed, and instead chose to attack on 13 May, leading to the Swedish failure at the Battle of Reval. The Swedish fleet stayed near Reval until late May, when it set sail to protect the flank of the coastal fleet; this led to another naval engagement, at the Battle of Kronstadt. Failing to inflict a decisive defeat on the Russians, or to prevent separate Russian squadrons from joining together, the open sea fleet sailed to Vyborg Bay.
The coastal fleet started its offensive on 8 May, under command of King Gustav III with de Frese as his flag-captain, without waiting for the coastal fleet's squadrons from Sweden or Pommern. The Swedish coastal fleet attacked the Russian fleet at Frederikshamn on 15 May, winning a clear victory over the defenders in the Battle of Fredrikshamn. However, attempts to capture the town and its fortifications failed. Instead of blockading the town, the Swedes chose to continue further towards Vyborg while raiding Russian supplies along the coast, and reached the Beryozovye Islands on 2 June, from where it attempted to support the open sea fleet in the Battle of Kronstadt.
The Russian fleet, under command of Admiral Vasily Chichagov, blockaded the Swedish fleets with their 30,000 men in Vyborg Bay. The blockade continued for a month and on 21–23 June, with supplies running out, the Swedes chose to attempt a breakout as soon as favorable winds would allow it. The Swedish coastal squadron under Lieutenant-Colonel Carl Olof Cronstedt arrived at Svensksund on 19 June and supported the ground forces of General Meijerfeldt in driving away Russian forces from its vicinity. However, Cronstedt's squadron could not get past a Russian frigate detachment under Captain Rowan Crown (orig. Robert Cronin) blocking the coastal sea route near modern-day Virolahti and had to return to Svensksund. The Swedish escape from Vyborg Bay started on 3 July and lost several ships when they ran aground due to bad visibility in the treacherous waters. The Swedish battle fleet retired to Sveaborg for repairs while the Swedish coastal fleet made for a strong defensive position at Svensksund. The Russian coastal fleet, led by Karl Heinrich von Nassau-Siegen started its attack against the Swedes on 9 July 1790, in what became known as the second Battle of Svensksund, which ended in a decisive Swedish victory.
Despite recent success, King Gustav III believed that his chances of successfully continuing the war were low. His government was also rapidly suffering from ever-increasing debt caused by the war expenses. On the other hand, Empress Catherine II became convinced that the Swedes would not be easily defeated and was anxious for peace in a war which was not important for her. The Russian Vice-Chancellor Alexander Bezborodko immediately agreed to negotiations, and the war was ended by the Treaty of Värälä on 14 August.
Aftermath
The Russo-Swedish War of 1788–1790 was, overall, mostly insignificant for the parties involved. Catherine II regarded the war against her Swedish cousin as a substantial distraction, as her land troops were tied up in the war against Turkey, and she was likewise concerned with revolutionary events unfolding in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (the Constitution of 3 May 1791) and in France (the French Revolution). The Swedish attack foiled the Russian plans of sending its navy into the Mediterranean Sea to support its forces fighting the Ottomans, as it was needed to protect the capital, Saint Petersburg. The war solved Gustav III's domestic problems only briefly, as he was assassinated at the opera in Stockholm, in 1792.
Notes
References
Bibliography
1788 in Denmark
1788 in Europe
1788 in Norway
1788 in Sweden
1788 in the Russian Empire
1789 in Denmark
1789 in Europe
1789 in Norway
1789 in Sweden
1789 in the Russian Empire
1790 in Denmark
1790 in Europe
1790 in Norway
1790 in Sweden
1790 in the Russian Empire
Catherine the Great
Conflicts in 1788
Conflicts in 1789
Conflicts in 1790
Sweden during the Gustavian era
Warfare of the early modern period
Wars involving Denmark
Wars involving Norway
Wars involving the Russian Empire
Wars involving Sweden
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408484
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian%20formalism
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Russian formalism
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Russian formalism was a school of thought literary theory in Russia from the 1910s to the 1930s. It includes the work of a number of highly influential Russian and Soviet scholars such as Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov, Vladimir Propp, Boris Eichenbaum, Roman Jakobson, Boris Tomashevsky, Grigory Gukovsky who revolutionised literary criticism between 1914 and the 1930s by establishing the specificity and autonomy of poetic language and literature. Russian formalism exerted a major influence on thinkers like Mikhail Bakhtin and Juri Lotman, and on structuralism as a whole. The movement's members had a relevant influence on modern literary criticism, as it developed in the structuralist and post-structuralist periods. Under Stalin it became a pejorative term for elitist art.
Russian formalism was a diverse movement, producing no unified doctrine, and no consensus amongst its proponents on a central aim to their endeavours. In fact, "Russian Formalism" describes two distinct movements: the OPOJAZ (Obshchestvo Izucheniia Poeticheskogo Yazyka, Society for the Study of Poetic Language) in St. Petersburg and the Moscow Linguistic Circle. Therefore, it is more precise to refer to the "Russian Formalists", rather than to use the more encompassing and abstract term of "Formalism".
The term "formalism" was first used by the adversaries of the movement, and as such it conveys a meaning explicitly rejected by the Formalists themselves. In the words of one of the foremost Formalists, Boris Eikhenbaum: "It is difficult to recall who coined this name, but it was not a very felicitous coinage. It might have been convenient as a simplified battle cry but it fails, as an objective term, to delimit the activities of the 'Society for the Study of Poetic Language'." Russian Formalism is the name now given to a mode of criticism which emerged from two different groups, The Moscow Linguistic Circle (1915) and the Opojaz group (1916). Although Russian Formalism is often linked to American New Criticism because of their similar emphasis on close reading, the Russian Formalists regarded themselves as developers of a science of criticism and are more interested in a discovery of systematic method for the analysis of poetic text.
Distinctive ideas
Russian formalism is distinctive for its emphasis on the functional role of literary devices and its original conception of literary history. Russian Formalists advocated a "scientific" method for studying poetic language, to the exclusion of traditional psychological and cultural-historical approaches. As Erlich points out, "It was intent upon delimiting literary scholarship from contiguous disciplines such as psychology, sociology, intellectual history, and the list theoreticians focused on the 'distinguishing features' of literature, on the artistic devices peculiar to imaginative writing" (The New Princeton Encyclopedia 1101).
Two general principles underlie the Formalist study of literature: first, literature itself, or rather, those of its features that distinguish it from other human activities, must constitute the object of inquiry of literary theory; second, "literary facts" have to be prioritized over the metaphysical commitments of literary criticism, whether philosophical, aesthetic or psychological (Steiner, "Russian Formalism" 16). To achieve these objectives several models were developed.
The formalists agreed on the autonomous nature of poetic language and its specificity as an object of study for literary criticism. Their main endeavor consisted in defining a set of properties specific to poetic language, be it poetry or prose, recognizable by their "artfulness" and consequently analyzing them as such.
Types
Mechanistic
The OPOJAZ, the Society for the Study of Poetic Language group, headed by Viktor Shklovsky was primarily concerned with the Formal method and focused on technique and device. "Literary works, according to this model, resemble machines: they are the result of an intentional human activity in which a specific skill transforms raw material into a complex mechanism suitable for a particular purpose" (Steiner, "Russian Formalism" 18). This approach strips the literary artifact from its connection with the author, reader, and historical background.
A clear illustration of this may be provided by the main argument of one of Viktor Shklovsky's early texts, "Art as Device" (Iskússtvo kak priyóm, 1916): art is a sum of literary and artistic devices that the artist manipulates to craft his work.
Shklovsky's main objective in "Art as Device" is to dispute the conception of literature and literary criticism common in Russia at that time. Broadly speaking, literature was considered, on the one hand, to be a social or political product, whereby it was then interpreted in the tradition of the great critic Belinsky as an integral part of social and political history. On the other hand, literature was considered to be the personal expression of an author's world vision, expressed by means of images and symbols. In both cases, literature is not considered as such, but evaluated on a broad socio-political or a vague psychologico-impressionistic background. The aim of Shklovsky is therefore to isolate and define something specific to literature or "poetic language": these, as we saw, are the "devices" which make up the "artfulness" of literature.
Formalists do not agree with one another on exactly what a device or "priyom" is, nor how these devices are used or how they are to be analyzed in a given text. The central idea is that more general: poetic language possesses specific properties, which can be analyzed as such.
Some OPOJAZ members argued that poetic language was the major artistic device. Shklovsky insisted that not all artistic texts defamiliarize language, and that some of them achieve defamiliarization (ostranenie) by manipulating composition and narrative.
The Formalist movement attempted to discriminate systematically between art and non-art. Therefore, its notions are organized in terms of polar oppositions. One of the most famous dichotomies introduced by the mechanistic Formalists is a distinction between story and plot, or fabula and "sjuzhet". Story, fabula, is a chronological sequence of events, whereas plot, sjuzhet, can unfold in non-chronological order. The events can be artistically arranged by means of such devices as repetition, parallelism, gradation, and retardation.
The mechanistic methodology reduced literature to a variation and combination of techniques and devices devoid of a temporal, psychological, or philosophical element. Shklovsky very soon realized that this model had to be expanded to embrace, for example, contemporaneous and diachronic literary traditions (Garson 403).
Organic
Disappointed by the constraints of the mechanistic method some Russian Formalists adopted the organic model. "They utilized the similarity between organic bodies and literary phenomena in two different ways: as it applied to individual works and to literary genres" (Steiner, "Russian Formalism" 19).
An artefact, like a biological organism, is not an unstructured whole; its parts are hierarchically integrated. Hence the definition of the device has been extended to its function in text. "Since the binary opposition – material vs. device – cannot account for the organic unity of the work, Zhirmunsky augmented it in 1919 with a third term, the teleological concept of style as the unity of devices" (Steiner, "Russian Formalism" 19).
The analogy between biology and literary theory provided the frame of reference for genre studies and genre criticism. "Just as each individual organism shares certain features with other organisms of its type, and species that resemble each other belong to the same genus, the individual work is similar to other works of its form and homologous literary forms belong to the same genre" (Steiner, "Russian Formalism" 19). The most widely known work carried out in this tradition is Vladimir Propp's "Morphology of the Folktale" (1928).
Having shifted the focus of study from an isolated technique to a hierarchically structured whole, the organic Formalists overcame the main shortcoming of the mechanists. Still, both groups failed to account for the literary changes which affect not only devices and their functions but genres as well.
Systemic
The diachronic dimension was incorporated into the work of the systemic Formalists. The main proponent of the "systemo-functional" model was Yury Tynyanov. "In light of his concept of literary evolution as a struggle among competing elements, the method of parody, 'the dialectic play of devices,' become an important vehicle of change" (Steiner, "Russian Formalism" 21).
Since literature constitutes part of the overall cultural system, the literary dialectic participates in cultural evolution. As such, it interacts with other human activities, for instance, linguistic communication. The communicative domain enriches literature with new constructive principles. In response to these extra-literary factors the self-regulating literary system is compelled to rejuvenate itself constantly. Even though the systemic Formalists incorporated the social dimension into literary theory and acknowledged the analogy between language and literature the figures of author and reader were pushed to the margins of this paradigm.
Linguistic
The figures of author and reader were likewise downplayed by the linguistic Formalists Lev Jakubinsky and Roman Jakobson. The adherents of this model placed poetic language at the center of their inquiry. As Warner remarks, "Jakobson makes it clear that he rejects completely any notion of emotion as the touchstone of literature. For Jakobson, the emotional qualities of a literary work are secondary to and dependent on purely verbal, linguistic facts" (71).
As Ashima Shrawan explains, "The theoreticians of OPOJAZ distinguished between practical and poetic language . . . . Practical language is used in day-to-day communication to convey information. . . . In poetic language, according to Lev Jakubinsky, 'the practical goal retreats into background and linguistic combinations acquire a value in themselves. When this happens, language becomes de-familiarized and utterances become poetic'" (The Language of Literature and Its Meaning, 68).
Eichenbaum criticised Shklovsky and Jakubinsky for not disengaging poetry from the outside world completely, since they used the emotional connotations of sound as a criterion for word choice. This recourse to psychology threatened the ultimate goal of formalism to investigate literature in isolation.
A definitive example of focus on poetic language is the study of Russian versification by Osip Brik. Apart from the most obvious devices such as rhyme, onomatopoeia, alliteration, and assonance, Brik explores various types of sound repetitions, e.g. the ring (kol'co), the juncture (styk), the fastening (), and the tail-piece (koncovka) ("Zvukovye povtory" (Sound Repetitions); 1917). He ranks phones according to their contribution to the "sound background" (zvukovoj fon) attaching the greatest importance to stressed vowels and the least to reduced vowels. As Mandelker indicates, "his methodological restraint and his conception of an artistic 'unity' wherein no element is superfluous or disengaged, … serves well as an ultimate model for the Formalist approach to versification study" (335).
Textual analysis
In "A Postscript to the Discussion on Grammar of Poetry," Jakobson redefines poetics as "the linguistic scrutiny of the poetic function within the context of verbal messages in general, and within poetry in particular" (23). He fervently defends linguists' right to contribute to the study of poetry and demonstrates the aptitude of the modern linguistics to the most insightful investigation of a poetic message. The legitimacy of "studies devoted to questions of metrics or strophics, alliterations or rhymes, or to questions of poets' vocabulary" is hence undeniable (23). Linguistic devices that transform a verbal act into poetry range "from the network of distinctive features to the arrangement of the entire text" (Jakobson 23).
Jakobson opposes the view that "an average reader" uninitiated into the science of language is presumably insensitive to verbal distinctions: "Speakers employ a complex system of grammatical relations inherent to their language even though they are not capable of fully abstracting and defining them" (30). A systematic inquiry into the poetic problems of grammar and the grammatical problems of poetry is therefore justifiable; moreover, the linguistic conception of poetics reveals the ties between form and content indiscernible to the literary critic (Jakobson 34).
Literature definition attempts
Roman Jakobson described literature as "organized violence committed on ordinary speech." Literature constitutes a deviation from average speech that intensifies, invigorates, and estranges the mundane speech patterns. In other words, for the Formalists, literature is set apart because it is just that: set apart. The use of devices such as imagery, rhythm, and meter is what separates "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns (Nabokov Lolita 9)", from "the assignment for next week is on page eighty four."
This estrangement serves literature by forcing the reader to think about what might have been an ordinary piece of writing about a common life experience in a more thoughtful way. A piece of writing in a novel versus a piece of writing in a fishing magazine. At the very least, literature should encourage readers to stop and look closer at scenes and happenings they otherwise might have skimmed through uncaring. The reader is not meant to be able to skim through literature. When addressed in a language of estrangement, speech cannot be skimmed through. "In the routines of everyday speech, our perceptions of and responses to reality become stale, blunted, and as the Formalists would say 'automatized'. By forcing us into a dramatic awareness of language, literature refreshes these habitual responses and renders objects more perceptible" (Eagleton 3).
Political offense
One of the sharpest critiques of the Formalist project was Leon Trotsky's Literature and Revolution (1924). Trotsky does not wholly dismiss the Formalist approach, but insists that "the methods of formal analysis are necessary, but insufficient" because they neglect the social world with which the human beings who write and read literature are bound up: "The form of art is, to a certain and very large degree, independent, but the artist who creates this form, and the spectator who is enjoying it, are not empty machines, one for creating form and the other for appreciating it. They are living people, with a crystallized psychology representing a certain unity, even if not entirely harmonious. This psychology is the result of social conditions" (180, 171).
The leaders of the movement began to be politically persecuted in the 1920s, when Stalin came to power, which largely put an end to their inquiries. In the Soviet period under Joseph Stalin, the authorities further developed the term's pejorative associations to cover any art which used complex techniques and forms accessible only to the elite, rather than being simplified for "the people" (as in socialist realism).
Legacy
Russian formalism was not a uniform movement; it comprised diverse theoreticians whose views were shaped through methodological debate that proceeded from the distinction between poetic and practical language to the overarching problem of the historical-literary study. It is mainly with this theoretical focus that the Formalist School is credited even by its adversaries such as Yefimov:
The contribution of our literary scholarship lies in the fact that it has focused sharply on the basic problems of literary criticism and literary study, first of all on the specificity of its object, that it modified our conception of the literary work and broke it down into its component parts, that it opened up new areas of inquiry, vastly enriched our knowledge of literary technology, raised the standards of our literary research and of our theorizing about literature effected, in a sense, a Europeanization of our literary scholarship…. Poetics, once a sphere of unbridled impressionism, became an object of scientific analysis, a concrete problem of literary scholarship ("Formalism V Russkom Literaturovedenii", quoted in Erlich, "Russian Formalism: In Perspective" 225).
The diverging and converging forces of Russian formalism gave rise to the Prague school of structuralism in the mid-1920s and provided a model for the literary wing of French structuralism in the 1960s and 1970s. "And, insofar as the literary-theoretical paradigms which Russian Formalism inaugurated are still with us, it stands not as a historical curiosity but a vital presence in the theoretical discourse of our day" (Steiner, "Russian Formalism" 29).
There is no direct historical relationship between New Criticism and Russian Formalism, each having developed at around the same time (RF: 1910-20s and NC: 1940s-50s) but independently of the other. Despite this, there are several similarities: for example, both movements showed an interest in considering literature on its own terms, instead of focusing on its relationship to political, cultural or historical externalities, a focus on the literary devices and the craft of the author, and a critical focus on poetry.
See also
Defamiliarization
Film semiotics
Formalism (literature)
Formalist film theory
Geneva School
Philosophy in the Soviet Union
Prague Linguistic Circle
References
Bibliography
Any, Carol. "Boris Eikhenbaum in OPOIAZ: Testing the Limits of the Work-Centered Poetics." Slavic Review 49:3 (1990): 409-26.
Shrawan, Ashima. The Language of Literature and Its Meaning: A Comparative Study of Indian and Western Aesthetics. Cambridge Scholars, 2019. p.68.
"Boris Eichenbaum." The Norton Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001. 1058-87.
Brown, Edward J. "The Formalist Contribution." The Russian Review 33:3 (1974): 243-58.
---. "Roman Osipovich Jakobson 1896-1982: The Unity of his Thought on Verbal Art." The Russian Review 42 (1983): 91-99.
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Erlich, Victor. "Russian Formalism: In Perspective." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 13:2 (1954): 215-25.
---. "Russian Formalism." Journal of the History of Ideas 34:4 (1973): 627-38.
---. "Russian Formalism." The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Ed. Alex Preminger and Terry V. F. Brogan. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993. 1101-02.
Garson, Judith. "Literary History: Russian Formalist Views, 1916-1928." Journal of the History of Ideas 31:3 (1970): 399-412.
Goldblatt, David; Brown Lee B (eds.). "Aesthetics a Reader in Philosophy of the Arts" 2nd ed. Pearson Education Inc
Gorman, David. "Bibliography of Russian Formalism in English." Style 26:4 (1992): 554-76.
---. "Supplement to a Bibliography of Russian Formalism in English." Style 29:4 (1995): 562-64.
Jakobson, Roman. "A Postscript to the Discussion on Grammar of Poetry." Diacritics 10:1 (1980): 21-35.
Knight, Chris. "Russian Formalist Roots', chapter 10 in Chris Knight, "Decoding Chomsky: Science and revolutionary politics", (paperback edition) London & New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018.
Mandelker, Amy. "Russian Formalism and the Objective Analysis of Sound in Poetry." The Slavic and East European Journal 27:3 (1983): 327-38.
Rydel, Christine A. "Formalism (Russian Formalists)." Encyclopedia of the Novel. Ed. Paul Schellinger et al. Vol. 1. Chicago; London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1998. 422-24. 2 vols.
Steiner, Peter. "Russian Formalism." The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Ed. Raman Selden. Vol. 8. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 11-29. 8 vols.
---. Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984.
Surdulescu, Radu. "Form, Structure and Structurality in Critical Theory." University of Bucharest Press, 2000 (online resource available: ).
Warner, Nicholas O. "In Search of Literary Science the Russian Formalist Tradition." Pacific Coast Philology 17 (1982): 69-81.
External links
Petrov, Petre. "Russian Formalism." 2 Feb. 2002. 21 Dec 2005
Everard, Jerry. "Introduction to Russian Formalism." 21 Dec 2005
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ra%C3%BAl%20Grijalva
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Raúl Grijalva
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Raúl Manuel Grijalva ( ; born February 19, 1948) is an American politician and activist who has served as the United States representative for from 2023 to the present and from 2003 to 2023. He is a member of the Democratic Party. The district, numbered as the 7th from 2003 to 2013, includes the western third of Tucson, part of Yuma and Nogales, and some peripheral parts of metro Phoenix. Grijalva is the dean of Arizona's congressional delegation.
Early life, education and career
Raúl Grijalva's father was a migrant worker from Mexico who entered the United States in 1945 through the Bracero Program and labored on southern Arizona ranches. Grijalva was born on Canoa Ranch, 30 miles south of Tucson. He graduated from Sunnyside High School in 1967 and is a 2004 inductee to the Sunnyside High School Alumni Hall of Fame. He attended the University of Arizona and earned a bachelor's degree in sociology.
Grijalva was an Arizona leader of the Raza Unida Party. According to Armando Navarro's history of the party, "Grijalva was so militant that he alienated some members of Tucson's Mexican-American community. After losing in his first bid for elective office, a 1972 run for a seat on the school board, he began to cultivate a less radical image."
In 1974, Grijalva was elected to the Tucson Unified School District board and served until 1986. Grijalva Elementary School in Tucson was named for him in 1987. From 1975 to 1986, Grijalva was the director of the El Pueblo Neighborhood Center, and in 1987 he was Assistant Dean for Hispanic Student Affairs at the University of Arizona. Grijalva was a member of the Pima County Board of Supervisors from 1989 to 2002, and served as chair from 2000 to 2002. He resigned as a supervisor in 2002 to run for Congress.
U.S. House of Representatives
Tenure
114th Congress (2015–17)
In 2015, Grijalva settled a complaint accusing him of drunkenness and a "hostile workplace environment" with a female staffer who had been at her job for three months. The $48,000 payment was made from House of Representatives funds.
116th Congress (2019–2021)
For his tenure as the chair of the House Natural Resources Committee in the 116th Congress, Grijalva earned an "A" grade from the nonpartisan Lugar Center's Congressional Oversight Hearing Index.
In 2019, Grijalva was the subject of an Ethics Committee probe relating to his alcoholism and creating a "hostile workplace". He has repeatedly come under fire for alcohol use, but has denied alcoholism.
117th Congress (2021–23)
Grijalva was at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, to certify the 2020 presidential electoral college votes when the Capitol was attacked by Donald Trump supporters. Moments after Grijalva finished speaking in support of certifying Arizona's votes, insurrectionists started banging on the doors of the House chambers. He called the attack "one of the darkest and most shameful days of our republic" and the perpetrators "domestic terrorists". Grijalva blamed President Donald Trump for inciting the attack and called for the 25th Amendment to be invoked to remove Trump from office. After the 25th Amendment was not invoked, Grijalva supported impeaching Trump a second time. He voted to impeach Trump again on January 13, 2021.
In February, Grijalva voted in support of the American Rescue Plan, which included a nationwide $15 federal minimum wage increase. The increase was removed from the bill by the Senate Parliamentarian. As a result, Grijalva joined a group of progressive Democrats in calling to overturn the Parliamentarian's ruling.
As of October 2021, Grijalva had voted in line with Joe Biden's stated position 100% of the time.
Committee assignments
For the 118th Congress:
Committee on Education and the Workforce
Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education
Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Development
Committee on Natural Resources (Ranking Member)
Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources
Caucus memberships
Grijalva is a member of several dozen caucuses. A full list is available at his website.
Congressional Progressive Caucus
Congressional Hispanic Caucus
LGBT Equality Caucus (vice chair)
Congressional Arts Caucus
Congressional NextGen 9-1-1 Caucus
Medicare for All Caucus
Blue Collar Caucus
House Pro-Choice Caucus
Political positions
Grijalva formerly co-chaired the Congressional Progressive Caucus with Mark Pocan, having been replaced by Pramila Jayapal after stepping down in order to chair the House Committee on Natural Resources. In 2008, he was among 12 members rated by National Journal as tied for most liberal overall. On the ideological map of all House members at GovTrack's website, Grijalva is ranked farthest to the left. Liberal and progressive activist groups routinely give him high marks for his voting record. Grijalva has received a 100% score from Americans for Democratic Action, Peace Action, the League of Conservation Voters, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, NARAL Pro-Choice America, Arab American Institute, and several other notable groups. At the start of the 114th Congress, Grijalva became the ranking member of the House Committee on Natural Resources.
Grijalva is an advocate of mining law reform and many other environmental causes. From his position on the House Committee on Natural Resources—where he has been the top Democrat on the Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands since 2007—he has led Democratic efforts to strengthen federal offshore oil drilling oversight since before the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill and introduced a successful bill to create a permanent National Landscape Conservation System at the Bureau of Land Management. He was a leading candidate for Secretary of the Interior when President Barack Obama was elected, but the job eventually went to Ken Salazar; according to The Washington Post, Obama made the decision in part because of Grijalva's stated preference for more environmental analysis before approving offshore drilling projects.
Grijalva has been a vocal opponent of Arizona's SB 1070 law, which mandates police checks of citizenship documentation for anyone subjected to a legitimate law enforcement stop, detention or arrest as long as the officer does not consider race, color or national origin during the stop, detention or arrest. Shortly after Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed the measure, Grijalva called on legal, political, activist and business groups not to hold their conventions or conferences in Arizona, a position he said quickly became misconstrued as a call for a general boycott of Arizona's economy. In response, the Arizona Republican Party handed out bumper stickers reading "Boycott Grijalva, Not Arizona". After a federal judge stopped implementation of most of SB 1070, Grijalva withdrew the boycott, saying that he had reacted to it "very personally". In an interview, he said, "to all of a sudden have a law that separates me from the whole I found very offensive and demeaning."
Grijalva criticized the 2010 deployment of 1,200 National Guard troops to the U.S.–Mexico border as "political symbolism" that he believed would not adequately address the issues of immigration and border security.
Grijalva often called for a withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and Iraq, and supports the wider implementation of the National Solidarity Program as a way to improve Afghans' economic and educational infrastructure. The group Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America gave him an "A" rating for the 2007–08 Congressional session.
Abortion
Grijalva has a pro-choice voting record and voted against the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. He was strongly critical of the Stupak-Pitts Amendment, which sought to place limits on taxpayer-funded abortions in the Affordable Health Care for America Act. Grijalva opposed the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade, calling it "about control" and "mostly men forcing women to carry a child against their will. It is about trapping women in our society in cycles of poverty, so that they cannot easily rise to challenge these men who fear their success."
Budget proposals
As co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Grijalva took a leading role in shaping CPC "alternative budgets"—budget bills offered by various groups and caucuses in Congress other than the official majority or minority party plan. In 2011 the CPC introduced what it called the People's Budget, which reached budget balance in 10 years according to an assessment by the Economic Policy Institute based on nonpartisan government data. The proposal was noted approvingly by some of the world's leading economists, including Jeffrey Sachs—who called it "a bolt of hope ... humane, responsible, and most of all sensible"—and Paul Krugman, who called it "genuinely courageous" for achieving budget balance "without dismantling the legacy of the New Deal".
In 2012, again with Grijalva as co-chair, the Progressive Caucus introduced the Budget for All, which is similar to the People's Budget and includes several new features, including a novel proposal to institute a small personal wealth tax above $10 million in net worth phased in over a period of five years. The proposal received 78 votes, all from Democrats, when the House considered it on March 29, 2012.
Grijalva was among the 46 Democrats who voted against final passage of the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 in the House.
Deepwater Horizon and oil rig safety
On February 24, 2010, Grijalva wrote a letter signed by 18 other representatives calling for an investigation of the BP Atlantis offshore drilling platform due to whistleblower allegations that it was operating without approved safety documents. He has called for Atlantis to be shut down. Since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on April 20, 2010, Grijalva has written letters to the Minerals Management Service and the Department of the Interior questioning current offshore drilling regulations and calling for stronger oversight of the oil industry.
Grijalva has gained prominence as an outspoken critic of what he calls lax federal oversight of the oil drilling industry, and in late 2010 launched an investigation of the White House's handling of the Horizon spill and its aftermath. That investigation revealed that scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency and elsewhere in the federal government had voiced concerns about drafts of an official government report on the cause and scope of the spill, but were overruled because the report was meant as a "communications document".
In 2010, Grijalva introduced H.R. 5355 to eliminate the cap on oil company liability for the cost of environmental cleanups of spills.
Education
Grijalva has sponsored numerous education bills, including the Success in the Middle Act and the Graduation for All Act. He has longstanding ties to the educational community from his time on the board of the Tucson Unified School District and his current position on the House Education and the Workforce Committee.
Environment
As a member and chair of the Pima County Board of Supervisors, Grijalva was widely regarded as a central figure behind the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan, an ambitious county program for planned land-use and biodiversity conservation. He consistently supported endangered species and wilderness conservation on the Board of Supervisors and has continued to do so in Congress, introducing a bill in 2009 to make permanent the National Landscape Conservation System within the Bureau of Land Management. In 2008, Grijalva released a report, The Bush Administration's Assaults on Our National Parks, Forests and Public Lands, that accused the Bush administration of mismanaging public land and reducing barriers to commercial access.
The Trump administration proposed changes to "the way it enforces the Endangered Species Act" in 2018. Among other things, the proposal would facilitate delisting endangered species and "streamline interagency consultations". A ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee at the time, Grijalva called the proposal "a favor to industry" and said the administration "doesn't seem to know any other way to handle the environment" than "as an obstacle to industry profits".
Foreign policy
In 2011, Grijalva and Representatives Barbara Lee, Mike Honda, and Lynn Woolsey criticized Obama for failing to seek congressional authorization for military intervention in Libya, and was one of the 70 Democrats to vote to defund the Libyan war. In 2013, he opposed intervening in Syria.
On April 25, 2018, 57 U.S. representatives, including Grijalva, released a condemnation of Holocaust distortion in Poland and Ukraine. They criticized Poland's new Holocaust law, which would criminalize accusing Poland of complicity in the Holocaust, and Ukraine's 2015 memory laws glorifying Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and its leaders, such as Roman Shukhevych.
In July 2019, Grijalva voted against a House resolution condemning the Global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement targeting Israel. The resolution passed 398–17.
In 2021, Grijalva was one of eight Democrats to vote against the funding of the Iron Dome in Israel.
Fossil fuel industry funding of climate change studies
On February 24, 2015, as the ranking Democratic member of the United States House Committee on Natural Resources, Grijalva sent letters to seven institutions employing scientists who disagree with most other climate scientists on manmade climate change. The letters requested information on any funding from fossil fuel companies as well as copies of all emails about the content of their congressional testimony. One of the recipients, University of Colorado Professor Roger Pielke Jr., responded that he had already testified to Grijalva's committee that he has received no funding from fossil fuel interests, and characterized the letter as part of a politically motivated "witch-hunt".
The heads of some mainstream scientific organizations criticized Grijalva's letters. Margaret Leinen, the president of the American Geophysical Union, posted on her AGU blog that in requiring information of only a few scientists, based only on their scientific views, Grivalja's action was contrary to academic freedom: "We view the singling out of any individual or group of scientists by any entity – governmental, corporate or other – based solely on their interpretations of scientific research as a threat to that freedom." The executive director of the American Meteorological Society wrote to Grijalva that his action "sends a chilling message to all academic researchers" and "impinges on the free pursuit of ideas that is central to the concept of academic freedom".
In response to criticism that requesting communications was counter to principles of academic freedom, Grijalva said he was willing to eliminate that part of the request.
Gun control
Grijalva supports increasing restrictions on the purchase and possession of guns and increasing enforcement of existing restrictions on gun purchase and possession. He was one of the 67 co-sponsors of the 2007 Assault Weapons Ban, HR 1022. Grijalva has an F rating from the NRA Political Victory Fund.
Health care
As co-chair of the Progressive Caucus, Grijalva was a prominent supporter of a public option throughout the debate over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The House-approved Affordable Health Care for America Act included a public option, but the Senate version did not, and it was ultimately not a part of the final package. Grijalva has largely been supportive of the ACA since its passage and argued the Supreme Court should not overturn it during a segment with Representative Peter Roskam, who opposed the law, on the PBS NewsHour on March 28, 2012.
Grijalva has a long history in community health activism as an early supporter of Tucson's El Rio Community Health Center. He supports single-payer health care, but voted for the ACA because he felt it was a major improvement over the status quo.
Immigration
Grijalva supports the DREAM Act and the Comprehensive Immigration Reform for America's Security and Prosperity Act (CIR ASAP) and has come to prominence because of his role in promoting immigration reform. He opposed the expansion of a border fence, citing cost effectiveness concerns and potential damage to sensitive wildlife habitats. The CIR ASAP bill includes his Border Security and Responsibility Act of 2009, which prioritizes remote cameras and other border monitoring techniques with a relatively slight environmental impact. The Immigrant Justice Advocacy Campaign gave him a 100% score for the first session of the 111th Congress. In previous years he voted against H.R. 4437 and the Secure Fence Act, and opposed Arizona Proposition 200 in 2004.
Grijalva has criticized armed civilian groups that patrol the Mexican border, accusing them of racism, and has reportedly used demeaning language to describe them. In return, some supporters of the armed patrols have called him "MEChA boy" in retaliation.
On July 26, 2019, Grijalva, whose district runs along the U.S.–Mexico border, called Trump's emergency declaration a "pathetic attempt to circumvent Congress".
Israel
Grijalva voted to support Israel following the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel.
Native Americans
Grijalva supports sovereignty and government-to-government relationships. In April 2010 he introduced the RESPECT Act, which mandates that federal agencies consult with Native tribes before taking a variety of major actions. The bill would codify a Clinton-era executive order that has never had the force of law.
SB 1070 and the boycott controversy
After the passage in April 2010 of Arizona's controversial SB 1070 law, which Grijalva saw as opening the door to racial profiling and granting traditionally federal immigration enforcement powers to local authorities, he suggested that civic, religious, labor, Latino, and other like-minded organizations refrain from using Arizona as a convention site until the law was repealed. His opposition to SB 1070 and his suggestion of a boycott of Arizona were widely viewed as the reason for multiple subsequent death threats against him and his staff, which led to several office closures in 2010.
When Judge Susan Bolton of the Arizona District Court enjoined major parts of the law in July 2010, Grijalva ended his call for economic sanctions. As he told the Arizona Daily Star, the largest paper in Tucson:
He subsequently said that his economic strategy was not as effective as he hoped in changing other state lawmakers' minds, and that he would focus on legal remedies in the future. The issue became a focal point in the 2010 election, in which Grijalva defeated Republican challenger Ruth McClung by less than 10,000 votes.
Presidential election objections
Concerned about allegations of voting irregularities purportedly leading to disenfranchisement, in 2004 Grijalva joined Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson and several other House Democrats in requesting that the United Nations observe and certify elections in the United States. After the general election, Grijalva was one of 31 representatives to vote not to count Ohio's electoral votes. President George W. Bush won Ohio by 118,457 votes. Without Ohio's electoral votes, the election would have been decided by the U.S. House of Representatives, with each state having one vote in accordance with the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Grijalva objected to North Carolina's electoral votes in the 2016 presidential election, which Donald Trump won by over 150,000 votes. Because no senator joined his objection, it was dismissed.
Giffords shooting
After the shooting of Gabby Giffords, Grijalva called it a consequence of the violent rhetoric that had been used by Tea Party members. He singled out Sarah Palin's rhetoric as "contributing to this toxic climate" and said she needed to monitor her words and actions.
Puerto Rico Statehood
In June 2023, Raul Grijalva traveled to Puerto Rico to discuss the prospects for statehood and energy issues in Puerto Rico. with Governor of Puerto Rico Pedro Pierluisi.
Political campaigns
After the 2000 United States census, Arizona gained two congressional districts. The 2nd district, which had long been represented by Mo Udall, was renumbered as the 7th district. Ed Pastor, a Phoenix Democrat who succeeded Udall in 1991, had his home drawn into the newly created 4th district and opted to run for election there, making the 7th district an open seat. Grijalva won a crowded seven-way Democratic primary, which was tantamount to election in this heavily Democratic, majority-Hispanic district. Before the 2010 election, he was reelected three times with no substantial Republican opposition. In 2008, he defeated Republican challenger Joseph Sweeney.
During the 2008 presidential primary campaign, Grijalva endorsed Obama for president, but Hillary Clinton won his district.
During the 2010 midterms, Grijalva faced his toughest reelection campaign yet, against Republican Ruth McClung. It was reported that although Grijalva had decades of experience and McClung had none, and although there were twice as many Democrats in the district as there were Republicans, the two candidates were neck-and-neck in the polls. The main reason was Grijalva's call for a boycott of Arizona in response to the state's new immigration law, SB 1070. Grijalva won, 50–44%, his smallest margin of victory since being elected, and the first close election in what is now the 7th since 1978, when Udall was held to 52% of the vote.
Grijalva's district was renumbered as the 3rd district after the 2010 census, and made somewhat more Democratic than its predecessor even though it lost some of its share of Tucson to the 2nd district (the reconfigured 8th). Co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Grijalva broke from many of his colleagues and announced his support for Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders on October 9, 2015, at a rally for Sanders in Tucson.
Electoral history
Personal life
Grijalva and his wife, Ramona, have three daughters, including Tucson Unified School District board member Adelita Grijalva, who was reelected to the post in 2018. Grijalva identifies as Catholic. On August 1, 2020, he tested positive for COVID-19.
Grijalva is a hiker and a fan of the University of Arizona's basketball team.
See also
List of Hispanic and Latino Americans in the United States Congress
References
Further reading
Videos of Grijalva discussing various issues Tucson Citizen, March 22, 2006
A Report on the Bush Administration Assaults On Our National Parks, Forests and Public Lands, October 22, 2008
Rep. Raul Grijalva, Vows to Bring Public Option to House Floor – video report by Democracy Now!, October 30, 2009
Rep. Raul Grijalva: New Deployment of National Guard to US–Mexico Border Is Election-Year "Political Symbolism", May 28, 2010
External links
Congressman Raul Grijalva official U.S. House website
Grijalva for Congress campaign website
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21st-century American politicians
American Roman Catholics
American politicians of Mexican descent
Democratic Party members of the United States House of Representatives from Arizona
Hispanic and Latino American members of the United States Congress
Catholics from Arizona
Living people
Politicians from Tucson, Arizona
University of Arizona alumni
University of Arizona faculty
American gun control activists
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John%20Boozman
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John Boozman
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John Nichols Boozman ( ; born December 10, 1950) is an American politician and former optometrist serving as the senior United States senator from Arkansas, a seat he has held since 2011. A member of the Republican Party, he was the U.S. representative for from 2001 to 2011. He is the dean of Arkansas's congressional delegation.
Boozman was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, where his father was stationed with the U.S. Air Force, but the family eventually returned to Fort Smith, Arkansas, where he was raised. He is the brother of the late state senator Fay Boozman. He attended the University of Arkansas, where he played football for the Arkansas Razorbacks, and later graduated from the Southern College of Optometry. He co-founded a private optometry clinic in 1977 and worked as a volunteer optometrist for low-income families. He won a special election in 2001 to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he served as assistant majority whip and sat on the Republican Policy Committee. He was an advocate for drug policy issues and chaired the Veterans' Affairs Economic Opportunity Subcommittee, where he led the passage of bills expanding services for unemployed veterans.
Boozman was elected to the United States Senate in 2010, defeating Democratic incumbent Blanche Lincoln by a 21-point margin and becoming the first Republican to be elected to the seat since Reconstruction. He took office in January 2011 and is the ranking Republican on the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Subcommittee on Commodities, Risk Management, and Trade and the Senate Appropriations Committee Subcommittee on Military Construction and Veterans Affairs and Related Agencies. He is also a senior member of the United States Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs. Boozman became the senior senator from Arkansas in 2015 when Democratic incumbent Mark Pryor left the Senate after his defeat by Tom Cotton. Boozman was reelected in 2016 and 2022.
Early life, education and career
Boozman was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, the son of Marie E. ( Nichols) and Fay Winford Boozman, Jr. (1923–1991). Boozman's father, whose last address was in Rogers, Arkansas, was a Master Sergeant in the United States Air Force. His elder brother, Fay Boozman (1946–2005), was also a politician. After graduating from Northside High School in Fort Smith, Arkansas, Boozman played football for the Arkansas Razorbacks at the University of Arkansas, which he attended from 1969 to 1973, while completing his pre-optometry requirements. He did not graduate from the University of Arkansas. He graduated from the Southern College of Optometry in 1977 and entered private practice that same year as co-founder of Boozman-Hof Regional Eye Clinic in Rogers, which has become a major provider of eye care to Northwest Arkansas. He established the low vision program at the Arkansas School for the Blind in Little Rock and worked as a volunteer optometrist at an area clinic that provides medical services to low-income families.
Before his election to Congress, Boozman served two terms on the Rogers Public School Board, which governs one of Arkansas's largest school districts.
U.S. House of Representatives
Elections
Boozman was elected to Congress in a special election after his predecessor, Asa Hutchinson, resigned to become the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration. Boozman was unopposed in 2002, defeated Democratic State Representative Jan Judy 59%-38% in 2004, and defeated Democratic nominee Woodrow Anderson III in 2006. The Democrats did not field a candidate against him in 2008, and he won with over 78% of the vote against token opposition from a Green Party candidate.
Tenure
In October 2002, Boozman voted in favor of the Iraq Resolution that led to the Iraq War. In 2011, after 4,500 Americans and hundreds of thousands of civilians had died, he said: "Right now, Iraq has a stable police force, a stable military. And hopefully that will continue, and they’ll be successful in having a form of democracy that is not a safe haven for terrorism in the future.”
Starting during the 108th Congress, Boozman served as an Assistant Whip, making him responsible for helping House Republican Whips Roy Blunt and Eric Cantor secure the votes for or against major legislation.
Boozman was also named to the Speaker's Task Force for a Drug-Free America in 2003. The task force advised House Speaker Dennis Hastert on major drug policy issues and helped author legislation regarding recreational drugs, including anti-methamphetamine legislation. Boozman was the lead author of the Stop Marketing Illegal Drugs to Minors Act, a bill that would increase penalties on criminals who design and market drugs such as candy-flavored meth for kids. He was praised by the National Association of Drug Court Professionals, earning the organization's Congressional Leadership Award in 2009. In 2006, Congress passed a Boozman-authored provision promoting an expanded role for drug courts in efforts to reduce drug abuse and recidivism.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, Boozman endorsed former Governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee for president.
In the 109th Congress, Boozman chaired the Veterans Affairs Economic Opportunity Subcommittee, which focuses on ensuring veterans have a smooth transition to civilian life. He has used his seat on the Veterans Affairs Committee to pass legislation honoring the service and sacrifice of United States military veterans and increasing benefits to them and their families. In the 111th Congress, Boozman introduced and the House of Representatives passed the Veterans Retraining Act of 2009, which provides resources and training opportunities for unemployed veterans. The House also passed several other Boozman-authored bills, including one that creates grants to help disabled veterans adapt their homes and vehicles to meet their needs.
In May 2004, Boozman was appointed to the House Policy Committee, a committee of Republicans who vet issues and formulate legislation to address them.
Boozman was also a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization Parliamentary Assembly (NATO PA), an inter-parliamentary organization of legislators from the 19 member countries of NATO and 20 associate countries. He was also appointed vice-chairman of the British American Parliamentary Group, a group of American and British lawmakers who meet to discuss issues of concern and fortify the already strong alliance between the two nations.
Boozman was a member of numerous House caucuses, including the Congressional Caucus to Fight and Control Methamphetamine, the National Guard and Reserve Components Caucus, the Congressional Rural Caucus and the Congressional Sportsman's Caucus. He was also one of the founding members of the Congressional I-49 Caucus to promote completion of Interstate 49, and chaired the Congressional Caucus on the Ivory Coast and West Africa Caucus.
Congress.org's power rankings rated Boozman's power rating at 7.31, making him the 386th most powerful member out of 435.
According to the April 28, 2007, Washington Post, Boozman was told by officials in the White House about its intention to fire Bud Cummins, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas, and replace him with Tim Griffin, an aide to Karl Rove. According to the Post, none of the Democrats in Arkansas' congressional delegation were told that Cummins was to be one of eight U.S. Attorneys to be fired. Although Boozman did not represent any counties in the Eastern District, he was informed because he was the only Republican in the state's congressional delegation.
Boozman told the Post and the Associated Press that White House officials had promised him that Griffin would be subject to Senate confirmation. Instead, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales appointed Griffin as interim U.S. Attorney, using a provision of the Patriot Act that has since been repealed due to the controversy. Boozman also said that he did not think Cummins should have been fired because he was "very well respected and has served the president well."
U.S. Senate
Elections
2010
In 2010, Boozman did not run for reelection to the House and instead ran for the Senate seat held by incumbent two-term Democrat Blanche Lincoln, who had defeated Boozman's brother, Fay, in her first run for the seat in 1998. He won the May 2010 Republican primary and defeated Lincoln in the general election with nearly 58% of the vote.
2016
Boozman won a second term in 2016, defeating former U.S. Attorney Conner Eldridge with 59.8% of the vote. He became the first Republican to be popularly elected to a second term in the Senate from Arkansas.
2022
On March 6, 2021, Boozman announced he would seek a third term as Senator. He won his third term in 2022, defeating Democrat Natalie James with 65.8% of the vote.
Term
Boozman began his term in the Senate in January 2011.
Boozman and Tom Cotton initially objected to the certification of the 2021 United States Electoral College vote count. After the 2021 United States Capitol attack, they voted to support it. Boozman said: "The events that transpired in Washington were not only shocking and unlawful, but represent a dark moment in our country's history that we must reckon with today and in the days to come."
Committee assignments
Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe
Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry (Ranking Member)
Subcommittee on Commodities, Risk Management, and Trade
Subcommittee on Conservation, Forestry, and Natural Resources
Subcommittee on Food and Nutrition, Specialty Crops, Organics, and Research
Subcommittee on Livestock, Dairy, Poultry, Local Food Systems, and Food Safety and Security
Subcommittee on Rural Development and Energy
Committee on Appropriations
Subcommittee on Defense
Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government
Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies
Subcommittee on Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, and Related Agencies (Ranking)
Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs
Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies
Committee on Environment and Public Works
Subcommittee on Chemical Safety, Waste Management, Environmental Justice, and Regulatory Oversight
Subcommittee on Fisheries, Water, and Wildlife
Subcommittee on Transportation and Infrastructure
Committee on Veterans' Affairs
Caucus memberships
Air Force Caucus (Co-Chair)
Senate Broadband Caucus (Co-Chair)
Congressional French Caucus (Co-Chair)
Paper and Packaging Caucus (Co-Chair)
Senate Recycling Caucus (Co-Chair)
4-H Caucus
Border Security and Enforcement First Caucus
International Conservation Caucus
National Guard Caucus
National Hunger Caucus (Co-Chair)
Republican Doctors Caucus
Sportsmen's Caucus
Afterschool Caucuses
Senate Republican Conference
Political positions and votes
Boozman voted for legislation requiring the Food and Drug Administration to improve safety by regulating non-corrective colored contact lenses as medical devices. President Bush signed this legislation into law in 2005.
In the 111th Congress, Boozman introduced legislation (H.R. 2230) to provide tax credits for teachers and principals who work in challenging, low-income schools. He has also introduced legislation to reform the No Child Left Behind Act. One bill (H.R. 2229) would give states latitude to adopt alternate and modified standards for children with disabilities.
Other Boozman bills include legislation to provide a tax credit for volunteer firefighters, a bill to require that parents be notified when a minor seeks an abortion, and a bill to create alternatives to traditional foreign aid to poor countries in sub-Saharan Africa.
The Zionist Organization of America has praised Boozman for his opposition to federal aid to Hamas.
Boozman received an 85.48% Lifetime Score from the American Conservative Union.
Abortion
Boozman opposes abortion. After Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization in June 2022, he wrote: "The Supreme Court’s decision to affirm there is no constitutional right to indiscriminately sacrifice the lives of children in their mothers' wombs is the culmination of decades of work to correct the tragic, deadly lie that unborn babies are expendable and undeserving of protection."
Arkansas history
Boozman introduced legislation in the 110th Congress calling for a study of the historic Butterfield Overland Mail Trail for the potential addition to the National Trails System. This legislation passed as part of an omnibus bill (P.L. 111-11), and was signed by Obama on March 30, 2009.
In addition to preserving the historical significance of the Butterfield Trail, Boozman supported an effort to secure the home of the U.S. Marshals Museum in Fort Smith; in January 2007, it was announced that Fort Smith would be the museum's permanent home. In the 111th Congress, Boozman introduced legislation to recognize the 225th Anniversary of the U.S. Marshals Service with a commemorative coin to be minted in 2014.
Boozman has penned three bills, each enacted into law, to name certain U.S. Post Offices in Arkansas, including naming The Harrison Post Office after former Arkansas Congressman John Paul Hammerschmidt.
Health care reform
Boozman voted against the Affordable Care Act on November 7, 2009, later writing: "I am for health care reform, unfortunately, this bill does more harm than good."
Donald Trump
Boozman supported Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. He voted with Trump's stated position 91.5% of the time, and voted to acquit Trump in both of his impeachment trials.
Gun violence and firearm laws
Boozman has an A rating from the NRA Political Victory Fund for his support of gun rights. In May 2011, he voted to table an amendment that prohibited usage of the Patriot Act to access firearm records. In April 2013, in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, Boozman was one of 46 senators to vote against a bill that would have extended background checks to all firearm transfers. He voted with 40 Republicans and five Democrats to stop the bill.
Boozman voted against the proposed Feinstein Amendment, in 2016, that sought to ban the sale of firearms to known and/or suspected terrorists, claiming that it would deprive Americans of due process.
Employment discrimination
In November 2013, Boozman was one of 32 senators (all Republican) to vote against the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, a bill prohibiting discrimination in organizations of 15 or more employees based on sexual orientation or gender identity.
In April 2014, Boozman voted against a cloture motion for the Paycheck Fairness Act, a bill that establishes additional penalties for violations of equal pay requirements in the Fair Labor Standards Act, including a prohibition on an employer from paying a wage rate to employees of a particular sex that is lower than the rate paid to employees of the opposite sex for equal work unless such payment is made due to certain factors including but not limited to "a bona fide factor other than sex". Some groups characterized the legislation as redundant, citing the 1963 Equal Pay Act and Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act as existing protections against wage discrimination based on gender or race. The Senate Republican Conference called it "the latest ploy in the Democrats' election-year playbook".
Civil rights
In September 2004, Boozman voted for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. The amendment did not pass.
In July 2006, Boozman co-introduced and voted for a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between one man and one woman. The amendment did not pass.
In April 2009, Boozman voted against the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which sought to define crimes committed against a person because of their sexual orientation or gender identity as hate crimes: "I opposed this legislation because it creates a new federal offense for so-called hate crimes, and adds a special class crimes potentially motivated by the victims sexual orientation, 'gender identity', or the perceived thoughts of the alleged criminal." The act passed the House.
In December 2010, Boozman voted against repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell, claiming that the "current policy has worked well" and that "we haven't had any significant problems with it." The vote passed by a margin of 250-175, and Don't Ask, Don't Tell was repealed.
In December 2012, Boozman voted against ratifying the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, an international human rights treaty of the United Nations intended to protect the rights and dignity of persons with disabilities. The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities sought to "promote, protect and ensure the full and equal enjoyment of all human rights and fundamental freedoms by all persons with disabilities, and to promote respect for their inherent dignity," but the convention only reached 61 of the 66 votes required for passage.
In February 2013, Boozman voted against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act. The bill passed by a 78–22 margin. He cited concerns "about the constitutionality of allowing tribal courts jurisdiction over non-Native Americans who are accused of committing an act of domestic violence on tribal lands or against Native Americans” as part of his opposition to the measure.
Veteran employment
In September 2012, Boozman voted to block advancement of the Veterans Job Corps Act of 2012, even though he partially authored the bill. The bill, which would have established a $1 billion Veterans Jobs Corps at a time when the unemployment rate for post-9/11 veterans was 10.9%, fell two votes shy (58–40) of the 60 needed for passage. The legislation underwent changes related to how it would offset spending, which led Boozman to vote against it.
Environment
In 2017, Boozman was one of 22 senators to sign a letter to President Donald Trump urging him to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement. According to OpenSecrets, Boozman has received nearly $150,000 from oil, gas and coal interests since 2012. He claimed that EPA regulations are creating a dirtier climate abroad and providing no gain to the United States.
Boozman wrote: "I commend President Trump for taking the appropriate steps to make a clean exit from it so we can continue to pursue an 'all-of-the-above' approach to meeting our energy needs free of the significant litigation risk created by the agreement." He added: "It is important to stress that a clean exit from the Paris climate accord will not take away the United States' seat at the table in future discussions, nor will it detract from our efforts to pursue renewable energy solutions."
Foreign policy
In March 2017, Boozman co-sponsored the Israel Anti-Boycott Act (s. 720), which made it a federal crime for Americans to encourage or participate in boycotts against Israel and Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories if protesting actions by the Israeli government.
In January 2019, Boozman was one of eleven Republican senators to vote to advance legislation intended to block Trump's intent to lift sanctions against three Russian companies.
January 6 commission
On May 28, 2021, Boozman voted against creating a January 6 commission to investigate the 2021 United States Capitol attack.
Electoral history
Personal life
Boozman lives in Rogers with his wife, Cathy Marley Boozman. They have three daughters. He has raised Polled Hereford cattle that were competitive in the show ring, and in bull testing at Oklahoma State University. The Boozman family is active in the 4-H program.
On April 22, 2014, Boozman underwent emergency heart surgery. In 2017, he underwent a successful followup procedure that was recommended by doctors who had been monitoring his aorta since a tear in it was surgically repaired in 2014.
John's ophthalmologist brother, Fay Winford Boozman III, co-founded the Boozman Regional Eye Clinic (now named BoozmanHof Regional Eye Clinic) with John after receiving his ophthalmology degree. Fay was elected to the Arkansas Senate in 1994 as a Republican and was nominated for the United States Senate in Arkansas in the 1998 election, losing to Democratic Congresswoman Blanche Lincoln 55% to 42%. Despite his defeat, Fay was nominated to be director of the Arkansas Health Department in 1999. Fay died in an accident on his farm in 2005, aged 58.
As of 2017, according to OpenSecrets.org, Boozman's net worth was more than $2.3 million.
References
External links
Senator John Boozman official U.S. Senate website
John Boozman for Senate
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1950 births
21st-century American politicians
American optometrists
Arkansas Razorbacks football players
Baptists from Arkansas
Living people
Politicians from Fort Smith, Arkansas
Politicians from Shreveport, Louisiana
Ranchers from Arkansas
Republican Party United States senators from Arkansas
School board members in Arkansas
Southern Baptists
Baptists from Louisiana
Republican Party members of the United States House of Representatives from Arkansas
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike%20Ross%20%28politician%29
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Mike Ross (politician)
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Michael Avery Ross (born August 2, 1961) is an American businessman and politician. A member of the Democratic Party, he served as the U.S. representative for from 2001 to 2013 and was his party's nominee for governor of Arkansas in 2014. He is currently the last Democrat to have represented Arkansas in the House of Representatives. He was also a member of the Arkansas Senate from 1991 to 2001, a member of the Nevada County Quorum Court from 1983 to 1985, and a small business owner.
On July 25, 2011, Ross announced that he would not seek reelection to the House in 2012. He instead became the Democratic nominee for governor of Arkansas in the general election scheduled for November 4, 2014. He faced the Republican nominee, former U.S. Representative Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas's 3rd congressional district, who had previously lost the 2006 gubernatorial election to Democrat Mike Beebe. Ross lost to Hutchinson, ending his undefeated electoral streak.
Ross is an officer and senior vice president at Little Rock-based Southwest Power Pool, which manages the electric grid and operates the wholesale electric market for all or parts of 14 states.
Early life, education, and career
Ross was born in Texarkana, Arkansas. A fifth-generation Arkansan, he lived for many years in Prescott until relocating in 2013 to the capital city of Little Rock. The grandson of farmers and a nurse and the son of two public school educators, he graduated from high school in Hope, Arkansas and earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, working his way through college as a local radio announcer.
Along with his wife Holly (divorced 2021), who is a pharmacist, they owned and operated a pharmacy and home medical equipment business in his hometown of Prescott, from 1993 until they sold it in 2007.
By the age of 20, Ross was driving and staffing then former governor Bill Clinton as he successfully waged his "come back" campaign for a second term as Governor of Arkansas. During the 1980s, Ross was also vice president for colleges for the Young Democrats of Arkansas and served for many years on the Democratic Party of Arkansas's state committee and its executive committee.
Ross previously served on the Nevada County Quorum Court from 1983 to 1985 and as chief of staff to then-lieutenant governor Winston Bryant from 1985 to 1989.
Ross was a member of the Arkansas State Senate for ten years (1991–2001), before being elected to the U.S. House of Representatives for Arkansas's 4th congressional district in 2000. Ross left Congress on January 3, 2013, after choosing not to seek a seventh term and after a brief stint in the private sector as an officer and senior vice president at the Little Rock-based non-profit Southwest Power Pool, he announced his candidacy for Governor of Arkansas on April 17, 2013. After an unsuccessful bid for governor, he returned to Southwest Power Pool, a regional transmission organization that manages the electric grid and operates the wholesale electric market for all or part of 14 states, where he currently serves as an officer and senior Vice President.
Arkansas State Senate
In 1990, Ross was elected to the Arkansas State Senate becoming the legislature's youngest member at that time, where he served as chair of the Senate Children and Youth Committee. During his tenure, Ross worked alongside future governor Mike Beebe to help pass the Arkansas Academic Challenge scholarship program.
Ross served in the state senate ten years, until his election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000.
U.S. House of Representatives
Committee assignments
Committee on Energy and Commerce
Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade
Subcommittee on Health
Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations
NATO Parliamentary Assembly
Caucus leadership and membership
Blue Dog Coalition (former co-chair)
Congressional Delta Caucus (former co-chair)
Congressional Sportsmen's Caucus (former co-chair)
Mississippi Valley Flood Control Association (former president)
Interstate 49 Caucus (former co-chair)
Interstate 69 Caucus (former co-chair)
Congressional Timber Caucus (former co-chair)
Congressional Cement Caucus (former co-chair)
Congressional Community Pharmacy Caucus (former co-chair)
Congressional Rice Caucus
Congressional Nursing Caucus
International Conservation Caucus
Congressional Arts Caucus
Congressional Humanities Caucus
Congressional MS Caucus
Congressional Rural Caucus
Congressional Fire Services Caucus
Congressional Waterways Caucus
Friends of Job Corps Caucus
Congressional Historic Preservation Caucus
Ross considered running for the position of Democratic Caucus Vice Chairman for the 110th Congress; however, he deferred to incumbent John Larson after Rahm Emanuel chose to run for caucus chair, which was the position for which Larson had been running.
Political positions
Health care
Ross has consistently voted against the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, more commonly known as Obamacare. He was one of three Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives to vote to repeal Obamacare and continued to vote to repeal the law throughout his tenure in Congress.
In a statement after his vote in January 2011, Mike Ross said: "I have said from the beginning that I believe we absolutely need health care reform, but we need commonsense health care reform that reflects Arkansas values. This law was more than 2,000 pages, cut Medicare by half a trillion dollars, placed huge unfunded mandates on our states and authorized the IRS to fine people who can't afford to buy health insurance. An overwhelming majority of my constituents continue to oppose this health care reform law and I believe we should repeal it, start over and listen to the majority of the American people—not the special interests and party leaders in Washington."
Ross supports Arkansas's bipartisan Medicaid expansion known as the "private option" – the state's plan to use federal Medicaid money to pay for private insurance for people earning up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level. Ross said that "although he voted against the Affordable Care Act, he supports the private option, which he called an 'Arkansas-specific, bipartisan and market-based solution' that helps working families. Arkansas' private option is a great example of what we can accomplish when we listen to one another and work together in a bipartisan way, and, as governor, I will support the law and its continued funding."
The Blue Dogs and health care
On June 19, 2009, Ross made clear that he and a group of other fiscally conservative, moderate Democrats, known as the Blue Dog Coalition, were increasingly unhappy with the direction that health-care legislation was taking in the House. They claimed the health care reform bill was being written behind closed doors without their input and that the proposals being consider fall short in reducing costs and increasing efficiency, outlining only a fraction of what will be required to achieve a product that does not add to the deficit.
Ross was thrust into the national spotlight on July 21 when he and a group of seven Blue Dog Democrats on Energy & Commerce bucked their party's leaders and brought the committee mark up process of H.R. 3200, America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009, to a halt. (This piece of legislation would eventually die and never receive a vote on the House floor. H.R. 3962, Affordable Health Care for America Act, is the House health care reform bill that would eventually be considered by the House of Representatives, and Ross voted against that bill.) House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman postponed meeting publicly to discuss the health-care legislation to negotiate with the Blue Dogs, meeting privately with Ross and other members of the so-called Blue Dog Coalition, conservative Democrats who sit on the committee and could join Republicans and vote down a bill they don't like since the panel has 36 Democrats and 23 Republicans.
After days of back-to-back meetings and intense negotiations into the night, four of the seven Blue Dog Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, led by Ross, said they resolved their differences with Chairman Henry Waxman of California and were able to force House leadership to agree on several provisions, namely that the full House would not vote on the legislation until at least September so lawmakers would have time to read the bill and listen to constituents.
Other concessions won by Blue Dogs, which drew immediate opposition from liberals in the chamber, would shave about 10 percent from the health care overhaul's $1 trillion, 10-year price tag, in part by limiting subsidies to people who are not insured. The exemption for small businesses would be doubled so that only businesses with payrolls greater than $500,000 a year would be required to offer insurance or pay a tax equivalent to 8 percent of their payroll.
Because many Blue Dogs, especially Ross, had serious concerns about the bill's potential harmful effects on rural doctors and rural hospitals, the group forced House leadership to accept that the government would negotiate rates with health care providers instead of using Medicare rates in any so-called public option.
However, some of the concessions to Ross set off a revolt among members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, who said they feared that the public insurance plan was being weakened. "We do not support this," said Representative Lynn Woolsey, Democrat of California, co-chairwoman of the progressive caucus. "It's a nonstarter."
After Congress' August recess, Ross announced that he could not support a bill with a Public Option. In a letter to constituents, he claimed that "An overwhelming number of you oppose a government-run health insurance option, and it is your feedback that has led me to oppose the public option as well." However, a Research 2000 poll, commissioned by the left-leaning group Daily Kos, found that a majority of his district actually supported a Public Option. While a poll from the University of Arkansas only found support for the public option at 39 percent. Ross ultimately voted against the health care reform bill that passed the House on November 7, 2009. In January 2011, Ross was one of three Democrats to vote with the unified Republican caucus for the repeal of the recent health care reform law.
Other issues
Ross co-sponsored and voted for the Federal Reserve Transparency Act to audit the Federal Reserve System.
Ross is against gun control and is one of the few Democratic members of Congress to consistently earn an A+ rating from the NRA Political Victory Fund.
Throughout his time in the U.S. House of Representatives, Ross was consistently ranked as one of the most independent and moderate members of Congress by National Journal. When Ross left Congress in 2013, he was ranked as the sixth most conservative Democrat in the entire U.S. House of Representatives.
Political campaigns
Ross won a narrow victory against incumbent Republican Jay Dickey in 2000 by portraying himself as a moderate, like the political tendencies of his district. In contrast, Dickey was seen as controversial because of his comments on stem cell research and homosexuality. Additionally, he had voted to impeach Bill Clinton, which was a highly unpopular move in Clinton's home district. Clinton, who had won the district by wide margins in both of his presidential bids, campaigned on behalf of Ross. Ross was the only Democratic House challenger outside of California to defeat a Republican incumbent in 2000.
Ross easily defeated Dickey in a 2002 rematch, then ran unopposed in 2004. He picked up an easy victory in the 2006 election, defeating the similarly named Republican, real estate executive Joe Ross, 75 percent–25 percent.
In terms of a possible ballot initiative in Arkansas to allow the use of doctor-prescribed medical marijuana, Ross' campaign said "over the next several months, many issues will try to get on the 2014 ballot, and, like every other Arkansan, Mike Ross will carefully review each measure once it's certified and placed on the ballot."
2008
Ross had no Republican opponent but did face Hot Springs lawyer and Green Party candidate Joshua Drake, whom he beat with a decisive 87% of the vote.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, like most Arkansas Democrats, Ross endorsed former U.S. Senator and former First Lady of the United States Hillary Clinton (D-New York) for president.
2010
Winning 58% of the vote, Ross handily defeated Republican nominee Beth Anne Rankin (40%) and Green Party nominee Josh Drake (2%), despite that year's Republican wave. Ross was the only U.S. House member from Arkansas who sought reelection in 2010, as Democrats Robert Marion Berry and Vic Snyder retired, while Republican John Boozman ran successfully for the U.S. Senate. Ross became the only Democrat in Arkansas' House Delegation, as all three open seats were won by Republicans.
2014 gubernatorial campaign
On July 25, 2011, Ross announced that he would retire from Congress at the end of 2012. As for possibly running for Governor of Arkansas in 2014, he said: "Whether I run for Governor in 2014 is a decision I have not yet made and won't make until sometime after my term in this Congress ends. But I do know if I was re-elected to the U.S. Congress next year, my term in the Congress would overlap with the Governor's race. I believe it would be impossible to successfully run for Governor here at home, while effectively carrying out my congressional duties in Washington."
On May 14, 2012, Ross announced that he would not run for governor in 2014. Instead, he became senior vice president for government affairs and public relations at the Little Rock-based, nonprofit Southwest Power Pool.
However, Ross resigned his position as an officer and senior vice president with Southwest Power Pool on April 2, 2013, to "pursue another opportunity in public service." Ross said he received numerous calls and e-mails from all over the state to reconsider his decision not to run for governor and on April 17, 2013, Ross formally announced his campaign for governor in his hometown of Prescott.
On April 29, 2013, Ross tweeted that he had raised more than half a million dollars in the first ten days of the campaign.
During his campaign for governor, Ross made access to quality pre-kindergarten education a centerpiece of his campaign, introducing a plan to make pre-kindergarten accessible to every 4-year-old in Arkansas by 2025.
Ross also made reducing domestic violence and child abuse priorities in his crime reduction plan, which included increased support for shelters, more investigative money for child abuse and more training of police officers in coping with domestic situations. One key initiative in Ross' plan would have changed the way police respond to domestic violence calls. Under Ross's plan, Arkansas police would have been trained to screen victims for risk level by asking a series of research-based questions. If the victim was determined to be at high risk, police would have been required to inform her about the danger she is in, encourage her to seek help and connect her with key resources. Ross' plan also included the creation of a confidential address program to help survivors of sexual assault, rape, stalking or domestic violence keep their location secret from abusers; changing the law so it's easier for domestic violence survivors to terminate a housing lease without penalty; and directing the state to publish a comprehensive report on domestic violence every two years.
Ross also proposed a major overhaul of the state's personal income tax structure and said the plan would have to be phased in over time as allowed by the state's finances. The total price tag of the restructuring would cost an estimated $574.5 million, according to the Arkansas Department of Finance and Administration. Ross said his tax cut plan, when fully implemented, would cut income taxes by as much as $465 for incomes at $30,000; $665 at $40,000; $880 at $50,000; and, $1,148 at $75,000 and up. He proposed mimicking Gov. Mike Beebe's phase-out of the sales tax on groceries as his blueprint for restructuring the tax code. Ross said, "I want to modernize our income tax code in a way that means lower, fairer taxes for working families and small businesses in Arkansas, and I want to do so in a fiscally responsible way that maintains our balanced budget and protects vital state services like education, Medicaid and public safety," Ross said. "Just like Governor Beebe did with the sales tax on groceries, I will also gradually phase in my tax cut plan as the state can afford to do so." The crux of Ross' plan would be to retroactively index Arkansas income tax brackets taking a 1997 state law and applying it to the 1971 realignment of the tax code. Act 328 of 1997 tied state income tax brackets to inflation on a forward-going basis.
Ross also announced a plan to create a "senior bill of rights," which would result in services for seniors centered on seven policy areas, including healthcare, food security and more simple access to information about government programs.
Electoral history
U.S. House of Representatives
Personal life
Mike was married to the former Holly Hempen of Texarkana, Texas in 1983. They had two children. They were divorced in 2021. He married Krystal H. Thrailkill on August 6, 2022. He is a member of Pulaski Heights United Methodist Church in Little Rock, Arkansas where he has resided since 2012.
References
External links
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1961 births
21st-century American politicians
American anti-war activists
Anti-corporate activists
Democratic Party Arkansas state senators
Businesspeople from Little Rock, Arkansas
Businesspeople in the pharmaceutical industry
Democratic Party members of the United States House of Representatives from Arkansas
Living people
Monetary reformers
People from Hope, Arkansas
Politicians from Little Rock, Arkansas
People from Prescott, Arkansas
People from Texarkana, Arkansas
University of Arkansas at Little Rock alumni
20th-century Methodists
21st-century Methodists
American United Methodists
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venustiano%20Carranza%2C%20Mexico%20City
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Venustiano Carranza, Mexico City
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Venustiano Carranza is a borough (demarcación territorial) in Mexico City, Mexico. Venustiano Carranza extends from the far eastern portion of the historic center of Mexico City eastward to the Peñón de los Baños and the border dividing the then Federal District from the State of Mexico. Historically, most of the territory was under Lake Texcoco, but over the colonial period into the 20th century, the lake dried up and today the area is completely urbanized. The borough is home to three of Mexico City's major traditional markets, including La Merced, the National Archives of Mexico, the Palacio Legislativo de San Lázaro, the TAPO intercity bus terminal and the Mexico City Airport.
Geography and environment
The borough is located in the center-east of Mexico City. It borders Gustavo A. Madero, Cuauhtémoc and Iztacalco with the State of Mexico to the east. The territory measures which is 2.24% of the total of Mexico City. The borough has 2,290 blocks and eighty officially designated neighborhoods.
It has an average altitude of above sea level with most of the surface flat. The territory is mostly the bed of the former Lake Texcoco with soils of compressed clay over sand, with the exception of the Peñón de los Baños at above sea level, made of basalt . Because it is mostly former lakebed, flooding (especially during the rainy season from June to October) and hailstorms in winter, are not uncommon. Flooding is often caused or exacerbated by the deteriorated drainage system. Aside from the one elevation, the far west of the borough corresponds to the far east of the former Tenochtitlan island. For this reason, about one quarter of the historic center of Mexico City belongs to the borough. It has a semi dry, temperate climate with an average annual temperature of and an average rainfall of .
In the parks and other green spaces of the borough, trees such as ash, white cedar, cypress, fig and Indian laurel, various scrubs and grasses can be found. Wildlife is limited to birds, rodents, lizards and insects. In 2011, reforestation efforts took place in four areas of the borough, planting 15,000 trees.
Neighborhoods
One of the notable neighborhoods of the borough is Magdalena Mixhuca . The community was a small island in Lake Texcoco in the pre Hispanic period and eventually became physically connected to the surrounding areas as the lake dried up. However, the area is still marked by the existence of small one-story houses with look very similar often painted some shade of orange, making it look like a small town. The kiosk in the community center is also painted the same color. Next to the plaza it is on is the church of Santa María Magdalena Mixhuca with an image of Mary Magdalene inside. The name Mixhuca comes from Nahuatl and means place of childbirth. The area is dedicated to Mary Magdalene because the first-born daughter of Moctezuma II requested such from Hernán Cortés .
Other notable neighborhoods include Colonia Balbuena, named after poet Bernardo de Balbuena, La Candelaria de los Patos, which gets its name from the large flocks of ducks that used to live here when the area was still lake, El Parque, Jamaica, Zaragoza, Romero Rubio and Gómez Fárias.
Landmarks
The borough is home to forty two traditional markets, with over 14,000 individual vendors. This includes three of Mexico City's large traditional markets, La Merced Market, Mercado de Sonora and Mercado Jamaica . La Merced is historically and culturally part of the historic center of Mexico City and is the largest retail food market in the city. The main building is 400 meters long with 3,205 stands mostly selling produce and groceries, meats and fish. There is a smaller section devoted to baskets, rope and handcrafts with another building selling leather, storage containers, ornamental plants and prepared food. This market is located in an area which has been a major market and receiving area since the colonial period. The entire neighborhood was filled in informal stands until the first building was constructed in 1860. Until the mid 20th century, La Merced was the main wholesale market, but this function was moved to the new Central de Abastos market in Iztapalapa. Mercado Jamaica is located in the neighborhood of the same name, next to the metro station named after it. It is known for the sale flowers and ornamental plants, but it also sells produce, groceries, meats and a selection of handcrafts. Mercado Sonora was opened in 1957. It is best known for the section dedicated to herbal medicine and the occult such as items associated with Santa Muerte. This section in located in the back. Other items include live animals, dishes, party favors and plastic items.
The National Archives or Archivo General de la Nación (formerly known as the Palacio Negro de Lecumberri) contain a significant part of Mexico's written history. Lecumberri was begun in 1885 as a prison when then San Lázaro area was at the city's periphery. Construction took 15 years and 2.5 million pesos and was inaugurated in 1900 as the most modern prison in Latin America. The prison was the scene of the incarceration and execution of Francisco I. Madero and José María Pino Suárez in 1913. By the 1970s, the prison had as many as 5,000 prisoners in 1,000 cells. The prison was closed by the end of the decade and renovated to its current use.
The Palacio Legislativo de San Lázaro was constructed on the former site of the San Lázaro Railroad Station by José López Portillo in the 1970s, opened in 1981. It was constructed to move the legislative body away from the Donceles Legislative Palace in the historic center of Mexico City. The building was nearly destroyed by a fire in 1989 but was restored in 1992. The façade is of red tezontle stone with white marble in the center with the seal of the country prominently displayed. The vestibule contains a collection of murals depicting Mexico's history done by Adolfo Mexiac. The main chamber can seat up to 2000 spectators. When the legislative building was restored, a museum called “Sentimientos de la nación” Legislative Museum was installed. This museum is dedicated to the history of Mexico's government and history up to the present.
The main governmental building for the borough is located at Avenida Francisco del Paso y Troncoso in Jardín Balbuena. These offices were opened in 1974 on the site of the former Balbuena military airfield. The building has four murals painted by Montury such as "El canto del cisne", "Quienes somos", "América en llamas" y "Dame una palanca y destruiré el mundo".
Major churches in the area include the Sanctuary of Nuestra Señora de San Juan de los Lagos in Colonia 20 de Noviembre, Temple of La Soledad y la Santa Cruz in Colonia Merced Balbuena, the Sanctuary of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe y La Santísima Hostia Sangrante in Colonia El Parque and the Temple of San Antonio Tomatlán in Colonia Morelos. La Soledad de la Santa Cruz Church was built by Augustine monks. This church was expanded between 1750 and 1789 to three naves supported by pilasters and a new main altar was installed. To the south of this church, the Temple of San Jeronimito was constructed in the La Candelaria de los Patos neighborhood.
The oldest sports facility of Mexico City was built in the Balbuena area with the name of Venustiano Carranza, inaugurated in 1929. Other sports facilities include Centro Deportivo Moctezuma, Centro Deportivo Ramón López Velarde, Centro Deportivo Felipe "Tibio Muñoz,” Centro Deportivo Ing. Eduardo Molina, Centro deportivo José Ma. Pino Suárez, Centro Deportivo Velódromo Olímpico, Centro Deportivo Plutarco Elías Calles and Centro Deportivo Oceanía.
The Centro Cultural Carranza was inaugurated in 2011 in Colonia Jardín Balbuena with the aim of making it the most important recreational and cultural center in the center east of the Federal District.
In addition, the borough contains about one hundred statues, plazas, buildings and gardens which function as monuments to the history of the borough and of Mexico. These include the monument to General Carranza in front of the borough hall, a monument to Simón Bolívar in Jardín Simón Bolívar, a plaque and medallions marking the place where Francisco I. Madero and José María Pino Suárez were executed, and one to Mahatma Gandhi .
The super-regional mall Encuentro Oceanía, including Mexico's first IKEA store, opened in the borough in 2021.
Reenactment of the Battle of Puebla
The Battle of Puebla has been reenacted each year at the Peñón de los Baños since 1930. Residents of this area dress as the Mexican forces, called Zacapoaxtlas and the French army and even includes the firing of cannons with blanks for effect. The reenactment is performed by hundreds of residents of three neighborhoods around Peñón de los Baños, with the event occurring in the neighborhood of that name. The divide to represent the French army and the band of peasants called Zacapoaxtlas along with Mexican soldiers which won the historical battle. The event begins early in the morning on May 5 with a salute to the Mexican flag and a parade to the Peñón de los Baños mountain. The first act occurs in Barrio del Carmen, then another act to commemorate the Treaty of Loreto and the Treaty of Guadalupe on Hidalgo and Chihualcan Streets. After this, there is a large shared banquet with food provided by area residents to the mock soldiers. Then there is an inspection of the troops by one playing General Zaragoza, with a tradition of cutting the hair of a new member of the troops for “lice.” The last battle occurs in the evening with the French troops climbing on airport side and the Mexican troops on the Río Consulado side. It is at this time that cannons with blanks are fired. When the French are defeated, they run down the mountain and through the Barrio del Carmen where they are chased and then “executed” at the area cemetery. After the day's events, there is a festival, dance and carnival.
History
Pre Hispanic era
The emblem of the borough is the former Aztec glyph used to mark a village name Xochicán as it appears in the Mendocino Codex. The flower image means “place of fragrant flowers.”
Except for the far west which was part of the island of Tenochtitlan, the Peñón de los Baños and a couple of very small islands in-between, the territory of the borough was covered by Lake Texcoco from the pre Hispanic period into the colonial period. The oldest human settlements in the area were located in the Mixuhca and Peñón de los Baños, which were both originally islands in Lake Texcoco. The eastern end of Tenochtitlan was associated with docks and markets that handled the produce and other items that came over the Lake's waters into the city from other parts of the Valley of Mexico such as Texcoco, Chalco and Xochimilco. The lake in this area also contained part of the Nezahualcoyotl Dike, built to separate the shallow waters.
The small islands on the lake were also inhabited. One of these was Mexicaltzingo, where the leader of Culhuacán allowed the Mexica to live for a while in exchange for military service. Today this area is at the intersection of Calzada de la Viga and Ermita Iztapalapa. Another area, Mixuhca, was a very small island in the lake and where it is said that one of the sons of Moctezuma II was born. The name is derived from Mixiuhtlán, which means “place of birth” for this reason. The Cerro el Peñón de los Baños was a recreational area for Aztec emperors. It contained a number of hot springs with high mineral content believed to be curative.
Colonial era
After the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire, the Spanish laid out their own capital over the ruins of Tenochtitlán. The eastern end of this city corresponds to the La Merced, San Lázaro and Candelario de los Patos neighborhoods. However, these areas were overpopulated and un-hygienic because of the low, muddy condition of the lands here next to the lake, constantly subject to flooding.
In the 17th century, the San Lazaro dike continued to define the border of Lake Texcoco with firm land. However, the process of the lake's desiccation was already evident, expanding the island to allow Mexico City to grow eastward. The drying of the lake lead to the creation of a network of canals, of which the Jamaica and La Viga Canals were most important from the colonial period to the early 20th century. The La Viga Canal linked the La Merced market area to agricultural area southeast of the city, with docks for the canoes called “trajineras” right next to the market.
In the 18th century, the San Antonio Tomatlán and La Candelaria churches were built in the neighborhoods of San Lázaro and Candelaria de los Patos.
Independence to the present
During the 19th century, the lake continued to dry up, expanding Mexico City east. One of the roads built on this “new” land was Calzada Ignacio Zaragoza, which today leads to the highway to Puebla and Veracruz. Whether covered in lake or not, the territory of the borough became part of the Federal District when it was created in 1824 and has remained since. In the latter part of the century, a number of Mexico's new rail lines terminated at the San Lázaro station, connecting Mexico City with Cuautla and Cuernavaca . The urbanized area extended to what is now the Avenida Congreso de la Unión, with the formation of neighborhoods such as San Lázaro, Santo Tómas, Manzanares, La Soledad, Morelos and Moctezuma. However, much of the land in the 19th century was still swampy with the exception of the far west and the Peñón de los Baños. By 1885, the area was drier but was sparsely populated. A prison was also built in a neighborhood called Lecumberri between 1885 and 1900.
At the end of the 19th century, Mexico City grew east with the establishment of Colonia Morelos, Colonia Penitenciaría and Romero Rubio. Most of the development was working class housing and industrial facilities. Most of the industries were initially connected with food processing and other activities related to the La Merced and Jamaica markets. This would bring the city's limits to Eduardo Molina and Avenida Congreso de la Unión by the beginning of the 20th century. Avenida Circunvalación, next to the La Merced Market, still connected to the La Viga Canal. What is now the borough then belonged to two districts: Mexico City proper and the municipality of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
Francisco I. Madero and Pino Suárez were executed next to Lecumberri prison in 1913.
In the 1920s, Calzada Ignacio Zarragoza was built to connect to the city center to the Puebla highway. This main road spurred the development of more subdivisions expanding the urban sprawl east. A large amount of land in this area belonged to a man named Alberto Braniff, who provided it to establish Mexico City's first private airstrip in 1909, which became the Aeropuerto Central de la Ciudad de México in 1943. In 1954, the airport relocated, expanded and was reconditioned for international flights to become the Mexico City International Airport. This airport prompted the development of warehouses, hotels, and offices in the area.
In the 1950s Viaducto Miguel Alemán was constructed after encasing the Tacubaya, Piedadad and Becerra rivers in concrete. The La Merced market was expanded and the Mercado Sonora was built. In the mid 20th century, the process of lake drying and new subdivisions was still ongoing, with Colonia Cuatro Arboles begun in 1945, only five years after the lake in this area disappeared.
The modern borough was created in 1970, when the center of Mexico City was split into a four boroughs with the other three being Benito Juárez, Cuauhtémoc and Miguel Hidalgo . The borough was named to honor Mexican Revolution General Venustiano Carranza . By the end of the decade, the entire territory of the borough was urbanized with the exception of the Peñón de los Baños and a reservoir area called the Bordo de Xochiaca, which is now mostly green space.
By 1982, informal stalls around the La Merced Market had invaded over and was threatening to increase indefinitely. This prompted the end of the market as the city's main retail center in favor of a new market, Central de Abastos in Iztapalapa. La Merced remains the largest retail market for foodstuffs in Mexico City.
In 2011, the borough broke the record for the world's largest torta sandwich, which measured fifty meters long, weighed and was put together in three minutes 57 seconds with seventy different ingredients. The sandwich was created as part of the annual Feria de la Torta.
Demographics
Since the 1990s, the borough has had a decrease in population, down from 462,806 from 2000. The borough's population accounted for 10.4% of the District's total in 1970. It accounted for 5.4% in 2000. One main reason for the decrease is the conversion of land from residential to commercial use.
The dominant religion is Roman Catholicism with over 90% of the population professing this faith. As of 2005, 4,489 people spoke an indigenous language, 1.1% of the total.
Education
There are 456 schools in the borough: 156 preschools, 200 primary schools, 73 secondary schools, 8 vocational high schools and 19 high schools. However, About eighty percent of the population has an education of less than high school level.
Public high schools of the Instituto de Educación Media Superior del Distrito Federal (IEMS) include:
Escuela Preparatoria Venustiano Carranza "José Revueltas Sánchez"
Socioeconomics
About 54% of the total population twelve or over is economically active. Most workers are between 35 and 39 years of age. As of 2000, over 98% of the working population was employed in either the formal or informal economies. Just under 80% are employed in commerce, 17.5% are employed in manufacturing and construction and .1% in agriculture.
The number of housing units in the borough has risen from 112200 units with an average occupancy of 3.3 in 1950 to 117800 units with 4.4 occupants in 1990. As of 1995, the average residential building was fifty years old. From 1990 to 2005, the numbers changed only slightly with 118400 units and 3.9 people per household. The improvement has much to with the decreasing population. Sewerage and electricity is available in over 97% of residential units but running water exists in just under 87%. Those without running water in the apartment have shared source of supply.
Transportation
TAPO
The Terminal de Autobuses de Pasajeros de Oriente, better known as TAPO is the main bus terminal for interstate travel to the east and southeast. It is located next to Metro San Lázaro and marked by its very large dome covering the structure. It was constructed by architect Juan José Díaz Infance and inaugurated in 1978. The outer rim of the circular interior contains ticket counters and boarding areas for bus lines such as Autobuses Unidos. The center contains a food court and other businesses.
Mexico City airport
Mexico City International Airport, known officially as Aeropuerto Internacional de Benito Juárez, is the main airport for Mexico City. It was formally named after the 19th century president Benito Juárez in 2006. The airport is owned by Grupo Aeroportuario de la Ciudad de México and operated by Aeropuertos y Servicios Auxiliares, the government-owned corporation, who also operates 21 others airports through Mexico. It is the country's busiest airport with 32 domestic and international airlines and offers direct flights to more than 100 destinations worldwide. In 2010, the airport served 24,130,535 passengers.
Other transportation
In total, the borough has 4,958 roads, 5.1% of the total of the Federal District. The most important roads include Anillo Periférico, Circuito Interior, Calzada Ignacio Zaragoza and Viaducto Miguel Alemán. Next in importance are Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, Eje 1 Oriente, Eje 2 Oriente (Avenida Congreso de la Unión ), Eje 3 Oriente, Eje 3 Sur, Eje 2 Sur, Eje 1 Norte, and Eje 2 Norte.
The high concentration of people and businesses has resulted in an extensive public transportation network which includes the Mexico City Metro, trolleybuses and various bus lines. The Metro lines that cross the borough are Line 1, Line 4, Line 5, Line 9, and Line B, with thirty six stations within borough limits.
Metro stations
Merced
Candelaria
San Lázaro
Moctezuma
Balbuena
Boulevard Puerto Aéreo
Gómez Farías
Zaragoza
Pantitlán
Consulado
Canal del Norte
Morelos
Fray Servando
Jamaica
Misterios
Valle Gómez
Eduardo Molina
Aragón
Oceanía
Terminal Aérea
Hangares
Ciudad Deportiva
Puebla
Romero Rubio
Ricardo Flores Magón
La Viga
Mixiuhca
Velódromo
References
External links
Alcaldía de Venustiano Carranza website
Boroughs of Mexico City
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408584
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry%20Moran
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Jerry Moran
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Gerald Wesley Moran ( ; born May 29, 1954) is an American lawyer and politician who is the senior United States senator from Kansas, a seat he has held since 2011. A member of the Republican Party, he was chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee for the 113th U.S. Congress, during which he led successful Republican efforts in the 2014 election, producing the first Republican Senate majority since 2006. Previously, he was a member of the United States House of Representatives, representing .
Raised in Plainville, Kansas, Moran graduated from the University of Kansas and the University of Kansas School of Law. He worked in private law and was the state special assistant attorney general (1982–1985) and deputy attorney of Rooks County (1987–1995). He served in the Kansas Senate from 1989 to 1997 and was majority leader for his last two years. He was elected to the House of Representatives in 1996 and spent seven terms there with little electoral opposition. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2010 after defeating fellow U.S. Representative Todd Tiahrt in a contentious primary. He was reelected to the Senate in 2016 and 2022.
Moran became the senior senator and dean of the Kansas congressional delegation in 2021 when Pat Roberts retired from the Senate.
Early life, education, and career
Moran was born in Great Bend, Kansas, the son of Madeline Eleanor (née Fletcher) and Raymond Edwin "Ray" Moran. He was raised in Plainville. He attended Fort Hays State University before enrolling at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in economics in 1976. While attending the University of Kansas, he worked as a summer intern for U.S. Representative Keith Sebelius in 1974, when impeachment proceedings were being prepared against President Richard Nixon.
Moran worked as a banker before receiving his Juris Doctor from the University of Kansas School of Law in 1982. He practiced law at Stinson, Mag & Fizzell in Kansas City, and later joined Jeter & Larson Law Firm in Hays, where he practiced for 15 years. In addition to his law practice, he served as the state special assistant attorney general (1982–1985) and deputy county attorney of Rooks County (1987–1995). He also served as an adjunct professor of political science at Fort Hays State University.
Kansas Senate
Moran served eight years (1989–1997) in the Kansas Senate. He served two years as the vice president and his last two years as majority leader.
U.S. House of Representatives
Elections
Moran was elected to Congress in 1996 and reelected six times, never facing serious opposition in the conservative 1st district. In 2006, his opponent was John Doll, against whom he received almost 79% of the vote—one of the highest totals for a Republican congressional incumbent in that election.
Tenure
During his time in the House of Representatives, Moran conducted an annual town hall meeting in each of the 69 counties in Kansas's "Big First" Congressional District. He continues the tradition in the U.S. Senate for all 105 counties.
As a senior member of the House Agriculture Committee, Moran worked with colleagues to craft legislation to aid Kansas farms and ranches. He was also an active member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and the House Veterans' Affairs Committee, where he served as chair of the Subcommittee on Health.
Slate's David Weigel wrote that, despite his insistence that earmarks are a way to get members of Congress to vote for spending "we can't afford", Moran requested $19.4 million in earmarks in the 2010 budget.
U.S. Senate
Elections
Moran became the Republican nominee for the 2010 U.S. Senate election in Kansas after defeating Representative Todd Tiahrt in the Republican primary, 50%–45%. In the general election, Moran defeated Democrat Lisa Johnston, Libertarian Michael Dann, and Reform Party candidate Joe Bellis, with 70% of the vote.
Tenure
Moran was elected chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee for the 113th U.S. Congress on November 14, 2012. He oversaw the Republican gain of nine Senate seats in the 2014 United States Senate elections, resulting in the first Republican Senate majority since 2006.
On January 5, 2021, Moran announced that he would vote to certify the 2021 United States Electoral College vote count, which was to take place the following day. He was participating in the certification when Trump supporters attacked the United States Capitol. During the attack, Moran tweeted that he condemned "the violence and destruction at the U.S. Capitol in the strongest possible terms. It is completely unacceptable and unpatriotic."
For his tenure as the chairman of the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee in the 116th Congress, Moran earned an "F" grade from the nonpartisan Lugar Center's Congressional Oversight Hearing Index.
Committee assignments
Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions
United States Senate Committee on Appropriations
Subcommittee on Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies
Subcommittee on Department of Defense
Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies (Chair)
Subcommittee on Defense
Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government
Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies
Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs
United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation
Subcommittee on Aviation Operations, Safety, and Security
Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, Innovation, and the Internet
Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, Insurance and Data Security (Chairman)
Subcommittee on Surface Transportation and Merchant Marine Infrastructure, Safety, and Security
Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works
United States Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs (Ranking Member)
United States Senate Committee on Indian Affairs
Caucus memberships
Afterschool Caucuses
Political positions
Moran's voting record is somewhat conservative. He has a lifetime rating of 86 from the American Conservative Union and a lifetime 71 rating from the Club for Growth.
Agriculture
In March 2019, Moran was one of 38 senators to sign a letter to United States Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue warning that dairy farmers "have continued to face market instability and are struggling to survive the fourth year of sustained low prices" and urging his department to "strongly encourage these farmers to consider the Dairy Margin Coverage program."
In May 2019, Moran was a cosponsor of the Transporting Livestock Across America Safely Act, a bipartisan bill introduced by Ben Sasse and Jon Tester intended to reform hours of service for livestock haulers by authorizing drivers to have the flexibility to rest at any point during their trip without it being counted against their hours of service and exempting loading and unloading times from the hours of service calculation of driving time.
Health care
Moran opposed the Medicare reform package of 2003, unlike most congressmen from rural districts. He also opposed the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare).
In May 2011, Moran sponsored S. 1058, the Pharmacy Competition and Consumer Choice Act of 2011. In the House, he served as co-chair of the House Rural Health Care Coalition and co-founder of the Congressional Community Pharmacy Coalition.
Moran voted against the July 2017 Senate health care bill. He criticized the closed-door process for developing the bill and criticized the legislation for not repealing the entire ACA.
National security and military
Since 2014, Moran has served on the United States Air Force Academy Board of Visitors.
In the early 2000s, Moran opposed a timetable for military withdrawal from Iraq.
Since entering Congress, Moran has traveled to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan to visit deployed American forces and meet with foreign leaders. His most recent trip to the region was in August 2017 to the northern regions of Afghanistan.In March 2018, Moran was one of five Republican senators to vote against tabling a resolution spearheaded by Bernie Sanders, Chris Murphy, and Mike Lee that would have required President Trump to withdraw American troops either in or influencing Yemen within the next 30 days unless they were combating Al-Qaeda. In October 2018, Moran was one of seven senators to sign a letter to United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo expressing that they found it "difficult to reconcile known facts with at least two" of the Trump administration's certifications that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were attempting to protect Yemen civilians and were in compliance with U.S. laws on arms sales, citing their lack of understanding for "a certification that the Saudi and Emirati governments are complying with applicable agreements and laws regulating defense articles when the [memo] explicitly states that, in certain instances, they have not done so." In June 2019, Moran was one of seven Republicans to vote to block Trump's Saudi arms deal providing weapons to Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Jordan, and one of five Republicans to vote against an additional 20 arms sales.
In January 2019, Moran was one of 11 Republican senators to vote to advance legislation intended to block Trump's intent to lift sanctions against three Russian companies.
In February 2019, amid a report by the Commerce Department that ZTE had been caught illegally shipping goods of American origin to Iran and North Korea, Moran was one of seven senators to sponsor a bill reimposing sanctions on ZTE in the event that ZTE did not honor both American laws and its agreement with the Trump administration.
In July 2019, Moran was one of 16 Republican senators to send a letter to Acting Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought, Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin encouraging them to work with them to prevent a continuing resolution "for FY 2020 that would delay the implementation of the President's National Defense Strategy (NDS) and increase costs" and writing that the yearlong continuing resolution suggested by administration officials would render the Defense Department "incapable of increasing readiness, recapitalizing our force, or rationalizing funding to align with the National Defense Strategy (NDS)."
Immigration and refugees
Moran critiqued Trump's 2017 executive order imposing a temporary ban on entry to the U.S. to citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries, saying, "While I support thorough vetting, I do not support restricting the rights of U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents. Furthermore, far-reaching national security policy should always be devised in consultation with Congress and relevant government agencies."
In March 2019, Moran was one of 12 Republican senators to vote to block Trump's national emergency declaration that would have granted him access to $3.6 billion in military construction funding to build border barriers.
Economy
In May 2019, Moran was one of eight senators to cosponsor the Global Leadership in Advanced Manufacturing Act, a bill that would develop new institutes that supported American manufacturing in technology and grant more federal investment in the national network such as preexisting institutes being made to compete globally as well as continue American economic and national security.
Education
Moran supports accountability metrics for public schools, but believes federal initiatives need to provide flexibility to states. In 2001, Moran voted against the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) because he felt it did not afford sufficient flexibility to schools. In 2017, Moran voted to confirm Betsy DeVos as United States Secretary of Education.
Gun policy
Moran has an "A" rating from the NRA Political Victory Fund (NRA-PVF) for his consistent support of pro-gun policies. The NRA endorsed him in his 2010 Senate run. NRA-Political Victory Fund chair Chris W. Cox called Moran a "steadfast supporter of our freedom". Since 1998, the NRA has donated $23,850 to Moran's political efforts.
In 2013, Moran joined other Republicans in saying they would filibuster any Democrat's proposals that Republicans considered a threat to the Second Amendment. In April, he voted against the Manchin-Toomey proposal for universal background checks for gun purchases.
Moran supports the concept of eliminating gun-free zones on military installations and recruitment centers. He said that they are an "infringement on the constitutional rights of our service members" and that gun-free zones make military sites "increasingly vulnerable to those who wish to do harm."
In 2016, Moran voted against the Feinstein Amendment, which would have banned suspected terrorists from acquiring guns.
Moran responded to the 2017 Olathe, Kansas shooting: "I strongly condemn violence of any kind, especially if it is motivated by prejudice and xenophobia."
In January 2019, Moran was one of 31 Republican senators to cosponsor the Constitutional Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act, a bill introduced by John Cornyn and Ted Cruz that would grant individuals with concealed carry privileges in their home state the right to exercise this right in any other state with concealed carry laws while concurrently abiding by that state's laws.
Environment and climate change
As of 2017, based on his environment-related votes, Moran had a lifetime score of 8% from the League of Conservation Voters, and a 0% score for 2016.
In 2015 Moran voted against a Senate amendment acknowledging that human activity contributes to climate change. In 2016, Moran and several other Senate Republicans signed a letter calling upon the U.S. to withdraw funding from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. In 2009, Moran voted against the American Clean Energy and Security Act (Waxman-Markey), which would have established a cap-and-trade system to reduce carbon emissions and combat climate change.
Moran is a strong supporter of the construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline.<ref>John Hanna, U.S. Sens. Moran, Roberts predicting success on Keystone XL project , 'Topeka Capitol-Journal (November 20, 2014).</ref> During the consideration of the Keystone XL pipeline legislation, he introduced an amendment to remove the lesser prairie chicken from the list of threatened species. The amendment failed on a 54–44 vote, having failed to get the required 60 votes.Keystone XL bill: Lesser prairie chicken amendment is rejected , Associated Press (January 29, 2015).
Entrepreneurship and startups
Moran is "one of the most active members of Congress when it comes to reaching out to Silicon Valley." In 2014, Consumer Electronics Association President and CEO Gary J. Shapiro dubbed Moran "Mr. Innovation" and described him as "one of the biggest tech entrepreneurship leaders in the U.S. Senate." Moran is the lead sponsor of Startup Act 3.0 legislation, which includes several provisions that would reform the American visa system for high-skilled, American-educated, and entrepreneurial immigrants. Moran also sponsored the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, also known as the JOBS Act, legislation to expand crowdfunding options for startups. Since its 2012 passage, he has criticized the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's JOBS Act rule-making as drawn out and potentially counterproductive to the legislation's intent. Moran is an advocate of increased engagement between Washington and the Startup community and has spoken on the issue at events like South by Southwest (SXSW) and the Consumer Electronics Show (CES).
Internet issues
Moran opposed the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) and Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). In November 2011, Moran, Senators Rand Paul, Ron Wyden and Maria Cantwell sent a letter to Senate leadership indicating they would place a Senate hold on PIPA, citing the threats PIPA (and SOPA) posed to liberty and innovation.
In 2017, Moran voted to repeal FCC Internet privacy rules that blocked internet providers from sharing or selling data on customers' private data (such as browsing history) without the customer's permission.
Abortion
Moran opposes abortion.Dave Ranney, Anti-abortion leader berates Shallenburger's inclusiveness , Lawrence Journal World (August 12, 2005). He has cosponsored legislation to ban abortions after the 20th week of pregnancy. He voted in favor of making harming a fetus a crime. Moran supported the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade, agreeing that the Constitution does not ensure right to an abortion.
LGBT rights
The Human Rights Campaign has rated his voting record on LGBT rights as zero in five separate scorecards.
Opioids
In September 2018, Moran voted for a package of 70 Senate bills that cost $8.4 billion and altered programs across multiple agencies, as part of a bipartisan effort to prevent opioids from being shipped through the U.S. Postal Service and to grant doctors the ability to prescribe medications designed to wean opioid addictions.
SafeSport
In February 2022, on a Nightline'' program about criticisms of the United States Center for SafeSport titled "Sports misconduct watchdog faces crisis of confidence", Moran said that every athlete-victim he visited with "had little or no confidence in SafeSport." He and Senator Richard Blumenthal said that they believe that more transparency is required from SafeSport, which does not make public its investigative findings or arbitration decisions, to protect young athletes, and that SafeSport must make its work public.
January 6 commission
On May 28, 2021, Moran voted against creating an independent commission to investigate the January 6 United States Capitol attack.
Personal life
Moran lived in Hays for most of his political career. In 2012, he moved to Manhattan to be closer to a major airport in order to cut down on his drive time back to Kansas each weekend. The nearest airport to Hays is Wichita Dwight D. Eisenhower National Airport, three hours southeast; Manhattan is two hours from Wichita and Kansas City. Additionally, Manhattan Regional Airport has direct jet service daily to and from Chicago and Dallas.
At Kansas State University, he was initiated into Alpha Tau Omega on September 28, 2013.
Moran volunteers his time with several community organizations. He is a former trustee of the Eisenhower Foundation, serves on the board of trustees of the Fort Hays State University Endowment Association, and serves on the Executive Committee of the Coronado Area Council of the Boy Scouts of America. He was also the 2008 Honorary Chair of the Law Enforcement Torch Run of the Kansas Special Olympics. Moran and his wife, Robba, have two daughters, Kelsey and Alex. Kelsey graduated from Kansas State University in 2010 and from Georgetown University Law Center in 2015. She is an attorney at Hogan Lovells. Alex studied at Kansas State University and graduated from Kansas State University College of Veterinary Medicine in 2016.
Ratings from political organizations
In the first half of the 116th Congress, Moran received a score of 71 from the American Conservative Union, with an overall lifetime rating of nearly 86. Americans for Democratic Action gave Moran a score of 15% for the same period.
Electoral history
See also
United States congressional delegations from Kansas
References
External links
Senator Jerry Moran official U.S. Senate website
Jerry Moran for Senator
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1954 births
21st-century American politicians
American Methodists
Methodists from Kansas
Fort Hays State University alumni
Kansas lawyers
Republican Party Kansas state senators
Living people
People from Great Bend, Kansas
People from Rooks County, Kansas
Politicians from Manhattan, Kansas
Protestants from Kansas
Republican Party members of the United States House of Representatives from Kansas
Republican Party United States senators from Kansas
Tea Party movement activists
University of Kansas School of Law alumni
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iztapalapa
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Iztapalapa
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Iztapalapa () is a borough (demarcación territorial) in Mexico City, located on the east side of the entity. The borough is named after and centered on the formerly independent municipality of Iztapalapa, which is officially called Iztapalapa de Cuitláhuac for disambiguation purposes. The rest is made up of a number of other communities which are governed by the city of Iztapalapa.
With a population of 1.8 million as of 2010, Iztapalapa is the most populous borough of Mexico City, and it is also the most populous municipality in the country. Over 90% of its territory is urbanized. The borough transitioned from a rural area with some farms and canals as late as the 1970s, to an area with the only green areas in parks and almost all of its people employed in commerce, services and industry. This is the result of a large influx of people into the borough starting from the 1970s and which still continues.
Iztapalapa remains afflicted by high levels of economic deprivation, and a significant number of its residents lack access to clean drinking water. Iztapalapa has one of the highest rates of violent crime in Mexico City, and combatting homicides and drug trafficking remain a major issue for local authorities.
The borough is home of one of Mexico City's major cultural events, the annual Passion Play in which 450 borough residents participate and about 2 million attend as spectators.
The borough and city
Iztapalapa today is a borough of the Mexico City, centered on what used to be an independent settlement with its origins in the pre-Hispanic period. It has a territory of , and is located on the east side of the Mexico City bordering the boroughs of Iztacalco, Xochimilco, Tláhuac, Coyoacán and Benito Juárez. The State of Mexico borders the borough on the east side, and Iztapalapa has strong cultural and economic ties to this part of the state.
The borough was created in 1928, centered on and named after a formerly independent municipality within the then Federal District, which already had governing authority over a number of surrounding communities. The modern borough is made up of 15 “barrios” or neighborhoods, considered to be part of city of Iztapalapa, and 18 other “pueblos” or communities outside of it. To distinguish the original city of Iztapalapa from the rest of the borough, it was officially named Iztapalapa de Cuitláhuac in 2006 in honor of the tenth Aztec emperor. However, eight of the barrios are considered to be the historic center of the city of Iztapalapa, which are La Asunción, San Ignacio, Santa Barbara, San Lucas, San Pablo, San Miguel, San Pedro and San José. Records of the “eight barrios of Iztapalapa” go back at least until 1898. Borough authorities have sought “Barrios Mágicos Turísticos” (Magical Tourism Neighborhoods) status for these, for a program similar to the “Pueblos Mágicos” tourism program run by the federal government. The goal is to attract visitors to these neighborhoods as well as other landmarks of the borough such as the Cerro de la Estrella, Pueblo Culhuacán, the Churubusco Gardens, La Magdalena Atlazolpa, Los Reyes, San Antonio Culhuacán, Mexicalzingo, the San Lorenzo Cemetery, San Andrés Tetepilco and San José Aculco.
Elevation and climate
The borough has an average elevation of asl and extends over firm land and what was former lake bed of Lake Texcoco. Some of the firm land is alluvial plain but most of it are elevations such as the Cerro de la Estrella ( asl), Peñón Viejo or Peñon del Marqués ( asl), and the Sierra de Santa Catalina, which contains the Cerro Tecuatzi ( asl), Cerro Tetecón ( asl), and the Guadalupe Borrego ( asl), Xaltepec ( asl); and Yuhualixqui ( asl) volcanoes. These are recent geological formations, with evidence of lava flow still existent and none extend over above the valley floor. Culturally, the most important of these elevations is the Cerro de la Estrella, which was the site of the New Fire ceremony. Since the pre-Hispanic period, Lake Texcoco has been drained, leaving behind only two natural river called the Churubusco and La Piedad, which unite to form the Unido River, and a few canals. However, the rivers are confined to large pipes as is one of the canals, and most of the Canal Nacional which forms part of the border of the borough has been filled in to create Calzada La Viga road. For this reason, there are no longer any naturally occurring surface water.
The climate of the area is divided into four zones. One consists of a warm wet climate with temperatures above in the coldest months. Another is a temperate wet climate with temperatures between in the coldest months. One has a relatively dry climate with a range of temperatures, and the last consists of a cold climate with average temperature not exceeding . Most of the area falls into the temperate category and all receive most of their rainfall in the summer and early fall.
Urbanization
Uncontrolled population growth in the area has nearly wiped out all forms of wildlife in the borough, although as late as the 1960s, there were still a number of waterfowl to be found. Animals found here now are pets or the few cases in which families still raise domestic fowl, rabbits and others for food. Almost all of the borough (90%) is urbanized, with only six percent designated as ecological reserve, concentrated in two parks, the Cerro de la Estrella National Park and the Sierra de Santa Catarina, declared a reserve in 1994. However, both of these areas are under pressure by the continued urbanization and population growth of the area.
Iztapalapa and most of the east side of the Federal District was historically rural and poor up until the mid-20th century. Large-scale urbanization and industrialization began in the 1950s, along with high rates of migration into the borough in the 1970s. Today, it has high population density, limited infrastructure and high levels of socio economic marginalization. Social problems include homelessness, unregulated street vending, illegal building and crimes associated with the sex trade. Many live in rundown housing with deficient municipal services. The exception to this are the areas that border the boroughs of Benito Juárez, Coyoacán and Iztacalco. As of 2010, about 30% of the borough's buildings still have damage from the 1985 earthquake. Most are located in the Peñon Viejo, Ermita Zaragoza, Santa Martha Acatitla, Santa Cruz Meyehualco, El Molino, San Lorenzo and La Hera areas, with about 150,000 damaged homes. Over 95% of the homes in the borough have electricity, running water and sewerage, and the borough provides sufficient educational services and other services such as sports facilities; however, the high population density means that the five or less percent equals a large number of people without sufficient services.
Crime
Primary problems facing the borough include crime, especially drug trafficking and sale of stolen auto parts, and also lack of water supply. Iztapalpa has the highest rates of rape, violence against women, and domestic violence in Mexico City. Most crime is connected with small scale drug trafficking, which is becoming more frequent on the borough's streets. Between 2008 and 2010, there were 470 murders in the borough, two out of ten for all of Mexico City, with one occurring every two days. It also has one of the highest rates of muggings and robberies of taxi drivers and public buses. Most of the crime problems are concentrated into a group of neighborhoods, such as Santa Martha Acatitla Norte, Desarrollo Urbano Quetzalcoatl, Tenorios, La Polvorilla, Santa Cruz Meyehualco, San Miguel Teotongo, Xalpa, Lomas Estrella, Lonas de Zaragoza and Achualtepec. This area has over 100 known points where drugs are sold. Its proximity to municipalities such as Nezahualcoyotl in the State of Mexico allows criminals to escape jurisdiction easily. However, the borough reports that crime rates diminished 5.41% from 2009 to 2010. Basic services, especially potable water, is lacking in many of these same areas, which are close to the Sierra de Santa Catalina where there is no piped water service; rather it is delivered in trucks to home storage tanks. Sometimes the wait for these trucks can last hours, and there have been hijackings of water delivery trucks. About 96% of homes in the borough do have piped-in water, but about 500,000 residents have insufficient supplies, low pressure and in many places the water quality is visibly poor. Visibly dirty water is locally called “agua de tamarindo” (tamarind water) because of its brown color.
Landmarks
The borough is home to a number of historic churches, many of which were built in the colonial era. The Franciscans built monasteries and churches in communities such as Huitzilopohco, San Marcos Mexicaltzingo, Santa Marta, and Nativitas Tepetlacingo. Most of these churches, especially those of San Lucas Evangelista, San Marcos Mexicaltzingo, San Juan Evangelista and the chapels of Calvario and Santa Martha Acatitla were built over foundations of pre Hispanic temples, which had been destroyed in the Conquest. The main parish church building of the city of Iztapalapa dates from at least 1664. Its main entrance contains various indigenous symbols. Some churches, however, were built later, such as the Asunción de María parish church built in 1890, and the current San Juan Evangelista church built between 1880 and 1897.
The two most important religious establishments have been Señor de la Cuevita Sanctuary and the former monastery of Culhuacán. The Señor de la Cuevita Sanctuary is located on Avenida Morelos and 16 de Septiembre in the city of Iztapalapa. It was built to house an image of Christ made of cornstalks which is called the “Señor de la Cuevita” (Lord of the Small Cave). According to legend, this image was taken from here to Etla, Oaxaca, but it mysteriously disappeared from there to reappear in a small cave back in Iztapalapa. However, its importance stems from a miracle attributed to it. In 1833, the area was hit by the 1826–1837 cholera pandemic. People appealed to this image and when the plague dissipated, this image was given credit. Yearly rites of gratitude to this image eventually developed into the borough's annual Passion Play. Since 1853, this church has been the center of most indigenous dance held. This is because in that year the archbishop of Mexico forbade “pagan” dances and to avoid confrontation, the dances began to be held here in the main atrium. In 1875, the church was painted by Anacleto Escutia.
The most important monastery founded in the area in the colonial period was in Culhuacán by the Augustinians. This monastery was begun in 1552 and dedicated to John the Baptist. The Augustinians founded a school to teach indigenous languages which operated for over 100 years. It was also a center of paper making, taking advantage of springs and canals for water. The original church of the monastery was demolished a long time ago, but parts of the original complex still remain. The original church was replaced in the late 19th century by the San Juan Evangelista parish church, built between 1880 and 1897. The rest of the complex has been secularized since the 19th century and declared a national monument in 1944. From 1960 to 1984, it was occupied by INAH, which renovated it. Today, this complex is home to the Museo del Exconvento de Culhuacán (Museum of the Former Monastery of Culhuacán), inaugurated in 1987. The grounds around it are referred to as the Parque Historico y Centro comunitario Culhuacán (Culhuacán Historic Park and Community Center). The park contains an artificial pond and areas planted with native trees such as ahuejotes. The monastery complex itself still contains a number of frescos on its walls, and its library is still an important cultural and research center. A number of the old monks’ cells now contain exhibits related to the institution.
The Cerro de la Estrella National Park was established in 1938 and is considered to be the most important natural area in the eastern part of the Valley of Mexico. The park covers over and was established for recreational and cultural purposes. The hill (cerro) was the site of the Aztec New Fire ceremony, last performed in 1507. The park is also culturally important due to the annual Passion Play which is partially conducted on the summit of the cerro each year. The area is managed by the Secretaría de Agricultura y Recursos Hidráulicos, but it lost its original forest cover due to over-cutting of trees. The ecosystem now on the site consists only of planted eucalyptus and Pinus patula trees, along with insects and rodents. There are also problems with illegal building and farming in areas.
The Museo Fuego Nuevo (New Fire Museum) was built by architect David Peña and inaugurated in 1998. The museum is dedicated to the history of the site, especially as related by the Fuego Nuevo Codex. There is evidence of the hill's ritual use going back 4,000 years; however, the New Fire Ceremony was Aztec. Every 52 years ended one cycle and began another. The worry, however, was that the sun would not return and the ceremony was designed to ensure the sun's return in the morning. Excavation of this site and others in the borough was begun in 1974 by INAH. This work has also uncovered fossilized human and mammoth remains in neighborhoods such as Santa María Aztahuacán and Santa Marta Acatitlán.
The Museo Cabeza de Juárez was constructed in 1976. This museum in Colonia Agua Prieta is an enormous multicolored monument of Benito Juárez’s head that measures in height and weighs six tons. It was decorated by David Alfaro Siqueiros but he died before he could finish the work. His brother-in-law, Luis Arenal Bastar completed it. The work is considered to be a fusion of painting, sculpting, engineering and architecture. Today, it contains a number of abstract murals, a permanent collection of lithographs and a large auditorium. The monument is a symbol of the eastern part of the city.
The Central de Abasto (Groceries Center) is Mexico City's main wholesale market for produce and other foodstuffs. It was constructed to be the meeting point for producers, wholesalers, retailers and consumers for the entire country. The site accommodates more than 250,000 people each day and provides foodstuffs for most of the people of Mexico City area. The facility extends over and is the most important commercial center for the city. It is the largest such market in Latin America. It was established in the 1970s, over what were the remaining chinampa farming plots in the borough, effectively eliminating this tradition in this part of the city. The main building was inaugurated in 1982, built by Abraham Zabludovesky, as a slightly deformed hexagon measuring across. It was built to take over from the La Merced Market, which was no longer large enough to meet the city's needs for the wholesale distribution of produce and other foodstuffs.
The borough is also home to Mexico City and Mexico's largest fish market, called La Nueva Viga, in Colonia San José Aculco on Prologación Eje 6 Sur. With 202 wholesalers and 165 retail outlets, it distributes about 60% of the country's seafood production along with much of what is imported. The market begins business at 4:00 a.m., when delivery trucks bring in fresh fish from all over Mexico to the vendors. This daily delivery is about 500 tons and includes all kinds of seafood from shrimp to fish to shellfish to small sharks and manta rays. The main fish market is here due to Mexico City's role as economic center since the pre Hispanic period.
The twice-weekly El Salado tianguis or street market offers everything from the cheapest used items to luxury items can be found.
The Fábrica de Artes y Oficios Oriente was inaugurated in 2000, located between the two largest apartment complexes of the borough, the Iztapalapa and the Unidad Vicente Guerrero. It contains a forum for 800 people, lobby with two wings for expositions and workshops. Classes are given in guitar, dance, candlemaking, ceramics, and sewing. There is also an area for major event which can hold 1,500 people.
The community museum of San Miguel Teotongo on the highway to Puebla contains finds related to the ancient inhabitants of the area. Most relate to the pre-Hispanic period and include utensils, ceremonial objects, ceramics, obsidian blades and arrowheads and jewelry.
The Museo de Hidrobiologia (Hydrobiology Museum) mostly contains preserved example of the various species found in the different types of water found in Mexico. These include rivers, lakes, ponds, estuaries, beach areas as well as reefs offshore.
The current borough government building, or “palacio delegacional” were inaugurated in 1989. It contains a mural by Francisco Cárdenas done in 2003 called “Iztapalapa: Ayer, Hoy y Siempre” (Iztapalapa: Yesterday, Today and Always).
The borough contains two large penal institutions called the Centro de Ejecución de Sanciones Penales Varonil Oriente and the Centro de Readaptación Social Varonil Santa Martha Acatitla. The Centro de Ejecución de Sanciones Penales Varonil Oriente (Center for the Execution of Penal Sanctions for Men East), more commonly called the Reclusorio Oriente (East Prison) was inaugurated in 1987 for adult males. The building extends over a surface in colonial San Lorenzo Tezonco. It contains five dormitories, intake center, workshops, sports facilities and classrooms. The Centro de Readaptación Social Varonil Santa Martha Acatitla (Center for Male Social Readaptation Santa Martha Acatitla) is for juvenile males which was inaugurated in 2003. It has a maximum population of 672 housed in four buildings with basketball court, dining hall, workshops, classrooms and computer room. A new building is under construction to bring the capacity up to 900 inmates.
Transportation
For most of the borough's history, most transportation of people and freight was done on the waters of the lake and through canals. However, these began to dry up starting in the 19th century. They remained important up until the early 20th century, with even steamships passing through at one time. In the 1930s, many of the barrios of Iztapalapa were still marked by canals and still grew vegetables, fruits and flowers. Eventually, major traffic was confined mostly to the Canal Nacional. As the canals dried up, newer modes of transportation were introduced. In 1903, mule-drawn trolleys were introduced into the municipality to link it Mexico City via Jamaica. These trolleys would be used to bring Mexican president Francisco I. Madero to celebrate his inauguration in 1912. Several train lines linked the area to other parts of Mexico by 1922. The first bus services between the center of Mexico City and the large market was begun in 1952.
Today, most transportation in the borough is on various roadways via public or private vehicle. Main avenues include Calzada Ermita-Iztapalapa, Calzada Ignacio Zaragoza, Calzada Benito Juárez, Calzada La Viga, Anillo Periférico Norte, Circuito Interior, Avenida Tláhuac, Avenida Plutarco Elias Calles. The “Eje” road system in the area includes Eje 3 Sur, Eje 4 Sur, Eje 5 Sur, Eje 6 Sur, Eje7 Sur, Eje 8 Sur, Eje 2 Oriente, Eje 3 Oriente, Eje 4 Oriente and Eje 5 Oriente. The main highway leaving Mexico City towards Puebla cuts through the borough. Each day about 80,000 vehicles pass through, making it the second busiest highway section in Mexico City. Many of these are local and intercity buses which can block two out of the three lanes. Construction work has been done to widen the highway, but political disputes have kept new lanes from opening as of early 2011. Public transportation includes several trolleybus lines, busses, taxis and bicitaxis. Line 8 and Line A of the Metro also pass through the borough.
Metro stations
Apatlaco
Aculco
Escuadrón 201
Atlalilco
Iztapalapa
Cerro de la Estrella
UAM-I
Constitución de 1917
Tepalcates
Guelatao
Peñón Viejo
Acatitla
Santa Marta
Mexicaltzingo
Culhuacán
San Andrés Tomatlán
Lomas Estrella
Calle 11
Demographics
With a population of 1,815,768 as of the 2010 census, Iztapalapa is the most populous and fastest growing borough in Mexico City. It is also the most populous locality (localidad) in Mexico, larger than Ecatepec de Morelos or Guadalajara. Until the mid-20th century, the area was rural, but migration into the borough began in the 1970s as this is the only area with significant land that could be developed. From 1970 to 1980, it accounted for 54.3% of the city's population increase. From 1980 to 1990, Iztapalapa gained 341,988, more than 1.6 times that of the rest of the city. Most of the migration came from families leaving the center of the city, but more importantly many migrants from other parts of Mexico into the city settled in the relatively cheap Iztapalapa. In the last decades, the population increase of the borough has accounted for 83% of the population growth of Mexico City. Today, the population of the borough accounts for over 20.5% of Federal District’s total. The population growth has slowed somewhat, but at its peak in the 1990s, it was over 100%. This population growth has spurred the location of most of the city's housing projects of the last decades in this area. The borough's population is still expected to increase at a rate of 0.77%. While migration into the borough is significant, there is very little migration out into other parts of Mexico or abroad.
Most of the borough's residents are poor to middle class, with a very large percentage of youth. Just over 42% of the population is considered to be socioeconomically marginalized, meaning there are fully or partially excluded from social and/or municipal services of one type or another. While this is not the highest level of all the boroughs, since Iztapalapa has the highest population by a significant margin, most of the city's marginalized are here with just under 9% of Mexico City's total. The population between 0 and 19 years of age represents about 40% of the total. Next are those between 20 and 34, who account for about 29% of the total. A large percentage of the population of the borough is under 15 at 36.4%, with only 7.6% over 50.
Languages
During the colonial period into the 19th century, Iztapalapa was mostly indigenous, with small population of European descent and mestizos. Migration into the area eventually would change the ethnic composition to primarily mestizo and the Nahuatl language would essentially disappear. As of 2005, only about two percent of the population speaks an indigenous language, with 94.8% bilingual in Spanish as well. This is about equal to the city average. However, the borough contains about 25% of the total ethnic indigenous of the city. Most of the indigenous languages found in the borough are those associated with the state of Oaxaca, such as Zapotec, Mixteca and Chatina. Oaxacan languages account for 34.9% of the total. Uto-Aztecan languages account for 23.32% which include Tarahumara, Mayo, Yaqui, Cora and Huichol. Another significant percentage are those of the Oto-Pamean languages which include Otomi, Mazahua and Matlatzinca.The only language which has been spoken in Mexico not represented in Iztapalapa is Kickapoo.
Religion
The overwhelming majority of the population is Catholic, although this has declined by 1.9% since the 1990s. Protestant and Evangelical sects have grown to about 6% of the population, with less than 2% professing no faith.
Education
The first public primary school classes in Iztapalapa were established in 1914 under the government of Venustiano Carranza at Escuela Enrique Laubscher and in the San Lucas Church. However, during the government of Lázaro Cárdenas, many in the borough refused to send their children to school, afraid that they would be indoctrinated against the Catholic faith. Today, the borough has sufficient educational infrastructure, with most schools belonging to the primary level. There are a number of institutions of higher education such as UAM, and the Facultad de Estudios Superiores Zaragoza of UNAM. There are 452 preschools, 612 primary schools, 191 middle schools, 21 vocational schools, 35 high schools, and two teachers’ colleges. Ninety-five percent of children between five and nine years of age attend school, with 96% of those between 10 and 14. Only 62% of those between 15 and 19 attend school and 27% of those between 20 and 24. About 4% of the population above the age of six is illiterate with 63% of this number being female. The highest rates of illiteracy are in the 65 and older age group.
Public high schools of the Instituto de Educación Media Superior del Distrito Federal (IEMS) include:
Escuela Preparatoria Iztapalapa I
Escuela Preparatoria Iztapalapa II "Benito Juárez"
Escuela Preparatoria Iztapalapa III "Miravalles"
Escuela Preparatoria Iztapalapa IV
The Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana was established in 1974 with three campuses in Azcapotzalco, Xochimilco and Iztapalapa. Iztapalapa was constructed first and covers an area of . Most of the institution's research work is conducted at the Iztapalapa campus. Other institutions include the University Autónoma dela Ciudad de México, San Lorenzo Campus and the Instituto Tecnológico de Iztapalapa.
Economy
The two most important economic activities in the borough are manufacturing and commerce. Sixty-three percent of all business establishments are dedicated to commerce, which employ 42% of the people and accounts for 45% of the borough's GDP. Commerce and services together employ 63.3% of the population. Twenty-four percent of this commerce is wholesale, much of which is tied to the Central de Abasto and the La Nueva Viga markets. However, wholesale businesses have declined 2.8% while retail establishment have increased 8.1%. This has a positive effect on employment, but this activity adds less to the GDP. The largest sector of retail sales is in street markets called tianguis, followed by public markets, street peddlers and lastly through the Central de Abasto.
A total of 32.5% is employed in industry, minerals and construction. Industry includes food processing, bottling, tobacco products, metals, machinery, surgical equipment, paper and printing and textiles. Only 0.3% is now employed in agriculture or livestock.
Culture
Passion Play
The Passion Play of Iztapalapa has its origin in an outbreak of cholera in 1833, which left many dead and many children orphaned. A procession was performed to an image of Christ called the “Señor de la Cuevita” (Lord of the Little Cave) to end the epidemic. When it subsided, it was considered a miracle and various cults to this Christ figure appeared. Expressions of gratitude to this figure eventually consolidated into two annual events. The first is a Mass in honor of these images, now known as the Fiesta de Solteras de Septiembre. The second is the annual Passion Play.
The Passion Play is considered to be part of “folk religion,” supported by clergy but not considered to be liturgy. The Passion Play has antecedents in the plays put on by evangelizers to teach the Catholic faith and to get the indigenous to renounce their former beliefs. However, the passion play incorporates areas which were special or sacred to the pre Hispanic world, including the gardens that once belonged to the emperor Cuitláhuac and the hill on which the New Fire ceremony was performed. The Passion Play started as a number of reenactment events held in a number of places in the borough during Lent and Holy Week, including a procession with the Señor de la Cuevita on the fifth Friday of Lent. However, by the early 20th century, one main passion play for the borough had come into existence. According to one local legend, Emiliano Zapata lent his horses for the 1914 version of the play.
Since that time, this Passion Play has become a major event with the participation of 450 actors and attended by 2 million people over the course of the week and 2,000 police to provide security. This includes people from other parts of Mexico, from abroad and from the media. It is the most crowded and best known of its type in Mexico. The most crowded day is Good Friday, but as many as 40,000 are expected on Palm Sunday at the start of the event. The reenactments start on Palm Sunday and last until Easter Sunday with various Biblical scenes related to the life and death of Jesus played out. The most important episodes include the blessing of the palms on Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday in the Cuitláhuac Garden, and Good Friday, with the sentencing, the crown of thorns and the crucifixion. At the Señor de la Cuevita Sanctuary, the scene of the expulsion of the money changers from the temple is re enacted. The Palm Sunday procession proceeds then to the Casa de la Mayordomía in the San Miguel barrio followed by hundreds dressed as Nazarenes and thousands more spectators. After the death of Jesus is played out, the “body” is lowered and taken to the Cuitláhuac Plaza where it is “buried” and “guarded” by people playing Roman soldiers. In 2010, the Passion Play was submitted to UNESCO to become an intangible cultural heritage.
Most Iztapalapa residents seek roles but not all are selected. The most coveted role is that of Jesus, which is selected each year by the Comité Organizador de Iztapalapa. Next is the role of the Virgin Mary. These are reserved for single young people, who do not have children, addictions, tattoos and can demonstrate their Catholic faith. The role of Jesus requires physical conditioning to carry the cross, which weight about 198 pounds. For a year, the chosen Jesus exercises daily as well as prays to prepare physically and spiritually. The Passion and Death are played out at the Cerro de la Estrella, emulating Calvary. The man playing Jesus must carry the cross from the center of Iztapalapa to the summit of the Cerro de las Estrellas to be crucified. The day after Easter Sunday the selection committee meets to choose the next Jesus and Mary.
While this Passion Play is the best known, events related to Holy Week take place in all parts and parishes of the borough including other re-enactments done by children as well as smaller events in Santiago Acahualtepec and Culhuacán which are more recent. Prisoners at the Reclusorio Oriente hold their own Passion Play with the involvement of about 80 people.
Nuevo Fuego Festival
The Festival del Fuego Nuevo (New Fire Festival) is an annual event held in November/December with events such as music, dance, theatre, cinema and art exhibitions. This event is named after the Aztec New Fire ceremony, which was celebrated every 52 years at the summit of the Cerro de la Estrella hill. This was a solemn ceremony when all fires were extinguished with a “new fire” ignited at night to provoke the return of the sun in the morning as well as the mark the beginning of a new 52-year cycle on the Aztec calendar. This “new fire” would then be distributed among the populace. The last ancient ceremony was held in 1507. While named for the ancient New Fire ceremony, the modern version is a cultural festival dedicated to the area's culture past and present. The festival is divided into four “axis” called “Traditions of the Ancient Mexicans,” “The Footsteps of Zapata,” “Sounds of the Underworld” and New Fire and Mexican Contemporary Cinema.”
Carnivals
Various neighborhoods hold celebrations for Carnival, which mostly consists of costumed groups, dance, live music and parades. These communities come together to hold a finale at the end of Carnival.
Other events
To celebrate the Christmas season, the borough sponsors various activities such as Christmas plays, processions “posadas” as well as cultural events such as dance recitals.
History
The borough is named after a city which was founded here in the pre-Hispanic period. "Iztapalapa" comes from Nahuatl and means "in the waters of the banks," referring to its position along the lakeshore, situated partly on dry land and partly over water
Like the pre-Hispanic villages of Xochimilco and Tláhuac, Iztapalapa began as a village on the shores of the lake system and dedicated to farming on chinampas. The first settlements on this side of Lake Texcoco were formed by refugees from the fall of Teotihuacan at the base of the Cerro de Culhuacán hill. These people were led by a chief named Mixcoatl and would become known as the Culhuas. At that time, the area was a peninsula jutting onto the lake formed by the Sierra de Santa Catarina. The first city on this peninsula was Culhuacán on the south side next to the Cerro de la Estrella, which grew to contain various neighborhoods surrounded by chinampas, or artificial islands in the lake used to grow food. These and the exploitation of lake resources was the basis of the city's economy.
Chinampa agriculture would be important in many areas of the Valley of Mexico, including the area of Iztapalapa. Chinampas here were made from reeds, tree branches and lake mud, growing corn, beans and wide variety of vegetables. These chinampas, now known as neighborhoods called Tezontitla, El Bordo, El Moral, Las Largas, Las Cuadradas, Tecorrales, Zapotla and others were separated by small canals and some of them had docks. They were also an ecosystem home to wide variety of land and aquatic flora and fauna, including storks, flowers, trees, reeds, quetzals, frogs, and fish. The chinampas remained in private hands until 1970, when they were expropriated to construct the Central de Abasto, which eliminated them.
Culhuacan was moved to a site called Tollantzingo in the 950s, and shortly after that migrants from Tula came into the area to settle as well, bringing with them the worship of Quetzalcoatl. Other pre-Hispanic settlements in the Iztapalapa area were established and grew as well, including Hitzilopochco (Churubusco), Mexicaltzingo and Iztapalapa. These would be the four main settlements of the area, with close relations that would last into the colonial era, when they were part of the Mexicaltzingo corregimiento. The village of Iztapalapa has its origins in the fall of Teotihuacan in the 8th century. Ancient Iztapalapa has alliances and disputes mostly with the other dominions with economies based on chinampas, such as Xochimilco, Chalco and Mixquic. By the 11th century, the Toltec descendants had become dominant with the area with Culhuacán becoming the capital of a dominion in 1114. The main rulers of this city included Nauhyotl, Cuauhtexpetlatzin, Huetzin, Nonoalcatle and Cuauhtonal who ruled between 1120 and 1251. In the middle of the 13th century, the Toltecs were displaced by the Chichimecas, who ruled it from 1250 to 1400 under various rulers.
One of the tribes that moved into the Valley of Mexico in the 14th century were the Mexica, at a time when the city of Culhuacán was powerful. However, the area was divided into a number of dominions around the lake system of the valley, which vied among themselves for dominance. As late arrivals, the Mexica wandered among the various dominions and were granted permission to settle in Culhuacán territory. They lived together mostly peacefully. However, records indicate that the Mexicas were forced into servitude as punishment for raids by young warriors to carry off women from neighboring settlements. One legend states that problems between the two peoples began when the Mexica asked for and received a Culhua princess, Achitómetla, to become a goddess of war. The ceremony required the woman to be sacrificed, angering Culhuacán. The Mexica were eventually forced off Culhua lands and forced to settle on an island on the west side of the lake, although the stronger city of Culhuacán maintained relations with them. This new settlement, called Tenochtitlan, would begin rising and dominating since its establishment in 1325. The Aztec Triple Alliance would be formed in the early 15th century, as part of the process of uniting the Nahuatl-speaking peoples of the valley.
Part of this process included legitimizing the lineage Tenochtitlan's rulers. These Mexica rulers used the time they spent in Culhuacán territory, and the links formed from it for this purpose. The ruling family could trace its ancestors back to Culhuacán ruler Nahuyotl. This and various marital ties from the past would make these new rulers descendants from the old. This was formalized with the government of Acamapichtli, who was granted the title of “culhua tecuhtli” (Lord of the Culhuas) . The Alliance came to include thirty dominions, with Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tlacopan, with Texcoco dominating the formerly powerful city of Culhuacán as well as Iztapalapa. As Tenochtitlan's power grew, it eventually ruled the new empire alone.
As one of the first members of the Alliance, Iztapalapa was not conquered. It was indirectly ruled by Tenochtitlan as part of a confederation of four city-states (along with Mexicaltzingo, Huitzilopochco and Culhuacán) allied with the Mexica. Later, Itzcoatl’s son, Huehua Cuitlahuatzin would be made ruler of Iztapalapa. Under this arrangement, Iztapalapa did not pay tribute to Tenochtitlan, they did have to supply labor for major projects as well as military service. Iztapalapa was important in pre Hispanic times militarily and religiously as the side of the Huixachtécatl, today called the Cerro de la Estrella. This was the site of the New Fire ceremony, held once every 52 years, beginning anew cycle of years. The ceremony also required the destruction of all household goods to be replaced by new. Women and children would stay at home while the men participated in the distribution of the “new fire.” It was celebrated a total of nine times, with the last one in 1507 (2 acatl by the Aztec calendar). For this last celebration, Moctezuma had a temple construction on the summit called the Ayauhcalli, later named “the church of the New Fire” by the Spanish.
By the time the Spanish arrived, Culhuacán was no longer an important city; rather it had been eclipsed by Iztapalapa as one of the Aztec royal town, chosen as such due to its defensive position. At that time, the area has about 10,000 inhabitants dedicated to chinampa agriculture and the raising of fish and birds. A causeway linking Iztapalapa and Tenochtitlan was one of the most important roads in the area. The construction of this causeway began in 1429 under Itzcoatl, using labor from peoples from the south of the valley such as the Xochimilcas. It consisted of artificial land built up from the shallow lake bottom, rising about a meter and a half over the lake's surface and extending for about . It was wide enough for horses to cross in pairs. The causeway was divided by a fort called Xoloc, made of stone with towers, merlons and gates to control entrance and exit. This causeway also had a branch leading to Coyoacán. Its ruler was Cuitláhuac, born in 1476 as younger brother of Moctezuma Ilhuicamina and son of Axayacatl. Cuitláhuac received the Spanish in Iztapalapa before they went onto Tenochtitlan. They met in a garden which most Aztec lords had as a refuge and to demonstrate culture. In the center of the garden was a large palace made of sandstone and fine woods such as cedar.
In 1519, the Spanish took Moctezuma, Cacamatzin (ruler of Texcoco), Cuitlahuac and other nobles as prisoners. Cortés was then forced to return to Veracruz to face Spanish authorities, leaving Pedro de Alvarado in charge. Alvarado had hundreds of Aztec nobles killed. After Cortés returned, he liberated Cuitláhuac in exchange for supplies, allowing the lord to organize an army against the Spanish. Cuitlahuac succeeded Moctezuma as Aztec emperor and forced the Spanish to flee during the Noche Triste. However, Cuitlahuac was ruler only somewhere between 40 and 80 days according to various records. He spent that time repairing the city of Tenochtitlan as the Spanish regrouped in Tlaxcala. Cuitlahuac died of smallpox in December 1520, with Cuauhtémoc succeeding him.
After the Spanish and their allies regrouped in Tlaxcala, Cortés decided to attack Iztapalapa before besieging the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, in part to secure supplies. The city of Iztapalapa had about 10,000 people with about two-thirds of its structures built over water. Eight thousand Aztecs defended the city on land and on water. Cortés and his indigenous allied burned, massacred and destroyed the city completely, killing 6,000 of the city's residents. But after the battle, when the Spanish let down their guard, Iztapalapa opened water channels to flood the city and drown the invaders. Most of the Spanish survived, but many of their Indian allies did not and were drowned. The Spanish lost all of their gunpowder.
After the Conquest, the pre-Hispanic temples of the area were destroyed, the Iztapalapa and surrounding cities were subjugated by Gonzalo de Sandoval. The process was brutal, as the area was highly loyal to Tenochtitlan, with more than 5,000 people killed by both war and epidemics. By the first census of the Viceroyalty of New Spain in 1552, Culhuacan was down to 817 inhabitants, and 260 in Mexicaltzingo.
Following the destruction of the temples, Augustinians and Franciscans moved in to build churches and monasteries. The Augustinians began construction of the Culhuacán monastery in 1552, built in various stages. It was dedicated to John the Baptist. They founded a school to teach indigenous languages which operated for 100 years. The Franciscans built a monastery in Huitzilopochco as well as small churches in San Marcos Mexicaltzingo and in Santa Marta and Nativitas Tepetlacingo. The churches of San Lucas Evangelista, San Marcos Mexicaltzingo, San Juan Evangelista and the chapels of Calvario and Santa Martha Acatitla were all built over foundations of pre-Hispanic temples which the Spanish had destroyed. These were built with much of the material from the destroyed temples. However, by the end of the 18th century, all of these would be in the hands of normal clergy.
Iztapalapa and several other nearby communities were under the direct control of Mexico City, but shortly after only Iztapalapa would remain so. Mexicaltzingo belonged to the Spanish Empire from early on. Iztapalapa became a tributary of Mexico City, required to provide food, manual labor and more. At the end of the 16th century, it too became property of the Spanish Crown. Other areas of the modern borough were made into encomiendas. Culhuacan came under the control of Cristóbal de Oñate, which remained in the family until the system was abolished. Later in the colonial period, the area would become a corregimiento headed by Mexicaltzingo and later an “alcaldia mayor” as it grew to include areas such as Los Reyes and Santa Marta.
During the colonial period, Iztapalapa was very rural, notable only as one of the primary providers of produce and flowers to Mexico City and its lake and canal transportation. Culhuacán had eighteen villages surrounding it in the pre Hispanic era, butby the 18th century, only San Lorenzo Tezonco and Santiago Acahualtepec remained. In the middle of the 18th century, there were still only 80 families in Iztapalapa, with 31 of them being Spanish. By the end of the same century, that would become 130 indigenous families distributed into nine barrios and three villages. At the end of the colonial period Iztapalapa would also include three haciendas and two ranches. During much of this time, Iztapalapa was also a stopover for travelers between Mexico City and Puebla or Veracruz. There were two main canals through here that connected the area with Chalco and Xochimilco. One of these was the Canal de la Viga, which was an important means of transporting corn, beans, vegetables and more into the capital These canals had control and customs checkpoints which divided Mexico City from rural areas. The most important of these was the La Viga control point due to the merchandise that passed through.
After the Mexican War of Independence, the Federal District of Mexico City was established as the new nation's capital in 1824. The village of Iztapalapa became part of this district at the same time, but the borough had not yet been established. It would remain an autonomous settlement. In 1828, it was one of the municipalities outside of Mexico City proper. The rest of the 19th century would be concerned with disease and the status of the area's water transportation. A cholera epidemic in 1833 prompted the first passion play to be performed in this area, which has been performed since. In the middle of the 19th century, the town of Iztapalapa had 3,416 inhabitants. Drainage of the lakes in the Valley of Mexico would have an effect on the size and arrangement of water transportation. According to records, the ancient “Calzada de los Indios” (Indian Causeway) that linked Iztapalapa and the Villa Guadalupe was destroyed in 1835. Much of what is now the borough was lake or crisscrossed by various canals, which carried barge, canoe and even steamship traffic until the late 19th century. New canals were dug to connect Mexico City with Peñón Viejo, Chalco and San Isidro as well as the villages of Ayotla, Tlapicahua and Tlapacoya. By the end of this century, much of the lake and many of the small canals had dried. The main ones were the Mexicaltzingo canal and those near the Churubusco River. The Mexicalcingo canal was widened for steamships.
The canals would remain a part of the borough until the mid-20th century. Efforts to preserve the system began in 1920, when ejido owners turned over land to construct new ones. In the 1930s, many of the barrios of Iztapalapa were still marked by canals and still grew vegetables, fruits and flowers. Major traffic was confined mostly to the Canal Nacional on the borough's border. However, groundwater pumping started in the 1950s lowered water tables and began the process of destroying the rest of the canals, and most of the chinampas along with them.
Industrialization began in the area in the 1890s but agriculture remained the most important economic activity. Most of the population in the area still lived in poor huts. In 1916, the haciendas and ranches of Iztapalapa were broken up and divided into ejidos; however the area remained extremely poor and there were disputes between Iztapalapa and neighboring Zapotitlán over ejido land. In 1920, the population was over 20,000 Iztapalapa would remain rural and poor until the 1950s, when its population and its urbanization began in earnest. In the 1940s, the urban sprawl of Mexico City had reached sections of the borough and furthering this was promoted by the federal government which favored industry over agriculture. In 1940, the chinampas suffered when the Canal de la Viga was drained, and only runoff from the Cerro de la Estrella was still available. Groundwater pumping dried swamps, allowing for more urbanization.
Iztapalapa had been semi-independent of Mexico City since the colonial era, but politically organized in various ways. It has been part of the Federal District since it was created, but this District was an unstable entity in the Reform War as Liberals, who favored a federalist government, fought with Conservatives, who favored a more centralized regime. Thus much of the borough would either be part of the Federal District or the State/Department of Mexico, depending on who was in power during the first half of the 19th century. The Federal District, including Iztapalapa, would be permanently restored in 1848, and then enlarged to its current dimensions between 1853 and 1854. Since that time, the Federal District has been reorganized several times, usually separating the Mexico City and making the other areas of the District either districts or municipalities. The current borough system was established in 1928. This created the current borough of Iztapalapa, centered on and named over the former municipality of Iztapalapa. This borough's government was appointed by the Mexican federal government until 1970, when borough presidents began to be democratically elected.
From the 1950s to the present, the borough's history has been dominated by its population growth and urbanization, along with the problems that come with it. Before 1970, the area still had various types of flora including forested hills, ponds and other surface water, grasslands and more. Chinampas and other farmland still existed as well. In the 1970s, waves of migrants from other parts of the country began to move into the borough. This prompted the building of a number of large apartment complexes including Unidad Vicente Guerrero, Unidad Ejército de Oriente, Unidad Santa Cruz Meyehualco, Conjunto Urbano Popular Ermita Zaragoza and Unidad Habitacional Ejército Constitucionalista. By 1980, all of the land that could be developed legally was, but the population continued to grow. In the 1990s, the borough had growth rates of over 100% according to INEGI. By 2000, the population of the borough accounted for over 20% of the total of the Federal District, the largest in population. Now almost all of the land in the borough has been urbanized, with only the highest elevations and a few family farm plots without buildings. The only green spaces are parks controlled by local or federal authorities, where various types of trees can still be found.
In 2006, there was a dispute in the election for borough president, between Rafael Acosta Angeles, better known as “Juanito” and Clara Brugada. Juanito and supporters blocked the main entrance to the borough offices, but allowed employees access through other entrances. The protest was to have him declared the winner of borough president elections. In the end, Brugada retained the position.
References
External links
Alcaldía de Iztapalapa website
Boroughs of Mexico City
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tlalpan
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Tlalpan
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Tlalpan (, ) is a borough (demarcación territorial) in Mexico City. It is the largest borough, with over eighty percent under conservation as forest and other ecologically sensitive area. The rest, almost all of it on the northern edge, has been urban since the mid-20th century. When it was created in 1928, it was named after the most important settlement of the area, Tlalpan, which is referred to as “Tlalpan center” (Tlalpan centro) to distinguish it from the borough.
This center, despite being in the urbanized zone, still retains much of its provincial atmosphere with colonial era mansions and cobblestone streets. Much of the borough's importance stems from its forested conservation areas, as it functions to provide oxygen to the Valley of Mexico and serves for aquifer recharge. Seventy percent of Mexico City's water comes from wells in this borough.
However, the area is under pressure as its mountainous isolated location has attracted illegal loggers, drug traffickers, and kidnappers; the most serious problem is illegal building of homes and communities on conservation land, mostly by very poor people. , the government recognizes the existence of 191 of the settlements, which cause severe ecological damage with the disappearance of trees, advance of urban sprawl, and in some areas, the digging of septic pits. The borough is home to one of the oldest Mesoamerican sites in the valley, Cuicuilco, as well as several major parks and ecological reserves. It is also home to a number of semi-independent “pueblos” that have limited self-rule rights under a legal provision known as “usos y costumbres” (lit. uses and customs).
Tlalpan center
What is now called “Tlalpan center” or sometimes “the historic center of Tlalpan” began as a pre-Hispanic village located at the intersection of a number of roads that connected Tenochtitlan (Mexico City) with points south. This village was renamed Villa de San Agustín de las Cuevas in 1645, with the last part “de las Cuevas” referring to the many small caves in the area. During the colonial period, the village was a modest farming village, known for its fruit orchards. However, the forests of the area made it attractive to the elite of Mexico City who built country homes and haciendas here, much as they did in other areas south of the city such as Chimalistac, San Ángel and Coyoacán .
Many of these homes and manor houses of the former haciendas still remain in and round Tlalpan center. As the urban sprawl of Mexico City only began to reach this area starting in the mid-twentieth century, much of the former village has retained its provincial streets, older homes and other buildings with façades of reds, whites, blues and other colors, although a number have been converted into other uses such as cafes, restaurants and museums. This makes the area similar to neighboring Coyoacán, and like this neighbor, Tlalpan center is popular with visitors, especially on weekends as people come to see its provincial main square/garden, mansions, narrow winding cobblestone streets lined with large trees, eat in its restaurants and cafes and visit its many nearby parks and other green areas. One popular area with cafes and restaurants is La Portada, on one side of the main plaza.
Tlalpan center has eighty structures from the 16th to the 20th centuries that have been classified by INAH as having historic value. Some of these include old Tlalpan Hacienda, the former home of the Marquis de Vivanco and the San Agustin parish church. The borough of Tlalpan has sought World Heritage Site status for the area because of these structures, the area's history and the nearby site of Cuicuilco.
The center of this former village is the main square or garden officially called the “Plaza de la Constitución” but better known as the “Jardín Principal” (Main Garden). Visually, what stands out is the large kiosk in the center, but historically more important is the “Arbol de los colgaldos” (Tree of the Hanged). This tree, still alive, was used to hang political enemies and bandits, including those opposed to the invading French Army during the French Intervention in Mexico. On weekends, vendors set up stalls selling handcrafts and other items. To one side of the plaza, there is a cantina called La Jalisciense, one of the oldest in Mexico City, having been in operation for over 135 years.
Facing the Jardín Principal, there is the “Palacio de Gobierno” (Government Palace), which was the site of the government of the State of Mexico, when Tlalpan served as state capital for six years in the early 19th century. Since then, it was used as a barracks for Benito Juárez’s soldiers, a jail, a residence for the Empress Carlota and the site of the Instituto Literario (today the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México) . Today, it serves as the headquarters of the borough, although it is also commonly referred to as the “ex palacio municipal” (former municipal palace) referring to the time when Tlalpan was an independent municipality in the State of Mexico. The current structure was built between 1889 and 1900 in Neoclassical style.
On another side of the main square, there is the San Agustin Church. The village church was established here in 1547 by the Dominicans, but the current structure on the site dates from the 18th century. It has an austere façade and faces the main square. Around it is an atrium, some simple gardens and a patios shaded by fruit trees. A fire at the end of the 19th century destroyed the Baroque altar, replaced with the sober one seen today. This parish is the site of the annual San Agustin de las Cuevas Festival, which is the largest religious event in the borough.
Casa Frissac is located just off the main square. It was built in the 19th century in French style as the residence of Jesús Pliego Frissac. According to local legend, bandit Chucho el Roto lived here at one time. In the 20th century, it belonged to Adolfo López Mateos then it became the site of the Lancaster School, which closed in the 1980s. In the 1950s, it was used as a set for the film Los Olvidados, by Luis Buñuel. Today, the house is still the protagonist for a number of local ghost stories; however, its official function is that of a cultural center called the Instituto Javier Barros Sierra. This center began operations in 2001 after 21,800,000 pesos worth of remodeling, which restored the structure to much of its 19th-century look. The center has hosted art exhibits by photographers, graffiti artists, and more—many with a political message. While the center's authorities insist the center is non-political, members of Mexico's PAN party raised objections to the content in the center's first year.
The Museo de Historia de Tlalpan (Museum of the History of Tlalpan, is housed in a building known as “La Casona” (The Mansion), which dates to 1874. In addition to its age, one of its claims to fame is that it is the site of the first long distance telephone call in Mexico, calling a telephone in the then-separate Mexico City. This call was made on 20 March 1878 and the telephone used to make the call is on display here. The mansion was classified as a historic monument by 1986, and it was converted into the current museum in 2003 after extensive remodeling, which included restoration of the original murals. The museum explores the culture and history of the Tlalpan borough. It also has a permanent collection of art work by Gilberto Aceves Navarro, Alberto Castro Leñero, Isabel Leñero, Javier Anzure Joëlle Rapp and Jorge Hernandez.
The museum was opened to be part of a “cultural circuit” integrated with other facilities such as Casa Frissac. Prior to the opening of this museum, the only other museum (as opposed to a cultural center focused on classes) was the Museo Soumaya, which is private. Much of the museum's collection of historic items was donated by over one hundred individual residents and include documents, photographs, artworks and more. These donations cover the eight rural “pueblos” in the Ajusco area, traditional barrios and the major apartment complexes in Coapa and San Lorenzo Huipulco as well as Tlalpan center. An organization called the Centro de Documentacion Historica de la Delegacion now accepts, organizes and cares for the borough collection of historic items.
Twenty blocks of Tlalpan center have been designated at the “Museo Público de Arte Contémporaneo de Tlalpan (MUPACT), an “open-air” museum of art, which opened in 2006 with eighteen works. The works are displayed on walls, trees, sidewalks and even streets. The borough offers a nominal fee for works selected to be displayed and requires that said works have a “strong social content.” One of the works that has been displayed was when artist Georgina Toussaint convinced the inmates of a Centro de Tratamiento de Varones to draw images of their identity and then displayed the works on the façade of the facility.
A major attraction of the center, not far from the square, is a manor house that belonged to the former Tlalpan Hacienda. The manor was constructed in 1737 around a central courtyard. Although the hacienda no longer exists, the structure is still surrounded by large gardens. The manor house is currently used as a luxury hotel and restaurant, although there are various salons available as well for events. When it was converted to its present use, it was remodeled in “Neo-Mexican” look with touches of Art Nouveau. The main restaurant offers traditional Mexican dishes with chiles en nogada, cabrito (roast goat), escamoles and duck as specialties. It has large gardens filled with peacocks. Much of the interior décor has been modeled in styles from the 19th century and earlier to evoke the grandeur of the area's upper class of that time.
Scattered among the cobblestone streets of the old village are a number of other notable houses and structure from various centuries. The Casa Chata is on the corner of Hidalgo and Matamoros Streets. It was built in the 18th century, with one corner cut off, creating a small façade around the main entrance. The name refers to this feature as “chata” mean flattened, or pushed in. As Tlalpan was the capital of the State of Mexico for six years, a number of constructions related to this function, such as the Casa de Moneda (coin mint) and a government print shop were built and still remain. In the latter, Cuban writer José María Heredia published poems about his stay in Mexico.
Other religious institutions include the Convent of the Capuchinas (the Capuchin Poor Clares), which still functions as a convent, where one can buy cookies made by the resident nuns. There is also the Capilla del Calvario, which was built in the 17th century. The former house of the Count De Regla is found on Congreso Street, and on San Fernando Street, there is a house where José María Morelos y Pavón was held prisoner. Another house on this street was occupied by Antonio López de Santa Anna. A notable market in the area is the Mercado de la Paz, which was built in 1900.
This historic center was designated as a "Barrio Mágico" by the city in 2011.
The borough
Political divisions
Tlalpan is the largest of Mexico City's sixteen boroughs, and vastly larger than the traditional village of Tlalpan. It has a surface of 310 km² and accounts for 20.6% of Mexico City, and a total population of 650,567 inhabitants. It lies at the far south of Mexico City bordering the boroughs of Coyoacán, Xochimilco and Milpa Alta with the state of Morelos to the south and the State of Mexico to the southwest.
Administratively, the borough is divided into five zones: Centro de Tlalpan ( pop. 163,209), Villa Coapa(118,291), Padierna Miguel Hidalgo(148,582) Ajusco Medio (59,905) and Pueblos Rurales(99,447). All of these are divided into neighborhoods variously called “colonias,” “barrios,” “fraccionamientos” or “unidades habitacionales” with the exception of the Pueblo Rurales area, which also contains eight semi independent villages. The far northern zones such as Tlalpan Center, Villa Coapa, and Padierna Miguel Hidalgo are urbanized areas where the sprawl of the city has reach, which the southern sections are still rural. The urbanized areas account for only about 15% of the borough, with the rest belonging to conservation areas or ejido communal lands. Pueblos Rurales is the largest zone, but 83% of the borough population is concentrated in the other four.
Urban areas
The urban sprawl of Mexico City reached the borough of Tlalpan in the mid-20th century, but only the far north of the borough is urbanized. This area accounts for over 80% of the borough population, who live in a mix of middle class residential areas and large apartment complexes for the lower classes. This northern area is crossed by a number of major road arteries such as the Anillo Periférico, Calzada de Tlalpan, Viaducto-Tlalpan, Acoxpa, Division del Norte/Miramontes, which experience extremely heavy traffic during rush hour. The highway connecting Mexico City with Cuernavaca also passes through the borough. Intersections of these major roads have large commercial and retail complexes such as that of Avenida Insurgentes and Anillo Periferico, which has several of these complexes, as this is a major highway connection for the south of the city.
Traffic and parking are the most serious issues for the areas in the urban areas, as the borough struggles to keep up with the demand but also keep areas such as Tlalpan Centro at least somewhat provincial. Parking problems are greatest in Ajusco Medio, Padiernoa, Pedregales and Colonia Miguel Hidalgo. Traffic problems are worst in Tlalpan center where the narrow streets get jammed by the vehicles of both residents and visitors, especially around the main plaza. The increasing popularity of this area with visitors makes the situation worse on weekends. In the urban areas, problems are similar to that in other parts of Mexico City and include carjacking, illegal firearms, muggings, graffiti, deterioration of infrastructure. Most crime is reported in the Villa Coapa with Tlalpan center coming in second.
Rural communities
The rest of the borough is filled with forested areas, rugged mountains and small communities, some of which have had a way of life little changed since colonial times. The Pueblos Rurales Zone contains only about one sixth of the borough's population, with the most important concentrations of people being the eight semi-independent communities. These villages are San Miguel Topilejo, San Pedro Mártir, San Andrés Totoltepec, San Miguel Xicalco, San Miguel Ajusco, Santo Tomás Ajusco, Magdalena Petlacalco, and Parres El Guarda.
These “pueblos” govern much of their local affairs through “usos y costumbres,” modern legal recognition of the old village governing structures still in place, many of which use some form of direct democracy. This is in stark contrast to areas such as Villa Coapa, where almost all local decisions are made by representatives. Because of the rugged terrain, few roads and little police protection, these settlements are isolated. While protected from some of crime problems that affect their urban counterparts, this isolation has made the area attractive for drug runners bringing their merchandise into Mexico City, for kidnappers, illegal logging and more, which has led to a number of murders in the area.
Many of high peaks between the borough and the State of Mexico are used as lookouts for criminal organizations. Because of this, the borough ranks ninth in criminal activity. The largest problem is illegal settlements. An estimated 191 forested and other areas have been taken over by about 8,000 families. Some of these communities are over twenty years old. Although some of the illegal construction represents individuals trying to claim a large tract, most of it is shantytowns for the poor with few or no services.
Geography and ecology
Tlalpan is located between the mountains that separate Mexico City from the states of Morelos and Mexico and the rocky areas of San Angel, Ciudad Universitaria and the delegation of Coyoacán. The south of the borough consists of the mountain ranges of Chichinautzin and Ajusco, which preserve most of the forested areas remaining in Mexico City. Fifteen of mountains in this area reach at least 3,000 masl, which include the two highest: Cruz del Marqués (3,930masl) and Pico del Aguila (3,880masl) . The borough, like the rest of the Valley of Mexico, lies on central part of the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt .
Much of the geology of the area formed when the Xitle volcano erupted in 100 CE, which created numerous caves and formed the basis of the volcanic soil that, 600 years later, makes the area's agriculture so productive. The borough has two types of soil: rocky in higher elevations and—in lower areas—less solid and containing more groundwater, making it somewhat spongy. The area experiences regular seismic activity, mostly of low intensity, which is believed mostly from small ancient faults reactivated by regional stresses, or by the sinking of the Valley of Mexico. The south of the Valley, including Tlalpan, is also affected by the underground movement of magma, especially when such contacts the waterlogged regions of the former Lake Xochimilco. Most of these tremors go unnoticed except for those that occur close to the surface such as the one centered 5 km south of the Ciudad Universitaria on 16 October 2005 (mag. 3.1). However, even this one was not felt far from its epicenter. Three areas in the borough are susceptible to seismic activity over 7.5 on the Richter scale: Colonia Isidro Fabela, Villa Coapa, and Tlalpan Centro. These areas are subject to special building inspections and annual earthquake drills. The borough has a warmer and more humid climate than the rest of Mexico City.
, 83.5% of the borough was officially defined as conservation space; however, the increase in illegal settlements and logging has been eroding this percentage. The forests are important to the Valley of Mexico/Mexico City as they not only release oxygen into the air, they are an important area for the recharge of the valley's aquifers. Wells from this borough provide 70% of Mexico City's potable water. The borough has 120 wells for potable water (out of a total of 450 in the city), which extract about 60 liters each second from each well. However, water shortages are relatively common in the borough proper. Most of this is due to the lack of wells, drilling equipment and pipelines to serve local residents, with the city authorities only reserving less than a fifth of its infrastructure budget for works in Tlalpan. One serious outage of water occurred in 2001 when thirty nine of the borough's colonias were without dependable water for two weeks because of the lack of water reserves. Deforestation and other ecological damage make a number of areas susceptible to flooding during the rainy season from June to October. These include Anillo Periférico, Renato Leduc, Boulevard de la Luz and the Picacho Highway. Forest fires are a common problem not only in the Bosque de Tlalpan but also in Parque Fuentes Brotantes, Parque Ciudad de Mexico and the Cerro de Zacatepetl.
Forests and green areas
Degradation of forest areas
Tlalpan has some of the largest forested lands within the Mexico City limits, with over 80% of this borough officially declared to be in conservation. However, only four percent of the borough is considered to be unharmed ecologically. The areas most affected by human activity are at the foot of the Xitle and Xictontle volcanos. The forest under protection in the borough equals 30,000 hectares but it is protected by only thirty-eight forest rangers, each with a territory of about 1,000 hectares of forest, canyons and volcanic areas. Three are provided by the Procuraduría Federal de Protección al Ambiente, fifteen from the Comisión de Recursos Naturales of Mexico City and twenty by the borough itself. These rangers work against illegal loggers, settlers and drug traffickers, who are often armed. The three main problems in the protected areas is illegal logging, the dumping of trash and rubble, squatting, and the theft of volcanic rock (for building materials). Most of the time, all the rangers can do is report the illegal activity to federal authorities but response is spotty.
The major problem is illegal settlements. In all of Mexico City there are over 800 illegal settlements which have some official recognition and occupy almost 60% of lands considered to be protected. These areas may hold as many as 180,000 residents who lack basic services, and cause grave ecological damage. These settlement make trees disappear and furthers urban sprawl. Erosion in conservation areas impedes aquifer recharge and disrupts the flow of surface water.
In Tlalpan, settlements are in Ajusco Medio, Pedregales and Padierna, where the mountainous terrain and/or volcanic rock severely limits the ability to provide services, often leading to residents creating septic pits. Since 2003, illegal settlements in Tlalpan have grown from 148(peligra), to 191 settlements that the government recognizes the existence of. Many settlements have occurred because communal owners of ejidos have illegally sold parts of their land at cheap prices to settlers on the outskirts of the city proper. Most illegal building is done by the very poor but there are also cases in which those which money illegally take over large sections of land for their own use. Illegal settlements have been made by individual families but increasingly developers are working to build illegal settlements in protected areas as well, by buying land and creating subdivisions with services, hoping to fix things with authorities later. In the early 2000s, the borough conducted over 125 operations to evict illegal settlements, dismantling over 440 housing units, but since 2005, the borough no longer has the authority to do this. Many of these illegal settlements seek and then get court orders prohibiting their removal and demanding services, first potable water then drainage.
To moderate the damage, there have been both public and private reforestation efforts. In 2005, forty families worked to plant 1,000 new trees in the Bosque de Tlalpan as part of an annual event sponsored by ecological associations such as Cultura Integral Forestal and Ciencia Cultura y Bosques. This annual event takes place in early July during the beginning of the rainy season and has been repeated for over twenty years. The event was initially sponsored by the Cultura Integral Forestal, made up of principally ex employees of the Loreto y Peña Pobre paper factory. Replanting efforts are focused on the main mountains of the Bosque de Tlalpan as well as the Tenantongo Valley in the same forest, planting mostly holm oak and ash trees. The annual effort has reforested over 1,500 hectares, using seeds encased in a clay ball designed to protect the seed and allow its germination. However, reforestation efforts have not been able to keep up with the deforestation of much of the borough.
Parque Nacional Cumbres del Ajusco
This is a national forest which covers much of the Sierra de Ajusco and Chichinautzin mountain ranges that separate Mexico City from the states of Morelos and the State of Mexico. A portion of this forest is located in the borough of Tlalpan, as well as Milpa Alta and Xochimilco. Much of the range consists of volcanic cones, almost all dormant, with the most prominent being Xitle. Depending on altitude, the climate ranges from temperate to cold, with all but the highest elevations covered in mostly pine forests. In winter, the highest peaks occasionally are covered in snow.
Bosque de Tlalpan
The Bosque de Tlalpan, also called the Parque Nacional Bosque de Pedregal, is fully surrounded by urban area, just south of the Anillo Periférico and between the highways heading to Cuernavaca and to Picacho-Ajusco. The Bosque de Tlalpan is filled with pines, oyamel fir, cedars, oaks and eucalyptus trees, which grow on a solidified lava bed. Wildlife includes eagles, falcons, squirrels and the Mexican mouse opossum. It has been open to the public since 1968. It has parking, restaurants and food stalls in cabins, playgrounds its own Casa de Cultura or cultural center.
One of the attractions in the park is the Tenantono Pyramid, which is located in a remote area of the park. Better known is the old Casa de la Bombas. This is an early 20th-century structure originally built in Colonia Condesa, Tlalpan to house a pump used to extract water from the ground. It ceased being a pump station in 1940 and laid vacant until 1975, when it was disassembled and moved to the Bosque. However, it was not reassembled until 1986 as part of a larger structure which now serves as a “Casa de Cultura” or cultural center. The façade of the center is made of volcanic stone called “chiluca” in French style, which was popular when it was originally built. The additions combine modern and Neoclassical elements but the interior is completely modern. The main areas are the gallery and the forum which host exhibitions and other events. There are also a number of workshops for dance, drama, music, literature and other arts. It is also the home of the Orquesta Juvenil de Tlalpan (Youth Orchestra of Tlalpan) .
Other parks
Fuentes Brotantes de Tlalpan is a national park with an area of about one km2 running alongside a small canyon. It has a small lake and its own Casa de Cultura (cultural center). It has problems with trash and its ecosystem is heavily damaged, although there a number of large Moctezuma cypress trees.
The Parque Ecológico Loreto y Peña Pobre is located on what were the lands of a former paper factory and extends over 21,000m2. This factory, called Loreto y Peña Pobre, was built in the late 19th century (a time called the Porfiriato in Mexico) when many factories and other infrastructure was built in this area. The paper factory shut down in the 20th century, and its main building eventually became a mall, called the Plaza Inbursa (formerly Plaza Cuicuilco), which is known for its various entertainment options such as restaurants and movie theaters. In 1989, the rest of the lands were converted into this ecological park. It contains a model house showing alternative technologies designed to avoid environmental damage. Workshops are offered for children at the site, as well as restaurants serving organic food.
The Parque Juana de Asbaje was established in 1999, on the site of a former psychiatric hospital on land measuring 17,000m2. It has green areas along with a bookstore selling coloring books of pre-Hispanic deities for children and replicas of archeological objects. In 2005, the area generated controversy as the borough sought to relocate the Luis Cabrera Library. Residents initially objected, stating that it would develop too much of what is legally public space. However, later studies found that the land was not originally part of the public land grant, and the expanded library would be beneficial to the community. It was then built and has a collection of 11,000 books.
The Parque Ecologico Ejidal San Nicolás Totolapan is located by the semi-independent rural village of the same name covering over 2,000 hectares. It contains an important reserves of tree species such as pine, oyamel fir, white cedar and holm oak, as well as meadows. It is home to eighty-two species of animals, many of which are migratory species from the United States and Canada. It is open to the public for hiking, skiing, camping, mountain biking and horseback riding.
History
The first major population center in this part of the Valley of Mexico was Cuicuilco, which was populated as early as 1000 BCE. The current site contains an unusual circular pyramid, and is believed to mimic one of the volcanoes in the area. Cuicuilco was destroyed by a volcanic eruption from Xitle in 100 CE, whose lava flow eventually covered much of the south of the Valley of Mexico, creating what is now called the Pedregales del Sur as well as numerous caves and caverns. This also created areas with rich volcanic soil which would allow for agriculture and repopulation 600 years later.
However, the area would not have another major city state, and eventually it was dominated by the Aztecs from Tenochtitlan by the 15th century. It is from their language, Nahuatl, that the name of Tlalpan, would come to be used for the largest village in the area. It means “over the earth” and refers to roads that converged here, linking Tenochtitlan with points south. The borough's glyph or symbol is the one given to the historic center by the Aztecs, a footprint over a symbol for clay soil.
The area come under control of the Spanish after the fall of Tenochtitlan, and the village's name was changed from Tlapan to Villa de San Agustin de las Cuevas in 1645. San Agustin is the area's patron saint, and the name of the parish church built by the Dominicans in the early 16th century. The last part means “of the caves,” referring to the many caves and caverns formed in the area by an eruption of the Xitle volcano in 100 CE. Initially, this area south of the Valley of Mexico was part of lands administered by authorities in Coyoacán. During the colonial period, the old village of Tlalpan was a modest farming village, known for its orchards and extensive forests. The latter made it attractive as a retreat for the wealthy of Mexico City. These elite established country homes and haciendas, which eventually became the economic base of the area. By the 18th century, the village of Tlalpan was large enough to be an ecclesiastical center.
After Independence, the Constitution of 1824, divided Mexico into states, with the area around Mexico City separated as a Federal District. However, the Tlalpan area was initially part of the then very large State of Mexico, which surrounded Mexico City. Tlalpan became the capital of the State of Mexico from 1837 until 1855, when the area was incorporated into the Federal District. U.S. troops passed this way in 1847 on the road to Coyoacán where they fought Mexican troops at the Battle of Churubusco .
After this war, President Antonio López de Santa Anna, expanded the Federal District south over Tlalpan to the southern mountains to make the Federal District more defensible. The village of Tlalpan became the head of what was then called the Southern Prefecture. Foreign troops passed through here again during the French Intervention in Mexico. Mexican opponents of this invasion in the village were hung at the “Arbol de los colgados” in the central plaza or square.
The latter decades are marked by industrialization. In the 1860s and 1870s varies types of modern infrastructure was introduced including telegraph (1866), railroad (1869) and the first long distance telephone in Mexico in 1878. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, (known as the Porfirato), various factories were established in the area including the then well known paper factory called Loreto y Peña Pobre. Today, the site of this factory is an ecological park. However, the village itself remained relatively untouched, filled with cobblestone streets and haciendas owned by the wealthy and filled with orchards growing apples, plums and more. No battle of the Mexican Revolution occurred here, but Zapatista troops passed through, allowing for a historic meeting between Emiliano Zapata and Francisco Villa in Tlalpan.
The borough of Tlalpan was created in 1928, when the Federal District of Mexico City was reorganized into 16 administrative parts called delegaciones (boroughs). At that time, the area was still very rural showing little influence from then-fast growing Mexico City. One reason for this was the area called the Pedregal, the old hardened lava flow from the Xitle volcano on much of the north end of the borough. This made development of much of the borough impossible until the mid-20th century. With the construction of the Jardines de Pedregal by Luis Barragán and the Ciudad Universitaria by Mario Pani, the city began to grow in that direction. The urban sprawl of Mexico City began to reach Tlalpan centero in the middle of the 20th century.
For the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, two facilities were constructed in the delegation. Both were housing facilities for athletes called Villa Olimpica and Villa Coapa, which were turned into permanent houses after the games ended. In the 1990s, borough authorities warned that there was no more space in Tlalpan suitable for development and that preservation of the ecological areas needed to be primary as most of the territory is mountainous, with delicate forests and meadows. However, illegal settlements in conservation areas have continued the advance of urban sprawl into ecologically sensitive and protected areas. Most of these families are poor and the lack of living space pushes them into these areas where there are no services.(mancah) The advance of urbanization means the loss of protected areas and the loss of environmental services provided by the city government. It also increased the demand for borough services such as water, sewerage and roads, despite environmental regulations.
Culture and recreation
The Festival Ollin Jazz Tlalpan Internacional is a series of concerts which has hosted artists such as Enrique Neri, Eugenio Toussaint, Agustín Bernal, Bill McHenry, Brian Allen and Héctor Infanzón. The annual event takes place at the Multiforo Ollin Kan and other venues in the borough.
Six Flags México, the largest theme park in Latin América, is located in Tlalpan. This park is the most popular recreation center in the city and has numerous roller coasters, rides and shows.
Just outside the archeological zone of Cuicuilco is the Centro Cultural Ollin Yoliztli (Movement and Life), where professional classes in music and dance are offered. Its concert hall is one of the sites of the Philharmonic Orchestra of Mexico City. There is another smaller hall dedicated to chamber music as well as galleries for exhibitions.
In the Torre de Telmex (Telmex Tower) the Soumaya Museum was inaugurated in 1998, which features a collection of 19th century sculpture including works by Antonio Rosseti, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Auguste Rodin and Dominico Morone. Soumaya also holds temporary exhibits such as one called “Sanctuarios de lo intimo” which featured more than 600 miniature portraits and reliquaries in 2005. Nearby is the Mercado de Muebles Vasco de Quiroga furniture market where items such as bedroom sets, armoires, bookcases, tables and more are both made and sold.
The borough has sponsored graffiti artists to paint certain public areas such as on and under bridges. The goal is to divert said artists away from illegally defacing property and creating murals and encouraging more talented prospects to more formal training. These graffiti murals have had themes such as the war in Iraq and can be seen at intersections as Insurgentes/Renato Leduc and Calzada Tlalpan/Viaducto Tlalpan as well as on the highway leading to Cuernavaca. The borough has also encouraged the creation of formal graffiti “guilds” to work with authorities on projects.
In 2006, the borough constructed a public pool facility in Colonia Heroes de Padierna. The semi-Olympic sized pool is part of a sports facility that promotes sustainable development; the pool is solar heated. Heroes de Padierna is a lower-class neighborhood and the pool is aimed at attracting children and youths, charging only a small fee, in order to provide alternative recreation and sporting opportunities for families with few resources. The pool was built at a cost of 10,500,000 pesos with another million spent creating a soccer field alongside.
Education
Post-secondary education
Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education, Mexico City is physically small, densely packed campus that is divided into two parts. In one are the academic and administrative facilities, and in the other are the sports facilities. The design of its buildings reflect the various architectural styles that exist in Mexico City from the 17th to the 20th centuries., and is designed to reflect the historic center of this city. The campus offers programs and degrees from the high school/preparatory level to the doctorate level. Most university and graduate school programs focus on the sciences and technology, with a number of business and legal programs. The campus also sponsors research programs in the applied sciences as well as recreational and counseling programs for its students.(campus p19) The campus was founded in 1973 and was originally located in downtown Mexico City.
When the campus had grown sufficiently, land in the southern part of the city was purchases and a new campus built there in 1990. Since then the campus has grown with new programs and new installations. In 2004, the campus and borough authorities signed an agreement to provide online preparatory education open to the public run as a joint venture between ITESM and the borough. The online program is meant to solve some of the problems with providing educational opportunities to the more rural areas of the borough such the communities of Ajusco Medio and Ajusco Alto. In addition, to the online resources, students from the campus can also complete their social service requirement for graduation by tutoring in rural schools in the borough.
One of the most successful of Universidad del Valle de Mexico’s campuses is in the borough. In 2004, UVM expanded its campus and accommodates over 8,000 students. It offers over 25 bachelor's degrees in areas such as law, education, architecture, mechanical engineering and accounting as well as seven master's degrees. The campus contains 154 classrooms, 2 large lecture halls, over 12 computer labs, and a central library with book and digital divisions. The campus also offers sports and other recreational facilities for students.
Primary and secondary schools
Of the 619 schools in the borough, 475 are pre-schools and primary schools. Ninety-seven are technical schools, and forty-seven are academic high schools or preparatory. Only 2.8% of the population over the age of fifteen is illiterate. Educationally, there are as many as ten areas of the borough where the lack of education is considered to be critical, mostly in the very rural isolated areas such as Ajusco Medio and Ajusco Alto areas. One effort to provide better education to the rural area is the first Preparatoria de los Pueblos of Tlalpan. It is public preparatory school was constructed in the Topilejo on a site donated by the village. The borough signed agreements with various universities such as UNAM, UAM and IPN to help provide teaching staff.
National public high schools of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) Escuela Nacional Preparatoria include:
Escuela Nacional Preparatoria 5 "José Vasconcelos"
Public high schools of the Instituto de Educación Media Superior del Distrito Federal (IEMS) include:
Escuela Preparatoria Tlalpan I "Gral. Francisco J. Múgica"
Escuela Preparatoria Tlalpan II "Otilio Montaño" in San Miguel Topilejo
International schools:
Tlalpan campus of Peterson Schools (in San Andrés Totoltepec)
Formerly the British American School
Other private schools:
Colegio Alejandro Guillot
Colegio Franco Español (CFE)
Colegio Madrid
Colegio México Bachillerato
Colegio O'Farrill
Instituto Escuela del Sur (IE)
Colegio Princeton middle and senior high school campus
Colegio Williams Campus Ajusco
La Escuela de Lancaster
The Campus Yaocalli (Centro Escolar Yaocalli), for girls, of the Universidad Panamericana Preparatoria is located in Colonia Miguel Hidalgo, Tlalpan.
Colegio Europeo Robert Schuman
Economy
Tlalpan accounts for 6.8% of Mexico City's workforce. Most are employed in services (48.5%), followed by commerce (25.1%) and manufacturing (15.8%). The borough accounts for 4.4% of Mexico City's GDP, mostly from services (68.6% of the borough GDP), transportation and commerce. The borough accounts for 13.3% of Mexico City's rural economy (agriculture, forestry etc.) producing staple crops such as corn and beans as well as fruits (apples, peaches, etc.) and cut and uncut flowers. Livestock percentages of higher producing 28% of cattle, 23.2% of pigs and 66.9%.
There have been efforts by the city tourism agency to bring more tourism to the borough, especially to Tlalpan center. One proposal is to have the Turibus tour bus system include a stop in the area. However, studies and neighborhood groups have express concerns about the possibility of this leading to deterioration of the area.
Cuicuilco
Cuicuilco is the site of the first large-scale ceremonial center in the Mexican Plateau and one of oldest of any size in the Americas, with occupation starting around 1000 BCE. Cuicuilco means “place of hieroglyphics” in Nahuatl. The most important structure of the site is the Gran Basamento Circular or “Great Circular Base” which has characteristics typical for the Pre-Classic period in Mesoamerican chronology (800BCE to 150AC). There are two access ramps on the east and west sides aligned with the sun on the equinoxes. Today, still on these days, many visitors come dressed in white. Eruptions from the nearby Xitle volcanos destroyed the center and its population relocating to other parts of the Valley of Mexico. These same eruptions covered much of the south of the Valley of Mexico, created the rock bed known as the Pedregales del Sur, which cover parts of Tlalpan. There is a site museum which features small anthropomorphic figures.
Villa Olimpica
Near Cuiculco there is the Villa Olímpica which was constructed in 1968, and a zone with sculptures called the Ruta de la Amistad (Friendship Route), created for the Cultural Olympics of 1968. The Villa Olímpica, along with Villa Coapa, were housing complexes for athletes curing the 1968 Olympic Games, which were subsequently converted into lower class housing afterwards. The Villa Olímpica also contains sporting facilities built at the same time, which currently serve 1,500 visitors per day. In 2003, these faculties were rehabilitated by the Federaciones Mexicanas de Atletismo y de Deportes en Silla de Ruedas and the borough. Some of these include the Olympic track and the indoor gymnasium.
The area also hosts one of Mexico City's artificial beaches, called the Playa Villa Olímpica. On busy days, this beach can receive as many as 5,000 visitors, requiring workers to go through the beach area every two hours just to pick up garbage. However, water quality in the various pools tends to suffer greatly during peak times.
The Pueblos area
The origins of the pueblos comes from the colonial period, when authorities worked to group dispersed bands of indigenous into villages centered around a church. This allowed them more control over the population and to regulate the economy. The pueblos in Tlalpan were mostly founded in the 16th century. In the most rural areas of Mexico City, some of these pueblos still exist intact. In Tlalpan, these include San Pedro Mártir, San Andrés Totoltepec, San Miguel Topilejo, San Miguel Xicalco, Parres el Guarda, Magdalena Petlacalco, San Miguel Ajusco and Santo Tomás Ajusco. The last two are often referred to together as “the two Ajuscos.”
The name Petlacalco means “house of palm mats.” It was one of the first villages established on the slopes of the Ajusco Mountain. It took the prefix of Magdalena to honor Mary Magdalene, as patron saint. The town is centered on a church built in 1725. It has one nave divided into three sections and a presbytery with a Neoclassical altar. On this altar is an image of Mary Magdalene which dates from the 18th century. The wooden main doors of the church were constructed much later, 1968. The town's saint's days are 1 January and 22 July. It also has a patron an image of the Señor de la Columna, an image of Jesus as he was tied to a post for flogging. This image is brought out for procession and other honors on the first Friday of Lent. The village is surrounded by communal lands in which there are forests, surface water and landscapes that the residents are tasked with conserving. It is the site of El Arenal, a sand dune formed by the ash of the Xitle volcano. The area attracts families and other visitors who climb dunes.
Parres el Guarda was founded in the middle of the 19th century as a rail town, when the line connecting Mexico City and Cuernavaca was built. Parres was an important stop for both passengers and freight along this line. The community was founded on lands that belonged to the Juan de las Fuentes Parres Hacienda, giving the town its name. Today, one can still see the ruins of the old hacienda main house. Its economy currently is based on the cultivation of animal feed and is an important producer of this product. It is also known for the sheep meat which is most often used in the preparation of barbacoa in the Mexico City area. Its patron saint is the Virgin of Guadalupe, celebrated on 12 December traditionally with the Chinelos dance, fireworks, cockfights and more.
San Andrés Totoltepec was founded in 1548, when the lands in this area were taken from their indigenous owners and the residents moved to the new village, with its church whose current structure was built in the 18th century. In 1560, the lands were returned for communal possession of the village. The name Nahuatl name Totoltepec mean “turkey hill.” Over half of the village's residents today are dedicated to commerce, one fifth to industry and only a tenth to agriculture and livestock. Of the land surrounding it, 40% is unsuitable for farming due to volcanic rock. The center of the town is its church, dedicated to the Apostle Andrew. It has one nave, choir and presbytery with an altarpiece from the 18th century. This altarpiece has paintings of Christ receiving baptism and the appearances of the Virgin of Guadalupe. At the top, there is an image of Andrew, sculpted in wood. The east wall has a paintings from the 18th century with an image of Saint Isadore the Laborer, along with an image of the Virgin Mary in wood and an image of Christ in cornstalk paste.
San Miguel Ajusco was founded in 1531 by an indigenous leader named Tecpanécatl under the auspices of the Spanish. The center of the village then and now is church founded in dedicated to the Archangel Michael. According to local tradition, this angel has appeared to the village three times. The church's current structure dates to 1707, with an 18th-century wood sculpture of the Archangel in the presbytery. The main portal is made of sandstone with a high relief of Saint James the Greater which as has an inscription in Nahuatl. The archangel is commemorated on 8 May and 29 September, with Chinelos, rodeo and other traditional events. Near the village, there is an area called Las Calaveras at the foot of the Mesontepec Hill, which has a small pyramid called Tequipa.
San Miguel Topilejo was founded by Franciscan friars under Martín de Valencia. Topilejo is from Nahuatl and means “he who wields the precious scepter of command”. One of the main attractions is the San Miguel Arcangel Church on the town's main square. This church was built in 1560, with the cupola redone in the 18th century and the tower finished in 1812. The atrium is built over what probably was a pre-Hispanic platform. It was declared a historic monument by the federal government in 1932. The town's economy is mostly based on farming, producing crops such as vegetables, houseplants, oats and corn, with forty percent of the population dedicated to this. The town and church is dedicated to the Archangel Michael who is honored each 29 September with Aztec dance, Chinelos, wind band and other folk and popular dance. The town also hosts the annual Feria del Elote (Corn Fair) which began in 1985.
San Miguel Xicalco is located just off the Mexico City-Cuernavaca highway. Xicalco comes from Nahuatl and means “house of grass” or “house of plants.” San Miguel is in honor of the Archangel Michael, the patron saint, who is said to have appeared here. The center of the small community is a chapel from the 17th century, which has one nave, of three sections and a presbytery. The image of Michael inside is made of cornstalk paste. Michael is honored twice a year here, on 8 May, when he is said to have appeared and on 29 September, his usual feast day. These days are traditionally celebrated with mole rojo (red mole sauce), tamales, Chinelos, other indigenous and folk dance as well as traditional music. Another story from the area is that during the Mexican Revolution, Zapatista troops took control of the small church to use as a headquarters. Today, there is a small cannon which is said to have been left by these troops.
San Pedro Mártir is believed to have been founded by Franciscan friars during the early colonial period, with its chapel around the end of the 17th or early 18th century. This chapel has a simple portal with little decoration. The entrance arch has a niche with a sculpture of Saint Peter of Verona, the patron saint, with a cross at the crest. This chapel has a single nave with a vault covering it. Above the choir area, there is an Austrian eagle and a medallion with an image of the Archangel Michael. There is also an 18th-century sculpture of Saint Peter of Verona. The main altar contains a crucifix which also dates from the 18th century. The feast day of the patron saint is celebrated on 29 April with traditional dances such as Santiagos, Pastores, Arreiros and Chinelos. Many residents sustain themselves on ejido lands which they gained after the Mexican Revolution, growing staple crops such as corn and beans.
Santo Tomás Ajusco was founded in the early colonial period. Ajusco refers to the many fresh water springs which flow on the side of the Ajusco Mountain. The center of the town has a single nave church with a sculpture of Saint Thomas sculpted in wood, a crucifix made of ivory and an 18th-century sculpture of Saint James on horseback inside. The façade has three portals in sandstone with the center one decorated in plant motifs. The face also has three low reliefs. The atrium is paved with rock taken from the Tequipa pyramid. The feast day of the patron saint is 3 July.
In 2010, the city incorporated 175 hectares of forest in the borough as areas protected by the city in the areas around San Miguel Ajusco and Santo Tómas Ajusco. One reason for this was to put an end to territorial disputes between these two communities as well as with the neighboring community of Xalatlco in the State of Mexico for seventy years. Another reason is to combat continuing illegal logging and settlements.
Notable people
Isaías Juárez (1885–1967), district judge in Tlalpan, vice-president of Tlalpan
Renato Leduc (1897–1986), poet and journalist
References
External links
Alcaldía de Tlalpan website
Images of Tlalpan
Information about Tlalpan, and its political and ecological developments
Boroughs of Mexico City
1928 establishments in Mexico
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xochimilco
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Xochimilco
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Xochimilco (; , ) is a borough (demarcación territorial) of Mexico City. The borough is centered on the formerly independent city of Xochimilco, which was established on what was the southern shore of Lake Xochimilco in the precolonial period.
Today, the borough consists of the 18 , or neighborhoods, of this city along with 14 , or villages, that surround it, covering an area of . The borough is in the southeastern part of the city and has an identity that is separate from the historic center of Mexico City, due to its historic separation from that city during most of its history.
Xochimilco is best known for its canals, which are left from what was an extensive lake and canal system that connected most of the settlements of the Valley of Mexico. These canals, along with artificial islands called chinampas, attract tourists and other city residents to ride on colorful gondola-like boats called around the of canals. This canal and chinampa system, as a vestige of the area's precolonial past, has made Xochimilco a World Heritage Site. In 1950, Paramahansa Yogananda, in his Autobiography of a Yogi, wrote that if there were a scenic beauty contest, Xochimilco would get the first prize.
The city and borough
The borough of Xochimilco was created in 1928, when the federal government reorganized the Federal District of Mexico City into sixteen boroughs. The Xochimilco borough was centered on what was the city of Xochimilco, which had been an independent settlement from the pre-Hispanic period to the 20th century. The area's historic separation from Mexico City proper remains in its culture. While officially part of the city, its identity is more like a suburb. This historic center was designated as a "Barrio Mágico" by the city in 2011. The borough is center-south of the historic center of Mexico City, and bordered by the boroughs of Tlalpan, Coyoacán, Tláhuac and Milpa Alta. It extends over , accounting for 8.4% of the Federal District's territory. It is the third largest borough, after Tlalpan, and Milpa Alta. The borough has an emblem, also known as an Aztec glyph, which is a representation of the area's spongy soil from which two flowering plants emerge. In spite of the serious environmental issues, 77.9% of the territory is designated as ecological reserve, 15.2% as residential and 4.6 as commercial and industrial.
The borough is divided into eighteen “barrios,” which make up the old city of Xochimilco and fourteen communities outside the traditional city called “pueblos.” The barrios are El Rosario, Santa Crucita, Caltongo, San Lorenzo, San Diego, La Asunción, San Juan, San Antonio, Belem, San Cristóbal, San Esteban, La Santísima, La Guadalupita, La Concepción Tlacoapa, San Marcos and Xaltocan, The fourteen pueblos are San María Tepepan, Santiago Tepalcatlalpan, San Mateo Xalpa, San Lorenzo Atemoaya, Santa Cruz Xochitepec, San Lucas Xochimanca, San Francisco Tlalnepantla, Santa María Nativitas, San Gregorio Atlapulco, Santiago Tulyehualco, San Luis Tlaxialtemalco, San Andrés Ahuayucan, Santa Cecilia Tepetlapa and San Cruz Acalpixca. There are also 45 smaller divisions called “colonias” and twenty major apartment complexes. The city acts as the local government for all the communities of the borough, whether part of the city or not. These offices are located on Calle Guadalupe I. Ramirez 4, in the El Rosario area. The borough has of primary roadway and of paved surface. Major thoroughfares include the Xochimilco-Tulyehualco road, Nuevo León, Periférico Sur, Avenida Guadalupe and Calzada México-Xochimilco. However, many of the areas of the borough are still semi-rural, with communities that still retain many old traditions and economic activities. For example, San Antonio Molotlán is noted for textiles and its Chinelos dancers. San Lorenzo Tlaltecpan is known for the production of milk and there are still a large number of stables in the area.
The most notable neighborhoods/communities include Xaltocan, Ejidos de Tepepan, La Noria, Las Cruces, Ejidos de Xochimilco and San Gregorio Atlapulco. San Francisco Caltongo is one of the oldest neighborhoods of the borough. Xaltocán began as a ranch or hacienda that belonged to the indigenous caciques. It was later donated to the San Bernardino de Siena monastery. After the monastery was secularized, it became hacienda land again, but over time, parts were sold and it became the current area of Xochimilco. The church for this community was built in 1751 as the hacienda chapel. Originally, it was dedicated to Jesus, then Candlemas and finally the Virgin of the Sorrows (Virgen de los Dolores). It officially became a sanctuary in 1951, declared by the archbishop of Mexico. In 1964, Xaltocán became a parish and in 1976, this church became the official parish church. The main celebration of the church is to an image of the Virgin Mary, which is said to have miraculously appeared in the pen of a turkey kept by an old woman.
In 2005, the borough had a population of 404,458, 4.6% of the total population of the Federal District. The growth rate is 1.8% for the past decade, lower than the decade previous. However, a large percentage of the borough's population lives in poverty and many live illegally on ecological reserves, lacking basic services such as running water and drainage. In the past, houses in the area were constructed from adobe and wood from juniper trees, but today, most constructions are boxy cinderblock constructions, many of which are not painted. By the 2010 census its population had grown to 415,007 inhabitants, or 4.69% of Mexico City's total.
What was the city of Xochimilco, now sometimes called the historic center of the borough, began as a pre-Hispanic city on the southern shore of Lake Xochimilco. After the Conquest, the Spanish built the San Bernardino de Siena monastery and church, which is still the center of the borough. The main street through the center of town, Guadalupe I.Ramirez, was originally a land bridge connecting this area, then on an island, to the causeway that led to Tenochtitlan (Mexico City). As the lake dried, the bridge became road, and it was called the Puente de Axomulco in the colonial era. It received its current name in the 1970s to honor a delegate of the borough. This town center also has a large plaza and to the side of this, a large area filled with street vendors, many selling ice cream. There is also a “Tianguis de Comida” or market filled with food stalls. This center underwent renovations in 2002 at a cost of sixty million pesos. Drainage and sidewalks were improved and security cameras installed. To improve the area's look for tourists, businesses in the center agreed with the borough and INAH to change their façades to certain colors.
Much of the borough's land is former lakebed. Its main elevations include Xochitepec and Tlacualleli mountains along with two volcanoes named Teutli and Tzompol. It contains two natural rivers called Santiago and Tepapantla along with the various canals, which is what is left of the lake. The elevated areas of the borough contain small forests of ocotes, strawberry trees, cedars, Montezuma cypress and a tree called a “tepozan.”
Xochimilco, along with other southern boroughs such as Milpa Alta and Tlalpan, have lower crime statistics than most other areas of the Federal District. However, crime, especially that related to kidnapping and drug trafficking has been on the rise, and more rural communities have taken to vigilante justice. Residents state that this is necessary because there is insufficient police protection. Xochimilco has only one policeman for each 550 residents on average, and there have been complaints that police have taken over 30 minutes to respond to calls. The borough has a population of 368,798, but only 670 police and 40 police cars. There was one case of vigilante justice in 1999, when a youth accused of robbery was caught and beaten by residents before handed over to police. But the police did not pursue the charge.
The Xochimilco Light Rail line, locally known as El Tren Ligero, of STE, provides light rail service connecting the borough to the Mexico City Metro system.
Canals, chinampas and trajineras
Lake Xochimilco and the canal system
Xochimilco is characterized by a system of canals, which measure about a total of 170 km2. These canals, and the small colorful boats that float on them among artificially created land called chinampas, are internationally famous. These canals are popular with Mexico City residents as well, especially on Sundays. These canals are all of what is left of what used to be a vast lake and canal system that extended over most parts of the Valley of Mexico, restricting cities such as Tenochtitlan (Mexico City) and Xochimilco to small islands. This system of waterways was the main transportation venue, especially for goods from the pre-Hispanic period until the 20th century. In the pre-Hispanic period, parts of the shallow lakes were filled in, creating canals. Starting in the early colonial period, the interconnected lakes of the valley, including Lake Xochimilco, were drained. By the 20th century, the lakes had shrunk to a system of canals that still connected Xochimilco with the center of Mexico City. However, with the pumping of underground aquifers since the early 20th century, water tables have dropped, drying canals, and all that are left are the ones in Xochimilco. The canals are fed by fresh water springs, which is artificially supplemented by treated water. This because water tables are still dropping and human expansion and filling in of canals is still occurring, threatening to have the last of these canals disappear despite their importance to tourism.
These remaining canals and their ecosystem was declared a World Heritage Site in 1987, with the purpose of saving them. An important part of this ecosystem is a willow tree called a “ahuejote” that is native to the shallow waters of the lake/canals. These stem erosion, act as wind breakers and favor the reproduction of a variety of aquatic species. Some of these endemic species include a freshwater crayfish called an acocil, and the Montezuma frog. However, the most representative animal from these waters is the axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum). This amphibian was used as a medicine, food and ceremonial object during the Aztec Empire. It was considered to be an incarnation of the god Xolotl, brother of Quetzalcoatl. It has been studied due to its abilities to regenerate limbs and other body parts. It can also reach sexual maturity as a larva, which no other amphibian can do. While mostly aquatic, it does have limited ability to breathe air. As of 2003, there were only 600 axolotls known to exist in the wild. Most of the threat to the species is loss of habitat and pollution, but the introduction of non-native fish such as tilapia has also had disastrous effects on the population of this and other species. Conservation efforts include research and environmental education. The Grupo de Investigación del Ajolote en Xochimilco (GIA-X) is a nonprofit research group dedicated to the preservation of the axolotl, which is in danger of extinction. It works to better understand the creature as well as with the local community to protect what is left of its habitat. In addition to species that live in the area year round, the wetlands here host about forty percent of the migratory bird species that arrive to Mexico, roughly 350, use the wet areas around Xochimilco for nesting. Many of these come from the United States and Canada. However, much of this habitat has been urbanized. About 700 species have been found in the area overall. Some of the migratory species include pelicans, storks, buzzards and falcons.
The destruction of the last of these canals began in the 1950s. At that time, groundwater pumping under the city center was causing severe subsidence. These wells were closed and new ones dug in Xochimilco and other southern boroughs. High rates of extraction have had the same effect on water tables and canals began to dry. Since then reclaimed wastewater has been recycled to flow into the Xochimilco canals to supplement water from natural sources. However, this water is not potable, containing bacteria and heavy metals and the canals still receive untreated wastewater and other pollution Another major problem, especially in the past two decades has been the population explosion of Mexico City, pushing urban sprawl further south into formerly rural areas of the Federal District. This prompted authorities to seek World Heritage Site status for the canals and the pre-Hispanic chinampa fields to provide them with more environmental protection.
This was granted in 1987, but these same major environmental problems still exist. A 2006 study by UNESCO and Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana has shown that there are still very high levels of pollution (both garbage and fecal matter) in the canals and there still a rapid rate of deterioration 2,000 hectares of protected area. UNESCO has placed the most blame for the problems on the proliferation of illegal human settlements in the protected zone. Each year the borough loses six hectares of former lakebed to illegal settlements. According to the borough, about 90,000 people in Xochimilco live in illegal settlements, such as those in ecological zones, and 33,804 families live illegally on the chinampas. The most problematic are those closest to the canals, which cause the most pollution. The area is also sinking per year due to over pumping of groundwater, and canals are being filled in illegally. The deterioration is happening so fast, that UNESCO has threatened to pull Xochimilco World Heritage Site status.
Other major problems facing the canal system is the damage by introduced species and disease destroying native ones. Water lilies were introduced to the canals from Brazil in the 1940s. Since then, they have become a serious problem as their overgrowth depletes minerals and oxygen from the water. Up to 400 tons of the plant has been extracted from the canals monthly. In 2006, a Brazilian insect (Anthonomus grandis) was introduced to the canals to help control the plant. However, some need to be maintained because the axolotls are using them for reproduction purposes. Introduced species include carp and tilapia, which were introduced in the 1960s. However, these have been very detrimental to the native ecosystem, especially the axolotl, whose eggs they eat. Despite tons of the fish being caught in the canals, they are still a serious problem. Another major problem is the loss of trees, especially junipers in the ecological zone. Over sixty percent of the area is considered to be serious deforested and eighty percent of the junipers have the parasitic plant mistletoe.
Since being declared a World Heritage Site, there have been attempts to rescue the canal system. The first major effort occurred between 1989 and 1994, which was called the “Rescate Ecológico.” It had the goal of constructing a large artificial lake for tourism and sports covering 360 hectares, ten times the size of the lake in Chapultepec Park. These would be divided into two parts called the Ciénega Grande and Ciénega Chica on the side of the Periférico Sur. It would also include the creation of a chinampa zone and areas for culture and commerce and elevated buildings over the two sides of the Periférico Sur similar to those in the San Jerónimo area. However, this plan was stopped by agricultural communities in the area, which have a long history of defending their rights. However, since then, the area has been urbanized. It was replaced by a much smaller lake, with ecological area and plant market. In 2008, borough authorities began a reforestation program over 5,000 hectares of chinampas and forested areas at a cost of 20 million pesos. This program includes the cutting of non native species such as eucalyptus and certain pines and cedars to eradicate plagues associated with them. However, residents near forests such as in Nativitas oppose the cutting of healthy trees. These will be replaced by native species, especially junipers in the chinampa areas. However, it is still estimated that because of the continuance of urban sprawl, the remaining canals and protected land will disappear within fifty years.
Chinampas
The canals of Lake Xochimilco were initially created along with artificial agricultural plots called chinampas. Chinampas were invented by the pre-Hispanic peoples of the region around 1,000 years ago as a way to increase agricultural production. On the shallow waters of the lakes, rafts were constructed of juniper branches. Onto these rafts floating on the water, lakebed mud and soil were heaped and crops planted. These rafts, tied to juniper trees, would eventually sink and a new one be built to replace it. Over time, these sunken rafts would form square or rectangular islands, held in place in part by the juniper trees. As these chinampa islands propagated, areas of the lake were reduced to canals. These “floating gardens” were an important part of the economy of the Aztec Empire by the time the Spanish arrived.
Today, only about 5,000 chinampas, all affixed to the lake bottom, still exist in their original form, surrounded by canals and used for agriculture. The rest have become solid ground and urbanized. In the center of Xochimilco, there are about 200 chinampas, covering an area of 1,800 hectares. However, one reason the number has decreased is that smaller chinampas have been combined to create larger ones. While there are still those who maintain chinampas traditionally, and use them for agriculture, the chinampa culture is fading in the borough, with many being urbanized or turned into soccer fields and sites for housing and businesses. The deterioration of many of these chinampas can be seen as their edges erode into the dark, polluted water of the canals. The most deteriorated chinampas are located in the communities of Santa María Nativitas, Santa Cruz Acalpixca, San Gregoria Atlapulco, and Ejido de Xochimilco. Together, these have a total of thirty eight illegal settlements. To repair a number of chinampas, the borough, along with federal authorities, has reinforced of shoreline, of the that exist in the lake area. This involves the planting of juniper trees and the sinking of tezontle pylons into the lakebed.
These remaining chinampas are part of the Xochimilco World Heritage Site. Have since changed use and become residences and businesses. Those that remain agricultural are mostly used as nurseries, growing ornamental plants such as bougainvilleas, cactuses, dahlias, day lilies, and even bonsai. As they can produce up to eight times the amount of conventional land, they are still an important part of the borough's agricultural production. There have been various attempts to save the remaining chinampas, including their cataloging by UNESCO, UAM, and INAH in 2005, and various reforestation efforts, especially of juniper trees.
Island of the Dolls
About an hour long canal ride from an embarcadero lies Isla de las Muñecas, or the Island of the Dolls. It is the best-known chinampa, or floating garden, in Xochimilco. It belonged to a man named Don Julián Santana Barrera, a native of the La Asunción neighborhood. Santana Barrera was a loner, who was rarely seen in most of Xochimilco. According to the legend, one early morning a young girl and her sisters went swimming in the canal but the current was too strong. The sisters got separated and the current pulled one of the sisters all the way down the canal when Santana Barrera discovered the young girl while she was drowning. When Santana finally got to her she was already dead. He also found a doll floating nearby and, assuming it belonged to the deceased girl, hung it from a tree as a sign of respect. After this, he began to hear whispers, footsteps, and anguished wails in the darkness even though his hut—hidden deep inside the woods of Xochimilco—was miles away from civilization. Driven by fear, he spent the next fifty years hanging more and more dolls, some missing body parts, all over the island in an attempt to appease what he believed to be the drowned girl's spirit.
After Barrera's death in 2001—his body reportedly found in the exact spot where he found the girl's body fifty years before—the area became a popular tourist attraction where visitors bring more dolls. The locals describe it as "charmed"—not haunted—even though travelers claim the dolls whisper to them. The dolls are still on the island, which is accessible by boat. The island was featured on the Travel Channel show Ghost Adventures and the Amazon Prime show Lore. It was also featured in BuzzfeedUnsolved where Ryan and Shane visited the island with a guide, who lead them around the island during the night.
History
The name "Xochimilco" comes from Nahuatl and means "flower field." This referred to the many flowers and other crops that were grown here on chinampas since the pre-Hispanic period.
The first human presence in the area was of hunter gatherers, who eventually settled into farming communities. The first settlements in the Xochimilco area were associated with the Cuicuilco, Copilco and Tlatilco settlements during the Classic period. The Xochimilca people, considered one of the seven Nahua tribes that migrated into the Valley of Mexico, first settled around 900 BC in Cuahilama, near what is now Santa Cruz Acalpixca. They worshipped sixteen deities, with Chantico, goddess of the hearth; Cihuacoatl, an earth goddess; and Amimitl, god of chinampas, the most important.
The Xochimilcas were farmers and founded their first dominion under a leader named Acatonallo. He is credited with inventing the chinampa system of agriculture to increase production. These chinampas eventually became the main producer, with crops such as corn, beans, chili peppers, squash, and more. The city of Xochimilco was founded in 919. Over time, it grew and began to dominate other areas on the south side of the lakes such as Mixquic, Tláhuac, Culhuacan and even parts of what is now the State of Morelos. Xochimilco had one woman ruler, which did not happen anywhere else in Mesoamerica in the pre-Hispanic period. She is credited with adding a number of distinctive dishes to the area's cuisine, with inclusions such as necuatolli, chileatolli (atole with chili pepper), esquites and tlapiques.
In 1352, then emperor Caxtoltzin moved the city from the mainland to the island of Tlilan. In this respect it was like another island city in the area, Tenochtitlan. Although no longer an island, the city center is still in the same spot. In 1376, Tenochtitlan attacked Xochimilco, forcing the city to appeal to Azcapotzalco for help. The conquest was unsuccessful, but Xochimilco was then forced to pay tribute to Azcapotzalco. Tenochtitlan succeeded in conquering Xochimilco in 1430, while it was ruled by Tzalpoyotzin. Shortly thereafter, Aztec emperor Itzcoatl built the causeway or calzada that would connect the two cities over the lake. During the reign of Moctezuma Ilhuicamina, the Xochimilcas contributed materials and manpower to construct a temple to Huitzilopochtli. They also participated in the further conquests of the Aztec Empire such as in Cuauhnáhuac (Cuernavaca), Xalisco and the Metztitlán and Oaxaca valleys. For their service, Ahuizotl, granted the Xochimilcas autonomy in their lands, and the two cities coexisted peacefully. Aztec emperors would pass by here on royal barges on their way to Chalco/Xico, then an island in Lake Chalco. For centuries Xochimilco remained relatively separate from Mexico City but provided much of the larger city's produce.
Aztec emperor Moctezuma Xocoyotzin imposed a new governor, Omácatl, onto Xochimilco due to the arrival of the Spanish, but this governor was forced to return to Tenochtitlan, when the emperor was taken prisoner. He was then succeeded by Macuilxochitecuhtli, but eighty days later he too went to Tenochtitlan to fight the Spanish alongside Cuitláhuac. He was followed by Apochquiyautzin, who remained loyal to Tenochtitlan. For this reason, Hernán Cortés decided to send armies to subdue Xochimilco before taking Tenochtitlan. This occurred on 16 April 1521. During the battle, Cortés was almost killed when he fell off his horse, but he was saved by a soldier named Cristóbal de Olea. The battle was fierce and left few Xochimilca warriors alive. The invaders later raped and pillaged the city. According to legend, it was after this battle that Cuauhtémoc came to Xochimilco and planted a juniper tree in the San Juan neighborhood to commemorate the event.
Pre-Hispanic Xochimilco was an island connected to the mainland by three causeways. One of these still exists in the form of Avenida Guadalupe I.Ramirez, one of the city's main streets. This causeway led to the main ceremonial center of the town, which was called the Quilaztli. The Spanish destroyed the Quilaztli during the Conquest, and replaced it with the San Bernardino de Siena Church, which would become the social and political center of the colonial city. The city in turn, was the most important settlement in the south of the Valley of Mexico in the colonial era. It became a settlement of Spanish, criollos and mestizos, with the indigenous living in rural communities outside of the city proper.
During the Siege of Tenochtitlan, Hernán Cortés attacked the city and the "great number of warriors" in it. During the battle, Cortes was knocked from his horse, and almost captured by the Mexicans. The following day, Guatemoc sent ten thousand warriors by land and two thousand by canoe to attack the Spaniards, followed by ten thousand reinforcements. The Mexicans were defeated, and Cortes was able to capture five Mexican captains. Cortes then proceeded with his march.
After the Conquest, Apochquiyauhtzin, the last lord of Xochimilco, was baptized with the name of Luís Cortés Cerón de Alvarado in 1522 and he was allowed to continue governing under the Spanish. Evangelization was undertaken here by Martín de Valencia with a number of others who are known as the first twelve Franciscans in Mexico. Their monastery was built between 1534 and 1579, along with many chapels and churches in the Xochimilco area, a hospital in Tlacoapa and a school. Xochimilco was made an encomienda of Pedro de Alvarado in 1521 and remained such until 1541.
The Spanish used the lakes and canals of the Valley of Mexico much as the indigenous did, at least at first. Xochimilco remained an important agricultural area, shipping its produce to Mexico City in the same ways. However, problems with flooding, especially the Great Flood of 1609 in Mexico City and Xochimilco, spurred the Spanish to begin projects to drain the lakes. As a result, these lakes, including Lake Xochimilco, has suffered one of the most radical transformations in the history of urbanization. Five hundred years ago, the lake extended and contained of chinampas and of canals. Today, there are only of chinampas and of canals, and they are still disappearing.
Xochimilco was granted the title of city by Felipe II in 1559. Through much of the colonial era, the city's native population was decimated by epidemics, especially typhoid. Despite this, and because of the apparent acceptance of Christianity, the Xochimilcas were permitted to retain a number of their traditions and their identity as a people. The area remained mostly indigenous for much of the colonial period. Its importance as an agricultural center with easy access to Mexico City meant that in the 17th century, about two thousand barges a day still traveled on the waters that separated the two areas.
In 1749, Xochimilco became a "corregimiento" or semi-autonomous area from Mexico City and would remain so until Independence. It would also increase in importance as a stopover for those traveling between Mexico City and Cuernavaca. Also during this time, Xochimila Martín de la Cruz, wrote Xihuipahtli mecéhual amato, better known as the Aztec Herbal Book or the Cruz-Badiano Codex. It is the oldest book on medicine written on the American continent. It was translated into Latin by Juan Badiano. The original is in the Vatican.
After Independence, Xochimilco became a municipality in what was then the State of Mexico. It would later become a part of the Federal District of Mexico City after the Mexican–American War, when this district was expanded.
Manuel Payno in his novel "Los bandidos del río Frio" related a journey through here between San Lázaro and Chalco. In 1850, the first steam-powered boat traveled through here, connecting Mexico City with Chalco. Steam powered ships remained in Xochimilco waters from then until the 1880s, when they faded from use. Before, during and after, Xochimilco continued to make more traditional rafts, canoes and trajineras, pushed along the shallow waters by a pole.
Up through the centuries, the valley lakes continued to shrink but there were still canals that linked Xochimilco to the center of Mexico City. In the late 19th century, Mexico City had outgrown its traditional water supplies and began to take water from the springs and underground aquifers of Xochimilco. Degradation of the lakes was fastest in the early 20th century, when projects such as the Canal del Desagüe were built to further drain the valley. This and excessive aquifer pumping lowered water tables and canals near Mexico City center dried up and cut off an inexpensive way to get goods to market for Xochimilco. This had a major effect on the area's economy, along with the effects of the loss of fishing for communities such as Santa Cruz Acalpixca, San Gregorio Atlapulco and San Luis Tlaxialtemalco.(rescartarlo) In 1908, an electric tram serves was inaugurated that was supposed to reach Tulyehualco, but never did.
During the Mexican Revolution, the first Zapatistas came into the borough through Milpa Alta. They burned areas in Nativitas and San Lucas in 1911 and then stayed without further attacks. They then took the city of Xochimilco in 1912, burning the southern part. The Zapatistas then controlled most of what is now the borough. On 23 April 1913, 39 youths were shot to death in a small alley in San Lucas Xochimanca. A plaque commemorates the site. When the Zapatistas were confronted by troops loyal to Venustiano Carranza in Cuemanco, they damaged pumps and set the center of Xochimilco and the original municipal palace on fire. In 1914, Francisco Villa and Emiliano Zapata met in San Gregorio and signed an alliance called the Pact of Xochimilco.
After the war, Xochimilco became a borough when the Federal District was reorganized, including the communities of Mixquic, San Juan Ixtayopan and Tetelco. These and other territories would be lost and its final dimensions attained in 1931.
In the 1920s, Xochimilco lost control of most of its water supply, taken by the city for its needs. The urban sprawl of Mexico City reached Xochimilco in the mid 20th century and it still affects the borough today. In the 1970s, the federal government began to replace the lost supply to the canals with treated water from the nearby Cerro de la Estrella. This is most of the water that now flows in the canals. The treated water is clear, but not potable due to bacteria and heavy metals. However, it is used to irrigate crops grown on the chinampas, even though the canals are further polluted by untreated sewage and garbage. The biggest threat to the canals and their ecosystem is uncontrolled sprawl, mostly due to illegal building on conservation land. These settlements are polluting canals with untreated garbage and waste, and filling in canals to make "new land." There are thirty-one illegal settlements in the historic center, with 2,700 constructions. Ten of these are in the chinampas of San Gregorio Atlapulco, San Luis Tlaxialtemalco, Santa Cruz Acalpixca, and Santa María Nativitas. The borough and UNESCO are at odds over what to do about the 450 hectares of illegal settlements. UNESCO demands their eviction, but the borough says this would be too difficult and better to legalize the settlements, putting efforts into preventing more.
Religion
From the pre-Hispanic period to the present, religion has pervaded the life of people in this region. Since it was imposed in the early 16th century, the Catholic religion has permeated and molded popular culture. As in other parts of Mexico, indigenous beliefs and practices, such as those of the Xochimilca, were not completely eradicated. Instead, many were integrated and readapted to Catholicism. One example of this is the building of churches over former temples and other sacred sites. These churches' decorations often have indigenous elements as well. Despite the fact that 91% of the population self identifies as Catholic, there are still many indigenous traditions related to the agricultural cycle. A more important syncretism has been the many religious festivals that occur through the year, and the means by which these festivals are sponsored and organized. Much of religious practice in the borough is through symbolic processes that work to produce a kind of social cohesion. The most visible of these are the large civic/religious festivals.
There is some religious plurality in the borough although they represent a very small minority of the population. There are thirty six non-Catholic congregations in the borough with about seventy places of worship. Almost all are Protestant or Evangelical groups established by missionaries, mostly from the United States. The first was established 120 years ago, but most have been established in the last twenty years, with a small but growing number of followers. However, since almost all social activity is related to this popular Catholic festival calendar, intolerance of religious minorities generally takes the subtle form of being excluded from events, although a number of non-Catholics participate in festivities anyway.
These mostly religious festivals and other traditions have been maintain despite the urbanization of the borough. The calendar of celebrations here is extensive. Some are civic or political events such as Independence Day or local celebrations such as the birth of poet Fernando Celada, the birth of Quirino Mendoza y Cortés, composer of “Cielito Lindo,” and the commemoration of the meeting of Francisco Villa and Emiliano Zapata on December 4 in this area. However, most events are tied to religious activity and tradition, organized by volunteers called mayordomos. The mayordomia system is the most important social structure in the borough. The primary task of these volunteers is to sponsor and organized any many religious festivals and celebrations that occur through the year, as well as other duties. This may be paid for by collecting donations or paid for directly by the mayordomo. There are 422 officially recognized festivals during the year, including those local to specific communities. One of these more localized festivals is on May 3, Day of the Holy Cross, which has been celebrated in communities such as Santa Cruz Xochitepec (or Magdalena Xochitepec), Santa Cruz Acalpixcan and the center of Xochimilco for over 400 years.
However, the best known mayordomo position is not for a festival, but rather for the care of an image of the child Jesus called the Niñopa. The image is over 435 years old and has a following of about 25,000 in the Xochimilco area. It measures and weighs less than a kilo. The name “Niñopa” comes from the Spanish word “niño” (child) and the Nahuatl suffix “-pan” (place) to mean “child of the place.” The image was thought to have been made of orange tree wood, but this was proven false when the image was dropped and a finger damaged, allowing for the taking of a small sample. The analysis showed that it was made in the local area of a tree called a chocolín, in the 16th or 17th century. The prestige for becoming a mayordomo for the Niñopa is so great, that the waiting time to become one is decades long. The mayordomo receives nothing for the care of the image and pays all expenses out of pocket, which includes building rooms for the image to stay, and sponsoring the nearly daily events dedicated to this image. The annual cycle begin on February 2, when the image is received by a new mayordomo. During the year, the image visits homes and hospitals, accompanied by Chinelos dancers. In addition to the Niñopan, other important child Jesus figures include the Niño Dormidito in the Xaltocan neighborhood, the Niño de Belen at the Salitre Embarcadero, the Niño Tamalerito, and the Niño de San Juan. These images, along with the Niñopan, are celebrated together on April 30, at an event called the Niños Sagrados. There are various replicas of the Niñopa, which are owned by former mayordomos.
Fifteen of the eighteen pueblos of Xochimilco hold major events for Day of the Dead, including costume parades, exhibitions, especially of altars, in cemeteries, museums, plazas and more. The Dolores Olmedo Museum has an annual monumental altar to the dead for the occasion As per traditions, the cemeteries of smaller communities such as San Francisco Tlalnepantla, Santa Cruz Xochitepec and Santa María Nativitas are lit with the glow of numerous candles and loved ones sit vigil over the graves. The best known event associated with Day of the Dead is the “la Cihuacoatle, Leyenda de la Llorona,” which is a spectacle based on the La Llorona spectre, which runs from late October to mid November. It takes place on the waters of the old Tlilac Lake. Spectators watch the event from trajineras that depart from the Cuemanco docks and travel the canals to reach the lake. Another similar performance is called “Retorno al Mictlan “or Return to Mictlan, the Aztec land of the Dead, which is performed in the historic center of Xochimilco.
After the Conquest, Spaniards began to build churches and monasteries in the various villages in what is now the borough. Typical of these is the monastery at Santa María Tepepan, constructed between 1525 and 1590. Today, Xochimilco has nine parishes and five rectories. The most important of this is also the first church established in the area, the San Bernardino de Siena church and former monastery founded by Martín de Valencia. The current church building was constructed between 1535 and 1590 under the direction of Francisco de Soto, but the cloister and monastery area were not finished until the early 17th century. In 1609, a monastery school was founded at the site with classes in rhetoric, theology and arts and letters. Most of the funding of the project came from indigenous leaders of the area, especially Martín Cerónde de Álvaro. In 1538, the Church wanted to bring the complex's Franciscans into Mexico City, but the local people opposed and won. However, in 1569, there were still only four monks serving over 5,000 native people. Soon after, the indigenous population was organized into neighborhoods for indoctrination and census purposes: Santiago Tepalcatlalpan, San Lucas Xochimanca, San Mateo Pochtla, San Miguel Topilejo, San Francisco Tlalnepantla, San Salvador Cuautenco, Santa Cecilia Ahuautla, San Andrés Ocoyoacac, San Lorenzo Tlatecpan, San Martín Tiatilpan, Santa Maria Nativitas Zacapan y Santa Cruz Acalpixcan. Major restoration work was done on the church in its decorative elements in the 1970s. This also included removing two schools that had been established on the large atrium area as well as banning commercial activities from the same.
The church maintains is very large atrium, which was common to monasteries during the evangelization efforts of the very early colonial period. These atriums were meant to hold large congregations of indigenous peoples, who were ministered to by very few monks. The side gate of the atrium has a mixture of Plateresque, Gothic and indigenous feature. The west gate has three arches, which represent the Spanish, indigenous and mestizo peoples of the area. This was the space where the first baptisms of the indigenous were done. The church/monastery complex is tall and has a fortress appearance, again something common for the time period.
The church interior conserves its original 16th-century main altar, with four stories tall, contains indigenous, Italian, Flemish and Spanish influence and is covered in 24karat gold leaf. It contains a relief of San Bernardino surrounded by two groups of indigenous sculptures, who are helping to build the church. Above San Bernardino, there is a depiction of the Virgin of the Assumption and the Virgin of Xochimilco. The paintings represent episodes from the life of Jesus and have been attributed to Simon Pereyns and Andrés de la Concha. This is one of the few 16th-century altarpieces to have survived and the only one similar to it in size and construction is located in the monastery in Huejotzingo, Puebla.
There are seven other altarpieces, which date from the 16th to the 18th centuries. The one dedicated to Christ on the north side is from the 16th century, but it is incomplete at its base and sides. The one dedicated to the Holy Family dates from either the 17th or 18th century. Another dedicated to Christ on the south side is from the 16th or 17th century. One dedicated to Martin de Porres is notable because it has no columns.
The church's only chapel serves as a tabernacle. This room contains a large painting of Calvary. There are also a large number of notable paintings by names such as Echave Orio, Simón Pereyns, Sánchez Salmerón Caravaggio, Francisco Martínez, Luis Arciniegas and Juan Martínez Monteñés. The baptismal fonts are decorated in acanthus leaves, among which is a pre-Hispanic style skull. The organ is Baroque from the 17th century. The pews are made of red cedar as are the two pulpits, all made by Juan Rojas in the 18th century.
The San Pedro Tlalnahuac Church was one of the first “poza” chapels (used for processions) built in Xochimilco, dating from 1533. The main church has a masonry façade. In front, a small paved yard contains a cross sculpted in wood and sandstone. A significant number of pre-Hispanic artifacts have been found on the grounds. It is located on Calle Pedro Ramírez del Castillo.
The La Asunción Colhuacatzinco Church is Neoclassical with arches serving as buttresses. It main altar is modern, from the end of the 20th century. This church is important due to its association with a number of traditions including the Burning of Judas on Easter Sunday and fireworks on frames called toritos. Good Friday is dedicated to the Holy Burial, with mayordomos sponsoring breakfast. It is located in the La Asunción neighborhood.
The Santa Crucita de Analco Church was first built in 1687 then rebuilt in Neoclassical style in 1860. Its main altar is modern. It has a chapel in which a number of films have been shot including one called María Candelaria.
The San Juan Bautista Tlateuhchi Church is fronted by a large juniper tree said to have been planted by Cuauhtémoc to commemorate the alliance of the Xochimilas with the Aztecs to fight the Spanish. The church has been through a number of restorations. It is located in the historic center of Xochimilco.
The Santa María de los Dolores Xaltocan Church is a Neoclassical building but its main altar is Plateresque and Baroque. This church is hosts a 20-day celebration of Carnival long with the surrounding neighborhoods and markets.
The Belem Church in the historic center dates from 1758. It has been renovated several times, with the last time in 1932.
The La Concepción de María Tlacoapa Church was originally part of a hospital, built by the Franciscans in the 17th century.
The El Rosario Nepantlatlaca is a chapel unique to the area, as its façade is decorated with tiles. It contains a notable painting of Saint Christopher from the 17th century. Originally, the chapel was dedicated to Saint Margaret. It was declared a Historic Monument in 1932.
The Francisco Caltongo Church is one of the farthest from the historic center of the borough in the Caltongo neighborhood. Its façade has a number of pre-Hispanic elements even though it was built in 1969.
The La Santisima Trinidad Chililico Church is noted for its equestrian statue of Saint James as well as its collection of documents related to Xochimilco's history. It is located in the La Santisima neighborhood.
The San Esteban Tecpanpan Church was built on the site of a pre-Hispanic palace and ceremonial center. The current building was constructed in the middle of the 19th century. This building lost its original vault, but it was rebuilt in 1959 along with the bell tower. It is located in the San Esteban neighborhood.
The San Cristóbal Xalan Church is located in the San Cristóbal neighborhood, which is known for floriculture, including poppies that were brought from Europe. Since it blooms in spring, there was a day dedicated to the red poppy called the “Lunes de amapolas,“ which is the day after Easter Sunday. However, this tradition ended when poppy cultivation was banned in 1940.
The San Lorenzo Tlaltecpan Church is located in the San Lorenzo neighborhood, once known for its fishermen. They still specialize in a tamale with fish.
Non-religious festivals
There are forty nine important mostly secular festivals through the year, with the most important being the Feria de la Nieve, Feria de la Alegría y el Olivo, and the Flor más Bellas del Ejido. The “Flor más Bella del Ejido” (Most Beautiful Flower of the Ejido or Field) pageant is a borough-wide event dedicated to the beauty of Mexican indigenous women. The origins of this event are traced back over 220 years with symbolism that is based on the pre-Hispanic notion of a “flower-woman” representative of Mother Earth and fertility. This flower-woman is based on the goddess Xochiquetzal, the goddess of flowers and love, robbed from her husband Tlaloc by Tezcatlipoca. After the Conquest, this “flower-woman” symbol survived and would appear at certain Catholic festivals such as the Viernes de Dolores, or the Friday before Palm Sunday. An official pageant dedicated to this was established in 1786. Originally, its purpose was religious but it eventually became secularized. For this reason, the event was moved to a week before the Viernes de Dolores and then called the Viernes de las Amapolas. The event existed in this form for 170 years, with dancing, food, pulque, charros and pageants featuring china poblanas. In 1902, the tradition diminished as the last of the canals connecting the area with the Jamaica market closed. In 1921, the El Universal newspaper held a beauty pageant for the 100th anniversary of the end of the Mexican War of Independence, calling it “La India Bonita” dedicated to indigenous women. The first winner was María Bibiana Uribe. In 1936, another pageant was created for mestizo women called “la Flor Más Bella del Ejido” or the Most Beautiful Flower of the Ejido, which occurred each year on the Viernes de Dolores in the Santa Anita area. This event was moved to San Andres Mixquic in the 1950s, but the lack of crowds had it move again in 1955 to Xochimilco, where it remains.
The Feria de Nieve (Ices and Ice cream Fair) takes place in Santiago Tulyehualco each April. Flavored snow was consumed in the pre Hispanic period, eaten by the rich and made from snow from the nearby mountains and transported through this area. The consumption of this flavored snow continued into the colonial era and the first fair dedicated to it was established in 1529 by Martín de Valencia. The fair was celebrated sporadically until 1885 when there was renewed interest in it, making it an annual event. In 2009, the event had its 124th anniversary. During this time, new flavors and types of frozen confections have been invented. Some of the flavors are uncommon, such as rose petal, pulque, mole, spearmint, lettuce, shrimp and tequila. Many of these were developed by local resident Faustino Cicilia Mora.
The community of Santiago Tepalcatlalpan holds an annual corn festival, as it is still a significant producer of this crop. This event is called the Feria del Maiz y la Tortilla (Corn and Tortilla Fair) in May. It focuses on the traditional methods of preparing and eating the grain, such as in tortillas, gorditas, sopes, quesadillas, tlacoyos with various fillings and atole, especially a version flavored with chili peppers.
The Feria de la Alegría y el Olivo (“Alegria” and Olive Fair) has been an annual event since the 1970s in Santiago Tulyehualco. It is mostly based on a grain native to Mexico called amaranth. An “alegria” is a sweet made with this grain, honey with dried fruits and nuts sometimes added. However, the term is also used to refer to the plant that produces amaranth. An “olivo” is an olive tree. Amaranth was an important part of the pre-Hispanic diet, due to its nutritive qualities and its use in various ceremonies. This annual fair is dedicated to elaboration of this sweet along with olive products from the area. Over 250 producers of the grain offer their products in various preparations. There are also cultural events such as concerts.
The Feria Nacional del Dulce Cristalizado (National Crystallized Candy Fair) takes place each year in the Santa Cruz Acalpixca community at the Plaza Civica. This fair is dedicated to a traditional sweet of various fruits and sometimes plants, which are conserved in a sugar solution until they crystallize. These include squash, pineapple, nopal cactus, tomatoes, chili peppers, figs and more. These traditional sweets are often sold alongside others such as coconut confections, palanquetas de cacahuate (similar to peanut brittle), and nuez con leche (a nut-milk confection). These candies are the result of a blending of pre-Hispanic and European sweet traditions. The main European contributions are sugar and milk products, which are often mixed with native or other introduced ingredients. Originally, fruits and other foods were crystallized this way for conservation. Many in the community of Santa Cruz Acalpixca specialize in the making of one or more of these sweets, which began in 1927 with two shops belonging to Santiago Ramírez Olvera and Aurelio Mendoza in the Tepetitla neighborhood. In the 1980s, the town decided to hold an annual fair to promote their products, which originally was held in conjunction with the festival to the local patron saint. The event includes prizes for the best confections in several categories and the introduction of new types of candies.
Other events include the Carnival of Xochimilco, which was begun in 2004, to rescue the carnival tradition in the area. It consists of a series of musical concerts of various types, art exhibits, food and crafts displays and plays for children. There are also fairs dedicated to rabbits and poinsettias, as well as local civic celebrations to honor events such as the birth of poet Fernando Celada, the birth of Quirino Mendoza y Cortés, composer of “Cielito Lindo,” and the commemoration of the meeting of Francisco Villa and Emiliano Zapata on December 4 in this area.
Xochimilco has also traditionally held the Oktoberfest at the Club Alemán, which is located in the borough.
In Xochimilco was made film Sin Azul. Úrsula Murayama appeared in that film as Laura.
Economy
Since the pre-Hispanic period, Xochimilco's economy has traditionally been based on agriculture, mostly by supplying to the needs of Mexico City. This not only dominated the economy but also the area's religious practices, some of which can still be seen to the present day. Agriculture still remains important in the borough, but most of the focus has shifted to flowers and ornamental plants. One major reason for this is the poor quality of the area's water supply. Xochimilco has four major markets dedicated to the sale of plants and flowers: Cuemanco, Palacio de la Flor, Mercado de Madre Selva and the historic market at San Luis Tlaxialtemalco. Cuemanco is the largest in Xochimilco and the largest of its kind in Latin America, covering thirteen hectares, with its own cactus garden and forms part of the ecological preserve of Cuemanco. The borough produces 2.5 million poinsettias each year, accounting for most of the 3.5 million sold each year in Mexico City. This represents an income for the borough of about 25 to 30 million pesos annually, grown by about 10,000 growers.
However, starting in the later 20th century, most of area's economy has shifted away from agriculture. One reason for this is the deterioration of the area's environment. Plagues and poor planning have gravely affected the conservation area in Xochimilco, to the extent that many fruit trees traditionally grown here have disappeared, including capulins and peaches. Over the last forty years, the percentage of people in the borough working in agriculture has dropped from forty percent to three percent.
Xochimilco still has 3,562 units of agricultural production, accounting for 17.7% of the total of the Federal District. These cover 2,741.4 hectares of land or 11.4% of the District. 2741.4 hectares is farmland, with a much smaller amount dedicated to fishing and forestry. Xochimilco accounts for 90.8 percent of the flower production of the District, 76.9% of poinsettias, and all of the geraniums and roses grown here. It also grows about 40% of the District's spinach crop, 24.6 of the figs, 8.7 of pears, 13.2 of pears and 9% of plums. As a producer of livestock, Xochimilco accounts for 36% of the cattle, 29.8% of the pig, 17.2 of sheep and 27.8% of the domestic fowl production of the District.
Most of the employed are in manufacturing (23.5%) commerce (39,7%) and services (33.3%). Over 91% of all businesses in the borough are related to commerce and services. However, manufacturing contributes to 61.8% of the borough GDP, with commerce at 18.9% and services at 18%. After agriculture, the most visible economic activity is tourism, which is considered part of commerce and services. The canals, chinampas and trajineras are the borough's main tourist attraction. In February 2011, trajinera operators protested the existence of “clandestine” tour operators supposedly tolerated by authorities. There are supposedly as many as twenty five or thirty of these who pay bribes of 500 pesos a month to operate away from the six embarcaderos authorized by the borough. Relative to the rest of the city, Xochimilco has a negligible amount of hotel infrastructure. There are no five star hotels. There are 183 four-star and 98 three-star hotels, but they represent only two percent and one percent respectively of the total for the city.
Other landmarks
Aside from the canals and trajineras, the best-known attraction in Xochimilco is the Dolores Olmedo Museum. This museum was once the home of socialite Dolores Olmedo. Before this, it was the main house of the La Noria Hacienda, established in the 17th century. Before she died, Ms. Olmedo decided to donate her house, much of what was in it and her art collection to the public as a museum. The buildings are surrounded by gardens planted with native Mexican species, around which wander peacocks. Another area houses a number of xoloitzcuintle dog. The museum's collection includes about 600 pre Hispanic pieces, the largest collection of works by Diego Rivera at 140 pieces, as well as a number of works by Frida Kahlo and Angelina Beloff. It also contains rooms filled with furniture, items from many parts of the world and everyday items used by Olmedo and her family. In November, the museum set up a monumental altar to the dead.
The Museo Arqueológico de Xochimilco (Archeological Museum of Xochimilco) began as a collection of pre-Hispanic artifacts such as ceramics, stone items, bones, and more that had been found in the area, often during construction projects. In 1965, the museum began to display these items to the public. In 1974, the collection moved permanently to a late 19th-century house, which was restored in the 1980s and inaugurated under its current name. This collection contains 2,441 pieces, mostly ceramic and stone objects, including figures, cooking utensils, arrowheads. It is located on Avenida Tenochtitlán in Santa Cruz Acalpixca. Located to one side is one of the fresh water springs that feed the canals. On the other sides are gardens.
Near the archeological museum is a site called Cuahilama. It is a hill that rises about fifty meters above the lakebed. The site consists of terraces and twelve petroglyphs that date to about 1500. The most important of these is called the Nahualapa, a map that contains the locations of 56 sources of water, Lake Xochimilco, eight buildings and a large quantity of roads and paths.
As much of the borough is still classified as an ecological reserve, there are a number of green areas open to the public. These include several “forests” such as the Bosque de Nativitas, the Xochimilco Ecological Reserve, the Centro Acuexcomatl, and Michmani Ecotourism Park. There are several parks designated as forests such as the Bosque de Nativitas and the Bosque de San Luis Tlaxialtemaco. These are considered “areas of environmental value” by the city and established to counter some of the damage caused by urban sprawl in Xochimilco. These areas are open to the public but with minimal services such as picnic tables and horseback riding. The largest ecological area is the Xochimilco Ecological Reserve, inaugurated in 1993. It covers over 200 hectares and is filled with numerous plant and animal species that live or migrate here. The park also contains a bike path, thirty five athletic fields, a flower market and a visitor center. It is second in size only to Chapultepec Park. It is also possible to travel in some of the canals here by trajinera. The Centro de Educación Ambiental Acuexcomatl (Acuexcomatl Environmental Education Center) is located on the road between Xochimilco center and Tulyehualco. It contains fish farms, beekeeping, plant nurseries and greenhouses as well as sports facilities, classrooms, workshops, an auditorium, an open-air theatre and a cafeteria. It is in Colonia Quirino Mendoza. Michmani is an ecotourism program sponsored by the borough, which is situated on fifty hectares of chinampas. The site offers kayaking, recreational fishing, a temazcal, cabin rentals and environmental education.
The crater of the Teoca volcano has a sports facility with jai alai, gymnasiums and a soccer field.
The Virgilio Uribe rowing course was built for the 1968 Olympics in one of the canals. It measures 2,000m long and wide. It is still used for canoeing, kayaking, and rowing.
Education
The borough contains 116 preschools, 128 primary schools, 48 middle schools, four technical high schools and 15 high schools that serve a student population of over 100,000 students. 4.6 percent of the population is illiterate, lower than the city average. The highest percentage of illiterate people consists of those over sixty years of age. The lowest is in the 15-19-year-old bracket.
Post-secondary education
The Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana was established in 1974 in Xochimilco under Mexican president Luis Echeverría to meet the growing demand for public university education in the city. Currently, the institution has three campuses in the Federal District, in Azcapotzalco, Iztapalapa and Xochimilco and it is composed of several academic divisions. These divisions include the División de Ciencias y Artes para el Diseño, División de Ciencias Biológicas y de la Salud and the División de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades. The institution offers about twenty bachelor's degrees, an equal number of master's and doctorate degrees as well as a number of certificate programs.
The Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas (National School of Fine Arts) was originally established as the San Carlos Academy in the historic center of Mexico City during the late colonial era in 1781. The school became the most prestigious art academy in Mexico after Independence in the 19th century. In 1910, the school was incorporated into the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. In the 1970s, the school divided into an undergraduate and graduate division and in 1979, the undergraduate division moved to a new campus in Xochimilco, leaving the graduate studies at the traditional site in the historic center. ENAP remains as the country's largest and most prestigious art education institution.
Primary and secondary schools
National public high schools of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) Escuela Nacional Preparatoria include:
Escuela Nacional Preparatoria Plantel 1 "Gabino Barreda"
Public high schools of the Instituto de Educación Media Superior del Distrito Federal (IEMS) include:
Escuela Preparatoria Xochimilco "Bernardino de Sahagún"
The Colegio Alemán Alexander von Humboldt has its Campus Sur/Campus Süd (formerly Campus Xochimilco) in the district. The Kindergarten and primary levels occupy the Plantel Tepepan in Colonia Tepepan and the secondary and preparatory levels occupy the Plantel La Noria in Colonia Huichapan (La Noria).
Notes
References
Cline, S.L., "A Cacicazgo in the Seventeenth Century: The Case of Xochimilco." in Land and Politics in Mexico, Ed. H.R. Harvey.|University of New Mexico Press1991, pp. 265–274
External links
Alcaldía de Xochimilco website
Environmentalgraffiti.com blog: "The Island of Dolls" — article and photographs.
Soy Xochimilco – CONABIO via YouTube
Boroughs of Mexico City
Aztec sites
Nahua settlements
History of Mexico City
Venues of the 1968 Summer Olympics
Olympic canoeing venues
Olympic rowing venues
Tourist attractions in Mexico City
World Heritage Sites in Mexico
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tl%C3%A1huac
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Tláhuac
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Tláhuac is a borough (demarcación territorial) in the Mexico City, located in the southeastern edge of the entity. Though Tláhuac still contains rural communities within its borders, mostly in the southern and eastern portions, the borough has undergone a massive shift from urbanization, especially in its northwest. Tláhuac has experienced the fastest rate of population growth in Mexico City since the 1960s.
Much of the area is former lakebed where Lake Chalco and Lake Xochimilco met, with the town of San Pedro Tláhuac originally on an island. There are still some lake areas along with four major canals and wetlands, also under conservation status. The urbanization has led to serious traffic and transportation problems as well as the completion of Line 12 of the Mexico City Metro in 2012, which a terminal in the borough.
Geography and environment
The borough of Tláhuac is located in the southeastern part of the Mexico City, about 60 km from the historic center of Mexico City . It is bordered by the boroughs of Iztapalapa, Milpa Alta and Xochimilco as well as the municipality of Valle de Chalco Solidaridad in the State of Mexico . The borough extends over 89.5.km2 of territory, accounting for 5.75% of the Mexico City. The borough is part of the Valley of Mexico, in the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt that extends across central Mexico. The borough expands over much of the former Lake Chalco and Lake Xochimilco where the two connected, which were drained over the centuries since the Spanish conquest. The territory is classified into three zones, flat lakebed, transitional areas and hills with accumulated volcanic materials. The main elevations include the Guadalupe Volcano, the Xaltepec Volcano, Tecuautzi, Tetecón, the Sierra de Santa Catarina and Teuhtli Volcano. The Sierra de Santa Catarina is a small volcanic belt which has elevations of up to 2,800 meters above sea level. It serves as an important aquifer recharge area as well as a barrier to urban sprawl from Iztapalapa on the other side. On the south end is the Tehuitli Volcano with an altitude of 2,700 meters above sea level.
The borough contains a number of towns and localities. Those considered by the government to be urban (with 2010 population figures in parentheses) are: Tláhuac (305,076), San Juan Ixtayopan (24,120), San Andrés Mixquic (13,310), Santa Catarina Yecahuitzotl (9,563), and San Nicolás Tetelco (4,246). In addition, there are approximately 50 rural settlements with populations each of less than 1,000.
The predominant climate of the borough is semi moist and temperate with an average annual temperature of 15.7C varying between a low of 8.3C and a high of 22.8C. The average annual rainfall is 533.8mm with most rain falling from June to August.
Much of the area is former shallow lake with remaining open water, wetlands and canals. Much of the surface water is saline due to the high mineral content of the soil and lack of natural outflow. The Lago de los Reyes Aztecas (Lake of the Aztec Kings) is a lake that covers 1.9 hectares and connects to the large network of canals and chinampas of the borough. It hosts about twenty five species of migratory birds including ducks and storks along with various fish, amphibians and reptiles. It is the most important tourist attraction of the borough with docks and trajinera boats. The main docks in Tlahuac do not have a large number of boats or restaurants as in Xochimilco. It is still possible to see small natural islands as well as natural vegetation in much of the area with chinampas still growing foodstuffs such as broccoli, chard, beets, chili peppers, peas, fava beans and corn. There are four main canals: Chalco, Guadalupano, Atecuyuac and Amecameca. The first two are important as sources of water for the chinampas of the borough and as a tourist attraction. There are also other smaller canals which serve as irrigation. On the border with the State of Mexico, there is an important ecological reserve lake area called the Cieniega de Tláhuac. There is also an artificial lake at the Bosque de Tláhuac. Los Humedales wetlands is an ecological reserve which covers between 400 and 800 hectares depending on whether it is the rainy or dry season, a remnant of Lake Chalco. It is one of the few wetlands left in the Valley of Mexico and host a large number of migratory birds. It is also home to species called pocket gophers, skunks, squirrels, snakes and bats.
Much of the borough is an important recharge zone for aquifers especially the area around the Sierra de Santa Catarina. There are a number of flooding areas, especially during the rainy season, mostly due to poor drainage systems and the existence of urban areas on former lakebed. Despite having a significant amount former lakebed the borough in general is not prone to earthquake damage, with only a few areas with susceptibility scattered in the borough. There is also a fault line south of Avenida Tláhuac.
Most of the wild vegetation of the area is that of grassland with very little forest mostly due to a long history of agriculture in the area. One of the few forested areas is the Ayaquemetl mountain is near San Nicolás Tetelco with about ten hectares. There have been some efforts at reforestation. However, most of the plant life is the growing of crops, especially in the east and south growing corn, spinach, other leafy greens, alfalfa, figs, pears, and walnuts. There is also significant aquatic vegetation such as water lilies, chichicastle and ninfa. Most of the wildlife of the area has been extinguished because of human encroachment but in the Santa Catarina mountains there are still badgers, cacomistle and bats as well as various kinds of rodents and birds found throughout the borough.
The main problems confronting the borough, like others in the south of the Mexico City, are urban sprawl and environmental concerns. The area is under transition from rural to urban as it borders the urbanized Iztapalapa and the rural Milpa Alta. Its population is growing as people move away from the more crowded city center. 33.5% of the territory is urbanized and 66.5% is classified as environmentally protected. Most of the latter land (4,030 hectares out of 5,674) is farmed. Most of the rest of the land corresponds to surface water such as the Ciénega de Tláhuac and the foothills of the Teuhtli mountains west of San Juan Ixtayopan. Just under 75% of the urbanized space is residential, with 12.1% as mixed use, 5.8% is parks and green spaces, 5.5% is occupied by irregular settlements and 1.7% is dedicated to urban infrastructure. The areas undergoing the most urbanization are La Nopalera. Agrícola Metropolitana, Villa Centroamericana, Santiago Norte and La Asunción, mostly due to the construction of apartment buildings. Sprawl comes into the borough mostly from Iztapalapa, through Avenida Tláhuac and the San Rafael Atlixco rail line. It also comes in from Coyoacan and Xochimilco through the Canal de Chalco and Anillo Periférico, as well as from Valle de Solidaridad Chalco in the State of Mexico. The best preserved areas are those that border rural Milpa Alta. The main urban corridors are along Avenida Tláhuac which is also where most of the commercial activity takes place. Other corridors include Avenida Estanislao Ramírez, Avenida La Turba and Avenida Jiménez. Most of the mixed use space is in the northwest of the borough and along Avenida Tláhuac. Urbanization is most prominent in the northwest of the borough, which has most of the area's apartment complexes. The rest of the borough has single family homes and duplexes. Other areas with significant residential growth are Zapotitlán and San Francisco Tlaltenco which has led to a deterioration of their traditional rural appearance. This is especially true in locations closest to Avenida Tlahuac. Areas which have maintained more of their rural character are Santa Catarina Yechuizotl (sheltered by Sierra de Santa Catarina), as well as SanJuan Ixtayopan, San Nicolas Tetelco and San Andrés Mixquic, which are mostly surrounded by chinampas and other farmland that is under protection.
Other green spaces in the borough include parks, sporting and recreational areas. The Bosque de Tláhuac is a recreational area with a number of attractions, which was opened in 2007, converted from a former landfill. It extends over 72 hectares and features an artificial lake, a teaching farm/greenhouse, a cactus garden, volleyball and basketball courts, soccer fields, track, bicycle paths and an area for cultural events. It also includes an area called the “Mini-Marquesa” with attractions such as ATV tracks similar to those found at the La Marquesa National Park, as well as the city's first artificial beach (pools plus sand area) designed for children. Parque de los Olivos (Olive Tree park) dates back to the colonial period when in 1531 olive trees were planted here by missionaries and were some of the few that escaped destruction by royal decree to protect Spanish olive production. It also contains a small hill where archeological artifacts from as far back as 400 BCE have been found. Parque Xalli (Xalli Park) is located on the old road to San Francisco Tlatenco. It was founded by Alejandro Reyes and Valentín Hernández with 3,000 square meters of installations related to ecology. It has a 60 meter long zip line and a climbing wall. It has a large sand area for children, as well as a trampoline, pool, tree house and mini zip lines. There is also a petting zoo with various farm animals, most of which were donated to the park. Other green spaces include athletic and recreational centers in Santa Catarina, Colonia del Mar, Miguel Hidalgo, Zapotitlán, San Francisco Tlaltenco, San Pedro Tláhuac, San Juan Ixtayopan, San Nicolás Tetelco and San Andrés Mixquic.
Pollution problems in the borough stem from the urbanization of the area. Traffic congestion is a serious problem and parking space is severely lacking. Much of the pollution in the borough comes from fixed sources along Avenida Tláhuac. Canal and lake waters have moderate problems with pollution in the way of garbage and the infestation of non-native water lily plants. The borough generates 356 tons of trash per day, 3.12% of what is produced in the Mexico City. There are thirty areas where there is illegal house building, mostly near the Sierra de Santa Catarina and around San Juan Ixtayopan and La Conchita.
Seven Native Towns
The most important communities in the borough are called the Seven Original/Native Towns of Tláhuac (Siete Pueblos Originarios de Tláhuac), meaning that they were established before the arrival of the Spanish. These are Santiago Zapotitlán, San Francisco Tlaltenco, Santa Catarina Yechuizotl, San Nicolas Tetelco, San Juan Ixtayopan, San Andrés Mixquic and San Pedro Tláhuac.
San Pedro Tláhuac is the oldest of these, founded in the 13th century. From that time until well into the colonial period, it was an island in the waters between Lake Chalco and Lake Xochimilco, and was the capital of a dominion that stretched of much of what is now the borough of Tláhuac. After the Spanish conquest, the ceremonial center was destroyed on top was built a church and monastery dedicated to Saint Peter, dated to 1529. At the time, it was one of the most important churches in the southern Valley of Mexico. It was rebuilt several times due to moisture damage with the current structure dating to the 17th century. The San Pedro church as three naves with images of Saint Peter, Saint Joachim and the Holy Trinity inside. In the tower there is a clock dating to 1924, which was donated by the Ejido of Tláhuac. Around the town, there is an areas with chinampas and a small residual lake called the Lago de los Reyes Aztecas, which also hosts the “Museo Vivo” (Live Museum) about the canals and farming of the area. Its main festivity is the Regional Fair of Tláhuac, held at the end of June along with honors to the town's patron saint.
San Andrés Mixquic in the Mesoamerican period was also a dominion located on a small lake island. Its main landmark is its parish church, founded in 1537. This church was built on top of a sanctuary for the goddess of life and death with archeological excavations finding many artifacts including a Chac Mool and two rings for a Mesoamerican ball court. The original building was mostly destroyed in an earthquake and then rebuilt in 1600. The only remains from the first church is the bell tower, which is separate from the church building. In each of the town's named neighborhoods, there is a stone cross, which is the center of celebrations on May 3. The patron saint is honored on November 30, with processions. San Andrés Mixquis is known for its Day of the Dead celebrations which attract many visitors each year.
San Francisco Tlaltenco is one of the largest communities in the borough, located in the north of the borough on the south side of the Sierra de Santa Catarina. It main church is the San Francisco de Asís founded in 1547. Another important landmark is the Gate or Arch of Tlaltenco, which dates to the colonial period. It served as a customs checkpoint until just after the Mexican War of Independence. It is considered to be symbolic of the area. During the Mexican Revolution, it was occupied by the Zapatistas and those loyal to Venustiano Carranza as a campsite. Its patron saint, Francis of Assisi, is honored for eight days starting on October 4 with processions and sawdust carpets. Another major celebration is Carnival which is celebrated with Chinelos. On the fifth Sunday after Ash Wednesday, a Christ figure called the Señor de Mazatepec is honored.
Santiago Zapotitlán was founded in 1435. After the Aztecs conquered the area, they rearranged the layout of this town. After the Spanish conquest, the Inmaculada Concepción church was established in 1541 and rebuilt in 1939. Its founding is celebrated on December 8 of each year. Santiago Zapotitlán is noted for its religious and cultural traditions with both pre Hispanic and Spanish roots. One of its main celebrations is the La Fiesta de Luces y Música (Festival of Lights and Music) which is based on the New Fire ceremony. Today it is celebrated with traditional dances and fireworks along with music played on both indigenous and European instruments.
San Juan Ixtayopan is in the south of the borough made up of five named neighborhoods called San Augustin, La Concepción, La Soledad, La Asunción and La Lupita. Just outside there are six others called Francisco Villa, El Rosario, Tierra Blanca, Peña Alta and Jardines del Llano. Its main church is La Soledad constructed in the 19th century. Although it has been severely affected urban sprawl, there is still some chinampa farming surrounding it. The town was the site of the Battles of Ixtayopan during the Mexican Revolution. Zapatistas under Everardo González took over the area from federal troops with the support of the local people. Later these forces battled those loyal to Venustiano Carranza in the power struggles that ensued among the rebel factions. San Juan Ixtayopan has a site museum located in Los Olivos Park which houses a number of archeological finds with 188 exhibited. The main plaza is the Plaza de la Soledad, built in the 17th century. The main festivals are for Our Lady of Solitude from 2–5 January and for John the Baptist from 22 – 24 June. The town is noted for a hot beverage called calientito” (little hot one) which is a mix of sugar cane alcohol, orange juice, guava, raisins and sugar cane. In August, San Juan Ixtayopan hosts an annual Corn Fair to promote products made with the grain as well as the local culture.
San Nicolás Tetelco is centered on its parish church dedicated to Nicholas of Tolentino, constructed in the 17th century. In the presbytery, there is a large crucifix which is probably made from corn stalk in the colonial era as well as a holy water font from the 16th century. Other landmarks include the Plaza Emiliano Zapata, which is surrounded by older constructions, the Monument to Christ the King, the Ahuapa sports facility, the Ayaquemetl ecological area and the chinampa zones. It is also home to the former hacienda Santa Fe, which was founded in the 17th century which operated until the Mexican Revolution. Remains of its chapel, main house and workers’ living quarters still remain. The town is noted for its atole, cooked traditionally over a wood fire.
Santa Catarina Yecahuitzotl is located in the northeast of the borough. Its church, dedicated to Saint Catherine, dates to 1647, constructed of tezontle. The atrium has four small chapels located in the four corners. Until the 1960s, the community was isolated from Mexico City. However at that time urban sprawl began to reach it changing much of the community's way of life. Its original name was Acatzinco, then Santa Catarina Cuautli-Itlacuayan. Its current name has been interpreted to mean “the third part of the south road,” the “nose of an amphibian” and “land of ants.” The name change came with the town's refounding in 1924 when ejido members organized their lands among themselves. Other important locations include La Troje, site of Mexican Revolution activity, the charrería ring, the former Xico hacienda and two environmental education centers. It is divided into a number of neighborhoods called colonias such as Maria Isabel, Santiago, Del Carmen, San Juan Tlalpizahuac, Ampliación San Juan TlalpizahuacSan Francisco Apolocalco, La Cañada, Campestre Potrero, San Francisco Tlaltenco, Selene and Ampliacion Selene.
History
The name “Tláhuac” comes from Nahuatl, mostly likely a derivation of “Cuitláhuac”. However, its meaning is in dispute, with interpretations including “the place where cuítatl (a type of algae) is gathered”, “place where the Lord sings”, “guardian or steward of the land", “born among the rocks of the lakes” and “place of he who cares for the water”.
The Tláhuac was established on a small island in the waters between Lake Chalco and Lake Xochimilco in 1222 by the Chichimecas. By the 14th century, it had become a dominion expanding as far as what is now Santiago Zapotitlán and Santa Catarina Yecahuizotl, but distinct from the dominion of Mixquic, which was on a nearby island. Tláhuac was connected to the mainland by two causeways leading to Santiago Zapotitlán and Tulyehualco. The first regional leader of the area was Cohuatomatzin in 1262. The dominion remained independent until the 14th century, when it was conquered by the Tepanecs. Soon after, it was dominated by the Aztecs. During the pre-Hispanic period, the economy of the area was based on chinampa farming and fishing. After conquest, the area paid tribute to Azcapotzalco and then to Tenochtitlan. The town of Tláhuac was laid out along the various dikes and canals which centered on a ceremonial center, where the San Pedro parish church is today.
The area was prone to flooding but it was prosperous due to intensive chinampa farming, growing corn, beans, chili peppers, tomatoes, squash, flowers and more. Much of this produce was sent to Mexico City as a way of paying tribute. There was a major flood in 1499, prompting the construction of a large dike against the lake waters. Another dike was constructed to separate the lakes.
After the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire, colonial authorities defined Tláhuac as extending to Zapotitlán, Cuauhtlitl-Tlacuayan (Santa Catarina) and Tulyehualco. In the colonial period, the Spanish authorities initially emphasized Mixquic as a political center because it has only one indigenous chief, while Tláhuac was divided under four. Three orders began evangelical work, the Augustinians in Mixquic and the Franciscans, replaced by the Dominicans in Tláhuac. By the 18th century, Tláhuac had come under the administration of Chalco. The area's economy remain tied to agriculture, still sending much of the production to Mexico City, now to be sold. Flood control projects continued, with drainage of lake area begun in 1555. During the colonial period and into the 19th century, transportation by small boats was primary on the area's lakes and canals. Boats transported not only people but cargo, especially agricultural produce bound for Mexico City. Customs gates were installed on the main canals in Tlatenco and Tulyehualco to collect taxes on various vegetables, cereals and alcohol from the state of Morelos. Important colonial era haciendas included San Nicolas Tolentino, Santa Fe Tetelco and Zoquiapan.
After the Mexican War of Independence, Tláhuac became part of the State of Mexico. When the Federal District of Mexico City was expanded in 1854, Tláhuac became part of the District, then part of the prefecture of Xochimilco in 1857. Agriculture remained the main economic activity. In the late 19th century, the Santa Fe hacienda was known for its cattle and the size of the vegetables grown there. In 1856, the Mexico City-Tlahuac causeway flooded completely. In 1895, a project was started to drain Lake Chalco. Soon after, the Chalco-Tlaltenco road was constructed over the former lake bed, followed by a rail line that passed through half of the current territory of the borough. In the latter 19th century, steamships traveling between Mexico City and Chalco passed by.
In the 19th century, the town of Tláhuac had municipality status which was eliminated in 1903 with a reorganization of the Federal District. The Mexican Revolution soon followed with one major battle at San Juan Ixtayopan between forces loyal to Emiliano Zapata and Venustiano Carranza. After the end of the military conflict, residents petitioned for autonomy, leading to the segregation of Tláhuac from Xochimilco in 1924 as a municipality. In 1928, this revived municipality was reorganized again into the current borough. The borders of the borough were not finalized until 1994, over opposition from ejido members in some communities along the border with the State of Mexico.
The urban sprawl of Mexico City began to take over the ejido lands in the mid-20th century, with former farmlands converted into housing subdivisions, especially in the areas closest to Iztapalapa.
In November 2004, three policemen were surrounded by an angry mob in San Juan Ixtayopan. They were accused of being kidnappers after taking pictures of children. The result was two of the policemen burned alive with one rescued hours after the incident began.
Culture
The area considers itself traditional conserving many colonial and Mesoamerican era traditions. Culturally the most important communities are the seven which have pre Hispanic roots which were located on the banks of Lakes Chalco and Xochimilco. Today these communities area marked by the oldest churches in the borough. Other important heritage sites as demarcated by INAH and the borough include the chinampas, located in various parts of the borough and Parque de los Olivos.
One important tradition is Day of the Dead, celebrated throughout the borough but San Andrés Mixquic's is particularly well known, attracting thousands of visitors from Mexico and abroad. The celebration generally lasts three days from October 31 to November 1 each day focusing on different groups, children, adults and saints. One local tradition related to the day is to hang a paper lantern often in the form of a star at the entrance to home as a way to greet the return of the souls of the dead. The Fiestas del Santo Jubileo is a custom observed on different days in the communities of the borough. It consists of a mass and exhibition of the Host on the main altar of the church for 40 hours, surrounded by flowers, sawdust carpets, live music, dances and fireworks. Carnival is important in San Francisco Tlaltenco and Santiago Zapotitlán, where dancers generally are chinelos and those in charro suits. These carnivals begin on the fourth Sunday of Lent. The tradition in San Francisco Tlaltenco goes back to the end of the 19th century. A reenactment of Palm Sunday has been held each year at San Pedro Tláhuac for over eighty years, with the procession winding its way through eight different neighborhoods. San Pedro Tláhuac is also the site of the Regional Fair of Tláhuac. It was first organized in 1956, with the goal so attracting tourism and encouraging youth to maintain traditions. It begins with a procession of the image of the patron saint, the Apostle Peter, in decorated trajinera boats in the chinampa areas of Lago de los Reyes Aztecas. Other events include the selection of a fair queen, conferences, cultural events, concerts, dances, fireworks and more, with proceeds going to the restoration of the San Pedro Apostal Church.
The Baile del Guajolote (Dance of the Turkey) is a traditional dance in the towns of Santiago Zapotitlán and San Pedro Tláhuac, which is performed at weddings, baptism, first communions and quinceañeras. It includes the gifting of a live turkey along with a large food basket from one family to another. Another important traditional dance, especially in Santiago Zapotitlan is the Dance of Moors and Christians also called the Danza de los Santiagueros (Dance of those of Saint James). The dance represents the battles between the Moors and Christians in which Saint James plays a central role.
Typical foods are mostly similar to those found in the rest of Mexico City. One local dish is michmole, made from fish and sauce with herbs such as epazote .
Overall, there is a significant lack of cultural institutions such as theaters, auditoriums and museums. However a number of institutions do exist. The Tlahuac Regional Museum is located in San Pedro Tláhuac. It is housed in the former civil registry office and was the first museum established in the borough. The Regional Museum of Mixquic is on the side of the parish church. It contains exhibitions of local archeological pieces which mostly date between 1200 and 1500CE but also some from the Toltec and Teotihuacan periods. The church and former monastery are also classed as an archeological site. The Andrés Quintana Roo Museum has a collection of 279 archeological pieces from the collectionof Dr. Socorro Bernal Roque. The pieces are mostly of clay and stone from the Teotihuacan era found in the Tlahuac area. The most important pieces are a chac-mool, the remains of a teotlachtli, clay and stone seals, a tzompantli and a cylindrical serpent. The Tomás Medina Villarruel Museum is named after a native of San Juan Ixtayopan who is an important figure in the conservation of the archeological record of the area. In 1984, he and his family donated a collection of 850 pieces to the borough. The museum was built in 1998 as a community museum and the collection has since grown with new donations. The Fábrica de Artes y Oficios FARO Tláhuac was founded in 2006, as part of a network of FAROs sponsored by the city Secretary of Culture. Its aim is to promote community involvement in the arts and various trades. It has workshops on various to allow residents to learn creative and practical skills as well as conferences, cinema, theater, art exhibitions, concerts and more. Other cultural institutions in the borough include the Centro Cultural Zapotitlán, Centro Cultural Santa Catarina, Centro Cultural Nopalera, Casa de Cultura Diego Rivera, Casa de Cultura Frida Kahlo, Casa de Cultura Ampliación Los Olivos and the Casa de Cultura Rosario Castellanos.
Socioeconomics
From the second half of the 20th century, the population and number of housing units has risen rapidly. The population has grown from 29,880 inhabitants in 1960, to 146,293 in 1980, to 255,891 in 1995 to 361,014 as of the 2010 census. In the 1960s and 1970s, the rate of growth was over 7%. It has since slowed to under 4.5%, but it is still the highest in the Federal District. The main draw is the relatively low cost of land in comparison to the rest of the city. Tláhuac has a population density of 90 inhabitants per hectare, one of the lowest in the Federal District, which has an average of 128 per hectare. However, in some areas, density has climbed to over 200 per hectare mostly in the northwest. However, most of the borough still has fewer than 100 per hectare. Neighborhoods with the densest population include La Nopalera, Colonial Miguel Hidalgo and Colonial Los Olivos where most of the borough's apartment complexes can be found. Just under eighty percent of housing units are owned by their occupants, but still about ninety percent of housing units are single family homes.
Between 60,000 and 70,000 families inhabit 93 irregular settlements in Tlahuac. While some of the irregular settlements are in conservation areas, most are in areas in which the topography does not allow for the provision of urban services such as water. Although basic services extend to over 80-90 percent of the population, communities in the periphery and those which are new and not yet consolidated tend to suffer a lack of basic services along with transportation and roads.
Just under seventy percent of the population is under age thirty but this percentage has been slowing shrinking as the borough ages.
The Consejo Nacional de Población ranks Tláhuac as having a very low level of socioeconomic marginalization. About seventy percent of the population is employed in commerce and services. Twenty eight percent is involved in manufacturing and about 3.5% work in agriculture, the highest percentage in the Federal District. Over ninety percent of the commerce in the delegation occurs in small businesses, mostly along Avenida Tláhuac, Avenida La Turba and in the centers of the towns. Informal commerce, especially tianguis markets, is found in Zapotitlpan, San Pedro Tláhuac, near the San Lorenzo Tezonco cemetery and some along Avenida Tláhuac. There are 712 manufacturing concerns generally small concerns located in the northwest of the borough, producing food products, drinks, tobacco products, metal products, machinery and equipment. The service sector is mostly related to repair and maintenance. Most agriculture is found in the south and east with just over 4,000 hectares are under cultivation in the borough growing corn, animal feed, spinach, alfalfa and figs. Most of the livestock raised is pigs, followed by cattle than sheep.
The borough has two groups of police and five monitoring stations. However, the urbanization of the area has brought in increased crime including gang activity.
Education
The borough has sixty seven preschools, seventy nine primary schools, twenty three middle schools and four high schools. There are sufficient primary and middle schools but a lack of educational services above this level. There are public libraries in Santiago Zapotitlán, San Pedro Tláhuac, Colonial del Mar, Miguel Hidalgo and Tetelco. The Universidad Insurgentes has several installations in the borough. The borough has a 5.61% illiteracy rate which compares favorably to the rest of Mexico City, but drop out rates are a concern. Most students drop out at the high school level or above, completing primary and middle school. But even at the primary level the dropout rate is 22.8%. The primary reason is the financial situation of the family.
Public high schools of the Instituto de Educación Media Superior del Distrito Federal (IEMS) include:
Escuela Preparatoria Tláhuac "José Ma. Morelos y Pavón"
Transportation
Transportation for the borough connects the area with neighboring boroughs and the State of Mexico. The Most important road is Avenida Tláhuac, which crosses almost the entire territory, followed by Anillo Periférico and the Mexico City-Tulyehualco road. Road traffic is heavy and congested during many hours of the day, including weekends. Some of the worst traffic in the borough is in Santiago Tulyehualco, where various major roads such as Aquiles Serdan, Francisco Presa, the Tlahuac-Tulyehualco road and Isidro Tapia all converge.
There are both public and private bus lines, mostly working out of four official bus stations. There is also one taxi station but there are also a large number of informal bicycle taxis, motorcycle taxis and taxis converted from golf carts because of the lack of organized public transportation in a number of areas.
A major change in public transportation is the completion of Line 12 of the Mexico City Metro, which a terminal in Tláhuac. The construction of the line into the borough was controversial. One argument was that it would worsen the already bad traffic congestion by encouraging more urban sprawl. Ejido members protested the appropriation of the Ejido of San Francisco Tlaltenco in order to build the terminal. The establishment of the terminal Tláhuac caused a struggle between bus operators in the Federal District and neighboring State of Mexico for rights to transport passengers between the station and points in the State of Mexico, especially the suburb of Chalco. Residents complained that construction of the line left Avenida Tláhuac in poor condition for local traffic and pedestrians.
Metro stations
Periférico Oriente
Tezonco
Olivos
Nopalera
Zapotitlán
Tlaltenco
Tláhuac
References
External links
Alcaldía de Tláhuac website
Tlahuac mob lynches 3 federal agents by mistake.
Website Tlahuac.com.mx · Noticias · Política · Eventos · Denuncias · Arte · Cultura · Línea 12 del metro · Medio ambiente · CIRE ·
La Guirnalda Polar Online book about history, people and ancient culture of Tlahuac.
Salvemos a Tlahuac, no al basurero (CIRE) Official site
Comisión Organizadora de la Feria Anual Patronal en San Pedro Tláhuac Official site of the Festival of Saint Peter
Museum of Tlahuac official website, in Mexico City.
Two great personages from Tlahuac, a bio about Ing. Estanislao Ramírez Ruiz and Faustino Galicia Chimalpopoca, by Baruc Martínez in the Canadian webzine "La Guirnalda Polar".
Boroughs of Mexico City
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408600
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milpa%20Alta
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Milpa Alta
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Milpa Alta is a borough (demarcación territorial) in Mexico City. It lies in the southeast corner of the nation's capital, bordering the State of Mexico and Morelos. It is the least populated, second largest and most rural of all the boroughs. It is also one of the most traditional areas of the city, with over 700 religious and secular festivals during the year and an economy based on agriculture and food processing, especially the production of nopal cactus, barbacoa and mole sauce.
Geography and environment
The borough of Milpa Alta is located in the southeast of Mexico City bordering the boroughs of Xochimilco, Tláhuac and Tlalpan, with the state of Morelos to the south and the State of Mexico to the west. It has the second largest territorial extension after Tlalpan, occupying 268.6km2.
The terrain is rugged mostly consisting of volcanic peak along with some small flat areas mostly formed in the Cenozoic Era. City officials have classified the entire borough as a conservation zone, important for its role as an aquifer recharge area as well as its forests. Forest, farmland and grazing areas constitute 98.1% of the total surface area.
It has an average altitude of 2,420 meters above sea level with altitudes varying between 2,300 and 3,600. It is part of the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt and the Sierra Chichinautzin volcanic mountain chain, which separates Mexico City from the state of Morelos. The borough is divided into three zones: Ajusco-Teuhtli, the lowest elevations, Topilejo-Milpa Alta in the medium range and Cerro-Tlicuaya at the highest elevations. The main elevations are volcanic and include Cuautzin (3,510), Tulmiac, Ocusacayo (3,220), La Comalera (3,230), San Bartolo (3,200), Tláloc (3,510), Chichinautzin (3,470), Yecahuazac, Quimixtepec, El Oclayuca (3,140), El Pajonal (3,100), El Ocotécatl (3,480), Acopiaxco (3,320), Tetzacoatl (3,310), Tehutli (2,800) Cilcuayo (3,580), Nepanapa (3,460), Texalo (3,560), Oclayuca (3,390), San Miguel (2,988) .
The area belongs to the Amacuzac River basin but only small streams run on the surface. It has ample surface water but confined to small springs and streams which over time have formed a succession of narrow valleys or micro-basins, which are important for recharging the Valley of Mexico’s aquifers. These micro-basins include Cilcuayo, Río Milpa Alta and Cocpiaxco and contain the borough’s main towns.
Most of the area has a temperate climate, with cold climates found at the highest elevations. The average annual temperature is with average lows at and averages highs at . Average annual precipitation is . Freezing temperatures occur occasionally from October to March especially in the higher elevations. The windiest months are February and March. On the Koppen scale, its climate is described as C (W2) (w) b (i’) which signified a relatively moist climate, with a rainy season in the summer especially in July and August. However, the climate varies substantially in the territory based mostly on altitude, with six sub-climates: C(E)(w2) which is relatively cold, C(E)(m) also relatively cold but wetter, C(w1) a temperate climate, C (w2) a températe and relatively wet climate, C ( w1) temperate and relatively dry and C ( w2) which is relatively cold with rains falling mostly in the highest areas.
The area has a number of species found nowhere else. The natural vegetation is mostly forest with a mix of pine, oyamel fir and holm oak, with some concentrations of Abies religiosa. The most intact forest is found in the small canyons of the Nepanapa volcano and the west side of the Tláloc volcano. Other vegetation include fruit trees such as tejocote (Crataegus pubescens), capulin (Prunus serotona ssp capulli) blackberry (Rubus adenotrichus) and well as various scrubs, grass and flowers. The rugged terrain presents a number of micro climates which favor certain species. Depending on conditions oak, cedar, strawberry trees (Arbutus), pirul (Schinus molle), tepozan (Buddleia cordata), nopal cactus and maguey can be found. Wildlife includes 59 species of mammals such as zacatuche rabbits (Romerolagus diazi), which in danger of extinction, along with coyotes, deer, lynx and moles. However, only sixteen of these species are still commonly seen because of habitat destruction. Species such as wild boar, bobcats and opossums are extinct in the area. There are about 200 bird species native to the area in 128 classes, 33 families and eleven orders. Eighty percent of the species live in the area year round. There are twenty four amphibian species from ten classes, seven families and two orders and fifty six species of reptiles from thirty one classes, ten families and two orders. A notable areas for these two classes of animal is the corridor between the Ajusco and Chichinautzin mountains.
While named after Villa Milpa Alta, the borough is not concentrated on a single community like Tlahuac or Xochimilco but rather is composed of twelve main towns all of which are rural. This limits the area’s connectivity with the urban zone of Mexico City. Main communities in the borough include San Pedro Atocpan, Villa Milpa Alta (formerly called Malacachtepec), San Bartolome Xicomulco, San Francisco Tecoxpa, Santa Ana Tlacotenco, San Lorenzo Tlacoyucan, San Juan Tepanahuac, San Agustin Ohtenco, San Antonio Tecómitl, San Pablo Oztotepec and San Jerónimo Miacantla. San Agustin Ohtenco is considered to be the smallest community in Mexico City. These main towns are subdivided into twenty nine neighborhoods called barrios and there are 225 communities in the borough total. Villa Milpa Alta has seven barrios, San Mateo (the largest), La Concepción, Los Angeles, Santa Cruz, San Agustin, Santa Martha and La Luz.
Demographics and culture
With a population of 130,592 , Milpa Alta has the lowest population of Mexico City’s sixteen boroughs. About half of the borough’s residents live in or near Villa Milpa Alta and about eighty percent are under forty. It is also one of the city’s most rural and traditional areas. There is a dual system of government, administrative and agricultural, with the latter mostly tasked with the administration of common lands. The social organization of the area is traditional, based on families headed by a male, nuclear in the towns and extended in the more rural areas. Men still hold most of the paying jobs, with most women classed as homemakers, although many of these work in family business, generally for no salary. While it has the lowest crime rates overall, it does have problems with alcoholism in men leading to domestic violence. The borough is gaining population from migration from places like the State of Mexico, Puebla and Oaxaca. and few people migrate out.
The borough contains a number of towns and localities. Those considered by the government to be urban (with 2010 population figures in parentheses) are: San Antonio Tecómitl (24,397), Villa Milpa Alta (18,274), San Pablo Oztotepec (15,507), San Salvador Cuauhtenco (13,856), San Francisco Tecoxpa (11,456), Santa Ana Tlacotenco (10,593), San Pedro Atocpan (8,283), San Bartolomé Xicomulco (4,340), San Lorenzo Tlacoyucan (3,676), and San Nicolás Tetelco (3,490). In addition, there are approximately 250 rural settlements with populations each of less than 1,000.
Before the arrival of the Spanish, the area was dominated by the Nahuas. Its one of the few places left in the city with Nahuatl speaking communities, with 4,007 people speaking an indigenous language . The use of Nahuatl is widespread in the borough, with the most concentrated in the towns of Santa Ana Tlacotenco, San Lorenzo Tlacoyucan and San Pablo Oztotepec. Ethnic Nahuas are found in all of the borough’s main towns. There are also efforts to preserve and promote the use of the language in the borough.
The Nahuas are primarily Catholic with a number of indigenous beliefs still remaining and blended in. Most of these have to do with the agricultural cycle, often represented by veneration to the saints. Traditional medicine is still practiced by a number of Nahuas in combination with modern medicine. Starting in the 1950s, evangelical movements such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses have made inroads into the area. Traditional housing among the Nahuas is of adobe, but these are being replaced by cement and cinderblock constructions. Traditional handcrafts include embroidered clothing and articles made from maguey fiber (ixtle). The current community struggles to maintain its identity and culture and to prevent being absorbed into the urban sprawl of Mexico City. One way of doing this is through ecotourism on tribal land including guided hikes, zip lines, temazcals and camping. The community also sponsors reforestation events.
The borough lacks theaters, shopping centers, supermarkets and hotels. However, it is one of the boroughs in the city that conserves many of its traditional religious festivals, with about 700 per year, about two per day somewhere in the borough. these fairs and festivals bring 1,200,000 visitors each year to the borough. Each community in the borough, including the twelve main towns and each of these towns’ neighborhoods has a patron saint celebrated once a year. The areas with the most festivals and other events are San Francisco Tecoxpa, San Pedro Atocpan, San Lorenzo Tlacoyucan, San Salvador Cuauhtenco, Santa Ana Tlacotenco, San Pablo Ozotepec, San Agustín Ohtenco, Villa Milpa Alta, San Jerónimo Miacatlán and San Juan Tepanahuac. The most important saint day in the entire borough is that of Our Lady of the Assumption in August. Other important religious events include the passion play, held jointly by the towns of San Francisco Tecoxpa, San Pedro Atocpan, San Lorenzo Tlacoyucan and San Antonio Tecómitl and requires six months of preparations. Carnival is celebrated in San Lorenzo Tlacoyucan, San Antonio Tecómitl, San Pablo Oztotepec and Villa Milpa Alta. Day of the Dead is celebrated in the borough with altars, the cleaning and decorating of gravesites, masses and vigils like many other places in Mexico but it is also celebrated with the release of sky lanterns in communities such as San Agustin Ohtenco, as well as publicly held events such as concerts, the creation of monumental paper mache skulls and even Mesoamerican ball games. Holy Week is very important in the borough, especially the Passion Play held each year to reenact the passion and death of Jesus. The event involves over sixty actors, all residents of the borough chosen yearly. The current tradition was started in 1905, although it was suspended during the Mexican Revolution. The scenes of the play are enacted in several locations. Palm Sunday in San Agustin el Alto, the Asunción parish to the main church in Villa Milpa Alta for Good Friday .
Secular events include the Festival of Corn and Pulque in San Antonio Tecomitl in September, Feria de la Nieve (Ice Cream Fair) in San Antonio Tecomitl in March, Feria Ganadera, Gastronómica y Artesanal (Livestock, Gastronomy and Handcraft Fair) in San Pablo Ozotepec in April, the Festival de Juegos Autóctonos celebrating native toys in San Juan Tapanáhuac, the annual fair of San Lorenzo Tlacoyucan in August, and the entire borough celebrates the founding of Villa Milpa Alta on 22 August with a Regional fair and lighting of a New Fire in the crater of the Teutli volcano. In 2012, this event celebrated the town’s 480th anniversary.
The borough is home to four significant balloon events, which together are called the Magic Route of Light. It begins with the Festival Multicultural de Globos de Cantolla (Multicultural Festival of Sky Lanterns) in September in Santa Ana Tlacotenco, with the main event of 3000 lanterns launched at once. It is followed by the Concurso Nacional de Globos y Faroles de Papel de China and the Encuentro Internacional de Constructores de Globos de Papel in San Agustin Ohtenco and San Antonio Tecomitl in November. The last is the Noche de Luces (Night of Lights) in San Francisco Tecoxpa in late November.
History
The name Milpa Alta means “high cornfield.” “Alta” means high in Spanish and “milpa” is a Mexican Spanish word from Nahuatl referring to cornfields interspersed with other crops such as squash and maguey. The Nahua name for the area is Momochco Malacateticpac, which means “place of altars surrounded by mountains.” This name is derived from the various volcanoes in the area.
The recorded history of the area begins around 1240 when a Chichimeca group migrated into the Valley of Mexico from the north and founded the Malacachtepec Momozco dominion. They formed settlements in what is now the borough in places such as Malacatepec Momoxco, Ocotenco, Texcalapa, Tototepec, Tepetlacotanco, Huinantongo and Tlaxcomulco. In 1440, Mexica leader Hueyitlahuilli subdued these settlements and installed a leader. The capital of this dominion was centered on the town of Milpa Alta, in what are now the Santa Cruz, Los Angeles, San Mateo and Santa Martha neighborhoods with the name of Malacatepec Momoxco. The area formed a strategic point controlling the road between Tenochtitlan and Oaxtepec and Cuernavaca. At this time several lakeside docks, a ceremonial center, barracks and tribute collections centers were constructed, remnants of which remain.
The indigenous of this area, allied with the Aztecs, struggled against the Spanish for about 100 years before being subdued. This caused many of the indigenous here to abandon their lands and hide in the mountains, making incursions into Spanish held territory to plunder. In 1528, a peace pact was made with these people and the following year, Spanish authorities acknowledge their right to own land and have local governors; however, they were required to pay tribute to the Spanish and convert to Christianity. The Spanish mostly kept their promise to allow indigenous rule except for a brief period in the 17th century. Organizationally, it was considered to be a district of Xochimilco. Compared to the rest of the valley area, it had little contact with the Spanish, allowing it to retain much of its indigenous character.
The Franciscans were in charge of evangelization, naming Our Lady of the Assumption as patron. For evangelization purposes, a modest hermitage dedicated to Saint Martha was constructed with later churches constructed in Tlatatlapocoyan and San Lorenzo. In 1570, the monastery and church of the Assumption was begun, taking a century to construct.
After Independence, the area was initially part of the State of Mexico. The area’s incorporation into the Federal District of Mexico City began in 1854, when the district was expanded by Antonio López de Santa Anna expanded including part of what is now Milpa Alta. However, towns such as San Pedro Atocpan were municipalities in the State of Mexico in the 19th century. In 1903, the Federal District of Mexico City was expanded to include the rest of Milpa Alta.
During the Mexican Revolution, the area generally sympathings with the Liberation Army of the South. In 1914 this army marched to Mexico City from the state of Morelos against the regime of Victoriano Huerta. Part of that march included the occupation of the Milpa Alta area, forming a base. Here Emiliano Zapata ratified the Plan of Ayala on July 19, 1914.
Reorganization of the Federal District of Mexico City created the modern borough, with the government in Villa Milpa Alta in 1929.
While part of the Federal District, most residents still talk about Mexico City as a separate entity. However, it is part of Greater Mexico City. The pace of urbanization in the borough is slower in Milpa Alta than other outlying areas of the Federal District, but the growth of Mexico City since the mid 20th century has been affecting it. Production of corn began to decrease in the mid 20th century. In the 1970s, this process began to hasten. The two major problems associated with this is illegal settlements or squatting on common land and illegal logging. Both of these are most serious in San Salavador Cuauhtenco, where squatters who have been there for years demand regularization and services and enforcers of environmental laws are threatened by residents.
Socioeconomics
Milpa Alta is officially classed as one of the poorest in the Federal District by income, with 48.6% considered to be below the poverty line. However it is also considered to have a low level of socioeconomic marginalization. The discrepancy is likely due to the fact that the economy is based on cash and not all economic activity is reported. Most of the land is held in common, either in ejidos or other arrangements. There is a problem with the lack of formal titles to land, which has allowed irregular settlements. There is a telegraph office, a post office and various city agencies. Medical attention is mostly provided by two large clinics, one administered by UNAM and the other by ISSSTE and various small ones in various towns. It has little in the way of commerce and services, with no large chain stores, few banks, no movie theaters or little else in the way of entertainment.
The main economic activities of the borough are agriculture and food processing. Most agriculture is still done with traditional methods with only those of greater resources using machinery such as tractors. The most important crop is the nopal cactus, with fields found just about everywhere including spaces between houses in the towns. Founded in 1986, the Feria del Nopal is held in Villa Milpa Alta in June with the aim of promoting the consumption of the paddle cactus. The main event is the culinary exhibition of dishes made with the vegetable along with cultural, social, sporting and artistic events. Other important crops include corn, beans, animal feed, fava beans, peas and honey. Pulque is produced for local consumption.
One important processed food in Milpa Alta is the making of barbacoa, sheep meat cooked in a pit oven lined with maguey leaves. This is made principally for weekend sales for traditional markets and street stands in most of Mexico City. The most important barbacoa producing area is Barrio San Mateo in Villa Milpa Alta. About three thousand sheep are slaughtered and prepared as barbacoa each week in Milpa Alta, but barbacoa is increasingly being made with sheep meat imported from Australia, New Zealand and the United States as it is cheaper than that produced in Mexico. The barbacoa business in the area began in the 1940s and since then has been successful enough to allow many families to send their children to school and become professionals. Despite the younger generation’s higher education, many still participate in the family business. Its success has also allowed barbacoa families to gain a certain amount of prestige in the community.
Even more important is the creation of pastes and powders to make mole sauce. These are created from the grinding and blending of twenty or more ingredients, which always include a variety of chili peppers. The mole sauces made are of various types such as rojo, verde, almendrado and about twenty others with trademarks. The main producer of mole in the borough is San Pedro Atocpan, with almost all its residents involved in its production in some way. Most of this production is done in families or small cooperatives. The restaurants in San Pedro Atocpan also specialize in mole and receive about 8,000 customers each week. The Feria Nacional del Mole occurs each year in San Pedro Atocpan in October and receives thousands of visitors to the festival site as well as the forty restaurants in the town that serve meats in mole sauce.
The only other industry in Milpa Alta is small handcraft workshops making articles such as leather goods, furniture and textiles.
Education
Although there are various primary schools, two technical middle schools and two high school (one a vocational school run by the Instituto Politécnico Nacional), Milpa Alta has the highest adult illiteracy rate at 5.6%. Recently a technological institute called the Instituto Technológico de Milpa Alta was opened. Another educational and cultural institution is the Fábrica de Artes y Oficio Milpa Alta. It is the second of its type in the Federal District of Mexico City, patterned after the successful Fábrica de Artes y Oficios Oriente in Iztapalapa. Its function is to provide cultural and entertainment options to residents as well as classes in various arts and trades. In addition it supports the customs and traditions of the twelve indigenous communities found in the borough. It also hosts an annual Pantomime, Clown and Circus Festival sponsored by the city’s secretary of culture. The purpose of the event is to promote the circus arts.
Public high schools of the Instituto de Educación Media Superior del Distrito Federal (IEMS) include:
Escuela Preparatoria Milpa Alta "Emiliano Zapata"
The Otilio Montaño Library is in Tlacoyucan.
Transportation
Public transportation includes thirteen major bus route connecting the borough to Metro Tasqueña, Metro Tlahuac, the Central de Abastos, La Merced Market, Xochimilco and Santa Martha Acatitla, along with 23 smaller routes which are operated by private contractors. It takes about two hours by public transportation to travel from the center of Mexico City to Villa Milpa Alta. It can take up to three if traffic is bad, but lately, the subway made close Milpa Alta to the rest of the city via Tecomitl. For a short time beginning in the late 1980s, Milpa Alta was also served by trolleybuses of Servicio de Transportes Eléctricos, with a route from Tláhuac, but this service lasted only from October 1988 to early 1991.
Most of the borough is accessible by road. This has facilitated problems such as illegal logging and irregular homesteading. The main access roads to the borough are the federal highway connecting the south of the city with Oaxtepec in Morelos, the highway connecting San Pablo-Xochimilco and the Tulyehualco-Milpa Alta road.
Landmarks
Most of the borough’s landmarks are churches and chapels dating from the colonial period.
The Santa Marta Chapel is considered to be the founding church of Milpa Alta. From here the churches of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries were founded. The first of these is the Parish of the Assumption of Mary constructed in the 16th century along with its former monastery in Villa Milpa Alta. Other colonial era churche/chapels include Nuestra Señora de la Concepción Chapel (1767), Santa Cruz Chapel, San Agustín el Alto Chapel (16th century), San Francisco de Asís Chapel (16th century), San Jeronimo Chapel (16th century), San Juan Bautista Chapel (16th, 17th and 19th centuries), San Lorenzo Martir Chapel (1605), Calvario Hermitage (16th and 17th centuries), San Pablo Apostol Parish (16th can 17th centuries), La Lupita Chapel (16th century), San Pedro Apostol Church (17th century), San Martin Chapel (16th and 17th centuries), Santa María de Guadalupe Chapel (16th and 17th centuries), San Francisco Chapel (16th century), Divino Salvador Chapel (16th century), Nuestra Señora de Santa Ana Parish (17th century) and the San Bartolome Chapel (17th century).
La Casona is one of the most important civil buildings in Milpa Alta both because of its construction and because of its history. It was constructed at the end of the 19th century and was the home of Rafael Coronel. Another important structure is the former headquarters of the Liberation Army of the South, now a museum.
References
Bibliography
External links
Alcaldía de Milpa Alta website
Boroughs of Mexico City
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408613
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John%20Doolittle
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John Doolittle
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John Taylor Doolittle (born October 30, 1950), is an attorney and an American politician. Elected to Congress in 1990, he served as a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives from 1991 to 2009, representing (numbered as during his first term). In the 109th Congress, he held a leadership role as the Deputy Whip for the Republican party in the House. He was succeeded in the House of Representatives by Tom McClintock. Before being elected to Congress, he had served in the California State Senate from 1984 to 1991.
In the approach to the 2008 election, Doolittle lost support from previous allies and had difficulty in fundraising. He announced that he would not run again. He had been criticized by opponents for improprieties, including using his wife's one-person firm for his political fundraising, as she based her compensation on a percentage of all funds raised, including from his PAC. She made nearly $180,000 in such commissions from 2001 to 2006. His office did not stop using her firm for fundraising until January 2007.
He was under investigation from 2006 to 2010 related to alleged financial improprieties. These included his and his wife's business relations with Jack Abramoff, a prominent Washington, D.C. lobbyist who was found to have defrauded numerous clients, including Indian tribes. During this period, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) listed Doolittle as among the 20 most corrupt congressmen in reports from 2006 to 2009. The US Attorney closed its investigation of Doolittle in 2010 without bringing any charges against him.
Early life and education
Doolittle was born in Glendale, California. He grew up in Cupertino, California, attending local public schools. He graduated from Cupertino High School in 1968. He graduated with honors with a B.A. in history from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He earned a Juris Doctor degree from McGeorge School of Law, University of the Pacific, in Sacramento, in 1978.
Before going to law school, Doolittle spent two years as a missionary in Argentina for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, to which he and his family belonged. Doolittle is married to the former Julia (Julie) Harlow. They have a son and daughter.
Career prior to the U.S. House
Doolittle entered politics early. Soon after passing the bar, in 1979 Doolittle started work as an aide to California state senator H. L. Richardson, the conservative founder of Gun Owners of America and the Law and Order Campaign Committee.
The next year Doolittle decided to run for the state senate, with encouragement from Richardson and other Republicans. Riding on the coattails of Governor Ronald Reagan's victory in the presidential race, in 1980 the 29-year-old Doolittle narrowly defeated incumbent Democrat Albert S. Rodda, dean of the state Senate and chair of the Senate Finance Committee. Doolittle won his seat in the California State Senate.
In 1981, the Democratic-dominated state legislature issued a redistricting plan following the 1980 census and congressional reapportionment. It tried to squeeze out Republican lawmakers. The newly drawn district put Doolittle into a predominately Democratic district, where he lost to then-Assemblyman Leroy Greene in 1982 for the state senate. But by a quirk of redistricting rules, Doolittle was able to keep his original seat until 1984. He won another term in the state senate by beating Ray E. Johnson, a Republican turned Independent from Chico. An administrative law judge later found Doolittle guilty of violating campaign finance laws because his campaign had contributed to his Democratic opponent in order to pull votes away from Johnson.
Doolittle easily won re-election in 1988. From 1987 to 1990, he was chairman of the state Senate Republican Caucus.
Initial election and re-elections
In 1990, Republican Norman D. Shumway, also a Mormon, retired from Congress. In the November general election, Doolittle defeated Patty Malberg, a Democrat from Lincoln, getting 51% of the vote, in what was then California's 14th congressional district. The district covered much of the northeastern corner of the state, from the northern suburbs of Sacramento to the Oregon border.
Doolittle's district was renumbered as California's 4th congressional district in 1992, following redistricting. He was reelected with 50 percent of the vote, again defeating Malberg. In 1994 he received 60% of the vote and did not face another close race until 2006.
Political positions and actions
In his first years in Congress, Doolittle was a member of the group known as the Gang of Seven, which had a role in exposing the House banking scandal.
Doolittle is a staunch conservative. According to the Associated Press, "Doolittle is a generally loyal supporter of the Bush administration—though like many House Republicans he opposes Bush's support for an immigration guest worker program." He is in favor of partial privatization of Social Security, saying he would like to see people "gain ownership over their own funds". He opposes gun control and abortion rights.
After the Republican Study Committee had its funding yanked in 1995, Doolittle helped revive it as the "Conservative Action Team." He alternated the chairmanship with Dan Burton of Indiana, Sam Johnson of Texas, and Ernest Istook of Oklahoma until 1999.
In November 1997, Doolittle was one of eighteen Republicans in the House to co-sponsor a resolution by Bob Barr that sought to launch an impeachment inquiry against President Bill Clinton. The resolution did not specify any charges or allegations. This was an early effort to impeach Clinton, predating the eruption of the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal. The eruption of that scandal would ultimately lead to a more serious effort to impeach Clinton in 1998. On October 8, 1998, Doolitte voted in favor of legislation that was passed to open an impeachment inquiry. On December 19, 1998, Doolittle voted in favor of all four proposed articles of impeachment against Clinton (only two of which received the needed majority of votes to be adopted).
In January 2006, an opinion piece published in The Union newspaper, of Grass Valley, California, quoted Doolittle as saying that "A liberal front is underway to find God and all things pertaining to him unconstitutional."
In February 2006, Doolittle was praised by the El Dorado Irrigation District for his assistance in obtaining federal funds for hydroelectric power projects.
Auburn Dam Project
Doolittle is known for support of the Auburn Dam project, despite environmental concerns. People who opposed construction of the dam were particularly concerned about the uncertainties of the potential effects of such a dam on seismic activity in the area. A mid-1990s preliminary United States Geological Survey report cited concerns about the potential for earthquakes to be caused by that project.
Doolittle's stated reason for supporting the Auburn Dam was for flood control of Sacramento. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, he portrayed the flooding in New Orleans as an example of why the project was needed. Critics replied that the Gulf Coast, with its hurricane season and the torrential rainfalls associated with it, is not a valid comparison to a region of the country that historically often has droughts. They said that Folsom and Nimbus dams sufficed to control floods in an intense rainy season. Opponents of the project believe that the proposed Auburn Dam will also accelerate urban sprawl east of Sacramento and downriver from the proposed dam. Placer County already has one of the highest growth rates in the country, putting strains on local services and infrastructure, and affecting the environment. Opponents also cited other issues, such as destruction of the canyon environment and loss of habitat for wildlife.
In 1975, the construction of the dam was stopped due to environmental concerns, money issues, and the seismic instability of the proposed dam site. The construction was canceled and the project is abandoned. Much of the preliminary work on the dam can still be seen today. In 2005, Doolittle secured funding for studies to move the project forward.
21st century re-election campaigns
2002
In 2002, Doolittle defeated Republican challenger Dr. Bill Kirby of Auburn, California, 78%–22%. In the general election, Doolittle defeated Mark Norberg, 65%-35%, while raising $1,024,986 compared to Norberg's $8,202.
2004
In 2004, Doolittle took in more than $1 million in contributions and received 65% of the vote. His Democratic opponent David Winters raised $2,300; he won 35 percent of the vote.
2006
In the Republican primary on June 6, 2006, Doolittle was challenged for his party's nomination by Mike Holmes, the mayor of Auburn. Doolittle raised more than $1.1 million in campaign contributions, more than 14 times the fund of Holmes. Doolittle won the primary with 67% of the vote.
In the general election, Doolittle's Democratic opponent was retired Air Force Lt. Colonel Charles Brown. Doolittle agreed to a single debate, on October 11, 2006. Doolittle defeated Brown, getting 49% of the vote to Brown's 46%. Brown defeated Doolittle in Nevada County, but narrowly lost Placer County, the most populated county in the district, and lost the rest of the district.
In January 2007, Doolittle announced ten steps he said he would take to re-establish the confidence of the district in his holding office. He announced the planned changes in an op-ed piece he distributed to newspapers in his district, to attempt to gain free publicity about it.
Legislative record
State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP)
In 2007, Congress took up the reauthorization of the State Children's Health Insurance Program, which provides health care for about 6 million children and 670,000 adults from families who earn too much money to qualify for Medicare but not enough to afford health insurance. Congressional Democrats and many Republicans tried to expand the coverage of the program to other needy families, but they were opposed by President George W. Bush and other Republicans. In 2006, 5.4 million children were eligible but not enrolled in SCHIP or Medicaid, and 9.4 million total children were uninsured. Such children and their families are often treated in emergency rooms of hospitals, a much more expensive alternative for taxpayers than expanding the SCHIP and similar programs.
John Doolittle voted against the first House bill, which passed along party lines. It would have added $47 billion over five years to the $25 billion cost of the program and added about 5 million people to the program, including children, some legal immigrants, pregnant women, and adults aged 18 and 19. The bill was to be financed mainly by an increase in cigarette taxes.
House Democrats, with 45 Republicans, later compromised and passed a bill that expanded the plan by $35 billion and would have insured about 3.5 million more children from families generally making between 250% and 300% of the federal poverty line (about $51,000 to $62,000 for a family of four). Most non-pregnant, childless adults were excluded, as were most legal immigrants and all illegal immigrants. Doolittle voted against the bill.
After President Bush vetoed the bill, Democratic leaders attempted to override the veto with the same bill but failed. Doolittle voted against the bill.
House Democrats attempted to override the veto with a new bill, which acceded to Republican demands for increased checks for citizenship, the quick phasing-out of adult coverage, a hard limit of 300% of the federal poverty level, and funding for families to cover their children through private insurance instead. Angry that the congressional vote was scheduled to proceed despite massive wildfires in California, Republicans blocked the veto override. Doolittle voted with fellow Republicans against the bill.
Campaign finances
Between 2005 and 2006, John Doolittle raised a total of $2,354,786 for his political campaign. 65.1% of his finances came from private donors, 34.5% from PACs, and 0.3% from other various sources. 54.3% of the PAC contributions came from business organizations while the other 45.7% came from labor and ideological groups. At the end of his 2005–2006 political campaign, 98.4% of his finances were completely disclosed. According to the FEC (Federal Election Commission), John Doolittle raised a total of $278,142 in that year.
Controversies
Doolittle was investigated by the US Attorney for issues related to his campaign financing and reporting, beginning in 2006. He and his wife both had business and political relations with Jack Abramoff, a prominent lobbyist in Washington, DC. Abramoff was investigated by a Congressional committee and found to have defrauded numerous clients, especially Indian tribes which he represented on gaming issues. Doolittle's wife had a consulting firm that Abramoff used for some activities. He required his Indian tribe clients to contribute some $50,000 to Doolittle's political campaigns and personally contributed another $14,000.
On September 20, 2006, the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a non-profit group headed by former Democratic Congressional staffer Melanie Sloan, released its second annual report on the most corrupt members of Congress. It was entitled Beyond DeLay: The 20 Most Corrupt Members of Congress (and Five to Watch). Doolittle was one of the 20 discussed in the report. The organization said, "His ethics issues stem from his wife's relationship to his campaign and political action committees, as well as campaign contributions and personal financial benefits he accepted from those who sought his legislative assistance." He was also listed as among the most corrupt Congressmen in CREW's subsequent 2007 and 2008 reports.
On June 11, 2010, the U.S. Attorney announced that, after a 4-year investigation, they had closed its case against Congressman Doolittle and would not pursue charges. Doolittle, who had consistently denied wrongdoing, expressed regret that so many lives and careers had been affected by the investigation. He was forced from office by it. He said he was relieved that the investigation was ended.
Abramoff connections
John Doolittle has been entangled in the scandal involving Jack Abramoff. On September 27, 2007, he indicated that he planned to fight a Justice Department subpoena for 11 years of records as part of that department's investigation into his conduct.
Doolittle has denied any wrongdoing. In connection with the matter, he hired David Barger, a criminal defense lawyer and former prosecutor from Ken Starr's office, and Wiley Rein LLP, a law firm that specializes in campaign finance and government ethics. Doolittle has estimated that he received about $50,000 in contributions for his campaigns from clients of Abramoff, mostly Indian tribes. His congressional campaigns from 1999 to 2004 received $14,000 in personal donations from Abramoff over the period 1999–2004 to Doolittle's congressional campaigns. After Doolittle's Chief of Staff Kevin A. Ring left to work for Abramoff, Ring helped arrange for Abramoff to hire a consulting firm owned by Doolittle's wife. Doolittle used Abramoff's luxury sports box for a political fundraiser and failed to report this as part of his campaign finances. Doolittle was investigated by a federal probe into his relationship with Abramoff. On April 13, 2007, Doolittle's former aide, Kevin Ring, resigned from his lobby firm. On the same day, the FBI raided Doolittle's Virginia home. On September 4, 2007, the House announced that Doolittle's Chief of Staff Ron Rogers and Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Blankenburg were subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury.
Small towns pressured to hire lobbyists
Dan Landon, a Republican and the executive director of the Nevada County Transportation Commission, said that he was told recently by Doolittle's staff that "it also doesn't hurt to have a lobbyist". Sharon Atteberry, city administrator for the city of Oroville, said she had also been urged to hire a lobbyist by Doolittle's staff. "They encouraged us that a lobbyist is very important to any city or county government" she said.
Activities of Julie Doolittle
During the 2001–2005 period, Julie Doolittle had at least three different occupations: she worked for Jack Abramoff doing event planning (see above); she worked as a bookkeeper for a lobbying firm; and she worked on commission as a fundraiser for her husband. Payments to Julie Doolittle during the period were done via a company called Sierra Dominion Financial Solutions. It was founded in March 2001, just after Congressman Doolittle gained a seat on the Appropriations Committee. It is based at the couple's home in Oakton, Virginia; Julie is the only employee. The company (that is, Julie) has continued to do fundraising, but no event planning or other work, since the Abramoff scandal first became public in early 2005.
Work for lobbying firm
From 2002 until mid-2005, the Alexander Strategy Group, a Washington, D.C. lobbying firm with close ties to Congressman Tom DeLay, paid Sierra Dominion for bookkeeping work for a nonprofit group called the Korea-U.S. Exchange Council (KORUSEC). The latter was created by Ed Buckham, a partner in the firm, and was located at the ASG headquarters. KORUSEC is also connected to Kevin Ring, one of Doolittle's former assistants. ASG closed due to the financial scandals caused by Jack Abramoff and his associates. Julie Doolittle's records regarding her work there were subpoenaed by the US Department of Justice.
Fundraising commissions from Doolittle campaign revenues
Sierra Dominion charged Doolittle's campaign and his Superior California Political Action Committee a 15 percent commission on any contribution that Julie Doolittle helped bring in. Federal and state campaign records show that, since late 2001, she had received nearly $180,000 in commissions from for such fundraising. This meant that Doolittle and his family had personally made money off his political fundraising. Doolittle aides said even though the PAC had made payments to other fundraisers, Julie Doolittle was entitled to 15 percent of all money the PAC brought in because those donations were raised at events she helped organize.
In December 2005, Richard Robinson, Doolittle's Chief of Staff, defended the commission structure. "Sierra Dominion's compensation is based entirely on performance in that it receives a percentage in what it is directly involved in raising. This arrangement is not only consistent with that of other fund raisers but is designed to avoid the appearance that Sierra Dominion is compensated for anything other than its tireless and effective work. Any suggestion otherwise is completely without merit."
But in 2006, the 27,000-member Association of Fundraising Professionals published a letter it had sent to Doolittle, stating emphatically that his wife's activities and form of compensation violated the Association's ethics code. Their code "explicitly prohibits percentage-based compensation".
In January 2007, Doolittle announced that he would no longer employ his wife as his campaign fundraiser. Instead, he said, he would hire an outside fundraiser. But in July 2007, his campaign reported expenses of $50,000 for fundraising by Sierra Dominion Financial Solutions during the April–June 2007 period. The company was also still owed $76,000 in commissions from the 2006 race.
2005 trip to Asia
KORUSEC, which employed Doolittle's wife (see above) and the U.S.-Malaysia Exchange Association, another non-profit firm operated by ASG, paid the total $29,400 cost of what was described as a "fact finding mission" in 2005 for Congressman Doolittle and his 12-year-old daughter to South Korea and Malaysia. This trip included a stop at the Berjaya Beach & Spa Resort on the Malaysian island of Langkawi.
KORUSEC and the U.S.-Malaysia Exchange Association, which were operated by the Washington lobbying firm, Alexander Strategy Group, were, as of November 2006, being investigated by the FBI as possible conduits for illegal influence in U.S. affairs; foreign corporations such as KORUSEC and foreign governments, such as USMEA, are prohibited from seeking such influence. A spokeswoman for Doolittle said that he believed that his trip was proper and that it had nothing to do with the earmarks he had approved in the federal budget.
Connections to Brent Wilkes
PerfectWave is a company owned by Brent R. Wilkes; Doolittle has had significant involvement with both the company and its owner. Disgraced Congressman Duke Cunningham admitted receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and favors from Wilkes for his efforts to help another of Wilkes' companies, ADCS Inc.
In 2002, Wilkes hired the Alexander Strategy Group (ASG) for lobbying for his company. In November 2003, Wilkes hosted a fund-raising dinner for Congressman Doolittle. Between 2002 and 2005, Doolittle received at least $118,000 in campaign contributions from Wilkes, PerfectWave associates and their wives, and ASG lobbyists Edwin A. Buckham and Tony C. Rudy (two former aides of Tom DeLay) and their wives.
Doolittle, a member of the House Appropriations Committee, said in January 2006 that he had helped steer defense funds totaling $37 million to PerfectWave ($1 million in 2002, $18 million in 2003, and then $18 million in 2004.) Doolittle said that his support was based "on the project's merits and the written support of the military."
But the San Diego Union-Tribune reported that "The money was not requested by the Navy but was instead inserted by the Appropriations Committee as part of the closed-door congressional earmarking process." They further reported that "[T]he only evidence Doolittle's office could provide to show military support for the project was a letter of praise from Robert Lusardi, a program manager for light armored vehicles at the Marine Corps dated Feb. 25—two and a half years after PerfectWave got its first earmark. By the time Lusardi wrote his letter, the company had received at least $37 million in earmarks."
In February 2006, Doolittle said that he was glad he supported PerfectWave, saying "it has unique technology ... that ensures the safety of our armed forces in the war on terror."
Investigation of Charles Hurwitz
On January 8, 2006, the Los Angeles Times reported that "Reps. John T. Doolittle and Richard W. Pombo joined forces with former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas to oppose an investigation by federal banking regulators into the affairs of Houston millionaire Charles Hurwitz, documents recently obtained by The Times show." "When the FDIC persisted [in seeking investigation], Doolittle and Pombo—both considered proteges of DeLay—used their power as members of the House Resources Committee to subpoena the agency's confidential records on the case, including details of the evidence FDIC investigators had compiled on Hurwitz." The FDIC investigation was ultimately dropped.
The Times reported that "Although Washington politicians frequently try to help important constituents and contributors, it is unusual for members of Congress to take direct steps to stymie an ongoing investigation by an agency such as the FDIC." The article concluded, "in the Hurwitz case, Doolittle and Pombo were in a position to pressure the FDIC and did so."
On April 19, 2007, Doolittle resigned from the Committee on Appropriations in response to a raid by the FBI at his Northern Virginia home. The raid stemmed from possible involvement by his wife in the investigation of Jack Abramoff for defrauding clients as a lobbyist and inappropriate influence.
2008 re-election campaign
Democrat Charlie Brown, a retired Lt. Colonel who had narrowly lost to Doolittle in 2006 by 3 percent of the vote, announced in February 2007 that he would run again in 2008. In the first and second quarters of 2007, Brown raised more campaign funds than Doolittle; as of June 30, he had a net cash balance of $251,000; Doolittle had a negative balance of $32,000. Analysts believed that the continuing corruption investigation caused the decline in support for Doolittle.
In August 2007, former Placer County Republican Party chairman Ken Campbell, a longtime financial backer of Doolittle, said he was withdrawing his support. Campbell cited a recent Club for Growth report on votes in 2007 on spending bills, where Doolittle scored 2 percent, compared to the Republican average of 43 percent.
In July 2007, Eric Egland, a 37-year-old Air Force reservist and security consultant, announced that he would seek the Republican nomination for the seat held by Doolittle. In August 2007, Auburn City Councilman Mike Holmes announced that he also was entering the 2008 race. Holmes ran unsuccessfully against Doolittle in the primary for the Republican nomination in 2006, getting 33 percent of the primary vote to 67 percent for Doolittle.
On August 30, 2007, State Assemblyman Ted Gaines announced the establishment of an exploratory committee to begin raising money to run for Congress against Doolittle, stating "I think voters have lost faith in his leadership ability ... when you lose the moral ability to lead, you kind of have to re-evaluate."
Doolittle said, "After spending the last month talking to local voters, I have seen strong support for my candidacy and a strong desire to focus on solving problems instead of plotting for political advantage ... I will gladly place before the voters my record of over 30 years of service to the Republican Party to Ted Gaines' less than one year."
After much speculation, on January 10, 2008, John Doolittle announced he would finish his current term, but would not run for re-election.
After Doolittle's retirement announcement, Councilman Holmes quit the race and instead endorsed former Republican Congressman Doug Ose, who announced on February 1, 2008, that he is running for Doolittle's seat. Ose faced opposition from former California State Senator Rico Oller (R-San Andreas), who announced his candidacy on January 10, 2008. When California State Senator Tom McClintock (R-Thousand Oaks) announced that he too was running for Doolittle's seat on March 4, 2008, Oller dropped out of the race, and decided to give his endorsement to McClintock. Although he didn't live in the district, McClintock beat Charlie Brown in the general election by only 1,800 votes.
See also
List of federal political scandals in the United States
References
External links
Profile at SourceWatch
John Doolittle for Congress – Official campaign site
Legislation sponsored or cosponsored
107th Congress Sponsored Cosponsored
108th Congress Sponsored Cosponsored
109th Congress Sponsored Cosponsored
110th Congress Sponsored Cosponsored
Articles
Suspect Doolittle says he'll fight subpoenas Dennis Zaki, AlaskaReport.com, September 27, 2007
Lawmakers Under Scrutiny in Probe of Lobbyist Susan Schmidt and James V. Grimaldi, The Washington Post, November 26, 2005
The Daily Muck Paul Kiel's blog, January 24, 2006, Doolittle's contributions from Abramoff
Abramoff Ties Continue to Weigh Down Doolittle in Calif. 4 Rachel Kapochunas, The New York Times, October 19, 2006
Auburn Dam Structural Info
Join California John Doolittle
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1950 births
20th-century Mormon missionaries
21st-century American politicians
Latter Day Saints from California
American Mormon missionaries in Argentina
Republican Party California state senators
Living people
McGeorge School of Law alumni
People from Roseville, California
Republican Party members of the United States House of Representatives from California
University of California, Santa Cruz alumni
People from Oakton, Virginia
Members of Congress who became lobbyists
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuisine%20of%20Quebec
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Cuisine of Quebec
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The cuisine of Québec (also called "French Canadian cuisine" or "cuisine québécoise") is a national cuisine in the Canadian province of Québec. It is also cooked by Franco-Ontarians.
Québec's cuisine descended from 17th-century French cuisine and began to develop in New France from the labour-intensive nature of colonial life, the seasonality of ingredients and the need to conserve resources. It has been influenced by the province's history of fur trading and hunting, as well as Québec's winters, soil fertility, teachings from First Nations, British cuisine, American cuisine, historical trade relations and some immigrant cuisines.
Québec is home to many unique dishes and is most famous for its poutine, tourtières, pâté chinois, pea soup, fèves au lard, cretons and desserts such as grands-pères, pouding chômeur and St. Catherine's taffy. Québec's unique dishes are the traditional fare of the holidays, as well as the temps des sucres, a time in March where families go to sugar shacks.
Québec is known for being the biggest producer of maple syrup on the planet, as 72% of the maple syrup sold in the world (and 90% sold in Canada) originates from Québec. The province is also recognized for having created over 700 different kinds of cheese, some of which have won international contests.
Food critic Jacob Richler wrote that Québec's cuisine is better defined than that of the rest of Canada, due to its language barrier with the dominant culture of the United States and having had more time to develop. Conversely, Québec's cuisine and Acadian cuisine have much in common due to proximity and a shared language and history.
History
The cuisine of Québec evolved from that of 17th-century Northern France. It also retains some heritage from Poitevin cuisine: many Québecois make pâté marmite; soupe aux gourganes, which is based on gourgane beans, a strain of fava bean; and soups based on other legumes. Charentaise chowders (chaudrées charentaises) have evolved into the quiaudes of Gaspesia and the tourtes salées of Poitiers into tourtières.
Other foods that originate from France are pot-au-feu; blood sausage (boudin); head cheese (tête fromagée); plorine sausages; ham hock stew (ragoût de pattes de cochon); rabbit stew (civet de lapin); French toast (pain perdu or pain doré); and pastries like crêpes, beignets, croquignole biscuits, and tarts. As in France, pork is the most popular meat.
From the moment they arrived in the early 17th century, French colonists always preferred their native cuisine. However, they learned some culinary techniques from the Algonquins, Atikamekw and Iroquois. The most important ones were l’acériculture (the process of harvesting maple sap and creating maple syrup), ice fishing, and boucanage (in which fish or other meat is smoked for preservation and flavour).
Food preservation was always important in pioneer times, due to long winters and to the frequent voyages of coureurs des bois. Butter, herbs, and lard were used for seasoning and salting. Pork and fish were boucanés, while other meats and vegetables were preserved in vinegar. These techniques are still practiced today, though not for survival. As game was so plentiful, pioneers and their descendants always hunted and fished for sustenance.
By the 1670s, a substantial agrarian population had emerged in the region of Québec City, and French habits dominated. Meals almost always featured soup, bread, meat, and wine. Since the climate made it difficult to grow grapes, wines were always imported from France.
The Conquest of New France in 1760 brought some culinary changes to Québec. One of the immediate effects was the elimination of wine, as it could no longer be imported from France. Another major change was the importation of the potato, which, in only a few decades, became a staple ingredient in Québec, dethroning bread in popularity. Sugar consumption also increased. Finally, the British imported many recipes like mashed potatoes, crumble, and meat pies.
Because tensions with the young United States alleviated, the period following the Aroostook War in 1839 saw increased interaction between Québec and New England. Some recipes inspired by the cultural exchange included fèves au lard, ketchup maison, and date squares. The socio-economic standing of French Canadians also fell to deplorable levels; the intense poverty pushed them to simplify their meals. Recipes for bouillon were now almost nothing more than warm water. Alcoholic beverages were rarely consumed, and butter was either used sparingly or absent. Some famine foods like ploye emerged during this period.
By the early 1900s, conditions had improved somewhat, though French Canadians were still poor. Most families would often eat a mix of potatoes and pork on their plate, which is still a staple combination today. During this period, the passenger pigeon, called tourte in French, also became extinct. Because this bird's meat had been used to fill the pie-like dishes known as tourtières, the tourtière recipe had to change. Farm-raised meats like beef and pork were usually chosen as the substitutes.
The Great Depression of the 1930s saw the creation of new recipes like pâté chinois ("Chinese pie") and pouding chômeur ("unemployed man's pudding") that were delicious and cost-conscious. Immigration after this period diversified; immigrants no longer came only from the British Isles but also from other parts of Europe. Jewish specialties like bagels and Eastern Europe-style smoked meat became popular, resulting in the creation of Montréal-style smoked meat and Montréal-style bagels.
The 1950s saw many changes in the eating habits of the Québécois for a variety of reasons: many American fast-food restaurants expanded in Québec, raw milk was banned, and many fruits and vegetables became available year-round thanks to refrigerators and larger supply chains. As a result, the homemade pain de ménage was replaced with store-bought sandwich bread; many old cheese recipes were abandoned and new ones created; and spaghetti, pizza, turkey, bacon, sausages, industrial cheeses, hamburgers, hot dogs, french fries, coleslaw and lobster rolls all become popular.
In the late 1950s, these changes brought about the creation of poutine—arguably the most famous Québécois dish—as well as other dishes, like hot chicken and guédilles.
The Quiet Revolution of the 1960s to 1970s greatly improved the socio-economic standing of French Canadians. This allowed them to have a more diverse diet. It also set the stage for high-quality products to be created in Québec and for the emergence of Québécois restaurants, for example Lafleur, Valentine, La Belle Province or St-Hubert.
From the 1980s to today, a desire for higher quality foods, more spending power, and an influence by immigrants from Europe —particularly Italy, Greece, France and Portugal— has led to the rise of the creation and production of high-quality cheeses and alcoholic beverages across Québec, as well as a return to recipes of the terroir. Immigration from Greece has popularized gyros and brought about slouvaki pitas. Immigrants from Lebanon have popularized shawarmas which has created shish taouk. Finally, NAFTA and the new culture of Quebecers vacationing south has resulted in the adoption of Americanized sushi and Tex-Mex dishes like nachos, fajitas, salsa, chili and burritos.
Ingredients
Game, seafood, and fish
Historical poverty led many families in Québec to hunt for substenance until the mid 20th century. Tourtières were stuffed with the meat of the tourte, or passenger pigeon, which used to be common and easy prey. But, by the early 20th century, the passenger pigeon became extinct due to overhunting, deforestation, and the Allee effect. Families had to replace the meat with whatever they had. As a result, most modern tourtières are filled with beef or pork.
Today, the consumption of game remains a tradition, although game is not sold in grocery stores. When available, Québécois eat meat from moose, deer, hares, ruffed grouse, wild turkey, waterfowl and more rather than that of livestock. Game is also sometimes given as a gift.
As for seafood, lobster and crab are caught in Gaspesia, la Côte-Nord, and the Magdalen Islands to be sold to the rest of Québec. Shrimp is often marketed as crevette de Matane after the shrimp-processing factory in the town of Matane. However, the shrimp themselves are caught in several villages on the Saint Lawrence River estuary. Mussels, oysters, scallops, and whelks (bourgots) are also caught.
Salmon and trout are the most popular fish in Québec. The brook trout is nearly ubiquitous, salmon is farmed and can be caught in 118 different rivers, and Arctic char is present across nearly 100 lakes. Other fished species include lake trout, yellow perch, walleye, muskellunge, Northern pike, micropterus, rainbow smelt, Greenland halibut, mackerel, lake sturgeon, lake whitefish, Atlantic cod (Eastern Québec), Atlantic herring (Eastern Québec), American eel (between Trois-Rivières and Cap-Chat), ouananiche (a kind of freshwater salmon; Lac Saint-Jean), frostfish (Sainte-Anne-de-la-Pérade), deepwater redfish (Saguenay fjords), capelin (coastal villages), and brown bullhead (Îles de Sorel).
Sainte-Anne-de-la-Pérade holds a world-renowned festival every December to February called La pêche des petits poisons des chenaux, where ice fishers catch tomcods. Historically, starving French colonists learned ice fishing techniques from the Atikamekw—a privilege, as the technique was kept a secret from neighbouring First Nations.
Livestock
Pork is the meat used most often in Québécois recipes. Beef is also commonly used but has been losing popularity in recent years. In summer, beef commonly features in barbecues.
Québécois pigs are mostly hybrids of the Duroc, Yorkshire, and American Landrace breeds. The cattle are also hybrids of many breeds; the Aberdeen Angus, Charolais, and Limousin are the most common. Despite the large cattle population, Québec imports most of its beef from the Canadian West, using its own cattle mostly for dairy. Milk production is dominated by the Holstein, but Jersey or Brown Swiss cows are also milked.
Poultry is commonly consumed. Chicken is the most popular by far, but turkey and duck are also consumed. Chicken eggs are very popular and mostly used at breakfast and to make pastries. Turkey is traditionally served at Christmas and Thanksgiving with croutons and sage. The Estrie region has produced duck since the early 20th century. Québec is also the only producer of foie gras in Canada, as well as its largest producer in North America.
Horse is eaten very marginally- by less than 1% of Quebecois. Its consumption is taboo.
Other meats include lamb, veal, rabbit, bison, elk and frog legs (from American bullfrogs and leopard frogs).
Spices, sweeteners and cereals
Spices common in traditional recipes are linked to local production and historical commerce: salt, savory, cloves, cinnamon, parsley, thyme, sage, nutmeg, quatres épices, chives, garlic, oregano and bay leaf. Thanks to globalisation, a wider selection of international spices are available today, like turmeric, curry powder, allspice, cumin, cayenne pepper, etc. In recent years, chefs have attempted to create excitement for the flavours of the boreal forest; among them are green alder pepper, sweetfern, caraway seed, sweetgale, and juniper berry.
The types of sugar used are white sugar, brown sugar and maple sugar. Maple syrup is used to sweeten breakfasts, meats, and pastries. Honey is almost exclusively used for desserts, but it is also used as toast spread. Molasses and raisins are common ingredients in traditional recipes because of historical commerce with the Antilles and Brazil.
Traditional and most common cereals are wheat, rice, oat and buckwheat. Buckwheat became popular because it could grow well on the Canadian Shield. Nowadays, a few other cereals have managed to gain a small presence: quinoa, wild rice, chia seeds, and barley.
Fruits and vegetables
The most commonly used vegetables in traditional Québécois cuisine were those that can easily be preserved to last throughout the winter, either kept in a cool storage area like a root cellar or brined in jars. These vegetables are potato, onion, carrot, beet, pumpkin, squash (butternut, spaghetti, accorn, etc.), zucchini, beans, cabbage, turnip, and corn. In modern times, Québécois also cook with store-bought tomato, bell pepper, cucumber, lettuce, asparagus, cauliflower, broccoli, avocado, microgreens, radish, shallot, spinach, parsnip, eggplant, artichoke, kale, leek, rutabaga, sweet potato, celeri, lentil, peanut, soybean, chickpea and others. Rhubarb is typically grown in backyard gardens. Fiddleheads are gathered from the wild in the spring.
Frequently eaten berries are the blueberry, strawberry, raspberry, blackberry, grape, cherry and cranberry. The goldenberry is uncommonly imported from South America. Cloudberries only grow in the wilds of the boreal forest, but are still gathered seasonally in northern communities. Finally, as these plants were banned on the continent in the early 20th century and were, with time, forgotten, all types of gooseberries or currants are virtually unknown to Quebecers.
Other important locally-grown fruits are the apple, pear, plum, cantaloupe and watermelon. The most eaten imported fruits are: banana, orange, lemon, lime, kiwi, coconut, mango, clementine and pineapple. Other imported -but less popular- fruits include: pomegranate, grapefruit, starfruit, papaya, dragonfruit, passionfruit, fig and others.
Mushrooms have long been absent from Québec's traditional cuisine. However, they are present now, and almost always of the cremini variety. In recent years, morchella, chanterelle shiitake and enokis mushrooms have gained a small presence.
Examples of unique dishes
Entrées or sides
Betteraves marinées—pickled beets
Cretons—forcemeat-style pork spread containing onions and spices
Fèves au lard—beans slow-cooked with bacon and maple syrup
Ketchup maison—green or red sauce made with sugar, vinegar, tomatoes, onions, apples and spices
Soupe aux gourganes—soup showcasing the traditional gourgane bean
Soupe à l'orge perlé—soup showcasing pearl barley
Soupe aux pois—soup showcasing peas
Oreilles de crisse—a dish consisting of deep-fried salted fatback
Quiaude—a chowder that uses white fish
Main course
Bouilli de légumes —a bouillon of traditional ingredients and spices
Chiard—pork stew with potatoes and onions
Cigares au chou—ground beef cabbage rolls with a homemade ketchup or tomato sauce coating
Coquille Saint-Jacques —seafood chowder surrounded by mashed potatoes and covered with cheese
Feuilleté jambon-fromage—rolled-up pastries with ham and cheese in the middle, looks like cinnamon buns
Galette aux patates—potato pancake
Gibelotte de Sorel—soup made with a tomato base, several vegetables and white fish, dish originally from Sorel-Tracy
Guédille—lobster roll on a hotdog bun, can use other seafood instead of lobster
Hot chicken—a chicken sandwich with gravy and peas served on top
Pâté chinois—pâté consisting of a layer of ground beef at the bottom, either whole kernel or creamed corn in the centre and mashed potatoes on top
Pizza-ghetti— a combination meal commonly found in fast food or family restaurants, another variety is the Pizza-caesar
Pot-au-feu de la récolte—pork or beef pot-au-feu with traditional vegetables (ex. carrots, cabbage, etc.)
Poulet chasseur—floured chicken cooked with certain vegetables and tomato sauce
Poutine—french fries topped with cold or room temperature cheese curds and hot gravy, the most famous Québécois dish
Poutine variants—variations on the classic poutine
Ragoût de boulettes—a type of complex meatball ragoût
Ragoût de pattes de cochon—a type of complex ragoût made using pig feet
Tête fromagée—a solid structure made from a mix of pork, spices, onions, carrots and celery
Souvlaki pita—the Québec version of the Gyros or Nova Scotian donair, largely inspired by 20th century Greek immigrants and today popular in many pizzerias and patateries
Tourtière—pie usually made with minced pork or beef, a signature dish of the temps des fêtes
Tourtière du Lac-Saint-Jean—a type of tourtière made with a thicker crust and with cubes of potatoes, meats and broth
Desserts
Beigne à l'ancienne—old-fashioned doughnuts
Beigne aux patates—potato doughnuts
Bonbons aux patates—potato candy
Bûche de Noël—Yule log
Galette à la mélasse—molasses pancake
Gâteau Reine Élisabeth—type of cake made with dates, walnuts and coconut icing
Gâteau au pain d'épices—cake made with certain spices
Grands-pères—wrinkly ball-shaped cake often covered with maple syrup or stuffed with a fruit-based filling
Pets de sœurs—rolled-up pastry with a brown sugar filling, looks like cinnamon buns
Pouding chomeur—white cake laying in a maple-syrup based pudding
Queue de castor—oval-shaped fried dough covered in a sweet garnish
Sucre à la crème—cubes of sugar, cream and brown sugar, similar to Scottish tablets
Tarte à la ferlouche—pie made with raisins, molasses and brown sugar
Tarte au sucre—pie made from a sugar-based filling
Tarte au suif—pie made from a sweet beef-fat based filling
Tire de la Sainte-Catherine—a kind of sweet taffy, created to celebrate the Saint Catherine of Alexandria
Tire sur neige—boiling maple sap laid on snow and rolled up on a popsicle stick
Trottoir—strawberry or blueberry-based pie whose upper crust has a pattern of rhombus-shaped holes
Drinks
Bière d'épinette—spruce beer
Ice cider
Ice wine
Caribou—drink made from red wine, a spirit and maple syrup
Poutine variants
Poutine is arguably the most famous Québécois dish. The classic poutine is composed of fresh French fries and fresh cheese curds topped with hot brown gravy in a shallow bowl. The cheese curds are usually at room temperature to prevent them from melting and losing their elasticity or "squeakiness". Poutine emerged in the Centre-du-Québec area in the late 1950s. Its precise origins are uncertain as there are several cities and towns claiming to have invented the dish.
For many years, it was perceived negatively by English Canadians and mocked in English Canada. It was even used by some to stigmatize Québec society. But, it later became celebrated as a symbol of Québécois culture and the province of Québec. It has long been associated with Québec cuisine, and its rise in prominence has led to its popularity in the rest of Canada, in the northern United States, and internationally. Poutine has been called "Canada's national dish" though many believe this is cultural appropriation of Québécois and Québec's national identity, especially since Canada has mocked Québec for it, in the not-so-distant past.
Because variants on the classic poutine have become widespread, many now consider poutine to be a dish class of its own. Some of the most commonly seen variants include: chicken poutine (chicken is added), hot dog poutine (hot dog is added), pulled pork poutine (pulled pork is added), smoked meat poutine (Montréal smoked meat is added), galvaude poutine (adds peas and turkey, and is associated with maritime Québec), all-dressed poutine (adds ingredients to imitate an all-dressed pizza), "Italian" poutine (which replaces gravy with bolognese sauce), and lobster poutine (lobster is added and gravy is substituted). Menus who list variants on the classic poutine can vary wildly between restaurants. Establishments who specialise in poutines usually offer many variants and are called poutineries.
Cheeses
When Canada was part of the French Empire, colonials used their Canadienne cattle to create a variety of soft, semi-soft and soft-ripened cheeses to eat. Following the Conquest of New France, the British began importing hard cheeses like Cheddar.
In the 1960s, the banning of crude milk made most of the old cheese-making techniques and recipes, which up to that point had been successfully passed on for centuries, disappear and become forgotten. Only a few recipes remain. The Saint-Pierre, produced on l'île d’Orléans, has the honour of being the oldest North American cheese. It is a soft-ripened cheese sold under the forms of la Faisselle, le Paillasson or le Raffiné. The Cailles cheese, a cheese made from fermented milk and typically used in salads, also used to be quite widespread. It now only exists in the Charlevoix and Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean regions. Nowadays, there are attempts to diversify the ways in which Cailles is consumed.
There are some cheeses that were created by priests. Towards the end of the 19th century, a group of trappist monks were expelled from France and moved to Oka. One of them, who originated from Notre-Dame-du-Port-du-Salut, created a paste which was eventually used to mold the first Oka cheese. Benedictines were responsible for creating l’Ermite, a blue cheese, in 1943 at Saint-Benoît-du-Lac.
Today, Québec creates over 700 different kinds of cheeses and is the biggest cheese producer in Canada. Québecers enjoy many natively produced and imported hard cheeses, including hard cheeses flavored with beer or wine. Most soft cheeses are produced locally and many are artisanal.
Maple syrup
Québec produces 72% of the maple syrup sold on Earth and 90% of the maple syrup sold in Canada. Maple syrup is made from heated maple sap. The syrup is often used at breakfast to cover crêpes and pain doré, and as a component of fèves au lard. It can also be used to caramelize meats like ham, to stabilize the acidity of certain sauces, and to complement desserts. It is the main ingredient showcased in sugar shacks.
Many maple syrup-derived products exist. Tire, French for sugar on snow, is heated maple syrup that is cast onto a flat bed of snow and then rolled up onto a Popsicle stick. Tire is very popular at sugar shacks and during springtime. Maple butter is a spread commonly used at breakfast on toast. Maple sugar can serve as a replacement to brown and white sugar.
Smoked meat
In Québec, a technique called boucanage is sometimes used to smoke meat.
Colonials learned this technique from Native Americans. After they discovered that it was useful for preserving food, they decided to start smoking their meat in the boucanage fashion, following their usual brining and/or spicing. Native Americans, on the other hand, continued to only boucaner and never started brining or spicing. Today, Québecers still eat food that has been boucané for its taste.
Establishments called boucanières or boucaneries are specialized in the process. Modern boucanières can also use tree essences to infuse a certain taste in the meat, with maple wood being the most popular choice. A technique called boucaner à froid has also been developed; it involves drying fish and then suspending them over a fire. Boucaner à froid has always been popular in the Gaspesia, Bas-Saint-Laurent and Côte-Nord regions since fish were and are still commonly caught there.
In the 1930s, Jewish immigrants came to Montréal and introduced their own Eastern European meat-smoking technique to Québec. This technique is often used today to make Montréal smoked meat, which is then often cut up in narrow slices to be added to dishes as an ingredient. Montréal smoked meat is also often spiced with Montréal steak spice and used to make Montréal smoked meat sandwiches.
Smoked salmon has become more popular in recent decades due to influence from the United States and Europe. Smoked pork's popularity has decreased and it is now almost exclusively consumed during Easter.
Charcuterie
In Quebec, charcuterie is sometimes referred to as cochonailles.
Creton is composed of ground pork, lard, milk and cereal that is cooked together to obtain a creamy paste. Cretons are often eaten as a snack or for breakfast on roasted bread pieces called rôties. If another kind of meat is used to create cretons, like poultry or veal, it is called cretonnade instead.
Tête fromagée is less popular but used in the same way as cretons.
The boudin of Québec is made of lard, milk, onions and pork blood. It is served in a pan along with a sweet side or a sauce. Since 2018, the Goûte-Boudin de Boucherville association hands out a yearly prize for the best boudin.
Plorines are composed of lard and flavoured meat enveloped in pork caul fat. Sometimes plorine recipes can also include eggs, beef and/or bread.
Oreilles de Christ are lard pieces that are fried until crispy. They are eaten as an amuse-gueule and sometimes with maple syrup.
Pastries
Here are some pastries popular in Quebec:
Crêpes are flat and round, made from wheat or buckwheat flour. The crêpes of Québec are thicker than those from France, but not thick like pancakes of Anglo-Saxon cultures. They are popular breakfast items. They are often served with maple syrup and/or fruits.
Doughnuts. The doughnut holes are eaten as well with powdered sugar or icing on top.
Croquignoles are braided, twisted or rectangular fried dough pastries. They can be found in rural regions.
Pies. The most popular kinds are fruit-based, like blueberry, apple, strawberry, or raspberry. Other popular kinds of pies include tarte au sucre, tarte à la farlouche, and tarte au suif.
Cakes. Popular kinds include carrot cake and chocolate cake.
Sucre à la crème is a fudge-like sweet.
Pets-de-sœur and cinnamon rolls are both popular and spiral-shapped.
Chocolatines consist of small croissants with chocolate inside.
Pouding chomeur is a white cake soaked in maple syrup or brown sugar.
Grands-pères, a spherical cake that is eaten plain, with maple syrup, or filled with fruits.
Éclairs, an oblong pastry stuffed with cream and topped with chocolate.
Macarons are a sandwich-shaped meringue-based sweet.
Mille-feuilles are a layered puff pastry.
Regional foods
Some regions of Québec are known for specific foods or products. Montréal is known for having created Montréal-style smoked meat, Montréal-style bagels, Montréal hot dogs (also called "steamies"), and Montréal melons. The Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region is the birthplace of the tourtière du Lac-Saint-Jean, soupe aux gourganes and Saguenay Dry.
Maritime Quebec, known for its fish and seafood, is a region where cipaille is consumed during the holidays. Pot-en-pot des îles de la Madeleine is a dish of the Magdellan Islands.
Some municipalities are associated with high-quality meat, such as duck from lake Brome or Charlevoix lamb.
Strains and breeds
Strains
Over the centuries, new strains of fruits and vegetables were created in Québec. Then, in the 1900s, people moved away from a farming lifestyle. As a result, most of these have been lost. Here are some that have been preserved or rediscovered:
The Montréal melon
White Canadian corn
The crotte-d’ours potato of Louis-Marie
The Thibodeau bean of Saint-Jules
The pomme Fameuse
The Mémé tomato of Beauce
The potato onion
Breeds
Though few in number now, these breeds are still used today:
Canadienne cattle
Chantecler chicken
References
Sources
Bibliography
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Couillard, Suzette and Normand, Best Québec Recipes of Bygone Days , L'Islet: Éditions Suzette Couillard, 2002, 367 p. ().
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Hélène-Andrée Bizier and Robert-Lionel Séguin, Le Menu quotidien en Nouvelle-France, Art global, 2004, 124 p. ().
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Jean-Marie Francœur, Encyclopédie de la cuisine de Nouvelle-France (1606-1763). Histoires, produits et recettes de notre patrimoine culinaire, Anjou (Québec), Fides, 2015, 590 p. (, OCLC 914400153).
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Martin Fournier, Jardins et potagers en Nouvelle-France. Joie de vivre et patrimoine culinaire, Sillery, Septentrion, 2004, 242 p. ().
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Michel Lambert, Histoire de la cuisine familiale du Québec, vol. 2 : La Mer, ses régions et ses produits, des origines à aujourd’hui, Québec, Les Éditions GID, 2007, 912 p. ().
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Micheline Mongrain-Dontigny, A Taste of Maple : History and Recipes, Saint-Irénée: Éditions La Bonne recette, 2003, 127 p. ()
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Micheline Mongrain-Dontigny, La Cuisine traditionnelle de la Mauricie. Un patrimoine culinaire à découvrir, Montréal, Éditions La Bonne recette, 1998, 181 p. ().
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Sœur Sainte-Marie-Vitaline, 235 recettes pour dîners et soupers. Exercices pratiques d'art culinaire, Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Montréal, 1942, 80 p.
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Vincent Demester, La Cuisine des premiers migrants du Québec. Enquête sur la disparition du patrimoine culinaire du Poitou-Charentes, Paris (France), L'Harmattan, coll. « Questions alimentaires et gastronomiques », 2014, 250 p. ().
Culture of Quebec
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara%20Lee
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Barbara Lee
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Barbara Jean Lee (; born July 16, 1946) is an American politician and social worker who has served as a U.S. representative from California since 1998. A member of the Democratic Party, Lee represents (numbered as the 9th district from 1998 to 2013 and as the 13th district from 2013 to 2023), which is based in Oakland and covers most of the northern part of Alameda County. According to the Cook Partisan Voting Index, it is one of the nation's most Democratic districts, with a rating of D+40.
Born and raised in Texas, Lee holds degrees from Mills College and the University of California, Berkeley. She started her career by working on the presidential campaign of Shirley Chisholm, and she later was involved with the Black Panther Party. After working as chief of staff for U.S. Representative Ron Dellums, Lee served in the California State Assembly from 1990 to 1996 and in the California State Senate from 1996 to 1998.
Lee was elected to the House of Representatives in a 1998 special election to succeed Dellums. A noted progressive, she chaired the Congressional Progressive Caucus from 2005 to 2009 and the Congressional Black Caucus from 2009 to 2011. In addition, she is the vice chair and a founding member of the Congressional LGBTQ+ Equality Caucus, a co-chair of the Congressional Cannabis Caucus, and a co-chair of the House Democratic Steering Committee. She has played a major role in the antiwar movement, notably in her vocal criticism of the Iraq War and for being the only member of Congress to vote against the authorization of use of force following the September 11 attacks.
Lee is a candidate for the United States Senate in the 2024 election to succeed late senator Dianne Feinstein.
Early life and education
Lee was born Barbara Jean Tutt on July 16, 1946, in El Paso, Texas. She is the oldest of three daughter of Mildred Adaire (née Parish; 1924-2015) and Garvin Alexander Tutt (1924-2007), a lieutenant colonel in the United States Army. When she was born in a segregated hospital, her mother was left in the hallway, as the hospital refused to assist her. Lee is African American; according to a DNA analysis, she descends primarily from the people of Guinea-Bissau and Sierra Leone. She was raised Catholic and attended Catholic schools, where she was taught by the Sisters of Loretto. She was the only African-American Girl Scout in El Paso, and she recalls having faced racial discrimination throughout her childhood.
Lee's parents divorced in 1955. Five years later, she moved to California with her mother and two sisters. She attended San Fernando High School in the Pacoima neighborhood of Los Angeles, where she worked with the NAACP to become the school's first African-American cheerleader, and she graduated in 1964. When she was 15, Lee had a back-alley abortion in Ciudad Juárez. She married Carl Lee, a member of the United States Air Force, and moved with him to England after high school; they had two children, and then divorced when Lee was 20. Lee describes the marriage as abusive, and she became homeless following the divorce.
She later moved to the Bay Area and attended Mills College, where she served as president of the college's Black Student Union, and she graduated in 1973 with a bachelor of arts in psychology. She later attended the University of California, Berkeley, from where she graduated in 1975 with a master of social work. Throughout college, Lee was a single mother of two on public assistance and food stamps, and she often took her children to class because she was unable to afford child care.
Early political career
Lee worked for the Glendale Welfare Council and later as a statistical clerk for the California Department of Labor Statistics. As president of the Mills College Black Student Union, Lee invited Representative Shirley Chisholm to speak on campus. She was inspired to register to vote by Chisholm's visit, and she went on to work on Chisholm's 1972 presidential campaign, serving as one of her delegates at the 1972 Democratic National Convention. Lee later said Chisholm was a mentor who inspired her to run for office. Also while a student, Lee volunteered at the Oakland chapter of the Black Panther Party's Community Learning Center and worked on Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale's 1973 campaign for mayor of Oakland. Lee was surveilled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation due to her involvement with the Black Panthers.
As a graduate student, Lee founded the Community Health Alliance for Neighborhood Growth and Education (CHANGE), a community-based mental health clinic. She was later offered an internship in the office of Representative Ron Dellums, who represented an Oakland-based district. Following the internship, she took a full-time job in Dellums's office and eventually became his chief of staff. Lee was one of the only African Americans and women to hold a senior staff position on Capitol Hill. After leaving Dellums's office in 1987, she returned to the Bay Area and founded a facilities-management company.
California State Legislature
Lee was elected to the California State Assembly in 1990 to succeed Elihu Harris, who retired to successfully run for mayor of Oakland. She served three terms in the Assembly, and she was elected to the California State Senate in 1996. She resigned her seat in the State Senate after winning a special election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1998.
Lee was the first African-American woman to represent Northern California in the California State Legislature. During her time in the Legislature, she authored 67 bills that were signed into law by then-Governor Pete Wilson, a Republican; among those bills were the California Schools Hate Crimes Prevention Act and the California Violence Against Women Act. Lee also worked to defeat California's three-strikes law and was an early champion of LGBTQ+ rights.
Lee was a member of the California Commission on the Status of Women and founded the California Commission on the Status of African American Males.
U.S. House of Representatives
Elections
After Dellums resigned from the U.S. House of Representatives in 1998, Lee successfully ran in the special election to succeed him, winning 66% of the vote. She was elected to a full term later that year, winning 83% of the vote. She has since been re-elected to the House of Representatives 12 more times.
In lieu of running for a 14th term, Lee is running to succeed Dianne Feinstein in the United States Senate in 2024.
Tenure
Lee originally represented California's 9th congressional district, from which she served until 2013. She later represented the 13th district from 2013 to 2023, and she has represented the 12th district since 2023. Her district is located in Alameda County and includes the cities of Oakland, Berkeley, Emeryville, Alameda, Albany, Piedmont, San Leandro, and most of San Lorenzo. The Cook Partisan Voting Index gives her district a rating of D+40, making it one of the most Democratic districts in the nation.
Lee's voting record as a member of Congress was ranked by the National Journal in 2007, based on roll-call votes on economic, social and foreign policy issues in 2006. Lee scored an overall 84.3%, meaning that she voted with a more liberal stance than 84.3% of the House. National Journal scored Lee as voting 82% liberal on economic issues, 92% liberal on social issues, and 65% liberal on foreign policy. The 92% rating on social issues came from Lee being grouped with 35 other House legislators who all tied for the highest, most liberal ranking. Lee received a 97% progressive rating from "The Progressive Punch" and a 4% conservative rating from the American Conservative Union. In 2016, GovTrack's 2015 Report Card on members in Congress ranked Lee the 3rd most progressive member of the House.
Lee endorsed Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries. In February 2019, she endorsed Kamala Harris in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries.
As of October 2021, Lee had voted in line with President Joe Biden's stated position 100% of the time.
AUMF opposition
Lee gained national attention in 2001 as the only member of Congress to vote against the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists (AUMF), stating that she voted no not because she opposed military action but because she believed the AUMF, as written, granted the president overly broad powers to wage war at a time when the facts regarding the situation were not yet clear. She "warned her colleagues to be 'careful not to embark on an open-ended war with neither an exit strategy nor a focused target. Lee has said:It was a blank check to the president to attack anyone involved in the September 11 events—anywhere, in any country, without regard to our nation's long-term foreign policy, economic and national security interests, and without time limit. In granting these overly broad powers, the Congress failed its responsibility to understand the dimensions of its declaration. I could not support such a grant of war-making authority to the president; I believe it would put more innocent lives at risk. The president has the constitutional authority to protect the nation from further attack, and he has mobilized the armed forces to do just that. The Congress should have waited for the facts to be presented and then acted with fuller knowledge of the consequences of our action.Her vote made national news and a large and extremely polarized response, with the volume of calls gridlocking the switchboard of her Capitol Hill office. Although it appears to have reflected the beliefs of the majority of her constituents, the majority of responses from elsewhere in the nation were angry and hostile, some calling her "communist" and a "traitor". Many of the responses included death threats against her or her family to the point that the Capitol Police provided round-the-clock plainclothes bodyguards. Lee was also criticized by politicians and in editorial pages of conservative-leaning newspapers, such as John Fund's column in The Wall Street Journal. In 2002, she received the Seán MacBride Peace Prize from the International Peace Bureau for her vote.
In her speech, she quoted Nathan D. Baxter, dean of the Washington National Cathedral: "As we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore."
On June 29, 2017, the House Appropriations Committee approved Lee's amendment to repeal the 2001 AUMF that was the foundation of the United States' post-September 11 military actions. The amendment, if passed, would have required that the AUMF be scrapped within 240 days. In June 2021, Lee sponsored a bipartisan bill in the House to repeal the AUMF, which passed 268–161. The bill was never put to a vote in the Senate.
Foreign policy
Although Lee is considered a progressive Democrat, she has occasionally split with members of her party throughout her career, especially on foreign policy. She voted to limit military operations in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, against authorizing air strikes, and for a Republican-backed plan to completely withdraw U.S. troops from the operation, all in 1999. Lee voted against the Iraq War Resolution in 2002. She was one of only 46 Democrats to vote for the Online Freedom of Speech Act of 2005. Lee was one of only 13 Democrats to vote against an emergency supplemental appropriations bill in 2007 which, among other things, funded the Iraq War but required withdrawal of U.S. forces to begin by October 1, but in favor of overriding President Bush's veto of the measure on May 2. In November 2009, Lee was one of 36 representatives to vote against House Resolution 867, which condemned the UN's Goldstone Report. She voted to withdraw troops from Afghanistan in 2010 and 2011. Lee also voted in favor of similar resolutions involving troop withdrawal from Pakistan and, most recently, Libya. She joined her Republican colleagues, one of 70 Democrats to do so, in voting against a resolution to authorize limited use of force in Libya. Lee was also one of only 36 Democrats to vote to limit funds appropriated for military operations in Libya.
In an August 2017 interview, Lee said of President Donald Trump's comments on North Korea, "His saber-rattling is putting the world at risk. The United States should be the grown-up in the room", and that his rhetoric reminded her of news about the Cuban Missile Crisis during her mid-teens, adding, "the words of war weren't as profound and dangerous and scary [then] as they are now."
In September 2018, Lee was one of 11 House Democrats to sign a statement announcing their intent "to introduce a new, privileged resolution in September invoking the War Powers Resolution of 1973 to withdraw U.S. Armed Forces from engaging in the Saudi-led coalition's conflict with the Houthis should additional escalations continue and progress fail to be made towards a peace agreement."
In April 2019, after the House passed the resolution withdrawing American support for the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, Lee was one of nine lawmakers to sign a letter to Trump requesting a meeting with him and urging him to sign "Senate Joint Resolution 7, which invokes the War Powers Act of 1973 to end unauthorized US military participation in the Saudi-led coalition's armed conflict against Yemen's Houthi forces, initiated in 2015 by the Obama administration." They asserted the "Saudi-led coalition's imposition of an air-land-and-sea blockade as part of its war against Yemen's Houthis has continued to prevent the unimpeded distribution of these vital commodities, contributing to the suffering and death of vast numbers of civilians throughout the country" and that Trump's approval of the resolution would send a "powerful signal to the Saudi-led coalition to bring the four-year-old war to a close".
In July 2019, Lee voted against a House resolution condemning the Global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement targeting Israel. The resolution passed 398–17.
In October 2020, Lee co-signed a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo condemning Azerbaijan's offensive operations against the Armenian-populated enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.
In April 2021, Lee supported President Joe Biden's plan to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan.
In 2023, Lee was among 56 Democrats to vote in favor of H.Con.Res. 21 which directed President Joe Biden to remove U.S. troops from Syria within 180 days.
Lee has supported U.S. involvement in the Ukraine-Russia conflict and has supported all bills for aid to Ukraine with a rationale to "preserve democracy" and "make sure that the United States is on the right side of history and provides the resources, the economic resources, the humanitarian resources, so that Ukrainian people can live in peace and in security." On July 6, 2023, President Joe Biden authorized the provision of cluster munitions to Ukraine in support of a Ukrainian counter-offensive against Russian forces in Russian-occupied southeastern Ukraine. Lee opposed the Biden administration's decision to supply cluster munitions to Ukraine.
Gun control
Lee is a strong advocate for legislation restricting the availability of guns. She participated in the 2016 sit-in against gun violence in the House of Representatives. Democratic members of Congress adopted the slogan "No Bill, No Break" in an attempt to push the introduction of legislation increasing restrictions on guns. In a statement on the sit-in, Lee said:
Environment
Lee introduced the Women and Climate Change Act in February 2018. The bill aims to create a Federal Interagency Working Group on Women and Climate Change. Lee said of the bill, "Climate change is already impacting communities around the world with a disproportionate effect on the world's poorest residents. Women make up the majority of the world's poor and are especially vulnerable to abrupt changes in the environment. As leaders in their families, women are called upon to find food and clean water, secure safe housing, and care for loved ones. As climate change worsens, provoking historic droughts, rising sea levels and violent storms, women and girls will bear the brunt of this global crisis".
Education
Lee is the author of the Shirley A. Chisholm United States−Caribbean Educational Exchange Act, which would enhance U.S. foreign relations with CARICOM nations. This act directs the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to develop a comprehensive program that extends and expands existing primary and secondary school initiatives in the Caribbean to provide teacher training methods and increased community involvement in school activities. The bill is named for Shirley Chisholm, who helped inspire Lee to become involved in politics when Chisholm ran for the Democratic nomination for president; Lee was the Chisholm campaign's Northern California chair.
Black Panthers
In 1968, Lee began volunteering at the Black Panther Party's Community Learning Center in Oakland. She also worked on Bobby Seale's 1973 campaign for mayor of Oakland.
Lee disagreed with the National Park Service removing funding for a Black Panther Legacy Project in 2017. She released a statement saying, "It is outrageous that the National Park Service has stripped resources from the Black Panther Party Research, Interpretation & Memory Project. The Black Panther Party was an integral part of the civil rights movement and the public has a right to know their history. I call upon the National Park Service and the Department of [the] Interior to provide a full explanation as to why these critical federal resources have been taken away".
Cannabis
Lee has supported a number of efforts to reform cannabis laws in Congress. In 2018, she introduced the Marijuana Justice Act to remove cannabis from the Controlled Substances Act, penalize states that enforce cannabis laws disproportionately (regarding race or income status), and enact other social justice-related reforms. Additional legislation Lee has introduced includes the States' Medical Marijuana Property Rights Protection Act, the Veterans Medical Marijuana Safe Harbor Act, the Restraining Excessive Federal Enforcement & Regulations of Cannabis (REFER) Act, and the Realizing Equitable & Sustainable Participation in Emerging Cannabis Trades (RESPECT) Resolution. Lee was an original cosponsor of the Ending Federal Marijuana Prohibition Act when it was first introduced in 2011. In January 2019, she was named a co-chair of the Congressional Cannabis Caucus.
Presidential election objections
In 2001, Lee and other House members objected to counting Florida's electoral votes in the 2000 presidential election after a contentious recount. Because no senator joined their objection, it was dismissed by Vice President Al Gore, who lost the election to George W. Bush.
In 2005, Lee was one of 31 House Democrats who voted not to accept Ohio's electoral votes in the 2004 presidential election. Bush won Ohio by 118,457 votes.
After the 2016 presidential election, Lee objected to Michigan's and West Virginia's electoral votes. Because no senator joined her objections, they were dismissed. Donald Trump won Michigan by slightly over 10,000 votes and West Virginia by over 300,000 votes.
Defense budget
Lee called for a 10% cut to the military budget of the United States. She backed an amendment to reduce the size of the $740 billion National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021, but a majority of Democrats and Republicans rejected it.
Housing
Lee has made affordable housing a top priority, particularly in the East Bay. She has supported and backed legislation meant to expand home ownership opportunities, improve public housing quality, and assist the homeless.
Health care
Lee was strongly critical of the Stupak–Pitts Amendment, which places restrictions on health insurance plans providing coverage for abortions in the context of the Affordable Health Care for America Act. She supports Medicare for All.
Abortion
Lee is pro-choice. During a September 30, 2021, hearing of the House Oversight Committee, she recounted having to travel to Mexico for a back-alley abortion in the 1960s: "I'm sharing my story even though I truly believe it is personal and really nobody's business—and certainly not the business of politicians. But I'm compelled to speak out because of the real risks of the clock being turned back to those days before Roe v. Wade." Lee opposed the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade, which she called an "attack on reproductive freedom" and blamed on a "decades-long coordinated strategic assault on women's rights by right-wing extremists".
Economy
On September 29, 2008, Lee was one of 95 Democrats to vote against the defeated Emergency Economic Stabilization Act. She voted for a modified version on October 3.
Lee was among the 46 Democrats who voted against final passage of the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 in the House.
Death penalty
In 2002, Lee's opposition to the death penalty was recognized by Death Penalty Focus, which gave her the Mario Cuomo Act of Courage Award.
Louis Farrakhan
In March 2018, Lee said, "I unequivocally condemn Minister Farrakhan's anti-Semitic and hateful comments."
Committee assignments
For the 118th Congress:
Committee on Appropriations
Subcommittee on Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies
Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies
Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs (Ranking Member)
Committee on the Budget
Caucus memberships and leadership
House Democratic Steering Committee (co-chair)
Medicare for All Caucus
Task Force on Poverty and Opportunity (chair)
Congressional Caucus on HIV/AIDS (co-chair)
Congressional Out of Poverty Caucus (co-chair)
Congressional Progressive Caucus (former co-chair and former whip)
Congressional Black Caucus (former chair, 2008–2010)
Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus
Health Care Task Force
Congressional Caucus on Global Road Safety
United States Congressional International Conservation Caucus
Congressional LGBTQ+ Equality Caucus (vice chair and founding member)
Congressional Social Work Caucus (chair)
Congressional Arts Caucus
Congressional HIV/AIDS Caucus (co-founder and co-chair)
Congressional Pro-Choice Caucus (co-chair)
Afterschool Caucuses
Congressional Cannabis Caucus (co-chair)
On March 15, 2013, Lee announced the official relaunch of the Congressional Social Work Caucus to the 113th Congress as its new chair.
Lee co-chaired the Congressional Progressive Caucus with Lynn Woolsey from 2005 to 2009. She also chaired the Congressional Black Caucus from 2009 to 2011.
On November 28, 2018, Lee lost an attempt to become chair of the House Democratic Caucus to Hakeem Jeffries.
On November 30, 2018, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi announced that she had recommended Lee to become one of three co-chairs of the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee alongside Rosa DeLauro and Eric Swalwell. The change was approved on December 11, 2018.
United Nations assignments
Lee was the United States representative to the 68th, 70th, and 72nd sessions of the United Nations General Assembly.
2024 U.S. Senate campaign
In January 2023, it was reported that Lee planned to run in the 2024 election for the United States Senate seat held by Dianne Feinstein, after she revealed her intentions to members of the Congressional Black Caucus. The report came a day after Representative Katie Porter announced her own candidacy. A third Democrat, Adam Schiff, had also announced his candidacy, and Ro Khanna had also expressed interest in running. Lee formally launched her Senate campaign in Oakland on February 21, 2023. On September 29, 2023, Feinstein died while serving in office. Governor Gavin Newsom appointed Laphonza Butler to serve out the remainder of the term.
Personal life
Lee married Carl Lee after graduating high school in 1964. She described the marriage as abusive, and she divorced her husband when she was 20. The marriage produced two children, Tony and Craig, whom she raised as a single mother. Both of Lee's sons now work in the insurance industry: Tony Lee is the CEO of Dickerson Employee Benefits, an African-American owned insurance brokerage and consulting firm, and Craig Lee is a senior executive at State Farm.
Lee married Rev. Dr. Clyde Oden Jr., a retired pastor from Oxnard, on New Year's Eve in 2019. They live together in Oakland.
In 2002, the Peace Abbey in Boston gave Lee the Courage of Conscience Award for her vote against the call to war after the September 11 attacks. In her speech, she said, "let us not become the evil that we deplore."
In 2003, Lee was recognized as a Woman of Peace at the Global Exchange Human Rights Awards in San Francisco with Bianca Jagger, Arundhati Roy and Kathy Kelly. In 2010, Lee took the food stamp challenge and also appeared in the documentary film Food Stamped.
In 2014, Lee, Hill Harper, and Meagan Good contributed to Enitan Bereola II's bestselling book Gentlewoman: Etiquette for a Lady, from a Gentleman.
In 2015, Lee won the 43rd Thomas Merton Award.
Electoral history
California State Assembly
California State Senate
U.S. House of Representatives
California's 9th congressional district
California's 13th congressional district
|- class="vcard"
| style="background-color: #3333FF; width: 2px;" |
| class="org" style="width: 130px" | Democratic
| class="fn" | Barbara Lee (incumbent)
| style="text-align:right;" | 159,751
| style="text-align:right;" | 99.3
|-
|- class="vcard"
| style="background-color: #17aa5c; width: 2px;" |
| class="org" style="width: 130px" | Green
| class="fn" | Laura Wells (write-in)
| style="text-align:right;" | 832
| style="text-align:right;" | 0.5
|-
|- class="vcard"
| style="background-color: #E81B23; width: 2px;" |
| class="org" style="width: 130px" | Republican
| class="fn" | Jeanne Marie Solnordal (write-in)
| style="text-align:right;" | 178
| style="text-align:right;" | 0.1
|-
|- class="vcard"
| style="background-color: #FED105; width: 2px;" |
| class="org" style="width: 130px" | Libertarian
| class="fn" | James M. Eyer (write-in)
| style="text-align:right;" | 39
| style="text-align:right;" | 0.0
|-
|- class="vcard"
| style="background-color: #DDDDDD; width: 2px;" |
| class="org" style="width: 130px" | No party preference
| class="fn" | Lanenna Joiner (write-in)
| style="text-align:right;" | 26
| style="text-align:right;" | 0.0
|-
|- class="vcard"
| style="background-color: ; width: 2px;" |
| class="org" style="width: 130px" | American Independent
| class="fn" | Vincent May (write-in)
| style="text-align:right;" | 3
| style="text-align:right;" | 0.0
|-
|- class="vcard"
| style="background-color: #3333FF; width: 5px;" |
| class="org" style="width: 130px" | Democratic
| class="fn" | Barbara Lee (incumbent)
| style="text-align: right; margin-right: 0.5em" |
| style="text-align: right; margin-right: 0.5em" | 88.4
|-
California's 12th congressional district
See also
Abby Ginzberg, director and producer of the documentary Truth to Power: Barbara Lee Speaks for Me
Jeannette Rankin, the only member of Congress to vote against American entry into World War II
Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American woman to be elected to Congress and run for the Democratic presidential nomination
List of African-American United States representatives
Women in the United States House of Representatives
References
Further reading
September 15, 2001
Alone on the Hill Mother Jones, September 20, 2001, interview with Barbara Lee
Permanent Occupation Rep. Barbara Lee, In These Times, September 29, 2005
A Progressive State of the Union Barbara Lee and Lynn Woolsey, In These Times, January 31, 2006
Rep. Barbara Lee: Lone Lawmaker to Vote Against 2001 Authorization - video report by Democracy Now!, October 7, 2009
External links
Congresswoman Barbara Lee official U.S. House website
Inventory of the Barbara Lee Papers, African American Museum and Library at Oakland, Oakland Public Library.
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1946 births
21st-century American politicians
21st-century American women politicians
Activists from Oakland, California
Activists from El Paso, Texas
African-American Christians
African-American members of the United States House of Representatives
African-American state legislators in California
African-American women in politics
American anti–Iraq War activists
American anti–death penalty activists
American people of Bissau-Guinean descent
American people of Sierra Leonean descent
Baptists from Texas
Baptists from California
Baptists from the United States
Democratic Party California state senators
American cannabis activists
Female members of the United States House of Representatives
Living people
Democratic Party members of the California State Assembly
Democratic Party members of the United States House of Representatives from California
Mills College alumni
Protestants from California
Politicians from Los Angeles
Politicians from Oakland, California
San Fernando High School alumni
UC Berkeley School of Social Welfare alumni
Women state legislators in California
Former Roman Catholics
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard%20Pombo
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Richard Pombo
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Richard William Pombo, GOIH (born January 8, 1961) is an American lobbyist for mining and water-management companies and former Republican member of the United States House of Representatives, having represented California's 11th congressional district from 1993 to 2007. Pombo lost a reelection bid to Democratic challenger Jerry McNerney on November 7, 2006.
On January 4, 2010, Pombo announced his candidacy for Congress in California's 19th congressional district to succeed retiring fellow Republican George Radanovich, although he did not live in the district. Pombo came in third in that four-way GOP race, with 20.8 percent of the votes.
Early life and career
Pombo was born in Tracy, California, 18 miles south of Stockton. He attended Cal Poly, Pomona, for three years before dropping out to work for his family's cattle and dairy business. He is a descendant of Portuguese immigrants. Pombo is married to the former Annette Cole and has three children. Even after being elected to Congress, he returned to his 500-acre (2 km2) ranch near Tracy every week. Pombo is a Roman Catholic.
From 1990 to 1992, Pombo served on the Tracy City Council.
House of Representatives
1992 election
In 1992, Pombo won the Republican primary by defeating several candidates in a race for an open seat in a district newly created by redistricting. California had added seven seats in the House after the 1990 census. Pombo's strongest opponent in the Republican primary was moderate Republican Sandra Smoley, a Sacramento County Supervisor.
In November, although the district had a Democratic majority and was carried by Bill Clinton, Pombo nonetheless defeated Democrat Patti Garamendi (wife of current California Congressman John Garamendi).
1994–2000 elections
Pombo was reelected from this district in 1994, 1996, 1998, and 2000.
2002–2004 elections
For his first five terms, Pombo represented a district covering almost all of San Joaquin County and a large slice of Sacramento County. However, Pombo's district was significantly altered as a result of the 2000 round of redistricting. He lost his share of Sacramento County to the 3rd district, and lost most of Stockton to the 18th District. The district was pushed westward into the San Francisco Bay Area when it picked up some of the more Republican-leaning portions of Alameda and Contra Costa counties, which had previously been part of the East Bay–based 10th district. Pombo was reelected in 2002 and 2004 after the redistricting.
Political positions
In Congress, Pombo had a conservative track record. In 1994, during the Republican Revolution, he was one of the signatories of the Contract with America. He was a member of the conservative Republican Study Committee. He was given the nickname "The Marlboro Man" by President George W. Bush.
Private property rights
Pombo co-wrote a book in 1996 with Joseph Farah of WorldNetDaily about private property issues, entitled This Land is Our Land: How to End the War on Private Property. The San Joaquin County Citizen's Land Alliance, founded in July 1997, has been described as a group, co-founded by Pombo, that included farmers and other landowners advocating for private property rights and opposing government encroachment on these rights. As of March 2018 it was being led by Gary Barton as CEO Michael Petz as CFO, with Nanette Martin serving as corporation secretary, and as of that date it was listed as terminated (its registration having expired).
Pombo's association with the defense of private property rights was spurred by the Southern Pacific Railroad's abandonment of the Altamont Pass route through Tracy. Pombo owned land adjacent to the abandoned railroad line, and argued that the abandoned easement should legally revert to the adjacent property owners (such as himself) rather than to the local park district. He further argued that as the easement was granted based on a promise that the land would be used for railroad purposes only, that the easements ended entirely when they were abandoned.
Pombo's case resulted in Congress passing the Rails to Trails Act. In a New York Times editorial, Pombo was called "an outspoken product of the extreme property rights movement." In 2005, he proposed legislation that would allow mining companies to buy lands on which they have staked claims, even if there is no evidence of valuable minerals on that land; according to the editorial, "This has nothing to do with mining, and everything to do with stealing land that is owned by the American people."
Iraq
Pombo supported the Iraq War. In August 2006, anti-Iraq War activists criticized him, citing an estimate that taxpayers in the 11th congressional district paid $974 million for the war by that time.
Warrantless wiretapping
In a 2006 debate, Pombo said that "intelligence agents should obtain surveillance warrants before monitoring phone calls", but "less than five months later, he voted to allow warrantless wiretapping." He told the Tracy Press that his vote was consistent with his statement, and that although the bill allows a delay in obtaining a warrant, it requires that Congressional Intelligence Committees and the FISA Court be notified, this maintaining separation of powers among the branches of government. An advocate for the Center for Democracy and Technology said the bill went further than Pombo acknowledged insofar as it allowed for the warrantless collection of large amounts of data as long as no specific individual was being targeted (and that the bill in fact defined "electronic surveillance" as excluding such activity). Pombo's opponent in 2006, Jerry McNerney, who went on to defeat Pombo, opposed the bill.
Committee and caucuses
Committee assignments
From 2003 to 2007, a member of the House Agriculture Committee, and was the Chairman of the House Resources Committee, which has oversight and sets policy on matters involving natural resources, Indian Country and Indian gaming. Pombo was also a co-chair of the House Energy Action Team (HEAT), whose stated goal was to find alternative energy solutions.
Caucuses
Pombo was an early member of the Congressional Hispanic Conference, a Republican caucus that promotes the interest of Hispanic and Portuguese Americans. He was also a member and former Chairman of the Congressional Western Caucus, which is made up of Western State members of Congress concerned about Endangered Species Act reform, water rights, private property rights, and other issues affecting the western states. He was also, as of 2007, co-chair of the Portuguese Caucus, a coalition of Members of Congress who promote positive Portuguese-American relations, and a group he is said to have founded. In that role, he hosted prominent visitors from Portugal to the United States, and the Portuguese government bestowed Pombo with the Grand Order of Infante D. Henrique, Portugal's highest civilian honor, in recognition of his efforts to improve Portuguese-American relations.
Environmental record
Pombo proposed legislation to sell roughly a quarter of the land managed by the National Park Service. In November 2005, Pombo and Jim Gibbons (R-NV) co-authored an amendment to the Federal Budget Reconciliation Bill easing restrictions of sale of federal lands to mining companies. This amendment was opposed by environmentalists, anti-growth advocates, and even some Republican Senators concerned about the measure's effects on hunting and fishing. The amendment narrowly passed the House, but was defeated in the Senate. The legislation was later described by his chief of staff as a "bureaucratic exercise" designed to evaluate the costs of not drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).
Pombo supported oil drilling in the ANWR, despite concerns about the ecosystem and opposition from moderate Republicans.
In September 2005, Pombo helped write a revision of the 1973 Endangered Species Act. The proposed revision "was widely denounced by environmentalists as a disturbing retreat from habitat protection and a paperwork nightmare for agencies seeking to revive the 1,268 threatened and endangered plants and animals in the country, 186 of which are in California." The bill did not pass.
By March 2006, Environmental Science & Technology reported that Pombo was coordinating efforts with Pac/West Communications to weaken the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Pac/West created the Save Our Species Alliance, an anti-environmental front group that campaigned for Pombo's bill to change the ESA.
The League of Conservation Voters, a nonpartisan PAC, assigned Pombo a lifetime average rating of 7 on a scale of 0 to 100. In 2005, he scored a 6. Subsequently, the organization named Pombo as one of the "Dirty Dozen" in 2006. LCV released an ad on October 31, 2006, citing Pombo's acceptance of $120,000 from oil companies and his ties to indicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
Rolling Stone ranked him one of the worst congressmen and called him "Enemy of the Earth". The Sierra Club called him an "eco-thug".
As the chairman of the House Resources Committee, Pombo blocked legislation that would have created the Wild Sky Wilderness area in Washington state, despite broad support for the bill.
His political revival was characterized as giving environmentalists "fits" by the San Jose Mercury News in addition to describing his perception by that community as similar to that of Exxon-Valdez Captain Joseph Hazelwood or the hunter that shot Bambi's mother.
The League of Conservation Voters added him to their Dirty Dozen list in 2010, even though this list is typically reserved for sitting members of Congress; and Warner Chabor, the organization's CEO, stated, "Having Pombo represent a district that includes Yosemite National Park is like electing Godzilla as mayor of Tokyo".
Controversies and criticisms
In 2006, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonpartisan watchgroup founded in 2005 by liberal and Democratic Party activists released a report naming Pombo as one of the 13 most corrupt members of Congress. Pombo issued a statement where he denied the allegations and described the group as "a liberal-activist organization masquerading as a government watchdog group."
Corruption allegations
Pombo and his political action committee RICH PAC was among a dozen leaders in the House of Representatives reportedly under investigation as part of the corruption and influence-peddling scandal centered around disgraced Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff, and his policy issues, including Indian gaming. Pombo had accepted more money from Abramoff than had any other member of Congress ($500,000). Fundraisers organized by Indian gaming interests and tied to the 2005 MLB All-Star Game are among those activities under scrutiny.
On January 8, 2006, the Los Angeles Times alleged that Pombo helped one of Abramoff's clients, the Mashpee Indians in Massachusetts, gain federal recognition as a tribe. In return, Pombo received campaign contributions from both the tribe and Abramoff.
In the 2006 cycle, Abramoff was one of the top donors to Pombo's political action committee. Several of Pombo's top five donors are political influence brokers from Detroit, who hosted several $5,000-per-person fundraisers for Pombo in their owners box at Comerica Park during the 2005 MLB All-Star Game. News reports indicated contributions from the two-day fundraising event would go to RICH Political Action Committee. However, Federal Election Commission reports filed by RICH PAC show only one such contribution. Apparently contributions were diverted to some other entity making it difficult to track who attended and contributed.
The Ilitch family, owners of the MLB Detroit Tigers and Detroit's MotorCity Casino, are also financial backers of various Indian tribes, including the Shinnecock Indian Nation, which is seeking to build a gaming casino on its reservation near Southampton, New York. Various issues and tribal disputes involving the Shinnecock were before the House Resources Committee chaired by Pombo just days after the fundraiser.
On October 11, 2006, it was reported that Pombo "says he never worked with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff in his fourteen years in Congress, but billing records suggest at least two interactions between the two in 1996".
Freeways that could enhance owned real estate
Various members of the Pombo family individually own more than undeveloped near two proposed freeways. If even one of the proposed freeways is eventually built, the value of the property owned by Pombo's relatives and located near the proposed freeway will be worth far more than its currently assessed value.
Pombo led an effort to build a multilane freeway (State Route 130) through the mostly uninhabited Diablo Range to facilitate Bay Area-bound commuting from the greater Tracy area.
Windfarm regulations
Pombo's home town of Tracy is close to a large wind farm on Altamont Pass. In 2004, Pombo's office sent a letter to then-Secretary of the Department of the Interior Gale Norton, urging the suspension of environmental guidelines opposed by the wind power industry. Pombo's parents have received hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties from wind-powered turbines on their ranch. Pombo owns an interest in his parents' ranch.
Payments to family
Between 2000 and 2004, Pombo used his campaign and PAC funds to pay his brother Randall $272,000, and his wife (between 2003 and 2004) $85,000. In that 2003–04 campaign cycle, Pombo paid more to his family members—$217,000—than his opponent, Jerry McNerney, spent on his entire campaign. The two were paid for duties listed as bookkeeping, fundraising, consulting and other unspecified services.
After publicity about the payments to his family, Randall was taken off Pombo's payroll (total payments between January 2005 and mid-2006 were less than $7,000). Pombo's wife continued to be paid at the rate of $3,000 per month.
Mailings during 2004 campaign
In October 2004, Pombo used the franking privileges afforded members of Congress to mail approximately 175,000 copies of a two-page leaflet that openly praised the House Resources Committee and the Bush administration for overturning Clinton Administration limits on snowmobiling in national parks. The leaflets were sent to snowmobile owners in the swing states of Wisconsin and Minnesota. Pombo authorized the expenditure of $68,081 from House Resources Committee funds for the mailing of the leaflets as "official business." House members are required to seek prior approval and obtain advisory opinions before sending out franked mail; no such approval was obtained prior to the October mailing.
2003 RV trip charged to the federal government
In August 2003, Pombo and his family rented an RV and "spent two weeks on vacation, stopping along the way to enjoy ... our national parks". The trip included stops in the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Joshua Tree, Sequoia National Park, Kings Canyon National Park and Mount Rushmore, Badlands National Park, and other parks. The $4,935 cost of the rental was charged to the federal government, but was determined to be a more cost effective alternative to flying, renting a car, and staying in a hotel.
When asked in February 2006 about the trip—rules forbid government-funded travel for personal vacations, but allow lawmakers to bring family members on official trips—Pombo said that he had looked into flying into the parks by commercial air or charters, but found the costs to be excessive. After choosing to travel instead by RV, he invited his family along with him.
At Yellowstone, Pombo had a lengthy meeting with the park superintendent, which a spokesman charactizered as official. Pombo's visit to the Badlands National Park is in dispute: the secretary to the superintendent said he did not show; a spokesman for Pombo said that Pombo was certain he was there and met with a group of Native American tribal leaders nearby. Reports concerning Pombo's visit to Joshua Tree are also contradictory. The Los Angeles Times was told that Pombo had shown up for his meeting but "they were not there". The Tracy Press was told that Pombo met with the park's acting superintendent.
Officials from Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks did not return calls seeking comment.
Investigation of Charles Hurwitz
One January 8, 2006, the Los Angeles Times reported that Pombo and Representative John Doolittle had joined with then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas to oppose an investigation by federal banking regulators into the affairs of Houston millionaire Charles Hurwitz. The Times reported that "When the FDIC persisted, Doolittle and Pombo—both considered protegés of DeLay—used their power as members of the House Resources Committee to subpoena the agency's confidential records on the case, including details of the evidence FDIC investigators had compiled on Hurwitz." The investigation was ultimately dropped.
According to the Times, "Although Washington politicians frequently try to help important constituents and contributors, it is unusual for members of Congress to take direct steps to stymie an ongoing investigation by an agency such as the FDIC." The article concluded, "in the Hurwitz case, Doolittle and Pombo were in a position to pressure the FDIC and did so."
Corruption at the Interior Department
On September 23, 2006, the Central Valley Record reported that East Bay Representative George Miller and six other House Democrats had requested that Pombo hold "immediate" congressional hearings concerning oil lease payments to the Interior Department. The article noted that "Miller and his allies—including Pombo's challenger, wind power consultant Jerry McNerney—want oil companies such as Chevron to renegotiate contracts they inked with Clinton administration officials that failed to include language requiring the firms to pay taxes when oil prices pass $36 a barrel." Pombo "had a provision written into the House's offshore drilling legislation, which passed earlier this year, that would instead levy a fee on those firms that refuse to renegotiate their contracts."
Probed oil firm linked to Pombo
An Alaskan oil services company under federal investigation in connection with allegations of influence peddling has contributed nearly $18,000 to Pombo. The investigation sparked a Washington state candidate for the Senate to return his contributions from Anchorage-based VECO Corporation the day after the FBI raided offices of several Alaskan state legislators.
2006 re-election campaign
Amid these growing scandals, Pombo faced serious primary opposition for the first time since his initial race in 1992. His leading opponent was former congressman Pete McCloskey, a leading moderate Republican. Earlier, McCloskey had led an effort to find a viable primary challenger to Pombo. Pombo defeated McCloskey in the primary with 61 percent of the vote. McCloskey had been endorsed by The Sacramento Bee, the San Jose Mercury News, and the League of Conservation Voters. Seven weeks later, McCloskey endorsed Pombo's Democratic opponent, Jerry McNerney, who had won the Democratic primary over Steve Filson and Steve Thomas. McNerney received just over half of the Democratic vote and faced Pombo in the 2006 general election in November. McNerney had been Pombo's opponent in 2004.
On October 3, 2006, a Democratic-commissioned poll was released with McNerney leading Pombo 48 percent to 46 percent. There were two polls commissioned by the NRCC, but results weren't released. Based on these events, in early October, Congressional Quarterly changed their rating of this race from Republican Favored to Leans Republican. This was a significant development; Pombo had soundly defeated McNerney in 2004, taking 61 percent of the vote.
On November 7, 2006, Pombo was defeated by McNerney. McNerney got 53.1 percent of the vote to Pombo's 46.9 percent. Apart from prevailing national Democratic trends and the corruption allegations dogging him, Pombo was also the number one national target of environmental groups. Washington, D.C.-based Defenders of Wildlife spent more than $1 million on the race and commissioned the first poll in 2005 that showed Pombo to be vulnerable in his re-election bid. The Sierra Club sent over 300 volunteers and organizers to work for McNerney in the final weeks of the campaign. The group, allied with the League of Conservation Voters, also aired issue ads attacking Pombo. Pombo and Heather Wilson were the two Representatives targeted by the Humane Society, which spent over $100,000 in Pombo's district, including organizers. Since Pombo left office, no other Republican has represented a significant part of the Bay Area in Congress.
In a letter dated November 29, 2006 from PAC/West Communications, Pombo states, "I have accepted a position as Senior Partner at Pac/West, a full service political public relations firm with offices from California to Washington, D.C."
2010 Congressional campaign
On January 4, 2010, Pombo announced his candidacy for Congress in California's 19th congressional district after Congressman George Radanovich, a fellow Republican, announced he wouldn't run for reelection. The 19th neighbors Pombo's former 11th district and leans more Republican than the 11th. Pombo said he "didn't think [he] would ever run again, but when George Radanovich announced he wasn't running, my phone rang off the hook". Pombo faced Radanovich-backed state Senator Jeff Denham and former Fresno mayor Jim Patterson in the primary, which Jeff Denham won.
Pombo followed up his candidacy for Congress announcement by signing the Taxpayer Protection Pledge sponsored by Americans for Tax Reform on January 5, 2010. This marks the second time that Pombo signed the Pledge. He previously signed it as Representative of California's 11th congressional district. According to ATR, Pombo has a lifetime rating of 91% from their annual Congressional Scorecards.
Primary opponent Jeff Denham stated that Pombo was a liability to the Republican Party who has "given them a lot of material over the years", a reference to his various scandals and notoriety among environmentalists.
Electoral history
Honours
Grand Officer of the Order of Prince Henry, Portugal (8 June 1996)
References
External links
Congressional
Richard Pombo for Congress official 2010 campaign site
Profiles/voting records
Profile San Diego Union Tribune
Voting record, The Washington Post
League of Conservation Voters gives Pombo a lifetime score of 7 on a scale of 0 to 100
PoliticalFriendster – originally a Stanford University student project
Criticism
Complaint against Pombo's franked mail
Tribe's backers are Pombo's Donors by Indianz.com
News articles
Pombo's position as public enemy number 1 for environmental groups m The Wall Street Journal
Congressman's donors tied to tribal dispute, ABC News
"Will the Real Mr. Pombo Please Stand Up?", profile of Pombo by High Country News
Probed oil firm linked to Pombo. The Record September 7, 2006
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1961 births
20th-century American politicians
21st-century American politicians
American people of Azorean descent
American people of Portuguese descent
California State Polytechnic University, Pomona alumni
Farmers from California
Living people
People associated with the Jack Abramoff scandals
People from Tracy, California
Ranchers from California
Republican Party members of the United States House of Representatives from California
Members of Congress who became lobbyists
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Tom Lantos
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Thomas Peter Lantos (born Tamás Péter Lantos; February 1, 1928 – February 11, 2008) was a Hungarian-born American politician who served as a U.S. representative from California from 1981 until his death in 2008. A member of the Democratic Party, he represented the state's 11th congressional district until 1993, and from then the 12th congressional district, which both included the northern two-thirds of San Mateo County and a portion of the southwestern part of San Francisco after redistricting.
Lantos, who served as Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee in his last term, announced in early January 2008 that he would not run for re-election because of cancer of the esophagus. He died before finishing his term. A Hungarian Jew, Lantos was the only Holocaust survivor to have served in the United States Congress; he survived the genocide with help from Raoul Wallenberg. In speaking before the House of Representatives after his death, Speaker Nancy Pelosi stated that Lantos "devoted his public life to shining a bright light on the dark corners of oppression. He used his powerful voice to stir the consciousness of world leaders and the public alike." U2 lead singer Bono called him a "prizefighter", whose stamina would make him go "any amount of rounds, with anyone, anywhere, to protect human rights and common decency".
In 2008, after his death, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, which he founded in 1983, was re-named the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission. Its mission is partly "to promote, defend, and advocate internationally recognized human rights". In the final weeks of his life, Lantos asked that a non-profit be established to carry on the work he felt so passionately about. The Lantos Foundation for Human Rights & Justice was founded later that year to carry out that wish. In 2011, the Tom Lantos Institute was set up in Budapest to promote tolerance and support minority issues in Central Europe and Eastern Europe, as well as around the world.
Early life
Lantos was born Tamás Péter Lantos () into a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary, the son of Anna, a high school English teacher, and Pál Lantos, a banker. His family was heavily involved in education, and included an uncle who was a professor at the University of Budapest and a grandmother who was a high school principal.
World War II
His life in Hungary would change after the annexing of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938, with the Austrian border just from Budapest. Lantos remembered this period and a newspaper headline he read when he was ten years old, "Hitler Marches into Austria". Even at a young age, he understood the significance of this invasion, recalling in a 1999 interview with University of Washington Magazine, "I sensed that this historic moment would have a tremendous impact on the lives of Hungarian Jews, my family, and myself".
Six years later, in March 1944, the German military invaded Hungary and occupied Budapest, its capital. As he was Jewish, Lantos, then 16, was arrested and sent to a forced labor camp outside of Budapest. He escaped, but was soon caught by the Germans and beaten severely, then returned to the labor camp. He again escaped, this time making his way back to Budapest, away. There, he hid with an aunt in a safe house set up by Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat.
Lantos joined Wallenberg's network; his fair hair and blue eyes, which to the Nazis were physical signs of "Aryanism", enabled him to serve as a courier and deliver food and medicine to Jews living in other safe houses. In January 1945, less than a year later, Soviet military forces fought door-to-door battles and liberated Hungary from German occupation. However, Lantos, then 17, returned home only to discover that his mother and other family members had all been murdered by the Germans, along with 440,000 other Hungarian Jews, during the preceding 10 months of their occupation. Wallenberg, for his part, was later credited with saving the lives of thousands of other Hungarian Jews.
Lantos described some of his experiences in the Academy Award-winning documentary film The Last Days (1998), produced by Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation. In his floor speeches as a congressman, he sometimes referred to himself as one of the few living members of Congress who had fought against fascism. In 1981, Lantos sponsored a bill making Wallenberg an Honorary Citizen of the United States, and became a member of the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation. In January 2006, he traveled to Hungary and attended a ceremony commemorating the 61st anniversary of the liberation of the Budapest Ghetto. The event was held at the Great Synagogue in Budapest.
Education
In 1946, Lantos enrolled at the University of Budapest. As a result of his fluent English, he wrote an essay about Franklin D. Roosevelt, and he was awarded a scholarship by the Hillel Foundation to study in the United States. He then emigrated to the U.S., and studied economics at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he earned a B.A. in 1949 and an M.A. in 1950. He continued his post-graduate education at the University of California, Berkeley, and received a Ph.D. in economics in 1953.
Early career
After graduation from Berkeley, Lantos became a professor of economics at San Francisco State University. In subsequent years, he worked as a business consultant and television commentator on subjects of foreign policy. He eventually became a senior advisor to various U.S. Senators, and in 1980, he was elected to the U.S. Congress, where he remained until his death in February 2008. Recalling his early life, he announced his retirement by stating to Congress, "I will never be able to express fully my profoundly felt gratitude to this great country."
Personal and family life
Despite becoming fluent in English, Lantos never lost his Hungarian accent. During his childhood, he met his future wife, Annette Tillemann (or Tilleman; born June 27, 1931), then using the name Agnes Ethel Seymour. Her family had managed to escape to Switzerland, using Swedish passports issued by Raoul Wallenberg. After Hungary was liberated, she and her family returned to Budapest, where she and Lantos met again. After emigrating to the United States, they married on July 13, 1950. They remained married until his death in 2008. Agnes Ethel Lantos became a naturalized United States citizen on May 17, 1954, under that name. Annette's father Sebastian was the brother of Jolie Gabor, with Jolie's daughters Magda, Zsa Zsa, and Eva Gabor being first cousins to Annette Lantos.
Lantos and his wife had two daughters, Annette Marie and Katrina, and 18 grandchildren, including Levi, an author and energy expert; Tomicah, a former Democratic political speechwriter; and Charity, an opera singer and activist. The Lantoses' daughter Annette was married to Timber Dick, an independent businessman in Colorado, until his accidental death in 2008.
Lantos's younger daughter, Katrina, is married to ambassador and former U.S. Representative from New Hampshire Richard Swett, and was herself a candidate for Congress in New Hampshire. Lantos considered himself a secular Jew.
Political career and positions
Lantos made his first run for office in 1980, challenging Republican Congressman Bill Royer, who had won a 1979 special election after Democrat Leo Ryan was killed in the Jonestown massacre. Lantos defeated Royer by 5,700 votes. He never again faced such a close contest, and was re-elected 13 times. Lantos earned a reputation as a champion for various human rights causes, such as having Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang testify at a congressional hearing after the company turned over the email records of two Chinese dissidents to the Chinese government, allowing them to be traced and one sentenced to jail.
Lantos was a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and repeatedly called for reforms to the nation's health-care system, reduction of the national budget deficit and the national debt, repeal of the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001. He opposed Social Security privatization efforts. He supported same-sex marriage rights and marijuana for medical use, was a strong proponent of gun control and adamantly pro-choice.
Lantos was an advocate on behalf of the environment, receiving consistently high ratings from the League of Conservation Voters and other environmental organizations for his legislative record. His long-standing efforts to protect open space brought thousands of acres under the protection of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, including Mori Point, Sweeney Ridge, and Rancho Corral de Tierra, which will keep its watersheds and delicate habitats free from development permanently.
While Lantos was an early supporter of the Iraq War, from 2006 onward, he acknowledged public criticism about the conduct of the war and called for a diplomatic approach toward ceasing hostilities.
Foreign affairs issues
Lantos served as the chairman of the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Through its more than 20 years of work, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus—of which Lantos was co-chair with Representative Frank Wolf—covered a wide range of human rights issues. They included speaking for Christians in Saudi Arabia and Sudan to practice their faith, helping Tibetans to retain their culture and religion in Tibet, and advocating for other minorities worldwide.
Among his other efforts was a demand that Japan apologize for sex slavery during World War II. He declared Turkey's mass killings of Armenians during World War I to be genocide. In more recent times, he supported democracy in Burma and pressed for sanctions on Iran for supporting terrorism. In 2004, he sponsored a bill to stop the spread of antisemitism.
On other aspects of American foreign policy, Lantos spoke out against waste, fraud and abuse in the multi-billion dollar U.S. reconstruction program in Iraq, and warned that the U.S. could lose Afghanistan to the Taliban if the Bush administration failed to take decisive action to halt the current decline in political stability there. Lantos was against U.S. military aid to Egypt as the Egyptian military had failed to stop the flow of money and weapons across the Egyptian border to Hamas in Gaza, and Egypt had not contributed troops to the peacekeeping efforts in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
1991 Gulf War
Lantos was a strong supporter of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. During the run-up to the war in 1990, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, of which Lantos was co-chairman, hosted a 15 year old Kuwaiti girl, then identified only as "Nurse Nayirah", who told of horrific abuses by Iraqi soldiers following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, including the killing of Kuwaiti babies by taking them out of their incubators and leaving them to die on the floor of the hospital. These alleged atrocities figured prominently in the rhetoric at the time about Iraqi abuses in Kuwait. Her witness account was later challenged by independent human rights monitors.
"Nurse Nayirah" later turned out to be the daughter of Kuwaiti politician Saud Nasser Al-Saud Al-Sabah, who serve as Kuwait's ambassador to the United States at the time. Asked about having allowed the girl to give testimony without identifying herself, and without her story having been corroborated, Lantos replied, "The notion that any of the witnesses brought to the caucus through the Kuwaiti Embassy would not be credible did not cross my mind... I have no basis for assuming that her story is not true, but the point goes beyond that. If one hypothesizes that the woman's story is fictitious from A to Z, that in no way diminishes the avalanche of human rights violations."
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation sent investigators to Kuwait who went through the hospital and counted the incubators and they found that "except for one or two that may have been misplaced" all of the incubators were still in the hospital. The investigators concluded that there were no deaths resulting from stolen equipment. And the doctor who provided Amnesty International with the number of babies killed dropped from 312 to 72 and then 30, 19 of which died before the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq. After the war, The New York Times wrote, "It's plainly wrong for a member of congress to collaborate with a public relations firm to produce knowingly deceptive testimony on an important issue. Yet Representative Tom Lantos has been caught doing exactly that. His behavior warrants a searching inquiry by the House Ethics Committee."
War in Iraq
On October 4, 2002, Lantos led a narrow majority of Democrats on the House International Relations Committee to a successful vote in support of the Resolution for the Use of Force, seeking the approval of the United Nations and under the condition that President George W. Bush would allow UN weapons inspectors to finish their work and that Bush would need to return to Congress for an actual declaration of war before invading Iraq. The resolution later passed the House and the Senate with a total of 373 of 435 members of Congress supporting it. "The train is now on its way", said Lantos after the resolution successfully passed both houses of Congress. In later hearings on the war, Lantos continued his enthusiastic support.
Starting in early 2006, Lantos distanced himself from the Bush Administration's Iraq policy, making critical statements at hearings, on the House floor and in published media interviews about the conduct of the war. During hearings of the House International Relations Committee, where he was then the ranking member, Lantos repeatedly praised the investigative work of the office of the Special Inspector of Iraq Reconstruction General Stuart Bowen, which uncovered evidence of waste, fraud and abuse in the use of U.S. taxpayer dollars intended to help secure and rebuild Iraq. Lantos was an immediate and consistent critic of the troop surge advocated by President Bush. On the night in January 2007 that Bush announced his plan, Lantos responded, "I oppose the so-called surge that constitutes the centerpiece of the President's plan. Our efforts in Iraq are a mess, and throwing in more troops will not improve it."
During a joint House hearing on September 10, 2007, featuring General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, Lantos said:
At the same hearing, Lantos drew comparisons between some of the current U.S. activities in Iraq to U.S. support two decades earlier of Islamic militants in Afghanistan:
Human rights advocate
Tibet
As co-founder of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus in 1983 and as Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Lantos would "stir the consciousness of world leaders and the public alike", according to Representative Nancy Pelosi. She added: "Wherever there was injustice or oppression, he used his expertise and moral authority to put the United States on the side of justice and human rights". In 2007, in his effort to help the people of China and Tibet, he presented the Dalai Lama with the Congressional Gold Medal.
Darfur
On April 28, 2006, Lantos and four other Democratic U.S. Representatives, along with six other activists, took part in a civil disobedience action in front of the Sudanese embassy in Washington, D.C. They were protesting the role of the Sudanese government in carrying out genocide in the Darfur conflict and were arrested for disorderly conduct.
Hungarian minorities
Lantos was an activist for the rights of Hungarian minorities; as a member of the US House of Representatives. In a 2007 letter he asked Robert Fico, the Prime Minister of Slovakia to distance themselves from the Beneš decrees, a reasonable process in the Hedvig Malina case, and to treat members of the Hungarian minority as equal.
The American Hungarian Federation recognized Congressman Lantos for his "Leadership in Support of Democracy, Human Rights and Minority Rights in Central and Eastern Europe", awarding him the organization's highest award, the "Col. Commandant Michael Kovats Medal of Freedom", at the October 19, 2005, Congressional Reception commemorating the 49th Anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.
Lebanon
On August 27, 2006, at the Israeli Foreign Ministry building in Israel, Lantos said he would block a foreign aid package promised by President George W. Bush to Lebanon unless and until Beirut agreed to the deployment of international troops on the border with Syria and Lebanon takes control of its borders with Syria to prevent arms smuggling to Hezbollah guerrillas.
Morocco and Western Sahara
Lantos supported Morocco's demand to gain sovereignty over Western Sahara, and criticized the Polisario Front, which demands independence for the disputed region. In 2007, he backed Morocco's proposal to make the region autonomous under Moroccan rule, saying: "I urge the leadership of the Polisario to realize that they will never again get such a good deal for the population they purport to represent."
Death and legacy
On January 2, 2008, after having been diagnosed with esophageal cancer, Lantos announced he would not run for a 15th term in the House, but planned to complete his final term. In his statement, he said:
Lantos died from complications of esophageal cancer at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on February 11, 2008, ten days after his 80th birthday, and eleven months before the end of his term. Numerous politicians memorialized him; House Minority Whip Roy Blunt called him "a man of uncommon integrity and sincere moral conviction — and a public servant who never wavered in his pursuit of a better, freer and more religiously tolerant world", and President George W. Bush called Lantos "a man of character and a champion of human rights" and "a living reminder that we must never turn a blind eye to the suffering of the innocent at the hands of evil men". A memorial service was held for Lantos on February 14, 2008, at Statuary Hall in the Capitol. Speakers included Senator Joe Biden, Bono of U2, Rep. Steny Hoyer, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Rep. Christopher Shays and Elie Wiesel. He was buried in Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C.
A special election was held to fill his seat on April 8, 2008, and was won by former State Senator Jackie Speier, whom Lantos had endorsed.
On June 19, 2008, Bush posthumously awarded Lantos the Medal of Freedom. In a ceremony at the White House, Bush stated "We miss his vigorous defense of human rights and his powerful witness for the cause of human freedom. For a lifetime of leadership, for his commitment to liberty, and for his devoted service to his adopted nation, I am proud to award the Presidential Medal of Freedom, posthumously, to Tom Lantos, and proud that his loving wife Annette will receive the award on behalf of his family."
In 2008, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, which he founded in 1983, was renamed The Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission. Its mission is partly "to promote, defend and advocate internationally recognized human rights." The first Lantos Human Rights Prize was presented to the 14th Dalai Lama in 2009. In 2011, the institute was set up in Budapest to promote tolerance and support minority issues in central and eastern Europe and in the world.
In the final weeks of his life, Lantos asked that a non-profit be established to carry on the work he felt so passionately about. The Lantos Foundation for Human Rights & Justice was founded later that year to carry out that wish. Lantos's daughter, Katrina Lantos Swett, serves as the Foundation's president and CEO.
On September 10, 2011, the Peninsula Humane Society & SPCA officially opened the Tom and Annette Lantos Center for Compassion, located at 1450 Rollins Road in Burlingame, California. The facility was funded with a naming gift in the Lantos's honor by Oracle founder, Larry Ellison, and his wife, Melanie.
Tom Lantos Tunnels south of San Francisco have been named after the late Congressman, as has a street in Netanya, Israel.
BBYO, Inc. (formerly B'nai B'rith Youth Organization) chapter honored Tom Lantos's legacy by naming the chapter in his honor. Lantos AZA #2539 now thrives in the Rockville, Maryland, area.
Budapest named a promenade in the city in honor of Lantos in 2016.
Lantos received the Grand Cross, Hungary's highest civilian honor.
Congressional scorecards
See also [all links dead]
Project Vote Smart provides the following results from congressional scorecards.
American Civil Liberties Union – 91% for 2005–2006
Americans for Democratic Action – 100% for 2006
American Land Rights Association – 9% for 2006
Americans for Tax Reform – 0% for 2006
Animal Welfare Institute Compassion Index – 100% for 2007
AFL–CIO – 100% in 2006
Campaign for America's Future – 100% for 2005–2006
Conservative Index (John Birch Society) – 11% for fall 2004
Children's Defense Fund – 100% for 2006
Drug Policy Alliance – 83% for 2006
Drum Major Institute – 100% for 2005
Family Research Council – 0% for 2006
FreedomWorks – 0% for 2006
Gun Owners of America – 0% for 2006
Humane Society of the United States – 100% for 2005–2006
League of Conservation Voters – 92% for 2006
NARAL Pro-Choice America – 100% for 2006
National Association of Wheat Growers – 37% for 2005
National Education Association – 100% for 2005–2006
National Federation of Independent Business – 14% for 2005–2006
National Journal – Composite liberal score of 86.2% for 2006
National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws – 20 for 2006
National Organization for Women – 95% for 2005–2006
National Rifle Association – F for 2006
National Right to Life Committee – 0% for 2005–2006
National Taxpayers Union – 10% for 2006
Population Connection – 100% for 2006
Republican Liberty Caucus – 16% for 2005
Secular Coalition for America – 70% on 2006 scorecards
United States Chamber of Commerce – 33% for 2006
Controversies
During a 1996 congressional inquiry into the Filegate scandal, Lantos told witness Craig Livingstone that "with an infinitely more distinguished public record than yours, Admiral Boorda committed suicide when he may have committed a minor mistake". Boorda, the Chief of Naval Operations, had taken his own life after his right to wear Combat V decorations had been questioned. Lantos was criticized by some (including fellow Congressman Joe Scarborough) for this comment.
On May 3, 2000, Lantos was involved in an automobile accident while driving on Capitol Hill. He drove over a young boy's foot and then failed to stop his vehicle and was later fined over the incident for inattentive driving.
In 2002, Lantos, who was on the House Committee on International Affairs, took Colette Avital, a Labor Party member of the Israeli Knesset, by the hand and, according to Haaretz, tried to reassure her with these words: "My dear Colette, don't worry. You won't have any problem with Saddam. We'll be rid of the bastard soon enough. And in his place we'll install a pro-Western dictator, who will be good for us and for you." He later denied saying this, but Avital confirmed it, according to Ben Terrall, an adviser to Maad H. Abu-Ghazalah, a Libertarian Party candidate who ran against Lantos that year.
In June 2007, Lantos called former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder a "political prostitute" at the dedication ceremony of the Victims of Communism Memorial, which caused a political backlash from the German government. Lantos was referring to Schröder's ties to energy business in Russia, and remarked that this appellation would offend prostitutes.
In October 2007, Dutch parliamentarians said Lantos insulted them while discussing the War on Terror by stating that the Netherlands had to help the United States because it liberated them in World War II, while adding that "Europe was not as outraged by Auschwitz as by Guantanamo Bay."
On January 6, 2008, FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds included Lantos's photograph among others featured in the "State Secrets Privilege Gallery" posted on her website, composing images of figures considered to be relevant to her case. On August 8, 2009, she gave sworn testimony about Lantos and others during a witness deposition before the Ohio Elections Commission in the Schmidt v. Krikorian case, in which she alleged that he had engaged in "[N]ot only ... bribe[ry], but also ... disclosing highest level protected U.S. intelligence and weapons technology information both to Israel and to Turkey. ... other very serious criminal conduct."
Electoral history
*Write-in and minor candidate notes: In 1980, Nicholas W. Kudrovzeff, American Independent Party, received 1,550 votes (1%). In 1982, Nicholas W. Kudrovzeff, American Independent Party, received 1,250 votes (1%). In 1988, Nicholas W. Kudrovzeff, American Independent Party, received 1,893 votes (1%).
See also
List of Jewish members of the United States Congress
List of United States Congress members who died in office (2000–)#2000s
References
External links
Freedom of Information request on death threats against Tom Lantos.
, video, Associated Press News, February 11, 2008
Congressional hearings 15 video clips
Lantos set to retire after 27 years in public office, Canadian Hungarian Journal
Finding Aid to the Tom Lantos Papers, 1944-2008, The Bancroft Library
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20th-century American politicians
21st-century American politicians
American human rights activists
American people of Hungarian-Jewish descent
American political activists
American political consultants
American political commentators
American Zionists
Deaths from cancer in Maryland
Deaths from esophageal cancer
Hungarian emigrants to the United States
Hungarian Jews
Jewish American activists
Jewish American people in California politics
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People with acquired American citizenship
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Secular Jews
Tibet freedom activists
University of Washington College of Arts and Sciences alumni
University of California, Berkeley alumni
Hungarian World War II forced labourers
20th-century American Jews
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Nagaland
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Nagaland () is a landlocked state in the north-eastern region of India. It is bordered by the Indian states of Arunachal Pradesh to the north, Assam to the west, Manipur to the south, and the Sagaing Region of Myanmar (Burma) to the east. Its capital city is Kohima and its largest city is the twin Chümoukedima–Dimapur. The state has an area of with a population of 1,980,602 as per the 2011 Census of India, making it one of the smallest states of India.
Nagaland consists of 16 Administrative Districts, inhabited by 17 major tribes along with other sub-tribes. Each tribe is distinct in character from the other in terms of customs, language and dress. It is a land of folklore passed down the generations through word of mouth. The earliest recorded history of the tribes of present day Nagaland dates back to the 13th century.
In the 19th century, the British India forces began expanding their influence in Northeast India, including the Naga Hills. After India's independence in 1947, the question of the Naga Hills' political status emerged. Nagaland was a district in the State of Assam until 1957, known to others as “The Naga Hills”. The Naga National Council, led by Zapu Phizo, demanded an independent Naga state and launched an armed insurgency. The Indian Government, however, maintained that Nagaland was an integral part of the Indian Union. The conflict between the Naga National Council and the Indian Government resulted in a protracted insurgency. The State of Nagaland was formally inaugurated on 1 December 1963, as the 16th State of the Indian Union, and a democratically elected government took office in 1964.
Nagaland is home to a rich variety of natural, cultural, and environmental resources. It is a mountainous state and lies between the parallels of 95° and 94° eastern longitude and 25.2° and 27.0° latitude north. The high-profile Dzüko Valley is at Viswema, in the southern region of the state. The state has significant resources of natural minerals, petroleum, and hydropower, with agriculture as the state's most important economic activity, accounting for over 70% of its economy. Other significant activities include forestry, tourism, insurance, real estate, horticulture, and miscellaneous cottage industries.
Names and their etymologies
The origin of the word 'Naga' is unclear. A popularly accepted, but controversial, view is that it originated from the Burmese word Na-Ka' or 'Naga', meaning "people with earrings." Others suggest it means pierced noses. In Burmese, Naka and Naga are pronounced the same way.
Before the arrival of European colonialism in South Asia, there had been many wars, persecution and raids from Burma on the Nagas, Meiteis and others in India's northeast. The invaders came for "head hunting" and to seek wealth and captives from these tribes and ethnic groups. When the British inquired with Burmese guides about the people living in the northern Himalayas, they were told 'Naka'. This was recorded as 'Naga' and has been in use thereafter.
History
Prehistory
The ancient history of the Nagas is unclear. Ethnic groups migrated at different times, each settling in the northeastern part of present India and establishing their respective sovereign mountain terrains and village states. There are no records of whether they came from the northern Mongolian region, southeast Asia, or southwest China, except that their origins are from the east of India, and historical records show the present-day Naga people settled before the arrival of the Ahoms in 1228 CE.
1200s
According to the Burmese chronicles Tagung Yazawin, the first Chaopha of Mongkawng Samlongpha (1150 - 1201) with the main town in Mogaung captured Naga country in the early 1200s. In the chronicle Naga country is named as "Khang Se".
1400s
In Yan-aung-myin Pagoda inscription found in Pinya of Myanmar mentions that the Kingdom of Ava under Minkhaung I (1400 - 1421) in the early 1400s extended till the territories of the Nagas.
British administration
With the arrival of the British East India Company in the early 19th century, followed by the British Raj, Britain expanded its domain over the whole of South Asia, including the Naga Hills. The first Europeans to enter the hills were Captain Francis Jenkins and Lieutenant Robert Pemberton in 1832. The early contact with the Naga ethnic groups was characterised by suspicion and conflict. The colonial interests in Assam, such as managers of tea estates and other trading posts led defensive action against raids from the ethnic groups who were known for their bravery and "head hunting" practices. To put an end to these raids, the British troops recorded 10 military expeditions between 1839 and 1850. In February 1851, at the bloody Battle of Kikrüma, people died on both the British side and the Kikrüma (Naga) side; in the days after the battle, inter-ethnic warfare followed that led to more bloodshed. After that war, the British adopted a policy of caution and non-interference with Naga ethnic groups.
Despite this, colonists continued to move into Naga peoples' territory. Between 1851 and 1865, Naga ethnic groups continued to raid the British in Assam. The British India Government took over the holdings of the East Indian Company following the Indian Rebellion of 1857. The failings and atrocities of the East Indian Company led the British Crown to review its governance structure throughout South Asia including its northeastern region. In 1866, the British India administration established a post at Samaguting with the explicit goal of ending intertribal warfare and tribal raids on property and personnel.
In 1869, Captain Butler was appointed to lead and consolidate the British presence in the Nagaland Hills. In 1878, the headquarters were transferred to Kohima — creating a city that remains an important center of administration, commerce, and culture for Nagaland.
On 4 October 1879, British political agent G. H. Damant went to Khonoma with troops, where he was shot dead with 35 of his team. Kohima was subsequently attacked and the stockade looted. This violence led to a determined effort by the British Raj to return and respond. The subsequent defeat of Khonoma marked the end of serious and persistent ultimatums in the Naga Hills.
Between 1880 and 1922, the British administration consolidated their position over a large area of the Naga Hills and integrated it into its Assam operations. The British administration enforced the rupee as the currency for economic activity and a system of structured ethnic government that was very different from historic social governance practices. These developments triggered profound social changes among the Naga people. In 1926, it became a part of Pakokku Hill Tracts Districts of Burma until 4 January 1948.
In parallel, since the mid-19th century, Christian missionaries from the United States and Europe, stationed in India, reached into Nagaland and neighbouring states, converting Nagaland's Naga ethnic groups from animism to Christianity.
World War II
In 1944, during World War II, the Japanese Army, with the help of the Indian National Army led by Netaji Subhashchandra Bose, invaded through Burma and attempted to take India through Kohima. The population was evacuated. British India soldiers defended the area of Kohima and having lost many of their original force were relieved by British in June 1944.
Together the British and Indian troops successfully repelled the Japanese troops.
The battle was fought from 4 April to 22 June 1944 from the town of Kohima, coordinated with action at Imphal, Manipur. The Indian National Army lost half their numbers, many through starvation, and were forced to withdraw through Burma.
There is the World War II Cemetery, and the War Museum, in honour of those who died during World War II during the fighting between the British Empire and Japanese troops. Nearly 4,000 British Empire troops died, along with 3,000 Japanese. Many of those who died were Naga people, particularly the Angami Nagas. Near the memorial is the Kohima Cathedral, on Aradura Hill, built with funds from the families and friends of deceased Japanese soldiers. Prayers are held in Kohima for peace and in memory of the fallen of both sides of the battle.
Naga national awakening
In 1929, a memorandum was submitted to the Simon Statutory Commission, requesting that the Nagas be exempt from reforms and new taxes proposed in British India, should be left alone to determine their own future. This Naga Memorandum stated,
From 1929 to 1935, the understanding of sovereignty by Nagas was 'self-rule' based on the traditional territorial definition. From 1935 to 1945, Nagas were merely asking for autonomy within Assam. In response to the Naga memorandum to Simon Commission, the British House of Commons decreed that the Naga Hills ought to be kept outside the purview of the New Constitution; the Government of India Act, 1935 and ordered Naga areas as Excluded Area; meaning outside the administration of British India government. Thereafter from 1 April 1937, it was brought under the direct administration of the Crown through Her Majesty's representative; the Governor of Assam province.
The Naga Memorandum submitted by the Naga Club (which later became the Naga National Council) to the Simon Commission explicitly stated, 'to leave us alone to determine ourselves as in ancient times.' In February 1946, the Naga Club officially took shape into a unified Naga National Council in Wokha. In June 1946, the Naga National Council submitted a four-point memorandum to officials discussing the independence of India from British colonial rule. The memorandum strongly protested against the grouping of Assam with Bengal and asserted that Naga Hills should be constitutionally included in an autonomous Assam, in a free India, with local autonomy, due safeguards and separate electorate for the Nagas.
Jawaharlal Nehru replied to the memorandum and welcomed the Nagas to join the Union of India promising local autonomy and safeguards. On 9 April 1946, the Naga National Council (NNC) submitted a memorandum to the British Cabinet Mission during its visit to Delhi. The crux of the memorandum stated that: "Naga future would not be bound by any arbitrary decision of the British Government and no recommendation would be accepted without consultation".
In June 1946, the NNC submitted a four-point memorandum signed by The president of the NNC was T. Aliba Imti Ao and the joint secretary T. Sakhrie.T. Sakhrie; to the still-visiting British Cabinet Mission. The memorandum stated that:
1. The NNC stands for the solidarity of all Nagas, including those in un-administered areas;
2. The Council protests against the grouping of Assam with Bengal;
3. The Naga Hills should be constitutionally included in an autonomous Assam, in a free India, with local autonomy and due safeguards for the interests of the Nagas;
4. The Naga tribes should have a separate electorate.
On 1 August 1946, Nehru, President of the Indian National Congress Party in his reply to the memorandum, appealed to the Nagas to join the Union of India promising local autonomy and safeguards in a wide-ranging area of administration. It was after 1946 only that the Nagas had asserted their inalienable right to be a separate nation and an absolute right to live independently.
After the independence of India in 1947, the area remained a part of the province of Assam. Nationalist activities arose amongst a section of the Nagas. Phizo-led Naga National Council demanded a political union of their ancestral and native groups. The movement led to a series of violent incidents, that damaged government and civil infrastructure, attacked government officials and civilians. The central government sent the Indian Army in 1955, to restore order. In 1957, an agreement was reached between Naga leaders and the Indian government, creating a single separate region of the Naga Hills. The Tuensang frontier was united with this single political region, Naga Hills Tuensang Area (NHTA), and it became a union territory directly administered by the central government with a large degree of autonomy. This was not satisfactory to the Nagas, however, and agitation with violence increased across the state – including attacks on army and government institutions, banks, as well as non-payment of taxes. In July 1960, following discussion between Prime Minister Nehru and the leaders of the Naga People Convention (NPC), a 16-point agreement was arrived at whereby the Government of India recognised the formation of Nagaland as a full-fledged state within the Union of India.
Nagaland statehood and late 20th century
Accordingly, the territory was placed under the Nagaland Transitional Provisions Regulation, 1961 which provided for an Interim body consisting of 45 members to be elected by tribes according to the customs, traditions and usage of the respective tribes. Subsequently, Nagaland attained statehood with the enactment of the state of Nagaland Act in 1962 by the Parliament. The interim body was dissolved on 30 November 1963 and the state of Nagaland was formally inaugurated on 1 December 1963 and Kohima was declared as the state capital. After elections in January 1964, the first democratically elected Nagaland Legislative Assembly was constituted on 11 February 1964.
The rebel activity continued in many Naga inhabited areas both in India and Burma. Ceasefires were announced and negotiations continued, but this did little to stop the violence. In March 1975, a direct presidential rule was imposed by the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on the state. In November 1975, some leaders of largest rebellion groups agreed to lay down their arms and accept the Indian constitution, a small group did not agree and continued their insurgent activity. The Nagaland Baptist Church Council played an important role by initiating peace efforts in the 1960s. This took concrete and positive shape during its Convention in early 1964. It formed the Nagaland Peace Council in 1972. However, these efforts have not completely ended the inter-factional violence.
21st century
In 2004, two powerful bombs were set off on the same day and struck the Dimapur Railway Station and the Hong Kong Market, resulting in 30 deaths and wounding over 100 others in the deadliest terrorist attack in Nagaland to date.
Over the 5-year period of 2009 to 2013, between 0 and 11 civilians died per year in Nagaland from rebellion related activity (or less than 1 death per 100,000 people), and between 3 and 55 militants died per year in inter-factional killings (or between 0 and 3 deaths per 100,000 people).
In early 2017, Nagaland went into a state of civil unrest and protests in response to the announcement to implement 33% women's reservation in the Civic Elections.
On 4 December 2021, a unit of the 21st Para Special Forces of the Indian Army killed six civilian labourers near Oting Village in the Mon District of Nagaland. Eight more civilians and a soldier were killed in subsequent violence. The incident was widely condemned, with many calling out to repeal and revoke the Armed Forces Special Powers Act.
The most recent Nagaland Legislative Assembly election took place on 27 February 2023 to elect the Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) in the 60 Assembly Constituencies in the state. A voter turnout of 87% was observed in the election. The election created history by electing two women candidates for the first time in Nagaland — Hekani Jakhalu Kense and Salhoutuonuo Kruse. Both candidates were from the ruling Nationalist Democratic Progressive Party (NDPP). Salhoutuonuo Kruse later became the first woman minister of the Nagaland Legislative Assembly.
Geography
Nagaland lies between 93°20'E and 95°15'E longitude and between 25°6'N and 27°4'N latitude. It is largely a mountainous state. The Naga Hills rise from the Brahmaputra Valley in Assam to about and rise further to the southeast, as high as . Mount Saramati at an elevation of is the state's highest peak; this is where the Naga Hills merge with the Patkai Range, which form the bounder with Burma. Rivers such as the Doyang and Diphu to the north, the Barak river in the southwest, dissect the entire state.
Twenty per cent of the total land area of the state is covered with wooded forest, a haven for flora and fauna. The evergreen tropical and subtropical forests are found in strategic pockets in the state.
Climate
Nagaland has a largely monsoon climate with high humidity levels. Annual rainfall averages around , concentrated in the months of May to September. Temperatures range from . In winter, temperatures do not generally drop below , but frost is common at high elevations. Summer is the shortest season in the state, lasting only a few months. The temperature during the summer season remains between . Winter often arrives early, with bitter cold and dry weather striking certain regions of the state. The maximum average temperature recorded in the winter season is . Strong northwest winds blow across the state during the months of February and March. Snowfall happens in the higher elevations, but it is rare and most of the state does not witness any snow.
Flora and fauna
About one-sixth of Nagaland is covered by tropical and sub-tropical evergreen forests—including palms, bamboo, rattan as well as timber and mahogany forests. While some forest areas have been cleared for jhum cultivation, many scrub forests, rainforests, tall grassland, and reed-grass marshes remain. Ntangki National Park, Pulie Badze Wildlife Sanctuary, Fakim Wildlife Sanctuary and Rangapahar Reserve Forest are some natural reserves in Nagaland. Some noteworthy mammals found in Nagaland include the slow loris, Assamese macaque, pig-tailed macaque, stump-tailed macaque, rhesus macaque, capped langur, hoolock gibbon, Himalayan black bear, few sun bear, dhole, occasional Bengal tiger, Indian leopard, clouded leopard, marbled cat, golden cat, Indian elephants, Indian rhinoceros, gaur, red serow, common and leaf muntjac, eastern hog deer, sambar, Chinese pangolin, Malayan porcupine, Asiatic brush-tailed porcupine, and Hoary bamboo rats.
Nagaland has a rich birdlife with more than 490 species. The great Indian hornbill has a place in Naga culture. Blyth's tragopan, a vulnerable species of galliform, is the state bird of Nagaland. It is sighted in Mount Japfü and Dzüko Valley of Kohima District, Satoi range in Zünheboto District and Pfütsero in Phek District. The state is also known as the "falcon capital of the world."
Mithun (a semi-domesticated gaur) is the state animal of Nagaland and has been adopted as the official seal of the Government of Nagaland. It is ritually the most valued species in the state. To conserve and protect this animal in the northeast, the National Research Centre on Mithun (NRCM) was established by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) in 1988.
Nagaland is home to 396 species of orchids, belonging to 92 genera of which 54 having horticultural and medicinal economic importance. Kopou (pictured right) is also used for festive hairstyle decoration by women in India's northeast.
Rhododendron is the state flower. The state has at least four species which is endemic to the state.
Geology
Several preliminary studies indicate significant recoverable reserves of petroleum and natural gas. Limestone, marble and other decorative stone reserves are plentiful, and other as yet unexploited minerals include iron, nickel, chromium, and cobalt.
Urbanisation
The Nagaland population is largely rural with 71.14% living in rural regions in 2011. Census reports up to 1951 listed just one settlement in Nagaland as a town, the capital Kohima. The next two settlements, Dimapur and Mokokchung were listed as towns from 1961. Four more towns appeared in 1981, Tuensang, Wokha, Mon and Zünheboto.
The relatively slow rate of urbanisation in Nagaland was described in the 1980s as being an effect of (a) the largely administrative roles of the towns, except for Dimapur which had a more diversified economy, and (b) a low level of mobility among the tribes of Nagaland, scheduled tribes constituting nearly 90% of the population.
Demographics
Population
The population of Nagaland consists of almost 2.2 million people, consisting of 1.04 million males and 0.95 million females. Among its districts, Kohima has the largest population (270,063) followed by Dimapur (170,000). The least populated district is Longleng (50,593). 75% of the population lives in the rural areas. As of 2013, about 10% of rural population is below the poverty line; among the people living in urban areas 4.3% of them are below the poverty line.
The state showed a population drop between the 2001 census and the 2011 census, the only state to show a population drop in the census. This has been attributed, by scholars, to incorrect counting in past censuses; the 2011 census in Nagaland is considered most reliable so far.
The largest urban agglomerations are centred upon Dimapur (122,834) and Kohima (115,283).
Other major towns (and 2011 census populations) are Tuensang (36,774), Mokokchung (35,913), Wokha (35,004), Mon (26,328), Chümoukedima (25,885), Zünheboto (22,633), Kiphire (16,487), Kuda (16,108), Kohima Village (15,734), Phek (14,204), Pfütsero (10,371) and Diphupar 'A' (10,246).
Ethnic groups
The state is home to 17 major ethnic groups— Angami, Ao, Chakhesang, Chang, Kachari, Khiamniungan, Konyak, Kuki, Lotha, Phom, Pochury, Rengma, Sangtam, Sümi, Tikhir, Yimkhiung and Zeme-Liangmai (Zeliang).
Some other minor tribes or subtribes are Garo, Karbi, Chirr, Makury, and Rongmei.
There are also sizeable populations of non-Naga communities like Bengalis, Marwaris, Nepalis, Punjabis and others living mostly around Dimapur City.
Languages
Naga people form the majority of the population. According to the 2011 census there are 2 million people living in Nagaland. The Naga people number around 1.8 million in the state, constituting over 90% of the population. These belong mostly to the Sino-Tibetan language family. Shafer came up with his own classification system for languages found in and around Nagaland. Each ethnic group has one or more dialects that are unintelligible to others.
In 1967, the Nagaland Assembly proclaimed Indian English as the official language of Nagaland and it is the medium for education in Nagaland. Other than English, Nagamese, a creole language based on Assamese, is widely spoken.
The major languages spoken as per the 2011 census are Konyak (244,135), Ao (231,084), Lotha (177,488), Angami (151,883), Chokri (91,010), Sangtam (75,841), Bengali (74,753), Zeme (71,954; covering Zeliang, 60,399 and Zemi, 11,165), Yimkhiungrü (74,156), Chang (65,632), Khiamniungan (61,906), Rengma (61,537), Phom (53,674), Nepali (43,481), Kuzhami (34,218), Pochury (21,446), Kuki (18,391), Chakhesang (17,919), Assamese (17,201), Bodo (12,243; covering Bodo 7,372 and Dimasa 4,871), Manipuri (9,511), Sema (8,268), etc.
Religion
Christianity
The state's population is 1.978 million, out of which over 90% are Abrahamics in general and 88% are Christians in particular. The census of 2011 recorded the state's Christian population at 1,739,651, making it one of the three Christian-majority states in India along with Meghalaya and Mizoram. The state has a very high church attendance rate in both urban and rural areas. Huge churches dominate the skylines of Kohima, Chümoukedima, Dimapur, Wokha and Mokokchung.
Nagaland is known as "the only predominantly Baptist State in the World" and "the most Baptist State in the World." Catholics, Revivalists, Pentecostals and Seventh-day Adventist are the other Christian denominations. Catholics are found in significant numbers in parts of Kohima District, Wokha District, Phek District and as well as in the urban areas of Kohima and Dimapur.
Christianity arrived in Nagaland in the early 19th century. The American Baptist Naga mission grew out of the Assam mission in 1836. Miles Bronson, Nathan Brown and other Christian missionaries working out of Jaipur to bring Christianity to the Indian subcontinent, saw the opportunity for gaining converts since many parts of India's northeast was principally animist and folk religion-driven. Along with other tribal regions of the northeast, the people of Nagaland converted to Christianity. However, the conversions have been marked by high rates of changing denomination ever since. After having converted to Christianity, people do not feel bound to any one sect and tend to switch affiliation between denominations.
Hinduism
Hinduism is the second largest religion in Nagaland. Hindus are concentrated mainly in the erstwhile Dimapur District (as per the 2011 Census of India, comprising the present districts of Dimapur, Niuland, and Chümoukedima) (28.75%) and Kohima District (9.51%). Dimapur Kalibari is a famous temple in Nagaland.
Other religions
There are also folk religions practised by some Nagas, specially among the Zeliangrongs (Zemes and Rongmeis) but few among other Naga ethnic groups.
Government
The governor is the constitutional head of state, representative of the President of India. He possesses largely ceremonial responsibilities apart from law and order responsibilities.
The Legislative Assembly of Nagaland (Vidhan Sabha) is the real executive and legislative body of the state. The 60-member Vidhan Sabha – all elected members of the legislature – forms the government executive and is led by the Chief minister. Nagaland has been granted a great degree of state autonomy, like other Indian States as well as special powers and autonomy for Naga ethnic groups to conduct their own affairs. Each ethnic group has a hierarchy of councils at the village, range, and ethnic levels dealing with local disputes.
Elections
The Democratic Alliance of Nagaland (DAN) is a state level coalition of political parties. It headed the government with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Janata Dal (United) (JDU). It was formed in 2003 after the Nagaland Legislative Assembly election, with the Naga People's Front (NPF), and the BJP. The alliance was in power in Nagaland from 2003 to 2018.
The NDPP–BJP–NPF alliance led UDA government has won the majority in 2018 Nagaland Legislative Assembly election and has been in power since then.
Administrative districts
When created in 1963 the state of Nagaland was divided into just three districts, Kohima District, Mokokchung District and Tuensang District. By a process of subdivision that number increased to seven in 1973, to eleven by 2004, and the most recent districts to be created, Chümoukedima District, Niuland District and Tseminyü District in 2021 and Shamator District in 2022, brought the total number to sixteen districts. The most populous and the most urbanised is Dimapur District, with seven times the inhabitants of Longleng District, the least populous. Noklak District is considered entirely rural. Dimapur District is also at the lowest elevation, Zünheboto District being highest in the mountains.
Districts
The sixteen districts of Nagaland, and their headquarters, 2011 census populations, areas and elevations (of the seat) are:
Economy
The Gross State Domestic Product (GSDP) of Nagaland was about in 2011–12. Nagaland's GSDP grew at 9.9% compounded annually for a decade, thus more than doubling the per capita income.
Nagaland has a literacy rate of 80.1 per cent. The majority of the population in the state speaks English, which is the official language of the state. The state offers technical and medical education. Nevertheless, agriculture and forestry contribute a majority of Nagaland's Gross Domestic Product. The state is rich in mineral resources such as coal, limestone, iron, nickel, cobalt, chromium, and marble. Nagaland has a recoverable reserve of limestone of 1,000 million tonnes plus a largely untapped resource of marble and handicraft stone.
Most of the state's population, about 68 per cent, depends on rural cultivation. The main crops are rice, millet, maize, and pulses. Cash crops, like sugarcane and potato, are also grown in some parts.
Plantation crops such as premium coffee, cardamom, and tea are grown in hilly areas in small quantities with large growth potential. Most people cultivate rice as it is the main staple diet of the people. About 80% of the cropped area is dedicated to rice. Oilseeds is another, higher income crop gaining ground in Nagaland. The farm productivity for all crops is low, compared to other Indian states, suggesting a significant opportunity for farmer income increase. Currently, the Jhum to Terraced cultivation ratio is 4:3; where Jhum is the local name for cut-and-burn shift farming. Jhum farming is ancient, causes a lot of pollution and soil damage, yet accounts for the majority of the farmed area. The state does not produce enough food and depends on the trade of food from other states of India.
Forestry is also an important source of income. Cottage industries such as weaving, woodwork, and pottery are an important source of revenue.
Tourism has a lot of potentials but was largely limited due to insurgency and concern of terrorist violence over the last five decades. More recently, a number of Small Medium Enterprises and private sector companies have actively promoted Nagaland tourism, helping initiate a growing tourism market. Tourism experts contend that the state's uniqueness and strategic location in northeast India give Nagaland an advantage in tapping into the tourism sector for economic growth.
Nagaland's gross state domestic product for 2004 is estimated at $1.4 billion in current prices.
The state generates 87.98 MU compared to a demand for 242.88 MU. This deficit requires Nagaland to buy power. The state has significant hydroelectric potential, which if realised could make the state a power surplus state. In terms of power distribution, every village and town, and almost every household has an electricity connection; but, this infrastructure is not effective given the power shortage in the state.
Natural resources
After a gap of almost 20 years, Nagaland state Chief Minister, T. R. Zeliang launched the resumption of oil exploration in Changpang and Tsori areas, under Wokha District in July 2014. The exploration will be carried out by the Metropolitan Oil & Gas Pvt. Ltd. Zeliang has alleged failures and disputed payments made to the statement made by the previous explorer, the state-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC).
Transportation
Nagaland's rugged and mountainous landscape presents a major challenge to the infrastructural development of transport. Roads are the backbone of Nagaland's transportation network. The state has over 15,000 km of surfaced roads, but these are not satisfactorily maintained given the weather damage. Yet, in terms of population served for each kilometre of surfaced road, Nagaland is the second best state in the region after Arunachal Pradesh.
Roadways
International highways passing through Nagaland
Asian Highway 1
Asian Highway 2
National highways in Nagaland
: Dibrugarh–Tuli–Changtongya–Mokokchung–Wokha–Tseminyü–Kohima–Viswema–Imphal
: Dabaka–Dimapur–Chümoukedima–Kohima–Kigwema–Chizami–Jessami
: Dimapur–Numaligarh
: Dimapur–Rüzaphema–Pimla–Jalukie–Peren–Maram
: Mokokchung–Tuensang–Meluri–Jessami–Imphal
: Changtongya–Longleng–Mon–Tizit–Sapekhati
: Longleng–Tuensang
State highways in Nagaland
There are of state highways in the state.
Dimapur–Mokokchung–Chozuba–Zunheboto
Kohima–Meluri via Chakhabama
Mokokchung–Mariani
Mokokchung–Tuensang
Namtola–Mon
Tuensang–Mon–Naginimora
Tuensang–Kiphire–Meluri
Wokha–Merapani Road
Airways
Dimapur Airport, is the sole airport in Nagaland with scheduled commercial services to Kolkata,
Guwahati, Imphal, and Dibrugarh. It is located from Dimapur, and from Kohima. The airport's asphalt runway is 2290 metre long, at an elevation of 487 feet. Alongside Dimapur Airport another airport is planned.
Railway
Nagaland was first connected to the railway line in 1903 when the 1,000 mm (3 ft 3 3⁄8 in) wide metre-gauge railway track earlier laid by Assam Bengal Railway from Chittagong to Lumding was extended to Tinsukia on the Dibru–Sadiya line.
The railway network in the state is minimal with the Dimapur railway station on the Lumding–Dibrugarh rail section as the only railway station in Nagaland. Broad-gauge lines run , National Highway roads , and state roads .
As part of the Indian Railways' ambitious plan to connect all the capitals of the north-eastern states by broad-gauge rail link, railway minister Suresh Prabhu laid the foundation stone of the 88-km rail line to bring Kohima (Dhansiri–Zubza line), the capital of Nagaland, on the railway map of India. The project will be executed in three phases.
The first phase involves the construction of Dhansiri to Shokhüvi (16 km) line.
The second phase involves Shokhüvi to Khaibong (30 km).
The third phase involves Khaibong to Zubza (45 km).
The entire phase of the project is targeted for completion by 2026.
Culture
The 17 main ethnic groups of Nagaland are Angami–Chakhesang, Ao, Chang, Dimasa Kachari, Khiamniungan, Konyak, Kuki, Lotha, Phom, Pochury, Rengma, Sangtam, Sümi, Tikhir, Yimkhiung and Zeliang. The Angami–Chakhesangs, Aos, Konyaks, Lothas and Sümis are the largest Naga ethnic groups.
Ethnic and clan traditions and loyalties play an important part in the life of Nagas. Weaving is a traditional art handed down through generations in Nagaland. Each Naga ethnic groups has unique designs and colours, producing shawls, shoulder bags, decorative spears, table mats, wood carvings, and bamboo works. Among many tribes, the design of the shawl denotes the social status of the wearer. Some of the more known shawls include tsüngkotepsü and rongsü of the Aos; sütam, ethasü, longpensü of the Lothas; süpong of the Sangtams, rongkhim and tsüngrem khim of the Yimkhiungs; the Angami lohe shawls with thick embroidered animal motifs; etc.
Folk songs and dances are essential ingredients of the traditional Naga culture. The oral tradition is kept alive through folk tales and songs. Naga folk songs are both romantic and historical, with songs narrating entire stories of famous ancestors and incidents. There are also seasonal songs which describe activities done in an agricultural season. Ethnic dances of the Nagas give an insight into the inborn Naga reticence of the people. War dances and other dances belonging to distinctive Naga ethnic groups are a major art form in Nagaland.
Festivals
Nagaland is known in India as the Land of Festivals. The diversity of people and ethnic groups, each with their own culture and heritage, creates a year-long atmosphere of celebrations. In addition, the state celebrates all Christian festivities. Traditional ethnic-related festivals revolve round agriculture, as a vast majority of the population of Nagaland is directly dependent on agriculture. Some of the significant festivals for each major ethnic groups are:
Hornbill Festival
The Hornbill Festival was launched by the Government of Nagaland in December 2000 to encourage inter-ethnic interaction and to promote cultural heritage of the state. Organised by the State Tourism Department and Art & Culture Department. Hornbill Festival showcases a mix of cultural displays under one roof. This festival takes place between 1 and 10 December every year.
It is held at the Kisama Heritage Village which is about 12 km south of Kohima. All the ethnic groups of Nagaland take part in this festival. The aim of the festival is to revive and protect the rich culture of Nagaland and display its history, culture and traditions.
The festival is named after the hornbill bird, which is displayed in folklores in most of the state's ethnic groups. The week-long festival unites Nagaland and people enjoy the colourful performances, crafts, sports, food fairs, games, and ceremonies. Traditional arts which include paintings, wood carvings, and sculptures are on display. Festival highlights include traditional Naga Morungs exhibition and sale of arts and crafts, food stalls, herbal medicine stalls, shows and sales, cultural medley – songs and dances, fashion shows, beauty contest, traditional archery, naga wrestling, indigenous games, and musical concerts. Additional attractions include the Konyak fire eating demonstration, pork-fat eating competitions, the Hornbill Literature Festival (including the Hutton Lectures), Hornbill Global Film Fest, Hornbill Ball, Choral Panorama, North East India Drum Ensemble, Naga King Chilli eating competition, Hornbill National Rock Contest, Hornbill International Motor Rally and WW-II Vintage Car Rally.
Traditional sports
Kene
Kene or Naga wrestling is a folk wrestling style and traditional sport of the Nagas. The objective of the sport is to bring any part of the opponent's body above the knee to the ground.
Aki Kiti
Aki Kiti or Sümi kick fighting is a traditional combat sport originating from and was practised by the Sümi Nagas. It is characterised by kicking and blocking solely using the soles of the feet. The sporting event served the purpose of righting wrongs, restoring honour, or "settling scores" between tribes and tribesmen without resorting to violence. It was practised during tribal ceremonies.
Cuisine
Nagaland is home to the Naga Morich or Raja Mircha (King Chilli), one of the hottest chilis in the world at 855,000 SHU on the Scoville scale. All the ethnic groups of Nagaland have their own cuisine, and they use a lot of meat, fish, and fermented products in their dishes. However, the state dish is smoked pork cooked with fermented soya bean. Naga dishes use a lot of locally grown herbs, ghost peppers, ginger, and garlic. Famous dishes include snails cooked with pork and silkworm larvae, which is an expensive delicacy of the state. Galho is a vegetarian porridge cooked with rice, leaves, and condiments. Drinks include Zutho and Thuthse, beers made with sticky rice.
Historical rituals
Feasts of Merit
In Naga society, individuals were expected to find their place in the social hierarchy, and prestige was the key to maintaining or increasing social status. To achieve these goals a man, whatever his ascendancy, had to be a headhunter or great warrior, have many sexual conquests among women, or complete a series of merit feasts.
The Feasts of Merit reflected the splendor and celebration of Naga life. Only married men could give such Feasts, and his wife took a prominent and honoured place during the ritual which emphasised male-female co-operation and interdependence. His wife brewed the beer which he offered to the guests. The event displayed ceremonies and festivities organised by the sponsor. The Feast given by a wealthier community person would be more extravagant. He would typically invite everyone from the ethnic group. This event bestowed honour to the couple from the community. After the Feast, the tribe would give the couple rights to ornaments equally.
Education
Nagaland's schools are run by the state and central government or by a private organisation. Instruction is mainly in English — the official language of Nagaland. Under the 10+2+3 plan, after passing the Higher Secondary Examination (the grade 12 examination), students may enroll in general or professional degree programs.
Nagaland has three autonomous colleges:
St. Joseph's College, Jakhama
Kohima Science College, Jotsoma
Patkai Christian College, Chümoukedima
Along with one central university—Nagaland University, one engineering college—National Institute of Technology, one College of Veterinary Science and Animal Husbandry in Jalukie and three private Universities—St. Joseph University, Northeast Christian University (NECU) and Institute of Chartered Financial Analysts of India University (ICFAI University).
Tourism
Tourism experts contend that the state's uniqueness and strategic location in northeast India give Nagaland an advantage in tapping into the tourism sector for economic growth. The state has been extremely successful in promoting the great Hornbill Festival, which attracts Indian and foreign tourists alike.
The key thrusts of Nagaland's tourism are its rich culture, showcasing of history and wildlife. Tourism infrastructure is rapidly improving and experts contend this is no longer an issue as was in the past. Local initiatives and tourism pioneers are now beginning to promote a socially responsible tourism model involving the participation of the councils, village elders, the church and the youth.
See also
Naga Self-Administered Zone in Myanmar.
Outline of Nagaland
Index of Nagaland-related articles
Kohima
References
Further reading
Drouyer, A. Isabel, René Drouyer, "THE NAGAS: MEMORIES OF HEADHUNTERS- Indo-Burmese Borderlands-vol. 1", White lotus, 2016, .
Glancey, Jonathan. 2011. Nagaland: a Journey to India's Forgotten Frontier. London: Faber
Hattaway, Paul. 2006. 'From Head Hunters To Church Planters'. Authentic Publishing
Hutton, J. 1986. 'Report on Naga Hills' Delhi: Mittal Publication.
Kunz, Richard & Vibha Joshi. 2008. Naga – A Forgotten Mountain Region Rediscovered. Basel: Merian.
Oppitz, Michael, Thomas Kaiser, Alban von Stockhausen & Marion Wettstein. 2008. Naga Identities: Changing Local Cultures in the Northeast of India. Gent: Snoeck Publishers.
Stirn, Aglaja & Peter van Ham. The Hidden world of the Naga: Living Traditions in Northeast India. London: Prestel.
von Stockhausen, Alban. 2014. Imag(in)ing the Nagas: The Pictorial Ethnography of Hans-Eberhard Kauffmann and Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf. Arnoldsche, Stuttgart, .
External links
Government
Official Tourism Site of Nagaland
Department of Power Nagaland
General information
Nagaland Encyclopædia Britannica entry
1963 establishments in India
English-speaking countries and territories
Northeast India
States and territories established in 1963
States and union territories of India
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin%20Megastores
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Virgin Megastores
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Virgin Megastores is an international entertainment retailing chain, founded in early 1976 by Richard Branson as a record shop on London's Oxford Street.
In 1979 the company opened their first Megastore at the end of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road. The company expanded to hundreds of stores worldwide in the 1990s, but has lost a large number of stores in recent years, largely with the sale and eventual closing of the European, North American, Australian, Japanese and Chinese stores. By 2015, it operated only in the Middle East and in North Africa.
History
Branson's early business ventures
Richard Branson and Nik Powell had initially run a small record shop called Virgin Records and Tapes on Notting Hill Gate, London, specialising particularly in "krautrock" imports, and offering bean bags and free vegetarian food for the benefit of customers listening to the music on offer. After making the shop into a success, they turned their business into a fully fledged record label, Virgin Records. The name Virgin, according to Branson (in his autobiography), arose from a colleague of his when they were brainstorming business ideas. She suggested Virgin, as they were all new to business, like "virgins". The first release on the label was the progressive rock album Tubular Bells by multi-instrumentalist Mike Oldfield in 1973.
Virgin Megastores
Virgin's first formal store opened on London's Oxford Street in January or February 1971 (exact date uncertain). In 1979 the company opened their first Megastore at the end of Oxford Street and Marble Arch. Virgin Megastores and Virgin Records operated as entirely separate entities, like many of the other Virgin companies. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s Virgin Megastores opened over 100 stores in the UK, and many others around the world, including expansion into Asia Pacific and North America, under the leadership of Ian Duffell – President & CEO of Virgin Entertainment Group until 1998. Simon Wright – Chief Executive of the Virgin Entertainment Group from 1999 to 2009 was instrumental in the growth of the stores in particular developing the stores in the Middle East before their eventual disposals under license detailed under Ownership.
Ownership
Like many of Branson's Virgin brands, Virgin Megastores is not wholly owned by the Virgin Group. During the early to mid-2000s Virgin Group decided to sell off most of its Virgin Megastores to various companies, including the Lagardere Group. By 2001 the Virgin Megastores worldwide were split between the Virgin Group and the Lagardère Group. The Virgin Group kept the United Kingdom, Ireland, United States and Japan outlets while the Lagardère Group obtained the shops in France and travel retail locations globally including Australia, China, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Greece, Italy, Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan.
Virgin Megastores in the Middle East currently trades as V Star Multimedia LLC. Culture Convenience Club owns what was Virgin Megastores Japan, which have since been rebranded as Tsutaya. The Australian Virgin Megastores and Virgin at Myer concept stores were operated by Brazin Limited. (Sanity Entertainment after 2009) until all were closed in 2010; Brazin also ran local HMV outlets, in addition to their own Sanity brand. In December 2007 Butler Capital Partners announced their intention to mount a majority takeover of the French arm of Virgin from Lagardère. This deal was finalised in February 2008.
In 2007 the real estate company Related Companies and Vornado Realty Trust acquired Virgin Megastores North America. Related and Vornado were the landlords for the two most profitable stores in the United States and those stores were profitable because they had long-term leases in which rents were locked in at an extremely low rate. Both real estate companies wanted to break the leases and replace Virgin with new tenants that were willing to pay the then current higher rental rates that would make an entertainment retail business unprofitable. They have since decided to close all the American stores.
Store experience
Product range
Virgin shops have a wide selection of CDs, games, books, DVDs, vinyl records, magazines, portable media players, accessories and additional products such as calendars, board games and Virgin branded items. Larger stores also stock electronic equipment and computer peripherals. Not all of these product categories are stocked by all Virgin shops, though the larger stores do generally stock the full product range.
In 2003, all US Stores increased their focus on multiple fashion categories spanning Pop culture, Street, Urban, Movie & TV to complement the music, DVD and video games offers. Virgin Mobile products can also be found in separately run Virgin Mobile Concessions within most Virgin Megastores. Some shops also house cafes or coffee shops run by external companies.
Technology
In 2005, Virgin Digital was launched to cater for those that bought their music digitally or wanted to rip and burn their current music collection. This is designed to add to the services provided by Virgin, rather than replace the Megastores. The download service faced some criticism from consumer groups due to its incompatibility with the popular iPod music player. The service has since been discontinued. Around the world there were other Virgin branded digital music retail websites, such as VirginMega.fr, France's number 2 music download website.
Operations
Europe
Austria
In 2003, the first and only Virgin Megastore in Vienna, on Mariahilferstraße, was sold and closed.
France
There were 35 Virgin Megastores in France. Twelve additional stores in France were branded Furet du Nord, and about ten international stores were owned by the same company. The French Megastore business was launched in 1988 by Branson and Patrick Zelnick, CEO of music publisher Naïve.
Lagardère Group bought the chain in 2001. In December 2007 Butler Capital Partners announced their intention to mount a majority takeover of the French arm of Virgin from Lagardère. This deal was finalised in February 2008. According to the Lagardère 2007 report, 80% of the Virgin stores was to be sold by Lagardère Services at a value of €76.4 million, and 20% would be kept. Prior to this sale 51% of VirginMega, France's number 2 music download website, was transferred to the Virgin Stores company (sold to Butler), and the remaining 49% was kept by Lagardère Active.
In July 2012, LS Travel Retail announced that they will phase out the Virgin Entertainment brand in France, commencing 2013, converting all remaining Virgin travel outlets into larger sized Fnac formats stocking the same range in addition to more product lines.
In January 2013, Virgin Megastore France filed for bankruptcy. At that time there were 26 Megastores in France, employing 1,000 people, after two years of cutting over 200 staff and several shops. The company had taken steps to terminate the lease on its flagship Champs-Élysées store in Paris after 25 years on the famous avenue. In June 2013 the company was finally liquidated and ceased operations after 25 years.
Germany
Virgin Megastore withdrew from the German market in 1994, amid complaints that the country's shop-closing law was too restrictive.
The Virgin name is used by the Lagardère Group to brand a small number of convenience stores within airports and railway stations. In September 2019 there were seven Virgin shops, of which four are in or adjacent to Frankfurt airport.
Greece
As of June 2005 there were 15 Virgin Megastores in Greece, operated by Vivere Entertainment. As of 2015, no Virgin Megastores exist in the country.
Hungary
In 1996, local merchandising group Fotex opened the first and only Hungarian Virgin Megastore (1000 m2) in the first "western" shopping mall, Duna Plaza, in Budapest. It was operated under a franchise until 2000. Between 2001 and 2006, Fotex operated the store as "Hungaroton Gigastore". The shop was closed in 2006 and no more Virgin Megastore shops were opened in Hungary.
Ireland
Virgin Megastores opened its first store in the Republic of Ireland in Dublin in 1986. More stores opened in Ireland from the early 1990s including Cork City. The company had planned to launch an online store specifically for the Republic of Ireland at virginmegastores.ie however plans were shelved when its Irish operations were sold in 2007. At its height of success the company owned 6 stores in the Republic of Ireland, however, by 2002 stores began to close. The Virgin Group sought to sell its Irish operations during 2007, and on 17 September 2007, it was announced Irish and UK stores would separate from the Virgin Group. A management buy-out offer was accepted. Stores were rebranded as Zavvi.
Following the collapse of Zavvi's supplier in December 2008, stores in Ireland were immediately closed in January 2009 with the hope Irish stores could be sold to another buyer unfortunately all were closed with some taken over by other music retailers.
Italy
In February 2004, the Virgin Megastore in Piazza Duomo Milan closed. Currently this building is occupied by a Mondadori retail store. After the Italian franchise Virgin Retail Italy filed for bankruptcy and liquidation, the Italian bankruptcy court ordered in May 2004 the immediate closure of three out of four of the remaining stores while allowing the store in Bergamo to remain open for a few additional months to allow the company to depose of its remaining inventory.
The Netherlands
Virgin Megastores entered the Dutch market in the 1990s and operated four stores (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Maastricht). In 2000, it decided to exit the market. Three stores were sold to the Free Record Shop group, while the Maastricht branch was closed. Free Record Shop also acquired three Virgin Megastores in Belgium.
Spain and Portugal
Virgin Retail España, S.L. opened its Barcelona store in November 1992, just after the Barcelona Olympics. This opening was followed by another Megastore in Seville (1993) however the opening of a flagship store in Madrid eluded the retailer, because at that time, cinemas and theatres in the Gran Vía (Madrid's most popular commercial thoroughfare) could not easily be reassigned for commercial use. The Spanish company diversified by opening small outlets in busy Spanish and Portuguese airports. In 1994, Virgin Retail España reached an agreement with the department store chain Galerías Preciados and opened small concessions in their Madrid stores (Callao, Goya, Serrano, La Vaguada and Parquesur). Galerías Preciados ceased trading the following year and Virgin Retail España quickly re-organised its operations and opened medium-sized stores in ABC Serrano (Madrid), La Coruña, Vigo, Málaga, Bilbao and Santander. Larger stores followed in Portugal (Lisbon and Oporto) but by 1997 the impact of digital technology had already hit their distribution model very hard. Music was by then being traded freely on the Internet but the major music labels did little to help support high street retailers. Inevitably, the Virgin Retail Group took the difficult strategic decision to close all of Virgin's high street stores in southern Europe. In July 1998 Virgin Megastores closed its southern European flagship store in Barcelona on the corner of Passeig de Gràcia and Gran Vía de les Corts Catalans. This building is currently occupied by Zara clothes store.
UK
The first Virgin Megastore opened in the United Kingdom in 1979 and between the 1980s and 1990s, the chain grew, including via its merger with Our Price whilst under the ownership of WH Smith. By the 1990s Virgin Megastores had become an international franchise as part of the Virgin Group.
The Virgin Group sought to sell its UK and Ireland stores during 2007, and on 17 September 2007, it was announced that the UK and Ireland arm of the Virgin Megastores brand was to break away from the Virgin Group. A management buy-out offer was accepted. Stores were rebranded as Zavvi.
Following the collapse of Woolworths, which owned Zavvi's supplier Entertainment UK, Zavvi entered administration on 24 December 2008 as it had been unable to source stock from other suppliers under favourable terms. By February 2009 Zavvi had closed its stores, selling some to rival HMV, and a few to Simon Douglas and Les Whitfield's Head Entertainment.
Turkey
Virgin entered the Turkish market in March 2011 with a store located in the Demirören shopping centre on Istiklal Street near Taksim, Istanbul. The product mix of books, digital media and electronics failed to compete with better established chains and the store closed in autumn 2012.
Arab world
The Azadea Group of Beirut, Lebanon has an exclusive license since 2001 to operate Virgin Megastores in many countries within the Middle East, except for countries which already have a franchise. Operating as Virgin Megastores Middle East, Azadea has stores in UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Egypt, Kuwait, and Jordan.
Megastores of Lebanon S.A.L. has an exclusive franchise to operate Virgin Megastores in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia.
Best Financière (Label Vie Carrefour) of Rabat has an exclusive license to operate Virgin Megastores within Morocco. Since 2010, Best has been opening a new store nearly every year.
Antar Group of Damascus has an exclusive to operate Virgin Megastores in Syria since 2007. Since the Syrian Civil War has caused most normal economic activities to virtually cease in the country since 2011, all megastores in the country are currently closed and may not return until political stability returns.
Lebanon
Virgin's main store in Lebanon was located in the old Cinema Opera on Martyrs' Square, Beirut Central District; it opened on 3 July 2001 and was shut down in 2018. The four level store's inauguration was attended by Virgin's founder Sir Richard Branson. There are also smaller stores at ABC Mall Achrafieh, ABC Mall Dbayeh, ABC Mall Verdun, CityMall Dora, as well as in Beirut International Airport. New stores were opened in ABC Mall Dbayeh in November 2012 and ABC Mall Verdun in November 2017.
Saudi Arabia
First megastore in Riyadh opened in February 2015.
By December 2015, there were four Virgin Megastores in Saudi Arabia. They were located on Tahliah Street in the Roshana Centre, Red Sea Mall and on in Jeddah domestic airport in Jeddah and there's one at Dhahran Mall Eastern Province.
In November 2017, a fifth Saudi location was open at the Hayat Mall in Riyadh.
Bahrain
As of September 2008, there is currently one Virgin Megastore in Bahrain. It is in the Bahrain City Centre.
Egypt
The first Egyptian store was opened at the City Stars Mall in Cairo in October 2005. Six years later, a second location was opened at the Mall of Arabia in 6th of October City in December 2011. A third location was opened at the Festival City Mall in Cairo in June 2015.
And the 4th and newest branch opened in Mall of Egypt on 27 September 2017.
Kuwait
The first location in Kuwait opened in 2002. By May 2008, there were two Virgin Megastores in Kuwait, one at Marina Mall in Salmiya and the other at the airport. However, by late 2011 the airport branch was shut down, while the second branch shut down in March 2012.
After a seven-year absence, Virgin Megastores returned to Kuwait in February 2020 by opening its first new store there at The Avenues Mall.
Qatar
Virgin Megastores currently has six stores in Qatar, with one being located in the Villaggio Mall (an Italian-themed mall), Doha which is the shopping centre's main anchor. In November 2008 they opened a smaller store in a shopping centre called Landmark. Other locations includes Mall of Qatar, Qatar Mall, Doha Festival City, Hamad International Airport (departure area) and a small kiosk at The Pearl.
United Arab Emirates
The first Virgin Megastore in the United Arab Emirates in September 2001 at the Deira City Centre in Dubai, two months after the opening in Beirut. A few months later, the second store in the country was opened in Abu Dhabi in October 2001. A fourth store in UAE opened in Jumeirah in 2002.
By October 2005, there were four stores in the UAE, with stores at the Deira City Center, at Burjuman and at Mercato Mall in Dubai and at the Abu Dhabi Mall in Abu Dhabi. A month later, Branson was present at the Virgin Megastores opening at the Mall of the Emirates in Dubai.
Sometime between 2009 and 2010, the ownership for the Virgin Megastore franchise in the United Arab Emirates and the Middle East was transferred from Star Multimedia to Virgin Megastores Middle East, Azadea Group. By May 2010, stores were also added at the Mirdif City Centre and at the Jumeira Beach residence in Dubai to make a total of seven stores in the UAE.
The eighth store in the UAE was opened in September 2011 at the Dubai Mall in Dubai. The Jumeirah Beach residence appeared to have been closed sometime before September 2012, bring the store count back down to seven.
A second store in Abu Dhabi opened at the Al Wahda Mall in November 2012.
As of November 2012, there were eight Virgin Megastores in the UAE six of which are located in Dubai.
In December 2014, a store was opened at the Yas Mall in Abu Dhabi. The thirteenth store in the UAE was opened at the Al Jimi Mall in Al Ain in July 2015.
As well as being an all-rounded entertainment retailer, these Megastores also act as venues, with artist signings/appearances, performances and quiz nights and a newly launched boutique section offering everything from movie memorabilia to jewellery.
This store is quite popular among locals and expats in the country, as this is the only store where they sell more music than most stores in the country, which also explains why the country has more branches than the other Gulf countries.
Jordan
The first Virgin Megastore in Jordan opened in Amman at the City Mall in September 2007. A second location, also in Amman, was opened at the Taj Mall in October 2015.
Morocco
In 2007, Best Financière (Label Vie Carrefour) of Rabat received a franchise from Lagardère to operate Virgin Megastores in Morocco. The first store in Morocco opened at the Almazar mall in Marrakech in April 2010. A second store was opened in Rabat (Kitéa Géant Mall) in December 2012 which was quickly followed weeks later by the openings of two additional stores in Casablanca (AnfaPlace Shopping Center) and Fez (Borj Fez Mall). A fifth store was opened in downtown Casablanca in September 2015. In August 2016, a sixth store was opened on the property of a Carrefour Store located in the Sidi Maârouf Neighbourhood next to the city of Casablanca.
Syria
In 2007, Antar Group of Damascus was awarded a franchise by Lagardère to operate Virgin Megastores in Syria. The Antar Group was in the process of opening a store in the Al Shahba Mall in Aleppo when the Syrian Civil War broke out in 2011. The business has since closed after the mall had been heavily damaged during the fighting.
Oman
The first Virgin Megastore in Oman opened in Muscat in November 2015 at the Muscat City Centre.
North America
United States
In 1992, the Virgin Group and Blockbuster entered into a joint venture to set up the first Virgin Megastore on Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, which was closed in 2008. The US Megastore business was launched in 1992 by Richard Branson and Ian Duffell, CEO of Virgin Entertainment Group. At its peak, there were 23 Megastores in the U.S. which generated $310 million annually. The U.S. stores were purchased by Related Companies and Vornado Realty Trust in 2007 for the purpose of closing the stores and to break the long term long rental leases.
Store closures
Under new ownership, eleven stores were gradually closed in 2007. On 2 March 2009, it was announced that all Virgin Megastores in the United States would close.
The store at Arden Fair Mall in Sacramento, CA, closed in 2005 and was converted to an Urban Outfitters, while the Grapevine Mills location was closed at the end of 2008. Related Companies announced that the Virgin Megastore flagship store in Times Square would close by April 2009, with the space being replaced by Forever 21. On 25 February 2009, it was announced that the stores in San Francisco and Union Square (New York) would close in April and May, respectively, and the announcement of all stores closing followed soon thereafter. On 12 May 2009, the Virgin Megastore at Downtown Disney (now Disney Springs) at Walt Disney World closed permanently. As of September 2012, the last remaining Virgin Books & Music outlet operated in Terminal 3 at John F. Kennedy International Airport. Both airport locations closed by the middle of 2013. The JFK Airport location was closed by the time Terminal 3 was demolished and converted into a parking lot in 2013.
In-stores
Most locations included an in-store radio station, branded Virgin Radio. U.S. Virgin Radio was not a broadcast radio station, but a DJ operated hard-lines system which broadcast throughout the store, and the complex in which the store was located. At the Times Square location, DJ selections were heard on the retail floor, in the office areas, processing areas, and even out on the shop's Broadway sidewalk frontage.
All employees of the U.S. Virgin Megastores could be identified by their trademark red or black t-shirts which had the Virgin logo on the front and the word STAFF on the back, as well as required lanyards with their first name printed on them.
Technology
The Virgin Megastore chain in the U.S. had a different GSA look-up system to other the international arms of the chain. This system was a private network that linked all North American stores, updating each shop's product inventory every 24 to 48 hours. The GSA was reportedly accessible from the internet.
American Virgin Megastores implemented a near real-time data warehouse in 2004. The data warehouse named 'Crescendo' collects POS transactions, along with customer traffic counts and generates KPI reports in near real-time. The near real-time information helped the managers identify trends quicker and react accordingly. The U.S. stores shared their experience with the real-time warehouse and the UK stores also used similar process.
Virgin Megastore (U.S.) had a Customer Loyalty Program named 'Virgin V.I.P.' The Program used a read/write 'GraphiCard'. Every time a member purchase is made, the Graphicard was swiped through the POS Graphicard Terminal. Members points were instantly updated on the face of the card. The website shared the loyalty program with the U.S. stores.
Website
Virgin Megastores U.S. website is VirginMega.com. In 2002 this website became co-branded with Amazon.com, and was powered by Amazon. Later in 2002 VirginMega.co.jp, the Japanese equivalent, followed suit. In 2007 the website was again changed, when Virgin Megastores partnered with Baker & Taylor. On 31 May 2009 VirginMega.com ceased operating.
Canada
The first and only Virgin Megastore in Canada opened in December 1996 at 750 Burrard Street, at the corner of Robson Street and Burrard Street in Vancouver, British Columbia. The , three-level store was located in Downtown Vancouver, the city's busiest and most prestigious retail destination. The building was previously home to the central branch of the Vancouver Public Library. The Virgin Megastore ceased its operations in Vancouver on 4 September 2005 when on 28 June 2005, HMV Canada announced it was planning to expand the store and rebrand the location into the HMV brand. The acquisition took effect immediately after the closure and on 5 September 2005, HMV was opened. With the dominance of HMV in Canada, Virgin thus decided to exit the Canadian market entirely. This Vancouver HMV location would later close in 2012.
There were also plans to build its second Canadian store at Metropolis (later Toronto Life Square, now 10 Dundas East) in Downtown Toronto, just south of the since-closed Sam the Record Man flagship store as well as HMV's existing Toronto flagship. However, the exit from Canada resulted in the cancellation of these plans. An Adidas Performance store stands where Virgin would have.
Oceania
Australia
The first Australian Megastore was launched in 1988 by Richard Branson and Ian Duffell, CEO Virgin Megastores Asia-Pacific. Between 1988 and 1992 Megastores were opened in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. In 1992, the Virgin Group and Blockbuster Inc. entered into a joint venture. This lasted until Virgin sold their interest in the six stores to Blockbuster, who promptly rebranded them in 1993 to Blockbuster Music.
In October 2001, Ian Duffell, Managing Director of Brazin Limited (owner of Australia's largest entertainment retailer, Sanity) reintroduced Virgin Megastores in the country via two related transactions with the Virgin Group, acquiring 77 troubled Our Price music stores in the UK for a symbolic £2, and in turn gaining exclusive license rights in Australia for Virgin Entertainment, initially setting up the first Virgin Megastore on Chapel Street's, The Jam Factory in April 2002. Brazin also intended to use the Virgin brand to open 45 new Megastores in addition to converting 55 of its existing small-scale IN2 Music stores that had not already been rebranded as Sanity. Yet, the programme stalled as Brazin battled internal disruptions and struggled to separate the target-markets for Virgin and its chain of more than 200 Sanity stores (at the time). As a result, the company's entertainment division posted a $27 million loss in financial year, 2002–03, and by mid-2004, Brazin had only managed to open 12 Virgin Megastores.
In September 2003, Brazin sold out of its 118-store Sanity UK (former Our Price and VShop outlets) store network to Primemist Limited. In July 2004, Brazin entered into an agreement with Coles Myer to open 62 Virgin concept stores within the Myer department store chain. Brazin agreed to buy all of Myer's remaining CD and DVD stock, recruit, train and pay their own staff, and work within Myer's systems and promotions. These concept stores were marketed separately to stand-alone Virgin Megastores (due to their more limited stock availability) and branded, Virgin at Myer. This solved Brazin's problem since 2002 by separating the Virgin and Sanity target markets by making Virgin more "family orientated" while leaving Sanity's "street edge" to continue. Exactly a year later, Brazin stated that after a rocky start (with staff recruitment issues and aligning products with the typical Myer customer), Virgin at Myer was up 45 per cent on comparative sales and was performing well.
In December 2004, HDS Retail Asia Pacific opened Australia's first Virgin Books and Music travel outlet at Melbourne Airport. Since then, the company – now known as LS Travel Retail – opened another five Virgin outlets at other major capital city airports in addition to one railway outlet at Southern Cross station in Melbourne. Yet, by early 2012, all of these stores have been closed.
By mid-2010, Sanity Entertainment (formerly Brazin Limited) closed all Virgin Megastores. Also, in August of that year, all Virgin at Myer concept stores stopped operating under the Virgin brand due to Sanity Entertainment not renewing their contract with Myer Holdings (formerly Coles Myer) and were either closed or converted back into a basic audio/visual department operated by Myer (in 2011, these non-branded audio/visual departments were later closed by Myer anyway). Sanity elected to exit the Virgin brand despite the licensing deal running until 2015.
Virgin Entertainment's Australian peak was reached in 2006 with 24 Virgin Megastores, 62 Virgin at Myer outlets, and 2 Virgin Books and Music stores in operation. As of September 2012, Australia contains no more Virgin Entertainment outlets.
Asia
Japan
In 1990 Virgin Megastores Japan Limited was started as a 50/50 venture between Marui and the Virgin Entertainment Group. In September 1990, the first Japanese Virgin Megastore opened in Shinjuku. During the 1990s, more Megastores were opened all over Japan. On 19 September 2002, following its American counterpart, the VirginMega.co.jp website became powered by Amazon.co.jp. This website has since disappeared.
In 2005 Culture Convenience Club bought Virgin Megastore's operations (totalling 22 stores) in Japan from Marui Co. By November 2008 the number of Virgin Megastores in Japan had lessened to 15. Culture Convenience Club's licensing contract with Virgin Group for the use of the Virgin Megastore brand had expired, and there was no desire to renew it. As of November 2008 Culture Convenience Club's subsidiary company, Tsutaya Stores Holdings Co., is expected to acquire Virgin Megastores Japan Co. Virgin Megastores Japan are to be rebranded as Tsutaya by early 2009.
China
In November 2007, HDS Retail Asia Pacific (now known as LS Travel Retail) opened China's first and only Virgin Books and Music travel outlet at Hongqiao International Airport in Shanghai. As of June 2012, it is still in operation.
Virgin Books and Music
Virgin Books and Music is a Virgin-branded entertainment retail chain exclusive to airports and travel locations, operated by the Lagardère Services division of the French conglomerate Lagardère Group. Such stores have a much smaller size than Virgin Megastores and currently operate in 10 countries: Canada, China, Germany, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Poland, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States.
References
External links
Virgin Megastores (International portal)
Virgin Megastore (Gulf countries and Egypt)
Virgin Megastore Lebanon
Virgin Megastores Morocco
Virgin Megastore Saudi Arabia
Lagardère Group
M
Music retailers of the United States
Retail companies established in 1971
Retail companies of the United Kingdom
Music retailers of the United Kingdom
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War%20of%20the%20Second%20Coalition
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War of the Second Coalition
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The War of the Second Coalition () (1798/9 – 1801/2, depending on periodisation) was the second war on revolutionary France by most of the European monarchies, led by Britain, Austria, and Russia and including the Ottoman Empire, Portugal, Naples and various German monarchies. Prussia did not join the coalition, and Spain supported France.
The overall goal of Britain and Russia was to contain the expansion of the French Republic and to restore the monarchy in France, while Austria —weakened and in deep financial debt from the War of the First Coalition—sought primarily to recover its position and come out of the war stronger than when it had entered. In large part because of the difference in strategy among the three major allied powers, the Second Coalition failed to overthrow the revolutionary government, and French territorial gains since 1793 were confirmed. In the Franco–Austrian Treaty of Lunéville in February 1801, France held all of its previous gains and obtained new lands in Tuscany in Italy. Austria was granted Venetia and the former Venetian Dalmatia. Most other allies also signed separate peace treaties with the French Republic in 1801. Britain and France signed the Treaty of Amiens in March 1802, followed by the Ottomans in June 1802, which brought an interval of peace in Europe that lasted several months until Britain declared war on France again in May 1803. The renewed hostilities culminated in the War of the Third Coalition.
Background
On 20 April 1792, the French Legislative Assembly declared war on Austria. In the War of the First Coalition (1792–97), France fought against most of the states with which it shared a border, as well as Great Britain, Portugal and Prussia. The Coalition forces achieved several victories at the outset of the war, but were ultimately repulsed from French territory and then lost significant territories to the French, who began to set up client republics in their occupied territories. Napoleon Bonaparte's efforts in the northern Italian campaigns of the French Revolutionary Wars pushed Austrian forces back and resulted in the negotiation of the Treaty of Leoben (18 April 1797) and the Treaty of Campo Formio (October 1797), leaving Britain to fight on alone against France, Spain and the Netherlands.
Peace interrupted
From October 1797 until March 1799, France and Austria, the signatories of the Treaty of Campo Formio, avoided armed conflict but remained suspicious of each other, and several diplomatic incidents undermined the agreement. The French demanded additional territory not mentioned in the Treaty. The Habsburgs were reluctant to hand over designated territories, much less additional ones. The Congress at Rastatt proved inept at orchestrating the transfer of territories to compensate the German princes for their losses. Republicans in the Swiss Cantons, supported by the French Revolutionary Army, overthrew the central government in Bern and established the Helvetic Republic.
Other factors contributed to the rising tensions. In the summer of 1798, Napoleon led an expedition to Egypt and Syria. On his way to Egypt, he had stopped at the heavily fortified port city of Valletta, the capital city of Hospitaller Malta. Grand Master Ferdinand von Hompesch zu Bolheim, who ruled the island, allowed only two ships at a time in the harbour, in accordance with the island's neutrality. Napoleon immediately ordered the bombardment of Valletta, and on 11 June 1798, General Louis Baraguey d'Hilliers directed a landing of several thousand French troops at strategic locations around the island. The French Knights of the order deserted, and the remaining Knights failed to mount a successful resistance. Napoleon forcibly removed the other Knights from their possessions, angering Emperor Paul I of Russia, who was the honorary head of the Order. Moreover, the French Directory was convinced that the Austrians were conniving to start another war. Indeed, the weaker the French Republic seemed, the more seriously the Austrians, Neapolitans, Russians and British actually discussed this possibility. Napoleon's army got trapped in Egypt, and after he returned to France (October 1799), it eventually surrendered (September 1801).
Preliminaries to war
Military planners in Paris understood that the Upper Rhine Valley, the southwestern German territories, and Switzerland were strategically important for the Republic's defence. The Swiss passes commanded access to northern Italy; consequently, the army that held those passes could move troops to and from northern and southern theatres quickly.
Toward this end, in early November 1798, Marshal Jean-Baptiste Jourdan arrived in Hüningen to take command of the French forces there, called the Army of Observation because its function was to observe the security of the French border on the Rhine. Once there, he assessed the forces' quality and disposition and identified needed supplies and manpower. He found the army woefully inadequate for its assignment. The Army of the Danube and its two flanking armies, the Army of Helvetia and the Army of Mayence, or Mainz, were equally short of manpower, supplies, ammunition, and training; most resources were already directed to the Army in Northern Italy, the Army of Britain, and the Egyptian expedition. Jourdan assiduously documented these shortages, pointing out in lengthy correspondence to the Directory the consequences of an undermanned and undersupplied army; his petitions seemed to have little effect on the Directory, which sent neither significant additional manpower nor supplies.
Jourdan's orders were to take the army into Germany and secure strategic positions, particularly on the southwest roads through Stockach and Schaffhausen, at the westernmost border of Lake Constance. Similarly, as commander of the Army of Helvetia (Switzerland), André Masséna would acquire strategic positions in Switzerland, in particular the St. Gotthard Pass, the passes above Feldkirch, particularly Maienfeld (St. Luciensteig), and hold the central plateau in and around Zürich and Winterthur. These positions would prevent the Allies of the Second Coalition from moving troops back and forth between the northern Italian and German theatres, but would allow French access to these strategic passes. Ultimately, this positioning would allow the French to control all western roads leading to and from Vienna. Finally, the army of Mayence would sweep through the north, blocking further access to and from Vienna from any of the northern Provinces, or from Britain.
Formation of the Second Coalition
The Second Coalition took several months to form, starting with Naples allying itself with Austria (19 May 1798) and Russia (29 November), after which British Prime Minister Pitt and Austrian State Chancellor Thugut (the latter only on the condition that Russia also joined the coalition) failed to persuade Prussia (which had left the First Coalition as early as April 1795) to join in. Neither were Britain and Austria able to formalise an alliance, due to lack of an agreement on the loan convention that would cover Austria's outstanding debt to Britain from the previous war, let alone British subsidy to Austria for the upcoming war; they resorted to ad hoc cooperation without formal agreement. Next, Russia allied itself with the Ottoman Empire (23 December) and Great Britain (26 December) while attacking the French Ionian Islands. By 1 December, the Kingdom of Naples had signed alliances with both Russia and Great Britain.
The preliminary military action under the alliance occurred on 29 November when General Karl Mack, an Austrian serving Naples, occupied Rome, wishing to restore Papal authority with the Neapolitan army. King Ferdinand was pushed by his angry German wife Queen Maria Carolina, Marie Antoinette's sister, and by Horatio Nelson through his secret lover, the British Ambassador's wife Emma, Lady Hamilton. All these companions became reckless gamblers when the poorly equipped and led Neapolitan army was not only soon defeated outside Rome and pushed back, but Naples itself was occupied by France on January 23. The king, the British officials and the women had only the time to escape to Sicily.
War
1799
In Europe, the allies mounted several invasions, including campaigns in Italy and Switzerland and an Anglo-Russian invasion of the Netherlands. Russian general Alexander Suvorov inflicted a series of defeats on the French in Italy, driving them back to the Alps. The allies were less successful in the Anglo-Russian invasion of Holland, where the British and Russians retreated after a defeat at Castricum, and in Switzerland, where after initial victories an Austro-Russian army was completely routed at the Second Battle of Zurich. These reverses, as well as British insistence on searching shipping in the Baltic Sea, led to Russia's withdrawal from the Coalition.
Napoleon invaded Syria from Egypt, but retreated after a failed siege of Acre, repelling a British-Turkish invasion. Alerted to the political and military crisis in France, he returned, leaving his army behind, and used his popularity and army support to mount a coup that made him First Consul, the head of the French government.
1800
Napoleon sent Moreau to campaign in Germany, and went himself to raise a new army at Dijon and march through Switzerland to attack the Austrian armies in Italy from behind.
Moreau meanwhile invaded Bavaria and won a great battle against Austria at Hohenlinden. He continued toward Vienna and the Austrians sued for peace. The result was the Armistice of Steyr on 25 December.
In May 1800, Napoleon led his troops across the Alps through the Great St. Bernard Pass into Italy in a military campaign against the Austrians. He conducted the Siege of Fort Bard against the Sardinian and Austrian armies for two weeks, after which he was able to cross the Alps and enter Italy. He narrowly defeated the Austrians at the Battle of Marengo. While the Austrians had a much larger force, Napoleon was able to organise a hurried retreat from the village before returning with reinforcements. The French successfully charged the Austrian flank with cavalry and Napoleon negotiated for Austria to evacuate Piedmont, Liguria and Lombardy.
1801
Prior to the Acts of Union of July/August 1800, Ireland was a separate kingdom, with its own parliament, held in a personal union with Great Britain under the Crown. In response to the 1798 United Irishmen revolt, it became part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, effective 1 January 1801.
The Austrians signed the Armistice of Treviso on 16 January, ending the war in northern Italy. On 9 February, they signed the Treaty of Lunéville for the entire Holy Roman Empire, basically accepting the terms of the previous Treaty of Campo Formio. In Egypt, the Ottomans and British invaded and compelled the French to surrender after the fall of Cairo and Alexandria.
Britain continued the war at sea. A coalition of noncombatants including Prussia, Russia, Denmark-Norway, and Sweden joined to protect neutral shipping from Britain's blockade, resulting in Nelson's surprise attack on the Danish fleet in harbour at the Battle of Copenhagen.
France and Spain invaded Portugal in the War of Oranges, forcing Portugal to sign the Treaty of Badajoz (1801).
Russia formally made peace with France through the Treaty of Paris on 8 October, signing a secret alliance two days later.
In December 1801, France dispatched the Saint-Domingue expedition to recapture the island, which had been independent since the 1791 Haitian Revolution. This included over 30,000 troops with many experienced and elite veterans, but ended in catastrophic failure; by the end of 1802, an estimated 15,000–22,000 had died of disease and yellow fever, among them Napoleon's brother-in-law General Charles Leclerc.
Aftermath
On 25 March 1802, Britain and France signed the Treaty of Amiens, ending British involvement in the war. After a preliminary treaty signed at Paris on 9 October 1801, the Treaty of Paris of 25 June 1802 ended the war between France and the Ottoman Empire, the last remaining member of the Second Coalition. The peace treaties ceded the left bank of the Rhine to France and recognized the independence of the Cisalpine, Batavian and Helvetic republics. Thus began the longest period of peace during the period 1792–1815.
Strategic analysis
American historian Paul W. Schroeder (1987) claimed that, at the time of his writing, most historians – exemplified by Piers Mackesy (1984) – had all too simplistically blamed the Second Coalition's failure on the requirement of "Britain and Russia to trust Austria, when it was obvious that Austria could not be trusted". These historians had assumed that Austria failed to act in accordance with the Coalition's common goal of invading France, ending the Revolution and restoring the Bourbon monarchy, because Vienna was too selfish and too greedy for territorial expansion. Schroeder argued it was not that simple: while Austria's primary war aim was not to overthrow the French Republic, it was reasonable for Vienna to set its own conditions for entering a war with France. The enormous financial debt it still had from the War of the First Coalition jeopardised not just the Habsburg Monarchy's ability to field an army capable of defeating the French, but had also caused hyperinflation and internal instability that risked a revolution inside Austria itself. The Habsburg monarchy's very survival was at stake, and so Emperor Francis II and Thugut resolved not to enter a war in order to defeat France at all costs, but to make Austria come out stronger than it went in. Moreover, Schroeder reasoned that all the other great powers that were negotiating to form the Second Coalition – Russia, Prussia (which ultimately remained neutral), Britain, and the Ottoman Empire – were duplicitous: each was afraid of and scheming against the others to make sure it gained the most from the war and the others would gain little or actually grow weaker with the new postwar balance of power.
See also
List of battles of the War of the Second Coalition
Suvorov's Swiss campaign
War of the First Coalition
War of the Third Coalition
Notes
References
Citations
Sources
Acerbi, Enrico. "The 1799 Campaign in Italy: Klenau and Ott Vanguards and the Coalition’s Left Wing April–June 1799". Napoleon Series, Robert Burnham, editor in chief. March 2008. Retrieved 30 October 2009.
Ashton, John. English caricature and satire on Napoleon I. London: Chatto & Windus, 1888.
Blanning, Timothy. The French Revolutionary Wars. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, .
Boycott-Brown, Martin. The Road to Rivoli. London: Cassell & Co., 2001. .
Bruce, Robert B. et al. Fighting techniques of the Napoleonic Age, 1792–1815. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin's Press, 2008,
Chandler, David. The Campaigns of Napoleon. New York: Macmillan, 1966. ; comprehensive coverage of N's battles
Clausewitz, Carl von (2020). Napoleon Absent, Coalition Ascendant: The 1799 Campaign in Italy and Switzerland, Volume 1. Trans and ed. Nicholas Murray and Christopher Pringle. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas.
Clausewitz, Carl von (2021). The Coalition Crumbles, Napoleon Returns: The 1799 Campaign in Italy and Switzerland, Volume 2. Trans and ed. Nicholas Murray and Christopher Pringle. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas.
Dwyer, Philip. Napoleon: The Path to Power (2008) excerpt vol 1
Gill, John. Thunder on the Danube Napoleon's Defeat of the Habsburgs, Volume 1. London: Frontline Books, 2008, .
Griffith, Paddy. The Art of War of Revolutionary France, 1789–1802 (1998)
Hochedlinger, Michael. Austria's Wars of Emergence 1683–1797. London: Pearson, 2003, .
Kagan, Frederick W. The End of the Old Order. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press 2006, .
Mackesy, Piers. British Victory in Egypt: The End of Napoleon's Conquest (2010)
Mackesy, Piers. War Without Victory: The Downfall of Pitt, 1799–1802 (1984)
; 303 pages; short biography by an Oxford scholar
; well-written popular history
Pivka, Otto von. Armies of the Napoleonic Era. New York: Taplinger Publishing, 1979.
Phipps, Ramsay Weston. The Armies of the First French Republic, volume 5: The armies of the Rhine in Switzerland, Holland, Italy, Egypt and the coup d'état of Brumaire, 1797–1799, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939.
Roberts, Andrew. Napoleon: A Life (2014)
Rodger, Alexander Bankier. The War of the Second Coalition: 1798 to 1801, a strategic commentary (Clarendon Press, 1964)
Rothenberg, Gunther E. Napoleon's Great Adversary: Archduke Charles and the Austrian Army 1792–1814. Spellmount: Stroud, (Gloucester), 2007. .
Schroeder, Paul W. The Transformation of European Politics 1763–1848 (1994) 920 pp; advanced history and analysis of major diplomacy online
Smith, Digby. The Napoleonic Wars Data Book. London: Greenhill, 1998.
Smith, Digby. Klenau. "Mesko". "Quosdanovich". Leopold Kudrna and Digby Smith (compilers). A biographical dictionary of all Austrian Generals in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1792–1815. The Napoleon Series, Robert Burnham, editor in chief. April 2008 version. Retrieved 19 October 2009.
Smith, Digby. Charge! Great cavalry charges of the Napoleonic Wars. London: Greenhill, 2007.
, 412 pages; by an Oxford scholar
External links
18th century in France
19th century in France
19th-century military history of the United Kingdom
Conflicts in 1798
Conflicts in 1799
Conflicts in 1800
Conflicts in 1801
Conflicts in 1802
French Consulate
French Directory
Coalition, Second
Coalition, 2nd
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark%20Cuban
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Mark Cuban
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Mark Cuban (born July 31, 1958) is an American billionaire businessman, film producer, investor, and television personality. He is best known as the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, co-owner of 2929 Entertainment, and one of the main "sharks" on the ABC reality television series Shark Tank.
Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Cuban's entrepreneurial actions manifested early with ventures ranging from selling garbage bags to running newspapers during a strike. He graduated from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University and embarked on a diverse business career that included founding MicroSolutions and Broadcast.com, both of which he sold at substantial profits. Cuban's investments span various industries, from technology and media to sports and entertainment. He has been a prominent figure in the NBA, known for his active involvement with the Mavericks and frequent disputes with the league's management. Outside of business, Cuban has gathered notability for his philanthropy, political commentary, and involvement in reality television.
Early life and education
Cuban was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His father, Norton Cuban, was an automobile upholsterer. Cuban described his mother, Shirley (née Feldman), as someone with "a different job or different career goal every other week."
Cuban is Jewish, and grew up in Mount Lebanon, a suburb of Pittsburgh, in a Jewish working-class family. His paternal grandfather changed the surname from "Chabenisky" to "Cuban" after his family emigrated from Russia through Ellis Island. His maternal grandparents were Romanian Jewish immigrants, according to Mark's brother Brian, though Mark has claimed their maternal grandmother was from Lithuania.
Cuban first ventured into business at age 12. He sold garbage bags to pay for a pair of expensive sneakers. A few years later, he earned money by selling stamps and coins. At age 16, Cuban took advantage of a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette strike by running newspapers from Cleveland to Pittsburgh.
Instead of attending high school for his senior year, he enrolled as a full-time student at the University of Pittsburgh, where he joined the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity. After one year at the University of Pittsburgh, Cuban transferred to Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, where he graduated from the Kelley School of Business in 1981 with a Bachelor of Science degree in management. He chose Indiana's Kelley School of Business without even visiting the campus because it "had the least expensive tuition of all the business schools on the top 10 list". He had various business ventures during college, including a bar, disco lessons, and a chain letter.
After graduating, Cuban returned to Pittsburgh and took a job with Mellon Bank, where he immersed himself in the study of machines and networking.
Business career
On July 7, 1982, Cuban moved to Dallas, Texas, where he first found a job as a bartender for a Greenville Avenue bar called Elan and then as a salesperson for Your Business Software, one of the earliest PC software retailers in Dallas. He was fired less than a year later after meeting with a client to procure new business instead of opening the store.
Cuban co-founded MicroSolutions with help from his previous customers from Your Business Software. MicroSolutions was initially a system integrator and software reseller. The company was an early proponent of technologies such as Carbon Copy, Lotus Notes, and CompuServe. One of the company's largest clients was Perot Systems.
The company grew to more than $30 million in revenue, and in 1990, Cuban sold MicroSolutions to CompuServe—then a subsidiary of H&R Block—for $6 million. He made approximately $2 million after taxes on the deal.
Audionet and Broadcast.com
In 1995, Cuban and fellow Indiana University alumnus Todd Wagner joined Audionet (founded in 1989 by Chris Jaeb, who retained 10% of the company), combining their mutual interest in Indiana Hoosier college basketball and webcasting. With a single server and an ISDN line, Audionet became Broadcast.com in 1998. By 1999, Broadcast.com had grown to 330 employees and $13.5 million in revenue for the second quarter. In 1999, Broadcast.com helped launch the first live-streamed Victoria's Secret Fashion Show. That year, during the dot com boom, Broadcast.com was acquired by Yahoo! for $5.7 billion in Yahoo! stock.
After the sale of Broadcast.com, Cuban hedged against the risk of a decline in the value of the Yahoo! shares he received in the deal. The Guinness Book of Records credits Cuban with the "largest single e-commerce transaction" after purchasing a Gulfstream V jet for $40 million over the internet in October 1999.
Yahoo!'s costly purchase of Broadcast.com is now regarded as one of the worst internet acquisitions of all time. Broadcast.com and Yahoo!'s other broadcasting services were discontinued within a few years after the acquisition. Cuban has repeatedly described himself as very lucky to have sold the company before the dot-com bubble burst. However, he also emphasized that he hedged against the Yahoo! shares he received from the sale and would have lost most of his fortune if he had not done so.
Cuban continues to work with Wagner in another venture, 2929 Entertainment, which provides vertically integrated production and distribution of films and video.
On September 24, 2003, the firm purchased Landmark Theatres, a chain of 58 arthouse movie theaters. The company is also responsible for the updated version of the TV show Star Search, which was broadcast on CBS. 2929 Entertainment released Bubble, a movie directed by Steven Soderbergh, in 2006.
Cuban was featured on the cover of Best magazine's November 2003 premiere issue, announcing the arrival of high-definition television. Cuban also was co-founder (with Philip Garvin) of AXS TV (formerly HDNet), the first high-definition satellite television network.
In February 2004, Cuban announced that he would be working with ABC television to produce a reality television series, The Benefactor. The premise of the six-episode series involved 16 contestants trying to win $1 million by participating in various contests, with their performances being judged by Cuban. It premiered on September 13, 2004, but the series was canceled before the full season aired due to poor ratings.
In 2018, Cuban was no. 190 on Forbes list of "World's Richest People", with a net worth of $3.9 billion.
Cuban financially supported Grokster in the Supreme Court case MGM v. Grokster. He is also a partner in Synergy Sports Technology, a web-based basketball scouting and video delivery tool used by many NBA teams.
Investments in startups
Cuban has also assisted ventures in the social software and distributed networking industries. He was an owner of IceRocket, a search engine that scours the blogosphere for content. Cuban was a partner in RedSwoosh—a company that uses peer-to-peer technology to deliver rich media, including video and software, to a user's PC—later acquired by Akamai. He was also an investor in Weblogs, Inc., which was acquired by AOL.
In 2005, Cuban invested in Brondell Inc., a San Francisco startup making a high-tech toilet seat called a Swash that works like a bidet but mounts on a standard toilet. "People tend to approach technology the same way, whether it's in front of them, or behind them", Cuban joked. He also invested in Goowy Media Inc., a San Diego Internet software startup. In April 2006, Sirius Satellite Radio announced that Cuban would host his own weekly radio talk show, Mark Cuban's Radio Maverick. However, the show has not materialized.
In July 2006, Cuban financed Sharesleuth.com, a website created by former St. Louis Post-Dispatch investigative reporter Christopher Carey to uncover fraud and misinformation in publicly traded companies. Experimenting with a new business model for making online journalism financially viable, Cuban disclosed that he would take positions in the shares of companies mentioned in Sharesleuth.com in advance of publication. Business and legal analysts questioned the appropriateness of shorting a stock before making public pronouncements which are likely to result in losses in that stock's value. Cuban insisted that the practice is legal in view of full disclosure.
In April 2007, Cuban partnered with Mascot Books to publish his first children's book, Let's Go, Mavs!. In November 2011, he wrote a 30,000-word e-book, How to Win at the Sport of Business: If I Can Do It, You Can Do It, which he described as "a way to get motivated".
In October 2008, Cuban started Bailoutsleuth.com as a grassroots, online portal for oversight over the U.S. government's $700 billion "bailout" of financial institutions.
In September 2010, Cuban provided an undisclosed amount of venture capital to store-front analytics company Motionloft. According to the company's CEO Jon Mills, he cold-emailed Cuban on a whim with the business proposition and claimed Cuban quickly responded that he would like to hear more. Mills credited that sentence for launching the company. In November 2013, several investors questioned Cuban about Mills' representation of a pending acquisition of Motionloft. Cuban denied an acquisition was in place. Mills was terminated as CEO of Motionloft by stockholders on December 1, 2013, and in February 2014 was arrested by the FBI and charged with wire fraud; it was alleged that Mills misrepresented to investors that Motionloft was going to be acquired by Cisco. Cuban has gone on record to state that the technology, which at least in part is meant to serve the commercial real estate industry, is "game changing" for tenants.
In 2019, Cuban, Ashton Kutcher, Steve Watts and Watts' wife Angela, acquired a 50% stake in Veldskoen Shoes USA business. In 2021, Cuban, Pantera Capital, BlockTower, Hashed, Cadenza Ventures (backed by 100x Group), CMS and QCP Capital backed a layer-2 decentralized exchange protocol, Injective Protocol and their CEO Eric Chen. Also in late 2021, Cuban purchased the entire town of Mustang, Texas, a 77-acre town in Navarro County. He told the Dallas Morning News that a buddy needed to sell it and, "I don't know what if anything I will do with it."
Shark Tank
Cuban has been a "shark" investor on the ABC reality program Shark Tank since season two in 2011.
As of May 2015, he has invested in 85 deals across 111 Shark Tank episodes, for a total of $19.9 million invested. The actual numbers vary because the investment happens after the handshake deal on live television, after the due diligence is performed to ensure the accuracy of the information presented in the pitch room. For instance, Hy-Conn, a manufacturer of fire hose adapters, after agreeing to a deal of $1.25 million for 100% of the company with Cuban, did not go through with the deal.
Cuban's top three deals, all with at least $1 million invested, are Ten Thirty One Productions, Rugged Maniac Obstacle Race, and BeatBox Beverages.
Since Cuban joined the show in 2011, the ratings for Shark Tank have increased, and also during his tenure, the show has won four Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Structured Reality Program (from 2014 to 2017). Before the category came into existence it won the award for outstanding reality program for two years in a row (2012 to 2013), all of these awards came after he joined. As of 2023, Cuban is the richest of all Sharks to appear on the show.
Magnolia Pictures
Cuban owns film distributor Magnolia Pictures. Through Magnolia, he financed Redacted, a fictional dramatization based on the 2006 Mahmudiyah killings, written and directed by Brian De Palma. In September 2007, Cuban, in his capacity as owner of Magnolia Pictures, removed disturbing photographs from the concluding moments of the Redacted, citing copyrights/permissions issues.
In April 2011, Cuban put Magnolia Pictures and Landmark Theatres up for sale, but said, "If we don't get the price and premium we want, we are happy to continue to make money from the properties."
Cryptocurrency
Cuban has invested in the cryptocurrency Dogecoin, as well as accepting the particular cryptocurrency as a method of payment for Dallas Mavericks merchandise and tickets since at least early 2021. After being asked by CNBC for his thoughts on the payment method, Cuban responded, "It’s a medium that can be used for the acquisition of goods and services. The community for doge is the strongest when it comes to using it as a medium of exchange."
After Voyager Digital, a cryptocurrency lender, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in July 2022, Cuban and the Dallas Mavericks were named in a class-action lawsuit that alleged that Voyager Digital was a Ponzi scheme the following month due to Cuban's promotion of Voyager and Voyager's sponsorship with the team. In February 2022, the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in a lawsuit against Bitconnect that the Securities Act of 1933 extends to targeted solicitation using social media.
In September 2023, Cuban's MetaMask cryptocurrency wallet was drained by scammers. As a result he had lost about $870,000 worth of tokens.
Cost Plus Drug Company
In January 2022, Mark Cuban launched the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company, with the aim of lowering generic drug prices for end consumers in the US.
Sports businesses
Dallas Mavericks
On January 4, 2000, Cuban purchased a majority stake in the NBA's Dallas Mavericks for $285 million from H. Ross Perot Jr.
In the 20 years before Cuban bought the team, the Mavericks won only 40% of their games and had a playoff record of 21–32. In the 10 years following, the team won 69 percent of their regular season games and reached the playoffs in each of those seasons except for one. The Mavericks' playoff record with Cuban is 49–57, including their first trip to the NBA Finals in 2006, where they lost to the Miami Heat.
Historically, NBA team owners publicly play more passive roles and watch basketball games from skyboxes; Cuban sits alongside fans while donning team jerseys. Cuban travels in his private airplane—a Gulfstream V—to attend road games.
In May 2010, H. Ross Perot Jr., who retained 5% ownership, filed a lawsuit against Cuban, alleging the franchise was insolvent or in imminent danger of insolvency. In June 2010, Cuban responded in a court filing maintaining Perot is wrongly seeking money to offset some $100 million in losses on the Victory Park real estate development. The lawsuit was dismissed in 2011, due in part to Cuban asserting proper management of the team due to its recent victory in the 2011 NBA Finals. In 2014, the 5th Circuit Court affirmed that decision on appeal. Following his initial defeat, Perot attempted to shut out Mavericks fans from use of the parking lots he controlled near the American Airlines Center.
In January 2018, Cuban announced the Mavericks would be accepting Bitcoin as payment for tickets in the following season. On March 4, 2021, Cuban announced the Mavericks would begin accepting Dogecoin as payment for both merchandise as well as tickets to games.
In early 2021, he decided to stop playing the National Anthem at Dallas Mavericks games in order to "respect those whose believed the anthem did not represent them." He also supported the movement as far back as late 2020. The NBA responded by requiring every team to play it, citing it as their "long-standing policy". Cuban did not complain, and ended up playing the anthem.
Major League Baseball
Cuban has repeatedly expressed interest in owning a Major League Baseball franchise and has unsuccessfully attempted to purchase at least three franchises. In 2008, he submitted an initial bid of $1.3 billion to buy the Chicago Cubs and was invited to participate in a second round of bidding along with several other potential ownership groups. Cuban was not selected to participate in the final bidding process in January 2009. In August 2010, Cuban actively bid to buy the Texas Rangers with Jeffrey L. Beck. Cuban stopped bids after 1 a.m., having placed bids totaling almost $600 million. He had outbid a competing ownership group led by ex-pitcher and Rangers executive Nolan Ryan, but lost the deal before the Rangers played the San Francisco Giants in the 2010 World Series.
In January 2012, Cuban placed an initial bid for the Los Angeles Dodgers, but was eliminated before the second round of bidding. Cuban felt that the value of the Dodgers' TV rights deal drove the price of the franchise too high. He had previously said that he would not be interested in buying the franchise at $1 billion, telling the Los Angeles Times in November 2011 "I don't think the Dodgers franchise is worth twice what the Rangers are worth." However, as the bidding process drew near many speculated that the sale would surpass $1.5 billion, with Jon Heyman of CBS Sports reporting on Twitter that at least one bid in the $1–1.5 billion range was placed in the initial round of the bidding process. Ultimately, the Dodgers sold for $2.15 billion to Guggenheim Baseball Management.
Cuban also previously expressed interest in becoming a minority owner of the New York Mets after owner Fred Wilpon announced in 2011 that he was planning to sell up to a 25% stake in the team.
Cuban has wanted to purchase his hometown Pittsburgh Pirates, but was rebuffed by then owner Kevin McClatchy in 2005.
Other sports businesses
In 2005, Cuban expressed interest in buying the NHL's Pittsburgh Penguins. In 2006, Cuban joined an investment group along with Dan Marino, Kevin Millevoi, Andy Murstein, and Walnut Capital principals Gregg Perelman and Todd Reidbord to attempt to acquire the Penguins. The franchise ultimately rejected the group's bid when team owners Mario Lemieux and Ronald Burkle took the team off the market.
At WWE's Survivor Series in 2003, Cuban was involved in a staged altercation with Raw General Manager Eric Bischoff and Raw wrestler Randy Orton. On December 7, 2009, Cuban acted as the guest host of Raw, getting revenge on Orton when he was the guest referee in Orton's match against Kofi Kingston, giving Kingston a fast count victory. He then announced that Orton would face Kingston at TLC: Tables, Ladders & Chairs. At the end of the show, Cuban was slammed through a table by the number one contender for the WWE Championship, Sheamus.
On September 12, 2007, Cuban said that he was in talks with WWE Chairman Vince McMahon to create a mixed martial arts company that would compete with UFC. He is now a bondholder of Zuffa, which was formerly UFC's parent company.
Cuban followed up his intentions by organizing "HDNet Fights", a mixed martial arts promotion which airs exclusively on HDNet and premiered on October 13, 2007, with a card headlined by a fight between Erik Paulson and Jeff Ford as well as fights featuring veterans Drew Fickett and Justin Eilers.
Since 2009, Cuban has been a panelist at the annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.
In April 2010, Cuban loaned the newly formed United Football League (UFL) $5 million. He did not own a franchise, and he was not involved in day-to-day operations of the league nor of any of its teams. In January 2011, he filed a federal lawsuit against the UFL for their failure to repay the loan by the October 6, 2010 deadline.
In June 2015, Cuban invested in the esports betting platform Unikrn.
In February 2016, Cuban purchased a principal ownership stake in the Professional Futsal League.
Political activity
Cuban is an admirer of author and philosopher Ayn Rand. About Rand's novel The Fountainhead, he said, that it "was incredibly motivating to me. It encouraged me to think as an individual, take risks to reach my goals, and responsibility for my successes and failures. I loved it." His political views have leaned toward libertarianism. He held a position on the centrist Unity08 political organization's advisory council. Despite leaning towards libertarianism, Cuban posted an entry on his blog claiming paying more taxes to be the most patriotic thing someone can do.
In 2012, Cuban donated $7,000 to political campaigns, with $6,000 going to Republican Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah and $1,000 to Democratic California Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren.
On February 8, 2008, Cuban voiced his support for the draft Bloomberg movement attempting to convince New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg to run in the U.S. presidential election of 2008 on his blog. Cuban concluded a post lamenting the current state of U.S. politics: "Are you listening, Mayor Bloomberg? For less than the cost of opening a tent pole movie, you can change the status quo." He eventually voted for Barack Obama in the 2008 election.
In November 2012, in response to Donald Trump offering President Obama $5 million to a charity of President Obama's choosing if he released passport applications and college transcripts to the public, Cuban offered Trump $1 million to a charity of Trump's choosing if Trump shaved his head.
On December 19, 2012, Cuban donated $250,000 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation to support its work on patent reform. Part of his donation funded a new title for EFF's staff attorney Julie Samuels: The Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents.
At the Code/Media conference in February 2015, Cuban said of net neutrality that "having [the FCC] overseeing the Internet scares the shit out of me".
Cuban formally endorsed Hillary Clinton for president at a July 30, 2016 rally in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. During that campaign stop, Cuban said of Republican nominee Donald Trump, "You know what we call a person like that in Pittsburgh? A jagoff ... Is there any bigger jagoff in the world than Donald Trump?"
On November 22, 2016, Cuban met with the then President-elect Trump's key advisor Steve Bannon, according to reports.
During an appearance on an episode of Hannity in May 2020, Cuban voiced his support for former Vice President Joe Biden in the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
On February 2, 2021, Cuban joined Reddit's WallStreetBets "Ask Me Anything" forum with millions of community members and fielded user questions related to the widely publicized battle between retail traders and Wall Street short sellers over GameStop shares. In the previous days, GameStop shares experienced a meteoric rise to as much as $489 on January 28, 2021, up from $17.15 on January 4, 2021. The growth was mainly brought on by an organized group of Reddit users named "WallStreetBets" that noticed GameStop stock was heavily shorted by Wall Street hedge firms and launched an ensuing campaign to buy enough shares to raise share value and produce a GameStop short squeeze. In the aftermath, the stock became heavily volatile as hedge firms repositioned themselves in the market. Firms like Melvin Capital required bailouts exceeding $2B and retail traders experienced excessive but temporary gains, whereas GameStop share value dropped to below $100 within a few days of closing at over $300. The consistent decline into February raised a lot of questions about next steps for retail traders and prompted Cuban to step in and provide advice to the Reddit community. Amid the volatility, Cuban had been an outspoken supporter of the WallStreetBets community alongside other wealthy financial figureheads like Chamath Palihapitiya, Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss. In the AMA session, Cuban publicly called the trust of the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission into question as well as the capabilities of zero commission brokerage firms, like Robinhood, that restricted retail traders from purchasing GameStop shares and other shorted stocks which he said crippled demand. Cuban's advice to Reddit users was to hold GameStop shares if they could afford it in anticipation of additional short sales by Wall Street firms, but ultimately acknowledged that the odds were stacked against them and to use it as a learning experience. He offered insight into his trading technique suggesting that traders know why they are buying something and to "HODL"(hold on for dear life) until they learn that something has changed. Cuban noted a need for policy change to better support retail traders, credited the WallStreetBets community for leading the charge, and expressed optimism about blockchain trading as a more efficient, transparent and trustworthy form of trading for retail traders in the future.
In October 2021, Cuban said that he supports making the minimum wage a living wage.
Fallen Patriot Fund
Cuban started the Fallen Patriot Fund to help families of U.S. military personnel killed or injured during the Iraq War, personally matching the first $1 million in contributions with funds from the Mark Cuban Foundation, which is run by his brother Brian Cuban.
Speculation of a presidential run
In September 2015, Cuban stated in an interview that running for president was "a fun idea to toss around", and that, if he was running in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, he "could beat both Trump and Clinton". This was interpreted by many media outlets as indication that Cuban was considering running, but he clarified soon afterward that he had no intention to do so.
In October 2015, Cuban posted on Twitter, "Maybe I'll run for Speaker of the House." At the time, there was no clear front-runner to replace the outgoing John Boehner (the Speaker of the House does not have to be a member of Congress).
Cuban told Meet the Press in May 2016 that he would be open to being Clinton's running mate in the election, though he would seek to alter some of her positions in order to do so. In the same interview, the self-described "fiercely independent" Cuban also said that he would consider running as Republican nominee Trump's running mate after having a meeting with Trump about Trump's positions on the issues and suggesting solutions. Cuban also described Trump as "that friend that you just shake your head at. He's that guy who'd get drunk and fall over all the time, or just says dumb shit all the time, but he's your friend." On July 21, 2016, Cuban appeared on a live segment on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert entitled "Gloves Off: Mark Cuban Edition" in which he mocked Trump, including referencing the Trump companies' multiple bankruptcies, the failed Trump University program, and questioning the size of Trump's actual net worth.
In a September 2016 interview with NPR's Scott Simon, Cuban effectively positioned himself to support Clinton. He posited that the best strategy to beat Trump was to attack his insecurities, especially that of his intellect. He also added that Trump is the least qualified to be president and is not informed about policies.
Later in September 2016, during a post-presidential debate interview, Cuban criticized Trump's characterization that paying the minimum required taxes 'is smart' and criticized Trump for not paying back into the system that allowed him to amass such wealth.
In October 2017, Cuban said that he would "definitely" run for president if he was single. Later that month, Cuban claimed that if he ran for president in 2020, it would be as a Republican, and described himself as "socially a centrist ... but very fiscally conservative". It had also been speculated that he could have challenged president Donald Trump in 2020 as a Democrat. However, in a March 2019 interview with the New York Daily News, Cuban stated that he was "strongly considering running" for president as an independent candidate. In May 2019, Cuban said: "It would take the perfect storm for me to do it. There's some things that could open the door, but I'm not projecting or predicting it right now."
In a June 2020 interview with CNN and former Obama advisor David Axelrod, Cuban revealed that he had seriously considered running for president that year as an independent candidate. He went so far as to commission a national poll, which, according to Cuban, showed he would only receive 25 percent of the vote in a hypothetical matchup with President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden. Cuban also said that the poll showed his candidacy would have pulled votes from both Trump and Biden.
Legal issues
NBA fines
Cuban's ownership has been the source of extensive media attention and controversy involving league policies.
Cuban has been fined by the NBA, mostly for critical statements about the league and referees, at least $1.665 million for 13 incidents. In a June 30, 2006 interview, Mavericks player Dirk Nowitzki said about Cuban:
In an interview with the Associated Press, Cuban said that he matches NBA fines with charitable donations of equal amounts. In a nationally publicized incident in 2002, he criticized the league's manager of officials, Ed T. Rush, saying that he "wouldn't be able to manage a Dairy Queen." Dairy Queen management took offense to Cuban's comments and invited him to manage a Dairy Queen restaurant for a day. Cuban accepted the company's invitation and worked for a day at a Dairy Queen in Coppell, Texas, where fans lined up in the street to get a Blizzard from the owner of the Mavericks.
During the 2005–06 NBA season, Cuban started a booing campaign when former Mavericks player Michael Finley returned to play against the Mavericks as a member of the San Antonio Spurs. In a playoff series between the Mavericks and Spurs, Cuban cursed Spurs forward Bruce Bowen and was fined $25,000 by the NBA for rushing onto the court and criticizing NBA officials. After the 2006 NBA Finals, Cuban was fined $250,000 by the NBA for repeated misconduct following the Mavericks' loss to the Miami Heat in Game Five of the 2006 NBA Finals.
In February 2007, Cuban publicly criticized NBA Finals MVP Dwyane Wade and declared that he would get fined if he made any comments about what he thought really happened in the 2006 NBA Finals.
On January 16, 2009, the league fined Cuban $25,000 for yelling at Denver Nuggets player J. R. Smith at the end of the first half on a Mavericks-at-Nuggets game played on January 13. Cuban was apparently incensed that Smith had thrown an elbow that barely missed Mavericks forward Antoine Wright. Cuban offered to match the fine with a donation to a charity of Smith's choosing. Cuban stated that if he doesn't hear from Smith, then he will donate the money to the NHL Players' Association Goals and Dreams Fund in the names of Todd Bertuzzi and Steve Moore. In May 2009, Cuban made a reference to the Denver Nuggets being "thugs" after a loss to the Nuggets in game 3 of the Western Conference Semifinals. The statement was geared towards the Nuggets and their fans. As he passed Kenyon Martin's mother, who was seated near Cuban as he left the arena, he pointed at her and said, "that includes your son." This controversial comment revisited media attention on Cuban yet again. Cuban issued an apology the next day referencing the poor treatment of away fans in arenas around the league. The league issued a statement stating that they would not fine him.
On May 22, 2010, Cuban was fined $100,000 for comments he made during a television interview about trying to sign LeBron James.
Despite his history, he was notably silent during the Mavericks' 2011 championship playoff run.
Despite Cuban's history with David Stern, he believed the NBA Commissioner would leave a lasting legacy "of a focus on growth and recognizing that the NBA is in the entertainment business and that it's a global product, not just a local product. Whatever platforms that took us to, he was ready to go. He wasn't protective at all. He was wide open. I think that was great."
On January 18, 2014, Cuban was once again fined $100,000 for confronting referees and using inappropriate language toward them. As with previous fines, Cuban confirmed that he would match the fine with a donation to charity, however, with the condition that he reaches two million followers on his Twitter account. Cuban also jokingly commented that he could not let Stern leave without a proper farewell.
On February 21, 2018, Cuban was fined $600,000 by the NBA for stating that the Dallas Mavericks should "tank for the rest of the season." Commissioner Adam Silver stated that the fine was "for public statements detrimental to the NBA."
On March 6, 2020, Cuban was fined $500,000 by the NBA for "public criticism and detrimental conduct regarding NBA officiating", according to the league.
SEC insider trading allegation
On November 17, 2008, it was reported that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a civil suit against Cuban relating to alleged insider trading in the shares of Mamma.com, now known as Copernic. A stock dilution occurred shortly after a trade in June 2004, giving hints of inside knowledge at the time of the trade, and Cuban allegedly was saved from a loss of $750,000. The SEC claimed that Cuban ordered the sale of his holdings in Mamma.com after he had been confidentially approached by the company to participate in a transaction likely to dilute shares of current shareholders. Cuban disputed the charges, saying he had not agreed to keep the information secret. On his blog, Cuban contended the allegations were false and that the investigation was "a product of gross abuse of prosecutorial discretion". DealBook, a section of The New York Times, reported through an anonymous source that Cuban believed the investigation was motivated by an SEC employee having taken offense to his interest in possibly distributing the film Loose Change.
In July 2009, the U.S. District Court dismissed the charges against Cuban, and the SEC appealed. In September 2010, an appeals court said that the district court had erred and that further proceedings would be necessary to address the merits of the suit.
A federal jury in Texas found in favor of Cuban on October 16, 2013. The nine-member jury issued the verdict after deliberating 3 hours and 35 minutes.
In March 2014, Cuban was on air at CNBC criticizing high-frequency trading (HFT). Those against HFT, such as Cuban, believe the technology is equivalent to automated insider trading.
Sexual harrasment allegation
In a March 6, 2018 article, Willamette Week reported on an alleged April 2011 incident between Cuban and a female patron of a Portland, Oregon bar called the Barrel Room. The woman told Portland police that Cuban sexually groped her while she posed for pictures with him. She submitted seven photographs, two of which Portland Police Detective Brendan McGuire referred to as "significant". Cuban denied the allegations, and his attorney provided the results of a polygraph test taken by Cuban and written statements from two medical doctors stating that the actions described were anatomically improbable. The Portland District Attorney's office declined to prosecute, citing a lack of concrete evidence to support the claim and the woman's preference not to proceed with charges, and concluding that "no crime can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt". The NBA announced on March 8, 2018, that it was reviewing the matter.
Personal life
Cuban has two brothers, Brian and Jeff.
In September 2002, Cuban married Tiffany Stewart in a private ceremony in Barbados. They have two daughters, born in 2003 and 2006, and a son born in 2009. They live in a mansion in the Preston Hollow area of Dallas, Texas.
Cuban is a vegetarian. He is a fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers of the National Football League.
Philanthropy
In 2003, Cuban founded the Fallen Patriot Fund to help families of U.S. military personnel killed or injured during the Iraq War.
In June 2015, Cuban made a $5 million donation to Indiana University Bloomington for the "Mark Cuban Center for Sports Media and Technology", which was built inside Assembly Hall, the school's basketball arena.
In March 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Cuban posted an offer on LinkedIn to small business owners who had questions about what to do in order to survive the economic downturn being caused by the pandemic. He said people could ask him anything, but that his preference was "going to be helping small biz trying to avoid layoffs and hourly reductions." There were more than 10,000 comments in response to his offer.
In 2020, Cuban picked up homeless former NBA player Delonte West from a gas station in Dallas. He paid for a hotel room for West along with his treatment at a drug rehabilitation center.
In 2022, the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company was set up with a goal to dramatically reduce the cost of prescription drugs in the US and to introduce transparency to the pricing of drugs.
Awards and honors
NBA
2011 NBA Champion (as owner of the Dallas Mavericks)
Business
1998 Kelley School of Business Alumni Award – Distinguished Entrepreneur: 1998
2011 D Magazine CEO of the Year
Media
2011 Outstanding Team ESPY Award (as owner of the Dallas Mavericks)
Filmography
Film
Television
Bibliography
How to Win at the Sport of Business: If I Can Do It, You Can Do It. Diversion Publishing. 2011.
Let's Go, Mavs!. Mascot Books. 2007.
References
External links
Blog
Mark Cuban collected news and commentary at The Guardian
1958 births
Living people
20th-century American businesspeople
20th-century American Jews
20th-century American male writers
20th-century American non-fiction writers
21st-century American businesspeople
21st-century American Jews
21st-century American male writers
21st-century American non-fiction writers
2929 Entertainment holdings
American bartenders
American billionaires
American bloggers
American book publishers (people)
American business writers
American chairpersons of corporations
American children's writers
American computer businesspeople
American financiers
American film producers
American investors
American libertarians
American male bloggers
American male non-fiction writers
American male television actors
American mass media owners
American people of Lithuanian descent
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helioseismology
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Helioseismology
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Helioseismology, a term coined by Douglas Gough, is the study of the structure and dynamics of the Sun through its oscillations. These are principally caused by sound waves that are continuously driven and damped by convection near the Sun's surface. It is similar to geoseismology, or asteroseismology (also coined by Gough), which are respectively the studies of the Earth or stars through their oscillations. While the Sun's oscillations were first detected in the early 1960s, it was only in the mid-1970s that it was realized that the oscillations propagated throughout the Sun and could allow scientists to study the Sun's deep interior. The modern field is separated into global helioseismology, which studies the Sun's resonant modes directly, and local helioseismology, which studies the propagation of the component waves near the Sun's surface.
Helioseismology has contributed to a number of scientific breakthroughs. The most notable was to show the predicted neutrino flux from the Sun could not be caused by flaws in stellar models and must instead be a problem of particle physics. The so-called solar neutrino problem was ultimately resolved by neutrino oscillations. The experimental discovery of neutrino oscillations was recognized by the 2015 Nobel Prize for Physics. Helioseismology also allowed accurate measurements of the quadrupole (and higher-order) moments of the Sun's gravitational potential, which are consistent with General Relativity. The first helioseismic calculations of the Sun's internal rotation profile showed a rough separation into a rigidly-rotating core and differentially-rotating envelope. The boundary layer is now known as the tachocline and is thought to be a key component for the solar dynamo. Although it roughly coincides with the base of the solar convection zone — also inferred through helioseismology — it is conceptually distinct, being a boundary layer in which there is a meridional flow connected with the convection zone and driven by the interplay between baroclinicity and Maxwell stresses.
Helioseismology benefits most from continuous monitoring of the Sun, which began first with uninterrupted observations from near the South Pole over the austral summer. In addition, observations over multiple solar cycles have allowed helioseismologists to study changes in the Sun's structure over decades. These studies are made possible by global telescope networks like the Global Oscillations Network Group (GONG) and the Birmingham Solar Oscillations Network (BiSON), which have been operating for over several decades.
Types of solar oscillation
Solar oscillation modes are interpreted as resonant vibrations of a roughly spherically symmetric self-gravitating fluid in hydrostatic equilibrium. Each mode can then be represented approximately as the product of a function of radius and a spherical harmonic , and consequently can be characterized by the three quantum numbers which label:
the number of nodal shells in radius, known as the radial order ;
the total number of nodal circles on each spherical shell, known as the angular degree ; and
the number of those nodal circles that are longitudinal, known as the azimuthal order .
It can be shown that the oscillations are separated into two categories: interior oscillations and a special category of surface oscillations. More specifically, there are:
Pressure modes (p modes)
Pressure modes are in essence standing sound waves. The dominant restoring force is the pressure (rather than buoyancy), hence the name. All the solar oscillations that are used for inferences about the interior are p modes, with frequencies between about 1 and 5 millihertz and angular degrees ranging from zero (purely radial motion) to order . Broadly speaking, their energy densities vary with radius inversely proportional to the sound speed, so their resonant frequencies are determined predominantly by the outer regions of the Sun. Consequently it is difficult to infer from them the structure of the solar core.
Gravity modes (g modes)
Gravity modes are confined to convectively stable regions, either the radiative interior or the atmosphere. The restoring force is predominantly buoyancy, and thus indirectly gravity, from which they take their name. They are evanescent in the convection zone, and therefore interior modes have tiny amplitudes at the surface and are extremely difficult to detect and identify. It has long been recognized that measurement of even just a few g modes could substantially increase our knowledge of the deep interior of the Sun. However, no individual g mode has yet been unambiguously measured, although indirect detections have been both claimed and challenged. Additionally, there can be similar gravity modes confined to the convectively stable atmosphere.
Surface gravity modes (f modes)
Surface gravity waves are analogous to waves in deep water, having the property that the Lagrangian pressure perturbation is essentially zero. They are of high degree , penetrating a characteristic distance , where is the solar radius. To good approximation, they obey the so-called deep-water-wave dispersion law: , irrespective of the stratification of the Sun, where is the angular frequency, is the surface gravity and is the horizontal wavenumber, and tend asymptotically to that relation as .
What seismology can reveal
The oscillations that have been successfully utilized for seismology are essentially adiabatic. Their dynamics is therefore the action of pressure forces (plus putative Maxwell stresses) against matter with inertia density , which itself depends upon the relation between them under adiabatic change, usually quantified via the (first) adiabatic exponent . The equilibrium values of the variables and (together with the dynamically small angular velocity and magnetic field ) are related by the constraint of hydrostatic support, which depends upon the total mass and radius of the Sun. Evidently, the oscillation frequencies depend only on the seismic variables , , and , or any independent set of functions of them. Consequently it is only about these variables that information can be derived directly. The square of the adiabatic sound speed, , is such commonly adopted function, because that is the quantity upon which acoustic propagation principally depends. Properties of other, non-seismic, quantities, such as helium abundance, , or main-sequence age , can be inferred only by supplementation with additional assumptions, which renders the outcome more uncertain.
Data analysis
Global helioseismology
The chief tool for analysing the raw seismic data is the Fourier transform. To good approximation, each mode is a damped harmonic oscillator, for which the power as a function of frequency is a Lorentz function. Spatially resolved data are usually projected onto desired spherical harmonics to obtain time series which are then Fourier transformed. Helioseismologists typically combine the resulting one-dimensional power spectra into a two-dimensional spectrum.
The lower frequency range of the oscillations is dominated by the variations caused by granulation. This must first be filtered out before (or at the same time that) the modes are analysed. Granular flows at the solar surface are mostly horizontal, from the centres of the rising granules to the narrow downdrafts between them. Relative to the oscillations, granulation produces a stronger signal in intensity than line-of-sight velocity, so the latter is preferred for helioseismic observatories.
Local helioseismology
Local helioseismology—a term coined by Charles Lindsey, Doug Braun and Stuart Jefferies in 1993—employs several different analysis methods to make inferences from the observational data.
The Fourier–Hankel spectral method was originally used to search for wave absorption by sunspots.
Ring-diagram analysis, first introduced by Frank Hill, is used to infer the speed and direction of horizontal flows below the solar surface by observing the Doppler shifts of ambient acoustic waves from power spectra of solar oscillations computed over patches of the solar surface (typically 15° × 15°). Thus, ring-diagram analysis is a generalization of global helioseismology applied to local areas on the Sun (as opposed to half of the Sun). For example, the sound speed and adiabatic index can be compared within magnetically active and inactive (quiet Sun) regions.
Time-distance helioseismology aims to measure and interpret the travel times of solar waves between any two locations on the solar surface. Inhomogeneities near the ray path connecting the two locations perturb the travel time between those two points. An inverse problem must then be solved to infer the local structure and dynamics of the solar interior.
Helioseismic holography, introduced in detail by Charles Lindsey and Doug Braun for the purpose of far-side (magnetic) imaging, is a special case of phase-sensitive holography. The idea is to use the wavefield on the visible disk to learn about active regions on the far side of the Sun. The basic idea in helioseismic holography is that the wavefield, e.g., the line-of-sight Doppler velocity observed at the solar surface, can be used to make an estimate of the wavefield at any location in the solar interior at any instant in time. In this sense, holography is much like seismic migration, a technique in geophysics that has been in use since the 1940s. As another example, this technique has been used to give a seismic image of a solar flare.
In direct modelling, the idea is to estimate subsurface flows from direct inversion of the frequency-wavenumber correlations seen in the wavefield in the Fourier domain. Woodard demonstrated the ability of the technique to recover near-surface flows the f modes.
Inversion
Introduction
The Sun's oscillation modes represent a discrete set of observations that are sensitive to its continuous structure. This allows scientists to formulate inverse problems for the Sun's interior structure and dynamics. Given a reference model of the Sun, the differences between its mode frequencies and those of the Sun, if small, are weighted averages of the differences between the Sun's structure and that of the reference model. The frequency differences can then be used to infer those structural differences. The weighting functions of these averages are known as kernels.
Structure
The first inversions of the Sun's structure were made using Duvall's law and later using Duvall's law linearized about a reference solar model. These results were subsequently supplemented by analyses that linearize the full set of equations describing the stellar oscillations about a theoretical reference model and are now a standard way to invert frequency data. The inversions demonstrated differences in solar models that were greatly reduced by implementing gravitational settling: the gradual separation of heavier elements towards the solar centre (and lighter elements to the surface to replace them).
Rotation
If the Sun were perfectly spherical, the modes with different azimuthal orders m would have the same frequencies. Rotation, however, breaks this degeneracy, and the modes frequencies differ by rotational splittings that are weighted-averages of the angular velocity through the Sun. Different modes are sensitive to different parts of the Sun and, given enough data, these differences can be used to infer the rotation rate throughout the Sun. For example, if the Sun were rotating uniformly throughout, all the p modes would be split by approximately the same amount. Actually, the angular velocity is not uniform, as can be seen at the surface, where the equator rotates faster than the poles. The Sun rotates slowly enough that a spherical, non-rotating model is close enough to reality for deriving the rotational kernels.
Helioseismology has shown that the Sun has a rotation profile with several features:
a rigidly-rotating radiative (i.e. non-convective) zone, though the rotation rate of the inner core is not well known;
a thin shear layer, known as the tachocline, which separates the rigidly-rotating interior and the differentially-rotating convective envelope;
a convective envelope in which the rotation rate varies both with depth and latitude; and
a final shear layer just beneath the surface, in which the rotation rate slows down towards the surface.
Relationship to other fields
Geoseismology
Helioseismology was born from analogy with geoseismology but several important differences remain. First, the Sun lacks a solid surface and therefore cannot support shear waves. From the data analysis perspective, global helioseismology differs from geoseismology by studying only normal modes. Local helioseismology is thus somewhat closer in spirit to geoseismology in the sense that it studies the complete wavefield.
Asteroseismology
Because the Sun is a star, helioseismology is closely related to the study of oscillations in other stars, known as asteroseismology. Helioseismology is most closely related to the study of stars whose oscillations are also driven and damped by their outer convection zones, known as solar-like oscillators, but the underlying theory is broadly the same for other classes of variable star.
The principal difference is that oscillations in distant stars cannot be resolved. Because the brighter and darker sectors of the spherical harmonic cancel out, this restricts asteroseismology almost entirely to the study of low degree modes (angular degree ). This makes inversion much more difficult but upper limits can still be achieved by making more restrictive assumptions.
History
Solar oscillations were first observed in the early 1960s as a quasi-periodic intensity and line-of-sight velocity variation with a period of about 5 minutes. Scientists gradually realized that the oscillations might be global modes of the Sun and predicted that the modes would form clear ridges in two-dimensional power spectra. The ridges were subsequently confirmed in observations of high-degree modes in the mid 1970s, and mode multiplets of different radial orders were distinguished in whole-disc observations. At a similar time, Jørgen Christensen-Dalsgaard and Douglas Gough suggested the potential of using individual mode frequencies to infer the interior structure of the Sun. They calibrated solar models against the low-degree data finding two similarly good fits, one with low and a corresponding low neutrino production rate , the other with higher and ; earlier envelope calibrations against high-degree frequencies preferred the latter, but the results were not wholly convincing. It was not until Tom Duvall and Jack Harvey connected the two extreme data sets by measuring modes of intermediate degree to establish the quantum numbers associated with the earlier observations that the higher- model was established, thereby suggesting at that early stage that the resolution of the neutrino problem must lie in nuclear or particle physics.
New methods of inversion developed in the 1980s, allowing researchers to infer the profiles sound speed and, less accurately, density throughout most of the Sun, corroborating the conclusion that residual errors in the inference of the solar structure is not the cause of the neutrino problem. Towards the end of the decade, observations also began to show that the oscillation mode frequencies vary with the Sun's magnetic activity cycle.
To overcome the problem of not being able to observe the Sun at night, several groups had begun to assemble networks of telescopes (e.g. the Birmingham Solar Oscillations Network, or BiSON, and the Global Oscillation Network Group) from which the Sun would always be visible to at least one node. Long, uninterrupted observations brought the field to maturity, and the state of the field was summarized in a 1996 special issue of Science magazine. This coincided with the start of normal operations of the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SoHO), which began producing high-quality data for helioseismology.
The subsequent years saw the resolution of the solar neutrino problem, and the long seismic observations began to allow analysis of multiple solar activity cycles. The agreement between standard solar models and helioseismic inversions was disrupted by new measurements of the heavy element content of the solar photosphere based on detailed three-dimensional models. Though the results later shifted back towards the traditional values used in the 1990s, the new abundances significantly worsened the agreement between the models and helioseismic inversions. The cause of the discrepancy remains unsolved and is known as the solar abundance problem.
Space-based observations by SoHO have continued and SoHO was joined in 2010 by the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), which has also been monitoring the Sun continuously since its operations began. In addition, ground-based networks (notably BiSON and GONG) continue to operate, providing nearly continuous data from the ground too.
See also
160-minute solar cycle
Coronal seismology
Differential rotation
Diskoseismology
Frequency separation
Magnetogravity wave
Moreton wave
Solar neutrino problem
Solar tower (astronomy)
Stellar rotation
References
External links
Non-technical description of helio- and asteroseismology retrieved November 2009
Scientists Issue Unprecedented Forecast of Next Sunspot Cycle National Science Foundation press release, March 6, 2006
European Helio- and Asteroseismology Network (HELAS)
Farside and Earthside images of the Sun
Living Reviews in Solar Physics
Helioseismology and Asteroseismology at MPS
Satellite instruments
VIRGO
SOI/MDI
SDO/HMI
TRACE
Ground-based instruments
BiSON
Mark-1
GONG
HiDHN
Further reading
Fields of seismology
Seismology
Stellar phenomena
Asteroseismology
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisters%20of%20Notre%20Dame%20de%20Namur
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Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur
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The Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur (Congregationis Sororum a Domina Nostra Namurcensi) are a Catholic institute of religious sisters, founded to provide education to the poor.
The institute was founded in Amiens, France, in 1804, but the opposition of the local bishop to missions outside his diocese led to the moving of headquarters to Namur (in present-day Belgium), in 1809 (then occupied by Napoleon), from which it spread to become a worldwide organization. The Sisters now have foundations in five continents and in 20 countries.
Members of the order are identified by the post-nominal letters SNDdeN (less often SNDN or SND). These should not be confused with the School Sisters of Notre Dame (SSND) of Bavarian origin.
Foundation
Founders were St. Julie Billiart and Marie-Louise-Françoise Blin de Bourdon, Countess of Gézaincourt, whose name as a Sister was Mother St. Joseph. Mlle Blin de Bourdon, who had received spiritual guidance from Julie for many years, defrayed the immediate expenses of founding the Congregation.
At Amiens, August 5, 1803, they took a house in Rue Neuve. In the chapel of this house, at Mass on February 2, 1804, the two foundresses and their postulant, Catherine Duchatel of Reims, made or renewed their vow of chastity, to which they added that of devoting themselves to the Christian education of girls, further proposing to train religious teachers who would go wherever their services were requested. Victoire Leleu (Sister Anastasie) and Justine Garçon (Sister St. John) joined the institute the same year.
The Fathers of the Faith (a group founded for Jesuits during the Suppression of the Society of Jesus) who were giving missions in Amiens sent to the sisters women and girls to be prepared for the sacraments. St. Julie assisted the Fathers in the neighboring towns. In Amiens, Mother St. Joseph Blin trained the novices and sisters with the assistance of (former Jesuit) Frs. Varin, Enfantin, and Thomas (a former professor in the Sorbonne).
The first regular schools of the Sisters were opened in August 1806, with a rush of students. The urgent need of Christian education among all classes of society in France at the time, led the foundresses to modify their original plan of teaching only the poor and to open schools for the children of the rich also. A unique feature of St. Julie's educational system was to use revenue from the Institute's academies to defray expenses at the free schools.
The community lived under a provisional rule based upon that which Saint Ignatius of Loyola wrote for the Jesuits, drawn up by Mother Julie and Fr. Varin and approved in 1805 by Jean-François de Mandolx (fr), Bishop of Amiens. A more permanent Rule was adopted in 1818 and it became the basis for various versions of the Rule until 1968. At that time a total revision occurred guided by changes at the Second Vatican Council. A later update occurred in 1984.
Expansion
Europe
The first branch house was established at St. Nicholas, near Ghent. This, along with Mother Julie's five other foundations in France, were all temporary. Later and permanent foundations were made in Belgium: Namur, 1807, which became the motherhouse in 1809; Jumet, 1808; St. Hubert, 1809; Ghent, 1810; Zele, 1811; Gembloux and Andenne, 1813; Fleurus, 1814; and Liège and Dinant, 1816.
Mother St. Joseph Blin de Bourdon, the co-foundress, was elected Superior General succeeding Saint Julie. During her generalate the institute passed through the most critical period of its existence, due to the persecution of religious institutes by William of Orange-Nassau, King of the Netherlands. Some of the measures adopted to harass and destroy all teaching institutes were to compel them to remain in status quo, to hold diplomas obtained only after rigid examinations in Dutch and French by state officials, and to furnish lengthy accounts regarding convents, schools, finances, and subjects. But Mother St. Joseph's tact and zeal for souls saved the institute. During his tour in 1829, King William visited the establishment at Namur and was so pleased that he gave the Mother General Dutch citizenship. She founded houses at Thuin, 1817; Namur Orphanage, 1823; Hospital St. Jacques, 1823; Verviers, 1827; Hospital d'Harscamp; and Bastogne, 1836 – which had been for the past thirty years a state normal school; Philippeville, 1837. The Revolution of 1830 and the assumption of the crown of Belgium by Leopold of Saxe-Gotha had put an end to petty persecutions of religious.
The most important work of Mother St. Joseph's generalate was the compiling and collating of the Rules and Constitution of the Sisters of Notre Dame. She left an explanation of the Rules, the particular rule of each office, and the Directory and Customs. She had preserved a faithful record of all that Mother Julie had said or written on these points. She also drew up a system of instruction based upon that of St. John Baptist de La Salle for the French Brothers of the Christian Schools. Mother St. Joseph was twice re-elected superior-general, the term being at first fixed at ten years. To give greater stability to the government of the institute, a general chapter unanimously approved extension to life-tenure for the office of superior-general.
In 1819 a foundation for the Netherlands was sought by Rev. F. Wolf, S.J., but, on account of political difficulties, Mother St. Joseph could not grant it. She offered, instead, to train aspirants to the religious life. Accordingly, two came to Namur, passed their probation, made their vows, and returned to labor in their own country. This is the origin of the congregation of Sisters of Notre Dame of Amersfoort, whose mother-house is at Amersfoort, Netherlands. Later in 1850, the political situation in Europe necessitated that the Amersfoort Sisters go to Coesfeld, Germany, to train two young women, Hilligonde Wohlbring and Elizabeth Kuhling, among others, according to the rule of St. Julie. The Sisters of Notre Dame of Coesfeld spread to America where they have large schools in Cleveland, Ohio, Covington, Kentucky, Toledo, Ohio, and Thousand Oaks, California.
Mother St. Joseph died on February 9, 1838. The third superior-general was Mother Ignatius (Therese-Josephine Goethals, b. 1800; d. 1842). Her services during the persecution under King William had been invaluable. Excessive toil, however, took their toll and she died in the fourth year of her generalate, but not before she had sent the first group of sisters to America in 1840. She was succeeded by Mother Marie Therese who, on account of ill-health, resigned her office the following year.
Further afield
In 1841 Mother Constantine (Marie-Jeanne-Joseph-Collin, b. 1802, d. 1875) was elected. She governed the institute for thirty-three years. Her term of office was marked by the papal approbation of the Rule in 1844, the first mission to England in 1845, to California in 1851, and to Guatemala in 1859. Under Mother Aloysie (Therese-Joseph Mainy, b. 1817, d. 1888), fifth superior-general, the processes for the canonization of Mother Julie and Mother St. Joseph were begun in 1881; twenty houses of the institute were established – in Belgium, England, and America.
Under Aloysie's successor, Mother Aimee de Jesus (Elodie Dullaert, b. 1825, d. 1907), the Sisters of Notre Dame, at the request of Leopold II of Belgium, took charge of the girls' schools in the Jesuit missions of the Congo Free State, where three houses were established. She also sent from England a community of eight sisters for the girls' schools in the Jesuit mission of Zambezi, Mashonaland. An academy and free school were opened later at Kronstadt, Orange River Colony, South Africa. The King of Belgium created Mother Aimee de Jesus a Knight of the Order of Leopold, and Sister Ignatia was accorded a similar honor after fourteen years of labor in the Congo. During Aimee's generalate Mother Julie Billiart was solemnly beatified by Pius X, May 13, 1906. Mother Marie Aloysie was elected superior general in January 1908.
The Americas
In 1840 the first foundation in America was made at Cincinnati, Ohio, at the request of the Right Reverend John B. Purcell, then Bishop and later the first Archbishop of Cincinnati. Sister Louise de Gonzague was appointed superior of the eight sisters who arrived for this foundation. After firmly establishing the institute in America, failing health caused Sr. Louise's recall to Namur, where she worked until her death in 1866. The superiors who followed Louise found themselves after 1845 in charge of other houses founded east of the Rocky Mountains. Every year the sisters were asked for in some part of the country, and the mother-house of Namur gave generously of sisters and funds until the convents in America were able to supply their own needs.
In this period fifteen houses were founded by the Sisters of Notre Dame, including Trinity College, Washington, D.C., and a provincial house and novitiate at Cincinnati, Ohio. Sister Agnes Mary (b. 1840, d. 1910) made three foundations and built the first chapel dedicated to Blessed Mother Julie in America, a beautiful Gothic structure in stone at Moylan, Pennsylvania. In 1886 Sister Julia McGroarty succeeded as superior of the order’s American houses east of the Rocky Mountains. In her 15 years as superior she founded 14 new convents, a large novitiate in Waltham, Massachusetts, and an orphanage in San Jose, California. A Connecticut province was founded and a numerous apostolates would be pursued in Baltimore.
On February 22, 1847, a colony of eight sisters under the care of Right Reverend F.N. Blanchet and Fr. Peter De Smet, S.J., left Namur to labor among the Indians of the Oregon Territory. Five years later these sisters, at the request of the Right Reverend Joseph S. Alemany, Archbishop of San Francisco, were transferred to San Jose, California. This first establishment on the Pacific Coast was followed in the course of time by ten others, which formed a separate province from Cincinnati. For thirty years Sister Marie Cornélia directed the province.
In 1851 two foundations were made in Guatemala, Central America, under government auspices and with such an outburst of welcome and esteem from the people as reads like a romance. Twenty years later the forty-one Sisters of Notre Dame laboring there were expelled by the government. And each February the Sisters remember Sister Dorothy Stang who was assassinated in Brazil in 2005, for standing with the indigenous Amazonian people in their struggle against the logging companies who took their land.
Notre Dame Health Care Center in Worcester, Massachusetts, with roots dating back to 1900, has long been a leading health care facilitator. Peace and justice work has increasingly become a part of the sisters' efforts.
Great Britain
It was through the Redemptorists that the Sisters of Notre Dame first went to England. Father de Buggenoms, a Belgian and superior of a small mission at Falmouth, felt the urgent need of schools for poor, Catholic children. He asked and obtained from the Superior of the Sisters of Notre Dame at Namur a community of six sisters, and with these he opened a small school at Penryn in Cornwall. It continued only three years, however, as the place afforded no means of subsistence for a religious house. The Redemptorists having established a second English mission at Clapham, near London, and having asked again for Sisters of Notre Dame for a school, the community of Penryn was transferred there in 1848. Through the initiative of Father Buggenoms the Sisters of the Holy Child Jesus, a community in the Diocese of Northampton, about fifty in number, were affiliated in 1852 to the Institute of Notre Dame, with the consent of the Bishop of Namur and Bishop of Northampton. Scarcely had the Hierarchy been re-established in England when the Government offered education to the Catholic poor. The Sisters of Notre Dame devoted themselves to this work, under the guidance of Sister Mary of St. Francis (Hon. Laura M. Petre), who was to the congregation in England what Mother St. Joseph was to the whole institute. Before her death (June 24, 1886) eighteen houses had been founded in England. By 1910 there were twenty-one.
Among these English houses is the Training College for Catholic School-Mistresses at Mount Pleasant, Liverpool, the direction of which was confided to the Sisters of Notre Dame by the government in 1856. The sisters who ran the Training College resided in what is now known as Notre Dame Catholic College in Everton valley.
At the request of the Scottish Education Department, the Sisters led by Mary Lescher opened the Dowanhill Training College for Catholic School-Mistresses at Glasgow in 1895. A second convent in Scotland opened at Dumbarton in 1910.
Post-Vatican II
Pope Paul VI canonized St. Julie Billiart in 1969. With the inspiration of the Second Vatican Council, and with ecclesiastical approval, the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur updated their Constitutions in 1984. Their charism now, as then, is to make known God's goodness. The great variety of ways they do this includes spirituality programs, legal aid, job training, and simply going around greeting people to bring them comfort and joy.
In 1992, the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur established Notre Dame Mission Volunteers - AmeriCorps as a non-profit volunteer organization. In 2015 at the 175th anniversary of their arrival in the United States, the sisters there numbered 800, with an additional 400 in the South American and African missions. A video presentation of their history was made for the occasion.
The current Congregational Leader is Sister Teresita Weind, elected in 2008. In 2011 there were about 2000 SNDdeN sisters around the world.
Education
Schools
The Sisters founded and continue to administer schools in every continent.
Asia
Notre Dame Seishin Junior Senior High School, Kurashiki, Japan
Notre Dame Seishin University, Okayama, Japan
United Kingdom
Notre Dame Catholic Sixth Form College, Leeds (previously Notre Dame Collegiate School)
Notre Dame Catholic College, Liverpool
Notre Dame Catholic School, Plymouth
Notre Dame Catholic High School, Norwich
St Julie's Catholic High School, Liverpool
Notre Dame High School, Sheffield
Notre Dame Roman Catholic Girls School, London
North America
United States
Notre Dame High School, San Jose, California
Academy of Notre Dame de Namur, Villanova, Pennsylvania
Chaminade-Julienne High School, Dayton, Ohio (co-sponsored with the Marianist Brothers; previously Notre Dame Academy and Julienne High School)
Maryvale Preparatory School, Brooklandville, Maryland
Notre Dame Catholic High School, Fairfield, Connecticut (previously co-sponsored)
Notre Dame Belmont High School, an all-female High School, Belmont, California
Notre Dame Academy, Hingham, Massachusetts (originally Roxbury, Massachusetts)
Notre Dame Academy, an all-female High School, Worcester, Massachusetts
Academy of Notre Dame, Tyngsboro, Massachusetts
Notre Dame Cristo Rey High School, Lawrence, Massachusetts
Mount Notre Dame High School, Cincinnati, Ohio
Summit Country Day School, originally Our Lady of Cincinnati; now a private school, Cincinnati, Ohio
Notre Dame High School, Moylan, Pennsylvania, an all female high school, 1935-1981. Yearbook from the Class of 1959 accepted by the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum
Julie Country Day School, K-8 school, 1941-2006, Leominster, Massachusetts
Notre Dame Academy, Park Hills, Kentucky
Tertiary institutions
Japan
Notre Dame Seishin University
United States
Emmanuel College, Boston, Massachusetts
Notre Dame de Namur University, Belmont, California
Trinity Washington University, Washington, D.C.
See also
Wendy Beckett
Dorothy Stang
Notre Dame Mission Volunteers - AmeriCorps
Fathers of the Faith
References
External links
Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur/Notre Dame Long Term Care Center
Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur
Dorothy Stang Center at Notre Dame de Namur University, Belmont California
Notre Dame de Namur University, Belmont California
Notre Dame Mission Volunteers - AmeriCorps
Notre Dame High School for Girls in Chicago
Notre Dame High School, San Jose, California
East Catholic High School, Manchester, Connecticut
http://www.sophiahighschool.com/
Catholic teaching orders
Namur (city)
Christian organizations established in the 19th century
Catholic female orders and societies
1803 establishments in France
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins%20of%20the%20American%20Civil%20War
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Origins of the American Civil War
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Historians who address the origins of the American Civil War agree that the preservation of the institution of slavery was the principal aim of the 11 Southern states (seven states before the onset of the war and four states after the onset) that declared their secession from the United States (the Union) and united to form the Confederate States of America (known as the "Confederacy"). However, while historians in the 21st century agree on the centrality of the conflict over slavery—it was not just "a cause" of the war but "the cause" according to Civil War historian Chris Mackowski—they disagree sharply on which aspects of this conflict (ideological, economic, political, or social) were most important, and on the North’s reasons for refusing to allow the Southern states to secede. Proponents of the pseudo-historical Lost Cause ideology have denied that slavery was the principal cause of the secession, a view that has been disproven by the overwhelming historical evidence against it, notably the seceding states' own secession documents.
The principal political battle leading to Southern secession was over whether slavery would be permitted to expand into the Western territories destined to become states. Initially Congress had admitted new states into the Union in pairs, one slave and one free. This had kept a sectional balance in the Senate but not in the House of Representatives, as free states outstripped slave states in numbers of eligible voters. Thus, at mid-19th century, the free-versus-slave status of the new territories was a critical issue, both for the North, where anti-slavery sentiment had grown, and for the South, where the fear of slavery's abolition had grown. Another factor leading to secession and the formation of the Confederacy was the development of white Southern nationalism in the preceding decades. The primary reason for the North to reject secession was to preserve the Union, a cause based on American nationalism.
Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 presidential election, even though he was not on the ballot in ten Southern states. His victory triggered declarations of secession by seven slave states of the Deep South, all of whose riverfront or coastal economies were based on cotton that was cultivated by enslaved labor. They formed the Confederate States after Lincoln was elected in November 1860 but before he took office in March 1861.
Nationalists in the North and "Unionists" in the South refused to accept the declarations of secession. No foreign government ever recognized the Confederacy. The U.S. government, under President James Buchanan, refused to relinquish its forts that were in territory claimed by the Confederacy. The war itself began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate forces bombarded Fort Sumter, in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina.
As a panel of historians emphasized in 2011, "while slavery and its various and multifaceted discontents were the primary cause of disunion, it was disunion itself that sparked the war." Historian David M. Potter wrote: "The problem for Americans who, in the age of Lincoln, wanted slaves to be free was not simply that southerners wanted the opposite, but that they themselves cherished a conflicting value: they wanted the Constitution, which protected slavery, to be honored, and the Union, which was a fellowship with slaveholders, to be preserved. Thus they were committed to values that could not logically be reconciled."
Other important factors were partisan politics, abolitionism, nullification versus secession, Southern and Northern nationalism, expansionism, economics, and modernization in the Antebellum period.
Geography and demographics
By the mid-19th century the United States had become a nation of two distinct regions. The free states in New England, the Northeast, and the Midwest had a rapidly growing economy based on family farms, industry, mining, commerce and transportation, with a large and rapidly growing urban population. Their growth was fed by a high birth rate and large numbers of European immigrants, especially from Ireland and Germany. The South was dominated by a settled plantation system based on slavery; there was some rapid growth taking place in the Southwest (e.g., Texas), based on high birth rates and high migration from the Southeast; there was also immigration by Europeans, but in much smaller number. The heavily rural South had few cities of any size, and little manufacturing except in border areas such as St. Louis and Baltimore. Slave owners controlled politics and the economy, although about 75% of white Southern families owned no slaves.
Overall, the Northern population was growing much more quickly than the Southern population, which made it increasingly difficult for the South to dominate the national government. By the time the 1860 election occurred, the heavily agricultural Southern states as a group had fewer Electoral College votes than the rapidly industrializing Northern states. Abraham Lincoln was able to win the 1860 presidential election without even being on the ballot in ten Southern states. Southerners felt a loss of federal concern for Southern pro-slavery political demands, and their continued domination of the federal government was threatened. This political calculus provided a very real basis for Southerners' worry about the relative political decline of their region, due to the North growing much faster in terms of population and industrial output.
In the interest of maintaining unity, politicians had mostly moderated opposition to slavery, resulting in numerous compromises such as the Missouri Compromise of 1820 under the presidency of James Monroe. After the Mexican–American War of 1846 to 1848, the issue of slavery in the new territories led to the Compromise of 1850. While the compromise averted an immediate political crisis, it did not permanently resolve the issue of the Slave Power (the power of slaveholders to control the national government on the slavery issue). Part of the Compromise of 1850 was the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 that required Northerners assist Southerners in reclaiming fugitive slaves, which many Northerners found to be extremely offensive.
Amid the emergence of increasingly virulent and hostile sectional ideologies in national politics, the collapse of the old Second Party System in the 1850s hampered politicians' efforts to reach yet another compromise. The compromise that was reached (the 1854 Kansas–Nebraska Act) outraged many Northerners and led to the formation of the Republican Party, the first major party that was almost entirely Northern-based. The industrializing North and agrarian Midwest became committed to the economic ethos of free-labor industrial capitalism.
Arguments that slavery was undesirable for the nation had long existed, and early in U.S. history were made even by some prominent Southerners. After 1840, abolitionists denounced slavery as not only a social evil but also a moral wrong. Activists in the new Republican Party, usually Northerners, had another view: They believed the Slave Power conspiracy was controlling the national government with the goal of extending slavery and limiting access to good farm land to rich slave owners. Southern defenders of slavery, for their part, increasingly came to contend that black people benefited from slavery.
Historical tensions and compromises
Early Republic
At the time of the American Revolution, the institution of slavery was firmly established in the American colonies. It was most important in the six southern states from Maryland to Georgia, but the total of a half million slaves were spread out through all of the colonies. In the South, 40% of the population was made up of slaves, and as Americans moved into Kentucky and the rest of the southwest, one-sixth of the settlers were slaves. By the end of the Revolutionary War, the New England states provided most of the American ships that were used in the foreign slave trade, while most of their customers were in Georgia and the Carolinas.
During this time many Americans found it easy to reconcile slavery with the Bible but a growing number rejected this defense of slavery. A small antislavery movement, led by the Quakers, appeared in the 1780s, and by the late 1780s all of the states had banned the international slave trade. No serious national political movement against slavery developed, largely due to the overriding concern over achieving national unity. When the Constitutional Convention met, slavery was the one issue "that left the least possibility of compromise, the one that would most pit morality against pragmatism." In the end, many would take comfort in the fact that the word "slavery" never occurs in the Constitution. The three-fifths clause was a compromise between those (in the North) who wanted no slaves counted, and those (in the South) who wanted all the slaves counted. The Constitution also allowed the federal government to suppress domestic violence which would dedicate national resources to defending against slave revolts. Imports could not be banned for 20 years. The need for three-fourths approval for amendments made the constitutional abolition of slavery virtually impossible.
The importation of slaves into the United States was restricted in 1794, and finally banned in 1808. Many Americans believed that the passage of these laws had finally resolved the issue of slavery in the United States. Any national discussion that might have continued over slavery was drowned out by other issues such as trade embargoes, maritime competition with Great Britain and France, the Barbary Wars, and the War of 1812. A notable exception to this quiet regarding slavery was the New Englanders' association of their frustration with the war with their resentment of the three-fifths clause that seemed to allow the South to dominate national politics.
During and in the aftermath of the American Revolution (1775–1783), the Northern states (north of the Mason–Dixon line separating Pennsylvania from Maryland and Delaware) abolished slavery by 1804, although in some states older slaves were turned into indentured servants who could not be bought or sold. In the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, Congress (at that time under the Articles of Confederation) barred slavery from the Midwestern territory north of the Ohio River. When Congress organized the territories acquired through the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, there was no ban on slavery.
Missouri Compromise
With the admission of Alabama as a slave state in 1819, the U.S. was equally divided with 11 slave states and 11 free states. Later that year, Congressman James Tallmadge Jr. of New York initiated an uproar in the South when he proposed two amendments to a bill admitting Missouri to the Union as a free state. The first would have barred slaves from being moved to Missouri, and the second would have freed all Missouri slaves born after admission to the Union at age 25. The admission of the new state of Missouri as a slave state would give the slave states a majority in the Senate, while passage of the Tallmadge Amendment would give the free states a majority.
The Tallmadge amendments passed the House of Representatives but failed in the Senate when five Northern senators voted with all the Southern senators. The question was now the admission of Missouri as a slave state, and many leaders shared Thomas Jefferson's fear of a crisis over slavery—a fear that Jefferson described as "a fire bell in the night". The crisis was solved by the Missouri Compromise, in which Massachusetts agreed to cede control over its relatively large, sparsely populated and disputed exclave, the District of Maine. The compromise allowed Maine to be admitted to the Union as a free state at the same time that Missouri was admitted as a slave state. The Compromise also banned slavery in the Louisiana Purchase territory north and west of the state of Missouri along parallel 36°30′ north. The Missouri Compromise quieted the issue until its limitations on slavery were repealed by the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854.
In the South, the Missouri crisis reawakened old fears that a strong federal government could be a fatal threat to slavery. The Jeffersonian coalition that united southern planters and northern farmers, mechanics and artisans in opposition to the threat presented by the Federalist Party had started to dissolve after the War of 1812. It was not until the Missouri crisis that Americans became aware of the political possibilities of a sectional attack on slavery, and it was not until the mass politics of Andrew Jackson's administration that this type of organization around this issue became practical.
Nullification crisis
The American System, advocated by Henry Clay in Congress and supported by many nationalist supporters of the War of 1812 such as John C. Calhoun, was a program for rapid economic modernization featuring protective tariffs, internal improvements at federal expense, and a national bank. The purpose was to develop American industry and international commerce. Since iron, coal, and water power were mainly in the North, this tax plan was doomed to cause rancor in the South, where economies were agriculture-based. Southerners claimed it demonstrated favoritism toward the North.
The nation suffered an economic downturn throughout the 1820s, and South Carolina was particularly affected. The highly protective Tariff of 1828 (called the "Tariff of Abominations" by its detractors), designed to protect American industry by taxing imported manufactured goods, was enacted into law during the last year of the presidency of John Quincy Adams. Opposed in the South and parts of New England, the expectation of the tariff's opponents was that with the election of Andrew Jackson the tariff would be significantly reduced.
By 1828 South Carolina state politics increasingly organized around the tariff issue. When the Jackson administration failed to take any actions to address their concerns, the most radical faction in the state began to advocate that the state declare the tariff null and void within South Carolina. In Washington, an open split on the issue occurred between Jackson and his vice-president John C. Calhoun, the most effective proponent of the constitutional theory of state nullification through his 1828 "South Carolina Exposition and Protest".
Congress enacted a new tariff in 1832, but it offered the state little relief, resulting in the most dangerous sectional crisis since the Union was formed. Some militant South Carolinians even hinted at withdrawing from the Union in response. The newly elected South Carolina legislature then quickly called for the election of delegates to a state convention. Once assembled, the convention voted to declare null and void the tariffs of 1828 and 1832 within the state. President Andrew Jackson responded firmly, declaring nullification an act of treason. He then took steps to strengthen federal forts in the state.
Violence seemed a real possibility early in 1833 as Jacksonians in Congress introduced a "Force Bill" authorizing the President to use the federal army and navy in order to enforce acts of Congress. No other state had come forward to support South Carolina, and the state itself was divided on willingness to continue the showdown with the federal government. The crisis ended when Clay and Calhoun worked to devise a compromise tariff. Both sides later claimed victory. Calhoun and his supporters in South Carolina claimed a victory for nullification, insisting that it had forced the revision of the tariff. Jackson's followers, however, saw the episode as a demonstration that no single state could assert its rights by independent action.
Calhoun, in turn, devoted his efforts to building up a sense of Southern solidarity so that when another standoff should come, the whole section might be prepared to act as a bloc in resisting the federal government. As early as 1830, in the midst of the crisis, Calhoun identified the right to own slaves—the foundation of the plantation agricultural system—as the chief southern minority right being threatened:
On May 1, 1833, Jackson wrote of this idea, "the tariff was only the pretext, and disunion and Southern confederacy the real object. The next pretext will be the negro, or slavery question."
The issue appeared again after 1842's Black Tariff. A period of relative free trade followed 1846's Walker Tariff, which had been largely written by Southerners. Northern industrialists (and some in western Virginia) complained it was too low to encourage the growth of industry.
Gag Rule debates
From 1831 to 1836 William Lloyd Garrison and the American Anti-Slavery Society (AA-SS) initiated a campaign to petition Congress in favor of ending slavery in the District of Columbia and all federal territories. Hundreds of thousands of petitions were sent, with the number reaching a peak in 1835.
The House passed the Pinckney Resolutions on May 26, 1836. The first of these stated that Congress had no constitutional authority to interfere with slavery in the states and the second that it "ought not" do so in the District of Columbia. The third resolution, known from the beginning as the "gag rule", provided that:
The first two resolutions passed by votes of 182 to 9 and 132 to 45. The gag rule, supported by Northern and Southern Democrats as well as some Southern Whigs, was passed with a vote of 117 to 68.
Former President John Quincy Adams, who was elected to the House of Representatives in 1830, became an early and central figure in the opposition to the gag rules. He argued that they were a direct violation of the First Amendment right "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances". A majority of Northern Whigs joined the opposition. Rather than suppress anti-slavery petitions, however, the gag rules only served to offend Americans from Northern states, and dramatically increase the number of petitions.
Since the original gag was a resolution, not a standing House Rule, it had to be renewed every session, and the Adams' faction often gained the floor before the gag could be imposed. However, in January 1840, the House of Representatives passed the Twenty-first Rule, which prohibited even the reception of anti-slavery petitions and was a standing House rule. Now the pro-petition forces focused on trying to revoke a standing rule. The Rule raised serious doubts about its constitutionality and had less support than the original Pinckney gag, passing only by 114 to 108. Throughout the gag period, Adams' "superior talent in using and abusing parliamentary rules" and skill in baiting his enemies into making mistakes, enabled him to evade the rule and debate the slavery issues. The gag rule was finally rescinded on December 3, 1844, by a strongly sectional vote of 108 to 80, all the Northern and four Southern Whigs voting for repeal, along with 55 of the 71 Northern Democrats.
Antebellum South and the Union
There had been a continuing contest between the states and the national government over the power of the latter—and over the loyalty of the citizenry—almost since the founding of the republic. The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798, for example, had defied the Alien and Sedition Acts, and at the Hartford Convention, New England voiced its opposition to President James Madison and the War of 1812, and discussed secession from the Union.
Southern culture
Although a minority of free Southerners owned slaves, free Southerners of all classes nevertheless defended the institution of slavery—threatened by the rise of free labor abolitionist movements in the Northern states—as the cornerstone of their social order.
Per the 1860 census, the percentage of slaveholding families was as follows:
26% in the 15 Slave states (AL, AR, DE, FL, GA, KY, LA, MD, MS, MO, NC, SC, TN, TX, VA)
16% in the 4 Border states (DE, KY, MD, MO)
31% in the 11 Confederate states (AL, AR, FL, GA, LA, MS, NC, SC, TN, TX, VA)
37% in the first 7 Confederate states (AL, FL, GA, LA, MS, SC, TX)
25% in the second 4 Confederate states (AR, NC, TN, VA)
Mississippi was the highest at 49%, followed by South Carolina at 46%
Based on a system of plantation slavery, the social structure of the South was far more stratified and patriarchal than that of the North. In 1850 there were around 350,000 slaveholders in a total free Southern population of about six million. Among slaveholders, the concentration of slave ownership was unevenly distributed. Perhaps around 7 percent of slaveholders owned roughly three-quarters of the slave population. The largest slaveholders, generally owners of large plantations, represented the top stratum of Southern society. They benefited from economies of scale and needed large numbers of slaves on big plantations to produce cotton, a highly profitable labor-intensive crop.
Per the 1860 Census, in the 15 slave states, slaveholders owning 30 or more slaves (7% of all slaveholders) owned approximately 1,540,000 slaves (39% of all slaves).(PDF p. 64/1860 Census p. 247)
In the 1850s, as large plantation owners outcompeted smaller farmers, more slaves were owned by fewer planters. Yet poor whites and small farmers generally accepted the political leadership of the planter elite. Several factors helped explain why slavery was not under serious threat of internal collapse from any move for democratic change initiated from the South. First, given the opening of new territories in the West for white settlement, many non-slaveowners also perceived a possibility that they, too, might own slaves at some point in their life.
Second, small free farmers in the South often embraced racism, making them unlikely agents for internal democratic reforms in the South. The principle of white supremacy, accepted by almost all white Southerners of all classes, made slavery seem legitimate, natural, and essential for a civilized society. Racial discrimination was completely legal. White racism in the South was sustained by official systems of repression such as the slave codes and elaborate codes of speech, behavior, and social practices illustrating the subordination of blacks to whites. For example, the "slave patrols" were among the institutions bringing together southern whites of all classes in support of the prevailing economic and racial order. Serving as slave "patrollers" and "overseers" offered white Southerners positions of power and honor in their communities. Policing and punishing blacks who transgressed the regimentation of slave society was a valued community service in the South, where the fear of free blacks threatening law and order figured heavily in the public discourse of the period.
Third, many yeomen and small farmers with a few slaves were linked to elite planters through the market economy. In many areas, small farmers depended on local planter elites for vital goods and services, including access to cotton gins, markets, feed and livestock, and even loans (since the banking system was not well developed in the antebellum South). Southern tradesmen often depended on the richest planters for steady work. Such dependency effectively deterred many white non-slaveholders from engaging in any political activity that was not in the interest of the large slaveholders. Furthermore, whites of varying social class, including poor whites and "plain folk" who worked outside or in the periphery of the market economy (and therefore lacked any real economic interest in the defense of slavery) might nonetheless be linked to elite planters through extensive kinship networks. Since inheritance in the South was often unequitable (and generally favored eldest sons), it was not uncommon for a poor white person to be perhaps the first cousin of the richest plantation owner of his county and to share the same militant support of slavery as his richer relatives. Finally, there was no secret ballot at the time anywhere in the United States—this innovation did not become widespread in the U.S. until the 1880s. For a typical white Southerner, this meant that casting a ballot against the wishes of the establishment meant running the risk of being socially ostracized.
Thus, by the 1850s, Southern slaveholders and non-slaveholders alike felt increasingly encircled psychologically and politically in the national political arena because of the rise of free soilism and abolitionism in the Northern states. Increasingly dependent on the North for manufactured goods, for commercial services, and for loans, and increasingly cut off from the flourishing agricultural regions of the Northwest, they faced the prospects of a growing abolitionist movement in the North.
Historian William C. Davis refutes the argument that Southern culture was different from that of Northern states or that it was a cause of the war, stating, "Socially and culturally the North and South were not much different. They prayed to the same deity, spoke the same language, shared the same ancestry, sang the same songs. National triumphs and catastrophes were shared by both." He stated that culture was not the cause of the war, but rather, slavery was: "For all the myths they would create to the contrary, the only significant and defining difference between them was slavery, where it existed and where it did not, for by 1804 it had virtually ceased to exist north of Maryland. Slavery demarked not just their labor and economic situations, but power itself in the new republic."
Militant defense of slavery
With the outcry over developments in Kansas strong in the North, defenders of slavery—increasingly committed to a way of life that abolitionists and their sympathizers considered obsolete or immoral—articulated a militant pro-slavery ideology that would lay the groundwork for secession upon the election of a Republican president. Southerners waged a vitriolic response to political change in the North. Slaveholding interests sought to uphold their constitutional rights in the territories and to maintain sufficient political strength to repulse "hostile" and "ruinous" legislation. Behind this shift was the growth of the cotton textile industry in the North and in Europe, which left slavery more important than ever to the Southern economy.
Abolitionism
Southern spokesmen greatly exaggerated the power of abolitionists, looking especially at the great popularity of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), the novel and play by Harriet Beecher Stowe (whom Abraham Lincoln reputedly called "the little woman that started this great war"). They saw a vast growing abolitionist movement after the success of The Liberator in 1831 by William Lloyd Garrison. The fear was a race war by blacks that would massacre whites, especially in counties where whites were a small minority.
The South reacted with an elaborate intellectual defense of slavery. J. D. B. De Bow of New Orleans established De Bow's Review in 1846, which quickly grew to become the leading Southern magazine, warning about the dangers of depending on the North economically. De Bow's Review also emerged as the leading voice for secession. The magazine emphasized the South's economic inequality, relating it to the concentration of manufacturing, shipping, banking and international trade in the North. Searching for Biblical passages endorsing slavery and forming economic, sociological, historical and scientific arguments, slavery went from being a "necessary evil" to a "positive good". Dr. John H. Van Evrie's book Negroes and Negro slavery: The First an Inferior Race: The Latter Its Normal Condition—setting out the arguments the title would suggest—was an attempt to apply scientific support to the Southern arguments in favor of race-based slavery.
Latent sectional divisions suddenly activated derogatory sectional imagery which emerged into sectional ideologies. As industrial capitalism gained momentum in the North, Southern writers emphasized whatever aristocratic traits they valued (but often did not practice) in their own society: courtesy, grace, chivalry, the slow pace of life, orderly life and leisure. This supported their argument that slavery provided a more humane society than industrial labor. In his Cannibals All!, George Fitzhugh argued that the antagonism between labor and capital in a free society would result in "robber barons" and "pauper slavery", while in a slave society such antagonisms were avoided. He advocated enslaving Northern factory workers, for their own benefit. Abraham Lincoln, on the other hand, denounced such Southern insinuations that Northern wage earners were fatally fixed in that condition for life. To Free Soilers, the stereotype of the South was one of a diametrically opposite, static society in which the slave system maintained an entrenched anti-democratic aristocracy.
Southern fears of modernization
According to historian James M. McPherson, exceptionalism applied not to the South but to the North after the North ended slavery and launched an industrial revolution that led to urbanization, which in turn led to increased education, which led to various reform movements, especially abolitionism, gaining strength. The fact that seven immigrants out of eight settled in the North (and the fact that most immigrants viewed slavery with disfavor), compounded by the fact that twice as many whites left the South for the North as vice versa, contributed to the South's defensive-aggressive political behavior. The Charleston Mercury wrote that on the issue of slavery the North and South "are not only two Peoples, but they are rival, hostile Peoples." As De Bow's Review said, "We are resisting revolution.... We are not engaged in a Quixotic fight for the rights of man.... We are conservative."
Allan Nevins argued that the Civil War was an "irrepressible" conflict, adopting a phrase from Senator William H. Seward. Nevins synthesized contending accounts emphasizing moral, cultural, social, ideological, political, and economic issues. In doing so, he brought the historical discussion back to an emphasis on social and cultural factors. Nevins pointed out that the North and the South were rapidly becoming two different peoples, a point made also by historian Avery Craven. At the root of these cultural differences was the problem of slavery, but fundamental assumptions, tastes, and cultural aims of the regions were diverging in other ways as well. More specifically, the North was rapidly modernizing in a manner some perceived as threatening to the South. Historian McPherson explains:
When secessionists protested in 1861 that they were acting to preserve traditional rights and values, they were correct. They fought to preserve their constitutional liberties against the perceived Northern threat to overthrow them. The South's concept of republicanism had not changed in three-quarters of a century; the North's had. ... The ascension to power of the Republican Party, with its ideology of competitive, egalitarian free-labor capitalism, was a signal to the South that the Northern majority had turned irrevocably towards this frightening, revolutionary future.
Harry L. Watson has synthesized research on antebellum southern social, economic, and political history. Self-sufficient yeomen, in Watson's view, "collaborated in their own transformation" by allowing promoters of a market economy to gain political influence. Resultant "doubts and frustrations" provided fertile soil for the argument that southern rights and liberties were menaced by Black Republicanism.
J. Mills Thornton III explained the viewpoint of the average white Alabamian. Thornton contends that Alabama was engulfed in a severe crisis long before 1860. Deeply held principles of freedom, equality, and autonomy, as expressed in Republican values, appeared threatened, especially during the 1850s, by the relentless expansion of market relations and commercial agriculture. Alabamians were thus, he judged, prepared to believe the worst once Lincoln was elected.
Sectional tensions and the emergence of mass politics
The politicians of the 1850s were acting in a society in which the traditional restraints that suppressed sectional conflict in the 1820s and 1850s—the most important of which being the stability of the two-party system—were being eroded as this rapid extension of democracy went forward in the North and South. It was an era when the mass political party galvanized voter participation to 80% or 90% turnout rates, and a time in which politics formed an essential component of American mass culture. Historians agree that political involvement was a larger concern to the average American in the 1850s than today. Politics was, in one of its functions, a form of mass entertainment, a spectacle with rallies, parades, and colorful personalities. Leading politicians, moreover, often served as a focus for popular interests, aspirations, and values.
Historian Allan Nevins, for instance, writes of political rallies in 1856 with turnouts of anywhere from twenty to fifty thousand men and women. Voter turnouts even ran as high as 84% by 1860. An abundance of new parties emerged 1854–56, including the Republicans, People's party men, Anti-Nebraskans, Fusionists, Know Nothings, Know-Somethings (anti-slavery nativists), Maine Lawites, Temperance men, Rum Democrats, Silver Gray Whigs, Hindus, Hard Shell Democrats, Soft Shells, Half Shells and Adopted Citizens. By 1858, they were mostly gone, and politics divided four ways. Republicans controlled most Northern states with a strong Democratic minority. The Democrats were split North and South and fielded two tickets in 1860. Southern non-Democrats tried different coalitions; most supported the Constitutional Union party in 1860.
Many Southern states held constitutional conventions in 1851 to consider the questions of nullification and secession. With the exception of South Carolina, whose convention election did not even offer the option of "no secession" but rather "no secession without the collaboration of other states", the Southern conventions were dominated by Unionists who voted down articles of secession.
Economics
Historians today generally agree that economic conflicts were not a major cause of the war. While an economic basis to the sectional crisis was popular among the "Progressive school" of historians from the 1910s to the 1940s, few professional historians now subscribe to this explanation. According to economic historian Lee A. Craig, "In fact, numerous studies by economic historians over the past several decades reveal that economic conflict was not an inherent condition of North-South relations during the antebellum era and did not cause the Civil War."
When numerous groups tried at the last minute in 1860–61 to find a compromise to avert war, they did not turn to economic policies. The three major attempts at compromise, the Crittenden Compromise, the Corwin Amendment and the Washington Peace Conference, addressed only the slavery-related issues of fugitive slave laws, personal liberty laws, slavery in the territories and interference with slavery within the existing slave states.
Economic value of slavery to the South
Historian James L. Huston emphasizes the role of slavery as an economic institution. In October 1860 William Lowndes Yancey, a leading advocate of secession, placed the value of Southern-held slaves at $2.8 billion (~$ in ). Huston writes:
The cotton gin greatly increased the efficiency with which cotton could be harvested, contributing to the consolidation of "King Cotton" as the backbone of the economy of the Deep South, and to the entrenchment of the system of slave labor on which the cotton plantation economy depended. Any chance that the South would industrialize was over.
The tendency of monoculture cotton plantings to lead to soil exhaustion created a need for cotton planters to move their operations to new lands, and therefore to the westward expansion of slavery from the Eastern seaboard into new areas (e.g., Alabama, Mississippi, and beyond to East Texas).
Regional economic differences
The South, Midwest, and Northeast had quite different economic structures. They traded with each other and each became more prosperous by staying in the Union, a point many businessmen made in 1860–61. However, Charles A. Beard in the 1920s made a highly influential argument to the effect that these differences caused the war (rather than slavery or constitutional debates). He saw the industrial Northeast forming a coalition with the agrarian Midwest against the plantation South. Critics challenged his image of a unified Northeast and said that the region was in fact highly diverse with many different competing economic interests. In 1860–61, most business interests in the Northeast opposed war.
After 1950, only a few mainstream historians accepted the Beard interpretation, though it was accepted by libertarian economists. Historian Kenneth Stampp, who abandoned Beardianism after 1950, sums up the scholarly consensus: "Most historians ... now see no compelling reason why the divergent economies of the North and South should have led to disunion and civil war; rather, they find stronger practical reasons why the sections, whose economies neatly complemented one another, should have found it advantageous to remain united."
Free labor vs. pro-slavery arguments
Historian Eric Foner argued that a free-labor ideology dominated thinking in the North, which emphasized economic opportunity. By contrast, Southerners described free labor as "greasy mechanics, filthy operators, small-fisted farmers, and moonstruck theorists". They strongly opposed the homestead laws that were proposed to give free farms in the west, fearing the small farmers would oppose plantation slavery. Indeed, opposition to homestead laws was far more common in secessionist rhetoric than opposition to tariffs. Southerners such as Calhoun argued that slavery was "a positive good", and that slaves were more civilized and morally and intellectually improved because of slavery.
Religious conflict over the slavery question
Led by Mark Noll, a body of scholarship has highlighted the fact that the American debate over slavery became a shooting war in part because the two sides reached diametrically opposite conclusions based on reading the same authoritative source of guidance on moral questions: the King James Version of the Bible.
After the American Revolution and the disestablishment of government-sponsored churches, the U.S. experienced the Second Great Awakening, a massive Protestant revival. Without centralized church authorities, American Protestantism was heavily reliant on the Bible, which was read in the standard 19th-century Reformed hermeneutic of "common sense", literal interpretation as if the Bible were speaking directly about the modern American situation instead of events that occurred in a much different context, millennia ago. By the mid-19th century this form of religion and Bible interpretation had become a dominant strand in American religious, moral and political discourse, almost serving as a de facto state religion.
The Bible, interpreted under these assumptions, seemed to clearly suggest that slavery was Biblically justified:
"The pro-slavery South could point to slaveholding by the godly patriarch Abraham (Gen 12:5; 14:14; 24:35–36; 26:13–14), a practice that was later incorporated into Israelite national law (Lev 25:44–46). It was never denounced by Jesus, who made slavery a model of discipleship (Mk 10:44). The Apostle Paul supported slavery, counseling obedience to earthly masters (Eph 6:5–9; Col 3:22–25) as a duty in agreement with "the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching which accords with godliness" (1 Tim 6:3). Because slaves were to remain in their present state unless they could win their freedom (1 Cor 7:20–24), he sent the fugitive slave Onesimus back to his owner Philemon (Phlm 10–20). The abolitionist north had a difficult time matching the pro-slavery south passage for passage. ... Professor Eugene Genovese, who has studied these biblical debates over slavery in minute detail, concludes that the pro-slavery faction clearly emerged victorious over the abolitionists except for one specious argument based on the so-called Curse of Ham (Gen 9:18–27). For our purposes, it is important to realize that the South won this crucial contest with the North by using the prevailing hermeneutic, or method of interpretation, on which both sides agreed. So decisive was its triumph that the South mounted a vigorous counterattack on the abolitionists as infidels who had abandoned the plain words of Scripture for the secular ideology of the Enlightenment."
Protestant churches in the U.S., unable to agree on what God's Word said about slavery, ended up with schisms between Northern and Southern branches: the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1844, the Baptists in 1845, and the Presbyterian Church in 1857. These splits presaged the subsequent split in the nation: "The churches played a major role in the dividing of the nation, and it is probably true that it was the splits in the churches which made a final split of the nation inevitable." The conflict over how to interpret the Bible was central:
"The theological crisis occasioned by reasoning like [conservative Presbyterian theologian James H.] Thornwell's was acute. Many Northern Bible-readers and not a few in the South felt that slavery was evil. They somehow knew the Bible supported them in that feeling. Yet when it came to using the Bible as it had been used with such success to evangelize and civilize the United States, the sacred page was snatched out of their hands. Trust in the Bible and reliance upon a Reformed, literal hermeneutic had created a crisis that only bullets, not arguments, could resolve."
The result:
"The question of the Bible and slavery in the era of the Civil War was never a simple question. The issue involved the American expression of a Reformed literal hermeneutic, the failure of hermeneutical alternatives to gain cultural authority, and the exercise of deeply entrenched intuitive racism, as well as the presence of Scripture as an authoritative religious book and slavery as an inherited social-economic relationship. The North—forced to fight on unfriendly terrain that it had helped to create—lost the exegetical war. The South certainly lost the shooting war. But constructive orthodox theology was the major loser when American believers allowed bullets instead of hermeneutical self-consciousness to determine what the Bible said about slavery. For the history of theology in America, the great tragedy of the Civil War is that the most persuasive theologians were the Rev. Drs. William Tecumseh Sherman and Ulysses S. Grant."
There were many causes of the Civil War, but the religious conflict, almost unimaginable in modern America, cut very deep at the time. Noll and others highlight the significance of the religion issue for the famous phrase in Lincoln's second inaugural: "Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other."
The territorial crisis and the United States Constitution
Between 1803 and 1854, the United States achieved a vast expansion of territory through purchase (Louisiana Purchase), negotiation (Adams–Onís Treaty, Oregon Treaty), and conquest (the Mexican Cession). Of the states carved out of these territories by 1845, all had entered the union as slave states: Louisiana, Missouri, Arkansas, Florida, and Texas, as well as the southern portions of Alabama and Mississippi. With the conquest of northern Mexico, including California, in 1848, slaveholding interests looked forward to the institution flourishing in these lands as well. Southerners also anticipated annexing as slave states Cuba (see Ostend Manifesto), Mexico, and Central America (see Golden Circle (proposed country)). Northern free soil interests vigorously sought to curtail any further expansion of slave soil. It was these territorial disputes that the proslavery and antislavery forces collided over.
The existence of slavery in the southern states was far less politically polarizing than the explosive question of the territorial expansion of the institution in the west. Moreover, Americans were informed by two well-established readings of the Constitution regarding human bondage: that the slave states had complete autonomy over the institution within their boundaries, and that the domestic slave trade—trade among the states—was immune to federal interference. The only feasible strategy available to attack slavery was to restrict its expansion into the new territories. Slaveholding interests fully grasped the danger that this strategy posed to them. Both the South and the North believed: "The power to decide the question of slavery for the territories was the power to determine the future of slavery itself."
By 1860, four doctrines had emerged to answer the question of federal control in the territories, and they all claimed to be sanctioned by the Constitution, implicitly or explicitly. Two of the "conservative" doctrines emphasized the written text and historical precedents of the founding document, while the other two doctrines developed arguments that transcended the Constitution.
One of the "conservative" theories, represented by the Constitutional Union Party, argued that the historical designation of free and slave apportionments in territories should become a Constitutional mandate. The Crittenden Compromise of 1860 was an expression of this view.
The second doctrine of Congressional preeminence, championed by Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party, insisted that the Constitution did not bind legislators to a policy of balance—that slavery could be excluded altogether in a territory at the discretion of Congress—with one caveat: the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment must apply. In other words, Congress could restrict human bondage, but never establish it. The Wilmot Proviso announced this position in 1846.
Of the two doctrines that rejected federal authority, one was articulated by northern Democrat of Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas, and the other by southern Democratic Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi and Senator John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky.
Douglas devised the doctrine of territorial or "popular" sovereignty, which declared that the settlers in a territory had the same rights as states in the Union to establish or disestablish slavery—a purely local matter. Congress, having created the territory, was barred, according to Douglas, from exercising any authority in domestic matters. To do so would violate historic traditions of self-government, implicit in the US Constitution. The Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 legislated this doctrine.
The fourth in this quartet is the theory of state sovereignty ("states' rights"), also known as the "Calhoun doctrine" after the South Carolinian political theorist and statesman John C. Calhoun. Rejecting the arguments for federal authority or self-government, state sovereignty would empower states to promote the expansion of slavery as part of the federal union under the US Constitution—and not merely as an argument for secession. The basic premise was that all authority regarding matters of slavery in the territories resided in each state. The role of the federal government was merely to enable the implementation of state laws when residents of the states entered the territories. Calhoun asserted that the federal government in the territories was only the agent of the several sovereign states, and hence incapable of forbidding the bringing into any territory of anything that was legal property in any state. State sovereignty, in other words, gave the laws of the slaveholding states extra-jurisdictional effect.
"States' rights" was an ideology formulated and applied as a means of advancing slave state interests through federal authority. As historian Thomas L Krannawitter points out, "[T]he Southern demand for federal slave protection represented a demand for an unprecedented expansion of federal power."
By 1860, these four doctrines comprised the major ideologies presented to the American public on the matters of slavery, the territories and the US Constitution.
Abolitionism
Antislavery movements in the North gained momentum in the 1830s and 1840s, a period of rapid transformation of Northern society that inspired a social and political reformism. Many of the reformers of the period, including abolitionists, attempted in one way or another to transform the lifestyle and work habits of labor, helping workers respond to the new demands of an industrializing, capitalistic society.
Antislavery, like many other reform movements of the period, was influenced by the legacy of the Second Great Awakening, a period of religious revival in the new country stressing the reform of individuals, which was still relatively fresh in the American memory. Thus, while the reform spirit of the period was expressed by a variety of movements with often-conflicting political goals, most reform movements shared a common feature in their emphasis on the Great Awakening principle of transforming the human personality through discipline, order, and restraint.
"Abolitionist" had several meanings at the time. The followers of William Lloyd Garrison, including Wendell Phillips and Frederick Douglass, demanded the "immediate abolition of slavery", hence the name. A more pragmatic group of abolitionists, like Theodore Weld and Arthur Tappan, wanted immediate action, but that action might well be a program of gradual emancipation, with a long intermediate stage. "Antislavery men", like John Quincy Adams, did what they could to limit slavery and end it where possible, but were not part of any abolitionist group. For example, in 1841 Adams represented the Amistad African slaves in the Supreme Court of the United States and argued that they should be set free. In the last years before the war, "antislavery" could mean the Northern majority, like Abraham Lincoln, who opposed expansion of slavery or its influence, as by the Kansas–Nebraska Act, or the Fugitive Slave Act. Many Southerners called all these abolitionists, without distinguishing them from the Garrisonians. James M. McPherson explains the abolitionists' deep beliefs: "All people were equal in God's sight; the souls of black folks were as valuable as those of whites; for one of God's children to enslave another was a violation of the Higher Law, even if it was sanctioned by the Constitution."
Stressing the Yankee Protestant ideals of self-improvement, industry, and thrift, most abolitionists—most notably William Lloyd Garrison—condemned slavery as a lack of control over one's own destiny and the fruits of one's labor.
Wendell Phillips, one of the most ardent abolitionists, attacked the Slave Power and presaged disunion as early as 1845:
The experience of the fifty years ... shows us the slaves trebling in numbers—slaveholders monopolizing the offices and dictating the policy of the Government—prostituting the strength and influence of the Nation to the support of slavery here and elsewhere—trampling on the rights of the free States, and making the courts of the country their tools. To continue this disastrous alliance longer is madness. ... Why prolong the experiment?
Abolitionists also attacked slavery as a threat to the freedom of white Americans. Defining freedom as more than a simple lack of restraint, antebellum reformers held that the truly free man was one who imposed restraints upon himself. Thus, for the anti-slavery reformers of the 1830s and 1840s, the promise of free labor and upward social mobility (opportunities for advancement, rights to own property, and to control one's own labor), was central to the ideal of reforming individuals.
Controversy over the so-called Ostend Manifesto (which proposed the U.S. annexation of Cuba as a slave state) and the Fugitive Slave Act kept sectional tensions alive before the issue of slavery in the West could occupy the country's politics in the mid-to-late 1850s.
Antislavery sentiment among some groups in the North intensified after the Compromise of 1850, when Southerners began appearing in Northern states to pursue fugitives or often to claim as slaves free African Americans who had resided there for years. Meanwhile, some abolitionists openly sought to prevent enforcement of the law. Violation of the Fugitive Slave Act was often open and organized. In Boston—a city from which it was boasted that no fugitive had ever been returned—Theodore Parker and other members of the city's elite helped form mobs to prevent enforcement of the law as early as April 1851. A pattern of public resistance emerged in city after city, notably in Syracuse, New York, in 1851 (culminating in the Jerry Rescue incident late that year), and Boston again in 1854. But the issue did not lead to a crisis until revived by the same issue underlying the Missouri Compromise of 1820: slavery in the territories.
Arguments for and against slavery
William Lloyd Garrison, a prominent abolitionist, was motivated by a belief in the growth of democracy. Because the Constitution had a three-fifths clause, a fugitive slave clause, and a 20-year protection of the Atlantic slave trade, Garrison publicly burned a copy of the U.S. Constitution, and called it "a covenant with death and an agreement with hell".
In 1854, he said:
Opposite opinions on slavery were expressed by Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stephens in his "Cornerstone Speech". Stephens said:
"Free soil" movement
Opposition to the 1847 Wilmot Proviso helped to consolidate the "free-soil" forces. In 1848 Radical New York Democrats known as Barnburners, members of the Liberty Party, and anti-slavery Whigs formed the Free-Soil Party. The party supported former President Martin Van Buren and Charles Francis Adams Sr. for President and Vice President. The party opposed the expansion of slavery into territories where it had not yet existed, such as Oregon and the ceded Mexican territory. It had the effect of dividing the Democratic Party in the North, especially in areas of Yankee settlement.
Eric Foner in Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (1970) emphasized the importance of free labor ideology to Northern opponents of slavery, pointing out that the moral concerns of the abolitionists were not necessarily the dominant sentiments in the North. Many Northerners (including Lincoln) opposed slavery also because they feared that rich slave owners would buy up the best lands and block opportunity for free white farmers using family and hired labor. Free Soilers joined the Republican party in 1854, with their appeal to powerful demands in the North through a broader commitment to "free labor" principles. Fear of the "Slave Power" had a far greater appeal to Northern self-interest than did abolitionist arguments based on the plight of black slaves in the South.
Slavery question in territories acquired from Mexico
Soon after the Mexican War started and long before negotiation of the new US-Mexico border, the question of slavery in the territories to be acquired polarized the Northern and Southern United States in the most bitter sectional conflict up to this time, which lasted for a deadlock of four years during which the Second Party System broke up, Mormon pioneers settled Utah, the California Gold Rush settled California, and New Mexico under a federal military government turned back Texas's attempt to assert control over territory Texas claimed as far west as the Rio Grande. Eventually the Compromise of 1850 preserved the Union, but only for another decade. Proposals included:
The Wilmot Proviso banning slavery in any new territory to be acquired from Mexico, not including Texas, which had been annexed the previous year. Passed by the United States House of Representatives in August 1846 and February 1847 but not the Senate. Later an effort to attach the proviso to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo also failed.
Failed amendments to the Wilmot Proviso by William W. Wick and then Stephen Douglas extending the Missouri Compromise line (36°30′ parallel north) west to the Pacific Ocean , allowing slavery in most of present-day New Mexico and Arizona, southern Nevada, and Southern California, as well as any other territories that might be acquired from Mexico. The line was again proposed by the Nashville Convention of June 1850.
Popular sovereignty, developed by Lewis Cass and Douglas as the eventual Democratic Party position, letting each territory decide whether to allow slavery.
William L. Yancey's "Alabama Platform", endorsed by the Alabama and Georgia legislatures and by Democratic state conventions in Florida and Virginia, called for no restrictions on slavery in the territories either by the federal government or by territorial governments before statehood, opposition to any candidates supporting either the Wilmot Proviso or popular sovereignty, and federal legislation overruling Mexican anti-slavery laws.
General Zachary Taylor, who became the Whig candidate in 1848 and then President from March 1849 to July 1850, proposed after becoming President that the entire area become two free states, called California and New Mexico, but much larger than the eventual ones. None of the area would be left as an unorganized or organized territory, avoiding the question of slavery in the territories.
The Mormons' proposal for a State of Deseret, incorporating most of the area of the Mexican Cession but excluding the large non-Mormon populations in Northern California and central New Mexico, was considered unlikely to succeed in Congress, but nevertheless in 1849 President Zachary Taylor sent his agent John Wilson westward with a proposal to combine California and Deseret as a single state, decreasing the number of new free states and the erosion of Southern parity in the Senate.
The Compromise of 1850, proposed by Henry Clay in January 1850, guided to passage by Douglas over Northern Whig and Southern Democrat opposition, and enacted September 1850, admitted California as a free state, including Southern California, and organized Utah Territory and New Mexico Territory with slavery to be decided by popular sovereignty. Texas dropped its claim to the disputed northwestern areas in return for debt relief, and the areas were divided between the two new territories and unorganized territory. El Paso, where Texas had successfully established county government, was left in Texas. No territory dominated by Southerners (like the later short-lived Confederate Territory of Arizona) was created. Also, the slave trade was abolished in Washington, D.C. (but not slavery itself), and the Fugitive Slave Act was strengthened.
States' rights
States' rights was an issue in the 19th century for those who believed that the authority of the federal government was superseded by that of the individual states and had exceeded the role intended for it by the Founding Fathers of the United States. Kenneth M. Stampp notes that each section used states' rights arguments when convenient, and shifted positions when convenient. For example, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was enacted by southern representatives to use federal authority to suppress northern states' rights. The constitution gave federal protection to slave property rights, and slaveholders demanded that this federal power should be strengthened and take precedence over northern state laws. Anti-slavery forces in northern legislatures had resisted this constitutional right in the form of state personal liberty laws that placed state laws above the federal mandate.
States' rights and slavery
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. noted that the states' rights "never had any real vitality independent of underlying conditions of vast social, economic, or political significance." He further elaborated:
Echoing Schlesinger, Forrest McDonald wrote that "the dynamics of the tension between federal and state authority changed abruptly during the late 1840s" as a result of the acquisition of territory in the Mexican War. McDonald states:
In a February 1861 speech to the Virginian secession convention, Georgian Henry L. Benning stated the reasoning behind Georgia's declaring secession from the Union:
States' rights and minority rights
States' rights theories gained strength from the awareness that the Northern population was growing much faster than that of the South, so it was only a matter of time before the North controlled the federal government. Acting as a "conscious minority", Southerners hoped that a strict constructionist interpretation of the Constitution would limit federal power over the states, and that a defense of states' rights against federal encroachments or even nullification or secession would save the South. Before 1860, most presidents were either Southern or pro-South. The North's growing population would mean the election of pro-North presidents, and the addition of free-soil states would end Southern parity with the North in the Senate. As the historian Allan Nevins described Calhoun's theory of states' rights, "Governments, observed Calhoun, were formed to protect minorities, for majorities could take care of themselves."
Until the 1860 election, the South's interests nationally were entrusted to the Democratic Party. In 1860, the Democratic Party split into Northern and Southern factions as the result of a "bitter debate in the Senate between Jefferson Davis and Stephen Douglas". The debate was over resolutions proposed by Davis "opposing popular sovereignty and supporting a federal slave code and states' rights" which carried over to the national convention in Charleston.
Jefferson Davis defined equality in terms of the equal rights of states, and opposed the declaration that all men are created equal. Jefferson Davis stated that a "disparaging discrimination" and a fight for "liberty" against "the tyranny of an unbridled majority" gave the Confederate states a right to secede. In 1860, Congressman Laurence M. Keitt of South Carolina said, "The anti-slavery party contend that slavery is wrong in itself, and the Government is a consolidated national democracy. We of the South contend that slavery is right, and that this is a confederate Republic of sovereign States."
Stampp mentioned Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens' A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States as an example of a Southern leader who said that slavery was the "cornerstone of the Confederacy" when the war began and then later switched course in saying that the war was not about slavery but states' rights after the Confederacy's defeat. Stampp said that Stephens became one of the most ardent defenders of the Lost Cause mythology.
Historian William C. Davis also mentioned inconsistencies in Southern states' rights arguments. He explained the Confederate Constitution's protection of slavery at the national level as follows:
W.C. Davis also stated that:
Southern historian Gordon Rhea wrote in 2011 that:
Compromise of 1850
The victory of the United States over Mexico resulted in the addition of large new territories conquered from Mexico. Controversy over whether the territories would be slave or free raised the risk of a war between slave and free states and over Northern support for the Wilmot Proviso, which would have banned slavery in the conquered territories, increased sectional tensions. The controversy was temporarily resolved by the Compromise of 1850, which allowed the territories of Utah and New Mexico to decide for or against slavery, but also allowed the admission of California as a free state, reduced the size of the slave state of Texas by adjusting the boundary, and ended the slave trade but not slavery itself in the District of Columbia. In return, the South got a stronger fugitive slave law than the version mentioned in the US Constitution. The Fugitive Slave Law would reignite controversy over slavery.
Fugitive Slave Law issues
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 required Northerners to assist Southerners in reclaiming fugitive slaves, which many Northerners strongly opposed. Anthony Burns was among the fugitive slaves captured and returned in chains to slavery as a result of the law. Harriet Beecher Stowe's best-selling novel Uncle Tom's Cabin greatly increased opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act.
Kansas–Nebraska Act (1854)
Most people thought the Compromise had ended the territorial issue, but Stephen A. Douglas reopened it in 1854. Douglas proposed the Kansas–Nebraska Bill with the intention of opening up vast new high-quality farm lands to settlement. As a Chicagoan, he was especially interested in the railroad connections from Chicago into Kansas and Nebraska, but that was not a controversial point. More importantly, Douglas firmly believed in democracy at the grass roots—that actual settlers have the right to decide on slavery, not politicians from other states. His bill provided that popular sovereignty, through the territorial legislatures, should decide "all questions pertaining to slavery", thus effectively repealing the Missouri Compromise. The ensuing public reaction against it created a firestorm of protest in the Northern states. It was seen as an effort to repeal the Missouri Compromise. However, the popular reaction in the first month after the bill's introduction failed to foreshadow the gravity of the situation. As Northern papers initially ignored the story, Republican leaders lamented the lack of a popular response.
Eventually, the popular reaction did come, but the leaders had to spark it. Salmon P. Chase's "Appeal of the Independent Democrats" did much to arouse popular opinion. In New York, William H. Seward finally took it upon himself to organize a rally against the Nebraska bill, since none had arisen spontaneously. Press such as the National Era, the New-York Tribune, and local free-soil journals, condemned the bill. The Lincoln–Douglas debates of 1858 drew national attention to the issue of slavery expansion.
Fragmentation of the American party system
Founding of the Republican Party (1854)
The American party system had been dominated by Whigs and Democrats for decades leading up to the Civil War. But the Whig party's increasing internal divisions had made it a party of strange bedfellows by the 1850s. An ascendant anti-slavery wing clashed with a traditionalist and increasingly pro-slavery southern wing. These divisions came to a head in the 1852 election, where Whig candidate Winfield Scott was trounced by Franklin Pierce. Southern Whigs, who had supported the prior Whig president Zachary Taylor, had been burned by Taylor and were unwilling to support another Whig. Taylor, who despite being a slaveowner, had proved notably anti-slavery despite campaigning neutrally on the issue. With the loss of Southern Whig support, and the loss of votes in the North to the Free Soil Party, Whigs seemed doomed. So they were, as they would never again contest a presidential election.
The final nail in the Whig coffin was the Kansas-Nebraska act. It was also the spark that began the Republican Party, which would take in both Whigs and Free Soilers and create an anti-slavery party that the Whigs had always resisted becoming. The Act opened Kansas Territory and Nebraska Territory to slavery and future admission as slave states, thus implicitly repealing the prohibition on slavery in territory north of 36° 30′ latitude that had been part of the Missouri Compromise. This change was viewed by anti-slavery Northerners as an aggressive, expansionist maneuver by the slave-owning South. Opponents of the Act were intensely motivated and began forming a new party. The Party began as a coalition of anti-slavery Conscience Whigs such as Zachariah Chandler and Free Soilers such as Salmon P. Chase.
The first anti-Nebraska local meeting where "Republican" was suggested as a name for a new anti-slavery party was held in a Ripon, Wisconsin schoolhouse on March 20, 1854. The first statewide convention that formed a platform and nominated candidates under the Republican name was held near Jackson, Michigan, on July 6, 1854. At that convention, the party opposed the expansion of slavery into new territories and selected a statewide slate of candidates. The Midwest took the lead in forming state Republican Party tickets; apart from St. Louis and a few areas adjacent to free states, there were no efforts to organize the Party in the southern states. So was born the Republican Party—campaigning on the popular, emotional issue of "free soil" in the frontier—which would capture the White House just six years later.
"Bleeding Kansas" and the elections of 1856
In Kansas around 1855, the slavery issue reached a condition of intolerable tension and violence. But this was in an area where an overwhelming proportion of settlers were merely land-hungry Westerners indifferent to the public issues. The majority of the inhabitants were not concerned with sectional tensions or the issue of slavery. Instead, the tension in Kansas began as a contention between rival claimants. During the first wave of settlement, no one held titles to the land, and settlers rushed to occupy newly open land fit for cultivation. While the tension and violence did emerge as a pattern pitting Yankee and Missourian settlers against each other, there is little evidence of any ideological divides on the questions of slavery. Instead, the Missouri claimants, thinking of Kansas as their own domain, regarded the Yankee squatters as invaders, while the Yankees accused the Missourians of grabbing the best land without honestly settling on it.
However, the 1855–56 violence in "Bleeding Kansas" did reach an ideological climax after John Brown—regarded by followers as the instrument of God's will to destroy slavery—entered the melee. His assassination of five pro-slavery settlers (the so-called "Pottawatomie massacre", during the night of May 24, 1856) resulted in some irregular, guerrilla-style strife. Aside from John Brown's fervor, the strife in Kansas often involved only armed bands more interested in land claims or loot.
Of greater importance than the civil strife in Kansas, however, was the reaction against it nationwide and in Congress. In both North and South, the belief was widespread that the aggressive designs of the other section were epitomized by (and responsible for) what was happening in Kansas. Consequently, "Bleeding Kansas" emerged as a symbol of sectional controversy.
Indignant over the developments in Kansas, the Republicans—the first entirely sectional major party in U.S. history—entered their first presidential campaign with confidence. Their nominee, John C. Frémont, was a generally safe candidate for the new party. Although his nomination upset some of their Nativist Know-Nothing supporters (his mother was a Catholic), the nomination of the famed explorer of the Far West and ex-senator from California with a short political record was an attempt to woo ex-Democrats. The other two Republican contenders, William H. Seward and Salmon P. Chase, were seen as too radical.
Nevertheless, the campaign of 1856 was waged almost exclusively on the slavery issue—pitted as a struggle between democracy and aristocracy—focusing on the question of Kansas. The Republicans condemned the Kansas–Nebraska Act and the expansion of slavery, but they advanced a program of internal improvements combining the idealism of anti-slavery with the economic aspirations of the North. The new party rapidly developed a powerful partisan culture, and energetic activists drove voters to the polls in unprecedented numbers. People reacted with fervor. Young Republicans organized the "Wide Awake" clubs and chanted "Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, Frémont!" With Southern Fire-Eaters and even some moderates uttering threats of secession if Frémont won, the Democratic candidate, Buchanan, benefited from apprehensions about the future of the Union.
Millard Fillmore, the candidate of the American Party (Know-Nothings) and the Silver Gray Whigs, said in a speech at Albany, New York, that the election of a Republican candidate would dissolve the Union. Abraham Lincoln replied on July 23 in a speech at Galena, Illinois; Carl Sandburg wrote that this speech probably resembled Lincoln's Lost Speech: "This Government would be very weak, indeed, if a majority, with a disciplined army and navy, and a well-filled treasury, could not preserve itself, when attacked by an unarmed, undisciplined, unorganized minority. All this talk about the dissolution of the Union is humbug—nothing but folly. We won't dissolve the Union, and you shan't."
Dred Scott decision (1857) and the Lecompton Constitution
The Lecompton Constitution and Dred Scott v. Sandford (the respondent's name, Sanford, was misspelled in the reports) were both part of the Bleeding Kansas controversy over slavery that arose as a result of the Kansas–Nebraska Act, which was Stephen Douglas' attempt to replace the Missouri Compromise's ban on slavery in the Kansas and Nebraska territories with popular sovereignty, which would have allowed the people of a territory to vote for or against slavery. The Lecompton Constitution, which would have allowed slavery in Kansas, was the result of massive vote fraud by the pro-slavery border ruffians. Douglas defeated the Lecompton Constitution because it was supported by the minority of pro-slavery people in Kansas, and Douglas believed in majority rule. Douglas hoped that both the South and the North would support popular sovereignty, but neither did, as neither trusted Douglas.
The Supreme Court decision of 1857 in Dred Scott v. Sandford escalated the controversy. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney's decision said that blacks were "so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect," and that slavery could spread into the territories even if the majority of people in the territories were anti-slavery. Lincoln warned that "the next Dred Scott decision" could impose slavery on Northern states.
Historians agree that the decision dramatically inflamed tensions leading to the Civil War. In 2022 historian David W. Blight argues that the year 1857 was, "the great pivot on the road to disunion...largely because of the Dred Scott case, which stoked the fear, distrust and conspiratorial hatred already common in both the North and the South to new levels of intensity."
Buchanan, Republicans and anti-administration Democrats
President James Buchanan decided to end the troubles in Kansas by urging Congress to admit Kansas as a slave state under the Lecompton Constitution. Kansas voters, however, soundly rejected this constitution by a vote of 10,226 to 138. As Buchanan directed his presidential authority to promoting the Lecompton Constitution, he further angered the Republicans and alienated members of his own party. Prompting their break with the administration, the Douglasites saw this scheme as an attempt to pervert the principle of popular sovereignty on which the Kansas–Nebraska Act was based. Nationwide, conservatives were incensed, feeling as though the principles of states' rights had been violated. Even in the South, ex-Whigs and border state Know-Nothings—most notably John Bell and John J. Crittenden (key figures in the event of sectional controversies)—urged the Republicans to oppose the administration's moves and take up the demand that the territories be given the power to accept or reject slavery.
As the schism in the Democratic party deepened, moderate Republicans argued that an alliance with anti-administration Democrats, especially Stephen Douglas, would be a key advantage in the 1860 elections. Some Republican observers saw the controversy over the Lecompton Constitution as an opportunity to peel off Democratic support in the border states, where Frémont picked up little support. After all, the border states had often gone for Whigs with a Northern base of support in the past without prompting threats of Southern withdrawal from the Union.
Among the proponents of this strategy was The New York Times, which called on the Republicans to downplay opposition to popular sovereignty in favor of a compromise policy calling for "no more slave states" in order to quell sectional tensions. The Times maintained that for the Republicans to be competitive in the 1860 elections, they would need to broaden their base of support to include all voters who for one reason or another were upset with the Buchanan Administration.
Indeed, pressure was strong for an alliance that would unite the growing opposition to the Democratic Administration. But such an alliance was no novel idea; it would essentially entail transforming the Republicans into the national, conservative, Union party of the country. In effect, this would be a successor to the Whig party.
Republican leaders, however, staunchly opposed any attempts to modify the party position on slavery, appalled by what they considered a surrender of their principles when, for example, all the ninety-two Republican members of Congress voted for the Crittenden-Montgomery bill in 1858. Although this compromise measure blocked Kansas' entry into the union as a slave state, the fact that it called for popular sovereignty, instead of rejecting slavery altogether, was troubling to the party leaders.
In the end, the Crittenden-Montgomery bill did not create a grand anti-administration coalition of Republicans, ex-Whig Southerners in the border states, and Northern Democrats. Instead, the Democratic Party merely split along sectional lines. Anti-Lecompton Democrats complained that certain leaders had imposed a pro-slavery policy upon the party. The Douglasites, however, refused to yield to administration pressure. Like the anti-Nebraska Democrats, who were now members of the Republican Party, the Douglasites insisted that they—not the administration—commanded the support of most northern Democrats.
Extremist sentiment in the South advanced dramatically as the Southern planter class perceived its hold on the executive, legislative, and judicial apparatuses of the central government wane. It also grew increasingly difficult for Southern Democrats to manipulate power in many of the Northern states through their allies in the Democratic Party.
Honor
Historians have emphasized that the sense of honor was a central concern of upper-class white Southerners. The idea of being treated like a second-class citizen was anathema and could not be tolerated by an honorable southerner. The abolitionist position held that slavery was a negative or evil phenomenon that damaged the rights of white men and the prospects of republicanism. To the white South this rhetoric made Southerners second-class citizens because it trampled what they believed was their Constitutional right to take their chattel property anywhere.
Assault on Sumner (1856)
On May 19 Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner gave a long speech in the Senate entitled "The Crime Against Kansas", which condemned the Slave Power as the evil force behind the nation's troubles. Sumner said the Southerners had committed a "crime against Kansas", singling out Senator Andrew P. Butler of South Carolina. Sumner famously cast the South Carolinian as having "chosen a mistress ... who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight—I mean the harlot, slavery!" According to Hoffer (2010), "It is also important to note the sexual imagery that recurred throughout the oration, which was neither accidental nor without precedent. Abolitionists routinely accused slaveholders of maintaining slavery so that they could engage in forcible sexual relations with their slaves." Three days later, Sumner, working at his desk on the Senate floor, was beaten almost to death by Congressman Preston S. Brooks, Butler's nephew. Sumner took years to recover; he became the martyr to the antislavery cause who said the episode proved the barbarism of slave society. Brooks was lauded as a hero upholding Southern honor. The episode further polarized North and South, strengthened the new Republican Party, and added a new element of violence on the floor of Congress.
Emergence of Lincoln
Republican Party structure
Despite their significant loss in the election of 1856, Republican leaders realized that even though they appealed only to Northern voters, they needed to win only two more states, such as Pennsylvania and Illinois, to win the presidency in 1860.
As the Democrats were grappling with their own troubles, leaders in the Republican party fought to keep elected members focused on the issue of slavery in the West, which allowed them to mobilize popular support. Chase wrote Sumner that if the conservatives succeeded, it might be necessary to recreate the Free Soil Party. He was also particularly disturbed by the tendency of many Republicans to eschew moral attacks on slavery for political and economic arguments.
The controversy over slavery in the West was still not creating a fixation on the issue of slavery. Although the old restraints on the sectional tensions were being eroded with the rapid extension of mass politics and mass democracy in the North, the perpetuation of conflict over the issue of slavery in the West still required the efforts of radical Democrats in the South and radical Republicans in the North. They had to ensure that the sectional conflict would remain at the center of the political debate.
William Seward contemplated this potential in the 1840s, when the Democrats were the nation's majority party, usually controlling Congress, the presidency, and many state offices. The country's institutional structure and party system allowed slaveholders to prevail in more of the nation's territories and to garner a great deal of influence over national policy. With growing popular discontent with the unwillingness of many Democratic leaders to take a stand against slavery, and growing consciousness of the party's increasingly pro-Southern stance, Seward became convinced that the only way for the Whig Party to counteract the Democrats' strong monopoly of the rhetoric of democracy and equality was for the Whigs to embrace anti-slavery as a party platform. Once again, to increasing numbers of Northerners, the Southern labor system was increasingly seen as contrary to the ideals of American democracy.
Republicans believed in the existence of "the Slave Power Conspiracy", which had seized control of the federal government and was attempting to pervert the Constitution for its own purposes. The "Slave Power" idea gave the Republicans the anti-aristocratic appeal with which men like Seward had long wished to be associated politically. By fusing older anti-slavery arguments with the idea that slavery posed a threat to Northern free labor and democratic values, it enabled the Republicans to tap into the egalitarian outlook which lay at the heart of Northern society.
In this sense, during the 1860 presidential campaign, Republican orators even cast "Honest Abe" as an embodiment of these principles, repeatedly referring to him as "the child of labor" and "son of the frontier", who had proved how "honest industry and toil" were rewarded in the North. Although Lincoln had been a Whig, the "Wide Awakes" (members of the Republican clubs) used replicas of rails that he had split to remind voters of his humble origins.
In almost every northern state, organizers attempted to have a Republican Party or an anti-Nebraska fusion movement on ballots in 1854. In areas where the radical Republicans controlled the new organization, the comprehensive radical program became the party policy. Just as they helped organize the Republican Party in the summer of 1854, the radicals played an important role in the national organization of the party in 1856. Republican conventions in New York, Massachusetts, and Illinois adopted radical platforms. These radical platforms in such states as Wisconsin, Michigan, Maine, and Vermont usually called for the divorce of the government from slavery, the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Laws, and no more slave states, as did platforms in Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Massachusetts when radical influence was high.
Conservatives at the Republican 1860 nominating convention in Chicago were able to block the nomination of William Seward, who had an earlier reputation as a radical (but by 1860 had been criticized by Horace Greeley as being too moderate). Other candidates had earlier joined or formed parties opposing the Whigs and had thereby made enemies of many delegates. Lincoln was selected on the third ballot. However, conservatives were unable to bring about the resurrection of "Whiggery". The convention's resolutions regarding slavery were roughly the same as they had been in 1856, but the language appeared less radical. In the following months, even Republican conservatives like Thomas Ewing and Edward Baker embraced the platform language that "the normal condition of territories was freedom". All in all, the organizers had done an effective job of shaping the official policy of the Republican Party.
Southern slaveholding interests now faced the prospects of a Republican president and the entry of new free states that would alter the nation's balance of power between the sections. To many Southerners, the resounding defeat of the Lecompton Constitution foreshadowed the entry of more free states into the Union. Dating back to the Missouri Compromise, the Southern region desperately sought to maintain an equal balance of slave states and free states so as to be competitive in the Senate. Since the last slave state was admitted in 1845, five more free states had entered. The tradition of maintaining a balance between North and South was abandoned in favor of the addition of more free soil states.
Sectional battles over federal policy in the late 1850s
Lincoln–Douglas Debates
The Lincoln-Douglas debates were a series of seven debates in 1858 between Stephen Douglas, United States senator from Illinois, and Abraham Lincoln, the Republican who sought to replace Douglas in the Senate. The debates were mainly about slavery. Douglas defended his Kansas–Nebraska Act, which replaced the Missouri Compromise ban on slavery in the Louisiana Purchase territory north and west of Missouri with popular sovereignty, which allowed residents of territories such as the Kansas to vote either for or against slavery. Douglas put Lincoln on the defensive by accusing him of being a Black Republican abolitionist, but Lincoln responded by asking Douglas to reconcile popular sovereignty with the Dred Scott decision. Douglas' Freeport Doctrine was that residents of a territory could keep slavery out by refusing to pass a slave code and other laws needed to protect slavery. Douglas' Freeport Doctrine, and the fact that he helped defeat the pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution, made Douglas unpopular in the South, which led to the 1860 split of the Democratic Party into Northern and Southern wings. The Democrats retained control of the Illinois legislature, and Douglas thus retained his seat in the U.S. Senate (at that time senators were elected by the state legislatures, not by popular vote); however, Lincoln's national profile was greatly raised, paving the way for his election as president of the United States two years later.
Background
In The Rise of American Civilization (1927), Charles and Mary Beard argue that slavery was not so much a social or cultural institution as an economic one (a labor system). The Beards cited inherent conflicts between Northeastern finance, manufacturing, and commerce and Southern plantations, which competed to control the federal government so as to protect their own interests. According to the economic determinists of the era, both groups used arguments over slavery and states' rights as a cover.
Recent historians have rejected the Beardian thesis. But their economic determinism has influenced subsequent historians in important ways. Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (1974) by Robert William Fogel (who would win the 1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences) and Stanley L. Engerman, wrote that slavery was profitable and that the price of slaves would have continued to rise. Modernization theorists, such as Raimondo Luraghi, have argued that as the Industrial Revolution was expanding on a worldwide scale, the days of wrath were coming for a series of agrarian, pre-capitalistic, "backward" societies throughout the world, from the Italian and American South to India. But most American historians point out the South was highly developed and on average about as prosperous as the North.
Panic of 1857 and sectional realignments
A few historians believe that the serious financial Panic of 1857 and the economic difficulties leading up to it strengthened the Republican Party and heightened sectional tensions. Before the panic, strong economic growth was being achieved under relatively low tariffs. Hence much of the nation concentrated on growth and prosperity.
The iron and textile industries were facing acute, worsening trouble each year after 1850. By 1854, stocks of iron were accumulating in each world market. Iron prices fell, forcing many American iron mills to shut down.
Republicans urged western farmers and northern manufacturers to blame the depression on the domination of the low-tariff economic policies of southern-controlled Democratic administrations. However, the depression revived suspicion of Northeastern banking interests in both the South and the West. Eastern demand for western farm products shifted the West closer to the North. As the "transportation revolution" (canals and railroads) went forward, an increasingly large share and absolute amount of wheat, corn, and other staples of western producers—once difficult to haul across the Appalachians—went to markets in the Northeast. The depression emphasized the value of the western markets for eastern goods and homesteaders who would furnish markets and respectable profits.
Aside from the land issue, economic difficulties strengthened the Republican case for higher tariffs for industries in response to the depression. This issue was important in Pennsylvania and perhaps New Jersey.
Southern response
Meanwhile, many Southerners grumbled over "radical" notions of giving land away to farmers that would "abolitionize" the area. While the ideology of Southern sectionalism was well-developed before the Panic of 1857 by figures like J.D.B. De Bow, the panic helped convince even more cotton barons that they had grown too reliant on Eastern financial interests.
Thomas Prentice Kettell, former editor of the Democratic Review, was another commentator popular in the South to enjoy a great degree of prominence between 1857 and 1860. Kettell gathered an array of statistics in his book on Southern Wealth and Northern Profits, to show that the South produced vast wealth, while the North, with its dependence on raw materials, siphoned off the wealth of the South. Arguing that sectional inequality resulted from the concentration of manufacturing in the North, and from the North's supremacy in communications, transportation, finance, and international trade, his ideas paralleled old physiocratic doctrines that all profits of manufacturing and trade come out of the land. Political sociologists, such as Barrington Moore, have noted that these forms of romantic nostalgia tend to crop up whenever industrialization takes hold.
Such Southern hostility to the free farmers gave the North an opportunity for an alliance with Western farmers. After the political realignments of 1857–58—manifested by the emerging strength of the Republican Party and their networks of local support nationwide—almost every issue was entangled with the controversy over the expansion of slavery in the West. While questions of tariffs, banking policy, public land, and subsidies to railroads did not always unite all elements in the North and the Northwest against the interests of slaveholders in the South under the pre-1854 party system, they were translated in terms of sectional conflict—with the expansion of slavery in the West involved.
As the depression strengthened the Republican Party, slaveholding interests were becoming convinced that the North had aggressive and hostile designs on the Southern way of life. The South was thus increasingly fertile ground for secessionism.
The Republicans' Whig-style personality-driven "hurrah" campaign helped stir hysteria in the slave states upon the emergence of Lincoln and intensify divisive tendencies, while Southern "fire eaters" gave credence to notions of the slave power conspiracy among Republican constituencies in the North and West. New Southern demands to re-open the African slave trade further fueled sectional tensions.
From the early 1840s until the outbreak of the Civil War, the cost of slaves had been rising steadily. Meanwhile, the price of cotton was experiencing market fluctuations typical of raw commodities. After the Panic of 1857, the price of cotton fell while the price of slaves continued its steep rise. At the 1858 Southern commercial convention, William L. Yancey of Alabama called for the reopening of the African slave trade. Only the delegates from the states of the Upper South, who profited from the domestic trade, opposed the reopening of the slave trade since they saw it as a potential form of competition. The convention in 1858 wound up voting to recommend the repeal of all laws against slave imports, despite some reservations.
John Brown and Harpers Ferry (1859)
On October 16, 1859, radical abolitionist John Brown led an attempt to start an armed slave revolt by seizing the U.S. Army arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia). Brown and twenty-one followers, including whites (three of whom were Brown's sons) and Blacks (three free Blacks, one freedman, and one fugitive slave), planned to seize the armory and use weapons stored there to arm Black slaves in order to spark a general uprising by the slave population.
Although the raiders were initially successful in cutting the telegraph line and capturing the Armory, they allowed a passing train to continue, and at the next station with a working telegraph the conductor alerted authorities to the attack. The raiders were forced by the militia and other locals to barricade themselves in the Armory, in a sturdy building later known as John Brown's Fort. Robert E. Lee (then a colonel in the U.S. Army) led a company of U.S. Marines in storming the armory on October 18. Ten of the raiders were killed, including two of Brown's sons; Brown himself along with a half dozen of his followers were captured; five of the raiders escaped immediate capture. Six locals were killed and nine injured; the Marines suffered one dead and one injured.
Brown was subsequently hanged by the state of Virginia for treason, murder, and inciting a slave insurrection, as were six of his followers. (See John Brown's raiders.) The raid, trial, and execution were covered in great detail by the press, which sent reporters and sketch artists to the scene on the next train. It immediately became a cause célèbre in both the North and the South, with Brown vilified by Southerners as a bloodthirsty fanatic, but celebrated by many Northern abolitionists as a martyr to the cause of ending slavery.
Elections of 1860
Initially, William H. Seward of New York, Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, and Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania were the leading contenders for the Republican presidential nomination. But Abraham Lincoln, a former one-term House member who gained fame amid the Lincoln–Douglas debates of 1858, had fewer political opponents within the party and outmaneuvered the other contenders. On May 16, 1860, he received the Republican nomination at their convention in Chicago.
The schism in the Democratic Party over the Lecompton Constitution and Douglas' Freeport Doctrine caused Southern "Fire-Eaters" to oppose front runner Stephen A. Douglas' bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. Douglas defeated the pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution for Kansas because the majority of Kansans were antislavery, and Douglas' popular sovereignty doctrine would allow the majority to vote slavery up or down as they chose. Douglas' Freeport Doctrine alleged that the antislavery majority of Kansans could thwart the Dred Scott decision that allowed slavery by withholding legislation for a slave code and other laws needed to protect slavery. As a result, Southern extremists demanded a slave code for the territories, and used this issue to divide the northern and southern wings of the Democratic Party. Southerners left the party and in June nominated John C. Breckinridge, while Northern Democrats supported Douglas. As a result, the Southern planter class lost a considerable measure of sway in national politics. Because of the Democrats' division, the Republican nominee faced a divided opposition. Adding to Lincoln's advantage, ex-Whigs from the border states had earlier formed the Constitutional Union Party, nominating John C. Bell for president. Thus, party nominees waged regional campaigns. Douglas and Lincoln competed for Northern votes, while Bell, Douglas and Breckinridge competed for Southern votes.
Result and impact of the election of 1860
Lincoln handily won the electoral votes:
Abraham Lincoln: 180 (40% of the popular vote)
J.C. Breckinridge: 72 (18% of the popular vote)
John Bell: 39 (13% of the popular vote)
Stephen A. Douglas: 12 (3% of the popular vote)
Voting [on November 6, 1860] split sharply along sectional lines. Lincoln was elected by carrying the electoral votes of the North; he had a sweeping majority of 180 electoral votes. Given the vote count in each state, he would still have won the electoral college even if all three opponents had somehow been able to merge their tickets.
Split in the Democratic Party
The Alabama extremist William Lowndes Yancey's demand for a federal slave code for the territories split the Democratic Party between North and South, which made the election of Lincoln possible. Yancey tried to make his demand for a slave code moderate enough to get Southern support and yet extreme enough to enrage Northerners and split the party. He demanded that the party support a slave code for the territories if later necessary, so that the demand would be conditional enough to win Southern support. His tactic worked, and lower South delegates left the Democratic Convention at Institute Hall in Charleston, South Carolina, and walked over to Military Hall. The South Carolina extremist Robert Barnwell Rhett hoped that the lower South would completely break with the Northern Democrats and attend a separate convention at Richmond, Virginia, but lower South delegates gave the national Democrats one last chance at unification by going to the convention at Baltimore, Maryland, before the split became permanent. The result was that John C. Breckinridge became the candidate of the Southern Democrats, and Stephen Douglas became the candidate of the Northern Democrats.
Yancey's previous 1848 attempt at demanding a slave code for the territories was his Alabama Platform, which was in response to the Northern Wilmot Proviso attempt at banning slavery in territories conquered from Mexico. Justice Peter V. Daniel wrote a letter about the Proviso to former President Martin Van Buren: "It is that view of the case which pretends to an insulting exclusiveness or superiority on the one hand, and denounces a degrading inequality or inferiority on the other; which says in effect to the Southern man, 'Avaunt! you are not my equal, and hence are to be excluded as carrying a moral taint with you.' Here is at once the extinction of all fraternity, of all sympathy, of all endurance even; the creation of animosity fierce, implacable, undying." Both the Alabama Platform and the Wilmot Proviso failed, but Yancey learned to be less overtly radical in order to get more support. Southerners thought they were merely demanding equality, in that they wanted Southern property in slaves to get the same (or more) protection as Northern forms of property.
Southern secession
With the emergence of the Republicans as the nation's first major sectional party by the mid-1850s, politics became the stage on which sectional tensions were played out. Although much of the West—the focal point of sectional tensions—was unfit for cotton cultivation, Southern secessionists read the political fallout as a sign that their power in national politics was rapidly weakening. Before, the slave system had been buttressed to an extent by the Democratic Party, which was increasingly seen as representing a more pro-Southern position that unfairly permitted Southerners to prevail in the nation's territories and to dominate national policy before the Civil War. But Democrats suffered a significant reverse in the electoral realignment of the mid-1850s. 1860 was a critical election that marked a stark change in existing patterns of party loyalties among groups of voters; Abraham Lincoln's election was a watershed in the balance of power of competing national and parochial interests and affiliations.
Immediately after finding out the election results, a special South Carolina convention declared "that the Union now subsisting between South Carolina and other states under the name of the 'United States of America' is hereby dissolved;" by February six more cotton states would follow (Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas), forming the Confederate States of America. In 1960, Lipset examined the secessionist vote in each Southern state in 1860–61. In each state he divided the counties by the proportion of slaves, low, medium and high. He found that in the 181 high-slavery counties, the vote was 72% for secession. In the 205 low-slavery counties, the vote was only 37% for secession, and in the 153 middle counties, the vote for secession was at 60%. Both the outgoing Buchanan administration and the incoming Lincoln administration refused to recognize the legality of secession or the legitimacy of the Confederacy. After Lincoln called for troops, four border states (that lacked cotton) seceded (Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee). The Upper Southern States were in a dilemma: they wanted to retain their slaves but were afraid that if they joined with the lower southern states that were rebelling they would be caught in the middle of a conflict, and their states would be the battle ground. By staying in the Union the Upper Southern states felt that their slave rights would continue to be recognized by the Union.
Other issues
The tariff issue was and is sometimes cited—long after the war—by Lost Cause historians and neo-Confederate apologists. In 1860–61 none of the groups that proposed compromises to head off secession brought up the tariff issue as a major issue. Pamphleteers North and South rarely mentioned the tariff, and when some did, for instance, Matthew Fontaine Maury and John Lothrop Motley, they were generally writing for a foreign audience.
The tariff in effect prior to the enactment of the Morrill Tariff of 1861 had been written and approved by the South for the benefit of the South. Complaints came from the Northeast (especially Pennsylvania) and regarded the rates as too low. Some Southerners feared that eventually the North would grow so big that it would control Congress and could raise the tariff at will.
As for states' rights, while a state's right of revolution mentioned in the Declaration of Independence was based on the inalienable equal rights of man, secessionists believed in a modified version of states' rights that was safe for slavery.
These issues were especially important in the lower South, where 47 percent of the population were slaves. The upper South, where 32 percent of the population were slaves, considered the Fort Sumter crisis—especially Lincoln's call for troops to march south to recapture it—a cause for secession. The northernmost border slave states, where 13 percent of the population were slaves, did not secede.
Fort Sumter
When South Carolina seceded in December 1860, Major Robert Anderson, a pro-slavery, former slave owner from Kentucky, remained loyal to the Union. He was the commanding officer of United States Army forces in Charleston, South Carolina—the last remaining important Union post in the Deep South. Acting upon orders from the War Department to hold and defend the U.S. forts, he moved his small garrison from Fort Moultrie, which was indefensible, to the more modern, more defensible, Fort Sumter in the middle of Charleston Harbor. South Carolina leaders cried betrayal, while the North celebrated with enormous excitement at this show of defiance against secessionism. In February 1861 the Confederate States of America were formed and took charge. Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president, ordered the fort be captured. The artillery attack was commanded by Brig. Gen. P. G. T. Beauregard, who had been Anderson's student at West Point. The attack began April 12, 1861, and continued until Anderson, badly outnumbered and outgunned, surrendered the fort on April 14. The battle began the American Civil War, as an overwhelming demand for war swept both the North and South, with only Kentucky attempting to remain neutral.
According to Adam Goodheart (2011), the modern meaning of the American flag was also forged in the defense of Fort Sumter. Thereafter, the flag was used throughout the North to symbolize American nationalism and rejection of secessionism.
Historiographical debates on causes
Abraham Lincoln's rejection of the Crittenden Compromise, the failure to secure the ratification of the Corwin Amendment in 1861, and the inability of the Washington Peace Conference of 1861 to provide an effective alternative to Crittenden and Corwin came together to prevent a compromise that is still debated by Civil War historians. Even as the war was going on, William Seward and James Buchanan were outlining a debate over the question of inevitability that would continue among historians.
Needless war argument
Two competing explanations of the sectional tensions inflaming the nation emerged even before the war. The first was the "Needless War" argument. Buchanan believed the sectional hostility to be the accidental, unnecessary work of self-interested or fanatical agitators. He also singled out the "fanaticism" of the Republican Party. Seward, on the other hand, believed there to be an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces. Shelden argues that, "Few scholars in the twenty-first century would call the Civil War 'needless,' as the emancipation of 4 million slaves hinged on Union victory."
Irrepressible conflict argument
The "Irrepressible Conflict" argument was the first to dominate historical discussion. In the first decades after the fighting, histories of the Civil War generally reflected the views of Northerners who had participated in the conflict. The war appeared to be a stark moral conflict in which the South was to blame, a conflict that arose as a result of the designs of slave power. Henry Wilson's History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America (1872–1877) is the foremost representative of this moral interpretation, which argued that Northerners had fought to preserve the union against the aggressive designs of "slave power". Later, in his seven-volume History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the Civil War (1893–1900), James Ford Rhodes identified slavery as the central—and virtually only—cause of the Civil War. The North and South had reached positions on the issue of slavery that were both irreconcilable and unalterable. The conflict had become inevitable.
Revisionists
The idea that the war was avoidable became central among historians in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. Revisionist historians, led by James G. Randall (1881–1953) at the University of Illinois, Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924) at Princeton University and Avery Craven (1885–1980) at the University of Chicago, saw in the social and economic systems of the South no differences so fundamental as to require a war. Historian Mark Neely explains their position:
Revisionism challenged the view that fundamental and irreconcilable sectional differences made the outbreak of war inevitable. It scorned a previous generation's easy identification of the Northern cause with abolition, but it continued a tradition of hostility to the Reconstruction measures that followed the war. The Civil War became a needless conflict brought on by a blundering generation that exaggerated sectional differences between North and South. Revisionists revived the reputation of the Democratic party as great nationalists before the war and as dependable loyalists during it. Revisionism gave Lincoln's Presidency a tragic beginning at Fort Sumter, a rancorous political setting of bitter factional conflicts between radicals and moderates within Lincoln's own party, and an even more tragic ending. The benevolent Lincoln died at the moment when benevolence was most needed to blunt radical designs for revenge on the South.
Randall blamed the ineptitude of a "blundering generation" of leaders. He also saw slavery as essentially a benign institution, crumbling in the presence of 19th century tendencies. Craven, the other leading revisionist, placed more emphasis on the issue of slavery than Randall but argued roughly the same points. In The Coming of the Civil War (1942), Craven argued that slave laborers were not much worse off than Northern workers, that the institution was already on the road to ultimate extinction, and that the war could have been averted by skillful and responsible leaders in the tradition of Congressional statesmen Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. Two of the key leaders in antebellum politics, Clay and Webster, in contrast to the 1850s generation of leaders, shared a predisposition to compromises marked by a passionate patriotic devotion to the Union.
But it is possible that the politicians of the 1850s were not inept. More recent studies have kept elements of the revisionist interpretation alive, emphasizing the role of political agitation (the efforts of Democratic politicians of the South and Republican politicians in the North to keep the sectional conflict at the center of the political debate). David Herbert Donald (1920–2009), a student of Randall, argued in 1960 that the politicians of the 1850s were not unusually inept but that they were operating in a society in which traditional restraints were being eroded in the face of the rapid extension of democracy. The stability of the two-party system kept the union together, but would collapse in the 1850s, thus reinforcing, rather than suppressing, sectional conflict. The union, Donald said, died of democracy.
See also
American Civil War
Compensated emancipation
Conclusion of the American Civil War
Historiographic issues about the American Civil War
Slavery in the United States
Timeline of events leading to the American Civil War
Notes
References
Craven, Avery. The Coming of the Civil War (1942)
Donald, David Herbert; Baker, Jean Harvey; and Holt, Michael F. The Civil War and Reconstruction. (2001)
Ellis, Richard E. The Union at Risk: Jacksonian Democracy, States' Rights and the Nullification Crisis. (1987)
Fehrenbacher, Don E. The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government's Relations to Slavery. (2001)
Forbes, Robert Pierce. The Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath: Slavery and the Meaning of America. (2007)
Freehling, William W. Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Crisis in South Carolina 1816–1836. (1965)
Freehling, William W. The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay 1776–1854. (1990)
Freehling, William W. and Craig M. Simpson, eds. Secession Debated: Georgia's Showdown in 1860 (1992), speeches
Hesseltine, William B., ed. The Tragic Conflict: The Civil War and Reconstruction (1962), primary documents
Huston, James L. Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War. (2003)
Mason, Matthew. Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic. (2006)
McDonald, Forrest. States' Rights and the Union: Imperium in Imperio, 1776–1876. (2000)
McPherson, James M. This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War. (2007)
Miller, William Lee. Arguing About Slavery: John Quincy Adams and the Great Battle in the United States Congress. (1995)
Nichols, Roy. The Disruption of American Democracy: A History of the Political Crisis That Led up to the Civil War (1949) online
Niven, John. John C. Calhoun and the Price of Union (1988)
Perman, Michael, ed. Major Problems in Civil War & Reconstruction (2nd ed. 1998) primary and secondary sources.
Remini, Robert V. Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Freedom, 1822–1832, v2 (1981)
Stampp, Kenneth, ed. The Causes of the Civil War (3rd ed 1992), primary and secondary sources.
Varon, Elizabeth R. Disunion: The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789–1859. (2008)
Wakelyn, Jon L., ed. Southern Pamphlets on Secession, November 1860 – April 1861 (1996)
Wilentz, Sean. The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln. (2005)
Further reading
Primary sources
CivilWar.com, many source materials, including states' secession declarations
Causes of the Civil War, collection of primary documents
Declarations of Causes of Seceding States
Alexander H. Stephens' Cornerstone Address
Historiography
Ayers, Edward L. What Caused the Civil War? Reflections on the South and Southern History (2005). 222 pp.
Beale, Howard K., "What Historians Have Said About the Causes of the Civil War", Social Science Research Bulletin 54, 1946.
Boritt, Gabor S. ed. Why the Civil War Came (1996)
Childers, Christopher. "Interpreting Popular Sovereignty: A Historiographical Essay", Civil War History Volume 57, Number 1, March 2011 pp. 48–70 in Project MUSE
Crofts, Daniel. Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis (1989), pp. 353–82, 457–80
Etcheson, Nicole. "The Origins of the Civil War", History Compass 2005 #3 (North America)
Foner, Eric. "The Causes of the American Civil War: Recent Interpretations and New Directions". In Beyond the Civil War Synthesis: Political Essays of the Civil War Era, edited by Robert P. Swierenga, 1975.
Kornblith, Gary J., "Rethinking the Coming of the Civil War: A Counterfactual Exercise". Journal of American History 90.1 (2003): detailed historiography; online version
Pressly, Thomas. Americans Interpret Their Civil War (1954), old survey that sorts historians into schools of interpretation; online
SenGupta, Gunja. "Bleeding Kansas: A Review Essay", Kansas History 24 (Winter 2001/2002): 318–41. online
Smith, Stacey L. "Beyond North and South: Putting the West in the Civil War and Reconstruction", Journal of the Civil War Era (Dec 2016) 6#4 pp. 566–91. excerpt
Towers, Frank. "Partisans, New History, and Modernization: The Historiography of the Civil War's Causes, 1861–2011." The Journal of the Civil War Era (2011) 1#2 pp: 237-264.
Tulloch, Hugh. The Debate on the American Civil War Era (Issues in Historiography) (2000)
Woods, Michael E., "What Twenty-First-Century Historians Have Said about the Causes of Disunion: A Civil War Sesquicentennial Review of the Recent Literature", Journal of American History (2012) 99#2 pp. 415–39. online
Woodward, Colin Edward. Marching Masters: Slavery, Race, and the Confederate Army during the Civil War. University of Virginia Press, 2014. Introduction pp. 1–10
Woodworth, Steven E. ed. The American Civil War: A Handbook of Literature and Research (1996), 750 pages of historiography; see part IV on Causation.
"Needless war" school
Bonner, Thomas N. "Civil War Historians and the 'Needless War' Doctrine." Journal of the History of Ideas (1956): 193–216. in JSTOR
Childers, Christopher. "Interpreting Popular Sovereignty: A Historiographical Essay." Civil War History (2011) 57#1 pp. 48–70. online
Craven, Avery, The Repressible Conflict, 1830–61 (1939)
The Coming of the Civil War (1942)
"The Coming of the War Between the States", Journal of Southern History 2 (August 1936): 30–63; in JSTOR
Donald, David. "An Excess of Democracy: The Civil War and the Social Process", in David Donald, Lincoln Reconsidered: Essays on the Civil War Era, 2nd ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), 209–35.
Goldfield, David. America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation (2011), New York: Bloomsbury Press.
Holt, Michael F. The Political Crisis of the 1850s (1978) emphasis on political parties and voters
Pressly, Thomas J. "The Repressible Conflict", chapter 7 of Americans Interpret Their Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954); online
Ramsdell, Charles W. "The Natural Limits of Slavery Expansion", Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 16 (September 1929), 151–71, in JSTOR; says slavery had almost reached its outer limits of growth by 1860, so war was unnecessary to stop further growth. online version without footnotes
Randall, James G. "The Blundering Generation", Mississippi Valley Historical Review 27 (June 1940): 3–28 in JSTOR
Randall, James G. The Civil War and Reconstruction. (1937), survey and statement of "needless war" interpretation
Economic causation and modernization
Beard, Charles, and Mary Beard. The Rise of American Civilization. Two volumes (1927)
Hofstadter, Richard. "The Tariff Issue on the Eve of the Civil War," American Historical Review (1938) 44#1 pp. 50–55. in JSTOR
Luraghi, Raimondo, "The Civil War and the Modernization of American Society: Social Structure and Industrial Revolution in the Old South Before and During the War", Civil War History XVIII (September 1972), in JSTOR
McPherson, James M. Ordeal by Fire: the Civil War and Reconstruction (1982), uses modernization interpretation
Moore, Barrington. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966), modernization interpretation
Thornton, Mark; Ekelund, Robert B. Tariffs, Blockades, and Inflation: The Economics of the Civil War (2004)
Nationalism and culture
Crofts Daniel. Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis (1989)
Current, Richard. Lincoln and the First Shot (1963)
Miller, Randall M., Harry S. Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson, eds. Religion and the American Civil War (1998), essays
Nevins, Allan, author of most detailed history
Ordeal of the Union 2 vols. (1947) covers 1850–57
The Emergence of Lincoln, 2 vols. (1950) covers 1857–61; does not take strong position on causation
Olsen, Christopher J. Political Culture and Secession in Mississippi: Masculinity, Honor, and the Antiparty Tradition, 1830–1860" (2000), cultural interpretation
Potter, David M., completed and edited by Don E. Fehrenbacher. The Impending Crisis: America Before the Civil War: 1848–1861 (1976), Pulitzer Prize-winning history emphasizing rise of Southern nationalism
Potter, David M. Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis (1942).
Slavery as cause
Ashworth, John
Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic (1995)
"Free labor, wage labor, and the slave power: Republicanism and the Republican party in the 1850s", in Melvyn Stokes and Stephen Conway (eds), The Market Revolution in America: Social, Political and Religious Expressions, 1800–1880, pp. 128–46. (1996)
Randall, J.G. and Donald, David. The Civil War and Reconstruction (Second Edition, 2016 [1953]), 1,497-page survey
Fellman, Michael, Leslie J. Gordon, Daniel E. Sutherland. This Terrible War: The Civil War and its Aftermath (Third Edition, 2014), 432-page survey
Foner, Eric
Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (1970, 1995) stress on ideology
Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press (1981)
Freehling, William W. The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854 (1991), emphasis on slavery
Gienapp, William. The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856 (1987)
Manning, Chandra. What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War. New York: Vintage Books (2007)
Morrison, Michael. Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War (1997)
Morrow, Ralph E. "The Proslavery Argument Revisited", The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. 48, No. 1. (June 1961), pp. 79–94. in JSTOR (Maintains that antebellum pro-slavery writing was not intended to, or not solely intended to, convince Northerners, but was written and published to reduce the guilt felt by many in slave states.)
Oakes, James.
Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865 (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2012)
The Scorpion's Sting: Antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2014)
The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2021)
Rhodes, James Ford. History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the McKinley–Bryan Campaign of 1896 Volume: 1 (1920), highly detailed narrative 1850–56. Vol 2 1856–60; emphasis on slavery
Schlesinger, Arthur Jr. "The Causes of the Civil War" (1949), reprinted in his The Politics of Hope (1963); reintroduced new emphasis on slavery
Stampp, Kenneth M.
America in 1857: A Nation on the Brink (1990)
And the War Came: The North and the Secession Crisis, 1860–1861'' (1950)
External links
Civil War and Reconstruction: Jensen's Guide to WWW Resources
Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice
State by state popular vote for president in 1860 election
Tulane course – article on 1860 election
Tulane course – article on Fort Sumter
Onuf, Peter. "Making Two Nations: The Origins of the Civil War". 2003 speech
The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
An entry from Alexander Stephens' diary, dated 1866, reflecting on the origins of the Civil War
The Arguments of the Constitutional Unionists in 1850–51
Shmoop US History: Causes of the Civil War, study guide, dates, trivia, multimedia, teachers' guide
Booknotes interview with Stephen B. Oates on The Approaching Fury: Voices of the Storm, 1820–1861, April 27, 1997
Was the Civil War About Slavery? Yes.
19th century in the United States
Pre-emancipation African-American history
Politics of the American Civil War
American Civil War, Origins of the
Bleeding Kansas
History of the Southern United States
Federalism in the United States
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/108th%20United%20States%20Congress
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108th United States Congress
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The 108th United States Congress was a meeting of the legislative branch of the United States federal government, composed of the United States Senate and the United States House of Representatives from January 3, 2003, to January 3, 2005, during the third and fourth years of George W. Bush's presidency.
House members were elected in the 2002 general election on November 5, 2002. Senators were elected in three classes in the 1998 general election on November 3, 1998, 2000 general election on November 7, 2000, or 2002 general election on November 5, 2002. The apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives was based on the 2000 United States census.
This is the most recent Congress to have a Democratic senator from South Carolina, Fritz Hollings, who retired at the end of the Congress.
Both chambers had a Republican majority, with the Republicans slightly increasing their edge in the House, and regaining control of the Senate, after party control had switched back and forth during the 107th Congress due to various factors. With President Bush, this gave the Republicans an overall federal government trifecta.
Major events
February 1, 2003: Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated during reentry
March 20, 2003: 2003 invasion of Iraq began
April 14, 2003: Human Genome Project was completed
July 14, 2003: CIA leak scandal began
May 17, 2004: Same-sex marriage began in Massachusetts
July 22, 2004: 9/11 Commission issued an initial report of its findings
September 13, 2004: expiration of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban
November 2, 2004:
2004 United States presidential election: George W. Bush defeated Democratic challenger, Senator John Kerry from Massachusetts.
United States Senate elections, 2004 & United States House of Representatives elections, 2004: Republicans increased their majorities in both houses.
Major legislation
Enacted
March 11, 2003: Do-Not-Call Implementation Act of 2003,
April 25, 2003: Clean Diamond Trade Act, Pub.L. 108-19
April 30, 2003: PROTECT (Prosecutorial Remedies and Other Tools to end the Exploitation of Children Today) Act, including Illicit Drug Anti-Proliferation Act,
May 27, 2003: United States Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria Act of 2003, Pub.L. 108-25
May 28, 2003: Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003,
May 29, 2003: Veterans' Memorial Preservation and Recognition Act of 2003, Pub.L. 108-29
June 25, 2003: Keeping Children and Families Safe Act of 2003, Pub.L. 108-36
September 4, 2003: Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003,
October 1, 2003: Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, 2004, Pub.L. 108-90
October 28, 2003: Check 21 Act,
November 5, 2003: Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act,
December 3, 2003: Healthy Forests Restoration Act of 2003, Pub.L. 108-148
December 3, 2003: 21st Century Nanotechnology Research and Development Act, Pub.L. 108-153
December 4, 2003: Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act,
December 6, 2003: Fairness to Contact Lens Consumers Act, Pub.L. 108-164
December 8, 2003: Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act,
December 12, 2003:Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act,
December 16, 2003: CAN-SPAM Act,
March 25, 2004: Unborn Victims of Violence Act (Laci and Conner's Law),
June 30, 2004: Bunning-Bereuter-Blumenauer Flood Insurance Reform Act,
July 7, 2004: GAO Human Capital Reform Act of 2004,
July 21, 2004: Project BioShield Act of 2004,
October 18, 2004: North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004,
October 18, 2004: Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, 2005, Pub.L. 108-334
October 20, 2004: Belarus Democracy Act of 2004,
October 22, 2004: American Jobs Creation Act of 2004, Pub.L. 108-357
October 30, 2004: Crime Victims' Rights Act, Pub.L. 108-405
December 3, 2004: Internet Tax Nondiscrimination Act, Pub.L. 108-435
December 3, 2004: Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004, Pub.L. 108-446
December 8, 2004: Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2005, Pub.L. 108-447
December 10, 2004: Alaska Land Transfer Acceleration Act, Pub.L. 108-452
December 17, 2004: Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act,
Proposed, but not enacted
: Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003
Party summary
Senate
The party summary for the Senate remained the same during the entire 108th Congress.
House of Representatives
Due to resignations and special elections, Republicans lost a net of two seats to the Democrats. All seats were filled though special elections. (See Changes in membership, below.)
Leadership
Senate
President: Dick Cheney (R)
President pro tempore: Ted Stevens (R)
Majority (Republican) leadership
Majority Leader: Bill Frist
Majority Whip: Mitch McConnell
Republican Conference Chairman: Rick Santorum
Republican Conference Secretary: Kay Bailey Hutchison
Republican Campaign Committee Chairman: George Allen
Policy Committee Chairman: Jon Kyl
Chief Deputy Whip: Bob Bennett
Minority (Democratic) leadership
Minority Leader: Tom Daschle
Minority Whip: Harry Reid
Policy Committee Chairman: Byron Dorgan
Democratic Conference Secretary: Barbara Mikulski
Democratic Campaign Committee Chairman: Jon Corzine
Steering and Outreach Committee Chair: Hillary Clinton
Chief Deputy Whip: John Breaux
House of Representatives
Speaker: Dennis Hastert (R)
Majority (Republican) leadership
Majority Leader: Tom DeLay
Majority Whip: Roy Blunt
Chief Deputy Whip: Eric Cantor
Republican Conference Chairman: Deborah Pryce
Republican Conference Vice-Chairman: Jack Kingston
Republican Conference Secretary: John T. Doolittle
Policy Committee Chairman: Christopher Cox
Republican Campaign Committee Chairman: Tom Reynolds
House Rules Committee Chairman: David Dreier
Minority (Democratic) leadership
Minority Leader: Nancy Pelosi
Minority Whip: Steny Hoyer
Senior Chief Deputy Minority Whip: John Lewis
Democratic Caucus Chairman: Bob Menendez
Democratic Caucus Vice Chairman: Jim Clyburn
Democratic Campaign Committee Chairman: Bob Matsui
Chief Deputy Minority Whips: Joe Crowley, Baron Hill, Ron Kind, Ed Pastor, Max Sandlin, Jan Schakowsky, & Maxine Waters
Members
Senate
The Senators are preceded by the class, In this Congress, Class 3 meant their term ended with this Congress, requiring reelection in 2004; Class 1 meant their term began in the last Congress, requiring reelection in 2006; and Class 2 meant their term began in this Congress, requiring reelection in 2008.
Alabama
2. Jeff Sessions (R)
3. Richard Shelby (R)
Alaska
2. Ted Stevens (R)
3. Lisa Murkowski (R)
Arizona
1. Jon Kyl (R)
3. John McCain (R)
Arkansas
2. Mark Pryor (D)
3. Blanche Lincoln (D)
California
1. Dianne Feinstein (D)
3. Barbara Boxer (D)
Colorado
2. Wayne Allard (R)
3. Ben Nighthorse Campbell (R)
Connecticut
1. Joe Lieberman (D)
3. Chris Dodd (D)
Delaware
1. Tom Carper (D)
2. Joe Biden (D)
Florida
1. Bill Nelson (D)
3. Bob Graham (D)
Georgia
2. Saxby Chambliss (R)
3. Zell Miller (D)
Hawaii
1. Daniel Akaka (D)
3. Daniel Inouye (D)
Idaho
2. Larry Craig (R)
3. Mike Crapo (R)
Illinois
2. Dick Durbin (D)
3. Peter Fitzgerald (R)
Indiana
1. Richard Lugar (R)
3. Evan Bayh (D)
Iowa
2. Tom Harkin (D)
3. Chuck Grassley (R)
Kansas
2. Pat Roberts (R)
3. Sam Brownback (R)
Kentucky
2. Mitch McConnell (R)
3. Jim Bunning (R)
Louisiana
2. Mary Landrieu (D)
3. John Breaux (D)
Maine
1. Olympia Snowe (R)
2. Susan Collins (R)
Maryland
1. Paul Sarbanes (D)
3. Barbara Mikulski (D)
Massachusetts
1. Ted Kennedy (D)
2. John Kerry (D)
Michigan
1. Debbie Stabenow (D)
2. Carl Levin (D)
Minnesota
1. Mark Dayton (DFL)
2. Norm Coleman (R)
Mississippi
1. Trent Lott (R)
2. Thad Cochran (R)
Missouri
1. James Talent (R)
3. Kit Bond (R)
Montana
1. Conrad Burns (R)
2. Max Baucus (D)
Nebraska
1. Ben Nelson (D)
2. Chuck Hagel (R)
Nevada
1. John Ensign (R)
3. Harry Reid (D)
New Hampshire
2. John E. Sununu (R)
3. Judd Gregg (R)
New Jersey
1. Jon Corzine (D)
2. Frank Lautenberg (D)
New Mexico
1. Jeff Bingaman (D)
2. Pete Domenici (R)
New York
1. Hillary Clinton (D)
3. Chuck Schumer (D)
North Carolina
2. Elizabeth Dole (R)
3. John Edwards (D)
North Dakota
1. Kent Conrad (D-NPL)
3. Byron Dorgan (D-NPL)
Ohio
1. Mike DeWine (R)
3. George Voinovich (R)
Oklahoma
2. Jim Inhofe (R)
3. Don Nickles (R)
Oregon
2. Gordon H. Smith (R)
3. Ron Wyden (D)
Pennsylvania
1. Rick Santorum (R)
3. Arlen Specter (R)
Rhode Island
1. Lincoln Chafee (R)
2. Jack Reed (D)
South Carolina
2. Lindsey Graham (R)
3. Fritz Hollings (D)
South Dakota
2. Tim Johnson (D)
3. Tom Daschle (D)
Tennessee
1. Bill Frist (R)
2. Lamar Alexander (R)
Texas
1. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R)
2. John Cornyn (R)
Utah
1. Orrin Hatch (R)
3. Bob Bennett (R)
Vermont
1. Jim Jeffords (I)
3. Patrick Leahy (D)
Virginia
1. George Allen (R)
2. John Warner (R)
Washington
1. Maria Cantwell (D)
3. Patty Murray (D)
West Virginia
1. Robert Byrd (D)
2. Jay Rockefeller (D)
Wisconsin
1. Herb Kohl (D)
3. Russ Feingold (D)
Wyoming
1. Craig L. Thomas (R)
2. Mike Enzi (R)
House of Representatives
The Members of the House of Representatives are preceded by the district number.
Alabama
. Jo Bonner (R)
. Terry Everett (R)
. Mike Rogers (R)
. Robert Aderholt (R)
. Bud Cramer (D)
. Spencer Bachus (R)
. Artur Davis (D)
Alaska
. Don Young (R)
Arizona
. Rick Renzi (R)
. Trent Franks (R)
. John Shadegg (R)
. Ed Pastor (D)
. J. D. Hayworth (R)
. Jeff Flake (R)
. Raúl Grijalva (D)
. Jim Kolbe (R)
Arkansas
. Marion Berry (D)
. Vic Snyder (D)
. John Boozman (R)
. Mike Ross (D)
California
. Mike Thompson (D)
. Wally Herger (R)
. Doug Ose (R)
. John Doolittle (R)
. Robert Matsui (D), until January 1, 2005, vacant thereafter
. Lynn Woolsey (D)
. George Miller (D)
. Nancy Pelosi (D)
. Barbara Lee (D)
. Ellen Tauscher (D)
. Richard Pombo (R)
. Tom Lantos (D)
. Pete Stark (D)
. Anna Eshoo (D)
. Mike Honda (D)
. Zoe Lofgren (D)
. Sam Farr (D)
. Dennis Cardoza (D)
. George Radanovich (R)
. Cal Dooley (D)
. Devin Nunes (R)
. Bill Thomas (R)
. Lois Capps (D)
. Elton Gallegly (R)
. Howard McKeon (R)
. David Dreier (R)
. Brad Sherman (D)
. Howard Berman (D)
. Adam Schiff (D)
. Henry Waxman (D)
. Xavier Becerra (D)
. Hilda Solis (D)
. Diane Watson (D)
. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D)
. Maxine Waters (D)
. Jane Harman (D)
. Juanita Millender-McDonald (D)
. Grace Napolitano (D)
. Linda Sánchez (D)
. Edward R. Royce (R)
. Jerry Lewis (R)
. Gary Miller (R)
. Joe Baca (D)
. Ken Calvert (R)
. Mary Bono (R)
. Dana Rohrabacher (R)
. Loretta Sanchez (D)
. Christopher Cox (R)
. Darrell Issa (R)
. Duke Cunningham (R)
. Bob Filner (D)
. Duncan Hunter (R)
. Susan Davis (D)
Colorado
. Diana DeGette (D)
. Mark Udall (D)
. Scott McInnis (R)
. Marilyn Musgrave (R)
. Joel Hefley (R)
. Tom Tancredo (R)
. Bob Beauprez (R)
Connecticut
. John Larson (D)
. Rob Simmons (R)
. Rosa DeLauro (D)
. Chris Shays (R)
. Nancy Johnson (R)
Delaware
. Mike Castle (R)
Florida
. Jeff Miller (R)
. Allen Boyd (D)
. Corrine Brown (D)
. Ander Crenshaw (R)
. Ginny Brown-Waite (R)
. Cliff Stearns (R)
. John Mica (R)
. Ric Keller (R)
. Michael Bilirakis (R)
. Bill Young (R)
. Jim Davis (D)
. Adam Putnam (R)
. Katherine Harris (R)
. Porter Goss (R), until September 24, 2004, vacant thereafter
. Dave Weldon (R)
. Mark Foley (R)
. Kendrick Meek (D)
. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R)
. Robert Wexler (D)
. Peter Deutsch (D)
. Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R)
. Clay Shaw (R)
. Alcee Hastings (D)
. Tom Feeney (R)
. Mario Diaz-Balart (R)
Georgia
. Jack Kingston (R)
. Sanford Bishop (D)
. Jim Marshall (D)
. Denise Majette (D)
. John Lewis (D)
. Johnny Isakson (R)
. John Linder (R)
. Mac Collins (R)
. Charlie Norwood (R)
. Nathan Deal (R)
. Phil Gingrey (R)
. Max Burns (R)
. David Scott (D)
Hawaii
. Neil Abercrombie (D)
. Ed Case (D), from January 4, 2003
Idaho
. Butch Otter (R)
. Mike Simpson (R)
Illinois
. Bobby Rush (D)
. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D)
. William Lipinski (D)
. Luis Gutiérrez (D)
. Rahm Emanuel (D)
. Henry Hyde (R)
. Danny Davis (D)
. Philip Crane (R)
. Janice Schakowsky (D)
. Mark Kirk (R)
. Jerry Weller (R)
. Jerry Costello (D)
. Judy Biggert (R)
. Dennis Hastert (R)
. Tim Johnson (R)
. Donald Manzullo (R)
. Lane Evans (D)
. Ray LaHood (R)
. John Shimkus (R)
Indiana
. Pete Visclosky (D)
. Chris Chocola (R)
. Mark Souder (R)
. Steve Buyer (R)
. Dan Burton (R)
. Mike Pence (R)
. Julia Carson (D)
. John Hostettler (R)
. Baron Hill (D)
Iowa
. Jim Nussle (R)
. Jim Leach (R)
. Leonard Boswell (D)
. Tom Latham (R)
. Steve King (R)
Kansas
. Jerry Moran (R)
. Jim Ryun (R)
. Dennis Moore (D)
. Todd Tiahrt (R)
Kentucky
. Ed Whitfield (R)
. Ron Lewis (R)
. Anne Northup (R)
. Ken Lucas (D)
. Hal Rogers (R)
. Ernie Fletcher (R), until December 9, 2003
Ben Chandler (D), from February 7, 2004
Louisiana
. David Vitter (R)
. William Jefferson (D)
. Billy Tauzin (R)
. Jim McCrery (R)
. Rodney Alexander (D, then R)
. Richard Baker (R)
. Christopher John (D)
Maine
. Tom Allen (D)
. Mike Michaud (D)
Maryland
. Wayne Gilchrest (R)
. Dutch Ruppersberger (D)
. Ben Cardin (D)
. Albert Wynn (D)
. Steny Hoyer (D)
. Roscoe Bartlett (R)
. Elijah Cummings (D)
. Chris Van Hollen (D)
Massachusetts
. John Olver (D)
. Richard Neal (D)
. Jim McGovern (D)
. Barney Frank (D)
. Marty Meehan (D)
. John Tierney (D)
. Ed Markey (D)
. Mike Capuano (D)
. Stephen Lynch (D)
. Bill Delahunt (D)
Michigan
. Bart Stupak (D)
. Peter Hoekstra (R)
. Vern Ehlers (R)
. David Lee Camp (R)
. Dale Kildee (D)
. Fred Upton (R)
. Nick Smith (R)
. Mike Rogers (R)
. Joe Knollenberg (R)
. Candice Miller (R)
. Thaddeus McCotter (R)
. Sander Levin (D)
. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick (D)
. John Conyers (D)
. John Dingell (D)
Minnesota
. Gil Gutknecht (R)
. John Kline (R)
. Jim Ramstad (R)
. Betty McCollum (DFL)
. Martin Olav Sabo (DFL)
. Mark Kennedy (R)
. Collin Peterson (DFL)
. James Oberstar (DFL)
Mississippi
. Roger Wicker (R)
. Bennie Thompson (D)
. Chip Pickering (R)
. Gene Taylor (D)
Missouri
. Lacy Clay (D)
. Todd Akin (R)
. Dick Gephardt (D)
. Ike Skelton (D)
. Karen McCarthy (D)
. Sam Graves (R)
. Roy Blunt (R)
. Jo Ann Emerson (R)
. Kenny Hulshof (R)
Montana
. Denny Rehberg (R)
Nebraska
. Doug Bereuter (R), until August 31, 2004, vacant thereafter
. Lee Terry (R)
. Tom Osborne (R)
Nevada
. Shelley Berkley (D)
. Jim Gibbons (R)
. Jon Porter (R)
New Hampshire
. Jeb Bradley (R)
. Charlie Bass (R)
New Jersey
. Rob Andrews (D)
. Frank LoBiondo (R)
. Jim Saxton (R)
. Chris Smith (R)
. Scott Garrett (R)
. Frank Pallone (D)
. Mike Ferguson (R)
. Bill Pascrell Jr. (D)
. Steve Rothman (D)
. Donald M. Payne (D)
. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R)
. Rush Holt Jr. (D)
. Bob Menendez (D)
New Mexico
. Heather Wilson (R)
. Steve Pearce (R)
. Tom Udall (D)
New York
. Tim Bishop (D)
. Steve Israel (D)
. Peter King (R)
. Carolyn McCarthy (D)
. Gary Ackerman (D)
. Gregory Meeks (D)
. Joe Crowley (D)
. Jerry Nadler (D)
. Anthony Weiner (D)
. Edolphus Towns (D)
. Major Owens (D)
. Nydia Velázquez (D)
. Vito Fossella (R)
. Carolyn Maloney (D)
. Charles Rangel (D)
. José E. Serrano (D)
. Eliot Engel (D)
. Nita Lowey (D)
. Sue W. Kelly (R)
. John E. Sweeney (R)
. Michael McNulty (D)
. Maurice Hinchey (D)
. John M. McHugh (R)
. Sherwood Boehlert (R)
. James T. Walsh (R)
. Thomas M. Reynolds (R)
. Jack Quinn (R)
. Louise Slaughter (D)
. Amo Houghton (R)
North Carolina
. Frank Ballance (D), until June 9, 2004
G. K. Butterfield (D), from July 20, 2004
. Bob Etheridge (D)
. Walter B. Jones Jr. (R)
. David Price (D)
. Richard Burr (R)
. Howard Coble (R)
. Mike McIntyre (D)
. Robin Hayes (R)
. Sue Myrick (R)
. Cass Ballenger (R)
. Charles H. Taylor (R)
. Mel Watt (D)
. Brad Miller (D)
North Dakota
. Earl Pomeroy (D-NPL)
Ohio
. Steve Chabot (R)
. Rob Portman (R)
. Mike Turner (R)
. Mike Oxley (R)
. Paul Gillmor (R)
. Ted Strickland (D)
. Dave Hobson (R)
. John Boehner (R)
. Marcy Kaptur (D)
. Dennis Kucinich (D)
. Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D)
. Pat Tiberi (R)
. Sherrod Brown (D)
. Steve LaTourette (R)
. Deborah Pryce (R)
. Ralph Regula (R)
. Tim Ryan (D)
. Bob Ney (R)
Oklahoma
. John Sullivan (R)
. Brad Carson (D)
. Frank Lucas (R)
. Tom Cole (R)
. Ernest Istook (R)
Oregon
. David Wu (D)
. Greg Walden (R)
. Earl Blumenauer (D)
. Peter DeFazio (D)
. Darlene Hooley (D)
Pennsylvania
. Bob Brady (D)
. Chaka Fattah (D)
. Phil English (R)
. Melissa Hart (R)
. John Peterson (R)
. Jim Gerlach (R)
. Curt Weldon (R)
. Jim Greenwood (R)
. Bill Shuster (R)
. Don Sherwood (R)
. Paul Kanjorski (D)
. John Murtha (D)
. Joseph M. Hoeffel (D)
. Mike Doyle (D)
. Patrick Toomey (R)
. Joseph R. Pitts (R)
. Tim Holden (D)
. Tim Murphy (R)
. Todd Russell Platts (R)
Rhode Island
. Patrick J. Kennedy (D)
. James Langevin (D)
South Carolina
. Henry Brown (R)
. Joe Wilson (R)
. Gresham Barrett (R)
. Jim DeMint (R)
. John Spratt (D)
. Jim Clyburn (D)
South Dakota
. Bill Janklow (R), until January 20, 2004
Stephanie Herseth (D), from June 1, 2004
Tennessee
. Bill Jenkins (R)
. John Duncan (R)
. Zach Wamp (R)
. Lincoln Davis (D)
. Jim Cooper (D)
. Bart Gordon (D)
. Marsha Blackburn (R)
. John Tanner (D)
. Harold Ford Jr. (D)
Texas
. Max Sandlin (D)
. Jim Turner (D)
. Sam Johnson (R)
. Ralph Hall (D, then R)
. Jeb Hensarling (R)
. Joe Barton (R)
. John Culberson (R)
. Kevin Brady (R)
. Nick Lampson (D)
. Lloyd Doggett (D)
. Chet Edwards (D)
. Kay Granger (R)
. Mac Thornberry (R)
. Ron Paul (R)
. Rubén Hinojosa (D)
. Silvestre Reyes (D)
. Charles Stenholm (D)
. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D)
. Larry Combest (R), until May 31, 2003
Randy Neugebauer (R), from June 5, 2003
. Charlie Gonzalez (D)
. Lamar Smith (R)
. Tom DeLay (R)
. Henry Bonilla (R)
. Martin Frost (D)
. Chris Bell (D)
. Michael C. Burgess (R)
. Solomon P. Ortiz (D)
. Ciro Rodriguez (D)
. Gene Green (D)
. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D)
. John Carter (R)
. Pete Sessions (R)
Utah
. Rob Bishop (R)
. Jim Matheson (D)
. Chris Cannon (R)
Vermont
. Bernie Sanders (I)
Virginia
. Jo Ann Davis (R)
. Ed Schrock (R)
. Bobby Scott (D)
. Randy Forbes (R)
. Virgil Goode (R)
. Bob Goodlatte (R)
. Eric Cantor (R)
. Jim Moran (D)
. Rick Boucher (D)
. Frank Wolf (R)
. Tom Davis (R)
Washington
. Jay Inslee (D)
. Rick Larsen (D)
. Brian Baird (D)
. Doc Hastings (R)
. George Nethercutt (R)
. Norm Dicks (D)
. Jim McDermott (D)
. Jennifer Dunn (R)
. Adam Smith (D)
West Virginia
. Alan Mollohan (D)
. Shelley Moore Capito (R)
. Nick Rahall (D)
Wisconsin
. Paul Ryan (R)
. Tammy Baldwin (D)
. Ron Kind (D)
. Jerry Kleczka (D)
. Jim Sensenbrenner (R)
. Tom Petri (R)
. Dave Obey (D)
. Mark Green (R)
Wyoming
. Barbara Cubin (R)
Non-voting members
. Eni Faleomavaega (D)
. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D)
. Madeleine Bordallo (D)
. Aníbal Acevedo Vilá (Resident Commissioner) (D/PPD)
. Donna Christian-Christensen (D)
Changes in membership
Members who came and left during this Congress.
Senate
There were no changes in Senate membership during this Congress.
House of Representatives
|-
|
| | Ed Case (D)
| Member-elect Patsy Mink (D) died September 28, 2002, but was posthumously elected to the 108th Congress.Ed Case had won a special election for the seat in the 107th Congress November 30, 2002, but not for the 108th Congress.A special election was held January 4, 2003.
| | Ed Case (D)
| January 4, 2003
|-
|
| | Larry Combest (R)
| Resigned May 31, 2003, for personal reasons.A special election was held June 3, 2003.
| | Randy Neugebauer (R)
| June 5, 2003
|-
|
| | Ralph Hall (D)
| Changed political parties, with no interruption in his service.
| | Ralph Hall (R)
| January 5, 2004
|-
|
| | Ernie Fletcher (R)
| Resigned December 9, 2003, to become Governor of Kentucky.A special election was held February 17, 2004
| | Ben Chandler (D)
| February 17, 2004
|-
|
| | Bill Janklow (R)
| Resigned January 20, 2004, because of a December 2003 felony conviction in relation to a traffic accident.A special election was held June 1, 2004.
| | Stephanie Herseth (D)
| June 1, 2004
|-
|
| | Frank Ballance (D)
| Resigned June 9, 2004, as a result of health problems.A special election was held July 20, 2004
| | G. K. Butterfield (D)
| July 20, 2004
|-
|
| | (D)
| Switched parties August 9, 2004
| | (R)
| August 9, 2004
|-
|
| | Doug Bereuter (R)
| Resigned August 31, 2004, to head the Asia Foundation.
| colspan=2 | Remained vacant until the next Congress.
|-
|
| | Porter Goss (R)
| Resigned September 23, 2004, to head the CIA.
| colspan=2 | Remained vacant until the next Congress.
|-
|
| | Bob Matsui (D)
| Died January 1, 2005
| colspan=2 | Remained vacant until the next Congress.
|}
Committees
Senate
Aging (Special) (Larry E. Craig, Chair; John Breaux, Vice Chair)
Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry (Thad Cochran, Chair; Tom Harkin, Ranking Member)
Forestry, Conservation and Rural Revitalization (Mike Crapo, Chair; Blanche Lincoln, Ranking Member)
Marketing, Inspection and Product Promotion (Jim Talent, Chair; Max Baucus, Ranking Member)
Production and Price Competitiveness (Elizabeth Dole, Chair; Kent Conrad, Ranking Member)
Research, Nutrition and General Legislation (Peter Fitzgerald, Chair; Patrick Leahy, Ranking Member)
Appropriations (Ted Stevens, Chair; Robert C. Byrd, Ranking Member)
Agriculture, Rural Development and Related Agencies (Robert F. Bennett, Chair; Herb Kohl, Ranking Member)
Commerce, Justice, State and the Judiciary (Judd Gregg, Chair; Ernest F. Hollings, Ranking Member)
Defense (Ted Stevens, Chair; Daniel K. Inouye, Ranking Member)
District of Columbia (Mike DeWine, Chair; Mary Landrieu, Ranking Member)
Energy and Water Development (Pete Domenici, Chair; Harry Reid, Ranking Member)
Foreign Operations (Mitch McConnell, Chair; Patrick Leahy, Ranking Member)
Homeland Security (Thad Cochran, Chair; Robert C. Byrd, Ranking Member)
Interior (Conrad Burns, Chair; Byron Dorgan, Ranking Member)
Labor, Health, Human Services and Education (Arlen Specter, Chair; Tom Harkin, Ranking Member)
Legislative Branch (Ben Nighthorse Campbell, Chair; Richard J. Durbin, Ranking Member)
Military Construction (Kay Bailey Hutchison, Chair; Dianne Feinstein, Ranking Member)
Transportation/Treasury and General Government (Richard Shelby, Chair; Patty Murray, Ranking Member)
VA, HUD and Independent Agencies (Kit Bond, Chair; Barbara A. Mikulski, Ranking Member)
Armed Services (John Warner, Chair; Carl Levin, Ranking Member)
Airland (Jeff Sessions, Chair; Joe Lieberman, Ranking Member)
Emerging Threats and Capabilities (Pat Roberts, Chair; Jack Reed, Ranking Member)
Personnel (Saxby Chambliss, Chair; Ben Nelson, Ranking Member)
Readiness and Management Support (John Ensign, Chair; Daniel Akaka, Ranking Member)
Seapower (Jim Talent, Chair; Edward M. Kennedy, Ranking Member)
Strategic Forces (Wayne Allard, Chair; Bill Nelson, Ranking Member)
Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs (Richard Shelby, Chair; Paul Sarbanes, Ranking Member)
Economic Policy (Jim Bunning, Chair; Chuck Schumer, Ranking Member)
Financial Institutions (Robert F. Bennett, Chair; Tim Johnson, Ranking Member)
Housing and Transportation (Wayne Allard, Chair; Jack Reed, Ranking Member)
International Trade and Finance (Chuck Hagel, Chair; Evan Bayh, Ranking Member)
Securities and Investment (Mike Enzi, Chair; Chris Dodd, Ranking Member)
Budget (Don Nickles, Chair; Kent Conrad, Ranking Member)
Commerce, Science and Transportation (John McCain, Chair; Ernest F. Hollings, Ranking Member)
Aviation (Trent Lott, Chair; Ernest F. Hollings, Ranking Member)
Communications (Conrad Burns, Chair; Ernest F. Hollings, Ranking Member)
Competition, Foreign Commerce and Infrastructure (Gordon Smith, Chair; Byron L. Dorgan, Ranking Member)
Consumer Affairs and Product Safety (Peter Fitzgerald, Chair; Ron Wyden, Ranking Member)
Oceans, Fisheries and Coast Guard (Olympia J. Snowe, Chair; Ernest F. Hollings, Ranking Member)
Science, Technology and Space (Sam Brownback, Chair; John Breaux, Ranking Member)
Surface Transportation and Merchant Marine (Kay Bailey Hutchison, Chair; Daniel Inouye, Ranking Member)
Energy and Natural Resources (Pete Domenici, Chair; Jeff Bingaman, Ranking Member)
Energy (Lamar Alexander, Chair; Bob Graham, Ranking Member)
National Parks (Craig Thomas, Chair; Daniel Akaka, Ranking Member)
Public Lands and Forests (Larry E. Craig, Chair; Ron Wyden, Ranking Member)
Water and Power (Lisa Murkowski, Chair; Byron Dorgan, Ranking Member)
Environment and Public Works (Jim Inhofe, Chair; Jim Jeffords, Ranking Member)
Clean Air, Wetlands, Private Property and Nuclear Safety (George Voinovich, Chair; Tom Carper, Ranking Member)
Fisheries, Wildlife, and Drinking Water (Mike Crapo, Chair; Bob Graham, Ranking Member)
Superfund and Waste Management (Lincoln Chafee, Chair; Barbara Boxer, Ranking Member)
Transportation and Infrastructure (Kit Bond, Chair; Harry Reid, Ranking Member)
Ethics (Select) (George V. Voinovich, Chair; Harry Reid, Vice Chair)
Finance (Chuck Grassley, Chair; Max Baucus, Ranking Member)
Health Care (Jon Kyl, Chair; John D. Rockefeller IV, Ranking Member)
International Trade (Craig Thomas, Chair; Max Baucus, Ranking Member)
Long-Term Growth and Debt Reduction (Gordon H. Smith, Chair; Bob Graham, Ranking Member)
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African Affairs (Lamar Alexander, Chair; Russ Feingold, Ranking Member)
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Governmental Affairs (Susan M. Collins, Chair; Joe Lieberman, Ranking Member)
Oversight of Government Management, the Federal Workforce and the District of Columbia (George V. Voinovich, Chair; Richard Durbin, Ranking Member)
Financial Management, the Budget and International Security (Peter G. Fitzgerald, Chair; Daniel Akaka, Ranking Member)
Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (Norm Coleman, Chair; Carl Levin, Ranking Member)
Indian Affairs (Select) (Ben Nighthorse Campbell, Chair; Daniel K. Inouye, Vice Chair)
Intelligence (Select) (Pat Roberts, Chair; John D. Rockefeller IV, Vice Chair)
Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (Judd Gregg, Chair; Edward M. Kennedy, Ranking Member)
Children and Families (Lamar Alexander, Chair; Chris Dodd, Ranking Member)
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services (Mike DeWine, Chair; Edward Kennedy, Ranking Member)
Aging (Kit Bond, Chair; Barbara A. Mikulski, Ranking Member)
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Judiciary (Orrin G. Hatch, Chair; Patrick Leahy, Ranking Member)
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Crime, Corrections and Victims' Rights (Lindsey Graham, Chair; Joe Biden, Ranking Member)
Immigration, Border Security and Citizenship (Saxby Chambliss, Chair; Edward M. Kennedy, Ranking Member)
Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security (Jon Kyl, Chair; Dianne Feinstein, Ranking Member)
Rules and Administration (Trent Lott, Chair; Chris Dodd, Ranking Member)
Small Business and Entrepreneurship (Olympia J. Snowe, Chair; John Kerry, Ranking Member)
Veterans' Affairs (Arlen Specter, Chair; Bob Graham, Ranking Member)
House of Representatives
Agriculture (Bob Goodlatte, Chair; John Boehner, Vice Chair)
Conservation, Credit and Rural Development (Frank D. Lucas, Chair; Tom Osborne, Vice Chair)
Department Operations, Oversight, Nutrition and Forestry (Gil Gutknecht, Chair; Dennis Rehberg, Vice Chair)
General Farm Commodities and Risk Management (Jerry Moran, Chair; Nick Smith, Vice Chair)
Livestock and Horticulture (Robin Hayes, Chair; Doug Ose, Vice Chair)
Specialty Crops and Foreign Agriculture Programs (William L. Jenkins, Chair; Terry Everett, Vice Chair)
Appropriations (Bill Young, Chair; Dave Obey, Ranking Member)
Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration and Related Agencies (Henry Bonilla, Chair; Marcy Kaptur, Ranking Member)
Commerce, Justice, State and the Judiciary (Frank R. Wolf, Chair; Jose E. Serrano, Ranking Member)
Defense (Jerry Lewis, Chair; John Murtha, Ranking Member)
District of Columbia (Rodney P. Frelinghuysen, Chair; Chaka Fattah, Ranking Member)
Energy and Water Development (David L. Hobson, Chair; Pete Visclosky, Ranking Member)
Foreign Operations, Export Financing and Related Programs (Jim Kolbe, Chair; Nita Lowey, Ranking Member)
Homeland Security (Hal Rogers, Chair; Martin Olav Sabo, Ranking Member)
Interior (Charles H. Taylor, Chair; Norm Dicks, Ranking Member)
Legislative (Jack Kingston, Chair; Jim Moran, Ranking Member)
Military Construction (Joe Knollenberg, Chair; Chet Edwards, Ranking Member)
Transportation, Treasury and Independent Agencies (Ernest J. Istook Jr., Chair; John Olver, Ranking Member)
VA, HUD and Independent Agencies (James T. Walsh, Chair; Alan Mollohan, Ranking Member)
Armed Services (Duncan Hunter, Chair; Ike Skelton, Ranking Member)
Projection Forces (Roscoe G. Bartlett, Chair; Gene Taylor, Ranking Member)
Readiness (Joel Hefley, Chair; Solomon P. Ortiz, Ranking Member)
Strategic Forces (Terry Everett, Chair; Silvestre Reyes, Ranking Member)
Tactical Air and Land Forces (Curt Weldon, Chair; Neil Abercrombie, Ranking Member)
Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capabilities (Jim Saxton, Chair; Marty Meehan, Ranking Member)
Total Force (John M. McHugh, Chair; Vic Snyder, Ranking Member)
Budget (Jim Nussle, Chair; John M. Spratt Jr., Ranking Member)
Education and the Workforce (John Boehner, Chair; George Miller, Ranking Member)
Education Reform (Michael Castle, Chair; Lynn Woolsey, Ranking Member)
Employer-Employee Relations (Sam Johnson, Chair; Robert E. Andrews, Ranking Member)
Select Education (Peter Hoekstra, Chair; Ruben Hinojosa, Ranking Member)
Workforce Protections (Charlie Norwood, Chair; Major Owens, Ranking Member)
21st Century Competitiveness (Buck McKeon, Chair; Dale Kildee, Ranking Member)
Energy and Commerce (Billy Tauzin, Chair; Richard Burr, Vice Chair)
Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection (Cliff Stearns, Chair; John B. Shadegg, Vice Chair)
Energy and Air Quality (Joe Barton, Chair; John Shimkus, Vice Chair)
Environment and Hazardous Materials (Paul E. Gillmor, Chair; Vito Fossella, Vice Chair)
Health (Michael Bilirakis, Chair; Charlie Norwood, Vice Chair)
Oversight and Investigations (James C. Greenwood, Chair; Greg Walden, Vice Chair)
Telecommunications and the Internet (Fred Upton, Chair; Cliff Stearns, Vice Chair)
Financial Services (Mike Oxley, Chair; Barney Frank, Ranking Member)
Capital Markets, Insurance and Government-Sponsored Enterprises (Richard H. Baker, Chair; Paul Kanjorski, Ranking Member)
Domestic and International Monetary Policy, Trade and Technology (Peter T. King, Chair; Carolyn Maloney, Ranking Member)
Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit (Spencer Bachus, Chair; Bernie Sanders, Ranking Member)
Housing and Community Opportunity (Bob Ney, Chair; Maxine Waters, Ranking Member)
Oversight and Investigations (Sue W. Kelly, Chair; Luis Guiterrez, Ranking Member)
Government Reform (Thomas Davis, Chair; Henry Waxman, Ranking Member)
Civil Service and Agency Organization (Jo Ann Davis, Chair; Danny K. Davis, Ranking Member)
Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources (Mark Souder, Chair; Elijah E. Cummings, Ranking Member)
Energy Policy, Natural Resources and Regulatory Affairs (Doug Ose, Chair; John Tierney, Ranking Member)
Government Efficiency and Financial Management (Todd R. Platts, Chair; Edolphus Towns, Ranking Member)
Human Rights and Wellness (Dan Burton, Chair; Diane Watson, Ranking Member)
National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations (Christopher Shays, Chair; Dennis J. Kucinich, Ranking Member)
Technology, Information Policy, Intergovernmental Relations and the Census (Adam Putnam, Chair; William Lacy Clay, Ranking Member)
House Administration (Bob Ney, Chair; John B. Larson, Ranking Member)
International Relations (Henry J. Hyde, Chair; Tom Lantos, Ranking Member)
Africa (Ed Royce, Chair; Donald Payne, Ranking Member)
Asia and the Pacific (Jim Leach, Chair; Eni Faleomavaega, Ranking Member)
Europe (Doug Bereuter, Chair; Robert Wexler, Ranking Member)
International Terrorism, Nonproliferation and Human Rights (Elton Gallegly, Chair; Brad Sherman, Ranking Member)
The Middle East and Central Asia (Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Chair; Gary Ackerman, Ranking Member)
The Western Hemisphere (Cass Ballenger, Chair; Robert Menendez, Ranking Member)
Judiciary (Jim Sensenbrenner, Chair; John Conyers, Ranking Member)
Commercial and Administrative Law (Chris Cannon, Chair; Mel Watt, Ranking Member)
The Constitution (Steve Chabot, Chair; Jerrold Nadler, Ranking Member)
Courts, The Internet and Intellectual Property (Lamar S. Smith, Chair; Howard Berman, Ranking Member)
Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security (Howard Coble, Chair; Bobby Scott, Ranking Member)
Immigration, Border Security and Claims (John Hostettler, Chair; Sheila Jackson Lee, Ranking Member)
Resources (Richard Pombo, Chair; Jim Gibbons, Vice Chair)
Energy and Mineral Resources (Barbara Cubin, Chair; Ron Kind, Ranking Member)
Fisheries Conservation, Wildlife and Oceans (Wayne T. Gilchrest, Chair; Frank Pallone Jr., Ranking Member)
Forests and Forest Health (Scott McInnis, Chair; Jay Inslee, Ranking Member)
National Parks, Recreation and Public Lands (George P. Radanovich, Chair; Donna Christian-Christensen, Ranking Member)
Water and Power (Ken Calvert, Chair; Grace Napolitano, Ranking Member)
Rules (David Dreier, Chair; Porter Goss, Vice Chair)
The Legislative Process (Deborah Pryce, Chair; Lincoln Diaz-Balart, Vice Chair)
Technology and the House (John Linder, Chair; Sue W. Myrick, Vice Chair)
Science (Sherwood Boehlert, Chair; Ralph M. Hall, Ranking Member)
Energy (Judy Biggert, Chair; Nick Lampson, Ranking Member)
Environment, Technology and Standards (Vernon Ehlers, Chair; Mark Udall, Ranking Member)
Research (Nick Smith, Chair; Eddie Bernice Johnson, Ranking Member)
Space and Aeronautics (Dana Rohrabacher, Chair; Bart Gordon, Ranking Member)
Small Business (Donald A. Manzullo, Chair; Nydia Velazquez, Ranking Member)
Regulatory Reform and Oversight (Edward L. Schrock, Chair; Charles A. Gonzalez, Ranking Member)
Rural Enterprises, Agriculture and Technology (Sam Graves, Chair; Frank Ballance, Ranking Member)
Tax, Finance and Exports (Patrick J. Toomey, Chair; Juanita Millender-McDonald, Ranking Member)
Workforce, Empowerment and Government Programs (W. Todd Akin, Chair; Tom Udall, Ranking Member)
Standards of Official Conduct (Joel Hefley, Chair; Alan B. Mollohan, Ranking Member)
Transportation and Infrastructure (Don Young, Chair; Jim Oberstar, Ranking Member)
Aviation (John Mica, Chair; Peter A. DeFazio, Ranking Member)
Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation (Frank A. LoBiondo, Chair; Bob Filner, Ranking Member)
Economic Development, Public Buildings and Emergency Management (Steve LaTourette, Chair; Eleanor Holmes Norton, Ranking Member)
Highways, Transit and Pipelines (Tom Petri, Chair; Bill Lipinski, Ranking Member)
Railroads (Jack Quinn, Chair; Corrine Brown, Ranking Member)
Water Resources and Environment (John J. Duncan Jr., Chair; Jerry F. Costello, Ranking Member)
Veterans' Affairs (Chris Smith, Chair; Lane Evans, Ranking Member)
Benefits (Henry E. Brown Jr., Chair; Michael Michaud, Ranking Member)
Health (Rob Simmons, Chair; Ciro Rodriguez, Ranking Member)
Oversight and Investigations (Steve Buyer, Chair; Darlene Hooley, Ranking Member)
Ways and Means (Bill Thomas, Chair; Charles Rangel, Ranking Member)
Health (Nancy Johnson, Chair; Pete Stark, Ranking Member)
Human Resources (Wally Herger, Chair; Ben Cardin, Ranking Member)
Oversight (Amo Houghton, Chair; Earl Pomeroy, Ranking Member)
Select Revenue Measures (Jim McCrery, Chair; Michael McNulty, Ranking Member)
Social Security (E. Clay Shaw Jr., Chair; Bob Matsui, Ranking Member)
Trade (Phil Crane, Chair; Sander Levin, Ranking Member)
Whole
Joint committees
Economic (Sen. Robert F. Bennett, Chair; Rep. Jim Saxton, Vice Chair)
Taxation (Rep. Bill Thomas, Chair; Sen. Chuck Grassley, Vice Chair)
The Library (Sen. Ted Stevens, Chair; Rep. Vernon J. Ehlers, Vice Chair)
Printing (Rep. Bob Ney, Chair; Sen. Saxby Chambliss, Vice Chair)
Caucuses
Employees
Legislative branch agency directors
Architect of the Capitol: Alan M. Hantman
Attending Physician of the United States Congress: John F. Eisold
Comptroller General of the United States: David M. Walker
Director of the Congressional Budget Office: Barry B. Anderson, until February 5, 2003
Douglas Holtz-Eakin, from February 5, 2003
Librarian of Congress: James H. Billington
Public Printer of the United States: Bruce James
Senate
Chaplain: Lloyd John Ogilvie (Presbyterian), until March 15, 2003
Barry C. Black (Seventh-day Adventist), from July 7, 2003
Curator: Diane K. Skvarla
Historian: Richard A. Baker
Parliamentarian: Alan S. Frumin
Secretary: Emily J. Reynolds
Librarian: Greg Harness
Secretary for the Majority: David J. Schiappa
Secretary for the Minority: Martin P. Paone
Sergeant at Arms: Alfonso E. Lenhardt, until March 17, 2003
William H. Pickle, from March 17, 2003
House of Representatives
Employees include:
Chaplain: Daniel P. Coughlin (Roman Catholic)
Chief Administrative Officer: James M. Eagen III
Clerk: Jeff Trandahl
Inspector General: Steven McNamara
Parliamentarian: Charles W. Johnson III, until May 31, 2004
John V. Sullivan, from May 31, 2004
Reading Clerks: Mary Kevin Niland (Democratic); Paul Hays (Republican)
Sergeant at Arms: Wilson Livingood
See also
Elections
2002 United States elections (elections leading to this Congress)
2002 United States Senate elections
2002 United States House of Representatives elections
2004 United States elections (elections during this Congress, leading to the next Congress)
2004 United States presidential election
2004 United States Senate elections
2004 United States House of Representatives elections
Membership lists
List of new members of the 108th United States Congress
Notes
References
External links
Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress
Congress.gov
History, Art and Archives from the United States House of Representatives
Statistics & Lists from the United States Senate
United States 108th Congress Web Archive from the U.S. Library of Congress
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devin%20Nunes
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Devin Nunes
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Devin Gerald Nunes (; born October 1, 1973) is an American businessman and politician who is chief executive officer of the Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG). Before resigning from the House of Representatives and joining TMTG, Nunes was first the U.S. representative for and then from 2003 to 2022.
A member of the Republican Party, Nunes was the chair of the House Intelligence Committee from 2015 to 2019. He was also a member of President Donald Trump's transition team. Nunes's former district, numbered as the 21st from 2003 to 2013 and as the 22nd after redistricting, was in the San Joaquin Valley and included most of western Tulare County and much of eastern Fresno County.
In March 2017, the U.S. House intelligence committee, which Nunes chaired at the time, launched an investigation into possible Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. In February 2018, Nunes publicly released a four-page memorandum alleging an FBI conspiracy against Trump. Nunes subsequently began an investigation of the FBI and the U.S. Justice Department for allegedly abusing their powers in an attempt to hurt Trump. In January 2021, Trump awarded Nunes the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Early life, education, and early career
Nunes was born on October 1, 1973, the older of two sons of Antonio L. "Anthony" Nunes Jr. and Toni Diane Nunes (née Enas). His grandfather founded Nunes & Sons, a prominent dairy operation in Tulare County. His family operated their farm in California until 2006, when they sold the property and purchased a dairy in Sibley, Iowa.
Nunes is of three-quarters Portuguese descent, with ancestors emigrating from the Azores to California. He has one younger brother, Anthony III. In 2009, Nunes wrote in The Wall Street Journal that he became an entrepreneur at age 14 when he bought seven head of young cattle, learning quickly how to profit from his investment.
After receiving his Associate of Arts degree from the College of the Sequoias in 1993, Nunes graduated from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo with a bachelor's degree in agricultural business in 1995, and a master's degree in agriculture in 1996. After finishing school, Nunes returned to farming.
In 1996, at age 23, Nunes was elected to the College of the Sequoias Board, making him one of California's youngest community college trustees in state history. He served on the board until 2002.
In 2001, President George W. Bush appointed Nunes to serve as California State Director for the United States Department of Agriculture's Rural Development section.
U.S. Congress
Elections
In 1998, Nunes entered the "top two" primary race for California's 20th congressional district seat held by Democrat Cal Dooley. He finished in third place.
In 2002, Nunes ran for the Republican nomination in the 21st congressional district, a new district created by reapportionment after the 2000 United States census. His principal opponents in the crowded seven-way primary were former Fresno mayor Jim Patterson and state Assemblyman Mike Briggs. Nunes was the only major candidate from Tulare County; Patterson and Briggs were both from Fresno. This was critical, as 58% of the district's population was in Tulare County.
Patterson and Briggs split the vote in Fresno County, allowing Nunes to win by a four-point margin over Patterson, his nearest competitor. Nunes won 46.5% of the vote in Tulare County and 28.1% of the vote in Fresno County. Nunes was also helped by a strong showing in the rural part of the district. He was endorsed by the California Farm Bureau and The Fresno Bee. The district was solidly Republican, and Nunes coasted to victory in November 2002. He was 29 years old.
Nunes faced token Democratic opposition in 2004, 2006, and 2008. He ran unopposed in the 2010 general election.
After the 2010 census, Nunes's district was renumbered the 22nd. It lost most of eastern Tulare County to the neighboring 23rd District, and now has a small plurality of Hispanic voters. Despite these changes, on paper it was no less Republican than its predecessor. Nunes was reelected with 62% of the vote in 2012, 72% in 2014, and 68% in 2016.
During the 2014 election cycle Nunes received approximately $1.4million in political action committee (PAC) contributions. During the 2016 election cycle, he received approximately $1.6million in campaign contributions from PACs.
In 2018, Nunes faced Democratic nominee Andrew Janz, a Fresno County prosecutor. Nunes defeated Janz with 53% of the vote to Janz's 47%, the closest race of Nunes's career.
In 2020, Nunes received 56.5% of the vote in the primary. Nunes defeated Phil Arballo in the general election on November 3, 2020.
Committees and caucuses
In 2015, Nunes became the Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
As co-chair of the U.S.–Mexico Friendship Caucus, he and Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer met with President Felipe Calderón of Mexico in April 2012.
Nunes was a member of the House Baltic Caucus and the U.S.-Japan Caucus.
112th Congress
House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence
Committee on Ways and Means
Subcommittee on Trade
Subcommittee on Health
114th and 115th Congress
House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (chair)
Committee on Ways and Means
116th and 117th Congress
House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (Ranking Member)
Committee on Ways and Means
Resignation
In December 2021, Nunes resigned from the House, effective January 1, 2022, in order to join the Trump Media & Technology Group as chief executive officer.
Political positions
Former Trump campaign CEO and chief strategist Steve Bannon has called Nunes Trump's second-strongest ally in Congress.
Los Angeles Times described him as "one of Trump's most ardent and outlandish defenders in Congress" who "parroted the president's conspiracy theories" and used his position "to try to undermine [the] investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election."
During the presidency of Donald Trump, Nunes voted in line with the president's stated position 96.2% of the time. As of December 2021, Nunes had voted in line with Joe Biden's stated position 11% of the time.
Energy
On July 28, 2010, Nunes introduced H.R. 5899, "A Roadmap for America's Energy Future", which would have accelerated the exploration and production of fossil fuel, supported the rapid development of market-based alternative energy supplies, and expanded the number of nuclear reactors from 104 to 300 over the next thirty years. Kimberley Strassel of The Wall Street Journal wrote, "It's a bill designed to produce energy, not restrict it" with "no freebies", and "offers a competitive twist to government support of renewable energy."
Environment
Nunes wrote in his book Restoring the Republic that environmental lobbyists were "followers of neo-Marxist, socialist, Maoist or Communist ideals."
In February 2014, during a drought in California, Nunes rejected any link to global warming, claiming "Global warming is nonsense." He has said it was a "man-made drought" due to water restrictions from the Endangered Species Act of 1973 and other environmental regulations that have seen water allocations decline dramatically even in non-drought years.
He criticized the federal government for shutting off portions of California's system of water irrigation and storage and diverting water into a program for freshwater salmon and the delta smelt. Nunes co-sponsored the Sacramento-San Joaquin Valley Emergency Water Delivery Act to stop a project designed to restore a dried-up section of the San Joaquin River. He also co-sponsored the California Emergency Drought Relief Act. The bills passed the House of Representatives in February 2014 and December 2014 respectively, but were not voted on by the Senate.
Fiscal policy
On January 27, 2010, Nunes co-sponsored H.R. 4529, Roadmap for America's Future Act of 2010, the Republican Party's budget proposal.
On December 2, 2010, Nunes introduced H.R. 6484, the Public Employee Pension Transparency Act, which would "provide for reporting and disclosure by State and local public employee retirement pension plans," but it never received a vote.
Nunes has long been a proponent of a consumption tax model and has been influenced by David Bradford. In 2016, he introduced the American Business Competitiveness Act (H.R. 4377), known as the ABC Act, a "cash-flow tax plan" featuring full expensing and a reduction of the highest rate for federal corporate income tax rate to 25%. Nunes's proposal was influential among House Republicans, and had similarities to the House Republican tax plan introduced by Speaker Paul Ryan and Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady in June 2016. Conservative economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin said Nunes had "a tremendous impact on the debate" for a non-chairman.
In April 2016, Nunes voted for the Preventing IRS Abuse and Protecting Free Speech Act, a bill that would prevent the IRS from accessing the names of donors to nonprofit organizations. Critics of the bill, which was promoted by the Koch brothers, say IRS access to donor information is important for ensuring foreign funds do not impact U.S. elections.
Nunes voted in support of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.
Health care
In 2009, Nunes co-authored the "Patients' Choice Act" with Paul Ryan (R-WI) in the House, and Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Richard Burr (R-NC) in the Senate. The bill would have established a system of state health insurance exchanges and amended the Internal Revenue Code to allow a refundable tax credit for qualified health care insurance coverage. It also proposed to absorb Medicaid programs into the exchange system. The Patients' Choice Act was incorporated into the "Roadmap for America's Future Act of 2010".
Nunes opposes the Affordable Care Act and has said it cannot be fixed. In 2017 he voted to repeal it.
Immigration and refugees
Nunes supported President Trump's 2017 executive order imposing a temporary ban on entry into the United States by citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries, claiming it was "a common-sense security measure to prevent terror attacks on the homeland".
Intelligence Committee
Nunes opposed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, an international agreement that the U.S. and other major world powers negotiated with Iran, under which Iran was granted partial sanctions relief in exchange for limits on and monitoring of its nuclear activities.
As House Intelligence Committee chairman, Nunes oversaw the Republican-controlled committee's two-year-long investigation into the U.S. response to the 2012 Benghazi attack. The committee's final report found no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or any other Obama administration officials, and concluded that the response of CIA and U.S. military to the attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound was correct. The committee's report debunked "a series of persistent allegations hinting at dark conspiracies" about the attack, determining that "there was no intelligence failure, no delay in sending a CIA rescue team, no missed opportunity for a military rescue, and no evidence the CIA was covertly shipping arms from Libya to Syria", but found "that the State Department facility where [Christopher] Stevens and [Sean] Smith were killed was not well-protected, and that State Department security agents knew they could not defend it from a well-armed attack".
Paul Ryan vacated the chairmanship of the Ways and Means Committee when he replaced John Boehner as Speaker of the House of Representatives. Ryan asked Nunes to stay on the Intelligence Committee, and Nunes complied.
Marijuana policy
Nunes has a "D" rating from the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) for his voting history on cannabis-related causes.
Surveillance
In January 2019, Congress passed a bill Nunes supported, which extends Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) until 2023, and Trump signed it into law that month. FISA Section 702 allows the National Security Agency to conduct searches of foreigners' communications without a warrant. The process incidentally collects information from Americans. Nunes lauded the bill's passing: "The House of Representatives has taken a big step to ensure the continuation of one of the Intelligence Community's most vital tools for tracking foreign terrorists".
Armenia–Azerbaijan conflict
Nunes accused Turkey, a NATO member, of inciting the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh. On October 1, 2020, he co-signed a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that condemned Azerbaijan's offensive operations against Nagorno-Karabakh, denounced Turkey's role in the conflict and called for an immediate ceasefire.
Transportation
California State Route 99 is a highway running north–south that branches from Interstate 5 at the community of Wheeler Ridge in Kern County and continues northward through the Central Valley until it connects with Interstate 5 again at Red Bluff in Tehama County. In 2005 Nunes introduced H.R. 99, which designated State Route 99 as a congressional High Priority Corridor. The bill also provided federal authorization for Highway 99 to become part of the Interstate Highway System. On February 17, 2011, Nunes introduced H.R. 761, the "San Joaquin Valley Transportation Enhancement Act", which would give the State of California the option to redirect federal high-speed rail funds to finance improvements to Highway 99. H.R. 761 was cosponsored by Jeff Denham (R-CA) and House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-CA).
U.S. base in Portugal
In 2015, Nunes clashed with the Pentagon over a U.S. base in the Azores, Portugal. He proposed relocating Africa Command and European Command intelligence centers to the Azores, contrary to plans by Pentagon and NATO to create a larger intelligence "fusion" facility in the United Kingdom, maintaining that this would save money because of the Azores' lower living and construction costs. The Pentagon responded by stating "Moving to Lajes Field is very expensive and living is expensive as well." In sum, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found inaccuracies in the information provided by the Department of Defense to Congress, according to its report.
COVID-19 pandemic
On March 15, 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Nunes encouraged families who were "healthy" to "go out and go to a local restaurant, likely you can get in easy." This advice contradicted that of the CDC, and WHO, as well as that of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the federal government's leading expert on infectious diseases, who advised people to stay at home if they could. Later, Nunes walked back his comments and claimed that he had encouraged people to use drive-throughs. On March 31, he described California's decision to close schools to halt the spread of coronavirus as "way overkill". Nunes said he wanted people to return to work in one to two weeks.
On March 17, 2020, Nunes told Laura Ingraham on Fox News that the media was exaggerating the threat of COVID-19. He predicted that the crisis would be over by Easter. "There's a good chance we can get through this in the next couple of weeks and for sure by Easter, because we will have a handle on who's getting sick and how to treat them," he said.
Legal issues
Comments about other politicians
During the debate over the Affordable Health Care Act in the House of Representatives, Nunes said of then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, "For most of the 20th century people fled the ghost of communist dictators and now you are bringing the ghosts back into this chamber." He has also had a long-running dispute with another San Francisco Bay-area Democrat, Senator Dianne Feinstein, over California water policy and other issues, even running a series of advertisements against her in California.
Nunes's criticisms have not been limited to liberals or the Obama administration. During the October 2013 budget standoff, Nunes called certain members of his own Republican Conference who favored a government shutdown "lemmings with suicide vests". "It's kind of an insult to lemmings to call them lemmings" because of their tactics, he said.
In May 2014, Nunes came under fire when he charged that Michigan Congressman and (then) fellow Republican Justin Amash was "al-Qaeda's best friend in Congress" because of Amash's supposed voting record on National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance. At the time, Amash had voted in opposition to a Nunes water bill for California "on constitutional grounds".
Role in Trump–Russia investigation
In February 2017, Nunes, who served on the Trump transition team, was the first leading House Republican to deny that the intelligence community had evidence of contact between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives. He rejected repeated calls for an investigation by a select committee, saying the House should not engage in a "witch hunt" and that "at this point, there's nothing there". Nunes also rejected calls that he request President Trump's tax returns. At a White House communications aide's request, Nunes spoke to a reporter for The Wall Street Journal to challenge a story about the Trump campaign's connections to Russia.
When Trump's national security adviser Michael Flynn resigned after it was revealed that he had allegedly misled Vice President Mike Pence about his communication with Russian officials, Nunes said he would not seek to investigate Flynn's ties to Russia: "From everything that I can see, his conversations with the Russian ambassador—he was doing this country a favor, and he should be thanked for it."
On March 22, 2017, during the House Intelligence Committee's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, Nunes held a press conference to announce that he had received information that the communications of "some members of Trump's transition team, including potentially the president himself" had been "incidentally collected" by the intelligence community and "widely disseminated" throughout the intelligence community. He added that it was legal FISA surveillance, and unrelated to Russia. It was later revealed that it involved Russia and the Trump transition team. The surveillance was of multiple phone conversations between Michael Flynn, a member of the transition team, and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, which occurred after Flynn sought advice from the Trump transition team at Mar-a-Lago, where they discussed what Flynn should tell Kislyak "about the administration's stance on the sanctions. [Kislyak had contacted Flynn the day before]... members of the team at the president's Florida estate agree that they do not want Russia to escalate the diplomatic crisis. After the initial call, Flynn [spoke] with Kislyak multiple times by phone and urge[d] him not to exacerbate the situation. U.S. intelligence officials intercept[ed] the calls as part of their routine surveillance of foreign dignitaries."
Nunes had met his source for the information one day earlier at the White House grounds, with a spokesman for Nunes claiming this provided "a secure location" to view the material. Although Nunes had characterized his intelligence sources as whistle-blowers whose identities he had to protect, The New York Times reported that they were actually White House officials Ezra Cohen-Watnick and Michael Ellis, while The Washington Post reported that along with Cohen-Watnick and Ellis, a third man, National Security Council lawyer John Eisenberg, was involved.
Nunes was widely criticized for sharing this information with the media and the president before briefing his colleagues on the committee. According to Nunes, the intercepted communications came in November, December and January—after Trump won the election but before he was sworn in as president. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the committee, and House Democratic leadership called on Nunes to recuse himself from the investigation. He also received criticism from Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham. The latter compared Nunes's actions to those of the comically incompetent fictional character Inspector Clouseau. Nunes was criticized by Democrats and some Republicans for sharing information on an investigation of the Trump campaign with the administration without communicating it to Schiff, his Democratic Intelligence Committee counterpart.
In late March 2017, Nunes canceled a public hearing in which former acting Attorney General Sally Yates, former National Security Agency Director James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan were to testify, saying he wanted to hear FBI Director James Comey and National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers in a classified setting first. Democrats criticized Nunes's decision and said he was trying to protect the White House from damaging revelations.
On April 6, 2017, Nunes temporarily stepped aside from leading the Russia investigation while the Office of Congressional Ethics investigated whether he had "made unauthorized disclosures of classified information, in violation of House Rules, law, regulations, or other standards of conduct" in his March press conference. He called the charges "entirely false and politically motivated". On April 12, 2017, sources from both the Republican and the Democratic parties said the original documents Nunes cited did not support Trump's claims that the Obama administration acted illegally or unusually.
In May 2017, Nunes unilaterally issued three subpoenas seeking documents about former Obama administration officials who requested the unmasking of Trump aides, which led to renewed accusations of colluding with the White House to undercut the Russia probe.
According to Politico, in July 2017 an aide to Nunes secretly sent a pair of Republican staffers to London to contact Christopher Steele. The Los Angeles Times editorial board wrote that Nunes's involvement in the investigation was "threatening the credibility of the probe".
In December 2017, the United States House Committee on Ethics closed its investigation into improper disclosure of classified information by Nunes; the co-chairs of the Committee stated: "The Committee does not determine whether information is or is not classified. In the course of this investigation, the Committee sought the analysis of Representative Nunes's statements by classification experts in the intelligence community. Based solely on the conclusion of these classification experts that the information Representative Nunes disclosed was not classified, the Committee will take no further action and considers this matter closed." In January 2018, The Atlantic cited three congressional sources describing that the Ethics Committee was never able to obtain the classified information it was investigating regarding Nunes's case. In February 2018, Nunes released a four-page memorandum alleging that the FBI's 2016 surveillance of Carter Page, a former member of the Trump campaign, was motivated by bias against Trump. Trump said the Nunes memo vindicated him.
In August 2018, Nunes traveled to London in an attempt to meet with the heads of MI5, MI6, and GCHQ for information about Steele, but was rebuffed by the three agencies.
Role in Trump impeachment inquiry
As the top Republican ("Ranking Member") on the House Intelligence Committee, Nunes was a key player in the Trump impeachment inquiry. During the November 2019 public hearings, he delivered the opening statement for the GOP minority. Nunes used most of the allotted Republican time for questioning himself instead of deferring to the Minority Counsel. Nunes has tried to identify the whistle-blower whose complaint played a part in launching the impeachment inquiry. Further, during the hearings, Nunes repeatedly claimed that Ukraine had attempted to influence the 2016 United States presidential election, one of the conspiracy theories related to the Trump–Ukraine scandal.
In November 2019, Rudy Giuliani's associate Lev Parnas said he had helped Nunes arrange meetings with Ukrainian officials in efforts to procure politically embarrassing "dirt" on former Vice President Joe Biden. Parnas said he would be willing to testify to Congress about his own role as well as Nunes's in the events, which included meeting with disgraced former Ukrainian prosecutor-general Viktor Shokin.
Parnas's attorney Joseph A. Bondy has said that Nunes and his staffer former U.S. Army colonel Derek Harvey met with Parnas several times for updates on claims against Biden and the CrowdStrike/2016 U.S. election conspiracy theory. Parnas's attorney said, "Mr. Parnas learned through Nunes's investigator, Derek Harvey, that the congressman had sequenced this trip to occur after the mid-term elections yet before Congress' return to session, so that Nunes would not have to disclose the trip details to his Democrat colleagues in Congress."
When asked by CNN to comment on his trips overseas to solicit dirt on Biden, Nunes responded, "I don't talk to you in this lifetime or the next lifetime. At any time. On any question."
On November 24, 2019, Nunes alleged in an interview with Fox News that CNN and the Daily Beast had committed crimes reporting on his trips to Europe and that he would pursue legal action against the news organizations for reporting the stories. In the interview, he did not answer the host Maria Bartiromo's question about whether he had met with disgraced former Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin in 2018, saying he would be detailing all the facts in federal court filings.
That same day, CNBC reported that Lev Parnas was willing to testify under oath in Congress that Nunes's aides called off a 2019 trip to Ukraine to dig up more dirt on Joe Biden when they realized he would have to report the trip to Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff. CNBC reported that Parnas's allegations "potentially implicate Nunes and his committee staff in the same events the committee is currently investigating. Specifically, the monthslong effort by Trump, Giuliani and others to get Ukrainian officials to help them dig up dirt on Biden, and to validate far-right conspiracies about Ukraine and the 2016 election."
Nunes, who co-sponsored the "Discouraging Frivolous Lawsuits Act", has a long history of filing frivolous lawsuits. On December 4, 2019, Nunes sued CNN for alleged defamation in Nunes v. CNN, seeking $435,350,000 in damages for their reporting of Parnas's lawyer's statement. That month, an attorney for Nunes sent a letter to congressman Ted Lieu threatening to sue over Lieu's comments about Nunes's relationship with Parnas. In response, Lieu wrote, "I welcome any lawsuit from your client and look forward to taking discovery of Congressman Nunes. Or, you can take your letter and shove it." Federal judge Laura Taylor Swain dismissed Nunes's suit against CNN on February 19, 2021.
On December 3, 2019, the report from the House Intelligence Committee regarding the impeachment inquiry documented with call records new information about Rudy Giuliani's interactions with the White House, his associates and Nunes. The frequent contact of Giuliani and Lev Parnas, who has been indicted for criminal activity, with Nunes are regarded as "highly unusual and likely to renew calls from Democrats for Mr. Nunes to face an ethics inquiry." The report detailed call records acquired by subpoenas from AT&T that revealed Nunes to be in contact with Giuliani on April 10, and with Giuliani and Parnas on April 12, described in the report as the same days as other significant actions in the scandal, including phone calls between Giuliani and the White House and the Office of Management and Budget as well as a retainer agreement between Trump-affiliated lawyers diGenova & Toensing and former Ukrainian officials Yuriy Lutsenko and Konstiantyn Kulyk, "two of the primary sources" for articles in The Hill that promoted the conspiracy theory of Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Nunes asserted it was "very unlikely" he had spoken with Parnas, adding, "I don't really recall that name."
After the report was released, CNN analysts suggested the new evidence raises questions about whether Nunes was an investigator or a participant in the Trump–Ukraine scandal.
On January 14, 2020, the House Intelligence Committee released text messages Parnas had provided investigators. Two days later, Nunes acknowledged he had spoken to Parnas, after previously suggesting he had not. The next day, the House Judiciary Committee released text messages between Nunes's top aide Derek Harvey and Parnas in which they discussed arranging meetings for Harvey with Ukrainian officials.
Defamation lawsuits filed by Nunes
Nunes has filed multiple lawsuits characterized as Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation ("SLAPP"). Experts have described the lawsuits as "unlikely to succeed" and "virtually free of merit". Between 2019 and 2023, Nunes has filed at least 11 defamation suits; many have been dismissed, others have been voluntarily dropped by Nunes.
Twitter, Liz Mair, Devin Nunes's Mom, Devin Nunes's Cow
On March 18, 2019, Nunes filed defamation lawsuits against Twitter, Elizabeth "Liz" Mair, Mair Strategies LLC, and the Twitter accounts, "Devin Nunes's Mom" (@DevinNunesMom) and "Devin Nunes's Cow" (@DevinCow), seeking $250million in damages. As the story went viral, the popularity of the defendants' accounts soared, gaining more followers than Nunes's own account. The San Francisco Chronicle cited this as an example of the Streisand Effect. Kathryn Watson of CBS News said the filing was "particularly interesting" because in 2018 Nunes supported the "Discouraging Frivolous Lawsuits Act". A filing to quash a subpoena argued that "no reasonable person would believe that Devin Nunes's cow actually has a Twitter account" as cows "do not have the intelligence, language, or opposable digits needed to operate a Twitter account". In June 2020, a judge ruled that Twitter was immune from Nunes's suit because of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. In August 2021, the same judge dismissed the second of two suits Nunes had filed against Mair. Status: suit dismissed against Twitter and Mair - status of the suit against Devin Nunes's Cow and Devin Nunes's Mom is unclear.
McClatchy
In April 2019, Nunes filed a separate $150million defamation lawsuit against the McClatchy Company and others. In May 2018, The Fresno Bee, a local paper owned by McClatchy, reported that in 2016 a former server of Alpha Omega Winery sued the winery, which is partly owned by Nunes. The server alleged that in 2015 some investors of the company held a yacht party that involved cocaine and prostitution. The report said it was "unclear" whether Nunes "was aware of the lawsuit" or involved in the fund-raising event at the yacht. He did not attend the party, nor was he mentioned in the lawsuit. Nunes said the article was politically motivated and improperly linked him to the fund-raiser. A McClatchy spokesperson defended the report and said Nunes's claim was without merit. Some legal experts have speculated that even though both Nunes and McClatchy are based in California, he filed the lawsuit in Virginia because California has enacted stricter rules against strategic defamation lawsuits than Virginia. Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute said the report did not say or imply that Nunes was at the party. According to her, his intention was to harm the Bee and similar lawsuits are designed to send a chilling effect on journalists. Nunes withdrew the suit in 2020. Status: Withdrawn.
Bixman et. al.
In August 2019, Nunes sued a group of activists who had tried to force Nunes to stop using "farmer" as his occupation on the 2018 ballot. The activists had argued that Nunes's parents had long ago moved the family dairy farm to Iowa and Nunes himself had no apparent farming connection left other than a small investment in a friend's Napa valley winery. Status: Withdrawn.
Ryan Lizza and Hearst Magazines
In September 2019, Nunes sued political journalist Ryan Lizza and Hearst Magazines, the publisher of Esquire, alleging that a 2018 Esquire story had damaged his reputation. Lizza wrote that Nunes's family had "secretly" moved its dairy operation from California to Iowa in 2007. Nunes did not specifically contest the veracity of Lizza's reporting, but claimed he "fabricated a 'secret' where none existed". By the time Esquire published the piece, The Bee had already covered the move to Iowa. Nunes alleged in the suit that "Lizza stalked Plaintiff's grammar-school aged nieces, behaved like a sex offender or pedophile cruising the local neighborhood for victims, frightened a family member to tears, and exploited a grieving mother." United States District Judge C. J. Williams, a Trump appointee, dismissed this suit in its entirety on August 5, 2020. On September 15, 2021, the Eighth Circuit Court upheld the dismissal of some counts but remanded the case back to the district court. On April 25, 2023, the district court ruled ruled that the claims at issue were essentially accurate and dismissed the suit, including a similar suit filed by his relatives and the company NuStar Farms. Status: Dismissed
Campaign for Accountability and Fusion GPS
In September 2019, Nunes sued the liberal nonprofit Campaign for Accountability (CfA) and the opposition research firm Fusion GPS. The latter was hired to dig up dirt on Trump at the behest of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. The research was compiled into the Steele dossier. In 2018 CfA filed three ethics complaints against Nunes. In the lawsuit he alleged that CfA and Fusion GPS had conspired to hinder his investigation into the dossier, citing a $138,684 payment from CfA to Fusion GPS. CfA said it did not hire Fusion GPS to investigate Nunes. The suit was dismissed in September 2020. Status: Dismissed.
CNN
On December 4, 2019, Nunes sued CNN for alleged defamation, seeking $435,350,000 in damages for their reporting of Parnas's lawyer's statement. The complaint stated, "CNN is the mother of fake news. It is the least trusted name. CNN is eroding the fabric of America, proselytizing, sowing distrust and disharmony. It must be held accountable." He claimed that the network has an "institutional hatred" for the Republican Party. The suit alleges that CNN reported that Nunes traveled to Vienna in December 2018, and met with Viktor Shokin, the former Ukrainian prosecutor general, about investigating Joe Biden. The suit claims this is untrue and that Nunes was in Benghazi, followed by Malta. Before the filing of the CNN suit, an attorney representing McClatchy in Nunes's suit told The Washington Post's Eric Wemple, "He's filing these lawsuits and threatening these lawsuits purely to try to chill speech about himself and matters of public interest." Federal judge Laura Taylor Swain dismissed the suit on February 19, 2021.
Status: Dismissed.
Ted Lieu
On December 31, 2019, Nunes, through his Charlottesville, Virginia, attorney Steven S. Biss, issued a letter that threatened litigation against Representative Ted Lieu based on alleged damage to Nunes's reputation. Lieu responded, "I welcome any lawsuit from your client and look forward to taking discovery of Congressman Nunes. Or, you can take your letter and shove it."
NBCUniversal
On August 3, 2021, Nunes filed a defamation suit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas which was transferred to the Southern District of New York, the domicile of the defendant, on February 28, 2022. The complaint alleges that several statements made by Rachell Maddow on defendant's MSNBC network in March 2021 defamed Nunes. On November 28, 2022, Judge Kevin Castel ruled against Nunes on all but one claim, allowing the case to proceed on the one claim the judge found to "plausibly allege actual malice" and allowed the case to proceed with respect to that one claim. Status: Ongoing.
CNN and Jake Tapper
On November 19, 2022, Nunes filed a defamation suit in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, alleging that several statements made on CNN on October 31, 2022, were defamatory. The case was dismissed in March 2023 on jurisdictional grounds since the segment and people who made it have no direct connection to the state of Florida. Nunes appealed the decision, which was denied on May 22, 2023, because his attorneys failed to respond to notices from the appellate court. Status: Dismissed.
The Guardian
In April 2023, Nunes filed suit against The Guardian, alleging that he had been defamed by an article entitled "Federal investigators examined Trump Media for possible money laundering, sources say" claiming that the "Defendants published and republished egregious statements online and via social media (Twitter) that falsely accused or implied that Nunes engaged in or aided and abetted money laundering." Also named in the suit is Will Wilkerson, former executive vice president of operations for Donald Trump's media business and co-founder of Trump's Truth Social website. Wilkerson provided 150,000 emails, contracts and other internal documents from Trump Media and Truth Social to law enforcement, and was interviewed by the Guardian for the article named in the lawsuit. Status: pending
Conservative Political Action Conference attendance
In late February 2021, Nunes and a dozen other Republican House members skipped votes and enlisted others to vote for them, citing the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. But he and the other members were actually attending the Conservative Political Action Conference, which was held at the same time as their absences. In response, the Campaign for Accountability, an ethics watchdog group, filed a complaint with the House Committee on Ethics and requested an investigation into Nunes and the other lawmakers.
Personal life
The Nunes family is of Portuguese descent, immigrating from the Azores to California in the early 20th century. Nunes wrote a foreword to the 1951 novel Home Is An Island by Portuguese-American author Alfred Lewis for the 2012 edition by Tagus Press, an imprint of the Center for Portuguese Culture and Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth.
Nunes married Elizabeth Nunes (née Tamariz), an elementary school teacher, in 2003. They have three daughters. Nunes is a practicing Catholic, and attends Mass in Tulare.
Honors
President Donald Trump awarded Nunes the Presidential Medal of Freedom on January 4, 2021, along with fellow Representative Jim Jordan. No media were allowed to document the ceremony. In a press release from the Trump White House before the ceremony, Nunes was described as having exposed illegal wiretapping by the Obama administration on Trump and the Trump campaign, as part of the unsubstantiated Trump Tower wiretapping allegations. In the same release Nunes is praised as having helped "thwart a plot to take down a sitting United States president", in reference to his work to discredit the allegations (which the release calls the "Russia Hoax") leading to Trump's first impeachment.
Nunes has received the following foreign honors:
Grand-Officer of the Order of Prince Henry, Portugal (June 7, 2013)
Commander of the Order of the Star of Romania, Romania (June 8, 2017)
References
External links
Profile at SourceWatch
Smart Voter's election results for 2002, 2004, 2006
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1973 births
21st-century American politicians
American conspiracy theorists
American people of Azorean descent
American people of Portuguese descent
American Roman Catholics
California Polytechnic State University alumni
College of the Sequoias alumni
Commanders of the Order of the Star of Romania
Grand Officers of the Order of Prince Henry
Living people
People from Tulare, California
People from Visalia, California
Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients
Republican Party members of the United States House of Representatives from California
Trump–Ukraine scandal
United States Department of Agriculture officials
21st-century American businesspeople
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A%20Delicate%20Balance%20%28play%29
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A Delicate Balance (play)
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A Delicate Balance is a three-act play by Edward Albee, written in 1965 and 1966. Premiered in 1966, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1967, the first of three he received for his work.
The uneasy existence of upper-middle-class suburbanites Agnes and Tobias and their permanent houseguest, Agnes's witty and alcoholic sister Claire, is disrupted by the sudden appearance of lifelong family friends Harry and Edna, fellow empty nesters with free-floating anxiety, who ask to stay with them to escape an unnamed terror. They soon are followed by Agnes and Tobias's bitter 36-year-old daughter Julia, who returns home following the collapse of her fourth marriage.
Productions
The original Broadway production, directed by Alan Schneider, opened at the Martin Beck Theatre on September 22, 1966, and closed on
January 14, 1967, after 132 performances and 12 previews. The cast included Hume Cronyn as Tobias, Jessica Tandy as Agnes, Rosemary Murphy as Claire, Henderson Forsythe as Harry, Carmen Mathews as Edna, and Marian Seldes as Julia. The scenic design was by William Ritman, costumes by Theoni V. Aldredge, and lighting by Tharon Musser.
A revival produced by Lincoln Center Theater at the Plymouth Theatre opened on April 21, 1996, and ran for 185 performances and 27 previews. It was directed by Gerald Gutierrez, and starred Rosemary Harris as Agnes, George Grizzard as Tobias, John Carter as Harry, Elizabeth Wilson as Edna, Elaine Stritch as Claire, and Mary Beth Hurt as Julia. The production won the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play, as well as Tony Awards for Grizzard and Gutierrez, and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Revival of a Play.
A 1973 film adaptation was directed by Tony Richardson for the short-lived American Film Theater series. It starred Katharine Hepburn, Paul Scofield, Lee Remick, Joseph Cotten, and Kate Reid.
A production previewed in the West End at the Theatre Royal Haymarket from October 15, 1997, opened on October 21, 1997, and closed on April 4, 1998. It starred Eileen Atkins as Agnes, Maggie Smith as Claire, John Standing as Tobias, Annette Crosbie as Edna, Sian Thomas as Julia, and James Laurenson as Harry. Atkins won the Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Actress for the play in 1998.
A 2011 revival was presented at the Almeida Theatre in Islington, London, directed by James Macdonald. The cast included Lucy Cohu (Julia), Diana Hardcastle (Edna), Ian McElhinney (Harry), Tim Pigott-Smith (Tobias), Imelda Staunton (Claire), and Penelope Wilton (Agnes).
A Delicate Balance was produced in 2013 at the McCarter Theater, with Edward Albee attending rehearsals and contributing minor rewrites. It featured Kathleen Chalfant as Agnes, John Glover as Tobias, and was directed by Emily Mann. Sets were designed by Daniel Ostling, costumes by Jennifer von Mayrhauser, and lighting by Lap Chi Chu.
A new revival directed by Pam MacKinnon ran on Broadway at the John Golden Theatre. Previews began on October 20, 2014, and it officially opened on November 20, 2014. Its last performance was February 22, 2015. The cast featured Glenn Close as Agnes, John Lithgow as Tobias, Martha Plimpton as Julia, Lindsay Duncan as Claire, Bob Balaban as Harry and Clare Higgins as Edna.
Plot
Act I
Agnes, an upper-class woman in her late 50s, discusses the possibility of losing her mind. Agnes exclaims that although she is astonished by her own thoughts of madness, it is her sister, Claire, who lives with them, who astonishes her the most. Claire appears and apologizes to Agnes that her own nature is such to bring out in her sister the full force of her brutality. Claire senses that Tobias and Agnes's daughter Julia might be going on her fourth divorce and predicts that Julia will be coming home shortly. Agnes reenters, announcing that Julia is coming home. Tobias then tells the story of a cat that he once had. There is a knock on the door. Harry and Edna, Agnes and Tobias's best friends, arrive and ask if they can stay there. They have been frightened by something intangible.
Act II
Agnes and Julia are discussing the fact that Harry and Edna are occupying Julia's old bedroom. Harry and Edna have spent the entire day in the room. Julia whines to Tobias next about not having her room. Claire enters and chides Julia about her new divorce. Julia teases Claire back about her drinking. After asking Tobias for a drink, she announces that “there is no point in pressing” the issue of Harry and Edna. At the end of scene 1, Harry and Edna appear with their coats over their arms. They announce they are going home but will return with their suitcases.
Scene 2 opens with Julia and Agnes alone after dinner. Julia is disgusted with her mother's desire to control everyone's conversations and emotions. Agnes retorts, “There is a balance to be maintained...and I must be the fulcrum.” Agnes and Tobias leave to help Harry and Edna unload their suitcases from their car. Edna enters and tells Julia that it is time for her to grow up. Julia reminds Edna that she is a guest in the house, and Edna responds that she and Harry are Agnes and Tobias's best friends. When Harry enters, he goes to fix everyone a drink at the bar. Julia blocks him from the bar and insists that he stay away from it. Julia yells “I WANT...WHAT IS MINE!” and leaves the room. Agnes reminisces about the death of her son. She suspects that Tobias has been unfaithful, and asks Harry and Claire to confirm it, but they both deny it. After Tobias attempts to excuse Julia as being in hysterics, Julia reappears with a gun in her hand. She insists that Harry and Edna leave. Edna declares, “We have rights here. We belong,” and insists that she and Harry are staying there forever, “if need be.”
Act III
Tobias has stayed up all night, and is making himself a morning cocktail. Agnes comes down from her room. She tells Tobias that it is his role to make all the decisions with regards to what to do about Edna and Harry. She reminds Tobias of the time when he prevented her from getting pregnant after the death of their son. Claire, Julia, Tobias, and Agnes all discuss their versions of why Harry and Edna are there and what they should do about it. Harry and Edna join them, and everyone in the room is drinking. Edna announces that Harry wants to talk to Tobias alone, and the women exit. Harry tells Tobias that if the circumstances were reversed, he and Edna don’t think they would allow Tobias and Agnes to live at their house in spite of the fact that they are best friends. Harry asks Tobias, “You don’t want us, do you, Toby?” Tobias answers that he does not really want Harry and Edna to stay there but that Harry and Edna have the right to be there because they are friends. He goes with Harry to get their suitcases and put them back in their car. Agnes says to Edna, “Everything becomes..too late, finally.” The play ends on Agnes's rumination that people sleep at night because they are afraid of the dark: “They say we sleep to let the demons out, to let the mind go raving mad, and when the daylight comes again... comes order with it.”
Characters
Agnes
Agnes is the main female character of the play. She is a woman in her 50s, well off, and married to Tobias. She is also the mother of Julia and the sister of Claire. Agnes believes herself to be the fulcrum of the family, keeping everyone in balance. She often maintains this balance, or order, by not confronting issues, not taking a stand, and not processing emotions. She tries to keep the peace by not dealing with anything that might upset it.
On the surface, Agnes is completely supportive of her husband Tobias. She looks to him to confirm her thoughts, and likewise, she confirms his. It is not until near the end of the play that she brings up issues that show cracks in her relationship with her husband. When the memory of the death of her son is brought to the surface of her thoughts, she reminisces about how difficult a time that was for her, a time when she questioned everything, including her husband's love and faithfulness to her.
Although she feels as if she is the fulcrum, Agnes begins and ends the play on her musings of insanity. She wonders if she could just suddenly slip off into madness and what that would be like. She wonders what her husband would do if that happened. Would she be an embarrassment to him? Embarrassment is a very large issue with Agnes. She is easily embarrassed by her sister Claire, who Agnes believes has wasted her life and her potential. When Claire insists that she is not an alcoholic, Agnes states sarcastically, “that’s very nice.” Then she lists times that Claire has vomited, fallen down, and called from the club to have someone come and get her. She concludes this commentary with the words: “If we change for the worse with drink, we are an alcoholic.”
Agnes's relationship with her daughter Julia does not fare much better. Julia also embarrasses her mother. When Julia becomes hysterical, Tobias asks Agnes to go talk to their daughter. Agnes's response is “I haven’t the time.” Instead of empathizing with Julia, Agnes becomes more self-absorbed. She tells her husband that she has suffered far more than her daughter. This same self-absorption is apparent in all of Agnes's relationships. She easily becomes lost in self-pity and at the same time believes herself to be above everyone around her. If she is the fulcrum of the balance in the family, Albee portrays her as a very unstable one. Albee has admitted that the character of Agnes is based on his real-life adopted mother.
Claire
Claire is Agnes's younger sister. She claims that she is not an alcoholic but rather a willful drinker. Of all the characters in the play, whether it is due to the alcohol or not, Claire has the loosest tongue. She speaks her mind and is the least affected by social politeness.
Claire lives with Agnes and Tobias and appears to have no means of support except for them. Her main role in life seems to be to annoy and embarrass her sister. She is everything that Agnes dislikes. Claire makes the statement, after telling Tobias that he would be better off if he killed Agnes, Julia, and herself, that she will never know whether she wants to live until Agnes is dead. With this statement, Albee makes it sound as if Claire holds Agnes up as a role model, a model that she has never been able to reach. And instead of trying to reach it, she has done everything to live her life in a diametrically opposed manner.
Claire's relationship with Julia is closer than her relationship with anyone else. She and Julia identify with one another in their roles as the “other”—people on the periphery of Tobias's and Agnes's lives. Claire and Julia are the rebels, the failures, the embarrassments that must be tolerated. When Julia arrives home, Claire greets her more honestly, more warmly than do Julia's parents.
Despite Claire's open disdain for her sister, she has never told Agnes about Tobias's affair. It is not clear if she does this out of love or out of spite. She keeps the affair a secret, almost as if she has a hidden weapon that she protects in case she may have to use it one day. When Agnes comes right out and asks Claire to confirm her suspicions about Tobias, Claire's answer is, “Ya got me, Sis.” Shortly after this exchange, Agnes describes Claire in this way: “Claire could tell us so much if she cared to...Claire, who watches from the sidelines, has seen so very much, has seen us all so clearly...You were not named for nothing.” Claire is said to closely resemble Albee's aunt Jane, an alcoholic and frequent visitor to the Albee home.
Edna
Edna is Harry's wife. It is not clear if she is really Agnes's friend or if she and Agnes know one another only because their husbands are friends. Edna arrives one day at the door of Agnes and Tobias's home. She takes it for granted that they will let her and Harry stay there for however long it takes them to get over their unnamed fear.
Despite the fact that the relationship between Edna and Agnes is not clear (their names are very similar), Edna sometimes takes on the role of mother to Julia. Although Edna's manner is dissimilar, her sentiments are comparable to Agnes's. Edna is not afraid to voice her opinions. Edna tells Julia that she is no longer a child and should take more responsibility for her life. She also declares that Julia no longer has rights in her parents’ house.
Edna also confronts Agnes and tells her to stop making fun of her and her husband Harry. Although Edna may not be able to name the fear that has driven her out of her own house, she appears to be quite capable of naming the things that other people are doing wrong in their lives.
But then again, it is Edna, in the end, who realizes that there are boundaries, even between friends. She understands that there are some boundaries that should not be pushed, some things that “we may not do...not ask, for fear of looking in a mirror.” And it is also through her reflection that the play resolves. Edna has looked into that mirror at the end of the play and has decided that if the tables were turned, if Agnes and Tobias had come to her, she would not have allowed them to stay at her house.
Harry
Harry is Edna's husband and Tobias's best friend. At one point in the past, Harry and Tobias, coincidentally, had an extramarital affair with the same young woman. Besides both having been businessmen and meeting at the same club, it is unclear what else Harry and Tobias have in common except that they have known one another for a long time and neither sleeps with his wife. Harry is something of a reflection of Tobias, but he is even more reserved. Of all the characters in this play, Harry speaks the least. And when he does speak, he is a man of few words with pauses around each one. He prefers to talk around things rather than going at them straight on. He also avoids questions, like when Agnes tries to find out why he and his wife have come to their home. Instead of giving Agnes an answer, he compliments the furnishings in Agnes's home. He also has the tendency to repeat himself; at one point he repeats the same line four times when he tries to explain how fear has driven his wife and him out of their home. It is Harry, in the end, who tells Tobias that he and Edna have decided to leave. Although Harry prompted the discussion with Edna about resolving the issue of staying at their friends’ house, it is implied that Edna made the decision and that Harry just delivered the message.
Julia
Julia is the 36-year-old daughter of Agnes and Tobias. Three times divorced, she has recently left her fourth husband, and has returned home. Her father calls her a whiner, and her mother has little time for her. Julia has set a pattern in her life of marrying for the wrong reasons and then divorcing and returning home. Her parents welcome her, although they make it clear that they wish she would establish an independent life of her own.
Julia is the catalyst of the play. While the other characters either hide their emotions in alcohol or avoid confrontations by smothering their feelings in banal talk, Julia brings matters to the forefront. She has wants, and she demands that they be at least heard, if not satisfied. The most obvious thing that she wants in this play is her bedroom in her parents’ home. However, upon her return, she discovers that her room is being occupied by Edna and Harry, her parents’ so-called best friends. In her attempts to regain control of her bedroom, Julia makes everyone confront the issues of the play, namely defining relationships, wants, needs, and rights. At one point, Julia forces the issue first by having an emotional tantrum, then by upsetting the furniture and all the clothes in her bedroom, and finally by threatening everyone with a gun.
Julia tends to put down her mother and commiserate with her mother's sister Claire. Julia acts as if she is Claire's friend until Claire points her finger at Julia and lets her know that Julia is as much a visitor in her parents’ home as Harry and Edna are.
Julia, Claire, Harry, and Edna are portrayed as invaders in the lives of Agnes and Tobias. They all have their own reasons for needing to be there: None of them is able to make it alone in the outside world. Julia falls back on her childhood to claim her spot, even though she is nearing middle age. She has little empathy for the others who are also seeking comfort in the same house. The character of Julia is based on Barbara Lauder, one of Albee's cousins.
Tobias
Tobias is Agnes's husband and the father of Julia. He is a well-to-do, retired businessman. Although he is tolerant of people around him, he, like his wife, tends to avoid emotional topics. His tolerance toward his sister-in-law Claire is shown in his nonjudgmental attitude toward her drinking. Although he encourages her to return to Alcoholics Anonymous at one point in the play, he does not berate her for drinking. In some ways, he even encourages it or at least does not discourage it. There are a few subtle insinuations that Claire and Tobias might have at one time had an affair, but this is initially only alluded to by script directions that have Claire open her arms to Tobias in a “casual invitation”. Later in the play, Agnes asks Tobias (when he cannot sleep) if he went to Claire.
Whether Tobias had an affair with Claire is not certain; however, his infidelity is. Claire knows about an affair that Tobias had with a young woman, but she has never told Agnes about it. Claire only uses the information to taunt Tobias. Some critics have suggested that the young anonymous woman with whom Tobias had the affair was actually Claire. Despite all this, Tobias appears secure in his marriage with Agnes, even though they have not shared the same bed for many years. Their marriage seems to have become something of a habit. Tobias shows very little affection to his wife except in the way that he reinforces her thoughts, giving her assurances, for instance, that she, of all people, should not worry about going mad.
Tobias appears to be closer to his daughter than Agnes is. However, the degree of intimacy is not considerably greater. Tobias is the more concerned parent when Julia becomes hysterical, although he does nothing but ask Agnes to console her. It is Tobias who takes the gun away from his daughter, and it is Tobias to whom Julia apologizes for her outburst.
If Agnes is the fulcrum, then Tobias is the energy behind the fulcrum that works at keeping a balance in this dysfunctional family. He constantly is asking people to talk more kindly about one another. Or, in the least, it is Tobias who keeps silent while fury flares around him. It is also Tobias who serves everyone drinks as if trying to soften the edges of their grievances with alcohol.
It is Tobias's friend Harry (and his wife, Edna) who bring the play to its conclusion, forcing Tobias to define what friendship is all about. In the end, Tobias proclaims that friendship is not about wants but rather about rights. Tobias's friend Harry has the right to move into Tobias's house even if that is not what Tobias, or the rest of his family, wants. Contradicting this conclusion is the story concerning his cat that Tobias tells in the middle of the play. In this case, the cat wanted to be left alone. Tobias was uncomfortable with the cat's noncompliance, and eventually he hits the cat and then has the cat euthanised. But disregarding the cat, Tobias seems true to his definition of friendship. He has, after all, allowed his sister-in-law to live off him. He allows his 30-something daughter to continually move in and out of his house, and he tolerates his wife. He also tolerates his friend Harry's moving into his house uninvited. At the end of the play, Tobias questions Harry's efforts at friendship and honesty. Then he apologizes. Albee admits that the character of Tobias is based on his adopted father.
Awards and nominations
Awards
1967 Pulitzer Prize for Drama
1967 Tony Award, Best Featured Actress in a Play (Seldes)
1996 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Revival of a Play
1996 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play
1996 Tony Award, Best Actor in Play (Grizzard)
Nominations
1967 Tony Award for Best Play
1967 Tony Award, Best Actor in Play (Cronyn)
1967 Tony Award, Best Actress in a Play (Murphy)
1967 Tony Award, Best Direction of a Play
1996 Tony Award, Best Actress in a Play (Harris)
1996 Tony Award, Best Actress in a Play (Stritch)
1996 Tony Award, Best Scenic Design (Beatty)
1996 Tony Award, Best Costume Design (Greenwood)
References
Sources
Further reading
External links
1966 plays
Broadway plays
Drama Desk Award-winning plays
Plays by Edward Albee
Pulitzer Prize for Drama-winning works
Tony Award-winning plays
American plays adapted into films
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford%20FE%20engine
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Ford FE engine
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The Ford FE engine is a Ford V8 engine used in vehicles sold in the North American market between 1958 and 1976. The FE was introduced to replace the short-lived (in the USA) Ford Y-block engine, which American cars and trucks were outgrowing. It was designed with room to be significantly expanded, and manufactured both as a top-oiler and side-oiler, and in displacements between and .
"FE" derives from 'Ford-Edsel.' Versions of the FE line designed for use in medium and heavy trucks and school buses from 1964 through 1978 were known as "FT," for 'Ford-Truck,' and differed primarily by having steel (instead of nodular iron) crankshafts, larger crank snouts, smaller ports and valves, different distributor shafts, different water pumps and a greater use of iron for its parts.
Use
The FE series engines were used in cars, trucks, buses, and boats, as well as for industrial pumps and other equipment. Ford produced the engine from 1958 and ceased production in 1976. Aftermarket support has continued, with replacement parts as well as many newly engineered and improved components.
In Ford vehicles, the FE primarily powered full and midsize cars and trucks. Some of the models in which the FE was installed:
Ford Galaxie,
Ford Custom 500,
Ford Mustang,
Ford Thunderbird - 3rd generation,
Ford Thunderbird - 4th generation,
Ford LTD,
Ford Torino,
Ford Ranchero,
Ford Talladega,
Ford Fairlane,
Ford Fairlane Thunderbolt, and F-Series trucks though typically only those 1 ton and lesser in capacity.
In addition to its use in Ford and Mercury branded vehicles, the FE was also sold to third parties for use in their own products such as buses, and boats. Also, the FE was used to power irrigation pumps, generators and other machinery where long-running, low-rpm, reliable service was required.
Ford regularly made updates to the design of the FE which appear as engineering codes or variations in casting numbers of parts. In addition to production casting codes, Ford also made use of "SK" and "XE" numbers if the parts were one-offs or developmental designs not approved for production. Many parts attached to Ford's racing engines carried SK and XE numbers.
Marine
The FE block was manufactured using a thinwall casting technique, where Ford engineers determined the required amount of metal and re-engineered the casting process to allow for consistent dimensional results. A Ford FE from the factory weighed with all iron components, while similar seven-liter offerings from GM and Chrysler weighed over . With an aluminum intake and aluminum water pump the FE could be reduced to under . This weight saving was significant to boaters and racers. The FE was popular in V-drive marine applications, available as a factory option in Century boats.
Beginning in 1968, the U.S. Navy SEALS used twin 427 FEs to power their Light SEAL Support Craft (LSSC).
Racing
Specific models that used FE engines include the AC Cobra MKIII, GT40s, the AC Frua, as well as various factory racing versions of Ford Mustangs, Ford Galaxies, Ford Fairlanes, and Ford Thunderbirds.
In the 1960s, most organized racing events required either stock components or components that were readily available to the general public. For NASCAR racing, rules required that at least 500 vehicles be sold to the general public equipped as raced. Many drag racing and road racing organizations had similar rules, which contributed to a wide range of performance parts being made available through Ford dealership parts counters. In addition, aftermarket suppliers produced performance parts and accessories.
The use of the FE by Ford itself as the powerplant in many of its racing programs and performance vehicles resulted in constant improvements and engineering changes over the course of its life. Racing-inspired changes to the FE which later made it to production engines included the side-oiler block, which directed oil first to the lower portions of the block.
Road and track racing
In 1963, the 427 Galaxies dominated NASCAR primarily because in January 1963 G.M. told its divisions to get out of racing. Tiny Lund won the biggest race of the year, the Daytona 500, with 427s finishing first through fifth. Ford won 23 races to Plymouth's 19. The Plymouths earned all their victories on the short tracks while Ford dominated the super speedways, Chevrolet finished with eight wins and Pontiac had four.
In 1964, Ford had their best season ever, with 30 wins. Dodge was second with 14, while Plymouth had 12. Adding the five wins that Mercury had, the 427 had a total of 35 NASCAR Grand National wins for the 1964 season. Fred Lorenzen won the Atlanta 500 and proceeded to beat Dodges and Plymouths, which were using 426 Hemi engines, in six of the next seven races. Ford was using the high-riser intake and matching heads, which were allowed by NASCAR for one season (1964).
In 1965, NASCAR banned Ford's high-riser version of the engine, claiming they did not fit under "stock" hoods. Chrysler's 426 Hemi was banned as well, returning in 1966 after a de-tuned version was installed in a production vehicle that year. For the 1965 season, Ford developed its own version of a hemi-chambered engine, the 427 single overhead cam (SOHC) "Cammer" which used a single chain-driven overhead camshaft per head to operate the valves in its hemi. NASCAR banned the engine. Then Ford developed the medium-riser intake and head, which fit under stock hoods and was accepted by NASCAR. Ned Jarrett, driving for Ford, was the 1965 Grand National champion and Ford won the NASCAR crown.
Also in 1965, Ford and Carroll Shelby began production of a new and improved Cobra using a 427 cubic inch (7.0 L) FE side-oiler in place of the original's 289 cubic inch Windsor small-block. A new chassis was built enlarging 3" main tubing to 4", with coil springs all around. The new car also had wide fenders and a larger radiator opening. The S/C (for semi-competition) "street" engine was rated at , which provided a top speed of 164 mph (262 km/h), and the competition version (csx 6000) with a top speed of . Cobra Mark III production began on 1 January 1965, and was used for racing into the 1970s. An original S/C sold in 2011 for US$1.5 million, making it one of the most valuable Cobra variants.
In 1966, the 427 cubic inch Ford GT40 Mk II dominated the 24 Hours of Le Mans race, with a one-two-three result.
In 1967, Parnelli Jones, in a Holman-Moody prepped Fairlane, won the season-opening Riverside 500 road race. Then, Mario Andretti captured the Daytona 500 in a Fairlane, with Fred Lorenzen a close second in his Holman-Moody Ford. The FE again powered the 24 Hours of Le Mans winner. In 1968, the rules of the race were changed, limiting displacement to 302 cubic inches under certain circumstances. Ford won the following two years using its Ford Windsor smallblock in the GT40.
Ford's racing partner, privately owned Holman-Moody, also developed a version of the FE for the Can-Am racing series. It used factory-supplied tunnel port heads, a mechanical fuel injection system mounted on a crossram intake manifold, and a revised dry sump oiling system, but met with only limited success.
Drag racing
Organized drag racing (NHRA, AHRA and even NASCAR dabbled in drag racing in the mid-1960s) was a major venue for the FE in its various forms. Many of the most innovative products were developed and used for 1/4 mile drag racing as aftermarket suppliers eagerly supported the engine design with products such as special intakes, camshafts, superchargers, manifolds, cylinder heads, water and fuel pumps, and exhaust headers. But it was the Ford company itself which developed the most potent products and platforms for the drag-racer. Beginning in 1962 and continuing through 1964, Ford made lightweight versions of its popular Galaxie model using aluminum, fiberglass and specially chosen components emphasizing light weight over comfort or style. Many parts were simply not put on the vehicle, such as a passenger side windshield wiper, sound deadening, armrests, heater, and radio.
In late 1964, Ford contracted Holman & Moody to prepare ten 427-powered Mustangs to contest the National Hot Rod Association's (NHRA) A/Factory Experimental Class in the 1965 drag racing season. Five of these special Mustangs made their competition debut at the 1965 NHRA Winternationals, where they qualified in the Factory Stock FX Eliminator Class for (FX cars only). The car driven by Bill Lawton won the class.
For the 1964 model year, Ford introduced the two-door Fairlane 500 sedan-based Thunderbolt. Modified to accept a 427 high-riser engine, it featured a teardrop-shaped bubble hood to clear the induction system and drivetrain components from the larger Galaxie model. The two inner headlights were eliminated and replaced with air inlets ducted directly to the two four-barrel carbs. It was an industry first, the only time that a turn key drag car was made available to the general public. However, the extensive modifications to the car did not meet Ford appearance quality standards.
The 1964 NHRA Super Stock meeting was captured with a Thunderbolt. However, all three NHRA Top Stock Eliminator titles were won by Chrysler's Race Hemi. Nearly half a century later, in 2013, a Thunderbolt set a new SS/A record of 8.55 seconds in the quarter mile, with a closing speed of 154 mph,
In 1963, Dick Brannan set the NHRA Super/Stock National record at 12.42 on a hot July day. In the biggest race of the year, the INDY Nationals, Ed Martin's lightweight Galaxie lost the Super Stock trophy run to John Barker's Dodge but at the teardown, the Dodge was found to have an illegal cam. In drag racing, the 427 Ford Galaxie was a winner in three consecutive National Events: the '64 Indy Nationals, the 1965 WinterNationals and the 1965 Indy Nationals. It was Mike Schmitt driving the Desert Motors Galaxie to the AA/SA Class win at the 1964 Indy Nationals. At the 1965 Winternationals it was a clean sweep as Doug Butler's four-speed took the win in AA/S with a 12.77 @ 114.21 and Bill Hanyon won on the automatic side with a 12.24 @ 117.95. Additionally, Bud Schellenberger's "Double A Stock" 1964 Galaxie was the 1965 Indy Nationals Top Stock Eliminator with a 12.16 @ 114.21. The Shelby Super Snake top fuel dragster, powered by a 427 supercharged SOHC, became the first car in NHRA competition to break the six-second quarter-mile time barrier. It was the winner of the 1966 NHRA Spring Nationals. In every decade since, the FE has held drag-racing records. In 2011, the new decade opens with the NHRA SS/F (class rules include stock compression ratio, stock valve sizes, stock carb sizing and other OEM-type equipment limitations) national record: the quartermile in 9.29 seconds, with a closing speed of 143.63 mph.
Other closed course racing
In 1970, an FE-powered vehicle set the land speed record for the U.K. Tony Densham set the new British land speed record of just over over the flying kilometer (the average of two runs in opposite directions within an hour) and then held onto the record for over 30 years. The FE-powered vehicle beat the official British wheel-driven record over the flying 500 and kilometer distances, until then held by Sir Malcolm Campbell, of 174.883 mph
Custom automobiles
The FE engine is used extensively in custom installations. The extensive availability of multi-carburetor and other exotic intakes, as well as many other "dress-up parts", has contributed to its use where the engine would be shown off. FEs powered the original Batmobiles built by George Barris for the 1966 TV series. It fit under the hood along with the Bat-ray, Bat-ram, a nose-mounted aluminum chain slicer and all the associated support hardware of the 5,500-pound vehicle. One dragstrip version was equipped with a Holman-Moody prepped 427 FE with dual quads, which would be launched in second gear and spin its tires the entire quarter-mile length of the track. In 1968 Carroll Shelby created a custom Mustang using a California Special model and an experimental Ford 428 FE (known as a CJX, precursor to the 428 Cobra Jet). This "Green Hornet" had a custom independent rear suspension, four-wheel disc brakes and a Conelec electronically controlled port fuel injection system. It had a 5.7 sec 0-60 time and 157 mph top speed, versus a factory 428 cu in FE Shelby GT500's 6.5 second 0-60 and 128 mph top speed.
Description
The FE and FT engines are Y-block designs—so-called because the cylinder block casting extends below the crankshaft centerline, giving great rigidity and support to the crankshaft's bearings. In these engines, the casting extends below the crankshaft centerline, which is more than an inch below the bottom of the crank journals.
Blocks were cast in two major groups: top-oiler and side-oiler. The top-oiler block sent oil to the top center first, the side-oiler block sent oil along a passage located on the lower side of the block first.
All FE and FT engines have a bore spacing (distance between cylinder centers) of , and a deck height (distance from crank center to top of block) of . The main journal (crankshaft bearing) diameter is . Within the family of Ford engines of the time, the FE was neither the largest nor smallest block.
Because the FE was never a completely static design and was constantly being improved by Ford, references to a particular version of the FE can become difficult. Generally though, most FEs can be described using the following descriptors:
1) Carburetor count, i.e. single 2V (two-barrel), single 4V, dual quad (two 4V carburetors), tripower (three 2V carburetors) or Weber (four 2V Weber carburetors).
2) Top-oiler or side-oiler block (though there are known instances of side-oiler blocks drilled at the factory as top-oilers; perhaps to salvage blocks with quality control issues that prevented them from being completed as side-oilers).
3) Head type: low-riser, medium-riser, high-riser, tunnelport, or SOHC. These descriptions actually refer to the intakes used with the heads...a low-riser intake, designed to fit under a low hoodline was the earliest design. The high-riser intake required a bubble in the hood of cars it was installed in for clearance. While the low and medium riser heads could be used in combination with either low or medium riser intakes, the high riser head required a high-riser intake due to the increased height of the intake port. The medium riser's intake port is actually shorter in height, though wider, than the low-riser's port. The high-riser's ports are taller than either the low or medium-riser ports. Low-riser intakes have the carburetor placed relatively low so that the air-fuel mix must follow a more convoluted path to the chamber. A high-riser's intake places the carburetor approximately higher so the air-fuel mixture has a straighter path to the chamber. The tunnelport and SOHC heads both bolted onto FE blocks of either variety but required their own matching intakes. Within the major head groups, there were also differences in chamber designs, with small chambers, machined chambers and large chambers. The size and type of chamber affected the compression ratio, as well as the overall performance characteristics of the engine.
Generation 1
332
The smallest displacement FE engine was the "332", with a bore and stroke. It was used in Ford-brand cars in 1958 and 1959, domestically marketed U.S.- and Canadian-built Edsel-brand cars in 1959, and in export-configured 1958 and 1959 Edsels. The two-barrel version produced , a Holley or Autolite four-barrel version .
332 engine configurations and applications
1st generation FE block shouldn't be confused with 383, 410, 430 Mercury MEL blocks, which had a wedge shaped combustion chamber in their blocks, not in the head as in FE blocks.
4V, 9.5:1 — at 4600 rpm and at 2800 rpm
1958 Ford
1958 Edsel Ranger, Pacer, Villager, Roundup and Bermuda overseas export vehicles only
2V, 8.9:1 — at 4600 rpm and at 2200 rpm
1959 Ford
1959 Edsel Corsair and Villager, standard equipment, (called "Express V8")
352
Introduced in 1958 as part of the Interceptor line of Ford V8 engines, the Ford 352 of actual displacement was the replacement for the Lincoln Y-block. It is a stroked 332 with stroke and a bore, and was rated from with a 2-barrel carburetor to over on the 4-barrel models. When these engines were introduced, they were called Interceptor V-8 on the base models and Interceptor Special V-8 on the 4-barrel models. The 1958 H vin coded 352 was designated as Interceptor V-8 Thunderbird Special according to the 1958 Ford V8 Cars & Thunderbird Service Manual pg 483. The Interceptor was the base-performance engine in 1958. For the 1959 model year, the FE engine series was renamed the Thunderbird V-8 and the Thunderbird Special V-8. When installed in Mercury vehicles, these engines were named "Marauder". This series of engines usually weighed over . In 1960 Ford created a high-performance version of the 352 rated at it featured an aluminum intake manifold, Holley 4160 4-barrel (4-choke) carburetor, cast iron header-style exhaust manifolds, 10.5:1 compression ratio, and solid lifters.
352 engine configurations and applications
2V
8.4:1 — at 4000 rpm and at 2800 rpm
1965–1967 Ford F-Series
8.9:1 — at 4400 rpm and at 2400 rpm
1961–1963 Ford
1961–1963 Mercury (1961 Meteor and 1961–1963 Monterey, Commuter Wagon, Colony Park)
4V
10.2:1 — at 4600 rpm and at 2800 rpm
1958 Ford Interceptor
1958–1959 Ford
1958–1959 Ford Thunderbird
9.6:1 — at 4600 rpm and at 2800 rpm
1960 Ford
1960 Edsel
1960 Ford Thunderbird
10.6:1 — at 6000 rpm and at 3400 rpm
1960 Ford
8.9:1 — at 4400 rpm and at 2400 rpm
1960 Ford
9.3:1 — at 4400 rpm and at 2800 rpm
1964–1966 Ford
361 Edsel
Edsel 361 engines were assembled in Cleveland Ohio, and Dearborn Michigan. They were standard equipment in the 1958 Edsel Ranger, Pacer, Villager, Roundup and Bermuda.
The Edsel 361 was the very first FE block engine to be offered for sale in any market, having been introduced to the public in the U.S. on September 4, 1957, almost two months before any 1958 Fords were sold.
The 361 cid 4V FE engine was also sold on 1959 Edsels in the U.S. and Canada, and 1958 and 1959 Ford and Meteor brand automobiles in Canada in place of the 352 cid, which was not available with any Ford Motor Company of Canada brand until the 1960 model year. Edsel 361 engines were available to U.S. law enforcement agencies and state and municipal emergency services purchasing fleet Fords as the 1958 Ford "Police Power Pack."
361 Edsel engine configurations and applications
4V
10.5:1 Compression Ratio
@4600 rpm
Torque @2800 rpm
x Bore/Stroke
4-bbl Holley or Ford (Autolite) carburetor
Pushrod overhead valve
Angle-wedge machined combustion chamber
Firing order: 1-5-4-2-6-3-7-8
Cylinder numbering (front-to-rear): Right 1-2-3-4 Left 5-6-7-8
18 mm spark plugs, 0.034 in. gap
Hydraulic lifters
1958 Edsel Ranger, Pacer, Villager, Roundup and Bermuda, standard equipment (called "E400")
4V
9.6:1 or 10.0:1 Compression Ratio depending on source of information.
@4600 rpm
Torque @2800 rpm
x Bore/Stroke
4-bbl Ford (Autolite) carburetor
Pushrod overhead valve
Angle-wedge cast combustion chamber
Firing order: 1-5-4-2-6-3-7-8
Cylinder numbering (front-to-rear): Right 1-2-3-4 Left 5-6-7-8
18 mm spark plugs, 0.034 in. gap
Hydraulic lifters
1959 Edsel Corsair, Villager and Ranger, optional equipment (called "Super Express V8")
360 Truck
The 361/360, of actual displacement, was introduced in 1968 and phased out at the end of the 1976-year run; it was used in the Ford F Series trucks and pickups. It has a bore of a 390 () and used the 352's rotating assembly. 361s & 360s were also constructed with heavy duty internal components for truck use. Use of a standard 352/390 cam for use in passenger cars along with carburetor and distributor adjustment allowed the 360 to give performance similar to that of the 352 and 390 car engines. Rated at at 4100 rpm and of torque @2600 rpm (2-barrel carb, 1968). The 360 used the same block, heads and other parts as a 390, this makes them indistinguishable from each other unless the stroke is measured.
360 Truck engine configurations and applications
2V, 8.4:1
at 4100 rpm and at 2600 rpm
1968–1971 Trucks
net at 4000 rpm and at 2400 rpm
1972–1976 Trucks
390
The 390, with true displacement, had a bore of and stroke of . It was the most common FE engine in later applications; used in many Ford cars as the standard engine, including the Thunderbird, and in many trucks as well. It was a popular high-performance engine; although not as powerful as the 427 and 428 models, it provided good performance, particularly in lighter-weight vehicles. The 2v is rated at @ 4,100 rpm, while the 4v version was rated at @ 4,100 rpm in certain applications. Certain 1967 & 68 Mustangs had 390 4v engines rated at , as did some Fairlane GTs and S code Mercury Cougars. When the 390 was first offered for 1961 model there was a High Performance version that featured an aluminum 4bbl intake manifold, cast iron "header" style exhaust manifolds, 10.5:1 compression ratio and a solid lifter valve train. Many of these cars came with an aluminum 3x2bbl intake manifold in the trunk that was meant to be installed by the dealer and raised the engine's output to .
390 engine configurations and applications
2V
8.9:1 — at 4400 rpm and at 2400 rpm
1963–1965 Mercury
9.4:1 — at 4600 rpm and at 2400 rpm
1964–1965 Mercury
9.5:1 — at 4400 rpm and at 2600 rpm
1966 Ford
1966 Ford Fairlane
1966 Mercury
1966 Mercury Comet
9.5:1 — at 4400 rpm and at 2600 rpm
1967 Ford
1967–1968 Ford Fairlane
1967 Mercury
1967 Mercury Comet
1968 Ford Mustang
1968 Mercury Cyclone GT
1968 Mercury Cougar GT
10.5:1 — at 4600 rpm and at 2800 rpm
1968 Ford
1969 Mercury
9.5:1 — at 4400 rpm and at 2600 rpm
1968 Ford Fairlane
1968 Ford Torino
1968–1970 Ford
1968–1970 Mercury
8.6:1 — at 4400 rpm and at 2600 rpm
1968–1971 Trucks
9:1 — at 4400 rpm and at 2600 rpm
1971 Ford, Mercury
8.2:1 — net at 4000 rpm and at 2600 rpm
1972–1975 Trucks
4V
10.6:1 — at 6000 rpm and at 3400 rpm
1961–1962 Ford
9.6:1 — at 4600 rpm and at 2800 rpm
1961–1963 Ford
1961–1963 Ford Thunderbird
1963 Mercury
9.6:1 — at 5000 rpm and at 3200 rpm
1961–1963 Ford Police Interceptor
1963 Mercury Police Interceptor
10.1:1 — at 5000 rpm and at 3200 rpm
1964 Ford Police Interceptor
1964 Mercury Police Interceptor
11:1 — at 4600 rpm and at 2800 rpm
1964–1965 Ford
1964–1965 Mercury
1964–1965 Ford Thunderbird
10.5:1 — at 4600 rpm and at 2800 rpm
1966–1967 Ford
1966–1968 Ford Thunderbird
1968 Mercury
10.5:1 — at 4600 rpm and at 3200 rpm
1967, 1969 Ford Mustang
1967, 1969 Ford Fairlane
1967, 1969 Mercury Cyclone GT
1967, 1969 Mercury Cougar GT
1969 Ford Torino
1969 Mercury Montego
10.5:1 — at 4800 rpm and at 2800 rpm
3x2V, 10.6:1
at 6000 rpm and at 3500 rpm
1961–1962 Ford
at 6000 rpm and at 3500 rpm
1962 Ford
1962–1963 Ford Thunderbird
Generation 2
406
The 406 engine used a new bore with the 390's stroke, giving a displacement of , rounded up to "406" for the official designation. The larger bore required a new block casting design allowing for thicker walls, but otherwise was very similar to the 390 block.
It was available for less than two years before it was replaced by the 427.
Testing of the 406, with its higher power levels, led to cross-bolted mains – that is, main bearing caps that were secured not only by bolts at each end coming up from beneath, but also by bolts coming in from the sides through the block. A custom fit spacer was used between the cap and the block face. This design prevented the main bearing caps from "walking" under extreme racing conditions, and can be found today in many of the most powerful and modern engines from many manufacturers.
406 engine configurations and applications
4V, 11.4:1 — at 5800 rpm and at 3400 rpm
1962–1963 Ford
1963 Mercury
3x2V, 11.4:1 — at 5800 rpm and at 3500 rpm
1962 Ford
3x2V, 12.1:1 — at 5800 rpm and at 3500 rpm
1963 Ford, Mercury
410
The 410 engine, used in 1966 and 1967 Mercurys (see Ford MEL engine regarding 1958 senior series Edsels), used the same bore as the 390 engine, but with the 428's stroke, giving a real displacement. The standard 428 crankshaft was used, which meant that the 410, like the 428, used external balancing. A compression ratio of 10.5:1 was standard.
410 engine configurations and applications
4V, 10.5:1 — at 4600 rpm and at 2800 rpm
1966–1967 Mercury
427
The 427 V8 was produced as both a top-oiler and side-oiler. Introduced in 1963, its true displacement was 425.98 cubic inches, but Ford called it the 427 because was the maximum displacement allowed by several racing organizations at the time. The stroke was the same as the 390 at , but the bore was increased to . The block was made of cast iron with a specially thickened deck to withstand higher compression. The cylinders were cast using cloverleaf molds— the corners were thicker all down the wall of each cylinder. Many 427s used a steel crankshaft and all were balanced internally. Most 427s used solid valve lifters with the exception of the 1968 block which was drilled for use with hydraulic lifters. Space-saving tunnel-port heads with matching intakes were available, which routed pushrods through the intake's ports in brass tunnels. As an engine designed for racing, it had many performance parts available both from the factory and the aftermarket. A race-ready NASCAR 13.6-1 high-riser was good for some +550 hp, depending on tune. This engine was also used in the A/FX-cars like the famous Fairlane Thunderbolt.
Two different 427 blocks were produced, the top oiler and side oiler. The top oiler version was the earlier and delivered oil to the cam and valvetrain first and the crank second. The side oiler, introduced in 1965, sent oil to the crank first and the cam and valvetrain second. This was similar to the oiling design from the earlier Y-block. The engine was available with low-rise, medium-rise, or high-rise heads, and either single or double four-barrel carburetors on an aluminum manifold matched to each head design. Ford never released an official power rating.
The side-oiler powered Ford GT40 MkIIs to a 1-2-3 finish in the 1966 24 Hours of Le Mans, and the winner's podium in 1967.
The 427 remains a popular engine among Ford enthusiasts.
427 SOHC "Cammer"
The Ford single overhead cam (SOHC) 427 V8 engine, familiarly known as the "Cammer", was released in 1964 in an effort to maintain NASCAR dominance by seeking to counter the enormously large block Chrysler 426 Hemi "elephant" engine. The Ford 427 block was closer dimensionally to the smaller 392 cu. in. first generation Chrysler FirePower Hemi; the Ford FE's bore spacing was compared to the Chrysler 392's . The Ford FE's deck height of was lower than that of the Chrysler 392 at . For comparison, the 426 Hemi has a deck height of and bore spacing of ; both Chrysler Hemis have decks more than taller than the FE.
The engine was based on the high performance 427 side-oiler block, providing race-proven durability. The block and associated parts were largely unchanged, but an idler shaft replaced the camshaft in the block, which necessitated plugging the remaining camshaft bearing oiling holes.
The cast-iron heads were designed with hemispherical combustion chambers and a single overhead camshaft over each head, operating shaft-mounted roller rocker arms. The valvetrain consisted of valves larger than those on Ford wedge head engines, made out of stainless steel and with sodium-filled exhaust valves to prevent the valve heads from burning, and dual valve springs. This design allowed for high volumetric efficiency at high engine speed.
The idler shaft in the block in place of the camshaft was driven by the timing chain and drove the distributor and oil pump in conventional fashion. An additional sprocket on this shaft drove a second "serpentine" timing chain, long, which drove both overhead camshafts. The length of this chain made precision timing of the camshafts an issue at high RPM.
The engine also had a dual-point distributor with a transistorized ignition amplifier system, running 12 amps of current through a high-output ignition coil.
The engines were essentially hand-built for racing, with combustion chambers fully machined to reduce variability. Nevertheless, Ford recommended blueprinting before use in racing applications. With a single four-barrel carburetor they weighed and were rated at at 7,000 rpm & of torque @ 3,800 rpm, with dual four-barrel carburetors at 7,500 rpm & of torque @ 4,200 rpm. Ford sold them via the parts counter, the single four-barrel model as part C6AE-6007-363S, the dual carburetor model as part C6AE-6007-359J for $2350.00 (as of October, 1968).
Ford's hopes to counter Chrysler were, however, cut short. Although enough 427 SOHCs were sold to have the design homologated, Chrysler protests succeeded in getting NASCAR to effectively legislate the engine out of competition. This was due to the motor not being available in a factory production motor vehicle. It was not the only engine ever banned from NASCAR; the 1963 Chevrolet 427 ‘mystery motor’, the 1965 426 ‘Race Hemi’ and the Chrysler A-925 DOHC Hemi were also banned during the 1960s for the same reason. This scuttled the awaited 1965 SOHC versus Hemi competition at the Daytona 500 season opener.
Nevertheless, the SOHC 427 found its niche in non-stock drag racing, powering many altered-wheelbase A/FX Mustangs, and becoming the basis for a handful of supercharged Top Fuel dragsters, including those of Connie Kalitta, Pete Robinson, and Lou Baney (driven by Don "the Snake" Prudhomme). In 1967 Connie Kalitta's SOHC-powered "Bounty Hunter" slingshot dragster won Top Fuel honors at AHRA, NHRA and NASCAR winter meets, becoming the only "triple crown" winner in drag racing history. It was also used in numerous nitro funny cars including those of Jack Chrisman, "Dyno" Don Nicholson, Eddie Schartman, Kenz & Leslie, and in numerous injected gasoline drag racing vehicles.
427 engine configurations and applications
Low-riser intake, 4V
10.9:1 — at 5600 rpm and at 3200 rpm
1968 Mercury Cougar GT-E only (it was to be offered in the Ford Mustang, according to early press releases, but there are no records or verification of any factory 427 Mustangs). In the spring of 1968, the 428 Cobra Jet officially replaced the 427; however, leftover 427s were installed until late June of that year, when stocks were depleted.
11.6:1 — at 5600 rpm and at 3400 rpm
1963–1964 Ford
1963–1964 Mercury
Low-riser intake, 2x4V
12:1 — at 6000 rpm and at 3700 rpm
1964 Ford Fairlane Thunderbolt, Mercury:
High-riser intake, 2x4V
13.6:1 — at 7000 rpm and at 4700 rpm
1966–1967 Ford Fairlane 500 "R-Code", Mercury
Mid-riser intake, 4V
11.0:1 — at 5600 rpm and at 3400 rpm
1965–1967 Ford
1965–1967 Mercury
Mid-riser intake, two 4-barrel Holley 780 CFM carburetor
11.5:1 — at 6000 rpm and at 3700 rpm
1965–1967 Ford
1965–1967 Mercury
1965–1967 Shelby Cobra 427.
428
With its bore size, the 427 block was expensive to manufacture as the slightest shifting of the casting cores could make a block casting unusable. Therefore, Ford combined attributes that had worked well in previous incarnations of the FE – a stroke and a bore – to create an easier-to-make engine with nearly identical displacement. The engine used a cast nodular iron crankshaft and external balancer.
428 FE engines were fitted to Galaxies
(badged simply as '7 Litre') and Thunderbirds in the 1966 and 1967 model years. It was also found in Mustangs, Mercury Cougars, some AC (Shelby) Cobras and various other Fords from 1968. This engine was also available as standard equipment in 1966 and 1967 in the Mercury S-55.
428 engine configurations and applications
4V, 10.5:1
at 4600 rpm and at 2800 rpm
1966–1967 Ford
1966–1967 Ford Thunderbird
1966–1967 Mercury
1966-1967 Ford 7-Litre
1966-1967 Mercury S-55
at 5400 rpm and at 3200 rpm
1966–1970 Ford Police Interceptor
1966–1970 Mercury Police
1969 Shelby GT500KR
Interceptor
at 4600 rpm and at 2800 rpm
1968 Ford
1968 Mercury
at 5400 rpm and at 3200 rpm
1968 Shelby GT500
2x4V, 10.5:1 — "" at 5400 rpm and at 3200 rpm
1967 Shelby GT500
428 Cobra Jet
The 428 Cobra Jet was a performance version of the 428 FE. Launched in April 1968, it was built on a regular production line using a variety of cylinder heads combined with a 735 CFM Holley four-barrel carburetor. The Cobra Jet used heavier connecting rods with a 13/32 rod bolt and a nodular iron crankshaft casting #1UB. A Holman and Moody specially prepared "stripper", which carried no sound deadener, undercoating, or any optional factory equipment, was used as the introductory press car in 1968.
Historical road test data on actual production 428 CJ cars suggest peak output in the neighborhood of 275 SAE Net ("as installed") HP, using published trap speed and "as tested" weights, and Hale's trap speed formula. Period road tests revealed quarter mile performance in the low 14-second to very high 13-second range, with trap speeds around :
Despite urban legend suggesting that this engine produced 410 HP in production line stock form, meticulously prepared but primarily faithful to production line stock examples prove otherwise:
The 428 Cobra Jet engine (modified to the NHRA Stock and Super Stock technical specifications) made its drag racing debut at 1968 NHRA Winternationals, held from February 2–4, 1968, at the Auto Club Raceway at Los Angeles County Fairgrounds, in Pomona, California. Ford Motor Company sponsored five drivers (Gas Ronda, Jerry Harvey, Hubert Platt, "Dyno Don" Nicholson, Kenneth McLellan, and Al Joniec) to race six 428 CJ-equipped Mustangs. They raced in classes C Stock Automatic (C/SA, ), based on advertised horsepower) and Super Stock E (SS/E or SS/EA, manual or automatic transmission, respectively, at , based on factored horsepower). The engine lived up to expectations as four of the cars made it to their respective class finals. Al Joniec won both his class (defeating Hubert Platt in an all-CJ final) and the overall Super Stock Eliminator title (defeating Dave Wren who ‘red lighted’ in his faster 426 Race Hemi Plymouth).
428 Cobra-Jet engine configurations and applications
Cobra-Jet 4V, 10.8:1 — at 5200 rpm and at 3400 rpm
1968 Ford Mustang
1968 Mercury Cougar
1968 Shelby GT500KR
1968 Ford Fairlane
1968 Ford Torino
1968 Mercury Comet
1968 Mercury Cyclone
Cobra-Jet and Super Cobra-Jet 4V, 10.6:1 — at 5200 rpm and at 3400 rpm
1969–1970 Ford Mustang
1969–1970 Mercury Cougar
1969 Ford Fairlane
1969 Ford Torino
1969 Ford Cobra
1969 Mercury Montego, Cyclone and CJ
428 Super Cobra Jet
The 428 Super Cobra Jet (also known as the 428SCJ) used the same top end, pistons, cylinder heads, camshaft, valve train, induction system, exhaust manifolds, and engine block as the 428 Cobra Jet. However, the crankshaft and connecting rods were strengthened and associated balancing altered for drag racing. A nodular iron crankshaft casting #1UA was used as well as heavier 427 "Le Mans" connecting rods with capscrews instead of bolts for greater durability. The heavier connecting rods and the removal of the centre counterweight on the stock 428 Cobra Jet crankshaft (1UA), required an external weight on the snout of the crankshaft for balancing. A 428 Super Cobra Jet engine with oil cooler was standard equipment when the "Drag Pack" option (which came when selecting either a 3.91 or 4.30 rear end gear ratio) was ordered with cars manufactured from 13 November 1968. In addition, while the CJ and SCJ engines used the same autothermic piston casting, the piston-to-bore clearance specification between the CJ and SCJ 428 engines is slightly different, with the SCJ engines gaining a slightly looser fit to permit higher operating temperature. Horsepower measurements at a street rpm level remained the same. The 428 Super Cobra Jet engine was never offered with factory air conditioning due to the location of its engine oil cooler.
428 Cobra-Jet and Super Cobra-Jet engine configurations and applications
Cobra-Jet and Super Cobra-Jet — Bore X Stroke ; Valvetrain: OHV 2 valves per cylinder, naturally aspirated 4-barrel Holley carburetor, compression ratio: 10.6:1 rated at @ 5200 rpm and maximum torque of @ 3400 rpm
1969–1970 Mercury Cougar
1969 Ford Cobra
1969 Mercury Cyclone
Vehicles
Selection of vehicles in which the FE was installed as original equipment:
Replacement
By the mid-1970s the FE had been widely used in Ford vehicles for nearly two decades. To replace it, Ford had developed the 335-series engines, commonly referred to as "Cleveland" engines, and the 385-series engines. These were produced in displacements ranging from up to , including , giving Ford V8s of , , and . The last FE was installed in a production vehicle in 1976, and in the late 1970s the Dearborn Engine Plant that produced the FE engines was completely retooled to produce the 1.6 L engine introduced in the Ford Escort in 1981.
References
Further reading
External links
FE
V8 engines
Gasoline engines by model
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/107th%20United%20States%20Congress
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107th United States Congress
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The 107th United States Congress was a meeting of the legislative branch of the United States federal government, composed of the United States Senate and the United States House of Representatives. It met in Washington, D.C., from January 3, 2001, to January 3, 2003, during the final weeks of the Clinton presidency and the first two years of the George W. Bush presidency. The apportionment of seats in this House of Representatives was based on the 1990 United States census.
The House of Representatives had a Republican majority throughout the session, while the Senate was tied 50–50 for only the third time in history resulting in numerous changes in the majority. Vice President Al Gore gave Democrats a majority for 17 days, then a Republican majority after Dick Cheney became Vice President on January 20, 2001. Senator Jim Jeffords (R-VT) became an independent who caucused with the Democrats on June 6, 2001, giving the party a 51–49 majority for the rest of the Congress.
When Bush was sworn in as president on January 20, the Republicans held a federal trifecta for the first time since the 83rd Congress in 1955.
Major events
A rare even split in the United States Senate, the defection of a Senator, and the inauguration of a new Vice President, led to three changes in majorities.
January 3, 2001: The 107th Congress officially begins, with the Senate split 50–50. Democrat Al Gore — the outgoing Vice President — briefly gives the Democrats a majority.
January 3, 2001: First Lady Hillary Clinton, wife of outgoing President Bill Clinton, became the first, and, to date, only presidential spouse to hold political office (briefly serving as both First Lady and Senator).
January 20, 2001: George W. Bush was sworn in as the 43rd President of the United States; simultaneously, Dick Cheney was sworn in as the 46th Vice President, giving Republicans a Senate majority.
May 24, 2001: Senator Jim Jeffords left the Republican Party, becoming an independent who caucused with the Democrats, giving them a majority from June 6.
September 11, 2001: The September 11 attacks occurred.
September 20, 2001: President Bush reported to a joint session of Congress, announcing the investigation into the September 11 attacks.
October 7, 2001: Operation Enduring Freedom began with airstrikes against the Taliban.
October 9, 2001: Anthrax spores were mailed to, among others, two Senators, Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD) and Patrick Leahy (D-VT).
December 2001: Accounting scandals arise from the financial practices of Enron and WorldCom.
June 12, 2002: John Howard, the Prime Minister of Australia, addressed a joint session of Congress. The address was originally scheduled for September 12, 2001, but was postponed after the September 11 attacks.
October 25, 2002: Senator Paul Wellstone (D-MN), dies in a plane crash, and non-caucusing Independence Party member Dean Barkley is appointed to hold the seat until a special election was held.
November 23, 2002: Jim Talent wins the United States Senate special election for a Missouri seat, giving Republicans the majority once again (though formal reorganization was delayed until the 108th United States Congress convened).
Major legislation
June 7, 2001: Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act, ,
September 18, 2001: Authorization for Use of Military Force of 2001, Pub.L. 107-40
September 22, 2001: Air Transportation Safety and System Stabilization Act, Pub.L. 107-42
September 28, 2001: United States-Jordan Free Trade Area Implementation Act, Pub.L. 107-43
October 26, 2001: "USA PATRIOT" Act, ,
October 27, 2001: International Money Laundering Abatement and Financial Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001, Pub.L. 107-57
November 19, 2001: Aviation and Transportation Security Act, Pub.L. 107-71
December 18, 2001: MD-Care Act, Pub.L. 107-84
December 21, 2001: Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act of 2001, Pub.L. 107-99
January 8, 2002: No Child Left Behind Act, ,
January 8, 2002: District of Columbia Police Coordination Amendment Act of 2001, Pub.L. 107-113
January 11, 2002: Small Business Liability Relief and Brownfields Revitalization Act, ,
March 9, 2002: Job Creation and Worker Assistance Act, ,
March 27, 2002: Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (McCain-Feingold), ,
May 13, 2002: Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002, ,
May 14, 2002: Hematological Cancer Research Investment and Education Act, Pub.L. 107-172
May 14, 2002: Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act of 2002, Pub.L. 107-173
May 15, 2002: Notification and Federal Employee Antidiscrimination and Retaliation (No-FEAR) Act of 2002, Pub.L. 107-174
July 30, 2002: Sarbanes–Oxley Act, ,
August 5, 2002: Born-Alive Infants Protection Act of 2002, Pub.L. 107-207
August 6, 2002: Trade Act of 2002, ,
October 1, 2002: National Construction Safety Team Act, Pub.L. 107-231
October 16, 2002: Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq, ,
October 21, 2002: Sudan Peace Act, ,
October 29, 2002: Help America Vote Act, ,
November 6, 2002: Rare Diseases Act of 2002, Pub.L. 107-280
November 25, 2002: Maritime Transportation Security Act of 2002, Pub.L. 107-295
November 25, 2002: Homeland Security Act, ,
November 26, 2002: Terrorism Risk Insurance Act of 2002, Pub.L. 107-297
December 17, 2002: E-Government Act of 2002, ,
Party summary
Senate
House of Representatives
Leadership
Senate
President: Al Gore (D), until January 20, 2001
Dick Cheney (R), from January 20, 2001
President pro tempore: Robert Byrd (D), until January 20, 2001
Strom Thurmond (R), January 20 – June 6, 2001
Robert Byrd (D), from June 6, 2001
Republican leadership
Minority Leader: Trent Lott (R), until January 20, 2001, and from June 6, 2001
Majority leader January 20 – June 6, 2001
Minority Whip: Don Nickles (R), until January 20, 2001, and from June 6, 2001
Majority whip January 20 – June 6, 2001
Republican Conference Chairman: Rick Santorum
Republican Conference Secretary: Kay Bailey Hutchison
Republican Campaign Committee Chair: Bill Frist
Republican Policy Committee Chairman: Larry Craig
Democratic leadership
Majority Leader: Tom Daschle (D), until January 20, 2001, and from June 6, 2001
Minority leader January 20 – June 6, 2001
Majority Whip: Harry Reid (D), until January 20, 2001, and from June 6, 2001
Minority whip January 20 – June 6, 2001
Democratic Policy Committee Chairman: Byron Dorgan
Democratic Conference Secretary: Barbara Mikulski
Democratic Campaign Committee Chairman: Patty Murray
Democratic Chief Deputy Whip: John Breaux
House of Representatives
Speaker: Dennis Hastert (R)
Majority (Republican) leadership
Majority Leader: Dick Armey
Majority Whip: Tom DeLay
Chief Deputy Whip: Roy Blunt
Republican Conference Chairman: J. C. Watts
Republican Conference Vice-Chairman: Deborah Pryce
Republican Conference Secretary: Barbara Cubin
Policy Committee Chairman: Christopher Cox
Republican Campaign Committee Chairman: Thomas M. Davis
House Rules Committee Chairman: David Dreier
Minority (Democratic) leadership
Minority Leader: Dick Gephardt
Minority Whip: David E. Bonior, until January 15, 2002
Nancy Pelosi, from January 15, 2002
Chief Deputy Minority Whips: John Lewis, Ed Pastor, Max Sandlin & Maxine Waters
Democratic Caucus Chairman: Martin Frost
Democratic Caucus Vice Chairman: Bob Menendez
Democratic Campaign Committee Chairman: Nita Lowey
Members
Skip to House of Representatives, below
Senate
Senators are listed by their class. In this Congress, Class 2 meant their term ended with this Congress, facing re-election in 2002; Class 3 meant their term began in the previous Congress, facing re-election in 2004; and Class 1 meant their term began in this Congress, facing re-election in 2006.
Alabama
2. Jeff Sessions (R)
3. Richard Shelby (R)
Alaska
2. Ted Stevens (R)
3. Frank Murkowski (R), until December 2, 2002
Lisa Murkowski (R), from December 20, 2002
Arizona
1. Jon Kyl (R)
3. John McCain (R)
Arkansas
2. Tim Hutchinson (R)
3. Blanche Lincoln (D)
California
1. Dianne Feinstein (D)
3. Barbara Boxer (D)
Colorado
2. Wayne Allard (R)
3. Ben Nighthorse Campbell (R)
Connecticut
1. Joe Lieberman (D)
3. Chris Dodd (D)
Delaware
1. Tom Carper (D)
2. Joe Biden (D)
Florida
1. Bill Nelson (D)
3. Bob Graham (D)
Georgia
2. Max Cleland (D)
3. Zell Miller (D)
Hawaii
1. Daniel Akaka (D)
3. Daniel Inouye (D)
Idaho
2. Larry Craig (R)
3. Mike Crapo (R)
Illinois
2. Richard Durbin (D)
3. Peter Fitzgerald (R)
Indiana
1. Richard Lugar (R)
3. Evan Bayh (D)
Iowa
2. Tom Harkin (D)
3. Chuck Grassley (R)
Kansas
2. Pat Roberts (R)
3. Sam Brownback (R)
Kentucky
2. Mitch McConnell (R)
3. Jim Bunning (R)
Louisiana
2. Mary Landrieu (D)
3. John Breaux (D)
Maine
1. Olympia Snowe (R)
2. Susan Collins (R)
Maryland
1. Paul Sarbanes (D)
3. Barbara Mikulski (D)
Massachusetts
1. Ted Kennedy (D)
2. John Kerry (D)
Michigan
1. Debbie Stabenow (D)
2. Carl Levin (D)
Minnesota
1. Mark Dayton (DFL)
2. Paul Wellstone (DFL), until October 25, 2002
Dean Barkley (IPM), from November 4, 2002
Mississippi
1. Trent Lott (R)
2. Thad Cochran (R)
Missouri
1. Jean Carnahan (D), until November 23, 2002
Jim Talent (R), from November 23, 2002
3. Kit Bond (R)
Montana
1. Conrad Burns (R)
2. Max Baucus (D)
Nebraska
1. Ben Nelson (D)
2. Chuck Hagel (R)
Nevada
1. John Ensign (R)
3. Harry Reid (D)
New Hampshire
2. Bob Smith (R)
3. Judd Gregg (R)
New Jersey
1. Jon Corzine (D)
2. Robert Torricelli (D)
New Mexico
1. Jeff Bingaman (D)
2. Pete Domenici (R)
New York
1. Hillary Clinton (D)
3. Chuck Schumer (D)
North Carolina
2. Jesse Helms (R)
3. John Edwards (D)
North Dakota
1. Kent Conrad (D-NPL)
3. Byron Dorgan (D-NPL)
Ohio
1. Mike DeWine (R)
3. George Voinovich (R)
Oklahoma
2. James Inhofe (R)
3. Don Nickles (R)
Oregon
2. Gordon Smith (R)
3. Ron Wyden (D)
Pennsylvania
1. Rick Santorum (R)
3. Arlen Specter (R)
Rhode Island
1. Lincoln Chafee (R)
2. Jack Reed (D)
South Carolina
2. Strom Thurmond (R)
3. Fritz Hollings (D)
South Dakota
2. Tim Johnson (D)
3. Tom Daschle (D)
Tennessee
1. Bill Frist (R)
2. Fred Thompson (R)
Texas
1. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R)
2. Phil Gramm (R), until November 30, 2002
John Cornyn (R), from December 2, 2002
Utah
1. Orrin Hatch (R)
3. Bob Bennett (R)
Vermont
1. Jim Jeffords (R until June 6, 2001, then I)
3. Patrick Leahy (D)
Virginia
1. George Allen (R)
2. John Warner (R)
Washington
1. Maria Cantwell (D)
3. Patty Murray (D)
West Virginia
1. Robert Byrd (D)
2. Jay Rockefeller (D)
Wisconsin
1. Herb Kohl (D)
3. Russ Feingold (D)
Wyoming
1. Craig L. Thomas (R)
2. Mike Enzi (R)
House of Representatives
Congressional district numbers are linked to articles describing the district itself.
Alabama
. Sonny Callahan (R)
. Terry Everett (R)
. Bob Riley (R)
. Robert Aderholt (R)
. Robert E. Cramer (D)
. Spencer Bachus (R)
. Earl Hilliard (D)
Alaska
. Don Young (R)
Arizona
. Jeff Flake (R)
. Ed Pastor (D)
. Bob Stump (R)
. John Shadegg (R)
. Jim Kolbe (R)
. J. D. Hayworth (R)
Arkansas
. Robert Marion Berry (D)
. Vic Snyder (D)
. Asa Hutchinson (R), until August 5, 2001
John Boozman (R), from November 20, 2001
. Mike Ross (D)
California
. Mike Thompson (D)
. Wally Herger (R)
. Doug Ose (R)
. John Doolittle (R)
. Bob Matsui (D)
. Lynn Woolsey (D)
. George Miller (D)
. Nancy Pelosi (D)
. Barbara Lee (D)
. Ellen Tauscher (D)
. Richard Pombo (R)
. Tom Lantos (D)
. Pete Stark (D)
. Anna Eshoo (D)
. Mike Honda (D)
. Zoe Lofgren (D)
. Sam Farr (D)
. Gary Condit (D)
. George Radanovich (R)
. Cal Dooley (D)
. Bill Thomas (R)
. Lois Capps (D)
. Elton Gallegly (R)
. Brad Sherman (D)
. Howard McKeon (R)
. Howard Berman (D)
. Adam Schiff (D)
. David Dreier (R)
. Henry Waxman (D)
. Xavier Becerra (D)
. Hilda Solis (D)
. Diane Watson (D), from June 5, 2001
. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D)
. Grace Napolitano (D)
. Maxine Waters (D)
. Jane Harman (D)
. Juanita Millender-McDonald (D)
. Steve Horn (R)
. Ed Royce (R)
. Jerry Lewis (R)
. Gary Miller (R)
. Joe Baca (D)
. Ken Calvert (R)
. Mary Bono (R)
. Dana Rohrabacher (R)
. Loretta Sanchez (D)
. Christopher Cox (R)
. Darrell Issa (R)
. Susan Davis (D)
. Bob Filner (D)
. Duke Cunningham (R)
. Duncan L. Hunter (R)
Colorado
. Diana DeGette (D)
. Mark Udall (D)
. Scott McInnis (R)
. Bob Schaffer (R)
. Joel Hefley (R)
. Tom Tancredo (R)
Connecticut
. John B. Larson (D)
. Rob Simmons (R)
. Rosa DeLauro (D)
. Chris Shays (R)
. James H. Maloney (D)
. Nancy Johnson (R)
Delaware
. Mike Castle (R)
Florida
. Joe Scarborough (R), until September 6, 2001
Jeff Miller (R), from October 16, 2001
. Allen Boyd (D)
. Corrine Brown (D)
. Ander Crenshaw (R)
. Karen Thurman (D)
. Cliff Stearns (R)
. John Mica (R)
. Ric Keller (R)
. Michael Bilirakis (R)
. Bill Young (R)
. Jim Davis (D)
. Adam Putnam (R)
. Dan Miller (R)
. Porter Goss (R)
. Dave Weldon (R)
. Mark Foley (R)
. Carrie Meek (D)
. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R)
. Robert Wexler (D)
. Peter Deutsch (D)
. Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R)
. Clay Shaw (R)
. Alcee Hastings (D)
Georgia
. Jack Kingston (R)
. Sanford Bishop (D)
. Mac Collins (R)
. Cynthia McKinney (D)
. John Lewis (D)
. Johnny Isakson (R)
. Bob Barr (R)
. Saxby Chambliss (R)
. Nathan Deal (R)
. Charlie Norwood (R)
. John Linder (R)
Hawaii
. Neil Abercrombie (D)
. Patsy Mink (D), until September 28, 2002
Ed Case (D), from November 30, 2002
Idaho
. Butch Otter (R)
. Mike Simpson (R)
Illinois
. Bobby Rush (D)
. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D)
. Bill Lipinski (D)
. Luis Gutierrez (D)
. Rod Blagojevich (D)
. Henry Hyde (R)
. Danny K. Davis (D)
. Philip Crane (R)
. Jan Schakowsky (D)
. Mark Kirk (R)
. Jerry Weller (R)
. Jerry Costello (D)
. Judy Biggert (R)
. Dennis Hastert (R)
. Tim Johnson (R)
. Don Manzullo (R)
. Lane Evans (D)
. Ray LaHood (R)
. David D. Phelps (D)
. John Shimkus (R)
Indiana
. Pete Visclosky (D)
. Mike Pence (R)
. Tim Roemer (D)
. Mark Souder (R)
. Steve Buyer (R)
. Dan Burton (R)
. Brian D. Kerns (R)
. John Hostettler (R)
. Baron Hill (D)
. Julia Carson (D)
Iowa
. Jim Leach (R)
. Jim Nussle (R)
. Leonard Boswell (D)
. Greg Ganske (R)
. Tom Latham (R)
Kansas
. Jerry Moran (R)
. Jim Ryun (R)
. Dennis Moore (D)
. Todd Tiahrt (R)
Kentucky
. Ed Whitfield (R)
. Ron Lewis (R)
. Anne Northup (R)
. Ken Lucas (D)
. Hal Rogers (R)
. Ernie Fletcher (R)
Louisiana
. David Vitter (R)
. William J. Jefferson (D)
. Billy Tauzin (R)
. Jim McCrery (R)
. John Cooksey (R)
. Richard H. Baker (R)
. Chris John (D)
Maine
. Tom Allen (D)
. John Baldacci (D)
Maryland
. Wayne Gilchrest (R)
. Bob Ehrlich (R)
. Ben Cardin (D)
. Albert Wynn (D)
. Steny Hoyer (D)
. Roscoe Bartlett (R)
. Elijah Cummings (D)
. Connie Morella (R)
Massachusetts
. John Olver (D)
. Richard Neal (D)
. Jim McGovern (D)
. Barney Frank (D)
. Marty Meehan (D)
. John F. Tierney (D)
. Ed Markey (D)
. Mike Capuano (D)
. Joe Moakley (D) until May 28, 2001
Stephen F. Lynch (D), from October 16, 2001
. Bill Delahunt (D)
Michigan
. Bart Stupak (D)
. Peter Hoekstra (R)
. Vern Ehlers (R)
. Dave Camp (R)
. James A. Barcia (D)
. Fred Upton (R)
. Nick Smith (R)
. Mike Rogers (R)
. Dale Kildee (D)
. David Bonior (D)
. Joe Knollenberg (R)
. Sander Levin (D)
. Lynn N. Rivers (D)
. John Conyers (D)
. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick (D)
. John Dingell (D)
Minnesota
. Gil Gutknecht (R)
. Mark Kennedy (R)
. Jim Ramstad (R)
. Betty McCollum (DFL)
. Martin Olav Sabo (DFL)
. Bill Luther (DFL)
. Collin Peterson (DFL)
. Jim Oberstar (DFL)
Mississippi
. Roger Wicker (R)
. Bennie Thompson (D)
. Chip Pickering (R)
. Ronnie Shows (D)
. Gene Taylor (D)
Missouri
. Lacy Clay (D)
. Todd Akin (R)
. Dick Gephardt (D)
. Ike Skelton (D)
. Karen McCarthy (D)
. Sam Graves (R)
. Roy Blunt (R)
. Jo Ann Emerson (R)
. Kenny Hulshof (R)
Montana
. Denny Rehberg (R)
Nebraska
. Doug Bereuter (R)
. Lee Terry (R)
. Tom Osborne (R)
Nevada
. Shelley Berkley (D)
. Jim Gibbons (R)
New Hampshire
. John E. Sununu (R)
. Charles Bass (R)
New Jersey
. Rob Andrews (D)
. Frank LoBiondo (R)
. Jim Saxton (R)
. Chris Smith (R)
. Marge Roukema (R)
. Frank Pallone (D)
. Mike Ferguson (R)
. Bill Pascrell (D)
. Steve Rothman (D)
. Donald M. Payne (D)
. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R)
. Rush Holt Jr. (D)
. Bob Menendez (D)
New Mexico
. Heather Wilson (R)
. Joe Skeen (R)
. Tom Udall (D)
New York
. Felix Grucci (R)
. Steve Israel (D)
. Peter T. King (R)
. Carolyn McCarthy (D)
. Gary Ackerman (D)
. Gregory Meeks (D)
. Joe Crowley (D)
. Jerry Nadler (D)
. Anthony Weiner (D)
. Edolphus Towns (D)
. Major Owens (D)
. Nydia Velázquez (D)
. Vito Fossella (R)
. Carolyn Maloney (D)
. Charles Rangel (D)
. José E. Serrano (D)
. Eliot Engel (D)
. Nita Lowey (D)
. Sue W. Kelly (R)
. Benjamin Gilman (R)
. Michael R. McNulty (D)
. John E. Sweeney (R)
. Sherwood Boehlert (R)
. John M. McHugh (R)
. James T. Walsh (R)
. Maurice Hinchey (D)
. Thomas M. Reynolds (R)
. Louise Slaughter (D)
. John J. LaFalce (D)
. Jack Quinn (R)
. Amo Houghton (R)
North Carolina
. Eva Clayton (D)
. Bob Etheridge (D)
. Walter B. Jones Jr. (R)
. David Price (D)
. Richard Burr (R)
. Howard Coble (R)
. Mike McIntyre (D)
. Robin Hayes (R)
. Sue Myrick (R)
. Cass Ballenger (R)
. Charles H. Taylor (R)
. Mel Watt (D)
North Dakota
. Earl Pomeroy (D-NPL)
Ohio
. Steve Chabot (R)
. Rob Portman (R)
. Tony P. Hall (D), until September 9, 2002, vacant thereafter
. Mike Oxley (R)
. Paul Gillmor (R)
. Ted Strickland (D)
. Dave Hobson (R)
. John Boehner (R)
. Marcy Kaptur (D)
. Dennis Kucinich (D)
. Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D)
. Pat Tiberi (R)
. Sherrod Brown (D)
. Thomas C. Sawyer (D)
. Deborah Pryce (R)
. Ralph Regula (R)
. James Traficant (D), until July 24, 2002, vacant thereafter
. Bob Ney (R)
. Steve LaTourette (R)
Oklahoma
. Steve Largent (R), until February 15, 2002
John A. Sullivan (R), from February 15, 2002
. Brad Carson (D)
. Wes Watkins (R)
. J. C. Watts (R)
. Ernest Istook (R)
. Frank Lucas (R)
Oregon
. David Wu (D)
. Greg Walden (R)
. Earl Blumenauer (D)
. Peter DeFazio (D)
. Darlene Hooley (D)
Pennsylvania
. Bob Brady (D)
. Chaka Fattah (D)
. Robert A. Borski Jr. (D)
. Melissa Hart (R)
. John E. Peterson (R)
. Tim Holden (D)
. Curt Weldon (R)
. James C. Greenwood (R)
. Bud Shuster (R), until February 3, 2001
Bill Shuster (R), from May 15, 2001
. Don Sherwood (R)
. Paul Kanjorski (D)
. John Murtha (D)
. Joe Hoeffel (D)
. William J. Coyne (D)
. Pat Toomey (R)
. Joe Pitts (R)
. George Gekas (R)
. Mike Doyle (D)
. Todd Russell Platts (R)
. Frank Mascara (D)
. Phil English (R)
Rhode Island
. Patrick J. Kennedy (D)
. James Langevin (D)
South Carolina
. Henry E. Brown Jr. (R)
. Floyd Spence (R), until August 16, 2001
Joe Wilson (R), from December 18, 2001
. Lindsey Graham (R)
. Jim DeMint (R)
. John Spratt (D)
. Jim Clyburn (D)
South Dakota
. John Thune (R)
Tennessee
. Bill Jenkins (R)
. Jimmy Duncan (R)
. Zach Wamp (R)
. Van Hilleary (R)
. Bob Clement (D)
. Bart Gordon (D)
. Ed Bryant (R)
. John S. Tanner (D)
. Harold Ford Jr. (D)
Texas
. Max Sandlin (D)
. Jim Turner (D)
. Sam Johnson (R)
. Ralph Hall (D)
. Pete Sessions (R)
. Joe Barton (R)
. John Culberson (R)
. Kevin Brady (R)
. Nick Lampson (D)
. Lloyd Doggett (D)
. Chet Edwards (D)
. Kay Granger (R)
. Mac Thornberry (R)
. Ron Paul (R)
. Rubén Hinojosa (D)
. Silvestre Reyes (D)
. Charles Stenholm (D)
. Sheila Jackson Lee (D)
. Larry Combest (R)
. Charlie Gonzalez (D)
. Lamar Smith (R)
. Tom DeLay (R)
. Henry Bonilla (R)
. Martin Frost (D)
. Ken Bentsen (D)
. Dick Armey (R)
. Solomon P. Ortiz (D)
. Ciro Rodriguez (D)
. Gene Green (D)
. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D)
Utah
. James V. Hansen (R)
. Jim Matheson (D)
. Chris Cannon (R)
Vermont
. Bernie Sanders (I)
Virginia
. Jo Ann Davis (R)
. Ed Schrock (R)
. Bobby Scott (D)
. Norman Sisisky (D), until March 29, 2001
Randy Forbes (R), from June 19, 2001
. Virgil Goode (R), (I prior to August 1, 2002)
. Bob Goodlatte (R)
. Eric Cantor (R)
. Jim Moran (D)
. Rick Boucher (D)
. Frank Wolf (R)
. Tom Davis (R)
Washington
. Jay Inslee (D)
. Rick Larsen (D)
. Brian Baird (D)
. Doc Hastings (R)
. George Nethercutt (R)
. Norman D. Dicks (D)
. Jim McDermott (D)
. Jennifer Dunn (R)
. Adam Smith (D)
West Virginia
. Alan Mollohan (D)
. Shelley Moore Capito (R)
. Nick Rahall (D)
Wisconsin
. Paul Ryan (R)
. Tammy Baldwin (D)
. Ron Kind (D)
. Jerry Kleczka (D)
. Tom Barrett (D)
. Tom Petri (R)
. Dave Obey (D)
. Mark Andrew Green (R)
. Jim Sensenbrenner (R)
Wyoming
. Barbara Cubin (R)
Non-voting members
. Eni Faleomavaega (D)
. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D)
. Robert A. Underwood (D)
. Aníbal Acevedo Vilá (Res. Comm.) (D/PPD)
. Donna Christian-Christensen (D)
Changes in membership
Senate
|-
| Vermont (1)
| nowrap | Jim Jeffords (R)
| Incumbent changed party and joined the Democratic caucus.
| nowrap | Jim Jeffords (I)
| June 6, 2001
|-
| Minnesota (2)
| nowrap | Paul Wellstone (D)
| Incumbent died October 25, 2002.Successor appointed to serve the remaining two months of the term.
| nowrap | Dean Barkley (IMN)
| November 4, 2002
|-
| Missouri (1)
| nowrap | Jean Carnahan (D)
| Interim appointee lost election.Successor elected November 5, 2002.
| nowrap | Jim Talent (R)
| November 23, 2002
|-
| Texas (2)
| nowrap | Phil Gramm (R)
| Incumbent resigned November 30, 2002, to give successor seniority advantages.Successor appointed on December 2, 2002, having already been elected to the next term.
| nowrap | John Cornyn (R)
| December 2, 2002
|-
| Alaska (3)
| nowrap | Frank Murkowski (R)
| Incumbent resigned December 2, 2002, to become Governor of Alaska.Successor appointed to remainder of the term ending January 3, 2005.
| nowrap | Lisa Murkowski (R)
| December 20, 2002
|}
House of Representatives
|-
|
| Vacant
| Incumbent Julian Dixon (D) had died December 8, 2000, before the beginning of this Congress.A special election was held June 5, 2001.
| nowrap | Diane Watson (D)
| June 5, 2001
|-
|
| nowrap | Bud Shuster (R)
| Incumbent resigned, effective January 31, 2001.A special election was held May 15, 2001.
| nowrap | Bill Shuster (R)
| May 15, 2001
|-
|
| nowrap | Norman Sisisky (D)
| Incumbent died March 30, 2001.A special election was held June 19, 2001.
| nowrap | Randy Forbes (R)
| June 19, 2001
|-
|
| nowrap | Joe Moakley (D)
| Incumbent died May 28, 2001.A special election was held October 16, 2001.
| nowrap | Stephen F. Lynch (D)
| October 16, 2001
|-
|
| nowrap | Asa Hutchinson (R)
| Incumbent resigned August 5, 2001, to head the Drug Enforcement Administration.A special election was held November 20, 2001.
| nowrap | John Boozman (R)
| November 20, 2001
|-
|
| nowrap | Floyd Spence (R)
| Incumbent died August 16, 2001.A special election was held December 18, 2001.
| nowrap | Joe Wilson (R)
| December 18, 2001
|-
|
| nowrap | Joe Scarborough (R)
| Incumbent resigned, effective September 6, 2001.A special election was held October 16, 2001.
| nowrap | Jeff Miller (R)
| October 16, 2001
|-
|
| nowrap | Steve Largent (R)
| Incumbent resigned, effective February 15, 2002, to concentrate on his campaign for governor.A special election was held January 8, 2002.
| nowrap | John A. Sullivan (R)
| February 15, 2002
|-
|
| nowrap | Jim Traficant (D)
| Incumbent expelled July 24, 2002, for criminal conviction of 10 counts of bribery, racketeering, and tax evasion.
| Vacant
| Not filled for remainder of Congress
|-
|
| nowrap | Virgil Goode (I)
| Incumbent changed party.
| nowrap | Virgil Goode (R)
| August 1, 2002
|-
|
| nowrap | Tony P. Hall (D)
| Incumbent resigned September 9, 2002, after he was appointed to be the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.
| Vacant
| Not filled for remainder of Congress
|-
|
| nowrap | Patsy Mink (D)
| Incumbent died September 28, 2002, but was elected posthumously on November 5, 2002.
| nowrap | Ed Case (D)
| November 30, 2002
|}
Committees
Senate
Aging (Special) (Chair: John Breaux, then Larry Craig, then John Breaux)
Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry (Chair: Tom Harkin, then Richard Lugar, then Tom Harkin)
Forestry, Conservation and Rural Revitalization (Chair: Blanche Lincoln)
Marketing Inspection and Product Promotion (Chair: Max Baucus)
Production and Price Competitiveness (Chair: Kent Conrad)
Research, Nutrition and General Legislation (Chair: Patrick Leahy)
Appropriations (Chair: Robert Byrd, then Ted Stevens, then Robert Byrd)
Agriculture, Rural Development and Related Agencies (Chair: Herb Kohl)
Commerce, Justice, State and the Judiciary (Chair: Ernest F. Hollings)
Defense (Chair: Daniel K. Inouye)
District of Columbia (Chair: Mary Landrieu)
Energy and Water Development (Chair: Harry Reid)
Foreign Operations (Chair: Patrick Leahy)
Interior (Chair: Robert Byrd)
Labor, Health, Human Services and Education (Chair: Tom Harkin)
Legislative Branch (Chair: Richard Durbin)
Military Construction (Chair: Dianne Feinstein)
Transportation (Chair: Patty Murray)
Treasury and General Government (Chair: Byron Dorgan)
VA, HUD and Independent Agencies (Chair: Barbara Mikulski)
Armed Services (Chair: Carl Levin, then John Warner, then Carl Levin)
Airland (Chair: Joe Lieberman)
Emerging Threats and Capabilities (Chair: Mary Landrieu)
Personnel (Chair: Max Cleland)
Readiness and Management Support (Chair: Daniel Akaka)
Seapower (Chair: Ted Kennedy)
Strategic (Chair: Jack Reed)
Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs (Chair: Paul Sarbanes, then Phil Gramm, then Paul Sarbanes)
Economic Policy (Chair: Chuck Schumer)
Financial Institutions (Chair: Tim Johnson)
Housing and Transportation (Chair: Jack Reed)
International Trade and Finance (Chair: Evan Bayh)
Securities (Chair: Chris Dodd)
Budget (Chair: Kent Conrad, then Pete Domenici, then Kent Conrad)
Commerce, Science and Transportation (Chair: Ernest Hollings, then John McCain, then Ernest Hollings)
Aviation (Chair: Jay Rockefeller)
Communications (Chair: Daniel Inouye)
Consumer Affairs, Foreign Commerce and Tourism (Chair: Byron Dorgan)
Oceans, Atmosphere and Fisheries (Chair: John Kerry)
Science, Technology and Space (Chair: Ron Wyden)
Surface Transportation and Merchant Marine (Chair: John Breaux)
Energy and Natural Resources (Chair: Jeff Bingaman, then Frank Murkowski, then Jeff Bingaman)
Energy Research, Development, Production and Regulation (Chair: Bob Graham)
Forests and Public Land Management (Chair: Ron Wyden)
National Parks, Historic Preservation and Recreation (Chair: Daniel Akaka)
Water and Power (Chair: Byron L. Dorgan)
Environment and Public Works (Chair: Harry Reid, then Bob Smith, then Jim Jeffords)
Clean Air, Wetlands and Climate Change (Chair: Joe Lieberman)
Fisheries, Wildlife, and Water (Chair: Bob Graham)
Superfund, Toxics, Risk and Waste Management (Chair: Barbara Boxer)
Transportation, Infrastructure and Nuclear Safety (Chair: Harry Reid)
Ethics (Select) (Chair: Pat Roberts, then Harry Reid)
Finance (Chair: Max Baucus, then Chuck Grassley, then Max Baucus)
Health Care (Chair: Jay Rockefeller)
International Trade (Chair: Max Baucus)
Long-Term Growth and Debt Reduction (Chair: Bob Graham)
Social Security and Family Policy (Chair: John Breaux)
Taxation and IRS Oversight (Chair: Kent Conrad)
Foreign Relations (Chair: Joe Biden, then Jesse Helms, then Joe Biden)
African Affairs (Chair: Russ Feingold)
Central Asia and the South Caucasus (Chair: Robert Torricelli)
East Asian and Pacific Affairs (Chair: John Kerry)
European Affairs (Chair: Joe Biden)
International Economic Policy, Export and Trade Promotion (Chair: Paul Sarbanes)
International Operations and Terrorism (Chair: Barbara Boxer)
Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs (Chair: Paul Wellstone)
Western Hemisphere, Peace Corps, Narcotics and Terrorism (Chair: Chris Dodd)
Governmental Affairs (Chair: Joe Lieberman, then Fred Thompson, then Joe Lieberman)
International Security, Proliferation and Federal Services (Chair: Daniel Akaka)
Oversight of Government Management, Restructing and the District of Columbia (Chair: Richard Durbin)
Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (Chair: Carl Levin)
Indian Affairs (Select) (Chair: Daniel Inouye, then Ben Nighthorse Campbell, then Daniel Inouye)
Intelligence (Select) (Chair: Bob Graham, then Richard Shelby, then Bob Graham)
Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (Chair: Ted Kennedy, then Jim Jeffords, then Ted Kennedy)
Children and Families (Chair: Chris Dodd)
Public Health (Chair: Ted Kennedy)
Aging (Chair: Barbara Mikulski)
Employment, Safety and Training (Chair: Paul Wellstone)
Judiciary (Chair: Patrick Leahy, then Orrin Hatch, then Patrick Leahy)
Administrative Oversight and the Courts (Chair: Chuck Schumer)
Antitrust, Business Rights and Competition (Chair: Herb Kohl)
Constitution, Federalism and Property Rights (Chair: Russ Feingold)
Crime and Drugs (Chair: Joe Biden)
Immigration (Chair: Ted Kennedy)
Technology, Terrorism and Government Information (Chair: Dianne Feinstein)
Rules and Administration (Chair: Chris Dodd, then Mitch McConnell, then Chris Dodd)
Small Business (Chair: John Kerry, then Kit Bond, then John Kerry)
Veterans' Affairs (Chair: Jay Rockefeller, then Arlen Specter, then Jay Rockefeller)
House of Representatives
Agriculture (Chair: Larry Combest, Vice Chair: John A. Boehner)
Department Operations, Oversight, Nutrition and Forestry (Chair: Bob Goodlatte)
Conservation, Credit, Rural Development and Research (Chair: Frank Lucas)
Department Operations, Oversight, Nutrition and Forestry (Chair: Bob Goodlatte)
General Farm Commodities and Risk Management (Chair: Saxby Chambliss)
Livestock and Horticulture (Chair: Richard Pombo)
Specialty Crops and Foreign Agriculture Programs (Chair: Richard Pombo)
Appropriations (Chair: Bill Young)
Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration and Related Agencies (Chair: Henry Bonilla)
Commerce, Justice, State and Judiciary (Chair: Frank Wolf)
Defense (Chair: Jerry Lewis)
District of Columbia (Chair: Joe Knollenberg)
Energy and Water Development (Chair: Sonny Callahan)
Foreign Operations, Export Financing and Related Programs (Chair: Jim Kolbe)
Interior (Chair: Joe Skeen)
Labor, Health, Human Services and Education (Chair: Ralph Regula)
Legislative (Chair: Charles H. Taylor)
Military Construction (Chair: David L. Hobson)
Transportation (Chair: Hal Rogers)
Treasury, Postal Service and General Government (Chair: Ernest J. Istook)
VA-HUD Independent Agencies (Chair: James T. Walsh)
Armed Services (Chair: Bob Stump, Vice Chair: Floyd Spence)
Military Installations and Facilities (Chair: Jim Saxton)
Military Personnel (Chair: John M. McHugh, Vice Chair: Robin Hayes)
Military Procurement (Chair: Floyd Spence then Curt Weldon, Vice Chair: Lindsey Graham)
Military Readiness (Chair: Joel Hefley, Vice Chair: Bob Riley)
Military Research and Development (Chair: Duncan D. Hunter, Vice Chair: Walter B. Jones Jr.)
Special Oversight Panel on Morale, Welfare and Recreation (Chair: Roscoe G. Bartlett)
Special Oversight Panel on the Merchant Marine (Chair: Duncan L. Hunter)
Department of Energy Reorganization (Chair: Mac Thornberry, Vice Chair: Ken Calvert)
Special Oversight Panel on Terrorism (Chair: Jim Saxton, Vice Chair: John N. Hostettler)
Budget (Chair: Jim Nussle)
Education and the Workforce (Chair: John Boehner, Vice Chair: Tom Petri)
Employer-Employee Relations (Chair: Sam Johnson, Vice Chair: Ernie Fletcher)
Workforce Protections (Chair: Charlie Norwood, Vice Chair: Judy Biggert)
21st Century Competitiveness (Chair: Buck McKeon, Vice Chair: Johnny Isakson)
Education Reform (Chair: Michael N. Castle, Vice Chair: Bob Schaffer)
Select Education (Chair: Peter Hoekstra, Vice Chair: Pat Tiberi)
Energy and Commerce (Chair: Billy Tauzin, Vice Chair: Richard Burr)
Commerce, Trade and Consumer Production (Chair: Cliff Stearns, Vice Chair: Nathan Deal)
Energy and Air Quality (Chair: Joe Barton, Vice Chair: Steve Largent)
Environment and Hazardous Materials (Chair: Paul E. Gillmor, Vice Chair: John Shimkus)
Health (Chair: Michael Bilirakis, Vice Chair: Charlie Norwood)
Oversight and Investigations (Chair: James C. Greenwood, Vice Chair: Ed Whitfield)
Telecommunications and the Internet (Chair: Fred Upton, Vice Chair: Cliff Stearns)
Financial Services (Chair: Mike Oxley, Vice Chair: Marge Roukema)
Capital Markets, Insurance and Government-Sponsored Enterprises (Chair: Richard H. Baker, Vice Chair: Robert W. Ney)
Domestic Monetary Policy, Technology and Economic Growth (Chair: Peter T. King, Vice Chair: Jim Leach)
Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit (Chair: Spencer Bachus, Vice Chair: Dave Weldon)
Housing and Community Opportunity (Chair: Marge Roukema, Vice Chair: Mark Green)
International Monetary Policy and Trade (Chair: Doug Bereuter, Vice Chair: Doug Ose)
Oversight and Investigations (Chair: Sue W. Kelly, Vice Chair: Ron Paul)
Government Reform (Chair: Dan Burton)
Census (Chair: Dan Miller, Vice Chair: Chris Cannon)
Civil Service and Agency Organization (Chair: Dave Weldon)
Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources (Chair: Mark Souder, Vice Chair: Benjamin A. Gilman)
District of Columbia (Chair: Constance Morella, Vice Chair: Todd R. Platts)
Energy Policy, Natural Resources and Regulatory Affairs (Chair: Doug Ose, Vice Chair: Butch Otter)
Government Efficiency, Financial Management and Intergovernmental Relations (Chair: Stephen Horn, Vice Chair: Ron Lewis)
National Security, Veterans' Affairs and International Relations (Chair: Christopher Shays, Vice Chair: Adam Putnam)
Technology and Procurement Policy (Chair: Thomas M. Davis, Vice Chair: Jo Ann Davis)
House Administration (Chair: Bob Ney)
International Relations (Chair: Henry Hyde)
Africa (Chair: Edward Royce)
East Asia and the Pacific (Chair: Jim Leach)
Europe (Chair: Elton Gallegly)
International Operations and Human Rights (Chair: Ileana Ros-Lehtinen)
The Middle East and South Asia (Chair: Benjamin Gilman)
Western Hemisphere (Chair: Cass Ballenger)
Judiciary (Chair: Jim Sensenbrenner)
Commercial and Administrative Law (Chair: Bob Barr, Vice Chair: Jeff Flake)
The Constitution (Chair: Steve Chabot, Vice Chair: Melissa Hart)
Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property (Chair: Howard Coble, Vice Chair: Bob Goodlatte)
Crime (Chair: Lamar Smith)
Immigration and Claims (Chair: George Gekas, Vice Chair: Chris Cannon)
Resources (Chair: James V. Hansen, Vice Chair: Don Young)
Energy and Mineral Resources (Chair: Barbara Cubin, Vice Chair: Jim Gibbons)
Fisheries Conservation, Wildlife and Oceans (Chair: Wayne T. Gilchrest, Vice Chair: Jim Saxton)
National Parks, Recreation and Public Lands (Chair: George P. Radanovich, Vice Chair: John E. Peterson)
Forests and Forest Health (Chair: Scott McInnis, Vice Chair: Walter B. Jones Jr.)
Water and Power (Chair: Ken Calvert, Vice Chair: George P. Radanovich)
Rules (Chair: David Dreier, Vice Chair: Porter Goss)
The Legislative Process (Chair: Deborah Pryce, Vice Chair: Porter Goss)
Technology and the House (Chair: John Linder, Vice Chair: Lincoln Diaz-Balart)
Science (Chair: Sherwood Boehlert, Vice Chair: Gil Gutknecht)
Energy (Chair: Roscoe G. Bartlett, Vice Chair: Melissa A. Hart)
Environment, Technology and Standards (Chair: Vernon J. Ehlers, Vice Chair: Felix J. Grucci Jr.)
Research (Chair: Nick Smith, Vice Chair: Tim Johnson)
Space and Aeronautics (Chair: Dana Rohrabacher, Vice Chair: Dave Weldon)
Small Business (Chair: Don Manzullo)
Regulatory Reform and Oversight (Chair: Mike Pence)
Rural Enterprises, Agriculture and Technology (Chair: John R. Thune)
Tax, Finance and Exports (Chair: Patrick J. Toomey)
Workforce, Empowerment and Government Programs (Chair: Jim DeMint)
Standards of Official Conduct (Chair: Joel Hefley)
Transportation and Infrastructure (Chair: Don Young, Vice Chair: Tom Petri)
Aviation (Chair: John Mica, Vice Chair: John Cooksey)
Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation (Chair: Frank LoBiondo, Vice Chair: Rob Simmons)
Economic Development, Public Buildings and Emergency Management (Chair: Steven LaTourette, Vice Chair: Shelley Moore Capito)
Highways and Transit (Chair: Tom Petri, Vice Chair: Mark R. Kennedy)
Railroads (Chair: Jack Quinn, Vice Chair: Mike Ferguson)
Water Resources and Environment (Chair: John J. Duncan, Vice Chair: Denny Rehberg)
Veterans' Affairs (Chair: Chris Smith, Vice Chair: Michael Bilirakis)
Benefits (Chair: Mike Simpson, Vice Chair: Floyd Spence)
Health (Chair: Jerry Moran, Vice Chair: Cliff Stearns)
Oversight and Investigations (Chair: Steve Buyer, Vice Chair: Bob Stump)
Ways and Means (Chair: Bill Thomas)
Health (Chair: Nancy Johnson)
Human Resources (Chair: Wally Herger)
Oversight (Chair: Amo Houghton)
Select Revenue Measures (Chair: Jim McCrery)
Social Security (Chair: E. Clay Shaw)
Trade (Chair: Phil Crane)
Whole
Joint committees
Economic (Chair: Rep. Jim Saxton, Vice Chair: Sen. Jack Reed)
Taxation (Chair: Rep. Bill Thomas, Vice Chair: Sen. Max Baucus)
The Library (Chair: Rep. Vernon J. Ehlers, Vice Chair: Sen. Chris Dodd)
Printing (Chair: Sen. Mark Dayton, Vice Chair: Rep. Robert W. Ney)
Caucuses
Employees
Legislative branch agency directors
Architect of the Capitol: Alan M. Hantman
Attending Physician of the United States Congress: John F. Eisold
Comptroller General of the United States: David M. Walker
Director of the Congressional Budget Office: Dan Crippen
Librarian of Congress: James H. Billington
Public Printer of the United States: Michael F. DiMario, until 2002
Bruce James, from 2002
Senate
Chaplain: Lloyd John Ogilvie (Presbyterian)
Curator: Diane K. Skvarla
Historian: Richard A. Baker
Parliamentarian: Bob Dove, until May 2001
Alan Frumin, May 2001 - end
Secretary: Gary Lee Sisco, until July 11, 2001
Jeri Thomson, July 12, 2001 - end
Librarian: Greg Harness
Sergeant at Arms: James W. Ziglar, until August 2, 2001
Alfonso E. Lenhardt, September 4, 2001 - end
Secretary for the Majority / Minority:
Martin P. Paone (Democrats)
Elizabeth B. Letchworth (Republicans)
David J. Schiappa (Republicans)
House of Representatives
Chaplain: Daniel P. Coughlin (Roman Catholic)
Chief Administrative Officer: James M. Eagen III
Clerk: Jeff Trandahl
Parliamentarian: Charles W. Johnson
Reading Clerks:
Mary Kevin Niland (D)
Paul Hays (R)
Sergeant at Arms: Wilson Livingood
Inspector General: Steven McNamara
See also
List of new members of the 107th Congress
2000 United States elections (elections leading to this Congress)
2000 United States presidential election
2000 United States Senate elections
2000 United States House of Representatives elections
2002 United States elections (elections during this Congress, leading to the next Congress)
2002 United States Senate elections
2002 United States House of Representatives elections
Notes
References
External links
United States 107th Congress Web Archive from the U.S. Library of Congress
Congress.gov
History, Art and Archives from the United States House of Representatives
Statistics & Lists from the United States Senate
Booknotes interview with Tom Daschle on Like No Other Time: The 107th Congress and the Two Years That Changed America, November 30, 2003.
Articles containing video clips
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad%20Sherman
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Brad Sherman
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Bradley James Sherman (born October 24, 1954) is an American accountant and politician serving as the U.S. representative for California's 32nd congressional district. A member of the Democratic Party, he first entered Congress in 1997; Sherman represented California's 24th congressional district for three terms, California's 27th congressional district for five terms, and California's 30th congressional district for five terms. His district is in the San Fernando Valley, in Los Angeles County, as well as the eastern part of the Simi Hills in Ventura County. He resides in Sherman Oaks.
Early life, education, and early career
Sherman was born in Los Angeles, the son of Lane (from the Philadelphia area) and Maurice Hyman Sherman (from Indiana). His parents were both of Russian Jewish descent. He attended Mark Keppel High School and Corona del Mar High School. He received a B.A. in political science from University of California, Los Angeles, in 1974, and a J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1979. He is also a tax law specialist and Certified Public Accountant. Before joining Congress, Sherman worked at one of the nations' big-four CPA firms, participated in audits of large businesses and governmental entities as a staff member, provided tax law counsel on multi-million-dollar transactions, advised entrepreneurs and small businesses on tax and investment issues, and helped represent the Philippine government under Corazon Aquino in a successful effort to seize assets of deposed president Ferdinand Marcos. Sherman was also an instructor at Harvard Law School's International Tax Program.
Board of Equalization (1991–1996)
Sherman served on the California State Board of Equalization from 1991 to 1996. He chaired the board from 1991 to 1995.
It was reported that the campaign for the Board of Equalization involved numerous attacks. Claude Parrish, Sherman's opponent, said that an attorney general candidate declined to endorse Sherman due to a post on the state's elected tax appeals board. Sherman replied, calling it "one of the most outrageous hit pieces in contemporary California political history".
U.S. House of Representatives
Elections
In 1994, incumbent Democratic U.S. Representative Anthony C. Beilenson of California's 24th congressional district barely survived the Republican Revolution, winning reelection by a two-point margin, by far the worst election performance of his career. In 1996, Beilenson decided to retire.
Sherman ran for the seat and won the seven-candidate Democratic primary with 54% of the vote. In the general election, he defeated Republican nominee Rich Sybert (also the 1994 nominee), 49%–44%. He has not faced another contest nearly that close since. In 1998, he was reelected with 57% of the vote. Since then, he has been reelected every two years with at least 62%.
2012
Redistricting following the 2010 census drew the homes of Sherman and fellow Democrat Howard Berman, who had previously represented the 28th district, into the 30th district. The redrawn 30th was more Sherman's district than Berman's; Sherman retained approximately 60% of his former territory, while Berman retained 20% of his former voters. On June 5, 2012, Sherman faced Berman in the primary for the 30th district. Sherman finished first, leading 42% to 32%. Due to California's new election system, which put the two candidates who received the most votes in the primary against each other, regardless of party, the two faced each other again in the general election. Neither candidate was endorsed by the state Democratic Party.
Berman was the more established candidate. He was endorsed by over 20 congressmen, including party leaders Steny Hoyer and Xavier Becerra, and by sitting Governor Jerry Brown, sitting Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, and the state's two U.S. senators, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein. He was also endorsed by ten Republican congressmen from California: David Dreier, Wally Herger, Dan Lungren, Elton Gallegly, Buck McKeon, Ed Royce, Jerry Lewis, Ken Calvert, Mary Bono Mack, and Darrell Issa. In addition, he was endorsed by two Republican U.S. senators, John McCain and Lindsey Graham, and by Independent U.S. senator Joe Lieberman.
Sherman was endorsed by then-lieutenant governor (and future governor) Gavin Newsom, former president Bill Clinton, and former Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis.
In the general election, Sherman defeated Berman, 60%–40%.
Tenure
First elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1996, Sherman is serving his 12th term in Congress. He is a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and serves as the top Democrat on the Subcommittee on Asia. He is chairman emeritus of the Subcommittee on International Terrorism, Non-Proliferation, and Trade. He is also a senior member of the Financial Services Committee.
Sherman has held over 160 Town Hall meetings since being elected to Congress. In the Washingtonian's 2012 anonymous survey of congressional staff, Sherman was named the second-meanest member of the House, after Sheila Jackson Lee.
Environment
Sherman has earned a 100% rating from the Sierra Club and the League of Conservation Voters.
Serving on the House Budget Committee in 1997, Sherman authored the Sherman Amendment to the Budget Resolution, providing an additional $700 million for the acquisition of environmentally important lands in FY 1998.
Labor
Sherman's voting record has most often earned him a 100% rating from the AFL–CIO, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and the American Federation of State, County, & Municipal Employees (AFSCME).
Sherman was an original co-sponsor of The Employee Free Choice Act when it was introduced at the start of 2007 and when it was reintroduced in 2009.
In 2008 and 2010, Sherman introduced legislation to eliminate so-called state "Right to Work" laws nationwide, and he supports a single national standard that protects labor rights. Sherman has also opposed Free Trade deals with South Korea, Colombia, and other countries, because he believes they are bad for American workers.
Transportation
Sherman has worked to reduce airport noise in the San Fernando Valley. He joined several colleagues in introducing legislation, the Valley-Wide Noise Relief Act, to allow the operator of Bob Hope Airport to implement a mandatory nighttime curfew.
Sherman secured federal funds to initiate several improvements at the 101/405 interchange.
Animal rights
Sherman's voting record has earned him a 100% rating in 2004 from the Humane Society, which has awarded him the "Humane Champion" award for five consecutive years.
In 2017 and 2018, the Animal Welfare Institute gave Sherman a rating of 68%, based on congressional voting records.
Fiscal policy
Sherman "led the House revolt" against the original $700 billion bailout plan, known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). He introduced the "Too Big to Fail, Too Big to Exist Act", with regard to large financial entities.
In 2010, Sherman received a 61% rating from the Chamber of Commerce and a 55% rating from the National Federation of Independent Business.
In 2018, the Chamber of Commerce gave Sherman a 55% rating on issues relating to budget, spending, and taxes, and a 41% rating on issues relating to businesses and consumers.
Financial crisis
During the debate over the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (commonly known as "the bailout of the U.S. financial system"), Sherman was an early and outspoken critic of the proposal, leading the House revolt against the bill, a move that made him "spectacularly unpopular with both the Republican and Democratic leaderships, not to mention K Street". He argued that Bush and his advisors had created a panic atmosphere in an effort to get lawmakers to rubber-stamp the bill.
Social Security and health care
Sherman has said he is "opposed to creating a voucher system for Medicare". He wants to avoid "turn[ing] Social Security into a welfare program", instead keeping it "for people who contribute to it".
For his voting record and efforts in Congress, Sherman has consistently earned a 100% rating from the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare and the AARP. He supports the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
Sherman helped secure funds to develop a new women's and children's patient wing at El Proyecto del Barrio's Family Health Care Clinic in Winnetka.
Housing
Sherman introduced the Preserving Equal Access to Mortgage Finance Programs Act (HR 1754), which raises the conforming loan limit for FHA loans in high-cost areas such as Sherman's district.
Sherman frequently holds seminars for Valley residents in his district, to address issues of home purchasing, home refinancing, and foreclosure avoidance.
Civil liberties
Sherman's legislative record received a 100% rating from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in 2011, a 100% from the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 2007–08, a 100% from the Human Rights Campaign in 2009–10, and a 98% rating from the NAACP in 2009–10.
Sherman co-sponsored the Due Process Guarantee Act, which amends the Non-Detention Act of 1971 to provide that Congressional authorization of the use of military force does not authorize the indefinite detention without charge or trial of U.S. citizens.
In 2011, Sherman voted against reauthorizing the Patriot Act because of concerns that it would infringe on certain civil liberties, including the "library provision" that allows the FBI to acquire records about what books a person has checked out from libraries.
Foreign relations
In August 2010, Sherman introduced legislation aimed at rescinding China's Most Favored Nation status as long as there was not "a more level playing field between our two nations". He said, "the U.S.-China trade relationship is horrendously lopsided".
Sherman has introduced or co-sponsored more than 20 bills in the 111th and 112th Congresses that he says "enact tougher sanctions to isolate Iran economically and diplomatically". His efforts have included legislation designed to close loopholes for U.S. companies with subsidiaries operating in Iran, and to curtail U.S. funding of international organizations providing loans to Iran.
Sherman has been a strong supporter and advocate of the U.S-Israel relationship, consistently supporting aid to Israel. In 2016, he called the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Washington's chief pro-Israel lobbying and advocacy organization, "the single most important organization in promoting the U.S.-Israel alliance". In 2004, Sherman first introduced the U.S.-Israel Energy Cooperation Act. It provides grants to joint ventures between American and Israeli academics and private companies that conduct research and develop energy-efficient and renewable energy technologies.
On July 9, 2014, Sherman appeared as a guest commentator on the Al Jazeera America's network. During his appearance, he criticized the network's Qatar-based owners for funding Hamas. Sherman said: "Every one of those rockets [fired by Hamas into Israeli cities] is a war crime, almost every one. Of course it's a war crime committed by Hamas. And of course the owners of this TV network help fund Hamas." Sherman emphasized that Hamas often aims attacks at civilian targets. The Qatari government owns Al Jazeera.
In December 2014, Sherman and Representative Pete Roskam requested new sanctions on Qatar in a letter to Secretary of Treasury Jack Lew. They also asked for a detailed accounting of public and private financing from within Qatar for Hamas, Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and the al-Nusra Front.
Sherman and other pro-Israel members of Congress have introduced legislation to allow Israel to be part of the visa waiver program. The legislation failed because the Israeli government was unwilling to grant reciprocal visa-free travel for all U.S. citizens.
As a senior member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Sherman has focused on Congressional recognition of the Armenian genocide, as well as increasing funding to Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh, which is officially part of Azerbaijan, but has been under control of ethnic Armenian forces backed by Armenia since the end of a separatist war in 1994. He called for the imposition of sanctions against Azerbaijan.
Sherman urged the Trump administration to take a tougher line on China by imposing sanctions on Chinese officials who are responsible for human rights abuses against the Uyghur Muslim minority in China's Xinjiang region. In March 2019, Sherman and other lawmakers wrote Secretary of State Mike Pompeo a letter that read in part, "This issue is bigger than just China. It is about demonstrating to strongmen globally that the world will hold them accountable for their actions."
Religion
Sherman and his wife, who are Jewish, have been active members of Valley Beth Shalom, a Conservative synagogue in Encino, California, for many years.
As a congressman, Sherman has appeared at events sponsored by virtually every religious denomination practiced in America – including Orthodox Jewish, Reform Jewish, Conservative Jewish, Reconstructionist Jewish, Traditional Persian Jewish, Sephardic Jewish, Scientologist, Muslim, Catholic, Roman Catholic, Coptic Christian, The Assyrian Church, Greek Orthodox, the Armenian Church, Sikh, Buddhist, Hindu, Russian Orthodox, the Hungarian reformed Orthodox Church, Episcopalian, Methodist, Presbyterian, the Church of Christ, nondenominational Christian, and evangelical Christian.
Sherman expressed condolences to the Sikh community after the deadly shootings at a Sikh temple in August 2012. After the September 11 attacks, Sherman joined colleagues in introducing a resolution to condemn bigotry and violence against Sikh-Americans. He has advocated on behalf of religious minorities outside the U.S., including Hindus in Pakistan and Christians and Jews in the Arab world. Sherman introduced the Religious Minorities in the Arab World Resolution, which calls for the protection of the rights and freedoms of ethno-religious minorities, particularly in Egypt and Iraq.
Internet policy
In 2011, Sherman co-sponsored SOPA, a controversial copyright bill. His 2012 opponent, Howard Berman, was an original co-sponsor of SOPA.
Cryptocurrency
On March 14, 2018, Sherman made highly critical remarks about Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, and initial coin offerings. He started his prepared remarks by saying, "Cryptocurrencies are a crock". He further said, on Congressional record, that all Bitcoin does is allow "a few dozen men in my district to sit in their pajamas on their couch all day and tell their wives they are going to be millionaires". He further suggested that Bitcoin provides no value to the real economy, asking: "When you buy a Bitcoin, are you helping build a new factory?" On July 18, 2018, Sherman called for a ban on dealing in or mining of cryptocurrencies by U.S. persons and said that use of cryptocurrencies as a medium of exchange is useful only to people facilitating narcotics trafficking, terrorism, and tax evasion.
LGBT
Sherman strongly supports LGBT rights. He earned a 100% rating from the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest LGBT rights group, in the 114th, 113th, and 112th Congresses.
Sherman is a member of the LGBT Equality Caucus and supports same-sex marriage. He voted for the Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act of 2010.
Sherman was an original co-sponsor of Representative Jared Polis's Student Non-Discrimination Act. Sherman is also a co-sponsor of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. In 2009, he voted for the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which imposes additional federal penalties for crimes motivated by hatred on the basis of race, religion, or actual or perceived sexual orientation.
Abortion
Sherman is pro-choice. He earned a 100% rating from NARAL and Planned Parenthood in 2009. Sherman opposed the overturning of Roe v. Wade, calling it "appalling and outrageous."
Gun control
Sherman has worked to expand the definition of armor-piercing ammunition. He sponsored the Protect Law Enforcement Armor (PLEA) Act. Sherman has received a 100% rating from the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.
International trade
Sherman opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), arguing that they cost American jobs, fail to protect foreign workers, harm the environment, and cost U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars. He has also opposed a Free Trade Agreement with South Korea, arguing that such an agreement could undermine U.S. security and economic interests by benefiting China and North Korea.
Education
Sherman has earned a 100% rating from the California Teachers Association, the National Education Association, and the American Federation of Teachers.
Office environment
In December 2017, eight former aides to Sherman said that his offices in Washington, D. C., and California had a toxic environment characterized by frequent "verbal abuse from the congressman and senior staff that made them feel bullied and demoralized". A focus of the criticism was Matt Dababneh, Sherman's district director and a close advisor, who began working for Sherman in 2005, and became district director to Sherman in 2009. Dababneh was elected to the California State Assembly in 2013 and resigned from that body after allegations of sexual assault and other misconduct were made against him. Former employees in Sherman's office told the Los Angeles Times that Dababneh frequently made inappropriate sexual remarks, including degrading and sexist comments, and bragged about his sexual exploits. No one suggested that Sherman knew of Dababneh's conduct, but several staffers said that the office environment did not encourage reporting and that Sherman would not have been receptive to complaints about a trusted advisor.
Sherman has acknowledged being "a demanding boss" but "denied that his management style contributed to the silence about Dababneh's behavior". Surveys of Capitol Hill staff rated Sherman as one of the worst members of Congress to work for, with high staff turnover rates.
In January 2018, Sherman held a town hall meeting in Reseda, where a questioner who supported a Democratic primary challenger to Sherman accused Sherman of having an inadequate sexual harassment policy. Sherman replied: "We have five different ways to report sexual harassment in my office. One among those is to talk to me personally. And I talk to each staff member several times a year about the office policy." The exchange was cut from a video of the event that Sherman's office posted to YouTube; the office said that it excluded from the highlight reel "all questions asked by a questioner working with an opponent's campaign if the questioner failed to disclose that fact in their question".
Impeachment
On July 12, 2017, Sherman introduced an Article of Impeachment (H. Res. 438) against President Donald J. Trump for High Crimes and Misdemeanors on the grounds that Trump attempted to obstruct justice by firing James Comey from the F.B.I. Sherman had only one co-sponsor, Al Green, who first called for Trump's impeachment in May 2017.
Committee assignments
For the 118th Congress:
Committee on Financial Services
Subcommittee on Capital Markets (Ranking Member)
Subcommittee on Digital Assets, Financial Technology and Inclusion
Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Monetary Policy
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Subcommittee on the Indo-Pacific
Subcommittee on the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia
Caucus memberships
Congressional Progressive Caucus
Israel Allies Caucus (co-chair)
Congressional Sindh Caucus (chair)
House Baltic Caucus
Congressional Arts Caucus
Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus
Personal life
On December 3, 2006, Sherman married Lisa Nicola Kaplan, a foreign affairs officer for the U.S. State Department. The couple's first child, Molly Hannah Sherman, was born on January 14, 2009. Their second, Naomi Claire Sherman, was born on February 6, 2010. Their third, Lucy Rayna Sherman, was born on August 8, 2011.
See also
List of Jewish members of the United States Congress
References
External links
Congressman Brad Sherman official U.S. House website
Brad Sherman for Congress campaign website
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1954 births
20th-century American politicians
21st-century American politicians
American people of Russian-Jewish descent
California lawyers
Harvard Law School alumni
Jewish members of the United States House of Representatives
Living people
Democratic Party members of the United States House of Representatives from California
People from Monterey Park, California
People from Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles
Politicians from Los Angeles
University of California, Los Angeles alumni
21st-century American Jews
American Jews from California
Mark Keppel High School alumni
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam%20Schiff
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Adam Schiff
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Adam Bennett Schiff (born June 22, 1960) is an American lawyer, author, and politician serving as a U.S. representative from California since 2001. A member of the Democratic Party, Schiff was a member of the California State Senate from 1996 to 2000.
Schiff graduated from Stanford and Harvard Law School. As an Assistant United States Attorney, he successfully prosecuted Soviet spy Richard Miller in 1993 and began running for office the following year. He represents California's 30th congressional district, which is centered in the San Gabriel Valley east of Los Angeles and includes Pasadena, Glendale, Burbank, West Hollywood, and the Los Angeles neighborhoods of Hollywood, Sunland-Tujunga, Edendale, Park La Brea, Hancock Park, and Echo Park.
Schiff chaired the House Intelligence Committee from 2019 to 2023 and was removed from it by Speaker Kevin McCarthy in 2023. He is on leave from the House Appropriations Committee, which he joined in 2007. He previously served on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Schiff was the lead impeachment manager in the first impeachment trial of President Donald Trump. He had previously served as the joint-lead impeachment manager in two judicial impeachments trials.
Schiff is a candidate for the United States Senate in the 2024 election to succeed Laphonza Butler after Dianne Feinstein's death.
Early life and education
Schiff was born in Framingham, Massachusetts, the son of Edward and Sherrill Ann (née Glovsky) Schiff. He was raised in a Jewish family that moved to Scottsdale, Arizona, in 1970 and Alamo, California, in 1972. In 1978, he graduated from Monte Vista High School in Danville, California, where he played soccer and was both the class salutatorian and the student his peers voted "most likely to succeed".
Schiff received a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from Stanford University in 1982 and graduated with distinction. He obtained his Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School cum laude in 1985. Schiff was a member of the Harvard Law School Forum; his tasks included driving guest speakers (including William J. Brennan Jr.) from the airport to campus and back. He also worked as a student research assistant for Professor Laurence Tribe.
Law career
After law school, Schiff spent a year as a law clerk for Judge William Matthew Byrne Jr. of the United States District Court for the Central District of California. From 1987 to 1993, he was an Assistant United States Attorney in the Office of the United States Attorney for the Central District of California. In this position, Schiff came to public attention when he prosecuted the case against Richard Miller, a former FBI agent who spied for the Soviet Union. The first trial resulted in a hung jury; the second trial resulted in a conviction that was overturned on appeal. Miller was convicted in a third trial.
In May 1994, Schiff was a candidate for the 43rd district seat in the California State Assembly in a special election and lost to Republican nominee James E. Rogan. That November, he was the unsuccessful Democratic nominee for a full term, again losing to Rogan.
California State Senate
In 1996, Schiff was elected to represent the 21st district in the California State Senate. When his term began, he was the Senate's youngest member, at 36. During his four-year term, Schiff chaired the senate's Judiciary Committee and Select Committee on Juvenile Justice, and the state legislature's Joint Committee on the Arts.
As a state senator, Schiff authored dozens of measures that were enacted into law. These included Senate Bill 1847, Chapter 1021. Passed in 1998, this legislation continued work on the stalled Blue Line light rail extension to Pasadena by renaming the Blue Line the Gold Line and creating the Foothill Gold Line Construction Authority, which separated the project from the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The construction authority finished the Pasadena line in 2003 and extended it to Azusa in 2016. A third leg was begun, which is intended to extend the line to Pomona by 2025. Schiff's work to re-energize the project caused him to be regarded in the San Gabriel Valley as the "Father of the Gold Line".
During his tenure, Schiff also authored "tough on crime" measures, which did not pass or were vetoed by both Republican and Democratic governors, including a bill to allow minors 14 or older accused of serious crimes to be tried as adults, and a bill that would have made it a felony to hire an undocumented immigrant. According to The Guardian, these proposals were in line with the "tough on crime" attitude of other politicians in the late 1990s.
U.S. House of Representatives
Elections
In 2000, Schiff challenged Rogan, then the incumbent, in what was then California's 27th congressional district. The district had once been a Republican stronghold but had been trending Democratic since the early 1990s. In what was the most expensive House race ever at the time, Schiff unseated Rogan, taking 53% of the vote to Rogan's 44%. He became only the second Democrat to represent this district since its creation in 1913.
After the 2000 census, the district was renumbered the 29th and made significantly more Democratic. As a result, Schiff has never faced another contest nearly as close as his 2000 bid, and has been reelected 11 times. His district became even more Democratic after the 2010 census, when it was renumbered the 28th and pushed into Los Angeles proper. Even before that, none of his Republican challengers had cleared 35% of the vote.
In 2010, Schiff defeated Tea Party–backed Republican John Colbert for a sixth term. In 2012, he defeated Republican Phil Jennerjahn. In 2014, he defeated independent candidate Steve Stokes. In 2016, he defeated Republican candidate Lenore Solis.
In 2018, Schiff initially competed in the primary with Democratic challenger Kim Gruenenfelder. After Gruenenfelder dropped out of the race, Schiff defeated Republican nominee Johnny Nalbandian.
In 2020, Schiff faced a crowded primary, which included Republican attorney Eric Early and Democratic drag queen Maebe A. Girl. He won the primary with a majority of the vote, with Girl and Early in a close race for second. Early was finally determined to have advanced to the general election on March 27, 2020. Schiff easily won the general election.
After the 2020 census, Schiff's district was renumbered the 30th and made more Democratic. In January 2022, Schiff announced he would run for reelection in the new 30th district. He defeated Girl with 71% of the vote.
In lieu of running for a 13th term, Schiff is running to succeed Dianne Feinstein in the United States Senate in 2024.
Tenure
2003 invasion of Iraq
Schiff voted in favor of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In February 2015, discussing how or whether to tailor Bush-era plans from 2001 and 2002 to fight ISIS, Schiff was asked if he regretted voting to invade. He said: "Absolutely. Unfortunately, our intelligence was dead wrong on that, on Saddam at that time. The vote set in motion a cascading series of events which have [had] disastrous consequences."
Armenian genocide resolution
Schiff has been a leading voice in Armenian-American issues; he claims to have over 70,000 Armenian-Americans in his district. He introduced U.S. House Resolution 106, recognizing the Armenian genocide, which the House Foreign Affairs Committee approved on October 11, 2007, but began to lose support after Turkey's prime minister said that approval of the resolution would endanger U.S.–Turkey relations. On March 4, 2010, the House Foreign Affairs Committee again approved the resolution by a 23–22 margin. Immediately, the Turkish government recalled its U.S. ambassador. Schiff said in 2007, "When you think about what we have against us – the president, a foreign policy establishment that has condoned this campaign of denial, the Turkish lobby – against that you have the truth, which is a powerful thing but doesn't always win out". On October 29, 2019, the full House of Representatives passed the resolution by a vote of 405–11.
Helicopter noise
Beginning with Representative Howard Berman before Berman was voted out, Schiff worked on the Helicopter Noise Relief Act, a measure to reduce unwanted helicopter noise across Los Angeles County by authorizing the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to study and regulate it. After reintroducing his legislation, Schiff worked with Senator Dianne Feinstein to push the FAA to act, and together they attached a provision in the 2014 omnibus appropriations package directing the U.S. Secretary of Transportation and the FAA to address helicopter noise in Los Angeles County. As a result, in 2015 the FAA created a countywide helicopter noise public complaint system, the first step toward regulation.
Intelligence and surveillance reform
Schiff has been a prominent supporter of surveillance reforms, especially in the wake of the leaks of classified intelligence by Edward Snowden. In 2007, in response to disclosure of the Terrorist Surveillance Program, Schiff and Representative Jeff Flake offered a successful amendment in the House of Representatives to clarify that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is the exclusive means for collecting foreign intelligence information within the U.S. Schiff has criticized the bulk collection of telephone metadata by the National Security Agency. In January 2014, he introduced the Telephone Metadata Reform Act, which would prohibit the bulk collection of domestic phone records. Schiff has also introduced several bills aimed at reforming the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, including a bill to require outside counsel to be appointed to argue for privacy and civil liberties protections in certain cases before the Court.
Investigation of Benghazi attack
Nancy Pelosi appointed Schiff to the House Select Committee on Benghazi in 2014 as one of the five Democrats on the committee. He had participated in the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence investigation into the attacks on the Benghazi diplomatic compound, which found that the initial talking points the intelligence community provided were flawed but not intended to deceive, and that diplomatic facilities across the world lacked adequate security. The report's findings were unanimous and bipartisan. Before he was appointed to the Benghazi Select Committee, Schiff called the establishment of a select committee to investigate the 2012 attack a "colossal waste of time" and said Democratic leaders should not appoint any members, stating: "I think it's just a tremendous red herring and a waste of taxpayer resources". Despite those reservations, he still accepted an appointment to the Committee because if he felt he "could add value, [he] would serve".
Press freedom
In 2006, Schiff formed the bipartisan, bicameral Congressional Caucus for the Freedom of the Press, aimed at advancing press freedom around the world. The Caucus proposed the Daniel Pearl Freedom of the Press Act, originally introduced to Congress by Schiff, Representative Mike Pence, and Senator Christopher Dodd on October 1, 2009, in response to the murder of Daniel Pearl by terrorists in Pakistan. The legislation requires the United States Department of State to expand its scrutiny of news media intimidation and freedom of the press restrictions during its annual report on human rights in each country. After its introduction, the act passed the House by a vote of 403 to 12 and unanimously in the Senate; however, the Senate removed a provision requiring the Secretary of State (in coordination with the Department of State's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, and in consultation with the Undersecretary for Public Affairs and Public Diplomacy) to establish a grant program aiming to promote freedom of the press worldwide. On May 17, 2010, President Barack Obama, accompanied by the Pearl family, signed the act into law.
Saudi Arabian–led intervention in Yemen
In 2015, Schiff supported the Saudi Arabian–led intervention in Yemen, saying: "The military action by Saudi Arabia and its partners was necessitated by the illegal action of the Houthi rebels and their Iranian backers. ... But ultimately, a negotiated end to this crisis is the only way to restore order in Yemen and shrink the space for terrorism".
In April 2019, Schiff voted for a bipartisan resolution under the War Powers Act to end U.S. involvement in the war. It passed the Senate, but after passing the House it was vetoed.
War authorization reform and authorization against ISIS
After President Obama's speech at the National Defense University examining the U.S. war powers during the War on Terror, Schiff introduced bipartisan legislation to repeal the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists, the legislation passed in the days after the September 11 attacks to combat al-Qaeda, because he felt that "the current AUMF is outdated and straining at the edges to justify the use of force outside the war theater". The bill, introduced with Representative Tom Rooney, was intended to sunset. In addition to his legislation, Schiff has been a forceful proponent of debating and voting on a new war authorization against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
Schiff has been a supporter of national defense spending, voting for every increase in the defense budget over the course of his career.
Comments on Trump–Russia collusion investigation
In a March 22, 2017, interview with Chuck Todd on MSNBC, Schiff claimed there was "more than circumstantial evidence now" that Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign colluded with Russia. Todd followed up by asking if he had seen direct evidence of collusion and Schiff responded that there was "evidence that is not circumstantial and is very much worthy of investigation".
On April 2, 2017, Schiff, the ranking member on the House Select Intelligence Committee, which is tasked with conducting inquiries related to Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, appeared on CNN's State of the Union. In the wide-ranging interview, Schiff and host Jake Tapper discussed Michael Flynn's request for immunity, Schiff's and Devin Nunes's separate inspections of White House documents, Trump's allegations of wiretapping in Trump Tower, and Nunes's apparent close association with the Trump White House. Tapper asked Schiff if there was evidence of Donald Trump–Russia collusion. Schiff replied: "I don't think we can say anything definitively at this point. We are still at the very early stage of the investigation. The only thing I can say is that it would be irresponsible for us not to get to the bottom of this". Tapper asked, "Do you think that Chairman Nunes was part of an attempt to provide some sort of cover for the president's claim about Obama wiretapping him at Trump Tower, which, obviously, this does not prove, but to cover for that, or an attempt to distract, as you're suggesting?" Schiff replied, "It certainly is an attempt to distract and to hide the origin of the materials, to hide the White House hand. The question is, of course, why? And I think the answer to the question is this effort to point the Congress in other directions, basically say, don't look at me, don't look at Russia, there is nothing to see here". A few days later, Nunes recused himself as leader of the investigative panel while the House Committee on Ethics investigated whether he had disclosed classified information.
On July 23, 2017, on Meet the Press, Schiff stated: "[A]t the end of the day we need to make sure that our president is operating not in his personal best interests and not because he's worried about what the Russians might have but because what he is doing is in America's best interest. The fact that we have questions about this is in itself harmful". The following morning on Twitter, Trump called Schiff "Sleazy Adam Schiff, the totally biased Congressman looking into 'Russia and called the Russian collusion investigation "the Dem loss excuse". Schiff responded on Twitter that the president's "comments and actions are beneath the dignity of the office".
In December 2018, Schiff suggested that Trump associate Roger Stone might have lied to Congress, and said the transcript of his testimony should be forwarded to the Special Counsel. In November 2019, Stone was convicted of lying to Congress.
When he became chair of the House Intelligence Committee in 2019, Schiff took a personal mission to investigate Trump's connections to Russia, separate from the Special Counsel investigation. Schiff came under fire when he demurred when asked if he would accept it if the Special Counsel's investigation concluded that Trump had not colluded with Russia, saying that he had great confidence in Mueller but that "there may be, for example, evidence of collusion or conspiracy that is clear and convincing, but not proof beyond a reasonable doubt," as is needed for a criminal conviction.
On March 28, 2019, the nine Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee officially called for Schiff to resign due to his allegations that Trump's campaign colluded with Russians in the 2016 election. Schiff responded by accusing the Republican members of tolerating "immoral" and "corrupt" conduct by Trump campaign members and administration appointees.
On June 21, 2023, the House of Representatives censured Schiff in a party-line vote on a resolution that called for an investigation into his alleged "falsehoods, misrepresentations and abuses of sensitive information" about the 2016 United States presidential election and the first impeachment of Donald Trump. Schiff has denied the allegations, calling them "defamatory".
North Korea
Schiff called North Korea "one of the most brutal and despotic regimes in the world". After the death of American student Otto Warmbier, who was imprisoned during a visit to North Korea, Schiff said, "The barbaric treatment of Otto Warmbier by the North Korean regime amounts to the murder of a U.S. citizen".
In April 2018, asked whether he thought Trump deserved at least partial credit for North Korea's involvement in talks with the U.S., Schiff responded: "I think it's more than fair to say that the combination of the president's unpredictability and indeed his bellicosity had something to do with the North Koreans deciding to come to the negotiating table".
Israel and antisemitism
Schiff is a supporter of Israel. In December 2016, he urged Obama to veto UN Security Council Resolution 2334, which condemned Israeli settlement building in the occupied Palestinian territories as a violation of international law.
In February 2019, Representative Ilhan Omar tweeted, "It's all about the Benjamins baby" in reference to American politicians' support for Israel and invoked the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). The tweet received widespread bipartisan condemnation, including from many Democratic leaders as well as Schiff, for implying that lobby money was fueling American politicians' support of Israel. Schiff said it was "never acceptable to give voice to, or repeat, anti-Semitic smears".
Murder of Jamal Khashoggi
After news reports that the CIA concluded that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had ordered the assassination of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Trump said there was insufficient CIA evidence to link bin Salman to the murder. The top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, Schiff was briefed by the CIA on the agency assessment, and stated afterward that Trump was being dishonest about the CIA findings.
Impeachments
In 2009, Schiff was appointed and served as an impeachment manager (prosecutor) in the impeachment trial of Judge Samuel B. Kent. He was the lead manager alongside Bob Goodlatte. The next year, Schiff was appointed and served as an impeachment manager in the impeachment trial of Judge Thomas Porteous. He was again the lead manager alongside Goodlatte.
As chair of the Intelligence Committee, Schiff was one of the lead investigators in the impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump stemming from the Trump–Ukraine scandal. Trump was impeached along party lines by 228 votes to 193 in the House on December 18, 2019, making him the third president to be impeached.
On January 15, 2020, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi named Schiff a lead impeachment manager. In this role, he led a team of seven House members responsible for presenting the impeachment case against Trump during his trial before the United States Senate.
Armenia–Azerbaijan War
Schiff accused Turkey of inciting the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh. He stated that the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war "must cause us [to] reexamine our relationship with both Turkey and Azerbaijan. If an ally of the United States is recruiting fighters from Syria to encourage further bloodshed and murder of civilians, what kind of ally are they in NATO or otherwise?". Schiff co-signed a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stating: "We write to express our deep concern with Azerbaijan's renewed aggression against Artsakh (Nagorno Karabakh) and the rising possibility of a wider conflict with Armenia. We ask that the Administration use all available diplomatic tools to reduce tensions, end the fighting, and restrain Azerbaijan from further offensive actions." Schiff called for U.S. recognition of the separatist, self-declared Republic of Artsakh, which is officially part of Azerbaijan, but has been under control of ethnic Armenian forces backed by Armenia since the end of a separatist war in 1994. He reiterated that call in April 2023.
Investigation into the January 6 attack on the Capitol
On July 1, 2021, Pelosi appointed eight members (seven Democrats and two Republicans) to the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol, which included Schiff.
On June 21, 2022, Schiff led Day 4 of the committee's public hearings, which included testimony from three Republican officials to whom Trump reached out after the election: Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, his deputy Gabe Sterling, and Arizona House of Representatives Speaker Rusty Bowers. The second half of the hearing focused on the emotional impact on a Georgia poll worker and her family of harassment and threats by Trump supporters, to the point of quitting her job and going into hiding.
Schiff was interviewed after the hearing by reporters and called the testimony "enormously powerful". He added, "The lie lives on, and with it so does the danger."
Ban on stock trading
Schiff supports a ban on stock trading by members of Congress.
Committee assignments
For the 118th Congress:
Committee on the Judiciary
Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet
Caucus memberships
Co-chair of the Congressional International Anti-Piracy Caucus
Co-founded the Democratic Study Group on National Security
Co-founded the Congressional Caucus for Freedom of the Press
Vice Chairman of the Congressional LGBT Equality Caucus
New Democrat Coalition
House Baltic Caucus
Congressional Arts Caucus
Afterschool Caucuses
Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus
2021 California Attorney General bid
In early December 2020, then-President elect Joe Biden announced he would nominate Attorney General of California Xavier Becerra for Secretary of Health and Human Services. Axios reported in February 2021 that Schiff was lobbying Governor Newsom and his allies to appoint him as Attorney General, with Speaker Nancy Pelosi's approval.
In response to Schiff's lobbying for the attorney general's post, 36 criminal and social justice groups, notably the Black Lives Matter Los Angeles and Long Beach chapters, wrote an open letter to Newsom expressing "strong opposition", citing his past support for "tough on crime" measures, though they also specified that their letter was not an endorsement of any other candidate. On March 24, 2021, Newsom announced he would appoint California state assemblyman Rob Bonta, who took office on April 23.
2024 U.S. Senate campaign
On January 26, 2023, Schiff announced his candidacy for the United States Senate in the 2024 election. On February 2, 2023, Schiff was endorsed by Nancy Pelosi, not long before incumbent Dianne Feinstein announced she would not seek reelection. On February 14, 2023, Feinstein confirmed that she would retire in January 2025.
Schiff is running against fellow Representatives Katie Porter and Barbara Lee in the primary.
Electoral history
California's 21st State Senate district
California's 27th congressional district
California's 29th congressional district
California's 28th congressional district
California's 30th congressional district
Personal life
Schiff met his wife, Eve Sanderson, on a tennis court in 1990. They married in 1995 and have two children.
Schiff and his family live in Burbank. He is Jewish.
Schiff has participated in multiple endurance challenges, including triathlons and marathons. He was the only U.S. representative to participate in the inaugural Washington, D.C., triathlon in 2010 and has since participated in races in Philadelphia, New York City, and Malibu. In 2014, Schiff was the first member of Congress to participate in the AIDS/LifeCycle, a seven-day charity bike ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles to raise awareness and funding to fight HIV and AIDS.
The New Yorker reported in 2018 that "Schiff has been writing screenplays on the side for years", including a murder mystery, a post-Holocaust story, and a spy drama. In October 2021, Schiff published Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could, a book recounting the effects of the Trump presidency.
Books
Midnight in Washington (2021)
See also
List of current members of the United States House of Representatives
List of United States representatives expelled, censured, or reprimanded
List of United States representatives from California
References
External links
Congressman Adam Schiff official U.S. House website
Adam Schiff for Congress
Adam Schiff at NPR.org (October 2019)
Column archives at The Guardian
Join California Adam Schiff
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20th-century American lawyers
20th-century American politicians
21st-century American memoirists
21st-century American politicians
American Jews from California
Assistant United States Attorneys
California lawyers
Democratic Party California state senators
Democratic Party members of the United States House of Representatives from California
Harvard Law School alumni
Jewish American attorneys
Jewish members of the United States House of Representatives
Living people
People from Alamo, California
People from Burbank, California
People from Framingham, Massachusetts
Stanford University alumni
Trump–Ukraine scandal
Members of the United States Congress stripped of committee assignment
Monte Vista High School (Danville, California) alumni
Censured or reprimanded members of the United States House of Representatives
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris%20Akunin
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Boris Akunin
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Boris Akunin () is the pen name of Grigori Chkhartishvili (; , born 20 May 1956), a Russian-Georgian writer. He is best known as writer of detective and historical fiction. He is also an essayist and literary translator. Grigory Chkhartishvili has also written under pen names Anatoly Brusnikin, Anna Borisova, and Akunin-Chkhartishvili. His characters include Erast Fandorin, Nicholas Fandorin and Sister Pelagia.
Life and career
Chkhartishvili was born in Zestaponi to a Georgian father and a Jewish mother and lived in Moscow from 1958 until 2014. Since then he has lived between Britain, France and Spain. Influenced by Japanese Kabuki theatre, he joined the historical-philological branch of the Institute of Asian and African Countries of Moscow State University as an expert on Japan. He was engaged in literary translation from Japanese and English. Japanese authors Yukio Mishima, Kenji Maruyama, Yasushi Inoue, Masahiko Shimada, Kobo Abe, Shinichi Hoshi, Takeshi Kaiko, Shohei Ooka were published in his translation, as well as representatives of American and English literature (T. C. Boyle, Malcolm Bradbury, Peter Ustinov, etc.).
He worked as assistant to the editor-in-chief of the magazine Foreign Literature, but left in October 2000 to pursue a career as a fiction writer.
Under his given name of Grigory Chkhartishvili, he serves as editor-in-chief of the 20-volume Anthology of Japanese Literature, chairman of the board of a large "Pushkin Library,” and is the author of the book The Writer and Suicide (Moscow, The New Literary Review, 1999). He has also contributed literary criticism and translations from Japanese, American and English literature under his own name.
Since 1998 he has been writing fiction under the pseudonym “B. Akunin". Decoding "B" as "Boris" appeared a few years later, when the writer began to be frequently interviewed.
Under the pseudonym Boris Akunin, he has written many works of fiction, mainly novels and stories in the series The Adventures of Erast Fandorin, The Adventures of Sister Pelagia, The Adventures of the Master (following Nicholas Fandorin, Erast's grandson), all published in Russia by Zakharov Books, and the Roman-Kino ("Novel-Film") series set during World War I. Akunin's specialty is historical mysteries set in Imperial Russia. It was only after the first books of the Fandorin series were published to critical acclaim that the identity of B. Akunin (i.e., Chkhartishvili) was revealed.
Chkhartishvili "prefers to work with historical material" and has been called the "undisputed champion" of Russian crime fiction given that as Boris Akunin he "has written more than a dozen crime novels and has been widely appreciated by discerning readers ... and has been translated into many languages."
"Akunin" (悪人) is a Japanese word that translates to "great bad man". In his novel The Diamond Chariot, the author redefines an "akunin" as a great evil man who creates his own rules. He publishes critical and documentary works under his real name.
Akunin has been critical of Vladimir Putin's domestic and foreign policies, including the annexation of Crimea in 2014. In 2012, Putin attributed Akunin's critical attitudes to his Georgian background.
He resides in a flat near St. Paul's Cathedral in London.
Awards and honors
In the year 2000, Akunin was nominated for the Smirnoff-Booker Prize. In September 2000, Akunin was named Russian Writer of the Year and won the "Antibooker" prize 2000 for his Erast Fandorin novel Coronation, or the last of the Romanovs.
In 2003, the British Crime Writers' Association placed Akunin's novel The Winter Queen on the short list for the Dagger Award in Fiction. In 2004, he was a member of the jury at the 26th Moscow International Film Festival.
On 10 August 2009, for the contribution to the development of cultural ties between Russia and Japan, he was awarded the prize of the Japan Foundation acting under the auspices of the government.
Laureate of the Noma Prize (2007, Kodansha Publishing House, Japan) - "For the best translation from Japanese of works of the writer Yukio Mishima".
Adaptations
Three Fandorin novels, The Winter Queen, The Turkish Gambit, and The State Counsellor, were made into big-budget Russian movies. Azazel was re-updated as a TV Show named Fandorin. Azazel, produced by Yandex Studios and Kinopoisk streaming service.
An English remake of The Winter Queen was in production. It was set to start filming in 2007, but the leading actress, Milla Jovovich, became pregnant, and the production process was delayed to unknown date.
Pelagia and the White Bulldog was made into a TV mini-series in 2009, while The Spy Novel came out in a 2012 theatrical release as Spy.
List of works
Erast Fandorin series (publication dates in parentheses). Each historical mystery novel is assigned its own subgenre of detective fiction (conspiracy, political, etc.):
The Winter Queen, original title Azazel / Азазель (1998). A conspiracy mystery. 1876. The 20-year-old Fandorin begins his career by accidentally stumbling over a plot for world domination.
The Turkish Gambit / Турецкий гамбит (1998). A spy mystery. 1877. Fandorin takes part in the Russo-Turkish War and the Siege of Plevna as he is trying to uncover a Turkish spy.
Murder on the Leviathan, original title Leviathan / Левиафан (1998). A closed set-up mystery. 1878. Fandorin investigates a murder while traveling on a steamship headed from England to India.
The Death of Achilles / Смерть Ахиллеса (1998). A hired assassin mystery. 1882. Upon returning from diplomatic service in Japan, Fandorin tackles the mysterious death of Mikhail Skobelev (called Sobolev in the novel) in a Moscow hotel.
Special Assignments:
The Jack of Spades / Пиковый валет (1999). A novella about confidence men. 1886. Fandorin hunts down a clever gang of swindlers.
The Decorator / Декоратор (1999). A novella about a maniac. 1889. After ending his string of murders in England, Jack the Ripper surfaces in Moscow.
The State Counsellor / Статский советник (1999). A political mystery. 1891. Revolutionary terrorism in late 19th-century Russia takes center stage, as Fandorin is pursuing a group of daring radicals.
The Coronation / original title Coronation, or the Last of the Romanovs (Коронация, или Последний из Романов) (2000). A high society mystery. 1896. The plot surrounds the ascension of Tsar Nicholas II, whose family is being blackmailed by an international supervillain.
She Lover of Death / Любовница смерти (2001). A decadent mystery. 1900. A decadent suicide society causes a stir in Moscow.
He Lover of Death / Любовник Смерти (2001). A Dickensian mystery. Simultaneously with the decadent society investigation, Fandorin is looking into a series of murders in the slums of Khitrovka, Moscow.
The Diamond Chariot / Алмазная колесница (2003). An ethnographic mystery. Events of the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 set against a flashback to Fandorin's diplomatic service in Yokohama in 1878.
Ying and Yan /Инь и Ян (2006). A play about Erast Fandorin, set in 1882.
The Jade Rosary / Нефритовые четки (2006). Seven short stories and three novellas set between 1881 and 1900. Some of the "holes" in the narrative are filled, including Fandorin's service in Japan, his investigations in the 1880s while a Deputy for Special Assignments in the Moscow city administration and his adventures in America.
All the World's a Stage / Весь мир театр (2009). A theatrical mystery. 1911. The 55-year-old Fandorin has his life turned upside-down when investigating strange incidents in a fashionable Moscow theater.
The Black City / Черный город (2012). 1914. While pursuing a daring Bolshevik terrorist, Fandorin goes to the Azerbaijani capital Baku, where his wife is shooting a motion picture.
Planet Water / Планета Вода (2015). Three novellas set between 1903 and 1912: Planet Water (1903, a treasure hunt in the Atlantic), A Lonely Sail (1906, a cruel murder of an abbess from a distant monastery), and Where Shall We Paddle? (1912, a pursuit of a cruel train robber in Poland).
Not Saying Goodbye / Не прощаюсь (2018). A novel set between 1918 and 1921. In his final adventure, Erast Fandorin finds himself in a country radically transformed by the Revolution and the Russian Civil War.
Just Masa / Просто Маса (2020). A novel set in 1923. New adventure of Masahiro Shibata after Fandorin's death.
Yama / Яма (2023). A novel set in 1900. Memories of Masahiro Shibata.
Note: (The Jack of Spades and The Decorator were published together in a single volume, Special Assignments: The Further Adventures of Erast Fandorin / Особые поручения.)
Sister Pelagia series (about a crime-solving nun in turn-of-the-20th-century provincial Russia):
Pelagia and the White Bulldog / Пелагия и белый бульдог (2000). A bishop of a large Volga province sends an astute nun Pelagia to look into mysterious deaths of his aunt's prize-winning dogs.
Pelagia and the Black Monk / Пелагия и черный монах (2001). Mysterious events in a remote monastery force bishop Mitrofani to start an inquiry, which only leads to more tragedy.
Pelagia and the Red Rooster / Пелагия и красный петух (2003). A stranger who has started a new sect in provincial Russia becomes the focus of sinister and deadly plots.
Nicholas Fandorin series (about Erast Fandorin's grandson, a modern-day British historian):
Altyn Tolobas / Алтын-толобас (2000). Nicholas visits Russia in 1995 to investigate artifacts left by his ancestor, Cornelius von Dorn, a German soldier in the service of the Russian czar in the 17th century. Cornelius's story is told in alternating chapters.
Extracurricular Reading/ Внеклассное чтение (2002). Nicholas' adventures in Moscow in 2001 are told together with a story of a 7-year-old prodigy entangled in a regicidal plot at the end of Catherine the Great's reign.
F.M. (2006). Nicholas is looking for a lost Dostoevsky manuscript, a fictional original draft of Crime and Punishment written as a detective novel.
The Falcon and the Swallow / Сокол и Ласточка (2009). Nicholas and his British aunt are looking for a treasure in the Caribbean. The origin of the treasure is told in a story about Laetitia von Dorn (Cornelius's niece) set in 1702.
The Genres Project (novels written in different fiction genres, each book's title refers to the particular genre):
Children's Book / Детская книга (2006). Erast Fandorin Jr. (Nicholas' ten-year-old son) goes on a time-travelling adventure.
Spy Novel / Шпионский роман (2005). Set in 1941, just before Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union. State security officers are on the trail of a deeply embedded German spy.
Science Fiction / Фантастика (2006). Two young men cope with their mysteriously acquired superpowers in the Soviet Union's dying days.
Quest / Квест (2008). In 1930, an Indiana Jones-like American scientist and two of his colleagues go to Moscow in an attempt to disrupt Soviet eugenics experiments. The novel imitates a computer game. The second part of the narrative, called Codes to the Novel is set in 1812, during Napoleon's invasion of Russia.
Children's Book For Girls / Детская книга для девочек (2012). Co-authored with Gloria Mu. Angelina Fandorina (Erast Jr.'s twin sister) goes on a time-traveling, world-saving quest of her own.
Fairy Tales from Around the World / Сказки народов мира (2021)
Brüderschaft with Death (A "cinematic novel", written as a collection of ten novellas ("films") about the rivalry between Russian and German intelligence during World War I. Each "film" is written in a different cinematic genre. There are two main characters in the series: Alexei Romanov and Sepp von Theofels). The following "films" have been released in Russian:
The Infant and the Devil / Младенец и черт (2007). Comedy. July 1914. A German ace of espionage is trying to steal the plans of Russian military operations, as a young St. Petersburg student unexpectedly interferes.
The Torment of a Broken Heart / Мука разбитого сердца (2007). Melodrama. November 1914. Junior sergeant Alexei Romanov, sent away from the front after being wounded, takes part in an operation in Switzerland, where Russian intelligence is attempting to neutralize a "dealer in secrets."
The Flying Elephant / Летающий слон (2008). Aeronautic adventures. April 1915. Captain von Theofels infiltrates Russia's Special Aviation Corps in order to sabotage the development of the world's first heavy bomber, the Sikorsky Ilya Muromets.
Children of the Moon / Дети Луны (2008). A decadent étude: August 1915. Ensign Romanov, fresh after completing the Russian General Staff's counter-intelligence course, goes undercover into a Petrograd society of young decadents. One of the members is about to transfer a copy of secret military documents to a German spy.
The Wandering Man / Странный человек (2009). Mystical. December 1915. Major von Theofels is trying to discredit the head of Russian military intelligence. To achieve his goal he is trying to get close to a mysterious "Wanderer" who greatly resembles the historical Grigory Rasputin. The Russian title plays with the double meaning of the word "странный": wandering (archaic meaning) and strange, weird.
Let the Thunder of Victory Rumble! / Гром победы, раздавайся! (2009). Front-line sketch. April 1916. Junior lieutenant Romanov's adventures at Russia's South-Western Front, as he is trying to ensure the secrecy of the plans for the impending Brusilov Offensive.
Mariya, Maria... / "Мария", Мария ... (2010). A true tale of the sea. October 1916. Major von Theofels has a new assignment, to sabotage the Russian battleship Imperatritsa Mariya.
Nothing Sacred / Ничего святого (2010). A hellish scheme of the Germans. November 1916. Von Theofels and his nemesis Alexei Romanov are about to meet again as the German spy is preparing an assassination of Czar Nicholas II. This time, Romanov, now a lieutenant, is a much more worthy opponent.
Operation Transit / Операция "Транзит" (2011). Preapocalyptic. April 1917. With Russia facing political turmoil after the February Revolution, the Germans hope to further the collapse by helping the Bolshevik leader V. I. Lenin return to the country. Major von Theofels' new assignment is to ensure his safe passage.
The Angels Battalion / Батальон ангелов (2011). Apocalyptic. Summer 1917. With Russia's ability to sustain the war at an end and the army demoralized, the Russian Provisional Government creates the Women's Battalion of Death in order to boost the soldiers' morale. Stabskapitän Alexei Romanov joins the strange outfit as an instructor.
History of the Russian State (История Российского государства). A series of non-fiction books documenting the history of Russia from the 9th century to 1917, complemented by a series of fictional works.
A Part of Europe - From the beginnings to the Mongol Conquest | Часть европы - От истоков до монгольского нашествия (2013). History of Russian statehood from its beginnings (9th century) up to the Mongol Conquest (early 13th century).
The Fiery Finger | Огненный перст (2013). Three historical novellas set between the 9th and 13th centuries: The Fiery Finger (the adventures of a Byzantine spy in the Slavic lands in 856 AD), The Devil's Spittle (political games at the court of Yaroslav the Wise in 1050) and Prince Cranberry (about a young ruler of a tiny duchy, located dangerously close to the Wild Steppe, in 1205).
A Part of Asia - The Horde Period | Часть Азии - Ордынский период (2014). History of Russian statehood under the Mongol rule (from early 13th century to mid-15th century).
Bosch and Schelm | Бох и Шельма (2014). Two historical novels. The first novel tells of a horrific invasion of Tartars (Mongols) in 1237 and is narrated from both the Russian and Mongolian perspectives, falling into the Tragic Genre. The second novel is about the adventures of a smart swindler who is wandering around Russia and the neighbouring countries on the eve of dramatic events – the great Battle of Koulikovo in 1380 where the united Russian army faced the army of the Golden Horde. The novel is comical and belongs to the Picaresque genre.
Between Asia and Europe - From Ivan III to Boris Godunov | Между Азией и Европой - От Ивана III до Бориса Годунова (2015). History of Russian statehood from Ivan III (mid-15th century) up to Boris Godunov (first years of the 17th century).
Widow's card or Widow's kerchief | Вдовий плат (2016). Two historical novels. Widow's card is set in the times of Ivan III, while The mark of Cain takes place during Ivan IV's reign.
Between Europe and Asia - The Seventeenth Century | Между Европой и Азией - Семнадцатый век (2016). Russia's emergence from The Time of Troubles and the reigns of the early Romanovs.
Sennight of the Three-Eyed | Седмица Трехглазого (2017). A historical detective novel, relaying the life of a 17th-century Moscow sleuth and a play To Kill The Snakelet about Peter the Great's coup to overthrow princess Sophia Alekseyevna.
Asiatic Europeization - Czar Peter Alexeyevich | Азиатская европеизация - Царь Пётр Алексеевич (2017). The reign of Peter the Great foundation of the Russian Empire.
Nutshell Buddha | Ореховый Будда (2018). A novel about the adventures of a Japanese monk and an orphan Russian girl in Peter the Great's Russia.
Eurasian Empire - The Era of Czarinas|Евразийская империя - Эпоха цариц (2018). Post-Peter 18th century Russia, including the reign of Catherine the Great.
Goodventures and Ruminations of Lucius Katin|Доброключения и рассуждения Луция Катина (2019). A novel set in the middle of the 18th century, focusing on an idealistic young man and his desire to bring about progress and enlightenment.
The First Superpower - Alexander the Blessed and Nicholas the Unforgettable|Первая сверхдержава - Александр Благословенный и Николай Незабвенный (2019). Russia's rise and fall as a European superpower during the reigns of Alexander I and Nicholas I.
Non-series books:
The Seagull / Чайка, Комедия в двух действиях (2000). A reworking of Anton Chekhov's Seagull as a mystery
Comedy/Tragedy / Комедия/Трагедия (2000). Two plays, Hamlet, a Version and Mirror of Saint Germain
Fairy Tales for Idiots / Сказки для Идиотов (2000). A collection of short stories, not related to any of the series.
Screenplays / Сценарии (2006). Original screenplays written by Akunin for three of his novels.
Photos as Haiku / Фото как хокку (2011). A collection of biographical stories sent in by the readers of Akunin's blog.
The Most Frightening Villain and other stories / Самый страшный злодей и другие сюжеты (2012). A collection of blog posts from 2010 to 2011.
A Real Princess and other stories / Настоящая принцесса и другие сюжеты (2013). A collection of blog posts from 2011 to 2012.
The most mysterious secret and other stories / Самая таинственная тайна и другие сюжеты (2014). A third collection of blog posts.
The Northern sentry and other stories / Северный Часовой и другие сюжеты (2015). A fourth collection of blog posts.
As Grigory Chkhartishvili:
The Writer and Suicide / Писатель и самоубийство (1999). A non-fiction study of suicide in literary circles throughout history.
Cemetery Tales / Кладбищенские истории (2004). Written as both Boris Akunin and Grigory Chkhartishvili, the book consists of literary essays about cemeteries in different parts of the world, each accompanied by a macabre short story. One of the short stories (Shigumo) features Erast Fandorin, and is included in The Jade Rosary.
As Boris Akunin-Chkhartishvili:
Aristonomia / Аристономия (2012). Akunin's first attempt to write "serious literature", as opposed to genre fiction. The novel is set during the turmoil of the February and October Revolutions and the Russian Civil War, with philosophical ruminations on the nature and development of human dignity woven into the plot.
Another Way / Другой Путь ' (2015). The novel is set in 1927, as Joseph Stalin is consolidating power. The main character finds true love and continues his philosophical work, now on the subject of intimacy and love's transformative powers.
Happy Russia / Счастливая Россия (2017). The story continues in 1937, at the height of Stalin's purges. A secret society of Moscow freethinkers, who philosophized about an ideal future for their country, is investigated by the secret police.
Tresorium / Трезориум (2019). A novel theory of primary education is explored in the Warsaw Ghetto, and a young Soviet officer seeks his destiny in War-ravaged Europe.
Plans
As Akunin has indicated in interviews, the Sister Pelagia series is finished (only three books were ever planned) and so, in all likelihood, is the Nicholas Fandorin series. The Alexei Romanov/Sepp von Theofels series, planned for 10 novellas, was completed in 2011. The other two projects will continue. In particular, Akunin plans to write two more Erast Fandorin books, both collections of short stories and novellas, similar in structure to The Jade Rosary and taking place entirely during the 20th century.
The Genres project may continue as well, with Akunin possibly exploring new genres. He has also stated he may write more Akunin-Chkhartishvili novels to continue the story and to further develop the ideas from Aristonomy.
In March 2013, Akunin announced in his blog that he was going to wind down his career in detective fiction (though he still plans to finish the Erast Fandorin series as promised) and begin concentrating his energy on a new big project, History of the Russian State. He plans to write eight volumes of history, from the Middle Ages to the Russian Revolution, aiming to make it completely "non-ideological" yet interesting to read. Accompanying each volume of history, there will be a book of fiction taking place in the same time period. All the fiction pieces will be parts of one, long family saga. The first part of the project was released in November 2013. It includes two volumes, A Part of Europe (a volume of history, covering the period between the formation of the Kievan Rus in the 9th century and the beginning of the Mongol conquest of Russia in the 13th century) and The Fiery Finger (a collection of three novellas, set in the same time period). The second part was released in 2014, and the third part in 2015/2016.
Anatoly Brusnikin
In November 2007, AST, one of the publishing houses with which Akunin is affiliated, came out with a historical mystery novel by a new author, Anatoly Brusnikin, called Девятный спас (Devyatny Spas, The Ninth Savior). Despite the fact that Brusnikin was a complete unknown, AST spent lavishly on an advertising campaign for the book, which almost immediately resulted in rumors that Brusnikin might actually be Akunin in a new disguise.
The rumors about the authorship of Devyatny Spas were also fueled by the total secrecy surrounding the person of the author and the fact that his name, A. O. Brusnikin, is an exact anagram of Boris Akunin. AST has also released a photograph of Brusnikin, which greatly resembled Chkhartishvili's face.
In January 2012, two years after the second Brusnikin novel was published and just prior to the release of the third one, Chkhartishvili admitted in his blog that it was indeed him hiding under a new nom-de-plume. The reason for creating another alter ego was Akunin's desire to write historical novels without a mystery component and to attempt a "Slavophile" look at Russian history in lieu of his usual "Westerner" outlook. The Brusnikin "photograph" was revealed to be a combination of Chkhartishvili's face with the face of a studio designer who made the picture.
To date, three Brusnikin novels have been written.
The Ninth Savior / Девятный Спас (2007). Set in the beginning of Peter the Great's reign, it follows the lives of three friends (clearly modeled after the Three Bogatyrs of the Russian folk tales) and a scion of the Romanovs named Vasilisa (modeled after Vasilisa the Wise) and their involvement in a series of sinister plots.
A Hero of A Different Time / Герой иного времени (2010). An homage to Lermontov's A Hero of Our Times, it is set during the Caucasus War in the early 1840s.
Bellona / Беллона (2012). The Crimean War is the main subject.
Akunin has said he has no definite plans to write more Brusnikin novels, though he remains open to the possibility.
Anna Borisova
At about the same time as Brusnikin had made his appearance, Chkhartishvili's other disguise, Anna Borisova, hit the bookstores relatively undetected. In this literary experiment Chkhartishvili wanted to attempt to write as a woman and to get away from detective and adventure fiction. Similar to the Brusnikin ruse, the "photograph" of Borisova released by the publisher was actually a combination of Chkhartishvili's face with that of his wife.
Borisova's work, though not overly complicated, is more literary and philosophical in nature. There were three Borisova novels written.
There... / Там ... (2007). Victims of a terrorist attack in Moscow experience afterlife, each in accordance with their very different beliefs.
The Idea-Man / Креативщик (2009). A mysterious stranger walks the streets of Saint Petersburg, telling people strange and fascinating stories.
Vremena goda (2011). Set in a French retirement home for Russian-speaking clientele. The main characters are a young Muscovite doctor suffering from a potentially fatal brain aneurism and a supercentenarian owner of the home incapacitated by the locked-in syndrome.
Akunin has said that he will not write any more Borisova novels "unless I get a sex-change (surgery)."
References
External links
Akunin's site (contains the full text of ten novels)
Akunin's personal blog
Fandorin.ru Official Site of Erast Fandorin and other Akunin characters
The Erast P. Fandorin Virtual Museum
Akunin.net Akunin's published books in Russian, English, German and French, last updated in 2005
Times online interview with Boris Akunin
Boris Akunin: the Evil Spirit or Good Luck of Modern Russian Fiction?
2002 AEI paper analyzing Akunin's works
Russian library site containing the full texts of most of Akunin's novels, including all three Pelagia novels, two Nicholas Fandorin novels, and all Erast Fandorin books except The Jade Rosary and All the World's a Stage
in 2022 Boris Akunin co-founded True Russia - anti war charitable organization that supports Ukrainian refugees
1956 births
Living people
20th-century pseudonymous writers
20th-century Russian dramatists and playwrights
20th-century Russian translators
21st-century pseudonymous writers
21st-century Russian dramatists and playwrights
21st-century Russian translators
Moscow State University alumni
Recipients of the Order of the Rising Sun, 4th class
Russian people of Georgian descent
Russian people of Jewish descent
Writers from Tbilisi
Russian crime fiction writers
Russian historical novelists
Writers of historical mysteries
Russian-language writers
Detective fiction writers
Russian emigrants to France
Russian emigrants to the United Kingdom
Russian activists against the Russian invasion of Ukraine
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey%20Hunter
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Jeffrey Hunter
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Jeffrey Hunter (born Henry Herman McKinnies Jr.; November 25, 1926 – May 27, 1969) was an American film and television actor and producer known for his roles in films such as The Searchers and King of Kings. On television, Hunter is known for his 1965 role as Captain Christopher Pike in the original pilot episode of Star Trek.
Early life
Hunter was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, the son of Edith Lois (née Burgess) and Henry Herman McKinnies. His family was of Scottish ancestry. After 1930, he was reared in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he graduated from Whitefish Bay High School. He was involved in school sports and began acting in local theater and radio in his early teens.
From 1942 to 1945, he spent his summers appearing in small roles for a touring summer-stock theater company from New York called the Northport Players. He made his professional radio debut in his senior year in high school on a program called Those Who Serve, playing a G.I. After graduating from high school in 1945, Hunter joined the United States Navy. He completed a naval radar course at the Radio Technical School and was assigned to Communications Division, Headquarters of the Ninth Naval District in Great Lakes, Illinois. He did not see any battle duty because of a broken arch bone suffered in a high-school football injury.
College
During World War II, Hunter served in the Navy. After the war, he attended Northwestern University from which he graduated in 1949. Here, he was a member of Phi Delta Theta fraternity.
In college, Hunter appeared in two NU stage productions, including Ruth Gordon's Years Ago (as Captain Absolute). He also acted with the NU Theatre summer-stock company at Eagles Mere, Pennsylvania, in 1947, appearing in Too Many Husbands, The Late George Apley, Payment Deferred, The Merchant of Venice, and Fata Morgana. He did radio work with the NU Radio Workshop and Radio Guild, and worked summers with the NBC Radio Institute in Chicago.
Hunter's first film role came in 1949. While at NU, he was one of a number of students who were cast in David Bradley's version of Julius Caesar (1950). The movie is best remembered today for starring a young Charlton Heston as Mark Antony.
He graduated from NU on August 26, 1949, then moved to the University of California at Los Angeles to get his master's degree in radio. In 1950, he was appearing in a college production of All My Sons (in the role of Chris) and was spotted by talent scouts from 20th Century Fox and Paramount. Paramount tested him - doing two scenes from All My Sons with Ed Begley. They were impressed and offered him an option; Darryl F. Zanuck of Fox heard about this and offered him a long-term contract. The young actor agreed and the studio changed his name to "Jeffrey Hunter" on June 1, 1950.
20th Century Fox
Fox started off Hunter in a small role in Fourteen Hours (1951), shot in New York City for director Henry Hathaway; Debra Paget and he were two young people who connect while watching a man about to jump off a ledge. He had a two-minute scene in Call Me Mister (1951), then was given a bigger part in the all-male war movie The Frogmen (1951) for director Lewis Milestone, supporting Richard Widmark and Dana Andrews; among his fellow support players was Robert Wagner, another young male under contract to Fox at the time — the two actors would appear in several movies together and were often rivals for the same part. Hunter was then a "campus Casanova" in a Jeanne Crain drama, Take Care of My Little Girl (1952), directed by Jean Negulesco.
Leading man
Fan response to these appearances was positive, and Hunter moved into leading roles with Red Skies of Montana (1952), billed third in a film about smokejumpers with Richard Widmark. He had a more conventional male juvenile lead in Belles on Their Toes (1953), a sequel to Cheaper by the Dozen, which reunited him with Crain.
Marilyn Monroe later gave an interview where she discussed Hunter's appeal:
To me, Jeff is the acme of young American manhood. Why, he looks like he just stepped off a college campus. He's extremely handsome, but this is not what impresses me. He has sort of — well, an all-encompassing type of magnetism. And he's a walking advertisement for marriage. You can't be with Jeff more than two minutes without realizing that he takes his marriage seriously, and adores his wife and child. He talks about them constantly, and with extreme pride ... You would be certain to guess, even without knowing, that Jeff is the real athletic type. He likes to ski especially, and can you think of anyone who would look better soaring down a mountain?
Fox gave Hunter his first starring role in Lure of the Wilderness (1952), a remake of Swamp Water, directed by Negulesco and opposite Jean Peters. After Dreamboat (1952), where Hunter supported Clifton Webb and Ginger Rogers, he was given his best role yet, the starring part in a war film, Sailor of the King (1953), based on C. S. Forester's book, Brown on Resolution. Although financed by Fox, it was essentially a British film, with British talent — Hunter was cast as a Canadian to explain his accent (his casting led to some difficulties with British film unions).
Sailor of the King was a minor success, as was a Western Hunter made with Mitzi Gaynor, Three Young Texans (1954). Princess of the Nile (1954) was an "Eastern" with Debra Paget in the title role. It was not particularly successful, either, and Hunter did not manage to transition into being a top-line star. The title role in Prince Valiant, which had been mentioned for him, was given to Robert Wagner. "It was a terrible disappointment to me," said Hunter later. "I just didn't know what to do. It seemed my career was over. They were making a lot of pictures on the lot, but I wasn't cast in any of them and I couldn't understand why, particularly since I started out with such a terrific lot of luck."
Career lull
Fox lent him out, along with Debra Paget, to Allied Artists to play the abolitionist Owen Brown in Seven Angry Men (1955), with Raymond Massey in the lead.
Hunter then played an Indian chief in the Western, White Feather (1955), essentially supporting Robert Wagner. It was a moderate hit at the box office. Hunter said after it, "I had no immediate pictures scheduled ... Nothing seemed to be coming up. I wasn't thinking of leaving my studio — it's important having a major studio behind you. It was just that I was restless, and nothing seemed to be happening."
With a friend, Bill Hayes, he set up a production company, Hunter Enterprises. They produced a documentary, The Living Swamp. Hunter also began appearing regularly on television, having particular success in an episode of Climax! he made with Margaret O'Brien. Back at Fox, he supported Anthony Quinn in Seven Cities of Gold (1955).
He was lent to United Artists along with fellow Fox contract players Wagner and Joanne Woodward for A Kiss Before Dying (1956). Wagner had the best role —as a killer—while Hunter had the more conventional leading-man part. (The movie was shelved for a year before being released.) A loan-out to co-star with John Wayne in the title roles of the now-classic Western The Searchers (1956) began the first of three pictures he made with director John Ford, followed by The Last Hurrah (1958) and Sergeant Rutledge (1960).
The Searchers
Hunter's career was revitalized when he successfully lobbied John Ford to cast him as the second lead in The Searchers (1956), supporting John Wayne.
Disney borrowed him to play William Allen Fuller in the Civil War action movie The Great Locomotive Chase (1956), opposite Fess Parker. Ironically, according to Parker's Archive of American Television interview, Ford had originally wanted to cast Parker in Hunter's role in The Searchers, but Disney refused to lend him out, something Parker did not hear about until years later; Parker referred to this lost opportunity as his single biggest career setback.
The success of The Searchers and The Great Locomotive Chase reignited Fox's interest in Hunter and the studio resigned him, while giving him the right to make one "outside" film a year.
He supported Robert Ryan in a Western, The Proud Ones (1956). Hunter went over to Universal Studios and supported another older star, Fred MacMurray, in another Western, Gun for a Coward (1957), in a role originally meant for James Dean. Back at Fox, Hunter was reunited with Wagner as the James brothers in The True Story of Jesse James (1957), directed by Nicholas Ray (Hunter played Frank); it was mildly popular, although considered a critical disappointment.
Fox gave him a leading role in The Way to the Gold (1957), another Western. It was a low-budget production, but proved profitable. He was one of several leads in Fox's look at young people, No Down Payment (1957) - not a big hit, but the early work for director Martin Ritt received some critical acclaim. Fox sent Hunter to Britain to be an American star in a British war film once more: Count Five and Die (1957).
Illness
Hunter was meant to make a movie for Universal, If I Should Die (later Appointment with a Shadow), but collapsed on his return from Europe; he was replaced by George Nader. He was off the screen for 14 months while ill with what was diagnosed as hepatitis.
John Ford cast him in another film, The Last Hurrah (1958), starring Spencer Tracy. He had a cameo as himself in the Pat Boone musical at Fox, Mardi Gras (1958).
Hunter then made a war film, In Love and War (1958), co-starring with several other Fox signees such as Wagner. It proved popular.
Hunter formed a production company, Mexico Films, and made a film in Mexico, The Holy City, The Sacred City. It struggled to find a release.
John Ford used him for a third (and final) time as the lead in the Western legal drama Sergeant Rutledge (1960) starring Woody Strode, and the film was not a big success.
Hunter was in an urban thriller, Key Witness (1960), directed by Phil Karlson. After making the film, Fox did not renew its contract with Hunter.
Career after Fox
Hunter's next film was with Karlson; he played Guy Gabaldon in the Allied Artists film Hell to Eternity (1960), which was a hit at the box office. Gabaldon later named one of his sons Jeffrey Hunter Gabaldon.
King of Kings
Nicholas Ray cast Hunter in the role of Jesus Christ in the $8 million epic King of Kings (1961), produced by Samuel Bronston. "I've broken my shackles at last," said Hunter at the time. He told Louella Parsons, "Christ was a carpenter and 33 years old, and I am 33, and I suppose my physical measurements fitted the description in the New Testament. At the time of His death, He was robust, and not a delicate man."
It was a difficult part, met by critical reaction that ranged from praise to ridicule because of Hunter's youthful, matinee-idol appearance. However, the film was a box-office hit and remains one of Hunter's best-remembered roles. Hunter later said: "I still get an average of 1,500 letters a month from people who saw me in that film and share the beauty and inspiration I derived from it with me. There are some things that can't be measured in dollars and cents and how can anyone put a price—even the price of a million-dollar career—on the role of the greatest Being this mortal world has ever known?"
When Hunter returned to Hollywood, he deliberately selected parts that were different, such as that of a psychopathic killer in an episode of Checkmate and as the lead in a heist thriller Man-Trap (1961), directed by actor Edmond O'Brien.
At Universal, Hunter starred in No Man Is an Island (1962), the story of George Ray Tweed. He joined an all-star cast in the Fox World War II battle epic The Longest Day. Hunter provided a climactic heroic moment playing a sergeant who is killed while leading a successful attempt to breach the defense wall atop Omaha Beach in Normandy.
He traveled to Italy to make Gold for the Caesars (1963) with director Andre DeToth. He was set to costar with Spencer Tracy and James Stewart in The Long Flight when he received an offer to appear in a television show.
Temple Houston
Having guest-starred on television dramas since the mid-1950s, Hunter was offered a two-year contract by Warner Bros. studio head Jack Warner that included a starring role as circuit-riding Texas lawyer Temple Lea Houston, the youngest son of Sam Houston, in the NBC series Temple Houston (1963–1964), which Hunter's production company coproduced.
Star Trek
Temple Houston did not survive beyond 26 weeks, and in 1964, Hunter accepted the lead role of Captain Christopher Pike in "The Cage", the first pilot episode of Star Trek, completed in early 1965 (with a copyright date of 1964). Hunter declined to appear in a second Star Trek pilot requested by NBC in 1965 in order to concentrate on film roles. He told the press, "I was asked to do it, but had I accepted, I would have been tied up much longer than I care to be. I have several things brewing now and they should be coming to a head in the next few weeks. I love doing motion pictures and expect to be as busy as I want to be in them."
Later in 1965, Hunter filmed the pilot for another NBC series, the espionage thriller Journey into Fear, which the network rejected.
Later career
With the demise of the studio contract system in the early 1960s and the outsourcing of much feature production, Hunter, like many other leading men of the 1950s, found work in B movies produced in Italy, Hong Kong and Mexico, with an occasional television guest part in Hollywood.
His films included the William Conrad thriller Brainstorm (1965), the Western Murieta (1965), the spy film Dimension 5 (1965), the Hong Kong-filmed but unreleased Strange Portrait (1966) and A Witch Without a Broom (1967), a comedy fantasy set in Spain. He guest-starred on Insight, Daniel Boone and The F.B.I.
After a cameo in A Guide for the Married Man (1967), Hunter took the lead role in a Western shot in Spain for Sidney W. Pink, The Christmas Kid (1967). Hunter appeared in Custer of the West (1968), also shot in Spain.
In Hollywood, Hunter supported Bob Hope in The Private Navy of Sgt. O'Farrell (1968). He returned to low-budget films such as Find a Place to Die (1968), a spaghetti Western, although in the lead role. He appeared in Italian films such as Sexy Susan Sins Again (1968) and Cry Chicago (1969), and was set to make A Band of Brothers with Vince Edwards when he died.
Personal life
Hunter's first marriage from 1950 to 1955 to actress Barbara Rush produced a son, Christopher (born 1952). From 1957 to 1967, Hunter was married to model Dusty Bartlett. He adopted her son Steele, and the couple had two other children, Todd and Scott. In February 1969, just three months before his death, he married actress Emily McLaughlin.
Hunter was a Republican.
Death
While in Spain in November 1968 to film Cry Chicago (¡Viva América!), a story about the Chicago Mafia, Hunter was injured in an on-set explosion when a car window near him, which had been rigged to explode outward, accidentally exploded inward. Hunter sustained a serious concussion. According to Hunter's wife Emily, he "went into shock" on the flight back to the United States after filming and "couldn't speak. He could hardly move." After landing, Hunter was taken to Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles, but doctors could not find any serious injuries except for a displaced vertebra and a concussion.
On the afternoon of May 26, 1969, Hunter suffered an intracranial hemorrhage while walking down stairs at his home in Van Nuys, California. He fell, knocked over a planter and struck his head on the banister, fracturing his skull. He was found unconscious by his visiting friend Frank Bellow and taken to Valley Presbyterian Hospital, where he underwent brain surgery. He died at about 9:30 the following morning at the age of 42.
Hunter's funeral was held at St Mark's Episcopal Church in Van Nuys on May 31. He was interred at Glen Haven Memorial Park in Sylmar, California.
Filmography
References
External links
Tribute site to Jeffrey Hunter
1926 births
1969 deaths
20th Century Studios contract players
Accidental deaths from falls
Accidental deaths in California
20th-century American male actors
American male film actors
American male television actors
American television producers
Warner Bros. contract players
Northwestern University School of Communication alumni
Male actors from New Orleans
Male actors from Milwaukee
Male Western (genre) film actors
University of California, Los Angeles alumni
United States Navy officers
United States Navy personnel of World War II
Burials in California
20th-century American businesspeople
California Republicans
American Episcopalians
Film producers from Wisconsin
Film producers from Louisiana
Whitefish Bay High School alumni
American people of Scottish descent
Deaths from intracranial haemorrhage
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408957
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flinders%20Street%20railway%20station
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Flinders Street railway station
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Flinders Street railway station is a train station located on the corner of Flinders and Swanston streets in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. It is the second busiest train station in Australia, serving the entire metropolitan rail network, 15 tram routes travelling to and from the city, as well as some country and regional V/Line services to eastern Victoria. Opened in 1854, the station is the oldest in Australia, backing onto the Yarra River in the central business district, the complex includes 13 platforms and structures that stretch over more than two city blocks, from east of Swanston Street to nearly at Market Street.
Flinders Street is served by Metro Trains services and V/Line regional services to Gippsland. It is the busiest station on Melbourne's metropolitan network, with an average of 77,153 daily entries recorded in the 2017/18 fiscal year. It was the terminus of the first railway in Australia (the Port Melbourne line) and was reputedly the world's busiest passenger station in the 1920s, owing to the concentration of services there that was only rectified with the construction of the City Loop in the 1970s. Its main platform (operationally divided into platforms 1 and 14) is Australia's 2nd longest, and the eighteenth longest railway platform in the world. Flinders Street connects with several tram services and is responsible for two of Melbourne's busiest pedestrian crossings, both across Flinders Street, including one of Melbourne's few pedestrian scrambles.
The station's current main building was completed in 1909 and is a cultural icon of Melbourne. The distinctive and eclectic Edwardian building, with its prominent dome, arched entrance, tower and clocks is one of the city's most recognisable landmarks, and its grand, somewhat exotic character led to the popular myth that the design was actually intended for Mumbai's Victoria Terminus and vice versa, but was swapped in the post.
The Melbourne saying "I'll meet you under the clocks" refers to the row of indicator clocks above the main entrance, which show the next departure for each line; the alternative, "I'll meet you on the steps", refers to the wide staircase beneath the clocks.
It has been listed on the Victorian Heritage Register since 1982.
History
Early terminus
The first railway station to occupy the Flinders Street site was a collection of weatherboard train sheds. It was opened on 12 September 1854 by the Lieutenant-Governor, Charles Hotham. The terminus was the first city railway station in Australia, and the opening day saw the first steam train trip in the country. It travelled to Sandridge (now Port Melbourne), over the since-redeveloped Sandridge Bridge and along the now-light rail Port Melbourne line.
There is some confusion over the original name of the station. In his book "Victorian Railways to '62", Leo Harrigan indicates that it was first named "Melbourne Terminus". Newspaper articles about the opening in September 1854 refer to "Melbourne terminus" with a lower case t, which may have caused this mis-apprehension.
H.K Atkinson in his book "Suburban Tickets of the Victorian Railways", lists the station as being called "Flinders Street" from its opening. Early tickets for the railway just show "Melbourne" as the destination. Moreover, a newspaper report of December 1854 mentions that the Hobsons Bay Railway Company shareholder meeting was held at "Flinders Street Station".
In all likelihood, the station was called "Melbourne, Flinders Street" from the outset, and the somewhat superfluous "Melbourne" was gradually dropped through common usage. When Prince's Bridge station opened across the street in 1859, the Flinders Street name would undoubtedly have become more prominent. The platforms for trains arriving from Station Pier retained the "Melbourne, Flinders Street" signage well into the twentieth century, so migrants fresh off the boat wouldn't be confused about where they were.
The first terminus had a single platform long, and was located beside the Fish Market building on the south-west corner of Swanston and Flinders Streets. An additional platform was provided in 1877, along with two overhead bridges to provide passenger access, followed by additional timber and corrugated iron buildings and a telegraph station in 1879. The first signal boxes were opened at the station in 1883, one at each end of the platforms. By the 1890s, a third island platform had been constructed. Melbourne's two other early central-city stations, Spencer Street and Princes Bridge, opened in 1859. Spencer Street served the lines to the west of the city, and was isolated from the eastern side of the network until a ground level railway was built connecting it to Flinders Street in 1879, this track being replaced by the Flinders Street Viaduct in 1889.
Princes Bridge was originally separated from Flinders Street, even though it was only on the opposite side of Swanston Street. Once the railway line was extended under the street in 1865 to join the two, Princes Bridge was closed. It was reopened in April 1879, and from 1909 slowly became amalgamated into Flinders Street. Federation Square now occupies its site. Up until the 1880s a number of designs for a new station had been prepared, but none ever went further.
Current building
By the 1880s, it was becoming clear that a new central passenger station was needed to replace the existing ad-hoc station buildings. A design competition was held in 1883, but the winning entry, by William Salway, featuring a pair of grandiose Italianate buildings either side of a yet to be rebuilt Princes Bridge, was not built.
Well over a decade later the Railway Commissioners prepared an in-house design for a new 'Central Railway Station'. It was published on 28 July 1898, and featured a dome on the corner and a clocktower at the Elizabeth Street end, and a large roof over all the platforms. The State Government's Railways Standing Committee accepted the track and platform layout, the location of the concourse and entrances, and even the room layout to some extent, and agreed to fund it. They were not however satisfied with the architectural design, asking in April 1899 for a design competition 'for the frontage', with a closing date of August 1899. 17 entries were received, and the winners were announced on 28 May 1900.
The £500 first prize was awarded to railway employees James Fawcett and H. P. C. Ashworth (Fawcett and Ashworth), whose design, named Green Light, was described as French Renaissance style. Like the Commissioners design, it included a large dome over the main entrance, a tall clock tower over the Elizabeth Street entrance, an entrance opposite Degraves Street, and two subways. There was to be a roof over the platforms ‘supported by 12 columns’, of corrugated iron and with minimal amounts of glass to protect against the summer sun (drawings of it have not survived). The Swanston Street elevation does survive, and shows an impressive three-arched roof running east–west, with a tall stained glass east end, which most likely was only to cover the concourse. The roof over the platforms may have been a similar arrangement of arches but across the lines rather than parallel.
Work began in 1900 on the rearrangement of the station tracks, while the final design of the station building was still being worked on. Work on the central pedestrian subway started in 1901, with the foundations of the main building completed by 1903.
In 1904, in mid construction, the plans were extensively modified by the Railways Commissioners. The proposed single platform roof was replaced by individual platform roofs, and it was decided not to include the arched concourse roof. To increase office space, a fourth storey was added to the main building, which resulted in the arches above each entrance on Flinders Street being lowered, decreasing their dominance.
In 1905, work began on the station building itself, starting at the west end and progressing towards the main dome. Ballarat builder Peter Rodger was awarded the £93,000 contract. The building was originally to have been faced in stone, but that was considered too costly, so red brick, with cement render details, was used for the main building instead. Grey granite from Harcourt was used for many details at ground level on the Flinders Street side, "in view of the importance of this great public work". The southern facade of the main building consisted of a lightweight timber frame clad with zinc sheets, which were scored into blocks and painted red to look like large bricks. That was done to create corridors instead of what were to be open-access balconies inside the scrapped train shed.
Work on the dome started in 1906. The structure required heavy foundations as it extended over railway tracks. In May 1908, work was progressing more slowly than planned, with the expected completion date of April 1909 increasingly unlikely to be met. Rodger's contract was terminated in August 1908. A Royal Commission was appointed in May 1910, finding that Rodger could be held accountable for the slow progress in 1908, but he should be compensated for the difficulties before then. The Way and Works Branch of the Victorian Railways took over the project, and the station was essentially finished by mid-1909. The verandah along Flinders Street, and the concourse roof and verandah along Swanston Street, were not completed until after the official opening in 1910.
The building had three levels at the concourse, or Swanston Street, end, and four at the lower Elizabeth Street end. Numerous shops and lettable spaces were provided, some on the concourse, but especially along the Flinders Street frontage, many at lower than street level, accessed by stairs, which created a fifth or basement level. The top three levels of the main building contain a large number of rooms, particularly along the Flinders Street frontage, mostly intended for railway use, but also many as lettable spaces. Numerous ticket windows were located at each entry, with services, such as a restaurant, country booking office, lost luggage office and visitors help booth, at the concourse or platform level. Much of the top floor was purpose-built for the then new Victorian Railway Institute, including a library, gym and a lecture hall, later used as a ballroom. Those rooms have been largely abandoned and decaying since the 1980s. For a number of years in the 1930s and 1940s, the building featured a creche next to the main dome on the top floor, with an open-air playground on an adjoining roof. Since 1910, the basement store beside the main entrance has been occupied by a hat store, known as "City Hatters" since 1933.
The first electric train service operated from Flinders Street to Essendon in 1919, and by 1923 it was thought to be the world's busiest passenger station, with 2300 trains and 300,000 passengers daily. In 1954, to cater for increasing traffic, as well as for the 1956 Summer Olympics, the Degraves Street subway from the station was extended to the north side of Flinders Street, creating Campbell Arcade. In March 1966, platform 1 was extended to long.
Redevelopment plans
Plans arose at various times from the 1960s to the 1970s for the demolition or redevelopment of the station, as well as the adjacent Jolimont Yard area. The station had fallen into disrepair, having not been cleaned in decades, and covered with advertising hoardings and light up signs.
In 1962, the Minister for Transport and HKJ Pty Ltd signed an agreement for a £30 million redevelopment of the station that would have resulted in the demolition of the clock tower and replacement with an office building up to 60 storeys high. Work was to begin in 1964, but instead the Gas & Fuel Building was constructed over Princes Bridge station. In 1967 a company purchased the option to lease the space above Flinders Street Station, planning to build a shopping plaza and two office towers, the dome and clock tower being kept as part of the design, but strong opposition saw this project lapse.In 1972, Victorian Premier Henry Bolte unveiled another redevelopment plan, to cover of space above the station and Jolimont Yard for a complex of shops, offices, theatres and other community facilities. A newspaper report of 1974 said that planning was still underway for the $250 million proposal, but by 1975, public perceptions had begun to turn towards retention of the station. A Builders Labourers Federation green ban at the time helped preserve it in its existing form. The controversy over these proposals led to a re-apprasial of the architecture and significance of the station, which had been seen as something of an oddity, or even simply as dirty and ugly, such that it was classified by the National Trust of Australia (Victoria) by 1976, and eventually listed on the state Heritage Register in 1982.
In 1989, under the John Cain government, an agreement to construct a "Festival Marketplace" was signed. Designed by Daryl Jackson architects, it was to be built over the existing platforms in a style sympathetic to the existing station, and be completed by 1992. Planned to feature shops, restaurants and cafes, the project was abandoned in 1991 after the inability of the financiers to come up with the $205 million required due to the early 1990s recession.
In November 2011, the Victorian Government launched a $1 million international design competition to rejuvenate and restore the station. In October 2012, after receiving 118 submissions, six finalists were selected. The public could vote and the jury's choice and people's choice winner were announced on 8 August 2013. The competition winner was Hassell + Herzog & de Meuron, while the people's choice winner were University of Melbourne students Eduardo Velasquez, Manuel Pineda and Santiago Medina. No funding was attached to the competition, and no major changes were undertaken.
Refurbishment
The Swanston Street concourse has undergone the most change of any part of the station, and is now three times the depth of the original structure, is located near Federation Square and only the canopy and roofed area on Swanston Street remains of the original. After the first round of works in 1985 a City of Melbourne councillor, Trevor Huggard, described the renovation as "vandalism of historically important sections of the station", and in 1997 the National Trust of Australia described the additions to the concourse as unsympathetic and detrimental to the station, having "the character of a modern shopping centre".
The television displays used to display next train information were added to each platform in July 1980.
In 1982, a $7 million refurbishment was announced by the Minister for Transport, Steven Crabb, divided into four phases, designed by the railways architect Kris Kudlicki. Completed by 1984, the first escalators at the station provided on platforms 2 and 3 replaced ramps, and new public toilets were provided, replacing those over the platforms. The main station concourse was tiled and extended westward over the tracks, with skylights added above the ramps, and 16 new shops opened on the concourse. A restaurant was built on the southern side facing the river, which opened in October 1985, but closed soon after, instead becoming the "Clocks on Flinders" poker machine venue in 1994. The main steps were embedded with electrical circuits to keep them dry in June 1985.
In 1993, the Elizabeth Street subway was extended and opened at the Southbank end. Conservation work was also carried out to the main building, with the external facade repainted, exterior feature lighting installed, and the stained glass feature windows above each entry restored. Further changes were made through the late 1990s with the opening of access from the main Swanston Street concourse to platform 1, platform resurfacing with tactile tiles, and the replacement of the remainder of the original platform access ramps (except platform 10) with escalators and elevators.
The tracks to the east of the station were rebuilt between 1997 and 1998 to clear the way for the Federation Square project. Jolimont Yard was eliminated, with $40 million spent to reduce 53 operating lines between Flinders Street and Richmond Station to just 12. The number of points was also reduced, from 164 to 48. These changes also saw a reallocation of platform usage at the station, country trains being shifted from platform 1 to platform 10, and Clifton Hill group trains being shifted from the deleted Princes Bridge station to platform 1.
The final round of changes were completed by 2007. It included refurbishment of the building roof and concourse foundations, an upgrade of platform 10 with escalators and a lift replacing the ramp, the relocation of all ticket booking offices to the main entrance under the main dome and new LCD passenger information displays installed on the platforms, subways and concourse. In March 2009 an escalator replaced the lift to platform 12 and 13, with platform 13 also extended west into daylight along the alignment of the former platform 11.
In 2008, the retail pavilions on the concourse were rebuilt, increasing their area. An investigation of the potential of the abandoned spaces in the station, overseen by a task force comprising representatives from Connex, the Committee for Melbourne, Melbourne City Council, Heritage Victoria, was completed the same year, but the conclusions were not made public. In January 2010, one of the first announcements by the new Minister for Public Transport was that the government was investigating the refurbishment of the abandoned spaces for "cultural uses".In mid-February 2015, Premier Daniel Andrews and Minister for Public Transport Jacinta Allan announced that $100 million would be spent for urgent refurbishment works to upgrade station platforms, entrances, toilets, information displays and to restore the exterior of the main building. By July 2017, the station had been almost completely repainted in the original 1910 colours. The distinctive yellow mustard colour was replaced with more muted shades of stone and red, which were determined based on a forensic analysis of the original paint layers on the surface of the building.
As painting continued in January 2018, a further round of works was announced including the renewal of the Elizabeth Street pedestrian subway and rebuilding of the subway's south entrance to include direct access to platform 10. In 2018 the pedestrian forecourt in front of the station's main entrance was expanded and new security bollards were installed to protect pedestrians from cars, as part of the security response to the January 2017 Bourke Street car attack.
Town Hall station
From 2025, the Flinders Street station complex will expand with the opening of the adjacent Town Hall rapid transit station under Swanston Street, which will have a number of new entrances in the surrounding precinct.
As part of the Metro Tunnel project, City Square on Swanston Street was fenced off in 2017 for the commencement of construction works on a new CBD station, which will directly connect with Flinders Street. In November 2017, after a naming competition, it was announced the CBD South station would have a separate name from Flinders Street station and be named Town Hall, after the nearby Melbourne Town Hall. Major station works on Town Hall station began in 2018 with the station expected to open in 2025.
The new station will connect with Flinders Street station via an underground walkway through the existing Campbell Arcade and Degraves Street underpass. A number of changes were made to the design of the connection with the 1950s Campbell Arcade to preserve the site's heritage character and small, art deco shopfronts. In 2019, a section of Flinders Street was closed to cars to allow the construction of the underground connection between the two stations.
The connection, named 'Flinders Link', will allow for a paid-area interchange between Metro Tunnel services at Town Hall and Flinders Street services. As part of the project, six lifts are being installed on Flinders Street station platforms 1–10 to allow for accessible access via the Degraves Street underpass.
Clocks
The distinctive clocks under the main dome that show the departure times of the next trains date back to the 1860s. Sixty Bathgate indicators were purchased from England for use at the Flinders Street, Spencer Street, Richmond and South Yarra stations. Those at Flinders Street were placed into storage when the old station was demolished in 1904, with 28 placed into the new station in 1910. They were located at the main entry under the dome, the southern side archway, and the Degraves and Elizabeth Street entrances.
Manually operated by a railway officer using a long pole, during an 8-hour period the clocks at the main entrance were changed an average of 900 times. The original indicator clocks were removed from service in 1983 as part of a redevelopment of the station, with their replacement by digital displays planned. An outpouring of public outrage and sentimentality saw the decision reversed within one day. The clocks at the main entrance were altered to automatic operation by computer, but those at the Degraves and Elizabeth Street entrances were replaced by large airport-style split-flap displays.
The space "under the clocks" or "on the steps" leading to the dome has been a popular informal meeting place for Melburnians since the station's opening. Although the area was not intended for this purpose, and there is no seating or other infrastructure to suggest it as a destination, the locationopposite the well-known Young and Jackson Hotel and overlooking two of the busiest tram routes in the citymeans it is accessible and visible to many of the city's main pedestrian thoroughfares. Many people who meet "under the clocks" do not arrive by train; the site's cultural significance extends beyond its main function as a transport hub.A clock tower has also existed at the end of Elizabeth Street since 1883. The first clock was known as the 'Water Tower Clock', after a wooden framed water tower erected on the site in 1853. This clock remained in place until 1905 when work begun on the new station, the clock tower being moved to outside Princes Bridge station. In 1911 it was moved to Spencer Street station, where it remained until the station was redeveloped in 1967. Sold to a private collector, it was returned to public ownership and in 1999 was put on display at the Scienceworks Museum, Spotswood. It was returned to the renamed Southern Cross station in 2014.
Today's Elizabeth Street clock tower was constructed between August 1906 and November 1907, the clock being built by Melbourne clock maker F. Ziegeler to an English design. Originally needing to be wound every day, it is now electrically operated. It was cleaned and overhauled between 2017 and 2018 before being fully restored to service.
Signal boxes
The first signal boxes were opened at the station in 1883, one at each end of the platforms. From the 1900s until 1983, five signal boxes controlled traffic into the station.
Flinders Street A was located at the western end of the station, between the lines to St Kilda/Port Melbourne and Spencer Street, and controlled all traffic from the west. It was of "traditional" Victorian Railways design, in brick, and had two mechanical lever frames of equal size, totalling 280 levers. The mechanical signals were decommissioned in October 1979. The signal box has been burnt twice, the second time being in 2002, destroying the timber and glass superstructure and slate roof. In 2009, it was rebuilt as Signal, a youth arts centre funded by the City of Melbourne.
Flinders Street B was located at the Richmond end of platforms 8 and 9 and controlled the southern tracks from Jolimont Yard. It was of traditional VR design, in brick, and was demolished when the Federation Square deck was built.
Flinders Street C was located beyond the Richmond end of platforms 4 and 5 and controlled the northern tracks from Jolimont Yard. It was of traditional VR design and was demolished together with Flinders Street B.
Flinders Street D was located at the Richmond end of the Princes Bridge island platform (later incorporated into Flinders Street as platforms 15 and 16). The structure, of utilitarian brick construction, remains today, just beyond the Federation Square deck.
Flinders Street E was located at Richmond Junction, and controlled the junction as well as access into the Richmond end of the stabling sidings. Of utilitarian brick construction, it remains in place today underneath the William Barak Bridge.
Since 1983, the station has been remotely controlled by Metrol. The station precinct is operated by four interlockings corresponding to former signal boxes A, B, D and E.
Platforms
The platform layout at Flinders Street is unusual among Australian terminal stations for being almost entirely composed of through tracksa product of the constrained geography of the site and the haphazard development of the rail network around it. The first platform at the station, constructed near and parallel to Flinders Street itself, was barely even long, and allowed trains from Port Melbourne to terminate. The opening of the rail connection under Swanston Street in 1865 enabled trains from Brighton to access the platform, and so it was later extended to enable the simultaneous arrival of trains from the east and west.
A second platform to the south of the first was provided in 1877, after the amalgamation of railway companies began to increase traffic at the station. Platform expansion began in earnest following the 1882 recommendation that Flinders Street be developed as a major terminal, and the subsequent government acquisition of the railways; between 1889 and 1892, three further platforms were constructed on land acquired from the former fish market in anticipation of additional traffic, which eventuated when Essendon, Coburg and Williamstown trains were routed across the viaduct in 1894. Development continued with the completion of the 1899 ground plan, which specified a total of 11 platformsplatform 1 along the main building and five pairs of island platforms to the south. The remaining platforms were constructed as works progressed on the main building, and in 1909, a decision was made to extend platforms 10 and 11 eastwards, creating two new platforms originally numbered 10 East and 11 East and now numbered 12 and 13.
Railway officials proposed amalgamating the nearby Princes Bridge station with Flinders Street with improved passenger connections in the 1890s, but failed to obtain funding from the state government for the project despite the massive redevelopment works. Nevertheless, the two stations were merged for signalling and operational purposes in 1910, and in 1966, platform 1 at Flinders Street was extended to meet its counterpart at Princes Bridge, creating a single platform face with a length over . The west end of platform 1 could also be used as a separate "Platform 1 West". Eventually, in 1980, Princes Bridge was formally incorporated into Flinders Street and its three platforms were renumbered 14, 15 and 16.
Several platforms were decommissioned in the early 1990s following reductions in suburban train services. Platform 11 fell into disuse following the closure of the Port Melbourne line in 1987, and platforms 14, 15 and 16 were closed to regular services, along with the west end of platform 1. Although proposals were made to reopen it by the East West Link Needs Assessment, the platform 11 site was converted into a bar and restaurant in 2014. Platforms 15 and 16 were demolished to make way for Federation Square, but platform 14 remains intermittently in use.
A short dock platform, known as the Milk Dock or Parcels Dock, was constructed in 1910 to the north of platform 1 at the west end of the main building. Prior to the widespread transport of dairy products by road, the dock was a distribution centre for milk and other small goods arriving in Melbourne on early morning trains from Gippsland. Other small goods and parcels were later also loaded at the dock until most such traffic ceased in the 1960s. The structure remains essentially intact.
Three concourses link the platforms. The main concourse is at the east end of the station, located off Swanston Street and the main dome, and has direct access to all platforms via escalators, stair and elevators. The Degraves Street subway runs under the centre of the station, exiting to Flinders Street at the north end, with stairs directly connecting to all platforms except for platform numbers 12 and 13. The Elizabeth Street subway is at the west end, and has direct access via ramps to all platforms except for platforms 12, 13 and 14, and via a stairway to platform 1, reopened in 2017.
Trains may use a different platform if the platform it is originally scheduled at is occupied.
Platform 1:
Destinations via City Loop – Clifton Hill Group:
all stations and limited stop services to Eltham and Hurstbridge, peak services to Heidelberg, Macleod and Greensborough
all stations and limited stop services to Mernda, peak services to Epping and South Morang
Platform 2 & 3:
Destinations via City Loop – Burnley Group:
all stations and limited stop services to Lilydale, peak services to Blackburn, Ringwood and Mooroolbark
all stations and limited stop services to Belgrave, peak services to Upper Ferntree Gully
all stations and limited stop services to Glen Waverley, peak services to Syndal
weekday all stations and limited stop services to Alamein, morning peak service to Riversdale
Platform 4 & 5:
Destinations via City Loop – Northern Group:
all stations and limited stop services to Craigieburn, peak services to Broadmeadows
all stations and limited stop services to Upfield
all stations and limited stop services to Watergardens & Sunbury
Destinations via Richmond (platform 4 only):
all stations and limited stop services to Blackburn
all stations and limited stop services to Blackburn
weekday all stations and limited stop services to Alamein
all stations and limited stop services to Glen Waverley
Platform 6 & 7:
Destinations via Richmond:
express services to Pakenham
express services to Cranbourne
V/Line services to Traralgon & Bairnsdale (pick up only)
V/Line services to Southern Cross (set down only)
Platform 8 & 9:
Destinations via Richmond:
all stations and limited stop services to Frankston
Destinations via Southern Cross (platform 9 only):
all stations and limited stop services to Laverton & Werribee
all stations services to Williamstown
Platform 10:
Destinations via Southern Cross:
weekday all stations and limited stop services to Laverton & Werribee
weekday all stations services to Williamstown
limited stop services to Showgrounds and/or Flemington Racecourse (special event days only)
select services to Craigieburn
Platform 11:
Removed and fenced off, Now a restaurant separate from the station.
Platform 12 & 13:
Destinations via Richmond:
all stations services to Sandringham
Destinations via Southern Cross (platform 12 only):
select services to Laverton and Werribee
Platform 14:Currently not in use, "Emergency Egress Only".
Transport links
Yarra Trams operates 14 services via Flinders Street, Swanston Street and Elizabeth Street:
Notes
References
Bibliography
External links
Flinders Street Station, historic images and original architectural plans at Culture Victoria
Melway map at street-directory.com.au
Art Nouveau architecture in Melbourne
Art Nouveau railway stations
Buildings and structures in Melbourne City Centre
Domes
Green bans
Heritage-listed buildings in Melbourne
Landmarks in Melbourne
Listed railway stations in Australia
Premium Melbourne railway stations
Railway stations in Australia opened in 1854
Railway stations in the City of Melbourne (LGA)
Romanesque Revival architecture in Australia
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xavier%20Becerra
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Xavier Becerra
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Xavier Becerra ( ; ; born January 26, 1958) is an American lawyer and politician serving as the 25th United States Secretary of Health and Human Services since March 2021. Becerra previously served as the Attorney General of California from January 2017 until March 2021. He was a member of the United States House of Representatives, representing Downtown Los Angeles in Congress from 1993 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Becerra was Chairman of the House Democratic Caucus from 2013 to 2017.
Born in Sacramento, California, Becerra graduated from Stanford University and received his Juris Doctor degree from Stanford Law School. He worked as a lawyer at the Legal Assistance Corporation of central Massachusetts, before returning to California in 1986 to work as an administrative assistant for state senator Art Torres. He served as a deputy attorney general in the California Department of Justice from 1987 to 1990 before he was elected to the California State Assembly, where he served one term from 1990 to 1992.
Becerra was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1992. He represented California's 30th congressional district from 1993 to 2003, California's 31st congressional district from 2003 to 2013, and California's 34th congressional district from 2013 to 2017. He served as Chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus from 1997 to 1999, Vice Chairman of the House Democratic Caucus from 2009 to 2013, and as a member of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction.
Early life and education
Born in Sacramento, California, on January 26, 1958, Becerra is the son of working-class parents, Maria Teresa and Manuel Guerrero Becerra. His father was born in the U.S. and raised in Tijuana, Mexico, and his mother was from Guadalajara. As a child, Becerra grew up in a one-room apartment with his three sisters. He graduated in 1976 from C.K. McClatchy High School, located in the center of Sacramento. He studied abroad at the University of Salamanca in Salamanca, Spain, from 1978 to 1979, before earning his Bachelor of Arts in economics from Stanford University in 1980, becoming the first person in his family to graduate from college. He received his Juris Doctor from Stanford Law School in 1984, and was admitted to the State Bar of California in 1985.
Early career
Becerra began his career as a lawyer, working on cases involving individuals who had mental disorders for the Legal Assistance Corporation of Central Massachusetts (now Community Legal Aid).
Becerra worked as an administrative assistant for California state senator Art Torres in 1986. He served as a deputy attorney general in the California Department of Justice under Attorney General John Van de Kamp from 1987 to 1990.
After incumbent state assemblyman Charles Calderon decided to seek a seat in the California Senate, Becerra launched a grass-roots campaign for the California State Assembly, defeating Calderon's Senate aide Marta Maestas in the Democratic primary. He went on to defeat Republican Lee Lieberg and Libertarian Steven Pencall, receiving 60% of the vote. Becerra served one term in the State Assembly, representing California's 59th district, from 1990 to 1992. As a state legislator, Becerra worked to pass a law that would increase gang members' sentences.
U.S. House of Representatives (1993–2017)
Elections
In 1992, 25th district congressman Edward Roybal announced his retirement after 30 years in Congress. Becerra entered the race for the seat, which had been renumbered as the 30th district after redistricting.
Becerra won the Democratic primary with a plurality of 32% of the vote. In the general election, he defeated Republican nominee Morry Waksberg, 58%–24%. He won re-election to a second term in 1994 with 66% of the vote. His district was renumbered as the 31st district after the 2000 census.
After redistricting, ahead of the 2012 elections, most of Becerra's old district became the 34th district. He defeated Republican Stephen Smith 85.6% to 14.4%.
Tenure
Becerra was a member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, of which he served as chairman during the 105th Congress.
Becerra voted against the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 because he "wanted to see direct protections for responsible homeowners" in the bill.
Becerra was appointed assistant to the Speaker of the House for the 110th Congress. He won his bid to succeed John Larson as Vice-Chair in the 111th Congress, defeating Marcy Kaptur of Ohio by a vote of 175–67.
Becerra successfully ran for a second term as Vice-Chair in 2011 to serve during the 112th Congress.
During the 111th Congress and 112th Congress, Becerra served on several high-profile committees. He was appointed to serve on the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (often called Bowles-Simpson/Simpson-Bowles) on March 24, 2010. Becerra was selected to serve on the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction (also known as the Super Committee) on August 11, 2011. And on December 23, 2011, he was appointed to serve on a bi-cameral conference committee to find bi-partisan solutions on middle-class tax cuts, unemployment insurance, and the Medicare physician payment rate.
Becerra had a seat on the House Ways and Means Committee and was the first Latino to serve on the committee.
Abortion rights and pay equity
A writer for Vanity Fair described Becerra as a "strident supporter of women's health and reproductive rights"; The New York Times stated that he has been "vocal in the Democratic Party about fighting for women's health". He voted against H.R. 3541, the Prenatal Non-Discrimination Act (PRENDA), which would have imposed civil and criminal penalties on anyone knowingly attempting to perform a sex-selective abortion. The 2012 bill also would have required health care providers to report known or suspected violations to law enforcement, including suspicions about a woman's motives for seeking an abortion. Becerra received a 100% rating from Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America in 2012. Becerra voted for the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009.
Becerra argued before the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that the Little Sisters of the Poor, a Catholic religious order, should be required to provide birth control services under the Affordable Care Act. In late 2020, arguing that the prosecution would discourage pregnant women from obtaining addiction treatment, Becerra requested that the Supreme Court of California block the murder prosecution of a woman who had consumed methamphetamine during her pregnancy, resulting in a stillbirth. The court declined to do so. In response to the Trump administration's 2020 decision to restrict federal funding to California because it requires insurance providers to cover abortion, Becerra stated that "California has the sovereign right to protect women's reproductive rights".
Committee assignments
Committee on Ways and Means
Subcommittee on Oversight
Subcommittee on Health
Subcommittee on Social Security
Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction
Caucus memberships
Congressional Hispanic Caucus (Former Chair)
Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus
Congressional Progressive Caucus
Other political ambitions
2001 Los Angeles mayoral election
Becerra ran for mayor of Los Angeles in 2001. He finished with 6% of the primary vote, finishing behind businessman Steve Soboroff, Councilman Joel Wachs, former California State Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa, and the eventual winner, then-City Attorney James Hahn.
Consideration for federal government positions
In 2008, Becerra was considered for the position of U.S. Trade Representative in the administration of President-elect Obama. While it was reported that he had already accepted, he announced on December 15 that he would not accept the position. Becerra had endorsed then-Senator Barack Obama for president on January 27, 2008.
Becerra was on the shortlist of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton for the vice presidential nomination in 2016. Senator Tim Kaine was eventually chosen.
During the presidential transition of Joe Biden in 2020, it was reported that Becerra was being considered for the Cabinet positions of Secretary of Homeland Security and Attorney General.
2020 U.S. Senate speculation
In August 2020, California Senator Kamala Harris was selected by presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden as his vice presidential running mate. After Biden ultimately won the general election, Becerra was floated as a possible replacement for Harris, along with others such as Representative Karen Bass, Representative Barbara Lee, Secretary of State Alex Padilla (who was eventually chosen), and former Secretary of Labor Hilda Solís. Early December reports that Biden planned to nominate Becerra as Secretary of Health and Human Services rendered such speculation moot.
California Attorney General (2017–2021)
Becerra accepted Governor Jerry Brown's offer to be the attorney general of California on December 1, 2016. The California Legislature confirmed Becerra to the post on January 23, 2017. He succeeded Kamala Harris, who was elected to the United States Senate. Becerra was sworn in January 24, 2017, becoming the first Latino to serve as California's attorney general. Becerra was elected to a full four-year term in 2018, after defeating Republican challenger Steven Bailey and securing 61 percent of the vote.
While Attorney General, Becerra delivered the Democratic Spanish-language response to President Trump's 2019 State of the Union address.
California Department of Justice reforms
In 2018, Becerra created an environmental justice branch of the California Department of Justice. Among other projects, it opposed the effort to expand San Bernardino International Airport due to concerns regarding air pollution.
California law enforcement
Becerra brought fourteen felony charges against Center for Medical Progress activists for recording fourteen videos (see Planned Parenthood 2015 undercover videos controversy), and one felony charge for conspiring to invade privacy, on March 28, 2017. The charges were dismissed by a California Superior Court judge in June for not stating the names of those recorded and the specific dates of the recordings; the charges were refiled with the names and dates in July 2017.
In 2019, Becerra threatened "legal action" against reporters who had received records of California law enforcement officers who had been convicted of crimes during the past decade.
In December 2020, Becerra was faulted by state district attorneys for not taking leadership to help stop unemployment fraud during the COVID-19 pandemic, in what was described as the "biggest taxpayer fraud in California history". In January 2021, investigators said the total fraud was over $11 billion, with $19 billion in claims still under investigation. Most of this money will likely never be recovered, prosecutors said.
Lawsuits against Trump administration
In February 2019, Becerra, Governor Gavin Newsom, and 15 other states filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration over the president's declaration of a national emergency to fund a wall at the southern U.S. border. As of September 26, 2019, Becerra had sued the Trump administration 62 times in total.
The Trump administration opened 1 million acres in California to fracking and drilling in December 2019. Under the new policy, the Bureau of Land Management proposed new lease sales for oil and gas extraction along "California's Central Valley and Central Coast, touching eight counties and including 400,000 acres of public land". California officials and agencies, including Becerra, filed a lawsuit against the Bureau of Land Management in January 2020.
Despite the multiple lawsuits against the Trump administration filed with other state attorneys general, Becerra had not joined antitrust efforts against any major tech companies. His office would not disclose whether it had examined any tech companies and had not endorsed any joint investigations with other states. On December 9, 2020, it was reported that Becerra's office had joined 47 other states and the Federal Trade Commission in an antitrust lawsuit against Facebook, Inc, headquartered in California.
Ballot drafting
As Attorney General of California, Becerra was tasked with writing ballot titles and summaries that appeared on voter information guides and ballots in both the 2018 and 2020 elections. Proponents accused Becerra multiple times of writing biased descriptions that violated the law, which requires "a true and impartial statement of the purpose" of measures. In one of many unsuccessful lawsuits against Becerra, a state judge wrote that attorneys general have "wide latitude" in how they write ballot descriptions. Critics said the responsibility to write the ballot title and summary should be transferred to a different, non-partisan office.
Secretary of Health and Human Services (2021–present)
Confirmation
After Joe Biden's election as president in November 2020, Becerra was considered a candidate for United States Attorney General. The New York Times reported in early December 2020 that Biden would nominate Becerra as Secretary of Health and Human Services. His nomination to lead the Health and Human Services Department has been criticized by pro-life and conservative leaders led by Students for Life of America, citing his "absence of health care experience and his disregard for people of faith". Becerra's nomination was deadlocked by the Senate's Finance Committee on March 10, 2021. One day later, on March 11, 2021, Becerra's nomination was discharged from the Finance Committee by the entire Senate, in a vote of 51-48. He was confirmed by the Senate in a vote of 50-49 on March 18, 2021, with all but one Democrat present and one Republican, Susan Collins, voting in favor. This was the narrowest vote for any of Biden's cabinet positions. On March 22, 2021, Becerra was sworn in to be the new secretary.
Tenure
Soon after officially becoming the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Becerra released a statement praising the Affordable Care Act and encouraging people to keep enrolling in its health care program. Becerra also became Secretary during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, of which his cabinet department the U.S. Health and Human Services was mainly responsible for mitigating the pandemic's effects to the American public.
Becerra has been widely criticized as health and human services secretary for being absent in the public eye during the pandemic, for being responsible for confusing messaging by federal public health authorities and for the subsequent loss of public trust, and for his passive management style while serving as secretary, with some administration officials, public health experts, and scientists calling for him to improve his performance or step aside; his defenders said he was given an unclear role as secretary. Becerra was similarly criticized following his agency's response to the 2022 monkeypox outbreak amid issues with health policy communication and what was widely considered a slow response; White House officials said that Becerra sought to scapegoat the states to avoid criticism rather than take responsibility for the subpar response.
On October 6, 2022, Becerra was tasked by President Biden with expeditiously reviewing the Schedule I classification of Cannabis.
In 2023, The New York Times published investigations regarding immigrant child laborers who are working in violation of child labor laws across the U.S. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is responsible for the welfare of these children, but according to the Times' reports, "Again and again, veteran government staffers and outside contractors told the Health and Human Services Department, including in reports that reached Secretary Xavier Becerra, that children appeared to be at risk".
Personal life
Becerra is married to physician Carolina Reyes, and they have three daughters. He is a member of the Inter-American Dialogue think tank, based in Washington, D.C. Becerra is Roman Catholic.
Election history
California State Assembly
U.S. House of Representatives
California Attorney General
See also
List of first minority male lawyers and judges in California
List of Hispanic and Latino Americans in the United States Congress
References
External links
Campaign website
Join California Xavier Becerra
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1958 births
21st-century American politicians
Biden administration cabinet members
California Attorneys General
Democratic Party members of the United States House of Representatives from California
Hispanic and Latino American members of the Cabinet of the United States
Hispanic and Latino American members of the United States Congress
Hispanic and Latino American state legislators in California
Living people
Democratic Party members of the California State Assembly
Members of the Inter-American Dialogue
Mexican-American people in California politics
Politicians from Los Angeles
Politicians from Sacramento, California
Stanford Law School alumni
Stanford University alumni
United States Secretaries of Health and Human Services
University of Salamanca alumni
Biden administration personnel
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilda%20Solis
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Hilda Solis
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Hilda Lucia Solis (; born October 20, 1957) is an American politician and a member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors for the 1st district. Solis previously served as the 25th United States Secretary of Labor from 2009 to 2013, as part of the administration of President Barack Obama. She is a member of the Democratic Party and served in the United States House of Representatives from 2001 to 2009, representing the 31st and 32nd congressional districts of California that include East Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Valley.
Solis was raised in La Puente, California, by immigrant parents from Nicaragua and Mexico. She earned degrees from the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona and the University of Southern California and worked for two federal agencies in Washington, D.C. Returning to her native state, she was elected to the Rio Hondo Community College Board of Trustees in 1985, the California State Assembly in 1992, and the California State Senate in 1994. She was the first Hispanic woman to serve in the State Senate, and was reelected there in 1998. Solis sought to pass environmental justice legislation. She was the first female recipient of the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award in 2000.
Solis defeated a long-time Democratic incumbent as part of getting elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000, where she focused mainly on labor causes and environmental work. She was reelected easily to four subsequent terms. In December 2008, President-elect Barack Obama announced his intention to nominate Solis as the next secretary of labor. She took office after being confirmed by the United States Senate in February 2009, becoming the first Latina to lead one of the United States federal executive departments. There she focused on workplace safety issues and on strengthening compliance with wage and hour laws. In January 2013, Solis stepped down from her post as Labor Secretary.
Returning to the area of her upbringing, in April 2014, Solis formally announced a campaign for a seat on the non-partisan Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. Solis won the seat outright in a June 3 election and was sworn in on December 1. As Supervisor, Solis successfully lobbied the state to allocate funds for the Exide battery plant cleanup. One of her areas of responsibility was Downtown Los Angeles, where her main priority was dealing with gentrification and the lack of affordable housing. She was unopposed for re-election as Supervisor, which took place in June 2018. She served one-year terms as county chair from 2015 to 2016 and again from 2020 to 2021.
Early life and education
Solis was born in Los Angeles, California, as the daughter of immigrant parents who had met in citizenship class and married in 1953: Juana Sequeira (b. 1926, from Nicaragua) and Raúl Solís (from Mexico). Her father was a Teamsters shop steward in Mexico and, after coming to the United States, worked at the Quemetco battery recycling plant in the City of Industry in the San Gabriel Valley. There he again organized for the Teamsters, to gain better health care benefits for workers, but also contracted lead poisoning. Her mother worked for over 20 years on the assembly line of Mattel once her children were all of school age, belonged to the United Rubber Workers, and was outspoken about working conditions. She stressed the importance of education and was a devout Roman Catholic.
Hilda Solis is the third oldest of seven siblings (four sisters, two brothers) and grew up in a tract home in La Puente, California. She had to help raise her youngest siblings, and later said of her childhood: "It wasn't what you would call the all-American life for a young girl growing up. We had to mature very quickly." She graduated from La Puente High School, where she saw a lack of support for those wishing to continue their education, including a guidance counselor who told her mother that "Your daughter is not college material. Maybe she should follow the career of her older sister and become a secretary." However, another counselor did encourage her to attend college, and even went to her house to help her fill out an application. She took her younger sisters to the library to get them to follow her lead.
She was the first of her family to go to college, being accepted into the Educational Opportunity Program (which assists low-income, first-generation college students) at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (Cal Poly Pomona) and paying for it with the help of government grants and part-time jobs. She graduated in 1979 with a Bachelor of Arts in political science. She then earned a Master of Public Administration degree at the University of Southern California in 1981.
Early career
Solis served near the end of the Carter Administration in the White House Office of Hispanic Affairs, where she was editor-in-chief of a newsletter during a 1980–1981 Washington semester internship as part of her master's program. At the start of the Reagan Administration in 1981, she became a management analyst at the civil rights division of the Office of Management and Budget, but her dislike for Ronald Reagan's policies motivated her to leave later that year.
In Washington, she met Sam H. Sayyad, whom she subsequently married. He owns an automobile repair center in Irwindale, California. The couple lives in a modest house in El Monte, California, not far from where she grew up.
Returning to California, Solis became director of the California Student Opportunity and Access Program in 1982, to help disadvantaged youth gain necessary preparation for college. In particular, she worked with the Whittier Union High School District. Friends urged her to try for elective office, and so in 1985, she ran for the board of trustees of the Rio Hondo Community College District. She campaigned hard and overtook an incumbent and one other better established candidate to become the top placer. She was reelected in 1989. During her time on the board, she worked towards improved vocational job training at the college and sought to increase the number of tenured faculty positions held by minorities and women. She joined several California chambers of commerce, women's organizations, and Latino organizations. She gained added political visibility in 1991 when she was named to the Los Angeles County Commission on Insurance by Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina, a political mentor. Solis also served as chief of staff for State Senator Art Torres.
California State Legislature
Solis had the opportunity to run for the California State Assembly when, after California's 1991 redistricting, the incumbent Dave Elder in Solis's 57th State Assembly district was shifted into another district, while her new representative retired. In the June 1992 Democratic primary to fill the open seat, Solis's opponents had the endorsement of powerful State Assemblyman Richard Polanco and the former incumbent. Solis had the support of Molina and U.S. Representative Barbara Boxer, in an effort that focused on door-to-door campaigning and featured Solis's mother making burritos for campaign volunteers. Solis came out on top of a three-way Democratic race, receiving 49 percent of the vote and besting her nearest competitor, future Assemblyman Ed Chavez, who received 31 percent. In the general election, Solis garnered 61 percent of the vote against Republican Gary Woods's 34 percent, and gained election to the Assembly. She was one of seven Latinos who won election to the Assembly in the wake of the redistricting and became collectively known as Los Siete. Solis was among the most liberal of this ideologically diverse group.
In her one term in the State Assembly, Solis was prominent in the debate on illegal immigration to the United States, backing a bill to allow immigrants in the United States illegally to attend California colleges as long as they were residing in the state. She backed labor and opposed the tobacco industry in supporting a bill that banned smoking in all workplaces. She served on committees dealing with education, labor, and environmental issues, including a new committee that dealt with groundwater contamination and landfill leakage. She was not known as a strong orator.
The Democratic incumbent in Solis's 24th State Senate district, Art Torres, gave up his office when he received the 1994 Democratic nomination for the statewide office of California Insurance Commissioner. Solis ran for the seat, won the Democratic primary with 63 percent of the vote against two opponents, and then won the 1994 general election with 63 percent of the vote against Republican Dave Boyer's 33 percent. She became the first Hispanic woman to ever serve in the State Senate and the first woman ever to represent the San Gabriel Valley; she was also the Senate's youngest member at that time. She was reelected in 1998 with 74 percent of the vote.
In the State Senate, Solis authored 17 bills to prevent domestic violence and championed labor, education, and health care issues. She described herself as "a big believer that government, if done right, can do a lot to improve the quality of people's lives". In 1995 she sponsored a bill to raise the minimum wage from $4.25 to $5.75; it was strongly opposed by business organizations and the restaurant industry. When Governor Pete Wilson vetoed it, she organized a successful drive to make the issue into a ballot initiative the next year, using $50,000 of her own campaign funds and rallying union support. The initiative's passing garnered her a statewide reputation and other states followed with similar initiatives. She chaired the labor committee and established herself as loyal to labor interests, but made a point of establishing relationships with Republicans on the committee. Solis held high-profile hearings on labor law enforcement following a summer 1995 sweatshop raid in El Monte that discovered more than 70 Thai workers existing in slave-like conditions. She called garment manufacturers to explain themselves and pushed for tougher enforcement of anti-sweatshop laws. Republican state senator Ray Haynes later said that Solis was "a committed liberal in the pockets of labor", but Republican State Senate Leader Rob Hurtt said of her, "We obviously didn't see eye to eye. But she was respectful. I'll give her credit; she was a very hard worker and she knew her stuff."
Solis was an environmental activist in the State Senate, due to concerns that stemmed from a childhood spent within smelling distance of the Puente Hills Landfill and making frequent visits to the San Gabriel Mountains. In 1997, she worked to pass environmental justice legislation with a law to protect low-income and minority communities from newly located landfills, pollution sources, and other environmental hazards in neighborhoods that already had such sites. She got the bill, SB 1113, approved over the strong opposition of various business interests, water contractors, and some state government agencies, but Wilson vetoed it. She returned in 1999 with a weakened measure, which was signed by Governor Gray Davis. Calling for "the fair treatment of people of all races, cultures, and incomes with respect to the development, adoption, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws", it represented the first legislation of its kind in the nation and is considered a landmark.
Solis faced controversy with her 1999 legislation, SB 63, that lowered the carpool restrictions on the El Monte Busway from three or more occupants to two or more. When this took effect in January 2000, it quickly resulted in greatly increased volume on the busway and protests from bus riders and prior carpoolers. Solis at first defended the change, but it continued to have a detrimental effect on the busway and did not improve flow in the regular traffic lanes. By May, she was co-sponsoring legislation to rescind the change and restore the higher occupancy requirement, which passed and took effect in July 2000.
Due to her work in overcoming obstacles for environmental justice, in 2000 Solis was given the Profile in Courage Award by the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, and was praised as "a politician who hasn't shied away from challenging the old boy network both within and without the Latino community". She was the first woman to win the award, and gained appearances in George and People magazines and on the Today show. Art Torres, who had become California Democratic Party chair, said of Solis, "She's going to be a national star".
U.S. House of Representatives
Term limits would have prevented Solis from seeking reelection to the State Senate. After months of deliberation, she decided to run for the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000 against 18-year incumbent Matthew G. Martínez in the 31st congressional district, which consisted largely of working class Hispanics and Asians. This action was criticized by Hispanics and others, and only two members of Congress, Barbara Boxer and Loretta Sanchez, supported her. Martínez was more conservative than many of his constituents, as he had supported the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), opposed gun control, and supported bans on specific abortion procedures. He was also criticized for lacking effort and neglecting his district. Solis was able to obtain the support of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor (which called her a "warrior for working families"), Emily's List, Handgun Control Incorporation, the Sierra Club and the California League of Conservation Voters. With their help, Solis outspent Martínez by a 4-to-1 margin and had hundreds of volunteers working for her.
She defeated the incumbent Martínez in the March 2000 Democratic primary by a 69 percent to 31 percent margin. On primary night, Martínez called Solis "obnoxious" and accused her of untruthful advertising. He subsequently switched to the Republican Party, and urged Latinos to vote against her, to no great effect. Without a Republican opponent in the general election, Solis beat three little-known challengers from third parties and won 79 percent of the vote.
Upon arriving in the House of Representatives, Solis was named freshman class whip, making her responsible for collecting votes from first-term Democrats. National Journal magazine named her one of its "Ten Freshmen to Watch", and said that her election "is a sign of things to come in California and a generational changing of the guard in the Hispanic Caucus". Solis commissioned for her new office a painting of the United States Capitol with the San Gabriel Mountains behind it, so that she would not forget her roots. Her Washington apartment was tiny.
As congresswoman, Solis was most known for her work on environmental issues as a member of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, the Committee on Natural Resources, and the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. She made the promotion of green-collar jobs a priority and sponsored the Southern California portion of the California Wild Heritage Act, which would create or enlarge many wilderness areas. In 2003 she sponsored legislation that funded a National Park Service study to designate a large swath of the Angeles National Forest, the Puente and Chino Hills, and the Rio Hondo and San Gabriel River, a National Recreation Area. (In 2013, after Solis had left the Obama administration, the Park Service recommended proceeding with a greatly reduced version of the original proposal; while other advocates evinced disappointment, Solis said it was still a positive step and that Congress could expand the area in whatever legislation it undertook.)
Solis was not a member of the Education and the Workforce Committee, but championed the Employee Free Choice Act and was the only member of Congress on the board of American Rights at Work, a pro-union organization that strongly supports the act, for whom she served as treasurer starting in 2004. On trade she voted against both the Dominican Republic–Central America trade agreement and the U.S.-Peru trade agreement, and also expressed opposition to a purposed bilateral U.S.-Colombia trade agreement, citing concerns about human rights violations. Solis opposed legislation that would soften job safety requirements. She received 100 percent ratings from several pro-labor groups for the years 2005 through 2007, and was a major recipient of union political donations. United Farm Workers co-founder Dolores Huerta is one of Solis's role models.
During her tenure in the House Solis was an advocate of comprehensive immigration reform. She was one of the leading opponents of H.R. 4437 a House bill sponsored by Wisconsin Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner and voted against it.
Solis supported legislation aimed at reducing the number of teen pregnancies within Latina and African American communities and sponsored a bill, that became law in 2003, that granted U.S. citizenship to immigrants after one year of military service instead of the previous three years.
Solis is Roman Catholic and pro-choice. Along with 47 other Catholic members of Congress, she sent a letter to Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington, D.C., in order to dissuade him from refusing them the sacraments because of their pro-choice legislative voting. Solis signed a "Statement of Principles," stating her commitment to her faith as well as her disagreement with the Roman Catholic Church on some issues. They stated that on those issues, such as abortion rights, they decided to follow their conscience instead of the Church teachings.
Solis was a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and rated a lifetime "liberal quotient" of 99 percent from Americans for Democratic Action, and a lifetime 2 percent rating from the American Conservative Union. From 2006 to 2008 she wrote blog entries for The Huffington Post. Solis believed in the importance of mentoring, and as a House member continued relationships she had established with up-and-coming political figures in her district, including California State Assemblywoman Judy Chu and Monterey Park Mayor Sharon Martinez.
After the 2000 census and subsequent redistricting, Solis's area became part of California's 32nd congressional district. She was reelected for additional terms in 2002, 2004, and 2006 by very large margins, twice with no Republican in opposition. She ran unopposed in 2008.
Solis chaired the Health and the Environment Task Force of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus during the 110th Congress. However, during 2006 and 2007, Solis was part of a falling out between several female representatives and Joe Baca, leader of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, arguing there was a "lack of respect afforded to women members of the Hispanic Caucus," which Baca denied. She had previously broken ties with the caucus' political action committee over its campaign contributions to Baca's sons. Baca responded that Solis "was a kiss-up" to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, a remark for which he later apologized. Solis was indeed considered a close ally of Pelosi, which helped her get a seat on the Energy and Commerce Committee. She considered running for the position of Democratic Caucus Vice-Chairman for the 110th Congress, but deferred to incumbent John Larson after Rahm Emanuel chose to run for caucus chair, which Larson had been running for. Solis's aggressive fundraising for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee gained her a vice chair position on the Democratic Steering & Policy Committee. At the time of her selection to Obama's cabinet, she had been elected 2nd vice chair of the Hispanic Caucus and was considered a potential candidate for a leadership position in the House.
Solis was a strong supporter of Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential bid; when that fell short, Barack Obama aggressively sought her support, as part of strengthening his appeal to Hispanic voters. She supported Clinton's effort to establish a U.S. Public Service Academy and was a co-sponsor of a House bill to create one. Solis did not become wealthy from her political career; by 2008, she and her husband's main assets consisted of retirement funds and his auto shop, valued at under $100,000.
U.S. Secretary of Labor
On December 18, 2008, sources close to the Obama transition team identified Solis as the President-elect's choice for Secretary of Labor, the last cabinet position yet to be filled. The selection earned praise from the AFL–CIO and other labor organizations, but was not well received by business groups and the anti-union group Center for Union Facts. The official announcement was made by Obama on December 19. Solis's successor was chosen in a special election in California's 32nd congressional district; she declined to endorse a candidate in the primary (from which her past mentee Judy Chu emerged on top and eventually won the general election).
Solis's confirmation hearings were held on January 9, 2009, before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. Committee chair Ted Kennedy repeatedly praised her, while, despite examination by Republican members, Solis declined to discuss specific policy issues, including the Employee Free Choice Act. Several days later, Senate Republicans said they might try to put a procedural hold on her nomination because of her unwillingness to answer questions in detail in the hearings. By January 23, a secret hold was placed on the nomination by an anonymous Republican. A series of written questions and responses between Republican members and Solis followed, during which she was more forthcoming. Republican Mike Enzi pressed her on whether her unpaid high-level positions at American Rights at Work constituted prohibited lobbying activity; Solis denied violation of rules of conduct and stated she had not helped lobbying. Solis did acknowledge that she had failed to report those positions on her annual House financial disclosure forms at the time, which a White House spokesperson argued was an unintentional oversight. On February 2, Obama appointed veteran Labor Department official Edward C. Hugler as Acting Secretary. The prolonged process was considered by some Republican aides to be a preview of future battles on labor issues between the Obama administration and Republicans in Congress.
A vote on Solis's committee confirmation was set on February 5, but postponed after news that Solis's husband Sam Sayyad had just paid $6,400 in outstanding state and local tax liens dating back to 1993 for his auto repair business. Sayyad had filed a separate tax return from Solis, and intended to contest the lien as they were for business taxes he believed to have already paid. A White House spokesperson stated Solis should not be penalized for any mistakes that her husband may have made. The revelations came in the wake of several other Obama nominations troubled or derailed due to tax issues. Committee Republicans subsequently indicated they would not blame Solis, but were still concerned about her ties to American Rights at Work. On February 11, 2009, the committee approved her nomination by voice vote with two votes opposed. After still further delays, Republicans agreed not to subject her nomination to a filibuster and on February 24, 2009, Solis was confirmed by the Senate by a vote of 80–17. She resigned from the House and was sworn into her new position that evening. (A ceremonial swearing in featuring Vice President Joe Biden was later held on March 13.)
Solis became the first Hispanic woman to serve as a regular U.S. cabinet member and the first cabinet secretary with Central American descent. She also became the first Hispanic Secretary of Labor. Solis felt that under the George W. Bush administration, the department had become unimportant and lacking in power, and that its actions reflected a pro-business agenda. Accordingly, she hoped to reinvigorate it.
In her first days as secretary, Solis affirmed an extension to unemployment benefits specified by the 2009 Obama stimulus package, and joined Vice President Biden's Middle Class Task Force. In her first major speech as secretary, Solis pleased community forum attendees at Miami's Greater Bethel AME Church by vowing more aggressive enforcement of workplace protection laws, saying "You can rest assured that there is a new sheriff in town." In late March 2009, Solis vowed to add 250 investigators to the department's Wage and Hour Division after a Government Accountability Office report showed the division's enforcement of wage laws was quite inadequate; the staffing up was completed by the end of the year. In late May 2009, Solis suspended immigrant guest worker regulations related to H-2A visas adopted in the final days of the Bush administration; the move earned plaudits from the United Farm Workers. In July 2009, she expressed concern about workplace deaths among Hispanics, which she said they were especially vulnerable to (her continuing attention to issues such as this during her tenure would lead to Hispanic workers considering her their champion). In October 2009, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration levied the largest fine in its history on BP for failing to fix safety problems following the 2005 Texas City Refinery disaster. Business groups such as the National Federation of Independent Business complained that Solis was forging a less cooperative relationship, one that departed from the Bush administration's "compliance assistance" approach; the Labor Department said that compliance assistance was still an important part of the new strategy.
For 2010, Solis's agenda was to enact some ninety new rules and regulations intended to grant more power to unions and to workers. Whether Solis would try to revive Clinton administration ergonomics rules that had been discarded in the early days of the Bush administration, and that business groups continued to oppose, was unclear. In the wake of the April 2010 Upper Big Branch Mine disaster in West Virginia, the worst in the U.S. in forty years, Solis announced that the Labor Department's Mine Safety and Health Administration would conduct an internal review of its enforcement of the Massey Energy mine prior to the accident. She also requested that the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health provide an independent analysis of that review. (By the end of her tenure, however, some safety experts said she had fallen short of getting any meaningful new regulatory scheme in place in the wake of the disaster.) Later that month, Solis and the department hosted the first-ever meeting of the G-20 labor ministers; they discussed how to accelerate job creation in their respective countries. Solis also faced disgruntlement from a local of the American Federation of Government Employees representing her own employees, who were unhappy that a longstanding flextime program reduced under the George W. Bush administration had not been restored. The department said the program was modern and fair and that it was part of ongoing contract negotiations with the local. The year also saw the department trying to crack down on firms that illegally use summer internships for free labor, by clarifying what may constitute an unpaid academic internship; the move brought resistance from universities. The year additionally saw Solis leading an administration campaign against farmers who employed children or underpaid workers. (Proposed new rules in this area were dropped in 2012, however, following adamant criticism from conservatives and agricultural groups.)
In February 2011, as protests continued over Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's proposal to limit that state's public employee unions' collective bargaining rights, and similar proposals were made in other states, Solis spoke out strongly and emotionally against such moves, saying "[those governors] aren't just asking workers to tighten their belts, they're demanding they give up their uniquely American rights as workers." Overall, however, the Obama administration did not speak out forcefully against these moves.
In October 2012, Solis defended the work of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, after the Current Population Survey it puts out monthly reported that unemployment in the United States had fallen below eight percent for this first time since Obama took office. Some critics, including former General Electric CEO Jack Welch, charged that the number had been tampered with in order to benefit Obama one month before the U.S. presidential election. Solis said, "I'm insulted when I hear that because we have a very professional, civil service organization where you have top, top economists that work at the BLS. They've been doing these calculations. These are our best trained and best-skilled individuals working in the BLS, and it's really ludicrous to hear that kind of statement." For the year, the Labor Department set a record for the most back pay it had ever collected due to wage violations, $280 million going to some 300,000 workers. Workplace fatalities in construction and general industrial sectors reached an all-time low.
On January 9, 2013, Solis tendered her resignation as Secretary of Labor, becoming one of several Cabinet members deciding not to stay on for Obama's second term. Her last day in office was January 22, 2013.
Solis, who had never become part of the inner circle of presidential advisors, said it had been a difficult decision and Obama praised her work as secretary. Reflecting upon her tenure, Solis generally garnered praise from labor unions and leading Democrats for her stricter enforcement of job safety regulations and more aggressive pursuit of wage and hour violators. Other leaders and analysts in the labor field thought her performance as secretary was underwhelming, with minimal public visibility and no memorable legacy left behind. All agreed that she operated in a difficult political environment, with the effects of the Great Recession still being felt, Republicans staunchly opposed to labor-based initiatives, and the Obama administration's attentions focused elsewhere. Business groups, meanwhile, continued to characterize her as having been uncooperative in her dealings with them.
During early 2014, reports emerged that the United States Office of Special Counsel, the United States Department of Justice, and the FBI had begun investigating Solis during 2012 for possible violations of fundraising rules by federal officials during her time as Labor Secretary. Allegations were made that Solis solicited subordinates for funds for the 2012 re-election campaign of President Obama. A spokesperson for Solis said that she believed she had done nothing wrong. The matter was also being looked into by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and its chair, Representative Darrell Issa, who said there was evidence supporting the allegations. By early 2016, no further word had emerged on any of these investigations.
Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors
Solis's departure from the Labor Department was speculated as a preparation for a run for a seat on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors in 2014, to replace the term-limited incumbent, 1st District supervisor Gloria Molina. Officially, Solis only said that she wanted to rest, reconnect with her local community after twelve years in Washington, and spend time with her mother, who was 87 years old at the time.
Later during January 2013, Solis confirmed her interest in the County Board of Supervisors race, saying "I'm going to take a look at it." In explaining why a former U.S. Representative and Cabinet member would be interested in a county-level body, analysts stated that the board is the most powerful county-level legislative body in the United States, and exercises some executive and quasi-judicial powers as well. It controls a workforce larger than the Labor Department's and its $26 billion budget is equivalent to that of an average U.S. state. Each member presiding over some two million constituents, three times that of Solis' old congressional district, and that it is quite possibly the fourth most powerful position in California politics, after governor, U.S. Senator, and mayor of Los Angeles. The supervisors have long been nicknamed "the five little kings".
In November 2013, Solis became a scholar-in-residence at her alma mater of Cal Poly Pomona. Her duties were to include guest lecturing in classes, mentoring students, and assisting in curriculum development, with a focus in political science.
On April 5, 2014, Solis formally announced the start of her campaign for the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors seat, with the election to be held on June 3. By this time she had raised over $600,000 for her effort and was considered the favorite to win the contest. News of the federal investigation had little effect on her campaign. Solis won the seat on June 4, 2014, garnering 70 percent of the vote against two other opponents. The margin meant she won the seat outright and would not need to run in a runoff election.
As Supervisor for District 1, she was at the forefront of the response to the Exide lead contamination issue, which affected Vernon and several other communities within her purview and which touched upon her past concerns with environmental justice. The Supervisors allocated some county money for cleanup, with Solis saying, "the state continues to drag its feet". Going to the state capitol and asking for additional funds to remedy the situation, she said, "This has gone on too long." In February 2016 she praised Governor Jerry Brown for finally increasing state funds for the cleanup, saying "Our voices were heard. For too long we have seen two Americas: one in which affluent neighborhoods get immediate help and relief. The other America is made up of poor working-class families who silently suffer. Today's announcement from the governor reconciles these two Americas."
Among the other areas Solis was responsible for was Downtown Los Angeles. There she said her main priority was dealing with gentrification and the lack of affordable housing. By 2017, data showed that, under her tenure, the homeless rate had gone up by 48 percent in her district, with a 36 percent increase in the San Gabriel Valley itself. The increase was attributed by officials familiar with the problem to constantly increasing housing costs combined with flat incomes. Solis said in response, "With increasingly out-of-control rents, we need more tools to secure housing stability for the most vulnerable County residents."
Regarding the new job as a whole, Solis said, "It's fascinating how many people work for the county – over 100,000. At the Department of Labor it was like 15,000. The budget here is $26 billion, much more than what I was used to in D.C." In December 2015 Solis took over as Chair of the Supervisors, a position which is rotated on a yearly basis. She said a priority for 2016 would be "to reaffirm our commitment to our diverse county family – to make this family, our family, inclusive for everybody, no matter their background, no matter where they come from, no matter how far down the scale they have been." One of her efforts went towards getting additional resources for older children who were transitioning out of the foster care system.
Following the results of the 2016 United States presidential election and the fear of mass deportations that ensued due to the victor, Solis worked together with Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti to create the $10 million L.A. Justice Fund, which would provide legal services to illegal immigrants facing deportation.
In May 2017, Solis voted in favor of retaining designation of the San Gabriel Mountains National Monument, created in 2014 but under review, along with other recently created national monuments, by new U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke for possible revocation. Solis also favored a parcel tax to increase the number of parks and playgrounds in Los Angeles. In October 2017 a motion that she authored passed the board and resulted in Columbus Day being replaced as an official holiday in Los Angeles County by Indigenous Peoples Day. She said in a statement, "This action is about publicly recognizing that America's ancestors, for centuries, oppressed certain minority groups. This is not about erasing history; I believe the full history and impact of Christopher Columbus should be taught to current and future generations. While we cannot change the past, we can realize the pain that millions suffered throughout our nation's history, as well as the tremendous achievements of the original inhabitants of our continent."
In January 2018, Solis and the other supervisors supported the appointment of Nicole Tinkham as interim public defender, despite a letter signed by 390 public defenders who were concerned that Tinkham lacked criminal law experience and the potential for a conflict of interest, given Tinkham's prior representation of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.
In the 2018 Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors election, Solis ran unopposed, and was accordingly re-elected on June 5, 2018. A lack of serious opposition, or any opposition at all, is not unusual for incumbent Supervisors.
In 2019, Solis, with fellow supervisor Sheila Kuehl, was a leader of the successful effort to stop a planned $1.7 billion mental health treatment center in the downtown area, intended to replace Men's Central Jail. Solis and others argued that the new facility would become a de facto jail and instead urged the creation of smaller treatment facilities spread around the county. Solis said in reference to contractors for any such project, "I don't want to see people who are just used to building brick and mortar. I want to see people who have a humanistic approach."
During the year, Solis also became an active supporter for Joe Biden's 2020 presidential campaign, saying that the former vice president, whom she dealt with during her time as Secretary of Labor, had the necessary "steady hand and experience" and who also is "personable" and can interact well with a wide range of people.
The year 2020 was marked by the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, and Solis and the other supervisors consistently urged residents to stay at home and use other social distancing measures. However some county employees in the districts of Solis and another supervisor complained that they were being compelled to report to unsafe offices instead of being allowed to work remotely. Solis said that the services provided by some positions could only be done in person, but following newspaper inquiries on the matter, remote work was opened up to more county workers. In December 2020, Solis became rotating chair of the board again, and by then the entire board was women, a first for the county and something that Solis said was a historic accomplishment. As the pandemic in Los Angeles reached an especially high peak towards the end of the year, Solis pleaded with county residents to stay home: "As we near Christmas, I urge everyone to cancel their holiday plans to gather with members outside of one's households. This will save many lives."
The pandemic subsequently ebbed for a while, but then by mid-2021 the highly infectious Delta variant had become a significant threat, and in July 2021 Solis issued an executive order reimposing an indoors mask mandate within the county. By this point COVID-19 vaccination in the United States was well underway but also increasingly the subject of political disputes. Saying that "As vaccinations continue at a pace slower than what is necessary to slow the spread, the need for immediate action is great," Solis issued a mandate in August 2021 that county employees, who numbered over a hundred thousand, be vaccinated by October 1. Her action gave no option for regular testing and thus went further than most such mandates elsewhere in California and the rest of the country.
Awards and honors
As mentioned, in 2000, Solis was given the Profile in Courage Award by the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation.
In 2010, Solis received the inaugural Robert P. Biller Award for Exemplary Public Service from the University of Southern California's School of Policy, Planning, and Development. The Hispanic Association of Colleges & Universities named Solis as the recipient of its 2011 President's Award for Excellence. In 2012, Solis received the Champion for the Futures of Farmworker Children Award from the Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs. That same year, Solis was given a President's Award from an organization associated with California State University, Los Angeles. The Imagen Foundation honored Solis with its President's Award in 2016, with the presentation being done by the actress America Ferrara. In 2019, Solis received the Leadership Award at the annual American Latino Influencer Awards.
Solis gave the commencement address at Rio Hondo College in 2014, where she had once been on the board of trustees. In recognition of her long career in public service, she was in 2023 awarded an honorary doctor of laws degree by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Several entities have been named after Solis. Beginning in the 1990s, the Hilda L. Solis Scholarship Dinner & Reception has been given annually by her alma mater, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, with a large number of students having benefitted from receiving scholarships.
The Hilda L. Solis Care First Village is a set of housing units intended for the homeless that are put together using modular building techniques and located in Downtown Los Angeles. The Hilda L. Solis Learning Academy School of Technology, Business and Education is located in the general East Los Angeles area and is part of the Los Angeles Unified School District.
In 2022, the White House appointed Solis to the Board of Trustees for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
See also
List of female United States Cabinet members
List of Hispanic and Latino Americans in the United States Congress
Women in the United States House of Representatives
References
External links
Campaign website
Biography at the United States Department of Labor
Fighting for Workers This 2010 Labor Day by Hilda Solis
Join California Hilda Solis
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan%20People%27s%20Party
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Pakistan People's Party
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The Pakistan People's Party (, ; PPP) is a centre-left, social-democratic political party in Pakistan. It is currently the second-largest party in the Senate. The party was founded in 1967 in Lahore, when a number of prominent left-wing politicians in the country joined hands against the military rule of president Muhammad Ayub Khan, under the leadership of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. It is affiliated with the Socialist International. The PPP's platform was formerly socialist, and its stated priorities continue to include transforming Pakistan into a social-democratic state, promoting egalitarian values, establishing social justice, and maintaining a strong military. The party, alongside the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz and the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, is one of the three largest political parties of Pakistan.
Since its foundation in 1967, it has been a major centre-left force in the country and the party's leadership has been dominated by the members of the Bhutto family. Its centre of power lies in the southern province of Sindh. The People's Party has been voted into power on five separate occasions (1970, 1977, 1988, 1993 and 2008), while on four occasions (1990, 1997, 2002 and 2013) it emerged as the largest opposition party. There have been a total of four prime ministers from the PPP.
The PPP dominated the politics of Pakistan during the 1970s, suffering a temporary decline during the military dictatorship of president Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. After the re-establishment of democracy in 1988 following Zia's death, a two-party system developed, consisting of the People's Party and the Islamic Democratic Alliance, later succeeded by the Nawaz League. The party served as the principal opposition to the Pervez Musharraf-led military government from 1999 to 2008.
The party conceded defeat during the 2013 general election, losing swathes of support in the Punjab Province where most of its base was lost to the emerging PTI, although it retained its provincial government in Sindh. In the 2018 general election, for the first time in history, the party was able to neither form the government nor emerge as the largest party in opposition.
History
Foundation
The Pakistan People's Party (PPP) was launched at its founding convention held in Lahore on 30 November and 1 December 1967. At the same meeting, former Foreign Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was elected as its chairman. Among the expressed goals of the party were the establishment of an "egalitarian democracy" and the "application of socialistic ideas to realize economic and social justice". A more immediate task was the struggle against the Presidency of Muhammad Ayub Khan.
Left-wing beginnings
In the 1960s, Ayub Khan's policies were seen by many to have nourished the capitalist class at the expense of ordinary people, evidenced by the drastic increase in income inequality and poverty. In April 1968, Dr. Mahbub ul Haq, the then Chief Economist of the Planning Commission reported that 22 families controlled 66% of the industries and owned an 87% share in the country's banking and insurance industries. Due to the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965, the economy collapsed, and investment growth in Pakistan saw a 20% decline in following years. Although Pakistan was not able to win the war of 1965, victory was propagated by the military establishment. Under pressure from the Soviet Union, both India and Pakistan signed the Tashkent Declaration in Uzbekistan. The Tashkent Declaration shocked the people of Pakistan due to their expectation of a Pakistani victory. Ayub Khan fiercely defended the declaration and called it in the best interest of the people. This led to a confrontation between Ayub Khan and his Foreign Minister Zulifkar Ali Bhutto which led to the resignation of the latter and the eventual creation of the People's Party. Bhutto went on to accuse Ayub of "losing the war on the negotiating table." Opposition parties decided to protest against the declaration, but the state responded by imposing bans upon public gatherings and arresting activists. The resignation of Bhutto further angered the public, who were growing ever more discontent with President Khan's government. On 5 February 1966, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman announced his program of regional autonomy for East Bengal at a news conference.
Bhutto's passionate stance against Ayub's regime was hailed by leftist groups, leading him to attempt to find a suitable position for himself in the National Awami Party (NAP). Unable to succeed in this, Bhutto decided to launch his own political party. On 30 November 1967, a convention was held in Lahore, where democratic socialists and left-wing intellectuals gathered to meet with Bhutto at the residence of Dr. Mubashir Hassan, and the Pakistan People's Party was formed. The members of the newly formed party elected Zulfikar Ali Bhutto as its first chairman. Its manifesto, titled 'Islam is our Religion; Democracy is our Politics; Socialism is our Economy; Power Lies with the People' was written by Bengali communist J. A. Rahim, and published on 9 December 1967. The main objective of the party was to establish a more classless society, adopting a clear socialist programme of nationalisation and reducing economic inequality. The document declared that "Only socialism, which creates equal opportunities for all, protects [people] from exploitation, removes the barriers of class distinction, and is capable of establishing economic and social justice. Socialism is the highest expression of democracy and its logical fulfillment".
According to Philip E. Jones, the People's Party had three main ideological camps: Marxists, Islamic socialists and the landed elite. In 1968, when Ayub Khan was celebrating his government's 'Decade of Development', demonstrations erupted all over the country. In the same year, spontaneous students' movements erupted throughout the country, largely due to unemployment and economic hardship which saw the beginning of the 1968 movement in Pakistan. In the same time, ideological differences emerged within the NAP, which led to a major split between the pro-Soviet and pro-China factions. The pro-Soviet faction, led by Wali Khan, proposed a parliamentary route to power, whereas the pro-China faction led by Moulana Bhashani advocated for a peasant revolution to overthrow Ayub Khan's regime. The vacuum on the left generated by the disunity of the National Awami Party was effectively filled by Bhutto's People's Party as a united front of opposition to Ayub Khan. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, being shrewder in sensing the mood of the mass movement, had embarked upon the 'need for socialism' and other radical slogans. This PPP programme connected with the masses' moods, aspirations and sentiments; the PPP became the largest party of the masses in the history of Pakistan, almost overnight. The first activists and cadres who gave the PPP a foothold and standing were from the different Maoist groups and other scattered left activists. These groups were disillusioned and frustrated by the traditional Stalinist leadership of the left.In 1968, a massive public-relations program was launched by the party, beginning in the Punjab. Bhutto's program directly targeted the country's poverty-stricken masses. The left-wing oriented slogan 'Land to the Landless' proved to be popular amongst the peasants and labour-force, as the party promised not only to abolish the feudal system, but also to redistribute land. The working-classes quickly flocked to the party, believing it to be a party dedicated to the destruction of capitalism in the country. The young university students and teachers who often bore the brunt of Ayub Khan's dictatorial regime during his decade-long rule were promised a better future with better educational and career opportunities. Many other members of society who had felt stifled and repressed by the press-control and heavy censorship practised by the authoritarian Khan regime also joined the new party, whose manifesto also attracted the country's numerous minorities. The continuous contentions forced Ayub Khan to resign from the presidency in 1969, leading to the imposition of martial law by Army Commander General Yahya Khan, after he promised to hold elections within two years. During this time, the Peoples Party intensified its support in West Pakistan, organizing itself and gaining support from poor masses in West Pakistan.
1970 general election and 1971 war
Ayub Khan succumbed to political pressure on 26 March 1969 and handed power to the Commander-in-Chief of the Pakistan Army, General Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan. President Yahya Khan imposed martial law and the 1962 Constitution was abrogated. On 31 March 1970, President Yahya Khan announced a Legal Framework Order (LFO) which called for direct elections to a unicameral legislature. Many in the West feared the East wing's demand for provincial autonomy. The purpose of the LFO was to secure the future constitution which would be written after the election in order for it to include safeguards such as preserving Pakistan's territorial integrity and Islamic ideology. In the background of recent political developments, the People's Party decided to hold its National Conference. This was to be held in Lahore from 4–6 April 1969 but due to the imposition of Martial law, it was called off. Later from 1–3 July 1970, the first conference was held in Hala Sharif, Sindh. At this historical conference which is known as the Hala Conference, there were two different opinions on participating in the upcoming general election. Some argued that the Party should not take part in elections but rather adopt methods of revolutionary insurrection to take power, whereas others emphasized the importance of partaking in parliamentary democracy. In the end, the decision to participate in the elections was taken. On 4 January 1970, Z.A. Bhutto officially launched his election campaign by addressing a public meeting at Nishtar Park, Karachi then conducted public meetings at Rawalpindi's Liaquat Bagh and NWFP. By the 1970s, the Pakistan Peoples Party had become the leading party of the Left in Pakistan, publishing its ideas in newspapers such as Nusrat, Fatah, and Mussawat. During the 1970 General Election, the People's Party dominated West Pakistani seats, defeating far-right and other right-of-centre forces in West-Pakistan, However, the story in East Pakistan was altogether different, where the Awami League had dominated and the People's Party had failed to win a single seat (likewise, the Awami League had also failed to make a breakthrough in West Pakistan). The Awami League secured 160 seats out of the total 300 seats in the National Assembly, whereas the People's Party came second with 81 seats.
The results gave the Awami League the constitutional right to form a government. However, Bhutto contested Rahman's mandate to form government in West Pakistan due to his party not having won a single seat there. Instead, Bhutto proposed the One Unit scheme, with two separate prime ministers for West and East Pakistan. This proposal was rejected by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, whose Six Point programme for a more federal Pakistan was also rejected by Bhutto. On 3 March 1971, the two leaders, along with President General Yahya Khan, met in Dacca to try and resolve the constitutional crisis. After their discussions yielded no satisfactory results, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman called for a nationwide strike. Bhutto, fearing a civil war, sent his trusted companion, Mubashir Hassan to convey a message to Rahman, who agreed to meet Bhutto once again. The two leaders agreed to form a coalition government with Rahman as prime minister and Bhutto as president. However, the military was unaware of these developments, and Bhutto increased his pressure on Rahman to reach a decision. After the launch of military action in East Pakistan (see Operations Searchlight and Barisal), the situation became unreconcilable .
Bhutto and his supporters criticised Yayha Khan's handling of the situation which led to the arrests of Bhutto and members of the People's Party, alongside Mujibur Rahman in Adiala Jail. This was followed by Indian intervention in East Bengal, cementing the defeat of the Pakistan Armed Forces, and the independence of Bangladesh.
Post-war politics
As result of Pakistan's defeat by India in Indo-Pakistani War of 1971, General Yahya Khan was forced to resign. On 20 December, he was taken to the President House in Rawalpindi, where he took over two positions from Yahya Khan, one as president and the other as first civilian Chief Martial Law Administrator. Thus, he was the first civilian Chief Martial Law Administrator of the dismembered Pakistan. By the time Bhutto had assumed control of what remained of Pakistan, the nation was completely isolated, angered, and demoralized. After becoming president, Bhutto in his first statement to foreign media correspondents said: Let us forget the past. We have made terrible mistakes and Pakistan is in a mess—the worst crisis in our history. But we have been given a terrible bashing by the Western press and I ask you now to please get off our backs while we put our house in order.
Bhutto era
Bhutto vowed to build a new Pakistan. On 2 January 1972 Bhutto announced the nationalisation of all major industries, including iron and steel, heavy engineering, heavy electricals, petrochemicals, cement and public utilities. A new labour policy was announced increasing the power of trade unions. Although he came from a feudal background himself, Bhutto announced reforms limiting land ownership and a government take-over of more than a million acres to distribute to landless peasants. More than 2,000 civil servants were dismissed on charges of corruption. He successfully negotiated the return of 93,000 prisoners of war and settlement with India, whilst kicking off the country's nuclear programme in January 1972. The promulgation of the 1973 constitution put Pakistan on the road to parliamentary democracy. In the People's Party's first budget of 1972–3, health and education were nationalised, with a record 42.3 percent of the total budget being allocated for them.
The National Assembly of Pakistan approved the new constitution on 10 April 1973 and it came into effect from 14 August 1973, the day Bhutto became Prime Minister of Pakistan. Bhutto initiated different reforms like expanding the school network to slums and small villages, creating basic health facilities, land reforms and housing schemes. However, the Party's measures fell through as a result of 1970s global economic recession, the 1973 oil crisis, and the failure of reforms resulted into rising inflation. The letter of credit of Pakistan was rejected by foreign banks and a massive outflow of capital was seen from the country. Dr Mubashar Hassan, then-finance minister wrote in a note to all ministers, special assistants, provincial chief ministers and governors: "We have been in office for more than six months. Many decisions have been taken but a growing implementation gap is becoming visible. Once the implementation gap sets in, the decline begins. We came to abolish the abominable status quo but the status quo is very much present..."Similarly, workers intensified their demands and during first months of 1972, whole country engulfed with periodic lockouts and encirclement of industries. Among them notable struggles were the emergence of a worker-led court under Abdur Rehman in Kot Lakhpat and the Karachi labour unrest of 1972.
In the field of foreign policy, the People's Party built a good relationship with China, with Bhutto successfully negotiating an aid package worth $300 million for Pakistan and also writing off loans amounting to over $110 million. On 22 February 1974, Pakistan hosted all the leaders of the Islamic world in the summit of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation in Lahore.
Domestically, serious issues began to emerge within the party's ranks, when Bhutto decided to utilise the state to keep an eye on the activities of the Pakistan National Alliance. After he purged left-wing activists – such as Malik Meraj Khalid, a Marxist law minister – from his own party's ranks, Dr. Mubashir Hassan also resigned. In September 1974, under pressure from religious organizations, Bhutto passed a constitutional amendment declaring the Ahmadiyya community to be non-Muslim. In 1973, Bhutto ordered an Army operation in the Baluchistan province against the government of the National Awami Party.
In the 1977 general election, the People's Party won a landslide majority. However, the PNA-led opposition started demonstrations against alleged rigging in the elections. The opposition labelled Bhutto as a 'Kafir' (i.e., unislamic) and an alcoholic, to which Bhutto responded, by saying, "Yes, I drink alcohol, but I do not drink the blood of the people", although, in 1974, he had banned alcohol. Bhutto offered to hold another set of elections in November 1977 and offered ministries to the PNA, but this failed, sparking further civil disobedience against the Peoples Party. Tensions mounted and despite an agreement reached between the opposition and PPP, martial law was imposed in the country by Chief of Army Staff Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. In April 1979, after a controversial trial found him guilty of murdering a political opponent, Bhutto was executed by hanging.
In 1982, his daughter, Benazir Bhutto, was elected as the Peoples Party's co-chairperon alongside his wife, Nusrat Bhutto, who was elected in 1979. The People's Party headed the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy which was one of the largest non-violent democratic movements in the world against the military dictatorship of Zia-ul-Haq.
After eleven years, the People's Party returned to power by winning the 1988 General Election, with Benazir Bhutto becoming the first female head of government in the Muslim world. In 1990, the Peoples party's government was dismissed due to economic recession, issues regarding to national security and nationalisation. Benazir and the Peoples Party lost the 1990 General Election serving in opposition for the first since its inception in 1967. It was found by the Supreme Court of Pakistan in 2012 that this election had been rigged in favour of the Pakistan Muslim League.
The People's Party returned to power in the 1993 General Election, forming a coalition with JUI(F). However, over the next few years, the Party split into three main factional groups: the Bhuttoists, the Parliamentarians and the Sherpaoists, with Bhuttoism becoming the most influential and powerful in Sindh. Internal opposition and disapproval of Benazir Bhutto's policies by her brother Murtaza Bhutto created a rift in their relations. Murtaza Bhutto was assassinated in 1996, with many pointing the finger of blame at his sister.
Its effect on the Peoples Party was disastrous, whose government was dismissed by the party's own elected President Farooq Leghari in September 1996. Since 1996 and Bhutto's assassination in 2007, the Peoples Party has suffered with major internal factional conflicts, between leftists and neoliberals over the Party's shift to Thatcherite economics.
Recent history
After the assassination of Benazir Bhutto on 27 December 2007, the 2008 parliamentary elections which were scheduled to be held in January were postponed until 18 February. The PPP won the considerable victory on among all political parties, gaining a momentum of general seats 121 from all provinces in the Parliament, whilst the centre-right, Pakistan Muslim League came second in place, managing to secure 91 seats from all over the country. In 2008, the co-chairman Asif Ali Zardari announced to end the fourth dictatorship when he quoted: "Pakistan was on its way of ridding dictatorships forever", and appealed to the Pakistan Muslim League (N) leader, former Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, to form a coalition controlling over half the seats in Pakistan's 342 seat parliament.
On 9 March 2008 in a press conference held in Muree, Punjab, conservatives under Nawaz Sharif and socialists led by Asif Ali Zardari officially signed an agreement to form a coalition government. Titled the PPP-PML summit declaration, the joint declaration both parties agreed on the reinstatement of judges deposed during the emergency rule imposed on 3 November 2007 by General Pervez Musharraf within 30 days after the new federal government was formed. On 28 March, the peoples party appointed Yousaf Raza Gillani for the office of prime minister and formed coalition government with Pakistan Muslim League (Q) in Punjab, Awami National Party in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, JUI(F) in Balochistan and Muttahida Qaumi Movement in Sindh. While on other hand, the Peoples Party claimed the exclusive mandate in Gilgit-Baltistan and Kashmir. However, this treaty was later on was violated by PPP government, after which PML(N) withdrew from coalition and federal government.
On 5 September 2008, the Peoples Party nominated its co-chairman and chairman of central executive committee, Asif Ali Zardari, for the upcoming presidential election. Zardari secured 481 votes out of 700 votes from the Electoral College of Pakistan, winning the Pakistan's presidential election on 5 September 2008. In April 2010, president Zardari voluntarily surrendered his political and presidential powers to prime minister Gillani and the parliament, and through 18th Amendment to the Constitution of Pakistan, Zardari transferred the authority of government and political appointments, and powers to exercise the authority of government to prime minister Gillani as part of country's road to parliamentary democracy. Even though growing unpopularity, it has managed to maintain a large vote bank in deeper Sindh and South Punjab. On national front, it is currently competing against Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf and Pakistan Muslim League (N). On 22 June 2012, the PPP nominated Raja Pervez Ashraf was elected as the new Pakistan PM.
As of 2017, according to The Economist, the party "has become irrelevant outside their home province of Sindh."
On 11 April 2022, the PPP formed a coalition government with the PML-N and other parties, electing Shehbaz Sharif as Prime Minister.
Electoral history
National Assembly elections
Senate of Pakistan Elections
Sindh Assembly elections
Punjab Assembly elections
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Assembly elections
Azad Kashmir Legislative Assembly Elections
Gilgit-Baltistan Assembly Elections
Notable leadership
The first socialist and democratic convention attended by the leading 67 left-wing intellectuals who appointed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto as the first and founding chair of the Pakistan Peoples Party. After his execution, the senior party leadership handed over the chairmanship of the party to his wife, Nusrat Bhutto, and held the position into the 1980s. In 1982, Nusrat Bhutto, ill with cancer, was given permission to leave Pakistan for medical treatment and remained abroad for several years. At that point her daughter, Benazir Bhutto, became acting head of the party while Nusrat technically remained its chairman and was referred to as such as late as September 1983. By January 1984, Benazir was being referred to as the party's chairman and subsequently secured the legal appointment by the senior leadership of Central Executive Committee at the convention held in 1984. She had been elected chairperson for life, which she remained until her assassination on 27 December 2007. Her nineteen-year-old son, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari and his father Asif Ali Zardari were appointed party co-chairmen after assassination of Benazir Bhutto on 30 December 2007.
List of party's presidents
List of party's prime ministers
Current structure and composition
The Central Executive Committee of the Pakistan Peoples Party of Pakistan serves as party's highest leadership, and apex governing authority, and is primarily responsible for promoting Peoples Party activities, promotion, media campaigning, welfare distribution, public policy and works. The CEC is the supreme parliamentary body in charge of setting out strategies and positions during and after elections. The CEC is currently chaired by Asif Ali Zardari, assisted by additional vice-chairmen, including all the major office bearers of the party. However, the CEC is focused on election campaigning and organizational strategy during the national parliamentary elections, overseeing the media works, ideological promotion, and the foreign policy. The public works, welfare distribution are partly managed at the municipal unit level up to the federal level, which supervise and give legal authority for such works.
The PPP-Young Organization is a youth-led party organisation that attempts to mobilise the youth for Peoples Party candidates for the Youth Parliament. The group's Trotskyist-Marxist wing, "The Struggle", which is internationally affiliated with International Marxist Tendency (IMT) pursues an entryist strategy by working inside party's student wing, the Peoples Students, a student-outreach organization with the goal of training and engaging the new generation of the Pakistan Peoples Party. The Peoples Party also has an active military-street wing, the People's Committee, controversially affiliated with the Pakistan Peoples Party.
Nationally, each province and territory has a provisional committee, made up of elected committee members as well as ex-officio committee members who elect its presidents. The local committees often coordinate campaign activities within their jurisdiction, oversee local conventions, and in some cases primaries or caucuses, and may have a role in nominating candidates for elected office under state law. All administration, campaign, and party policies required complete permission from the CEC's co-chairman and the vice-chairmen.
Ideology
In its inception, the notable communists from the Communist Party and socialists of the defunct Socialist Party gathered to form the Peoples Party in 1967 by electing Zulfikar Ali Bhutto its first chairman. The Pakistan Peoples Party's leftist program remains far more successful and integrated in the civil society than Communist Party.
Since then, the Peoples Party has been a leading proponent of democratic socialism with the mainstream agenda of social democracy, favouring semi-secular and semi-Islamic socialist principles. Historically, the Peoples Party favoured financially stable farmers, industrial labour unions and the middle-class. The Peoples Party rejected far-left politics and ultra-leftism, supporting unregulated business and finance, and laissez-faire capitalism, after which it was no longer widely viewed as a socialist or social-democratic party, as its economic policies swung dramatically to the right-wing, embracing economic neoliberalism and unfettered capitalism and privatisation of publicly owned institutions, favouring partial income taxes.
Despite its democratic-socialist ideas, the Peoples Party never actually allied with the Soviet Union, with the Communist Party of Pakistan remaining one of its major rivals. The Peoples Party has been criticised by various socialists such as Fahad Rizwan who accused the Peoples Party of opportunism. Recently, the Peoples Party has adopted privatisation and small-scale nationalisation policies, with centrist economic and socially progressive agendas.
Basic, enshrined principles of PPP include "Islam [as] our Faith. Democracy is our Politics. Socialism is our Economy. All Power to the People".
Issues involving foreign policy
Relations with the China, Russia, Iran and Turkey, are the central and the strongest proponents of the People's Party's foreign policy. Under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan built closer ties with Soviet Union, China, and Iran, but under Benazir Bhutto, the foreign policy was revised after taking shifts to centre-right policies. On the other hand, Benazir Bhutto adopted Nawaz Sharif's conservative privatisation policies in order to secure funding from the United States and the World Bank, but received a harsh opposition from within the party. Under former Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani, the People's Party pushed its foreign policy towards Russia as the party's relationship with the United States went cold in 2010. Earlier in the 1970s, the People's Party faced a "secret" cold war with the United States, but then suffered a US-backed coup in 1977. Throughout the 1980s, the party's credibility was damaged by the United States who "keenly sabotaged" any of its efforts and organizational establishment in the dense areas of country.
Academia
The Pakistan Peoples Party through Zulfikar Ali Bhutto proudly receives all credit for launching the atomic bomb project in 1972, public ceremonies are held on Youm-e-Takbir (lit. Day of Greatness) to commemorate the political services of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who established the program.
In 1976, Murtaza Bhutto graduated from Harvard University, Bhutto graduated with his thesis entitled "Modicum of Harmony". His thesis dealt with the spread of nuclear weapons in general, and the implications of India's nuclear weapons on Pakistan in particular. Murtaza went on to Christ Church College Oxford, his father's alma mater, for a three-year course to read for an MLit degree. Bhutto submitted his master thesis, containing a vast argumentative work on Nuclear strategic studies, where he advocated for Pakistan's approach to develop its nuclear deterrence program to counter Indian nuclear program.
Since its establishment, the People's Party has produced prolific scientists-turned technocrats, including Farhatullah Babar, Mubashir Hassan, and the senior academic scientists who played a role in building the atomic bomb. The People's Party member's notably provided their public support to Abdul Qadeer Khan who had been forced to attend the military debriefings by General Pervez Musharraf in 2004. In August 2012, after years of negligence, the peoples party made its effort to bestowed and award Munir Ahmad Khan the highest state honor, the Nishan-e-Imtiaz, as a gesture of political rehabilitation; the honor was publicly presented by President Asif Ali Zardari in a public ceremony.
In 1995–1996, the People's Party under Benazir Bhutto's era opened computer literacy centres to provide the public with access to computers and technology. In 1990, they made Pakistan the first Muslim country to launch a satellite, Badr-I, they are also responsible for establishing, nurturing, and funding the missile's programs, such as Ghauri and Shaheen in the 1990s. As part of the science policy, they established the Pakistan Science Foundation in 1973 and helped establish the Pakistan Academy of Letters in 1976. In 1996, Benazir Bhutto established SZABIST at Karachi to become a leading institution of science and technology and appointed world-renowned academic Dr. Javaid Laghari as its first president, who later was also elected Senator from Sindh on a technocrat seat and eventually Chairman HEC leading a revolution of reforms in higher education in South Asia
Challenges and controversies
Lost left
Since the 1990s, the People's Party has been under intense criticism even inside the party both from its own members and the other leftists in the country, notably due to the charges of large-scale corruptions. The leading leftist, Nadeem Paracha, has asserted that since 1977 the People's Party's manifesto has been transformed into a centre-right platform, whereas in 1977 parliamentary elections, the People's Party's manifesto did not mention the word "socialism". During the 1973–75, the Peoples Party's radical ultra-left and communist wings led by Mirage Khalid and the Maoist wings under Khalid Syed were purged by the People's Party to ensure the political support of the powerful Sindh's feudal lords and Punjab's landed elite, with Paracha claiming the People's Party has "lost the left".
Leading left-wing journalist Mehdi Hasan has remarked that the Peoples Party is "not a secular party", firstly citing its support of declaring Ahmadiyya community as non-Muslims through the second constitutional amendment, secondly for banning the use of liquor, and thirdly for the Peoples Party declaring Friday as a holiday to win the support of religious elements.
Kashmir Cause
The chairman of PPP Bilawal Bhutto Zardari led a convention on 19 September 2014 in Multan, Punjab, where he reportedly quoted: "the [PPP] would take back entire Kashmir for his country."
Bhutto emphasized on his last part of the speech: "I will take back Kashmir, all of it, and I will not leave behind a single inch of it because like the other provinces, it belongs to Pakistan. He pledged to continue supporting Kashmiri freedom struggle morally and diplomatically...(.)".
Internal opposition and factionalism
Since the 1990s, the factionalism has grew in the party when Murtaza Bhutto returned to Pakistan. Disagreeing with Benazir and Asif Ali Zardari's political philosophy brewing the party, Murtaza Bhutto split and formed the more powerful yet more leaning towards left wing faction, Bhuttoist in 1995. Confrontation with Benazir Bhutto in 1999 over the party guidance, Aftab Sherpao splits from the party and forming the Pakistan Peoples Party (Sherpaoist)—a more reformist with libertarian agenda.
Factionalism continued in 2011 when PPP sacked Mahmood Qureshi over the Raymond Davis incident in Lahore. Qureshi later defected to PTI. Another leftist leader, Malik Ali Khan also resigned from the Peoples Party, saying that he "did not agree with how President Zardari was leading the party particularly with regards to an alliance with centre-right PML (Q) and the foreign policy."
In 2012, the PPP's powerful leader, Zulfiqar Mirza, quit from the party despite urgings amidst disagreement with Asif Zardari's leadership and policies with regards to dealings with the liberal MQM in Sindh. Reasoning with their isolation, the socialist politicians felt that the party had now moved away from the original ideas it was founded on by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1967. In 2014, Labour leader, Safdar Ali Abbasi, formed the Workers faction amid disagreement with party's fiscal policy.
Defection in PPP: The Launch of Pakistan People's Party Parliamentarian-Patriots
The Pakistan People's Party Parliamentarian-Patriots (PPPPP) was launched in Lahore in the year 2002 as a 'forward bloc' that broke away from the PPP to back the Pakistan Muslim League Quaid-e-Azam (PML-Q) transforming itself into Pakistan's newest party at that time. The leader of the rebel group was Makhdoom Faisal Saleh Hayat. In January 2017, Former federal minister Syed Faisal Saleh Hayat joined the Pakistan Peoples Party on Monday, more than 14 years after being elected on the PPP ticket in 2002, bringing an end to the PPPPP.
See also
Bhuttoism and Sindh
Roti Kapada Aur Makaan
Radical left factions in the Pakistan Peoples Party
Pakistan Peoples Party (Bhuttoist)
Pakistan Peoples Party (Marxism)
Pakistan Peoples Party (Parliamentarians)
Pakistan Peoples Party (Workers)
Political realism
Socialism in Pakistan
Explanatory notes
References
Further reading
External links
Pakistan Peoples Party Pakistan based Web site
Pakistan Peoples Party USA official site
The Pakistan People's Party, Radio France Internationale (in English)
A detailed Web site on the life of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto
2008 Election dossier, Radio France Internationale (in English)
1967 establishments in Pakistan
Full member parties of the Socialist International
Islamic socialist political parties
Liberal parties in Pakistan
Progressivism in Pakistan
Centre-left parties in Asia
Social democratic parties in Pakistan
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron%20Kind
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Ron Kind
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Ronald James Kind , (born March 16, 1963) is an American lawyer and politician who served as the U.S. representative for from 1997 to 2023. He is a member of the Democratic Party. His former district is in western Wisconsin, anchored by La Crosse, Eau Claire, Platteville, Stevens Point, Wisconsin Rapids, Prescott, and River Falls. Kind was the dean of Wisconsin's congressional delegation when he chose not to seek re-election in 2022.
Early life, education, and career
Kind was born and raised in La Crosse, the third of five children born to Greta and Elroy Kind. His is the fifth generation of his family to live in the area. Kind's mother formerly worked as the assistant director of personnel in the La Crosse School District. His father had a 35-year career as a telephone repairman and union leader at the La Crosse Telephone Company.
Kind attended La Crosse schools and was a student athlete at Logan High School in both football and basketball. He accepted a scholarship to Harvard College and graduated with honors in 1985. At Harvard, Kind played quarterback on the football team and worked during the summer for Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire in Washington. While working for Proxmire, he took part in investigations that helped determine the "winners" of the Golden Fleece Awards, presented by Proxmire to those responsible for government waste.
Kind received a master's degree from the London School of Economics and a J.D. degree from the University of Minnesota Law School. He practiced law for two years at Quarles and Brady, a law firm in Milwaukee.
Kind returned to La Crosse to become an assistant district attorney. He later served as a state special prosecutor in several western Wisconsin counties.
U.S. House of Representatives
Elections
While campaigning for an eighth term in Congress in 1994, Republican Representative Steve Gunderson announced that it would be his last. Kind, then an assistant district attorney in La Crosse, moved quickly to set up a campaign operation. In April 1995, he took a leave of absence from the district attorney's office and by June he boasted an extensive campaign operation across the district. In September 1995, Kind announced his candidacy. A yearlong, five-way Democratic primary contest ensued; Kind won the September 1996 primary election with 46% of the vote. In the general election, he faced Republican James Harsdorf, a former Wisconsin state senator. At the time of the 1996 election, only two Democrats had represented Wisconsin's 3rd congressional district during the 20th century and only one in the last 88 years; the election was hotly contested with national political figures appearing in support of both candidates. Kind's campaign attacked Harsdorf for his stated support for polarizing national Republican leaders such as Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey, and used it to link him to unpopular Republican policies such as cutting Medicare; Harsdorf bashed Kind as "another lawyer running for Congress." Kind defeated Harsdorf with 52% of the vote. He didn't face another contest nearly that close until 2010.
2006
In 2006, Kind faced a surprise primary challenge from La Crosse activist Charles "Chip" DeNure, who ran unsuccessfully for mayor in 2001 and had flirted with several other mayoral campaigns. He challenged Kind over the Iraq War, with DeNure declaring his support for a timetable to withdraw American forces. DeNure also claimed the September 11 attacks were "an inside job by terrorists within the U.S. government." Kind won 83% of the primary vote and went on to defeat Republican Paul R. Nelson with 65% of the vote in the general election.
2010
In late 2009, Kind considered running for governor of Wisconsin in 2010 but ultimately said that instead he would push in Congress for health care reform. Of his decision to run for reelection, Kind said: "My first responsibility must be to get affordable and accessible health care reform passed this year for all Wisconsin families. That is why I cannot run for governor. I have a responsibility and duty to the people of Wisconsin to continue work on the health care reform agenda ahead of us." The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that he had given up on running for governor "after a poll showed that few Wisconsinites knew him."
Amid the difficult and controversial passage of the Affordable Care Act and the Tea Party protests of 2009 and 2010, Wisconsin media described Kind as facing "what is widely considered his toughest re-election challenge." His Republican opponent, state senator Dan Kapanke, who represented much of the central portion of the district, "focused almost exclusively on three core Republican issues—less spending, lower taxes, and smaller government." Kapanke also criticized Kind for allegedly soliciting thousands of dollars in 2007 from a group of Eau Claire doctors. Despite a national Republican wave, which also saw Republicans win every statewide office in Wisconsin, Kind survived the challenge from Kapanke with just over 50% of the vote.
2012
There was talk that Kind might run for the U.S. Senate in 2012 to replace the retiring Herb Kohl, but he decided not to mount a primary challenge to fellow U.S. Representative Tammy Baldwin, who had already announced her candidacy. There was also a push to draft Kind to run for governor against Scott Walker in the 2012 gubernatorial recall election.
Kind ultimately decided to run for reelection to Congress. He faced retired U.S. Army Colonel Ray Boland in the November election and won with 64% of the vote.
2016
In 2016, seeking his 11th term in Congress, Kind faced a primary challenge from Eau Claire teacher Myron Buchholz. Buchholz was an outspoken supporter of U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, who had been defeated in the 2016 Democratic Party presidential primaries but had carried Kind's congressional district in the Wisconsin presidential primary. Kind said, "I think that people have gotten to know me. I will not apologize for trying to find common ground in divided government", and defended his support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an issue that was polarizing working-class voters. Kind defeated Buchholz, 81% to 19%, in the primary, and faced no Republican challenger in the general election.
2018
In April 2017, The Hill reported that Kind was a "prime target" for Republicans in the 2018 elections. The article cited a number of concerns for Kind, including that President Donald Trump had carried his district in the 2016 presidential election. The Cook Political Report also cited Kind's district as the 25th most Republican-trending district held by a Democrat. Kind was also facing criticism over the fact that a veteran who had died after taking an off-label mixture of pills prescribed to him by the Tomah VA had previously contacted Kind's congressional office.
Kind also faced a potential primary challenge in 2018 from LGBTQ advocate Juliet Germanotta, who described herself as transgender, HIV positive, and a democratic socialist, but in February 2018, she was charged on an outstanding warrant in New York City for the theft of a $4,800 ring. Germanotta ultimately failed to gather enough signatures to appear on the primary ballot, and Kind avoided a primary.
Despite Republican hopes for the district, Kind was easily reelected, defeating Republican Steve Toft with 59% of the vote.
Tenure
Kind was the House Democrats' Chief Deputy Whip under Steny Hoyer. He was co-founder of both the Upper Mississippi River Congressional Caucus and the Congressional Wildlife Refuge Caucus, and chair of the New Democrat Coalition. He voted with his party 87% of the time in the 112th Congress and 94% of the time in the 111th Congress. During the 114th Congress Kind was ranked the 19th most bipartisan member of the U.S. House of Representatives and the most bipartisan member of the House from Wisconsin in the Bipartisan Index created by The Lugar Center and the McCourt School of Public Policy. The index ranks members of Congress by bipartisanship by measuring how often their bills attract co-sponsors from the opposite party and how often they co-sponsor bills by members of the opposite party.
After the failed effort to unseat Governor Scott Walker in a June 2012 recall election, Kind said that Democrats should be proud of forcing recall elections despite the outcome. He said that his conversations with voters had convinced him that the only reason that Democrats lost was that people didn't think it was a proper use of the recall process.
Kind opposed Nancy Pelosi's bids for Speaker of the House in both 2006 and 2018. After winning control of the House in 2006, Pelosi asked Kind to resign from his position as Chief Deputy Whip. In 2018, as Democrats were again poised to win a majority, he again noted his opposition, saying to The Hill: "I've been consistent in saying we're in desperate need of new leadership on both sides, as we move forward in the new Congress." Kind followed through on his election pledge to oppose Pelosi and voted instead for Congressman John Lewis in the election for Speaker in 2019.
On December 18, 2019, Kind voted for both articles of impeachment against President Trump.
Agricultural issues
Representing some of the country's most productive dairy farms, Kind has for many years supported reforms to U.S. agricultural subsidy programs. In 2007, he upset Democratic House leaders by co-sponsoring—with Republican congressman Jeff Flake—a bill that would have eliminated subsidies for those earning over $250,000 while increasing funding for conservation and rural development. At the time, the bill split the Democratic caucus, which had previously agreed to a similar bill which set the cutoff at $1,000,000—in order to placate rural farm-state Democrats. Pelosi, who had worked to make the original bill accommodating for those rural Democratic interests, was upset with Kind's proposal. Agricultural Committee Chairman Collin Peterson said Kind was "a lone ranger on this, and he's dividing the caucus, and I don't appreciate it." Kind's proposal was ultimately referred to committee and never voted on.
Childhood obesity
Kind and Colorado Senator Mark Udall introduced the Healthy Kids Outdoors Act, aimed at encouraging and supporting children's outdoor activities. He has been the House sponsor of the FIT Kids Act for the last several House sessions. The act would require school districts to report on students' physical activity and to give youngsters health and nutritional information.
In 2011, Kind wrote a piece about "the childhood obesity epidemic", in which he promoted both the FIT Kids Act and the Healthy Kids Outdoors Act. He said that healthy bodies lead to healthy minds, and that his FIT Kids Act would push parents and the public by requiring states and school districts to report on children's physical activity. As for the Healthy Kids Outdoors Act, it "provides state-level incentives to develop five-year state strategies to connect children, youth and families with nature and promote outdoor recreation in communities."
Environment
In October 2017, Kind announced a plan to protect the Mississippi River. It involved "four main parts: creating jobs by supporting recreation, tourism and navigation; maintaining railroad safety; supporting the Mississippi River Restoration Program; and promoting the 'Conservation on the Farm' bill".
Gun control
During his 2012 campaign, Kind opposed any form of enhanced gun control, but after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting he seemed to be open to it, saying, "We're going to have to have a discussion while also keeping in mind the concerns of law-abiding, safety-conscious gun owners in America." He added, "I just don't see where armed guards or teachers with guns in our schools means freedom for our children."
WIZM reported in February 2018 that Kind was one of a relatively small number of Democrats who had received contributions from the National Rifle Association. Since 2009, he had accepted $7,950 in from various NRA political action committees. He had also collected $5,400 from the Connecticut-based National Shooting Sports Foundation, which calls itself "The Firearms Industry Trade Association." The NRA endorsed Kind in 2010.
Kind was one of two Democrats to vote against HR 1446: Enhanced Background Checks Act of 2021, designed to close the so-called Charleston loophole. Earlier he had voted in favor of HR 8: Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2021 to expand background checks on gun purchases. Both bills passed the House on March 11, 2021.
In June 2022, Kind was the only Democrat to vote against a measure establishing AMBER Alert-like systems for active shooter events. He again voted against the measure when it came up the following month and was again the only Democrat to do so. In a statement, Kind said he is "concerned that a system like this could generate more chaos and cause armed civilians to rush to the scene, potentially interfering with law enforcement efforts."
On July 29, 2022, Kind and four other Democrats joined the Republicans in voting against a bill banning assault weapons.
Health care
Kind supported and voted for the Affordable Care Act, denying at a public event that insurers were canceling insurance. Rather, they were signing customers up "with new plans that are compliant with ACA." He insisted that under five percent of the population would lose their insurance under Obamacare and that most would "get a much better deal in the healthcare exchange—good price and much better benefits than what they were paying before." He added that young people are "probably going to get a real good deal" under Obamacare.
Kind voted against the 2017 Republican health care bill. "I thought it was a bad piece of legislation," he said, "both in the process of how it came together and the impact it will have for people back home."
Immigration
In October 2014, Kind said he supported "comprehensive immigration reform that secures our borders, helps our farmers and businesses meet their labor needs, and fairly addresses the millions of undocumented individuals in the shadows." On October 20, 2017, Kind spoke up in defense of DACA, saying that Dreamers "are as American as anyone else's children."
When then-presidential candidate Donald Trump called in 2015 for temporarily banning all Muslims from entering the United States, Kind said Trump was "playing in the same huddle as ISIS” and was making ISIS recruiting easier by playing into the terrorist group's narrative.
In January 2017, Kind issued a statement in which he maintained that "President Trump's Executive Order blocking refugees and people from select Muslim countries from entering the United States does not reflect who we are as a nation. We cannot start discriminating based on religion. Instead of helping keep our country safe it will jeopardize our national security by giving ISIS and other terror groups another recruitment tool and making it harder for our allies in Muslim nations to work with us on counter-terrorism operations."
Marijuana legalization
Kind has evolved on the issue of marijuana legalization. While running for reelection in 2014, he indicated his support for medical marijuana, but opposed "the full legalization of recreational marijuana." He also said, "Colorado and Washington State have taken the lead to decriminalize marijuana. We should watch those experiments closely before deciding to legalize recreational marijuana nationally." When the House of Representatives considered a stand-alone bill for the legalization of marijuana in December 2020, Kind voted in favor.
Taxation and retirement
In 2017, Kind rejected the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 as a rehash of failed trickle-down economics policies. He indicated he personally supported tax reform to simplify the tax code, but accused Republicans of blowing up the deficit in their rush to cut taxes for their corporate allies, saying the Republican plan would lead to future cuts to Medicare and Social Security and would not invigorate the economy.
Kind was an early co-sponsor of the bipartisan SECURE Act of 2019, which contained a number of provisions to expand access to retirement planning options and to encourage employers to set up retirement plans for workers. The bill, originally introduced in late March 2019, was enacted in December 2019 as part of the fiscal year 2020 federal appropriations bill.
Trade
Kind was the lone Wisconsin Democrat to support free trade with China, despite pressure from unions that claimed trade with China is costing jobs.
The La Crosse Tribune reported in January 2014 that Kind was coming "under increasing criticism from those on the left who say his support of new free-trade agreements will kill jobs." For example, he urged fellow House members to vote for the Trans-Pacific Partnership—a comprehensive agreement with 11 other Pacific nations. At the Democratic National Convention, protesters criticized Kind for his support of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. "There's confusion; people are conflating trade with trade agreements", Kind insisted. "The trade that's going on absent trade agreements has not worked well for us: China, Brazil, India. We don't have trade agreements with those countries." Ultimately, at Trump's direction, the U.S. withdrew from consideration of the TPP, and the remaining members consolidated the agreement into the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, which came into force in 2018, forming one of the largest trading blocs globally.
Veterans issues
Kind announced in May 2014 that he would ask for the establishment of an independent bipartisan commission to investigate conditions at VA hospitals.
War on Terrorism
On October 10, 2002, Kind voted for the Authorization to use military force against Iraq. He later expressed regret for that vote, saying in 2008, "It was the wrong war at the wrong time for the wrong reason", and in 2016, "My great regret is that if you look at the Iraq resolution that we had to vote on, there were multiple steps that had to be taken before the use of force. My great regret is realizing now that President Bush wasn't interested in those steps. He ordered the troops in when it wasn't a last resort."
In a January 2007 letter to President Bush, Kind and a dozen-odd other members of Congress wrote that success in Iraq "requires regional cooperation and positive engagement from all neighboring states. The history of the Middle East is too vast, too complex and too tumultuous to expect progress without an integrated diplomatic effort and multinational support from all of Iraq's neighbors. History is replete with centuries of marked violence and failed crusades, perpetrated by ignorance, arrogance and dogma."
In September 2014, Kind said that he opposed "sending any military combat troops in order to deal with ISIS," but expressed support for President Obama's "decisions to use targeted airstrikes in Syria and Iraq to degrade and destroy ISIS, and to send service members to assist Iraqi and Kurdish forces with training and intelligence."
Committee assignments
Committee on Ways and Means
Subcommittee on Health
Subcommittee on Trade
Caucus memberships
Congressional Wildlife Refuge Caucus
United States Congressional International Conservation Caucus
Sportsmen's Caucus
Upper Mississippi River Congressional Caucus
Congressional Arts Caucus
Congressional United Kingdom Caucus
New Democrat Coalition
Congressional NextGen 9-1-1 Caucus
Climate Solutions Caucus
U.S.-Japan Caucus
Retirement
Kind announced on August 10, 2021, that he would not seek re-election in 2022. Having won the 2020 general election by only about three percentage points, compared to a 20-point win in 2018, and facing a rematch with his 2020 Republican opponent (and ultimate successor) Derrick Van Orden, Kind told reporters, "I've run out of gas."
Personal life
Kind and his wife, Tawni, live in La Crosse. She is an official court reporter for the County Court system. They have two sons.
Kind is a member of the La Crosse Optimists Club, a leader in the Boys and Girls Club, and the La Crosse YMCA. He is also on the board of directors for Coulee Council on Alcohol or Other Drug Abuse.
On February 6, 2023, Kind joined the law firm Arnold & Porter as a senior policy advisor.
Kind was appointed an Honorary Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2023 Special Honours for services to UK/US relations.
Controversies
Rangel ethics probe
In October 2009, The Hill profiled Kind, focusing on his challenge to "the Democratic status quo." While calling him "an influential voice on...ethics," The Hill also noted that Kind had refused to join in the effort that year to have Ways and Means Chairman Charles Rangel step down amid an ethics probe involving Rangel's taxes. "We're all ultimately human and none of us are perfect and we're all prone to mistakes from time to time", Kind said. "If that becomes that new standard--that any mistake is subject to dismissal or losing their position--then that's going to be a very tough standard for each and every member to have to live up to."
Pay-for-talk controversy
In October 2010, two doctors at the OakLeaf Surgical Hospital in Eau Claire charged that Kind had demanded campaign donations before meeting them to discuss the Children's Health and Medical Protection Act. Kind denied the accusation. One of the accusers, a surgeon who requested anonymity, asserted in a sworn statement that a Kind aide explained that he "typically requires a contribution of $10,000 for a one to two-hour personal meeting and $25,000 for a half-day meeting."
Electoral history
U.S. House (1996–2020)
References
External links
Profile at the Democratic Party of Wisconsin (archived)
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1963 births
20th-century American politicians
21st-century American politicians
Alumni of the London School of Economics
American evangelicals
American Lutherans
American prosecutors
Democratic Party members of the United States House of Representatives from Wisconsin
Harvard College alumni
Living people
Logan High School (La Crosse, Wisconsin) alumni
Lutherans from Wisconsin
Members of Congress who became lobbyists
Politicians from La Crosse, Wisconsin
University of Minnesota Law School alumni
Wisconsin lawyers
Honorary Officers of the Order of the British Empire
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxine%20Waters
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Maxine Waters
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Maxine Moore Waters (née Carr; born August 15, 1938) is an American politician serving as the U.S. representative for since 1991. The district, numbered as the 29th district from 1991 to 1993 and as the 35th district from 1993 to 2013, includes much of southern Los Angeles, as well as portions of Gardena, Inglewood and Torrance.
A member of the Democratic Party, Waters is in her 17th House term. She is the most senior of the 13 black women serving in Congress, and chaired the Congressional Black Caucus from 1997 to 1999. She is the second-most senior member of the California congressional delegation, after Nancy Pelosi. She chaired the House Financial Services Committee from 2019 to 2023 and has been the ranking member since 2023.
Before becoming a U.S. representative, Waters served seven terms in the California State Assembly, to which she was first elected in 1976. As an assemblywoman, she advocated divestment from South Africa's apartheid regime. In Congress, she was an outspoken opponent of the Iraq War and has sharply criticized Presidents George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump.
Waters was included in Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People of 2018.
Early life and education
Waters was born in 1938 in St. Louis, Missouri, the daughter of Remus Carr and Velma Lee (née Moore). The fifth of 13 children, she was raised by her single mother after her father left the family when Maxine was two. She graduated from Vashon High School in St. Louis before moving with her family to Los Angeles in 1961. She worked in a garment factory and as a telephone operator before being hired as an assistant teacher with the Head Start program in Watts in 1966. Waters later enrolled at Los Angeles State College (now California State University, Los Angeles), where she received a bachelor's degree in sociology in 1971.
Early political career
In 1973, Waters went to work as chief deputy to City Councilman David S. Cunningham, Jr. She was elected to the California State Assembly in 1976. In the Assembly, she worked for the divestment of state pension funds from any businesses active in South Africa, a country then operating under the policy of apartheid, and helped pass legislation within the guidelines of the divestment campaign's Sullivan Principles. She ascended to the position of Democratic Caucus Chair for the Assembly.
U.S. House of Representatives
Elections
Upon the retirement of Augustus F. Hawkins in 1990, Waters was elected to the United States House of Representatives for California's 29th congressional district with over 79% of the vote. She has been reelected consistently from this district, renumbered as the 35th district in 1992 and as the 43rd in 2012, with at least 70% of the vote.
Waters has represented large parts of south-central Los Angeles and the Los Angeles coastal communities of Westchester and Playa Del Rey, as well as the cities of Torrance, Gardena, Hawthorne, Inglewood and Lawndale.
Tenure
On July 29, 1994, Waters came to public attention when she repeatedly interrupted a speech by Representative Peter King. The presiding officer, Carrie Meek, classed her behavior as "unruly and turbulent", and threatened to have the Sergeant at Arms present her with the Mace of the House of Representatives (the equivalent of a formal warning to desist). , this is the most recent instance of the mace being employed for a disciplinary purpose. Waters was eventually suspended from the House for the rest of the day. The conflict with King stemmed from the previous day, when they had both been present at a House Banking Committee hearing on the Whitewater controversy. Waters felt King's questioning of Maggie Williams (Hillary Clinton's chief of staff) was too harsh, and they subsequently exchanged hostile words.
Waters chaired the Congressional Black Caucus from 1997 to 1998. In 2005, she testified at the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce hearings on "Enforcement of Federal Anti-Fraud Laws in For-Profit Education", highlighting the American College of Medical Technology as a "problem school" in her district. In 2006, she was involved in the debate over King Drew Medical Center. She criticized media coverage of the hospital and asked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to deny a waiver of the cross ownership ban, and hence license renewal for KTLA-TV, a station the Los Angeles Times owned. She said, "The Los Angeles Times has had an inordinate effect on public opinion and has used it to harm the local community in specific instances." She requested that the FCC force the paper to either sell its station or risk losing that station's broadcast rights. According to Broadcasting & Cable, the challenges raised "the specter of costly legal battles to defend station holdings... At a minimum, defending against one would cost tens of thousands of dollars in lawyers' fees and probably delay license renewal about three months". Waters's petition was unsuccessful.
As a Democratic representative in Congress, Waters was a superdelegate to the 2008 Democratic National Convention. She endorsed Democratic U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton for the party's nomination in late January 2008, granting Clinton nationally recognized support that some suggested would "make big waves." Waters later switched her endorsement to U.S. Senator Barack Obama when his lead in the pledged delegate count became insurmountable on the final day of primary voting.
In 2009 Waters had a confrontation with Representative Dave Obey over an earmark in the United States House Committee on Appropriations. The funding request was for a public school employment training center in Los Angeles that was named after her. In 2011, Waters voted against the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012, related to a controversial provision that allows the government and the military to detain American citizens and others indefinitely without trial.
Upon Barney Frank's retirement in 2012, Waters became the ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee. On July 24, 2013, she voted in favor of Amendment 100 in H.R. 2397 Department of Defense Appropriations Act of 2014. The amendment targeted domestic surveillance activities, specifically that of the National Security Agency, and would have limited the flexibility of the NSA's interpretation of the law to collect sweeping data on U.S. citizens. Amendment 100 was rejected, 217–205.
On March 27, 2014, Waters introduced a discussion draft of the Housing Opportunities Move the Economy Forward Act of 2014 known as the Home Forward Act of 2014. A key provision of the bill includes the collection of 10 basis points for "every dollar outstanding mortgages collateralizing covered securities", estimated at $5 billion a year. These funds would be directed to three funds that support affordable housing initiatives, with 75% going to the National Housing trust fund. The National Housing Trust Fund will then provide block grants to states to be used primarily to build, preserve, rehabilitate, and operate rental housing that is affordable to the lowest income households, and groups including seniors, disabled persons and low income workers. The National Housing Trust was enacted in 2008, but has yet to be funded. In 2009, Waters co-sponsored Representative John Conyers's bill calling for reparations for slavery to be paid to black Americans.
For her tenure as chair of the House Financial Services Committee in the 116th Congress, Waters earned an "A" grade from the nonpartisan Lugar Center's Congressional Oversight Hearing Index.
CIA
After a 1996 San Jose Mercury News article alleged the complicity of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the Los Angeles crack epidemic of the 1980s, Waters called for an investigation. She asked whether "U.S.-government paid or organized operatives smuggled, transported and sold it to American citizens". The United States Department of Justice announced it had failed to find any evidence to support the original story. The Los Angeles Times also concluded after its own extensive investigation that the allegations were not supported by evidence. The author of the original story, Gary Webb, was eventually transferred to a different beat and removed from investigative reporting, before his death in 2004. Webb was found in his apartment with two bullet holes in his head. His death was declared a suicide. After these post-publication investigations, Waters read into the Congressional Record a memorandum of understanding in which former President Ronald Reagan's CIA director rejected any duty by the CIA to report illegal narcotics trafficking to the Department of Justice.
Allegations of corruption
According to Chuck Neubauer and Ted Rohrlich writing in the Los Angeles Times in 2004, Waters's relatives had made more than $1 million (~$ in ) during the preceding eight years by doing business with companies, candidates and causes that Waters had helped. They claimed she and her husband helped a company get government bond business, and her daughter Karen Waters and son Edward Waters have profited from her connections. Waters replied, "They do their business and I do mine." Liberal watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington named Waters to its list of corrupt members of Congress in its 2005, 2006, 2009 and 2011 reports. Citizens Against Government Waste named her the June 2009 Porker of the Month due to her intention to obtain an earmark for the Maxine Waters Employment Preparation Center.
Waters came under investigation for ethics violations and was accused by a House panel of at least one ethics violation related to her efforts to help OneUnited Bank receive federal aid. Waters's husband is a stockholder and former director of OneUnited Bank and the bank's executives were major contributors to her campaigns. In September 2008, Waters arranged meetings between U.S. Treasury Department officials and OneUnited Bank so that the bank could plead for federal cash. It had been heavily invested in Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, and its capital was "all but wiped out" after the U.S. government took it over. The bank received $12 million in Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) money. The matter was investigated by the House Ethics Committee, which charged Waters with violations of the House's ethics rules in 2010. On September 21, 2012, the House Ethics Committee completed a report clearing Waters of all ethics charges after nearly three years of investigation.
Objection to 2000 presidential election results
Waters and other House members objected to Florida's electoral votes, which George W. Bush narrowly won after a contentious recount. Because no senator joined her objection, the objection was dismissed by Vice President Al Gore, who was Bush's opponent in the 2000 presidential election.
Objection to 2004 presidential election results
Waters was one of 31 House Democrats who voted to not count Ohio's electoral votes in the 2004 presidential election. President George W. Bush won Ohio by 118,457 votes.
Objection to 2016 presidential election results
Waters objected to Wyoming's electoral votes after the 2016 presidential election, a state Donald Trump won with 68.2% of the vote. Because no senator joined her objection, the objection was dismissed by then-Vice President Joe Biden.
"Reclaiming my time"
In July 2017, during a House Financial Services Committee meeting, Waters questioned United States Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin. At several points during the questioning, Waters used the phrase "reclaiming my time" when Mnuchin did not directly address the questions Waters had asked him. The video of the interaction between Waters and Mnuchin became popular on social media, and the phrase became attached to her criticisms of Trump.
Louis Farrakhan
In early 2018, Waters was among the members of Congress the Republican Jewish Coalition called on to resign due to their connections with Nation of Islam leader and known anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan, who had recently drawn criticism for antisemitic remarks. The Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle noted that Waters had "long embraced Farrakhan" and refused to denounce him, even as other members of the Congressional Black Caucus who secretly met with Farrakhan in 2005 eventually did.
Confrontationalism
Rodney King verdict and Los Angeles riots
When south-central Los Angeles erupted in riotsin which 63 were killedafter the Rodney King verdict in 1992, Waters gained national attention when she led a chant of "No justice, no peace" at a rally amidst the riot. She also "helped deliver relief supplies in Watts and demanded the resumption of vital services". Waters described the riots as a rebellion, saying, "If you call it a riot it sounds like it was just a bunch of crazy people who went out and did bad things for no reason. I maintain it was somewhat understandable, if not acceptable." In her view, the violence was "a spontaneous reaction to a lot of injustice." In regard to the looting of Korean-owned stores by local black residents, she said in an interview with KABC radio host Michael Jackson: There were mothers who took this as an opportunity to take some milk, to take some bread, to take some shoes. Maybe they shouldn’t have done it, but the atmosphere was such that they did it. They are not crooks.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders
On June 23, 2018, after an incident in which White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was denied service and asked to leave a restaurant, Waters urged attendees at a rally in Los Angeles to confront Trump administration officials, saying:If you see anybody from [Trump's] cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd, and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere. Many on the Right saw this statement as an incitement of violence against officials from the Trump administration.
In response, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi posted comments on Twitter reported to be a condemnation of Waters's remarks: "Trump's daily lack of civility has provoked responses that are predictable but unacceptable."
Derek Chauvin trial
Comments by Waters on April 17, 2021, while attending protests over the killing of Daunte Wright in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, drew controversy. Responding to questions outside the Brooklyn Center police departmenta heavily fortified area that for days had been the site of violent clashes between law enforcement and demonstrators attempting to overrun itWaters commented on the protests and the looming jury verdict in the trial of Derek Chauvin, a former Minneapolis police officer who at the time was charged with murdering George Floyd. Before closing arguments in the trial, Waters said, "I hope we get a verdict that says guilty, guilty, guilty. And if we don't, we cannot go away", and when asked, "What happens if we do not get what you just told? What should the people do? What should protesters do?", Waters responded: We've got to stay on the street. And we've got to get more active, we've got to get more confrontational, we've got to make sure that they know that we mean business.In response to a question from a reporter about the curfew in effect in Brooklyn Center, which loomed shortly, Waters said, "I don't think anything about curfew ... I don't know what 'curfew' means. Curfew means that 'I want to you all to stop talking, I want you to stop meeting, I want you to stop gathering.' I don't agree with that."
The protests outside the Brooklyn Center police station remained peaceful through the night. The crowd grew raucous when the curfew went into effect but shrank shortly after as protesters left on their own and no arrests were reported.
The judge in Chauvin's trial said on April 19, 2021, that Waters's comments were "abhorrent" and that it was "disrespectful to the rule of law and to the judicial branch" for elected officials to comment in advance of the verdict. The judge refused the defense's request for a mistrial, saying that the jury "have been told not to watch the news. I trust they are following those instructions", but also that "Congresswoman Waters may have given you something on appeal that may result in this whole trial being overturned".
After Waters's comments, Republican minority leader Kevin McCarthy said, "Waters is inciting violence in Minneapolis just as she has incited it in the past. If Speaker Pelosi doesn’t act against this dangerous rhetoric, I will bring action this week”. On April 19, 2021, McCarthy introduced a resolution in the House to censure Waters, calling her comments "dangerous". The following day, the House voted to block McCarthy's resolution, narrowly defeating it along party lines, 216–210.
Waters later said that her remarks in Brooklyn Center were taken out of context and that she believed in nonviolent actions. In an interview, she said, "I talk about confronting the justice system, confronting the policing that’s going on, I’m talking about speaking up. I’m talking about legislation. I’m talking about elected officials doing what needs to be done to control their budgets and to pass legislation."
Bombing attempt
Packages that contained pipe bombs were sent to two of Waters's offices on October 24, 2018. They were intercepted and investigated by the FBI. No one was injured. Similar packages were sent to several other Democratic leaders and to CNN. In 2019, Cesar Sayoc pleaded guilty to mailing the bombs and was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Committee assignments
For the 118th Congress:
Committee on Financial Services (Ranking Member)
Caucus memberships
Chief Deputy Whip
Founding member and Chair of the Out of Iraq Caucus
Congressional Progressive Caucus
Congressional Black Caucus (CBC); past chair of CBC (105th United States Congress)
Medicare for All Caucus
Political positions
Abortion
Waters has a 100% rating from NARAL Pro-Choice America and an F rating from the Susan B. Anthony List based on her abortion-related voting record. She opposed the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Barack Obama
In August 2011, Waters criticized President Barack Obama, saying he was insufficiently supportive of the black community. She referred to African Americans' high unemployment rate (around 15.9% at the time). At a Congressional Black Caucus town-hall meeting on jobs in Detroit, Waters said that African American members of Congress were reluctant to criticize or place public pressure on Obama because "y'all love the President".
In October 2011, Waters had a public dispute with Obama, arguing that he paid more attention to swing voters in the Iowa caucuses than to equal numbers of (geographically dispersed) black voters. In response, Obama said that it was time to "stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying" and get back to working with him.
Crime
Waters opposes mandatory minimum sentences.
Donald Trump
Waters has called Trump "a bully, an egotistical maniac, a liar and someone who did not need to be president" and "the most deplorable person I've ever met in my life". In a 2017 appearance on MSNBC's All In with Chris Hayes, she said Trump's advisors who have ties to Russia or have oil and gas interests there are "a bunch of scumbags".
Waters began to call for the impeachment of Trump shortly after he took office. In February 2017, she said that Trump was "leading himself" to possible impeachment because of his conflicts of interest and that he was creating "chaos and division". In September 2017, while giving a eulogy at Dick Gregory's funeral, she said that she was "cleaning out the White House" and that "when I get through with Donald Trump, he's going to wish he had been impeached." In October 2017, she said the U.S. Congress had enough evidence against Trump to "be moving on impeachment", in reference to Russian collusion allegations during the 2016 presidential election, and that Trump "has openly obstructed justice in front of our face".
Linking Trump to the violence that erupted at a white nationalist protest rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 12, 2017, Waters said that the White House "is now the White Supremacists' House". After Trump's 2018 State of the Union address, she released a video response addressing what most members of the Congressional Black Caucus viewed as his racist viewpoint and actions, saying, "He claims that he's bringing people together but make no mistake, he is a dangerous, unprincipled, divisive, and shameful racist." Trump later replied by calling her a "low-IQ individual".
On April 24, 2018, while attending the Time 100 Gala, Waters urged Trump to resign from office, "So that I won't have to keep up this fight of your having to be impeached because I don't think you deserve to be there. Just get out."
On December 18, 2019, Waters voted for both articles of impeachment against Trump. Moments before voting for the second impeachment of Donald Trump, she called him “the worst president in the history of the United States.″
Economy
Cryptocurrency
On June 18, 2019, Waters asked Facebook to halt its plan for the development and launching of Libra, a new cryptocurrency, citing a list of recent scandals. She said: "The cryptocurrency market currently lacks a clear regulatory framework to provide strong protections for investors, consumers and the economy. Regulators should see this as a wake-up call to get serious about the privacy and national security concerns, cybersecurity risks, and trading risks that are posed by cryptocurrencies".
Foreign affairs
In August 2008, Waters introduced HR 6796, the Stop Very Unscrupulous Loan Transfers from Underprivileged countries from Rich Exploitive Funds Act (Stop VULTURE Funds Act). It would limit the ability of investors in sovereign debt to use U.S. courts to enforce those instruments against a defaulting country. The bill died in committee.
Cuba
Waters has visited Cuba a number of times, praising Fidel Castro's moves towards democracy. She also criticized previous U.S. efforts to overthrow him and demanded an end to the U.S. trade embargo. In 1998, Waters wrote Castro a letter calling the 1960s and 1970s "a sad and shameful chapter of our history" and thanking him for helping those who needed to "flee political persecution".
In 1998, Waters wrote Castro an open letter asking him not to extradite convicted terrorist Assata Shakur from Cuba, where she had sought asylum. Waters argued that much of the Black community regarded her conviction as false. She had earlier supported a Republican bill to extradite Shakur, who was referred to by her former name, Joanne Chesimard. In 1999, Waters called on President Bill Clinton to return six-year-old Elián González to his father in Cuba; the boy had survived a boat journey from Cuba, during which his mother had drowned, and was taken in by U.S. relatives.
Haiti
Waters opposed the 2004 coup d'état in Haiti and criticized U.S. involvement. After the coup, she, TransAfrica Forum founder Randall Robinson, and Jamaican member of parliament Sharon Hay-Webster led a delegation to meet with Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and bring him to Jamaica, where he remained until May.
Nagorno-Karabakh conflict
On October 1, 2020, Waters co-signed a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that condemned Azerbaijan’s offensive operations against the Armenian-populated enclave Nagorno-Karabakh, denounced Turkey’s role in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, and called for an immediate ceasefire.
George H. W. Bush
In July 1992, Waters called President George H. W. Bush "a racist" who "polarized the races in this country". Previously, she had suggested that Bush had used race to advance his policies.
Tea Party movement
Waters has been very critical of the Tea Party movement. On August 20, 2011, at a town hall discussing some of the displeasure that Obama's supporters felt about the Congressional Black Caucus not supporting him, Waters said, "This is a tough game. You can't be intimidated. You can't be frightened. And as far as I'm concerned, the 'tea party' can go straight to Hell ... and I intend to help them get there."
War
Iraq War
Waters voted against the Iraq War Resolution, the 2002 resolution that funded and granted Congressional approval to possible military action against the regime of Saddam Hussein. She has remained a consistent critic of the subsequent war and has supported immediate troop withdrawal from Iraq. Waters asserted in 2007 that President George W. Bush was trying to "set [Congress] up" by continually requesting funds for an "occupation" that was "draining" the country of capital, soldier's lives, and other resources. In particular, she argued that the economic resources being "wasted" in Iraq were those that might provide universal health care or fully fund Bush's "No Child Left Behind" education bill. Additionally, Waters, representing a congressional district whose median income falls far below the national average, argued that patriotism alone had not been the sole driving force for those U.S. service personnel serving in Iraq. Rather, "many of them needed jobs, they needed resources, they needed money, so they're there". In a subsequent floor speech, she said that Congress, lacking the votes to override the "inevitable Bush veto on any Iraq-related legislation," needed to "better [challenge] the administration's false rhetoric about the Iraq war" and "educate our constituents [about] the connection between the problems in Pakistan, Turkey, and Iran with the problems we have created in Iraq". A few months before these speeches, Waters cosponsored the House resolution to impeach Vice President Dick Cheney for making allegedly "false statements" about the war.
Personal life
Waters's second husband, Sid Williams, played professional football in the NFL and is a former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas under the Clinton Administration. They live in Los Angeles's Windsor Square neighborhood.
In May 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Waters confirmed her sister, Velma Moody, had died of the virus aged 86.
Other achievements
Maxine Waters Preparation Center in Watts, California – named after her while she was a member of the California Assembly
Co-founder of Black Women's Forum
Co-founder of Community Build
Received the Bruce F. Vento Award from the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty for her work on behalf of homeless persons.
Candace Award, National Coalition of 100 Black Women, 1992
Electoral history
California State Assembly
U.S. House of Representatives
See also
List of African-American United States representatives
Women in the United States House of Representatives
References
External links
Congresswoman Maxine Waters official U.S. House website
Maxine Waters for Congress campaign website
Image of Richard Hatcher, Coretta Scott King, Maxine Waters at the Black Caucus of the 1984 Democratic National Convention. Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive (Collection 1429). UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.
Articles
Los Angeles Times Interview: Maxine Waters by Robert Scheer, LA Times, May 16, 1993
Top BlacksMaxine Waters: Distinguished Congresswoman 2001 profile
Maxine Waters speaks with Street Gangs Media by Alex Alonso, www.streetgangs.com, January 18, 2003
Haiti regime neither able nor willing to hold fair election by Rep. Maxine Waters, October 19, 2005
Beyond DeLayRep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) criticism from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington
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1938 births
20th-century American politicians
20th-century American women politicians
21st-century American politicians
21st-century American women politicians
California State University, Los Angeles alumni
Female members of the United States House of Representatives
Living people
Democratic Party members of the California State Assembly
Democratic Party members of the United States House of Representatives from California
People from South Los Angeles
Politicians from Los Angeles
Politicians from St. Louis
South Los Angeles
Women state legislators in California
African-American women in politics
American reparationists
20th-century African-American women
20th-century African-American politicians
21st-century African-American women
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tammy%20Baldwin
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Tammy Baldwin
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Tammy Suzanne Green Baldwin (born February 11, 1962) is an American politician and lawyer who has served as the junior United States senator from Wisconsin since 2013. A member of the Democratic Party, she served three terms in the Wisconsin State Assembly, representing the 78th district, and from 1999 to 2013 represented Wisconsin's 2nd congressional district in the United States House of Representatives. In 2012, Baldwin was elected to the United States Senate, defeating Republican nominee Tommy Thompson. In 2018, Baldwin was reelected, defeating Republican nominee Leah Vukmir. On April 12, 2023, Baldwin announced her candidacy for reelection in the 2024 United States Senate election in Wisconsin.
Baldwin, who is a lesbian, became the first openly LGBT woman elected to the House of Representatives and to the Senate in 1999 and 2013, respectively. She was also the first woman to be elected to either chamber from Wisconsin. Baldwin identifies as a progressive, and she has a consistent progressive voting record. She supports Medicare for All, LGBTQ rights, and gun control, and opposed the Iraq War.
Early life, education, and early political career
Baldwin was born and grew up in Madison, Wisconsin. Her mother, who died in 2017, was 19 and going through a divorce when Baldwin was born. Baldwin was raised by her grandparents and spent Saturdays with her mother, who suffered from mental illness and opioid addiction. Her maternal grandfather, biochemist David E. Green, was Jewish (the son of immigrants from Russia and Germany), and her maternal grandmother, who was Anglican, was English-born. Baldwin's aunt is biochemist Rowena Green Matthews. Through her maternal grandfather, Baldwin is a third cousin of comedian Andy Samberg.
Baldwin graduated from Madison West High School in 1980 as the class valedictorian. She earned a B.A. from Smith College in 1984 and a J.D. from the University of Wisconsin Law School in 1989. She was a lawyer in private practice from 1989 to 1992.
Baldwin was first elected to political office in 1986 at the age of 24, when she was elected to the Dane County Board of Supervisors, a position she held until 1994. She also served one year on the Madison Common Council to fill a vacancy in the coterminous district.
Wisconsin Assembly (1993–1999)
Elections
In 1992, Baldwin ran to represent Wisconsin's 78th Assembly district in western Madison. She won the Democratic primary with 43% of the vote. In the general election, Baldwin defeated Mary Kay Baum (Labor and Farm Party nominee) and Patricia Hevenor (Republican Party nominee) by a vote of 59%-23%-17%. She was one of just six openly gay political candidates nationwide to win a general election in 1992.
In 1994, Baldwin won election to a second term with 76% of the vote. In 1996, she was elected to a third term with 71% of the vote.
Tenure
Baldwin was the first openly lesbian member of the Wisconsin Assembly and one of a very few openly gay politicians in the country at the time. In 1993, she said she was disappointed by Democratic President Bill Clinton's support of the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy. In early 1994, she proposed legalizing same-sex marriage in Wisconsin. In 1995, she proposed domestic partnerships in Wisconsin.
Baldwin opposes capital punishment in Wisconsin.
Committee assignments
Criminal Justice Committee
Education Committee (Chair)
U.S. House of Representatives (1999–2013)
Elections
In 1998, U.S. Congressman Scott Klug of the 2nd district, based in Madison, announced he would retire, prompting Baldwin to run for the seat. She won the Democratic primary with a plurality of 37% of the vote. In the general election she defeated Republican nominee Josephine Musser 53%-47%.
Baldwin was the first woman elected to Congress from Wisconsin. She was also the first openly gay person elected to the House of Representatives, and the first open lesbian elected to Congress. In 2008, Baldwin and Representative Barney Frank co-founded the Congressional LGBTQ+ Equality Caucus.
In 2000, Baldwin won reelection to a second term, defeating Republican John Sharpless 51%-49%, a difference of 8,902 votes. She lost eight of the district's nine counties, but carried the largest, Dane County, with 55% of the vote.
After the 2000 census the 2nd district was made significantly more Democratic in redistricting. Baldwin won reelection to a third term in the newly redrawn 2nd district with 66% of the vote against Republican Ron Greer. In 2004, she beat Dave Magnum 63%-37%. She won a 2006 rematch against Magnum, again winning 63%-37%. In 2008, she defeated Peter Theron 69%-31%, and in 2010 she won a seventh term with 62% of the vote against Chad Lee.
Committee assignments
Committee on Energy and Commerce
Subcommittee on Environment and Economy
Subcommittee on Health
U.S. Senate (2013–present)
Elections
2012
Baldwin ran as the Democratic nominee against Republican nominee Tommy Thompson, who had formerly been governor and Secretary of Health and Human Services. She announced her candidacy on September 6, 2011, in a video emailed to supporters. She ran uncontested in the primary election, and spoke at the 2012 Democratic National Convention about tax policy, campaign finance reform, and equality in the United States.
She was endorsed by Democracy for America, and she received campaign funding from EMILY's List, the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund, and LPAC. Baldwin was endorsed by the editorial board of The Capital Times, who wrote that "Baldwin's fresh ideas on issues ranging from job creation to health care reform, along with her proven record of working across lines of partisanship and ideology, and her grace under pressure mark her as precisely the right choice to replace retiring U.S. Senator Herb Kohl".
Thompson claimed during his campaign that her "far-left approach leaves this country in jeopardy".
The candidates had three debates, on September 28, October 18, and October 26. According to Baldwin's Federal Election Commission filings, she raised about $12 million, over $5 million more than her opponent.
On November 6, 2012, Baldwin became the first openly gay candidate to be elected to the U.S. Senate, with 51.4% of the vote. Because of her 14 years in the House of Representatives, under Senate rules she had the highest seniority in her entering class of senators. She was succeeded in Congress by State Assemblyman Mark Pocan, who had earlier succeeded her in the state legislature.
Baldwin was featured in Time's November 19, 2012, edition, in the Verbatim section, where she was quoted as saying "I didn't run to make history" on her historic election. In a separate section, she was also mentioned as a new face to watch in the Senate.
2018
Baldwin won a second term in 2018 with 55.4% of the vote, defeating Republican Leah Vukmir by a margin of approximately 11%.
Committee assignments
Committee on Appropriations
Subcommittee on Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies
Subcommittee on Defense
Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development
Subcommittee on Homeland Security
Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies (Chair)
Subcommittee on Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, and Related Agencies
Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation
Subcommittee on Communications, Media, and Broadband
Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security
Subcommittee on Oceans, Fisheries, Climate Change and Manufacturing (Chair)
Subcommittee on Surface Transportation, Maritime, Freight, Freight, and Ports
Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions
Subcommittee on Employment and Workplace Safety
Subcommittee on Primary Health and Retirement Security
Political positions
Ideology
In 2003, Baldwin served on the advisory committee of the Progressive Majority, a political action committee dedicated to electing progressive candidates to public office.
In October 2012, Baldwin described herself as a progressive in the mold of Robert M. La Follette. In 2013, she and Wisconsin's senior U.S Senator Ron Johnson split on votes more frequently than any other Senate duo from the same state.
Baldwin is a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and the Afterschool Caucuses. According to a 2011 National Journal survey, she was among the most liberal members of the House. As of 2012, her voting record made her one of the most liberal members of Congress.
Agriculture
In May 2019, Baldwin and eight other Democratic senators sent United States Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue a letter that criticized the USDA for purchasing pork from JBS USA and called it "counterproductive and contradictory" for companies to receive funding from "U.S. taxpayer dollars intended to help American farmers struggling with this administration's trade policy." The senators requested that the department "ensure these commodity purchases are carried out in a manner that most benefits the American farmer’s bottom line—not the business interests of foreign corporations."
Antitrust, competition, and corporate regulation
In June 2019, Baldwin was one of six Democrats led by Amy Klobuchar who signed letters to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice recounting that many of them had "called on both the FTC and the Justice Department to investigate potential anticompetitive activity in these markets, particularly following the significant enforcement actions taken by foreign competition enforcers against these same companies" and requesting that each agency confirm whether it had opened antitrust investigations into each of the companies and that each agency pledge it would publicly release any such investigation's findings.
Economy and jobs
In a September 2015 radio interview, Baldwin said that she, the Pope, and Donald Trump all supported repeal of the carried interest tax loophole. Politifact stated that "while Pope Francis has called for helping the poor and addressing economic inequality, we could not find that has spoken out on this particular tax break."
In 2016, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a business-oriented lobbying group that usually supports Republican candidates, gave Baldwin a 32% cumulative score on "key business votes."
In October 2017, CBS News reported that the Freedom Partners, a Koch-funded group, had "launched a $1.6 million television and digital ad campaign" targeting Baldwin for her "stance on taxes." The ads charged her with having "voted for five trillion dollars in more taxes" and with having "supported higher income taxes, sales taxes—even energy taxes." One ad stated: "If Tammy Baldwin opposes tax reform, it's proof that she opposes jobs."
In October 2017 the editors of The Capital Times praised Baldwin and Bernie Sanders for their vocal opposition to a budget resolution that they believed would increase income inequality. Baldwin was described as "one of the budget's most ardent foes."
In November 2017, Baldwin expressed opposition to the Trump tax-reform bill, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, saying that it was being drafted "behind closed doors" and charging that it was being "shoved through." In its place she promoted the Stronger Way Act, a bill that she and Cory Booker (D-NJ) co-sponsored.
In 2018, Baldwin sponsored the Reward Work Act of 2018, which proposed to guarantee the right of employees in listed companies to elect one-third of the board of directors.
In July 2019, Baldwin signed a letter to United States Secretary of Labor Alexander Acosta that advocated that the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) make a full investigation into a complaint filed on May 20 by a group of Chicago-area employees of McDonald's that detailed instances of workplace violence, such as customers throwing hot coffee and threatening employees with firearms. The senators argued that McDonald's could and should "do more to protect its employees, but employers will not take seriously their obligations to provide a safe workplace if OSHA does not enforce workers rights to a hazard-free workplace."
Terrorism
In November 2013, Baldwin introduced a bill that would "bring greater government transparency, oversight and due process whenever authorities use information gathered for intelligence purposes to make domestic non-terrorism cases against Americans."
Baldwin described the mass shooting in Orlando, Florida, in June 2016 as a "hate crime" and said "The question now for America is are we going to come together and stand united against hate, gun violence and terrorism?"
Immigration
Baldwin voted against building a fence on the U.S.-Mexico border in 2006. In June 2013, she voted for S. 744, the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act, which would have enabled undocumented immigrants to acquire legal residency status and, later, citizenship. She voted against Kate's Law in 2016.
In 2017, NumbersUSA, an immigration reduction advocacy group, gave Baldwin an overall grade of F, with a score of 11% on immigration bills. On the reduction of unnecessary worker visas, she scored a C; on the reduction of refugee and asylum fraud, and on the reduction of amnesty enticements, she scored an F-.
Opposition to Iraq War
Baldwin was a vocal critic of the Iraq War. On October 10, 2002, she was among the 133 members of the House who voted against authorizing the invasion of Iraq. She warned there would be "postwar challenges," observing that "there is no history of democratic government in Iraq," that its "economy and infrastructure are in ruins after years of war and sanctions," and that rebuilding would take "a great deal of money." In 2005, she joined the Out of Iraq Caucus.
Impeachment of Dick Cheney and Alberto Gonzales
On August 1, 2007, Baldwin cosponsored H. Res. 333, a bill proposing articles of impeachment against Vice President Dick Cheney, and H Res. 589, a bill proposing the impeachment of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. On January 20, 2008, Baldwin wrote in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that on December 14, 2007, "I joined with my colleagues on the House Judiciary Committee, Reps. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.) and Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.), in urging Chairman Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) to conduct hearings on a resolution of impeachment now pending consideration in that committee." Although some constituents "say I have gone too far," others "argue I have not gone far enough" and feel "we are losing our democracy and that I should do more to hold the Bush administration accountable for its actions."
Health care
An outspoken advocate of single-payer, government-run universal health care system since her days as a state legislator, Baldwin introduced the Health Security for All Americans Act, which would have required states to provide such a system, in 2000, 2002, 2004, and 2005. The bill died each time it was introduced without a House vote.
She has said that she "believes strongly that a single-payer health system is the best way to comprehensively and fairly reform our health care system." In November 2009, Baldwin voted for the version of health-care reform that included a public option, a government-run health-care plan that would have competed with private insurers, but only the House passed that version. She ultimately voted for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, which became law in 2010. Baldwin said she hoped a public option in the ACA would lead to a single-payer system. The first version of the ACA Baldwin voted for included a public option, but the final version did not.
In 2009, Baldwin introduced the Ending LGBT Health Disparities Act (ELHDA), which sought to advance LGBT health priorities by promoting research, cultural competency, and non-discrimination policies. The bill was not passed.
In April 2017, Baldwin was one of five Democratic senators to sign a letter to President Trump warning that failure "to take immediate action to oppose the lawsuit or direct House Republicans to forgo this effort will increase instability in the insurance market, as insurers may choose not to participate in the marketplace in 2018" and that they remained concerned that his administration "has still not provided certainty to insurers and consumers that you will protect the cost-sharing subsidies provided under the law."
Baldwin wrote an op-ed in 2017 titled "Why I support Medicare for all and other efforts to expand health coverage."
In April 2018, Baldwin was one of ten senators to sponsor the Choose Medicare Act, an expanded public option for health insurance that also increased Obamacare subsidies and rendered people with higher incomes eligible for its assistance.
In January 2019, during the 2018–19 United States federal government shutdown, Baldwin was one of 34 senators to sign a letter to Commissioner of Food and Drugs Scott Gottlieb recognizing the efforts of the FDA to address the shutdown's effect on public health and employees while remaining alarmed "that the continued shutdown will result in increasingly harmful effects on the agency's employees and the safety and security of the nation's food and medical products."
In February 2019 Baldwin was one of 11 senators to sign a letter to insulin manufactures Eli Lilly and Company, Novo Nordisk, and Sanofi about their increased insulin prices depriving patients of "access to the life-saving medications they need."
In July 2019 Baldwin was one of eight senators to cosponsor the Palliative Care and Hospice Education and Training Act (PCHETA), a bill intended to strengthen training for new and existing physicians, people who teach palliative care, and other providers who are on the palliative care team that grants patients and their families a voice in their care and treatment goals.
Housing
In April 2019, Baldwin was one of 41 senators to sign a bipartisan letter to the housing subcommittee praising the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development's Section 4 Capacity Building program as authorizing "HUD to partner with national nonprofit community development organizations to provide education, training, and financial support to local community development corporations (CDCs) across the country" and expressing disappointment that President Trump's budget "has slated this program for elimination after decades of successful economic and community development." The senators wrote of their hope that the subcommittee would support continued funding for Section 4 in Fiscal Year 2020.
Resolution on 9/11 victims
Baldwin was one of 22 members of Congress to vote against a 2006 9/11 memorial bill; she said she "voted against the bill because Republicans had inserted provisions praising the Patriot Act and hard-line immigration measures". She voted nine times in favor of other similar bills.
Her vote received renewed attention in the 2012 U.S. Senate campaign when Tommy Thompson's campaign released an ad about it, which Politifact rated "Mostly False". Thompson said, "Wisconsin voters need to know that Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin put her extreme views above honoring the men and women who were murdered by the terrorists in the Sept. 11 attacks on our nation." Politifact stated, "Thompson said his Democratic challenger voted against a resolution honoring 9/11 victims. Technically, he's correct. Baldwin voted against the measure in 2006—and criticized Republicans for adding in references to the Patriot Act, immigration bills, and other controversial matters. But Baldwin has voted nine times in favor of similar resolutions, and the day before the vote in question supported creation of a memorial at the World Trade Center site. Thompson's statement contains an element of truth, but leaves out critical information that would give a different impression. That's our definition of Mostly False."
ACORN
In 2009, when the House voted overwhelmingly to defund ACORN, Baldwin was one of 75 House members (all Democrats) who voted against the measure.
2016 U.S. presidential election
On October 20, 2013, Baldwin was one of sixteen female Democratic Senators to sign a letter endorsing Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee in the 2016 presidential election.
Handling of Veterans Affairs report
In January 2015 USA Today obtained a copy of a report by the United States Department of Veterans Affairs inspector general about the Tomah, Wisconsin Veterans Affairs medical facility. The report said that two physicians at the Tomah VA were among the biggest prescribers of opioids in a multi-state region, raising "potentially serious concerns." Baldwin's office had received the report in August 2014 but did not take action until January 2015, when Baldwin called for an investigation after the Center for Investigative Reporting published details of the report, including information about a veteran who died from an overdose at the facility. A whistleblower and former Tomah VA employee learned that Baldwin's office had a copy of the report, and he repeatedly emailed Baldwin's office asking that she take action on the issue. Baldwin's office did not explain why they waited from August 2014 to January 2015 to call for an investigation. Baldwin was the only member of Congress who had a copy of the inspection report.
In February 2015, Baldwin fired her deputy state director over her handling of the VA report. The aide was offered but declined a severance deal that included a cash payout and a confidentiality agreement that would have required her to keep quiet. The aide filed an ethics complaint with the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The complaint was dismissed as lacking merit. Baldwin said, "we should have done a better job listening to and communicating with another constituent with whom we were working on problems at the VA", and that she had started a review of why her office had failed to act on the report. As a result of the review, Baldwin fined her chief of staff, demoted her state director, and reassigned a veterans' outreach staffer. In November 2017, Baldwin co-sponsored legislation designed to strengthen opioid safety in the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Drug policy
In December 2016, Baldwin was one of 17 senators to sign a letter to President-elect Trump asking him to fulfill a campaign pledge to bring down the cost of prescription drugs, stating their willingness "to advance measures to achieve this goal" and calling on Trump "to partner with Republicans and Democrats alike to take meaningful steps to address the high cost of prescription drugs through bold administrative and legislative actions."
In February 2017, Baldwin and thirty other senators signed a letter to Kaléo Pharmaceuticals in response to the opioid-overdose-reversing device Evzio rising in price from $690 in 2014 to $4,500 and requested the company answer what the detailed price structure for Evzio was, the number of devices Kaléo Pharmaceuticals set aside for donation, and the totality of federal reimbursements Evzio received in the previous year.
In December 2017, Baldwin was one of six senators to sign a letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer requesting their "help in ensuring the long-term sustainability of the 340B program", a Trump administration rule mandating that drug companies give discounts to health-care organizations presently serving large numbers of low-income patients.
Central America
In April 2019, Baldwin was one of 34 senators to sign a letter to Trump encouraging him "to listen to members of your own Administration and reverse a decision that will damage our national security and aggravate conditions inside Central America", asserting that Trump had "consistently expressed a flawed understanding of U.S. foreign assistance" since becoming president and that he was "personally undermining efforts to promote U.S. national security and economic prosperity" by preventing the use of Fiscal Year 2018 national security funding. The senators argued that foreign assistance to Central American countries created less migration to the U.S. by helping to improve conditions in those countries.
Russia
In February 2017, Baldwin was one of 11 senators to sign a letter to United States Attorney General Jeff Sessions expressing their concern "about credible allegations that the Trump campaign, transition team, and Administration has colluded with the Russian government, including most recently the events leading to the resignation of Lieutenant General Michael Flynn as National Security Adviser." The senators requested the creation of "an independent Special Counsel to investigate collusion with the Russian government by General Flynn and other Trump campaign, transition and Administrative officials" in order to maintain "the confidence, credibility and impartiality of the Department of Justice".
In December 2018, after United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the Trump administration was suspending its obligations in the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 60 days in the event that Russia continued to violate the treaty, Baldwin was one of 26 senators to sign a letter expressing concern over the administration "now abandoning generations of bipartisan U.S. leadership around the paired goals of reducing the global role and number of nuclear weapons and ensuring strategic stability with America's nuclear-armed adversaries" and calling on Trump to continue arms negotiations.
Saudi Arabia
In June 2017, Baldwin voted for a resolution by Rand Paul and Chris Murphy that would block Trump's $510 million sale of precision-guided munitions to Saudi Arabia that made up a portion of the $110 billion arms sale Trump announced during his visit to Saudi Arabia the previous year.
In March 2018, Baldwin voted against tabling a resolution spearheaded by Bernie Sanders, Chris Murphy, and Mike Lee that would have required Trump to withdraw American troops either in or influencing Yemen within the next 30 days unless they were combating Al-Qaeda. In December 2021, she voted for a resolution, opposed by a 67-30 majority, that would have blocked a $650 billion weapons sale to Saudi Arabia.
Israel
In May 2020, Baldwin voiced her opposition to Israel's plan to annex parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
United States Postal Service
In March 2019, Baldwin was a cosponsor of a bipartisan resolution led by Gary Peters and Jerry Moran that opposed privatization of the United States Postal Service (USPS), citing the USPS as a self-sustained establishment and noting concerns that privatization could cause higher prices and reduced services for its customers, especially in rural communities.
Trade
In September 2016, Baldwin was one of 12 senators to sign a letter to President Obama asserting that the passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership "in its current form will perpetuate a trade policy that advantages corporations at the expense of American workers" and that there would be an "erosion of U.S. manufacturing and middle class jobs, and accelerate the corporate race to the bottom" if provisions were not fixed.
Climate change
In November 2018, Baldwin was one of 25 Democratic senators to cosponsor a resolution in response to findings of the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change report and National Climate Assessment. The resolution affirmed the senators' acceptance of the findings and their support for bold action to address climate change.
LGBT rights
In September 2014, Baldwin was one of 69 members of the US House and Senate to sign a letter to then-FDA commissioner Sylvia Burwell requesting that the FDA revise its policy banning donation of corneas and other tissues by men who have had sex with another man in the preceding five years.
In October 2018, Baldwin was one of 20 senators to sign a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urging him to reverse the rolling back of a policy that granted visas to same-sex partners of LGBTQ diplomats who had unions that were not recognized by their home countries, writing that too many places around the world have seen LGBTQ individuals "subjected to discrimination and unspeakable violence, and receive little or no protection from the law or local authorities" and that refusing to let LGBTQ diplomats bring their partners to the US would be equivalent of upholding "the discriminatory policies of many countries around the world."
In June 2019, Baldwin was one of 18 senators to sign a letter to Pompeo, requesting an explanation of a State Department decision not to issue an official statement that year commemorating Pride Month, nor to issue the annual cable outlining activities for embassies commemorating Pride Month. They also asked why the LGBTI special envoy position remained vacant and asserted that "preventing the official flying of rainbow flags and limiting public messages celebrating Pride Month signals to the international community that the United States is abandoning the advancement of LGBTI rights as a foreign policy priority."
Gun control
In January 2016, Baldwin was one of 18 senators to sign a letter to Thad Cochran and Barbara Mikulski requesting that the Labor, Health and Education subcommittee hold a hearing on whether to allow the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to fund a study of gun violence and "the annual appropriations rider that some have interpreted as preventing it" with taxpayer dollars. The senators noted their support for taking steps "to fund gun-violence research, because only the United States government is in a position to establish an integrated public-health research agenda to understand the causes of gun violence and identify the most effective strategies for prevention."
In November 2017, Baldwin was a cosponsor of the Military Domestic Violence Reporting Enhancement Act, a bill to create a charge of domestic violence under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) and stipulate that convictions must be reported to federal databases to keep abusers from purchasing firearms within three days in an attempt to close a loophole in the UCMJ whereby convicted abusers retain the ability to purchase firearms.
In 2018, Baldwin was a cosponsor of the NICS Denial Notification Act, legislation developed in the aftermath of the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting that would require federal authorities to inform states within a day after a person failing the National Instant Criminal Background Check System attempted to buy a firearm.
Veterans
In August 2013, Baldwin was one of 23 Democratic senators to sign a letter to the Defense Department warning that some payday lenders were "offering predatory loan products to service members at exorbitant triple digit effective interest rates and loan products that do not include the additional protections envisioned by the law" and asserting that service members and their families "deserve the strongest possible protections and swift action to ensure that all forms of credit offered to members of our armed forces are safe and sound."
Electoral history
U.S. House of Representatives (1998–2010)
United States Senate
Personal life
Baldwin is the granddaughter of biochemist David E. Green and the niece of another biochemist, Rowena Green Matthews. Baldwin is also a third cousin of comedian and actor Andy Samberg. For 15 years, Baldwin's domestic partner was Lauren Azar; in 2009, the couple registered as domestic partners in Wisconsin. They separated in 2010. Baldwin was baptized Episcopalian but considers herself "unaffiliated" with a religion.
Baldwin's real estate holdings total more than $2 million, including a rooftop condo in D.C. that she shares with her partner, Maria Brisbane.
Awards and honors
In June 2020, in honor of the 50th anniversary of the first LGBTQ Pride parade, Queerty named Baldwin one of 50 heroes "leading the nation toward equality, acceptance, and dignity for all people".
See also
List of LGBT members of the United States Congress
Women in the United States House of Representatives
Women in the United States Senate
References
External links
Senator Tammy Baldwin official U.S. Senate website
Tammy Baldwin for Senate campaign website
"Federal Politics and Medical Practices", Presentation given by Baldwin at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, January 25, 2007
"Health Care Reform in 2009? The View from Washington, DC", Presentation given by Baldwin at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, February 4, 2008
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul%20Ryan
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Paul Ryan
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Paul Davis Ryan (born January 29, 1970) is an American politician who served as the 54th speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 2015 to 2019. A member of the Republican Party, he was the vice presidential nominee in the 2012 election with Mitt Romney, but the ticket lost to incumbents President Barack Obama and then-Vice President Joe Biden.
Ryan is a native of Janesville, Wisconsin and graduated from Miami University in 1992. He spent five years working for Congress in Washington, D.C. He became a speechwriter and returned to Wisconsin in 1997 to work at his family's construction company. He was elected to Congress to represent the following year, replacing Mark Neumann, who vacated the seat to run for U.S. Senate. Ryan would represent the district for 20 years. He chaired the House Budget Committee from 2011 to 2015 and briefly chaired the House Ways and Means Committee in 2015 prior to being elected Speaker of the House in October 2015 following John Boehner's retirement.
A self-proclaimed deficit hawk, Ryan was a major proponent of Social Security privatization in the mid-2000s. During the 2010s, two proposals heavily influenced by Ryan—"The Path to Prosperity" and "A Better Way"—became part of the national dialogue advocating for the privatization of Medicare, the conversion of Medicaid into a block grant program, the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, and significant federal tax cuts. As Speaker he played a key role in the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 and the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act in 2018, which partially repealed the Dodd–Frank Act. His other major piece of legislation, the American Health Care Act of 2017, passed the House but failed in the Senate by one vote.
Ryan declined to run for re-election in the 2018 midterm elections. With the Democratic Party taking control of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi succeeded Ryan as Speaker of the House.
Early life and education
Paul Davis Ryan was born on January 29, 1970, in Janesville, Wisconsin, the youngest of four children of Elizabeth "Betty" Ann (née Hutter), who later became an interior designer, and Paul Murray Ryan, a lawyer. He is a fifth-generation Wisconsinite. His father was of Irish ancestry and his mother of German and English descent. One of Ryan's paternal ancestors settled in Wisconsin prior to the Civil War. His great-grandfather, Patrick William Ryan, founded an earthmoving company in 1884, which later became P. W. Ryan and Sons and is now known as Ryan Incorporated Central. Ryan's grandfather, Stanley M. Ryan, was appointed United States Attorney for the Western District of Wisconsin. In 2018, while filming a segment for the PBS series Finding Your Roots, Ryan learned that his DNA results included 3 percent Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry.
Ryan attended St. Mary's Catholic School in Janesville, then attended Joseph A. Craig High School, where he was elected president of his junior class, and thus became prom king. As class president Ryan was a representative of the student body on the school board. Following his second year, Ryan took a job working the grill at McDonald's. He was on his high school's ski, track, and varsity soccer teams and played basketball in a Catholic recreational league. He participated in several academic and social clubs including the Model United Nations. Ryan and his family often went on hiking and skiing trips to the Colorado Rocky Mountains.
Although Ryan's father was not a lifelong heavy drinker, staying sober for nearly twenty years after his first stint in rehabilitation, he had become an alcoholic by the time Ryan was a teenager. Ryan later commented on his relationship with his father, whom he revered as a young child, stating that "[alcohol] made him more distant, irritable and stressed ... whiskey had washed away some of the best parts of the man I knew." When he was 16, Ryan found his 55-year-old father lying dead in bed of a heart attack, something Ryan later partially attributed to heavy alcohol consumption. Following the death of his father, Ryan's grandmother moved in with the family. As she had Alzheimer's, Ryan helped care for her while his mother commuted to college in Madison, Wisconsin. From the time of his father's death until his 18th birthday, Ryan received Social Security survivors benefits which were saved for his college education. His mother later married widower Bruce Douglas.
Ryan has a bachelor's degree in economics and political science from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where he became interested in the writings of Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman. He often visited the office of libertarian professor Richard Hart to discuss the theories of these economists and of Ayn Rand. Hart introduced Ryan to National Review, and with Hart's recommendation Ryan began an internship in the D.C. office of Wisconsin U.S. Senator Bob Kasten, where he worked with Kasten's foreign affairs adviser.
Ryan attended the Washington Semester program at American University. He worked summers as a salesman for Oscar Mayer and once got to drive the Wienermobile. Ryan was a member of the College Republicans, and volunteered for the congressional campaign of John Boehner. He was a member of the Delta Tau Delta social fraternity.
Early career
Betty Ryan reportedly urged her son to accept a congressional position as a legislative aide in Senator Kasten's office, which he did after graduating in 1992. In his early years working on Capitol Hill, Ryan supplemented his income by working as a waiter, as a fitness trainer, and at other jobs.
A few months after Kasten lost to Democrat Russ Feingold in the 1992 election, Ryan became a speechwriter for Empower America (now FreedomWorks), a conservative advocacy group founded by Jack Kemp, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and William Bennett.
Ryan later worked as a speechwriter for Kemp, the Republican vice presidential candidate in the 1996 United States presidential election. Kemp became Ryan's mentor, and Ryan has said he had a "huge influence".
In 1995, Ryan became the legislative director for then-U.S. Congressman Sam Brownback of Kansas. In 1997 he returned to Wisconsin and worked for a year as a marketing consultant for the construction company Ryan Incorporated Central, owned by his relatives.
U.S. House of Representatives
Elections
Ryan was first elected to the House in 1998, winning the 1st District seat of Republican Mark Neumann, a two-term incumbent who had vacated his seat to make an unsuccessful bid for the U.S. Senate. 28-year-old Ryan won the Republican primary over 29-year-old pianist Michael J. Logan of Twin Lakes, and the general election against Democrat Lydia Spottswood. This made him the second-youngest member of the House.
Reelected eight times, Ryan never received less than 55 percent of the vote in a congressional election. He defeated Democratic challenger Jeffrey C. Thomas in the 2000, 2002, 2004, and 2006 elections. In the 2008 election, Ryan defeated Democrat Marge Krupp.
In the 2010 general election, he defeated Democrat John Heckenlively and Libertarian Joseph Kexel. In 2012, under Wisconsin election law, Ryan was allowed to run concurrently for vice president and for Congress and was not allowed to remove his name from the Congressional ballot after being nominated for the vice presidency. He faced Democratic nominee Rob Zerban. As of July 25, 2012, Ryan had over $5.4 million in his congressional campaign account, more than any other House member. He was reelected with 55 percent of his district's vote and 44 percent of the vote in his hometown, Janesville.
Zerban again challenged Ryan in the 2014 House election. Ryan won with 63 percent of his district's vote.
In the 2016 Republican primary election, Ryan faced businessman Paul Nehlen, who had been endorsed by Sarah Palin. Because of Nehlen's support for Trump, Trump publicly thanked him on Twitter and later told The Washington Post that Nehlen was "running a very good campaign", even though he did not endorse him. On August 5, 2016, Trump endorsed Ryan's re-election after pressure from fellow Republican leaders. In the August 9, 2016, primary election, Ryan overwhelmingly defeated Nehlen, taking over 84 percent of the vote. In the November general election, Ryan faced Democrat Rebecca Solen and won with 65 percent of his district's vote.
Committee assignments
As Speaker of the House of Representatives, Ryan was not a chair or a member of any committee. Prior to his speakership, Ryan held the following assignments:
Committee on Ways and Means (Chairman)
Subcommittee on Health
Caucus memberships
House Republican Caucus
Caucus of House Conservatives Republican Study Committee
United States Congressional International Conservation Caucus
Middle East Economic Partnership Caucus
Prayer Caucus
Sportsmen's Caucus (Co-Chair)
Congressional Western Caucus
Pre-Speaker congressional tenure (1999–2015)
Ryan became the ranking Republican member of the House Budget Committee in 2007 and became chairman of the committee in 2011 after Republicans took control of the House. That same year, he was selected to deliver the Republican response to the State of the Union address. As of August 2012, Ryan had been the primary sponsor of more than 70 bills or amendments, and only two of those bills had become law. One, passed in July 2000, renamed a post office in Ryan's district; the other, passed in December 2008, lowered the excise tax on arrow shafts. As of August 2012, Ryan had also co-sponsored 975 bills, of which 176 had passed; 22% of these bills were originally sponsored by a Democrat.
Ryan was a "reliable supporter of the [George W. Bush] administration's foreign policy priorities" who voted for the 2002 Iraq Resolution, authorizing the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
In 2010, Ryan was a member of the bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (Bowles-Simpson Commission), which was tasked with developing a plan to reduce the federal deficit. He voted against the final report of the commission. In 2012, Ryan accused the nation's top military leaders of using "smoke and mirrors" to remain under budget limits passed by Congress. Ryan later said that he misspoke on the issue and called General Martin Dempsey, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to apologize for his comments.
2012 vice presidential campaign
Dan Balz of The Washington Post wrote that Ryan was promoted as a candidate for vice president "by major elements of the conservative opinion makers, including The Wall Street Journal editorial page, the Weekly Standard and the editor of National Review".
On August 11, 2012, the Romney campaign announced Ryan as its choice for Vice President through its "Mitt's VP" mobile app. It was reported that Romney had offered the position to Ryan on August 1, 2012, the day after returning from a foreign policy trip to the United Kingdom, Poland, and Israel. On August 11, 2012, Ryan formally accepted Romney's invitation to join his campaign as his running mate, in front of the USS Wisconsin in Norfolk. Ryan is the first individual from Wisconsin as well as the first member of Generation X to run on a major party's national ticket.
Also in August 2012, the Associated Press published a story saying that while the Tea Party movement had wanted a nominee other than Romney, it had gotten "one of its ideological heroes" in the vice presidential slot. According to the article, Ryan supports the Tea Party's belief in "individual rights, distrust of big government and an allegorical embrace of the Founding Fathers".
According to a statistical-historical analysis conducted by Nate Silver, "Ryan is the most conservative Republican member of Congress to be picked for the vice-presidential slot since at least 1900" and "is also more conservative than any Democratic nominee [for vice president who previously served in the Congress] was liberal, meaning that he is the furthest from the center" of any vice presidential candidate chosen from Congress since the turn of the 20th century.
Political scientist Eric Schickler commented that while Ryan "may well be the most conservative vice presidential nominee in decades," the NOMINATE methodology "is not suited to making claims about the relative liberalism or conservatism of politicians" over a long time span. A USA Today/Gallup poll found that 39% thought Ryan was an "excellent" or "pretty good" vice presidential choice, compared to 42% who felt he was a "fair" or "poor" choice.
Ryan formally accepted his nomination at the 2012 Republican National Convention on August 29, 2012. In his acceptance speech, he promoted Mitt Romney as the presidential candidate, supported repeal of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), said that he and Romney had a plan to generate 12 million new jobs over the ensuing four years, and promoted founding principles as a solution: "We will not duck the tough issues—we will lead. We will not spend four years blaming others—we will take responsibility. We will not try to replace our founding principles, we will reapply our founding principles."
The speech was well received by the convention audience and praised for being well-delivered. Some fact-checkers purported that there were important factual omissions and that he presented details out of context. Conservative media (including Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post, the Investor's Business Daily, and Fox News) disputed some of the fact-checkers' findings. Of 33 of Ryan's statements which Politifact.com suspected of being false or misleading, it rated 10.5% as True, 18% as Mostly True, 21% as Half True, 36% as Mostly False, 9% as False, and 6% as Pants on Fire. On October 11, 2012, Ryan debated his Democratic counterpart, incumbent Vice President Joe Biden, in the only vice presidential debate of the 2012 election cycle.
Romney and Ryan lost the 2012 presidential election, but Ryan retained his seat in the House of Representatives.
Speaker of the House
114th Congress
On September 25, 2015, John Boehner formally announced to House Republicans his intention to resign from the speakership and the House. Among those interested in the post, Kevin McCarthy—who had wide support among Republicans, including Boehner, and Ryan, who was set to officially nominate him—was considered the presumptive favorite. His candidacy was opposed by conservative House Republicans of the Freedom Caucus, and when it became clear that caucus members would not support his candidacy, McCarthy withdrew his name from consideration on October 8. This led many Republicans to turn to Ryan as a compromise candidate. The push included a plea from Boehner, who reportedly told Ryan that he was the only person who could unite the House Republicans at a time of turmoil. Ryan released a statement that said, "While I am grateful for the encouragement I've received, I will not be a candidate." The next day however, close aides of Ryan's confirmed that Ryan had re-evaluated the situation, and was considering the possibility of a run.
Ryan confirmed on October 22, that he would seek the speakership after receiving the endorsements of two factions of House Republicans, including the conservative Freedom Caucus. Ryan, upon confirming his bid for the speakership, stated, "I never thought I'd be speaker. But I pledged to you that if I could be a unifying figure, then I would serve – I would go all in. After talking with so many of you, and hearing your words of encouragement, I believe we are ready to move forward as one, united team. And I am ready and eager to be our speaker."
On October 29, Ryan was elected Speaker, receiving 236 votes, an absolute majority of the 435-member chamber. Democrat Nancy Pelosi received 184 votes, with 12 more going to others. After the vote Ryan delivered his first remarks as speaker-elect and was sworn in by John Conyers, the dean of the House, becoming, at age , the youngest person elected as speaker since James G. Blaine (age ) in 1869. Later, he named lobbyist John David Hoppe as his chief of staff.
Ryan became the leader of the House Republicans upon becoming Speaker. However, by tradition, he largely stopped taking part in debate and made only a few votes from the floor. He was also not a member of any committees.
2016 presidential election
After Donald Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee in the 2016 presidential election on May 4, 2016, Ryan was hesitant to endorse him, stating on May 5 that he was "not ready". Ryan and Trump met in private on May 12, releasing a joint statement afterward, acknowledging their differences but stating "we recognize that there are also many important areas of common ground." On June 2, Ryan announced his support for Trump in an op-ed in The Janesville Gazette.
The following day, June 3, amid Trump's criticism of Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel, Ryan said Trump's critique "just was out of left field for my mind," and voiced disagreement with him. On June 7, Ryan disavowed Trump's comments about Curiel because he believed they were "the textbook definition of a racist comment". Nevertheless, Ryan continued to endorse Trump, believing that more Republican policies will be enacted under Donald Trump than presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. On June 15, after Kevin McCarthy stated during a conversation among Republicans, "There's two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump. Swear to God", Ryan interjected, "No leaks. This is how we know we're a real family here."
On July 5, after FBI Director James Comey advocated against pressing charges against Clinton for her email scandal, Ryan said Comey's decision "defies explanation" and stated that "[d]eclining to prosecute Secretary Clinton for recklessly mishandling and transmitting national security information will set a terrible precedent."
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Ryan suggested that candidate Trump should release his tax returns.
In October 2016, following the Donald Trump Access Hollywood controversy, Ryan disinvited Trump from a scheduled campaign rally, and announced that he would no longer defend or support Trump's presidential campaign but would focus instead on Congressional races. He also freed down-ticket congress members to use their own judgment about Trump, saying "you all need to do what's best for you and your district." Trump then went on to attack Ryan, accusing him and other "disloyal" Republicans of deliberately undermining his candidacy as part of "a whole sinister deal".
115th Congress
Two months after the 2016 elections, Ryan was re-elected Speaker of the House on January 3, 2017, the opening day of the 115th Congress. He received 239 votes to House Democratic Leader Pelosi's 189 votes (with 5 more going to others).
On February 7, 2017, Ryan told reporters a replacement for the Affordable Care Act (ACA) would be introduced "this year" amid speculation Donald Trump would not act toward doing so until the following year. On March 9, Ryan gave a 30-minute lecture explaining the proposed replacement for the ACA, titled the American Health Care Act (AHCA). On March 30, Ryan said that he did not intend to work with Democrats on repealing and replacing the ACA, reasoning their involvement would lead to "government running health care." On April 4, Ryan confirmed renewed discussions of an ACA replacement, but warned that a replacement was in the "conceptual" stages of its development. On May 4, the House narrowly voted for the AHCA to repeal the ACA. On May 9, Ryan said that "a month or two" would pass before the Senate would pass its own ACA repeal and replacement legislation. The Senate created several of its own versions of the act but was unable to pass any of them.
In May 2017, Ryan said Congress' goal was "calendared 2017 for tax reform" and reported progress was being made in doing so. In December 2017, both houses of Congress passed a $1.5 trillion tax bill called the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which Trump signed into law on December 22. The tax law is projected to add an additional $1.5 trillion to the national debt over a decade, but the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation also estimated that the GDP level on average would be 0.7% higher during the same period. In the weeks leading up to his retirement announcement, Ryan also championed a $1.3 trillion government-wide spending bill that boosted military spending significantly. Politico noted that Ryan "clamored for austerity when he's been in the minority, trashing Democrats as profligate budget-busters, but he's happily busted budgets in the majority."
In June 2017, Ryan expressed support for strong sanctions on Russia in response to Russian interference in the 2016 elections and its annexation of the Crimea, saying that Russia's actions were "unacceptable". He urged Special Counsel Robert Mueller and Congressional oversight committees to "do their jobs so that we can get to the bottom of all of this." In July Congress passed a bill imposing new sanctions on Russia and giving Congress the power to overrule White House attempts to roll back sanctions. Both houses passed the bill with veto-proof majorities (98-2 in the Senate, 419–3 in the House), so Trump reluctantly signed it into law on August 2, 2017.
Ryan provided political cover for Devin Nunes, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, who many characterized as a source of the dysfunction in the committee as it investigated Russian interference in the 2016 election. Nunes accused the Obama administration of improperly "unmasking" the identities of Trump associates (which led Nunes' temporary recusal from the committee's Russia investigation), accused the FBI of misconduct, leaked the text messages of Senator Mark Warner (in an effort to misleadingly suggest impropriety on his behalf), and threatened to impeach FBI Director Christopher Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. The House Intelligence Committee was one of few so-called "select" committees in Congress, which meant that it was up to Ryan to decide the chairman of the committee.
Despite having favored comprehensive immigration earlier in his congressional career, Speaker Ryan prevented immigration legislation from being advanced in the House. When President Trump ended Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) – which granted temporary stay for undocumented immigrants brought into the United States as minors – Ryan said DACA recipients should "rest easy" because Congress would solve the problem for them, but Ryan backed no bills to protect DACA recipients.
An article in The Washington Post described Ryan's relationship with President Trump as "friendly, if occasionally uneasy," adding that "Ryan did little to check the president or encourage oversight of his administration." Ryan supported Trump's firing of FBI Director James Comey, and did not support legislation to protect Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Ryan said that legislation to protect Mueller's investigation was not "necessary".
On April 11, 2018, Ryan announced that he would not run for re-election in November, saying, "I like to think I've done my part, my little part in history to set us on a better course." In response, Trump tweeted, "Speaker Paul Ryan is a truly good man, and while he will not be seeking re-election, he will leave a legacy of achievement that nobody can question."
In May 2018, Ryan led the House in passing the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act, which partially repealed the Dodd-Frank Act. It was signed into law by President Trump a few days later.
After Republicans lost control of the House in the 2018 midterm elections, Ryan suggested that there were irregularities about the election results in California. Ryan said that California's election system was "bizarre", "defies logic" and that "there are a lot of races there we should have won." After Ryan's remarks were reported on, Ryan's spokesperson said "The Speaker did not and does not dispute the results".
Assessment of Speaker tenure
Following Ryan's retirement announcement, an article in The Washington Post stated that Ryan was "leav[ing] behind a legacy of dramatically expanded government spending and immense deficits, a GOP president unchecked, a broken immigration system, and a party that's fast abandoning the free-trade principles that he himself championed." According to the Associated Press, Ryan "achieved one of his career goals: rewriting the tax code"; however, "on his other defining aim—balancing the budget and cutting back benefit programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid—Ryan has utterly failed".
Constituent services
In fiscal year 2008, Ryan garnered $5.4 million in congressional earmarks, including $3.28 million for bus service in Wisconsin, $1.38 million for the Ice Age Trail, and $735,000 for the Janesville transit system. In 2009, he successfully advocated with the Department of Energy for stimulus funds for energy initiatives in his district.
Other home district projects he has supported include a runway extension at the Southern Wisconsin Regional Airport, an environmental study of the Kenosha Harbor, firefighting equipment for Janesville, road projects in Wisconsin, and commuter rail and streetcar projects in Kenosha. In 2008, Ryan pledged to stop seeking earmarks. Prior to that he had sought earmarks less often than other representatives. Taxpayers for Common Sense records show no earmarks supported by Ryan for fiscal years 2009 and 2010. In 2012, Ryan supported a request for $3.8 million from the Department of Transportation for a new transit center in Janesville, which city officials received in July.
Ryan was an active member of a task force established by Wisconsin governor Jim Doyle that tried unsuccessfully to persuade General Motors to keep its assembly plant in Janesville open. He made personal contact with GM executives to try to convince them to save or retool the plant, offering GM hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer-funded incentives. Following the closure of factories in Janesville and Kenosha, constituents expressed dissatisfaction with Ryan's voting history. During the 2011 Congressional summer break, Ryan held town hall meetings by telephone with constituents. The only public meetings Ryan attended in his district required an admission fee of at least $15.
In August 2011, constituents in Kenosha and Racine protested when Ryan would not meet with them about economic and employment issues, after weeks of emailed requests from them. His Kenosha office locked its doors and filed a complaint with the police, who told the protesters that they were not allowed in Ryan's office.
Ryan maintained a mobile office to serve constituents in outlying areas.
Congressional Leadership Fund
The Congressional Leadership Fund (CLF), a Super PAC, has been closely linked and aligned with Ryan. Ryan has directed major GOP donors towards the CLF.
Political positions
Ryan's political positions were generally conservative, with a focus on fiscal policy. Ryan "played a central role in nearly all" the policy debates of the period 2010–2012. In 2012, Ryan voted against the Simpson–Bowles commission proposal to reduce the deficit, because the proposal raised taxes and failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act. While he was a self-proclaimed deficit hawk, Ryan's tenure of Speaker of the House saw a major expansion in government spending and a ballooning of deficits despite unified Republican control of Congress and the White House, no recession and no new foreign conflict.
Ryan subscribed to supply-side economics and supported tax cuts including eliminating the capital gains tax, the corporate income tax, the estate tax, and the Alternative Minimum Tax. Ryan supports deregulation, including the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act of 1999, which repealed some financial regulation of banks from the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933. During the economic recovery from the Great Recession of the late 2000s, Ryan supported the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which authorized the Treasury to purchase toxic assets from banks and other financial institutions, and the auto industry bailout; Ryan opposed the Credit CARD Act of 2009, which expanded consumer protections regarding credit card plans, and the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which strengthened financial regulation. In 2018 as House Speaker, Ryan helped pass the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act that repealed large parts of Dodd-Frank.
In 2016, Ryan rolled out a set of anti-poverty proposals that "seek to expand work requirements for those receiving federal benefits, to give states and local jurisdictions a greater role in administering those benefits, to better measure the results of federal programs for the poor, and to crack down on waste, fraud and abuse." Ryan believes federal poverty reduction programs are ineffective and he supports cuts to welfare, child care, Pell Grants, food stamps, and other federal assistance programs. Ryan supports block granting Medicaid to the states and the privatization of social security and Medicare. Ryan supported the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit and opposes the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as "Obamacare." Ryan supported the American Health Care Act of 2017 (AHCA), the 2017 House Republican plan to repeal and replace the ACA. In 2012, The New York Times said Ryan was "his party's most forceful spokesman for cutting entitlement spending."
Ryan's non-fiscal policy positions were subject to additional national attention with his 2012 candidacy for vice president. Ryan is pro-life and opposes abortion rights. Ryan opposed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, which provides that the 180-day statute of limitations for filing an equal-pay lawsuit regarding pay discrimination resets with each new paycheck affected by that discriminatory action. In 2012, Ryan supported civil unions and opposed same-sex marriage.
Ryan supported school vouchers, and supported the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001 and its repeal the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015. Ryan is unsure, and believes climate scientists are unsure, of the impact of human activity on climate change. Ryan supported tax incentives for the petroleum industry and opposed them for renewable energy. Ryan supported gun rights and opposed stricter gun control. Ryan supported the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Ryan condemned Barack Obama's decision not to block a UN resolution criticizing Israeli settlement building in the occupied Palestinian territories as "absolutely shameful". Ryan supported President Donald Trump's decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital. He stated: "Jerusalem has been, and always will be, the eternal, undivided capital of the State of Israel."
Following the 2018 Russia–United States summit, in which Donald Trump stated that he believed Russian government did not interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Ryan confirmed his belief that Russian government interfered and advocated for more economic sanctions against Russia for the interference.
Ryan supported U.S. involvement in the Saudi-led intervention in the Yemeni civil war and used his power to block a House vote on the war in Yemen.
In a 2022 interview, Ryan described himself as a "Never-Again Trumper". While he was "proud of the accomplishments [during the Trump administration]", Ryan highlighted how under Trump, the Republican Party lost elections in 2018, 2020, and 2022, and said that the party should thus distance itself from Trump.
History with Objectivism
At a 2005 Washington, D.C., gathering celebrating the 100th anniversary of Ayn Rand's birth, Ryan credited Rand with having inspired him to get involved in politics. In a speech that same year at The Atlas Society, he said he grew up reading Rand, and that her books taught him about his value system and beliefs. Ryan required staffers and interns in his congressional office to read Rand, and gave copies of her novel Atlas Shrugged as gifts to his staff for Christmas. In his Atlas Society speech, he also described Social Security as a "socialist-based system".
In 2009, Ryan said, "What's unique about what's happening today in government, in the world, in America, is that it's as if we're living in an Ayn Rand novel right now. I think Ayn Rand did the best job of anybody to build a moral case of capitalism, and that morality of capitalism is under assault."
In April 2012, after receiving criticism from Georgetown University faculty members on his budget plan, Ryan rejected Rand's philosophy of Objectivism as atheistic, saying it "reduces human interactions down to mere contracts". He also called the reports of his adherence to Rand's views an "urban legend" and stated that he was instead deeply influenced by his Catholic faith and by Thomas Aquinas.
Electoral history
Post-congressional life
In March 2019, Ryan joined the board of directors of Fox Corporation, the owner of Fox News Channel and the Fox broadcast network. In August 2019, he joined the board of SHINE Medical Technologies. He later joined the faculty of the University of Notre Dame as a professor of practice for the 2019–20 academic year as a guest lecturer in political science and economics. In April 2019, Ryan was nominated as the delegation leader to represent President Trump to visit Taipei. With Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, he attended the 40th-anniversary ceremony of the Taiwan Relations Act. In October 2019, Ryan launched a non-profit called American Idea Foundation.
In October 2020, Ryan joined the public relations and advisory company Teneo as a senior advisor.
On May 17, 2023, Ryan unveiled his official portrait at the U.S. Capitol during a ceremony in Statuary Hall. During his speech, he said, "Only in America would it be possible for a kid from Janesville to go from an intern to the Speaker of the House".
Personal life
In December 2000, Ryan married Janna Christine Little who is a tax attorney. Janna Ryan is a native of Madill, Oklahoma and a graduate of both Wellesley College and George Washington University Law School. The Ryans live in the Courthouse Hill Historic District of Janesville, Wisconsin. They have three children: Elizabeth "Liza" Anne, Charles Wilson, and Samuel Lowery. Ryan is a member of St. John Vianney Catholic Church in Janesville.
Janna is a cousin of former Democratic Representative Dan Boren (D-OK). She is also a granddaughter of Reuel Little, who helped found the American Party to support the 1968 presidential campaign of George Wallace. Through his marriage, Ryan is related to Supreme Court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Due to a family history of fatal heart attacks before age 60, Ryan is involved in an intense cross-training fitness program called P90X. He has always been a fitness enthusiast and was a personal trainer after graduating from college. Speaking of P90X he said, "It works because it's called muscle confusion. It hits your body in many different ways. Pull-ups, push-ups, sit-ups, lots of cardio, karate, jump training. It has results, it works. It's a good workout."
In a 2010 Politico interview he stated that he weighed 163 pounds and maintained his body fat percentage between 6 and 8%. Tony Horton, creator of P90X, who has personally trained Ryan many times, reiterated the claim saying, "He is very, very, very lean. I know what 6 to 8 percent body fat looks like, and there's no fat anywhere on the man. I'm around 9 percent and he's much leaner than I am. He's easily 6 to 8 percent body fat. You just have to eat right and exercise every day, and that’s what he does."
During a 2012 radio interview, Ryan claimed he had once run a marathon in under three hours; he later said he forgot his actual time and was just trying to give what he thought was a normal time. His one official marathon time is recorded as slightly over four hours.
Awards and honors
2004, 2010 – Guardian of Small Business Award, National Federation of Independent Business
2008 – Defending the American Dream Award, Americans for Prosperity, Wisconsin chapter
2009 – Manufacturing Legislative Excellence Award, National Association of Manufacturers
2009 – Honorary Degree, Miami University
2010 – Legislator of the Year Award, International Franchise Association
2011 – Statesmanship Award, Claremont Institute
2011 – Fiscy Award for responsible financial stewardship and fiscal discipline in government.
2011 – Leadership Award, Jack Kemp Foundation
2011 – Freedom and Prosperity Award, Mason Contractors Association of America
2012 – Chair, Honorary Board of the Archery Trade Association
2014 – Alexander Hamilton Award, Manhattan Institute for Policy Research
2018 – Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service
References
Further reading
Works about Ryan
Works by Ryan
External links
Paul Ryan, Wisconsin Historical Society
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan%20Muslim%20League%20%28N%29
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Pakistan Muslim League (N)
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The Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) ( PML(N) or PML-N) is a centre-right, liberal conservative political party in Pakistan. It is currently the third-largest party in the Senate. The party was founded in 1993, when a number of prominent conservative politicians in the country joined hands after the dissolution of Islamic Democratic Alliance, under the leadership of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. The party's platform is generally conservative, which involves supporting free markets, deregulation, lower taxes and private ownership. Although the party historically supported social conservatism, in recent years, the party’s political ideology and platform has become more liberal on social and cultural issues. Alongside the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) and Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), it is one of the three major political parties of the country.
One of several continuing factions of the original Muslim League, the seeds of the party were sown following the 1985 Elections when the Prime Minister of Pakistan Muhammad Khan Junejo organised the supporters of President Zia-ul-Haq's dictatorship into a single party, known as the Pakistan Muslim League. After President Zia's death in 1988, under the leadership of Fida Mohammad Khan, a large faction split away from the Junejo-led Pakistan Muslim League, and formed a conservative alliance with various right-wing and Islamist political parties, called the Islamic Democratic Alliance. The alliance formed a government in 1990 under the leadership of Nawaz Sharif. In 1993, the alliance dissolved and the party assumed its current shape, branding itself as the "Nawaz" faction of the Pakistan Muslim League, in contrast to the "Junejo" faction.
After its foundation, the PML-N, along with the People's Party, dominated the two-party political system of Pakistan. However, after the 1999 coup, the party was eclipsed by its own splinter faction, the Musharraf-backed Pakistan Muslim League (Quaid), for almost a decade. PML-N regained popularity in the 2008 general elections, when it was elected as the principal opposition party. It returned to power following the elections of 2013, with Sharif elected as the Prime Minister for an unprecedented third term. The party however faced a major setback following the disqualification of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in 2017. The situation was worsened when Sharif and his daughter Maryam were sentenced to imprisonment on charges of corruption, however their respective sentences were later suspended.
The party lost both the centre and the provincial government of its stronghold Punjab, to PTI in the 2018 elections. As of 2022, it is the main governing party in Parliament under the leadership of Sharif's younger brother Shehbaz.
History
Breakaway from the original PML
Upon the creation of Pakistan and departure of the British Crown in 1947, the All-India Muslim League (AIML) became the Muslim League, which was now led by Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan. After the assassination of Prime Minister Ali Khan, the Muslim League struggled to revive itself, eventually losing control of East Pakistan in legislative elections to the Left Front. Internal disagreement over the party's direction, lack of a political program, motivation for public reforms, and inadequate administrative preparations and mismanagement all led to the public decline of the party. With the Socialist Party, the Muslim League struggled for its survival while facing the Republican Party and Awami League. The martial law imposed in 1958 eventually outlawed all political parties in the country.
The foundation and ground base of the PML-N lies with the Pakistan Muslim League, which was founded in 1962 as an enriched conservative project derived from the defunct Muslim League. The PML was presided over by Fatima Jinnah, who actively participated in presidential elections held in 1965 against Ayub Khan. After Fatima Jinnah's death, the PML was led by Nurul Amin, a Bengali leader, who deepened its role in West Pakistan.
On a nationalist and conservative platform, the party engaged in political campaigns against the leftist Pakistan Peoples Party and the Bengali nationalist party, the Awami League, in the general elections held in 1970. It managed to secure only two electoral seats in the East Pakistan parliament and only ten in the National Assembly of Pakistan. In spite of its limited mandate, Nurul Amin became the Prime Minister and Vice-President of Pakistan — the only figure to have been appointed as Vice-President. The PML government was short-lived and soon its government fell in the aftermath of the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971. The PML-N is ideologically close to the military and holds common beliefs on national security.
The list below shows the well-known breakaway factions and their relationships with the military, although many minor factions have existed throughout Pakistani history:
Electoral history
The Pakistan Muslim League went into a political abyss after the death of Nurul Amin and during the PPP government of Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. It made a strong comeback in response to Bhutto's nationalisation program in the 1970s. Influential young activists, including Nawaz Sharif, Javed Hashmi, Zafar-ul-Haq, and Shujaat Hussain, ascended as the leaders of the party and started their political career through the Muslim League.
The party became an integral part of the nine-party alliance, PNA, against the PPP, and campaigned against the PPP in the 1977 general elections. They campaigned on a right-wing platform and raised conservative slogans in the 1977 general elections. The PML, including Sharif and Hussain, were a conglomerate of diverse views and had provided large capital for the Muslim League's financial expenses. It was at this time that the party was revived and joined the anti-Bhutto PNA with Pir Pagara, an influential Sindhi conservative figure, as its elected president.
After the martial law of 1977, the party reassessed itself and saw the rise of the powerful oligarch bloc led by Zahoor Illahi, who was the main PML leader. After the 1984 referendum, President Zia-ul-Haq had become the country's elected president. During the 1985 general election, a new PML-N emerged on the country's political scene. The party had supported the presidency of Zia-ul-Haq and won his support to appoint Mohammad Khan Junejo to the office of Prime Minister. Nawaz Sharif had won the favour and support of President Zia-ul-Haq, who approved his appointment as Chief Minister of Punjab Province in 1985.
1988 general elections
The modern history of the party began during the 1988 parliamentary elections, when the Pakistan Muslim League, led by former prime minister Mohammed Khan Junejo, split into two factions: one was led by Fida Mohammad Khan and Nawaz Sharif, the then chief minister of Punjab Province, and the other by Junejo (who later founded the Pakistan Muslim League (F)).
In 1988, the Pakistan Muslim League (N) was founded and established by Fida Mohammad Khan, an original Pakistan Movement activist, who became the party's founding president, whilst Nawaz Sharif became its first secretary-general. The party is not the original Muslim League, but is accepted as its continuing legal successor.
At the time of the 1988 elections, the PML was part of the eight-party Islamic Democratic Alliance (IDA), which had contained the right-wing conservative mass as one entity against the left-wing circles, led by the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP). The general elections of 1988 marked the emergence of the Pakistan Peoples Party's as the single largest political party, with its election to 94 of 237 seats in the state parliament. The IDA occupied 55 seats, but an influential leader, Nawaz Sharif, chose to serve the Chief Minister of Punjab Province. With Benazir Bhutto elevated to the post Prime Minister of Pakistan, the IDA nominated Abdul Wali Khan as a compromise candidate for opposition leader in the state parliament. Within 20 months, tales of bad governance and corruption plagued the Pakistan Peoples Party's government. Finally, in 1990, President Ghulam Ishaq Khan charged the PPP government with corruption and lack of governance and dismissed the National Assembly and the first Bhutto government.
1990 general elections
The PML-N was still part of the Islami Jamhoori Ittehad (IDA) and participated, under the leadership of Nawaz Sharif, in the 1990 general elections. The IDA competed against the leftist alliance, known as the People's Democratic Alliance (PDA), which had contained the Pakistan Peoples Party and the TeI. The elections resulted in the victory of IDA, with Nawaz Sharif becoming Prime Minister. Through IDA, the conservative forces under Sharif had a chance to form a national government for the first time in the history of Pakistan. With Sharif taking office, his ascendancy also marked a transition in the political culture of Pakistan – a power shift from control by the traditional feudal aristocracy to the growing class of modern and moderate entrepreneurs. For the first time, Sharif launched privatisation and economic liberalisation policy measures, and his economic team actually implemented some of the serious economic liberalisation and privatisation measures previous governments had merely talked about.
Election results also showed liberals, the MQM, emerging as the third major party with 15 seats. For the first time in the history of the country, Sharif allowed foreign money exchange to be transacted through private money changers. While internationally acclaimed, his policies were condemned by the PPP. Benazir Bhutto mounted pressure on President Ghulam Ishaq Khan, who dismissed the IDA government on 18 April 1993. The PML-N appealed to the Supreme Court, which then restored Sharif's government on 26 May. The country's armed forces and the military leadership attempted to negotiate with Sharif and get him to step down. This culminated in the resignation of Nawaz Sharif, and President Ghulam Ishaq Khan was also removed from office.
1993 elections and opposition
The PML-N gained national prominence in the 1993 parliamentary elections and occupied 73 seats in the state parliament. The party asserted its role as opposition to the Pakistan Peoples Party. The PML-N charged Benazir Bhutto with corruption, stagnation, and endangering national security. The PPP also suffered due to internal factions, one of which was led by Murtaza Bhutto. The controversial murder of Murtaza Bhutto by Sindh Police and the pressure on MQM further weakened Benazir Bhutto. The PML-N and Sharif himself were shocked when they learned the news of Benazir Bhutto's dismissal. An ironic aspect of this dismissal was that it was prompted by the then-President Farooq Leghari, a trusted lieutenant of Benazir, who sent her to the presidency as a safeguard for the PPP's government after the office was vacated by Ghulam Ishaq Khan. During that movement, Nawaz Sharif travelled through the length and breadth of Pakistan. He also embarked on a train march from Lahore to Peshawar as part of his campaign to oust Benazir.
During this time, the party was among the closest to the civil bureaucracy and the Pakistan Armed Forces, and had close ties and influence in the Pakistan Armed Forces' appointments as well as their military strategies.
1997 elections and power politics
The Pakistan Muslim League (N) struck its remarkable, biggest, and most notable achievement in the 1997 parliamentary elections, held on 3 February 1997. It secured a two-thirds majority in the Pakistan Parliament, the only political party to have gained a two-thirds majority since the country's independence in 1947. During this time, the PML-N was the largest conservative party, with its members occupying 137 seats out of 207, roughly 66.2%. In 1997, the party secured its win with an overwhelming mandate, with only a small opposition. On 18 February 1997, when Nawaz Sharif obtained a vote of confidence, the Pakistan Muslim League assumed the government of Pakistan. Nawaz Sharif allowed Benazir Bhutto to hold the office of Leader of the Opposition, though the PML-N held control of the state parliament. The PML-N government passed the Thirteenth and the Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of Pakistan to stabilize its mandate and strengthen its position.
In 1998, the law and order situation came under the PML-N's control and economic recovery was also secured. A number of constitutional amendments were made to make the country a parliamentary democracy. In May 1998, the PML-N government led by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif ordered six nuclear tests, in response to Indian nuclear tests. The tests were extremely popular and PML-N's image and prestige rose to a record level at home. However, in 1998, the PML-N government effectively dismissed general Jehangir Karamat (see Dismissal of General Jehangir Karamat), which ruined its public ratings, but marked a perception of the civilian control of the military. This type of power politics and the repeated dismissals of military leaders soured the party's relations with the Pakistan Armed Forces and its public ratings gradually went down.
Despite its heavy public mandate, serious disagreements appeared within the party. Finally, the 1999 coup d'état ended the PML-N's government. Controversially, in 1999, the party was significantly divided, further affecting Nawaz Sharif's trial in military court. No massive protests were held by the party; its leaders remained silent and remained supportive towards the military action against Nawaz Sharif. In 2001, the party was further divided by factionalism. Dissenters formed the Pakistan Muslim League, later called Pakistan Muslim League (Quaid-e-Azam) (or PML-Q), which became allies of then president Pervez Musharraf. In 2001, the Muslim League (Nawaz) formally adopted the name of Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), also known as PML(N).
2002 general elections
As a result of the Kargil War with India, the PML-N government had generated frustration within the party and a secret splinter group inside the party united on a one-point agenda with all the opposition parties in 1999 to remove Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif from office. This resulted in a military coup d'état. The Supreme Court validated the coup and gave General Pervez Musharraf three years to hold general elections. After deposing Sharif's government, the party split into several groups and its size shrunk as many of its members decided to defect to the splinter political bloc. Many of its most influential members, sponsors, and financiers came to defect to the new group that was sympathetic to Pervez Musharraf. This splinter group emerged as the Pakistan Muslim League (Q), which registered itself as a political party with the Election Commission. Sharif was removed from the party's presidency and the position was handed over to Dr. Kalsoum Nawaz, wife of Sharif. With Nawaz Sharif exiled to Saudi Arabia, the party's presidency was handed over to Javed Hashmi, and the party began to reassert itself in the coming elections. They campaigned all over the country and competed in the 2002 general elections for the state parliament. The election polls announced the victory of the Pakistan Muslim League (Q) and the liberals, MQM, with PML-Q retaining the majority in the state parliament and brutally defeating the PML-N.
During the 2002 Pakistani general election, the PML-N performed poorly, only winning 9.4% of the popular vote and gaining seats for only 14 out of 272 elected members, the worst defeat since its inception in 1988. Hashmi was removed from the party's presidency after his controversial remarks towards the country's armed forces. In an indirect party election, Shahbaz Sharif was elected as the party's new president, and the party's leadership shifted its base to London, England. In 2006, the party signed a cooperative declaration with its rival Pakistan Peoples Party to outline and promote a new democratic culture in the country. Known as the Charter of Democracy, the document was signed by Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto in London, and they announced their opposition to Musharraf and Shaukat Aziz. In the 2008 general election, the party won urban votes and dominated the provisional assembly of Punjab Province. They secured a total of 91 seats in the state parliament, just second to the Pakistan Peoples Party, which won 121 seats, and the parties agreed on forming a coalition government. The PML-N called for the impeachment of President Pervez Musharraf, and successfully ousted him from the presidency and exiled him to the United States in 2008. However, before long, Nawaz Sharif announced his support for and leadership of the Lawyers' Movement to restore the suspended famed Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry in 2008. In 2011, the PML-N established a branch in Kashmir Province to participate in Kashmir's general elections.
2008 parliamentary election
After returning to Pakistan, the PML-N contested the 2008 general election, demanding a restoration of the judges sacked under the emergency rule put in place by President Pervez Musharraf, and the removal of Musharraf as President. After the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, Sharif announced that the PML-N would boycott the polls, but after some time and conversations with the co-chairman of the PPP, Asif Ali Zardari, Nawaz announced that the party would run in the polls and began to rally in the Punjab areas. On 18 February 2008, after the polls were closed and the results had been announced, the PML-N gained 68 seats in the National Assembly, just behind the PPP. They announced that they would have discussions on forming a coalition with the PPP, which would get half the seats in the 342 seat Parliament. In a press conference on 19 February, Nawaz called for President Pervez Musharraf to step down. Nawaz and Zardari agreed on forming a coalition, and Nawaz announced that he and his party gave the PPP the right to choose the next Prime Minister.
On 13 May 2008, the PML-N ministers resigned from the government due to a disagreement related to the reinstatement of the judges. Nawaz said that the PML-N would support the government without participating in it. Zardari, hoping to preserve the coalition, told Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani to reject the resignations.
On 27 June 2008, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) won three and two by-election seats respectively, in the national parliament. Polls were postponed for the sixth seat in Lahore due to Nawaz Sharif's eligibility contest. A court ruled he was ineligible due to an old conviction, amid a government appeal in the Supreme Court, which was slated to hear the case on 30 June, thus postponing the vote in the constituency. The two parties also won 19 of 23 provincial assembly seats where by-elections were held. The results did not affect the 18 February general election results in which Benazir Bhutto's PPP won 123 seats in the 342-seat National Assembly, and Sharif's party came second with 91, while Pervez Musharraf's party came a poor third, with 54 seats. Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) won eight provincial assembly seats, while the PPP won seven provincial seats. On 25 August 2008, Nawaz Sharif announced that Saeeduzzaman Siddiqui would be Pakistan Muslim League (N) nominee to replace Pervez Musharraf as President of Pakistan.
2013 general elections
During its election campaign for the 2013 general elections, the party competed against its arch-rival, the PPP, and another centrist party, the PTI. In an unofficial count, the party secured the qualified majority in the state parliament, the Punjab Assembly, and the Balochistan Assembly; it is yet the only party to have secured respectable seats and representation on provisional assemblies of Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The leader of PML-N, Nawaz Sharif, won a third term as Prime Minister of Pakistan, the first time this had happened in the history of the country.
2018 general elections
The 2018 Pakistani general election was majorly contested between PML-N and PTI. While PML-N retained its position in central Punjab it faced major setbacks in southern and northern Punjab. It obtained 64 seats in the National Assembly of Pakistan and 165 seats in the Punjab assembly. While it does not have mentionable shares in Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan Assembly. After the elections Shehbaz Sharif was elected as the leader of the opposition in the National Assembly of Pakistan, while his son Hamza Shahbaz was elected as Leader of the Opposition of Punjab (Pakistan).
PML-N became part of the opposition alliance Pakistan Democratic Movement, successfully moved No-confidence motion against Imran Khan and removed him from office on 10 April 2022, and Shehbaz Sharif became Prime Minister of Pakistan. Subsequently, the nonconfidence movement was launched in the Provincial Assembly of Punjab on 16, April 2022, and Hamza Shahbaz became Chief Minister of Punjab.
Election campaigns
National Assembly elections
Senate of Pakistan Elections
Punjab Assembly Elections
In the 2008 elections, the PML (N) and the PPP formed a coalition government, with PML (N) as the senior party and Shehbaz Sharif as Chief Minister of Punjab. However, in 2011, the PPP was expelled from this coalition.
Balochistan Assembly Elections
KPK Assembly Elections
Azad Kashmir Legislative Assembly Elections
Gilgit-Baltistan Assembly Elections
Structure
The major function of the General Council Meeting (or Central Working Committee) is to elect presidents and secretaries, while it is also responsible for promoting PML-N activities. The GCM's meetings are generally held at the Jinnah Convention Centre in Islamabad.
Nawaz Sharif was elected the President of Pakistan Muslim League (N) in 2011. The General Council Meeting raises funds and coordinates campaign strategy, and it has local committees in every province and in most large cities, counties, and legislative districts, but these have far less money and influence than the national body. The Central Secretariat and the Parliament Lodges of the Pakistan Parliament play important roles in recruiting strong state candidates.
Nawaz Sharif has been accused of corruption and involvement in smuggling large amounts of money outside the country, and he was recently revealed by the Panama Papers to have been involved in hiding money in offshore accounts and companies.
Ideology
Economic policies
The Pakistan Muslim League (N) policies include liberal conservatism, environmental conservation, national conservatism, and most importantly, economic liberalism and fiscal conservatism. Throughout its history, the Pakistan Muslim League (N) has emphasised the role of free markets and individual achievement as the primary factors behind economic prosperity, deregulation of all segments of the economic order, and the strong base of capitalism. In 1991, the PML-N's government established the National Highway Authority followed by inaugurating the M2 Motorways in 1997.
The Pakistan Muslim League (N) generally opposes labour union management and large-scale workers' unions. The party holds that "prosperous agriculture is the backbone of national prosperity and diversification of the rural economy, by expanding non-farm rural employment, is critical for the alleviation of poverty". During its federal government, the PML-N successfully privatised the major heavy industries under its planned industrial development programme.
Environmental policies
In 1997, the Environmental Protection Agency was established by the PML-N government, and its Ministry of Environment was one of the most notable government offices to protect national conservation and forestry in the country. In 1997, environmental PSAs were regularly paid for by the government to enhance and promote environmental awareness among the public.
However, the ministry's environmental policies remain a subject of ongoing controversy, often criticised for ignoring the health of the environment despite the party's declarations. The PML-N's provincial government in Punjab Province came under intense media, opposition, and public anger after failing to counter the 2011 dengue fever outbreak due to its apathy and the inadequacy of steps taken to enforce environmental awareness and regulations. Recently, the prestige of PML-N has suffered after the government's Health and Environment ministries failed to properly inspect the quality of medicines, resulting in major counterfeiting and environmental crises, which put the party's environmental and health policies in great doubt.
Science and politics
The Pakistan Muslim League (N) is credited for ordering and authorizing the country's first nuclear tests (see Chagai-I and Chagai-II) amid immense international pressure. It is also responsible for establishing the Pakistan Antarctic Programme as part of its science and technology strategy. Together with their main rival, the Pakistan Peoples Party, the Pakistan Muslim League (N) is also responsible for increasing Pakistan's nuclear deterrent as well as boosting the nation's nuclear power growth, first establishing the Chashma Nuclear Power Plant expansion as part of its nuclear policy.
Foreign policy issues
The party has been long advocated for broader and stronger relations with the United States, China, the United Kingdom, European Union, Singapore, Malaysia, and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, as well as India. In 1999, the party's government successfully signed the Lahore Declaration with India.
The Pakistan Muslim League (N) remains sceptical about the country's role in the war on terror, although it is firmly opposed to religious extremism and terrorism in all its manifestations. While it remains a strong supporter of the United States' financial and fiscal policies, it remains undecided about the military operations on its western frontier to curb militancy, with many PML-N intellectuals regarding the War on Terror as a campaign against Islam. During its previous tenure from 1997 to 1999, the PML-N government took a series of measures to control terrorist groups by establishing the Anti Terrorism Courts. The PML-N's leadership remains an avid supporter of Indian-held Kashmir, and numerous times it had made it clear that the party will "never compromise this long standing position on Kashmir dispute".
Leaders
Challenges and Controversies
Operation Clean-up
Nawaz Sharif, during his first tenure as prime minister of Pakistan (1990-1993), launched a military operation against his own allies in government, MQM, for allegations against the Jinnahpur conspiracy. Later, the ISPR denied any knowledge of the Jinnahpur conspiracy and separatist maps, which were highly publicized in the media prior to the operation's launch. Thousands of MQM activists were killed, its leadership arrested, and its head, Altaf Hussain, fled to exile in the UK.
Operation 1998
During his second term as prime minister (1997-1999), Nawaz Sharif again launched an operation against MQM, who were again in alliance in Sharif's government, on accusations of assassinating Hakeem Said. Due to MQM's militant activities and sectarian killings in Karachi, Nawaz Sharif was forced to end the alliance with MQM for the benefit of the nation. An elected PMLN Sindh government in alliance with MQM was dismissed and President's rule was imposed. The operation launched a new era of bloodshed in Karachi and many party leaders from MQM were arrested. Imran Farooq (MQM second in command at that time) was forced to flee Pakistan and took political asylum in the UK. Fasih Jugu, who was accused of assassination, was tortured to death by law enforcement officers. The operation resulted in major unrest as the PMLN government tried to nab the criminal elements ravaging the city of Karachi. This was one of the prime excuses the military conjured up for illegally ousting Nawaz Sharif's government in 1999 through martial law.
Plane hijacking
In 1999, Nawaz Sharif was allegedly involved in the hijacking of a plane carrying then Chief of Army Staff Pervez Musharraf as it was about to land at Karachi airport, and the control tower ordered the plane not to land in Pakistan but India instead. However, Musharraf and his loyalists had been planning a coup for months and some versions of the story claim that Musharraf orchestrated the coup from the plane and the military didn't allow the plane to land until Musharraf was assured that the military was in control of the airport. The military forced the courts to convict Sharif and sentence him to life imprisonment in 2000. General Musharraf had initially decided to hang Nawaz Sharif but under pressure from the President of the United States Bill Clinton and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, he decided not to go through with the plan. In 2010, The Supreme Court of Pakistan overturned Nawaz' conviction, making him eligible to run for power again.
Allegations of corruption
PMLN has been accused of corruption in revolutionary economic schemes such as the Yellow Cab Scheme, The National Debt Retirement Programme (NDRP), the Sasti Roti Scheme, and the Nandipur Power Project. More recently, an international newspaper published the Panama papers, naming Sharif's sons as among people who created offshore companies. Nawaz Sharif is accused of using corruption money to grow his assets in his business ventures and Ittefaq group. Also, Nawaz Sharif was condemned to 10 years in lockup for money laundering, including his daughter Maryam Nawaz for 7 years. On 29 September 2022, Islamabad High Court overturned the corruption conviction of Maryam Nawaz and her husband Muhammad Safdar. Maryam Nawaz is now eligible to run for election.
Panama papers case and its implications
The Panama Papers case was a landmark decision by the Supreme Court of Pakistan that disqualified the incumbent Prime Minister of Pakistan Nawaz Sharif from holding public office for life. The Supreme Court of Pakistan was petitioned by opposition politicians Imran Khan and Sheikh Rasheed, in the aftermath of the Panama Papers leak, which uncovered links between the Sharif family and eight offshore companies. The Court ordered for a Joint Investigation Team to be formed for the inquiry into allegations of money laundering, corruption and contradictory statements made by the Sharif family. On 10 July 2017, JIT submitted a 275-page report to the Supreme Court of Pakistan. The report found that Sharif, his sons and his daughter Maryam Nawaz could not justify their income nor their assets, adding that Maryam Nawaz had been proved to be a beneficial owner of Nielsen and Nescoll. The report also showed that Maryam Nawaz had falsified evidence before the Supreme Court, proven as the Calibri font used in the document did not exist at the time when documents were said to have been created. After hearing all arguments and based on evidence provided by the JIT, the Supreme Court of Pakistan announced its unanimous decision and disqualified the Prime Minister from holding public office, finding that he had been dishonest in not disclosing his employed in the Dubai-based Capital FZE company in his nomination papers.
Stemming from the JIT investigation, and based on NAB's investigations, the court sentenced Nawaz Sharif to 10 years of imprisonment in relation to the Avenfield Apartments case. The sentence also extended to his daughter Maryum Nawaz, and Son-in-Law Retired Captain Safdar, who were given 7 years and 1 year imprisonment respectively. On 29 September 2022, a Pakistani court quashed the conviction of Maryam Nawaz, the daughter of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, in a corruption case that had seen her sentenced to seven years in jail. A two-judge panel found there was no evidence to prove the prosecution case that Maryam Nawaz abetted any corruption in buying high-end apartments in London.
In the following election, PMLN suffered a massive blow due to these corruptions charges, with a net loss of 24.35%. PMLN blamed this primarily on alleged vote rigging and administrative malpractices. However, Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) outright rejected such reports and stated that the elections were conducted fair and free. The European Union Election Observation Mission said that no rigging had been found during the election, and polling was termed to be "transparent".
Allegations of treachery
Nawaz gave an interview to Dawn News on 12 May 2018 in which he said that non-state actors from Pakistan were involved in the Mumbai terrorist attacks in 2008. A spokesman for Sharif said that Indian media had twisted his statement to make it seem like he had suggested that the state of Pakistan endorsed and was directly involved in the attacks. A National Security Council meeting was called by the Pakistan Army which declared the allegations were based on lies and misconception without specifically naming Sharif.
See also
Muhammad Ali Jinnah
Nawaz Sharif
Maryam Nawaz
Right-wing politics in Pakistan
Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan Movement
Pakistan–United States relations
References
General bibliography
External links
1993 establishments in Pakistan
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griffith%20University
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Griffith University
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Griffith University is a public research university in South East Queensland on the east coast of Australia. Founded in 1971, Griffith was opened in 1975, introducing Australia's first degrees in environmental science and Asian Studies. The university has five campuses, in Gold Coast, Nathan, Logan, South Bank, and Mount Gravatt. The university was named after Sir Samuel Walker Griffith, who was twice Premier of Queensland and the first Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia. Sir Samuel Griffith played a major role in the Federation of Australia and was the principal author of the Australian constitution.
Griffith University is one of Australia's leading universities and is ranked in the top 2% of universities worldwide. The university offers undergraduate, postgraduate, and research programs across a range of disciplines, including business, law, science, health, education, engineering, and the arts.
Opening at Nathan as a single campus of 451 students, the University now has five campuses spanning three cities, the largest of which is the Gold Coast campus at Southport and the Nathan campus in Brisbane. The Mount Gravatt and South Bank campuses are also located in Brisbane, while the Logan campus is at Meadowbrook.
Griffith University, with about 50,000 students enrolled from more than 130 countries, is a verdant university and a member of the IRU. According to the 2021 Student Experience Survey, it has the ninth-highest student satisfaction rating among all Australian universities and, since 2012, has received more Australian Awards for University Teaching than any other Australian university.
History
Beginnings
In 1965, of natural bushland at Nathan was set aside for a new university campus. Initially, the site was to be part of the University of Queensland, which was experiencing strong demand in humanities and social sciences. By 1970, a new tertiary institution was being mooted, and Theodor Bray (later Sir Theodor Bray) was asked by the Queensland Government to establish a second for Brisbane and the third for the state. After several months of discussion, the government announced on 24 December 1970 that Bray would head a committee charged with establishing Griffith University.
On 30 September 1971, the Queensland Government officially created and recognized Griffith University with the passing of the Assent to Griffith University Act 1971. On 5 March 1975, Griffith University began teaching 451 students in four schools: Australian Environmental Studies, Humanities, Modern Asian Studies, and Science. The university was distinguished by its "problem-based", rather than disciplinary, approach to course design and research.
Expansion
In the 1990s, the Dawkins Revolution saw several tertiary education reforms in Australia, resulting in a series of amalgamations of colleges and universities. In 1990, the Mount Gravatt Teacher's College (est. 1969) and Gold Coast College of Advanced Education (est. 1987) became official campuses of Griffith University, remaining in the same location today. The Queensland Conservatorium of Music continued the higher education mergers and became an official part of Griffith University in 1991. Originally established in 1957, the new entity became known as Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University. In 1992, Griffith's amalgamations were completed with the Queensland College of Art (QCA), established in 1881 and recognized as the oldest continuously operating art training institution in Australia, officially becoming part of the university.
Griffith's fifth campus, Logan, opened in 1998. Located in the suburb of Meadowbrook, on an area of green fields south of Brisbane, the Logan campus was established to specifically address the interests and needs of the Logan City area.
Griffith University was an official Partner of the Gold Coast 2018 Commonwealth Games. Over 500 students and staff were closely involved in the planning and delivery of the event.
Campuses
Griffith University's campuses are distinctive for their nature-based settings within urban environments.
Gold Coast campus
The Gold Coast campus is located in the Gold Coast suburb of Southport. Set in native bushland, on the land of the Aboriginal Yugambeh and Kombumerri peoples, this campus hosts over 19,000 students from all over Australia and the world. It is Griffith University's largest campus.
The campus has seen significant growth and development over the last few years, with the opening of the $150 million Griffith Health Centre and the neighboring Gold Coast University Hospital in 2013, and the launch of the $38 million Griffith Business School building in 2014. The campus is serviced by two Gold Coast light rail (G: link) stations and is a major interchange for bus routes.
Logan campus
Logan is Griffith University's community-focused campus. Hosting roughly 2,500 students, the campus offers degrees in human services and social work, nursing and midwifery, business and commerce, education, and information technology. The campus has strong connections with the local community, hosting numerous sporting and cultural events throughout the year.
Nathan campus
Nathan, Griffith's foundation campus, is situated in tranquil, native bushland on the edge of Toohey Forest and less than 10 kilometers from the Brisbane CBD. Nathan hosts over 13,000 students and offers degrees in business and government, engineering and information technology, environment, humanities and languages, law, and science and aviation.
The buildings at the Nathan campus were designed to fit into the environment by Roger Kirk Johnson, the founding architectural designer of the campus, following the slope of the land and using architectural means of cooling. The library building was designed by Robin Gibson and won the first national award for library design. The clusters of buildings, sports facilities, bushland reserves, and recreational areas are connected by integrated networks of walking paths. On the northern edge of the campus lies the Dunn Memorial.
In 2013, the six-star, green-rated Sir Samuel Griffith Centre was opened on the Nathan campus. The building operates off the grid and is powered by a combination of photovoltaics and hydrogen.
The campus has two residential colleges for students and a range of sporting facilities.
Mount Gravatt campus
The Mount Gravatt campus, adjacent to the Nathan campus, hosts 4,400 students. It is the university's social sciences and humanities hub and the base for research into crucial social issues, including education and suicide prevention.
Like Nathan, the campus is situated on the edge of Toohey Forest. The campus features a recently upgraded aquatic and fitness center, with a heated pool and indoor and outdoor recreation areas, co-located with a 16-court tennis center, a training oval, and basketball and netball courts. On-campus student accommodation is also available.
South Bank campus
Located in Brisbane's cultural precinct, the South Bank campus is Griffith University's creative hub. It encompasses Griffith's Queensland College of Art and Queensland Conservatorium, and the Griffith Film School and Griffith Graduate Centre. , enrolment for all four units is about 3,400 students.
Organisation
Griffith University is structured in four academic groups, with teaching offered through a range of schools, colleges, and departments.
Arts, Education, and Law
School of Criminology and Criminal Justice
School of Education and Professional Studies
School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science
Griffith Law School
Queensland College of Art
Griffith Film School
Queensland Conservatorium
Griffith Business School
Department of Accounting, Finance, and Economics
Department of Employment Relations and Human Resources
Department of Business Strategy and Innovation
Department of Marketing
Department of Tourism, Sport and Hotel Management
School of Government and International Relations
Griffith Health
School of Applied Psychology
School of Health Sciences and Social Work
School of Medicine and Dentistry
School of Nursing and Midwifery
School of Pharmacy and Medical Sciences
Griffith Sciences
School of Engineering and Built Environment
School of Environment and Science
School of Information and Communication Technology
Academic profile
Rankings
In Australia, Griffith University ranks 18th out of 37 universities. Griffith is in the top 300 universities worldwide in four major world rankings; Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), QS World University Rankings (QS), Times Higher Education World University Rankings (THE-WUR), and University Rankings by Academic Performance (URAP).
Griffith also ranks highly as a young university, ranking 33rd in the 2021 QS University Rankings Top 50 Under 50 and 33rd in the 2022 Times Higher Education Young University Rankings.
Griffith has several top-ranking subjects according to the ShanghaiRanking Global Ranking of Academic Subjects 2022:
Top 10
Hospitality and Tourism Management (third globally, first in Australia)
Nursing and Midwifery (second globally, first in Australia)
Top 40–100
Computer Science and Engineering
Dentistry and Oral Sciences (second in Australia)
Education
Energy Science and Engineering
Law (first in Australia)
Marine/Ocean Engineering (third in Australia)
Water Resources
Top 101–150
Chemical Engineering
Civil Engineering
Environmental Science and Engineering
Geography
Materials Science and Engineering
Nanoscience and Nanotechnology
Public Administration
According to Excellence in Research for Australia (2018), Griffith was rated ‘well above world standard’ in 24 fields of research, including chemical sciences, dentistry, political science, and technology.
MBA
The Griffith MBA is ranked among Australia's leading MBA programs in CEO Magazine and its 2022 MBA Rankings. The rankings are compiled by the International Graduate Forum and are designed to present a 360-degree view of the world's leading business schools. The Griffith MBA is placed fourth in the top tier of Australian programs. It also features in the magazine's top 20 Global MBA Rankings.
The MBA is also the highest-ranking Australian MBA in the Aspen Institute's Centre for Business Education's most recent Beyond Grey Pinstripes Global Top 100, ranked at number 26. Griffith University was awarded this ranking for its focus on responsible leadership, sustainable business practices and the Asia-Pacific. It was also acknowledged as one of Australia's best, ranking fifth in Australia in the 2019 Financial Review BOSS Magazine MBA Survey.
Teaching awards
Griffith features prominently in Australia's national teaching awards and citations. Since 2012, Griffith has won 10 awards for Teaching Excellence, 7 awards for Programs that Enhance Learning, 46 Citations for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning, and 7 National Teaching Fellowships. Three Griffith staff have been named the Prime Minister's Australian Teacher of the Year.
Research
Griffith researchers work in 38 centers and institutes, investigating areas such as water science, climate change adaptation, criminology and crime prevention, sustainable tourism, and health and chronic disease.
The university's major research institutes include:
Advanced Design and Prototyping Technologies Institute (ADaPT)
Australian Rivers Institute
Cities Research Institute
Environmental Futures Research Institute
Griffith Asia Institute
Griffith Criminology Institute
Griffith Institute for Educational Research
Griffith Institute for Tourism
Institute for Glycomics
Institute for Integrated and Intelligent Systems
Menzies Health Institute Queensland (formerly the Griffith Health Institute)
Griffith Institute for Drug Discovery (GRIDD)
Additionally, Griffith hosts several externally supported centers and facilities, including:
Australian Institute for Suicide Research and Prevention
National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility
Smart Water Research Centre
NHMRC Centre of Research Excellence in Nursing
Research commercialization
Griffith offers research commercialization and services for business, industry, and government through Griffith Enterprise.
Other centres
As well as research centers and institutes, Griffith has several cultural and community-focused organizations. These include the EcoCentre, which provides a space for environmental education activities, exhibitions, seminars, and workshops; and the Centre for Interfaith & Cultural Dialogue (formerly the Multi-Faith Centre).
Recognised research
In 2021, a research team led by the University discovered a new type of tree frog in New Guinea which is commonly known as the "chocolate frog".
Student life
Student organisations
Griffith University has a wide array of cultural, intellectual, sporting, and social groups. Its Student Guild takes care of these clubs on the Gold Coast campus, as well as student issues, accommodation, employment, publication, events, sport, and recreation. On the Nathan campus, Campus Life supports many clubs including the long-running GRUBS (Griffith University Bushwalking Club), the Karate and Kickboxing club and the Griffith University Aikido Club.
Uniquely, Griffith University students are represented by two statutory embedded student organizations. The Griffith University Student Representative Council (GUSRC) represents undergraduate students and the Griffith University Postgraduate Students Association (GUPSA) represents post-graduate students in all campuses apart from the Gold Coast. GUPSA is a constituent member of the Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations. Unique to the Gold Coast is the Student Guild (GUSG), which represents all students from this campus and has an administrative structure that is apparently independent of the university.
Griffith Honours College
The Griffith Honours College offers high-achieving students potential opportunities to enrich their university experience through mentoring, international experiences, leadership roles, and community engagement activities.
Griffith Sports College
Students who are elite athletes are eligible to join Griffith Sports College, which provides support by helping them balance sporting and university commitments. Griffith University formally fielded soccer teams within Football Gold Coast competitions.
GUMURRII Student Support Unit
The GUMURRII Student Support Unit (SSU) is the heart of Griffith's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community and is located on each of Griffith's five campuses.
GUMURRII is a dedicated Student Support Unit for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff assist students from recruitment to orientation providing undergraduate and postgraduate support through to graduation to afar.
Griffith College
Located on Griffith University's Mount Gravatt and Gold Coast campuses, Griffith College, formerly the Queensland Institute of Business and Technology, offers undergraduate diplomas in a range of areas, which provide a pathway into many of Griffith's degree programs.
Griffith English Language Institute
Students from non-English-speaking backgrounds can study English at the Griffith English Language Institute (GELI). A wide range of English language courses is available to help students improve their English for work, travel, study, or everyday purposes.
Residential colleges
Griffith University has four residential colleges, with two located on its Nathan campus and one each on its Mt Gravatt and Gold Coast campuses. The three colleges located in Brisbane compete in the sporting Inter-College Cup, also known as the ICC. The premier event of the ICC is the Phar Cup, where both female and male teams compete in rugby league matches against each other. The colleges are as follows:
Bellenden Ker College, a.k.a. BK, is a co-educational college located on the Nathan Campus in the Toohey forest reserve.
KGBC, also known as "The Flats", consist of four co-educational undergraduate and postgraduate apartments on the Nathan Campus.
Mt Gravatt College, a.k.a. MG, is a co-educational college located on the Mt Gravatt Campus which itself sits on the hill for which the surrounding suburbs are named.
Griffith University Village is a collection of co-ed apartments on the Gold Coast Campus.
Safe Campuses initiative
Between 2011 and 2016, there were 46 officially reported cases of sexual abuse and harassment on campus released by the University, resulting in no expulsions and one six-month suspension, the highest reported stats in Queensland at the time. This was fewer than the 2017 Australian Human Rights Commission report on sexual assault and harassment, which found reported figures higher than this.
Following the release of the report, Griffith University established the Safe Campuses Taskforce. The Taskforce and its working parties are working to ensure Griffith's campuses provide safe, inclusive and respectful environments for all students and staff.
Alumni
Griffith has over 200,000 alumni. Notable graduates have been journalists, musicians, actors, artists, filmmakers, photographers, athletes, activists, and politicians in the Parliament of Australia and the Parliament of Queensland.
See also
List of universities in Australia
References
External links
Australian university rankings
Griffith University website
Griffith University Village
Griffith University Online
Two aerial photographs of the Nathan Griffith University Campus, State Library of Queensland
1971 establishments in Australia
APRA Award winners
Universities in Brisbane
Universities and colleges established in 1971
Education on the Gold Coast, Queensland
Universities in Queensland
Schools in Queensland
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stella%20Gibbons
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Stella Gibbons
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Stella Dorothea Gibbons (5 January 1902 – 19 December 1989) was an English author, journalist, and poet. She established her reputation with her first novel, Cold Comfort Farm (1932) which has been reprinted many times. Although she was active as a writer for half a century, none of her later 22 novels or other literary works—which included a sequel to Cold Comfort Farm—achieved the same critical or popular success. Much of her work was long out of print before a modest revival in the 21st century.
The daughter of a London doctor, Gibbons had a turbulent and often unhappy childhood. After an indifferent school career she trained as a journalist, and worked as a reporter and features writer, mainly for the Evening Standard and The Lady. Her first book, published in 1930, was a collection of poems which was well received, and through her life she considered herself primarily a poet rather than a novelist. After Cold Comfort Farm, a satire on the genre of rural-themed "loam and lovechild" novels popular in the late 1920s, most of Gibbons's novels were based within the middle-class suburban world with which she was familiar.
Gibbons became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1950. Her style has been praised by critics for its charm, barbed humour and descriptive skill, and has led to comparison with Jane Austen. The impact of Cold Comfort Farm dominated her career, and she grew to resent her identification with the book to the exclusion of the rest of her output. Widely regarded as a one-work novelist, she and her works have not been accepted into the canon of English literature—partly, other writers have suggested, because of her detachment from the literary world and her tendency to mock it.
Life
Family background and childhood
The Gibbons family originated from Ireland. Stella's grandfather, Charles Preston Gibbons, was a civil engineer who spent long periods in South Africa building bridges. He and his wife Alice had six children, the second of whom—the eldest of four sons—was born in 1869 and was known by his fourth Christian name of "Telford". The Gibbons household was a turbulent one, with tensions arising from Charles Gibbons's frequent adulteries. Telford Gibbons trained as a doctor, and qualified as a physician and surgeon at the London Hospital in 1897. On 29 September 1900 he married Maude Williams, the daughter of a stockbroker. The couple bought a house in Malden Crescent, Kentish Town, a working-class district of North London, where Telford established the medical practice in which he continued for the remainder of his life.
Stella, the couple's first child, was born on 5 January 1902; two brothers, Gerald and Lewis, followed in 1905 and 1909 respectively. The atmosphere in the Kentish Town house echoed that of the elder Gibbons's household, and was dominated by Telford's frequent bouts of ill-temper, drinking, womanising and occasional acts of violence. Stella later described her father as "a bad man, but a good doctor". He was charitable to his poorer patients and imaginative in finding cures, but made life miserable for his family. Initially Stella was his favourite, but by the time she reached puberty he frequently mocked her looks and size. Fortunately, her mother was a calm and stabilising influence. Until Stella reached the age of 13 she was educated at home by a succession of governesses, who never stayed long. The family's bookshelves provided reading material, and she developed a talent for storytelling with which she amused her young brothers.
In 1915 Stella became a pupil at the North London Collegiate School, then situated in Camden Town. The school, founded in 1850 by Frances Buss, was among the first in England to offer girls an academic education, and by 1915 was widely recognised as a model girls' school. After the haphazard teaching methods of her governesses, Stella initially had difficulty in adjusting to the strict discipline of the school, and found many of its rules and practices oppressive. She shared this attitude with her contemporary Stevie Smith, the future Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry winner, who joined the school in 1917. Although a moderate performer in school subjects, Stella found outlets for her talents by writing stories for her fellow-pupils, becoming vice president of the Senior Dramatic Club, and featuring prominently in the school's Debating Society, of which she became the honorary secretary.
Student years
While at school, Gibbons formed an ambition to be a writer, and on leaving in 1921 began a two-year Diploma in Journalism at University College, London (UCL). The course had been established for ex-servicemen returning from the First World War, but attracted several women, among them the future novelist Elizabeth Bowen. As well as English Literature, the curriculum covered economics, politics, history, science and languages; practical skills such as shorthand and typing were not included.
After the stifling experience of school, Gibbons found university exhilarating and made numerous friendships, particularly with Ida Affleck Graves, an aspiring poet who, although on a different course, attended some of the same lectures. The two shared a love of literature and a taste for subversive humour. Graves lived until 1999, and recalled in an interview late in life that many of the jokes they shared found their way into Cold Comfort Farm, as did some of their common acquaintances. Soon after Gibbons began the course she contributed a poem, "The Marshes of My Soul", to the December 1921 issue of University College Magazine. This parody, in the newly fashionable vers libre style, was her first published literary work. During the next two years she contributed further poems and prose to the magazine, including "The Doer, a Story in the Russian Manner", which foreshadows her later novels in both theme and style. Gibbons completed her course in the summer of 1923, and was awarded her diploma.
Journalism and early writings
Gibbons's first job was with the British United Press (BUP) news agency, where she decoded overseas cables which she rewrote in presentable English. During slack periods she practised at writing articles, stories and poems. She made her first trips abroad, travelling to France in 1924 and Switzerland in 1925. Swiss Alpine scenery inspired several poems, some of which were later published. In 1924 she met Walter Beck, a naturalised German employed by his family's cosmetics firm. The couple became engaged, and enjoyed regular weekends together, signing hotel registers as a married couple using false names.
In May 1926 Gibbons's mother, Maude, died suddenly at the age of 48. With little reason to remain with her father in the Kentish Town surgery, Gibbons took lodgings in Willow Road, near Hampstead Heath. Five months later, on 15 October, her father died from heart disease aggravated by heavy drinking. Gibbons was now the family's principal breadwinner; her youngest brother Lewis was still at school, while the elder, Gerald, was intermittently employed as an actor. The three set up home in a cottage on the Vale of Health, a small settlement in the middle of Hampstead Heath, with literary connections to Keats (whom Gibbons revered), Leigh Hunt and D. H. Lawrence. Later that year, as a result of an error involving the calculation and reporting of foreign exchange rates, Gibbons was sacked from the BUP, but quickly found a new position as secretary to the editor of the London Evening Standard. Within a short time she was promoted, and became a reporter and features writer at the then substantial salary of just under £500 a year, although she was not given a by-line until 1928.
During her Evening Standard years, Gibbons persevered with poetry, and in September 1927 her poem "The Giraffes" appeared in The Criterion, a literary magazine edited by T. S. Eliot. This work was read and admired by Virginia Woolf, who enquired if Gibbons would write poems for the Woolf publishing house, the Hogarth Press. In January 1928 , a leading voice in the "Georgian" poetry movement, began to publish Gibbons's poems in his magazine, The London Mercury. Squire also persuaded Longmans to publish the first collection of Gibbons's verses, entitled The Mountain Beast, which appeared in 1930 to critical approval. By this time her by-line was appearing with increasing frequency in the Standard. As part of a series on "Unusual Women" she interviewed, among others, the former royal mistress Lillie Langtry. The paper also published several of Gibbons's short stories.
Despite this evident industry, Gibbons was dismissed from the Standard in August 1930. This was ostensibly an economy measure although Gibbons, in later life, suspected other reasons, particularly the increasing distraction from work that arose from her relationship with Walter Beck. The engagement had ended painfully in 1928, primarily because Gibbons was looking for a fully committed relationship whereas he wanted something more open. Oliver believes Gibbons never entirely got over Beck, even after 1929 when she met Allan Webb, her future husband. She was not unemployed for long; she quickly accepted a job offer as an editorial assistant at the women's magazine, The Lady. Here, according to The Observer writer Rachel Cooke, "she applied her versatility as a writer to every subject under the sun bar cookery, which was the province of a certain Mrs Peel." At the same time she began work on the novel that would become Cold Comfort Farm; her colleague and friend Elizabeth Coxhead recorded that Gibbons "neglected her duties disgracefully" to work on this project.
Cold Comfort Farm
In her time with The Lady, Gibbons established a reputation as a caustic book reviewer, and was particularly critical of the then fashionable "loam and lovechild" rural novels. Novelists such as Mary Webb and Sheila Kaye-Smith had achieved considerable popularity through their depictions of country life; Webb was a favourite of the British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. Gibbons had first become familiar with the genre when she provided summaries of Webb's The Golden Arrow for the Evening Standard's 1928 serialisation. She found the writing overblown and the plotting ridiculous, and decided that her own first novel would be a comic parody of the genre. By February 1932 she had completed the manuscript and delivered it to her publishers, Longmans.
Gibbons's chosen title for her novel had been "Curse God Farm", before her friend Elizabeth Coxhead, who had connections in the Hinckley district of Leicestershire, suggested "Cold Comfort" as an alternative, using the name of a farm in the Hinckley area. Gibbons was delighted with the suggestion, and the work was published as Cold Comfort Farm in September 1932. The plot concerns the efforts of "a rational, bossy London heroine" to bring order and serenity to her rustic relations, the Starkadders, on their run-down Sussex farm. According to the Feminist Companion to Literature in English, Gibbons's parody "[demolishes] ... the stock-in-trade of earthy regionalists such as Thomas Hardy, Mary Webb, Sheila Kaye-Smith and D. H. Lawrence". The literary scholar Faye Hammill describes the work as "an extremely sophisticated and intricate parody whose meaning is produced through its relationship with the literary culture of its day and with the work of such canonical authors as D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, and Emily Brontë". In her history of the 1930s, Juliet Gardiner ascribes a socio-economic dimension to the book: "a picture of rural gloom caused by government lassitude and urban indifference".
The work was an immediate critical and popular success. The satire was heightened by Gibbons's mockery of purple prose, whereby she marked the most florid and overwritten passages of the book with asterisks, "for the reader's delectation and mirth". One critic found it hard to accept that so well-developed a parody was the work of a scarcely known woman writer, and speculated that "Stella Gibbons" was a pen-name for Evelyn Waugh. Gibbons suddenly found herself in demand in literary circles and from fellow writers, raised to a celebrity status that she found distasteful. She acquired an agent, who advised her that she could confidently expect a regular and comfortable income as a novelist. This assurance prompted her, at the end of 1932, to resign her position with The Lady and to embark on a full-time writing career.
In March 1931 Gibbons had become engaged to Allan Webb, a budding actor and opera singer five years her junior. He was the son of a cricketing parson, and the grandson of Allan Becher Webb, a former Bishop of Bloemfontein who served as Dean of Salisbury Cathedral. On 1 April 1933 the couple were married at St Matthew's, Bayswater. Later in 1933 she learned that Cold Comfort Farm had been awarded the Prix Étranger, the foreign novel category of the prestigious French literary prize, the Prix Femina. It had won against works by two more experienced writers, Bowen and Rosamond Lehmann. This outcome irritated Virginia Woolf, herself a former Prix Étranger winner, who wrote to Bowen: "I was enraged to see they gave the £40 (the cash value of the prize) to Gibbons; still, now you and Rosamond can join in blaming her". Cooke observes that of all the Prix Étranger winners from the inter-war years, only Cold Comfort Farm and Woolf's To the Lighthouse are remembered today, and that only the former has bequeathed a phrase that has passed into common usage: "something nasty in the woodshed".
Established author
1930s
During the remainder of the 1930s Gibbons produced five more novels, as well as two poetry collections, a children's book, and a number of short stories. From November 1936 the family home was in Oakshott Avenue, on the Holly Lodge Estate off Highgate West Hill, where Gibbons regularly worked in the mornings from ten until lunchtime. Her novels were generally well received by critics and the public, though none earned the accolades or attention that had been given to Cold Comfort Farm; readers of The Times were specifically warned not to expect Gibbons's second novel, Bassett (1934), to be a repetition of the earlier masterpiece. Enbury Heath (1935) is a relatively faithful account of her childhood and early adult life with, according to Oliver, "only the thinnest veil of fictional gauze cover[ing] raw experience". Miss Linsey and Pa (1936) was thought by Nicola Beauman, in her analysis of women writers from 1914 to 1939, to parody Radclyffe Hall's 1928 lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness. Gibbons's final prewar novels were Nightingale Wood (1935)—"Cinderella brought right up to date"—and My American (1939), which Oliver considers her most escapist novel, "a variant of Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen."
Gibbons always considered herself a serious poet rather than a comic writer. She published two collections of poetry in the 1930s, the latter of which, The Lowland Verses (1938) contains "The Marriage of the Machine", an early lament on the effects of industrial pollution: "What oil, what poison lulls/Your wings and webs, my cormorants and gulls?" Gibbons's single children's book was the fairy tale collection The Untidy Gnome, published in 1935 and dedicated to her only child Laura, who was born that year.
War years, 1939–1945
The advent of war in September 1939 did not diminish Gibbons's creative energy. In November she began a series of articles, "A Woman's Diary of the War", for St Martin's Review, the journal of the London church of St Martin-in-the-Fields. The series ran until November 1943, and includes many of Gibbons's private reflections on the conflict. In October 1941 she wrote: "[T]he war has done me good ... I get a dour satisfaction out of managing the rations, salvaging, fire watching, and feeling that I am trying to work for a better world". In July 1940 her husband Allan Webb enlisted in the Middlesex Regiment, and the following year was commissioned into the King's Royal Rifle Corps. He later served overseas, mostly in Cairo.
The title story in Gibbons's 1940 collection, Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm, failed to equal the impact of the original. When the collection was reissued many years later it was described as "oddly comforting and amusing ... and possibly a truer depiction of the times than we might think". Gibbons published three novels during the war: The Rich House (1941), Ticky (1942) and The Bachelor (1944). Ticky, a satire on mid-nineteenth century army life, was Gibbons's favourite of all her novels, although she acknowledged that hardly anyone liked it. It failed commercially, despite a favourable review in The Times Literary Supplement. Oliver surmises that "the middle of the Second World War was perhaps the wrong time to satirise ... the ridiculous and dangerous rituals that surround the male aggressive instinct". The Bachelor won critical praise for its revealing account of life in war-torn Britain—as did several of Gibbons's postwar novels.
Postwar years
Gibbons's first postwar novel was Westwood (1946). The book incorporates a comic depiction of the novelist Charles Morgan, whose novel The Fountain Gibbons had reviewed before the war and found "offensive as well as wearisome". In Westwood, Morgan appears in the guise of the playwright "Gerard Challis", a pompous, humourless bore. Oliver considers this characterisation to be one of Gibbons's "most enjoyable and vicious" satirical portraits. In her introduction to the book's 2011 reprint, Lynne Truss describes it as "a rich, mature novel, romantic and wistful, full of rounded characters and terrific dialogue" that deserved more commercial success than it received. The public's expectations were still prejudiced by Cold Comfort Farm, which by 1949 had sold 28,000 copies in hardback and 315,000 in paperback. Anticipating that a sequel would be popular, that year Gibbons produced Conference at Cold Comfort Farm, her shortest novel, in which the farm has become a conference centre and tourist attraction. There is much mockery of contemporary and indeed future artistic and intellectual trends, before the male Starkadders return from overseas, wreck the centre and restore the farm to its original primitive state. The book was moderately successful but, Oliver remarks, does not compare with the original.
In 1950 Gibbons published her Collected Poems, and in the same year was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Throughout the 1950s she continued, at roughly two-year intervals, to produce politely received novels, none of which created any particular stir. Among these was Fort of the Bear (1953), in which she departed from her familiar London milieu by setting the story largely in the wilder regions of Canada. This was the last of her books handled by Longmans; thereafter her work was published by Hodder and Stoughton. A journey to Austria and Venice in 1953 provided material for her novel The Shadow of a Sorcerer (1955). From 1954, having accepted an invitation from Malcolm Muggeridge, the editor of Punch, Gibbons provided frequent contributions to the magazine for the following 15 years. Among these was a science fiction story, "Jane in Space", written in the style of Jane Austen. Gibbons, who wrote the introduction to the 1957 Heritage edition of Sense and Sensibility, was a long-time admirer of Austen, and had described her in a Lady article as "one of the most exquisite" of woman artists.
After the war, Allan Webb resumed his stage career with the role of Count Almaviva in the 1946 Sadler's Wells production of The Marriage of Figaro. In 1947 he appeared in the original run of the Vivian Ellis musical Bless the Bride, and made several further stage appearances in the following two years. During this time he had a brief affair with the actress Sydney Malcolm, for which Gibbons quickly forgave him. He left the theatre in 1949 to become a director of a book club specialising in special editions, and later bought a bookshop in the Archway district of London. His health failed in the late 1950s and in 1958 he was diagnosed with cancer of the liver. He died in July 1959 at Oakshott Avenue.
Late career
After Webb's death, Gibbons remained at Oakshott Avenue and continued to write novels. From 1961 she rented a summer house at Trevone in Cornwall, which became the setting for her 1962 novel The Weather at Tregulla. She returned to literary criticism after many years, when in 1965 she contributed an essay to Light on C.S. Lewis, a review of that writer's work edited by Jocelyn Gibb. In 1966 she wrote an essay for Punch, "Genesis of a Novel", in which she mused on the detrimental effect of Cold Comfort Farm on her long-term career. She likened the book to "some unignorable old uncle, to whom you have to be grateful because he makes you a handsome allowance, but is often an embarrassment and a bore". Gibbons made her last overseas trip in 1966, to Grenoble in France where she visited her old friend Elizabeth Coxhead. This visit provided material for her 1968 novel The Snow Woman in which Gibbons overcame her habitual distaste for emotional excess by opening the book with a melodramatic birth on a sofa. The Woods in Winter (1970) was her last published novel; she decided at that point that she was no longer prepared to subject her work to editorial control. In the 1980s she wrote two more novels for private circulation among friends, The Yellow Houses and An Alpha. These books – An Alpha retitled Pure Juliet – were published by Vintage Classics in 2016, after the manuscripts were released by Gibbons's family.
Final years
The last two decades of Gibbons's life were uneventful and lived almost entirely beyond the public eye. She kept her health and looks until almost the end of her life—in a biographical sketch, Jill Neville recorded that "her beauty endured, as did her upright carriage, typical of Edwardian ladies who were forced as girls to walk around with a book balanced on their heads." As well as her unpublished novels she wrote occasional short stories, two of which were rejected by the BBC, and contributed three new poems to Richard Adams's 1986 anthology Occasional Poets, a work which included verses from part-time poets such as Iris Murdoch, William Golding, Alan Ayckbourn and Quentin Crisp. These were Gibbons's last published works. One of Gibbons's poems in the anthology was "Writ in Water", inspired by her love for the poetry of Keats. In 2013 the manuscript of this poem was presented to the Keats-Shelley Memorial House museum in Rome.
Gibbons maintained a wide circle of friends, who in her later years included Adams, the entertainer Barry Humphries and the novelist John Braine. From the mid-1970s she established a pattern of monthly literary tea parties in Oakshott Avenue at which, according to Neville, "she was known to expel guests if they were shrill, dramatic, or wrote tragic novels." As her own productivity dwindled and finally ceased altogether, she kept a commonplace book in which she was recording her thoughts and opinions on literature as late as 1988.
From the mid-1980s Gibbons experienced recurrent health problems, not helped when she resumed smoking. In her last months she was looked after at home by her grandson and his girlfriend. She died there on 19 December 1989, after collapsing the previous day, and was buried in Highgate Cemetery, alongside her husband. At her funeral, her nephew and future biographer Reggie Oliver read two of her poems, the latter of which, "Fairford Church", concludes with the words: "Little is sure. Life is hard./We love, we suffer and die./But the beauty of the earth is real/And the Spirit is nigh."
Writing
Style
Gibbons's writing has been praised by critics for its perspicacity, sense of fun, charm, wit and descriptive skill—the last a product of her journalistic training—which she used to convey both atmosphere and character. Although Beauman refers to "malicious wit", Truss sees no cruelty in the often barbed humour, which reflected Gibbons's detestation of pomposity and pretence. Truss has described Gibbons as "the Jane Austen of the 20th century", a parallel which the novelist Malcolm Bradbury thought apt; Flora Poste in Cold Comfort Farm, with her "higher common sense", is "a Jane-ite heroine transformed into a clear-eyed modern woman". Bradbury also observed that many of Gibbons's novels end in Austen-like nuptials.
Truss highlights the importance that Gibbons places on detachment as a necessary adjunct to effective writing: "Like many a good doctor, she seems to have considered sympathy a peculiar and redundant emotion, and a terrible waste of time." This matter-of-fact quality in her prose might, according to Gibbons's Guardian obituarist Richard Boston, be a reaction against the turbulent and sometimes violent emotions that she witnessed within her own family who, she said, "were all madly highly-sexed, like the Starkadders". It is, observed Neville, an irony that the overheated melodrama that Gibbons most disliked was at the heart of her one great success; Gibbons's writings on everyday life brought her restrained approval, but no noticeable literary recognition. Nevertheless, her straightforward, style, unadorned except in parody, is admired by Rachel Cooke, who praises her as "a sworn enemy of the flatulent, the pompous and the excessively sentimental." While short of sentimentality, Gibbons's writing, in prose or verse, did not lack sensitivity. She had what one analyst described as "a rare ability to enter into the feelings of the uncommunicative and to bring to life the emotions of the unremarkable".
Some of Gibbons's poetry expressed her love of nature and a prophetic awareness for environmental issues such as sea pollution, decades before such concerns became fashionable. In a critical summary of Gibbons's poems, Loralee MacPike has described them as "slight lyrics ... [which] tend toward classic, even archaic, diction, and only occasionally ... show flashes of the novels' wit". Such lines as "my thoughts, like purple parrots / Brood / In the sick light" come dangerously close indeed to the overblown rhetoric she satirized in Cold Comfort Farm: "How like yaks were your drowsy thoughts".
Reception and reputation
The immediate and enduring success of Cold Comfort Farm dominated the rest of Gibbons's career. Neville thought that after so singular a success at the start of her career, the rest was something of an anticlimax, despite her considerable industry and undoubted skills. The 1985 edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature defines Gibbons solely in terms of Cold Comfort Farm; it mentions none of her other works—while providing her bêtes noires Morgan and Mary Webb with full entries. To Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm became "That Book" or "You-Know-What", its title never mentioned. Despite her growing irritation and expressed distaste for it, the book continued to be lauded by successive generations of critics, Boston described it as "one of those rare books of comic genius that imprints itself on the brain and can never afterwards be eradicated". A more negative view of the book has been expressed by the literary critic Mary Beard, who considers it "a rather controlling victory of modern order, cleanliness, contraception and medicine over these messy, different, rural types ... I found myself screaming for the rights of these poor country folk NOT to fall into the hands of people like Flora".
Although Boston suggested that Gibbons's rating in the academic English Literature world ought to be high, her literary status is indeterminate. She did not promote herself, and was indifferent to the attractions of public life: "I'm not shy", she told Oliver, "I'm just unsociable". Truss records that Gibbons had "overtly rejected the literary world ... she didn't move in literary circles, or even visit literary squares, or love in literary triangles". Truss posits further reasons why Gibbons did not become a literary canon. Because she was a woman who wrote amusingly, she was classified as "middlebrow"; furthermore, she was published by Longmans, a non-literary publisher. Her lampooning of the literary establishment in the spoof dedication of Cold Comfort Farm to one "Anthony Pookworthy" did not amuse that establishment, who were further offended by the book's mockery of the writing of such canonical figures as Lawrence and Hardy—hence Virginia Woolf's reaction to the Prix Étranger award. Her belief in what she called "the gentle powers (Pity, Affection, Time, Beauty, Laughter)" also flew in the face of a disillusioned modernism.
The literary critic John Carey suggests that the abandonment by intellectuals of "the clerks and the suburbs" as subjects of literary interest provided an opening for writers prepared to exploit this underexplored area. He considers John Betjeman and Stevie Smith as two writers who successfully achieved this. Hammill believes that Gibbons should be named alongside these two, since in her writings she rejects the stereotypical view of suburbia as unexciting, conventional and limited. Instead, says Hammill, "Gibbons's fictional suburbs are socially and architecturally diverse, and her characters—who range from experimental writers to shopkeepers—read and interpret suburban styles and values in varying and incompatible ways". Hammill adds that Gibbons's strong identification with her own suburban home, in which she lived for 53 years, may have influenced her preference to stay outside the mainstream of metropolitan literary life, and from time to time mock it.
After many years in which almost all of Gibbons's output has been out of print, in 2011 the publishers Vintage Classics reissued paperback versions of Westwood, Starlight, and Conference at Cold Comfort Farm. They also announced plans to publish 11 of the other novels, on a print-on-demand basis.
List of works
Publisher information relates to first publication only. Many of the books have been reissued, usually by different publishers.
Novels
Short stories
Children's books
Poetry
Notes and references
Notes
Citations
Sources
External links
1902 births
1989 deaths
English women poets
English women novelists
Women science fiction and fantasy writers
Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature
Burials at Highgate Cemetery
People educated at North London Collegiate School
Alumni of University College London
20th-century English women writers
20th-century English novelists
20th-century English poets
English satirists
Women satirists
British parodists
Parody novelists
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New%20chronology%20%28Fomenko%29
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New chronology (Fomenko)
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The new chronology is a pseudohistorical conspiracy theory proposed by Anatoly Fomenko who argues that events of antiquity generally attributed to the ancient civilizations of Rome, Greece and Egypt actually occurred during the Middle Ages, more than a thousand years later.
The conspiracy theory further proposes that world history prior to AD 1600 has been widely falsified to suit the interests of a number of different conspirators including the Vatican, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Russian House of Romanov, all working to obscure the "true" history of the world centered around a global empire called the "Russian Horde".
Central concepts
The concepts that constitute the new chronology are largely derived from the work of Russian scholar Nikolai Morozov (1854–1946), although work by the French scholar Jean Hardouin (1646–1729) can be seen as anticipating Morozov. The "new chronology" per se is most commonly associated with Anatoly Fomenko, a Russian mathematician by trade, though he has collaborated extensively (usually with fellow mathematicians) in his writing on the subject. The theory is most fully explained in History: Fiction or Science?, originally published in Russian.
The new chronology features a totally reconstructed timeline, portraying a history that is radically shorter than what is universally accepted, based on a thesis that in effect compresses all of recorded history from the Neolithic to the Early Middle Ages into a period less than a millennium long. According to Fomenko's claims, the practice of written history only emerged , with there being almost no real information about events that occurred between 800 and 1000 AD, and most recorded historical events actually having taken place between 1000 and 1500AD.
The new chronology is universally rejected by the scientific and historiographical communities, being totally inconsistent with the accepted methodology used in the relevant fields, including absolute and relative dating techniques. It is considered to be pseudoarchaeological, pseudohistorical, and pseudoscientific. Interest in the theory from historians and scientists has primarily stemmed from its popularity among laypeople: in addition to formulating refutations of its methods and conclusions, academics have also tried to understand the social forces underlying its resonance: Halperin (2011) estimates that as many as 30% of Russians may have sympathy for the new chronology. However, it is not known what levels of veracity or salience are generally ascribed to new chronology texts by readers, whether the texts are generally regarded as history or as fiction, or what the demographics of their readership tend to be.
The theory emerged alongside numerous other alternate histories and conspiracy-minded literature in a period of heightened nationalism and more lax restrictions on freedom of press following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. While other authors have written on the new chronology theory, such as Russian Gleb Nosovsky and Bulgarian Yordan Tabov (who expanded the theory relating to the Balkans), the theory is mostly understood in terms of Fomenko's writings.
History of new chronology
The idea of chronologies that differ from the conventional chronology can be traced back to at least the second half of the 17th century. Jean Hardouin then suggested that many ancient historical documents were much younger than commonly believed to be. In 1685 he published a version of Pliny the Elder's Natural History in which he claimed that most Greek and Roman texts had been forged by Benedictine monks. When later questioned on these results, Hardouin stated that he would reveal the monks' reasons in a letter to be revealed only after his death. The executors of his estate were unable to find such a document among his posthumous papers. In the 17th century, Sir Isaac Newton, examining the current chronology of Ancient Greece, Ancient Egypt and the Ancient Near East, expressed discontent with prevailing theories and in The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended proposed one of his own, which, basing its study on Apollonius of Rhodes's Argonautica, changed the traditional dating of the Argonautic Expedition, the Trojan War, and the Founding of Rome.
In 1887, Edwin Johnson expressed the opinion that early Christian history was largely invented or corrupted in the 2nd and 3rd centuries.
In 1909 Otto Rank made note of duplications in literary history of a variety of cultures:
almost all important civilized peoples have early woven myths around and glorified in poetry their heroes, mythical kings and princes, founders of religions, of dynasties, empires and cities—in short, their national heroes. Especially the history of their birth and of their early years is furnished with phantastic traits; the amazing similarity, nay literal identity, of those tales, even if they refer to different, completely independent peoples, sometimes geographically far removed from one another, is well known and has struck many an investigator.
Fomenko became interested in Morozov's theories in 1973. In 1980, together with a few colleagues from the mathematics department of Moscow State University, he published several articles on "new mathematical methods in history" in peer-reviewed journals. The articles stirred a lot of controversy, but ultimately Fomenko failed to win any respected historians to his side. By the early 1990s, Fomenko shifted his focus from trying to convince the scientific community via peer-reviewed publications to publishing books. Alex Beam writes that Fomenko and his colleagues were discovered by the Soviet scientific press in the early 1980s, leading to "a brief period of renown"; a contemporary review from the Soviet journal Questions of History complained, "Their constructions have nothing in common with Marxist historical science."
By 1996 his theory had grown to cover Russia, Turkey, China, Europe, and Egypt.
Fomenko's claims
Central to Fomenko's new chronology is his claim of the existence of a vast Slav-Turk empire, called the "Russian Horde", which played a dominant role in Eurasian history before the 17th century. The various peoples identified in ancient and medieval history, from the Scythians, Huns, Goths and Bulgars, through the Polans, Dulebes, Drevlians and Pechenegs, to in more recent times, the Cossacks, Ukrainians, and Belarusians, are nothing but elements of the single Russian Horde.
Fomenko claims that the most probable prototype of the historical Jesus was Andronikos I Komnenos (allegedly AD 1152 to 1185), the emperor of Byzantium, known for his failed reforms, his traits and deeds reflected in 'biographies' of many real and imaginary persons. The historical Jesus is a composite figure and reflection of the Old-Testament prophet Elisha (850–800 BC?), Pope Gregory VII (1020?–1085), Saint Basil of Caesarea (330–379), and even Li Yuanhao (also known as Emperor Jingzong or "Son of Heaven" – emperor of Western Xia, who reigned in 1032–1048), Euclides, Bacchus and Dionysius. Fomenko explains the seemingly vast differences in the biographies of these figures as resulting from difference in languages, points of view and time-frame of the authors of said accounts and biographies. He claims that the historical Jesus was born in Cape Fiolent, Crimea, on December 25, 1152 A.D. and was crucified on March 20, 1185 A.D., on Joshua's Hill, overlooking the Bosphorus.
Fomenko also merges the cities and histories of Jerusalem, Rome and Troy into "New Rome" = Gospel Jerusalem (in the 12th and 13th centuries) = Troy = Yoros Castle. To the south of Yoros Castle is Joshua's Hill which Fomenko alleges is the hill Calvary depicted in the Bible.
Fomenko claims the Hagia Sophia is actually the biblical Temple of Solomon. He identifies Solomon as sultan Suleiman the Magnificent (1494–1566).
However, according to Fomenko the word "Rome" is a placeholder and can signify any one of several different cities and kingdoms. He claims: the "First Rome" or "Ancient Rome" or "Mizraim" is an ancient Egyptian kingdom in the delta of the Nile with its capital in Alexandria, that the second and most famous "New Rome" is Constantinople, and that the third "Rome" is constituted by three different cities: Constantinople (again), Rome in Italy, and Moscow. Also according to his claims, Rome in Italy was founded around AD 1380 by Aeneas and Moscow as the third Rome was the capital of the great "Russian Horde".
Specific claims
Some of the central concepts of new chronology asserted by Fomenko and colleagues are:
Fomenko's methods
Statistical correlation of texts
One of Fomenko's simplest methods is statistical correlation of texts. His basic assumption is that a text which describes a sequence of events will devote more space to more important events (for example, a period of war or an unrest will have much more space devoted to than a period of peaceful, non-eventful years), and that this irregularity will remain visible in other descriptions of the period. For each analysed text, a function is devised which maps each year mentioned in the text with the number of pages (lines, letters) devoted in the text to its description (which could be zero). The function of the two texts are then compared.
For example, Fomenko compares the contemporary history of Rome written by Livy with a modern history of Rome written by Russian historian V. S. Sergeev, calculating that the two have high correlation, and thus that they describe the same period of history, which is undisputed. He also compares modern texts which describe different periods, and calculates low correlation, as expected. When he compares, for example, the ancient history of Rome and the medieval history of Rome, he calculates a high correlation, and concludes that ancient history of Rome is a copy of medieval history of Rome, thus clashing with mainstream accounts.
Statistical correlation of dynasties
In a somewhat similar manner, Fomenko compares two dynasties of rulers using statistical methods. First, he creates a database of rulers, containing relevant information on each of them. Then, he creates "survey codes" for each pair of the rulers, which contain a number which describes degree of the match of each considered property of two rulers. For example, one of the properties is the way of death: if two rulers were both poisoned, they get value of +1 in their property of the way of death; if one ruler was poisoned and another killed in combat, they get −1; and if one was poisoned, and another died of illness, they get 0 (Fomenko claims there is possibility that chroniclers were not impartial and that different descriptions nonetheless describe the same person). An important property is the length of the rule, especially as they receive higher points, they are considered to be a more illustrious ruler of their nation.
Fomenko lists a number of pairs of unrelated dynasties – for example, dynasties of kings of Israel and emperors of late Western Roman Empire (AD 300–476) – and claims that this method demonstrates correlations between their reigns. (Graphs which show just the length of the rule in the two dynasties are the most widely known; Fomenko's conclusions are also based on other parameters, as described above.) He also claims that the regnal history from the 17th to 20th centuries never shows correlation of "dynastic flows" with each other, therefore Fomenko insists history was multiplied and outstretched into imaginary antiquity to justify this or other "royal" pretensions.
Fomenko uses for the demonstration of correlation between the reigns the data from the Chronological Tables of J. Blair (Moscow 1808–09) complemented with lists of rulers and their reign durations taken from other tables and monographs, both mediaeval and contemporary. Fomenko et al. say that Blair’s tables are all the more valuable to them since they were compiled in an epoch adjacent to the time of Scaligerian chronology. According to Fomenko these tables contain clearer signs of “Scaligerite activity” which were subsequently buried under layers of paint and plaster by historians of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Astronomical evidence
Fomenko examines astronomical events described in ancient texts and claims that the chronology is actually medieval. For example:
He says the mysterious drop in the value of the lunar acceleration parameter D" ("a linear combination of the [angular] accelerations of the Earth and Moon") between the years AD 700–1300, which the American astronomer Robert Newton had explained in terms of "non-gravitational" forces. By eliminating those anomalous early eclipses the new chronology produces a constant value of D" beginning around AD 1000. Newton's analysis has since been criticized as suffering "from two fundamental defects. The two parameters he sought to determine were highly correlated; and he also adopted a somewhat arbitrary weighting scheme in analysing suspected observations of total solar eclipses. Many of the observations he investigated were of doubtful reliability. Hence, despite the low weight he assigned them, they had a disproportionate effect on his solutions."
He associates initially the Star of Bethlehem with the AD 1140 (±20) supernova (now Crab Nebula) and the Crucifixion Eclipse with the total solar eclipse of May 1, AD 1185. He also believes that Crab Nebula supernova could not have been seen in AD 1054, but probably in AD 1153. He doubts the veracity of ancient Chinese astronomical data.
He argues that the star catalog in the Almagest, ascribed to the Hellenistic astronomer Ptolemy, was compiled in the 15th to 16th centuries AD. With this objective in sight he develops new methods of dating old stellar catalogues and claims that the Almagest is based on data collected between AD 600 and 1300, whereby the telluric obliquity is well taken into account.
He further develops Morozov's analysis of some ancient horoscopes, including the so-called Dendera Zodiacs—two horoscopes drawn on the ceiling of the temple of Hathor—and comes to the conclusion that they correspond to either the 11th or the 13th century AD. In his History: Fiction or Science series finale, he makes computer-aided dating of all 37 Egyptian horoscopes that contain sufficient astronomical data, and claims they all fit into 11th to 19th century timeframe. Traditional history usually either interprets these horoscopes as belonging to the 1st century BC or suggests that they weren't meant to match any date at all.
In his final analysis of an eclipse triad described by the ancient Greek Thucydides in History of the Peloponnesian War, Fomenko dates the eclipses to AD 1039, 1046 and 1057. Because of the layered structure of the manuscript, he claims that Thucydides actually lived in medieval times and in describing the Peloponnesian War between the Spartans and Athenians he was actually describing the conflict when the Duchy of Athens and the Duchy of Neopatras in Greece, held by the Catalan Company, were attacked by the Navarrese Company in the late 14th century.
Fomenko claims that the abundance of dated astronomical records in cuneiform texts from Mesopotamia is of little use for dating of events, as the astronomical phenomena they describe recur cyclically every 30–40 years.
Rejection of established dating methods
On archaeological dating methods, Fomenko claims:
Dendrochronology is rejected with a claim that, for dating of objects much older than the oldest still living trees, it is not an absolute, but a relative dating method, and thus dependent on traditional chronology. Fomenko specifically points to a break of dendrochronological scales around AD 1000.
Fomenko also cites a number of cases where carbon dating of a series of objects of known age gave significantly different dates. He also alleges undue cooperation between physicists and archaeologists in obtaining the dates, since most radiocarbon dating labs only accept samples with an age estimate suggested by historians or archaeologists. Fomenko also claims that carbon dating over the range of AD 1 to 2000 is inaccurate because it has too many sources of error that are either guessed at or completely ignored, and that calibration is done with a statistically meaningless number of samples. Consequently, Fomenko concludes that carbon dating is not accurate enough to be used on historical scale.
Fomenko rejects numismatic dating as circular, being based on the traditional chronology, and points to cases of similar coins being minted in distant periods, unexplained long periods with no coins minted and cases of mismatch of numismatic dating with historical accounts.
Reception
Fomenko's historical ideas have been universally rejected by mainstream scientists, historians, and scholars, who brand them as pseudohistory, pseudoarchaeology, and pseudoscience, but were popularized by former world chess champion Garry Kasparov. Billington writes that the theory "might have quietly blown away in the wind tunnels of academia" if not for Kasparov's writing in support of it in the magazine Ogoniok. Kasparov met Fomenko during the 1990s, and found that Fomenko's conclusions concerning certain subjects were identical to his own regarding the popular view (which is not the view of academics) that art and culture died during the Dark Ages and were not revived until the Renaissance. Kasparov also felt it illogical that the Romans and the Greeks living under the banner of Byzantium could fail to use the mounds of scientific knowledge left them by Ancient Greece and Rome, especially when it was of urgent military use. Kasparov does not support the reconstruction part of the new chronology.
According to Sheiko, "Fomenko and his allies are unrepentant, noting that the Mongolian, Turkic, and Ukrainian peoples are sadly mistaken in the delusion that they were ever anything other than elements of the Russian Horde," and remarks that for Russian critics, Fomenko represents both an embarrassment and a potent symbol of the depths to which the Russian academy and society have generally sunk amid the diverse societal misfortunes heaped upon Russia since the fall of Communism. Western critics see his views as part of a renewed Russian imperial ideology, "keeping alive an imperial consciousness and secular messianism in Russia".
In 2004 at the Moscow International Book Fair, Anatoly Fomenko with his coauthor Gleb Nosovsky were awarded for their books on "new chronology" the anti-prize called "Abzatz" (literally 'paragraph', a Russian slang word meaning 'disaster' or 'fiasco') in the category "Pochotnaya bezgramota" (the term is a pun upon "Pochotnaya gramota" (Certificate of Honor) and may be translated as either "Certificate of Dishonor" or literally, "Respectable Illiteracy") for the worst book published in Russia.
Critics have accused Fomenko of altering the data to improve the fit with his ideas and have noted that he violates a key rule of statistics by selecting matches from the historical record which support his chronology, while ignoring those which do not, creating artificial, better-than-chance correlations, and that these practices undermine Fomenko's statistical arguments. The new chronology was given a comprehensive critical analysis in a round table on "The 'Myths' of New Chronology," which was chaired by the dean of the department of history of Moscow State University in December 1999. One of the participants in that round table, the distinguished Russian archaeologist Valentin Yanin, compared Fomenko's work to "the sleight of hand trickery of a David Copperfield." Linguist Andrey Zaliznyak argued that by using the Fomenko's approaches one can "prove" any historical correspondence, for example, between Ancient Egyptian pharaohs and French kings.
James Billington, formerly professor of Russian history at Harvard and Princeton and the Librarian of Congress from 1987 to 2015, placed Fomenko's work within the context of the political movement of Eurasianism, which sought to tie Russian history closely to that of its Asian neighbors. Billington described Fomenko as ascribing the belief in past hostility between Russia and the Mongols to the influence of Western historians. Thus, by Fomenko's chronology, "Russia and Turkey are parts of a previously single empire." A French reviewer of Billington's book noted approvingly his concern with the phantasmagorical conceptions of Fomenko about the global "new chronology."
H.G. van Bueren, professor emeritus of astronomy at the University of Utrecht, concluded his scathing review of Fomenko's work on the application of mathematics and astronomy to historical data as follows:
In September 2020, major Russian politician and academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences Sergey Glazyev publicly proposed Fomenko's New Chronology as a "reliable support for the formation of modern ideology that consolidates Russian society":
Convergence of methods in archaeological dating
While Fomenko rejects commonly accepted dating methods, most archaeologists, conservators, and other scientists make extensive use of such techniques, which are expected to have been rigorously examined and refined during decades of use.
In the specific case of dendrochronology, Fomenko claims that this fails as an absolute dating method because of gaps in the record. Independent dendrochronological sequences beginning with living trees from various parts of North America and Europe extend back 12,400 years into the past. Furthermore, the mutual consistency of these independent dendrochronological sequences has been confirmed by comparing their radiocarbon and dendrochronological ages. These and other data have provided a calibration curve for radiocarbon dating whose internal error does not exceed ±163 years over the entire 26,000 years of the curve.
In fact, archaeologists have developed a fully anchored dendrochronology series going back past 10,000 BCE. "The absolutely dated tree-ring chronology now extends back to 12,410 cal BP (10,461 BC)."
Misuse of historical sources and forced pattern matching
Critics of Fomenko's theory claim that his use of historical sources is highly selective and ignores the basic principles of sound historical scholarship.Fomenko ... provides no fair-minded review of the historical literature about a topic with which he deals, quotes only those sources that serve his purposes, uses evidence in ways that seem strange to professionally-trained historians and asserts the wildest speculation as if it has the same status as the information common to the conventional historical literature.
They also note that his method of statistically correlating of texts is very rough, because it does not take into account the many possible sources of variation in length outside of "importance". They maintain that differences in language, style, and scope, as well as the frequently differing views and focuses of historians, which are manifested in a different notion of "important events", make quantifying historical writings a dubious proposition at best. Further, Fomenko's critics allege that the parallelisms he reports are often derived by alleged forcing by Fomenko of the data – rearranging, merging, and removing monarchs as needed to fit the pattern.
For example, on the one hand Fomenko asserts that the vast majority of ancient sources are either irreparably distorted duplicate accounts of the same events or later forgeries. In his identification of Jesus with Pope Gregory VII he ignores the otherwise vast dissimilarities between their reported lives and focuses on the similarity of their appointment to religious office by baptism. (The evangelical Jesus is traditionally believed to have lived for 33 years, and he was an adult at the time of his encounter with John the Baptist. In contrast, according to the available primary sources, Pope Gregory VII lived for at least 60 years and was born 8 years after the death of Fomenko's John-the-Baptist equivalent John Crescentius.)
Critics allege that many of the supposed correlations of regnal durations are the product of the selective parsing and blending of the dates, events, and individuals mentioned in the original text. Another point raised by critics is that Fomenko does not explain his altering the data (changing the order of rulers, dropping rulers, combining rulers, treating interregna as rulers, switching between theologians and emperors, etc.) preventing a duplication of the effort and effectively making this whole theory an ad hoc hypothesis.
Selectivity in reference to astronomical phenomena
Critics point out that Fomenko's discussion of astronomical phenomena tends to be selective, choosing isolated examples that support the new chronology and ignoring the large bodies of data that provide statistically supported evidence for the conventional dating. According to astronomer Yuri N. Efremov, for his dating of the Almagest star catalog Fomenko's selection of just eight stars from the more than 1000 stars in the catalog is arbitrary, and on grounds related to one of them (Arcturus) having a large systematic error, raised the opinion that this star has a dominant effect on Fomenko's dating. Statistical analysis using the same method for all "fast" stars points to the antiquity of the Almagest star catalog. Dennis Rawlins further points out that Fomenko's statistical analysis got the wrong date for the Almagest, because Fomenko considered Earth's obliquity to be a constant when it is actually a variable that changes at a very slow, but known, rate.
Fomenko's studies ignore the abundance of dated astronomical records in cuneiform texts from Mesopotamia. Among these texts is a series of Babylonian astronomical diaries, which records precise astronomical observations of the Moon and planets, often dated in terms of the reigns of known historical figures extending back to the 6th century BCE. Astronomical retrocalculations for all these moving objects allow dating these observations, and consequently the rulers' reigns, to within a single day. The observations are sufficiently redundant that only a small portion of them are sufficient to date a text to a unique year in the period 750 BCE to 100 CE. The dates obtained agree with the accepted chronology. In addition, F. R. Stephenson has demonstrated through a systematic study of a large number of Babylonian, Ancient and Medieval European, and Chinese records of eclipse observations that they can be dated consistently with conventional chronology at least as far back as 600 BCE. In contrast to Fomenko's missing centuries, Stephenson's studies of eclipse observations find an accumulated uncertainty in the timing of the rotation of the earth of 420 seconds at 400 BCE, and only 80 seconds at 1000 CE.
Magnitude and consistency of conspiracy theory
Fomenko states that world history prior to 1600 was deliberately falsified for political reasons. The consequences of this conspiracy theory are twofold. Documents that conflict with new chronology are said to have been edited or fabricated by conspirators; the Vatican, the Holy Roman Empire and pro-German Romanov dynasty. New chronology taps traditionally Russian anti-Western thoughts and ideas of Germany as a chief enemy. Further, the theory is Russocentric, diminishing achievements of other cultures and claiming major civilization accomplishments as Russian and by proposing a giant "Russian Horde" empire and eliminating historical time before its existence. The theory also claimed to undermine nationalism in countries neighboring Russia by positioning divisions and conflicts as fabricated. Unlike other popular conspiracy theories New Chronology is not antisemitic per se, but it contains claims that may be unwelcome by Jewish communities like that the Old Testament is newer than the New Testament, placing Jerusalem in Constantinople and projecting stereotypes of Jews by proposing that Jews originate from bankers in the Russian Horde that adopted the religion of Judaism, itself a derivative of Christianity and not the other way round.
The theory provides an alternate history account of the "true" history centered around a world empire called the "Russian Horde". The scope of the new chronology has been compared to J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy world. Thousands of pages have been written about it and authors address a wide range of objections.
Popularity in forums and amongst Russian imperialists
Fomenko has published and sold over one million copies of his books in his native Russia. Many Internet forums have appeared which aim to supplement his work with additional amateur research. His critics have suggested that Fomenko's version of history appealed to the Russian reading public by keeping alive an imperial consciousness to replace their disillusionment with the failures of Communism and post-Communist corporate oligarchies.
Levashovism has been inspired by this pseudohistory, taking the form of a racial occultist narrative about the Slavic Aryan "Great Tartaria". Another off-shoot on online forums has been the Tartaria conspiracy theory, which draws inspiration from historic architectural photography of demolished buildings as evidence of a long-lost civilization.
See also
New Chronology (disambiguation)
New Rome
Phantom time hypothesis; Heribert Illig's 1991 proposal that 297 years (AD 614–911) were added to chronology in the leadup to AD 1000
Glasgow Chronology; proposed revision of the chronology of ancient Egypt.
Ages in Chaos; 1952 book by Immanuel Velikovsky claiming that the histories of Ancient Egypt and Ancient Israel are five centuries out of step.
Big lie
Jovan I. Deretić; Deretić is the author of a nationalist pseudohistory of the world with Serbs at the centre.
Tartarian Empire (conspiracy theory)
Notes
References
A.T. Fomenko et al.: History: Fiction or Science? Chronology 1, Introducing the problem. A criticism of the Scaligerian chronology. Dating methods as offered by mathematical statistics. Eclipses and zodiacs.
A.T. Fomenko et al.: History: Fiction or Science? Chronology 2, The dynastic parallelism method. Rome. Troy. * Greece. The Bible. Chronological shifts.
A.T. Fomenko et al.: History: Fiction or Science? Chronology 3, Astronomical methods as applied to chronology. Ptolemy’s Almagest. Tycho Brahe. Copernicus. The Egyptian zodiacs.
A.T. Fomenko et al.: History: Fiction or Science? Chronology 4, Russia. Britain. Byzantium. Rome.
Empirico-Statistical Analysis of Narrative Material and its Applications to Historical Dating.
Vol.1: The Development of the Statistical Tools. Vol.2: The Analysis of Ancient and Medieval
Records. – Kluwer Academic Publishers. The Netherlands, 1994.
Geometrical and Statistical Methods of Analysis of Star Configurations. Dating Ptolemy's Almagest. Together with V. V Kalashnikov., G. V. Nosovsky. – CRC-Press, USA, 1993.
New Methods of Statistical Analysis of Historical Texts. Applications to Chronology. Antiquity in the Middle Ages. Greek and Bible History. Vols.1, 2, 3. – The Edwin Mellen Press. USA. Lewiston. Queenston. Lampeter, 1999.
A.T. Fomenko: Новые эмпирико-статистические методики датирования древних событий и приложения к глобальной хронологии древнего и средневекового мира (New empirical statistical techniques for dating ancient events, and their applications to the global chronology of the Ancient and Medieval World)
Robert Grishin and Vladimir Melamed, "The Medieval Empire of the Israelites", published 2003;
External links
Series "History: Fiction or Science?" Ep. 3: Methods (with English Subtitles)
New Chronology of the World History at www.univer.omsk.su
The Theft of the Millenium
1980 introductions
Eurasianism
Pseudohistory
Conspiracy theories in Russia
Alternative chronologies
Hagia Sophia
Solomon's Temple
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knole
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Knole
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Knole () is a country house and former archbishop's palace owned by the National Trust. It is situated within Knole Park, a park located immediately to the south-east of Sevenoaks in west Kent. The house ranks in the top five of England's largest houses, under any measure used, occupying a total of four acres.
The current house dates back to the mid-15th century, with major additions in the 16th and, particularly, the early 17th centuries. Its grade I listing reflects its mix of late-medieval to Stuart structures and particularly its central façade and state rooms. In 2019, an extensive conservation project, "Inspired by Knole", was completed to restore and develop the structures of the buildings and thus help to conserve its important collections. The surrounding deer park has also survived with varying degrees of management in the 400 years since 1600.
History
Location
Knole is located at the southern end of Sevenoaks, in the Weald of west Kent. To the north, the land slopes down to the Darenth valley and the narrow fertile pays of Holmesdale, at the foot of the North Downs. The land around Sevenoaks itself has sandy soils, with woodland that was used in the Middle Ages in the traditional Wealden way, for pannage, rough pasture and timber. The Knole estate is located on well-drained soils of the Lower Greensand. It was close enough to London to allow easy access for owners who were involved with affairs of state, and it was on "sounde, parfaite, holesome grounde", in the words of Henry VIII. It also had a plentiful supply of spring water. The knoll of land in front of the house gives it a sheltered position. The wooded nature of the landscape could provide not only timber but also grazing for the meat needs of a grand household. Moreover, it made an excellent deer park, being emparked before the end of the 15th century. The dry valley between the house and the settlement of Sevenoaks also makes a natural deer course, for a combined race and hunt between two dogs and fallow deer.
Early history
The earliest recorded owner of the core of the estate, in the 1290s, was Robert de Knole. However, nothing is known of any property he had on the estate. Two other families, the Grovehursts and the Ashburnhams, are known to have held the estate in succession until the 1360s, and the manor of Knole is first mentioned in 1364. In 1419, the estate, which then spread over 800 acres, had been bought by Thomas Langley, Bishop of Durham, and by 1429, he had extended it to 1,500 acres. The estate remained in the hands of the Langley family, it seems, until the mid-1440s when it had been acquired by James Fiennes, first Lord Saye and Sele. The circumstances of this transfer are not known, but it is clear that Lord Saye and Sele was also enlarging the estate by further, sometimes forcible, purchases of adjoining parcels of land. For example, in 1448 one Reginald Peckham was forced to sell land at Seal (at the north-eastern end of the current estate) to Saye "on threat of death". Forcible land transfers recur in the later history of the house, including that between Archbishop Thomas Cranmer and Henry VIII.
Lord Saye and Sele seems to have begun a building project at Knole, but it was incomplete by his death in 1450. His ruthless exploitation of his powerful position in Kent was a motivating factor in the Jack Cade Rebellion. Saye and Sele was executed on the authority of a hastily assembled commission initiated by Henry VI in response to the demands of Cade's rebels when they arrived in London.
Archbishop Bourchier's House
James Fiennes's heir, William, second Baron Saye and Sele, sold the property for 400 marks (£266 13s 4d) in 1456 to The Most Rev. Thomas Bourchier, Archbishop of Canterbury. He already had a substantial property in the area, Otford Palace, but the drier, healthier site of Knole attracted him. Archbishop Bourchier probably began building work by making substantial renovations of an existing house. Between 1456 and 1486, Bourchier and his bailiff for the Otford bailiwick, John Grymesdyche, oversaw substantial building work on the current house. The remodelled house must have been suitable for the archbishop by 1459, when he first stayed there, but he based himself there increasingly in his later years, particularly after 1480, when, at the age of about 69, he appointed a suffragan. In 1480, Thomas Cardinal Bourchier, as he had become in 1473, gave the house to the Archdiocese of Canterbury.
In subsequent years, Knole House continued to be enlarged, with the addition of a large courtyard, now known as Green Court, and a new entrance tower. These were long thought to be the work of one of Bourchier's successors, but the detailed study by Alden Gregory suggests that Bourchier was responsible. He took advantage of the political stability that followed the restoration of Edward IV in 1471 to invest further in his property.
Knole in the Tudor period
After Cardinal Bourchier's death in 1486, Knole was occupied by the next four archbishops: John Morton (1487–1500), Henry Deane (1501–1503), William Warham (1504–1532) and finally Thomas Cranmer. Sir Thomas More appeared in revels there at the court of Archbishop Morton, whose cognizance (motto) of Benedictus Deus appears above and to either side of a large late Tudor fireplace there. Henry VII was an occasional visitor, as in early October and midwinter 1490.
Cardinal Bourchier had enclosed the park with a pale to make a deer park and it seems that Henry VIII used to visit Archbishop Warham to hunt deer. After the death of Warham and before the appointment of his successor, Henry found his properties in nearby Otford and Knole useful residences for his daughter Mary, at the time of the protracted divorce from her mother, Catherine of Aragon. She was at Knole from 27 November 1532 to 5 March 1533.
Warham's successor as archbishop, Thomas Cranmer, acquired all the temporalities of the See of Canterbury. However, these brought with them substantial debts and complex demands of land management, set against a backdrop of massive land transfers associated with the dissolution of the monasteries and broader assaults on church wealth. Cranmer was, therefore, unable to withstand repeated demands from Henry VIII for exchanges of land. This was a long-term process stretching between 1536 and 1546, so that there is no need to imagine that Henry wanted Knole, specifically, for example as a deer park. In 1537 the manor of Knole, and five other manors and a number of advowsons and chantries largely forming the archbishop's bailiwick of Otford, were 'exchanged' with Henry VIII. In return, Cranmer received a package primarily consisting of former abbeys and priories between Canterbury and Dover.
Knole was granted to Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, in August 1547 at the start of his nephew Edward VI's reign, but following Somerset's execution in 1549 it reverted to the Crown. Mary gave the residence back to her Archbishop of Canterbury, Reginald Cardinal Pole, but with their deaths in 1558 the house reverted to the Crown.
In the early 1560s, Queen Elizabeth I gave Knole to Robert Dudley, but he returned it in 1566. However, he had already granted a lease (1 February 1566) to one Thomas Rolf. Under this the 'manor and mansion-house' of Knole and the park, with the deer, and also Panthurst Park and other lands, were demised to the latter for the term of ninety-nine years at a rent of £200. The landlord was to do all repairs, and reserved the very unusual right (to himself and his heirs and assigns) to occupy the mansion-house as often as he or they chose to do so, but this right did not extend to the gate-house, nor to certain other premises. The tenant was given power to alter or rebuild the mansion-house at his pleasure. Meanwhile, Elizabeth had possibly granted the estate to her cousin Thomas Sackville who, at that time, had the title of Lord Buckhurst.
There was competition at that time for the Knole estate. Rolf died very soon after, and the residue of the lease was bought by a wealthy local lawyer, John Lennard (of Chevening). He had gradually built up a network of properties around Sevenoaks, including the manor of Chevening, and adjoining property in the parishes of Knockholt and Halstead, all just to the north of Sevenoaks. Lennard had already pressurised Rolf to sell the lease before his sudden death but, at the same point, Lord Buckhurst was also competing for the lease. Knole was a significant addition to Lennard's local land-holdings when it was confirmed, around 1570. However, Buckhurst was still able to insist upon some rights on the estate, including the ownership of at least some of the deer in the park. John moved to Knole, but gave his son Sampson, Lord Dacre's son-in-law, a sub-lease. The Knole estate was worth a great deal to Sampson, bringing him in 1599 rents worth £218, 6s and 8d.
One of Sampson Lennard's daughters, Margaret, married Sir Thomas Waller, at one time lieutenant of Dover Castle and the younger son of an important Kent family, with their seat at Groombridge. An unusual term in the marriage covenant stipulated that Margaret and Thomas should live at Knole which is where Margaret gave birth to her son William, probably in 1598. The baptism is recorded in the Sevenoaks parish register for 3 December. In 1613, William inherited his father's baronetcy, becoming Sir William Waller. He later commanded a parliamentary army with some distinction during the English Civil War.
Early-Stuart Knole and the Sackvilles
Since Dudley had originally granted a 99-year lease, Thomas Sackville could only take it back by buying out the remaining 51 years of the lease for £4,000, which he did in 1603. Lennard was happy to sell, not only because of his mounting debts but also because he wished to gain the Dacre title, which he did in 1604 from a commission headed by the Lord Treasurer, Thomas Sackville. This is unlikely to have been a coincidence. Sackville's descendants, the Earls and Dukes of Dorset and Barons Sackville, have owned or lived in the property ever since.
Thomas Sackville, at that time Lord Buckhurst, had considered a number of other sites to build a house commensurate with his elevated status in court and government. However, he could not overlook the multiple advantages of Knole: a good supply of spring water (rare for a house on a hill), plentiful timber, a deer park and close enough proximity to London. He immediately began a large building programme. This was supposed to have been completed within two years, employing some 200 workmen, but the partially-surviving accounts show that there was continuing, vast expenditure even in 1608–1609. Since Sackville had had a distinguished career at court under Elizabeth and then been appointed Lord High Treasurer to James VI and I, he had the resources to undertake such a programme. Perhaps, with his renovations to the state rooms at Knole, Sackville hoped to receive a visit by the King, but this does not seem to have occurred and the lord treasurer himself died during the building work, in April 1608, at the age of about 72.
Thomas Sackville's Jacobean great house, like others such as Hatfield and Audley End, have been called "monuments to private greed". Unlike any surviving English great house apart from Haddon Hall, Knole today still looks as it did when Thomas died, having managed "to remain motionless like this since the early 17th century, balanced between growth and decay."
Thomas's son, Robert Sackville, second earl of Dorset, took over the titles and estates, gave a description of his father's work on re-modelling Knole: "late re-edified wth a barne, stable, dovehouse and other edifices, together wth divers Courts, the gardens orchards and wilderness invironed wth a stone wall, well planted wth choise frute, and beawtified wth ponds, and manie other pleasureable delights and devises are situate wthin the Parke of knoll, the charge of new building of the said house and making planting and furnishing of the said ponds yards gardens orchards and wilderness about Seaven yeares past Thirty thosand pounds at the least yet exstant uppon Accounpts. All wch are now in the Earle of dorsetts owne occupacon and are worth to bee sold."
The second earl did not enjoy Knole for long, since he died in January 1609. His two sons, in turn, inherited the title and estates, first Richard Sackville, third earl of Dorset (1589–1624) and then the much more politically significant Edward Sackville, fourth earl of Dorset (1590–1652). None of these earls lived permanently at Knole. In the first earl's case, this was no doubt due to the renovations. The third earl lived mostly at court, though he is known to have kept his hunting horses and hounds there.
The wife of the 3rd Earl, Lady Anne Clifford, lived at Knole for a time during the couple's conflict over her inheritance from her father, George Clifford, third earl of Cumberland. A catalogue of the household of the Earl and Countess of Dorset at Knole from this time survives. It records the names and roles of servants and indicates where they sat at dinner. The list includes two African servants, Grace Robinson, a maid in the laundry, and John Morockoe, who worked in the kitchen. Both are described as "Blackamoors". In 1623, a large part of Knole House burnt down.
Knole during the Civil War, Commonwealth and Restoration
Edward, a relatively moderate royalist, was away from Knole in the summer of 1642, when he and his cousin and factotum Sir John Sackville fell under suspicion of stockpiling arms and preparing local men to fight for Charles I during the Civil War. The rumours of the cache of arms reached Parliament in an intercepted letter for which Sir John was notionally the source. On Sunday 14 August 1642, Parliament sent three troops of horse under Colonel Edwin Sandys, a member of a Kentish puritan family, to seize these arms from Knole. Sir John was in the congregation for the parish Sunday service and Sandys waited with his troops outside the church until it had finished. Local people tried to rescue him but they quickly judged that the troops were too strong for them, and Sir John was arrested and taken to the Fleet prison.
Sandys's troops then moved to Knole where, according to the earl of Dorset's steward, they caused damage to the value of £186, and 'The Armes they have wholie taken awaie there being five wagenloads of them (sic passim).' In fact, the arms were largely of more interest to antiquarians than to soldiers; they included, for example, thirteen 'old French pistolls whereof four have locks [and] the other nine have none'. Sandys claimed that he had seized ' armes for 500 or 600 men', but this is untrue. Nevertheless, the House of Lords resolved that 'such [arms] as are fit to be made use of for the Service of the Kingdom are to be employed'. In addition, the House was sequestrated. Edward accepted the seizures and damage to Knole as an inevitable part of the Civil War, as he explained in a speech to Charles I and his peers in Oxford, in 1642: 'For my particular, in these wars I have suffered as much as any, my Houses have been searcht, my Armes taken thence, and my sonne and heire committed to prison; yet I shall wave these discourtesies, because I know there was a necessity they should be so.'
Parliament established County Committees to govern the counties under its control. For the first 12 to 18 months of its operation, the Kent Committee was based at Knole, until its obvious disadvantage, being at one end of a very large county, led to its removal first to Aylesford and then to Maidstone. Apart from the committee, the county treasury was based here, along with a bodyguard of between 75 and 150 men and the so-called 'Household'. To provision its varied occupants, the Committee not only used the Knole estate but also rented fields from local landowners, including, surprisingly, Lady Sackville (Sir John's wife). Some accounts for the period survive. They show, for example, a gift of a few pounds to goodman Skinner for 'looking to Knole Parkgate.' Other expenditure was seen as much more extravagant, including £3091 for the Household, called the 'seraglio' by local enemies. Committee meetings were held in the room now known as Poets' Parlour where, in addition to using the existing furnishings, £153 was spent on sheets, table linen and carpets and £22 on silverware, candlesticks, glasses, jugs and drinking horns. Additional beds were also brought from Kippington, Thomas Farnaby's sequestered house from the other side of Sevenoaks. One indication of the religious issues involved in the War is shown from the expenditure of £1 17s 4d for the 'carpenters and others employed in taking away the rails and levelling the ground in the chapel at Knole'. Nevertheless, the committee had moved to Aylesford Priory before April 1645.
When Edward Sackville died in 1652, his son Richard inherited not only the earldom, but estates in substantial debt, not least owing to fines imposed by Parliament for his father's role in the Civil War. He practised quiet retrenchment, despite taking part in some public work following the Restoration of Charles II, including membership of the commission for the trial of the regicides. However, his marriage to Lady Frances Cranfield, daughter of Lionel Cranfield, was important for Knole. When her brother died, she inherited the Middlesex estates, including Copt Hall in Essex. Richard died at Knole on 27 August 1677. but his son, Charles, the sixth earl of Dorset (1643–1706), sold Copt Hall in 1701. Many of the contents were then moved to Knole, substantially enriching the collection. These include the copies by Daniel Mytens of Raphael cartoons in the Cartoon Gallery and many portraits and pieces of furniture. Along with John Frederick Sackville, the third duke of Dorset (1745–1799), Charles can now be seen as one of the two principal collectors responsible for the remarkable holdings of Knole House.
Charles was an important figure in the late Stuart court; Vita Sackville-West calls him 'one of the most jovial and debonair figures in the Knole portrait-gallery.' He was a poet and patron who became Charles II's lord chamberlain and 'unofficial minister of the arts', with the 'poets' parlour' in Knole becoming a venue for literary society to converse. After 1688, John Dryden ceased to be poet laureate, owing to his catholic views which meant he refused the oath of allegiance to William and Mary. Charles stood by him with generous gifts of money, despite Dryden's bitterness about his treatment at court. On one occasion, dining at Knole, Dryden found a hundred-pound note under his plate. Not only Dryden but several other poets of the age appear to have been guests at Knole. The so-called 'Poet's Parlour' is today part of the private Sackville-West family apartments at Knole.
As the heir to the earl of Middlesex's estates, he obtained the new creation earl of Middlesex in 1674. In January 1688, his son, Lionel Sackville, was born at Knole. When Charles died in 1706, Lionel inherited.
Knole since 1700
Lionel Sackville was a key supporter of the Hanoverian Succession and was rewarded by George I with the Garter in 1714 and the dukedom of Dorset in 1720. In 1730, Sir Robert Walpole appointed him lord lieutenant of Ireland. Much later, in 1757, he was attacked in Knole Park by a mob protesting against the Militia Bill. However, he was saved by the arrival of a small cavalry force and died peacefully in Knole House in 1765. His wife, Elizabeth, had been a maid of honour to Queen Anne. Her great friend, Lady Betty Germain(e), lived at Knole for such a long time that her bedroom, sitting room and china closet are, to this day, named after her.
Lionel's son, Charles, 2nd Duke of Dorset, only survived his father by four years, but his grandson the 3rd Duke was a much more significant character for Knole. An avid collector with the means to satisfy his acquisitiveness, he not only brought back various old masters from his Grand Tour in 1770, but also became a discerning patron for contemporary artists. Sir Joshua Reynolds painted a full-length portrait and the duke also acquired several other paintings by Reynolds, eleven of which are still on display in the Reynolds Room.
John Frederick's only son, George, the fourth duke, died in 1815 aged 21, and Knole was then left by the third Duke's widow in 1825 to their daughter Mary, Countess of Plymouth. She died childless in 1864, leaving it to her sister Countess De La Warr and her heirs male. It ultimately passed to the latter's fourth son, Mortimer Sackville-West, 1st Baron Sackville, and thence to his successors. However, Lord Sackville's resources were insufficient to maintain the house and its possessions. He began selling a number of the heirlooms to enable him to keep the estate going.
The Sackville-West descendants included writer Vita Sackville-West. Her Knole and the Sackvilles, published 1922, is regarded as a classic in the literature of English country houses. Its rather romantic style is sometimes of dubious historical accuracy but it is based upon full access to the manuscripts and books at that time in the House's collection, though many are now in the Kent County Archives (originally at the Centre for Kentish Studies; hence CKS in some catalogue records, and now at the Kent History and Library Centre) in Maidstone.
It was soon after this book's publication, in December 1922, that Vita first met Virginia Woolf who, became a friend and, for a while in the later 1920s, her lover. Woolf wrote Orlando over the winter of 1927–1928, an experimental, though accessible, novel which drew on the history of the house and Sackville-West's ancestors, particularly as presented in Vita's book. The Sackville family custom of following the Salic rules of primogeniture was to prevent Vita from inheriting Knole upon the death of her father Lionel (1867–1928), the 3rd Lord Sackville. As she was not philoprogenitive, this was as well, but the thought hung heavily on her at this time. Woolf gave her a fantastical version of Knole and, when Vita had read it, she wrote to Virginia, 'You made me cry with your passages about Knole, you wretch.' This sentiment may be heightened by the uses of Vita as a historical model for some of the photos in the original Hogarth edition. Three of these are, in fact, adapted from pictures at Knole: 'Orlando as a boy' from the young Edward Sackville in the double portrait; 'Archduchess Harriet' from a picture of Mary, fourth countess of Somerset in Lord Sackville's private collection and 'Orlando as Ambassador' from a portrait of Lionel Sackville, the first duke of Dorset by Rosalba Carriera. On her father's death in 1928, the house and estate went to Lionel's younger brother, Charles (1870–1962). However, if Vita had to leave Knole, Orlando remained; the original manuscript of what Vita's son, Nigel Nicolson called, 'the longest and most charming love-letter in literature' is there. It is perhaps fairer to see it as a work of consolation to Vita, though it is one that also contains a number of barbed comments about Knole and the Sackvilles, with its altered versions of letters and lists:
Already – it is an effect lists have upon us – we are beginning to yawn. But if we stop, it is only that the catalogue is tedious, not that it is finished. There are ninety-nine pages more of it … . And so on and so on.
Art and architecture
House
Although its complex history reveals Knole to have been the result of many periods of development, its national importance is primarily for its 17th-century structure. As Newton puts it:
Knole is neither sublime nor picturesque. It is, however, especially in the distant view, authentic, looking almost exactly now as it did in the year Thomas Sackville died... . No English great house but Haddon has managed to remain motionless like this since the early-seventeenth century, balanced between growth and decay.
At the time of Sackville's rebuilding, little notice was taken of his work. It was not at the forefront of architectural development and, in 1673, John Evelyn called it '‘a great old fashioned house', quite unlike the classical style favoured by Inigo Jones and also illustrated by Thomas Howard, the first earl of Suffolk's almost contemporary rebuilding of Audley End. Knole may no longer look much like Bourchier's late-medieval house, but it can still give the impression of a sombre, squat, complex of houses, not least thanks to its use of the dark Kentish ragstone. However, Town asserts its importance, arguing that 'what Sackville achieved at Knole was a remarkable synthesis of what was inherited from the existing fabric and what was newly built.' He had taken a great, late-medieval house for a series of archbishops of Canterbury, usually among the most powerful men in the state, which had already experienced other changes of function and occupancy during the sixteenth century, and made it a Jacobean country house. Sackville recommended the "very excellent surveyor" John Thorpe to survey and make "plots" in 1605 for the rebuilding of Ampthill for Anne of Denmark and Prince Henry, and may have employed him on his own building projects.
Beyond the Jacobean facade, plentiful evidence still exists of the earlier house. One of the main surviving elements is the northern range of Stone Court. The upper floors contain a series of high-status apartments, and these are demonstrated by a number of structural features, such as the series of large garderobe towers protruding on the north side and the cellars below, which contain some late-15th-century wall paintings.
In 2013, Knole was granted £7.75m by the Heritage Lottery Fund for conservation and repair work to the House. As part of this work, in 2014, archaeologists found that the late-medieval wall and roof timbers, and the oak beams beneath floors, particularly near fireplaces, had been scorched and carved with scratched marks. Initial media coverage focused on these being apotropaic marks, or "witch marks", to prevent witches and demons from coming down the chimney. This is one of a series of possible interpretations of such marks, which are now being found increasingly on medieval and renaissance building across England, including at Sissinghurst. However, all interpretations suggest they were apotropaic rituals to ward off fire damage or evil spirits. Since many of these are late-medieval marks, covered up during the early-17th-century rebuilding of Knole, it is fanciful to link them to James I's interest in witchcraft, particularly since, after the publication of his book Daemonologie (1597), he later became much more sceptical about the existence of witches.
Rooms
The many state rooms open to the public contain a collection of 17th-century royal Stuart furniture, perquisites from the 6th Earl's service as Lord Chamberlain to William III in the royal court. These include three state beds, silver furniture (comprising a pair of torchieres, mirror and dressing table, being rare survivors of this type), outstanding tapestries and textiles, and the Knole Settee. The art collection includes portraits by Van Dyck, Gainsborough, Sir Peter Lely, Sir Godfrey Kneller and Sir Joshua Reynolds (the last being a personal friend of the 3rd Duke), and a copy of the Raphael Cartoons. Reynolds's portraits in the house include a late self-portrait in doctoral robes and depictions of Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith and Wang-y-tong, a Chinese page boy who was taken into the Sackville household. There are also survivals from the English Renaissance: an Italianate staircase of great delicacy and the vividly carved overmantel and fireplace in the Great Chamber. The 'Sackville leopards', holding heraldic shields in their paws and forming finials on the balusters of the principal stair (constructed 1605–1608) of the house, are derived from the Sackville coat of arms. The chapel-room with its crypt seems to pre-date this period and has contemporary pews.
The organ, in the late medieval private chapel at Knole, is arguably the oldest playable organ in England. The organ has four ranks of oak pipes (Stopped Diapason 8, Principal 4, Twelfth 22/3 and Fifteenth 2) contained in a rectangular ornamented chest with the keyboard at the top. Its date of construction is not known, but an early guidebook refers to a marked date of 1623 (although no such date mark is still apparent) – a date in the 1620s has been suggested. The pitch of the organ is sharp (A460 Hz) and the foot-pumped bellows remain in working order.
Collections
The National Trust has a digital record of most of its Knole collection. It contains internationally important collections, particularly of 17th-century state furniture.
Ownership, care and uses
The house is cared for and opened by the National Trust, which has owned the house since it was donated by The 4th Baron Sackville in 1947; however, the Trust owns only the house and an adjoining modest park – overall . Much of the house is lived in by the Sackville-Wests: the Sackville family or the family trust own the remainder of the deer park but permit commercialised access and certain charitable and sporting community events.
There is an oft repeated myth that Knole is a calendar house, which had 365 rooms, 52 staircases, 12 entrances and seven courtyards. P. G. Wodehouse, in chapter 14 of his 1953 work Bring On the Girls!, makes it 365 rooms, 52 staircases, 12 courtyards, and 20 bathrooms – including one that is haunted. While the number of rooms is approximately correct, the number of staircases has been reduced by internal renovations and changes. Traditionally, there have been sevens spaces called courts – Green Court, Stable Court, Stone Court, Water Court, Queen's Court, Pheasant Court and Men's Court. This definition is somewhat loose, with additional courtyards such as Brewhouse Yard and Carpenters Yard not included.
In January 2012, the National Trust launched a seven-year plan to conserve and restore the house, including a public appeal for £2.7M.
Gardens
Knole has a walled garden (30 including the 'footprint' of the house). It has the unusual – and essentially medieval feature of a smaller walled garden inside the outer one (Hortus Conclusus). It contains many other features from earlier ages which have been taken out of most country-house gardens: various landscapers have been employed to elaborate the design of its large gardens with distinctive features. These features include clair-voies, a patte d'oie, two avenues, and bosquet hedges. The herb garden by the orangery was designed in 1963 by Margaret Brownlow.
Remainder of the park
Overall the house is set in its deer park. This has generally been kept in traditional condition; however, the controlled deer population does not have access to all parts. Due to the rich woodland, Knole Park is a Site of Special Scientific Interest. The park hosts the annual Knole Run, a schools cross-country race.
Commercial and cultural uses
Knole was the setting for the filming in January 1967 of the Beatles' videos that accompanied the release of "Penny Lane" and "Strawberry Fields Forever". The stone archway through which the four Beatles rode on horses can still be seen on the southeastern side of the Bird House, which itself is on the southeastern side of Knole House. The same visit to Knole Park inspired another Beatles song, "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!," which John Lennon wrote after buying an 1843 poster in a nearby antiques shop that advertised Pablo Fanque's Circus Royal.
Knole also appears in the 2008 film The Other Boleyn Girl, along with nearby Penshurst Place and Dover Castle. It has been featured in several other films including Burke and Hare (2010), Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.
The British Film Institute has a freely-available, family home film from 1961, showing how the park looked at that time. A 1950 film made by the Sevenoaks Ciné Society, an amateur group, features the house in Hikers' Haunt.
See also
John Frederick Sackville, 3rd Duke of Dorset
Lionel Bertrand Sackville-West, 6th Baron Sackville
References
Bibliography
Primary sources
Centre for Kentish Studies, U269 T1 Bdl. A.
Early English Books Online, Thomason / 14:E.83[19]. Two speeches spoken at the councell-table at Oxford. The one, by the Right Honourable John Earle of Bristoll, in favour of the continuation of the present warre. The other, by the Right Honourable Edward Earle of Dorset, for a speedy accommodation betwixt His Majestie, and his high court of Parliament. Printed at Oxford by Leonard Lichfield, And now reprinted at LONDON for Iohn Hanson (1642).
House of Lords Journal for Monday 15 August 1642 (18 Car 289 vol 5; https://www.british-history.ac.uk/lords-jrnl/vol5/pp288-293#h3-0006).
The National Archive: PRO, Exchequer, E 101/421/10.
Secondary sources
Barrett Lennard, Thomas (1908), "An account of the families of Lennard and Barrett", private publication, https://archive.org/stream/accountoffamilie02barr.
Benson-Wilson, Andrew (January 2002), catalogue notes in "Thomas Tallis: The Complete Works, Volume 5" at signumrecords.com: http://www.signumrecords.com/catalogue/choral/thomas-tallis:-the-complete-works-*-volume-5/sigcd016.html.
Brady, Henry John, F.R.A.S. (1839), The Visitor's Guide to Knole, (James Payne, London, 1839)The Visitor's Guide to Knole.
Burns, Robert E. (2008), Sackville, 'Lionel Cranfield, first duke of Dorset', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (3.1.2008), accessed 23.2.2018.
Champion, Matthew (2018), 'Fighting fire with fire: taper burn marks', in British Archaeology (March–April 2018), 36–41.
Clark, Linda (2004),'Bourchier, Thomas', in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (23.9.2004), accessed 23.2.2018.
Coward, Barry & Gaunt, Peter (2017), The Stuart Age, 5th edition, Routledge.
Donnagan, Barbara (2008), 'Sir William Waller', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (3.1.2008), accessed 14.3.2018.
Du Boulay, F. B. H. (1952), 'Archbishop Cranmer and the Canterbury Temporalities', in English Historical Review vol. 67, no. 262 (Jan 1952), pages 19–36.
Everitt, Alan M. (1960), 'An Account Book of the Committee of Kent, 1646–7' in A Seventeenth Century Miscellany, Kent Records, vol. XVII (1960).
Everitt, Alan M. (1966), The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion, 1640–1660, Leicester University Press.
Everitt, Alan M. (1986), Continuity and Colonization: the evolution of Kentish settlement, Leicester University Press.
Forde, Deidre (2010), Knole Cellars in Stone Court, Sevenoaks, Kent, Oxford Archaeology for the National Trust, https://library.thehumanjourney.net/645/.
Graves, Michael (2014), 'Sackville, Robert, second earl of Dorset', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (25.9.2014), accessed 22.02.2018.
Gregory, Alden (2010) Knole: an Architectural and Social History of the Archbishop of Canterbury's House, 1456–1538, unpublished University of Sussex D Phil Thesis, available at http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/6896/ 72–83.
Harvey, I.M.W. (2004), 'Cade, John [Jack] [alias John Mortimer; called the Captain of Kent]', in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (23.9.2004), accessed 7.3.2018.
Hasted, Edward (1797), The History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent: Volume 3, .
Jackson-Stops, Gervase, Knole, the National Trust, 1984.
Laing, Alastair, foreword to 'Knole' in National Trust (no editor acknowledged), Oil Paintings in National Trust Properties in National Trust V: South Public Catalogue Foundation/ National Trust, 2013; foreword, pp. 160–162, followed by illustrated catalogue, pp. 162–189.
Love, Harold (2008), 'Sackville, Charles, sixth earl of Dorset and first earl of Middlesex', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (3.1.2008), accessed 23.2.2018.
National Heritage List for England|num=1000183|accessdate=17 August 2013.
Newman, John (2012), Kent: West and the Weald, in the series The Buildings of England, Yale and London: Yale University Press.
Newton, A.P. (1942), Introduction to Calendar of the Manuscripts of Major-General Lord Sackville, KBE, CB, CMG, Preserved at Knole, Sevenoaks, Kent, vol. 1, Cranfield Papers, 1551–1612, Historical Manuscripts Commission, 80; HMSO, London, 1942.
Rymer's Foedera Volume 12. Originally published by Apud Joannem Neulme, London, 1739–1745. Online edition from https://www.british-history.ac.uk/search/series/rymer-foedera.
Sackville-West, Robert (2010), 'Inheritance: The Story of Knole & the Sackvilles', Bloomsbury.
Sackville-West, Vita (1922), Knole and the Sackvilles, Heinemann.
Sackville-West, Vita 'Knole and its Owners', in Jackson-Stops, Gervase (1984) Knole, The National Trust.
Smith, David L. (1989), The Political Career of Edward Sackville, Fourth Earl of Dorset, University of Cambridge unpublished PhD thesis, https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/250968.
Smith, David L. (2008), 'Sackville, Edward, fourth earl of Dorset', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (3.1.2008), accessed 22.2.2018.
Spence, Richard T. (2004), 'Clifford, Anne [known as Lady Anne Clifford], countess of Pembroke, Dorset, and Montgomery', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, , 25.9.2014, accessed 14.3.2018.
Town, Edward (2010), A House 'Re-edified': Thomas Sackville and the Transformation of Knole, 1605–1608, unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Sussex; available online via Sussex Research Online:http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/6893/.
Turner, Steve (1994), "A Hard Day's Write." New York: HarperCollins.
Whitworth, Michael (2015), Introduction and Notes to Orlando: a Biography, Oxford World Classics, added to the 2015 edition.
Woolf, Virginia (1928), Orlando: a Biography, The Hogarth Press.
Wormald, Jenny (2014)'James VI and I', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, , 25.9.2014, accessed 28.2.2018.
Zim, Rivkah (2005) Sackville, Thomas, first Baron Buckhurst and first earl of Dorset, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, , (28.5.2015), accessed 22.02.2018.
External links
Knole information at the National Trust
Historical Images of Knole House
Read a detailed historical record on Knole House
National Archives: Archon directory entry for Centre of Kentish Studies
Kent Archives Service online catalogue
List of paintings on view
Country houses in Kent
National Trust properties in Kent
Episcopal palaces of archbishops of Canterbury
Buildings and structures in Sevenoaks
Grade I listed houses in Kent
Historic house museums in Kent
Sackville family
Grade I listed parks and gardens in Kent
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger%20Miller
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Roger Miller
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Roger Dean Miller Sr. (January 2, 1936 – October 25, 1992) was an American singer-songwriter, widely known for his honky-tonk-influenced novelty songs and his chart-topping country hits "King of the Road", "Dang Me", and "England Swings".
After growing up in Oklahoma and serving in the U.S. Army, Miller began his musical career as a songwriter in the late 1950s, writing such hits as "Billy Bayou" and "Home" for Jim Reeves and "Invitation to the Blues" for Ray Price. He later began a recording career and reached the peak of his fame in the mid-1960s, continuing to record and tour into the 1990s, charting his final top 20 country hit "Old Friends" with Price and Willie Nelson in 1982. He also wrote and performed several of the songs for the 1973 Disney animated film Robin Hood. Later in his life, he wrote the music and lyrics for the 1985 Tony Award−winning Broadway musical Big River, in which he acted.
Miller died from lung cancer in 1992 and was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame three years later. His songs continued to be recorded by other singers, with covers of "Tall, Tall Trees" by Alan Jackson and "Husbands and Wives" by Brooks & Dunn; both reached the number one spot on country charts in the 1990s. The Roger Miller Museum — now closed — in his home town of Erick, Oklahoma, was a tribute to Miller.
Early life
Roger Miller was born in Fort Worth, Texas, the third son of Jean and Laudene (Holt) Miller. Jean Miller died from spinal meningitis when Miller was a year old. Unable to support the family during the Great Depression, Laudene sent her three sons to live with three of Jean's brothers. Thus, Miller grew up on a farm outside Erick, Oklahoma, with Elmer and Armelia Miller.
As a boy, Miller did farm work, such as picking cotton and plowing. He later said he was "dirt poor" and that as late as 1951 the family did not own a telephone. He received his primary education at a one-room schoolhouse. Miller was an introverted child who often daydreamed or composed songs. One of his earliest compositions went: "There's a picture on the wall. It's the dearest of them all, Mother."
Miller was a member of the FFA in high school. He listened to the Grand Ole Opry and Light Crust Doughboys on a Fort Worth station with his cousin's husband, Sheb Wooley. Wooley taught Miller his first guitar chords and bought him a fiddle. Wooley, Hank Williams, and Bob Wills were the influences that led to Miller's desire to be a singer-songwriter. He began to run away and perform in Oklahoma and Texas. At 17, he stole a guitar out of desperation to write songs; however, he turned himself in the next day. He chose to enlist in the U.S. Army to avoid jail. He later quipped, "My education was Korea, Clash of '52." Near the end of his military service, while stationed in Atlanta, Georgia, Miller played fiddle in the "Circle A Wranglers", a military musical group started by Faron Young. While Miller was stationed in South Carolina, an army sergeant whose brother was Kenneth C. "Jethro" Burns, from the musical duo Homer and Jethro, persuaded him to head to Nashville after his discharge.
Career
Nashville songwriter
On leaving the Army, Miller traveled to Nashville to begin his musical career. He met with Chet Atkins, who asked to hear him sing, loaning him a guitar since Miller did not own one. Out of nervousness, Miller played the guitar and sang a song in two different keys. Atkins advised him to come back later, when he had more experience. Miller found work as a bellhop at Nashville's Andrew Jackson Hotel, and he was soon known as the "singing bellhop." He was finally hired by Minnie Pearl to play the fiddle in her band. He then met George Jones, who introduced him to music executives from the Starday Records label who scheduled an audition. Impressed, the executives set up a recording session with Jones in Houston. Jones and Miller collaborated to write "Tall, Tall Trees" and "Happy Child."
After marrying and becoming a father, Miller put aside his music career to be a fireman in Amarillo, Texas. A fireman by day, he performed at night. Miller said that as a fireman he saw only two fires, one in a "chicken coop" and another he "slept through", after which the department "suggested that...[he] seek other employment." Miller met Ray Price and became a member of his Cherokee Cowboys. He returned to Nashville and wrote "Invitation to the Blues", which was covered by Rex Allen and later by Ray Price, whose recording was a number three hit on country charts. Miller then signed with Tree Publishing on a salary of $50 a week. He wrote: "Half a Mind" for Ernest Tubb, "That's the Way I Feel" for Faron Young; and his first number one, "Billy Bayou", which along with "Home" was recorded by Jim Reeves. Miller became one of the biggest songwriters of the 1950s. Bill Anderson later remarked that "Roger was the most talented, and least disciplined, person that you could imagine", citing the attempts of Miller's Tree Publishing boss, Buddy Killen to force him to finish a piece. He was known to give away lines, inciting many Nashville songwriters to follow him around since, according to Killen, "everything he said was a potential song."
Recording career
Miller signed a recording deal with Decca Records in 1958. He was paired with singer Donny Lytle, who later gained fame under the name Johnny Paycheck, to perform the Miller-written "A Man Like Me", and later "The Wrong Kind of Girl". Neither of these honky-tonk-style songs charted. His second single with the label, featuring the B-side "Jason Fleming", foreshadowed Miller's future style. To make money, Miller went on tour with Faron Young's band as a drummer, although he had never drummed. During this period, he signed a record deal with Chet Atkins at RCA Victor, for whom Miller recorded "You Don't Want My Love" (also known as "In the Summertime") in 1960, which marked his first appearance on country charts, peaking at No. 14. The next year he made an even bigger impact, breaking through the top 10 with his single "When Two Worlds Collide", cowritten with Bill Anderson. But Miller soon tired of writing songs, divorced his wife, and began a party lifestyle that earned him the moniker "wild child." He was dropped from his record label and began to pursue other interests.
After numerous appearances on late night comedy shows, Miller decided that he might have a chance in Hollywood as an actor. Short of money, he signed with the up-and-coming label Smash Records, asked the label for $1,600 in cash in exchange for recording 16 sides. Smash agreed to the proposal, and Miller performed his first session for the company early in 1964, when he recorded the hits "Dang Me" and "Chug-a-Lug". Both were released as singles, peaking at No. 1 and No. 3 respectively on country charts; both fared well on the Billboard Hot 100 reaching No. 7 and No. 9. The songs transformed Miller's career, although the former was penned by Miller in just four minutes. Later that year, he recorded the No. 15 hit "Do-Wacka-Do", and soon after, the biggest hit of his career "King of the Road", which topped Country and Adult Contemporary charts while peaking at No. 4 on the Billboard 100. It also reached No. 1 in the UK Singles Chart for one week in May 1965. The song was inspired by a sign in Chicago that read "Trailers for Sale or Rent" and a hobo who happened upon Miller at an airport in Boise, but Miller needed months to write the song, which was certified gold in May 1965 after selling a million copies. It won numerous awards and earned a royalty check of $160,000 that summer. Later in the year Miller scored hits with "Engine Engine No. 9", "Kansas City Star" (a Top Ten country hit in 1965 about a local television children's show personality who would rather stay in the safety and security of his success in Kansas City than become a bigger star – or risk failure – in Omaha), and "England Swings" (an adult contemporary No. 1). He began 1966 with the hit "Husbands and Wives, a mid-tempo waltz reflecting on issues that affect marriages."
Miller was given his own TV show on NBC in September 1966. It lasted for 13 weeks, and it ended its run in January 1967. During this period Miller recorded songs written by other songwriters. The final hit of his own composition was "Walkin in the Sunshine", which reached No. 7 and No. 6 on the country and adult contemporary charts in 1967. Later in the year he scored his final top 10 hit with the first recording of Bobby Russell's "Little Green Apples". The next year, he was first to cover Kris Kristofferson's "Me and Bobby McGee," taking the song to No. 12 on country charts. In 1970, Miller recorded the album A Trip in the Country, honky-tonk-style standards penned by Miller, including "Tall, Tall Trees." Later that year, after Smash Records folded, Miller was signed by Columbia Records, for whom he released Dear Folks: Sorry I Haven't Written Lately in 1973. Later that year, Miller wrote and performed three songs in the Walt Disney animated feature Robin Hood as the rooster and minstrel Allan-a-Dale: "Oo-De-Lally", "Not in Nottingham", and "Whistle-Stop" (which was sampled for use in the popular Hampster Dance web site). He provided the voice of Speiltoe, the equine narrator of the Rankin/Bass holiday special Nestor the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey in 1977. Miller collaborated with Willie Nelson on an album titled Old Friends. The title track was based on a song he had previously penned for his family in Oklahoma. The song, with guest vocals from Ray Price, was the last hit of Miller's career, peaking at No. 19 on country charts in 1982.
Late career
In 1970, Miller opened the King of the Road Inn, a Nashville hotel. As Brian Carpenter wrote in Southern Cultures, "With its rooftop lounge and accompanying penthouse suite (complete with a swinging double bed), Miller's King of the Road Inn was, for a time, the unofficial center of Nashville's thriving music scene." It is now called the Clarion Hotel Downtown Nashville-Stadium.
Miller continued to record for different record labels and charted a few songs, but stopped writing in 1978, feeling that his more "artistic" works were not appreciated. He was absent from the entertainment business following the release of Old Friends in 1981, but returned after receiving an offer to write a Broadway score for a musical based upon Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Although he had not read the novel, Miller accepted the offer after discovering how the story brought him back to his childhood in rural Oklahoma. It took a year and a half to write the opening, but he eventually finished it. The work, titled Big River, premiered at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre in New York on April 25, 1985. The musical received glowing reviews, earning seven Tony Awards including "Best Score" for Miller. He acted the part of Huck Finn's father Pap for three months after the exit of actor John Goodman, who left for Hollywood. In 1983 Miller played a dramatic role on an episode of Quincy, M.E. He played a country and western singer who is severely burned while freebasing cocaine.
Miller left for Santa Fe to live with his family following the success of Big River. He co-wrote Dwight Yoakam's hit "It Only Hurts When I Cry" from his 1990 album If There Was a Way, and supplied background vocals. The song was released as a single in 1991, peaking at No. 7 on country charts. He began a solo guitar tour in 1990, ending the following year after being diagnosed with lung cancer. His last performance on television occurred on a special tribute to Minnie Pearl which aired on TNN on October 26, 1992, the day after Miller's death.
Style
Although he is usually grouped with country music singers, Miller's unique style defies easy classification. Many of his recordings were humorous novelty songs with whimsical lyrics, coupled with scat singing or vocalese riffs filled with nonsense syllables. Others were sincere ballads which caught the public's fancy, like his signature song, "King of the Road". The biographical book Ain't Got No Cigarettes described Miller as an "uncategorizable talent" and stated that many regarded him as a genius.
Miller's whimsical lyrics and nonsense sounding style led to him writing and performing songs for children's films such as "Oo-de-Lally" for the Disney animated film Robin Hood. During his most successful years as a songwriter and singer, Miller's music was placed in the country genre due to his somewhat country or folk sounding voice and the use of an acoustic guitar. AllMusic wrote that in blending country with jazz, blues, and pop, Miller "utilized unusual harmonic and rhythmic devices in his sophisticated songcraft" and was an important influence on progressive country.
On his own style, Miller remarked that he "tried to do" things like other artists but that it "always came out different" so he got "frustrated" until realizing "I'm the only one that knows what I'm thinking." He commented that the favorite song that he wrote was "You Can't Rollerskate in a Buffalo Herd." Johnny Cash discussed Miller's bass vocal range in his 1997 autobiography. He stated that it was the closest to his own that he had heard.
Personal life and death
Miller was married three times and fathered eight children. Miller married Barbara Crow, from Shamrock, Texas, when they were both 17. Together the couple had four children, the first of whom died shortly after birth. As Miller's young family grew, his desire for fame and success continued to grow, as well. After moving the family to California for a short time, Miller and Barbara divorced. Subsequent public interest in Miller led to the success he had long hoped for but brought with it struggles for the performer that are often associated with life in the entertainment business: periods of burnout as well as alcohol and substance abuse. His amphetamine use in the 1960s has been described as both damaging of his career and helpful to his songwriting. In 1972 he referred to amphetamines as "a snake pit I got into" and supported a ban on the drug in Oklahoma.
Miller married Leah Kendrick of San Antonio in 1964. Together the couple had two children including Roger Dean Miller Jr. The senior Miller wrote the Christmas song "Old Toy Trains" for his son, who was two years old when it was released in 1967.
After 14 years of marriage, Leah and Miller divorced in the mid-seventies. Miller eventually married Mary Arnold whom he met through Kenny Rogers. Arnold was a replacement member in The First Edition, a band that included Rogers. After the breakup of The First Edition, she performed with her husband Miller on tours as a backup singer, including a performance at the White House before President Gerald Ford. In 2009 she was inducted into the Iowa Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame. She currently manages Roger Miller's estate. She sued Sony for copyright infringement in the 2007 case Roger Miller Music, Inc. v. Sony/ATV Publishing, LLC, which went to the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Arnold was ultimately awarded nearly $1 million in royalties and rights to the songs Miller wrote in 1964.
Miller was a lifelong cigarette smoker. During a television interview, Miller explained that he composed his songs from "bits and pieces" of ideas he wrote on scraps of paper. When asked what he did with the unused bits and pieces, he half-joked, "I smoke 'em!" He also wrote a song about his habit, titled "Dad Blame Anything A Man Can't Quit". Miller died of lung and throat cancer in 1992, at age 56, shortly after the discovery of a malignant tumor under his vocal cords.
Filmography
Waterhole No. 3 (1967) – Balladeer (voice)
Daniel Boone (1969) – Johnny Appleseed
Robin Hood (1973) – Alan-a-Dale – The Rooster (voice)
Nestor, the Long–Eared Christmas Donkey (1977) – Spieltoe
The Muppet Show Season 3, Episode 21 (Airdate: May 10, 1979) – Himself
Quincy, M.E. (1983) On Dying High S8/Ep16 (undated CF 2825 well)
Murder, She Wrote Season 1, Episode 5, It's A Dog's Life (Airdate: November 4, 1984) the Sheriff
Lucky Luke (1991) – Jolly Jumper (voice)
Lucky Luke (8 episodes, 1992) – Jolly Jumper/narrator (voice)
Discography
Awards
In addition to 11 Grammy Awards, Roger Miller won Broadway's Tony Award for writing the music and lyrics for Big River, which won a total of 7 Tony's including best musical in 1985. He was voted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1973 and the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1995. Miller won 11 Grammy Awards. In Erick, Oklahoma, where he grew up, a thoroughfare was renamed "Roger Miller Boulevard" and a museum dedicated to Miller was built on the road in 2004.
Below is a list of awards won by Miller:
1964 — Grammy Award: Best Country Song: "Dang Me"
1964 — Grammy Award: Best New Country and Western Artist
1964 — Grammy Award: Best Country and Western Recording, Single: "Dang Me"
1964 — Grammy Award: Best Country and Western Performance, Male: "Dang Me"
1964 — Grammy Award: Best Country and Western Album: "Dang Me"/"Chug-a-Lug"
1965 — Jukebox Artist of the Year
1965 — Grammy Award: Best Country Song: "King of the Road"
1965 — Grammy Award: Best Country Vocal Performance, Male: "King of the Road"
1965 — Grammy Award: Best Country and Western Recording, Single: "King of the Road"
1965 — Grammy Award: Best Contemporary Vocal Performance, Male: "King of the Road"
1965 — Grammy Award: Best Contemporary (Rock 'N Roll), Single: "King of the Road"
1965 — Grammy Award: Best Country and Western Album: "The Return of Roger Miller"
1965 — Academy of Country and Western Music: "Best Songwriter"
1965 — Academy of Country and Western Music: "Man of the Year"
1973 — Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame
1985 — Tony Award for Best Score and Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Lyrics for Big River
1988 — Academy of Country Music: Pioneer Award
1995 — Country Music Hall of Fame (Inducted with Jo Walker-Meador)
1997 — Grammy Hall of Fame Song : "Dang Me"
1998 — Grammy Hall of Fame Song : "King of the Road"
2003 — CMT's 40 Greatest Men of Country Music: Ranked No. 23.
References
Sources
Cooper, Daniel. (1998). "Roger Miller." In The Encyclopedia of Country Music. Paul Kingsbury, Ed. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 347–8.
External links
All Roger Miller Songs Written and Released
Episode of Quincy ME starring Roger Miller
Roger Miller Museum in Erick, Oklahoma
Roger Miller interview on the Pop Chronicles
1936 births
1992 deaths
20th-century American composers
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heather%20Wilson
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Heather Wilson
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Heather Ann Wilson (born December 30, 1960) is the 11th President of the University of Texas at El Paso. She previously served as the 24th Secretary of the United States Air Force from 2017 through 2019. Wilson was the 12th president of the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City from 2013 to 2017, and she was the first female military veteran elected to a full term in Congress. She was a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives for from 1998 to 2009.
While Secretary of the Air Force, Wilson focused on restoring the readiness of the force which had declined after years of combat and budget constraints. She proposed and supported three straight years of double-digit budget increases for military space capability and publicly acknowledged that space is likely to be contested in any future conflict. Wilson also guided implementation of acquisition reform to reduce the time to get military capability to the warfighter and increase competition by making it easier for innovative companies to supply the Air Force. Wilson was honored by the Air Force, Army, Navy, and Department of Defense for her superior service upon her retirement.
While in the U.S. House of Representatives, Wilson focused on national security issues, serving on the United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the United States House Committee on Armed Services. She also focused on health care, energy, manufacturing and trade, and telecommunications, serving on the United States House Committee on Energy and Commerce. She opted not to run for re-election in 2008 and sought the U.S. Senate seat of retiring Senator Pete Domenici but finished second in the Republican primary to Congressman Steve Pearce, who then lost the general election to Democrat Tom Udall. On March 7, 2011, she announced another run for Senate in 2012 to replace retiring Senator Jeff Bingaman, but lost the general election to Democrat Martin Heinrich, her successor in the House of Representatives.
In April 2013 she was selected to be president of the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology by the South Dakota Board of Regents. She was the eighteenth president, and first female president, of SD Mines. Upon the recommendation of Secretary of Defense James Mattis, on January 23, 2017, President Donald Trump announced that he would nominate Wilson as Secretary of the Air Force. The U.S. Senate confirmed her nomination on May 8, 2017, and Mattis described her as “a leader for all seasons.” On March 8, 2019, Wilson said that she would resign as Secretary, effective May 31, 2019, in order to assume the office of President of the University of Texas at El Paso. On March 2, 2020, President Trump appointed Wilson to be a member of the National Science Board.
Early life and education
Wilson was born on December 30, 1960, in Keene, New Hampshire, the daughter of Martha Lou, nurse, and George Douglas "Doug" Wilson, a commercial pilot and member of the Experimental Aircraft Association. Wilson grew up around aviation and hoped to become a pilot like her father and grandfather before her. Her paternal grandparents were born in Scotland. Her grandfather, George Gordon "Scotty" Wilson, flew for the Royal Air Force in World War I and emigrated to America in 1922 where he was a barnstormer and airport operator in the 1920s and 1930s. He served as a courier pilot during World War II and started the New Hampshire Civil Air Patrol where he was a Wing Commander. Her father started flying at age 13 and enlisted in the United States Air Force after high school.
The United States Air Force Academy began admitting women during Wilson's junior year at Keene High School (Keene, New Hampshire). She applied and was appointed to the Academy. At the Academy, she was the first woman to command basic training and the first woman Vice Wing Commander. She graduated in 1982 as a Distinguished Graduate (magna cum laude equivalent). Wilson earned a Rhodes Scholarship to study at the University of Oxford and continued her education at Jesus College, earning an M.Phil. and D.Phil. in international relations by 1985.
In 1990, Oxford University Press published her book, International Law and the Use of Force by National Liberation Movements, which won the 1988 Paul Reuter Prize of the International Committee of the Red Cross. The Paul Reuter Prize is awarded for a major work in the sphere of international humanitarian law. Wilson won the second Reuter prize ever awarded.
An Air Force officer for seven years, Wilson was a negotiator and political adviser to the U.S. Air Force in the United Kingdom, and a defense planning officer for NATO in Belgium, where her work included arms control negotiations.
Career
National Security Council
Wilson served in the United States Air Force until 1989 when she was chosen to serve as director for European Defense Policy and Arms Control on the National Security Council staff, "the President's principal forum for considering national security and foreign policy matters with his senior national security advisors and cabinet officials. [. . .] The Council also serves as the President's principal arm for coordinating these policies among various government agencies." She worked for Republican President George H. W. Bush. Her principal responsibilities included guiding the U.S. position on the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) negotiations and NATO affairs during the period of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Warsaw Pact.
Keystone International
After leaving government in 1991, Wilson founded Keystone International, Inc. in Albuquerque, New Mexico to promote business development in the United States and Russia.
Governor Johnson administration
In 1995, Governor Gary Johnson appointed Wilson to be Cabinet Secretary of the New Mexico Children, Youth, and Families Department, a state-level agency with 2,000 employees and $200 million budget. During her tenure, Wilson lead efforts to reform child welfare laws, modernize the juvenile justice system, and improve early childhood education. This position led her to take an intense interest in Medicare and Medicaid and the ways in which the system can be improved to ensure the health of the American people and the American healthcare industry. Under her leadership, the department opened a juvenile work camp and a secure facility for young, non-violent offenders. It eliminated the wait for state-subsidized child care, revamped the foster care program and made adoptions faster. She also was an architect and the chief lobbyist for the governor's education agenda, including a law allowing charter schools, annual testing, and more budget authority for local school boards.
U.S. House of Representatives
Elections
1998 special election
Five-term Republican Congressman Steven Schiff declared he would not run for re-election in February 1998 because of his battle with squamous cell carcinoma. Wilson resigned her cabinet post to enter the Republican primary. She won the support of Schiff and U.S. Senator Pete Domenici. Domenici called Wilson "the most brilliantly qualified House candidate anywhere in the country." After Congressman Schiff's death in March, a special election on June 23 was announced. Wilson won the Republican primary for the general election with 62 percent of the vote, "propelling her to a sizable win in the June 2 primary for the fall election against conservative state senator William F. Davis."
Three weeks after winning the primary, Wilson won the special election with 44 percent of the vote in a four-way race against Democratic state senator Phil Maloof, Green Party candidate Robert L. Anderson, and Libertarian Party candidation Bruce Bush. She was sworn into office on June 25, 1998, making her the first woman since Georgia Lusk in 1946, and the first Republican woman ever, to represent New Mexico.
The special election set a record for the infusion of party money. For the June 23 special election, Maloof spent $3.1 million, approximately $1.5 million of which came from the Maloof family fortune and $1 million from committees. Wilson received $1 million from various GOP committees and raised an additional $1.5 million herself.
The special election also raised awareness of a 1996 occurrence when Wilson had her family's foster parent records relocated to a more secure location. After completing an investigation, Former District Attorney Bob Schwartz confirmed that the file was intact, accessible to the Department, and had not been tampered with. It remained in the custody of the Department, available for any official use but unavailable to her other than through the process all foster parents must use to get access to their records. Wilson produced an affidavit from the Department's General Counsel that the file remained intact and unavailable to her for the duration of her time as Cabinet Secretary.
1998 general election
Less than five months later in the general election, Wilson faced Phil Maloof again. This time, she won a full term, defeating Maloof 48 percent to 41 percent. Maloof far outspent Wilson again, spending an additional $5 million to Wilson's $1.1 million, making it the most expensive House race in New Mexico's history.
2000
Wilson managed to defeat her Democratic opponent, former U.S. Attorney John J. Kelly, by five points.
2002
Wilson had a somewhat easier time in 2002, defeating State Senate President Pro Tem Richard M. Romero by 10 points.
2004
In 2004, Wilson faced Romero again. Outside spending on the election was the 15th highest of all House races that year, totaling $2,499,980. The National Republican Congressional Committee spent $1,085,956 in the race. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spent $1,296,402.
Wilson and 66 other candidates received $10,000 donations from then-U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's Americans for a Republican Majority (ARMPAC) political action committee. ARMPAC filed termination papers with the Federal Election Commission on April 24, 2007. Wilson returned the $10,000 donation from ARMPAC.
During Wilson's reelection campaign in 2004, Romero ran advertisements that made the suggestion that her votes in Congress aided Osama bin Laden because she had voted against a bill to require the screening of cargo holds. Wilson's campaign countered with a policy ad stating Romero "voted against the death penalty for child molesters who murder their victims."
Wilson won the election by eight points.
2006
In the 2006 elections, Heather Wilson faced New Mexico Attorney General Patricia A. Madrid, and a poll taken from October 24–29 prior to the election by Reuters/Zogby showed Madrid leading Wilson 53–44. Wilson won the election by 875 (out of 211,000) votes, or 0.4%
Tenure
Wilson was the first woman to represent New Mexico since Georgia Lusk in the 1940s. Wilson was a member of the Republican Main Street Partnership, a coalition of centrist Republican leaders. Wilson has appeared on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher.
On October 10, 2002, together with 213 other Republicans and 81 Democrats, Wilson voted in favor of authorizing the use of military force against Iraq.
The Albuquerque Journal reported several instances in 2004 when Wilson acted in opposition to Republican interests: requiring the Bush administration to release cost figures for his prescription drug plan, criticizing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld about the failure to properly respond to violations of the Geneva Conventions during an Abu Ghraib hearing, and opposing a move by House Republicans to protect Tom DeLay from his fundraising scandal. While critics said these were calculated moves to moderate her image for her upcoming election, Wilson later lost her seat on the House Armed Services Committee due to the actions of Republican Joe Barton, an ally of DeLay.
Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003 Motion to Recommit
In 2003, Wilson joined 221 Republicans and 1 Democrat in voting against a Motion to Recommit the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003 (HR 1). The motion would have deleted entire sections of the joint House and Senate compromise bill and replaced them with the respective Senate version.
Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act
On January 21, 2004, legislation was introduced by Congressman Fred Upton to increase the fines and penalties for violating the prohibitions against the broadcast of obscene, indecent, or profane language. On February 11, 2004, the United States House Energy Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet held a hearing on the bill, at which representatives of the Federal Communications Commission, major broadcasting corporations, and the National Football League testified. During the hearing, Wilson denounced Karmazin saying, "You knew what you were doing. You knew what kind of entertainment you're selling, and you wanted us all to be abuzz, here in this room and on the playground in my kids' school, because it improves your ratings. It improves your market share, and it lines your pockets." The bill, H.R. 3717, passed the House of Representatives on March 26, 2004, by a vote of 391–22–1.
NSA warrantless domestic surveillance
On February 7, 2006, Wilson, while serving as Chairwoman of the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Technical and Tactical Intelligence, called for a full congressional inquiry into the NSA warrantless surveillance. Eric Lichtblau of The New York Times said that "the congresswoman's discomfort with the operation appears to reflect deepening fissures among Republicans over the program's legal basis and political liabilities." In an interview for the article, Wilson said, "The president has his duty to do, but I have mine too, and I feel strongly about that."
Terminated U.S. attorney
Wilson was accused of and later cleared of influencing the termination of a U.S. Attorney. In February 2007, former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias alleged that Wilson's competitive 2006 campaign for re-election to the House was a significant reason for his dismissal from the Justice Department. In a March 2007 statement, Wilson said an October call to Iglesias was to resolve an allegation of ethical impropriety made against Iglesias, which Iglesias denied. Iglesias never reported the contact, as he was required to do by DOJ rules. In July 2007, the United States House Committee on Ethics decided not to proceed with any investigation of Wilson. The Justice Department also did a review and the matter was thereafter closed.
Environmental record
Wilson was a member of the Republican Main Street Partnership, the chairs of which introduced legislation to make the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) a cabinet department.
Wilson, along with 80 Democrats and 215 other Republicans, supported House passage of the conference report on the Healthy Forests Restoration Act, which opponents argued would "reduce and expedite environmental and judicial reviews of forest thinning projects.
Wilson, 36 Democrats, and 192 other Republicans supported House passage of the Threatened and Endangered Species Recovery Act of 2005, which would have amended and reauthorized the Endangered Species Act of 1973 to provide greater results conserving and recovering listed species, and for other purposes.
The League of Conservation Voters (LCV) Action Fund, the political advocacy group's Political Action Committee (PAC), named Wilson to its 2006 "Dirty Dozen" list of members of Congress targeted for defeat by the LCV in the 2006 elections. The LCVAF also issued a press release in which Wilson was criticized for voting against a $58 million fund for voluntary conservation measures in the state.
Committee assignments
United States House Committee on Energy and Commerce, 105th Congress (1997–1998) until her retirement after the 110th Congress (2007–2008).
Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality
Subcommittee on Environment and Hazardous Materials
Subcommittee on Health
Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet
United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, 106th Congress (1999–2000), 109th Congress (2005–2006), and 110th Congress (2007–2008)
Subcommittee on Technical and Tactical Intelligence (Chair & Ranking Member)
Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations
United States House Committee on Armed Services, 107th Congress (2001–2002) and 108th Congress (2003–2004)
2008 U.S. Senate campaign
Wilson was defeated in a June 3, 2008, primary against Congressman Steve Pearce by a margin of 51% to 49%. Wilson immediately endorsed Pearce's candidacy, saying that Republicans have "no time for disappointment or for bitterness. Republicans have made their choice and I gladly accept it." In the general election, Pearce was overwhelmingly defeated by Congressman Tom Udall, 61% to 39%.
2012 U.S. Senate campaign
On November 6, 2012, incumbent Democratic U.S. Senator Jeff Bingaman decided to retire instead of running for reelection to a sixth term. Wilson won the Republican nomination to succeed him, and faced Democrat Martin Heinrich, who had succeeded Wilson in Congress. In the general election, Heinrich defeated Wilson 51% to 45%.
Academic career
Wilson served as President of the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology from 2013 to 2017, leaving to accept the appointment of Secretary of the Air Force. She returned to academia as the President of the University of Texas at El Paso following her resignation as Secretary of the Air Force.
Secretary of the Air Force
After being nominated by President Donald Trump on January 23, 2017, and confirmed by the U.S. Senate on May 8, 2017, Wilson became the first U.S. Air Force Academy graduate to be sworn in as Secretary of the Air Force on May 16, 2017.
As the 24th Secretary of the Air Force, she was responsible for the matters of the Air Force Department, including the organization, training, equipping and supplying 685,000 active, guard, reserve and civilian personnel and their families. She supervised the Air Force's yearly budget of more than $138 billion and leads strategy and policy development, risk management, weapons procurement, technology investments and human resources management within a global enterprise.
On March 8, 2019, Wilson announced she would resign from this position to be President of the University of Texas at El Paso.
Business career
Wilson was the head of the consulting firm, Heather Wilson & Company after leaving Congress.
During her Senate campaign, the Department of Energy began a review of her contracts with national laboratories. In June 2013, a Department of Energy Inspector General report claimed that Wilson collected $450,000 from four Department of Energy facilities between January 2009 and March 2011. The report criticized the labs for maintaining unsatisfactory documentation on the work performed. The labs disagreed with the report.
Sandia Corp., one of the laboratories, reimbursed the federal government for the fees paid to Heather Wilson & Company. There was a settlement agreement with the Justice Department, and Wilson was not mentioned in that agreement. In addition, Wilson stated that she "was not a lobbyist for Sandia and [she] was not a member of the Contract Strategy Team criticized by the Inspector General's report."
Heather Wilson chaired the Women in Aviation Advisory Board to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and has served on corporate boards of directors including Maxar Technologies, Raven Industries and Peabody Energy.
Personal life
Wilson is an instrument rated private pilot. She is married to Jay Hone, an attorney and retired Air National Guard Colonel. They have three adult children and one grandchild.
See also
Women in the United States House of Representatives
References
External links
Heather Wilson for Senate official campaign website
House Eyes National Toxics Law Zachary Coile, SF Chronicle, July 13, 2006.
Heather Wilson's comments during the hearing concerning the Super Bowl halftime show controversy YouTube clip of Heather Wilson at House FCC Hearing
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1960 births
20th-century American politicians
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human%20rights%20in%20Uzbekistan
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Human rights in Uzbekistan
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Human rights in Uzbekistan have been described as "abysmal" by Human Rights Watch, and the country has received heavy criticism from the UK and the US for alleged arbitrary arrests, religious persecution and torture employed by the government on a regional and national level. Amnesty International stated that freedom of expression, association, and peaceful assembly continue to be restricted, and that relations between gay men are illegal.
Overview
Human Rights Watch stated that "Uzbekistan's record of cooperation with UN human rights mechanisms is arguably among the worst in the world. For the past 12 years, it has ignored requests for access by all 11 UN human rights experts, and has rejected virtually all recommendations that international bodies have made for human rights improvements." IHF have expressed profound concern about "wide-scale violation of virtually all basic human rights".
Also, religious freedom is one of the country's greatest issues.
The U.S. Department of State has designated Uzbekistan a Country of Particular Concern for the religious persecution practiced in the country, and have defined Uzbekistan as "an authoritarian state with limited civil rights".
Human Rights Watch, however, says that the US government has "resisted imposing any serious policy or consequences for Uzbekistan's dismal rights record, viewing Tashkent as a key ally along the Northern Distribution Network (NDN) that it is using to withdraw supplies from the war in Afghanistan".
According to reports, the most widespread violations of human rights are torture, arbitrary arrests, and various restrictions of freedoms of religion, of speech and press, of free association and assembly. The reports maintain that the violations are most often committed against members of religious organizations, independent journalists, human right activists and political activists, including members of banned opposition parties.
In 2005, Uzbekistan was included into Freedom House's "The Worst of the Worst: The World's Most Repressive Societies".
The official position of the Uzbek government is summarized in a memorandum titled "The measures taken by the government of the Republic of Uzbekistan in the field of providing and encouraging human rights" and amounts to the following. The government does everything that is in its power to protect and to guarantee the human rights of Uzbekistan's citizens. Uzbekistan continuously improves its laws and institutions in order to create a more humane society. Over 300 laws regulating the rights and basic freedoms of the people have been passed by the parliament. For instance, an office of Ombudsman was established in 1996. On August 2, 2005, President Islom Karimov signed a decree that will abolish capital punishment in Uzbekistan on January 1, 2008.
Craig Murray, British ambassador 2002–2004, investigated human rights abuses, and, when his bosses at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office ignored his reports, he went public, bringing international attention to the situation. He was dismissed from his post, but continued to speak out against human rights abuses in the country. He also claimed there was extraordinary rendition by the United States of America to Uzbekistan, with surreptitious use of information obtained under torture as a result. Murray was removed from his post in October 2004, shortly after a leaked report in the Financial Times quoted him as claiming that MI6 used intelligence provided by Uzbek authorities that was acquired through torture. The FCO denied there was any direct connection and stated that Murray had been removed for "operational" reasons. In his book Murder in Samarkand (2006), Murray speculates that his anti-torture memos caused two problems for the US & UK governments. First, the CIA's extraordinary rendition program was secretly using Uzbekistan as a destination country to fly people to be tortured. Second, the transcripts of the torture sessions were then shared with Britain's MI6 because of the UK-US intelligence sharing agreements of World War II. By objecting to the UK's acceptance of CIA torture-obtained information, he was interfering with the secret rendition program as well as threatening the MI6's relationship with the CIA.
The 2005 civil unrest in Uzbekistan, which resulted in several hundred people being killed is viewed by many as a landmark event in the history of human rights abuse in Uzbekistan,
A concern has been expressed and a request for an independent investigation of the events has been made by the United States, European Union, the UN, the OSCE Chairman-in-Office and the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights.
The government of Uzbekistan is accused of unlawful termination of human life, denying its citizens freedom of assembly and freedom of expression. The government vehemently tried to rebuff the accusations, maintaining that it merely conducted an anti-terrorist operation, exercising only necessary force. In addition, some officials claim that "an information war on Uzbekistan has been declared" and the human rights violations in Andijan are invented by the enemies of Uzbekistan as a convenient pretext for intervention into the country's internal affairs.
The Constitution of Uzbekistan asserts that "democracy in the Republic of Uzbekistan shall be based upon common human principles, according to which the highest value shall be the human being, his life, freedom, honor, dignity and other inalienable rights".
Uzbekistan has abolished the death penalty. The abolition, initiated by the August 2005 decrees of President Karimov, became effective on January 1, 2008. Capital punishment has been substituted by longer term deprivation of liberty and life sentencing (see Death penalty in Uzbekistan).
In 2015 Human Rights Watch reported that:
Freedom of religion
Religious literature which is not state-approved, including the Bible, is often confiscated and destroyed.
Forum 18, a human rights organisation based in Norway, has documented raids by Uzbek police in which participants in unregistered religious services were beaten, fined, threatened and intimidated. In August 2005 one of the organisation's reporters was detained and deported by the authorities at Tashkent airport in Uzbekistan.
The Office of Public Information of Jehovah's Witnesses has documented several cases with imprisonment for teaching religion. The Barnabas Fund also states that Pastor Dmitri Shestakov was imprisoned for 4 years for Christian activities.
Torture
U.S.-based Human Rights Watch said in November 2007 that Uzbek prison authorities routinely beat prisoners and use electric shocks, asphyxiation and sexual humiliation to extract information and confessions. According to a forensic report commissioned by the British embassy, in August 2002 two prisoners were boiled to death. According to a report by the Human Rights Watch, Muslim prisoners have been tortured for praying.
Women's rights
Compulsory sterilization
It is reported that Uzbekistan has been pursuing a policy of forced sterilizations, hysterectomies and IUD insertions since the late 1990s in order to impose population control.
Domestic violence
Domestic violence against women is a serious problem in Uzbekistan. A survey by UNICEF found that 69.6% of women agreed that a husband is justified to beat or hit his wife under certain circumstances (including 61.2% if the wife goes out without telling him, and 47.9% if she argues with him).
Internet
Uzbekistan's "freedom on the net status" is "not free" in the 2012 and 2013 Freedom on the Net reports from Freedom House. Uzbekistan maintains the most extensive and pervasive filtering system among the CIS countries and has been listed as an Internet enemy by Reporters Without Borders since the list was created in 2006. The OpenNet Initiative found evidence that Internet filtering was pervasive in the political area and selective in the social, conflict/security, and Internet tools areas during testing that was reported in 2008 and 2010.
Uzbekistan prevents access to websites regarding banned Islamic movements, independent media, NGOs, and material critical of the government's human rights violations. Some Internet cafes in the capital have posted warnings that users will be fined for viewing pornographic websites or website containing banned political material. The main VoIP protocols SIP and IAX used to be blocked for individual users; however, as of July 2010, blocks were no longer in place. Facebook was blocked for a few days in 2010.
Internet censorship in Uzbekistan increased following the events of the Arab Spring in 2011. Additional websites are blocked, contributors to online discussion of the events in Egypt, Tunisia, and Bahrain have been arrested, and news about demonstrations and protest movements have been blocked. The BBC website was unblocked in late 2011, but since January 2012, specific pages dealing with the Arab Spring have been inaccessible. ISPs and mobile phone operators are required to report mass mailings of "suspicious content" and to disconnect networks upon authorities’ requests.
The principal intelligence agency in Uzbekistan, the National Security Service (SNB), monitors the Uzbek segment of the Internet and works with the main regulatory body to impose censorship. As all ISPs must rent channels from the state monopoly provider, available evidence strongly suggests that Internet traffic is recorded and monitored by means of a centralized system. SNB officers frequently visit ISPs and Internet cafés to monitor compliance.
In 2014, the entire country's internet and mobile messaging networks were stopped over a three- to four-hour window for 'urgent repairs' co-inciding almost precisely with national university entry exams.
History
2004
The U.S. State Department's 2004 report on human rights in Uzbekistan found limited improvement. While no detainees died while in police custody, police negligence led to the deaths of four prisoners. National Security Service officials "tortured, beat, and harassed" citizens but human rights activists were allowed to investigate instances in which prisoners died and activists suspected torture as the cause of death. Security forces did not arrest journalists and three were released. Some non-governmental organizations, most notably the Open Society Institute, were not allowed to register with the government, and thus prevented from work in Uzbekistan.
2005
In 2005 the Uzbek government arrested Sanjar Umarov, an opposition politician, and raided the office of Sunshine Uzbekistan, an opposition political alliance. United States Senators Bill Frist and Richard Lugar introduced a resolution calling on the Uzbek government to make sure Umarov "is accorded the full measure of his rights under the Uzbekistan constitution to defend himself against all charges that may be brought against him in a fair and transparent process, so that individual justice may be done".
Tashkent citizens found the body of Kim Khen Pen Khin, a Pentecostal, on 11 June 2005. According to one another Pentecostal church member police treated church members worse than animals, several beating three of them. One, a pastor, had a concussion. Police initially accused Kural Bekjanov, another church member, of murdering Khin, but dropped the charges against him two days later. When police discovered his religion they broke his ribs and put needles under his fingernails to get him to renounce Christianity.
In August the Uzbek government detained Elena Urlayeva, a human rights activist, on charges of disseminating anti-government leaflets. In October a Tashkent court ordered Urlayeva to undergo psychiatric treatment in a mental health facility in a legal preceding in which neither she nor her lawyer were present. The government released Urlayeva on 27 October after officials abused and beat her.
The Immigration Service and Border Guards of the Government of Uzbekistan detained Igor Rotar, a human rights activist who works for Forum 18 and Radio Free Europe, on 11 August. Rotar's plane took off from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan and arrived at Tashkent Airport at 10:25AM. Amnesty International condemned the incident, saying his "detention is part of a wave of intimidation and harassment of journalists and human rights defenders by the Uzbek authorities that escalated following the events in Andijan in May this year". Holly Cartner, Europe and Central Asia director for Human Rights Watch, said, "We are deeply concerned for Rotar's safety. He should be allowed to contact his organization and a lawyer, and should be released immediately."
2006
An unknown individual strangled Karina Rivka Loiper, secretary to Rabbi Abe David Gurevich, and her mother on 12 June in Tashkent. While police ruled it a robbery, the Federation of Jewish Communities of the Commonwealth of Independent States called for an investigation. Jewish community leaders said a spokesman for the Committee on Religious Affairs warned them against "politicizing" Loiper's death.
On 29 April 2006, human rights workers Azam Farmonov and Alisher Karamatov were arrested and allegedly tortured by state security forces. They are currently serving prison terms on charges of extortion that Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Front Line have condemned as politically motivated.
On 25 October the Karshi-Khanabad court fined two Baptists from Ferghana and Tashkent US$438 while four others were given smaller fines for participating in unregistered religious activity after police raided a Baptist church in the city. 30 police raided a Pentecostal church in Tashkent on 13 November. Another raid on 27 August yielded 38 unapproved pieces of literature.
Uzbek state television played a show entitled "Hypocrites" on 30 November and 1 December, in which Protestant missionaries were said to have engaged in plagiarism and drug use. The program said, "On the pretext of financially helping people in need, [missionaries] instill their own teachings in these people's minds". Converts are "zombies". Begzot Kadyrov, specialist of the State's Religious Affairs Committee, commenting on the program, said, "Turning away from the religion of one's ancestors is not only one's own mistake but could also lead to very bad situations between brothers, sisters and between parents and their children". Converts to Christianity are "lost to family, friends and society".
2007
The International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights (IHF), Human Rights Watch, and the International Federation for Human Rights International asked the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva to continue monitoring human rights in Uzbekistan on 22 March 2007. Aaron Rhodes, executive director of the International Helsinki Federation, criticized the suggestion, saying, "What that would really imply would be that the United Nations would reward the Uzbek government for its repressive policies and its refusal to cooperate with the Council. If the Human Rights Council can't take up the problems in Uzbekistan, then what is it for?".
Umida Niazova case
Uzbek police detained Umida Niazova, a human rights activist who worked for local group Veritas and Human Rights Watch in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, on 21 December 2006 in the Tashkent airport. Fearing criminal prosecution, she left the country for Kyrgyzstan, returning on the advice of her lawyer who said that no criminal case would be brought against her. At the border, she was arrested and stood trial on charges of illegally crossing the border, smuggling and distribution of illegal content. Holly Cartner, a director at Human Rights Watch alleges that "Niazova was threatened with these charges for... her human rights work".
On May 1, 2007, an Uzbek court convicted Niazova and sentenced her to seven years in prison, on charges of "preparing or disseminating material containing a threat to security and order". The Uzbek government alleged she was storing on her laptop literature by an Islamist extremist group. Niazova had written news stories about deadly protests in Andijan, Uzbekistan in 2005. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the United States government, and Human Rights Watch criticized the sentence. On May 8, she confessed in court and she was given a suspended sentence and released.
Historical situation
The following chart shows Uzbekistan's ratings since 1991 in the Freedom in the World reports, published annually by Freedom House. A rating of 1 is "free"; 7 "not free".
See also
Human rights in Asia
LGBT rights in Uzbekistan
Women in Uzbekistan
Child labour in Uzbekistan
Notes
1.Note that the "Year" signifies the "Year covered". Therefore the information for the year marked 2008 is from the report published in 2009, and so on.
2.As of January 1.
References
External links
High Prevalence of Multi-Drug Resistant Tuberculosis in Uzbekistan Central Asia Health Review Apr. 28, 2008
Human rights in Uzbekistan
Human rights in Uzbekistan, OHCHR
Ombudsman
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alonzo%20Mourning
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Alonzo Mourning
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Alonzo Harding Mourning Jr. (born February 8, 1970) is an American former professional basketball player who has served as vice president of player programs and development for the Miami Heat since June 2009. Mourning played most of his 15-year National Basketball Association (NBA) career for the Heat.
Nicknamed "Zo", Mourning played the center position. Following his college basketball career at Georgetown University, his tenacity on defense twice earned him the NBA Defensive Player of the Year Award and twice placed him on the NBA All-Defensive Team. Mourning made a comeback after undergoing a kidney transplant and later won the 2006 NBA championship with the Heat. Mourning also played for the Charlotte Hornets and New Jersey Nets. On March 30, 2009, Mourning became the first Miami Heat player to have his number retired. In 2010, Mourning was inducted into the Virginia Sports Hall of Fame. In August 2014, Mourning was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, and in August 2019 he was inducted into the FIBA Hall of Fame.
Early life
During his time at Indian River High School in Chesapeake, Virginia, he led the team to 51 straight victories and a state title his junior year (1987). As a senior, he averaged 25 points, 15 rebounds and 12 blocked shots per game. He was named Player of the Year by USA Today, Parade, Gatorade, and Naismith. He was the #1 recruit of the 1988 class, over Christian Laettner, Shawn Kemp, Billy Owens, Kenny Williams, Stanley Roberts, Rick Fox, and Malik Sealy, among others.
College career
Mourning played college basketball for John Thompson at Georgetown University. He made an immediate impact as a freshman, starting all 34 games for the Hoyas, averaging 13.1 points and 7.3 rebounds per game. But his most notable accomplishment was leading the nation in total blocked shots (169) and blocks per game (5.0); both figures led the nation and set NCAA records for a freshman at that time.
Mourning's scoring and rebounding improved over the next two seasons, but his shot-blocking declined significantly, as his taller teammate Dikembe Mutombo established himself as starting center for Georgetown, forcing Mourning to play at power forward. After Mutombo entered the NBA draft in 1991, Mourning re-took his place as starting center, and responded with a spectacular senior season in 1991–92. He averaged 21.3 points, 10.7 rebounds, and 5.0 blocks per game that year, and collected numerous awards, including Consensus First-Team All-American and Big East Conference Player of the Year. He was also named Big East Defensive Player of the Year, which he had won twice previously (as a freshman in 1988–89, and again as a sophomore in 1989–90, sharing the award with Mutombo that season; Mutombo won the award alone in 1990–91).
Mourning finished his college career with 2,001 points and 1,032 rebounds, reaching the exclusive 2,000-point and 1,000-rebound milestone. More impressively, he finished with 453 blocked shots in his college career, ranking first all-time in NCAA history at that time. Interestingly, Mourning was never listed as the all-time leader in Georgetown history, as the school credits Patrick Ewing with 493 blocks during his college career, but blocked shots were not an official NCAA statistic at that time.
Professional career
Charlotte Hornets (1992–1995)
Mourning was selected second overall in the 1992 NBA draft by the Charlotte Hornets, behind Shaquille O'Neal and before Christian Laettner. Mourning was named to the league's all-rookie team in 1993 after averaging 21.0 points, 10.3 rebounds, and 3.47 blocks. He finished second to Shaquille O'Neal in rookie of the year voting. He posted the highest scoring average of any rookie in Hornets history. Mourning and O'Neal were the first NBA rookies since David Robinson in the 1989–90 season to average 20 or more points and 10-plus rebounds in their first seasons. Mourning shattered Charlotte's blocked-shots records, becoming the Hornets' all-time career leader in the 49th game of the season. The greatest moment of Mourning's rookie season came on May 5, 1993, in Game 4 of a first-round playoff series against the Boston Celtics. His 20-footer with .4 seconds left gave the Hornets a 104–103 victory in the game and a 3–1 victory in the series. The Hornets lost in the second round to the New York Knicks in five games, with Mourning averaging 23.8 points, 9.9 rebounds and 3.4 blocks in nine playoff games. The following year, Mourning played in just 60 games, posting almost similar averages of 21.5 points, 10.2 rebounds and 3.1 blocks per game, but the Hornets missed the playoffs.
In the 1994–95 season, Mourning and teammate Larry Johnson led the Hornets to a 50-win season and reached the playoffs. Mourning ranked first on the team in scoring (21.3 per game), rebounding (9.9 per game), blocked shots (2.92 per game), and field goal percentage (.519), and played in the 1995 NBA All-Star Game where he scored 10 points and grabbed 8 rebounds. The Hornets lost in four games to the Chicago Bulls in the first round of the playoffs, despite Mourning averaging 22 points, 13.3 rebounds, and 3.3 blocks during the series.
Miami Heat (1995–2003)
On November 3, 1995, after Mourning rejected Charlotte's contract extension offer worth an average of $11.2 million for seven years and knowing they would not be able to re-sign him, the Hornets traded him, along with reserves Pete Myers and LeRon Ellis in exchange for Glen Rice, Matt Geiger, Khalid Reeves and a first-round pick in the 1996 NBA draft.
Mourning would immediately serve as the centerpiece of the Pat Riley-coached Heat, and in his first season in Miami he averaged 23.2 points, 10.4 rebounds and 2.7 blocks per game as Miami made the playoffs before being swept in the first round by the 72-win Bulls. Mourning played in the 1996 NBA All-Star Game and was joined by All-Star point guard Tim Hardaway who arrived through a mid-season trade.
In July 1996, Mourning signed a seven-year, $105 million contract with the Heat. In the 1996–97 season, the Heat would go on to win a then franchise-record 61 games, finishing second in the Eastern Conference behind the defending champions Bulls, while Mourning averaged 19.8 points, 9.9 rebounds and 2.9 blocks per game. In the playoffs, Miami defeated the Orlando Magic in five games, and advanced to the conference semifinals against the Knicks, where the rivalry between the Heat and the New York Knicks intensified. The Knicks took a 3–1 series lead, but following a brawl between Charlie Ward and P. J. Brown late in Game 5, multiple suspensions were handed down. Mourning scored 28 points in Game 6, followed by a 22-point, 12-rebound performance in Game 7 to help Miami advance to the Eastern Conference Finals, a franchise first, to face Chicago. The Bulls took a 3–0 series lead, and Mourning guaranteed a victory in Game 4 as the Heat won 87–80. However, with a 100–87 loss in Game 5, the Heat were eliminated by the Bulls.
In the 1997–98 season, Mourning played 58 games and averaged 19.2 points, 9.6 rebounds and 2.2 blocks per game as the Heat won 55 games. However, Miami lost in the first round to the Knicks, with Mourning missing the deciding Game 5 due to a suspension caused by a fight between Mourning and former teammate Larry Johnson in Game 4. The brawl also involved Knicks head coach Jeff Van Gundy, who was seen dangling on Mourning's leg in an attempt to break up the fight. The following season, the Heat won 31 games in a lockout-shortened 50-game schedule, and Mourning won his first of two consecutive Defensive Player of the Year awards after leading the league in blocks with 3.9 per game. Despite finishing with the best record in the Eastern Conference, the Heat once again fell short to the Knicks in the first round, with Allan Houston securing the series victory with a last-second jumper in Game 5. Mourning again led the NBA in blocks in the 1999–2000 season, this time with a 3.7 average, and won Defensive Player of the Year. Miami finished the regular season with 52 wins and faced the Knicks in the second round. But for a third straight season, the Heat lost to the Knicks in a winner-take-all game, this time in Game 7.
Shortly after playing for the gold medal-winning U.S. national team in the 2000 Summer Olympics, Mourning was diagnosed with a serious kidney disease. Initially deemed out for the remainder of the season, Mourning returned for the final 13 games, helping the Heat win 50 games despite playing limited minutes. However, Miami was swept 3–0 in the first round by the Hornets. In the 2001–02 season, Mourning played 75 games and averaged 15.7 points, 8.4 rebounds and 2.5 blocks per game, earning his final All-Star nod. Despite that, the Heat missed the playoffs with a 36–46 record. Mourning missed the entire 2002–03 season as he continued to deal with a serious kidney disorder, and without their star center, the Heat won only 25 games and missed the playoffs again.
New Jersey Nets (2003–2004)
Mourning signed a four-year deal with the New Jersey Nets in July 2003 as a free agent. On November 24, 2003, after appearing in 12 games, Mourning retired from the NBA due to complications from his kidney disease. On December 19, he underwent a successful kidney transplant. In 2004, he started practicing with the Nets again, and made the team's regular season roster during the 2004–05 season. He did not play a significant role with the Nets, however, and openly complained to the media that he wanted out of New Jersey, especially after the team traded away Kenyon Martin. After playing in just 30 total games for New Jersey, Mourning, Eric Williams and Aaron Williams were traded to the Toronto Raptors for Vince Carter on December 17, 2004. Mourning never reported to the Raptors, and was bought out of his contract at a remaining $9 million on February 11, 2005. Raptors team officials later said that he did not meet the medical conditions to play for the team. Mourning then finished the season with the Heat being paid a second salary, the veteran's minimum.
Return to the Heat (2005–2008)
Mourning re-signed with the Heat on March 1, 2005. His role was reduced as a backup because of superstar Shaquille O'Neal, although he was called upon as a starter due to O'Neal missing stretches due to injury. O'Neal and Mourning even played together on the court at times, with Mourning playing power forward. Because of physical limitations, his minutes were reduced, but was still a steady contributor. Mourning's tenacious defense, steady offense, and all around hustle helped the Heat gain and maintain the first seed in Eastern Conference during the 2004–05 season. Mourning finished the regular season ranking third in blocked shots at 2.66 per game, despite only playing 20 minutes per contest. Miami swept the Nets in the first round of the playoffs, with Mourning recording 21 points and nine rebounds in just 16 minutes in Game 2. In the second round against the Washington Wizards, Mourning stepped in for the injured O'Neal and scored 14 points with 13 rebounds and blocked four shots in Game 3 as Miami completed another four-game sweep. Miami fell in seven games to the defending champions, the Detroit Pistons, in the Eastern Conference Finals, with Mourning leading the team in blocks with three per game for the series.
On June 17, 2005, the Heat picked up the team option on Mourning, as the Heat once again overhauled their roster, acquiring other veterans seeking a title such as Antoine Walker and Gary Payton. Mourning continued to serve as the Heat's backup center, and early on stepped in to serve as the team's starting center after O'Neal suffered an injury. Mourning started in 20 games out of a total of 65 games played, averaging 7.8 points and 5.5 rebounds, while finishing third in the league with 2.7 blocks per game despite playing as a reserve. In the playoffs, Mourning continued to shine in his role as a defensive player off the bench, as Miami advanced past the Bulls and the Nets before defeating the Pistons in six games to advance to the 2006 NBA Finals, the first NBA Finals in franchise history and the first for Mourning. After a 2–0 deficit, Miami won all three of its home games led by the spectacular play of Dwyane Wade, and in Game 6 in Dallas, Mourning came off the bench to score eight points with six rebounds and a team-high five blocks to help Miami win its first NBA championship in franchise history.
After winning the championship, Mourning announced that he would return to the Heat in the 2006–07 season to defend their title, despite receiving offers of more money from other teams, including the San Antonio Spurs. In 2007, Mourning announced he would return for one more year with the Heat and his 15th season. "It will definitely be my last year", Mourning said. After starting the season on a solid note averaging 6 points, 3.8 rebounds and 1.75 blocks in just over 16 minutes played per 24 games, Mourning tore his patellar tendon in his right knee on December 19, 2007, during the first quarter of the 117–111 overtime loss to the Atlanta Hawks.
During the 2007–08 season, he became the Heat's all-time leader in points scored (which has since been surpassed by Dwyane Wade).
Retirement
Mourning announced his retirement from the NBA on January 22, 2009. In his press conference he said, "At 38 I feel like I've physically done all I can for this game." One month later, the Heat announced that they would retire Mourning's number 33 jersey, making him the first Heat player to be so honored. The jersey retirement ceremony occurred on March 30, 2009, when the Heat hosted the Orlando Magic. During the extended halftime ceremony, Mourning was introduced by Florida Governor Charlie Crist; former Georgetown University basketball coach John Thompson; Basketball Hall of Famer Patrick Ewing; Heat players Dwyane Wade and Udonis Haslem; and Heat head coach Pat Riley.
In May 2009, he was named to the Hampton Roads Sports Hall of Fame, which honors athletes, coaches, and administrators who contributed to sports in southeastern Virginia. In the following April, he was inducted into the Virginia Sports Hall of Fame in recognition of his outstanding high school, collegiate, and professional career as well as his commitment to volunteer service in the communities in which he has lived and worked throughout his life.
Mourning announced his return to the Heat in late June 2009; he holds the position of vice president of player programs and development, which covers community outreach and mentoring young players.
Mourning played in a basketball game for Barack Obama's 50th birthday at the basketball court at the White House in 2011. In addition to Mourning, the game featured Shane Battier, LeBron James, Magic Johnson, Maya Moore, Joakim Noah, Chris Paul and Derrick Rose and Obama's friends from high school. Kobe Bryant and Bill Russell were spectators.
On April 7, 2014, it was announced that Mourning would be inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame on August 8.
On March 26, 2019, Mourning was named to the FIBA Hall of Fame, and was inducted on August 30.
In 2021, to commemorate the NBA's 75th anniversary The Athletic ranked their top 75 players of all-time, and named Mourning as the 69th greatest player in NBA history.
Awards and achievements
3-time NBA champion: 2006 (as a player), 2012, 2013 (as vice president of player programs)
7-time NBA All-Star: 1994–1997, 2000–2002
All-NBA First Team: 1999
All-NBA Second Team: 2000
2-time NBA Defensive Player of the Year: 1999, 2000
2-time NBA All-Defensive First Team: 1999, 2000
NBA All-Rookie First Team: 1993
J. Walter Kennedy Citizenship Award: 2002
2-time NBA blocks leader: 1999, 2000
Heat franchise second leading scorer with 9,459 points
Won gold at the 1994 FIBA World Championship and the 2000 Summer Olympics with the United States national team
Won bronze at the 1990 FIBA World Championship with the United States national team
McDonald's All-American Game MVP : 1988
Mr. Basketball USA: 1988
Naismith Prep Player of the Year: 1988
USA Today High School Player of the Year: 1988
2× First-team Parade All-American: 1987, 1988
Second-team Parade All-American: 1986
Virginia Mr. Basketball: 1988
Charitable work
In 1997, Mourning established Alonzo Mourning Charities Inc. to aid in the development of children and families living in at-risk situations and provides support and services that enhance the lives of youth of promise.
After being diagnosed with focal glomerulosclerosis (FSGS), Mourning launched Zo's Fund for Life, a campaign which seeks to raise funds for research, education, and testing to fight focal glomerulosclerosis. Funds are allocated toward research for a cure, education for doctors and the general public, testing for early detection and a fund for those not able to afford medication.
In 2007, Mourning along with Andre Agassi, Muhammad Ali, Lance Armstrong, Warrick Dunn, Mia Hamm, Jeff Gordon, Tony Hawk, Andrea Jaeger, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Mario Lemieux, and Cal Ripken Jr. founded Athletes for Hope, a charitable organization, which helps professional athletes get involved in charitable causes and inspires millions of non-athletes to volunteer and support the community.
In 2003, he also founded the Overtown Youth Center for underprivileged kids, located in Miami, Florida. The program aims to inspire, empower, and enrich these children while teaching them to become positive contributing citizens.
In 2009, the Miami-Dade school board named a new high school in North Miami, Florida, in his honor, Alonzo and Tracy Mourning Senior High Biscayne Bay Campus.
Personal life
Mourning and his ex-wife Tracy have three children. Like his father, his oldest son, Trey Mourning played for the Georgetown Hoyas basketball team, wearing his father's signature number 33 jersey. They resided in Pinecrest, Florida, where Mourning purchased a two-story, 9,786-square-foot residence for $4.5 million in 2012. On June 26, 2019, Trey was included on the Miami Heat roster for the 2019 NBA Summer League, and was later selected second overall by the Sioux Falls Skyforce of the NBA G League in the 2019 NBA G League draft.
In July 2011, Mourning was sued by Miami-based lawyer Spencer Aronfeld on behalf of Alberto Candoleria for crashing his car into another car and then leaving the scene of the accident. The Florida Highway Patrol later charged Mourning with leaving the scene of a car accident. The accident allegedly occurred after he left Chris Bosh's wedding in Miami Beach after 3:00 a.m. Candoleria had just been in an accident when Mourning struck his car.
In 2015, Mourning was one of eight Virginians honored in the Library of Virginia's "Strong Men & Women in Virginia History" for his charitable work and for his contributions to the sport of basketball.
Kidney transplant
On November 25, 2003, Mourning's cousin and a retired U. S. Marine, Jason Cooper, was visiting Mourning's gravely ill grandmother in the hospital. Mourning's father was present and informed Cooper that Mourning was retiring that day from the NBA because of a life-threatening kidney disease, focal segmental glomerulosclerosis, the same problem that Sean Elliott had in 1999. Cooper asked if there was anything he could do, and began to contemplate donating one of his kidneys to his estranged cousin, whom he had not seen in 25 years and whom he only knew through basketball. Cooper was tested for compatibility, along with many other family members and friends (including fellow NBA center and good friend Patrick Ewing); during his grandmother's funeral, Mourning received the news that Jason Cooper was a match.
Mourning received Cooper's left kidney on December 19, 2003.
NBA career statistics
Regular season
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| style="text-align:left;"|1992–93
| style="text-align:left;"|Charlotte
| 78 || 78 || 33.9 || .511 || .000 || .781 || 10.3 || 1.0 || .3 || 3.5 || 21.0
|-
| style="text-align:left;"|1993–94
| style="text-align:left;"|Charlotte
| 60 || 59 || 33.6 || .505 || .000 || .762 || 10.2 || 1.4 || .5 || 3.1 || 21.5
|-
| style="text-align:left;"|1994–95
| style="text-align:left;"|Charlotte
| 77 || 77 || 38.2 || .519 || .324 || .761 || 9.9 || 1.4 || .6 || 2.9 || 21.3
|-
| style="text-align:left;"|1995–96
| style="text-align:left;"|Miami
| 70 || 70 || 38.2 || .523 || .300 || .685 || 10.4 || 2.3 || 1.0 || 2.7 || 23.2
|-
| style="text-align:left;"|1996–97
| style="text-align:left;"|Miami
| 66 || 65 || 35.2 || .534 || .111 || .642 || 9.9 || 1.6 || .8 || 2.9 || 19.8
|-
| style="text-align:left;"|1997–98
| style="text-align:left;"|Miami
| 58 || 56 || 33.4 || .551 || .000 || .665 || 9.6 || .9 || .7 || 2.2 || 19.2
|-
| style="text-align:left;"|1998–99
| style="text-align:left;"|Miami
| 46 || 46 || 38.1 || .511 || .000 || .652 || 11.0 || 1.6 || .7 || style="background:#cfecec;"| 3.9* || 20.1
|-
| style="text-align:left;"|1999–00
| style="text-align:left;"|Miami
| 79 || 78 || 34.8 || .551 || .000 || .711 || 9.5 || 1.6 || .5 || style="background:#cfecec;"| 3.7* || 21.7
|-
| style="text-align:left;"|2000–01
| style="text-align:left;"|Miami
| 13 || 3 || 23.5 || .518 || .000 || .564 || 7.8 || .9 || .3 || 2.4 || 13.6
|-
| style="text-align:left;"|2001–02
| style="text-align:left;"|Miami
| 75 || 74 || 32.7 || .516 || .333 || .657 || 8.4 || 1.2 || .4 || 2.5 || 15.7
|-
| style="text-align:left;"|2003–04
| style="text-align:left;"|New Jersey
| 12 || 0 || 17.9 || .465 || .000 || .882 || 2.3 || .7 || .2 || .5 || 8.0
|-
| style="text-align:left;"|2004–05
| style="text-align:left;"|New Jersey
| 18 || 14 || 25.4 || .453 || .000 || .593 || 7.1 || .8 || .3 || 2.3 || 10.4
|-
| style="text-align:left;"|2004–05
| style="text-align:left;"|Miami
| 19 || 3 || 12.9 || .516 || .000 || .564 || 3.7 || .2 || .2 || 1.7 || 5.0
|-
| style="text-align:left; background:#afe6ba;"|2005–06†
| style="text-align:left;"|Miami
| 65 || 20 || 20.0 || .597 || .000 || .594 || 5.5 || .2 || .2 || 2.7 || 7.8
|-
| style="text-align:left;"|2006–07
| style="text-align:left;"|Miami
| 77 || 43 || 20.4 || .560 || .000 || .601 || 4.5 || .2 || .2 || 2.3 || 8.6
|-
| style="text-align:left;"|2007–08
| style="text-align:left;"|Miami
| 25 || 0 || 15.6 || .547 || .000 || .592 || 3.7 || .3 || .2 || 1.7 || 6.0
|- class="sortbottom"
| style="text-align:center;" colspan="2"|Career
| 838 || 686 || 31.0 || .527 || .247 || .692 || 8.5 || 1.1 || .5 || 2.8 || 17.1
|- class="sortbottom"
| style="text-align:center;" colspan="2"|All-Star
| 4 || 1 || 18.8 || .545 || .000 || .667 || 4.8 || 1.0 || .8 || 2.0 || 10.0
Playoffs
|-
| style="text-align:left;"|1993
| style="text-align:left;"|Charlotte
| 9 || 9 || 40.8 || .480 || .000 || .774 || 9.9 || 1.4 || .7 || 3.4 || 23.8
|-
| style="text-align:left;"|1995
| style="text-align:left;"|Charlotte
| 4 || 4 || 43.5 || .421 || .500 || .837 || 13.3 || 2.8 || .8 || style="background:#cfecec;"|3.3* || 22.0
|-
| style="text-align:left;"|1996
| style="text-align:left;"|Miami
| 3 || 3 || 30.7 || .486 || .000 || .714 || 6.0 || 1.3 || .7 || 1.0 || 18.0
|-
| style="text-align:left;"|1997
| style="text-align:left;"|Miami
| 17 || 17 || 37.1 || .491 || .375 || .555 || 10.2 || 1.1 || .6 || style="background:#cfecec;"|2.7* || 17.8
|-
| style="text-align:left;"|1998
| style="text-align:left;"|Miami
| 4 || 4 || 34.5 || .518 || .000 || .655 || 8.5 || 1.3 || .8 || 2.5 || 19.3
|-
| style="text-align:left;"|1999
| style="text-align:left;"|Miami
| 5 || 5 || 38.8 || .521 || .000 || .653 || 8.2 || .8 || 1.6 || 2.8 || 21.6
|-
| style="text-align:left;"|2000
| style="text-align:left;"|Miami
| 10 || 10 || 37.6 || .484 || .000 || .667 || 10.0 || 1.4 || .2 || style="background:#cfecec;"|3.3* || 21.6
|-
| style="text-align:left;"|2001
| style="text-align:left;"|Miami
| 3 || 3 || 30.3 || .480 || .000 || .579 || 5.3 || 1.0 || .0 || 1.7 || 11.7
|-
| style="text-align:left;"|2005
| style="text-align:left;"|Miami
| 15 || 2 || 16.9 || .705 || .000 || .558 || 4.8 || .3 || .3 || 2.2 || 6.1
|-
| style="text-align:left; background:#afe6ba;"|2006†
| style="text-align:left;"|Miami
| 21 || 0 || 10.8 || .703 || .000 || .667 || 2.9 || .1 || .2 || 1.1 || 3.8
|-
| style="text-align:left;"|2007
| style="text-align:left;"|Miami
| 4 || 0 || 13.8 || .909 || .000 || .385 || 2.0 || .3 || .0 || .8 || 6.3
|- class="sortbottom"
| style="text-align:center;" colspan="2"|Career
| 95 || 57 || 27.3 || .512 || .368 || .649 || 7.0 || .9 || .5 || 2.3 || 13.6
See also
List of National Basketball Association career blocks leaders
List of National Basketball Association career playoff blocks leaders
List of NCAA Division I men's basketball career blocks leaders
List of NCAA Division I men's basketball season blocks leaders
List of NCAA Division I men's basketball career free throw scoring leaders
List of NCAA Division I men's basketball players with 2000 points and 1000 rebounds
References
External links
Mourning's acceptance speech for the 2015 Strong Men & Women in Virginia History event on YouTube
1970 births
Living people
20th-century African-American sportspeople
21st-century African-American sportspeople
1990 FIBA World Championship players
1994 FIBA World Championship players
African-American basketball players
All-American college men's basketball players
American men's basketball players
Basketball players at the 2000 Summer Olympics
Basketball players from Virginia
Centers (basketball)
Charlotte Hornets draft picks
Charlotte Hornets players
Competitors at the 1990 Goodwill Games
FIBA Hall of Fame inductees
FIBA World Championship-winning players
Georgetown Hoyas men's basketball players
Goodwill Games medalists in basketball
Kidney transplant recipients
McDonald's High School All-Americans
Medalists at the 2000 Summer Olympics
Miami Heat players
Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame inductees
National Basketball Association All-Stars
National Basketball Association players with retired numbers
New Jersey Nets players
Olympic gold medalists for the United States in basketball
Parade High School All-Americans (boys' basketball)
Sportspeople from Chesapeake, Virginia
United States men's national basketball team players
|
409281
|
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin%20Shields
|
Kevin Shields
|
Kevin Patrick Shields (born 21 May 1963) is an American-born Irish musician, singer-songwriter, composer, and producer, best known as the vocalist and guitarist of the band My Bloody Valentine. They became influential on the evolution of alternative rock with their two studio albums Isn't Anything (1988) and Loveless (1991), pioneering a subgenre known as shoegaze. Shields's texturised guitar sound and his experimentation with his guitars' tremolo systems resulted in the creation of the "glide guitar" technique, which became a recognisable aspect of My Bloody Valentine's sound, along with his meticulous production techniques.
Following My Bloody Valentine's dissolution in the late 1990s, Shields became a frequent guest musician, producer, engineer, and remixer with various bands and artists, including Experimental Audio Research, Yo La Tengo, Dinosaur Jr, and Mogwai. In 1998 he became a touring member of Primal Scream. Shields contributed several original compositions to the soundtrack of Sofia Coppolas 2003 film Lost in Translation, which earned him nominations for the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) and Irish Film and Television Academy (IFTA) awards. In 2008, Shields released a collaborative live album together with Patti Smith entitled The Coral Sea.
My Bloody Valentine reunited in 2007, and released their third studio album m b v in February 2013. The album was composed entirely by Shields and had been in production since the late 1990s, when Shields was rumoured to have been suffering from writer's block. Shields has since been featured in several publications' best-of-lists, including Rolling Stone 100 Greatest Guitarists and Spins 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time. Multiple musicians have also cited him as an influence, including Billy Corgan and J Mascis.
Early life
Kevin Patrick Shields was born on 21 May 1963 in Jamaica Hospital in Queens, New York City, United States. He is the eldest of five siblings born to Irish parents; his mother was a nurse and his father was an executive in the food industry. Shields' parents had emigrated from Ireland to the United States in the 1950s, when the couple were teenagers. Shields attended Christ the King, a Roman Catholic primary school which he described as "a really horrible school run by psychopathic nuns". They lived in Flushing, a neighbourhood in north-central Queens, relocating to Commack, Long Island, when Shields was four, where he lived until the age of ten. In 1973, Shields moved to Dublin, Ireland, with his parents and siblings due to financial conditions and in order to remain close to their extended family.
Shields was raised in Cabinteely, a suburb in Dublin's Southside. He has described the experience of moving to Ireland as a culture shock, "going from, as far as I was concerned, the modern world to some distant past." According to Shields, the main difference between the US and Ireland that affected him was the attitude towards music culture: "[in the US] there was no Top of the Pops, there was nothing like that, there was no MTV; and over in [Ireland], everything was completely catered to for teenagers." He said that the change was "what got [him] into music in a really big way."
Music career
1979–1982: Early projects
Shields received his first electric guitar, a Hondo SG, as a Christmas present from his parents in 1979. Shields befriended drummer Colm Ó Cíosóig in south Dublin during the summer of 1978, and together they answered an advertisement placed by a 12-year-old musician to form punk rock band The Complex. Ó Cíosóig's schoolfriend Liam Ó Maonlaí from Coláiste Eoin in Booterstown was recruited as lead vocalist, and the band began rehearsing. Shields later said that The Complex had formed out of "what all the nerds and weirdos actually do as opposed to the cool people with the leather jackets," who were forming fictional groups around Dublin in the late 1970s. According to Shields, the band played "a handful of gigs" during their short-lived career, the first of which included covers of songs by the Sex Pistols and Ramones.
The Complex disbanded when Ó Maonlaí left to form Hothouse Flowers, and Shields and Ó Cíosóig began rehearsing with another bassist. In 1981, the trio formed A Life in the Day, a band that focused on a more post-punk sound influenced by Siouxsie and the Banshees and Joy Division. The band recorded a demo tape, which features Shields' first experimentation with pitch bending, and performed at local venues to crowds of no more than a hundred people.
1983–1997: My Bloody Valentine
A Life in the Day disbanded in 1981, and Shields and Ó Cíosóig went on to form My Bloody Valentine in early 1983 with lead vocalist David Conway. Conway suggested a number of potential band names (including The Burning Peacocks) before the trio settled for My Bloody Valentine. Shields has since claimed that he was unaware at the time that My Bloody Valentine was the title of a 1981 Canadian slasher film.
On Shields's suggestion, Conway contacted Gavin Friday, lead vocalist of the Dublin post-punk band, the Virgin Prunes. Friday's contacts secured them a show in Tilburg, Netherlands, in early 1984, and the band relocated to the Netherlands. They lived there for a further nine months, squatting in Amsterdam and later in a more rural area, where Shields worked on a farm. Due to a lack of opportunities and correct documentation, the band relocated to West Berlin, Germany, in late 1984 and recorded their debut mini album, This Is Your Bloody Valentine (1985). The album, which features Shields on bass, failed to receive much attention, and the band returned temporarily to the Netherlands before settling in London in 1985.
The band recruited bassist Debbie Googe and released their debut extended play Geek! in December 1985. The EP received little attention, and due to the band's slow progress Shields contemplated relocating to New York, where members of his family were living. The band's two successive releases, The New Record by My Bloody Valentine (1986) and "Sunny Sundae Smile" (1987), brought minor success, peaking at number 22 and number 6 respectively on the UK Independent Albums Chart and Singles Chart. During a supporting tour in March 1987, David Conway announced his decision to leave the band due to his gastric illness, disillusionment with music and ambitions to become a writer. Conway was replaced by vocalist and guitarist Bilinda Butcher, with whom Shields split (and often shared) vocal duties. Shields was initially reluctant to take on a vocal role within the band, but said that he had "always sung in the rehearsal room... and made up the melodies." With the new line up in place, the band intended to drop the My Bloody Valentine moniker, but were unable to decide on a replacement and so kept the name "for better or for worse".
A series of successful releases followed including three-track single "Strawberry Wine" and the band's second mini album Ecstasy (1987), both featuring Shields on lead vocal duties. Whilst touring in support of Ecstasy, My Bloody Valentine signed to Creation Records, who described the band as "the Irish equivalent to Hüsker Dü". The band's first release for Creation was the EP You Made Me Realise (1988), followed by the band's hugely influential debut studio album Isn't Anything (1988), which is regarded as having "virtually created" shoegaze genre, establishing the template which a number of bands would work off.
My Bloody Valentine commenced the recording sessions for their second album in February 1989. Creation Records had believed that the album could be recorded in five days, but several unproductive months followed during which Shields took control of the musical and technical aspects of the sessions. Shields relocated to a total of 19 other studios and hired a number of engineers, including Alan Moulder, Anjali Dutt and Guy Fixsen. As the recording was taking so long, Shields and Creation agreed to release two interim EPs, Glider (1990) and Tremolo (1991). The Loveless album was eventually released in November 1991, and was rumoured to have cost over £250,000 and to have bankrupted Creation (claims which Shields has denied). Critical reception to Loveless was almost unanimous with praise, although the album was not a commercial success, peaking at number 24 on the UK Albums Chart but failing to chart internationally. Creation Records founder Alan McGee dropped My Bloody Valentine from the label soon after the release of Loveless, due to the album's excessive recording time and interpersonal problems with Shields.
In October 1992, My Bloody Valentine signed to Island Records for a reported £250,000. The band's advance went towards the construction of a home studio in Streatham, South London, which was completed in April 1993. Several technical problems with the studio sent the band into "semi-meltdown", according to Shields, who was rumoured to have been suffering from writer's block. Googe and Ó Cíosóig left the band in 1995, whilst Shields and Butcher attempted to record a third studio album; Shields had said that this would be released in 1998, but My Bloody Valentine disbanded in 1997. Unable to finalise a third album, Shields isolated himself, and in his own words "went crazy", drawing comparisons in the music press to the eccentric behaviour of musicians like Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys and Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd.
Rumours spread amongst fans that several albums worth of material had been recorded and shelved prior to the band's break up. In 1999, it was reported that Shields had delivered 60 hours of material to Island Records, and Butcher confirmed that there existed "probably enough songs to fill two albums." Shields later admitted that at least one full album of "half-finished" material was abandoned, stating "it was dead. It hadn't got that spirit, that life in it."
1997–2006: Collaborations and Lost in Translation
Following My Bloody Valentine's disbandment, Shields embarked on a number of collaborations with other artists, both as a guest musician and producing, engineering, mixing and remixing other acts. Shields contributed guitar loops to two Experimental Audio Research albums: 1996's Beyond the Pale (which was recorded at Shields' home studio in Streatham and credits him with "special thanks" on the album sleeve) and 1997's The Köner Experiment. He was a frequent collaborator with indie rock band Dinosaur Jr, appearing on and producing Hand It Over (1997) and Ear-Bleeding Country: The Best of Dinosaur Jr. (2001), as well as frontman J Mascis More Light (2000) and The John Peel Sessions (2003). Shields has lent his services as a guest musician to releases by Russell Mills & Undark, DJ Spooky, Curve, Manic Street Preachers, Le Volume Courbe, Gemma Hayes and Paul Weller. In a live capacity, Shields has performed with the Canadian contemporary dance company La La La Human Steps (contributing the song "2" to the 1995 performance of the same name), Gemma Hayes, The Charlatans and Spacemen 3 (appearing at their 2010 reunion show).
Shields has also remained active as a producer outside of My Bloody Valentine: his first credits were The Impossible's 1991 single "How Do You Do It?"; and "Tunnel", a track from GODs remix album Appeal to Human Greed (1995). He also produced Dot Allisons Afterglow (1997), Joy Zippers American Whip (2003) and The Beat Up's Blackrays Defence (2005). Shields has also mixed and remixed material by The Pastels, Yo La Tengo, Damian O'Neill, Mogwai, Hurricane #1, The Go! Team, Bow Wow Wow and Wounded Knees.
Between 1998 and 2006 Shields became a frequent collaborator and semi-permanent touring member of Primal Scream. He contributed guitar, produced and mixed tracks on two of the band's studio albums: XTRMNTR (2000), and Evil Heat (2002). Primal Scream frontman Bobby Gillespie has said that "[Shields] brings something that nobody else in the world can bring. He plays guitar the way that nobody else in the world plays guitar," adding that Primal Scream considered Shields to be "part of the family, very much so." Shields has remained close to the band following his departure in 2006, remastering Primal Scream's third studio album Screamadelica (1991) in 2010 and contributing guitar to "2013", the lead single from More Light (2013). Gillespie has since commented on Shields' absence, noting that "there's always room for Kevin Shields—always."
In 2003, Shields contributed four original compositions to the soundtrack for Sofia Coppola's 2003 film, Lost in Translation. Shields became involved with the score after being contacted by the film's music co-ordinator Brian Reitzell while in Tokyo, Japan. During summer 2002, Reitzell and Shields began impromptu jam sessions in London where the duo "adopted a late-night recording schedule," resulting in the single "City Girl." Released in August 2003 on V2 Records, the Lost in Translation soundtrack included three other ambient pieces which Shields had composed for the film: "Goodbye," "Ikebana," and "Are You Awake?". His contributions to the soundtrack earned Shields nominations for a British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) award for Best Film Music, an Irish Film and Television Academy (IFTA) award for Best Music in a Film, and an Online Film Critics Society award for Best Original Score.
In July 2008, Shields collaborated with the American musician Patti Smith to release the live album The Coral Sea on the PASK label (which the duo had also founded together). The double album features two performances at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, recorded on 22 June 2005 and 12 September 2006, wherein Smith reads the book of the name same (which she wrote in tribute to her friend, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe) over Shields' instrumental accompaniment.
2007–present: My Bloody Valentine reunion
In August 2007, reports emerged that My Bloody Valentine would reunite for the 2008 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, California, United States; this was later confirmed by Shields, along with the announcement that the band's third studio album (which he had begun recording in 1996) was near completion. In June 2008, My Bloody Valentine played two live rehearsals at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, their first public performances in 16 years. They began an extensive worldwide tour in summer 2008 (their first since their 1992 tour in support of Loveless) including appearances at Øyafestivalen in Oslo, Norway, Electric Picnic in Stradbally, Ireland, and the Fuji Rock Festival in Niigata, Japan. The band reportedly spent £200,000 on equipment for their world tour.
In October 2011, Shields launched the independent record label Pickpocket together with Le Volume Courbe frontwoman Charlotte Marionneau, and considered releasing a collaborative "ten minutes of noise" single on the imprint. In May 2012 remastered versions of Isn't Anything and Loveless were released as well as the EP's 1988–1991 collection, which featured the band's Shields-remastered Creation Records extended plays, singles and unreleased tracks.
In November, Shields announced plans to release My Bloody Valentine's third album online before the end of the year, before announcing during a warm-up show at Electric Brixton in London on 27 January 2013 that the album "might be out in two or three days." The m b v album was eventually released through the band's official website on 2 February 2013, crashing the site on its launch due to high traffic. According to Metacritic, m b v received "universal acclaim", and the band began a worldwide tour upon its release.
Shields has since announced intentions to release remastered analogue cuts of My Bloody Valentine's back catalogue followed by two releases of new material that were most recently expected to release in 2019.
In April 2018, Shields released The Weight Of History / Only Once Away My Son, a collaborative double A-side with Brian Eno, for Record Store Day.
In June 2023, he released the Fender Shields Blender, which he co-developed with Fender (company).
Artistry
Influences
Shields has referred to The Beatles and the Ramones as his favourite bands of all time. Upon moving to Ireland in 1973, he became a fan of "the energy, androgyny and otherworldy production style" of glam rock and has said Johnny Ramone inspired him to begin playing guitar. Speaking about Ramone, Shields said "I realised [Johnny] wasn't playing guitar—he was generating the sound ... it was just a noise generator." He later remarked seeing the Ramones perform in a North Dublin cinema "changed his life". Other guitarists he admired were Public Image Ltd guitarist Keith Levene and Killing Joke guitarist Geordie Walker. Some of his earlier influences included local Dublin punk band DC Nien, The Birthday Party, The Cramps and Einstürzende Neubauten. In the mid-to-late 1980s, he was influenced by The Byrds, Hüsker Dü, Dinosaur Jr and Sonic Youth—particularly two of the band's albums: EVOL (1986) and Sister (1987). He was also influenced by hip hop music, in particular Public Enemy, whose track "Security in the First World" Shields sampled on the 1988 My Bloody Valentine track "Instrumental No 2". Later Shields has cited The Beach Boys as an influence and expressed admiration for modern artists like Tame Impala.
Shields' production techniques were influenced by a range of producers and artists. He has stated a dislike for the "wet and ... liquid" production values of 1980s music and shoegaze artists; he instead favours the "dry ... and upfront" sound used by Dinosaur Jr and Sonic Youth. He said that the use of stereo in the 1980s was part of a "weak, corporate sound". Shields records and produces largely in mono, an approach influenced by Brian Wilsons production on The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds (1966) and veteran pop producer Phil Spector. He has also expressed admiration for producer Joe Meek and the French electronic duo Daft Punk.
Guitar sound
Shields' guitar sound has been cited as one of the most recognisable aspects of My Bloody Valentine's music. His sound uses "texture more than technique to create vivid soundscapes". He has been listed at number 95 and 2 on Rolling Stones and Spins 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time list. During the late 1980s, Shields began customising the tremolo systems for his Fender Jaguars and Jazzmaster guitars; he extended the tremolo arm and loosened it considerably, to allow him to manipulate the arm while strumming chords, which resulted in significant pitch bending. Shields used a number of alternate and open tunings that together with his tremolo manipulation, according to Rolling Stone Michael Azerrad, achieved "a strange warping effect that makes the music wander in and out of focus".
Among Shields' notable effects is digital reverse reverb, sourced from a Yamaha SPX90 effects unit. Together with the tremolo manipulation and distortion, he created a technique known as "glide guitar". Shields' effects rig, which is composed largely of distortion, graphic equalisers and tone controls, consists of at least 30 effects pedals. His rig is connected to a large number of amplifiers which are often set to maximum volume to increase sustain. During live performances with My Bloody Valentine – particularly during the closing number "You Made Me Realise" – Shields creates a blend of white noise, which often lasts for half an hour and can reach 130db. "It was so loud it was like sensory deprivation," he remarked. "We just liked the fact that we could see a change in the audience at a certain point."
Legacy
Shields' sound and performance have been regarded as influential, with musicians including Billy Corgan, J Mascis, and Greg Puciato citing him as an influence; the last revealed that his most desired collaboration would be with Shields.
"Kevin Shields achieved something on Loveless that only the great guitarists achieve: he achieved a wholeness and a unity," observed Living Colour's Vernon Reid. "He created his own sound."
Personal life
Health
Shields has mild dyslexia, "mild to extreme" tinnitus, and tendonitis in his left hand. He contracted tinnitus during the mixing of Loveless in 1991. Though initially worried about the condition, Shields has said he has "come to treat the tinnitus as a friend. It filters unwanted sounds and actually protects my ears. It becomes your first line of defence against audible stress." He said his tendonitis, which he has had since 1988, is relieved "once you start to immerse yourself in the sound, any discomfort just disappears."
Views on music industry
Shields has been outspoken about the corporate influence in the music industry. He has said that Sony Music Entertainment, upon inheriting My Bloody Valentine from Creation Records, deliberately hid the master tapes of the band's original recordings in an attempt to delay the release of EP's 1988–1991 (2012). Shields threatened to involve Scotland Yard in the dispute and then said the tapes "magically, suddenly reappear[ed]." He has since called for reorganisation of the record industry, which he has referred to as "psychopathic". As a result, My Bloody Valentine's third album, m b v (2013), was self-released. Reflecting on his decision, Shields said it was "great to release the record without any industry interaction at all, but it also meant that it was a bit too expensive to buy, so we're going to try to make it cheaper by working with various record companies in the future," though ruling out agreements with major labels. In 2013, following the release of m b v, he accused the organisers of the Mercury Prize of "banning" the album for the nominated shortlist. In an interview with The Guardian, Shields said My Bloody Valentine were "banned by [the Mercury Prize]" due to not having a major digital distribution deal in the United Kingdom. He added "because we're not on Amazon or iTunes ...it's not a real record. Our album's not a real album because it's independent. The corporateness has got to such a point where we've essentially been told that we don't exist."
Relationships and family
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Shields and Bilinda Butcher were in a relationship. Most of Shields' siblings have reached various degrees of fame. His brother Jimi was a founding member and drummer of the indie rock band Rollerskate Skinny, who has since formed Wounded Knees and become co-director of TTT (thirtythreetrees), a Dublin landscape design practice. His sister Ann Marie has worked extensively in the music industry and has managed tours for both My Bloody Valentine and Rollerskate Skinny, as well as being credited for coordination on Loveless. His youngest sister, Eileen, is a shoe designer who has designed for Bono, Drew Barrymore and PJ Harvey.
Discography
Kevin Shields
The Coral Sea (with Patti Smith) (2008)
My Bloody Valentine
Isn't Anything (1988)
Loveless (1991)
m b v (2013)
References
Bibliography
External links
Kevin Shields featured interview at The Quietus
1963 births
Living people
20th-century Irish male singers
21st-century Irish male singers
Alternative rock bass guitarists
Alternative rock guitarists
Alternative rock singers
Ambient musicians
Irish audio engineers
Indie pop musicians
Irish male bass guitarists
Irish expatriates in the United Kingdom
Irish film score composers
Male film score composers
Irish record producers
Irish rock guitarists
Irish rock singers
Irish male singer-songwriters
Irish singer-songwriters
Musicians from Dublin (city)
My Bloody Valentine (band) members
Musicians from Flushing, Queens
People from Commack, New York
Post-punk musicians
Primal Scream members
Punk rock guitarists
Remixers
Irish shoegaze musicians
Singers from London
People from Killiney
The Complex (band) members
21st-century Irish bass guitarists
20th-century Irish bass guitarists
20th-century Irish composers
21st-century Irish composers
|
409337
|
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music%20of%20Wales
|
Music of Wales
|
The Music of Wales (Welsh: Cerddoriaeth Cymru), particularly singing, is a significant part of Welsh national identity, and the country is traditionally referred to as "the land of song".
This is a modern stereotype based on 19th century conceptions of Nonconformist choral music and 20th century male voice choirs, Eisteddfodau and arena singing, such as sporting events, but Wales has a history of music that has been used as a primary form of communication.
Historically, Wales has been associated with folk music, choral performance, religious music and brass bands. However modern Welsh music is a thriving scene of rock, Welsh language lyricism, modern folk, jazz, pop, and electronic music. Particularly noted in the UK are the Newport rock scene, once labelled 'the new Seattle', and the Cardiff music scene, for which the city has been labelled 'Music City', for having the second highest number of independent music venues in the UK.
History
Early song
Wales has a history of folk music related to the Celtic music of countries such as Ireland and Scotland. It has distinctive instrumentation and song types, and is often heard at a twmpath (folk dance session), gŵyl werin (folk festival) or noson lawen (a traditional party similar to the Gaelic "Céilidh"). Modern Welsh folk musicians have sometimes reconstructed traditions which had been suppressed or forgotten, and have competed with imported and indigenous rock and pop trends.
Wales has a history of using music as a primary form of communication. Harmony and part singing is synonymous with Welsh music. Examples of well-developed, vertical harmony can be found in the Robert ap Huw Manuscript dating back to the 1600s. This text contains pieces of Welsh music from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that show amazing harmonic development.
The oldest known traditional songs from Wales are those connected to seasonal customs such as the Mari Lwyd or Hunting the Wren, in which both ceremonies contain processional songs where repetition is a musical feature. Other such ceremonial or feasting traditions connected with song are the New Year's Day Calennig and the welcoming of Spring Candlemas in which the traditional wassail was followed by dancing and feast songs. Children would sing 'pancake songs' on Shrove Tuesday and summer carols were connected to the festival of Calan Mai.
For many years, Welsh folk music had been suppressed, due to the effects of the Act of Union, which promoted the English language, and the rise of the Methodist church in the 18th and 19th century. The church frowned on traditional music and dance, though folk tunes were sometimes used in hymns. Since at least the 12th century, Welsh bards and musicians have participated in musical and poetic contests called eisteddfodau; this is the equivalent of the Scottish Mod and the Irish Fleadh Cheoil.
18th and 19th century, religious music
Music in Wales is often connected with male voice choirs, such as the Morriston Orpheus Choir, Cardiff Arms Park Male Choir and Treorchy Male Voice Choir, and enjoys a worldwide reputation in this field. This tradition of choral singing has been expressed through sporting events, especially in the country's national sport of rugby, which in 1905 saw the first singing of a national anthem, Wales's Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau, at the start of an international sporting encounter.
Welsh traditional music declined with the rise of Nonconformist religion in the 18th century, which emphasized choral singing over instruments, and religious over secular uses of music; traditional musical styles became associated with drunkenness and immorality. The development of hymn singing in Wales is closely tied with the Welsh Methodist revival of the late 18th century. The hymns were popularised by writers such as William Williams, while others were set to popular secular tunes or adopted Welsh ballad tunes. The appointment of Henry Mills as a musical overseer to the Welsh Methodist congregations in the 1780s saw a drive to improve singing throughout Wales. This saw the formation of local musical societies and in the first half of the 19th century Musical primers and collections of tunes were printed and distributed. Congregational singing was given further impetus with the arrival of the temperance movement, which saw the Temperance Choral Union (formed in 1854) organising annual singing festivals, these included hymn singing by combined choirs. The publication of Llyfr Tonau Cynulleidfaol by John Roberts in 1859 provided congregations with a body of standard tunes that were less complex with unadorned harmonies. This collection began the practice of combining together to sing tunes from the book laid the foundation for the Cymanfa Ganu (the hymn singing festival). Around the same period, the growing availability of music in the tonic sol-fa notation, promoted by the likes of Eleazar Roberts, allowed congregations to read music more fluently. One particularly popular hymn of this period was "Llef".
In the 1860s, a revival of traditional Welsh music began, with the formation of the National Eisteddfod Society, followed by the foundation of London-area Welsh Societies and the publication of Nicholas Bennett's Alawon fy Ngwlad ("Tunes of my Land"), a compilation of traditional tunes, in the 1890s.
19th–20th century, secular music
A tradition of brass bands dating from the Victorian era continues, particularly in the South Wales Valleys, with Welsh bands such as the Cory Band being one of the most successful in the world.
Although choral music in the 19th century by Welsh composers was mainly religious, there was a steady body of secular songs being produced. Composers such as Joseph Parry, whose work Myfanwy is still a favourite Welsh song, were followed by David Jenkins and D. Emlyn Evans, who tailored songs specifically for the Victorian music market. These secular hymns were embraced by the emerging male voice choirs, which formed originally as the tenor and bass sections of chapel choirs, but also sang outside the church in a form of recreation and fellowship. The industrial workforce attracted less of a jollity of English glee clubs and also avoided the more robust militaristic style of music. Composers such as Charles Gounod were imitated by Welsh contemporaries such as Parry, Protheroe and Price to cater for a Welsh fondness of dramatic narratives, wide dynamic contrasts and thrilling climaxes. As well as the growth of male voice choirs during the industrial period, Wales also experienced an increase in the popularity of brass bands. The bands were popular among the working classes, and were adopted by paternalistic employers who saw brass bands as a constructive activity for their work forces. Solo artists of note during the nineteenth century included charismatic singers Robert Rees (Eos Morlais) and Sarah Edith Wynne, who would tour outside Wales and helped build the country's reputation as a "land of song".
In the twentieth century, Wales produced a large number of classical and operatic soloists of international reputation, including Ben Davies, Geraint Evans, Robert Tear, Bryn Terfel, Gwyneth Jones, Margaret Price, Rebecca Evans and Helen Watts, as well as composers such as Alun Hoddinott, William Mathias, Grace Williams and Karl Jenkins. From the 1980s onwards, crossover artists such as Katherine Jenkins, Charlotte Church and Aled Jones began to come to the fore. Welsh National Opera, established in 1946, and the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World competition, launched in 1983, attracted attention to Wales's growing reputation as a centre of excellence in the classical genre.
Composer and conductor Mansel Thomas OBE (1909–1986), who worked mainly in South Wales, was one of the most influential musicians of his generation. For many years employed by the BBC, he promoted the careers of many composers and performers. He himself wrote vocal, choral, instrumental, band and orchestral music, specialising in setting songs and poetry. Many of his orchestral and chamber music pieces are based on Welsh folk songs and dances.
Post-1945, popular music
After World War II, two significant musical organisations were founded, the Welsh National Opera and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, both were factors in Welsh composers moving away from choral compositions to instrumental and orchestral pieces. Modern Welsh composers such as Alun Hoddinott and William Mathias produced large scale orchestrations, though both have returned to religious themes within their work. Both men would also explore Welsh culture, with Mathias setting music to the works of Dylan Thomas, while Hoddinott, along with the likes of Mervyn Burtch and David Wynne, would be influenced by the poetic and mythical past of Wales.
The 20th century saw many solo singers from Wales become not only national but international stars. Ivor Novello, who was a singer-songwriter during the First World War. Also, opera-singers such as Geraint Evans and later Delme Bryn-Jones found fame post World War II. The 1960s saw the rise of two distinctive Welsh acts, Tom Jones and Shirley Bassey, both of whom defined Welsh vocal styles for several generations.The 1960s saw important developments in both Welsh and English language music in Wales. The BBC had already produced Welsh language Radio programmes, such as Noson Lowen in the 1940s, and in the 1960s the corporation followed suite with television shows Hob y Deri Dando and Disc a Dawn giving Welsh acts a weekly stage to promote their sound. A more homely programme Gwlad y Gan was produced by rival channel TWW which set classic Welsh songs in idyllic settings and starred baritone Ivor Emmanuel. The Anglo-American cultural influence was a strong draw on young musicians, with Tom Jones and Shirley Bassey becoming world-famous singers; and the growth of The Beatles' Apple Records label saw Welsh acts Mary Hopkin and Badfinger join the roster. Not to be outdone, the short lived Y Blew, born out of Aberystwyth University, became the first Welsh language pop band in 1967. This was followed in 1969 with the establishment of the Sain record label, one of the most important catalyst for change in the Welsh language music scene.
In more modern times there has been a thriving musical scene. Bands and artists which have gained popularity include acts such as Man, Budgie, and solo artists John Cale & Mary Hopkin in the early 1970s and solo artists Bonnie Tyler and Shakin' Stevens in the 1980s, but through mimicking American music styles such as Motown or Rock and Roll. The Welsh language scene saw a dip in commercial popularity, but a rise in experimentation with acts such as punk band Trwynau Coch leading into a 'New Wave' of music. Bands that followed, like Anhrefn and Datblygu, found support from BBC Radio 1 disc jockey John Peel, one of the few DJs outside Wales to champion Welsh language music.
Wales embraced the new music of the 1980s and 1990s, particularly with the thriving Newport rock scene for which the city was labelled 'the new Seattle'. Acts and individuals based in the city during the period included Joe Strummer of The Clash, Feeder, The Darling Buds, Donna Matthews of Elastica, as well as Skindred and punk and metal acts. Famous performers or attendees at venues such as TJ's included Oasis, Kurt Cobain, and others.
21st century
The early 21st century produced a credible Welsh 'sound' embraced by the public and the media press of Great Britain. Such acts included the Manic Street Preachers, Stereophonics, Catatonia, Super Furry Animals and Gorky's Zygotic Mynci. The first two allowed the Welsh pop scene to flourish, and while not singing in Welsh they brought a sense of Welshness through iconography, lyrics and interviews. The latter two bands were notable for bringing Welsh language songs to a British audience. Music venues and acts thrived in the 2010s, with the noted success of the Cardiff music scene, for which the city has been labelled 'Music City'.
Styles of Welsh music
Traditional folk music
Early musical traditions during the 17th and 18th century saw the emergence of more complex carols, away from the repetitive ceremonial songs. These carols featured complex poetry based on cynghanedd, some were sung to English tunes, but many used Welsh melodies such as 'Ffarwel Ned Puw'. The most common Welsh folk song is the love song, with lyrics pertaining to the sorrow of parting or in praise of the girl. A few employ sexual metaphor and mention the act of bundling. After love songs, the ballad was a very popular form of song, with its tales of manual labour, agriculture and the every day life. Popular themes in the 19th century included murder, emigration and colliery disasters; sung to popular melodies from Ireland or North America.
The instrument most commonly associated with Wales is the harp, which is generally considered to be the country's national instrument. Though it originated in Italy, the triple harp (telyn deires, "three-row harp") is held up as the traditional harp of Wales: it has three rows of strings, with every semitone separately represented, while modern concert harps use a pedal system to change key by stopping the relevant strings. After losing ground to the pedal harp in the 19th century, it has been re-popularised through the efforts of Nansi Richards, Llio Rhydderch and Robin Huw Bowen. The penillion is a traditional form of Welsh singing poetry, accompanied by the harp, in which the singer and harpist follow different melodies so the stressed syllables of the poem coincide with accented beats of the harp melody.
The earliest written records of the Welsh harpists' repertoire are contained in the Robert ap Huw manuscript, which documents 30 ancient harp pieces that make up a fragment of the lost repertoire of the medieval Welsh bards. The music was composed between the 14th and 16th centuries, transmitted orally, then written down in a unique tablature and later copied in the early 17th century. This manuscript contains the earliest body of harp music from anywhere in Europe and is one of the key sources of early Welsh music. The manuscript has been the source of a long-running effort to accurately decipher the music it encodes.
Another distinctive instrument is the crwth, also a stringed instrument of a type once widespread in northern Europe, it was played in Wales from the Middle Ages, which, superseded by the fiddle (Welsh Ffidil), lingered on later in Wales than elsewhere but died out by the nineteenth century at the latest. The fiddle is an integral part of Welsh folk music. Other traditional instruments from Wales include the Welsh Bagpipes and Pibgorn.
Folk music
Welsh folk is known for a variety of instrumental and vocal styles, as well as more recent singer-songwriters drawing on folk traditions.
By the late 1970s, Wales, like its neighbours, had seen the beginning of a roots revival, the beginnings of which can be traced back to the 1960s folk singer-songwriter Dafydd Iwan. Iwan was instrumental in the creation of a modern Welsh folk scene, and is known for fiercely patriotic and nationalistic songs, as well as the foundation of the Sain record label. The Festival Interceltique de Lorient saw the formation of Ar Log, who spearheaded a revival of Welsh fiddling and harp-playing, and continued recording into the 21st century. A Welsh session band, following in the footsteps of their Irish counterparts Planxty, Cilmeri recorded two albums with a uniquely Welsh feel. Welsh folk rock includes a number of bands, such as Moniars, Gwerinos, The Bluehorses, Bob Delyn a'r Ebillion and Taran.
Sain was founded in 1969 by Dafydd Iwan and Huw Jones with the aid of funding from Brian Morgan Edwards. Originally, the label signed Welsh singers, mostly with overtly political lyrics, eventually branching out into a myriad of different styles. These included country music (John ac Alun), singer-songwriters (Meic Stevens), stadium rock (The Alarm) and classical singers (Aled Jones, Bryn Terfel).
The folk revival picked up energy in the 1980s with Robin Huw Bowen and other musicians achieving great commercial and critical success. Later into the 1990s, a new wave of bands including Fernhill, Rag Foundation, Bob Delyn A'r Ebillion, Moniars, Carreg Lafar, Jac y Do, Boys From The Hill and Gwerinos found popularity. Jac y Do is one of several bands that now perform twmpathau all over the country for social gatherings and public events. Welsh traditional music was updated by punk-folk bands delivering traditional tunes at a much increased tempo; these included early Bob Delyn a'r Ebillion and Defaid. The 1990s also saw the creation of Fflach:tradd, a label which soon came to dominate the Welsh folk record industry with a series of compilations, as well as thematic projects like Ffidil, which featured 13 fiddlers. Some Welsh performers have mixed traditional influences, especially the language, into imported genres, Soliloquise for example and especially John ac Alun, a Welsh language country duo who are perhaps the best-known contemporary performers in Welsh.
In June 2007, Tŷ Siamas was opened in Dolgellau. Tŷ Siamas is the National Centre for Traditional Music, with regular sessions, concerts, lessons, an interactive exhibition and a recording studio.
Pop and rock
In the non-traditional arena, many Welsh musicians have been present in popular rock and pop, either as individuals, (e.g. Tom Jones, Shirley Bassey, Bonnie Tyler, Dave Edmunds, Shakin' Stevens), individuals in groups (e.g. John Cale of The Velvet Underground, Green Gartside of Scritti Politti, Julian Cope of Teardrop Explodes and Andy Scott of Sweet, Roger Glover of Deep Purple and Rainbow), or as bands formed in Wales (e.g. Amen Corner, The Alarm, Man, Budgie, Badfinger, Tigertailz, Young Marble Giants), but not until the 1990s did Welsh bands begin to be seen as a particular grouping. Following on from an underground post-punk movement in the 1980s, led by bands like Datblygu and Fflaps, the 1990s saw a considerable flowering of Welsh rock groups (in both Welsh and English languages) such as Catatonia, Manic Street Preachers, Feeder, Stereophonics, Super Furry Animals, The Pooh Sticks, 60ft Dolls and Gorky's Zygotic Mynci.
The 21st century has seen the emergence of a number of new artists, including Marina and the Diamonds, Skindred, Lostprophets, The Kennedy Soundtrack, James Kennedy (musician), Kids in Glass Houses, Duffy, Christopher Rees, Bullet for My Valentine, The Automatic, Goldie Lookin Chain, People in Planes, Los Campesinos!, The Victorian English Gentlemens Club, Attack! Attack!, Gwenno, Kelly Lee Owens, Funeral for a Friend, Hondo Maclean, Fflur Dafydd, The Blackout, The Broken Vinyl Club, The Joy Formidable and The Anchoress. More abrasive alternative acts such as Jarcrew, Mclusky and Future of the Left – all well known within the independent music community and known as Welsh acts – have also received modest commercial success in the UK. Quite a strong neo-progressive/classic rock scene has developed from Swansea-based band Karnataka and other bands that have links to them. These include Magenta, The Reasoning and Panic Room.
Electronic music
Llwybr Llaethog has produced bilingual electronic music. DJ Sasha is from Hawarden, Flintshire. Also worth noting are the successful Drum and Bass DJ High Contrast who is from Cardiff, the veteran house outfit K-Klass from Wrexham, and the Swansea-based progressive breaks producers Hybrid. Escape into the Park and Bionic Events are examples of the Welsh Hard Dance scene. On 16 July 2011 Sian Evans of trip hop, synthpop Bristol based band Kosheen had a No.1 Official UK Singles Charts hit in collaboration with DJ Fresh.
Hip-hop
Welsh hip-hop and rap artists include Goldie Lookin Chain, LEMFRECK and Astroid Boys. Bilingual artists include Mr Phormula and more recently, Sage Todz, Dom James and Lloyd.
Welsh language popular music
There is a thriving Welsh-language contemporary music scene ranging from rock to hip-hop which routinely attracts large crowds and audiences, but they tend to be covered only by the Welsh-language media.
In 2013 the first Welsh Language Music Day was held, taking place each year in February. Events mark the use of Welsh language in a wide range of genres of music, and locations include Womanby Street in Cardiff as well as London, Swansea, Brooklyn and even Budapest.
Every year, Mentrau Iaith Cymru, The National Eisteddfod and BBC Radio Cymru have their national 'Battle of the Bands,' where young, upcoming Welsh bands can compete for £1000, and, what is thought to be one of the greatest possible achievements for a Welsh language act, to perform at Maes B, on its final night. In addition to Maes B, there are a number of various Welsh language music events throughout the year that have gained popularity in the past few years. In February each year the Welsh magazine 'Y Selar' hosts an award ceremony in Aberystwyth University where Welsh music fans from all over the country go to see the most popular and upcoming bands perform. There's also the 'Dawns Rhyngolegol' where the Welsh societies from every University in the UK gather to celebrate the best Welsh language music in Wales.
Current outlets
Welsh bands have the outlet for audiences, on such media as BBC Wales, BBC Cymru, S4C and The Pop Factory. In particular, BBC Radio 1's Bethan and Huw and BBC Radio Wales's Adam Walton support new Welsh music at their respective stations.
See also
List of Welsh bands
Music of Cardiff
Music of Newport
Notes
References
External links
BBC Wales Music
Tŷ Siamas, the National Centre for Traditional Music
Tŷ Cerdd / Music Centre Wales – a collection of links to music-based organisations in Wales.
Music pages on Wales.com website
Folk Radio Cymru
From Old Country to New World: Emigration in Welsh ballads — audio of lecture by Professor E. Wyn James, Cecil Sharp House, London (2015)
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil%20Taylor%20%28darts%20player%29
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Phil Taylor (darts player)
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Philip Douglas Taylor (born 13 August 1960) is an English former professional darts player, widely considered the greatest darts player of all time. Nicknamed The Power, he dominated darts for over two decades and won 214 professional tournaments, including a record 85 major titles and a record 16 World Championships. In 2015, the BBC rated Taylor among the ten greatest British sportsmen of the last 35 years.
Taylor won eight consecutive World Championships from 1995 to 2002, reached 14 consecutive finals from 1994 to 2007 and reached 21 world finals overall, all of which are records. He held the world number one ranking for thirteen years in total, including eight in a row from 2006 to 2013. He won 70 PDC Pro Tour events, which was a record until Michael van Gerwen passed it in February 2019. Taylor hit a record 11 televised nine-dart finishes (and 22 overall). He was also the first person to hit two nine-dart finishes in the same match.
Taylor played in competitions organised by the British Darts Organisation (BDO) until 1993. Amidst growing disenchantment with the BDO, he was among 16 top players who broke away to form their own organisation, the World Darts Council, now known as the Professional Darts Corporation (PDC). He won the PDC Player of the Year award six times (2006, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012) and was twice nominated for the BBC Sports Personality of the Year, in 2006 and 2010; in the latter event he finished as runner-up, making him the only darts player ever to finish in the top two. He was inducted into the PDC Hall of Fame in 2011. Taylor retired from professional darts after the . In 2022 he entered the inaugural 2022 World Seniors Darts Championship, and lost to Kevin Painter in the quarter-finals.
Early life
Taylor was born to Doug and Liz Taylor on 13 August 1960 in Burslem, Stoke-on-Trent. He left school at the age of 16, and after holding a few jobs including sheet metal worker, he spent most of his early working days making ceramic toilet roll handles, for which he earned £52 a week. Although he had liked to play darts and football as a child, he never took up the games seriously until 1986 when he moved into a terraced house in Burslem, living near to Eric Bristow's pub the Crafty Cockney.
A few months later, his wife Yvonne bought him a set of darts for his birthday and he started playing weekly, occasionally at Bristow's pub. By 1986, he was selected for the county team and playing at Super League level. Bristow started sponsoring him by loaning him £10,000 later that year to help him get started as a professional darts player, to take care of his family and on the condition that he give up his job in the ceramic industry.
Early career (1987–1993)
Bristow sponsored Taylor and they travelled to Las Vegas where Taylor was beaten in the first round of the North American Open as he struggled during his first year on tour.
Taylor's first title came at the Canadian Open in 1988, defeating then World Champion Bob Anderson in the final. After reaching the quarter-final of the British Open and the semi-final of the Winmau World Masters in 1989, he qualified for the World Championship for the first time in 1990. Although he had achieved some success in Open events, he went into the 1990 World Championship as a 125–1 unseeded outsider. He beat number six seed Russell Stewart 3–1 in the first round, Dennis Hickling 3–0 in the second round, Ronnie Sharp 4–2 in the quarter-finals and Cliff Lazarenko 5–0 to reach the final. He would then meet his mentor, Eric Bristow.
Bristow had been suffering with dartitis since 1986 but had recovered his world number one ranking to be the top seed in the event. After sharing the first two sets, Taylor beat Bristow 6–1 in sets to claim his first world title. For the rest of 1990, Taylor dominated the Open events taking the titles in the Isle of Man, Finland, North America, Denmark as well as the British Pentathlon, British Masters, Europe Cup and the game's second major tournament at the time, the Winmau World Masters.
Taylor's defence of the World Championship in 1991 ended at the quarter-final stage with a loss to Dennis Priestley, who went on to win his first world title. He picked up fewer titles in 1991 losing both his Danish Open and World Masters titles in finals to Rod Harrington. Taylor regained the World Championship title the following year beating Mike Gregory 6–5 in the final in a deciding leg. Gregory had missed six darts to win the title himself. Taylor has described the win as one of the favourites of his career. In 1993, Taylor became the landlord at the Cricketers Arms in Newcastle-under-Lyme.
Split in darts
From a peak during the 1980s, the game of darts had lost many sponsors and almost all television coverage. Players felt that the BDO was no longer serving the interests of the game at the top level. In 1993, Taylor was among a group of top players, which included every previous world champion, who broke away from the game's ruling body, the British Darts Organisation, and formed their own organisation, the World Darts Council (WDC), later renamed the Professional Darts Corporation (PDC).
In the 1993 World Championship, the last unified World Championship to be held, Taylor lost in the second round to Kevin Spiolek. The BDO refused to allow the new organisation to set up and run their own tournaments, so the WDC players decided that they would no longer compete in the BDO World Championship. They founded the WDC World Darts Championship as an alternative. In the first WDC World Championship in 1994, Taylor lost to Priestley. However, Taylor would go on to dominate the event for the following decade and beyond.
PDC career
1994 to 1998
After losing to Priestley in the final of the first PDC World Championship in 1994, Taylor began to dominate the event. Rod Harrington reached his first World Championship final in 1995 and, although he had won his previous three finals against Taylor in 1991 and 1992, Taylor took the title 6–2. It would be Harrington's only appearance in a World Final.
The finals of 1996, 1997 and 1998 would all feature Taylor and Priestley in a repeat of the inaugural final in 1994. Priestley achieved the first 100 average in a final in 1996 but still lost 6–4. The 1997 final saw Taylor recover from 0–2 down to win the title 6–3, and the 1998 final saw Taylor lose just two legs in the entire match en route to a 6–0 win and an average of 103.98. Taylor's victory and sixth title in 1998 meant that he had surpassed his mentor Eric Bristow's haul of five World Championships.
Taylor's record at Blackpool in the WDC's second major event, the World Matchplay, was not as strong early in his career as it has been in recent times. Taylor lost to Bob Anderson in 1994, Peter Evison in 1996 and Ronnie Baxter in 1998. However, he still won the event twice in the first five years of its existence, beating Priestley 16–11 in 1995 and Alan Warriner-Little 16–11 in 1997.
1999 to 2004
Taylor stretched his PDC World Championship unbeaten run to a record eight consecutive years beating Peter Manley in the 1999 and 2002 finals, Priestley for a fourth time in 2000, and John Part in 2001. Part would finally end the run by beating Taylor 7–6 (sets) in the 2003 World Championship final. Sid Waddell attributed this defeat to a weight-loss of three stone which he claimed affected Taylor's balance and resulted in him throwing "a quarter to half an inch below the 60 bed". Taylor went into the game a 1/7 favourite with bookmakers, but Part raced into leads of 3–0 and 4–1. Taylor fought back before ultimately being defeated 7–6.
Taylor would improve his record at Blackpool during this spell. After losing the 1999 semi-final of the World Matchplay to Manley, he would go on to win the title for the next five years (2000–2004) beating five different opponents in the final: Alan Warriner-Little (2000), Richie Burnett (2001), John Part (2002), Wayne Mardle (2003) and Mark Dudbridge (2004). By the end of 2004, Taylor had won 11 World Championships and seven World Matchplays.
Taylor has faced the incumbent BDO World Champion in challenge matches on two occasions. In 1999, he beat Raymond van Barneveld by 21 legs to 10 in a one-hour challenge dubbed "The Match of the Century" at the Wembley Conference Centre. The second challenge match came in 2004 against Andy Fordham at the Circus Tavern. Taylor was leading 5–2 in sets when Fordham, suffering a suspected asthma attack, abandoned the match.
2004 to 2008
Taylor reclaimed the World Championship in 2004 after edging Kevin Painter in the final 7–6 following a sudden death leg. After the match, having trailed 4–1 and 5–3, Taylor described himself as "a very lucky man" claiming that "Kevin out-played me". Referring to the epic World Championship final the previous year in which he had been defeated by John Part, Taylor added: "Last year was a good final, but this is one of the best".
Taylor would continue his dominance throughout 2005. However, after winning his 13th World Championship title in January 2006, he lost four matches in televised tournaments during the first half of the year. He lost to Jelle Klaasen and Simon Whitlock in the International Darts League tournament, and twice in a row to Raymond van Barneveld in the UK Open and the Las Vegas Desert Classic. He bounced back in the second half of the year to win the World Matchplay, the World Darts Trophy (a BDO affiliated event), and the World Grand Prix.
The 2007 World Final was contested between Taylor and Raymond van Barneveld. The match was tied at 6–6 in sets with van Barneveld leading 2–1 in legs. However, Van Barneveld missed four darts and Taylor tied the set at 2–2. The set went to 5–5 before van Barneveld won the sudden death leg for his fifth World Championship (four with the BDO and one with the PDC). Taylor said: "Of all the finals I've played in, I would probably put this one as the best."
2007 to 2008
Chris Mason hit the headlines for criticising Taylor in the newspapers before their last 16 match at the 2007 World Championship and allegedly swearing at him during the post-match handshake on-stage after Taylor beat him 4–0. He did apologise to Taylor after the tournament ended, but received a £750 fine and a four-month ban (suspended for 12 months) from the Darts Regulation Authority.
2007 proved to be Taylor's most barren year in terms of major title success. He was defeated at the International Darts League and the World Darts Trophy in the Netherlands. At the UK Open in Bolton, he suffered an 11–4 loss to van Barneveld. He lost to Mark Dudbridge
at the Las Vegas Desert Classic, and lost at the World Matchplay in Blackpool. At the World Grand Prix in Dublin, he lost to Adrian Gray. Taylor feared that his career was in decline but vowed to continue until 2012.
Having appeared in 14 out of 14 PDC World Darts Championship finals between 1994 and 2007, Taylor's record run came to an end in 2008 where he was beaten in the quarter-final. This was the first time that he had not reached the final stage of the PDC World Darts Championship. Taylor had been taken to the final set in each of his first three rounds before eventually losing to Wayne Mardle 5–4 (sets) despite leading 3–0 at one stage.
Before the start of the Premier League tournament, Taylor unveiled some new black 26g darts. Despite a poor start to his Premier League Darts campaign which included three defeats in his first four matches, Taylor ultimately finished at the top of the Premier League standings. He beat Adrian Lewis 11–1 with a 112.68 average in the semi-final, and went on to win his fourth consecutive Premier League title with a 16–8 victory over Wade whilst averaging 108.36. He won his second US Open title in May 2008, defeating Colin Lloyd in the final. At the UK Open, Taylor was defeated 10–9 in the quarter-final by Raymond van Barneveld.
Taylor went on a surge of form from the spring of 2008, by winning his fourth Las Vegas Desert Classic title. Taylor then went on to win the World Matchplay, World Grand Prix, the inaugural European Championship, and the Grand Slam of Darts.
2009 to 2011
In the 2009 world final, Taylor beat Raymond van Barneveld 7–1 for his fourteenth World Championship title. His 110.94 three-dart average was the highest recorded in a PDC final. His average during the course of the tournament was 104.08. In June, Taylor beat Colin Osborne 11–6 in the final of the UK Open. It was his third title overall at the event and his first since 2005. His tournament average was 107.38.
More success followed throughout 2009 with Taylor winning his fifth Las Vegas Desert Classic at what was the final instalment of the event. Taylor would also win the World Matchplay, the World Grand Prix, the European Darts Championship (achieving an overall 3-dart average per tournament of 111.54) and, for the third successive time, the Grand Slam of Darts in November.
Taylor began 2010 by winning his fifteenth World Championship title. He beat Simon Whitlock in the final 7–3 with an average of 104.38 and sealed victory with a 131 checkout. Taylor lost in the semi-final of the Players Championship at the Circus Tavern in Purfleet. Whilst attempting to defend the title he won in 2009 at the inaugural staging of the event, Taylor lost to eventual champion Paul Nicholson. Taylor admitted, following his defeat, that he had had little time to practice after his World Championship win. Taylor made history in the 2010 Premier League final against defending champion James Wade by hitting two nine-dart finishes in the same match. This was the first time that this had been done in professional darts.
By the summer of 2010, Taylor was the holder of the World Championship, the World Matchplay, the Premier League, the UK Open, the European Championship, the World Grand Prix and the Grand Slam of Darts. In fact, the only major televised title not held by Taylor at this time was the Players Championship Finals. At the UK Open, Taylor broke the world record for the highest average in a televised game by averaging 118.66 against Kevin Painter in round four- he won the match 9–0. These noteworthy performances, in addition to his longevity, contributed to Taylor's nomination for the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award in 2010. He was voted runner-up to A.P. McCoy.
However, defeats in the World Grand Prix, the Grand Slam, as well as a surprising loss to Mark Webster five sets to two in the quarter-final of the 2011 World Championship, meant that Taylor began 2011 as holder of four major titles- the World Matchplay, the Premier League, the European Championship and the UK Open.
He would bounce back and win his first major tournament in seven months at the 2011 Players Championship by beating Gary Anderson 13–12 in a thrilling final.
Taylor went on to win the World Matchplay for a record 12th time in 18 years in 2011. He beat Mark Hylton 10–8 in the 1st round, Wayne Jones 13–7 in the 2nd round, Wes Newton 16–5 in the quarter-final, Andy Hamilton 17–9 in the semi-final and James Wade 18–8 in the final. His overall tournament average was more than 106.
One week later, Taylor went to Düsseldorf to compete in the 2011 European Championship. He was aiming to win his fourth consecutive European title and did just that by beating John Michael 6–3, Mervyn King 10–3, Paul Nicholson 10–7, Simon Whitlock 11–4 and Adrian Lewis 11–8. He had a tournament average of 105.15.
On 27 September, Taylor competed in Group One of the Championship League and won all seven of his qualifying games: 6–3 against Adrian Lewis, 6–2 against Terry Jenkins, 6–3 against Wes Newton, 6–2 against James Wade, 6–3 against Simon Whitlock, 6–2 against Gary Anderson and 6–1 against Mark Webster. Taylor finished the group stage with a maximum 14 points, a leg difference of +28 (42 legs won and 16 lost), as well as £2,100 won during qualifying. However, he lost the semi-final 6–5 against Wes Newton but still won a further £500 in that match. This took his total winnings for the day to £2,600. As a result of not winning Group One, Taylor returned the following day to play in Group Two.
In Group Two, Taylor won six out of his seven games. He lost his fourth match 6–4 to Simon Whitlock, but defeated James Wade 6–1, Mervyn King 6–4, Paul Nicholson 6–0, Mark Webster 6–3, Wes Newton 6–4 and Andy Hamilton 6–1. He would finish top of the group with 12 points, a leg difference of +21 (40 legs won and 19 lost), as well as £2,000 won in qualifying. Taylor beat Paul Nicholson 6–3 in the semi-final and Simon Whitlock 6–5 in the final to win Group Two and progress to the Winner's Group.
In the Winner's Group, Taylor won all seven of his qualifying games. He beat Gary Anderson 6–5, Steve Beaton 6–3, Mervyn King 6–3 (hitting his 10th nine-dart finish in competition in the process), Mark Walsh 6–3, Simon Whitlock 6–5, Paul Nicholson 6–1 and Dennis Priestley 6–2 to qualify top of the group. He beat Steve Beaton 6–1 in the semi-final and Paul Nicholson 6–1 in the final to win his second Championship League title. Taylor won £6,600 in the group stages as well as a further £10,000 for winning the title.
In November, Taylor won the Grand Slam of Darts by beating Gary Anderson in the final 16–4. However, he was unable to defend his Players Championship title following an 8–5 loss in the last 16 to Mervyn King.
2012
In 2012, Taylor failed to make the quarter-finals of the PDC World Championship for the first time in his career following a shock four sets to one defeat in the second round by Dave Chisnall.
Taylor, looking to improve upon England's second round exit in 2010, represented England alongside Adrian Lewis in his second World Cup of Darts. Taylor began the tournament sluggishly, losing his singles matches against Ken MacNeil of Canada and Gary Mawson of the United States. Despite this, England progressed following a sudden-death leg against Canada and a doubles victory against the United States. A comfortable 5–1 win over Wales booked England's place in the final against the Australian pairing of Simon Whitlock and Paul Nicholson. Taylor won both his singles matches (including a 105.93 average against Whitlock). However, England lost the doubles meaning that the tie was level on points at 3–3 and consequently, would require a sudden-death leg. It proved to be a tense finale as Australia missed four darts to win the title. Taylor also missed two before Lewis took out double five to clinch England's first World Cup of Darts title.
Four days later, Taylor played Lewis in the first week of the 2012 Premier League and managed to draw 7–7 despite being 6–1 down. He averaged 112.79, which was until 2015 the highest average achieved by someone without actually winning the match. Taylor hit the ninth televised nine-darter of his career in the second week of the Premier League on the way to an 8–5 win against Kevin Painter. Two weeks later, he beat Simon Whitlock 8–4 and registered the highest three-dart average in the history of the tournament of 117.35. In week 13, Taylor beat James Wade 8–1 and averaged 116.10 in the process. Taylor ended the league campaign top of the table (eight points ahead of second placed Simon Whitlock) and was the only player to have a positive leg difference. In the 14 game league phase, Taylor had registered five of the top fifteen televised three-dart averages in the history of the game. In the semi-finals, he faced James Wade against whom he had inflicted heavy 8–1 and 8–2 defeats during the league stage. The semi-final, however, was much more competitive. Taylor trailed early on before winning four consecutive legs to lead 6–4 before Wade responded to level at 6–6. Taylor then took out a 149 finish, with Wade on 57, to break before closing out the match 8–6 to reach the final against Simon Whitlock. Taylor looked to be heading for a comfortable win in the final as he raced into a 7–2 lead. However, the Australian stormed back to level at 7–7. Nevertheless, Taylor held his nerve to win the last three legs of the match to complete a 10–7 win and to seal his sixth Premier League title.
Taylor won the third event of the Players Championship in March with a 6–1 victory over Wes Newton while averaging 113.54. He also hit a nine-darter earlier in the tournament during his second round match against Tony West. He reached the final of the fourth Players Championship event a day later where he lost 6–5 to Dave Chisnall. Taylor hit his second nine-dart finish of the weekend in a first round match against Peter Hudson.
In June, Taylor looked on course to win his fifth UK Open title after registering convincing wins over Ronnie Baxter, Terry Jenkins and Denis Ovens to book a place in the final against Robert Thornton. Taylor won the first two legs, but the Scot then won nine of the next 10 before closing out the match 11–5. Taylor had missed a total of 23 darts at doubles and, in doing so, suffered his sixth defeat in a major PDC final out of the 72 he had contested. Taylor then played in his first European Tour event and gained revenge for his defeat in the World Championship by beating Chisnall 6–2 in the final. He had beaten Raymond van Barneveld 6–5 in the quarter-finals and Wes Newton 6–3 in the semis at the event in Berlin. In July, Taylor walked off the stage at the Shetland Open during a semi-final match with Raymond van Barneveld.
Taylor then won his fifth consecutive World Matchplay title and thirteenth in total. He beat Mervyn King 10–8, Ian White 13–3, Andy Hamilton 16–11 and Ronnie Baxter 17–10 to face James Wade in the final for the fourth time. The final proved to be tight and tense, with Taylor edging it 18–15 and extending his unbeaten run at the event to 25 games.
In September, Taylor suffered defeat in the European Championship for the first time in a 10–6 quarter-final loss to Brendan Dolan. He averaged just 89.88 in a defeat which ended his run of four consecutive titles stretching back to the inaugural tournament in 2008. Taylor then lost to Thornton in a major event for the second time this year as he missed six match darts on the way to a three sets to two defeat in the second round of the World Grand Prix.
Taylor qualified from Group 4 of the Championship League winning all nine of his games and concluding with a 6–1 win over Mark Walsh. In the winners' group, he won each of his seven league matches before defeating Dave Chisnall 6–0 in the semi-finals (averaging 112.73) and Simon Whitlock 6–4 in the final (averaging 108.20) to clinch his third Championship League title.
Taylor finished second in Group A of the Grand Slam of Darts to face Michael van Gerwen in the last 16. It was a match that was billed as a clash between the two best players in the world. Taylor averaged 105 but failed to hit a single maximum as van Gerwen hit seven and averaged 108 in a 10–5 win.
Taylor lost in consecutive Players Championship finals over the last weekend of November to both Chisnall and Van Gerwen despite averaging 110 in the latter. He finished sixth on the ProTour Order of Merit to qualify for the Finals where he won his third title. Taylor defeated Mark Webster and Adrian Lewis in the first two rounds, but was then 9–5 down in the quarter-finals to Andy Hamilton in a best of 19 legs match. However, Taylor allowed Hamilton only one chance to win the match when on a 60 finish. Hamilton missed the board with his first dart and failed to hit double 20 with his third as Taylor won the five consecutive legs he required to win 10–9. He outplayed Simon Whitlock in the semi-finals in an 11–2 victory and, with the scores at 5–5 in the final against Kim Huybrechts, Taylor produced a devastating run of form to win eight of the following nine legs to secure the title.
2013
Taylor won his 16th World Championship at the 2013 staging of the event. He lost only nine legs on the way to the semi-finals where he played Raymond van Barneveld. Before the match, Taylor had taken offence to comments made by van Barneveld about not being scared of him and wanting to face him rather than Taylor's quarter-final opponent Andy Hamilton. Taylor raced into a five sets to one lead and withstood a strong fightback from van Barneveld before winning 6–4. After the match, Taylor reacted angrily when van Barneveld attempted to pull him back to congratulate him after their handshake. The pair were escorted from the stage separately by security staff. The next day, Taylor apologised for his behaviour which he described as "disgraceful". Taylor faced Michael van Gerwen in the final and, from 4–2 down, won five sets in a row to become the first man to lift the Sid Waddell Trophy. A day later, he was named the PDC Player of the Year.
Taylor retained his World Cup of Darts crown alongside Adrian Lewis in February. They survived two match darts against South Africa in the last 16 and one against Wales in the semi-finals before facing the Belgian brothers Ronny and Kim Huybrechts in the final. Taylor beat Ronny 4–0 and went into his second singles match knowing that a win against Kim would secure the title. He did just that by virtue of a 4–1 win.
Taylor did not finish top of the Premier League for the first time this year. He won eight, drew four and lost four of his 16 matches to finish third in the table. He played Van Barneveld in the semi-finals who he had beaten 7–3 and drawn with 6–6 during the league stage. From 3–3, Taylor surged ahead to triumph 8–4 and book his spot in the final against Van Gerwen. Taylor started the better of the two as he led 5–3 at the break. However, he then lost four successive legs upon the resumption of play. In the 14th leg, Van Gerwen opted not to go for the bull when on 87 and Taylor stepped in to hit a 160 finish to level the match at 7–7. At 9–8 down, Taylor had left 40 after 12 darts. Nonetheless, Van Gerwen hit a 132 finish on the bull to seal a 10–8 win and the title.
Taylor won his fifth UK Open title at his next event. He had to compete in the second round due to being ranked 44th on the UK Open Order of Merit after only competing in four of the eight Qualifiers and not advancing beyond the quarter-finals in any of them. At the tournament, he dropped only three legs in his first three matches before getting lucky in the last 16 against Brendan Dolan. Dolan missed three match darts to win 9–7 before Taylor threw an 11 dart leg in the decider. He produced an average of 106.56 to beat Van Gerwen 10–7 before easing past Peter Wright 10–5 in the semi-finals and Andy Hamilton 11–4 in the final. Taylor's combined average during the six matches he played was more than 100.
Taylor then won the Gibraltar Darts Trophy. He dropped just seven legs in the six matches he played which concluded with a 6–1 victory over Jamie Lewis in the final. However, Taylor's win in Gibraltar was later the subject of controversy as footage emerged showing him winning a leg and retrieving his dart when he had actually missed the double. Neither referee Russ Bray nor his opponent Dean Winstanley noticed the error and Taylor went on to win the match 6–1. Taylor insisted that he had not realised that the dart had missed and offered to replay the match and forfeit his prize money. The PDC released a statement blaming the incident on human error. The incident led to a feud with Taylor's old mentor Eric Bristow who stated: "The player knows if it's not in the bed and has to declare it. You don't want cheats in the game". Taylor responded by claiming that Bristow's comments were "hurtful" and that he would not be talking to Bristow again.
At the European Championship, Taylor lost in the second round to Ronny Huybrechts 10–5. Taylor then won his sixth consecutive World Matchplay crown and 14th in total by defeating Adrian Lewis 18–13 in the final with an average of 111.23, a record for a Matchplay final. His tournament average through 123 legs was 105.81. Taylor's next event was the Sydney Darts Masters which he won by beating Van Gerwen 10–3 in the final whilst averaging 109.46. Taylor continued his dominance in the major events by claiming his 11th World Grand Prix title in October. He thrashed Dave Chisnall 6–0 in sets in the final with Chisnall having to wait until the final set to pick up his first leg of the match. Taylor then won the Championship League title for the fourth time in six years. After claiming Group 1 by beating Lewis 6–1, having also hit a nine-darter earlier in the day, Taylor topped the Winners Group and went on to defeat Van Gerwen 6–3 in the final. At the inaugural staging of the Masters, a tournament which only features the top 16 on the Order of Merit, Taylor cruised to the title dropping just seven legs during the event which included 10–1 thrashings of James Wade and Lewis in the semi-finals and final respectively.
Taylor was involved in a high quality darts match in the semi-finals of the Grand Slam of Darts against Lewis as he averaged 109.76 to Lewis' 110.99 (the highest recorded combined average) in a 16–9 win. Taylor's finishing in the high scoring match proved to be the difference and included checkouts of 167 and 160. The players hit 32 180s between them breaking the PDC record of 31 which was set in the 2007 World Championship final, a match which had 32 more legs than this one. Both players described the game as the greatest they had been involved in afterwards. The final proved to be a more low-key affair as Taylor gained revenge over Robert Thornton for his loss in the 2012 UK Open to win 16–6 and seal his fifth Grand Slam title.
Taylor eased through to the final of the Players Championship Finals but fell victim to one of Van Gerwen's purple patches as, from 6–3 down, the Dutchman won seven legs in a row and went on to defeat Taylor 11–7.
2014
Taylor was 1/50 with bookmakers to win his second round match against Michael Smith in the 2014 World Championship but suffered a huge upset by losing 4–3 to the world number 32. Taylor lost the world number one spot to Michael van Gerwen after the event as the Dutchman won his first world title. He returned to action at the Premier League six weeks later with a new set of darts having switched manufacturers. However, Taylor suffered his first whitewash in the tournament's history as Van Gerwen thrashed him 7–0 in 13 minutes. Taylor bounced back a few days later to win the third UK Open Qualifier by defeating Adrian Lewis 6–2 and sealing the title with a nine-darter. It was his second perfect leg of the day after he had also hit one in the last 16 against Andy Hamilton. However, his poor start to the Premier League continued as he lost three of his next four games to find himself in real danger of relegation.
At the UK Open, he was the victim of the biggest shock in the tournament's history as factory worker Aden Kirk, ranked world number 137 and making his television debut, beat Taylor 9–7. This run of form prompted The Guardians Rob Smyth to write an article suggesting that Taylor's decline was now terminal.
Taylor lost 6–5 against Gary Anderson in the final of the third Players Championship. Earlier in the tournament, he had beaten Van Gerwen 6–5, who averaged 114 and hit a nine-darter. He had also seen off Terry Jenkins 6–4 despite him averaging 111. 24 hours later he won the fourth event following a 6–0 thrashing of Ian White in the final. Taylor played seven matches on the day and ended up with an overall average of 106.59, which included an average of 118.42 against Vincent van der Voort in the last 16. Taylor claimed another title at the German Darts Masters by beating Van Gerwen 6–4 in the final.
His form in the Premier League picked up remarkably as he remained unbeaten in his final 11 matches which included a 7–4 victory over Van Gerwen. Taylor finished third in the table for the second year in a row to qualify for the play-offs. Taylor led Raymond van Barneveld 3–0 in the semi-finals but could only hit 26% of his doubles during the match and, ultimately was defeated 8–5. This was the first time that the Dutchman had beaten him in the tournament in 21 attempts. Later, Taylor said that the six missed darts at double to move 5–2 ahead had played heavily on his mind and had made him nervous during the match- a feeling which he had never experienced before during his 26-year career.
Taylor and Lewis could not complete a hat-trick of World Cup of Darts titles as they were defeated by the Netherlands in the final. Taylor lost 4–0 to Van Gerwen, while Lewis was beaten 4–0 by Van Barneveld and 4–2 by Van Gerwen, which meant that the tie was over before Taylor's second singles match. Taylor later reflected on the first half of 2014 as the worst spell of form in his career.
Taylor threw his 10th televised nine-dart finish in the second round of the World Matchplay during a 13–6 win over Michael Smith. He returned to top form during the event beating Gary Anderson 17–15 with an average of 105.27 in the semi-finals. However, Taylor saved his best performance for the final as he raced into 7–1 and 13–2 leads over Van Gerwen and went on to seal his seventh consecutive Matchplay title and 15th in total with an 18–9 victory whilst averaging 107.27.
Taylor won the inaugural Perth Darts Masters after beating Van Gerwen in the final 11–9 whilst averaging 105.08. He then defended his Sydney Darts Masters title by beating Stephen Bunting 11–3 in the final. In the quarter-finals of the World Grand Prix, Taylor lost 3–1 against James Wade. This was the first time that Wade had beaten Taylor in a major televised knockout tournament. At the European Championship, Taylor lost 10–9 in a thriller to Stephen Bunting. Taylor comfortably progressed to the final of the Grand Slam and a meeting with Dave Chisnall. Despite taking an initial 5–0 lead, the final was by far his closest match of the event as Chisnall fought back to 10–10, before Taylor rediscovered his best form to win another five unanswered legs and seal his sixth Grand Slam title 16–13.
2015
Taylor reached the semi-finals of the 2015 World Championship without facing a top 16 player. His closest game came in the third round where he edged past Kim Huybrechts 4–3. Taylor maintained his unbeaten semi-final record in World Championships as he won his 20th by beating Raymond van Barneveld 6–2 and faced Gary Anderson in the final. From 3–1 down, Taylor won nine of the next ten legs to move 4–3 up and then missed three darts to lead 5–3. Instead he fell 6–4 behind, but again rallied to draw level missing one dart at double 12 for a nine darter in the process. However, more failed attempts at doubles proved costly as he could not take out double 16 with three darts to hold throw in the deciding set and was defeated 7–6. The 32 180s the pair threw during the game broke the PDC World Championship final record of 31 which was set in Taylor's match against Van Barneveld in the 2007 final.
Taylor won the last UK Open Qualifier by overcoming Ian White 6–2 in the final. He lost 10–6 in the quarter-finals of the UK Open itself. In week seven of the Premier League, Taylor averaged 115.80 against Van Barneveld but was defeated 7–4. It is the eighth highest televised average of all-time and the highest to lose a match. He went into the penultimate round of fixtures needing a victory over Anderson to stand a chance of progressing but, when he lost 7–5, it marked the first time in the 11-year history of the event that Taylor did not qualify for the play-offs. He did average 102.95 over his 16 matches, second only to Van Gerwen's 105.15. Taylor picked up his second title of the year at the ninth Players Championship with a 6–4 victory over Anderson in the final. He thrashed Anderson 11–3 in the semi-finals of the Dubai Darts Masters, before missing too many doubles from 8–6 ahead of Van Gerwen in the final, to lose 11–8. Taylor and Lewis played in the final of the World Cup against Scotland's Anderson and Peter Wright and it went all the way to the final singles match in which Lewis beat Wright to win England's third title in the event. Taylor had kicked off the final by beating Wright 4–0 whilst setting the highest individual average in the history of the event at 113.43. He followed that up by holding on from 7–2 ahead of Wright in the final of the inaugural Japan Darts Masters to edge it 8–7.
Taylor's 38-match unbeaten streak at the World Matchplay dating back to 2007 ended this year at the semi-final stage as Wade defeated him 17–14. After the event he slipped from second place to third in the Order of Merit, but then retained his Perth Darts Masters title by seeing off Wade 11–7. His third World Series of Darts win of the year came at the Sydney Darts Masters with an 11–3 thrashing of Adrian Lewis. A shock 2–0 elimination in the first round of the World Grand Prix followed at the hands of Vincent van der Voort, despite Taylor averaging 97.03 in the double to start event, the second highest of all 32 first round players. He also missed a dart at the bullseye for a nine-dart finish during the match.
Taylor held 3–0 and 7–3 leads over Van Gerwen in the final of the Grand Slam, but then missed far too many doubles and went on to lose 16–13. The defeat meant that Taylor held no majors for the first time since 1994.
2016
In the third round of the 2016 World Championship, Jelle Klaasen missed one dart to knock Taylor out and the match went to a deciding set. Taylor went 2–0 up in legs and a missed a match dart himself in the next, before Klaasen fought back to win the final set 4–2. In the semi-finals of the Masters, Taylor missed seven match darts to beat Van Gerwen and would lose 11–10. Taylor reached the final of the first UK Open Qualifier and lost to Adrian Lewis 6–2, but went one better in the third event as he averaged 109.59 in a 6–2 win over Van Gerwen to end a nine-month drought of a ranking title win. Van Gerwen broke Taylor's world record televised average with 123.40 in week four of the Premier League. An hour later Taylor averaged 115.25, currently the 12th highest of all-time as he overcame Dave Chisnall 7–5. In March, Taylor was beaten in the semi-finals of the UK Open 10–6 by Van Gerwen.
He was also convincingly beaten by Van Gerwen in his eighth Premier League final by 11 legs to 3.
Taylor and Lewis won their fourth World Cup crown by overcoming the Netherlands in the final, with Lewis beating Van Gerwen in the deciding match.
Taylor only competed in one PDC European Tour event during 2016, which was the Austrian Darts Open, but he won the title, defeating Michael Smith 6–4 in the final. During the final of the World Matchplay, Taylor encouraged the crowd to do a clapping chant made famous by the Icelandic football team in Euro 2016 when Van Gerwen was throwing. It did not seem to affect Van Gerwen though, as he won 18–10. Taylor is still the only player to have won the Sydney Darts Masters after he beat Van Gerwen 11–9 for his fourth title in the event.
Taylor participated in the inaugural Champions League of Darts, an event that was broadcast on the BBC. It was the first time since 1993 that Taylor had played in an event shown by the station and he dominated it by winning 52 legs over the weekend whilst only losing 19, culminating with an 11–5 victory over Van Gerwen in the final. Taylor had surprise 2–0 and 10–3 defeats to Steve West in first round of the World Grand Prix and Mensur Suljović in the quarter-finals of the European Championship. He also lost 16–10 to Peter Wright in the quarter-finals of the Grand Slam.
2017
Taylor matched John Lowe's record by making 28 consecutive appearances at the World Championship in the 2017 edition. He didn't drop a set in matches against David Platt and Kevin Painter and had a three sets to nil lead against Kim Huybrechts in their third round match. Huybrechts took two consecutive sets, but missed darts to force a decider and Taylor hit double seven to set up a quarter-final match against Raymond van Barneveld. In a rematch of the final ten years prior, Taylor recovered from a 3–1 deficit but lost the next two sets and, consequently, the match.
Taylor was sixth in the world rankings after the World Championship. On 27 January 2017, in an interview conducted before the start of the 2017 Masters, Taylor officially confirmed that he would retire after the 2018 World Darts Championship. He also stated that he would cut down on his non-televised appearances in the 2017 season. He did not play in the Grand Prix or UK Open. He reached the semi-finals of the Masters, losing 11–9 to Gary Anderson. He finished third in the table in the 2017 Premier League and trailed Peter Wright 4–0 in the semi-finals. Taylor gained the lead for the first time at 7–6, but missed a host of doubles including one to win the match and was beaten 10–9.
Taylor did make a final appearance at the World Matchplay, which he had previously said was his favourite tournament. He won the tournament for a sixteenth time, progressing to the final with victories over career-rivals van Barneveld (11–3), van Gerwen (16–6), Lewis (17–9), before beating Peter Wright 18–8 in the final, in what would be his last major win. Taylor also won a world series event in his final season, and reached the final of his last event in the series, which he lost to Wright. In August, Taylor won the inaugural Melbourne Darts Masters by successfully defeating Peter Wright 11–8 in the final.
2018
The 2018 PDC World Darts Championship was Taylor's 29th world championship appearance, surpassing the record he held jointly with John Lowe. He had previously announced that he would retire after the tournament. He entered the tournament ranked 6th in the PDC Order of Merit. Wins over Chris Dobey, Justin Pipe, Keegan Brown, Gary Anderson and Jamie Lewis took him to his 21st world final, extending his own record. However, he was beaten 7–2 in the final by Rob Cross, who was making his first appearance in the tournament. During the match, Taylor also missed a double for a nine-dart finish, which would have been his first in a world championship match. Taylor said afterwards: "I tried my best but he was like me 25 years ago, he was relentless and didn't stop putting me under pressure." He added: "It was like an old man against a young man, it was a mis-match. That's it for me because I haven't got the energy or interest to beat Michael van Gerwen or him (Cross)."
2022
Taylor took part in his first competitive darts event since 2018, when he entered the inaugural 2022 World Seniors Darts Championship. He lost to Kevin Painter in the quarter-finals.
Rivalries
Dennis Priestley
Dennis Priestley and Phil Taylor played each other in five World Finals, with Priestley winning in 1994 and Taylor emerging victorious in 1996, 1997, 1998 and 2000.
Taylor and Priestley first met in major competition in the 1990 World Masters. Taylor won that semi-final encounter en route to the title. Priestley then assumed the upper hand in their rivalry, however, with victories over Taylor in the quarter-finals of the 1991 World Championship, and in the British Matchplay final later that year. Their early meetings in the WDC were also won by Priestley, who defeated Taylor in the final of the 1994 World Championship, and in the Last 16 of the 1995 UK Matchplay.
However, since Taylor's win over Priestley in the 1995 World Matchplay final, Taylor has only lost once in all competitions and hasn't been beaten on television by Priestley since 1995. Taylor and Priestley remain great friends. At the 2009 Las Vegas championship Taylor was emotional when he beat Dennis Priestley 8–0 in the second round. He later said it was tough to beat such a great friend that way. Taylor and Priestley met in competition on at least 44 occasions, with Taylor winning 37 and Priestley winning 6, with 1 draw.
John Part
Taylor's next rivalry was with Canadian John Part, who won the BDO World Championship in 1994 and moved to the PDC in 1997. Their first meeting in the PDC came at the 2001 PDC World Championship final. The match was one-sided as Taylor averaged 107 and won 7–0. Taylor won their first five encounters including a 6–0 quarter final win at the 2002 PDC World Championships, a much closer match at the 2002 World Matchplay final, 18–16 and the 2002 World Grand Prix final, where Taylor again ended Part's attempt at a title by winning 7–3.
A turning point came in the 2003 World Championship, where Part and Taylor met in the final. Part took a 4–1 lead but Taylor hit back to take the lead, 5–4. At 6–6 Part held his nerve and beat Taylor 7–6 to end Taylor's eight tournament unbeaten run in the championship. Taylor's other losses to Part came in the 2003 Las Vegas Desert Classic (13–10 in the semi-final), the 2004 UK Open (8–6 in the quarter-final) and at the 2005 World Matchplay (16–11 in the quarter-final).
Part won the 2008 PDC World Championship and became the second player after Taylor to have won the tournament more than once. Taylor and Part met in competition on at least 37 occasions, with Taylor winning 31 and Part winning 6.
Raymond van Barneveld
van Barneveld switched to the PDC in 2006. Their first clash came in the 2006 Premier League Darts tournament and ended in a 7–7 draw. The return match went in Taylor's favour. Barneveld's first PDC win over Taylor came at the 2006 UK Open with an 11–10 quarter-final success, which he followed up with success in the semi-finals of the Las Vegas Desert Classic, winning by four sets to three. Taylor later defeated van Barneveld by three sets to one in the World Grand Prix.
They then met in the final of the 2007 PDC World Championship at the Circus Tavern. The match has been described as the greatest game in the history of darts. Despite being up three sets to nil at one point, Taylor was defeated by van Barneveld seven sets to six in a sudden-death leg. Taylor responded to his loss by defeating van Barneveld on two occasions in the 2007 Premier League Darts and beating him in the final of the inaugural US Open. Van Barneveld later defeated Taylor in the quarter-finals of the UK Open by 11 legs to four. Taylor lost his top spot in the PDC World Rankings to van Barneveld in January 2008, but regained it in June.
In major PDC tournaments in 2008, Taylor defeated van Barneveld twice in the Premier League, lost by 10 legs to nine in the quarter-finals of the UK Open, but won the World Grand Prix against his rival by six sets to two. The rivalry continued into 2009 with the two meeting in the World Championship final for a second time, with Taylor winning 7–1 with a 110.94 three-dart average. The two then met in the 2010 World Matchplay final; Taylor won 18–12, averaging more than 105, which was higher than van Barneveld's 100.11 average. After the game Barneveld acknowledged "I'm the number two at the moment, and players like James Wade, Simon Whitlock and Gary Anderson are all trying but he's just too good for everyone". The first win for Van Barneveld in a televised tournament after the 2008 UK Open came almost six years later. In the 2014 Premier League Darts the pair met three times. Twice during the league states, with both matches ending in a draw. Then, in the semi-finals they met again. Despite an early 4–1 lead for Taylor, the match turned around and Van Barneveld won the match 8–5 to claim his first televised victory against Taylor in more than six years. Van Barneveld defeated Taylor in both their league encounters in the 2015 Premier League, winning 7–4 despite Taylor hitting a 115.80 average, and winning 7–2 in the second encounter. In the 2017 World Championship van Barneveld defeated Taylor in the quarter-final. Taylor and van Barneveld met in competition on at least 83 occasions, with Taylor winning 61 and van Barneveld winning 18, with 4 draws.
James Wade
James Wade has won nine PDC major titles since he burst onto the scene in 2006. Wade handed Taylor his first defeat in a Premier League match in 2008. Another major win for Wade against Taylor was in the final of Championship League Darts 2010. The quarter-finals of the 2014 World Grand Prix was the first time Wade defeated Taylor in a televised knockout match. They have met in the final of the World Matchplay four times in 2006, 2008, 2011 and 2012 with Taylor victorious each time. In the 2014 Masters, Wade knocked out Taylor in the semi-final en route to winning the tournament. In the 2015 World Matchplay Wade Broke Taylor's 38 match winning streak at the Winter Gardens by defeating Taylor 17–14 in the semi-final. Taylor and Wade met in competition on at least 71 occasions, with Taylor winning 51 and Wade winning 14, with 6 draws.
Adrian Lewis
During the early part of Adrian Lewis' career until 2007, he was Taylor's protégé having practised together in their home city Stoke-on-Trent and made his television debut in 2004, aged 19, at the UK Open. However, Lewis has kicked on since then and has amassed four PDC major titles including two consecutive World titles in 2011 and 2012. The pair have been part of what has been a feisty rivalry at times. Taylor beat Lewis 5-0 in the World Championship quarterfinal in 2010. They met again in October 2010 in the World Grand Prix semi-final. Lewis would win that encounter five sets to four. Lewis and Taylor have met in four PDC major finals during their rivalry. These have included the finals of the 2008 and 2011 European Championship which Taylor won 11–5 and 11–8 respectively, the final of the 2013 Masters which Taylor won 10–1, as well as the final of the 2013 World Matchplay where Taylor averaged 111.23 and won 18–13. The latter involved Lewis playing in his first Matchplay final where he averaged 105.92 and hit 19 maximums. Taylor and Lewis met in competition on at least 74 occasions, with Taylor winning 55 and Lewis winning 17, with 2 draws.
Michael van Gerwen
Despite there being an age gap of almost 30 years between the two, in 2013 Michael van Gerwen became the world number two behind Taylor and was tipped to take over Taylor's dominance of the sport. The pair's first meeting saw Taylor win 3–2 when the Dutchman was 17 years old, before van Gerwen beat him 3–0 in the Masters of Darts and 7–6 in the International Darts League. Taylor then won 15 consecutive games against him encompassing a span of five years, during which van Gerwen struggled for form and confidence.
However, in October 2012 Van Gerwen won his first PDC major and when the two met in the last 16 of the 2012 Grand Slam of Darts, the match was billed as a clash between the two best players in the world. It was this match which truly started the rivalry as both players averaged more than 110 for long parts of it, with Taylor at one point gesturing for van Gerwen to get out of his way when he paused in retrieving his darts. Van Gerwen took the match 10–5 with it being signalled as the start of a new era in darts. The two then met in a Players Championship final with van Gerwen coming back from 5–4 down with back to back finishes of 164 and 124 to win in a final against Taylor for the first time.
At the 2013 World Championship, the two met in the final, where Taylor fought back from 2-0 and 4–2 down in sets to win 7–4. Van Gerwen averaged between 105 and 108 in the early sets but as his average dropped, Taylor's average reached 103, winning five successive sets to claim his 16th title over a rival he admitted in the post-match interview was 'hard to crack'.
A few months later, van Gerwen became the first player other than Taylor to finish top of the table of the Premier League with the two meeting in the final which van Gerwen won 10–8. Afterwards Van Gerwen called Taylor the greatest and said that no one will match his achievements in darts.
Taylor then won the next three high-profile meetings which included the finals of the Sydney Darts Masters and Championship League Darts. Taylor had won six major titles since the Premier League loss, whilst Van Gerwen hadn't won any until they met in the final of the 2013 Players Championship Finals. Van Gerwen won seven successive legs from 6–3 down before emerging victorious 11–7.
In January 2014, Van Gerwen won the World Championship and replaced Taylor as the world number one, and a month later inflicted the first whitewash over Taylor in Premier League history by beating him 7–0 in 13 minutes with an average of 109.59. Van Gerwen whitewashed Taylor 4–0 in the final of the World Cup, en route to the Netherlands' 3–0 win over England. In July, they contested the final of the World Matchplay; Taylor won 11 of the first 13 legs and went on to win 18–9, averaging 107.27. The loss reduced Van Gerwen to tears on the stage afterwards. In August, the pair met in the final of the inaugural Perth Darts Masters with Taylor fighting back from 6–3 down in legs to win 11–9 whilst averaging 105.08.
At the 2016 Masters van Gerwen became the first player to win 5 matches in a row against Taylor. Taylor defeated Van Gerwen 11–5 in the final of the inaugural Champions League of Darts tournament in September 2016, having defeated him 10–4 in an earlier group match. When Taylor retired, he had played Van Gerwen 62 times, winning 34 and losing 26, with 2 draws. Taylor won 6 of his last 9 matches against Van Gerwen before his retirement.
Nickname
Taylor had the nickname "The Crafty Potter" in the early 1990s, reflecting his status as the protégé of Eric Bristow (who was nicknamed "The Crafty Cockney") and his job in the ceramic industry. However, Taylor soon achieved success in his own right. In July 1995, Taylor was given the nickname "The Power" by Sky Sports production manager, Peter Judge, during the 1995 World Matchplay in Blackpool. Judge told Taylor that he should have a nickname and "The Power" became the serendipitous choice after Judge stepped on an empty CD case of Snap!'s "The Power".
Outside darts
Taylor and his former wife Yvonne (born 1963) have four children: Lisa (born 1983), Chris (born 1984), Kelly (born 1989) and Natalie (born 1992). He has written an autobiography with the late Sky TV darts commentator Sid Waddell. He supports his hometown football club, Port Vale. He was also inducted into the Stoke-on-Trent Hall of Fame when it was opened in January 2011. Taylor was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2001 New Year Honours. Taylor's father Douglas died from bowel cancer in 1997 and his mother Elizabeth died in 2015.
Indecent assault conviction
In October 1999, following an exhibition match in Fife, Scotland, 39-year-old Taylor returned to his van accompanied by two women, aged 23 and 25, who subsequently accused him of indecent assault. Taylor denied the charges, but the indecent assault accusations became public in March 2001 after he was found guilty in Dunfermline Sheriff Court, and the sentencing in May 2001 saw Taylor fined £2,000. As a result of his conviction, Taylor's MBE nomination from the 2001 New Year Honours was annulled before he was awarded it.
Television and music appearances
Taylor's achievements in darts have led to guest appearances on television.
He also appeared in Justin Hawkins' solo project British Whale's music video for a cover of the Sparks song, "This Town Ain't Big Enough for the Both of Us".
He made several appearances on the ITV game show Bullseye, hosted by comedian Jim Bowen and professional darts commentator Tony Green.
He has appeared on several BBC television shows over the years.
On 2 February 2009, he made a guest appearance in ITV's long-running popular soap opera Coronation Street, playing the part of 'Disco Dave', the captain of a rival darts team to the Rovers Return. Taylor was seen only briefly on screen and had no dialogue.
On 22 January 2011 he appeared to present the award for Best Comedy Panel Show at the British Comedy Awards hosted by Jonathan Ross.
On 1 January 2012, Taylor appeared on OMG! Jedward's Dream Factory, an Irish children's reality television show which pop duo Jedward helped to fulfil the wishes of children who have previously written in to the show. An episode featured a girl named Laura, a darts fan who wrote into the show wanting to meet and play darts with Taylor. It was recorded in 2011 when the World Grand Prix was in Dublin.
On 12 March 2012, Taylor made a guest appearance on A Question of Sport.
In May 2012, Taylor, together with the seven other players who competed in the Premier League, recorded a charity single with Chas Hodges and his band called "Got My Tickets for the Darts" which was written by Chas. It was released on 18 May, the night after the play-offs at the O2 in London, where it was premiered. Proceeds from the single were donated to the Haven House Children's Hospice.
Awards and records
Taylor held records for high scoring in darts. His three-dart average per match records were the highest in the history of the game.
Rob Cross is the only player with a winning record against him, having only faced him in the 2018 World Championship final. Taylor has a 56.67% win rate against Michael van Gerwen, the player with the most victories against him. Taylor is the first darts player to win more than £1 million in prize money.
On 9 January 2007, Taylor won the 2006 PDC Player of the Year award at the inaugural PDC Awards Dinner held at the Dorchester Hotel in London's Park Lane. He was one of ten nominees for the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award in 2006; the award went to Zara Phillips.
Taylor was voted the 2007 Fans' Player of the Year following a vote conducted on the website Planet Darts. He received the award at the annual PDC Awards Dinner in January 2008. After his fifteenth World Championship victory, Taylor was made an inaugural inductee to the Stoke-on-Trent Sporting Hall of Fame on 7 January 2010.
Awards excluding the Hall of Fame are handed out the following January.PDC Player of the Year: 2006, 2008–2012PDC Fans' Player of the Year: 2007–2011Best PDC Pro Tour Player/Floor Player: 2008, 2009PDPA Players' Player of the Year: 2008, 2009 Best Televised Performance of the Year: 2016 PDC Nine-Dart Club: 2006*, 2007+, 2008*+, 2009**, 2010*, 2011*+, 2012*, 2015*+ (*: Gold Pin Badge (Televised), +: Silver Pin Badge (Non-Televised))PDC Hall of Fame: 2011BBC Sports Personality of the Year (Runner-up): 2010
Career statistics
World Championship results
BDO
1990: Winner (beat Eric Bristow 6–1)
1991: Quarter-finals (lost to Dennis Priestley 3–4)
1992: Winner' (beat Mike Gregory 6–5)
1993: Second round (lost to Kevin Spiolek 1–3)
PDC
WSDT
2022: Quarter-finals (lost to Kevin Painter 0–3)
2023: Quarter-finals (lost to Richie Howson 1–3)
Nine-dart finishes
Notes
Footnotes
References
External links
PhilThePower.com Official Website
Phil Taylor profile on Darts Betting News
Target darts player profile
English darts players
PDC world darts champions
English people convicted of indecent assault
Sportspeople from Burslem
Professional Darts Corporation founding players
1960 births
Living people
People stripped of a British Commonwealth honour
Sports world record holders
British Darts Organisation players
BDO world darts champions
World Series of Darts winners
UK Open champions
World Matchplay (darts) champions
World Grand Prix (darts) champions
Grand Slam of Darts champions
Players Championship Finals champions
European Championship (darts) champions
Masters (darts) champions
Premier League Darts champions
Champions League of Darts champions
Las Vegas Desert Classic champions
Darts players who have thrown televised nine-dart games
PDC World Cup of Darts English championship team
Professional Darts Corporation Hall of Fame
Professional Darts Corporation former tour card holders
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary%20of%20partner%20dance%20terms
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Glossary of partner dance terms
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This is a list of dance terms that are not names of dances or types of dances. See List of dances and List of dance style categories for those.
This glossary lists terms used in various types of ballroom partner dances, leaving out terms of highly evolved or specialized dance forms, such as ballet, tap dancing, and square dancing, which have their own elaborate terminology. See also:
Glossary of ballet terms
Glossary of dance moves
Abbreviations
3T – Three Ts
CBL – Cross-body lead
CBM – Contra body movement
CBMP – Contra body movement position
COG – Center of gravity
CPB – Center point of balance
CPP – Counter promenade position
DC – Diagonally to center
DW – Diagonally to wall
IDSF – International DanceSport Federation
IDTA – International Dance Teachers Association
ISTD – Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing
J&J – Jack and Jill
LOD – Line of dance
MPM – Measures per minute
NFR – No foot rise
OP – Outside partner or open position
PP – Promenade position
Q – Quick
S – Slow
A–C
Alignment
Alignment can mean:
the directions the feet face in relationship to the room. See Direction of movement.
the positioning of the body's "building blocks" (head, shoulders, abdomen, hips) in top of each other.
Amalgamation
A combination of two or more figures; more generally: a sequence of figures that a couple wants to dance.
American Rhythm
A category of dances in American Style ballroom competitions. It includes cha-cha-cha, rumba, East Coast swing, bolero, and mambo. Sometimes it may include samba and West Coast swing.
This category loosely corresponds to the Latin category of International Style ballroom.
American Smooth
A category of dances in American Style ballroom competitions. It includes waltz, tango, foxtrot, and Viennese waltz. Previously Peabody was also included.
This category loosely corresponds to the Standard category of International Style ballroom. However, Smooth differs from Standard in its inclusion of open and separated figures, whereas Standard makes exclusive use of closed positions.
American Style
The term describes a particular style of ballroom dances developed in the United States that contrasts with the International Style. In a narrower sense, it denotes the group of dances danced in American Style ballroom competitions. The group consists of two categories: American Smooth and American Rhythm.
Backleading
In social dancing strongly relying on leading and following, this term means that the follower executes steps without waiting for or contrary to the lead of the leader. This is also called anticipation and usually considered bad dancing habit. An exception would be to avoid a collision with another couple the leader hasn't seen (but this is usually just to stop the leader performing specific steps rather than the follower actively executing steps).
Sometimes this term is used in the meaning of hijacking, which is not exactly the same.
Ballroom
Body contact
Body contact is a style of closed position in partner dancing (closed position with body contact); it is also a type of physical connection, mainly of the right-hand sides of the partners' costal arches.
Body flight
Body flight is a property of many movements in dances such as the waltz and foxtrot. It refers to steps taken with momentum in excess of that necessary to arrive at a point of static balance over the new position, which suggests a carry through to another step in the same direction. Steps in these dances naturally flow one into another, in contrast to the tango and to the Latin and rhythm dances where many steps arrive to a point of static balance.
Body support
Support of the partner's body is largely avoided in ballroom dancing. The exception would be "lifts" – often featured in some forms of swing dancing, and ballroom showdance presentations, but banned in ordinary ballroom competition and rarely seen in social dancing.
Call
A call in square dancing is a command by a caller to execute a particular dance figure. In round dancing, calls are called cues. See "Caller" for the explanation of the difference. Voice calls may be complemented by hand signs. See also Voice cue.
Caller
A caller or a cuer is a person that calls/cues dance figures to be executed in square dances and round dances.
Center
When indicating a direction of movement during a dance, the term "center" means the direction perpendicular to the line of dance (LOD) pointing towards the center of the room. If one stands facing the LOD, then the center direction is to their left.
The term center may also be used as shorthand for the center point of balance.
Center point of balance
Together with the center of gravity (COG), the center point of balance (CPB) helps the dancer to better understand and control their movements. CPB differs from the two other centers in two respects. The exact location of the COG is always well-defined, however it significantly depends on the shape the body assumes. In contrast, the CPB during normal dancing (head up, feet down on the floor) is always at the same place of the dancer's body, although defined in a loose way.
It is said that the CPB is in the general area of the solar plexus for the gentlemen, and navel for the women.
Chassé
A chassé is a figure of three steps in which the feet are closed on the second step.
Check
A pronounced discontinuation of movement through the feet. This is created by locking the back of one knee into the front of the other knee. A check position is created in Latin Ballroom dances such as rumba and cha-cha-cha, as well as in International Standard Ballroom dances such as quickstep locks.
Closed dance figure
The term has at least two meanings: regarding dance position and regarding footwork.
A figure performed in closed position.
A figure in which at the last step the moving foot closes to rest at the support foot. Examples are box step in American Style waltz or natural turn in International Style waltz.
Closed position
The ordinary position of ballroom dancing in which the partners face each other with their bodies approximately parallel. In Standard and Smooth the bodies are also offset about a half body width such that each person has their partner on their right side, with their left side somewhat unobstructed; in tango, the offset is somewhat larger. Contrast promenade position and open position.
Compression
The term has several meanings.
Compression is a type of physical connection, opposite to leverage, in which the dance partners lean together while being connected. In other words, a stress exists at the point(s) of contact directed towards the contact point(s) of the dance partner. The term is frequently used, e.g., in the swing dance community.
Compression is lowering the body by bending the knees in a preparation for a step. The term is mostly used in describing the rises and falls technique of ballroom dances of Standard (International style) and Smooth (American style) categories: waltzes, tangos, foxtrots.
Compression is a hip action in Latin dances.
An action to achieve a graceful sway.
Connection
A means of communication between dancers in the couple. Physical and visual types of connection are distinguished. Physical connection, sometimes referred to as resistance or tone, involves slightly tensing the upper-body muscles, often in the context of a frame, thus enabling leader to communicate intentions to follower. See compression and tension, two basic associated actions/reactions.
Contra body movement
Refers to the action of the body in turning figures; turning the opposite hip and shoulder towards the direction of the moving foot.
Contra body movement position
Contra body movement position occurs when the moving foot is brought across (behind or in front) the standing foot the body turning. Applies to every step taken outside partner; occurs frequently in tango and in promenade figures.
Counter promenade position
In ballroom dances, the dance couple moves (or intends to move) sidewise to the leader's right while the bodies form a V-shape, with leader's left and follower's right sides are closer than the leader's right and follower's left. In other dances, there are other definitions.
Cuban hip motion
Cue
A signal to execute a dance figure. See Call and Voice cue.
D–J
Dance formation
Dance move
Dance pattern
Dancesport
Dancesport is an official term to denote dance as competitive, sport activity.
Dance step
For one meaning, see Dance move, for another one, see Step. See also Glossary of dance steps.
Direction of movement
Direction of step
Direction of turn
Fallaway
Both dance partners take (at least) a step backwards into promenade position.
Figure
A completed set of steps. More explicitly: a small sequence of steps comprising a meaningful gestalt, and given a name, for example whisk or spin turn.
Follower
Footwork
In a wider sense, the term footwork describes dance technique aspects related to feet: foot position and foot action.
In a narrow sense, e.g., in descriptions of ballroom dance figures, the term refers to the behavior of the foot when it is in contact with the floor. In particular, it describes which part of the foot is in contact with the floor: ball, heel, flat, toe, high toe, inside/outside edge, etc. In the Smooth and Standard dances, it is common for the body weight to progress through multiple parts of the foot during the course of a step. Customarily, parts of the foot reached only after the other foot has passed to begin a new step are implied but not explicitly mentioned.
Formation
A formation or dance formation is a team of dance couples.
Formation of a dance team is the specification of
positions of dancers or dance couples on the floor relative to each other and
directions the dancers face or move with respect to others.
Formation dance
Formation dance is a choreographed dance of a team of couples, e.g., ballroom sequence or ballroom formation dance/team.
Full weight
Full weight or full-weight transfer means that at the end of the step the dancer's center of gravity is directly over the support foot. A simple test for a full weight transfer is that you can freely lift the second foot off the floor.
Frame
Dance frames are the positions of the upper bodies of the dancers (hands, arms, shoulders, neck, head, and upper torso). A strong frame is where your arms and upper body are held firmly in place without relying on your partner to maintain your frame nor applying force that would move your partner or your partner's frame. In swing and blues dances, the frame is a dancer's body shape, which provides connection with the partner and conveys intended movement.
Major types of dance frames are Latin, smooth, and swing.
Guapacha
Guapacha timing is an alternative rhythm of various basic cha-cha steps that are normally counted "<1>, 2, 3, cha-cha-1" whereas "cha-cha-1" is counted musically "4-&-1". In Guapacha, the step that normally occurs on count "2" is delayed an extra half-beat, to the "&" of 2, making the new count "<1>, <hold>-&-3, 4-&-1".
Handhold
Handhold is an element of dance connection: it is a way the partners hold each other by hands.
Heel lead
Landing on the heel of the foot in motion during a step before putting weight on the remainder of the foot. As in normal walking, much of the swing of the foot is accomplished with its midpart closest to the floor, emphasis shifting to the heel only as the final placement is neared.
Heel turn
A heel turn is an action danced by the partner on the inside of turn in certain figures in Standard or Smooth. During the course of rotation, the dancer's weight moves from toe to heel of one foot while the other foot swings to close to it, then forward from heel towards the toe of the just closed foot. Follower's heel turns feature body rise coincident with the first step, which leads her foot to close next to the standing one rather than swing past. In contrast, when the leader is dancing a heel turn the rise is delayed until the conclusion of the turn, as he can better lead the amount of turn from a more grounded position. The heel turn is distinguished from other members of the family of heel pull actions which do not require complete closure of the feet. Follower's heel turns are commonly found in the double reverse spin and the open or closed telemark, and the natural and reverse turns of international style foxtrot, while leader's heel turns form the basis of the open or closed impetus.
Hijacking
In social dancing strongly reliant on leading and following, hijacking means temporary assuming the leading role by the follower. Also known as stealing the lead. Contrast backleading.
International Latin
International Latin is category of dances in International Style ballroom competitions. It includes samba, cha-cha-cha, rumba, pasodoble, and jive.
International Standard
A category of dances in International Style ballroom competitions. Sometimes in the context of competitions it is called Ballroom or International Ballroom, confusing as it might be. (In England, the term "Modern" is often used, which should not be confused with modern dance that derives from ballet technique) It includes waltz (formerly called "slow waltz"), tango, foxtrot, quickstep, and Viennese waltz. This category loosely corresponds to the Smooth category of American Style ballroom.
International Style
The term describes a particular style of ballroom dances that contrasts with American Style. In a narrower sense, it denotes the group of dances danced in International Style ballroom competitions. The group consists of two categories: Standard and Latin.
Jack and Jill
Jack and Jill (J&J) is a format of competition in partner dancing, where the competing couples are the result of random matching of leaders and followers. Rules of matching vary. The name comes from the popular English nursery rhyme, "Jack and Jill". In venues with same-gender dance partners, the ambiguous names "Pat and Chris" have been used, or event could be called "Mix and Match".
In dance competitions J&J is included as a separate division (or divisions, with additional gradations).
J&J is popular at swing conventions, as well as at ballroom dance competitions in the United States.
L–R
Latin
As applied to dances, Latin dance is any type of social dance of Latin American origin.
Latin hip motion
A characteristic type of hip motion found in the technique of performing a step in Latin and Rhythm dances. Although most visible in the hips, much of the effect is created through the action of the feet and knees. Sometimes it is also called Cuban hip motion, although because of the divergence in dance technique between American Rhythm and International Latin some prefer to distinguish the two, with the term "Latin motion" reserved for International Style, while the "Cuban motion" reserved for American Style and Club Latin dances. The most notable distinction (in a simplified description) is that in the International Style "Latin motion" the straightening of the knee happens before the full weight transfer, while in the "Cuban motion" the straightening of the knee happens after the full weight transfer. As a result, the Cuban hip motion results in a more fluid leg movement, whereas the Latin hip motion results in a more staccato leg movement.
Leader
Leading and following
Lead stealing
Leverage
The term describes type of physical connection, opposite to compression, in which the dance partners lean away from each other while being connected. In other words, a stress exists at the point(s) of contact directed away from the contact point(s) of the dance partner. Predominantly used in the swing dance community. See also tension.
Line of dance
Line of dance (LOD or LoD) is conceptually a path along and generally parallel to the edge of the dance floor in the counterclockwise direction. To help avoid collisions, it is agreed that in travelling dances dancers should proceed along the line of dance.
Line of dance is a useful line of reference when describing the directions of steps taken, e.g., "facing LOD", "backing [or reverse] LOD". See also center, wall. Reference to the direction of movement is based on the direction faced by the leader rather than the follower.
Line of foot
An imaginary straight line passing through the foot in the heel-toe direction.
Measures per minute
Measures per minute, or MPM, refers to the tempo of the music according to the number of measures or bars occurring in one minute of music. This can vary from as low as 25–27 MPM for international style rumba to as fast as 58–60 MPM for international style Viennese waltz.
Moving foot
The foot that is in action (tap, ronde, etc.) while most or all of the body's weight is being supported by the standing foot. Compare Supporting foot.
Musicality
New Vogue
No foot rise
In descriptions of the footwork of step patterns the abbreviation NFR stands for no foot rise (or no foot-rise) and means that the heel of the support foot remains in contact with the floor until the weight is transferred onto the other foot. The rise is felt in body (i.e. the torso) and legs only, not in the feet.
Open dance figure
The term has at least two meanings: regarding dance position and regarding footwork.
A figure performed in open position.
A figure in which during the last step the moving foot passes the support foot. Examples are the feather step in foxtrot or the open reverse turn, e.g. in tango.
Open position
Open position is any dance position in couple dances, in which the partners stand apart in contrast to closed position. They may face inwards or outwards, and hold one or both hands or stand independently.
Outside partner position
A step into outside partner position occurs when the moving foot of the forward travelling partner moves on a track outside of their partner's standing foot when it would ordinarily move on a track aimed between their partner's feet. Due to the offset of the hold, this generally applies to a step with the right foot. (The term left side outside is often used for the rare occurrences when the left foot crosses to pass outside, as in the Hover cross). Steps into outside partner position are also required to be in contra body movement position, and are often preceded by a step with a strong side lead. The term "inline" is occasionally used when it is necessary to clarify that an outside partner position is not involved.
Pat and Chris
Physical connection, physical lead
A dance connection by means of physical contact. Types of physical connection are body contact, compression, leverage.
Pinched shoulder
Pinched shoulder is the position seen when promenade position is incorrectly danced with an outward rotation of the upper bodies, rather than a rotational stretch in each body. It is characterized by one or both partner's having their trailing elbow behind the line of their shoulders, with a resulting break in the arm line at the trailing shoulder.
Progressive dance
Promenade position
The promenade position is described differently in various dance categories.
In ballroom dances their common trait is that the dance couple moves (or intends to move) essentially sidewise to the leader's left while partners nearly face each other, with the leader's right side of the body and the follower's left side of the body are closer than the respective opposite sides (forming a V-shape when looking from above). Steps of both partners are basically sidewise or diagonally forward with respect to their bodies. Normally the dancers look in the direction of the intended movement.
In square dances it is a close side-by-side position in various handholds with the general intention to move together forward, "in promenade".
In American tango, the partners shift their shoulders, hips and heads to a variable degree less and up to 90 to that of their original position, while their feet: man's left; lady's right are rotated respectively leftward and rightward to make a "V" (to the left/right). This exact position is also called semi-open in some dance books, by some authors and teachers, especially in American Smooth Ballroom dance.
The shift in Argentine/salon style tango is less pronounced and more individualized: the hold similarly variable but usually very close especially in the upper body, less in the hips.
In some swing dances (East Coast, triple-count, country, or single-count), the feet are more opened/rotated in their respective directions to lie parallel to each other and exactly perpendicular to their original Closed position placement.
The intention, is for the position to anticipate a change in direction of movement, to direct each partner of the couple/partnership, and to lead the follower to step in the direction of the rotation between their bodies; similarly for the counter promenade position.
Replace
In brief descriptions of dance figures, replace means replacing the weight to the previous support foot while keeping it in place. For example, a "rock back" figure may be described as "step back, replace". Notice that it doesn't require to "replace" the moving foot to the place from where it come in the previous step.
Rhythm
See American Rhythm.
See Rhythm.
Rise and fall
Rises and falls refer to the body ascending and descending by use of feet, ankles, and legs, to create dynamic movement.
S–Z
Shadow position
Both partners face the same general direction, one of them (the man) behind and slightly shifted leftwards ("in the shadow"). Handholds vary. Variants: sweetheart position, cuddle position.
Side lead
A body position or action during a step, sometimes also called same side lead. Side-leading refers to a movement during which the side of the body corresponding to the moving foot is consistently in advance as a result of a previous contra body movement or body turns less action. A step with side lead will often precede or follow a step of the opposite foot taken into contra body movement position (in which the leading side is that opposite the moving foot) without requiring intervening rotation of the body.
Due to the offset position of the partners in the hold, a left side lead may be quite pronounced whereas a right side lead will be more subtle if taken in closed position.
Slot
In slotted dances, the dance slot is an imaginary narrow rectangle along which the follower moves back and forth with respect to the leader, who is more or less stationary. As a rule, the leader mostly stays in the slot as well, leaving it only to give way for the follower to pass him.
Some slots are fixed, some can rotate, some are only from close hold to open hold with one arm, or double from one side of the man to his full reach on the other (as in hustle), depending on the dance floor space available and the specific dance. The leader in social and performance/exhibition dancing is more free to step out from the slot, more in some dances, and dance styles (such as hustle and salsa), than in others.
Slotted dance
A dance style in which the couple's movements are generally confined to a slot. The most typical slotted dance is west coast swing. Some other dances, e.g., hustle and salsa, may be danced in slotted style. Compare spot dance, travelling dance.
Smooth
Spot dance
A dance that is generally danced in a restricted area of the dance floor. Examples are rumba, salsa, east coast swing. Compare travelling dance, slotted dance.
Spotting
A technique used during turns. The dancer chooses a reference point (such as their partner or a distant point along the line of travel) and focuses on it as long as possible. When during the turn it is no longer possible to see it, the head flips as fast as possible to "spot" the reference point again. This technique guides the body during the turn, makes it easier to determine when to stop turning, and helps prevent dizziness.
It must be done by rotating the head as close to perfectly in the horizontal plane as possible so as not to defeat the purpose of minimizing dizziness in those so predisposed. The most common spotting is 180° to and away from one's partner, or the line of dance (LOD) and a full 360° from the original spot, be it LOD, outside line of dance (OLOD), or toward or away from one's partner, a wall for example. It can be done in apart/free position or less frequently in closed position.
Standard
Stationary dance
Stealing the lead
In social dancing strongly reliant on leading and following, stealing the lead means temporary assuming the leading role by the follower. Also known as hijacking. Contrast backleading.
Step
In a strict sense, a step, or a footstep, is a single move of one foot, usually involving full or partial weight transfer to the moving foot. However foot actions, such as tap, kick, etc., are also sometimes called "steps". For example, in a description: "step forward, replace, together" all three actions are steps.
Sometimes it is important to define the exact limits of one (foot)step, i.e., exactly when it begins and ends. In describing the detailed technique in Standard and Smooth dances (waltz, tango,...) it is agreed that in figures where the moving foot doesn't stop at the support foot a step begins (and the previous step ends) at the moment when the moving foot passes the support foot. Notice that according to this agreement such steps begin and end precisely at the "counts" 1, 2, etc. which normally match musical beats.
In a broader sense, step means dance step, i.e., a dance figure, for example: basic step, triple step.
Standing foot
Same as Supporting foot.
Supporting foot
It is also called support foot or standing foot, a foot which bears the full or nearly full weight while the other foot does some action (step, tap, ronde, etc.). Compare moving foot.
Sway
The term sway has a specific meaning in the technique of ballroom dancing. Basically, it describes a body position in which its upper part gracefully deflects from the vertical. The direction of sway is usually away from the standing foot and the direction of movement.
Syncopation
In dancing, the term syncopation has two meanings. The first one is similar to the musical terminology: stepping on an unstressed musical beat. The second one is making more (and/or different) steps than required by the standard description of a figure, to address more rhythmical nuances of the music. The latter usage is considered incorrect by many dance instructors, but it is still in circulation, a better term lacking.
Tension
Describes a physical connection, opposite to compression, in which a stress exists at the point(s) of contact directed away from the contact point(s) between partners. People frequently resort to describing the actions as "push" (compression, towards partner) and "pull" (tension, away from partner) to get the idea across. See also leverage.
Three Ts
Technique, timing, and teamwork. The criteria for evaluation of dance mastery in the swing dancing community.
Timing
The relation of the elements of a dance step or dance figure with respect to musical timing: bars and beats. Also the synchronizing of movements between the dance partners, or between the parts of a dancer's body.
Toe lead
Landing on the toe of the foot in motion during a step before putting weight on the remainder of the foot.
Top line
The top line is the way dancers hold their head, neck, shoulders, arms, hands, and upper back.
Tracking, track of foot
The trajectory of the moving foot visualized as a narrow imaginary track, forward and backward of the foot rather than a line. For the standing foot, its track is determined by its current orientation on the floor which may be noted on the inside of turns where the feet often point in differing directions.
Travelling (progressive) dance
A dance that significantly travels over the dance floor, generally in the direction of the line of dance. Examples are waltz, foxtrot, polka, samba, Argentine tango. Compare spot dance, slotted dance.
Visual connection, visual lead
A dance connection by means of visual awareness of partners in a couple.
Visual connection by no means should replace the physical connection, and some consider it to be an inferior form of connection. However it does have its proper usages. Most important are the coordination of styles (arms, etc.) and when dancing without physical contact. An important example of the latter is spotting the partner during turns, especially free spins.
This type of connection is essential for "shine position patterns", commonly found in Latin dances like the cha-cha-cha, mambo, and salsa as well as "side by side position patterns".
Voice cue
Voice cues help match rhythmic patterns of steps (or other moves) with the music. There are different types of voice cues.
The most common example is the usage of "quick" and "slow" words: "quick-quick-slow" (pronounced as "quick quick slo-o-o-ow") immediately tells you that the third step takes twice the time of the first one (and of the second one).
Some East Coast Swing instructors cue the basic step as "shuf-fle-STEP, shuf-fle-STEP, rock BACK", to indicate both the rhythmic pattern of the figure (1&2, 3&4, 5, 6) and the syncopated character of swing music: every second syllable is stressed.
Still another example: the box step of American-style rumba may be cued as "forward-...-side-together, back-...-side-together", to indicate the directions of (leader's) steps and their timing.
Finally, for more advanced dancers voice cues are actually names of dance figures and standard variations:
"Two walks, link, closed promenade" (tango).
"Open Telemark, natural fallaway, whisk, quick wing" (waltz).
" (Spanish, used in )
Cues are an important element of round dances. In square dances they are called calls and called by a caller.
Wall
When indicating a direction of movement during a dance, the term "wall" means the direction perpendicular to the line of dance (LOD) pointing towards the wall of the room (possibly imaginary). If one stands facing the LOD, then the wall direction is to their right.
Weight transfer
See also
List of dance organizations
Musical terminology
List of musical topics
References
List of partner dance books
External links
Streetswing.com large information base about more than thousand dances.
Partner dance
Partner dance technique
Wikipedia glossaries using subheadings
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mihail%20Kog%C4%83lniceanu
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Mihail Kogălniceanu
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Mihail Kogălniceanu (; also known as Mihail Cogâlniceanu, Michel de Kogalnitchan; September 6, 1817 – July 1, 1891) was a Romanian liberal statesman, lawyer, historian and publicist; he became Prime Minister of Romania on October 11, 1863, after the 1859 union of the Danubian Principalities under Domnitor Alexandru Ioan Cuza, and later served as Foreign Minister under Carol I. He was several times Interior Minister under Cuza and Carol. A polymath, Kogălniceanu was one of the most influential Romanian intellectuals of his generation. Siding with the moderate liberal current for most of his lifetime, he began his political career as a collaborator of Prince Mihail Sturdza, while serving as head of the Iași Theater and issuing several publications together with the poet Vasile Alecsandri and the activist Ion Ghica. After editing the highly influential magazine Dacia Literară and serving as a professor at Academia Mihăileană, Kogălniceanu came into conflict with the authorities over his Romantic nationalist inaugural speech of 1843. He was the ideologue of the abortive 1848 Moldavian revolution, authoring its main document, Dorințele partidei naționale din Moldova.
Following the Crimean War (1853–1856), with Prince Grigore Alexandru Ghica, Kogălniceanu was responsible for drafting legislation to abolish Roma slavery. Together with Alecsandri, he edited the unionist magazine Steaua Dunării, played a prominent part during the elections for the ad hoc Divan, and successfully promoted Cuza, his lifelong friend, to the throne. Kogălniceanu advanced legislation to revoke traditional ranks and titles, and to secularize the property of monasteries. His efforts at land reform resulted in a censure vote, leading Cuza to enforce them through a coup d'état in May 1864. However, Kogălniceanu resigned in 1865, following his own conflicts with the monarch.
A decade after, he helped create the National Liberal Party, before playing an important part in Romania's decision to enter the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878—a choice which consecrated her independence. He was also instrumental in the acquisition, and later colonization, of Northern Dobruja region. During his final years, he was a prominent member and one-time President of the Romanian Academy, and briefly served as Romanian representative to France.
Biography
Early life
Born in Iași, he belonged to the Kogălniceanu family of Moldavian boyars, being the son of Vornic Ilie Kogălniceanu, and the great-grandson of Constantin Kogălniceanu (noted for having signed his name to a 1749 document issued by Prince Constantine Mavrocordatos, through which serfdom was disestablished in Moldavia). Mihail's mother, Catinca née Stavilla (or Stavillă), was, according to Kogălniceanu's own words, "[from] a Romanian family in Bessarabia". The author took pride in noting that "my family has never searched its origins in foreign countries or peoples". Nevertheless, in a speech he gave shortly before his death, Kogălniceanu commented that Catinca Stavilla had been the descendant of "a Genoese family, settled for centuries in the Genoese colony of Cetatea Albă (Akerman), whence it then scattered throughout Bessarabia".
During Milhail Kogălniceanu's lifetime, there was confusion regarding his exact birth year, with several sources erroneously indicating it as 1806; in his speech to the Romanian Academy, he acknowledged this, and gave his exact birth date as present in a register kept by his father. It was also then that he mentioned his godmother was Marghioala Calimach, a Callimachi boyaress who married into the Sturdza family, and was the mother of Mihail Sturdza (Kogălniceanu's would-be protector and foe).
Kogălniceanu was educated at Trei Ierarhi monastery in Iași, before being tutored by Gherman Vida, a monk who belonged to the Transylvanian School, and who was an associate of Gheorghe Șincai. He completed his primary education in Miroslava, where he attended the Cuénim boarding school. It was during this early period that he first met the poet Vasile Alecsandri (they studied under both Vida and Cuénim), Costache Negri and Cuza. At the time, Kogălniceanu became a passionate student of history, beginning his investigations into old Moldavian chronicles.
With support from Prince Sturdza, Kogălniceanu continued his studies abroad, originally in the French city of Lunéville (where he was cared for by Sturdza's former tutor, the abbé Lhommé), and later at the University of Berlin. Among his colleagues was the future philosopher Grigore Sturdza, son of the Moldavian monarch. His stay in Lunéville was cut short by the intervention of Russian officials, who were supervising Moldavia under the provisions of the Regulamentul Organic regime, and who believed that, through the influence of Lhommé (a participant in the French Revolution), students were being infused with rebellious ideas; all Moldavian students, including Sturdza's sons and other noblemen, were withdrawn from the school in late 1835, and reassigned to Prussian education institutions.
In Berlin
During his period in Berlin, he came in contact with and was greatly influenced by Friedrich Carl von Savigny, Alexander von Humboldt, Eduard Gans, and especially Professor Leopold von Ranke, whose ideas on the necessity for politicians to be acquainted with historical science he readily adopted. In pages he dedicated to the influence exercised by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel on Romanian thought, Tudor Vianu noted that certain Hegelian-related principles were a common attribute of the Berlin faculty during Kogălniceanu's stay. He commented that, in later years, the politician adopted views which resonated with those of Hegel, most notably the principle that legislation needed to adapt to the individual spirit of nations.
Kogălniceanu later noted with pride that he had been the first of Ranke's Romanian students, and claimed that, in conversations with Humboldt, he was the first person to use the modern equivalents French-language of the words "Romanian" and "Romania" (roumain and Roumanie)—replacing the references to "Moldavia(n)" and "Wallachia(n)", as well as the antiquated versions used before him by the intellectual Gheorghe Asachi; historian Nicolae Iorga also noted the part Kogălniceanu played in popularizing these references as the standard ones.
Kogălniceanu was also introduced to Frederica, Duchess of Cumberland, and became relatively close to her son George of Cumberland and Teviotdale, the future ruler of Hanover. Initially hosted by a community of the Huguenot diaspora, he later became the guest of a Calvinist pastor named Jonas, in whose residence he witnessed gatherings of activists in favor of German unification (see Burschenschaft). According to his own recollections, his group of Moldavians was kept under close watch by Alexandru Sturdza, who, in addition, enlisted Kogălniceanu's help in writing his work Études historiques, chrétiennes et morales ("Historical, Christian and Moral Studies"). During summer trips to the Pomeranian town of Heringsdorf, he met the novelist Willibald Alexis, whom he befriended, and who, as Kogălniceanu recalled, lectured him on the land reform carried out by Prussian King Frederick William III. Later, Kogălniceanu studied the effects of reform when on visit to Alt Schwerin, and saw the possibility for replicating its results in his native country.
Greatly expanding his familiarity with historical and social subjects, Kogălniceanu also began work on his first volumes: a pioneering study on the Romani people and the French-language Histoire de la Valachie, de la Moldavie et des Valaques transdanubiens ("A History of Wallachia, Moldavia, and of Transdanubian Vlachs", the first volume in a synthesis of Romanian history), both of which were first published in 1837 inside the German Confederation. He was becoming repulsed by the existence of Roma slavery in his country, and in his study, cited the example of active abolitionists in Western countries.
In addition, he authored a series of studies on Romanian literature. He signed these first works with a Francized version of his name, Michel de Kogalnitchan ("Michael of Kogalnitchan"), which was slightly erroneous (it used the partitive case twice: once in the French particle "de", and a second time in the Romanian-based suffix "-an").
Raising the suspicions of Prince Sturdza after it became apparent that he sided with the reform-minded youth of his day in opposition to the Regulamentul Organic regime, Kogălniceanu was prevented from completing his doctorate, and instead returned to Iași, where he became a princely adjutant in 1838.
In opposition to Prince Sturdza
Over the following decade, he published a large number of works, including essays and articles, his first editions of the Moldavian chroniclers, as well as other books and articles, while founding a succession of short-lived periodicals: Alăuta Românească (1838), Foaea Sătească a Prințipatului Moldovei (1839), Dacia Literară (1840), Arhiva Românească (1840), Calendar pentru Poporul Românesc (1842), Propășirea (renamed Foaie Științifică și Literară, 1843), and several almanacs. In 1844, as a Moldavian law freed some slaves in Orthodox Church property, his articles announced a great triumph for "humanity" and "new ideas".
Both Dacia Literară and Foaie Științifică, which he edited together with Alecsandri, Ion Ghica, and Petre Balș, were suppressed by Moldavian authorities, who considered them suspect. Together with Costache Negruzzi, he printed all of Dimitrie Cantemir's works available at the time, and, in time, acquired his own printing press, which planned to issue the complete editions of Moldavian chronicles, including those of Miron Costin and Grigore Ureche (after many disruptions associated with his political choices, the project was fulfilled in 1852). In this context, Kogălniceanu and Negruzzi sought to Westernize the Moldavian public, with interest ranging as far as Romanian culinary tastes: the almanacs published by them featured gourmet-themed aphorisms and recipes meant to educate local folk about the refinement and richness of European cuisine. Kogălniceanu would later claim that he and his friend were "originators of the culinary art in Moldavia".
With Dacia Literară, Kogălniceanu began expanding his Romantic ideal of "national specificity", which was to be a major influence on Alexandru Odobescu and other literary figures. One of the main goals his publications had was expanding the coverage of modern Romanian culture beyond its early stages, during which it had mainly relied on publishing translations of Western literature—according to Garabet Ibrăileanu, this was accompanied by a veiled attack on Gheorghe Asachi and his Albina Românească. Mihail Kogălniceanu later issued clear criticism of Asachi's proposed version of literary Romanian, which relied on archaisms and Francized phonemes, notably pointing out that it was inconsistent. Additionally, he evidenced the influence foreign poetry had on Asachi's own work, viewing it as excessive. Tensions also occurred between Kogălniceanu and Alecsandri, after the former began suspecting his collaborator of having reduced and toned down his contributions to Foaie Științifică. During this period, Kogălniceanu maintained close contacts with his former colleague Costache Negri and his sister Elena, becoming one of the main figures of the intellectual circle hosted by the Negris in Mânjina. He also became close to the French teacher and essayist Jean Alexandre Vaillant, who was himself involved in liberal causes while being interested in the work of Moldavian chroniclers. Intellectuals of the day speculated that Kogălniceanu later contributed several sections to Vaillant's lengthy essay about Moldavia and Wallachia (La Roumanie).
In May 1840, while serving as Prince Sturdza's private secretary, he became co-director (with Alecsandri and Negruzzi) of the National Theater Iași. This followed the monarch's decision to unite the two existing theaters in the city, one of which hosted plays in French, into a single institution. In later years, this venue, which staged popular comedies based on the French repertory of its age and had become the most popular of its kind in the country, also hosted Alecsandri's debut as a playwright. Progressively, it also became subject to Sturdza's censorship.
In 1843, Kogălniceanu gave a celebrated inaugural lecture on national history at the newly founded Academia Mihăileană in Iași, a speech which greatly influenced ethnic Romanian students at the University of Paris and the 1848 generation (see Cuvânt pentru deschiderea cursului de istorie națională). Other professors at the Academia, originating in several historical regions, were Ion Ghica, Eftimie Murgu, and Ion Ionescu de la Brad. Kogălniceanu's introductory speech was partly prompted by Sturdza's refusal to give him imprimatur, and amounted to a revolutionary project. Among other things, it made explicit references to the common cause of Romanians living in the two states of Moldavia and Wallachia, as well as in Austrian- and Russian-ruled areas:
"I view as my country everywhere on earth where Romanian is spoken, and as national history the history of all of Moldavia, that of Wallachia, and that of our brothers in Transylvania."Boia, History and Myth, p. 131; Gheorghe & Șerbu, p. 36
Revolution
Around 1843, Kogălniceanu's enthusiasm for change was making him a suspect to the Moldavian authorities, and his lectures on History were suspended in 1844. His passport was revoked while he was traveling to Vienna as the secret representative of the Moldavian political opposition (attempting to approach Metternich and discuss Sturdza's ouster). Briefly imprisoned after returning to Iași, he soon after became involved in political agitation in Wallachia, assisting his friend Ion Ghica: in February, during a Romantic nationalist celebration, he traveled to Bucharest, where he met members of the secretive Frăția organization and of its legal front, Soțietatea Literară (including Ghica, Nicolae Bălcescu, August Treboniu Laurian, Alexandru G. Golescu, and C. A. Rosetti).
Having sold his personal library to Academia Mihăileană, Kogălniceanu was in Paris and other Western European cities from 1845 to 1847, joining the Romanian student association (Societatea Studenților Români) that included Ghica, Bălcescu, and Rosetti and was presided over by the French poet Alphonse de Lamartine. He also frequented La Bibliothèque roumaine ("The Romanian Library"), while affiliating to the Freemasonry and joining the Lodge known as L'Athénée des étrangers ("Foreigners' Atheneum"), as did most other reform-minded Romanians in Paris. In 1846, he visited Spain, wishing to witness the wedding of Isabella II and the Duke of Cádiz, but he was also curious to assess developments in Spanish culture. Upon the end of his trip, he authored Notes sur l'Espagne ("Notes on Spain"), a French-language volume combining memoir, travel writing and historiographic record.
For a while, he concentrated his activities on reviewing historical sources, expanding his series of printed and edited Moldavian chronicles. At the time, he renewed his contacts with Vaillant, who helped him publish articles in the Revue de l'Orient. He would later state: "We did not come to Paris just to learn how to speak French like the French do, but also to borrow the ideas and useful things of a nation that is so enlightened and so free".
Following the onset of the European Revolutions, Kogălniceanu was present at the forefront of nationalist politics. Though, for a number of reasons, he failed to sign the March 1848 petition-proclamation which signaled the Moldavian revolution, he was seen as one of its instigators, and Prince Sturdza ordered his arrest during the police roundup that followed. While evading capture, Kogălniceanu authored some of the most vocal attacks on Sturdza, and, by July, a reward was offered for his apprehension "dead or alive". During late summer, he crossed the Austrian border into Bukovina, where he took refuge on the Hurmuzachi brothers' property (in parallel, the Frăția-led Wallachian revolution managed to gain power in Bucharest).
Kogălniceanu became a member and chief ideologue of the Moldavian Central Revolutionary Committee in exile. His manifesto, Dorințele partidei naționale din Moldova ("The Wishes of the National Party in Moldavia", August 1848), was, in effect, a constitutional project listing the goals of Romanian revolutionaries. It contrasted with the earlier demands the revolutionaries had presented to Sturdza, which called for strict adherence to the Regulamentul Organic and an end to abuse. In its 10 sections and 120 articles, the manifesto called for, among other things, internal autonomy, civil and political liberties, separation of powers, abolition of privilege, an end to corvées, and a Moldo-Wallachian union. Referring to the latter ideal, Kogălniceanu stressed that it formed:
"the keystone without which the national edifice would crumble".
At the same time, he published a more explicit "Project for a Moldavian Constitution", which expanded on how Dorințele could be translated into reality. Kogălniceanu also contributed articles to the Bukovinian journal Bucovina, the voice of revolution in Romanian-inhabited Austrian lands. In January 1849, a cholera epidemic forced him to leave for the French Republic, where he carried on with his activities in support of the Romanian revolution.
Prince Ghica's reforms
In April 1849, part of the goals of the 1848 Revolution were fulfilled by the Convention of Balta Liman, through which the two suzerain powers of the Regulamentul Organic regime—the Ottoman Empire and Russia—appointed Grigore Alexandru Ghica, a supporter of the liberal and unionist cause, as Prince of Moldova (while, on the other hand, confirming the defeat of revolutionary power in Wallachia). Ghica allowed the instigators of the 1848 events to return from exile, and appointed Kogălniceanu, as well as Costache Negri and Alexandru Ioan Cuza to administrative offices. The measures enforced by the prince, together with the fallout from the defeat of Russia in the Crimean War, were to bring by 1860 the introduction of virtually all liberal tenets comprised in Dorințele partidei naționale din Moldova.
Kogălniceanu was consequently appointed to various high level government positions, while continuing his cultural contributions and becoming the main figure of the loose grouping Partida Națională, which sought the merger of the two Danubian Principalities under a single administration. In 1867, reflecting back on his role, he stated:
"There is not a single reform, not a single national act, from which my name would be absent. All the major laws were made and countersigned by me."
He inaugurated his career as a legislator under Prince Ghica. On December 22, 1855, legislation he drafted with Petre Mavrogheni regarding the abolition of slavery was passed by the Boyar Divan. This involved the freeing of privately owned Roma slaves, as those owned by the state had been set free by Prince Sturdza in January 1844. Kogălniceanu claimed to have personally inspired the measure. Ghica was prompted to complete the process of liberation by the fate of Dincă, an educated Roma cook who had murdered his French wife and then killed himself after being made aware that he was not going to be set free by his Cantacuzino masters.
Prince Ghica also attempted to improve the peasant situation by outlawing quit-rents and regulating that peasants could no longer be removed from the land they were working on. This measure produced little lasting effects; according to Kogălniceanu, "the cause [of this] should be sought in the all-mightiness of landowners, in the weakness of the government, who, through its very nature, was provisional, and thus powerless".
Ad hoc Divan
Interrupted by Russian and Austrian interventions during the Crimean War, his activity as Partida Națională representative was successful after the 1856 Treaty of Paris, when Moldavia and Wallachia came under the direct supervision of the European Powers (comprising, alongside Russia and Austria, the United Kingdom, the Second French Empire, the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, and Prussia). As he later acknowledged, members of the Divan had begun to consider the Paris agreements, and especially the 1858 convention regarding the two countries, as a Constitution of Romania, in place until 1864.
In addition, Kogălniceanu began printing the magazine Steaua Dunării in Iași: a unionist mouthpiece, it enlisted support from Alecsandri and his România Literară. Kogălniceanu encouraged Nicolae Ionescu to issue the magazine L'Étoile de Danube in Brussels, as a French-language version of Steaua Dunării which would also serve to popularize Partida Națională'''s views. By that time, he was in correspondence with Jean Henri Abdolonyme Ubicini, a French essayist and traveler who had played a minor part in the Wallachian uprising, and who supported the Romanian cause in his native country.
Elected by the College of landowners in Dorohoi County to the ad hoc Divan, a newly established assembly through which Moldavians had gained the right to decide their own future, he kept in line with the Wallachian representatives to their respective Divan, and resumed his campaign in favor of union and increased autonomy, as well as the principles of neutrality, representative government, and, as he said later, rule by "a foreign prince". However, both Kogălniceanu and Alecsandri initially presented themselves as candidates for the regency title of Caimacam—Alecsandri, who was more popular, renounced first in order to back Costache Negri. Negri's candidature was dismissed by the Ottomans, who preferred to appoint Teodor Balș (June 1856).
Following the elections of September 1857, the entire Partida Națională chose to support Cuza for the Moldavian throne. This came after Nicolae Vogoride, the new Caimaicam, carried out an anti-unionist electoral fraud—a suffrage annulled by the common verdict of Napoleon III and Queen Victoria (August 9, 1857, first announced to the world on August 26).Djuvara, pp. 355–356
He played the decisive part in the Divan's decision to abolish boyar ranks and privileges, thus nullifying pieces of legislation first imposed under Prince Constantine Mavrocordatos. The final proposal, effectively imposing one law for all, universal conscription and an end to rank-based tax exemptions, was made by a commission which included Kogălniceanu and Vasile Mălinescu, and was passed by the Divan on October 29, 1857, with 73 out of 77 votes (the remaining 4 were all abstentions). Kogălniceanu noted with pride that "The entire nation has accepted this great reform, and everyone, former Princes, great boyars, low-ranking boyars, privileged strata, have received this equalitarian reform, discarding, even without special laws, all that derived from the old regime, and even all that resembled the old regime". He recorded that only two members of the boyar class had subsequently refused to abide by the new principles—the Vornics Iordache Beldiman (in Moldavia) and Ioan Manu (in Wallachia). In November, Partida Națională passed legislation forcing the end of religious discrimination against all non-Orthodox Christians in Moldavia (specifically, against Roman Catholics and Gregorian Armenians). The law had been initiated by Negri.
Many of Kogălniceanu's efforts were centered on bringing about an end to the peasant question, but, as he admitted, his boyar electorate threatened to recall him if he was to pursue this path any further. Consequently, he signed his name to the more moderate proposal of Dimitrie Rallet, which prevented boyars from instituting new corvées, while leaving other matters to be discussed by a future permanent Assembly. This project was instantly rejected by a solid majority of the Assembly, which in Kogălniceanu's view, led to the creation of two poles, "national liberal" and conservative, replacing the unionist-separatist divide and causing political conflicts inside the former unionist majority (thus forming the National Liberal and Conservative parties).
Outmaneuvering the opposition of Vogoride and his group of conservative followers during new elections for the Divan, Kogălniceanu was able to promote Cuza in Moldavia on January 17, 1859, leading to Cuza's election for a similar position in Wallachia (February 5)—the de facto union of the two countries as the United Principalities.Djuvara, pp. 332, 356; Gorovei, pp. 9–10 In October 1858, he made a clear proposal regarding the unification, which, as he noted, carried the vote with only two opposing voices (Alecu Balș and Nectarie Hermeziu, the Orthodox vicar of Roman Bishopric), being publicly acclaimed by Ion Roată, the peasant representative for Putna County. During 1859, Kogălniceanu again stood in the ad hoc Divan and rallied support for Cuza from all factions of the unionist camp, while promoting his candidature in Bucharest—thus profiting from ambiguities in the Paris Treaty. On the day Cuza took the throne, to begin his rule as Domnitor, Mihail Kogălniceanu welcomed him with an emotional speech.
Secularization of monastery estates
From 1859 to 1865, Kogălniceanu was on several occasions the cabinet leader in the Moldavian half of the United Principalities, then Prime Minister of Romania, being responsible for most of the reforms associated with Cuza's reign.Gheorghe & Șerbu, p. 35; Gorovei, p. 10 His first term in Moldavia ended during December 1860, when Kogălniceanu became involved in the scandal involving Metropolitan Sofronie Miclescu, who opposed Cuza's secularization of the monastery estates. In 1863, secularization was imposed by Cuza, with the land thus freed being divided among peasants—the land reform of 1864, which came together with the universal abolition of corvées.Gorovei, p. 10
Although political opposition prevented him from pushing agrarian reform at the time that he proposed it, Mihail Kogălniceanu is seen as the person responsible for the manner in which it was eventually carried out by Cuza. The changes in legislation came at the end of a lengthy process, inaugurated in 1860, when the institution regulating legislative projects for the two principalities, the Conservative-dominated Common Commission of Focșani, refused to create the basis for land reform.Giurescu, p. 147 Instead, it provided for an end to corvées, while allowing peasants on boyar estates control over their own houses and a parcel of pasture.Stavrianos, p. 353 Known as Legea Rurală (the "Rural Law"), the project received instant support from the then-Premier Barbu Catargiu, leader of the Conservatives, and the target of vocal criticism on Kogălniceanu's part.Gheorghe & Șerbu, p. 23; Giurescu p. 147 On June 6, 1862, the project was first debated in parliament, causing a standstill between Cuza and the Conservatives.Giurescu, pp. 147–148 As noted by historian L. S. Stavrianos, the latter considered the project advantageous because, while preserving estates, it created a sizable group of landless and dependent peasants, who could provide affordable labor.
Late in the same month, Catargiu was mysteriously assassinated on Mitropoliei Hill, on his way back from Filaret, where he had attended a festivity commemorating the Wallachian revolution (he was succeeded by Nicolae Kretzulescu, after the interim premiership of Apostol Arsachi).Gheorghe & Șerbu, pp. 24–27, 32–33; Giurescu, p. 148 On June 23, Legea Rurală was passed by Parliament, but Cuza would not promulgate it. According to Kogălniceanu, the Conservatives Arsachi and Kretzulescu were reluctant to propose the law for review by Cuza, knowing that it was destined to be rejected. Discussions then drifted toward the matter of confiscating land from the Greek Orthodox monasteries in Romania (their sizable properties and traditional tax exemptions had been the subject of controversy ever since the Phanariote period). In late 1862, their revenues were taken over by the state, and, during the summer of the following year, a sum of 80 million piasters was offered as compensation to the Greek monks, in exchange for all of the monasteries' land.
As the Ottoman Empire proposed international mediation, Cuza took the initiative, and, on October 23, 1863, deposed the Kretzulescu cabinet, nominating instead his own selection of men: Kogălniceanu as Premier and Interior Minister, Dimitrie Bolintineanu as Minister of Religious Affairs. In order to prevent further international tensions, they decided to generalize confiscation to all Eastern Orthodox Church estates, Greek as well as those of the incipient Romanian Orthodox monasteries. The resolution was passed with 97 out of 100 parliamentary votes. Later, the Greek Church was presented with an offer of 150 million piasters as compensation, which was viewed as two low by its intended recipients, including Patriarch Sophoronius III. Consequently, the Romanian state considered the matter closed. As a direct consequence, one third of the arable land in Moldavia and a fourth of that in Wallachia were made available for a future land reform (one fifth to one fourth of the total arable land in the state as a whole).Clark, p. 53
Cuza's personal regime
In the spring of 1864, the cabinet introduced a bill providing for an extensive land reform, which proposed allocating land based on peasant status.Clark, p. 53; Giurescu, p. 148 The fruntași ("foremost people"), who owned 4 or more oxen, were to receive 5 fălci of land, or approx. 7.5 hectares; mijlocași ("middle people"), with two oxen—approx. 6 hectares; pălmași ("manual laborers"), with no oxen—approx. 3 hectares. Peasants were to own their plots after making 14 yearly payments to their respective landowner. This caused uproar in Parliament, which represented around 4,000 mostly boyar electors, and voices from among the Conservatives deemed it "insane". The latter party prepared a censure vote, based on the fact that Kogălniceanu had publicized the project through Monitorul Oficial in contradiction with the one endorsed by the Focșani Commission, thus going against the letter of the law—he later justified himself saying: "Publication was necessary in order to quell the rural population, agitated by the [alternative project]". The cabinet handed in its resignation, but Cuza refused to countersign it.
Tensions mounted and, on May 14, 1864, Cuza carried out a coup d'état, coinciding with the moment when Conservatives imposed a censure vote. Kogălniceanu read in Parliament the monarch's decision to dissolve it, after which Cuza introduced a new constitution, titled Statutul dezvoltător al Convenției de la Paris ("Statute Expanding the Paris Convention"). Together with a law virtually establishing a system of universal male suffrage, it was submitted to the 1864 plebiscite, gaining support from 682,621 voters out of 754,148.
The new regime passed its own version of Legea Rurală, thus effectively imposing land reform, as well as putting an end to corvées.Clark, p. 53; Giurescu, pp. 148–149; Stavrianos, p. 353 This was accomplished through discussions in August 1864 by the newly established Council of State, where the law was advanced by, among others, Kogălniceanu, Bolintineanu, George D. Vernescu, Gheorghe Apostoleanu and Alexandru Papadopol-Callimachi. Kogălniceanu's other measures as minister included: the establishment of Bucharest University, the introduction of identity papers, the establishment of a national police corps (comprising Dorobanți units), the unification of Border Police.
More reserved members of the Council asked for the land reform law not to be applied for a duration of three years, instead of the presumed April 1865 deadline, and Cuza agreed. Arguing that Cuza's decision was "the very condemnation and crushing of the law", Kogălniceanu worried that peasants, informed of their future, could no longer be persuaded to carry out corvées. He threatened Cuza with his resignation, and was ultimately able to persuade all parties involved, including the opposition leader Kretzulescu, to accept the law's application as of spring 1865; a proclamation by Cuza, Către locuitorii sătești ("To the Rural Inhabitants") accompanied the resolution, and was described by Kogălniceanu as "the political testament of Cuza". Despite this measure, factors such as a growing population, the division of plots among descendants, peasant debts and enduring reliance on revenues from working on estates, together with the widespread speculation of estate leaseholders and instances where political corruption was detrimental to the allocation of land, made the reform almost completely ineffectual on the long term, and contributed to the countryside unrest which culminated in the Peasants' Revolt of 1907.
With Kogălniceanu's participation, the authoritarian regime established by Cuza succeeded in promulgating a series of reforms, notably introducing the Napoleonic code, public education, and state monopolies on alcohol and tobacco. At the same time, the regime became unstable and was contested by all sides, especially after his adulterous affair with Marija Obrenović became the topic of scandal. In early 1865, Cuza came into conflict with his main ally Kogălniceanu, whom he dismissed soon after.Stavrianos, p. 356 Over the following months, the administration went into financial collapse, no longer able to provide state salaries, while Cuza came to rely on his own camarilla (courtiers).
After 1863, relations between Mihail Kogălniceanu and his friend Vasile Alecsandri soured dramatically, as the latter declared himself disgusted with politics. Alecsandri withdrew to his estate in Mircești, where he wrote pieces critical of the political developments.
Carol's ascent and Mazar Pașa CoalitionDomnitor Cuza was ultimately ousted by a coalition of Conservatives and Liberals in February 1866; following a period of transition and maneuvers to avert international objections, a perpetually unified Principality of Romania was established under Carol of Hohenzollern, with the adoption of the 1866 Constitution. Two years later, in recognition of his scholarly contributions, Kogălniceanu became a member of the newly created Romanian Academy Historical Section.Gheorghe & Șerbu, p. 37; Gorovei, p. 10
In November 1868 – January 1870, he was again Minister of the Interior under Dimitrie Ghica. In this capacity, he regulated the design of police uniforms, and investigated the murder of Cuca-Măcăi peasants by rogue Gendarmes.
He was at the time involved in a new diplomatic effort: the Ghica government was aiming to receive formal recognition of the name "Romania", as opposed to "United Principalities". The bid was successful, after the Ottomans gave their approval, but marked a slump in Romania's relationship with Prussia—its Minister President, Otto von Bismarck, abstained on the matter. Such tensions were only worsened when Prussian money was attracted by Ghica into the development of a Romanian Railways system: later Romanian governments confronted themselves with the "Strousberg Affair", a volatile combination of investment scheme failure and anti-Prussian sentiment (see Republic of Ploiești). Although generally depicted as Prussian-friendly, the Conservatives were also opposed to such dealings, and their daily Térra referred to Kogălniceanu as the guilty party. Overall, however, the Francophile Ghica and his minister were not only hostile to Prussia, but also tried to help the national cause of Romanians living in Austria-Hungary (Transylvania, Bukovina, etc.). Reportedly, these pitted them against Domnitor Carol, the Prussian-born Germanophile.
Kogălniceanu's term was confirmed by the 1869 election, after which he was able to persuade Alecsandri to accept a position as deputy for Roman. The poet, who had been nominated without expressing his consent, cast aside hostility and became one of Kogălniceanu's main supporters in the chamber. Also then, Kogălniceanu blocked the republican gambit of his friend Ion Ghica, the acting Premier. When Carol threatened to leave the country and let he liberals deal with all subsequent problems, Kogălniceanu gathered together the party's moderates in a decisive show of support for the monarch.
Even after Cuza left the country and settled in Baden, relations between him and Kogălniceanu remained respectful, but distant: in summer 1868, when both of them were visiting Vienna, they happened to meet, and, without exchanging words, raised their hats as a form of greeting. On May 27, 1873, Kogălniceanu, alongside Alecsandri, Costache Negri, Petre Poni and other public figures, attended Cuza's funeral in Ruginoasa. Speaking later, he noted: "Cuza has committed great errors, but [the 1864 Către locuitorii sătești] shall never fade out of the hearts of peasants, nor from Romania's history".
Kogălniceanu carried on as leader of pragmatic-reformist liberalism in Romania; in loose opposition to the Conservative Party cabinet of Lascăr Catargiu (1875), he began talks with the radical faction of the liberal trend (most notably, Ion Brătianu, Dimitrie Sturdza, Ion Ghica, C. A. Rosetti, Dimitrie Brătianu, and Alexandru G. Golescu), which were carried at the Bucharest residence of Pasha Stephen Bartlett Lakeman. On May 24, 1875, negotiations resulted in the creation of the National Liberal Party—the so-called Coalition of Mazar Pașa.
Kogălniceanu also signed his name to the proclamation Alegătorul Liber ("The Enfranchised Voter"), which stated the main National Liberal goals. He was however an outspoken adversary of his former collaborator Nicolae Ionescu, who, as leader of the liberal splinter group Fracțiunea liberă și independentă, rejected National Liberal politics. In an 1876 speech in front of Parliament, Kogălniceanu attacked Ionescu and his supporters for their political and academic positions, approval from the conservative literary society Junimea and its anti-liberal gazette Timpul.
Like his political career, Kogălniceanu's tracts focused on condemning Austrian ethnic and territorial policies. Also in 1875, he issued from Paris an anti-Austrian brochure about the Romanian cause in Bukovina. Called Rapt de la Bukovine d'après les documents authentiques ("The Rape of Bukovina, from Genuine Documents"), it reused old texts collected by the Hurmuzachis. The propaganda effort won support from across the floor: Junimea Conservatives (Titu Maiorescu, Theodor Rosetti, Ioan Slavici), National Liberals (D. Sturdza) and independents (Alexandru Odobescu) all signed up to the enterprise.
Kogălniceanu joined other National Liberals in expressing opposition to the trade convention Catargiu had signed with Austria-Hungary, which was advantageous to the latter's exports, and which, they claimed, was leading Romanian industry to ruin. He accepted it while in office, but looked into adopting European-like patent laws, as a measure of encouraging local industries. A National Liberal government would repeal the agreement in 1886.
Romanian independence
Serving as Foreign Affairs Minister in the Ion Brătianu cabinet (spring-summer 1876, and again from April 1877 to November 1878), Mihail Kogălniceanu was responsible for Romania entering the War of 1877–1878 on the Russian side, which led the country to proclaim its independence (see Romanian War of Independence). He initially tried to obtain diplomatic recognition from various states, but the European states rejected the offer, and the Ottoman Porte ignored them. The Russian envoy Dimitri Stuart received instructions to "halt" Kogălniceanu's initiatives, so as not to aggravate the "Eastern Question".
Upon his return to office, Kogălniceanu personally organized conspiratorial meetings with the Russian diplomat Aleksandr Nelidov, and approved Russian demands in exchange for co-belligerency. With C. A. Rosetti and Brătianu, he supported the transit of Russian troops and persuaded Carol to accept the Russian alliance, contrary to the initial advice of the Crown Council. He also sought advice on this matter from the French Third Republic, who was still one of the powers supervising Romania; Louis, duc Decazes, the French Foreign Minister, declined to give him a reassuring answer, and pointed that, were Romania to join up with Russia, the other powers would cease offering their protection. Making note of this, Kogălniceanu expressed his hope that France would still support his country at the decisive moment.
In the end, the Russian declaration of war came as a surprise to both Carol and Kogălniceanu, who had not been informed of the exact date (April 23) when the Imperial Russian Army would start moving into Moldavia—hence, Romanians tended to regard it as an invasion. Also alarming for Kogălniceanu, the official Russian proclamation addressed Romanians as protegés of the Empire. Bilateral tensions were somewhat alleviated by Russian apologies and, later, by the Ottoman pledge to annex Romania; addressing a discontented Parliament, Kogălniceanu asserted that the Russian road was the country's only choice.
On May 9, 1877, it was through Kogălniceanu's speech in Parliament that Romania acknowledged she was discarding Ottoman suzerainty. He was rewarded by Carol, becoming one of the first three statesmen received into the Order of the Star of Romania. The Minister also negotiated the terms under which the Romanian Land Forces were to join the war effort in Bulgaria, specifically demanding Russian reparations and indemnities.
Over the following year, he coordinated efforts to have the act recognized by all European states, and stated that his government's policies were centered on "as rapid as possible, the transformation of foreign diplomatic agencies and consulates in Bucharest into legations". Late in 1877, he traveled to Austria-Hungary and met Austrian Foreign Minister Gyula Andrássy. He recorded a mood of opposition to the Romanian military effort, but received guarantees of border security. The main challenge was convincing Bismarck, who had since become Chancellor of the German Empire, and who was very reserved on the issue of Romanian independence.
Congress of Berlin and Northern Dobruja
Upon the war's end, Mihail Kogălniceanu and Ion Brătianu headed the Romanian delegation to the Congress of Berlin.Clark, pp. 61–62; Giura & Giura, pp. 169–170; Norton Medlicott, p. 90; Ornea, Anii treizeci..., p. 390; D. Vitcu, pp. 95sqq In this capacity, they protested Russia's offer to exchange the previously Ottoman-ruled Northern Dobruja for Southern Bessarabia, a portion of Bessarabia that Romania had received under the 1856 Treaty of Paris.Clark, pp. 61–62; Giura & Giura, pp. 168–170; Norton Medlicott, pp. 89–93 This came after months of tension between Romania and Russia, generated over the territorial issue and the Russian claim to be representing Romania at Berlin: Kogălniceanu's envoy (Eraclie Arion) had even threatened the Russians with a Romanian denunciation of their alliance, and 60,000 Romanian soldiers were prepared for the defense of Southern Bessarabia. The Conference's ultimate decision (Berlin Treaty) was in favor of Russia's proposal, largely due to support from Andrássy and William Henry Waddington, the French Minister of Foreign Affairs. Additional pressures came from Bismarck. The Russians themselves did register some setbacks by the end of the Conference. Their demands for Romania to allow indefinite military transit through Northern Dobruja were made ineffectual by the opposition of other European states, and Kogălniceanu was able to obtain the retrocession of Snake Island.
As an effect of Waddington's intervention,Clark, p. 62 Romania also agreed to resolve the issue of Jewish Emancipation. The government pledged itself to naturalize all of its non-Christian residents (see History of the Jews in Romania).Clark, p. 62; Gheorghe & Șerbu, p. 37; Giura & Giura, pp. 170–171; Ornea, Anii treizeci..., p. 390 Kogălniceanu himself made efforts to overturn this decision, and was bitter when the Germans refused to compromise. The resolution was debated inside Romania over the following year, and such a measure in respect to Jews was not introduced until 1922–1923.
This outcome was the subject of controversy in Romania, where the territorial exchange was generally considered unfair, with some voices even arguing that the country could again accept Ottoman suzerainty as a means to overturn the state of affairs. Unbeknown to them, the cession of Southern Bessarabia had been secretly agreed upon with Nelidov in early 1877. Even then, against his subordinates in the diplomatic corps, but in consonance with the Domnitor, Kogălniceanu privately noted that he "fully agreed" with it, and that he regarded the new province as a "splendid acquisition". However, in April 1877, Kogălniceanu had explicitly assured Parliament that no real threat loomed over Southern Bessarabia. By that point in time, both the Germans and the Austrians had begun suspecting that Kogălniceanu was in fact a favorite and agent of influence of the Russians, and, reportedly, he even encouraged the rumor to spread. Andrássy reportedly commented: "Prince Carol is really unfortunate to have people like Mr. Kogălniceanu in his service".
Opposition came from both Conservative and National Liberal legislators, who viewed Northern Dobruja as an inhospitable, nonstrategic and non-Romanian territory.D. Vitcu, pp. 105–107 Contrarily, with his proclamation to the peoples of Northern Dobruja, Kogălniceanu enshrined the standard patriotic narrative of the events: he asserted that the region had been "united" with Romania, as a "Romanian land", because of the people's wishes and sacrifices. During the heated parliamentary sessions of late September 1878, he helped swing the vote in favor of the annexation, with speeches which also helped transform the public's mood, and which promised a swift process of Romanianization. These addresses are credited with having first backdated the Romanian claim to ca. 1400, when Wallachia briefly held the Principality of Karvuna.
In 1879, again head of Internal Affairs, Kogălniceanu began organizing the administration of Northern Dobruja, through decrees. He supported a distinct legal regime, as a transition from Ottoman administration, and a period of rebuilding—in effect, a colonial rule, aiming for the assimilation of locals into the Romanian mainstream, but respectful of Dobrujan Islam. Unlike other partisans of colonization (including scientist Ion Ionescu de la Brad), Kogălniceanu saw the new territory as open only to ethnic Romanian homesteaders. His intercession played a part in the ethnic policies: he is reported to have personally urged the Romanian pastoralists (Mocani) to abandon their traditional lifestyle and their Bessarabian homes, offering them the option of purchasing Northern Dobrujan land. This had become widely available after the partition of Ottoman estates, the nationalization of land once owned by the Muhajir Balkan, and the appropriation of uncultivated plots (miriè). Kogălniceanu also advised the local administration to overrepresent existing Romanian communities in the decision-making process.
Final years
Kogălniceanu subsequently represented his country in France (1880), being the first Romanian envoy to Paris, and having Alexandru Lahovary on his staff. The French state awarded him its Legion of Honour, with the rank of Grand Officier. In January 1880 – 1881, Kogălniceanu oversaw the first diplomatic contacts between Romania and Qing China, as an exchange of correspondence between the Romanian Embassy to France and Zeng Jize, the Chinese Ambassador to the United Kingdom.
Upon his return to the newly proclaimed Kingdom of Romania, Kogălniceanu played a prominent part in opposing further concessions for Austria, on the issue of international Danube navigation. By 1883, he was becoming known as the speaker of a liberal conservative faction of the National Liberal group. Kogălniceanu and his supporters criticized Rosetti and others who again pushed for universal (male) suffrage, and argued that Romania's fragile international standing did not permit electoral divisiveness.
After withdrawing from political life, Kogălniceanu served as Romanian Academy President from 1887 to 1889 (or 1890). Having fallen severely ill in 1886, he spent his final years editing historical documents of the Eudoxiu Hurmuzaki fund, publicizing Ancient Greek and Roman archeological finds in Northern Dobruja, and collecting foreign documents related to Romanian history. One of his last speeches, held in front of the academy and witnessed by both Carol, who had since become King of Romania, and his wife Elisabeth of Wied, was a summary of his entire career as a politician, intellectual, and civil servant. In August 1890, while traveling through the Austrian region of Vorarlberg, he was troubled by news that Alecsandri had died at his home in Mircești. Writing to Alecsandri's wife Paulina, he asked: "I could not be present at his funeral, [therefore] you'll allow me, my lady, since I have unable to kiss him either alive or dead, to at least kiss his grave!"
Mihail Kogălniceanu died while undergoing surgery in Paris, and was succeeded in his seat at the academy by Alexandru Dimitrie Xenopol. He was buried in his native Iași, at the Eternitatea cemetery.
Views
Liberalism and conservatism
Mihail Kogălniceanu's contributions as a leader of opinion and statesman have won acclaim for their role in shaping the development of modern Romania before and after 1848. Nicolae Iorga, a major historian of the 20th century, celebrated Kogălniceanu as "the founder of modern Romanian culture, the thinker who has seen in clarity the free and complete Romania [...], the redeemer of peasants thrown into serfdom [a reference to corvées], the person understanding all the many, secretive, and indissoluble connections linking the life of a people to the moral quality and the energy of its soul".
Kogălniceanu was a democratic and nationalist politician who combined liberalism with the conservative principles acquired during his education, taking inspiration from the policies of the Prussian statesmen Baron vom und zum Stein and Karl August von Hardenberg. German statesmen were however disinclined to consider him one of their own: Bernhard von Bülow took for granted rumors that he was an agent of the Russians, and further alleged that the Romanian land reform was a sham.
Supportive of constitutionalism, civil liberties, and other liberal positions, Kogălniceanu prioritized the nation over individualism, an approach with resonated with the tendencies of all his fellow Moldavian revolutionaries. In maturity, Kogălniceanu had become a skeptic with respect to the French Revolution and its Jacobin legacy, arguing: "civilization stops when revolutions begin". At the same time, his connections within Freemasonry, mirroring the conviction and affiliation of most 1848 revolutionaries, were an important factor in ensuring the success of Romanian causes abroad, and arguably played a part in the election of Cuza, who was himself a member of the secretive organization.
Inside the Romanian liberal faction, and in contrast to his moderation on other topics, he was among the very few to tie together modernization, democracy, and the need to improve the situation of peasants (other notable politicians to do so were Nicolae Bălcescu, who died in late 1852, and Rosetti, who advocated a strict adherence to majoritarianism). Kogălniceanu praised Bălcescu's manifestos and activism in favor of the peasantry, indicating that they formed a precedent for his own accomplishments, while deploring the Wallachian uprising's failure to advance a definitive land reform. When faced with a negative response in the census-elected Parliament just prior to Cuza's coup, he defended his land reform project with the words:
"Two thousand boyars do not a nation make; that is an undeniable truth."
Late in his life, while crediting the University of Berlin and its notions of patriotism with having provided him with "the love for the Romanian motherland and the liberal spirit [emphasis in original]", he stressed:
"In my lengthy combats and actions, in the grim persecutions that have more than once been exercised as a means to crush me, I always had before my eyes those beautiful words which [...] Prince Hardenberg indicated as the strongest means to reawaken the character and manliness of the German people in order to liberate it from the foreign yoke, to raise and increase Germany: «Democratic principles as part of a monarchic government!»"
Antisemitism
Like many of his fellow Romanian liberals, Kogălniceanu advocated a series of antisemitic policies. He used his position as Internal Affairs Minister in the Dimitrie Ghica executive to resume the expulsions of Jewish community members from the countryside (thus denying them various sources of income). When faced with the official protests of European states, he replied that the matter was nobody's business but Romania's. He usually referred to the Jewish community in general with the insulting term jidani, and accepted their presence on Romanian soil as a concession to their alleged "too numerous and too powerful presence in Europe". During the 1930s, such attitudes, together with Kogălniceanu's involvement in peasant causes, were cited as a precedent by politicians of the fascist National Christian Party and Iron Guard, who, while promoting rural traditionalism, advocated restricting civil rights for the Jewish community.
Nevertheless, Kogălniceanu's antisemitic discourse was nuanced and less violent than that of some of his contemporaries. According to historian George Voicu, he stood for "a complicated balance in dealing with the 'Jewish question'", one between "antisemitic intransigence" and "concessions". The more radical antisemite and National Liberal Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu expressed much criticism of this moderate stance (which he also believed was represented within the party by Rosetti and Ion Ghica), and he even claimed that Kogălniceanu was a secret "faithful" of the Talmud. In 1885, Kogălniceanu strongly objected to a National Liberal cabinet decision to expel Moses Gaster, a renowned Jewish scholar, stating that the latter was "[the] only man who works in this country" (he would later celebrate him as the man "to whom Romanian literature owes so much"). Five years later, as rapporteur on naturalization issues, he conferred citizenship upon Marxist thinker Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea, who was a Russian-born Jewish immigrant. Shortly before his death, he reportedly endorsed a similar measure for Jewish scholar Lazăr Șăineanu, expressing condemnation for those antisemites within his own party who made efforts to block it.
Cultural tenets
In his polemical history tracing the development of literary criticism and its role in Romanian culture, the 20th century author Garabet Ibrăileanu made ample mention of Kogălniceanu's role in combating nationalist excesses, in particular the post-1840 attempts by Transylvanian and Wallachian intellectuals to change the fabric of the Romanian language by introducing strong influences from Latin or other modern Romance languages. To illustrate this view, he cited Kogălniceanu's Cuvânt pentru deschiderea cursului de istorie națională, which notably states:
"In me you shall find a Romanian, but ever to the point where I would contribute in increasing Romanomania, that is to say the mania of calling ourselves Romans, a passion currently reigning foremost in Transylvania and among some of the writers in Wallachia."
Ibrăileanu additionally credited the Moldavian faction, Kogălniceanu included, with having helped introduce spoken Romanian into the literary language, at a time when both Ion Heliade Rădulescu and successors of the Transylvanian School made use of the dialect prevalent in Orthodox and Greek-Catholic religious culture. This was in connection with Kogălniceanu's advocacy of pragmatic Westernization: "Civilization never does banish the national ideas and habits, but rather improves them for the benefit of the nation in particular and of humanity in general". He was averse to fast cultural reforms, stressing that acclimatization was always required.
A generation younger than Ibrăileanu, George Călinescu also noted the contrast between Mihail Kogălniceanu and his predecessors, as two sets of "Messianist" intellectuals—in this contrast, Heliade Rădulescu was "hazy and egotistic", whereas Kogălniceanu and others had "a mission which they knew how to translate into positive terms". As a historian, Kogălniceanu notably introduced several more or less influential Romantic nationalist theses: after 1840, he was noted for stressing the image of the 17th-century Wallachian Prince Michael the Brave as a unifier of Romania, although this view had not been at all present in his earlier essays; he proposed that the Romanian folk was among the first European peoples to record history in their national language, although the earliest Romanian-language chronicles date back to the 17th century; additionally, he argued that the Second Bulgarian Empire was a Romanian state. In some of his works, he claimed that Romanians traditionally practiced endogamy to preserve their purity. His 1837 study of the Romani people (Esquisse sur l'histoire, les moeurs et la langue des Cigains, or "Sketch of the History, Mores and Language of the Cigains") is however still seen as a groundbreaking work in its field. According to historian Viorel Achim, while it "does not reach the standards of scientific research", the book is still "a genuine contribution" to "Romology", and "a work of reference".
As early as 1840, Mihail Kogălniceanu was urging writers to seek inspiration for their work in Romanian folklore in creating a "cultured literature". In 1855, after the Wallachian revolution was defeated and most of its leaders went into exile, he noted that the lighter toll Russian intervention had in Moldavia contributed to the preservation of literature; alongside similar statements made by Vasile Alecsandri, this allowed Ibrăileanu to conclude that, after 1848, Moldavia played a bigger part in shaping the cultural landscape of Romania. Writing more than half a century after the critic, historian Lucian Boia also noted that, while Kogălniceanu stressed national unity, his discourse tended to place emphasis on Moldavian particularities. Also according to Ibrăileanu, Kogălniceanu and Alecu Russo have set the foundation for the local school of literary criticism, and, together, had announced the cultural professionalism advocated by Junimea after the 1860s. Garabet Ibrăileanu, Spiritul critic în cultura românească (wikisource): Evoluția spiritului critic – Deosebirile dintre vechea școală critică moldovenească și "Junimea" The latter conclusion was partly shared by Călinescu, Tudor Vianu and literary researcher Z. Ornea. Nevertheless, in its reaction against the 1848 generation, Junimea, and especially its main figure Titu Maiorescu, tended to ignore or outright dismiss Kogălniceanu's causes and the attitudes he expressed.Vianu, Vol. I, pp. 391–392; Vol. II, pp. 52, 244
While commenting on the differences between Moldavian and Wallachian literature, Paul Zarifopol gave a more reserved assessment of Kogălniceanu's position, arguing that the emphasis he had placed on "national taste" would occasionally result in acclaim for mediocre writers such as Alexandru Hrisoverghi. Călinescu observed that much of Kogălniceanu's own prose works imitated the style of his friend Costache Negruzzi, without carrying the same artistic weight, while noting that his few works of autobiography featured "pages of gracious [and] good-natured melancholy", which he attributed to the author's traditional upbringing. Also among Kogălniceanu's anthumous writings was Fiziologia provincialului în Iași ("The Physiology of the Parochial Man in Iași"), closely based on a French model by Pierre Durand and, through it, echoing Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin's Physiologie du goût. It was part of a series of such texts, popular in his generation and deemed "the first age of Romanian realism" by researcher Maria Protase. Among the other pieces were two comedy plays, both written in 1840, when he was co-director of the National Theater Iași: Două femei împotriva unui bărbat ("Two Women against One Man") and Orbul fericit ("The Happy Blind Man"). Kogălniceanu's Notes sur l'Espagne was published decades after his death, and received much critical acclaim.
Legacy
Descendants
Mihail Kogălniceanu was married to Ecaterina Jora (1827–1907), the widow of Iorgu Scorțescu, a Moldavian Militia colonel; they had more than eight children together (three of whom were boys). The eldest son, Constantin, studied Law and had a career in diplomacy, being the author of an unfinished work on Romanian history. Ion, his brother, was born in 1859 and died in 1892, being the only one of Mihail Kogălniceanu's male children to have heirs. His line was still surviving in 2001. Ion's son, also named Mihail, established the Mihail Kogălniceanu Cultural Foundation in 1935 (in 1939–1946, it published a magazine named Arhiva Românească, which aimed to be a new series of the one published during the 1840s; its other projects were rendered ineffectual by the outbreak of World War II).
Vasile Kogălniceanu, the youngest son, was noted for his involvement in agrarian and left-wing politics during the early 20th century. A founder of Partida Țărănească (which served as an inspiration for the Peasants' Party after 1918), he was a collaborator of Vintilă Rosetti in campaigning for the universal suffrage and legislating Sunday rest. A manifesto to the peasants, issued by him just before the Peasants' Revolt of 1907, was interpreted by the authorities as a call to rebellion, and led to Kogălniceanu's imprisonment for a duration of five months. A member of the Chamber of Deputies for Ilfov County, he served as a rapporteur for the Alexandru Averescu executive during the 1921 debates regarding an extensive land reform.
Vasile's sister Lucia (or Lucie) studied at a boarding school in Dresden during the late 1860s-early 1870s. Her third husband, Leon Bogdan, was a local leader of the Conservatives in Neamț County (according to the memoirist Constantin Argetoianu, Lucia was the one exercising real control over the organization's branch). After the Conservative Party faded out of politics as a result of World War I, she came to support the People's Party. Argetoianu later speculated that she was the most intelligent of the Kogălniceanu children, and claimed that Mihail Kogălniceanu had himself acknowledged this (quoting him as saying, "too bad Lucie is not a boy"). She was the mother of eight; one of her daughters, Manuela, married into the Ghica family.
Kogălniceanu's nephew, Grigore, himself a local leader of the Conservative Party and a major landowner, married to Adela Cantacuzino-Pașcanu, a member of the Cantacuzino family. He died in 1904, leaving his wife a large fortune, which she spent on a large collection of jewels and fortune-telling séances. Adela Kogălniceanu was robbed and murdered in October 1920; rumor had it that she had been killed by her own son, but this path was never pursued by authorities, who were quick to cancel the investigation (at the time, they were faced with the major strikes of 1920).
Landmarks and portrayals
Mihail Kogălniceanu's residence in Iași is kept as a memorial house and public museum. His vacation house in the city, located in Copou area and known locally as Casa cu turn ("The House with a Tower"), was the residence of composer George Enescu for part of the Romanian Campaign, and, in 1930, was purchased by the novelist Mihail Sadoveanu (in 1980, it became a museum dedicated to Sadoveanu's memory). The Kogălniceanu property in Râpile, Bacău County, was sold and divided during the early 20th century.
Chronicles edited by Kogălniceanu and Costache Negruzzi were the source of inspiration for several historical novelists, beginning with Alexandru Odobescu. His relationship with the peasant representative to the ad hoc Divan, Ion Roată, is briefly mentioned in an anecdote authored by Ion Creangă (Moș Ion Roată). He is also the subject of a short writing by Ion Luca Caragiale (first published by Vatra in 1894). Symbolist poet Dimitrie Anghel, whose father, the National Liberal parliamentarian Dimitrie A. Anghel, had been well acquainted with Kogălniceanu, authored a memoir detailing the fluctuating relationship between the two political figures, as well as detailing one of the former Premier's last speeches.
Kogălniceanu is the subject of many paintings, and features prominently in Costin Petrescu's fresco at the Romanian Athenaeum (where he is shown alongside Cuza, who is handing a deed to a peasant). In 1911, Iași became host to Kogălniceanu bronze statue by Raffaello Romanelli, purported to have been recast from one of the sculptor's older works. In 1936, the Mihail Kogălniceanu Cultural Foundation commissioned Oscar Han to create a monument dedicated to Kogălniceanu, which was erected in Bucharest during the same year. Actors have portrayed Kogălniceanu in several Romanian films—most notably, Ion Niculescu in the 1912 Independența României, and George Constantin in Sergiu Nicolaescu's 1977 Războiul Independenței. During the latter stages of the Romanian Communist regime, under Nicolae Ceaușescu, Mihail Kogălniceanu's image was present in official propaganda, alongside those of other historical figures who were considered progressive.
The historian's name was given to several places and landmarks; these include downtown Bucharest's Mihail Kogălniceanu Square (near the Izvor metro station, and housing Han's sculpture) and Mihail Kogălniceanu Boulevard, the Mihail Kogălniceanu commune in Constanța County, the Mihail Kogălniceanu International Airport (situated 26 km northwest of Constanța, and serving that city, the airport also houses a U.S. Military Forces base), and the Mihail Kogălniceanu University in Iași (the first private university in Moldavia, founded in 1990). In Lunéville, a plaque was dedicated to him by the French state.
Notes
References
Final Report of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, Polirom, Iași, 2004.
Viorel Achim, The Roma in Romanian History, Central European University Press, Budapest, 2004.
Marta Anineanu, "Prietenia Alecsandri—Kogălniceanu. Pășind alături spre visul înstelat", in Magazin Istoric, October 1971, pp. 62–67
Daniel Barbu, Cristian Preda, "Building the State from the Roof Down: Varieties of Romanian Liberal Nationalism", in Iván Zoltán Dénes, Liberty and the Search for Identity: Liberal Nationalisms and the Legacy of Empires, Central European University Press, Budapest & New York City, 2006, pp. 367–397.
Lucian Boia,
History and Myth in Romanian Consciousness, Central European University Press, Budapest, 2001.
Romania: Borderland of Europe, Reaktion Books, London, 2001.
George Călinescu, Istoria literaturii române. Compendiu, Editura Minerva, Bucharest, 1983
Virgil Cândea, Mărturii românești peste hotare: creații românești și izvoare despre români în colecții din străinătate. II: Finlanda – Grecia, Editura Biblioteca Bucureștilor, Bucharest, 2011.
Charles Upson Clark, United Roumania, Ayer Publishing, Manchester, New Hampshire, 1971.
Neagu Djuvara, Între Orient și Occident. Țările române la începutul epocii moderne, Humanitas, Bucharest, 1995.
Constantin Gheorghe, Miliana Șerbu, Miniștrii de interne (1862–2007). Mică enciclopedie, Romanian Ministry of the Interior, 2007
Maura G. Giura, Lucian Giura, "Otto von Bismarck și românii", in the December 1 University of Alba Iulia Annales Universitatis Apulensis, Series Historica (AUASH), Nr. 2–3, 1998–1999, pp. 161–175
Constantin C. Giurescu, Istoria Bucureștilor. Din cele mai vechi timpuri pînă în zilele noastre, Editura Pentru Literatură, Bucharest, 1966.
Dan Grigorescu, preface to Brillat-Savarin, Fiziologia gustului, Editura Meridiane, Bucharest, 1988, pp. 5–22
Ștefan Gorovei, "Kogălnicenii", in Magazin Istoric, July 1977, pp. 6–10, 60
Laura Guțanu, "Valori de patrimoniu. Lucia Kogălniceanu", in the University of Iași Central Library Biblos, Nr. 11-12 (2001), pp. 8–9
Vasile Maciu, "Costache Negri, un ctitor al României moderne", in Magazin Istoric, May 1975, pp. 66–69
William Norton Medlicott, The Congress of Berlin and After, Routledge, London, 1963.
Z. Ornea,
Anii treizeci. Extrema dreaptă românească, Editura Fundației Culturale Române, Bucharest, 1995.
Junimea și junimismul, Vol. II, Editura Minerva, Bucharest, 1998.
Laurence Senelick, National Theatre in Northern and Eastern Europe, 1746–1900, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991.
Leften Stavros Stavrianos, The Balkans since 1453, C. Hurst & Co, London, 2000.
Tudor Vianu, Scriitori români, Vols. I-II, Editura Minerva, Bucharest, 1970.
Dumitru Vitcu, "Les dilemmes, les controverses et les conséquences d'une alliance politique conjecturale. Les relations roumaino-russes des années 1877–1878", in the Ștefan cel Mare University of Suceava Codrul Cosminului, Nr. 14 (2008), pp. 77–117
D. Gh. Vitcu, "Cuza în exil. Puterea dragostei de țară", in Magazin Istoric'', May 1973, pp. 18–22
External links
The Mihail Kogălniceanu Memorial House in Iași
Ion Creangă, Moș Ion Roată, at wikisource
Independența României and Războiul Independenței, at the Internet Movie Database
Frescoes at the Romanian Athenaeum site
1817 births
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harbhajan%20Singh
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Harbhajan Singh
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Harbhajan Singh (born 3 July 1980) is an Indian politician, film actor, Television Celebrity and former cricketer. He serves as a member of parliament in Rajya Sabha, and is a retired cricketer and a cricket commentator. Harbhajan played for the Indian national cricket team from 1998 - 2016 in a career spanning nearly two decades. He was a right-arm off spin bowler. In Indian domestic cricket he played for Punjab cricket team, in IPL for Mumbai Indians, Chennai Super Kings and Kolkata Knight Riders franchise. He is considered to be one of the best spinners of his era. He was in the World Cup-winning team of both the 2007 T20 World Cup and the 2011 Cricket World Cup, along with the team that was one of the joint-winners of the 2002 ICC Champions Trophy, which was shared with Sri Lanka.
He occasionally worked as captain of Mumbai Indians and captained Punjab for the 2012–13 Ranji Trophy season. Under his leadership, Mumbai won the 2011 Champions League Twenty20.
Harbhajan made his Test and One Day International (ODI) debuts in early 1998. His career was initially affected by investigations into the legality of his bowling action, as well as several disciplinary incidents. However, in 2001, with leading leg spinner Anil Kumble injured, Harbhajan's career was resuscitated after Indian captain Sourav Ganguly called for his inclusion in the team; he took 32 wickets in the following series, becoming the first Indian bowler to take a hat-trick in Test cricket.
A finger injury in mid-2003 sidelined him for much of the following year, allowing Kumble to regain his place. He regained a regular position in the team in late 2007, but became the subject of more controversy. In early 2008, he was given a ban by the International Cricket Council (ICC) for racially vilifying Andrew Symonds. The ban was revoked upon appeal, but in April, he was banned from the 2008 Indian Premier League and suspended from the ODI team by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) for slapping Shanthakumaran Sreesanth after a match.
Harbhajan was conferred the Padma Shri, India's fourth highest civilian honour, in 2009. He retired from all forms of cricket in December 2021.
In March 2022, he was nominated to the Rajya Sabha by the Aam Aadmi Party as one of their five candidates from the state of Punjab and became an official brand ambassador for the sport prediction platform Betwinner News.
Early years and personal life
Harbhajan was born into a Sikh family. He is the only son of Sardar Sardev Singh Plaha, a Sikh Freedom Fighter who owned a ball bearing and valve factory. Growing up with five sisters, Harbhajan was in line to inherit the family business, but his father insisted that he concentrate on his cricket career and represent India.
Harbhajan was trained as a batsman by his first coach Charanjit Singh Bhullar, but converted to spin bowling after his coach's untimely death saw him turn to the tutelage of Davinder Arora. Arora credits Harbhajan's success to a work ethic that included a three-hour training session in the morning, followed by an afternoon session lasting from 3 pm until after sunset.
Following the death of his father in 2000, Harbhajan became the family head, and by 2001 had organised marriages for three of his sisters. In 2002 he ruled out his own marriage until at least 2008. In 2005 he again fended off marriage rumours linking him to a Bangalore-based bride, stating that he would only make a decision "after a couple of years", and that he would be seeking a Punjabi bride selected by his family.
In a country where cricketers are idolised, Harbhajan's performances have brought him government accolades and lucrative sponsorships. Following his performance against Australia in 2001, the Government of Punjab awarded him ₹5 lakhs, a plot of land, and an offer to become a Deputy Superintendent of Police in Punjab Police, which he did not comply (accept) later.
Despite having a job offer with the constabulary, Harbhajan sustained minor injuries in March 2002 in an altercation with police outside the team hotel in Guwahati. The scuffle broke out when Harbhajan remonstrated with officers after they refused to allow a photographer into the hotel. Harbhajan cut his bowling arm and injured his elbow when he was struck by the police. Extensive negotiations from local officials and organisers were required to dissuade Harbhajan and captain Sourav Ganguly from leaving the area after Ganguly said that the Indian team would abandon the scheduled match against Zimbabwe.
Harbhajan was caught at Auckland airport for failing to declare that he had filthy boots in his luggage. His only excuse was that he "couldn't be bothered" complying with New Zealand quarantine laws. He was fined $200 on the spot.
One of his common nicknames, outside India, is The Turbanator, deriving from his skill as a bowler in terminating the innings of the opposing team, and the fact that, as a Sikh, he wears a turban whenever he plays. Among Indians, Harbhajan is more commonly known as bhajji. It was estimated in 2005 that Harbhajan was the most recognised and commercially viable Indian cricketer after Sachin Tendulkar, in part due to his colourful personality and iconic turban, as well as his reputation for enjoying the celebrity social scene. His signing for English county team Surrey in 2005, based at The Oval in London, was partly attributed to his marketability. Harbhajan had generated a large personal following in the western London suburb of Southall, which boasts a majority Punjabi Sikh population, when he lived there in 1998 while training under Fred Titmus.
In 2006 Harbhajan's endorsements generated controversy when he appeared without his turban in an advertisement for Royal Stag whisky. This angered many orthodox Sikhs, leading to anti-Harbhajan protests in the Sikh holy city of Amritsar, with effigies of Harbhajan being burnt. The Sikh clergy and Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee demanded an apology from him and asked Seagram's to withdraw the advert, on the basis that it had "hurt the feelings of Sikhs". Harbhajan quickly issued an apology, but he was also unhappy at the clergy's interference, stating "If they were unhappy, they should have called me and talked to me like a son". Harbhajan was also a brand ambassador for eBikeGo.
Harbhajan married his longtime girlfriend, actress Geeta Basra, on 29 October 2015 in Jalandhar. They have a daughter, born on 27 July 2016, and a son, born on 10 July 2021.
Domestic career
Harbhajan broke into the Punjab Under-16s at the age of 15 years and 4 months in November of the 1995–96 season, and took 7/46 and 5/138 on debut against Haryana, setting up a nine-wicket win. He scored 56 in his next match against Delhi and then took 11/79 in his third match against Himachal Pradesh, orchestrating an innings win. He ended with 32 wickets at 15.15 and 96 runs at 48.00 in four matches. He was rewarded with selection for North Zone Under-16s, a team that represents all of northern India for a one-day series, in which he took two wickets at 43.50 in four matches and scored 18 runs. At the end of the season, he was called into the national Under-19 team at the age of 15 years and 9 months for a youth One Day International against South Africa. He took 1/19 from seven overs in an Indian win.
In 1996–97, Harbhajan was promoted to the Punjab Under-19s and he took 15 wickets at 20.20 in three matches, although he managed only two runs with the bat. This included match figures of 8/54 in an innings win over Jammu and Kashmir.
Harbhajan made his first-class cricket debut in late 1997 against Services, during the 1997–98 Ranji Trophy season. He took a total of 3/35 in an innings win but was dropped back to the Under-19s the following week. He then took 5/75 and 7/44 in two matches to earn a recall to the senior team. He then took a total of 7/123 in the next two matches for Punjab to earn selection for North Zone in the Duleep Trophy.
Harbhajan's season was interrupted when he represented India at the Under-19 World Cup in January 1998. He played in six matches, taking eight wickets at 24.75 with a best of 3/5 against Kenya.
After returning to India, he played in three more Ranji Trophy matches, and from a total of six matches, he took 18 wickets at an average of 22.50, ranking outside the top 20 in wicket taking. He took a total of 5/131 as North lost to East Zone by five wickets.
Harbhajan played the full 2009 Indian Premier League season in South Africa, taking 12 wickets at 21.33 and an economy rate of 5.81 in 13 matches. He was one of the most economical bowlers in the competition, and took 1/9 in four overs against Punjab to win the man of the match award. He ended the season with 4/17 against Delhi, but it was not enough to prevent a four-wicket defeat.
During the 2010 IPL season, he finished as the Mumbai Indian's leading wicket taker with 17 victims at an average of 22.17 helping his team to reach the final. Harbhajan opened the bowling during the final vs Chennai Super Kings but went wicketless and was promoted as a pinch hitter to number 4 in the batting order but could only contribute 1 run in the defeat.
Harbhajan had a largely successful 2011 IPL as part of an effective Mumbai Indians bowling attack. He took 5 for 18 against Chennai Super Kings during the round robin part of the tournament which are the best bowling figures of any player at the Wankhede Stadium in the IPL However, the team's form faltered during the playoffs as they lost back to back matches to Kolkata Knight Riders and Chennai Super Kings to miss out on the final.
After injuries, he returned to competitive cricket to lead the Mumbai Indians to 2011 Champions League Twenty20 title, but fell out of favor with the national selectors. He was not chosen in the home series squad against England in October and West Indies in November and December. Mumbai Indians won their first ever championship under his captaincy, winning the Champions League by 31 runs. Harbhajan was man of the match for his contribution.
He went on to play the 2012 IPL which was not that successful for him, but took his team to the semi-final while being captain. Harbhajan went to play for Essex in England but is not selected for the Sri Lankan tour before the 2012 ICC World Twenty20. In his debut match for Essex against Gloucestershire, Harbhajan did not take any wicket on 12 July 2012, conceding 33 runs in his 12 overs. He was bought by Chennai Super Kings in 2018 after 10 years with Mumbai Indians. On 20 January 2021 Harbajan announced his contract ended with Chennai Super Kings. He was signed by Kolkata Knight Riders during the 2021 IPL auction for a sum of 2 crore
Doorstep to international arena
After taking eight wickets in his next two Ranji matches, Harbhajan was selected to tour Australia in 1999–2000, as the second spinner. He did not play in the Tests, with India opting to field only Anil Kumble in the team. Australia whitewashed India 3–0, and Harbhajan struggled in his only first-class outing against Tasmania, taking 0/141, a portent of future unsuccessful tours to Australia.
Harbhajan was not part of the ODI squad for the Australian tour and upon returning to India in early 2000 needed strong first-class results to maintain his Test position. He went wicketless against Hyderabad, and was selected for the Board President's XI match against the touring South Africans. He took 2/88 and 2/59 and scored 38 and 39 to prevent the hosts being bowled out and defeated, but was dropped as the second slow bowler, as Murali Kartik became Kumble's spinning partner. Harbhajan returned to domestic action, taking 24 wickets in Punjab's remaining four first-class matches. He ended the Indian season with 46 first-class wickets at 26.23.
In mid-2000 an opportunity arose when Harbhajan was selected in the first group of trainees sent to the National Cricket Academy to study under Erapalli Prasanna and Srinivas Venkataraghavan, two off spin bowlers from the Indian spin quartet of the 1970s. However, his behaviour did not conform to requirements, and he was expelled on disciplinary grounds. His sponsorship job with Indian Airlines was also reviewed as a result of his indiscipline. Harbhajan later admitted that he had been at fault earlier in his career.
Following his run-ins with Indian cricket administrators, there was nothing to indicate that Harbhajan's chances of national selection had improved at the start of 2000–01. Despite Kumble being injured, Harbhajan was again overlooked as Kartik, Sunil Joshi, and debutant Sarandeep Singh were entrusted with the spin bowling duties in Test matches against Bangladesh and Zimbabwe on the subcontinent.
During the first half of the season, still in international exile, Harbhajan continued to pick up wickets on the domestic circuit. In five Ranji Trophy matches, he claimed 28 wickets at 13.96. He claimed 3/29 and 3/39 against Himachal Pradesh, 2/53 and 5/88 against Jammu and Kashmir, 4/77 and 2/33 against Haryana and 5/40 against Services in the first four matches, all of which ended in innings wins for Punjab. He then took a total of 4/32 in a 199-run win over Delhi. Harbhajan's batting, which had rarely been productive up to this point in his career, also improved. He scored a career-best 84 against Haryana and added 52 against Services, aggregating 207 runs at 51.75. After taking eight wickets at 21.12 in six one-dayers, Harbhajan was selected for North in the Duleep Trophy, but his early-season form deserted him. He took five wickets at 39.00 in two matches, although he did continue his productive run with the bat, scoring 130 runs at 32.50 with three scores above 35. In October 2019, Harbhajan drafted his name into the Hundred at a base price of $100,000, risking his international retirement.
International career
Debut days
Despite the superior statistics of other bowlers in domestic cricket, Harbhajan was the selected for the Indian Board President's XI to play the touring Australian cricket team ahead of the Tests. He managed only 1/127, and was ignored for the first two Tests before being selected to make his Test debut in the Third Test against Australia in Bangalore, where he scored 4 not out and a duck, and recorded the modest match figures of 2/136 as Australia won the match by eight wickets. He was subsequently overlooked for the triangular ODI tournament in India that followed the Tests, involving Zimbabwe in addition to Australia, but was selected for all group matches in the triangular tournament that followed soon after in Sharjah, where he made his ODI debut against New Zealand. He took 1/32 from ten overs on debut as India narrowly won by 15 runs. He then took 3/41 in the next match, a defeat against Australia, but then struggled in the second qualifying match against the same team, taking 1/63 in eight overs. He was subsequently dropped for the final against Australia, which India won, and ended the series with five wickets at 33.20 at an economy rate of 4.36.
1997- Struggling form
Having made little success in this phase of his international career, averaging 37.75 per Test wicket to date, and overlooked by selectors, Harbhajan faced a difficult decision. His father had recently died; as the family's only son, Harbhajan was now obliged to support his mother and unmarried sisters. He contemplated quitting cricket and moving to the United States to drive trucks for a living. After being out of the team for more than 12 months, there was little overt indication of the sudden rise that would occur in his cricketing career only a few months later.
Harbhajan was then omitted from the team during a home triangular ODI tournament against Bangladesh and Kenya, after taking 0/18 from four overs in his only match of the tournament against the former opponent, but was recalled for the Singer Trophy in Sri Lanka and also involving New Zealand. Playing in all five matches, Harbhajan claimed eight wickets at an average of 24.12 and economy of 4.38 in this tournament, taking at least one scalp in each match. Harbhajan was retained for the final and took 1/57, his worst return for the series, in an Indian win. After being omitted for the Sahara Cup series against Pakistan in Toronto, Harbhajan played in a weakened Indian team at the 1998 Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The matches were not given ODI status by the ICC, and India chose to send their better players to the Sahara Cup instead. India won their first two matches against Antigua and Canada, but Harbhajan managed only a total of 1/48 from 11 overs. The Indians then needed to beat a full-strength Australian outfit to win their group and progress to the semi-finals. Harbhajan was punished and went wicketless, conceding 50 runs in eight overs as Australia won by 146 runs, knocking India out of contention.
Recall to the team
Harbhajan was then recalled to the first-choice team and took five wickets at an average of 22.60 at 3.89 runs an over from three matches on a tour to Zimbabwe, in what would prove to be his last ODI appearances for India for more than two years. In all, he took 18 ODI wickets at an average of 27.2 during the 1998.
After taking 2/38 and 3/60 in an innings win in a tour match, Harbhajan was retained in the Test team, taking 2/42 and 3/63 in the only Test on the Zimbabwe tour. He was unbeaten on 15 in the second innings as the final wicket fell and India succumbed to a 51-run defeat.
Returning to India, Harbhajan started the 1998–99 domestic season well, taking 3/54 and 5/39 in an innings win over Services, before following up with 6/69 and 1/93 in the next match against Delhi, claiming his first five-wicket innings haul. He then took 6/63 and scored 31 in the first innings of a match for the Board PResident's XI against a touring West Indies A, and was taken on the tour of New Zealand in December. In a tour match against Central Districts, Harbhajan struggled, aggregating 2/112. He only played in one Test during the tour, and went wicketless, conceding 72 runs. Upon returning to India, he took a total of 3/158 for India A in a match against the touring Pakistanis ahead of the Tests. After being omitted for the First Test lost in Chennai, he was recalled for the latter two matches against Pakistan, and took five wickets at 34.60 as the matches were split. He then took 3/127 in a high-scoring draw against Sri Lanka. In all, he claimed 13 wickets at an average of 36.8 in five Tests for the season. When he was free of international fixtures for the season, he played in the Ranji Trophy matches, claiming 27 wickets at an average of 24.59 in five matches, including his first five-wicket haul at first-class level. He also registered his maiden first-class fifty, scoring an unbeaten 67 against Tamil Nadu cricket team.
Harbhajan took four wickets at 33.00 during the one-dayers during the season and was overlooked for the ODI team for the whole season and missed selection for the 1999 Cricket World Cup. In September 2003, he played for India A in a one-day series against their Australian counterparts in Los Angeles. Harbhajan took eight wickets at 17.00 at 3.77 runs an over in the five matches, with a best of 3/38.
After taking 4/91 against the touring team for the Board President's XI at the start of the season, Harbhajan managed to retain his Test position for the late 1999 home series against New Zealand, as India fielded a three-pronged spin attack on dusty tracks, taking six wickets at an average of 32.66 as the hosts prevailed 1–0 in the two Tests.
2001 Border-Gavaskar Trophy
With Kumble injured before the home series in March 2001 against the visiting Australians, Harbhajan, whose previous best Test figures were only 3/30, was the only capped spinner in the Indian team for the First Test. He had been recalled after captain Sourav Ganguly publicly called for his inclusion in the team. He was to lead the spin attack against an Australian team which had set a world record with 16 consecutive Test victories, and was searching for its first series victory on Indian soil since 1969. In a warm-up match for India A, Harbhajan had taken 2/63 and 3/81 against the tourists. Harbhajan started well in the First Test in Mumbai, taking three quick wickets in a spell of 3/8, to reduce Australia to 99/5 in response to India's first innings of 176. However, a counter-attacking 197-run partnership between Matthew Hayden and Adam Gilchrist in just 32 overs, saw Harbhajan concede 103 runs from his last 17 overs, to end with 4/121. Despite being struck for many sixes into the crowd, it was still Harbhajan's best statistical analysis at Test level. Australia eventually proceeded to a crushing 10-wicket victory, their sixteenth consecutive Test victory in succession. This test match has been called by many the greatest that has ever been played, in light of the nature of India's win under difficult circumstances.
With leading paceman Javagal Srinath ruled out of the series with a finger injury during the First Test, the teams met for the Second Test in Kolkata, with an even bigger burden on Harbhajan. Public opinion was skeptical about India's chances of stopping Australia's winning streak, with former captain Bishan Bedi lamenting the demise of Indian cricket. Australia were again in control on the first day, having scored 193/1, with Hayden having struck Harbhajan out of the attack. Harbhajan fought back to reduce Australia to 252/7, taking five wickets in the final session, including Ricky Ponting, Gilchrist and Shane Warne in successive balls to become the first Indian to claim a Test hat-trick. After a prolonged wait for the third umpire to adjudicate whether Sadagoppan Ramesh had managed to catch Warne before the ball hit the ground, the near-capacity crowd at Eden Gardens erupted when he was given out. Harbhajan eventually finished with 7/123 as Australia were bowled out for 445. India batted poorly and were forced to follow-on, but a 376-run partnership between V. V. S. Laxman and Rahul Dravid, who batted together for an entire day, allowed India to set Australia an imposing target of 384 to win on the final day. Australia appeared to be safely batting out the match for a draw, until losing 7/56 in the final session, collapsing from 166/3 to be bowled out for 212. Harbhajan claimed four of the wickets, to finish with 6/73 for the innings and a match tally of 13/196. India ended Australia's 16-match world record winning streak, and became only the third team to win a Test after being forced to follow on (Australia having lost all three of those matches).
The teams arrived in Chennai for the deciding Third Test, and Australia's batsmen again seized control after winning the toss, reaching 340/3 on the second morning. Then, Australian captain Steve Waugh padded away a delivery from Harbhajan. The ball spun back into Waugh's stumps, who pushed the ball away with his glove, becoming only the sixth batsman in Tests to be given out "handled the ball". Waugh's dismissal instigated another Australian batting collapse, losing 6 wickets for 51 runs to be bowled out for 391, with Harbhajan taking all six in a spell of 6/26, to finish with 7/133. After India's batsmen gained a first-innings lead of 110, the Australian batsmen were again unable to cope with Harbhajan in the second innings, who took 8/84 to end with match figures of 15/217. India appeared to be heading for an easy victory at 101/2 chasing 155, before losing 6/50 to be 151/8. Harbhajan walked to the crease, and struck the winning runs.
He was named man of the match and man of the series, having taken 32 wickets at 17.03 for the series, when none of his teammates managed more than three. The Wisden 100 study conducted by Wisden in 2002 rated all four of Harbhajan's efforts in the Second and Third Tests in the top 100 bowling performances of all time, the most for any bowler. He paid tribute to his father, who had died just six months earlier. His performance led to him usurping Anil Kumble's position as India's first-choice spinner.
Poor form and returning
Harbhajan's Test success saw him recalled to the ODI team after more than two years. He was unable to reproduce his Test form against Australia, managing only four wickets at an average of 59.25 and economy rate of 5.04. His best performance was a 3/37 in a 118-run win in the third match, and a cameo batting performance of 46 runs from 34 balls, including three sixes, in a losing run chase in the fourth fixture. He was dropped from the ODI team during a subsequent triangular tournament in Zimbabwe in 2001 after only managing two wickets at 69.00 in four matches although he had been economical at 3.63 runs an over. Harbhajan was also unable to maintain his form in the Test series against Zimbabwe. Harbhajan began the tour well with 13 wickets in two warm-up matches, including a match haul of 10/80 against the CFX Academy, but could not repeat such performances in the Tests. He took eight wickets at 29.12 in the two-Test series, which was drawn 1–1, but did manage to post his first Test half-century, reaching 66 in the First Test in Bulawayo, before scoring 31 in the first innings of the Second Test as the Indian batsmen struggled and ceded their series lead. The Indians subsequently toured Sri Lanka in mid-2001, enjoying spinning wickets similar to those in India. Harbhajan managed to establish himself in the ODI team with eleven wickets at 21.18 at the low economy rate of 3.42 in seven matches in the ODI tournament with the hosts and New Zealand. Ironically however, his best performances, in which he conceded less than 30 runs in his ten overs three times, all ended in Indian defeats. In contrast to his ODI improvement, Harbhajan's Test form deteriorated further, yielding only four wickets at 73.00 in three Tests, while Sri Lankan spinner Muttiah Muralitharan was named man of the series with 23 wickets, in what was billed as a contest between the world's two leading off-spinners. With the Tests locked at 1–1 Harbhajan managed only 2/185 in the Third Test as the hosts accumulated 6/610 declared and won by an innings. He scored 79 runs at 15.80 for the series.
Harbhajan was omitted from the Indian team in favour of Kumble as the first-choice spinner on the following tour of South Africa, only playing in the later matches when India fielded two spinners. Nevertheless, Harbhajan continued to do well in the ODIs, taking nine wickets at 20.44 in six matches at an economy rate of 3.53, winning his first man of the match award in the ODI form in an ODI against South Africa in Bloemfontein after taking 3/27 from his ten overs. He scored 62 runs at 15.50, including a rearguard 37 that was not enough to prevent an embarrassing 70-run loss to Kenya. After being omitted for the First Test, which India lost, his disciplinary problems continued when he was one of four Indian players fined and given a suspended one match suspension for dissent and attempting to intimidate the umpire by over-appealing in the Second Test. India managed to draw the match, but Harbhajan struggled and took 1/89 and 2/79. The off spinner continued his poor overseas Test form in what would have been the Third Test. However, India defied the ICC by playing banned batsman Virender Sehwag, while Mike Denness, the match referee who handed down the penalties, was locked out of the stadium, so the match was stripped of Test status. Harbhajan continued to be ineffective, taking only 1/104, although he showed resistance with the bat, scoring 29 and 30 when many specialist batsmen failed, as India slumped to an innings defeat.
Harbhajan's Test fortunes improved immediately upon the start of the 2001–02 international season in India. Playing in his first international match at his home ground in Mohali, Punjab, Harbhajan took match figures of 7/110, including 5/51 in the first innings, to help India win the First Test by ten wickets against the touring English team. He continued his steady form throughout the series with another five wicket haul in the Second Test in Ahmedabad, to end with thirteen wickets at 24.53 for the series, although he went wicketless in 27.1 overs in the Third and final Test. Harbhajan's good home form persisted in the Test matches against Zimbabwe, taking twelve wickets at 19.66 in two games. In the First Test, he took 4/46 in the second innings to seal an innings victory after going wicketless in the second innings. His 2/70 and 6/62 in the Second Test in Delhi saw him named man of the match in a Test for the second time in his career. As in the first instance, he hit the winning runs, a straight-driven six, after India had lost six wickets and threatened to collapse in pursuit of a modest 122 for victory. He also performed strongly in the ODIs during the Indian season, taking twenty wickets at 19.75 in ten matches and taking his first five wicket haul in ODIs. In the five matches against England, he took ten wickets at 20.10 at an economy rate of 4.27. His best result was a 5/43 in the last of these matches, but a late collapse handed the tourists a five-run win. He did better against the Zimbabweans, taking 10 wickets in five matches at an average of 19.40 and an economy rate of 4.06. This included a 4/33 in the final match. He also scored 39 runs without defeat for the series, including a 24 not out as India were skittled for 191 in one match. As Harbhajan was ensconced in the Indian team for the first team, he only played in two RAnji Trophy matches for Punjab, taking 13 wickets at 20.01 and scoring 71 runs at 17.75.
Harbhajan's overseas difficulties returned during the tour of the West Indies in mid-2002. He injured his shoulder while fielding in a tour match in which he started well with a total of 5/70, and was forced to miss the First Test in Guyana. After taking only six wickets at 38 upon his return to the team for the Second and Third Tests, he was dropped for the Fourth Test, but was recalled again for the Fifth Test at Sabina Park, after Kumble was injured. Despite taking improved match figures of 8/180, including 5/138 in the first innings, Harbhajan was unable to prevent an Indian defeat after the batting collapsed in the first innings. He claimed three wickets in the three match ODI series at 33.00, conceding 4.71 runs per over.
Despite his performance at Sabina Park, Harbhajan was dropped again when Kumble returned for the First Test on the tour to England at Lord's, where the hosts prevailed. India's coach John Wright later admitted that Harbhajan's omission had been a mistake. Harbhajan returned for the final three Tests with moderate success, taking 12 wickets at 34.16, improving as the English summer wore on. After claiming 3/175 in the drawn Second Test, he struck form in the tour match against Essex, taking 7/83 and 1/23. He then took 3/40 and 1/56 as India levelled the series in the Third Test at Headingley, before taking 5/115 in the first innings of the Fourth Test at The Oval, as well as managing his second Test half-century of 54 at Trent Bridge in the Second Test. He ended the series with 90 runs at 22.50. for the entire tour, Harbhajan aggregated 28 wickets at 27.60. Harbhajan had modest results in the Natwest Trophy. After being dropped after one wicketless match, he was dropped and then took 4/46 against Sri Lanka in the last match before the final to ensure his retention, but went wicketless in the decider, which India won. He played in three ODIs and took four wickets at 37.25 at 4.96.
2002 Champions Trophy
The 2002 ICC Champions Trophy in Sri Lanka at the end of the tour brought moderate results with six wickets at 30.66 at an economy rate of only 3.68, and a best of 3/27 from ten overs in the firstwashed out final against the host nation. Harbhajan helped restrict Sri Lanka to 5/244, but rain ended proceedings with India at 0/14. He then took 1/34 the next day during a replay of the final. This time the hosts made 7/222 and a downpour again thwarted the players, with India at 1/38 when play was called off and the trophy shared.
As was the case in the previous season, Harbhajan's return to Indian soil coincided with an improvement in results. He took 1/37 and 7/48 in an innings victory at Mumbai in the First Test against the West Indies, and then contributed match figures of 3/56, 4/79 and 37 in an eight-wicket victory in Chennai which saw him named man of the match. A haul of 5/115 in the Third Test at Calcutta was the best in a high scoring match, and with 20 wickets at 16.75 and 69 runs at 17.25, Harbhajan was named as the man of the series. He was unable to transfer his performances to the ODI format, taking only five wickets at 49.00 against the same team at an economy rate of 5.44. Harbhajan took only five wickets at 18.80 in the subsequent Test tour to New Zealand, in a series where five pace bowlers averaged less than 20 on green, seaming tracks. India lost the series 2–0 and Harbhajan's 20 and 18 in the Second Test amounted for more than 15% of India's match total. The off spinner then took 1/56 in one ODI before heading for his World Cup debut in South Africa.
2003 World Cup
Harbhajan had a mixed tournament at the 2003 Cricket World Cup, taking 11 wickets at 30.45 with an economy rate of 3.92 in ten matches. He was the first-choice spinner and played in all matches but one, being dropped for the victory against arch-rivals Pakistan in the group phase. His counterpart, Kumble, played in only three matches. Harbhajan was steady throughout the tournament, never taking more than two wickets in a match, and never conceding more than 42 runs from his quota of ten overs, except in the two matches against Australia, who went through the tournament without defeat. In the group match, Harbhajan was the second highest score, with a counter-attacking 28 as India collapsed for 125, but when it was his turn to bowl, the Australians attacked him and scored 49 runs from his 44 balls without losing a wicket in a decisive nine-wicket win. In the final, Ganguly elected to field and Harbhajan was the only Indian bowler to take a wicket, taking 2/49 from eight overs. In contrast, the Australians scored at 7.38 runs per over from the other bowlers to reach 2/359, the highest total in a World Cup final, and win by 125 runs. He was the fourth leading wicket taker for India overall and his tournament bowling average was worse than those of Zaheer Khan, Ashish Nehra and Javagal Srinath. He finished the season with six wickets at 14.00 at 3.65 runs per over in three matches in an ODI tournament in Bangladesh, where he was fined for abusing an umpire.
Finger injury
After experiencing pains in his spinning finger during the World Cup, Harbhajan was scheduled to undergo surgery in mid-2003 in Australia, but the surgery was delayed as he sought to play through the pain. He underwent physiotherapy in lieu of surgery and was declared fit for a two-match Test series at home against New Zealand in late 2003. His performance was substantially worse than his previous displays on Indian soil, taking only six wickets at an average of 50.00 as both matches ended in high-scoring draws. Aside from his debut series, it was his worst series bowling average on Indian soil. Despite a triangular ODI series against New Zealand and Australia in which he managed only four wickets at 40.50 in four matches and spent time in the sidelines, the Indian team attempted to manage his injury rather than have his finger operated on, and took him on the 2003–04 tour of Australia. As with his previous visit four years earlier, Harbhajan had an unhappy time, taking 2/159 in a tour match against Victoria. After an ineffective 1/169 in the First Test at Brisbane, his injury deteriorated and he underwent major finger surgery, sidelining him for a predicted five months. Kumble replaced him and took 24 wickets in the remaining three Tests in strak contrast of Harbhajan's struggles in Australia. Kumble bowled India to victory in the following Test against Pakistan in Multan, taking 6/71 to reclaim his position as the No. 1 spinner.
After a seven-month layoff, Harbhajan returned to represent India in ODIs in the Asia Cup in July 2004, where he took four wickets at 39.75 in four matches at 3.97 runs per over. His performance improved on the tour to England for an ODI series against England and the 2004 ICC Champions Trophy, taking eight wickets at 14.00, conceding only 2.80 runs an over, including 3/28 against England and 3/33 against Kenya and hitting as an unbeaten 41 against England at The Oval as India's batting collapsed to a substantial defeat.
Harbhajan made his Test return against Australia, who were again seeking their first series win on Indian soil since 1969 in the late 2004 home series. Harbhajan took 5/146 in the first innings and 6/78 in the second innings in addition to making a run out to reduce Australia from 103/3 to 228 all out. Despite this, India required 457 in their second innings to win, slumping to 125/8 before Harbhajan (42) and Irfan Pathan helped India to reach 239 after a rearguard counter-attack, still a 217-run loss. Harbhajan was less effective in the drawn Second Test in Chennai, with match figures of 5/198, which was washed out with India still needing 210 more runs on the last day with all ten wickets in hand. Harbhajan then withdrew from the Third Test in Nagpur due to illness. Australia won the match easily, clinching the series. Harbhajan returned for the final Test in Mumbai. After failing to take a wicket in the first innings, he claimed 5/29 in the second to help India bowl Australia out for 93 and claim a dramatic 14-run victory. Harbhajan ended the series with 21 wickets at 24.00 and 69 runs at 13.80.
A Test series in India against South Africa followed, with Harbhajan taking match figures of 4/166 in the drawn First Test in Kanpur, before producing a man of the match performance in the Second Test in Calcutta to lead India to a 1–0 series win. After taking 2/54 in the first innings, he took 6/78 in the second, including South Africa's first five batsman to help dismiss the tourists for 222. This set up a run-chase of 117, which India reached with eight wickets in hand. Harbhajan was the leading wicket-taker for the series, with 13 victims at an average of 23.61. He ended 2004 with a quiet tour of Bangladesh, scoring a 47 in the Second Test and taking four wickets at 41.75 in two Tests and one wicket at 94 at an economy rate of 5.22 in two ODIs. He had a relatively light workload, bowling only 47.4 overs in the Tests, as Irfan Pathan frequently scythed through the Bangladeshi batsmen with the new ball, taking three five wicket hauls. He then returned to India and took a total of 6/172 in North Zone's seven-wicket win over South.
His performance in Bangladesh saw him dropped for the First Test in the early 2005 series against Pakistan on his home ground in Mohali, with Kumble being the only spinner selected on the pace-friendly surface. India were in control of the match for four days, and needed only four wickets on day five, but were unable to break the Pakistani lower-order until play was almost over and the tourists had taken a lead, and the match ended in a draw. Harbhajan was recalled for the Second Test in Calcutta and took match figures of 4/145 in an Indian victory. Despite taking 6/152 in a marathon 51-over spell in the first innings of the Third Test in Bangalore, Pakistan won the match to level the series after India collapsed on the final day. Harbhajan finished the series with 10 wickets at 33.20. His performance in the subsequent ODI series was even worse, managing only three wickets at 73.66 in five matches at an economy rate of 4.80. In spite of the poor end to the season, his performance in the year since finger surgery in the long form of the game saw him nominated for the 2005 ICC Test Player of the Year. Harbhajan spent the international off-season playing for Surrey in English county cricket, citing the improvement that other international players had gained from such an experience. It was his first stint in county cricket, after a planned season at Lancashire in 2003 was cancelled due to injury. After taking six wickets in his opening two first-class fixtures, he struck form against Hampshire, taking 6/36 and 2/47 in an innings triumph. In is fourth and final first-class match, against Gloucestershire, Harbhajan took a total of 6/193 and equalled his previous first-class best of 84. He ended with 20 wickets at 25.85 and 124 runs at 31.00. In the Twenty20 competition, he had less success in the new format, taking four wickets at 38.00 at an economy rate of 6.60 in eight matches. In all he spent six weeks with the county.
Chappell era
Harbhajan's first outings under newly appointed coach Greg Chappell came at the Indian Oil Cup in Sri Lanka in August 2005. He took five wickets at 31.40, conceding 4.02 runs per over in four matches, but was wicketless in the final, which was won by the host nation. This was followed by a tour of Zimbabwe, which was marred by tension between the new coach and Indian captain Ganguly. This broke into the public arena when Ganguly claimed that he was asked to resign as captain. Harbhajan played in all five matches in the Videocon Tri-Series involving Zimbabwe and New Zealand with little success, managing only two wickets at 99.00 at an economy rate of 4.77, both of them against an inexperienced Zimbabwe team crippled by a mass exodus of white players from the Mugabe regime. Harbhajan had a quiet Test series against Zimbabwe, taking six wickets at 31.00. He was only required to bowl 58 overs, as the majority of the Zimbabwean batsmen were removed after being unable to cope with Pathan's swing which was likened to "Frisbees at high speed", leaving little work for the spinners. He managed to claim his 200th Test wicket in the First Test, and in doing so became the second youngest player to reach the mark after Kapil Dev. Harbhajan's batting was notable for an exceptionally aggressive 18-ball innings in the First Test in Bulawayo, where he struck four fours and three sixes in a cameo innings of 37.
Harbhajan's difficulties were compounded when he earned the ire of cricket authorities by publicly attacking Chappell and defending Ganguly after the team returned to India. He claimed that Chappell had used "double standards" and instilled "fear and insecurity" into the team. The Punjab Cricket Association called him to explain his actions, but he was not punished after offering an apology. In early 2006, Harbhajan changed his stance publicly, praising Chappell for the team's improved form, stating "He has great knowledge about the game and it has been a very successful year for us under him. He has lifted our team to great heights".
Harbhajan was under pressure to perform when Sri Lanka toured India in late 2005 following his attack on Chappell and the replacement of Ganguly, who had frequently supported him during previous career difficulties, with new captain Rahul Dravid. In addition, his home ODI form had been poor in the previous three years, managing only 12 wickets at 56 in 16 matches, with an economy rate of 4.8. In the three Challenger Trophy matches at the start of the season, he took five wickets at 24.20 at an economy rate of 4.25. He responded by claiming 3/35 in the first ODI in Nagpur after Sri Lanka had raced to 50 in just 6.3 overs. The Sri Lankan batsmen hit the Indian fast bowlers out of the attack, scoring 74 runs in the first 10 overs and forcing Dravid to delay the Power Play and introduce Harbhajan. This sparked a collapse, with 4 wickets taken for 14 runs, resulting in a 152-run Indian victory. Harbhajan took 2/19 in the next match, and aggregated six wickets at 26 in the first four matches, at a low economy rate of 3.43, with a series of performances noted for skilful variations in pace and flight, helping India gain an unassailable 4–0 series lead. He was subsequently rested for the fifth ODI, and ended the series as the most economical bowler, conceding only 3.62 runs per over.
He put on another strong personal performance in the first ODI of the following series against South Africa in Hyderabad, where he struck an aggressive unbeaten 37 from 17 balls, including two sixes, to help India recover to 249/9, before taking 1/35 from his 10 overs. He was unable to prevent an Indian loss, and was fined after pointing Ashwell Prince to the pavilion after dismissing him. Harbhajan ended the series with five wickets at 27.40, and was again India's most economical bowler, conceding 3.92 runs per over.
The year ended with a three Test series against Sri Lanka. After the first match in Chennai was washed out by monsoonal rains, Harbhajan took match figures of 4/137 as India took a 1–0 series lead in Delhi. He finished the calendar year with a man of the match performance in Ahmedabad, which saw India seal a 2–0 series victory with a 259 run victory. He took 7/62 in the first innings, including six of Sri Lanka's top eight batsmen. He precipitated a middle-order batting collapse, with 6 wickets falling for 82 runs, which allowed India to take a 193-run first innings lead. Harbhajan later contributed an aggressive innings of 40 not out from 51 balls, in an unbroken 49-run final-wicket partnership with Kumble in the second innings, their display of unorthodox hitting stretching India's lead to 508 runs. His prospects of a half century were cut short by a declaration from acting captain Virender Sehwag, but he was compensated with opening the bowling, as Sehwag employed a novel tactic of assigning the new ball to a spinner. He took 3/79 to finish with match figures of 10/141, ending the year on a high note after he had been embroiled in the leadership struggle only three months earlier.
Test decline
2006 began with Harbhajan's first tour to arch-rivals Pakistan. The First Test was a high scoring draw held in Lahore, where Harbhajan recorded his worst ever Test figures of 0/176, conceding more than five runs an over in a match where 1,089 runs were scored for the loss of just eight wickets. In a match in which many batting records fell, Harbhajan was hit for 27 runs in one over by Shahid Afridi, just one short of the world record. The second Test in Faisalabad was another high scoring draw, with the aggregate runs being the fourth highest in Test history. Harbhajan took 0/101 and 0/78. His 81 overs in the series were the fourth highest number of overs in any Test series without taking a wicket. When he was given the opportunity to make use of the batting surface in India's only innings in Faisalabad, he managed a brisk 38, including two sixes. Harbhajan was dropped for the Third Test in Karachi, where a green pitch promised to favour seam bowling, and Kumble was the only spinner used. After sustaining an injury, Harbhajan was sent home during the subsequent ODI series without playing a match, ending his tour without taking a wicket.
A return to Indian soil for the Test series against England failed to ease Harbhajan's wicket-taking difficulties. He managed match figures of 2/172 in the drawn First Test in Nagpur, and 1/83 in the Second Test in Mohali, where his main contribution was to hit 36 runs, helping India to a first innings lead. Despite taking 3/89 and 2/40 in the Third Test in Mumbai, Harbhajan ended the series with eight wickets at an average of 48.00, nearly twice his career average on Indian soil. Despite his difficulties in Test cricket, Harbhajan's ODI form remained strong, as he top-scored with a rearguard 37 out of 203 and then took 5/31 in a man of the match performance in the first ODI against England in Delhi, sparking a collapse of 7/47 which secured a 39-run victory. He ended the series with 12 wickets at 15.58 at an economy rate of 3.74 from five matches, and topped the wicket-taking list despite being rested for the last match, as well as having the best bowling average and economy rate. India took the series 5–1, Harbhajan taking 3/30 in their only loss.
Harbhajan was unable to maintain his ODI form on the tour to the West Indies, where he managed three wickets at 64 in five matches, although he continued to be economical, conceding 3.91 runs per over. He was omitted from the Test team for the opening two Tests as India opted to use three pace bowlers and Anil Kumble, scrapping the five bowler strategy used since early 2006. The reasons for the return to the four-man attack were unclear, with performance, fatigue and injury variously offered as explanations. Harbhajan was recalled for the Third Test in St Kitts after the pace attack was unable to dismiss the West Indian batsmen, with local captain Brian Lara stating that his team, who had three wickets in hand at the end of play, would have been lucky to draw the Second Test had Harbhajan been playing. In a drawn match, Harbhajan claimed the leading match figures of 6/186, as well as contributing an unbeaten 38 in the first innings. Harbhajan's 5/13 in 27 balls in the first innings in the Fourth Test saw the hosts lose their last six wickets for 23, to give India a 97 run first innings lead. India went on secure a victory in a low scoring match in three days and win the series 1–0, although Harbhajan was punished in the second innings, conceding 65 runs in 16 overs without taking a wicket. It was India's first series victory in the Caribbean in 35 years, with Harbhajan contributing 11 wickets at 24.00.
The 2006–07 season began with the DLF Cup in Malaysia, where Harbhajan made a good start to the season, taking six wickets at 19.16 at an economy rate of 3.59 in four matches. He was man of the match against the West Indies, scoring 37 in a 78-run partnership to push India to 162, before taking 3/35 to secure a 16-run victory. India failed to reach the final, contested by Australia and the West Indies. Harbhajan was unable to maintain his form in the 2006 ICC Champions Trophy held in India, managing only two wickets at 51.50 and saving his worst performance of 0/49 in the final group match against Australia on his home ground in Punjab. India won only one of their three matches and were eliminated, although Harbhajan continued to be tidy, conceding 3.67 runs per over. The tour of South Africa in late 2006 saw even less success, taking only one wicket in three ODI matches while conceding 161 runs at the expensive economy rate of 5.75. He finished the year watching from the sidelines as India fielded Kumble as the only spinner in the three Test series, which India lost 2–1. Apart from the injury hit 2003, it was Harbhajan's least productive year in Test cricket since he became a regular team member in 2001, managing only 19 wickets at 52.78.
Harbhajan returned for the early 2007 ODI series against the West Indies and Sri Lanka in India, taking seven wickets at 36.00 in seven matches at an economy rate of 4.27. Despite criticism that he was afraid to toss the ball up, and was concentrating on bowling flat in a defensive run-saving style, Harbhajan was selected as the off spin bowler in the Indian squad for the 2007 Cricket World Cup, while Ramesh Powar, who had been more expensive but had taken more wickets in recent times, was omitted. A statistical study showed that since the start of 2006, Harbhajan has been the second most economical bowler in the final 10 overs of ODIs.
During the 2007 Cricket World Cup, Harbhajan started as India's first-choice spinner and played in their first match against Bangladesh. He took 0/30 from his ten overs, but India lost the match as their batsmen collapsed and Bangladesh had no need to take risks against the bowling. Harbhajan was dropped in favour of Kumble for the second match against Bermuda, which India won easily. Harbhajan was recalled for the final group match against Sri Lanka, and had little effect, taking 0/53 from his ten overs as India were set 255 for victory. Harbhajan made an unbeaten 17 as India collapsed to 185 to lose the match and be eliminated in the group phase. Following the failed campaign, the Indian selectors made multiple changes to the national team and Harbhajan was dropped for the tours of Bangladesh and England. Rajesh Pawar, Piyush Chawla and Powar were the spinners selected to partner Kumble. Harbhajan's waning wicket-taking and his lack of flight were again perceived to be the cause of his problems.
In the meantime, Harbhajan played in two ODIs for the Asian Cricket Council against a combined African team, taking 1/53 and 3/48 as the Asians won both matches. He then returned to Surrey for a second season of county cricket in an attempt to rediscover his form while his compatriots were touring England, staying throughout July and August. After easing into the season with six wickets in the first two first-class matches, Harbhajan found a rich vein of form, taking 4/64 and 5/64 against Worcestershire, before following up with 5/34 and 6/57 against Kent, finishing off by scoring 29 to help guide Surrey home by four wickets after they had stumbled in pursuit of 107. He ended the first-class campaign with five and six wickets against Durham and Hampshire respectively and totalled 37 wickets at 18.54 in only six outings. He was not so successful in the one-dayers, taking six wickets at 29.50 and an economy rate of 4.65 in five matches.
2007 recall to the team
Harbhajan returned to international cricket as part of India's squad for the ICC World Twenty20 tournament in South Africa in September 2007, which India won, having been rank outsiders at the start of the tournament with many senior players opting out of the competition. He played in all six of India's matches and totalled seven wickets at 26.00 and an economy rate of 7.91. In the opening pool match against Pakistan, Harbhajan hit the stumps in a bowl-out after scores were tied; India won 3–0 after three rounds. In the semi-final against Australia, Harbhajan bowled Michael Clarke and conceded only three runs in his final over, the 18th of the match, to turn the match towards India. The final against Pakistan was the only match in which Harbhajan did not bowl his full quota of four overs, after being struck for three sixes in his third over by Misbah-ul-Haq, who led a late charge towards the target. India prevailed by five runs in the final over, Misbah being the last man to fall.
Harbhajan was recalled to the ODI squad during India's home season in 2006–07, which comprised series against Australia and Pakistan. In ten ODIs, he took seven wickets at 61.71 125 and an economy rate of 4.59, much higher than his career average. He scored 101 runs at 33.66 in these matches, including an unbeaten 38 in one match against Pakistan. He was then recalled to the Test squad, and with India fielding two spinners in its home series against Pakistan, Harbhajan accompanied Kumble in all three Tests. Playing in Tests for the first time in 16 months, he took 10 wickets at 44.10, much higher than his career average in India. His best result was 5/122 in the first innings of the Second Test at Eden Gardens. He toured Australia and played in three of the four Tests—India persisted with two spinners in all venues except for the Third Test at the pace-friendly WACA Ground. As he was during his previous visits to Australia, Harbhajan was ineffective with the ball. In the First Test in Melbourne, he took match figures of 3/162, before taking 4/200 in the Second Test in Sydney. Upon his recall in Adelaide, he took 1/128 in Australia's only innings on a placid surface, ending the series with eight wickets at 61.25. However, he did manage to take Ponting's wicket for three consecutive innings in the first two Tests, leading to much speculation about the Australian captain's difficulties against the off spinner. After the third dismissal in the Sydney Test, Harbhajan celebrated by running a distance before twice rolling over on the ground. Harbhajan's most noted contribution with the bat came in the Second Test when he came to the crease with India at 345/7, still 118 runs behind Australia, after a middle-order collapse of 4/52. He made 63 runs in a 129-run partnership with Tendulkar, which enabled India to gain a first-innings lead. In the Fourth Test, he came to the crease at 7/359 and scored 63 in a 107-run rearguard partnership with captain Kumble, allowing India to reach 529. He failed to reach double figures in his four other innings and ended with 142 runs at 23.66.
Revival
Harbhajan returned to international cricket for the tour of Sri Lanka in July and August. In the First Test at Colombo, he took 2/149 as Sri Lanka amassed 600/6 declared and won by an innings. In the Second Test in Galle, he took 6/102 to help India take a first innings lead of 37 and then took 4/51 in the second innings to help India level the series with a 170-run win. It was his fifth ten-wicket match haul and his first outside India. He was again India's leading wicket-taker in the Third Test defeat, with 3/104 and 1/44. He was India's leading wicket-taker with 16 scalps at 28.12, twice as many the second most-prolific Indian. In the subsequent ODI series, he played in the first four matches, taking six wickets at 18.83 at an economy rate of 3.80, including 3/40 in the win in the fourth match, which sealed the series. He was rested from the final dead rubber.
At the start of the Indian season, Harbhajan took 2/32 and 4/31 as the Rest of India defeated Delhi in the Irani Trophy. This was followed by the First Test against Australia in Bangalore. Harbhajan took Ponting's wicket in taking 1/103 in the first innings, but not before the Australian captain had scored 123. In reply to Australia's 430, India were in trouble at 195/6 when Harbhajan came in to bat. He scored a rearguard 54, putting on 80 with fellow bowler Zaheer Khan, to reduce India's deficit to 70. He then took 2/76 in the second innings as the match ended in a draw. Ponting later cited Harbhajan and Zaheer's partnership as the passage of play that prevented an Australian win. In the Second Test at his home ground in Mohali, Harbhajan took 2/60 in the first innings as India took a 201-run first innings lead. In the second innings Australia were chasing 516 for victory and had started aggressively, reaching 49/0 after seven overs. Harbhajan was introduced into the attack and removed Hayden and Simon Katich in his first over and then Mike Hussey in his next. This triggered Australia's collapse to 58/5 and their eventual defeat by 320 runs. Harbhajan was unable to find a fourth wicket, which would have seen him reach 300 Test wickets on his home ground, and ended with 3/36. He was then ruled out of the drawn Third Test because of a toe injury. Harbhajan returned for the Fourth Test in Nagpur and dismissed Ponting for the tenth time in Tests in the first innings to register his 300th wicket. He ended with 3/94 as India took an 86-run lead. However, a batting collapse meant that India were 6/166 at tea on day four, only 252 runs ahead and facing possible defeat if Australia could clean up the tail quickly. Harbhajan then scored 52, combining in a 107-run partnership with captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni to guide India out of trouble. India then successfully defended the target of 380 to win by 172 runs, with Harbhajan taking 4/64 including top-scorer Hayden and the final wicket.
Harbhajan was the equal-leading wicket-taker for the series along with Ishant Sharma, taking 15 wickets at 28.86. He also scored 125 runs at 41.66, helping to prevent two defeats. The series also saw the end of Harbhajan's partnership with Kumble, who missed the Second Test due to injury and then retired after suffering another wound in the next match. As a result, Harbhajan started a new pairing with leg spinner Amit Mishra.
In the five-match home ODI series against England, Harbhajan took seven wickets at 30.29 and an economy rate of 5.04 as India won 5–0. He took one wicket in each of the matches, except the third match in Kanpur. In that match, he took 3/31, registered his 200th ODI wicket and was named man-of-the match. During the two Tests, Harbhajan was the equal-leading wicket-taker with eight wickets at 35.00 and he also scored 69 runs at 34.50. This included a 40 in the first innings of the First Test to help India reach 241 after a top-order collapse, keeping India's deficit to 75; they went on to win the match. Harbhajan ended the year as the third-highest wicket-taker in the world, and the highest among Indian players. He was named by Wisden in their selection of the Test team of the year.
Harbhajan then missed the ODI tour of Sri Lanka at the beginning of the year with a hamstring injury. He recovered in time to be recalled for the tour of New Zealand. Harbhajan was the leading wicket-taker from both sides in both ODIs and Tests. Harbhajan was India's most economical bowler in the two T20 internationals at the start of the tour, taking a total of 2/34 from eight overs and scoring 21 in the first match; the hosts prevailed in both games. In series that saw four of the five ODIs truncated by rain, Harbhajan took five wickets at 29.60 at an economy rate of 5.69. He took 3/27 in the opening match, and then took 2/56 from ten overs in the third game, in which both teams passed 330, helping India to wins in both matches. In the First Test, Harbhajan took 1/57 and 6/63 to help set up a ten-wicket win. It was only the second time that he had taken five wickets in an innings outside the subcontinent. However, he was disappointing in a high-scoring draw in the Second Test, taking 2/120 as the hosts amassed 9/619 declared. In the Third Test, India suffered a middle-order collapse on the first afternoon, and a counter-attacking 60 by Harbhajan helped them to 379. He then took 3/43 and 4/59; New Zealand had only two wickets in hand when rain caused the match to end in a draw with more than a day's playing time lost. Harbhajan ended with 16 wickets at 21.37 and 94 runs at 23.50. India won both series, their first series win in New Zealand since 1981 and 1968 for ODIs and Tests respectively.
2009 ICC tournaments
Harbhajan was part of the Indian team that attempted to defend their crown at the 2009 World Twenty20. However they lost all three of their matches in the Super 8s round and were eliminated. Harbhajan took 3/30 in one of those matches against England, and ended the tournament with five wickets at 26.20 and an economy rate of 6.55. During the tour of the West Indies that followed, Harbhajan took three wickets at 45.33, conceding almost a run a ball in three ODIs as India prevailed 2–1.
In September, Harbhajan took 5/56 in the final of the Compaq Cup to help secure a 46-run Indian win over the hosts Sri Lanka. It was his first five-wicket haul in three years and capped off a tournament in which he took six wickets at 22.00 in three matches. He then struggled at the 2009 ICC Champions Trophy in South Africa, taking 1/71 from ten overs against Pakistan and 0/54 from nine overs against Australia. India lost to Pakistan and the latter match was washed out. He then took 2/14 from eight overs against the West Indies, but it was not enough to prevent India from being eliminated in the first round, despite winning the match.
2010 season
After his travails in South Africa, Harbhajan started the Indian season with eight wickets at 12.87 in three Challenger Trophy one-dayers for India Blue. He then played in a home ODI series against Australia taking eight wickets at 33.87 at an economy rate of 4.51 in six games. This included a best of 2/23 in the sixth match, but he made a more influential contribution in the first match with the bat, striking 49 at the death as India came within striking distance of their target before he fell in the last over and the hosts ended five runs adrift of the target. He scored a similarly rapid 31 in the fourth match, but India fell 24 runs short. Harbhajan ended the series with 81 runs at 20.25.
In the three home Tests against Sri Lanka, Harbhajan was the highest wicket-taker with 13 scalps, but these came at an average cost of 41.00. After taking 2/189 in the drawn First Test, he aggregated 5/152 and 6/192 as India took the next two fixtures by an innings. In the subsequent ODI series, he took six wickets at 35.00 at an economy rate of 4.88 as India won 3–1. He took 2/58 from his ten overs in the first match, which proved to be tidy in the context of a match in which both teams passed 410 and India prevailed by three runs.
During the tri-series in Bangladesh in January 2010, Harbhajan took six wickets at 24.00 in three matches. He missed the First Test due to neck pain but returned to take a total of 2/123 as India completed a clean sweep with a ten-wicket win in the Second Test.
During New Zealand's tour of India in November 2010, Harbhajan scored his maiden Test century during the First Test in Ahmedabad. This was the 100th century by an Indian in the second innings and he reached triple figures with a six. His 115, along with Laxman's 91 saved the game for India after they had collapsed to 5/15. Harbhajan was named man of the match. He followed on in the next test with 111* in India's 1st innings, becoming the first no. 8 batsman to score back-to-back test centuries.
After an ordinary performance with the ball in the 5-match ODI series in West Indies in June 2011 (where he was the vice captain to skipper Suresh Raina) (took 4 wickets from 3 matches, best of 3/32), he helped his team revive from dire straits in the 1st Test in Sabina Park at Kingston, Jamaica. With India struggling at 85/6, he along with Suresh Raina initiated a counter-attack to string an aggressive 146-run partnership with Suresh Raina(82 off 115 balls, 15 fours) to help India reach 246. Harbhajan scored 70 from 74 balls (10 fours, 1 six).
2011 removal from squad
Following a few poor performances, Harbhajan was injured in India's tour of England in the summer/monsoon of 2011 and was ruled out of the rest of the series. Harbhajan was also not selected for the Australian tour and the 2012 Asia Cup in Bangladesh. He was, however, included in 30 probables for the World T20 tournament held in Sri Lanka in September 2012. He was recalled to the Test squad after a gap of more than a year against New Zealand at the end of August 2012. Harbhajan was dropped from the test team after the 2013 series against Australia. He was called back to the test team after two years for a solitary test against Bangladesh.
2015–2016 inclusion
Following performances in IPL for Mumbai Indians in 2015 and 2014, he was included in the test team captained by Virat Kohli against Bangladesh for the one-off test match in Fatullah. He took 3 wickets in that test to overtake Wasim Akram in the list of most test match wickets to become the ninth highest wicket-taker in Tests. He was then called up for the ODI and T20I teams when a second-string Indian side toured Zimbabwe to play three One-day and two Twenty-20 matches. Though he did not take many wickets in that tour, he was impressive maintaining a tight line and stopping the flow of runs.
Harbhajan returned with figures of 2/29 in his first T20 international over two and a half years. He was in the squad for the 3 test away series against Sri Lanka led by Virat Kohli. He replaced injured Ashwin in series against South Africa. He was also part of the team that played 3 T20I matches against Australia, home series against Sri Lanka, Asia Cup in Bangladesh. He played only one match in the Asia Cup against UAE. He was also part of the T20 World Cup that took place in India but did not play any of the matches.
2017 Champions Trophy exclusion
Harbhajan was again excluded from the Indian squad for the 2017 Champions Trophy in England. After hearing of his exclusion, Harbhajan claimed he did not receive the same "privileges" other veteran cricketers, namely MS Dhoni, have been afforded by the national selectors. After the media pounced on this comment, Harbhajan claimed the media frenzy took his statement out of proportion.
Political career
In March 2022, Singh was nominated to the Rajya Sabha by the Aam Aadmi Party as one of their five candidates from the state of Punjab. He won unopposed and was officially elected as Member of Parliament, Rajya Sabha.
On 18 July 2022, Harbhajan took oath as a member of the Rajya Sabha from Punjab on the first day of the Monsoon session of Parliament.
Controversies
1998 suspension
Harbhajan was fined and given a suspended ban for one ODI by the match referee in his first international series, when his on-field behaviour was adjudged to breach the ICC Code of Conduct. The incident in question was his altercation with Ricky Ponting after dismissing him.
Altercations with Andrew Symonds and Sreesanth
While Harbhajan was batting during his 63 on the third day of the Second Test at the Sydney Cricket Ground, he became involved in an altercation with Australia's Andrew Symonds. As a result of this, he was charged with a Level 3 offence of racially abusing Symonds by calling the Australian—of Afro-Caribbean descent—a "monkey". Harbhajan and Tendulkar, his batting partner at the time of the incident, denied this. At a hearing after the conclusion of the Test, match referee Mike Procter found Harbhajan guilty and banned him for three Tests. This decision generated controversy because no audio or video evidence was available, and the conviction relied on the testimony of the Australian players. The Indian team initially threatened to withdraw from the series pending an appeal against Harbhajan's suspension, however BCCI president Sharad Pawar later claimed that the tour would proceed even if the second hearing was unsuccessful.
On 29 January, following the Fourth Test, the appeal hearing was conducted in Adelaide by ICC Appeals Commissioner Justice John Hansen. The result was that the racism charge was not proved, resulting in the revocation of the three-Test ban imposed by Procter. However, Harbhajan was found guilty of using abusive language and fined 50% of his match fee. Hansen later admitted he "could have imposed a more serious penalty if he was made aware by the ICC of the bowler's previous transgressions"—including a suspended one-Test ban.
It was reported that senior players from both sides had written a letter to Hansen requesting that the charge be downgraded. According to this report, the letter was signed by Tendulkar and Ponting and counter-signed by Michael Clarke, Hayden, and Symonds himself.
In the aftermath of the hearing, Hayden called Harbhajan an "obnoxious weed" during a radio interview, which earned him a code of conduct violation charge from Cricket Australia.
Harbhajan was involved in further controversy after an 2008 Indian Premier League (IPL) match between Mumbai Indians and Kings XI Punjab at Mohali in April 2008. While the teams were shaking hands, he slapped Kerala paceman and Indian teammate Sreesanth in the face. Harbhajan, who had stood in as the Mumbai captain for the first three matches of the tournament to that point, all of which were lost, had apparently been angered by Sreesanth's aggressive sending-off of his batsmen as Punjab coasted to a decisive victory. The Kings XI Punjab lodged an official complaint to the IPL. The match referee Farokh Engineer found Harbhajan guilty of a level 4.2 offence, banning him from the remainder of the IPL and preventing him from claiming his entire season's salary. Harbhajan made up with Sreesanth, and said that "I have been punished for the wrong I did". Harbhajan had taken five wickets at 16.40 at an economy rate of 8.20 and scored 30 runs at 15.00 in the three matches before his ban. On 14 May, the BCCI disciplinary committee found Harbhajan guilty under Rule 3.2.1 of their regulations and handed down the maximum punishment of five-match ban from ODIs. Harbhajan faces the prospect of a life ban if he commits significant disciplinary breaches in the future. As a result, Harbhajan missed the tri-series in Bangladesh and the 2008 Asia Cup in Pakistan, and India went down in the final of both tournaments after qualifying first on both occasions. He would have been eligible for selection after the first two matches of the Asia Cup, but the selectors omitted him entirely.
In 2021, he tendered an unconditional apology for sharing a social media post with a picture of Khalistani militant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale to pay homage to those who died in 'Operation Blue Star' of 1984. Facing backlash from all quarters, Harbhajan said he posted a WhatsApp forward on the 37th anniversary of the operation without realizing that the man in the picture was Bhindranwale.
Twitter fight with Mohammad Amir
On 27 October 2021, Harbhajan was involved in an ugly spat with Pakistani cricketer Mohammad Amir on Twitter following India's loss to Pakistan in 2021 ICC Men's T20 World Cup.
Playing style
Harbhajan was an attacking bowler who was regarded for his ball control and ability to vary his length and pace, although he was often criticised for his flat trajectory. His main wicket-taking ball climbs wickedly on the unsuspecting batsman from a good length, forcing him to alter his stroke at the last second. With a whippy bowling action, he was reported for throwing in November 1998. Although forced to travel to England for tests, his action was cleared by former English player Fred Titmus.
He has developed an ability to bowl the doosra, which was the subject of an official report by match referee Chris Broad, on-field umpires Aleem Dar and Mark Benson, and TV umpire Mahbubur Rahman after the Second Test between India and Bangladesh at Chittagong, Bangladesh in December 2004. The ICC cleared his action in May 2005, saying that the straightening of his elbow fell within the permitted limits.
Among off spinners, Harbhajan is the third highest wicket-taker in Test history, behind only Muttiah Muralitharan and Ravichandran Ashwin. He is the third-highest Test wicket-taker among all Indians. Harbhajan average with the ball in home Test matches hovers in the mid-20s. All five of his man of the match awards and both of his man of the series awards have been obtained in India. Outside India, his bowling average climbs to around 40. Statistically, his bowling in Test matches is most effective against the West Indies and Australia. As of May 2008, his most productive hunting grounds have been Eden Gardens in Calcutta, where he has taken 38 wickets at 23.10 in six Tests, while the Chepauk in Chennai, where he has claimed two-man of the match awards, has yield 34 wickets at 24.25 in five Tests. Harbhajan has claimed his wickets most cheaply at Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai, where he has taken 22 wickets at 19.45. Compared to Muralitharan, Harbhajan is less reliant on targeting the stumps for his dismissals; he captures more than 60% of his wickets via catches and less than 25% by bowling or trapping batsmen leg before wicket, whereas the corresponding figures for Muralitharan are in the 40s.
Harbhajan's off spin complements Kumble's leg spin. While Harbhajan is known for his emotional and extroverted celebrations, which are part of a deliberate strategy of aggression, Kumble is known for his undemonstrative and composed approach. Both spinners have opined that they bowl more effectively in tandem via persistent application of pressure to batsmen, but statistics have shown that while Kumble has performed better when paired with Harbhajan, Harbhajan has been more effective in Kumble's absence.
Harbhajan has been particularly successful against Australian batsman Ricky Ponting, taking his wicket on ten occasions in Test cricket.
In an interview in 2001, Harbhajan stated his ambition to become an all-rounder. Although he had recorded a few half-centuries at Test level, his batting average hovered around 15 in both Tests and ODIs. However, in the span of four years starting from 2003, he has shown improved performance, averaging around 20 with the bat. His style is frequently described as unorthodox, with pundits agreeing with his self-assessment attributing his batting achievements to his hand-eye coordination, rather than his footwork or technique. The aggression in Harbhajan's bowling also extends to his batting, with a Test strike rate in the 60s, placing him in the ten highest strike rates among players who have scored more than 1000 runs in Test cricket.
Test wicket milestones
1st: Greg Blewett (Australia)
50th: Ricky Ponting (Australia)
100th: Wavell Hinds (West Indies)
150th: Nathan Astle (New Zealand)
200th: Charles Coventry (Zimbabwe)
250th: Ricky Ponting (Australia)
300th: Ricky Ponting (Australia)
350th: JP Duminy (South Africa)
400th: Carlton Baugh (West Indies)
Filmography
Films
Television
References
External links
Harbhajan Singh takes 400th Test wicket
Harbhajan Singh on Twitter
1980 births
Living people
India One Day International cricketers
India Test cricketers
India Twenty20 International cricketers
Punjab, India cricketers
Surrey cricketers
Essex cricketers
North Zone cricketers
India Green cricketers
India Blue cricketers
Test cricket hat-trick takers
ACC Asian XI One Day International cricketers
Indian Sikhs
Cricketers at the 1998 Commonwealth Games
Cricketers at the 2003 Cricket World Cup
Cricketers at the 2007 Cricket World Cup
Cricketers at the 2011 Cricket World Cup
Indian cricketers
Cricketers from Jalandhar
Mumbai Indians cricketers
Chennai Super Kings cricketers
Kolkata Knight Riders cricketers
Recipients of the Padma Shri in sports
Recipients of the Arjuna Award
Commonwealth Games competitors for India
Cricketers who have acted in films
Rajya Sabha members from Punjab, India
Aam Aadmi Party politicians from Punjab, India
Rajya Sabha members from Aam Aadmi Party
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High%20Park
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High Park
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High Park is a municipal park in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. High Park is a mixed recreational and natural park, with sporting facilities, cultural facilities, educational facilities, gardens, playgrounds and a zoo. One-third of the park remains in a natural state, with a rare oak savannah ecology. High Park was opened to the public in 1876 and is based on a bequest of land from John George Howard to the City of Toronto. It spans and is the second-largest municipal park in Toronto, after Centennial Park.
High Park is located to the west of downtown Toronto, north of Humber Bay, and is maintained by the City of Toronto Parks Department. It stretches south from Bloor Street West to The Queensway, just north of Lake Ontario. It is bounded on the west by Ellis Park Road and Grenadier Pond and on the east by Parkside Drive.
Description
The landscape in the park is hilly, with two deep ravines extending the full north–south distance of the park. Significant natural parts of the park are classified as a provincial Area of Natural and Scientific Interest.
Eastern ravine
The eastern ravine is a north–south ravine occupying the eastern half of the park along a small creek and several ponds. A forested area begins at the north-east corner of the park, at Bloor Street and Parkside Drive. The creek begins at spring-fed ponds, Howard Pond, and Ridout Pond and flows south through the ravine along Spring Creek Road. Halfway to the southern boundary of the park, the ravine is less forested with picnic areas, the adventure playground, and the zoo. Upper Duck Pond, just to the west of the adventure playground, often has several species of ducks, including wood ducks to be seen. The pond was one of the first locations where bird banding was done, marked by a plaque. Great blue herons can sometimes be seen there and at Lower Duck Pond, just north of The Queensway, where the water drains in pipes south to Lake Ontario.
The eastern ravine lies over a buried river. In 2003, city workers found strong evidence of the pre-ice age Laurentian River when capping two artesian wells at the pond at the north-east corner of the Park. The wells began spewing a plume of water, sand, shale and gravel 15 metres into the air. With this discovery, geologists finally pinpointed the southern terminus of this ancient river system whose southerly flow begins near Georgian Bay. The watercourse, flowing below the surface in pure bedrock, has remained undisturbed for thousands of years.
Central plain and savannah
The central section is a large plain encompassing most of the northern boundary, slowly narrowing to a point overlooking the lake, which is the location of Colborne Lodge. While most of the plain is developed for picnicking, gardens and sports fields, it has a stretch of open habitat called oak savannah, of which there are few other examples in Ontario. The towering black oak trees found throughout High Park are a characteristic of this habitat. Many of the trees are over 150 years old. The savannah is under the special care of the City and volunteer conservationists. Forested areas of High Park are maintained to mimic natural conditions, with downed trees left to decay. Regular controlled burns are done to mimic forest fires and their beneficial effects for oaks. Non-native plants outside the ornamental gardens are weeded out by volunteers. There is, however, no shortage of non-native trees including Colorado spruce, Scots pine and Northern catalpa.
Grenadier Pond
Grenadier Pond is a large body of water in size, located on the western edge of the park. It is named after the local Town of York garrison of the 1800s and their use of the pond for fishing. There are two local myths circulating about the pond. One is that British Grenadiers fell through its thin ice when crossing to defend the city in the War of 1812. However the Grenadier Guards were not stationed at Fort York at this time, but rather the 8th (The King's) Regiment of Foot which are not linked to the Grenadier name. It is worth noting that most British infantry regiments grouped the largest and strongest men together during this period to form units of 'Grenadiers', who would form on the right flank of their parent regiment. Other myths include that the pond is 'bottomless', that is, its depth cannot be measured due to the amount of mud. Fishing remains a popular pastime. Largemouth bass, black crappie, yellow perch, pumpkinseed, bluegill, brown bullhead and carp sport fish are present in the pond. Fish caught in the pond are safe to eat, and fishing derbies and casting contests have been held there.
Initiatives have been made to improve the pond's health and environment. Grenadier Pond receives some of its water from Wendigo Creek (a small creek that began near Dundas Street West and Law Street and ran down to a sandbar to Lake Ontario) to Wendigo Pond and underground streams feeding it from the north. The northern end of the Pond was naturalized, building a wetland to filter the waters the Pond receives from the stream. The southern and south-western shore of the pond was also naturalized, removing the manicured lawn and concrete bank to improve the Pond's health and discourage Canada geese. Signs now ask people not to feed the waterfowl. Grenadier Pond is home to multiple species of bird and marsh wildlife. The pond exits out to Lake Ontario via pipes near Sir Casimir Gzowski Park, replacing the natural sandbar that existed for Wendigo Creek. Alongside its eastern shore are to be found High Park's hillside gardens and a grove of cherry trees.
At its northern end is a remnant of Wendigo Creek, Wendigo Pond and a children's playground. The creek, pond and Wendigo Way are likely named after the wendigo, mythical cannibalistic creatures of Algonquian mythology. Algonquins did not have a settlement in the park, but are believed to have used it for hunting and fishing and cultivating corn on the sandy uplands of the park. The ravine extending north along the creek at one time extended north of the park, past Bloor Street. The ravine was filled in to provide for an extension of Bloor Street, and for housing development north of the park.
History
In 1836, John George Howard purchased a property in the County of York, to the west of Toronto, for a sheep farm, at the cost of $1,000. It was here that Howard designed and built Colborne Lodge, a Regency-style cottage in 1837 to complement its natural surroundings as the residence for himself and his wife Jemima Frances Meikle.
In 1854, the railway first came to the south of the Howard estate. Howard sold a strip of land approximately along the southern edge of the property to Hamilton and Toronto Railway Company (Great Western Railway) for £300. The sand bar separating Grenadier Pond from Lake Ontario was filled in to support the rails. An outlet weir was installed to control water levels. In 1891, a further strip was sold to the Grand Trunk Railway for .
After a successful career as architect, engineer and land surveyor to the City of Toronto, Howard retired here in 1855. In 1873, Howard and his wife agreed to convey their country property of to the City of Toronto. There were several conditions to the conveyance, including that the Howards continue to live at their residence, no alcohol ever be served in the park, and that the city hold the park "for the free use, benefit and enjoyment of the Citizens of Toronto for ever and to be called and designated at all times thereafter High Park". The City also had to pay a down payment and an annual $1,200 pension to the Howards as long as either of them lived. The city council voted 13 to 2 to accept the Howard's conditions. The two dissenters felt the park was too far away from the city to be of any use to its citizens. At the time, direct access to the Howard property was only by boat, the Great Western Railway line to the south or a toll road. Soon afterward the "Road to High Park" was built from the Lake Road to the park lands, today's Spring Road and Centre Road.
In 1876, a portion of the Howard's property formed the original park, along with bought from Percival Ridout east of the Howard farm. The remaining southern of Howard's property, including Colborne Lodge, passed to the city after John Howard's death in 1890. The Howards are buried in High Park, under a stone monument that is fronted by a portion of ornate fencing from St. Paul's Cathedral in London, England, across the street from Colborne Lodge. Today, Colborne Lodge is a museum containing many of the original Howard furnishings and a collection of Howard's watercolours of early Toronto. The museum is open year-round.
The western section of High Park, including Grenadier Pond was privately owned by the Ellis family (headed by John Ellis), after which Ellis Avenue is named. The Ellis family sold the land to the Chapman family (Wilma Chapman), which used Grenadier Pond for ice-making under the brand name of the Grenadier Ice Company from the 1880s. After the development of artificial ice-making and modern refrigerators, ice-making from Grenadier Pond ceased around 1920 (operations moved to a Lake Simcoe location under Alfred H. Chapman, Toronto architect who inherited the family business after his father's death) The Grenadier Ice Company was located south of Grenadier Pond, east of Ellis Avenue. In 1930, the Chapmans sold , including the pond, to the City for $150,000.
The High Park Forest School was opened in 1915 on two acres at Colborne Lodge Road at Spring Road. The public school was for children of "low vitality" and emphasized physical activity over academics and often held classes outdoors. After the 1960s, the building was used by various organizations and was vacated in 2013. In 2015, High Park Nature Centre moved into the building.
In 1921, graves were found northwest of Grenadier Pond on the sandy ridge, during the course of road construction near Harcroft and Olympus Avenue, then the Harcroft Bird Sanctuary of architect J. A. Harvey. Eight skeletons were found in the sitting position in red sand below a huge stump. Other, smaller skeletons were found nearby. The human remains were dated to between 2,500 BC to 800 AD, indicating some sort of indigenous peoples' presence at High Park. The remains were coated in hematite red powdery substance in the custom of the Red Paint People who lived in New England and Atlantic Canada. The site is also similar to the Red Ocher people indigenous people who made burials in sandy ridges.
of High Park was later given to Metro Transportation when The Queensway was built in the early 1950s. This was in contravention of stipulations by original High Park owner John Howard that the lands be used for parkland only. Metro officials searched for descendants of Howard to obtain their consent.
The park was known as a location for clandestine meetings of homosexuals in the days before the decriminalization of homosexuality in Canada in the 1960s. Its reputation as a meeting place persisted for decades afterward. In 1985, a group of five young teenage boys from Toronto suburbs went to High Park and beat to death a 40-year-old male librarian.
In 1993, the High Park Citizens' Advisory Committee was founded as a volunteer group to aid the City of Toronto in the stewardship of the park. The group was renamed the High Park Community Advisory Council in 2003. The group and its offshoots have developed various programs and initiatives for the park, including the Volunteer Stewardship Program, which is involved in preserving and protecting the environment of the park. The group is active in promoting the natural plant species in the park, and volunteers regularly remove invasive non-native species.
According to the Taiaiako'n Historical Preservation Society, there are 57 ancient indigenous peoples' burial mounds in the park. In May 2011, one such location was occupied by the Society. The site, a small hill known as "Snake Mound" on the west bank of Lower Duck Pond, had been eroded by illegal BMX bike use. The society, in cooperation with the City of Toronto, cordoned off the location and worked to restore the site, fixing the erosion, and removing the bike ramps present. At first, a replacement BMX bike park was suggested for the parking lot at the south end of Spring Road, but public opposition led the bike facility to be built south of the railway, on land that was infilled in the 1920s as part of the Sunnyside park development. A mound north of Grenadier Restaurant, known as "Bear Mound", is believed by the Society to also be an ancient burial mound, although an assessment done for the City concluded otherwise.
In 2012, Toronto City Council, in a round of cuts to city services, voted to discontinue supporting the High Park Zoo and seek alternative funding. The zoo cost over annually to operate and was operated by the city's Park and Recreations Department. An organization, "Friends of the High Park Zoo", was formed to fundraise and seek other sponsors for the zoo. In April 2012, the organization was successful in finding a sponsor (the Honey Family Foundation) while the organization develops a permanent source of funding. The sponsor will match public donations for the next three years.
Points of interest
The park includes several points of interest, including Colborne Lodge historical museum, the hillside gardens, the zoo, the Grenadier Cafe and the amphitheatre. The park also has sports fields, a hockey rink, a pool, tennis courts, playgrounds, nature trails and picnic areas.
From spring to fall, a "trackless train"—a tractor that tows several wagons decorated to look like a red and white train—is operated, making a tour of the park every 30 minutes. The train stops near Bloor Street, the north-western playground, west of the Grenadier Cafe, at Grenadier Pond, south of Colborne Lodge and at the Bell playground. Tickets for the train are purchased from the train's conductor.
Colborne Lodge
Colborne Lodge is a historical museum located in an 1836 home built by John George Howard, an architect, engineer, and prominent Toronto citizen who was the first land-owner of High Park. Howard built this house, to house himself and his wife Jemima Frances Meikle. The lodge became the property of the city following his death in 1890. It is perched on the top of a hill overlooking Lake Ontario.
Across the street from the lodge is Howard's tomb, a cairn monument of Howard and his wife. The fence gate for the cairn is originally from St Paul's Cathedral in London, England. It dates from 1714, designed by Christopher Wren. Howard had it shipped from London in 1875.
Gardens
On the hill to the east of Grenadier Pond, extending up to Colborne Lodge Road, is a landscaped ornamental garden area known as "Hillside Gardens". There is a rock garden extending from the top of the hill near Grenadier Cafe, extending south-west nearly to the pond shore. Along Colborne Lodge Road is a hanging garden and ornamental garden with fountains, the 'sunken gardens.' At the bottom of the hill, nearly at the shoreline is a large maple leaf-shaped flower bed, visible from the top of the hill. The area was a tobogganing area in the early 1900s. Toboggan-runs were constructed from the top of the hill extending down to the pond's ice surface. Wedding photography is no longer permitted in the hillside gardens area.
North of Colborne Lodge is the High Park Children's Garden. It offers programs for schools in the fall and spring, and day camps during the summer for children to learn about growing plants and Toronto parks. The Children's Garden and Colborne Lodge hold an annual 'Harvest Festival' in the fall. It includes craft activities, pumpkin-decorating, gardening displays, traditional games, and rides on horse-drawn wagons.
North-east of the Grenadier Cafe are High Park's 109 allotment gardens. To the east, south of Centre Road, are the High Park greenhouses. Since 1956, the High Park greenhouses have produced millions of annuals and perennials for Toronto's park system. The nine interconnected greenhouses provide a view into the way the plants are grown and distributed across the city. The greenhouses are not normally open to the public, but are occasionally opened to tours.
Further north, around the High Park Forest School, are several examples of outdoor sculpture in the former sculpture garden. The sculptures were commissioned and placed around the area for a 1967 international symposium. Several of the sculptures are placed within the forested area. Since the symposium, several sculptures were relocated to other Toronto locations. One was relocated to Corktown Common and another to Iceboat Terrace, west of Spadina Avenue.
Cherry trees
There are several plantings of Japanese cherry trees in the park, attracting thousands of visitors every year from late April to early May. The main planting is a grove of trees along a roadway originating near Grenadier Cafe, leading down to Grenadier Pond. The other plantings are along West Road, the shore of the pond and west of the Jamie Bell playground. In 1959, the first Japanese Somei-Yoshino Cherry Tree was planted in High Park, a gift from the citizens of Tokyo. A plaque marks the spot in 1959 where the trees were presented by the Japanese ambassador to Toronto mayor Nathan Phillips. In all, over 2000 cherry trees were donated to Toronto.
Another 34 cherry trees were donated to High Park in 2001 from the Sakura project. These were planted around the Maple Leaf garden on the eastern shore of the pond. In 2006, a further 16 were planted in the park. In March 2019, Sakura in High Park indicated that following a brutal winter season, some trees showed signs of damage, however, many showed healthy, growing buds. The amount of visitors has necessitated the closure of the park to automobile traffic during the blooming period.
Grenadier Cafe
A 300-seat restaurant and outdoor patio area is located in the centre of the park at the intersection of West Road and Colborne Lodge Road. The restaurant opened in May 1958 as a dining room and coffee shop, known as The Grenadier. The outdoor patio area was added later. Due to the condition in the Howards' conveyance forbidding the consumption of alcohol in the park, High Park is the last "dry" area of the City of Toronto, and the Cafe restaurant and banquet hall is not licensed to serve alcohol. The restaurant is owned by the City of Toronto, and privately operated under contract by the Grenadier Group.
An outdoor organic produce market operates during the summer weekends. Twice a year, plant sales are held at the Cafe of plants native to the park to raise money for conservation activities. The plants are native to High Park and Ontario and cultivation of the plants is encouraged to preserve the species. The Cafe is also used for community meetings.
A labyrinth, based on the Chartres pattern, is located north of the cafe, marked onto a concrete circle formerly used for a picnic shelter. It was installed in 2004.
High Park Nature Centre
The High Park Nature Centre, located in the Forest School building, offers year-round outdoor and indoor programming to learn about nature. It has programs for parents and babies, school-aged children as well as family walks and adult workshops and lectures. A number of programmes with volunteers undertake stewardship activities in High Park to preserve native plant species, including the yearly removal of invasive species such as buckthorn. The Centre also organizes nature walks in the park. In 2016, over 12,000 visitors people took part in High Park Nature Centre programming.
The Centre is operated by High Park Initiatives, a registered non-profit organization. The High Park Nature Centre was awarded an Ontario Trillium Foundation grant in 2014, allowing for the purchase of furnishings to equip the much larger Forest School space and also to expand programming. Recently, an Outdoor Urban Restoration Space (OURSpace) was developed with the assistance of a Weston Parks Challenge Grant. The Centre was established in 1999.
High Park Zoo
High Park Zoo is a small collection of animals along Deer Pen Road, which rises from the eastern ravine up to the plateau near the Grenadier Restaurant. The zoo keeps American bison, Barbary sheep, capybaras, emus, Highland cattle, llamas, mouflon, peacocks, reindeer, wallabies and yaks in eleven paddocks. The zoo is open year-round from 7:00 a.m. to dusk. On weekends from March to October, the llama pen is open for visitors to feed and pet the llamas. Chickens and rabbits are also kept for children to interact with at the same time as the llama visits.
The zoo animals are cared for by Toronto Parks, Forestry and Recreation Division staff and Friends of High Park Zoo volunteers. The zoo's budget is partly paid for by volunteer donations to donation boxes located along the zoo and online donations that are matched by charitable foundations. Friends of High Park Zoo was formed after Toronto City Council voted to cancel funding for the zoo in 2012. The organization has announced a master plan of improvements it hopes to make to the zoo.
The practice of keeping animals in the park originated in 1893, with the keeping of deer. The zoo received international media coverage in 2015 when a peacock escaped and was at large in the surrounding neighbourhood for several weeks before returning on its own to the zoo.
Capybaras
A pair of capybaras kept at the zoo escaped in May 2016. After initial efforts to capture them were unsuccessful, sightings of capybaras were reported all over the city. On June 6, the capybaras were still at large, and a Twitter account was created in their honour. On June 12, one was re-captured. On June 28, the second capybara was re-captured. Due to their exploits, the two were nicknamed Bonnie and Clyde. In 2017, the pair became parents to three baby pups. The three pups were named Geddy, Alex and Neil, after the members of the Toronto rock group Rush.
Shakespeare in High Park
During the summer months, the Canadian Stage Company puts on selected Shakespearean plays in the park's amphitheatre. The amphitheatre is on the hill side directly to the east of the Grenadier Cafe and seats a few hundred people. The annual event is called "Shakespeare in High Park" and is popular with Torontonians.
Recreation
There are two main children's playgrounds in High Park. There is a playground in the northwest quadrant with a wading pool, picnic areas and snack bar. In a hollow in the south-east corner of the park, an 'adventure playground' for children was assembled by volunteers in 1999. It consists of wooden play structures with a "castle" theme, plus some swings. The playground is named after Jamie Bell, a volunteer who initially pioneered the idea. In March 2012, a portion of the wooden play structures was burned down in an act of arson. A new castle, created by Mike Holmes and landscape architect Janet Rosenberg, was rebuilt on the weekend of July 7–8, 2012 by volunteers. Another small play area is in the ravine just north of Grenadier Pond.
Dogs are welcome in the park. There is a large "off-leash" area to the north-east of the Grenadier Cafe. In the rest of the park, dogs must remain on-leash.
There are unpaved dirt trails throughout High Park that are for hikers and walkers only. Cycling is prohibited (by law) on unpaved trails and roads in the park to prevent erosion and disturbance. Several of the former roadways within the park have been closed to automotive traffic, but are still accessible to pedestrians and cyclists. In the winter, the hiking paths are maintained for cross-country skiing and snowshoeing.
A municipal swimming complex is open during the summertime, with a water slide, a splash pad and a shallow wading area. , there is no admittance fee for its use. The pool is supervised by lifeguards.
Skating on Grenadier Pond was banned by the Toronto Parks Department starting in 2001, but it remained a favourite skating location for Torontonians in the west end of the city for skating and shinny. In the past, the "old" City of Toronto flooded the surface from holes drilled in the ice and cleared areas for rinks. In 2015, Toronto City Council voted to fund a $25,000 ice monitoring program and legalize skating again. A record cold winter in 2015 had seen many people skating on the ice despite bylaw officers attempting to write $125 tickets. Ice conditions are now monitored annually by the City of Toronto Parks and Recreation staff and the ice condition posted on the City of Toronto's website. Grenadier Pond is the only open body of water on which skating is permitted by the City of Toronto.
Tobogganing used to be a popular pastime in the park. It is only done now at the hill at Howard Park Avenue and Parkside Drive. Several toboggan runs existed in the past in the hillside gardens area, and the "bowl" at the bottom of an old toboggan run still exists just east of Grenadier Pond, to the north-west of Grenadier Cafe, for a run that started at West Road and ended at the bowl next to the pond. The run is no longer used and trees block the run.
Sports facilities
In the central area of the park, there are two soccer fields and three baseball diamonds available for organized play. One of the baseball diamonds is home to the High Park baseball organization, providing "Little League" organized baseball programs for children. The smallest diamond is for T-Ball play and the larger field behind the little league diamond is for older players. Next to the little league diamond is the High Park swimming pool. In the winter, an ice hockey ice rink is operated to the north of High Park Pool. The rink was refurbished in 2009 after donations by the Toronto Maple Leafs and retailer The Home Depot.
There are several tennis courts in two separate locations. There are concrete courts along Colborne Lodge Road, to the north of the Pool, operated by the High Park Tennis Club. Along Parkside Drive, between Howard Park Avenue and Bloor Street, is a set of tennis courts and a club house, operated by the Howard Park Tennis Club.
High Park was used for cycling events for the 2017 Invictus Games, replacing Toronto Islands which was still recovering from flooding during the spring and summer.
Friends of the Park
The Volunteer Stewardship Program (VSP) is a volunteer group working with City of Toronto Urban Forestry and Horticulture staff, to protect and restore the remaining natural areas of High Park including large areas of Savannah with Black Oak trees and related flora and fauna. Spring, summer and fall activities include planting, collecting seeds, and removing invasive species from restoration sites. There are educational presentations and some greenhouse work in winter. The High Park Natural Environment Committee volunteer committee advises the city on environmental issues in the park. The groups have developed a web site highparknature.org with extensive information about High Park.
Surrounding neighbourhoods
High Park also lends its name to two neighbourhood names used by the City of Toronto, "High Park–Swansea" and "High Park North" adjoining the Park. High Park-Swansea encompasses the area west of Roncesvalles Avenue, to Bloor Street on the north, and the Humber River on the west, which includes High Park itself. High Park North encompasses the area to the east of Runnymede Road, north of Bloor Street, north to Annette Street and Humberside Avenue, and east to the CNR/CPR railway lines east of Dundas Street.
High Park North is within the boundaries of the former town of West Toronto Junction. These areas were developed in the decades following 1900 and are mainly detached or semi-detached homes. North of High Park, the area has seen extensive developer activity, including several large apartment towers. Residents to the north and east of the park normally call their neighbourhood High Park.
To the west is Swansea, which was once a village based around a metal works. To the south of High Park is the Sunnyside shoreline on Lake Ontario. Along the lake are beaches, several playgrounds, wading pools, Gus Ryder Pool and Sunnyside Bathing Pavilion. The area east of High Park, and south of Bloor Street, is also known as Roncesvalles.
Monuments and sculptures
Monument to John G. and Jemima Howard, benefactors of the park
Lesya Ukrainka monument, Mykhailo Chereshniovsky, 1975
Portuguese stone cross (padrão), 25th Anniversary of the Portuguese Community in Canada 1953 to 1978, 1978
In 1967, an area east of Colborne Lodge Road, south of Bloor Street, was the site of the Toronto International Sculpture Symposium and had numerous sculptures installed. Five of the original ten permanent pieces remain in High Park:
The Hippie, William Koochin, 1967
Midsummer Night's Dream, Wessel Couzijn, 1967
November Pyramid, Bernard Schottlander, 1967
The Temple, Hubert Dalwood, 1967
Three Discs, Menashe Kadishman, 1967
In popular media
High Park is one of the central settings in the 2015 prize-winning novel Fifteen Dogs by Canadian novelist, André Alexis.
Access
High Park is accessible by TTC:
The High Park and Keele subway stations on the Bloor–Danforth subway line
The 501 streetcar, 506 streetcar and 80 Queensway bus routes
The 203 High Park bus loops inside the park from Victoria Day to Labour Day
Automobile access is allowed to most of the park, although several roads are closed to vehicular traffic. Parking lots exist at the Bell playground and zoo, at Colborne Lodge, at Grenadier Cafe, High Park pool and the north-western children's playground, as well as along some roads. On Sundays in summer, the roads are closed to traffic. Colborne Lodge Road does not allow through traffic from The Queensway beyond the parking lot for the lodge.
People can walk or bicycle to the park along roads and streets and enter from the neighbourhood. They can take the Martin Goodman Trail along Lake Ontario to points south of the park.
See also
List of Toronto parks
Riverdale Farm
Toronto Zoo
References
External links
Map of High Park in (PDF)
High Park Community Advisory Council
Highparknature.org - Natural Environment Committee and VSP website about High Park
High Park Nature Centre
Parks in Toronto
1876 establishments in Ontario
Nature centres in Ontario
Zoos in Ontario
First Nations history in Ontario
First Nations sites in Toronto
Areas of Natural and Scientific Interest
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord%20Vetinari
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Lord Vetinari
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Lord Havelock Vetinari, Lord Patrician (Primus inter pares) of the city-state of Ankh-Morpork, is a fictional character in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. Vetinari has written an unpublished manuscript known as The Servant, the Discworld version of The Prince by the Italian statesman and diplomat Niccolò Machiavelli.
Fictional biography
Early years
Lord Vetinari was born into the extremely powerful Vetinari family (a pun on the real-life family of the Medici and on the word "veterinary") and raised by his aunt, Lady Roberta Meserole.
As a youth, he enrolled in the Assassins' Guild which, apart from teaching its students how to kill other people for money, also gives them an excellent academic education. Lord Vetinari was particularly interested in the classical arts and, in flagrant defiance of the Guild's conventions of style, camouflage, though he failed his stealth examination (due to the examiner's belief that he had never attended any of his classes). However, Lord Vetinari claimed that he religiously attended his classes, pointing out that in a class on an inherently discreet occupation, he was the only student that wasn't visibly present. Because of the similarity his name bore to "veterinary", he endured the nickname of Dog-botherer (cf. god-botherer). Vetinari graduated from the Guild with exceptional marks, scoring disconcertingly high in attention to detail. It is also mentioned that he studied languages; in Jingo he translates Klatchian for Sergeant Colon, although he flatly denies being able to speak it.
In his late teens, Vetinari was involved in the "Glorious 25th of May" (Night Watch), to which his most notable contribution was the non-assassination of the then-Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, Homicidal Lord Winder, at a crowded party. Vetinari was present at Winder's death, but although he certainly intended to assassinate Winder, his mere arrival was enough to frighten Winder to death. Vetinari was able to drop his bloodless sword beside Winder's corpse, unused, and leave – all seemingly unobserved by anyone in the room, save Winder (though it was hinted that the party was arranged for the very purpose of facilitating the occasion of Winder's assassination). Vetinari appeared in full Assassin regalia, which Winder regarded as something out of a nightmare. When asked (as was traditional) about who he is and who sent him, he replies, respectively, 'Think of me as...your future' and 'I come from the city' showing that he already has the concern for the city's welfare he later shows.
Later, he fought alongside the remnants of the Night Watch commanded, for want of better, by Sergeant-at-Arms Samuel Vimes (who had travelled backwards through time and was at time going by the name "John Keel", having to serve as mentor to his younger self, who was already serving as a probationary Constable; the real John Keel had been murdered by Carcer Dunn, a criminal who was also thrust backwards through time along with Vimes) against the remnants of the Cable Street Particulars (colloquially known as the Unmentionables), the late Lord Winder's secret police. The effect "Keel" has on Vetinari and the events of 25 May clearly shape Vetinari's views on the effective way of running the city (which had helped shape Vimes').
Vetinari later journeyed to Überwald on what is known as the Grand Sneer (a parody of Grand Tour); travels of the younger members of rich families to backward areas to see at first hand how inferior they are. There he met the vampire Lady Margolotta. It is implied that the two had some kind of relationship, and stated more clearly that he taught her a lot of what she knows, and vice versa. It was also there that he learnt about the nature of evil after witnessing a mother otter and its pups feeding on a salmon and its roes (Unseen Academicals).
Rise to power
Lord Vetinari succeeded Mad Lord Snapcase, who had been as mad as the name suggests. One of Vetinari's earliest actions and a sample of his way of running the city was to legalize Guilds such as those of the Thieves and the "Seamstresses", which had been active-but-outlawed for years. Their leaders became esteemed members of society and their members insured and licensed. Vetinari also made it clear to them that he knew everything about them, right down to where their wives had their hair done, and where their children played. Therefore, the Guilds did what he asked of them, and eventually, crime was not so much 'eliminated' as organized. Nowadays, for a modest fee, an Ankh-Morpork citizen may walk the streets confident that he will not be mugged more than a few times per year, and will always receive a receipt.
Vetinari's golden rule
Lord Vetinari's political philosophy can be summed up by his belief that what people wish for most is not good government, or even justice, but merely for things to stay the same; the Vetinari family motto is, after all, Si non confectus, non reficiat ("If it ain't broke, don't fix it"). This does not mean that there are absolutely no changes; however, things that don't work are fixed very quickly, even if it does not look like they are at first. In Soul Music, Mr. Clete expresses a belief that "things that didn't work ... got broken". Perhaps in conjunction with this, Vetinari has an interest in keeping things in smooth, simple working order. For example, Vetinari still maintains an ancient department of the Ankh-Morpork government responsible for ensuring all figures of speech have a basis in fact, on the basis that people who seek this kind of employment must be kept busy, or else they just might do anything.
Despite being technically a dictator, Lord Vetinari does not exercise the despotic rule that characterised some of his predecessors. Vetinari is the archetype of a benevolent dictator, in a chilly, inscrutable way. In The Truth, he permits the emergence of a free press, and has rarely, if ever, been known to have innocent people just dragged off to dungeons without a trial: The notable exception to this rule are mime artists, whom Vetinari despises. Vetinari banned all mime performances from Ankh-Morpork shortly after taking power. Mime artists who violate the ban usually find themselves hanging upside down in Vetinari's scorpion pit while reading a sign saying, "Learn the Words". This tyrannical 'quirk' has been met with either indifference or approval by average Ankh-Morpork citizens.
Morporkians are in no doubt that Vetinari is firmly in charge of the city; the political system of Ankh-Morpork is described as "One Man, One Vote," in which Vetinari alone is the Man, and he has the Vote. In Going Postal, while Vetinari could have ordered an investigation of the Grand Trunk company and their financial endeavours at any time, he did not do so until public opinion allowed it, and only then did he proclaim his right as a "tyrant" to launch such an inquiry. Also, in Making Money, he first appears to avoid meddling in the affairs of private business, but suddenly exercises his executive power in closing several prominent banks for audit at the end of the novel. Vetinari is broadly tolerant of individual rights, but highly intolerant of people who place their own interests above those of the city. Beyond this, he arranges for useful but problematical people to "vanish" in one fashion or another. Leonard of Quirm (the Discworld's Leonardo da Vinci) "vanished" and spends his time in an airy attic of the palace, quite happy to continue to invent in solitude and occasionally assisting when the City requires his genius (e.g. during the events of Jingo and The Last Hero). He also recruits condemned criminals with useful skills and traits, arranging for their hanging by an expert hangman who knows exactly how much rope to give a man for them to survive and be enlisted for the good of the city. These are generally offered the choice to work for the city using their unique skills or the "Freedom to take the Consequences". In Going Postal, both Moist von Lipwig and Reacher Gilt were offered the chance to work for the city, but while von Lipwig accepted and was tasked with resurrecting the Postal Service, Reacher Gilt decided to choose the "freedom" of a door which turned out, when chosen, to open into a deep pit. In Making Money, Vetinari similarly enlists the services of a remarkably skilled forger Owlswick Jenkins in the designing of unforgeable banknotes, although this was complicated when von Lipwig broke Jenkins out of prison for the same purpose.
Staying in power
While he is just as unpopular as those that came before him, Lord Vetinari is very much sane, of sound mind and judgment, and very much still alive. He has achieved this by ensuring that even though all power-wielding groups in the city dislike him, they dislike each other even more. He also carefully arranges matters so that a reality which includes him as Patrician is slightly better than one which does not, with the result being that there are only two people who may potentially benefit from his death: Carrot Ironfoundersson and Samuel Vimes who are claimants to the extant throne of Ankh along with their associates, on the grounds that they would be 'on top of the pile' if the city collapsed, as the city's rightful heir to the throne and the highest ranking noble respectively. Carrot Ironfoundersson and Samuel Vimes are the captain and commander of the City Watch, and hence are opposed to any kind of coup as part of their dedication to the rule of law. Ironfoundersson is noted by Vimes to be one of the few people who actually likes the Patrician, and Vimes, while adamant that he doesn't, shares the dedication to the city felt by Vetinari and Ironfoundersson. The Assassins' Guild no longer accepts contracts on the Patrician – he is the only person besides Samuel Vimes to have been taken off the register. He had the highest "official" price for a living being ever: 1 Million Ankh-Morpork Dollars" (Men at Arms).
In Thud!, his rule of the city is likened to a room full of tension, with people bickering and shouting at one another, and "in the middle of it all, one man, quietly doing his own thing".
Other reasons for the Patrician's continued rule include his mastery of diplomacy and manipulation, his distant and menacing air, his ever-present calmness and composure (which, ironically, make other people ill at ease), and his skills as an Assassin; in The Truth, another character relates that "Vetinari moved like a snake".
Additionally, Vetinari organizes grassroots resistance to himself, enabling him to ensure that all plots against him fail, and that the various groups are constantly quarrelling with each other.
Vetinari has created (or at least continued, though he denies it) the use of a team of clerks, sometimes called the 'Dark Clerks', who bring him information on just about everything; they serve, among other functions, as accountants, forensic auditors, and a domestic intelligence service.
Vetinari's rule over the city seems to be cemented by the general acknowledgement that very little goes on in the city that Vetinari does not know about. Thus, when a visitor stands in audience with the Patrician, they can be assured that Vetinari knows exactly why they're there, even if the visitor does not.
Deposition and restoration
Several attempts have been made on Vetinari's life or position; strangely enough, he seems to be involved in most of them. Shortly after his ascent to office, he was briefly turned into a lizard by a wizard under the influence of a Sourcerer. He was deposed for a time in favour of a pretender king and subsequently a summoned dragon (Guards! Guards!) and locked up in his own dungeons from which he is able to escape at his leisure.
As seen by Vimes, the door to his cell is very large and heavy, and is absolutely covered in bars, bolts and locks – on the inside. All that is found on the outside is a single lock, a key to which Vetinari had hidden in the cell. He has two mottos a ruler should remember when building dungeons: "Never build a dungeon you wouldn't want to spend the night in yourself", and, "Never build a dungeon you can't get out of".
The collection of sentient, loyal rats with access to the dungeons, and much of the palace itself, provides a well-secured backup escape plan; during a conflict with the palace's snake and scorpion populations Vetinari provided them with military advice, allowing them to become the palace's dominant vermin.
He is shot in the leg with a gonne and walks with an ebony cane (Men at Arms). It is rumoured that the cane held a sword that was made of iron from the blood of a thousand men, but this is revealed to be false (Making Money); as he says to Moist; "Oh, really. Do I look like a 'sword made of the blood of a thousand men' ruler?"
A year after the events of Men at Arms, he is poisoned with arsenic, which he inhales from the smoke of poisoned candles (Feet of Clay). Characteristically, he had caught-on to the ploy, but continued to fake both the symptoms and the evidence of it until the City Watch found out, cutting up the candle to give the impression that it had been burning all night, thus exposing the conspiracy behind the method.
During the brief war with Klatch, Vetinari unexpectedly surrenders unconditionally to martial law. When the island which is both the cause of controversy and the location set for the signing of the surrender treaty sinks into the ocean (again), all the terms of surrender are called off and the Klatchian leader loses face (and his throne), which was Vetinari's plan all along. He ends up being congratulated instead of being deposed and exiled (Jingo).
Some time later, Vetinari is framed for assault (on Drumknott) and theft from the city treasury. Again, he comes a hair's breadth from being deposed (The Truth). He is 'arrested' by his own Commander of the Watch (Samuel Vimes) for attempted murder, and spends part of the book incarcerated (although it is implied that this was done to keep Vetinari safe until the ultimate culprit was found, Commander Vimes suspecting something suspicious about the entire scenario), feigning unconsciousness throughout the main events, only to 'come to' once the mystery was solved. William de Worde works out that it was a plot using a body double for Vetinari. He first becomes suspicious when it occurs to him that if Vetinari had wanted Drumknott dead, Drumknott would undoubtedly be dead.
There have also been numerous attempts on his life by assassins retained by other parties; the universal failure of these attempts (as well as the insight that the city ruled by him is slightly better than it is without him) leads to the Assassins Guild's refusal to accept further contracts on Vetinari (Night Watch).
Notable events during Vetinari's rule
Vetinari has seen Ankh-Morpork through many unusual events, including the appearance of a Sourcerer (Sourcery), a dragon (Guards! Guards!), a near-civil war (Men at Arms), plus one actual war (Jingo) and an attempt to destroy the Discworld (The Last Hero), as well as the metaphysical crises of Moving Pictures, Music With Rocks In (Soul Music), superfluous life force and belief (Reaper Man, Hogfather), and one major temporal shatter (Thief of Time). It is unclear whether even the well-informed Vetinari was aware of the last.
Vetinari has encouraged the growth of the Guilds and public services. The Ankh-Morpork City Watch in particular has flourished, and is an excellent example of the adaptability which has kept Vetinari in office. At the time he rises to power, the Night Watch consists of three incompetents led by a drunk, just how he then wanted it (incapable of fighting crime, which was being efficiently controlled by the government-approved Thieves and Assassins Guilds). The group evolves into a large, efficient, well-oiled machine that facilitates the smooth operation of the city, and that appears to be just how he wants it. It is observed to him on one occasion that if Vimes (and presumably Vimes' Guards) did not exist, he would have had to invent him; to which he responds "You know, ... I rather think I did" (Feet of Clay).
Ankh-Morpork has given birth to the first newspaper, the Ankh-Morpork Times (The Truth), while the Grand Trunk Clacks Company established the first efficient international communication service from its headquarters there (The Fifth Elephant).
More recently, he has put into place Moist von Lipwig, who revamps the postal service without costing the taxpayers anything (Going Postal). During this, he invents stamps, which are the closest thing Ankh-Morpork had to banknotes until said form of currency makes its debut in Making Money (again by von Lipwig).
At some point between Thud! and Making Money, Vetinari begins planning for a phenomenal redevelopment project of Ankh Morpork titled 'The Undertaking' – this seems to have been inspired by the discovery in Thud! of an ancient perpetual motion engine – a twin of one which according to Carrot Ironfoundersson powers all of the machinery in one of the largest mines in Uberwald. Rumours around the Undertaking include mention of 'underground streets', 'waterproof tunnels' and 'new docks'.
Appearance, habits and miscellaneous
Currently in his late forties/early fifties (Sam Vimes noted in Feet of Clay that the Patrician was about the same age as he was, and it is shown in Night Watch that he was a licensed student Assassin, making him 17 at the time of the main events of the book, when Vimes was 16), Lord Vetinari is tall, thin and dresses all in dusty black, including a black skullcap. In Reaper Man, Mustrum Ridcully likens his appearance to a predatory flamingo, if one existed.
His family coat of arms is a plain, simple sable shield, and therefore does not show up against the black coach in which Vetinari travels – black on black (upon which Moist von Lipwig in Going Postal comments that "you had to admit that the bastard had style"). His family motto is Si non confectus, non reficiat (If it ain't broke, don't fix it).
Lord Vetinari lives and works in the Patrician's Palace, which used to be the Royal Winter Palace. He sits on a plain wooden chair at the feet of the Golden Throne of Ankh (much like the Steward of Gondor in The Lord of the Rings). The Throne remains untouched despite being allegedly made of gold, but Vetinari reveals to Captain Carrot that it is actually merely gold foil over rotten-through wood.
He accepts interviews in the Oblong Office (a reference to the White House's Oval Office). Notably he does not request, or even demand the presence of any of his citizens, but merely has them informed that they "have an appointment with him", and they are promptly escorted to said appointment. When Vetinari considers the meeting ended, he usually dismisses his visitors with the phrase "don't let me detain you", the inherent implication being that he just might if they let him.
He holds meetings in the Rats Chamber, so named because of its fresco of dancing rats on the ceiling (a play on the Star Chamber and the German Ratskammer, which translates as 'council chamber'). Occupants report that spending any time in the room makes one want to leave and go have a good long bath.
His bedroom is spartan; containing little more than a narrow bed and a few battered cupboards. He apparently requires so little sleep and gets up so early that going to bed is merely an excuse to change his clothes ("He has a bedroom. He presumably sleeps" The New Discworld Companion). He is known to always be in his office at very late (or perhaps early) hours, apparently just coinciding with when someone wishes to see him and he wishes to see them. He is not often described as sleeping (exceptions are in Jingo and The Truth), although he has been unconscious several times.
He has one known relative (Lady Roberta "Bobbi" Meserole, his aunt) who may come from Genua and lives in Pseudopolis. She appears to share his forté for subtle politics. His father apparently died while Havelock was still young, and, according to his aunt, took things much less seriously than his son does.
Vetinari has no lust for power; though he freely admits that he is a tyrant like his predecessors, he has skilfully arranged matters to ensure that the public prefers his particular form of tyranny over any other. The sole reason for his ruling the city is that he is fiercely loyal to it, although it is also at times been implied that he does it because it amuses him to do so, in the sense that he enjoys outwitting all the people who try to oppose him. He also has no exploitable vices, barring a strange fondness for candied jellyfish – mentioned in the early books but believed by some to be referring to a previous Patrician (see Bibliography). Compared to the previous Patricians of the city, Vetinari appears to be remarkably normal. The only exception to this is his pathological hatred of street mime artists, but this is largely seen as an acceptable quirk.
It was established in Guards!, Guards! that Vetinari can communicate with the palace rats. These rats have sentience because of the magic emanating from Unseen University. The rats are loyal to him because he provided them with military advice that, after a conflict with the snakes and scorpions that also inhabited the dungeons, allowed them to become the dominant vermin of the palace. During his imprisonment, as seen in the book, the rats have trouble with specific wording and Vetinari ends up with a book on lace-making in place of the one he desires. He takes the opportunity to learn lace construction anyway, on the principle that one never knows when such a thing may be useful.
Though he excels at the Discworld's equivalent of sudoku, Jikan no Muda (時間の無駄; literally, "Waste of Time" in Japanese), and can solve them after glancing at any grid for a few seconds, he finds them unsatisfying, as numbers are too easy to outwit. He enjoys crosswords far more, as one needs to comprehend how another person's mind works when actively trying to mislead. He has found great pleasure in the work of 'The Blind Letter Office' at the Post Office, helping to decipher the nigh-illegible gibberish that some of Ankh-Morpork's less educated citizenry address their letters with – for example working out casually that 'Duzbuns Hopsit pfarmarrsc' equals 'K. Whistler, Baker, 3 Pigsty Hill' (Does Buns Opposite the Pharmacy). The men employed for this job are successful in 'translating' five addresses out of every six, and view Vetinari's casual skill at it with something approaching awe. He is also very good at Thud, also known in the books by its Dwarvish name Hnaflbaflsniflwhifltafl (a reference to the Germanic-Scandinavian Tafl games, specifically Hnefatafl), and plays it to find his own weaknesses unlike other people (Reacher Gilt, Going Postal) who play Thud to find the opponent's weaknesses. The New Discworld Companion also mentions his mastery of Stealth Chess, a game commonly played by assassins' guild students and alumni. In Soul Music, Vetinari is mentioned as preferring to read sheet music rather than listen to music, because the idea of it being performed by people, with all the sweat and saliva involved, strikes him as distasteful.
Lord Vetinari also has a strange clock in his waiting-room. While it does keep completely accurate time overall, it sometimes ticks and tocks out of sync (example: "tick, tock ... ticktocktick, tock ...") and occasionally misses a tick or tock altogether, which has the net effect of turning one's brain "into a sort of porridge". (Feet of Clay, Going Postal). In Feet of Clay Vimes observes that it must have cost him quite a lot of money.
It has been suggested that Vetinari may not be entirely human, though this is primarily because of his methods and personality, as opposed to any sort of physical proof (although in The Fifth Elephant, Lady Margolotta was surprised at his lack of aging). Vetinari admits to being "drunk as a skunk" after a banquet at Unseen University, but continues to be startlingly lucid and eloquent, although Drumknott describes him as seeming "unusually talkative". The only discernible manifestation of his drunkenness: It takes him 15 seconds longer to solve the Ankh-Morpork Times daily crossword (Unseen Academicals).
Pets
He did keep a pet, a sixteen-year-old wire-haired terrier called Wuffles. It is said that Wuffles is the only living creature Lord Vetinari actually cares about (unless Ankh-Morpork is considered a living creature, to be thought of as "Morporkia", a nod to "Britannia"). Wuffles has been described as very elderly in two books that take place many years apart. In the novel Making Money, it is shown that Wuffles has, at some recent point, died; reinforcing Vetinari's affection for the dog is the rumour that every week he makes a short (and via a different path) walk to Wuffles' small grave in the palace grounds, every time leaving a dog biscuit, though this may be entirely untrue, or may simply be done to add a layer of apparent human weakness to those seeking one.
As of Making Money he is now caring for another dog – 'Mr. Fusspot', the former pet of the late Topsy Lavish (née Turvy), Chairwoman of the Royal Bank and Mint. Thanks to an unusual will and Topsy's contempt for her in-laws; the rest of the Lavish family, Mr. Fusspot is formally and legally the current chairman. This leads to the debate whether this gives Vetinari control of the bank and mint, since Topsy's will states the person caring for Mr. Fusspot is also the executor of 'the chairman's' wishes for both concerns. The authority rested in Moist von Lipwig, the current Master of the Mint and temporary caretaker of Mr. Fusspot before Vetinari adopted/seized/confiscated the dog. There has been concern over the quality of Vetinari's care of the dog, though no one wishes to risk raising the issue with him.
Bibliography
Lord Vetinari makes featured appearances in the Discworld novels Sourcery, Guards! Guards!, Moving Pictures, Reaper Man, Men at Arms, Feet of Clay, Jingo, Interesting Times, Soul Music, The Fifth Elephant, The Truth, The Last Hero, Going Postal, Thud!, Making Money, Unseen Academicals, Snuff and Raising Steam. Night Watch features him in his youth.
In The Colour of Magic, Rincewind is brought before "the Patrician" but it is not clear whether this Patrician is Vetinari or his predecessor, Mad Lord Snapcase, or possibly even Homicidal Lord Winder, although the description of this Patrician does not seem to tally with that of Vetinari, as the Patrician in question is, for example, described as obese – a trait his two predecessors did possess, but which he lacks. Pratchett has stated on Usenet that the Patrician in this case is indeed Vetinari, and that he simply lost weight due to the stress of his job. Upon being pressed, he admitted that the only real difference is that he has become a better writer since that time. It is also a reflection of the fact that the Discworld timeline is extremely uncertain.
Other media
Vetinari was played by Crawford Logan in the 1992 BBC Radio 4 adaptation of Guards! Guards!. In television adaptations, the character has been portrayed by several actors: Jeremy Irons in TV movie adaptation of Colour of Magic, Charles Dance in the TV movie adaptation of Going Postal, and Anna Chancellor in the television series The Watch.
Pratchett's own choice of actor to play Vetinari was Alan Rickman.
VLC media player version 3.0 was given the codename Vetinari.
Reception
Vetinari was included in a list of the top ten Discworld characters by The Daily Telegraph in 2013; Tim Martin describes the character as "The kind of benign despot who would make Machiavelli faint with fear and envy".
Matthew Sangster, in an article in Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, describes the character's "fantastical hypercompetence" as giving Pratchett a means to "skip over certain intricacies to imagine effects, affects, and consequences". Andrew Rayment, in a wide-ranging article on postmodernity, politics and fantasy in the journal Postmodern Studies, characterises Vetinari's decision to legalise the Guild of Thieves as a device for Pratchett to parody the fact that "official law is supported by the unwritten supplement that guarantees its functioning". He discusses Vetinari's attitude to journalistic truth and the freedom of the press in The Truth, stating that "he understands that part of the ideological role of newspapers is to reproduce already existing values about what the world is so that people can "'recognise' themselves in their world"", formulated in the form of news versus Vetinari's coinage "olds", and concluding that "Vetinari, as always, is right". Rayment goes on to highlight Vetinari's use of language, commenting on a scene in Unseen Academicals, that the character "change[s] the world with a flick (through) of a thesaurus".
Gideon Haberkorn, in an article in Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, describes Vetinari as a "realist" who is "no hero", and who provides a complementary viewpoint to Sam Vimes's cynicism and Carrot Ironfoundersson's idealism. In a review of Thud! for The Times, the novelist A. S. Byatt also compares the three characters, describing Vetinari's "chess-playing ordering of imperfect social beings" as being, as the series goes on, "ever more subtly" distinguished from Vimes's "sense of responsibility for his patch" and Carrot's "natural authority and courage".
See also
Enlightened absolutism
References
Source
External links
A Special Kind of Person, a web site concerning Lord Vetinari.
Discworld & Pratchett Wiki
Discworld characters
Fictional assassins
Literary characters introduced in 1983
Fictional dictators
Fictional governors
Fictional politicians
Male literary villains
Male characters in literature
Fictional lords and ladies
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List%20of%20accidents%20and%20incidents%20involving%20commercial%20aircraft
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List of accidents and incidents involving commercial aircraft
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This list of accidents and incidents involving commercial aircraft includes notable events that have a corresponding Wikipedia article. Entries in this list involve passenger or cargo aircraft that are operating commercially and meet this list's size criteriapassenger aircraft with a seating capacity of at least 10 passengers, or commercial cargo aircraft of at least . The list is grouped by the year in which the accident or incident occurred.
1910s and 1920s
1919
July 21 – The Goodyear dirigible Wingfoot Air Express catches fire and crashes into the Illinois Trust and Savings Building in Chicago, Illinois, while carrying passengers to a local amusement park, killing thirteen people: three out of the five on board and ten others on the ground, with 27 others on the ground being injured.
August 2 – A Caproni Ca.48 crashes at Verona, Italy, during a flight from Venice to Taliedo, Milan, killing all on board (14, 15, or 17 people, according to different sources).
1920
December 14 – A Handley Page O/400 hits a tree and crashes at Golders Green, London, after failing to gain height following takeoff, killing four out of eight on board.
1922
March 31 – A Beijing-Han Airlines Handley Page O/7 hits trees and crashes while landing at Beijing Nanyuan Airport, killing all 14 on board in China's first fatal aviation accident.
April 7 – In the Picardie mid-air collision, a de Havilland DH.18A, G-EAWO, operated by Daimler Hire Ltd., collides with a Farman F.60 Goliath, F-GEAD, operated by Compagnie des Grands Express Aériens (CGEA), over the Thieulloy-St. Antoine road near Picardie, France, killing all seven people on both aircraft. This is the first mid-air collision of two airliners.
1923
January 13 – An Aeromarine 75 seaplane of Aeromarine West Indies Airways, Columbus, rapidly sinks after a botched ditching in the Straits of Florida north of Havana, Cuba, leading to deaths of four passengers out of the nine occupants in the first airliner disaster of American aviation.
May 14 – An Air Union Farman F.60 Goliath crashes near Monsures, Somme, France, due to the structural failure of a wing, killing all six on board.
August 27 – An Air Union Farman F.60 Goliath crashes near East Malling, Kent, England, due to engine failure, and confusion among the passengers, killing one of 13 on board.
September 14 – A Daimler Airway de Havilland DH.34 crashes at Ivinghoe, Buckinghamshire, England, after stalling while attempting an emergency landing, killing all five on board.
1924
December 24 – An Imperial Airways de Havilland DH.34 crashes near Purley, Surrey, England, due to a stall during an attempted emergency landing in response to an unknown mechanical defect, killing all eight on board.
1926
August 18 – An Air Union Blériot 155 crashes during a failed emergency landing attempt at College Farm in Aldington, Kent, England. After experiencing engine failure, 2 of the 15 on board were killed on impact and the pilot died of his injuries one day later.
October 2 – An Air Union Blériot 155 crashes at Leigh, Kent, England, after the aircraft catches fire in mid-air during an attempted emergency landing at Penshurst Airfield, killing both crew members and all five passengers; this is the first in-flight fire to occur on an airliner.
1927
August 22 – A KLM Fokker F. VIII crashes near Sevenoaks, Kent, England, due to structural failure of the tailfin, killing one of 11 on board.
1928
July 13 – An Imperial Airways Vickers Vulcan crashes on a test flight from Croydon Airport, England, with a pilot and five passengers near Purley, Surrey, from the airport, with the death of four passengers.
1929
June 17 – An Imperial Airways Handley Page W.10 ditches in the English Channel due to engine failure, killing seven of the 13 on board.
September 6 – An Imperial Airways de Havilland Hercules crashes whilst landing at Jask Airport, Iran, killing three of the five occupants.
November 6 – A Luft Hansa Junkers G 24 crashes near Marden Park in Godstone, Surrey, England; killing 7 of the eight occupants.
1930s
1930
February 10 – An Air Union Farman F.63 Goliath crashes during an emergency landing at Marden Airfield, Marden, Kent, following failure of the right tailplane, killing two of the six on board.
October 5 – On its maiden voyage from the United Kingdom to British India, the British civil airship R101 crashes and burns in Allonne, Oise, France, while flying at low altitude at night in a rainstorm, killing 48 out of 54 on board, the worst civil airship disaster in history.
1931
March 21 – An Australian National Airways Avro 618 Ten, Southern Cloud, disappears in severe weather on a flight from Sydney to Melbourne, killing all eight on board in Australia's first significant airline disaster; the crash site in the Snowy Mountains remains undiscovered until 1958.
March 31 – A Transcontinental & Western Air Fokker F-10 Trimotor crashes near Bazaar, Kansas, after a wing breaks off in flight, killing all eight aboard, including University of Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne.
1933
March 28 – The 1933 Imperial Airways Dixmude crash in Belgium of an Armstrong Whitworth Argosy II is the first suspected case of air sabotage; all 15 on board are killed.
October 10 – United Air Lines Trip 23, a Boeing 247, is destroyed by a bomb over Chesterton, Indiana, United States, in the first proven case of air sabotage on a commercial aircraft; all seven on board are killed.
December 30 – In the 1933 Imperial Airways Ruysselede crash in Belgium, an Avro Ten collides with a radio mast, killing all 10 on board.
1934
February 23 – A United Air Lines Boeing 247 crashes into a Utah canyon in bad weather, killing all eight on board.
May 9 – An Air France Wibault 282T crashes into the English Channel off Dungeness, Kent, killing all six on board.
July 27 – A Swissair Curtiss T-32 Condor II crashes near Tuttlingen, Germany, after a wing separates in a thunderstorm, killing all 12 passengers and crew on board.
October 2 – A Hillman's Airways de Havilland Dragon Rapide crashes into the English Channel off Folkestone, Kent, due to pilot error, killing all seven on board.
1935
May 6 – TWA Flight 6, a Douglas DC-2 operating a multi-leg flight from Los Angeles, California, to Newark, New Jersey, United States, crashes on farmland near Atlanta, Macon, or Kirksville, Missouri, due to poor visibility and depleted fuel; five of the 13 on board are killed, including Senator Bronson M. Cutting.
October 7 – United Air Lines Trip 4, a Boeing 247D flying from Salt Lake City, Utah, to Cheyenne, Wyoming, United States, crashes near Silver Crown, Wyoming, due to pilot error; all 12 people on board die.
December 10 – A SABENA Savoia-Marchetti S.73 crashes near Tatsfield, Surrey, England, due to pilot error, while en route from Brussels Airport, Belgium, to Croydon Airport in South London; all 11 people on board die in the accident.
1936
January 14 – American Airlines Flight 1, a Douglas DC-2, crashes into a swamp near Goodwin, Arkansas, killing all 17 passengers and crew on board; the cause is never determined.
April 7 – TWA Flight 1, a Douglas DC-2, crashes near Uniontown, Pennsylvania, United States, due to pilot error, killing 12 of the 14 passengers and crew aboard.
June 16 – In the Havørn Accident, a Norwegian Air Lines Junkers Ju 52 crashes into Lihesten mountain in Hyllestad, Norway, killing all seven on board.
August 5 – Chicago and Southern Flight 4, a Lockheed Model 10 Electra, crashes after takeoff due to pilot error, killing all eight on board.
December 9 – A KLM Douglas DC-2 crashes on takeoff from Croydon Airport, England; 15 of 17 on board die.
December 27 – United Airlines Trip 34, a Boeing 247, crashes at Rice Canyon (near Newhall, California, United States) due to pilot error, killing all 12 on board.
1937
January 12 – Western Air Express Flight 7, a Boeing 247, crashes into a mountain near Newhall, California, United States. Five of the 13 people aboard die, including famed adventurer, author and filmmaker, Martin Johnson.
February 19 – An Airlines of Australia Stinson Model A suffers a controlled flight into terrain in Queensland, killing four of the seven people on board.
March 25 – TWA Flight 15A, a Douglas DC-2, crashes in Clifton, Pennsylvania due to ice accumulation. All 13 passengers and crew are killed.
May 6 – The Zeppelin Hindenburg bursts into flames and crashes while attempting a landing at Naval Air Engineering Station, Lakehurst, New Jersey, United States; of the 97 people on board, 35 are killed; one person on the ground also dies.
November 16 – The 1937 Sabena Junkers Ju 52 Ostend crash kills all 11 on board, including the Grand Duke Georg Donatus and Grand Duchess Cecilie of Hesse.
1938
January 10 – Northwest Airlines Flight 2, a Lockheed L14H Super Electra, crashes near Bozeman, Montana, United States, killing all 10 on board; the machine with which the manufacturer measured component vibration is found to be inaccurate, causing the aircraft to be more prone to flutter than anticipated.
January 11 – Pan American World Airways Flight 1, a Sikorsky S-42 flying boat named the Samoan Clipper, explodes in mid-air over Pago Pago, American Samoa, killing all seven on board.
March 1 – TWA Flight 8, a Douglas DC-2, disappears on a flight from San Francisco to Winslow, Arizona; the aircraft is found three months later on a mountain in Yosemite National Park; all nine on board die.
July 28 – Pan American World Airways Flight 229, a Martin M-130 flying boat named the Hawaii Clipper, disappears over the Pacific Ocean westbound from Guam to Manila with 15 on board.
October 25 – Kyeema, an Australian National Airways Douglas DC-2, crashes in heavy fog into Mount Dandenong in Victoria, Australia, killing all 18 people on board.
November 4 – In the 1938 Jersey Airport disaster, a Jersey Airways de Havilland DH.86 crashes on takeoff from Jersey Airport due to pilot error; all 13 passengers and crew lose their lives as well as one person on the ground.
1939
January 13 – Northwest Airlines Flight 1, a Lockheed L14H Super Electra, crashes on descent to Miles City, Montana, United States, after an intense fire breaks out in the cockpit due to a fuel leak from the aircraft's cross-feed fuel valve; all four on board are killed.
January 21 – An Imperial Airways flying boat ditches in the North Atlantic, southeast of New York, due to loss of power; the aircraft later sinks and three of the 12 on board die.
August 13 – A Pan Am Sikorsky S-43 crashes into Guanabara Bay, Brazil, due to loss of control following engine failure, killing 12 of the 14 on board.
1940s
1940
June 14 – In the Kaleva shootdown, Aero Flight 1631, an Aero Junkers Ju 52 en route from Tallinn, Estonia, to Helsinki, Finland, is shot down by two Soviet bombers over the Gulf of Finland during peacetime; all nine on board are killed.
August 31 – In the Lovettsville air disaster, Pennsylvania Central Airlines Trip 19, a Douglas DC-3A, crashes at Lovettsville, Virginia, United States, during an intense thunderstorm; all 25 on board die.
November 8 – A Deutsche Lufthansa Ju 90 crashes near Schönteichen in Saxony, Germany, after ice forms on the tail, killing all 29 passengers and crew on board.
1941
February 26 – Eastern Air Lines Flight 21, a Douglas DC-3, crashes while descending to land at Atlanta, Georgia, United States, killing eight of 16 aboard; World War I hero and Eastern Air Lines president Eddie Rickenbacker is among the survivors.
October 30 – American Airlines Flight 1, a Douglas DC-3, stalls and crashes at Lawrence Station, Ontario, Canada while attempting to find a place to land, killing all 20 on board; the cause of the crash is never determined.
October 30 – Northwest Airlines Flight 5, a Douglas DC-3, crashes at Moorhead, Minnesota in fog due to icing; of the 15 on board, only the pilot survived.
1942
January 16 – TWA Flight 3, a Douglas DC-3 returning to California crashes into Potosi Mountain southwest of Las Vegas, Nevada, United States; all 22 aboard are killed, including actress Carole Lombard and her mother.
January 30 – Qantas Short Empire G-AEUH is shot down by seven Japanese fighters and crashes from East Timor; 13 of 18 on board are killed.
March 3 – KNILM Douglas DC-3 PK-AFV is shot down by three Japanese fighters and crashes north of Broome, Western Australia, killing four of 12 on board.
October 23 – American Airlines Flight 28, a Douglas DC-3, crashes near Palm Springs, California, United States, after being struck by a U.S. Army Air Corps Lockheed B-34 bomber; all 12 aboard the airliner are killed, while the bomber lands safely with minor damage.
1943
January 21 – Pan Am Flight 1104, a Martin M-130 nicknamed the Philippine Clipper, crashes into a mountain near Boonville, California, United States, due to pilot error; all 19 occupants are killed, including Rear Admiral Robert H. English, the serving submarine commander of the US Pacific Fleet.
June 1 – BOAC Flight 777, a Douglas DC-3 flying from Lisbon in Portugal, to Bristol, England, is shot down by Luftwaffe fighter aircraft over the Bay of Biscay, killing all 17 people on board, including film actor Leslie Howard.
July 28 – American Airlines Flight 63, a Douglas DC-3 nicknamed the Flagship Ohio, crashes near Trammel, Kentucky, United States, after the crew loses control due to severe turbulence and violent downdrafts; 20 of the 22 people on board are killed.
October 15 – American Airlines Flight 63, a Douglas DC-3 nicknamed the Flagship Missouri, crashes near Centerville, Tennessee, United States, after ice forms on its wings and propellers; all eight passengers and three crew members are killed.
1944
February 10 – American Airlines Flight 2, a Douglas DC-3, crashes into the Mississippi River between Arkansas and Tennessee, United States, for reasons unknown, killing all 24 occupants (21 passengers and three crew members).
June 20 – TWA Flight 277, a Douglas C-54 Skymaster, crashes into Fort Mountain, Maine, United States, in severe weather, killing all seven passengers and crew on board.
1945
January 8 – The China Clipper, a Pan Am Martin M-130 flying boat operating an airmail service from Miami, Florida, United States, to Leopoldville in the Belgian Congo, crashes in Port of Spain, Trinidad, killing all 25 people on board.
January 10 – American Airlines Flight 6001, a Douglas DC-3-277B crashed into a hillside on approach to Hollywood Burbank Airport, killing all 24 on board.
January 31 – The Tokana, a Stinson operated by Australian National Airways, crashes near Tooborac, about north of Melbourne, Victoria, as the result of a fatigue crack in a wing spar; all 10 people on board are killed.
July 12 – Eastern Air Lines Flight 45, a Douglas DC-3A, collides with a Douglas A-26 Invader over Florence, South Carolina, United States; one of the 24 on board the DC-3 and two of the three on board the A-26 die.
October 5 – National Airlines Flight 16, a Lockheed L-18 Lodestar operating a multi-leg domestic flight in Florida, United States, overshoots the runway after landing at the new municipal airport in south Lakeland, killing two of the 15 people on board.
November 3 – The Honolulu Clipper, Boeing's 314 prototype, makes a forced landing in the Pacific Ocean east of Oahu due to double engine failure; all 37 on board survive the incident; the aircraft is deliberately sunk when salvage is deemed impractical.
1946
January 6 – Pennsylvania Central Airlines Flight 105, a Douglas DC-3, crashes in Birmingham, Alabama, United States, killing three of the four crew members; the flight attendant and all 16 passengers survive.
March 10 – The 1946 Australian National Airways DC-3 crash near Hobart, Tasmania, kills all 25 on board.
July 11 – TWA Flight 513, a Lockheed L-049 Constellation, crashes near Reading, Pennsylvania, United States, after a fire in the baggage compartment; of the six crew on board, only one survives.
August 7 – British European Airways Flight 530, a Douglas C-47, crashes into Mistberget mountain near Eidsvoll, Norway; killing three of five crew; all 10 passengers survive.
September 18 - A Sabena Douglas DC-4 (registration OO-CBG) crashes 35 km (22 mi) short of the runway while on final approach to Gander Airport in the Dominion of Newfoundland, killing 27 of the 44 people on board.
October 3 – An American Overseas Airlines Douglas DC-4 crashes into mountainous terrain after takeoff from Stephenville, Newfoundland, killing all 39 passengers and crew on board.
November 14 – In the 1946 KLM Douglas DC-3 Amsterdam accident, a Douglas DC-3 crashes while attempting to land at Amsterdam Schiphol Airport in the Netherlands; all 26 passengers and crew on board are killed.
December 19 – In the 1946 Railway Air Services Dakota crash, a Douglas DC-3 crashes shortly after taking off from Northolt Airport, England and comes to rest on top of a house. All five occupants survive the crash without injury.
December 28 – TWA Flight 6963, a Lockheed L-049 Constellation, crashes near Shannon Airport due to an inaccurate altimeter caused by maintenance errors, killing nine of 23 on board.
December 28 – American Airlines Flight 2207, a Douglas C-50, crashes near Michigan City, Indiana, United States following double engine failure caused by unexplained fuel starvation, killing both pilots; the remaining crew member and all 18 passengers survive.
1947
January 11 – In the 1947 BOAC Douglas C-47 crash, a BOAC Douglas C-47A crashes into Barley Hill near Stowting, Kent, United Kingdom, due to fuel starvation, killing eight of the 16 on board.
January 12 – Eastern Air Lines Flight 665, a Douglas C-49, crashes into high ground near Galax, Virginia, after the pilot became disorientated, 17 people were killed in the crash, only one survived.
January 25 – In the 1947 Croydon Dakota accident, a Spencer Airways Douglas C-47A fails to get airborne at Croydon Airport, United Kingdom, and crashes into a parked ČSA aircraft; 12 of the 22 on board are killed.
January 26 – In the 1947 KLM Douglas DC-3 Copenhagen accident, a Douglas DC-3 crashes shortly after takeoff from Kastrup Airport in Denmark, killing all 22 passengers and crew on board.
February 15 – An Avianca Douglas DC-4 crashes into Mount El Tabalazo due to pilot error, killing all 53 passengers and crew on board.
May 29 – In the 1947 Héðinsfjörður air crash, a Flugfélag Islands Douglas DC-3 crashes into Hestfjall on the west side of Héðinsfjörður fjord, killing all 25 on board in Iceland's deadliest air disaster.
May 29 – United Air Lines Flight 521, a Douglas DC-4, crashes on takeoff from LaGuardia Airport, New York, United States, due to pilot error; 42 of the 48 on board die.
May 30 – Eastern Air Lines Flight 605, a Douglas DC-4, loses control and crashes near Bainbridge, Maryland, United States, killing all 53 passengers and crew on board in the deadliest airliner crash in US history at the time.
June 13 – Pennsylvania Central Airlines Flight 410, a Douglas DC-4, crashes into Lookout Rock, in the West Virginia Blue Ridge Mountains of the United States en route from Pittsburgh to Washington DC; all 50 passengers and crew are killed.
June 19 – Pan Am Flight 121, a Lockheed L-049 Constellation, crashes in the Syrian desert, en route from Karachi to Istanbul, killing 14 of the 36 on board.
August 2 – In the 1947 BSAA Star Dust accident, an Avro Lancastrian airliner disappears over the Andes after transmitting an enigmatic coded message ("STENDEC"); the fate of the aircraft remains a mystery for more than 50 years until the crash site is finally located in 2000; it is apparent that all 11 people on board died in the accident.
August 28 – In the Kvitbjørn disaster, a Norwegian Air Lines Short Sandringham flying boat strikes a mountain near Lødingsfjellet, Norway, killing all 35 on board.
October 24 – United Air Lines Flight 608, a Douglas DC-6, crashes near Bryce Canyon Airport, Utah, United States when a fire caused by a design flaw destroys the aircraft; all 52 on board die in the first hull loss of the DC-6.
October 26 – Pan Am Flight 923, a Douglas DC-4, crashes into Tamgas Mountain on Annette Island, Alaska, killing all 18 passengers and crew on board; the cause of the accident is never determined.
December 27 – In the 1947 Korangi Creek crash, an Air India Douglas C-48 crashes shortly after takeoff, killing all 23 on board.
1948
January 28 – In the 1948 Los Gatos DC-3 crash, an Airline Transport Carriers Douglas DC-3 crashes in the Diablo Range, California, after an engine fire; all 32 passengers and crew are killed.
January 30 – In the BSAA Star Tiger disappearance, an Avro Tudor IV disappears without a trace en route from the Azores to Bermuda with 31 on board; the loss of the aircraft remains an unsolved mystery to this day, with the resulting speculation contributing to the Bermuda Triangle legend.
March 2 – In the 1948 Heathrow disaster, a Sabena DC-3 crashes at Heathrow Airport in poor visibility due to pilot error, killing 20 of 22 on board.
March 12 – Northwest Airlines Flight 4422, a Douglas C-54 Skymaster, crashes into Mount Sanford in the Alaska Territory, killing 30; although found, the wreckage is initially inaccessible and is not rediscovered until 1999 after being buried for more than 50 years.
April 5 – In the 1948 Gatow air disaster, a British European Airways Vickers VC.1 Viking crashes near RAF Gatow, Berlin, following a collision with a Soviet Air Force Yakovlev Yak-3 fighter; all 14 people on board the Viking are killed, as well as the Soviet pilot.
April 15 – Pan Am Flight 1-10, a Lockheed Constellation, crashes while on approach to Shannon Airport, Ireland; of the 31 people on board, only one survives.
April 21 – British European Airways Flight S200P, a Vickers VC.1 Viking, crashes into Irish Law Mountain in Scotland due to pilot error; all on board survive.
May 12 – In the 1948 Sabena Douglas DC-4 crash, a Douglas DC-4 crashes near Libenge, Belgian Congo (now Democratic Republic of the Congo) after flying into a tornado, killing 31 of 32 on board.
June 17 – United Air Lines Flight 624, a Douglas DC-6, crashes near Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania, after failed attempts to extinguish what was believed to have been an onboard fire; all 39 passengers and four crew are killed.
July 4 – The 1948 Northwood mid-air collision, between a Scandinavian Airlines System-operated Douglas DC-6 and an RAF Avro York, kills all 39 passengers and crew on board both aircraft.
July 17 – Miss Macao, a Catalina seaplane en route from Macau to Hong Kong in southern China, is hijacked over the Pearl River delta by a group attempting to rob the passengers; following a struggle in the cockpit, a crash kills all but one of the 26 people on board (the sole survivor is later identified as the lead hijacker); this is the earliest known airliner hijacking.
August 1 – Air France Flight 072, a Latécoère 631, disappears over the Atlantic Ocean with the loss of all 52 people on board. This was the worst aviation accident in the Atlantic Ocean at the time and remains the worst ever involving the Latécoère 631.
August 29 – Northwest Airlines Flight 421, a Martin 2-0-2, crashes near Winona, Minnesota, due to structural failure of a wing, killing all 37 on board in the worst ever accident involving the Martin 2-0-2. This crash is also the first loss of a 2-0-2.
September 2 – In the 1948 Lutana crash, Australian National Airways Flight 331, a Douglas DC-3, crashes into high terrain near Nundle, New South Wales, killing all 13 people on board.
October 2 – In the Bukken Bruse disaster, a Norwegian Air Lines Short Sandringham flying boat crashes upon landing in Trondheim, Norway, killing 19 of the 43 people on board; Bertrand Russell is among the 24 survivors.
October 12 – An Aeroflot Ilyushin Il-12 disappears over the Caucasus Mountains near Yevlakh, Azerbaijan with ten on board.
October 20 – In the 1948 KLM Constellation air disaster, a Lockheed Constellation named Nijmegen, flying from Schiphol Airport, Netherlands, to New York City, United States, crashes near Prestwick, Scotland, killing all 40 on board.
December 28 – In the 1948 Airborne Transport DC-3 (DST) disappearance, a Douglas DC-3 flying from San Juan, Puerto Rico to Miami, Florida, disappears without a trace off the coast of Florida with 32 on board.
1949
January 17 – In the BSAA Star Ariel disappearance, an Avro Tudor IV disappears without a trace en route from Bermuda to Jamaica with 20 on board; the loss of the aircraft remains an unsolved mystery to this day, with the resulting speculation contributing to the Bermuda Triangle legend.
February 19 – A British European Airways Douglas Dakota collides with a RAF Avro Anson over Exhall, Warwickshire, killing all 14 on board both aircraft.
March 10 – A Queensland Airlines Lockheed Lodestar crashes on takeoff from Coolangatta airstrip, killing all 21 on board.
May 4 – In the Superga air disaster, an Italian Airlines Fiat G.212 CP carrying the Torino football team crashes into the Superga hills near Turin, killing all 31 on board.
June 7 – In the 1949 Strato-Freight Curtiss C-46A crash, a Curtiss Wright C-46A-50 Modified D, crashes into the Atlantic Ocean shortly after takeoff from San Juan, Puerto Rico. Of the 81 passengers and crew on board, 53 are killed.
July 2 – A MacRobertson Miller Airlines Douglas DC-3 crashes on takeoff from Perth, Western Australia, killing all 18 on board.
July 12 – Standard Air Lines Flight 897R, a Curtiss C-46, crashes at Chatsworth, California, due to pilot error, killing 35 of 48 on board.
August 19 – A British European Airways Douglas DC-3 crashes into a hillside near Oldham, United Kingdom; of the 32 on board, only eight survive.
September 9 – Canadian Pacific Air Lines Flight 108, a Douglas DC-3, explodes over Cap Tourmente near Sault-au-Cochon, Quebec, due to a bomb planted by Albert Guay; all four crew members and 19 passengers on board are killed.
September 26 – A Mexicana de Aviacion DC-3 crashes into Popocatepetl volcano, killing all 23 on board.
October 28 – Air France Flight 009, a Lockheed Constellation crashes into a mountain on São Miguel Island, Azores, Portugal, killing all 48 people on board, including boxer Marcel Cerdan and violinist Ginette Neveu.
November 1 – Eastern Air Lines Flight 537, a Douglas DC-4, on approach to Washington National Airport, suffers a mid-air collision with a Lockheed P-38; all 55 people on board the DC-4 die, including Congressman George J. Bates, New Yorker cartoonist Helen E. Hokinson, and former Congressman Michael J. Kennedy; the pilot and sole occupant of the P-38 is seriously injured.
November 20 – In the Hurum air disaster, an Aero Holland Douglas DC-3 crashes near Hurum, Norway, killing 34 of the 35 on board, including 25 children.
November 29 – American Airlines Flight 157, a Douglas DC-6, en route from New York City to Mexico City with 46 passengers and crew, veers off the runway and strikes buildings after the flight crew loses control on final approach to Dallas Love Field; 26 passengers and two flight attendants die.
December 18 – A Sabena Douglas DC-3 crashes after suffering a structural failure of a wing, killing all eight on board.
1950s
1950
January 5 – In the 1950 Sverdlovsk air disaster, a Lisunov Li-2 crashes near Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg), Soviet Union, killing all 19 on board.
March 7 – Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 307, a Martin 2-0-2, crashes near Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport, after hitting a flagpole during approach, killing all 13 on board and two on the ground.
March 12 – The Llandow air disaster: An Airflight Avro 689 Tudor V stalls and crashes after the rear cargo hold was overloaded, resulting in a center of gravity exceeding the aft limit; 80 out of the 83 people on board die, at the time the worst air disaster in history.
1950 Air France multiple Douglas DC-4 accidents:
June 12 – An Air France Douglas DC-4 (F-BBDE) on a flight from Saigon to Paris crashes in the Arabian Sea while on approach to Bahrain Airport, killing 46 of 52 on board.
June 14 – An Air France Douglas DC-4, F-BBDM, crashes in the Arabian Sea while on approach to Bahrain Airport, killing 40 of 53 on board. This aircraft was operating on the same flight route as F-BBDE.
June 24 – Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 2501, a Douglas DC-4, with 58 people on board, disappears without a trace over Lake Michigan.
June 26 – Australian National Airways Amana, a Douglas DC-4, crashes after takeoff from Perth Airport, killing all 29 people on board.
August 31 – TWA Flight 903, a Lockheed L-749A Constellation, crashes because of an engine fire, in the desert about NNW of Cairo, Egypt; all 55 on board are killed in the worst ever accident involving the Lockheed L-749.
October 31 – A British European Airways Vickers VC.1 Viking crashes on the runway at London Heathrow Airport in foggy weather; of the 30 on board, only a stewardess and a passenger survive.
November 3 – Air India Flight 245, a Lockheed L-749A Constellation, crashes into Mont Blanc in France; all 40 passengers and eight crew are killed. Sixteen years later, Air India Flight 101 crashes in almost exactly the same spot.
November 13 – In the 1950 Tête de l'Obiou C-54 crash, a Douglas C-54 Skymaster operated by Curtiss Reid Flying Services crashes from Grenoble, France, on the Tête de l'Obiou mountain; all 52 passengers and crew die.
1951
January 14 – National Airlines Flight 83, a Douglas DC-4, crashes on landing at Philadelphia International Airport, Pennsylvania. Seven of the 28 passengers and crew are killed, one of them being heroine flight attendant Frankie Housley who died trying to save more passengers.
March 27 – In the 1951 Ringway Dakota crash, an Air Transport Charter Douglas DC-3 crashes shortly after taking off from Manchester-Ringway Airport, England. Two of the three crew members are killed.
April 25 – Cubana de Aviación Flight 493, a Douglas DC-4 en route from Miami to Havana, collides in mid-air with a United States Navy Beech SNB-1 Kansan off Key West; all 43 aboard both aircraft are killed.
June 22 – Pan Am Flight 151, a Lockheed L-049 Constellation en route from Accra, Ghana to Monrovia, Liberia, crashes into a hill near Sanoye in Bong County, Liberia, 54 miles (86 km) from the airport; all 31 passengers and six crew members die.
June 30 – United Air Lines Flight 610, a Douglas DC-6, flies into a mountain in Larimer County, Colorado, due to a navigational error; all 45 passengers and five crew members are killed.
July 21 – Canadian Pacific Air Lines Flight 3505, a Douglas DC-4, disappears on a flight from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, to Tokyo, Japan; all 37 on board are presumed dead; the aircraft has never been found.
August 24 – United Air Lines Flight 615, a Douglas DC-6B, crashes near Decoto (now Union City, California), while on final approach to Oakland, California; all 44 passengers and six crew members die.
November 15 – A LOT Polish Airlines Lisunov Li-2 crashes near Tuszyn shortly after takeoff due to engine failure, killing all 16 passengers and crew on board.
December 16 – A Miami Airlines Curtiss C-46 Commando crashes at Elizabeth, New Jersey, after a loss of control following an engine fire, killing all 56 passengers and crew on board.
December 22 – A Misrair SNCASE Languedoc crashes west of Tehran in a snowstorm, killing all 20 people on board.
December 29 – Continental Charters Flight 44-2, a Curtiss-Wright C-46, crashes into a ridge near Napoli, New York, while en route to Buffalo, New York; three crew members and 23 passengers die.
1952
January 22 – American Airlines Flight 6780, a Convair CV-240, crashes on approach to Newark, New Jersey, into dwellings in Elizabeth, New Jersey, killing 30 and leading to the Doolittle Commission recommendation for laws coordinating urban zoning to keep airport approach paths clear.
February 11 – National Airlines Flight 101, a Douglas DC-6 crashes into an apartment building in Elizabeth, New Jersey, two minutes after departing Newark Airport, killing 33 people (including four residents of the building).
March 3 – An Air France SNCASE Languedoc crashes on takeoff from Nice, France, due to jammed controls. All 38 people on board are killed.
March 22 – KLM Flight 592, a Douglas DC-6, crashes on approach to Ciampino Airport for reasons unknown, killing 45 of 47 on board.
April 9 – Japan Air Lines Flight 301, a Martin 2-0-2 leased from Northwest Airlines and named Mokusei, strikes the side of Mount Mihara, killing all 37 on board; the cause was not determined, but a navigation error was blamed.
April 11 – Pan Am Flight 526A, a Douglas DC-4, suffers engine failure and is forced to ditch in the Atlantic north of San Juan, Puerto Rico; 52 of 69 on board die.
April 28 – Pan Am Flight 202, a Boeing 377 Stratocruiser, crashes after a propeller failure in a remote area of Brazil on its way from Buenos Aires, Argentina, to New York City via Rio de Janeiro; all 50 on board are killed in the deadliest accident involving the Boeing 377.
June 28 – American Airlines Flight 910, a Douglas DC-6 carrying 55 passengers and five crew collides with a Temco Swift private plane on final approach to Dallas Love Field, killing both occupants of the Swift; the DC-6 lands safely with no injuries to the passengers or crew.
August 12 – A Transportes Aéreos Nacional Douglas C-47A explodes in mid-air on a domestic flight in Brazil; all 24 on board die.
December 6 – A Cubana de Aviación Douglas DC-4 crashes into the Atlantic Ocean off Bermuda after failing to gain altitude after takeoff, killing 37 of 41 on board.
1953
January 5 – In the 1953 Nutts Corner Viking accident, a Vickers Viking operated by British European Airways crashes on approach to Belfast-Nutts Corner Airport, killing 27 of the 31 on board.
January 7 - Associated Air Transport Trip 1-6-6A, a Curtiss C-46F Commando, crashes into a ravine after icing up, killing all 40 passengers and crew.
February 2 – In the 1953 Skyways Avro York disappearance, a plane with 39 on board disappears over the North Atlantic.
February 14 – National Airlines Flight 470, a Douglas DC-6 en route from Tampa, Florida to New Orleans, Louisiana crashes into the Gulf of Mexico after encountering severe turbulence. All 46 passengers and crew are killed.
May 2 – BOAC Flight 783, a de Havilland Comet, breaks up in mid-air and crashes near Calcutta, India after flying into a thunderstorm; all 43 on board die.
July 12 – Transocean Air Lines Flight 512, a Douglas DC-6A, crashes in the Pacific Ocean while en route from Wake Island to Honolulu, Hawaii. All 58 passengers and crew are killed.
August 3 – Air France Flight 152, a Lockheed L-749A Constellation ditches into the Mediterranean Sea while en route from Rome to Beirut after an engine separated. Four elderly passengers drowned.
September 1 – Air France Flight 178, a Lockheed Constellation, crashes into a mountain in southern France; all 42 on board are killed.
September 16 – American Airlines Flight 723, a Convair 240, crashes while on approach to Albany Airport; all 28 passengers and crew die.
October 14 – A Sabena Convair 240 loses control and crashes shortly after takeoff from Frankfurt Airport following double engine failure, killing all 44 on board.
October 29 – BCPA Flight 304, a Douglas DC-6B, crashes into King's Mountain, southeast of Half Moon Bay, California, on its approach to San Francisco International Airport, killing all 11 on board.
1954
January 10 – BOAC Flight 781, a de Havilland Comet flying from Rome to London on the last leg of a flight from Singapore, disintegrates in mid-air, when metal fatigue from repeated pressurization cycles compromises the fuselage, killing the 29 passengers and six crew.
March 13 – A BOAC Lockheed L-749A Constellation crashes as it attempts to land at Kallang Airport, Singapore; of the 40 passengers and crew on board, 33 are killed.
April 8 – South African Airways Flight 201, a de Havilland Comet flying from Rome to Cairo bound for Johannesburg, disintegrates in mid-air, killing all 14 passengers and seven crew; as in BOAC Flight 781, the cause is metal fatigue at stress risers at the corners of the square windows in the aluminium skin.
April 8 – Trans-Canada Air Lines Flight 9, a Canadair C-4 North Star, collides with a RCAF Harvard over Moose Jaw, Canada, killing all 37 on both aircraft.
June 19 – In the 1954 Swissair Convair CV-240 crash, a Convair CV-240 ditches into the English Channel after running out of fuel. All survive the ditching, but three of the passengers drown due to a lack of lifejackets.
July 23 – The 1954 Cathay Pacific Douglas DC-4 shootdown: a Cathay Pacific Douglas DC-4 is attacked by two PLAAF La-7 fighters and crashes off Hainan Island, killing 10 of 19 on board.
August 23 – KLM Flight 608, a Douglas DC-6, crashes into the North Sea for reasons unknown, killing all 12 passengers and nine crew members on board.
September 5 – KLM Flight 633, a Lockheed L-1049 Super Constellation, ditches after takeoff from Shannon Airport in Ireland, killing 28 of 56 on board.
December 25 – In the 1954 Prestwick air disaster a British Overseas Airways Corporation Boeing 377 Stratocruiser crashes on landing at Prestwick Airport, Scotland, killing 28 of the 36 on board.
1955
January 12 – TWA Flight 694, a Martin 2-0-2, collides with a privately owned Douglas DC-3 over Cincinnati, Ohio, killing all 15 on board both aircraft.
February 13 – Sabena Flight 503, a Douglas DC-6B, crashes into Monte Terminillo, Italy in poor weather, killing all 29 on board.
February 19 – TWA Flight 260, a Martin 4-0-4, crashes into the Sandia Mountains near Albuquerque, New Mexico, killing all 16 on board.
March 20 – American Airlines Flight 711, a Convair CV-240 crashes into a field on approach into Springfield-Branson Regional Airport, Missouri. 13 of the 35 passengers and crew are killed.
March 26 – Pan Am Flight 845/26, a Boeing 377 Stratocruiser, ditches in the Pacific Ocean off the Oregon coast, killing four of the 23 on board.
April 4 – A United Air Lines Douglas DC-6 crashes after takeoff from Long Island MacArthur Airport, killing all three on board.
April 11 – Air India Flight 300, a Lockheed L-749 Constellation named Kashmir Princess, explodes under suspicious circumstances; 16 people are killed and three survive.
July 27 – El Al Flight 402, a Lockheed L-049 Constellation, inadvertently strays over Bulgarian territory on its way from Vienna to Tel Aviv, and is shot down by two Bulgarian fighter aircraft, killing all 58 on board.
October 6 – United Air Lines Flight 409, a Douglas DC-4, crashes into Medicine Bow Peak near Centennial, Wyoming, killing all 66 on board.
November 1 – United Air Lines Flight 629, a Douglas DC-6B, is bombed by Jack Gilbert Graham over Longmont, Colorado; all 44 on board are killed.
1956
February 18 – In the Żurrieq Scottish Airlines crash, a Scottish Airlines Avro York crashes near Żurrieq, Malta due to pilot error, killing all 50 on board.
April 1 – TWA Flight 400, a Martin 4-0-4, crashes on takeoff at Greater Pittsburgh International Airport, killing 22 of the 36 on board; 14 survive.
April 2 – Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 2, a Boeing 377 Stratocruiser, ditches into Puget Sound after takeoff from Seattle–Tacoma International Airport after the cowl flaps are incorrectly set for takeoff; four passengers and a flight attendant die.
June 20 – Linea Aeropostal Flight 253, a Lockheed L-1049 Constellation, crashes into the Atlantic Ocean off Asbury Park, New Jersey. All 74 passengers and crew on board are killed.
June 24 – In the 1956 Kano Airport BOAC Argonaut crash, a Canadair C-4 Argonaut crashes shortly after taking off from Kano Airport, Nigeria, into a thunderstorm, killing 32 of the 38 passengers and three of the seven crew.
June 30 – The 1956 Grand Canyon mid-air collision between United Airlines Flight 718, a DC-7 and TWA Flight 2, a Lockheed Constellation, over the Grand Canyon, kills all 128 aboard both aircraft; operating under Visual Flight Rules, the planes fail to see each other and collide; the Federal Aviation Administration is created in the aftermath.
July 9 – Trans-Canada Air Lines Flight 304, a Vickers Viscount, sheds a propeller blade over Flat Rock, Michigan; the blade penetrates the passenger cabin, killing one of 35 aboard; this is the first known case of a turboprop shedding a blade in passenger service.
October 16 – Pan Am Flight 6, a Boeing 377 Stratocruiser, is forced to ditch in the Pacific Ocean between Hawai'i and San Francisco; all 31 on board are rescued by a nearby United States Coast Guard ship.
November 7 – Braathens SAFE Flight 253, a de Havilland Heron, crashes into Hummelfjell mountain near Tolga, Norway, killing two of 12 on board.
November 27 – Linea Aeropostal Flight 253, a Lockheed L-749 Constellation, crashes while on approach to Caracas International Airport, killing all 25 on board.
December 9 – Trans-Canada Air Lines Flight 810, a Canadair North Star, crashes near Hope, British Columbia, Canada, killing all 62 people on board; the wreckage is located several months later. Aboard are four members of the Canadian Football League Saskatchewan Roughriders, and former Iowa Hawkeye Outland Trophy winner Cal Jones.
1957
February 1 – Northeast Airlines Flight 823, a Douglas DC-6, crashes during a snowstorm shortly after takeoff from LaGuardia Airport; 20 of the 101 occupants die.
March 14 – British European Airways Flight 411, a Vickers Viscount, crashes while on approach to Manchester Airport, killing all 20 on board and two on the ground.
May 1 – In the 1957 Blackbushe Viking accident, an Eagle Aviation Vickers VC.1 Viking crashes after engine failure at Blackbushe Airport; of the 35 on board, only a passenger survives.
July 16 – KLM Flight 844, a Lockheed Super Constellation, crashes after takeoff from Biak-Mokmer Airport, Indonesia, killing 58 of 68 on board.
August 11 – Maritime Central Airways Flight 315, a Douglas DC-4, crashes near Issoudun, Quebec after encountering turbulence in a thunderstorm, killing all 79 passengers and crew on board.
September 15 – Northeast Airlines Flight 285, a Douglas DC-3, crashes on approach to New Bedford Regional Airport following a premature descent due to pilot error, killing 12 of 24 on board.
November 8 – Pan Am Flight 7, a Boeing 377 Stratocruiser, disappears between San Francisco and Honolulu; small pieces of wreckage and human remains are found almost a week later by the United States Navy; all 44 on board are believed to have been killed.
November 15 – In the 1957 Aquila Airways Solent crash, a flying boat crashes near Chessell, Isle of Wight, UK, due to engine failure, killing 45 out of the 58 on board.
1958
February 6 – In the Munich air disaster, a British European Airways Airspeed Ambassador operating as Flight 609 crashes while attempting a take off in a snowstorm from Munich-Riem Airport, killing 23 of 44 passenger and crew members on board including eight Manchester United footballers.
February 27 – In the Winter Hill air disaster, a Silver City Airways Bristol 170 Freighter traveling from the Isle of Man to Manchester Ringway Airport crashes into Winter Hill, Lancashire, killing 35 people and injuring seven.
April 6 – Capital Airlines Flight 67, a Vickers 745D Viscount, crashes at Tri-City Airport (now MBS International Airport) near Freeland, Michigan, killing all 47 passengers and crew; an undiscovered ice buildup on the wing and windy conditions are possible causes.
April 21 – United Airlines Flight 736, a Douglas DC-7, collides near Las Vegas, Nevada, with a US Air Force F-100 Super Sabre fighter on a training mission. All 47 aboard the airliner and both F-100 crew members are killed.
May 20 – Capital Airlines Flight 300, a Vickers Viscount, and an USAF T-33 jet trainer collide in midair and crash. Of the 13 people on both aircraft only 1 pilot of the jet survives.
May 25 – An Avro York 685 cargo aircraft crashes during a forced landing after an engine catches fire en route from Karachi to Delhi, killing four of the five people on board.
August 9 – Central African Airways Flight 890, a Vickers Viscount, crashes due to pilot error near Benina International Airport, Libya. Of the 54 on board, 36 are killed.
August 14 – KLM Flight 607-E, a Lockheed L-1049 Super Constellation (named Hugo de Groot) en route from Amsterdam to New York, crashes into the Atlantic Ocean shortly after takeoff from Shannon Airport in Ireland, killing all 99 passengers and crew, including six members of the Egyptian fencing team.
August 15 – Aeroflot Flight 4, a Tupolev Tu-104, crashes after stalling in an updraft, killing all 64 people on board.
August 15 – Northeast Airlines Flight 258, a Convair 240, crashes near Nantucket International Airport due to pilot error, killing 25 of 34 on board.
September 2 – An Independent Air Travel Vickers VC.1 Viking crashes near Southall, Middlesex, killing all three crew on board and another four people on the ground.
October 17 – An Aeroflot Tupolev Tu-104 crashes near Kanash, Russia due to a loss of control after encountering severe turbulence, killing all 80 on board.
October 22 – British European Airways Flight 142, a Vickers Viscount, collides with an Italian Air Force North American F-86 Sabre over Italy, all 31 on board die.
December 4 – An Aviaco SNCASE Languedoc crashes in the Guadarrama Mountains, killing all 21 people on board.
December 24 – A BOAC Bristol Britannia crashes near Christchurch, Dorset, England, killing nine of 12 on board.
1959
January 8 – Southeast Airlines Flight 308, a Douglas DC-3A, crashes into the Holston Mountain range, Tennessee, on approach to the Tri-Cities Regional Airport, killing all 10 people on board.
January 11 – Lufthansa Flight 502, a Lockheed L-1049 Super Constellation, crashes on approach to Rio de Janeiro–Galeão International Airport, Brazil, 36 of the 39 on board are killed.
January 16 – Austral Líneas Aéreas Flight 205, a Curtiss C-46 Commando, crashes after a missed approach to Mar Del Plata Airport in Argentina, killing 51 of the 52 people on board.
February 3 – American Airlines Flight 320, a Lockheed L-188 Super Electra, crashes into the East River, New York City, as a result of pilot error; 65 passengers and crew are killed.
February 3 – Pan Am Flight 115, a Boeing 707 with 119 people on board experiences an unplanned emergency descent from 35,000 ft to 6,000 ft. The crew manage to regain control and make an emergency landing in Gander, Canada.
February 17 – In the 1959 Turkish Airlines Gatwick crash, a chartered Vickers Viscount 793 carrying the Turkish prime minister and other government officials crashes in heavy fog during its final approach into London Gatwick Airport; five of the eight crew and nine of the 16 passengers die in the accident; Prime Minister Adnan Menderes is among the 10 survivors.
April 23 – In the 1959 Air Charter Turkey crash, an Avro Super Trader IV crashes on Mount Süphan, Turkey; all 12 crew on board die.
May 12 – Capital Airlines Flight 75, a Vickers Viscount 745D flying from New York City to Atlanta, breaks up in flight over Chase, Maryland, due to loss of control in severe turbulence; all 31 on board are killed.
June 26 – TWA Flight 891, a Lockheed Starliner, is struck by lightning shortly after takeoff from Milan Malpensa Airport and crashes near Marnate; all 68 passengers and crew on board are killed.
August 15 – American Airlines Flight 514, a Boeing 707 crashes near Calverton-Peconic River Airport, New York after a loss of control. All five crew members are killed in the first crash involving a Boeing 707.
August 19 – A Transair Douglas Dakota crashes into a mountain in Spain, killing all 32 on board.
September 24 – TAI Flight 307, a Douglas DC-7, crashes into a pine forest on departure from Mérignac Airport, France; 54 of the 65 people on board are killed.
September 29 – Braniff Flight 542, a Lockheed L-188 Electra, breaks up in mid-air and crashes from Buffalo, Texas; all 34 on board die.
October 30 – Piedmont Airlines Flight 349, a Douglas DC-3, crashes on Bucks Elbow Mountain near Charlottesville, Virginia, killing the crew of three and 23 of 24 passengers; the sole survivor is seriously injured; the cause is a navigational error during an Instrument Landing System approach.
November 16 – National Airlines Flight 967, a Douglas DC-7B, explodes in mid-air and crashes into the Gulf of Mexico while on a flight from Tampa, Florida, to New Orleans, Louisiana; all 40 on board die.
November 16 – Aeroflot Flight 315, an Antonov An-10, enters a nosedive and crashes on approach to Lviv Airport due to tail icing, killing all 40 on board.
November 21 – Ariana Afghan Airlines Flight 202, a Douglas DC-4, crashes into a hillside near Beirut shortly after takeoff, killing 24 of 27 on board.
December 1 – Allegheny Airlines Flight 371, a Martin 2-0-2 crashes on approach into Williamsport Regional Airport, Pennsylvania. Only one passenger survives out of the 26 passengers and crew on board.
December 13 – Aeroflot Flight 120, an Ilyushin Il-14, crashes in the Baysuntau mountain range, Uzbekistan, after the pilot deviates from the flight route; all 30 on board die.
1960s
1960
January 6 – National Airlines Flight 2511, a Douglas DC-6B bound from New York to Miami, crashes near Bolivia, North Carolina, when a bomb planted on board explodes in mid-air; all 34 people on board are killed.
January 18 – Capital Airlines Flight 20, a Vickers Viscount, en route from Washington National Airport to Norfolk International Airport crashes near Holdcroft, Virginia due to engine failure caused by icy conditions; all 50 on board are killed.
January 19 – Scandinavian Airlines System Flight 871, a Sud Aviation Caravelle, crashes while on approach to Esenboğa Airport, Ankara, Turkey, killing all 42 on board; an undetermined descent was to blame for the first fatal crash of the Sud Caravelle.
January 21 – Avianca Flight 671, a Lockheed Constellation, crashes on landing at Sangster International Airport, Jamaica, killing two of the seven crew and 35 of 39 passengers on board in Jamaica's worst aviation accident.
February 25 – The 1960 Rio de Janeiro mid-air collision: A United States Navy Douglas R6D-1 (DC-6A) collides with Real Transportes Aéreos Flight 753, a Douglas DC-3, over Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; of the 38 occupants of the American aircraft, three survive, and all 26 passengers and crew of the Brazilian aircraft are killed.
February 26 – Aeroflot Flight 315, an Antonov An-10A, crashes short of the runway at Lviv Airport due to tail icing; of the 33 on board, only a passenger survives.
February 26 – Alitalia Flight 618, a Douglas DC-7C, crashes shortly after takeoff from Shannon Airport for reasons unknown, killing 34 of 52 on board.
March 17 – Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 710, a Lockheed L-188 Super Electra en route from Chicago to Miami, Florida, breaks apart at and crashes near Tell City, Indiana, killing all 63 on board.
June 10 – Trans Australia Airlines Flight 538, a Fokker F-27, crashes into the ocean near Mackay, Queensland, Australia, killing all 29 on board in Australia's worst civilian air disaster. This crash was responsible for the mandatory installation of cockpit voice recorders in airliners in Australia, followed by the rest of the world.
June 10 – Aeroflot Flight 207, an Ilyushin Il-14, crashes into a mountain near Tkvarcheli, Georgia after the crew deviated from the flight route; all 31 on board die.
July 15 – Ethiopian Airlines Flight 372, a Douglas C-47 Skytrain, crashes into a mountain near Jimma, Ethiopia due to pilot error, killing one of the pilots.
August 17 – Aeroflot Flight 36, an Ilyushin Il-18, crashes near Tarasovich, Ukraine following an engine fire, killing all 34 on board.
September 26 – Austrian Airlines Flight 901, a Vickers Viscount, crashes short of runway 07 at Sheremetyevo International Airport. 31 of the 37 passengers and crew on board are killed.
October 4 – Eastern Air Lines Flight 375, a Lockheed L-188 Super Electra, crashes on takeoff from Boston's Logan International Airport into Winthrop Bay, after multiple bird strikes; 62 of 72 aboard die.
October 29 – The Cal Poly football team plane crash: a chartered Curtiss C-46 crashes on takeoff at the Toledo Express Airport in Toledo, Ohio, with the loss of 22 people including 16 players on the California Polytechnic State University football team.
November 23 – Philippine Airlines Flight S26, a Douglas DC-3C, strikes the slope of Mount Baco due to a possible navigation error; all 33 on board die.
December 16 – The 1960 New York mid-air collision: United Airlines Flight 826, a Douglas DC-8, and TWA Flight 266, a Lockheed Super Constellation, collide in mid-air over Staten Island in New York; all 128 aboard the two planes and six people on the ground are killed. This is the first crash in which a flight recorder was used to provide details in a crash investigation. The accident was the deadliest aviation disaster in history at the time.
1961
January 3 – Aero Flight 311, a Douglas DC-3, crashes into woods near Koivulahti, Finland, killing all 25 on board.
January 28 – American Airlines Flight 1502, a Boeing 707, crashes into the sea off Montauk Point, New York during a training flight following a loss of control. All six crew members on board are killed.
February 15 – Sabena Flight 548, a Boeing 707, crashes on approach in Brussels, Belgium, killing 73, including the entire United States figure skating team: a runaway stabilizer is thought to have been the cause of the first fatal accident involving a 707 in regular passenger service.
March 16 – Aeroflot Flight 68, a Tupolev Tu-104, crashes shortly after takeoff from Koltsovo Airport following engine failure, killing five of 51 on board; two people on the ground also die when the aircraft hits a house.
March 28 – ČSA Flight 511, an Ilyushin Il-18, breaks up and crashes at Gräfenberg, West Germany. All 52 passengers and crew on board are killed.
April 3 – LAN Chile Flight 621, a Douglas DC-3, crashes in the Andes, killing all 24 on board including footballers and coaching staff from the CD Green Cross Chilean football team.
May 10 – Air France Flight 406, a Lockheed Starliner, crashes into the Sahara Desert near the Edjele oilfield in Algeria after a bomb goes off on board. All 78 passengers and crew are killed in the crash.
May 30 – Viasa Flight 897, a Douglas DC-8, crashes shortly after taking off from Lisbon Portela Airport. All 61 passengers and crew on board are killed.
June 12 – KLM Flight 823, a Lockheed L-188 Electra, crashes while on approach to Cairo International Airport due to pilot error; 20 of 36 on board die.
July 11 – United Airlines Flight 859, a Douglas DC-8, crashes on landing at Stapleton International Airport, killing 17 passengers and one person on the ground.
July 12 – ČSA Flight 511, an Ilyushin Il-18, crashes at Anfa Airport, Morocco for reasons unknown, killing all 72 on board.
July 19 – Aerolíneas Argentinas Flight 644, a Douglas DC-6, breaks up and crashes 12 miles west of Pardo, Buenos Aires, Argentina after encountering severe turbulence shortly after takeoff. All 67 passengers and crew on board are killed.
July 21 – Alaska Airlines Flight 779, a Douglas DC-6A on a military contract flight crashes short of the runway at Shemya Air Force Base, Alaska. All six crew members are killed.
August 6 – In the 1961 Malév Hungarian Airlines Douglas C-47 Skytrain crash, a Malév Douglas C-47 crashes into an apartment building in Zugló, Budapest during a sightseeing flight due to pilot error, killing all 27 on board and three more on the ground; all in the apartment survived.
August 9 – The Holtaheia Accident: An Eagle Airways Vickers VC.1 Viking crashes at Holta, Strand, Norway, killing all 39 on board, including 36 people from the Archbishop Lanfranc School.
September 1 – TWA Flight 529, a Lockheed Constellation L-049 propliner, abruptly pitches up and crashes shortly after takeoff from Chicago's Midway Airport, killing all 73 passengers and five crew on board; a 5/16 inch bolt that fell out of the elevator control linkage just before the crash is blamed.
September 11 – A President Airlines Douglas DC-6 crashes shortly after takeoff from Shannon Airport en route to Gander due to loss of control caused by possible pilot error, killing all 83 passengers and crew on board. The crash remains the worst in Irish territory.
September 12 – Air France Flight 2005, a Sud Aviation Caravelle, crashes on approach to Rabat–Salé Airport due to misread instruments, killing all 77 on board.
September 17 – Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 706, a Lockheed L-188 Electra, crashes on takeoff from Chicago as a result of a maintenance error causing the ailerons to become detached from the control wheels; all 37 on board die.
September 18 – 1961 Ndola United Nations DC-6 Crash, a Douglas DC-6B, carrying Dag Hammarskjöld, second Secretary-General of the United Nations, crashes near Ndola, killing all 16 on board.
September 23 – Turkish Airlines Flight 835, a Fokker F27 Friendship crashes while on approach to Esenboğa Airport; 28 of the 29 passengers and crew on board die in the crash.
October 7 – In the 1961 Derby Aviation crash, a Douglas Dakota, crashes into Canigou mountainside en route to Perpignan from London due to a navigation error, killing all 34 aboard.
November 8 – Imperial Airlines Flight 201/8, a Lockheed Constellation L-049, crashes on landing at Byrd Field near Richmond, Virginia; all 74 passengers—mostly new US Army recruits being flown to their base for training—die of carbon monoxide asphyxiation, along with three crew members; the captain and flight engineer survive by escaping the burning wreckage.
November 23 – Aerolíneas Argentinas Flight 322, a de Havilland Comet, crashes in Campinas, Brazil, shortly after takeoff, killing all 12 crew and 40 passengers on board.
November 30 – Ansett-ANA Flight 325, a Vickers Viscount, crashes into Botany Bay, Australia, 9 minutes after takeoff, killing all 15 people on board.
December 17 – Aeroflot Flight 245, an Ilyushin Il-18, enters a nosedive and crashes near Chebotovka, Russia, after the pilot deployed the flaps by mistake, killing all 59 on board.
1962
February 25 – An Avensa Fairchild F-27 crashes into San Juan mountain on Margarita Island in the Caribbean Sea, killing all 23 on board.
March 1 – American Airlines Flight 1, a Boeing 707 destined for Los Angeles, California, United States, crashes in Jamaica Bay, Queens, New York, due to a rudder malfunction; all 95 passengers and crew on board are killed.
March 4 – Caledonian Airways Flight 153, a Douglas DC-7 operating a non-scheduled multi-leg flight out of Luxembourg, crashes into a jungle swamp at Douala, Cameroon for reasons unknown, killing all 111 on board.
March 8 – A Turkish Airlines Fairchild F-27 crashes into the Bolkar Mountains while on approach to Turkey's Adana Airport, killing all 11 on board.
March 16 – Flying Tiger Line Flight 739, a Lockheed L-1049 Super Constellation chartered by the United States military to transport 96 American soldiers to South Vietnam, disappears over the western Pacific.
May 6 – A Channel Airways Douglas C-47 Dakota crashes into a hill on the Isle of Wight in bad weather, while en route from Jersey to London's Southend Airport, killing 12 of the 18 on board.
May 12 – An Eastern Provincial Airlines Canso flying boat sinks at Godthab Harbour, Greenland, killing 15 of the 21 on board.
May 22 – Continental Airlines Flight 11, a Boeing 707 flying from Chicago, Illinois, to Kansas City, Missouri, breaks up in mid-air near Unionville, Missouri, after a passenger's bomb explodes in the lavatory, killing all 45 people on board.
June 3 – Air France Flight 007, a chartered Boeing 707, catches fire after overshooting the runway on takeoff, killing all but two of the 130 passengers and crew on board; among the fatalities are many of the civic and cultural leaders of Atlanta, Georgia; it is the worst single-aircraft accident to that date.
June 22 – Air France Flight 117, a Boeing 707 operating an international multi-leg flight from Paris, France, to Santiago, Chile, crashes into a forested hill on the island of Guadeloupe, while approaching Pointe-à-Pitre International Airport; all 113 on board are killed; the cause of the crash is never determined.
June 30 – Aeroflot Flight 902, a Tupolev Tu-104 operating a domestic flight in the Soviet Union, is shot down by a missile near Voznesenka, Krasnoyarsk Krai; all 84 people on board die in Russia's worst air accident to that date.
July 7 – Alitalia Flight 771, a Douglas DC-8 operating a multi-leg flight between Sydney, Australia, and Rome, Italy, hits high terrain while descending near Junnar in India, due to navigation error; all 94 on board are killed.
July 19 – United Arab Airlines Flight 869, a de Havilland DH-106 Comet 4C operating an international scheduled flight from Hong Kong to Cairo, via Bangkok, crashes into the Khao Yai mountain while descending to Bangkok; all 26 people on board lose their lives.
July 22 – Canadian Pacific Air Lines Flight 301, a Bristol Britannia destined for Nadi, Fiji, crashes during an attempted "go-around" on a three-engined approach at Honolulu Airport, Hawaii, after experiencing engine problems shortly after takeoff; 27 of the 40 on board are killed.
July 28 – Aeroflot Flight 415, an Antonov An-10 operating a domestic flight in the Soviet Union, crashes into a mountain near Sochi Airport due to ATC and crew errors; all 81 on board lose their lives.
September 3 – Aeroflot Flight 3, a Tupolev Tu-104 operating a domestic flight in the Soviet Union, crashes near Kuruna, Nanaysky District, due to an unexplained loss of control; all 86 on board are killed.
September 18 - Aeroflot Flight 213 (1962), an Ilyushin Il-14 operating a domestic flight in the Soviet Union, crashes near Chersky Airport, Sakha Republic, after controlled flight into terrain caused by poor weather; all 32 people on board are killed.
November 23 – United Airlines Flight 297, a Vickers Viscount 745D operating a multi-leg flight between the US states of New Jersey and Georgia, crashes near Ellicott City, Maryland, following a bird strike; all 17 people on board lose their lives.
November 27 – Varig Flight 810, a Boeing 707-441 flying from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to Los Angeles, California, United States, crashes into a mountain near Lima airport in Peru, killing all 97 occupants.
November 30 – Eastern Air Lines Flight 512, a Douglas DC-7B operating a domestic flight from Charlotte, North Carolina, United States, to New York City, crashes as a result of pilot error during a missed approach at New York's Idlewild Airport; 25 of the 51 on board are killed.
December 19 – A LOT Vickers Viscount Warsaw crashes on approach to Okecie International Airport, Warsaw, Poland, due to loss of control; all 33 passengers and crew on board lose their lives.
1963
February 1 – In the Ankara mid-air collision, Middle East Airlines Flight 265, a Vickers Viscount, collides with a Turkish Air Force Douglas C-47, killing all 17 on board both aircraft and 87 on the ground.
February 12 – Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 705, a Boeing 720, breaks up in turbulence associated with a severe thunderstorm and crashes into the Everglades; all 43 passengers and crew members on board are killed.
March 5 – Aeroflot Flight 191, an Ilyushin Il-18, crashes on landing at Ashgabat International Airport due to a dust storm, killing 12 of 54 on board.
April 4 – Aeroflot Flight 25, an Ilyushin Il-18, crashes in Tatarstan after suffering an engine malfunction, killing all 67 people aboard.
June 3 – Northwest Airlines Flight 293, a Douglas DC-7C operating a military charter crashes into the sea off Annette Island, Alaska for reasons unknown. All 101 passengers and crew are killed.
July 2 – Mohawk Airlines Flight 121, a Martin 4-0-4, crashes near Rochester, New York, while attempting takeoff, killing seven of the 43 people on board.
July 3 – New Zealand National Airways Corporation Flight 441, a Douglas DC-3 en route from Whenuapai Airport, Auckland to Tauranga, crashes into the Kaimai Ranges; all 23 aboard die, making it the worst air disaster in mainland New Zealand to date.
July 13 – Aeroflot Flight 12, a Tupolev Tu-104, crashes on approach to Irkutsk following a premature descent, killing 33 of 35 on board.
July 27 – United Arab Airlines Flight 869, a de Havilland Comet 4C, crashes into the sea while on approach to Bombay Airport, India, killing all 63 on board.
August 21 – An Aeroflot Tupolev Tu-124 ditches in the Neva river in Leningrad after engine failure; there are no fatalities among the 52 on board, but the aircraft is destroyed.
August 24 – Aeroflot Flight 663, an Avia 14P, crashes into a mountain near Gegechkori, Georgia in bad weather after the pilot deviated from the flight route; all 32 on board die.
September 4 – Swissair Flight 306, a Sud Aviation Caravelle, crashes near Dürrenäsch, Switzerland, due to an in-flight fire, killing all 80 on board.
November 8 – Aero Flight 217, a Douglas DC-3, crashes in poor visibility near Mariehamn Airport, killing 22 out of 25 on board.
November 29 – Trans-Canada Air Lines Flight 831, a Douglas DC-8, crashes shortly after takeoff from Montreal/Dorval Airport, killing all 118 people on board.
December 8 – Pan Am Flight 214, a Boeing 707, is struck by positive lightning and crashes near Elkton, Maryland, killing all 81 people on board.
1964
February 25 – Eastern Air Lines Flight 304, a Douglas DC-8 flying from New Orleans International Airport to Washington National Airport, crashes into Lake Pontchartrain, killing all 51 passengers and seven crew aboard.
February 29 – British Eagle International Airlines Flight 802, a Bristol Britannia, crashes into a mountain near Innsbruck, Austria. All 75 passengers and eight crew are killed in the crash.
March 1 – Paradise Airlines Flight 901A, a Lockheed L-049 Constellation, crashes near Lake Tahoe, killing all 85 aboard when it collides with a mountain.
May 7 – Pacific Air Lines Flight 773, a Fairchild F27, crashes near San Ramon, California, killing all 44 aboard, after a passenger shoots both the captain and first officer before turning the gun on himself.
June 20 – Civil Air Transport Flight 106, a Curtiss C-46, crashes near Shenkang, Taiwan, killing all 57 on board.
July 9 – United Airlines Flight 823, a Vickers Viscount, crashes near Parrottsville, Tennessee, after a fire on board; all 39 passengers and crew die.
September 2 – Aeroflot Flight 721, an Ilyushin Il-18, crashes into a hillside while on approach to Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk Airport due to pilot error, killing 87 of 93 on board.
November 15 – Bonanza Air Lines Flight 114, a Fairchild F27, flies into a mountain in poor weather while on a nighttime approach to Las Vegas, Nevada. All 29 aboard are killed.
November 20 – Linjeflyg Flight 267, a Convair CV-340, crashes during the approach to Engelholm, Sweden, when, in instrument meteorological conditions, the crew abandons the set procedure and descends prematurely; 31 people are killed; 12 survive.
November 23 – TWA Flight 800, a Boeing 707, suffers engine failure and crashes at Leonardo da Vinci-Fiumicino Airport, killing 50 of 73 on board; the cause is an inoperative thrust reverser.
December 24 – Flying Tiger Line Flight 282, a Lockheed Constellation, crashes near San Bruno, California, after an unexplained course deviation, killing the crew of three.
1965
January 4 – Aeroflot Flight 20, an Ilyushin Il-18, crashes on approach to Alma-Ata in poor visibility, killing 64 of 103 on board.
February 6 – LAN Chile Flight 107, a Douglas DC-6, crashes shortly after takeoff from Santiago-Los Cerrillos Airport in Santiago, Chile. All 87 passengers and crew on board are killed.
February 8 – Eastern Air Lines Flight 663, a Douglas DC-7B on takeoff, overreacts in avoiding Pan Am Flight 212 (a Boeing 707) on approach, loses control, and crashes into the ocean several miles off Jones Beach State Park, New York, killing all 84 on board.
March 8 – Aeroflot Flight 513, a Tupolev Tu-124V stalls and crashes after taking off from Kuybyshev Airport, Russia. 30 out of the 39 passengers and crew are killed.
April 14 – British United Airways Flight 1030X, a Douglas C-47, crashes on landing at Jersey Airport due to pilot error; of the 27 passengers and crew on board, only a flight attendant survives.
May 5 – Iberia Airlines Flight 401, a Lockheed L-1049 Super Constellation, crashes after striking a tractor on the runway at Los Rodeos Airport, Tenerife, during a go-around in foggy weather; 30 of 49 passengers and crew die.
May 20 – PIA Flight 705, a Boeing 720, crashes on descent to Cairo International Airport, killing 119 of 125 on board in the worst-ever accident involving the 720.
July 1 – Continental Airlines Flight 12, a Boeing 707, runs off the end of the runway at Kansas City Downtown Airport, breaking into three pieces; all 66 on board survive.
July 8 – Canadian Pacific Air Lines Flight 21, a Douglas DC-6, crashes near 100 Mile House, British Columbia, after the explosion of a device in the lavatory; all 46 passengers and six crew aboard die.
July 10 – A Skyways Coach-Air Avro 748 crashes on landing at Lympne Airport, Kent, United Kingdom, due to a waterlogged runway; all 52 on board survive; this crash marks the first loss of the Avro 748/HS 748.
July 20 – In the Cambrian Airways Liverpool crash, a Vickers Viscount crashes on approach into Liverpool-Speke Airport, United Kingdom. Both crew members, as well as two on the ground, are killed.
August 16 – United Airlines Flight 389, a Boeing 727, crashes into Lake Michigan at night, after the pilots apparently misread their altimeters; all 24 passengers and six crew die in the first fatal crash of the Boeing 727.
September 17 – Pan Am Flight 292, a Boeing 707, crashes into Chances Peak, Montserrat, in stormy weather; all 30 on board die.
November 8 – American Airlines Flight 383, a Boeing 727, crashes while on approach to Greater Cincinnati airport; of the 62 people on board, one flight attendant and three passengers survive.
November 11 – United Airlines Flight 227, a Boeing 727, crashes short of the runway during landing at Salt Lake City International Airport, Utah; 43 of 91 aboard are killed.
November 11 – Aeroflot Flight 99, a Tupolev Tu-124, crashes near Murmansk, Russia, due to pilot error, killing 32 of 64 on board.
December 4 – The 1965 Carmel mid-air collision; Eastern Air Lines Flight 853, a Lockheed Super Constellation, collides with TWA Flight 42, a Boeing 707 over Carmel, New York. Flight 42 makes an emergency landing at John F. Kennedy International Airport; Flight 853 is forced to crash land on Hunt Mountain near Danbury, Connecticut, killing three passengers and one of the pilots on board. No casualties are reported on board Flight 42.
1966
January 15 – Avianca Flight 4, a Douglas C-54, suffers engine failure and crashes off Cartagena, Colombia, killing 56 of the 64 on board.
January 24 – Air India Flight 101, a Boeing 707-437, crashes into the southwest face of Mont Blanc in France; all 106 passengers and 11 crew are killed. Sixteen years earlier Air India Flight 245 had crashed in almost exactly the same spot.
January 28 – Lufthansa Flight 005, a Convair 440, crashes at Bremen Airport; all 46 on board die.
February 2 – Pakistan International Airlines Flight 17, a Sikorsky S-61 helicopter, crashes near Faridpur, Bangladesh, Pakistan; of the 23 on board, only a passenger survives.
February 4 – All Nippon Airways Flight 60, a Boeing 727-100, crashes into Tokyo Bay, Japan; all 133 aboard are killed in Japan's worst air disaster at that time.
February 17 – Aeroflot Flight 65, a Tupolev Tu-114, crashes on takeoff from Sheremetyevo International Airport due to crew and ATC errors, killing 21 of 63 on board.
March 4 – Canadian Pacific Air Lines Flight 402, a McDonnell Douglas DC-8-43, crashes on landing at Tokyo International Airport in Japan, killing 64 passengers and crew; eight passengers survive.
March 5 – BOAC Flight 911, a Boeing 707 bound for Hong Kong, breaks up in mid-air and crashes at Mount Fuji near Gotenba, Japan, killing all 124 passengers and crew.
March 18 – United Arab Airlines Flight 749, an Antonov An-24, crashes while attempting to land at Cairo International Airport. All 30 passengers and crew on board are killed.
April 22 – American Flyers Airline Flight 280/D, a Lockheed L-188 Electra, crashes into a hill short of Ardmore Municipal Airport in Oklahoma, United States. 83 of the 98 passengers and crew on board are killed.
April 23 – Aeroflot Flight 2723, an Ilyushin Il-14, ditches in the Caspian Sea following unexplained engine problems; all 33 on board die.
April 27 – LANSA Flight 501, a Lockheed L-749A Constellation, crashes into a mountain in Tomas District, Peru, killing all 49 passengers and crew on board.
August 6 – Braniff Flight 250, a BAC One-Eleven, flies into an active squall line and breaks apart in mid-air near Falls City, Nebraska. All 42 on board are killed.
September 1 – Britannia Airways Flight 105, a Bristol Britannia, crashes on approach to Jože Pučnik Airport, Slovenia, due to an incorrectly set altimeter, killing 98 of 117 passengers and crew on board.
September 22 – Ansett-ANA Flight 149, a Vickers Viscount, crashes near Winton, Queensland, Australia, killing all 24 people on board.
October 1 – West Coast Airlines Flight 956 crashes with 18 fatalities south of Wemme, Oregon, marking the first loss of a Douglas DC-9.
November 13 – All Nippon Airways Flight 533, a NAMC YS-11, plunges into Seto Inland Sea after an overrun at Matsuyama Airport, Shikoku, Japan, killing all 50 passengers and crew; this crash is the first loss of a YS-11.
November 15 – Pan Am Flight 708, a Boeing 727, crashes near Berlin, Germany; all three crew members are killed.
November 24 – TABSO Flight 101, an Ilyushin Il-18B, crashes into a wooded hillside shortly after takeoff from Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, killing all 82 aboard.
1967
February 16 – Garuda Indonesia Flight 708, a Lockheed L-188 Electra, crashes on landing at Sam Ratulangi Airport, killing 22 of 84 passengers on board; all eight crew survive.
March 5 – Lake Central Flight 527, a Convair 580, crashes near Marseilles, Ohio, after a propeller detaches and severs the fuselage, causing a loss of control; all 38 on board die.
March 5 – Varig Airlines Flight 837, a Douglas DC-8, crashes while on approach to Roberts International Airport due to pilot error, killing 51 of 90 on board as well as five on the ground.
March 9 – TWA Flight 553, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9, collides with a Beechcraft Baron near Dayton, Ohio, killing all 26 on both planes.
March 10 – West Coast Flight 720, a Fokker F27 Friendship crashes shortly after taking off from Klamath Falls, Oregon. All four occupants are killed.
March 13 – South African Airways Flight 406, a Vickers Viscount 818, crashes into the sea while on approach to East London, South Africa, killing all 25 passengers and crew on board. The report on the accident speculated that the pilot of the plane suffered a fatal heart attack while on approach and the co-pilot was unable to regain control of the aircraft.
March 30 – Delta Air Lines Flight 9877, a DC-8, stalls during a simulated two engine-out approach and crashes in New Orleans, killing all 6 people on board and 13 on the ground.
April 11 – An Air Algérie DC-4 crashes into a mountain in Algeria, killing 35 out of the 39 on board.
April 20 – The 1967 Nicosia Britannia disaster: a Globe Air-operated Bristol Britannia on a charter flight in bad weather near Lakatamia, Cyprus, killing 126 of the 130 on board.
June 3 – In the 1967 Air Ferry DC-4 accident, a Douglas DC-4 crashes into a mountain en route from Manston Airport, England to Perpignan Airport, France. All 88 passengers and crew are killed.
June 4 – In the Stockport air disaster, a British Midland Canadair C-4 Argonaut carrying passengers returning from Palma de Mallorca is on approach to Manchester Airport when an engine loses power because of a design failure in the aircraft's fuel system; of the 84 passengers aboard, 72 were killed.
June 23 – Mohawk Airlines Flight 40, a BAC One-Eleven, crashes in Blossburg, Pennsylvania, killing all 34 people on board.
June 30 – Thai Airways International Flight 601, a Sud Aviation Caravelle, crashes into the sea on landing at Kai Tak Airport, killing 24 of 80 on board.
July 19 – Piedmont Airlines Flight 22, a Boeing 727 departing from Asheville, North Carolina, crashes shortly after takeoff after a mid-air collision with a twin-engine Cessna 310 on instrument approach to Asheville; all 82 passengers and crew on both aircraft die.
September 5 – ČSA Flight 523, an Ilyushin Il-18D flight from Prague Ruzyně International Airport, Czechoslovakia, to Havana, crashes after takeoff from a refuelling stop in Gander, Canada, killing 37 of 69 people on board.
October 12 – Cyprus Airways Flight 284, a de Havilland Comet, is destroyed by a bomb over the Mediterranean; all 66 passengers and crew die in the crash.
November 4 – Iberia Airlines Flight 062, a Sud Aviation Caravelle, crashes at Black Down Hill, Sussex, United Kingdom; all 37 passengers and crew are killed.
November 6 – TWA Flight 159, a Boeing 707, overruns the runway at Greater Cincinnati Airport and catches fire; all on board escape the aircraft, but a passenger dies four days later.
November 16 – Aeroflot Flight 2230, an Ilyushin Il-18, crashes just after takeoff from Koltsovo Airport, killing all 107 passengers and crew on board in the worst-ever accident involving the Il-18; the cause of the crash remains undetermined.
November 20 – TWA Flight 128, a Convair 880, crashes in Constance, Kentucky, on approach to Greater Cincinnati Airport, killing 70 of 82 persons on board.
December 30 – Aeroflot Flight 51, an Antonov An-24, crashes on approach to Liepāja Airport, Latvia due to pilot error, killing 43 of 51 on board.
1968
January 6 – Aeroflot Flight 1668, an Antonov An-24, crashes shortly after takeoff from Olekminsk, Russia due to an unexplained loss of control, killing all 45 on board.
February 16 – Civil Air Transport Flight 010, a Boeing 727, crashes at Hunan village, Linkou Township, Taipei County (now Linkou District, New Taipei City) due to pilot error, killing 21 of 63 on board and one person on the ground.
February 29 – Aeroflot Flight 15, an Ilyushin Il-18D crashes en route from Yemelyanovo, Russia to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Russia; of the 84 on board, only one survives.
March 6 – Air France Flight 212, a Boeing 707, crashes into the northwestern slope of La Soufrière Mountain in Guadeloupe with the loss of all 63 lives on board.
March 24 – Aer Lingus Flight 712, a Vickers Viscount 803, crashes off the Irish coast; all 61 on board die.
March 27 – Ozark Air Lines Flight 965, a Douglas DC-9, collides with a Cessna 150 while both aircraft are approaching the same runway at Lambert Field in St. Louis, Missouri. The DC-9 lands safely with no injuries to the 49 passengers and crew, while the two pilots in the Cessna are killed.
April 8 – BOAC Flight 712, a Boeing 707, suffers an engine fire after takeoff from London Heathrow Airport; the plane makes an emergency landing at Heathrow, but five of 127 aboard die in the resulting fire.
April 20 – South African Airways Flight 228, a Boeing 707, crashes just after takeoff from Strijdom International Airport, Windhoek, South West Africa (now Namibia), due to pilot error; of the 128 on board, only five survive.
May 3 – Braniff Flight 352, a Lockheed L-188A Super Electra en route from Houston, Texas to Dallas, breaks up in mid-air in a thunderstorm and crashes near Dawson, Texas; killing its five crew and 80 passengers.
May 22 – Los Angeles Airways Flight 841, a Sikorsky S-61L, crashes near Paramount, California, resulting in the loss of 23 lives.
May 28 – Garuda Indonesia Flight 892, a Convair CV-990, stalls and crashes near Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport, 4–5 minutes after take-off, resulting in the death of everyone on board and one on the ground.
July 1 – Seaboard World Airlines Flight 253A, a Douglas DC-8, is forced to land in the Soviet Union; on board are over 200 American troops bound for Vietnam.
July 3 – In the 1968 BKS Air Transport Heathrow crash, an Airspeed Ambassador freight aircraft experiences metal fatigue and crashes while landing, striking two unoccupied British European Airways airliners. Six of the freighter's crew of eight are killed, as are eight racehorses being transported. All Airspeed Ambassadors are grounded until a redesign strengthens the flaps.
July 23 – Three members of Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijack El Al Flight 426 from Rome to Tel Aviv. Diverting to Algiers the negotiations extend over 40 days. Both the hijackers and the hostages go free.
August 14 – Los Angeles Airways Flight 417, a Sikorsky S-61L prototype, crashes in Compton, California, resulting in the loss of 21 lives.
September 11 – Air France Flight 1611, a Sud Aviation SE-210 Caravelle, crashes near Nice, France, killing all 95 passengers and crew on board.
October 25 – Northeast Airlines Flight 946, a Fairchild 227, crashes near Etna, New Hampshire, killing 32 passengers and crew.
November 22 – Japan Airlines Flight 2, a Douglas DC-8, ditches in San Francisco Bay as a result of pilot error, all on board survive.
December 2 – Wien Consolidated Airlines Flight 55, a Fairchild F-27B, crashes into Pedro Bay, Alaska. All 39 passengers and crew on board are killed.
December 12 – Pan Am Flight 217, a Boeing 707, crashes near Caracas, Venezuela, as a result of pilot error; all 51 on board die.
December 24 – Allegheny Airlines Flight 736, a Convair CV-580, crashes while on approach to Bradford Regional Airport. 20 of the 47 passengers and crew on board are killed.
December 27 – North Central Airlines Flight 458, a Convair CV-580, crashes into a hangar at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago, Illinois, killing 27 of the 45 people on board and one person on the ground.
December 31 – MacRobertson Miller Airlines Flight 1750, a Vickers Viscount, crashes near Port Hedland in Western Australia, killing all 26 people on board.
1969
January 5 – Ariana Afghan Airlines Flight 701, a Boeing 727-100C, arriving at London Gatwick Airport from Frankfurt Airport crashes into a house in dense fog, killing 48 of the 62 persons aboard; a married couple living at the house also die, but their baby survives.
January 6 – Allegheny Airlines Flight 737, a Convair CV-580, crashes while on approach to Bradford Regional Airport. 11 of the 28 passengers and crew on board are killed.
January 13 – Scandinavian Airlines Flight 933, a Douglas DC-8, crashes into Santa Monica Bay due to pilot error, killing 15 of 45 on board.
January 18 – United Airlines Flight 266, a Boeing 727, en route from Los Angeles to Milwaukee loses all electrical power and crashes into Santa Monica Bay; six crew and 32 passengers are killed.
February 18 – Hawthorne Nevada Airlines Flight 708, a Douglas DC-3, crashes near Lone Pine, California, killing all 35 people on board.
February 24 – Far Eastern Air Transport Flight 104, a Handley Page Dart Herald, suffers engine failure and crashes while on approach to Tainan Airport, Taiwan; all 36 on board die.
March 5 – Prinair Flight 277, a de Havilland Heron, crashes into mountainous territory at Luquillo, Puerto Rico, killing all 19 people on board.
March 16 – Viasa Flight 742, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9-30, crashes on takeoff from Maracaibo, Venezuela. All 84 passengers on board, plus 71 people on the ground are killed in the crash. At 155 people dead, it was the worst aviation disaster in history at that time.
March 20 – In the 1969 Aswan Ilyushin Il-18 crash, a United Arab Airlines flight crashes while attempting to land at Aswan International Airport. 100 of the 105 passengers and crew on board are killed.
April 2 – LOT Polish Airlines Flight 165, an Antonov An-24, crashes in southern Poland, killing all 53 people on board.
April 28 – LAN Chile Flight 160, a Boeing 727, crashes near Colina, Chile; all 60 on board survive.
June 4 – Mexicana Flight 704, a Boeing 727, crashes near Salinas Victoria in Mexico. All 79 passengers and crew on board are killed.
June 23 – In the Yukhnov mid-air collision, Aeroflot Flight 831, an Ilyushin Il-14, collides in mid-air with a Soviet Air Force Antonov An-12 over Yukhnovsky District, Russia, killing all 120 people on both aircraft.
August 29 – In the TWA Flight 840 hijacking, two operatives from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine force a Boeing 707 to land at Damascus, Syria; all passengers are released except for two passengers who are released two months later; there are no casualties to the 127 on board, but the aircraft's nose section is blown up.
September 9 – Allegheny Airlines Flight 853, a Douglas DC-9, collides in flight with a Piper PA-28 Cherokee and crashes near Fairland, Indiana, killing all 83 occupants aboard the two aircraft.
September 12 – Philippine Airlines Flight 158, a BAC One-Eleven, crashes on approach to Manila International Airport, killing 45 of the 47 passengers and crew on board.
November 19 – Mohawk Airlines Flight 411, a Fairchild 227, crashes near Glens Falls, New York, killing all 14 people on board.
November 20 – Nigeria Airways Flight 825, a Vickers VC-10, crashes on approach to Lagos International Airport, killing all 87 passengers and crew on board.
December 3 – Air France Flight 212, a Boeing 707-328B, crashes into the sea shortly after takeoff from Simón Bolívar International Airport with the loss of all 62 on board.
December 8 – Olympic Airways Flight 954, a DC-6, crashes into Mt. Paneio while on approach to Athens-Ellinikon International Airport. All 90 passengers and crew on board are killed.
1970s
1970
January 5 – A Spantax Convair 990 Coronado crashes shortly after takeoff from Stockholm's Arlanda Airport when the flight crew loses control of the aircraft; five of the ten people on board are killed.
February 4 – Aerolíneas Argentinas Flight 707, a Hawker Siddeley HS 748 operating a multi-leg flight from Paraguay to Argentina, crashes near Loma Alta when the pilots lose control of the aircraft due to severe turbulence; all 37 passengers and crew die.
February 6 – Aeroflot Flight U-45, an Ilyushin Il-18 operating a domestic flight in Uzbekistan, crashes into a mountain on approach to Samarkand International Airport due to ATC error; 92 of the 106 people on board the aircraft were killed.
February 15 – A Dominicana Douglas DC-9 crashes shortly after takeoff from Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, due to engine failure; all 102 people on board are killed.
February 21 – Swissair Flight 330, a Convair CV-990 bound for Tel Aviv, Israel, en route to Hong Kong, crashes when a bomb detonates in the cargo hold nine minutes after takeoff from Zurich International Airport, Switzerland; all 38 passengers and nine crew die.
March 17 – Eastern Air Lines Shuttle Flight 1320, a Douglas DC-9-31 flying from Newark, New Jersey, to Boston, Massachusetts, is hijacked by a suicidal man who shoots both pilots before being subdued; the captain makes a successful emergency landing in Boston where the hijacker is arrested; the co-pilot dies from his injuries.
March 31 – Japan Airlines Flight 351, a Boeing 727 operating a domestic flight from Tokyo to Fukuoka, is hijacked by a Japanese Red Army faction who force the crew to proceed to North Korea after releasing 21 passengers at Fukuoka Airport; the hijackers eventually surrender and all 129 people on board the flight are unharmed.
April 1 – Aeroflot Flight 1661, an Antonov An-24 operating a domestic flight in Russia, crashes on climbout after departing from Novosibirsk Tolmachevo Airport, due to a collision with a weather balloon; all 45 passengers and crew are killed.
April 21 – Philippine Airlines Flight 215, a Hawker Siddeley HS 748 operating a domestic flight from Cauayan Airport to Manila International Airport, explodes in mid-air and crashes north of its destination, killing all 36 on board; a bomb is suspected.
May 2 – ALM Flight 980, a Douglas DC-9 operated by Overseas National Airways, ditches into the Caribbean Sea near St. Croix, Virgin Islands, due to fuel exhaustion after several unsuccessful landing attempts at St. Maarten in the Dutch Antilles; 23 of the 63 people on board die.
July 3 – Dan-Air Flight 1903, a de Havilland Comet 4 operating a flight from Manchester, England, to Barcelona, Spain, crashes near Arbúcies in Catalonia on approach to El Prat Josep Tarradellas Airport; all 112 people on board the aircraft are killed.
July 5 – Air Canada Flight 621, a Douglas DC-8 operating a flight from Montreal, Canada, to Los Angeles, United States, crashes during a failed landing attempt at its scheduled stopover at Toronto Pearson International Airport, killing all 109 on board.
August 9 – LANSA Flight 502, a Lockheed L-188 Electra turboprop operating a domestic flight in Peru, crashes shortly after takeoff from Cusco's Quispiquilla Airport due to engine failure, killing 99 of the 100 people on board, including 49 U.S. high school exchange students, as well as two on the ground.
August 12 – China Airlines Flight 206, a NAMC YS-11, crashes into Yuan Mountain in thick fog during a severe thunderstorm, while on approach to Taipei International Airport; 14 of the 31 people on board lose their lives.
September 2 – Aeroflot Flight 3630, a Tupolev Tu-124 en route from southern Russia to Lithuania, crashes after the pilots lose control of the aircraft at cruise altitude between Rostov-on-Don Airport and Vilnius Airport, on the second leg of the flight; all 37 passengers and crew are killed.
September 6 – The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine orchestrates the Dawson's Field hijackings of El Al Flight 219 (Boeing 707), Pan Am Flight 93 (Boeing 747), Swissair Flight 100 (Douglas DC-8), TWA Flight 741 (Boeing 707), and (on September 9) BOAC Flight 775 (Vickers VC10); the unprecedented scale of the incident draws international outrage and contributes to the eventual widespread implementation of systematic air passenger screening; Flight 93 is the first ever loss of the Boeing 747.
September 8 – Trans International Airlines Flight 863, a Douglas DC-8 on a re-positioning flight, crashes during takeoff from John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York, killing all 11 crew members on board.
October 2 – A chartered Martin 4-0-4 airliner crashes into a mountain near Silver Plume, Colorado, United States, while carrying members of the Wichita State University football team to Logan, Utah, for a game; 31 of the 40 people on board are killed.
October 15 – Aeroflot Flight 244, an Antonov An-24 flying from Georgia to Abkhazia along the Black Sea coast, is hijacked by a Lithuanian national and his 13-year-old son, who kill one flight attendant and force the plane to divert to Trabzon, Turkey, where they surrender to the Turkish government; this is the first known successful airline hijacking in the Soviet Union.
November 14 – Southern Airways Flight 932, a chartered Douglas DC-9 flying from North Carolina to West Virginia, United States, crashes on approach to Huntington's Tri-State Airport due to pilot error; all 75 on board die, including 37 players of the Marshall University football team and eight of the coaching staff.
November 27 – Capitol International Airways Flight C2C3/26, a chartered Douglas DC-8 scheduled to fly from McChord Field to Cam Ranh Air Base crashes on takeoff from Alaska during a stopover resulting in 47 of the 229 people onboard to perish.
1971
January 22 – An Aeroflot Antonov An-12 crashes due to icing while on approach to Surgut International Airport, RSFSR, Soviet Union, killing all 14 on board the aircraft.
January 30 – In the 1971 Indian Airlines hijacking, a Fokker F-27 Friendship 100 operating a domestic passenger flight is hijacked en route from Srinagar to Jammu and flown to Lahore in Pakistan where the passengers and crew are released and the plane is subsequently destroyed.
January 31 – An Aeroflot Antonov An-12 crashes due to icing while on approach to Surgut International Airport, RSFSR, Soviet Union. All seven on board are killed.
March 31 – Aeroflot Flight 1969, an Antonov An-10, crashes on approach to Voroshilovgrad Airport (now Luhansk Airport), Ukrainian SSR, following an unexplained structural failure of the right wing, killing all 65 on board.
May 23 – Aviogenex Flight 130, a Tupolev Tu-134 flying from London's Gatwick Airport to Rijeka Airport in Croatia, crashes on landing at its destination due to pilot error, killing 78 of the 83 people on board.
June 6 – Hughes Airwest Flight 706, a Douglas DC-9 operating a domestic flight from Los Angeles, California, to Seattle, Washington, United States, collides with a US Marine Corps McDonnell Douglas F-4B Phantom II fighter jet, and crashes into the San Gabriel Mountains near Duarte, California, killing all 49 people on board; the fighter jet pilot is also killed, but the Radar Intercept Officer successfully bails out.
June 7 – Allegheny Airlines Flight 485, a Convair CV-580 operating a multi-leg domestic flight between Washington, D.C., and Virginia in the United States, crashes on approach to Tweed New Haven Airport, Connecticut, killing 28 of the 31 people on board.
July 3 – Toa Domestic Airlines Flight 63, a NAMC YS-11 operating a domestic flight in Japan, crashes into Yokotsu Mountain near Hakodate Airport on Japan's Hokkaidō island, killing all 68 passengers and crew in the worst-ever disaster involving the YS-11.
July 25 – Aeroflot Flight 1912, a Tupolev Tu-104 operating a multi-leg domestic flight between Odessa and Vladivostok in the Soviet Union, lands hard and crashes short of the runway at Irkutsk Airport, killing 97 of the 126 people on board.
July 30 – All Nippon Airways Flight 58, a Boeing 727-200 operating a domestic flight from Sapporo to Tokyo, Japan, collides with a JASDF F-86 Sabre fighter jet at Shizukuishi near Morioka, killing all 162 passengers and crew on board; the F-86 pilot parachutes to safety, but is later arrested and charged with involuntary manslaughter.
July 30 – Pan Am Flight 845, a Boeing 747-100 flying from Los Angeles, California, United States, to Tokyo, Japan, collides with approach lighting structures on taking off from its intermediate stop, San Francisco International Airport, and then crashes after turning back to attempt an emergency landing at the same airport; there are no fatalities but 29 of the 199 passengers are injured.
August 28 – Malév Flight 731, an Ilyushin Il-18, crashes into Øresund off the coast of Denmark, about from Copenhagen Airport, during a heavy rainstorm. Of the 34 on board, only two survive.
September 4 – Alaska Airlines Flight 1866, a Boeing 727 operating a flight from Anchorage, Alaska, to Seattle, Washington, United States, crashes into a mountain in the Tongass National Forest near Juneau, Alaska, killing all 111 on board.
September 6 – Paninternational Flight 112, a BAC One-Eleven flying from Hamburg, Germany, to Málaga, Spain, suffers dual engine failure shortly after takeoff and crashes onto the motorway near Hamburg Airport, killing 22 of the 121 people on board.
September 16 – Malév Flight 110, a Tupolev Tu-134, crashes while on approach to Kiev-Borispol Airport, Ukrainian SSR, in foggy weather, killing all 49 passengers and crew on board.
October 2 – British European Airways Flight 706, a Vickers Vanguard turboprop flying from London's Heathrow Airport to Salzburg, Austria, breaks up in mid-air and crashes near Aarsele, Belgium, after suffering explosive decompression; all 63 people on board are killed.
October 10 – Aeroflot Flight 773, a Tupolev Tu-104, breaks up and crashes near Baranovo, Naro-Fominsky District, Russia when a bomb placed in the cabin explodes; all 25 on board die.
November 10 – A Merpati Nusantara Vickers Viscount 828 crashes in the Indian Ocean off the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia, on approach to Tabing Airport in Padang, due to poor visibility in bad weather; all 69 people on board are killed.
November 12 – Aeroflot Flight N-63, an Antonov An-24, stalls and crashes near Vinnitsa Airport, Ukrainian SSR, during a go-around in foggy weather, killing all 48 people on board.
November 20 – China Airlines Flight 825, a Sud Aviation Caravelle, explodes in mid-air and crashes into the Taiwan Strait while on a flight from Taipei to Hong Kong due to a terrorist bomb explosion, killing all 25 people on board.
November 24 – Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305, a Boeing 727 flying from Portland, Oregon, to Seattle, Washington, United States, is hijacked by an unidentified person who parachutes from the aircraft mid-flight after extorting US$200,000 of ransom money from the US government; the aircraft lands safely and all 41 on board are unharmed, but the perpetrator is never apprehended.
December 1 – Aeroflot Flight 2174, an Antonov An-24, loses control and crashes on approach to Saratov Airport due to wing icing, killing all 57 on board.
December 24 – LANSA Flight 508, a Lockheed L-188 Electra en route from Lima to Pucallpa, Peru, breaks apart in mid-air during a thunderstorm and crashes in the Amazon Rainforest; of the 92 on board, the sole survivor is a German teenager who falls strapped to her seat, and then walks for 10 days through the rainforest before being rescued by local lumbermen.
1972
January 7 – Iberia Airlines Flight 602, a Sud Aviation SE 210 Caravelle flying from Valencia to Ibiza, crashes into a mountain while on approach to Ibiza Airport, killing all 104 passengers and crew on board.
January 26 – JAT Flight 367, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9, suffers a bomb explosion in mid-air, killing 27 of the 28 on board; Vesna Vulović, the only survivor, is entered in the Guinness Book of World Records for surviving the longest fall without a parachute, over .
February 22 – Lufthansa Flight 649, a Boeing 747 en route from Tokyo to Frankfurt, is hijacked during the Delhi–Athens leg and forced to divert to Aden, South Yemen, where all 182 passengers and crew are released in exchange for a $5 million ransom.
March 3 – Mohawk Airlines Flight 405, a Fairchild F-27 flying from New York City to Albany, New York, crashes while descending to land at Albany County Airport, killing 16 of the 48 people on board and one on the ground.
March 14 – Sterling Airways Flight 296, a Sud Caravelle flying from Colombo, Ceylon, to Copenhagen, Denmark, crashes near Kalba in the United Arab Emirates due to pilot error; all 112 on board die in the worst air disaster in the history of the UAE.
March 19 – EgyptAir Flight 763, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9 flying from Egypt to South Yemen, crashes on approach to Aden International Airport, killing all 30 passengers and crew.
May 5 – Alitalia Flight 112, a Douglas DC-8 operating a domestic flight from Rome to Palermo, Italy, crashes into Mount Longa some southwest of its destination, killing all 115 passengers and crew on board; it remains the deadliest single-aircraft disaster in Italy.
May 8 – Sabena Flight 571, a Boeing 707 flying from Brussels to Tel Aviv, is hijacked by members of the Black September Organisation demanding the release of Palestinian prisoners by Israel; during a commando raid the hijackers are killed or captured and one hostage terminally injured, the others freed.
May 18 – Aeroflot Flight 1491, an Antonov An-10, suffers in-flight structural failure on approach to Kharkiv Airport in Ukraine; all 122 passengers and crew on board are killed.
May 30 – Delta Air Lines Flight 9570, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9 operating as a training flight, crashes while attempting to land at Greater Southwest International Airport in Fort Worth, Texas, United States, due to wake turbulence from a DC-10 that landed moments earlier; all four crew members are killed.
June 12 – American Airlines Flight 96, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10, suffers explosive depressurisation when one of its cargo doors fails in mid-flight; the crew performs an emergency landing at Detroit Metro Airport, Michigan, where all 67 on board are evacuated safely.
June 14 – Japan Airlines Flight 471, a Douglas DC-8 en route from Bangkok, Thailand, to New Delhi, India, crashes on approach to Palam Airport, killing 82 of the 87 on board and three people on the ground.
June 15 – A carry-on suitcase bomb explodes on Cathay Pacific Flight 700Z, a Convair 880, at over Vietnam; all 81 on board die.
June 18 – British European Airways Flight 548, a Hawker Siddeley Trident, undergoes a series of stalls due to pilot error, followed by a deep stall, and crashes near Staines, United Kingdom; all 118 on board are killed.
June 24 – Prinair Flight 191, a de Havilland Heron, over-rotates because of pilot error and crashes in Ponce, Puerto Rico, killing five of the 20 people on board.
June 29 – In the 1972 Lake Winnebago mid-air collision, North Central Airlines Flight 290, a Convair CV-580, and Air Wisconsin Flight 671, a de Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otter, collide over Lake Winnebago near Appleton, Wisconsin, killing all 13 people on board the two aircraft.
July 2 – Pan Am Flight 841, a Boeing 747 en route from San Francisco to Saigon, South Vietnam, is hijacked over the South China Sea by a political protester; the hijacker is killed at a fake re-fuelling stop and no one else is harmed.
August 14 – In the 1972 Königs Wusterhausen air disaster, an Interflug Ilyushin Il-62 flying from East Germany to Bulgaria, crashes near Königs Wusterhausen, to the southeast of Berlin; all 156 passengers and crew are killed in Germany's worst air disaster.
August 16 – A Burma Airways Douglas C-47 crashes into the sea, shortly after departing from Thandwe Airport in Burma, killing 25 of the 28 on board.
August 31 – Aeroflot Flight 558, an Ilyushin Il-18 en route from Karaganda, Kazakhstan, to Moscow in the Soviet Union, crashes following an in-flight fire; all 102 people on board are killed.
September 24 – Japan Airlines Flight 472, a Douglas DC-8 flying from London to Tokyo with 122 on board, overshoots the runway after landing at the wrong airport; there are no fatalities.
October 1 – Aeroflot Flight 1036, an Ilyushin Il-18V, crashes into the Black Sea during takeoff from Sochi International Airport in the Soviet Union, for reasons unknown; all 109 passengers and crew are killed.
October 13 – Aeroflot Flight 217, an Ilyushin Il-62 flying from Paris to Moscow, crashes on approach to Sheremetyevo International Airport for reasons unknown; all 174 passengers and crew on board are killed.
October 13 – Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, a Fairchild F-27 en route from Montevideo, Uruguay, to Santiago, Chile, crashes in the Andes due to pilot error; 29 of the 45 on board lose their lives, and the remaining 16 survive for 72 days by feeding on the dead.
October 29 – Lufthansa Flight 615, a Boeing 727 en route from Damascus to Frankfurt, is hijacked by sympathizers of Black September who demand the release of the three surviving perpetrators of the Munich massacre; the ensuing stand-off is eventually resolved and there are no casualties.
November 15 – Ansett Airlines Flight 232, a Fokker F27 Friendship operating a domestic flight in Australia, is hijacked on approach to Alice Springs; after landing at the airport, the perpetrator fatally shoots himself during a confrontation with the police.
November 28 - Japan Air Lines Flight 446, a Douglas DC-8 operating an international flight from Copenhagen, Denmark to Tokyo, Japan via Moscow, USSR, stalls and crashes after rotation from Sheremetyevo International Airport due to pilot error; 62 of the 76 people on board are killed.
December 3 – Spantax Flight 275, a Convair 990 Coronado, crashes in Tenerife while taking off in almost zero visibility; all 155 passengers and crew on board are killed.
December 8 – United Airlines Flight 553, a Boeing 737, crashes after aborting its landing attempt at Chicago Midway International Airport, killing 43 of 60 people on board and two people on the ground; one of the fatalities is Dorothy Hunt, wife of Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt. The crash is the first fatal crash involving the 737-200.
December 20 – In the 1972 Chicago–O'Hare runway collision, Delta Air Lines Flight 954, a Convair CV-880, and North Central Airlines Flight 575, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9, collide on the runway due to ATC communication errors, killing 10 people and injuring 17.
December 23 – Braathens SAFE Flight 239, a Fokker F-28 operating a domestic flight in Norway, crashes into terrain in Asker on approach to Oslo Airport, Fornebu, killing 40 of the 45 people on board.
December 29 – Eastern Air Lines Flight 401, a Lockheed L-1011 TriStar flying from New York to Miami, crashes in the Florida Everglades when the crew is distracted by a faulty gear-down light, resulting in the deaths of 101 of the 176 people on board; this is the first crash of a widebody aircraft and the first loss of a Lockheed Tristar.
1973
January 21 – Aeroflot Flight 6263, an Antonov An-24, loses control, breaks up and crashes while on approach to Perm Airport for reasons unknown, killing all 39 on board.
January 22 – In the Kano air disaster, a Boeing 707 crashes while attempting to land at Kano International Airport in Nigeria, killing 176 of the 202 passengers and crew on board.
January 29 – EgyptAir Flight 741 crashed in the Kyrenia mountain range while on approach to Nicosia International Airport; all 37 on board die.
February 19 – Aeroflot Flight 141, a Tupolev Tu-154, crashes short of the runway at Prague Ruzyně Airport for reasons unknown, killing 66 of 100 on board.
February 21 – Libyan Arab Airlines Flight 114, a Boeing 727, strays off course and is shot down by Israeli jets in the Sinai war zone, killing 108 of 113 people on board.
February 24 – Aeroflot Flight 630, an Ilyushin Il-18, crashes from Ura-Tube, Tajikistan, due to loss of control as a result of pilot error, killing all 79 on board.
March 3 – Balkan Bulgarian Airlines Flight 307, an Ilyushin Il-18, crashes short of the runway at Sheremetyevo International Airport, killing all 25 on board.
March 5 – Nantes mid-air collision, an Iberia McDonnell Douglas DC-9 collides with a Spantax Convair CV-990. All 68 people on board the DC-9 were killed. The CV-990 was able to make a successful emergency landing at Cognac – Châteaubernard Air Base.
April 10 – Invicta International Airlines Flight 435, a Vickers Vanguard 952 from Bristol Lulsgate to Basle, flies into a hillside near Hochwald, Switzerland, somersaults and breaks up, killing 108 with 37 survivors.
May 11 – Aeroflot Flight 6551, an Ilyushin Il-18, breaks up and crashes south of Semipalatinsk (now Semey), Kazakhstan following an unexplained loss of control; all 63 on board die.
May 18 – Aeroflot Flight 109, a Tupolev Tu-104, is hijacked en route to Chita from Irkutsk; a bomb the hijacker held detonates and the aircraft crashes east of Lake Baikal, killing all 81 on board.
May 31 – Indian Airlines Flight 440, a Boeing 737, crashes while on approach to Palam Airport in New Delhi, India. 48 of the 65 passengers and crew on board are killed in the accident.
June 10 – In the 1973 Nepal plane hijack, a de Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otter operated by Royal Nepal Airlines is hijacked after takeoff from Biratnagar Airport, Nepal. The hijackers force the pilot to land in a grass field in Forbesganj, Bihar, India. All 19 occupants survive.
June 20 – Aeroméxico Flight 229, a Douglas DC-9, crashes into the side of Las Minas Mountain while on approach to Lic. Gustavo Díaz Ordaz International Airport; all 27 on board die.
July 11 – Varig Flight 820, a Boeing 707, experiences an onboard fire and crashes near Paris, France, killing 123 out of 134 on board.
July 22 – Pan Am Flight 816, a Boeing 707, crashes shortly after takeoff from Faa'a's airport Tahiti, French Polynesia, killing 77 out of 78 on board.
July 23 – Japan Air Lines Flight 404, a Boeing 747, is hijacked after takeoff from Amsterdam Schiphol Airport in the Netherlands; one hijacker is killed and the flight's purser injured by a grenade blast; after several days and multiple flight legs, the passengers are released in Benghazi, Libya, and the aircraft is blown up on the ground; this is the first loss of a Boeing 747-200.
July 23 – Ozark Air Lines Flight 809, a Fairchild-Hiller FH-227, crashes short of the runway at St. Louis International Airport due to windshear from a thunderstorm, killing 38 of 44 on board.
July 31 – Delta Air Lines Flight 723, a Douglas DC-9, descends prematurely and crashes on final approach to Boston Logan International Airport, killing all 89 on board; probable cause is unstabilized final approach by the flight crew.
August 13 – Aviaco Flight 118, a Sud Caravelle, en route from Madrid to A Coruña crashes while approaching A Coruña Alvedro airport, in Montrove, 2 km from the airport; all 85 on board die, and one on the ground.
August 18 – Aeroflot Flight A-13, an Antonov An-24, crashes near Baku, Azerbaijan after striking a cable on an oil rig following engine failure, killing 56 of 64 on board. The accident remains the deadliest in Azerbaijan.
August 28 – TWA Flight 742, a Boeing 707, enters severe porpoising oscillations during the descent over the Pacific Ocean near Los Angeles; all on board escape the aircraft, but a passenger dies two days later.
September 8 – World Airways Flight 802, a Douglas DC-8-63CF crashes on approach into Cold Bay Airport, Alaska. All six occupants are killed.
September 11 – JAT Airways Flight 769, a Sud Aviation Caravelle, crashes into Mt. Maganik near Kolašin, Montenegro, killing all 41 on board.
September 27 – Texas International Airlines Flight 655, a Convair 600, crashes into Black Fork Mountain while avoiding thunderstorms, killing all 11 passengers and crew on board.
September 30 – Aeroflot Flight 3932, a Tupolev Tu-104, crashes shortly after takeoff from Koltsovo Airport in Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg), Russia after the pilots became disorientated following electrical failure, killing all 108 on board.
October 13 – Aeroflot Flight 964, a Tupolev Tu-104, crashes while on approach to Domodedovo International Airport, Moscow, Russia after the pilots became disorientated following electrical failure, killing all 122 on board in the deadliest accident involving the Tu-104.
November 2 – Aeroflot Flight 19, a Yakovlev Yak-40, is hijacked ten minutes before landing at Bryansk Airport, Russia. The aircraft is then diverted to Moscow's Vnukovo Airport where it is stormed by the authorities, killing a hijacker, while another hijacker commits suicide. All other passengers and crew survive.
November 3 – National Airlines Flight 27, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10 with 128 on board, suffers an uncontained engine failure at 39,000 feet 65 miles southwest of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Debris from the engine punctures the fuselage and a passenger is blown out of the aircraft, but the aircraft is able to land safely with no other casualties.
November 3 – Pan Am Flight 160, a Boeing 707 operating a cargo flight, crashes after smoke in the cockpit prevents the crew from keeping control of the aircraft while attempting an emergency landing at Boston Logan International Airport, Massachusetts, killing all three crew members.
November 25 – KLM Flight 861, a Boeing 747, is hijacked over Iraq. The hijackers force the crew to land at several different airports; the last one is at Dubai International Airport where the hijackers surrender to the authorities. All 264 people on board survive.
December 16 – Aeroflot Flight 2022, a Tupolev Tu-124, crashes near Karacharovo, Russia after entering a nosedive following a failure in the horizontal stabilizer, killing all 51 on board.
December 17 – Iberia Flight 933, a Douglas DC-10, crash lands on the runway of Boston Logan International Airport, Massachusetts, after colliding with the approach lighting system short of the runway threshold. All 168 on board survive, but 3 occupants receive serious injuries.
December 17 – In the 1973 Rome airport attacks and hijacking, armed gunmen kill two people in the terminal, then firebomb Pan Am Flight 110, a Boeing 707, killing 30 inside the aircraft. The gunmen then hijack Lufthansa Flight 303, a Boeing 737 en route to Munich, killing two more before landing and surrendering in Kuwait.
December 22 – In the 1973 Royal Air Maroc Sud Aviation Caravelle crash, a Sud Aviation Caravelle operated by Sobelair crashes into Mount Mellaline near Tanger-Boukhalef Airport, Morocco, killing all 106 on board.
1974
January 6 – Commonwealth Commuter Flight 317, a Beechcraft Model 99A, crashes short of the runway on approach to Johnstown–Cambria County Airport, Pennsylvania following a premature descent, killing 12 of the 17 on board.
January 26 – Turkish Airlines Flight 301, a Fokker F28-1000, stalls and crashes after takeoff from Izmir Cumaovasi Airport due to wing icing; of the 73 on board, only seven survive.
January 30 – Pan Am Flight 806, a Boeing 707-320B, crashes on approach to Pago Pago International Airport, American Samoa due to pilot error after encountering a microburst, killing 97 of 101 on board.
March 3 – Turkish Airlines Flight 981, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10, crashes in the Ermenonville forest near Senlis, France, after the rear underfloor cargo door opens in mid-flight; all 346 on board die.
March 13 – Sierra Pacific Airlines Flight 802, a Convair CV-440, crashes shortly after takeoff from Eastern Sierra Regional Airport near Bishop, California, while transporting a movie crew to Burbank. All 36 on board are killed.
March 15 – Sterling Airways Flight 901, a Sterling Airways Sud Aviation Caravelle suffers landing gear failure at Mehrabad International Airport; the right wing contacts the runway, rupturing a fuel tank and starting a fire that kills 15 of 92 passengers; all four crew survive.
April 18 – Court Line Flight 95, a BAC One-Eleven, collides with a Piper Aztec on the runway at London Luton Airport, killing the pilot of the Aztec; there are no casualties on board the One-Eleven, but the aircraft is substantially damaged; the Aztec is written off.
April 22 – Pan Am Flight 812, a Boeing 707-320B, crashes into mountainous terrain northwest of Denpasar, Bali due to instrument failure and pilot error, killing all 107 on board.
April 27 – An Aeroflot Ilyushin Il-18 crashes shortly after takeoff from Pulkovo Airport, Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), Russia due to loss of control following engine failure; all 109 on board die.
July 10 – An EgyptAir Tupolev Tu-154 crashes near Cairo International Airport during a training flight, killing all six crew members on board.
September 8 – TWA Flight 841, a Boeing 707, breaks up after a bomb explodes in the cargo hold and plunges into the Ionian Sea, killing all 88 on board.
September 11 – Eastern Air Lines Flight 212, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9, crashes on approach to Charlotte, North Carolina; 72 of 82 people on board are killed.
September 15 – Air Vietnam Flight 706, a Boeing 727, is hijacked and crashes in Phan Rang, Vietnam following an aborted landing; all 75 on board die.
November 1 – Aeroflot Flight 662, an Antonov An-2, collides in mid-air with a Mil Mi-8 helicopter near Surgut, Russia due to ATC errors, killing all 38 on board both aircraft.
November 20 – Lufthansa Flight 540 crashes shortly after takeoff in Nairobi, Kenya; 59 of 157 on board are killed in the first crash of a Boeing 747.
December 1 – Northwest Airlines Flight 6231, a Boeing 727, stalls and crashes twelve minutes after takeoff from John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York due to wing icing caused by pilot error, killing the three crew.
December 1 – TWA Flight 514, a Boeing 727 inbound to Dulles International Airport, crashes into Mount Weather in Bluemont, Virginia, killing all 92 on board.
December 4 – Martinair Flight 138, a Douglas DC-8 on a charter flight, crashes into a mountain shortly before landing, on approach to Katunayake, Sri Lanka, for a refueling stop; killing all aboard – 182 Indonesian hajj pilgrims bound for Mecca, and nine crew members.
December 22 – Avensa Flight 358, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9, suffers dual engine failure after takeoff and crashes near Maturín, Venezuela, killing all 77 on board.
1975
January 9 – Golden West Airlines Flight 261, a de Havilland Twin Otter, collides with a Cessna 150 near Whittier, California, killing all 14 people in both aircraft.
January 30 – Turkish Airlines Flight 345, a Fokker F-28, crashes into the Sea of Marmara after a missed approach; all 42 on board die; the cause is never determined.
June 24 – Eastern Air Lines Flight 66, a Boeing 727, encounters wind shear on final approach and strikes approach lights at John F. Kennedy International Airport, killing 113 of 124 people on board.
August 3 – The Agadir air disaster: an Air Maroc-operated Boeing 707 owned by Royal Jordanian Airlines crashes while on approach to Agadir, Morocco due to pilot error; all 188 on board die in the worst-ever accident involving the Boeing 707.
August 20 – ČSA Flight 540, an Ilyushin Il-62 crashes while on approach to Damascus, Syria. 126 of the 128 passengers and crew on board die in the accident.
August 30 – Wien Air Alaska Flight 99, a Fairchild F-27, crashes into Seuvokuk Mountain, Alaska, while on approach to Gambell Airport, killing 10 of 32 on board.
September 1 – Interflug Flight 1107, a Tupolev Tu-134, crashes while on approach to Leipzig, killing 27 of 34 on board.
September 24 – Garuda Indonesia Flight 150, a Fokker F-28 Fellowship, crashes while on approach to Sultan Mahmud Badaruddin II Airport in foggy weather; 25 of 61 on board die; one person on the ground also dies.
September 30 – Malév Flight 240, a Tupolev Tu-154, crashes on approach near Lebanon, killing all 60 people on board.
October 30 – Inex-Adria Aviopromet Flight 450, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9, crashes on approach in Prague suburb, killing 75 of 120 on board.
November 12 – Overseas National Airways Flight 032, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10 overruns the runway at John F. Kennedy Airport. Everyone on board survives while the aircraft was written-off as it was consumed by a fire.
1976
January 1 – Middle East Airlines Flight 438, a Boeing 720, crashes in Saudi Arabia when a bomb explodes in the forward baggage compartment, killing all 81 people on board.
January 3 – Aeroflot Flight 2003, a Tupolev Tu-124, crashes just after takeoff from Vnukovo Airport due to instrument failure, killing all 61 passengers and crew on board and one person on the ground.
January 15 – In the Taxi Aereo el Venado Douglas DC-4 accident, a Douglas DC-4 crashes into a mountain in Colombia killing all 13 on board.
February 9 – Aeroflot Flight 3739, a Tupolev Tu-104, crashes on takeoff from Irkutsk after the aircraft rolled to the right, killing 24 of 114 on board.
March 6 – Aeroflot Flight 909, an Ilyushin Il-18, crashes near Voronezh due to loss of control following an electrical failure, killing all 111 on board.
April 27 – American Airlines Flight 625, a Boeing 727, crashes on approach to St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, killing 37 of 88 people on board.
May 15 – Aeroflot Flight 1802, an Antonov An-24, crashes near Viktorovka, Chernigov Region due to loss of control following an unexplained rudder deflection, killing all 52 on board.
June 1 – Aeroflot Flight 418, a Tupolev Tu-154, crashes into a mountainside on the island of Bioko in Equatorial Guinea for reasons unknown; all 46 on board die.
June 4 – Air Manila Flight 702, a Lockheed L-188 Electra, crashes shortly after takeoff from NAS Agana, Guam due to engine failure and pilot error, killing all 45 on board; one person on the ground also dies when a car is struck by the aircraft.
June 6 – In the 1976 Sabah Air GAF Nomad crash, a GAF N-22B Nomad crashes into the sea on approach into Kota Kinabalu International Airport, Malaysia. All 11 passengers and crew are killed. Several local political leaders were on board at the time.
June 27 – Air France Flight 139, an Airbus A300, is hijacked from Athens by two Palestinians and two Germans who divert the flight to Libya and then to Uganda, where the plane is met by pro-Palestinian forces from Idi Amin's government; Israeli troops eventually storm the airport in Operation Entebbe, killing hijackers and Ugandan soldiers and freeing all but three of the hostages; Israeli colonel Yonatan Netanyahu, brother of Benjamin Netanyahu, is also killed in the raid.
July 28 – ČSA Flight 001, an Ilyushin Il-18, crashes near Bratislava in Czechoslovakia, killing 76 of 78 people on board.
August 15 – SAETA Flight 232, a Vickers Viscount 785D, goes missing mid-route from Quito to Cuenca, Ecuador; all four crew members and 55 passengers are killed, but the scene remains undiscovered for 26 years until October 2002, when climbers on the eastern face of the stratovolcano Chimborazo come upon the site.
September 9 – In the 1976 Anapa mid-air collision, Aeroflot Flight 7957, an Antonov An-24, collides with Aeroflot Flight C-31, a Yakovlev Yak-40, over the Black Sea off Anapa due to ATC and crew errors, killing all 70 on board both aircraft.
September 10 – 1976 Zagreb mid-air collision between British Airways Flight 476, a Hawker Siddeley Trident, and Inex-Adria Aviopromet Flight 550, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9, near Zagreb, Yugoslavia, kills all 176 people on board both aircraft.
September 19 – Turkish Airlines Flight 452, a Boeing 727, crashes into a hillside near Karatepe, Turkey, while on approach to Antalya Airport; all 154 passengers and crew die.
October 6 – Cubana de Aviación Flight 455, a Douglas DC-8, is bombed by anti-Castro militants and crashes near Bridgetown, Barbados, killing all 73 people on board.
October 12 – Indian Airlines Flight 171, a Sud Caravelle, crashes while attempting an emergency landing at Bombay Airport; all 95 passengers and crew on board are killed.
November 23 – Olympic Airways Flight 830, a NAMC YS-11A, crashes into a mountain in Greece in low visibility, killing all 50 on board.
November 28 – Aeroflot Flight 2415, a Tupolev Tu-104, crashes shortly after takeoff from Sheremetyevo International Airport due to crew disorientation following artificial horizon failure, killing all 73 on board.
December 17 – Aeroflot Flight N-36, an Antonov An-24, crashes on approach to Kiev-Zhuilany Airport, killing 48 of 55 on board.
December 25 – EgyptAir Flight 864, a Boeing 707, crashes into an industrial complex near Bangkok, Thailand, due to pilot error; all 52 on board are killed as well as another 19 on the ground.
1977
January 13 – Aeroflot Flight 3843, a Tupolev Tu-104 operating a flight from Khabarovsk Novy Airport, Soviet Union, to Almaty Airport in Kazakhstan, crashes in a field just short of its destination due to an engine fire; all 90 people on board are killed.
January 15 – Linjeflyg Flight 618, a Skyline Vickers Viscount 838 operating a multi-leg domestic flight in Sweden, crashes in the district of Kälvesta, western Stockholm, due to atmospheric icing, killing all 22 people on board.
February 15 – Aeroflot Flight 5003, an Ilyushin Il-18 operating a domestic flight in the western Soviet Union, crashes due to pilot error after a missed approach to Mineralnye Vody Airport, killing 77 of the 98 people on board.
March 27 – In the Tenerife airport disaster, two Boeing 747s, KLM Flight 4805 and Pan Am Flight 1736, collide on the runway at Los Rodeos Airport in heavy fog; 583 of the 644 people on board the two aircraft are killed in the deadliest accident in the history of commercial aviation.
April 4 – Southern Airways Flight 242, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9 flying from northwest Alabama to Atlanta, Georgia, crash lands on a highway near New Hope, Georgia, after encountering dual engine failure in a thunderstorm; 63 of the 85 people on board are killed, as well as nine on the ground.
April 12 – Delta Air Lines Flight 1080, a Lockheed L-1011 Tristar operating a domestic flight in California, United States, experiences a loss of pitch control during takeoff from Los Angeles International Airport due to a malfunctioning elevator; the aircraft is able to land safely with no casualties.
April 27 – An Aviateca Convair 240 crashes shortly after taking off from La Aurora International Airport, Guatemala City, Guatemala, in Central America, due to a maintenance error; all 28 people on board survived.
May 14 – A Dan-Air Boeing 707 crashes near Lusaka Airport, Zambia, at the conclusion of a multi-leg flight from London's Heathrow Airport, via Athens and Nairobi, due to structural failure; the one passenger and five crew members are killed.
May 27 – Aeroflot Flight 331, an Ilyushin Il-62 operating a multi-leg flight from Moscow, Soviet Union, to Havana, Cuba, crashes due to pilot error while on approach to its destination, José Martí International Airport, killing all but two of the 70 people on board, plus one person on the ground.
July 20 – Aeroflot Flight B-2, an Avia 14, crashes shortly after takeoff from Vitim Airport, Russia due to pilot and ATC errors; of the 50 on board, only a passenger survives.
September 27 – Japan Airlines Flight 715, a McDonnell Douglas DC-8 operating a multi-leg flight from Tokyo to Singapore, crashes into a hillside while on approach to Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport in Malaysia due to pilot error, killing 34 of the 79 people on board.
September 28 – Japan Airlines Flight 472, a McDonnell Douglas DC-8 bound for Tokyo, is hijacked by Japanese Red Army (JRA) militants shortly after departing from Bombay, India, and forced to land in Dhaka, Bangladesh; the hijackers' demands are eventually met and all 151 passengers and crew are released unharmed.
October 13 – Lufthansa Flight 181, a Boeing 737 flying from Mallorca to Germany, is hijacked over the Mediterranean Sea by members of the PFLP (a Palestinian revolutionary organization) who murder the pilot; the aircraft eventually lands in Mogadishu where it is stormed by German police commandos; three of the hijackers are killed, the fourth is captured, and there are no other fatalities.
October 20 – A Convair CV-240 chartered by Lynyrd Skynyrd crashes into a heavily wooded swamp in Amite County, Mississippi, United States, while en route from Greenville, South Carolina, to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, due to fuel exhaustion; four of the 24 passengers and both crew members are killed.
November 19 – TAP Portugal Flight 425, a Boeing 727 operating a multi-leg flight from Belgium to Portugal, plunges over a steep bank and bursts into flames after overshooting the runway at Madeira Airport due to pilot error, killing 131 of the 164 people on board.
December 2 – A Libyan Arab Airlines Tupolev Tu-154 crashes near Benghazi, Libya, due to fuel exhaustion, while en route from King Abdulaziz International Airport, Saudi Arabia, to Benina International Airport in Libya; 59 of the 165 people on board lose their lives.
December 4 – Malaysian Airline System Flight 653, a Boeing 737 operating a flight from Penang to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, crashes into a swamp near Tanjung Kupang, Johor, as a result of a failed hijacking attempt; all 100 people on board are killed.
December 13 – Air Indiana Flight 216, a Douglas DC-3 carrying the Purple Aces basketball team on a charter flight from Evansville, Indiana, to Nashville, Tennessee, crashes shortly after take-off due to overloading and pilot error, killing all 29 passengers and crew.
December 18 – United Airlines Flight 2860, a McDonnell Douglas DC-8 flying from San Francisco, California, to Chicago, Illinois, in the United States, crashes in the Wasatch mountain range in Utah, killing the three crew on board.
December 18 – SA de Transport Aérien Flight 730, a Sud Aviation SE-210 Caravelle operating a flight from Geneva, Switzerland, to Madeira, Portugal, crashes into the sea while on final approach to its destination due to pilot error, killing 36 of the 57 people on board.
1978
January 1 – Air India Flight 855, a Boeing 747, crashes into the Arabian Sea as a result of instrument malfunction and pilot error, killing all 213 passengers and crew on board.
February 11 – Pacific Western Airlines Flight 314, a Boeing 737-200, from Edmonton crashes at Cranbrook Airport after one thrust reverser did not fully stow following an aborted landing, killing 42 of the 49 people on board.
March 1 – Continental Airlines Flight 603, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10, crashes on takeoff from Los Angeles International Airport after a tire blows on the left main landing gear, causing it to collapse; of 200 on board, two die at the time and two others die of their injuries three months later.
March 3 – A Línea Aeropostal Venezolana Hawker Siddeley HS 748 crashes on departure from Simón Bolívar International Airport, Venezuela due to possible instrument failure; all 46 on board are killed.
March 16 – In the 1978 Balkan Bulgarian Tupolev Tu-134 crash, a Tupolev Tu-134 crashes near the village of Gabare, Bulgaria, killing all 73 people on board.
April 20 – Korean Air Lines Flight 902, a Boeing 707, is shot down by Soviet fighter planes; the plane crash-lands near the Soviet Union's border with Finland; two of the 109 people on board are killed, the rest are subsequently released.
May 8 – National Airlines Flight 193, a Boeing 727, lands short on approach to Pensacola, Florida, United States, in Escambia Bay, as a result of pilot error; three passengers out of 58 people on board drown.
May 19 – Aeroflot Flight 6709, a Tupolev Tu-154, crashes in a field near Maksatikha, Russia after all three engines failed due to fuel starvation, killing four of 134 on board.
June 26 – Air Canada Flight 189, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9, crashes on takeoff in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, because of tire failure; Two of the 107 passengers and crew on board die.
June 26 – Helikopter Service Flight 165, a Sikorsky S-61, crashes into the North Sea while en route to Statfjord oil field due to fatigue failure of a rotor, killing all 18 on board.
August 9 – Olympic Airways Flight 411, a Boeing 747-200, nearly crashes in downtown Athens following an uncontained engine failure during take-off. The plane regains enough speed to safely return to Ellinikon International Airport and none of the 418 passengers or crew suffer serious injury.
August 30 – In the LOT Polish Airlines Flight 165 hijacking, two East German citizens hijack a Tupolev Tu-134, and force it to land at Tempelhof Airport; there are no casualties to the 63 passengers on board.
September 3 – Air Rhodesia Flight 825 from Kariba to Salisbury is shot down by a SA-7 surface-to-air missile; 18 of the 56 passengers initially survive the emergency landing, 10 are subsequently killed by Zimbabwe People's Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) militants.
September 25 – Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 182, a Boeing 727, collides with a Cessna 172 over San Diego, California, United States; all 135 aboard the airliner, both pilots of the Cessna, and seven people on the ground are killed, making this the worst aviation disaster in California history, and the deadliest mid-air collision in North America.
October 7 – Aeroflot Flight 1080, a Yakovlev Yak-40, crashes shortly after takeoff from Koltsovo Airport due to engine failure caused by ice ingestion, killing all 38 on board.
November 15 – Icelandic Airlines Flight 001, a Douglas DC-8 on a charter flight, crashes into a coconut plantation while on approach to Katunayake, Sri Lanka, for a refueling stop; 183 out of 262 people on board are killed.
December 23 – Alitalia Flight 4128, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9-32, crashes into the Tyrrhenian Sea when on approach to Palermo International Airport in Palermo, Italy. Of the 129 passengers and crew, 108 die.
December 28 – United Airlines Flight 173, a Douglas DC-8, runs out of fuel while circling near Portland, Oregon, United States, as the crew investigates a light indicating a problem with the landing gear; the plane crashes in a suburban area damaging two unoccupied houses, killing 10 and injuring 24 of the 181 on board.
1979
January 30 – Varig Flight 967, a Boeing 707 bound for Rio de Janeiro–Galeão International Airport, disappears over the Pacific Ocean after takeoff from Narita International Airport; the cause for the disappearance remains unknown, as neither survivors (six-man flight crew) nor wreckage have ever been found.
February 12 – Air Rhodesia Flight 827, a Vickers Viscount on a flight between Kariba and Salisbury, is shot down by Zimbabwe People's Revolutionary Army militants using a SA-7 (Strela 2) surface-to-air missile shortly after takeoff in similar circumstances to Flight 825 five months earlier; all 55 passengers and four crew are killed.
February 17 – Air New Zealand Flight 4374, a Fokker F-27 Friendship crashes while on approach into Auckland International Airport, New Zealand. The captain and one passenger are killed.
March 13 – Alia Royal Jordanian Airlines Flight 600, a Boeing 727 crashes following a missed approach at Doha International Airport, Qatar; 44 of the 64 on board are killed.
March 17 – Aeroflot Flight 1691, a Tupolev Tu-104, crashes near Vnukovo International Airport while attempting to make an emergency landing after a fire alarm is reported, killing 58 of 119 on board.
March 29 – Quebecair Flight 255, a Fairchild F-27 bound for Montreal, crashes minutes after takeoff from Quebec City as it was attempting to return to the airport following the explosion of its number 2 engine, killing 17 of the 24 people on board.
April 4 – TWA Flight 841, a Boeing 727, goes into a dive over Saginaw, Michigan, following the loss of the number 7 slat; despite the loss of in altitude within 63 seconds, all 89 passengers and crew survive an emergency landing at Detroit after the first officer regains control of the plane at .
April 23 – SAETA Flight 011, a Vickers Viscount, crashes in a mountainous region of Pastaza, Ecuador, killing all 57 people on board.
May 25 – American Airlines Flight 191, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10, crashes upon takeoff from O'Hare International Airport after its left engine detaches from the wing, killing all 271 on board and two on the ground in the worst single-aircraft accident on U.S. soil.
May 30 – Downeast Flight 46, a de Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otter, crashes on approach into Knox County Regional Airport, Maine. 17 of the 18 passengers and crew are killed.
June 17 – Air New England Flight 248, a de Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otter, crashes near Camp Greenough, Massachusetts, while on approach to Barnstable Municipal Airport, killing the pilot.
June 20 – American Airlines Flight 293, a Boeing 727, is hijacked shortly before it lands in Chicago. After letting the passengers and most of the crew members go, the hijacker forces the remaining crew members to fly back to New York City, where he demands and receives a Boeing 707 to fly him initially to Johannesburg, South Africa, but later to Ireland. After arriving at Shannon Airport, he surrenders to the Irish authorities.
July 11 – A Garuda Indonesia Fokker F28 strikes a volcano on approach to Medan Airport, Indonesia, killing all 61 on board.
July 26 – Lufthansa Cargo Flight 527, a Boeing 707, crashes into a slope shortly after takeoff from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, killing all 3 crew members on board.
July 31 – Dan-Air Flight 0034, a Hawker Siddeley HS 748, fails to become airborne at Sumburgh Airport, Scotland, due to a maintenance error, killing 17 of 44 on board.
August 11 – The 1979 Dniprodzerzhynsk mid-air collision between two Aeroflot Tupolev Tu-134s kills 178.
August 29 – Aeroflot Flight 5484, a Tupolev Tu-124, breaks up in mid-air after experiencing loss of control due to unexplained release of the flaps, killing all 63 people aboard.
September 14 – Aero Trasporti Italiani Flight 12, a Douglas DC-9, crashes into a rocky mountainside during an attempted landing at Cagliari-Elmas Airport, Italy, killing all 31 people on board.
October 7 – Swissair Flight 316, a Douglas DC-8-62 crashes after overrunning the runway at Athens-Ellinikon International Airport, killing 14 of the 154 passengers and crew on board.
October 31 – Western Airlines Flight 2605, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10, strikes a vehicle on a closed runway in dense fog at Mexico City, Mexico; 72 die.
November 15 – American Airlines Flight 444, a Boeing 727, takes off with a bomb planted in the cargo hold by the Unabomber. The bomb fails to detonate, giving off large quantities of smoke. Twelve passengers are treated for smoke inhalation, but all 78 on board survive.
November 26 – Pakistan International Airlines Flight 740, a Boeing 707, crashes after a fire in the cabin in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; all 145 passengers and 11 crew die.
November 28 – Air New Zealand Flight 901, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10, collides with Mount Erebus, Antarctica, during a sightseeing flight, killing all 257 people on board; this crash is also known as the Mount Erebus Disaster.
December 23 – A Turkish Airlines Fokker F28 crashes into a hillside near Kuyumcuköy, Ankara, Turkey, while on approach to Esenboğa Airport; of the 45 on board, only four survive.
1980s
1980
January 21 – Iran Air Flight 291, a Boeing 727, crashes into the Alborz Mountains near Tehran, Iran, amid a snowstorm on approach to Mehrabad International Airport; killing all 128 people on board.
February 21 – Advance Airlines Flight 4210, a Beechcraft Super King Air 200, crashes shortly after takeoff from Sydney Airport, following failure of one engine due to water in the fuel, killing all 13 people on board.
March 14 – LOT Polish Airlines Flight 007, an Ilyushin Il-62, crashes near Warsaw, Poland, after the No. 2 engine disintegrates and severs the elevator and rudder control lines; all 87 on board are killed.
April 12 – Transbrasil Flight 303, a Boeing 727, crashes into a hill near Florianópolis, Brazil, killing 55 of 58 on board.
April 25 – Dan-Air Flight 1008, a Boeing 727, crashes into a mountain near Tenerife, Spain, killing all 138 passengers and eight crew on board.
April 27 – Thai Airways Flight 231, a Hawker Siddeley HS 748, crashes while on approach to Don Mueang International Airport, Bangkok, Thailand, in severe weather, killing 44 of 53 on board.
June 20 – Air Wisconsin Flight 965, a Swearingen Metro II, crashes after a catastrophic engine failure in poor weather en route to Lincoln Municipal Airport, Nebraska. 13 of the 15 passengers and crew are killed.
June 27 – Itavia Flight 870, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9, crashes into the Tyrrhenian Sea near Italy, killing all 81 people on board.
July 8 – Aeroflot Flight 4225, a Tupolev Tu-154, crashes shortly after takeoff from Almaty International Airport, killing all 166 people on board.
August 19 – Saudia Flight 163, a Lockheed L-1011 Tristar, lands at King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, when a fire breaks out on board; the evacuation of the plane is delayed and all 301 on board die.
September 12 – In the Florida Commuter Airlines crash, a Douglas DC-3 ditches into the Atlantic Ocean near the Bahamas, killing all 34 on board.
November 3 – In the Latin Carga Convair CV-880 crash, a Convair CV-880 crashes shortly after taking off from Caracas Airport, Venezuela. All four crew members are killed.
November 19 – Korean Air Flight 015, a Boeing 747, crashes on landing at Gimpo International Airport. 15 of the 226 passengers and crew on board are killed.
December 22 – Saudia Flight 162, a Lockheed L-1011 Tristar, suffers an explosive decompression over Qatar, killing two passengers who are blown out of the aircraft; the cause is traced to a fatigue failure of a main landing gear wheel flange.
1981
March 2 – Pakistan International Airlines Flight 326, a Boeing 720, is hijacked by the militant insurgency group Al-Zulfiqar in thirteen days. One passenger is killed amongst 144 people on board.
March 28 – Garuda Indonesia Flight 206, a Douglas DC-9, is hijacked by Komando Jihad, the pilot is killed; all others survive.
May 2 – Aer Lingus Flight 164, a Boeing 737, is hijacked while on approach to London Heathrow Airport. The hijacker demands to be taken to Iran. The plane lands at Le Touquet – Côte d'Opale Airport. After a nearly 10-hour stand-off, the hijacker is arrested. All 108 people survive.
May 7 – Austral Líneas Aéreas Flight 901, a BAC One-Eleven, crashes near Aeroparque Jorge Newbery after losing control in a thunderstorm, killing all 31 on board.
June 14 – Aeroflot Flight 498, an Ilyushin Il-14, crashes into a mountain on the Holy Nose Peninsula in Lake Baikal due to crew error, killing all 48 on board.
June 26 – Dan-Air Flight 240, a Hawker Siddeley HS 748, crashes near Nailstone, Leicestershire, due to failure of the baggage door, causing rapid decompression and loss of control; all three crew on board die.
July 18 – A Soviet Air Defence Forces Sukhoi SU-15 collides with an Argentine Canadair CL-44 operating an international cargo flight between Iran and Cyprus; the SU-15 pilot ejects and survives the incident, but all four occupants of the CL-44 are killed.
July 20 – Somali Airlines Flight 40, a Fokker F27 Friendship, crashes shortly after takeoff from Mogadishu International Airport. All 50 passengers and crew on board are killed.
July 27 – Aeromexico Flight 230, a DC-9, makes a hard landing at Chihuahua Airport, breaks up and a fire breaks out, killing 32 of the 66 people on board.
August 13 – In the G-ASWI North Sea ditching, a Bristow Helicopters Westland Wessex suffers engine failure and ditches in the North Sea, killing all 13 on board.
August 22 – Far Eastern Air Transport Flight 103, a Boeing 737, disintegrates during flight and crashes near Taipei, Taiwan; severe corrosion in the fuselage structure leads to explosive decompression and disintegration at high altitude; all 110 on board are killed.
August 24 – Aeroflot Flight 811, an Antonov An-24, collides in mid-air with a Soviet Air Force Tupolev Tu-16 over the Zavitinsky District, Russia, killing 31 of 32 on board the An-24 and all six on board the Tu-16.
August 26 – Aeropesca Colombia Flight 221, a Vickers Viscount, flies into Mount Santa Elena, killing all 50 people on board.
September 18 – In the 1981 Zheleznogorsk mid-air collision, a Yakovlev Yak-40 collides with a Mil Mi-8 helicopter, both operated by Aeroflot, near Zheleznogorsk-Ilimskiy Airport due to ATC errors, killing all 40 occupants on both aircraft.
September 22 – Eastern Air Lines Flight 935, a Lockheed L-1011 TriStar, makes an emergency landing after engine No. 2 explodes severing 3 out of 4 hydraulic lines, all 201 occupants on board survive.
September 29 – Indian Airlines Flight 423, a Boeing 737 operating a domestic flight from Delhi to Amritsar in India, is hijacked by Sikh extremists and forced to land in Lahore, Pakistan, where special forces storm the aircraft; there are no fatalities.
October 6 – NLM CityHopper Flight 431, a Fokker F28 Fellowship, is destroyed in flight by a tornado near Rotterdam, killing all 17 people on board.
November 8 – Aeroméxico Flight 110, a Douglas DC-9, suffers a cabin decompression and crashes near Zihuatanejo while attempting to make an emergency landing at Acapulco International Airport, killing all 18 on board.
November 17 – Aeroflot Flight 3603, a Tupolev Tu-154, crashes while attempting to land at Noril'sk Airport due to crew error and CFIT, killing 99 of the 167 passengers and crew on board.
December 1 – Inex-Adria Aviopromet Flight 1308, a McDonnell Douglas MD-81, crashes in the mountains while approaching Campo dell'Oro Airport in Ajaccio, Corsica, killing all 180 on board.
1982
January 13 – Air Florida Flight 90, a Boeing 737, crashes into the frozen Potomac River after takeoff from Washington National Airport, Virginia, United States; five on board survive; 74 on board and four on the ground die, including one initial survivor who dies after ensuring that the other crash survivors are rescued from the frozen river.
January 23 – World Airways Flight 30H, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10, overshoots the runway at Boston, Massachusetts, United States; two passengers are reported missing when part of the plane plunged into Boston Harbor and are presumed to have drowned.
February 9 – Japan Airlines Flight 350, a Douglas DC-8-61, crashes on approach to Tokyo International Airport (Haneda), Japan; of the 166 passengers and eight crew, 24 passengers are killed.
February 21 – Pilgrim Airlines Flight 458, a de Havilland Canada DHC-6-100, makes a forced landing on the frozen Scituate Reservoir near Providence, Rhode Island after a fire erupts in the cockpit and cabin. One passenger is killed, and eight of the remaining nine passengers, as well as both crew members, receive serious injuries.
March 11 – Widerøe Flight 933, a de Havilland Canada Twin Otter, crashes into the Barents Sea near Mehamn, killing all 15 on board; this accident sparked conspiracy theories in Norway.
March 20 – In the 1982 Garuda Fokker F28 crash, the Fokker F28 overruns the runway in bad weather at Tanjung Karang-Branti Airport; all 27 are killed when the aircraft bursts into flames.
March 26 – Aeropesca Colombia Flight 217, a Vickers Viscount, hits a mountain in Colombia; all 21 on board are killed.
April 26 – CAAC Flight 3303, a Hawker Siddeley Trident, crashes into a mountain near Yangsuo while on approach to Guilin Liangjiang International Airport, China, in heavy weather; all 112 on board die.
June 8 – VASP Flight 168, a Boeing 737, crashes into a hillside in Brazil, killing all 137 on board.
June 12 – A TABA Fairchild FH-227 crashes at Tabatinga Airport, Brazil; all 44 on board are killed.
June 21 – Air India Flight 403, a Boeing 707, crashes at Sahar International Airport in Bombay, India, while landing during a heavy rainstorm; 15 of 99 passengers and two of 12 crew are killed.
June 24 – British Airways Flight 009, a Boeing 747-200, flies through a cloud of volcanic ash south of Java; all engines fail in flight, forcing the plane to glide; the crew is able to restart the engines and make a safe landing.
June 28 – Aeroflot Flight 8641, a Yakovlev Yak-42, breaks up in mid-air and crashes near Mozyr, Belarus due to a failure in the jackscrew mechanism caused by metal fatigue, killing all 132 on board in the first loss of and the deadliest accident involving the Yak-42. The crash remains the worst in Belarus.
July 6 – Aeroflot Flight 411, an Ilyushin Il-62, crashes after takeoff from Sheremetyevo International Airport; all 90 on board are killed.
July 9 – Pan Am Flight 759, a Boeing 727, crashes in Kenner, Louisiana, United States, shortly after takeoff; all 145 on board and eight people on the ground are killed.
August 11 – Pan Am Flight 830, a bomb placed under a seat cushion explodes aboard a Boeing 747-100 flying from Tokyo, Japan to Honolulu, Hawaii, killing one passenger. The plane makes an emergency landing in Honolulu.
September 1 – An Aerolíneas Cóndor de Havilland Canada DHC-4 Caribou flies into high ground in the Andes, Ecuador; all 44 on board are killed.
September 13 – Spantax Flight 995, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10, is destroyed by a fire after an aborted takeoff at Málaga Airport, Spain; 50 of the 294 on board die.
September 29 – Aeroflot Flight 343, an Ilyushin Il-62, veers off the runway while landing at Luxembourg Findel Airport, killing seven of 77 on board.
December 9 – Aeronor Flight 304, a Fairchild F-27, crashes near La Florida Airport, Chile; all 46 on board are killed.
December 24 – CAAC Flight 2311, an Ilyushin Il-18, catches fire before landing at Baiyun Airport in Guangzhou, China, resulting 25 deaths of 69 on board though it successfully lands on the runway.
1983
January 11 – United Airlines Flight 2885, a Douglas DC-8-54F, crashes shortly after taking off from Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport, Michigan. All three crew members are killed.
January 16 – Turkish Airlines Flight 158, a Boeing 727, lands about short of the runway at Ankara Esenboğa Airport, Turkey, in driving snow, breaks up and catches fire; 47 passengers are killed, all seven crew and 13 passengers survive the accident with injuries.
March 11 – In the 1983 Avensa Douglas DC-9 crash, a Douglas DC-9 crashes at Barquisimeto Airport, Venezuela, killing 22 passengers and one crew member.
May 5 – Eastern Air Lines Flight 855, a Lockheed L-1011 Tristar, loses power from all engines 30 minutes after takeoff from Miami International Airport; the pilot is able to return to Miami after restarting one engine; no casualties are reported on board.
June 2 – Air Canada Flight 797, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9, catches fire in its lavatory during flight over Kentucky. 23 of 46 passengers die due to a plume of fire from the lavatory triggered by a flashover from the plane's doors opening rolled through the cabin and engulfed it in flames, even after the crew successfully landed the aircraft at the Cincinnati airport in northern Kentucky. The other 23 survivors suffered from smoke inhalation and sustained minor injuries.
June 8 – Reeve Aleutian Airways Flight 8, Lockheed L-188C Electra; one of the propellers broke away from its engine and struck the fuselage, damaging the flight controls. The pilots were able to make a successful emergency landing.
July 1 – A Chosonminhang Ilyushin Il-62 crashes in mountainous terrain near Labé, Guinea, killing all 23 on board.
July 11 – A TAME Boeing 737-200 crashes into a hill near Cuenca, Ecuador, killing all 119 on board.
July 16 – A British Airways Sikorsky S-61 helicopter crashes into the sea off the Isles of Scilly; 20 of 26 people on board die, in the worst helicopter accident in the United Kingdom to date and results in a review of helicopter safety.
July 23 – Air Canada Flight 143, a Boeing 767, runs out of fuel above Manitoba because of a miscalculation; the crew successfully glides the aircraft to a safe landing at a former Air Force base (and current drag strip) at Gimli, Manitoba; the aircraft becomes known as the Gimli Glider.
August 30 – Aeroflot Flight 5463, a Tupolev Tu-134A, crashes into a mountain while approaching Alma-Ata Airport, killing all 90 on board.
September 1 – Korean Air Lines Flight 007, a Boeing 747, is shot down by Soviet fighter planes near Sakhalin and Moneron Island after straying into Soviet airspace; all 269 people on board are killed.
September 14 – In the 1983 Guilin Airport collision, a PLAAF Harbin H-5 bomber collides with a CAAC Hawker Siddeley Trident 2E as it taxies for takeoff at Guilin Qifengling Airport, China. 11 of the 106 occupants aboard the Trident are killed. It is unknown how many casualties, if any, occurred aboard the Harbin H-5.
September 23 – Gulf Air Flight 771, a Boeing 737, crashes near Mina Jebel Ali, United Arab Emirates, after a bomb planted by the Abu Nidal Organization detonates on board; all 112 people on board die.
October 11 – Air Illinois Flight 710, a Hawker Siddeley HS 748, crashes near Pinckneyville, Illinois, due to electrical problems. All 10 passengers and crew on board are killed.
November 8 – TAAG Angola Airlines Flight 462, a Boeing 737-200, is shot down just after takeoff from Lubango Airport; all 130 on board die.
November 18 – Aeroflot Flight 6833, a Tupolev Tu-134, is hijacked by seven Georgians attempting to defect from the Soviet Union; the aircraft is stormed by Alpha Group who arrest four hijackers; three are executed while the fourth receives a jail sentence; of the 71 on board (including the hijackers), eight die; the aircraft is written off.
November 27 – Avianca Flight 011, a Boeing 747, strikes a hill because of a navigational error while attempting to land in Madrid, Spain; of the 192 passengers and crew aboard, 11 survive.
December 7 – In the Madrid runway disaster, Iberia Flight 350, a Boeing 727, collides with Aviaco Flight 134, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9, on a runway at Madrid–Barajas Airport; 51 people aboard the Boeing 727 and all 42 people aboard the DC-9 are killed.
December 18 – Malaysian Airline System Flight 684, an Airbus A300 crashes at Kuala Lumpur Airport in Malaysia. There are no fatalities of the 247 people on board.
December 20 – Ozark Air Lines Flight 650, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9, collides with a snow plow in Sioux Falls, South Dakota; all on board survive, however the driver of the snow plow is killed.
December 23 – In the 1983 Anchorage runway collision, Korean Air Lines Flight 084, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10, collides with SouthCentral Air Flight 59, a Piper PA-31-350, on a runway at Anchorage International Airport; all 12 occupants on both aircraft survive.
December 24 – Aeroflot Flight 601, an Antonov An-24, crashes on approach to Leshukonskoye Airport due to pilot error, killing 44 of 49 on board.
1984
January 10 – A Balkan Bulgarian Tupolev Tu-134 crashed into a forest near Sofia, Bulgaria, during a snowstorm killing all 50 people on board.
February 28 – Scandinavian Airlines System Flight 901, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10, crashes into a ditch after overshooting the runway at John F. Kennedy Airport, New York, due to pilot error; all 177 passengers and crew on board survive the incident.
March 22 – Pacific Western Airlines Flight 501, a Boeing 737, suffers an uncontained engine failure during takeoff from Calgary; all passengers and crew are safely evacuated, but the plane burns to the ground.
July 5 – Indian Airlines Flight 405, nine Sikhs belonging to the Khalistan movement forced an Airbus A300 on a domestic flight from Srinagar to the Delhi with 254 passengers and 10 crew on board, to be flown to Lahore Airport in Pakistan. The demands (release of prisoners and money) of the hijackers were not met and they ultimately surrendered to Pakistani authorities on July 6.
August 5 – A Biman Bangladesh Airlines Fokker F27-600 crashed into a marsh near Zia International Airport in Dhaka, Bangladesh while landing in poor weather. With a total death toll of 49 people, it is the deadliest aviation disaster to occur on Bangladeshi soil.
August 24 – Indian Airlines Flight 421, seven Sikh hijackers demanded an Indian Airlines Boeing 737 flying from Delhi to Srinagar be flown to the United Arab Emirates. The plane was taken to the UAE where the defense minister of UAE negotiated the release of the passengers. It was related to the Sikh secessionist struggle in the Indian state of Punjab.
August 30 – Cameroon Airlines Flight 786, a Boeing 737, with 109 passengers and seven crew on board, suffers an uncontained engine failure during taxi for takeoff at the Douala, Cameroon airport, starting a fire; two people die as the plane burns to the ground.
September 18 – Aeroservicios Ecuatorianos Flight 767-103, a Douglas DC-8-55F crashes after failing to get airborne at Quito's Mariscal Sucre International Airport, Ecuador. All four crew, as well as 49 on the ground, are killed.
October 11 – Aeroflot Flight 3352, a Tupolev Tu-154B, crashes on landing at Tsentralny Airport, Omsk, Russia, killing 174 passengers and four people on the ground.
December 6 – Provincetown-Boston Airlines Flight 1039, an Embraer 110 Bandeirante with 13 passengers and crew on board, crashes on takeoff at Jacksonville, Florida, killing all aboard.
December 23 – Aeroflot Flight 3519, a Tupolev Tu-154B, crashes at Krasnoyarsk Airport while attempting an emergency landing following an engine fire, killing 110 of 111 on board.
1985
January 1 – Eastern Air Lines Flight 980, a Boeing 727 en route from Paraguay to Florida, United States, impacts Mount Illimani in Bolivia while descending for a scheduled stopover at El Alto International Airport, killing all 29 people on board.
January 21 – Galaxy Airlines Flight 203, a Lockheed L-188 Electra bound for Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States, crashes shortly after takeoff from Cannon International Airport in Reno, Nevada, due to an improperly secured air start access door; 70 of the 71 people on board are killed.
February 1 – Aeroflot Flight 7841, a Tupolev Tu-134 operating a domestic flight in the Soviet Union, crashes east of Minsk National Airport after both engines fail due to ice ingestion, killing 58 of the 80 on board.
February 19 – China Airlines Flight 006, a Boeing 747SP en route from Taoyuan International Airport, Taiwan, to Los Angeles in the United States, suffers an engine flameout off the coast of California and dives before regaining control; the aircraft lands safely in San Francisco and all 274 occupants survive, with two passengers injured.
February 19 – Iberia Flight 610, a Boeing 727 operating a domestic flight in Spain, crashes into a television broadcast antenna installed on the summit of Monte Oiz while approaching Bilbao Airport, killing all 141 passengers and seven crew on board.
May 3 – Aeroflot Flight 8381, a Tupolev Tu-134 operating a domestic flight in the Soviet Union, collides with a Soviet Air Force Antonov An-26; both aircraft crash near Zolochev, Ukraine, killing all 94 people on board the two aircraft.
June 14 – Trans World Airlines Flight 847, a Boeing 727 operating a multi-leg flight from Cairo, Egypt, to San Diego, California, United States, is hijacked by Lebanese militants shortly after taking off from Athens in Greece; one passenger is murdered during the three-day ordeal.
June 21 – Braathens SAFE Flight 139, a Boeing 737 operating a domestic flight in Norway, is hijacked by a political activist who demands to speak to the Norwegian Prime Minister Kåre Willoch; all crew and passengers survive unharmed.
June 23 – Air India Flight 182, a Boeing 747 en route from Montréal–Mirabel International Airport to London Heathrow Airport, is destroyed over the Atlantic Ocean off the southwest coast of Ireland by a bomb planted by Sikh extremists; all 329 people on board lose their lives.
July 10 – Aeroflot Flight 7425, a Tupolev Tu-154B operating a domestic flight in the Soviet Union, stalls while cruising at over Uzbekistan and enters an unrecoverable spin, killing all 200 people on board.
August 2 – Delta Air Lines Flight 191, a Lockheed L-1011 TriStar flying from Florida to California in the United States, crashes on approach to Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport after experiencing wind shear from a sudden microburst thunderstorm; 136 of the 163 people on board are killed, as well as a motorist whose car is struck by the aircraft.
August 12 – Japan Airlines Flight 123, a Boeing 747 operating a domestic flight in Japan, crashes into Mount Takamagahara after suffering a rapid decompression that severs all hydraulic lines and renders the aircraft uncontrollable; with the loss of 520 of the 524 people on board, this is the deadliest single-aircraft disaster in history to date.
August 22 – British Airtours Flight 28M, a Boeing 737 bound for Corfu International Airport, Greece, aborts its takeoff from Manchester Airport, England, because of an engine fire; 55 of the 137 on board are killed, mostly due to smoke inhalation.
August 25 – Bar Harbor Airlines Flight 1808, a Beech 99 operating a domestic multi-leg flight from Boston, Massachusetts, to Bangor, Maine, crashes on approach to Auburn/Lewiston Municipal Airport, where it is about to make an unscheduled flag stop; all six passengers and two crew lose their lives.
September 4 – A Bakhtar Afghan Airlines Antonov An-26 is shot down over Afghanistan by a ground-to-air missile, while operating a domestic flight from Kandahar to Farah; all 52 people on board are killed.
September 6 – Midwest Express Airlines Flight 105, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9 bound for Atlanta, Georgia, crashes shortly after takeoff from Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport, Wisconsin, due to engine failure and pilot error, killing all 31 people on board.
September 23 – Henson Airlines Flight 1517, a Beechcraft Model 99 operating a domestic flight from Maryland to Virginia in the United States, crashes on approach to Shenandoah Valley Regional Airport, killing all 14 passengers and crew on board.
November 23 – EgyptAir Flight 648, a Boeing 737 operating a flight between Greece and Egypt, is hijacked by Palestinian militants and forced to land on the island of Malta where Egyptian Special Forces storm the aircraft; the incident kills 56 of the 89 passengers, two of the six crew members, and all but one of the hijackers.
November 25 – An Aeroflot Antonov An-12 is shot down over Angola by a surface-to-air missile, while operating a cargo flight from Cuito Cuanavale to Luanda, allegedly by South African Special Forces; all 21 people on board are killed.
December 12 – Arrow Air Flight 1285, a Douglas DC-8 operating a multi-leg charter flight from Cairo, Egypt, to Kentucky in the United States, crashes shortly after takeoff from Gander International Airport, Newfoundland, killing all 256 passengers and crew on board, making it the worst air disaster to occur on Canadian soil to date.
December 19 – Aeroflot Flight 101/435, an Antonov An-24 operating a multi-leg domestic flight in the Soviet Union, is hijacked by the co-pilot and diverted to China; the aircraft lands safely at Qiqihar Airport in northeast China and all 51 on board are unharmed.
1986
January 18 – In the 1986 Aerovías Guatemala air crash, a Sud Aviation SE-210 Caravelle crashes into a hill on approach into Santa Elena Airport, Guatemala. All 94 passengers and crew on board are killed.
January 28 – VASP Flight 210 runs off the end of the taxiway from which it mistakenly tried to take off from, and collides with an embankment, killing one passenger.
February 16 - China Airlines Flight 2265 crashes into the Pacific Ocean during go-around after touching the ground at Penghu Airport killing all 13 on board. The wreckage was found on March 10.
March 31 – Mexicana de Aviación Flight 940, a Boeing 727, crashes into high ground near Santiago Maravatío, Mexico. All 167 passengers and crew are killed in the worst ever air disaster involving the Boeing 727.
April 2 – TWA Flight 840, a Boeing 727, is bombed by Palestinian militants, killing four of the 121 people on board, the plane manages to land safely in Athens.
May 3 – Air Lanka Flight 512, a Lockheed L-1011, is bombed by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, killing 21 of 148 on board.
May 3 – China Airlines Flight 334, a Boeing 747, is hijacked by the pilot, who subdues the two other crew members and changes heading to land in Guangzhou. All three on board survive.
June 18 – Grand Canyon Airlines Flight 6, a De Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otter, collides with a Bell 206 helicopter over the Tonto Plateau, killing all 25 on board both aircraft.
July 2 – Aeroflot Flight 2306, a Tupolev Tu-134, crashes near Syktyvkar, Russia, while attempting an emergency landing following a fire in the cargo hold, killing 54 of 92 on board.
August 3 – LIAT Flight 319, a DHC-6 Twin Otter crashes into the sea en route to E. T. Joshua Airport, St. Vincent and the Grenadines. All 13 passengers and crew are killed.
August 31 – Aeroméxico Flight 498, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9, collides with a Piper Cherokee over Cerritos, California, killing all 67 people aboard both aircraft and 15 people on the ground.
September 5 – Pan Am Flight 73, a Boeing 747, is hijacked on the ground at Jinnah International Airport in Karachi, Pakistan, by Palestinian militants. Twenty people die after a shootout occurs inside the plane.
October 20 – Aeroflot Flight 6502, a Tupolev Tu-134, crashes in Kuybyshev (now Samara), Russia, due to pilot error, killing 70 of 94 people on board.
November 6 – In the 1986 British International Helicopters Chinook crash, a Boeing 234LR Chinook crashes on approach to Sumburgh Airport, Shetland Islands; of 47 people on board, 45 die.
December 12 – Aeroflot Flight 892, a Tupolev Tu-134A, crashes near Schonefeld Airport, East Berlin after the crew misunderstands instructions from ATC, killing 72 of 82 on board; two initially survive, but die later.
December 25 – Iraqi Airways Flight 163, a Boeing 737, is hijacked by Hezbollah militants while en route to Amman, Jordan. A confrontation with security forces causes the plane to crash, killing 63 of the 106 people on board.
1987
January 3 – Varig Flight 797, a Boeing 707, crashes near Abidjan because of engine failure. Out of the 52 passengers and crew on board, there is only one survivor.
January 15 – Skywest Airlines Flight 1834, a Swearingen Metro II, collides in mid-air with a private Mooney M-20 near Salt Lake City, killing all 10 on board both aircraft.
January 16 – Aeroflot Flight 505, a Yakovlev Yak-40, crashes into the ground at Tashkent, Uzbekistan, after encountering a wake vortex from an Ilyushin Il-76 that had taken off one and a half minutes earlier, killing all nine on board.
March 4 – Northwest Airlink Flight 2268, a CASA 212, crashes while attempting to land at Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport in Detroit, Michigan, killing nine of the 19 passengers and crew on board.
April 4 – Garuda Indonesia Flight 035, a Douglas DC-9, crashes while on approach to Medan Airport; 23 of 45 on board die.
May 8 – American Eagle Flight 5452, a CASA C-212, crashes while landing at Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, due to maintenance issues and pilot error. All four passengers survive, both crew are killed.
May 9 – LOT Polish Airlines Flight 5055, an Ilyushin Il-62M, crashes near Warsaw during landing because of engine failure. All 183 passengers and crew members die in the accident.
May 19 – Air New Zealand Flight 24, Boeing 747-200, is hijacked on the tarmac at Nadi International Airport, Fiji, while making a scheduled refuelling stop. The hijacker boards the aircraft and demands the release of deposed Fijian prime minister Dr. Timoci Bavadra and his 27 ministers who are being held under house arrest. The flight crew eventually overpower the hijacker and hand him over to local police. There are no deaths or injuries reported.
June 19 – Aeroflot Flight N-528, a Yakovlev Yak-40, overruns the runway on landing at Berdyansk, Ukraine, killing eight of 29 on board.
June 27 – Philippine Airlines Flight 206, a Hawker Siddeley HS 748, crashes on the slopes of Mount Ugo, Benguet, as it begins its approach to Loakan Airport in Baguio City; all 50 passengers and crew are killed. Poor visibility is blamed for the crash.
July 24 – Air Afrique Flight 056, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10-30, is hijacked and diverted to Geneva Airport, Switzerland, by a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The hijacker kills one passenger and injures another flight attendant before being apprehended, while 29 people receive injuries during the evacuation.
July 30 – In the 1987 Belize Air International C-97 Mexico City crash, a Boeing C-97G Stratofreighter crashes on to a highway shortly after taking off from Mexico City International Airport, Mexico. Five of the twelve passengers and crew are killed, as well as 44 on the ground.
August 16 – Northwest Airlines Flight 255, a McDonnell Douglas MD-82, crashes on takeoff from Detroit as a result of pilot error. Of 155 people on board, there is only 1 survivor, four-year-old Cecelia Cichan. Two people in a car on the ground are also killed.
August 31 – Thai Airways Flight 365, a Boeing 737, crashes into the ocean off the coast of Thailand as a result of pilot error. All 83 passengers and crew die.
October 15 – Aero Trasporti Italiani Flight 460, an ATR 42-312, crashed into a mountain 15 minutes after takeoff due to pilot error. All 37 on board die.
November 15 – Continental Airlines Flight 1713, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9, crashes on takeoff during a snowstorm at Denver's Stapleton International Airport, killing 25 passengers and three crew.
November 28 – South African Airways Flight 295, a Boeing 747, crashes into the Indian Ocean after a fire in the cargo hold. All 159 aboard die.
November 29 – Korean Air Flight 858, a Boeing 707, crashes into the Andaman Sea after a bomb explodes on board. All 115 people on board are killed.
December 7 – Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 1771, a BAe 146, is hijacked and deliberately crashes near Cayucos, California, by a disgruntled airline employee. All 43 people on board, including the hijacker, are killed.
December 8 – In the 1987 Alianza Lima plane crash, a chartered Peruvian Navy Fokker F-27, crashes into the Pacific Ocean from Jorge Chávez International Airport, whilst carrying the Peruvian football team Alianza Lima. Of the 44 people on board, only the pilot survive.
December 13 – Philippine Airlines Flight 443, a Shorts 360–300, crashes into Mt. Gurain on the island of Mindanao. All 15 passengers and crew on board are killed.
December 23 – Finnair Flight 915, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10, is the target of an attempted missile attack by the Soviet Union. The allegations come out in 2014 when Finnish media reports a claim by two of the flight's pilots that the missile explodes less than 30 seconds before impact. It causes outrage in Finland among those politicians and civil servants, to whom it should have been reported at the time.
1988
January 2 – Condor Flugdienst Flight 3782, a Boeing 737, crashes into a mountain near Seferihisar, Turkey, due to a navigation error, killing all 16 on board.
January 18 – China Southwest Airlines Flight 4146, an Ilyushin Il-18, crashes while on approach to Chongqing Airport in China due to loss of control following an in-flight fire; all 108 on board die.
January 18 – Aeroflot Flight 699, a Tupolev Tu-154, lands hard and crashes at Turkmenbashi International Airport due to pilot error, killing 11 of 146 on board.
January 19 – Trans-Colorado Airlines Flight 2286, a Swearingen SA.227AC Metro III, crashes while on approach to Durango-La Plata Airport. Nine of the 17 passengers and crew on board are killed.
February 8 – Nürnberger Flugdienst Flight 108, a Swearingen Metroliner III, crashes while en route to Düsseldorf Airport, Germany. The crew become disorientated after the aircraft is struck by lightning, leading to an uncontrollable spin. The aircraft disintegrates mid-air, resulting in the deaths of all 21 passengers and crew on board.
February 19 – AVAir Flight 3378, a Swearingen Metroliner III, crashes on takeoff from Raleigh-Durham Airport due to pilot error, killing all 12 on board.
March 4 – TAT Flight 230, a Fairchild FH-227, crashes near Fontainebleau, France, killing all 23 on board; an electrical problem is suspected.
March 17 – Avianca Flight 410, a Boeing 727, crashes into terrain near Cúcuta, Colombia after takeoff as a result of pilot error. All 143 people on board die.
April 5 – Kuwait Airways Flight 422, a Boeing 747, is hijacked en route from Bangkok to Kuwait by Lebanese guerillas demanding the release of Shi'ite prisoners held by Kuwait, leading to a hostage crisis lasting 16 days and encompassing three continents. The flight, initially forced to land at Mashhad in northeastern Iran, travels 3,200 miles to Larnaca, Cyprus and finally to Algiers. Two passengers are shot dead by the hijackers. The remainder of the 112 passengers and crew, including three members of the Kuwaiti royal family, are eventually released and the hijackers allowed to leave Algeria.
April 28 – Aloha Airlines Flight 243, a Boeing 737, suffers explosive decompression during flight but manages to land safely. Of 95 people on board, one flight attendant is blown out of the plane and killed, and several passengers are injured.
May 6 – Widerøe Flight 710, a Dash 7, crashes in Torghatten, Norway, in thick fog, killing all 36 passengers in the worst-ever Dash 7 accident.
May 24 – TACA Flight 110, a Boeing 737, suffers dual engine failure due to water ingestion; the aircraft lands safely at NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans; all on board survive.
June 12 – Austral Líneas Aéreas Flight 46, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9, crashes short of the runway at Libertador General Jose de San Martin Airport, killing all 22 on board.
June 26 – Air France Flight 296, an Airbus A320, makes a low pass over Mulhouse-Habsheim Airport in landing configuration during an air show and crashes into trees at the end of the runway. Of 130 passengers aboard, three die.
July 3 – Iran Air Flight 655, an Airbus A300, is shot down over Iranian waters by the missile cruiser USS Vincennes; all 290 people on board are killed.
July 13 – The 1988 British International Helicopters Sikorsky S-61N crash: a Sikorsky S-61 ditches in the North Sea due to an engine fire; all 21 on board survive.
August 31 – CAAC Flight 301, a Hawker Siddeley Trident operating a Guangzhou Baiyun Airport to Hong Kong Kai Tak Airport flight, runs off the runway. Seven of the 89 passengers and crew on board are killed.
August 31 – Delta Air Lines Flight 1141, a Boeing 727, crashes on takeoff from Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport as a result of pilot error and poor design Boeing's mechanical failsafe system on the 727; of 108 people on board, 12 passengers and two crew members are killed.
September 9 – Vietnam Airlines Flight 831, a Tupolev Tu-134, crashes on approach to Don Mueang International Airport in Bangkok. 76 of the 90 passengers and crew on board are killed.
September 15 – Ethiopian Airlines Flight 604, a Boeing 737, crashes on takeoff after suffering multiple bird strikes; 35 of 98 passengers die, all six crew survive.
October 17 – Uganda Airlines Flight 775, a Boeing 707-338C, crashes while attempting to land at Rome's Fiumicino Airport; 33 of the 52 passengers and crew on board are killed.
October 19 – Indian Airlines Flight 113, a Boeing 737, crashes on approach 2.6 km short of the runway in poor visibility in Ahmedabad, India, killing 133 of the 135 people on board.
November 2 – LOT Polish Airlines Flight 703, an Antonov An-24, crashes on approach to Rzeszów-Jasionka Airport, killing one passenger, all others survive.
December 21 – Pan Am Flight 103, a Boeing 747, disintegrates in the air over Lockerbie, Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland, after a terrorist bomb explodes on board. All 259 people on board and 11 on the ground are killed. The incident is also known as the Lockerbie air disaster.
1989
January 8 – British Midland Airways Flight 092, a Boeing 737, crashes near Kegworth, Leicestershire, United Kingdom, after one of its engines loses a fan blade and fails. Of the 118 passengers and eight crew, 79 survive. The incident became known as the Kegworth air disaster and is the first loss of a Boeing 737-400.
February 8 – Independent Air Flight 1851, a Boeing 707, crashes into a hill on approach to Santa Maria, the Azores. All 144 people on board are killed.
February 19 – Flying Tiger Line Flight 66, a Boeing 747 crashes near Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on approach to land, killing all four on board. The crash is caused by miscommunication between ATC and the crew.
February 24 – United Airlines Flight 811, a Boeing 747, suffers an explosive decompression shortly after takeoff from Honolulu, Hawaii, United States, caused by a cargo door that burst open during flight. Of 355 people on board, nine passengers are blown out of the plane, but the crew manage to land safely at Honolulu.
March 10 – Air Ontario Flight 1363, a Fokker F28, crashes immediately after takeoff from Dryden, Ontario, Canada, because of ice on the wings, killing 24 of 69 people on board.
March 18 – Evergreen International Airlines Flight 17, a Douglas DC-9, crashes while attempting an emergency landing at Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth, Texas, after the main cargo door burst open immediately after takeoff, killing both pilots.
March 21 – Transbrasil Flight 801, a Boeing 707, crashes on a high speed approach into São Paulo Guarulhos International Airport, the left wing striking a building and crashing into a residential area. All three crewmembers and 22 persons on the ground were killed. The 707 involved was used in the 1970 movie Airport when it was owned by Flying Tigers.
June 7 – Surinam Airways Flight 764, a Douglas DC-8, crashes while attempting to land in heavy fog at Paramaribo, Suriname. The plane hits trees and flips upside down, killing 176 of 187 people on board.
June 17 – Interflug Flight 102, an Ilyushin Il-62, overruns the runway whilst taking off from Berlin Schönefeld Airport, East Germany, killing 21 of 113 people on board.
July 19 – United Airlines Flight 232, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10, suffers a complete hydraulic system failure over Iowa, United States, after the tail-mounted engine disintegrates. The crew maintains partial control of the aircraft using differential throttle, bringing it to a crash landing on the runway of the Sioux City, Iowa, airport. Of the 296 people on board, 112 die.
July 27 – Korean Air Flight 803, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10, crashes while attempting to land in heavy fog at Tripoli, Libya. 75 of the 199 passengers and crew on board plus four people on the ground are killed in the accident.
August 3 – Olympic Aviation Flight 545, a Shorts 330–220, crashes into Mount Kerkis in Greece. All 34 passengers and crew on board are killed.
August 25 – Pakistan International Airlines Flight 404, a Fokker F27, disappears on a flight with 54 on board; the wreckage has never been found.
September 3 – Cubana de Aviación Flight 9046, an Ilyushin Il-62M, crashes while trying to take off from José Martí International Airport in Havana, Cuba. All 126 people on board the aircraft plus 24 people on the ground are killed in the crash.
September 3 – Varig Flight 254, a Boeing 737, runs out of fuel because of incorrect navigation and crashes in the Brazilian jungle, killing 13 of the 54 people on board.
September 8 – Partnair Flight 394, a Convair 580, crashes into the North Sea after its tail section falls off in mid-air. All 55 people on board die. The disaster is blamed on counterfeit aircraft parts.
September 19 – UTA Flight 772, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10, explodes in mid-air over the Sahara desert when a bomb hidden in its forward cargo hold detonates. All 170 people on board are killed. Responsibility for the bombing is later traced back to Abdullah Senussi, the brother-in-law of Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi, whose government in 2003 agrees to pay compensation to the victims.
September 20 – USAir Flight 5050, a Boeing 737, overruns the runway at LaGuardia Airport attempting to abort takeoff after a tire on a nosewheel bursts due to a mistrimmed rudder; two passengers die.
October 21 – Tan-Sahsa Flight 414, a Boeing 727, crashes into a mountain known as Cerro de Hula near Tegucigalpa, Honduras, due to pilot error; 127 of 146 on board die.
October 26 – China Airlines Flight 204, a Boeing 737, crashes into the Chiashan mountain range after takeoff from Hualien Airport due to pilot error; all 54 on board die.
November 27 – Avianca Flight 203, a Boeing 727, explodes in mid-air over Colombia, killing all 107 people on board and three people on the ground. The Medellín Cartel claimed responsibility for the attack.
December 15 – KLM Flight 867, a Boeing 747 flying from Amsterdam to Anchorage, Alaska, flies through a cloud of volcanic debris, subsequently losing power from all four engines. The crew is able to restart the engines and land the plane safely.
December 26 – United Express Flight 2415, a BAe Jetstream 31 operated by North Pacific Airlines crashes while attempting to land at Tri-Cities Airport, Washington. All six passengers and crew are killed.
1990s
1990
January 4 – Northwest Airlines Flight 5, a Boeing 727 with 145 on board, loses an engine over Madison, Florida and the aircraft makes an emergency landing at Tampa International Airport. All on board survive.
January 16 – SANSA Flight 32, crashes into a mountain just after takeoff from Juan Santamaria International Airport in San José, Costa Rica, killing all 20 passengers and three crew on board.
January 25 – Avianca Flight 052, a Boeing 707, runs out of fuel and crashes while attempting to land at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York; of the 158 people on board, 85 survive.
February 14 – Indian Airlines Flight 605, an Airbus A320, crashes on its final approach to Bangalore Airport. 92 out of 146 people on board are killed.
April 9 – Atlantic Southeast Airlines Flight 2254, an Embraer EMB 120 Brasilia, collides with a Cessna 172, both on the Cessna die. Flight 2254 lands; all seven on board survive.
April 12 – Widerøe Flight 839, a DHC-6 Twin Otter, crashes into water just after takeoff from Værøy Airport, killing all five people on board.
May 11 – Philippine Airlines Flight 143, a Boeing 737, explodes and burns on the ground at Ninoy Aquino International Airport, killing eight of 120 on board.
May 18 – Aerolift Philippines Flight 075, a Beechcraft 1900, crashes into a house in the suburban Paranaque neighborhood in Manila just after takeoff from Ninoy Aquino International Airport due to an engine failure; all 21 passengers and crew members on board are killed as well as four people inside the house.
June 10 – British Airways Flight 5390, a BAC One-Eleven, suffers explosive decompression over Didcot, Oxfordshire, England, when one of the front windscreen panes blows out. The captain is partially blown out of the cockpit, but a flight attendant manages to keep the unconscious pilot from falling out of the aircraft. The first officer lands the aircraft safely at Southampton Airport. All on board survive.
August 2 – British Airways Flight 149, a Boeing 747, is taken hostage by Iraqi forces after landing at its scheduled stopover at Kuwait International Airport hours after the invasion of Kuwait. All 385 people on board are evacuated and captured, and later released at various stages, but one passenger is listed as being murdered by Iraqi soldiers. The empty aircraft is destroyed on the ground by an aircraft attack during the latter stages of the conflict.
September 11 – A Faucett Perú Boeing 727 on a re-positioning flight disappears in an area of the Atlantic Ocean approximately southeast of Cape Race, Newfoundland, Canada with 16 passengers and crew on board.
October 2 – In the Guangzhou Baiyun airport collisions, a hijacked Boeing 737 operating Xiamen Airlines Flight 8301 clips China Southwest Airlines Flight 2402, a Boeing 707, during landing at Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport, and collides with China Southern Airlines Flight 2812, a Boeing 757; of the 225 occupants on board the three aircraft, 128 die.
November 14 – Alitalia Flight 404, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9, crashes on approach to Zürich Airport, Switzerland, killing all 46 people on board.
November 21 – Bangkok Airways Flight 125, a De Havilland Canada DHC-8-103, crashes on approach to Koh Samui Airport in Thailand, killing all 33 passengers and five crew on board.
December 3 – In the 1990 Wayne County Airport runway collision, Northwest Airlines Flight 1482, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9, collides with Northwest Airlines Flight 299, a Boeing 727, on a runway at Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport; eight of the 54 people on board the DC-9 are killed; all 154 people on board the Boeing 727 survive.
1991
February 1 – In the Los Angeles runway disaster, USAir Flight 1493, a Boeing 737 landing at Los Angeles International Airport, strikes SkyWest Airlines Flight 5569, a Fairchild Metro commuter plane waiting to take off from the same runway. All 12 people aboard the Metro and 23 of the 89 on the Boeing 737 are killed.
February 17 – Ryan International Airlines Flight 590, a Douglas DC-9, crashes on takeoff from Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, Ohio, killing both pilots.
February 20 – LAN Chile Flight 1069, a BAe 146, overruns the runway while landing at Puerto Williams, Chile, killing 20 of the 72 people on board.
March 3 – United Airlines Flight 585, a Boeing 737, crashes while attempting to land at Colorado Springs Airport, Colorado, killing all 25 people on board. The cause of the crash is not identified until the investigation into the crash of USAir Flight 427 in 1994; both crashes are eventually attributed to defects in a valve associated with the rudder.
March 5 – Aeropostal Alas de Venezuela Flight 108, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9 crashes into a mountain shortly after taking off from La Chinita International Airport, Venezuela. All 45 passengers and crew are killed.
March 26 – Singapore Airlines Flight 117, an Airbus A310, is hijacked by Pakistani militants en route to Singapore Changi Airport, where, upon landing, it is stormed by Singapore Special Operations forces. All of the hijackers are killed in the operation, with no fatalities among the passengers and crew.
April 5 – Atlantic Southeast Airlines Flight 2311, an Embraer EMB 120RT, rolls sharply and crashes on final approach to Brunswick, Georgia, killing all 23 people on board.
May 26 – Lauda Air Flight 004, a Boeing 767, disintegrates in mid-air over Uthai Thani Province and Suphan Buri Province, Thailand, killing all 223 people on board. A thrust reverser had accidentally deployed in flight, causing the disaster. It is the first fatal crash of a Boeing 767.
July 10 – L'Express Airlines Flight 508, a Beechcraft Model 99, crashes while on approach Birmingham Municipal Airport, Alabama, due to severe thunderstorms, killing 13 people on board.
July 11 – Nigeria Airways Flight 2120, a Nationair McDonnell Douglas DC-8 chartered by Nigeria Airways to transport Nigerian pilgrims to Mecca, crashes shortly after takeoff from King Abdulaziz International Airport, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, because of a fire caused by tire failure. All 261 on board die, including 14 Canadian crew members.
August 16 – Indian Airlines Flight 257, a Boeing 737, hits high ground during descent about 30 km from Imphal Airport. All six crew members and 63 passengers are killed.
September 11 – Continental Express Flight 2574, an Embraer EMB 120RT, crashes on descent in Eagle Lake, Texas, killing all 14 people on board. Maintenance crews traded work shifts during repairs to the horizontal stabilizer, inadvertently leaving 47 bolts missing. Reformers pointed to this error and called for development of a "safety culture".
December 27 – Both engines of Scandinavian Airlines System Flight 751, a McDonnell Douglas MD-81, surge shortly after takeoff from Stockholm Arlanda Airport. The pilots successfully make an emergency landing in a nearby field, injuring 25 passengers but incurring not a single fatality.
December 29 – China Airlines Flight 358, a Boeing 747 freighter, suffers double engine separation and crashes into a hill near Wanli, Taipei, Taiwan, killing all five crew on board.
1992
January 3 – CommutAir Flight 4281, a Beechcraft 1900C crashes on approach into Adirondack Regional Airport, New York. Two of the four occupants are killed.
January 20 – Air Inter Flight 148, an Airbus A320, crashes in the Vosges Mountains on approach to Strasbourg, France, killing 87 of 96 people on board.
February 15 – Air Transport International Flight 805, a Douglas DC-8 operated by Burlington Air Express, crashes during a second go-around attempt at Toledo Express Airport, Ohio, killing all four people on board and injuring 13 people on the ground.
March 22 – USAir Flight 405, a Fokker F-28, crashes on takeoff from New York because of ice buildup. Twenty-seven of the 51 people on board are killed.
March 31 – Trans-Air Service Flight 671, a Boeing 707-321C, experiences an in-flight separation of two engines on the right wing. Despite substantial control difficulties and a fire that breaks out on the right wing during approach, the pilots safely land at a military airbase in Istres, France. None of the five occupants are injured.
June 6 – Copa Airlines Flight 201, a Boeing 737-200 Advanced, crashes near Darién, Panama, killing all 47 passengers and crew on board; a faulty attitude indicator is the cause.
June 7 – American Eagle Flight 5456, a CASA C-212 Aviocar operated by Executive Airlines crashes on approach into Eugenio María de Hostos Airport, Puerto Rico. All five passengers and crew are killed.
June 8 – GP Express Flight 861, a Beechcraft Model 99 crashes on approach into Anniston Metropolitan Airport, Alabama. Three of the six passengers and crew on board are killed.
July 24 – Mandala Airlines Flight 660, a Vickers Viscount 816, crashes on approach to Pattimura Airport, Ambon, Indonesia, killing all 63 passengers and seven crew on board.
July 30 – TWA Flight 843 aborts takeoff at John F. Kennedy International Airport. The Lockheed L-1011 turns off the runway onto grass in order to avoid striking a concrete barrier. The plane is destroyed by fire shortly after all 292 passengers and crew evacuate with no loss of life.
July 31 – Thai Airways International Flight 311, an Airbus A310, crashes on approach into Kathmandu, Nepal, killing all 14 crew and 99 passengers on board.
July 31 – China General Aviation Flight 7552, a Yakovlev 42D, loses control just after takeoff from Nanjing Airport and crashes into a pond; 108 of 126 on board die.
August 27 – Aeroflot Flight 2808, a Tupolev Tu-134, crashes into buildings while attempting to land at Ivanovo Yuzhny Airport, killing all 84 on board.
September 4 – Vietnam Airlines Flight 850, an Airbus A310-200, is hijacked by a former pilot in the Republic of Vietnam Air Force. He then drops anti-communist leaflets over Ho Chi Minh City before parachuting out. Vietnamese security forces later arrest him on the ground. The aircraft lands safely, and no one on board is injured.
September 28 – Pakistan International Airlines Flight 268, an Airbus A300, crashes near Kathmandu, Nepal, killing all 12 crew and 155 passengers.
October 4 – El Al Flight 1862, a Boeing 747, freighter, crashes into high-rise apartment buildings in Amsterdam after two of its engines detach from the wing. Forty-three people, including the plane's crew of three plus an additional passenger, are killed.
October 18 – Merpati Nusantara Airlines Flight 5601, a CASA/IPTN CN-235, crashes into Mount Papandayan near the town Garut in Indonesia. All 31 passengers and crew on board are killed.
November 14 – Vietnam Airlines Flight 474, a Yakovlev Yak-40, crashes while on approach to Nha Trang Airport in a tropical storm. Thirty people on board are killed.
November 24 – China Southern Airlines Flight 3943, a Boeing 737-300, crashes on descent to Guilin Airport, killing all 141 aboard.
December 21 – Martinair Flight 495 crashes in Faro, Portugal, killing 54 people and injuring 106.
December 22 – Libyan Arab Airlines Flight 1103, a Boeing 727, collides with a Libyan Air Force MiG-23 near Tripoli International Airport, killing all 157 people aboard the 727. The two crew in the MiG-23 survive and later dispute the official explanation for the crash, claiming that the 727 was purposely destroyed while they were flying nearby.
1993
January 6 – Lufthansa CityLine Flight 5634, a de Havilland Canada DHC-8, crashes short of the runway at Paris–Charles de Gaulle Airport, killing four of 23 on board.
February 8 – In the 1993 Tehran mid-air collision, an Iran Air Tours Tupolev Tu-154 collides in mid-air with an Iranian Air Force Sukhoi Su-24, killing all 133 on board both aircraft.
February 11 – Lufthansa Flight 592, an Airbus A310-300, is hijacked and the pilot is forced to fly to John F. Kennedy International Airport. The plane lands safely and the hijacker surrenders. All 104 on board survive.
March 5 – Palair Macedonian Airlines Flight 301, a Fokker 100, crashes shortly after takeoff from Skopje Airport in Macedonia; 83 of the 97 passengers and crew on board are killed.
April 6 – China Eastern Airlines Flight 583, a McDonnell Douglas MD-11, makes an emergency landing at Shemya Air Force Base after the slats are accidentally deployed in mid-air near the Aleutian Islands; all on board initially survive, but two die later.
April 14 – American Airlines Flight 102, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10, veers off the runway on landing at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport; all on board survive.
April 18 – Japan Air System Flight 451, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9, encounters windshear and skids off the runway at Hanamaki Airport; all on board survive.
April 24 – Indian Airlines Flight 427, a Boeing 737-200, is hijacked on a flight between New Delhi and Srinagar, India. The plane lands at Amritsar Airport where it is stormed by commandos; the hijacker is killed and the 140 passengers and crew survive without injury.
April 26 – Indian Airlines Flight 491, a Boeing 737, strikes a large vehicle on a road just outside Aurangabad Airport, killing 55 of the 118 people on board.
May 19 – SAM Colombia Flight 501, a Boeing 727, crashes into Mount Paramo Frontino, killing all 132 on board.
July 1 – Merpati Nusantara Airlines Flight 724, a Fokker F28, collides with a small hill near the sea, breaks up and plunges into the sea shortly afterwards, killing 41 people on board.
July 23 – China Northwest Airlines Flight 2119, a BAe 146, overruns the runway at Yinchuan Hedong Airport, Ningxia, China after an aborted takeoff; the aircraft crashes into a lake, killing 54 passengers and one crew member.
July 26 – Asiana Airlines Flight 733, a Boeing 737, crashes into a mountain in Haenam, South Korea, after failed landing attempts, killing 78 of the 110 people on board; this crash is the first loss of a Boeing 737-500.
August 18 – American International Airways Flight 808, a DC-8, stalls on approach to Guantanamo Bay and crashes. Everyone survives.
August 26 – Sakha Avia Flight 301, a Let L-410 Turbolet, crashes on approach to Aldan Airport in Russia, killing all 24 people on board.
August 28 – A Tajik Air Yakovlev Yak-40 crashes after overshooting the runway on takeoff from Khorog Airport, killing 82 of the 86 people on board; the accident is the deadliest involving the Yak-40 as well as the deadliest accident in Tajikistan to date.
August 31 – An Everest Air Dornier Do 228 crashes near Bharatpur in Nepal, killing all 19 people on board.
September 14 – Lufthansa Flight 2904, an Airbus A320, crashes after overrunning the runway in Warsaw, Poland, killing two and injuring 68 of the 72 people on board.
September 21 – In the first of the three Transair Georgia airliner shootdowns, a Tupolev Tu-134A is hit on approach to Sukhumi-Babusheri Airport by a surface-to-air missile; the plane crashes into the Black Sea, killing all five crew members and all 22 passengers.
September 22 – In the second of the three Transair Georgia airliner shootdowns, a Tupolev Tu-154, carrying soldiers from Tbilisi, is shot down on landing in the Sukhumi-Babusheri Airport; the plane crashes on the runway and catches fire, killing 108 of the 132 people on board.
October 26 – China Eastern Airlines Flight 5398, a McDonnell Douglas MD-82, overruns the runway at Fuzhou Changle International Airport in heavy weather, killing two of 80 on board.
October 27 – Widerøe Flight 744, a de Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otter, crashes in Overhalla, Norway, on approach to Namsos Airport, killing both pilots and four passengers; the crash is also known as the Namsos Accident.
November 4 – China Airlines Flight 605, a Boeing 747-400, overruns Kai Tak Airport's runway 13 on landing during a typhoon; the aircraft is unable to stop before crashing into Hong Kong harbor; all 374 on board escape safely; this crash is the first loss of a Boeing 747-400.
November 13 – China Northern Airlines Flight 6901, a McDonnell Douglas MD-82, crashes on approach to Ürümqi Diwopu International Airport, Xinjiang, China; killing 12 of the 102 on board; pilot error is blamed.
November 20 – Avioimpex Flight 110, a Yakovlev Yak-42, crashes on approach to Ohrid Airport in Macedonia; all 116 passengers and crew die as a result of the crash, though one passenger lived for 11 days before succumbing to his injuries.
December 1 – Northwest Airlink Flight 5719, a Jetstream 31, crashes into two ridges east of Hibbing, Minnesota, killing all 18 on board.
1994
January 3 – Baikal Airlines Flight 130, a Tupolev Tu-154, loses control and crashes near Irkutsk, Russia, after the hydraulic system failed due to an engine fire, killing all 124 on board and one person on the ground.
January 7 – United Express Flight 6291, a BAe Jetstream 41 crashes on approach into Port Columbus International Airport, Ohio. Five of the eight passengers and crew are killed.
February 24 – Pulkovo Aviation Enterprise Flight 9045, an Antonov An-12BP crashes on approach into Nalchik Airport, Russia. All 13 passengers and crew are killed. The aircraft was carrying 12,515 kg of coins from the Saint Petersburg Mint.
March 8 – A Sahara Airlines Boeing 737 crashes during a training flight into an Aeroflot Ilyushin Il-86 at New Delhi, India, killing all 8 on both aircraft and 1 on the ground.
March 23 – Aeroflot Flight 593, an Airbus A310, crashes into a wooded hillside in Siberia. All 75 passengers and crew are killed.
April 4 – KLM Cityhopper Flight 433, a Saab 340, crashes while trying to return to Schiphol Airport, due to pilot error and equipment failure; the pilot and two passengers die, nine passengers are injured.
April 7 – Federal Express Flight 705, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10-30, experiences an attempted hijacking by a FedEx employee; the three crew members are severely injured, but manage to subdue the attacker and land the aircraft safely with no loss of life.
April 26 – China Airlines Flight 140, an Airbus A300, crashes while landing at Nagoya, Japan, as a result of pilot error. 264 of the 271 people on board die.
June 6 – China Northwest Airlines Flight 2303, a Tupolev Tu-154M, breaks up in mid-air and crashes near Xian, China, killing all 160 on board. The deadliest airplane crash ever to occur in China is attributed to a maintenance error.
June 30 – Airbus Industrie Flight 129, an Airbus A330 on a test flight, crashes at France's Toulouse-Blagnac Airport, killing all seven on board.
July 1 – Air Mauritanie Flight 625, a Fokker F28 Fellowship crashes on landing at Tidjikja Airport, Mauritania in sandstorm conditions. 80 of the 93 passengers and crew are killed.
July 2 – USAir Flight 1016, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9, crashes while attempting to land at Charlotte, North Carolina, during a thunderstorm. 37 of the 57 people on board are killed.
July 19 – Alas Chiricanas Flight 901, an Embraer EMB-110, explodes in mid-air over Panama, killing all 21 people on board. Investigators conclude that a suicide bomber caused the plane to explode, although motives and affiliation of the bomber remain unclear.
August 21 – Royal Air Maroc Flight 630, an ATR-42, is deliberately crashed into the Atlas Mountains, killing all 44 on board.
September 8 – USAir Flight 427, a Boeing 737, crashes while attempting to land at Pittsburgh International Airport, killing all 132 people on board. Investigations showed that a fault in the Boeing 737 rudder was to blame for the crash.
September 26 – In the 1994 Vanavara air disaster, a Yakovlev Yak-40 operated by Cheremshanka Airlines crashes near Vanavara, Russia after running out of fuel in bad weather, killing 28 passengers and crew.
October 12 – Iran Aseman Airlines Flight 746, a Fokker F-28, crashes into a mountain near Natanz, Iran, due to double engine failure, killing all 66 on board.
October 31 – American Eagle Flight 4184, an ATR 72 turboprop, crashes near Roselawn, Indiana, while waiting to land at Chicago, because of ice buildup on its wings. All 68 people on board die.
November 3 – Scandinavian Airlines System Flight 347, a McDonnell Douglas MD-82 operating a domestic flight in Norway, is hijacked by a Bosnian national; after landing at Bodø Airport to release some hostages, the aircraft flies on to Oslo Airport where the hijacker later surrenders.
November 22 – TWA Flight 427, a McDonnell Douglas MD-82, collides with a Superior Aviation Cessna 441 on the runway at Lambert-St. Louis International Airport, killing the pilot and passenger in the Cessna; there are no fatalities on board the MD-82.
December 11 – A bomb explodes on board Philippine Airlines Flight 434, a Boeing 747, killing one passenger, in a prelude to the terrorist Bojinka plot. Despite subsequent difficulties in controlling the aircraft, the crew succeeds in making an emergency landing at Naha, Okinawa.
December 19 – Nigeria Airways Flight 9805, a Boeing 707 operating a cargo flight between Saudi Arabia and Nigeria, suffers an in-flight fire before crashing into marshland in Nigeria; both passengers and one of the three crew members are killed.
December 21 – Air Algérie Flight 702P, a Boeing 737, crashes on approach to Coventry Airport, England, killing all five on board.
December 24 – Air France Flight 8969, an Airbus A300, is hijacked on the tarmac at Algiers, Algeria, by the militant group GIA. After a two-day standoff, the plane is allowed to fly to Marseille, France, where it is stormed by French commandos, who kill the four hijackers.
December 29 – Turkish Airlines Flight 278, a Boeing 737-400, crashes on final approach to Van Ferit Melen Airport in eastern Turkey in driving snow. Five of the seven crew and 52 of the 69 passengers are killed.
1995
January 11 – Intercontinental de Aviación Flight 256, a Douglas DC-9, crashes in a lagoon near María La Baja, Colombia due to an improperly set altimeter, killing 51 of 52 on board.
January 19 – Bristow Helicopters Flight 56C, a Eurocopter Super Puma, is struck by lightning and is forced to make an emergency landing in the North Sea; all 18 on board survive.
January 30 – TransAsia Airways Flight 510A, an ATR 72–200 on a re-positioning flight from Penghu to Taipei, crashes into a hill in Guishan District, Taoyuan, killing all four crew members.
February 16 – Air Transport International Flight 782, a Douglas DC-8 on a re-positioning flight, crashes after failing to get airborne at Kansas City International Airport, Missouri, killing all three crew members.
March 31 – TAROM Flight 371, an Airbus A310, crashes near Balotești, Romania due to mechanical failure and pilot error, killing all 60 on board.
May 24 – Knight Air Flight 816, an Embraer EMB 110 Bandeirante crashes whilst trying to return to Leeds Bradford Airport, UK in poor weather. All 12 passengers and crew are killed.
June 9 – Ansett New Zealand Flight 703, a de Havilland Canada DHC-8, crashes during a landing approach near the Tararua Ranges, New Zealand, killing four of the 21 people on board.
June 21 – All Nippon Airways Flight 857, a Boeing 747SR, is hijacked on a domestic flight between Tokyo and Hakodate in Japan; after landing at its destination, the aircraft is later stormed by police and the hijacker is arrested; all 365 people on board survive the incident.
August 3 – In the Airstan incident, an Airstan Ilyushin Il-76TD operated as Flight 199 is intercepted by a Taliban-controlled fighter aircraft before being forced to divert to Kandahar International Airport in Afghanistan; the seven crew are held captive for over a year before overpowering their captors and fleeing in the aircraft.
August 9 – Aviateca Flight 901, a Boeing 737, crashes into San Vicente volcano while on approach to Cuscatlán International Airport; all 65 on board die.
August 21 – Atlantic Southeast Airlines Flight 529, an Embraer EMB 120, crashes in a field near Carrollton, Georgia, United States, killing nine of the 29 people on board.
September 15 – Malaysia Airlines Flight 2133, a Fokker 50, crashes into a shantytown in Malaysia due to pilot error, killing 34 of 53 on board.
September 21 – MIAT Flight 557, an Antonov An-24, crashes into a mountain near Mörön Airport, Mongolia due to pilot error; of the 43 on board, only a passenger survives. The accident remains the deadliest in Mongolia.
November 12 – American Airlines Flight 1572, a McDonnell Douglas MD-83, collides with trees on approach causing a loss of both engines. It loses altitude, and strikes runway antennas before rolling to a stop. There is one minor injury of the 78 people on board.
November 13 – Nigeria Airways Flight 357, a Boeing 737, overruns the runway while landing at Kaduna Airport, killing 11 of 138 on board.
December 3 – Cameroon Airlines Flight 3701, a Boeing 737, loses control and crashes while on approach to Douala International Airport, Cameroon; of the 76 on board, five survive.
December 5 – Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 56, a Tupolev Tu-134, crashes on climbout from Nakhchivan Airport after an engine fails due to improper maintenance, killing 52 of 82 on board.
December 7 – Khabarovsk United Air Group Flight 3949, a Tupolev Tu-154B crashes after entering a steep downward spiral while at cruising altitude. All 98 passengers and crew are killed.
December 7 – In the 1995 Air St. Martin Beech 1900 crash, a Beechcraft 1900D crashes near Belle-Anse, Haiti, killing all 20 people on board.
December 13 – Banat Air Flight 166, a Romavia Antonov An-24, crashes after taking off from Verona Airport, because of overloading and ice accumulation on the wings; all 49 people on board are killed.
December 18 – In the 1995 Trans Service Airlift Electra crash, a Lockheed L-188 Electra crashes shortly after takeoff from Jamba, Angola, due to overloading and shifting baggage; of the 144 people on board, only three survive.
December 20 – American Airlines Flight 965, a Boeing 757, crashes into a mountain while approaching Alfonso Bonilla Aragón International Airport in Palmira, Colombia, killing 159 of 163 on board.
December 20 – Tower Air Flight 41, a Boeing 747, veers off the runway during takeoff from John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York. All 468 people on board survive, but 25 people are injured; the aircraft is written off.
1996
January 8 – In the 1996 Air Africa crash, an overloaded Antonov An-32 operated by Moscow Airways aborts takeoff and overruns into a market in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo, killing 227 people on the ground.
February 6 – Birgenair Flight 301, a Boeing 757, with 189 people on board, crashes into the ocean off Puerto Plata in the Dominican Republic shortly after taking off. All passengers and crew are killed.
February 29 – Faucett Flight 251, a Boeing 737, crashes into a hill while attempting to land at Arequipa, Peru. All 123 people on board die.
May 11 – ValuJet Flight 592, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9, crashes in the Everglades near Miami, Florida, because of a fire in its cargo hold. All 110 people on board are killed.
June 9 – Eastwind Airlines Flight 517, a Boeing 737-200, loses rudder control while on approach to Richmond International Airport, Richmond, Virginia, and makes an emergency landing; no fatalities.
June 13 – Garuda Indonesia Flight 865, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10, aborts takeoff due to an engine failure and crashes into a threshold at Fukuoka Airport, Fukuoka, Japan, killing three of 275 on board.
July 6 – Delta Air Lines Flight 1288, a McDonnell Douglas MD-88, experiences an uncontained engine failure during takeoff on Runway 17 at Pensacola, Florida. Fragments from the number one (left) Pratt & Whitney JT8D-219 turbofan engine penetrate the fuselage, killing two and seriously injuring two of the 142 people on board.
July 17 – TWA Flight 800, a Boeing 747, explodes in mid-air above the ocean off East Moriches, New York, killing all 230 people on board; 70% of passengers are sucked out during the explosion.
August 19 – Spair Airlines Flight 3601, an Ilyushin Il-76, crashes near Belgrade, Yugoslavia, with 11 fatalities.
August 29 – Vnukovo Airlines Flight 2801, a Tupolev Tu-154, crashes into a mountain on Spitsbergen, an island in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, killing all 141 on board. It remains Norway's worst air disaster to date.
September 3 – Hemus Air Flight 7081, a Tupolev Tu-154 is hijacked while en route from Beirut, Lebanon to Varna, Bulgaria. After landing in Varna, the 150 passengers are traded for fuel. The plane then flies on to Oslo Gardermoen Airport, Norway, where the hijacker later surrenders.
October 2 – Aeroperú Flight 603, a Boeing 757, crashes into the ocean off Pasamayo, Peru, because of a maintenance error. All 70 people on board are killed.
October 31 – TAM Transportes Aéreos Regionais Flight 402, a Fokker 100, crashes shortly after takeoff from Congonhas-São Paulo Airport, Brazil, striking an apartment building and several houses. All 89 passengers and six crew members on board die. Four people are killed on the ground.
November 7 – ADC Airlines Flight 086, a Boeing 727, crashes when the crew loses control of the aircraft while avoiding a mid-air collision on approach to Lagos, Nigeria. All 144 passengers and crew on board are killed.
November 12 – 1996 Charkhi Dadri mid-air collision: Saudi Arabian Airlines Flight 763, a Boeing 747, collides in mid-air with Kazakhstan Airlines Flight 1907, an Ilyushin Il-76, near Charkhi Dadri, India. All 312 on board the Boeing 747 and all 37 on board the Ilyushin Il-76 are killed. It is the deadliest mid-air collision in aviation history.
November 19 – United Express Flight 5925, a Beechcraft 1900, collides with a privately owned Beechcraft King Air at Quincy Regional Airport, Illinois; killing all 14 on board both aircraft.
November 23 – Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961, a Boeing 767, is hijacked over Kenya. The aircraft runs out of fuel, and the pilot attempts to ditch the aircraft in the ocean off Moroni, Comoros. Of the 175 people on board, 125 are killed (including the three hijackers).
December 7 – Dirgantara Air Service Flight 5940, a CASA C-212 Aviocar crashes into a gas factory shortly after takeoff from Syamsudin Noor International Airport, Indonesia following an engine failure. 16 of the 17 passengers and crew are killed, as well as two on the ground.
December 22 – Airborne Express Flight 827, a Douglas DC-8, stalls and crashes during a test flight in Narrows, Virginia, killing all 6 people on board.
1997
January 9 – Comair Flight 3272, an Embraer EMB 120 Brasília, crashes near Ida, Michigan, during a snowstorm, killing all 29 on board.
March 18 – Stavropolskaya Aktsionernaya Avia Flight 1023, an Antonov An-24, breaks up in flight and crashes near Cherkessk, Russia; all 50 on board die.
April 19 – Merpati Nusantara Airlines Flight 106, a BAe ATP crashes during a failed go-around in bad weather at Buluh Tumbang International Airport, Indonesia. 15 of the 53 passengers and crew are killed.
May 8 – China Southern Airlines Flight 3456, a Boeing 737, makes a hard landing in Shenzhen, China, during poor weather and crashes, killing 35 of the 74 people on board.
July 17 – Sempati Air Flight 304, a Fokker F27, crashes shortly after takeoff from Husein Sastranegara International Airport, killing 28 people on board.
July 30 – Air Littoral Flight 701, an ATR 42 flying from France to Italy, overshoots the runway at Florence Airport and crashes into a ditch; all 14 passengers and two of the three crew members survive, but the pilot is killed in the accident.
July 31 – FedEx Express Flight 14, a McDonnell Douglas MD-11, crashes upon landing at Newark Liberty International Airport; the two crew members and three passengers escape uninjured.
August 6 – Korean Air Flight 801, a Boeing 747, crashes while attempting to land in heavy rain at Guam International Airport; of the 254 people on board, 229 die.
August 7 – Fine Air Flight 101, a McDonnell Douglas DC-8-61F, crashes after take-off at Miami International Airport; all four people on board and one person on the ground are killed.
August 10 – Formosa Airlines Flight 7601, a Dornier Do 228, crashes while attempting to land at Beigan, Lienchiang, in the Matsu Islands. All 16 passengers and crew on board are killed.
September 3 – Vietnam Airlines Flight 815, a Tupolev Tu-134, crashes on approach to Phnom Penh International Airport in heavy rain, killing 65 of the 66 people on board.
September 6 – Royal Brunei Airlines Flight 238, a Dornier Do 228, crashes into a hillside in Lambir Hills National Park, killing all 10 on board.
September 26 – Garuda Indonesia Flight 152, an Airbus A300, crashes into a mountain near Buah Nabar, Indonesia, killing all 234 on board.
October 10 – Austral Líneas Aéreas Flight 2553, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9, crashes near Fray Bentos, Uruguay, traveling from Posadas to Buenos Aires, resulting in the death of all 74 occupants.
December 15 – Tajikistan Airlines Flight 3183, a Tupolev Tu-154, crashes into the desert near Sharjah Airport, of the 86 on board, only the flight engineer survives.
December 16 – Air Canada Flight 646, a Bombardier CRJ100ER operating a domestic flight in Canada, crashes on landing at Fredericton, New Brunswick, after a failed go-around attempt; all 42 passengers and crew survive the accident.
December 17 – Aerosvit Flight 241, a Yakovlev Yak-42, crashes near Thessaloniki, Greece, killing all 70 people on board.
December 19 – SilkAir Flight 185, a Boeing 737, crashes into the Musi River near Palembang, Indonesia, killing all 104 people on board.
December 28 – United Airlines Flight 826, a Boeing 747, encounters severe turbulence two hours into the flight; the aircraft safely lands back in Tokyo; all survive the accident, but a passenger dies later; despite having no damage, the aircraft is written off.
1998
February 2 – Cebu Pacific Flight 387, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9, crashes into a mountain near Mount Sumagaya in Misamis Oriental in the Philippines, killing all 104 passengers and crew members on board.
February 16 – China Airlines Flight 676, an Airbus A300, crashes into a residential area while attempting to land in Taipei, Taiwan. All 196 people on board are killed, in addition to seven on the ground.
March 18 – Formosa Airlines Flight 7623, a Saab 340, crashes in the ocean shortly after take-off following an electrical failure, killing all 13 on board.
March 19 – In the 1998 Ariana Afghan Airlines crash, a Boeing 727 crashes into Sharki Baratayi Mountain while on approach to Kabul International Airport, killing all 45 on board.
March 22 – Philippine Airlines Flight 137, an Airbus A320, overshoots the end of the runway while landing at Bacolod City in the Philippines, plowing through several houses. None of the passengers was harmed, but three people on the ground are killed and several more injured.
April 20 – Air France Flight 422, a Boeing 727 leased from TAME Airlines, crashes into the mountains east of Bogotá, Colombia, on takeoff from El Dorado International Airport of Bogotá in foggy weather. All 53 passengers and crew die.
May 5 – In the 1998 Occidental Petroleum Boeing 737 crash, a Boeing 737 leased from the Peruvian Air Force crashes while on approach to Alférez FAP Alfredo Vladimir Sara Bauer Airport, killing 75 of 88 on board.
May 25 – Pakistan International Airlines Flight 544, a Fokker F-27, is hijacked shortly after takeoff by three armed men. F-16 fighter jets intercept the plane and force it to land. The hijackers are arrested and sentenced to death. All 38 on board survive.
May 26 – The 1998 MIAT Mongolian Airlines crash: a Harbin Y-12 crashes 13 minutes after takeoff from Erdenet Airport, Mongolia, killing all 28 passengers and crew.
June 18 – Propair Flight 420, a Fairchild Metroliner crashes shortly after takeoff from Dorval Airport (now Montréal–Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport), Canada following an inflight fire. All 11 passengers and crew are killed.
July 30 – Proteus Airlines Flight 706: a Beechcraft 1900D collides in mid-air with a light aircraft over Quiberon Bay. Both aircraft crash into the sea, killing 15 people.
August 5 – Korean Air Flight 8702, a Boeing 747-400 flying from Japan to South Korea, rolls off the runway at Gimpo Airport in Seoul and crashes into a ditch; all 395 passengers and crew survive the accident.
August 24 – Myanma Airways Flight 635, a Fokker F-27 Friendship, crashes while on approach to Tachilek Airport; all 36 on board die.
August 29 – Cubana de Aviación Flight 389, a Tupolev Tu-154M, overruns the runway whilst taking off from Quito's Mariscal Sucre International Airport, Ecuador, proceeding to crash into a soccer field. 70 of the 91 passengers and crew are killed, along with 10 on the ground.
September 2 – Swissair Flight 111, a McDonnell Douglas MD-11, crashes into the sea near Halifax, Nova Scotia in Canada, because of an onboard fire. All 229 people on board die.
September 25 – PauknAir Flight 4101, a BAe 146, leaves Málaga but never reaches its destination in Melilla. All 38 passengers and four crew on board die.
September 29 – Lionair Flight 602, an Antonov An-24, is shot down by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and crashes off the coast of Jaffna, Sri Lanka, killing all 55 on board.
October 10 – The 1998 Lignes Aériennes Congolaises crash occurs when rebels using a Strela 2 missile shoot down the Boeing 727, which crashes near Kindu, Democratic Republic of Congo, killing all 41 on board.
December 11 – Thai Airways International Flight 261, an Airbus A310, crashes during poor weather near Surat Thani, Thailand. Of the 146 people on board, 101 are killed.
1999
February 24 – China Southwest Airlines Flight 4509, a Tupolev Tu-154, crashes while on approach to Wenzhou Airport, killing all 61 passengers and crew on board.
February 25 – Alitalia Flight 1553, a Dornier 328, loses control and overruns the runway while landing at Genoa Airport in Italy; 3 passengers and one crew member are killed.
March 15 – Korean Air Flight 1533, a McDonnell Douglas MD-83 operating a domestic flight in South Korea, overshoots the runway on landing in Pohang; all 156 people on board survive the incident but the aircraft is destroyed.
April 7 – Turkish Airlines Flight 5904, a Boeing 737-400, crashes in poor weather near Hamdilli, Ceyhan, Turkey; all six crew die.
April 15 – Korean Air Cargo Flight 6316, a McDonnell Douglas MD-11F, crashes shortly after takeoff from Shanghai Hongqiao Airport, China. All three crew members, as well as five on the ground, are killed.
June 1 – American Airlines Flight 1420, a McDonnell Douglas MD-82 with 139 passengers on board, skids off the runway on landing and crashes into a steel walkway at Little Rock, Arkansas during strong winds; 11 are killed, and 86 are injured.
July 23 – All Nippon Airways Flight 61, a Boeing 747, is hijacked by a passenger, Yuji Nishizawa, wielding a knife; after fatally stabbing the captain, he is overpowered by the crew; the first officer lands the plane safely at Haneda, Japan.
July 24 – Air Fiji Flight 121, an Embraer EMB 110 Bandeirante, crashes into a mountain en route to Nadi International Airport, Fiji. All 17 passengers and crew are killed.
August 7 – TACV Flight 5002, a Dornier Do 228, crashes into a mountain whilst returning to São Pedro Airport, Cape Verde in poor weather. All 18 passengers and crew are killed.
August 22 – China Airlines Flight 642, a McDonnell Douglas MD-11, crashes on landing at Hong Kong International Airport during Typhoon Sam; of the 315 people on board, three die.
August 24 – Uni Air Flight 873, a McDonnell Douglas MD-90, suffers an explosion and catches fire after landing in Hualien, Taiwan due to hazardous materials stored in the overhead bins, killing one passenger.
August 31 – LAPA Flight 3142, a Boeing 737, overshoots the runway in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and crashes into a golf course; of the 103 people on board, 63 are killed, as well as two on the ground.
September 5 – Necon Air Flight 128, a BAe 748, collides with a telecommunications tower whilst on approach into Kathmandu Airport, Nepal. All 15 passengers and crew are killed.
September 14 – Britannia Airways Flight 226A, a Boeing 757, veers off the runway at Girona, Spain, while landing in a thunderstorm and comes to rest in a field, broken apart in two places; 43 on board are injured, two seriously, but a passenger initially diagnosed as "lightly injured" dies five days later of unnoticed internal injuries.
September 23 – Qantas Flight 1, a Boeing 747, runs off the runway due to a storm and comes to a complete stop just short of a golf course. All on board, including 30 injured passengers, survive.
October 31 – EgyptAir Flight 990, a Boeing 767 bound for Cairo, Egypt, crashes into the Atlantic Ocean off Nantucket, Massachusetts, killing all 217 passengers and crew; cause is disputed: a deliberate suicide/homicide act by the relief first officer according to the NTSB, vs. a Boeing mechanical flaw according to Egyptian aviation authorities.
November 9 – TAESA Flight 725, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9, crashes near Uruapan, Mexico, killing all 18 on board.
November 12 – Si Fly Flight 3275, an ATR 42-300 operating a UN relief flight strikes a mountain in poor weather whilst on approach into Pristina Airport, Kosovo. All 24 passengers and crew are killed.
December 7 – Asian Spirit Flight 100, a Let L-410 Turbolet, crashes into a mountain while on approach to Cauayan Airport, killing all 15 passengers and crew on board.
December 11 – SATA Air Açores Flight 530M, a BAe ATP crashes into a mountain whilst on approach into Flores Airport in the Azores. All 35 passengers and crew are killed.
December 21 – Cubana de Aviación Flight 1216, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10, overruns the runway at La Aurora International Airport, killing 16 of 314 people on board and another two on the ground.
December 22 – Korean Air Cargo Flight 8509, a Boeing 747-200F, crashes after takeoff near Great Hallingbury, England; killing all four crew.
December 24 – Indian Airlines Flight 814, an Airbus A300, is hijacked en route to Delhi, India; one hostage is killed.
December 25 – Cubana de Aviación Flight 310, a Yakovlev Yak-42D, crashes into the San Luis Hill near Bejuma, Venezuela, while on approach to Arturo Michelena International Airport; all 22 on board die.
2000s
2000
January 10 – Crossair Flight 498, a Saab 340, crashes two minutes after takeoff in Niederhasli, Switzerland, killing all 10 people on board.
January 13 – A Short 360 operated by Avisto ditches into the sea near Marsa Brega, Libya, as a result of ice buildup, killing 22 of the 41 passengers and crew on board.
January 30 – Kenya Airways Flight 431, an Airbus A310, carrying 169 passengers and 10 crew members, crashes into the Atlantic Ocean off Côte d'Ivoire after takeoff from Abidjan; only 10 of the 179 people on board survive.
January 31 – Alaska Airlines Flight 261, an MD-83, crashes into the Pacific Ocean off Point Mugu, California, after experiencing problems with its horizontal stabilizer; all 83 passengers and five crew members are killed.
February 16 – Emery Worldwide Airlines Flight 17, a DC-8-71F crashes into a salvage yard shortly after takeoff from Sacramento Mather Airport, California, killing the three crew members on board.
March 5 – Southwest Airlines Flight 1455, a Boeing 737-300, overshoots the runway in Burbank, California; 44 of the 142 people on board are injured, two seriously.
April 19 – Air Philippines Flight 541, a Boeing 737-200, crashes in a coconut plantation on Samal Island, Davao del Norte while preparing to approach the Davao International Airport, killing all 131 people on board in one of the deadliest accidents involving the 737-200 and the deadliest in Philippines.
May 25 – Philippine Airlines Flight 812, an Airbus A330-301 operating a domestic flight in the Philippines, undergoes an attempted hijacking shortly before landing at Ninoy Aquino International Airport in Manila; all 290 passengers and crew survive the incident, but the hijacker jumps from the aircraft to his death.
June 22 – Wuhan Airlines Flight 343, a Xian Y-7, is struck by lightning and crashes in Hanyang District, Wuhan, killing all 42 on board and another seven on the ground in the worst ever accident involving the Y-7.
July 4 – Malév Hungarian Airlines Flight 262, a Tupolev Tu-154, lands on its belly at Thessaloniki International Airport in Greece; there are no serious injuries or fatalities.
July 8 – Aerocaribe Flight 7831, a British Aerospace Jetstream 32, crashes near Chulum Juárez, Mexico, killing all 19 on board.
July 12 – Hapag-Lloyd Flight 3378, an Airbus A310, crash lands short of the runway in Vienna after running out of fuel in flight; there are no serious injuries or fatalities.
July 17 – Alliance Air Flight 7412, a Boeing 737-200, crashes into government housing in Patna, India, as it approaches the airport, killing 55 of the 58 on board and five people on the ground.
July 25 – Air France Flight 4590, a Concorde crashes during takeoff from Paris, France, after striking debris on the runway, killing all 100 passengers and nine crew aboard as well as four people on the ground; the entire Concorde fleet is grounded for one year.
July 27 – A Royal Nepal Airlines de Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otter crashes into Jarayakhali Hill in western Nepal, while operating a domestic passenger flight from Bajhang Airport to Dhangadhi Airport, killing all 25 people on board.
August 23 – Gulf Air Flight 072, an Airbus A320, crashes into the Persian Gulf off Manama, Bahrain, while attempting to land; all 135 passengers and eight crew members are killed.
October 19 – Lao Aviation Flight 703, a Harbin Y-12 flying a domestic passenger flight in Laos, crashes into a mountain 12 km from Nathong Airport, killing eight of the 17 people on board.
October 31 – Singapore Airlines Flight 006, a Boeing 747-400, strikes construction equipment after using a closed runway for takeoff at Chiang Kai-shek International Airport, Taiwan, killing 83 out of 179 people on board.
November 15 – An ASA Pesada Antonov An-24RV crashes shortly after takeoff from Luanda's Quatro de Fevereiro International Airport, Angola, after suffering a catastrophic engine failure; all 57 passengers and crew are killed.
November 18 – Dirgantara Air Service Flight 3130, a Britten Norman BN-2 Islander operating a domestic flight in Indonesia, crashes into a forest on takeoff from Datah Dawai Airport in East Kalimantan due to overloading and pilot error; all 18 occupants survive the incident but 11 are seriously injured.
December 4 – Sabena Flight 877, an Airbus A330-223, is damaged by Hutu rebels firing machine guns during landing at Bujumbura International Airport, Burundi; all 170 on board escape without fatalities, two people are injured.
December 29 – British Airways Flight 2069, a Boeing 747-436 en route from Gatwick Airport, England, to Nairobi in Kenya, experiences an attempted hijacking by a mentally ill passenger who storms the cockpit at and sends the aircraft into a nosedive; the flight crew rescue the situation and none of the 398 people on board is seriously injured.
2001
January 23 – Yemenia Flight 448, a Boeing 727, is hijacked 15 minutes after takeoff from Sana'a International Airport, Yemen; the crew makes an emergency landing at Djibouti; the hijacker is subdued with no casualties to the 91 passengers or 10 crew members on board.
January 25 – RUTACA Airlines Flight 225, a Douglas DC-3, crashes shortly after takeoff from Tomás de Heres Airport, Venezuela, as a result of an engine failure; all 24 passengers and crew are killed.
January 31 – In the 2001 Japan Airlines mid-air incident, Japan Airlines Flight 907, a Douglas DC-10, and Japan Airlines Flight 958, a Boeing 747, narrowly avoid colliding by a margin of 36 feet (11 meters) near Yaizu, Japan.
February 27 – Loganair Flight 670A, a Short 360 operating a postal flight, crashes shortly after takeoff from Edinburgh Airport, Scotland, as a result of a double engine failure; both crew members are killed.
March 3 – Thai Airways International Flight 114, a Boeing 737-400, is destroyed by an explosion while on the tarmac at Don Mueang Airport, Thailand, prior to boarding; one flight attendant is killed in the explosion.
March 24 – Air Caraïbes Flight 1501, a DHC-6 Twin Otter, crashes into a house whilst on approach into Saint Barthélemy Airport, Guadeloupe; all 19 passengers and crew, as well as one person on the ground, are killed.
March 29 – In the 2001 Avjet Aspen crash, an Avjet charter flight, a Gulfstream III jet with 15 passengers and three crew, crashes on approach into Aspen, Colorado, killing all on board.
May 17 – In the 2001 Faraz Qeshm Airlines Yak-40 crash, a Yakovlev Yak-40 crashes into mountains en route to Gorgan Airport, Iran amid poor weather conditions; all 30 passengers and crew are killed, including Iran's Minister of Roads and Transportation, Rahman Dadman.
July 4 – Vladivostok Air Flight 352, a Tupolev Tu-154, enters a flat spin on approach to Irkutsk Airport in Irkutsk, Russia, crashes down onto its belly and bursts into flames in a wooded area, killing all 145 aboard.
July 14 - Rus Flight 9633, an Ilyushin Il-76TD, crashes on take-off from Chkalovsky Air Base, Moscow Oblast, Russia. The cause is attributed to aircraft overloading and take-off configuration. All 10 people on board are killed.
August 24 – Air Transat Flight 236, an Airbus A330, makes an emergency landing in the Azores after running out of fuel over the Atlantic Ocean; some tires blow out upon landing, causing a fire that is extinguished by emergency personnel on the ground; none of the 293 passengers or 13 crew on board the aircraft is seriously injured.
August 29 – Binter Mediterráneo Flight 8261, a CASA CN-235, suffers port engine failure and crashes onto the N-340 road while attempting to make an emergency landing at Ruiz Picasso International Airport, killing four of 43 on board; the pilot initially survives, but dies several hours later.
September 11 attacks:
September 11 – American Airlines Flight 11, a Boeing 767-200ER with 92 people on board, is hijacked after taking off from Boston, and is flown into the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York City; all on board are killed as well as around 1600 people on the ground and in the building; the collapse of both towers brings the total death toll from the two crashes to at least 2,763, the deadliest disaster involving commercial aircraft.
September 11 – United Airlines Flight 175, a Boeing 767-200 with 65 people on board, is hijacked after taking off from Boston and is flown into the south tower of the World Trade Center in New York City; all on board are killed as well as around 900 people on the ground and in the building; the collapse of both towers brings the total death toll from the two crashes to at least 2,763, the deadliest disaster involving commercial aircraft.
September 11 – American Airlines Flight 77, a Boeing 757-200 with 64 people on board, is hijacked after taking off from Dulles International Airport and is flown into the Pentagon; all on board are killed as well as 125 people in the building and on the ground.
September 11 – United Airlines Flight 93, a Boeing 757-200 with 44 people on board, is hijacked after taking off from Newark, New Jersey; passengers struggle with the hijackers, and the aircraft crashes in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing all on board.
September 15 – TAM Airlines Flight 9755, a Fokker 100 operating a domestic flight in Brazil, suffers an uncontained engine failure near Belo Horizonte; debris shatters three windows causing decompression of the aircraft; one passenger is partially blown out of the cabin and later dies, but the other 87 passengers and crew survive.
October 4 – Siberia Airlines Flight 1812, a Tupolev Tu-154, is shot down by the Ukrainian military over the Black Sea; all 66 passengers and 12 crew members are killed.
October 8 – In the Linate Airport disaster, Scandinavian Airlines System Flight 686, an MD-87, crashes into a Cessna business jet on takeoff from Milan, Italy, then swerves into a baggage handling building and catches fire; all 110 people on board the MD-87 and all four in the Cessna are killed, as well as four people on the ground.
October 10 – Flightline Flight 101, a Fairchild Swearingen Metroliner, crashes into the Mediterranean Sea near the Columbretes Islands after a lightning strike, killing all 10 on board.
November 12 – American Airlines Flight 587, an Airbus A300, crashes into a Queens neighborhood in New York City when the plane's vertical tail fin snaps off just after takeoff due to overuse of the rudder by the first officer during a wake turbulence encounter; all 251 passengers and nine crew members on board are killed as well as five people on the ground.
November 24 – Crossair Flight 3597, an Avro RJ100, crashes near Bassersdorf, Switzerland, while attempting to land in Zürich; 24 of the 33 people on board lose their lives.
December 22 – On board American Airlines Flight 63, a Boeing 767, a passenger, Richard Reid, attempts to detonate explosives hidden in his shoes, but fails and is subdued by two flight attendants and passengers; the aircraft lands safely in Boston.
2002
January 16 – Garuda Indonesia Flight 421, a Boeing 737-300, experiences a dual flameout after entering a thunderstorm, and crashes into the Bengawan Solo River in Indonesia; a flight attendant is killed. All other 59 people on board survive the accident.
January 28 – TAME Flight 120, a Boeing 727, crashes into a volcano on approach to Tulcán, Ecuador, in low-visibility conditions; all 94 on board are killed.
February 12 – Iran Air Tours Flight 956, a Tupolev Tu-154, crashes into the Sefid Kooh mountains during heavy rain, snow, and dense fog, while descending for Khorramabad Airport; all twelve crew members and 107 passengers are killed.
April 15 – Air China Flight 129, a Boeing 767-200ER, crashes into a hill during a landing attempt at Busan, South Korea, in misty conditions; of the 155 passengers and 11 crew, 37 survive.
May 4 – EAS Airlines Flight 4226, a BAC 1-11 500 series, crashes into the Gwammaja neighborhood at Kano, Nigeria, shortly after takeoff; the ensuing crash results in the deaths of 73 on board and at least 30 civilians on the ground.
May 7 – EgyptAir Flight 843, a Boeing 737-566, crashes near Tunis, Tunisia, while landing in rough weather; of the 62 people on board, 14 die.
May 7 – China Northern Airlines Flight 6136, a McDonnell Douglas MD-82, crashes near Dalian, China, after a passenger sets fire to the cabin with gasoline; all 103 passengers and nine crew are killed.
May 25 – China Airlines Flight 611, a Boeing 747-200B, disintegrates above the Taiwan Strait in mid-flight due to maintenance error, killing all 225 people on board.
July 1 – In the Überlingen mid-air collision, Bashkirian Airlines Flight 2937, a Tupolev Tu-154 with 60 passengers and nine crew members on board, collides with DHL Flight 611, a Boeing 757 freighter with two pilots on board near Lake Constance, Germany; all people on both planes die.
July 4 – In the 2002 Prestige Airlines Boeing 707 crash, a Boeing 707, crashes at Bangui Airport in the Central African Republic while attempting an emergency landing, killing 28 of 30 on board.
July 10 – Swiss International Air Lines Flight 850, a Saab 2000, strikes an earth bank after landing at Werneuchen Airfield, Germany, after multiple diversions due to a storm system; all 20 on board survive the accident but the aircraft is written off.
July 26 – The 2002 Africa One Antonov An-26 crashes after aborting takeoff at Kinshasa-N'Djili Airport, Democratic Republic of the Congo; all 21 passengers and crew on board survive but the aircraft is written off.
July 26 – FedEx Express Flight 1478, a Boeing 727, crashes during landing at Tallahassee International Airport, Florida; all three crew members survive but the aircraft is written off.
July 28 – Pulkovo Aviation Enterprise Flight 9560, an Ilyushin Il-86 on a re-positioning flight, crashes after takeoff from Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow, Russia, killing 14 out of 16 crew members on board.
August 22 – In the 2002 Shangri-La Air Twin Otter crash, a DHC-6 Twin Otter crashes in thick cloud whilst on approach into Pokhara Airport, Nepal, killing all 18 passengers and crew.
August 30 – Rico Linhas Aéreas Flight 4823, an Embraer EMB 120 Brasília, crashes on approach to Rio Branco International Airport, Brazil, in a rainstorm; the aircraft breaks up into three pieces and catches fire; 23 of 31 on board die.
September 14 – Total Linhas Aéreas Flight 5561, an ATR 42, crashes near Paranapanema, São Paulo, Brazil, due to a pitch trim control system failure, killing both pilots.
October 9 – Northwest Airlines Flight 85, a Boeing 747, experiences a rudder hardover; the crew make an emergency landing at Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport and all 404 people on board are unharmed.
November 6 – Luxair Flight 9642, a Fokker F50, crashes short of the runway on approach to Luxembourg Findel Airport in foggy weather conditions; of the 19 passengers and three crew on board, only two survive.
November 11 – Laoag International Airlines Flight 585, a Fokker F-27 Friendship, crashes into Manila Bay shortly after takeoff from Ninoy Aquino International Airport; of the 34 people on board, 19 are killed.
December 21 – TransAsia Airways Flight 791, an ATR 72-200 operating a cargo flight from Taipei to Macau, crashes into the sea near Penghu, Taiwan, killing both pilots.
December 23 – Aeromist-Kharkiv Flight 2137, an Antonov An-140, crashes near Ardestan in Iran whilst descending into Isfahan International Airport, claiming the lives of all 44 on board; the accident is found to have been caused by insufficient crew training.
2003
January 8 – Air Midwest Flight 5481, a Beechcraft 1900, crashes on takeoff from Charlotte, North Carolina, United States; all 19 passengers and two pilots are killed.
January 8 – Turkish Airlines Flight 634, an Avro RJ100, crashes during its final approach to land at Diyarbakır Airport, Turkey, in extensive fog. 5 crew and 70 passengers are killed, while 5 passengers survive with serious injuries.
January 9 – TANS Perú Flight 222, a Fokker F28, crashes while on approach to Chachapoyas Airport; all 46 on board die.
March 6 – Air Algérie Flight 6289, a Boeing 737-200, veers off the runway on takeoff in Tamanrasset, Algeria; 96 of the 97 passengers and all six crew members die.
May 8 – In the 2003 Congo air disaster, a Ukrainian Cargo Airways Ilyushin Il-76 suffers a rapid decompression after a cargo door opens mid-flight. The aircraft manages to return to Kinshasa, but not before between 17 and 200 civilians are sucked out to their deaths (casualty numbers vary depending on source).
May 25 – A Boeing 727-200 is stolen from Quatro de Fevereiro Airport in Angola, possibly by two men known to the authorities, and disappears over the Atlantic Ocean; despite an extensive search effort, the aircraft has never been found.
May 26 – UM Airlines Flight 4230, a Yakovlev Yak-42 crashes into the side of a mountain near the town of Maçka, Turkey. All 75 people are killed.
May 29 – A man attempts to hijack Qantas Flight 1737, a Boeing 717, in Melbourne, Australia, intending to crash the plane in Tasmania. He is overpowered by the flight crew and passengers, but injures three people.
June 22 – Air France Flight 5672, a Bombardier CRJ100ER operating a domestic flight from Nantes to Brest in France, crashes on approach to Brest-Guipavas Airport due to pilot error, killing one of the 24 people on board.
July 8 – Sudan Airways Flight 139, a Boeing 737-200, crashes shortly after taking off from Port Sudan, Sudan. 116 of the 117 people on board the plane die; a two-year-old boy is the sole survivor.
August 24 – Tropical Airways Flight 1301, a Let L-410 Turbolet operating a domestic flight in Haiti, crashes into a field shortly after taking off from Cap-Haïtien International Airport, due to a cargo door failure; all 21 people on board are killed.
August 26 – Colgan Air Flight 9446, a Beech 1900D crashes into the sea just after taking off from Barnstable Municipal Airport, Massachusetts. Both pilots are killed.
November 22 – A DHL Airbus A300 is struck by a missile near Baghdad, Iraq and loses hydraulic system function, but manages to land safely with only engine controls without any fatalities. This is the first non-fatal landing of an airliner without control surfaces.
December 18 – FedEx Express Flight 647, a McDonnell Douglas MD-10-10, veers off the runway upon landing after a landing gear collapse and catches fire at Memphis International Airport; two crew members and five passengers escape with only minor injuries.
December 25 – UTA Flight 141, a Boeing 727, runs off the end of the runway upon takeoff at Cotonou, Benin, and crashes onto the beach on the Bight of Benin, killing 138 of the 160 occupants and three people on the ground.
2004
January 3 – Flash Airlines Flight 604, a Boeing 737-300, crashes into the Red Sea, killing all 135 passengers and 13 crew members in the worst ever accident involving the 737-300.
January 13 – Uzbekistan Airways Flight 1154, a Yakovlev Yak-40 collides with a radar station on approach into Tashkent International Airport, Uzbekistan in poor weather. All 37 passengers and crew are killed.
February 10 – Kish Air Flight 7170, a Fokker 50, crashes at Sharjah International Airport, killing 43 people. Three survive with serious injuries.
May 14 – Rico Linhas Aéreas Flight 4815, an Embraer 120ER, crashes while on approach to Eduardo Gomes International Airport, killing all 33 passengers and crew on board; the cause is never determined.
June 8 – Gabon Express Flight 221, a Hawker Siddeley HS 748 crashes into the sea after attempting an emergency landing at Libreville International Airport, Gabon after an engine failure. 19 of the 30 passengers and crew are killed.
August 13 – Air Tahoma Flight 185, a Convair 580, crashes near Covington, Kentucky, while descending to land, killing the first officer.
2004 Russian aircraft bombings:
August 24 – Siberia Airlines Flight 1047, a Tupolev Tu-154, explodes in mid-air while flying over Rostov Oblast, Russia, killing all 38 passengers and eight crew members on board.
August 24 – Volga-AviaExpress Flight 1303, a Tupolev Tu-134, explodes in mid-air while flying over Tula Oblast, Russia, killing all 34 passengers and nine crew members on board.
October 14 – MK Airlines Flight 1602, a Boeing 747-200F, crashes on takeoff from Halifax Stanfield International Airport, killing all seven on board.
October 14 – Pinnacle Airlines Flight 3701, a CRJ-200 on a repositioning flight with no passengers, crashes near Jefferson City, Missouri, killing both pilots.
October 19 – Corporate Airlines Flight 5966, a British Aerospace Jetstream, crashes near Kirksville, Missouri, United States; 13 of the 15 people on board die.
November 21 – China Eastern Airlines Flight 5210, a Bombardier CRJ200, stalls and crashes near Baotou, China, shortly after takeoff because of frost contamination; all 53 on board and two people on the ground are killed.
November 30 – Lion Air Flight 583, a McDonnell Douglas MD-82, crash-lands in Solo City, Indonesia, killing 25 of the 154 people on board.
2005
February 3 – Kam Air Flight 904, a Boeing 737-200, crashes due to a snowstorm in the Pamir Mountains of Afghanistan. All 96 passengers and eight crew members die.
February 20 – British Airways Flight 268, a Boeing 747-400, taking off from Los Angeles to London suffers fire in engine 2. The plane flies on three engines to Manchester, where it performs an emergency landing. None of the 369 people on board are harmed.
March 6 – Air Transat Flight 961, an Airbus A310, suffers rudder failure after takeoff from Varadero, Cuba; the aircraft returns to Cuba with no casualties.
March 16 – Regional Airlines Flight 9288, an Antonov An-24RV, stalls and crashes into a small hill near Varandey Airport, Russia, due to a possible instrument failure, killing 28 of 52 on board.
March 25 – West Caribbean Airways Flight 9955, a Let L-410 Turbolet operating a domestic flight in Colombia, South America, stalls due to engine failure and crashes into a forest shortly after departing from El Embrujo Airport on Providencia Island, killing nine of the 14 people on board.
May 3 – Airwork Flight 23, a Fairchild SA227-AC Metro III operating a cargo flight between the north and south islands of New Zealand, breaks up in mid-air and crashes in Stratford, North Island, due to pilot error, killing the two crew members on board.
May 7 – In the Lockhart River air disaster, an Aero-Tropics Air Services Fairchild Swearingen Metroliner operating on behalf of Transair strikes terrain on approach into Lockhart River Airport, Australia. All 15 passengers and crew are killed.
June 9 – In the 2005 Logan Airport runway incursion, US Airways Flight 1170, a Boeing 737, and Aer Lingus Flight 132, an Airbus A330, almost collide on a runway at Logan International Airport in Boston, Massachusetts. None of the 381 people on either plane is harmed.
July 16 – An Equatorial Express Antonov An-24 crashes into a mountainside near Baney in Equatorial Guinea, killing all 60 people on board.
August 2 – Air France Flight 358, an Airbus A340-300, skids off a runway at Toronto Pearson International Airport, Ontario, while landing and catches fire; all 309 on board escape without fatalities, 43 people are injured, the aircraft is completely destroyed by the fire.
August 6 – Tuninter Flight 1153, an ATR 72, ditches into the Mediterranean Sea near Palermo, Sicily, with 35 passengers and four crew members on board; 14 passengers and two crew members die.
August 10 – Copterline Flight 103, a Sikorsky S-76 helicopter crashes off Tallinn, Estonia, killing all 14 on board.
August 14 – Helios Airways Flight 522, a Boeing 737-300, crashes near Kalamos, Greece, with 115 passengers and six crew members on board; there are no survivors.
August 16 – West Caribbean Airways Flight 708, a McDonnell Douglas MD-80, crashes in western Venezuela. All on board, 152 passengers and eight crew members, die.
August 23 – TANS Perú Flight 204, a Boeing 737-200, crashes on approach to Captain Rolden International Airport, Pucallpa, Peru. Thirty-five of the 91 passengers on board, as well as five of the seven crew members, die.
September 5 – Mandala Airlines Flight 091, a Boeing 737-200, crashes in Medan, Indonesia, killing 103 of the 111 passengers and all five crew members on board the aircraft and an additional 47 people on the ground.
September 5 – A Kavatshi Airlines Antonov An-26B crashes at Isiro Airport in Matari, Democratic Republic of the Congo, killing all 11 people on board.
September 9 – An Air Kasaï Antonov An-26B crashes in the Republic of the Congo north of Brazzaville, killing all 13 people on board.
September 21 – JetBlue Flight 292, an Airbus A320, makes an emergency landing at Los Angeles International Airport because of landing gear steering failure. There are no injuries to the 139 passengers and six crew members.
October 22 – Bellview Airlines Flight 210, a Boeing 737-200, crashes shortly after takeoff from Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Lagos, Nigeria, killing all 117 people on board.
December 8 – Southwest Airlines Flight 1248, a Boeing 737-700, slides off the runway during landing at Chicago Midway International Airport in Chicago in heavy snow. None of the people on board are injured, but the plane hits two automobiles on the ground, killing a passenger.
December 10 – Sosoliso Airlines Flight 1145, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9 with 110 people on board, crashes during landing in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. Of the 110 people on board; only two survive.
December 19 – Chalk's Ocean Airways Flight 101, a Grumman Mallard, crashes off the coast of Miami Beach, Florida, killing all 20 on board.
December 23 – Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 217, an Antonov An-140, crashes shortly after takeoff from Baku Airport due to instrument failure, killing all 23 on board.
2006
March 31 – TEAM Linhas Aéreas Flight 6865, a Let L-410 Turbolet crashes whilst conducting a VFR approach to Macaé Airport, Brazil. All 19 passengers and crew are killed.
April 10 – 2006 Kenya plane crash, a Kenya Air Force Harbin Y-12 crashed as it approached Marsabit air strip killing 14 passengers, including a number of politicians.
May 3 – Armavia Flight 967, an Airbus A320, crashes into the Black Sea near the Russian city of Sochi, killing all 113 on board.
June 21 – In the 2006 Yeti Airlines Twin Otter Crash, a DHC-6 Twin Otter crashes during a go-around at Jumla Airport, Nepal. All nine passengers and crew are killed.
July 9 – S7 Airlines Flight 778, an Airbus A310, crashes into a concrete barricade at Irkutsk International Airport, Russia, upon landing and catches fire. Of the 203 people on board, 125 are killed.
July 10 – Pakistan International Airlines Flight 688, a Fokker F27, crashes into a wheat field near Multan, Pakistan, ten minutes after taking off, killing all 41 passengers and four crew members on board.
July 28 – FedEx Flight 630, a McDonnell Douglas MD-10, crashes on landing at Memphis International Airport, Tennessee, after the left main landing gear collapses shortly after touchdown, all three crew members are seriously injured.
August 13 – Air Algérie Flight 2208, a Lockheed L‑100 Hercules in Northern Italy crashes as a result of an autopilot malfunction. All three on board are killed.
August 22 – Pulkovo Aviation Enterprise Flight 612, a Tupolev Tu-154, crashes near Donetsk, Ukraine, killing all 170 people on board.
August 27 – Comair Flight 5191, a Bombardier Canadair CRJ-100, crashes on takeoff at Blue Grass Airport, Kentucky, due to runway confusion; of the 50 passengers and crew on board, the only survivor is the first officer.
September 1 – Iran Air Tours Flight 945, a Tupolev Tu-154, crashes while attempting to land in Mashad, Iran, killing 28 of 154 on board.
September 29 – Gol Transportes Aéreos Flight 1907, a Boeing 737-800, collides with an Embraer Legacy business jet and crashes in Mato Grosso, Brazil; the Embraer Legacy, with seven on board, lands safely with no reported injuries while all 154 people on board the Boeing 737 die; this crash marks the first loss of a Boeing 737-800.
October 3 – Turkish Airlines Flight 1476, a Boeing 737, is hijacked in Greek airspace. The plane landed at Brindisi Airport, Italy, where the hijacker was arrested. All 113 people on board survive.
October 10 – Atlantic Airways Flight 670, a BAe 146, slides off the runway at Stord Airport, Norway, due to hydroplaning and brake failure, killing four of the 16 people on board.
October 28 – Continental Airlines Flight 1883, a Boeing 757, accidentally lands on a taxiway at Newark Liberty International Airport, New Jersey, none of the 154 people on board are injured.
October 29 – ADC Airlines Flight 053, a Boeing 737-200, crashes near Abuja, Nigeria, after encountering wind shear, killing 96 of the 105 people on board.
2007
January 1 – Adam Air Flight 574, a Boeing 737-400 with 102 people on board, crashes into the ocean off the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia, killing all on board in the worst ever crash involving the 737-400.
January 9 – An AerianTur-M Antonov An-26 crashes near Balad, Iraq, killing 34 of the 35 people on board. The official cause of the crash is poor weather conditions, but other sources claim that the plane was shot down by a missile.
January 24 – Air West Flight 612, a Boeing 737, is hijacked shortly after takeoff. The plane landed safely at N'Djamena International Airport, where the hijacker surrendered. All 103 people on board survive.
February 21 – Adam Air Flight 172, a Boeing 737-300, suffers structural damage while landing near Surabaya, Indonesia; none of the 149 people on board are seriously injured.
March 7 – Garuda Indonesia Flight 200, a Boeing 737-400, overshoots the runway and crashes while landing at Yogyakarta, Indonesia, killing 21 of the 140 people on board.
March 17 – UTair Flight 471, a Tupolev Tu-134, suffers severe structural damage while landing in Samara, Russia, killing six of the 63 people on board.
March 23 – The 2007 Mogadishu TransAVIAexport Airlines Il-76 crash of an Ilyushin Il-76 near Mogadishu, Somalia, after being hit by a surface-to-air missile, kills all 11 on board; one passenger initially survives, but dies hours later.
May 5 – Kenya Airways Flight 507, a Boeing 737-800 with 114 people on board, crashes near Douala, Cameroon, killing all on board.
June 3 – In the 2007 Paramount Airlines Mil Mi-8 crash, a Mil Mi-8 helicopter crashes in Lungi, Sierra Leone, killing all 22 people on board.
June 21 – The 2007 Free Airlines L-410 crash occurs shortly after takeoff from Kamina Town, Democratic Republic of Congo because of severe overloading. Of the 21 passengers and crew on board, one is killed and four are injured.
June 25 – PMTair Flight 241, an Antonov An-24, crashes in southwestern Cambodia, killing all 22 on board.
July 17 – TAM Airlines Flight 3054, an Airbus A320, crashes at Congonhas-São Paulo Airport, Brazil, killing all 187 people on board and 12 on the ground.
August 9 – Air Moorea Flight 1121, a de Havilland Canada DHC-6, crashes into the lagoon of the island of Moorea in French Polynesia just 11 seconds after takeoff, killing all 20 on board.
August 20 – China Airlines Flight 120, a Boeing 737-800, bursts into flames after landing at Naha, Japan; none of the 165 passengers on board are seriously injured.
August 26 – A Great Lakes Business Company Antonov An-32B crashes short of the runway after experiencing engine failure and attempting to return to Kongolo Airport in Kongolo, Democratic Republic of the Congo, killing 14 of the 15 people on board.
Scandinavian Airlines System Dash 8 landing gear incidents:
September 9 – Scandinavian Airlines System Flight 1209, a de Havilland Canada Dash 8, experiences a landing gear failure in Aalborg, Denmark; none of the 73 people on board is seriously injured, but three days later, after a similar incident, the airline grounds the aircraft type.
September 12 – Scandinavian Airlines System Flight 2748, a de Havilland Canada Dash 8, experiences a landing gear failure in Vilnius, Lithuania; none of the 52 people on board is injured, but because of a similar incident three days earlier, all their Dash 8s are grounded.
October 27 – Scandinavian Airlines System Flight 2867, a de Havilland Canada Dash 8, experiences a landing gear failure in Copenhagen, Denmark; none of the 44 people on board are injured, but because of similar incidents in September, the airline "permanently" removes its Dash 8s from service; the cause is eventually ascribed to maintenance error.
September 16 – One-Two-GO Airlines Flight 269, a McDonnell Douglas MD-82 carrying 130 people, crashes and bursts into flames after attempting to land in Phuket, Thailand, during poor weather conditions, killing 90 people.
October 4 – The 2007 Africa One Antonov An-26 crashes into a residential area in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo, shortly after taking off, killing at least 50 people, most of whom are on the ground.
November 30 – Atlasjet Flight 4203, a McDonnell Douglas MD-83, crashes into a mountain near Isparta, Turkey, killing all 57 on board.
December 30 – TAROM Flight 3107, a Boeing 737-300, is written-off after hitting a maintenance car on the runway and veering off the runway during takeoff run at Henri Coandă International Airport, Otopeni, Romania; none of the 123 passengers and crew on board are injured.
2008
January 4 – The 2008 Los Roques archipelago Transaven Let L-410 crash kills all 14 on board.
January 17 – British Airways Flight 38, a Boeing 777-200ER, lands short of the runway at London Heathrow Airport due to a fuel system problem; all 152 on board survive. This is the first loss of a Boeing 777-200ER, and the first loss of any 777 due to an operational incident.
February 8 – Eagle Airways Flight 2279, a BAe Jetstream 32, is hijacked 10 minutes after taking off from Blenheim, New Zealand by a passenger who attacks both pilots. The hijacker is eventually restrained by the co-pilot and the flight lands safely at Christchurch. All nine on board survive the incident.
February 14 – Belavia Flight 1834, a Bombardier CRJ100, hits its left wing on the runway while taking off from Yerevan, Armenia. All 21 on board escape the aircraft before it erupts into flames.
February 21 – Santa Bárbara Airlines Flight 518, an ATR 42-300, crashes shortly after taking off from Mérida, Venezuela, killing all 46 on board.
April 3 – In the 2008 Blue Wing Airlines An-28 crash, an Antonov An-28 operated by Blue Wing Airlines crashes near Benzdorp in Suriname. All 19 on board are killed.
April 11 – Kata Air Transport Flight 007, a Sudanese airline Antonov An-32 crashes when returning shortly after taking off from Chişinău International Airport, Moldova, for Turkey. All eight on board are killed.
April 15 – Hewa Bora Airways Flight 122, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9, crashes into a market near Goma, Democratic Republic of the Congo, killing 40 people, including three passengers.
May 25 – Kalitta Air Flight 207, a Boeing 747-200, overruns the runway at Brussels, Belgium. No one is injured but the aircraft is written off.
May 26 – Moskovia Airlines Flight 9675, a Moskovia Airlines Antonov An-12 crashes shortly after takeoff from Chelyabinsk Airport, Russia due to an onboard fire. All nine crew members are killed.
May 30 – TACA Flight 390, an Airbus A320, overruns the runway at Toncontín International Airport in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, killing five (including two on ground).
June 10 – Sudan Airways Flight 109, an Airbus A310, crashes at Khartoum International Airport and breaks apart, catching fire. 30 deaths are confirmed, six passengers are listed as missing.
July 7 – Centurion Air Cargo Flight 164, a Boeing 747-200BSF operated by Kalitta Air, crashes shortly after taking off from Bogota's El Dorado International Airport, Colombia due to an engine failure. All eight crew survive, but two on the ground are killed.
July 25 – Qantas Flight 30, a Boeing 747-400 en route from Hong Kong to Melbourne, performs an emergency descent and lands in Manila after a hull penetration results in rapid decompression; all aboard survive.
August 20 – Spanair Flight 5022, a McDonnell Douglas MD-82, crashes on takeoff at Barajas Airport in Madrid, Spain. Of the 172 people on board, 154 are killed.
August 24 – In the 2008 Aéreo Ruta Maya crash, a Cessna 208 Caravan, crashes 45 minutes after takeoff from La Aurora International Airport, Guatemala en route to El Estor, Guatemala. 11 of the 14 passengers and crew are killed.
August 24 – Iran Aseman Airlines Flight 6895, a Boeing 737, crashes just after takeoff from Manas Airport in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. 68 of the 90 passengers and crew on board are killed.
August 27 – Sriwijaya Air Flight 062, a Boeing 737-200 overruns the runway at Sultan Thaha Airport, Indonesia during a landing attempt, resulting in 26 injuries (14 of them serious). One person on the ground later dies from their injuries.
August 30 – In the 2008 Conviasa Boeing 737 crash, a Boeing 737-200 crashes into Illiniza, Ecuador whilst en route to Cotopaxi International Airport, Ecuador. All three on board are killed.
September 14 – Aeroflot Flight 821, a Boeing 737, crashes on approach to Perm Airport from Moscow due to pilot error, killing all 88 people on board in the worst ever accident involving the Boeing 737-500.
October 7 – Qantas Flight 72, an Airbus A330-300, makes an emergency landing in Exmouth, Australia, following a rapid descent that leaves over 70 people injured, 14 of them seriously.
October 8 – Yeti Airlines Flight 103, a de Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otter, crashes from Mt Everest, Nepal, killing 18 of 19 people on board.
November 10 – Ryanair Flight 4102, a Boeing 737, suffers up to 90 bird strikes on its final approach to Rome Ciampino Airport, damaging landing gear and both engines. The aircraft lands safely; 10 of the 172 on board are treated for minor injuries.
November 27 – XL Airways Germany Flight 888T, an Airbus A320, crashes into the Mediterranean Sea on approach into Perpignan-Rivesaltes Airport, France. All seven on board are killed.
December 20 – Continental Airlines Flight 1404, a Boeing 737-500 with 115 people on board, veers off the runway upon takeoff from Denver International Airport, comes to rest in a ravine near the runway and catches fire; 38 people are injured.
2009
January 15 – US Airways Flight 1549, an Airbus A320 bound for Charlotte, North Carolina, ditches in the Hudson River shortly after taking off from LaGuardia Airport, New York City, due to total engine failure caused by multiple bird strikes; all 155 people on board survive the accident.
January 27 – Empire Airlines Flight 8284, an ATR 42-300 operating a FedEx cargo flight in Texas, United States, crashes on approach to Lubbock Preston Smith International Airport due to pilot error; the two pilots on board survive the accident but the aircraft is destroyed.
February 7 – A Manaus Aerotáxi Embraer EMB 110 crashes in the Amazon basin near Santo António, Brazil, due to overloading, killing 24 of the 28 people on board.
February 12 – Colgan Air Flight 3407, a Bombardier Dash 8 Q400 flying from Newark, New Jersey, to Buffalo, New York, United States, crashes into a house in Clarence Center, New York state, killing all 49 on board the aircraft and one person on the ground.
February 25 – Turkish Airlines Flight 1951, a Boeing 737-800 flying from Istanbul, Turkey, to Amsterdam, Netherlands, stalls and crashes into a field during final approach to Schiphol Airport, killing nine of the 135 people on board.
March 12 – Cougar Helicopters Flight 91, a Sikorsky S-92 transporting workers to oil platforms off Canada's Newfoundland coast, ditches in the Atlantic Ocean east-southeast of Newfoundland due to a main gearbox failure; 17 of the 18 on board are killed.
March 20 – Emirates Flight 407, an Airbus A340-500 en route from Auckland, New Zealand, to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, suffers a tailstrike when attempting to take off from its intermediate stopover at Melbourne's Tullamarine Airport; the aircraft returns to the airport with no casualties.
March 23 – FedEx Express Flight 80, a McDonnell Douglas MD-11 operating a cargo flight from Guangzhou, China, to Narita, Japan, crashes while attempting to land at Tokyo Narita International Airport, killing the two crew members on board the flight.
April 1 – Bond Offshore Helicopters Flight 85N, a Eurocopter AS332 Super Puma returning from the Miller oilfield off the Aberdeenshire coast, Scotland, crashes northeast of Peterhead due to a catastrophic failure of the main rotor gearbox; all 16 on board are killed.
April 9 – An Aviastar BAe 146-300 crashes into Pikei Hill during a domestic cargo flight from Jayapura to Wamena, Indonesia, killing all 6 crew members on board.
April 17 – Mimika Air Flight 514, a Pilatus PC-6 operating a domestic flight in Western New Guinea, Indonesia, crashes into Mount Gergaji due to pilot error, killing all 11 people on board.
April 19 – CanJet Flight 918, a Boeing 737 operating a flight from Montego Bay, Jamaica, bound for Halifax, Canada, is seized on the ground before takeoff by a lone gunman; all 174 passengers are quickly released, but six crew members are taken hostage for several hours before being freed unharmed.
June 1 – Air France Flight 447, an Airbus A330 flying from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to Paris, France, crashes in the Atlantic Ocean, killing all 228 people on board; bodies and aircraft debris are recovered within days but the main fuselage and the black boxes are not found until 2011; this remains the deadliest accident involving the A330.
June 30 – Yemenia Flight 626, an Airbus A310 flying from Sanaa, Yemen, to Moroni, Comoros, crashes into the Indian Ocean on approach to Prince Said Ibrahim International Airport due to pilot error; all but one of the 153 occupants are killed, the sole survivor being a 12-year-old girl who is found clinging to the wreckage.
July 13 – Southwest Airlines Flight 2294, a Boeing 737 en route from Nashville, Tennessee, to Baltimore, Maryland, United States, makes an emergency landing in Charleston, West Virginia, after a large hole opens in the skin of the fuselage at causing a loss of cabin pressure; the aircraft lands safely and no-one is injured.
July 15 – Caspian Airlines Flight 7908, a Tupolev Tu-154 flying from Tehran, Iran, to Yerevan, Armenia, crashes 16 minutes after takeoff due to uncontained engine failure, killing all 168 people on board.
July 24 – Aria Air Flight 1525, an Ilyushin Il-62 operating a domestic flight in Iran, overshoots the runway while attempting to land at Mashhad International Airport, killing 16 of the 173 on board.
August 2 – Merpati Nusantara Airlines Flight 9760, a de Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otter operating a domestic flight in the Indonesian province of Papua, crashes into a mountain on approach to Oksibil Airport in good weather, due to pilot error; all 15 people on board are killed.
August 4 – Bangkok Airways Flight 266, an ATR 72-200 operating a domestic flight in Thailand, crashes while attempting to land at Samui Airport on Ko Samui island, resulting in at least one confirmed death and 37 injuries amongst the 72 people on board.
August 11 – Airlines PNG Flight 4684, a de Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otter operating a domestic flight in southeastern Papua New Guinea, crashes into mountainous terrain while on approach to Kokoda Airport due to poor visibility; all 13 people on board die in the accident.
August 26 – An Aéro-Frêt Antonov An-12 crashes whilst en route to Maya-Maya Airport, Brazzaville, Republic of the Congo, after breaking up in mid-air as a result of an inflight fire; all six occupants of the aircraft are killed.
September 9 – Aeroméxico Flight 576, a Boeing 737 flying from Cancún to Mexico City, Mexico, is hijacked by a Bolivian man carrying a fake explosive device; after landing in Mexico City, the aircraft is stormed by officials and all 107 passengers and crew are released unharmed.
September 24 – Airlink Flight 8911, a BAe Jetstream 41 operating a domestic flight in South Africa, crashes into a school shortly after taking off from Durban International Airport; the pilot dies two weeks later from injuries sustained in the crash.
October 21 – Azza Transport Flight 2241, a Boeing 707 bound for Khartoum, Sudan, crashes on takeoff from Sharjah International Airport, United Arab Emirates, due to pilot error; all six on board the aircraft are killed.
November 12 – RwandAir Flight 205, a Bombardier CRJ-100 bound for Entebbe, Uganda, crashes into a terminal building at Kigali International Airport in Rwanda shortly after returning for an emergency landing due to difficulties with the flight controls; one of the 10 passengers is killed.
November 18 – An IAI 1124 Westwind ditches in the Pacific Ocean west of Norfolk Island after failing to land at the island's airport, en route from Samoa to Melbourne, Australia; all six people on board survive the incident.
November 28 – Avient Aviation Flight 324, a McDonnell Douglas MD-11F bound for Manas International Airport, Kyrgyzstan, overshoots the runway during takeoff at Shanghai Pudong International Airport, China, killing three of the seven crew members on board.
December 22 – American Airlines Flight 331, a Boeing 737-800 operating a flight from the United States to Kingston, Jamaica, overshoots the runway on landing at Norman Manley International Airport due to pilot error; there are multiple injuries amongst the 154 people on board.
December 25 – Northwest Airlines Flight 253, an Airbus A330-300 flying from Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, Netherlands, to Detroit Metropolitan Airport, Michigan, United States, is attacked by a man using a small explosive device, causing a small onboard fire; the perpetrator is subdued by passengers and crew, and the fire quickly extinguished.
2010s
2010
January 21 – Cargolux Flight 7933, a Boeing 747-4R7F operating a multi-leg cargo flight from Hong Kong to Luxembourg, collides with a ground vehicle on landing at Luxembourg Findel Airport due to ATC error; the driver of the ground vehicle is injured in the accident.
January 24 – Taban Air Flight 6437, a Tupolev Tu-154M operating a domestic flight in Iran, crashes while making an emergency landing at Mashhad International Airport; all 157 passengers and 13 crew survive the accident with 47 receiving minor injuries.
January 25 – Ethiopian Airlines Flight 409, a Boeing 737-800 bound for the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, crashes into the Mediterranean Sea shortly after takeoff from Beirut Rafic Hariri International Airport; all 90 people on board die.
March 22 – Aviastar-TU Flight 1906, a Tupolev Tu-204 flying from Hurghada, Egypt, to Moscow, Russia, crashes on landing at Domodedovo International Airport in foggy weather; all eight crew on board survive, but the aircraft is written off; this is the first loss of the Tu-204.
April 10 – Polish Air Force Flight 101, a Tupolev Tu-154 aircraft crashed near the Russian city of Smolensk, killing all 96 people on board. Among the victims were the president of Poland, Lech Kaczyński, and his wife, Maria, the former president of Poland in exile, Ryszard Kaczorowski, the chief of the Polish General Staff and other senior Polish military officers, the president of the National Bank of Poland, Polish Government officials, 18 members of the Polish Parliament and more.
April 13 – AeroUnion Flight 302, an Airbus A300B4F operating a cargo flight from Mexico City, crashes on a missed approach to Monterrey International Airport, Mexico; all five crew members are killed, as well as one person on the ground.
April 13 – Merpati Nusantara Airlines Flight 836, a Boeing 737 operating a domestic flight in Indonesia, overshoots the runway at Rendani Airport; all 103 people on board survive, but three are seriously injured.
April 13 – Cathay Pacific Flight 780, an Airbus A330 flying from Juanda International Airport, Indonesia, to Hong Kong, lands safely after the engine thrust controls malfunction due to contaminated fuel; 57 of the 309 passengers are injured in the evacuation; the two pilots receive the IFALPA Polaris Award for their heroism and airmanship.
May 12 – Afriqiyah Airways Flight 771, an Airbus A330 that has flown from Johannesburg, South Africa, crashes on landing at Tripoli International Airport, Libya, killing all but one of the 104 people on board; the sole survivor is a child from the Netherlands.
May 17 – Pamir Airways Flight 112, an Antonov An-24 operating a domestic flight in Afghanistan, crashes shortly after taking off from Kunduz Airport; all 39 passengers and five crew lose their lives.
May 22 –Air India Express Flight 812, a Boeing 737-800 flying from Dubai, United Arab Emirates, to Mangalore, India, crashes after overshooting the runway at Mangalore International Airport; 158 of the 166 people on board are killed.
June 19 – A CASA C-212 Aviocar crashes near Djoum, Cameroon, while operating a charter flight to Yangadou, Republic of the Congo; all 11 occupants are killed, including the entire board of Sundance Resources, an Australian mining conglomerate.
June 19 – An Air Service Berlin Douglas C-47 Skytrain crashes due to engine failure shortly after taking off from Berlin Schönefeld Airport, Germany, for a sightseeing flight over Berlin; 7 of the 28 on board are injured in the accident.
July 27 – Lufthansa Cargo Flight 8460, a McDonnell Douglas MD-11 operating a multi-leg flight from Frankfurt, Germany, to Hong Kong in southern China, crashes on landing at King Khalid International Airport in Saudi Arabia; both occupants of the aircraft survive the incident.
July 28 – Airblue Flight 202, an Airbus A321 operating a domestic flight in Pakistan, crashes in the Margalla Hills northeast of Islamabad, resulting in the deaths of 146 passengers and six crew members; it is the first fatal accident involving an Airbus A321 and Pakistan's worst air disaster.
August 3 – Katekavia Flight 9357, an Antonov An-24 operating a domestic flight in Russia, crashes on approach to Igarka Airport in Krasnoyarsk Krai, killing 12 of the 15 people on board.
August 16 – AIRES Flight 8250, a Boeing 737 operating a domestic flight in Colombia, splits apart after a hard landing at Gustavo Rojas Pinilla Airport in San Andrés; of the 125 passengers and six crew members on board, two passengers are killed and another 113 injured.
August 24 – Agni Air Flight 101, a Dornier Do 228 operating a domestic flight in Nepal, crashes near Shikharpur in heavy rain, shortly after departing from Kathmandu, killing all 14 people on board.
August 24 – Henan Airlines Flight 8387, an Embraer E-190 operating a domestic flight in China, overshoots the runway and crashes at Yichun, Heilongjiang, killing 44 of the 91 passengers and five crew members; this is the first hull loss of an Embraer E-Jet.
August 25 – A Filair Let L-410 Turbolet crashes on approach to Bandundu Airport, Democratic Republic of the Congo, killing all but one of the 21 on board.
September 3 – UPS Airlines Flight 6, a Boeing 747-400 flying from Dubai, United Arab Emirates, to Cologne, Germany, crashes at a military base shortly after takeoff, killing both crew members.
September 7 – Alrosa Flight 514, a Tupolev Tu-154M operating a domestic flight in Russia, makes a successful emergency landing at Izhma Airport after suffering in-flight electrical failure; the aircraft overshoots the runway after landing but all 81 passengers and crew survive the incident.
September 13 – Conviasa Flight 2350, an ATR-42 operating a domestic flight in Venezuela, crashes shortly before landing at Guayana International Airport, killing 17 of the 51 people on board.
November 4 – Aero Caribbean Flight 883, an ATR-72 bound from Haiti to Cuba, crashes in the central Cuban province of Sancti Spíritus, killing all 68 on board in one of the worst-ever accidents involving the ATR 72.
November 4 – Qantas Flight 32, an Airbus A380 flying from London's Heathrow Airport to Sydney, Australia, suffers an uncontained engine failure after taking off from Singapore's Changi Airport; upon turning back, the flight lands safely and all 469 people on board are unharmed.
November 5 – JS Air Flight 201, a Beechcraft 1900 operating a domestic charter flight in Pakistan, crashes immediately after takeoff from Jinnah International Airport, Karachi, due to an engine malfunction; all 21 people on board are killed.
November 11 – A Tarco Airlines Antonov An-24 crashes on landing at Zalingei Airport, Sudan, killing six of the 44 on board.
November 28 – Sun Way Flight 4412, an Ilyushin Il-76TD flying from Karachi, Pakistan, to Khartoum, Sudan, suffers an engine fire and crashes near Jinnah International Airport, killing all eight crew on board and another four on the ground.
December 4 – Dagestan Airlines Flight 372, a Tupolev Tu-154 operating a domestic flight in Russia, skids off the runway during an emergency landing at Domodedovo International Airport, killing two of the 160 passengers on board and injuring 87.
December 15 – A Tara Air DHC-6 Twin Otter crashes in the Bilandu Forest near Shreechaur, Okhaldhunga District, Nepal, killing all 22 passengers and crew on board.
2011
January 1 – Kolavia Flight 348, a Tupolev Tu-154, erupts in flames while taxiing at Surgut International Airport, Russia, killing three out of 124 people and injuring 43.
January 9 – Iran Air Flight 277, a Boeing 727, crashes at Urmia Airport, Iran, during a go-around, killing 77 of 105 people on board.
February 10 – Manx2 Flight 7100, a Fairchild Metroliner III, crashes at Cork Airport, Republic of Ireland, and catches fire, killing six of 12 people on board.
February 14 – Central American Airways Flight 731, a Let L-410 Turbolet, crashes while on approach to Toncontín International Airport, killing all 14 on board.
March 11 – Sendai Airport in Japan is hit by an tsunami, during the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. The airport and a variety of aircraft are damaged.
March 21 – The 2011 Trans Air Congo Antonov An-12 crash: an Antonov An-12 crashes on approach to Pointe Noire Airport, Republic of the Congo, killing all four crew on board and another 19 on the ground.
April 1 – Southwest Airlines Flight 812, a Boeing 737, ruptures a hole in the fuselage at 36,000 feet, causing the cabin to lose pressure shortly after takeoff from Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. The plane lands safely at Yuma International Airport, Arizona, with 116 people aboard, two passengers with minor injuries.
April 4 – Georgian Airways Flight 834, a Bombardier CRJ-100 operated by the United Nations Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUSCO) crashes on landing at N'djili Airport, Democratic Republic of the Congo; all but one of the 33 on board are killed.
May 7 – Merpati Nusantara Airlines Flight 8968, a Xian MA60, crashes off the coast of West Papua, Indonesia, while on approach to Kaimana Airport in heavy rain, killing all 25 passengers and crew on board.
May 18 – Sol Líneas Aéreas Flight 5428, a Saab 340, crashes off Prahuaniyeu, Río Negro, Argentina, while en route to General Enrique Mosconi International Airport, Comodoro Rivadavia due to ice formation on the wings, propellers and under the fuselage, killing all 22 passengers and crew on board.
June 20 – RusAir Flight 9605, a Tupolev Tu-134, crashes onto the Russian highway A133 near the village of Besovets, Petrozavodsk, Russia, while on approach to Petrozavodsk Airport, killing 47 of 52 on board.
July 4 – In the Missinippi Airways Cessna 208 crash, a Cessna 208 Caravan overruns the runway and crashes into a ravine at Pukatawagan Airport, Manitoba after a failed aborted takeoff. One passenger is killed.
July 6 – The 2011 Silk Way Airlines Ilyushin Il-76 crash: An Ilyushin Il-76 crashes into a mountain short of Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, killing all nine people on board the cargo flight from Baku, operated on behalf of NATO.
July 8 – Hewa Bora Airways Flight 952, a Boeing 727, crashes on landing at Bangoka International Airport, Democratic Republic of the Congo, killing 74 of 118 on board.
July 11 – Angara Airlines Flight 9007, an Antonov An-24, ditches in the Ob River, Russia, after an engine fire, killing seven of 37 on board.
July 13 – Noar Linhas Aéreas Flight 4896, a Let L-410 Turbolet, crashes shortly after takeoff from Recife Airport, Brazil, killing all 16 on board.
July 28 – Asiana Airlines Flight 991, a Boeing 747 freighter, crashes into the Pacific Ocean, west of Jeju Island, South Korea, killing the two crew.
July 29 – EgyptAir Flight 667, a Boeing 777, suffers a cockpit fire at Cairo International Airport, injuring seven of 317 on board.
July 30 – Caribbean Airlines Flight 523, a Boeing 737, overruns the runway on landing at Cheddi Jagan International Airport, Georgetown, Guyana, and breaks in two; seven are injured but all 163 passengers and crew survive.
August 9 – Avis-Amur Flight 9209, an Antonov An-12, en route from Magadan Airport to Keperveyem Airport, crashes at Omsukchan, Russia, due to an engine fire, killing all 11 on board.
August 20 – First Air Flight 6560, a Boeing 737, crashes while on approach to Resolute Bay Airport, Nunavut, Canada, killing 12 of 15 on board.
September 6 – Aerocon Flight 238, a Fairchild Metroliner III, crashes near Trinidad, Bolivia, killing eight of nine people on board.
September 7 – 2011 Lokomotiv Yaroslavl plane crash, a Yak-Service Yakovlev Yak-42, crashes just after takeoff from Tunoshna Airport, Yaroslavl, Russia, due to pilot error, killing 44 of the 45 people on board. Many were players and staff of the Lokomotiv Yaroslavl ice hockey team of the KHL, as the flight was destined for Minsk, Belarus for a league game.
September 25 – Buddha Air Flight 103, a Beechcraft 1900D, crashes in dense fog while attempting to land at Kathmandu Tribhuwan International Airport, killing all 16 passengers and three crew members.
September 29 – Nusantara Buana Air Flight 823, a CASA C-212 Aviocar crashes in Indonesia during a domestic flight from Medan to Kutacane. All 18 passengers and crew are killed.
October 13 – Airlines PNG Flight 1600, a de Havilland Canada DHC-8, crashes near the mouth of the Gogol River, Papua New Guinea, killing 28 of 32 on board.
October 14 – In the Moremi Air Cessna 208 crash, a Cessna 208 Grand Caravan crashes shortly after taking off from Xakanaka Airstrip, Botswana. The pilot and seven passengers are killed, with four passengers surviving the crash.
October 18 – Iran Air Flight 742, a Boeing 727, en route from Moscow, Russia, to Tehran, Iran, lands without nose gear at Mehrabad International Airport; all 94 passengers and 14 crew members survive without injuries.
November 1 – LOT Polish Airlines Flight 16, a Boeing 767, performs a belly landing at Warsaw Chopin Airport after its landing gear failed to deploy; all 220 passengers and 11 crew members survive without injuries.
2012
April 2 – UTair Flight 120, an ATR-72, crashes shortly after takeoff from Roshchino International Airport, Tyumen, Russia, killing 31 of the 43 passengers and crew on board.
April 20 – Bhoja Air Flight 213, a Boeing 737, crashes near Chaklala airbase, Rawalpindi, Pakistan, in bad weather, killing all 127 people on board.
May 9 – In the Mount Salak Sukhoi Superjet 100 crash, a Sukhoi Superjet 100 crashes into Mount Salak, Indonesia, on an exhibition flight, killing all 45 passengers and crew on board.
May 14 – In the 2012 Agni Air Dornier 228 crash, a Dornier Do-228 crashes near Jomsom Airport, Nepal, during a go-around; of the 21 on board, six survive.
June 2 – Allied Air Flight 111, a Boeing 727, overruns the runway on landing at Kotoka International Airport, Accra, Ghana, and crashes through a fence; the aircraft then hits a bus on a nearby road; all four crew survive but 12 are killed on the ground.
June 3 – Dana Air Flight 992, a McDonnell Douglas MD-83 carrying 147 passengers and six crew members crashes in a suburb of Lagos, Nigeria, on approach to Murtala Muhammed International Airport, killing all on board and 10 more people on the ground.
June 29 – Six people attempt to hijack Tianjin Airlines Flight 7554, an Embraer E-190, 10 minutes after takeoff; passengers and crew are able to restrain the hijackers until the aircraft makes an emergency landing; of the 101 on board, two hijackers die and 11 passengers and crew are injured; this is China's first serious hijacking attempt since 1990.
August 19 – An Alfa Airlines Antonov An-24-100 crashes in the Nuba mountain range near Talodi, Sudan, on approach to Talodi Airstrip, killing all 32 people on board.
September 12 – Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky Air Flight 251, an Antonov An-28, crashes in Kamchatka Peninsula, Russia, killing 10 of the 14 passengers and crew on board.
September 28 – Sita Air Flight 601, a Dornier Do 228, crashes on the bank of the Manohara River, Kathmandu, Nepal, after a bird strike, killing all 19 on board.
November 30 – In the 2012 Aéro-Service Ilyushin Il-76T crash, an Ilyushin Il-76T freighter crashes short of runway threshold on approach to Maya–Maya Airport, Brazzaville, Republic of Congo, in bad weather, killing all six aboard, 26 on the ground, and injuring 14.
December 17 – The 2012 Amazon Sky An-26 crash kills a crew of four, when the aircraft hits the ground while crossing the Andes.
December 25 – Air Bagan Flight 011, a Fokker 100, crash-lands on a road near Heho Airport, Myanmar, killing one on board, one on the ground and injuring 11.
December 29 – Red Wings Airlines Flight 9268, a Tupolev Tu-204 on a re-positioning flight, overruns the runway on landing at Moscow's Vnukovo International Airport, then breaks apart and catches fire; five of the eight crew on board are killed in the first fatal accident involving the Tu-204.
2013
January 29 – SCAT Airlines Flight 760, a Bombardier CRJ200, crashes in thick fog on approach to Almaty International Airport, Kazakhstan, killing all 16 passengers and five crew on board.
February 13 – South Airlines Flight 8971, an Antonov An-24, crash-lands in dense fog at Donetsk International Airport, Ukraine, killing five of 52 people on board.
March 4 – A CAA Fokker 50 crashes in poor weather conditions on approach to Goma International Airport, Democratic Republic of the Congo, killing all five crew and one of the four passengers.
March 8 – ACE Air Cargo Flight 51, a Beechcraft 1900C-1 crashes into a mountain whilst on approach into Dillingham Municipal Airport, Alaska. Both crew members were killed.
April 13 – Lion Air Flight 904, a Boeing 737 carrying 101 passengers and seven crew members, crashes into the ocean while attempting to land at Ngurah Rai International Airport on the Indonesian island of Bali, injuring 46 people.
April 29 – National Airlines Flight 102, a Boeing 747 freighter, stalls and crashes shortly after takeoff from Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan, due to load shifting, killing all seven crew members on board.
May 16 – Nepal Airlines Flight 555, a de Havilland Canada DHC-6, overruns the runway on landing at Jomsom Airport, Nepal, injuring seven people.
June 10 – Merpati Nusantara Airlines Flight 6517, a Xian MA60, crashes on landing at El Tari Airport, Indonesia, injuring five people.
July 6 – Asiana Airlines Flight 214, a Boeing 777, crashes short of the runway on landing at San Francisco International Airport, killing three of 307 on board and injuring 182. The crash was the first fatal accident involving the Boeing 777.
July 7 – A de Havilland Canada DHC-3 operated by Rediske Air crashes on takeoff from Soldotna Airport, Alaska, killing all 10 people on board.
July 22 – Southwest Airlines Flight 345, a Boeing 737, suffers a landing gear collapse while landing at LaGuardia Airport, injuring 9.
August 14 – UPS Airlines Flight 1354, an Airbus A300 freighter, crashes short of the runway on approach to Birmingham–Shuttlesworth International Airport, killing the two pilots on board.
October 3 – Associated Aviation Flight 361, an Embraer 120, crashes shortly after takeoff from Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Lagos, killing 16 people on board.
October 16 – Lao Airlines Flight 301, an ATR-72, crashes shortly before landing at Pakse International Airport under adverse weather conditions, killing all 44 passengers and five crew on board.
November 17 – Tatarstan Airlines Flight 363, a Boeing 737, crashes at Kazan International Airport, Russia, during a go-around, killing all 50 people on board.
November 29 – LAM Mozambique Airlines Flight 470, an Embraer 190, en route from Maputo International Airport, Mozambique, to Quatro de Fevereiro Airport, Angola is deliberately crashed by the captain into Bwabwata National Park in northern Namibia, killing all 33 people on board.
2014
February 16 – Nepal Airlines Flight 183, a de Havilland Canada DHC-6, crashes near Khidim about 74 kilometres southwest of Pokhara, Nepal, killing all 18 people on board.
February 17 – Ethiopian Airlines Flight 702, a Boeing 767, is hijacked by the co-pilot while en route from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to Rome, Italy, but lands safely at Geneva, Switzerland. All 202 passengers and crew aboard are unharmed.
March 8 – Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, a Boeing 777 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 227 passengers and 12 crew on board, disappears from radar over the Gulf of Thailand. A wing part was later found in Réunion.
July 17 – Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, a Boeing 777 en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, is shot down over eastern Ukraine, killing all 283 passengers and 15 crew on board in the deadliest civilian airliner shootdown incident.
July 23 – TransAsia Airways Flight 222, an ATR-72 en route from Kaohsiung to Penghu, Taiwan, crashes during go-around, killing 48 of the 58 people on board.
July 24 – Air Algérie Flight 5017, a chartered Swiftair McDonnell Douglas MD-83 operating for Air Algérie en route from Burkina Faso to Algiers, crashes in the northern Mali desert after disappearing from radar approximately 50 minutes after takeoff, killing all 110 passengers and six crew members on board.
August 10 – Sepahan Airlines Flight 5915, a HESA IrAn-140 (an Antonov An-140 built under license) crashes shortly after takeoff from Mehrabad International Airport, Iran, killing 39 of the 48 people on board.
December 14 – Loganair Flight 6780, a Saab 2000, nosedives after a lightning strike. The crew makes a safe emergency landing back at Aberdeen. All 33 passengers and crew are unharmed.
December 28 – Indonesia AirAsia Flight 8501, an Airbus A320 en route from Surabaya, Indonesia to Singapore, crashes into waters off Borneo, killing all 155 passengers and seven crew on board.
2015
February 4 – TransAsia Airways Flight 235, an ATR-72, stalls on takeoff and crashes into the Keelung River in Taiwan after striking the Huandong Viaduct and a passing taxi. 43 of the 58 passengers and crew on board are killed.
March 5 – Delta Air Lines Flight 1086, a McDonnell Douglas MD-88 skids off the runway at LaGuardia Airport and crashes into a fence, coming inches from Flushing Bay. Several people are injured, but there are no fatalities.
March 24 – Germanwings Flight 9525, an Airbus A320, crashes in southern France en route from Barcelona, Spain to Düsseldorf, Germany as a result of a deliberate act by the first officer. All 144 passengers and six crew on board the aircraft die in the crash.
March 29 – Air Canada Flight 624, an Airbus A320, crashes short of the runway and hits power lines while landing at Stanfield International Airport, en route from Toronto. All 138 passengers and crew on board survive, with 23 treated for minor injuries.
April 13 – Carson Air Flight 66, a Swearingen Metro II crashes into a mountain en route to Prince George Airport, British Columbia. Both crew members are killed.
April 14 – Asiana Airlines Flight 162, an Airbus A320, crashes short of the runway and hits a localizer while landing at Hiroshima Airport, en route from Seoul. All 82 passengers and crew on board survive, but 27 are injured.
April 25 – Turkish Airlines Flight 1878, an Airbus A320, is severely damaged in a landing accident at Atatürk International Airport. All 102 passengers and crew on board are evacuated without injury.
August 16 – Trigana Air Service Flight 267, an ATR-42, crashes while en route from Sentani Airport, to Oskibil Airport in the eastern Indonesian province of Papua. All 49 passengers and five crew members are killed in the crash in the worst aviation accident ever involving the ATR-42.
September 5 – In the 2015 Senegal mid-air collision, a Boeing 737-800, collides in a mid-air with a BAe 125 air ambulance operated by Senegalair over eastern Senegal. The BAe 125 crashes in the Atlantic killing all seven on board, while the 737 lands safely without any injuries to those on board.
September 8 – British Airways Flight 2276, a Boeing 777-200, aborts takeoff at McCarran International Airport, Las Vegas, NV following an engine fire. All 189 passengers and crew are evacuated safely.
October 2 – Aviastar Flight 7503, a DHC-6 Twin Otter, crashes on a mountain 11 minutes after take-off over Palopo, Indonesia, killing all 10 passengers and crew on board.
October 29 – Dynamic Airways Flight 405, a Boeing 767-200, erupts in flames while preparing for take-off at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport. All 101 passengers and crew on board survive, but 21 people are injured.
October 31 – Metrojet Flight 9268, an Airbus A321, explodes in mid-air over the Sinai Peninsula due to a terrorist bomb, 23 minutes after takeoff from Sharm-El-Sheikh, killing all 224 passengers and crew on board.
November 4 – In the 2015 Juba An-12 crash, an Allied Services, Ltd. Antonov An-12 crashes near the White Nile shortly after takeoff from Juba International Airport, killing 37 of 39 on board.
November 22 – Avia Traffic Company Flight 768, a Boeing 737-300, touches down hard at Osh Airport injuring 8, and causing all landing gears to be ripped off. The aircraft skids off the runway and the left engine is ripped off.
December 24 – In the 2015 Services Air Airbus A310-300 crash, an Airbus A310-300F overshoots the runway at Mbuji-Mayi Airport, Democratic Republic of the Congo due to a brake failure. The five crew survive but eight on the ground are killed.
2016
January 8 – West Air Sweden Flight 294, a Bombardier CRJ200 cargo freighter, crashes while in cruise near Akkajaure in Sweden; both crew members on board are killed.
February 2 – Daallo Airlines Flight 159, an Airbus A321, suffers an explosion shortly after taking off from Aden Adde International Airport, Somalia; two people are injured and one, the suspected suicide bomber, is killed after falling from the aircraft.
February 24 – Tara Air Flight 193, a Viking Air-built DHC-6 Twin Otter, flies into a storm and crashes into a mountainside at Dana, Myagdi district, Nepal, killing all 23 on board.
February 26 – In the 2016 Air Kasthamandap crash, an Air Kasthamandap PAC 750XL crash-lands in Nepal, killing the two crew members and injuring nine passengers.
March 9 – True Aviation Flight 21, an Antonov An-26 crashes into the sea whilst trying to return to Cox's Bazar Airport, Bangladesh after an engine failure, killing three of the four crew on board.
March 19 – Flydubai Flight 981, a Boeing 737-800, crashes while landing at Rostov-on-Don, Russia, in poor weather, killing all 62 people on board.
March 29 – EgyptAir Flight 181, an Airbus A320, is hijacked and forcibly diverted to Larnaca International Airport, Cyprus; all passengers and crew are released unharmed.
April 4 – Batik Air Flight 7703, a Boeing 737-800, collides with an ATR 42 on the runway at Halim Perdanakusma Airport in Jakarta; both aircraft are substantially damaged, but all 60 occupants of the two aircraft survive.
April 13 – A Sunbird Aviation Britten-Norman Islander crashes on approach to Kiunga Airport in the Western Province of Papua New Guinea, while operating a non-scheduled domestic charter flight, killing all 12 on board.
April 29 – In the 2016 Turøy helicopter crash, a Eurocopter EC225L Super Puma helicopter crashes near Turøy, an island off the coast of Norway; all 13 passengers and crew are killed.
May 18 – In the 2016 Silk Way Airlines Antonov An-12 crash, a Silk Way Airlines Antonov An-12 cargo plane crashes after an engine failure, killing seven and injuring two.
May 19 – EgyptAir Flight 804, an Airbus A320, crashes into the eastern Mediterranean Sea after a series of sharp descending turns; all 56 passengers and 10 crew are killed.
May 27 – Korean Air Flight 2708, a Boeing 777-300, suffers an engine failure and resulting fire while taxiing for takeoff at Haneda Airport; all 319 passengers and crew are evacuated although 12 are injured.
August 3 – Emirates Flight 521, a Boeing 777-300, lands wheels-up at Dubai International Airport and bursts into flames shortly after landing; all 300 passengers and crew escape from the aircraft unharmed, but one firefighter is killed by an explosion.
August 5 – ASL Airlines Hungary Flight 7332, a Boeing 737, overruns a runway on landing at Orio al Serio International Airport; both pilots survive.
August 27 – Southwest Airlines Flight 3472, a Boeing 737, suffers an uncontained engine failure over the Gulf of Mexico, causing substantial damage to the aircraft and loss of cabin pressure; the aircraft lands safely at Pensacola International Airport, with no injuries among the 104 on board.
October 28 – American Airlines Flight 383, a Boeing 767-300ER, suffers an uncontained engine failure and fire at Chicago O'Hare Airport; 20 of the 170 people on board suffer injuries.
October 28 – FedEx Express Flight 910, a McDonnell Douglas MD-10-10F, skids off the runway after the landing gear collapses on landing at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport; the left wing is severely damaged in a post-crash fire but both pilots survive.
October 31 – In the 2016 Alfa Indonesia DHC-4 crash, a DHC-4T Turbo Caribou operating a cargo flight to Ilaga Airport, Indonesia, crashes in the Ilaga Pass; all four crew members are killed.
November 28 – LaMia Flight 2933, an Avro RJ85, crashes at Cerro Gordo en route to Medellín, Colombia, whilst carrying the Brazilian football team Chapecoense; all but six of the 77 passengers and crew die.
December 7 – Pakistan International Airlines Flight 661, an ATR-42-500, crashes at Havelian while en route from Chitral to Islamabad; all 42 passengers and five crew members are killed in the accident.
December 20 – Aerosucre Flight 157, a Boeing 727-200, crashes while failing to take off from Puerto Carreño en route to Bogota, Colombia; there is only one survivor among the six crew members on board.
December 23 – Afriqiyah Airways Flight 209, an Airbus A320-214, is hijacked by two Gaddafi supporters and forced to land at Malta Airport; after several hours, all passengers and crew are released and the hijackers surrender.
2017
January 16 – Turkish Airlines Flight 6491, a Boeing 747-400F, crashes into a residential area upon attempting landing in thick fog in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. The four crew members and 35 people on the ground are killed.
March 8 – Ameristar Charters Flight 9363, an MD-83 chartered to fly the Michigan Wolverines men's basketball team to the 2017 Big Ten Men's Basketball Tournament in Washington, D.C., overruns the runway on takeoff at Willow Run Airport, Ypsilanti, Michigan after suffering a jammed elevator. The aircraft is damaged but all 116 on board survive.
March 20 – In the 2017 South Supreme Airlines Antonov An-26 crash, an Antonov An-26 crashes on landing at Wau Airport, South Sudan. All 40 passengers and five crew members survive.
March 28 – Peruvian Airlines Flight 112, a Boeing 737-300, is burnt out following the collapse of the landing gear at Francisco Carle Airport, Jauja. All 150 people on board survive.
April 29 – In the 2017 Aerogaviota Antonov An-26 crash, an Antonov An-26 crashes into a mountain whilst on a military charter flight from Gustavo Rizo Airport, Cuba. All eight on board are killed.
May 27 – Summit Air Flight 409, a Let L-410 operating a cargo flight crashes short of Lukla Airport, Nepal in poor visibility. Two of the three crew members are killed, one of whom dies later in hospital.
July 7 – Air Canada Flight 759, an Airbus A320 on approach to runway 28R at San Francisco International Airport, nearly lands on a taxiway occupied by four loaded passenger jets. No one is killed or injured.
September 30 – Air France Flight 66, an Airbus A380, suffers an uncontained engine failure and makes an emergency landing at Goose Bay Airport, Newfoundland & Labrador, Canada. No one is killed or injured.
October 14 – In the 2017 Valan International Antonov An-26 crash, an Antonov An-26 crashes into the sea just short of Abidjan's Félix Houphouët Boigny International Airport, Ivory Coast. Four of the ten occupants are killed.
November 15 – Khabarovsk Airlines Flight 463, a Let L-410 Turbolet, crashes short of the runway at Nelkan Airport in Russia, killing four of the five passengers and both crew members.
December 13 – West Wind Aviation Flight 282, an ATR 42-300, crashes shortly after takeoff from Fond-du-Lac Airport, Saskatchewan, Canada. Of the 25 passengers and crew on board, all initially survive, but one passenger dies of his injuries in the hospital 12 days later.
December 31 – Nature Air Flight 9916, a Cessna 208 Caravan crashes shortly after takeoff from Punta Islita Airport, Costa Rica. All 12 passengers and crew on board are killed.
2018
January 13 – Pegasus Airlines Flight 8622, a Boeing 737-800, skids off the end of the runway at Trabzon Airport, Turkey, and comes to rest on a cliff. All 168 passengers and crew survive without injury. The aircraft is written off.
February 11 – Saratov Airlines Flight 703, an Antonov An-148, crashes shortly after taking off from Domodedovo International Airport, Russia. All 71 passengers and crew are killed.
February 13 – United Airlines Flight 1175 , a Boeing 777-200 operating a domestic flight between San Francisco International Airport and Honolulu International Airport, suffers an uncontained engine failure over the Pacific Ocean. An emergency landing is successfully performed at Honolulu and all 373 passengers and crew survive unharmed.
February 18 – Iran Aseman Airlines Flight 3704, an ATR 72–200 on a domestic flight in Iran, crashes into the Zagros Mountains killing all 60 passengers and six crew members on board.
March 11 – A Bombardier Challenger 604 private jet crashes in the Zagros Mountains, Iran, killing all 11 people on board.
March 12 – US-Bangla Airlines Flight 211, a Bombardier Q400 on an international flight from Dhaka, crashes on landing at Tribhuvan International Airport, Nepal; 51 of the 71 people on board are killed.
April 17 – Southwest Airlines Flight 1380, a Boeing 737-700 en route over Bernville, Pennsylvania, suffers an engine failure at cruise altitude. Some debris enters the fuselage, causing substantial damage to the aircraft and loss of cabin pressure. The crew safely diverts to Philadelphia International Airport. One passenger is killed; another seven are injured.
April 18 – Delta Air Lines Flight 30, an Airbus A330-300, experiences an engine fire after takeoff from Atlanta, Georgia. The aircraft immediately returns to Atlanta and makes an emergency landing. All 288 people on board survive without any injuries. The aircraft receives substantial damage.
May 14 – Sichuan Airlines Flight 8633, an Airbus A319-100, makes an emergency landing at China's Chengdu Shuangliu Airport after part of the cockpit windshield fails; all 128 passengers and crew survive the incident.
May 18 – Cubana de Aviación Flight 972, a Boeing 737-200/Adv, crashes shortly after takeoff from José Martí International Airport, Cuba. 112 of the 113 passengers and crew are killed; the sole survivor is seriously injured.
June 28 – A Beechcraft King Air C90 crashes at Jagruti Nagar, India, killing all four people on the aircraft and one person on the ground.
July 28 – Air Vanuatu Flight 241, an ATR 72-500, skids off the runway after a flight from Tanna to Port Villa, Vanuatu. 13 of the 43 people on board suffer minor injuries.
July 31 – Aeroméxico Connect Flight 2431, an Embraer ERJ-190AR, crashes into wooded terrain shortly after takeoff from Durango International Airport, Mexico. The aircraft is destroyed, but all 99 passengers and four crew survive.
August 4 – A Ju-Air Junkers Ju 52 crashes near Piz Segnas, Switzerland, killing all 20 on board.
August 10 – 2018 Horizon Air Q400 incident, a Horizon Air Bombardier Dash 8 Q400 with no passengers on board, is stolen from Seattle–Tacoma International Airport by a non-pilot airline employee and later crashes on Ketron Island, killing him.
August 16 – Xiamen Airlines Flight 8667, a Boeing 737-800, overshoots the runway on landing at Ninoy Aquino International Airport, Philippines, in heavy monsoon rains. All 157 passengers and eight crew are unharmed.
September 1 – UTair Flight 579, a Boeing 737-800, overshoots the runway and catches fire while landing in Sochi International Airport, injuring 18 people. One airport employee dies of a heart attack.
September 9 – A Let L-410 Turbolet crashes into a lake in Yirol, South Sudan, killing 20 of the 23 passengers and crew on board.
September 28 – Air Niugini Flight 73, a Boeing 737-800, lands short of the runway and comes to rest in a lagoon at Chuuk International Airport in the Federated States of Micronesia, one passenger dies whilst 34 passengers and 12 crew escape without serious injuries.
October 11 – Air India Express Flight 611, a Boeing 737-800 operating an international flight from Tiruchirappalli, India to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, suffers a tail strike and crashes into Airport equipment and a perimeter wall on takeoff. The aircraft continues to fly for hours before diverting to Mumbai. All 136 people on board survive.
October 29 – Lion Air Flight 610, a Boeing 737 MAX 8 bound for Pangkal Pinang, Indonesia, crashes into the Java Sea shortly after takeoff from Soekarno–Hatta International Airport in Jakarta due to a design flaw in the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), an automatic flight stabilization program. All 181 passengers and eight crew are killed in the worst accident involving Boeing 737.
November 7 – Sky Lease Cargo Flight 4854, a Boeing 747-400F, overruns the runway while attempting to land at Halifax Stanfield International Airport, Canada. Three crew members are injured.
November 9 – Fly Jamaica Airways Flight 256, a Boeing 757-200, crash lands after returning to Cheddi Jagan International Airport, Guyana, after suffering a hydraulic failure 45 minutes after takeoff en route to Toronto. All on board initially survive, but one passenger dies a week later due to injuries sustained in the crash.
November 11 – Air Astana Flight 1388, an Embraer ERJ-190, suffers severe control issues shortly after takeoff. It lands safely 90 minutes later at Beja Airbase, Portugal. The aircraft is written off.
November 29 – VietJet Air Flight 356, an Airbus A321-271N, touches down hard at Buon Ma Thuot Airport, causing substantial damage to its nosegear and breaking off both wheels. Among 207 passengers and crew on board, six are hospitalized.
2019
January 14 – A Saha Airlines Boeing 707 crashes after overshooting the runway at Fath Air Base in Iran, when the crew attempts to land at the wrong airport; 15 of the 16 people on board lose their lives.
February 23 – Atlas Air Flight 3591, a Boeing 767 en route from Miami, Florida, to Houston, Texas, United States, crashes into Trinity Bay on approach to Houston's George Bush Intercontinental Airport, killing both crew members and the single passenger on board.
February 24 – Biman Bangladesh Airlines Flight 147, a Boeing 737-800 flying from Bangladesh to Dubai, undergoes an attempted hijacking and makes an emergency landing at Shah Amanat International Airport in Chittagong; all passengers are safely evacuated and the perpetrator is shot dead by Bangladeshi special forces.
March 4 – United Express Flight 4933, an Embraer EMB145XR attempting to land at Presque Isle International Airport in Maine, touches down off the runway after the pilots continue the approach despite being unable to see the runway surface due to snow; three aircraft occupants suffer minor injuries.
March 9 – A Laser Aéreo Douglas DC-3 crashes while attempting to land at La Vanguardia Airport, Villavicencio, Colombia, killing all 11 passengers and three crew members on board the aircraft.
March 10 – Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, a Boeing 737 MAX 8 bound for Nairobi, Kenya, crashes near Bishoftu, Ethiopia, shortly after taking off from Addis Ababa's Bole International Airport, due to an MCAS malfunction similar to the one that downed Lion Air Flight 610 in 2018; all 157 people on board die.
May 3 – Miami Air International Flight 293, a Boeing 737-81Q operating a flight from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to Florida, United States, overshoots the runway on landing at Naval Air Station Jacksonville during a thunderstorm; all 143 passengers and crew survived the accident.
May 5 – Aeroflot Flight 1492, a Sukhoi Superjet 100 operating a domestic flight in Russia, suffers an inflight electrical failure shortly after departing from Sheremetyevo International Airport, Moscow, and returns to the airport where it catches fire after landing; 41 of the 78 people on board died.
May 8 – Biman Bangladesh Airlines Flight 060, a Bombardier Q400 inbound from Shahjalal International Airport in Bangladesh, overshoots the runway in bad weather at Yangon International Airport, Myanmar; all 33 people on board survived but 18 were injured.
May 13 – A Taquan Air de Havilland Canada DHC-3 Turbine Otter floatplane collides in mid-air with a Mountain Air Service de Havilland Canada DHC-2 Beaver floatplane, while both are operating sightseeing flights over George Inlet, Alaska, United States; the DHC-2 pilot and all four passengers are killed; the DHC-3 makes an emergency water landing with the loss of one of its 10 passengers.
June 27 – Angara Airlines Flight 200, an Antonov An-24 operating a domestic flight in Russia, suffers an in-flight engine failure and lands at Nizhneangarsk Airport where it overshoots the runway and crashes into a building; all 43 passengers survive but two of the four crew members are killed.
August 15 – Ural Airlines Flight 178, an Airbus A321 bound for Simferopol, Crimea, suffers a double bird strike immediately after takeoff from Zhukovsky International Airport in Moscow, Russia, and performs an emergency belly landing in a cornfield; 74 of the 233 people on board are injured.
October 4 – Ukraine Air Alliance Flight 4050, an Antonov An-12 en route from Spain to Turkey, crashes on approach to its intermediate stopover at Lviv International Airport in Ukraine, due to fuel exhaustion; five of the eight occupants are killed and the three survivors are seriously injured.
October 17 – PenAir Flight 3296, a Saab 2000 flying from Anchorage, Alaska, United States, to Amaknak Island off the Alaskan coast, overshoots the runway after landing in erratic wind conditions, critically injuring two of the 42 people on board, one of whom dies the next day.
November 24 – A Busy Bee Dornier Do 228 crashes into a densely populated area shortly after takeoff from Goma International Airport in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, killing all 19 occupants of the aircraft and 10 people on the ground.
December 27 – Bek Air Flight 2100, a Fokker 100 operating a domestic flight in Kazakhstan, crashes on takeoff from Almaty International Airport, killing 13 of the 98 people on board and injuring 66.
2020s
2020
January 8 – Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752, a Boeing 737-800 bound for Kyiv, Ukraine, crashes shortly after taking off from Imam Khomeini International Airport in Tehran, Iran, after being hit by two surface-to-air missiles launched by Iranian military forces; all 176 crew and passengers on board are killed.
January 14 – Delta Air Lines Flight 89, a Boeing 777-200, dumps fuel over several schools and neighborhoods while returning to Los Angeles International Airport due to a compressor stall, injuring 56.
January 27 – Caspian Airlines Flight 6936, a McDonnell Douglas MD-83, flying a domestic flight from Tehran, Iran, overruns the runway on landing at Mahshahr Airport, Iran; the aircraft comes to a stop on a road, injuring 2 of the 144 passengers and crew on board.
February 5 – Pegasus Airlines Flight 2193, a Boeing 737-800 operating a domestic flight between İzmir and Istanbul in Turkey, skids off the runway and drops down an embankment on landing at Sabiha Gökçen International Airport; three of the 183 people on board are killed.
May 4 – An East African Express Airways Embraer EMB 120 Brasilia crashes after being fired upon by Ethiopian ground forces during a charter cargo flight carrying pandemic relief supplies to Berdale, Somalia; all four passengers and two crew are killed.
May 22 – Pakistan International Airlines Flight 8303, an Airbus A320, crashes in a residential neighborhood in Karachi minutes before a second attempted landing at Jinnah International Airport. 2 passengers survive among the 99 on board. One victim on the ground later dies from her injuries.
August 7 – Air India Express Flight 1344, a Boeing 737-800 operating an international repatriation flight, crashes on landing at Kozhikode International Airport, skidding off the runway and plunging into a gorge; 21 occupants are killed, including both pilots.
August 22 – A South West Aviation Antonov An-26 crashes in a residential area after taking off for a charter cargo flight from Juba International Airport, South Sudan, killing 8 of 9 people on board.
November 13 – Volga-Dnepr Airlines Flight 4066, an An-124 operating a cargo flight from Novosibirsk, Russia to Vienna, Austria, suffers an uncontained engine failure on takeoff and overruns the runway upon returning to Novosibirsk. All 14 crew members survive the incident.
2021
January 9 – Sriwijaya Air Flight 182, a Boeing 737-500 operating a domestic flight to Pontianak, Indonesia, crashes shortly after takeoff from Jakarta's Soekarno–Hatta International Airport. All 62 passengers and crew are killed in the crash.
February 20 – Longtail Aviation Flight 5504, a Boeing 747-400BCF operating a cargo flight from Maastricht, Netherlands to New York, United States suffers engine failure shortly after takeoff. The aircraft safely diverts to Liege, Belgium but two people on the ground are injured by falling debris.
February 20 – United Airlines Flight 328, a Boeing 777-200 flying from Denver to Honolulu suffers an uncontained engine failure after takeoff, scattering debris over residential neighborhoods below. The plane uses the remaining engine to safely land in Denver, none of the 241 passengers and crew are injured, nor was anyone injured on the ground from debris.
March 2 – A South Sudan Supreme Airlines Let L-410 Turbolet crashes whilst operating a domestic flight from Pieri to Yuai, South Sudan. All 8 passengers and 2 crew are killed.
May 12 – Key Lime Air Flight 970, a Swearingen Metroliner on a chartered cargo flight from Salida, Colorado, collides with a Cirrus SR22 on approach to Centennial Airport, Colorado. The Cirrus crash-lands in a nearby field whilst the Swearingen Metroliner makes an emergency landing. All three occupants on both aircraft survive.
May 23 – Ryanair Flight 4978, a Boeing 737-800 operating an international scheduled passenger flight from Athens, Greece to Vilnius, Lithuania, is forced to land at Minsk, Belarus after a false bomb alarm, escorted by a Belarusian Air Force MiG-29. Activist Roman Protasevich, who was on board the aircraft, is arrested.
July 2 – Transair Flight 810, a Boeing 737-200C operating a domestic cargo flight in Hawaii between Honolulu, Oahu and the neighbouring island of Maui, suffers engine failure shortly after takeoff and ditches in the sea. Both pilots survive with injuries.
July 6 – Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky Air Enterprise Flight 251, an Antonov An-26 operating a domestic flight from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky to Palana, Russia, crashes on approach. All 22 passengers and 6 crew are killed.
July 16 – Siberian Light Aviation Flight 42, an Antonov An-28 operating a domestic flight from Kedrovy to Tomsk, Russia, makes a crash landing after takeoff, injuring 11 of the 18 passengers and crew on board.
September 12 – Siberian Light Aviation Flight 51, a Let L-410 operating a domestic flight from Irkutsk to Kazachinskoye, Russia, crashes in a forest short of the runway while attempting to land in heavy fog. 4 of the 16 occupants are killed and the 12 survivors are seriously injured.
October 19 – In the 2021 Houston MD-87 crash, a McDonnell Douglas MD-87 aircraft crashes on take-off from Houston Executive Airport, Houston, Texas. All 21 people on board survive.
November 3 – Grodno Aviakompania Flight 1252, an Antonov An-12, crashes whilst attempting to land at Irkutsk International Airport, Russia whilst operating a cargo flight. All 9 aboard are killed.
2022
February 26 – AB Aviation Flight 1103, a Cessna 208D Grand Caravan operating a flight from Moroni to Mohéli, crashes into the ocean while en route. All 14 occupants aboard are killed.
March 21 – China Eastern Airlines Flight 5735, a Boeing 737-89P operating a domestic flight from Kunming to Guangzhou, China, crashes in a mountainous region in Guangxi after entering a near vertical nosedive, killing all 132 on board.
April 7 – DHL Aero Expreso Flight 7216, a Boeing 757-27A PCF, overruns the runway and breaks apart during an emergency landing at Juan Santamaría International Airport, Costa Rica, prompted by hydraulic problems. There are no serious injuries.
May 12 – Tibet Airlines Flight 9833, an Airbus A319-100, aborts a take-off from Chongqing and veers off the runway. A fire erupts, but all 122 occupants evacuate safely.
May 29 – Tara Air Flight 197, a de Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otter operating a flight from Pokhara to Jomsom, Nepal, crashes in poor weather conditions, killing all 22 on board.
June 21 – RED Air Flight 203, a McDonnell Douglas MD-82 operating a flight from Santo Domingo, veers off the runway and catches fire after the landing gear collapses on landing at Miami International Airport. There are three minor injuries among the 140 passengers and crew on board.
July 16 – Meridian Flight 3032, an Antonov An-12 carrying weapons and ammunition cargo from Niš, Serbia to Dhaka, Bangladesh, crashes near Kavala in Greece, killing all 8 on board.
July 18 – In the 2022 Jubba Airways crash, a Fokker 50 operated by Jubba Airways crashes and rolls over while landing in Mogadishu, Somalia, injuring 16 of the 36 occupants on board.
September 4 – In the 2022 Mutiny Bay DHC-3 Otter crash, a DHC-3 Turbine Otter carrying tourists from Friday Harbor Seaplane Base to Renton Municipal Airport, Washington, nosedives into the sea, killing all 10 on board.
October 23 – Korean Air Flight 631, an Airbus A330-300 flying from Seoul, overshoots the runway at Mactan-Cebu International Airport, Philippines, in poor weather and collides with airport equipment. There are no injuries among the 173 passengers and crew.
November 6 – Precision Air Flight 494, an ATR 42-500 flying a domestic flight from Dar es Salaam, crashes into Lake Victoria while attempting to land at Bukoba Airport, Tanzania. Of the 43 people on board, 19 are killed.
November 18 – LATAM Perú Flight 2213, an Airbus A320neo operated by LATAM Chile taking off from Jorge Chávez International Airport, Peru, collides with a fire engine crossing the runway, killing three firefighters. All 102 passengers and 6 crew aboard escape unharmed. This is the first hull loss of an A320neo.
2023
January 2 – In the 2023 Gold Coast mid-air collision, 2 Eurocopter EC130s operated by Sea World Helicopters collide near Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia, killing 4 and injuring 8.
January 15 – Yeti Airlines Flight 691, an ATR 72-500 operating a domestic flight from Tribhuvan International Airport to Pokhara International Airport, crashes into the gorge of the Seti Gandaki River in Pokhara, Nepal. All 72 people aboard are killed. The crash is the deadliest involving the ATR 72.
January 18 – In the 2023 Brovary helicopter crash, a Ukrainian Eurocopter EC225 carrying ten people on board including 7 from the Interior Ministry of Ukraine crashes into a kindergarten in Brovary, Ukraine. All 10 people on board are killed, as well as 4 people on the ground with an additional 25 injured.
February 6 – In the 2023 Coulson Aviation crash, a Boeing 737-300 owned by Coulson Aviation used as an air tanker crashes at Fitzgerald River National Park in the Great Southern Region in Western Australia while fighting multiple fires. Both occupants on board survive but sustain minor injuries.
July 11 – A Halla Airlines Embraer EMB 120 Brasilia crashes while landing at Aden Adde International Airport in Mogadishu, Somalia. All 34 occupants survive the crash, with 2 passengers sustaining minor injuries.
September 12 – Ural Airlines Flight 1383, an Airbus A320 operating a flight from Sochi to Omsk in Russia, makes an emergency landing on a field after reporting hydraulic issues. All 165 on board survive without injuries.
September 16 – A Manaus Aerotaxi Embraer Bandeirante crashes into an embankment on approach to Barcelos Airport, Brazil, while performing a go-around, killing all 14 occupants on board.
October 22 – Horizon Air Flight 2059, an Embraer 175 operating a flight from Everett to San Fransisco, diverts to Portland after the off-duty pilot attempts to shut off both engines with the fire handles. The pilot is subdued and arrested after landing. There are no injuries.
External links
Aircraft Crash Record Office
The Aviation Herald
Aviation Safety Network
Jet Airliner Crash Data Evaluation Centre
PlaneCrashInfo.com
Accidents and incidents
Commercial aircraft
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409573
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bel%C3%A9m
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Belém
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Belém (; Portuguese for Bethlehem; initially called Nossa Senhora de Belém do Grão-Pará, in English Our Lady of Bethlehem of Great Pará) often called Belém of Pará, is a Brazilian city, capital and largest city of the state of Pará in the country's north. It is the gateway to the Amazon River with a busy port, airport, and bus/coach station. Belém lies approximately 100 km upriver from the Atlantic Ocean, on the Pará River, which is part of the greater Amazon River system, separated from the larger part of the Amazon delta by Ilha de Marajó (Marajo Island). With an estimated population of 1,499,641 people — or 2,491,052, considering its metropolitan area — it is the 11th most populous city in Brazil, as well as the 16th by economic relevance. It is the second largest in the North Region, second only to Manaus, in the state of Amazonas.
Founded in 1616 by the Kingdom of Portugal, Belém was the first European colony on the Amazon but did not become part of Brazil until 1775. The newer part of the city has modern buildings and skyscrapers. The colonial portion retains the charm of tree-filled squares, churches and traditional blue tiles. The city has a rich history and architecture from colonial times. Recently it witnessed a skyscraper boom.
Belém is also known as the Metropolis of the Brazilian Amazon region or the Cidade das Mangueiras (City of Mango Trees) due to the vast number of those trees found in the city. Brazilians often refer to the city as Belém do Pará ("Belém of Pará") rather than just Belém, a reference to an earlier name for the city, Santa Maria de Belém do Grão Pará ("Saint Mary of Bethlehem of Great Pará"), and also to differentiate it from a number of other towns called Belém in Brazil, as well as the city of Bethlehem in the West Bank of Palestine. It is named after Santa Maria de Belém in Lisbon, also better known by its shortened name, Belém.
Belém is served by Belém International Airport, which connects the city with the rest of Brazil and other cities in South America, North America (United States) and Europe (Lisbon). The city is also home to the Federal University of Pará and the State University of Pará.
Etymology
Belém is the Portuguese name for Bethlehem, and has its origin in Hebrew which means "the house of bread". Initially the city was called "St. Mary of Belém of Pará" () or "Our Lady of Belém of Grão-Pará" (), eventually shortened to Belém do Pará (name given by Philip III of Spain), in reference to Christmas; the day when captain Francisco Caldeira Castelo Branco left from the city of São Luís in 1615 to conquer the lands of Pará.
History
In 1615, Portuguese captain-general Francisco Caldeira Castelo Branco of the captaincy of Bahia commanded a military expedition sent by the Governor General of Brazil to check the trading excursions of foreigners (French, Dutch, English) up the river (Amazon) from the Cabo do Norte in Grão Pará.
On January 12, 1616, he anchored in what is now known as Guajará Bay, formed by the confluence of the Para and Guamá Rivers, called by the Tupinambás, "Guaçu Paraná". Caldeira mistook the bay for the main channel, and thirty leagues (178 km) upstream, he built a wooden fort, covered with straw, which he called "Presépio" (nativity scene), now known as "Forte do Castelo". The colony formed by the fort was given the name Feliz Lusitânia, "Fortunate Lusitania". It was the embryo of the future city of Belém. The fort failed to suppress Dutch and French trading, but did ward off colonization.
Feliz Lusitânia was later called Nossa Senhora de Belém do Grão Pará (Our Lady of Bethlehem of Grao-Para) and Santa Maria de Belém (St. Mary of Bethlehem). Belém was given city status in 1655 and was made capital of the State when Pará state was split off from Maranhão in 1772. The early decades of the 19th century were marked by political instability. Uprisings and internecine strife finally ended in 1836, after considerable loss of life.
The sugar trade in the Belém region was important up to the end of the 17th century. Thereafter the city's economic importance alternately rose and fell. Cattle ranching supplanted sugar until the 18th century, when cultivation of rice, cotton and coffee became profitable. With the settlement of southern Brazil, where such crops could be produced more efficiently, Belém declined again. The city subsequently became the main exporting centre of the Amazon rubber industry, and by 1866 its position was further enhanced by the opening of the Amazon, Tocantins and Tapajós rivers to navigation. The importance of Belém was then somewhat reduced by the development of the Port of Manaus upriver. The rubber era ended after the boom of 1910–12, but Belém continued to be the main commercial centre of northern Brazil and the entrepôt for the Amazon valley.
Geography
The municipality includes the islands of Mosqueiro, fringed by 14 freshwater beaches, and Caratateua which receive a large number of visitors in summertime. In addition to these and also near Belém, is the island of Tatuoca which is the location of one of the seven geophysical stations in the world, and the only station in Latin America.
Climate
Belém has a tropical rainforest climate (Köppen: Af) more subject to the Intertropical Convergence Zone than the maritime trade winds, and with no cyclones, that is a true equatorial climate. In all 12 months of the year, the city on average sees more than 60 mm of rainfall, so the city has no true dry season month. However, Belém features noticeably wetter and drier seasons. The wetter season spans from December through May, while the drier season covers the remaining six months of the year. Like many cities with a tropical rainforest climate, average temperatures vary little throughout the course of the year, generally hovering around 26.5 degrees Celsius. As one would expect, tropical rainforest is the natural vegetation in and around the city.
Vegetation
The Amazon represents more than half the planet's remaining rainforests and comprises the largest and most species-rich tract of tropical rainforest in the world. Wet tropical forests are the most species-rich biome, and tropical forests in the Americas are consistently more species rich than the wet forests in Africa and Asia. As the largest tract of tropical rainforest in the Americas, the Amazonian rainforests have unparalleled biodiversity. More than one-third of all species in the world live in the Amazon Rainforest.
Economy
Many valuable products now exported from the Amazon by way of Belém are aluminium, iron ore, and other metals, nuts (chiefly Brazil nuts), pineapples, cassava, jute, wood veneers, and hardwoods. Japanese immigration after the 1930s was an important factor in developing jute and black pepper, notably at Tomé-Açu, just south of Belém, and near Santarém. Marajó Island, the largest fluvial island in the world, which lies just across the Rio Pará from Belém, has some livestock grazing. Electricity is provided by the massive Tucuruí Dam, some 300 km southwest of the city on the Tocantins River.
Demographics
According to the IBGE of 2018, there were 2,491,052 people residing in the Metropolitan Region of Belém. This region is composed by 7 cities: Belém (1,485.732 people), Ananindeua (525,566 people), Marituba (129,321 people), Benevides (61,689 people), Santa Bárbara do Pará (20,704 people), Santa Izabel do Pará (69,746 people), and Castanhal (198,294 people). In 2012, according to IBGE, the capital city itself had a population density of . The last PNAD (National Research for Sample of Domiciles) census revealed the following numbers: 1,379,655 Pardo (Multiracial) people (64.5%), 588,225 White (27.5%), 156,147 Black (7.3%), 14,973 Asian or Amerindian people (0.7%).
According to an autosomal DNA genetic study from 2011, the ancestral composition of the population of Belém is: 68.6% European ancestry, followed by 20.9% Amerindian ancestry and 10.6% African ancestry.
Education
Portuguese is the official national language, and thus the primary language taught in schools. But English and Spanish are part of the official high school curriculum.
Education institutions
Universidade Federal do Pará (UFPA);
Universidade do Estado do Pará (UEPA);
Federal Rural University of Amazonia (UFRA);
Universidade da Amazônia (UNAMA);
Centro de Instrução Almirante Brás de Aguiar (CIABA);
Centro Universitário do Estado do Pará (Cesupa);
Amazon Valley Academy International School (AVA);
Escola Superior da Amazônia (UNIESAMAZ);
Centro Universitário Metropolitano da Amazônia (UNIFAMAZ)
Instituto Federal de Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia do Pará (IFPA)
Culture
Círio de Nazaré
On the second Sunday in October, Pará celebrates the largest religious event in Brazil: the procession of the Círio of Nazaré. This tradition started when a farmer and lumberman called Plácido José de Souza found an image of the Virgin and Child on the edge of the Murucutu creek, where the Basilica of Our Lady of Nazareth of Exile stands today. He decided to take the image home. However, the image would mysteriously go back to the place where it was initially found every time he took it home. So Plácido decided to build a small chapel on the edge of the creek. This episode was regarded as miraculous throughout the region. It attracted hundreds of believers to see the image and pay homage to it.
Since then, the Círio has been celebrated as a long procession lasting around five hours, in which thousands of people follow the statue through the streets of Belém. The Círio festival is regarded as the "Christmas of the Amazon" because everyone is involved in the arrangements to receive the saint. In early September, minor celebrations take place as a spiritual preparation for the Círio, with thousands of images scattered all over the capital and neighboring cities.
In time it became necessary to incorporate new elements into the tradition due to the people's desire to honor their patron saint. On the Saturday morning prior to the Círio procession the statue is taken to the square of Ananindeua, a nearby city, to begin a Road Pilgrimage to the Icoaraci pier for a Mass. The river pilgrimage then begins. It was created to honor the "water men" who regard the Virgin of Nazareth as their patron saint. There is a traditional ship contest to award the most originally decorated boat. When the Sacred Image leaves Icoaraci in a Navy Corvette, it is followed by dozens of boats and ships through the waters of Guajará Bay to the pier of Belém, from where it is escorted all the way to the Gentil Bittencourt School. The subsequent candle-lit procession symbolizes the story of the discovery of the Saint and its return to where it was found. The procession follows the Carriage, to which a huge rope is tied, which is carried by the faithful until the procession arrives at the Sé Cathedral.
During the procession, there is a fireworks show, sponsored by the Stevedores' Union, marking the passage of the Saint until its arrival at the Cathedral. At daybreak of the next day, the faithful start to gather at the Old City, believing that this will bring them closer to the Virgin. At 7 o'clock, the archbishop conducts the image to the carriage as bells toll and fireworks explode. The main procession then goes through the streets of the city to the Architectonic Centre of Nazareth, known for its Sanctuary Square. As it arrives at the square, the image is removed from the carriage for the celebration of a Mass and then lifted so that everybody will be blessed by the patron saint of Pará.
The festivities last 15 days, with religious celebrations, like the Children's Círio, and its procession, held two Sundays after the Círio. The Re-Círio marks the end of the celebrations, with a shorter course back to the Gentil Bittencourt chapel.
Convention and Fair Centre of the Amazon
Built in a 23,000-square-metre area, the Hangar Convention and Fair Center of the Amazon has 12 rooms, ticket offices, baggage keeping, press room, and a food court, distributed in two big buildings with a parking lot for 800 vehicles. Genuine Amazonian trees will soon be planted in the outdoor area. With Hangar, Belém joins the market for national conventions that take place in a different city each time, such as the Brazilian Computer Society Congress. National conventions had not been held in the Northern region previously.
Hangar, whose auditorium has room for 2,160 participants, has some of the best technologies available in the world and is the most modern and functional space for events in the country. According to the Brazilian Association of Convention and Fair Centers (ABRACCEF), there are 17,500 events happening on average throughout the 53 main convention and exhibition centres of Brazil. These activities bring together approximately 28 million participants. Belém has great potential for this type of tourism.
Architecture
In many ways, Belém's colonial architecture reflects the seventeenth-century architecture of Lisbon in Portugal which served as the inspiration for the main housing projects of the time, with the frequent use of tile-hung façades. Neoclassical architecture is also present in buildings such as the Theatro da Paz, built in 1874. Many of the buildings at the end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century also echo French architecture.
Belém began with the narrow streets of the Cidade Velha (Old City), a district which still preserves some structures that the Portuguese colonials built here, places like Forte do Castelo, a fort built to defend the region against French, Dutch and British colonization attempts, and one of the first structures in the capital. The Ver-o-pêso market is the biggest open market in Latin America where you can find everything, from the most exotic fruit, to the scented baths.
Cuisine
The local Amerindian culture makes use of local elements to create the colors and flavors of its cuisine. One such dish, "Cupuaçu", comes from the Cupuaçu tree, found in the Amazonian woods. Cupuaçu is easily identified by its unique smell and sour taste. Its pulp is also extracted to make juices, candies, jellies, liquors, and ice cream. Açaí is a palm tree with a long, thin stem. Açaí, also known as Jussara, is purple in color with a delicious taste. Long prized by the local population, it recently it has also reached the national menu.
Freshwater crab, a traditional local delicacy, is popular. Found only in swamps, its well-tempered meat can be served in different forms: as a shell, the so-called unha (the claws) or toc-toc. "Maniçoba" is another highlight of local cuisine. Its preparation is time-consuming and its final appearance is quite surprising for those who have never tried it, due to the dark look of the cooked maniva (ground manioc leaves). But this first impression ends quickly, after you taste the dish with its seemingly awkward ingredients. Maniçoba is often served in ceramic dishes, and can be eaten with rice or with manioc flour and capsicum.
Belém has been part of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network in the category of gastronomy since 2015.
World Social Forum
The World Social Forum 2009 took place from January 27 to February 1 in Belém.
Sports
The three main football teams in Pará are based in Belém: Paysandu, Remo and Tuna Luso. Paysandu based in São Braz, play at the 16200 capacity Estádio da Curuzú, the oldest stadium of Pará state; Remo, based in Travessa Antônio Baena, play at the 17250 capacity Baenão; and Tuna Luso-Brasileira based in Souza play at the much smaller 6500 Estádio Francisco Vasques. The latter stadium is currently the home of Clube Municipal Ananindeua who represent the very large suburb of Ananindeua.
The Estádio Olímpico do Pará is the biggest in the city and hosts 45,000 spectators, the stadium hosts the Grande Premio Brasil de Atletismo, that is part of the IAAF World Challenge as well as Sport Club Belém and the aforementioned teams for large matches.
União Esportiva used to be a relatively successful club based in the city but was disbanded in 1965.
Tourism
Belém has a modern appearance with tree-lined streets, several plazas and public gardens, and many noteworthy buildings. The north's leading educational and cultural centre, it is the seat of a bishopric, and its cathedral (Igreja da Sé, founded in 1917) is one of Brazil's largest. Santo Alexandre, the oldest of Belém's churches, was built in 1616. The Museu (museum) Paraense Emílio Goeldi, the Teatro da Paz (a classical theatre), and the public library and archives are other notable institutions. The Universidade Federal do Pará (1957), a teacher-training school, an agricultural institute, and an institute for research on tropical diseases are also in the city. The Ver-o-Peso (Portuguese: "see the weight") market in the old port centre is a major tourist attraction. The city is also home to a large football stadium, the Estádio Olímpico do Pará.
Utinga State Park
The municipality of Belém contains 99% of the Utinga State Park, created in 1993 to protect the metropolitan area's water supply.
The park provides a space for healthy activities in contact with nature by local people, visitors or tourists.
It is just a few kilometers from the city center.
There are eight trails, all providing direct contact with various species of flora and fauna.
The most popular is the monkey trail, which takes about 40 minutes and goes from Bolonha lake to the visitor center, where other activities are available.
Visitors can also learn about the water treatment plant that supplies Belém.
Amazon Biopark Zoo
Located less than from the center of Belém, in the Tenoné neighborhood, the Bioparque Amazônia Safari - Crocodilo Safari Zoo, is surrounded by forests, rivers and streams. Summary of the Amazon landscape with lush flora and fauna, the zoo has about of trails in an area composed of four interconnected ecosystems.
A large attractive Bioparque is the Museum of Paleontology and Malacology where visitors can watch a collection of three thousand pieces of exposed shells and mollusks collected from all continents. On site, you will also see paintings with motifs of cabloco Amazon.
Bioparque The Amazon is a private investment, owner Jorge Arthur Aarão Monteiro, authorized and licensed by IBAMA to function as C class zoo, the only category of Pará There are four different species of alligators in a population of thousands of individuals, highlighting açu for alligator, monkeys, anteaters, and the otters, hyacinth macaw, papagaios, tucannos, pacaranas, harpy eagle, among other animals.
Also see the city turistic website here.
Rodrigues Alves Wood–Botanical Garden
Inspired by the Bois de Boulogne Park in Paris, the Rodrigues Alves Wood is a little piece of Amazonia preserved in the middle of the city. Comprising 16 hectares, in the ample Avenida Almirante Barroso, one of the city's busiest thoroughfares, having 2,500 native species, an orchidary, lakes, caverns, waterfalls and even a replica of a mountain. There you can see small animals characteristic to the region, such as squirrel monkeys, agoutis and macaws.
The Estação das Docas Complex
The Estação das Docas Complex reopened the windows of Belém to Guajará Bay. The restoration project covers the area of old warehouses of the Pará Docks Company. Constructed from prefabricated metal structures in England and that were built at the beginning of the 20th century in Belém.
There are of urbanised area, with coffee bar services, various restaurants, stores, travel agencies, banks, in addition to an auditorium and two memorials: The Porto Memorial and the Fortaleza de São Pedro Nolasco Memorial There is also a fluvial station and extensive external area.
Ver-o-Peso Market
Created in 1688, as a result of the Portuguese deciding to levy a tax for everything entering and leaving Amazonia. Despite resembling a large retailer, the mixture of colours, fragrances and objects is very interesting as well as folkloric.
Medicinal herbs, various regional fruits, arts and crafts, domestic utilities, meats, fish and seasonings and spices can be found there. The Market brings together two thousand stalls and traders in every part and is located near to the old Mercado de Ferro (Iron market), on the quays.
Mosqueiro
The river island of Mosqueiro, north of the heart of the city, attracts beach tourists in the dry season.
Infrastructure
Airports
Belém International Airport is the major airport serving the city of Belém. The building design uses plane curves on its roof to permit light to enter its entire large terminal hall.
The architect Sérgio Parada used adopted multiple-use totems integrated with light projectors, a sound system, air conditioning, and public telephones. Currently Belém International Airport serves 2.7 million passengers a year, in a constructed area of .
Traditionally called Belém Airport, it is responsible for increasing tourism in the Amazon region, as well as for the outflow of products and attracting new investments. The passenger terminal is fully air conditioned on two levels and has "futuristic" architecture, designed to take advantage of natural lighting. People with special needs have individualized service with own equipment at specific locations to facilitate their access. The terminal's interior is decorated with plants native to the Amazon region and is enclosed by a source able to imitate the sound of the rains that fall every day in the region.
There also used to exist a smaller Brig. Protásio de Oliveira Airport (Júlio César), also administrated by Infraero, which was used for general aviation, in January, 1st, 2022 it was taken out of service and the area it occupied is going to be turned into a park, its functions were transferred to the main Belém Airport.
Belém Air Force Base - ALA9, one of their most important bases of the Brazilian Air Force, is located in Belém.
Highways
BR-316 is the major access highway for those coming from the Northeastern Brazil. For visitors from the Southern, Southeastern, and Mid-Eastern Regions, the best route is BR-010, which originates in Brasília in the South, and also PA-150, a route that links Belém to Southern Pará.
Waterways
Belém can be reached by the Tocantins River and Amazonas River and by the Atlantic Ocean.
Railways
The EF-151 railway, known as "Ferrovia Norte-Sul", literally meaning "North-South Railway", is being extended to run until the city of Barcarena, that is about 111 km away by road. When construction is finished, Barcarena will be linked with important cities, like Imperatriz, Porto Nacional, Anápolis and Panorama.
Distances
São Paulo:
Rio de Janeiro:
Brasília:
Manaus:
Teresina:
São Luís:
Santarém, Pará:
Rio Branco:
Florianópolis:
Cuiabá:
Belo Horizonte:
Notable people
Myke Carvalho — brazilian boxer
Benedito José Nascimento — comic book artist
Beto Gonçalves — footballer
Dira Paes — actress
Dona Onete — singer
Fafá de Belém — singer
Yago Pikachu — Brazilian football player
Gaby Amarantos – singer
Giovanni Silva de Oliveira – footballer
Giuseppe Antonio Landi — architect
Guilherme Paraense — Olympic medalist
Hélio Gracie – martial artist
Ismael Nery — painter
Charles Guerreiro — Brazilian football player
João Clemente Baena Soares — diplomat
Larissa Pacheco — mixed martial artist
Lyoto Machida — mixed martial artist
Paulo Henrique Chagas de Lima — footballer
Priscilla Meirelles — beauty queen
Paulo Vítor — Brazilian football player
Leila Pinheiro — singer
Waldemar Henrique — composer
Rosamaria Murtinho — actress
Rossevelt Bala — heavy metal singer
Victória Pitts – mezzo-soprano
Government
Subdivisions
Based on Municipal Law nº 8.655 of 30 July 2008, the municipality is divided in 8 Administrative Districts and 71 Neightborhoods:
International Relations
Belem has the following partnership cities:
References
External links
Website with information, guides and tourist information about Belém (English)
Website of festivals, events and cultural agenda of the City of Belém (English)
Port cities in Brazil
Populated places established in 1616
1616 establishments in the Portuguese Empire
1616 establishments in South America
Municipalities in Pará
State capitals in Brazil
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witold%20Lutos%C5%82awski
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Witold Lutosławski
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Witold Roman Lutosławski (; 25 January 1913 – 7 February 1994) was a Polish composer and conductor. Among the major composers of 20th-century classical music, he is "generally regarded as the most significant Polish composer since Szymanowski, and possibly the greatest Polish composer since Chopin". His compositions—of which he was a notable conductor—include representatives of most traditional genres, aside from opera: symphonies, concertos, orchestral song cycles, other orchestral works, and chamber works. Among his best known works are his four symphonies, the Variations on a Theme by Paganini (1941), the Concerto for Orchestra (1954), and his cello concerto (1970).
During his youth, Lutosławski studied piano and composition in Warsaw. His early works were influenced by Polish folk music and demonstrated a wide range of rich atmospheric textures. His folk-inspired music includes the Concerto for Orchestra (1954)—which first brought him international renown—and Dance Preludes (1955), which he described as a "farewell to folklore". From the late 1950s he began developing new, characteristic composition techniques. He introduced limited aleatoric elements, while retaining tight control of his music's material, architecture, and performance. He also evolved his practice of building harmonies from small groups of musical intervals.
During World War II, after narrowly escaping German capture, Lutosławski made a living playing the piano in Warsaw bars. After the war, Stalinist authorities banned his First Symphony for being "formalist": accessible only to an elite. Rejecting anti-formalism as an unjustified retrograde step, Lutosławski resolutely strove to maintain his artistic integrity, providing artistic support to the Solidarity movement throughout the 1980s. He received numerous awards and honours, including the Grawemeyer Award and a Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medal. In 1994, Lutosławski was awarded Poland's highest honour, the Order of the White Eagle.
Life and career
Early years (1913–1938)
Lutosławski's parents were both born into the Polish landed nobility; they owned estates in the area of Drozdowo. His father Józef was involved in the Polish National Democratic Party ("Endecja"), and the Lutosławski family became intimate with its founder, Roman Dmowski (Witold Lutosławski's middle name was Roman). Józef Lutosławski studied in Zürich, where in 1904 he met and married a fellow student, Maria Olszewska, who later became Lutosławski's mother. Józef pursued his studies in London, where he acted as correspondent for the National-Democratic newspaper, Goniec. He continued to be involved in National Democracy politics after returning to Warsaw in 1905, and took over the management of the family estates in 1908. Witold Roman Lutosławski, the youngest of three brothers, was born in Warsaw shortly before the outbreak of World War I.
In 1915, with Russia at war with Germany, Prussian forces drove towards Warsaw. The Lutosławskis travelled east to Moscow, where Józef remained politically active, organising Polish Legions ready for any action that might liberate Poland (which had been divided over a century earlier—Warsaw was part of Tsarist Russia). Dmowski's strategy was for Russia to guarantee security for a new Polish state. In 1917, the February Revolution forced the Tsar to abdicate, and the October Revolution started a new Soviet government that made peace with Germany. Józef's activities were now in conflict with the Bolsheviks, who arrested him and his brother Marian. Thus, although fighting stopped on the Eastern Front in 1917, the Lutosławskis were prevented from returning home. The brothers were interned in Butyrskaya prison in central Moscow, where Witold—by then aged five—visited his father. Józef and Marian were executed by a firing squad in September 1918, some days before their scheduled trial.
After the war, the family returned to the newly independent Poland, only to find their estates ruined. After his father's death, other members of the family played an important part in Witold's early life, especially Józef's half-brother Kazimierz Lutosławski, a priest and politician.
At age six, Lutosławski started two years of piano lessons in Warsaw. After the Polish-Soviet War the family left Warsaw to return to Drozdowo, but after a few years of running the estates with limited success, his mother returned to Warsaw. She worked as a physician, and translated books for children from English. In 1924, Lutosławski entered secondary school (Stefan Batory Gymnasium) while continuing piano lessons. A performance of Karol Szymanowski's Third Symphony deeply affected him. In 1925, he started violin lessons at the Warsaw Music School. In 1931, he enrolled at Warsaw University to study mathematics, and in 1932 he formally joined the composition classes at the Conservatory. His only composition teacher was Witold Maliszewski, a renowned Polish composer who had been a pupil of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Lutosławski was given a strong grounding in musical structures, particularly movements in sonata form. In 1932, he gave up the violin, and in 1933 he discontinued his mathematics studies to concentrate on the piano and composition. As a student of Jerzy Lefeld, he gained a diploma for piano performance from the Conservatory in 1936, after presenting a virtuoso program including Schumann's Toccata and Beethoven's fourth piano concerto. His diploma for composition was awarded by the same institution in 1937.
World War II (1939–1945)
Military service followed; Lutosławski was trained in signalling and radio operating in Zegrze near Warsaw. He completed his Symphonic Variations in 1939. The work was premiered by the Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Grzegorz Fitelberg, with the performance broadcast on radio on 9 March 1939. Like most young Polish composers, Lutosławski wanted to continue his education in Paris. His plans for further musical study were dashed in September 1939, when Germany invaded western Poland and Russia invaded eastern Poland. Lutosławski was mobilised with the radio unit for the Kraków Army. He was soon captured by German soldiers, but escaped while being marched to prison camp, walking back to Warsaw. Lutosławski's brother was captured by Russian soldiers and later died in a Siberian labour camp.
To earn a living, Lutosławski joined "Dana Ensemble", the first Polish revellers, as an arranger-pianist, singing in "Ziemiańska Cafe". He then formed a piano duo with friend and fellow composer Andrzej Panufnik, performing together in Warsaw cafés. Their repertoire consisted of a wide range of music in their own arrangements, including the first incarnation of Lutosławski's Variations on a Theme by Paganini, a transcription of the 24th Caprice for solo violin by Niccolò Paganini. Defiantly, they sometimes played Polish music (the Nazis banned Polish music in Poland—including that of Frédéric Chopin), and composed Resistance songs. Listening in cafés was the only way in which the Poles of German-occupied Warsaw could hear live music; putting on concerts was impossible since the Germans occupying Poland prohibited any organised gatherings. In café Aria, where they played, Lutosławski met his future wife Maria Danuta Bogusławska, a sister of the writer Stanisław Dygat.
Lutosławski left Warsaw in July 1944 with his mother, just a few days before the Warsaw Uprising. During the complete destruction of the city by Germans after the failure of the uprising, most of his music was lost, as were the family's Drozdowo estates. He was able to salvage only a few scores and sketches; of the 200 or so arrangements that Lutosławski and Panufnik had worked on for their piano duo, only Lutosławski's Variations on a Theme by Paganini survived. Lutosławski returned to the ruins of Warsaw after the Polish-Soviet treaty in April 1945.
Post-war years (1946–1955)
During the postwar years, Lutosławski worked on his First Symphony—sketches of which he had salvaged from Warsaw—which he had started in 1941. It was first performed in 1948, conducted by Fitelberg. To provide for his family, he also composed music that he termed functional, such as the Warsaw Suite (written to accompany a silent film depicting the city's reconstruction), sets of Polish Carols, and the study pieces for piano, Melodie Ludowe ("Folk Melodies").
In 1945, Lutosławski was elected as secretary and treasurer of the newly constituted (ZKP—Związek Kompozytorów Polskich). In 1946, he married Danuta Bogusławska. The marriage was a lasting one, and Danuta's drafting skills were of great value to the composer: she became his copyist, and solved some of the notational challenges of his later works.
In 1947, the Stalinist political climate led to the adoption and imposition by the ruling Polish United Workers' Party of the tenets of socialist realism. The political authorities condemned new compositions deemed to be non-conformist. This artistic censorship, which ultimately came from Stalin personally, was to some degree prevalent over the whole Eastern bloc, and was reinforced by the 1948 Zhdanov decree. By 1948, the ZKP was taken over by musicians willing to follow the party line on musical matters. Lutosławski resigned from the committee, implacably opposed to the ideas of socialist realism.
Lutoslawski's First Symphony was proscribed as "formalist", and he found himself shunned by the Soviet authorities, a situation that continued throughout the era of Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko. In 1954, the climate of musical oppression drove his friend Andrzej Panufnik to defect to the United Kingdom. Against this background, Lutosławski was content to compose pieces for which there was social need, but in 1954 this earned him—much to the composer's chagrin—the Prime Minister's Prize for a set of children's songs. He commented: "[I]t was for those functional compositions of mine that the authorities decorated me... I realised that I was not writing indifferent little pieces, only to make a living, but was carrying on an artistic creative activity in the eyes of the outside world."
It was his substantial and original Concerto for Orchestra of 1954 that established Lutosławski as an important composer of art music. The work, commissioned in 1950 by the conductor Witold Rowicki for the newly reconstituted Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra, earned the composer two state prizes in the following year.
Maturity (1956–1967)
Stalin's death in 1953 allowed a certain relaxation of the cultural totalitarianism in Russia and its satellite states. By 1956, political events had led to a partial thawing of the musical climate, and the Warsaw Autumn Festival of Contemporary Music was founded. Conceived as a biennial festival, it has been held annually ever since 1958 (except under Martial law in 1982 when, in protest, the ZKP refused to organise it). The first performance of his Musique funèbre (in Polish, Muzyka żałobna, English Funereal Music or Music of Mourning) took place in 1958. It was written to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the death of Béla Bartók, but took the composer four years to complete. This work brought international recognition, and the annual ZKP prize and the International Rostrum of Composers prize in 1959. Lutosławski's harmonic and contrapuntal thinking were developed in this work, and in the Five songs of 1956–57, as he introduced his twelve-note system, he realised the fruits of many years of thought and experiment. Another new feature of his compositional technique became a Lutosławski signature: he introduced randomness into the exact synchronisation of various parts of the musical ensemble in Jeux vénitiens ("Venetian games"). These harmonic and temporal techniques became part of every subsequent work, and were integral to his style.
In a departure from his usually serious compositions in 1957 to 1963, Lutosławski also composed light music under the pseudonym Derwid. Mostly waltzes, tangos, foxtrots and slow-foxtrots for voice and piano, these pieces are in the genre of Polish actors' songs. Their place in Lutosławski's output may be seen as less incongruous in light of his own performances of cabaret music during the war, as well as his relationship by marriage to his wife's sister-in-law, the famous Polish cabaret singer Kalina Jędrusik.
In 1963, Lutosławski fulfilled a commission for the Music Biennale Zagreb, his Trois poèmes d'Henri Michaux for chorus and orchestra. It was the first work he had written for a commission from abroad, and brought him further international acclaim. It earned him a second State Prize for music (Lutosławski was not cynical about the award this time), and he gained an agreement for the international publication of his music with Chester Music, then part of the Hansen publishing house. His String Quartet was first performed in Stockholm in 1965, followed the same year by the first performance of his orchestral song-cycle Paroles tissées. This shortened title was suggested by the poet Jean-François Chabrun, who had published the poems as Quatre tapisseries pour la Châtelaine de Vergi. The song cycle is dedicated to the tenor Peter Pears, who first performed it at the 1965 Aldeburgh Festival with the composer conducting. (The Festival was founded and organised by Benjamin Britten, with whom the composer formed a lasting friendship.)
Shortly after this, Lutosławski started work on his Second Symphony, which had two premieres: Pierre Boulez conducted the second movement, Direct, in 1966, and when the first movement, Hésitant, was finished in 1967, the composer conducted a complete performance in Katowice. The Second Symphony is very different from a conventional classical symphony in structure, with Lutosławski using his many compositional innovations to build a large-scale, dramatic work worthy of the name. In 1968, the Symphony earned Lutosławski first prize from the International Music Council's International Rostrum of Composers, his third such award, confirming his growing international reputation. In 1967, Lutosławski was awarded the Léonie Sonning Music Prize, Denmark's highest musical honour.
International renown (1967–1982)
The Second Symphony, and Livre pour orchestre and a Cello Concerto which followed, were composed during a particularly traumatic period in Lutosławski's life. His mother died in 1967, and in 1967–70 there was a great deal of unrest in Poland. This sprang first from the suppression of the theatre production Dziady, which sparked a summer of protests; later, in 1968, the use of Polish troops to suppress the liberal reforms in Czechoslovakia's Prague Spring, and the Gdańsk Shipyards strike of 1970—which led to a violent clampdown by the authorities, both caused significant political and social tension in Poland. Lutosławski did not support the Soviet regime, and these events have been postulated as reasons for the increase in antagonistic effects in his work, particularly the Cello Concerto of 1968–70 for Rostropovich and the Royal Philharmonic Society. Indeed, Rostropovich's own opposition to the Soviet regime in Russia was just coming to a head (he shortly afterwards declared his support for the dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn). Lutosławski himself did not hold the view that such influences had a direct effect on his music, although he acknowledged that they impinged on his creative world to some degree. In any case, the Cello Concerto was a great success, earning both Lutosławski and Rostropovich accolades. At the work's première with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, Arthur Bliss presented Rostropovich with the Royal Philharmonic Society's gold medal.
In 1973, Lutosławski attended a recital given by the baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau with the pianist Sviatoslav Richter in Warsaw; he met the singer after the concert and this inspired him to write his extended orchestral song Les Espaces du sommeil ("The spaces of sleep"). This work, Preludes and Fugue, Mi-Parti (a French expression that roughly translates as "divided into two equal but different parts"), Novelette, and a short piece for cello in honour of Paul Sacher's seventieth birthday, occupied Lutosławski throughout the 1970s, while in the background he was working away at a projected Third symphony and a concertante piece for the oboist Heinz Holliger. These latter pieces were proving difficult to complete, as Lutosławski struggled to introduce greater fluency into his sound world and to reconcile tensions between the harmonic and melodic aspects of his style, and between foreground and background. The Double Concerto for oboe, harp and chamber orchestra—commissioned by Sacher—was finally finished in 1980, and the Third Symphony in 1983. In 1977, he received the Order of the Builders of People's Poland. In 1983, he received the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize.
During this period, Poland was undergoing yet more upheaval: in 1980, the influential movement Solidarność was created, led by Lech Wałęsa; and in 1981, martial law was declared by General Wojciech Jaruzelski. From 1981 to 1989, Lutosławski refused all professional engagements in Poland as a gesture of solidarity with the artists' boycott. He refused to enter the Culture Ministry to meet any of the ministers, and was careful not be photographed in their company. In 1983, as a gesture of support, he sent a recording of the first performance (in Chicago) of the Third Symphony to Gdańsk to be played to strikers in a local church. In 1983, he was awarded the Solidarity prize, of which Lutosławski was reported to be more proud than any other of his honours.
Final years (1983–1994)
Through the mid-1980s, Lutosławski composed three pieces called Łańcuch ("Chain"), which refers to the way the music is constructed from contrasting strands which overlap like the links of a chain. Chain 2 was written for Anne-Sophie Mutter (commissioned by Sacher), and for Mutter he also orchestrated his slightly earlier Partita for violin and piano, providing a new linking Interlude, so that when played together the Partita, Interlude, and Chain 2 form his longest work.
In 1985, the Third Symphony earned Lutosławski the first Grawemeyer Prize from the University of Louisville, Kentucky. The significance of the prize lay not just in its prestige but in the size of its financial award (then US$150,000). The award is intended to remove recipients' financial concerns for a period to allow them to concentrate on serious composition. In a gesture of altruism, Lutosławski announced that he would use the fund to set up a scholarship to enable young Polish composers to study abroad; Lutosławski also directed that his fee from the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra for Chain 3 should go to this scholarship fund.
In 1986, Lutosławski was presented (by Tippett) with the rarely awarded Royal Philharmonic Society's Gold Medal during a concert in which Lutosławski conducted his Third Symphony; also that year a major celebration of his work was made at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. In addition, he was awarded honorary doctorates at several universities worldwide, including Cambridge.
At this time Lutosławski was writing his Piano Concerto for Krystian Zimerman, commissioned by the Salzburg Festival. His earliest plans to write a piano concerto dated from 1938; he was himself in his younger days a virtuoso pianist. It was a performance of this work and the Third Symphony at the Warsaw Autumn Festival in 1988 that marked the composer's return to the conductor's podium in Poland, after substantive talks had been arranged between the government and the opposition.
Around 1990 Lutosławski also worked on a fourth symphony and his orchestral song-cycle Chantefleurs et Chantefables for soprano. The latter was first performed at a Prom concert in London in 1991, and the Fourth Symphony in 1993 in Los Angeles. In between, and after initial reluctance, Lutosławski took on the presidency of the newly reconstituted "Polish Cultural Council", which was set up after the 1989 legislative elections led to the end of communist rule in Poland.
In 1993, Lutosławski continued his busy schedule, travelling to the United States, England, Finland, Canada and Japan, and sketching a violin concerto, but by the first week of 1994 it was clear that cancer had taken hold, and after an operation the composer weakened quickly and died on 7 February, aged 81. He had, a few weeks before, been awarded Poland's highest honour, the Order of the White Eagle (only the second person to receive this since the collapse of communism in Poland—the first had been Pope John Paul II). He was cremated; his wife Danuta died shortly afterwards.
Music
Lutosławski described musical composition as a search for listeners who think and feel the same way he did—he once called it "fishing for souls".
Folk influence
Lutosławski's works up until and including the Dance Preludes (1955) show the influence of Polish folk music, both harmonically and melodically. Part of his art was in transforming folk music, rather than quoting it exactly. In some cases, such as the Concerto for Orchestra, folk music is unrecognisable as such without careful analysis. As Lutosławski developed the techniques of his mature compositions, he stopped using folk material explicitly, although its influence remained as subtle features until the end. As he said, "[in those days] I could not compose as I wished, so I composed as I was able", and about this change of direction he said, "I was simply not so interested in it [using folk music]". Also, Lutosławski was dissatisfied with composing in a "post-tonal" idiom: while composing the first symphony, he felt that this was for him a cul-de-sac. As such, Dance Preludes would prove to be his final composition centered around folk music; he described it as a "farewell to folklore".
Pitch organisation
In Five Songs (1956–57) and Musique funèbre (1958) Lutosławski introduced his own brand of twelve-tone music, marking his departure from the explicit use of folk music. His twelve-tone technique allowed him to build harmony and melody from specific intervals (in Musique funèbre, augmented fourths and semitones). This system also gave him the means to write dense chords without resorting to tone clusters, and enabled him to build towards these dense chords (which often include all twelve notes of the chromatic scale) at climactic moments. Lutosławski's twelve-note techniques were thus completely different in conception from Arnold Schoenberg's tone-row system, although Musique funèbre does happen to be based on a tone row. This twelve-note intervallic technique had its genesis in earlier works such as Symphony No. 1, and Variations on a Theme by Paganini.
Aleatory technique
Although Musique funèbre was internationally acclaimed, his new harmonic techniques led to something of a crisis for Lutosławski, during which he still could not see how to express his musical ideas. Then on 16 March 1960, listening to Polish Radio broadcast on new music, he happened to hear John Cage's Concert for Piano and Orchestra. Although he was not influenced by the sound or the philosophy of the music, Cage's explorations of indeterminacy set off a train of thought which resulted in Lutosławski finding a way to retain the harmonic structures he wanted while introducing the freedom for which he was searching. His Three Postludes were hastily rounded off (he had intended to write four) and he moved on to compose works in which he explored these new ideas.
In works from Jeux vénitiens, Lutosławski wrote long passages in which the parts of the ensemble are not to be synchronised exactly. At cues from the conductor, each instrumentalist may be instructed to move straight on to the next section, to finish their current section before moving on, or to stop. In this way, the random elements within compositionally controlled limits defined by the term aleatory are carefully directed by the composer, who controls the architecture and harmonic progression of the piece precisely. Lutosławski notated the music exactly; there is no improvisation, no choice of parts is given to any instrumentalist, and there is thus no doubt about how the musical performance is to be realised.
For his String Quartet, Lutosławski had produced only the four instrumental parts, refusing to bind them in a full score, because he was concerned that this would imply that he wanted notes in vertical alignment to coincide, as is the case with conventionally notated classical ensemble music. The LaSalle Quartet, however, specifically requested a score from which to prepare for the first performance. Bodman Rae relates that Danuta Lutosławska solved this problem by cutting up the parts and sticking them together in boxes (which Lutosławski called mobiles), with instructions on how to signal in performance when all of the players should proceed to the next mobile. In his orchestral music, these problems of notation were not so difficult, because the instructions on how and when to proceed are given by the conductor. Lutosławski's called this technique of his mature period "limited aleatorism".
Both Lutosławski's harmonic and aleatory processes are illustrated by example 1, an excerpt from Hésitant, the first movement of the Symphony No. 2. At number 7, the conductor gives a cue to the flutes, celesta and percussionist, who then play their parts in their own time, without any attempt to synchronise with the other instrumentalists. The harmony of this section is based on a 12-note chord built from major seconds and perfect fourths. After all the instrumentalists have finished their parts, a two-second general pause is indicated ("P.G. 2" at top right of the example). The conductor then gives a cue at number 8 (and indicates the tempo of the following section) for two oboes and the cor anglais. They each play their part, again with no attempt to synchronise with the other players. The harmony of this part is based on the hexachord F–G–A–C–D–D, arranged in such a way that the harmony of the section never includes any sixths or thirds. When the conductor gives another cue at number 9, the players each continue until they reach the repeat sign, and then stop: they are unlikely to end the section at the same time. This "refrain" (from numbers 8 to 9) recurs throughout the movement, slightly altered each time, but always played by double-reed instruments which do not play elsewhere in the movement: Lutosławski thus also carefully controls the orchestral palette.
Late style
The combination of Lutosławski's aleatory techniques and his harmonic discoveries allowed him to build up complex musical textures. According to Bodman Rae, in his later works Lutosławski evolved a more mobile, simpler, harmonic style, in which less of the music is played with an ad libitum coordination. This development first appeared in the brief Epitaph for oboe and piano, around the time Lutosławski was struggling to find the technical means to complete his Third Symphony. In chamber works for just two instrumentalists the scope for aleatory counterpoint and dense harmonies is significantly less than for orchestra.
Lutosławski's formidable technical developments grew out of his creative imperative; that he left a lasting body of major compositions is a testament to his resolution of purpose in the face of the anti-formalist authorities under which he formulated his methods.
Legacy
In the 21st century, Lutosławski is generally considered the most important Polish composer since Szymanowski, and perhaps the most outstanding since Chopin. This evaluation was not apparent after World WarII, when Panufnik was more highly regarded in Poland. The success of Lutosławski's Concerto for Orchestra and Panufnik's 1954 defection to England brought Lutosławski to the forefront of modern Polish classical music. Initially, he was coupled with his younger contemporary Krzysztof Penderecki, due to their music's shared stylistic and technical characteristics. When Penderecki's reputation declined in the 1970s, Lutosławski emerged as the major Polish composer of his time and among the most significant 20th-century European composers. His four symphonies, the Variations on a Theme by Paganini (1941), the Concerto for Orchestra (1954), and a cello concerto (1970) are his best known works.
Awards and honours
See for a comprehensive list.
Order of Polonia Restituta, 1953
Order of the Banner of Work, 1955
Związek Kompozytorów Polskich (ZKP) Prize, 1959
First Prize of the International Music Council's International Rostrum of Composers, 1959
Koussevitzky Prix Mondial du Disque (France), 1964
Grand Prix du Disque de Académie Charles Cros (France), 1965
Jurzykowski Prize (United States), 1966
Herder Prize (Germany/Austria), 1967
Léonie Sonning Music Prize (Denmark), 1967
First Prize of the International Music Council's International Rostrum of Composers, 1968
Grand Prix du Disque de Académie Charles Cros (France), 1971
Prix Maurice Ravel (France), 1971
Honorary member of the Polish Composers' Union, 1971
Wihuri Sibelius Prize (Finland), 1973
Honorary degree of the University of Warsaw, 1973
Koussevitzky Prix Mondial du Disque (France), 1976
Order of the Builders of People's Poland, 1977
Honorary degree of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, 1980
Ernst von Siemens Music Prize (Germany), 1983
Honorary doctorate, Durham University 1983
Honorary degree of the Jagiellonian University, 1984
Queen Sofía Composition Prize (Spain), 1985
Grawemeyer Award (United States), 1985
Koussevitzky Prix Mondial du Disque (France), 1986
Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medal (United Kingdom), 1986
Grammy Award for Best Classical Contemporary Composition, 1987
Honorary doctorate, University of Cambridge, 1987
Honorary degree of the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music, 1988
Pour le Mérite for Sciences and Arts, 1993
Polar Music Prize (Sweden), 18 May 1993
Kyoto Prize (Japan), 1993
Honorary doctorate, McGill University, 30 October 1993
Order of the White Eagle (Poland), 1994
References
Sources
Books
Online
Witold Lutosławski – Guide to Warsaw. NIFC 2013 free app with biography
Further reading
See and for extensive bibliographies.
Jakelski, L., and N. Reyland (eds.). Lutosławski's Worlds. [S.l.]: The Boydell Press, 2018.
External links
Polish Music Center: Witold Lutosławski
Witold Lutosławski – a classic of 20th-century music at culture.pl
Lutosławski Year 2013 official website
1913 births
1994 deaths
20th-century classical composers
Chopin University of Music alumni
Grammy Award winners
Kyoto laureates in Arts and Philosophy
Polish classical composers
Polish male classical composers
Musicians from Warsaw
EMI Classics and Virgin Classics artists
Deutsche Grammophon artists
Recipients of the Order of the Builders of People's Poland
Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medallists
Recipients of the Order of the Banner of Work
Recipients of the Pour le Mérite (civil class)
Burials at Powązki Cemetery
Recipients of the Léonie Sonning Music Prize
International Rostrum of Composers prize-winners
Members of the Academy of Arts, Berlin
Herder Prize recipients
Ernst von Siemens Music Prize winners
20th-century male musicians
Recipients of the State Award Badge (Poland)
Recipients of the Order of the White Eagle (Poland)
Foreign members of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael%20Laudrup
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Michael Laudrup
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Michael Laudrup (, born 15 June 1964) is a Danish professional football coach and former player. He is considered to be one of the greatest players of all time. He is the older brother of fellow retired footballer Brian Laudrup.
During his playing career, Laudrup won league titles with Ajax, Barcelona, Real Madrid and Juventus, playing mainly as an attacking midfielder, although he was also capable of playing in other attacking positions. He was a member of Johan Cruyff's "Dream Team" at Barcelona, where he won nine trophies, including four successive La Liga titles from 1991 to 1994 and the European Cup in 1992. Laudrup moved to arch-rivals Real Madrid in 1994, with whom he won his fifth La Liga title in a row.
Laudrup made his debut for the Denmark national team on his 18th birthday in 1982, and scored 37 goals in 104 appearances. He starred in the 1986 FIFA World Cup, and from November 1994, he captained Denmark for a total of 28 matches, including the victorious 1995 Confederations Cup tournament. He played alongside his brother Brian in the Denmark team that reached the quarter-finals of the 1998 World Cup, and retired as an active player after the tournament.
In 1999, Laudrup was voted the Best Foreign Player in Spanish Football over the preceding 25-year period and in April 2000 he was knighted, receiving the Order of the Dannebrog. In November 2003, to celebrate UEFA's Jubilee, he was selected as the Golden Player of Denmark by the Danish Football Union, their most outstanding player of the past 50 years. He was officially named the best Danish footballer of all time by the Danish Football Union (DBU) in November 2006. He was named by Pelé in the FIFA 100 list of the world's greatest living players at a FIFA awards ceremony in 2004. In April 2013, he was named by Marca readers in the "Best foreign eleven in Real Madrid's history".
On 16 October 2021, at a show celebrating the National Olympic Committee and Sports Confederation of Denmark's 125th anniversary, 125 candidates for the title of the greatest ever Danish sports star had been reduced to eight, and Laudrup was named the winner.
After retiring as a player, Laudrup took up coaching, and became assistant manager of the Denmark national team. He got his first manager job at former club Brøndby in 2002, whom he guided to the 2005 Danish Superliga championship. He chose not to extend his contract with Brøndby in May 2006. He took over as coach of Getafe and had notable success there. He brought the club comparative success in the Copa del Rey and UEFA Cup, and the team's attacking style received plaudits. On 15 June 2012, Laudrup was appointed the manager of Premier League club Swansea City on a two-year contract. In his first season in south Wales, he won the League Cup, the first major English trophy in Swansea's 100-year history. On 4 February 2014, he was sacked by Swansea after a "significant" slump in the Premier League, leaving them two points above the relegation zone. Laudrup then managed Qatari clubs Lekhwiya and Al Rayyan between 2014 and 2018.
Club career
Born in Frederiksberg, Copenhagen, Michael Laudrup began playing football in father Finn Laudrup's childhood club Vanløse. When Finn Laudrup became player/coach of Brøndby IF in 1973, the family moved to Brøndby and both Michael and his brother Brian Laudrup started playing for the club as well. Michael followed his father to the top-flight Danish 1st Division club Københavns Boldklub in 1976, while Brian remained at Brøndby.
Early career
Laudrup made his senior debut playing for KB (Kjøbenhavns Boldklub) in 1981, and made his debut for the Danish under-19 national team in February 1981. In all, he scored a combined total of 14 goals in 25 games at various youth levels. He went back to play for Brøndby in 1982, where his father had ended his career in 1981, contributing to the promotion of Brøndby to the 1st Division.
At Brøndby, Laudrup scored two goals in the club's 1st Division debut game, as fellow promoted team Boldklubben 1909 were beaten 7–1. He scored 15 league goals in 1982, and ended the season as the third top goal scorer of the 1st Division. His accomplishments earned him the 1982 Danish Player of the Year award. He played part of the 1983 season for Brøndby, and scored nine goals, before he was sold to defending Serie A champions Juventus from Italy in June 1983. It was the biggest transfer deal in Danish football at the time, worth around $1 million. He was due to sign for Liverpool the same year on a three-year contract, but at the last minute, Liverpool proposed a four-year contract and Laudrup opted not to sign.
Under restriction of a maximum of two foreign players in the team, of which the club had Polish midfielder Zbigniew Boniek and Michel Platini, Juventus initially lent Laudrup to newly promoted Rome club Lazio for a single season, something he had not been informed about before signing for Juventus. With Lazio, he scored two goals in his Serie A debut, a 2–4 loss to Hellas Verona. In his first year at Lazio, Lazio narrowly avoided relegation, but as Juventus wanted to keep Boniek and Platini, he stayed for another year. Lazio started the 1984–85 season poorly, eventually finishing in last place to become relegated to Serie B. Laudrup scored just one goal that season.
Laudrup returned to Juventus in summer 1985 to replace Zbigniew Boniek, playing alongside Michel Platini. In his first year at the club, he won the 1985–86 Serie A as well as the Intercontinental Cup trophy, scoring the equalising goal in the final of the latter tournament, although he later missed a penalty in the resulting shoot-out; he was once again named Danish Player of the Year in 1985. However, the following season was not a success for Laudrup, who suffered multiple injuries. When Platini retired in 1987, Laudrup was expected to lead the team in his place, playing alongside newly bought Welsh forward Ian Rush. But Laudrup failed to live up to Platini's standards and did not score any goals, despite playing all 30 matches of the 1987–88 season.
Barcelona
After an unsuccessful season with Juventus, Laudrup decided it was time to leave, looking for a new experience after six years in Italy. In 1989, he joined Spanish club Barcelona on the premise that Dutch coach Johan Cruyff, his childhood role model, had been assembling a team that was striving for success. Immediately, Laudrup enjoyed major success under Cruyff's leadership, citing the Dutchman's philosophy and perception of the game as one of the main assets that helped foster his talent. He was one of the restricted three foreign players allowed in the team, alongside Dutch defender Ronald Koeman and Bulgarian striker Hristo Stoichkov, who were the pillars of the Barça "Dream Team", along with rising stars Pep Guardiola, José Mari Bakero, and Txiki Begiristain.
The Dream Team played attractive football that was comparable to the 1970s Ajax team, and won four consecutive La Liga championships from 1991 to 1994, as well as the 1991–92 European Cup, along with the 1992 UEFA Super Cup, 1989–90 Copa del Rey and 1991 and 1992 Supercopa de España titles. Laudrup was twice named the best player of the year in Spain during his Barcelona years. When Barça hired a fourth foreign star player, Brazilian striker Romário in 1993, it meant the four foreigners would rotate as the three foreign players allowed in each match, and when he was not selected for the 1994 European Cup final 0–4 loss to Milan (amid conflicts with Cruyff), his time at Barcelona was effectively over. After the match, Milan's manager Fabio Capello remarked: "Laudrup was the guy I feared but Cruyff left him out, and that was his mistake."
Laudrup's departure from Barcelona was a huge blow for the fans and his teammates alike. Pep Guardiola was reportedly so upset by the news that he cried and begged Laudrup to change his mind. Reflecting on his time at Barcelona, Laudrup commented, "I think we played some very good football, and I think most of all we demonstrated that even without getting the ten best players in the world, you can have the best team. Because everybody talked about Begiristain, Bakero, Guardiola, Stoichkov, and Koeman, but when we started none of us was a best player, then we became maybe the best team in the world, together with AC Milan in that period."
Real Madrid
In 1994, Laudrup completed a controversial move from Barça to Real Madrid after he fell out with Johan Cruyff. On this, Laudrup stated he did not have a hidden agenda. It was the year after the 1994 FIFA World Cup and according to him, because players usually suffer a drop in performance after such a major international tournament, he correctly predicted that Barcelona would not win major trophies the following season.
Despite widespread belief Laudrup joined arch-rivals Real Madrid in an attempt to "get back" at Cruyff, the decision was based on the fact Real Madrid had been struggling for a long period and were eager to return to supremacy, like Barcelona when he decided to join them. Laudrup said, "People say I wanted to go to Real Madrid just to get revenge. I say revenge from what? I've had a perfect time; five fantastic years here [at Barcelona]. I went to Madrid because they were so hungry to win, and they had four or five players who went to the World Cup. I said this would be perfect; new coach, new players, and hungry to win." On 5 November 1994, he assisted Raúl's first professional goal in a 4–2 win over Atlético Madrid
Laudrup went on to guide Real Madrid in a championship-winning season that would end the Barça stranglehold, making him the only player ever to win the Spanish league five times in a row playing for two different clubs. After the initial success at Real, a lacklustre season would be in store for the club. Despite only playing two seasons at Real Madrid, he was voted the 12th-best player in Real Madrid history in an internet survey by Spanish newspaper Marca when the club celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2002.The following season while playing for Real Madrid, he aided in the revenge beating Madrid gave Barça, the final score also ending 5–0. Daniel Storey wrote of Laudrup, "no other player is loved on both sides of the clásico divide quite like Laudrup" as he remains held in high regard by both Barça and Madrid fans. Following the match, Laudrup's former Barcelona manager Cruyff commented: "When Michael plays like a dream, a magic illusion, determined to show his new team his extreme abilities, no one in the world comes anywhere near his level."
Later career and retirement
In 1996, Laudrup left Real Madrid to play for Vissel Kobe in Japan. On 18 August 1996, he played his first match for Vissel Kobe and scored two goals in a 4–2 win against Brummell Sendai. He helped Vissel to promotion from the second-tier Japan Football League to the J1 League. He was registered as a player in Bosnian Premier League club Čelik Zenica in a controversial signing in which he did not play any games for Čelik, but was signed as a player. After the details were resolved, he ended his playing career in a championship winning season at Dutch side Ajax in 1998.
Following his retirement, Laudrup sometimes turned out to play for Lyngby's Old Boys team in his spare time.
International career
Laudrup was called up for the Denmark national team during Brøndby's debut season in the top-flight. On his 18th birthday on 15 June 1982, he became the then-second-youngest Danish national team player ever, following Harald Nielsen. Despite playing for relegation battlers Lazio, Laudrup starred for the Denmark national team at UEFA Euro 1984, playing all four of Denmark's matches.
Laudrup participated in the 1986 FIFA World Cup in Mexico, a performance which is best remembered for his exceptional solo dribble and goal in the 6–1 defeat of Uruguay. He was also a part of the disappointing Denmark squad at Euro 1988, though Laudrup experienced personal success, scoring one of Denmark's two goals.
Following three matches in the qualification campaign for Euro 1992, Laudrup opted to quit the national team in November 1990 (alongside his brother Brian Laudrup and Jan Mølby) following differences with coach Richard Møller Nielsen. The Danes originally failed to qualify but were later given Yugoslavia's place as Yugoslavia were disqualified due to war in their country. Notwithstanding their qualification, Laudrup rated Denmark's chances of success so low he stayed on holiday. However, Denmark caused one of the biggest upsets in football history by going on to win the tournament, beating holders the Netherlands in the semi-final and, in the final beating reigning world champions and favourites Germany, with a 2–0 win thanks to goals from John Jensen and Kim Vilfort.
Laudrup returned to Nielsen's Danish squad in August 1993, but saw Spain and the Republic of Ireland qualify for the 1994 World Cup ahead of Denmark. He scored a goal in the 2–0 victory against Argentina, as Denmark won the 1995 Intercontinental Cup. He also scored four goals in ten matches as Denmark qualified for Euro 1996.
Laudrup's last matches for Denmark came at the 1998 World Cup, when he captained the nation to the quarter-final. Laudrup made his 100th appearance for Denmark in the team's opening game of the tournament, a 1–0 defeat of Saudi Arabia in Lens. Denmark was defeated 2–3 by Brazil in the quarter-finals, and both Michael and Brian Laudrup announced their international retirement following the elimination. Both brothers ended their international careers on a high note as both Michael and Brian were named in FIFA's All-Star Team.
Player profile
Style of play
A quick, intelligent and talented midfielder, known for his pace on the ball, Laudrup is regarded as one of the most effective and versatile attacking midfielders, as well as one of the most skilful and elegant players in the history of the game. Although primarily an offensive playmaker, he was capable of playing in several positions in or behind the front-line, and was even deployed as a winger, as a central midfielder or deep-lying playmaker, or as a second striker on occasion, in particular in his youth, or even as a forward or striker on rarer instances; he was also used as a centre-forward on occasion under his Barcelona manager Johan Cruyff, a role which was similar to that of the modern false 9 role. Laudrup is considered by many in the sport as one of the best passers of all time, and as one of the most technically accomplished players ever.
Regarding Laudrup's vision and passing ability, his brother Brian stated in 2008: "My brother started as an attacker but became an elegant attacking midfielder, perhaps the most complete there has ever been. His vision, speed of thought and passing were on a different level; he always knew what was going to happen before anybody else did. If anyone had a 'football brain', it was him." Despite being primarily a creative team player, he also possessed an accurate shot, and was capable of scoring goals as well as creating them.
Nicknamed "The Prince of Denmark," throughout his career, Laudrup was acclaimed for his technique, balance, elegance, ball control, and dribbling ability, as well as his vision, ability to read the game, and range of passing, including deep passes, through balls, and crosses, which made him an excellent assist provider. In regard to his vision, Jorge Valdano, the Argentinian coach of Laudrup in Real Madrid, said, "[H]e has eyes everywhere." His trademark move – looking one way and passing the other – fooled countless opponents during his career.
The Laudrup dribble, a signature feint also known as the croqueta, was perhaps the best-known part of his game, and involved him quickly moving the ball from one foot to the other away from the defender, a move which was later also popularised by later Barcelona midfielder Andrés Iniesta. Laudrup's ball skills and feints were combined with creativity, which he used to get past defenders in one on one situations. This led to the expression "Made in Laudrup" being coined in the Spanish football media, which was widely used in Spain to describe his trademark assists, in particular his lobbed passes, as well as his unique play. According to a 2018 article by Josh Butler of The Athletic and These Football Times, several of Laudrup's teammates said of his creative style of play: "Just run, he will always find a way of passing you the ball."
Reception
Throughout his career, Laudrup was often ranked among the best players in the world, with the French three-time European footballer of the year award winner Michel Platini describing him as one of the most talented players ever, only lamenting his lack of selfishness causing him to score too few goals. In a 2006 interview, Laudrup's Real Madrid teammate Raúl called him the best player he had ever played with, a view echoed by his Barcelona teammate Romário, who opined that he was able to create and score goals almost at will, and ranked him the fourth-best player in the history of the game (behind Pelé, Diego Maradona and himself). Luís Figo instead labelled Laudrup as arguably the best opponent he had ever faced. Ronald Koeman rated Laudrup as "possibly the most skillful and elegant player [he] ever played with," adding: "Few could dribble like he could. He could sense when a game was ready to be seized and transformed by a moment of individual brilliance." Roberto Galia stated in 2008: "I have played against Maradona, Platini and Baggio. But the player I saw do the most indescribable things was Michael Laudrup." Former teammate Guillermo Amor said: "I have never seen a better player in one-on-ones. He was our special player." Diego Maradona stated that "Michael is one of the greatest. If you ask if there is a new Maradona, you also have to ask if there is a new Laudrup. The answer is no."
Thierry Henry named Laudrup as the best player he had never played with, saying he did not know any better passer than him and "the world of football did not give him the credit that guy [Laudrup] deserved." John Toshack ranked Laudrup as "the best player of his generation," likening him to Cruyff both as a player and a manager, a view shared by Franz Beckenbauer, who dubbed Laudrup the best player of the 90s. Javier Clemente once stated: "To me, Michael Laudrup is the most genius player the world has ever seen. He will always be my numero uno. Always." José Mari Bakero instead remarked: "No one has given the club [Barcelona] as much inspiration as Michael. We all look up to him. It is a privilege to have your day enriched by a genius." In 2012, Ian Rush described him as "an incredible player," who "probably had the most individual skill" he had ever seen. Daniel Storey of Planet Football stated in 2020 that he believed that Laudrup was one of the most underrated players of the previous 30 years, a view shared by Albert Ferrer, who stated in 2009: "Few people made me enjoy the game as much as Michael. Maybe he didn't get the media recognition he deserved, but he was so classy and a real thinker. A master of the blind pass and impossible through-balls and I will never forget his 'spoon' pass in a game against Osasuna. He lifted the ball right over the defence and Romario touched it in first time."
At Barcelona, Laudrup played alongside Hristo Stoichkov, who scored many goals from Laudrup's passes. Regarding Laudrup's ability to create chances for his teammates, he commented in his 2008 autobiography: "From more than hundred goals that I scored I'm sure that over 50 were assisted by Michael. To play with him was extremely easy. We found each other by intuition on the field and found common football language. Look at Ivan Zamorano. Laudrup went there (Real) and Zamorano is a goalscorer. Sometimes I envy Ivan for the passes he receives. Passes on foot after you accelerated. Few people understand football like the Danish player. He can only be compared with Maradona, Schuster or Roberto Baggio. They make things easy and find the right solutions. For them [it] is simple, for the opponent – unthinkable. Phenomenal! His only problem is his character. He is emotional and terribly reserved. This affects him a lot, because he takes everything personally – no matter if someone tells him something or decision that he does not agree. His relations with Cruyff were delicate because he couldn't take the critics. I listen to him but I don't care that much. For Michael this was fatal. He couldn't take it anymore so he left without a word." That same year, in an interview with FourFourTwo magazine, Stoichkov included Laudrup in his "Perfect XI," and labelled him as: "One of the best European players I've ever seen," and as a player who was "up there with the greats." He went on to describe him as: "An elegant, old-fashioned playmaker," who "did things few other footballers could do." In 2010, he instead said that "Laudrup was the greatest."
Another striker who benefitted from Laudrup's playmaking abilities was Real Madrid teammate Iván Zamorano, who called Laudrup "El Genio" ("The Genius," in Spanish) during Laudrup's time in the Spanish capital. Zamorano was going through a hard spell in Madrid, but when Laudrup arrived to assist his goals, Zamorano immediately became the top goalscorer of La Liga, winning the pichichi trophy; Zamorano himself credited Laudrup for his role in his increased goalscoring output, describing him as a "genius," while also commenting: "...The reason why I make so many goals is Laudrup." He also stated: "Michael was a magician and one of the greatest players ever. He was amazing in one-on-ones too. I always say that Laudrup had three eyes, not two like everyone else. As a forward, I had to be aware all the time, because he could make you a chance out of nothing and you had to be prepared for that moment." Andrés Iniesta, who became known for using Laudrup's signature dribbling move – the croqueta – rated Laudrup as the greatest player of all time.
Throughout his career, his number of assists were almost always the highest of his team. However, despite his talent and reputation as one of the most technically gifted and creative players of his generation, certain players, pundits and managers have questioned Laudrup's work rate, mentality, determination, and consistency throughout his career at times, in particular in his early career. His former Juventus teammate and admirer Michel Platini, for example, once said, "[Laudrup]'s the greatest player in the world, in training," also describing him as "one of the biggest talents ever," while also lamenting that he "never used his talent to its fullest during matches." His former Barcelona manager Johan Cruyff described him as "One of the most difficult players [he had] worked with," adding: "When he gives 80–90% he is still by far the best, but I want 100%, and he rarely does that." In 1998, he stated: "Had Michael been born in a poor ghetto in Brazil or Argentina with the ball being his only way out of poverty he would today be recognised as the biggest genius of the game ever. He had all the abilities to reach it but lacked this ghetto-instinct, which could have driven him there." At Swansea in 2012, Alan Tate commented: "He is still the best player in training at [age] 48 years." This was echoed by Swansea player Danny Graham: "Laudrup was the best player in training by a mile. It was unreal." In addition to his playing ability, Laudrup was known for his good conduct on the pitch and he never received a red card in his career.
Managerial career
Early years
After his playing career ended with Ajax, Laudrup became a coach at age 36 when he started serving as an assistant coach for the Denmark national team head coach Morten Olsen in 2000. The national team would play a 4–2–3–1 formation, depending on two fast wingers and with the aim to dominate games with a short-passing possession game. Together, they led Denmark to the knock-out stage of the 2002 World Cup.
Brøndby
After his success as Denmark assistant manager, Laudrup signed on as manager for Danish Superliga club Brøndby. As his assistant coach, he paired up with former Danish championship winning manager John Jensen, who had played alongside him in the Denmark national team. At the start of his reign, he proclaimed a tactical scheme close to that which Olsen and he had coached at the national team. He renovated the Brøndby team by letting a large contingent of older and experienced players leave, in favour of several new offensive players, and he also gave the chance to young talents from the club's youth scheme.
To ensure the defensive strength of the team, Laudrup signed proven national team player Morten Wieghorst. He began his reign as Brøndby manager by winning his first trophy in his managerial career, the 2002 Danish Supercup. In his first season as head coach, he guided the team to win the Danish Cup, after Brøndby beat Midtjylland 3–0 in the final and runners-up in the Danish Superliga. Laudrup's success led him to being voted and awarded the Danish Manager of the Year.
In the following season, he again finished the season runners-up to first place Copenhagen by just one point. However, he would not be denied in the 2004–05 season, where he finally led the team to the Danish Superliga title. In the same season, he also completed The Double after he won his second Danish Cup in four seasons. This saw him being given his second Danish Manager of the Year award. After finishing runners-up in the 2005–06 Danish Superliga, Laudrup announced that he, along with assistant Faxe Jensen, could not come to an agreement for a one-year contract extension that was offered by the club. The pair, after winning four trophies in four seasons, subsequently left Brøndby in June 2006.
Laudrup was associated with several new jobs, including becoming manager of former club Real Madrid and that he would replace Lars Lagerbäck as head coach of the Sweden national team.
In 2007, Brøndby decided to name a new lounge at the stadium "The Michael Laudrup Lounge", with Laudrup's approval. His success led him to being voted and awarded the Danish Manager of the Year.
Getafe
On 21 June 2007, Laudrup was linked to a move to Madrid-based La Liga club Getafe by sports newspaper Marca. This was confirmed on 9 July 2007. During his stay in Getafe, the club reached the final of the Copa del Rey, losing to Valencia, and the quarter-finals of the UEFA Cup, losing in extra time to Bayern Munich. During his tenure as successor to Bernd Schuster, he brought in a new brand of exciting and free-flowing attacking football to the club, bringing back memories of Laudrup as a player. His team, which was not one of the established powers in Spanish football, enjoyed comparative success. However, he performed only one season as manager, resigning in May 2008.
After Laudrup announced his departure from Getafe, he was linked with jobs at Barcelona, Valencia, Benfica, Chelsea, Blackburn Rovers, Panathinaikos, CSKA Moscow and West Ham United. He almost got the job at Panathinaikos, but according to Danish media, he wanted an option to allow him to leave if he received an offer from a Spanish club. This request was not accepted by the Greeks, who chose to hire Henk ten Cate instead.
Spartak Moscow
On 12 September 2008, it was officially announced that Laudrup had signed a one-and-a-half-year contract to manage Spartak Moscow, replacing Stanislav Cherchesov following his dismissal after a string of poor results. However, Laudrup started on a poor note, winning just one of his first four league matches. He was subsequently sacked on 15 April 2009, just seven months on the job, in the wake of Spartak's quarter-final 3–0 loss to Dynamo Moscow in the Russian Cup. The official statement from Spartak read, "From this point onwards, head coach Michael Laudrup has been relieved of his responsibilities because of unsatisfactory results."
On 22 October 2009, Spanish media announced Laudrup would be appointed as new manager of Spanish side Atlético Madrid, replacing the short and unsuccessful run of Abel Resino, following Atlético's 4–0 UEFA Champions League group stage defeat to Chelsea. However, Laudrup and Atlético were not able to agree on terms and the deal fell apart. The day after, on 23 October, Resino was sacked and Quique Sánchez Flores was appointed as coach as the side's second-choice.
Mallorca
In July 2010, Laudrup was appointed manager of Mallorca on a contract lasting until the end of June 2012. In his first season, he kept the struggling Mallorca side from relegation, which was suffering from losing many first team players and who was ejected from the UEFA Europa League due to its poor financial situation. At the beginning of the 2011–12 season, on 27 September 2011, Laudrup resigned as manager following the firing of his assistant, Erik Larsen. Laudrup cited great frustration with Lorenzo Serra Ferrer, the club's director of football, leading to a bad work climate as the main reason for his resignation.
Swansea City
On 15 June 2012, Laudrup was appointed manager of Swansea City on a two-year contract, becoming the first Dane to manage in the Premier League. He made several new signings after arriving at Liberty Stadium, including Michu, Chico Flores, Pablo Hernández, Jonathan de Guzmán and Ki Sung-yueng. His first competitive match as Swansea manager came as an impressive 0–5 away win at Loftus Road against Queens Park Rangers.
At Swansea, Alan Tate said that Laudrup was considered to be the best player in training, despite being 48 years old. He has been commended for his choice of signings, most notably with Michu, who scored 22 goals in 2012 for Swansea after he signed him for a bargain €2.5 million from Rayo Vallecano. On 23 January 2013, he led Swansea into their first ever major cup final after defeating reigning European champions Chelsea 2–0 on aggregate over two legs in the League Cup semi-finals.
On 7 February 2013, Laudrup appointed former Danish international midfielder Morten Wieghorst as his assistant after previously signing him as a player when Laudrup was managing Brøndby. Laudrup would later say he "certainly" believes Wieghorst "can be manager" of Swansea, as "he has experience from Scottish football and is familiar with English football". On 24 February, Laudrup said he had no "ambition to become the manager" of a big club, because he could not "have done everything for 10 years" in management and then be fired "after nine months" for not winning any trophies. He also said it gave him "much more pleasure to see how well" he could do where he did not "have to win all the time".
On 24 February 2013, Laudrup won his first trophy with Swansea after his side beat Bradford City 5–0 to win the Football League Cup at Wembley. This was also Swansea's first major trophy in English football in the club's history.
Following Swansea's 1–0 win over Newcastle United on 2 March 2013 the club moved into eighth position in the top-half of the Premier League table, seemingly safe from relegation with 40 points and ten games left; Laudrup said he wanted Swansea to finish eighth, stating that "coming eighth [will be] like winning the league" for the club because he felt "the first seven spots" were already taken by Manchester United, Manchester City, Chelsea, Tottenham Hotspur, Arsenal, Liverpool and Everton. On 3 March, though he had said that his "intention" was "to stay" in south Wales for the next year, Swansea chairman Huw Jenkins said that the club were in the "process of looking for the next manager" of the club in case Laudrup did choose to leave the club.
On 8 March 2013, Laudrup signed a new contract with Swansea, keeping him at the club until 2015. Reports indicated that he agreed to a contract with a release clause in the region of £5 million, much like the release clause Brendan Rodgers agreed to when he signed a contract extension at the Liberty Stadium four months prior to joining Liverpool. On 10 May, however, he confirmed that his "intention" was to stay at Swansea "next season," saying that reports he wanted to leave Wales was "pure speculation."
On 4 February 2014, Laudrup was sacked by Swansea following a poor run of form which left the club two points clear of relegation. At the time of the decision, the team had lost six out of their last eight league games.
Lekhwiya
On 30 June 2014, Laudrup became the new manager of Qatar Stars League champions Lekhwiya after signing a one-year deal. He guided the Lekhwiya to a club-record Qatar Stars League and a Crown Prince Cup double in his first season. The club also qualified for the quarter-finals of the 2015 AFC Champions League during his reign. On 17 June 2015, Laudrup announced that he would not extend his contract, departing the club.
Al Rayyan
On 3 October 2016, Laudrup was unveiled as the new manager of Al Rayyan on a two-year contract, replacing Jorge Fossati. His first match in charge was on 15 October 2016, when Al Rayyan faced Al Sailiya in an away match in the league, with the match ending in a 1–1 draw.
Style of management and tactics
As assistant manager to Morten Olsen, the Denmark national team employed a 4–2–3–1 system with pacey wingers playing the pivotal role in attack. Laudrup learnt from Olsen and used the same tactical style with Brøndby, with the team becoming more attacking and focused on a short passing style. He continued to employ a similar tactical style when he joined Getafe, ushering a new brand of exciting and free-flowing attacking football to help the club to the Copa del Rey final. However, at Spartak Moscow, he could not adapt his formation and tactics to the Russian game, with the club unable to score enough goals per match.
As Mallorca manager, Laudrup inspired a team that lost a number of key players from relegation by playing an offensive game. In 2012, he joined Swansea City as manager, replacing Brendan Rodgers. Under Rodgers, Swansea were known to play a 4–3–3 approach with a lot of focus on passing, where the full-backs pushed up when in possession and the outfield players played a high tempo pressing game. Under Laudrup, the team began employing a 4–2–3–1 formation, becoming more attacking while retaining the passing and pressing game. He also signed a number of new players, primarily from La Liga, trying to bring the attacking style from Spain to Wales, which saw more goals scored. He said, "You can get a lot of quality for a reasonable amount in Spain right now."
Laudrup earned plaudits for maintaining their flowing, attacking brand of football and attractive, passing style of play throughout the season, which saw his side win the League Cup, after beating Bradford City a record 5–0 in the final. "You can't ask players to do things that Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi are doing, but you can ask the easy things," he said. "Sometimes the easiest things in football, a simple pass five or eight yards, can be the most effective. That, everybody can learn."
Outside of football
Personal life
Michael Laudrup is part of a family with three generations of footballers. His uncle was former Brøndby and Aberdeen manager Ebbe Skovdahl. He is the son of former Danish national team player Finn Laudrup. From his marriage with his first wife, Tina Thunø, Laudrup has a son, Mads. Mads has been the team captain of various Danish youth national teams since January 2005. Today, he is married with Siw Retz Laudrup, with whom he has two children, Andreas and Rebecca. Andreas was selected a part of the under-16 national team in March 2006.
Michael Laudrup has a younger brother, Brian Laudrup, who was also a footballer. Brian Laudrup is the record holder of Danish player of the year awards with four, and was rated by FIFA as the fifth-best player in the world in 1992. Brian Laudrup was in the Euro 1992 Team of the Tournament and World Cup 98 Team of the Tournament. Brian was also known for his part in the Rangers squad which won nine consecutive titles in the 1990s. Brian was a part of the trophy-winning Danish national team at UEFA Euro 1992, but Michael did not play in that championship due to differences with the national team coach Richard Møller Nielsen and because he thought that the barring of Yugoslavia for political, rather than football, reasons was not just. In 2004, both the Laudrup brothers were named in the FIFA 100, a list of the 125 greatest living footballers chosen by Pelé as part of the celebration of FIFA's 100th anniversary.
Politics and business
Alongside his professional football career, Laudrup began importing Spanish wine to Denmark starting in 1993. Initially, the wine import was sort of a hobby, but business grew rapidly and today his company Laudrup Vin og Gastronomi has over ten employees, runs a Wine Academy and imports wines from all over the world.
In 2004, Michael Laudrup was one of the founders of CEPOS, a Danish classical liberal/free-market conservative think-tank.
Career statistics
Club
International
Scores and results list Denmark's goal tally first, score column indicates score after each Laudrup goal.
Managerial statistics
Honours
Player
Juventus
Serie A: 1985–86
Intercontinental Cup: 1985
Barcelona
La Liga: 1990–91, 1991–92, 1992–93, 1993–94
Copa del Rey: 1989–90
Supercopa de España: 1991, 1992
European Cup: 1991–92
UEFA Super Cup: 1992
Real Madrid
La Liga: 1994–95
Ajax
Eredivisie: 1997–98
KNVB Cup: 1997–98
Denmark
FIFA Confederations Cup: 1995
Individual
Danish Player of the Year (2): 1982, 1985
Don Balón Award – La Liga Best Foreign Player of the Year: 1991–92
ESM Team of the Year: 1994–95
FIFA XI (Reserve): 1996
FIFA World Cup All-Star Team: 1998
Best Foreign Player in Spanish Football in the last 25 years: 1974–1999
UEFA Golden Player (Greatest Danish Footballer of the last 50 Years): 2003
FIFA 100
Denmark's Best Player of All Time: 2006
Scandinavia Best Player Ever: 2015
Danish Football Hall of Fame
World Soccer The Greatest Players of the 20th century: The 100 Greatest Footballers of All Time
Manager
Brøndby
Danish Superliga: 2004–05
Danish Cup: 2002–03, 2004–05
Danish League Cup: 2005
Danish Supercup: 2002
Swansea City
Football League Cup: 2012–13
Lekhwiya
Qatar Stars League: 2014–15
Crown Prince Cup: 2014–15
Individual
Danish Manager of the Year: 2002–03, 2004–05
Qatar Stars League Manager of the Month: August 2014, December 2014
Orders
Order of the Dannebrog: 2000
Films
Jørgen Leth, "Michael Laudrup – en fodboldspiller", Denmark, 1993
References
Sources
Further reading
Bruno Bernardi, "Michael Laudrup", Italy, 1986
Flemming Nielsen and Vagn Nielsen, "Fodboldkunstneren Michael Laudrup : rundt om en stjerne", Denmark, 1986
Michael Laudrup, "Mod nye mål", Denmark, 1989,
External links
1964 births
Living people
Footballers from Frederiksberg
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SS Lazio players
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Michael
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf%20H%C3%B6ss
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Rudolf Höss
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{{Infobox criminal
| name = Rudolf Höss
| birth_name = Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Höß
| birth_date =
| death_date =
| birth_place = Baden-Baden, Grand Duchy of Baden, German Empire
| death_place = Auschwitz, Oświęcim, Polish People's Republic
| image = Rudolf Hoess, Auschwitz. Album Höcker (cropped)(b).jpg
| caption = Höss at Auschwitz, 1944
| trial = Supreme National Tribunal
| party = Nazi Party #3240 (joined 1922)SS #193616 (joined 1934)
| conviction_penalty = Death
| spouse =
| children = 5
| module = {{Infobox military person |embed=yes|embed_title=SS service
|branch=Death's Head UnitsWaffen-SS
|serviceyears=1934–1945
|rank=SS-lieutenant colonel (Obersturmbannführer) (1942)
|unit=
|commands=* Block Leader and Report Leader in Dachau (November 1934)
adjutant to the comandant (August 1938) and commander of the detention camp (December 1939) in Sachsenhausen
Commandant in Auschwitz (30 April 1940)
Head of office D I in the department D (Camps inspectorate) of SS-WVHA (1 December 1943)
Chief Commandant (Standortältester) in Auschwitz ("Operation Höss" – mass murder of Hungarian jews)(8 May – 29 July 1944)
Coordinator of killing operation by gassing in Ravensbrück (November 1944)
}}
| criminal_status = Executed
| conviction = Crimes against humanity
| death_cause = Execution by hanging
}}Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Höss (also Höß, Hoeß, or Hoess; ; 25 November 1901 – 16 April 1947) was a German SS officer during the Nazi era who, after the defeat of Nazi Germany, was convicted for war crimes. Höss was the longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp (from 4 May 1940 to November 1943, and again from 8 May 1944 to 18 January 1945). He tested and implemented means to accelerate Hitler's order to systematically exterminate the Jewish population of Nazi-occupied Europe, known as the Final Solution. On the initiative of one of his subordinates, Karl Fritzsch, Höss introduced the pesticide Zyklon B to be used in gas chambers, where more than a million people were killed.
Höss was hanged in 1947 following a trial before the Polish Supreme National Tribunal. During his imprisonment, at the request of the Polish authorities, he wrote his memoirs, released in English under the title Commandant of Auschwitz: The Autobiography of Rudolf Hoess.
Upbringing
Höss was born in Baden-Baden into a strict Catholic family. He lived with his mother Lina (née Speck) and father Franz Xaver Höss. Höss was the eldest of three children and the only son. He was baptized Rudolf Franz Ferdinand on 11 December 1901. He was a lonely child with no companions of his own age until he entered elementary school; all of his associations were with adults. He claimed in his autobiography that he was briefly abducted by Romanis in his youth. His father, a former army officer who served in German East Africa, ran a tea and coffee business. He brought his son up on strict religious principles and with military discipline, having decided that he would enter the priesthood. Höss grew up with an almost fanatical belief in the central role of duty in a moral life. During his early years, there was a constant emphasis on sin, guilt, and the need to do penance.
Youth and World War I
When World War I began, Höss served briefly in a military hospital and then, at age 14, was admitted to his father's and grandfather's old regiment, the German Army's 21st Regiment of Dragoons. Aged 15, he fought with the Ottoman Sixth Army at Baghdad, at Kut-el-Amara, and in Palestine. Höss was present at the right time and place to have been a witness to the Armenian genocide, an event which is not mentioned in his memoirs. While stationed in Turkey, he rose to the rank of (sergeant-in-chief) and at 17 was the youngest non-commissioned officer in the army. Wounded three times and a victim of malaria, he was awarded the Iron Crescent, the Iron Cross first and second class and other decorations. Höss also briefly commanded a cavalry unit. When the news of the armistice reached Damascus, where he was at that time, he and a few others decided not to wait for Allied forces to capture them as prisoners of war, but instead to try to ride all the way back home. This involved traversing the enemy territory of Romania, but they eventually made it back home to Bavaria.
Joining the Nazi Party
After the Armistice of 11 November 1918, Höss completed his secondary education and soon joined some of the emerging nationalist paramilitary groups, first the East Prussian Volunteer Corps, and then the Freikorps "Rossbach" in the Baltic area, Silesia and the Ruhr. Höss participated in the armed terror attacks on Polish people during the Silesian uprisings against the Germans, and on French nationals during the French Occupation of the Ruhr. After hearing a speech by Adolf Hitler in Munich, he joined the Nazi Party in 1922 (member number 3240) and renounced affiliation with the Catholic Church.
On 31 May 1923, in Mecklenburg, Höss and members of the Freikorps attacked and beat to death local schoolteacher Walther Kadow on the wishes of farm supervisor Martin Bormann, who later became Hitler's private secretary. Kadow was believed to have tipped off the French occupational authorities that Freikorps paramilitary soldier Albert Leo Schlageter was carrying out sabotage operations against French supply lines. Schlageter was arrested and executed on 26 May 1923; soon afterwards Höss and several accomplices, including Bormann, took their revenge on Kadow. In 1923, after one of the killers confessed to a local newspaper, Höss was arrested and tried as the ringleader. Although he later claimed that another man was actually in charge, Höss accepted the blame as the group's leader. He was convicted and sentenced (on 15 or 17 March 1924) to ten years in prison, while Bormann received a one-year sentence.
Höss was released from prison in July 1928 as part of a general amnesty and joined the Artaman League, an anti-urbanization movement, or back-to-the-land movement, that promoted a farm-based lifestyle. On 17 August 1929, he married Hedwig Hensel (3 March 1908 – 15 September 1989), whom he met in the Artaman League. Between 1930 and 1943 they had five children: two sons (Klaus and Hans-Jürgen) and three daughters (Heidetraut, Inge-Brigitt, and Annegret). Heidetraut, Höss's eldest daughter, was born in 1932; Inge-Brigitt was born on a farm in northern Germany in 1933; and Annegret, the youngest, was born in Auschwitz in November 1943."Hitler's Children", BBC documentary It was during this time that he became acquainted with Heinrich Himmler.
SS career
On 1 April 1934 Höss joined the SS, on Himmler's effective call-to-action, and in the same year moved to the Death's Head Units. Höss was assigned to the Dachau concentration camp in December 1934, where he held the post of Block leader. His mentor at Dachau was the then SS-brigadier general Theodor Eicke, the reorganizer of Nazi concentration camp system. In 1938, Höss was promoted to SS-captain and was made adjutant to Hermann Baranowski in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. There he led the firing squad that, on Himmler's orders on 15 September 1939, killed August Dickman, a Jehovah's Witness who was the first conscientious objector to be executed after the start of the War. Höss fired the finishing shot from his pistol. He joined the Waffen-SS in 1939 after the invasion of Poland. Höss excelled in that capacity, and was recommended by his superiors for further responsibility and promotion. By the end of his tour of duty there, he was serving as administrator of prisoners' property. On 18 January 1940, as head of the protective custody camp at Sachsenhausen, Höss ordered all prisoners not assigned to work details to stand outside in frigid conditions reaching -26 Celsius. Most of the inmates had no coats or gloves. When block elders dragged some of the frozen inmates to the infirmary, Höss ordered the infirmary doors to be closed. During the day, 78 inmates died; another 67 died that night.
Auschwitz command
Höss was dispatched to evaluate the feasibility of establishing a concentration camp in western Poland, a territory Germany had incorporated into the province of Upper Silesia. His favorable report led to the creation of Auschwitz and his appointment as its commandant. The camp was built around an old Austro-Hungarian (and later Polish) army barracks near the town of Oświęcim; its German name was Auschwitz. Höss commanded the camp for three and a half years, during which he expanded the original facility into a sprawling complex known as Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Höss had been ordered "to create a transition camp for ten thousand prisoners from the existing complex of well-preserved buildings," and he went to Auschwitz determined "to do things differently" and develop a more efficient camp than those at Dachau and Sachsenhausen, where he had previously served. Höss lived at Auschwitz in a villa with his wife and five children.
The earliest inmates at Auschwitz were Soviet prisoners-of-war and Polish prisoners, including peasants and intellectuals. Some 700 arrived in June 1940, and were told they would not survive more than three months. At its peak, Auschwitz comprised three separate facilities: Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II-Birkenau and Auschwitz III-Monowitz. These included many satellite sub-camps, and the entire camp was built on about that had been cleared of all inhabitants. Auschwitz I was the administrative centre for the complex; Auschwitz II Birkenau was the extermination camp where most of the murders were committed; and Auschwitz III Monowitz was the slave-labour camp for I.G. Farbenindustrie AG, and later other German industries. The main purpose of Monowitz was the production of buna, a form of synthetic rubber.
Most infamous at Auschwitz I, the original camp, was Block 11 and the courtyard between Blocks 10 and 11. High stone walls and a massive wooden gate shielded Nazi brutality from observers. A condemned prisoner was led from Block 11, naked and bound, to the Death Wall at the back of the courtyard. A member of the Political Department then shot the prisoner in the back of the head with a small caliber pistol to minimize noise. As punishment, Höss also employed standing cells in Block 11. On multiple occasions, he condemned ten random prisoners to death by starvation in a Block 11 cell in retaliation for the escape of one inmate.
Mass murder
In June 1941, according to Höss's trial testimony, he was summoned to Berlin for a meeting with Himmler "to receive personal orders". Himmler told Höss that Hitler had given the order for the "Final Solution". According to Höss, Himmler had selected Auschwitz for the extermination of Europe's Jews "on account of its easy access by rail and also because the extensive site offered space for measures ensuring isolation". Himmler described the project as a "secret Reich matter" and told Höss not to speak about it with SS-Gruppenführer Richard Glücks, head of the Nazi camp system run by the Death's Head Unit. Höss said that "no one was allowed to speak about these matters with any person and that everyone promised upon his life to keep the utmost secrecy". He told his wife about the camp's purpose only at the end of 1942, since she already knew about it from Fritz Bracht. Himmler told Höss that he would be receiving all operational orders from Adolf Eichmann, who arrived at the camp four weeks later.
Höss began testing and perfecting techniques of mass murder on 3 September 1941. His experiments led to Auschwitz becoming the most efficiently murderous instrument of the Final Solution and the Holocaust's most potent symbol. According to Höss, during standard camp operations, two or three trains carrying 2,000 prisoners each would arrive daily for four to six weeks. The prisoners were unloaded in the Birkenau camp and subjected to "selection", usually by a member of the SS medical staff."The unloading ramps and selections" Auschwitz.org Men were separated from women. Only those deemed suitable for Nazi slave labor would be allowed to live. The elderly, infirm, children, and mothers with children were sent directly to the gas chambers. Those found fit for labor were marched to barracks in either Birkenau or one of the Auschwitz camps, stripped naked, shorn of all hair, sprayed with disinfectant, and given a tattoo. At first, small gassing bunkers were located deep in the woods to avoid detection. Later, four large gas chambers and crematoria were constructed in Birkenau to make the killing process more efficient, and to handle the sheer volume of victims.
Höss experimented with various gassing methods. According to Eichmann's trial testimony in 1961, Höss told him that he used cotton filters soaked in sulfuric acid for early killings. Höss later introduced hydrogen cyanide (prussic acid), produced from the pesticide Zyklon B, to the process of extermination, after his deputy Karl Fritzsch had tested it on a group of Russian prisoners in 1941. With Zyklon B, he said that it took 3–15 minutes for the victims to die and that "we knew when the people were dead because they stopped screaming." In an interview at Nuremberg after the war, Höss commented that, after observing the prisoners die by Zyklon B, " ...this gassing set my mind at rest for the mass extermination of the Jews was to start soon."
In 1942, Höss had sexual relations with a political prisoner at Auschwitz named Eleonore Hodys (or Nora Mattaliano-Hodys). The woman became pregnant, and was imprisoned in a standing-only arrest cell. Released from the arrest, she had an abortion in a camp hospital in 1943 and, according to her later testimony, just barely evaded being selected to be killed. These events may have led to Höss's recall from the Auschwitz command in 1943. SS judge Georg Konrad Morgen and his assistant Wiebeck investigated the case in 1944, interviewed Hodys and Höss and intended to proceed against Höss, but the case was dismissed. Morgen, Wiebeck and Hodys gave testimony after the war.
After being replaced as the Auschwitz commander by Arthur Liebehenschel, on 10 November 1943, Höss assumed Liebehenschel's former position as the head of Amt D I in Amtsgruppe D of the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office (WVHA); he also was appointed deputy of the inspector of the concentration camps under Richard Glücks.
Operation Höss
On 8 May 1944, Höss returned to Auschwitz to supervise Operation Höss, in which 430,000 Hungarian Jews were transported to the camp and killed in 56 days. Even Höss' expanded facility could not handle the huge number of victims' corpses, and the camp staff were obliged to dispose of thousands of bodies by burning them in open pits. In May and June alone, almost 10,000 Jews were being gassed per day. Because the number of people exceeded the capacity of the gas chambers and crematoria, mass pit executions were established. Jews were forced to undress then led to a hidden fire pit by Sonderkommando where they were shot by the SS, then thrown into the flames.
Ravensbrück
Höss's final posting was at Ravensbrück concentration camp. He moved there in November 1944 with his family who lived close by. After the completion of the gas chamber, Höss coordinated the operations of killing by gassing, with a death toll of more than 2,000 female prisoners.
Arrest, trial, and execution
In the last days of the war, Himmler advised Höss to disguise himself as a member of the Kriegsmarine. Adopting the pseudonym "Franz Lang" and working as a gardener, Höss lived in Gottrupel, Schleswig-Holstein with his family and evaded arrest for nearly a year. In 1946, Hanns Alexander, a German Jew who had fled to England in 1936 and became a Nazi hunter working for the British government's "No. 1 War Crimes Investigation Team", managed to discover Höss's location. Alexander, who was then a captain in the Royal Pioneer Corps, travelled to Höss's residence with a group of British soldiers, many of whom were also Jewish. Alexander's men unsuccessfully interrogated Höss's daughter Brigitte for information; according to Brigitte, the soldiers subsequently started to beat her brother Klaus, leading to Höss's wife to give up his location. According to Alexander, Höss attempted to bite into a cyanide pill once he was discovered by the soldiers. He initially denied his identity, "insisting he was a lowly gardener, but Alexander saw his wedding ring and ordered Höss to take it off, threatening to cut off his finger if he did not. Höss' name was inscribed inside. The soldiers accompanying Alexander began to beat Höss with axe handles. After a few moments and a minor internal debate, Alexander pulled them off."
Rudolf Höss testified at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg on 15 April 1946, where he gave a detailed accounting of his crimes. He was called as a defense witness by Ernst Kaltenbrunner's lawyer, Kurt Kauffman. The transcript of Höss' testimony was later entered as evidence during the 4th Nuremberg Military Tribunal known as the Pohl Trial, named for principal defendant Oswald Pohl. Affidavits that Rudolf Höss made while imprisoned in Nuremberg were also used at the Pohl and IG Farben trials.
In his affidavit made at Nuremberg on 5 April 1946, Höss stated:
When accused of murdering three and a half million people, Höss replied, "No. Only two and one half million—the rest died from disease and starvation."
On 25 May 1946, he was handed over to Polish authorities and the Supreme National Tribunal in Poland tried him for murder. In his essay on the Final Solution in Auschwitz, which he wrote in Kraków, he revised the previously given death toll:
In his memoir, he also revealed his mistreatment at the hands of his British captors:
His trial lasted from 11 to 29 March 1947. Höss was sentenced to death by hanging on 2 April 1947. The sentence was carried out on 16 April next to the crematorium of the former Auschwitz I concentration camp. He was hanged on a short-drop gallows constructed specifically for that purpose, at the location of the camp's Gestapo. The message on the board that marks the site reads:
Höss wrote his autobiography while awaiting execution; it was published first in a Polish translation in 1951 and then in the original German in 1956, edited by Martin Broszat. Later it appeared in various English editions (see Bibliography). It consists of two parts, one about his own life and the second about other SS men with whom he had become acquainted, mainly Heinrich Himmler and Theodor Eicke, among several others. Höss blamed his subordinates and Kapos, prisoner functionaries, for the mistreatment of prisoners. He claimed that, despite his best efforts, he was unable to stop the abuse. He also stated that he was never cruel and never mistreated any inmate. Höss blamed Hitler and Himmler for using their powers "wrongly and even criminally." He saw himself as, " ... a cog in the wheel of the great extermination machine created by the Third Reich."After discussions with Höss during the Nuremberg trials at which he testified, the American military psychologist Gustave Gilbert wrote the following:
Four days before he was executed, Höss acknowledged the enormity of his crimes in a message to the state prosecutor:
Shortly before his execution, Höss returned to the Catholic Church. On 10 April 1947, he received the sacrament of penance from Fr. , S.J., provincial of the Polish Province of the Society of Jesus. On the next day, the same priest administered to him Holy Communion as Viaticum.
On 16 April 1947 Höss was hanged. At the request of former camp prisoners, the execution was carried out in Auschwitz, the camp he once commanded. Approximately one hundred witnesses were present including former prisoners and various high-ranking officials of the Polish government. Höss's was the last public execution in Poland.
Family
Rudolf Höss married Hedwig Hensel on 17 August 1929.
Issue:
Klaus Höss: born 6 February 1930, died in Australia in the 1980s.
Heidetraud Höss: born 9 April 1932, died prior to 2020.
Inge-Brigitt Höss: born 18 August 1933.
Hans-Jürgen Höss: born in May 1937.
Annegret Höss: born 7 November 1943.
In a farewell letter to his wife, Höss wrote on 11 April:
The same day in a farewell letter to his children, Höss told his eldest son:
In popular culture
Günther Maria Halmer took on the role of Höss in the 1988-89 American television miniseries War and Remembrance.
Höss was portrayed by Colm Feore in the 2000 television miniseries Nuremberg.
In 2023 Höss was portrayed by Christian Friedel in Jonathan Glazer's Holocaust drama The Zone of Interest. The book the film was based on (by Martin Amis) did not specifically name Höss, but Glazer framed it around him and his wife in his adaptation.
ReferencesNotesBibliography
Ravenswood, Linda, Frau Kommandant Hoess' Pink Cardigan, Rivets Literary Magazine, 2010.
SS Personnel Service Record of Rudolf Höss, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland, US.
Further reading'''
Fest, Joachim C. and Bullock, Michael (trans.) "Rudolf Höss – The Man from the Crowd" in The Face of the Third Reich New York: Penguin, 1979 (orig. published in German in 1963), pp. 415–432. .
Primomo, John W., (2020). Architect of Death at Auschwitz: A Biography of Rudolf Höss''. North Carolina: McFarland & Company. ISBN 978-1-4766-8146-7.
External links
1901 births
1947 deaths
20th-century Freikorps personnel
Auschwitz concentration camp personnel
Dachau concentration camp personnel
Executed German mass murderers
Executed Nazi assassins
Executed Nazi concentration camp commandants
Executed people from Baden-Württemberg
Executions by the Supreme National Tribunal
German people convicted of crimes against humanity
German people convicted of murder
German Roman Catholics
Holocaust perpetrators in Poland
People convicted of murder by Germany
People from Baden-Baden
People from the Grand Duchy of Baden
Prussian Army personnel
Recipients of the Iron Cross (1914), 1st class
Romani genocide perpetrators
Sachsenhausen concentration camp personnel
SS-Obersturmbannführer
Witnesses to the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg
Witnesses of the Armenian genocide
Waffen-SS personnel
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David%20Wojnarowicz
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David Wojnarowicz
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David Michael Wojnarowicz ( (September 14, 1954 – July 22, 1992) was an American painter, photographer, writer, filmmaker, performance artist, songwriter/recording artist, and AIDS activist prominent in the East Village art scene. He incorporated personal narratives influenced by his struggle with AIDS as well as his political activism in his art until his death from the disease in 1992.
Biography
Wojnarowicz was born in Red Bank, New Jersey, where he and his two siblings and sometimes their mother were physically abused by their father, Ed Wojnarowicz. Ed, a Polish-American merchant marine from Detroit, had met and married Dolores McGuinness in Sydney, Australia, in 1948 when he was 26 and she was 16. After his parents' bitter divorce, Wojnarowicz and his siblings were kidnapped by their father and raised in Michigan and Long Island. After finding their young, Australian-born mother in a New York City phone book, they moved in with her. During his teenage years in Manhattan, Wojnarowicz worked as a street hustler around Times Square. He graduated from the High School of Music & Art in Manhattan. By 1971, at age 17, Wojnarowicz was living on the streets full time, sleeping in halfway houses and squats.
After a period outside New York, Wojnarowicz returned in the late 1970s and emerged as one of the most prominent and prolific members of an avant-garde wing that used mixed media as well as graffiti and street art. His first recognition came from stencils of houses afire that appeared on the exposed sides of East Village buildings.
Wojnarowicz completed a 1977–1979 photographic series on Arthur Rimbaud, did stencil work and collaborated with the band 3 Teens Kill 4, which released the independent EP No Motive in 1982. He made autonomous super-8 films such as Heroin and Beautiful People with bandmate Jesse Hultberg, and collaborated with filmmakers Richard Kern and Tommy Turner of the Cinema of Transgression. He exhibited his work in well-known East Village galleries and New York City landmarks, notably Civilian Warfare Gallery, Ground Zero Gallery NY, Public Illumination Picture Gallery, Gracie Mansion Gallery, and Hal Bromm Gallery.
Wojnarowicz was also connected to other prolific artists of the time, appearing in or collaborating on works with Nan Goldin, Peter Hujar, Luis Frangella, Karen Finley, Kiki Smith, Richard Kern, James Romberger, Marguerite Van Cook, Ben Neill, Marion Scemama, and Phil Zwickler.
In early 1981, Wojnarowicz met the photographer Peter Hujar, and after a brief period as lovers, came to see Hujar as his great friend and mentor. Weeks after Peter died of AIDS on November 26, 1987, Wojnarowicz moved into his loft at 189 2nd Avenue. David was soon diagnosed with AIDS himself and, after successfully fighting the landlord to keep the lease, lived the last five years of his life in Hujar's loft. Inheriting Hujar’s dark room—and supplies like rare Portriga Rapid paper—was a boon to David’s artistic process. It was in this loft that he printed elements of his ‘Sex Series’ and an edition of “Untitled” (Buffaloes Falling).
Hujar's death moved Wojnarowicz to create much more explicit activism and political content, notably about the injustices, social and legal, in the response to the AIDS epidemic. He collaborated with video artist Tom Rubnitz on the short film Listen to This (1992), a critique of the Reagan and Bush administrations' homophobic responses and failure to address the crisis. The film was shown at MoMA's 2017-18 exhibit Club 57: Film, Performance, and Art in the East Village, 1978–1983.
In 1985, Wojnarowicz was included in the Whitney Biennial's so-called Graffiti Show. In the 1990s, he sued and obtained an injunction against Donald Wildmon and the American Family Association on the grounds that Wojnarowicz's work had been copied and distorted in violation of the New York Artists' Authorship Rights Act.
Wojnarowicz's works include Untitled (One Day This Kid...), Untitled (Buffalo), Water, Birth of Language II, Untitled (Shark), Untitled (Peter Hujar), Tuna, Peter Hujar Dreaming/Yukio Mishima: St. Sebastian, Delta Towels, True Myth (Domino Sugar), Something From Sleep II, Untitled (Face in Dirt), and I Feel a Vague Nausea.
Wojnarowicz also wrote two memoirs in his lifetime including Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, discussing topics such as his troubled childhood, becoming a renowned artist in New York City, and his AIDS diagnosis and Memories that Smell like Gasoline. Knives opens with an essay about his homeless years: a boy in glasses selling his skinny body to the pedophiles and creeps who hung around Times Square. The heart of Knives is the title essay, which deals with the sickness and death of Hujar, Wojnarowicz's lover, best friend and mentor, "my brother, my father, my emotional link to the world". In the final essay, "The Suicide of a Guy Who Once Built an Elaborate Shrine Over a Mouse Hole", Wojnarowicz investigates the suicide of a friend, mixing his own reflections with interviews with members of their shared circle. In 1989, Wojnarowicz appeared in Rosa von Praunheim's widely acclaimed film Silence = Death about gay artists in New York City fighting for the rights of AIDS sufferers.
Wojnarowicz died at home in Manhattan on July 22, 1992, at the age of 37, from what his boyfriend, Tom Rauffenbart, confirmed was AIDS.
After his death, photographer and artist Zoe Leonard, a friend of Wojnarowicz, exhibited a work inspired by him, Strange Fruit (for David).
Legacy
A Fire in My Belly controversy
In November 2010, after consultation with National Portrait Gallery director Martin Sullivan and co-curator David C. Ward but not co-curator Jonathan David Katz, Smithsonian Institution Secretary G. Wayne Clough removed an edited version of footage used in Wojnarowicz's short silent film A Fire in My Belly from the exhibit "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture" at the National Portrait Gallery in response to complaints from the Catholic League, U.S. House Minority Leader John Boehner, Representative Eric Cantor and the possibility of reduced federal funding for the Smithsonian. The video contains a scene with a crucifix covered in ants. William Donohue of the Catholic League claimed the work was "hate speech" against Catholics. Gay historian Jonathan Ned Katz wrote:
Response from Clough and Smithsonian
Clough later said that although he stood by his decision, it "might have been made too quickly", and called the decision "painful." He said that because of the controversy surrounding the footage and the possibility that it might "spiral out of control", the Smithsonian might have been forced to shut down the entire "Hide/Seek" exhibition, and that was "something he didn't want to happen." The "Hide/Seek" exhibition "examined representations of homosexuality in American portraiture", and Clough said, "The funders and people who were upset by the decision—and I respect that—still have an appreciation that this exhibition is up. We were willing to take this topic on when others were not, and people appreciate that."
Clough added, "But looking back, sure, I wish I had taken more time. We have a lot of friends who felt left out. We needed to spend more time letting our friends know where this was going. I regret that."
The video work was shown intact when Hide/Seek moved to the Tacoma Art Museum.
Response from the art world and the public
The curator David C. Ward defended the artwork, saying, "It is not anti-religion or sacrilegious. It is a powerful use of imagery".
In response, The Andy Warhol Foundation, which had provided a $100,000 grant to the exhibition, announced that it would not fund future Smithsonian projects, while several institutions, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Tate Modern, scheduled showings of the removed work.
On December 2, 2010, protesters against the censorship marched from the Transformer Gallery to the National Portrait Gallery. The work was projected on the building. On December 5, activists Michael Blasenstein and Michael Dax Iacovone were detained and barred from the gallery for holding leaflets.
On December 9, National Portrait Gallery Commissioner James T. Bartlett resigned in protest. The artist AA Bronson sought to withdraw his art from the exhibit, with support from the lending institution, the National Gallery of Canada, but was unsuccessful. The curators appeared at a forum at the New York Public Library. A protest was held from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Cooper Hewitt Museum.
On December 15, a panel discussion was held at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. On December 20, a panel discussion was held at the Washington, D.C. Jewish Community Center. On January 20, 2011, the Center of Study of Political Graphics held a protest at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.
Clough issued a statement standing by the decision, spoke at a Town Hall Los Angeles meeting, and appeared at a public forum on April 26–27, 2011.
Several Smithsonian curators criticized the decision, as did critics, with Newsweek arts critic Blake Gopnik going so far as to call the complaints "gay bashing" and not a legitimate public controversy.
Notable posthumous exhibitions
In 2011, P.P.O.W. gallery showed Spirituality, an exhibition of Wojnarowicz's drawings, photographs, videos, collages, and personal notebooks; in a review in The Brooklyn Rail, Kara L. Rooney called the show "meticulously researched and commendably curated from a wide array of sources, ... a mini-retrospective, providing context and clues for Wojnarowicz's often elusive, sometimes dangerous, and always brutally honest work."
In 2018, the Whitney Museum of American Art hosted a major retrospective, David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night, which was co-curated by the Whitney's David Kiehl and art historian David Breslin. It received international praise.
Influence
In 1992, the band U2 used Wojnarowicz's tumbling buffalo photograph "Untitled (Buffaloes)" for the cover art of its single "One". The band further adapted this imagery during its Zoo TV Tour. The single and subsequent album became multi-platinum over the next few years, and the band donated a large portion of its earnings to AIDS charities. An oversized gelatin print of "Untitled (Buffaloes)" sold at auction in October 2014 for $125,000, more than four times the estimated price.
In 1988, Wojnarowicz wore a leather jacket with the pink triangle and the text: "If I die of aids - forget burial - just drop my body on the steps of the F.D.A.". In his 1991 memoir Close to the Knives, Wojnarowicz imagined "what it would be like if, each time a lover, friend or stranger died of this disease, their friends, lovers or neighbors would take the dead body and drive with it in a car a hundred miles an hour to Washington, D.C., and blast through the gates of the White House and come to a screeching halt before the entrance and dump their lifeless form on the front steps." On October 11, 1992, activist David Robinson received wide media attention when he dumped the ashes of his partner, Warren Krause, on the grounds of the White House as a protest against President George H. W. Bush's inaction in fighting AIDS. Robinson reported that his action was inspired by this text in Close to the Knives. In 1996, Wojnarowicz's own ashes were scattered on the White House lawn.
His name appears in the lyrics of the Le Tigre song "Hot Topic." Weight of the Earth, the transcription of Wojnarowicz's audio journals, inspired Mega Bog's album Life, and Another, and gives its name to the song "Weight of the Earth, on Paper".
On September 13, 2021, at the Met Gala in New York City the Canadian actor Dan Levy wore an outfit by designer Jonathan Anderson for Loewe which prominently featured an adapted version of Wojnarowicz's artwork F--- You F----- F----- depicting
two men kissing while shaped as maps, with the support of the visual artist's estate.
Collective exhibitions
A list of Wojnarowicz's group exhibitions the year prior to his death.
1991
The Figure in the Landscape, Baumgartner Galleries, February, Washington, DC
From Desire...A Queer Diary, curated by Nan Goldin, Richard F. Brush Art Gallery Canton, NY
Whitney Biennial, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
The Art of Advocacy, The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT
Hands Off!, The New School for Social Research, New York, NY
Tableaux Du SIDA, Foundation Deutsch, Belmont-Sur-Lausanne, France
The Third Rail, curated by Karin Bravin, John Post Lee Gallery, New York, NY
Compassion and Protest: Recent Social and Political Art from the Eli Broad Family Foundation Collection, San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA
American Narrative Painting and Sculpture: The 1980s, Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn, NY
Cruciformed: Images of the Cross since 1980, curated by David Rubin, Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, Cleveland, OH
Social Sculpture, curated by Steven Harvey and Elyse Cheney, Vrej Baghoomian Gallery, New York, NY
The Interrupted Life, New Museum, New York, NY
Outrageous Desire: The Politics and Aesthetics of Representation in Recent Works by Lesbian and Gay Artists, Rutgers University, Mason Gross School of the Arts, New Brunswick, NJ
Art of the 1980s: Selections from the Collection of Eli Broad Foundation, Duke University Museum of Art, Durham, NC
Domenikos Theotokopoulos-A Dialogue, Philippe Briet Gallery, New York, NY
Fuel, curated by Jay Younger, The Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia; The Australia Centre for Photography, Sydney, Australia; The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, Australia
Books
Sounds in the Distance. (1982). Aloes Books.
Tongues of Flame. (Exhibition Catalog). (1990). Illinois State University.
Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration. (1991). Vintage Books.
Memories That Smell Like Gasoline. (1992). Artspace Books.
Seven Miles a Second. (Collaborative graphic novel with James Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook, completed posthumously). (1996). Vertigo/DC Comics.
The Waterfront Journals. (1997). Grove/Atlantic.
Rimbaud In New York 1978–1979. (Edited by Andrew Roth). (2004). Roth Horowitz, LLC/PPP Editions.
In the Shadow of the American Dream: The Diaries of David Wojnarowicz. (Amy Scholder, editor). (2000). Grove/Atlantic.
Willie World. (Illustrator; written by Maggie J. Dubris). (1998). C U Z Editions.
Weight of the Earth: The Tape Journals of David Wojnarowicz. (Lisa Darms and David O'Neill, editors). (2018). MIT Press.
Films
Directed by Wojnarowicz
Heroin – filmed in New York City in 1981, no soundtrack
Fire in my Belly – filmed in Mexico and New York in 1986 and 1987, no soundtrack
Beautiful People – filmed in New York City in 1987, no soundtrack
About Wojnarowicz
Post Cards from America (1994) – a non-linear biography of Wojnarowicz (Steve McLean, director)
Wojnarowicz: F**k You F*ggot F**ker (2021) – biographical documentary
Music and Multimedia
3 Teens Kill 4 EP No Motive 1982
David Wojnarowicz & Ben Neill: ITSOFOMO (In the Shadow of Forward Motion) LP New Tone Records 1992
Optic Nerve CD-ROM The Red Hot Organization 1999
Cross Country 3 x LP Reading Group 2018
Critical studies and adaptations
Blinderman, Barry ed. David Wojnarowicz : Tongues of Flame, 1990,
Close to the Knives. (1993) AIDS Positive Underground Theatre. John Roman Baker.
David Wojnarowicz: Brush Fires in the Social Landscape. (1995). Aperture.
Wojnarowicz, David, et al., ed. Amy Scholder. Fever: The Art of David Wojnarowicz. (1999). New Museum Books.
David Wojnarowicz : A Definitive History of Five or Six Years on the Lower East Side, interviews by Sylvère Lotringer, edited by Giancarlo Ambrosino (2006).
Carr, Cynthia Fire in the Belly The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz (2012) St Martin's Press.
Laing, Olivia The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone (2016) Canongate
Archival collections
The David Wojnarowicz Papers are at the Fales Library at New York University. The Fales Library also houses the papers of John Hall, a high school friend of Wojnarowicz. The papers include a small collection of letters from Wojnarowicz to Hall.
See also
Joel Wachs, head of Andy Warhol Foundation, protested removal of Wojnarowicz piece
References
External links
P.P.O.W Gallery New York, Estate of David Wojnarowicz
NYU's Fales Library and Special Collections Guide to the David Wojnarowicz Papers
NYU's Fales Library and Special Collections Guide to the John Hall Papers-contain letters from Wojnarowicz
David Wojnarowicz by Dan Cameron and Dennis Szakacs
David Wojnarowicz Reading
David Wojnarowicz & Doug Bressler: (1984) "American Dreamtime" published at Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine
NYU's Fales Library and Special Collections Guide to the David Wojnarowicz—Janine Pommy-Vega Letters
Huffington Post analysis of the Smithsonian Wojnarowicz controversy*
David Wojnarowicz Journals: Years Ago Before the Nation went Bankrupt
David Wojnarowicz (1954–1992) ubu.com
"Outlaw Documentary:David Wojnarowicz's Queer Cinematics, Kinerotics, Autothanatographics" by Dianne Chisholm. Canadian Review of Contemporary Literature 21.1 & 2, 1994
David Wojnarowicz Knowledge Base
1954 births
1992 deaths
AIDS-related deaths in New York (state)
20th-century American memoirists
20th-century American painters
20th-century American male artists
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Artists from New York (state)
American contemporary painters
American gay artists
American gay writers
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen%20dowager
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Queen dowager
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A queen dowager or dowager queen (compare: princess dowager or dowager princess) is a title or status generally held by the widow of a king. In the case of the widow of an emperor, the title of empress dowager is used. Its full meaning is clear from the two words from which it is composed: queen indicates someone who served as queen consort (i.e. wife of a king), while dowager indicates a woman who continues to hold the title from her deceased husband (a queen who reigns in her own right is a queen regnant). A queen mother is a former queen consort, often a dowager queen, who is the mother of the reigning monarch.
Currently (2019) there are five queens dowager: Kesang Choden of Bhutan (who is the only living queen grandmother worldwide), Norodom Monineath of Cambodia (who is also queen mother), Lisa Najeeb Halaby (Noor Al'Hussein) of Jordan, and Sirikit Kitiyakara of Thailand (who is also queen mother). Queen Latifah of Morocco is queen dowager since her husband's death and is now also a queen mother since her son is now king.
Status
A queen dowager has an important royal position (whether or not she is the mother of the reigning sovereign) but does not normally have any rights to succeed a king as monarch on his death unless she happens to be next in line to the throne (one possibility would be if the king and queen were also cousins and childless, the king had no other siblings, and she in her other position as his cousin was also his heiress presumptive).
A queen dowager continues to enjoy the title, style, and precedence of a queen, but is no longer referred to as the queen. A new reigning king would have (at accession or eventually) a wife who would be the new queen consort and therefore the queen; and, of course, a queen regnant would also be called the queen. Many former queens consort do not formally use the word "dowager" as part of their titles. There may be more than one queen dowager at any given time. The Garter King of Arms's proclamation in the United Kingdom of the styles and titles of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother at her funeral on 9 April 2002 illustrates her dual status as a queen dowager and a queen mother:
Distinction from queen mother
A queen mother is a former queen, often a queen dowager, who is the mother of the current monarch. Not every queen mother is a queen dowager, such as Queen Paola of Belgium, who became the queen mother of her son Philippe after her husband Albert II abdicated the throne but retained the title of king. Not all queens dowager are the queen mother; they may have a relation other than mother to the reigning monarch, such as aunt or grandmother. For example, Mary, Queen of Scots, was queen dowager of France after the death of her husband Francis II, to whom she bore no children. Similarly, Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen was queen dowager after her husband William IV was succeeded by his niece Victoria.
Not every mother of a reigning monarch is the queen mother or a queen dowager. For example, the mother of Queen Victoria of United Kingdom, Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, was not a queen dowager nor the queen mother because her husband, Edward Augustus, Duke of Kent, had never been king. Similarly, whilst being the mothers of monarchs, both Augusta of Saxe-Gotha and Srinagarindra of Thailand were not styled queen dowager because their respective husbands, Frederick, Prince of Wales and Mahidol Adulyadej, Prince of Songkla, were never kings. Instead, Augusta held the title of "Dowager Princess of Wales" (a precedent was Henry VII of England's mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, titled "My Lady the King's Mother"); Srinagarindra meanwhile received the designation "Princess Mother".
As there is only one monarch, there can only be one queen mother. It is possible for there to be a queen mother and one or more queens dowager alive at any one time. This situation occurred in the Commonwealth realms in the period between the accession of Queen Elizabeth II on 6 February 1952 and the death of her paternal grandmother on 24 March 1953, when, for slightly over a year, there were three queens alive:
Queen Elizabeth II, the reigning monarch (queen regnant).
Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, the widow of the deceased King George VI and the mother of the reigning queen. Queen Elizabeth, the former queen consort, specifically adopted the appellation queen mother to distinguish herself from her daughter, Queen Elizabeth II. She reportedly loathed being referred to as a dowager queen, and felt there would be confusion if she were called simply by her name, as her two immediate predecessors, Queen Mary and Queen Alexandra, had been.
Queen Mary, the widow of King George V, the mother of the former king Edward VIII (the then Duke of Windsor) and of the late King George VI. Queen Mary had been the queen mother from the death of her husband in 1936 until the accession of her granddaughter, Queen Elizabeth II, in 1952. She continued to be titled and styled Her Majesty Queen Mary.
British queens dowager
There were several former queens consort of England, Scotland, and later the United Kingdom, who were never queen mothers. The following queens were dowagers between the given dates, whether queen mothers or not:
Of England:
Edith of Wessex 5 January 1066 – 18 December 1075, wife of Edward the Confessor; sister of Harold Godwinson.
Adeliza of Louvain 1 December 1135 – 23 April 1151, wife of Henry I of England; remarried to William d'Aubigny, 1st Earl of Arundel in 1139.
Eleanor of Aquitaine 6 July 1189 – 1 April 1204, wife of Henry II of England; queen mother to Richard I and John.
Berengaria of Navarre 6 April 1199 – 23 December 1230, wife of Richard I of England.
Isabella of Angoulême 18/19 October 1216 – 31 May 1246, wife of John of England and queen mother to Henry III of England. Remarried to Hugh X of Lusignan 1220.
Eleanor of Provence 16 November 1272 – 24 June 1291, wife of Henry III of England and queen mother to Edward I of England.
Marguerite of France 7 July 1307 – 14 February 1317, wife of Edward I of England and stepmother to Edward II of England.
Isabella of France September 1327 – 22 August 1358, wife of Edward II of England and queen mother to Edward III of England, from her husband's deposition on 20 January 1327.
Isabella of Valois 14 February 1399 – 13 September 1409, wife of Richard II of England; ceased to be queen consort with Richard's deposition on 30 September 1399. Remarried to Charles I de Valois, Duke of Orléans on 29 June 1406.
Joanna of Navarre 20 March 1413—9 July 1437, wife of Henry IV of England and stepmother to Henry V of England.
Catherine of Valois 31 August 1422 – 3 January 1437, wife of Henry V of England and queen mother to Henry VI of England. Remarried to Owen Tudor in 1428 or 1429.
Margaret of Anjou 21 May 1471 – 25 August 1482, wife of Henry VI of England.
Elizabeth Woodville 9 April 1483 – 8 June 1492, wife of Edward IV of England and queen mother to Edward V of England until the latter's deposition in 1483.
Of England and Ireland
Anne of Cleves survived her marriage to Henry VIII until her death on 16 July 1557, but since her marriage had been annulled on 12 July 1540, she was not considered a queen dowager.
Catherine Parr 28 January 1547 – 5 September 1548, sixth and last wife of Henry VIII of England and stepmother to his children King Edward VI, Lady Mary and Lady Elizabeth. Remarried to Thomas Seymour, 1st Baron Seymour of Sudeley most likely in mid-spring of 1547.
Of Scotland
Margaret of Wessex 13 November 1093 – 6 November 1093, wife of Malcolm III of Scotland.
Ermengarde de Beaumont 4 December 1214 – 12 February 1233/34, wife of William I of Scotland and queen mother to Alexander II of Scotland.
Marie de Coucy 6 July 1249 – 1285, wife of Alexander II of Scotland and queen mother to Alexander III of Scotland. Remarried to Jean de Brienne in 1257.
Yolande of Dreux 19 March 1286 – 2 August 1322, wife of Alexander III of Scotland. Remarried to Arthur II, Duke of Brittany in 1292.
Joan Beaufort 21 February 1437 – 15 July 1445, wife of James I of Scotland and queen mother to James II of Scotland. Remarried to James Stewart in 1439.
Mary of Guelders 3 August 1460 – 1 December 1463, wife of James II of Scotland and queen mother to James III of Scotland.
Margaret Tudor 9 September 1513 – 8 October 1541, wife of James IV of Scotland and queen mother to James V of Scotland. Remarried to Archibald Douglas, 6th Earl of Angus in 1514 and Henry Stewart, 1st Lord Methven in 1528.
Mary of Guise 14 December 1542 – 11 June 1560, wife of James V of Scotland and queen mother to Mary, Queen of Scots.
Of England, Ireland and Scotland
Henrietta Maria of France 30 January 1649 – 10 September 1669, wife of Charles I and queen mother to Charles II.
Catherine of Braganza 6 February 1685 – 30 November 1705, wife of Charles II.
Mary of Modena 16 September 1701 – 7 May 1718, wife of James II and VII; ceased to be queen consort with his deposition on 11 December 1688.
Of the United Kingdom:
Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen 20 June 1837 – 2 December 1849, wife of William IV.
Alexandra of Denmark 6 May 1910 – 20 November 1925, wife of Edward VII, queen mother to George V.
Mary of Teck 20 January 1936 – 24 March 1953, wife of George V, queen mother to Edward VIII and George VI until the latter's death on 6 February 1952.
Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon 6 February 1952 – 30 March 2002, wife of George VI and queen mother to Elizabeth II – styled as Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother.
If the current queen consort, Queen Camilla, outlives the incumbent king, King Charles III, she will become a queen dowager, while King Charles’s son and daughter in law become the new king and queen consort respectively. She would not be known as a queen mother, as she is not the biological parent of Prince William.
Other
Note that in some of the countries mentioned below it is unusual to indicate a former queen-consort as a dowager.
East Asia
China
Queen Dowager Xuan, concubine of King Xiaowen and mother of King Zhaoxiang of Qin.
Queen Dowager Zhao, wife of King Zhuangxiang of Qin and mother of Qin Shi Huang.
Empress Lü, wife of Emperor Gaozu of Han.
Wu Zetian, wife of Emperor Gaozong and mother of Emperors Zhongzong and Ruizong of Tang. Later became the only Empress regnant in the history of China.
Empress Dowager Cixi, wife of Xianfeng Emperor and mother of Tongzhi Emperor of Qing.
Japan
Empress Dowager Eishō (11 January 1835 – 11 January 1897), wife and widow of Emperor Kōmei of Japan.
Empress Shōken (9 May 1849 – 9 April 1914), wife and widow of Emperor Meiji of Japan.
Empress Teimei (25 June 1884 – 17 May 1951), wife and widow of Emperor Taishō of Japan and mother of Emperor Shōwa.
Empress Kōjun (6 March 1903 – 16 June 2000), wife and widow of Emperor Shōwa of Japan and mother of Emperor Akihito.
Korea
Queen Heonae (997–1009), wife and widow of Gyeongjong of Goryeo and sister of Seongjong of Goryeo, mother of Mokjong of Goryeo and daughter of Gwangjong of Goryeo
Queen Jangryeol (1624–1688), wife and widow of Injo of Joseon step-mother of Hyojong of Joseon, step-grandmother of Hyeonjong of Joseon, step-great-grandmother of Sukjong of Joseon.
Queen Jeongsun (1745–1805), second wife and widow of Yeongjo of Joseon and step-grandmother of Jeongjo of Joseon and step-great-grandmother of Sunjo of Joseon.
Europe
Croatia
Helen of Zadar (969 – 976), wife and widow of King Michael Krešimir II of Croatia.
Portugal
Beatrice of Castile (1242 – 27 October 1303), wife of King Afonso III of Portugal and mother of King Dinis I of Portugal
Elizabeth of Aragon (1271 – 4 July 1336), wife of King Dinis I of Portugal and mother of King Afonso IV of Portugal
Beatrice of Castile (8 March 1293 – 25 October 1359), wife of King Afonso IV of Portugal and mother of King Peter I of Portugal
Leonor Telles de Menezes (1350 – 27 April 1386), wife of King Fernando I of Portugal
Eleanor of Aragon (1 February 1402 – 19 February 1445), wife of King Duarte I of Portugal and mother of King Afonso V of Portugal
Eleanor of Viseu (2 May 1458 – 17 November 1525), wife of King João II of Portugal
Eleanor of Austria (15 November 1498 – 25 February 1558), third wife of King Manuel I of Portugal
Catherine of Austria (14 January 1507 – 12 February 1578), wife of King João III of Portugal and grandmother of King Sebastião I of Portugal
Luisa of Guzman (13 October 1613 – 27 February 1666), wife of King João IV of Portugal and mother of Kings Afonso VI and Pedro II
Maria Anna of Austria (7 September 1683 – 14 August 1754), wife of King João V of Portugal and mother of King José I of Portugal
Mariana Victoria of Spain (31 March 1718 – 15 January 1781), wife of King José I of Portugal and mother of Queen Maria I of Portugal
Carlota Joaquina of Spain (25 April 1775 – 7 January 1830), wife of King João VI of Portugal and mother of King-Emperor Pedro IV of Portugal and King Miguel I of Portugal
Maria Pia of Savoy (14 February 1847 – 5 July 1911), wife of King Luís I of Portugal and mother of King Carlos I of Portugal
Amélie of Orleans (28 September 1865 – 25 October 1951), wife of King Carlos I of Portugal and mother of King Manuel II of Portugal
Romania
Elisabeth of Wied (27 September 1914 – 2 March 1916), wife of King Carol I of Romania
Marie of Edinburgh (20 July 1927 – 18 July 1938), wife of Ferdinand I of Romania
Saxony
Maria Anna of Bavaria (27 January 1805 – 13 September 1877), second wife and widow of King Frederick Augustus II of Saxony.
Castile
Mafalda of Portugal (1197-1 May 1256), wife of King Henry I of Castile
Constance of Portugal (3 January 1290 – 18 November 1313), wife of King Ferdinand IV of Castile, mother of King Alfonso XI of Castile
Maria of Portugal (9 February 1313 – 18 January 1357), wife of King Alfonso XI of Castile, mother of King Peter I of Castile
Isabella of Portugal (1428 – 15 August 1496), wife of King John II of Castile, mother of Isabella I of Castile
Joan of Portugal (20 March 1439 – 12 December 1475), wife of King Henry IV of Castile
León
Urraca of Portugal (1151–1222), wife of King Ferdinand II of León, mother of King Alfonso IX of León
Teresa of Portugal (4 October 1178 – 8 June 1250), wife of King Alfonso IX of León
Constance of Portugal (3 January 1290 – 18 November 1313), wife of King Fernando IV of León, mother of King Alfonso XI of León
Maria of Portugal (9 February 1313 – 18 January 1357), wife of King Alfonso XI of León, mother of King Peter I of León
Isabella of Portugal (1428 – 15 August 1496), wife of King John II of León, mother of Isabella I of León
Joan of Portugal (20 March 1439 – 12 December 1475), wife of King Henry IV of León
Sweden
In Sweden, there has also been another title for a dowager queen, called Riksänkedrottning, which means Queen Dowager of the Realm. This title was used in the 16th and 17th centuries. The last time the title queen dowager was used was in 1913.
Catherine Stenbock, (1537–1610), third wife and widow of King Gustav I of Sweden.
Gunilla Bielke, (1568–1597), second wife and widow of King John III of Sweden.
Christina of Holstein-Gottorp, (1573–1625), second wife and widow of King Charles IX of Sweden.
Maria Eleonora of Brandenburg, (1599–1655), widow of King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden.
Hedwig Eleonora of Holstein-Gottorp, (1636–1715) widow of King Charles X Gustav of Sweden.
Louisa Ulrika of Prussia, (1720–1781), widow of King Adolph Frederick of Sweden.
Sophia Magdalena of Denmark, (1746–1815), widow of King Gustav III of Sweden.
Hedvig Elisabeth Charlotte of Holstein-Gottorp, (1759–1818) widow of King Charles XIII of Sweden.
Désirée Clary, (1777–1860) widow of King Charles XIV John of Sweden.
Josephine of Leuchtenberg, (1807–1876) widow of King Oscar I of Sweden.
Sophia of Nassau, (1836–1913) widow of King Oscar II of Sweden.
Württemberg
Charlotte, Princess Royal of Great Britain and Ireland (29 September 1765 – 5 October 1828), second wife and widow of King Frederick I of Württemberg and stepmother of King William I of Württemberg.
Pauline Therese of Württemberg (25 June 1864 – 10 May 1873), second wife and widow of William I of Württemberg and mother of Charles I of Württemberg.
Olga Nikolaevna of Russia (6 October 1891 – 30 October 1892), widow of Charles I of Württemberg.
Pacific
Hawaii
Dowager Queen Ka'ahumanu, favoured wife of King Kamehameha I
Queen Emma of Hawaii, queen consort of King Kamehameha IV
South America
Brazil
Amélie of Leuchtenberg (July 31, 1812 – January 26, 1873), wife and widow of Pedro I of Brazil.
Southeast Asia
Malaysia
Raja Perempuan Tengku Anis of Kelantan, widow of Sultan Ismail Petra
Tunku Puan Nora of Johor, widow of Sultan Ismail
Raja Permaisuri Tuanku Bainun of Perak, widow of Sultan Azlan Shah
Tunku Ampuan Najihah of Negeri Sembilan, widow of Tuanku Ja'afar
Permaisuri Siti Aishah of Selangor, widow of Sultan Salahuddin
Che Puan Besar Haminah of Kedah, widow of Sultan Abdul Halim
Cik Puan Besar Kalsom of Pahang, widow of Sultan Haji Ahmad Shah
Myanmar
Yun San, chief queen consort of King Alaungpaya and mother to three successive kings,Naungdawgyi, Hsinbyushin and Bodawpaya
Shin Phyo Oo, chief queen consort of King Naungdawgyi, mother to Phaungka
Me Myat Shwe, Princess of Taungoo, chief queen consort of King Tharawaddy, mother of King Pagan and Queen Consort Setkya Dewi
Kyaut Maw Mibaya,Shin Min Yin, queen of the southern department of King Tharawaddy and mother of King Mindon
Laungshe Mibaya, Nanzwe queen consort of King Mindon and mother of King Thibaw
Thailand
Amarindra, (7 September 1809 – 25 May 1826), wife and widow of King Rama I of Siam and mother of King Rama II of Siam.
Sri Suriyendra, (21 July 1984 - 18 October 1836), wife and widow of King Rama II of Siam and mother of King Mongkut and King Pinklao.
Saovabha Phongsri, (23 October 1910 – 20 October 1919), wife and widow of King Chulalongkorn of Siam and mother of King Vajiravudh and King Prajadhipok.
Savang Vadhana, (23 October 1910 – 17 December 1955), wife and widow of King Chulalongkorn of Siam and grandmother of King Ananda Mahidol and King Bhumibol Adulyadej.
Sukhumala Marasri, (23 October 1910 – 9 July 1927), wife and widow of King Chulalongkorn of Siam.
Rambai Barni, (30 May 1941 – 22 May 1984), wife and widow of King Prajadhipok of Siam.
Sirikit, (since 13 October 2016), wife and widow of King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand and mother of King Vajiralongkorn.
West Asia
Jordan
Musbah bint Nasser (1884 – 15 March 1961), wife of Abdullah I of Jordan and mother of Talal of Jordan.
Zein Al-Sharaf Talal (2 August 1916 – 26 April 1994), wife of Talal of Jordan and mother of Hussein of Jordan.
Lisa Najeeb Halaby (Noor Al'Hussein) (b. 23 August 1951), the fourth wife and widow of King Hussein of Jordan and the stepmother of the current king, Abdullah II.
Fiction
In the novel series The Princess Diaries, the character Princess Clarisse Marie Grimaldi Renaldo is the princess dowager of the principality of Genovia. In the films, where Genovia is portrayed as a kingdom, Clarisse is portrayed as a dowager queen.
In the fantasy novel series A Song of Ice and Fire, and later the HBO series Game of Thrones, the character Cersei Lannister became the queen mother to King Joffrey Baratheon after her husband Robert Baratheon was killed in a hunting accident, although she managed to strong-arm the position of regent as well, and was thus known as the "queen regent". In the episode "High Sparrow", the new queen consort, Margaery Tyrell, mocks Cersei's loss of power by asking her to clarify whether she should be addressed as queen mother or dowager queen.
In the 2015 Indian movie Baahubali-The Beginning and its sequel Baahubali-the Conclusion, actress Ramya Krishnan portrays the character "Rajamatha Shivagami Devi". In most Indian languages, the word 'rajamata' means 'Queen-Mother'.
In the video game Long Live the Queen, after the queen regnant of the kingdom of Nova is assassinated, her widower is referred to as the king-dowager.
Notes
Royal titles
Widowhood
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary%20Miller%20%28politician%29
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Gary Miller (politician)
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Gary Gene Miller (born October 16, 1948) is an American politician, who was the U.S. representative for . A Republican, he was first elected in 1998 and served until 2015, when he retired. The district includes most of southern and western San Bernardino County. He previously represented the 42nd district from 1999 to 2013 (numbered as the 41st from 1993 to 2003). In February 2014, Miller announced he would step down at the next election.
Early life, education, and business career
Miller was born in Huntsville, Arkansas, but grew up in Whittier, California. He attended Mount San Antonio College in Walnut, California, and served briefly in the United States Army in 1967 being discharged after seven weeks of boot camp at Fort Ord near Monterey.
He is a businessman who founded several companies bearing his name, including G. Miller Development, G. Miller Masonry, and G. Miller Framing. At the age of 20, he began his first company, which built single-family and custom homes. His business expanded to the development of planned communities. Miller remains active in real estate through his development company.
Early political career (1988–1994)
Local politics
Miller was appointed to the Diamond Bar, California, Municipal Advisory Council in 1988. In 1989, he was elected to the city's first council that helped incorporate the city. He served as mayor in 1992.
State Senate elections
In 1990, he decided to run for a seat in the California Senate. Incumbent Republican State Senator Bill Campbell of California's 31st State Senate district decided to resign. In the February 1990 special election (open primary), Miller ranked fourth, or last, among Republicans in the field, getting just 16% of the vote.
In 1994, he decided to run for the vacant California's 29th State Senate district. In the open primary in September 1994, he ranked second among Republicans getting 21% of the vote, behind State Representative Dick Mountjoy, who ranked first with 45% of the vote.
California Assembly (1995–1999)
Elections
In 1995, Miller ran in a special election for a seat in the California State Assembly in the 60th district after incumbent Paul Horcher was recalled. Miller won the open primary with 39% of the vote in a six candidate field.
In 1996, he won re-election defeating Democrat Susan Amaya 53–47%. He was succeeded in office by Bob Pacheco.
Committee assignments
He was Chairman of the Assembly Budget Committee.
U.S. House of Representatives (1999–2015)
Elections
He was elected to the U.S. House in 1998, defeating incumbent Republican and fellow Diamond Bar resident Jay Kim in the primary and then Democrat Eileen Ansari in the general election with 53 percent. He won again in 2000 with 59 percent of the vote and was re-elected in 2002 with 68 percent of the vote. In 2004, he defeated Democrat Lewis Myers with 71.5% of the vote per OCvote.com, the official county elections office website. Similarly, he won in 2008 with 63.8% of the vote, defeating Democrat Ed Chau.
For his first seven terms in Congress, Miller represented a district comprising portions of northern and eastern Orange County, southern Los Angeles County and a small portion of San Bernardino County. After the 2010 United States census, Miller's district was renumbered as the 39th district, and pushed further into Orange County, making this already strongly Republican seat even more so. The new map also placed the home of fellow Republican and 10-term incumbent Ed Royce into the 39th, setting up what would have been the only primary contest between two California Republicans. Although the 39th was more Miller's district than Royce's (Miller retained 53 percent of his former territory), Royce was considered the stronger candidate. Partly due to this, Miller announced in January 2012 that he would run in the newly created 31st district, located entirely in San Bernardino County. Miller's move effectively ended the career of House Rules Committee chairman David Dreier, who had represented a large slice of the new 31st. As part of the move, he bought a second home in Rancho Cucamonga, which he now claims as his official residence.
On paper, Miller faced daunting odds. He was running in a district that he had never represented before, had a sizable Democratic lean and was majority-Hispanic. Had it existed in 2008, Barack Obama would have won it with 56 percent of the vote. However, due to California's new "top-two" primary system, the three Democrats in the field split the vote, allowing Miller to come in first with only 27 percent of the vote while a fellow Republican, State Senator Bob Dutton came in second with 25 percent while three Democrats split the remaining 48 percent of the vote. In the general election, Miller defeated Dutton with 55 percent of the vote.
Tenure
Transportation and infrastructure
Congressman Miller was the most senior Republican from the California delegation on the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. He served on the Highways and Transit; Railroads, Pipelines and Hazardous Materials; and Water Resources and Environment Subcommittees.
In 2005, Congressman Miller secured a provision in the 2005 SAFE-TEA LU Highway Reauthorization that initiated a pilot program where 5 states, including California would assume the responsibility for conducting the federal environmental review process required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). In California, the NEPA pilot program has shaved 17 months off of environmental review processes and 30 months off of overall project delivery.
Streamlining regulations and review for transportation projects
During the 112th Congress, Miller introduced legislation to build off the success of the 2005 pilot program to further improve highway project delivery by eliminating bureaucratic red tape and restoring greater control to state and local governments.
In June 2011, he introduced the Environmental Review Cooperation Act, which would make permanent a National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) pilot program that authorizes five states—including California—to take on the responsibility of complying with NEPA for Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) funded projects. The bill would also expand the program to all states that have environmental standards that are equal to or exceed federal requirements.
In August 2011, Congressman Miller introduced the Breaking Down Barriers Act, which provides common sense proposals to make highway project delivery more efficient. HR 2766, The Breaking Down Barriers Act includes language that allows transportation agencies to move forward on construction activities prior to receiving grant funds, and requires prompt action by federal agencies by establishing deadlines for project approvals.
Energy
During the 111th Congress, Congressman Miller introduced a comprehensive energy bill that would reduce regulatory burdens that delay improvements and advancements in domestic energy production. The bill would open U.S. coastal waters for drilling, allow states to share a portion of the revenue derived from such drilling, and use the earnings from offshore drilling to pay down the national debt. The legislation also included energy tax incentives for wind, solar, biodiesel, clean coal technologies and other forms of energy. Congressman Miller stated his resolution and plan to lower gas prices and work for a long-term solution for the country.
In 2010 Miller signed a pledge sponsored by Americans for Prosperity promising to vote against any Global Warming legislation that would raise taxes.
Animal welfare
During the 111th and 112th Congresses, Congressman Miller cosponsored the Puppy Uniform Protection Statute (PUPS) Act, which sets out to close loopholes in the 1966 law that allows breeders to sell puppies over the Internet without federal oversight. Specifically, this legislation requires any breeder who sells or offers to sell more than 50 dogs annually directly to the public, including over the Internet, to be licensed and inspected. The bill would also require that dogs in commercial breeding facilities have appropriate space and daily exercise.
Congressman Miller was an original cosponsor of legislation in the 111th Congress to prohibit knowingly selling or offering to sell videos of animal crush videos in interstate or foreign commerce for commercial gain. This legislation, H.R. 5566, the Animal Crush Video Prohibition Act, was signed into law on December 9, 2010. In the 110th Congress, he sponsored the Animal Fighting Prohibition Enforcement Act, which imposes a fine and up to three years in jail for violations of the Animal Welfare Act related to sponsoring or exhibiting animals in an animal fighting venture and for buying, selling, or transporting any animal for participation in an animal fighting venture. This legislation became law on May 3, 2007.
Supporting breast cancer research
Congressman Miller cosponsored legislation supporting Breast Cancer Deadline 2020, a call to action for policymakers, researchers, breast cancer advocates, and other stakeholders to end the disease by the end of the decade. H.R. 3067 would create a commission to identify promising research, encourage partnerships between government and the private sector, and create opportunities for trans-disciplinary collaboration that may advance the mission of ending breast cancer. Congressman Miller also cosponsored H.R. 466, legislation to reauthorize the sale of the Breast Cancer Stamp, with proceeds from the stamp going to the National Institute of Health to fund breast cancer research. Congressman Miller is also a long time supporter of the Department of Defense Breast Cancer Research Program.
During the 111th and 112th Congresses, Congressman Miller sent a letter to House Appropriations Committee requesting that appropriators include $120 million for the Department of Defense (DOD) Breast Cancer Research Program (BCRP) in defense appropriations legislation.
Veterans
Congressman Miller supports continuing the extension of benefits to all veterans of the armed services of the United States. During the 112th Congress, Congressman Miller cosponsored the Veteran Skills to Jobs Act, which addresses the high rate of veteran unemployment by streamlining the bureaucratic processes for veterans with relevant training to get jobs when they return home. Specifically, H.R. 4155 would direct federal agencies to view relevant military training as the equivalent of federal licensing and certification requirements.
Congressman Miller also cosponsored H.R. 178, legislation to repeal the so-called "Widow's Tax" and ensure military widows and families of military heroes will be fully protected. H.R. 178, also known as the Military Surviving Spouses Equity Act, would repeal current law that requires a dollar-for-dollar deduction of VA benefits for service connected deaths from military survivors' Survivor Benefit Plan (SBP) annuity.
Anti-terrorism
In 2005, Miller cosponsored the Border Protection, Anti-terrorism and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005 (H.R. 4437) with representative Jim Sensenbrenner. In 2006, after widespread demonstrations by immigrants, Miller wrote: "Too bad their protest didn't include giving up government-paid social services—because a day without illegal aliens would be a boon to U.S. taxpayers."
Miller backed the development of a rail link between Ontario and Anaheim, part of a proposed line between Orange County and Las Vegas. "Once completed, there would be no need for an airport in south Orange County, and the Inland Empire will reap the economic benefits as a true transportation hub," Miller said.
Miller, a history buff, become involved in the preservation of Civil War battlefields, after he played a bit part in the 2003 movie Gods and Generals.
Miller signed the Taxpayer Protection Pledge.
In 2011, Miller voted for the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 as part of a controversial provision that allows the government and the military to indefinitely detain American citizens and others without trial.
Allegation of sheltering profits of real estate sales
Miller sold to the city of Monrovia, in 2002, making profit of more than $10 million. Normally, he would have had to pay state and federal taxes of up to 31% on that profit.
Miller told the Internal Revenue Service and the state of California that Monrovia had forced him to sell the property under threat of eminent domain. That allowed him to shelter the profits from capital gains taxes for more than two years before he had to reinvest the money.
Monrovia officials stated that Miller sold the land willingly and that they didn't threaten to force him to sell. A videotape of a February 2000 City Council meeting shows Miller asking city officials four times to buy his land. Another, earlier videotape confirmed Miller's position that the city had refused to let him develop the land and threatened "condemnation" of his property for public use. Although all early drafts of Monrovia's sales contract with Miller included the phrase "friendly condemnation", it was deleted when the final deal was made. Miller and his wife signed an amendment to the escrow instructions on August 1, 2002, saying, "condemnation deleted", or no longer in effect.
Miller took an exemption again in 2005 when he sold the 10 lots to the city of Fontana and again in 2006 when he sold a building to Fontana, claiming both were compulsory sales. The lots and building had been purchased in late 2004 with proceeds from the Monrovia sale. Such exemptions gave him another two years after each sale to reinvest the funds without paying capital gains taxes.
In each case, those involved in the purchases say eminent domain was neither used nor threatened. On January 31, 2007, the Los Angeles Times reported that Miller's transactions are being investigated by the FBI.
Miller declined to comment on the sales. The FBI also declined to comment. As of 2008, no investigation or legal action could be confirmed.
2005 profits from dealings with business partner and federal transportation bill
As a member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, Miller pushed for a provision in the 2005 transportation bill that allowed the city of Rialto to close its airport, the first time an act of Congress has ever shuttered an airport. It is a power the Federal Aviation Administration traditionally has had sole authority to exercise. The closing of the airport paved the way for Lewis Operating, a business partner and campaign contributor, to win a multimillion-dollar contract from the city to develop the airport land and build a planned community consisting of 2,500 homes, parks and of retail space on the former airport and adjacent land.
Miller also helped secure $1.28 million in that bill for street improvements in front of a planned housing and retail center, including a Target store that he co-owned with Lewis Operating.
Miller took out nearly $7.5 million in promissory notes in 2004 from Lewis Operating, which he used to purchase land from the company. In 2005, he sold some of that land to a part of the company, making a profit of between $1.1 million and $6 million, according to his financial disclosure report (which requires reporting a dollar range, not an exact dollar figure). The majority of the parcels that Miller bought are about two miles (3 km) from the airport.
House Rules explicitly state that before entering into loans from an entity other than a financial institution, members of Congress and staff must submit the terms of the loans for review and a determination from the ethics committee on whether the loan is acceptable under the gift rule. It is not clear if Miller complied with this requirement.
December 2006 allegations
In December 2006, the Los Angeles Times reported that Miller had used "congressional muscle" for "personal business matters". This included having congressional staff do Miller's personal errands, collecting nearly $25,000 a year in rent from his campaign committee, using the offices of his real estate development firm as his campaign office, and ordering an aide to find a way to get a city business-friendly council member on the National Park Board who was involved in a city purchase of Miller's property.
May 2010 allegations
In May 2010, the FOX affiliate MyFOXLA interviewed Miller over claims led by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) stating he "directed millions of dollars in government money to non-profits headed by one of his campaign contributor[s], developer Jeffrey Burum". Burum, his company, and his wife donated $26,350 to Miller's campaign for what CREW alleges is over a million dollars in congressional earmarks kicked back to Burum's non-profit Hope Through Housing Foundation.
Committee assignments
Committee on Financial Services
Subcommittee on Insurance, Housing and Community Opportunity
Subcommittee on International Monetary Policy and Trade (Chairman)
Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure
Subcommittee on Highways and Transit
Subcommittee on Railroads, Pipelines, and Hazardous Materials
Subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment
Caucus membership
Chairman of the Building a Better America Caucus
Republican Study Committee
Tea Party Caucus
Congressional Cement Caucus
Controversies
Accusation of sexual harassment
Rebecca Weir, a former staff member of Miller, claimed that he asked her to "twirl for him" after a meeting. According to Weir, "He said, ‘My God, you look amazing today. Just stunning.’ And he was kind of leering at me, and then he asked me to twirl,". Soon after the incident, Miller's Chief of Staff, called Ms. Weir to offer an ad-hoc bonus as instructed by Miller.
Personal life
Miller and his wife, Cathy, have three sons and one daughter.
Abduction of grandchildren
On November 19, 2007, three of Miller's grandsons, Brian (8) and twins Evan and Christian (6), did not show for a scheduled joint-custody visit with their grandparents, the Millers. The Millers accused the boys' mother, Jennifer Lopez DeJongh, of abducting the children. DeJongh was divorced from Miller's son, Brian Miller, and the two were in dispute over certain custodial rights regarding medical and educational decisions for the children. Brian had previously pled guilty in 2000 to charges of spousal and child abuse. In 2006, prosecutors allowed him to change his plea to not guilty and dismissed the case after he completed probation, a parenting class, and 224 hours of community service. In August 2011, DeJongh and the boys were located in Mexicali, Mexico. DeJongh was charged with three counts of child custody deprivation in Los Angeles County, but federal charges of flight to avoid prosecution were dropped following her extradition. The children were reunited with the Miller family. Congressman Miller commented that, "My wife and I are extremely relieved that after more than 3 1/2 years our grandchildren have been found unharmed and returned safely to the United States" and that he was "eternally grateful" to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, Mexican authorities and "all those whose hard work and unwavering dedication made this possible".
References
External links
Profile at SourceWatch
Associated Press profile
Join California Gary G. Miller
1948 births
Living people
Republican Party members of the California State Assembly
Mayors of places in California
People from Huntsville, Arkansas
People from Whittier, California
Mt. San Antonio College alumni
People from Diamond Bar, California
Republican Party members of the United States House of Representatives from California
Activists from California
21st-century American politicians
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich-Wilhelm%20Kr%C3%BCger
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Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger
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Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger (8 May 1894 – 10 May 1945) was a German paramilitary commander in charge of, and personally involved in progressive annihilation of Polish nation, its culture, its heritage and its wealth. Long before the war he was a high-ranking member of the SA and the SS. Between 1939 and 1943 he was the Higher SS and Police Leader in the General Government, giving him command of all police and security forces in German-occupied Poland. In this capacity, he organized and supervised numerous crimes against humanity and had major responsibility for the German genocide of the Polish nation: the extermination of six million Poles (three million of them Polish Jews) and massive destruction, degradation and impoverishment of the Polish state. Never sentenced for his deeds, he committed suicide in May 1945.
Career
Krüger was born in 1894 into a military family in Straßburg, Alsace-Lorraine, then part of the German Empire (today, Strasbourg, France). He attended the gymnasium in Rastatt and then pursued a military career as a cadet in the military school at Karlsruhe and the military academy at Gross-Lichterfelde. In June 1914, Krüger was commissioned a Leutnant in the Imperial German Army's 25th Royal Prussian Infantry Regiment. During the First World War, he served as a platoon leader, a company commander and the regimental adjutant. He was wounded three times, promoted to Oberleutnant and awarded the Iron Cross, 1st and 2nd class. In August 1919, he joined the , which he left in March 1920. He then entered civilian employment as a clerk to a bookseller and to a publisher until 1922. He got married, went to work for a waste disposal firm from 1924 to 1928 and then became a self-employed businessman.
Activities in SA and SS
While working at the refuse company, he probably met Kurt Daluege, who was an engineer at the company at that time and who later became SS commander in Berlin and leader of the Ordnungspolizei (order police) or Orpo. The two men soon formed a friendship. On 15 November 1929, Krüger joined the Nazi Party (NSDAP) as member 171,199. On 1 February 1931, he also joined the SS (member number 6,123), which he left in April to transfer to the SA. With the help of Daluege, Krüger began a rapid rise in the SA ranks. He was promoted to SA-Oberführer (31 July 1931) and SA-Gruppenführer (10 September 1931). He commanded the SA-Gruppe Ost, encompassing the Berlin area, from April 1931 to July 1932. In July 1932 he was made leader of the Group Staff in the supreme SA leadership under SA-Stabschef Ernst Röhm, and he served as the SA representative to the Reich Defense Council. In October 1932, he became a member of the State Board for Youth Physical Training.
On 27 June 1933, Krüger was promoted to SA-Obergruppenführer and appointed chief of Ausbildungswesen (Training). Cooperating closely with the Reichswehr, he used his new position to school the SA's recruits (an estimated 250,000) to become unit leaders. Krüger was not caught in the Night of the Long Knives, in which Röhm and many other high-ranking SA members were killed, and it has been speculated that his switch from the SS to the SA was only for pragmatic reasons, especially in the light of Krüger transferring the SA armouries of which he was in charge to the Reichswehr as soon as the purge began.
On 25 January 1935, Krüger re-entered the SS, was given the rank of SS-Obergruppenführer and placed on Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler's personal staff. In February 1936, he was appointed Inspector of Border Guard Units. On 16 May 1938, he was named Inspector of SS Mounted Units.
Throughout these years, Krüger also pursued a political career within the Nazi Party. At the July 1932 election, he won a seat in the Reichstag from electoral constituency 5 (Frankfurt an der Oder) and, on 10 July 1933, he was made a member of the Prussian State Council. He would hold these seats until the fall of the Nazi regime. Also he served a term as a District Councillor (Rattsherr) in Berlin from 1933 through 1935. In July 1937, he was given a seat on the People's Court and he was appointed the Reich Supreme Authority for Equestrian Sports in January 1939.
Crimes in Poland
On 4 October 1939, Himmler appointed Krüger as the Higher SS and Police Leader (Höherer SS- und Polizeiführer, HSSPF) to the German military administration in Łódź. This was rapidly followed on 26 October by his formal appointment as HSSPF "Ost" to the part of German-occupied Poland organized into the General Government, with headquarters in Kraków. Krüger thus held the highest police and security post in occupied Poland.
During the first months of the war in Poland, he was one of the coordinators of Action AB - the mass murder by shooting of Polish intelligentsia, which was performed by Orpo or ethnic Germans (Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz). The victims were mainly University lecturers, retired military officers, high-rank policemen, managing staff of the Polish State Railways, journalists, businessmen, landowners, notable Catholic priests, internationally known sportsmen (vide Janusz Kusociński), judges, teachers, social workers, senior administrative officials or other members of Polish intellectual elite.
Already in November 1939, Krüger had fulfilled Hitler's personal order, and 184 professors of Jagiellonian University were arrested in the Sonderaktion Krakau action and deported on a cattle train to Sachsenhausen concentration camp; fewer than 50 of the professors survived the war.
From the very beginning he introduced the terror on a large scale. For every killed German in General Government by Home Army, ten random Polish civilians were shot. Regular arrests of Polish inhabitants of Warsaw, during the street Razzia () and transporting them to the Third Reich to do slave labor for German industry (for among others: Krupp, Audi, IG Farben, Porsche, Volkswagen...), or straight to concentration camps, were organized on his orders.
The deportation to the concentration camp was practically equal to the death sentence. One of the men from units subordinated to Krüger: SS-Hauptsturmführer (captain) Karl Fritzsch, the deputy (Schutzhaftlagerführer) Auschwitz commander, once said to a new transport of Polish prisoners:
The collective responsibility was the new law introduced by SS. If someone in the family committed an act against the new rules (for example: failure to comply with the curfew), all the members of the family were sent to concentration camp. In the case, when a serious disobedience was committed by a farmer, the whole village was under process of pacification (mass execution by burning).
Due to harsh "politics" of the occupiers, the shortage of the food and medications in the cities and towns was extrema. The Poles were starving (average food allocation amounted to 2,600 calories for Germans, 700 for Poles and 400 for Jews). The worst situation was in the ghettos, where the mortality was much higher than among "free" Poles. Farmers in GG were obliged to deliver draconian amount of grain, meat, milk and potatoes, which were sent straight to Germany. No pay was given to the victims. Just in the year 1942–1943 around 633,000 tons of the grain were confiscated from Polish villages. In the Autumn period of 1944 nearly 388,000 tons of potatoes were stolen. The contingents were taken by force and in the whole process military or para-military forces were used, acting on orders of local SS or police commander. In the case of refusal to deliver on time, severe punishments like beatings or arrests were applied. Some of them were resulting in sending to a concentration camps. All sorts of repressions were introduced, including the death penalty (without formal accusation or a lawful trial).
To terrorize the population - on SS commanders' orders - public executions by shooting or hanging were conducted.
The systematic process of kidnapping around 200,000 children from Polish families for further Germanisation was also Krüger's domain.
People disabled mentally or with Down syndrome were secretly killed by the authorities (mainly by Sicherheitspolizei). Later on, the gas vans were invented by German doctor of chemistry and SS-Untersturmführer August Becker (not subordinated to Krüger), to make the whole process faster, more discreet and taking the burden of participating in a mass shootings from ordinary soldiers.
Krüger supervised the action of destroying Polish historical buildings (without military significance), cultural sites and in general Polish culture - both by stealing the art works or - if they were related to Polish history - burning some of them on the spot (vide: medieval synagogue). More than 500,000 of Polish and international (paintings by da Vinci, Raphael or Rembrandt) piece of arts were stolen. Most of them never come back to Poland after the war. Some of the goods - crucial to Polish cultural heritage like paintings: Battle of Grunwald or Prussian Homage, were hidden in a local farms. If they were seized by the occupiers, they would be destroyed as anti-German. Policies aimed at cultural genocide resulted in the deaths of thousands of scholars and artists, and the theft and destruction of innumerable cultural artifacts.
All Polish theatres were disbanded, likewise all universities were shut, and the secondary schools were teaching only basics. Lessons of history, geography and the Polish literature ceased to be performed. The primary education in the countryside was not allowed during the next five years, leaving - in 1945 - a couple of million teenagers, barely able to write and read. In Galicia for every book given to the German authorities, a bottle of alcohol was the pay (one of the assumptions of the Generalplan Ost). The plan was originating from Otto von Bismarck's operations against - among others - Poles, mainly in Provinz Posen (Greater Poland) in the 19th century.
Once Bismarck wrote to his sister in 1861:
Reichsführer SS expressed the German doctrine against Untermenschen by these words:
As the highest commander in charge he looked after the execution of Operation Harvest Festival in district of Lublin, when during one day in November 1943 SS, Order Police (101st Police Battalion from Hamburg volunteered for this operation) and the Ukrainian Sonderdienst shot to death in mass killings more than 83,000 Jews. Krüger's men, hand-in-hand with Order Police battalions, Einsatzgruppen and Wehrmacht were conducting during a few years time, the genocide program of quelling guerrilla activity, so-called: "anti-partisan" fighting in the General Government. During these operations, which meant to be against Polish "bandits", as the Germans called partisans, the murders of women and children were carried out on a daily basis. For a help given to the partisans by local farmers and their families, the entire villages were burnt to the ashes with all inhabitants (so-called pacification action).
Such "disciplinary" campaigns were a commonplace in Poland under German occupation - more than 300 Polish villages were destroyed (within the borders after 1945). In the most of cases, before the fire was set to the village, all the peasants were gathered in the biggest village building and burnt alive. Earlier, several grenades were thrown into the crowd.
Among other deeds committed by Krüger were: responsibility for eliminating rebellions in the extermination camps, providing victims for the medical experiments typically resulting in the death or permanent disability, setting up forced labour camps, the employment of police and SS in the deportations of Jews from ghettos in General Government to extermination camps.
He was in charge of driving out (ethnic cleansing) of over 116,000 Polish farmers (30 thousands of them were children) from the area around Zamość, known as Aktion Zamosc. Most of the children were sent to concentrations camps and to labor camps. Blond and sufficiently young were being sent to the III Reich to be Germanised, or work as slaves for German industry or farms. Only 800 were successfully reclaimed after the war.
Disagreements with governor general Hans Frank led to Krüger's dismissal on 9 November 1943. He was replaced by Wilhelm Koppe.
Due to Krüger, Koppe and their troops and policemen, altogether more than 6 million Poles (2.9 million of them were Polish Jews) were killed in gas chambers, in forced labour camps, during mass shootings, from hunger, disease, cold or because of mandatory expulsions from their houses or farms, and transportation of these empty-handed victims on the bare fields of General Government. Almost the entire population of Polish Jews was exterminated. Travelling Roma were treated by German authority equally to Jews (Romani genocide).
The economical downfall of the Polish industry, the railway network, the agriculture, the forestry and total destruction of the country (the retreating Germans blew up Polish sea port in Gdynia) were not in connection with the military actions only. Most of the victims have perished due to political doctrine, classifying all the Slavic nations as subhumans, and other administrative and compulsory orders and restrictions set up by the new government, with SS-Obergruppenführer Krüger as the most senior commander of SS and Police in German-occupied Poland.
I have nothing against - after the war will be won - the extermination of all this Slavic mob.
The Polish Secret State ordered his death, but an assassination attempt on 20 April 1943 in Kraków failed when two bombs hurled at his car missed the target.
Six months later, he wrote in a letter:
Later career and suicide
From November 1943 until April 1944 Krüger served with the SS Division Prinz Eugen conducting Nazi security warfare in occupied Yugoslavia. While ostensibly engaged in anti-partisan fight in Yugoslavia, this unit became notorious for committing atrocities against the civilian population.
On 8 July 1944, Krüger was given the rank of General der Waffen-SS. From June to August he took over the command over the SS Division Nord in northern Finland. From August 1944 until February 1945 Krüger was commanding general of the V SS Mountain Corps. In February 1945 he was Himmler's representative at the German southeast front and in April and May 1945 he was commander of a combat unit of the Orpo at Army Group South (known as Army Group Ostmark after 1 May 1945). At the end of the war Krüger committed suicide in Upper Austria.
Awards
Iron Cross (1914) 2nd Class (7 September 1914), 1st Class (17 February 1915)
Knight's Cross of the Royal House Order of Hohenzollern with Swords (25 April 1918)
Wound Badge in Silver (1918)
War Merit Cross 2nd and 1st Class with Swords (20 April 1942)
Clasp to the Iron Cross (1939) 2nd Class (2 August 1943) & 1st Class (15 May 1944)
Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross on 22 October 1944 as commander of the 6. SS-Gebirgs-Division "Nord"
See also
Palmiry massacre,
Massacres in Piaśnica,
Szczurowa massacre - part of genocide on Polish Romani,
Polish culture during World War II,
References
Citations
Bibliography
Birn, Ruth Bettina (1986). Die höheren SS- und Polizeiführer. Himmlers Vertreter im Reich und in den besetzten Gebieten. Droste Verlag, Düsseldorf. .
Casagrande, Thomas (2003). Die Volksdeutsche SS-Division 'Prinz Eugen'. Die Banater Schwaben und die National-sozialistischen Kriegsverbrechen. Campus Verlag. .
Döring, Martin (2001). "Parlamentarischer Arm der Bewegung", Die Nationalsozialisten im Reichstag der Weimarer Republik, Droste Verlag, Düsseldorf. .
Friedmann, Tuviah (1995) Der Höhere SS- und Polizeiführer im Generalgouvernement, SS-Obergruppenführer Krüger. Haifa, Israel: [Institute of Documentation in Israel for the Investigation of Nazi War Crimes].
Patin, Nicolas (2017), Krüger. Un bourreau ordinaire, Fayard, Paris, .
Thompson, Larry V. (1967). Nazi Administrative Conflict. The Struggle for Executive Power in the General Government of Poland 1939–1943, Dissertation, University of Wisconsin.
Thompson, Larry V. (2000). "Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger. Höherer SS- und Polizeiführer Ost", in : Ronald Smelser, Enrico Syring (Hg.), Die SS : Elite unter dem Totenkopf. Paderborn. .
Wulf, Josef (1961). Das dritte Reich und seine Vollstrecker. Die Liquidation von 500 000 Juden im Ghetto Warschau, Arani Verlags GmbH, Berlin.
David Cesarani, Adolf Eichmann. His life and crimes, William Heinemann, London 2004, s. 458, .
External links
1894 births
1945 suicides
1945 deaths
German Army personnel of World War I
Holocaust perpetrators in Poland
Members of the Prussian State Council (Nazi Germany)
Members of the Reichstag of Nazi Germany
Members of the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic
Military personnel from Strasbourg
Nazis who committed suicide in Austria
Military personnel from Alsace-Lorraine
Recipients of the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross
Recipients of the Order of the Yugoslav Crown
SS and Police Leaders
SS-Obergruppenführer
Sturmabteilung officers
20th-century Freikorps personnel
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago%2C%20Rock%20Island%20and%20Pacific%20Railroad
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Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad
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The Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad (CRI&P RW, sometimes called Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railway) was an American Class I railroad. It was also known as the Rock Island Line, or, in its final years, The Rock.
At the end of 1970, it operated 7,183 miles of road on 10,669 miles of track; that year it reported 20,557 million ton-miles of revenue freight and 118 million passenger miles. (Those totals may or may not include the former Burlington-Rock Island Railroad.)
The song "Rock Island Line", a spiritual from the late 1920s first recorded in 1934, was inspired by the railway.
History
Incorporation
Its predecessor, the Rock Island and La Salle Railroad Company, was incorporated in Illinois on February 27, 1847, and an amended charter was approved on February 7, 1851, as the Chicago and Rock Island Railroad. Construction began in Chicago on October 1, 1851, and the first train was operated on October 10, 1852, between Chicago and Joliet. Construction continued on through La Salle, and Rock Island was reached on February 22, 1854, becoming the first railroad to connect Chicago with the Mississippi River.
In Iowa, the C&RI's incorporators created (on February 5, 1853) the Mississippi and Missouri Railroad Company (M&M), to run from Davenport to Council Bluffs, and on November 20, 1855, the first train to operate in Iowa steamed from Davenport to Muscatine. The Mississippi River bridge between Rock Island and Davenport was completed on April 22, 1856.
In 1857, the steamboat Effie Afton ran into the Rock Island's Mississippi River Bridge. The steamboat was overcome by a fire, which also destroyed a span of the bridge. This accident caused a series of court cases. In one of the cases, Abraham Lincoln, a lawyer at the time, represented the Rock Island. Lincoln argued that not only was the steamboat at fault in striking the bridge, but that bridges across navigable rivers were to the advantage of the country.
The M&M was acquired by the C&RI on July 9, 1866, to form the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad Company. The railroad expanded through construction and acquisitions in the following decades.
On March 21, 1910, the Green Mountain train wreck resulted when a Rock Island Railroad passenger train derailed, killing 52 passengers and severely injuring scores of others.
The railroad retired its last steam locomotive from service in 1953.
Territory
The Rock Island stretched across Arkansas, Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Texas. The easternmost reach of the system was Chicago, and the system also reached Memphis, Tennessee. To the west, it reached Denver, Colorado, and Santa Rosa, New Mexico. Southernmost reaches were to Galveston, Texas, and Eunice, Louisiana, while in a northerly direction, the Rock Island got as far as Minneapolis, Minnesota. Major lines included Minneapolis to Kansas City, Missouri, via Des Moines, Iowa; St. Louis, Missouri Meta, Missouri, to Santa Rosa via Kansas City; Herington, Kansas, to Galveston, Texas, via Fort Worth, Texas, and Dallas, Texas; and Santa Rosa to Memphis. The heaviest traffic was on the Chicago-to-Rock Island and Rock Island-to-Muscatine lines.
Intercity passenger service
In common with most American railroad companies, the Rock Island once operated an extensive passenger service. The primary routes served were: Chicago-Los Angeles, Chicago-Denver, Memphis-Little Rock-Oklahoma City-Tucumcari, and Minneapolis-Dallas. The Rock Island ran both limited and local service on those routes, as well as locals on many other lines on its system. In 1937, the Rock Island introduced diesel power to its passenger service, with the purchase of six lightweight Rocket streamliners.
In competition with the Santa Fe Chiefs, the Rock Island jointly operated the Golden State Limited (Chicago—Kansas City—Tucumcari—El Paso—Los Angeles) with the Southern Pacific Railroad (SP) from 1902 to 1968. On this route, the Rock Island's train was marketed as a "low-altitude" crossing of the Continental Divide. The Rock Island did not concede to the Santa Fe's dominance in the Chicago–Los Angeles travel market and re-equipped the train with new streamlined equipment in 1948. At the same time, the Limited was dropped from the train's name and the train was thereafter known as the Golden State. The local run on this line was known as the Imperial, which had a branch operating through the northwestern edge of Mexico.
The 1948 modernization of the Golden State occurred with some controversy. In 1947, both the Rock Island and Southern Pacific jointly advertised the coming of a new entry in the Chicago-Los Angeles travel market. The Golden Rocket was scheduled to closely match the Santa Fe's transit time end-to-end and was to have its own dedicated trainsets, one purchased by the Rock Island, the other by Southern Pacific. As the Rock Island's set of streamlined passenger cars was being finished, the Southern Pacific abruptly withdrew its purchase. The Rock Island's cars were delivered and found their way into the Golden State'''s fleet soon after delivery.
The Golden State was the last first-class train on the Rock Island, retaining its dining cars and sleeping cars until its last run on February 21, 1968.
The Rock Island also competed with the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy railroad in the Chicago-to-Denver market. While the Q fielded its Zephyrs on the route, the Rock Island ran the Rocky Mountain Rocket. The RMR split at Limon, Colorado, with half the train diverting to Colorado Springs, an operation known as the "Limon Shuffle". The Rock Island conceded nothing to its rival, even installing ABS signaling on the route west of Lincoln in an effort to maintain transit speed. The train was also re-equipped with streamlined equipment in 1948.
As the Rocky Mountain Rocket was downgraded due to nonrail competition, the route traveled by the train was gradually shortened from 1966 onward. Its western terminus was cut back first to Omaha, then to Council Bluffs. After briefly running without a name, it was renamed The Cornhusker. Finally, in 1970, the train was cut back to a Chicago-Rock Island run entirely within the confines of the state of Illinois and renamed the Quad Cities Rocket.
Other trains operated by the Rock Island as part of its Rocket fleet included the Corn Belt Rocket (Chicago—Des Moines—Omaha), the Des Moines-Omaha Limited (Chicago-Des Moines-Omaha), the Twin Star Rocket (Minneapolis—St. Paul—Des Moines—Kansas City—Oklahoma City—Fort Worth—Dallas—Houston), the Zephyr Rocket (Minneapolis—St. Paul—Burlington—St. Louis), the Choctaw Rocket (Memphis—Little Rock—Oklahoma City—Amarillo) and the Cherokee (a local counterpart to the Choctaw Rocket, Memphis-Little Rock-Oklahoma City-Amarillo-Tucumcari-Los Angeles).
By the time Amtrak was formed in 1971, the once-proud Rock Island was down to just two intercity trains, the Chicago-Peoria Peoria Rocket and the Chicago-Rock Island Quad Cities Rocket, both of which now operated entirely within the borders of Illinois. However, the Rock Island opted against joining Amtrak, in part because the government assessed the Amtrak entrance fee based upon passenger miles operated in 1970. After concluding that the cost of joining would be greater than remaining in the passenger business, the railroad decided to "perform a public service for the state of Illinois" and continue intercity passenger operations. To help manage the service, the Rock Island hired National Association of Railroad Passengers founder Anthony Haswell as managing director of passenger services.
The last two trains plied the Rock Island's Illinois Division as the track quality declined from 1971 through 1977. The transit times, once a speedy 2½ hours in the 1950s, had lengthened to a 4½ hour run by 1975. The State of Illinois continued to subsidize the service to keep it running. The track program of 1978 helped with main-line timekeeping, although the Rock Island's management decreed that the two trains were not to delay freight traffic on the route. By this time, both once-proud trains were down to just two coaches, powered by EMD E8 locomotives entering their second decade of service. With the trains frequently running with as many paying passengers as coaches in the train, Illinois withdrew its subsidy, and the two trains made their final runs on December 31, 1978.
Chicago commuter service
The Rock Island also operated an extensive commuter train service in the Chicago area. The primary route ran from LaSalle Street Station to Joliet along the main line, and a spur line, known as the "Suburban Line" to Blue Island. The main-line trains supplanted the long-distance services that did not stop at the numerous stations on that route. The Suburban Line served the Beverly Hills area of Chicago as a branch leaving the main line at Gresham and heading due west, paralleling the Baltimore and Ohio Chicago Terminal Railroad passenger line before turning south. The Suburban Line made stops every four blocks along the way before rejoining the main line at Western Avenue Junction in Blue Island.
From the 1920s on, the suburban services were operated using Pacific-type 4-6-2 locomotives and specially designed light-heavyweight coaches that with their late 1920s build dates became known as the "Capone" cars. The suburban service became well known in the diesel era, as the steam power was replaced, first with new EMD FP7s and ALCO RS-3s, with two Fairbanks-Morse units added later. In 1949, Pullman-built 2700-series cars arrived as the first air-conditioned commuter cars on the line.
In the 1960s, the Rock Island tried to upgrade the suburban service with newer equipment at lower cost. Second-hand Aerotrains, while less than successful in intercity service, were purchased to provide further air-conditioned accommodations that had proven popular with the 2700 series cars.
When the Milwaukee Road purchased new Budd Company stainless-steel, bilevel cars in 1961, the Rock Island elected to add to a subsequent order and took delivery of its first bilevel equipment in 1964. Power for these new cars was provided by orphaned passenger units: three EMD F7s, an EMD E6, and the two EMD AB6s. The engines were rebuilt with head end power to provide heat, air conditioning, and lighting for the new cars. In 1970, another order, this time for Pullman-built bilevel cars arrived to further supplement the fleet. To provide the power for these cars, several former Union Pacific EMD E8 and EMD E9 diesels were also rebuilt with head end power and added to the commuter pool.
The commuter service was not exempt from the general decline of the Rock Island through the 1970s. Over time, deferred maintenance took its toll on both track and rolling stock. On the Rock Island, the Capone cars were entering their sixth decade of service and the nearly 30-year-old 2700s suffered from severe corrosion due to the steel used in their construction. LaSalle Street Station, the service's downtown terminal, suffered from neglect and urban decay with the slab roof of the train shed literally falling apart, requiring its removal. By this time, the Rock Island could not afford to replace the clearly worn-out equipment.
In 1976, the entire Chicago commuter rail system began to receive financial support from the state of Illinois through the Regional Transportation Authority. Operating funds were disbursed to all commuter operators, and the Rock Island was to be provided with new equipment to replace the tired 2700 series and Capone cars. New Budd bilevels that were near copies of the 1961 Milwaukee Road cars arrived in 1978. New EMD F40PH units arrived in late 1977 and, in summer, 1978, briefly could be seen hauling Capone cars. The Rock Island's commuter F and E units were relegated to freight service or the scrapyard.
With the 1980 end of the Rock Island, the RTA purchased the suburban territory and remaining Rock Island commuter equipment from the estate, while the Chicago and North Western Railway took over operations for a year before the RTA began operating it directly in 1981. LaSalle Street Station was torn down and replaced with the Chicago Stock Exchange building, with a smaller commuter station located one block south of the old station. The RTA gradually rebuilt the track and added more new equipment to the service, leaving the property in better shape than it was in the Rock Island's heyday, albeit with less track. The Rock Island District, as the Rock Island's suburban service is now known, now operates as part of Metra, the Chicago commuter rail agency.
Rock Island's survival challenge
The Rock Island hit its peak under the presidency of John Dew Farrington, from 1948 to 1955. As the aura from those days waned in the late 1950s, the Rock Island found itself faced with flat traffic, revenues, and increasing costs. Despite this, the property was still in decent shape, making the Rock Island an attractive bride for another line looking to expand the reach of their current system.
The Rock Island was known as "one railroad too many" in the plains states, basically serving the same territory as the Burlington, only over a longer route. The Midwest rail network had been built in the late 19th century to serve that era's traffic. The mechanization of grain hauling gave larger reach to large grain elevators, reducing the need for the tight web of track that crisscrossed the plains states such as Iowa. As for available overhead traffic, in 1958, no less than six Class I carriers were serving as eastern connections for the Union Pacific at Omaha, all seeking a slice of the flood of western traffic that UP interchanged there. Under the ICC revenue rules in place at the time, the Rock Island sought traffic from Omaha, yet preferred to keep the long haul to Denver, where interchange could be made with the Denver and Rio Grande Western, a connection to the Western Pacific for haulage to the West Coast.
The only option for the Rock Island to grow revenues and absorb costs was to merge with another, perhaps more prosperous railroad. Overtures were made from fellow Midwest granger line C&NW, as well as the granger turned transcon Milwaukee Road. Both of these never advanced much beyond the data gathering and initial study phases. In 1964, its last profitable year, the Rock Island agreed to pursue a merger plan with the UP, which would form one large "super" railroad stretching from Chicago to the West Coast.
Facing the loss of the UP's traffic at the Omaha gateway, virtually every railroad directly and indirectly affected by the potential UP/Rock Island merger immediately filed protests to block it. With these filings began the longest and most complicated merger case in Interstate Commerce Commission history. Faced with failing granger railroads and large Class I railroads seeking to expand, ICC Hearing Examiner Nathan Klitenic, presiding over the case, sought to balance the opposing forces and completely restructure the railroads west of the Mississippi River.
The UP-RI merger case
After 10 years of hearings and tens of thousands of pages of testimony and exhibits produced, Klitenic, now an administrative law judge, approved the Rock Island-Union Pacific merger as part of a larger plan for rail service throughout the West. Under Klitenic's proposal, almost all of the Rock Island, including the Chicago-Omaha main line, would go to the Union Pacific. The Kansas City-Tucumcari Golden State route would be sold to the Southern Pacific. The Memphis-Amarillo Choctaw route would be sold to the Santa Fe. The Rio Grande would have an option to purchase the Denver-Kansas City line.
During most of the ensuing merger process, Rock Island operated at a financial loss. In 1965, Rock Island earned its last profit. With the merger with Union Pacific seemingly so close, the Rock Island cut expenses to conserve cash. Expenditures on track maintenance were cut, passenger service was reduced as fast as the ICC would allow, and locomotives received only basic maintenance to keep them running. The Rock Island began to take on a ramshackle appearance and derailments occurred with increasing frequency. In an effort to prop up its future merger mate, UP asked the Rock Island to forsake the Denver gateway in favor of increased interchange at Omaha. Incredibly, the Rock Island refused this, and the UP routed more Omaha traffic over the Chicago and North Western.
As a result, by 1974, the Rock Island was no longer the attractive prospect it had once been in the 1950s. The cost-cutting measures enacted to conserve cash for the merger left the Rock Island property in such a state that the Union Pacific viewed the expense of bringing it back to viable operating condition to be severely prohibitive. Additionally, the ICC attached conditions for both labor and operating concessions that the UP deemed too excessive for their tastes. These factors led the Union Pacific to walk away from the deal later in 1974.
From the vantage point of the 1974 railroad industry, Klitenic's plan was viewed as an unmanageable and far too radical solution to both the granger railroad issue and the larger issue of the future of rail freight transportation in general. The visionary plan would not be realized until the megamergers of the 1990s with the BNSF Railway and Union Pacific remaining as the two surviving major rail carriers west of the Mississippi.
The Rock Island's last attempt to survive
Now set free and adrift, both operationally and financially, the Rock Island assessed its options. It hired a new president and CEO, John W. Ingram, a former Federal Railway Administration (FRA) official. Ingram quickly sought to improve efficiency and sought FRA loans for the rebuild of the line, but finances caught up with the Rock Island all too quickly. With only $300 of cash on hand, on March 17, 1975, Rock Island entered its third bankruptcy under Chapter 77 of the Federal Bankruptcy Act. William M. Gibbons was selected as receiver and trustee by Judge Frank J. McGarr, with whom Gibbons had practiced law in the early 1960s.
With its debts on hold, Rock Island charted a new course as a grain funnel from the Midwest to the port of Galveston, Texas. The Ingram administration estimated that the Rock Island could be rebuilt and re-equipped at a cost of $100 million and sought financing for the plan. Grain shuttles that had no cabooses at the end of their trains became a cost-effective way to gain market share and help finance the plan internally.
Nevertheless, new and rebuilt locomotives arrived on the property in gleaming powder blue and white to replace some of the tired, filthy power. Track rebuild projects covered the system. Main lines that had seen little or no maintenance in years were pulled from the mud. Rail and tie replacement programs attacked the maintenance backlog. This coincided with a massive campaign beginning in May 1975 to rebrand the railroad as simply “The Rock”, with modern eye-catching livery. However, the FRA-backed loans that Ingram sought were thwarted by the lobbying efforts of competing railroads, which saw a healthy Rock Island as a threat to their own survival. By 1978, main line track improved in quality. For example, at the end of that summer, the Illinois Division had no slow orders, and freight velocity was rising. The sale of the Golden State Route to the Southern Pacific had been agreed to. The Rock Island slowly inched towards a financial break-even point, despite the economic malaise that plagued the late 1970s.
Creditors, such as Henry Crown, advocated for the shutdown and liquidation of the property. Crown declared that the Rock Island was not capable of operating profitably, much less paying its outstanding debts. At the same time, Crown invested as much as he could in Rock Island bonds and other debt at bankruptcy-induced junk status prices.
For the previous two years, while the Rock Island invested heavily into its physical plant, the Rock Island brotherhoods had been working under labor agreements that were no longer valid. The front line operating employees had not had an increase in pay since the existing contracts expired yet remained on the job during extensive contract negotiations. By the summer of 1979, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and the United Transportation Union had accepted new agreements. The Brotherhood of Railway and Airline Clerks (BRAC) held firm to their demand that pay increases be back dated to the expiration date of the previous agreement.
The Rock Island offered to open the books to show the precarious financial condition of the road in an effort to get the BRAC in line with the other unions that had already signed agreements. Fred J. Kroll, president of the BRAC, declined the offer to audit the books of the Rock Island. Kroll pulled his BRAC clerks off the job in August, 1979. Picket lines went up at every terminal on the Rock Island's system and the operating brotherhoods honored the picket lines. The Rock Island ground to a halt.
The Ingram management team operated as much of the Rock Island as they could. Trains slowly began to move, with more traffic being hauled every week of the strike. President Jimmy Carter issued a back-to-work order that BRAC dismissed. Still more traffic flowed on the strikebound Rock Island. According to Ingram, "by the end of the sixth week, the Rock Island was handling about 30 percent of its prestrike tonnage with 5 percent of the prestrike onboard train operating personnel. Projections indicated that by the end of November, the company would be handling about half of its prestrike tonnage and earning a profit of about $5 million per month. In other words, the company was winning the strike." Seeing the trains rolling despite the strike and fearing a Florida East Coast strikebreaking situation, the unions appealed to the FRA and ICC for relief. Despite the fact that Rock Island management had been able to move 80% of pre-strike tonnage, at the behest of the Carter Administration, the ICC declared a transportation emergency, finding that the Rock Island would not be able to move the 1979 grain harvest to market. This decision came despite the railroad's movement of more grain out of Iowa in the week immediately preceding the order than during any week in its history. The ICC issued a Directed Service Order authorizing the Kansas City Terminal Railway to take over operations.
The Directed Service Order enabled one-time suitors, via KCT management, to basically test operate portions of the Rock Island that had once interested them. On January 24, 1980, Judge McGarr elected to not review the Rock Island's final plan of reorganization. He simply initiated the shutdown and liquidation of the Rock Island, which was what Henry Crown had advocated for from the very beginning. Not wanting to preside over an asset sale, Rock Island president John W. Ingram resigned, and Gibbons took over as president of the bankrupt railroad.
Kansas City Terminal began the process of embargoing in-bound shipments in late February, and the final train battled three days of snow drifts to arrive in Denver on March 31, 1980. Cars and locomotives were gathered in 'ghost trains' that appeared on otherwise defunct Rock Island lines and accumulated at major terminals and shops and prepared for sale.
Legacy
The railroad's locomotives, rail cars, equipment, tracks, and real estate were sold to other railroads or to scrappers. Gibbons was able to raise more than $500 million in the liquidation, paying off all the railroad's creditors, bondholders and all other debts in full at face value with interest. Henry Crown was ultimately proven correct, as both he and other bondholders who had purchased Rock Island debt for cents on the dollar during the low ebb in prices did especially well.
Gibbons was released from the Rock Island on June 1, 1984, after its estate expired. With all assets sold and all debt retired, the Rock Island found itself with a large infusion of cash. The name of the company was changed to Chicago Pacific Corporation to further distance itself from the defunct railroad. Its first purchase was vacuum maker Hoover Company. In 1988, the company was acquired by the Maytag Corporation.
Ironically, through the megamergers of the 1990s, the Union Pacific ultimately ended up owning and operating more of the Rock Island than it would have acquired in its attempted 1964 merger. The one line it currently does not own (or operate regularly, other than detours) is the Chicago-to-Omaha main line that drove it to merge with the Rock Island in the first place. This line now prospers under the Iowa Interstate Railroad.
The company inspired the song "Rock Island Line", first written in 1934 and recorded by numerous artists.
A spur of the Rock Island Railroad that ran beside a small hotel in Eldon, Missouri, owned by the grandmother of Mrs. Paul (Ruth) Henning also inspired the popular television show "Petticoat Junction" in the early 1960s. Ruth Henning is listed as a co-creator of the show, along with her husband Paul, who also created "The Beverly Hillbillies" and executive produced Jay Sommers's "Green Acres."
The Rock Island Line Workshop, located in Silvis, Illinois, is now home to the Railroading Heritage of Midwest America (RRHMA), a non-profit railroad preservation organization. Built in 1903, this was the railroad's largest workshop, sitting on a 900-acre site between the railroad's main line and the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad’s Rock Island branch. After the closing in 1980, the workshop was sold to National Railway Equipment, and it remained a maintenance and refurbishment hub for the wider North American railroad industry. NRE sold the facility to the RRHMA in late 2021, and plans call for the refurbishment of the facility to maintain steam, heritage diesel and associated rolling stock, in addition to developing a museum on the site.
Reestablishment
In 2017, thirty-seven years after the Rock Island folded, a new startup company that owns the rights to the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific name began operating in the southern United States. The new Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad LLC is primarily a shortline holding company, while also providing numerous other railroad services, such as switching, railroad management, railcar fleet management, railcar storage, and locomotive maintenance. The company acquired their first railroad in early 2019 with the acquisition of the Mississippi Delta Railroad. The company rosters eight locomotives.
Company officers
Presidents of the Rock Island Railroad included:
James W. Grant, November 27, 1850 - December 22, 1851.
John Bloomfield Jervis, December 22, 1851 - December 1854.
Henry Farnam, December 1854 - June 1863.
Charles W. Durant, June 1863 - August 1866.
John F. Tracy, August 1866 - April 14, 1877.
Hugh Riddle, April 14, 1877 - June 6, 1883.
Ransom Reed Cable, June 6, 1883 - June 1898.
Warren G. Purdy, June 1898 - December 31, 1901.
William Bateman Leeds, December 31, 1901 - March 26, 1904.
Benjamin L. Winchell, March 26, 1904 - December 1909.
Henry U. Mudge, December 1909 - April 20, 1915.
Jacob McGavock Dickinson appointed receiver trustee during bankruptcy, April 20, 1915 - June 21, 1917.
James E. Gorman, June 22, 1917 - June 7, 1933.
Joseph B. Fleming, Frank Orren Lowden (until his death on March 20, 1943) and James E. Gorman (until his death on March 25, 1942) appointed receiver trustees during bankruptcy, June 7, 1933 - December 31, 1947. Aaron Colnon replaced Frank O. Lowden as receiver trustee on April 19, 1943.
John Dow Farrington, January 1, 1948 - 1955.
Downing B. Jenks, 1956–1961.
R. Ellis Johnson, 1961–1964.
Jervis Langdon, Jr., 1965–1970.
William J. Dixon, 1970–1974.
John W. Ingram, 1974 - January 1980.
William M. Gibbons appointed receiver trustee during bankruptcy, March 17, 1975 - June 1, 1984.
See also
Chicago, Rock Island and Gulf Railway, its subsidiary extending to Galveston, Texas
El Comedor''
Grand Excursion
Iowa Interstate Railroad
Joseph E. Sheffield
LaSalle Street Station
RailsWest Railroad Museum
Rock Island Rockets
References
Further reading
External links
Rock Island System map, 1966
The Rock Island Line
The Rock Island In Arkansas
Rock Island System Map, 1885
Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture - Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific Railroad
Oklahoma Digital Maps: Digital Collections of Oklahoma and Indian Territory
Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad LLC
Guide to Oral Opinion of Hon. Smith McPherson in the Case of the United States vs. Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific Railway Company 1908 at the University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center
Wheels of Progress, 1950
Defunct companies based in Chicago
Former Class I railroads in the United States
Defunct Arkansas railroads
Defunct Colorado railroads
Defunct Illinois railroads
Defunct Iowa railroads
Defunct Kansas railroads
Defunct Louisiana railroads
Defunct Minnesota railroads
Defunct Missouri railroads
Defunct Nebraska railroads
Defunct New Mexico railroads
Defunct Oklahoma railroads
Defunct South Dakota railroads
Defunct Tennessee railroads
Defunct Texas railroads
Railroads in the Chicago metropolitan area
Standard gauge railways in the United States
Rock Island, Illinois
Railway companies established in 1866
Railway companies disestablished in 1880
Railway companies established in 1947
Railway companies disestablished in 1980
1866 establishments in the United States
American companies established in 1947
American companies established in 1866
American companies disestablished in 1880
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List%20of%20reportedly%20haunted%20locations
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List of reportedly haunted locations
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This is a list of reportedly haunted locations that are said to be haunted by ghosts, demons, or other supernatural beings throughout the world. Reports of haunted locations are part of ghostlore, which is a form of folklore.
Argentina
Cinco Saltos in Río Negro has been reported to have a number of ghosts, most of them reportedly the result of witchcraft. In 2009, an intact corpse of an 8- to 12-year-old girl who had died in the 1930s was found in a cemetery ossuary.
Australia
Ararat Lunatic Asylum, or Aradale, is the largest abandoned lunatic asylum in Ararat. Opened in 1867, Aradale was reserved for many of the incurable mental patients in Victoria during the 1800s. An estimated 13,000 people died here during 140 years of operation.
Beechworth Lunatic Asylum in Beechworth, Victoria is reportedly haunted by several ghosts of departed patients. Open from 1867 to 1995, it has appeared in several books, television shows, and documentaries, including A.C.T. Paranormal. Ghost tours run nightly.
Dreamworld is a theme park in Coomera, Queensland. One building inside the grounds of the theme park, where the reality television series Big Brother Australia is produced, has been reported to be haunted since the show's first season in 2001. Numerous production staff claim to have witnessed the presence of a young girl, as well as a child's voice and fog appearing late at night and early in the morning.
The Hotel Kurrajong in Canberra is said to be haunted by the ghost of former Prime Minister Ben Chifley, who died there in 1951. Some reports have Chifley pointing towards Old Parliament House, another location said to be haunted.
Monte Cristo Homestead in Junee, New South Wales was the site of seven deaths during the 1800s, and is reported to be the most haunted house in Australia. Various ghost groups have reported sightings there.
North Head Quarantine Station in Manly, New South Wales housed victims of a number of diseases including smallpox and the Spanish flu between 1833 and 1984. It was the site of over 500 deaths. A number of ghost tours are run on the grounds, which includes a large cemetery.
Port Arthur, Tasmania has a reported 2000 ghost sightings.
The Princess Theatre Melbourne has reported several ghosts since the building opened in 1886. The theatre's best known "inhabitant" is Frederick Baker, whose stage name was Frederick Federici, a talented bass-baritone singer who died during March 1888 whilst singing the role of Mephistopheles in Faust – and who was seen by the rest of the cast taking his bows with them soon thereafter. For years the theater kept a seat vacant in the dress circle for Federici (only ceasing the practice on economic grounds), and his appearance in the dress circle during rehearsals for a new show is considered a good omen.
Willow Court Asylum is reported to have numerous ghosts.
Bangladesh
Dhaka Airport Road: The segment of the road between Nikunjo and Biman office is reported by believers to be haunted by a lady at night, supposedly causing accidents.
Dhaka Golf Heights, Banani, Dhaka: Claimed by believers to be haunted by a crying baby, and feelings of being watched are reported.
Under-construction apartment in Old DOHS, Banani, Dhaka: Said to have ties to Satanism. Lanes 4 and 5 are reputed to have been built on top of graves.
Purbo Nayatola Rail Crossing, Dhaka: Reported by believers to be haunted by a woman frantically looking for her missing infant.
Shahidullah Hall Pond, Dhaka: The old pond adjoining Shahidullah Hall at Dhaka University campus is believed to be haunted by people who drowned in the pond.
Farmhouse in Comilla: A huge farmhouse in Comilla is reported to be haunted by black shadows assaulting people at night.
Barbados
Chase Vault is a burial vault in the cemetery of the Christ Church Parish Church in Oistins, Christ Church, Barbados best known for a widespread but unverified legend of "mysterious moving coffins". According to the story, each time the heavily sealed vault was opened during the early 19th century for burial of a family member, all of the lead coffins had changed position. The facts of the story are unverified, and skeptics call the tale "historically dubious." The tale appears to have originated from anecdotes told by Thomas H. Orderson, Rector of Christ Church during the 1800s, and subsequently repeated in James Edward Alexander's 1833 Transatlantic Sketches.
Brazil
The Joelma Building (now the Praça da Bandeira Building) in São Paulo is allegedly haunted by victims of the fire that started on 1 February 1974, after an air conditioning unit on the twelfth floor overheated; centered on the "Mystery of the Thirteen Souls", individuals who died within an elevator as they were trying to escape the fire, and are haunting the building.
Cambodia
Kampong Chhnang: The famous "ghost house" in Cambodia.
S-21 Prison: This infamous detention center is haunted by the victims of the Cambodian Genocide.
Canada
China
Colombia
Czech Republic
Zvíkov Castle: Until 1597 there are stories about a Zvíkovský Rarášek (Rarach is a supernatural being common in Slavic folklore, similar to an imp or trickster) which haunts people in the ancient tower, Markomanka. This tower has stones engraved with unknown symbols, and was built during the Marcomanni rule over Bohemia, in the 1st century BC and 2nd century AD. It was integrated into Zvíkov castle hundreds of years later. Strange events occur here frequently, including weird photos, technical problems, unpredictable behaviour of animals, spontaneous extinguishing of fires, electromagnetic anomalies, and the presence of ghosts. In Czech media it's a popular subject of investigation. Other areas of the castle are also haunted; it is said to be dangerous to sleep in the main tower, as anyone who does supposedly dies within a year. Another monster common in Czech culture, fire hounds are also part of the myths surrounding the castle. It is said that these spectral dogs (in some accounts they are depicted with burning eyes) are guarding a hidden tunnel underneath Zvíkov.
Egypt
Baron Empain Palace: Tourists have reportedly heard voices throughout the palace late at night. Guards and police have reported seeing ghostly apparitions of people who were once residents of the palace, wandering the outside lawn at midnight.
Farafra Desert: The ghost of Akhenaten is said to wander the Farafra Desert (also known as the White Desert) of Egypt, reported by dozens of tourists and nomads. Legend says this is because Akhenaten abolished the Egyptian gods when he became Pharaoh, angering the religious followers and priests of Egypt. Upon his death, the priests are believed to have cursed him to wander the deserts forever as punishment.
Pyramids of Giza: A man in early 20th-century clothing has been seen by visitors, rumored to be the ghost of Howard Carter. Various employees and tourists have reported seeing an orb apparition of an Egyptian Pharaoh, floating away from the pyramids towards the Valley of the Kings.
Valley of the Kings: Eyewitnesses have reported seeing the vision of an Egyptian Pharaoh in the Valley of the Kings, wearing his golden collar, headdress, and riding a fiery chariot with black phantom horses.
Finland
Alexander Theatre in Helsinki is reportedly haunted by the ghost of an officer. The ghost moved to Helsinki as the tiles to build Alexander Theatre were relocated from Åland. Some have suggested that the officer died in the Crimean War and has been there ever since.
The Finnish National Theatre in Helsinki is reportedly haunted by at least three ghosts - an unknown Grey Lady and the ghosts of actors Aarne Leppänen and Urho Somersalmi.
Haihara Manor in Tampere is supposedly haunted by The Blue Maid, former maid of the manor.
Nummela Sanatorium, an abandoned hospital in the village of Röykkä has been rumoured to exhibit paranormal phenomena, like mysterious lights appearing in the windows of the building, and on the edge of the roof, the ghost of a woman who commits suicide by jumping down. There is also a rumour that the hospital might be haunted by the spirit of a girl who died there at a young age.
Omenainen, an uninhabited island in the municipality of Nagu (now Pargas) in the central Archipelago Sea, which was formerly a burial ground for those parishioners of Rymättylä and Nagu whom the church refused to bury in consecrated ground (because they'd committed, for example, murder, and other sins). In folklore, the island is considered cursed and ghost stories are told about it.
Svenska Klubben (The Swedish Club) house in Kruununhaka, Helsinki, is haunted by the Grey Madame. She is rumoured to be the former lady of the house who had an affair with her chauffeur. She is known to swing the chandeliers, play the piano and to walk around the house.
Villa Kleineh, a historical villa in Helsinki currently used by the Dutch embassy, reportedly hosts a ghost called The White Lady.
France
Germany
Berlin: The Reichstag building has been reported to be haunted by numerous ghosts of famous German politicians.
Heidelberg: The Hexenturm (Witches Tower) and the Nazi Amphitheatre are both said to be haunted by various ghosts.
Frankenstein Castle: Frankenstein Castle () is a real hilltop castle in the Odenwald, overlooking the city of Darmstadt, and allegedly an inspiration for Mary Shelley when she wrote her monster novel Frankenstein. The SyFy TV show Ghost Hunters International aired an entire episode about the castle and testified it had "... significant paranormal activity".
Lichtenegg Castle: The ghost of a lady in a white dress is said to be seen standing in front of the entrance to the ruins at midnight. She will, usually, sit down on a flat rock covered with moss.
Schloss Nordkirchen: The castle was built between 1703 and 1734. According to the legend, at full moon and on certain foggy nights, a few people have reported seeing a luxurious carriage with stallions running through the grounds.
Wolfsegg, Bavaria, Wolfsegg Castle: This 14th-century castle was supposed to be a sanctuary for travellers. The folklore of this haunting originated from the 1500s, when Ulrich von Laaber hired two young farmers to kill his wife, Klara von Helfenstein, after discovering she was having an affair. Soon thereafter, Ulrich and his sons also died suddenly. There have been reports of strange noises coming out of a cave area near the castle. Several expeditions into the cave, uncovering numerous animal skeletons, leading locals to decide the noises had come from hunters who were hiding their prey. While the cave noises might have been solved, this has not been the case of the haunting of the "White Woman" who is still restlessly making her rounds of the castle.
Würzburg: There is supposedly the ghost of a dead nun walking through the halls of Praemonstratenser Abbey. The ghost is said to be that of Maria Renata Von Mossau, accused of mixing herbs into everyone's food in order to bewitch them. The nun was taken to be executed only three days after her sentencing in court. She was first decapitated, and then burned and her ashes scattered. To this day, there are reports of her walking down the hallways and holding a bouquet of roses while picking off the petals, leaving a trail across the grounds.
India
Indonesia
Lawang Sewu: Dutch-built building which served as Administrative Headquarters for the Dutch Indies Railway Company. During World War II, when the Japanese troops took it over. Stories about torture and execution are the source of the haunted lore around it. The name Lawang Sewu translates to "Building of a Thousand Doors."
Jakarta History Museum: This building is located on the Old Town of Jakarta. It was built in 1710 and served as the city hall for Batavia, the capital of the Dutch East Indies. It opened as a museum in 1974. Folklore of its haunting are connected to violence committed under the colonial government.
Jeruk Purut Cemetery: According to local legend, the cemetery is haunted by a decapitated pastor.
Menara Saidah: A 28-storey building located in East Jakarta was once an office tower owned by local Arab-Indonesian businessman of the same name. The building was abandoned in 2007. Since the abandonment, there are numerous stories about paranormal activities within the building such as lady in red, a ghost sightings in the basement, mysterious ride hailing order and postal delivery coming from the tower, and mysterious job interview invite from the tower. The building remain a popular spot among local ghost hunters
Toko Merah: A Dutch colonial building located in Jakarta Old Town was built by Colonial Governor-General Gustaaf Willem van Imhoff and later owned by Chinese-Indonesian landlord Oey Liauw Kong. The building was known to be the site of 1740 Batavia massacre where the building was used for torture and killings at the time. Many locals reported the sound of screaming at night and sightings of Dutch lady in white gown.
Ireland
Charles Fort: Haunted by a 17th-century bride known as "The White Lady of Kinsale".
Charleville Castle: This castle is haunted by the third Earl of Charleville's younger daughter, Harriet. She lost her life after falling from the main staircase of this building at the age of eight, in April 1861.
Ducketts Grove: The mansion was owned by the Duckett family for 300 years, and is said to be haunted by a Banshee Ghost. On 17 March 2011, the SyFy show Destination Truth featured a four-hour live investigation for the season finale to find out the mystery of the ruins.
Kilmainham Gaol: This former prison has paranormal activities of lights which often turn themselves on and off in the prison's chapel, unseen forces pushing people over, apparitional footsteps, the feeling of being watched by spirits, as well as unexplained bangs and disembodied voices.
Kinnitty Castle: This Gothic castle sits on a plot that once housed Druids and Bards. It has witnessed a long and turbulent history, and is reportedly the home of many ghosts, the most popular of which is the Phantom Monk of Kinnitty.
Malahide Castle: This castle is haunted by Lord Galtrim, Sir Walter Hussey, the son of the Baron of Galtrim. Killed in battle on his wedding day during the 15th century, his apparition roams the castle at night, groaning in pain, while pointing at the spear wound in his side. There is also Lady Matilda "Maud" Plunkett. Her spirit appears to workers and guests as she did on the day of her marriage to the Lord Chief Justice. Maud would chase his spirit through the corridors. The third spirit is Puck, a jester who fell in love with Gerard FitzGerald's daughter, Lady Eleanor, who was detained at the castle by Henry VIII for inciting rebellions. One snowy night in December, Puck was found stabbed through the heart, still wearing his jester suit and cap. Before his death, he swore that he would haunt here until a master with a bride from the people ruled this castle. However, he promised not to harm any male Talbot who slept here. Numerous visitors have reported seeing the jester's face on some photos taken here. The White Lady is the fourth apparition here. The White Lady is a painting of a very beautiful, but unknown, lady which hangs on the castle's Great Wall. It is said that she would leave her painting at times and wander through the grounds at night. The fifth and final spirit is Miles Corbet. He was given this castle and the surrounding property by Oliver Cromwell. During the Restoration, Miles was made to pay for his crimes, and was hanged. It is reported that his apparition appears as a whole soldier in armour which then suddenly fall into pieces.
Montpelier Hill: The Stewards House, or Killakee House, was built around 1765 by the Conolly family as a hunting lodge. The house has a reputation for being haunted. Stories tell of a particularly large ghostly black cat. The best documented account occurred between 1968 and 1970 when the Evening Herald and Evening Press newspapers carried a number of reports regarding a Mrs. Margaret O'Brien and her husband Nicholas, a retired Garda superintendent, who were converting the house into an arts centre. During the conversion, tradesmen employed on the work site began complaining of ghosts. One night, a friend of the O'Briens, artist Tom McAssey, and two workmen were confronted by a spectral figure and a black cat with glowing red eyes. McAssey painted a portrait of the cat which hung in the house for several years afterwards. Although locals were skeptical of the reports, further apparitions were reported, most notably that of an Indian gentleman, and of two nuns called Blessed Margaret and Holy Mary who had taken part in black masses on Montpelier Hill. There were also reports of incorporeal ringing bells and poltergeist activity. In 1970, an RTÉ television crew recorded a documentary about the house. In the documentary, a clairvoyant called Sheila St. Clair communicated with the spirits of the house through automatic writing. In 1971, a plumber working in the house discovered a grave with a skeleton of a small figure, most likely that of a child or, perhaps, the body of the dwarf alleged to have been sacrificed by the members of the Hell Fire Club. The house operated as a restaurant in the 1990s before closing in 2001; it is now a private residence.
Leap Castle: Many people were imprisoned and executed in this castle, and it is supposedly haunted by several spirits.
Ross Castle: Guests often wake at night hearing disembodied voices and doors banging and shutting on their own. An apparitional spirit who roams here is Richard Nugent's daughter, Sabina. Her lover, Orwin drowned himself. A second apparitional spirit who roams here is Orwin's father, Myles "The Slasher" O'Reilly. This Irish soldier spent his last night here before dying in a battle in 1644.
St. Michan's Church: This church is haunted by disembodied whispering voices from mummies entombed in the vaults.
Shelbourne Hotel: This hotel is believed to be haunted by a seven-year-old girl from the 18th century, named Mary Masters, who had lived in the row of houses which once stood where the hotel is now. She died due to cholera during 1791. Her apparition roams the halls.
Italy
Colosseum: Known also as the Flavian Amphitheatre, was reported to be haunted according to some witnesses and researchers' testimonies. Visitors have described observing ghostly figures wandering the staircases. There have been reports of hearing the cheers and screams from a crowd, while no sign of people existed in the particular section. The vaults were, reportedly, haunted by the spirits of gladiators waiting to fight, actors waiting to perform, and prisoners becoming prepared for execution. Several accounts of cold touches or pushes have been felt by both tourists and employees. Sounds of animals have also been heard within the vaults.
Poveglia: This island, near Venice, was once a sanctuary to refugees during the Ottoman conflicts, and a hospice for sick patients throughout the centuries. It was detailed, from witnesses, haunted by many victims of the plague. In 1922, the island became home to a mental hospital, where a doctor, reportedly, experimented on patients with crude lobotomies. He later threw himself from the hospital tower after claiming he had been driven mad by the spirits of the island. The island has been featured on the paranormal shows Ghost Adventures and Scariest Places on Earth. Poveglia is widely believed to be one of the most haunted places in the world.
Hotel Burchianti: It was a popular destination for celebrities during the 20th century. Guests have reported sounds of children skipping down the halls. In the Fresco room, guests claimed they felt icy breaths down their spines.
Japan
Jordan
Petra: The residence of jinns, supernatural beings in Islam according to the Bedouin's saying.
Malaysia
Agnes Keith House: A house built on the site of a former house for British colonial officials. Reportedly haunted with a female apparition based on the experience by the house's former owners, the ghost is theorized to be the spirit of a known American author named Agnes Newton Keith. The house turned into a museum in 2004.
Amber Court: An apartment and hotel in Genting Highlands built in the 1990s. It has a notorious reputation as a haunted location with supernatural activities.
Bukit Tunku: Previously known as Kenny Hills, Bukit Tunku is a leafy area with British colonial houses. There's a report of a phantom motorcycle and a ghost of a woman standing in the middle of the road. Local taxi drivers usually refuse to pick up women and children at night.
Genting Highlands: Some apartments like Amber Court and Ria Apartment are reportedly haunted as well as First World Hotel, which 6,118 of its rooms are reportedly haunted due to gambling related suicides.
Highland Towers: After a tragedy that killed 48 residents, the remaining towers were reportedly haunted as claimed by the nearest residents who live not far from there.
Kellie's Castle: A Moorish revival castle located in Batu Gajah was built by Scottish businessman William Kellie-Smith as a gift for his wife. The building remained unfinished as Kellie died of pneumonia in 1926 before the completion of the castle. It was believed the castle was haunted by alleged Indian workers who died during the construction of the castle, the castle become one of popular spot among local and international ghost hunters.
Kinarut Mansion: A former German manor house in the Graeco-Roman style. Local population living near the area of the mansion ruins claims the place is haunted with "Hantu Tinggi", a type of Malay ghost in the form of a tall tree who is usually disguised as a normal tree in the heavily forested area. Other passerby claimed to have seen a fast moving apparition and hearing the eerie voice of pontianak, a Malay female ghost at night which were also supported by media crews who covering information about the mansion when they felt "something" was following them through their walk in the area.
Kuala Lumpur International Airport: The main international airport of Malaysia stands on former oil palm fields. Nighttime employees often see sightings and hear mysterious sounds. There are also reports of possession of airline staff and airport securities.
Masjid Kampung Tedong: A new masjid in Kampung Tedong, Melaka, built in May 2016. CCTV cameras captured two wooden boards that moved themselves as if a poltergeist was manipulating them.
Mimaland: Located in Gombak, Selangor, Mimaland used to be the largest theme park in Malaysia until it closed in 1994 due to a giant water slide incident that killed a Singaporean tourist in 1993 and landslide within the same area in the same year it shut its door permanently. Locals often reported paranormal activities around the former site of the theme park.
Shih Chung Branch School: The building that was once school in George Town, Penang was built during the British colonial period in 1880 and later closed its door in 1994. The school was once a private residence belonged to Hokkien businessman Cheah Tek Soon until it was later converted into hotels and finally a school building. During the Japanese era, the building was used as administrative building of Japanese empire and it also rumored that many locals were tortured and executed within the school building. It was believed that the ghost of executed locals still haunt the abandoned building as well as ghost of Japanese soldiers patrolling the building. Some ghost hunters reported that they have experienced psychological effects with some illness symptoms when entering the old building
Tambun Inn: Located in Ipoh, it is one of the top tourist destinations in Malaysia, and is reported to be haunted by many ghostly apparitions. Some of these accounts mention lights turning on and off, sounds of whispers and eerie cries, as well as a report of the ghost of an old woman spotted within the vicinity of the inn.
Mexico
Monaco
A yacht once belonging to Errol Flynn, the , is berthed here and is supposed to be haunted. Witnesses have reported seeing Errol Flynn's ghost pacing aboard. Others have described the sounds of voices and laughter as if a wild party were happening on board.
Myanmar (formerly Burma)
Keng Tung: Kyaing Tong New Hotel was once a palace, it is now a reportedly haunted hotel.
Netherlands
Binnenveld mansion is a rijksmonument located in Huissen, in the province of Gelderland. The mansion is better known as the 'haunted house of Huissen'. This building stood in the front area during the Battle of Arnhem (a major battle of World War II). According to locals, this house is haunted.
New Zealand
Larnach Castle, on Otago Peninsula, is said to be haunted by at least one, and possibly two ghosts: that of Kate, daughter of the mansion's original owner, William Larnach; and that of Larnach's first wife, Eliza.
The Vulcan Hotel, in Saint Bathans, Otago is reputedly haunted by the ghost of a nineteenth century prostitute, "The Rose".
Norway
Lier Sykehus: An old insane asylum situated in Drammen, Norway, where people claim to have seen ghosts, shadows and apparitions.
Oman
Bahla: A town located in Oman. In neighboring Gulf countries and Oman itself, there are rumors of Bahla being home to jinns, which are same as genies in English.
Pakistan
The Koh-i-Chiltan peak: This mountain in Balochistan is described, according to a local myth and the legend associated with it, as being haunted by the "... spirits of forty babies."
The Mohatta Palace in Karachi: Said to be haunted by ghosts of the British Raj era. Museum guides have reportedly seen various objects which have moved from their original place, or shifted about while guards have claimed to have "felt" the presence of certain spirits during the night.
Panama
Coiba: The largest island in the Central American region. It used to be a prison for prisoners in the era of the dictator Manuel Noriega was a very scary place at night. Until a former stronger boxer, Roberto Durán said that he is not alone in the night.
Philippines
Poland
Haunted house in Jeleń (part of Jaworzno city). Several families left this place, complaining of noises in the night and items thrown about by a poltergeist. The current owner offers adventure seekers an opportunity to stay in the house overnight (however, only groups of at least two people are accepted).
An unfinished house at Kosocicka St. in Kraków. According to the story known by locals, the house was located on a former cemetery ground. Construction started in the 1970s as an investment made by two brothers, but stopped after one of them killed the other in the house. After that the property was bought by another owner, who, for unknown reasons, committed suicide in the house at night, at the 3rd floor. Locals claim that ghosts appear in the house.
The castle of Ogrodzieniec. Allegedly, the castle is guarded by a ghost of a giant black dog, as well as by three human ghosts.
Abandoned hospital in Olesno.
Auschwitz concentration camp: This infamous concentration camp is known to be haunted by ghosts of prisoners and victims of the Holocaust.
Portugal
The Beau-Séjour Palace, in Lisbon, is said to be haunted by the Baron of Glória, who lived in the palace during the 19th century. Employees working at the palace report moving and disappearing objects and windows opening and closing abruptly. Visitors to the gardens also report hearing the ringing of non-existent bells.
The Castelinho de São João do Estoril, in Estoril, is said to be haunted by the ghost of a little blind girl who accidentally fell to her death in a nearby cliff.
The Quinta da Juncosa, in Penafiel, is said to be haunted by the Baron of Lages and his family. Suspecting that his wife was unfaithful to him, the baron reportedly tied her to one of his horse's legs and dragged her across the floor, killing her. After finding that she was innocent, he proceeded to kill his children and commit suicide. Locals have reported seeing the ghost of the baron several times over the years.
Romania
Singapore
Bedok: A planning area in the southeastern coast of Singapore, which is famous for its paranormal activities. There are numerous reports of suicide or murder-suicide around the residential areas. The most famous paranormal activity in the area is the ghost of a woman and her 3-year-old child. She allegedly died by jumping from the HDB (government high-rise flat), after throwing her child. But before she did that, she wrote "It's not over, darling" on the wall with her own blood in Mandarin. Residents claim they hear female laughter and wailing near the unit.
East Coast Park: One night in May 1990, a young couple was having a date at the park's Amber Beacon Tower. It was at this tower where two men attacked them, knocking the boyfriend, 22-year-old James Soh Fook Leong, unconscious and killing the 21-year-old girlfriend Kelly Tan Ah Hong. After this particular incident, known as the Amber Beacon Tower murder, there have been people claiming to have seen a female figure, allegedly the ghost of the murdered victim, near the tower, and there were also alleged screams of help resonating from the area. The murder itself remains unsolved as of today.
Old Changi Hospital: The vacated hospital compound was popular with movie-makers after the Singapore Land Authority commenced short term rental of the buildings and is often listed as one of Singapore's most haunted locations due to its history. A former British military hospital, its reputation as a haunted location likely stems from the Japanese occupation, when the Kempeitai used its premises as a prison camp and reportedly turned some of the rooms into a torture chamber.
Pasir Ris Park: One of the white sand beaches of Singapore. It is a place where it has been reported that a haunted place is a hotspot where women commit suicide. Nowadays, it is very popular among the ghost hunters.
Lim Chu Kang Cemetery, Choa Chu Kang Cemetery and Kranji Cemeteries: A cemetery area that includes Chinese, Muslim, Hindu Cemetery. Taxi Drivers encounter strange and mysterious passengers at midnight and in the wee hours. Rumour has it after they pick their passengers they will drive to the cemeteries and get paid in either dry leafs, hell notes or the mysterious passenger, just disappears into thin air causing the driver to be stranded in the cemetery. However, if they are unlucky their passenger will reveal their true form (a ghost covered in blood).
Spooner Road: Surrounded by various HDB flats (government high-rise flat), These HDB flats were formerly used for the railway employees who worked at the former Tanjong Pagar Railway Station. After the railway station closed down, the flats were abandoned for a period of time. The flats were eventually used for low cost housing. However, current and former residents claimed they saw moving shadows, items moving, ghost sightings and heard unexplained noises.
Pulau Tekong: After the Japanese invaded Singapore, the Japanese beheaded many Chinese people and threw their remains into the ocean. After the war, the Singapore Armed Forces turned parts of the island into a military base. Many military recruits claim they see shadows, headless bodies and the famous dissembowelled recruit. Many other recruits claim to hear Japanese soldiers marching as well.
South Africa
South Korea
Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital: Famous for its very dark past among ghost hunters in Seoul. This abandoned hospital in Gwangju, Gyeonggi is claimed to be the most haunted place in Korea. The once psychiatric hospital is home to many rumors of ghosts. Over 2.6 million people watched a horror film dealing with poltergeist phenomena in Gonjiam. Gonjiam hospital has since been demolished as of 28 May 2018.
Korean Folk Village: The most popular tourist attraction is located Yongin, Gyeonggi province has been reported to have witnessed Gwisin a vengeful ghost in the Korean folklore.
Spain
Barranco de Badajoz (Tenerife) - According to witnesses, various spectral apparitions take place there.
Casa Fuset or Casa de Franco (Tenerife) - In the property there are many cabalistic and satanic symbols painted on the walls. It is claimed that satanic rituals are performed in it, that shots are heard at night and psychophonies are obtained.
Museum of the History of Tenerife - Located in the city of San Cristóbal de La Laguna, in it the ghost of Catalina Lercaro appears according to legend, who according to legend committed suicide by throwing herself into a well of her mansion when she was forced to marry a man who did not love.
Palace of Linares in Madrid: Built between 1872 and 1890 for the Marquis of Linares José de Murga. According to legend this place is the most haunted in Spain. Supposedly, a little girl appears in the mansion, the Marquis fathered her with his sister and they murdered her in order to hide their incestuous relationship.
Sweden
Borgvattnets Prästgård: The rectory of the small village of Borgvattnet in Jämtland, northern Sweden, where there have been reports of hauntings since the early 1920s. On December 2, 1947, Bishop Torsten Bohlin revealed plans to "order a scientific investigation of the vicarage after several years of ghosts". The Church of Sweden confirmed ghosts and the village of Borgvattnet immediately became world famous. Today, the rectory is open to the public, and people can spend nights in the house for a small fee (which benefits the village).
Switzerland
The house located in Junkerngasse no 54 in Bern is the subject of a number of stories about its haunting.
Taiwan
Chiayi Min-Hsiung Haunted House: Located in Chiayi City, it was once the residence of the Liu family. It is probably one of the most recognized haunted house in Taiwan.
Grand Hyatt Taipei: The hotel that is located in Xinyi District, Taipei was believed to be haunted. The site of the hotel was believed by the locals to be a former Japanese concentration camp and believed to be haunted by former prisoners. It was believed that two big talisman-like paintings in the lobby was displayed on purpose to calm the spirits
Sanzhi UFO houses: The UFO houses were constructed beginning in 1978. They were intended as a vacation resort in a part of the northern coast adjacent to Tamsui, and were marketed towards U.S. military officers coming from their East Asian postings. However, the project was never completed in 1980 due to investment losses and several car accident deaths and suicides during construction, which is said to have been caused by the inauspicious act of bisecting the Chinese dragon sculpture located near the resort gates for widening the road to the buildings. Other stories indicated that the site was the former burial ground for Dutch soldiers. The last standing UFO houses have been completely demolished.
Thailand
United Arab Emirates
Al Jazirah Al Hamra: An abandoned fishing village near Ras al-Khaimah which is believed to be haunted by the presence of supernatural jinns.
United Kingdom
United States
Vietnam
300 Kim Mã in Hanoi is a building which was proposed to be the Bulgarian Embassy in Vietnam, but was abandoned for an unknown reason. After a murder near this building, the story of mysterious phenomenas including the ghost of a Western man is popularised across the nation. Now it is the property of Vietnamese government.
Côn Đảo: The unfinished stone bridge in the deep jungle named "Ma Thiên Lãnh Bridge", or locally known as "Ghostly Bridge", which is a bridge built by over 300 prisoners who suffered immensely and died under French control. One villager saw a long haired male ghost in a white shirt and black pants watch him while he was drinking with a friend, and then disappear. Another female villager said she saw a woman wearing a white dress standing on a bridge alone at the dawn, whose she instantly recognized as a hungry ghost. Another woman says she came across the ghosts of two shirtless boys, who forced her to give them dessert.
The Hui Mansion (now Ho Chi Minh City Museum of Fine Arts): One of the most mysterious places in Ho Chi Minh City, located at 97 Phó Đức Chính Street, District 1. People believe that the mansion is haunted by the ghost of Mr. Hui Bon Hoa's leprosy daughter.
727 Tran Hung Dao, one of the reportedly haunted buildings located in Ho Chi Minh City. It was built in 1960 by a Vietnamese businessman, Nguyễn Tấn Đời.
See also
Ghost hunting
Haunted house
List of ghosts
List of ghost films
List of Ghost Adventures episodes (includes lists of reportedly haunted locations mostly in the United States that have been investigated)
List of Ghost Hunters episodes (includes lists of reportedly haunted locations in the United States that have been investigated)
List of Most Haunted episodes (includes lists of reportedly haunted locations in the United Kingdom and Ireland that have been investigated)
References
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher%20Cox
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Christopher Cox
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Charles Christopher Cox (born October 16, 1952) is an American attorney and politician who served as chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, a 17-year Republican member of the United States House of Representatives, and member of the White House staff in the Reagan Administration. Prior to his Washington service he was a practicing attorney, teacher, and entrepreneur. Following his retirement from government in 2009, he returned to law practice and currently serves as a director, trustee, and advisor to several for-profit and nonprofit organizations.
Early life and education
Cox was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. After graduating from Saint Thomas Academy in Mendota Heights, Minnesota in 1970, Cox earned a Bachelor of Arts degree the University of Southern California in 1973, following an accelerated three-year course. He was also a member of Delta Tau Delta fraternity. In 1977, he earned both an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School and a J.D. from Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review.
Career
From 1977 to 1978, he served as law clerk to Judge Herbert Choy of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
In October 1978, Cox was paralyzed from the waist down following a serious off-road Jeep accident in the rainforest on the Hawaiian island of Molokai. He eventually regained the ability to walk but wore a harness of steel bars and leather straps for six months. He still has two metal screws in his back, and according to a 2005 Fortune magazine profile, “has been in pain every day for the past 27 years.” Since he can't sit for extended periods of time, he has a special desk that allows him to work while standing.
As a contestant on the NBC-TV game show Password Plus, Cox won more than $5,000 over multiple appearances. According to a re-broadcast of Password Plus on the cable network GSN, Cox appeared in 1980 and won $5,400 cash.
From 1977 to 1986, Cox was first an associate and then partner with the international law firm of Latham & Watkins. At the time of his retirement in 1986 he was the Partner in Charge of the Corporate Department in the Orange County office, and served as a member of the firm's national management. In 1982–83, Cox took a leave of absence from Latham & Watkins to teach federal income tax at Harvard Business School.
In 1984, Cox co-founded Context Corporation, which produced daily English reproductions of the leading Soviet state-controlled newspaper, Pravda. The publication was used chiefly by U.S. universities and U.S. government agencies, and was eventually distributed to customers in 26 countries around the world. The company had no connection to the Soviet government.
White House
During the second term of Ronald Reagan from 1986 to 1988, Cox served as senior associate counsel to the president. His duties included advising on the nomination of three Supreme Court justices, the establishment of the Brady Commission following the 1987 market crash, and the drafting of legislative reform proposals for the federal budget process.
In 1986, following Chief Justice Warren Burger's confidential message to President Reagan that he planned to step down from the bench, White House Counsel Peter Wallison tasked a small team including Cox with thoroughly researching the opinions and judicial philosophies of the leading candidates for the next Supreme Court nomination. The effort focused on judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals who had a substantial record of decisions. After narrowing the field to five or six, the search quickly settled on Judge Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, a recommendation the president accepted.
As a part of his White House responsibilities, Cox also reviewed the FBI files of nominees for presidential appointments.
When Howard Baker took over for Donald Regan as chief of staff in 1987, bringing with him Arthur B. Culvahouse Jr. as counsel to the president, First Lady Nancy Reagan specifically asked Culvahouse to keep Cox on the White House staff. According to Culvahouse, she and the East Wing staff "liked Chris a lot ... He is a very good lawyer," and his willingness to give up his partnership in a prestigious law firm to join the White House staff only a year before had made an impression. As senior associate counsel under Culvahouse, Cox became deeply involved in market issues and securities issues including then-pending congressional proposals for legislation on insider trading, greenmail, junk bonds, golden parachutes and golden handcuffs, tender offers, and takeovers.
His work on the White House response to the 1987 stock market crash included the formation of the Presidential Task Force on Market Mechanisms and the recruitment of Harvard Business School professor Robert Glauber, who had been Cox's department chairman during his stint on the faculty there, as its executive director. The Commission provided the definitive autopsy on what happened to the markets on Black Monday, October 19, 1987, and its aftermath. Coincidentally, eight months prior to the crash, Chief of Staff Howard Baker had asked Cox to write a detailed memo describing the emergency powers that the President might exercise in a market crisis. That landed Cox in an emergency meeting in the chief of staff's office on Black Monday, from which Baker called then-NYSE Chairman John Phelan to urge him to drop his plan to shut down the New York Stock Exchange.
At the time, some conservatives were pushing for a constitutional convention to advance a balanced budget amendment, and Cox conducted research on the question. He represented the White House at hearings on the advisability of releasing John Hinckley from St. Elizabeth's Hospital following Hinckley's attempted assassination of President Reagan, and led the vetting and research effort that resulted in Northwestern Law School Dean David Ruder being recommended to the president as SEC Chairman in 1987.
A former soccer player at USC, as a White House counsel Cox worked with the United States Soccer Federation on its proposal to bring the World Cup to the United States in 1994. “He was a key. Everybody in the damned government had their fingers in this,” said Eddie Mahe, who ran the U.S. Soccer Federation's 1986 campaign to bring the event to the United States. “Without him, I don’t know that it would have survived.” According to the Los Angeles Times, soccer's governing body was requiring waivers of federal laws and regulations from virtually every agency of the federal government, and in "record time, Cox prepared an executive order directing the agencies to fall in line. Reagan signed it." On July 5, 1988, the U.S. won the selection bid. In appreciation, the U.S. team presented Cox with the first jersey to be signed by all 22 members.
U.S. House of Representatives
Cox was elected to Congress in 1988 from what was then California's 40th congressional district. He was re-elected eight more times from this Orange County-based district, which was renumbered as the 47th District in 1993 and the 48th District in 2003.
Early in his congressional career, Cox befriended two anti-Communists in Hungary and Lithuania who had been prisoners of conscience and who later became presidents of their countries after the end of Soviet domination. Cox met Árpád Göncz in 1989, and when Cox was later married, he spent part of his honeymoon in Hungary with then-President Göncz and his wife Mária Zsuzsanna Göntér. Cox met Dr. Vytautas Landsbergis, a professor at the Conservatory of Music in Vilnius, in 1989, well before the successful reestablishment of Lithuanian independence. The night Landsbergis was elected President of Lithuania, he embraced Cox on the tarmac at the airport in Vilnius after the Soviet Union had held Cox in East Berlin for a prolonged period. In May 1998, Cox was presented with the Order of the Lithuanian Grand Duke Gediminas, the highest honor the Republic of Lithuania can give to a living noncitizen.
In 1989, Polish President Lech Wałęsa joined Cox in a Washington, DC ceremony marking the enactment of Cox's legislation establishing the Polish-American Enterprise Fund. Together with the Baltic-American Enterprise Fund, the Hungarian-American Enterprise Fund, and seven other enterprise funds in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the Cox legislation, incorporated in the Support Eastern European Democracy (SEED) Act, matched U.S. foreign aid with venture capital in the newly free countries of the former Warsaw Pact. Cox has some fluency in the Russian language.
In 1994, Cox was appointed by President Clinton to the Bipartisan Commission on Entitlement and Tax Reform, which in 1995 published a unanimous report warning that the nation cannot continue to allow entitlement programs to consume a rapidly increasing share of the federal budget.
Among Cox's notable legislative successes as a Representative was the Internet Tax Freedom Act, a 1998 law prohibiting federal, state, and local government taxation of Internet access and banning Internet-only levies such as email taxes, bit taxes, and bandwidth taxes. With U.S. Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) as his chief co-sponsor, Cox authored legislation in 1997 to privatize the National Helium Reserve, which was then $1.4 billion in debt to taxpayers. As of 2004, this was the third-largest privatization in U.S. history, surpassing the value of the 1988 Conrail privatization. Cox also wrote the only law that was enacted over President Bill Clinton's veto, the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, aimed at protecting investors from fraudulent and extortionate lawsuits.
For 10 of his 17 years in the Congress, from 1995 to 2005, Cox served in the House Majority Leadership as Chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee, the fifth-ranking elected leadership position (behind the Speaker, the Majority Leader, the Majority Whip, and the Chair of the House Republican Conference). He was Chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, and also Chairman of the Select Committee on U.S. National Security that produced the Cox Report, an indictment of Chinese espionage and of security failures at several U.S. national laboratories.
When Congress established the Bipartisan Study Group on Enhancing Multilateral Export Controls through federal legislation in 1999, Cox was tapped as co-chairman. The group published a unanimous report in 2001 recommending wholesale modernization of U.S. export controls. Cox also served as Chairman of the Select Committee on Homeland Security (the predecessor to the permanent House Committee); Chairman of the Task Force on Capital Markets; and Chairman of the Task Force on Budget Process Reform.
In the spring of 2001, then-Representative Cox was considered by President George W. Bush for a federal appellate judgeship on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Cox withdrew his name from consideration before a nomination could be made because one of his home state Democratic Senators, Barbara Boxer, objected to him due to his perceived conservatism. The seat that Cox had been considered for was eventually filled by Bush nominee Carlos Bea.
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
Cox was nominated by President George W. Bush to be the 28th chairman of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on June 2, 2005, and unanimously confirmed by the United States Senate on July 29, 2005. He was sworn in on August 3, 2005.
Shortly after becoming SEC Chairman, he was diagnosed with thymoma, a rare form of cancer, and underwent surgery in January 2006 to remove a tumor from his chest. He returned to work "after several weeks recovering from surgery," according to The Associated Press. (The cancer returned 10 years later, but Cox was again given a clean bill of health after surgery and treatment.)
In May 2008, Cox delivered the Commencement Address at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. In April 2008, he received the University of Southern California's highest award, the Asa V. Call Achievement Award, in a ceremony at the Los Angeles Millennium Biltmore Hotel.
The Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008, enacted in July 2008, gave Cox one of five seats on the Federal Housing Finance Oversight Board, which advises the Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency with respect to overall strategies and policies regarding the safety and soundness of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Federal Home Loan Banks. In September 2008, the U.S. Congress passed and President Bush signed the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, which placed Cox on the newly established Financial Stability Oversight Board to oversee the $700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program.
Regulatory initiatives
During his tenure, Cox led the Commission to implement new executive compensation rules. Since the early 1990s, support for reform had been growing, urged by the U.S. Financial Accounting Standards Board and others. Relying in part on FASB's recommendations for improved presentation of compensation information, the Cox reforms made it possible for users of financial statements to readily understand how public company executives are compensated. Newly required information included the lump-sum cost of retirement benefits and explanations of why specific stock option grants were approved. The New York Times observed that the Commission "largely stood its ground amid pressure from compensation specialists, investor advocates, and industry groups." With more than 20,000 comment letters, Cox said, "No issue in the history of the SEC has generated such interest."
One of his first initiatives was launching a plain English effort, to eliminate legalese in investor communications in favor of clear language that let investors focus on what was important, the better to hold a company's performance up to the light of day. Not only the executive compensation rules, but also disclosure rules for investment advisors and mutual funds—where more than half of U.S. households had their retirement and college savings—were subjected to the plain English requirements. Under Cox the SEC wrote new rules requiring the $10.6 trillion mutual fund industry to make their prospectuses easier for investors to read, understand, and access.
Cox defended the 2002 Sarbanes–Oxley Act and resisted efforts to repeal it or scale it back legislatively. The greatest source of complaint about the law during his tenure was its Section 404, which produced compliance expenses far higher than the SEC under his predecessor had predicted. Working with the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, the SEC under Cox replaced the original auditing standard for Section 404 with a streamlined, more cost-effective version, and also provided new guidance for management intended to reduce unnecessary costs. At Cox's direction the agency undertook a nationwide Small Business Cost-Benefit Study to determine whether, as intended, the new auditing standard and management guidance had made compliance less expensive and better focused the 404 process on control elements that truly matter for companies of all sizes.
In June 2007 the Commission voted unanimously to repeal the so-called "uptick rule" or "tick test." The action was not controversial at the time: it was taken after an extensive multi-year study by the Office of Economic Analysis, begun in 2003 under Chairman Bill Donaldson. The study found that the rule—which had never applied on NASDAQ or to ECNs and other trading systems—had been rendered ineffective on the NYSE due to decimalization (that is, the reduction of the "tick" increment to a penny, as compared to the 1/8 or 12½¢ that was in effect when the rule was adopted in 1938). Its repeal later became the subject of much debate, with some advocating its reinstatement. On July 15, 2008, Cox told a U.S. House hearing that the Commission was studying the potential institution of "a price test that could work with an increment of a nickel or dime" or some more meaningful amount.
Technological modernization
Technological modernization of the SEC was a Cox priority throughout his tenure. He introduced new technology for investor disclosure, compliance analytics, nationwide investigative work sharing, and management of funds recovered for investors. In August 2008 he rolled out the future replacement of the SEC's forms-based disclosure database, called EDGAR, with a new interactive disclosure system using computer-tagged data in the eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL). The new system was designed to let future investors easily search, sort, and recombine information to generate reports and analysis from hundreds of thousands of companies and millions of forms. Under Cox the SEC oversaw the creation of a taxonomy of over 11,000 XBRL data tags that catalog every element of U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. In 2008 the Commission issued rules requiring all publicly traded companies and mutual funds in the United States to tag their financial information.
Another Cox technology initiative liberalized the proxy rules to allow investors and companies to use Electronic Shareholder Forums—virtual meeting places on the Internet to promote shareholder initiatives, conduct straw polls, apprise a company's directors of critical shareholder concerns, and inform shareholders of management's and directors' views.
In 2006 the SEC launched a war against Internet financial spam, shutting down trading in companies that touted their stock by clogging investors’ in-boxes. Investor complaints about the practice fell from more than 220,000 per month in December 2006 to 70,000 per month in February 2007; Internet software and services company Symantec credited the SEC with cutting financial spam by 30 percent.
These technological initiatives were widely supported, with one observer noting that Cox "earned virtually universal plaudits for efforts to modernize technology, transparency, and understandability of corporate reports, and to provide for apples-to-apples comparisons (for the first time ever) of corporate executive compensation."
Individual investors and seniors
The particular needs of senior investors, whose ranks are growing rapidly, was a special Cox focus. In April 2006, the SEC held its first “Seniors Summit”, working with AARP, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, the North American Securities Administrators Association, and several state regulators; the conferences are now held annually. A nationwide sweep examination conducted by the SEC and authorities in seven states found that "free lunch" investment seminars, which draw large numbers of retirees, routinely involved significant fraud. Many were advised to put their retirement funds into equity-indexed annuities, where they could get stock market returns while keeping their money “safe”. But neither these investments, nor the sales agents, were registered with state or federal securities regulators—and investors were frequently unaware that it would be impossible to get their money back for as much as 15 years without paying a stiff penalty. The SEC enacted rules in 2008 to protect seniors and other investors from fraudulent and abusive practices in annuities sales.
International integration
During Cox's tenure the SEC significantly expanded its international activity. Between 2005 and 2008, Cox signed supervisory arrangements covering enforcement and regulatory cooperation with regulators in the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, Australia, Germany, Bulgaria, and Norway. As Chairman of the International Organization of Securities Commissions' Technical Committee, he led international efforts to converge U.S. GAAP and International Financial Reporting Standards. In December 2007, the SEC adopted rules to permit foreign issuers to use IFRS without reconciliation to U.S. GAAP. And in November 2008, the
SEC issued a roadmap – with clear milestones along the way — that would lead to a Commission decision as early as 2014 on whether or not U.S. public companies should be required to use IFRS. Cox also initiated a mutual recognition process for foreign regulators, based on an assessment of whether the securities regulatory system in another country produces comparably high-quality results for investors, including in the area of enforcement. In August 2008 he executed an arrangement with the Australian Securities & Investments Commission under which the SEC could approve exemptions allowing Australian-registered securities exchanges to operate in the U.S. without having also to register with the SEC, and U.S. exchanges would have the same privilege in Australia. As of 2008, the SEC was in mutual recognition discussions with regulators in Canada, and also in preliminary discussions with the Committee of European Securities Regulators.
Law enforcement
International enforcement also stepped up considerably under Cox. In 2008, the SEC made 556 requests of foreign regulators for assistance with SEC investigations, many of which were connected to potential wrongdoing in the subprime market. Among the significant international cases the Commission brought during this period were the highly publicized 2008 charges against Hong Kong-based insider trading in Dow Jones prior to its acquisition by News Corporation. Under Cox the SEC also brought the largest number of cases in its history charging corporations and their officers with foreign bribery under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and imposed record penalties for these cases.
Overall, enforcement was Cox's stated priority beginning in 2005 and throughout his chairmanship. He moved quickly to settle the debate over whether it was legitimate to impose penalties on corporations, adopting a policy that made clear the SEC "isn't turning out to be the corporate-friendly place that many in the boardroom set were hoping for." Within the SEC budget, as of 2008, he had increased the share devoted to enforcement to its highest level in 20 years. Nonetheless, the SEC's overall appropriation was held steady during two of his budget years, first by a Republican and then a Democratic Congress, and it was increased by only 2% in a third year. These sub-inflation agency budgets, combined with merit pay increases for staff, caused the total enforcement personnel to decline. Critics attacked the underfunding of the SEC and blamed Cox, though Congress and the administration clearly shared the responsibility. When the agency budget was finally increased in fiscal 2008, he increased enforcement personnel by 4%.
Beginning early in his chairmanship he focused the agency's enforcement efforts on stock option backdating, an illicit practice that had been exposed after the 2002 Sarbanes–Oxley Act changed the rules regarding the reporting of stock option grants. Under Cox the SEC investigated more than 160 stock option backdating cases, aided by the fact that the reporting forms for stock option disclosure were among the first to be mandated in “interactive data” format. Some of these cases were noteworthy for their size: in December 2007 the agency won $468 million in a settlement for stock option backdating against the former chairman and CEO of UnitedHealth Group.
Cox also aggressively used the agency's “Fair Funds” authority to distribute funds recovered from securities law violators directly to injured investors. By February 2008 the SEC had returned more than $3.5 billion to wronged investors, including more than $2 billion in 2007 alone. To expedite the return of the funds, cut red tape and lower costs, Cox created a new Office of Collections and Distributions. A few weeks later, in May 2008, the new Office began sending more than $800 million in Fair Funds to harmed investors in American International Group, Inc. (AIG), which settled SEC charges of financial fraud. In 2006 the Commission obtained a $350 million penalty from Fannie Mae after accusing it of accounting fraud; the penalty was one of the largest in Commission history. The following year the Commission charged Freddie Mac with accounting fraud and recovered a $50 million penalty.
As the 2008 credit crunch spread to municipal finance, the auction rate securities market froze, leaving investors without access to their cash. The SEC immediately investigated the largest firms in the market and entered into settlements that were the largest in the history of the SEC, amounting to up to $30 billion to injured
investors.
Cox also targeted municipal securities fraud. In April 2008 the SEC charged five former San Diego city officials with securities fraud involving billions in undisclosed pension liabilities that had placed the city and taxpayers in serious financial jeopardy. Throughout his chairmanship he railed against the inadequacy of disclosure to investors in municipal securities, which the SEC does not regulate, and asked Congress for explicit authority for the agency to do so. In December 2008, the SEC under his leadership authorized the creation of a free, Internet-accessible repository for municipal finance disclosure. "With liquidity problems of municipal auction rate securities and rating downgrades of municipal bond insurers contributing to the current credit crisis, the disclosure and transparency of the municipal markets have never been more critical," he said.
In late December 2008, following the confession by New York investment advisor Bernard Madoff and the filing of SEC charges against him alleging a $50 billion fraud, Cox stated that he was "gravely concerned" that "specific and credible evidence" provided to the agency over a period of at least 10 years had not previously been referred to the Commission for commencement of a formal investigation. He ordered an internal investigation by the agency's Inspector General. The report found that substantive allegations concerning Madoff were first brought to the SEC in 1992.
Response to the beginning of the 2008 U.S. recession
Under his leadership, the SEC on September 17 and 18, 2008, imposed a variety of both permanent and emergency restrictions on short selling in response to the liquidity crisis. Abusive naked short selling, in which the seller intentionally fails to deliver the shares sold short in time for settlement, was banned outright, an exception for options market makers that had been in place for several years was eliminated, and a new anti-fraud provision, Rule 10b-21, was adopted to give specific enforcement authority in such cases. In September 2008, short selling of 799 financial stocks was temporarily curtailed in response to rumors accompanied by heightened short selling activity in the shares of major financial institutions.
On September 26, 2008, Cox ended the 2004 program for voluntary regulation of investment bank holding companies, begun under SEC Chairman William Donaldson and then-Director of Market Regulation (later SEC Commissioner) Annette Nazareth. The program "was fundamentally flawed from the beginning, because investment banks could opt in or out of supervision voluntarily," Cox said. A critical report by the SEC inspector general that evaluated the program in light of the Bear Stearns near-failure in March 2008 found that while "Bear Stearns was compliant with the capital and liquidity requirements" at the time of its acquisition, "its collapse raises serious questions about the adequacy of these requirements." However, according to the Inspector General, his report "did not include a determination of the cause of Bear Stearns' collapse" or determine "whether any of these issues directly contributed to Bear Stearns' collapse." On that subject, the report stated, "we have no evidence linking these significant deficiencies with the cause of Bear Stearns' collapse." Cox criticized the oversight program on the ground that because of its voluntary nature and the SEC's limited statutory authority, the agency could not force changes in the hundreds of unregulated subsidiaries of large investment banks such as Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns as bank regulators could do with bank holding companies. In testimony before Congress on several occasions in 2008, he asked for statutory authority to regulate investment bank holding companies.
In addition to the fact that the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act did not give the SEC the authority to regulate large investment bank holding companies, Cox noted that investors were vulnerable to other regulatory gaps such as the fact that the $60 trillion market for credit default swaps was then completely unregulated. "Neither the SEC nor any regulator has authority even to require minimum disclosure", he said. In testimony and public statements he urged Congress to enact remedial legislation.
Cox said that during the buildup of the credit crisis, when the credit rating agencies were still unregulated, they gave top credit ratings to financial instruments which packaged risky loans and spread the negative impacts of the credit crisis more broadly throughout the markets. Following the first-time SEC registration of the credit rating agencies in September 2007 under newly enacted legislative authority, he ordered a 10-month examination of the three major rating agencies that uncovered significant weaknesses in their ratings practices for mortgage-backed securities and that called into question the impartiality of their ratings. The results were reported to Congress in July 2008. The SEC immediately commenced a rulemaking which concluded on December 3, 2008, with approval of a series of measures to regulate the conflicts of interests, disclosures, internal policies, and business practices of credit rating agencies. The regulations were intended to ensure that firms provide more meaningful ratings and greater disclosure to investors concerning collateralized debt obligations and residential mortgage-backed securities.
In an interview with The Washington Post in late December 2008, Cox said, "What we have done in this current turmoil is stay calm, which has been our greatest contribution—not being impulsive, not changing the rules willy-nilly, but going through a very professional and orderly process that takes into account unintended consequences and gives ample notice to market participants." Cox added that the Commission's decision to impose a three-week ban on short selling of financial company stocks was taken reluctantly, but that the view at the time, including from Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, was that "if we did not act and act at that instant, these financial institutions could fail as a result and there would be nothing left to save." In a December 2008 interview with Reuters, he explained that the SEC's Office of Economic Analysis was still evaluating data from the temporary ban, and that preliminary findings pointed to several unintended market consequences and side effects. "While the actual effects of this temporary action will not be fully understood for many more months, if not years ... knowing what we know now, I believe on balance the Commission would not do it again."
Cox stepped down as Chairman of the SEC at the end of the Bush administration, on January 20, 2009.
Later career
Following his tenure at the SEC, Cox returned to his home in Southern California and the practice of law, which had been his pre-Washington profession. He joined the Boston-based international law firm of Bingham McCutchen LLP as a partner in the firm's Corporate, M&A and Securities practice, resident in its Orange County office, where in 2014 The Best Lawyers in America named him Lawyer of the Year in the Corporate Governance category. He also served as president of Bingham Consulting LLC, the firm's global strategic consulting business. Following the November 2014 combination of Bingham and the Philadelphia-based international law firm of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, Cox became a partner of Morgan Lewis and president of Morgan Lewis Consulting LLC. Other recent members of Morgan Lewis Consulting include former Arizona Diamondbacks and San Diego Padres owner Jeff Moorad, former National Labor Relations Board chairman Philip Miscimarra, former New Hampshire Governor Steve Merrill, former California Governor and U.S. Senator Pete Wilson, former Clinton White House Cabinet Secretary Thurgood Marshall Jr., and former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine and George Bush Presidential Library Executive Director Roman Popadiuk. While at Morgan Lewis, Cox was again named by The Best Lawyers in America as Lawyer of the Year in Orange County, this time in the Corporate Law category for 2016. In February 2020, Cox retired as a partner of Morgan Lewis and as president of Morgan Lewis Consulting, taking the title of counsel at the law firm.
Cox is a member of the board of directors of ophthalmic technology maker RxSight, Inc., and governance, risk and compliance firm ACA Compliance Group. He is a life trustee of the University of Southern California and a member of the advisory boards of private equity firm Starr Investment Holdings, RevOZ Capital, the United States Energy Security Council, and the Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute, founded by Nobel Prize winner George A. Olah. He formerly served on the boards of health care companies Alphaeon Corporation and Calhoun Vision, Inc., photonics manufacturer Newport Corporation, and governance, risk and compliance firm Thomson Reuters. For ten years, he was a member of the board of directors of the National Endowment for Democracy, and of the board of trustees of Chapman University.
The Forum for Corporate Directors honored Cox as a "Director of the Year" in March 2019 in the category of Corporate Governance. In June 2014, Cox was named a "Father of the Year" by the Father's Day Council and the American Diabetes Association in recognition of his "outstanding contributions to his family, profession and community."
References
External links
Official Biography – SEC Website
Christopher Cox Sworn in as SEC Chairman – SEC Press Release
President Bush Nominates Congressman Cox as SEC Chairman – White House Press Release
Speeches and Statements as SEC Chairman
The changes I've seen – Farewell letter by Chris Cox in the Orange County Register
Congressional
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1952 births
21st-century American politicians
American lawyers
Businesspeople from Saint Paul, Minnesota
Harvard Business School alumni
Harvard Law School alumni
Living people
Members of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
People associated with Latham & Watkins
People from Newport Beach, California
Politicians from Saint Paul, Minnesota
Reagan administration personnel
Recipients of the Order of the Lithuanian Grand Duke Gediminas
Republican Party members of the United States House of Representatives from California
University of Southern California alumni
George W. Bush administration personnel
Members of Congress who became lobbyists
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob%20Filner
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Bob Filner
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Robert Earl Filner (born September 4, 1942) is an American former politician who was the 35th mayor of San Diego from December 2012 through August 2013, when he resigned amid multiple allegations of sexual harassment. He later pleaded guilty to state charges of false imprisonment and battery. He is a member of the Democratic Party.
Filner was previously the U.S. representative for , and the 50th, serving from 1993 to 2012. He was chair of the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs from 2007 to 2011.
Early life, education, and academic career
Filner was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood. He is Jewish, the son of Sarah F. and Joseph H. Filner. His father was a labor union organizer, U.S. Army veteran and later international metal trader.
He attended Cornell University, where he worked on the Cornell Daily Sun, a student newspaper, and took part in civil rights demonstrations. In June 1961, after pulling into the bus station in Jackson, Mississippi as a Freedom Rider, Filner was arrested for "disturbing the peace and inciting a riot." He refused to post bond for his release and remained incarcerated for two months.
He graduated from Cornell in 1963 with a degree in chemistry, and earned his doctorate in history of science from Cornell six years later. While completing his PhD, he moved to San Diego, becoming a history professor at San Diego State University for more than 20 years.
Early political career
Filner was long interested in politics. He worked for U.S. Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota in 1975 and for Minnesota Congressman Don Fraser in 1976. He also worked for Congressman Jim Bates from the San Diego area in 1984.
His elective career began in 1979, when his opposition to the closing of a neighborhood school led him to run for the San Diego Unified School District Board of Education, defeating a longtime incumbent. His "back to basics" approach to education won him wide praise, and his colleagues elected him president of the board in 1982. He was elected to the San Diego City Council in 1987 and was reelected in 1991; his colleagues elected him Deputy Mayor of San Diego.
U.S. House of Representatives
Elections
California gained seven seats after the 1990 census, and one of them was the 50th District in south San Diego (renumbered the 51st District after the 2000 census). The district is one of the most ethnically diverse in the nation, including much of San Diego's southern section, the cities of Chula Vista and National City and all of Imperial County. It includes most of California's border with Mexico, except for the city of Imperial Beach. In 1992, Filner ran in a five-way Democratic primary for the seat and won a narrow victory. One of his primary opponents was his former boss, Jim Bates, who had lost his seat in a sexual harassment scandal in 1990 and whose home had been drawn into the district.
Another opponent was veteran state Senator Wadie Deddeh, who was term-limited. Filner defeated Deddeh by a narrow margin, with Bates finishing third place in the primary. The district was almost 40% Hispanic (redistricting in 2000 made it 53% Hispanic) and heavily Democratic, and his victory in November (with 57 percent of the vote) was a foregone conclusion. He was reelected nine times with no substantive Republican opposition. He ran unopposed in 1998. He chose not to run for re-election to Congress in 2012, opting instead to run for Mayor of San Diego. He resigned from the House of Representatives on December 3, 2012, in order to take office as Mayor of San Diego.
Filner had a bitter rivalry with Juan Vargas, another Democratic politician who ran against Filner in the Democratic primary three times. Filner and Vargas accused each other of corruption. However, in the 2012 mayoral race, Vargas endorsed Filner for Mayor of San Diego and Vargas was elected to Filner's seat in Congress.
Tenure
Filner was a founding member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. He was also a member of the Congressional Motorcycle Safety Caucus and International Conservation Caucus. He was one of the 31 House Democrats who voted to not count the 20 electoral votes from Ohio in the 2004 presidential election, despite Republican President George Bush winning the state by 118,457 votes. In 2008, Filner sponsored a resolution, passed by the House of Representatives, in support of National Aviation Maintenance Technician Day. While in congress, Filner was known for his combative personality, and for personally dealing with constituent issues.
Veterans issues
Filner served on the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs and ascended to the chairmanship when the Democrats took over the House of Representatives after the 2006 election. As chairman, Filner advocated for funding for veterans benefits, increased spending on veterans healthcare, and a new GI bill for veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq. Filner stayed on as ranking Democrat on the committee after the Republicans retook the House in the 2010 election.
Filipino issues
Filner's district in south San Diego had one of the largest populations of Filipino Americans in the country, leading Filner to focus on issues relevant to the Philippines while in congress, especially Filipino veterans. Filner's accomplishments included legislation allowing Filipino veterans to maintain a small stipend from the government if they moved back to the Philippines, burial benefits, and access to VA clinics. In 2009 Filner brokered a deal securing $198 million in pension benefits for Filipino veterans who had served for the United States in World War II in the form of a $15,000 lump sum payment as part of the 2009 stimulus bill. In February 2009, Rep. Antonio Diaz filed a bill in the Philippine House of Representatives seeking to confer honorary Filipino citizenship on Filner and U.S. Senators Daniel Inouye, Daniel Akaka, and Ted Stevens for their role in securing the passage of this legislation.
Airline worker controversy
On August 20, 2007, Filner was involved in an altercation with a United Airlines employee at Dulles International Airport after he became upset that his baggage had not yet arrived on a baggage carousel. Filner entered the baggage claim office and became irritated when the employee was busy helping another customer and asked the congressman to wait his turn. It was at this point that it is alleged that Filner attempted to enter the employee-only area of the office. He was asked to leave the area several times by airline employees but refused to do so until airport police were called in.
Filner was on his way to visit troops in Iraq at the time of the incident. He released a statement saying "suffice it to say now, that the story that has appeared in the press is factually incorrect and the charges are ridiculous". He was later charged with assault and battery. Filner pleaded guilty in an Alford plea to reduced charges of trespassing. The House Ethics Committee began a probe into the event, but it was later dropped.
People's Mujahedin of Iran
Filner, along with several senior United States officials, argued that the People's Mujahedin of Iran, also known as the MEK, should have its designation as a terrorist group removed. Filner considered the MEK, a major member of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, an ally against the current Iranian regime. The U.S. Department of State lifted the MEK's designation as a terrorist organization as of September 28, 2012.
Committee assignments
Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure
Subcommittee on Aviation
Subcommittee on Highways and Transit
Subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment
Committee on Veterans' Affairs (Ranking Member)
Mayor of San Diego
Election
Filner announced on June 8, 2011, that he would be a candidate for Mayor of San Diego in the 2012 election and would not run for re-election to Congress. In the primary on June 5, 2012, he placed second with 30.7% of the vote. He faced city councilmember Carl DeMaio in the November 2012 runoff election. Filner defeated DeMaio, 52.5% to 47.5%. Filner, age 70, won as San Diego's first elected Democratic mayor since 1992 and only its second since 1971.
Tenure
In his first speech as mayor, Filner promised to focus on rebuilding the neighborhoods of San Diego, improving city services, increasing staffing for public safety, bringing jobs to the city, and developing stronger regional ties with Tijuana.
In January 2013, following a meeting between Filner and the San Diego chapter of Americans for Safe Access, Filner instructed the San Diego Police Department and city code compliance officers to stop enforcing codes against marijuana dispensaries and stop forwarding cases to the San Diego City Attorney's Office. In April 2013, Filner proposed a new ordinance to restore permanent legal status to dispensaries, but the City Council rejected it and suggested that the City Attorney draft a new ordinance in its place. Meanwhile, federal agencies continued to raid and prosecute dispensaries within city limits.
In February 2013, Filner raised controversy by not authorizing funding of the Tourism Marketing District, a hotelier-run organization charged with promoting San Diego as a tourist destination that is funded by a 2 percent surcharge on hotel rooms. In 2012, the San Diego City Council agreed to renew the District for 39 1/2 years, but outgoing mayor Jerry Sanders did not sign the agreement before leaving office. Filner publicly withheld his signature on the agreement, wanting a series of concessions that would raise hotel worker salaries, protect the City from liability, and direct more of the funds collected to be used by the City of San Diego. The District subsequently filed suit against the Mayor to enforce the agreement, but Judge Timothy Taylor ruled that Filner had the discretion not to sign. After this ruling, Filner and the hoteliers agreed to a compromise and Filner signed the contract. However, in late May 2013 Filner temporarily withheld payments to the District until it agreed to provide upfront funding for a centennial celebration for Balboa Park.
2013 allegations and resignation
Allegations of sexual harassment
On July 11, 2013, three of Filner's long-time supporters held a press conference to call for Filner's resignation as mayor, based on numerous unspecified but "credible" allegations that he had sexually harassed women. KPBS-FM said that it had been investigating reports of sexual harassment of female staff members for several months, and that the complaints included "inappropriate comments, kissing and groping". Later that day Filner issued a video statement apologizing and saying that he was seeking professional help to change his behavior. The next day Filner told reporters that he had treated women poorly and sometimes intimidated them, but insisted that a "fair and independent investigation" would clear him of sexual harassment charges.
On July 12, Filner's chief of staff, Vince Hall, announced his resignation, effective immediately. On July 24, Filner's new chief of staff Tony Buckles, his former congressional chief of staff, resigned after only 10 days on the job and was replaced by Lee Burdick, a woman who had been serving as deputy chief of staff.
On July 15, the same three former supporters held another press conference, describing in more detail charges by women who said they had been forcibly kissed, groped, and subjected to sexually suggestive comments by Filner; the alleged but unidentified victims include a mayoral staffer, a campaign volunteer and a constituent. Filner repeated that he had done nothing wrong and would not resign.
On July 22, 2013, attorney Gloria Allred announced at a press conference that her firm had filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against Filner on behalf of the mayor's former communications director. By August 26, 19 women had publicly claimed that Filner had sexually harassed them, including a retired admiral, a Marilyn Monroe impersonator who appeared at one of his fundraisers, a 67-year-old great-grandmother who worked for the city, a nurse who said Filner demanded a date in exchange for helping a Marine who had suffered a brain injury and PTSD during service in Iraq, and several female members of the U.S. armed forces who had been raped during their service. In the last two instances, Filner's contact with the women stemmed from his position at the time as ranking member of the House Veterans' Affairs Committee.
In the ensuing weeks, calls for Filner's resignation came from Democratic U.S. senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, representatives Susan Davis and Scott Peters, DNC chairwoman and U.S Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, California State Assembly members Toni Atkins and Lorena Gonzalez, Nancy Pelosi, and all nine members of the City Council.
On July 26, 2013, Filner announced that he planned to take a leave of absence "to undergo two weeks of intensive therapy” starting August 5. He started the treatment but ended it early on August 10, according to his attorney.
On July 29, 2013, Filner asked the city of San Diego to pay his legal fees for a sexual harassment lawsuit regarding his former communications director. The city council voted not to do so, and in fact to sue Filner for any costs incurred by the city due to claims filed against him and the city. The City Council later reversed itself as part of a negotiated agreement with Filner.
Other issues
Federal, state and local investigators looked into several other issues involving Filner. One matter involved a trip he took to Paris with his then-fiancée in June 2013; questions had been raised about the nonprofit group that paid his expenses and the use of city credit cards to pay for his accompanying security detail. On another issue, FBI agents looked into a pair of proposed housing developments which Filner blocked with an "administrative hold" until the developers contributed money to certain city projects.
Recall effort
In August 2013 two different groups started the process to mount a recall drive against Filner; the two groups later combined their efforts. In order to force a recall election, they would have had to gather more than 100,000 signatures of city voters (15% of the votes cast in the most recent election) within a 39-day window. On August 18, 1,200 volunteers began collecting signatures. Less than a week after the signature drive began, Filner agreed to resign. The recall organizers wound down the effort, called for all petitions to be turned in so they could be counted and destroyed, and worked on preparing a final financial accounting.
Resignation
On August 21, 2013, city attorney Jan Goldsmith said that Filner had reached an agreement with the city after three days of mediation. The City Council considered the agreement in a closed session on August 23 and voted 7-0 to accept Filner's resignation. The resignation deal with the City Council limits Filner's "legal and financial exposure" by providing a joint legal defense for him and the city for claims filed against him by current or former city employees, as well as paying up to $98,000 of his outside legal fees. Filner signed a letter of resignation that became effective at 5 p.m PDT August 30, 2013. City Council president Todd Gloria served as interim mayor, with limited powers, pending election of a new mayor. A special election was held on November 19, 2013; since no candidate received a majority of the vote, a runoff election was held on February 11, 2014, wherein Kevin Faulconer was elected to be the next mayor.
Conviction
On October 15, 2013, Filner pleaded guilty in San Diego Superior Court to three criminal counts filed against him by the California state attorney general, who took over the case after the San Diego County district attorney recused herself. The charges were one felony count of false imprisonment and two misdemeanor battery charges. The victims were identified as three Jane Does. He could have faced up to five years in prison, but a plea bargain was reportedly reached, under which he would be given three months of house arrest, three years probation, and partial loss of his mayoral pension. On December 9, 2013, the terms of the plea bargain were imposed at a sentencing hearing. The plea bargain would have prohibited him from ever seeking or holding public office again, but the judge reduced the prohibition so it applies only while he is on probation. He served a three-month term of house arrest which ended on April 6, 2014.
In a 2016 interview, Filner denied all allegations of sexual harassment.
Additional allegation in 2017
On November 20, 2017, Representative Diana DeGette (D-Colorado) alleged during an interview on MSNBC's Meet the Press Daily that Filner tried to force himself on her in an elevator.
Personal life
Filner is divorced from his first wife, Barbara (Christy) Filner, a retired mediation specialist whom he met when they both taught in a summer program in the early 60s at Tuskegee University (then Institute). They have two adult children, a son and a daughter.
Filner was later married to Jane Merrill, but they divorced in 2011.
At his first news conference after his election as mayor in 2012, Filner introduced his fiancée, Bronwyn Ingram, a disability analyst who worked for the Social Security Administration. On July 8, 2013, Ingram announced by email to a group of her supporters that the engagement had been called off and the relationship was over. In a subsequent statement, Ingram cited Filner's verbal abuse and blatant sexting as reasons for the split.
References
External links
1942 births
Living people
Cornell University alumni
People in history occupations
Jewish mayors of places in the United States
Freedom Riders
Jewish members of the United States House of Representatives
Mayors of San Diego
Democratic Party members of the United States House of Representatives from California
People who entered an Alford plea
San Diego City Council members
San Diego State University faculty
School board members in California
California politicians convicted of crimes
Activists from California
21st-century American politicians
Jewish American people in California politics
21st-century American Jews
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan%20L.%20Hunter
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Duncan L. Hunter
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Duncan Lee Hunter (born May 31, 1948) is an American politician. He was a Republican member of the House of Representatives from California's 52nd, 45th and 42nd districts from 1981 to 2009.
Hunter was the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee during the 108th and 109th Congress. Hunter sought the Republican Party nomination for President of the United States for 2008, but his campaign failed to attract significant voters or delegates in early primary and caucus states, and he dropped out after the Nevada Republican caucuses.
He was succeeded as representative for the 52nd district by his son, Duncan D. Hunter.
Early life, education, military service, and family
Hunter was born in Riverside, California, the son of Lola Lee (née Young) (d. 2004) and Robert Olin Hunter (1905–2006). He graduated from Rubidoux High School in Riverside in 1966. He attended the University of Montana from 1966 to 1967, and then briefly the University of California, Santa Barbara, before being commissioned into the United States Army in 1969.
He served in South Vietnam from 1970 to 1971 during the Vietnam War in the Army Rangers' 75th Infantry Regiment, attached to the 173rd Airborne Brigade. He participated in 24 helicopter assaults as well as in a number of night-time reconnaissance patrols. He held the rank of first lieutenant, and was awarded the Bronze Star, Air Medal, and service ribbons such as the Vietnam Service Medal. He has said, "I didn't do anything special in the U.S. Army, but I served with very special soldiers I will never forget."
Making use of the G.I. Bill in 1973, he enrolled at the San Diego campus of the Western State University College of Law (now Thomas Jefferson School of Law) and earned a Bachelor of Science in Law and Juris Doctor in 1976. Hunter worked farming and construction jobs to supplement his income while finishing his degree. He was admitted to the State Bar of California on December 22, 1976, but has held inactive status since January 1, 1983.
Hunter married Lynne Layh in 1973. Hunter's son, Duncan Duane Hunter (born 1976), a major in the United States Marine Corps Reserve, was deployed to Iraq in 2003 and 2004 and Afghanistan in 2007. On November 4, 2008, Duncan D. Hunter was elected to succeed his father as the congressional representative of the California's 52nd congressional district. On August 21, 2018, Duncan D. Hunter and his wife Margaret, were indicted for criminal activity. In June 2019, federal prosecutors showed that from 2009 to 2016, Hunter had spent campaign funds on extramarital affairs with five women, including lobbyists and congressional staff. In December 2019, Hunter changed his plea to guilty on one count of misusing campaign funds. On March 17, 2020, Hunter was sentenced by the U.S. District Court Southern District of California to 11 months in prison.
Hunter's family attends First Baptist Church of Alpine, which is affiliated with the San Diego Southern Baptist Association. Hunter's Alpine, California home burned down during the October 2003 Cedar Fire. The loss was over $500,000, but insurance covered most of it. Hunter was critical of Governor Gray Davis's response to the fire.
Hunter has another son, Samuel. He has a brother, John Hunter, who has worked as a weapons scientist.
U.S. House of Representatives
Initial election and re-elections
In 1980, Hunter was recruited to run for Congress in what was then the 42nd District against 18-year incumbent Democrat Lionel Van Deerlin. Hunter was initially an underdog in a district where Democrats outnumbered Republicans by almost 2 to 1. However, his attacks on Van Deerlin's record on national defense gained traction in a district dominated by military bases and personnel. Van Deerlin did not respond quickly enough, and Hunter narrowly defeated him. He was one of many Republicans swept into office from historically Democratic districts as a result of the "Reagan revolution"; Van Deerlin had been the district's only congressman since its creation in 1963.
After the 1980 census, many of the more Democratic areas were cut out of Hunter's district, and he was reelected 13 more times with no substantive opposition. During this time, he only won less than 60 percent of the vote once, when he was held to 53.8 percent in 1992. His district was renumbered as the 45th District in 1983 and the 52nd in 1993.
In the 2006 general election, he defeated Navy veteran/minister John Rinaldi, a Democrat, and Michael Benoit, a Libertarian. Hunter was re-elected with 65 percent of the vote, a 33-point margin over Rinaldi.
On March 20, 2007, Hunter announced that, as part of his presidential bid, he would not seek a 15th term in the House of Representatives in 2008. After his son, Duncan D. Hunter, announced his candidacy for his father's seat, the younger Hunter was recalled by the United States Marine Corps to serve in the Operation Enduring Freedom – Afghanistan. During Duncan D. Hunter's active service, his wife, Margaret Hunter, campaigned on his behalf. On June 3, 2008, Duncan D. Hunter won 72% of the Republican Primary vote and became the Republican nominee to replace his father representing the 52nd District.
House Armed Services Committee
Hunter became chairman of the House Armed Services Committee in 2002. As such, he sponsored legislation authorizing defense department fiscal year activities from FY2004 to FY2007. During consideration of the FY2006 Defense Authorization Act, Hunter offered an amendment to the bill clarifying enacted policy restricting women from direct combat units. Hunter's amendment codified existing Army policy enacted in 1994 under former Defense Secretary Les Aspin that prohibited women from submitting or migrating into combat units or operations. The amendment was subsequently withdrawn in order for a study to be conducted on the rationale and future implementation of the policy.
In November 2004, Hunter and Wisconsin Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner withheld their support for a bill creating a Director of National Intelligence (DNI) until specific conditions were met. Hunter argued that the military is the biggest consumer of intelligence and any reforms enacted, including the creation of a DNI, must not endanger the lives of troops on the battlefield. The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, which created the DNI position, was passed by Congress and signed by President George W. Bush later that year.
In a House Armed Services Committee hearing on November 9, 2005, Hunter strongly criticized a Defense Logistics Agency "prime vendor" buying program that led to the purchase of $20 ice cube trays and a tiny refrigerator for $22,797 (initially exposed by The State). Hunter stated that he wanted explanations from the companies in question and the government purchasing agents who had approved the purchases, accusing the latter of "absolute incompetence." He further stated that the purchases are "a real slap in the face to the guy making $13,000 a year who is engaged in a firefight in Ramadi," and claimed that "A fairly large amount of incompetence is embedded into the system."
On November 18, 2005, in response to Pennsylvania Congressman John Murtha's resolution to terminate the deployment of United States forces in Iraq, to redeploy the forces already involved in Iraq, and to "pursue security and stability in Iraq through diplomacy", Hunter and other Republicans drafted a two-sentence counter-resolution that read:
Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the deployment of United States forces in Iraq be terminated immediately.
Resolved, That it is the sense of the House of Representatives that the deployment of United States forces in Iraq be terminated immediately.
Democrats condemned the bill as a political stunt; they made much of the fact that Hunter himself didn't support his own resolution. The bill was defeated, 3–403, in the House of Representatives.
Hunter became ranking member of the committee when Democrats took control of the House in 2007.
On January 31, 2007, Hunter held a press conference on the 2007 Chinese anti-satellite missile test, stating that it "represents the commencement of a new era of military competition in space." He contended that the United States' ability to engage in warfare depends heavily on its space assets, and opined that the country must take steps to "ensure our forces cannot be targeted through an adversarial space strike."
On April 25, 2007, after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid declared "the war is lost", Hunter wrote "my highest obligation is, like yours, owed to our forces in uniform, especially during this time of war... Given your position of leadership within the United States Government, I find your pronouncement of failure irresponsible and disserving to America's armed forces. In light of the fact that this statement has both been used by our adversaries and has exhibited a marked lack of leadership to U.S. troops, I call on you to resign your leadership position". Hunter further wrote that Reid's declaration "can have no effect but to demoralize the brave men and women, who are honorably fulfilling their mission in Iraq, and to encourage our adversaries... Even if you sincerely believe it to be true, your pronouncement of failure will undoubtedly be used by terrorist leaders to rally their followers – inevitably leading to increased attacks on U.S. and coalition forces".
According to the July 2007 edition of Pacific Flyer, Hunter and Cunningham had pressured the Department of Defense to "...advise DARPA to put an immediate halt to bureaucratic delays and get on with the DuPont Aerospace DP-2 testing." The DP-2 is a Vertical Take-Off and Landing, or VTOL, aircraft designed by DuPont Aerospace to transport special operations forces, but has been repeatedly rejected by the United States Navy, United States Army, United States Air Force, NASA, and DARPA. The design, of which all four constructed models have crashed, has had $63 million appropriated to it since 1991, not including a suggested $6 million for fiscal year 2008. Despite the rejections and reports by multiple military and civilian experts that the aircraft will not fly or hover and will incinerate Special Operations forces rappelling out of the aircraft, Hunter has allegedly repeatedly added funding for the DP-2 in "earmarks" and defended the aircraft in recent testimony to the Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight of the Committee on Science and Technology. Hunter received $36,000 in donations from DuPont Aerospace.
According to his testimony before Congress,
Hunter compared the lack of success of the DP-2 to the trials of perfecting the V-22 Osprey. He alleged that such long-term testing is necessary to keep American forces equipped with the best technology.
In April 2023 NPR reported on a "friendly fire" mortar incident in Iraq that occurred in 2004, but had been covered up. Hunter's son Duncan D. Hunter was serving at the command center that ordered the mortar fire, and may have been responsible for the order. Lt. Gen. James Conway, top Marine officer in Iraq, signed off on the report that declined to exact punishments from those responsible for the incident. He did so two days after a personal visit from Hunter. The report was only disseminated to family members three years later, by order of a congressional investigation carried out after Hunter had left the committee. The Marine Corps claimed to be unable to fulfill NPR's FOIA request for the report, as it was said to be "missing."
Other legislative actions
In November 1997, Hunter was one of eighteen Republicans in the House to co-sponsor a resolution by Bob Barr that sought to launch an impeachment inquiry into President Bill Clinton. The resolution did not specify any charges or allegations. This was an early effort to impeach Clinton, predating the eruption of the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal. The eruption of that scandal would ultimately lead to a more serious effort to impeach Clinton in 1998. On October 8, 1998, Hunter voted in favor of legislation that was passed to open an impeachment inquiry. On December 19, 1998, Hunter voted in favor of all four proposed articles of impeachment against Clinton (only two of which received the needed majority of votes needed to be adopted).
On December 8, 2006, Hunter introduced H.R. 6375, which would have required the defense department to post the purpose of all congressional earmarks in annual defense bills, along with the location and a grade according to the utility of the earmark.
Hunter introduced H.R. 552, The Right to Life Act, on February 2, 2005. The purpose of the bill is to "implement equal protection... for the right to life of each born and preborn human person." In the 109th Congress, the legislation collected 101 cosponsors. Hunter states that The Right to Life Act "would legally define "personhood" as the moment of conception and, therefore, guarantee all constitutional rights and protections, including life, to the unborn without utilizing a constitutional amendment." Hearings for H.R. 552 were scheduled for December 12, 2006, but were cancelled right before the House adjourned.
On April 28, 2004, Hunter introduced legislation that he said could "turn parents into prosecuting attorneys fighting a wave of obscenity." HR 6390 IH, also called the "Parents Empowerment Act", would allow the parent or guardian of a minor to sue in federal court anyone who knowingly disseminates material "that is harmful to minors", or specifically, "any pornographic communication, picture, image, graphic image file, article, recording, writing, or other pornographic matter of any kind", if it is distributed in a way that "a reasonable person can expect a substantial number of minors to be exposed to the material and the minor, as a result to exposure to the material, is likely to suffer personal or emotional injury or injury to mental or moral welfare."
In 1994, Hunter legislatively mandated the construction of of security fencing on the international land border separating San Diego County and Tijuana, Mexico. In 2005, Hunter introduced legislation calling for the construction of a reinforced fence along the entire U.S.-Mexico border, citing crime statistics as measures of San Diego-Tijuana fence's success.
After successfully adding an amendment to a House-passed bill that ultimately stalled in House–Senate negotiations, Hunter's amendment was later incorporated into H.R. 6061, the Secure Fence Act, introduced by New York Congressman Peter T. King. He has said that if he becomes president, the double layer border fence will be built in less than 12 months.
Hunter repeatedly voted against international trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) and the World Trade Organization (WTO).
Cunningham / Wilkes
Hunter was not implicated in the Duke Cunningham / Brent R. Wilkes congressional bribery scandal. In December 2005, Hunter directed that the contributions his campaign received from Wilkes and Wade be given to the Injured Marine Semper Fi Fund. "We had options," said Bruce Young, treasurer for Hunter's re-election campaign. "We could keep the money, send it back, send it to the government or send it to a charity. We just felt that because of the situation, we would rather not have the money." More than 100 members of the House and Senate – Republicans and Democrats – accepted money from Wilkes, former MZM Inc. president Mitchell Wade, their relatives, employees or political action committees, according to OpenSecrets, a campaign watchdog group.
2008 Presidential campaign
On October 30, 2006, Hunter announced his intention to consider running for the Republican nomination for President in 2008. Throughout 2006, his Peace Through Strength PAC raised funds and ran advertising expressing his issues of border security and fair trade.
Hunter formally announced his presidential candidacy in Spartanburg, South Carolina, on January 25, 2007.
During 2007, Hunter did well in some county- and state-level straw polls, including a victory at the first GOP Texas Straw Poll on September 1, but those results did not transfer to regular polls at national or state levels. Some major polls did not even list Hunter as an option along with Mitt Romney, John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Ron Paul, Fred Thompson, or Rudy Giuliani. When national polls did list Hunter, he consistently got three percent or less support among Republicans.
Conservative commentator Ann Coulter and aviation legend Chuck Yeager both endorsed Hunter as their choice for President, but Hunter received little support from the Republican establishment. Governor Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, who was also seeking the Republican nomination for President, stated that Hunter might play a role in a potential Huckabee administration, noting that he is "extraordinarily well qualified to be Secretary of Defense."
As the caucus and primary season got underway, Hunter began being excluded from Republican debate forums. On January 7, 2008, he held a press conference where reporters thought he would announce his withdrawal. Instead, he surprised pundits by first lambasting ABC News and Fox News not allowing him to participate in previous days' televised debates and then declaring that he would not withdraw from the presidential race: "I am not going to let some arrogant knucklehead executive in a glass office 10 stories above a mall in New York City decide the outcome of this election."
In the Iowa caucuses Hunter finished in seventh place with 524 votes, or one percent of the total. In the New Hampshire primary he finished in seventh and last place again with 1,220 votes, or less than one percent of the total votes cast. In the Wyoming caucuses he had his best showing, coming in third and scoring 1 delegate to the Republican National Convention. However, in the Michigan primary, Hunter once again placed last, coming in eighth behind "Uncommited" (which received 15,000 more votes than Hunter). On the last day of his campaign, Hunter won just two percent of the vote in the Nevada caucuses, and in the South Carolina primary he received only 0.2 percent of the vote, putting him in last place in both states. He withdrew from the race that night, on January 19, 2008. Hunter subsequently endorsed Huckabee for the Republican nomination.
Political positions and voting record
Hunter voted with a majority of the Republicans 88.7 percent of the time. He was a member of the conservative Republican Study Committee. Hunter is a member of the United States Congressional International Conservation Caucus. Hunter is a staunch conservative. In January 2007, when he announced his presidential candidacy, Hunter had a lifetime rating of 92% from the American Conservative Union, indicating a highly conservative voting record.
Economy
Hunter was a supporter of the FairTax plan, which would replace all federal income taxes with a federal sales tax.
Environment
On environmental issues, Hunter score a 9% (out of 100%) lifetime voting score from the League of Conservation Voters, an environmental group. He supporting drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), voting twice to open the area to drilling. Hunter also voted for legislation reducing protections for endangered species. Hunter twice co-sponsored legislation to end the moratorium on offshore drilling in American waters. Hunter acknowledged the occurrence of climate change, but called the position of former Vice President Al Gore, who agrees with the scientific consensus on climate change, "doomsday alarmism".
Foreign relations
During his tenure in the House and his unsuccessful campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, Hunter was a staunch supporter of the Iraq War. Although Hunter generally favored free trade, he condemned Chinese currency devaluation and expressed a desire to protect the U.S. manufacturing sector, and proposed imposing tariffs on imports from China.
Healthcare
Hunter voted for the 2003 legislation that created Medicare Part D, a partial prescription drug benefit for seniors.
LGBT rights
Hunter opposed same-sex marriage, and proposed a constitutional amendment to define marriage as between one man and one woman.
Military
As chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Hunter "developed a reputation for never meeting a weapons system he didn't like." Hunter used congressional earmarks to "steer money" to defense projects that the Defense Department did not want, including the L-3 Communications Sea Fighter and the DuPont Aerospace DP-1. Hunter defended the use of earmarks by saying that it was the constitutional prerogative of Congress to decide how specifically federal monies should be spent.
Social issues
Abortion
He is opposed to abortion in all cases and proposed a constitutional amendment to make abortion illegal. He also introduced a number of bills in the House to restrict abortion. Hunter also opposed embryonic stem cell research, and voted against the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act of 2005.
Immigration
Hunter was outspoken in his opposition to illegal immigration, favoring strict measures to combat it. He was a leading voice pushing for faster and more extensive construction of a U.S.–Mexico border fence, naming the border "our biggest homeland security problem" and listing a fence as a top priority. Hunter criticized the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under the George W. Bush administration for planning to build just half of the 700 miles of U.S.–Mexico border barrier authorized by the Secure Fence Act of 2006.
Capital punishment
Hunter supported death penalty and voted against legislation to restrict its use.
Religious liberty
Hunter was a major supporter of the controversial Mount Soledad cross, clashing with advocates for separation of church and state over the issue.
Education
Hunter favored school vouchers and homeschooling.
References
External links
Documentaries, topic pages and databases
Profile from SourceWatch
Collected news stories and commentary from The New York Times
Genealogy of Duncan Hunter
Vote 2008: Duncan Hunter from PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer
Media coverage
USA Today – Duncan Hunter associated with Randy "Duke" Cunningham/Brent Wilkes scandal, November 29, 2005.
MonksMedia Radio Network – Duncan Hunter Supporters Radio
Official sites for 2008 presidential campaign
MySpace
External links
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1948 births
Living people
21st-century American politicians
United States Army personnel of the Vietnam War
Lawyers from Riverside, California
Military personnel from California
Recipients of the Air Medal
Republican Party members of the United States House of Representatives from California
Southern Baptists
Thomas Jefferson School of Law people
United States Army officers
Candidates in the 2008 United States presidential election
Western State University College of Law alumni
People from Alpine, California
Activists from California
United States Army Rangers
Rubidoux High School alumni
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRELIMO
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FRELIMO
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FRELIMO (; from Portuguese: , ) is a democratic socialist political party in Mozambique. It is the dominant party in Mozambique and has won a majority of the seats in the Assembly of the Republic in every election since the country's first multi-party election in 1994.
Founded in 1962, FRELIMO began as a nationalist movement fighting for the self-determination and independence of Mozambique from Portuguese colonial rule. During its anti-colonial struggle, FRELIMO managed to maintain friendly relations with both the Soviet Union and China, and received military and economic assistance from both Moscow and Beijing. Independence was achieved in June 1975 after the Carnation Revolution in Lisbon the previous year. It formally became a political party during its 3rd Party Congress in February 1977, and adopted Marxism–Leninism as its official ideology and FRELIMO Party () as its official name.
FRELIMO has ruled Mozambique since then, initially as the sole legal party in a one-party system and later as the democratically elected government in a multi-party system. FRELIMO fought a protracted civil war from 1976 to 1992 against the anti-communist Mozambican National Resistance or RENAMO. RENAMO received support from the then white minority governments of Rhodesia and South Africa. FRELIMO approved a new national constitution in 1990, which ended one-party rule and established a multi-party system.
Independence war (1964–1974)
After World War II, while many European nations were granting independence to their colonies, Portugal, under the Estado Novo regime, maintained that Mozambique and other Portuguese possessions were overseas territories of the metropole (mother country). Emigration to the colonies soared. Calls for Mozambican independence developed rapidly, and in 1962 several anti-colonial political groups formed FRELIMO. In September 1964, it initiated an armed campaign against Portuguese colonial rule. Portugal had ruled Mozambique for more than four hundred years; not all Mozambicans desired independence, and fewer still sought change through armed revolution.
FRELIMO was founded in Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika, on 25 June 1962, when three regionally based nationalist organizations: the Mozambican African National Union (MANU), National Democratic Union of Mozambique (UDENAMO), and the National African Union of Independent Mozambique (UNAMI) merged into one broad-based guerrilla movement. Under the leadership of Eduardo Mondlane, who was elected president of the newly formed organization, FRELIMO settled its headquarters in 1963 in Dar es Salaam. Uria Simango was its first vice-president.
The movement could not then be based in Mozambique as the Portuguese opposed nationalist movements and the colony was controlled by the police. (The three founding groups had also operated as exiles.) Tanzania and its president, Julius Nyerere, were sympathetic to the Mozambican nationalist groups. Convinced by recent events, such as the Mueda massacre, that peaceful agitation would not bring about independence, FRELIMO contemplated the possibility of armed struggle from the outset. It launched its first offensive in September 1964.
During the ensuing war of independence, FRELIMO received support from the Soviet Union, China, the Scandinavian countries, and some non-governmental organisations in the West. The mobilization of all, regardless of gender, motivated the initial inclusion of women into the war. Initially women were used to carry goods from Tanzania, but over time they were tasked with "making the first contacts with the population in a new area." Women were expected to engage with the locals and politicize them. This discourse helped legitimize female cadres as real revolutionaries.
Frelimo founded the Women's Detachment, a part of the Department of Defense, as a way to encourage the mobilization of women and enlarge Frelimo's support. Women cadres brought "a new and decisive force to the revolutionary struggle."
Frelimo's initial military operations were in the North of the country; by the late 1960s it had established "liberated zones" in Northern Mozambique in which it, rather than the Portuguese, constituted the civil authority. In administering these zones, FRELIMO worked to improve the lot of the peasantry in order to receive their support. As liberated areas grew, colonial governmental structures were replaced, as Frelimo activists and local chiefs assumed roles of authority. Traditional leaders were accustomed to controlling “the productive and reproductive capacity of women.” They “rejected women’s rights to participate in armed struggle and defended the bride price system, child marriage and polygamy.” These traditional practices “were all viewed as incompatible with the tenets of revolutionary society.” Over time, traditional power structures were delegitimized by their association with Portuguese colonization and their inability to accommodate key components of revolutionary ideology. Frelimo encouraged the creation of collectives and greatly increased peasant access to education and healthcare. Often FRELIMO soldiers were assigned to medical assistance projects.
Its members' practical experiences in the liberated zones resulted in the FRELIMO leadership increasingly moving towards a Marxist policy. FRELIMO came to regard economic exploitation by Western capital as the principal enemy of the common Mozambican people, not the Portuguese as such, and not Europeans in general. Although it was an African nationalist party, it adopted a non-racial stance. Numerous white people were members.
The war of liberation was viewed as a rejection of “obstructionist, traditional-feudal and capitalist practices.” The transformation of “social and economic relations” had significant implications for women. Women’s liberation was “not an act of charity,” but rather “a fundamental necessity for the revolution, the guarantee of its continuity and the precondition to its victory.” This perspective recognizes the immense labor force that women constitute. Frelimo acknowledged that women’s involvement in the formal economy would result in an economically stronger Mozambique. The population was encouraged to view women’s emancipation as vital to the amelioration of Mozambique’s society.
The early years of the party, during which its Marxist direction evolved, were times of internal turmoil. Mondlane, along with Marcelino dos Santos, Samora Machel, Joaquim Chissano and a majority of the Party's Central Committee promoted the struggle not just for independence but to create a socialist society. The 2nd Party Congress, held in July 1968, approved the socialist goals. Mondlane was reelected party President and Uria Simango was re-elected vice-president.
After Mondlane's assassination in February 1969, Uria Simango took over the leadership, but his presidency was disputed. In April 1969, leadership was assumed by a triumvirate, with Machel and Marcelino dos Santos supplementing Simango. After several months, in November 1969, Machel and dos Santos ousted Simango from FRELIMO. Simango left FRELIMO and joined the small Revolutionary Committee of Mozambique (COREMO) liberation movement.
FRELIMO established some "liberated" zones (countryside zones with native rural populations controlled by FRELIMO guerrillas) in Northern Mozambique. The movement grew in strength during the ensuing decade. As FRELIMO's political campaign gained coherence, its forces advanced militarily, controlling one-third of the area of Mozambique by 1969, mostly in the northern and central provinces. It was not able to gain control of the cities located inside the "liberated" zones but established itself firmly in the rural regions.
In 1970 the guerrilla movement suffered heavy losses as Portugal launched its ambitious Gordian Knot Operation (Operação Nó Górdio), which was masterminded by General Kaúlza de Arriaga of the Portuguese Army. By the early 1970s, FRELIMO's 7,000-strong guerrilla force had opened new fronts in central and northern Mozambique.
The April 1974 "Carnation Revolution" in Portugal overthrew the Portuguese Estado Novo regime, and the country turned against supporting the long and draining colonial war in Mozambique, Angola and Guinea-Bissau. Portugal and FRELIMO negotiated Mozambique's independence, which resulted in a transitional government until official independence from Portugal in June 1975.
FRELIMO established a one-party state based on socialist principles, with Samora Machel re-elected as President of FRELIMO and subsequently the First President of the People's Republic of Mozambique. The new government first received diplomatic recognition, economic and military support from Cuba and the Socialist Bloc countries. Marcelino dos Santos became vice-president of FRELIMO and the central committee was expanded.
At the same time FRELIMO had to deal with various small political parties that sprung up and were now contesting for control of Mozambique with FRELIMO along with the reaction of white settlers. Prominent groups included FICO ("I stay" in Portuguese) and the "Dragons of Death" which directly clashed with FRELIMO. Government forces moved in and quickly smashed these movements and arrested various FRELIMO dissidents and Portuguese collaborators who were involved in FICO, the Dragons and other political entities that conspired or aligned against FRELIMO. These included prominent dissidents such as Uria Simango, his wife Celina, Paulo Gumane, Lazaro Nkavandame and Adelino Gwambe.
Marxist–Leninist period (1975–1989)
Mozambique's national anthem from 1975 to 1992 was "" ().
Immediately after independence, Mozambique and FRELIMO faced extraordinarily tough circumstances. The country was bankrupt with almost all of its skilled workforce fleeing or already fled, a 95% illiteracy rate and a brewing counter revolutionary movement known as the "Mozambique National Resistance" (RENAMO) was beginning its first strikes against key government infrastructure with the assistance of Ian Smith's Rhodesia. As the RENAMO movement grew in strength, FRELIMO and RENAMO began clashing directly in what would quickly turn into the deadly Mozambican Civil War which did not end until 1992.
Large steps had already been taken towards the construction of a Mozambican socialist society by time of the 3rd Party Congress in February 1977, including the nationalisation of the land, many agricultural, industrial and commercial enterprises, rented housing, the banks, health and education.
FRELIMO transformed itself into a Marxist-Leninist vanguard party of the worker-peasant alliance at the congress. The congress laid down firmly that the political and economic guidelines for the development of the economy and the society would be for the benefit of all Mozambicans. FRELIMO was also restructured extensively, the central committee expanding to over 200 members and the transformation of FRELIMO from a front into a formal political party, adopting the name "Partido FRELIMO" (FRELIMO Party).
FRELIMO began extensive programs for economic development, healthcare and education. Healthcare and Education became free and universal to all Mozambicans and the government begun a mass program of immunisations which was praised by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as one of the most successful ever initiated in Africa. The scheme reached over 90% of the Mozambican Population in the first five years and led to a 20% drop in infant mortality rates. Illiteracy rates dropped from 95% in 1975 to 73% in 1978. Those who were previously denied access to education because of class, gender, or race were exposed to education. Frelimo’s dedication to accessible education had long-lasting consequences as previously marginalized groups, such as women, were able to engage intellectually and be involved in formal political and economic structures for the first time.
Despite the difficult situation and economic chaos the Mozambican economy grew appreciably from the period of 1977–1983.
However, some serious setbacks occurred, with particular force in the years 1982–1984. Neighbouring states, firstly Rhodesia and then South Africa, made direct armed incursions and promoted the growing RENAMO insurgency which continued to carry out economic sabotage and terrorism against the population. Natural disasters compounded the already devastating situation, with large scale floods in some regions from Tropical Storm Domoina in 1984, followed by extensive droughts.
Some of FRELIMO's more ambitious policies also caused further stress to the economy. Particularly FRELIMO's agricultural policy from 1977–1983 which placed heavy emphasis on state farms and neglected smaller peasant and community farms caused discontent among many peasant farmers and led to a reduction in production. At the 4th Party Congress in 1984 FRELIMO acknowledged its mistakes in the economic field and adopted a new set of directives and plans, reversing their previous positions and promoting more peasant and communal based farming projects over the larger state farms, many of which were either dismantled or shrunk.
As the war with RENAMO intensified much of the improvements to healthcare, education and basic infrastructure by FRELIMO were wiped out. Agriculture fell into disarray as farms were burnt and farmers fled into the cities for safety, industrial production slowed as many workers were conscripted into battle against RENAMO and frequent raids against key roads and railways caused economic chaos across the country. FRELIMO's focus rapidly shifted from socialist construction to maintaining a basic level of infrastructure and protecting the towns and cities as best they could. Despite small scale reforms in the party and state and the growing war Machel continued to maintain a hardline Marxist–Leninist stance and refused to negotiate with RENAMO.
In 1986 while returning from a meeting with Zaire and Malawi, President Samora Machel died in a suspicious airplane crash many blamed on the apartheid regime in Pretoria. In the immediate aftermath the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of FRELIMO assumed the duties of President of FRELIMO and President of Mozambique until a successor could be elected. Joaquim Alberto Chissano was elected as the President of FRELIMO and was inaugurated as the Second President of the People's Republic of Mozambique on 6 November 1986. Despite being considered a "Moderate Marxist" Chissano initially maintained Machel's hardline stance against RENAMO but begun economic reforms with the adoption of The World Bank and IMF's "Economic Rehabilitation Program" (ERP) in September 1987. By 1988 Chissano had relented on his hardliner position and begun seeking third party negotiations with RENAMO to end the conflict.
In 1989 at the 5th Party Congress, FRELIMO officially dropped all references to Marxism–Leninism and class struggle from its party directives and documents, and democratic socialism was adopted as the official ideology of FRELIMO while talks continued with RENAMO to broker a ceasefire.
Movement towards democratic socialism (1989–2000)
With the removal of the final vestiges of Marxism from FRELIMO at the 5th Party Congress, greater economic reform programs commenced with the help of the World Bank, IMF and various international donors. FRELIMO also believed it needed to reduce all traces of socialist influence, this resulted in the removal of hardline Marxists such as Sergio Viera, Jorge Rebelo and Marcelino dos Santos from positions of power and influence within the party. Additionally FRELIMO begun to revise the history of the Mozambican War of Independence to distort it to suit FRELIMO's new, contradictory pro-capitalist beliefs.
In 1990 a revised constitution was adopted which introduced a multi-party system to Mozambique and ended one-party rule. The revisions also removed all references to socialism from the constitution and resulted in the People's Republic of Mozambique being renamed to the Republic of Mozambique.
The civil war conflict continued under a lessened pace until 1992 when the Rome General Peace Accords was signed. United Nations' peacekeeping operation started in 1992 and ended in 1994, helping to end the civil war. With the end of the civil war elections were scheduled for 1994 under the new pluralistic system. FRELIMO and RENAMO campaigned heavily for the elections. FRELIMO ultimately won the elections with 53.3% of the vote with an 88% voter turnout. RENAMO contested the election results and threatened to return to violence, however, under both internal and external pressure RENAMO eventually accepted the results.
In 1992 Frelimo implemented a voluntary quota system like many other "post-conflict countries that had left-leaning parties in power with longstanding commitments to gender equality." Frelimo’s quota system requires that 30% of the candidates running for the National Assembly under Frelimo’s leadership must be women. There is “equal distribution of women’s names (every third name is a woman’s) through the candidate lists.” Equal distribution on lists are called “zebra lists” and this type of list has proven to be important to the success of quota systems. The adoption of the quota system has resulted in steady growth since its implementation. In 1994 women made up 26% of the national parliament, in 1999 they made up 30%, and in 2004, women won 35%, in 2015 women won 40% of the parliamentary seats. Mozambique is ranked twelfth in the world and fourth in Africa for women’s involvement in its national parliament.
Throughout the mid to late 1990s, FRELIMO moved towards democratic socialist views (officially adopting it at the 10th Party Congress), as further liberalisation continued the government received further support and aid from countries such as the United Kingdom and United States. Mozambique became a member of the Commonwealth of Nations, despite not being a former British colony, for its role in ensuring the independence of Zimbabwe in 1980.
In the 1999 general election, Chissano was re-elected as President of Mozambique with 52.3% of the vote, while FRELIMO secured 133 of 250 parliamentary seats.
2000s onwards
In early 2001 Chissano announced his intention to not stand for the 2004 presidential election, although the constitution permitted him to do so.
In 2002, during its 8th Congress, the party selected Armando Guebuza as its candidate for the presidential election held on 1–2 December 2004. As expected given FRELIMO's majority status, he won, gaining about 60% of the vote. At the legislative elections of the same date, the party won 62.0% of the popular vote and 160 of 250 seats in the national assembly.
RENAMO and some other opposition parties made claims of election fraud and denounced the result. International observers (among others, members of the European Union Election Observation Mission to Mozambique and the Carter Center) supported these claims, criticizing the National Electoral Commission (CNE) for failing to conduct fair and transparent elections. They listed numerous cases of improper conduct by the electoral authorities that benefited FRELIMO. However, the EU observers concluded that the elections shortcomings probably did not affect the presidential election's final result.
Foreign support
FRELIMO has received support from the governments of Tanzania, South Africa, Algeria, Ghana, Zambia, Libya, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Cuba, China, the Soviet Union, Egypt, SFR Yugoslavia and Somalia.
Mozambican presidents representing FRELIMO
Samora Machel: 25 June 1975 – 19 October 1986
Joaquim Chissano: 6 November 1986 – 2 February 2005
Armando Guebuza: 2 February 2005 – 15 January 2015
Filipe Nyusi: 15 January 2015 – present
Other prominent members
José Ibraimo Abudo, justice minister
Isabel Casimiro, Frelimo MP, sociologist and professor
Basilio Muhate, Chairman of Frelimo Youth Organization since 2010
Isabel Nkavadeka, politician, elected to Assembly of the Republic of Mozambique in 2009
Sharfudine Khan, Ambassador of Mozambique (After Liberation)
Electoral history
Presidential elections
Assembly elections
See also
African independence movements
Notes
References
Bibliography
Further reading
Basto, Maria-Benedita, "Writing a Nation or Writing a Culture? Frelimo and Nationalism During the Mozambican Liberation War" in Eric Morier-Genoud (ed.) Sure Road? Nationalisms in Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique (Leiden: Brill, 2012).
Bowen, Merle. The State Against the Peasantry: Rural Struggles in Colonial and Postcolonial Mozambique. Charlottesville, Virginia: University Press Of Virginia, 2000.
Derluguian, Georgi, "The Social Origins of Good and Bad Governance: Re-interpreting the 1968 Schism in Frelimo" in Eric Morier-Genoud (ed.) Sure Road? Nationalisms in Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique (Leiden: Brill, 2012).
Morier-Genoud, Eric, “Mozambique since 1989: Shaping democracy after Socialism” in A.R.Mustapha & L.Whitfield (eds), Turning Points in African Democracy (Oxford: James Currey, 2009), pp. 153–166
Opello, Walter C. "Pluralism and elite conflict in an independence movement: FRELIMO in the 1960s", Journal of Southern African Studies, Volume 2, Issue 1, 1975
Simpson, Mark, "Foreign and Domestic Factors in the Transformation of Frelimo", Journal of Modern African Studies, Volume 31, no.02, June 1993, pp 309–337
Sumich, Jason, "The Party and the State: Frelimo and Social Stratification in Post-socialist Mozambique", Development and Change, Volume 41, no. 4, July 2010, pp. 679–698
External links
FRELIMO official site
Special Report on Mozambique 2004 Elections, Carter Center]
Final Report of the European Union Election Observation Mission, 2004
National liberation armies
National liberation movements
Collaborators with the Soviet Union
Parties of one-party systems
Political parties in Mozambique
Separatism in Mozambique
Separatism in Portugal
1962 establishments in Mozambique
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle%20of%20the%20Sabis
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Battle of the Sabis
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The Battle of the Sabis, also (arguably erroneously) known as the Battle of the Sambre or the Battle against the Nervians (or Nervii), was fought in 57 BC near modern Saulzoir in Northern France, between Caesar's legions and an association of Belgae tribes, principally the Nervii. Julius Caesar, commanding the Roman forces, was surprised and nearly defeated. According to Caesar's report, a combination of determined defence, skilled generalship, and the timely arrival of reinforcements allowed the Romans to turn a strategic defeat into a tactical victory. Few primary sources describe the battle in detail, with most information coming from Caesar's own report on the battle from his book, Commentarii de Bello Gallico. Little is therefore known about the Nervii perspective on the battle.
Prelude
During the winter of 58–57 BC rumours came to Caesar's ears that the Belgae tribes were forming a union because they feared possible Roman interference in their affairs. The union included the Bellovaci, Suessiones, Nervii, Atrebates, Ambiani, Morini, Menapii, Caleti, Veliocasses, Viromandui, Aduatuci, Condrusi, Eburones, Caeroesi, and Paemani tribes, and was under the leadership of Galba, a king of the Suessiones. These reports provided Caesar with a good pretext for conquering more than Gaul "itself", and for this, he raised two legions in Cisalpine Gaul (XIII and XIV) and convinced the Remi tribe to side with him.
In response, the other Belgae and Celtic tribes had attacked Bibrax (the oppidum of the Remi, situated near the river Aisne). Caesar countered by defending the oppidum and winning an action at the Aisne. In the face of this and because of shortage of provisions, the union collapsed and tribal armies retreated to their own lands, with the agreed future intention of coming to the support of any tribe invaded by the Romans. Caesar continued his advance and tribes surrendered one by one. However, four tribes, the Nervii, the Atrebates, the Aduatuci, and the Viromandui refused to submit.
The Ambiani told Caesar that the Nervii were the most hostile of the Belgae to Roman rule. A fierce and brave tribe, they did not allow the import of luxury items as they believed these had a corrupting effect and probably feared Roman influence. They had no intention of entering peace negotiations with the Romans. Caesar would move on them next.
Forces
As with all ancient battles, estimates of the forces available to both sides will always be a matter of some speculation. A Roman legion during this era had a theoretical strength of some 4,800 fighting men with additional auxiliary forces (usually skirmishers and cavalry). Eight Roman legions plus an unknown number of auxiliary (skirmishers: archers, slingers and javelinmen) and allied cavalry are recorded to have taken part in the battle. It is not known if the legions were at full strength, but a reasonable estimate for Caesar's army might be in the range of 30,000–45,000 fighting men (including skirmishers and cavalry). The 30,000–45,000 range does not include non-combatants, although, in this case, they participated in the fighting during the final phase of the battle. A legion was usually accompanied by some 1,200 non-combatants (theoretically) so their numbers could have been 9,000-10,000 men.
Caesar claims he had earlier received intelligence from the Remi that the various tribes of the Belgae had promised to contribute a total of 300,000 fighting men. According to Caesar the Remi estimates of the men promised by the four tribes now left to oppose Caesar were: 50,000 Nervii, 15,000 Atrebates, 10,000 Veromandui and 19,000 Aduatuci. If these figures were reliable it would mean that Caesar was immediately faced with a maximum of 75,000 men, as the Aduatuci were still en route. Promises are not always kept so it is probable the actual number was smaller than this, though still high enough to outnumber the legionaries. Drawing on demographic data, Hans Delbrück estimated a maximum of 30,000 combatants for the three tribes fighting at the Sabis, and probably far less.
Order of battle
Roman Republic – Julius Caesar's eight legions: VII, VIII, IX Triumphalis, X Equestris, XI, XII Victrix, XIII, XIV – auxiliaries: slingers, archers, javelinmen and cavalry. The IX and X legions formed the left flank, the VIII and the XI were in the centre, and the VII and XII were on the right.
The Belgae attacked with the Atrebates forming the right wing, the Viromandui in the centre, and the Nervi on the left.
Traditionally it was believed that the battle was fought on the banks of the river Sambre, near modern Aulnoye-Aymeries, but in 1955 Turquin showed that it was fought on the west bank of the river Selle, near modern Saulzoir.
Before the battle
Caesar's legions had been marching in Nervian territory for three days, following an ancient road. He learnt from prisoners that the Belgae were massing on the far side of the River Sabis, which was about ahead. The Nervii had persuaded the Atrebates and the Veromandui to support them. The Aduatuci were marching to join them, but they did not arrive in time to take part in the battle. Their non-combatants had moved to a safe area screened by marshes, where an army could not approach. The Belgae had made their preparations and were now waiting for the Romans.
Caesar sent forward experienced scouts to choose the next campsite.
He learnt from prisoners taken later that sympathisers in the ragtag of surrendered Belgae and other Gauls travelling with the army had gone to the Nervii and reported the disposition of his column. They reported that the individual legionary baggage trains were interspersed between the legions and that it would be easy to cut off the leading legion from the rest and destroy it before any support could reach it. It was believed this would intimidate the Romans into withdrawing. The Nervii, having traditionally always relied on infantry rather than cavalry, had over the years developed a technique of building dense, impenetrable hedges of briars and thorns set between young trees as a defence against the raids of surrounding tribes. These would obstruct Caesar's advance and help the attack. It was agreed that the signal for an attack was to be the appearance of the baggage train behind the first legion. In doing this, the Nervii were intending to use what is recognisable today as the modern army doctrine of force concentration. As will be seen, their plan would be frustrated by Caesar.
Battle
The campsite was to be laid out on a hill which gently sloped down to the river. On the other side of the river there was another hill directly opposite, similarly sloping. The top of that hill was densely wooded but the lower part was open and sloped down to the river over a distance of 200 paces (roughly ). The enemy was concealed inside the woods, but a few cavalry pickets could be seen in the open area by the river. The river was very wide, but only about three feet (one metre) deep.
At some point on his march to the Sabis, Caesar reorganised the column and reverted to his usual tactic of leading his forces with six legions in light marching order. Behind them was the baggage column of the entire army, followed by the newly recruited legions, XIII and XIV. Caesar does not say whether this change was fortuitous or was made in response to the intelligence received. While Caesar's force began to set up camp on the slope running down to the river, his cavalry, together with slingers and archers, was ordered to cross the river to reconnoiter. This developed into a skirmish with the few troops of Belgic cavalry that had been observed on the far side. Caesar describes the enemy cavalry as sallying repeatedly from the woods at the top of the hill and says his cavalry did not dare follow them in when they retreated. He does not elaborate further so it will never be known if the Nervii were trying to entice the skirmishers onto their hidden position or holding them in play on the slopes in preparation for the planned rush.
Meanwhile, the legions had started arriving at the camp site and began to build its fortifications. The Belgae, waiting for the baggage train to appear, gradually found themselves faced with not one legion, but six. Their plan of piecemeal destruction had to be abandoned, but they must have believed their numbers more than adequate to deal with their enemy.
Ambush
As the Roman baggage train came into view, the Belgic force suddenly rushed out of the trees and surprised their opponents, overwhelming the Roman cavalry. They crossed the shallow river at full speed and charged up the hill against the legions setting up camp, giving them no time to get into battle formation. It seemed to Caesar that the Nervii came on with incredible speed, all at once pouring out of the trees, charging across the river and overrunning his legionaries.
Taken by surprise, Caesar had to rapidly give orders to sound the alarm both by raising the battle-standard and by trumpet, get his men away from construction work, recall the wood-cutting parties, and try to get his legions into some semblance of order. There was very little time and much had to be left undone. Two things, though, saved the legions from being immediately routed—firstly, the knowledge and experience of the soldiers (which meant that they could decide for themselves what to do without waiting for orders) and secondly, Caesar had previously ordered all legion commanders to stay with their legions during the setting up of the camp.
Caesar went wherever he was needed, giving only essential orders and eventually found himself on the left wing with Legion X. Seeing that the enemy were within range of the Romans he gave the order to hurl a volley of pilae. Going to another part of the field, he found his men already fighting. The men had run from their building tasks to fall into ranks but many did not even have time to put on their helmets or take the covers off their shields. The legionaries had no opportunity to group with their own cohorts and instead congregated around the first friendly standard they saw. Caesar states that the hedges were a considerable obstruction to his men during the battle, although he does not specify their locations on the field, but the woody hilltop is the one place we can infer their presence.
The soldiers of legions X Equestris and IX Triumphalis on the left flank, having thrown their pilae at their Atrebates opponents, charged. They threw the enemy back and drove them into the river, killing many. The Romans crossed the river and found themselves on disadvantageous or uneven ground, but although the Atrebates regrouped and launched a counter-attack, the Romans put them to flight a second time. Further along, in the centre, two legions, XI and VIII, having checked the Viromandui with whom they were engaged, pushed them from the higher ground into the river.
However, as these four legions pushed their opponents back, the front and left of the camp was left undefended and a gap opened up in the Roman line. A compact column of Nervii under Boduognatus (the overall commander of the Belgae) rushed through the opening. Part of the column turned to encircle the two legions holding the right flank; the rest continued upwards to attack the higher part of the camp.
Crisis
Meanwhile, the routed Roman cavalry and skirmishers were just straggling into camp when they found themselves face to face with the Nervii – they ran again. Camp followers further up the hill by the camp's back gate had observed the success of the Romans at the river and came down in the hope of plunder, but noticed the Nervii in the camp and also ran. People accompanying the baggage train just arriving were horrified at the sight before them and panicked as well. Even the usually-dependable Treveri cavalry arriving to support the Romans looked at the seemingly hopeless situation and promptly turned for home to report the disaster.
After encouraging Legion X Caesar went to the right wing. The situation seemed desperate. He could see that the men of XII Victrix were crammed so closely together into one mass by their standards that they could not fight effectively. All (six) centurions of the fourth cohort were dead, its standard bearer killed, and the standard missing. Of the remaining cohorts, almost all the centurions were either wounded or killed; Baculus, the legion's primipilus, a fine soldier, had received so many minor and serious wounds that he could barely stand. The Nervii were attacking vigorously from lower ground and pressing at the front and both flanks. Caesar could see some men were shirking and trying to get to the rear; others were slowly ceasing effective resistance. There were no reserves. This was the crisis-point. He took a shield from a soldier at the rear and went to the first line. Calling his centurions by name, he ordered them to have the soldiers advance (signa inferre) and the maniples open up and extend. As he tells it, his arrival brought hope and boosted the soldiers’ morale. Every man was now keen to do well in front of his general. As a result, the enemy assault was checked slightly.
Recovery
Caesar saw that Legion VII nearby was also hard-pressed. He ordered the tribunes to redeploy the two legions to gradually join and fight back to back. This further increased his men's confidence. By now, the legions escorting the baggage, having received a report of the action, had come on at double pace and the enemy could see them coming over the hill above the camp. Legion X, under legate Labienus, had overcome the Atrebates, crossed the river, and defeated the Belgic reserves. Now they seized the Belgic camp on the wooded hill. From the higher ground, Labienus could see that Caesar's right wing was in serious trouble. He ordered his men back across the river to attack the Nervii from the rear.
Soon Legions XIII and XIV joined the fight. Caesar does not detail their actions, but they probably cleared the camp (as it was their nearest target) and went to the right to relieve the pressure on Legions XII and VII. This, coupled with the return of Legion X, transformed the situation. Seeing the position begin to stabilise, cavalry and skirmishers took heart and, keen to wipe out their earlier shame, started to fight in earnest. The camp followers joined in now that they could see their enemy's dismay. The entire Roman force was now fully committed.
At this point of the battle it is clear that Caesar's opposition had little hope of survival. They were being pushed closer and closer into a dense pack that was being surrounded by Caesar's men who were using projectile weapons to pick off their remaining forces. Using peltasts (a light infantry) equipped with slings and javelins, and with the help of archers, they unleashed a barrage of missiles at the closely packed Nervii. The last of them fought with ferocity and courage for they were continuing to retaliate with their spears and catching the Romans javelins and throwing them back at them. The Nervii hadn't used any other projectile type weapon except for spears. The Nervii warriors fought to the last, standing on the bodies of their slain comrades, and throwing the Romans’ own spears back at them. Eventually the few remaining Nervii broke and fled the field.
Caesar's opinion of the Nervii was that they had shown great fighting spirit in carrying an attack forward so vigorously on to difficult ground and in continuing to fight stubbornly when the tide of battle turned irretrievably against them. Caesar talks of a grimly inspiring image of the last of the Nervii who were atop a mound of corpses of their own warriors and shouting in defiance towards the Romans, fighting till their last breath. He goes on to say that they had outstanding courage, for they launched a surprise attack, crossed a river up its banks, then rushed on to attack all with a fighting spirit. He glorifies his victory by stating how well his army did without having to be ordered to launch a counter-attack. It is probable that his soldiers were experienced veterans who were able to hold off their onslaught. He evidently mitigates his losses by not mentioning the Roman casualties, or conceding that they were in serious danger of defeat, as appears to have been the case. While Caesar appears to give a relatively frank account of the course of the battle, in The Conquest of Gaul, this remains one of the only primary sources. And since it was written by Caesar, much is unknown of the Nervii's perspective, such as the extent to which Boduognatus planned the attack and directed his forces during the battle.
Casualties
The older men of the Nervii, described by Caesar as “senators”, came out of their hiding place in the marshland and surrendered. They said that their council had been reduced from 600 men to three and that of 60,000 fighting men there were barely 500 left. It is not entirely clear if this is a figure for the dead or if it includes wounded, nor is it clear if these are solely Nervii casualties or if the figure includes their allies. Caesar states that he spared the Nervii and ordered the surrounding tribes not to take advantage of their weakness.
Caesar gives no indication of his own casualties.
Aftermath
The Aduatuci turned for home as soon as they heard about the defeat. They were subsequently defeated by Caesar and some 53,000 of them sold into slavery.
The Veneti, the Unelli, the Osismii, the Curiosolitae, the Sesuvii, the Aulerci and the Rhedones were all brought under Roman control following the battle.
In 54 BC Ambiorix persuaded the Nervii to join the Eburones after the latter had destroyed a legion and five cohorts under Sabinus and Cotta during the Ambiorix's revolt.
During Vercingetorix's revolt (52 BC) the Nervii were only asked to supply 5,000 men to the forces raised by a confederation of over forty tribes.
Notes
Sources
Caesar, C. Julius. The Gallic War. Trans. Carolyn Hammond. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Literature
Delbrück, Hans. History of the Art of War Vol I.
Pierre Turquin, "La Bataille de la Selle (du Sabis) en l' An 57 avant J.-C." in Les Études Classiques 23/2 (1955), 113-156
External links
The Battle of the Sabis (57 BCE) Photos of the battlefield
Caesar and the Nervians Text of Caesar's account of the battle
Battle of the Sambre[sic] from the Military History Encyclopedia on the Web
Clash on the Sabis painting titled 'Fury of the Goths'
Sabis
57 BC
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History of Nord (French department)
Gallia Belgica
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409795
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimberley%20%28Western%20Australia%29
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Kimberley (Western Australia)
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The Kimberley is the northernmost of the nine regions of Western Australia. It is bordered on the west by the Indian Ocean, on the north by the Timor Sea, on the south by the Great Sandy and Tanami deserts in the region of the Pilbara, and on the east by the Northern Territory.
The region was named in 1879 by government surveyor Alexander Forrest after Secretary of State for the Colonies John Wodehouse, 1st Earl of Kimberley.
History
The Kimberley was one of the earliest settled parts of Australia, with the first humans landing about 65,000 years ago. They created a complex culture that developed over thousands of years. Yam (Dioscorea hastifolia) agriculture was developed, and rock art suggests that this was where some of the earliest boomerangs were invented. The worship of Wandjina deities was most common in this region, and a complex theology dealing with the transmigration of souls was part of the local people's religious philosophy.
During the 18th century, Dutch explorers named the region of Kimberley and nearby Darwin variations of Van Diemen's Land after the VOC governor-general Anthony van Diemen. This should not be confused with the more general and prolonged use of the same name for Tasmania.
In 1837, with expedition support from the Royal Geographical Society of Great Britain, Lieutenants George Grey and Franklin Lushington and 12 men sailed on the schooner Lynher from Cape Town, South Africa. They reached Hanover Bay on 2 December 1837. The exploring party started inland on 19 January 1838. Leaders and men were totally inexperienced, their progress was delayed by flooded country, and they abandoned many stores along the way. The party was constantly split up although they had to contend with large numbers of hostile Aboriginals. On 11 February, Grey was speared and became critically ill but, after two weeks, continued the exploration. The party found and named the Gairdner River, the Glenelg River, the Stephen and Whately ranges and Mount Lyell before returning to Hanover Bay in April. There they were picked up by and Lynher and taken to Mauritius to recuperate.
In 1879, Western Australian government surveyor Alexander Forrest led a party of seven from the west coast at Beagle Bay to Katherine, Northern Territory. Forrest explored and named the Kimberley district, the Margaret and Ord rivers and the King Leopold Ranges (now the Wunaamin-Miliwundi Ranges), and located well watered pastoral lands along the Fitzroy and Ord rivers. He subsequently set himself up as a land agent specialising in the Kimberley during a period to 1883 when over of land were taken up as pastoral leaseholds in the region.
In 1881, Philip Saunders and Adam Johns, in the face of great difficulties and dangers, found gold in various parts of the Kimberley. Early in 1881, the first five graziers, who called themselves the Murray Squatting Company, took up behind Beagle Bay and named it Yeeda Station. In 1883 they were the first men to shear sheep in the southern Kimberley. Additional Anglo-European settlement occurred in 1885, when ranchers drove cattle across Australia from the eastern states in search of good pasture lands. After gold was discovered around Halls Creek, many other erstwhile European miners arrived rapidly.
In the 1890s, the area was the site of an armed insurrection of indigenous people led by Jandamarra, a Bunuba warrior.
During World War II, when Australia was among the nations at war with the Axis powers, the Japanese invaded the nation with only a small reconnaissance party in the Kimberley on 19 January 1944; they were investigating reports that the Allies were building large bases in the region. Four Japanese officers were on board a small fishing boat. They investigated the York Sound region for a day and a night before returning to Kupang in Timor on 20 January. After returning to Japan in February, the junior officer, who had commanded the party, suggested using 200 Japanese prison inmates to launch a guerrilla campaign in Australia. No superior adopted his suggestion, and the officer was posted to other duties.
Demographics
The 2011 estimated permanent population of the Kimberley was 34,794 but it rises dramatically during winter when it attracts a seasonal population. On Census night in 2011 (9 August), it was 50,113. The population is fairly evenly distributed, with only three towns having populations in excess of 2,000: Broome (12,766), Derby (3,261), and Kununurra (4,573). Approximately 40% of the region's population is of Aboriginal descent.
Urban centres and localities
Indigenous languages
The Kimberley has been noted as a region of great linguistic diversity, rivalled in Australia only by the Top End. Depending on the geographical boundaries of the Kimberley, and the definition of what constitutes a "language" (as opposed to a "dialect"), about 50-60 Aboriginal languages were once spoken in this region. The vast majority of these do not belong to the family of Pama-Nyungan languages. Four endemic, primary language families are recognized within the core Kimberley region:
Nyulnyulan languages, including languages spoken on the Dampier Peninsula and along the Fitzroy River
Bunuban languages, including languages spoken in the Fitzroy River Basin
Worrorran languages, including languages spoken in the northern Kimberley, north of King Sound, up to Wyndham
Jarrakan languages, including languages spoken along the Ord River, from Halls Creek up to Wyndham and Kununurra.
Pama-Nyungan languages spoken in and around the Kimberley region include the Marrngu languages (such as Karajarri and Nyangumarta, the Ngumpin languages (such as Walmajarri and Jaru), the Yapa languages (such as Warlpiri) and the Western Desert languages (including Wangkajunga and Kukatja). Non-Pama-Nyungan languages spoken around the Kimberleys (but speakers of which today live within the Kimberley) include the Daly language Murrinh-Patha and Western Mirndi language Jaminjung.
Presently, many indigenous languages are no longer spoken on a daily basis. In addition to Australian English, post-contact languages spoken in the Kimberley include Aboriginal English, Kriol, Pidgin English and the Malay-based Broome Pearling Lugger Pidgin (not spoken on a daily basis any more).
Politics
At the federal level, the Kimberley is represented by the member for Durack. At state level, the Kimberley electorate takes in all of the region and its towns.
The Kimberley region consists of the local government areas of Broome, Derby-West Kimberley, Halls Creek and Wyndham-East Kimberley.
Art
Rock art in the Kimberley is some of the oldest in Australia and could date back 40,000 years. The best known examples of rock art from the Kimberley are Wandjina and Gwion Gwion. The earliest form of Kimberley rock art was hand stencils, and rock art continued up to the 1960s when Wandjina were still being repainted.
Some of Australia's best known indigenous artists came from the Kimberley. These artists painted in a style unique to this area, a style initially associated with the Krill Krill ceremony but later known as the Kimberley Art Movement. These artists include Rover Thomas, Jaminji Paddy Bedford and Queenie McKenzie.
Art and culture still flourishes today, with many contemporary artists being supported by the Mowanjum Aboriginal Arts and Cultural centre.
Geography
The Kimberley is an area of , which is about three times the size of England, twice the size of Victoria, or just slightly smaller than California.
The Kimberley consists of the ancient, steep-sided mountain ranges of northwestern Australia cut through with sandstone and limestone gorges and steep ridges, from which the extreme monsoonal climate has removed much of the soil. The southern end of the Kimberley beyond the Dampier Peninsula is flatter with dry tropical grassland and is used for cattle ranching. In parts of the Kimberley, such as the valleys of the Ord and Fitzroy Rivers in the south, the soils are relatively usable cracking clays, whilst elsewhere they are lateritic Orthents. Although none of the mountains reach even , there is so much steep land as to make much of the region difficult to traverse, especially during the wet season, when even sealed roads are often flooded. The coast is typically steep cliffs in the north but flatter in the south, all subject to high tides.
Climate
The Kimberley has a tropical monsoon climate. The region receives about 90% of its rainfall during the short wet season, from November to April, when cyclones are common (especially around Broome) and the rivers flood. The annual rainfall is highest in the northwest, where Kalumburu and the Mitchell Plateau average per year, and lowest in the southeast where it is around . In the dry season, from May to October, south easterly breezes bring sunny days and cool nights. Climate change since 1967 has led to large increases of as much as per year in annual rainfall over the whole region. A recent study suggests Asian pollution may be a key contributory factor to this increased rainfall. In 1997 and 2000, the region received especially heavy rains, leading to record flooding of the Fitzroy and other rivers.
The Kimberley is one of the hottest parts of Australia, with the average annual mean temperature around , and with mean maximum temperatures almost always above , even in July. The hottest part of the year is November before the rains break, when temperatures frequently reach above on the coast and well over inland. Mean minimum temperatures in July range from around in the south to along the coast, whilst in November and December they are generally around . Record high temperatures range from around , while record lows are around , although some parts of the central Kimberly plateau can drop below during the dry season.
The Aboriginal people of the Kimberley recognise six traditional seasons based on meteorological events, as well as on observations of flora and fauna.
Geology
During the Devonian period, a barrier reef system formed before a subsequent drop in sea levels over the Kimberley. This reef system was similar to the Great Barrier Reef and is still visible today in the form of the Napier Range and the Ningbing Range. Some of the features are Tunnel Creek, Windjana Gorge and Geikie Gorge.
This area is also known as the Kimberley Block physiographic province, of which it is part of the larger West Australian Shield division. This province contains the Wunaamin-Miliwundi Range, Durack Range, Leveque Rise, Browse Depression, and Londonderry Rise physiographic sections.
Coastline
In Bureau of Meteorology weather reports the "North Kimberley Coast" is the WA border to Kuri Bay section of the coast, while the "West Kimberley Coast" is from Kuri Bay to Wallal Downs. Significant sections of the coastline between Broome and Wyndham have no means of road access, and boat or helicopter are the only means. Due to the isolation, a number of tourist operations on the coastline have been called "wilderness" locations.
Ecology
The rugged and varied sandstone landscape is home to a distinctive mixture of wildlife, which has been thoroughly mapped and described by the Western Australian Department of Conservation and Land Management. There are habitats similar to the Kimberley across the border in the Northern Territory, including the valleys of the Victoria and Daly Rivers but these have been less carefully studied.
Flora
Much of the Kimberley is chiefly covered in open savanna woodland dominated by low bloodwood and boab trees (Adansonia gregorii) with Darwin stringybark and Darwin woollybutt eucalyptus in the wetter areas. The red sandy soil of the Dampier Peninsula in the south is known for its characteristic pindan wooded grassland, while in the more fertile areas like the Ord Valley, the trees are found in grasslands of Chrysopogon, Aristida, Dichanthium and Xerochloa (rice grass) in the wetter valleys. The banks of the Ord, Fitzroy River and other rivers are home to a greater variety of vegetation, while in sheltered gorges of the high rainfall north there are patches of tropical dry broadleaf forest, called monsoon forests, deciduous vine forest or vine thicket in Australia (often mistakenly called "dry rainforest"), which were unknown to science until 1965, and are one of the most floristically rich parts of Australia outside the Wet Tropics and southwestern WA. There are also areas of mangrove in river estuaries where the coast is flatter.
Flora regions
In 1979, Beard identified four phytogeographic districts within the Northern Botanical Province:
Gardner District (Ga) in the north (and further divided into the West Gardner (WGa), Central Gardner (CGa) and East Gardner (EGa))
Fitzgerald District (Fi) in the centre
Dampier (Da) and Hall (Ha) Districts in the south
Fauna
Animals found here include the huge saltwater crocodile and a rich variety of birds such as the channel-billed cuckoo, Pacific koel, purple-crowned fairywren and the bowerbird. The sandstone gorges of north Kimberley are an important refuge for a particularly rich collection of endemic species including some that have disappeared from the flatter areas, including the purple-crowned fairywren, the endangered Gouldian finch and a large number of amphibians: flat-headed frog, cave-dwelling frog, magnificent tree frog, Derby toadlet, small toadlet, fat toadlet, the unconfirmed marbled toadlet, Mjoberg's toadlet, mole toadlet and stonemason's toadlet. Mammals that have declined especially in the flatlands include the bilby, northern quoll, pale field rat, golden-backed tree-rat, and golden bandicoot. Megabats such as the black flying foxes and little red flying foxes are common and perform important pollination and seed dispersal work for many species of native trees and shrubs.
A species of endemic gecko, Gehyra kimberleyi, is named after the Kimberley region.
The gorges of central Kimberley are known for their fossils and for their large colonies of bats, including Windjana, Tunnel Creek, and Geikie Gorges. Lake Argyle and other wetlands of the Ord and the Kimberley are important habitats while there are important populations of shorebirds in the Ord estuary, Eighty-mile Beach and Roebuck Bay, which has been described as "one of the most important stop-over areas for shorebirds in Australia and globally". Finally there are a number of rocky islands off the north coast that are home to seabirds and turtles.
Threats and preservation
Little of the Kimberley has been subject to wholesale clearance other than particularly fertile parts of the Ord Valley (and areas of Kimberley-type habitat across in the Daly River basin in the Northern Territory) but the pastureland in the southern areas has been affected by 100 years of livestock grazing and other threats including introduced weeds (such as cocklebur, parkinsonia, bellyache bush and castor oil plant), feral cats and changes to traditional Aboriginal fire regimes (the way grassland is burnt and allowed to renew). However, the remote sandstone areas to the north have valuable original habitats in good condition providing shelter for much wildlife.
The largest protected areas are the Prince Regent National Park and the Drysdale River National Park along with Gregory National Park and Keep River National Park across in the Northern Territory, which preserves similar habitats. (Keep River's nearest town is Kununurra in the Kimberley.)
The Kimberley is a popular tourist destination, with areas such as the Bungle Bungle Range, the Gibb River Road, Lake Argyle, El Questro Station, Mornington Sanctuary, Horizontal Falls and Cape Leveque. The Gibb River Road and the road into the Bungle Bungles can at times be accessed in a two-wheel drive car, although one can access many additional areas in a four-wheel drive vehicle.
Other parks in the region include Geikie Gorge National Park, Mirima National Park, Mitchell River National Park, Point Coulomb National Park, Purnululu National Park, Tunnel Creek National Park, Windjana Gorge National Park and Wolfe Creek Meteorite Crater National Park. In 2012 the Western Australian government announced the creation of the 7,062 square kilometre Camden Sound Marine Park with a further three to come.
Visitors to the area should be aware that the area can be subject to controlled burns at any time of year. In September 2011, a fire burned five people, two severely, who had been competing in the Kimberley Ultramarathon, an endurance cross country footrace.
Save the Kimberley campaign
The Wilderness Society has led a campaign to protest a proposal to industrialize the James Price Point area of Broome. The Woodside corporation, with the additional involvement of BHP Billiton and the Australian government, has sought to build a gas industrial complex, and those in opposition believe that such a development threatens the region. The campaign has received support from public figures such as John Butler, Clare Bowditch, Missy Higgins and former leader of the Australian Greens, Bob Brown.
On 5 October 2012, a concert was held at Federation Square in Melbourne, Australia, to raise awareness of the campaign; the protest event attracted approximately 6,000 people.
On 24 February 2013, an estimated 20,000 people gathered for a charity concert in Fremantle, Western Australia to raise awareness and funds to help protect the Kimberley, with performances from Ball Park Music, Missy Higgins, and John Butler.
Economy
The Kimberley region has a diverse regional economy. Mining, construction, tourism, retail, agriculture, and pearling are major contributors to the region's economic output.
The town of Broome has a flourishing pearling industry, which operates around the Kimberley coast. Some of the major farmers are Paspaley Pearls, Clipper Pearls, Broome Pearls and the Willie Creek Pearl Farm.
One third of the world's annual production of diamonds is mined at the Argyle and the Ellendale diamond mines. Oil is extracted from the Blina oil field and natural gas is expected to be taken from offshore sources soon. Zinc and lead were mined at the Pillara and Cadjebut mines near Fitzroy Crossing, with nickel still being mined at Sallay Mallay near Halls Creek. Derby is the nearest export base for shipping these metals.
Traditionally, the economy depended on pastoral leases, with most of the region covered by the leases.
More recently agriculture has been focused on the Ord River Irrigation Area near Kununurra. Irrigation was also trialled in the West Kimberley by way of the now defunct Camballin Irrigation Scheme. There are also fruit growers in Broome and in other areas in the West Kimberley. Beef cattle are grown in the Kimberley and exported live. Wyndham features the last remaining meatworks in the Kimberley - there were formerly works at Broome and Derby but financial constraints have caused these to be closed.
Barramundi are bred in Lake Argyle, and Broome features a fully equipped Aquaculture Park near the port; tenants include Paspaley Pearls and Broome TAFE. The Kimberley also has a thriving fishing industry.
Some of Australia's most prominent indigenous artists and art centres are in or adjacent to the Kimberley region. Artists such as Paddy Bedford and Freddie Timms have an international profile, and there are a number of Aboriginal-owned and controlled art centres and companies that assist artists, arrange exhibitions and sell works. The art centres in the region are also organized through the Association of Northern, Kimberley and Arnhem Aboriginal Artists. Issues have been raised regarding the exploitation of indigenous artists by businesses and individuals, including in the Kimberley, which were canvassed in an Australian Senate parliamentary committee report.
Tourism is expected to remain one of the Kimberley region's major growth industries. Averaged across 2010, 2011, and 2012, there were 292,600 domestic and international visitors to the Kimberley annually.
See also
List of pastoral leases in Western Australia
Kimberley-Perth Canal
Kimberley Plan
References
General
External links
Kimberley Development Commission
Kununurra Historical Society Inc. Archive, Library, Museum & Research for links to history images of the Kimberley
Regions of Western Australia
Physiographic provinces
Drainage basins of Australia
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409801
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List%20of%20films%3A%20numbers
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List of films: numbers
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It covers film titles that begin with a number, whether written in Arabic numerals or spelled out. Excluding articles (e.g., "a", "an", "the" in English), it does not include film titles containing numbers after the first word.
In numerical order
0
00 Schneider – Jagd auf Nihil Baxter (1994)
Zero (2018)
Zero Charisma (2013)
Zero Dark Thirty (2012)
Zero Day (2003)
Zero Effect (1998)
Zero for Conduct (1933)
Zero Hour! (1957)
Zero Kelvin (1995)
Zero Tolerance (1995)
Decimals
.45 (2006)
0.5mm (2014)
1
The $1,000,000 Reward (1920)
One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961)
One Hundred Men and a Girl (1937)
One A.M. (1916)
One Day (2011)
One False Move (1992)
One Fine Day (1996)
Day One (1989)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)
One Hour Photo (2002)
One Million Years B.C. (1966)
One More Time (1970)
One Night with the King (2006)
One Night of Love (1934)
The 1 Second Film (2007)
#1 Serial Killer (2013)
One, Two, Three (1961)
One Way Passage (1932)
One Week: (1920 & 2008)
One of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing (1975)
10 (1979)
The Ten Commandments: The Movie (2016)
10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)
10 Items or Less (2006)
Ten Little Indians: (1965 & 1989)
10 Rillington Place (1971)
10 Rules for Sleeping Around (2013)
10 Things I Hate About You (1999)
10 to Midnight (1983)
10 Years (2011)
Ten Years (2015)
10 Years Later (2010)
10,000 BC (2008)
100 Bloody Acres (2013)
100 Days with Mr. Arrogant (2004)
100 Feet (2008)
100 Rifles (1969)
101 Dalmatians (1996)
101 Dalmatians II: Patch's London Adventure (2003)
101 Rent Boys (2000)
101 Reykjavík (2000)
102 Dalmatians (2000)
108 Demon Kings (2015)
10000 Years Later (2015)
10th & Wolf (2006)
The 10th Kingdom (2000) (TV)
The 10th Victim (1965)
10½ (2010)
11-11-11 (2011)
11:14 (2003)
11M: Terror in Madrid (2022)
The 11th Hour (2007)
12: (2003 & 2007)
12 Angry Men: (1957 & 1997)
12 Citizens (2014)
12 and Holding (2005)
12 Hour Shift (2020)
12 Men of Christmas (2009) (TV)
12 Monkeys (1995)
12 Rounds (2009)
12 Rounds 2: Reloaded (2013)
12 Rounds 3: Lockdown (2015)
12 Years a Slave (2013)
12 Strong (2018)
125 Years Memory (2015)
127 Hours (2010)
12:01 (1993)
12:01 PM (1990)
12th and Delaware (2010)
13 (2010 & 2022)
13th (2016)
13 Assassins: (1963 & 2010)
13 Beloved (2006)
Thirteen Days (2000)
13 Ghosts (1960)
Thirteen Ghosts (2001)
13 Going on 30 (2004)
13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (2016)
13 Moons (2002)
13 Rue Madeleine (1947)
13 Sins (2014)
13 Tzameti (2006)
The 13th Warrior (1999)
137 Shots (2021)
14 Peaks: Nothing Is Impossible (2021)
1408 (2007)
1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992)
15 August (2019 film) (2019)
15 Minutes (2001)
15: The Movie (2003)
15 Lads (2011)
The 15:17 to Paris (2018)
16 Blocks (2005)
16-Love (2012)
16 Wishes (2010)
17 Again (2009)
1776 (1972)
18 Again! (1988)
18 Presents (2020)
19 (2001)
#1915House (2018)
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)
1900 (1976)
1917: (1970 & 2019)
1920 series:
1920 (2008)
1920: The Evil Returns (2012)
1920: London (2016)
1922 (2017)
1941 (1979)
1968 Tunnel Rats (2009)
1982 - A Love Marriage (2016)
1984 (1956)
1990: The Bronx Warriors (1983)
1991: The Year Punk Broke (1992)
The One (2001)
One-Way Ticket to Mombasa (2002)
The Thirteenth Floor (1999)
A Thousand Acres (1997)
A Thousand Clowns (1965)
A Thousand Words (2012)
Twelve (2010)
2
2 Days in New York (2012)
2 Days in Paris (2007)
2 Days in the Valley (1996)
Two Days, One Night (2014)
The Two Faces of January (2014)
Two Family House (2002)
2 Fast 2 Furious (2003)
2 Guns (2013)
The Two Jakes (1990)
Two Lovers (2008)
Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970)
Two Solitudes (1978)
Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964)
Two Weeks Notice (2002)
Two Women (1960)
Two for the Money (2005)
2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967)
2 States (2014)
20 Dates (1998)
20 Feet From Stardom (2013)
20 Million Miles to Earth (1957)
20th Century Girl (2022)
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: (1907, 1916, 1954, 1997 Hallmark, & 1997 Village Roadshow)
20,000 Years in Sing Sing (1932)
200 Motels (1971)
200 Pounds Beauty (2006)
2000 Maniacs (1964)
2001 Maniacs (2005)
2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams (2010)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
2001: A Space Travesty (2000)
2009: Lost Memories (2002)
2010 (1984)
2012 (2009)
2019, After the Fall of New York (1984)
2020 Texas Gladiators (1984)
2036: Nexus Dawn (2017 short)
2046 (2004)
2048: Nowhere to Run (2017 short)
2050 (2018)
2067 (2020)
2081 (2009)
Twenty-One (1991)
21 (2008)
21 & Over (2013)
21 Grams (2003)
21 Jump Street (2012)
21 Up (1977)
22 Jump Street (2014)
23 (1998)
23 Blast (2013)
23 Paces to Baker Street (1956)
24 City (2008)
24 Frames (2017)
24 Hour Party People (2002)
25th Hour (2002)
27 Dresses (2008)
28 Days (2000)
28 Days Later (2002)
28 Hotel Rooms (2012)
28 up (1984)
28 Weeks Later (2007)
29th Street (1991)
2:22 (2017)
2:37 (2006)
3
Three Amigos (1986)
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005)
Three Coins in the Fountain (1954)
Three Colors series:
Three Colors: Blue (1993)
Three Colors: Red (1994)
Three Colors: White (1994)
Three Comrades (1938)
Three on a Couch (1966)
Three Days of the Condor (1975)
3 Days to Kill (2014)
3 Dev Adam (1973)
The Three Faces of Eve (1957)
Three Fugitives (1989)
3G (2013)
3 Godfathers (1948)
The Three Caballeros (1944)
Three Godfathers (1936)
The Three Godfathers (1916)
Three the Hard Way (1974)
3 Idiots (2009)
Three Kings (1999)
Three on a Match (1932)
Three Men and a Baby (1987)
Three Men and a Little Lady (1990)
Three Mothers (2006)
The Three Musketeers: (1921, 1933, 1948, 1973, 1992, 1993, 2011 & 2023)
3 Ninjas (1992)
3 Ring Circus (1954)
Three for the Road (1987)
Three Sisters: (1966, 1970, 1970 Olivier & 1994)
Three to Tango (1999)
3 Women (1977)
Three Young Texans (1954)
3,2,1... Frankie Go Boom (2012)
3-Iron (2004)
30 Days of Night (2007)
30 Days of Night: Dark Days (2010)
30-Love (2017)
30 Minutes or Less (2011)
300 (2006)
300: Rise of an Empire (2014)
The 300 Spartans (1962)
3000 Miles to Graceland (2001)
301, 302 (1995)
3022 (2019)
31 (2016)
35 up (1991)
The 355 (2022)
36 Hours (1965)
360 (2011)
The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1979)
36th Precinct (2004)
The 39 Steps: (1935, 1959, 1978 & 2008 TV)
3: The Dale Earnhardt Story (2004)
3:10 to Yuma: (1957 & 2007)
The Third Man (1949)
Thr3e (2007)
Three (2002)
Three... Extremes (2004)
π (1998)
4
Four Brothers (2005)
Four Daughters (1938)
4 Days in May (2011)
Four Feathers: (1939, 1978 & 2002)
Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1972)
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1962)
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921)
Four Lions (2010)
4 Little Girls (1997)
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007)
The Four Musketeers (1974)
Four Rooms (1995)
The Four Seasons (1981)
4 for Texas (1963)
Four for Venice (1998)
Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)
4.3.2.1 (2010)
40 Days and 40 Nights (2002)
The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005)
The 400 Blows (1959)
The 41-Year-Old Virgin Who Knocked Up Sarah Marshall and Felt Superbad About It (2010)
42 (2013)
42 up (1998)
42nd Street (1933)
44 Inch Chest (2010)
44 Minutes: The North Hollywood Shoot-Out (2003)
47 Meters Down (2017)
47 Meters Down: Uncaged (2019)
47 Ronin (2013)
48 Hrs. (1982)
49th Parallel (1941)
4D Man (1959)
The 4th Floor (2000)
The Fourth Kind (2009)
The Fourth Man (1983)
The Fourth Protocol (1987)
5
Da 5 Bloods (2020)
5 Broken Cameras (2011)
5 Card Stud (1968)
5 Centimeters per Second (2007)
5 Days of War (2011)
Five Easy Pieces (1970)
5 Fingers (1952)
Five Feet Apart (2019)
Five Fingers (2006)
Five Fingers of Death (1973)
Five Graves to Cairo (1943)
The Five Man Army (1969)
Five Minutes of Heaven (2009)
The Five Senses (1999)
Five Weeks in a Balloon (1962)
50 First Dates (2004)
The 51st State (2001)
52 Pick-Up (1986)
54 (1998)
55 Days at Peking (1963)
The Fifth Element (1997)
5x2 (2004)
(500) Days of Summer (2009)
The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953)
Five Million Years to Earth (1967)
50/50 (2011)
#50Fathers (2015)
The Five People you Meet in Heaven (2004)
Five Children and It (2004)
6
6 Angels (2002)
6 Below: Miracle on the Mountain (2017)
6 Days (2017)
6 Underground (2019)
6 Souls (2010)
61* (2001) (TV)
The 6th Day (2000)
The 601st Phone Call (2006)
633 Squadron (1964)
64: Part I (2016)
64: Part II (2016)
65 (2023)
#66 (2015)
678 (2010)
#69 Samskar Colony (2022)
Ridiculous Six (2015)
Six Days, Seven Nights (1998)
Six Degrees of Separation (1993)
Six Pack (1982)
Sixteen Candles (1984)
The Sixth Sense (1999)
7
The Magnificent Seven (1960)
Seven Beauties (1976)
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954)
7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964)
7 Khoon Maaf (2011)
Seven Men from Now (1956)
Seven Pounds (2008)
Seven Psychopaths (2012)
Seven Samurai (1954)
7 Seconds (2005)
Seven Swords (2005)
The Seven Tapes (2012)
Seven Up! (1964)
7 Women (1966)
The Seven Year Itch (1955)
Seven Years in Tibet (1997)
7:35 in the Morning (2003)
Seventh Heaven: (1927, 1937 & 1993)
The Seventh Seal (1957)
The Seventh Sign (1988)
Seventh Son (2015)
The Seventh Victim (1943)
The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958)
Se7en (1995)
The Seven-Ups (1973)
7½ Phere (2005)
"#73, Shaanthi Nivaasa" (2007)
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937 film) (1937)
8
8 x 10 Tasveer (2009)
Eight Ball (1992)
Eight Bells (1935)
Eight Below (2006)
Eight Crazy Nights (2002)
Eight Days a Week (1998)
The Eight Diagram Pole Fighter (1984)
Eight Girls in a Boat (1932)
Eight Girls in a Boat (1934)
8 Heads in a Duffel Bag (1997)
Eight Hours of Terror (1957)
Eight Iron Men (1952)
Eight Legged Freaks (2002)
Eight Men Out (1988)
8 Mile (2002)
8 Million Ways to Die (1986)
Eight Minutes to Midnight: A Portrait of Dr. Helen Caldicott (1981)
Eight O'Clock Walk (1954)
Eight on the Lam (1967)
8 Ounces (2003)
8 Seconds (1994)
8 Women (2002)
Eighth Grade (2018)
80 for Brady (2023)
84 Charing Cross Road: (1975 TV & 1987)
88 Minutes (2008)
8: The Mormon Proposition (2010)
8mm (1999)
8mm 2 (2005)
8½ (1963)
8½ Women (1999)
8000 Miles (2009)
The Hateful Eight (2015)
The 8th Night (2021)
9
9: (2005 short & 2009)
Nine (2009)
Nine Dead (2009)
9 Dead Gay Guys (2002)
9 to 5 (1980)
Nine Hours to Rama (1963)
Nine Lives: (1957, 2002, 2005 & 2016)
Nine Miles Down (2009)
Nine Months (1995)
Nine Queens (2000)
9 Songs (2004)
9 Souls (2003)
9/11 (2002)
9012Live (1985)
976-EVIL (1989)
9th Company (2005)
The 9th Life of Louis Drax (2016)
9½ Weeks (1986)
The Nines (2007)
The Ninth Configuration (1980)
The Ninth Gate (1999)
In numerical order (by number value)
0–π
Zero Effect (1998)
Zero Dark Thirty (2012)
Zero Theorem (2013)
.45 (2006)
0.5 mm (2014)
One A.M. (1916)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)
One Hour Photo (2002)
One More Time (1970)
One Night of Love (1934)
One of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing (1975)
The 1 Second Film (2007)
#1 Serial Killer (2013)
One, Two, Three (1961)
One Week: (1920 & 2008)
One-Way Ticket to Mombasa (2002)
2 Days in New York (2012)
2 Days in the Valley (1996)
Two Days, One Night (2014)
2 Fast 2 Furious (2004)
Two for the Money (2005)
The Two Jakes (1990)
Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970)
Two Solitudes (1978)
Two Weeks Notice (2002)
Two Women (1960)
The Third Man (1949)
Three (2002)
Three... Extremes (2004)
Three Amigos (1986)
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005)
Three Coins in the Fountain (1954)
Three Colors: Blue (1993)
Three Colors: Red (1994)
Three Colors: White (1994)
Three Comrades (1938)
Three on a Couch (1966)
Three Days of the Condor (1975)
The Three Faces of Eve (1957)
Three Fugitives (1989)
Three the Hard Way (1974)
Three Kings (1999)
Three on a Match (1932)
Three Men and a Baby (1987)
Three Men and a Little Lady (1990)
The Three Musketeers: (1921, 1933, 1973, 1992 & 1993, 2011 & 2023)
3 Ring Circus (1954)
Three for the Road (1987)
Three Sisters: (1970 Olivier & 1994)
Three Young Texans (1954)
3,2,1... Frankie Go Boom (2012)
π (1998)
4–6
4D Man (1959)
Four Daughters (1938)
Four Feathers: (1939 & 2002)
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1962)
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921)
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007)
The Four Musketeers (1974)
Four Rooms (1995)
The Four Seasons (1981)
Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)
The Fourth Man (1983)
The Fourth Protocol (1987)
5x2 (2004)
5 Broken Cameras (2011)
5 Card Stud (1968)
5 Centimeters Per Second (2007)
The Fifth Element (1997)
Five Easy Pieces (1970)
5 Fingers (1952)
5ive Girls (2006)
Five Graves to Cairo (1943)
The Five Man Army (1969)
Five Minutes of Heaven (2009)
Five Weeks in a Balloon (1962)
The 6th Day (2000)
Six Degrees of Separation (1993)
Six Days Seven Nights (1998)
The Sixth Sense (1999)
7–9
Se7en (1995)
Seven Beauties (1976)
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954)
Seven Up! (1964)
Seven Psychopaths (2012)
The Seven Samurai (1954)
7 Women (1966)
The Seven Year Itch (1955)
Seventh Heaven: (1927, 1937 & 1993)
The Seventh Seal (1957)
The Seventh Sign (1988)
Seven Years in Tibet (1997)
7:35 in the Morning (2003)
Eight Below (2006)
Eight Crazy Nights (2002)
Eight Men Out (1988)
8 Women (2002)
8 Mile (2002)
8 Heads in a Duffel Bag (1997)
Eight on the Lam (1967)
Eighth Grade (2018)
8: The Mormon Proposition (2010)
8-Bit Christmas (2021)
8mm (1999)
8mm 2 (2005)
8½ (1963)
8½ Women (1999)
9: (2005 short & 2009)
9/11 (2002)
9½ Weeks (1986)
The Nines (2007)
Nine Dead (2009)
9 Dead Gay Guys (2002)
The Ninth Configuration (1980)
The Ninth Gate (1999)
The 9th Life of Louis Drax (2016)
9 Songs (2004)
Nine to Five (1980)
10–99
10 (1979)
10/31 (2017)
10½ (2010)
10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)
The Ten Commandments: The Movie (2016)
10 Items or Less (2006)
Ten Little Indians (1965)
Ten Little Indians (1989)
10 Questions for the Dalai Lama (2006)
10 Things I Hate About You (1999)
The Ten (2007)
The Ten Commandments: (1923, 1956, 2007)
The 10th Kingdom (2000) (TV)
The 10th Victim (1965)
10th & Wolf (2006)
11'09"01 September 11 (2002)
11:14 (2003)
Twelve (2010)
12 (2007)
12 and Holding (2006)
12 Angry Men (1957)
The Twelve Chairs: (1962, 1970, 1971 & 1976)
12 Citizens (2014)
12 Monkeys (1995)
12 O'Clock Boys (2013)
The Twelve Tasks of Asterix (1976)
12 Years A Slave (2013)
13 (2010)
13th (2016)
13 Ghosts (1960)
13 Going on 30 (2004)
The Thirteen Chairs (1969)
Thirteen Ghosts (2001)
Thirteen (2003)
Thirteen Days (2000)
13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (2016)
13 Moons (2002)
Las 13 rosas (2007)
The 13th Warrior (1999)
The Thirteenth Floor (1999)
15 Minutes (2001)
15: The Movie (2003)
15 Lads (2011)
16 Blocks (2006)
Sixteen Candles (1984)
16 December (2002)
16 Wishes (2010)
17 Again (2009)
Twenty-One (1991)
21 (2008)
21 Grams (2003)
21 Jump Street (2012)
21 Up (1977)
22 Jump Street (2014)
23 (1998)
23rd March 1931: Shaheed (2002)
The Number 23 (2007)
24 City (2008)
24 Hour Party People (2002)
25th Hour (2002)
27 Dresses (2008)
28 up (1984)
28 Days (2000)
28 Days Later (2002)
28 Weeks Later (2007)
29th Street (film) (1991)
-30- (2016)
30 Days of Night (2007)
30-Love (2014)
30 Minutes or Less (2011)
31 (2016)
31st October (2016)
35 Shots of Rum (2009)
35 up (1991)
The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978)
36 China Town (2006)
36 Ghante (1974)
The 39 Steps: (1935, 1959 & 1978)
40 Days and 40 Nights (2002)
The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005)
The 41-Year-Old Virgin Who Knocked Up Sarah Marshall and Felt Superbad About It (2010)
42 (2013)
42 up (1998)
42nd Street (1933)
The 47 ronin: (1941, 1994)
47 Ronin (2013)
Black 47 (2018)
48 Hrs. (1982)
49th Parallel (1941)
49 up (2005)
50/50 (2011)
#50Fathers (2015)
50 First Dates (2004)
50 Ways of Saying Fabulous (2005)
51 (2011)
The 51st State (2001)
52 Pick-Up (1986)
52 Tuesdays (2014)
61* (2001) (TV)
64: Part I (2016)
64: Part II (2016)
#66 (2015)
'68 (1988)
#69 Samskar Colony (2022)
'71 (2014)
80 for Brady (2023)
84 Charing Cross Road: (1975 TV & 1987)
88 (2015)
92 in the Shade (1975)
'96 (2018)
99: (1918 & 2009)
99 Homes (2014)
100–999
100 Days (1991)
One Hundred Men and a Girl (1937)
100 Years (2015)
One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961)
101 Dalmatians (1996)
101 Dalmatians II: Patch's London Adventure (2003)
101 Reykjavík (2000)
102 Dalmatians (2000)
108 Demon Kings (2015)
120 (2008)
122 (2019)
125 Years Memory (2015)
127 Hours (2010)
200 Cigarettes (1999)
211 (2018)
300 (2007)
300: Rise of an Empire (2013)
The 300 Spartans (1962)
301, 302 (1995)
305 (2008)
360 (2011)
365 Days (2020)
The 400 Blows (1959)
404 (2011)
499 (2020)
(500) Days of Summer (2009)
The 601st Phone Call (2006)
633 Squadron (1964)
964 Pinocchio (1991)
1000–millions
A Thousand Acres (1997)
A Thousand Clowns (1965)
1014 (2019)
1408 (2007)
1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992)
1776 (1972)
1915 (2015)
#1915House (2018)
1917: (1970 & 2019)
1920 (2008)
1921 (2018)
1922 (2017)
1941 (1979)
1945 (2017)
1969 (1988)
1971 (2007)
1983 (2014)
1984 (1956)
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)
1985 (2018)
1987 (2014)
1991: The Year Punk Broke (1992)
2000 Maniacs (1964)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
2001: A Space Travesty (2000)
2009: Lost Memories (2002)
2010 (1984)
2012 (2009)
2019, After the Fall of New York (1984)
2020 Texas Gladiators (1984)
2036: Nexus Dawn (2017 short)
2046 (2004)
2048: Nowhere to Run (2017 short)
2050 (2018)
2067 (2020)
2081 (2009)
3000 Miles to Graceland (2001)
3022 (2019)
3615 code Père Noël (1989)
The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953)
10000 Years Later (2015)
708090 (2015)
Million Dollar Arm (2014)
Million Dollar Baby (2004)
The Million Dollar Duck (1971)
One Million Years B.C. (1966)
The $1,000,000 Reward (1920)
Five Million Years to Earth (1967)
Millions (2004)
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See also
List of film genres
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List of film and television directors
List of documentary films
List of film production companies
References
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B.U.G.%20Mafia
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B.U.G. Mafia
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B.U.G. Mafia (an abbreviation for "Bucharest Underground Mafia"), is a Romanian hip hop group from Pantelimon, Bucharest, widely regarded as one of the seminal acts of gangsta rap in Romania. Founded in 1993 as Black Underground, its original lineup consisted of Vlad "Tataee" Irimia, Dragoș "Caddy" (short for Cadillac) Vlad-Neagu and two other members, D.D. and Mr.Nobody, who, by the end of the year, had already departed from the group. Irimia and Vlad-Neagu, who were still teenage high school students at the time, had been working on amateur solo recordings and had little professional prospects on their own prior to their encounter. The group initially performed as a duo throughout Bucharest at local highschool proms and parties while considering their options for professional careers in music and, following a string of relatively unsuccessful attempts at promoting their music in English, they recruited Alin "Uzzi" Demeter in 1995 and eventually transitioned to writing in Romanian.
Throughout the years, the group endured a long-standing controversy due to the explicit and confrontational nature of their lyrics. Focusing on subjects such as the post-communist Romanian political class, poverty and crime in Romania's communist-built housing projects or their recurring hostility towards Romanian Police, they were subsequently banned from many mainstream T.V. and radio stations in Romania and even at times prevented from touring, spending a night in police custody after their first concert in Drobeta-Turnu Severin in 1997. Although controversial in their incipient years, their lyricism has been praised by a number of literary figures, such as Emil Brumaru and Mircea Cărtărescu.
Despite being independently produced on a modest budget over just a few months in 1995, their debut album Mafia signified the birth of Romanian gangsta rap and established them on the fledgling hip hop scene emerging at the time in Romania. They have been estimated to have sold over 1,150,000 records.
History
Formation and early years (1992–1995)
The group was founded in late 1993 when Pantelimon-based producer Vlad "Tataee" Irimia met Dragoş "Caddy" Vlad-Neagu in Bucharest. Tataee, who was still in highschool, had been interested in becoming a professional musician since 1992, when, under the stage name Doom, he had produced an independent demo called "Straight Outta da Hell", stirring Caddillac's interest, as he was also an amateur recording artist working under the name MC La Duc and had recorded a track titled "Apocalipse" on his own earlier in 1993. As Romania had just overthrown its communist regime in the Romanian Revolution of 1989, western goods such as bootleg recordings of rap albums had started to flood the market in the market liberalization process that had begun. As Irimia and Vlad-Neagu learned that their musical tastes coincided, they decided on pursuing their careers as a group which they named Black Underground and abbreviated it to B.U.G. in late 1993. Two friends of Irimia and Vlad-Neagu, D.D. and Mr.Nobody also joined later but, due to a lack of interest and involvement, quit in early 1994, before the group recorded any songs. In March 1994, Irimia and Vlad-Neagu, working under the stage names Doom and Klax 187 respectively, reworked Irimia's demo recording into their debut single. Working at the Uniplus Radio studios in Bucharest, the two decided to keep the title "Straight Outta da Hell" and recorded the song with Florin "DJ Sensei" Cojocaru, an electronic musician and DJ who produced the record. "Straight Outta da Hell" premiered a month later on Uniplus Radio during "YO! Rap is Moving." a hip-hop oriented late night program hosted by Adrian Niculescu, a local radio personality and DJ. Shortly following their radio debut, Tataee and Caddillac managed to book their first live appearance during a local hip hop concert in Bucharest, an experience they would both later remember as unpleasant, but also significantly influential in their choice of pursuing careers as professional musicians.
Since hip hop was just emerging as a music genre in Romania in the early 1990s, studio time and stage performance opportunities were relatively limited, so the group had to rely on the restricted prospects that presented themselves to record more songs. They began working with Romeo Vanica, a keyboardist who had been a member of the Romanian rock group Mondial, who agreed to allow them to use his studio equipment for music production in 1994 as they started creating more songs for an English debut album, tentatively titled Breakin' da Law.
While involved in the production process, Irimia and Vlad-Neagu also became interested in music management and consequently started exploring the local rap scene for other groups or solo artists to associate with in order to include a more diverse variety of artists on the album. In December 1994, they met Alin Demeter, who at the time performed under the stage name Drama and was a member of Demonii (The Demons), one of the few local rap acts who performed in Romanian. Initially, B.U.G. invited both members of the group to enroll in the newly founded crew and, throughout the first half of 1995, Demonii became involved in a number of local live performances with Black Underground in Bucharest. Following Demeter's bandmate's decision to form another group besides Demonii, the two parted ways and Demeter joined Black Underground in May 1995. After the settlement, Irimia, Vlad-Neagu and Demeter decided to scrap the recordings they had worked on and switch to performing and writing in Romanian in order to gain access to a larger potential fanbase in their native Romania.
Mafia (1995–1996)
The group released Mafia in late 1995 and, since music distribution was virtually nonexistent in Romania at the time, the album was only available for a relatively short period of time in Bucharest, becoming valuable fan memorabilia over time. The album, recorded by Holograf keyboardist and producer Antonio "Tino" Furtună, contained 15 tracks, including collaborations with Pantelimon-based group M&G, hip hop artist Marijuana and Romanian actress Rona Hartner. Even though their lyrical abilities have refined over the time, the group reflected the rising anger of the urban youth detailing aspects such as urban violence or the rising poverty of the Romanian working class in post-communist Romania in their debut work. With songs such as "Viață De Borfaș" (Thug Life), "Ucigaș" (Killer) or "Înc-o Cruce-n Cimitir" (Another Cross In The Cemetery) they painted their worldview as inner-city youths.
Despite the album's poor sound quality and virtually inexistent label promotion, it created enough controversy around the group to allow them get signed by Cat Music, one of the largest Romanian record labels, paving their way to national superstardom. Mafia is frequently quoted among Romanian hip hop historians as the third hip hop album to be released in Romania, after R.A.C.L.A.'s Rap-Sodia efectului defectului (Rap-sody For The Flaw's Effect) and Paraziţii's Poezii pentru pereţi (Poetry For The Walls).
Cat Music and national exposure (1996–1997)
After releasing their debut album, controversy surrounded the group regarding recurring use of violent and sexual lyrics and profanity. The situation created a buzz around them that sparked the interest of Alin Braşov, a Romanian American lawyer who had just returned to Romania and was one of the four associates who owned Cat Music, one of the first professional record labels, which also was the local branch of Sony Records. Braşov, having heard about the impressive success N.W.A had had in the United States, convinced the other three associates, Emanuel Maxwell, Sorin Golea and Dan Popi to give the group a chance. B.U.G. Mafia were subsequently signed by Cat Music and released their second studio material, the Înc-o zi, înc-o poveste (Another Day, Another Story) EP. It sparked the group's first hit single, "Pantelimonu' Petrece" (Pantelimon's Having A Party), a feature with young pop singer Iuliana "July" Petrache. Tataee referenced this moment in a 2009 interview with Radio ZU talk show-host Mihai Morar, mentioning that the song became a hit just after Romania adopted a new copyright law, enabling the group to make significant profits, as B.U.G. Mafia were one of the few Romanian groups that received radio airplay in the mid 90s. He also mentioned on his official Twitter page that Mircea Badea was the first TV host to have the group on the air in 1996, during the morning show he presented at Tele 7 abc with Teo Trandafir. "Pantelimonu' Petrece" was so successful that the group was actually in talks with the TV station to produce a music video for the song, but the idea eventually fell through.
One hit single wasn't enough for B.U.G. Mafia and they released their third studio material and second full-length album the same year. Născut şi crescut în Pantelimon (Born And Raised In Pantelimon), an homage to the neighbourhood where Tataee, Uzzi and Caddillac grew up, sparked hit singles "Până când moartea ne va despărţi" (Until Death Do Us Part), which is also Puya's studio debut and "Născut şi crescut în Pantelimon" (Born And Raised In Pantelimon). The album included notable guests such as Don Baxter and DJ Freakadadisk, members of Romanian group Morometzii at the time, who would go on to become two of the most notable figures in Romanian hip hop.
Controversy and superstardom years (1997–2000)
Arrest and IV: Deasupra tuturor
As Cat Music had grown into a fully professional record label, the group started to get noticed by the romanian media. In early 1997, Tataee, Caddilac and Uzzi, together with La Familia members Tudor Sisu and Dragos "Puya" Gardescu, were taken into police custody after a concert in Turnu Severin. As Romania was still a fairly conservative country in the mid-90s, the Romanian penal code forbad the use of profanity in public places. Refusing to take into account that the violent lyrics were not actually performed in a public place, the Romanian Police forces arrested the five artists, charging them with outrage against good customs. They were eventually released after 10 hours of giving statements at the police station and district attorney's office in Turnu Severin. The Romanian media brought the case to national fame and, much like the FBI drawing publicity to N.W.A in the early 90s, the case was the starting point of a media frenzy that would last for over 2 years and bring a lot of unexpected fame for both B.U.G. Mafia and La Familia.
Over the summer, the group continued studio work on its fourth album, IV: Deasupra tuturor (IV:Above Everybody). Group producer Tataee had just started collaborating with Eddy "DJ Phantom" Schneider, one of the most well known romanian composers in the 1990s, who helped refine the g-funk sound the group was trying to achieve at the time. The legal incident that had occurred in February reflected in the album's sales, as it moved an impressive 55,000 units with no music video or radio single promoting it. It was the first B.U.G. Mafia album to be released on both cassette tape and CD.
De cartier and national fame
The group released the first single from its fifth studio album, "Pentru '98" (For '98) in June 1998. Although commercial sounding and easygoing, the track was met with reluctance by both radio stations and fans alike. A music video was shot by the then newly formed Atomic TV music channel, but the result was disappointing for the group's members and management and thus the video was never released. An unexpected success came from the single's b-side, a song entitled "N-ai fost acolo" (You weren't there), a viral response to critics claiming that the group's lyrics were pure fiction and had no factual basis whatsoever, became a massive hit during the summer and provided a strong launch pad for the album's release in September 1998. De Cartier (From The Hood) was B.U.G. Mafia's best selling album, moving over 125,000 copies and catapulting the group to national superstardom. The album's success attracted pop icon Loredana Groza's interest for a collaboration. The resulting song, "Lumea e a mea" (The world is mine) was released as a single in late 1998 and became an instant hit in Romania. The success prompted the making of a music video, which was the first Romanian hip hop video ever made.
B.U.G. Mafia continued to work throughout 1999 and, after the impressive success one of their concerts in Bucharest had, they were invited by TV host Mihai Tatulici to talk about their work and history in a special edition of his talk show. The exposure they got reflected in the sales of their sixth studio effort, Dupa blocuri, which was released in early 2000 by Cat Music. Accompanied by the group's first official music video, the album is often categorized as their darkest work to this day. Influenced by the massive discreditation campaign started by the Romanian media after the success of 1998's De cartier, the album was very liberal and experimental with production and songwriting techniques for its time in Romanian music. The group's notoriety also prompted some inmates incarcerated at the Rahova State Penitentiary in Bucharest to request a B.U.G. Mafia concert. The live performance took place in mid-2000 and is frequently mentioned by Tataee, Caddilac and Uzzi as a very special and meaningful moment in the group's history.
Întotdeauna pentru totdeauna (Always Forever) was released in late 2000, making it their second album in the same year. Supported by the "Un 2 şi trei de 0" (A two followed by three zeroes) single, it brought singer-songwriter Vilmos "Villy" Kanalas to national fame, making him one of the most well known B.U.G. Mafia collaborators over time. The album was also known in Romania for its inclusion of the "Poezie de stradă" (Street Poetry) song which was released as a single in 2001 and had a music video that featured real Romanian Police officers crashing an organized crime meeting.
Casa Productions
The group had been interested in founding a record label since the late 1990s so they could obtain more creative control in producing their own music and also sign and develop new artists. The paperwork was finalized in 2001 and the newly formed Casa Productions entered the Romanian music market a year later, when the group released the B.U.G. Mafia prezinta CASA (B.U.G. Mafia presents: Casa) compilation album to introduce the label's new artists to the world. Hip hop heavyweights M&G and XXL & 10 Grei as well as newcomers Mahsat, Anturaj and Luchian were amongst the label's new signees in 2002. Gangsta rap pioneers La Familia were also interested in joining Casa Productions but a disagreement with the label's management led to a conflict that took both groups to court a couple of years later. The album sold over 100,000 copies and has remained one of the best-selling compilation albums released in Romania. Mahsat were the first act to release their album under Casa Productions in late 2002. A commercial failure, it sold just over 1,000 units and it led to the group's disbanding and the release from their contract in 2004. Aside from Casa Productions, each group member founded his own label for personal projects. Rapper Mihai "JerryCo" Dumitrescu released his debut album in 2010 under Tataee's label, Legend Audio.
DJ Swamp (2003–2008)
Nicolae "DJ Swamp" Oncescu had been a full-time member of hip hop group R.A.C.L.A. for over a year when he decided to join B.U.G. Mafia after a few live appearances with them in 2002. Oncescu quit R.A.C.L.A. shortly after and became a full-time member of B.U.G. Mafia and a staff producer for Casa Productions. Tataee had stated in various interviews that he had been interested in adding a professional DJ to the group since the early 90s but the few hip hop DJs in Romania were already committed to other projects. Petre "Freakadadisk" Urda, who had collaborated with the group on their 1996 album, Născut şi crescut în Pantelimon (Born and raised in Pantelimon), had been a full-time member of Morometzii before joining Romanian hip hop pioneers Parazitii in 1998 and DJ Dox was also working with R.A.C.L.A. at the time. Oncescu parted ways with the group in 2008 citing creative differences and stated that he remained in good terms with them. However, group producer Tataee repeatedly mentioned that the break up had not been a friendly one and that he had not maintained any connection to DJ Swamp. Oncescu has since changed his professional name to Nicalai and has pursued a career as an electronic music artist, releasing his debut album A.E.R. - Asta E Romania (T.I.R. - This Is Romania) in 2009. In a 2011 interview, Oncescu claimed that the reason he parted ways with Mafia was a financial misunderstanding.
The Goodfellas (2003)
Băieţii Buni (The Goodfellas), the eight studio album, was a milestone for several firsts in the group's history. It was their first album to be released under the then newly formed Casa Productions label, as well as it was their first album to be recorded at Ines Sound & Video, in Bucharest, at the time Romania's most high end recording studio. Group producer Tataee employed several new production techniques and this was reflected in the overall sound of the album, as well as in the way it was received by its fans and critics. With 22 tracks, it was B.U.G. Mafia's most lengthy album, also the first in the group's history not to have any female guest performers. The follow-up to Baietii Buni was only released in 2011 as the group embarked in a 6-year-long journey producing and recording two greatest hits albums in the first decade of the 21st century.
Greatest Hits Era (2003–2009)
Starting in late 2003, the group started work on a greatest hits album that was to take them just under 6 years to complete. Tataee wanted the group to re-record the vocals for every song that was to be included on the album, while he produced new beats for the updated versions of the tracks. Titled Viata Noastra (Our Life), recording sessions for the album started in 2003 at the Ines Sound and Video studios in Bucharest and carried on throughout 2004 before being halted so the group could work on the Băieți buni (Good Guys) soundtrack.
Our Life Vol.1 (2003–2006)
The album was released in mid-2006 by Cat Music and Casa Productions after multiple delays. The first single was the title track "Viata Noastra" (Our Life). Using a sample from Casa Productions artist Villy's 2002 "O Alta Zi" (Just Another Day) song, it was released in early 2006 along with a music video
shot by Marius Panduru and directed by Marian Crisan. The album included 14 hit records of the group, all of which had been completely re-recorded and featured an updated sound. As "Pantelimonu' Petrece" (Pantelimon's Having A Party) had been one of their first signature hit-songs, the record was released as a single in mid-2006, with a music video also directed by Marian Crisan. Pop singer Adriana Vlad was hired to record all the female-vocal parts. The album sold over 40,000 copies and was certified gold in Romania.
Străzile and film work (2004–2005)
In 2004, the group was approached by Pro TV to compose and produce the soundtrack for Andrei Boncea's procedural drama, Băieți buni (Good Guys). The resulting track, "Străzile" (The Streets) was released as a single in 2005 along with a music video directed by Andreea Paduraru and shot by Tudor Lucaciu. The recording sessions interrupted the group's work on their greatest hits album, so its release had to be further delayed until early 2006.
Our Life Vol.2 (2005–2009)
Recording sessions for the second part of the group's greatest hits album started in 2005, again at the Ines Sound & Video studios in Bucharest. The only song that was released from the 2005 sessions was on the Baieti buni-soundtrack single Strazile (The Streets). The album was initially planned to be released in late 2007 but Ines changed their location, upgrading their recording technology, making group producer Tataee to insist for a re-do of the whole album in the new studio. Various other obstacles pushed the release even further into late 2009. Viaţa noastră (Vol.2) (Our Life Vol.2) was B.U.G. Mafia's last release on Cat Music, their home label for over 14 years, as the group went independent from 2010.
Internet Era (2009–present)
A series of notable changes occurred after the release of the second volume of the "Viata Noastra" (Our Life) best-of series. The group left Cat Music, the record company that had catapulted them to superstardom 14 years earlier, which had been their distribution company since they had made the switch to Casa Productions in late 2001. Group producer Tataee mentioned that the group would employ a new approach to music since the Internet had played a crucial role in the demise of the compact disc-era in the musical industry.
Members
Tataee (1993–present)
Caddillac (1993–present)
D.D. (1993)
Mr.Nobody (1993)
Uzzi (1995–present)
DJ Swamp (2002-2008)
Lineup chronology
Discography
Studio albums
In a career that spans over 20 years of activity, the group has released over 20 singles, 8 studio albums, one extended play, one compilation album and two greatest hits albums.
Mafia (The Mafia) - 1995
Născut şi crescut în Pantelimon (Born and Raised in Pantelimon) - 1996
IV: Deasupra tuturor (IV: Above All) - 1997
De Cartier (From The Hood) - 1998
După blocuri (Behind The Buildings) - 2000
Întotdeauna pentru totdeauna (Always Forever) - 2000
Băieţii Buni (The Goodfellas) - 2003
Înapoi În Viitor (Back to the Future) - 2011
Extended plays
Înc-o zi, înc-o poveste (Another Day, Another Story) - 1996
Compilations
B.U.G. Mafia prezintă CASA (B.U.G. Mafia Presents 'CASA') - 2002
Greatest hits albums
Viaţa noastră Vol.1 (Our Life Vol. 1) - 2006
Viaţa noastră Vol.2 (Our Life Vol. 2) - 2009
Viaţa noastră (Deluxe Edition) (Our Life Deluxe Edition) - 2009
References
External links
Official website
B.U.G. Mafia on Discogs
Romanian hip hop groups
Musical groups established in 1993
1993 establishments in Romania
Gangsta rap groups
Musical groups from Bucharest
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History%20of%20dance
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History of dance
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The history of dance is difficult to access because dance does not often leave behind clearly identifiable physical artifacts that last over millennia, such as stone tools, hunting implements or cave paintings. It is not possible to identify with exact precision when dance becomes part of human culture. Dance is filled with aesthetic values, making it distinct from one society to another and is shrouded in symbolism that expounds on the cultural heritage of a community accordingly being unique from one society to another. Dance can help tell a story, convey feelings and emotions, and connect with others and ourselves.
Early dance
The natural impulse to dance may have existed in early primates before they evolved into humans.
Dance has been an important part of ceremony, rituals, celebrations and entertainment since before the birth of the earliest human civilizations. Archaeology delivers traces of dance from prehistoric times such as the 10,000-year-old Bhimbetka rock shelters paintings in India and Egyptian tomb paintings depicting dancing figures from c. 3300 BC. Many contemporary dance forms can be traced back to historical, traditional, ceremonial and ethnic dances of the ancient period.
Means of social communication and bonding
Dance may have been used as a tool of social interaction that promoted cooperation essential for survival among early humans. Studies found that today's best dancers share two specific genes associated with a predisposition for being good social communicators.
Also, the term “kinesthetic” is the right term to help understanding how dance makes communication, and it means recognition of movement of one’s own body, this word is a combination of two words (kinein=to move, aesthesis= perception). And dance in communication is like language, you can understand, feel, see and hear. When someone uses all the body muscles and feeling in a dance you will send like a message to the audience or who was watching. So dance moves and background sounds play a big role too. When there is a group performance by holding hands or shoulders or even dancing opposite each other makes them feel communicated and bonded.
As folk celebrations
Many dances of the early periods were performed as a ritual to the gods who ancestors believed needed to be kept entertained for world peace. Dance used in many celebrations and until now. Throughout history we can notice that dance had many uses such as also community dance, harvesting and worship. Dance evolution started as folk origins to court presentations and now theater or even cinema movies.
In ceremonies and rituals
Dance may be performed in religious or shamanic rituals, for example in rain dance performed in times of drought. Shamans dancing for rain is mentioned in ancient Chinese texts. Dance is an important aspect of some religious rites in ancient Egypt, similarly dance is also integral to many ceremonies and rites among African people. Ritual dances may also be performed in temples and during religious festivals, for example the Rasa ritual dances of India (a number of Indian classical dances may have their origin in ritual dances), and the Cham dances of Tibet.
As a method of healing
Another early use of dance may have been as a precursor to ecstatic trance states in healing rituals. Dance is used for this purpose by many cultures from the Brazilian rainforest to the Kalahari Desert. Medieval European danses macabres were thought to have protected participants from disease; however, the hysteria and duration of these dances sometimes led to death due to exhaustion.
According to a Sinhalese legend, Kandyan dances originated 2500 years ago from a magic dance ritual that broke the spell on a bewitched king to cure the king of a mysterious illness.
As a method of expression
One of the earliest structured uses of dances may have been in the performance and in the telling of myths. It was also sometimes used to show feelings for one of the opposite gender. It is also linked to the origin of "lovemaking." Before the production of written languages, dance was one of the methods of passing these stories down from generation to generation.
In European culture, one of the earliest records of dancing is by Homer, whose Iliad describes chorea (χορεία khoreia). The early Greeks made the art of dancing into a system, expressive of all the different passions. For example, the dance of the Furies, so represented, would create complete terror among those who witnessed them. The Greek philosopher, Aristotle, ranked dancing with poetry, and said that certain dancers, with rhythm applied to gesture, could express manners, passions, and actions. The most eminent Greek sculptors studied the attitude of the dancers for their art of imitating the passion.
Cultural traditions
Asia
Indian classical dance
An early manuscript describing dance is the Natya Shastra on which is based the modern interpretation of classical Indian dance (e.g. Bharathanatyam).
During the reign of the last Mughals and Nawabs of Oudh, dance fell down to the status of 'nautch', an unethical sensuous thing of courtesans.
Later, linking dance with immoral trafficking and prostitution, British rule prohibited public performance of dance. Many disapproved it. In 1947, India won its freedom and created for dance an ambience where it could regain its past glory. Classical forms and regional distinctions were re-discovered, ethnic specialties were honored, and by synthesizing them with the individual talents of the masters in the line and fresh innovations, emerged dance with a new face but with classicism of the past.
In Sri Lanka, the ancient Sinhalese chronicle Mahavamsa states that when King Vijaya landed in Sri Lanka in 543 BCE he heard sounds of music and dancing from a wedding ceremony. The origins of the dances of Sri Lanka are dated back to the aboriginal tribes, and to the mythological times of aboriginal yingyang twins and "yakkas" (devils). The classical dances of Sri Lanka (Kandyan dances) feature a highly developed system of tala (rhythm) and provided by cymbals called thalampataa.
Chinese dance
There is a long recorded history of Chinese dances. Some of the dances mentioned in ancient texts, such as dancing with sleeve movements are still performed today. Some of the early dances were associated with shamanic rituals. Folk dances of the early period were also developed into court dances. The important dances of the ancient period were the ceremonial yayue dated to the Zhou dynasty of the first millennium BC. The art of dance in China reached its peak during the Tang dynasty, a period when dancers from many parts of the world also performed at the imperial court. However, Chinese opera became popular during the Song and Yuan dynasty, and many dances were merged into Chinese opera. The art of dance in women also declined from the Song dynasty onward as a result of the increasing popularity of footbinding, a practice that ironically may have originated from dancing when a dancer wrapped her feet so she may dance ballet-fashion. The best-known of the Chinese traditional dances are the dragon dance and lion dance. Lion dance was described in the Tang dynasty in form that resembles today's dance.
Iranian dance
Prehistory
The people of the Iranian plateau have known dance in the forms of music, play, drama or religious rituals and have used instruments like mask, costumes of animals or plants, and musical instruments for rhythm, at least since the 6th millennium BC. Cultural mixed forms of dance, play and drama have served rituals like celebration, mourning and worship. And the actors have been masters of music, dance, physical acts and manners of expression. Artifacts with pictures of dancers, players or actors were found in many archaeological prehistoric sites in Iran, like Tepe Sabz, Ja'far Abad, Chogha Mish, Tall-e Jari, Cheshmeh Ali, Ismaeel Abad, Tal-e bakun, Tepe Sialk, Tepe Musian, tepe Yahya, Shahdad, Tepe Gian, Kul Farah, Susa, Kok Tepe, Cemeteries of Luristan, etc.
History
The earliest researched dance from historic Iran is a dance worshiping Mithra (as in the Cult of Mithras) in which a bull was sacrificed. This cult later became highly adhered in the Roman Empire. This dance was to promote vigor in life. Ancient Persian dance was significantly researched by Greek historian from Herodotus of Halikarnassos, in his work Book IX (Calliope), in which he describes the history of Asian empires and Persian wars until 478 BC. Ancient Persia was occupied by foreign powers, first Greeks, then Arabs, and then Mongols and in turn political instability and civil wars occurred. Throughout these changes a slow disappearance of heritage dance traditions occurred.
Religious prohibition of dancing in Iran came with the spread of Islam, but it was spurred by historical events. Religious prohibition to dancing waxed and waned over the years, but after the Iranian Revolution in 1979 dancing was no longer allowed due to its frequent mixing of the sexes. The Islamic Revolution of 1979 was the end of a successful era for dancing and the art of ballet in Iran. The Iranian national ballet company was dissolved and its members emigrated to different countries. According to the principles of the “cultural revolution” in Iran, dancing was considered to be perverse, a great sin, immoral and corrupting. As a result, many of the talented Persian dancers moved to the West and spread out mainly in Europe and the United States and a new generation of Iranian dancers and ballet artists have grown up in the Diaspora.
Europe
15th–19th centuries: from court dancing to Romanticism
The origins of ballet dancing can be traced to the Italian Renaissance courts of the 15th century. Dance masters would teach the steps to nobility and the court would participate in performances as a form of social entertainment. This practice continued for several centuries. In the 17th century, courtly ballet reached its peak under the rule of King Louis XIV.
By the 18th century, ballet had migrated from the French and Italian royal courts to the Paris Opéra under the careful direction of composer/dancer Jean-Baptiste Lully. Lully sought to develop ballet into more serious art. Under his influence, ballet was turned into a recognized art that was performed by professional dancers rather than courtiers.
During the 18th century, ballet transitioned from a courtly dance of moving images as a spectacle to performance art in its own right. Ballet performances developed around a central narrative and contained an expressive movement that revealed the relationships between characters. This dramatic style of ballet became known as the ballet d'action. The ballet d'action strove to express, for the first time, human emotions drawn directly from the dancers themselves. Masks previously worn by performers were removed so that emotional content could be derived from facial expressions.
Costumes during this time were very restricting for dancers. Although a more expressive use of the body was encouraged, dancers' movements were still restricted due to heavy materials and corseted dresses. Costumes often covered a dancer's physique and made it difficult to see complex or intricate choreography. It was not until choreographer Jean Georges Noverre called for dance reforms in 1760 with his Letters on Dancing and Ballets that costumes became more conducive. Noverre urged that costumes be crafted using lightweight fabrics that move fluidly with the body, complementing a dancer's figure. In addition, dancers wore soft slippers that fit snugly along the foot. This shoe design instilled confidence within the ballerina, daring her to dance on her toes. Naturalistic costuming allowed dancers to push the boundaries of movement, eventually rising en pointe.
The era of Romanticism produced ballets inspired by fantasy, mystique, and the unfamiliar cultures of exotic places. Ballets that focused more on the emotions, the fantasy and the spiritual worlds and heralded the beginning of true pointe-work. Now, on her toes, the deified ballerina (embodied in this period by the legendary ballerina Marie Taglioni) seemed to magically skim the surface of the stage, an ethereal being never quite touching the ground. It was during this period that the ascending star of the ballerina quite eclipsed the presence of the poor male dancer, who was in many cases reduced to the status of a moving statue, present only in order to lift the ballerina. This sad state was really only redressed by the rise of the male ballet star Vaslav Nijinsky, with the Ballets Russes, in the early 20th century. Ballet as we know it had well and truly evolved by this time, with all the familiar conventions of costume, choreographic form, plot, pomp, and circumstance firmly fixed in place. Nijinsky brought athleticism into ballet. Although at that time his choreography was considered as controversial, now they are considered as one of the first contemporary ballets.
Early 20th century: from ballet to contemporary dance
Since the Ballets Russes began revolutionizing ballet in the early 20th century, there have been continued attempts to break the mold of classical ballet. Currently the artistic scope of ballet technique (and its accompanying music, jumper, and multimedia) is more all-encompassing than ever. The boundaries that classify a work of classical ballet are constantly being stretched, muddied and blurred until perhaps all that remains today are traces of technique idioms such as turnout.
The 20th century was indeed a period of breaking away from everything that ballet stood for. It was a time of unprecedented creative growth, for dancers and choreographers. It was also a time of the broadening of the definition of dance. Ballets Russes was a turning point to the future of ballet in the West and in the world. Collaborating with that era geniuses, such as Coco Chanel, Pablo Picasso and others. Ballets Russes brought together great music, design and dance together in a one complete performance.
Africa
African dance refers mainly to the dance styles of Sub-Saharan Africa, of which many are based on traditional rhythms and music traditions of the region. Modern African dance styles are deeply rooted in culture and tradition. Many tribes have a role solely for the purpose of passing on the tribe's dance traditions; dances which have been passed down through the centuries, often unchanged, with little to no room for improvisation. Each tribe developed its own unique style of dance, falling into three categories based on purpose. The first is religious dancing, which many tribes purport enhances peace, health, and prosperity. Religious dances often involved masqueraders, performing as both the spirits and those who placated them. Religion and spirituality infused every part of traditional African life, and continues to affect African dance today. The second is griotic, and was a type of dance that told a story. It is named after a griot, which is a term for a traditional storyteller in West Africa. Certain griotic dances were only danced by the tribe's griot; today, troupes perform the same dances that were once exclusive to the griot. The third type is ceremonial. These dances are performed at ceremonies such as weddings, anniversaries, and rites of passage. However, many dances did not have only one purpose. Rather, there was often one primary purpose, that blended into many secondary purposes. Dance was often very important to the maintenance of a ruler's status in the tribal society. Colonialism and globalization have resulted in the eradication of certain styles of African dance. Other styles have been blended together, or mixed with dance styles outside of Africa.
African dance in the context of slavery
As people were taken from Africa to be sold as slaves, especially starting in the 1500s, they brought their dance styles with them. Entire cultures were imported into the New World, especially those areas where slaves were given more flexibility to continue their cultures and where there were more African slaves than Europeans or indigenous Americans, such as Brazil. African dance styles were merged with new cultural experiences to form new styles of dance. For example, slaves responded to the fears of their masters about high-energy styles of dance with changing stepping to shuffling. However, in North America, slaves did not have as much freedom to continue their culture and dance. In many cases, these dances have evolved into modern dance styles, such as African-American dance and Brazilian dance. For example, the Calenda evolved in Brazil from tribal dance. The Calenda then evolved into the Cakewalk, which was danced originally to mock plantation owners; it then evolved into the Charleston. Capoeira was a martial art practiced originally in Africa which the enslaved Africans masked as a form of dance in order to not arouse the suspicion of plantation owners.
The late 20th and early 21st centuries
Postmodernism
After the explosion of modern dance in the early 20th century, the 1960s saw the growth of postmodernism. Postmodernism veered towards simplicity, the beauty of small things, the beauty of untrained body, and unsophisticated movement. The famous "No" manifesto, by Yvonne Rainer, rejecting all costumes, stories and outer trappings in favour of raw and unpolished movement was perhaps the extreme of this wave of thinking. However, it was not long before sets, décor and shock value re-entered the vocabulary of modern choreographers.
Street dance/Hip-hop dance
At the same time, mass culture experienced expansion of street dance. In 1973, famous group Jackson 5 performed on television a dance called Robot (choreographed by postmodern artist Michael Jackson), a dance form cultivated in Richmond, CA. This event and later Soul Train performances by black dancers (such as Don Cambell) ignited a street culture revolution, in a sense. B-boying in New York, Locking in L.A., Popping in Fresno, CA, Boogaloo in Oakland, CA, Robot in Richmond, CA, all had their own creative explosions happen around the late 60's – 70's. Each with their own histories, practices, innovators and foundations.
For the emergence of 20th-century modern dance see also: Mary Wigman, Gret Palucca, Harald Kreutzberg, Yvonne Georgi, and Isadora Duncan.
Hip-hop dance started when Clive Campbell, aka Kool DJ Herc and the father of hip-hop, came to New York from Jamaica in 1967. Toting the seeds of reggae from his homeland, he is credited with being the first DJ to use two turntables and identical copies of the same record to create his jams. But it was his extension of the breaks in these songs—the musical section where the percussive beats were most aggressive—that allowed him to create and name a culture of break boys and break girls who laid it down when the breaks came up. Briefly termed b-boys and b-girls, these dancers founded breakdancing, which is now a cornerstone of hip-hop dance.
See also
History of ballet
History of figure skating
References
Further reading
Adshead-Lansdale, J. (ed.) (1994). Dance History: An Introduction. Routledge..
Charman, S. Kraus, R, G. Chapman, S. and Dixon-Stowall, B. (1990). History of the Dance in Art and Education. Pearson Education. .
Dils, A. (2001). Moving History/Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader. Wesleyan University Press. .
Wood, Melusine (1952). Some historical dances twelfth to nineteenth century; their manner of performance and their place in the social life of the time, London: Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing.
External links
Historic Illustrations of Dancing from 3300 B.C. to 1911 A.D. from Project Gutenberg
The history of pointe shoes and technique (ballet)
Dance research
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayne%20Mansfield
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Jayne Mansfield
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Jayne Mansfield (born Vera Jayne Palmer; April 19, 1933 – June 29, 1967) was an American actress, singer, nightclub entertainer, and Playboy Playmate. A sex symbol of the 1950s and early 1960s, Mansfield was known for her publicity stunts and well-publicized personal life. Although her film career was short-lived, she had several box-office successes, and won a Theatre World Award and Golden Globe Award.
Mansfield gained notoriety after playing the role of fictional actress Rita Marlowe in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1955–1956) on Broadway, which she reprised in the film adaptation of the same name in 1957. Her other film roles include the musical comedy The Girl Can't Help It (1956), the drama The Wayward Bus (1957), the neo-noir Too Hot to Handle (1960), and the sex comedy Promises! Promises! (1963); the latter established Mansfield as the first major American actress to perform in a nude scene in a post-silent era film.
Mansfield took her professional name from her first husband, public relations professional Paul Mansfield. She married three times, each marriage ending in divorce, and had five children. She was allegedly intimately involved with numerous men, including Robert and John F. Kennedy, her attorney Samuel S. Brody, and Las Vegas entertainer Nelson Sardelli. On June 29, 1967, she died in an automobile crash in New Orleans at the age of 34.
Early life
Jayne Mansfield was born Vera Jayne Palmer on April 19, 1933, at Bryn Mawr Hospital in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, the only child of Herbert William Palmer, of English and German ancestry, and Vera Jeffrey (née Palmer) Palmer, of English and Cornish descent. She inherited more than $90,000 from her maternal grandfather, Thomas ($ in dollars), and more than $36,000 from her maternal grandmother, Beatrice Mary Palmer, in 1958 ($ in dollars).
Palmer spent her early childhood in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, where her father was an attorney practicing with future New Jersey governor Robert B. Meyner. In 1936, her father died of a heart attack. In 1939, Palmer's mother married sales engineer Harry Lawrence Peers and the family moved to Dallas, Texas, where she was known as Vera Jayne Peers. As a child, she wanted to be a Hollywood star like Shirley Temple. At age 12, Palmer took ballroom dance lessons. She graduated from Highland Park High School in 1950. While in high school, Palmer took violin, piano, and viola lessons. She also studied Spanish and German. Palmer received grades in the high Bs in all subjects consistently.
At age 17, she married Paul Mansfield on May 6, 1950. Their daughter, Jayne Marie Mansfield, was born six months later, on November 8, 1950. Jayne and her husband enrolled in Southern Methodist University to study acting. In 1951, Jayne moved to Los Angeles and attended a summer semester at UCLA. She entered the Miss California contest but Paul found out and forced her to withdraw from the competition. She then moved to Austin, Texas, with her husband, and studied dramatics at the University of Texas at Austin. There, Mansfield worked as a nude art model, sold books door-to-door, and worked as a receptionist at a dance studio. She also joined the Curtain Club, a campus theatrical society that included lyricist Tom Jones, composer Harvey Schmidt, and actors Rip Torn and Pat Hingle among its members. Mansfield then spent a year at Camp Gordon, Georgia, while her husband Paul served in the United States Army Reserve during the Korean War.
In 1953, she moved back to Dallas and studied acting for several months under Baruch Lumet, the father of director Sidney Lumet and founder of the Dallas Institute of Performing Arts. Lumet gave Mansfield private lessons and called Mansfield and Rip Torn his "kids". Eventually, Lumet helped Jayne get her first screen test at Paramount in April 1954. Paul, Jayne, and Jayne Marie moved to Los Angeles in 1954. Jayne worked at a variety of odd jobs including: selling popcorn at the Stanley Warner Theatre, teaching dance, selling candy at a movie theater, modeling part-time at the Blue Book Model Agency, and working as a photographer at Esther Williams' Trails Restaurant.
Career
Playboy
While attending the University of Texas at Austin, Mansfield won several beauty contests, including Miss Photoflash, Miss Magnesium Lamp, and Miss Fire Prevention Week. By her own account, the only title she refused was Miss Roquefort Cheese, because she believed it "just didn't sound right". Mansfield later rejected "Miss Prime Rib" in 1957 as well. In 1952, while in Dallas, she and Paul Mansfield participated in small local-theater productions of The Slaves of Demon Rum and Ten Nights in a Barroom, and Anything Goes in Camp Gordon, Georgia. After he left for military service, she made her first significant stage appearance in a production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman on October 22, 1953, with the players of the Knox Street Theater, headed by Lumet. While at UCLA, she entered the Miss California contest (hiding her marital status), and won the local round before withdrawing.
Early in her career, some advertisers considered her prominent breasts undesirable, which led to her losing her first professional assignment – a commercial for General Electric that depicted young women in bathing suits relaxing around a pool. Emmeline Snively, head of the Blue Book Model Agency, had sent her to photographer Gene Lester, which led to her short-lived assignment in the General Electric commercial. In 1954, she auditioned at both Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. At Paramount, Jayne performed a sketch she had worked out with Lumet from Joan of Arc for casting director Milton Lewis. Lewis informed her that she was wasting her "obvious talents" and had her come back a week later to perform the piano scene from The Seven Year Itch. Jayne failed to impress but learned she would have to go blonde. She then performed the piano scene for Warner Brothers, but, again, failed to impress. She landed her first acting assignment in Lux Video Theatre, a series on CBS in the episode "An Angel Went AWOL", aired on October 21, 1954. In it, she sat at a piano and delivered a few lines of dialogue for $300 ($ in dollars).
In December 1953, Hugh Hefner began publishing Playboy. The magazine became a success, in part, because of early appearances from Mansfield, Marilyn Monroe, Bettie Page, and Anita Ekberg. In February 1955, Mansfield was the Playboy Playmate of the Month, and appeared in the magazine several times. Her February appearance increased the magazine's circulation and helped boost Mansfield's career. Shortly afterward, she posed for the Playboy calendar, covering her breasts with her hands. Playboy featured Mansfield each February from 1955 to 1958, and again in 1960.
In August 1956, Paul Mansfield sought custody of his daughter, alleging that Jayne was an unfit mother because she appeared nude in Playboy. In 1964, the magazine repeated the 1955 pictorial. Playboy reprinted photos from that pictorial issue, with titles such as December 1965's "The Playboy Portfolio of Sex Stars", and January 2000s "Centerfolds of the Century".
Film
Mansfield's first film part was a supporting role in Female Jungle, a low-budget drama completed in ten days. Her part was filmed over a few days, and she was paid $150 ($ in dollars). It was released unofficially in early 1955. In February 1955, James Byron, her manager and publicist, negotiated a seven-year contract with Warner Brothers, who were intrigued by her publicity antics. The contract initially paid her $250 a week ($ in dollars) and landed her two films – one with an insignificant role and another unreleased for two years. She filed for separation from Paul Mansfield that January. Mansfield was given bit parts in Pete Kelly's Blues (1955), starring Jack Webb, and Hell on Frisco Bay (1955), starring Alan Ladd. She acted in one more movie for Warner Brothers – another small but significant role opposite Edward G. Robinson in the courtroom drama Illegal (1955).
Mansfield's agent, William Shiffrin, signed her to play fictional film star Rita Marlowe in the Broadway play Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? with Orson Bean and Walter Matthau. She accepted the part while working in producer Louis W. Kellman's The Burglar (1957), director Paul Wendkos's film adaptation of David Goodis' novel, made in film noir style. Mansfield appeared alongside Dan Duryea and Martha Vickers. It was released two years later, when Mansfield's fame was at its peak. She was successful in this straight dramatic role, though most of her subsequent film appearances were comedic or capitalized on her sex appeal. It was Kellman's first major venture, and he claimed to have "discovered" Mansfield. She was announced for Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? in mid-July 1955 and was dropped by Warner Brothers on July 31.
Twentieth Century-Fox signed Mansfield to a six-year contract on May 3, 1956, in its New York office to mold her as a successor to the increasingly difficult Marilyn Monroe, their resident blonde sex symbol, who had just completed the very difficult Bus Stop. Mansfield was still under contract to Broadway and continued playing Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? on stage until September 15, 1956. She undertook her first starring film role as Jerri Jordan in Frank Tashlin's The Girl Can't Help It (1956). Originally titled Do-Re-Mi, it featured a high-profile cast of contemporary rock and roll and R&B artists including Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Fats Domino, The Platters and Little Richard. Released in December 1956, The Girl Can't Help It became one of the year's biggest successes, both critically and financially, earning more than Gentlemen Prefer Blondes had three years before.
Soon afterward, Fox started promoting Mansfield as "Marilyn Monroe king-sized", attempting to coerce Monroe to return to the studio and complete her contract. Mansfield next played a dramatic role in The Wayward Bus (1957), an adaptation of John Steinbeck's novel of the same name. With this film, she attempted to move away from her "blonde bombshell" image and establish herself as a serious actress. The film enjoyed moderate box-office success, and Mansfield won a Golden Globe in 1957 for New Star of the Year, beating Carroll Baker and Natalie Wood with her performance as a "wistful derelict". It was "generally conceded to have been her best acting", according to The New York Times, in a fitful career hampered by her flamboyant image, distinctive voice ("a soft-voiced coo punctuated with squeals"), voluptuous figure and limited acting range. Tashlin cast Mansfield in the film version of the Broadway show Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, released in 1957, reprising her role of Rita Marlowe alongside costars Tony Randall and Joan Blondell. Fox launched its new blonde bombshell with a North American tour and a 40-day, 16-country tour of Europe. She attended the premiere of the film (released as Oh! For a Man in the UK) in London, and met Queen Elizabeth II.
Mansfield's fourth starring role in a Hollywood film was in Kiss Them for Me (also 1957), for which she received prominent billing alongside Cary Grant. However, in the film itself she is little more than comic relief; Grant's character relates to a redhead played by fashion model Suzy Parker. The film, described as "vapid" and "ill-advised", was a critical and box-office flop, and marked one of the last attempts by 20th Century-Fox to publicize Mansfield. The continuing publicity surrounding Mansfield's physical appearance failed to sustain her career. Fox gave her a leading role opposite Kenneth More in The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw (1958), a western comedy filmed on location in Spain. In the film, Mansfield's three songs were dubbed by singer Connie Francis. Fox released the film in the United States in 1959, and it was Mansfield's last mainstream film success. Columbia Pictures offered her a part opposite James Stewart and Jack Lemmon in the romantic comedy Bell, Book and Candle (1958), but she turned it down because she was pregnant. Fox then attempted to cast Mansfield opposite Paul Newman in Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys! (1958), his ill-fated first attempt at comedy.
With a decreased demand for big-breasted, blonde bombshells and an increasing negative backlash against her excessive publicity, Mansfield became a box-office has-been by the early 1960s, yet she remained a celebrity, still able to attract large crowds outside the United States by way of lucrative and successful nightclub acts.
Mansfield gained no major star role in film roles after 1959. She was unable to fulfill a third of her contract with Fox due to her reported "repeated pregnancies". Fox stopped viewing her as a major Hollywood star and started loaning her and her likeness out to foreign productions in England and Italy, respectively, until the end of her contract in 1962. Many of her English/Italian films are regarded as obscure and some considered lost.
In 1959, Fox cast her in two independent gangster films shot in the United Kingdom: The Challenge and Too Hot to Handle, both released the following year. Both films were low-budget, and their American releases were delayed. Too Hot to Handle was not released in the United States until 1961 as Playgirl After Dark. The Challenge was released in 1963 as It Takes a Thief. In the United States, censors objected to a scene in Too Hot to Handle in which Mansfield, wearing silver netting with sequins painted over her nipples, appears nearly nude.
When Mansfield returned to Hollywood in mid-1960, 20th Century Fox cast her in It Happened in Athens (1962) with Trax Colton, a handsome newcomer Fox was trying to mold into a heartthrob. She received first billing above the title but appeared in only a supporting role. The Olympic Games-based film was shot in Greece in the fall of 1960 but was not released until June 1962. It was a box-office failure, and 20th Century Fox dropped Mansfield's contract. In 1961, Mansfield signed on for a minor role but above-the-title billing in The George Raft Story, released the following year. Starring Ray Danton as Raft, the film showcased Mansfield in a small part as a glamorous film star. Soon after the film's release, she returned to European films, appearing in low-budget foreign films such as Heimweh nach St. Pauli (1963, Germany), L'Amore Primitivo (1964, Italy), Panic Button (1964, Italy) and Einer frisst den anderen (1964, Germany).
Tommy Noonan persuaded Mansfield to become the first mainstream American actress to appear nude in a starring role, in the film Promises! Promises! (1963). Playboy published nude photographs of Mansfield on the set in its June 1963 issue, resulting in obscenity charges against Hugh Hefner in a Chicago court. Promises! Promises! was banned in Cleveland, Ohio, but enjoyed box-office success elsewhere. As a result of the film's success, Mansfield landed on the Top 10 list of box-office attractions for that year. Soon after her success in Promises! Promises!, Mansfield was chosen from many other actresses to replace the recently deceased Marilyn Monroe in Kiss Me, Stupid (1964), a romantic comedy also starring Dean Martin. She turned down the role because of her pregnancy with daughter Mariska Hargitay, and was replaced by Kim Novak. That same year, Mansfield appeared in a pinup book called Jayne Mansfield for President: the White House or Bust, which was promoted on billboards; David Attie, a commercial and fine art photographer, took the photographs.
In 1966, Mansfield was cast in Single Room Furnished, directed by husband Matt Cimber. The film required Mansfield to portray three different characters, and was her first starring, dramatic role in several years. It was released briefly in 1966, but did not enjoy a full release until 1968, almost a year after her death. After Single Room Furnished wrapped, Mansfield was cast opposite Mamie Van Doren and Ferlin Husky in The Las Vegas Hillbillys (1966), a low-budget comedy from Woolner Brothers. It was her first country and western film, and she promoted it through a 29-day tour of major U.S. cities, accompanied by Husky, Don Bowman and other country musicians. Before filming began, Mansfield said she would not "share any screen time with the drive-in's answer to Marilyn Monroe", meaning Van Doren. Though their characters did share one scene, Mansfield and Van Doren filmed their parts at different times to be edited together later.
Mansfield's wardrobe relied on the shapeless styles of the 1960s to hide her weight gain after the birth of her fifth child. Despite career setbacks, she remained a highly visible celebrity during the early 1960s through her publicity antics and stage performances. In early 1967, Mansfield filmed her last role, a cameo in A Guide for the Married Man, a comedy starring Walter Matthau, Robert Morse and Inger Stevens. The opening credits listed Mansfield as one of the technical advisers, along with other star names.
Television
Mansfield played her first leading role on television in 1956 on NBC's The Bachelor. In her first appearance on British television in 1957, she recited from Shakespeare (including a line from Hamlet) and played piano and violin. Her notable performances in television dramas included episodes of Burke's Law, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Red Skelton Hour (three episodes), Kraft Mystery Theater and Follow the Sun. Mansfield's performance in her first series Follow the Sun ("The Dumbest Blonde"; Season 1, Episode 21; February 4, 1962; produced by 20th Century Fox Television) was hailed as the advent of "a new and dramatic Jayne Mansfield". She appeared on a number of game shows including "Talk it up," Down You Go (as a regular panelist), The Match Game (one rare episode has her as a team captain), and What's My Line? (as a special mystery guest).
She performed in a number of variety shows including The Jack Benny Program (on which she played violin), The Steve Allen Show and The Jackie Gleason Show (during the mid-1960s, when the show was the second-highest-rated program in the U.S.). In November 1957, in a special episode of NBC's The Perry Como Show ("Holiday in Las Vegas"), one of her nightclub acts was featured, something quite scandalous for the audience according to the broadcaster. She was a member of the headlining guests for three of The Bob Hope Specials. In 1957, she toured United States Pacific Command areas in Hawaii, Okinawa, Guam, Tokyo and Korea with Bob Hope for the United Service Organizations for 13 days appearing as a comedian; and in 1961, toured Newfoundland, Labrador and Baffin Island in Canada for a Christmas special. Her talk show career includes a large number of appearances which she appreciated for the publicity. One of her more notable appearances on a variety show was on The Ed Sullivan Show (Season 10, Episode 35; May 26, 1957) right after her success with Rock Hunter, where she played violin with a six-person backup band. After the show she exclaimed, "Now I am really national. Momma and Dallas see the Ed Sullivan show!"
By 1958, she earned $20,000 per episode for television performances ($ in dollars). In 1964, Mansfield turned down the role of Ginger Grant on the up-and-coming television sitcom Gilligan's Island. Although her acting roles were becoming marginalized, Mansfield rejected the part as it epitomized the stereotype she wished to rid herself of. The part eventually went to Tina Louise. A widespread rumor that Mansfield had a breast-flashing dress mishap at the 1957 Academy Awards was found baseless by Academy researchers. Ten days before her death, she read To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time, a poem by Robert Herrick about early death on The Joey Bishop Show – her last television appearance.
As late as the mid-1980s, Mansfield remained one of the biggest television draws. In 1980, The Jayne Mansfield Story aired on CBS starring Loni Anderson in the title role and Arnold Schwarzenegger as Mickey Hargitay. It was nominated for three Emmy Awards. A+E Networks TV series Biography featured her in an episode titled Jayne Mansfield: Blonde Ambition. The TV series won an Emmy Award in the outstanding non-fiction TV series category in 2001. A&E again featured her life in another TV serial, Dangerous Curves, in 1999. In 1988, her story and archival footage was a part of the TV documentary Hollywood Sex Symbols.
Other ventures
Stage appearances
Between 1951 and 1953 she acted in The Slaves of Demon Rum, Ten Nights in a Barroom, Macbeth, and Anything Goes. Her performance in an October 1953 production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman attracted Paramount Pictures to audition her. Lumet trained her for the audition. In 1955, she went to New York and appeared in the Broadway production of George Axelrod's comedy Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, also featuring Orson Bean and Walter Matthau. It was her first major stage performance, garnering her critical attention which was not always positive. She starred as Rita Marlowe (a wild, blonde Hollywood starlet à la Monroe) in the musical spoofing Hollywood in general and Marilyn Monroe in particular. Her wardrobe, namely a bath-towel, caused a sensation. She received a Theatre World Award (Promising Personality) for her performance in 1956, as well as a Golden Globe Award (New Star of the year, Actress) in 1957. Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times described the "commendable abandon" of her scantily clad rendition of Rita Marlowe in the play as "a platinum-pated movie siren with the wavy contours of Marilyn Monroe". She performed in about 450 shows between 1955 and 1956. At the time, she was considered one of the biggest Broadway-to-Hollywood success stories.
In 1964, she performed in stage productions of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes at Carousel Theater, and Bus Stop at Yonkers Playhouse. Both co-starred Mickey Hargitay and were well-reviewed. Mansfield toured small U.S. towns alternating between the two plays. In 1965, she performed in another pair of plays: Rabbit Habit at the Latin Quarter nightclub, and Champagne Complex, directed by Matt Cimber, at the Pabst Theater. Both plays received poor reviews.
Nightclub
In February 1958, the Tropicana Las Vegas launched Mansfield's striptease revue The Tropicana Holiday (produced by Monte Proser, co-starring Mickey Hargitay) under a four-week contract that was extended to eight. The opening night raised $20,000 for March of Dimes ($ in dollars). She received $25,000 per week for her performance as Trixie Divoon in the show ($ in dollars), while her contract with 20th Century Fox was paying her $2,500 per week ($ in dollars). She had a million-dollar policy with Lloyd's of London in case Hargitay dropped her as he whirled her around for the show. In 1959, Jayne returned to the Tropicana and made $30,000 per week, with her show being extended twice. In December 1960, the Dunes hotel and casino launched Mansfield's revue The House of Love (produced by Jack Cole, co-starring Hargitay). She received a salary of $35,000 a week ($ in dollars) – the highest in her career.
Her wardrobe for the shows at Tropicana and Dunes featured a gold mesh dress with sequins to cover her nipples and pubic region. That controversial sheer dress was referred to as "Jayne Mansfield and a few sequins". In early 1963, she performed in her first club engagement outside Las Vegas, at the Plantation Supper Club in Greensboro, North Carolina, earning $23,000 in a week ($ in dollars), and then at Iroquois Gardens in Louisville, Kentucky. She returned to Las Vegas in 1966, but her show was staged on Fremont Street, away from the Strip where the Tropicana and Dunes were. Her last nightclub act French Dressing was at the Latin Quarter in New York in 1966, also repeated at the Tropicana. It was a modified version of the Tropicana show, and ran for six weeks with fair success.
Her nightclub career became inspirations for films, documentaries, and a musical album. 20th Century Fox Records recorded "The House of Love" for an album entitled Jayne Mansfield Busts Up Las Vegas in 1962. She played the roles of burlesque entertainer Midnight Franklin in Too Hot to Handle (1960) and Las Vegas show girl Tawni Downs in The Las Vegas Hillbillys (1966). In 1967, an independent documentary Spree (alternative title Las Vegas by Night) on the antics of Las Vegas entertainers was released. The film, narrated as a part of a travelogue of Vic Damone and Juliet Prowse, featured Mansfield, Hargitay, Constance Moore and Clara Ward as guest stars. Mansfield strips and sings "Promise Her Anything" from the film Promises! Promises!. A court order prohibited using any of the guest stars to promote the film.
Later in her career, Mansfield was busier on stage, performing and making appearances with her nightclub acts, club engagements, and performance tours. By 1960, she made personal appearances for everything from supermarket promotions to drug store openings, at $10,000 per appearance ($ in dollars).
Musical work
Mansfield had classical training in piano and violin. She sang in film soundtracks, on stage for her theatrical and nightclub performances, and had singles and albums released. After her death, Mansfield became an inspiration for punk-rock musicians.
Soundtracks
Mansfield sang in English and German for a number of her films, including The Girl Can't Help It ("Ev'rytime" and "Rock Around the Rock Pile"), Illegal ("Too Marvelous for Words"), The Las Vegas Hillbillys ("That Makes It"), Too Hot to Handle ("Too Hot To Handle", "You Were Made For Me", "Monsoon" and "Midnight"), Homesick for St. Pauli ("Wo Ist Der Mann" and "Snicksnack Snuckelchen"), The Challenge ("The Challenge of Love"), The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw ("Strolling Down The Lane With Billy" and "If The San Francisco Hills Could Only Talk"), and Promises! Promises! ("I'm in Love", alternative title "Lullaby of Love").
Live performances
In 1958, an orchestra was recorded for the 31st Academy Awards ceremony with Jack Benny on first violin, Mansfield on violin, Dick Powell on trumpet, Robert Mitchum on woodwind, Fred Astaire on drums and Jerry Lewis as conductor; however, the performance was canceled. She sang "Too Marvelous for Words" for The Jack Benny Program ("Jack Takes Boat to Hawaii"; Episode 9, Season 14; November 26, 1963). Her club performances regularly featured songs like Call Me, A Little Brains, A Little Talent ("This Queen has her aces in all the right places"), Plain Jane, Quando-Quando, Bésame Mucho, and the song made famous by Marilyn Monroe – Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend.
Discography
In 1962, 20th Century Fox Records released the album Jayne Mansfield Busts Up Las Vegas, a recording of her Las Vegas revue The House of Love. In 1964 MGM Records released a novelty album called Jayne Mansfield: Shakespeare, Tchaikovsky & Me, in which Mansfield recited Shakespeare's sonnets and poems by Marlowe, Browning, Wordsworth, and others against a background of Tchaikovsky's music. The album cover depicted a bouffant-coiffed Mansfield with lips pursed and breasts barely covered by a fur stole, posing between busts of Tchaikovsky and Shakespeare. The New York Times described the album as a reading of "30-odd poems in a husky, urban, baby voice". The reviewer went on to remark that "Miss Mansfield is a lady with apparent charms, but reading poetry is not one of them."
In 1965, Jimi Hendrix played bass and added lead in his session musician days for Mansfield on two songs – "As The Clouds Drift By" and "Suey" – released as a 45-rpm single by London Records in 1966. Ed Chalpin, the record producer, claimed that Mansfield played all the instruments on the singles. According to Hendrix historian Steven Roby (Black Gold: The Lost Archives Of Jimi Hendrix, Billboard Books), this collaboration occurred because they shared the same manager. "Wo ist der Mann" sung in German and released by Polydor Records in Austria was much in demand immediately after its release in August 1963. The A-side featured Hans Last's "Snicksnack-Snuckelchen". The Original Sound label released two original songs from the soundtrack of The Las Vegas Hillbillys – "That Makes It" (an answer to The Big Bopper's "Chantilly Lace") on the A-side, and "Little Things Mean a Lot" on the B-side – in 1964.
Personal life
Mansfield had a daughter with her first husband, public relations professional Paul Mansfield. She was the mother of three children from her second marriage to actor/bodybuilder Mickey Hargitay, including actress Mariska Hargitay. She also had a son with her third husband, film director Matt Cimber.
Mansfield's son Zoltan made news when a lion named Sammy attacked him and bit his neck while he and his mother were visiting the theme park Jungleland USA in Thousand Oaks, California on November 23, 1966. He suffered from severe head trauma, underwent three surgeries at Community Memorial Hospital in Ventura, California, including a six-hour brain surgery, and contracted meningitis. He recovered, and Mansfield's attorney Sam Brody sued the theme park on the family's behalf for $1.6 million ($ million in dollars). The negative publicity led to closure of the theme park.
In 1967, film critic and exploitation movie expert Whitney Williams wrote of Mansfield in Variety: "her personal life out-rivaled any of the roles she played". Mansfield was allegedly intimately involved with many men, including Claude Terrail (owner of the Paris restaurant Tour d'Argent), Robert F. Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, Brazilian billionaire Jorge Guinle, her attorney Samuel S. Brody, Las Vegas entertainer Nelson Sardelli, and producer Enrico Bomba. She met John F. Kennedy through his brother-in-law Peter Lawford in Palm Springs, California, in 1960, but their alleged affair did not last. Mansfield and Brody, her lawyer and alleged lover at the time, were both killed in a car crash.
Religion
In August 1963, Mansfield decided to convert to Catholicism. Although she never converted, she did attend Catholic services when she was in Europe, and followed Catholic practices when she was involved with a Catholic partner (including Hargitay, Sardelli and Cimber). In May 1967, her performance at the Mount Brandon Hotel in Tralee, Ireland, was canceled because Catholic clergy condemned it. She wanted to marry Cimber in a Catholic ceremony, but was unable to find a priest who would perform it. While involved with Brody, she also showed interest in Judaism.
In San Francisco for the city's 1966 Film Festival, Mansfield and Brody visited the Church of Satan to meet Anton LaVey, the church's founder. He awarded Mansfield a medallion and the title "High Priestess of San Francisco's Church of Satan." The media enthusiastically covered the meeting and the events surrounding it, identifying her as a Satanist, and speculating that she was somehow romantically involved with LaVey. That meeting remained a much-publicized and oft-quoted event both of her life and of the history of the Church of Satan. Karla LaVey, Anton LaVey's daughter, asserted in a 1992 interview with Joan Rivers that Mansfield was a practicing LaVeyan Satanist and that she had a romantic relationship with Anton LaVey.
Marriages
First marriage
Jayne met Paul Mansfield at a party on Christmas Eve in 1949; she was a popular student at Highland Park High School, and he at Sunset High School in Dallas. On May 6, 1950, they married in Fort Worth, Texas. At the time of their marriage, Jayne was 17 and three months pregnant, while Paul was 20. While most major biographies put the date at May 6, some sources say the marriage was on May 10, 1950. According to biographer Raymond Strait, she had an earlier "secret" marriage on January 28, after which she conceived her first child. On November 8, 1950, Mansfield gave birth to her daughter, Jayne Marie Mansfield. Some sources cite Paul Mansfield as the father of her child, others allege that the pregnancy was the result of date rape.
Paul Mansfield hoped the birth of their child would discourage her interest in acting. When it did not, he agreed to move to Los Angeles in late 1954 to help further her career. In 1952, she juggled motherhood and classes at the University of Texas. Early in 1952, Paul was called to the United States Army Reserve for the Korean War. While he served in the army, she spent a year at Camp Gordon, Georgia. Her life became easier with Paul's army allotment. Returning from the Korean War in 1954, he took a job with a small newspaper in East Los Angeles, California, and lived in a small apartment in Van Nuys, Los Angeles, with Jayne and her pets – a Great Dane, three cats named Sabina, Romulus, and Ophelia, two chihuahuas, a poodle dyed pink, and a rabbit. While in California, she left Jayne Marie with her maternal grandparents and spent the summer semester at UCLA.
After a series of marital rows around Jayne's ambitions, infidelity, and animals, they decided to dissolve the marriage. It was a long process. In February 1955, Jayne filed for separate maintenance and in August 1956 Paul filed for custody of their daughter, Jayne Marie. Jayne filed for divorce in California in 1956; Paul filed for divorce in 1957 in Texas citing mental cruelty, and they received their divorce papers on January 8, 1958. After the divorce, she decided to keep "Mansfield" as her professional name. Paul Mansfield remarried, settled into the public relations business and moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee, but failed to win custody suits over Jayne Marie or restrain her from traveling abroad with her mother.
Following her 18th birthday, Jayne Marie complained that she had not received her inheritance from the Mansfield estate or heard from her father since her mother's death.
Second marriage
Mansfield met her second husband, Mickey Hargitay, at the Latin Quarter nightclub in New York City on May 13, 1956, where he was performing as a member of the chorus line in Mae West's show. Hargitay was an actor and bodybuilder who had won the Mr. Universe competition in 1955. Mansfield fell for him immediately, which resulted in a squabble with West. In the ensuing row, Mr. California, Chuck Krauser, beat Hargitay up and was arrested and released on a $300 bond ($ in dollars).
After Mansfield returned from her 40-day European tour, Hargitay proposed to her on November 6, 1957, with a $5,000 10-carat diamond ring ($ in dollars). On January 13, 1958 (days after her divorce from Paul was finalized), Mansfield married Hargitay at the Wayfarers Chapel in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. The unique glass chapel made public and press viewing of the wedding easy. Mansfield wore a sensational pink, skintight wedding gown made of sequins with a flounce of pink tulle (designed by a 20th Century-Fox costume designer), and at the reception she had Hargitay drink pink champagne.
Hargitay made his first film appearance with Mansfield in a bit part in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?. The couple became a performing team touring in stage shows, where Mansfield's leopard-spot bikini became a topic of discussion and newspaper coverage. As a highlight, Hargitay tossed her around his waist and spun her in wide circles as her shows made more headlines. On screen, he was Mansfield's male lead in her Italian ventures – The Loves of Hercules and L'Amore Primitivo, and a major supporting character in Promises! Promises!. On stage, he was the male lead in The Tropicana Holiday, The House of Love, French Dressing, and other nightclub acts.
They made personal appearances on television shows such as the Bob Hope Specials. Mansfield and Hargitay had a number of business holdings, including the Hargitay Exercise Equipment Company, Jayne Mansfield Productions, and Eastland Savings and Loan. She co-wrote the autobiographical book Jayne Mansfield's Wild, Wild World with Hargitay. The book also contained 32 pages of black-and-white photographs from the film printed on glossy paper.
In 1962, she had a well-publicized affair with Enrico Bomba, the Italian producer and production manager of her film Panic Button. Hargitay accused Bomba of sabotaging their marriage. In 1963, she had another well-publicized relationship with singer Nelson Sardelli, whom she said she planned to marry when her divorce from Mickey Hargitay was finalized. The couple divorced in Juarez, Mexico, in May 1963, where Nelson Sardelli accompanied Mansfield in her legal preparations. She had previously filed for divorce on May 4, 1962, but told reporters "I'm sure we will make it up." During the acrimonious divorce proceedings, the actress attempted to force a more favorable financial settlement by accusing Hargitay of kidnapping one of her children.
Mansfield discovered that she was pregnant after her divorce. Being an unwed mother would have endangered her career, so she and Hargitay announced that they were still married. Mariska Hargitay was born January 23, 1964, after the actual divorce but before California ruled it valid. Mansfield sued to get the Juarez divorce declared legal after Mariska was born, and the divorce was recognized on August 26, 1964. A court decree in June 1967 made Hargitay the guardian of Mickey, Zoltan, and Mariska, though they continued to live with Mansfield. He married airline stewardess Ellen Siano in 1968, and she accompanied him to New Orleans when he picked up his three children after Mansfield's death. Shortly after her funeral, Hargitay sued his former wife's estate for more than $275,000 ($ million in dollars) to support the children, as he and his wife Ellen would raise them, but he lost the suit. Mansfield had once told Hargitay on a television talk show that she was sorry for all the trouble that she had given him.
Third marriage
Mansfield became involved with Matt Cimber (a.k.a. Matteo Ottaviano, né Thomas Vitale Ottaviano), an Italian-born film director, when he directed her in a stage production of Bus Stop in Yonkers, New York, costarring Hargitay. She married him on September 24, 1964, in Mulegé, Baja California Sur, Mexico. The couple separated on July 11, 1965, and filed for divorce on July 20, 1966. Cimber took over managing her career during their marriage, and guided her through a series of increasingly tawdry projects like Promises, Promises and The Las Vegas Hillbillys. Mansfield's marriage to Cimber began to collapse in the wake of her alcohol abuse, open infidelities, and her disclosure to Cimber that she had been happy only with her former lover, Nelson Sardelli. Work on Mansfield's film, Single Room Furnished directed by Cimber (1966), was suspended. The couple had one son, Antonio Raphael Ottaviano (a.k.a. Tony Cimber, born October 18, 1965). Cimber and his second wife, dress designer Christy Hilliard Hanak, whom he married on December 2, 1967, raised Tony, Mansfield's youngest child. Cimber later worked as an announcer for Married... with Children and a producer for Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling.
At the time, Mansfield had degenerated into alcoholism, drunken brawls, and performing at cheap burlesque shows. By July 1966, she started living with her attorney, Sam Brody, who had frequent drunken brawls with her and mistreated her eldest daughter, Jayne Marie. Sam's wife, Beverly Brody, filed for divorce, naming Mansfield the "41st other woman" in Sam's life.
Two weeks before her mother's death in 1967, 16-year-old Jayne Marie accused Sam Brody of beating her. The girl's statement to officers of the Los Angeles Police Department the following morning implicated her mother in encouraging the abuse, and days later a juvenile court judge awarded temporary custody of Jayne Marie to Paul's uncle William W. Pigue and his wife Mary.
Public image
Influence
Mansfield was a major Hollywood sex symbol of the 1950s and early 1960s and 20th Century Fox's alternative to Marilyn Monroe. She came to be known as the "Working Man's Monroe". She was one of Hollywood's original blonde bombshells, and, although many people have never seen her movies, Mansfield remains one of the most recognizable icons of 1950s celebrity culture.
According to Hollywood historian and biographer James Parish, Mansfield's hourglass figure (she claimed dimensions of 40–21–35), unique sashaying walk, breathy baby talk, and cleavage-revealing costumes made an enduring impact. Hollywood historian Andrew Nelson said that she was seen as Hollywood's gaudiest, boldest, D-cupped, B-grade actress from 1955 until the early 1960s.
Frequent references have been made to Mansfield's very high IQ, which she claimed was 163. In addition to English, she spoke four other languages. She learned French, Spanish, and German in high school, and in 1963 she studied Italian. Reputed to be Hollywood's "smartest dumb blonde", she later complained that the public did not care about her brains saying, "They're more interested in 40–21–35 [a reference to her body measurements]."
Trademarks
Blonde
A natural brunette, Mansfield had her hair bleached, and colored platinum blonde when she moved to Los Angeles, and became one of the early "blonde bombshells", along with Marilyn Monroe, Betty Grable, and Mamie Van Doren. In 1958, she also had her eyebrows dyed platinum. Following Jean Harlow (who started the trend with her film Bombshell), Monroe, Mansfield, and Van Doren helped establish the stereotype typified by a combination of curvaceous physique, very light-colored hair, and a perceived lack of intelligence. A review of English-language tabloids shows it to be one of the most persistent blonde stereotypes – along with busty blonde, and blonde babe.
Mansfield and Monroe have been described as representations of a historical juncture of sexuality in comedy and popular culture. Academics also added Anita Ekberg and Bettie Page to the list of catalysts of the trend of exaggerated female sexuality, along with Mansfield and Monroe. M. Thomas Inge describes Mansfield, Monroe, and Jane Russell as personifications of the bad girl in popular culture. Judy Holliday and Goldie Hawn are also identified to have established the stereotype of the "dumb blonde", typified by their combination of overt sexuality, and apparent inability to understand everyday life. Instead of the asexualized and virginal "nice girls" of earlier films, the pneumatic blonde bombshells took over the screen in the 1950s to become a cult that has been consistently emulated from that era on. Social historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg described the 1950s as "an era distinguished by its worship of full-breasted women" and attributes the paradigm shift to Mansfield and Monroe. Patricia Vettel-Becker made that observation more specific by attributing the phenomenon to Playboy and Mansfield and Monroe's appearances in the magazine.
Anatomy
Newspapers in the 1950s routinely published Mansfield's body measurements, which once led evangelist Billy Graham to exclaim, "This country knows more about Jayne Mansfield's statistics than the Second Commandment." Mansfield proclaimed a 41-inch bust line and a 22-inch waist when she made her Broadway debut in 1955, though some scholars dispute those figures. She was known as "the Cleavage Queen" and "the Queen of Sex and Bosom".
It was said that her breasts fluctuated in size from her pregnancies and nursing her five children. Her smallest bust measurement was 40-D (102 cm), which was constant throughout the 1950s, and her largest was 46-DD (117 cm), measured by the press in 1967. According to Playboy, her vital statistics were 40D-21-36 (102–53–91 cm) on her 5'6" (1.68 m) frame.
It has been claimed that her bosom was a major force behind the development of 1950s brassieres, including the whirlpool bra, cuties, the shutter bra, the action bra, latex pads, cleavage-revealing designs, and uplifted outlines. R. L. Rutsky and Bill Osgerby have claimed that it was Mansfield, along with Marilyn Monroe and Brigitte Bardot, who made the bikini popular. Drawing on the Freudian concept of fetishism, British science-fiction writer and socio-cultural commentator, J. G. Ballard commented that Mae West's, Mansfield's, and Monroe's breasts "loomed across the horizon of popular consciousness". According to Dave Kehr, as the 1960s approached, the anatomy that had made her a star turned her into a joke. In this decade, the female body ideal shifted to appreciate the slim waif-like features popularized by supermodel Twiggy, actress Audrey Hepburn, and others, demarcating the demise of the busty blonde bombshells.
Publicity
Mansfield's drive for publicity was one of the strongest in Hollywood. She gave up all privacy, and her doors were always open to photographers. On Christmas Eve 1954, she walked into publicist James Byron's office with a gift and asked him to oversee her publicity, which he did, for the most part, until the end of 1961. Byron appointed most of the people on her team – William Shiffrin (press agent), Greg Bautzer (attorney) and Charles Goldring (business manager) – and constantly planted publicity material in the media. She appeared in about 2,500 newspaper photographs, and had about 122,000 lines of newspaper copy written about her between September 1956 and May 1957.
Because of the successful media blitz, she achieved international renown. On October 10, 1959, she visited White Hart Lane, England, and watched the Tottenham Hotspur versus Wolverhampton Wanderers FC football match. By 1960, Mansfield had topped press polls for more words in print than anyone else in the world, had made more personal appearances than a political candidate, and was regarded as the world's most-photographed Hollywood celebrity. She made news on a regular basis, for malfunctioning dresses and clothing that burst strategically at the seams, to wearing low cut dresses without a bra. Things worsened when she took charge of her own publicity without advice. According to her agent William Shiffrin, "She became a freak." James Bacon wrote in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner in 1973: "Here was a girl with real comedy talent, spectacular figure and looks and yet ridiculed herself out of business by outlandish publicity."
Mansfield received her first truly negative publicity after she and Hargitay pleaded poverty when his first wife, Mary Hargitay, whom he divorced on September 6, 1956, requested additional child support for their nine-year-old, first child, Tina, in September 1958. Mansfield said she slept on the floor of her mansion, was unable to buy furniture, and spent only $71 on her daughter Jayne Marie ($ in dollars). During this marriage she had three children, Miklós Jeffrey Palmer Hargitay (born December 21, 1958), Zoltán Anthony Hargitay (born August 1, 1960), and Mariska Magdolna Hargitay (born January 23, 1964).
Publicity stunts
In January 1955, Mansfield appeared at a Silver Springs, Florida, press junket promoting the film Underwater!, starring Jane Russell. She purposely wore a too-small red bikini, lent to her by photographer friend Peter Gowland. When she dove into the pool for photographers, her top came off, creating a burst of media attention. The ensuing publicity led to Warner Bros. and Playboy approaching her with offers. On June 8 of the same year, her dress fell down to her waist twice in a single evening – once at a movie party, and later at a nightclub. In February 1958, she was topless at a Carnival party in Rio de Janeiro. She shimmied out of her polka-dot dress in a Rome nightclub in June 1962. In the three years since making her Broadway debut in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, Mansfield had become the most controversial star of the decade.
In April 1957, her breasts were the focus of a publicity stunt intended to deflect media attention from Sophia Loren during a dinner party in the Italian star's honor. Photographs of them were published around the world. The best-known photo showed Loren's gaze falling on the actress's cleavage (she was seated between Loren and her dinner companion, Clifton Webb) when Mansfield leaned over the table, allowing her breasts to spill over her low neckline, exposing one of her nipples. The Jayne Mansfield-Sophia Loren photograph was a UPI sensation, appearing in newspapers and magazines with the word "censored" hiding the actress's exposed nipple.
At the same time, the world's media were quick to condemn Mansfield's stunts. One editorial columnist wrote: "We are amused when Miss Mansfield strains to pull in her stomach to fill out her bikini better; but we get angry when career-seeking women, shady ladies, and certain starlets and actresses ... use every opportunity to display their anatomy unasked." By the late 1950s, Mansfield began to generate a great deal of negative publicity because of repeated exposure of her breasts in carefully staged public "wardrobe accidents". Richard Blackwell, her wardrobe designer (who also designed for Jane Russell, Dorothy Lamour, Peggy Lee and Nancy Reagan), dropped her from his client list because of this. In April 1967, the Los Angeles Times wrote: "She confuses publicity and notoriety with stardom and celebrity and the result is very distasteful to the public."
Signature color
Mansfield adopted pink as her color in 1954, and was associated with it for the rest of her career. Her original choice was purple, but she thought it too close to lavender, Kim Novak's signature color. "It must have been the right decision," she said, "because I got more column space from pink than Kim Novak ever did from lavender." In November 1957, shortly before their marriage, using money from an inheritance, Mansfield bought the 40-room Mediterranean-style mansion (formerly owned by Rudy Vallée) at 10100 Sunset Boulevard in the Holmby Hills section of Los Angeles. Mansfield had the house painted pink, with cupids surrounded by pink fluorescent lights, pink fur in the bathrooms, a pink heart-shaped bathtub, and a fountain spurting pink champagne; she then dubbed it the "Pink Palace". Hargitay (a plumber and carpenter before taking up bodybuilding) built the pink heart-shaped swimming pool. The year after reconstructing the "Pink Palace" as a "pink landmark", she began riding in a pink Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz convertible with tailfins, then the only pink Cadillac in Hollywood.
Rivalry
Throughout her career, Mansfield was compared by the media to the reigning sex symbol of the period, Marilyn Monroe. 20th Century Fox groomed her, as well as Sheree North, to substitute for Monroe, their resident "blonde bombshell", while Universal Pictures launched Van Doren as their substitute. The studio launched Mansfield with a grand 40-day tour of England and Europe from September 25 to November 6, 1957. She adopted Monroe's vocal mannerisms instead of her original husky voice and Texas accent, performed in two plays that were based on Marilyn Monroe vehicles – Bus Stop and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes – and her role in The Wayward Bus was strongly influenced by Monroe's character in Bus Stop.
Other studios also tried to find their own versions of Monroe. Columbia Pictures tried it with Cleo Moore, Warner Bros. with Carroll Baker, Paramount Pictures with Anita Ekberg, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer with Barbara Lang, while Diana Dors was dubbed England's answer to Mansfield. Jacqueline Susann wrote, "When one studio has a Marilyn Monroe, every other studio is hiring Jayne Mansfield and Mamie Van Doren." The crowd of contenders also included Sheree North, Kim Novak, Joi Lansing, Beverly Michaels, Barbara Nichols and Greta Thyssen, and even two brunettes – Elizabeth Taylor and Jane Russell. Mamie Van Doren, Diana Dors and Kim Novak also acted in productions of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Even when Mansfield's film roles were drying up, she was still considered Monroe's primary rival. Mansfield considered Mamie Van Doren her professional nemesis. At one point, Monroe, Mansfield, and Mamie were known as The Three M's.
Death
In 1967, Mansfield was in Biloxi, Mississippi, for an engagement at the Gus Stevens Supper Club. After two appearances on the evening of June 28, Mansfield, her attorney Sam Brody, their driver Ronnie Harrison (age 20), and three of her children – Miklós, Zoltán, and Mariska – left Biloxi after midnight in a 1966 Buick Electra 225. Their destination was New Orleans, where Mansfield was to appear on WDSU's Midday Show the next day. At about 2:25 a.m. on June 29, on U.S. Highway 90, west of the Rigolets Bridge, the Buick crashed at high speed into the rear of a 'Johnson' tractor-trailer, driven by a Mr. Rambo, that had slowed down for an approaching insecticide fog-spraying truck which was flashing a red light. The three adults in the front seat died instantly. The children, asleep in the rear seat, survived with minor injuries.
Reports that Mansfield was decapitated are untrue, although she suffered severe head trauma. This urban legend started with the appearance in police photographs of the crashed car with its top virtually sheared off, and what resembled a blonde-haired head tangled in the car's smashed windshield. However, Mansfield's death certificate, which states her immediate cause of death to be "crushed skull with avulsion of cranium and brain," rules this out. The identity of the head-like shape has not been definitively determined, but it is debated to have been either a wig that Mansfield was wearing or carrying, the top portion of her real hair and scalp, or "something else entirely." After her death, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recommended requiring an underride guard (a strong bar made of steel tubing) on all tractor-trailers; the trucking industry was slow to adopt this change. In America, the underride guard is sometimes known as a "Mansfield bar", or an "ICC bumper".
Mansfield's funeral took place on July 3 in Pen Argyl, Pennsylvania. The service was conducted by Charles Montgomery, a pastor of the Zion Methodist Church. A private funeral service was held at the chapel of the Pullis Funeral Home. A Methodist minister conducted her funeral ceremony. Mickey Hargitay was the only ex-husband present at the funeral. Mansfield was interred in Fairview Cemetery, southeast of Pen Argyl, beside her father Herbert Palmer.
In 1968, two wrongful-death lawsuits were filed on behalf of Jayne Marie Mansfield and Matt Cimber, one for $4.8 million ($ in dollars) and the other for $2.7 million ($ in dollars). The death car was saved by a private collector in Florida, where it became a roadside attraction in the 1970s. , the car is owned by Scott Michaels and is housed and shown at his Dearly Departed Tours & Artifact Museum in Los Angeles across from Hollywood Forever Cemetery.
Achievements and legacy
Awards and nominations
Jayne Mansfield received a Theatre World Award (Promising Personality) for Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? in 1956.
She received a Golden Globe Award (New Star of the year, Actress) for The Girl Can't Help It in 1957.
She received a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on February 8, 1960, for her contribution to motion pictures.
On Mother's Day of 1960, the Mildred Strauss Child Care Chapter of Mount Sinai Hospital, New York City declared her family as the "Family of the Year".
Italian film, radio and television journalists awarded her the Silver Mask award in 1962.
Mansfield received the Oscar of the Two World award in Italy.
In 1963, Mansfield was voted one of the top-10 box-office attractions by an organization of American theater owners for her performance in Promises! Promises! (a film banned in parts of the U.S.).
In 1968, the Hollywood Publicists Guild declared a "Jayne Mansfield Award" would be given to the actress who received the most exposure and publicity in a year. Raquel Welch was the first winner of the award in 1969.
The airport on the remote Norwegian island Jan Mayen is named as a tribute and a pun 'Jan Mayensfield',
Legacy
Mansfield left behind five children and a crumbling estate, including the Pink Palace. The 1991 US top 40 single "Kiss Them for Me" by the group Siouxsie and the Banshees and the L.A. Guns song "The Ballad of Jayne", are about Mansfield and her untimely death.
Mansfield is known for helping shape the "dumb blonde" stereotype. Contrary to her public persona, Mansfield was quite intelligent, and at one point could speak up to five different languages.
Her daughter Mariska Hargitay became an actress and star of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. She has won several awards for her work on the show, including a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in 2005, an Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series in 2006, and a People's Choice Award for the Drama TV Star of the Year in 2018.
Estate
After Mansfield's death, Hargitay, Cimber, Vera Peers (Mansfield's mother), William Pigue (Jayne Marie's legal guardian), and Charles Goldring (Mansfield's business manager), as well as Bernard B. Cohen and Jerome Webber (both administrators of the estate) filed unsuccessful suits to gain control of her estate. Mansfield's estate was appraised initially at $600,000 ($ million in dollars), including the Pink Palace, estimated at $100,000 ($ in dollars), a sports car sold for $7,000 ($ in dollars), her jewelry, and Sam Brody's $185,000 estate left to her in his last will ($ in dollars). In 1971, Beverly Brody sued the Mansfield estate for $325,000 ($ in dollars) worth of presents and jewelry given to Mansfield by Sam Brody; the suit was settled out of court. However, her four eldest children (Jayne Marie, Mickey, Zoltan, and Mariska) went to court in 1977 to find that approximately $500,000 in debt that Mansfield had incurred ($ million in dollars), including $11,000 for lingerie ($ in dollars), $11,600 for plumbing of the heart-shaped swimming pool ($ in dollars), and litigation had left the estate insolvent.
The Pink Palace was sold. Its subsequent owners included Ringo Starr and Engelbert Humperdinck. Cass Elliot is often falsely claimed to have owned the home. In 2002 Humperdinck sold it to developers, and the house was demolished in November of that year. What remained of her estate was subsequently managed by CMG Worldwide, an intellectual property-management company.
See also
Jayne Mansfield performances
Jayne Mansfield in popular culture
The Jayne Mansfield Story
Playboy
List of people in Playboy 1953–1959
List of people in Playboy 1960–1969
Notes
Citations
Biographies
Internet
Books
Michael Feeney Callan (1986) Pink Goddess: The Jayne Mansfield Story. W H Allen.
External links
Jayne Mansfield arrives in Houston in 1963 KPRC2 video from Texas Archive of the Moving Image
1933 births
1967 deaths
American film actresses
American people of Cornish descent
American people of English descent
American people of German descent
American stage actresses
American television actresses
Burials in Pennsylvania
New Star of the Year (Actress) Golden Globe winners
People from Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania
People from Phillipsburg, New Jersey
1950s Playboy Playmates
Road incident deaths in Louisiana
University of Dallas alumni
University of Texas at Austin College of Fine Arts alumni
20th-century American actresses
20th Century Studios contract players
Original Sound artists
Articles containing video clips
UCLA Film School alumni
American LaVeyan Satanists
Southern Methodist University alumni
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%20and%20Wellesley
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Church and Wellesley
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Church and Wellesley is an LGBT-oriented enclave in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is roughly bounded by Gerrard Street to the south, Yonge Street to the west, Charles Street to the north, and Jarvis Street to the east, with the core commercial strip located along Church Street from Wellesley south to Alexander. Though some LGBT-oriented establishments can be found outside this area, the general boundaries of this village have been defined by the Gay Toronto Tourism Guild.
Overview
While the neighbourhood is home to the community centre, parks, bars, restaurants, and stores catering to the LGBT community (particularly along Church Street), it is also a historic community with Victorian houses and apartments dating back to the late 19th and early 20th century. Many LGBT people also live in the nearby residential neighbourhoods of The Annex, Cabbagetown, St. James Town, St. Lawrence, Riverdale and the Garden District, and in smaller numbers throughout the city and its suburbs.
Church and Wellesley is home to the annual Pride Toronto celebrations, the largest event of its kind in Canada with over 90 floats and an enthusiastic crowd that numbers in the hundreds of thousands. The main Pride Toronto festival and parade is always on the last weekend in June, although a program of Pride-related events is held throughout the month of June. The Pride Parade takes place on Sunday and runs southward along Yonge Street. The Dyke March is a dyke and lesbian grassroots march that runs on the Saturday afternoon and typically ends in Allan Gardens for a community fair and Dyke Stage entertainment. The Trans March and fair open up the weekend, with the Trans March taking place the Friday evening. There is also a weekend-long community fair that closes off Wellesley between Yonge and Church and stretches down Church Street to Dundas. The community fair includes tables from a wide variety of groups involved in or associated with queer culture and services.
The 519 Church Street Community Centre is the meeting place for numerous social and political groups and became well known as an LGBT-friendly space. "The 519", as it is most often called, is a city-run community centre that has been adopted locally as the queer community centre, though its programming is not exclusive to LGBT groups and organizations. In 2007, a new wing was opened, and upgrades to the existing spaces were completed in 2009.
Church and Wellesley is also home to the AIDS Memorial, located in Barbara Hall Park, where the names of members of the community who have been lost to AIDS are etched into bronze plaques. A memorial candlelight vigil is held each year at the AIDS Memorial, during Pride Week.
Buddies in Bad Times is a theatre within the enclave dedicated to "the promotion of queer theatrical expression."
Alternate names
A number of alternative names for Church and Wellesley exist in local vernacular, including the Gay Ghetto, the Village, the Gaybourhood or the Gay Village — however, many of these "nicknames" are generic to gay villages across the English speaking world, and are therefore not descriptive of Church and Wellesley specifically, but of gay villages in general. Most people refer to it simply as Church Street or the Village, since most of the LGBT-related establishments in the area are located on that street.
Bar scene
Bars in the Church and Wellesley neighbourhood include Woody's, Pegasus On Church, Crews & Tangos, the Churchmouse, O'Grady's, Statler's, Black Eagle, Boutique, The Well, Flash, and Glad Day.
Business association
The Church Wellesley Village Business Improvement Area was established October 2002.
In the summer of 2004, the business association launched a pilot project. Every Sunday from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. throughout the summer, two blocks of Church Street, from Wellesley south to Alexander, were closed to traffic to encourage more pedestrian activity. However, this proved controversial when some business owners accused other businesses of "stealing" customers by providing street entertainment, and ended three weeks earlier than planned due to a lack of money.
The business association also sponsored the Church Street Fetish Fair in August. In 2003, San Francisco's Folsom Street Fair had licensed a consortium of Toronto community groups to use the name Folsom Fair North for a similar fetish fair. That fair was held in a large parking lot near the corner of Wellesley and Yonge in 2003 and 2004, and in Allan Gardens in 2005, and the "Church Street Fetish Fair" was widely perceived as retaliation for the Folsom fair not being held on Church Street itself. Folsom Fair North, which changed its name to FFN in 2006, was last held in 2007.
History
The portion of the neighbourhood bounded by Yonge, Jarvis, Maitland and Carlton Streets was once the estate of Alexander Wood, a merchant and magistrate in Upper Canada who was at the centre of a strange, supposedly sexually related scandal in 1810. His lands were derisively known as "Molly Wood's Bush" in the early nineteenth century — "molly" being a contemporaneous slang term for "homosexual". In the spring of 2005, a statue of Wood was erected at the corner of Church and Alexander Streets (the latter named for Wood), honouring him as a forefather of Toronto's modern gay community.
Church Street and the area around it has been familiar to the Toronto gay community for many decades. Prior to the 1970s there had been an underground (mostly male) gay scene centred on various bathhouses and bars around the city that were not exclusively gay establishments but were known to be frequented by homosexuals. Allan Gardens, just east of Church Street on Carlton, was a well-known cruising area for gay men.
From the late 1960s through the early 1980s the focus of Toronto's gay subculture was the Yonge and Wellesley area. The most notable bars for the gay subculture were the Parkside Tavern and the St. Charles Tavern on Yonge Street (one block west of Church) just south of Wellesley. During the 1970s, the St. Charles in particular was the focus of many attacks by homophobes, especially on Halloween when the tavern held an annual drag contest that had been proceeded by an outdoor promenade until attacks by homophobes hurling eggs and rotten fruit made that impossible. The Glad Day Bookshop, for many years the city's only gay oriented bookstore, opened on Yonge Street near Wellesley in the mid-1970s. There were also a number of gay-oriented businesses and clubs on the side streets running west off of Yonge street around Wellesley, in particular St. Nicholas Street, a laneway running behind the west side of Yonge, and St. Joseph Street, one block north of Wellesley running west off Yonge. The streets and alleys between Yonge and Bay also became a cruising area frequented by male prostitutes and their clients referred to by the police as "Track two".
Church Street, one block east of Yonge, had been a depressed area with low rents and started to become a predominantly gay area as gay owned bars and other businesses started opening up as an alternative to the straight owned Parkside and St. Charles Taverns whose owners were accused of being hostile of their gay clientele.
The centre of the gay life in Toronto shifted to Church Street following the 1981 Toronto bathhouse raids, an event that galvanized the gay and lesbian community in the city. George Hislop, a gay businessman and co-owner of one of the raided bathhouses, ran for Toronto City Council with his campaign headquarters located at Church and Wellesley.
In the 1980s, the 519 Church Street Community Centre became the meeting place for numerous social and political groups and became well known as an LGBT friendly space. A strip of gay bars opened along the street and many LGBT people rented apartments, joined residential co-ops or bought condos close to Church. The area became known as a friendly environment where people could be open about their sexual orientation.
Uncertain future
As times have changed and Toronto public has become more open to homosexuality, the role of Church and Wellesley as a "sanctuary" for LGBT people has been debated in recent years. Many bars and clubs throughout Toronto are now gay-friendly; establishments such as Wayla, the Drake Hotel, the Gladstone Hotel and the Beaver, although outside Toronto's traditional gay village and not technically gay bars per se, are popular destinations for young gay and lesbian club-goers.
Rental rates for both commercial and residential property have also risen significantly. In the 2000s, many privately owned businesses, including This Ain't the Rosedale Library, have been forced to close down or move to other areas due to these rent increases, and much larger corporations, such as Starbucks, The Body Shop, David's Tea, Subway and the Bank of Montreal, have settled on the street in their place. The Priape chain of gay porn and clothing stores closed its Church Street and other locations in October 2013 when it filed for bankruptcy; as of June 2019, its former location is still vacant. Many smaller gay-owned businesses have moved to cheaper areas such as Cabbagetown, located east of Church and Wellesley.
The residents of the area are now largely middle-aged men with established careers, as the high rents and increasing density of condominium development mean that the majority of gay youth cannot afford to live in the neighbourhood. Some choose to settle in nearby neighbourhoods such as St. James Town and Cabbagetown, while others no longer feel it necessary to live near the village as they can be open about their sexuality without as much fear of backlash. Many in the gay community have expressed concern about the decline of the neighbourhood's appeal with youth and its loss of small businesses. Other downtown neighbourhoods much farther afield from Church and Wellesley, including Parkdale, Trinity-Bellwoods, Riverdale and Leslieville, are also now popular areas for LGBT residents; Parkdale in particular has even earned the nickname of "Queer West Village" in recent years.
In 2013, a partnership of community organizations, including The 519 and the Church-Wellesley Business Improvement Association, launched a community survey to solicit ideas for community revitalization. Questions posed by the study included "What is the role of an 'LGBTQ village' in a modern, progressive city?" and "What must be done to support the Church-Wellesley Village to solidify its role as a major cultural community hub in the Toronto context now and into the future?"
Politics
Federal
The neighbourhood is part of the federal electoral district of Toronto Centre, currently represented in the House of Commons by Marci Ien of the Liberal Party of Canada. Previous representatives have included Bill Morneau, Bob Rae, Chrystia Freeland, and Bill Graham.
In the 2012 electoral redistribution proposals at the federal level, the neighbourhood was proposed for division, with Wellesley Street serving as the new boundary between Toronto Centre to the south and a new district of Mount Pleasant to the north. Due to community opposition, in the final report the northern boundary of Toronto Centre was shifted north to Charles Street.
Provincial
As early as 1977, politicians and journalists were already identifying the riding of St. George, the electoral district which included the Church and Wellesley village at that time, as perhaps the only electoral district in North America outside San Francisco where the support of gay voters could almost singlehandedly determine the winner. That district's MPPs in the 1970s and 1980s, Margaret Campbell (1973–1981) and Susan Fish (1981–1987), were both among the province's most vocal supporters of LGBT rights initiatives in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario during their terms in office. Despite this, the parties remained reluctant to actually nominate an openly gay candidate, for fear of backlash against the parties in other parts of the province – in 1981, the Ontario Liberal Party rejected the candidacy of Peter Maloney and the Ontario New Democratic Party rejected the candidacy of John Argue, with Maloney claiming that party insiders had dismissed him as a "single-issue candidate".
When St. George was redistributed into St. George—St. David for the 1987 election, Ian Scott defeated Fish for the seat. Scott was not openly gay during his time in the legislature, although his sexuality was something of an open secret, and he came out after his retirement from politics. When Tim Murphy won the seat in a 1993 by-election after Scott's resignation from the legislature, one of his first significant legislative initiatives as an MPP was the presentation of a private member's bill which would have expanded the rights of same-sex couples, although it was later superseded by the Rae government's failed Equality Rights Statute Amendment Act.
For the 1999 election, St. George—St. David was redistributed into the current district of Toronto Centre. George Smitherman, the first openly gay MPP elected to the provincial legislature in Ontario, represented the district from 1999 to 2010. After his resignation from the legislature to run for Mayor of Toronto in the 2010 mayoral election, he was succeeded by the openly gay Glen Murray. Murray resigned his seat effective 1 September 2017 to accept a position with the Pembina Institute, and the seat remained vacant until the 2018 provincial election. Suze Morrison was elected to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario to represent Toronto Centre in the 2018 provincial election. In 2021 Morrison came out as bisexual.
Kristyn Wong-Tam, formerly the area's representative to Toronto City Council, was elected to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario in 2022.
Municipal
In 1991, Kyle Rae was elected to Toronto City Council to represent the ward that includes Church and Wellesley, becoming the city's first out gay councillor. He represented the area until 2010, when he retired and was succeeded by Kristyn Wong-Tam, the city's first out lesbian councillor.
Since the 2022 Toronto municipal election, the neighbourhood is represented by Chris Moise.
Demographics
In 2006, the non-immigrant population accounted for 58% of the census tract population. The immigrant population was 35% and the non-permanent residents 7%. In 2011, the non-immigrant population still accounted for 58% but the non-permanent residents population rose from 7 to 10%, leaving the immigrant population at 32%.
Transportation
The Wellesley subway station on Line 1 Yonge–University provides the community with access to Toronto's extensive subway system. Other stations that are within walking distance to the community include:
Yonge–University–Spadina line:
Bloor-Yonge
College
Bloor–Danforth line:
Bloor-Yonge
Sherbourne
Castle Frank
Bus and streetcar routes that provide transportation to the community include:
75 Sherbourne (Northbound to South Drive Northbound and Southbound to Queen's Quay)
94 Wellesley (no transfer required at Wellesley station)
97(B) Yonge (Northbound to Steeles Avenue and Southbound to Queen's Quay)
141 Jarvis (Express service northbound to Mount Pleasant Road/Davisville Avenue (Davisville Village) and southbound service to Dundas Street/Jarvis Street ; Express routes require additional fare.)
506 Carlton
In popular culture
The television series Queer as Folk, a Canadian-American coproduction, was filmed in the Church and Wellesley area. Although considerable outdoor filming took place and the neighbourhood was quite recognizable within the show, the series was set in Pittsburgh rather than Toronto.
The Toronto-based comedy troupe The Kids in the Hall performed a recurring sketch, "The Steps", on their television series in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Although the sketch was filmed on a studio set, it was inspired by a real cultural touchstone in the Church and Wellesley area, a series of steps along the length of a building on the southwest corner of Church and Wellesley where residents of and visitors to the neighbourhood regularly congregated to hang out and drink coffee from the Second Cup franchise in the building.
In 2020, CBC Gem premiered the web series Queens, a comedic mystery set in the neighbourhood and starring several real life Toronto drag queens.
Notable people
Enza Anderson, transgender media personality and political candidate
Michelle DuBarry, drag entertainer
Mark Elliot, the first openly gay talk show host on CFRB
Malcolm Ingram, director Small Town Gay Bar
Kyle Rae, former Toronto city councillor
Michelle Ross, drag entertainer
See also
List of gay villages
List of neighbourhoods in Toronto
References
External links
The 519 Church Street Community Centre
Church and Wellesley Village BIA
Neighbourhoods in Toronto
Gay villages in Canada
LGBT culture in Toronto
Business improvement districts in Canada
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University%20of%20North%20Carolina%20at%20Charlotte
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University of North Carolina at Charlotte
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The University of North Carolina at Charlotte (or Charlotte) is a public research university in Charlotte, North Carolina. UNC Charlotte offers 24 doctoral, 66 master's, and 79 bachelor's degree programs through nine colleges. It is classified among "R2: Doctoral Universities – High research activity".
The university experienced rapid enrollment growth in the late 2000s and early-mid 2010s when it was the fastest-growing institution in the UNC System.
It has three campuses: Charlotte Research Institute Campus, Center City Campus, and the main campus, located in University City. The main campus sits on 1,000 wooded acres with approximately 85 buildings about from Uptown Charlotte.
History
On September 23, 1946, the State of North Carolina opened the Charlotte Center of the University of North Carolina with an enrollment of 278 students. It was founded to serve the educational needs of returning World War II veterans. Like many of the United States' "post–World War II" universities, it owes its inception to the G.I. Bill and its effects on public education. In 1949, when the state began closing the centers, the Charlotte Center was taken over by the city school district and became Charlotte College, a two-year junior college. It was first funded by student tuition payments, then by local property taxes. Classes were held at Central High School near uptown Charlotte, but by 1957, enrollment increased to 492, and the school's leaders began searching for a permanent site for the campus. They decided on a tract of land northeast of the city near the Cabarrus County border. The college became state-supported in 1958 upon joining the newly formed North Carolina Community College System and moved to its current location in 1961.
In 1963, Charlotte College became a four-year college. On July 1, 1965, it merged with the Consolidated University of North Carolina (since 1972 called the University of North Carolina) under its current name. In 1969, the university began offering programs leading to master's degrees. In 1992, it was authorized to offer programs leading to doctoral degrees.
The city of Charlotte had sought a public university since 1871 but was never able to sustain one. For years, the nearest state-supported university was away. The city submitted a bid in the late 1880s for what would become North Carolina State University, but lost to the city of Raleigh after a local farmer offered to donate land for the campus. In 1946, the city sought a state-run medical school; instead, the state expanded the existing two-year school at UNC-Chapel Hill.
Leaders of the university
Bonnie Ethel Cone, founder
Bonnie Ethel Cone (1907–2003), or Miss Bonnie as she was known to students, was chosen to as director of the Charlotte Center in 1946. From 1949 to 1965, she served as president of Charlotte College. When Charlotte College joined the UNC system in 1965, Cone served as acting chancellor until 1966.
Chancellors
Dean W. Colvard (1913–2007) was appointed the first chancellor of the young university in 1966. A North Carolina native, Colvard had served as president of Mississippi State University (MSU). At MSU he was the first president to defy university policy of not playing against integrated teams when he ordered the men's basketball team to play Loyola University Chicago in 1963. At UNC Charlotte, Colvard took on the challenge of converting the school from a small college to a four-year member of the UNC system. Indeed, he had been chosen specifically because UNC system officials believed the newly minted UNC Charlotte needed a leader with experience running a four-year university. Colvard oversaw accreditation of the university, development of University Research Park (now one of the top five largest research parks in the country), constructed the first residence halls, created the first graduate programs, and grew the enrollment from about 1,700 to just over 8,000 students. He retired as chancellor in 1978, served as Chancellor Emeritus until his death. Colvard also received the Order of the Long Leaf Pine. The Colvard building, completed on the main campus in 1979, is named in his honor and houses the Department of Psychology.
E.K. Fretwell (1923–2012), the second chancellor of the university, was named in 1979. He came to the university from Buffalo State College where he was president. Under Fretwell, campus enrollment surged from 8,000 students to over 12,000. He oversaw the creation of the Graduate School, created more graduate degrees, integrated the library's card catalog into the Internet in 1983, created the groundwork for a major business incubator, helped to develop the university's surrounding neighborhood, and increased academic grants to over $6.1 million. Fretwell retired as chancellor in 1989. He served as interim president of the University of Massachusetts system from 1991 to 1992, and in 1998, he served as the interim president of the University of North Florida. In 1996 UNC Charlotte opened the Fretwell building, dedicated in honor of him and his wife Dorrie. The building headquarters the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences.
James H. Woodward succeeded Fretwell in 1989. Woodward came to UNC Charlotte from the University of Alabama at Birmingham where he served as dean of engineering and senior vice president of academic affairs. Under Woodward, enrollment grew to over 19,000 students. Like his predecessors, he continued the growth of the Graduate School and added new doctoral programs. He oversaw the largest fundraising campaign in the school's history and its largest building boom; in the summer of 2005, no less than six buildings were actively under construction on the main campus. He also oversaw the creation of the CRI Campus. Woodward announced his retirement in 2004 and left the office of chancellor on June 30, 2005. Woodward Hall, which houses the College of Computing & Informatics, was dedicated in his honor on November 16, 2005. He is currently Chancellor Emeritus and teaches in the university's William States Lee College of Engineering.
Philip L. Dubois was the fifth leader and fourth chancellor of the university. Dubois assumed his duties as chancellor on July 15, 2005. He returned to Charlotte after serving as the president of the University of Wyoming from 1997 through 2005. Previously, he was the Provost and Professor of Political Science in the Department of Political Science (now the Department of Political Science and Public Administration) at UNC Charlotte from 1991 until 1997. Dubois, along with his wife and children, was the first chancellor to occupy the Chancellor's Residence (known as the Bissell House) on the UNC Charlotte campus that was completed in the winter of 2005. His goal was to oversee the process of the university becoming the fourth research-extensive university in the state.
2019 shooting
On April 30, 2019, a mass shooting occurred in the Woodford A. Kennedy Building on campus, killing two and leaving four others injured. The shooter, identified as Trystan Andrew Terrell, was arrested shortly afterwards.
Campuses
Main Campus – University City
The university operates several campuses in Charlotte. The Main Campus is situated on just under 1,000 acres (4 km2) of rolling land between U.S. Route 29 and N.C. Highway 49, about 10 miles (16 km) from Uptown Charlotte in the University City neighborhood. The campus is self-contained, meaning that no major roads run through the campus. The campus boasts several man-made lakes, and is heavily wooded. Near the center of campus are two gardens that attract over 300,000 visitors a year. The architecture of the original central campus, particularly the oldest buildings, are precast concrete and utilitarian-looking because they were built with limited state funds in the 1960s and 1970s. Starting in 2014, these buildings are being renovated to today's standards. Under the campus' third chancellor, James Woodward, the campus underwent major changes which continue today. The newest buildings, funded from state bonds, are being constructed in brick with neoclassical architecture. Concrete and asphalt sidewalks have largely been replaced by brick. The campus' road system is being upgraded to include landscaped medians and more trees.
Charlotte Research Institute Campus
The Charlotte Research Institute was created in 2000. It sits on a campus, attached to the main Charlotte campus, on a tract of land originally named the Millennial Campus. The research-oriented CRI Campus focuses on precision metrology and intelligent manufacturing, optoelectronics and optical communication, and software and information technology. This campus brings together faculty, students, and outside researchers to work together.
The CRI Campus also houses the new, on-campus football stadium, with 15,300 initial seats that can be expanded to more than 40,000.
Center City Campus
The third campus is in the first ward of Uptown Charlotte. This campus focuses on business and evening courses, thus catering to center city workers. Formerly located in the Mint Museum of Craft+Design, the Uptown campus moved into the $50.4 million Center City building at 320 East Ninth Street, at the beginning of the Fall 2011 semester. It is next to the ninth Street Station of the LYNX Blue Line Extension and First Ward Park, and houses the nationally ranked Master of Business Administration (MBA), Master of Urban Design (MUD), Master of Public Administration (MPA), and other graduate programs. The facility contains an art gallery, a 300-seat auditorium, and a 110-seat lecture hall. The 12-story, 143,000 square foot Center City building was designed by world-renowned architectural firm KieranTimberlake. The building features exterior glass walls individually tailored to the amount of sunlight, and cantilevered multi-story blocks which provide shade and give the building a distinctive look resembling a stack of books.
Students
Approximately 30,000 students were enrolled in the university in the fall of 2020. Students hail from 97 of North Carolina's 100 counties, 45 states, and 103 countries.
Academics
UNC Charlotte is classified among "R2: Doctoral Universities – High research activity." In 2014, UNC Charlotte was ranked the 38th top college in the United States by the Social Mobility Index college rankings. The 2013 edition of the U.S. News & World Report Best Colleges ranked the university's undergraduate program 199th overall among national universities, however by 2020 it had dropped to 227 The 2023 U.S. News rankings have it as 219th out of 443 "National Universities". Forbes placed the university at 252 from among 498 nationwide.
Colleges and programs
The university offers 171 majors that lead to 79 baccalaureate (bachelor's degree) degrees, 66 master's degree programs, and 24 doctoral programs. Fifteen degree and certificate programs are offered via distance education, from 25% to 100% online.
The university is divided into nine colleges:
College of Liberal Arts & Sciences - academic disciplines including the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and mathematics
College of Arts + Architecture - fine and performing arts (art, theater, dance, and music), as well as the School of Architecture, which is housed within the college
Cato College of Education - the school of education
College of Health and Human Services - social work, kinesiology, and athletic training; also contains the School of Nursing and programs like public health and health administration.
William States Lee College of Engineering - engineering college with undergraduate and graduate programs in the following: civil and environmental engineering, mechanical engineering and engineering science, electrical and computer engineering, systems engineering and engineering management, construction management, and engineering technology
College of Computing and Informatics - computer science, computer programming, health informatics, and bioinformatics; as of April 2021, the College of Computing and Informatics is the largest computing college in North Carolina — and the number 1 producer of computer science graduates in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia.
Belk College of Business - the business school, which offers undergraduate, graduate and executive education in five major departments: Accounting, Business Information Systems & Operations Management (BISOM), Economics, Finance, Management, and Marketing. The college offers three undergraduate degrees (Bachelor of Science in Accounting, Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, and Bachelor of Science in economics); five master's programs (Master of Business Administration, Master of Accountancy, Master of Science in Economics, Master of Science in Real Estate, and Master of Science in Mathematical Finance as well as a Professional Science Master's (PSM) program in Data Science and Business Analytics); a Doctorate in Business Administration and a Ph.D. in Business Administration concentrating in finance. The college was established in 1965, became the College of Business Administration in 1971, and was renamed the Belk College of Business in honor of the Belk family in 1990.
University College - general education college for undergraduates who have not yet declared a major
Honors College - a selective honors college that seeks to provide students with a liberal arts college experience
Graduate School - graduate school; works with the undergraduate colleges to organize the master's and doctoral degree programs
Scholarships
In 2009, UNC Charlotte received the largest single donation from a private source, when The Leon Levine Family Foundation donated $9.3 million to the university to form the Levine Scholars program. The scholarship program, named for Leon and Sandra Levine, provides a four-year scholarship to UNC Charlotte. The scholarship includes tuition, fees, books, room, four summer experiences, and an $8,000 grant for community service initiatives.
In addition to the Levine Scholars, the university offers eleven other merit-based scholarship programs.
Library system
UNC Charlotte's J. Murrey Atkins Library, named for the first chairman of the Board of Trustees of Charlotte College, has over 3.3 million volumes, including 930,000 e-books, over 400 databases, and approximately 75,000 journals, the vast majority available electronically, as well as an area for special collections. The recently renovated library includes a ten-story tower that accentuates the library's place at the heart of UNC Charlotte's campus. In April 2007, Atkins received its one-millionth volume, a copy of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. A special collections section is housed on the tenth floor at the top of the library.
Athletics
The nickname of the athletic teams are the 49ers, indicative of the fact that UNC Charlotte (then Charlotte College) was saved from permanent closure in 1949. The mascot is "Norm the Niner", a gold miner. The school's colors are green and white; gold and black are both featured in the logo and frequently used in the uniforms of several sports.
For athletics purposes, the school is known as simply Charlotte, a change made official by the athletic department on August 23, 2000. The athletic department sponsors nineteen varsity teams and competes in the NCAA's Division I. The university is a full member of American Athletic Conference following the 2022-23 calendar season. On September 18, 2008, Chancellor Dubois recommended adding a Division I FCS football program to UNC Charlotte. On November 13, 2008, the UNC Charlotte Board of Trustees voted 8–0 in favor of adding football to the university.
Men's basketball
Men's basketball, coached by Ron Sanchez. The team has reached the NCAA Tournament 11 times, including a trip to the Final Four in 1977. NBA players that once suited up for the 49ers include Boston Celtics great Cedric Maxwell, DeMarco Johnson, 2001 NBA draft lottery pick Rodney White, and Eddie Basden.
Women's basketball
Women's basketball has seen a surge in popularity on campus over the past several years, with the 2003 team, led by coach Katie Meier, reaching the NCAA Tournament for the first time. Meier was succeeded in 2005 by Amanda Butler, who left after two seasons to take over the same position at the University of Florida. Karen Aston took the reins for the 2007–08 season; Cara Consuegra served as head coach for the 2011 season. In the 2021–22 season, Consuegra led the team to a CUSA regular season and tournament championship, resulting in an NCAA tournament berth.
Baseball
Charlotte Baseball has made 6 NCAA Tournament appearances with the most recent coming in 2021. The 49ers have four conference tournament championships, and eight regular season conference championships. Baseball alums with Major League experience include Bryan Harvey (Angels), Jeff Johnson (Yankees), Chris Haney (Kansas City Royals), John Maine (New York Mets), Jason Stanford (Cleveland Indians). Fieldin Culbreth is a recently retired MLB umpire who worked the 2008 World Series.
Football
Charlotte's Division I FCS football team kicked off in 2013. It plays at Jerry Richardson Stadium, which holds approximately 15,000 people and can be expanded to hold up to 40,000 people. Its first game was a 52–7 victory against Campbell University on August 31, 2013.
The football program moved up to Division I FBS in 2015 and play as members of Conference USA. The Charlotte 49ers participated in their first bowl game in 2019 against the Buffalo Bulls in the Bahamas Bowl.
Charlotte has had 5 players selected in the NFL Draft; Larry Ogunjobi, Nate Davis, Alex Highsmith, Cameron Clark and Grant DuBose.
Men's Golf
In September 2007, the Charlotte men's golf team reached the ranking of being the top-rated golf team in the nation.
Men's soccer
The men's soccer team reached the College Cup in 1996 and 2011. The team advanced all the way to the 2011 NCAA Division I Men's Soccer Championship, losing to UNC-Chapel Hill and finishing second in the national polls. Former 49ers soccer players now playing in the MLS include Floyd Franks, Donnie Smith, Brandt Bronico, and Jon Busch. The team won a conference title in 2013–2014.
Track and field
The men's and women's track and field teams have also made national berth, throughout the school's history. Their most notable athlete is Shareese Woods. She is the most decorated athlete in school history, running professionally for ADIDAS.
Volleyball
Women's volleyball is one of the largest sponsors of the Side-Out Foundation's "Dig Pink" for breast cancer awareness.
Student organizations
There are a large number of student organizations associated with the university. Their focuses include academic, graduate, honor societies, interest, international, multicultural, political, religious, service, secret societies, and sports. UNC Charlotte also boasts a diverse Greek life, with over 10 sororities and 14 fraternities serving the campus community.
Notable alumni and faculty
Every graduate of UNC Charlotte automatically becomes a member of the Alumni Association, an organization of more than 147,000 former students whose primary purpose is to advance the interests of the university. There are no membership fees or annual dues, but there is an expectation that members will be active participants in the organization. In addition to promoting the interests of UNC Charlotte, the Alumni Association acts as a network of UNC Charlotte graduates who assist each other in their personal, professional and social development, and recognize and cheer the accomplishments of their fellow members. The association offers members a number of benefits and services. Some are in the form of information and communications, including a UNC Charlotte magazine and a quarterly electronic newsletter which keeps alumni up to date on news from the association and the university. The only requirement for membership is that alumni maintain contact with the Office of Alumni Affairs, provide an up-to-date address for alumni files, and keep the association informed about their personal progress and career achievements.
See also
Dale F. Halton Arena
Lee Rose
Jeff Mullins
Bobby Lutz
Notes
References
Further reading
Sanford, Ken. Charlotte and UNC Charlotte: Growing Up Together (2021) summary
External links
Charlotte Athletics website
Universities and colleges established in 1946
Universities and colleges in Charlotte, North Carolina
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Universities and colleges accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools
1946 establishments in North Carolina
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercedes-Benz%20S-Class
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Mercedes-Benz S-Class
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The Mercedes-Benz S-Class, formerly known as Sonderklasse (German for "special class", abbreviated as "S-Klasse"), is a series of full-sized luxury sedans, limousines and armored sedans produced by the German automaker Mercedes-Benz. The S-Class is the designation for top-of-the-line Mercedes-Benz models and was officially introduced in 1972 with the W116, and has remained in use ever since. The S-Class is the flagship vehicle for Mercedes-Benz.
The S-Class has debuted many of the company's latest innovations, including drivetrain technologies, interior features, and safety systems (such as the first seatbelt pretensioners). The S-Class has ranked as the world's best-selling luxury sedan. In automotive terms, Sonderklasse refers to "a specially outfitted car." Although used colloquially for decades, following its official application in 1972, six generations of officially named S-Klasse sedans have been produced.
In 1981, the two-door, four-seat S-Class, designated as SEC, was introduced, sharing the petrol V8 engines with its four-door version, W126. After the introduction of a new nomenclature scheme, SEC was simply renamed as S-Class Coupé. For the 1996 model year, the coupé was separated from the S-Class line and named as new CL-Class (in line with other two-door models: CLK, SL, and SLK); however, the CL-Class was reintegrated into the S-Class model line (same with CLK becoming E-Class Coupé and Cabriolet). The first-ever S-Class convertible since 1972, internally named A217, was introduced and became a one-generation model only. After the end of W222 production in 2020, the successors to the C217 coupé and A217 convertible are not planned, citing the low demand for those models and stronger demand for SUV models.
Model nomenclature
The major revision to the nomenclature scheme in 1991 renamed the S-Class with the "S" prefix that has three numbers for engine displacement in "centilitre" with no suffix for fuel type or wheelbase length. The extra information was sometimes affixed to the right-hand side of boot/trunk, denoting the diesel version (TURBODIESEL or later CDI), hybrid version (HYBRID), all-wheel-drive version (4MATIC), AMG, and MAYBACH. The second revision in 2015 allows the suffixes such as d (diesel), e (plug-in hybrid), and the h (mild hybrid) for several years before h was dropped. For 2018 model year, the model designation and AMG and MAYBACH labels switched their position to the left.
Predecessor models
"Ponton" (1954)
The W180 line debuted in 1954, and is the first lineup of "Ponton" models retroactively associated with the Mercedes-Benz S-Class. The W180 featured six-cylinder sedan, coupé, and convertible models, and was produced until 1959. It featured the 220S models (sedan, coupé, and cabriolet) powered by a 2.2L straight-6, and came to ten. The "Ponton" designation referred to its unibody construction, with the era's rounded fenders a stylistic feature on the W180 model.
The "Ponton" lineup included four- and six-cylinder models, but only the six-cylinder W180 line is considered part of the Mercedes-Benz S-Class chronology, as they were the most powerful "Ponton" versions available. The Big "Ponton" model was Mercedes' first without a conventional frame, using a unitized body/frame construction.
"Fintail" (1959)
Mercedes-Benz Fintail () is an informal nickname given to Mercedes-Benz vehicles notable for the presence of tailfins. Though never officially designated as such — Mercedes-Benz claimed they were functional and designated them , assisting to mark the end of the car in the rear-view mirror. The Fintail series replaced the Ponton series.
The exterior was designed for the European and North American markets. The W111 was a chassis code given to its top-range vehicles, including four-door sedans, produced from 1959 to 1968, and two-door coupes and cabriolets from 1961 to 1971. The W111, was initially attributed only to six-cylinder cars with 2.2-litre engines. The luxury version with big-block 3-litre engines were given the chassis code W112. The entry-level vehicles with four-cylinder engines were called W110. All three versions W110, W111, and W112, in both two- and four-door bodies, were based on the same unibody structure.
W108 (1965)
The updated and larger W108/W109 model lines were introduced in 1965. The squarish W108 line included the straight-six M129 engine powered 250S, 250SE, 280S 280SE and 280SEL. In 1968 the 300 SEL 6.3 borrowed the 6-litre V8 from the W100 600 Pullman to offer a truly high-performance luxury sedan.
During this period, the designation S (for "Sedan") was used for standard carbureted short-wheelbase models; an E (for "Einspritzung", German for fuel-injection) was added to the 250SE, 280SE and 300SE. Long-wheelbase models gained an L (for "Lang", German for "long"), reflecting an extra added in the rear passenger compartment. Since the advent of the W108 series, the Mercedes-Benz S-Class has always included two wheelbase lengths, although not all wheelbases are sold in every country.
The more powerful 300SE and 300SEL models were classified as the W109 chassis, with front and rear air suspension (rather than the coil spring based W108 rear suspension), and available burl walnut interior trim, automatic transmission, and power windows.
In 1968, the W108 line dropped the 250SE in favor of the larger-engined 280S and 280SEL; the 250S remained as an entry model until 1969; the 300SE/SEL yielded their 3.0 litre inline-6 for the intermediate SL type (W113) 2.8 litre engine, and were later offered with a 3.5-litre V8 engine (in both the SE and SEL form, not in the U.S.) and 4.5-litre (U.S. only) and 6.3-litre V8 engines (in the SEL model only). The W108/109 lines, which eventually supplanted the W111 lines, were never available with four-cylinder engines.
First generation (W116; 1972)
In 1972, Mercedes-Benz introduced the W116 line, the first to be officially called the S-Class. Produced from 1972 through 1980, the W116 series featured a four-wheel independent suspension and disc brakes. The 280, 350, and 450 (4.5L version) models featured SE and SEL versions. Production of the W116 totaled 473,035 units. This was a groundbreaking sedan for Mercedes-Benz, and for the first time in the company history, the car had an obvious, blatant and outward emphasis on safety placed above a pure styling viewpoint. The overall design incorporated numerous safety features developed from the "safety research vehicles" in the mid-to-late 1960s to the very early 1970s.
These safety features were all newly introduced passenger-car "firsts" on a production vehicle: padded door trim around the windows, heavily padded steering wheel (later to be replaced by an airbag with the Mercedes-Benz abbreviation of SRS standing for the English-language term Supplemental Restraint System), more comprehensive safety padding on the dashboard and around the interior, dual asymmetric windshield wipers, headrests with a center depression to locate the occupant's head in a more central position during a rear impact, a rain-water management system to improve visibility consisting of deep channels on both sides of the windshield and flowing into deeply channeled rain gutters, including similar designs on the side mirrors, rounded body shapes along the edges, such as the tops of the front fenders, etc., designed to ameliorate pedestrian injuries, ribbed rear taillamp lenses which would remain clearer of dirt on the recessed areas, an easy-to-access first aid kit stowed in a recessed compartment on the rear parcel shelf prominently labeled with the universally recognized "cross" symbol which represents "first aid", and several other subtle safety features related to both active and passive safety. The Mercedes-Benz S-Class is a classic chauffeur driven car, and has frequently been used as standard by car hire companies. It is comfortable and safe as well as elegant looking; ideal for drives across the countryside or high class transport on a night out.
The W116 models were large luxury sedans. The W116 was larger on the outside than the W108/W109 series it replaced, but had similar interior capacity, as the additional bulk was driven by several new and aforementioned engineering developments on car safety and occupant protection in a crash. The W116 introduced other improved passive safety features into the vehicle design, including a strengthened vehicle occupant shell. It was one of the first cars to be available with ABS, a driver's airbag supplemental restraint system (but not available at the vehicle's initial launch). Also, the W116 was the first mass production passenger vehicle offered with a turbocharged diesel engine.
The 450SE, then the most powerful model in the W116 lineup, was awarded European Car of the Year in 1974. At the New England Auto Show in 1972 held in the fall season in Boston, the Monroney Label of a 1973 450SE was right at $13,000. 1973 was the first model year of the W116 for the US market. Starting in 1975, the W116 was upgraded with a new fuel injection system to comply with revised exhaust emission standards in European markets. A slight power reduction was a result of this update, but in 1978, a series of further engine upgrades restored original performance levels under the new fuel injection systems.
Between 1973 and 1977, 997 Special Edition W116 models were made on order by Mercedes. These cars incorporated stronger body paneling and suspension and was 50 kg heavier than its normal counterpart.
Engines
With the W116 models, the V8-engines of the 350/450 SE/SEL models were now regular options. Due to the oil crisis, fuel efficiency was the major concern for the engineers, yet they still added also the high-performance, limited-production 450 SEL 6.9. This 8-cylinder model, affectionately referred to as simply "the 6.9", boasted the largest engine installed in a postwar Mercedes-Benz up to that time. Every 450 SEL 6.9 featured a self-leveling hydropneumatic suspension, and offered the ABS anti-lock braking system as an option from 1978 onwards. Also, in the United States and Canada only, Mercedes-Benz introduced the economical but powerful 3.0-liter 5-cylinder turbo-diesel OM 617 A producing in 1978, sold as the 300SD.
Second generation (W126/C126; 1979)
The W126 series premiered in September 1979, launching in March 1980 as a 1980 model and late 1980 as a 1981 model in the US and Australia replacing the W116 line. The W126 line featured improved aerodynamics and enlarged aluminum engine blocks. In Australia in 1981, the W126 S-Class won Wheels magazine's Car of the Year award. The W126 was manufactured from 1979 through 1991 with a mid-cycle update. Coupé models based on the S-Class were reintroduced with the W126 (380/500 SEC). Total sales of the W126 S-Class sedans reached 818,036 units, with an additional 74,060 coupes sold.
In December 1980, the W126 introduced a driver side airbag, as patented by Mercedes-Benz in 1971, as well as passenger side airbags (in 1988), seat-belt pretensioners, and traction control. It was the first production car to feature an airbag standard, and as late as 1991 there were only a few other manufacturers in Europe who offered an airbag. The interior featured additional courtesy and reading lamps, along with heated seats and a more advanced climate control system. A four-speed automatic transmission was standard.
Although the top of range Mercedes-Benz 450SEL 6.9 of the previous generation was not directly replaced, the W126 carried forward the hydropneumatic suspension of the 6.9 as an option on the 500SEL. A new cruise control system was offered as well. Succeeding the roadster based coupes, the W126 introduced a two-door variant, the SEC coupé.
The W126 S-Class received a mid-cycle update in 1985 that included both exterior modifications and engine upgrades.
Engines
The power plants on the W126 S-Class included straight-6 and V8 engines. Most sales came from the diesel model in Europe and straight-six models in the United States, although the V8 models were praised by contemporary journalists. The US initially received only the smaller of the two V8 engines, the 3.8 liter, which turned out to be a disaster, both due to timing chain repair issues, and to being severely underpowered, with 0- acceleration in a leisurely 11 seconds and a modest top speed of . The 5.0 liter engine was far more capable, with 0- acceleration in 7.3 seconds and a top speed of .
During the W126 mid-cycle update in 1986, both the straight-6 and V8 engines were upgraded in several models to different displacement levels (six-cylinder upgraded from 2.8 L to 3.0 L, eight-cylinder upgraded from 3.8 L to 4.2 L, and 5.0 L to 5.6 L).
Third generation (W140/C140; 1991)
In 1991, the W140 series replaced the W126 line with the first production model assembled in April of that year. The W140 grew in proportions and featured two wheelbase lengths and a shorter-wheelbase W140 coupé. Production totalled 432,732 units.
The W140 cost 25% more than the W126 that it replaced and featured double-pane window glazing, self-closing boot lid and doors, electric windows with a jam-protection feature (lowering when encountering an obstruction), rear-parking markers in the US (which appeared on the rear wings when in reverse), and a heating system which emitted warm air while residual energy was available after the engine was turned off.
In 1993, Mercedes-Benz model nomenclature was rationalized, with the SE/SEL/SEC cars becoming the S-Class and alphanumerical designations inverted (e.g. both the 500SE and 500SEL became S500 regardless of wheelbase length). In 1995, the W140 received a minor face lift featuring clear turn signal indicator lenses on the front and rear as well as headlamps fitted with separate low- and high-beam reflectors for the US market. Following the mid-year face lift, the W140 coupe and sedan (Saloon) featured Electronic Stability Control. The W140 is heavily referred to or nicknamed as the Mercedes "Shabah/شبح" (Meaning "ghost" when translated) in many Middle Eastern countries.
Fourth generation (W220; 1998)
Mercedes-Benz presented the W220 in July 1998, marketed as a sedan, only. Despite being smaller than the previous generation, the W220 offered more interior space. Production of the W220 totaled 485,000 units.
The W220 introduced air suspension, marketed as Airmatic, as well as a navigation system with center console-mounted screen display, along with its input control system, marketed as COMAND. Other options included keyless entry and ignition, a radar-controlled cruise control system marketed as Distronic and a cylinder shut-off system marketed as Active Cylinder Control. The all-wheel drive system was introduced to the North America market S-Class for 2003, and marketed as 4MATIC.
Consumer Reports classified the W220 model's reliability as "poor," its lowest rating, and called it one of the "least reliable luxury cars;" Edmunds gave the S-Class a 5 out of 5 reliability rating; and MSN Autos gave a rating of 9.0 out of 10. By March 2011, Consumer Reports revised its reliability ratings for the 2001 and 2002 S-Class to "average". Forbes described the W220 S500 as "built remarkably well." Early W220s in 1999 were recalled for issues with the trunk spring and the hydraulic fuel line; there were no recalls for the 2005 or 2006 model years.
In 2002, Mercedes-Benz introduced the world's first preemptive safety system on the W220 with a system marketed as Pre-Safe. The W220 received an exterior refresh with updates to the front fascia. The grille angle was adjusted to a slightly more upright position, and the xenon-discharge headlamps were given a new transparent housing, replacing the earlier opaque versions. The front bumper's lower air intakes were also restyled. In 2005, the S-Class was the first vehicle to receive a TÜV Institute environmental certificate from the German Commission on Technical Compliance for environmentally friendly components.
Engines
The W220 was available with more engine options than the W126 or W140. The range started with smaller 2.8 (Singapore) then 3.2L V6 motor, which was superseded by an enlarged 3.7 L V6 in the S350. The S430 was powered by a 4.3 L V8 and the S500 was powered by a 5.0 L V8. The S55 AMG was outfitted with a supercharged 5.4 L V8 motor, the S55 AMG 2000/2001 was outfitted with the naturally aspirated 5.4 L V8 motor. The S600 was outfitted with a 5.5 L M275 V12 biturbo engine, the S600 2000/2001 was outfitted with the naturally aspirated M137 5.8 L V12 engine.
In 2001, Mercedes produced a very rare S 63 AMG with a 5 speed automatic transmission and a modified version of the M137 V12 engine (displacement went up from 5.8 to 6.3 liters, 6258 cc) making at 5,500 RPM, and of torque at 4000 RPM. 70 examples were manufactured and marketed in Europe and Asia.
In 2003, Mercedes debuted the S 65 AMG, powered by a biturbocharged M275 AMG V12 engine and a 5 speed automatic transmission, it produced at 5100 RPM, and of torque at 4000 RPM. Acceleration from 0 to was officially rated at 4.4 seconds (0 to in 4.2 seconds), and the car was limited to .
Fifth generation (W221; 2005)
The W221 was introduced in the autumn of 2005 at the Frankfurt International Motor Show, with sales starting in autumn of 2005 and export to other markets beginning in 2006. Again there was a big change in design. The W221 S-Class made its North American premiere at the 2006 North American International Auto Show in January. The W221 is slightly larger in all dimensions than its predecessor, and it features three newly developed engines with up to 26% power increase. The interior is completely new, all materials have been upgraded and make for a more luxurious ride, and the center console transmission gear lever has been replaced with a column-mounted shifter. New technological features on the W221 include an infrared Night View Assist feature and the latest Mercedes-Benz pre-collision system. The W221 features sharper exterior styling (most notably wide fender arcs) and technological improvements. The W221 is the second consecutive generation of the S-Class to be solely produced in a sedan body style.
Models sold in North America are the S450 (2008– , SWB and Canada only), S400 Hybrid (2010– ), S350 Bluetec 4MATIC (2012- ), S550, S600, S63 AMG and S65 AMG; other models to be sold outside North America include the S280, S350, S300, S420 CDI and S320 CDI. The first W221 model released in North America and Japan was the S550 (called S500 outside North America), with the S600 arriving in the following spring.
In the US for the 2010 model year, the S-Class received a facelift across the entire model line in mid-2009, with a new S400 Hybrid version. Daytime LED running lights were fitted to the outer edges of the bi-xenon lamp units. The rear end was accented with a total of 52 distinctively arranged LEDs in the two taillights. Gone are the body-colored strips through the tail lamps. Other noticeable changes at the front of the car are a more pronounced arrow-shaped grille, a new front bumper with a light-catching contour, and a chrome strip below the cooling air intakes. New, sleeker rear-view door mirrors with LED turn signals were also added. The exhaust tailpipes of all S-Class variants were visibly integrated into the rear bumper. The wheels were updated to more modern-style ones. Safety is also improved on most Mercedes-Benz models with the orange-colored light reflectors mounted on the sides of the bumpers. The C-Class look at the front is removed. Some shiny chrome is added to the bottom of the doors and bumper.
In terms of performance, the S550 completes the 0– run in just 5.4 seconds. Despite weighing , the S65 AMG still makes in just 4.2 seconds. The S600 makes the same sprint in about 4.6 seconds.
The brakes continue to become more advanced with the new Brake Assist Plus system monitoring for an impending collision and increasing braking if needed, while the Distronic Plus radar-guided cruise control can now bring the car to a complete stop. This system works in outdoor conditions; a test demonstration by Mercedes-Benz in a crash-test hall resulted in embarrassment for the company when a new S-Class crashed into the back of a stationary W220 S-Class. This incident was later attributed to the radar system malfunctioning inside the radar-reflective (i.e. radar-confusing) steel test building where the event was filmed.
Upscale department store Saks Fifth Avenue offered 20 special-edition S600 sedans for sale in its 2005 Christmas catalog. All 20 cars, priced at US$145,000 each, were sold on November 22, 2005, in under seven minutes. The Saks-edition S600 sedans were finished in a mocha black exterior with an almond beige interior and were the first examples of the S600 to be sold to private owners. The S600s came with nearly every option standard. In 2007, Automobile Magazine named the W221 S-Class as one of its 2007 "All-Stars" over rivals from Lexus and BMW, and Car and Driver selected the S550 as the winner in a five-way comparison test of flagship luxury sedans, as did Motor Trend Magazine in July 2009 in a three-way comparison test, with the other two competitors being the BMW 750Li, and Audi A8L 4.2 Quattro. The W221 S-Class was also the recipient of several other motoring awards (see following).
Sixth generation (W222/C217/A217; 2013)
Officially unveiled in May 2013, the newest S-Class has a more streamlined appearance than the outgoing model. Some interesting features include a large front grille inspired by the F700 Concept car and LED lights used exclusively inside and out — a first in the automotive industry. Two strong converging character lines give the flanks a more sculpted look, while integrated exhaust tips and a large glass roof (likely optional) highlight the design.
Along with the sedan, the S-Class spawned a coupe (Mercedes-Benz C217) and convertible (Mercedes-Benz A217) as well as an extended-wheelbase 'Pullman' variant, longer than the long-wheelbase 'L.' While the short-wheelbase model carries chassis code W222, the long-wheelbase model uses chassis code V222. Unlike previous generations, Mercedes focused primarily on the development of the longer model as many customers in the fast-growing Asian markets prefer to be chauffeured. In 2016 Mercedes W222 was the last car with an S65 AMG engine.
Equipment
Inside, almost every surface is covered by a 'luxury' material – everything that looks like leather is genuine leather, and metal is used rather than any plastic alternative. The instrument cluster consists entirely of two widescreens (30.5 cm diagonal) LCDs with animated graphics. A 'Head-Up' display and gesture-responsive touchpad became options in early 2014. It featured a new infotainment system.
The W222 debuts the available Magic Body Control, consisting of windshield-mounted stereo cameras that can 'read' the road ahead (Road Surface Scan) and communicate with the Active Body Control suspension to ready it for an uneven road surface. Initially available only on 8-cylinder models and above, Magic Ride Control attempts to isolate the car's body by predicting rather than reacting to broken pavement and speed humps.
Available luxury appointments over and above what was offered in the W221 include a choice of massage type for each seat occupant (the W221 offered various intensities of a single massage type) and two levels of premium audio from the luxury German brand, Burmester.
The W222 has driver assistance systems aboard that allow it to steer a course within a lane and follow a leading vehicle for a short period (DISTRONIC PLUS with Steering Assist, also called traffic jam assistant). It will also slow or come to a dead stop and accelerate in response to traffic ahead. Mercedes engineers claim to have, under controlled conditions, ridden aboard a W222 S Class that has driven autonomously for 50 km, merely by altering parameters controlling equipment already fitted. Such modifications are not available to the general public.
Powertrain
Like the W221 S500, the W222 S-Class is powered by a more powerful twin-turbo V8 producing while the S600 will carry a twin-turbo V12. There is also a diesel-powered S350 BlueTEC version, a hybrid S400 with a electric motor and V6 engine, a diesel-electric hybrid S300 BlueTEC. An S500 Plug-in Hybrid was later introduced at the Frankfurt Motor Show (IAA) with a market release in 2014 and claimed a mileage, a CO2 rating of and up to of emissions-free driving. The S500 Plug-In hybrid is fitted with a 3-litre V6 and an electric motor. AMG fettled S63 (V8 bi-turbo) and S65 (V12 bi-turbo) LWB sedans are also on offer. All S-Class models will come with a 7-speed automatic transmission.
Seventh generation (W223; 2020)
The W223 was unveiled on 2 September 2020. This generation will not feature a coupe or convertible model as they will instead be replaced by the next generation AMG GT and SL-Class models respectively. The interior of the new model includes up to five displays, augmented reality head-up display and an ambient lighting system. Additionally, the W223 S-Class is the first car in the world to come with rear seat airbags that work by using gas to inflate supporting structures to deploy a bag that fills with ambient air, instead of conventional fully gas-inflated airbags that are widely used in automotive airbag systems. On 5 December 2022 Mercedes-AMG has debuted the S 63 E Performance V8 PHEV with 802 HP.
Engineering
Historically, the engineering of the S-Class was claimed to have been designed without regard to cost, a practice that continued unfettered up through the W140 line. The company in turn has been able to exploit this as a marketing tool, culminating in its one-time slogan, "engineered like no other car in the world." This slogan was used throughout the 1980s with the marketing of the W126 S-Class. However, following the formation of DaimlerChrysler and the cessation of engineer-sanctioned overbudgeting in the late 1990s, this slogan was dropped. The subsequent W220 model S-Class was reported to suffer from relatively lower reliability and quality rates than previous models. However, ratings have been improving since the W221.
Concept cars
In the 1980s, Mercedes-Benz built the world's first driverless cars using the S-Class, together with the team of Professor Ernst Dickmanns at Bundeswehr Universität München. The culmination of this effort was achieved in 1995, when Dickmanns' re-engineered autonomous S-Class robot completed a trip from Munich, Bavaria to Copenhagen, Denmark and back. On the autobahn, the robot S-Class achieved speeds exceeding . It suggested and executed overtaking maneuvers. The car's abilities left a big impression on many observers and are said to have heavily influenced robot car research and funding decisions worldwide.
A concept future hybrid, the F700 research car, was also unveiled at the 2007 Frankfurt Motor Show. The F700 featured three regular opening doors and a fourth door capable of 180-degree rotation. The concept also featured bulletproof and puncture-resistant tires.
Safety
Mercedes-Benz has traditionally introduced its safety innovations in the S-Class. For instance, the S-Class was the first car in Europe to incorporate airbags. S-Class safety features included innovations in active safety (accident avoidance), passive safety (collision protection), and holistic safety (integration of both active and passive safety features). Active safety features include: ABS braking in 1978 (acts to reduce braking distances and improve stopping control; co-developed with Bosch); traction control and Electronic Stability Program (ESP) in 1995 (improves driver control during difficult road conditions); and Brake Assist (provides full braking power during emergency stops). In 2005, a new infrared night vision feature was introduced (improves visibility during nighttime conditions). Despite the popular misconception, the S-Class was not the first car fitted with ABS braking technology, although some credit can be given for popularizing this now largely standard feature (ABS was initially an option on most models of the W126 S-Class). Active lane keeping became standard in 2011.
Passive safety features include: crumple zones in 1957 (vehicle body structure absorbs the force of impact); collapsible steering column (prevents the steering column from protruding into the cabin during accidents), strengthened occupant cell enhanced occupant protection during severe impacts (rollovers); pre-accident seatbelt tensioning (tightens seatbelts prior to impact), and sandwich platforms (allows the engine to slide under the occupants in a head-on collision).
PRE-SAFE, Mercedes-Benz's holistic safety feature, was introduced on the S-Class in 2002. PRE-SAFE integrates multiple active and passive safety features for a "safety net" approach to vehicle safety by attempting to prevent accidents; if accidents do occur, PRE-SAFE aims to reduce occupant injury. In the latest version of this pre-collision system, PRE-SAFE will prime the brake assist system, lock the doors to prevent accidental opening during the accident, adjust the seats, close the windows and sunroof, and tighten seatbelts during certain types of collisions. In the event an accident results in a rollover, the PRE-SAFE feature unlocks the doors and lowers the windows approximately to allow you to exit or safety workers to gain access easily.
Rear seat airbags are a world-first and will be introduced on the W223. In addition, E-ACTIVE BODY CONTROL is available for the first time on an S-Class.
S-Guard
A special armored version of the Mercedes-Benz S-Class has been produced, known as the S-Guard. Features include the capability to withstand small arms fire and certain explosive devices, a self-sealing fuel tank, and an alarm system.
In 2009, Mercedes-Benz launched a long-wheelbase version of the S-Guard, known as the Pullman Guard. This model is longer than the standard model. It also has a higher roof and a taller rear window, with a different rake. The Pullman Guard is also available in the W222 and the W223.
The S-Guard is widely used at the diplomatic level to protect world leaders. Ninety governments worldwide are known to use the S-Guard for the transport of government leaders and dignitaries. The S-Guard is built on a special production line at the S-Class facility in Sindelfingen, Germany, with specific S-Guard enhancements integrated at multiple stages throughout the production process.
Production
Most S-Class models, including the W221, are built at the Daimler AG plant in Sindelfingen, Germany, and the Mercedes-Benz-Valdez plant in Santiago Tianguistenco, Mexico. Founded by Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft in 1915, the Sindelfingen plant also produced the model 600 "Grosser Mercedes" and past generations of the S-Class. Previous S-Class models (such as the W126) were built in different locations ranging from Stuttgart to South Africa, but with recent models (such as the W220) production has been concentrated in Sindelfingen and Santiago Tianguistenco. In February 2007, DaimlerChrysler Malaysia's (now, Mercedes-Benz Malaysia) plant in Pekan, Pahang began production of S350 (model W221) vehicles and is currently assembling S300, S350L, and S500L. In all, some 2.7 million S-Class vehicles have been produced in the past forty years.
W116: 473,035
W126: 818,036
W140: 406,532
W220: 485,000
W221: ~516,000 split in 85,900 ('06), 85,500 ('07), 90,600 ('08), 53,400 ('09), 66,500 ('10), 68,969 ('11), 65,128 ('12)
W222: 373,637 split in 103,737 ('14), 106,200 ('15), 84,300 ('16), 79,400 ('17)
Sales
Awards
Notable examples of awards received by the Mercedes-Benz S-Class include the top ranking in the J.D. Power Sales Satisfaction Index from 1987 to 1990, seven time ranking as What Car? "Best Luxury Car", and five times as Fleet News "Luxury Car of the Year". The S-Class was Wheels Magazine Car of the Year for 1981 and 1999, U.S. Highway Loss Data Institute "Safest Passenger Car of the Year" in 1988 and 1989, and European Car of the Year in 1974. The S-Class is also the first car ever (2005) to receive an environmental certificate from the German Commission on Technical Compliance (TÜV). Other awards range from Popular Science Best of What's New—Grand Award 2005 to Top Gear magazine's "Limousine of the Year" for 2006.
References
Notes
Bibliography
General
Workshop manuals
External links
Mercedes S-Class—official US site
S-Class Saloon—official UK vehicle site
S-Klasse Limousine—official Germany site
A Break in Time - The New S-Class in Canada Short film for Mercedes by Christopher Kippenberger
Full-size vehicles
Flagship vehicles
Limousines
Hybrid electric cars
S-Class
Sedans
Cars introduced in 1972
1970s cars
1980s cars
1990s cars
2000s cars
2010s cars
2020s cars
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesco%20Tamagno
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Francesco Tamagno
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Francesco Tamagno (28 December 1850 – 31 August 1905) was an Italian operatic dramatic tenor who sang with enormous success throughout Europe and America. On 5 February 1887, he sang Otello in the first performance of Giuseppe Verdi's opera. He is also the earliest Italian tenor of note to have left a sizeable body of recordings of his voice. He was one of the first international male public figures to admit that he was the single parent and caregiver of a daughter from her birth.
Musical significance
The most famous heroic tenor of his age, Tamagno performed in 26 countries, gaining renown for the power of his singing, especially in the upper register. Tamagno was among the rare species of singers known as a tenore robusto or tenore di forza, and critics likened the sound of his voice to that of a trumpet or even a cannon. Tamagno's vocal range extended up to high C-sharp during his prime, but he was no mere ”belter” of high notes; his recordings provide evidence of his ability, even at career's end, to sing softly when required, modulating the dynamic levels of his voice with skill and sensitivity.
Best known as the creator of the protagonist's part in Verdi's Otello at La Scala, Milan in 1887, he also was the first Gabriele Adorno in Verdi's 1881 revision of Simon Boccanegra, a far more lyrical assignment than the "Moor of Venice". He participated in the premiere of Verdi's Italian-language version of Don Carlos when it was staged at La Scala in 1884, singing the eponymous role of the Infante of Spain. Five other operas in which Tamagno created leading roles were Carlos Gomes' Maria Tudor (in 1879), Amilcare Ponchielli's Il figliuol prodigo (1880) and Marion Delorme (1885), Ruggero Leoncavallo's I Medici (1893) and Isidore de Lara's Messaline (1899).
He was lauded for his performances of such established parts as Manrico in Il trovatore, Don Alvaro in La forza del destino, the title roles in Ernani and Poliuto, Arnold in Guillaume Tell, John of Leyden in Le prophète, Raoul in Les Huguenots, Vasco in L'Africaine, Robert in Robert le diable and Eleazar in La Juive. He excelled in the newer dramatic parts of Radames in Aida, Samson in Samson et Dalila, Alim in Le roi de Lahore and John the Baptist in Hérodiade. Yet, in his younger days, before his voice grew too robust, he was able to negotiate a role as light and graceful as that of Edgardo in Lucia di Lammermoor due to his accomplished mezza-voce singing.
Tamagno sang in approximately 55 different operas and sacred works (including Verdi's Requiem and Gioachino Rossini's Stabat Mater) during the course of his career as a soloist, which began in Turin in 1873 and continued for another 32 years, only to be curtailed by the onset of a cardiovascular affliction that killed him in middle age. With one notable exception, Tamagno largely eschewed verismo opera, considering it to be an uncomfortable fit with his stylistic training in the bel canto tradition. That notable exception was Umberto Giordano's Andrea Chénier. He studied the score of Chénier with Giordano in 1898 and earned accolades for his magisterial delivery of the tenor lead's four showpiece solos at ensuing productions of the work. He was on friendly terms, too, with Giordano's rival Giacomo Puccini. In 1892, he took part in a revival of Puccini's flawed early opera Edgar which was staged in Madrid under the supervision of the composer, but even Tamagno's involvement in the enterprise was not enough to reinvigorate Edgar and it remains rarely heard. (Tamagno also ventured a few performances of Pietro Mascagni's archetypal verismo piece, Cavalleria rusticana, in New York City in 1894.)
To paraphrase Tamagno's New York Times obituary of 1 September 1905, such was the extraordinary facility of the tenor's upper register, he made the hurling forth of his high A, B and C sound as easy as everyday speech. Like all singers, however, he had his vocal shortcomings and bad habits. The vibrant, power-packed tone of his voice, while thrilling, could never be described as "honeyed" or "seductive" and this reduced the effectiveness of his contribution to the more intimate passages of love duets, such as the one for the protagonist and Desdemona that crowns Act One of Otello. He was not an adroit sight-reader, justifying this limitation by insisting that he was an emotional person who preferred to deliver his music from the "heart" rather than from the "head". Critics occasionally reprimanded him for striving to maximise the excitement factor of his performances by holding on to top notes longer than necessary and by sometimes pushing them sharp. He was also chided intermittently for getting behind or ahead of the conductor's beat.
Tamagno pursued a busy and highly acclaimed career that lasted for more than three decades. During that time, he sang at almost every important theatre in Europe, South America and the United States. While he was not a sophisticated actor or a flawless musician, his huge voice and volcanic renditions of the most forceful tenor roles in the Italian and French repertoires had a tremendous impact on audiences, enabling him to build a worldwide reputation, and to charge promoters on both sides of the Atlantic top-tier fees for his services.
Life and singing career
Born into a large family in the northern Italian city of Turin (Torino) in 1850, Tamagno was the son of a wine-seller who ran a modest trattoria. His vocal promise manifested itself early, and although encouraged by his parents to learn a trade, he was still able to take singing lessons with the conductor and composer Carlo Pedrotti at Turin's Liceo Musicale music school and gain experience as a chorister.
In 1873, Tamagno completed his musical studies, and having got a stint of compulsory military service out of the way, he undertook a few small parts at Turin's Teatro Regio (Royal Theatre), of which institution Pedrotti was the director. He then made the most of an opportunity to execute a major operatic role, bursting into prominence on 20 January 1874 with a sensational performance as Riccardo in Giuseppe Verdi's Un ballo in maschera at the Teatro Bellini, Palermo. Tamagno embarked on a series of follow-up singing engagements in Ferrara, Rovigo, Venice and Barcelona which raised his profile further and enabled him to make his debut at Milan's La Scala in 1877.
La Scala was Italy's principal opera theatre, and Tamagno became a core member of its company of singers. His voice continued to mature at La Scala, reaching its full potential after a few years of spirited use in a variety of operas. He enjoyed the added advantage of working closely with Verdi, and his vocalism acquired a discipline and polish that hitherto it had lacked. According to The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Opera, he eventually took part in every La Scala season until the end of 1887 and appeared there again in 1901 as a guest artist. He did not completely turn his back on Turin, however, and he found time to sing periodically in his hometown; indeed, his last known public engagement occurred in Turin in 1905.
Argentina was an overseas bastion of Italian opera throughout this period, and Tamagno undertook the first of several well-remunerated visits to Buenos Aires in 1879. Earlier, in 1875–1876, he had sung in Spain. His international career did not take off explosively until 1888, with the role of Otello—which Verdi had written with Tamagno's voice in mind—serving as his global calling card. Music-performance historian John Potter noted regarding Otello in his 2009 book, Tenor: History of a Voice (Yale University Press, p. 61): "The title role was one of the most taxing tenor parts ever written and was created specifically for the unique talents and vocal persona of Tamagno. The requirements of the role, an imposing physical presence capable of combining lyrical sweetness with stentorian declamation that ranges from a rich baritonal middle to a ringing upper register, have made it problematic to cast ever since."
Tamagno toured sedulously during the final dozen years of the 19th century, accepting lucrative invitations to perform Otello and other strenuous operatic roles in countries as diverse as England, France, Portugal, Spain (again), Germany, Austria, Russia, Uruguay, Brazil, Mexico and Argentina. He performed often at the fashionable Monte Carlo Opera and appeared at key musical venues in the North American cities of New York City, Chicago, Boston, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and San Francisco. Tamagno's obituary in the New York Times says that he sang in the United States for the first time in 1890. The prominent American impresario Henry Eugene Abbey managed him during that trans-Atlantic visit.
To give just five specific examples of Tamagno's foreign engagements in the wake of the 1887 premiere of Otello, he performed at the New York Metropolitan Opera in 1894–1895, at London's Lyceum Theatre in 1889, at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg in 1896-97, at the Paris Opera in 1897, and at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in 1895 and 1901. (During his London seasons, he also sang privately for Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle.)
Orchestral conductors of the calibre of Franco Faccio, Luigi Mancinelli and Arturo Toscanini partnered Tamagno during his heyday, and he appeared opposite some of the most illustrious sopranos, baritones and basses in operatic history. Veteran opera-goers regarded Tamagno as being the legitimate successor to Enrico Tamberlik (1820–1889), the dominant Italian heroic tenor of the mid-19th century, while Jean de Reszke (1850–1925) was widely considered to be the finest of his tenorial coevals. An elegant lyric-dramatic tenor of the French school, de Reszke's repertoire overlapped Tamagno's to some extent, and although he could never outsing his Italian rival, he had a rounder voice and a suaver stage presence. He was also the foremost male exponent of Richard Wagner's operas to be heard on the stages of London and New York during the late-Victorian Era. Tamagno, however, refused to perform Wagnerian works, even in Italian translation; he believed that the tessitura of the music written for Wagner's tenor heroes lay too low to suit his vocal range.
Tamagno lived long enough to witness the rise to fame of the young Enrico Caruso (1873–1921). He admired Caruso's ability, predicting as far back as 1898 that Caruso would go on to become the number-one Italian tenor of the 20th century. As M. J. Phillips-Matz observes in her 2002 Puccini biography, Tamagno and Caruso actually appeared on the same stage in February 1901, during a concert at La Scala. The concert had been organised by Toscanini as a commemorative tribute to the recently deceased Verdi. (In it, Tamagno sang an extract from La forza del destino and Caruso led the quartet from Rigoletto.) Opera commentator Michael Scott states that Tamagno gave his last performance as Otello in Rome in 1903, when he starred in a gala production mounted for Kaiser Wilhelm II.
A single father who never married, Tamagno possessed an affable personality in addition to a shrewd business brain and a careful attitude to money. Soprano Nellie Melba's most recent biographer, Ann Blainey, recounts how Melba reacted to Tamagno's penny-pinching when she twice encountered demonstrations of it during the 1894-1895 New York Met season:
"His astounding voice was said to have 'the metallic penetration of an eight-inch [artillery] shell', but at heart he remained a simple peasant, and his peasant-like parsimony was a source of amusement. One night Melba and Jean de Reszke watched open-mouthed as he pocketed the after-dinner candies and souvenired a bunch of orchids from the table. Soon after, at a lunch, Melba saw him gather up his neighbour's uneaten cutlets and wrap them in a newspaper. He said they were for his dog, but Melba guessed they were for his own dinner." (See I Am Melba, Black Inc. Books, Melbourne, Australia, 2008, p. 149.)
Tamagno had a bullish physique but a chronic cardiac ailment caused his health to deteriorate during the early 1900s. Although this ailment forced him to quit the operatic stage, he continued to give recitals and appear in concerts, the final one of which was held in Ostend, Belgium, in 1904. He sang briefly in public for the last time in March the following year and withdrew to the tranquility of a villa in Varese, Lombardy, that he had owned since 1885 and had remodelled extensively. Tamagno's medical condition failed to improve, however, and he suffered a heart attack while at the villa. He was confined to his bed, experienced a relapse and died on 31 August 1905, aged 54. His body lies interred in an elaborate stone mausoleum at Turin's General Cemetery.
Tamagno's beloved daughter Margherita, who had been born out of wedlock, and for whom he cared from her birth, writing to her throughout his career and her childhood incredibly moving letters, inherited his considerable estate, according to biographer Ugo Piavano. Piavano's definitive biography, Otello Fu: La Vera Vita di Francesco Tamagno, il "tenore-cannone", was published in Milan in 2005 by Rugginenti Editore to mark the 100th anniversary of the singer's death. Both Volume One of Michael Scott's The Record of Singing (published by Duckworth, London, 1977) and J. B. Steane's The Grand Tradition: 70 Years of Singing on Record (Duckworth, London, 1974) contain evaluations of Tamagno's voice and artistry. Furthermore, the Teatro Regio di Torino has acquired many of Tamagno's costumes and other items relating to his operatic career, while his butterfly collection can be viewed in Varese at the Villa Mirabello.
Recordings
Tamagno's intensely bright, steel-tipped voice with its stentorian timbre, open production, vigorous (but never disruptive) vibrato and incisive declamation is preserved on two batches of technologically primitive recordings of operatic items. They were made during February 1903 at Tamagno's holiday retreat in Ospedaletti and during April 1904 at a 'studio' in Rome.
The British Gramophone & Typewriter Company, HMV/EMI's predecessor, produced all of Tamagno's recordings (issued in the US by the Victor Talking Machine Company), which were released on shellac discs 10 or 12 inches in diameter and play correctly at speeds in the range of 73 to 77 rpm (the 78 rpm standard was not established until the 1920s). It dispatched one of its best engineers, Will Gaisberg, to Italy to handle the recording sessions. (Such sessions could be a daunting experience for singers of Tamagno's generation, who were accustomed to performing before an audience in an opera house environment.) The company paid Tamagno a cash advance of 2,000 pounds sterling to make his first lot of recordings. He also received royalties from the company for every individually numbered, custom-labelled pressing that sold. Roland Gelatt's revised edition of The Fabulous Phonograph (Collier Books, New York, 1977, p. 119) asserts that Tamagno's recording contract, signed in December 1902, was the first to embody "the royalty principle".
Gelatt states that Tamagno approved 19 recordings from his Ospedaletti session for release to the public. They went on sale in April 1903 and were heavily advertised in the press, with Tamagno billed as the world's greatest tenor. Buyers were charged one pound sterling, or its equivalent in other currencies, per disc; in comparison, Caruso's early 10-inch discs (made in Italy the previous year) sold for just 10 shillings or an equivalent amount of money. The amount charged for each of Tamagno's discs represented at least a week's wages for the common man and for that outlay he would receive a single-sided product, sometimes containing less than two minutes of music. Clearly, Tamagno's recordings were aimed at upper-crust customers, as were those made by such eminent contemporaries of his as Nellie Melba, Adelina Patti, Pol Plançon and Mattia Battistini.
The small group of composers featured on Tamagno's combined recorded output of 1903 and 1904 comprises Giacomo Meyerbeer, Camille Saint-Saëns, Jules Massenet, de Lara, Giordano, Rossini and, naturally enough, Verdi. Apart from Otello, the operas from which he elected to record arias, in multiple takes, were Il trovatore, Guillaume Tell (Guglielmo Tell), Le prophète (Il profeta), Samson et Dalila (Sansone e Dalila), Hérodiade, Messaline and Andrea Chénier.
When he stepped before the recording horn, Tamagno was in poor health and semi-retirement after a long and demanding career. Consequently, his voice, although still astonishingly powerful and kept under firm technical control, was no longer at its peak, though the recording technology of the time was almost certainly not equal to the task of capturing the full breadth of Tamagno's ability at the time.
Potter pays tribute to Tamagno's vocal attributes in his book about the history of tenor singing, averring that his "recorded legacy" is "a priceless connection with Verdi" while Steane, writing in The Grand Tradition (pp. 19–23), praises Tamagno's discs as "artistic and devoted performances by a singer of exceptional gifts" with a "great voice". Scott declares in The Record of Singing (pp. 131–133) that Tamagno's Otello recordings are "invaluable historically" with the Esultate in particular displaying "amazing force" and all of them exhibiting an "intensity of utterance" that is "unique". Indeed, Henry Pleasants, author of The Great Singers, goes so far as to say that the "searing despair" of Tamagno's version of Otello's death aria, Niun mi tema, "is possibly unmatched by anything else on wax" (Macmillan Publishing, revised edition, London, 1983, pp. 252–254).
Symposium Records has released a two-CD anthology of Tamagno's published and unpublished recordings (catalogue number 1186/87), while an extensive selection of them was issued on the Pearl/Opal label (CD 9846) in 1990. Those wanting to hear Tamagno in a broader context may wish to consult EMI's three-CD La Scala Edition, Volume One, 1878-1914 (CHS 7 64860 2). This edition contains four Tamagno tracks in expertly re-mastered transfers plus recordings made by a number of his colleagues, including baritone Victor Maurel, the creator of the role of Iago in Otello, and bass Francesco Navarini, the creator of the role of Lodovico in the same opera.
Of more specialist interest (but bringing us closer to Tamagno in recording quality) has been a 2007 release of all of Tamagno's extant 12-inch records on high quality vinyl discs (pressed from the original metal "masters"/parts found in a German archive) by the United Kingdom firm Historic Masters. This was followed in 2012 by all the ten inch recordings.
All but one of Tamagno's recordings (published or not) have been found. The Historic Masters boxed set is accompanied by a biographical essay written by Michael Aspinall, who also discusses Tamagno's discography and appraises his vocal technique. The set contains, among other things, a recently discovered recording of the Oath Duet from Otello ('Si pel ciel') and an aria from Messaline that was previously known only from a private test pressing once belonging to Tamagno. The baritone on the Otello duet is anonymous, but Aspinall believes it might be Tamagno's younger brother, Giovanni, who had a minor singing career. Aspinall concludes his essay thus: "Tamagno is one of the most charismatic and communicative singers ever to record his voice for the wonderment of future generations ... The privilege of listening to the complete recordings of Tamagno helps us to realise his immense stature among the great names of music drama."
References
External links
International Jose Guillermo Carrillo Foundation, accessed 20 May 2010
Biography from Stanford University, accessed 20 May 2010
Francesco Tamagno includes his 1903 recording of the death of Otello, accessed 20 May 2010
Historic Masters, Notes to Issue 32- Tamagno 10″ Records, accessed 20 May 2010
Historic Masters Tamagno discography, accessed 20 May 2010
The Career of Francesco Tamagno, article by Michael Aspinall, 2007, accessed 20 May 2010
History of the Tenor / Francesco Tamagno / Sound Clips and Narration
1850 births
1905 deaths
Musicians from Turin
Italian operatic tenors
19th-century Italian male opera singers
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National%20Democratic%20Alliance
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National Democratic Alliance
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The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) () is a centre-right to right-wing conservative Indian political alliance led by the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). It was founded in 1998 and currently controls the government of India as well as the government of 15 Indian states and one Union territory.
Its first chairman was Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. L. K. Advani, the former Deputy Prime Minister, took over as chairman in 2004 and served until 2014, and Amit Shah has been the chairman since 2014. The coalition ruled from 1998 to 2004. The alliance returned to power in the 2014 general elections with a combined vote share of 38.5%. Its leader Narendra Modi was sworn in as Prime Minister of India on 26 May 2014. In the 2019 general election, the alliance further increased its tally to 353 seats with combined vote share of 45.43%.
History
The NDA was formed in May 1998 as a coalition to contest the general elections. The main aim of the NDA was to form an anti-Indian National Congress coalition. It was led by the BJP, and included several regional parties, including the Samata Party and the AIADMK, as well as Shiv Sena, but Shiv Sena broke away from the alliance in 2019 to join the Maha Vikas Aghadi with Congress and the NCP. Samata Party is also broke away from alliance in 2003 after formation of Janta Dal (United). The Shiv Sena was the only member which shared the Hindutva ideology of the BJP. After the election, it was able to muster a slim majority with outside support from the Telugu Desam Party, allowing Atal Bihari Vajpayee to return as prime minister.
The government collapsed within a year because the AIADMK withdrew its support. After the entry of a few more regional parties, the NDA proceeded to win the 1999 elections with a larger majority. Vajpayee became Prime Minister for a third time, and this time served a full five-year term.
The NDA called elections in early 2004, six months ahead of schedule. Its campaign was based around the slogan of "India Shining" which attempted to depict the NDA government as responsible for a rapid economic transformation of the country. However, the NDA suffered a defeat, winning only a 186 seats in the Lok Sabha, compared to the 222 of the United Progressive Alliance led by the Congress, with Manmohan Singh succeeding Vajpayee as prime minister. Commentators have argued that the NDA's defeat was due to a failure to reach out to the rural masses.
Structure
The National Democratic Alliance does not have a formal governing structure such as an executive board or politburo. It has been up to the leaders of the individual parties to make decisions on issues such as sharing of seats in elections, allocation of ministries and the issues that are raised in Parliament. Given the varied ideologies among the parties, there have been many cases of disagreement and split voting among the allies.
Owing to ill health, George Fernandes, who was the NDA convener until 2008, was discharged of his responsibility and replaced by Sharad Yadav, the then national president of the JD(U) political party. On 16 June 2013, the JD(U) left the coalition and Sharad Yadav resigned from the role of the NDA convener. Then the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh N. Chandrababu Naidu was made the NDA convener. Later in 2018, after the withdrawal of TDP from NDA the post of convenor was vacant. However NDA allies like LJP demanded the appointment of a convenor in 2019 for better coordination of the allies.
On 27 July 2017 JD(U) with the help of BJP formed the government in Bihar. Later, on 19 August 2017 JD(U) formally rejoined the NDA after 4 years.
Strength in parliament
Governments
The BJP has previously been the sole party in power in Delhi, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Rajasthan. It has also ruled Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh as part of coalition and alliance governments.
The NDA has never been in power in 3 states – Kerala, Telangana, (between 1999 and 2004 BJP in alliance with TDP ruled a United Andhra Pradesh) and West Bengal. But BJP led NDA has ruled many local governing institutions including corporations, municipalities, panchayats and has also been elected to many Lok Sabha constituencies, state assembly constituencies and local body divisions and wards in these 3 states.
List of current NDA governments
Strength in legislative assemblies
Strength in state legislative assemblies
List of presidents and vice presidents
Note that it refers to nomination by alliance, as the offices of President and Vice President are apolitical.
Presidents
Vice presidents
List of prime ministers
List of deputy prime ministers
List of chief ministers
List of current deputy chief ministers
Candidates in elections
Lok Sabha general elections
1998 Indian general election
1999 Indian general election
2004 Indian general election
2009 Indian general election
2014 Indian general election
2019 Indian general election
2024 Indian general election
Member parties
As of July 2023, there are 36 political parties that are members of the alliance. The Bharatiya Janata Party and the National People's Party are the only two political parties being recognised by the Election Commission of India as national parties. Other parties in the alliance are either recognised as state level parties or unrecognised parties.
Electoral history
Lok Sabha 1998 general election
Lok Sabha 1999 general election
Lok Sabha 2004 general election
Lok Sabha 2009 general election
Lok Sabha 2014 general election
Contested by BJP symbol lotus
Indhiya Jananayaga Katchi
Kongunadu Makkal Desia Katchi
Puthiya Needhi Katchi
Lok Sabha 2019 general election
Contested by AIADMK two leaves symbol
Puthiya Tamilagam
Puthiya Needhi Katchi
Lok Sabha 2024 general election
Timeline
2009
Telangana Rashtra Samithi in United Andhra Pradesh, joined the NDA on 10 May 2009 and subsequently denied the fact that it joined NDA and clarified that they only extended the support.
2011
Kuldeep Bishnoi led Haryana Janhit Congress (BL) Joined NDA.
Ramdas Athawale led Republican Party of India (A) Joined NDA.
Ajit Singh led Rashtriya Lok Dal withdrawn from the NDA.
2012
Presidential election
NDA nominated P. A. Sangma as its presidential candidate who lost against UPA's Pranab Mukherjee.
Vice-Presidential election
Jaswant Singh was named as the candidate for the post of Vice-President against UPA's Hamid Ansari. Ansari won his second term in office.
2013
On 16 June 2013, Nitish Kumar led Janta Dal United has withdrawn from NDA.
On 13 September 2013, Narendra Modi declared as PM candidate for 2014 Elections.
2014
On 1 January 2014, Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhhagam leader Vaiko has announced that MDMK formally joined back to NDA.
The two small parties viz Kongunadu Munnetra Kazhagam and Indhiya Jananayaga Katchi have also joined NDA.
The BJP would like two more southern parties such as Desiya Murpokku Dravida Kazhagam, Pattali Makkal Katchi to also join the alliance.
In Maharashtra, two regional political outfits, Swabhimani Paksha and Rashtriya Samaj Paksha, joined NDA in January.
The coalition of five parties is termed as Mahayuti. So in Maharashtra now NDA alliance consist of 5 Parties viz BJP, Shiv Sena, Republican Party of India, Swabhimani Paksha and Rashtriya Samaj Paksha.
On 23 February 2014, Rashtriya Lok Samata Party led by Upendra Kushwaha joined NDA and will be contesting at 3 Lok Sabha seats in Bihar.
On 27 February 2014 Lok Janshakti Party led by Ram Vilas Paswan joined NDA It would contest at 7 Lok Sabha Seats in Bihar during 2014 Elections.
DMDK will be fighting Lok Sabha Election through an alliance with BJP led NDA.
Pattali Makkal Katchi led Social Democratic Alliance are the other allies of NDA in Tamil Nadu.
Maharashtra Navnirman Sena : Its President, Raj Thackeray announced external support to NDA on 9 March 2014 which is marked as Party's formation day, supporting Narendra Modi as Prime Ministerial Candidate.
Indian National Lok Dal : Its Gen. Sec., Sh. Ajay Singh Chautala announced external support to NDA, supporting Sh. Narendra Modi as Prime Ministerial Candidate.
Lok Satta Party : President Shri J P Narayan announced external support to NDA, supporting Sh. Narendra Modi as Prime Ministerial Candidate
All India NR Congress (AINRC) formally joined NDA on 13 March 2014 and will be contesting in Puducherry.
Telugu Desam Party (TDP) rejoined NDA on 6 April, after breaking alliance in 2004 post general election defeat.
Shiv Sena Though Shiv Sena has quit Mahayuti in Maharashtra, before Maharashtra Legislative Assembly Elections 2014, but has decided to remain with NDA at the centre.
All Jharkhand Students Union clinched an alliance with BJP for Jharkhand Assembly elections under which its junior partner will contest eight of the 81 seats in the state.
2015
Bharatiya Janata Party on 27 February 2015 clinched an alliance with People's Democratic Party for Government Formation in Jammu and Kashmir under which its CM will be from PDP.
In the month of November, BJP alliance lost the legislative assembly election in Bihar to the Mahagathbandhan comprising JD(U), RJD and the INC.
2016
In January 2016, Bharatiya Janata Party clinched an alliance with Bodoland People's Front in Assam.
In March 2016, after a meeting with AGP President Atul Bora and former Chief Minister Prafulla Kumar Mahanta, BJP formed an alliance with Asom Gana Parishad for upcoming Assam legislative assembly election 2016.
BJP also aligned with Rabha and Tiwa Tribe outfit Rabha Jatiya Aikya Manch and Tiwa Jatiya Aikya Manch.
In March 2016, BJP forged an alliance with Kerala-based Ezhava outfit Bharath Dharma Jana Sena Party for Kerala Elections 2016.
Following BJP's victory in the Assam Legislative Assembly Elections 2016, the party formed an alliance of like-minded non-Congress parties in the Northeast, called the North-East Democratic Alliance, consisting of 11 regional parties of Northeast India.
Himanta Biswa Sarma, BJP leader from Assam has been appointed Convener of the regional alliance.
On 21 December 2016, Khandu was suspended from the party by the party president and Takam Pario was named as the next likely Chief Minister of Arunachal Pradesh replacing Khandu after People's Party of Arunachal suspended Khandu along with 6 other MLAs.
In December 2016, Khandu proved majority on the floor with 33 of the People's Party of Arunachal's 43 legislators joining the Bharatiya Janata Party as the BJP party increased its strength to 45 and it has the support of two independents. He became second Chief Minister of Arunachal Pradesh of Bharatiya Janata Party in Arunachal Pradesh after the 44 days lead Gegong Apang government in 2003.
2017
In January 2017, Bharatiya Janata Party's alliance partner Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party in Goa and Shiv Sena in Maharashtra came together to contest Goa Legislative Assembly election in 2017 against the BJP with another Sangh Pariwar group called Goa Suraksha Manch.
The results of the 2017 Goa Assembly election gave rise to a hung assembly since no political party could achieve a complete majority of 21 in the 40 member Goa Legislative Assembly.
The Indian National Congress emerged the largest party with 17 seats but ultimately, the Bharatiya Janata Party which emerged victorious in 13 constituencies formed the government with the support of the Goa Forward Party, Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party and independents.
The Goa Forward Party expressed its support to the Bharatiya Janata Party on the condition that the then Union Defence Minister of India Manohar Parrikar would return to Goa as the Chief Minister of Goa.
On 15 March 2017, N. Biren Singh was sworn as the Chief Minister by having coalition with NPP, NPF, LJP and others, the first time that BJP formed a government in Manipur, though the INC emerged as the single largest party.
On 27 July 2017, Janata Dal (United) rejoined NDA and formed a coalition government with Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Bihar with Nitish Kumar as the Chief Minister and Sushil Kumar Modi as the Deputy Chief Minister, and with that BJP completed its domination in Hindi belt.
2018
On 9 March 2018, Biplab Kumar Deb was sworn as the Chief Minister having a pre-poll alliance with IPFT, the first time that BJP formed a government in Tripura.
TDP withdrew from the NDA on 16 March 2018 due to failure in fulfilling the promises made in the State Reorganisation Act and not granting the Andhra Pradesh special status by the BJP.
Rashtriya Lok Samata Party (RLSP) withdrew from the NDA on 10 December 2018, citing a lack of progress on development in Bihar.
In December 2018's state elections, the NDA lost elections in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Chhattisgarh to the INC. In Chhattisgarh, BJP was defeated by the INC with 3/4th majority. It was also defeated by the TRS in Telangana and BJP managed to win only 1 seat out of the 119 constituencies in Telangana
2019
On 7 January 2019, the AGP withdrew from the NDA and also from the Assam Government on the issue of citizenship amendment bill.
On 21 January 2019, the GJM withdrew from the NDA and extended the support to Mamata Banerjee .
On 19 February 2019, AIADMK and PMK rejoined NDA and BJP announced that "They will contest 5 Lok sabha seats in Tamil Nadu".
On 19 February 2019, Pattali Makkal Katchi rejoined NDA
BJP announced that "They will contest 5 Lok sabha seats in Tamil Nadu".
On 10 March 2019, DMDK rejoined NDA.
On 8 March 2019 in Sikkim, BJP joined hands with opposition party SKM
On 12 March 2019 in Assam, BJP joined hands with old ally AGP
On 12 March 2019 in Maharashtra, Rayat Kranti Sanghatana is a part of NDA
On 25 March 2019 in Tamil Nadu, Puthiya Needhi Katchi is a part of Alliance
On 4 April 2019 in Rajasthan, BJP joined hands with the RLP
On 5 April 2019 in Uttar Pradesh, Nishad Party joined hands with NDA
On 23 May 2019 NDA won the 2019 Indian General election with record breaking 352 seats with its allys
In May 2019, NDA lost state elections of Andhra Pradesh & Odisha
In May 2019, NDA won the state elections of Arunachal Pradesh & Sikkim.
On 25 October 2019 in Haryana,
JJP joined hands with NDA to forming a stable government at Haryana with BJP
On 11 November 2019 in Maharashtra,
Shiv Sena exited from the NDA, as BJP was not willing to agree for Sharing CM Post with Shiv Sena to form government in Maharashtra.
In November 2019, NDA won the state election of Haryana
In November 2019, NDA lost the state election of Maharashtra
On 15 November 2019 in Jharkhand,
BJP, AJSU sever ties in Jharkhand days before Assembly elections 2019.
On 23 November 2019 in Maharashtra, NCP (Ajit Pawar Faction) joined NDA, Ajit Pawar took oath as Maharashtra's Deputy Chief Minister.
On 26 November 2019 in Maharashtra, Ajit Pawar resigns as Maharashtra's Deputy Chief Minister. With immediate effect Devendra Fadnvis also resigns from the post of CM of Maharashtra. His term becomes the shortest term as Maharashtra's Chief Minister.
In December 2019, NDA lost the state election of Jharkhand.
2020
On 16 January 2020 Jana Sena of Pawan Kalyan announced that tying up with Bharatiya Janata Party in Andhra Pradesh, this decision came after Chief minister Y. S. Jagan Mohan Reddy's intention to decentralise the capital, instead of developing Amaravati.
Jharkhand Vikas Morcha (Prajatantrik) led by Babulal Marandi merged with the Bharatiya Janata Party on 17 February 2020, at Jagannathpur Maidan, Ranchi in presence of Union Home Minister Amit Shah, BJP president Jagat Prakash Nadda and former Chief Ministers of Jharkhand Arjun Munda and Raghubar Das.[excessive citations] Earlier, Marandi expelled MLAs Pradeep Yadav and Bandhu Tirkey from the party for "anti-party activities". Both of them later joined Indian National Congress in its Delhi headquarters.
In February 2020, NDA lost the state election of Delhi
In August 2020, Hindustani Awam Morcha re-joined NDA & granted 7 seats to contest in 2020 Bihar Legislative Assembly election.
Shiromani Akali Dal announced leaving NDA in September 2020.
In October 2020, the Vikassheel Insaan Party which had left the Mahagathbandhan (Bihar) joined the National Democratic Alliance and was granted 11 seats to contest.
In October 2020, The All Jharkhand Students Union re-joined NDA.
In October 2020, Gorkha Janmukti Morcha broke the alliance ahead of 2021 West Bengal Legislative Assembly election and allied with All India Trinamool Congress.
In October 2020, Kerala Congress (Thomas) broke the alliance ahead of 2021 Kerala Legislative Assembly election and allied with United Democratic Front.
In November 2020, BJP had the alliance with Bodoland People's Front ahead of 2020 Bodoland Territorial Council election.[irrelevant citation]
In November 2020, NDA won the state election of Bihar.
In December 2020, United People's Party Liberal and Gana Suraksha Party joined the NDA and NEDA as alliance to Executive Committee in Bodoland Territorial Council.
In December 2020, Rashtriya Loktantrik Party broken the alliance on the issue of 3 agriculture reforms laws.
2021
In March 2021, Kerala Congress (Thomas) Has Withdrawn alliance ahead of 2021 Kerala Legislative Assembly election And Joined United Democratic Front.
In March 2021, Desiya Murpokku Dravida Kazhagam broken the alliance for not issuing demanded number of constituency in the 2021 Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly election.
In April 2021, Goa Forward Party withdrew from the NDA for a variety of reasons, ranging from environmental issues to BJP apathy towards unemployment.
In May 2021, NDA lost state elections of Tamil Nadu, Kerala, West Bengal
In May 2021, NDA won state elections of Assam & Puducherry.
In May 2021, Sukhdev Singh Dhindsa led Shiromani Akali Dal (Sanyukt) joined NDA.
In December 2021, Captain Amrinder Singh led Punjab Lok Congress joined NDA.
2022
In January 2022, Simarjit Singh Bains led Lok Insaaf Party joined NDA.
In January 2022, Simarjit Singh Bains led Lok Insaaf Party broken the alliance for not issuing demanded number of constituency in the 2022 Punjab Legislative Assembly election.
Bodoland People's Front rejoined NDA.
NDA won the state elections of Uttar Pradesh, Goa, Uttarakhand & Manipur.
NDA lost the state elections of Punjab.
After Goa Assembly elections 2022 Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party extended support to NDA.
On 9 August 2022, Nitish Kumar led Janata Dal (United) has withdrawn from NDA.
On 19 September, Capt. Amrinder Singh led Punjab Lok Congress merged with BJP
NDA won state elections of Gujarat.
NDA lost the state elections of Himachal Pradesh.
2023
In February, BJP broke alliance with National People's Party to contest all seats in 2023 Meghalaya Legislative Assembly election
NDA won state elections in Tripura, Meghalaya and Nagaland.
NDA lost state election in Karnataka.
In June 2023 Hindustani Awam Morcha Joined NDA
In July 2023 Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party Joined NDA
In September 2023, Janata Dal (Secular) joined NDA
On 25 September 2023, AIADMK left the NDA alliance.
See also
North-East Democratic Alliance
Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance
Mahagathbandhan
Notes
References
External links
lkadvani.in
narendramodi.in
amitshah.co.in
1998 establishments in India
Political parties established in 1998
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409918
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List%20of%20film%20and%20television%20directors
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List of film and television directors
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This is a list of notable directors in motion picture and television arts.
A
Dodo Abashidze
George Abbott
Norman Abbott
Phil Abraham
Jim Abrahams
Abiola Abrams
J. J. Abrams
Ivan Abramson
Lenny Abrahamson
Hany Abu-Assad
Tengiz Abuladze
Herbert Achternbusch
Andy Ackerman
Andrew Adamson
Anita W. Addison
Maren Ade
Carine Adler
Percy Adlon
John G. Adolfi
Franklin Adreon
Ben Affleck
Casey Affleck
Neil Affleck
Andrew Agnew
Alejandro Agresti
Joe Ahearne
Caroline Aherne
Abdel Rahim Ahmed
Aqeel Ahmed
Alexandre Aja
Chantal Akerman
Desiree Akhavan
Fatih Akın
Moustapha Akkad
John Akomfrah
R. Kan Albay
Barbara Albert
Félix Enríquez Alcalá
Alan Alda
Robert Aldrich
Tomás Gutiérrez Alea
Grigori Aleksandrov
Victoria Aleksanyan
Chris Alexander
David Alexander
Jason Alexander
John Alexander
Sherman Alexie
Ozzie Alfonso
Khalik Allah
Marc Allégret
Yves Allégret
Elizabeth Allen
Irwin Allen
Lewis Allen
Woody Allen
Raine Allen-Miller
Hassan Al-Imam
Syed Ali Raza Usama
Mairzee Almas
Pedro Almodóvar
Paul Almond
Robert Altman
Fede Álvarez
Silvio Amadio
Mathieu Amalric
Rod Amateau
Ned Ambler
Gianni Amelio
Alejandro Amenábar
Jon Amiel
Ana Lily Amirpour
George Amponsah
Dev Anand
Sean Anders
Thom Andersen
Bob Anderson
Brad Anderson
Broncho Billy Anderson
Deborah Anderson
Gordon Anderson
Justin Anderson
Lindsay Anderson
Michael Anderson
Mitch Anderson
Paul Thomas Anderson
Paul W. S. Anderson
Trevor Anderson
Wes Anderson
Roy Andersson
Metodi Andonov
Raoul André
Bryan Andrews
Kostas Andritsos
Theo Angelopoulos
Kenneth Anger
Threes Anna
Graham Annable
Ken Annakin
Jean-Jacques Annaud
Hideaki Anno
Arnold Antonin
Michelangelo Antonioni
Pan Anzi
Judd Apatow
Emmanuel Apea
Oscar Apfel
Norman Apstein
Michael Apted
Gregg Araki
Alfonso Aráu
Roscoe Arbuckle
Denys Arcand
George Archainbaud
Wes Archer
Jane Arden
Emile Ardolino
Asia Argento
Dario Argento
Adam Arkin
Allan Arkush
Serena Armitage
Dionciel Armstrong
Gillian Armstrong
Andrea Arnold
Jack Arnold
Darren Aronofsky
Fernando Arrabal
Miguel Arteta
Larysa Artiugina
Dorothy Arzner
Dinara Asanova
Hal Ashby
John Mallory Asher
Anthony Asquith
Olivier Assayas
Ari Aster
Carlos Atanes
Richard Attenborough
Dan Attias
David Attwood
Jacques Audiard
Jacqueline Audry
John H. Auer
Bille August
Claude Autant-Lara
Aram Avakian
Roger Avary
Pupi Avati
Hy Averback
Ilya Averbakh
Julius Avery
Tex Avery
John G. Avildsen
Jon Avnet
David Ayer
Dan Aykroyd
Richard Ayoade
Nabil Ayouch
Mary Ayubi
Top of page
B
Ba–Bh
Jamie Babbit
Héctor Babenco
Lloyd Bacon
Clarence G. Badger
John Badham
Bae Yong-Kyun
Cindy Baer
Prince Bagdasarian
King Baggot
Nadeem Baig
Prano Bailey-Bond
Jon S. Baird
Stuart Baird
Imruh Bakari
Roy Ward Baker
Sean Baker
Mohammad Bakri
Ralph Bakshi
Bob Balaban
Aleksei Balabanov
Kailasam Balachander
Jan Balej
Peter Baldwin
Carroll Ballard
Anne Bancroft
Albert Band
Charles Band
Biyi Bandele
Elizabeth Banks
Monty Banks
Joseph Barbera
Juan Antonio Bardem
Richard L. Bare
Francesco Barilli
Sooraj R. Barjatya
Clive Barker
Reginald Barker
Tom Barman
Boris Barnet
Matthew Barney
Daniel Barnz
Allen Baron
David Barrett
Chuck Barris
Robert V. Barron
Christopher Barry
Drew Barrymore
Morris Barry
Lionel Barrymore
Andrzej Bartkowiak
Jules Bass
M. J. Bassett
Joy Batchelor
Jason Bateman
Otto Bathurst
Paul Bartel
Hall Bartlett
Charles Barton
Felix Basch
Aclan Bates
Jay Bauman
Noah Baumbach
Lamberto Bava
Mario Bava
Michael Bay
Samuel Bayer
Juan Antonio Bayona
Edward Bazalgette
Luigi Bazzoni
Warren Beatty
William Beaudine
Harry Beaumont
Harold Becker
Jacques Becker
Josh Becker
Terry Becker
Wolfgang Becker
Guy Norman Bee
Ford Beebe
Greg Beeman
Morgan Beggs
Hans Behrendt
Jean-Jacques Beineix
Timur Bekmambetov
Susan Belbin
Monta Bell
Earl Bellamy
Troian Bellisario
Marco Bellocchio
Jerry Belson
Maria Luisa Bemberg
Steve Bendelack
Jack Bender
László Benedek
Shyam Benegal
Lubomír Beneš
Roberto Benigni
David Benioff
Richard Benjamin
Rodney Bennett
Spencer Gordon Bennet
Robert Benton
Luca Bercovici
Bruce Beresford
Alec Berg
Peter Berg
Andrew Bergman
Ingmar Bergman
Busby Berkeley
Luis Garcia Berlanga
Greg Berlanti
Abby Berlin
Marc Berlin
Robert Berlinger
Andrea Berloff
Paul Bern
Ishmael Bernal
Paul Bernard
Curtis Bernhardt
Adam Bernstein
Claude Berri
Halle Berry
John Berry
Arthur Berthelet
André Berthomieu
Bryan Bertino
Bernardo Bertolucci
Luc Besson
Frank Beyer
Bharathiraja
Top of page
Bi–Bz
Dominic Bianchi
Ed Bianchi
John Biddle
Fabián Bielinsky
Kathryn Bigelow
Tony Bill
Anna Biller
Peter Billingsley
Bruce Bilson
Brad Bird
Bill Bixby
Alice Guy-Blaché
Herbert Blaché
John Black
Nicola Black
Shane Black
Farren Blackburn
Gerald Blake
George Blair
Alessandro Blasetti
William Peter Blatty
Bertrand Blier
Jeffrey Blitz
Neill Blomkamp
Matt Bloom
Don Bluth
John G. Blystone
Keith Boak
James Bobin
Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck
Richard Boden
Eugeniusz Bodo
Carl Boese
Budd Boetticher
Paul Bogart
Peter Bogdanovich
José Bohr
Michel Boisrond
Patrick Bokanowski
Richard Boleslawski
Uwe Boll
Mauro Bolognini
Fyodor Bondarchuk
Sergei Bondarchuk
Bong Joon-ho
Linwood Boomer
John Boorman
Walerian Borowczyk
Frank Borzage
John and Roy Boulting
Lucien Bourjeily
David Bowers
Pearl Bowser
Muriel Box
David Boyd
Dermot Boyd
Danny Boyle
Charles Brabin
Richard Bracewell
Harry Bradbeer
Robert N. Bradbury
John Brahm
Stan Brakhage
Matt Braly
A.V. Bramble
Kenneth Branagh
Spike Brandt
Fred C. Brannon
Tinto Brass
Charles Braverman
Kevin Bray
Neil Breen
Catherine Breillat
Herbert Brenon
Will Brenton
Robert Bresson
Martin Brest
Vinko Brešan
Howard Bretherton
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Michael E. Briant
Monte Brice
Patrick Brice
Sean Bridgers
James Bridges
Nicholas Briggs
Guido Brignone
Steven Brill
Philippe de Broca
Tricia Brock
Lino Brocka
Henry Bronchtein
Ronald Bronstein
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James L. Brooks
Mel Brooks
Richard Brooks
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Clarence Brown
Harry Joe Brown
Rowland Brown
Tod Browning
Martin Bruestle
Adrian Brunel
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Detlev Buck
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Norman Buckley
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Jan Bucquoy
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Brian Patrick Butler
Chris Butler
David Butler
John Butler
Robert Butler
Ray Butt
Jörg Buttgereit
Zane Buzby
Edward Buzzell
Ed Bye
James Ward Byrkit
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Christy Cabanne
Michael Cacoyannis
Margarita Cadenas
Israel Adrián Caetano
David Caffrey
Nicolas Cage
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Edward L. Cahn
James Cameron
Douglas Camfield
Augusto Caminito
Donald Cammell
Joe Camp
Juan José Campanella
Colin Campbell
Jonny Campbell
Luke Campbell
Martin Campbell
Mont Campbell
Norman Campbell
Jane Campion
Antonio Campos
Danny Cannon
Dyan Cannon
Kay Cannon
Colin Cant
Graham Cantwell
Peter Capaldi
Albert Capellani
Frank Capra
Luigi Capuano
Leos Carax
Jack Cardiff
Christian Carion
Joe Carnahan
Marcel Carné
John Carney
Giuliano Carnimeo
Marc Caro
Niki Caro
Benjamin Caron
John Carpenter
Thomas Carr
Enrique Carreras
John Paddy Carstairs
Chris Carter
D. J. Caruso
Enrico Casarosa
John Cassavetes
Nick Cassavetes
P. J. Castellaneta
William Castle
Torre Catalano
Michael Caton-Jones
Peter Cattaneo
Alberto Cavalcanti
Liliana Cavani
Paolo Cavara
André Cayatte
Ralph Ceder
Christiane Cegavske
Jeff Celentano
Simon Cellan Jones
Mark Cendrowski
Tony Cervone
Pablo César
Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Claude Chabrol
Gurinder Chadha
Justin Chadwick
Don Chaffey
Aneesh Chaganty
Youssef Chahine
Fruit Chan
Jackie Chan
Peter Chan
Charlie Chaplin
Larry Charles
Charley Chase
David Chase
Émile Chautard
Michael Chaves
Damien Chazelle
Stephen Chbosky
Jeremiah S. Chechik
Kate Cheeseman
Peter Chelsom
Kaige Chen
Pierre Chenal
Yarrow Cheney
David Cherkassky
Tom Cherones
Marc Cherry
Pierre Chevalier
Milan Cheylov
Abigail Child
Ching Siu-Tung
Stephen Chiodo
Samson Chiu
Tadeusz Chmielewski
Lisa Cholodenko
Joyce Chopra
Yash Chopra
Chor Yuen
Deborah Chow
Stephen Chow
Benjamin Christensen
Roger Christian
Christian-Jaque
Rich Christiano
Roger Christiansen
Jon M. Chu
Grigori Chukhrai
Lee Isaac Chung
Peter Chung
Věra Chytilová
Derek Cianfrance
Michael Cimino
Claudio Cipelletti
Souleymane Cissé
Louis C.K.
René Clair
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Bob Clark
Larry Clark
Richard Clark
Alan Clarke
Shirley Clarke
S. J. Clarkson
William F. Claxton
Barnaby Clay
Jack Clayton
Tom Clegg
William Clemens
Jemaine Clement
René Clément
Ron Clements
Elmer Clifton
Edward F. Cline
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Robert Clouse
Henri-Georges Clouzot
Enrico Cocozza
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Coen Brothers
Clément Cogitore
Romain Cogitore
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Rob Cohen
Jaume Collet-Serra
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Lewis D. Collins
Chris Columbus
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Luigi Comencini
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Bruce Conner
Jack Conway
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Barry Cook
Fielder Cook
Victor Cook
Josh Cooley
Hal Cooper
Merian C. Cooper
Francis Ford Coppola
Roman Coppola
Sofia Coppola
Frank Coraci
Roger Corman
Alain Corneau
Joe Cornish
Orlando Corradi
Rich Correll
Lloyd Corrigan
Raiya Corsiglia
Helena Cortesina
Don Coscarelli
Brian Cosgrove
George Pan Cosmatos
Pedro Costa
Costa-Gavras
Kevin Costner
Manny Coto
T. Arthur Cottam
Alex Cox
Frank Cox
Paul Cox
William James Craft
Kelly Fremon Craig
William Crain
Bryan Cranston
Wes Craven
Joel Crawford
Peter Cregeen
Destin Daniel Cretton
Charles Crichton
Michael Crichton
Jon Cring
Donald Crisp
Armando Crispino
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David Croft
Donald Crombie
John Cromwell
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David Cronenberg
Mackenzie Crook
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John Crowley
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Billy Crystal
Arzén von Cserépy
Alfonso Cuarón
Chris Cuddington
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Jeremy Culver
Fiona Cumming
Irving Cummings
Michael Cumming
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Sean S. Cunningham
Adam Curtis
Dan Curtis
Jamie Lee Curtis
Richard Curtis
Michael Curtiz
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Paul Czinner
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Nia DaCosta
Diminas Dagogo
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Frank Daniel
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Lee Daniels
Stan Daniels
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Joe Dante
Frank Darabont
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Harry d'Abbadie d'Arrast
Jules Dassin
Hayato Date
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Byambasuren Davaa
Delmer Daves
Alki David
Hugh David
John Howard Davies
John Rhys-Davies
Terence Davies
Andrew Davis
Garth Davis
Ossie Davis
Tamra Davis
J. Searle Dawley
Roxann Dawson
Shane Dawson
Robert Day (director)
Jonathan Dayton
Drew Daywalt
Basil Dean
Basil Dearden
Tiffanie DeBartolo
Jan de Bont
Philippe de Broca
Fred de Cordova
Allen Coulter
Albert de Courville
Russell DeGrazier
Rolf de Heer
Steve De Jarnatt
Fred Dekker
Alex de la Iglesia
Jean Delannoy
Bruce Dellis
Greg DeLiso
Hampton Del Ruth
Roy Del Ruth
Guillermo del Toro
Alberto De Martino
Kirk DeMicco
Cecil B. DeMille
William C. deMille
Jonathan Demme
Ted Demme
James DeMonaco
Jacques Demy
Reginald Denham
Robert De Niro
Claire Denis
Martin Dennis
Pen Densham
Ruggero Deodato
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Ben Palmer
Charles Palmer
Jake Paltrow
Serge de Poligny
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John Derek
Maya Deren
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Bernard Derriman
Giuseppe de Santis
Vittorio De Sica
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Howard Deutch
Michel Deville
Danny DeVito
Dean Devlin
Maury Dexter
David Dhavan
Matthew Diamond
Emma-Rosa Dias
Tom DiCillo
Nigel Dick
Vivienne Dick
Ernest Dickerson
Thorold Dickinson
William Kennedy Dickson
Carlos Diegues
Vin Diesel
William Dieterle
Helmut Dietl
J. D. Dillard
John Francis Dillon
Michael Dante DiMartino
Mark Dindal
Mark A.Z. Dippé
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Lino DiSalvo
Walt Disney
Adriaan Ditvoorst
Ivan Dixon
Edward Dmytryk
Darren Doane
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Lawrence Dobkin
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Jacques Doillon
Michael Dolan
Xavier Dolan
Miles Doleac
Andrew Dominik
Roger Donaldson
Stanley Donen
Hwang Dong-hyuk
Ciaran Donnelly
Clive Donner
Richard Donner
Mark Donskoi
Robert Dornhelm
Doris Dörrie
Nelson Pereira dos Santos
Maïmouna Doucouré
Michael Dougherty
Gordon Douglas
Robert Douglas
Aleksandr Dovzhenko
Tony Dow
John Erick Dowdle
Kevin Dowling
B. E. Doxat-Pratt
Jim Drake
Oliver Drake
Polly Draper
Jean Dréville
Ben Drew
Carl Theodor Dreyer
Marcel Duchamp
Frederik Du Chau
Terence Dudley
Peter Duffell
Duffer brothers
Troy Duffy
Dennis Dugan
Joshua Dugdale
Bill Duke
Bruno Dumont
Duwayne Dunham
George Dunning
Cheryl Dunye
Quentin Dupieux
Jay Duplass
Mark Duplass
Ewald André Dupont
Momina Duraid
Marguerite Duras
Fred Durst
Richard Dutcher
Guru Dutt
Robert Duvall
Ava DuVernay
Julien Duvivier
Allan Dwan
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E
B. Reeves Eason
Clint Eastwood
Uli Edel
Blake Edwards
Gareth Edwards
Harry Edwards
Shawn Efran
Robert Eggers
Eagle Egilsson
Atom Egoyan
Mohammed Ehteshamuddin
Lena Einhorn
Sergei Eisenstein
Gösta Ekman
Richard Elfman
Stephan Elliott
David R. Ellis
Robert Ellis
Scott Ellis
Maurice Elvey
Obi Emelonye
John Emerson
Roland Emmerich
Andy De Emmony
Cy Endfield
John English
Robert Englund
Robert Enrico
Ray Enright
Jason Ensler
Ildikó Enyedi
Nora Ephron
Sheldon Epps
Jean Epstein
Luciano Ercoli
Víctor Erice
Chester Erskine
Juan Escobedo
Giancarlo Esposito
Danishka Esterhazy
Lukas Ettlin
Jean Eustache
David M. Evans
Gareth Evans
Marc Evans
Valie Export
Chris Eyre
Richard Eyre
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F
Peter Faiman
Ben Falcone
Rick Famuyiwa
James Fargo
Harun Farocki
Asghar Farhadi
Julian Farino
Valerie Faris
Bobby Farrelly
Peter Farrelly
John Farrow
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Jon Favreau
Sam Feder
Fei Mu
Paul Feig
Henry Feinberg
Paul Fejos
Sam Fell
Andrea Fellers
Federico Fellini
Emerald Fennell
Michael Ferguson
Guy Ferland
Emilio Fernández
Abel Ferrara
Marco Ferreri
Giorgio Ferroni
Louis Feuillade
Jacques Feyder
Severin Fiala
Sally Field
Todd Field
Chip Fields
Ralph Fiennes
Mike Figgis
Dave Filoni
David Fincher
Will Finn
Elvira Fischer
Terence Fisher
Dallas M. Fitzgerald
George Fitzmaurice
Robert J. Flaherty
Mike Flanagan
Gary Fleder
Dave Fleischer
Max Fleischer
Richard Fleischer
Ruben Fleischer
Andrew Fleming
Victor Fleming
Anne Fletcher
Dexter Fletcher
Mandie Fletcher
Benedek Fliegauf
James Flood
Robert Florey
Emmett J. Flynn
Shannon Flynn
James Foley
Sheree Folkson
Jorge Fons
Aleksander Ford
Francis Ford
Jeremy J. Ford
John Ford
Philip Ford
Tom Ford
Eugene Forde
Miloš Forman
Tom Forman
Willi Forst
Marc Forster
Bill Forsyth
John Fortenberry
Amparo Fortuny
Bob Fosse
Jodie Foster
Lilibet Foster
Lewis R. Foster
Norman Foster
Jeff Fowler
Wallace Fox
Bryan Foy
Jonathan Frakes
Rhys Frake-Waterfield
Coleman Francis
James Franco
Jesús Franco
Georges Franju
Melvin Frank
Scott Frank
David Frankel
John Frankenheimer
Carl Franklin
Howard Franklin
Sidney Franklin
Veronika Franz
Harry L. Fraser
Toa Fraser
James Frawley
David Frazee
Stephen Frears
Riccardo Freda
Sydney Freeland
Thornton Freeland
Morgan Freeman
Morgan J. Freeman
Mark Freiburger
Lloyd French
Victor French
Karl Freund
Ron Fricke
Fridrik Thor Fridriksson
Jason Friedberg
Lionel Friedberg
David Friedkin
William Friedkin
Seymour Friedman
Su Friedrich
Gunther von Fritsch
Carl Froelich
Sarah Frost
Soleil Moon Frye
Zetna Fuentes
Kinji Fukasaku
Shozin Fukui
Lucio Fulci
Sam Fuller
Antoine Fuqua
Sidney J. Furie
Tim Fywell
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Béla Gaál
Leonid Gaidai
Ray Gallardo
Florian Gallenberger
Alex Galvin
Harry Gamboa Jr.
Abel Gance
Christophe Gans
Dennis Gansel
Arline Gant
Carla Garapedian
Rodrigo García
Ana García Blaya
Jeremy Garelick
Jeff Garlin
Tay Garnett
Philippe Garrel
Mick Garris
Matteo Garrone
Harry Garson
William Garwood
Louis J. Gasnier
Tucker Gates
Mark Gatiss
Tony Gatlif
Nils Gaup
Roberto Gavaldón
Barrie Gavin
Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia
Paul Geday
Jean Genet
Xavier Gens
Giacomo Gentilomo
Fred Gerber
Aleksei Yuryevich German
Aleksei Alekseivich German
Pietro Germi
Clyde Geronimi
Kurt Gerron
Douchan Gersi
Viktor Gertler
Ricky Gervais
Greta Gerwig
Jennifer Getzinger
Subhash Ghai
Ritwik Ghatak
Bahman Ghobadi
Charles Giblyn
Angela Gibson
Mel Gibson
Billy Gierhart
Joaquin "Kino" Gil
John Gilbert
Lewis Gilbert
David Giler
Stuart Gillard
Craig Gillespie
Terry Gilliam
Tyler Gillett
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John Gilling
Dan Gilroy
Tony Gilroy
Arvid E. Gillstrom
Bernard Girard
Marino Girolami
Ken Girotti
Pavel Giroud
Amos Gitai
Ellen Gittelsohn
Stanka Gjurić
Rose Glass
Lesli Linka Glatter
Jonathan Glazer
John Glen
Peter Glenville
James Glickenhaus
Will Gluck
Jean-Luc Godard
Andy Goddard
Drew Goddard
Theo van Gogh
Michael Goi
Menahem Golan
Evan Goldberg
Jonathan Goldstein
Bobcat Goldthwait
Nick Gomez
Alfonso Gomez-Rejon
Michel Gondry
Alejandro González Iñárritu
Martin Gooch
Derrick Goodwin
Leslie Goodwins
Rupert Goold
Adoor Gopalakrishnan
Bryan Gordon
George Gordon
Michael Gordon
Stuart Gordon
John Gorrie
Yana Gorskaya
Hideo Gosha
Ryan Gosling
Raja Gosnell
Lisa Gottlieb
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Alfred Goulding
Edmund Goulding
Ashutosh Gowariker
Jake Graf
Todd Graff
William A. Graham
Michael Grandage
Brian Grant
Lee Grant
Alex Graves
F. Gary Gray
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Alfred E. Green
Dave Green
David Green
David Gordon Green
Guy Green
Hilton A. Green
Norm Green
Pamela Green
Steph Green
Tom Green
Peter Greenaway
Josh Greenbaum
C. H. Greenblatt
Paul Greengrass
Jeff Greenstein
Robert Greenwald
Edwin Greenwood
Robert Gregson
Jean Grémillon
Johannes Grenzfurthner
John Greyson
John Grierson
Ken Grieve
D. W. Griffith
Edward H. Griffith
Murray Grigor
Peter Grimwade
Nick Grinde
David Grossman
Luca Guadagnino
Matthew Gray Gubler
Romolo Guerrieri
Christopher Guest
Val Guest
John Guillermin
Fred Guiol
Sacha Guitry
Yilmaz Güney
Andrew Gunn
James Gunn
Hrafn Gunnlaugsson
Manish Gupta
Stephen Gurewitz
Jorge Gutierrez
Sebastian Gutierrez
Alice Guy-Blaché
Patricio Guzmán
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H
Charles F. Haas
Kamal Haasan
Taylor Hackford
Zach Hadel
Tala Hadid
Lucile Hadžihalilović
Piers Haggard
Paul Haggis
Larry Hagman
Don Hahn
Antonio Margheriti
Jody Margolin Hahn
Charles Haid
Andrew Haigh
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Don Hall
Lasse Hallström
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Gary Halvorson
Ryusuke Hamaguchi
John Hamburg
Bent Hamer
Robert Hamer
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Hamish Hamilton
Jonathan Hammond
Sanaa Hamri
Victor Hanbury
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Michael Haneke
Tom Hanks
William Hanna
Ken Hannam
Curtis Hanson
Geir Hansteen Jörgensen
Alex Hardcastle
Neasa Hardiman
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Tom Harper
Veit Harlan
Renny Harlin
Harry Harris
Owen Harris
Peter Harris
Mary Harron
Harvey Hart
William S. Hart
Hal Hartley
Anthony Harvey
Herk Harvey
Jack Harvey
Wojciech Has
Henry Hathaway
James Hawes
Howard Hawks
Will Hay
Salma Hayek
Michael Hayes.
David Hayman
James Hayman
Toby Haynes
Todd Haynes
Jimmy Hayward
Michel Hazanavicius
Amy Heckerling
Ralph Hemecker
Anthony Hemingway
Siân Heder
Victor Heerman
Zachary Heinzerling
Stuart Heisler
Jalmari Helander
Brian Helgeland
Marielle Heller
Monte Hellman
Michael "Ffish" Hemschoot
Joseph Henabery
Chris Henchy
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
Dell Henderson
John Henderson
Frank Henenlotter
Hobart Henley
Paul Henreid
Julian Henriques
Buck Henry
Brian Henson
Jim Henson
Perry Henzell
Paula Heredia
Stephen Herek
Albert Herman
Oliver Hermanus
Kate Herron
William Blake Herron
Michael Herz
John Herzfeld
Werner Herzog
Zako Heskiya
Jared Hess
Jerusha Hess
Gordon Hessler
Marianne Hettinger
Jennifer Love Hewitt
David Hewlett
John Heys
Douglas Hickox
Scott Hicks
Howard Higgin
George Roy Hill
George Hill
Jack Hill
Jody Hill
Robert F. Hill
Sinclair Hill
Walter Hill
Stephen Hillenburg
Arthur Hiller
William Byron Hillman
Lambert Hillyer
Anthony Himbs
Art Hindle
Cheryl Hines
Ryūichi Hiroki
Oliver Hirschbiegel
Leon Hirszman
Leslie S. Hiscott
Alfred Hitchcock
Godfrey Ho
Peter Hoar
Jessica Hobbs
Gregory Hoblit
Brent Hodge
Mike Hodges
Jack Hofsiss
James P. Hogan
P. J. Hogan
Clive Holden
Agnieszka Holland
Todd Holland
Tom Holland
Savage Steve Holland
Tonya Holly
Ben Holmes
John Holmquist
Seth Holt
Ishirō Honda
Mitsuru Hongo
Tobe Hooper
Tom Hooper
Stephen Hopkins
Dennis Hopper
Jerry Hopper
Gwyneth Horder-Payton
Leonard Horn
James W. Horne
Oliver Horsbrugh
Hou Hsiao-hsien
Li Hsing
John Hough
Bryce Dallas Howard
Byron Howard
David Howard
Michael Howard
Ron Howard
William Howard
Peter Howitt
King Hu
L. Ron Hubbard
Reginald Hudlin
Hugh Hudson
Bronwen Hughes
Howard Hughes
John Hughes
Ken Hughes
Robert F. Hughes
Terry Hughes
Ann Hui
Danièle Huillet
Arthur Humberstone
H. Bruce Humberstone
André Hunebelle
Helen Hunt
Tim Hunter
Lawrence Huntington
Nick Hurran
Michael Hurst
Sam Hurwitz
Metin Hüseyin
Waris Hussein
John Huston
Charles Hutchison
Brian G. Hutton
Willard Huyck
Peter Hyams
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I
Armando Iannucci
Juan Ibáñez
Kon Ichikawa
Steve Ihnat
Brian Iles
Im Kwon-Taek
Shōhei Imamura
Michael Imison
Hiroshi Inagaki
John Ince
Ralph Ince
Thomas H. Ince
Rex Ingram
Ciro Ippolito
Dickson Iroegbu
John Irvin
George Irving
Kyōhei Ishiguro
Debbie Isitt
Marc Israel
Jūzō Itami
Aleksandr Ivanovsky
Ivan Ivanov-Vano
Joris Ivens
James Ivory
Top of page
J
Jacques Jaccard
David Jackson
Dianne Jackson
Michael Jackson
Mick Jackson
Paul Jackson
Peter Jackson
Wilfred Jackson
Gregory Jacobs
Rick Jacobson
Sarah Jacobson
Henry Jaglom
Wanda Jakubowska
Alan James
Steve James
Brian Jamieson
Miklós Jancsó
Leigh Janiak
Jang Joon-hwan
Bob Jaques
Derek Jarman
Jim Jarmusch
Julian Jarrold
Charles Jarrott
Risto Jarva
Leigh Jason
Kang Je-gyu
Barry Jenkins
Dallas Jenkins
Patty Jenkins
Garth Jennings
Humphrey Jennings
Shelley Jensen
Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Norman Jewison
Jia Zhangke
Jiang Wen
Jaromil Jireš
Phil Joanou
Alejandro Jodorowsky
Mark Joffe
Roland Joffé
Clark Johnson
Craig Johnson
Duke Johnson
Lamont Johnson
Liza Johnson
Mark Steven Johnson
Nunnally Johnson
Rian Johnson
Tim Johnson
Joe Johnston
Gerard Johnstone
Angelina Jolie
Chuck Jones
Duncan Jones
F. Richard Jones
Grover Jones
Michael Jones
Ron Jones
Terry Jones
Tommy Lee Jones
Spike Jonze
Neil Jordan
Michael B. Jordan
Edward José
Max Joseph
Jon Jost
Louis Jouvet
Paul Joyce
Jonathan Judge
Mike Judge
Rupert Julian
Isaac Julien
Miranda July
Nathan Juran
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K
Karel Kachyňa
George Kaczender
Jeremy Kagan
Mauricio Kagel
Joseph Kahn
Sathish Kalathil
Mikhail Kalatozov
Alex Kalymnios
Kamal
Arunraja Kamaraj
Sekhar Kammula
Deborah Kampmeier
Puttanna Kanagal
Adam Kane
Joseph Kane
Shusuke Kaneko
Jeff Kanew
Garson Kanin
Jonathan Kaplan
Raj Kapoor
Shekhar Kapur
Pekka Karjalainen
Phil Karlson
Roman Karmen
Jason Kartalian
Jake Kasdan
Lawrence Kasdan
Mathieu Kassovitz
Aaron Katz
Lloyd Kaufman
Philip Kaufman
Aki Kaurismäki
Mika Kaurismäki
Helmut Käutner
Jerzy Kawalerowicz
Minoru Kawasaki
Tony Kaye
Elia Kazan
Helmut Käutner
Buster Keaton
Abdellatif Kechiche
William Keighley
Asaad Kelada
Frederick King Keller
Harry Keller
Michael Keller
Barnet Kellman
Brian Kelly
Gene Kelly
Richard Kelly
Gil Kenan
David Kendall
Alex Kendrick
Anna Kendrick
Erle Kenton
James V. Kern
David Kerr
Robert Kerr
Michael Kerrigan
Irvin Kershner
James Kerwin
Abbas Kiarostami
Krzysztof Kieślowski
Maggie Kiley
Edward Killy
Kim Jee-woon
Kim Ki-duk
Max Kimmich
Anthony Kimmins
Simon Kinberg
Burton King
Gary King
George King
Henry King
Louis King
Paul King
Shaka King
Stephen King
Keisuke Kinoshita
Klaus Kinski
Teinosuke Kinugasa
Brian Kirk
Randal Kirk
Mark Kirkland
Lyudmil Kirkov
Karey Kirkpatrick
Alan Kirschenbaum
Ryuhei Kitamura
Takeshi Kitano
Alf Kjellin
William Klein
Randal Kleiser
Elem Klimov
León Klimovsky
Alexander Kluge
Jennifer Kluska
Harley Knoles
Masaki Kobayashi
Chris Koch
Kogonada
Bob Koherr
Vincent Kok
Henry Kolker
Alexander Kolowrat
Satoshi Kon
Andrei Konchalovsky
Larysa Kondracki
Tadeusz Konwicki
Alexander Korda
Zoltan Korda
Hirokazu Koreeda
Harmony Korine
Caryl Korma
Baltasar Kormákur
Brigitte Kornetzky
John Korty
Joseph Kosinski
Henry Koster
Ted Kotcheff
Mariusz Kotowski
Serguei Kouchnerov
Nikos Koundouros
Jan Kounen
Paul Kowalski
Aaron Kozak
Ivan Kraljevic
Stanley Kramer
John Krasinski
Kurt Kren
Mitchell Kriegman
Krishnan–Panju
William Kronick
Stanley Kubrick
George Kuchar
Lev Kuleshov
Roger Kumble
Zacharias Kunuk
Akira Kurosawa
Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Karyn Kusama
Emir Kusturica
Geir Ove Kvalheim
Daniel Kwan
Stanley Kwan
Ken Kwapis
Top of page
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John La Bouchardière
Nadine Labaki
Neil LaBute
Gregory La Cava
Harry Lachman
Aldo Lado
Edward Laemmle
James Lafferty
John Lafia
René Laloux
Ringo Lam
Fernando Lamas
Mary Lambert
Charles Lamont
Lew Landers
Alejandro Landes
John Landis
Max Landis
Christopher Landon
Michael Landon
Sidney Lanfield
Fritz Lang
Walter Lang
Michael Lange
Rémi Lange
Jerry Langford
Doug Langway
Yorgos Lanthimos
Claude Lanzmann
Janez Lapajne
Victoria Larimore
Pablo Larraín
John Lasseter
Andrew Lau
Jeffrey Lau
Peter Lauer
Charles Laughton
Mélanie Laurent
Carl Lauten
Arnold Laven
Diarmuid Lawrence
Francis Lawrence
Marc Lawrence
J. F. Lawton
Tracie Laymon
Paul Lazarus
Philip Leacock
David Lean
Patrice Leconte
Bruce Leddy
Mimi Leder
D. Ross Lederman
Ang Lee
David Lee
Jennifer Lee
Lee Chang-dong
Lee Cheol-ha
Lee Lik-Chi
Rowland V. Lee
Spike Lee
Michael Leeston-Smith
Michael Lehmann
Henry Lehrman
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Sergio Leone
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Lo Wei
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Phil Lord
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Hamilton Luske
Dorothy Lyman
Euros Lyn
David Lynch
Jeffrey Lynch
Jennifer Lynch
Liam Lynch
Adrian Lyne
Jonathan Lynn
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M
Ma–Mc
David MacDonald
Hettie MacDonald
Kevin Macdonald
Carl Macek
Seth MacFarlane
Gustav Machatý
Willard Mack
Alexander Mackendrick
David Mackenzie
Philip Charles MacKenzie
Will Mackenzie
Douglas Mackinnon
Gillies MacKinnon
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Madonna
Holger-Madsen
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Alan Mak
Dušan Makavejev
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Samira Makhmalbaf
Károly Makk
Sundeep Malani
Sarah Maldoror
Terrence Malick
Louis Malle
Nicholas Mallett
William Malone
David Maloney
Leo D. Maloney
Henrik Malyan
Djibril Diop Mambéty
Manakis brothers
Milcho Manchevski
Don Mancini
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Chris Mandia
Luis Mandoki
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Anthony Mann
Daniel Mann
Delbert Mann
Michael Mann
Seith Mann
Guy Manos
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Terry Marcel
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Nick Marck
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Juliet May
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Colm McCarthy
Tom McCarthy
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Martin McDonagh
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Terry McDonough
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Bernard McEveety
Vincent McEveety
McG
William C. McGann
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Joseph McGrath
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David McKay
Jim McKay
John McKay
Lucky McKee
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Norman McLaren
Greg McLean
Norman Z. McLeod
Tom McLoughlin
Sean McNamara
John McNaughton
Daniel McNicoll
Robert Duncan McNeill
Steve McQueen
John McTiernan
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Md–Mz
Shane Meadows
Peter Medak
Don Medford
Dariush Mehrjui
Deepa Mehta
Gus Meins
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Adolfas Mekas
Jonas Mekas
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Wilco Melissant
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Jean-Pierre Melville
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Hayao Miyazaki
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Josefina Molina
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Terry O. Morse
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Otto Muehl
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Robert Mulligan
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F. W. Murnau
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Ralph Murphy
Ryan Murphy
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John Musker
Floyd Mutrux
Mark Mylod
Daniel Myrick
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N
Amir Naderi
Kenji Nagasaki
Mira Nair
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Hideo Nakata
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Khodzha Kuli Narliyev
Mikio Naruse
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Thuc Nguyen
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Mike Nichols
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Edward Norton
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Phillip Noyce
Elliott Nugent
David Nutter
Bruno Nuytten
Andy Nwakalor
Christian Nyby
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O
Dave O'Brien
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Izu Ojukwu
Kihachi Okamoto
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Liddy Oldroyd
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Ruben Östlund
Richard Oswald
Dominique Othenin-Girard
Katsuhiro Otomo
Ulrike Ottinger
Idrissa Ouedraogo
Horace Ové
André Øvredal
Jennifer Oxley
Frank Oz
François Ozon
Yasujirō Ozu
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P
Sergio Pablos
Georg Wilhelm Pabst
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Debarun Pal
Jafar Panahi
Norman Panama
Gleb Panfilov
Pang Ho-Cheung
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Park Chan-Wook
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Nick Park
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Ol Parker
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Reza Parsa
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Goran Paskaljević
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Ray Patterson
Anand Patwardhan
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Paweł Pawlikowski
Alexander Payne
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Matthew Penn
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Oz Perkins
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Tyler Perry
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Wolfgang Petersen
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Elio Petri
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Andy Picheta
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Ho Ping
Steve Pink
Lucian Pintilie
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Pitof
René Plaissetty
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Michael Polish
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Harry A. Pollard
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Ted Post
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Jeff Povey
Frank Powell
Michael Powell
Paul Powell
Kemp Powers
Udayan Prasad
Rosa von Praunheim
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Ellen S. Pressman
Michael Pressman
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Sarah Price
Prince
Yakov Protazanov
Alex Proyas
Aleksandr Ptushko
Vsevolod Pudovkin
Jon Puno
Derek Purvis
Ivan Pyryev
Parvez Sharma
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Q
Farooq Qaiser
Steven Quale
Brothers Quay
John Quigley
Richard Quine
James Quinn
Faisal Qureshi
Nabeel Qureshi
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R
Ra–Re
Peer Raben
Michael Radford
Bob Rafelson
Jeff Ragsdale
Sam Raimi
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Sharat Raju
Harold Ramis
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Lynne Ramsay
Tony Randel
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Irving Rapper
Mani Ratnam
Brett Ratner
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John Rawlins
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Bernard B. Ray
Fred Olen Ray
Man Ray
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Godfrey Reggio
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Chris Renaud
Drew Renaud
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Jean Renoir
Rob Renzetti
Alain Resnais
Adam Resnick
Carlos Reygadas
Gene Reynolds
Kevin Reynolds
Lynn Reynolds
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Rf–Rz
Mike Rianda
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John Rich
Tony Richardson
Hans Richter
W. D. Richter
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Wolf Rilla
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Arturo Ripstein
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Matthew Robinson
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Michael Roemer
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Am Rong
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Phil Rosen
Stuart Rosenberg
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Tatia Rosenthal
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Joe Roth
Tim Roth
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Oscar Rudolph
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Richard Rush
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David O. Russell
Ken Russell
Paddy Russell
Russo brothers
Stefan Ruzowitzky
Eldar Ryazanov
Zbigniew Rybczyński
Mark Rydell
Gary Rydstrom
Stellan Rye
RZA
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S
Sa–Sh
Maher Sabry
Daniel Sackheim
Christopher Sadler
Numa Sadoul
Safdie brothers
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Bob Saget
Abdulkadir Ahmed Said
Richard Sakai
Alik Sakharov
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Eriq La Salle
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Ari Sandel
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Helma Sanders-Brahms
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Mark Sandrich
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Alfred Santell
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Miguel Sapochnik
Richard C. Sarafian
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Michael Sarnoski
Peter Sasdy
Shinsuke Sato
Yūichi Satō
Marjane Satrapi
Charles Saunders (director)
Hubert Sauper
Claude Sautet
Fred Savage
Philip Saville
Seth Savoy
Donald Sawyer
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John Sayles
Rodo Sayagues
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Ian Schneider
Paul Schneider
Rob Schneider
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Barbet Schroeder
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Michael Schultz
Hugh Schulze
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Robert Schwentke
David Schwimmer
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Martin Scorsese
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Ridley Scott
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Swinton O. Scott III
Tony Scott
Aubrey Scotto
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Selvaraghavan
Edgar Selwyn
Ousmane Sembène
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Larry Semon
Mrinal Sen
Dominic Sena
Lorraine Senna
Mack Sennett
Craig Serling
Menelik Shabazz
Tom Shadyac
Matt Shakman
Lee Shallat Chemel
S. Shankar
Adam Shankman
John Patrick Shanley
Ted Sharks
Tristram Shapeero
Parvez Sharma
Jim Sharman
William Shatner
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Larry Shaw
Scott Shaw
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Barry Shear
Chuck Sheetz
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Ron Shelton
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Jim Sheridan
Kirsten Sheridan
Rondell Sheridan
Taylor Sheridan
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George Sherman
Lowell Sherman
Vincent Sherman
Domee Shi
John Shiban
Steve Shill
Takashi Shimizu
Peter Shin
Naoyoshi Shiotani
Alexandra Shiva
Jack Sholder
Cate Shortland
Wil Shriner
M. Night Shyamalan
Charles Shyer
Justin Simien
Joe Simon
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Si–Sz
George Sidney
Scott Sidney
David Siegel
Don Siegel
Ted Sieger
Pedro Sienna
Floria Sigismondi
Slobodan Šijan
Brad Silberling
David Silverman
Dean Silvers
Lisa Simon
S. Sylvan Simon
Yves Simoneau
Giorgio Simonelli
Alexander Singer
Bryan Singer
Grant Singer
Manmohan Singh
Tarsem Singh
Tony Singletary
John Singleton
Roger Singleton-Turner
Robert Siodmak
Puneet Sira
Douglas Sirk
Cheick Oumar Sissoko
Andrea Sisson
Chris Sivertson
Tom Six
Vilgot Sjöman
Victor Sjöström
Kari Skogland
Jerzy Skolimowski
Gia Skova
David Slade
Paul Sloane
Edward Sloman
Michael Slovis
Yannis Smaragdis
Alan Smart
Ralph Smart
Jack Smight
Adam Smith
Brian Trenchard-Smith
Charles Martin Smith
Christopher Smith
David Smith
Gary Smith
George Albert Smith
Harry Everett Smith
Jim Field Smith
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John N. Smith
Julia Smith
Kevin Smith
Michael V. Smith
Noel M. Smith
Roy Allen Smith
Sarah Smith
Seth Grahame-Smith
Simon J. Smith
Adam Smoluk
Michael Snow
Zack Snyder
Michele Soavi
Steven Soderbergh
Gennady Sokolsky
Aleksandr Sokurov
David Solomon
Frances-Anne Solomon
Todd Solondz
Andrew Solt
Stephen Sommers
Barry Sonnenfeld
Sion Sono
Paolo Sorrentino
Jen and Sylvia Soska
Tressie Souders
Simon Spencer
George Spenton-Foster
Jaap Speyer
Penelope Spheeris
Bryan Spicer
Steven Spielberg
Götz Spielmann
Spierig brothers
Bob Spiers
Roger Spottiswoode
Jill Sprecher
Alejandro Springall
Aaron Springer
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Anthony Stacchi
John M. Stahl
Sylvester Stallone
Andrew Stanton
Wendey Stanzler
Ladislas Starevich
Jack Starrett
Richard Starzak
Ralph Staub
Malcolm St. Clair
J.A. Steel
Burr Steers
Paul L. Stein
David Steinberg
Hans Steinhoff
Steno (director)
Boris Stepantsev
Mike Stephens
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Sandor Stern
Steven Hilliard Stern
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Dan Stevens
George Stevens
George Stevens Jr.
Robert Stevens
Robert Stevenson
Gordon Stewart
Ginny Stikeman
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Mauritz Stiller
Whit Stillman
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Marcus Stokes
Mike Stoklasa
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Benjamin Stoloff
Andrew L. Stone
Ezra Stone
Jamie Magnus Stone
Matt Stone
Oliver Stone
Tad Stones
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Jerome Storm
Jean-Marie Straub
Frank R. Strayer
Suresh Joachim
Amanda Street
Graham Streeter
Barbra Streisand
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James Strong
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Mel Stuart
Gene Stupnitsky
John Sturges
Preston Sturges
K. Subash
Arne Sucksdorff
Elia Suleiman
Sun Yu
Mohit Suri
Stephen Surjik
A. Edward Sutherland
Hal Sutherland
Kiefer Sutherland
Seijun Suzuki
Jan Švankmajer
Mary Sweeney
Harry Sweet
Justin Swibel
David Swift
Hans-Jürgen Syberberg
Khady Sylla
István Szabó
Peter Szewczyk
Damián Szifron
Małgorzata Szumowska
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T
Rachel Talalay
Patrick Tam
Lee Tamahori
Cyndi Tang
Alain Tanner
Danis Tanović
Quentin Tarantino
Andrei Tarkovsky
Béla Tarr
Genndy Tartakovsky
Frank Tashlin
Jacques Tati
Norman Taurog
Bertrand Tavernier
Alan Taylor
Don Taylor
Don Taylor
Ray Taylor
Sam Taylor
Stanner E.V. Taylor
William Desmond Taylor
Colin Teague
Lewis Teague
André Téchiné
Julien Temple
Suzie Templeton
Larry Teng
Andy Tennant
George Terwilliger
Hiroshi Teshigahara
Duccio Tessari
Ted Tetzlaff
Kirk Thatcher
Wilhelm Thiele
Gerald Thomas
John G. Thomas
Ralph Thomas
Bernard Thompson
Caroline Thompson
J. Lee Thompson
Tommy Thompson
Robert Thornby
Billy Bob Thornton
Richard Thorpe
Rawson Marshall Thurber
Paul Tibbitt
Greg Tiernan
George Tillman Jr.
Constance Tillotson
Tony Tilse
Mihai Timofti
Bruce Timm
James Tinling
Phil Tippett
Justin Tipping
Romeo Tirone
Johnnie To
James Toback
Norman Tokar
Jan Tománek
Mattson Tomlin
Liesl Tommy
Mark Tonderai
Aad van Toor
Hisayuki Toriumi
Giuseppe Tornatore
Miguel Contreras Torres
Ivan Tors
André de Toth
Laurent Touil-Tartour
Viktor Tourjansky
Jacques Tourneur
Maurice Tourneur
Robert Townsend
Frederick E.O. Toye
Wendy Toye
Josh Trank
David Trainer
David Owen Trainor
Pablo Trapero
Pete Travis
Scott Treleaven
Jeff Tremaine
Jesús Salvador Treviño
Colin Trevorrow
Joachim Trier
Justine Triet
Laurence Trimble
Nadine Trintignant
Jan Troell
Alice Troughton
Gary Trousdale
Keith Truesdell
François Truffaut
Ming-liang Tsai
Peter Tscherkassky
Tsui Hark
Shinya Tsukamoto
Stanley Tucci
Anand Tucker
Rex Tucker
Gary J. Tunnicliffe
Brad Turner
Jon Turteltaub
Frank Tuttle
David Twohy
Chris Twomey
Michael Tyburski
Tom Tykwer
Morten Tyldum
George Tyne
George Tzavellas
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U
Gustav Ucicky
Edgar G. Ulmer
Ron Underwood
Lee Unkrich
Upendra
Michael Uppendahl
Urszula Urbaniak
Carl Urbano
Chano Urueta
Carly Usdin
Kinka Usher
Peter Ustinov
Roar Uthaug
Top of page
V
Roger Vadim
Ladislao Vajda
Luis Valdez
Steve Valentine
Tonino Valerii
Mike Valerio
Jean-Marc Vallée
Jackie van Beek
W. S. Van Dyke
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References
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical%20race%20concepts
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Historical race concepts
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The concept of race as a categorization of anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) has an extensive history in Europe and the Americas. The contemporary word race itself is modern; historically it was used in the sense of "nation, ethnic group" during the 16th to 19th centuries. Race acquired its modern meaning in the field of physical anthropology through scientific racism starting in the 19th century. With the rise of modern genetics, the concept of distinct human races in a biological sense has become obsolete. In 2019, the American Association of Biological Anthropologists stated: "The belief in 'races' as natural aspects of human biology, and the structures of inequality (racism) that emerge from such beliefs, are among the most damaging elements in the human experience both today and in the past."
Etymology
The word "race", interpreted to mean an identifiable group of people who share a common descent, was introduced into English in about 1580, from the Old French (1512), from Italian . An earlier but etymologically distinct word for a similar concept was the Latin word meaning a group sharing qualities related to birth, descent, origin, race, stock, or family; this Latin word is cognate with the Greek words "genos", () meaning "race or kind", and "gonos", which has meanings related to "birth, offspring, stock ...".
Early history
In many ancient civilizations, individuals with widely varying physical appearances became full members of a society by growing up within that society or by adopting that society's cultural norms. (Snowden 1983; Lewis 1990)
Classical civilizations from Rome to China tended to invest the most importance in familial or tribal affiliation rather than an individual's physical appearance (Dikötter 1992; Goldenberg 2003). Societies still tended to equate physical characteristics, such as hair and eye colour, with psychological and moral qualities, usually assigning the highest qualities to their own people and lower qualities to the "Other", either lower classes or outsiders to their society. For example, a historian of the 3rd century Han dynasty in the territory of present-day China describes barbarians of blond hair and green eyes as resembling "the monkeys from which they are descended". (Gossett, pp. 4)
Dominant in ancient Greek and Roman conceptions of human diversity was the thesis that physical differences between different populations could be attributed to environmental factors. Though ancient peoples likely had no knowledge of evolutionary theory or genetic variability, their concepts of race could be described as malleable. Chief among environmental causes for physical difference in the ancient period were climate and geography. Though thinkers in ancient civilizations recognized differences in physical characteristics between different populations, the general consensus was that all non-Greeks were barbarians. This barbarian status, however, was not thought to be fixed; rather, one could shed the 'barbarian' status simply by adopting Greek culture. (Graves 2001)
Classical antiquity
Hippocrates of Kos believed, as many thinkers throughout early history did, that factors such as geography and climate played a significant role in the physical appearance of different peoples. He writes, "the forms and dispositions of mankind correspond with the nature of the country". He attributed physical and temperamental differences among different peoples to environmental factors such as climate, water sources, elevation and terrain. He noted that temperate climates created peoples who were "sluggish" and "not apt for labor", while extreme climates led to peoples who were "sharp", "industrious" and "vigilant". He also noted that peoples of "mountainous, rugged, elevated, and well-watered" countries displayed "enterprising" and "warlike" characteristics, while peoples of "level, windy, and well-watered" countries were "unmanly" and "gentle".
The Roman emperor Julian factored in the constitutions, laws, capacities, and character of peoples:
Middle Ages
European medieval models of race generally mixed Classical ideas with the notion that humanity as a whole was descended from Shem, Ham and Japheth, the three sons of Noah, producing distinct Semitic (Asiatic), Hamitic (African), and Japhetic (Indo-European) peoples. Some critics have alleged that the association between the sons of Noah and skin color dates back at least to the Babylonian Talmud, which some have argued states that the descendants of Ham were cursed with black skin. In the seventh century, the idea that black Africans were cursed with both dark skin and slavery began to gain strength with some Islamic writers, as black Africans became a slave class in the Islamic world.
In the 9th century, Al-Jahiz, an Afro-Arab Islamic philosopher, attempted to explain the origins of different human skin colors, particularly black skin, which he believed to be the result of the environment. He cited a stony region of black basalt in the northern Najd as evidence for his theory.
In the 14th century, the Islamic sociologist Ibn Khaldun, dispelled the Babylonian Talmud'''s account of peoples and their characteristics as a myth. He wrote that black skin was due to the hot climate of sub-Saharan Africa and not due to the descendants of Ham being cursed.
Independently of Ibn Khaldun's work, the question of whether skin colour is heritable or a product of the environment is raised in 17th to 18th century European anthropology.
Georgius Hornius (1666) inherits the rabbinical view of heritability, while François Bernier (1684) argues for at least partial influence of the environment.
Ibn Khaldun's work was later translated into French, especially for use in Algeria, but in the process, the work was "transformed from local knowledge to colonial categories of knowledge". William Desborough Cooley's The Negro Land of the Arabs Examined and Explained (1841) has excerpts of translations of Khaldun's work that were not affected by French colonial ideas. For example, Cooley quotes Khaldun's describing the great African civilization of Ghana (in Cooley's translation):
"When the conquest of the West (by the Arabs) was completed, and merchants began to penetrate into the interior, they saw no nation of the Blacks so mighty as Ghánah, the dominions of which extended westward as far as the Ocean. The King's court was kept in the city of Ghánah, which, according to the author of the 'Book of Roger' (El Idrisi), and the author of the 'Book of Roads and Realms' (El Bekri), is divided into two parts, standing on both banks of the Nile, and ranks among the largest and most populous cities of the world.
The people of Ghánah had for neighbours, on the east, a nation, which, according to historians, was called Súsú; after which came another named Máli; and after that another known by the name of Kaǘkaǘ; although some people prefer a different orthography, and write this name Kághó. The last-named nation was followed by a people called Tekrúr. The people of Ghánah declined in course of time, being overwhelmed or absorbed by the Molaththemún (or muffled people; that is, the Morabites), who, adjoining them on the north towards the Berber country, attacked them, and, taking possession of their territory, compelled them to embrace the Mohammedan religion. The people of Ghánah, being invaded at a later period by the Súsú, a nation of Blacks in their neighbourhood, were exterminated, or mixed with other Black nations."
Ibn Khaldun suggests a link between the rise of the Almoravids and the decline of Ghana. However, historians have found virtually no evidence for an Almoravid conquest of Ghana.David Conrad and Humphrey Fisher, "The Conquest That Never Was: Ghana and the Almoravids, 1076, Vol. I: The External Arabic Sources", History of Africa, Vol. 9 (1982), African Studies Association
Early modern period
Scientists who were interested in natural history, including biological and geological scientists, were known as "naturalists". They would collect, examine, describe, and arrange data from their explorations into categories according to certain criteria. People who were particularly skilled at organizing specific sets of data in a logically and comprehensive fashion were known as classifiers and systematists. This process was a new trend in science that served to help answer fundamental questions by collecting and organizing materials for systematic study, also known as taxonomy.
As the study of natural history grew, so did scientists' effort to classify human groups. Some zoologists and scientists wondered what made humans different from animals in the primate family. Furthermore, they contemplated whether homo sapiens should be classified as one species with multiple varieties or separate species. In the 16th and 17th century, scientists attempted to classify Homo sapiens based on a geographic arrangement of human populations based on skin color, others simply on geographic location, shape, stature, food habits, and other distinguishing characteristics. Occasionally the term "race" was used, but most of the early taxonomists used classificatory terms, such as "peoples", "nations", "types", "varieties", and "species".
Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) and Jean Bodin (1530–1596), French philosopher, attempted a rudimentary geographic arrangement of known human populations based on skin color. Bodin's color classifications were purely descriptive, including neutral terms such as "duskish colour, like roasted quinze", "black", "chestnut", and "farish white".
17th century
German and English scientists, Bernhard Varen (1622–1650) and John Ray (1627–1705) classified human populations into categories according to stature, shape, food habits, and skin color, along with any other distinguishing characteristics.
Ray was also the first person to produce a biological definition of species.
François Bernier (1625–1688) is believed to have developed the first comprehensive classification of humans into distinct races which was published in a French journal article in 1684, Nouvelle division de la terre par les différentes espèces ou races l'habitant, New division of Earth by the different species or races which inhabit it. (Gossett, 1997:32–33). Bernier advocated using the "four quarters" of the globe as the basis for providing labels for human differences. The four subgroups that Bernier used were Europeans, Far Easterners, Negroes (blacks), and Lapps.
18th century
As noted earlier, scientists attempted to classify Homo sapiens based on a geographic arrangement of human populations. Some based their hypothetical divisions of race on the most obvious physical differences, like skin color, while others used geographic location, shape, stature, food habits, and other distinguishing characteristics to delineate between races. However, cultural notions of racial and gender superiority tainted early scientific discovery. In the 18th century, scientists began to include behavioral or psychological traits in their reported observations—which traits often had derogatory or demeaning implications—and researchers often assumed that those traits were related to their race, and therefore, innate and unchangeable. Other areas of interest were to determine the exact number of races, categorize and name them, and examine the primary and secondary causes of variation between groups.
The great chain of being, a medieval idea that there was a hierarchical structure of life from the most fundamental elements to the most perfect, began to encroach upon the idea of race. As taxonomy grew, scientists began to assume that the human species could be divided into distinct subgroups. One's "race" necessarily implied that one group had certain character qualities and physical dispositions that differentiated it from other human populations. Society assigned different values to those differentiations, as well as other, more trivial traits (a man with a strong chin was assumed to possess a stronger character than men with weaker chins). This essentially created a gap between races by deeming one race superior or inferior to another race, thus creating a hierarchy of races. In this way, science was used as justification for unfair treatment of different human populations.
The systematization of race concepts during the Enlightenment period brought with it the conflict between monogenism (a single origin for all human races) and polygenism (the hypothesis that races had separate origins). This debate was originally cast in creationist terms as a question of one versus many creations of humanity, but continued after evolution was widely accepted, at which point the question was given in terms of whether humans had split from their ancestral species one or many times.
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) divided the human species into five races in 1779, later founded on crania research (description of human skulls), and called them (1793/1795):
the Caucasian or white race. Blumenbach was the first to use this term for Europeans, but the term would later be reinterpreted to also include Middle Easterners and South Asians.
the Mongolian or yellow race, including all East Asians.
the Malayan or brown race, including Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders.
the Ethiopian or black race, including all sub-Saharan Africans.
the American or red race, including all Native Americans.
Blumenbach argued that physical characteristics like the collective characteristic types of facial structure and hair characteristics, skin color, cranial profile, etc., depended on geography and nutrition and custom. Blumenbach's work included his description of sixty human crania (skulls) published originally in fascicules as Decas craniorum (Göttingen, 1790–1828). This was a founding work for other scientists in the field of craniometry.
Further anatomical study led him to the conclusion that 'individual Africans differ as much, or even more, from other individual Africans as Europeans differ from Europeans'. Furthermore, he concluded that Africans were not inferior to the rest of mankind 'concerning healthy faculties of understanding, excellent natural talents and mental capacities'.
"Finally, I am of opinion that after all these numerous instances I have brought together of negroes of capacity, it would not be difficult to mention entire well-known provinces of Europe, from out of which you would not easily expect to obtain off-hand such good authors, poets, philosophers, and correspondents of the Paris Academy; and on the other hand, there is no so-called savage nation known under the sun which has so much distinguished itself by such examples of perfectibility and original capacity for scientific culture, and thereby attached itself so closely to the most civilized nations of the earth, as the Negro."
These five groups saw some continuity in the various classification schemes of the 19th century, in some cases augmented, e.g. by the Australoid race and the Capoid race in some cases the Mongolian (East Asian) and American collapsed into a single group.
Racial anthropology (1850–1930)
Among the 19th century naturalists who defined the field were Georges Cuvier, James Cowles Pritchard, Louis Agassiz, Charles Pickering (Races of Man and Their Geographical Distribution, 1848). Cuvier enumerated three races, Pritchard seven, Agassiz twelve, and Pickering eleven.
The 19th century saw the introduction of anthropological techniques such as anthropometrics, invented by Francis Galton and Alphonse Bertillon. They measured the shapes and sizes of skulls and related the results to group differences in intelligence or other attributes.
Stefan Kuhl wrote that the eugenics movement rejected the racial and national hypotheses of Arthur Gobineau and his writing An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. According to Kuhl, the eugenicists believed that nations were political and cultural constructs, not race constructs, because nations were the result of race mixtures. Georges Vacher de Lapouge's "anthroposociology", asserted as self-evident the biological inferiority of particular groups (Kevles 1985). In many parts of the world, the idea of race became a way of rigidly dividing groups by culture as well as by physical appearances (Hannaford 1996). Campaigns of oppression and genocide were often motivated by supposed racial differences (Horowitz 2001).
During the late 19th century and early 20th century, the tension between some who believed in hierarchy and innate superiority, and others who believed in human equality, was at a paramount. The former continued to exacerbate the belief that certain races were innately inferior by examining their shortcomings, namely by examining and testing intelligence between groups. Some scientists claimed that there was a biological determinant of race by evaluating one's genes and DNA. Different methods of eugenics, the study and practice of human selective breeding often with a race as a primary concentration, was still widely accepted in Britain, Germany, and the United States. On the other hand, many scientists understood race as a social construct. They believed that the phenotypical expression of an individual were determined by one's genes that are inherited through reproduction but there were certain social constructs, such as culture, environment, and language that were primary in shaping behavioral characteristics. Some advocated that race 'should centre not on what race explains about society, but rather on the questions of who, why and with what effect social significance is attached to racial attributes that are constructed in particular political and socio-economic contexts', and thus, addressing the "folk" or "mythological representations" of race.
Louis Agassiz's racial definitions
After Louis Agassiz (1807–1873) traveled to the United States, he became a prolific writer in what has been later termed the genre of scientific racism. Agassiz was specifically a believer and advocate in polygenism, that races came from separate origins (specifically separate creations), were endowed with unequal attributes, and could be classified into specific climatic zones, in the same way he felt other animals and plants could be classified.
These included Western American Temperate (the indigenous peoples west of the Rockies); Eastern American Temperate (east of the Rockies); Tropical Asiatic (south of the Himalayas); Temperate Asiatic (east of the Urals and north of the Himalayas); South American Temperate (South America); New Holland (Australia); Arctic (Alaska and Arctic Canada); Cape of Good Hope (South Africa); and American Tropical (Central America and the West Indies).
Agassiz denied that species originated in single pairs, whether at a single location or at many. He argued instead multiple individuals in each species were created at the same time and then distributed throughout the continents where God meant for them to dwell. His lectures on polygenism were popular among the slaveholders in the South, for many this opinion legitimized the belief in a lower standard of the Negro.
His stance in this case was considered to be quite radical in its time, because it went against the more orthodox and standard reading of the Bible in his time which implied all human stock descended from a single couple (Adam and Eve), and in his defense Agassiz often used what now sounds like a very "modern" argument about the need for independence between science and religion; though Agassiz, unlike many polygeneticists, maintained his religious beliefs and was not anti-Biblical in general.
In the context of ethnology and anthropology of the mid-19th century, Agassiz's polygenetic views became explicitly seen as opposing Darwin's views on race, which sought to show the common origin of all human races and the superficiality of racial differences. Darwin's second book on evolution, The Descent of Man, features extensive argumentation addressing the single origin of the races, at times explicitly opposing Agassiz's theories.
Arthur de Gobineau
Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882) was a successful diplomat for the Second French Empire. Initially he was posted to Persia, before working in Brazil and other countries. He came to believe that race created culture, arguing that distinctions between the three "black", "white", and "yellow" races were natural barriers, and that "race-mixing" breaks those barriers down and leads to chaos. He classified the populations of the Middle East, Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, North Africa, and southern France as being racially mixed.
Gobineau also believed that the white race was superior to all others. He thought it corresponded to the ancient Indo-European culture, also known as "Aryan". Gobineau originally wrote that the white race's miscegenation was inevitable. He attributed much of the economic turmoils in France to the pollution of races. Later on in his life, he altered his opinion to believe that the white race could be saved.
To Gobineau, the development of empires was ultimately destructive to the "superior races" that created them, since they led to the mixing of distinct races. This he saw as a degenerative process.
According to his definitions, the people of Spain, most of France, most of Germany, southern and western Iran as well as Switzerland, Austria, Northern Italy, and a large part of Britain, consisted of a degenerative race that arose from miscegenation. Also according to him, the whole population of North India consisted of a yellow race.
Thomas Huxley's racial definitions
Thomas Huxley (1825–1895) wrote one paper, "On the Geographical Distribution of the Chief Modifications of Mankind" (1870), in which he proposed a distinction within the human species ('races'), and their distribution across the earth. He also acknowledged that certain geographical areas with more complex ethnic compositions, including much of the Horn of Africa and the India subcontinent, did not fit into his racial paradigm. As such, he noted that: "I have purposely omitted such people as the Abyssinians and the Hindoos, who there is every reason to believe result from the intermixture of distinct stocks." By the late nineteenth century, Huxley's Xanthochroi group had been redefined as the Nordic race, whereas his Melanochroi became the Mediterranean race. His Melanochroi thus eventually also comprised various other dark Caucasoid populations, including the Hamites (e.g. Berbers, Somalis, northern Sudanese, ancient Egyptians) and Moors.
Huxley's paper was rejected by the Royal Society, and this became one of the many theories to be advanced and dropped by the early exponents of evolution.
Despite rejection by Huxley and the science community, the paper is sometimes cited in support of racialism. Along with Darwin, Huxley was a monogenist, the belief that all humans are part of the same species, with morphological variations emerging out of an initial uniformity. (Stepan, p. 44). This view contrasts with polygenism, the theory that each race is actually a separate species with separate sites of origin.
Despite Huxley's monogenism and his abolitionism on ethical grounds, Huxley assumed a hierarchy of innate abilities, a stance evinced in papers such as "Emancipation Black and White" and his most famous paper, "Evolution and Ethics".
In the former, he writes that the "highest places in the hierarchy of civilization will assuredly not be within the reach of our dusky cousins, though it is by no means necessary that they should be restricted to the lowest". (Stepan, p. 79–80).
Charles Darwin and race
Though Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory was set forth in 1859 upon publication of On the Origin of Species, this work was largely absent of explicit reference to Darwin's theory applied to man. This application by Darwin would not become explicit until 1871 with the publication of his second great book on evolution, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex.
Darwin's publication of this book occurred within the heated debates between advocates of monogeny, who held that all races came from a common ancestor, and advocates of polygeny, who held that the races were separately created. Darwin, who had come from a family with strong abolitionist ties, had experienced and was disturbed by cultures of slavery during his voyage on the Beagle years earlier. Noted Darwin biographers Adrian Desmond and James Moore argue that Darwin's writings on evolution were not only influenced by his abolitionist tendencies, but also his belief that non-white races were equal in regard to their intellectual capacity as white races, a belief which had been strongly disputed by scientists such as Morton, Agassiz and Broca, all noted polygenists.
By the late 1860s, however, Darwin's theory of evolution had been thought to be compatible with the polygenist thesis (Stepan 1982). Darwin thus used Descent of Man to disprove the polygenist thesis and end the debate between polygeny and monogeny once and for all. Darwin also used it to disprove other hypotheses about racial difference that had persisted since the time of ancient Greece, for example, that differences in skin color and body constitution occurred because of differences of geography and climate.
Darwin concluded, for example, that the biological similarities between the different races were "too great" for the polygenist thesis to be plausible. He also used the idea of races to argue for the continuity between humans and animals, noting that it would be highly implausible that man should, by mere accident acquire characteristics shared by many apes.
Darwin sought to demonstrate that the physical characteristics that were being used to define race for centuries (i.e. skin color and facial features) were superficial and had no utility for survival. Because, according to Darwin, any characteristic that did not have survival value could not have been naturally selected, he devised another hypothesis for the development and persistence of these characteristics. The mechanism Darwin developed is known as sexual selection.
Though the idea of sexual selection had appeared in earlier works by Darwin, it was not until the late 1860s when it received full consideration (Stepan 1982). Furthermore, it was not until 1914 that sexual selection received serious consideration as a racial theory by naturalist thinkers.
Darwin defined sexual selection as the "struggle between individuals of one sex, generally the males, for the possession of the other sex". Sexual selection consisted of two types for Darwin: 1.) The physical struggle for a mate, and 2.) The preference for some color or another, typically by females of a given species. Darwin asserted that the differing human races (insofar as race was conceived phenotypically) had arbitrary standards of ideal beauty, and that these standards reflected important physical characteristics sought in mates.
Broadly speaking, Darwin's attitudes of what race was and how it developed in the human species are attributable to two assertions, 1.) That all human beings, regardless of race, share a single, common ancestor, and 2.) Phenotypic racial differences are superficially selected, and have no survival value. Given these two beliefs, some believe Darwin to have established monogenism as the dominant paradigm for racial ancestry, and to have defeated the scientific racism practiced by Morton, Knott, Agassiz et al., as well as notions that there existed a natural racial hierarchy that reflected inborn differences and measures of value between the different human races.
Nevertheless, he stated: "The various races, when carefully compared and measured, differ much from each other – as in the texture of hair, the relative proportions of all parts of the body, the capacity of the lungs, the form and capacity of the skull, and even the convolutions of the brain. But it would be an endless task to specify the numerous points of difference. The races differ also in constitution, in acclimatization and in liability to certain diseases. Their mental characteristics are likewise very distinct; chiefly as it would appear in their emotion, but partly in their intellectual faculties." (The Descent of Man, chapter VII).
In The Descent of Man, Darwin noted the great difficulty naturalists had in trying to decide how many "races" there actually were:
Man has been studied more carefully than any other animal, and yet there is the greatest possible diversity amongst capable judges whether he should be classed as a single species or race, or as two (Virey), as three (Jacquinot), as four (Kant), five (Blumenbach), six (Buffon), seven (Hunter), eight (Agassiz), eleven (Pickering), fifteen (Bory St. Vincent), sixteen (Desmoulins), twenty-two (Morton), sixty (Crawfurd), or as sixty-three, according to Burke. This diversity of judgment does not prove that the races ought not to be ranked as species, but it shews that they graduate into each other, and that it is hardly possible to discover clear distinctive characters between them.
Decline of racial studies after 1930
Several social and political developments that occurred at the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century led to the transformation in the discourse of race. Three movements that historians have considered are: the coming of mass democracy, the age of imperialist expansion, and the impact of Nazism. More than any other, the violence of Nazi rule, the Holocaust, and World War II transformed the whole discussion of race. Nazism made an argument for racial superiority based on a biological basis. This led to the idea that people could be divided into discrete groups and based on the divisions, there would be severe, tortuous, and often fatal consequences. The exposition of Nazi racial theories, which culminated in the Final Solution, created a moral revolution against racism. In 1945, and as a response to the genocide by Nazism, UNESCO was formed. In 1950, it released a statement saying that there was no biological determinant or basis for race.
Consequently, studies of human variation focused more on actual patterns of variation and evolutionary patterns among populations and less about classification. Some scientists point to three discoveries. Firstly, African populations exhibit greater genetic diversity and less linkage disequilibrium because of their long history. Secondly, genetic similarity is directly correlated with geographic proximity. Lastly, some loci reflect selection in response to environmental gradients. Therefore, some argue, human racial groups do not appear to be distinct ethnic groups.
Franz Boas
Franz Boas (1858–1942) was a German American anthropologist and has been called the "Father of American Anthropology". Professor of anthropology at Columbia University from 1899, Boas made significant contributions within anthropology, more specifically, physical anthropology, linguistics, archaeology, and cultural anthropology. His work put an emphasis on cultural and environmental effects on people to explain their development into adulthood and evaluated them in concert with human biology and evolution. This encouraged academics to break away from static taxonomical classifications of race. It is said that before Boas, anthropology was the study of race, and after Boas, anthropology was the study of culture.
The 20th-century criticism of racial anthropology was significantly based on Boas and his school. Beginning in 1920, he strongly favoured the influence of social environment over heritability. As a reaction to the rise of Nazi Germany and its prominent espousing of racist ideologies in the 1930s, there was an outpouring of popular works by scientists criticizing the use of race to justify the politics of "superiority" and "inferiority". An influential work in this regard was the publication of We Europeans: A Survey of "Racial" Problems by Julian Huxley and A. C. Haddon in 1935, which sought to show that population genetics allowed for only a highly limited definition of race at best. Another popular work during this period, "The Races of Mankind" by Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish, argued that though there were some extreme racial differences, they were primarily superficial, and in any case did not justify political action.
Julian Huxley and A. C. Haddon
Sir Julian Sorell Huxley (1887–1975) was an English evolutionary biologist, humanist, internationalist, and the first director of UNESCO. After returning to England from a tour of the United States in 1924, Huxley wrote a series of articles for the Spectator which he expressed his belief in the drastic differences between "negros" and "whites". He believed that the color of "blood" – percentage of 'white' and 'black' blood – that a person had would determine a person's mental capacity, moral probity, and social behavior. "Blood" also determined how individuals should be treated by society. He was a proponent of racial inequality and segregation.
By 1930, Huxley's ideas on race and inherited intellectual capacity of human groups became more liberal. By the mid-1930s, Huxley was considered one of the leading antiracists and committed much of his time and efforts into publicizing the fight against Nazism.
Alfred Cort Haddon (1855–1940) was a British anthropologist and ethnologist.
In 1935, Huxley and A. C. Haddon wrote, We Europeans, which greatly popularized the struggle against racial science and attacked the Nazis' abuse of science to promote their racial theories. Although they argued that 'any biological arrangement of the types of European man is still largely a subjective process', they proposed that humankind could be divided up into "major" and "minor subspecies". They believed that races were a classification based on hereditary traits but should not by nature be used to condemn or deem inferior to another group. Like most of their peers, they continued to maintain a distinction between the social meaning of race and the scientific study of race. From a scientific standpoint, they were willing to accept that concepts of superiority and inferiority did not exist, but from a social standpoint, they continued to believe that racial differences were significant. For example, they argued that genetic differences between groups were functionally important for certain jobs or tasks.
Carleton Coon
In 1939, Coon published The Races of Europe, in which he concluded:
The Caucasian race is of dual origin consisting of Upper Paleolithic (mixture of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals) types and Mediterranean (purely Homo sapiens) types.
The Upper Paleolithic peoples are the truly indigenous peoples of Europe.
Mediterraneans invaded Europe in large numbers during the Neolithic period and settled there.
The racial situation in Europe today may be explained as a mixture of Upper Paleolithic survivors and Mediterraneans.
When reduced Upper Paleolithic survivors and Mediterraneans mix, then occurs the process of dinarization, which produces a hybrid with non-intermediate features.
The Caucasian race encompasses the regions of Europe, Central Asia, South Asia, the Near East, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa.
The Nordic race is part of the Mediterranean racial stock, being a mixture of Corded and Danubian Mediterraneans.
In 1962, Coon also published The Origin of Races, wherein he offered a definitive statement of the polygenist view. He also argued that human fossils could be assigned a date, a race, and an evolutionary grade. Coon divided humanity into five races and believed that each race had ascended the ladder of human evolution at different rates.
Since Coon followed the traditional methods of physical anthropology, relying on morphological characteristics, and not on the emerging genetics to classify humans, the debate over Origin of Races has been "viewed as the last gasp of an outdated scientific methodology that was soon to be supplanted." In today's anthropology, Coon's theories on races are considered pseudoscientific.
Ashley Montagu
Montague Francis Ashley Montagu (1905–1999) was a British-American anthropologist. In 1942, he made a strong effort to have the word "race" replaced with "ethnic group" by publishing his book, Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race. He was also selected to draft the initial 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race.
Montagu would later publish An Introduction to Physical Anthropology, a comprehensive treatise on human diversity. In doing so, he sought to provide a firmer scientific framework through which to discuss biological variation among populations.
UNESCO
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was established November 16, 1945, in the wake of the genocide of Nazism. The UNESCO 1945 constitution declared that, "The great and terrible war which now has ended was made possible by the denial of the democratic principles of the dignity, equality and mutual respect of men, and by the propagation, in their place, through ignorance and prejudice, of the doctrine of the inequality of men and races." Between 1950 and 1978 the UNESCO issued five statements on the issue of race.
The first of the UNESCO statements on race was "The Race Question" and was issued on July 18, 1950. The statement included both a rejection of a scientific basis for theories of racial hierarchies and a moral condemnation of racism. Its first statement suggested in particular to "drop the term 'race' altogether and speak of 'ethnic groups, which proved to be controversial. The 1950 statement was most concerned with dispelling the notion of race as species. It did not reject the idea of a biological basis to racial categories. Instead it defined the concept of race in terms as a population defined by certain anatomical and physiological characteristics as being divergent from other populations; it gives the examples of the Caucasian, Mongoloid and Negroid races. The statements maintain that there are no "pure races" and that biological variability was as great within any race as between races. It argued that there is no scientific basis for believing that there are any innate differences in intellectual, psychological or emotional potential among races.
The statement was drafted by Ashley Montagu and endorsed by some of the leading researchers of the time, in the fields of psychology, biology, cultural anthropology and ethnology. The statement was endorsed by Ernest Beaglehole, Juan Comas, L. A. Costa Pinto, Franklin Frazier, sociologist specialised in race relations studies, Morris Ginsberg, founding chairperson of the British Sociological Association, Humayun Kabir, writer, philosopher and Education Minister of India twice, Claude Lévi-Strauss, one of the founders of ethnology and leading theorist of structural anthropology, and Ashley Montagu, anthropologist and author of The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity, who was the rapporteur.
As a result of a lack of representation of physical anthropologists in the drafting committee the 1950 publication was criticized by biologists and physical anthropologists for confusing the biological and social senses of race and for going beyond the scientific facts, although there was a general agreement about the statement's conclusions.
UNESCO assembled a new committee with better representation of the physical sciences and drafted a new statement released in 1951. The 1951 statement, published as "The Race Concept", focused on race as a biological heuristic that could serve as the basis for evolutionary studies of human populations. It considered the existing races to be the result of such evolutionary processes throughout human history. It also maintained that "equality of opportunity and equality in law in no way depend, as ethical principles, upon the assertion that human beings are in fact equal in endowment."
As the 1950 and 1951 statements generated considerable attention, in 1964 a new commission was formed to draft a third statement titled "Proposals on the Biological Aspects of Race". According to Michael Banton (2008), this statement broke more clearly with the notion of race-as-species than the previous two statements, declaring that almost any genetically differentiated population could be defined as a race. The statement stated that "Different classifications of mankind into major stocks, and of those into more restricted categories (races, which are groups of populations, or single populations) have been proposed on the basis of hereditary physical traits. Nearly all classifications recognise at least three major stocks" and "There is no national, religious, geographic, linguistic or cultural group which constitutes a race ipso facto; the concept of race is purely biological." It concluded with "The biological data given above stand in open contradiction to the tenets of racism. Racist theories can in no way pretend to have any scientific foundation."
The 1950, 1951, and 1964 statements focused on dispelling the scientific foundations for racism but did not consider other factors contributing to racism. For this reason, in 1967 a new committee was assembled, including representatives of the social sciences (sociologists, lawyers, ethnographers and geneticists), to draft a statement "covering the social, ethical and philosophical aspects of the problem". This statement was the first to provide a definition of racism: "antisocial beliefs and acts which are based upon the fallacy that discriminatory intergroup relations are justifiable on biological grounds". The statement continued to denounce the many negative social effects of racism.
In 1978, the general assembly of the UNESCO considered the four previous statements and published a collective "Declaration on Race and Racial Prejudice". This declaration included apartheid as one of the examples of racism, an inclusion which caused South Africa to step out of the assembly. It declared that a number of public policies and laws needed to be implemented. It stated that:
"All human beings belong to a single species."
"All peoples of the world possess equal faculties for attaining the highest level in intellectual, technical, social, economic, cultural and political development."
"The differences between the achievements of the different peoples are entirely attributable to geographical, historical, political, economic, social and cultural factors."
"Any theory which involves the claim that racial or ethnic groups are inherently superior or inferior, thus implying that some would be entitled to dominate and eliminate others, presumed to be inferior, or which bases value judgements on racial differentiation, has no scientific foundation and is contrary to the moral and ethical principles of humanity."
Criticism of racial studies (1930s–1980s)
Claude Lévi-Strauss' Race and History (UNESCO, 1952) was another critique of the biological "race" notion, arguing in favor of cultural relativism. Lévi-Strauss argued that when comparatively ranking cultures, the culture of the person performing the ranking would naturally decide which values and ideas are prioritized. Lévi-Strauss compared this to special relativity, suggesting that each observer's frame of reference, their culture, appeared to them to be stationary, while the others' cultures appeared to be moving only in relation to an outside frame of reference. Lévi-Strauss cautioned against focusing on specific differences, such as which race was first to develop a specific technology in isolation, as he believed this would create a simplistic and warped view of humanity. Instead Lévi-Strauss instead advocated looking at why these developments were made in context, and what problems they addressed.
In his 1984 article in Essence magazine, "On Being 'White' ... and Other Lies", James Baldwin reads the history of racialization in America as both figuratively and literally violent, remarking that race only exists as a social construction within a network of force relations:
Disproof by modern genetics
The impossibility of drawing clearly defined boundaries between the areas of the supposed racial groups had been observed by Blumenbach and later by Charles Darwin.
With the availability of new data due to the development of modern genetics, the concept of races in a biological sense has become untenable. Problems of the concept include: It "is not useful or necessary in research", scientists are not able to agree on the definition of a certain proposed race, and they do not even agree on the number of races, with some proponents of the concept suggesting 300 or even more "races". Also, data are not reconcilable with the concept of a treelike evolution nor with the concept of "biologically discrete, isolated, or static" populations.
In 2019, the American Association of Physical Anthropologists stated: "The belief in 'races' as natural aspects of human biology, and the structures of inequality (racism) that emerge from such beliefs, are among the most damaging elements in the human experience both today and in the past."
After discussing various criteria used in biology to define subspecies or races, Alan R. Templeton concludes in 2016: "[T]he answer to the question whether races exist in humans is clear and unambiguous: no."
See also
Cephalometry
Biological anthropology
History of anthropometry
Phrenology
Eugenics
One-drop rule
Racial hygiene
Heritability
Biological determinism
Nature versus nurture
Race and intelligence
References
Citations
Sources
Alexander, Nathan G. (2019). Race in a Godless World: Atheism, Race, and Civilization, 1850-1914. New York/Manchester: New York University Press/Manchester University Press.
Augstein, Hannah Franziska, ed. Race: The Origins of an Idea, 1760–1850. Bristol, England: Thoemmes Press, 1996.
Banton, Michael P. (1977) The idea of race. Westview Press, Boulder
Banton, Michael P. Racial Theories. 2nd ed. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Barkan, Elazar. The Retreat of Scientific Racism. New York: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, 1992.
Bowcock A. M., Kidd JR, Mountain JL, Hebert JM, Carotenuto L, Kidd KK, Cavalli-Sforza LL "Drift, admixture, and selection in human evolution: a study with DNA polymorphisms". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 1991; 88: 3: 839–43
Bowcock, A. M., "High resolution of human evolutionary trees with polymorphic microsatellites", 1994, Nature, 368: pp. 455–57
Brace, C. Loring. "Race" is a Four-Letter Word: the Genesis of the Concept. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Dain, Bruce R. A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Foucault, Michel. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1975–76. Trans. David Macey. Eds. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana. City: Picador, 2003.
Gossett, Thomas F. Race: The History of an Idea in America. 1963. Ed. and with a foreword by Shelley Fisher Fishkin and Arnold Rampersad. Oxford, England: Oxford UP, 1997.
Gould, Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man. Rev. and expand ed. New York: Norton, 1996.
Hannaford, Ivan. Race: The History of an Idea in the West. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1996.
Harding, Sandra. The "Racial" Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic Future. Indiana University Press, 1993.
Hoover, Dwight W. "Paradigm Shift: The Concept of Race in the 1920s and the 1930s". Conspectus of History 1.7 (1981): 82–100.
Koenig, Barbara A., Lee Sandra Soo-Jin, and Richardson Sarah S. Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age. Piscataway: Rutgers University Press, 2008.
Lewis, B. Race and slavery in the Middle East. Oxford University Press, New York, 1990.
Lieberman, L. "How 'Caucasoids' got such big crania and why they shrank: from Morton to Rushton". Current Anthropology 42:69–95, 2001.
Malik, Kenan. The Meaning of Race. New York: New York University Press, 1996.
Meltzer, M. Slavery: a world history, rev ed. DaCapo Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1993.
Rick Kittles, and S. O. Y. Keita, "Interpreting African Genetic Diversity", African Archaeological Review, Vol. 16, No. 2,1999, pp. 1–5
Sarich, Vincent, and Miele Frank. Race: the Reality of Human Differences. Boulder: Westview Press, 2004.
Shipman, Pat. The Evolution of Racism: Human Differences and the Use and Abuse of Science. 1994. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Smedley, Audrey. Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview. Boulder: Westview Press, 1999.
Snowden F. M. Before color prejudice: the ancient view of blacks. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1983.
Stanton W. The leopard's spots: scientific attitudes toward race in America, 1815–1859. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1960.
Stepan, Nancy. The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–1960. Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1982
Takaki, R. A different mirror: a history of multicultural America. Little, Brown, Boston, 1993.
von Vacano, Diego. The Color of Citizenship: Race, Modernity and Latin American/Hispanic Political Thought''. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
External links
Dictionary definitions
Definition of "race" in the 1913 Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary provided by the ARTFL Project, University of Chicago.
Definition of "race" in the Wiktionary
Web sites devoted to the history of "race"
The RaceSci Website preserved at the Internet Archive: website devoted to providing information for scholars and students of the history of "race" in science, medicine, and technology, maintained at the Department of History at the University of Toronto and includes subject bibliographies as well as an annotated link list.
PBS website for the three-part television documentary Race – The Power of an Illusion with background reading and teaching resources.
Social constructionism
fr:Race humaine#Historique de la notion
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldwide%20Developers%20Conference
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Worldwide Developers Conference
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The Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is an information technology conference held annually by Apple Inc. The conference is usually held at Apple Park in California. The event is usually used to showcase new software and technologies in the macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and tvOS families as well as other Apple software; new hardware products are sometimes announced as well. WWDC is also an event hosted for third-party software developers that work on apps for iPhones, iPads, Macs, and other Apple devices. Attendees can participate in hands-on labs with Apple engineers and attend in-depth sessions covering a wide variety of topics.
The first ever WWDC was held in 1983, with the introduction of Apple Basic, but it was not until 2002 that Apple started using the conference as a major launchpad for new products. Beginning in 1987, WWDC was held in Santa Clara. After 15 years in nearby San Jose, the conference moved to San Francisco, where it eventually became Apple's primary media event of the year and regularly sold out. WWDC returned to San Jose 13 years later.
WWDC 2020 and WWDC 2021 were hosted as online-only conferences due to the COVID-19 pandemic. WWDC 2022 invited developers and the press back to Apple Park for the first time in about three years despite the COVID-19 pandemic. Customers and consumers watched the event via online live streams. All of these events were hosted at Apple Park in Cupertino, California. The most recent conference, called WWDC 2023, was held both online and in-person.
Attendance
A $1,599 ticket is required to enter the conference. Tickets are obtained through an online lottery. Scholarships are available for students and members of STEM organizations. Attendees must be 13 years or older and must be a member of an Apple Developer program.
Until 2007, the number of attendees varied between 2,000 and 4,200; however, during WWDC 2007, Steve Jobs noted that there were more than 5,000 attendees. The WWDC events held from 2008 to 2015 were capped, and sold out at 5,000 attendees (5,200 including special attendees). WWDC 2018 had 6,000 attendees from 77 countries, including 350 scholarship recipients.
Content
WWDC is held annually from Monday to Friday on one week in June. The conference consists primarily of a keynote address, presentation sessions, one-on-one "lab" consultations, and special get-togethers and events.
The conference begins with a Monday morning keynote address by Tim Cook and other Apple executives. (From 1998 until his resignation and death in 2011, Steve Jobs gave the keynote address, which the media often called the Stevenote.) It is attended by both conference attendees and the media, since Apple regularly makes product announcements at the event. Hardware announced during the address is sometimes exhibited in the conference hall afterwards. The keynote address is followed in the afternoon by a Platforms State of the Union address, which highlights and demonstrates changes in Apple's software developer platforms that are detailed in sessions later in the week. The Apple Design Awards are also announced on the first day of the conference.
Several session tracks run simultaneously from Tuesday through Friday. The presentations cover programming, design, and other topics and range from introductory to advanced. Almost all regularly scheduled presentations are delivered by Apple employees. These presentations are streamed live, and recordings can be viewed on demand on the Apple Developer website in the conference's iOS and tvOS applications. Lunchtime sessions are given by a variety of guest speakers who are industry experts in technology and science; these sessions are not streamed or recorded. In the past, some sessions included question-and-answer time, and a popular Stump the Experts session featured interaction between Apple employees and attendees.
At the labs, which run throughout the week, Apple engineers are available for one-on-one consultations with developers in attendance. Experts in user interface design and accessibility are also available for consultations by appointment.
Apple organizes social get-togethers during the conference for various groups, such as women in technology or developers interested in internationalization or machine learning. The Thursday evening Bash (previously the Beer Bash) at a nearby park features live music, food, and drinks for all attendees 21 years or older.
History
1980s
1983 – Apple Independent Software Developers Conference
In 1983, the first WWDC was held. During this time, the event was called The Apple Independent Software Developers Conference. Participants of the event had to sign an NDA, so not much is known about the event, but what is known is that people got a first look at Lisa, the world's first personal computer with a graphical interface.
1984 – Apple II Forever
In 1984, Jobs introduced the famous Macintosh, the second graphical interface personal computer, to developers. This was also the first year the conference was open to the media.
1986 – Apple World Conference
The 1986 Apple World Conference was in San Francisco, featuring over 400 exhibitors and 200 companies showcasing Apple II and Macintosh-related products. Attendees could purchase computer accessories, peripherals, hardware, and software. Apple also introduced the monochrome laser printer LaserWriter Plus at the conference. Notable industry experts, such as Stewart Alsop II, David Bunnell, Esther Dyson, Adam Green, and Guy Kawasaki led several conferences.
1987 - AppleWorld Conference
The AppleWorld Conference 1987 was a two-day event held in Los Angeles on March 2–3, 1987, to celebrate Apple's tenth anniversary and introduce new products. At the keynote event, Apple introduced the Macintosh SE and Macintosh II, which was the first Macintosh to support A/UX, Apple's implementation of Unix. In addition, Apple announced its collaboration with 3Com to develop EtherTalk, an Ethernet-compatible version of the AppleTalk protocol. During the opening session, Apple COO Del Yocam, Steve Wozniak, and CEO John Sculley spoke about Apple's history, philosophy, and goals, respectively. Sculley hinted at Apple's future plans, including a commitment to higher-resolution screens.
1987 - Apple Developers Conference
The 1987 DevCon was on the first week of April.
Spring, 1988
In the last week of April, in anticipation of the System 6.0 launch, Apple announced several features that would be included in the release. These features included a notification manager that could send data to foreground applications, Macro Maker, a program designed to create keyboard macros, Quickergraf, a performance enhancement to Quickdraw, and enhancements to the system's print monitor.
For System 7.0, Apple announced additional features, including functions related to interapplication communication, and MultiFinder would become a standard, integrated part of the operating system, replacing Finder. Apple also addressed issues related to 32-bit graphics, including Color Quickdraw.
Greater multitasking was also emphasized, in the form of interprocess communications.
In addition to these updates, Bill Atkinson introduced Version 1.2 of HyperCard, which provided support for CD-ROM and other write-protected media.
Summer, 1988
In the second week of September, Apple announced AppleTalk support for VMS and DECnet.
1989
In 1989, System 7 was announced.
1990s
1991
In 1991, WWDC saw the first public demonstration of QuickTime.
1995
In 1995, WWDC'95 focused almost fully on the Copland project, which by this time was able to be demonstrated to some degree. Gil Amelio stated that the system was on-schedule to ship in beta form in later summer with an initial commercial release in the very late fall. However, very few live demos were offered, and no beta of the operating system was offered.
1996
In 1996, WWDC'96's primary emphasis was a new software component technology called OpenDoc, which allowed end users to compile an application from components offering features they desired most. The OpenDoc consortium included Adobe, Lotus, others, and Apple. Apple touted OpenDoc as the future foundation for application structure under Mac OS. As proof of concept, Apple demonstrated a new end-user product called Cyberdog, a comprehensive Internet application component suite offering users an integrated browser, email, FTP, telnet, finger and other services built fully of user-exchangeable OpenDoc components. ClarisWorks (later renamed AppleWorks), a principal product in Apple's wholly owned subsidiary Claris Corporation, was demonstrated as an example of a pre-OpenDoc component architecture application modified to be able to contain functional OpenDoc components.
1997
In 1997, WWDC marked the return of Steve Jobs as a consultant, and his famous reaction to an insult by a developer. WWDC'97 was the first show after the purchase of NeXT, and focused on the efforts to use OPENSTEP as the foundation of the next Mac OS. The plan at that time was to introduce a new system then named Rhapsody, which would consist of a version of OPENSTEP modified with a more Mac-like look and feel, the Yellow Box, along with a Blue Box that allowed extant Mac applications to run under OS emulation. The show focused mainly on the work in progress, including a short history of development efforts since the two development teams had been merged on February 4. Several new additions to the system were also demonstrated, including tabbed and outline views, and a new object-based graphics layer (NSBezier).
1998
In 1998, in response to developer comments about the new operating system, the big announcement at WWDC'98 was the introduction of Carbon, effectively a version of the classic Mac OS API implemented on OpenStep. Under the original Rhapsody plans, classic applications would run in sandboxed installation of the classic Mac OS, (called the Blue Box) and have no access to the new Mac OS X features. To receive new features, such as protected memory and preemptive multitasking, developers had to rewrite applications using the Yellow Box API. Developer complaints about the major porting effort to what was then a shrinking market and warnings that they might simply abandon the platform, led Apple to reconsider the original plan. Carbon addressed the problem by dramatically reducing the effort needed, while exposing some of the new functions of the underlying OS. Another major introduction at WWDC'98 was the Quartz imaging model, which replaced Display PostScript with something akin to display PDF. Although the reasons for this switch remain unclear, Quartz also included better support for the extant QuickDraw model from the classic OS, and (as later learned) Java2D. Supporting QuickDraw directly in the graphics model also led to a related announcement, that the Blue Box would now be invisible, integrated into the extant desktop, instead of a separate window.
1999
In 1999, WWDC'99 was essentially a progress report as the plans outlined in WWDC'98 came to fruition. Three major announcements were the opening of the operating system underlying the new OS as Darwin, improvements to the Macintosh Finder, and the replacement of QuickDraw 3D with OpenGL as the primary 3D API. The system formerly named OpenStep, and during development termed Yellow Box, was formally renamed Cocoa. 2,563 developers attended.
2000s
2000
WWDC 2000 was another "progress report" before the upcoming release of Mac OS X. Recent changes included a modified dock and improved versions of the developer tools. Developer Preview 4 was released at the show, with the commercial release pushed back to January 2001. Also, WebObjects was dropped in price to a flat fee of US$699. Approximately 3,600 developers attended and the band The Rippingtons played at the Apple campus.
2001
In 2001, Mac OS X had only recently been released, but WWDC'01 added the first release of Mac OS X Server and WebObjects 5. Over 4,000 developers attended, and leather jackets with a large blue "X" embroidered on the back were distributed to attendees.
2002
In 2002, Mac OS X v.10.2, QuickTime 6 and Rendezvous (now named Bonjour) were presented. Apple also said farewell to Mac OS 9 with a mock funeral, and told the developers that no more Mac OS 9 development would occur, reinforcing that the future of the Mac was now entirely on Mac OS X, thus shutting down the Classic Mac OS operating system.
2003
In 2003, WWDC 2003 demonstrated the Power Mac G5, previewed Mac OS X Panther (10.3), announced the launch of Safari 1.0 (concluding its beta phase), and introduced the iApps: iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, etc. Attendees received Apple's first model of the iSight web camera (to coincide with the launch of iChat AV), pre-releases of Mac OS X 10.3 and Mac OS X 10.3 Server, the O'Reilly book Cocoa in a Nutshell, and a 17-inch notebook carry bag. Apple also screened the Pixar film Finding Nemo for attendees, ahead of its premiere in cinemas. Formerly scheduled for May 19 to 23 in San Jose, California, WWDC 2003 was rescheduled for June 23 to 27 at San Francisco's Moscone Center. Approximately 3,000 developers attended.
2004
In 2004, WWDC was held from June 28 to July 2. Jobs noted that 3,500 developers attended, a 17% increase from 2003. New displays were introduced in 23- and 30-inch widescreen. Mac OS X Tiger (10.4) was previewed and iTunes 4.9, the first version with integrated podcast support, was demoed by Jobs. All attendees received a developer preview of Tiger, a grey T-shirt with the Apple logo on the front and "WWDC 2004" on the back, a backpack able to hold a 17-inch PowerBook, and a copy of Apple Remote Desktop 2.0. The band Jimmy Eat World played at the Apple campus after attendees were taken there by bus from Moscone Center West.
2005
WWDC 2005 was held from June 6 to 10. After a basic market update, Jobs announced that Apple would transition the Mac to Intel processors. The keynote featured developers from Wolfram Research, who discussed their experience porting Mathematica to Mac OS X on the Intel platform. The conference consisted of 110 lab sessions and 95 presentation sessions, while more than 500 Apple engineers were on site alongside 3,800 attendees from 45 countries. The band The Wallflowers played at the Apple campus.
2006
In 2006, Jobs once again delivered the keynote presentation at the WWDC, which was held from August 7 to 11 in Moscone Center West, San Francisco. The Mac Pro was announced as a replacement to the Power Mac G5, which was Apple's prior pro desktop computer and the last remaining PowerPC-based Mac. The standard Mac Pro featured two 2.66 GHz dual core Xeon (Woodcrest) processors, 1 GB RAM, 250 GB hard drive, and a 256 MB video card. An Xserve update, based on the dual core Xeons, was also announced. Redundant power and Lights Out Management were further product improvements to Apple's server lineup. While certain key Mac OS X improvements were undisclosed, there were 10 improvements in the next iteration, Mac OS X Leopard (10.5), including: full 64-bit app support, Time Machine, Boot Camp, Front Row, Photo Booth, Spaces (Virtual Desktops), Spotlight enhancements, Core Animation, Universal Access enhancements, Mail enhancements, and Dashboard enhancements (including Dashcode, and iChat enhancements). Along with the Leopard features that were announced, a major revision to the Mac OS X Server product was announced. New features to the Server included: a simplified set-up process, iCal Server (based on the CalDAV standard), Apple Teams (a set of web-based collaborative services), Spotlight Server, and Podcast Producer. The 2006 WWDC attracted 4,200 developers from 48 countries, while there were 140 sessions and 100 hands-on labs for developers. More than 1,000 Apple engineers were present at the event, and the DJ BT performed at the Apple Campus in Cupertino.
2007
WWDC 2007 was held from June 11 to 15 in Moscone Center West, and started with a keynote presentation from Jobs. Apple presented a feature-complete beta of Mac OS X Leopard, even though its release date was pushed back to October. Jobs announced that a version of Safari, Apple's proprietary web browser, had been created for Windows, and that a beta release was being made available online that same day. Apple also announced support for third-party development of the then-upcoming iPhone via online web applications running in Safari on the handset. The announcement implied that Apple, at least for the time being, had no plans to release an iPhone software development kit (SDK), meaning that developers must use standard web protocols. Also, Jobs noted during the keynote that more than 5,000 attendees were present at WWDC 2007, breaking the prior year's record. The band Ozomatli played at the Yerba Buena Gardens.
2008
In 2008, WWDC 2008 took place from June 9 to 13 in Moscone Center West. Apple reported that, for the first time, the conference had sold out. There were three tracks for developers, iPhone, Mac, and IT. Announcements at the keynote included the App Store for iPhone and iPod Touch, the stable version of the iPhone SDK, a subsidized 3G version of the iPhone for Worldwide markets, version 2.0 of iPhone OS, Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6), and the replacement/rebranding of .Mac as MobileMe. Seven years later, Yahoo News would describe 2008 as "perhaps the peak year for WWDC product intros", which however was marred by problems with MobileMe that caused "one of the biggest PR disasters in Apple history". For the bash held June 12, the band Barenaked Ladies played at the Yerba Buena Gardens.
2009
In 2009, WWDC 2009 took place from June 8 to 12 in Moscone Center West, and Apple reported that the 2009 conference sold out in late April. Announcements at the keynote included the release of the iPhone OS 3.0 software announced to developers in March, a demonstration of Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6), the new 13" MacBook Pro, updates to the 15" and 17" MacBook Pros, and the new iPhone 3GS. Phil Schiller, Apple's SVP for Product Marketing, presented the WWDC keynote this year, instead of Jobs, who had taken medical leave of absence since the start of the year. Attendees received a neoprene messenger bag and the band Cake played at the Yerba Buena Gardens. This was the first year plastic badges were used instead of printed paper badges.
2010s
2010
WWDC 2010 was announced on April 28, 2010 and held at Moscone Center West from June 7 to 11. Apple reported that the conference was sold out within 8 days of tickets being made available, even though tickets were only available at the full price of US$1599 (2009 and prior, tickets could be bought with an early-bird discount of US$300). On June 7, 2010, Jobs announced the iPhone 4, whose technical problems, combined with Jobs blaming phone owners for them, would dominate the aftermath of the conference ("Antennagate"). Also at WWDC 2010, the renaming of iPhone OS to iOS was announced. The FaceTime and iMovie app for iPhone applications were also announced. The band OK Go played at the Yerba Buena Gardens. Attendees received a black track jacket with the letters "WWDC" across the vest and the number "10" stitched on the back.
2011
WWDC 2011 was held in Moscone Center West from June 6 to 10, 2011. The event reportedly sold out within just 12 hours of the 5,000 tickets being placed on sale on March 28, 2011. The ticket price also remained the same from the 2010 WWDC, selling at US$1,599, however, after-market pricing for tickets ranged from US$2,500 to US$3,500. At the keynote, Apple unveiled its next generation software: Mac OS X Lion, the eighth major release of Mac OS X; iOS 5, the next version of Apple's advanced mobile operating system which powers the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch; and iCloud, Apple's upcoming cloud services offering. Michael Franti and Spearhead played at the Bash in Yerba Buena Gardens on June 9. Attendees received a black track jacket similar to that of the prior year, but with a smaller "WWDC" across the front and the number "11" stitched on the back. This was the final Apple event hosted by Jobs.
2012
WWDC 2012 was held in Moscone Center West from June 11 to 15. The ticket price remained the same as the 2010 WWDC, selling at US$1,599. Apple changed the purchasing process by requiring purchases to be made using an Apple ID associated with a paid Apple developer account. Tickets went on sale shortly after 8:30 am Eastern Time on Wednesday April 25, 2012, and were sold out within 1 hour and 43 minutes. The keynote highlighted the launch of Apple Maps, and also announced new models of the MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro including one with Retina Display. Apple also showcased OS X Mountain Lion and iOS 6.
In prior years, attendees were required to be at least 18 years old. In 2012, Apple changed this requirement to at least 13 years after a minor who was "accidentally" awarded a student scholarship in 2011 successfully petitioned Tim Cook to retain the award. Despite the change, Beer Bash attendees were still required to be 18 years old, and 21 years old to consume alcohol, in accord with local and federal laws. Neon Trees performed at the WWDC Bash.
2013
In 2013, WWDC 2013 was held from June 10 to 14, 2013 in Moscone Center West. Tickets went on sale at 10 am PDT on April 25, 2013, selling out within 71 seconds (1 minute and 11 seconds). Apple also announced that it would award 150 free WWDC 2013 Student Scholarship tickets for young attendees to benefit from the conference's many workshops.
In the keynote, Apple unveiled redesigned models of the Mac Pro, AirPort Time Capsule, AirPort Extreme, and MacBook Air, and showcased OS X Mavericks, iOS 7, iWork for iCloud, and a new music streaming service named iTunes Radio. Vampire Weekend performed at the Bash on June 13 at the Yerba Buena Gardens. Attendees received a black wind breaker with the letters "WWDC" across the front and the number "13" stitched on the back.
2014
WWDC 2014 was held from June 2 to 6, 2014 in Moscone Center West. For the first time, the opportunity to buy tickets was given at random to developers who were members of an Apple developer program at the time of the conference announcement, and who registered at Apple's developer web site. Apple also gave 200 free Student Scholarship tickets. The keynote began on June 2 and Apple unveiled several new software items, including iOS 8—the largest update to iOS since the release of the App Store—and OS X Yosemite, which features a redesigned interface inspired by iOS. Announcements included the new programming language Swift, many developer kits and tools for iOS 8, but no new hardware. Bastille performed at the Yerba Buena Gardens, and attendees received a black windbreaker with the letters "WWDC" across the front and the number "14" stitched on the back, along with a US$25 iTunes gift card to commemorate the 25th anniversary of WWDC.
2015
WWDC 2015 was held from June 8 to 12, 2015 in Moscone Center West in San Francisco. The major announcements were the new features of iOS 9, the next version of OS X called OS X El Capitan, the first major software update to the Apple Watch, the June 30 debut of Apple Music, and news that the language Swift was becoming open-source software supporting iOS, OS X, and Linux. The Beer Bash was held at the Yerba Buena Gardens on June 11. Walk the Moon performed there.
2016
WWDC 2016 was held from June 13 to June 17, 2016, at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium and Moscone Center West in San Francisco. The announcements at the event included renaming OS X to macOS, the new version named macOS Sierra, as well as updates to iOS 10, watchOS 3, and tvOS 10. Apple proclaimed that the keynote would be the largest ever for developers; this became the reality when they allowed third-party developers to extend the functionality in Messages, Apple Maps, and Siri. Cisco Systems and Apple announced a partnership at the 2016 WWDC. Cisco APIs, accessed through Cisco DevNet, were to have greater interoperability with Apple iOS and APIs.
The keynote was more about software updates and features, as no new hardware was introduced. Apple released the Home App that works with HomeKit as a control center for all third-party applications which provide functions for the home. Also, Swift Playgrounds was announced as an iPad exclusive app that helps younger people learn to code with Apple's programming language Swift. APFS, Apple's new file system, was introduced.
The Bash was performed by Good Charlotte at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium.
2017
WWDC 2017 (stylized as WWDC17) was held from June 5 to June 9, 2017, at the San Jose Convention Center in San Jose, California, which was the first time since 2002 that the conference took place in the city. Software announcements included iOS 11, watchOS 4, macOS High Sierra, and tvOS 11. Hardware announcements included updates to iMac, MacBook and MacBook Pro, as well as the new iMac Pro, 10.5-inch iPad Pro and smart speaker HomePod. Fall Out Boy performed at the Bash held in Discovery Meadow on June 8.
2018
WWDC 2018 was held from June 4 to June 8, 2018, at the San Jose Convention Center in San Jose, California. The announcements at the event included iOS 12, macOS Mojave, watchOS 5, and tvOS 12. As with 2016, there were no new hardware announcements. Panic! at the Disco performed at the Bash at Discovery Meadow Park.
2019
WWDC 2019 was held from June 3 to June 7, 2019, at the San Jose Convention Center in San Jose, California. The announcements at the event included iOS 13, macOS Catalina, watchOS 6, tvOS 13, iPadOS 13, the 3rd generation Mac Pro, and the Pro Display XDR. Weezer performed at the Bash at Discovery Meadow Park.
2020s
2020
WWDC 2020 was held from June 22 to June 26, 2020 as an online-only conference for the first time because of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The announcements at the online Apple Special Event included iOS 14, iPadOS 14, watchOS 7, tvOS 14, macOS Big Sur, and Apple's transition to custom ARM processors for their Macintosh family of personal computers, including a prototype ARM-based Mac for developer use. The event video footage was recorded at Apple Park in Cupertino, California. In total, the event got over 22 million views with around 72 hours of content.
2021
WWDC 2021, with the tag line "Glow and behold.", was held from June 7 to June 11, 2021 as another online-only conference due to the COVID-19 pandemic. iOS 15, iPadOS 15, watchOS 8, tvOS 15, macOS Monterey, and other software updates were announced. There were no new hardware announcements at the conference. As with 2020, the event video footage was recorded at Apple Park in Cupertino, California.
2022
WWDC 2022, with the tagline "Call to code.", was held from June 6 to June 10, 2022, as an online conference due to the COVID-19 pandemic despite improvements, although there was a special day at Apple Park on June 6, allowing developers and students to watch the online events together. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the event also occurred as an in-person conference for the first time since the previous one held in 2019. iOS 16, iPadOS 16, watchOS 9, tvOS 16 and macOS Ventura were announced at the conference. Stage Manager for Macs was also introduced during the initial presentation. Hardware announcements included the M2 chip and updated MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro models based on it.
2023
WWDC 2023 with the tagline "Code new worlds" was held from June 5 to June 9 in an online format with an in-person experience at Apple Park on the first day of the show. Similarly to the previous years, Apple held the Swift Student Challenge, launched in 2020 for the first time, with applications through April 19 and results on May 9. Prizes included WWDC outerwear, AirPods Pro, a customized pin set, and a one-year membership in the Apple Developer Program. Among the winners, some were randomly be chosen to attend the Apple Park special event. For software, Apple introduced macOS 14 Sonoma, the 20th major release of macOS, as well as iOS 17, iPadOS 17, watchOS 10, tvOS 17 and firmware updates to AirPods. For hardware, they announced the Apple M2 Ultra SoC for Macs, 15-inch MacBook Air, Mac Studio with M2 Max and Ultra and the long awaited Mac Pro with M2 Ultra. They also unveiled a AR/VR headset under the name of "Apple Vision Pro", which would have games and experiences developed with Unity.
Scholarships
In 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Apple replaced the annual WWDC Scholarships with the Swift Student Challenge, a programming contest held before WWDC which centers on the Swift programming language. , the program was managed by Apple head of developer marketing Esther Hare. 350 winners are selected, who receive WWDC-themed clothing, a metal pin set, the ability to meet Apple engineers, a one-year membership of the Apple Developer Program, and since 2022, a pair of AirPods Pro. In 2022, Tim Cook met with 12 of the winners. In 2023, students could also enter a lottery for in-person attendance of WWDC at Apple Park.
The task is to create an interactive scene, shorter than 3 minutes, inside Swift Playgrounds, an Apple app that teaches introductory programming. The projects are judged based on technical accomplishment, creativity, and the text accompanying the submission.
The challenge is only open to students 13 or older, the minimum age in their jurisdiction, for example, 16 in the European Union, who are currently enrolled in an accredited school or have recently graduated, and who are not working full-time as developers. Students can win the award up to four times.
Related events
Several third-party conferences are held in conjunction with WWDC each year, including AltConf, Layers, and NextDoor. Prominent podcasters Jim Dalrymple and John Gruber hold events nearby, and former Apple evangelist James Dempsey performs a benefit concert.
Previously, Apple also announced new products at Macworld Expo and Apple Expo. Apple continues to hold "special events" throughout the year for product introductions, and on rare occasions releases products without holding an event.
See also
Apple Inc. advertising
Apple Music Festival
Google I/O
Microsoft Build
List of Apple Inc. media events
References
External links
Recurring events established in 1983
1983 establishments in California
June events
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American%20Indian%20Movement
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American Indian Movement
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The American Indian Movement (AIM) is an American Indian grassroots movement which was founded in Minneapolis, Minnesota in July 1968, initially centered in urban areas in order to address systemic issues of poverty, discrimination, and police brutality against American Indians. AIM soon widened its focus from urban issues to many Indigenous Tribal issues that American Indian groups have faced due to settler colonialism in the Americas. These issues have included treaty rights, high rates of unemployment, the lack of American Indian subjects in education, and the preservation of Indigenous cultures.
AIM was organized by American Indian men who had been serving time together in prison. They had been alienated from their traditional backgrounds as a result of the United States' Public Law 959 Indian Relocation Act of 1956, which supported thousands of American Indians who wanted to move from reservations to cities, in an attempt to enable them to have more economic opportunities for work. In addition, Public Law 280, otherwise known as the Indian Termination Act, proposed to terminate the federal government's relations with several tribes which were determined to be far along the path of assimilation. These policies were enacted by the United States Congress under congressional plenary power. As a result, nearly seventy percent of American Indians left their communal homelands on reservations and relocated to urban centers, many in hopes of finding economic sustainability. While many Urban Indians struggled with displacement and such radically different settings, some also began to organize in pan-Indian groups in urban centers. They were described as transnationals. The American Indian Movement formed in such urbanized contexts, at a time of increasing Indian activism.
From November 1969 to June 1971, AIM participated in the occupation of the abandoned federal penitentiary on Alcatraz Island organized by seven Indian movements, including the Indians of All Tribes and Richard Oakes, a Mohawk activist.[4] In October 1972, AIM and other Indian groups gathered members from across the United States for a protest in Washington, D.C., known as the Trail of Broken Treaties. According to public documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), advanced coordination occurred between federal Bureau of Indian Affairs staff and the authors of a twenty-point proposal drafted with the help of the AIM for delivery to the United States government officials focused on proposals intended to enhance US–Indian relations.
In the decades since AIM's founding, the group has led protests advocating indigenous American interests, inspired cultural renewal, monitored police activities, and coordinated employment programs in cities and in rural reservation communities across the United States. They have also allied with indigenous interests outside the United States.
Background
1950s
Preceding the Indian Termination Policies, an official policy directive of the United States government from 1940 to the early 1960s and directed by multiple executive administrations (both Democrat and Republican), uranium mining operations were established across Navajo tribal lands. These often offered the only available employment in isolated areas to the Navajo people. Although Navajo workers were initially enthusiastic about employment, the U.S. government appears to have been aware of the harmful risks associated with uranium mining since the 1930s and neglected to inform the Navajo communities. In addition, the majority of Navajo workers did not speak English. They had no understanding of radiation, nor a translation for the word in their language.
Both the open and other, now abandoned, uranium mines have continued to poison and pollute land, water and air of Navajo communities today. Even after environmental laws were passed and the dangers assessed, clean-up has been slow. The Navajo people believed that the federal government has violated the Treaty of 1868 by these results; the Bureau of Indian Affairs was assigned to care for Navajo economic, educational, and health services.
1960s
On March 6, 1968, President Johnson signed Executive Order 11399, establishing the National Council on Indian Opportunity (NCIO). President Johnson said, "the time has come to focus our efforts on the plight of the American Indian", and NCIO's formation would "launch an undivided, Government-wide effort in this area". Johnson tried to connect the nation's trust responsibility to the tribes and nations to contemporary issues for African American civil rights, an area with which he was much more familiar.
In Congress, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Indian Affairs, James Haley (D-FL), supported Indian rights. He thought that Indians should participate more in "policy matters", but he also believed that "the right of self-determination is in the Congress as a representative of all the people". In the 1960s Haley met with President John F. Kennedy and Vice President Johnson, pressing them to support Indian self-determination and control in transactions over their communal lands. One struggle was over the long-term leasing of American Indian land.
Non-Indian businesses and banks said they could not invest in leases of 25 years, even with generous options, as the time was too short for land-based transactions. Relieving the long-term poverty on most reservations through business partnerships by leasing land was seen as infeasible. A return to the 19th century 99-year leases was seen as a possible solution. But an Interior Department memo said, "a 99-year lease is in the nature of a conveyance of the land". These battles over land had their beginnings in the 1870s when federal policy often related to wholesale taking, not leases. In the 1950s, many American Indians believed that leases too frequently had become a way for outsiders to control Indian land.
Wallace "Mad Bear" Anderson (Tuscarora) was a leader in central New York in the 1950s. He struggled to resist the New York City planner Robert Moses' plan to take tribal land in upstate New York for use in a state hydropower project to supply New York City. The struggle ended in a bitter compromise.
Initial movement
As had civil rights and antiwar activists, AIM used the American press and media to present its message to the United States public. It created events to attract the press. If successful, news outlets would seek out AIM spokespersons for interviews. Rather than relying on traditional lobbying efforts, AIM took its message directly to the American public. Its leaders looked for opportunities to gain publicity. Sound bites such as the "AIM Song" became associated with the movement.
Events
During ceremonies on Thanksgiving Day 1970 to commemorate the 350th anniversary of the Pilgrims' landing at Plymouth Rock, an AIM group seized the replica of the Mayflower in Boston. In 1971, members occupied Mount Rushmore for a few days. This huge sculpture had been created on a mountain long considered sacred by the Lakota; whose associated land in the Black Hills of South Dakota was taken by the federal government after gold was discovered there. This area was originally within the Great Sioux Reservation as created by the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868, which covered most of present-day South Dakota west of the Missouri River. After the discovery of gold in 1874, the federal government broke up the large reservation, and sold off much of the Black Hills to European Americans for mining and settlement. It reassigned several Lakota tribes to five smaller reservations in this area.
Native American activists in Milwaukee staged a takeover of an abandoned Coast Guard station along Lake Michigan. The takeover was inspired by the 1969 Alcatraz occupation. Activists cited the Treaty of Fort Laramie and demanded the abandoned federal property revert to the control of the Native peoples of Milwaukee. AIM protestors retained possession of the land, and the land became the site of the first Indian Community School, which operated until 1980.
Also in 1971, AIM began to highlight and protest problems with the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), which administered programs and land trusts for Native Americans. The group briefly occupied BIA headquarters in Washington, D.C. A brief arrest, reversal of charges for "unlawful entry" and a meeting with Louis Bruce (Mohawk/Lakota), the BIA Commissioner, ended AIM's first event in the capital. In 1972, activists marched across country on the "Trail of Broken Treaties" and took over the Department of Interior headquarters, including Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), occupying it for several days and allegedly doing millions of dollars in damage.
AIM developed the Twenty Points, to summarize its issues with federal treaties and promises, which they publicized during their occupation in 1972. The list was largely written by the Native American activist and strategist Hank Adams. Twelve points addressed treaty responsibilities which the protesters believed the U.S. government had failed to fulfill:
Restore treaty-making (ended by Congress in 1871).
Establish a treaty commission to make new treaties (with sovereign Native Nations).
Provide opportunities for Indian leaders to address Congress directly.
Review treaty commitments and violations.
Have unratified treaties reviewed by the Senate.
Ensure that all American Indians are governed by treaty relations.
Provide relief to Native Nations as compensation for treaty rights violations.
Recognize the right of Indians to interpret treaties.
Create a Joint Congressional Committee to reconstruct relations with Indians.
Restore of land taken away from Native Nations by the United States.
Restore terminated rights of Native Nations.
Repeal state jurisdiction on Native Nations (Public Law 280).
Provide Federal protection for offenses against Indians.
Abolish the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Create a new office of Federal Indian Relations.
Remedy breakdown in the constitutionally prescribed relationships between the United States and Native Nations.
Ensure immunity of Native Nations from state commerce regulation, taxes, and trade restrictions.
Protect Indian religious freedom and cultural integrity.
Establish national Indian voting with local options; free national Indian organizations from governmental controls.
Reclaim and affirm health, housing, employment, economic development, and education for all Indian people.
In 1973 AIM was invited to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation to help gain justice from border counties' law enforcement and to moderate political factions on the reservation. They became deeply involved and led an armed occupation of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 1973. Other events during the 1970s were designed to achieve the goal of gaining public attention. They ensured AIM would be noticed to highlight what they saw as the erosion of Indian rights and sovereignty.
On June 10, 2020, AIM Twin Cities (a splinter group from the original AIM) members tore down the Christopher Columbus statue located outside the Minnesota State Capitol. Once a widely celebrated explorer credited with discovering America, Columbus became acknowledged over the years for atrocities he and his followers had committed against natives during their American voyages. Self-declared AIM member Mike Forcia acknowledged he spoke with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minnesota Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan before the event took place. The Grand Governing Council dismissed Forcia's actions as it affected their position for peaceful grassroots initiatives and clarified his role in the splinter group.
The Longest Walk (1978)
The Longest Walk (1978) was an AIM-led spiritual walk across the country to support tribal sovereignty and bring attention to 11 pieces of legislation that AIM asserted would abrogate Indian Treaties and quantify and limit water rights. This walk's purpose was to educate people about the government's continuing threat to tribal sovereignty; it rallied thousands representing many Indian nations throughout the United States and Canada. Traditional spiritual leaders from many tribes participated, leading traditional ceremonies. Non-Indian supporters included the American boxer Muhammad Ali, US Senator Ted Kennedy and the actor Marlon Brando. International spiritual leaders like Nichidatsu Fujii also took part in the Walk.
The first walk began on February 11, 1978, with a ceremony on Alcatraz Island, where a sacred pipe was loaded with tobacco. The pipe was carried the entire distance. On July 15, 1978, The Longest Walk entered Washington, D.C., with several thousand Indians and a number of non-Indian supporters. The traditional elders led them to the Washington Monument, where the pipe carried across the country was smoked. Over the following week, they held rallies at various sites to address issues: the 11 pieces of legislation, American Indian political prisoners, forced relocation at Big Mountain, the Navajo Nation, etc.
President Jimmy Carter refused to meet with representatives of The Longest Walk. Congress voted against a proposed bill to abrogate treaties with Indian Nations. During the week after the activists arrived, Congress passed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, which allowed Native Americans the use of peyote in worship.
The Longest Walk 2 (2008)
Thirty years later, AIM led the Longest Walk 2, which arrived in Washington in July 2008. This -walk had started from the San Francisco Bay area. The Longest Walk 2 had representatives from more than 100 American Indian nations, and other indigenous participants, such as Maori. It also had non-indigenous supporters. The walk highlighted the need for protection of American Indian sacred sites, tribal sovereignty, environmental protection and action to stop global warming. Participants traveled on either the Northern Route (basically that of 1978) or the Southern Route. Participants crossed a total of 26 states on the two different routes.
Northern Route
The Northern Route was led by veterans of that action. The walkers used sacred staffs to represent their issues; the group supported the protection of sacred sites of indigenous peoples, traditional tribal sovereignty, issues related to native prisoners, and the protection of children. They also commemorated the 30th anniversary of the original Longest Walk.
Southern Route
Walkers along the Southern Route picked up more than 8,000 bags of garbage on their way to Washington. In Washington, the Southern Route delivered a 30-page manifesto, "The Manifesto of Change", and a list of demands, including mitigation for climate change, a call for environmental sustainability plans, protection of sacred sites, and renewal of improvement to Native American sovereignty and health.
Relationship with other civil rights movements
AIM's leaders spoke out against injustices against their people, taking inspiration from the African American leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. AIM leaders talked about high unemployment, slum housing and racist treatment, fought for treaty rights, fought for the reclamation of tribal land, and advocated on behalf of urban Indians.
In response to its provocative events and its advocacy of Indian rights, the Department of Justice (DOJ) scrutinized the AIM. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) used paid informants to report on the AIM's activities and members.
In February 1973, AIM leaders Russell Means, Dennis Banks and other AIM activists occupied the small Indian community of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Reservation. They were protesting against what they said was the corrupt local government, along with federal issues which were affecting Indian reservation communities, as well as the lack of justice in border counties. Indians from many other communities, primarily urban Indians, mobilized to come and join the occupation. The FBI dispatched agents and US Marshals in an attempt to cordon off the site. Later a higher-ranking DOJ representative took control of the government's response. Through the resulting siege that lasted for 71 days, twelve people were wounded, including an FBI agent left paralyzed. In April at least two people - a Cherokee and a Lakota activist - died of gunfire (at this point, the Oglala Lakota called an end to the occupation). Additionally, two other people, one of them an African American civil rights activist, Ray Robinson, went missing, and are believed to have been killed during the occupation, though their bodies have never been found. (In 2014, the FBI confirmed that Robinson had been killed and buried on the reservation in April 1973 after he was allegedly killed by AIM members during an argument.) Afterward, 1200 American Indians were arrested. Wounded Knee drew international attention to the plight of American Indians. AIM leaders were tried in a Minnesota federal court. The court dismissed their case on the basis of governmental prosecutorial misconduct.
History
AIM protests
AIM opposes national and collegiate sports teams using figures of indigenous people as mascots and team names, such as the Cleveland Indians, the Atlanta Braves, the Chicago Blackhawks, the Kansas City Chiefs and the Washington Redskins and has organized protests at World Series and Super Bowl games against these teams. Protesters held signs with slogans such as "Indians are people not mascots". or "Being Indian is not a character you can play".
Although sports teams had ignored such requests by individual tribes for years, AIM received attention in the mascot debate. NCAA schools such as Florida State University, University of Utah, University of Illinois and Central Michigan University have negotiated with the tribes whose names or images they had used for permission for continued use and to collaborate on portraying the mascot in a way that is intended to honor Native Americans.
Goals and commitments
AIM has been committed to improving conditions faced by native peoples. It founded institutions to address needs, including the Heart of The Earth School, Little Earth Housing, International Indian Treaty Council, AIM StreetMedics, American Indian Opportunities and Industrialization Center (one of the largest Indian job training programs), KILI radio and Indian Legal Rights Centers.
In 1971, several members of AIM, including Dennis Banks and Russell Means, traveled to Mount Rushmore. They converged at the mountain in order to protest the illegal seizure of the Sioux Nation's sacred Black Hills in 1877 by the United States federal government, in violation of its earlier 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie. The protest began to publicize the issues of the American Indian Movement. In 1980, the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government had illegally taken the Black Hills. The government offered financial compensation, but the Oglala Sioux have refused it, insisting on return of the land to their people. The settlement money is earning interest.
Work on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation
Border town cases
In 1972, Raymond Yellow Thunder, a 51-year-old Oglala Lakota from Pine Ridge Reservation, was murdered in Gordon, Nebraska, by two brothers, Leslie and Melvin Hare, younger white men. After their trial and conviction, the Hares received the minimal sentence for manslaughter. Members of AIM went to Gordon to protest the sentences, arguing they were part of a pattern of law enforcement that did not provide justice to Native Americans in counties and communities bordering Indian reservations.
In the winter of 1973, Wesley Bad Heart Bull, a Lakota, was stabbed to death at a bar in South Dakota by Darrell Schmitz, a white male. The offender was jailed but released on a $5000 bond and charged with second degree manslaughter. Believing the charges to be too lenient, a group of AIM members and leaders from Pine Ridge Reservation and leaders travelled to the county seat of Custer, South Dakota, to meet with the prosecutor. Police in riot gear allowed only four people to enter the county courthouse. The talks were not successful, and tempers rose over the police treatment; AIM activists caused $2 million in damages by attacking and burning the Custer Chamber of Commerce building, the courthouse, and two patrol cars. Many of the AIM demonstrators were arrested and charged; numerous people served sentences, including the mother of Wesley Bad Heart Bull.
1973 Wounded Knee Incident
In addition to the problems of violence in the border towns, many traditional people at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation were unhappy with the government of Richard Wilson, elected in 1972. When their effort to impeach him in February 1973 failed, they met to plan protests and action. Many people on the reservation were unhappy about its longstanding poverty and failures of the federal government to live up to its treaties with Indian nations. The women elders encouraged the men to act. On February 27, 1973, about 300 Oglala Lakota and AIM activists went to the hamlet of Wounded Knee for their protest. It developed into a 71-day siege, with the FBI cordoning off the area by using US Marshals and later National Guard units. The occupation was symbolically held at the site of the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre. The Oglala Lakota demanded a revival of treaty negotiations to begin to correct relations with the federal government, the respect of their sovereignty, and the removal of Wilson from office. The American Indians occupied the Sacred Heart Church, the Gildersleeve Trading Post and numerous homes of the village. Although periodic negotiations were held between AIM spokesman and U.S. government negotiators, gunfire occurred on both sides. A US Marshal, Lloyd Grimm, was wounded severely and paralyzed. In April, a Cherokee from North Carolina and a Lakota AIM member were shot and killed. The elders ended the occupation then.
For about a month afterward, journalists frequently interviewed Indian spokesmen and the event received international coverage. The Department of Justice then excluded the press from access to Wounded Knee. The Academy Awards ceremony was held in Hollywood, where the actor Marlon Brando, a supporter of AIM, asked Sacheen Littlefeather to speak at the Oscars on his behalf. He had been nominated for his performance in The Godfather and won. Littlefeather arrived in full Apache regalia and read his statement that, owing to the "poor treatment of Native Americans in the film industry," Brando would not accept the award. In interviews, she also talked about the Wounded Knee occupation. The event grabbed the attention of the US and the world media. The movement considered the Awards ceremony publicity, together with Wounded Knee, as a major event and public relations victory, as polls showed that Americans were sympathetic to the Indian cause.
Violence on the Pine Ridge Reservation
AIM members continued to be active on the Pine Ridge Reservation, but Wilson stayed in office and in 1974, he was re-elected in a contested election. The number of violent deaths increased during this period, an event which has been called the "Pine Ridge Reign of Terror", and as a result, more than 60 people, some of them were his political opponents, died in violent incidents during the next three years. On June 26, 1975, two FBI agents, Jack Coler and Ronald Williams, were on the Pine Ridge Reservation searching for someone who was wanted for questioning which was related to an assault and a robbery which was committed against two ranch hands. The FBI agents were driving two unmarked cars, and they were also following a red pick-up truck which matched the suspect's description, driving into tribal land. The FBI agents were shot at by the occupants of the vehicle and others. The agents managed to fire five rounds before they were killed, while at least 125 bullets were fired at them. The agents were also shot at close range, with physical evidence which suggested that they had been executed. Later, reinforcements arrived, and Joe Stuntz, an AIM member who had taken part in the shootout, was fatally shot, and when he was found dead, he was wearing Coler's FBI jacket. According to the FBI, Stunz had been firing at agents when he was killed. Three AIM members were indicted for the murders: Darryl Butler, Robert Robideau and Leonard Peltier, who had escaped to Canada. An eyewitness stated that the three men joined the shooting after it had started. Butler and Robideau were both acquitted at trial, and Peltier was tried separately and controversially, he was convicted in 1976 and currently, he is serving two consecutive life sentences. The evidence which was exhibited during the trial of Butler and Robideau had been ruled inadmissible. Amnesty International has referred to his case under its Unfair Trials category.
Informants true and false
In late 1974, AIM leaders discovered that Douglas Durham, a prominent member who was by then head of security, was an FBI informant. They confronted him and expelled him from AIM at a press conference in March 1975. Durham's girlfriend, Jancita Eagle Deer, was later found dead after being struck by a speeding car. She had last been seen with Durham, and he continued to be a suspect in her possible murder. Durham was also scheduled to testify in front of the Church Committee, but that hearing was suspended due to the deadly Pine Ridge reservation shootout.
With some members in fugitive status after the Pine Ridge shootout, suspicions about FBI infiltration remained high. For various reasons, Anna Mae Aquash, the highest-ranking woman in AIM, was mistakenly suspected of being an informant, after she had voiced suspicions about Durham. Aquash had also been threatened by FBI agent David Price, with the threat she would be dead within the year if she refused to inform on Leonard Peltier. Aquash had been arrested then quickly released shortly before her death, creating more unfounded suspicion. According to testimony at trials in 2004 and 2010 of men convicted of her murder, she was interrogated in the fall of 1975. In mid-December she was taken from Denver, Colorado, to Rapid City, South Dakota, and interrogated again, then taken to Rosebud Reservation and finally to a far corner of Pine Ridge Reservation, where she was killed by a gunshot wound to the back of the head. Her decomposing body was found February 1976. After the coroner failed to find the bullet hole in Aquash's head, the FBI severed both of her hands and sent them to Washington, D.C., allegedly for identification purposes, then buried her as a Jane Doe. Aquash's body was later exhumed, identified by relatives and a second autopsy discovered the bullet wound, and found she had been murdered. Aquash was given a second burial, before her remains were moved to her ancestral land in Nova Scotia.
1980s support of Nicaraguan Miskito Indians
During the Sandinista/Indian conflict in Nicaragua of the mid-1980s, Russell Means sided with Miskito Indians opposing the Sandinista government. The Miskito charged the government with forcing relocations of as many as 8,500 Miskito. This position was controversial among other left-wing, indigenous rights groups and Central American solidarity organizations in the United States who opposed Contra activities and supported the Sandinista movement. The complex situation included Contra insurgents' recruiting among Nicaraguan Indian groups, including some Miskitos. Means recognized the difference between opposition to the Sandinista government by the Miskito, Sumo, and Rama on one hand, and the Reagan administration's support of the Contras, dedicated to the overthrow of the Sandinista regime.
AIM protests and contentions
Many AIM chapters remain committed to confronting government and corporate forces that they allege seek to marginalize Indigenous peoples. They have challenged the ideological foundations of US national holidays, such as Columbus Day and Thanksgiving. In 1970 AIM declared Thanksgiving a National Day of Mourning. This protest continues under the work of the United American Indians of New England, who protest continued theft of indigenous peoples' territories and natural resources. AIM has helped educate people about the full history of the US, and advocates for the inclusion of Indigenous American perspectives in U.S. history. Its efforts are recognized and supported by many institutional leaders in politics, education, arts, religion, and media.
Professor Ronald L. Grimes wrote that in 1984 "the Southwest chapter of the American Indian Movement held a leadership conference that passed a resolution labeling the expropriation of Indian ceremonies (for instance, the use of sweat lodges, vision quests, and sacred pipes) a "direct attack and theft". It also condemned certain named individuals (such as Brooke Medicine Eagle, Wallace Black Elk, and Sun Bear and his tribe) and criticized specific organizations such as Vision Quest, Inc. The declaration threatened to take care of those abusing sacred ceremonies.
2000s
In June 2003, United States and Canadian tribes joined internationally to pass the "Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality." They felt they were being exploited by those marketing the sales of replicated Native American spiritual objects and impersonating sacred religious ceremonies as a tourist attraction. AIM delegates are working on a policy to require tribal identification for anyone claiming to represent Native Americans in any public forum or venue.
In February 2004, AIM gained more media attention by marching from Washington, D.C., to Alcatraz Island. This was one of many occasions when Indian activists used the island as the location of an event since the Occupation of Alcatraz in 1969, led by the United Indians of All Tribes, a student group from San Francisco. The 2004 march was in support of Leonard Peltier, whom many believed had not had a fair trial; he has become a symbol of spiritual and political resistance for Native Americans.
In December 2007, a delegation of Lakota Sioux, including Talon Becenti, delivered to the U.S. State Department a declaration of separation from the United States citing many broken treaties by the U.S. government in the past, and the loss of vast amounts of territory originally awarded in those treaties, the group announced its intentions to form a separate nation within the U.S. known as the Republic of Lakotah.
In March 2011, the AIM announced its support for the Gaddafi government in Libya during the First Libyan Civil War. Stating that "He [Gaddafi] has never backed down from his hatred of imperialism." and "Ghaddafi is no more a dictator than George W. Bush.", Libya and the AIM had maintained friendly relations since the 1980s, when the AIM visited Libya alongside the All-African People's Revolutionary Party in 1986, in violation of the Reagan administration's travel ban.
AIM timeline
1968 – Minneapolis AIM Patrol created to monitor police treatment of urban American Indians and their treatment in the justice system.
1969 – Indian Health Board of Minneapolis founded. This was the first American Indian, urban-based health care provider in the nation. The San Francisco-based United Indians of All Tribes and the Alcatraz-Red Power Movement occupied Alcatraz Island, a former federal prison site, for 19 months. They reclaimed federal land in the name of Native Nations. The first American Indian radio broadcastsRadio Free Alcatrazwere heard in the Bay Area. Some AIM activists joined them.
1970 – Legal Rights Center created in Minneapolis to assist American Indians (as of 1994, over 19,000 clients have had legal representation thanks to AIM's work). AIM takeover of abandoned property at the naval air station near Minneapolis focuses attention on Indian education and leads to early grants for Indian education.
1971 – Citizen's arrest of John Old Crow. Takeover of the Bureau of Indian Affairs' headquarters in Washington, D.C., to publicize improper BIA policies. Twenty-four protesters arrested for trespassing and released. BIA Commissioner Louis Bruce shows his AIM membership card at the meeting held after the release of protesters. First National AIM Conference: 18 chapters of AIM convened to develop long-range strategy for the movement. Takeover of Winter Dam: AIM assists the Lac Court Oreilles (LCO) Ojibwe in Wisconsin in taking over a dam controlled by Northern States Power, which had flooded much of their reservation land. This action gained support by government officials and an eventual settlement with the LCO. The federal government returned more than of land to the LCO tribe for their reservation, and the Power company provided significant monies and business opportunities to the tribe.
1972 – Red School House, the second survival school to open, offering culturally based education services to K-12 students in St. Paul, Minnesota. Hearth of the Earth Survival School (HOTESS), a K-12 school established to address the extremely high drop-out rate among American Indian students and lack of curricula that reflected American Indian culture. HOTESS serves as the first model of community-based, student-centered education with culturally correct curriculum operating under parental control. Trail of Broken Treaties, a pan-Indian march across country to Washington, D.C., to dramatize failures in federal policy. Protesters occupied the BIA national headquarters and did millions of dollars in damages, as well as irrevocable losses of Indian land deeds. The protesters presented a 20-point demand paper to the administration, many associated with treaty rights and renewed negotiations of treaties.
1973 – Legal action for school funds as in reaction to the Trail of Broken Treaties the government canceled education grants to three AIM-sponsored schools in St. Paul and Milwaukee. AIM files legal challenges, and the District Court orders the grants restored and government payment of costs and attorney fees. Wounded Knee: AIM was contacted by Oglala Lakota elders of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation for assistance in dealing with failures in justice in border towns, the authoritarian tribal president and financial corruption within the BIA and executive committee. Together with Oglala Lakota, armed activists occupied the town of Wounded Knee for 71-days against United States armed forces.
1973 – On February 27, 1973, a large public meeting of 600 Indians at Calico Hall organized by Pedro Bissonette of Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization (OSCRO) and addressed by AIM leaders Banks and Russell Means. Demands were made for investigations into vigilante incidents and for hearings on their treaties and permission given by the tribal elders to make a stand at Wounded Knee.
1974 – International Indian Treaty Council, an organization representing Indian peoples throughout the western hemisphere was recognized at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. Wounded Knee trials: eight months of federal trials of participants in Wounded Knee took place in Minneapolis. It was the longest Federal trial in the history of the United States. As many instances of government misconduct were revealed, the District judge Fred Nichol dismissed all charges due to government "misconduct" which "formed a pattern throughout the course of the trial" so that "the waters of justice have been polluted". Loralei DeCora Means, Madonna Thunderhawk, Phyllis Young, and Janet McCloud founded WARN or Women of all Red Nations, a women's movement within the AIM movement.
1975 – Federation of Survival Schools created to provide advocacy and networking skills to 16 survival schools throughout the United States and Canada. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) chose AIM to be the primary sponsor of the first American Indian-run housing project, Little Earth of United Tribes.
1977 – MIGIZI Communications founded in Minneapolis. The organization is dedicated to producing Indian news and information and educating students of all ages as tomorrow's technical work force. International Indian Treaty Council establishes non-government organization status at United Nations offices in Geneva; attends the International NGO conference and presents testimony to the United Nations. American Indian Language and Culture Legislation: AIM proposes legislative language which is passed in Minnesota, recognizing state responsibility for Indian education and culture. This legislation was recognized as a model throughout the country.
1978 – The first education programs for American Indian offenders: AIM establishes the first adult education program for American Indian offenders at Stillwater Prison in Minnesota. Programs later established at other state correctional facilities modeled after the Minnesota program. Circle of Life Survival School established on the White Earth Indian Reservation in Minnesota. The school receives funding for three years of operation from the Department of Education. Run for Survival: AIM youth organize and conduct run from Minneapolis to Lawrence, Kansas, to support The Longest Walk. The Longest Walk: Indian Nations walk across the United States from California to Washington, D.C., to protest proposed legislation calling for the abrogation of treaties with Indian nations. They set up and maintain a tipi near the White House. The proposed legislation is defeated. The Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) is passed in 1978 by President Jimmy Carter. This piece of legislation made it so Native American children would remain connected to their families and tribes in the case of removal from their primary residence.
1979 – Little Earth housing protected: an attempt by the HUD to foreclose on the Little Earth of United Tribes housing project is halted by legal action and the District Court issues an injunction against the HUD. The American Indian Opportunities Industrialiazation Center (AIOIC) creates job-training schools to alleviate the unemployment issues of Indian people. More than 17,000 Native Americans have been trained for jobs since AIM created the AIOIC in 1979. Anishinabe Akeeng Organization is created to regain stolen and tax-forfeited land on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota.
1984 – Federation of Native Controlled Survival Schools presents legal education seminars at colleges and law schools in Minnesota, Wisconsin, California, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Oklahoma for educators of Indian students. National conference held in San Jose, California, concurrent with the National Indian Education Association Convention.
1986 – Schools lawsuit: Heart of the Earth and Red School House successfully sue the Department of Education Indian Education Programs for ranking the schools' programs below funding recommendation levels. The suit proved discriminatory bias in the system of ranking by the Department staff.
1987 – AIM Patrol: Minneapolis AIM Patrol restarts to protect American Indian women in Minneapolis after serial killings committed against them.
1988 – Elaine Stately Indian Youth Services (ESIYS) developed to create alternatives for youth in Minneapolis as a direct diversion to gang-involvement of Indian youth. Fort Snelling AIM annual Pow Wow: AIM establishes an annual pow-wow to recognize its 20th anniversary at Fort Snelling in Minnesota. The event becomes the largest Labor Day weekend event in any Minnesota state park.
1989 – Spearfishing: AIM is requested to provide expertise in dealing with protesters at boat landings. American Indian spearfishing continues despite violence, arrests and threats from whites. Senator Daniel Inouye calls for a study on the effects of Indian spearfishing. The study shows only 6% of fish taken are by Indians. Sports fishing accounts for the rest.
1991 – Peacemaker Center: AIM houses its AIM Patrol and ESIYS in a center in the heart of the Indian community, based on Indian spirituality. Sundance returned to Minnesota: with the support of the Dakota communities, AIM revives the Sundance at Pipestone, Minnesota. Ojibwe nations have helped make the Minnesota Sundance possible. The Pipestone Sundance becomes an annual event. In 1991, some self-appointed leaders of the Oglala Lakota, Cheyenne and other nations declare independence from the United States. The group establishes a provisional government to develop a separate national government. Elected leaders and council members of the nations do not support this action. National Coalition on Racism in Sports and Media: AIM organizes this group to address the issue of using Indian figures and names as sports team mascots. AIM leads a walk in Minneapolis to the 1992 Super Bowl. In 1994, the Minneapolis Star Tribune agrees to stop using professional sports team names that refer to Indian people unless these have been approved by the tribes.
1992 – The Food Connection organizes summer youth jobs program with an organic garden and spiritual camp (Common Ground) at Tonkawood Farm in Orono, Minnesota.
1993 – Expansion of American Indian OIC Job Training Program: the Grand Metropolitan, Inc. of Great Britain, a parent of the Pillsbury Corporation, merges its job training program with that of AIOIC and pledges future monies and support in Minnesota. Little Earth: after AIM's 18-year struggle, the HUD secretary Henry Cisneros rules that Little Earth of United Tribes housing project shall retain the right to preference for American Indian residents when considering applicants for the project. Wounded Knee anniversary: at the 20th anniversary of the Wounded Knee Incident at Pine Ridge Reservation, the elected Oglala Sioux Tribe president John Yellow Bird Steele thanked AIM for its 1973 actions.
Due to continuing dissension, AIM splits. AIM Grand Governing Council (AIMGGC) is based in Minneapolis and still led by founders while AIM-International Confederation of Autonomous Chapters is based in Denver, Colorado.
1996 – April 3–8, 1996: as a representative of the AIM Grand Governing Council and special representative of the International Indian Treaty Council, Vernon Bellecourt, along with William A. Means, president of IITC, attends the preparatory meeting for the Intercontinental Encounter for Humanity and Against Neo-Liberalism (IEHN), hosted by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), held in LaRealidad, Eastern Chiapas, Mexico between July 27 and August 3, 1996. The second meeting for the IEHN in 1997 is hosted by the EZLN and attended by delegates of the IITC and AIM.
1998 – February 12, 1998: AIM is charged with Security at the Ward Valley Occupation in Southern California. The occupation lasts for 113 days and results in a victory for the Colorado River Indian Tribes (CRIT) against the plan to use the area for the disposal of nuclear wastes. February 27, 1998: on the 25th anniversary of Wounded Knee, an Oglala Lakota Nation resolution establishes February 27 as a National Day of Liberation. July 16–19, 1998: the 25th annual Lac Courte Oreilles Honor the Earth Homecoming Celebration to honor the people who participated in the July 31, 1971, takeover of the Winter Dam and the beginning of the Honor the Earth observance. August 2–11, 1998: 30th Anniversary of the AIM Grand Governing Council and Sacred Pipestone Quarries in Pipestone, Minnesota. Conference commemorating AIM's 30th anniversary.
1999 – February 1999: three United States activists working with a group of UÕwa Indians in Colombia are kidnapped by rebels. Ingrid Washinawatok, 41 (Menominee), a humanitarian; Terence Freitas, 24, an environmental scientist from Santa Cruz, California; and LaheÕenaÕe Gay, 39 of Hawaii, are seized near the village of Royota, in Arauca province in northeastern Colombia on February 25 while preparing to leave after a two-week on-site visit. On March 5, their bullet-riddled bodies are discovered across the border in Venezuela.
2000 – July 2000: AIM 32nd anniversary Conference on the Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe Nation Reservation in northern Wisconsin. October 2000 – AIM founded commission to seek justice for Ingrid Washinawatok and companions.
2001 – March 2001: Reps of the AIM GGC attend the EZLN March for Peace, Justice and Dignity, Zocolo Plaza in Mexico City. July 2001 – 11th annual Youth & Elders International Cultural Gathering and Sundance in Pipestone, Minnesota. August 2001: five anti-wahoo demonstrators with AIM bring civil lawsuit for false arrest against the city of Cleveland, Ohio. November 2001 – The American Indian Forum on Racism in Sports and Media is held at Black Bear Crossing in St. Paul, Minnesota.
2002 – August 2002: 12th annual International Youth & Elders Cultural Gathering and Sundance in Pipestone, Minnesota.
2003 – May 2003: Quarterly Meeting of the AIM National Board of Directors Thunderbird House in Winnipeg, Manitoba. August 2003 – 13th Annual International Youth & Elders Cultural Gathering and Sundance, Pipestone, Minnesota.
2004 – August 2004: 14th annual International Youth & Elders Cultural Gathering and Sundance in Pipestone, Minnesota.
2005 – May 2005: 1st annual Clyde H. Bellecourt Endowment Scholarship Fund and Awards Banquet in Minneapolis. July 2005 – 15th annual International Youth & Elders Cultural Gathering and Sundance, Pipestone, Minnesota.
2006 – May 2006: 2nd annual Clyde H. Bellecourt Endowment Scholarship Fund and Awards Banquet in Minneapolis. July 2006 – 16th annual International Youth & Elders Cultural Gathering and Sundance, Pipestone, Minnesota.
Other Native American organizations
The American Indian Movement founded several organizations since its establishment in 1968. Its focus on cultural renewal and employment has led to the creation of housing programs, the American Indian Opportunities and Industrialization Center (for job training), and AIM Street Medics, as well as a legal-aid center. The American Opportunities and Industrialization Center, founded in 1979 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, has built a workforce of over 20,000 people from the entire Twin City area and tribal nations across the country and is a nationally recognized leader in the workforce development field. Following the AIM's all-inclusive practice, AIOC resources are available to all regardless of race, creed, age, gender, or sexual orientation. The Tokama Institute, a division of the AIOIC, is focused on helping American Indians acquire the foundational skills and knowledge in order to obtain a successful career. Aside from post-secondary institutions, AIM has helped develop and establish its own K-12 schools including Heart of the Earth Survival School and the Little Red Schoolhouse both located in Minneapolis. Further, AIM has led to the establishment of Women of All Red Nations (WARN). Established in 1974, WARN has put women at the forefront of the organization and focused its energies in combating sexism, government sterilization policies, and other injustices. Other Native American organizations include NATIVE (Native American Traditions, Ideals, Values Educational Society), LISN (League of Indigenous Sovereign Nations), EZLN (Zapatista Army of National Liberation), and the IPC (Indigenous Peoples Caucus). Although each group may have its own specific goals or focus, they are all fighting for the same principles of respect and equality for Native Americans. The Northwest Territories Indian Brotherhood, the Committee of Original People's Entitlement were two organization that spearheaded the native rights movement in northern Canada during the 1960s.
International Indian Treaty Council
AIM established the International Indian Treaty Council (IITC) in June 1974. It invited representatives from numerous indigenous nations, and delegates from 98 international groups attended the meeting. The sacred pipe serves as a symbol of the Nations "common bonds of spirituality, ties to the land and respect for traditional cultures". The IITC focuses on issues such as treaty and land rights, rights and protection of indigenous children, protection of sacred sites, and religious freedom.
The International Indian Treaty Council (IITC) uses networking, technical assistance, and coalition building. In 1977, the IITC became a Non-Governmental Organization with Consultative Status to the United Nations Economic and Social Council. The organization concentrates on involving Indigenous Peoples in U.N. forums. In addition, the IITC strives to bring awareness about the issues concerning Indigenous Peoples to non-Indigenous organizations.
United Nations adoption of indigenous peoples' rights
On September 13, 2007, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the "Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples". A total of 144 states or countries voted in favor. Four voted against it while 11 abstained. The four voting against it were the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, whose representatives said they believed the declaration "goes too far".
The Declaration announces rights of indigenous peoples, such as rights to self-determination, traditional lands and territories, traditional languages and customs, natural resources and sacred sites.
Ideological differences within AIM
In 1993, AIM split into two factions, each claiming to be the authentic inheritor of the AIM tradition. The AIM-Grand Governing Council is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and was associated with the leadership of Clyde Bellecourt (who died in 2022) and his brother Vernon Bellecourt (who died in 2007). The GGC tends toward a more centralized, controlled political philosophy.
The AIM-International Confederation of Autonomous Chapters, based in Denver, Colorado, was founded by thirteen AIM chapters in 1993 at a meeting in Denver, Colorado. The group issued its Edgewood Declaration, citing organizational grievances and complaining of authoritarian leadership by the Bellecourts. Ideological differences were growing, with the AIM-International Confederation of Autonomous Chapters taking a spiritual, perhaps more mainstream, approach to activism. The autonomous chapters group argues that AIM has always been organized as a series of decentralized, autonomous chapters, with local leadership accountable to local constituencies. The autonomous chapters reject the assertions of central control by the Minneapolis group as contrary both to indigenous political traditions and to the original philosophy of AIM.
Accusations of murder
At a press conference in Denver, Colorado, on 3 November 1999, Russell Means accused Vernon Bellecourt of having ordered the execution of Anna Mae Aquash in 1975. The "highest-ranking" woman in AIM at the time, she had been shot execution style in mid-December 1975 and left in a far corner of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation after having been kidnapped from Denver, Colorado, and interrogated in Rapid City, South Dakota, as a possible FBI informant. Means implicated Clyde Bellecourt in her murder as well, and other AIM activists, including Theresa Rios. Means said that part of the dissension within AIM in the early 1990s had related to actions to expel the Bellecourt brothers for their part in the Aquash execution; the organization split apart.
Earlier that day in a telephone interview with the journalists Paul DeMain and Harlan McKosato about the upcoming press conference, Minnie Two Shoes had said, speaking of the importance of Aquash: Part of why she was so important is because she was very symbolic, she was a hard working woman, she dedicated her life to the movement, to righting all the injustices that she could, and to pick somebody out and launch their little cointelpro program on her to bad jacket her to the point where she ends up dead, whoever did it, let's look at what the reasons are, you know, she was killed and lets look at the real reasons why it could have been any of us, it could have been me, it could have been, ya gotta look at the basically thousands of women, you gotta remember that it was mostly women in AIM, it could have been any one of us and I think that's why it's been so important and she was just such a good person.
McKosato said that "her [Aquash's] death has divided the American Indian Movement". On 4 November 1999, in a follow-up show on Native American Calling the next day, Vernon Bellecourt denied any involvement by him and his brother in the death of Aquash.
At Federal grand jury hearings in 2003, the Indian men Arlo Looking Cloud and John Graham were indicted for shooting Aquash in December 1975. In February '04, Arlo Looking Cloud was convicted of murder in Rapid City. He named as the gunman John Graham, who was in the Yukon. After extradition, John Graham was convicted, in 2010 in Rapid City, of the murder. In both trials, hearsay testimony about the motive for the murder included statements that Aquash heard Leonard Peltier say he killed the FBI agents at Oglala in June 1975, and fear that Aquash could be working with the FBI. Peltier was convicted in 1976 of murder for the Oglala killings, on other evidence.
See also
Black Panther Party
Brown Berets
Republic of New Afrika
Young Lords Party
Zapatista Army of National Liberation
References
Bibliography
External links
AIM Grand Governing Council homepage
American Indian IOC
American Indian Movement of Colorado.
Cleveland American Indian Movement Cleveland AIM is the oldest urban AIM organization and a member of the International Confederation of Autonomous Chapters of AIM.
International Confederation of Autonomous chapters of AIM.
AIM's "Background on US Government War Against AIM"
Articles about AIM. by Ward Churchill and others.
"USA: Longest Walk 2 for Native Americans rights".
"Longest Walk 1978 Collected Works".
Jason Heppler, "Framing Red Power: The American Indian Movement, the Trail of Broken Treaties, and the Politics of Media". Digital history project.
List of incidents attributed to the American Indian Movement on the START database.
The Owen Luck Photographs Collection, 1973–2001 is open for research at Princeton University. Luck was present at the incident at Wounded Knee in 1973 and the Menominee Warrior Society occupation of the Alexian Brothers Novitiate in Gresham, Wisconsin, in 1975 and took a total of 66 photographs. Images include Dennis Banks, Clyde Bellecourt, and Russell Means.
"A Brief History of the American Indian Movement".
1968 establishments in Minnesota
COINTELPRO targets
Hostage taking
Native American history of Minnesota
Native American rights organizations
Organizations established in 1968
Social movements in the United States
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard%20Williamson%20%28bishop%29
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Richard Williamson (bishop)
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Richard Nelson Williamson (born 8 March 1940) is a British independent Traditionalist Catholic bishop who opposes the changes in the church brought about by the Second Vatican Council.
In 1988, Williamson was one of four Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX) priests illicitly consecrated as bishops by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, for which Pope John Paul II declared he had incurred ipso facto automatic excommunication. The validity of the excommunication has always been denied by the SSPX, who, citing canon law, argue that the consecrations were permissible due to a crisis in the Catholic Church. The excommunications, including that of Williamson, were lifted on 21 January 2009 but the suspension of the bishops from ministry within the Catholic Church remained in force. Certain exceptions were granted by Popes Benedict XVI and Francis as a way to foster dialogue and goodwill and to allow the priests to exercise limited ministry despite their canonically irregular situation.
Immediately afterward, Swedish television broadcast an interview recorded earlier at the SSPX's seminary in Zaitzkofen, Bavaria. During the interview, Williamson expressed his belief that no more than 200,000 to 300,000 Jews were killed during the Holocaust and that Nazi Germany did not use gas chambers. Based upon these statements, he was charged with and convicted of Holocaust denial by the district court of Regensburg, Germany. The Holy See declared that Pope Benedict had been unaware of Williamson's views when he lifted the excommunication of the four bishops. He said that Williamson would remain suspended from his episcopal functions until he unequivocally and publicly distanced himself from that stated position on the Holocaust. In 2010, Williamson was convicted of incitement in a German court in relation to those views; the conviction was later vacated on appeal. He was convicted again on this charge in a retrial in early 2013. Williamson appealed again, but his appeal was rejected.
After a number of incidents, including calling for the resignation of Bernard Fellay as the Superior General of the Society of St. Pius X, refusal to stop publishing his weekly email and an unauthorised visitation to Brazil, Williamson was expelled from the Society in 2012. After leaving the Society, Williamson consecrated Jean-Michel Faure, Tomás de Aquino Ferreira da Costa, and as bishops in 2015, 2016, and 2017. Because of these consecrations, he was excommunicated latae sententiae from the Catholic Church again in 2015.
Williamson is fluent in English, French, German and Spanish.
Early life
Williamson was born in 1940 in Buckinghamshire, England, the middle son of a Marks & Spencer buyer and his wealthy American wife. Williamson attended Winchester College before going on to study at Clare College, Cambridge, where he received a degree in English literature. Upon graduating, he taught at a college in Ghana for a brief period.
Williamson, originally an Anglican, was received into the Catholic Church in 1971. After a few months as a postulant at the Brompton Oratory, he left. He became a member of the Society of Saint Pius X, a traditionalist Catholic faction founded in 1970 by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in protest against what Lefebvre saw as the liberalism of the Second Vatican Council. Williamson entered the International Seminary of Saint Pius X at Écône, Switzerland, and in 1976 he was ordained a priest by Lefebvre.
Williamson subsequently moved to the United States, where he served as the rector of St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary in Ridgefield, Connecticut from 1983, and continued in the position when the seminary moved to Winona, Minnesota in 1988.
Consecration and excommunication
In June 1988 Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre announced his intention to consecrate Williamson and three other priests (Bernard Fellay, Bernard Tissier de Mallerais, and Alfonso de Galarreta) as bishops. Lefebvre did not have a pontifical mandate for these consecrations (i.e. permission from the pope), normally required by canon 1382 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law. On 17 June 1988 Cardinal Bernardin Gantin, prefect of the Congregation for Bishops sent the four priests a formal canonical warning that they would automatically incur the penalty of excommunication if they were to be consecrated by Lefebvre without papal permission.
On 30 June 1988 Williamson and the three other priests were consecrated bishop by Archbishop Lefebvre and Antônio de Castro Mayer. On 1 July 1988 Cardinal Bernardin Gantin issued a declaration stating that Lefebvre, de Castro Mayer, Williamson, and the three other newly ordained bishops "have incurred ipso facto the excommunication latae sententiae reserved to the Apostolic See".
On 2 July 1988, Pope John Paul II issued the motu proprio Ecclesia Dei, in which he reaffirmed the excommunication, and described the consecration as an act of "disobedience to the Roman pontiff in a very grave matter and of supreme importance for the unity of the Church", and that "such disobedience – which implies in practice the rejection of the Roman primacy — constitutes a schismatic act".
Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos, head of the commission responsible for implementing Ecclesia Dei, has said this resulted in a "situation of separation, even if it was not a formal schism."
The SSPX denied the validity of the excommunications, saying that the consecrations were necessary due to a moral and theological crisis in the Catholic Church, making them permissible under canon law.
His excommunication, along with that of Archbishop Lefebvre and the other bishops consecrated the Écône consecrations were lifted in 2009 by Benedict XVI.
Episcopal duties
After his episcopal consecration Williamson remained rector of St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary in Winona, Minnesota. He performed various episcopal functions, including confirmations and ordinations. In 1991, he assisted in the consecration of Licínio Rangel as bishop for the Priestly Society of St. John Mary Vianney after the death of its founder, Antônio de Castro Mayer. In 2006, he ordained two priests and seven deacons in Warsaw, Poland for the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Priestly Society of Saint Josaphat ().
In 2003 Williamson was appointed rector of the Seminary of Our Lady Co-Redemptrix in La Reja, Argentina.
Views
Catholicism
In common with other traditionalists, Williamson opposes the changes in the Catholic Church brought about by the Second Vatican Council. He sees such changes as being unacceptably liberal and modernistic, and as being destructive to the Church. Among the changes he opposes are the Church's increased openness to other Christian denominations and other religions, and changes in the forms of Catholic worship such as the general replacement of the Tridentine Mass with the Mass of Paul VI. Williamson has criticised Pope John Paul II, to whom he attributed a "weak grasp of Catholicism". Williamson holds that the SSPX is not schismatic, but rather is composed of true Catholics who are keeping the "complete Roman Catholic apostolic faith".
Williamson is viewed as being located towards the hardline end of the traditionalist spectrum, though he does not go quite so far as to espouse sedevacantism. In the past, he opposed compromise between the SSPX and the Church leadership in Rome, accusing the latter of deceit and of being under "the power of Satan". He has been reported as viewing reconciliation between the SSPX and the Holy See as being impossible, and he has noted that some SSPX members might refuse to follow the Society in such a direction even if an agreement were reached.
Williamson was reportedly dismissive of Mother Teresa because of her supposedly 'liberal' views.
Society
Williamson holds strong views regarding gender roles. He opposes women wearing trousers or shorts, women attending college or university, and women having careers. He has urged greater "manliness" in men.
Regarding parenting style, he denounced the film The Sound of Music as "soul-rotting slush" and says that, by putting "friendliness and fun in the place of authority and rules, it invites disorder between parents and children."
Conspiracy theories
Williamson supports conspiracy theories regarding the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the World Trade Center controlled demolition conspiracy theory, denying that the September 11 attacks were foreign terrorist attacks and claiming they were instead staged by the U.S. government. He has also said that the 7 July 2005 London bombings were an "inside job" and propagated rumours about the likelihood of a nuclear attack on the London Olympics in 2012.
Jews and Holocaust denial
Williamson condemns the Jewish religion. He has urged the conversion of the Jews to Catholicism.
He says that Jews and Freemasons have contributed to the "changes and corruption" in the Catholic Church. He has also stated that Jews aim at world dominion and believes The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to be authentic. Williamson has denied that he is promoting hatred, identifying the contemporary enemies of the faith as "Jews, Communists and Freemasons". He argues that "Anti-Semitism means many things today, for instance, when one criticizes the Israeli actions in the Gaza Strip. The Church has always understood the definition of anti-Semitism to be the rejection of Jews because of their Jewish roots. This is condemned by the Church."
Since the late 1980s, Williamson has been accused of Holocaust denial. Citing the pseudoscientific Leuchter report, Williamson has denied that millions of Jews were murdered in Nazi concentration camps and the existence of Nazi gas chambers and praised Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel. During an interview on Swedish television recorded in November 2008, he stated: "I believe that the historical evidence is strongly against, is hugely against six million Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler", and "I think that 200,000 to 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps, but none of them in gas chambers."
On the occasion of Robert Faurisson's death in 2018, he summarised: "[T]he people who hold world-wide power today over politics and the media are people who want the godless New World Order," and "they have fabricated a hugely false version of World War Two history to go with a complete fabricated religion to replace Christianity."
Lifting of the excommunication
Wishing to heal the rift with the SSPX, Pope Benedict XVI lifted the declared automatic excommunications of the four bishops Marcel Lefebvre had consecrated, as they had requested. The decree was signed on 21 January 2009, the same day that the interview on Swedish television was broadcast. The decision stirred widespread outrage, particularly in Germany, where the interview was conducted and where Holocaust denial is illegal and punishable by imprisonment of up to five years. Reaction from the State of Israel and much of the worldwide Jewish community was strongly negative, and Abraham Foxman, president of the Anti-Defamation League, wrote to Cardinal Walter Kasper in order to express his opposition to any ecclesiastic re-integration of Williamson. In January 2009, the Chief Rabbinate of Israel suspended contacts with the Vatican. The Chief Rabbi of Haifa told The Jerusalem Post that he expected Williamson to retract publicly his statements before any dialogue could resume.
Pope Benedict XVI stated that he deplored all forms of antisemitism and that all Catholics must do the same. The Pope expressed his "unquestionable solidarity" with the Jewish people, and stated his hope that "the memory of the Shoah will induce humanity to reflect on the unpredictable power of hate when it conquers the heart of man", and condemned the denial of the Holocaust. Vatican officials stated that they had not been aware of Williamson's views prior to the lifting of the excommunication; as a result, in a July 2009 Vatican reorganisation, the Pope tightened control and supervision over reconciliation efforts with SSPX.
Williamson sent the Pope a letter expressing his regret about the problems that he had caused, but did not retract his statements. On 4 February 2009 the Vatican Secretariat of State issued a note stating that Williamson would have to distance himself unequivocally and publicly from the opinions that he had expressed before he would be permitted to act as a bishop within the Church. Williamson responded that he would do so only after looking at the historical evidence for himself.
On 26 February, he formally apologised for the offence that had been caused by his comments, but did not indicate that he had changed his views. The Vatican rejected his apology, stating that he needed to "unequivocally and publicly" withdraw his comments. Some Jewish groups have expressed disappointment at the ambiguity of his apology, because he failed to address the consensus about the Holocaust. He subsequently repeated the denial to followers, stating that "The fact is that the 6 million people who were supposedly gassed represent a huge lie."
Fellay of the SSPX initially denied responsibility, stating that Williamson's statements were his alone and that the affair did not concern the SSPX as a whole. However, he subsequently forbade Williamson from speaking out publicly about historical or political matters, and asked Pope Benedict for forgiveness for the damage done by Williamson's statements. In a subsequent interview he likened Williamson to uranium, asserting that "It's dangerous when you have it," but you can't "simply leave it by the side of the road."
The Vatican declared that "in order to be admitted to episcopal functions within the Church, (Williamson) will have to take his distance, in an absolutely unequivocal and public fashion, from his position on the Shoah, which the Holy Father (i.e., the Pope) was not aware of when the excommunication was lifted."
In Argentina
In Argentina, Williamson became a cult figure amongst the far-right seminarians, The Guardian reports.
Williamson was removed as the head of the seminary in La Reja, Argentina and Fellay stated that if Williamson again denied the Holocaust, he would be excluded from the society.
In February 2009, the government of Argentina asked Williamson to leave the country over irregularities with his visa, and stated that his recent statements about Jews "profoundly offend Argentinian society, the Jewish people and all of humanity". On 24 February 2009, Williamson flew from Argentina to London, where he was met by Michele Renouf, a former model known for her antisemitic views, with whom he had been put in touch by holocaust denier David Irving.
Criminal conviction in Germany
On 4 February 2009, German prosecutors announced the launch of a criminal investigation into the statements. In October 2009, a German court, using an "order of punishment" fined Williamson €12,000 after finding him guilty of Holocaust denial. Williamson denied the charges and appealed, paving the way for a full hearing that Williamson need not attend. He did not attend the trial, on orders from his society, on charges of inciting racial hatred in Regensburg, Germany on 16 April 2010, and was found guilty. The court reduced the fine to . The fine was appealed by lawyers from both sides; the lawyer Williamson hired was the former leader of the Wiking-Jugend, an outlawed Neo-Nazi group. The Society of St. Pius X ordered Williamson to find a new lawyer under threat of expulsion. His appeal was held on 11 July 2011. At appeal the lower court's decision was upheld but the fine was reduced to €6,500, reportedly due to Williamson's financial circumstances. On 22 February 2012 the higher court dismissed this conviction, finding that the initial charges against Williamson had been inadequately drawn, having failed to specify the nature of his offence, or at what point his filmed comments came under German jurisdiction, or in what sense he could be held liable for failing to prevent their publication in Germany. On 16 January 2013, he was prosecuted and condemned again, but this time with a much reduced fine of €1,600, because of his "unemployed state". He refused to pay the fine and appealed again, but his appeal was dismissed. On 31 January 2019 the European Court of Human Rights ruled against Williams' attempt to overturn a conviction for Holocaust denial on the grounds of free speech.
Expulsion from SSPX
In August 2012, Williamson administered the sacrament of confirmation to about 100 laypeople at the Benedictine Monastery of the Holy Cross in Nova Friburgo, Brazil, during an unauthorised visit to the State of Rio de Janeiro. The society's South American district superior, interlanguage Christian Bouchacourt, protested against his action on the SSPX website, saying that it was "a serious act against the virtue of obedience." In early October 2012, the leadership of the SSPX gave Williamson a deadline to declare his submission, instead of which he published an "open letter" asking for the resignation of the Superior General. On 4 October 2012, the Society expelled Williamson in a "painful decision" citing the failures "to show respect and obedience deserved by his legitimate superiors".
St. Marcel Initiative, episcopal consecrations, second excommunication
In the first issue of his weekly blog after his expulsion, Williamson wrote: "Hang tight, everybody. We are in for one 'helluva' ride. Let's just make that a ride to Heaven!" And later he wrote: "For myself, I shall attempt to follow [God's] Providence in the ordaining of priests – or in the consecrating of bishops. God's will be done." He called for the establishment of a loose network of what he called "Catholic Resistance" to any proposal by the SSPX to drop its opposition to Rome. An initiative was set up by Williamson under the title "The St. Marcel Initiative".
On 19 March 2015, Williamson ordained Frenchman Jean-Michel Faure, a former member of the SSPX, as a bishop in a ceremony in Nova Friburgo, Brazil. Faure had, like Williamson, opposed reconciliation discussions between the SSPX and the Catholic Church. As this was done without papal mandate, both Faure and Williamson incurred a latae sententiae excommunication. The SSPX condemned the consecration as "not at all comparable to the consecrations of 1988" and as proof that Williamson and Faure "no longer recognize the Roman authorities, except in a purely rhetorical manner".
Exactly one year later, Williamson consecrated Tomás de Aquino Ferreira da Costa as a bishop in Brazil. This consecration also took place without papal approval. The following year, it was announced that Williamson intended to consecrate a third bishop, Mexican-American prelate Gerardo Zendejas, on 11 May 2017. The consecration was held at St. Athanasius Church in Vienna, Virginia.
In late December 2022, Williamson stated he had privately consecrated another bishop, Giacomo Ballini (the leader of the Cork branch of the group calling itself 'SSPX Resistance'. They are a group founded by Williamson), in 2021. If this claim is to be believed, Williamson has in total consecrated four bishops since he has become independent.
On 15 August 2022 he consecrated Michał Stobnicki as a bishop in Poland.
Currently Williamson writes comments on St. Marcel Initiative, part of BRN ASSOCIATES INC, non-profit corporation registered in Virginia with a mailing address in St. Louis.
References
Bibliography
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External links
Eleison Comments A weekly column in five languages by Bishop Richard Williamson.
1940 births
Living people
Alumni of Clare College, Cambridge
Late Modern Christian anti-Judaism
Antisemitism in England
Catholic priests convicted of crimes
Converts to Roman Catholicism from Anglicanism
Écône consecrations
English conspiracy theorists
British Holocaust deniers
English people of American descent
English people of Scottish descent
People convicted of Holocaust denial
English traditionalist Catholics
People educated at Winchester College
People excommunicated by the Catholic Church
People expelled from the Society of St. Pius X
Traditionalist Catholic conspiracy theorists
Traditionalist Catholic bishops
Traditionalist Catholic writers
9/11 conspiracy theorists
English expatriates in Argentina
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fad%20diet
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Fad diet
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A fad diet is a diet that is popular, generally only for a short time, similar to fads in fashion, without being a standard dietary recommendation, and often making unreasonable claims for fast weight loss or health improvements; as such is often considered a type of pseudoscientific diet. Fad diets are usually not supported by clinical research and their health recommendations are not peer-reviewed, thus they often make unsubstantiated statements about health and disease.
Generally, fad diets promise an assortment of short-term changes requiring little to no effort; attracting the interests of consumers uneducated about whole-diet, whole-lifestyle changes necessary for sustainable health benefits. Fad diets are often promoted with exaggerated claims, such as rapid weight loss of more than 1 kg/week, improving health by "detoxification", or even dangerous claims, such as highly restrictive and nutritionally unbalanced food choices leading to malnutrition or eating non-food items like cotton wool. Highly restrictive fad diets should be avoided. At best, fad diets may offer novel and engaging ways to reduce caloric intake, but at worst they may be medically unsuitable to the individual, unsustainable, or even dangerous. Dietitian advice should be preferred before attempting any diet.
Celebrity endorsements are frequently used to promote fad diets, which may generate significant revenue for the creators of the diets through the sale of associated products. Regardless of their evidence base, or lack thereof, fad diets are extremely popular, with over 1500 books published each year, and many consumers willing to pay into an industry worth $35 billion per year in the United States. About 14–15% Americans declare having used a fad diet for short-term weight loss.
Description
Definition
There is no single definition of what is a fad diet, encompassing a variety of diets with different approaches and evidence base, and thus different outcomes, advantages, and disadvantages. Furthermore, labeling a diet as a fad is ever-changing, varying socially, culturally, timely, and subjectively. However, a common definition lies in the popularity of a diet promoting short-term changes instead of lifelong changes, and that popularity (or lack thereof) has no association with a diet's effectiveness, nutritional soundness, or safety. The Federal Trade Commission defines fad diets as those that are highly restrictive and promoting energy dense foods that are often poor in nutrients.
Types of fad diets
Although fad diets are ever-changing, most can be categorized in these general groups:
Physical or physiological testing, such as applied kinesiology and blood group analysis
Low calorie diets:
Food-specific diets, which encourage eating large amounts of a single food, such as the cabbage soup diet
High-fiber, low-calorie diets, which often prescribe double the normal amount of dietary fiber
Liquid diets, such as SlimFast meal replacement drinks
Fasting
Adequate-protein, low-carbohydrate diets, such as the Atkins diet, which first became popular in the 1970s
Fad diets are generally restrictive, and are characterized by promises of fast weight loss or great physical health (notably by "detoxification"), and which are not grounded in sound science.
Some fad diets, such as diets purporting to be alternative cancer treatments, promise health benefits other than weight loss.
Commercial weight management organizations (CMWOs), such as Weight Watchers, were inappropriately associated with fad diets in the past.
Several factors can cause someone to start a fad diet, such as socio-cultural peer pressure on body image, self-esteem and the effect of media.
Bad diets
Although not all fad diets are inherently detrimental to health, there are "red flags" of bad dietary advice, such as:
Promising rapid weight loss such as more than 1 kg/week (2 lb/week) or other extraordinary claims that are "too good to be true"
Being nutritionally imbalanced, or highly restrictive, forbidding entire food groups, or even only allowing one food or food type. In the most extreme form, they may claim that humans can survive without eating or by having liquid meals only or by consuming non-food items such as cotton wool
Recommending eating food in a specific order or combination, sometimes based on physiological properties such as genetics or blood type
Recommending specific foods purported to be detoxing or to "burn" fat
Promises a one-size-fits-all "magic bullet" with little to no effort, without including or encouraging long-term whole dietary changes nor physical exercise tailored to the specific needs of the individual
Based on anecdotal testimonials such as personal success stories, instead of medical evidence from randomized tests by commercial weight management organizations to be approved.
Health claims evaluations
Fad diets have variable results as these include a variety of different diets. They tend to result in short-term weight loss, but afterwards, the weight is often regained.
The restrictive approach, regardless of whether the diet prescribes eating large amounts of high-fiber vegetables, no grains, or no solid foods, tend to be nutritionally unsound, and can cause serious health problems if followed for more than a few days.
A considerable disadvantage of fad diets is that they encourage the notion of a diet as a short-term behavior, instead of a sustainable lifelong change. Indeed, fad diets often fail to re-educate dieters about a healthy nutrition, portion control and under-emphasize efforts and especially physical activity, so that followers cannot acquire the skills and knowledge they need for long-term maintenance of their desired weight, even if that weight is achieved in the short-term. Several diets are also unsustainable in the long-term, and thus dieters revert to old habits after deprivation of some foods which may lead to binge eating. Fad diets generally fail to address the causes of poor nutrition habits, and thus are unlikely to change the underlying behavior and the long-term outcomes.
Some fad diets are associated with increased risks of cardiovascular diseases, kidney stones, and mental disorders such as eating disorders and depression, and dental risks. For instance, long-term low-carbohydrate high-fat diets are associated with increased cardiac and non-cardiac mortality. Teenagers following fad diets are at risk of permanently stunted growth.
Some fad diets do however provide short-term and long-term results for individuals with specific illnesses such as obesity or epilepsy. Very-low-calorie diets, also known as crash diets, are efficient for liver fat reduction and weight loss before bariatric surgery. Low-calorie and very-low-calorie diets may produce initially faster weight loss within the first 1–2 weeks of starting compared to other diets, but this superficially faster loss is due to glycogen depletion and water loss in the lean body mass and regained quickly afterward.
Diet success in weight loss and health benefits is most predicted by adherence and negative energy balance, regardless of the diet type. Fad diets, with their popularity and variety, may be useful to introduce obese individuals via a dietary plan tailored to their food preferences and lifestyle into long-term dietary and lifestyle changes under supervision by nutrition professionals. Indeed, a wide variety of diets aiming at gentle caloric restriction under supervision, including commercial, fad, and standard care diets, have shown considerable and comparable success and safety, both in the short-term and long-term. Comprehensive diet programs are more effective than dieting without guidance. According to David L. Katz, "efforts to improve public health through diet are forestalled not for want of knowledge about the optimal feeding of Homo sapiens but for distractions associated with exaggerated claims, and our failure to convert what we reliably know into what we routinely do.
There is a commonly claimed figure that "95% of dieters regain their weight after a few years", but this is a "clinical lore" based on a 1953 primary study, with newer evidence demonstrating long-term weight loss after dieting under supervision, although a 2007 review found that one-third to two-thirds of dieters had slight to no long-term weight loss based on lesser quality trials, supporting Health at Every Size according to its authors. A review reported that extended calorie restriction suppresses overall and specific food cravings.
Healthy diets
Improving dietary habits is a societal issue that should be considered when preparing national policies, according to the World Health Organization. They propose a set of recommendations for a healthy diet:
Achieve an energy balance and maintain a healthy weight.
Promote the consumption of fruits, vegetables, whole-grains, nuts, seeds, peas, beans, legumes, herbs, and spices.
Limit sweets and sugar.
Limit salt from all sources and ensure salt is iodized.
Limit total fat consumption and in particular replace saturated fats by unsaturated fats as much as possible, and eliminate trans-fatty acids.
The 2015–2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans implement these recommendations in the US, as follows:
Follow a lifelong healthy eating pattern.
Focus on variety, nutrient density, and quantity.
Limit calories from added sugars and saturated fats. Reduce sodium intake.
Prefer healthier food and beverage choices, such as nutrient-dense foods. These preferences should account for cultural and personal preferences to make application easier.
Community support of healthy eating patterns for everyone.
Contrary to the previous editions which mainly focused on dietary components such as food groups and nutrients, the latest offer a more global approach focusing on eating patterns and nutrients characteristics as "people do not eat food groups and nutrients in isolation but rather in combination, and the totality of the diet forms an overall eating pattern". Indeed, "the components of the eating pattern can have interactive and potentially cumulative effects on health", noting that "these patterns can be tailored to an individual's personal preferences, enabling Americans to choose the diet that is right for them".
Several diets have shown sufficient evidence of safety and constant beneficial effects to be recommended. These include the DASH diet for anyone but especially for cardiac risk prevention in obesity and diabetes, the Mediterranean diet with similar indications, the U.S. Department of Agriculture "MyPlate" for healthy diet guidelines, and the ketogenic diet for reducing risk of seizures in people who have epilepsy.
History
Ancient history
The word "diet" comes from the Greek diaita, which described a whole lifestyle, including mental and physical, rather than a narrow weight-loss regimen. The Greek and Roman physicians considered that how a body functioned was largely dependent on the foods eaten, and that different foods could affect people in different ways.
Western medical science at the time was founded on diatetica, the "fundamental healing therapy of a regimen of certain foods". Overweight or being too slim were seen as signs of an unhealthy body, with an imbalance of its four essential "humours" (black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm).
The earliest diet known is from the oldest surviving medical document, the Ebers papyrus (circa 1550 BC), which described a recipe for an antidiabetic diet of wheat germ and okra. An early dietary fad is known from about 500–400 BC, when athletes and warriors consumed deer livers and lion hearts, thinking these products would impart benefits such as bravery, speed, or strength.
In the Corpus Hippocraticum, Hippocrates, a Greek philosopher and physician c. 460–370 BC, describe his views on human health, as being primarily influenced by alimentation and the environment we inhabit. He thought that the underlying principles of health were food and exercise, what he called "work", and that a high food intake needed a lot of hard work to be properly assimilated. A failure to balance work and food intake would upset the body's metabolism and incur diseases. As he wrote: "Man cannot live healthily on food without a certain amount of exercise". He thought that changes in food intake should be made progressively to avoid upsetting the body. He made several recommendations, some of which being: walking or running after eating, wrestling, avoiding drinks outside of meals, dry foods for obese people, never missing a breakfast and eat only just one main meal a day, bathing in only lukewarm water, avoiding sex, and the more dangerous "induction of vomiting", which he considered particularly beneficial. Nowadays, these advices seem mixed, some sensible, others inadvisable or even dangerous, but they made sense at the time given the contemporary knowledge and practices. For example, induced vomiting was quite popular, almost an art form. The importance of foods was further established by one of his followers, who became extremely influential, the Greek physician Galen (129 – ca. 216 AD), with his work On the Power of Foods, where he claimed that good doctors should also be good cooks, and provided several recipes.
In the classical world, what foods were eaten, and how much, played an important role in ethical, philosophical, and political teachings and thinking, centered on the ideas of luxury and corruption. Food was for sustenance alone, overindulging was morally and physically bad, at least a manifestation of a lack of self-control, but at worst leading to further passions and greed of other luxuries.
19th century
Fad diets as we know them really started during the Victorian era in the 19th century. A competitive market for "healthy diets" arose in the 19th-century developed world, as migration and industrialization and commodification of food supplies began eroding adherence to traditional ethno-cultural diets, and the health consequences of pleasure-based diets were becoming apparent. As Matt Fitzgerald describes it:
Many fad diets, at the time called "foodie", were promoted during the 19th century.
Lord Byron was obsessed with his appearance, as he had a "morbid propensity to fatten". He tried several diets, such as his favorite meal of biscuits and soda water, and others which he devised, such as the "vinegar and water diet" in the 1820s, which was very popular at the time, and involved drinking water with apple cider vinegar. He would cycle perpetually between self starvation, measurements, and binge eating. His influence was such that he was accused of encouraging melancholia and emotional volatility on Romantic youth, making girls "sicken and waste away". Indeed, according to Byron, "a woman should never be seen eating or drinking, unless it be lobster salad and champagne, the only truly feminine and becoming viands". His views on women's diets and appearances worried his contemporaries, such as the American physician George Miller Beard, who fretted that young ladies may live their growing girlhood in semi-starvation because of their fears of "incurring the horror of disciples of Lord Byron".
In 1825, Jean Brillat-Savarin wrote about a low carbohydrate diet and focusing on chewing and swallowing to better taste food and supposedly eat less. This idea would later reappear in 1903 under the name of "Fletcherizing", derived from its author's name Horace Fletcher, "a self-taught nutritionist". Fletcher promoted chewing all food until it was thoroughly mixed with saliva, to the point that it was swallowed in a liquid state.
"Banting" or "to bant" became a highly popular synonym of dieting in 1863, when William Banting published "A Letter on Corpulence", which detailed the first known low-carbohydrate diet, which he followed from Dr. William Harvey, a surgeon known for a starch- and sugar-free diet treatment for diabetes. He immediately lost weight, from 202 to 156 pounds eventually. Banting is credited for writing the first diet book, which at his death in 1878 sold more than 58,000 copies over a total of 12 editions published between 1863 and 1902. Although the 2500 copies of the first and second editions were printed at his expenses and distributed for free, in the hopes of "benefitting to the working-class people", he sold later copies.
Around the same time, Sylvester Graham, of Graham cracker fame, is often given credit for creating the first fad diet in the 1830s and is considered the father of all modern diets. The diet recognized the importance of whole grains food. Designed from a religious motivation, Graham promoted a raw-food vegetarian diet that was lower in salt and fat, emphasizing an anti-industrial, anti-medical "simpler" or "natural" lifestyle, opposing the meat and other rich, calorie-dense foods produced in great quantities in the industrial era, declaring them "sinful". In 1830, he was appointed a general agent of the Pennsylvanian Temperance Society. During his time there, and due to his history, and inspired by the French vitalist school of medicine, he thought nutrition had moral as well as physical qualities, and viewed any desire for food or drink not due to necessity (stark hunger or thirst) to be depravation. Consequently, he viewed gluttony as the debilitating consequence of an unhealthy urge. He was determined to fight against what he perceived as nutritional "debauchery" and gluttony. He became a controversial figure, an evangelical New England preacher and speaker, with his spartan views on nutrition at a time where Americans' diets were primarily made of meat and white bread, by advocating adamantly in favor of raw vegetarian food and whole-grain food, authorizing but limiting meat, and forbidding highly refined or commercially baked white bread. He also described the use of corsets as "disfiguring" and advocated loose, comfortable clothing, which further attracted women to his precepts. After his death in 1851, his followers, dubbed "Grahamites", most of them being women but also including famous men such as John Harvey Kellogg of cornflakes fame, continued to advocate vegetarianism, temperance, and bran bread. Graham's ideas proved to have a lasting influence on American diet, as the per capita meat consumption dropped gradually in the subsequent years, whereas vegetable consumption increased and Americans started to eat more balanced diets. Graham's diet legacy continued in the 20th with another diet philosophy by Bernarr Macfadden, who relentlessly promoted a dieting philosophy named "physical culture", the idea that nearly all diseases were caused by toxins in the blood from poor diet and lack of exercise, and that nearly all diseases could be cured through fasting, eating the correct foods, and physical exercise. Macfadden was one of the most effective promoter of diets in history, as he is believed by historians to be largely at the root of 20th and 21st century health and fitness practices in America.
The 19th century also saw the first and one of the most dangerous fad diet pills, with the marketing of arsenic pills for weight loss, which not only did not work, but which dieters often consumed more quantity than the prescribed dosage. Some diet hoaxes also appeared, such as the tapeworms diet, where the dieters would purportedly willfully ingest tapeworms in the hopes they would reach maturity in the intestines and absorb food, until the dieter attains the weight loss goal and consumes an anti-parasitic pill to kill and hopefully excrete the worms, if the dieter was lucky enough to not experience gastric obstruction.
20th century
The concept calorie restriction appeared under the name of "calorie counting" in the 1917 book "Diet and Health, With Key to the Calories" by Lulu Hunt Peters.
Other fad diets appeared in the 1930s. The grapefruit diet was a low-calorie plan, which became popular and known as the "Hollywood diet", and involved eating grapefruit or its juice with other items such as toast or eggs, totaling about 500 calories per day. Such liquid diets, cleanses and detox diets would prove popular over the following decades with the Master Cleanse or Lemonade Diet in 1941 and Last Chance Diet in 1976. Around the same time, in 1925, Lucky Strike launched the "cigarette diet", relying on the appetite suppressing effect of nicotine, with the famous marketing slogan "Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet". The use of amphetamines, initially designed to treat narcolepsy, skyrocketed when doctors began prescribing them for appetite suppression and the treatment of depression, becoming a high success in the diet industry. Despite the American Medical Association opposing this use of amphetamines as early as 1943 due to problems of addiction, doctors continued to prescribe them, in addition to barbiturates to reduce the addiction cravings. The first liquid protein diet appeared also in the 1930s with the marketing of the "Dr. Stoll's Aid".
In 1950, another liquid diet appears, the "cabbage soup diet", highly restrictive but promising great weight loss in the first week, at the expense of causing flatulence. Later, and although it did not become a fad for another generation, the Zen macrobiotic diet was developed by the Japanese philosopher George Ohsawa, purporting a "yin and yang of food" to help maintain the body's balance, and proposing a grain-heavy diet composed of 50–60% of whole grains (e.g., brown rice), discouraging refined or processed food and certain cooking techniques and utensils.
Bernarr Macfadden was another major figure of dieting in the 1950s, taking the legacy of Graham. He grew in a difficult environment. At age 11, both of his parents were deceased, his father from alcoholism, his mother from tuberculosis, and suffered from several illnesses himself. He later went on to live in a farm, which fortified his health, and studied human physiology, diet, and nutrition. Due to his history, and largely influenced by Graham, he became convinced that all health issues were due to nutrition. He advocated a similar diet, and regular fasting in addition. His demise happened as a consequence of his extreme devotion to his own ideas: since he was convinced fasting could cure any ailment, he tried to treat a urinary tract blockage he developed in 1955 by fasting, which only caused emaciation which no doctor could undo.
Other notable food faddists of this era include Paul Bragg, Adelle Davis, and J. I. Rodale.
In 1961, Jean Nidetch founded the Weight Watchers. In 1970, the "sleeping beauty diet", using sedative pills to avoid eating, became popular. Slim Fast appeared in 1977, claimed as a "super diet" by having shakes for breakfast and lunch. In 1985, Fit for Life promotes a diet forbidding complex carbohydrates and proteins in the same meal. In 1992, 1995, and 2003, the Atkins diet, Zone diet and South Beach Diets appear successively. The Atkins diet has been described as "one of the most popular fad diets in the United States".
In 1997, the American Heart Association (AHA) "declares war on fad diets [...] to inform the public of misleading weight loss claims".
21st century
During the early 2000s, the Paleolithic diet was popularized by Loren Cordain and has attracted a largely internet-based following on forums and social media. This modern fad diet consists of foods thought to mirror those eaten during the Paleolithic era.
The very dangerous cotton ball diet surfaced in 2013, prompting dieters to eat up to five cotton balls at a time to lower hunger, leading to intestinal occlusion and potentially death. Aseem Malhotra has promoted a low-carbohydrate fad diet known as the Pioppi diet. It was named by the British Dietetic Association as one of the "top 5 worst celeb diets to avoid in 2018".
A recent fad diet promoted on social media platforms is the carnivore diet that involves eating only animal products. There is no clinical evidence that the carnivore diet provides any health benefits. Other recent fad diets include the lectin-free diet that has been promoted by Steven Gundry and the pegan diet of Mark Hyman.
Marketing
Most fad diets promote their plans as being derived from religion or science. Fad diets may be completely based on pseudoscience (e.g., "fat-burning" foods or notions of vitalism); most fad diets are marketed or described with exaggerated claims, not sustainable in sound science, about the benefits of eating a certain way or the harms of eating other ways.
Such diets are often endorsed by celebrities or celebrity doctors who style themselves as "gurus" and profit from sales of branded products, books, and public speaking. One sign of commercial fad diets is a requirement to purchase associated products and pay to attend seminars in order to gain the benefits of the diet.
The audience for these diets is people who want to lose weight quickly or who want to be healthy and find that belonging to a group of people defined by a strict way of eating helps them to avoid the many bad food choices available in the developed world.
Regardless of their evidence base, or lack thereof, fad diets are extremely popular, with over 1500 books published each year, and many consumers willing to pay for diet products, making for an industry worth $35 billion/year in the US. About 14–15% Americans declare having used a fad diet for short-term weight loss. Fad diet is a part of the diet industry with no specific estimation available, with the biggest part being "diet foods" such as light soda, for a total diet industry worth $35 billion/year in the USA.
An analysis of the top trending diet-related queries on Google's search engine between 2006 and 2016 reveals that diet practices are highly variable and ever changing.
Society and culture
According to the American Heart Association, a liquid very-low-calorie diet caused at least 60 deaths in 1977.
In Sweden, in 2005, the Atkins diet was at the crux of a controversy, when Dietician started recommending it to her diabetic patients, which prompted an investigation by the Swedish National Institute of Public Health ().
List of fad diets
Fad diets are a subset of all named or defined diets, typically identified by being associated by a founding person or organization, making health claims, most often of rapid weight loss.
See also
Health food
List of food faddists
Food trends
References
External links
FakeMeds, a UK campaign to raise awareness of fake medical products, including diet related
Be Science Savvy to Avoid Falling for Health Trends and Fad Diets, American Heart Association, 7 December 2018
Diet reviews by the Harvard School of Public Health
Diets
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